Shot over the course of eighteen months, Julien Nitzberg’s amazing documentary film, The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia follows the often comical, sometimes tragic antics of the hell-raising hillbilly White family of Boone County, WV. The Whites engage in a mind-blowing array of anti-social and criminal activities with barely concealed glee. This must-see film is unlike like any documentary I’ve ever seen and finally, a year after this interview was taped, it’s getting released theatrically and on iTunes and Amazon.
Then came Johnny Guitar, On Dangerous Ground, and, most recently, Criterion‘s bang-up resissuing of 1956’s Bigger Than Life. James Mason plays a milquetoast school teacher, who, thanks to the “miracle drug” Cortisone, releases with near-tragic consequences his inner Übermensch. You can watch a great, Mason-hosted trailer for the film here.
If you haven’t seen Bigger Than Life, please do—it remains one of the more scathing critiques of the “American Dream” ever committed to film.
After dying 31 years ago this month, Nicholas Ray popped up again in yesterday’s NYT. During the years preceding his death, Ray devoted himself to his experimental film, We Can’t Go Home Again.
Made in collaboration with his college students at the time, segments of the film pop up in Lightning Over Water, but now Ray’s widow, Susan, in honor of what would have been her husband’s 100 birthday, is assembling a full print of We Can’t Go Home Again for next year’s Venice Film Festival:
“It was an experimental film, a difficult film and I think a visionary film that is particularly important today,” Ms. Ray said from her home in Saugerties, N.Y., where she has also been organizing the storehouse of original scripts, notes and movie storyboards for a sale. Ray worked on the project from 1972 to 1976 with students he taught at Harpur College at the State University of New York at Binghamton. An early version was screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973, but Ray continued to revise, reshoot and re-edit it until his death. The film employs what Ray called “mimage” (short for multiple image), in which a number of camera images are simultaneously projected on the screen.
In certain respects his ideas were ahead of their time. On screen Ray and the students play versions of themselves, a conceit that smoothly fits into this era of reality television. Today’s digital techniques would also make it easy to create the effects Ray painstakingly tried to achieve on a shoestring budget. Ray and his students, for example, used Super 8 millimeter and 16 millimeter formats and early video technology, projected the images onto a screen and then refilmed these multiple images using a 35 millimeter camera.
Jean-Luc Godard famously called Ray, “the camera,” and for a man whose conflicts—bisexuality, drug and alcohol abuse—always seemed on the verge of overwhelming his talents, it’s not surprising the director’s life was the subject of more than one documentary.
What follows is another look at Ray, ‘74’s I’m a Stranger Here Myself. Directed by David Helpern Jr. and James C. Gutman, the doc covers Ray’s Harpur College teaching years, and features several sequences of Ray working on We Can’t Go Home Again. Remaining parts follow at the bottom.
In light of Dennis Hopper’s recent passing, it’s also definitely worthwhile checking out Wenders’ The American Friend. Hopper plays Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley, and Ray, in the opening scene, contributes a small but impactful cameo as a painter who’s faked his own death. That scene, restaged with a frail and sickly Ray, opens Lightning Over Water.
I’m a Stranger Here Myself, Part II, III, IV, V, VI
Today marks the half-century anniversary of the premiere of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, which—along with Fellini’s La Dolce Vita opening earlier the same year—used the artform of cinema to hold up the cracked mirror of compulsive desire to Western civilization.
Movies, of course, would never be the same. Who better to drive the point home than our friendly neighborhood Lacanian critical theorist from Slovenia, Slavoj Žižek, from his excellent 2006 documentary, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema?
When Bob Marley’s family called on the legendary singer’s childhood friend Alan Greenberg to film his funeral in 1982, it’s worth wondering whether Greenberg knew that he’d end up widening the scope to make one of the iconic films about Jamaica.
Shot by Werner Herzog associate Joerg Schmidt-Reitwein, Land of Look Behind seems to almost float across the island, touching down in both impoverished rural badland areas and the crowded setting of Kingston for the superstar’s stately final rites. Backed by the Kerry Leimer’s unlikely ambient score and featuring performers like Gregory Isaacs and Mutabaruka, Land… is a rich document of the places, faces, and voices of a Jamaica coming to terms with its lagging economy and post-colonial future.
Former Cabaret Voltaire member Richard H. Kirk sampled many bits of the film’s various monologues to populate In Dub: Chant to Jah and Live in the Earth, the electro-dub albums he made in his Sandoz guise.
Backbeat. The Hours and Times. I Wanna Hold Your Hand. Fictionalized accounts of The Beatles constitute, by now, a genre of their own, and range in quality from the barely watchable to the dreadful (and while not a strict account per se, I utterly loathed Across The Universe). Joining those films in October is Nowhere Boy, a chronicle of the early days of John Lennon.
While the below trailer for the bio-pic looks, well, like a trailer for a bio-pic, the film stars the reliably amazing Kristin Scott Thomas as Lennon’s Aunt Mimi (a rare, ‘81 clip of the real Mimi Smith follows at the bottom).
I’m also somewhat intrigued by Nowhere Boy‘s director, Sam Taylor-Wood. She’s the British artist with a thing for decaying still-lives. If you’ve never seen her A Little Death video, an ode to “the transience of biological life” featuring a rapidly decaying cobrarabbit, check it out here.
After overcoming two bouts with cancer—breast and colon—Taylor-Wood is now in a relationship with Nowhere Boy‘s Lennon, actor Aaron Johnson, who’s 23 years her junior. The couple are expecting the birth of their first child somewhere around the time Nowhere Boy opens in the U.S.
Some stunning early films from the 1930s (!) by New Zealand “direct” film (generally camera-less; images painted and scratched directly onto the film itself) innovator, sculptor and “least boring person who ever lived” Len Lye. These films are pure enjoyment of color and composition and an obvious influence on Stan Brakhage‘s later amazing though far less fun work. Swinging the Lambeth Walk is particularly beautiful; in essence a music video for Django Reinhardt‘s tune of the same name.
Initially published in 2006, Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids revealed a selection of enigmatic shots taken in Italy and at Tarkovsky’s home, thick with atmosphere, that could easily pass for stills from his films. Follow the link below to the entire collection, recently scanned for a Russian site.
David Lynch’s Interview Project has recently and quietly come to its scheduled end. The well-produced online-only project comprises a full 121 video interviews with random people, shot by Lynch’s team (led by his son Austin) on a year-long road-trip around the United States.
Lynch and co. manage to tap deeply into the wealth of personal stories in the great American working class that was first mined by the likes of oral historian Studs Terkel. But Interview Project filters Terkel’s ultra-earnest approach through the post-thereputic present, often getting a surprising amount of confessional material from a literal stop-and-talk encounter.
2010 marks the 46th year since a young dandy named Davy Jones made the media scene. On June 6th 1964, at the age of 17, he’d released a typical mod-blues single with the King Bees called “Liza Jane.” Later that same year, he’d appeared on Cliff Michelmore’s BBC Tonight show as head of The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-haired Men.
Two years before this, he’d gotten into a scrap with his friend George Underwood, who punched Jones in the eye with a ring on his hand. Although imperceptible in the BBC Tonight clip, it would leave the young Jones with a permanently dilated pupil a different color in that injured eye, one of the many features of the future superstar that would later fascinate millions.
. These films are pure enjoyment of color and composition and an obvious influence on 
‘s later amazing though far less fun work. Swinging the Lambeth Walk is particularly beautiful; in essence a music video for 
‘s tune of the same name.
revealed a selection of enigmatic shots taken in Italy and at Tarkovsky’s home, thick with atmosphere, that could easily pass for stills from his 
. Follow the link below to the entire collection, recently scanned for a Russian site.
