June 30th Fundraiser

Emergency USA is hosting a fundraiser for its activities in the Sudan tonight. Book reading, documentary screening, music and all. Come out for a good cause.

Elevator to the Gallows (Acenseur pour l’échafaud)

Jean-Pierre Melville meets Eric Rohmer.

Black and white beauty. This film is a must see and is released today widely in North America.

Moreau plots with her lover Maurice Ronet for the death of her oil magnate husband who is Ronet’s boss. Ronet ends up leaving his coat and revolver in his automobile and running back up to take care of a rope he has left hanging from the dead man’s window. A young florist who has noticed Ronet ends up praising him to her boyfriend who decides they should steal Ronet’s car for the weekend. Ronet meanwhile is caught in the elevator of his building as the power supply is turned off for the night.

We watch the young florist and her boyfriend play out their fears and dreams as they run wild with Ronet’s convertible. Ronet exhausts himself trying to pry his way out of the elevator while Moreau searches high and low for her lover ending up eventually at La Madeleine at 5 in the morning and hauled to the police station mistaken for a woman of questionable character.

Ronet is a precursor to the quintessential Alain Delon role in later Melville films. He speaks little, dresses dapper, and has a hazy past. The dialogs of the young florist Véronique and Moreau pre-figure what we see years later in the dialogs of Rohmer’s films; both women have an exaggerated sense of love for the men in their lives and for love itself.

Moreau plays an evolved variant of this role of unfaithful wife in the Malle film Les Amants made a year after Elevator and later in Truffaut’s Jules et Jim. Funny and dark. Great performances, a suspenseful plot, and a key of sorts to so much that was to come later in French cinema.

Weltman's voice

It was nice to remember today that Sunday mornings weaving through the streets of Soho can involve more than just milling tourists and screaming fire engines.

Carolyn Weltman is a UK born artist with international recognition who continues, as her website says, to bring her art directly to the people. So yes, Prince street still boasts some real art that can arrest you in your steps and take you far from the quotidian. Carolyn’s mixed-media work (giclée prints, computer designs, sketches) belongs to that narrow zone of overlap between Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt. She said she’s less angry than Schiele and indeed her work expresses a different sentiment than Schiele’s but in the strength and sensibility of the lines there is a Schiele-esque refinement. Just as in the perspectives and poses there is a hint of Klimt’s cabinet (recently exhibited for the first time in a comprehensive exhibit at Musée Maillol in Paris).

I asked Weltman who her favorite artists were. For draftsmanship Leonardo she said. She only became familiar with Schiele when she started showing her work to the public and people told her about him. Given the erotic content of Weltman’s drawings it isn’t surprising that the resemblance is obvious. I however just went through the archives on her site and found a sketch of New York and the Chrysler building. And somehow wasn’t surprised to see that this atypical piece by Weltman bears heavy resemblance to Schiele’s atypical early work (he drew trains and village vistas).

As a writer one tends to think of voice as the driving force of a narrative. Yann Apperry told me in a conversation recently that he searches for the voice when he wants to write a book. Qui parle? Weltman’s lines retain a unity whether they are sketching a shoe or a building or a woman. And I cannot help wondering if lines are for an artist what voice is to a writer. While she might share the voice with Schiele the story she is telling is her own. I cannot wait to check out some of the original and larger pieces of her work in Chelsea where she is permanently represented by Art at Large.

Louis Malle’s World

The Silent World (1956) is a somewhat strange film in which one can see a kind of prototype for both Luc Besson’s The Big Blue and James Cameron’s Titanic. Made by Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Louis Malle the film is an artistic documentary of sorts that chronicles the life of marine explorers and the sea-life they are exploring. The Walter Reade’s site says, “Louis Malle was just 23 when he was asked by author and undersea explorer Cousteau to help him make a film that could be a kind of illustrated companion to his immensely popular book also entitled The Silent World.”

It is unclear which language this film was made in originally. The version screening at the Walter Reade seems almost dubbed in English at moments and this is distracting. Some of the attempts at acting/dialog between the real life explorers are a bit off. One of the divers who gets the bends is asked to go into a decompression chamber, at this point the narrative voice of the film is broken so that he can ask the captain if he must go into the chamber. Apart from a few annoying instances such as this where the divers seem to be trying to act like actors acting like divers, the film is captivating and beautiful.

We see the depth and wealth of the sea floor, the exploration of a shipwreck (that and the monsoon storms the ship weathers feel so much more real than the studio created special effects of the Titanic), the daily life on sea. The score is allowed to take over from the narrative when the ship encounters a school of dancing porpoises. These prefigure schools of dancing dolphins. Tragically, a baby dolphin ventures too near the ship and is injured. Malle and Cousteau capture the inevitable dance of death that follows with beauty and an unwavering eye. The baby dolphin’s death seems to be radioed across the ocean surface within minutes. A school of sharks come to feed on the carcass. The narrator calls it an “orgy.” The ship’s crew at this point decides to avenge the dolphin. What follows is rendered all the more sharp by the narrative silence. In these short minutes we are shown the full nature of our situation, our abuse of our power over nature, our capacity for sympathy, our despicable hypocritical morality, and our lust for blood. Unlike the sharks who simply follow their hunger and biological drive we humans hide our monstrosity behind convenient masks.

The Silent World will screen at the Walter Reade on Sat June 25: 12:30; Mon June 27: 1 Wed June 29: 4:15 & 8:30 as part of Risks and Reinvention: The Cinema of Louis Malle. The festival is a near complete retrospective including Malle’s seven-hour film Phantom India. For more information on the film screenings check out the Walter Reade website.