July 18, 2022 On Film On Paris Blues By Darryl Pinckney Sidney Poitier and Paul Newman in Paris Blues (1961). Courtesy of Metrograph. “For me as a kid,” writes Darryl Pinckney in a memoir in the Review’s Summer issue, “the film had everything I couldn’t have: cigarettes and train stations, late nights and drinking. Sex.” The film in question is Paris Blues (1961), directed by Martin Ritt and starring Sidney Poitier and Paul Newman. In honor of Pinckney’s essay, the Review and Metrograph cohosted a screening of the film on the evening of Sunday, July 10—the first in an ongoing series of cohosted evenings. Before a sold-out theater, Pinckney greeted the enthusiastic audience with a talk that spanned the glory of Sidney Poitier, the changing role of race in postwar cinema, and dreams of integration and artistic integrity. Today, we are publishing his remarks in full. The black character entered mainstream postwar cinema as a social problem. This is the milieu of Sidney Poitier’s debut, in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s No Way Out in 1950. He is a doctor, and the black community beats off the white mob come for revenge on Poitier’s character after a bigot’s brother dies in his care. Two decades went by before a network television station was willing to air the film in prime time. In Richard Brooks’s Blackboard Jungle (1955), Poitier is thirty-one years old but completely convincing as a bright, ambivalent black student at a high school troubled by violent ethnic rivalries and nihilistic juvenile crime. In The Devil Finds Work (1976), James Baldwin recalls that Harlem audiences bayed at the Sidney Poitier character at the end of Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones (1958). A black convict is suddenly free of the white convict he’s been chained to for more than an hour on-screen, but he falls off the train he hopped on to escape, because he extended his hand too far to the white convict, who had been giving him such an awful, racist time. Poitier found a film world opposed to the Hays Code, segregation, and McCarthyism by temperament as well as from principle. He fit right in. He worked with the best people right off. These films were made with studio commitment, if not entirely wanted by them. The black director Lloyd Richards made a Broadway hit of Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun in 1959, but he was passed over when it came to the making of the film, which featured the original cast, including Sidney Poitier. The film came out in 1961, a few months ahead of Paris Blues. Read More
May 10, 2022 On Film Tricks, Tension, Surface, Suspense By Andrew Norman Wilson Topkapi (1964) by Jules Dassin. Paris, 1954. Jules Dassin—blacklisted in Hollywood for his Communist affiliations—hadn’t worked on a film set in four years. He wandered the mist-shrouded city streets scouting locations for a film based on a crime novel titled Rififi. He hated the book, in part for its racism, but needed the job. The adaptation was to be shot on a $200,000 budget with an underpaid crew and no star power; in fact, Dassin himself would decide to play a central role. Dassin’s character, César, is eventually killed by Tony—a member of his own band of thieves—for naming names, in an allegorical comeuppance fantasy aimed at Dassin’s enemies in the entertainment industry: those former colleagues who, in his words, “put their careers before honor” by ratting out Communists. Tony is a recently released jewel thief who, as another figuration of the effects of Dassin’s blacklisting, looks unkempt, ill, and nearly unable to breathe until he’s recruited by his friend Jo to rob a highly secure jewelry shop. This seemingly impossible task is taken on by a multilingual team assembled from Paris’s criminal demimonde, self-consciously staging the international crew’s own predicament in making the film. Read More
April 22, 2022 On Film We Need the Eggs: On Annie Hall, Love, and Delusion By Sheila Heti TWO ILLUSTRATIONS BY RICHARD KEARTON, 1896. One night, my stand-up comic brother, David, and I were sitting on my couch, talking about the joke that concludes Woody Allen’s 1977 film, Annie Hall. We’d watched the movie together dozens of times growing up, and we’d always assumed that we interpreted the ending—about how people get into relationships because we “need the eggs”—the same way. That night, we discovered we did not, and even after much talking, we found we couldn’t agree on the joke’s meaning. In the weeks that followed, I longed to restage and expand our conversation, and hopefully to answer some of the questions it had raised, so I invited a few other people into the discussion: Zohar Atkins, a rabbi and poet; Nathan Goldman, a literary critic and editor; and Noreen Khawaja, a professor of religion who has written a book on existentialism. Could we, together, get to the bottom of this profound and amazing joke? DAVID HETI The joke came up one night when Sheila and I were talking. SHEILA HETI I think we’d been talking about relationships. Read More
October 22, 2018 On Film Hayao Miyazaki’s Cursed Worlds By Susan Napier © 1997 Studio Ghibli – ND How do you live with a true heart when everything around you is collapsing? —Hayao Miyazaki I brought a friend with me the first time I saw Princess Mononoke in an American movie theater. He had no experience with Miyazaki or with Japanese culture or animation, but he was intrigued to see what promised to be a grand adventure story, especially one that was appearing in the United States under the auspices of Disney. In the middle of watching the movie, however, he started nudging me. “Who’s the good guy?” he hissed irritably. “I can’t tell which is the good guy and which is the bad guy!” “That’s the whole point!” I whispered back. Princess Mononoke inaugurated a new chapter in Miyazakiworld. Ambitious and angry, it expressed the director’s increasingly complex worldview, putting on film the tight intermixture of frustration, brutality, animistic spirituality, and cautious hope that he had honed in his manga Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. The film offers a mythic scope, unprecedented depictions of violence and environmental collapse, and a powerful vision of the sublime, all within the director’s first-ever attempt at a jidaigeki, or historical film. It also moves further away from the family fare that had made him a treasured household name in Japan. In the complicated universe of Princess Mononoke, there is no longer room for villains such as Future Boy Conan’s power-hungry Repka, the greedy Count of The Castle of Cagliostro, or the evil Muska of Laputa: Castle in the Sky. Miyazaki instead gives his audiences the ambitious but generous Lady Eboshi and the enigmatic monk Jiko-bō, who insists that we live in a cursed world. Jiko-bō isn’t the only one who thinks this, apparently. In the darkest moments of his tale of humans battling the “wild gods” of the natural world in fourteenth-century Japan, Miyazaki seems to be saying that all the dwellers of this realm, human and nonhuman, are equally cursed. Princess Mononoke raises questions Miyazaki had implicitly asked in the Nausicaä manga: Given what humanity has done to the planet, do we have a right to keep on waging war against the nonhuman other? Is there any way that humans and nonhumans can coexist? Read More
July 9, 2018 On Film On Agnès Varda’s Vagabond By Andrea Kleine Still from Vagabond, by Agnès Varda. As a teenager, my view of the world was bleak. I was the only one of my small group of misfit friends to leave home and go away to college. Not long before I did, I saw Agnès Varda’s film Vagabond. I can’t remember if I saw it at the local art-house cinema (which went out of business the same year) or if I pulled it off the rack at the neighborhood video-rental store or if I happened upon it on Cinemax, which in the late eighties was known for showing the HBO leftovers: foreign films and soft porn. I’m fairly certain I saw Vagabond alone. There were few female heroines that made sense to me growing up in the eighties, an era whose filmic representations were overwhelmed by John Hughes and his bubblegum suburbia, where misunderstood girls were eventually sexualized and therefore welcomed to the ranks of fitting in. That kind of conformist resolution was unsettling to me. Agnès Varda finally gave me a female protagonist who didn’t compromise. Read More
June 22, 2018 On Film Witches, Artists, and Pandemonium in Hereditary By Dorothea Lasky Still from Hereditary. I had been sitting in a lovesick fog, waiting to see Ari Aster’s Hereditary, ever since I first heard about it. I don’t usually follow new movie releases too closely, but I found out about the movie back in January, when people at the Sundance Film Festival lost their minds about how good it was. As soon as I saw the words The Exorcist and The Shining attached to the film’s publicity materials, I knew I had to see it. I spent six agonizing months memorizing its trailers, watching YouTube fan movies (and considering making my own), talking to my friends about it until they began rolling their eyes, and dreaming about its possible endings. I fell madly in love with the idea of what it could be and what it might do to my imagination. For a poet, this is a movie’s greatest gift. The film came out on June 8, and I’ve already seen it twice. The first time, I saw it only through my fingers. I kept my hands plastered on my face, trying to avoid any jump scares (something I wish I had done when I first saw The Shining nearly twenty years ago and the ghost of room 237 began her lifelong emblazonment on my psyche). The second time, I wrote notes in a green notebook in the dark, scribbling half-words that I can barely read now. It reminded me of the way I first started writing poems in the darkness of my bedroom when I was a little girl. Read More