Short-Order - THE ANTIQUE COLLECTOR (1976)

It's a shame that short films have largely gone the way of the dodo, at least outside of bundled showings at film festivals.  Edison famously remarked that he didn't think anybody would sit still for a movie longer than a half hour, and short films used to be a standard part of the theater-going experience along with newsreels and cartoons.  Most shorts shown theatrically from the 30's through the 50's were serial films shown one episode at a time, and once TV came along theatrical serials quickly became obsolete.  Theaters started shedding shorts along with newsreels and cartoons (also largely rendered obsolete by TV) in an effort to fit more screenings in per day.  Short films occasionally get shown on TV for special occasions (such as Mickey's Christmas Carol or Mr. Humphreys and His Inheritance) but almost never theatrically, the main exception being Pixar shorts shown in front of their own feature films.  Home video has helped shorts out somewhat but only in bundled form and usually under the banner of awards consideration, such as the Academy Awards shorts collections released each year.  It's because of this lack of availability that short films have a sort of fleeting preciousness, so I appreciate whenever I can find a good older one, and for that purpose I'm once again grateful to the fine uploaders at YouTube and Internet Archive.  The latter hasn't been featured too much on this blog but has been an invaluable resource for collecting interesting movies that have fallen into the public domain or whose owners don't mind putting up for free.  A while ago I snagged an interesting short from the Internet Archive, The Antique Collector, made by an industrial film maker in the mid-70's and remaining a finely crafted curio from an age when shorts were at their most threatened.

A young boy named Tom (Scott Hart) works at his grandmother's antique store, scooping up items where he can and learning the fine art of marking up prices and haggling.  His grandma (Edna Macafee) is an expert in the business but her spirit is gradually fading, and one day is charmed by a wealthy-looking man (Tom Ramirez) who buys an expensive piece of glassware from the store without asking the price.  What she doesn't know what Tom sees - the man pitched the item into the trash after leaving the store.  After he comes around a couple more times Tom realizes that he's not interested in the items he buys from the store, but rather buying Tom's grandma - and he may not realize how literal the collector's intentions are.

Unfolding like a delicate Twilight Zone episode, The Antique Collector is a warm and strangely resonant fable that has held up rather nicely for being almost forty years old.  The direction and cinematography seep atmosphere and mood, the store among a pocket of antique shops stuck in a strange, dusty strip mall.  The store is so displaced that the characters seem to inhabit a kind of dreamworld, an atmosphere supported by the boy having a secret best friend in an unsettling mannequin propped on a balcony.  The acting, while not exactly Hollywood-level professional, is at least impassioned and works well with the odd premise.  The only actor to have appeared in anything else (according to IMDB) is the grandma, Edna Macafee, who managed to appear in both Warlock Moon and Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, a resume I'd kill to have.  The music is pure 70's and extremely charming, and the ending has a cozy, still-shot quality that puts it in league with the best of 70's horror flicks (...like Warlock Moon, for that matter).  Its writer/director, Jerry Callner, apparently had an award-winning career in industrial and educational films (much like Carnival of Souls director Herk Harvey) and his son James went on to make a number of films about obsessive compulsive disorder, a condition he suffers from himself.  It's a shame this is so unknown that it doesn't even have an IMDB entry, nor does its creator or hardly any of the actors involved, but that's exactly what Internet Archive is for - helping people like me fill in the gaps of American film culture.  Here's the short in full for those with just under a half hour to spare, not even breaking Thomas Edison's famous prediction of the maximum amount of time that people would sit still for a film.

~PNK

A SIFF 2016 request - SEANCE ON A WET AFTERNOON (1964)

Last year I spotlighted nine films that I'd seen at the 2014 Seattle International Film Festival, and this year I'm going to publish another round-up article, hopefully reviewing many more films than my relatively paltry run last time.  This year I'm going to at least one of the special revival screenings featuring an older film rather than a new one, and SIFF always has a few of them each year - one year I saw the deeply unnerving Mother Joan of the Angels and left the theater shaking.  The revival I most want to see this year (and my schedule allows me to see) is The Color of Pomegranates, long on my TO WATCH list and most likely one for your list, too, and I'm really peeved I'm going to be missing Cave of the Spider Women.  While I've had some good luck in catching Midnight Movies and historical screenings at various silver screens (catching rarities like Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains and The Best Man utilizing original prints) I've recently been thinking of a list of older gems I'd love to see in a packed, darkened theater at SIFF or elsewhere, including a bunch of movies I've reviewed here.  Today I'd like to spotlight a film that not many people have seen but those who have hold it dearly to their hearts as a gem of 60's British filmmaking, Bryan Forbes's Seance on a Wet Afternoon.  Only fitfully available in the U.S., Seance has never been a huge moneymaker but its superb artistry and singularity in its genre make it a must-see for fans of psychological nail-biters, and I'd like to think of my article as my bid for its inclusion in SIFF's 2016 festival.

Myra (Kim Stanley) and Billy (Richard Attenborough) never really recovered from the death of their son Arthur.  Having been left to their own devices for far too long, Myra has unglued herself into the role of a professional medium and Billy laid down as her doormat long ago.  Myra hatches a plan - the two of them kidnap the young daughter of a wealthy couple and send a phony ransom letter.  Keeping the child in their son's old room masquerading as hospital staff treating her for "double German measles", Myra plans to step forward offering her services as a medium and eventually help the family and the police "find" the child.  As neither of the pair are professional criminals things can't exactly go as planned, and Myra's continued "communication" with Arthur may only be the least of their worries.

Botched kidnappings have long been a great plot device for crime thrillers, including After Dark, My Sweet, Fargo and Julia, but Seance tops them all in its exposure of the kind of loneliness and desperation that drives someone to take another family's child.  Largely eschewing the typical setpieces and pacing of its thriller genre, Seance uses silence and calm to crush the viewer's soul.  It's one of the slowest crime dramas I've ever seen yet it's never boring, the total stillness of Myra and Billy's insular existence so stifling at times to make the viewer want to claw their way out of their own skin.  There are rarely more than four or five people on screen at a time, the scenes mostly confined to drawing rooms and bedrooms, and when the action finds its way outdoors its surroundings are so entropied and forgotten some of them could double for a post-apocalyptic landscape.  Its through this acute emptiness and loneliness writer-director Bryan Forbes (working from a novel by Mark McShane) draws an indescribable and frightening atmosphere, playing off tight angles and stark confinement so well the viewer can feel the proximity of walls and taste the dust in the air.  I could feel the influence of Jack Clayton's The Innocents through much of the film, and why not take influence from one of the greatest horror films of the 60's to make a kidnapping film?  Both films illuminate how madness feeds off the echoes of the human mind left in the dark, as Myra's increasing instability and Billy's insurmountable weakness to her demands create a psychological moebius strip, each decision to dig their hole deeper dovetailing into the next.  The range of questions raised when someone decides to become a medium is a large and fruitful one for fiction, but Myra's need for her "gift" is both unsettling and enormously sad, and Billy's painful loyalty to her does little more than delay an inevitable point of psychological destruction.  The performances here are extraordinary and most likely career bests for both Stanley and Attenborough - Stanley teetered on a razor's edge so long the skin finally breaks, and Attenborough more regret than human.  The cinematography by Gerry Turpin (who would later photograph the heartbreaking senility portrait The Whisperers) is crisp and cold, accentuating each dry crack in living room walls and making sure neither the characters nor the viewer have any means of escape.  The music by John Barry (yes, the James Bond John Barry) has moments of shimmering, heartstopping simplicity and sensitivity, and the outdoor locations need little help to be engulfing.

Seance on a Wet Afternoon is hardly a thriller, and its insistence on forcing the viewer to live out the arc of its characters' madness in real time most likely contributed to its difficulty in finding an audience outside of England, even in spite of its mostly positive critical reception.  After briefly seeing the light of day on a VidAmerica VHS release in the 80's the film remained hidden until a 2002 DVD release by Home Vision Entertainment, the company behind the Criterion Collection that once had a DVD line under its own name that had a similarly high standard of its catalog without Criterion releases' high price tags and exhaustive print restoration.  The cover above is from that release, and I deviated from my usual practice of using original posters as headers for my reviews because I feel the HVE DVD cover is a better representation of the film's mood and atmosphere than any of the posters.  The release has its flaws, though - there's nary a special feature to be found and the sound transfer is poor, with people's voices creating ripping distortion at any dynamic above mezzo piano.  If I were a less jaded viewer I might be able to take the release's stifling sound transfer as another dimension to Myra and Billy's physical and mental prison but I've long outgrown the phase where I'd hold on to a fullscreen DVD of The Ring just because the movie is about video tapes.  I wonder why HVE didn't think the film wasn't good enough to be included in the Criterion Collection, as it's a hell of a lot better than a lot of movies they've featured (And the Ship Sails On, anyone?) and they later inducted The Innocents, anyways.  While we might not see a re-issue anytime soon some enterprising fans have made it easy for us and uploaded the film to YouTube, so until a revival comes your way you can at least see Seance for yourself in all its harrowing power.  It's a great reminder that sometimes prisoners are kept not so much so they can't get out but because their captors can't live without them inside.

~PNK

Calling the Eye and the Ear - the short films of Stefan and Franciszka Themerson

Now THIS is what I call a blurb:

When an unknown black poodle inexplicably explodes in philosophy professor Timothy Chesterton-Brown's back yard - paralyzing the professor and killing his guest, a graduate student diligently interviewing friends of a deceased literary master to learn the color of the Great Man's eyes - we enter the mystery of the sardine.  It is a mystery whose unwitting detectives are not trench-coated sleuths but, rather, include a twelve-year-old Oxonian mathematician named Ian, author of Euclid Was an Ass; his mother, Miss Prentice, a palmist; his beloved, Emma, daughter of the professor, for whom he names his most important postulate; a bureaucrat, Joseph Kszak, dubbed the Minister of Imponderabilia; the Great Man's widow and his secretary, affectionately known as the Dancing Ladies; and Lady Cooper, the aging daughter of a famous Polish general.  The clues they unearth - drawing on philosophical logic, the occult, intuition, and everything in between - lead them far from the tiny sea-coast town with the exploding poodle: we find them hunting in Majorca, Rome, Warsaw, and London.  The solution ultimately lies, however, at the furthest and most magical reaches of reason, which can only be deduced by this mystery's most visionary detectives.

Sorry to drop all that on you at once, but that's the blurb of what sounds like the greatest novel ever written, and I just happened to find it at an estate sale in a pristine, hardback First Edition for $2.  It's called The Mystery of the Sardine, and its author, Stefan Themerson, was not only a novelist but also a philosopher and composer (at least of the 2-act opera St. Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio, or Brother Francis' Lamb Chops (!)).  He also made experimental short films in the 30's and 40's with his wife Franciszka, who was herself a painter, illustrator and stage designer.  Oh, and Stefan also did the illustrated initials to the chapters of one of the greatest books ever written, Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style:

Obviously the Themersons are too amazing to ignore, and ignore I shalln't.  I obviously can't review the book here, but there's a sad catch to this article - all but three of the short films are lost, which for somebody used to a world where any movie can be seen by anybody is worse than if they never existed, because at least then I wouldn't be angry that they disappeared.*  There are three left: Przygoda czlowieka poczciwego (The Adventures of a Good Citizen), Calling Mr. Smith from 1942 and The Eye & the Ear from 1945.  Fine souls have uploaded all three to YouTube and we're knocking down all of 'em today.

An "irrational humoresque", The Adventures of a Good Citizen starts with a couple intertitles I can't read.  Then official looking people look right and left as per signs that flash on the screen, then walk right and left through mirror trickery.  This sets the stage for blitz-speed comic setpieces of men answering the phone and then backing up through paper walkways, as well as men trying to move a large mirrored bureau.  If you were thinking that sounded like a film that featured a lot of footage of people in reverse you'd be right.  Among those who move forward are two teams of protesters that appear to be walking into each other as per the Eisenstein 180-degree rule.  Then the people moving the mirror find themselves stopped in the woods and have altogether too much fun with it.  I suspect you might have altogether too much fun with this short, especially considering the overcaffeinated music by Stefan Kiesliewski.  What I'm saying is that everybody who reads my blog is already irrational.

Made after the Themersons settled in England, Calling Mr. Smith begins by opening Encyclopedia Brittanica to set the theme - art as a reflection of the soul of the age, rattling off the artistic "peaks" of various European cultures.  Then church organs and sculptures melt through trick photography.  A swastika glides by and the narrator (presumably Franciszka) says that Nazism (as well as murder and atrocity) are the peak of German culture - and then the film splits, leaving a silhouetted fragment on the screen and the projectionist bumble-yelling.  The projectionist is the Mr. Smith of the title, and we realize that Calling Mr. Smith is an anti-Nazi propaganda film, now a bit ironic as Joseph Goebbels was the Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda and helped pioneer the concept of propaganda in the 20th century.  The Themerson's investment in anti-Nazism is the occupation and large-scale suppression of their Polish homeland and its people and Nazism's wide suppression of the arts, including much of Germany's artistic past (including the music of Bach) and Polish composers such as Chopin and Szymanowski, each composer illuminated through a glass darkly as distant, monochrome silhouettes of leaves, violins and children bend and break across the screen.  While the Themerson's illustrate how the occupation of Poland has wreaked havoc in many ways, including showing a list of some 200 illustrious Polish professors who were sent to concentration camps, their accusation of Germany's suppression of the arts is an important one, as Hitler's stance on what kind of art was acceptable to the Reich was a very narrow one and was largely an excuse to suppress Jews by labeling their art as "degenerate".  Gallery shows and concerts were mounted showcasing "degenerate" art and music, and many of these subjugated figures weren't given their just exposure until decades later.  I normally don't like discussing propaganda films here but this one has a real artistic merit, using the device of still images passed over a skewed looking glass to great effect and utilizing a metafictional element in the use of a projectionist who doesn't want to screen the film we are currently watching.  It's a haunting piece, capitalizing on distant sadness and personal neglect, and would make a heck of a double feature with Winsor McCay's The Sinking of the Lusitania as the most artistically valuable propaganda films of all time.

The Eye & the Ear is an attempt to create a visual experience equal to that of an auditory experience, chiefly that of listening to four orchestrally-accompanied songs from Slopiewnie by Karol Szymanowski, previously featured in Calling Mr. Smith and long regarded as one of the greatest Polish composers of all time.  This film features the most animation of the three - while the previous two had featured momentary stop-motion animation The Eye & the Ear uses both stop-motion and traditional animation much more extensively, first to show falling leaves and growing branches, then later Art Deco geometry and score analysis.  The visuals are extraordinary, utilizing collage, modern design and special photographic effects to great illustrative effect.  Fantasia may have come out five years prior but not even Fantasia approached the modernist potential of this kind of music-illustration cinema.  The four songs show a full range of psychological approaches to visualizing music, from fluid thematic representation to free-association collage, mathematical abstraction and finally a gripping subconscious simplicity.  It's the best of the surviving Themerson films by far and a masterful cinematic tribute to the emotional and psychological power of modern Classical music.

If you're going to watch any of these watch The Eye & the Ear, but really we should be checking every attic and storage room in Poland and England for the rest of these dark beauties.  The Themerson's were simply unstoppable and I'm really glad to have chanced upon their work.  This article has been a long time coming and hopefully can act as a bit of a warm-up to my SIFF 2015 overview, or at least that dang belated article about Household Saints.  The moral of this story is that $2 is never too high a price when dealing with genius.

~PNK

*Of course, my greatest sadness in cinema is over a movie that never came to be, Salvador Dali's collaboration with the Marx Brothers.  Holy Shit.  Without hyperbole, that would have been the greatest movie ever made.