Neither Lost Nor Found: On the Trail of an Elusive Icon’s Rarest Film
December 4, 2014 7:38 AM Subscribe
"Screening rats and bootleg-swappers always have a holy grail. It sits at the top of a list of titles, on a folded sheet of notebook paper or in a Word document, bolded, underlined, or marked with a little squiggly star. ... These lists never get smaller; they only grow more obscure until they are filled with titles the list-maker has only a slim chance of ever seeing." Ignatiy Vishnevetsky [previously, previously] on rare movies, Jean-Luc Godard, and the life of the obsessive film fan.
Wonder piece, looking forward to reading his others.
posted by stinkfoot at 8:41 AM on December 4, 2014
posted by stinkfoot at 8:41 AM on December 4, 2014
After the death of a loved one, a person often finds themselves indulging in absurd fantasies of suddenly discovering that it was all a silly mistake, and there your loved one is, they just went off for an unscheduled vacation and everything's fine now.
I sometimes catch myself having those fantasies about Welles' original cut of The Magnificent Ambersons.
posted by ThatFuzzyBastard at 8:43 AM on December 4, 2014 [4 favorites]
I sometimes catch myself having those fantasies about Welles' original cut of The Magnificent Ambersons.
posted by ThatFuzzyBastard at 8:43 AM on December 4, 2014 [4 favorites]
I sometimes catch myself having those fantasies about Welles' original cut of The Magnificent Ambersons.
Of course, sometimes the impossible lost films do show up, which is another reason film is better than life, if not as important.
posted by maxsparber at 9:08 AM on December 4, 2014 [3 favorites]
Of course, sometimes the impossible lost films do show up, which is another reason film is better than life, if not as important.
posted by maxsparber at 9:08 AM on December 4, 2014 [3 favorites]
I have had a fantasy of doing a GLD fest on FanFare. I think this is probably the best place to ask. Does anyone have interest/the patience to watch a bunch of Godard movies and discuss them here?
posted by latkes at 9:51 AM on December 4, 2014
posted by latkes at 9:51 AM on December 4, 2014
A while ago I wrote an essay about a Holy Grail film.
posted by pxe2000 at 10:16 AM on December 4, 2014
posted by pxe2000 at 10:16 AM on December 4, 2014
stinkfoot, I would recommend his essay on the 1995 version of The Shadow, which is in a similar vein.
posted by alexoscar at 10:24 AM on December 4, 2014
posted by alexoscar at 10:24 AM on December 4, 2014
This reminds me of a short story/novella I read where a critic tracks down a long-thought-dead filmmaker out in the desert who's spent years doing strange experimental films with a woman. The whole thing ends with the filmmaker dying and the critic/woman clashing over whether he wanted his films seen, and the story ends with the films destroyed and the critic dying. It really played with what was real and what was illusory within the fiction of the story itself, and I remember liking it quite a bit. I can't for the life of me remember where I read it, although it sounds like the kind of think McSweeney's or the New Yorker would publish.
posted by Oktober at 10:41 AM on December 4, 2014
posted by Oktober at 10:41 AM on December 4, 2014
As a film buff, I used to have a List. Oh sure, it's still technically sitting there, listing Welles's original cut of Ambersons and The Day the Clown Cried, and with David O. Russell's Nailed about to unexpectedly transmute into Politics of Love. But I don't really think about it much any more.
I too followed the canon, reading voraciously about film and then checking off films from various directors, eras and movements while also trying to catch up with everything coming through town. But at some point - in the mid-aughts - I started to sour. Like Vishnevetsky, I too sought out Los Angeles Plays Itself and Model Shop, and eventually had the opportunity to watch them. While both are fine, notable films, I realized that both sounded much better to me on paper than they were on the screen. This happened over and over, where I would seek out critically acclaimed or oft-written-about but rarely seen films, only to find I got more pleasure out of the hunt than experiencing the movie itself.
But in the case of Model Shop, something interesting happened. I had ordered the massive box set of the complete re-release of all of Demy's films on DVDs from France. After Model Shop and a few of the other obscurities disappointed, I slipped in one last obscurity that I had rarely heard about - A Room In Town. Canby in The New York Times called it "a sad 1982 attempt to to reprise [Demy's] success", and everything else I had read about it pegged it as a flop and a failure and generally to be avoided.
I loved it. It wasn't The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, but it was really something, and one of the best films I saw that year. Everyone else thought of it as a footnote, I found it a revelation.
(A different kind of footnote: in the past few years, A Room In Town's star has risen, likely due to other film buffs getting their hands on that same French set. It started receiving fine reviews from major critics after more recent repertory screenings. It earned a place in Criterion's new Demy box set, while Model Shop didn't. But, as above, that certainly wasn't the case when I saw it.)
A few years later, after browsing movie poster sites and grindhouse blogs, I saw the remarkable posters and a few production stills for a '60s film named Femina Ridens, aka The Frightened Woman and The Laughing Woman. Those images were dazzling, combining a certain formal elegance with a wild, pop-art insanity. I sought out the film - which had just been released in a remastered form by a small British grindhouse video firm.
I loved it. I loved it intensely. It is still one of my favorite movies, a delirious blend of '60s style, art house sensibilities, and a script that should have been a basic grindhouse conceit but turned into so much more.
So I went back to see how I could have missed it, but unlike A Room In Town, Femina Ridens wasn't even a footnote. Nobody reviewed it. It didn't even earn a mention in the Psychotronic Film Guide (although strangely, there was a still from the film, misattributed to Radley Metzger, who had distributed it.) I never saw it stocked in a video store.
As with Model Shop, after a restored DVD release and discussions on the Internet, people are finally talking about Femina Ridens. As '60s grindhouse fare, it's far from the canon, but I had missed it all that time because, well, there really wasn't a way for me to hear about it.
I changed my strategy for finding new films from reading film criticism to browsing old film posters, reading grindhouse blogs, looking for small video releases. I suddenly started discovering other intense, wonderful and often weird films that had zero critical momentum or had slipped into deep obscurity - Crime Wave, The Woman Chaser, the films of the lost silent great Charlie Bowers, and Die Reise En Gluck being some of the most fascinating, but also literally hundreds (possibly thousands) of previously unknown, interesting films.
As I transitioned, in Vishnevetsky's terms, from a connoisseur to a goof, my love of film was rekindled. By ignoring The List, a list full of seemingly diminishing returns, I found instead a rich vein of wonderful things that appealed to me far more than second-tier films which had been written up in Cahiers or Sight and Sound once upon a time.
Thankfully, I had quickly found those doing the same thing, taking the road less traveled through the history of film - and started taking chances on repertory screenings of things I knew almost nothing about, visiting The Cinefamily in LA and The Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, regularly visiting The House of Self-Indulgence instead of The Dissolve. The Internet has ushered in a new era where you can at least find two or three mentions of deep obscurities, where in the past you never would have known unless you happened to be in the right place at the right time.
So film buffs, especially those with waning film mojo, I implore you - throw away your List. Take a few months and disregard the canon or Cahiers or Pauline Kael or the Times. Browse old posters to find titles you hadn't heard of. Read blogs about genre films in genres you don't think you like. Buy DVDs or catch repertory screenings for things that look interesting but have three or four reviews on the net total. There is still a world of film out there yet to be unearthed, and excavation is a big part of the fun. I wish you luck.
posted by eschatfische at 11:03 AM on December 4, 2014 [13 favorites]
I too followed the canon, reading voraciously about film and then checking off films from various directors, eras and movements while also trying to catch up with everything coming through town. But at some point - in the mid-aughts - I started to sour. Like Vishnevetsky, I too sought out Los Angeles Plays Itself and Model Shop, and eventually had the opportunity to watch them. While both are fine, notable films, I realized that both sounded much better to me on paper than they were on the screen. This happened over and over, where I would seek out critically acclaimed or oft-written-about but rarely seen films, only to find I got more pleasure out of the hunt than experiencing the movie itself.
But in the case of Model Shop, something interesting happened. I had ordered the massive box set of the complete re-release of all of Demy's films on DVDs from France. After Model Shop and a few of the other obscurities disappointed, I slipped in one last obscurity that I had rarely heard about - A Room In Town. Canby in The New York Times called it "a sad 1982 attempt to to reprise [Demy's] success", and everything else I had read about it pegged it as a flop and a failure and generally to be avoided.
I loved it. It wasn't The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, but it was really something, and one of the best films I saw that year. Everyone else thought of it as a footnote, I found it a revelation.
(A different kind of footnote: in the past few years, A Room In Town's star has risen, likely due to other film buffs getting their hands on that same French set. It started receiving fine reviews from major critics after more recent repertory screenings. It earned a place in Criterion's new Demy box set, while Model Shop didn't. But, as above, that certainly wasn't the case when I saw it.)
A few years later, after browsing movie poster sites and grindhouse blogs, I saw the remarkable posters and a few production stills for a '60s film named Femina Ridens, aka The Frightened Woman and The Laughing Woman. Those images were dazzling, combining a certain formal elegance with a wild, pop-art insanity. I sought out the film - which had just been released in a remastered form by a small British grindhouse video firm.
I loved it. I loved it intensely. It is still one of my favorite movies, a delirious blend of '60s style, art house sensibilities, and a script that should have been a basic grindhouse conceit but turned into so much more.
So I went back to see how I could have missed it, but unlike A Room In Town, Femina Ridens wasn't even a footnote. Nobody reviewed it. It didn't even earn a mention in the Psychotronic Film Guide (although strangely, there was a still from the film, misattributed to Radley Metzger, who had distributed it.) I never saw it stocked in a video store.
As with Model Shop, after a restored DVD release and discussions on the Internet, people are finally talking about Femina Ridens. As '60s grindhouse fare, it's far from the canon, but I had missed it all that time because, well, there really wasn't a way for me to hear about it.
I changed my strategy for finding new films from reading film criticism to browsing old film posters, reading grindhouse blogs, looking for small video releases. I suddenly started discovering other intense, wonderful and often weird films that had zero critical momentum or had slipped into deep obscurity - Crime Wave, The Woman Chaser, the films of the lost silent great Charlie Bowers, and Die Reise En Gluck being some of the most fascinating, but also literally hundreds (possibly thousands) of previously unknown, interesting films.
As I transitioned, in Vishnevetsky's terms, from a connoisseur to a goof, my love of film was rekindled. By ignoring The List, a list full of seemingly diminishing returns, I found instead a rich vein of wonderful things that appealed to me far more than second-tier films which had been written up in Cahiers or Sight and Sound once upon a time.
Thankfully, I had quickly found those doing the same thing, taking the road less traveled through the history of film - and started taking chances on repertory screenings of things I knew almost nothing about, visiting The Cinefamily in LA and The Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, regularly visiting The House of Self-Indulgence instead of The Dissolve. The Internet has ushered in a new era where you can at least find two or three mentions of deep obscurities, where in the past you never would have known unless you happened to be in the right place at the right time.
So film buffs, especially those with waning film mojo, I implore you - throw away your List. Take a few months and disregard the canon or Cahiers or Pauline Kael or the Times. Browse old posters to find titles you hadn't heard of. Read blogs about genre films in genres you don't think you like. Buy DVDs or catch repertory screenings for things that look interesting but have three or four reviews on the net total. There is still a world of film out there yet to be unearthed, and excavation is a big part of the fun. I wish you luck.
posted by eschatfische at 11:03 AM on December 4, 2014 [13 favorites]
This essay is a real treat for somebody like me who got into geeking out over rare movies before the Internet era. I especially remember the mystique attached to Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo, which I had fantasized about for years, based on descriptions found in Danny Peary's Cult Movies and Hoberman & Rosenbaum's Midnight Movies. El Topo was a paradigmatic cult film back in the day, because it was more written about and talked about than actually seen. I remember going to see Santa Sangre at a midnight screening in college, which was a huge deal back then because it was the first Jodorowsky film that had been released in many many years. A friend of mine from the campus Film Society was there, and we were talking about how we would love to see El Topo (based on what we had read) and how there was no way we could get a copy on VHS and they never screen it. Suddenly, this guy pops out of nowhere (think Vincent Schiavelli as the "Get off of my train" guy in Ghost, but stumpier and with beadier eyes), and he's all "Pssst, I can get you El Topo...," like he was trying to sell us a dime bag of weed. We were both taken aback, but we didn't take him up on it, because in those days, I suppose it might have been equal chance whether we would get a cinematic holy grail or end up buried under that guy's floorboards.
Anyhow, I guess what I'm saying is that kids today have it so easy. You can now buy El Topo as part of a Jodorowsky DVD box set, fercryinoutloud! If you didn't grow up in the pre-Internet era where you had to know a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy just to get access to anything culturally non-mainstream, I suppose you might have no idea what that was like.
posted by jonp72 at 11:15 AM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
Anyhow, I guess what I'm saying is that kids today have it so easy. You can now buy El Topo as part of a Jodorowsky DVD box set, fercryinoutloud! If you didn't grow up in the pre-Internet era where you had to know a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy just to get access to anything culturally non-mainstream, I suppose you might have no idea what that was like.
posted by jonp72 at 11:15 AM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
If we're listing holy grail films, I've been trying to track down Romain Gary's Birds in Peru for a long time. Doesn't seem to exist anywhere.
posted by hadlexishere at 12:03 PM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by hadlexishere at 12:03 PM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
If we're listing holy grail films, I've been trying to track down Romain Gary's Birds in Peru for a long time. Doesn't seem to exist anywhere.
Good luck on that. Some really connected film guys have been searching for years to no avail. However, I believe I saw some clips of it in the Mark Rappaport film, the Journals of Jean Seberg. Maybe you could track down Rappaport and ask him?
posted by jonp72 at 12:07 PM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
Good luck on that. Some really connected film guys have been searching for years to no avail. However, I believe I saw some clips of it in the Mark Rappaport film, the Journals of Jean Seberg. Maybe you could track down Rappaport and ask him?
posted by jonp72 at 12:07 PM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
There's a copy of Birds Of Peru floating around. It aired on an Italian channel called Studio Universal in the late 1990s or early 2000s, and somebody taped it off it. It's Italian dubbed with serious generation loss and some tracking issues in the first 15 mins, but it exists.
posted by alexoscar at 12:13 PM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by alexoscar at 12:13 PM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
It's fun reading this thread in contrast to High Frame Rate thread, both ostensibly about the same thing, movies, but otherwise totally different.
posted by benito.strauss at 12:36 PM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by benito.strauss at 12:36 PM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
> This essay is a real treat for somebody like me who got into geeking out over rare movies before the Internet era.
Same here, especially since I'm a rabid Godard fan (though not as rabid as Vishnevetsky, thank goodness). One thing I miss about living in NYC is getting to go to retrospectives at MOMA and Lincoln Center and the Astoria Museum of the Moving Image; I've seen some pretty rare stuff. But I have to admit I don't remember ever hearing of Une Femme Coquette. I'll probably never see it, but that's OK; I'm just glad I have a DVD of Two or Three Things—I was terrified when I went to see it at the Museum of the Moving Image and it was a crappy 16 mm. print and they said they had been unable to get a better one and there might be only one 35 mm print left in the world!
> As a film buff, I used to have a List.
When I started your comment, I was sure it was going to be a too-cool-for-school "lists are for losers, I've risen above that now, suckers" comment, but it's much more subtle and interesting than that; I'm glad you took the trouble to make it, and there's a lot to think about there. But I have to disagree with "throw away your List." There's lots of great stuff on the List, and we all need a trail of breadcrumbs through the dark forest. That said, it's also important to wander away into the darkness, as you suggest, and see what forgotten treasures are lurking there.
posted by languagehat at 5:45 PM on December 4, 2014 [2 favorites]
Same here, especially since I'm a rabid Godard fan (though not as rabid as Vishnevetsky, thank goodness). One thing I miss about living in NYC is getting to go to retrospectives at MOMA and Lincoln Center and the Astoria Museum of the Moving Image; I've seen some pretty rare stuff. But I have to admit I don't remember ever hearing of Une Femme Coquette. I'll probably never see it, but that's OK; I'm just glad I have a DVD of Two or Three Things—I was terrified when I went to see it at the Museum of the Moving Image and it was a crappy 16 mm. print and they said they had been unable to get a better one and there might be only one 35 mm print left in the world!
> As a film buff, I used to have a List.
When I started your comment, I was sure it was going to be a too-cool-for-school "lists are for losers, I've risen above that now, suckers" comment, but it's much more subtle and interesting than that; I'm glad you took the trouble to make it, and there's a lot to think about there. But I have to disagree with "throw away your List." There's lots of great stuff on the List, and we all need a trail of breadcrumbs through the dark forest. That said, it's also important to wander away into the darkness, as you suggest, and see what forgotten treasures are lurking there.
posted by languagehat at 5:45 PM on December 4, 2014 [2 favorites]
Hey, this is a really great piece, both for the specifics of the Godardiana and for the general catholicity of its cinephile's mentality. That easygoing, two-way commerce between hardcore obsessive geekery and critical connoiseurship is something I've often thought critics and fans of other cultural forms could stand to learn from film buffs, at least from the best of them.
posted by RogerB at 6:11 PM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by RogerB at 6:11 PM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
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Really interesting reading, though. It's very similar to how certain types of birders are with their life-list. They'll go to the (literal) ends of the world to track down even a fleeting glimpse of a long-sought bird.
posted by Thorzdad at 8:33 AM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]