Posts

Filmmaking, Feminism, Genre: Women Make Horror

By smallbackroom -
Image
Women’s screen presence is the most striking in the horror genre. To be gazed upon is in part to be possessed, consumed or at the least, threatened with commodification. From silent era vampire’s desire Ellen in 1922 Nosferatu by F.W. Murnau, to Fay Wray in King Kong, to Hitchcock’s beleaguered Rebecca, to Polanski’s Carol in Repulsion, to Antonioni’s Giuliana in Red Desert, the case of female weakness, hysteria, paranoia, delusion and despair have been some of the main narrative trajectories of the horror heroine. Christopher Sharrett’s analysis of the film Haunting by Robert Wise makes up for a concise analysis of the female issue and the ultimate struggle that ensued in genre filmmaking: The film seems to recognize, in 1963, the frustrations of women under bourgeois patriarchal society, while also arguing that there is no way out. Even while offering the option of same-sex relations, the male and his property interests (symbolized by the immense Hill House) ultimately triumph. In th...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Individual, Collective, and Transcendental – ReFocus: The Films of Paul Schrader

By smallbackroom -
Image
Paul Schrader began his career as a film critic, reviewing films for his college newspaper, the Calvin College Chimes. Later at the American Film Institute, he became the editor of Cinema, a quasi-fan magazine devoted to the industry, and later for publications such as the LA Free Press and Film Comment. He wrote and co-wrote screenplays, often with his brother Leonard Schrader, before he became a director. In his conversations with Kevin Jackson, Schrader stated how screenwriting was not really writing: “it’s really part of the oral tradition and it has a lot more to do with the day your uncle went hunting and the dog went crazy and the bird got away than it does with literature.” 1 Essentially his love for cinema emanated from his love for writing. It was a way to rebel, to radicalize (it is well known that Schrader’s strict Calvinist upbringing forbade him from watching films or engaging in any so-called subversive activities), and he slowly but surely moved away from his churc...
Post a Comment
Read more

"Sure Did Talk to You" - Bumpy Road: the Making, Flop, and Revival of Two-Lane Blacktop

By smallbackroom -
Image
Sylvia Townsend’s production history Bumpy Road: The Making, Flop and Revival of Two-Lane Blacktop (Mississippi, 2019) chronologically explores the film’s development from concept through elaboration, distribution, reissue, and its subsequent revival. Her interlocutors were the people directly involved in the development of the film, from studio heads to car mechanics. Also involved were the ever-growing loyal fans and champions of the film. There is very little sentimentality or intellectualization in the book. Townsend has written an accurate, extensively researched, but rather dry account, describing the origins and processes by which the film came about. The author views the film as a collaborative product, rather than solely an auteur work. Though all accounts indicate the collaborative nature, Monte Hellman’s vision of the film, his use of landscapes, space, and time, and the overall poetry is what clearly stands out. Hellman was both the film’s director and its editor, and his...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Long Trail to Continue: Women in the Western

By smallbackroom -
Image
The review is published on Film Internatonal website. Director Anthony Mann famously said “…without a woman the Western wouldn’t work.”  But how have themes of femininity on the frontier in women-led Westerns changed from silent to the streaming age of cinema? In Sue Matheson’s book Women in the Western, published by University of Edinburgh, the idea of the essential nature of the female presence in America’s frontier mythology is explored in eighteen contributing essays divided into two main chapters, those regarding the traditional period of the genre, from silents to the 1940s, on to post-Second World War years, and also the revisionist and post-modern Western.  Historian David Blanke’s essay “When East Goes West: The Loss of Dramatic Agency in DeMille’s Western women from the 1910s to the 1930s” deals with the director’s establishment within the genre. From 1914 until 1917, DeMille made seven Western features and advanced from stage to film directing. Blanke establishes the w...
Post a Comment
Read more

Remembering Robert Frank

By smallbackroom -
Image
Robert Frank died in September this year. In the mid 1950s, traveling on a Guggenheim fellowship, he took 27,000 photographs while crossing America. He distilled a book of 81 photographs out of 800 rolls of film and called it The Americans. It made diners, off-beaten tracks and cool cowboys on city pavement popular. And almost a dream. Although nothing was as it appears. If it wasn’t for his monograph The Americans, an average European who dreams of vast Prairies, endless road trips of self-discovery, of getting lost, would have a harder time imagining how that trip might actually look. He’s the artist who became a journalist soon to become a filmmaker , on temporary assignment to our collective dreams, the “walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction,” He was half foreign, half immigrant; half genius, half savant and a pure component of the adulterated profane. One of the original high art low-lives, it was in opposites where he truly thrived. He made what the amate...
Post a Comment
Read more

Carnival of Souls ( Herk Harvey, 1962)

By smallbackroom -
Image
The world is so different in the daylight. In the dark, your fantasies get so out of hand. But in the daylight everything falls back into place again.” – These are the worlds spoken by the unconventional heroine played by Candance Hilligoss in a surreal and lonely horror film from 1962 called Carnival of Souls. Mary suffers a traumatic car accident, a car drag and falls from the bridge in the car with two of her other friends to be the only one surviving and walking away from it, seemingly unhurt. Soon she starts to feel out of touch with herself and the rest of society. She continues her way to Utah where she got a job as a local church organist. We move fast from the scene of the accident to her seemingly “normal” continuation of life or so we think. In the car, on the way to the town , she sees a strange white faced The Man, a ghoul, that creeps her out but it doesn’t scare her. She meets another one in the boarding house where she checks in, this one in flesh and blood, the creepy...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ray Meets Helen ( Alan Rudolph, 2017)

By smallbackroom -
Image
Ray Meets Helen is Alan Rudolph’s 22nd film to date and sadly last film Sondra Locke played in. It’s the 6th film Alan made with Keith Carradine who plays Ray, a broken down ex-boxer now doing shady jobs for his pal and employe Harve (Keith David) who also goes behind his back and meets up with Ray’s ex Ginger (Jennifer Tilly), a self-proclaimed last living romantic. Ray meets Helen in a restaurant and they bond instantly. She arrived to L.A. asking money loan and after being refused, meets a lonely woman who commits suicide and leaves an impromptu will: whoever finds her first can enjoy her wealth. Helen seizes the opportunity. She is in need of the money as all the family deaths are coming to her and dying costs. There are more characters on display and even though it may seem a hot mess, Ray Meets Helen is a display of certain freedom only a few directors maintain in Hollywood. Unconvential plot is not catered to the contemporary needs. It’s flawed, mysterious, allienated. It gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more