Twittering Machines

I don’t have much to say about this film other than if you have an interest in Caravaggio and film, see it. While the story follows Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio it also seamlessly floats between the imagined then (1571-1610) and now (1986) with typewriters, tuxedos, motorcycles, cigarettes and calculators fitting into Jarman’s version of the late 16th / early 17th Century. There’s also lots of dark passion of all stripes, Caravaggio was apparently omnivorous, so if you’re offended by depictions of anything other than ‘family values’ you may want to grow up.

Jarman along with production designer Christopher Hobbs, cinematographer Gabriel Beristain, costume designer Sandy Powell and makeup artist Morag Ross (not to mention the actors, the rest of the crew and an un-credited Suso Cecchi D’Amico who said “Cinema should be written with the eyes”) have re-created the light and look of Caravaggio going so far as to stage some of his paintings which, to my eyes and mind, is a visually stunning and thought-provoking treat turning film into paint, paint into film, then into now, now into then, them into us, us into them…

Caravaggio also marks the film debut of Tilda Swinton and to say that she is stunningly luminous is to miss the point, and the stunning and thought-provoking treat, of seeing her act.

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Popol Vuh
Aguirre

The double whammy. The soundtrack. Well, sorta. This record came out in 1975 while Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God came out in 1972. So let’s consider this record a compilation seeing as only two tracks are actually from the film. By this time, 1975, Florian Fricke had pretty much laid down his moog in favor of acoustic instruments like piano and spinett but songs including the side-long track “Vergegenwaertigung” (nearly a side-long title), pre-date this unplugged period so we get moog-ie mist, lovely guitar work from Daniel Fichelscher and dreamy vocals from Djong Yun.

In some ways it’s difficult to connect this beautiful peaceful and dreamy music with the jungle, or “chunkle” as Herzog would say (“I have a very stark view of the jungle or nature,” Herzog tells NPR’s Guy Raz. “I think the jungle is vile and debased and full of lewdness and obscenity”), and Herzog’s emotional-mind-fuck that is Aguirre: The Wrath of God the film. Herzog claims to have written the screenplay “in a fever” and in just a few days after being set on fire from reading a half a page about Lope de Aguirre the 16th C. Basque Spanish conquistador. Herzog actually wrote a bunch of Aguirre on a bus trip with his soccer team and one overly partied player puked on a few pages which Herzog summarily threw out of the window (he says he doesn’t recall what was on those pages, maybe it was the happy ending).

Filmed in the Peruvian rain forest in and on the Amazon, Aguirre would be an inspiration for Coppola’s own mad chunkle river adventure. But no one does mad like Klaus Kinski, not even Dennis Hopper, and this was the first Herzog/Kinski pairing on film. They’d known each other years prior, Kinksi had rented a room from Herzog and terrorized him and everyone else in the house so Herzog knew that Kinski was his Aguirre from the moment he dreamed up his ecstatic truth version of this otherwise true story. On set, Herzog would purposefully piss Kinski off, an apparently easy thing to do, before shooting a scene because he wanted Kinski’s Aguirre to smolder whereas Kinski wanted him to rage. So Herzog had Klaus let out his rage and began filming after it had run its course.

Then there’s the story of Kinski getting pissed off at the noise coming from a nearby tent so he shot at it and accidentally blew off a crew member’s finger. Or the one about Herzog hiring natives to gather 400 monkeys for the final scene, the natives getting a better offer for the lot from some poachers, and Herzog showing up in the nick of time at the airport claiming to be a veterinarian and also claiming the monkeys, all 400, needed their shots. He got them back, filmed them and set them free. In the chunkle.

Daniel Fichelscher, Djong Yun and Florian Fricke

Of course none of this is in this music but if you see the film, you’ll have the wonderfully good fortune of experiencing both.

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From The Island of Dr. Moreau one of the great film fuckups of all time. Brando stole Val Kilmer’s midget (according to Kilmer) played by Nelson de la Rosa the inspiration for Mini-Me, they went through two directors, three lead actors (Kilmer demoted himself), endless script re-writes with everyone lending a hand including Brando pulling a John Cage by carrying around a portable radio and repeating random police reports “There’s a robbery at Woolworths’” and Director John Frankenheimer’s famous quote “Will Rogers never met Val Kilmer.”

Gloriously silly, menacingly bestial.

How do you like your history served up? Dry as a bone or crisp and fatty like a slab of bacon with a dollop of Herzog’s ecstatic truth on top?

Based on events in 17th Century France as well as the novel The Devil’s of Loudon by Aldous Huxley and the play The Devils by John Whiting, Ken Russell’s The Devils stars a perfectly cast and even perfecter performance by Oliver Reed as Father Urbain Grandier – Catholic Priest, leader of Loudon, philanderer, and holdout against and critic of Cardinal Richelieu’s quest for unity, i.e. control and power – who is handily accused of being a warlock by the sex-starved and twisted Sister Jeanne, played to absolute stunning demented perfection by Vanessa Redgrave.

Politics disguised as religion (and vice versa), abstinence disguised as morality (where all manner of behavior is publicly reviled while privately and ravenously pursued), the glorification of ignorance and the calculated use of fear (the oldest and simplest mass-control device known to man) all in the quest for power. Ah, the 17th Century suddenly sounds so very au courant.

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A Les Blank Film
The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins

In 1968 Les Blank insinuated himself into Lightnin’ Hopkins life for about 6 weeks capturing bits and pieces on film. There’s no omniscient narrator besides Lightnin’ himself and I get the feeling he’d have it no other way. Blank’s camera follows Lightnin’ as he plays at a bbq, a rodeo, for himself, kills a snake and when he goes home to Centerville, Texas (pop. 865).  I’d like to say this is a beautiful film but I wouldn’t.

still from The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins

There’s lots of music, lots of drinking, lots of dancing, flirting, laughter and lots of stories (wonderful stories as blues is story-telling and Lightnin’ is a master story-teller)  amid pride and dirt poor poverty. Ramshackle, claustrophobic, fenced-in by racism and circumstance there’s no use in complainin’ so you may as well make music, dance, laugh, get drunk, get laid, and kill a snake poverty.

From Les Blank’s notes on the making of the film (Les Blank made a lot of films on music but I first found him through his 2 films on Werner Herzog – Burden of Dreams on the making of Fitzcarraldo and Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe because he said he would):

You make your bed hard, baby,
and calls it ease.
The blues is just a funny feelin’,
yet some folks calls it a mighty bad disease.

This line was composed late one night while I was filming what started out to be an ordinary interview. I had asked him to tell me what the blues meant to him. He picked up his guitar and started to sing about a woman named Mary who had left him. Earlier that evening his wife had left him after a nasty argument that caused her cousin to attempt to shoot Lightnin’.

While the song was being sung, the cousin was lurking outside the apartment door with a loaded pistol. Lightnin’ also had a large loaded gun stuck down the front of his pants. Hardly a situation in which to delve into an academic and linear exploration of the nature of truth and the blues, but I came away feeling I knew a lot more about it than before, but I couldn’t exactly put it in words.

I’d say he put it in pictures…

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Werner Herzog
Of Walking in Ice
Munich – Paris
11/23 to 12/14, 1974

The notebook. There are so many, too many to name what would amount to even a few but I do have some that have stood out more than others over time. One is André Gide’s The White Notebook which was recommended by a friend, a good friend even though I only knew Julia for a few short months while she figured out where next. Julia had a map of the world on the wall of her painting studio stuck with colorful push pins in places under consideration. Each time I came into her studio she’d ask or I’d ask where next.

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Old And New Dreams
Playing

“The kicker suddenly started his run.

The goalkeeper, who was wearing a bright yellow jersey, stood absolutely still, and the penalty kicker shot the ball into this hands.”

This quote appears on the front and back jacket of Playing and it comes from a favorite novel with a favorite title by Peter Handke…

Peter Handke
The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

Old And New Dreams is Don Cherry (trumpet, piano), Dewey Redman (tenor sax, musette), Charlie Haden (bass), and Ed Blackwell (drums). This group was together from 1976 – 1987 and they released 2 LPs on the Black Saint label (a 1976 self titled LP and A Tribute to Ed Blackwell from 1987) and 2 LPs on ECM – another self-titled LP from 1979 and Playing a live recording from June 1980 at the Theater am Kornmarkt, Austria.

There’s something fitting about this novel being tied to music – namely the tension between players and the anticipation/anxiety that comes about through improvisation, playing. Wim Wenders made a film of the novel (Handke also wrote the screenplay for Wings of Desire and Until the End of the World) which is about a soccer player’s decent into madness or maybe he always was.

Whose idea was it to put this Handke quote on Playing?

I don’t know but I do know these ECM records sound pretty amazing and this band of ex-Ornette players sure can play.

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Bruno S. (June 2, 1932 – August 11, 2010)

from The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser

Do you have any favorite music for when it’s nearly unbearably hot? Maybe the soundtrack from The Hot Spot? How about another soundtrack Siesta? Of course the visuals in both films reinforce the hotness but what if we take away Jennifer Connelly and Ellen Barkin, then what?

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There’s a scene in Wolf Gremm’s film Kamikaze 89 a zany crazy-assed film I happen to love which stars Rainer Werner Fassbinder as a detective where he’s caught staring into the reflection in the visor of Buzz Aldrin’s helmet as if looking for meaning. The image above follows directly after that moment where his searching has once again come up empty.

Once, If I remember well, my life was a feast where all hearts opened and all wines flowed. ~ Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell

And it still is. ~ Anon.

Despair is a pathetically tragicomic thing, isn’t it? I think Fassbinder thought so and he explores this theme in Despair a film he directed based on a novel by Nabakov adapted by Tom Stoppard. Despair stars Dirk Bogard (a favorite actor) as Hermann Hermann (no relation to Humbert Humbert) a man in crisis desperate to leave the trappings of the life he’s built that’s crumbling to pieces behind. Kinda like Rimbaud’s Season only funnier.

Warning Spoiler Alert!

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The Seventh Seal
Tartan Video Special 3D Edition

I finally got to see Ingmar Bergman’s classic film The Seventh Seal in 3D and now I finally get it!

“And when the Lamb had opened the seventh seal,
there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour”
(Revelation 8:1)

He was talking about God’s silence through all of life’s pain and suffering and the game of chess Block plays with Death represents mortality, the problem of free will and the search for meaning. “My life has been a futile pursuit, a wandering, a great deal of talk without meaning. I feel no bitterness or self-reproach because the lives of most people are very much like this. But I will use my reprieve for one meaningful deed.”

I never understood any of this with the plain old crummy black and white version and I believe these revelations were brought on by how big and palpable Bibi Andersson’s breasts look in 3D.

4 out of 5 spectacles
Highly Recommended!

I’m a fan of:

A.
B.
C. all of the above
D. none of the above

What do you think the odds are of a C?

Dennis Lee Hopper (May 17, 1936 – May 29, 2010)