Irezumi (Tattoo) may not be Yasuzo Masumura’s most famous movie, but it is one of his most emblematic ones. Masumura, an atypical and precursory film maker under contract to Daiei Japanese studio, studies for three years at the Centro Sperimenrale della Cinematografia in Roma. When he comes back to Japan in 1957, his stories of desire and asserted perversions pave the way to the New Wave of Oshima and Imamura. But he is still a studio film maker who sometimes has to be content with ridiculous conditions of shooting and learns to master them perfectly.
1966 is his most prolific year. He directs four movies, among which the famous Red Angel and the deliberately inflammatory Irezumi, an adaptation of two short stories written by Junichiro Tanizaki, a most important writer having shared Ozu’s path and his taste for the West. Masumura makes a diagnosis on Japanese society: overburdened with the ideological pressure of their modern governments, the Japanese have sacrificed their desires of their own accord. In Irezumi, young Otsuya is forced to work in a geisha’s house by unscrupulous men. As if she was under the influence of the spider tatooed on her back, she soon makes of her customers the victims of a revenge all the more devastating as it seems to be irrepressible, systematic, instinctive and with no selfish motives. The terrible beauty of the movie comes from a technicolor reduced to the red and black of the tatooist’s inks. Or also from its Cinemascope format which, for once, does not aim imposing panoramas, but at catching the lascivious and poisonous lying body of Ayako Wakao, with whom Masumura had a tempestuous relationship and made his greatest movies.

Retrospective at the French Cinémathèque from August 22nd to October 14th.
Available in a set released by Ciné Malta, along with The Blind Beast.
Also available are Seisaku’s Wife and Passion.

Antoine Thirion.

This summer, for the French moviegoer in search of a little heat, Delirious was a possible destination. The diehard independent filmmaker Tom DiCillo recounts the meeting between a small-time paparazzi (Steve Buscemi) and a homeless youth who becomes his assistant (Michael Pitt). To teach him the trade, he simply opens the trunk of his car with pride and shows him where he stores all the equipment and accessories necessary for his next scoop.

The Photomobile

Has this existed since the dawn of time? No, only since the time of Weegee, an American photographer who was born in Eastern Europe in 1899 and died in Manhattan in 1968, and to whom the Musée Maillol has dedicated a retrospective from June 20 to October 15 of vintage prints gathered with passion and patience by the collector Hendrik Berinson. Weegee made two self-portraits: one in 1941 in a grungy darkroom that he renamed “my headquarters”, and the other the following year, sitting on a stool in front of the open trunk of a Chevy Coupe fitted out as a photomobile. “My car became my home. (…) I kept everything in there, an extra camera, cases of flash bulbs, extra-loaded holders, a typewriter, firemen’s boots, boxes of cigars, salami, infra-red films for shooting in the dark, uniforms, disguises, a change of underwear, and extra shoes and socks. I was no longer tied to the teletype machine at police headquarters. I had my wings. I no longer had to wait for crime to come to me; I could go after it. The police radio was my life line. My camera… my life and my love… was my Aladdin’s lamp.” (Lire la suite…)

Forbidden Planet is one of the most important landmarks in Science Fiction movies history. Adapted from William Shakespeare’s Tempest, the movie starts with a rescue team searching for the survivors of an exploring crew left on Planet Altair IV decades ago. They’ll meet there the only survivor, Dr. Morbius, living here with his daughter born and raised on the hostile planet… Forbidden Planet was the very first science-fiction movie of the MGM and the very first picture of the genre shot in cinemascope and in colors. It also was the first movie in history to feature an entirely synthetic soundtrack. From design to themes, Forbidden Planet was a major influence for science-fiction films and is still now one of the most brilliant productions of the genre.

The collector DVD which is presented here contains three movies featuring the legendary Robby the Robot (Invisible Boy and an episode of The Thin Man TV series), a miniature reproduction of the robot, many documentaries about the making of Forbidden Planet and his heritage, deleted scenes and much more ! A wonderful package for all the lovers of this unforgettable classic and for all curious to discover this truly remarkable work which for ever changed science fiction movies history.

“Rock filmmakers don’t exist”, said F.J. Ossang as he left the projection of Silencio, his new, powerful short film presented at the latest Festival Paris Ciné (read the interview with F.J Ossang). At a time when Julien Temple’s two feature films are being released – Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten, a biographical homage magnificently documented, but unfortunately, with no surprises, and Glastonbury, about the legendary festival (read the interview with Julien Temple)–, F.J. Ossang brings into question the genre “rock cinema”, if indeed such a concept even exists.

“Of course, my whole cinema is fueled by everything I love, and above all, rock music,” he says, “but that doesn’t make me a rock filmmaker, a label which for me is meaningless. If push came to shove, you might say Eisenstein, for his editing, is the closest any filmmaker has come to rock music. There are some filmmakers who have tried to make movies about rock music, or about the lives of rock musicians, but generally it has little to do with rock as a process.” What defines rock music and how is it embodied in cinema?

When media first recognized rock ’n’ roll as a phenomenon, Hollywood seized hold of the movement and the immense interest it aroused in a youth whose purchasing power had constantly increased since the end of World War II (read the review of the Rock’n'Roll exhibition in the Fondation Cartier). The studios created projects from scratch that allowed them to capitalize on the emerging celebrity of new idols and at the same time helped the artists launch their careers once and for all. From Little Richard or Bill Haley to Elvis Presley, going before the camera became a mandatory step. These films, often put together with a certain degree of cynicism, aimed in reality at exploiting the artist’s image and delivering a much more controlled vision of it. Rock ’n’ roll in these films is reduced to the original soundtrack and a Happy Days imagery. Catchy titles like Don’t Knock the Rock, Rock Pretty Baby, Let’s Rock or Shake, Rattle and Rock and stars on the movie posters were enough to ensure the films’ success and give birth to the teenage movie genre. But for the “spirit of rock”, we need look elsewhere. It is much more present in films that are not about music, but explore youth itself: Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause, starring James Dean, and László Benedek’s The Wild One, starring Marlon Brando, exposed the world to the malaise of teenagers who were in direct conflict with the values of their elders. And although these two movies were made with anything but a “rock ’n’ roll” budget, and even though neither film contains a single rock song, they’re much closer to rock music in their intention. Future links between rock ’n’ roll and cinema were to spring from this very dichotomy: exploitative products banking on imagery for more or less honorable purposes, versus cinematic works that rely more heavily on a counter-cultural manifesto.

In the early 60s, with the end of the studio system and the emergence of new, independent means of production and distribution – the “new Hollywood” – a cinema was born that could really be called “rock ’n’ roll”. From Arthur Penn’s Bonny and Clyde to Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, refrains of anti-establishment rebellion were sung, bringing into doubt a suffocating social model, and completely exposing the diktats issued by deciders who were disconnected from young adults trying to redefine themselves. For that is where the spirit of rock ’n’ roll is best expressed: in the most complete independence, and in defiance against all forms of authority.

Upon closer inspection, it is effectively not in musical films that we find what is essentially “rock”. Although Alan Parker’s The Wall, conceived with Pink Floyd, and, on another level, Jean-Luc Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil, showing the Rolling Stones in a recording session, may manage to capture the spirit that animates musicians, they have nothing of the definitive quality of universality that defines rock ’n’ roll. What is ultimately the essence of rock ’n’ roll is found more in the films of John Waters or Russ Meyer (in his early period, before his pure frenzy of mammary fetishism), such as Faster Pussycat Kill Kill or Super Vixens, in the debauchery of sex and violence, in a challenge to dominant morality and established order, and in a certain art of provocation. For in the end, rock ’n’ roll is not so much a question of music as it is a state of mind. Ultimately, there’s infinitely more rock ’n’ roll in any one film by John Carpenter than in the entire filmography of Elvis Presley, and in their own way, John Huston or Luis Bunuel are undoubtedly much more rock ’n’ roll than all the A Hard Day’s Nights and Almost Famouses in the world.

From the experimental opus of Kenneth Anger to the recent, and nastily in-your-face, films by Rob Zombie (lead singer of White Zombie and, in 2005, director of Devil’s Rejects, which brilliantly brought back to life the “bad-ass” attitude of the 70s), the “spirit of rock” can never be expressed in cinema in more than an indirect way. Political provocation, self-destructive hedonism, rebellion against the established order: what makes the “rock ’n’ roll attitude” can only be captured beyond the music itself and only expressed outside the shackles of films produced by a studio system that is inevitably destined to consolidate the largest number, while, in fact, the rocker is by definition alone against the world, an anti-hero, a magnificent loser with a fate that is necessarily as tragic as it is grandiose.

By Olivier Gonord with Jean Jacques Rue.

Mistrusted and attacked since the beginning by puritanical and conservative society, rock’n’roll makes its way today into the world of museums with a splendid exhibition that opened on June 22 at the Fondation Cartier in Paris. Spanning the most significant years of a musical and social movement that was to change the face of America and the world, the exhibition is as much the portrait of a handful of musical geniuses as it is that of a society in the midst of fundamental change. From the 1940s, which posed the musical foundation of the movement, to the golden years at the end of the 1950s, the exhibition invites you on a broad tour through America.

From the first rooms with their iconic imagery – an impressive collection of vintage juke boxes, mikes, guitars, turntables, the reconstruction of a period recording studio, and even a Cadillac – to the large mural fresco retracing the history of a society in upheaval and laying out the infamous lives of certain emblematic figures, the rock ’n’ roll exhibition puts into perspective this singular musical current by placing it in its historical context: first, within the history of music, revealing the origins of the movement from gospel to rhythm and blues, but more importantly, its place within a broader history, with the beginnings of the struggle for civil rights, and a search for awareness and self-empowerment by the youth, leading to the ideals and struggles of the 1960s and 70s.

With its rare and fascinating images, including numerous posters of concerts from the era and the incredible series of photos made of King Elvis in 1956 by Alfred Wertheimer, most of which have never been published, the abundant and impressive documentation alone justifies this trip to the heart of the 1950s. For beyond the major importance of the upheaval that this musical movement engendered, its imagery was also to mark Western collective imagination forever with its esthetic canons and the fate of the most outstanding figures, from Buddy Holly to Elvis Presley, “the King”, who is at the heart of the exhibition and for whom we “celebrate” this year the thirtieth anniversary of his death.

By Olivier Gonord.

The first films of this child of the 80s created a universe often compared to that of Marc Caro’s Bunker de la Dernière Rafale (Bunker of the Last Gunshot) and of Lars Von Trier’s Element of Crime. Indeed, in L’Affaire des Divisions Morituri (1984) and Le Trésor des Iles Chiennes (1990), we find the same post-apocalyptic horizons, the same modern gladiators dressed in Gestapo coats, and most of all, an esthetic and a narrative style that borrow as much from the silent films of Murnau as from the New Wave, or even from the surrealistic literary imagination of the likes of Ballard or Burroughs.
However, in contrast to his illustrious fellow filmmakers, Ossang didn’t simply turn the accumulation of references into a forceful concept for one or two films. Ossang makes this kind of cinema because he can’t do otherwise. He is fed by cinematic references that sometimes obsess him and reinjects them into his films with a surprising naiveté and frankness. For example, in Docteur Chance (1997), the characters find themselves in an unlikely setting deep in the Chilean desert standing in front of a movie theater showing Murnau’s Sunrise. Unlike Von Trier and Caro, Ossang, in a few – too few – movies, has continued making the same type of film, while the other two directors have taken more “modern” paths, in line with changing times. As a poet, Ossang has sustained his love for literature, and has even made certain sacrifices in his filmmaking career to keep writing poems, as well as homages to writers who have impressed him. His latest work, WS BURROUGHS vs FORMULE MORT, has just recently been published. Similarly, FJ Ossang is one of the last great punk cavaliers and still plays in his band M.K.B. (Messageros Killers Boys) Fraction Provisoire and more recently in BMW (Baader Meinhof Wagen), with its brilliantly cold and generous punk sound reminiscent of 1970s Germany. It is no coincidence that music is closely linked to his filmography: l’Affaire des Divisions Morituri includes the all members of the legendary band Lucrate Milk; and in Docteur Chance, FJ Ossang takes the liberty of having Joe Strummer play the character Vince Taylor. Such authenticity inevitably takes its toll and FJ Ossang hasn’t shot a feature film in 10 years. Let’s hope that his project La Succession Starkov will come out soon on the big screen. (Lire la suite…)

How did you see the Glastonbury festival evolve through years ?
That was what the movie was about, how it evolved and more importantly, how it mirrors the evolution of a wider culture. It was important to maintain the ideas of the beginning of the festival, those of the sixties and seventies, for all the people who went there, but obviously it exists like a spaceship travelling through a changing world, and it mirrors that world. You can see people, how they move, what they wear, you can nearly see how they think, you can see the changes, it’s like a Darwin evolution of a specie. It happened very fast. I wanted to make a movie about the crowd not the music, the music evolved too, that was part of it, but music is like a fuel to the spaceship, it’s just an element like the rain or the mud.
You see the festival overcoming a lot of obstacles to survive, and the biggest threat is the commercialization. It’s such an institution in England you see big companies want to put big signs everywhere.

(Lire la suite…)