I was hoping to rewatch Chris Marker's La Jetée this morning and headed to Youtube to see if an English translated version was there. I didn't find one, but did discover this lovely piece by TroisCouleurs where possible influence from Hitchcock's Vertigo on Marker's remarkable short film are considered. If you're unfamiliar with either or both films, this probably won't make sense to you, but I thought it was a lovely essay, done completely non-verbally in about 2 minutes.
If you think this essay far-fetched, here's another:
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:
Nestflix is a site for cataloging movies within movies and shows within shows. "Fictional movies within movies? Got ‘em. Fake shows within shows? You bet. Browse our selection of over 750 stories within stories."
For example, remember in Robert Altman's The Player, there's a film starring Julia Roberts and Bruce Willis? Yup, that's Habeas Corpus.
I've been a fan of Lem Dobbs since around 1987 or '88, back when he was known throughout Hollywood for writing Edward Ford, which many consider to be the greatest unproduced screenplay of all time. That script is one of the first things I sought when I got on the internet in the early 90s.
Today, Dobbs is likely best known as the writer of The Limey. Steven Soderbergh directed the film and Terance Stamp starred in it. I believe it's not only a great "gangster picture," it's also Soderbergh's best and one of the most accurate film portrayals of memory.
If you have the chance to listen to Dobbs' commentary on The Limey DVD, I highly recommend it.
There's a notorious 90 second scene in The Limey, which you can watch here:
In the commentary, Dobbs uses this scene to highlight a problem with film critics — and perhaps the public's understanding of filmmaking in general.
Dobbs notes that the film's negative press often referred to it as "underwritten," while the positive press praised Soderbergh's "brilliant direction." Many of them cited this scene and how the camera waits outside, forcing the viewer to imagine what's happening inside while increasing the menace as Stamp's character approaches after exiting.
The irony is that the script was not underwritten. Soderbergh cut out much of what the critics wanted. Furthermore, in the screenplay, which Dobbs wrote years before Soderbergh was involved, Dobbs instructed the camera to remain outside:
Wilson is taken outside and dumped. After a moment, het gets to his feet. Dusting himself. Reaches for ANOTHER GUN tucked in his lower back. He re-enters the building.
A beat. We hear several SHOTS.
Seconds later, one of the Meat Puppets comes stumbling out of the door, terrified. He runs past us, fast.
A moment later, Wilson emerges, gun in hand.
WILSON: You tell him. You tell him I'm coming!
Dobbs took the blame for what Soderbergh changed and Soderbergh received credit for what Dobbs envisioned.
Such is the life of a Hollywood Screenwriter.
All this to alert you to this lengthy interview with Dobbs. Admittedly, not the prettiest website, but an interesting read nonetheless.
Anecdote Alert
For years, I used the name Dobbs as one of my heteronyms. Both Lem and I took the name from the same source: Humphrey Bogart's character in Treasure of the Sierra Madre. (Lem's birth name is Anton Kitaj. He is the son of painter, R. B. Kitaj.)
I have another very odd connection here. The scene in the clip above was filmed at the far end of this street in downtown Los Angeles:
To get to it (just prior to the clip), Wilson walks past the building on the left, which happens to be owned by a friend of mine. I've spent a great number of American Thanksgivings there over the years — the best dinner parties I've been to in my life have all been in that building.
On one of the first trips I took after my stroke, I ended up crashed here while my friend was out of town filming the devastation of the Camp Fire in Paradise, California. Another friend of his, filmmaker Noaz Deshe, was also staying there at the same time. I have fond memories of deep discussions of film history with Noaz. What was particularly delightful is that they were the first signs that my memory wasn't completely shorted-out from the stroke — something that had been deeply troubling me. In particular, we had a mutual fondness for Miklós Jancsó's films, The Red and the Black, and Round Up (posters below). Good times.
Footnotes
If you want to read the screenplay for The Limey, you can find a PDF here.
You can also get a PDF of Lem Dobbs' celebrated, unproduced script, Edward Ford.
If you're a fan of Terance Stamp, I recommend the audiobook for one of his memoirs: The Ocean Fell Into the Drop, which is unfortunately an Audible Exclusive.
Today I learned that in 1983, there was a Casablanca television show starring David Soul as Rick and Scatman Crothers as Sam. The cast also included Ray Liotta as Sasha, the bartender, and Hector Elizondo as Renault.
I couldn't find original episodes of it, but here's a Video Essay about it, from The Seventh Art.
My Blonde GF is a 19 minute film about the victim of a deepfake porn. One interesting revelation is that, in the UK at least, deepfakes aren't considered revenge porn because they don't feature the actual victim, but just their image overlayed onto another party. Just another way that our laws aren't keeping up with technology.
From Guardian Documentaries. I mostly like The Guardian but am conflicted supporting it because their Trans coverage is garbage. That in mind, they excel at documentaries and podcasts.
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:
