As it currently stands, Chiwetel Ejiofor, the Nigerian-British actor is the bookies favorite to win the Oscar for his outstanding performance in Steve McQueen’s 12 Years A Slave. I hope he wins.

The talented Mr. Ejiofor has also been writing and directing short films, Slapper in 2008, and last year, Columbite Tantalite, which is described as “a postcolonial parable about the west’s hunger for African mineral wealth.”

As Chiwetel Ejiofor explained in The Guardian last year, his film deals with the mineral coltan, which is mainly mined in east Congo:

In the ground, [coltan is] a metallic ore; when refined, it acquires unique heat-resistant characteristics that make it perfect for use in electronic capacitors. As a result, it is present in nearly every electronic device you can name. Coltan is with us almost everywhere we are – in smartphones, laptops, desktop computers, games consoles – but few people have heard of it. And its story reaches back directly to Congo, where the mining industry has been linked with everything from bankrolling civil wars in the region to the destruction of gorilla habitats.

In full, coltan’s name is columbite-tantalite, after Tantalus, the figure in Greek mythology who was condemned to a horrifying eternal torment, of the things he most desired being just out of his grasp. For many people in Congo, that’s exactly what coltan is – close enough to touch, but its riches out of reach. Like copper at the birth of the electrical age, rubber during the era of automobiles, diamonds for as long as they have been mined, it’s a substance that Congo has supplied to other countries, and which, for all the wealth it generates, has turned into a kind of curse. I knew then that I had the nugget of an idea. And the title for the film.

Without giving too much away, the story focuses on a character who has made a life out of coltan and his attempts to come to terms with his past. Interwoven with this is another strand, which focuses on a new computer game that’s being developed, a game so lifelike that it’s almost like stepping into another world. The young guy promoting the game has no sense at all of how he’s involved in the wider scheme. Indeed, the idea that he is connected to a conflict in a remote part of the world would seem absurd.

But, in a way, that’s what was interesting to me: the capitalist system itself being almost like a game. A game with winners and losers, a game that has had terrible, devastating consequences for so many people in the world. A game that we all play, and in which we manage to silence the horrors that implicate us.

The film was a collaboration between The Guardian newspaper and The Young Vic theater.
 

 
Gilda Radner’s (almost) 1979 one-woman Broadway show “Gilda Radner: Live from New York” ran for 52 performances at the Winter Garden Theatre, the venue which would later host both Cats and Mama Mia. Don Novello (“Father Guido Sarducci”) and Paul Shaffer were also featured in the show.

Although Radner’s live show was a hit with New York audiences, Mike Nichols’ cinematic document of her performance, released as Gilda Live in theaters and on record didn’t fare as well. I had the album when I was a kid and to this day I think I still have most of it memorized. Here’s one of Gilda Live‘s highlights, “Let’s Talk Dirty to the Animals”:
 

 
Cinema’s “All American” auteur of the dark, surreal and inexplicable turns 68 today, yet he somehow remains boyish. Must be all that meditation?

David Lynch student film, ‘Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times)’ (1967)
If ‘Dirty Dancing’ were directed by David Lynch
‘Eraserhead Stories’: David Lynch looks back on his weirdest film
‘Hotel Room’: David Lynch’s oddball HBO mini-series, 1993
David Lynch’s guide to film-making
David Lynch sells coffee
‘The Pink Jack’ : AC/DC vs David Lynch vs. Dead Can Dance (NSFW)
David Lynch’s ‘Eraserhead’ in 60 seconds, done in clay
David Lynch’s hair compared to well-known paintings
Sean Young’s Super-8 film diary from David Lynch’s ‘Dune’ (1983)
David Lynch: ‘Ideas flow through like these beautiful little fish, and you catch them’
 
Below, a young David Lynch makes a brief appearance on New Wave Theatre sometime in the early 1980s.

 
Robert Shaw liked to drink. Indeed, the actor, author and playwright liked to drink a lot. And it often led to some disastrous consequences.

During the making of Jaws, Robert Shaw had an alcohol-induced blackout during the filming of that famous S.S. Indianapolis speech. Shaw had convinced director Steven Spielberg that as the three characters in the scene (played by Shaw, Roy Scheider, and Richard Dreyfuss) had been drinking, it might be an idea to have a wee chaser before filming, just to get him in the mood. Spielberg agreed. It was an unwise decision as Shaw drank so much he had to be carried back onto the set. Hardly any filming took place that day, and Spielberg wrapped the crew at eleven in the morning.

Later that night, in the wee small hours, a panicked Shaw ‘phoned Spielberg to ask if he had done anything embarrassing as he could not remember what had happened. And would the director let him film the scene again?

The next day, a sober and contrite Shaw turned up early for work and delivered one of cinema’s most memorable speeches.

“Drink?” Shaw once famously said in 1977, “Can you imagine being a movie star and having to take it seriously without a drink?”

“I agree with Richard Burton that drink gives poetry to life. Drink for actors is an occupational hazard born largely out of fear.”

The stories of Shaw’s alcoholic excesses, often abusive behavior, and on-set pranks can sometimes overshadow his quality as an actor and his talent as a writer. The academic John Sutherland has pointed out Shaw was a far better writer than many of the best-selling authors whose books inspired the films he starred in, particularly Pete Benchley (Jaws, The Deep) and Alistair MacLean (Force 10 From Navarone), though sadly none of Shaw’s five novels or his three plays are currently in print.

As we all (probably) know, Shaw himself was involved in the writing of the famous Indianapolis speech, as Spielberg has explained in 2011:

I owe three people a lot for this speech. You’ve heard all this, but you’ve probably never heard it from me. There’s a lot of apocryphal reporting about who did what on Jaws and I’ve heard it for the last three decades, but the fact is the speech was conceived by Howard Sackler, who was an uncredited writer, didn’t want a credit and didn’t arbitrate for one, but he’s the guy that broke the back of the script before we ever got to Martha’s Vineyard to shoot the movie.

I hired later Carl Gottlieb to come onto the island, who was a friend of mine, to punch up the script, but Howard conceived of the Indianapolis speech. I had never heard of the Indianapolis before Howard, who wrote the script at the Bel Air Hotel and I was with him a couple times a week reading pages and discussing them.

Howard one day said, “Quint needs some motivation to show all of us what made him the way he is and I think it’s this Indianapolis incident.” I said, “Howard, what’s that?” And he explained the whole incident of the Indianapolis and the Atomic Bomb being delivered and on its way back it was sunk by a submarine and sharks surrounded the helpless sailors who had been cast adrift and it was just a horrendous piece of World War II history. Howard didn’t write a long speech, he probably wrote about three-quarters of a page.

But then, when I showed the script to my friend John Milius, John said “Can I take a crack at this speech?” and John wrote a 10-page monologue, that was absolutely brilliant but out-sized for the Jaws I was making! (laughs) But it was brilliant and then Robert Shaw took the speech and Robert did the cut-down.

Robert himself was a fine writer, who had written the play The Man in the Glass Booth. Robert took a crack at the speech and he brought it down to five pages. So, that was sort of the evolution just of that speech.

 
More on Robert Shaw, after the jump…

 
One thing is for sure: Chris Marker’s cat Guillaume-en-Egypte (yes, that’s right, “William in Egypt”—whatevs) is no Maru, the wildly videogenic Japanese feline whose winsome antics catapulting himself in and out of cardboard boxes have made his owner a thousandaire many times over. In Marker’s 1990 short Chat écoutant la musique, Guillaume mostly snoozes atop an electronic keyboard as a lugubrious jazz piano theme by Federico Mompou emanates throughout the room. A couple times he looks around, and towards the end (drama!) he switches position. Hey, he’s a cat—mainly he snoozes.

Marker’s short film, one of five animal-related movies that comprised his Bestiaire, would probably fail as YouTube click bait, but it succeeds as a dreamy meditation by one of cinema’s most challenging experimental directors, best known for Sans Soleil and La Jétee, the latter of which Terry Gilliam (not Guillaume, not from Egypt) improbably transmogrified into the frenetic time-twisting thriller Twelve Monkeys.   
 

 
The Residents, if you didn’t know, are a long running cross-media band who are pretty much the yardstick by which high quality avant-pop weirdness is measured. Last time DM checked up on them, they were delivering the single most jaw-dropping trove of band merch ever to a superfan in Indiana who had fat cash to burn and priorities with which we cannot argue.

Since then, The Residents have successfully reached the crowd-sourced fundraising goal for the completion of their film The Theory of Obscurity, a history of the band by filmmaker Don Hardy (no relation to the tattoo artist/douchebag t-shirt guy). The latest trailer is the longest, most generous taste yet of the doc’s contents, and features members of Residents-influenced bands like Devo, Primus, Ween and Talking Heads chiming in on the band’s history, innovations, and legacy.
 

 
On Tuesday, the band posted this long lost interview on their Facebook page. In it, Hardy Fox, then and still one of the band’s longtime spokesmen, discusses on a New Zealand TV program the then-recent theft of one of the band’s trademark eyeball masks, their musical influences, and the concepts behind the band’s ongoing commitment to anonymity, and some of anonymity’s consequences. But one of the best moments comes within the first half-second of the thing, when the interviewer’s accent makes Fox’s first name sound like “hottie.” Rrrowwwwrrr.
 

 
The Residents’ latest release is Mush-room, though at the rate they put stuff out, it’s probable that that album will effectively be an oldie within a couple of months.

 
The name Russ Meyer has some striking connotations. The first being a comic-book style obsession with large, heaving, fleshy female breasts. But if all you see with the man is pendulous, heaving, busting-out-of-the screen tatas, then you are seeing only part of the picture. Meyer’s signature films boasted top notch editing that never let you finish a breath, plot lines that played out like the weirdest morality tale and characters that were so over the top and wild, that you really wished real life could be just like that.

Out of the 24 feature films he is credited with directing, there is one that has been fairly obscure and in the shadows till now. With 1964’s Fanny Hill, there are some potential reasons for this. That’s not to say it is a bad movie. It’s cute, features some lovely ladies and some fun performances. Fanny Hill stars Italian actress Leticia Roman as the very pretty, sweet natured and brain-damaged/naive titular character. Unlike the sexually precocious character from the classic 1700’s purple prose book, this Fanny Hill is about as glowy-cheeked and innocent as a Disney character.
 

 
After being orphaned by her rural parents, Fanny is taken to the city by her “friend,” whom we never meet. Abandoned, homeless and hungry, a desperate Fanny ends up at an employment office run by a hirsute woman with salacious looks. Before the living definition of mustache rides can act on any of her barely hidden impulses, Mrs. Maude Brown (legendary classic Hollywood actress Miriam Hopkins) saunters in and is flabbergasted at the eerie resemblance that young Fanny has with her late daughter.

Mrs. Brown immediately takes on the young lamb, not as a maid, but as a surrogate daughter. Madame seems a bit off, but compared to whatever fate beautiful-dim bulb Fanny has with Mustache Rides, she is in better hands with Mrs. Brown. She soon gets to stay at her new benefactress’s lovely home and her coterie of comely “cousins.” At last, the Meyer-ian buxotic factor comes into play, as each woman is gorgeous and colorful, including one acting like a crazed Lolita and another one practicing her whipping techniques on a mannequin. Russ Mayer fans will spot the uber-busty Rena Horten, whom he would go on to use in the incredible sex filled, fire and brimstone fueled Mudhoney, amongst the “cousins.”
 

 
After setting her up with one particularly lecherous, bewigged older man that ends up in catastrophe, Mrs. Brown realizes how genuinely virginal her new charge is. Of course, does that dissuade her from wanting to assimilate the young lovely into her roster of sexed-up, tigress-courtesans? Of course not!

However, as if Fanny’s blind allegiance to her own dim-witted naivete was not enough, soon another threat looms to wrench Brown’s plans for making the girl her next soiled dove. A chance meeting with a young sailor, Charles (future director Ulli Lommel), plunges Cupid’s arrow straight down Fanny’s heart. The young lovers announce their plans to wed to Mme. Brown. Not wanting her still untarnished future meal ticket to slip away, Brown engineers a plan to put Charles far away on an island. But you cannot keep a seafaring soul away and hijinks ensue, including one randy aristocrat named Hemingway (Walter Giller) who tries to wed Fanny, solely to get into her pantaloons. Will true love intervene or will our young heroine end up violated by a man whose sexual games involve gropey sleepwalking?
 

 
Fanny Hill is a cheeky film that is about as racy, if not slightly less so, than an episode of Benny Hill. Given that Mayer was THE godfather behind the nudie-cutie film movement, starting with the groundbreaking Immoral Mr. Teas, it is incredibly surprising that there is nary any real nudity in the entire film. There’s a decent amount of cleavage and some of the aforementioned ribaldry, but given that this came out the same year as Meyer’s far heavier and lurid Southern-fueled exploiter, Lorna, it feels unreasonably tame.

That said, Fanny Hillis a charming film with a cast that obviously had a lot of fun and relish with their roles. Hopkins, famous for her work in such Hollywood classics as 1933’s Design for Living, glams it up as the advantageous Mrs. Brown. Giller as the ridiculously lecherous Hemingway is even better, to the extent that you want more of his character. Roman is highly pretty and well suited to the supernaturally naive Fanny. Out of the canon of Meyer heroines, she is the wallflower at a swinging, claws-out-fighting party filled with women like Tura Satana, Erica Gavin, Kitten Natividad and Uschi Digard. But that’s okay because “Fanny Hill” itself is the wallflower of Meyer’s filmography.
 

 
That said, even wallflowers have their moments and deserve love too. Thanks to the continually fine work from the folks at Vinegar Syndrome, this long obscure title is now available, spiffed up from its original negative and released on both DVD and Blu Ray. It’s great to have it, especially since the only time I ever remember seeing it beforehand was on a battered Paragon VHS at the second oldest video store in my hometown. On top of this nice release, they have also included an interview with former protege of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and director of the 1980 Richard Hell film Blank Generation, Ulli Lommel. They have also included Albert Zugsmith’s The Phantom Gunslinger as a bonus second feature! (Zugsmith who produced Fanny Hill.) Starring former teen heartthrob Troy Donahue and famed Mexican horror actor German Robles, The Phantom Gunslinger ironically looks visually more like a Meyer film, minus the breasty factor, than Fanny Hill. Splashy colors, Ala Wild Gals of the Wild West, and an over-the-top approach to characters that it feels like Tex Avery did five hits of acid and decided to make a live-action Western film with Troy Donahue. This is praise, by the way.
 

 
Fanny Hill is a cute and interesting cinematic footnote of one of the truly most innovative, talented and wholly unique filmmakers America has produced in the last 100 years. Treat it like your charming Aunt, tipsy at a brunch after her 3rd Mimosa, telling you a PG-13 joke and giggling like she just said the nastiest thing in the world.
VHS release on

 
Back in August, Richard brought us a glimpse of some fascinating behind-the-scenes footage from one of the most fascinating movie projects in the history of cinema, the movie that we may never see, yet must see, yet maybe it’s better if we continue imagining it and never see it at all! I refer of course to Jerry Lewis’ The Day the Clown Cried, the 1972 movie about a clown in a Nazi concentration camp that Jerry has hidden away and swears will never be seen by anyone.

At the time, Richard urged people to watch the YouTube clip NOW, because it’ll be yanked before you know it. Five months later and the clip is still up ... perhaps a sign that Jerry’s ability or desire to keep this from people is abating? We can’t know.
 

 
What we do know is that a new clip has surfaced with additional behind-the-scenes footage! And it’s tasty indeed, we get an entire scene in the process of being filmed. Jerry’s working with French actors here, so his directorial word of approval is invariably “Bon.” We get a fascinating clip of Jerry in full clown makeup in the middle of an empty big top, looking down at a pile of ashes as “Taps” plays. We also get a minute or two of Jerry working with the orchestra.
 

 
It’s a weird clip, actually. The YouTube “About” information reads in part, “This is the remainder of the footage from the full documentary, you’ve already seen the rest.” I take this to mean that the clip Richard posted in August is “the rest,” and that this second clip now completes the documentary. This YouTube file, unlike the other one, isn’t actually the documentary as much as someone filming a computer monitor that is playing the documentary—you can see the computer monitor clearly throughout, especially in the beginning as someone adjusts the frame. The monitor even has visible fingerprints on it.
 

 
In the clip below, Jerry interacts with an interviewer in a hotel room in Paris, two weeks before the production of The Day the Clown Cried. The date is March 1972. Jerry discusses the choice of Cirque d’Hiver de Paris for the location of the all-important circus in the movie, the ten years he waited before he felt he was ready to shoot the movie, and the casting of the children in the movie, among many other subjects. He also discusses his use of video playback, which (as he says) he invented sixteen years earlier. His mention of the circus as the location for the first day of shooting leads me to believe that the footage in the other two documentary clips similarly comes from early in the shoot. Much of the movie was shot in Sweden.

Interestingly, this interview clip ends with Jerry lighting a cigarette off of a candle, which (they had NO way of knowing this) is reminiscent of a gag from the August footage in which Jerry’s clown is not able to light a cigarette because the flame keeps going out just as he needs it.
 

 
via Cinephilia and Beyond

 
As most of the nation still tries to stay warm, If you’re casting about for something to watch or even just something to fill the room, you could do a lot worse than this.

Black Wax, Robert Mugge’s 1982 documentary about Gil Scott-Heron is positively overflowing with the legendary talker and musician—“talker” seeming a far apter description of what GSH did than “street poet.” The man was born to talk, and everything he says in this movie has a wonderful, cockeyed, sad beauty to it. The music, supplied by the Midnight Band, has the same marvelous flow.
 

 
This photo is from the start of Scott-Heron’s tour of Washington, D.C., somewhere around the middle of part 1. His angry poem “Whitey on the Moon,” which kicks off part 2, is a particular highlight. Enjoy.
 
Gil Scott-Heron, Black Wax, part 1:

 
Part 2 after the jump…

 
It is claimed Alfred Hitchcock was so traumatized after viewing footage of the liberation of the Belsen-Bergen concentration camp that the legendary film director stayed away from Pinewood Film Studios for a week.

Hitchcock had been enlisted by friend and patron, Sidney Bernstein to make a documentary on German atrocities carried out during the Second World War. The director was to use footage shot by British and Soviet film units during the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. The material was so disturbing that Hitchcock’s complete film has rarely been seen. Speaking to the Independent newspaper, Dr Toby Haggith, Senior Curator at the Department of Research, Imperial War Museum, said:

“It was suppressed because of the changing political situation, particularly for the British. Once they discovered the camps, the Americans and British were keen to release a film very quickly that would show the camps and get the German people to accept their responsibility for the atrocities that were there.”

According to Patrick McGilligan in his biography Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light:

[Hitchcock met] with two writers who had witnessed the atrocities of Bergen-Belsen first-hand. Richard Crossman contributed a treatment, while Colin Wills, an Australian correspondent, wrote a script that relied heavily on narration.

The director had committed himself to the project early enough to give Hitchcockian instructions to some of the first cameramen entering the concentration camps. Hitchcock made a point of requesting “long tracking shots, which cannot be tampered with,” in the words of the film’s editor, Peter Tanner, so that nobody could claim the footage had been manipulated to falsify the reality. The footage was in a newsreel style, but generally of high quality, and some of it in color.

....

The footage spanned eleven concentration camps, including Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Buchenwald, Ebensee, and Mathausen. The filmmakers ended up with eight thousand feet of film and newsreel, some of it shot by allied photographers, the rest of it impounded. It was to be cut and assembled into roughly seven reels.

Hitchcock watched “all the film as it came in,” recalled Tanner, although the director “didn’t like to look at it.” The footage depressed both of them: the piles of corpses, the staring faces of dead children, the walking skeletons. The days of looking at the footage were long and unrelievedly grim.

In the end, the planned film took Hitchcock and his team much longer than anticipated, and when it was delivered, the perceived opinion was the documentary would not help with Germany’s postwar reconstruction. Despite protests from Bernstein and Hitchcock, the documentary was dumped and five of the film’s six reels were deposited at the Imperial War Museum, where they were quietly forgotten.

Some later thought Hitchcock’s claims of making a Holocaust documentary were mere flights of fancy, that was until 1980, when an American researcher discovered the forgotten five reels listed as “F3080” in the Museum’s archives. These were screened at the Berlin Film Festival in 1985, and this incomplete and poor quality version was then shown on PBS under the title Memory of the Camps, with its original commentary by Crossman and Wills, narrated by Trevor Howard.

Now, the Imperial War Museum has painstakingly restored all six reels according to Hitchcock’s original intentions. This has led to some “wariness” over seeing the documentary as a “Hitchcock film” rather than as an important and horrific record of Nazi atrocities.

Haggith, who worked as an advisor on the project, has said the film is “much more candid” than any previous Holocaust documentary, and has described it as “brilliant” and “sophisticated.”

“It’s both an alienating film in terms of its subject matter but also one that has a deep humanity and empathy about it. Rather than coming away feeling totally depressed and beaten, there are elements of hope.

“We can’t stop the film being incredibly upsetting and disturbing but we can help people understand why it is being presented in that way.

“Judging by the two test screenings we have had for colleagues, experts and film historians, what struck me was that they found it extremely disturbing.

“When you’re sitting in a darkened cinema and you’re focusing on a screen, your attention is very focused, unlike watching it on television… the digital restoration has made this material seem very fresh. One of the common remarks was that it [the film] was both terrible and brilliant at the same time.”

Work on Hitchcock’s documentary is almost complete, and the film (with as yet to be announced new title) will be shown on British TV in early 2015 to mark the 70th anniversary of the “liberation” of Europe. The film will also be screened at film festivals and in the cinema.

The following is the 5-reel version of Hitchcock’s documentary. Warning: the film contains horrific and disturbing images, which may not be suitable viewing for all.
 

 
Via the ‘Independent’ with thanks to Tara!