Trailer for The World According to Allee Willis, "the most interesting woman you've never heard of," according to the Washington Post. Looks great!
In addition to being a prolific and grammy-winning songwriter, Willis ran the Museum of Kitsch, which is how I first heard of her in 2010 (though I'd been of a fan of her music without knowing she'd written it). Willis died in 2019, but her Youtube channel lives on.
Digression Alert
Watching this trailer, I was reminded of Montez, a milliner I met once in LA in summer, 2016. She owned and operated The Milliner's Guild at Crossroads of the World.
After walking into her shop, which was closed at the time, I immediately felt a connection to her and we began a talk that lasted a few hours where she told me about growing up in Venice and hanging out with Hendrix or Jim Morrison or both. The specifics are vague as it was my first trip after a stroke a few months prior. She'd made hats for Madonna and plenty of other celebrities from the 80s going forward. We stayed in touch digitally for a few years and the last I heard, she'd moved to New Mexico with her husband. I just sent her a message through a probably now-dead channel, but hopefully I'll hear back.
I wonder if she knew Willis. Montez, are you out there?
The 75-minute feature film, David Holzman's Diary, has long been a favorite of mine. The distributor, Kino Lorber, has put it on YouTube in its entirety. If you plan to watch it, I strongly discourage you from reading about it first.
I used to have a list of films that I thought should have been shown to me when I was a film student (1990 - 1994). This film was top of that list and it's even more relevant today.
Digression Alert
Those already familiar with the film may remember David quoting filmmaker Francois Truffaut about Debbie Reynolds "giving herself away" with a gesture in Singin' In the Rain. Here's what Truffaut wrote:
In the three thousand films I’ve seen, the most beautiful shot is in Singin’ in the Rain. In the middle of the film, Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor, and Debbie Reynolds, after a moment of discouragement, regain their taste for life and start singing and dancing in the apartment. Their dance leads them to leap over a sofa on which all three of them have to land seated side by side. During this dancing stunt over the sofa, Debbie Reynolds makes a determined and rapid gesture, pulling her short pink skirt down over her knees with a deft hand, so that her panties can’t be seen when she lands seated. That gesture, quick as lightning, is beautiful because in the same image we have the height of cinematographic convention (people who sing and dance instead of walking and talking) and the height of truth, a little lady taking care not to show her thighs. This all happened just once, fifteen years ago, it lasted less than a second, but it was imprinted on film as definitively as the arrival of the train at La Ciotat station. These sixteen frames of Singin’ in the Rain, this beautiful gesture by Debbie Reynolds, which is almost invisible, well illustrates this second action of films, this second life, which is legible on the editing table.
Here is that gesture:
What Truffaut is suggesting here is that Reynolds is conscious of the camera's angle and is doing her best to lower her skirt, which raised during her dancing, to cover her knees, which would have been proper when the film was released in 1952. But she's not supposed to be in a film. This is supposed to be "real life" and there's no one else in the room — certainly not a man with a camera, right?
Now, allow me to ramble for a moment on why this fascinates me.
I first saw David Holzman's Diary in 1991, when I read that it had been selected for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. I was previously unfamiliar with the title and the Truffaut quote, but quickly became intrigued by both. I still look for actors "giving themselves away" in their performances.
Second, you'll notice that Truffaut doesn't actually use the phrase "gives herself away" at all. Holzman read the diary and reinterpreted it in his own language and his own film language, making it even more personal when he continues by saying a woman in his own film "gives herself away. To me," when she makes a certain hand gesture.
Third, you'll notice that Truffaut describes Reynolds as wearing a pink skirt when in fact she is wearing a blue dress. She does wear a pink dress in another scene, but not one in which she jumps over a couch or adjusts its length. Is Truffaut conflating these two scenes / outfits — or simply misremembering? Or is he fantasizing?
Truffaut also doesn't account for — or completely dismisses — habit. I excuse myself when I burp in an empty room. I thank my dog when she does as I ask. Habits are powerful things. Perhaps Reynolds wasn't thinking of the camera at all when she attempted to lower her dress. Perhaps it was just habit.
1. Sit. ===> 2. Lower skirt.
Of course, there's no way to know why she did it and there's no way to know if Truffaut is conflating or if the creator of Diary is aware of his misquote. But these elements just make the concept, and Holzman's observing it and making it his own, even more fascinating to me.
Since you've read this far, why not watch the scene in full. Indeed, it's wonderful:
I'm at a loss for words at how extraordinary I find Jørgen Dahl Moe's cover of Bruce Springsteen's cover of Dancing In the Dark. One of the most disarming voices I've heard. The judges look like they're watching a magic trick they can't fathom.
I'd love a copy of the track without the judges' interruptions, but I don't subscribe to Spotify or Apple Music, so I'll have to do without. There's another version on Youtube that is the full song but it lacks a bit of the charm:
Speaking of Springsteen and covers, his interpretation of Suicide's Dream Baby Dream is the best thing he's ever recorded, imo. Here's the vinyl-released version that someone's paired up with footage from FW Murnau's tremendous silent film, Sunrise: A Tale of Two Humans:
F Major (below) was the first I'd heard of Hania Rani, but I've loved everything I've heard her play. I missed her in Toronto a few years ago and was angry for weeks.
Probably my favorite video of hers is this set from Studio S2 in Warsaw:
And while I have your attention fixed on a woman killing it on piano, allow me to share this video of Kadri-Ann Sumera playing Piano Piece 1981, composed by her father, Lepo Sumera.
I first heard this track in 2000 in the film Der Krieger und die Kaiserin. Frustrated that the track was not identified in the credits, I sent a letter to director Tom Tykwer, who wrote back with its identity. I had an mp3 of it for a while, which then went astray — and the title and composer with it. Fifteen years later I was thrilled to find the above video after playing one of my favorite piano pieces, The Homeless Wanderer, composed and performed by Tsegue Maryam Guebrou, who died last year at the age of 99.
There is also an interview with Toronto filmmaker Hugh Gibson, who I first met in 1993 when he was just 14 or 15 years old. His parents had sent him to Art & Trash Video, a shop I ran from '93 to '98. Because he was underage, his folks wrote him a letter saying that he could rent any film he wished, regardless of the film's rating. I put a note on his file and for the next five years we rented Hugh many of the world's greatest films. (A&T existed pre-DVD, so we were renting out VHS tapes and Laserdiscs.)
To my knowledge, we had the largest foreign film collection in Canada: 14,000 titles from 113 countries, all organized by Country > Director. Regular customers included Cinematheque Ontario, The Festival of Festivals (now called TIFF), and every filmmaker in the city worth their salt. It was a great place to work.
In 1994, we were also one of the first video stores in the world to have a website. I'd built it to help myself learn how to build websites. A few months earlier I'd also built [sic], which was one of the first-ever blogs. (The word blog would not be coined for another 3 years.) [sic] won Canadian Website of the Year, which got it some press, and that, along with the Art & Trash site, led to my phone ringing and me becoming one of the first professional web designers in the country. My clients included YTV, The Ontario Federation of Labour, Danko Jones, and General Motors. I would do this for a living for twelve years until returning to retail at Vortex.
The Art & Trash site contained a searchable database of our entire inventory and I distinctly remember having to repeatedly explain to people what a website was. It was these customer interactions that, in a circuitous way, would also lead to me being interrogated in my living room after midnight by CSIS a few years later, but that's another story altogether.
Years later I would run into Hugh at TIFF when he was introducing a film he hadn't directed. We caught up and met for dinner a few times — turns out he lived on Roncesvalles — but then I lost touch with him when he moved out of the neighborhood.
Here's the trailer for his stellar documentary, The Stairs:
