posted by Peter Monaghan on December 30, 2011
A still from "Citizen Kane." Warner Home Video
Much has been written about how Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane so annoyed its quasi-subject, media baron William Randolph Hearst, that he set the dogs on Welles. Peter Rainer, a Bloomberg News arts and culture critic, revisits the sordid response, on the occasion of Warner Home Video’s 70th-anniversary re-issue of the film in a restored, three-disc edition, on both DVD and Blu-ray.
Rainer describes a documentary film included in the package, The Battle Over Citizen Kane, which tells the tale of Hearst’s anger at Welles and his co-screenwriter, Herman J. Mankiewicz.
Turns out it wasn’t the depiction of Kane/Hearst that bothered the magnate so much, but a Freudian reference to his mistress’s genitals.
Say what?
posted by Peter Monaghan on December 30, 2011
Still from "A Bashful Bigamist," 1921. NFPF
The National Film Preservation Foundation is presenting, on its website, three more films preserved through its collaboration with the New Zealand Film Archive. This second round of films includes Won in a Closet (1914), directed by and starring Mabel Normand, a 1917 automobile manufacturing saga from the Dodge Brothers, and the comedic short A Bashful Bigamist (1921). Watch them here.
posted by MIAN on December 30, 2011
Still from "Birth of a Nation." Courtesy Kino International
D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation was the cinematic supercolliding superconductor of its day. Although odious in many respects, it helped shape film into a sometimes-more-than-middlebrow endeavor in the United States.
Its reissue last month by Kino International in Blu-Ray ($39.95) and DVD ($29.95) versions prompted the New York Times to look back at its original launch. Already fabled for its budget – “a then-staggering” $110,000 – it ran well over three hours, employed 18,000 people and 3,000 horses, and was the first movie to open at a “legitimate” theater on Broadway. And what an opening: tickets were $2 at a time when 15 cents was the going rate. Seats could be reserved, all the better to snuggle up to the 40-piece orchestra. It played for 804 consecutive performances, a record, and then repeated its success in other cities. By 1922, more than five million Americans had seen it.
That was thanks to not only the film’s unprecedented scale, but also its glorification of the harmonization and unification of the opposing regions and political visions into a United States of America.
The Times’s Dave Kehr also noted that Walter H. White of the NAACP described it in a 1922 letter to the Motion Picture Commission of the State of New York as “a glorification and exaltation of the Ku Klux Klan,” and “a malicious misrepresentation of colored people, depicting them as moral perverts.”
Kehr ventures: “Griffith’s racial caricatures were crude in 1915; seen today, as the film approaches its 100th anniversary, these images may seem more ludicrous than dangerous (watermelon plays a major role).”
As spectacle, however, the film had power to burn. Writes Kehr: “More than any other movie, The Birth of a Nation demonstrates how thoroughly form can trump content in the cinema — how even our deepest convictions can succumb to the power of the moving image.”
posted by MIAN on December 30, 2011
Source: BBC
Dr Who is not the only superhero to turn up in recent days. David Bowie footage, from the Ziggy Stardust period of his meteoric rise to fame, also has been rediscovered.
In 1973, Bowie and band went onto the British hitmaker TV show, Tops of the Pops, to perform “Jean Genie.” The film went to air, but then evaporated into it.
The segment was classic Bowie: high glam, crooked teeth, astounding self-assurance. His demeanour was justified; the performance was riveting, Bowie at the top of just one of the peaks of his powers.
Cameraman John Henshall shot some of the slot with a Telefex Fisheye lens – his choice was savvy, given the wonderfully warped content that was standard Bowie of that time. He obtained a copy of that day’s program on two-inch broadcast videotape so he could show it to future employees. Those would turn out to include producers of music videos by the likes of Blondie, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Kate Bush, Spandau Ballet, Roxy Music, and Queen.
Source: BBC
Now 69, and living in Oxfordshire, he, like so many other discoverers of rare footage, had it in his possession for some time – in his case, ever since he shot it. He was shocked to learn how rare his copy of the footage is. Parts of the performance footage are now online. The full segment was shown at the recent Missing Believed Wiped evening at the British Film Institute in London.
The “Jean Genie” performance will also be included in a BBC4 documentary, Tales of Television Centre, planned for transmission in early 2012.
