Short Takes, or, Catching Up From the Hard Freeze (Patreon)

Because of my exciting Bear Grylls adventure in Texas living, I've fallen a bit behind in writing up films. As it happens, I feel no particular need to go long on these.

Psalm IV: Valley of the Shadow (Phil Solomon, 2013)

One of the final films Solomon created before retiring, Psalm IV obliquely refers to his earlier "Twilight Zone" influenced films made between 1999 and 2002. Those works were defiantly celluloid based, exhibiting Solomon's highly unique roiling-image chemical processing. It's difficult to see a formal connection between those films and Psalm IV, which continues the artist's series of digital works drawing imagery from "Grand Theft Auto." It's perhaps more instructive to look at Psalm IV in relation to those other GTA films, since the presence of human figures winnows away until, here, we have only a brief suggestion of a body. Most of the film consists of skies, seas, and rainstorms, in jet blacks and midnight blues. The Psalm films were originally called "Twilight Psalms," and this film shows the world sinking down into the dead of night. Possibly Solomon's most funereal film, maybe a memorial for himself. Goodbye, Phil.

Heavy Architecture (Edgar Pêra, 2007)

Most people who were suitably horrified by Pêra's film Cinesapiens, his "contribution" to 3X3D, probably decided never to sully their eyes on the man's work again. Me, masochist that I am, found myself curious, wondering what Pêra had done to gain a reputation. As it turns out, this essay film from 2007 is pretty good. Working with singer-songwriter Nel Monteiro, Pêra offers us a critique of Portuguese social engineering. The film examines five massive public works projects (e.g., 1998 EXPO, the Belém Cultural Center, the Casa da Música) and questions why the government insisted on constructing these brutal(ist) assertions of raw power instead of, say, feeding or housing the poor. Comically enough, this film was commissioned for the Lisbon Architecture Triennale.

(I also watched one of Pêra's "para-films," a short work that's sort of an advertisement / proposal for a feature, pending funding. It was called One Way or Another: Reflections of a Psykokiller [sic]. In it, a lunatic wanders through Busan, snarling about how he wants to kill everyone he sees. Sort of funny in its singlemindedness.)

THOMA (Gina Telaroli, 2021)

A lot more playful than other works I've seen by Telaroli, THOMA pays tribute to songwriter Vincent Thoma, using his bizarre, New Orderish pop song "Crystal Eyes" from the soundtrack of a French bauble called Les nouveau tricheurs (1987). Gina is dancing up a storm, layering her image multiple times and fragmenting objects and colors to create a sort of electric Cubism. The closest thing I can compare THOMA to is the work of Pat O'Neill, who likes to use intensive post-production to warp the standard picture plane into hopeless abstraction. Telaroli reminds us that formalism can actually be seductive.

American Fabulous (Reno Dakota, 1991)

Barely a film (more of a documented performance), American Fabulous is something my friends and I used to watch a lot back in college, and I was curious to see how it held up. It's a discontinuous monologue by one Jeffrey Strouth, someone who is not exactly a writer or an actor but has mostly mastered the art of living. He describes his wretched childhood in rural Ohio, his eventual exodus to various big cities, and total surrender to hard drugs and what they used to call "the gay lifestyle." Strouth is a remarkable raconteur, wry yet flamboyant, and committed to total honesty. As he says at one point, "nobody could make this up, and if they could, why would they want to?" There's no middleground here: you'll either find this uproarious or excruciating. See for yourself. 

Stage Door (Gregory LaCava, 1937)

A few nights back, I was tired but not ready for bed, so I thought I'd turn to TCM for a little light viewing. Ha! Joke's on me. What starts out as a too-close-for-comfort comedy of overpopulation (cf. You Can't Take It With You) gradually evolves into a dark, fatalistic consideration of the Broadway dream, the utter disposability of young women and their willing submission to a machine that grinds them to pulp. Katherine Hepburn plays Terry, the wealthy heir to an industrial fortune who sincerely wants to pursue acting (much to her father's bemused disapproval) but exists slightly apart from the (genuinely) starving artists around her. The other ladies resent her participant-observer bearing, especially dancer Jean Maitland (Ginger Rogers). 

Jean knows the score, immediately sussing out that producer Anthony Powell (Adolphe Menjou) is a cross between Harvey Weinstein and Christopher Walken's "The Continental." (Poor Franklin Pangborn minces away as his butler.) But woman after woman falls under his spell. Some did so just to get ahead; others thought he respected their talent. Even Jean eventually lets her guard down, only to be discarded in turn. But the real tragedy at the heart of Stage Door comes courtesy of Kay (Andrea Leeds), an actress who got great notices for her role in last year's Powell production, but sees her dream-role snatched away by Terry (and some financial chicanery). Terry, who is hopeless as an actress, suddenly absorbs Kay's talents, as if by a kind of vampirism of horizontal violence. Her triumph is supposed to ameliorate our horror. In the end, another ingenue moves into the boarding house, and the cycle continues. How did this even get made?