Silver Halide Crystals

Or, as is more often the case these days, photodiodes.

For me, the haunting magic of film and photography lies in the fact they capture a slice of time forever: London in 1927, in colour.

Yes, Virginia, there are ghosts.

Restoring the home of Niepce and recovering the view from which he took the first photograph:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAcTHpuqQIs

I love the ghosts.

Sidney Lumet died last Saturday. He was one of the great American artists of his time, underappreciated in my opinion because he was neither fish nor fowl: a commercial filmmaker who created intelligent, well-scripted, and affecting films that were tightly composed - jettisoning the superfluous, and fleshing out the unspoken. He was probably not elevated to the lofty status of "auteur" because he avoided facile signatures; although he made many forays into more popular material, some mishaps, he was never behind an idiotic blockbuster; his films were often literate, yet unpretentious; and they contained several memorable frames that did not draw attention to themselves; overall, they had the quiet cultivation of another era. In an age of comic-book movies, he turned into something of an anomaly. There were struggles, slightly compensated for by a very belated Oscar from that company of hacks. Hollywood has lost many of the qualities he brought to filmmaking - grace, artistry, compassion - and it doesn't seem like they'll be refreshed anytime soon.

#1, #2

E, Thea, fantastic links! Saved both.

We are ghosts too.

1
Really enjoyed watching this. I swear I've taken that approach to Nelson's Column, either in this life or another. (I remember that day because my fiancee and I had Indian food in one of those shops and had a spat in the National Portrait Gallery.)

The state of preservation of that film is superb.

3
Lumet was of that shining moment in the 70's when films were made for grownups. Fortunately, no one told him when that moment was over.

#4 We are ghosts too.

Yes! Too few realize this unfortunately ...

#5 Lumet was of that shining moment in the 70's when films were made for grownups

I like making a trip to the multiplex, but popular stuff of the past couple of decades seems to have two primary demographics: kids and morons.

I went to see Rango recently, and I watched True Grit and Social Network in the theatres last year; all exceptions to this unfortunate rule.

Broadcast Live! From the 19th century... The Coronation of Tsar Nicholas II: http://youtu.be/2b-Cfe7fPok, http://youtu.be/-FgHZ7I5keY.

The formal coronation was in 1896, and the montage dates from then, but Nicholas took the throne in 1894, which might explain the mistake in one of the headers.

There's even more on Youtube and elsewhere. See Nicholas II Declares War on Germany 1914: http://youtu.be/5zWDOZ4w8YE.

I'm in love with these (click to enlarge):

New York 1941-2 (from the Charles W. Cushman Collection).









TAKE ME BACK!

The Cushman Collection covers a broad range of places and dates, so toy with the filters to bring up other results!

Not to forget the original colour documentarian par excellence: Prokudin-Gorskii. Click to see the entire collection at the Library of Congress.

Tolstoy, 1908:



There's Albert Kahn as well.

Books: Photographs for the Tsar, The Dawn of the Color Photograph.

One of my favorite movies is from October 26, 1903, when a guy named A.E. Weed set up his camera at Broadway & 23rd: field(NUMBER+band(lcmp002+m2a33981))" rel="nofollow" target="_top">At the foot of the Flatiron Building. (Also at YouTube.)

Re: #2: In 1985 I went to Lacock Abbey and reproduced this 1835 image on my own modern color film, 150 years later, almost to the day:

this corner was known as the windiest corner of the city, and in the era of the long skirt, standing on it was considered a good vantage point for a glimpse of a lady's ankle.

har!

"Hope springs eternal".

At about 1:23 you can see the three young women smiling at their wind-blown disarray - and the sidewalk louts checking them out. It's timeless.

Yeah, noticed! How wonderful is it that we have all this available free now, btw?

E: that is a beautiful portrait of Tolstoy.
Thank you.

Welcome, Murr. Do you know the famous colour portraits of Joyce, by Gisèle Freund?





There's a book as well: Three Days with Joyce.

Recently discovered color photographs of the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake here.

oh wow! great joyce pics!

#8 The hats in three pictures remind me of my father who always wore that type of hat. I think his was sewn on.

#17

The 3D glasses that came with Harold Lloyd's Hollywood nudes in 3D proved their worth again!

#17 Thanks Thea! What a difference it makes to see something in colour that was only known in black and white - the apparently immeasurable distance between then and now suddenly vanishes.

The LOC has a blog on Old Photos of Japan - those that aren't in black and white have been coloured in, but they can still be very evocative.

the apparently immeasurable distance between then and now suddenly vanishes.

Exactly. Funny, that. I remember first being shocked by this effect with WWII colour footage.

>WWII colour footage

Victory in Europe: D-day to V-E day has striking photographs by George Stevens, the multiple-Oscar winning movie director (Giant, etc.) I just found out there's also a DVD, D-Day to Berlin, about the experiences of his unit, and it contains some colour footage they shot.

Click for opening. All about the good ol' days.

Excellent movie.

This is fantastic:



A tremendous study of the mind unanchored in a rocky harbour without a lighthouse: intensity, severity, experimentation, consistency, ignorance and obsession, all clattering together in a stormy cauldron of fantasy and ugliness.

Great performances, but I have some problems with the story--oddly enough, only with the movie, not the book.

My Daguerreotype Boyfriend

Similarly: Fuck Yeah History Crushes!!

Ha! Love the necrophiliac crushes--so safe.

Reminds me I meant to look up the photographer of this:



I don't have the book, and all I remember of the (19th century) photo is that the prisoner was French, death row. I think it was from a series of prison photographs. Does anyone know it?

Here are the references of the photograph :
Louis Adolphe Humbert de Mollard, Louis Dodier en prisonnier, 1847 (Daguerréotype, 11,5 x 15,5 cm)
I remembered seing it it the catalogue from the "Crime et Châtiment" exhibition (Musée d'Orsay, Paris, 2010)/

THANK YOU!!

Oh. It was a POSED photograph, not actual prison scene!

I went on a Malick binge recently and watched Days of Heaven, The New World, and Tree of Life, all within a few days.

I can't express enough how grateful I am that there are still English language movies appearing in mainstream theatres that are worth getting a ticket for and taking the trouble to go see. Nevertheless, having watched three of Malick's grand total of five features in rapid succession, I am ambivalent, as I have been before, about a number of things regarding his films; but this ambivalence, worth discussing and part of the reason to go see his latest, has to be salvaged from the dispiriting aggregate of reactions by the majority of moviegoers, who're so deprived of non-standard fare that they are almost all contemptuous of, frustrated by, or inordinately reverential about a fairly linear narrative that does not confound the viewer at every step, as a Godard work might. I don't know why standard, predictable knee-jerk reactions annoy me, but they do. I suppose I'm not blasé enough.

Anyway, some of the things that bother me about Tree of Life in particular - 1) impressive cinematography; so unfailingly masterful that most filmmakers, independent or not, would kill to achieve something remotely similar - and yet, sometimes so 'clean', so immaculate as to become the equivalent of advertising or nature-documentary; 2) powerful, hypnotic sense of wonder or communion with one's environment, alive or inanimate - which occasionally falls into parody and kitsch (a perceptive IMDb reviewer was particularly scathing); 3) in common with and perhaps as an inevitable development of the preceding points, a hankering after simple bifurcations - nature vs. culture, the past vs. the present, etc.; and 4) frequent and probably not merely diegetic references to the divine, afterlife, or theological questions, etc. Malick is undoubtedly an intellectual filmmaker, and yet - partly on account of the limits of the medium (but this is not enough of a justification) - his films only seem to succeed on account of his superb ability to evoke the visceral; the ideas are not abstract enough, or are missing.

There's no shortage of cliches and the jokes are recycled, the characterizations are quite shallow and unconvincing if not downright hokey, the dates have been all mixed up, and it ends rather abruptly - but it's fun; quite a lot of fun. As a dour, usually anti-Woody acquaintance of mine put it, you grin like an idiot all the way through.



I'm glad Allen is seeing some success, even if he has to put out movies that are far from the wit and the intricacy of his mid 70s to mid 80s work.

I like the poster. Is that Brody with blond hair? Looks like Aaron Eckhart from here.

Owen Wilson, a virtual opposite of the standard Woody Allen character as the latter himself explained in a long interview, but who does a pretty good job of the baffled, naive but affable hack.

Recently rereleased:



Clouzot has not been given enough credit as one of the major directors - despite working within the confines of popular genres, his realism, through very close attention to detail, and the gradual build-up of his stories and characters, through various physical and psychological cues, combine to make his films seem far more "mature" than their contemporary English-language equivalents. The still-gripping suspense in his films, which of course made them commercial successes, is in retrospect only a sort of excuse for the masterful overlapping of observation, cynical (and almost satirical) portraiture and unembellished storytelling.

(Interesting trivia just read on IMDb - apparently Clouzot procured the rights to the story only hours before Hitchcock, and in compensation the authors Boileau and Narcejac wrote the story for Vertigo exclusively for Hitch.)

So, what, did they add stuff to the new edition? I used to have the older Criterion one, just the movie.

Hm, I didn't have the impression Clouzot wasn't "given enough credit". Wages of fear alone reverberated high and wide. Definitely a super-successful classic.

I forgot to mention the picture above links to the Criterion site, which lists all the new features (and apparently a digital remastering.)

I didn't care much for this movie when I watched a poorly transferred VHS a dozen years ago, but watching it once again with the benefit of a tad more experience, and with the help of a beautiful, revelatory transfer, I'm bowled over; it's not merely "another explicit story of sexual obsession". I'd love to talk about it at length, but I don't want to spoil it for anyone here. All I can suggest for now is watching it if, as with me, it's been a while since the last viewing and your reaction to it was lukewarm.

cinematically, I live in a cultural desert, alas. Getting these movies is well nigh impossible. I've ordered stuff on Amazon before, but all those stupid 'regional' issues makes them often difficult to play with the right subtitles and so on. I bought some DVDs in Paris, but found that I cannot play them with English subtitles on my DVD player here. I do have access to a wonderful chinese site which lets you download pirated versions for free, but they have a giant catalogue in which all names are translated into Chinese, which makes searching difficult, and they only have mandarin subtitles.

Any studio copyright lawyers fucking arsehole scumbags out there reading this, why can't I play a DVD bought in France on a DVD player bought in Taiwan?

#42

YEAH, that whole region-divide of DVDs is dastardly scumbaggy!

#41

Have you listened to the commentary? I forget the chap's name, but I loved his cautionary intro: "Um, I'm not an expert on porn, sexology etc."

It's not a movie I could watch endlessly. First time was after a high school excursion, when we reached home earlier than (our parents) expected, and took the opp. to take in a smutty movie, en masse. I shall never ever go see ANYTHING with a dozen teenage boys again, that's for sure.

#42 Murr, you can get a multi-region DVD player (can be bought for under $100 here, maybe a lot less there) or hack it to make it multi-region (this isn't possible in all cases, but if you did it, it would void the warranty, an irrelevant consideration if the warranty's already expired.) Lots of information on the net about how to go about this, though I must admit I haven't tried it myself yet.

#43 No, I haven't listened to the commentary yet, I probably should because there's so much to mull over. There is an informative but not especially insightful review at Senses of Cinema.

>44 Existanai: yes, I know. Usually, when you buy a DVD player in Taiwan, they hack it for you on the spot (I love Taiwan), but that often renders certain functions, like subtitles, unstable.

Have you tried playing it on a computer?

Waggish hates Haneke. And elsewhere he calls Haneke an "amateur shock artiste". What do others think of this review of The White Ribbon?

he calls Haneke an "amateur shock artiste"

And that's enough to know not to bother with waggish Waggish at all.

As my Methodist friends would say, I'm so blessed--nothing comes easier to me than ignoring critics completely.

yeah, I"m with Lola on this. It's a typical response of American/English film critics to European art films, especially European art films that have ambiguous moral content which is usually over the head of the critic.. He makes movies about ideas. Something most film critics are not aware of. Idea? wats dat?

First, the fact that a film can actually shock people in our jaded age is already an achievement in itself. Hanneke's films leave one distinctly uneasy. That's his achievement. His technical mastery is of course beyond reproach. The White Ribbon was breathtakingly gorgeous.

btw, who is Waggish?

The Piano Teacher by Haneke is terrible; strange people doing strange things.
Who needs a story or plot, just act strange?
I think I'll pass on the rest of Haneke.

See, I don't think Haneke's morally ambiguous at all.

#50

I didn't like The Piano Teacher because it was a painful experience that hit too close to home. But you're missing some great art if you ignore him completely. Sure, there's always some OTHER great art...

nor do I, but my point was that the average movie critic has to work too hard to get the moral of his movies. His movies don't bludgeon their morality like your average Hollywood movie.

The French photographer Nadar (1820-1910).

Fantastic Thea, thank you so much.

#53 Yes, thank you, Thea. That was wonderful.

Marvellous, Thea!

Oh, joy. The poet H.D.'s personal scrap book...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/beinecke_library/sets/72157622105638953/

Très, très cool.

She met Pound at fifteen? Where were her parents...

Pound was only a year older, so perhaps we ought to forgive Doolittle's parents for not knowing the dashing young Ezra Pound would grow up to be, well, Ezra Pound.

Still, End to Torment makes it obvious that getting close to Pound even in his youth was a bad idea.

Oh, and haha. Teen pals! Now that's cute.

And now for something completely different:

Soviet Experiments in the Revival of Organisms (1940)

http://www.archive.org/details/Experime1940

Good luck with no fuckin' head!

Although I'd like a proper description of the experiment, I'm betting on fake/tragically misguided, easily, but the visuals are AWSM.

Brings to mind Bulgakov's Heart of a dog.

Looks like Fido's "fetching" days are over.

You may recognize the strange person doing the introduction, J.B.S. Haldane. The name seemed vaguely familiar, turns out he was a prolific author in his own right, but I can't vouch for his work. He seems to have had some patina of respectability.

Yes, Haldane was a legend. 'Twas he famously remarked of the Creator's extraordinary fondness of beetles. But that means nothing.

Sorry, that was posted in haste and came out garbled--not beetles re dogs, of course, just a digression, I meant that extraordinary claims cannot be trusted on any one person's authority.

If it were possible to revive dead dogs, even only those dead for ten minutes only, it would have been done a zillion times since 1940. We'd have heard. Physiology advanced on, not to finesse it, wholesale no-bounds animal torture for more than a century, anywhere where there was a faculty of experimental medicine, so if this experiment remained unreproduced, I bet it is because it wasn't reproducible with those results, not because it hasn't being tried.

So it seems to me we have here a "resurrected Jesus" situation. Testimony of dubious sort of the original event, but nothing since.

A short (about 7 minutes) Pathé film of Moscow in winter 1908:

Moscow Clad in Snow (1908)