Kool-Aid Live Aid

SHADOWS OF OUR FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS SERGEI PARAJANOV 1964


[actual film is in color]

A contagious kind of exuberance charges Parajanov's first major work so ferociously and rich in religious fervor that it transforms a crude, cartoonishly simple romantic tragedy into a vortex of hyperkineticism, lyrical beauty, and drunken worship. I'm not sure how this film would play on a TV screen, but in the 'theatre' it's a truly sweeping and nearly physical event. There may not be a single repeated shot in the whole film (in a good way!), but consistency is found in the repeated low angle shots, causing characters to waver and nearly loooooooom over the audience.

Ivan and Marichka first exchange pleasantries (a slap from former to latter) immediately following the death of the boy's father at the hands of the girls'. Marichka is wealthy and Ivan is not, and apparently they live in a lawless frontier without much in the way of court systems, so Ivan's father's murderer is fairly overlooked (as will be others). But $ doesn't matter much to each child and after getting slightly familiar the two set off on a playfully erotic nude bathing excursion in the woods. It's cute and very underage and marks one of many shockingly unexpected segues, this time into the couples' early adulthood, at which point Ivan sets off to find his fortune.

But all does not turn out as happily as planned and I was a bit disappointed by the all-too-early exit of Marichka's naive maiden. Best remembered during a lengthy wavering zoom-in on her tear and rain-soaked face following a passionate goodbye to Ivan, Marich's childish devotion keeps things in high spirits. Once absent, the mood is a bit more dour, but no less splattered and juiced.

An early faded red tone of the film gives way to more naturalistic hues later on (purposefully or time-ravagedly I cannot say), which I found a bit disappointing again. But still the playground swing-informed cinematographic aesthetic never wanes, dropping us into severely canted angles at one moment, skewed geometric landscapes, striking close-ups, or flat theatrical medium shots at any possible other.
There's no end to style in this film and more than surface-level window dressing for an otherwise simplistic plot, the camera movement and bravado grants a hallucinatory and devotional urgency to the material. If the showy shooting exceeds the romantic cliches, it perfectly matches director Parajanov's great enthusiasm for Pagan and Christian folklore, as elaborated in several bawdy rituals.

Besides the active camera, Shadows' frequent and irreverent holy rites filled with dance, eery song, and eerier costume lend the primary narrative thread a strong undercurrent of fable. Far less sober than the title might imply, the film freaks like the Monty Python crew (circa Holy Grail) getting drunk in the folk art masks section of the natural history museum and reenacting a skeletal version of Romeo and Juliet with inspiration from Andrei Rublev as interpreted by Seijun Suzuki's visual schizophrenia.

My expectations were REALLY high for this one after the first 20 minutes or so, and things feel slightly predictable and linear by the end, but for the most part this is some out out singular genius stuff.

Apparently the director made one more stone-cold masterpiece a few years later and then alternated the remainder of his career with stints in the Soviet GULAG.

Another reason to appreciate the wealth of opportunity and freedom of expression provided by American capitalism, eh comrade?


[Gene Siskel Film Center: Chicago]

Room for More Rheum Anyone?

HUSH…HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE ROBERT ALDRICH 1964



Virulent piece of sensationalist Crumbling Mansion/Visage-styled trash from the same connoisseurs of feminine hysteria who brought us What Ever Happened to Baby Jane('62), Hush… was supposed to pair Bette Davis with Joan Crawford once again for another fertile bout of feline clawing, but the latter proved so difficult and eventually became so sick that the role went to the still-gorgeous Olivia de Havilland. Taking over where Crawford was likely coating the set in toxic yellow spittle, de Havilland exudes a stern yet demure waspy-kinda cunning to perfectly play off Davis’ expectedly manic cake-face howl. If it’s a battle of cruel stench then the only thing Hotter ‘n’ Wetter than that thick Loooooziana air is these 2 nasty old broads’…

Me oh my! Seems someone chopped off head and hand of ol’ John (Bruce Dern) back in 1927, and dear Charlotte (Davis) looked to be the easiest suspect:
Immediately following a shock-o-rama murder to rival early H.G. Lewis or top shelf Hitchcock, a blood stained Charlotte emerges from the scene of the crime into a room full of hi-society revelers, looking about as guilty as Captain Sin at the wheel of the Sacrilege X-press. Well! Never convicted but never cleared of charges Charlotte’s been holed up in her dead daddy’s estate with naught but a crudely unrecognizable Agnes Moorhead for company all these many years. And family doc Drew Bayliss (Joseph Cotton).

Anyway, in the present day Charlotte calls on her ol’ pal Miriam (de Havilland) for moral support, as it seems the City’s about to take her property away to build a bridge on. Things start to get sticky, and there’s a foul game afoot when it’s all de Havilland and Doctor Drew can do to try and placate dear Charlotte’s more hallucinatory urges. But something doesn’t smell right to Ms. Moorhead and if I said anymore you wouldn’t have to see the movie, hmm?

Worth it alone by far for Davis' transcendent performance as a shrieking heap of boiled alabaster caught in the dellusional prison of her own putrid mind. De Havilland is the perfect sparring mate and plays restrained a tad less fiercely than I imagine Crawford would have.

But what really lets this film rise from piercing melodrama to cinematically rich High Camp is Aldrich's overly-embellished flair for visual intoxication. Drawing upon a monotonously repeated visual motif alluding to the above mentioned corpse’s specific manner of dispatchment, director Aldrich uses every available opportunity to dismember, dissect, and disembody his leads with as many severe shadows as he’s got. This trick is extra effective due to the bold contrast between darks and lights throughout the film. Characters spend most of the tale enveloped in a harsh white, near-interrogative glow, and it’s only when Aldrich’s bold thick diagonal shadows rip across their torsos that the ever-looming black and misty background begins to lay claim to their hacked-up forms.

If Aldrich’s battle of the broads does anything it goes to show how outrageously aligned is the monstrous and horrific with the ‘feminine.’ While most horror films work on the voyeuristic anxiety associated with dude-on-dame slicing and dicing, Hush…Hush proves without falter that there’s absolutely nothing as gruesome nor sheet-soaking as watching a couple ladies go teeth to vagina as it were over love & money. Hard as it is to chew, Aldrich’s sloppy sweaty soap opera is nearly as starkly gutsy as Blood Feast, gilded almost with the same high mark of arch-style as Welles’ Touch of Evil, and EVERY bit as knowingly nihilistic as Psycho. And a good glop more messy and far more scary than fucking Baby Jane. Highly and inexplicably underrated.

Suave v Mauve

ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS LOUIS MALLE 1958



A B&W sheen adorns Malle’s feature debut so crisply, cleanly and faintly, the film seems wrapped in silver gauze. Or maybe that’s the post-one-a.m. fairy dust settling in for the night at the corners of my eye sockets. Either way, this Elevator carried my sticky ass like a dream-cloud through 1.5 hours of gorgeous Gallic style and street smarts with enough patience to let me stay awake for it all. (Can’t say as much for my travelin’ companions…) At times out-Melvilling the dude himself, Malle’s proto-New Wave noir handles criminal logistics, ex.angst, menace, and rhythm all with equal, how you say, a-plomb.

After performing the perfect murder of sultry Florence’s husband, cool + collected killer Julien(1) hastily hustles back into his office hi-rise to undo a forehead-slappingly obvious and overlooked clue only to be trapped in the elevator on the way up. The torturous liftian purgatory of the corporate world, Julien’s impenetrable elevator suspends him between earthly freedom below and Catholic absolution—or at least concealment—above. It’s also a shitty alibi. When two sexy teens in love steal his running auto left on the street and take it on the lamb, convincing Moreau that Julien has fled with another dame as they whip by her in a coffee shop, you know this shit has to go bad. Malle cops James M. Cain riffing Shakespeare and by the end everyone incriminates everyone so hard Hope starts to look like a faded, rotting, Disney reel from the early 30s deemed too corny for the masses.

If icy French cigarette-kinda flicks aren’t normally your bag though, I should mention that Miles ‘diddy’ Davis does the soundtrack. Convinced?


1. That’s Jeanne Moreau, a cheeky Jean Wall, and Maurice Ronet respectively.


Where’d I See It?
MY ‘LIVING’ ROOM [chi-town]



INDIA MATRI BHUMI ROBERTO ROSSELLINI 1959



On the opposite end of the (hardly) color(ed) spectrum exists Rossellini’s recently (almost) restored, re-released, rediscovered, reappraised ‘masterwork’ India…, which looks about as crude as that eye crust I mentioned in the above spew. I got a glimpse of a screen capture on the internets that implies the film should be full-color (see! above!), if not quite of the Peter Maxian ‘quality.’ This recent overhaul of a purportedly tattered film however, is sticky as dog vomit and just as murky. Visually speaking, a good part of the really light stuff is completely washed out to shallow blanco and the rest is either dusty lavender or a couple shades of mustard. (Stone-ground for the curious.)

To sum plots, I heard it starts off with a really cheesy narrated travelogue bit summarizing something ‘r Other as the camera flies over Bombay. But I missed that part, somewhat on purpose, and jumped right into the (mostly) fiction. Mostly because it’s presented as documentary but I guess the director gave the actors lines and parts and scenes even though (I think) they were mostly living and doing in their normal environs. So here’s the line-up:

1. Young man works as an elephant handler. Picks up local hottie.
2. 30something dad slaves at an open pit moving rocks. Watches a corpse get incinerated. Speaks poeticism. Yells at wife in film’s funniest sequence.
3. Stubborn codger vs. ravenous tiger.
4. Cute monkey’s master dies. Said simian moves to city for a new scene.

There’s some really nice fluidity between the transitions of these four parts and all stories seem to contain some kind of cohesive logic (besides the obvious Man & Nature theme) but damned if I missed the narrative “morphing” that the Chi-town Reader’s Rosenbaum was flogging. There’s a beautiful kind of flow and pull going on though, that’s for sure.

Referring back to the previous debate, in the end, the film kind of seems like neither fic nor doc. It plays exactly like a film world, just like a good film should. Not so much documentation as hallucination then…due in no small part to the aid of a ferociously dirty soundtrack. Birdcalls smother drumbeats become dying baby cries hump monkey legs yelp thick fucking jungle noise all over the place. U C? And the theater (scusa, theatre) played it loud too. Damn surprised there weren’t any walkouts. I mean, the film is one of those enigmatic ones. And fuck, ‘not much happens.’

But it’s cool, because there are a million good scenes, like when all of the elephant handlers wash out all the pachyderms’ wrinkles or the vultures circle the dead man or the tiger prowls around looking like Shere Khan with a bone to pick. It shouldn’t all Be so magical, but somehow it Is.

The sound's thick and crunchy and that’s how it looks too. It doesn’t even matter that it’s in India or that it’s shot by a Frenchie. Could be, someone scraped the back of your lungs and performed a really cool puppet show behind the gooey screen? You wouldn’t know the difference.

If you happen to live in a ‘major’ city, this will likely come your way and you should probably catch it. Just so you know.


Where’d I See It?
CHOPIN THEATRE [chi-town]