By Joe Bendel. How hip a blues guitarist was Sister Rosetta Tharpe? Well, she was one of the primary influences on a kid from Tupelo, Mississippi named Elvis. Yet she was not really a blues or R&B artist, but a Gospel singer. By profiling trailblazers like Tharpe, director Don McGlynn and producer Joe Lauro celebrate the rich legacy and diversity of American Gospel music in Rejoice and Shout, which opens this Friday in New York at Film Forum.
Rejoice opens on a true high note, as a young member of the Selvy Family of Gospel singers belts out a powerful old-time religion rendition of “Amazing Grace.” The film then proceeds to backpedal, explaining where the music came from. Yes, it is rooted in the plantation experience of African Americans, but the story of Gospel’s development is more complicated, involving entrepreneurial figures like Thomas A. Dorsey. A reformed bluesman, Dorsey penned and promoted scores of Gospel standards, often popularized through performances by the great Mahalia Jackson.
Frankly, it is pleasantly surprising how intelligently Rejoice addresses the actual music. The film is particularly effective illustrating the complexity of the arrangements and the syncopated jazz influences of the vocal ensembles like the Golden Gate Quartet. More to the point, many people will probably be surprised how much fun this legitimately sacred music truly is.
Of course, the music is the thing in Rejoice. To their credit, McGlynn and Lauro unearthed some remarkable rare footage, ranging from sound film that predates Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer to some totally cool video of the Edwin Hawkins Singers performing “Oh Happy Day” during a stadium concert. Still, Rejoice never forgets the music’s raison d’être, allowing former 1970’s Gospel superstar turned everyday preacher Andraé Crouch the time and space to speak eloquently of the glory and power of God. Continue reading Say Amen! LFM Reviews Rejoice and Shout
By David Ross. I first heard Bach’s choral prelude Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ (“I call to you, Lord Jesus Christ”) in Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972). It seems to me one of the world’s most beautiful compositions, and Tarkovsky’s scene, in which the piece harmonizes with the camera as it plays over Brueghel’s Hunters in the Snow (1565), seems to me one of the most solemnly lovely scenes in cinema. The camera scrutinizes the details of Brueghel’s painting, at first coldly (as Kris must see it), but then with a certain wistful sorrow, as if in recognition of our hopeless estrangement from the natural life of the old village. The mournful precision of the piece by Bach (see here for Vladimir Horowitz’ transcendently lovely interpretation) underscores that there is only the beautiful sadness of our estrangement and longing. Kris stirs with new humility and humanity, and he and Hari begin to float, ostensibly in a state of zero gravitation, but actually in a state of grace.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder's "The Hunters in the Snow" (1565).
People often speak of Falconetti’s ecstatic expression in Dreyer’s La passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928)as film’s most inspired synecdoche of the religious experience, but Tarkovsky, in my opinion, exceeds Dreyer artistically and spiritually. Tarkovsky seems engaged not in a pastiche of an archaic faith, but in the genuine struggle of modern faith, and his dense, intricately coded scene seems to compress everything integral to Western culture in its modern self-bewilderment and tentative hope.
In a 1986 interview, Laurence Cossé asked Tarkovsky whether he considered his films “acts of love towards the Creator.” Tarkovsky responded “I would like to think so. I’m working in it, in any case. The ideal for would be to make this constant gift, this gift that Bach alone, truly, was able to offer God.”
By Jason Apuzzo. It’s probably time to start talking about David Fincher’s forthcoming adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. A ‘pirated’ red band trailer of the film recently ‘leaked’ on-line – or was it actually ‘leaked’ by Sony? – created a lot buzz, and now … as if by magic … the official version of the trailer (above) has been released, along with a new website.
My own thoughts are these: on balance I think this is a good trailer, excellent for a thriller, but Fincher’s films have repeatedly let me down … always somehow promising a great deal more than is actually delivered. A case in point recently was The Social Network, a film that implied it would have a great deal to say about the phenomenon of social networking – but actually said little (other than: ‘nerdy Jewish guy seeks revenge against WASP elites who rejected him by creating non-hierarchical on-line social scene’). So I remain skeptical. Nice Led Zeppelin cover, though …
By David Ross. Over two years, my nearly-six-year-old daughter and I have blown through all of Narnia, all of Harry Potter, and nearly all of Phillip Pullman’s great Dark Materials trilogy. She was attentive to Narnia and delighted by Harry Potter, but Pullman has entranced her to the extent that her face goes long with shock and anguish when I close the book and tell her to shout down the stairs for her nightly cocoa. Our next adventure is The Hobbit and its sequels. After tramping the roads with Frodo for six months, she will be primed for The Odyssey, beyond which lies the great Western sea of literature in all its dimensions of imagination and idea.
This program depends on the strict suppression of competing media (broadcast television, computer games, and web-surfing are verboten) and the realization that kids are by nature imaginative and that all attempts to subordinate the imagination to didactic and activist aims will produce a backlash of reluctance and indifference. Heather has two mommies, you say? This is a curious detail, worth a question or two, but not conducive to make-believe games or ruminations in the dark of bedtime. How much better if one of Heather’s mommies were a reincarnated Egyptian princess or a fairy queen cruelly trapped in a mortal body. This is not a political or literary judgment, merely an observation about developmental psychology.
Barbara Feinberg’s useful memoir of her kids’ reading, Welcome to Lizard Motel: Children, Stories, and the Mystery of Making Things Up,elaborates much the same point. Her basic thesis is that kids resist reading because contemporary books are insufferably pedantic and boring. This assumes that kids still read books at all. These days, schools seem happy enough to replace books with assorted ‘educational materials,’ not realizing or caring that these have all the romantic resonance of the suburban office parks where they were developed.
J.W. Waterhouse's "Hylas and the Nymphs" (1896).
With the right bait, the fish is easily hooked. Not long ago my daughter happened to look over my shoulder as I perused a book of paintings by J.W. Waterhouse, the pre-Raphaelite master. She drank in the scowling witch (Circe) and the dead lady in the snow (St. Eulalia) and the beautiful lady in the boat (the Lady of Shalott) and the young man saying hello to the beautiful water fairies (Hylas and the Nymphs). These are images to trigger reactions in recesses of the brain not usually exercised in school, in comparison to which the images of her everyday visual field – all those bright socially aware posters in the hallways, for example – are pablum. She added the Waterhouse book to her “birthday list,” which in our house is the ultimate form of canonization. Continue reading Kids, Imagination & The Arts
By Joe Bendel. A Mediterranean cruise sounds like a pleasant indulgence, but of course, none of the standard rules apply to Jean-Luc Godard. Certainly narrative and aesthetic conventions will be flaunted, as will polite decorum. Indeed, some might argue Godard’s latest and possibly final film (he has been somewhat coy on the subject) represents the height of self-indulgence. Yet, for hardy cineastes, the arrival of Film Socialisme, Godard’s latest cinematic-essay-provocation is as serious as a heart attack. Needless to say though, there will be plenty of shaking heads in the audience, even amongst the initiated, when Socialisme opens this Friday in New York at the IFC Center.
Dubbed “a symphony in three movements,” Socialisme is not Breathless, which proceeds along a more or less traditional narrative course, despite Godard’s periodic winking subversions. It is closer to his 1987 anti-adaptation of Shakespeare’s KingLear, but even there Godard left enough structural building blocks laying around for viewers to impose their own order. Rather, like his other post-2000 works, Socialisme is largely a cinematic collage providing viewers hints of narrative only for the sake of immediately snatching them back.
As Socialisme’s initial non-setting, the luxury ocean liner offers Godard a vehicle for some striking images and a frequent water motif. Just how the non-characters came to be on this cruise scarcely matters. Though a colorful assemblage – including a French philosopher, a war criminal of undisclosed nationality, a spy of some sort, and a chanteuse (played by Patti Smith) – they are only here to give voice to Godard’s polemical slogans. As he segues into his second and third movements, the film becomes something of a movie mixtape, juxtaposing text and visuals for ideological purposes.
It is not snarky to question just whom Socialisme is meant for, because of Godard’s signature gamesmanship. While the French dialogue is relatively conventional (if stilted), Godard’s subtitles are translated into crude Tarzan-like English, formatted in a style befitting e.e. cummings. Are English audiences seeing Socialisme as it is truly intended, or were the French, for whom it was presumably exhibited sans subs? Perhaps the film is best appreciated by those fluent in both languages, watching outside the francophone world. Is this a film primarily produced for French expats?
Naturally, Godard’s mischief is not limited to subtitles, but extends to soundtrack drop-outs and film-stock adulterations as well. As one would also expect, his extremist politics are also front-and-center, including a preoccupation with the Arab-Israeli conflict and the rather unsettling observation: “strange thing Hollywood Jews invented it.” Continue reading LFM Review: Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme
Concept art for "Dominion: Dinosaurs Versus Aliens."
By Jason Apuzzo. • There’s a lot of news on the Alien Invasion Front, but probably the most interesting thing that’s happened recently is that two joint video interviews were released – one featuring Michael Bay talking with James Cameron, the other featuring J.J. Abrams talking with Steven Spielberg. The two films they’re discussing, obviously, are the two big alien invasion thrillers coming down the pike: Bay’s Transformers: Dark of the Moon, and the Abrams/Spielberg Super 8. The interviews are both roughly 15 minutes long, but are otherwise studies in contrast.
The Bay-Cameron interview is very much tech-talk – good tech-talk mind you, intelligent discussion of a subject that many people are familiar with but rarely understand on a sophisticated level: moving stereoscopic (i.e., 3D) imagery. Bay and Cameron deliver one of the more thoughtful discussions I’ve heard on this subject – examining how 3D impacts editing, and how 3D is ‘dynamic’ (i.e., it can be dialed back, when necessary).
You really get a feel in this interview for how smart these guys really are when they’re discussing their own profession, or in pushing the technological envelope in big, mainstream filmmaking. I may disagree with Cameron about a great many things, but I would not want to tangle with him on the subject of stereo-optics, or on the subject of cinema montage in general. He’s certainly impressive, as is Bay. Both understand how the cinema really needs to push forward innovations like 3D in order to give audiences new reasons to go out to the movies, rather than to stay home and watch downloads. I fear for what YouTube and the internet in general are doing to the cinema, but these guys are obviously aware of the problem and developing creative solutions to address it. I found their discussion inspiring, and interesting … but probably best recommended for the more technically inclined readers out there.
Watching Abrams and Spielberg go at it is a completely different ball of wax, altogether! Although I admire Cameron (minus his politics) and Bay, Abrams and Spielberg seem more personable, fun, and you really get a sense of what a sentimental exercise filmmaking is for them. Super 8 is quite obviously intended as a journey back to their childhood, to what inspired their young imaginations and pushed them to become storytellers in the first place.
Both men also have what is clearly an advanced understanding of what generates excitement in audiences, and in how to create an air of mystery and suspense about what they’re doing. You really get a sense of what a personal matter filmmaking is to these guys, how non-technical it is, how filmmaking is something tied up with their everyday lives and emotions – even in their emotional reactions to other peoples’ films.
Anyway, I enjoyed both discussions and found them inspiring for different reasons – and I’m very much looking forward to both films. We’ll be getting Super 8 very shortly …
• On the Transformers: Dark of the Moon front, the film will have its world premiere June 23rd as the opening-night film of the Moscow International Film Festival (probably because the film has a neo-Cold War angle involving the Russians), and the U.S. debut has been bumped up to June 29th. Capone over at Aint It Cool News has already seen the film, and given it a rave review – praising it “not just in terms of its scope, but also in its pacing, performances, and ideas. This one dares to go dark from time to time, and that helped me find the often-lacking component of many Bay films: emotion.” Also: the film’s 3D IMAX trailer is now available on-line (I’ve seen it in a theater; it’s phenomenal); new ads and clips are out; and there’s already an ILM featurette out about the film’s VFX (in particular, it’s old-school use of miniatures).
Yes.
Better still, the best image yet of Rosie Huntington-Whiteley in Transformers has been released (see above), an image suggesting how deeply Michael Bay understands the male imagination (Victoria’s Secret supermodel + Mercedes concept car = automatic ticket purchase). The image also got me thinking: somebody should give Michael Bay the Bond franchise. Can you imagine how great that would be? In any case, you can also watch a clip of Rosie Huntington-Whiteley in the film … and Rosie talks to The HuffPo about her life as a farm girl. According to HuffPo:
She was pretty frank when discussing her shooting of livestock on her parents’ farm. “I know where my food comes from. I don’t get sad ’cause you don’t build relationships with those animals,” Huntington-Whiteley said. “I’m a farm girl; there’s the pigs, that’s the dog that I play with and love, but it’s the pig that’s gonna be in the freezer next month.”
By Joe Bendel. How hip a blues guitarist was Sister Rosetta Tharpe? Well, she was one of the primary influences on a kid from Tupelo, Mississippi named Elvis. Yet she was not really a blues or R&B artist, but a Gospel singer. By profiling trailblazers like Tharpe, director Don McGlynn and producer Joe Lauro celebrate the rich legacy and diversity of American Gospel music in Rejoice and Shout, which opens this Friday in New York at Film Forum.
