settima#Bales2023FilmChallenge June 11: Say Hi! on #SayHiDay
The #telephone as a character in
#PhillipsSmalley & #LoisWeber's nail-biting Suspense (1913) ☞ https://write.underworld.fr/settima/suspense-1913
#Bales2023FilmChallenge June 11: Say Hi! on #SayHiDay
The #telephone as a character in
#PhillipsSmalley & #LoisWeber's nail-biting Suspense (1913) ☞ https://write.underworld.fr/settima/suspense-1913
#Bales2023FilmChallenge June 11: Say Hi! on #SayHiDay
The #telephone as a character in
#PhillipsSmalley & #LoisWeber's nail-biting Suspense (1913) ☞ https://write.underworld.fr/settima/suspense-1913
Such a group telephony system is called a “party line” so I looked it up…
1956 #Mississippi, ladies and gentlemen (source https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=h_UlAAAAIBAJ&sjid=qfQFAAAAIBAJ&pg=820%2C5514413)
#Bales2023FilmChallenge June 12: Child labour in a movie on #ChildLaborDay
“This isn’t playtime, kids, it’s work.” –Charles Lamont, Baby Burlesk director
In the #BabyBurlesk Kid 'N' Hollywood [aka Kid in Hollywood] (#CharlesLamont, 1933), #ShirleyTemple plays a Hollywood hopeful called Morelegs Sweettrick, who gets her break when the star doesn't feel like showing up (kids, right? no discipline).
Oof, lots of catching up to do… But first
#Bales2023FilmChallenge June 16: A Richard for #NationalRichardDay
Richard Wagner comes in many forms in Ken Russell's Franz Liszt #musical #biopic-#fantasy extravaganza #Lisztomania (1975). A sailor Dracula is not in the least the most outrageous one.
“You know, I wish I had my board with me… even if I could just wax it once in a while.” —Lt. Doolittle
#Bales2023FilmChallenge June 17: Surfing on #InternationalSurfingDay
On the other side of outer space, far far away from crypto-fascist space operas and existentialist odysseys, is a little stoner cosmos where a small, dilapidated starship manned by long-haired freaks drifts about. This is #JohnCarpenter's Dark Star (1974).
#Bales2023FilmChallenge June 18: An #aquarium on #CleanYourAquariumDay
A middle-class Austrian family – father, mother and their ten year old daughter – live a mundane, almost ritualised life. There's work, school, social obligations. Stuff to maintain and food to prepare. Patients to see and fish to feed. Constant repetition begets chaos.
Der siebente Kontinent [The Seventh Continent ] (1989) ☞ https://write.underworld.fr/settima/der-siebente-kontinent-1989
#MichaelHaneke #film #cinema #FilMastodon #CineMastodon @film
#Bales2023FilmChallenge June 19: Cardboard boxes on #InternationalBoxDay
Inmates preoccupy themselves with making cardboard boxes. While working together, talking, gaining trust, plans for an escape unfold. Le trou [The Hole aka The Night Watch] (Jacques Becker, 1960) is based on a real #PrisonEscape and introduced by one of the men involved, Jean Keraudy ☞ https://write.underworld.fr/settima/le-trou-1960
#Bales2023FilmChallenge June 20: Filmed in #Argentina on #NationalFlagDay
A slum survives next to a railroad bridge. When the train travelling from the city shows up, the children who are old and gutsy enough run along and yell tire dié! toss me a dime! Some of them make more than their parents do. Fernando Birri's Tire dié (1958) is a sobering account of #poverty and how it's as much a part of life's schedule as a slow running train on a rickety bridge. #film #cinema #documentary @film
> Welcome home, Ethan.
#Bales2023FilmChallenge June 21: Filmed in #Arizona on #NationalArizonaDay
John Ford's The Searchers (1956)
#JohnFord #JohnWayne #NatalieWood #western #drama #USA #1950s
#Bales2023FilmChallenge June 23: A typewriter for #NationalTypewriterDay
Office worker Josef K. is brought to trial and at no point told what he is accused of, if anything. #Kafka was a trained lawyer working as an insurance agent in an impossible artifice world of reports & precise wording. W/i its extended logic a man can get perplexedly lost, either within the walls of his #office or one's bed.
#OrsonWelles' Le procès ☞ https://write.underworld.fr/settima/le-proces-1962
#Bales2023FilmChallenge #BalesBonus Joan #Crawford as Flaemmchen [“Little Flame”] in Edmund Goulding's Grand Hotel (1932)
#Bales2023FilmChallenge June 24: Someone swimming on #'SwimALapDay
In his 1973/74 A Bigger Splash, cinematographer and filmmaker #JackHazan juxtaposes #DavidHockney working on “Portrait of an Artist” with speculative scenes about the creation of the work and the disintegration of Hockney's & Schlesinger's relationship. It did create a splash, in particular in its ordinary depiction of a homosexual relationship ☞ https://write.underworld.fr/settima/a-bigger-splash-1973-74
#Bales2023FilmChallenge June 26: Sarah on #NationalSarahDay
Commissioned for a West-German TV series, filmmaker #HarunFarocki visits artist #SarahSchumann in her Berlin studio. The resulting documentary, Ein Bild von Sarah Schumann (1978), shows the process of creating one art piece over the course of nine weeks. Schumann's work in that period consists of collage portraits of women important in her life. ☞ https://write.underworld.fr/settima/ein-bild-von-sarah-schumann-1978
#Bales2023FilmChallenge June 25: Let's go camping on #NationalCampCountsDay
#JohnSturges' Jeopardy (1953) is a thrilling, reverse home invasion. The haunting photography (by Victor Milner), small, intense cast, short runtime and claustrophobic sets make for a very modern, economic #thriller. And #BarbaraStanwyck is the heroine we wouldn't see much of until decades later ☞ https://write.underworld.fr/settima/jeopardy-1953
#Bales2023FilmChallenge June 27: Someone proposes on #DecideToBeMarriedDay
Refugee Karen meets an Italian serviceman and decides to say yes when he proposes. When they go home she finds to her dismay that he's a poor Sicilian fisherman from #Stromboli, a volcanic island home to a small Catholic parish. #Rossellini's Stromboli (1950) is a peculiar melodramatic IT/US hybrid that seems to strongly dismiss the Italian aspect ☞ https://write.underworld.fr/settima/stromboli-terra-di-dio-1950
#Bales2023FilmChallenge June 28: A car crash on #NationalInsuranceAwarenessDay
A couple rushing home at night hit a cyclist. Knowing he's still alive, they opt to leave the site of the crash and never mention it again. Reports about the death of a cyclist cause a rupture; because of the couple's class differences, because they're lovers, and because no one can know about their whereabouts on the night of the accident ☞ https://write.underworld.fr/settima/muerte-de-un-ciclista-1955
#Bales2023FilmChallenge June 29: A handshake on #NationalHandshakeDay
Cheated out of their wages, two broke Americans are approached by a former prospector. There's #gold in the #SierraMadre mountains, he tells them. Seemingly character driven, #JohnHuston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) is an adventure moved by a relentless #landscape, the urge to drift, and utter #greed ☞ https://write.underworld.fr/settima/the-treasure-of-the-sierra-madre-1948
#HumphreyBogart #western #adventure #film #cinema #FilMastodon #CineMastodon @film
Wait, no one's been shaking hands with danger!?
#Bales2023FilmChallenge June 30: Driving a #Corvette on #DriveYourCorvetteToWorkDay
#CarlosSaura's Peppermint Frappé (1967) takes Vertigo with a twist of Buñuel and serves it over an anti-#Francoist tale of self-doubting machismo obsessing over The Other. Even Elena's car, American instead of a much more obvious European model, dismisses fascist Spain's perceived superiority. Indeed the Generalisimo drove a Cadillac ☞ https://write.underworld.fr/settima/peppermint-frappe-1967
#Bales2023FilmChallenge July 1: A #joke for #InternationalJokeDay
The great Garbo was known for her beauty, her coolness, her tragedy, everything but her laughter. So typecast she became that the tagline for *Ninotchka* (1939) – Garbo laughs! – is a #joke in itself.
Penned by the great #BillyWilder, the Ernst #Lubitsch directed comedy unexpectedly revived #Garbo's career, who by the time 1938 came around had become box office poison.
And the joke? Well… ☞ https://write.underworld.fr/settima/ninotchka-1939
Woodrow Truesmith
