August 2nd 2013. Pick Of The Day.
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Rene Clair's LE BEAUTE DU DIABLE, the frogteur's take on the Faust legend, begins a one-week run at the Film Forum this afternoon. Gerard Philipe essays the role of the world's oldest dealmaker, Mephistopheles himself, who seduces the well-intentioned alchemist, played by the legendary Michel Simon, into the worst contract of all time. Until A-Rod met the Steinbrenners, that is.
I resist all the worldly temptations this flick has to offer today, but I won't make any promises about tomorrow...
Ingmar Bergman's THE MAGICIAN screens at the Rubin Museum this evening as part of their excellent Cabaret Cinema series. Max Von Sydow's travelling prestidigitator happily takes on the resident would-be debunkers of a small town he seeks to profit from. As usual the price of a glass of booze gains you admittance to the museum's awesome screening lounge, but get there early as these things tend to sell out. I pass this up today in favor of one of cinema's most important behind-the-camera magicians, one no less audacious or mischevious. Keep goin'.
Midnight fare about our movie-mad metropolis includes the celluloid hijinks of Jim Henson's THE GREAT MUPPET CAPER at the Landmark Sunshine Cinema, Tony Scott's erotically charged 80's vampire flick THE HUNGER at the Film Society's Elinor Bunin Monroe Film Center, and Bill Lustig's self-explanatory MANIAC COP at the Nitehawk Cinema in harmonically hirsute Williamsburg. I eschew the lot, ESCHEW I sez, to choose instead a titanic figure in the medium's evolution. His rep may remain somewhat sullied because, y'know, racism never got as uncontroversial as he once might've believed, but his contributions to the language of the cinema are unequivocal, and the lexicon currently employed would perhaps not exist, at least not in the way we know it, without the efforts of one David Wark Griffith.
Edward Muybridge filmed the first moving image. William Kennedy Dickson devised 35mm film. The Lumiere brothers projected the first moving image onto a screen. Edwin S. Porter discovered the innovation of film editing. These breakthroughs represent the absolute infancy of what would become the most popular and profitable art form the world has ever seen. D. W. Griffith, the man who would usher the medium into its adolescence, was raised in poverty, and worked at several menial tasks to support his family before discovering the theater. Failing as a playwright he tried his luck as an actor, finding middling success. He moved to NY in 1907 hoping to sell scripts to Porter, then busily cranking out the finest films Thomas Edison's Black Maria studio in New Jersey had to offer, but instead was placed before the camera as an actor yet again. Success would never come for thespian Griffith, but this newly birthed film industry intrigued him. He eventually found employment at NYC's Biograph studios, taking the director's chair for the first time as the studio floundered in search of a hit. Griffith delivered with his first film, THE ADVENTURES OF DOLLIE. A legacy was underway.
Griffith campaigned to film the historical Mexican drama IN OLD CALIFORNIA in the eponymous locale, a rarity in 1910 but essential to the film's verisimilitude, he argued. The exact location for the film's shooting was a pleasant nowhere town called Hollywood, a first that would've cemented his name outside Grauman's Chinese Theater all by itself. It wasn't until 1915, though, that his greatest contribution to the history of film would unspool. Already tinkering with and broadening Porter's elementary concepts of film editing Griffith was convinced the then "modern" audience was ready, indeed hungry, for a proper feature-length production, a belief spurred on by the success of Giovanni Pastrone's epic CABIRIA. Biograph balked, as they, like most studios, believed a film longer than an hour would cause irrevocable damage to the viewer's eyesight. Griffith found a home for his epic project, an adap of Thomas Dixon's THE CLANSMEN, in his newly founded Reliance-Majestic Studios, and the resulting feature, a little something called THE BIRTH OF A NATION, was an enormous hit that broke box office records across the country.
It also proved an enormous embarrassment that broke race relations, already fragile, across the country. Regardless of its status as game-changer both artistically and commercially the unforgivable depiction of African-Americans a mere 50 years post-Civil War, and during a Jim Crow era that kept the country divided still, outraged the NAACP, caused "race" riots in several major cities, and labelled the film's maker as a bigot at best. In response not just to the personal attacks but the movie's immense box office Griffith took on an even more ambitious project, one that he believed would not only restore his good name but prove an even greater, more innovative artistic statement and financial behemoth, a meditation on that very same mindless hatred his previous blockbuster celebrated. He was right about one of those things anyway, as the resounding failure of this follow-up forced the dissolution of his film company, and did virtually nothing to polish his image with liberal filmgoers across the U.S. What landed with a thud back in 1916, however, proved monumentally influential to future filmmakers up to this very day. Griffith would find himself at the end of his days broke, reviled and largely forgotten among members of the industry he'd helped mint, and that might well be appropriate for someone who created such an epic ode to the notion of white supremacy, but the fact remains that this complicated artist pushed the kid into the pool, as it were, knowing that the cinema would not merely float, it'd swim like a seal. So for a week anyway let's remember the good D.W. and let all apologies be damned. We got an honest-to-god epic screening to be giddy over.
D.W. Griffith's INTOLERANCE proves harmless on the eyeballs for a week at the Film Forum. The beginnings of the film industry don't screen much larger than this.
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Be safe and sound and make sure the next guy/gal is too. Back soon with new Picks and the August 2013 Overview. Someone, I implore, slow this goddam summer down to a crawl. Anyone?
-Joe Walsh
