Marlene Dietrich's ABC: D is for Dishwasher

I think I've got Marlene figured out as a strong progressive-minded woman and then I read this:

Dishwashing
A woman can stand at the sink, damp under the spray of her dishwashing, the steam in her hair. She, like Phoenix out of the ashes, can emerge and be utterly desirable afterward. She has magic powers. The man has not. Anyway, not when he is being domesticated. A man at the sink, a woman's apron tied high around his waist, is the most miserable sight on earth. No woman should make her man wash dishes.
She did not find him at a kitchen sink when he first caught her fancy--or, if she did, he was the plumber.

Baffling. Where did Marlene the no-nonsense feminist go to? Maybe she will reveal herself again in chapter E?

Bruce McClure and Stochiastic Resonance

Last month the cinema ate me. An hour long series of assaultive flickers from Brooklyn-based filmmaker Bruce McClure up and swallowed me whole. In the first minute or two I felt afraid that I might really, truly have a seizure from the hard flashing light on screen that pulsed over the heads of the audience. When I arrived at White Light Cinema one night in late April, the ticket taker handed me a pair of foam earplugs with a warning that "you'll need them," which was neither a lie or an exaggeration.


McClure's self-made percussive music crashes and buzzes through your ear drums, burrowing through your brain until it begins to effect the way you see. Somewhere, someone who is fluent in scientific jargon will be able to explain this phenomenon, that of Stochiastic resonance, which McClure copycats in his presentation of live light and sound.

Watching is an abstract experience. As you watch the screen there are a series of shapes and apparent splotches or scratches in the projected image. There's a sense that something, an object of some sort, is coming into focus, so your eye is constantly looking for form within the frame. Sometimes the rectangular frame of the projection is the only line your eye can decipher, and I noticed my eye wandering toward it at various points during the screening, half to keep myself focused and not dizzy, and half because it was sometimes the only steady line I could make sense of.

I was thinking as I watched of how one finds rhythm in everyday sounds: a train barreling by, steady traffic on a road, lights buzzing in a room, etc. I don't know what that phenomenon is called, when your ear starts to hear rhythm in a sequence of sounds that doesn't have any, but McClure's film was a visual equivalent of that to me. It was a moment of searching for visual form and meaning where there is none, and eventually, without knowing it, giving yourself over to the pulsing light and sound unconsciously.

The venue for the White Light Cinema series is the definition of underground. A bare one room area that houses the projector and audience in the same space, folding chairs and found couches along the wall's perimeter, and filled to the brim with the arty hipster type--think vintage flannel shirts and dark rimmed glasses as the fashions of choice. The room is attached to an apartment building that housed people right above us (I believe Christy LeMaster, the head curator of the program struck a deal with those people to use the space for free as long as the audience kept away from the stairs and out of her living space. We found this out as one guy tried to scale the stairs for a makeshift balcony seat).

The front door is unmarked and surrounded by a dark metal gate. There is no marquee. So when McClure arrived and began his introduction there was a sense that I was witnessing something historic, underground and historic and completely of the moment. And McClure's performance pieces are never duplicated. Each show is altered by virtue of the changes he makes in his music and those made behind the projector. It was ephemeral. Exactly what cinema is essentially--a fleeting series of pictures that you can't index in a book. Only this time, there's no DVD copy to replay at leisure in your living room.

For an awesome interview with McClure at the Brooklyn Rail click here.

Marlene Dietrich's ABC: C

Happy Monday for the week of May 18, 2009. Here are two short and sweet quotes from Dietrich's chapter C to help the day along. I checked for "Cannes" in her dictionary since it's that time of the season and all, but sorry, nothing on it. Enjoy these instead:

Cigarettes
I started smoking during the war. I have kept it up ever since. It keeps me healthy.

Complexes
I am getting tired of people alibiing for their bad manners by citing their complexes.


On the latter quote, I say ditto and that starts with D, the next letter up!

The Night of the Hunter (1955)

I just finished watching The Night of the Hunter with Robert Mitchum and Lillian Gish and think I have found my center of gravity for all movies past and present. I should explain, as I watched Charles Laughton's directorial shock wave of all things horror, terror, suspense and melodrama, I was reminded of scores of movies that had both come before and after it, like it's a breathing time capsule of everything the movies are. By the movie's midpoint I spotted scenes akin to F.W. Murnau's Sunrise (1927), heard melodies that sparked memories of The Wizard of Oz (1939), and I couldn't for the life of me remove the image of Martin Scorsese's eyes endlessly flickering over the black and white reels, his heart skipping beats with each cut. For some odd reason this movie is visible to me in every piece of film the followed it. It's as if all of production history from 1955 to the present could not have happened if it weren't for the demonic Mitchum, here, in The Night of the Hunter.

A psychotic conman dressed like a preacher, Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) has tattooed across his fists the words "LOVE" and "HATE," the two fists put together symbolizing the biblical struggle of Cain and Abel in his ever-twisted mind. They're the same two words in melded gold knuckle rings that adorn Radio Raheem's (Bill Nunn) outfit in Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing (1989). It's an observation that I offer without further explanation, but that I would be pressed to believe is coincidental either. As the two stowaway children meander down river away from their terrorizing step-father, a sky of stars as bright as Christmas bulbs hang above them, a giant bullfrog sits riverside on a rock watching them float by, a pair of rabbits do the same, and the pleasant and escapist artificiality of the sequence makes you feel like you've entered a fairy tale, something fantastic like Alice in Wonderland (1951).

Mitchum hulks around the family grounds hunting the children like a wild gorilla, and in one scene madly tears through bushes, bare-handed, like he was King Kong (1933) himself. It's not the only horror movie monster we're reminded of as we watch: Mitchum's inarticulate groans and grunts, his plasticky face contorting with no normal correspondence of emotion, makes him seem like a slightly-evolved (if unreasonably blood-thirsty) monster a la Frankenstein (1931).

And then there was the German Expressionist lighting, shooting structurally impossible daggers of shadow and light in the family bedrooms, the most frightening of all in Willa (Shelley Winters) and Harry's own chamber of traumatized abstinence. In the scene of Willa's death she appears in a coffin of artificial light, laying in bed as still like as a corpse, her arms folded across her chest; radiating outwardly from her head is a brighter halo of light: she is an angel, or maybe a saint. She's at the very least a holy martyr juxtaposed with a stark background of hard white light and black shadow as we've seen in Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928).

When the children arrive at a makeshift orphanage we're immediately transported to the veritable origins of cinema, in the introduction of the house mother Ms. Cooper, played by the great matron of American movies, Lillian Gish. Gish, the unspeakably great actress of the early screen, doesn't break form here in this latter-day picture either. If her work in D.W. Griffith's films were characterized by melodramatic roles and moral tales, this is just what her character is concerned with here, even offering first-person narration--in scenes she is at the moment a part of--of the virtues of youth and childhood.

Perhaps the most frightening scene of all is where Harry, the devil incarnate himself, whistles his way down the lane and into the lives of Willa and her family to kick off the whole show. It's the original mold for Kane (Julian Beck), a preacher from his days on Earth, but now a tormented ghost stuck between worlds in Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986). In this movie, you'll find what is still the most frightening shot that, for me, was ever printed on film: Kane humming a hymn down a sunny street that suddenly turns stormy in his presence. His eyes are fixed on the child, Carol Anne (Heather O'Rourke), playing on the front lawn; she, and we too, become paralyzed in our gaze on his figure in preternatural fright.

Mitchum is equally transfixing in The Night of the Hunter. Maybe that is why Laughton's movie felt like such a significant signpost in cinema, because I simply could not look away.

Interview with Lena Dunham up Today!

I was as shocked as filmmaker Lena Dunham to realize when we spoke recently that our last chat had taken place over a year ago. Time flies when you've just graduated, completed a feature film and had it premiere at the SXSW Film Festival, apparently. Dunham's Creative Nonfiction opened at the fest last March, just under the year mark from her own college graduation, an ambitious and heady feat that went as smoothly as she could have expected. As the cherry on top, Ms. Dunham even met her crush, Andrew Bujalski. (As she peered through the seats at her festival screening, she's pretty sure he enjoyed her work as much as she does his. Unconfirmed as of press time, but he might have even been laughing at her film.) To hear more from the delightful, whip-smart, and highly un-pretentious Lena Dunham, head over to The Rumpus where our latest--our 2nd annual--interview is up today!

Marlene Dietrich's ABC: B!

Slow times have arrived again and I am still jet lagged. It's a strange feeling not to sleep, like ever, isn't it? Well, the Milanese adventures were worth the extended lack of sleep. Before I forget about Scarlett though, below find a selection from section B of Marlene Dietrich's priceless dictionary. I'm trying to pick only the gems, but that's a harder task to tackle when each one is so pleasantly entertaining.

Maybe two this time? Yes, good plan, PK. Below is one B dictionary entry for those married and mother-to-be friends (who seem to be popping up like wild flowers these days), and one entry for the singles. You can figure out which is which.

Baby
The all-important. The wonder. The never-disappointing. The reason for enduring anything and everything. Living confidence. The epitome of trust. A fragile, helpless Hercules.

Bloomingdale's
My Mecca. The harbour of supplies for demands SOS'd to me by family, friends, acquiantances--usually ten minutes before closing time.