I and I

Where is that ‘still point in the turning world’ these days? Was one ever thus? Will it be the Higgs Boson particle? When Jon Stewart was announced presenter of last year’s Oscars ceremony, much of the world must have being asking who HE? Now in 2009, La Stewart has hit international headlines because one of his lampooned subjects hit back. Namely:
The Daily Show host Jon Stewart and stock analyst Jim Cramer from the American network CNBC are in the midst of an angry feud being played out on national television.

The saddest music of them all was when Cramer, in Stewart’s The Daily Show ‘play-off’, lamented that some of his now discredited ‘sources’ were among his ‘oldest friends’. I know exactly how u must feel Mr. Cramer. Believe me, I do. Only I never really trusted them in the first place. They’re only human after all. We must forgive. Yeah right: the lying, greedy, onanistic Sh**bags! And that’s a euphemistic phrase smelling of daisies...

Is London any better? Yeah, right.
Cabinet Office papers reveal Iraq dossier fears
Secret emails show Iraq dossier was 'sexed up'
Nothing compared to the government goings on at Danegrove Primary School. Can we look forward to the film version Revenge of the Hobnobs? (might need re-titling for mass American consumption) starring Owen Wilson as the double agent PE teacher and Jennifer Aniston as the bolshy mum (Paltrow turned it down – didn’t want to blot her Brit copy book ;). What began innocently as a chocolate bar in a kid’s lunchbox became the living hell school of Lindsay Anderson’s If. Didn’t the New Labour government have a schools’ sports deal with Cadbury’s a few years ago? Memories can be so short. Maybe the film could be a horror/musical- High School Musical meets Super Size Me meets Roger Corman with nods to Ken Loach. Danny Boyle could direct, and to ease her mind from Olympic twaddle architect Zaha Hadid could design the lunchboxes for the Dali-esque fantasy scenes: oh, the possibilities for freedom of expression are endless...

The Lost World of Communism is on BBC 2. The first ep on Eastern Germany had great material and food for thought. And BBC Four’s Do it Yourself: The Story of Rough Trade doco about the ‘indie’ London record label really made one ponder marrying independence, business, creativity and happiness. The label recently scored their first Number 1 hit with Duffy (who they’d also nurtured).

I dragged moi out das depressive slime (or was that silicon stasis?) to survey ‘WALL-E’s new world, what with the great political brains (i.e. democratically elected by... “don’t finish that sentence...” – thanks S.S.) meeting in rural idyllic Horsham, England (do I smell Simon Pegg and Hot Fuzz?). (Was anyone beheaded, poisoned, pilloried or beleaguered there in aeons gone Mr. Simon Schama? He’d be the one to know - the unwritten l’histoire,,,- The Madwoman of Chaillot...) But perhaps the best ‘talking fish’ j’arrived recently with Optimum’s DVD set The Jean Pierre Melville Collection), though Optimum don’t seem so keen as I am as they haven’t yet put a link on their website!:) I say ‘best’ because Melville (he took his name from the American writer) was not necessarily one of the greatest cinematic originals of the C20, nor the ‘nicest’ nor the most ‘vile’ director: but he knew far more than most ‘what was what’. And nor is Optimum’s set ‘that’ original with most of the ‘must-have’ DVD extras having appeared on the BFI DVDs and Criterion’s in the States. But Optimum’s is, nonetheless, incredibly good value and consummately informative. Ponder Melville’s life from these discs and you’ll understand a helluva lot about contemporary politics. If only they were able to include the rarely (if at all) available Deux Hommes dans Manhattan (1958) (that starred the director himself in an acting part) then the set would have been unbeatable!

The world doesn’t need me to echo praises for Melville’s work except for the question ‘why do we keep re-watching Melville films’? Because they undoubtedly remain irresistible and re-watchable. As Volker Schlöndorff the film-maker, and assistant on Léon Morin, prêtre noted: “long before the nouvelle vague had been invented Melville had been there”- “ ‘dogma film’ before ‘dogma’ .” (the Danish late 90s new wave ‘no-frills’ style). Melville was “steeped in the milieu of American culture” states Ginette Vincendeau, the author of a new book on Melville and who also offers audio commentary on most of the DVD discs (without even a centime of info fat). Last year, Second Sight gave us the DVD of Le Silence de la Mer (The Silence of the Sea) – Melville’s very first film that explored French silence during the Nazi occupation and French resistance (and its publicly re-iterated myth). Melville observes rather than judges his characters. He even had a commercial hit at the French box-office with Léon Morin, prêtre “commercial cinema with a sincerity and personal style leading to a new classicism” notes Vincendeau, “the uphill struggle of male failure”. Who would think that French star and boxing hunk Belmondo would make a convincing Catholic priest? But he does. In spade-ish cheekbones! And one who prays “only when I can help it”. A filmmaker who also worked with Melville, the great Bertrand Tavernier (The Watchmaker of St. Paul(L'Horloger de Saint Paul)), is interviewed on the DVD discs. “A strong style that re-arranged the world” states his Melville assistant Bernard Stora in one of the most revealing DVD interviews. In some ways it’s hard to believe that the same man who made Le Silence and Léon Morin, prêtre also made the ‘gangster’ movies of later years. But then you begin to realise the similarities between – dare I say...well let’s say ‘Scorsese’ cinema as a moderate example. “America [as] both sublime and abominable,” notes critic Rui Nogueira.

My blog review from last year:
“Nina Simone's rhythmic song was also brilliantly used in The Thomas Crown Affair remake having taking its impetus from a simple foot tapping scene in the Steve McQueen original. Jean-Pierre Melville was also fascinated by such simplicity - never using style over content. His first film Le Silence de la Mer (The Silence of the Sea), just out on Eureka's Masters of Cinema DVD, accentuates the ticking of the clock in the French farmhouse where an old man and his niece take a resistance vow of silence in having to accommodate a Nazi officer. The film explores the notion of attentistes, those who just waited for the war to end. Melville's resistance film 20 years later, L' Armée des ombres (Army of Shadows), also has the ticking clock just before Lino Ventura's escape from Gestapo HQ and his running footsteps, as does Belmondo running in the opening credits of the 1962 Le Doulos (French slang for police informer) and just re-released in New York. Melville's choreographing of his characters' relation to time and the sound of silence is one of the qualities that make Melville a cinema master.

Essay on the 2004 great restoration of Army of Shadows cool blues and browns in the latest American Cinematographer.
Army of Shadows (US DVD), recent (BFI DVD)
Les enfants terribles (recent US DVD) (BFI DVD)
Le Doulos (BFI DVD)
Le Cercle Rouge (BFI DVD)
(US DVD)
Le Samourai (US DVD)
Bob Le Flambeur (US DVD)
Bob Le Flambeur(Optimum)
Le deuxième souffle
L'Armeé des Ombres Senses of Cinema article
good blog Melville mention
Save our film heritage from the political vandals (The Observer)

Le Silence (1949) was an extraordinary first feature and one of the most important and controversial in world cinema. Melville had no film training, didn't wish to be part of a union, and persuaded the writer Vercors not only to allow him to adapt the most important novel of the resistance, but also to film it in Vercors' house. But it was only on the condition that the finished film be screened to a jury of eminent members of the resistance for approval. "The thing I liked enormously about Le Silence was the anti-cinematographic aspect of the story. I wanted to attempt a language composed entirely of images and sounds, and from which movement and action would be more or less banished," Melville says in the fantastically revealing interview with Rui Nogueira reprinted in the DVD's booklet. Narrated in voice-over, the only word spoken by the couple in the film is the niece's adieu, an acknowledgement of the arrival of their voyage of understanding of what it is to be human. "I learned then that the hands, if you observe them well, can be as expressive as the face as they more easily escape the control of the will,” says the narration.

Melville's last film from 1972, Un Flic (The Cop), has just been re-issued as part of Optimum's Alain Delon set and is another masterpiece. It opens with the stormy sleet greys of a seafront bank heist, the sea battering man's ramparts. In fact the whole film looks like it's shot in the depths of a London winter. Delon plays Coleman the cop: "This job makes you sceptical," says his partner. "I'm sceptical about scepticism," says Coleman, "The only feelings man has ever inspired in a police officer are ambiguity and ridicule. Ridicule", he repeats his face now in darkness. Melville chooses a building location for police HQ where all the office windows are each seemingly askew only combining to form faceless architecture. Coleman's office window faces a brick wall and a drainpipe. This is the underbelly world of Abel Ferrara or Cassavetes, the big difference being that Coleman is a good cop with a totally dispassionate eye. "I sometimes read," says Melville, "Melville is being Bressonian. I'm sorry but it's Bresson who has always been Melvillian." Un Flic's methodical ingenious train heist by helicopter is a great example of this. The sustained close-up in the patrol car of the almost blank but beautiful eyes of Delon in the film's final moments reminds one of Albert Camus's doctor and his dictum in his novel La Peste: that the only certitude we have is in the daily round.” Here ends moi blogging from last year.
Worth comparing Leon to Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest

How to follow Melville? John Patrick Shanley’s recent American film Doubt does rather pale in comparison. But look how assembling amazing performances enhances a ‘big brushstrokes’ script. Melville always wanted to work with ‘stars’ when he could. And with good reason. Yet he was also able to achieve very similar ‘parallel’ results with lesser known actors. We’d still pay to see Philip Seymour Hoffman even if he didn’t give his performances those extra nuances. And Meryl Streep seems to do it so effortlessly that her work can too often be ‘taken for granted’.
Doubt is out on Miramax DVD in the States April 6

Eureka DVD has just issued William Dieterle’s The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941) in their Masters of Cinema (MoC) series-(trailer). The extras on this one are sadly rather slim for an MoC release (outtakes from the original version All That Money Can Buy) as compared to the bulging issue from Criterion DVD in the States. But there is Eureka’s customary 60 page booklet that includes the original story by 1928 Pulitzer writer Stephen Vincent Benet. And it’s certainly an intriguing film that lay somewhat dormant for 50 years. Seeming costume (mid C19) Faustian melodrama finally wends its way into the moral debating arena of It’s a Wonderful Life. Joseph August’s B/W cinematography, Bernard Herrmann’s score, Robert Wise’s editing – well worth a look.

David Thomson discusses RKO’s Orson Welles who used the same creative team as Dieterle on his 1941 Citizen Kane, also a box office failure.
Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon screens tonight at the BFI. Designer Ken Adam and actor Steve Berkoff recall working with Stanley Kubrick on his adaptation of Thackeray's novel
In BBC Radio 4’s The Film Programme (Jan 30)

Ole Christian Madsen’s meticulously researched Flame & Citron - (official UK trailer) is another debunking of cosy political myth – here for the first time exploring Danish WWII resistance. It’s undeniably a powerful film but one that for me didn’t quite resonate as expected. Perhaps in trying so hard to tell the unbearable truth there’s the possibility that one can distance oneself saying, well at least that wasn’t me. The unbearable, insidious complicity of politics that Jean-Pierre Melville conjures so well.
Henryk Ross's Jewish ghetto photos that were conveniently ignored for some time after the war.
The dirty war on our doorstep

Bernhard Schlink discusses his novelThe Reader
The Boy In The Striped Pajamas is out on DVD and very strongly recommended for all humans.
Max Ernst? He's out picking tomatoes
Malevolent voices that despise our freedoms
Pet Shop Boys new song: We're All Criminals Now
And this sounds like a catchy song: You’ve brought the Tube to its knees, Gordon, now take the blame. Any dream will do...

more tomorrow.....