Filed under: Film Series: High, Guest Blogger, Review | Tags: films, high museum of art, India, Jean Renoir, Satyajit Ray, world war II
Satyajit Ray
In Our Films, Their Films, a collection of his essays published posthumously in 1994, India filmmaker Satyajit Ray wrote about the great French director, Jean Renoir. As part of his tribute, he asked Renoir, who had fled to California from France to escape the Nazis, what was wrong with Hollywood. Renoir named the star system, the endless codes of censorship, and the tendency to regard film as a mass produced commodity as three major factors. He then added that he felt the best movies are created in times of stress:
“Look what the war has done to Italian films. Look at Brief Encounter. I don’t think a great film like that would have been possible without all those air raids London had to suffer. I think what Hollywood needs is a really good bombing.”
Of course, in Hollywood parlance, a bomb has a totally different meaning. But I can see what Renoir is getting at. Hollywood is fat, dumb, and happy — happiest of all during the “high seasons,” summer and the holidays. What would Ray –or Renoir, for that matter– have thought of movies like G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra or Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen?
Ray’s final film, The Stranger, showing at the High tonight (August 22) in the Hill Auditorium at 8 p.m., doesn’t have a single robot or explosion. It doesn’t have the acuity and passion of his masterpiece trilogy, The World of Apu, either. But the director was ill when he made it. What it does have is Ray’s customary compassion and seemingly effortless technique.
The plot is simple — a variation on the stranger among us. A well-to-do Calcutta housewife named Anila receives a letter from a man claiming to be her uncle who disappeared 35 years ago, when she was a toddler. In it, he asks if he may come and stay with her for a few days. Her husband is immediately suspicious. Uncertain, Anila nonetheless allows Uncle Mitra into their home. He turns out to be a total charmer with extraordinary tales about his world travels. Still, he must deal with a stream of interrogators as family, friends, and neighbors try to find the truth.
What strikes me most about The Stranger is, if you didn’t know Ray was 70 when he made it, you’d mistake it for a young man’s work. The film has a kind of Sixties idealism in its plea for universal brotherhood and fascination with simpler cultures. Anila’s uncle is an exemplar of these attitudes, and they are again embodied in her young son, who is enchanted by the elderly man’s stories about America’s Indians.
That small boy was played by Vikram Bhattacharjee, who is now a 28-year-old research scientist living in Philadelphia, PA. Bhattacharjee’s family moved to the Atlanta suburbs when he was ten, and he’ll be present at the High’s screening to share him reminiscences of working with India’s most acclaimed director.
Eleanor Ringel Cater
Filed under: Film Series: Online | Tags: beach, cult favorite, documentary, dysfunctional family, films, summer, surfing, world war II, youtube
Endless Summer
Summer bliss has been distilled for as long as moving images endure in Bruce Brown’s 1966 glorified home movie, the surfing classic Endless Summer. A daring example of a filmmaker taking on his own distribution, the film remains a cult favorite.
For the funhouse mirror version of the surfing life, see Doug Pray’s Surfwise. It’s a dysfunctional family doc that will leave you grateful for your own less-than-perfect upbringing. Surfwise focuses on the lives of Paskowitz family, dominated by dad Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz, a surfer, health nut, and self-appointed sex god. Doc (a one-time physician) and his Mexican-Indian wife Juliet had nine kids — eight sons and a daughter — who were raised to be natural creatures, not products of American middle-class conformity. Everyone lived together in a minivan and like the surfers in Endless Summer, chased the waves.
Paskowitz, who was 85 when the film was made in 2007, is Jewish, and the film explores how his devotion to fitness, strength, and self-sufficiency was a direct response to the widespread vision of Jews as helpless victims during the Holocaust. As one son wryly comments, “Doc wanted to repopulate the world with Jews.”
YouTube Diversions
Filed under: General, High Museum | Tags: annette funicello, apocalypse, beach, burt lancaster, deborah kerr, disney, doomsday, dysfunctional family, films, frankie avalon, from here to eternity, movies, on the beach, Oscars, photography, richard misrach, summer, world war II
Landscape photographer Richard Misrach‘s works are on view at the High, so the next few posts will spin off from the exhibition On the Beach, a show of exquisite, large scale pictures shot from an overhead vantage point in Hawaii after 9/11. Some of the images are populated, some devoid of human presence, but all suggest both seaside paradise and doomsday unease. This duality is embodied in the exhibition’s title, a forthright statement of what to expect from the images, and also a reference to Nevil Shute’s book and Stanley Kramer’s post-apocalyptic film of the same name about a bunch of Australians awaiting the appearance of a nuclear cloud that promises to annihilate them all.
Beach Blanket Bingo
OK, impending extinction may not be your idea of summer fun. So let’s consider beach blanket escapades, amusement parks, surfing, and all things sweaty and summery, with just a quick side trip into the apocalyptic.
To begin on an historic note, Blake Leland, a poet and longtime professor in the Science, Technology, and Culture program at Georgia Tech, points out that “many of the beach movies (Beach Blanket Bingo, Beach Party, Muscle Beach and the like) were released after the Cuban missile crisis (as close to actual apocalypse as we’ve come so far).” He continues, “I wonder if these atrocious movies aren’t part of a kind of pre-apocalyptic denial of the possibility of annihilation–at least for teens!”
Well, partying on the eve of destruction is a hallowed tradition, so in retrospect maybe the spunky teens were trying to tell us something. I suspect that all that American International Pictures saw when they produced the cycle of beach party movies made in the mid-1960s were dollar signs. The films starred Philadelphia teen idol Frankie Avalon and a curvy grown-up Mouseketeer, Annette Funicello.
Funicello was still under contract with Disney when these films were shot, and AIP had to promise that she wouldn’t appear in a bikini since exposing too much flesh would tarnish her wholesome image. I must admit that during the time when Beach Blanket Bingo et al appeared in theaters, I was too busy being a junior high school existentialist to see them and I haven’t revisited them since. They did make lots of money, and they may still have some campy charm.
From Here to Eternity
Before Annette and Frankie were kicking up sand and singing rock n’ roll, some other Hollywood icons were grabbing Oscars for a World War II era saga, From Here to Eternity, which features an indelible image of Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster locked in a wave-wetted embrace. The 1953 drama directed by Fred Zinneman, ends with the bombing of Pearl Harbor, which in a sense presages the looming atomic disaster of On the Beach. When From Here to Eternity was restored and re-released in 2003, J. Hoberman wrote in the Village Voice, “Contemporary audiences may not see why, even in its toned-down simplification of the novel, From Here to Eternity was the most daring movie of 1953, but it remains an acting bonanza”
Linda Dubler
High Museum of Art: Films 