So Much Tenderness...I read in Shadow & Act that Fassbinder stalwart, Günter Kaufmann, died a few days ago. Weird that there was so little coverage of the story. The son of an African-American serviceman and a German mother, he acted in over 27 films primarily in Germany begininng in the 70s as a member of the Fassbinder "stable".
Below is a clip from The American Soldier (1970) now one of my favorite RWF films but when I first saw it I slept through most of it's short, confusing 80 minute running time. But I did awaken for a finale that was so strange (and beautiful) I was convinced I was still asleep and dreaming! The odd and, I think, lovely song that accompanies the scene lingers. It's sung by Kaufmann.
Alert: If you haven't seen the movie this scene is a spoiler..sort of!
The American Soldier (1970) d. Rainer Werner Fassbinder
For your reading pleasure, my review of the NYAFF at Film Comment's online magazine!
Along with daffodils, sunshine, and graduations, a sure sign of spring is the arrival of the New York African Film Festival, founded and programmed by executive director Mahen Bonetti. The 19th edition arrived at the Film Society of Lincoln Center with the hallmarks of the season: color, freshness, warmth, and variety, with hopes for renewal and contemplation of what’s past...Read more
Some of you may be familiar with my obsession with squirrels...
Here's some of my Squirreltography:
So The 8th Orphan Film Symposium had a movie I was very curious to see: Adaptive Behavior of Golden-Mantled Ground Squirrels (Lester F. Beck, 1942). I missed it but in my online search came upon this delight!
I'm going to see the restoration tonight. It will be my 15th or 16th time seeing it--I've lost count. I would always cry at the end. I saw it once at the theater in Paris that plays it continuously. But I stopped seeing it long before it became available generally on DVD. Before I had heard of a dvd. I've never watched a videotape of it. I may have watched it on TV once. You went to see it--if it was playing somewhere...like France. I had a book of the film. The cover is tattered and that's how I "saw" the film in between it's rare outings. But some time after college I saw l'Atalante by Vigo and fell in love with it instead. I would cry at the end but with delight. Still, I can recite whole scenes of Paradis in english and in french (well, at least the men's roles). Baptiste (Jean-Louis Barrault) was my obessesion. I tried to turn innocent young guys attempting to be my boyfriend into him--rather like crazed surgeon, Pierre Brasseur, in Eyes Without a Face. Speaking of Pierre, I find him, as Frédérick Lemaître, much more alluring now than pining, pale, white-faced Baptiste. Black-faced-Othello, agressive, Frédérick!
Brasseur...
who always reminded me of...
Le Pew!
Anyway, can't say more now--I have to go and fight for a premium seat not in the "paradis" of Walter Reade--and take a trip down the "Boulevard du Crime" to my old days.
And cry?
It's a big movie at 3 hours+ but with a passion like ours...
Just in time for the Academy Awards, I will be showing:
Hattie McDaniel: A Credit to The Motion Picture Industry 2004 6m
"I sincerely hope I shall always be a credit to my race and to the motion picture industry," McDaniel said as she accepted the 1st Academy Award given to an African-American for the film Gone with the Wind. A continuity error in a clip of the 1939 Oscars suggests that the "documentary" footage and her speech were re-staged.
Below is a clip of the opening shots of Husbands, my favorite Cassavetes film. Now all three fellas are gone and it seems like the end of an era. Or the end of something. I love this LIFE cover but it makes me sad. And happy. That it makes me sad. Because all three worked so hard to make us feel...
Husbands (1970) d. John Cassevetes
“He just buried us!”
The Dick Cavett Showw/ John Cassavetes, Peter Falkand Ben Gazzara
“It’s exactly like Star Wars…The story is too fantastic and wonderful to cram into 2 hours.” If we get a good first weekend…there is a prequel and a sequel and they’re better than this movie by a long shot…I took the soft center."
Well, it is what it is! I find this clip of George Lucas discussing RED TAILS on the Daily Show both illuminating and amusing!
Illuminating because he addresses some of my very mixed feelings about the movie. My father, Lee (Buddy) Archer, was a Tuskegee Airman and he and his good friend Dr. Roscoe Brown ("The Gruesome Twosome"), consulted on the film and appeared in the accompanying documentary, Double Victory. Dad passed away in January 2010 and did not get to see any of the completed film.
I attended a preview screening a couple of months ago and the premiere last week. The film, much improved from the first time I saw it, should be supported. As a daughter, at first I found Red Tails disappointing, having had the good fortune to hear first-hand stories from the Airmen all of my life (I'll never forget the image of the small sea of red jackets at my mother's funeral in 1996). As a filmmaker tho', I'm intrigued by the way Red Tails is being hyped, the vague authorship of the movie and how it fits into Black cinema, historically. The amusing part is that I thought that Lucas called the film the 1st black-cast film (!) but, in fact, he claims "It's one the first all-black action pictures ever made."(see below)
Also funny--or at least a little hyperbolic--is his fear that the film, if it fails, will endanger if not destroy the opportunities for black filmmakers from this weekend on--prompting from Greg Tate and others the moniker “George Lucas, Black Filmmaker”! But I think Lucas is actually referring to the dangers of big —or should I say GI-normous budget films with predominantly black cast with a black director at the helm. This confused authorship between Lucas and the film’s director, Anthony Hemingway, is intriguing and in the clip Lucas self-effacingly disparages the film (the "soft" center) but inadvertently or unconsciously depending on how you feel about Lucas’ motives, displaces director Hemingway who he does not otherwise refer to in the interview.
The soapy and boyish "soft center" he describes is a truncated and specifically located episode, with hugely compressed characters. The focus then is mainly on dogfights and air(and digital) technology with an almost complete lack of context for the characters--particularly the absense of black women or almost any women--who are not even referenced (no gals back home? No sisters, no Mamas?), nor of African Americans at home following the airmen's adventures.
Well, I guess all of this was relegated to the prequels and sequels that hopefully will be produced (and maybe with my help!)but now hang in the balance of the OPENING WEEKEND BOX OFFICE!!
Anyway, all of this reminds me that all-black/colored movies directed by blacks and whites have existed since the movies began. There’s more than one per decade (I'll make a list later)! For example, preserved in part by our own Women’s Film Preservation Fund, A Fool and His Money (1912) is thought to be the first American film featuring an all African-American cast. And it was made by a LADY!—Alice Guy Blaché who owned Solax Studios, in Fort Lee, New Jersey and produced and directed dozens of films in the silent era.
The first all black action picture? What about The Norman Studios The Flying Ace set in WW1 and made in 1926! This film featured air battles, special effects (the camera turns completely upside down), comedy, action, daring aerial rescues AND romance!!
Here is a great clip from this rarely screened jewel!
Whether they run for two hours or for "6 SMASHING Reels!" black-cast films with their delights, issues, failings and travails are uniquely American and for me, essential in our understanding of the history of cinema.
SO,go see Red Tails this weekend!! You'll have fun!
