Poster of the Week!--A surreal and oddly erotic advertisement for the 1933 color horror film . It wasn't the first full length color horror feature.
That honor goes to , a kissing cousin of sorts to Wax Museum, which had the same director (journeyman and Spielberg fave ) and the same stars (classic heavy and beautiful and plucky ). The copy on the poster resembles surrealist verse badly translated: "Images of wax that throbbed with human passion! / Almost Woman!
/ What do they lack?"
You may find screen grabs of this early example of from a DVD review of Warner's House of Wax and Mystery of the Wax Museum on , at an extensive collection of stills and screengrabs from the Fay Wray site (complete with images from Doctor X and Wray's other WB horror film that she again co-starred with Lionel Atwll, the monochromatic The Vampire Bat, and at a blog concentrating on pre-code Hollywood films, (nice!).
If you're in the mood for reading and not looking at pictures, you can read the script for Wax Museum .
It goes without saying: click on the image on the left for a much larger version. 474 K
In other words, I was bored. Maybe I wasn't yet ripe enough to fully dig Guy's maddeningly romantic parody of early sound cinema or his creaky and cranky comedy. Maybe it's not that the films we watched weren't very good, but that we weren't quite good enough when we watched them.
In any case, I hadn't watched another Maddin film until earlier today, when I saw The Heart of the World.
Well, I wasn't bored with this one. It's a frenetic six minute montage upon montage of images, ideas, symbols and tropes; a multi-layered mixture of history, theory and an allegorical fiction about a young "State Scientist", Anna, who, while warning the world of an eminent calamity (and ignored), is torn by the love of two brothers.
She is tempted and seduced by the filty lucre of a wealthy industrialist (who is fat, smokes big cigars, wears a stylish 1920 pince-nez and carries bags of money stamped with dollar signs like Scrooge McDuck). Just as Anna marries and succumbs to the industrialist, the eminent calamity of which she spoke occurs: the heart of the world fails; the earth has a heart attack (a close up of a bladderlike heart pumping crazily). Buildings fall; nations fall.
Now Anna regains her conscience, strangles the industrialist (framed in Murnau style shadow-silhouette) and falls through a chute to the center of the world where she repairs the heart by the creation of KINO (cinema, film, motion pictures, movies) and the flickering image of a shimmering Anna are projected majestically on flags and dancing bodies. Indeed, here cinema saves the world.
Built as a parody/tribute to early Soviet propaganda films (particularly and , billed as a tribute to the Toronto Film Festival, by way of a celebration of "kino", it's much more than this, although I would be at a loss to attempt to explain it.
It's movies like The Heart of the World that allow me to fall in hopeless love with the artform once again, the combination of visual poetry, rythmn and a density of ideas. The only analogue I could find to The Heart of the World as a film is David Lynch's Premonitions Following an Evil Deed, the very short and cery remarkable film he made with a restored Lumiere movie camera in 1997 (see stills and download a small quicktime file ).
While foraging through Russian Live Journal sites (and finding some very cool things!
), I found which had (and not one but two) to a 45MB avi file of The Heart of the World (and if you don't read Russian, like me, the links are and (and none of them the dread rapidshare). So, do yourself a favor and watch it. If you want to read about the movie, here's , , and an interesting review of the .
If something aural is what you're looking for, here's a concerning The Heart of the World.
Poster of the Week!--An interesting Polish poster advertising Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. I've loved this movie for more than 30 years, for different reasons at different points of my life. When I first viewed it from the backseat of a station wagon at a South Texas drive-in theater sometime in the very early 70s, I was struck by the pure spectacle and awesome wonder of the film.
I had been awed by movies before in my short movie-watching history, but nothing like 2001. For better or worse, it planted a seed. Fast-forward a bit to the teens and twenties, I discovered that there was more to 2001 than spectacle or fantastic special effects.
I discovered that it was ...
profound. Monkish, dark, shaggy Kubrick became a prophet. I would pontificate to anyone who would listen about 2001's utter genius and the clean grandeur of its presentation.
A couple of pet theories uttered over beer and cigarettes: 2001 is an epic poem to science; it's a religious film for the non-religious, spirituality for atheists. Or something like that.
Fast forward to the thirties and beyond the infinite.
In recent re-viewings (once a year, pretty much), instead of pondering the big ideas, piecing the puzzle, I've gone back to enjoying the spectacle just for spectacle's sake or just enjoying the a newfound texture to the visuals. This could be because of two factors: the somewhat recently struck 70mm prints which I've seen projected at least three times in a vintage movie palace; also, ownership of the restored remastered DVD. One way, the movie becomes monstrously huge, grandly universal, telescopic even, as it attempts to bring the whole universe to our big wide window.
And then there's the microscopic aspect of the DVD experience, where the viewer can freeze any frame, rewind, fast forward, play in slow motion, zoom into detail. After years of watching SLP pan scan dupes, these new opportunities to watch and understand 2001 were revelations. Or at least a charge for re-evaluation.
So, is the movie, as they say, profound? Sure. But it's also fun to play in slow motion and capture the perfect freeze frame of Kubrick's reflection (Kubrick was shooting with a hand-held camera) on Heywood Floyd's helmet visor as he's coming down the ramp to view the TMA.
It only happens for a split second. Or you might dig on the kitschiness of Space Station V, the impossibly white floors and walls and clashing red , the HoJo's, the missing cashmere sweater, the Bell Picturephone. Or chuckle at Dr.
Floyd's Hugh Beaumont-Fred McMurray goofy sitcom dad routine, especially when he talks about loyalty oaths (with a gladhanded chuckle: "Well, Bill, heh heh heh...
"). Or realize that the only "art" created within the narrative space of the movie are Bowman's bloodless drawings of the hibernacla, which HAL kindly appreciates. In fact, HAL appears to be the only being to truly appreciate art.
No one reads a book or listens to music. There's a film playing on the spaceliner and Floyd, the dunderhead, is asleep.
Of course, the irony is that many people fell asleep during 2001.
But those who didn't fall asleep all started websites. Some of them even started sites about their favorite movie. And for some of them, 2001 is their favorite movie.
You can start with , a site that's been around since November 1994...
. or with , a 2001 site that's only been with us since March 1996.
And speaking of cut scenes, outtakes and trims, here's an on what was trimmed and what wasn't, explicating the differences between the premiere version screened on April 2 and what screened after the furious re-edit and 19 minutes were trimmed in a three day marathon that started on April 5.
Count me among those who would gladly donate a gonad to see this original cut...
Then there's , which, as the site says, is a "non-profit resource archive for documentary materials regarding, in whole or in part, the work of the late American film director and producer Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999)". Lots of good things here. One of my favorite pieces about the film is , by Barry Krusch.
...
for those a bit more mechanical, here's a rundown of all the seen in the movie...
and also some ...
. and if you like modeling, you may like the .
.
...
also the Kubrick used for the . So, was HAL truly insane?
If you're looking for intelligent Kubrick talk, there's no better place than the usenet group.
Some interesting threads I've found: a ; the incestuous ; and the fans' reaction to a L ...
. There was also a play based on 2001 produced in Lansing, Michigan. Here's a on the play.
Here's the , complete with pictures and posters.
And there's more. Here's a .
I've also put together a for your viewing pleasure.
And, yes, click on the image on the upper left for a larger version. 113 K
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