Category Archives: Canonically Weird (The List)

Canonically Weird (The List)

175. L’IMMORTELLE (1963)

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“-Do you know the poems of Sultan Selim?

‘They are full of flowers and perfumes,

greenery, cool fountains, and slim jets of water.’

-Which Sultan Selim?

-I don’t know. Whichever. They were all named Selim and they all wrote the same poems with the same cliched imagery that recurs like fetishes. Or passwords you utter to pass through the garden gate and enter the palace of your sleepless nights.”- L’Immortelle

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Jacques Doniol-Valcroze,

PLOT: A professor vacationing in Istanbul comes across a mysterious, vivacious woman who weaves in and out of his life during a fateful summer. The impenetrability of the woman ignites an obsession in the professor, one that leads him into the shadowy, knotted heart of the city and the underbelly of his own desire.

Stil from L'Immortelle (1963)

BACKGROUND:

  • Already a staple in French New Wave as a successful screenwriter (Last Year in Marienbad), Alain Robbe-Grillet was trying to break into motion pictures as a director, but was unable to find the funding. A Belgian producer agreed to fund his first feature on the condition that he use funds legally tied up in Turkey (due to an inability to convert the Turkish pound, which had left a wool-trading friend of the producer’s unable to use his profit anywhere else in the world). Robbe-Grillet shot the film there and used the location as a central narrative device, in the vein of a cinematic arabesque.
  • Robbe-Grillet’s own wife Catherine plays the oft-mentioned Catherine Sarayon (or Carayon). Robbe-Grillet met her in Turkey, which is similar to the way the protagonist meets the woman he falls for in L’Immortelle. Catherine wrote several novels of sadomasochistic erotica, sometimes under the pseudonym “Jean de Berg.”
  • During filming, Turkey erupted into a violent revolution in which the heads of government were all hanged. Robbe-Grillet, whose production company had made deals with the ousted government, had to get out hastily and wait in France for the volatile situation to die down before returning to complete the film.
  • Although it was reasonably well-regarded at the time of its release, screening at the Berlin Film Festival, L’Immortelle since fell between the cracks and was not released on home video in any form until 2014.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: This film is rife with iconic, spellbinding imagery, but chief among them is the mystical and sacred moment in the mosque as the professor, already deeply entranced by the woman of his waking dreams, searches for her in the darkness. He shambles around a corner with desperation in his gait (slowly, though, as if no wait was long enough), and spies the woman kneeling on the ground kneeling in prayer, perfect and impregnable. She rises to meet him like a goddess of torturous pleasure; her grace and beauty combined with his love-struck agony in the shadows is a moment of understated, haunting beauty.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: L’Immortelle operates less like a film and more like a state of mind, using baffling, at times purposely repetitive shots to create something that transcends the world of the nominal. It is a movie based in philosophy, emotion, and spirituality, not plot and structure. It does not want to entertain or make sense, it wants to touch below the surface, and it does through the tried-and-true tactic of not explaining a single thing, compounding each image placed on screen into an enigma that never diminishes as time rolls on.


Original French language trailer for L’Immortelle

COMMENTS: The narrative tradition is a lie. From our earliest fables to the towering epics of our own time, we tell stories in the way that is the most Continue reading 175. L’IMMORTELLE (1963) →

Canonically Weird (The List)

174. VERTIGO (1958)

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“If Vertigo remains, unchallengeably, Hitchcock’s masterpiece, this is surely because there the attitude to the unknown and mysterious is not simply one of terror but retains, implicitly, a profound and disturbing ambivalence.”–Robin Wood, “Hitchcock’s Films”

“Only one film had been capable of portraying insane memory, impossible memory: Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.”—, Sans Soleil

Must See

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: James Stewart, , Barbara Bel Geddes

PLOT: During a rooftop pursuit of a fleeing suspect, John “Scottie” Ferguson finds himself hanging from a drainpipe; the uniformed cop who tries to save him slips and falls to his death. Suffering from debilitating acrophobia and vertigo, as well as survivor’s guilt, Scottie quits the police force. An old college acquaintance offers him a job tailing his wife, and Scottie becomes obsessed with the beautiful and mysterious woman who believes she is possessed by the spirit of a suicidal ancestor.

Still from Vertigo (1958)
BACKGROUND:

  • The source of Vertigo was the novel “D’Entre Les Morts” (translated in English as “The Living and the Dead”), by the French writing team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. Hitchcock had wanted to adapt the pair’s first novel, “Celle qui n’était plus,” but the rights were sold to a French company and it was made as Les Diaboliques by Henri-Georges Clouzot. Boileau-Narcejac would later write the screenplay for Les Yeux Sans Visage [Eyes Without a Face] (1960).
  • Hitchcock bought the rights to Vertigo back from Paramount (along with four other 1950s-era films), then willed them to his daughter. The film went out of circulation for many years. The rights eventually ended up with rival studio Universal, who restored and re-released the film theatrically (in 1983 and again, after a major restoration, in 1996) to great acclaim.
  • The dizzying “vertigo” effect (sometimes known as the “dolly zoom” or “trombone shot”) is the film’s most famous technical innovation: the camera tracks backwards on a dolly while simultaneously zooming the lens, resulting in  a disorienting visual experience of moving backwards and forwards simultaneously.
  • Abstract Expressionist painter John Ferren designed the dream sequence.
  • A controversial flashback scene reveals the “twist ending” about two-thirds of the way through the movie. Before the film’s release Hitchcock decided to remove this sequence, over the strenuous objections of his producer, Herbert Coleman. After preview audiences were unimpressed by the flashback-free cut, the studio ordered Hitchcock to return the film to the way it was originally shot.
  • Vertigo, which was exceedingly dark compared to the average Jimmy Stewart vehicle, was not as successful as Hitchcock’s previous hits such as 1954’s Rear Window, and barely broke even at the box office. The scale of its initial failure is often exaggerated, however, for the sake of a good story: it qualified more as a minor disappointment than a flop. The contemporaneous reviews were also mixed (leaning towards positive with reservations about plausibility and pacing), rather than universally negative, as is sometimes implied.
  • In the 2012 Sight & Sound critics poll, Vertigo replaced Citizen Kane, the top vote getter every year since the poll’s inception in 1962, as the greatest movie of all time. (It ranked #7 on the director’s poll, where Tokyo Story took the top spot).

INDELIBLE IMAGE: It has to come from the dream sequence. Although we chose Jimmy Stewart’s head floating against a shifting kaleidoscope background to illustrate this review, the most thematically significant image is the male shadow falling, first onto a terracotta rooftop and then through a white void (this figure is incorporated into the original Saul Bass-designed poster, where it combines with the movie’s other significant motif, the spiral).

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Vertigo may be one of the most subtly strange movies out there. It’s entirely possible to watch it and see it as no more than a conventionally (if implausibly) plotted mystery. But peer into its vortex closer and you’ll see why this brightly lit but oddly dreamlike tragedy has fascinated generations of moviegoers: in its depths hides madness, illusion, necrophilia, sexual domination, a perverse longing for death, guilt, and the grinding gears of merciless fate. There’s a reason Vertigo is a cult movie. It doesn’t give up its secrets easily. Watch it again, with your weird eyes.


Re-release trailer for Vertigo

COMMENTS: Did any movie produced under the Hollywood studio system ever torture its protagonist as mercilessly as Vertigo torments Scottie Continue reading 174. VERTIGO (1958) →

Canonically Weird (The List)

173. THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (1955)

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“Dream, little one, dream,

Dream, my little one, dream.

Oh, the hunter in the night

Fills your childish heart with fright.

Fear is only a dream.

So dream, little one, dream.”

Lullaby from Night of the Hunter (lyrics by Walter Schumann)

Must See

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Billy Chapin, ,

PLOT: Harry Powell is a self-ordained Reverend during the Great Depression who makes a living by touring Appalachia and marrying widows, who disappear soon thereafter under mysterious circumstances. In prison for stealing a car, he shares a bunk with Ben Harper, a bank robber on death row who has refused to tell the authorities the location of the $10,000 he has stolen. After his release (and Harper’s execution), Rev. Powell finds the robber’s widow, and learns that his young son John knows where the fortune is hidden.

Still from Night of the Hunter (1955)
BACKGROUND:

  • The film is based on a 1953 novel by Davis Grubb. The book was a bestseller at the time of it’s release but was long out-of-print until a 2014 reprint.
  • Night of the Hunter‘s Harry Powell was based on real-life murderer Harry Powers, nicknamed “The Bluebeard of Quiet Dell,” a West Virginia-based killer responsible for the deaths of two widows and three children.
  • was Laugton’s first choice for Harry Powell but he turned down the role of the serial-killing misogynist preacher, thinking it might damage his career. Robert Mitchum had no such concerns and was eager to play the part.
  • Mitchum’s autobiography contains several inaccurate accounts of the filming, including the allegation that Laughton heavily rewrote James Agee’s original script (an accusation supported by Laughton’s widow Elsa Lanchester). Film scholars who studied Agee’s original script, which was discovered in 2003, reported that the director shot the film almost exactly as written.
  • This was the only film Charles Laughton ever directed. Although the story that he was so stung by the negative critical reaction to the movie that he never directed again is often repeated, Laughton himself claimed that he simply preferred directing theater to working on films.
  • Prior to shooting, Laughton screened silent films by D.W. Griffith to get a feel for the look he wanted for the movie.
  • In 1992, Night of the Hunter was selected for inclusion in the National Film Registry.
  • Ranked #71 in Empire Magazine’s 2008 poll of the Greatest Films of All Time. Ranked #2 on “Cahiers du Cinema”‘s list of the “100 Most Beautiful Movies.”

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Pick a single image from Night of the Hunter? It’s a fool’s errand. As much as it hurts to pass up the vision of the “good” Reverend with his right hand of love wrestling his left hand of hate, or the dreamlike serenity of Willa Harper’s final resting place, we think the most meaningful image must come from the children’s flight downriver—specifically, we chose the shot of the skiff passing before the spiderweb, as John and Pearl (temporarily) float away from their murderous stepfather’s snares.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The Night of the Hunter is such a massive achievement that we’re invoking 366 Weird Movies’ sliding scale rule: the better a movie is, the less weird it needs to be to make the List. Not that Hunter isn’t strange, by Hollywood standards (and particularly by 1950s Hollywood standards). Film archivist Robert Gitt called this expressionist/Southern Gothic hybrid “the most unusual and experimental film made in Hollywood in the 1950s.” Perhaps that is why director Charles Laughton decided to bring cinematographer Stanley Cortez, who once bragged “I was always chosen to shoot weird things,” onto the crew. Hunter is packed with shadowy, stagey, artificial shots (contemporary critics complained that the effects—both narrative and visual—were “misty”). Mixing fairy tale menace and Freudian killer fathers while masquerading as a titillating potboiler, Hunter was so unique and unexpected that it slid right under the upturned noses of viewers in the 1950s, that most conformist-minded of decades. Generations since have remembered it fondly—well, in their nightmares, at least—and it has since been elevated into the canon of great movies. And now, of great weird movies.


Original trailer for Night of the Hunter

 COMMENTS: An utterly original blend, Night of the Hunter is simultaneously a melodrama, a fairy tale, a film noir, a Southern Gothic, a Biblical Continue reading 173. THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (1955) →

Canonically Weird (The List)

172. ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW (2013)

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“Imaginate, what we can do, when Tomorrow there’s another YOU?
On the other side, we will realize
Wishes really do come, come true.

Imaginate, imaginate, imaginate, imaginate, imaginate,
like we can do, wishes really do come true…”

“Imaginate” (from the Escape from Tomorrow soundtrack)

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Randy Moore

FEATURING: Roy Abramsohn, Elena Schuber, Katelynn Rodriguez, Jack Dalton, Danielle Safady, Ahnnet Mahendru, Alison Lees-Taylor, Stass Klassen

PLOT: A day in the life of an American family vacationing at Disneyland… or Walt Disney World… or at least some Disney related theme park. Only this day starts out with Jim (Roy Abramsohn) getting a call from his boss, who tells him that there’s no job for him to return to. Things can only go downhill from there, but everything is filtered through a cheerful veneer. From a spreading cat-flu epidemic, to stalking teen-age girls, brainwashing by Park cyborgs, it just goes to show that “bad things happen everywhere”… even in the Happiest Place On Earth.

Still from Escape from Tomorrow (2013)
BACKGROUND:

  • Escape from Tomorrow was the “buzz” picture at the 2013 Sundance film festival, with most of the talk centering around the fact that much of the movie was shot surreptitiously at Disney World by the crew while posing as ordinary tourists.
  • The release of Canon’s 5D Mark II Digital SLR camera was the spur to get the movie made; the image quality was cinematic and the cameras small enough to allow a crew to shoot surreptitiously.
  • Pre-production was meticulous, every shot planned and blocked out weeks ahead of time, due to the limited window of opportunity, even to the point of charting out the position of the sun.
  • Post-production was done in South Korea, mainly due to the editor and producer’s contacts, but also to not allow word of the project to get near Disney.
  • Although it was widely assumed that Disney’s notoriously litigious legal department would act swiftly to stop distribution of Escape from Tomorrow, the corporation decided the wiser strategy to protect their brand was to ignore this small independent film rather than bringing additional attention to it.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: An immobile Jim, head replaced by a mini-Epcot dome, uniquely captures the tone and intent of the film.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:The film’s subversive commentary on Disney’s hold on the collective imagination has a solid bite that has not been previously approached as directly as it is here, by actually shooting on Disney property completely in plain sight – in the belly of the Beast, so to speak. The black and white photography also helps in making that familiar world appear alien. Plus, a mad scientist turns a guy’s head into the Epcot center.


Escape from Tomorrow original trailer

COMMENTS: “Jim, listen to me. Don’t let your imagination run wild. It’s a transitional period.”

Continue reading 172. ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW (2013) →

Canonically Weird (The List)

171. SIN CITY (2005)

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366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

“It’s pretty damn weird to eat people.”–Marv, Sin City

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: , , (“special guest director”)

FEATURING: , , , , Nick Stahl, Jaime King, , , , ,

PLOT: The movie tells three stories (with some common characters) set in the mythical Basin City: in one, a police detective risks his life to stop a child-killer. In a second, a brutal, mentally ill criminal hunts down the men he believes killed the only woman who ever showed kindness to him. A final strand tells of a suave assassin who attempts to prevent someone else’s accidental killing from turning into an all-out war between the cops, the mafia, and the self-governing prostitutes of Old Town.

Still from Sin City (2005)
BACKGROUND:

  • A fan of Frank Miller’s original series of Sin City comics, Robert Rodriguez wanted to make the movie as true to the book as possible: “a translation, not an adaptation.” The actual comics were used as the storyboards. The stories selected were “The Hard Goodbye,” “The Big Fat Kill,” and “That Yellow Bastard” as well as the short “The Customer is Always Right.”
  • Rodriguez shot the opening segment, “The Customer is Always Right,” in one day as a proof-of-concept to convince Miller that he could do justice to the art style. He then used that clip to convince actors such as Bruce Willis and Benicio Del Toro to sign on to the project.
  • Rodriguez insisted that Miller receive a co-director credit on the film, but the Directors Guild of America objected to the credit (they do not allow co-directing). He then decided to give Miller full credit, but Miller refused. Rodriguez then resigned from the Guild so the co-directing credit could remain.
  • Quentin Tarantino directed a single scene in the movie (a segment from “The Big Fat Kill” involving a conversation between the severed head of Del Toro’s “Jackie-Boy” and Clive Owen’s “Dwight”). Tarantino directed for a salary of $1 as a way to repay Rodriguez for composing music for Kill Bill: Vol. 2 for $1.
  • The movie was entirely shot on Rodriguez’s “digital backlot” (green screen studio) near his home in Austin, Texas.
  • Sin City screened in competition at Cannes and won the Technical Grand Prize.
  • Plans for a sequel (based on Miller’s “A Dame to Kill For“) were announced immediately after the film was completed; the followup feature was delayed until 2014, however.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: From the very first frame—a woman in a blood-red backless cocktail dress on a balcony staring out over a steel-grey city—Sin City‘s pulp Expressionism is consistently startling and poetic. Since we’re fascinated by the weird, we’ll select the first sight of the Yellow Bastard, the bald, satellite dish-eared pedophile killer dyed the color of French’s mustard, as our unforgettable take-home image from the movie.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: A marriage between the mythologies of film noir and violent comics, Sin City‘s bloody tales are set in an abstract urban hellscape inhabited by invulnerable tough guys and rough sexy dames. They play like the lost works of Raymond Chandler’s alternate universe grandson, written to scrape up a few bucks for a bottle of booze while he was down and out in Gotham City. With a cast of cannibal serial killers, jaundiced pedophiles and ninja hookers, the adventures of the hard-boiled demigods of Sin City are as fantastical as its random splotches of color in a monochrome landscape are visually unreal.


Original trailer for Sin City

COMMENTS: Sin City earns its “recommended” label almost solely on the basis of its visuals (bolstered by some finely weird touches), and not for its Continue reading 171. SIN CITY (2005) →