1960s List Discussion and Suggestions (Lists Project Vol. 3)

[swo17]

A bunch of highly recommended experimental films released by the excellent French label Re:Voir

Do Re:Voir DVDs ever go on sale? And is there anywhere else to get them besides directly or from BFI's filmstore?

[Yojimbo]

My top East German pick - though it probably won't reach my top fifty - is Traces of the Stones. Seems to be in print in R1. The stills make it look like a Kaurismaki film -- Leningrad Cowboys Go Construction - but it's actually a surprisingly nuanced social realist film that deals with Party influence with considerable ambivalence. Hence its suppression for several decades.

Looks like a cross between 'The Wild Bunch' and 'Even Dwarves Started Small'

If you want to watch only one 60s feature film which has been produced in the GDR then you should definitely watch Traces of Stones. It might be Beyer's masterpiece and it's surely been a disaster that it got shelved in 1966. It's actually in the lead position on my list at the moment ...

How does one get to see it?

[swo17]

My top East German pick - though it probably won't reach my top fifty - is Traces of the Stones. Seems to be in print in R1. The stills make it look like a Kaurismaki film -- Leningrad Cowboys Go Construction - but it's actually a surprisingly nuanced social realist film that deals with Party influence with considerable ambivalence. Hence its suppression for several decades.

If you want to watch only one 60s feature film which has been produced in the GDR then you should definitely watch Traces of Stones. It might be Beyer's masterpiece and it's surely been a disaster that it got shelved in 1966. It's actually in the lead position on my list at the moment ...

How does one get to see it?

It's out on DVD in R1 from First Run Features.

[zedz]

A bunch of highly recommended experimental films released by the excellent French label Re:Voir

Do Re:Voir DVDs ever go on sale? And is there anywhere else to get them besides directly or from BFI's filmstore?

Their gallery in Rue de Faubourg St-Martin? (I actually did seem to get a discount when I shopped there, but I was - to put it mildly - buying in bulk).

Flippancy aside, I've never seen any of their releases discounted. They don't seem to be carried by amazon (not that amazon.fr is prone to discounting non-mainstream stuff at the best of times).

Word of caution, if this is a deal-breaker for you: some of the older titles seem to be kept in print by substituting DVD-Rs for pressed discs. For titles more than a few years old, it might pay to double check what you're getting.

[swo17]

I bought the Len Lye DVD a couple years ago, which came as a DVD-R. It was my understanding that it was only ever available that way.

[zedz]

Maybe. My haul was mixed pressed / burned, and it seems to be the older titles that were burned. Given the extremely marginal nature of the films they release, I wouldn't be surprised if the initial pressings are miniscule.

All of the Re:Voir discs I've ordered in the past from the BFI were pressed, however.

Oh! One essential Re:Voir release that is available from amazon (presumably because it's a co-production with other labels that amazon routinely carries), and is reasonably priced, is the new Jonas Mekas box set.

[swo17]

FWIW, I got the Lye DVD from the BFI.

[Wu.Qinghua]

If you want to watch only one 60s feature film which has been produced in the GDR then you should definitely watch Traces of Stones. It might be Beyer's masterpiece and it's surely been a disaster that it got shelved in 1966. It's actually in the lead position on my list at the moment ...

How does one get to see it?

It's out on DVD in R1 from First Run Features.

Maybe I should add that Traces of Stones is a rather local film. It's a filmic adaption of a well-known and celebrated East German novel, which is deeply rooted in the history of the GDR and discusses questions which were considered to be important in the 60s, as, for instance, the relation between avantgarde/party and base/working class, socialist personality, gender relations and other questions of everyday living. Apart from that, it should in no way be read as an oppositional film as it stays firmly within 60s socialist discourse, which again makes its ban all the more ironic.

[Yojimbo]

Maybe I should add that Traces of Stones is a rather local film. It's a filmic adaption of a well-known and celebrated East German novel, which is deeply rooted in the history of the GDR and discusses questions which were considered to be important in the 60s, as, for instance, the relation between avantgarde/party and base/working class, socialist personality, gender relations and other questions of everyday living. Apart from that, it should in no way be read as an oppositional film as it stays firmly within 60s socialist discourse, which again makes its ban all the more ironic.

Sounds a right barrel of laughs!

[FerdinandGriffon]

Some more notes. I had planned to write on every sixties film I watched during the run of the project, but I'm a few miles behind that goal at the moment, so we'll see.

The Quiller Memorandum, Michael Anderson, 1966
This is a film that begins pleasantly dry but ends up barren, an abortive exercise in cold-war absurdism delivered by a director who seems as humorless and rigid as the glorified bureaucrats that populate the screen. Harold Pinter's script is a decent attempt at injecting some self-parody and genuine paranoia into the spy genre, but it's not his best work either, all too often lapsing into repetitive and inane back and forths that lose their satirical edge minutes into the running time. He's also undercut at every step by bland and flavorless direction that, though always competent and professional, has no comic chops. The cast seems similarly unaware of the true nature of the material, with even von Sydow playing dead straight and dull. Patrick McGoohan might have saved the film in the lead, but George Segal comes across as buffoonish and dumb. The sole exceptions to mediocrity are Alec Guinness, who is delightfully odd as Segal's sandwich devouring keeper, and George Sanders, who has two blink and you'll miss it non-sequitur cameos. The first thirty minutes are also of interest for the way in which they catalogue German cultural institutions with an almost Kluge-like precision and regularity, jumping from sports stadium to school to beer hall in pursuit of an essay film that never fully comes into being.

Heureux anniversaire, Jean-Claude Carrière & Pierre Etaix, 1962
A few good gags, but almost all attendant upon the satellite cars encircling the bland hero and his tiresome quest. As a comic-cinematic debut, it's about as promising as Pialat's Drôles de bobines. Pialat went on to other things.

Le Grand amour, Pierre Etaix, 1969
A world driven over by beds rejiggered as automobiles, and a bizarre spasm of enraged masculinity and pedantic literalism. Two sublime sequences operating on the level of pure fantasy, surrounded by wide expanses of drudgery and social realism. The film's structure is too fast and loose to build on any of its ideas or comic concepts, but at the same time it's too tied down to its kitschy premise and setting to take off into the surrealism that the presence of Carrière might promise.

Tears on the Lion's Mane, Shinoda Masahiro, 1962
AKA A Flame at the Pier. Another noteworthy Terayama scripted Shinoda, though not as electrifying or furious as Dry Lake. The hero is a yakuza's flunky paid by management to suppress dockworkers' unions, and though almost every single action he takes has an immediate political consequence, he has no awareness of this whatsoever. Slightly touched, slouching through the film with a combination of James Dean cool and childish petulance, he acts according to two principles only: whim, and dedication to his manipulative gangster handler, who claims that his leg was mangled rescuing the boy during the war. This is a lie, of course, but this revision of wartime history keeps our hero bound till long after the beneficiaries of postwar economic miracles have found a way to destroy him. Mariko Kaga makes her debut, and is, of course, lovely.

Maître Gailip, Maurice Pialat, 1964
Try as I might, I've not been able to get much from these Turkish shorts. The footage's relationship to the VO seems tenuous at best, and though Kurant's images are always well-judged and sometimes striking, Pialat's editing strategy escapes me. Almost all of the early shorts included on MoC's releases seem barely worth the time except for as proofs of his unsuitability for genres outside of that which he would help create.

The Patsy, Jerry Lewis, 1964
Not as tight conceptually or dramaturgically as The Ladies Man, nor as unsettlingly psychological as The Big Mouth, this is nonetheless a lovingly crafted showcase for some of Jerry's most sublime gags, from a trio of horribly familiar doo-wop vocalists to an ice-bucket fiasco of characteristic interminability. The jewel may be a scene in which Jerry's would be movie star goes to a voice lesson at a Viennese instructor's antique-strewn apartment. Vase after vase teeters, falls, is caught, mere millimeters from the ground, but Jerry's splayed legs have always knocked another deflowered art object from its perch. The instructor (the impeccable and magnificent Hans Conreid) winces, as does the viewer, but only at the deliciousness of ever-postponed catastrophe. The unlikely cameo-pageant of Jerry's entourage (Lorre, Carradine, Wynn, Sloane, what the hell?) rounds out a not quite masterpiece.

I giorni cantati, Elio Petri, 1962
More sub-Antonioni existentialism courtesy of Guerra and Petri, those lovable lost souls of post neo-realistic Italian arthouse. Never bad, but it lacks the daring necessary to escape categorization with later films in the I'm-going-to-die-better-swim-with-dolphins genre like The Bucket List and Last Holiday.

[domino harvey]

The jewel may be a scene in which Jerry's would be movie star goes to a voice lesson at a Viennese instructor's antique-strewn apartment. Vase after vase teeters, falls, is caught, mere millimeters from the ground, but Jerry's splayed legs have always knocked another deflowered art object from its perch. The instructor (the impeccable and magnificent Hans Conreid) winces, as does the viewer, but only at the deliciousness of ever-postponed catastrophe.

It's a tough call amidst plenty of worthy competition but if pressed I'd say the above sequence is Lewis' funniest bit of extended physical comedy ever

[swo17]

Not to oversell it, but yes. Also, great participation in this thread this past week, everyone!

[Cold Bishop]

I love The Quiller Memorandum. It's probably my favorite Spy film behind John Huston's masterful and acidic The Kremlin Letter (which IMDb use to list as a 60s film, but alas no more!). Frankly, I think you were looking for the wrong film... I think the "satire" and "humor" was never meant to be anything other than a minor undercurrent. My favorite thing about it is the way the whole film gets leveled down to three long-form set-pieces: 1) The Kluge-like travelogue you mentioned, which manages to dispense with much of the set-up and exposition, 2) the extended interrogation sequence, which is pure Pinter, 3) the final foot-chase, which is suspenseful for precisely how un-thrilling and matter-of-fact it is.

[FerdinandGriffon]

I love The Quiller Memorandum. It's probably my favorite Spy film behind John Huston's masterful and acidic The Kremlin Letter (which IMDb use to list as a 60s film, but alas no more!). Frankly, I think you were looking for the wrong film... I think the "satire" and "humor" was never meant to be anything other than a minor undercurrent. My favorite thing about it is the way the whole film gets leveled down to three long-form set-pieces: 1) The Kluge-like travelogue you mentioned, which manages to dispense with much of the set-up and exposition, 2) the extended interrogation sequence, which is pure Pinter, 3) the final foot-chase, which is suspenseful for precisely how un-thrilling and matter-of-fact it is.

I was going to mention The Kremlin Letter in my original post! I too consider Huston's film one of the best in the genre, as well as one of the best insidiously subversive black comedies of the era, even rivaling Dr. Strangelove. When I saw it for the first time recently, the first thing I thought was that it was the George Sanders be-cameoed spoof thriller that I had wished Quiller would be. Also the movie that made me realize Richard Boone was a god. A shoe-in for my seventies list.
I might have been looking for the wrong film, but it's funny that the one I was looking for is your favorite spy film!

[Yojimbo]

Also the movie that made me realize Richard Boone was a god.

Well, then, 'Hombre' has to be on your 1960s list.
Boone's 'entrance' alone is almost Orson Welles/Harry Lime-esque in its significance.
I've been a fan since first seeing 'Have Gun Will Travel' on tv.

[knives]

I think everyone is forgetting Mann's final bow in all of this spy talk. A Dandy in Aspic is certainly one of the grimmest and upsetting films about cold war politics.

[Yojimbo]

I think everyone is forgetting Mann's final bow in all of this spy talk. A Dandy in Aspic is certainly one of the grimmest and upsetting films about cold war politics.

Not forgetting 'The Deadly Affair', of course

[Cold Bishop]

A rundown of the 60s Spy Film is one of those write-ups I'm toying with, but who knows if I'll get around to them with only four months and a few other genres vying for my attention (a separate revisit to the James Bond films; a long overdue Spaghetti Western overview; the early Hong Kong wuxia-pian; the Men-on-a-Mission film; the loosely-connected late 60s Hollywood thrillers during the breakdown of the Code)

[Lighthouse]

Does anyone here think that the James Bond films were something special for the 60s?

(apart from special effects and stunts)

[knives]

The last Connery one of the decade is fun and Bond 2's outing seems to be trying, but mostly I'd say no. I can't stand most of the entries in the series with them being simple minded and campy in the worst possible ways. If anything I'd say they're some of the worst of the genre.

[Cold Bishop]

Well, that's one of the reasons I plan on revisiting them, but based on memory, I would say, yes, From Russia With Love and On Her Majesty's Secret Service are both genuinely great films.

[knives]

I figure this is a good place for this, but going over Russ Meyer's films today I was left wondering about a major gap for that 'genre' for me in Radley Metzger. Is there a release/ film particularly if it is appropriate for this decade I could use as an entry?

[MichaelB]

I figure this is a good place for this, but going over Russ Meyer's films today I was left wondering about a major gap for that 'genre' for me in Radley Metzger. Is there a release/ film particularly if it is appropriate for this decade I could use as an entry?

Five out of the six Metzger films I've seen date from the 1970s, but the exception, Camille 2000, is worth a look - it's a surprisingly straight adaptation/update of Dumas' La Dame aux camélias, and if nothing else it's terrifically stylish: designer Enrico Sabbatini more than earned his fee.

[colinr0380]

A rundown of the 60s Spy Film is one of those write-ups I'm toying with, but who knows if I'll get around to them with only four months and a few other genres vying for my attention (a separate revisit to the James Bond films; a long overdue Spaghetti Western overview; the early Hong Kong wuxia-pian; the Men-on-a-Mission film; the loosely-connected late 60s Hollywood thrillers during the breakdown of the Code)

I hope that you add Danger: Diabolik to your 'spy film' list! And in terms of Hong Kong films I highly recommend A Touch Of Zen, which is one of my sure top ten locks for this decade (as certain of its place as Contempt!)

[Mr Sausage]

A rundown of the 60s Spy Film is one of those write-ups I'm toying with, but who knows if I'll get around to them with only four months and a few other genres vying for my attention (a separate revisit to the James Bond films; a long overdue Spaghetti Western overview; the early Hong Kong wuxia-pian; the Men-on-a-Mission film; the loosely-connected late 60s Hollywood thrillers during the breakdown of the Code)

I hope that you add Danger: Diabolik to your 'spy film' list! And in terms of Hong Kong films I highly recommend A Touch Of Zen, which is one of my sure top ten locks for this decade (as certain of its place as Contempt!)

If I were submitting a list, I'm pretty sure Contempt would take the top spot. That film's magic; it's the only one of Godard's films that I more than merely liked (so far, anyway). Here is a fascinating lecture by the maginifcent poet/classicist Anne Carson that connects The Odyssey with both Alberto Moravia's novel Contempt and Godard's adaptation of it, especially his use of Bardot. She's a bit of a dry speaker (in person she's so slight she seems as tho' she's about to simply drift away on the breeze, and her voice somewhat reflects this), but, as always, what she says is fascinating.