Classiq - An online journal that celebrates cinema, culture, style and storytelling.

12 August 2024

August Newsletter: Lords of Dogtown, Dylan’s Infidels and Trails Worth Hiking

Photos: Classiq Journal

“This was a magical time in the ’70s
when this burst of creativity came from these kids
who were from the wrong side of the tracks.”

Catherine Hardwicke, director of Lords of Dogtown

Viewing

Lords of Dogtown, 2005
Catherine Hardwicke

“This was a magical time in the ’70s when this burst of creativity came from these kids who were from the wrong side of the tracks,” director Catherine Hardwicke said. “They had shitty, unstable home lives. They weren’t good in school and couldn’t afford an expensive sport. But anyone could buy a skateboard super cheap. And with Skip Engblom as their father figure, it felt like the family they didn’t have. […] Each character is finding his powers and creativity. It’s an expression of pure bliss and freedom. Stacy, Tony and Jay were always trying to one-up each other, pushing the sport. Their music was integrated into the style of skating because, for these rebellious, frustrated kids, the pounding of that music helped them. The skaters found poetry from a drought and empty pools.”

This is the ‘70s skateboard counterculture of the mean streets of west Los Angeles, the Dogtown area, brought to life with raw energy, youthful grit and incredible visual sensibility. You are living it, riding it, immersed in an endless California vibe. It is the true story of the legendary Zephir skateboarders (Z-Boys) who redefined skate culture in the 1970s. Stacy (John Robinson), Jay (Emile Hirsche) and Tony (Victor Rasuk), under the guidance of their team leader, Skip Engblom (Heath Ledger) – Zephir comes from the surf shop Skip owns. These wonderfully cast actors (and I really want to insist on Heath, his dedication to a role was hypnotic all-absorbing, and it was maybe his greatest gift and greatest misfortune) are the rebels who defined an era. Lords of Dogtown is also one of the most beautifully shot films in Los Angeles, back-lit by the sun and defined by a rock attitude that I feel every generation should experience.

Summer with Monika, 1953
Ingmar Bergman

It still surprises today with its freshness and sensuality. “What were we dreaming of when Summer with Monika was first shown in Paris?,” Godard wrote. “Ingmar Bergman was already doing what we are still accusing French directors of not doing. Summer with Monika was already Et Dieu…créa la femme, but done to perfection. And that last shot of Nights of Cabiria, when Giulietta Masina stares fixedly into the camera: have we forgotten that this, too, appeared in the last reel but one of Summer with Monika? Have we forgotten that we have already experienced – but with a thousand times more force and poetry – that sudden conspiracy between actor and spectator which so aroused André Bazin’s enthusiasm, when Harriet Andersson, laughing eyes clouded with confusion and riveted at the camera, calls on us to witness her disgust in choosing hell instead of heaven?”

High Noon, 1952
Fred Zinnemann

Lee Van Cleef. He doesn’t utter a single word and delivers the best performance. It almost makes you forget the wooden acting of Gary Cooper and the far fetched idea of the lonely frightened hero. Howard Hawks was right: “I made Rio Bravo because I didn’t like High Noon. I didn’t think a good town marshal was going to run around town like a chicken with his head cut off asking everyone to help.”

Reading

The smell of watermelon, the sound of cow bells on mountain trails, the taste of sea water on your face, the sound of tennis balls on dirt elicit my strongest memories of childhood summers. And Agatha Christie’s books. At least one of the above punctuated every summer day. I am reading Christie’s books for the first time since then. My fascination has remained intact and much more than back then, I realise this writer’s great understanding of human nature and how much ahead of her time she was, or just the opposite, how much of her time she was.

Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden is a book every child should read, and everyone should re-read to never lose the kid in them.

On my list: Dogtown – The Legend of the Z-Boys – it’s the photos in here (by C. R. Stecyk III and Glen E. Friedman) that the film Lords of Dogtown used as inspiration.

Listening

The soundtrack: Lords of Dogtown

The podcast: Trails Worth Hiking. It tells the stories behind the world’s most interesting backpacking and trekking routes, and inspire you to hike them. One of the most beautiful of these o routes is Via Transilvanica and this is the episode dedicated to it.

The album: Infidels, Bob Dylan

Making

I first interviewed Anna Westerlund in 2015 and she still is one of the artists that stands out for me. This summer I finally made it to her shop, Together, in the Portuguese capital. On one of the walls are written these words: “When buying from an artist/maker you’re buying more than an object. You are buying hundreds of hirs of failures and experimentation and moments of pure joy. Our greatest tools are our hearts and hands so when we take time to make something with our hands we connect with ourselves and others. An object made with love, dedication and passion makes you feel happier and more fulfilled as that object will survive in time. Thank you.” It is a shop that instinctively reflects Anna’s aesthetics and values, creating a sense of place and tells the story of her craft with elegance and emotion and good vibes. And here’s Anna’s take on her city: “Lisbon is perfect because it has a great vibe, you have perfect food, good sightseeings and busy cultural life, but it is also near to the beach. So it gives you the best of two different worlds. That is not so easy to find, and it has a light that is unique!”

Exploring

The Surf Film Festival Anglet, running from 26-29 August. Founded 20 years ago in the sun-kissed town of Anglet, the festival, which celebrates the artistic merit of films about the world of surfing and enables a wider audience to discover them, sees silver screens installed on the beach and offers free entry. The film posters for this year’s line-up are a wonderful, immersive world in themselves.

On an end note

Few things can make a city more appealing and more alive than its news kiosks and magazine shops. There is hardly anything that gives me greater joy on a city walk, whether at home or on a trip, than stopping by a newsstand in the street mingling with the locals and travellers alike, or entering a shop with beautiful lined-up shelves, stacked with magazines and newspapers. All the magazines I read in print, I have come across this very way and not online. People who like to read things on paper are more connected, with the others and with the world around, and more present in their own lives. Hello, Kristof (selling coffee as well as cool independent magazines, such as Waves & Woods and Sirene) and Under the Cover are two new favourites, both in Lisbon, but I have to say that the one I have a soft spot on is the van-turned-news kiosk at LX Factory. It was summer, outside was raining, the shop assistant was sick inside, which made this culture-fill stop, for the magazine obsessive in me, frenetic and fun.

The regulars: The interviews, newsletters and podcasts I turn to every week and/or every month because they are that good. Craig Mod’s newsletters: Roden and Ridgeline. Soundtracking, with Edith Bowman. Alicia Kennedy’s newsletter. Racquet’s Rennae Stubbs tennis podcast. Gone to Timbuktu with Sophy Roberts. Wachstumsversuche, with Sarah Schill. Sirene Journal, Racquet, and Waves & Woods in print.

Heath Ledger in “Lords of Dogtown”, 2005. Columbia Pictures, Art Linson Productions, Indelible Pictures

“One of the strange things about living in the world
it is that only now and then one is quite sure
one is going to live forever and ever and ever.
One knows it sometimes when one gets up at the tender
solemn dawn-time and goes out and stands alone and throws
one’s head far back and looks up and up and watches the pale sky
slowly changing and flushing and marvelous unknown things happening…”

Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

Posted by classiq in Books, Culture, Film, Newsletter | | Comments Off

7 August 2024

The Man’s Fedora Hat, and Its Narrative Role, As Seen on the Heroines of Ozu, Godard and Sautet

Romy Schneider in “Max et les Ferrailleurs”, 1971

A bleak, dark detective story that taps into noir, Claude Sautet’s Max et les ferrailleurs is more than a “policier” film. It draws two fine character studies: Michel Piccoli’s Max, a former judge converted into a cop, and Romy Schneider’s Lily, a prostitute linked to a gang of hard-luck, two-time crooks whom Max wants to catch in order to restore his recently tarnished reputation in the department.

But Max is “no ordinary policeman”, as his superior says. Independently wealthy, he renounced being an examining judge because he wanted to be in the midst of the action. His job is more than a job. He is a solitary, no-family man, a dedicated, methodical police detective, even amoral in his willingness to catch the criminals at all costs, even if this means planning the crime himself. Catching them red-handed becomes an obsession and his job is more like a rite to him, nothing deters him from his mission, and this monastic feeling that seems driven by an inner calling rather than policeman duty and righteousness, is evident in the way he dresses, too. His pin-striped black suit, white shirt, black tie and fedora hat are like a uniform (he is always buttoned-up, even when at home, playing cards), very much in the vein of Alain Delon’s Le Samouraï, or, as a matter of fact, a few others of Jean-Pierre Melville’s anti-heroes. The look in Max’s eyes, when filmed in close-up, is so blank and unflinching that he may very well be carrying a gun in his hands (you are almost surprised that he doesn’t when the camera moves away), that, indeed, he may very well be one of the criminals. Sautet inverts in fact the moral dilemma of the crime film and makes the criminals more sympathetic than the lawman. Nothing can disturb Max’s icy exterior, nothing distracts his attention, not even Lily. She is no ordinary prostitute either. She is the brain behind the gang of small-time criminals and it is her ambition that will get them all into trouble. Romy and Michel were friends and had a wonderful rapport on the screen, and worked together on a few Claude Sautet films – Piccoli was in fact reticent to accept the role of Max because he considered Sautet shouldn’t have brought him and Romy back together on screen so soon (they had made Les choses de la vie a year earlier).

Romy Schneider is again wearing Yves Saint Laurent in Max et les ferrailleurs. But this in no way distracts us from the plot. Because Yves Saint Laurent had an “immediate and astounding sense of costume”, in the words of Roland Petit. The designer chose a very sexy wardrobe for Romy in this film. Violet or red low-cut dresses, form-fitting black dress with plunging neckline, ribbon tied around the neck, and the black patent trench coat – the revival of the vinyl trench five years after Catherine Deneuve wore hers for another prostitute role, that of Severine in Luis Buñuel’s Belle de jour.

But if there is one sartorial moment that surpasses all the rest, it’s Lily wearing Max’s hat. When Lily takes a bath in Max’s apartment, he throws her his hat, the item he almost never parts with, and takes pictures of her naked but wearing his hat. It is Max who is playing her, paying her not for sex but for spending time with him, toying with her body and her emotions to scheme his plan. But using her for criminal thought inception won’t leave him unscathed. He does have a breaking point but it remains unseen right until the end. And the end will take us completely by surprise. This impenetrable character is all the more surprising, brilliantly conceived and played, as he is playing opposite one of the most beautiful and enigmatic women in the history of cinema, Romy Schneider.

Jean Seberg in “À bout de souffle”, 1960

In a rare interview talking about À bout de souffle, taken just before shooting a scene from the film, Jean Seberg, dressed in the striped dress that her character, Patricia, wears in the film, said that Godard described her character as “the one in Bonjour Tristesse two years later”. Godard was a cinephile and when he went from the front of the camera as editor of Les Cahiers du Cinéma, to behind the camera as a film-maker, he frequently made allusions to his director peers whom he admired. There are many “film in film” sequences in Breathless, such as the one when Patricia hides in a cinema, the famous Le Mac Mahon, from the police, where the show that they are announcing next is Preminger’s very own Whirlpool (1949), or the stack of Screen Time magazines scattered on the table in Patricia’s apartment, or the film posters popping up throughout the film on the streets of Paris.

Further discussing her character, Seberg depicted her as “a very franchised American girl, a very sophisticated American girl, I suppose what some would call a very liberated American girl”. Belmondo, a young man on the run in Paris, is her boyfriend. He was one of the anti-heroes of La nouvelle vague. She was the anti-heroine of this new cinema that had new life in it, that questioned the establishment, that wanted to experiment in new ways with everything.

And experiment with everything they did, including costumes. The film does not credit any costume designer for the wardrobes. It is very likely that Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg made their own sartorial choices or even wore their own clothes on set. Never paying with his hat, sunglasses and cigarette, he set the standard for smoky French sex appeal, and she, with her infusion of French charm into her American sporty, preppy style (just like Seberg in real life), finally made a big entrance on screen and would be admired and copied by the worldwide public for generations to come, creating the stereotype of the French gamine. She is all light and cool and mischief. Patricia Franchini, an American student working for the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune in Paris and an aspiring journalist, made style news with her pixie haircut, black eyeliner and a wardrobe packed with sailor stripes, oversized men’s shirts, ballet slippers, loafers, trench coat, skinny pants and the Trilby hat borrowed from Jean-Paul Belmondo’s Michel Poiccard.

It is he however who first lends her the hat, if only for a few minutes, in the car parking lot before he flees for a few minutes. It looks good on her, dressed as she is in a pleated skirt and Breton top, a sudden American infussion into her French look. Godard consciously sought models in the past, in earlier films and filmmakers, maybe more than any other filmmaker. In Breathless, Michel has a smart attitude and a serious Bogart obsession, modelling himself on the Humphrey Bogart of Warner’s gangster movies – hat perched on the head, cigarette permanently dangling from his lips, his roaming outside the cinema where lobby cards and film posters starring Bogart are displayed, and finally his mock-heroic salute to his movie idol when he meets his end. That moment when Belmondo takes off his hat and puts it on Jean Seberg might have had another influence though, further back still than Bogart and the American genres that inspired Godard from his writer days at Cahiers. According to Shiguéhiko Hasumi, who wrote Directed by Ozu, only recently translated into English, Godard could have gotten the idea from the Japanese filmmaker’s That Night’s Wife.

Emiko Yagumo in “That Night’s Wife”, 1930

Yasujirō Ozu’s That Night’s Wife concerns a simple salaryman who is driven to desperation and commits armed robbery in order to provide for his sick daughter’s medical care. In the midst of the night he escapes to his apartment, where he confesses to his wife what he has done. Soon there is a knock at the door and the wife, Emiko Yagumo, urges her husband to hide behind the curtains. What follows is marked by a sartorial story that could hardly go unnoticed and it is Shiguéhiko Hasumi who most beautifully describes the scene in his book dedicated to Ozu: “The detective, who seems to have borrowed his rugged look from George Bancroft and his stout build from Walter Huston – a name legible on a movie poster hanging in the background – peers hawk-eyed into the room before announcing that he will just wait if her husband is out, pushing his way inside. Okada has left his hat on the table. As if to reproach the wife for her lie, the detective picks it up and places it gently on her hair, which is wrapped into a bun in the back.”

Emiko Yagumo in “That Night’s Wife”, 1930

“This moment in particular is very moving,” the author continues. “Emiko Yagumo, wearing the bun and kimono typical of a Japanese housewife, removes the hat with a slow gesture. But before she does, her eyes point toward the floor, as if she has resolved to do something. Or rather, it seems that this fedora has introduced a transformation into the narrative, in covering her hair for only a brief moment and contrasting with her kimono. In fact, when the detective then senses the presence of the husband in the shadows and draws his guns the wife receives the pistol she has been concealing and sticks it in his back. But she does not stop there. Having disarmed him, she strikes a pose with arms akimbo, brandishing both her weapon and his. What is especially beautiful in this That’s Night’s Wife sequence is the emphasis on the sartorial disequilibrium of Yagumo clutching handguns while wearing a housewife’s kimono.” A sartorial imbalance that has the power to subtly but unequivocally transform the character from a mother attending to her sick daughter into a woman fighting for a husband.

Shiguéhiko Hasumi concludes that “it is also hard not to be distracted by the more fantastic, perhaps implausible, idea that the Jean-Luc Godard who accessories Jean Seberg with Belmondo’s fedora in Breathless might quietly have seen this silent Ozu masterpiece.” The fedora on Yagumo’s hair bun performs an unmistakable narrational function, something that is totally missing from Godard’s Breathless. For all the irresistible appeal and determined unconformity of Belmondo and Seberg, her wearing her boyfriend’s hat is much more ornamentation than anything else. But maybe that was the magic in it. There were no rules, Godard seems to say, not in the way he filmed, not in the way they acted, not in the way they looked, and that feeling must have been mighty freeing. We feel it as we go back watching it time and again.

Editorial sources (from personal film book collection – please refer to Classiq Journal if you use quotes cited here): “Le Paris de Claude Sautet: Romy, Michel, Yves et les autres…”, by Hélène Rochette; “Godard on Godard”, translated and edited by Tom Milne; “Directed by Ozu”, by Shiguéhiko Hasumi

Jean Seberg in “À bout de souffle”, 1960

This Summer We’re Channelling: Grace Kelly in “Rear Window”

One evening this summer, when a cool breeze was starting to push the heat from the earlier scorcher into more bearable a memory, we watched Rear Window in the garden. I have watched it on repeated times throughout the years, as with most of Hitchcock’s films, but each time on a tv screen, first on VHS, then on DVD, and, eventually and ever more reluctantly, on Blu-ray. The opportunity of watching it when it was screened at the festivals I have attended during all these years of cinephilia has somehow always escaped me. That evening, I finally experienced what it must feel like to watch a Hitchcock on a big screen, a timely and proper celebration for the up-coming Rear Window and Hitchcock anniversaries (70 years and 125 years, respectively). Grace Kelly was more beautiful, identifying with James Stewart was more powerful, Thelma Ritter’s dialogue was spicier than ever before. The actors felt closer yet grander than ever before. Colour was used for dramatic purposes rather than pictorial ends, I came to realise. When Jeff and Lisa and Tom Doyle are having a heated discussion exchanging suggestive glances, eyebrows raised, glasses of brandy stirred relentlessly in their hands, I sensed the tension more than the humour in it for the very first time. And when the killer attacks James Stewart, that moment of contact at the very end, I was involved in the sense of the violence in a way I hadn’t been before. Hitchcock should only be watched on a big screen.

“There’s more pure film there, even though it’s static, than in many films I’ve made,” Hitchcock told Ian Cameron and V.F. Perkins in an interview in 1963. Hitchcock makes sure to use purely cinematic means from the very first shot. François Truffaut made Hitchcock the perfect resume in their interviews: “You open up with the perspiring face of James Stewart, you move on to his leg in a cast, and then, on a nearby table, there is the broken camera, a stack of magazines, and, on the wall, there are pictures of racing cars as they topple over on the track. Throughout that single opening camera movement we have learned where we are, who the principal character is, all about his work, and even how it caused his accident.”

”It was a possibility of doing a purely cinematic film.
You have an immobilized man looking out. That’s one part of the film.
The second part shows what he sees and the third part shows how
he reacts. This is actually the purest expression of a cinematic idea.”

Alfred Hitchcock

The thriller is at the forefront of Rear Window, but the film is really a love story between L.B. Jeffries, Jeff (James Stewart), a photojournalist, whose profession and travels mean everything to him and who is reluctant to commit himself to a relationship, and his high-spirited girlfriend, Lisa (Grace Kelly), who wants to marry him. Jeff is confined to a wheelchair at home with a broken leg, and, from his window, he watches his neighbours from across the courtyard, peering into their windows. As Truffaut observed in his book, Hitchcock Truffaut, it was this technical challenge that had Hitchcock’s interest in making the film, based on a Cornell Woolrich short story, “a whole film from the viewpoint of one man, and embodied in a single large set”. Another one of Hitchcock’s genius touches is that each of the neighbours Jeff is watching reflects aspects of his own life and relationship with Lisa, but also an image of the world, mirroring, as Hitchcock told Truffaut, “every kind of human behavior”, “a small universe” (and “a display of human weaknesses and people in pursuit of happiness”, as the French filmmaker himself concurred).

Edith Head sketch for Grace Kelly’s costumes in “Rear Window”, 1954

”Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds,
just something that comes out of the mouths of people
whose eyes tell the story in visual terms.”

Alfred Hitchcock

In one of the most famous close-ups in film history, we are introduced to Lisa in a scene where a drowsy James Stewart awakes to a full close-up of Lisa coming towards him for a kiss. The neckline of the dress was kept very simple so that Grace’s face was framed by it for the close-up. When the camera pulled back, progressively revealing more of Lisa’s look as she turns on the light on all the lamps in the room, Hitchcock made sure that the public knew that Lisa was a woman who came from wealth. A dress “fresh from the Paris plane” is how Lisa describes it, with a fitted black bodice with an off the shoulder, deep “V” cut neckline and with cap sleeves, and a mid-calf full skirt, very New Look style, gathered and layered in chiffon tulle, with a spray bunch pattern on the hip area. A black patent leather belt, a white chiffon shoulder wrap, white elbow-length silk gloves, a single strand of pearls and black high heeled strapped sandals complete the look.

Edith Head, the costume designer, had previously worked with Grace and they had become good friends. Their relationship grew even closer when Hitchcock chose them both for Rear Window. Lisa works in the high fashion New York trade and her interest in clothes – so obviously put on a show here – is in high contrast to Jeff’s. “Lisa, it’s perfect – it’s always perfect,” he answers unenthusiastically when she asks what she thinks of her dress. Beauty, or this kind of beauty, emphasised through the most glamorous clothes, is of no importance to Jeff as long as their interests lie in opposite directions. Costume is used to establish identity – feminine perfection in this case – but it also quickly gives us the exact idea where the relationship between the two protagonists stands.

Edith Head sketch for Grace Kelly’s costumes in “Rear Window”, 1954

The simple black silk organza dress, with translucent cap sleeves, appears, darkly, at the pivotal point in the film, when Lisa starts to believe Jeff, and that the man they are watching is a murderer. Jeff, too, starts to see her with different eyes.

Edith Head sketch for Grace Kelly’s costumes in “Rear Window”, 1954

When Lisa arrives to spend the night at Jeff’s, she is wearing the famous eau de nil suit: a midi-length jacket with stand-up collar and rounded shoulders, a style reminiscent of the designs of Cristóbal Balenciaga. Underneath, she wears a white silk halterneck, beautifully gathered at the waist (see above) with a wrapover front that sits atop a ’50s style midi skirt, but in a tubular cut this time, nipped in at the waist. The ensemble is further accessorised with a white pillbox hat with half veil, a single strand of pearls, stud earrings with glass cameo, and a multi-stringed pearl bracelet with hanging gold ornate lockets. The bracelet is by far the most spectacular piece of costume Lisa is wearing, reestablishing her image as the personification of idealised femininity reflected in the way she dresses.

From inside her Mark Cross overnight case, Lisa produces a nightgown which she calls “a preview of coming attractions.” The dialogue is incredibly witty and entertaining in Rear Window, as it usually is in Hitchcock’s movies.

“I wish I was more creative,” Lisa tells Jeff. “But, sweetheart, you are. You have a great talent for creating difficult situations,” he says, referring to her decision of spending the night over, “I do?,” Lisa answers, smiling satisfyingly.

Grace wears a print dress towards the end of the film. Edith was more liberal in her designs in the 1930s, as David Chierichetti, film historian and costumer, remarked. In the 50s and 60s, she simply didn’t use prints, because she was worried that the picture could be delayed and the prints would look dated. “She uses a print dress here, because it serves a certain dramatic purpose.” It’s a beautiful, very feminine dress, and Lisa has high heels on. “This look makes her more vulnerable, more natural, more foolhearty.” I think it is when Jeff realises how much he loves Lisa.

The casual outfit Lisa wears at the end of the movie was Hitchcock’s way to suggest she could be the sporty type, Jeff’s type, after all. Edith dressed Grace in slim indigo jeans and a pink casual men’s shirt with button-down collar and rolled-up sleeves, and dark brown loafers.

Grace Kelly’s costumes in Rear Window are the perfect example of the stylish and elegant fifties. But, most importantly, they are an essential part of building-up character and just by watching Lisa’s changing outfits and wealth of details of her clothes, you become aware of the layers of the story and of the character.

Photos: movie stills, Classiq Journal. Credit: Paramount Pictures

Editorial sources: “Edith Head: The Fifty-Year Career of Hollywood’s Greatest Costume Designer”, by Jay Jorgensen; “Alfred Hitchcock: The Complete Films”, by Paul Duncan; “Alfred Hitchcock Interviews”, edited by Sidney Gottlieb

Posted by classiq in Film, Film costume, This summer we’re channelling | | 5 Comments

14 July 2024

July Newsletter: So Cal, ‘Round Midnight, and Timeless Pagnol

Photos: Classiq Journal

“It’s like life really; you start out with a rough
overall design for it, but the dream is always changing,
evolving and you have to be open and adaptive to the unexpected.
I think from the outside I can even be seen as a bit of a drifter,
but I think it’s more like tracking a boat: you have a destination
in mind but it’s not that simple, you have to make a lot of seemingly
wayward manoeuvres to get there. And in these detours lies the magic.”

Ed, I Love the Seaside

Viewing

‘Round Midnight, 1986
Bertrand Tavernier

Bertrand Tavernier had an affinity for music and a love for cinema. In no other film of his was that probably more evident than in ‘Round Midnight, his elegy to jazz that captures the very essence of jazz music and the jazz musicians’ lives like no other. Actually, the film reminded me of Geoff Dyer’s book, But Beautiful. Dyer writes beautifully in such a way that you can not tell where reality ends and where fiction begins. It takes imagination and ardor and improvisation and spontaneity to write like this and the portraits of the musicians he evokes – Duke Ellington, Lester Young, Charles Mingus, Chet Baker, Thelonius Monk, Bud Powell, Ben Webster, Art Pepper – are alive, intimate, lyrical, heartbreaking, and capture the spirit of jazz better than any other writing. And so is Bertrand Tavernier’s portrayal of his character, Dexter Gordon/Dale Turner.

Tavernier wanted to base his film on the friendship between the pianist “Bud” Powell and Francis Paudras, a Parisian lover of American jazz, who wrote a book about it, Dance of the Infidels: A Portrait of Bud Powell. Saxophonist Dexter Gordon, who had a long career playing with some of the great American bands in the 1940s and ‘50s, played Dale Turner – Tavernier and producer Irwin Winkler wanted to get musicians, not actors for the leading roles and they put together a group of great names led by Herbie Hancock, Bobby Hutcherson, Billy Higgings, Ron Carter, Freddie Hubbard and Chet Baker. François Cluzet played the French friend.

Dexter Gordon is Dale Turner, and commands the screen with an instinctive naturalness. As Irwin Winkler writes in his auto biography, Dexter’s “dialogue was not from the script; it was improvised, like the notes on his saxophone, delivered in a voice damaged by years of cigarette smoke and drugs – too unique for an actor to imitate. He had not only played jazz, he talked jazz. He not only played drunk, he was drunk.” François Cluzet, short and slender, was shot by Bertrand Tavernier so that he was always looking up to his idol, but no sequence is more moving than that of him staying outside the Blue Note nightclub where Dale Turner is playing, crouched, listening transfixed by the vent, because he doesn’t have enough money to get inside to see his idol play. Another unforgettable scene is when singer Lonette McKee joins Dexter on the scene. Her voice and Turner’s saxophone transport you to another time and place, difficult to describe in words.

Morocco, 1930
Josef von Sternberg

I would often watch it just for the costumes. The top hat, tuxedo and white bow-tie Marlene Dietrich wore for her first performance in her first American film became her signature look. By deciding to put her in trousers in the first important act, Josef von Sternberg not only built up the anticipation of the audiences, who were anxious to see Marlene’s legs revealed as they had been made famous in The Blue Angel (1930), also directed by von Sternberg, but this smart move would always link her image to that of an enigmatic persona, who, unlike many other stars, would use subtext to enhance the femme fatale perception of her. The director had seen her wearing a man’s suit and a top hat at a party in Berlin, and it inspired him to use it as a dramatic look for her first musical number in an American film. The result still tantalizes the viewers, more than nine decades later. Wearing men’s attire suited Marlene like a charm, but whether in a man’s suit or a glamorous gown, she exuded sex appeal all her life, never lacking tastefulness.

Point Break (1991)
Kathryn Bigelow

This is a film that takes my mind to rebellious summers and endless beach days as a way of life. It’s a perfect blend of fearlessness, atmospheric scenery and thriller action (mainly thanks to the two leading men, Keanu Reeves, as rookie FBI agent Johnny Utah, and Patrick Swayze, as the leader of a gang of surfers who moonlight as bank robbers) that pulls you in and lingers with you long after the ending credits. But there is also a philosophical side to the characters and that’s one of the most interesting parts of the movie, allowing you to be part of it and make your own version of it. It is also the film that introduced me to Kathryn Bigelow’s work years ago, and what a fine job she does here!

And I have to mention another favourite Bigelow film: Strange Days, from 1995. It paints a Los Angeles of the year 1999 at the confluence of futuristic landscape and 1940s noir, of science-fiction and crime thriller. We live in the digital age, in the age of virtual reality, but it still feels unsettling to watch the prospect of computer-generated reality as imagined almost thirty years in advance. It just shows how creepy the world would become; it shows how creepy the world has become almost thirty years on. “Jacking in” means attaching a “squid” to your skull – a brain wave transmitter that creates the impression that you are having someone else’s experiences. And don’t we today want to constantly watch other people’s lives, to have their experiences? And some of the technology we can use, like social media, seems so much more gentile and harmless that you don’t even realise the danger and audacity of our new reality. The mood, the noir-inspired hero (the morally ambiguous hero alienated from society, charismatic yet flawed, harking back in the past, played by a fantastic Ralph Fiennes), the relentless and suspenseful pacing, the cinematography, Bigelow’s skill to make you live the characters’ experiences – this is one great piece of cinema making.

Reading

The most authentic, laidback and cool travel and surf guide, and so much more than that. I Love the Seaside: The Surf & Travel Guide to Southwest Europe gathers intel from across the coastlines of Portugal, Spain and France into a beautiful book that is a world in itself. Backdrop stories about the surf culture in the region, short interviews with interesting local people, knowledge about local food, culture, makers and menders, little gems found on site, true and tried over the years. Places that may not be picture-perfect or where they may not speak English, but where you will experience something real. And having it on paper offers you an enhanced sense of place, awaiting for notes to be penned on the side and revisited as time passes, its pages a little more creased after each time we open it.

Burma Sahib, by Paul Theroux. He writes about George Orwell before he was George Orwell, but a 19-year-old policeman in Burma. They say those five years were the years that made him. “Drawing on all his powers of observation and imagination, Theroux brings Orwell’s Burma tears to radiant life, tracing the developments of the young man’s consciousness as he confronts both the social, racial and class politics of his colonial colleagues, and the reality of the Burma beyond, which he yearns to grasp.”

Les Classiques de Lire Magazine dedicated to Marcel Pagnol in its entirety. “My grandfather is timeless,” says Nicolas Pagnol. So is this special number of Lire magazine.

Sylvie Simmons on Tom Waits in Mojo magazine (the print edition): “The Heart of Saturday Night, released 50 years ago, lit a path for Tom Waits’ next decade of music-making. Beat poetry and noir jazz entwined and his roots in rough-and-tumble San Diego showed through in his first truly Waitsian oeuvre. All the elements were there, ready to be drawn out.”

Listening

The Podcast: Wild, Wild Podcast and its episode on Il Cinema Ritrovato as we get to follow Adrian Smith around, watching movies, attending the festival’s phenomenal book fair, buying film posters and casually talking about films and Bologna. To any friend of cinema, this sounds mighty good.

The soundtrack: ‘Round Midnight

The album: Unforgettable Fire, U2

Making

Ciel Glue is a French artist based in Portugal, whose influences come from his love of surfing and the ocean and his collages are one of the best things I brought home from a trip to Portugal. His art plays on the idea of timelessness using vintage imagery to add an element of not only fun but an understanding that surf will never age.

“I take great pleasure in finding these images of vintage surfers, their lives destined to the closed pages of a dusty magazine at the back of a library and rescuing them from their dark, eternal fate. Bringing them back to the ocean and placing them on the waves of their life. Giving back to them that feeling of the first drop in. My line of creation resides around the sentence: ‘To read the wave.’”

Mojak makes hats, inspired by the sea, timeless and handcrafted, for a lifetime of adventure. It was early summer 2016 when Bodensee-born Emanuel Mauthe set off on the 1280 km journey to the French Atlantic coast.

“The two most beautiful things are the home from which we come and the home to which we wander.” – Heinrich Jung-Stilling

He did his work in pouring rain, thunderstorms and, by French standards, unbridled cold. He had set out to deliver surf equipment. To protect himself from the constant rain, he pulled out his old hat, which he had inherited from his grandfather years ago. Looking back, this moment was the birth of Mojak. Constant rain was followed by sunshine and heat. One evening, he met the musician and surf instructor Jules Ahoi. Over a glass of red wine and good music, they talked about their passion for travelling, and, as the story suggests, their shared passion for hats.

Exploring

The surf culture and the hiking trails along the coast of Portugal, on the cliffs above as praias, each one a stunner of a hike that will leave the walker spoilt for view. There is something about surf culture that never stops short to fascinate – the surf culture of Portugal in particular, a country that somehow feels personal enough yet exotic enough. Surfing, just like mountaineering, and the people at its core imply passion, improvisation, rhythm and tempo, a love for challenges and a motivation that is stronger than our fears. Surfers, wherever they ride, have a local demeanor that’s only derived from the proximity of the sea and their love for it. Even if you don’t surf, when you find yourself around them you almost feel the need to always be with a step in the ocean. Stop for lunch at a restaurant-café with a Californian vibe and bohemian atmosphere on the brim of the beach cliff, watch the surfers wax their boards outside their private cabins, and step inside one of the many welcoming surf shops that seem set up for ocean lovers and have all surf essentials but also lifestyle clothing and accessories, art and books… Yes, it looks a lot like summer.

“I love the sea, because it teaches me, as writer Pablo Neruda said. We always search for perfection, and waves are the best metaphor for life. The perfection depends on how willing you are to catch waves. If you go out often, no matter how the waves are, you will find some perfect days, because you did the preparation in ‘bad’ days, on the other hand, if you are only looking for those perfect days of surfing, maybe when you’re out there, you won’t appreciate it. We need the bad experiences to give significance to the good ones.” – artist Lisa Marques, I Love the Seaside

On an end note

With a medieval castle, an old cathedral and white washed winding streets, Silves is the most charming little town in the South of Portugal. Found inland, off the beaten path (which is why we love it), this Moorish historic town along the Arade River has one more little gem tucked within one of its quaint cobbled squares: Café DaRosa. Opened 50 years ago, it sells traditional pastries as well as coffee and the best berries lemonade. But it’s not just the tradition, it’s the location, the friendly yet elevated atmosphere and the intricate interior decor with its marvelous blue-tiled walls that make Café DaRosa a luxurious treat and worth the half an hour or an even longer detour from the coastline. In an age when so many new ventures pop up over night and this return to traditions can sometimes feel condescending more than it is authentic, it feels good to spend time in a place that has been slowly writing its own story for half a century.

“And if you find a bumpy dirt-track leading to a remote surf spot,
think twice before you share you ‘secret discovery’ online.”

I Love the Seaside

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8 July 2024

Read Instead…in Print

“Silence is very powerful.
Just not saying anything is already a powerful statement.”

Read instead…in print #33

Harry Dean Stanton: Hollywood’s Zen Rebel is a soulful approach to the life and career of one of Hollywood’s most fascinating actors. Not a star, but the actor by métier who hated labels and was very gifted with dialogue and words yet often spoke more with his eyes and utilised the power of silence in both his acting and his life. Author Joseph B. Atkins has the ability to capture in his writing that naturalness and innocence that defined Harry Dean, according to David Lynch, that sense of wonder that shaped his reality, never losing sight of his authentic self, forever young even when his whole life showed on his face in the twilight of his life.

“If he doesn’t talk, convert that into melody.
With Harry Dean, it’s all in his face.”

Ry Cooder

Read instead… in print is about a good book about cinema or filmmakers. No discursive, pretentious analyses, no verbose scrutiny. Because the idea is to invite you to read the book, not read about it here. But instead of using social media, I use my journal. Back to basics. Take it as a wish to break free of over-reliance on social media (even if it’s just for posting a photo of a good book) for presenting my work, cultural finds and interests. These are things to be enjoyed as stand-alone pieces in a more substantial and meaningful way than showing them in the black hole of Instagram thronged with an audience with a short attention span. This is also a look through my voluminous collection of books about film that I use as research in my adamant decision to rely less and less on the online and more on more on print materials.

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