Category: Elements of Cinema Archive

Editor’s note: On August 28, 2018 Daniel Gaucher, Professor in the Department of Visual & Media Arts at Emerson College, introduced Robert Altman’s The Player, part of the Brattle’s Elements of Cinema program. These are his introductory remarks. –Jessie Schanzle, Film Notes editor

I wanted to watch The Player tonight not only to see all the nice designer suits everybody wears in it from the 90s, but also to get a sense of what was called the developing shot. Now you might, if you’ve seen The Player, think to yourself, “well crap, they do a lot of long takes in that, don’t they? Where’s all the editing?”

Editor’s note: On July 30, 2018 Ezra Haber Glenn, lecturer in Community Development and the Undergraduate Chair in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies & Planning, introduced The Crowd, part of the Brattle’s Elements of Cinema program. These are his introductory remarks. –Jessie Schanzle, Film Notes editor

Thanks, Ned, for that introduction. It’s so great to see so many people here, willing to show up for 90 minutes of free air conditioning on a Monday night.

My name is Ezra Glenn, and as Ned said, I teach in the urban planning program at MIT. My background is on the applied side of the field – I worked for over a decade in municipal government, including stints as the director of planning for the city of Somerville and director of community development for the city of Lawrence. So I came to MIT having worked a lot in the actual making of cities.

Editor’s note: On June 27, 2018 Keridwen Luis, lecturer on studies of women, gender, and sexuality at Harvard University, introduced The Rocky Horror Picture Show, part of the Brattle’s Elements of Cinema program. These are her introductory remarks. –Jessie Schanzle, Film Notes editor

Thank you so much for the lovely introduction, and thank you for everyone at the Brattle for inviting me to this. This is lovely and exciting, and it’s been delightful trying to think, what can I say about The Rocky Horror Picture Show? I mean, what is left to say about this film? Actually, there’s a lot I could say about this film, but I’m not going to say it all because I’m sure we’d all rather be watching the film.

This is the most classic of what we call the “cult films.” It is a timely commentary and a cultural touchstone. It is supremely dated, and yet, it exists in this weird eternal present for us. It’s a classic, but why is it a classic?

PETER: I’d like to start by thanking Yangqiao Lu not only for the opportunity to show you all one of my absolute favorite movies, but also for letting me get on the stage of a theatre that I have been visiting since I was a college freshman in 1985.

I chose these two films because I think they go together well – I’ll tell you why and how in a moment. I think I’ll start by giving you some historical background on the film People on Sunday, then some stylistic things to look for and some matters of content, and then I’ll say a little about Jay Leyda and his short film A Bronx Morning.

November 14, 2017 / / Elements of Cinema Archive

Wes Alwan: Good evening everyone. Thanks for coming. Thank you to the Brattle for asking me to do this.

I am here to talk to you about damn dirty apes and after that some philosophical themes. So I think that this is a really good film to be watching the day before Halloween. I actually wanted to find a good Planet of the Apes costume for Halloween tomorrow but I couldn’t find one. Even if I did, of course it wouldn’t come close to what they did with the make-up in that film, which is a kind of famous story in its own right. The movie almost wasn’t made because of the technical challenges in doing the make-up and presenting the apes as these humanized apes that really would just get a laugh out of the audience. One of the screenwriters, Rod Serling, the creator of The Twilight Zone, really early on was asked to do some initial drafts of the screenplay and he went through like thirty or forty drafts. But, before he was convinced to go through all that work, he said he couldn’t be associated with the movie. He just didn’t think it was plausible. He thought everyone would laugh. The studios initially felt the same way. It took years for the producer Arthur Jacobs to convince them to do the film. To do that, he had to do a strength test where he had people in make-up. The make-up artist John Chambers actually ended up winning an Academy Award. The film actually spent the most money adjusted for inflation on make-up of any film in history. Twenty percent of the Planet of the Apes budget was spent on make-up.

Why do I mention all this? I think the greatest challenge and accomplishment of the film is to not to make humans convincingly apelike but to make these apes convincingly human. To do so, you need not just a mask. Chambers adapted techniques used during World War II to help disfigured soldiers. He used latex prosthetics in addition to make-up so that the actors could still make emotional facial expressions. They could use their eyes to act, they could wrinkle their noses, and they could convincingly speak underneath the latex and make-up. It’s still not perfect, however. Planet of the Apes has a very campy reputation because of that. There’s still a mask-like effect to the make-up, but I think that works better than full-blown CGI. There’s actually something important about the fact that the make-up is not perfect and there’s still a mask-like quality to it.—I think of it almost like a semi-mask or almost a Venetian half-mask. I’ll talk more later about why I think it’s so important that the make-up is done like that.

September 9, 2017 / / Elements of Cinema Archive

CATHERINE: I’m glad to be here and thank you for that introduction and I’d like to thank Yangqiao Lu, who initially sent out the invitation to me. So why screen the Young Girls of Rochefort now? Its 2017, this film came out in 1967, so that’s fifty years ago. To film curators, that’s normally enough to show something on it’s 50th or 25th anniversary, but I also think this film is an important one, its one that I really like and I think it gives a different vision of French cinema that you may be used to be seeing in American movies theaters. SO if you think about 1967 and French film, you’re probably thinking about Jon Luc Godard, François Truffaut…revolutionary filmmaking and this obsession with Maoism. This is not that type of film. Young Girls of Rochefort is made for a mass audience. It’s joyful, it’s delightful, it’s shot in vibrant color, it’s a different type of innovative formal filmmaking. So for a long time, Demy was thought of as less successful than Godard, he was thought of as less than an auteur, and he fell out of favor in 1970s and 80s and he’s recently made a comeback and this was due to the DVD box set of his work and the screenings organized around that, and I think that you will find him intriguing. He has a style that is about building a universe, it’s about creating an alternate world and that’s one of the things I want you to think about. How is he creating a different type of universe in his film?