To Find the Shark and Kill It - Conquering Cousteau's Silent World

Louis Malle had a hell of a film career.

From fictional features in his native France, for which he was nominated and won many international awards, to directing Hollywood films with major American stars, to his epic 6-hour TV documentary "Phantom India," his work has pretty much covered all subjects and settings, including some territory that in 1956 was quite uncharted.

I just got back from the Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theater on Fairfax. It's been under the management of a pretty passionate cinephile for about 2 years now (same guy, I believe, who runs a video rental shop named "Cinefile" down by the Nuart), and the programming is pretty spectacular, even for a town like LA, which already has several decent rep houses competing for the attentions of the discriminating film-goer. Tonight's show was a must for me, being that a) it was two unreleased-on-DVD features, and b) the subject was the underwater world (I am a diver and underwater enthusiast), and c) one of the films was "Le Monde du Silence" (The Silent World) by Jacques Cousteau, which I have been itching to see for years, but have been unable to find even on torrent tracker sites due to its relative scarcity on video. How does this tie in to Louis Malle? Malle, it turns out, cut his teeth (fresh out of film school) by co-directing the film with Cousteau. I must confess to having never seen a Malle narrative feature, by the way, but his documentaries on India, and particularly his one on the American heartland, "God's Country" (1986), were what stirred the excitement when I first learned he had co-directed a Cousteau film. "Le Monde du Silence" was chum in the water for me: several interests bound up into one film and made extra enticing by its relative rarity.

I have not posted any thoughts to this blog in quite a while but tonight's films got a few bees buzzing around in my head, and after coming home and waiting for some rice to cook for my dinner at a tardy 12:30, I thought I'd finally get back to sharing some of that buzzing here. First off, I arrived early, which I never do, to find a line already forming outside, at least 40 minutes before the show was scheduled to start. Although there were only about 15 people waiting, I wondered whether this would be indicative of a strong turn-out. That would be miraculous. Friday night in LA and two Jacques Cousteau films from 50 years ago sell out the house? Turns out, that's exactly what happened.

As I speculated aloud while standing in line about a possible large turnout, the man waiting in front of me rationalized by explaining that the program had been highlighted by the LA Weekly as a "critic's pick" event. So there weren't really that many cool divers in LA. But nevertheless, I was still impressed.

Cinefamily's founder and programmer, Hadrian Belove, introduced the films and explained that he'd decided to show "Le Monde Sans Soleil" (1964) first, swapping the original order, because "Sans Soleil" was shot in 35mm Technicolor, and he wanted anyone who might leave after the first screening to definitely see that one. It was a beautiful 35mm flat (1.33) print, with minimal print damage (tail wear only) and no color fading. The story was mostly about Cousteau's team of divers, who he had dubbed the "Oceanauts," living in underwater research stations at several different depths, aided by their surface ship, the Calypso. Listening to the narrator give the statistical data, I was a little non-plussed with the depths of 35 feet and 85 feet for the research stations, although later my cocky superiority was leveled hearing of divers going to nearly 300 feet on trimix gas. There was a definite kind of hi-tech retro-future adventure flavor to it: part James Bond, part Danger:Diabolik. Besides the science and gadgetry combining to create a kind of futuristic, adventure spirit, in an effort to translate information into narrative, different little humorous gags were dropped in, and crew members were portrayed with enough quirks that one began to wonder why Wes Anderson felt the need to fictionalize the team into Team Zissou. There was even a scene with a cello-playing crew-member sitting atop the deck of the Calypso that gave Seu Jorge's guitar-strumming balladeer a run for his money. As the night's program wore on, it became pretty clear that Cousteau's crew was actually far more outrageous than the wildest stunts embarked on by Team Zissou (more on that later).

The audience was clearly primed for laughs (perhaps by virtue of their exposure to the Zissou crew), expecting to find the humor in a bunch of bare-chested guys playing grab-ass with each other while showering, or eating, or doing housekeeping aboard the sea-stations. Yeah, there was a lot of unintentional (I presume) homo-erotic subtext in a film about a bunch of manly men doing manly things out at sea. It was a hipster crowd, and everybody "got the joke" and the giggles continued through most of the night. Other things that elicited scattered (intentional) chuckles were the staged elements designed to dramatize the dangers or realities of underwater exploration, such as when one diver begins to experience symptoms of the Bends, and must be placed in a recompression chamber. It's a coffin-like cylinder that Cousteau and his men have rigged up on the deck of the Calypso, and after placing the diver inside, they all promptly head off to eat lunch without him. I found there to be some of the same brilliance of imagination in Cousteau as shared by Walt Disney. Both men are pitched to kids, although they can both come off as rather eccentric (with some dark overtones). They both imagine the future in great detail, but always in terms of "colonization," seemingly oblivious to the destructive effect of man's mere presence in certain environments.

Now that I think about it, when I was in Yonaguni Japan, drinking awamori with a fantastic human and diving-guide, Keizen, he asked me why I had taken up diving and I answered that when I was a kid I had seen Disney's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea." So I can certainly respect the spirit of exploration in both of these men, and credit them for inspiring others to take an interest in the world. But I also find that with exploration, and "conquest," however benign it may seem (conquest of the sea, conquest of space, conquest of the frontier), there is a certain carelessness and disregard (and arrogance) that can accompany the drive to push forward into new worlds. "Le Monde Sans Soleil" contained some examples of this recklessness, but the earlier "Le Monde du Silence" contained far more - a fact that I hope points to an evolution in Cousteau's thinking in the intervening 10 years.

Before I detail some of the offensive bits of these films, I should take a minute to clarify that I am not a member of PETA. The strongest position I hold on animal rights is that I don't believe in torturing them (for research or any other purpose) and I don't own any pets (because I acknowledge that my neglectful irresponsible lifestyle would be a hazard to them). Still, I once explained to my diving buddy, Peter, why it was that I chose not to spear-fish (an activity he was eager to try). It was not because I don't enjoy eating fish. Oddly, every time we surfaced after a day of diving, we both shared a craving for sushi. The reason I chose not to spear-fish was that, after my first couple of night-dives, hovering among sleeping fish with my dive light blasting a beam of 8 "C" cell-powered white light over that "silent world," I realized how destructive my presence was as an observer, without becoming any further intrusive. As one of the only creatures underwater making noise, by the expulsion of my air bubbles, and certainly the only creature shining a bright light into the milky black water, I compared myself to the "ghetto-birds" that hovered over my apartment, whirling blades chopping the night sky into thunderous pieces, shining their "night sun" into windows at 2 in the morning, "observing." In my dive training, which was administered by a good guy, but not the most "humanitarian" individual imaginable, I was instructed that divers were "ambassadors to the ocean." We were to tread with caution, leave the environment untouched, to the extent that we not even touch the reefs, or stir the sand too much so as to cause a cloud in the water. We should respect the creatures whose world we were visiting, and seek to promote knowledge and awareness of oceanic concerns above water whenever possible. It was always my understanding that not only the science of diving, but these attitudes of conservation had their roots in Cousteau's legacy. I know that Cousteau was the man who was really responsible for scuba - he created the Aqualung !

So imagine my surprise (and evidently, judging by the shocked, nervous laughter, the surprise of the entire audience) when Cousteau's team was pictured, in their own film (!), proudly DYNAMITING a peaceful cove to collect specimens of fish for study (while the voice-over narration reminds us that fishing with dynamite is illegal due to the fact that many more fish will be killed than can be harvested). The camera drifts over piles of fish corpses that look like the aftermath of the Somme. This scene was a kind of climax to a building sense of shame I was feeling at watching Cousteau's researchers as they hammered away at reefs with mallets and chisels, collecting samples, or grabbed fish and stuffed them in plastic bags, which the film's narrator described without remorse as floating prisons, while the fish inside were attacked by predators who could not understand the plastic barrier that prevented them from swallowing the smaller fish. Clearly the "leave no trace" philosophy of diving did not originate with this Cousteau.

The worst episode, by far, was when a beautiful scene of hundreds of dolphins racing alongside the Calypso was followed by a scene of the team searching for whales. A cry goes up from one of the crew members and the boat races off to follow a pod of giant sperm whales. One of the crew races down to a platform below the bow of the boat, standing just above the water's surface. The narrator explains his excitement, "[in 32 years at sea, this is the closest he has ever been to a whale of this size]." He is promptly handed down a home-made harpoon by one of the crew-members. The narrator tells us that the man simply cannot resist having a throw at the giant mammal. We watch him hurl the harpoon, but it merely bounces off the whale's tough skin. The Calypso chases on, running with the whales for several minutes until the narrator notes danger. A baby whale has fallen behind the pod and the Calypso is closing in on it. Cousteau calls for the engines to slow, but it is too late. The engine room calls out that something has hit their left propeller and the camera pans over the side in time to see the water turning red and the baby whale gashed and sliced like a large sausage. The man who had previously tried his hand at harpooing decides that he must administer a "mercy kill," and delivers it with gunshot to the baby whale's head. The crew, "feeling horrible" begin to tow the body up alongside the boat, but the blood in the water attracts a school of sharks who begin to pick and tear at the whale's body. The crew, out of guilt and a general contempt for sharks, decide to "avenge" the whale by gaffing as many sharks as they can hoist aboard and BEATING the living shit out of them. No, I am not kidding. The film glories in several minutes of footage of crew hoisting whatever blunt object was handy high overhead and bringing it crashing down on the thrashing, bleeding, fighting sharks. I am a diver, and no lover of sharks. Encountering a large one would surely scare the piss out of me. But I could not for the LIFE of me understand how JACQUES fucking COUSTEAU could allow this to happen on the deck of his boat ! First of all, it was the Calypso that RAN OVER and killed the whale, not the sharks ! Second, the sharks came to feed. That's what they do. That's what they were designed to do. That is their job in nature. So seeing Cousteau's men bash their brains out with shovels and axes to "avenge" the death of the whale put Cousteau's comments about the conquest of the sea-shelf into an entirely different light. He began to sound less like the wide-eyed adventurer in a world of wonder that Disney would have depicted, and more like a Western frontiersman, looking to "tame" the wild through brute force. It even made me rethink another episode in the film, in which Cousteau's divers feed scraps of meat to a giant grouper, and then "imprison" him in a shark cage when he becomes too aggressive, dominating the feeding and preventing other fish from getting their hand-out. The divers even name him - "Ulysses." It's this weird effort to anthropomorphize the fish that seems jarring to me. These guys are supposed to be marine researchers. How can they learn anything if they are projecting all these human traits and biases and expectations on to the creatures they are studying? Suddenly, Bill Murray's dynamite-fishing Steve Zissou character begins to look less like a comedic caricature and more like a biographical commentary with his mission to "find and kill" the shark that ate his friend.

When the curtain closed, there was boisterous applause, despite the fact that many people were looking at each other with uncertain half-frowns on their faces. I'm sure people expected to find some humor and fun in the source of their beloved Bill Murray movie, and the movies were a lot of fun, and were executed with a kind of playfulness and humor that kept you engaged, not to mention the stunning underwater photography. In one brilliant sequence, plankton was shot with macro lenses to show the huge variety of organisms found within it. Another creature brought aboard was said to eat sand, digesting all the bits of plankton within it, and disposing of the indigestible grit. When turned upside down on deck, several living, symbiotic fish tumbled out. Things like this made my mouth drop open in wonder, and I am a diver who has watched many marine documentaries inspired by Cousteau and his team. I can only imagine how jaw-dropping these films must have been in the 1950s and 1960s. That said, the films are now artifacts from the past that must almost be presented with the all-too-familiar disclaimer of present-day political correctness. Just the other day, I was talking with a co-worker about Hergé and Tintin, asking her if she had ever read or heard of the infamous "Tintin in the Congo." (That book, in addition to it's racist depictions of Africans, also has a scene involving the dynamiting of animals, coincidentally). Watching these Cousteau films reminded me of that discussion because with such works you are forced to take the bad with the good. You cannot deny Hergé's talent or influence on the world of graphic line-art. Just as you cannot deny Cousteau's influence on future generations of oceanographers. But neither can you dismiss either man's callous big-headedness. Hergé can be said to have evolved, going back in an attempt to revise the content he considered shameful in some of his earlier work, and showing some degree of open-mindedness in work he completed toward the end of his career. Cousteau must have worked hard in the succeeding years to create a more positive legacy on film - films that can be shown without any need for contextualizing disclaimers about the "different attitudes" people had in the past - or I'm sure, despite his contributions to dive science, he would not be remembered as fondly now. Watching that shark slaughter made me realize why it is that this film is probably so hard to see - I imagine it has something to do with the Cousteau estate being less than flattered by it. For that matter, I was a bit surprised given Louis Malle's involvement - how much was he a party to the objectionable bits? Again, I do not know his work in great detail, but I have been drawn in by his documentaries and through them sensed a man of great sensitivity. Perhaps he filmed the Cousteau crew's wantonness unsparingly, as exposé - or maybe merely as verité, simply existing as a fly-on-the-wall to events on the ship and below the water.

I do know that films of this type have been considered good educational material for kids - at least when i was growing up. But they present some difficult questions to answer since it seems clear that the ideology behind today's Cousteau Society was not yet fully formed. Cousteau ends "Le Monde Sans Soleil" in an undersea cave, hundreds of feet below the surface. His submersible vehicle surfaces in a lake, the hatch opens, and for a moment he and his co-pilot breathe in the thousand-year-old air and shine their lights around the stone walls of an environment never seen before by man. It is a wondrous moment, and makes me wish we could be spending more money to explore the oceans, just as others wish to explore space. Perhaps if there was more extensive and better funded research on-going, we would develop deeper understanding and respect, not simply treating the oceans as our waste dump. I believe Cousteau began his mission as a seafarer of old - out to tame the sea, and claim his portion of it. But I would suppose that anyone spending such an amount of time as he did at sea would eventually have to develop a conservationist attitude. He is quoted as saying, "One protects what one likes," and maybe it is the hunters and conquerors who first become aware of the need to protect nature, as they see the ravages of man firsthand, before the rest of us even notice.

While standing in line to get in, the man in front of me mentioned mistakenly that Le Monde du Silence was co-directed by Jean-Pierre MELVILLE, rather than Louis MALLE. My God, I thought, leaving the theater. Could you imagine the film that THOSE two would have made together?

La Smog di Rossi

Smog is an Italian film directed by Franco Rossi from 1962. It screened April 7 at the Billy Wilder Theater (within the Armand Hammer museum) in Westwood, which seems to be the new home of the UCLA Film Archive. I went to see it because I learned that it was shot in LA, and I've become one of those Angelenos who loves to do cinematic archaeology of the city. Smog is also one of those films which does not exist on DVD in any form at the moment (bootleg or otherwise), and I really make an effort to see those kinds of rarities when I can.

The title "Smog" grabbed me, leaving me wondering if there was any connection to Italo Calvino's short story, "La nuvola di Smog." I read the story several years ago and tossed around ideas for adapting it into a short film as I drove my commute in-and-out of Hollywood on La Cienega everyday, past oil drills pumping in the shadows of Baldwin Hills suburban ranch homes. The film had no connection to Calvino, but I was happy to find a nice little cinematic gem. This film shows some interesting locations, from the opening at LAX to Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards, to the oil fields in (what is referred to as) Culver City. ( They looked a lot like the ones off La Cienega, but it was hard to be sure ). It's interesting to see what's changed and what has stayed the same. Beyond just the physical locations, it's interesting to see the portrayal of an ex-pat community in Los Angeles, since communities of foreign-born people, like the landmarks, are characteristic of the city. In 2008, I have not encountered any large community of Italian-born people in LA, and I wondered whether this reflected a reality in 1962 that has since changed. But the attitudes and ideas could be transposed to Korean or Latin-American or what-have-you.

The story is simple: A lawyer from Italy has a stopover in LA on his way to handle a case in Mexico. He is released from the airport without passing through immigration by an airline attendant who keeps his ID. He intends to do some brief sightseeing in Hollywood, but quickly discovers that the real Hollywood is nothing like what he imagined. Unable to function in English, he quickly falls in with various Italian ex-pats, making friends with their affluent and well-connected American contacts. Most of the Italian people Vittorio comes in contact with are hustling different jobs, installing stereo equipment, teaching Italian language to rich housewives, doing caricature artwork, etc. One of them, Mario, is a particularly ambitious Jack-of-all-trades type who sinks below Vittorio's standard of morality with his credo of "A little ingenuity, a lot of nerve."

Renato Salvatori as Mario, teaching Italian to idle housewives.

Mario and Vittorio (Enrico Maria Salerno) later have out over some cash missing from Vittorio's jacket pocket.

Vittorio sees himself in a different class of people than most of the countrymen he meets in Los Angeles. When asked by an airline attendant if he would like to pass time in a waiting room with an Italian couple he'd met on the plane, Vittorio shrugs them off, saying, "They're just some immigrants I met on the plane. Italians are OK in Italy, but..." He seems to find much more in common with the affluent people he meets at a Pasadena cocktail party, even if they mispronouce his name, insist that he is the "ambassador of somewhere," or generally rely on him for entertainment.

Vittorio accompanies Gabriela to a high-society cocktail party, where he seems to feel right at home, despite his inability to be understood.

I read the film as a statement on the difficulty of connecting on an honest human level with anyone in the city, regardless of their language or nationality. It's a familiar theme in many movies about Los Angeles, and is explored visually through Vittorio's outsider perspective. At times, the "smog" layer which inhibits human contact is so thick (as in a bowling alley's barroom, choked with cigarette smoke) that it is nearly impossible to see the faces in front of you. Race, class and language are the obvious barriers dividing people, but even Mario and Gabriela, who share a language, culture and situation as foreigners, seem to be pursuing dreams on parallel but separate paths, only overlapping when they need each others' comfort. In this regard, although Smog may have originally been made primarily for an Italian audience (not sure about this, but it is mostly English-subtitled Italian language), it belongs solidly among the ranks of other films about LA, many of which observe the isolation of its people.

** I did a search for information about the film on the internet and found a review that Time magazine published in 1962. It leads me to believe there may be two endings to this film, since the one mentioned in the review differs from what I saw. The Time review mentions Vittorio becoming trapped in the home of an architect, where design has overwhelmed function. The ending I saw had a considerably less sardonic tone, leaving Vittorio to revel at the party with his new friends, and following Gabriela back to the home she dreams of buying. Gabriela, the passed-over girl who leaves the party alone, spends the night with Mario, the uninvited, who nonetheless understands status even if he cannot transcend his own. Although they have each other, it is only for the night, and the film ends with Gabriela watching Mario drive away to begin his hustle anew. If this film ever sees the light of day on DVD, it would be cool to find out whether or not there was an alternate ending, and why.

Mario takes a dip in Gabriela's dream pool. Vittorio passes out after drinking too much at the bowling alley.

Morbidezza: 書を捨てよ町へ出よう

Film Review: Throw Away Your Books and Go Out Into the Streets
1971 Japan. dir: Shuji Terayama

I recently obtained a copy of a film called Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets made in Japan in 1971. Two weeks prior to watching it, I watched another film from the same era, Easy Rider, with someone from Japan who had never seen it before. Mulling over the Japanese film for several days afterward, I pondered the similarities between the films, and realized bemusedly that "書を捨てよ" probably had the same effect on me that Easy Rider had on my Japanese friend. Probably, neither of us quite grasped the full impact of certain visual (or musical) references, but we each understood that the films represented a bas-relief of the specific cultural attitudes from which they emerged.

I know next to nothing about Shuji Terayama (the film's director), but I have gleaned that he was a member of a group called the Art Theater Guild, which played a crucial role in the independent Japanese film industry starting in about the late 1960s. The Art Theater Guild was a kind of filmmakers cooperative, whose chief purpose was to provide a distribution outlet for struggling independent filmmakers. Japan's film industry at that time was a studio system not unlike Hollywood's of the same era, so forming such an organization made a lot of sense for art filmmakers who would other wise have little chance getting distribution. The Art Theater Guild was able to make one-on-one arrangements with theater owners to give their titles limited runs, at times when theater owners might otherwise be facing programming slowdowns. A by-product of this coalition was that many of these filmmakers collaborated on each others' work - so it became a kind of production workshop/studio in its own right. The roster of Japanese filmmakers associated in one way or another with the Art Theater Guild is an impressive roll call, and includes Nagisa Oshima and Toshio Matsumoto. In this regard, Terayama and ATG occupied a similar space in the Japanese film industry as Hopper, Fonda, Altman and others occupied in Hollywood - at the crest of a wave of changes in film aesthetics and industry business practices.

As a straight narrative, Throw Away Your Books is much more loosely wrapped than Easy Rider (which, as a buddy-road movie, is essentially a "quest," and one of the oldest narrative models known to Western culture). Terayama's film is a series of vignettes, following a young protagonist and his family and friends, intercut with documentary elements. It is bookended by two sequences in which the narrator breaks the 4th wall and addresses the audience in a monologue on the artificiality of cinema. Obviously, these filmmakers who contributed to what became known as the "Japanese New Wave" took much inspiration from the French movement of the same name. However, in content it clearly urges Japan to reclaim an identity that is free of Western influence.

In the film's symmetrical bookend sequences, the narrator speaks directly to the audience, mockingly identifying himself as "no one," a figure of no historical importance. He questions our willingness to sit in the dark and wait for something to happen, for events to be revealed by insignificant shadows on the screen. At the film's end he chides our readiness to stroll out of the theater and let the events we'd witnessed be banished from our memories as daylight banishes the image from a movie screen.

Cueing the lights to come up, the narrator reveals himself to be standing amongst all of the crew members. "Although it is true that movies themselves can exist only in the dark," he tells us, "[from them can be born something which we can take away, into our daily lives.]"

There is almost a pre-punk, anti-Establishment ethic to the film. It swears off Western capitalism, it burns the American flag, there is a "Primer For Young People on How to do Drugs" vignette. It's easy to understand where this comes from. Japan's entire post-war identity was modeled after the US.

Terayama blasts Japan for being "like a lizard, captured in the Cola bottle" of the US, humiliated and incapable of escape. Over a shot of trashed empty cigarette cartons, branded "Peace," one of the film's many songs shouts "We want real peace." It's not just real peace that seems to be the bone of contention, but a real identity of this generation's own making, rather than an inheritance of the legacy of WWII.

All of the angst, the loud music, wild handheld camera, sexuality and drug use is part of the generational rebellion that was ocurring all over the world in the late 60s and early 70s. For American youth as much as Japanese, the generational rebellion was probably influenced in part by the legacy of WWII, since in the US it was the righteous victory against Fascism that was turned upside down in Vietnam which ignited the youth movement. In Terayama's depiction of Japan, WWII hangs over the family, even though the official Occupation has ended. Father is a "beaten dog, a war criminal," who drinks, pilfers money from his son and spies on women in the toilet. "Home is a pigsty," and father wants grandma to go to an old folks' home run by American-influenced Christian missionaries. Terayama's protagonist's urge to leave "home" could be read as a desire to escape the paternalistic shadow of the US.



There is a recurrent image in the film of the protagonist at the helm of a lightweight glider, trying to take flight, but always just barely skimming over the ground. At the film's end, the glider burns in an empty field.

In his epilogue, the narrator tells us that while filming, each actor became their role and thus, each situation became real. And while it played on screen, it was real for each of us in the audience. The glider cannot escape the bounds of the film screen; it crashes and burns, showing us again that reality of art is finite. But the implied hope I think is that the audience will be provoked, and move "skyward" by other means. Terayama was acknowledging that his art was a seed that needed minds to take root.

Lastly, the film has a really cool final credit sequence. There are no names given (at least not on the version I saw). It is merely a long dolly past all of the faces that appeared in the film. Long ago, I saw a student film titled "Morbidezza." The term originated during the Renaissance and described an extreme delicacy in the rendering of human fleshtones. In that film, the filmmaker gathered his family around a dinner table and had them hold a pose for 10 minutes, then slowly tracked over all of their faces. In Easy Rider also, Dennis Hopper films this type of "morbidezza" sequence (to re-appropriate the term). The scene takes place in the hippie commune, during a prayer of thanks for the food they have struggled to farm. I always thought it was astoundingly sensitive and real, and kind of epitomizes a film which has become a time capsule of a specific generational attitude. In Terayama's hands the shot is equally effective, especially following his character's overt bids for anonymity, which the shot proceeds to disprove. "I am no one." "You will forget us," the narrator says. These words lead into the shot, tracking across dozens of faces, in full silence, re-familiarizing the audience with every single cast member of the past two and a half hours. In their plainness and silence, they are rendered un-anonymous. All of their individual characteristics are thrown into relief and we can stare directly into their eyes and see each living soul that played a role in creating this work. It reminds us that each of us has the power to be creative and collaborative in an infinite variety of ways.



One further note -- the last face is that of Akihiro Miwa, a famous drag performer in Japan who has a small part in the film. I really loved Kuro Bara no Yakata (Black Rose Mansion), so it was a surprise pleasure to see him pop up in another film.


A reviewer on IMDB wrote that this was the "strangest" and "best" Japanese film they had ever seen. I would describe it as neither, but it's worth checking out if you can find a copy or catch a screening.

Efrem's Visit - Sun Drunk Biking and Skidoo

My friend Efrem came to visit again this summer. He is working on a phD in Math and for the past two summers has participated in summer academic programs at UCLA. Last year I caught up with him a bit - saw that he had his dreadlocks back, which reminded me of the old days when we used to play in a band together. I know Efrem's into biking and I had wanted to do a Midnight Ride with him, but the scheduling just didn't work out while he was here. So I met him in Westwood with the aim of biking down to the beach.

We biked down to Santa Monica and then headed south along the beach bike path. This summer has been hot as blazes in LA and Saturday was no exception. After an hour or so, we began to discuss getting some food. We were down around Playa del Rey and I knew there was a pier at Redondo with a restaurant that served deep-fried seafood. Efrem seemed into it, so we started biking for that.

But I had forgotten how far Redondo really was. I was looking for the twin smoke-stacks of the power plant that sits just off Redondo Beach. I have seen those when I have been diving there. As we approached the El Segundo area, I saw the smoke-stacks and told him, "We're almost there." But, it was a water treatment plant - false alarm.

My ass began to get REALLY sore. My bike is 12 years old and badly needs some chain grease and a new seat. It was squeaking and the seat felt like it was made of nails. We both started to complain of being tired. The sun really didn't help. I could feel my face and arms getting a good burn. I started to laugh everytime I told Efrem that it was just a bit further. We were both hungry, but I could not let us stop before we reached the seafood joint.

Eventually, I saw the pier.
We found the seafood place and got a couple of deep-fried plates of seafood and some beer. Efrem swatted at the seagulls who begged at our window. We noticed that the place was Korean, and we saw some delicious looking Korean seafood stew being served. Since we were still kind of ravenously hungry, we decided to order some. And more beer. And some soju to go with it. Efrem thought the soju was strong, so I drank most of the bottle.

Now exuding spicy garlic kimchee fish breath and alcohol fumes, we hobbled back to our bikes and began the trek back to Westwood. Having been the one inciting us to persevere on the way down, I was doing a lot more complaining on the way back up. When we got back to Westwood, it was about 9pm and dark. I had wanted to make my way to the Cinematheque for a screening of Otto Preminger's LSD-inspired 1960s comedy Skidoo, with Jackie Gleason and Groucho Marx. (I'm not kidding, either... I'd heard rumors that Jackie and Groucho and Otto all did LSD together before making this film. I can only confirm that Otto did.)
For some incomprehensible reason, despite the ridiculous distance we had just biked in sweltering heat, under the influence of large quantities of fermented hops and rice, and knowing that we were already late to the screening, which was in Hollywood - a 20 minute drive - we decided to go.
They let us in free since we were over an hour late, but the film had not started yet anyway. Since it is such a bizarre cult film that is rarely ever screened, there was an hour or so of introduction, which is what we walked in at the tail end of. For a review of the film, you will have to talk to Efrem, or Jeff and Teresa, who also showed up. I sat down, saw about ten minutes and the fatigue from the day caught up with me. I snoozed through Jackie Gleason's famous acid trip scene and woke up to Carol Channing singing "Skidoo" on a boat, while a bunch of people danced behind her in a samba line. I've probably slept through better films.

The next day, Efrem sent me this map of our trip. Just so no one thinks I am a complete wuss, we biked more than 40 goddamn miles! Drunk and sunburned!





Lastly, there's this: (I wonder if this was post-LSD Gleason talking..?)

(Buy Skidoo on DVD! Through the wonder of the internets!)

Linda Lea I Love You Still

On foot one day in downtown LA, I noticed a dilapidated old neighborhood movie theater with a cracked marquee featuring a kimono-clad geisha. Linda Lea Japanese Films, read the marquee. Up top, I noticed the Toei Studios logo, familiar from so many yakuza and samurai flicks that I have been unearthing over the past few years on DVD.

I usually make my way to the Egyptian for their annual Japanese Outlaw Masters series, which is a great way to get your fix of chanbara and yakuza films on the big screen. But seeing the Linda Lea marquee there on the edge of Little Tokyo kind of blew my mind. For one thing, there is only one operating movie theater in downtown now; chalk that up to a small residential population and the plethora of other movie/shopping "destinations" around the city. But for another, even considering the number of former theaters demolished, decrepit or being used for other purposes in downtown, I was startled to see one that specialized in Japanese films.

The theater sits on Main Street, which is not the bustling metropolitan thoroughfare that the name might suggest. The street on this block (and stretching several blocks south) is populated mostly by homeless people who are corraled into Skid Row by an unofficial and controversial policy of containment. Standing on the desolate street before the cracked marquee, I could imagine this place as it must have been in the late 1960s or early 1970s, with the words GRAVEYARD OF HONOR or SWORD OF DOOM stuck in red plastic letters to the marquee.

In fact, the theater's history is much older than that. I found a great site called Cinema Treasures, on which users submit data about old theaters dug up from public records. The history of the Linda Lea is a little patchy and hard to follow. It seems to have gone by several different names, and there are records of different kinds of businesses inhabiting the address. As far back as 1890, there are conflicting city records documenting the existence of (variously) a saloon, a furniture store and the Los Angeles Floral Society, all at 251 S. Main. Confusing matters slightly is the fact that, apparently, another theater existed at 255 S. Main (next-door), which was known at different times as the Union and the New York. Clearly, from looking at newspaper articles and directories, Main Street in the early 1900s was a booming entertainment district with many bars, burlesques, shops and theaters. The first real historic thread for the Linda Lea appears in 1924, when a construction contract was put together to build a 500-seat theater at 251 S. Main, the site where she currently stands.

A photo of Main St taken c.1925, showing the Arrow Theater, later to become the Linda Lea. Note the distinctive upward slope on the roof and the sign proclaiming "All Seats 10 cents." This is where the Linda Lea/Toei logo would later be mounted. From LA Public Library. Click to enlarge.

In 1925, right around the time the Arrow (as it was then known) was opening for business, another theater was built just up the street at 324 E. 1st St, in the heart of Little Tokyo. It was called the Fuji-Kan and screened Japanese movies exclusively. Wikipedia* states that "At its peak, Little Tokyo had approximately 30,000 Japanese Americans living in the area." That's about the estimated population of all residents in downtown today. Clearly, there was enough patronage for an all-Japanese movie theater. But 16 years later, that would change with the attack on Pearl Harbor and Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066. In 1942, Little Tokyo became a ghost town. The doors of the Fuji-Kan were boarded up.

The Fuji Kan Theater at 324 E. 1st St. Left: 1939. Right: 1941.

With many white American men in military service, African-Americans from the South moved to California in numbers to work in the shipyards, where bosses temporarily put aside their discriminatory hiring practices to meet the demands of the war. People came to the coast cities in such numbers, there was a lack of housing. In addition, in most of the city, restrictive housing covenants were in place that prohibited African-Americans from buying or renting. The empty buildings of Little Tokyo soon became home to a thriving African-American community with an identity of its own. Few people that I've met have heard of LA's Bronzeville, as its tenure lasted only about three years. But it forms an important part of the city's history, extending the African-American corridor of Central Avenue into the heart of downtown. Music critic RJ Smith recently wrote a very interesting book on Central Avenue's cultural significance, and includes an entire chapter on jazz and rhythm-n-blues in Bronzeville.

Perhaps a former restaurant, a sign over the door reads Bronzeville Arcade. Through the glass, a neon sign written in Japanese is still visible, reading 料理, or "cuisine." One of many Little Tokyo buildings that served Bronzeville residents. c.1945 (From the Bronzeville site.)

In 1945, the Fuji-Kan, now sitting in the heart of Bronzeville, re-opened as the Linda Lea. At its gala opening on Sat Feb 10, there was a double-feature of Minstrel Man and Brazil, as well as an orchestra, tap dancers and other stage performers. Meanwhile, the Arrow Theater back on Main was undergoing its own changes. Sometime around 1940, it changed its name to the Azteca and began showing Spanish language films. A news photo from Nov 20 1940 shows the building's marquee (minus the geisha of today), with the titles El Vuelo de la Muerte, and Bajo el Cielo de Mexico.

It's interesting to me seeing how the names of the theaters, and the titles of the films programmed, reflect the changes in the area demographics. In addition to the creation of Bronzeville, one of the other side-effects of the Japanese internment was an increase in Mexican immigrants. LA has always had a large Mexican population, but during the internment, there were more people coming directly from Mexico to work. Japanese-Americans played a large role in farming and agriculture, operating their own farms, or working for other growers. In Hawaii for instance, where Pearl Harbor actually ocurred, the Japanese-Americans were not interned, because the government recognized that their labor in pineapple and sugarcane fields was too indispensible, and could result in economic collapse if lost. Just as the war industry was willing to look the other way when it came to hiring African-Americans in the factories, some Japanese were released from the detention camps in order to help harvest crops. "They literally saved the beet harvest in '42 and '43, because so many of the men were away for the war," said Patricia Wolfe, treasurer of the Heart Mountain, Wyoming Foundation.(USAToday*). America was facing a shortage of labor of crisis proportions, so Mexicans were brought in by train to downtown LA Union Station, under the Bracero Program.

From 1945-46, with the war still on, but Japan in retreat, the internment camps began to close and release Japanese-Americans. They had lost farms, houses and shops, and would find it difficult to resume life as before. Nevertheless, there were those who returned and downtown landlords returned their leases, beginning a transition that ended the Bronzeville era. In 1947, the Linda Lea on 1st St (the former Fuji-Kan) closed down and re-opened at 251 S. Main, replacing the Azteca (the former Arrow). I have not yet found information on whether the theater switched its programming to Japanese films at this time. One can only speculate as to why the name remained Linda Lea once Japanese programming resumed.

After the internment, Little Tokyo would never fully recover, as most families moved to outlying suburbs like Torrance and Gardena instead of returning to downtown. From the "30,000" believed to have lived there prior to 1941, there are now "about 1000," most of them retirees (Wikipedia*). Although the Japanese-American community became politically active in the 1970s and 80s, seeking restitution for the internment and attempting to restore Little Tokyo through community development projects, a new residential base never took hold. In the years following the war, the city of LA claimed property under Eminent Domain laws for the construction of city projects (including the Police headquarters) and the New Otani Hotel, with other portions being plowed under for industrial warehouse space. As an ethnic enclave, it became characterized by an assortment of ramen shops, video rental and bookstores, and Japanese grocery markets. Despite a recent surge in popularity of Japanese pop culture, and the resultant influx of dollars from visiting shoppers, Little Tokyo seems to be steadily assimilating into the generic downtown backdrop, as businesses like American Apparel, Office Depot and Starbucks replace storefronts previously occupied by Japanese businesses.

A friend of mine commented that Little Tokyo today is "like Disneyland," presenting a dressed-up, tourist version of its former self. Would preserving the Linda Lea only add to that sense of the artificial? Many people that I've talked with, even LA history buffs, have never heard of Bronzeville. Does the preservation of buildings like the Linda Lea automatically raise our awareness of our city's history?

Right now, downtown LA is experiencing one of the largest urban makeovers anywhere in the country. The NY Times reports that over 15,000 new residential units have been completed or are in the process of construction in downtown since 1999. There are numerous loft/condos in converted warehouses surrounding Little Tokyo with selling prices starting around $670 per square foot. Proponents of urban redevelopment can point to conditions on Skid Row and argue that change in downtown is a good thing. But few people can afford to buy in to the condos and lofts that are being built. And LA has a particular habit of destroying historic buildings, only to memorialize them later out of some pious regret. The current wave of development is just one of many changes in the downtown neighborhood over the decades, but it is the most large-scale and expensive. Is there anything wrong with asking whether downtown will be better served by franchise clothing stores, coffee shops and luxury lofts than by family-run LA institutions like Fugetsu-Do, the Japanese confectionery which has been here since 1903?

Recently, some Angelenos have banded together to slow the development of the area. After being petitioned with over 5500 public signatures, Councilwoman Jan Perry has expressed concern over the potential loss of Little Tokyo's "distinct characteristics."

Mulling over these things, I have watched the Linda Lea sit in disrepair for months while plans for its renovation were discussed. Finally, work is underway, although at the moment it looks like it is being completely demolished to make way for the new project. Leased by the ImaginAsian Entertainment company, the site will host a theater programming Asian films from all over the world. I'm happy to see another theater occupy this spot where, for over 80 years, people have been watching movies. That's a span of time that is almost as old as movies themselves. Hopefully the new theater will connect with an audience, and movies will continue to live on Main St. It may be interesting for some armchair history sleuth to discover the lineage of whatever building faces demolition eighty years from now.

History is a white elephant sale: what's meaningless to one may be dear to another. Unfortunately, as with so many things, the value is often determined by the highest bidder.

My Sources
Bronzeville
Cinema Treasures
Articles on Downtown Development
Little Tokyo Motion Highlights Downtown's Lack of Specific Plans
Downtown development spills into rebounding ethnic enclave
In Los Angeles, a Gehry-Designed Awakening
Articles on the Linda Lea and the ImaginAsian
ImaginAsian Center Will Add Modern Life to Main
The Linda Lea Sequel - Rundown Theater to Be Recast as One-Screen Specialty Cinema
Curtain Comes Back Up on Historic Japanese Theater
Articles on Skid Row
Desolation Boulevard
Escape from L.A.'s Skid Row Can Prove Difficult

Infiltrating the DGA: The Donner Cut and My Dinner with Ilya

On the left stands Director Richard Donner at the screening for his long-awaited version of Superman II. On the right, the impish Producer blamed for keeping this film from public eyes, Ilya Salkind.

For reasons I should probably not reveal, I was a guest at the industry-only screening of "Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut," at the Director's Guild Theater this past Thursday night.

I'm not a religious Superman or comic book fan. I simply got myself involved several years ago with a crazy bunch of people in their passionate attempt to convince Warner Bros. to unvault some missing reels of footage that were rumored to exist. There are detailed accounts around the web of how that footage came to be "lost" and why there are now two existing versions of Superman II, so I won't recount the story. But as an obsessive film geek, hearing the unusual production history of the firing and hiring of directors, the re-writing of the script, and the elimination of Marlon Brando from the final edit refreshed my interest in the film as further documentation of Hollywood's madness.

The invitation, and the film's existence, felt like a vindication of my clandestine group's efforts, although probably very little credit is attributable in our direction. Nevertheless, we were allowed in, wearing suits and ties, to mingle freely with the likes of Richard Donner, Bryan Singer, and other cast and crew members from both feature film franchises.

With the recent proliferation of "Director's Cut" DVDs, there are increasingly more films for which multiple versions exist, although it is rarely the case that the different versions are drastically different . Often, the "director's cut" is merely the re-insertion or extension of a few trimmed scenes which were lost for the sake of a kinder MPAA rating, or for the sake of pacing, etc. It has seldom been the case that a studio or producer has assumed complete creative autonomy and delivered a film that is radically different from what was scripted and shot. One example is the Japanese film Gojira, which was completely reformulated and released in English as Godzilla, King of the Monsters, with new scenes filmed with Raymond Burr and a totally different storyline (aside from the basic premise of a giant lizard crushing Tokyo). A new DVD which pairs both films is a perfect demonstration of Lev Kuleshov's first experiment in film montage - artificial landscape. A commentator on Godzilla, King of the Monsters notes that audiences were unaware that the film was different from what Japanese audiences saw, and the film was admired for it's authenticity in Japanese casting and Japanese set creation. Raymond Burr, it was thought, had been flown to Tokyo for the filming, when in fact, all of his scenes were shot on a cramped stage at a low-rent studio on Vermont Av. ( I hoped to find the studio, since I now live just off of Vermont, but found out that, like many other sites of historical significance in LA, it was torn down years ago).

The next film I can think of which falls into this odd category is Terry Gilliam's Brazil. It too has been released on a great DVD from Criterion which clearly documents the studio's interference with the film and offers two versions to the viewer for comparison.

And then there's Superman II. The backstory to this one seems to have been common lore to any self-respecting film geek; in fact, it is mentioned on the Godzilla commentary as one of the few other examples of an alternate version of a film existing, although, at the time it was not known whether it would ever see the light of day. Most of the fans seemed to be content with the idea of just seeing the raw footage. Apparently, it existed and somewhere buried among it was a performance by the late Marlon Brando. There were photographs which roughly illustrated scenes from the original script, and all of these artifacts had been shared over the magic of the internet for years, giving fans a chance to reconstruct in their heads what Superman II would have been like in a parallel universe.

Finally, due to a confluence of recent events - the revival of the Superman film franchise, the alignment of the planets, and some would say the emergence of a fan-edited reconstruction of the film using bits of "lost" footage culled from international TV broadcasts, Warner Bros and Ilya Salkind and the other powers that be agreed that there were tremendous profits awaiting them should they put aside past differences and allow a new cut of Superman II to be released into the world. And so Donner's sometime editor, Michael Thau, took on the job of patching together a new cut of the film, after 20-some odd years, following the original script and using footage that Donner had shot before he was fired.

Although the DGA theater was mostly filled with industry people (Joe Dante sat directly behind me, Richard Donner and Bryan Singer off to my left, Margot Kidder and Brandon Routh behind them), there were some covert fan infiltrators, like ourselves, peppered throughout the crowd. The sense of anticipation ran through them like electric current, causing nervous twitches and excited bursts of energetic gab. When the MC finished his announcement of the film, a guy in front of me tensed himself inwards, hissing "YES!" in a scream of catharsis that he self-consciously tried to keep from echoing off the theater walls.

The film itself was a bit of a patchwork. There are completed scenes which were lifted unaltered from the theatrically-released Superman II. There were new scenes which were completed with rough visual effects work and/or body double shots. And there was at least one scene which was completed with the only existing footage available - two screen tests of Chris Reeve and Margot Kidder. Even in an industry screening, there were people in the crowd who expected the polish of a finished film, not a historical blueprint; and so, there were snickers at some of the rough FX shots and at Chris Reeve's inconsistent hairstyle across cuts. I was bothered more by gaps in the narrative logic than bad continuity, but I refuse to critique it as a movie because I don't really feel that it is one. For all the money that was spent putting these pieces together (and I don't think it was much), it is really just a chance to see the missing footage that fans were dreaming about all those years.




After the screening there was a panel discussion with Donner and other crew and cast members. Donner seemed content with the film and vindicated at seeing his vision on screen, which is interesting since I think his involvement was mainly to critique Michael Thau's editorial work, rather than play a hands-on role in shaping the cut and re-shooting. Truly, with the deaths of the two actors playing the story's central characters and twenty-plus years of age on everyone else, there was little that could realistically be done in terms of re-shooting. But I think he was perhaps slightly more ambivalent towards a re-edit than say, Terry Gilliam was towards restoring his vision of Brazil. That may have to do with the fact that Terry Gilliam actually shot and cut his version, and saw it with his own eyes before it was shredded to pieces under the supervision of Sid Sheinberg. At any rate, Donner says he now feels relieved that it exists in this "restored" form. Audiences will take away what they will.

After the screening, my friends and I went across the street for a bite only to have Superman's producer, Ilya Salkind, seated with his guests directly across from us. He's a crazy guy. He told us to say that.

"Tell them he's a crazy fucker, because I am!" he giggled in his multi-lingual accent, sipping a beer.

Ilya Salkind proved quite genial and loquacious, hanging over the divider between tables at Greenblatt's to tell his side of things.

We all looked up in disbelief as he walked in and sat at a table near us, but he engaged us directly in conversation, saying first that we looked like the Reservoir Dogs (all of us dressed in suits), and then asking if we were Hollywood consultants. When my friends explained that we were just a group of Superman fans, Ilya's companion decided to quiz us and see if we were "real" fans. "Name three girlfriends Superman had whose intials were all LL." I knew that if I had been alone, the conversation would have ended there, but I also knew that this guy had no idea who he was fucking with. My friends were the real deal. Having passed the test, Ilya cheerfully leaned over the handrail separating our tables and bantered on for at least twenty minutes about the difficulty of working with Donner, his reputation in the media, and his previous attempts to re-edit Superman I & II with Richard Donner into one long movie.

"We were gonna trim all the fat, and that fucking movie would have been like a rocket! Dick was so excited about it, we were jumping up and down, kissing each other."

I don't know whether Richard Donner and Ilya Salkind ever shared so much joint passion over anything that they actually jumped up and down kissing each other. Donner made it rather clear on the panel that he had banished the Salkinds (Ilya produced with his father, Alexander) from the set and that their relationship had ended very badly. Margot Kidder also engaged in a little Salkind-bashing on the panel, and mentioned that her previous on-record outrage at the producers back in the early 1980's had resulted in her part being vengefully slashed away in Superman III. Clearly, history has been kinder to Donner than Salkind. This was Donner's party, after years worth of fan support, clamoring for Warner Bros to release the footage from the vaults. All the celebrating was leaving Ilya feeling a little cold though, and as the night wore on, he embarked on an above-the-belt revenge-rant against Donner and Donner-philia, pausing only for self-congratulatory asides.

"Do you know how many fucking takes he did of that red sun?" Ilya claimed it was in the 40s I believe, though I have forgotten the precise number.

"That's hilarious," one of us responded.

"It's not hilarious when you're producing a movie! What did you think about the boy in Superman Returns having super powers? The love scene in this Donner Cut was edited with that in mind, but it makes no sense! How could he fuck her? He's an alien ! It makes sense in our film."

When Tom Mankiewicz spoke at the panel discussion, he related his initial reluctance to do a comic book adaptation. He went to meet with Richard Donner and found him dressed in the Superman costume. "Just try the costume on, Tom. Once you do, I swear you'll want to do the story," Donner told him. Mankiewicz attributed the film's narrative success to Donner's willingness to "get inside" the story, to accept the fantastical elements as factual and proceed to the emotional heart of it. Whether this view of the story was shared by Salkind I don't know, but he seemed as passionate about the story as any fan I'd ever met, and just as ready to engage with it on his own terms of "realism."

"What did you notice in the original Superman II about the molecule chamber?" he asked, as we were leaving. He had that impish grin again, waiting to trip us up on our knowledge of Superman. "Not this edit, but the original one. What did you see? No fan has ever caught this."

My friend, who has seen the Superman films more times than is safe for one's health, made several attempts to guess at where Salkind was leading.

"No! Wrong! What did you see?!"

Giving up, he finally told us. "His skull! It's his skull!"

We looked at each other blankly.

"He has an alien skull!"

I meekly attempted to follow up the uncomfortable silence with a query for more information. "What was the distinguishing characteristic of the skull?"

"It's ALIEN!" Salkind roared. "Go and watch it! I made them put an alien skull in there!"

As we said goodnight and shuffled off, I pondered Salkind's situation. He was the Judas of Superman. He was blasted by Donner, the cast and crew, the media, and the fans. Although he had initiated the project and put as much sweat into it as anyone, his legacy was as the "ruiner." There was something a little bit sad about the whole thing. Donner being celebrated for a work that is supposed to be "his," Salkind's frustrations with the project growing out of his hands and turning its back on him like an angry teenager, and not least, the fans who would undoubtedly watch the new film and return to the internet to bemoan its shortcomings. For many people, it will always be what it was supposed to be - simple inspirational myth. But filmmaking is such a wierd political, strategic beast to conquer, sometimes the events surrounding the mythmaking take on their own mythic qualities. Those who care enough to do the archeological digging end up sharing the neuroses of the filmmakers, and the whole spectacle can shift focus to new players.

As much as I have sometimes hated being a part of the pollutive cultural fallout of the entertainment industry, the trade-off is being able to swim in these little eddies of minor historic cultural significance. The dramas that unfold here may be of little import on the grand scale of life, but some of these episodes are almost Shakespearean in their parade and bedeviling of pride and passion.

Polish Movie Posters ( ...Are Cool... )

Polski Governator circa 1984

I haven't had much to say lately. Maybe it is the heat-wave that has been burning up Southern California and the rest of the country lately. Maybe it is watching Beirut get blown to bits while Bush and Rice say they don't want to negotiate for peace unless it is a lasting peace. I have no idea what any of this blather means anymore. Sitting in my shorts sweating and watching people make meaningless blah-blah talk. The weather forecasters keep saying that LA is in the 90's, but the "feels like" temperature is well over 100. I don't know when they began giving the forecast in "feels like" degrees. Temperature seems to have become a very subjective issue this year, with Al Gore trumpeting the alarms of global-warming and being ludicrously compared to Joseph Goebbels by the right-wing pundits. Voices on the radio and television are talking about blackouts in California again, saying this time, there is no Enron to blame. Ken Lay is Dead; not from heat exhaustion, but heart exhaustion. Too much cholesterol in his diet. News that the energy crisis was manufactured came too late to stop the Republican coup that seized the California governorship, but it probably did slow the rate at which they hoped to build new power plants. Now that we are all sweltering, the hands are hovering over the power kill switches, and politicians are ready to explain to us that the power grid is old and out of date and insufficient to meet current demand, which I understand owes its blame to increased population... caused by immigration. It all dovetails so nicely sometimes. I found this rather ingenious solution to the problem while poking around the web: http://www.pocho.com/news/2001/wattback/wattback.html
I actually had this idea myself, when I was frequenting the gym. Why are those treadmills and ski machines plugged in, drawing power? Why not reverse the flow and let those hot young girls in their 20's pump their energy back into the grid? As one dirty old man said to the other, if we could bottle that heat, we'd be rich.

So on to the Polish movie posters.




Sampling of Polish movie poster art from the late 1960s to the 1980s. From L-R top to bottom: Apocalypse Now, Platoon, In Cold Blood, Playtime, Alien, and The Phantom of Liberty.

I signed up as a volunteer with the American Cinematheque. I've been trying to get myself a little bit more involved in community affairs. Being a lousy manager of my own time often makes that extremely difficult. But the Cinematheque is one of those places that has exposed me to too much good stuff, and I owe something, however small, in exchange for all the great films I've learned about from their programming staff. So this month I searched the internet for movie posters to upload to fandango.com, to represent the films that are programmed in August. Found some cool old stuff for the Roger Corman retrospective, and old Elvis movie poster art is fun to look at it.

One of the great resources on the net for old movie poster art is posteritati.com. They specialize in film posters for collectors and have a bunch of posters for foreign films and foreign posters of American films. While browsing, I began to notice that almost all movie posters from Poland resisted the typical Hollywood marketing strategies that have been inherited in most other parts of the world. Polish movie posters, first of all, are almost always painted artwork, rather than photographic art from special photo shoots. Also, in concept, they do not strain themselves to "sell the star," by showing his stupid face. Instead, they draw their concept from the theme of the film, resulting in great expressionistic (or impressionistic?) subjective variations on the content of the movie. I have no idea how many Polish artists were active in the film advertising industry during its peak, or during the duration represented by posteritati's collection. But the art seems highly individual, as though there were no agency art director, no creative meetings, no client on the phone to dumb down the concept or request that it look more like the poster of last year's Oscar winner. These are designs where the painter seems to have had full control.

It is interesting to see how they interpreted huge Hollywood blockbusters, movies that were marketed here with bright colors, big stars' faces, bold letters. The Polish art is totally indifferent to the salary of the actor who was in the movie, or the box office draw of the name "Spielberg." In the case of Back to the Future, it's as if the artist knew the movie was a pointless piece of shit and could not be bothered to make any unreasonable fuss over it. In more than one instance, looking at the Polish movie art for Hollywood films makes me curious to see what a Polish version of those same films would have been like. Of course, with films that have interesting thematic content, the artist grabs hold of it and produces a bold, effective design that often trumps the design from any other country. What's cool about posteritati's search engine is that you can search by film title or just by country, so after pulling a huge list of Polish posters, you can select one title and compare it to other art from around the world. This is exactly how I discovered that there was a consistent style to the art from Poland. If I knew more about art and painting, maybe I could use vocabulary to describe it more effectively or understand its relationship to the rest of Polish or Eastern European art. But as it is, I'm just a film buff who finds it extraordinary, and if I had the disposable wealth, and the mind to spend it on a collection of stuff, I would doubtless be buying Polish movie art.



Great Polish art for a great Polish film director. Polanski's Rosemary's Baby and The Tenant.

Go to posteritati's search engine and select POLISH from the POSTER NATIONALITY drop-down menu.
While you're at it, why not go to the Cinematheque's calendar and see what cool movies are showing this month?