A Certain Slant of Light

I enjoyed doing the 100 books list so much (and doing everyone else's, too) that I decided to do one for movies, as well. Here it is!

In my youth, I directed a few films starring my friends. The films have since been lost, but I have a few stills, and I thought it would be fun to put them in my scrapbook… and then I thought it would be fun to write up my filmmaking career in the form of an academic article… and, well, here it is.

“The Lost Films of A. G. Gray” is a perfectly cromulent subtitle, but I’m trying to think of a title to go with it. Some poetry quote, perhaps?

***

In the early 21st century, a new star appeared in the directorial firmament. But like all too many female film directors, A. G. Gray faded into obscurity after only a brief career. All four of her films have been lost.

Of the first two, there is no record even of the titles. Only the synopses remain. Gray’s debut was a black and white silent melodrama about a young girl (Emma M.) slowly driven mad by her quest to pursue fifty-five majors. As she sinks deeper into her obsession with a can of Spaghetti-Os, her desperate friends (Caitlin A. and Sarah T.) take her to an asylum, knocking the Spaghetti-Os from her grip. (In a dramatic close-up, the Spaghetti-Os roll from her hand, like the baby carriage rolling down the steps in Battleship Potemkin.) But the Spaghetti-Os catch A. in their wicked net. The film closes on a close-up of her face as she holds the Spaghetti-Os to her cheek and strokes it. “My precious,” proclaims the closing intertitle.

Before Gray began her next film, the era of sound dawned, and her use of music shows that she was swift to grasp its possibility. In this psychological drama, two friends (Micaela C. and Monika F.) find themselves trapped in a ski lodge by a blizzard. F. passes the time by singing Christmas carols, until C., driven mad by the incessant singing, locks F. outside in the storm. F., frantic, bangs on the door. But soon her knocking falls into a rhythm, and her irrepressible spirit triumphs as she bursts into song again.

Gray’s third and most experimental film, Fans in Three Modes, has left the most complete record. The film begins with a young girl (M. again) in a black dress, attempting to pick a fan to complete her outfit for the evening. As she considers various fans, different scenarios appear. In one, a girl in an orange shawl (A., another reappearance) peers over a black fan at a tempting plate of strawberries. In another, A. does battle with an adversary (Myra A.) armed with a red fan. The red fan triumphs. We return to M., who selects the red fan and sets out to conquer.

Questions, however, remain. Though the title alludes to three modes, we only see two. What was the second mode? (One feels instinctively that the fan battle is the climax of the film.) And what is the deeper meaning of this fan-tasy?

Gray ended her career with a more conventional offering, The Trojan Horse. Long-time collaborator M. is joined by newcomer Rebecca W. (visible in the only extant still), who is attempting to infiltrate Purdue gear onto the IU campus, prompting a battle of wits with M. There are unsubstantiated rumors that the director herself played a cameo as the evil mastermind behind the scheme. No record of the ending remains.

There is no record, either, to explain the abrupt termination of Gray’s career. She had the experimental verve of Maya Deren, the unflinching eye of Agnes Varda, and the highly aestheticized interest in the female experience of Sofia Coppola. The loss of the films that she made is hard enough to bear, but the loss of the films that might have been is incalculable.

I’ve been watching a lot of movies lately, so I thought I’d write up some quick reviews.

Steel Magnolias. Years ago I watched this on my own, and thought it was so-so. This time I watched it at the Artcraft Theater, where I discovered that this is perhaps the Legally Blonde of the Boomers, because the theater was packed with women of a certain age and their friends. The management clearly hadn’t expected this level of response, and the show started nearly an hour late because of a big back-up in the concession line, but everyone was so hyped to be there it didn’t matter much.

Naturally I enjoyed it a lot more this time around! I find that I usually do enjoy movies more when I see them with other people, whether in a theater or with a friend. And I think it also helped that I’m older now: having seen some of the shit life throws at people, I’m willing to accept a higher level of drama before I start to scoff, “Melodrama.”

I’ve heard the stage play takes place entirely in the beauty shop, and I’d love to see it sometime to see how that shapes the story.

Oh Brother Where Art Thou. My first Coen brothers film. Really enjoyed it! You know I love a Great Depression story, and young George Clooney is fantastic as a vain escaped convict (but can you blame him for vanity when he looks like that?) smooth-talking his way across the southern landscape.

Priscilla. Of course I had to see the latest Sofia Coppola film! (Still haven’t seen On the Rocks, though.) Difficult to review, as Coppola’s films tend to be: aimless, drifting, powered by aesthetics rather than plot (the one exception is The Beguiled, which is powered by both aesthetics and plot; it remains my favorite Coppola film), and yet so absorbing that it’s startling to realize you’ve arrived at the end.

My favorite Coppola aesthetic is “blonde girls in white dresses,” and this one is definitely more “celebrity glam” - of a different decade than The Bling Ring, but the same aesthetic of excess. But no matter which aesthetic she selects, Coppola always commits, and I love that about her. In fact, I’ve realized that commitment to an aesthetic is something I appreciate in film or TV in general, even if the aesthetic is not one that I particularly like (like the Barbie pink aesthetic in the recent Barbie movie): it takes a certain sincerity to commit so hard to anything.

Addams Family Values. Didn’t like this one, because I am an old fuddy-duddy who no longer enjoys murder jokes. Did the original show have this many murder jokes? (Did I ever actually watch the original show? I must have seen a few episodes, because I know the theme song.) I did like the scene where Morticia and Gomez tango their way around a restaurant in a cavern.

Rocky. Another classic that I’d never seen, although we did watch the famous scene where he runs up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in my high school film lit class. (That was probably one of the most influential classes of my life. I’m still chasing down movies from it.)

Didn’t expect to enjoy this one, but actually I mostly did, although the scene where Rocky takes Adrian out on their first date is super uncomfortable. Have you heard of a boundary, Rocky! (It is 1975. He has not.) But actually they’re pretty cute once they’re together. And I really dug the grungy 1970s aesthetic - it’s so characteristic, and so different from movies in the decades before and after.

This week, my assignment for my History of Fascism class was to watch Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, which I attempted to watch a few years ago when it was shown in the IU Cinema, but about half an hour in, I got so bored that I left.

This time I made it the whole way through, but the film remains intensely tedious. There are a few iconic shots, notably the blocks of SA and SS troops which later inspired certain shots of the Imperial troops in Star Wars, but there is also a fifteen-minute segment (how I wish I was exaggerating) which is just guys marching. They march with flags, they march with shovels, they march with swords, they march with drums, they march and march and march.

This time around I went in forewarned by that first attempt, but the first time round I left the theater feeling let down. I had gone in under the impression that the film was (to quote Roger Ebert) "great but evil." But it's not! It's just dull! Riefenstahl is fantastic at setting up a shot, and I strongly suspect that the years when many people experienced this film in the form of a few iconic still images really raised its reputation. The stills are tremendous, and when you look at them you can extrapolate a propaganda film of artistic genius and almost hypnotic power.

But the film itself, again quoting Ebert, is "paralyzingly dull, simpleminded, overlong and not even 'manipulative', because it is too clumsy to manipulate anyone but a true believer."

Now it may have been less dull in 1935: indeed, it might be quite riveting if you were watching it in an uneasy attempt to gauge Germany's resurgent military power. God, so many guys marching! But riveting for utterly non-artistic reasons.

Pace Wikipedia, there was apparently little attempt to promote the film internationally. I suspect the real intended audience was your average Nazi-in-the-street pining for some way to experience the Nuremberg Rally vicariously. It might perhaps be enjoyable if you were imagining yourself taking part in the interminable marching.

I waffled about seeing Midsommar, because I’m a wimp about scary movies, but I love Florence Pugh and I love stories about cults, and the Kan-Kan was showing it on the big screen, so who was I to resist? So I dragged along my friend Becky and it blew out tiny minds so hard that we stood in the parking lot for half an hour discussing the movie, even though the movie ended at 11:30 and we both had work the next day.

Florence Pugh plays Dani, a psychology grad student grief stricken in the aftermath of a family tragedy. Her boyfriend Christian is her only remaining source of support, so she clings to him even though he’s barely emotionally present in the relationship. He was thinking about breaking up with Dani when the tragedy struck, and what kind of asshole breaks up right after a tragedy? The kind of asshole who realizes that a clean break might be kinder than remaining in the relationship in a completely half-hearted way, which is what Christian does.

Like Christian, Christian’s friends offer Dani half-hearted support, while really wishing she would just go away. (Aster’s evocation of modern-day conflict-averse we-all-speak-therapy-but-we-don’t-actually-care social dynamics are pitch perfect and pitch black.) The one exception is Pelle, a Swedish student who always treats Dani with genuine understated warmth.

Pelle grew up on an isolated commune in Sweden, and he invites the whole gang to visit for the annual Midsommar celebrations. As Christian and his friends are all anthropology students, they jump at the chance, and soon they arrive in a bucolic village full of people in soft white clothes frolicking in the endless midsummer sun. (Indeed, in the background of many of the shots, you see the villagers clasping hands, dancing in circles, etc., an eerie yet attractive density of ritual.)

( Spoilers )

For a variety of reasons my progress in Karl Schlogel’s The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World has been slow, and one of them is that I keep pausing to watch the movies he mentions. A surprising number of Soviet movies are available on Youtube with English subtitles! (And a few, tantalizingly, are available only without subtitles, like Three Plus Two. Someday maybe a subtitled version will appear…)

Tractor Drivers is a 1939 musical extravaganza, the classic “a boy, a girl, and a tractor” Soviet film. It features Marina Ladynina as Maryana, a tractor driver who swaggers around in overalls, driving her motorcycle at top speed down the darkened roads. She’s a new Soviet Woman, ready, willing, and able to work alongside the men, but still one of the girls even though all the other girls on the kolkhoz still wear their traditional kerchiefs and skirts. You might imagine there would be a little tension, but no! Everyone loves and admires Maryana, the wave of the future, their very own Stakhanovite tractor driver.

(Schlogel thinks Maryana is not attractive enough, but he is objectively wrong. Her soft butch aesthetic is adorable, and she also shows a softer appeal when she takes off her motorcycle cap to reveal the soft waves of her cute golden bob.)

The only drawback of Maryana’s fame as a Stakhanovite is that she keeps getting unwanted marriage proposals. Therefore, she creates a fake engagement with a fellow worker, who is not in fact her love interest: instead, the fake engagement is an impediment to the true love interest, a tank driver whom she meets after she crashes her motorcycle and injures her ankle… a gender-swapped Jane Eyre moment!

The tank drive has recently demobbed from uhhhhh I don’t actually remember, but the important thing is not where he comes from but what he brings with him: the doctrine of military preparedness! Soon all the lads in the kolkhoz are learning about tanks, and Maryana leads a delegation of girls who want to learn tank tactics too.

Ten years later, Marina Ladynina reappears in Cossacks of the Kuban, in which she plays a collective farm manager who is secretly in love with the Cossack who runs the next collective farm over, although she keeps refusing his entreaties to wed. The film gives her a much more feminine look, all skirts and soft hair. It’s not only in America that the post-war years featured a feverish return to traditional values.

However, the main theses of this film is “Cossacks are hot” - an abrupt swerve from my previous experience with film Cossacks, who are usually setting villages on fire! - and “There is plenty of food in the Soviet Union!” Stalin, infamously, referred to this film when his advisors tried to explain that famine was threatening yet again: what food shortages?, he demanded. Look at the mountains of melons in Cossacks on the Kuban!

Schlogel notes the almost fairy-tale plenty of the agricultural fair where most of the film takes place. The characters ride in carts on massive piles of food; the stalls overflow; and not just with food, but with cloth, books, records, guitars, horse collars - shoddy horse collars, though! And the horse collar dealer gets called out for his poor wares in the fair entertainment later that night.

Said entertainment also features a song in which Marina Ladynina and her Cossack are singled out by name and basically informed “Everyone ships you! Get on with it!” Oh my God. Marina has refused her Cossack for all these years because he keeps doing un-Soviet things like “attempt to form a cabal with the other growers to charge high prices for his produce”; he is forced to drop prices when Marina drops prices on her farm’s produce, but he never actually seems to grow or change, so it’s a little weird that they get together.

But then we have a heroic montage of tractors plowing the black Ukrainian earth as the characters sing, reminding us that the true hero of any Soviet film is the collective might of the laborers. Happy end!

For a while I was writing reviews of all the movies I’d seen by women film directors, but at the beginning of 2023 I fell out of the habit, and since I’m now quite a bit in arrears, I’ve decided to clear the decks with a bunch of micro-reviews.

Dava Whisenant’s Bathtubs Over Broadway is a documentary about corporate musicals - that is, musicals commissioned by corporations to show to their sales teams at the big annual meeting, most common from the 1950s to 1970s. Fascinating. Highly highly recommend if you’re at all interested in musicals as an art form or in the business of making a living as an artist, as these corporate musicals kept a lot of singers and dancers afloat in between Broadway productions!

I recall that Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman 1984 got panned when it came out, but perhaps since I went in with low expectations, I thought it was fine. It’s not as good as the first Wonder Woman, but it’s a solid popcorn flick, and Gal Gadot is a wonderful presence as ever.

Sara Dosa’s Fire of Love is another documentary (I’ve been on a bit of a documentary kick) about two rogue French volcanologists, a married couple who built their entire life around spending as much time on and around volcanoes as possible, following their passions until it ended about how you’d expect a life built around volcanoes to end. The film uses a lot of their gorgeous volcano footage, which is so wonderful and strange to watch.

Emma Holly Jones’ Mr. Malcolm’s List, another one that I thought was fine. I enjoyed the sumptuous settings and costumes but I thought the story dragged a bit.

A story that did not drag at all: Schmigadoon!. Only season 2 has a female film director, Alice Mathias, but of course I watched both seasons. I perhaps liked season 1 a little more, because like Melissa I prefer the cheerful Music Man style musicals to the darker Chicago style, but they’re both fantastic, so much fun and so visually striking. I haven’t seen a show go so all out to build an ~aesthetic since Pushing Daisies, and I love it. Very funny, great songs, highly recommended.

Elaine May’s Ishtar famously flopped when it came out - there was in fact a Far Side cartoon depicting a video store in Hell that loaned out nothing but Ishtar - only to receive a later critical reassessment, so of course I would like to say that I loved it. Unfortunately, I felt it kind of dragged, although its depiction of American masculinity is interesting and I can see why critics went for it later on. Plus it stars the luminously beautiful Isabelle Adjani: a definite bonus.

The Kan-Kan was apparently doing an Elaine May retrospective, because they also showed A New Leaf, which I missed! Devastated. Probably I would have felt it dragged too (as I also felt this about the other May film that I’ve seen, Mikey and Nicky), but nonetheless… the one that got away.

Haifaa al-Mansour’s Mary Shelley is another one that’s been on the list for a while! I love al-Mansour’s Wadjda and I love Elle Fanning, who plays Mary, so it’s shocking really how long I let this languish. Well worth seeing if you’re into dirtbag romantic poets. Percy Shelley is styled like Edward Cullen from Twilight, for reasons of emotional vampirism, while also being just thrilling and sexy enough that you can see why Mary falls so hard for him. Mary’s friendship with her stepsister Claire Clairmont is also a standout: they are sometimes seemingly rivals for Percy’s affection, but whenever one of them is in trouble, their own affection for each other comes to the fore.

Up the Women is a delightful BBC comedy series, two seasons amounting to a mere nine total episodes, in which the Banbury Intricate Craft Circle Politely Requests Women’s Suffrage. One of those wonderful British comedy series where the writers create a cast of eccentrics and then simply allow them to play off each other, to create comic effect. The members of the BICCPRWS vary widely in their attitude toward suffrage, ranging from the anti-suffrage Helen (who rules her husband with an iron fist) to Helen’s trampled but militant daughter Emily, a renegade E. M. Forster heroine who at one point writes KILL THE KING on a banner for a suffrage march.

Finally, Suzanne Raes’ Close to Vermeer, a documentary about putting together a Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Loved the chance to see the paintings “in person,” as it were - of course a film is still a reproduction, but unlike a still reproduction, you can at least tell the size of the piece, something about the experience of being in its presence. An illuminating discussion about Vermeer’s use of the camera obscura, with new insight into how he might have gotten access to what was then a high-tech instrument: he lived next door to some Jesuits who are known to have had one.

There was also a very mannered disagreement between some American curators who think that Girl with a Flute is not a true Vermeer, from which conclusion the Dutch curators politely demure… until the story erupts in the international press, when one of the Dutch curators comments (I am paraphrasing), “The American National Gallery may not be lending Girl with a Flute as a Vermeer, but the Rijksmuseum will display it as one. All doubts will evaporate over the Atlantic.” SHOTS FIRED. No controversy like art world controversy.

And now I’m all caught up! Will I be able to stay on top of my reviews from now on? We shall see…

A Castle for Christmas features Brooke Shields as a world-famous writer who, after her divorce, decides to buy a castle in Scotland from its owner Cary Elwes, the cranky laird with a heart of gold.

This movie is exactly the kind of movie that you would expect from that description, and if that’s the kind of movie you liked you’ll like it, and if it isn’t you won’t. A good watch for when you want to turn off your brain and enjoy crumbling (yet still sumptuous) castles, festive Christmas feasts, the inevitable romance, and Cary Elwes having a wonderful time with his Scottish accent.

As I commented in yesterday’s post, I am returned from Massachusetts! An excellent trip! Extra shout-out to skygiants and genarti for letting me show up a day early when my initial plan to stop in Ithaca fell through when my hostess’s son took ill. (This resulted in a fourteen-hour drive and PERHAPS the course of wisdom would have been to stop at a hotel, but no regrets.)

Highlights of the trip, in roughly chronological order:

Two days in Concord! On the first day, I recreated (backward) Georgie’s walk in The Fledgling from her house to Walden Pond. (Did not meet a Goose Prince who could teach me how to fly. Perhaps if I had started at Georgie’s house and walked to Walden Pond rather than the other way around.) Also waded in Walden Pond as it was very warm.

Second day: visited Louisa May Alcott’s house, which featured a video of an LMA reenactor warmly welcoming us into the house, when we all know that the real LMA would have been climbing out the back windows to avoid annoying literary fans. Particularly enjoyed the paintings that May (Amy in Little Women) sketched directly on the wall.

In the evening we watched the Biggles movie, in which a perfectly good Biggles movie has been inexplicably chopped up to introduce a time-traveling TV dinner salesman, who is somehow the main character, even though the movie is called Biggles and also the time-traveling TV dinner salesman actor can’t act. Baffling.

(However it did later on contribute to a conversation about plotting, action sequences, World War I pilots etc. which may have finally cracked the story of the World War I princess fighter pilot and her communist BFF who overthrew the monarchy and is now trying to have the princess executed by firing squad! “It’s not personal, Fritzi.” “If it’s so impersonal, then why don’t you shoot me yourself? Or are you too good to complete the same tasks as common soldiers?”)

On Saturday, skygiants and genarti and I visited the Athenaeum! If I lived in Boston I would be DEEPLY tempted to get a membership. If only I could split in two and the second me could make it her life’s work to read in the Athenaeum all day long… Told them the v. important story about how Josephine Preston Peabody and her BFF Abbie Farwell Brown used to use a specific book in the Athenaeum as a post office to leave notes to each other. Doesn’t that sound like the beginning of a novel in itself?

Then the second leg of my journey began! I went to western Massachusetts to visit asakiyume, and we went to the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, where I would happily leave yet another, third self simple to read through the entire picture book library… However, I suspect this third self would eventually finish the holdings (it is a small library, and picture books are quick to read; I zoomed through Christopher Denise’s adorable Knight Owl about an owl who becomes a knight and befriend a dragon), at which point perhaps it would pop over to the Yiddish Book Center (literally right across the street! asakiyume and I went on a tour with a wonderfully knowledgeable guide) and teach itself Yiddish, because if you can subdivide like an amoeba and have infinite selves then why not?

…Curiously enough asakiyume and I also watched Severance, which is about a different and darker kind of subdivision of selves. Amazing. Can’t believe it ended on a cliffhanger like that. Fascinating to see the different ways that these characters have adjusted (or refuse to adjust) to life in this totalizing workplace that their subdivided selves never get to leave.

Oh, and we made an apple pie! I made the crust and it turned out pretty nicely if I do say so myself.

And then back on the road, with a stop in Ithaca after all, as my friend’s son had recovered from his indisposition and it was safe for me to come! I took along the picture books Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and Anatole as presents and said son (two years old; obsessed with trains; “Can’t he get to his dinosaur phase yet?” my friend sighed) requested each one read at least twice, so overall successful presents.

And then home again! And then right back to work yesterday, and now I am weary. Today perhaps will be a quiet day to rest, but I do want to get back to writing soon… I rattled off the first chapter of The Princess and the Communist (working title; had to set aside The Flying Princess) while on the road but of course one needs all the subsequent chapters too!

Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game tells the story of Roger Sharpe, an avid pinball player in his college years at a large Midwestern university, who moved to New York City in the 1970s and discovered that it was almost impossible to find a pinball machine in the city. He eventually finds three pinball machines in the foyer of a porn store, and when he gets divorced and loses his job in short order, he spends hours playing pinball there… until the police raid the store and bust up the pinball machines.

The police came, it turns out, specifically for the pinball machines. Pinball had been illegal in New York ever since Fiorello La Guardia banned the game in the 1930s. Why? “Gambling,” he called it. “A game of chance.” “A way for the Mob to steal children’s lunch money.” Cities across the country followed suit.

Thus, Sharpe gets drawn into an attempt to overturn the city council’s pinball ban, which ends with Sharpe playing a demonstration pinball game in court to show that pinball is a game of skill, not chance. He makes a particularly difficult shot, and everyone cheers! People throw their hats in the air! The cranky anti-pinball councilman hugs Sharpe…

“Wait, wait, wait,” protests Roger Sharpe, the reenactment cutting back to a shot of modern-day Roger Sharpe, whose interviews have been interspersed throughout. “It wasn’t like that! Nobody acts like that!”

Back to the city council chamber, where the cranky anti-pinball councilman snaps, “I’ve seen enough.” He lumbers off, chats with the other council members, and - votes to overturn the pinball ban.

Pinball is one-quarter documentary, three-quarters biopic, and 100% delightful. I wasn’t sure at first about the ratio of love-story-to-pinball, but it actually really won me over, not least because it’s a somewhat unusual love story: divorced Roger Sharpe fell for a divorced woman six years his senior who already had an eleven-year-old son from her first marriage. The age difference is a non-issue, but Roger is understandably concerned about the emotional challenges of dating someone who has a kid. What happens if he gets sufficiently involved with the mother that he becomes a part of the son’s life, and the son gets attached to him, and then things don’t work out? “Would that make me a bad guy?” he muses to his coworkers.

“Oh, you’d be a bad guy,” says his coworker (the very gay art director at Gentleman’s Quarterly; a delight), “But what’s life without risk?”

Delighted to inform you that this movie won the Audience Choice award at the Heartland Film Festival. Nothing makes you feel like your vote counted like seeing your favorite movie of the festival win.