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I'm so tired of being alone that I can't even stand my own company
And tonight I went to the Brattle with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rushthatspeaks and derspatchel to see Paul Fejos' Lonesome (1928), a mostly silent film mostly set (although mostly not shot) at Coney Island. It's a fascinating collage of modern documentary and romantic melodrama; I thought at different points of Tati's Playtime (1967) and Weegee's New York (1948) and not as much Metropolis (1927) as I would have expected, considering it opens with painted skyscrapers and the superimposed hands of a clock tick round the working hours of our two protagonists' lives. She's a switchboard operator, the air around her as crowded with callers' chattering faces as her ears must be with their noise. He works a drill press, punching razor blades out of sheet metal while the numbers roll slowly up on the manual counter. Both are lonely, socially awkward—manifesting in her case as a kind of wistful reserve, as when she turns down going out with friends to shift restlessly around her apartment in the exhausting third-of-July heat; his is a more comic pathos, signaled the minute he sleeps through his alarm and has to dress with such frantic disorganization that the viewer is uncertain whether he's going to leave for work before or after he remembers to put on a shirt—and when they discover one another among the holiday weekend crowd, it could be anything from the beginning of a beautiful friendship to the last straw of urban alienation, especially once the consequences become clear of never even exchanging last names. (Ask Rush about their update for the age of social media.)
The sound scenes are stilted. There are three of them; they were added partway through production; the first scrapes through, ironically, on the strength of Glenn Tryon's stiff delivery (he is such a fluent and physically comfortable actor whenever he doesn't have to be heard, mime-gifted, with a face that's earnest go-getter by genetics and shlimazl by expression most of the time, Rob guessed some of it had to do with keeping to his marks for the microphone), as his Jim tries too hard to put himself over as a self-assured swell and neither Barbara Kent's Mary nor the audience is buying it, but the other two are notable mostly for their visual framing and a striking use of hand-tinting, which none of us were expecting. When he's not chained to a soundstage, Fejos excels at motion and montage, creating the same density of textures on the screen that a sound engineer might mix in the studio to communicate New York in all its honking, teeming, never-sleeping maelstrom and progress. The elevated rattles and bangs over the streets where horses' hooves still jostle for attention with car horns and the countless feet of pedestrians. Whistles blow off-shift, their scream of a steam-plume held in the foreground as the camera crossfades from Jim's station to Mary's switchboard, both of them responding. Truly unbelievable amounts of confetti rain down on the midway, visual white noise. And he may have filmed most of his Coney Island at The Pike in Long Beach, California (there was never a coaster called the Jack Rabbit Racer at Coney), but he gives us so many details of the rides and the games and the lights and the boardwalk and the funhouse and the donkey cart and kewpie dolls have never not been terrifying that I began to feel I had actually spent the evening at an amusement park, fortunately with the two people I would most like to spend an evening at an amusement park with. There is color scattered throughout these scenes, glowing sometimes for realism (the incandescent skyline of Luna Park, one of the location shots) and sometimes for emotion (the dreamy violet haze of the ballroom where Jim and Mary dance for the first time to Irving Berlin's "Always," a stave of which floats at the bottom of the screen complete with lyrics—did Peter Greenaway see this movie?) and it never feels like a stunt; it is like the moments in a musical where the only way for a character to express themselves is to abandon speech and sing. It is never as schematic as opening a door into Oz. It almost saves the second sound scene, when the crowds on the beach melt away into darkness and Jim and Mary could be on the stage of a theater, black boards underfoot and the colored lights of Coney running like an abstract behind them. (Then they start speaking.)
I don't know if I am making the film sound better than it is. In every way, I found it technically fascinating. It is surprisingly subtle in some of its observations, as when Jim and Mary romp uncomfortably in the surf, knowing they're supposed to be having fun like all the couples around them and not quite sure if they're doing it right (it's not that their mutual interest is feigned, but they're a pair of introverts who just met trying very hard not to look self-conscious; they laugh most freely when a wave knocks both of them over, nothing they could predict), and if it can go completely expressionist for moments like the wheel of a wooden coaster catching fire (does not happen all that often, Rob tells me) or a storm breaking apart not only the night's festivities but Jim and Mary's fragile relationship, it's also capable of restraint when it needs to be. The twist ending would be unendurably schmaltzy except that the camera refuses the visual equivalent of swelling violins, keeping all the emotion in the song we know is playing because we saw the label on the 78. I could list individual shots and bits of business I loved. There were also headdesk moments aplenty and I don't know why anyone was surprised at the Irish policeman. For once, though, and I appreciate this immensely, I don't have to yell at Criterion to put the thing out on DVD.
rushthatspeaks and derspatchel to see Paul Fejos' Lonesome (1928), a mostly silent film mostly set (although mostly not shot) at Coney Island. It's a fascinating collage of modern documentary and romantic melodrama; I thought at different points of Tati's Playtime (1967) and Weegee's New York (1948) and not as much Metropolis (1927) as I would have expected, considering it opens with painted skyscrapers and the superimposed hands of a clock tick round the working hours of our two protagonists' lives. She's a switchboard operator, the air around her as crowded with callers' chattering faces as her ears must be with their noise. He works a drill press, punching razor blades out of sheet metal while the numbers roll slowly up on the manual counter. Both are lonely, socially awkward—manifesting in her case as a kind of wistful reserve, as when she turns down going out with friends to shift restlessly around her apartment in the exhausting third-of-July heat; his is a more comic pathos, signaled the minute he sleeps through his alarm and has to dress with such frantic disorganization that the viewer is uncertain whether he's going to leave for work before or after he remembers to put on a shirt—and when they discover one another among the holiday weekend crowd, it could be anything from the beginning of a beautiful friendship to the last straw of urban alienation, especially once the consequences become clear of never even exchanging last names. (Ask Rush about their update for the age of social media.)The sound scenes are stilted. There are three of them; they were added partway through production; the first scrapes through, ironically, on the strength of Glenn Tryon's stiff delivery (he is such a fluent and physically comfortable actor whenever he doesn't have to be heard, mime-gifted, with a face that's earnest go-getter by genetics and shlimazl by expression most of the time, Rob guessed some of it had to do with keeping to his marks for the microphone), as his Jim tries too hard to put himself over as a self-assured swell and neither Barbara Kent's Mary nor the audience is buying it, but the other two are notable mostly for their visual framing and a striking use of hand-tinting, which none of us were expecting. When he's not chained to a soundstage, Fejos excels at motion and montage, creating the same density of textures on the screen that a sound engineer might mix in the studio to communicate New York in all its honking, teeming, never-sleeping maelstrom and progress. The elevated rattles and bangs over the streets where horses' hooves still jostle for attention with car horns and the countless feet of pedestrians. Whistles blow off-shift, their scream of a steam-plume held in the foreground as the camera crossfades from Jim's station to Mary's switchboard, both of them responding. Truly unbelievable amounts of confetti rain down on the midway, visual white noise. And he may have filmed most of his Coney Island at The Pike in Long Beach, California (there was never a coaster called the Jack Rabbit Racer at Coney), but he gives us so many details of the rides and the games and the lights and the boardwalk and the funhouse and the donkey cart and kewpie dolls have never not been terrifying that I began to feel I had actually spent the evening at an amusement park, fortunately with the two people I would most like to spend an evening at an amusement park with. There is color scattered throughout these scenes, glowing sometimes for realism (the incandescent skyline of Luna Park, one of the location shots) and sometimes for emotion (the dreamy violet haze of the ballroom where Jim and Mary dance for the first time to Irving Berlin's "Always," a stave of which floats at the bottom of the screen complete with lyrics—did Peter Greenaway see this movie?) and it never feels like a stunt; it is like the moments in a musical where the only way for a character to express themselves is to abandon speech and sing. It is never as schematic as opening a door into Oz. It almost saves the second sound scene, when the crowds on the beach melt away into darkness and Jim and Mary could be on the stage of a theater, black boards underfoot and the colored lights of Coney running like an abstract behind them. (Then they start speaking.)
I don't know if I am making the film sound better than it is. In every way, I found it technically fascinating. It is surprisingly subtle in some of its observations, as when Jim and Mary romp uncomfortably in the surf, knowing they're supposed to be having fun like all the couples around them and not quite sure if they're doing it right (it's not that their mutual interest is feigned, but they're a pair of introverts who just met trying very hard not to look self-conscious; they laugh most freely when a wave knocks both of them over, nothing they could predict), and if it can go completely expressionist for moments like the wheel of a wooden coaster catching fire (does not happen all that often, Rob tells me) or a storm breaking apart not only the night's festivities but Jim and Mary's fragile relationship, it's also capable of restraint when it needs to be. The twist ending would be unendurably schmaltzy except that the camera refuses the visual equivalent of swelling violins, keeping all the emotion in the song we know is playing because we saw the label on the 78. I could list individual shots and bits of business I loved. There were also headdesk moments aplenty and I don't know why anyone was surprised at the Irish policeman. For once, though, and I appreciate this immensely, I don't have to yell at Criterion to put the thing out on DVD.
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Rob has been watching that show! Are you still following it?
Which in turn leads me to posit Viktor and Mordecai getting stuck in that confetti storm in the Criterion site excerpt, which never goes anywhere good.
I got two simultaneous and contradictory images as soon as I read this: Mordecai stonefaced in the paper blizzard, refusing to notice the confetti that is piling up so unsymmetrically on his hat-brim and the shoulders of his coat; and Mordecai in a lost-cufflinks flurry of ruffled fur taking shelter inside some amusement he would never ordinarily be caught dead within fifteen feet of, waiting for the fun-storm to subside.
I'd read either.
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As for your Mordecai scenarios, I could see one leading to the other, actually. And both are really adorable.;)
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You can see me protesting . . .
As for your Mordecai scenarios, I could see one leading to the other, actually. And both are really adorable.
Hah. You are welcome to them, if you like!
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The complex had an insanely intricate backstory involving the original owner of Pleasure Island, Merriweather Adam Pleasure, an early 20th century canvas magnate and eccentric globetrotting inventor. Kind of a Henry Flagler type but weirder. The Imagineers behind the project worked the New Year's Eve stuff into the story; suddenly Pleasure and two of his children just happened to have been born on December 31st. When his youngest daughter was born in February, Pleasure decided to bring her into the family's legacy by claiming every night was New Year's Eve on his island so that they all would have reason to celebrate.
The original plan was to have a spacecraft land every midnight, as Pleasure was also an alien enthusiast. He built his own landing pad in 1941 for any extra-terrestrial travellers who might decide to vacation in Florida. (That wasn't even the weirdest part of the backstory. Apparently the island was originally inhabited by a native tribe called the I-4. There was also some kind of deity involved called The Funmeister. I can understand why Disney brass didn't quite get what all this was supposed to be about.)
All this world-building wasn't explained very well to the average visitor. All they got were out-of-the-way plaques which were hard to read at night even by the somewhat sober. The backstory and themed nightclubs were eventually phased out in favor of an AMC multiplex and the generic Downtown Disney nightclub area. So it goes.
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I admit a cargo cult nightclub is not the most common gimmick.
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I'm not sure if the parallel world where it was would be better or worse than ours, or if those words even have any utility in discussing the matter, but it would certainly be different.
Perhaps soup would rain from the sky there.