L’impression sur pellicule est une chose  fascinante. Le film de Serge Bromberg et de Ruxandra Medrea ne cesse de nous le rappeler. Ou comment le cinéma parvient à capturer le temps pour l’immortaliser ensuite – une base que l’on aurait tendance à oublier. De la résurrection des esquisses non abouties d’un grand cinéaste ne peut finalement émaner qu’une perle cinéphilique. Preuve à l’appui.

Initialement, L’Enfer était l’histoire d’un jeune couple de province dont le mari (Serge Reggiani) était convaincu d’être trompé en permanence par sa femme (Romy Schneider). Clouzot, à qui les financiers du film avaient donné carte blanche, s’est embourbé dans nombre d’expérimentations, souhaitant entre autre mêler art cinétique et musique électro-acoustique. Rongé par l’angoisse, les tribulations du cinéaste ont débouché sur une interruption de tournage et, finalement, à un abandon complet du projet.

L’Enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot est un film pour les cinéphiles fait par des cinéphiles. Voir Serge Reggiani et Romy Schneider s’animer sur des plans inédits, qui-plus-est dirigés par Clouzot, constitue un bonheur dont on savoure chaque seconde. En un sens, un simple alignement d’images muettes dénichées sur You Tube aurait pu provoquer le même effet. Le film va plus loin, bien évidemment, proposant entre autre une relecture du scénario par des acteurs contemporains et un point de vue général plus ou moins discutable. En l’occurrence, Bromberg et Medrea présentent L’Enfer comme un chef d’œuvre tué dans l’œuf, ce dont on peut sérieusement douter. Si le film a des ambitions résolument avant-gardistes, on devine néanmoins par l’assemblage des anecdotes qui nous sont relatées, que Clouzot savait qu’il fonçait droit dans le mur. De là son besoin d’être en permanence sur le qui-vive, ses insomnies, et ses crises de nerfs. En avance sur son temps, Clouzot l’était certainement, mais pas suffisamment pour concrétiser cet ambitieux projet.

On peut donc déplorer que les réalisateurs se reposent sur ce sentiment de lourd regret qui parcourt tout le film. Finalement, il n’a pas véritablement lieu d’être. Pourquoi d’ailleurs ne pas seulement évoquer celui qui reprit le flambeau, à savoir Claude Chabrol, qui remania le scénario avant de tourner le même film trente ans plus tard avec Emmanuelle Béart et François Cluzet ? Devons-nous mettre cela sur le compte d’une certaine fascination pour l’ancien ? Peut-être sommes-nous ici confrontés à la différence des générations qui séparent les cinéphiles fanatiques de ceux qui restent encore sur le qui-vive.

Pour autant, Clouzot, c’est indéniable, était un auteur important dont je ne remettrai pas en doute les idées novatrices. L’Enfer n’était sans doute pas encore un film de son temps. D’autres que Clouzot se trouveront en charge de briser les tabous et de retourner les clichés tel qu’il souhaitait le faire à travers L’Enfer. Ainsi, Romy est restée la prude Sissi. Nous aurons attendu 2009 pour qu’elle nous soit révélée en personnification du désir sexuel. Des images muettes, inédites, presque volées qui gagnent dans ce film une dimension mystique. Les charmes de Romy. C’est essentiellement pour elle que L’Enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot mérite d’être vu, devenant ainsi, plus qu’une perle cinéphilique, un trésor érotique insoupçonné.

‘

L’ENFER D’HENRI-GEORGES CLOUZOT (Fr., 2009) R. : Serge Bromberg, Ruxandra Medrea ; Sc. : S. Bromberg ; Ph. : Jérôme Krumenacker, Irina Lubtchansky ; M. : Bruno Alexiu ; Int. : Romy Schneider, Serge Reggiani, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Bérénice Béjo, Jacques Gamblin, Costa-Gavras . Noir & Blanc / Couleurs, 102mn.

This film premiered at New York Film Festival Sunday October 4th. More here

Avis aux cinéphiles: “L’Enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot” de Serge Bromberg et Ruxandra Medrea vous emmènera au paradis. Plus qu’un documentaire, le récit de ce film mythique inachevé se laisse voir comme une expédition archéologique aux multiples rebondissements, avec au centre d’un mystère du passé, un grand réalisateur perdu dans les méandres de la créativité artistique: Henri-Georges Clouzot…

Henri-Georges Clouzot est en 1964, un réalisateur de talent confirmé, un des grands du 7ème art Français. “Le salaire de la peur”, “Le Corbeau” & surtout “Les Diaboliques”, c’est lui. Il est surnommé le Hitchcock français & malgré sa réputation de réalisateur difficile, les stars rêvent de travailler avec (pour!) lui. Lorsqu’il engage Romy Shneider, LA star incontournable de l’époque, tout le monde prédit un chef d’oeuvre. Mais au bout de quelques semaines de tournage houleux, des équipes & des acteurs qui déclarent forfait, Clouzot victime d’un infarctus, L’Enfer est abandonné…

Serge Bromberg & Ruxandra Medrea ont eu la chance d’avoir accès aux pellicules tournées en 1964 & gardées par la veuve de Clouzot: dans les 15 heures de bobines de film, est la clé du mystère de L’Enfer & de son infernal réalisateur.

Leur documentaire qui au début semble de facture assez classique, mêle très habilement la quête d’un Graal cinéphile à ce qu’aurait pu être le film de Clouzot. Les images sublimes qu’ils dévoilent, révèlent un réalisateur fou obsédé par la révolution cinématographique qu’il voulait créer. L’histoire, somme toute, assez banale d’une jalousie maladive d’un homme à l’égard de sa femme, est conçue comme une expérience visuelle, sonore, profondément organique. Clouzot n’hésite pas à commander à ses équipes des centaines d’expériences visuelles avec des caméras, des lentilles, des effets cinétiques, puisant dans l’art contemporain pour illustrer et ressentir au mieux sa conception de la folie. Le scénario de “L’Enfer” est filmé en noir et blanc mais dès que le mari interprété par Serge Reggianni se laisse aller à ses crises de jalousie, le monde bascule en couleurs saturées et éclatantes. Sa femme jouée par Romy Shneider, devient une femme caméléon, sensuelle, provocatrice, sublimée par des effets visuels inédits pour l’époque & toujours aussi impressionnants de beauté plastique aujourd’hui.

Suivre la construction du film à travers ses préparatifs, puis découvrir les images inédites montées chronologiquement comme s’il s’agissait d’un film, procure un plaisir indéniable. On suit une enquête “cinéphile-policière” qui retrace des événements depuis longtemps oubliés, entrecoupée par moments par les interventions de certains témoins de l’époque, de l’équipe du film “maudit”. On essaie de percer le mystère Clouzot qui est habité par son imaginaire débordant et torturé, son perfectionnisme troublant & mystérieux. S’est-il laissé aller à la dérive à cause de ses démons (il avait sombré dans une dépression suite au décès de sa 1ère épouse)? Ou voulait-il se réinventer face aux nouveaux talents émergents de l’époque (Fellini, Truffaut, Godard…)?

L’enquête se révèle à la fin infructueuse et le doute et la frustration se font sentir longtemps après la projection. Mais les 2 détectives-documentaristes auront offert au spectateur la vision d’une magnifique et vénéneuse descente aux enfers…

Les Voyeurs #88 – Des Voyeurs dans l’avion

Diffusion le : jeudi 19 novembre 2009 à 18h sur Radio Grille Ouverte
vendredi 20 novembre 2009 à 18h sur Radio 16.
Rediffusion le samedi 21 novembre 2009 à 10h sur RGO.
En téléchargement pendant une semaine ici.
Et en écoute permanente là.

Actualité

Capitlism – A Love Story : Sortie au cinéma le 25 novembre 2009 du nouveau film de Michael Moore.
Spiderman 4 : Confirmation de la présence au casting de l’acteur Dylan Baker, interprétant le personnage du Dr Connors, devenant dans la BD le super-vilain Le Lézard.
Buffy, la tueuse de vampires : une web-série animée adaptant la 8ème saison des aventures en comics de la tueuse de vampires, va bientôt voir le jour, faisant donc suite à la 7ème saison de la série TV.
Delta Blues : la série créée en 2008 par Joshua Harto et produite par Georges Clooney à enfin trouvé son acteur principal en la personne de Jason Lee (le héros de “Earl”).
Prince of Persia – Les Sables du Temps :  Le prince de Perse doit combattre un Vizir rebelle désireux de s’emparer des Sables du Temps, un artefact conférant à son possesseur le contrôle du Temps. Adaptation cinéma de la célèbre licence de jeux vidéos. Réalisé par Mike Newell. Avec Jake Gyllenhaal. Sortie France 26 mai 2010. BA visible en VF pourrie ou VO HD.
L’actualité des Arcades : A l’origine ; L’Imaginarium du Dr Parnassus, Le Ruban Blanc (en VO), Away We Go, Micmacs à tire larigot, 2012, Twilight chapitre 2 : Tentation, Saw VI.
Les Beaux Gosses : Le beau coffret collector du film est disponible depuis le 12 novembre. Contient le film en édition collector 2DVD mais également le CD de la BO du film et surtout le “manuel pratique du puceau” !! Dépêchez-vous c’est pas cher !
L’actu du Sémaphore de Nîmes : L’Imaginarium du Dr Parnassus (en VO), mais aussi le film qui n’est plus à Alès et c’est dommage Panique au village !. Le Sémaphore organise également jusqu’au 26 janvier 2010 des projections des grands classiques du cinéma italien dont Affreux, sales et méchants, Les Monstres, Le Fanfaron, Hier aujourd’hui demain, L’Étranger. Plus de détails sur la programmation sur le site du cinéma ici => Sémaphore.

Dossier de la semaine : Des Voyeurs dans l’avion

La saga des “Airport”

Airport (1970) de Georges Seaton
Airport 75 (747 en péril – 1975) de Jack Smight
Airport 77 (Les Naufragés du 747 – 1977) de Jerry Jameson
Concorde : Airport 79 (Airport 80 Concorde – 1980) de David Lowell Rich

Les vols de l’extrême

L’Étoffe des Héros (The Right Stuff – 1983) de Phillip Kaufman
Des serpents dans l’avion (Snakes on a plane – 2006) de David R. Ellis
Des Zombies dans l’avion (Flight of the Living Dead : Outbreak on a plane – 2007) de Scott Thomas
Les Ailes de L’Enfer (Con-Air – 1997) de Simon West
Flight Plan (2004) de Robert Schwentke
Air Force One (1997) de Wolfgang Pertersen
Independence Day (1996) de Roland Emmerich
Die Hard 4 – retour en enfer (Die Hard 4.0 – 2007) de Len Wiseman

Les avions “cartoons” : les Z.A.Z. aux commandes

Les avions du futur

Furtif (Stealth – 2005) de Rob Cohen
D.A.R.Y.L. (1985) de Simon Wincer
Firefox, l’arme absolue (1982) de et avec Clint Eastwood

Coups de Cœur

Les Chevaliers du Ciel (2005) de Gérard Pirès
Aviator (2004) de Martin Scorsese

La bande originale de la semaine :

Papa Loves Manbo par Perry Como
Extrait de la bande originale du film Ocean’s Eleven (2001) de Steven Soderbergh

Chronique : La Carte Postale Sétoise

L’Enfer d’Henry-Georges Clouzot de Serge Bromberg et Ruxendra Medrea

Musique :
Who’s Driving Your Plane ? par The Rolling Stones

Extraits :
Airport 75 (747 en péril)
Des Serpents dans l’Avion
Firefox, l’arme absolue

Présentation : Cédric Cance, Erik Antolin, Jérôme Bauzon
Chronique : l’irremplaçable Jan Jouvert !
Technique : Jérémie Adrian

L’Enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot.

En el cuadro del Festival de Cine Lumière 2009, desarrollado entre el 13 y el 18 de octubre, he tenido la oportunidad de ver (o más bien descubrir) el famoso INFIERNO de Henri-Geroges Clouzot (L’Enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot).

Digo descubrir ya que las cintas de esta película se pensaban perdidas, sin embargo, el registro de tal mítico rodaje deposaba en un archivo fílmico pero en medio de un gran disputa legal entre la compañía de seguros y la viuda de Monsieur Clouzot que prohibía proyectar el material.

Tal como relata el restaurador y director de esta, la nueva cinta de L’enfer, Serge Bromberg, fue gracias a un ascensor en pana que ayudó a que finalmente fuera él quien pudiese recuperar los aproximados 110 carretes de cinta que fueron filmados. Visionarlos, analizarlos, restaurarlos para poder dar vida a este nuevo material que prontamente será exhibido en el cine.

Bromberg relata con el desplante que caracteriza a alguien que a trabajado en televisión por 15 años como esta cadena de hechos inesperados lo llevaron a revivir el infierno.

Luego de llegar a un acuerdo con la aseguradora el segundo paso fue convencer a la viuda de Clouzot de ceder los derechos y permitirle recuperar las cintas. Situación a la que madame Clouzot se opuso fuertemente de la misma manera que lo hizo con todos los demás que vinieron antes con la misma intención.

Luego de un buen discurso donde describía lo especial que era él, su trabajo y todo lo demás la opinión de madame Clouzot seguía intacta, argumentando que si no pasaba nada especial con alguien no veía la razón de tener que entregar las cintas.

Gracias a la facilidad verbal de Bromberg ella decidió no entregarle las cintas pero si acompañarlo hasta el ascensor y luego de ruegos y más ruegos ella rió y firme y sin ceder a la entrega de las películas, accedió acompañarlo hasta la entrada del edificio, y de pronto… ¡se quedaron encerrados en el ascensor por 3 horas!

Al cabo de 3 horas, cuando salieron del ascensor, ella accedió entregarle los derechos y las películas argumentando que por fin había pasado algo especial y que se había ganado el honor de hacer renacer el trabajo de su marido.

Es así como (re) nace  el Infierno de Clouzot, película experimental que contó con un enorme presupuesto pero que debido a los diversos problemas dentro del plató y un ataque cardiaco que dejó por varios meses a Clouzot en estado de coma, no pudo terminarse.

Los extractos de la filmación son alucinantes, se comprende muy bien como se ganó el apodo del Hitchcock francés, la estética cuidada al más mínimo detalle, la experimentación con la iluminación y el sonido nos da efectos jamás antes vistos.

La simple historia de un marido celoso y la obsesión con su esposa, la voces internas y el comportamiento de un hombre normal que se va perdiendo en la obsesión, Clouzot ha sabido como desarrollar el sentimiento al punto de que logra transmitir perfectamente las emociones y angustias de los personajes.

La mezcla entre las filmaciones de l’enfer, las entrevistas y la reproducción contemporánea de trozos faltantes de la historia entregan un trabajo que logra darse a entender, tanto la historia original como los sucesos acontecidos durante el rodaje además de entregarnos pinceladas de la interesante biografía de Henri-Georges Clouzot.

Sólo nos da más ganas de ver y conocer más sobre Clouzot.

El salario del miedo, 1953,  Henri-Georges Clouzot

Ver en YouTube:  RobinSenathePhoenix

“Ni un libro ni un filme pueden transformar la sociedad. Es suficiente con que abran sus ojos.”

Yves Montand

Romy Schneider indulges herself in this outtake from "Inferno"

Bromberg is known for finding rare films that have either been lost or kept from the public for many years, and for his latest documentary, he convinced Clouzot’s widow to license him the footage from his aborted production, Inferno.

Earlier this morning, Bromberg discussed his encounter with Clouzot’s widow at the New York Film Festival, and while these introductions rarely last more than a minute, Bromberg kept stalling the screening of his film with his anecdote, much to the audience’s delight. It was clear that he and film critic Scott Foundas had rehearsed this little routine (which he also performed at previous festivals), but it was a charming way to open the movie.

Apparently, Clouzot’s widow told Bromberg that many people had approached her about Inferno, but she never felt compelled to release the footage. She agreed to meet with him anyway, and every time Bromberg believed he had convinced her, she would shoot him down, pushing him to grovel a little bit more.

When Foundas cut off Bromberg, he was recounting his pleas to Clouzot’s widow as she escorted him to the elevator. At that point, Bromberg told us he would finish the story after the show, and when the film started up, the first words we heard were: “Our story begins in a dark elevator in Paris…”

•          •          •          •

When the French New Wave landed in 1959, they apparently raked Clouzot over the coals.* To them, Clouzot was part of the French filmmaking establishment they were rebelling against, and with Inferno, Clouzot was determined to show them a thing or two.

What followed actually recalls the Beach Boys’ SMiLE album; the film was never completed and Clouzot suffered greatly for it (though not as much as Brian Wilson did for SMiLE). But what little survives is revelatory and stylistically audacious.

Most of the unearthed footage appears to be test shots, and as can be expected, the experiments are hit-or-miss. The kaleidoscope effects in particular look very dated, but some effects look absolutely stunning. Coming from Clouzot, it was even more impressive; nothing in his previous work had anything like this. How often do you see an established, successful veteran leaping out of his comfort zone and swinging for the fences?

One of the more fascinating experiments dealt with color – some of the visuals Clouzot had in mind were difficult enough, but he wanted to forgo photographic processing altogether and do everything in-camera. For example, much of the film takes place around a lake, and he wanted to alter the color of the water and the landscape while retaining the actors’ natural skin color. Clouzot apparently accomplished this with the help of body make-up, painting the actors in blue tones so that they would look ‘natural’ on film.

Unfortunately, the production didn’t last long, and very little was ultimately shot. The documentary doesn’t even show any dialogue scenes; instead, Bromberg had to film recreations with Berenice Bejo and Jacques Gamblin, framing them on blank sets.

What we do get is two sequences that are close to completion. Inferno deals with a husband’s pathological jealousy, and both sequences are compelling portrayals of this mindset.

The first one follows the wife through the local marketplace, and it unfurls many of the experiments seen in the earlier test shots. It’s hardly subtle, but it all works, with every trick rooted in the husband’s warped perspective. Clouzot handles everything with just enough discipline to keep it palatable.

The second is far more tantalizing, with the husband observing his wife with another man. This time, a stronger narrative runs through the sequence, and Clouzot’s bold experiments feel wholly organic to the storytelling. For example, Clouzot shifts back and forth from color to black and white, the former representing crazed delusions and the latter reality. Even better are the brilliant compositions scattered throughout this sequence, with the best one involving a train running over a bridge. (When I find a still, I’ll post it.)

The last few minutes of the documentary is dedicated to a series of color shots involving Romy Schneider, who played the wife. Most of these were intended as brief inserts, and Bromberg believes they would not have survived in their entirety had they been edited into the film. Seen uncut, they comprise one saving grace of the production’s failure. (I doubt a slinky has ever been filmed with more suggestiveness).

•          •          •          •

Which brings us to the conclusion of Bromberg’s story. As luck would have it, their elevator was stalled for two hours. During that time, Bromberg and Clouzot’s widow got acquainted on a personal level, and it was only then that she agreed to loan the footage to him.

A year later, when Bromberg showed her the completed documentary, she was visibly upset throughout the entire screening. When the lights went up, Bromberg believed his film would never see the light of day. Instead, she told him, “this is exactly how it happened,” and no changes were ever made to the Bromberg’s documentary.

* Bromberg conceded that Truffaut wrote Clouzot a gushing fan letter, but he said that “Truffaut wrote a lot of letters to everybody…if you went through Leni Riefenstahl’s files, I’m sure you would find a letter from Truffaut.”

A supplement included on Criterion’s edition of The Wages Of Fear details the history of the cuts made to the film for it original American release to keep on the nice side of era’s delicate political sympathies. Gone: a lot of explicitly anti-capitalist talk and material that portrayed the Southern Oil Company as nakedly exploitative in its use of desperate men to cart truckloads of nitroglycerine through the inhospitable terrain of an unnamed South American country. Even the substantial cuts didn’t quiet some of the critics; Time dubbed it “a picture that is surely one of the most evil ever made.” (A side note: Back-issues of Time make for pretty fascinating reading. I remember reading a ‘60s movie review—forget the film—that dropped the word “faggot” with casual disapproval and a search of the archives makes it clear this wasn’t too unusual for that era of the magazine. Will the middle of our political road look so ugly decades from now?)

So why “evil”? I’m not sure it’s terribly productive to spend that much time defending a five-decades-old film against charges of being in league with the devil for portraying an exploitative situation. I don’t doubt that director Henri-Georges Clouzot was perfectly happy portraying an American Oil Company as heartlessly exploitative but I’m also among the last to be shocked and offended by such a depiction. Here the Southern Oil Company (any resemblance to Standard Oil is, no doubt, not that coincidental) puts profits above lives and the film’s journeys takes its protagonists on a tour of a land well on its way to being wrecked by the oil industry. One of the final stops involves a sludge through an oil slick that Clouzot makes look like hell erupting in the middle of paradise. Greenpeace and the labor movement could both easily claim it as their own.

To focus on the politics, however, is to miss much of the movie and I think there’s a reason it found a U.S. audience even with some of its edges sanded off. For one, it’s a superior piece of action filmmaking so intense it’s hard to watch at times. After a long, appropriately indulgent stretch getting to know the stranded Europeans and the desperate jungle town they’ve all come to call home, the movie gives way to a series of set pieces, each one tenser than the last. Between them, we get to know the four men willing to risk their lives for the $2000 promised them should any them deliver their dangerous cargo to a burning oil rig.

For all the technical skill on display, it’s Clouzot’s ability to convey those men’s desperation that puts the film over. Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Peter van Eyck, and Folco Lulli work toward a common goal and form friendships in the midst of a terrible situation but unlike in, say, a Howard Hawks films, the two activities don’t always complement one another. (I don’t want to spoil the film for those who haven’t seen it, so I’ll simply mention that the tar pit becomes a hell for reasons beyond ecological ruin.) I somehow hadn’t seen The Wages Of Fear until yesterday, but I recognized a lot of it anyway. Peckinpah beautifully borrowed the opening shot for The Wild Bunch; others have clearly drawn inspiration from Clouzot’s men-living-on-the-edge.

I’m thinking specifically of Katherine Bigelow in this summer’s great The Hurt Locker and the undeniably memorable Point Break, where men forever return danger out of compulsion, whether it wears a cloak of patriotism and crime. Bigelow fixates on extraordinary men. Clouzot doesn’t. Pure need drive his protagonists as they make their way through winding roads not-quite-yet beating back the natural world around them. Oil pipes line the roads’ edges and shape the journey, but a later moment finds Montand focusing on the abyss waiting just beyond the borders we impose like a true existentialist as he recalls a fence in his childhood neighborhood and considers the nothingness it contains. Whatever political readings The Wages Of Fears invites, the film’s more philosophical journey than expose. It offers little comfort and one of the saddest uses of the “Fin” title I’ve seen, but that doesn’t match any definition of “evil” I know.

One final note: Dennis Lehane’s Criterion essay beautifully states something about “cold” directors like Clouzot and Kubrick, and why they move their admirers anyway, better than I could:

Clouzot’s camera may as well be the eyeball of a lizard, for all the emotion it shows the humans who enter its field of vision—but the charge of “anti-everything,” while certainly valid on a surface level, fails to take into account one of the basic tenets of cinematic humanism as employed by Clouzot and John Huston and Stanley Kubrick, among others: that by removing all hint of subjectivity from the point of view, one thus removes any stain of sentimentality. This erasure of sentiment does not cancel out empathy. In fact, in that very void, we, the viewer, are forced to decide what our capacity for empathy is. What remains in Clouzot’s chilly remove from his main characters is a fascinatingly odd mixture of contempt and love, one akin to that of a father who has closed off all outward displays of emotion for his children because he fears the heartbreak that could destroy him should anything tragic befall them.

MAD ABOUT MOVIES: Toronto’s 34th annual movie marathon officially opens tonight with at Roy Thomson Hall, but it really kicks off today at noon with

BETTANY: as Charles Darwin

a screening of Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man at Yonge-Dundas Square. Other films unspooling before tonight’s opening Gala include director Lone Scherfig’s An Education, already provoking Oscar buzz for U.K. actress Carey Mulligan; the new documentary about legendary French film director Henri-Georges Clouzot, renowned for his suspense thrillers, and the film he was never able to finish; and Sook Yin Lee’s

FALCO: back on the boards

Year Of The Carnivore, which is definitely not the opera. (Or Short Bus, for that matter. Tonight’s Gala opener is Creation, director Jon Amiel’s ambition exploration of the life and loves of Charles Darwin, with real-life couple Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly as the renowned scientist and his missus, as he begins to write On the Origin of Species, destined to become the most widely read book of natural science and one which will irrevocably change the world. For a sneak preview, click here.

FOOTLIGHTS: Remember when L.A. was a cultural wasteland? Happily, things change. High-profile thesps set to star on L.A. Theatre Works stages this season include Ed Asner and Jonathan

ARKIN: on stage

Silverman in Once In A Lifetime; Kate Burton in The Constant Wife; Edie Falco in Side Man; Adam Arkin and JoBeth Williams in Dr. Cerberus; and Mark Ruffalo and Lauren Ambrose in Awake and Sing (even if Albert Schultz and Soulpepper beat them to it) … Nuala Fitzgerald is set to do one of her dazzling salon solos next month in Toronto to benefit the Actors’ Fund Of Canada. Her new show, Away With Words, is a pastiche of her favourite bon mots and brilliant passages from O’Casey, Yeats, Shaw, Joyce, John Lennon, Dorothy Parker, Ogden Nash and even Spike Milligan. For tickets write edgarcowan@hotmail.com … and the

PITRE: trick or treat?

much-anticipated return of musical comedy showstopper Louise Pitre in Toxic Avenger: The Musical is currently set to premiere on Halloween, Saturday Oct. 31, at the newly-renovated (what, again?) Music Hall on the Danforth. Meanwhile, La Pitre will re-team with her Mamma Mia composers Benny Andersson & Bjorn Ulvaes to headline a Broadway concert vetsion of their new ABBA musical Kristina on Sept. 23-24 at the Stern Auditorium in Manhattan.

Sounds like an extremely hot ticket to me.

A TREE GROWS IN TORONTO: It’s been invited to more than 50 film festivals and received 12 international awards from cities as diverse as Chicago, Taipei, Cairo, Mexico and Iran. This fall it’s invited to the Tel Aviv International Children’s Film Festival, the 7th Istanbul International Children’s Film Festival, the National Archives in Ottawa and the Tribeca Cinemas Kids Series. And chances are you’ve never even heard of it. A short film produced, written and directed by Toronto-based filmmaker Mitra Sen, The Peace Tree tells the story of two little girls, one Muslim and one Christian, who dream of celebrating each other’s festivals, Christmas and Eid, but have to overcome resistance from their parents before they can realize their dream.  Filmmaker Sen is currently working on a new project, Under The Same Sun, but since its release in 2005 her film has triggered the creation of Peace Trees in schools and gardens around the world. For more about The Peace Tree and the remarkable seeds it planted, click here.

TOMORROW:

more TIFF premieres, Michael Douglas & Catherine Zeta-Jones

and the one-man renaissance of Cheistopher Plummer

]]> http://cinematronica.wordpress.com/2009/08/26/wages-of-fear/ Thu, 27 Aug 2009 05:17:11 +0000 cinematronica http://cinematronica.wordpress.com/2009/08/26/wages-of-fear/

One could call Wages of Fear a horrifying trek through a single unbearable journey. One could call it a bleak, hopeless film about modern man’s struggle to survive amongst one another. One could just call it plain scary. They’re all correct things to say about this captivating piece of work, but words are somehow inadequate to accurately describe this frenzied film about the bitter dregs of capitalism. It’s not an easy view, but trust me when I say that it’s worth it.

Four displaced broke fellows are down on their luck and stuck in the armpit of South America, a tiny town called Las Piedras. Everyone needs money in the poor, labor-class village, but some jobs even the most cavalier worker wouldn’t risk. Or, at least one would think. The four previously mentioned gentlemen are hired out of a maddeningly high amount of hopefuls by an oil company for what is basically a suicide mission. They’re to deliver two large trucks full of nitroglycerin to cap an oil well fire many miles away from the town. They’ll be paid $2,000 a driver, which is great money, but the trick lies in the terrain. In between Las Piedras and the oil well are miles and miles of incredibly dangerous weather-worn mountain road. One slip of the truck, one bump too many and BAM! the nitro ignites. It’s a terrifying job, and not one they do gladly, but it’s a way for these strange displaced Europeans to fund their trip back home across the ocean, as long as they make it back in one piece…

It’s a scary concept, and one that most people find bizarre in its grim realism, but one that rings with the sickening thud of a true story. Wages of Fear is a movie that rings with a social and political agenda, and it was indeed taken as a stab against America when it was made in 1953, and subsequently edited to fit the prevailing party’s agenda of the time. The Criterion Collection release of this DVD was actually one of the first unedited editions to be found here in the States, if that tells you anything about the insecurities the powers that be have about this film. What it really seems to be is an indictment of capitalism on both sides of the oil company; it indicts the truck drivers for mindlessly filing into the office to get their checks for their suicide work, and the company for practicing reckless and dangerous practices that are demeaning at best and psychotic at worst. Whatever your interpretation may be, it definitely has something to say.

The movie is divided into two sections; the setup of these characters in the cantina, and the drive across the mountains. While one can say that the cantina scenes were useless pap, and I would almost agree for many of the characters, I like to think that they were very revealing into the two real powerful characters in this film, Mario and Jo, played by the great Yves Montand and Charles Vanel respectively. Pay attention to these early scenes very closely as Clouzot frames their dialog and actions around these troubled frames, and I think you’ll agree that these two characters really take the movie from a simple thriller to a fear tinged drama that makes you feel for these two as the world begins to become enveloped in a shroud of terror.

I won’t go on too much about the second half of the film, i.e. the truck-driving scenes, only to say that to see them is to contemplate the idea of your life under a constant threat of instant annihilation. it is something that is not easily conjured up in the heart, and only a great director like Clouzot can make one not only feel a time and place, but also make one, in a certain aspect, live it. You can’t watch it without putting yourself in those shaking, trembling shoes of theirs, so it ends up being a very effective sequence that will live on for ages to come.

You need to see Wages of Fear. For the sake of your cinematic credibility, your curiosity, and your conscience as a capitalist, it’s another movie by Henri-Georges Clouzot that takes the kaleidoscope of human emotion and shakes it as it spins before out eyes. He shakes it until we feel like we could explode at any moment, and in this situation, that’s not such a bad thing. And if you don’t watch it for the nitro scenes, watch it for Mario and Jo, two of the great unsung characters in cinematic history. I give Wages of Fear 9 vicious capitalists out of 10. A high recommendation!

Tomorrow we’re off to see the Prince of Squint, the Sultan of Slob himself, Steven Seagal! Check out my review of Fire Down Below then!

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Diabolique is a haunting and increasingly terrifying meditation on the strategy of murder.  It is also a portrayal of the bleakness of the female situation, and the lengths to which a woman will go to emancipate herself from an abusive husband.  Interestingly, Clouzot’s own wife, the unassuming beauty Véra Clouzot, takes on this role of battered spouse with a deft mix of fragility and desperate abandon.  Véra Clouzot plays Christina Delasalle, the wife of tyrannical principal Michel Delasalle (Paul Meurisse) at the upper-crust boys’ Delasalle School.  The school is founded and monetarily funded completely by Christina, who comes from a wealthy background and who is a language teacher at the school.  Christine is fully aware that Michel—who is one of the great loathsome monsters of French cinema—is having an extra-marital affair with another of the school’s teachers, Nicole Horner (a coolly jaded Simone Signoret).  Christina also knows that Michel occasionally beats Nicole, as evidenced by Nicole’s choice of sunglasses while indoors, and Nicole is aware that Michel inflicts worse punishment on Christina.

Nicole approaches Christina with a plan—a plan that involves a bathtub full of water and Michel’s bug-eyed head submerged in it— and Christina is horrified.  But when she realizes that her horror of conspiring to murder her husband is outdone by the domestic horrors she faces on a daily basis, she agrees to Nicole’s proposition.  And so, over the course of a long weekend, the two women lure Michel out to Nicole’s rural hometown, drug him, hold down his head in bathtub water, and then stuff his body in a large wicker trunk and return with it to the school after their little holiday.  To create the look of an accidental drowning, Christina and Nicole dump the man’s body into the school’s swimming pool, and let it sink limply to the bottom.  With the exception of Christina’s jangling nerves, the crime seems to have gone off without a hitch.  Yet something is strange.  Days go by, and still no one discovers the principal’s corpse in the murky swimming pool.  Anxious to have the body found and the verdict claimed as accidental death, Christina demands the pool be drained for sanitation purposes.  It is, and the body is no where to be found.  Christina begins to unravel, her shiny eyes peeled open with paranoia and her braided head quivering, and even the unflappable Nicole seems worried.  Where is the body of Michel?

This question is not so easily answered, but the appearance of Michel’s ghostly face in the background of a school photo, and the claim by a young student that he spoke with the principal, only build terror in the two women.  Christina, always having been a sickly woman with a heart condition, can feel her health begin to give way to the stress of a corpse seemingly returned from the dead.  It was the ardent wish of Clouzot that viewers of Diabolique not be little “diaboliques” themselves and give away the ending for others.  Yet the brilliance of the film is fully manifested with knowledge of the finale, and the nightmare of monstrous people does not diminish with the twist being given away.  It will suffice to say that an increasingly enfeebled Christine has a heart-stopping encounter with what she believes is the ghost of Michel Delasalle.  Because this encounter is one she never recovers from, she does not see Nicole slip out from a hiding place nearby and passionately embrace Michel, nor does she hear Nicole’s cooing voice fret about Michel being stuffed uncomfortably in that wicker trunk for hours at a time.

Clouzot is a master of the graphic match.  When Nicole shoves the cavernous trunk—soon to stow the body of Michel– down a staircase leading from the school’s attic, the wicker coffin barrels down the stairs with a tremendous force and a thunderous rumble.  A cut later, the rambunctious boys of the Delasalle School also come barreling, thundering down the school’s main staircase for recess.  The downward momentum of the trunk and the students, and the hefty noise that accompanies both, are matched perfectly.  Hauntingly so, because this simple cut reminds us that plans of murder and childhood frivolity occupy the same space in the world of Diabolique.  Perhaps the most disturbing recurring image from the film is Michel’s lifeless eyes, rolled over white, after he has been “drowned.”  Those eyes, framed by a soaked mop of stringy hair and a chalk white complexion, shock us initially and then keep us uncomfortably tense every time Michel’s unmoving body is in frame.  It is impossible to look away from those eyes.  And when Christina sees them again in the final minutes of the film, resurrected from the open grave of the drained bathtub, her small, fragile body collapses to the floor and heaves its last agonized breath.  It is a horrid joke that it is ultimately Christina’s rolled-back eyes, not Michel’s, that leave us terrified.

Diabolique, a marvelous crime-horror hybrid, has been acknowledged as an influence on Hitchcock’s Psycho and seems to have had an impressive effect on at least one other director who has excelled in both the crime and horror genres.  In Diabolique, in the final sequence inside the dark corridors of the school, a horrified Christina enters a lit room from which she has heard a typewriter being maniacally typed upon.  Despite the rat-a-tat-tatting of keys, the room is empty, with only the gloves of Michel left upon the machine, as if poised for a composition written from the afterlife.  If this is not gnawing enough, when Christina dares to approach the typewriter, she discovers a single page clenched in it, with “Michel Delasalle” written in varying sizes all over the page.  She flees the room, hysterical with fear.  It is very interesting, then, that a few decades later in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, Shelley Duvall (also playing the role of an abused wife tormented by her own fear) would approach her husband’s typewriter and discover, to her emotional undoing, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” written on a sheet slung through the machine.

The crime film has always had a troubled relationship with female characters.  Some films of the genre have excluded women’s presence completely, while the majority sideline women as either deceitful seductresses or concerned spouses.  There are exceptions to this rule (The Big Sleep, Silence of the Lambs, Thelma and Louise), and there are many masterful films that are not exceptions to this rule (The Red Circle, Out of the Past, Gun Crazy, Heat, and again, The Big Sleep).  Diabolique is fascinating because it is a film seemingly about two women concocting and then committing a heinous crime. Yet it is a film actually about a man and a woman committing a heinous crime against another woman.   The idea of the perfect murder (which very rarely proves to be perfect) is upended by the question, “The perfect murder of whom?”

Many of the scenes in Diabolique consist of Christina and Nicole alone together and discussing with one another, conspiring and sometimes arguing.  Not only is this an unusual visual motif in the crime film, where the women who do exist in the plot tend to be isolated from one another, but it is also a surprising (and very French) plot device given the status of the two women.  Christina is Michel’s wife, and Nicole is Michel’s mistress.  Each has complete knowledge of the other’s relationship to Michel, and yet their communication never dissolves into hysterics or jealousy.  Rather, they have rational, honest, even sympathetic conversations with each other.  Despite Nicole’s ultimate betrayal of Christina, this fact remains and shades Diabolique with unexpected nuance.  It is also worth noting that quite a few of these sequences between Christina and Nicole involve one other horrifically eerie presence: the body of Michel.  While many contributions to the crime genre (particularly the police procedural) involve men discovering, examining, or defiling the dead body of a woman, in Diabolique we return again and again to these two women situated in a frame with Michel’s pasty, waterlogged corpse.  Yet one confounding detail fully reaffirms Diabolique’s complexity: the corpse is still alive.

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This week on An Alan Smithee Podcast, Andrew and Matt take a dangerous road trip through Puerto Rico with two trucks of nitroglycerin in the 1953 classic so says the Criterion Collection The Wages Of Fear. There’s a lot to praise about the film’s curiously bifurcated structure which begins with an hour of character development and concludes with an hour of nail-biting, edge-of-your-seat suspense setpieces involving the transport of those dangerous trucks. We also touch upon Sorcerer, William Friedkin’s ill advised 1977 remake starring Roy Scheider.

Then it’s on to the histrionic ravings of Oliver Stone, whose completely forgotten 1988 film Talk Radio is a big pile of sensationalistic cheese and completely ignorant about it’s own subject matter. To be fair, the ignorance comes mainly from star Eric Bogosian, who wrote and starred in the original stage play.

However, Stone makes things a whole lot more incoherent by fusing Bogosian’s story with the true-life story of murdered talk radio host Alan Freed, transplanting the character from Cleveland to Texas and compounding the already baffling level of hate drawn by a character who’s supposed to be incredibly popular and on the verge of breaking nationally. We do our best to rationalize what Stone was thinking at the time.

NEXT WEEK: YOJIMBO (1961, AKIRA KUROSAWA) & BAD MAGIC (1998, THE POLONIA BROTHERS)

PLUS A VERY SPECIAL HALLOWEEN II (1981, RICK ROSENTHAL) COMMENTARY TRACK!!