F FOR FAKE - ORSON WELLES:

Now this has been standing here for centuries. The premier work of man perhaps in the whole western world and it's without a signature: Chartres. A celebration to God’s glory and to the dignity of man.

All that’s left most artists seem to feel these days, is man. Naked, poor, forked, radish. There aren’t any celebrations.  Ours, the scientists keep telling us, is a universe, which is disposable.

You know it might be just this one anonymous glory of all things, this rich stone forest, this epic chant, this gaiety, this grand choiring shout of affirmation, which we choose when all our cities are dust, to stand intact, to mark where we have been, to testify to what we had it in us, to accomplish.

Our works in stone, in paint, in print are spared, some of them for a few decades, or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash. The triumphs and the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life. We're going to die.

“Be of good heart,” cry the dead artists out of the living past. Our songs will all be silenced – but what of it? Go on singing. Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much.

The Edge of the World (1937)

by Mark Burell

Last week, I finally saw The Edge of the World (1937) which was Powell's first big movie (and a couple of years before he met Pressburger), a film nearly ethnographic in its focus on the community & landscape of a small Scottish island in the Shetland Islands (he was inspired by the story of the "evacuation" of the people of St. Kilda, who threw in the towel after most of the younger generation left for better jobs & lives on the mainland).

Almost every scene makes use of the dramatic cliffs and fields and seascapes of the island – some of the vertiginous cliff drops similar to the sheer Himalayan drops in Black Narcissus (1947). Laurie also loved this movie – who wouldn't? It's a GREAT rich movie – but she was especially smitten because as a little girl (and just recently she reread it again) she loved a book with a similar setting, tiny little community on an Irish island, called Twenty Years A-Growing, by Maurice O'Sullivan. I just saw in Wikipedia that it was originally published in 1933 in both English and Irish (Gaelige). The book was fairly successful and is still in print today, with many critics (including EM Forster) giving enthusiastic reviews.

The movie is not at all based on this book, but similarly documents a vanishing way of life in a ravishingly isolated island community. (They have to resort to attaching letters to little wooden blocks attached to sheep bladders & thrown into the sea, to be picked up by passing ships, to get a message to the mainland!) Powell's fidelity to his story, the use of non-actor locals throughout, the swooning love for the dramatic landscape, everything combines wonderfully to create a very moving portrait of the people of Foula. And with this first major project, Powell is already spreading the pixie dust around a little, his camera constantly capturing an atmosphere of magic and wonder, the everyday atmosphere for the islanders; you can almost see in their faces (of the locals acting in the movie) how much it has affected them to live their lives in such a rich and challenging place. One of my favorite set-pieces is when an elderly farmer has to rope-climb down a steep hillside to rescue a stranded sheep – very matter-of-fact how he risks his life to get this one animal back up to the hilltop, with the ocean heaving just below. If you haven't seen this, make sure you add it to your list – it's not an Archer's film, but it's a fantastic beginning to a fantastic life in film.

I really want to see The Spy in Black now, not a P/P Archer film but Pressburger did contribute some scriptwork, I think. It doesn't seem to be available except as a Region 2 DVD, so I can't play it on my DVD player. I shall have to scour the interwebs & see if anybody has posted it online. Amazon instant video does have Contraband available for viewing, so I think that's my next Powell movie (and the first real Pressburger/Powell movie).

More notes on 49th Parallel / A Canterbury Tale

More notes on 49th Parallel / A Canterbury Tale

I really liked this film, but there were some dumb things. For example, four times in this movie unarmed Canadian civilians challenged or disobeyed armed German soldiers, they got themselves killed in three of those four situations. If P&P and the British propaganda people thought that this was the way to win a war, there were sorely mistaken. The Germans were just as reckless and showed an incredible lack of discipline. At the trading post, an ordinary sailor, acting on his own killed two Canadians who could have been very useful to their escape. I’m also sure that German soldiers knew that if they killed unarmed civilians while trying to escape, they would not be sent to a POW camp, they would be hung. So In essence, what they were doing was an irrational suicide mission. Still, it was an entertaining movie. And we do get a pretty accurate view of how a dedicated Nazi thinks though, Portman’s Lt. Hirth. And the comical performances of Laurence Olivier and Ashley Wilkes, I mean Leslie Howard. The climax with Raymond Massey was well played, with a much gritter looking Eric Portman snapping to life as his escape nears. I usually root for the underdog, and it was easy to do in this film, especially when they give the villain all the best lines that flow so well. Like this in the boxcar -

“Yes, I’m a Nazi. (One of them off the U-boat) Quite right my friend. In two minutes I shall be across the border. Once there were six of us. Now I represent them all. We've beaten these dirty democracies, these weaklings. I tell you we've something inside us, something beyond the dim, muddied minds of you in the democracies. What do you know of the glorious, mystical ties of blood and race that unite me and every German Aryan? It’s not the Canadian people were against, its your filthy government, the whole democratic system.”  

And this, when at the Hutterite farm Vogel expresses regret over all the killing they had done -

“You know, Vogel, I’m worried about you. You’re a good fellow, but you don’t discipline yourself. You give way to emotions. That’ll land you in trouble one of these days. Why don’t you take an example from Kranz, a fine, soldierly fellow. You could be just as good a Nazi as he is if you tried.”

A Canterbury Tale

This film was pure propaganda with no entertaining Nazis to redeem it, instead we get a rather annoying American soldier/bumpkin. The two themes here, English heritage and Anglo American relations just before D-day, were not convincingly explored in my opinion. The film did have some of P&P's usual quirky charm, and some nice vistas, but it just wasn't enough. No memorable dialog like 49th P. I didn't dislike it, but I really couldn't recommend it to anyone as entertainment, except to someone with very specialized interests. I just re-watched some of Patton the other night, now there’s an entertaining look at Anglo-American relations during the war. The British took some hard shots in that film, I don’t know whether they were justified or not. OK, that’s all for now. I look forward to learning from someone out there the things that I may have overlooked.

Cheers.

Powell and Pressburger Film Discussion

I thought I would open a discussion of the Powell and Pressburger films and British film in general, if anyone wishes to broaden the discussion. I also wanted to follow up on Mark’s perceptive comments in the previous post on 49th Parallel being “intended as WWII propaganda to help coax the US into the war, illustrating just what total bastards the Nazis are and how you can't ignore them...”

I was going to write about the significance of WWII in these films but it started to get endless so I gave up. I thought it was interesting that in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), there was a sympathetic German character, so there was an effort to avoid portraying the German people as evil en masse. The liberation of the death camps in 1945 meant that any future film made about the war would have to acknowledge that incredible evil. But to make it even more complex, as soon as we learned about the Holocaust, the Germans themselves could not be portrayed as completely evil because we needed West Germany as our ally in the looming Cold War against the USSR. So we again had to be more nuanced and separate Germans from Nazis.

BTW, if anyone is interested in a French twist on this, take a look at the novel Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky. It covers the German invasion of France in 1940 and the first year of the occupation. The story behind this novel is quite incredible. I recommend reading the novel before reading the intro or any biographical info. A film is coming out this year.

This is list of 1940’s P & P films:

Contraband (1940)

49th Parallel (1941)

One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942)

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)

The Volunteer (1943)

A Canterbury Tale (1944)

I Know Where I'm Going! (1945)

A Matter of Life and Death (1946)

Black Narcissus (1947)

The Red Shoes (1948)

The Small Back Room (1949)

I've seen these - 49th Parallel (1941) The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) I Know Where I'm Going! (1945) A Matter of Life and Death (1946) Black Narcissus (1947) The Small Back Room (1949)   --All but Black Narcissus are about the war on some level.

I have A Canterbury Tale (1944) and The Red Shoes (1948) on hold at the library so it shouldn't be more than a week or so before I’m able to talk about them.

Here’s some comments on I Know Where I’m Going from Wiki.

"I've never seen a picture which smelled of the wind and rain in quite this way nor one which so beautifully exploited the kind of scenery people actually live with, rather than the kind which is commercialized as a show place." – Raymond Chandler

"The cast makes the best possible use of some natural, unforced dialogue, and there is some glorious outdoor photography." – The Times, 14 November 1945

"[It] has interest and integrity. It deserves to have successors." – The Guardian, 16 November 1945

"I reached the point of thinking there were no more masterpieces to discover, until I saw I Know Where I'm Going!" – Martin Scorsese

The film critic Barry Norman included it among his 100 greatest films of all time.

A Common Future Filled With Hope?

“Now I don't pretend to tell you how to find happiness and love when every day is just a struggle to survive, but I do insist that you do survive because the days and the years ahead are worth living for. One day soon man is going to be able to harness incredible energies, maybe even the atom. Energies that could ultimately hurl us to other worlds in some sort of spaceship. And the men that reach out into space will be able to find ways to feed the hungry millions of the world and to cure their diseases. They will be able to find a way to give each man hope and a common future, and those are the days worth living for.”

This statement was made by a character in a film or tv show sometime during the 20th century. Any guesses before I post the answer?