The high point of cinema so far has been the American films made between the late 1960s and the early 1980s. Roughly speaking, these dates constitute the New Hollywood period when failing studios turned to young, maverick directors influenced by the anarchistic re-making of genre cinema by European directors like Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut. Movies like Easy Rider, Bonnie and Clyde and Raging Bull are emblematic of this period of high art on the big screen where films about bikers, boxers and beautiful killers defied expectations while often also bringing boffo box office.

Another great American flick of the 1970′s is Alan Parker’s Midnight Express. Parker is a Brit, but the film was distributed by Columbia and written by the great Oliver Stone who won a screenwriting Oscar for adapting Billy Hayes’ memoir of getting arrested for hashish smuggling and being locked-up in a Turkish prison. Stone’s script is a brutal document and Parker puts his audience in Billy’s skin behind bars and bereft of hope. Brad Davis is unforgettable as Billy and while the film was shot in a Maltese fort the depictions of the cruelty of Turkish justice are so savage and real-seeming that Midnight Express was screened as a cautionary tale for U.S. Navy sailors visiting Turkey for years after the film’s release.

Celebrating 40 years of Midnight Express — and its amazing Giorgio Moroder soundtrack — here’s an episode of Locked Up Abroad featuring the real Billy Hayes and the harrowing true story of his time in Turkey…

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Last week I finally got around to posting about Jean-Luc Godard’s 87th birthday, and today Open Culture reminded me how rich the master’s collection of odds-and-ends shorts and clips can be. In 1968, Godard shot Jefferson Airplane performing live on a rooftop in Manhattan. Godard’s film features a performance of “The House at Pooneil Corners,” and footage of the band’s inevitable arrest. Here’s a bit from Open Culture and my favorite living film critic, Richard Brody…

“He took over from the specialists and operated the camera from the window of Leacock-Pennebaker’s office on West Forty-fifth street, shooting the band on the roof of the Schuyler Hotel across the street. (Pennebaker recalled him to be an amateurish cameraman who could not avoid the beginner’s pitfall of frequent zooming in and out.) The performance took place without a permit, at standard rock volume: as singer Grace Slick later wrote, “We did it, deciding that the cost of getting out of jail would be less than hiring a publicist…”

Amateurish or not, a piece of the footage has surfaced on YouTube. Listen to the Airplane perform “The House at Pooneil Corners,” watch Godard’s dramatic swings of focus and zoom as he attempts to convey the spectacle of the band and the spectacle of countless surprised Manhattanites at once, and think for yourself about this peculiar intersection of two bold lines in the era’s alternative zeitgeist. As Jefferson Airplane co-founder Paul Kantner said in a 1986 interview, “Just for a while there, maybe for about 25 minutes in 1967, everything was perfect.” But these seven minutes in November 1968, from opening shouts to inevitable arrest, don’t seem so dull themselves.

Check out the short here…

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Jean-Luc Godard celebrated his 87th birthday on December 3 and even though I read a handful of articles and re-tweeted tweet I saw about the master I’m only getting around to mentioning it here. Maybe I was slow to this task because GODARD seems too massive for a quick mention in a blog post. He’s absolutely one of my favorite film directors and movies like Pierrot, Le Feu have had a direct impact on my own creating. While I love the frenzied physicality of Oliver Stone in his prime, and I’m in an eternal/fraternal wrestling match with John Cassavetes for the rest of my life, Godard’s marriage of incisive vision, and sensuous imagery and editing gives us a stylized cinema of cool that turns a critical eye back on the camera and even on the audience. I saw Godard’s 3D film Goodbye to Language the one time it screened in Nashville at the Nashville Film Festival back in 2015. A sampling of the critical response following the movie’s 2014 premiere at Cannes includes Antoine De Baecque writing that the film remained faithful to the ideals of the French New Wave by being “absolutely contemporary” and telling the truth of the modern age. While Éric Neuhoff of Le Figaro wrote that Godard was an “old senile adolescent” who had “lost his inspiration” and “has learned nothing about love, the couple [or] society”, and mocked the film’s fifteen-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival. Would you believe that they’re both right?

Here is Godard with Dick Cavett in a warm and charming interview from 1980.

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Fifty-five years ago this spring, in 1960, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless changed cinema forever. Breathless wasn’t the first film of the French New Wave, but it was the first popular hit that brought the energy of the new filmmaking to a global audience, impacting American cinema and paving the way for our own New American Cinema of the mid-1960′s through the 1970′s.

Here’s a great BBC doc that provides a thorough 101 on some of the most exhilarating, and visually energized films ever made. It also goes on to document key films of the New American Cinema like Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider and Taxi Driver that nod back to Godard, Truffaut and the New Wave films that inspired them…

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This year we mark the 50th anniversary of Jean-Luc Godard’s sci-fi thriller, Alphaville. The futuristic-seeming settings and the presence of actor Eddie Constantine assure us that this is indeed a sci-fi thriller, but this is a Godard film so its also a movie about movies. Here’s the word from the British Film Institute…

While the narrative is formulaic, combining a series of conventions from several genres (science fiction, film noir, crime films), Godard’s imagery is dense with references to history and cultural texts and often anti-illusionist. If Godard’s nouvelle vague colleague François Truffaut failed to make a completely satisfying interpretation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966) the following year, Godard succeeds in making Brechtian science fiction with social satire and critique.

Pulp-fiction secret agent Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine), a character originally created by British writer Peter Cheyney and which Constantine had already played in many films (he also reappears as Caution in Godard’s later Germany Year 90 Nine Zero (1991), travels to the dystopian, technocratic world of Alphaville – a night’s drive through ‘sidereal space’ in his Ford Galaxie. He poses as a journalist from the ‘Outlands’ with a secret mission to neutralise the mastermind of Alphaville, Professor von Braun (Howard Vernon), and destroy Alpha 60, the super-computer that controls the city and its people, imposing its logical orientation on all aspects of social organisation. Individualism has been all but eliminated in the logical world of Alphaville. Thus in Alphaville emotion is forbidden, and anyone who reveals emotional behaviour, such as weeping, is arrested and executed in public spectacles.

As is typical of Godard’s early work, the story is a pretext for an investigation of a variety of artistic, philosophical and political issues, including the nature and function of art, the power of language and the relation of ideology and culture – issues that came increasingly to the fore as Godard’s career grew more overtly political in the late 1960s.

The film anticipates Godard’s subsequent abandonment of narrative in favour of a more experimental approach, encouraging viewers to question how film images signify, thus positioning us in direct opposition to the citizens of Alphaville, who are outlawed from asking ‘Why?’ Because Alpha 60 is omnipresent and omniscient in Alphaville, the computer’s voice periodically acts as a voice-of-God narrator. And despite the film’s futuristic setting, Godard uses no special effects and no sets, but only actual locations in Paris, the city’s modern (at the time) glass and concrete architecture convincingly signifying its dystopian vision. The seemingly endless corridors of office buildings through which Raoul Coutard’s camera tracks indicates just how impersonal the world had already become.

Here is British writer and film producer Colin McCabe recalling this landmark film…

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Anticipating the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, here’s a look back to a super project dreamed up by Wim Wenders at the festival way back in 1982: Room 666 is a documentary project that profiles a number of prominent filmmakers using a static camera in room 666 of the Hotel Martinez. According to the Wiki…

Each director is given one 16 mm reel (approximately 11 minutes) to answer the questions. The principal question asked was, “Is cinema a language about to get lost, an art about to die?” Wenders then edited this footage and added an introduction.

Directors interviewed include Steven Spielberg, Jean-Luc Godard, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who died less than a month after filming. The film was later screened out of competition at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival.

This year’s Cannes Film Festival will get underway on May 13. In the meantime, here’s Room 666…

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Been having some trouble sleeping lately. Actually, I’ve been falling right to sleep, but I keep waking up in the middle of the night for an hour or so with some minor nightmare that seems connected to the anxiousness I feel upon fully waking. Of course, the only thing to do is to make myself comfortable, relax and be confident that sleep will come.

That would be the smartest option, and it’s ultimately what happens once my eyes get tired again and I’m sure that I can get my ticket to dreamland punched. However, before that, I’ve been spending my early morning hours adding stories to the Flipboard magazine I’ve been curating with Joseph Matheny and David Metcalfe.

It’s a blast working with such an interesting team as everybody is always turning up some great little nugget of avant garde, countercultural import, and today was no exception. Joseph Matheny posted a couple of stories about French philosopher, writer, filmmaker, activist and revolutionary, Guy Debord who shot himself in the heart 20 years ago in 1994. Here’s a remembrance from Verso…

He is now something of a canonical figure in literature, cinema and the art world. It has become commonplace to refer to the media sphere as a spectacle, and the cut and mix practices of today’s aesthetics appeals to the apparently similar Situationist practice of détournement for legitimation. He has been, as he might say, recuperated back in to spectacular commodity production. Such is the fate of all avant-gardes…

Debord’s work is quite deservedly canonized. His writing has an austerity and beauty all its own. His short autobiographical text Panegyric is a masterpiece. His last work on film, In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni is a highpoint in avant-garde cinema. The movement he co-founded, the Situationist International, endured for some fifteen years and involved some remarkable collaborators, such as Michèle Bernstein, Asger Jorn, Constant and Raoul Vanegeim, whose work is also celebrated and studied…

It was apparent to Debord that the capitalism of postwar France was a new and strange kind of commodity economy, one in which even the parties and trade unions of the working class had become mere images of themselves. If there was a challenge to the spectacle it might come from boredom with the paltry pleasures of commodified life. And come it did, most famously as ‘May 1968’. Usually thought of as a student revolt, it was also one of the biggest general strikes in history.

The revolution against the spectacle did not come to pass. By 1972 Debord had wound up the Situationist International and gone into a kind of internal exile. His later work has a tone of revolutionary nostalgia, intended not to mythologize past struggles but more to give courage to those to come to look to their own situation and find what might be possible.

Debord’s first film was an experimental adaptation of Society of the Spectacle made from found footage. Here’s the movie…

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Today we remember American actress Jean Seberg who was born on this day in 1938. Seberg isn’t a household name, but her iconic turn as an unlikely femme fatale in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless made her a screen immortal even if her activism and the FBI harassment it attracted proved she was all-too-human.

Here’s Roger Ebert‘s take on this fascinating, impressionistic documentary about the actress, From the Journals of Jean Seberg…

If it is true, as Jean-Luc Godard once said, that “cinema history is the history of boys photographing girls,” then one task of movie historians should be to find out what happened to the girls in the process. Mark Rappaport, who uses the Godard quote in his new film “From the Journals of Jean Seberg,” takes it to heart in a unique way. He presents Seberg as the narrator of her own life.

Some of it may be based on things she said or thought. Most of it, incon women in the movies, politics, and her fellow actresses, is invention. Rappaport’s mixture of fact and fiction is more audacious than Oliver Stone’s “Nixon” – but the movie makes it perfectly clear that it is using both history and imagination, and the result is a tough, intelligent look at the grueling job of being one of those girls photographed by the boys.

Here’s the film…

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25 years ago Charles Bukowski published Hollywood — the poet’s fictional account of adapting the screenplay of his novel Barfly for film.

This all gets a little meta, but Buk wrote a screenplay adaptation of his novel and then adapted his experience of making the Barbet Schroeder film — featuring Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway — into a book.

Hollywood tells the hilarious story of Bukowski’s trying to navigate the machinations of the star system of La La Land in a voice that could only be his own. Here’s the Wiki…

The novel is a Roman à clef, in which Bukowski uses the following names as pseudonyms for the fictionalized versions of people with whom he worked on the movie Barfly:
Mickey Rourke, the lead actor in the film, is named Jack Bledsoe.
Faye Dunaway, the lead actress in the film, is named Francine Bowers.
Barbet Schroeder, the director of the film, is named Jon Pinchot.
He also references people he met in Hollywood during his time working on the movie:
Jean-Luc Godard is named Jon-Luc Modard.
Steve Baës is named Francois Racine
Dennis Hopper is named Mack Austin
Sean Penn is named Tom Pell
Norman Mailer is named Victor Norman
David Lynch is named Manz Loeb
Isabella Rossellini is named Rosalind Bonelli
Werner Herzog is named Wenner Zergog
Taylor Hackford is Hector Blackford

Here is a short documentary about the making of Barfly…

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My favorite photography book of 2013 was probably Steve Schapiro’s Taxi Driver, but one of the most surprising was Terry O’Neill’s eponymous career retrospective published by ACC Editions.

O’Neill first made his mark in the 1960′s. The young British photographer snapped everyone from The Beatles to The Stones to Janis Joplin to Jean Luc Godard’s then-muse, Anna Karina. The stunning black-and-white portrait of Brigitte Bardot that graces the book’s cover is pure O’Neill — an iconic image of celebrity from the era he helped to define.

However, in another sense, Bardot’s sexy, open lips barely balancing a raggedy cigar seem posed in light of the fact that O’Neill helped to pioneer a more candid, off-the-cuff style of star-snapping that stripped away glamor and glitz in favor of instants of intimacy. And while some contemporary photographers use similar techniques to demean their subjects, O’Neill caught rock stars backstage and film icons in their trailers in a manner that brought human depth to their two-dimensional images.

Given the hit-and-run paparazzi photographs we see today, O’Neill’s images stand-out for their proximity to their subjects and the details that nearness reveals. An essay by fashion editor and music author Dylan Jones recounts O’Neill’s days as a young drummer in a jazz band. As the photographer recalls, “When I was playing jazz I was always part of the rhythm section…while the stars were up front, so I got accustomed to dealing with egos…” Perhaps that’s the key to O’Neill’s success: a sense of timing, and the good discretion to capture the limelight by staying out of it.

Here’s O’Neill at an exhibition of his work, speaking with the Irish Examiner about his early days as a musician and a photographer:

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