View image It's the third door on your...

Kathleen Murphy has written a stunning piece over at Testpattern called "The Haunted Palace." (I've been waiting weeks for it to appear so I could send you there.) Although primarily about Alain Resnais' "Last Year at Marienbad," the article moves through those haunted corridors, into Stanley Kubrick's Overlook Hotel, passing through doors (and walls) into the worlds of Max Ophuls, Luis Buñuel, Josef von Sternberg... As you wander through the maze of this "Lady from Shanghai" hall of mirrors you'll catch glimpses of ghosts around every corner -- not just the phantom images of particular movies, but insights into a spectral world Dave Kehr has described as "the lost continent of cinephilia."

From Kathleen's magnificent guided tour of the grounds:

Once upon a time, movie-loving folk actually, in the words of Susan Sontag, "arranged their emotional and intellectual lives around an art that was 'poetic and mysterious and erotic and moral all at the same time.'" We thrived on films such as "Vertigo" (1958), "L'Avventura" (1960), "Jules and Jim" (1962), "Vivre sa vie" (1962) -- works that, like [Ophuls'] "Letter From an Unknown Woman," plunged into the very DNA of the cinematic imagination. We happily drowned, not in narrative alone -- or even at all -- but in the seductive images, spaces and faces conjured by the formidable magic of the medium....

Continue reading "Wandering the hallways from Marienbad to the Overlook" »

Posted by Jim Emerson at 10:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

View image

I wasn't old enough to experience the French New Wave first hand. My introduction to the New German Cinema (Fassbinder, Herzog, Wenders, et al.) was getting my mind blown by Werner Herzog's 1973 "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" when it was released in the US in 1977. The bossa nova craze was before my time, as was Elvis, but I vividly remember Beatlemania and felt that punk and grunge were mine. It's hard for me to imagine what it must be like to look back on some of the things I experienced first-hand and to approach them retroactively.

I've been thinking about this for a while -- what a pleasure it has been, for example, to see Steven Spielberg develop, having watched his TV movie "Duel" when it was first broadcast and being absolutely riveted; discovering the monstrous phenomenon of "Jaws" when it opened and created the "summer blockbuster" before we had a term for it; witnessing the remarkable suburban double-whammy of "E.T." and "Poltergeist" (in which Spielberg's presence was clearly felt) in the summer of 1982...

But what brought it to the forefront of my consciousness was this (last?) week's Entertainment Weekly cover story touting a big ol' list of 1,000 "New Classics" in film, music, theater, video games, etc. I'm not entirely sure what their definition of "classic" is meant to be, though among the terms they use to describe them are "iconic" ("Pulp Fiction"), "primal work of popular art" ("Titanic"), "quotable" ("Jerry Maguire"), "apotheosis of its genre" ("A Room With a View"), "most amazing" ("Children of Men")... and, um, "classic" ("When Harry Met Sally").

Continue reading "What makes a movie a "classic"?" »

Posted by Jim Emerson at 05:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (89)

Hitchcock

I've been loading my thousands of CDs (most of which have been in boxes for about three years) into iTunes in recent weeks and it's been quite a revealing experience. (It explains, for one thing, why I've never been able to accumulate any money. And this project is going to require two 2TB external hard drives, because I'm using lossless compression.) Sometimes it's embarrassing or mystifying. What void was I trying to fill with a Kurtis Blow's greatest hits? I already had "The Breaks" -- one of the earliest non-Sugarhill rap/hip-hop hits -- and "Hard Times" on various compilations... but it sounds good. And I do love compilations, especially those from obscure jazz, soul and R&B labels from the '40s, '50s and '60s (like Minit or Specialty or Sue or Excello), up to the better-known Vee Jay and Okeh and Ace and Commodore, or the bubblegum label Buddah (yes, it's spelled that way). And, of course, various label, period, artist and thematic anthologies put together by Rhino (including the massive Stax/Volt and Atlantic boxes). The "Beg, Scream & Shout!" box is the greatest.

But the reason I'm writing this now is my reencounter with Robyn Hitchcock. I did a piece a while back about the cinematic imagination of Joni Mitchell, and I was happy to reacquaint myself with "My Wife and My Dead Wife" on the album "Fegmania!" It's quintessentially Hitchcockian, reflective of Robyn's eerie ectoplasmic humor (though much of his work is more surreally Cronenbergian, bursting with ghastly biological horrors, as in "Star of Hairs" or "Tropical Flesh Mandala"), and suggesting Sir Alfred, too. In some respects it's a twist on "Rebecca," but funnier. Notice, too, the ways Hitchcock chooses to belatedly reveal what's going on, almost as if you were suddenly catching a glimpse of a ghost out of the corner of your eye. And the final pull-back at the seashore is masterful. This is quite a movie:

My wife lies down in a chair
And peels a pear
I know she's there
I'm making coffee for two
Just me and you
But I come back in with coffee for three
Coffee for three?

Continue reading "Hitchcockian chills" »

Posted by Jim Emerson at 11:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)