Two from the toob

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uRNA3SgUG8&]

Lena Horne in Now (1965) by Santiago Álvarez

Now (1965) is the title of a short subject directed by Cuban filmmaker Santiago Álvarez, about racial discrimination towards black people and ensuing race riots in the United States. The propaganda/political film uses morgue photos and newsreel footage and is narrated by Lena Horne by way of a song (words set to the ultimate world music classic “Hava Nagila“) entitled “Now is the Time.”

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RA3NRe5kgak]

L’Inferno by Giuseppe de Liguoro with added music by Zbigniew Preisner

L’Inferno is a 1911 silent film by Giuseppe de Liguoro, loosely adapted from Dante‘s The Divine Comedy and presented to a Parisian public by Ricciotto Canudo in the same year to inaugurate “The Birth of the Sixth Art“.

8 thoughts on “Two from the toob”

  1. lichanos

    This film is absolutely wonderful! Like seeing a Dore come to life. Your wiki write up says it was a huge success, but I wonder what went through the minds of the audience members? Such images and effects were so new – to see THE DIVINE COMEDY in motion! We are so used to it now – did they grow accustomed to it quickly then?

  2. jahsonic

    … Dore come to life

    I love this analogy, it’s exactly what this film is about Doré in motion.

    Which reminds me of a previous discussion we’ve had on reading vs. viewing and questions of filmability and unfilmability.

    The current reading experience should be such (imo) that it cannot be duplicated in film (and vice versa).

    Jan

  3. lichanos

    I have owned this image by Dore since college (a 3rd edition print, I believe)

    http://triggur.org/inferno/big/044.jpg

    It shows flatterers and seducers drowning in their excrement. (Canto XVIII) Notice the echoes of the Medici tomb by Michaelangelo. So much for art history – I was delighted to see the imagery come alive in the film!

    Re. filmability…once again, I don’t get it. Anything is filmable as long as you accept that nothing is. That is, of course a film is a different work than the book – they are never equivalent, so, anything readable can be made into a film. I can’t see how ANY reading experience could be duplicated in film. The best you can do – and this is doing a LOT – is to make a work that is just as valuable according to whatever aesthetic criteria you employ. Nobody who loves literature would say that any film is the SAME as the book that inspired it…only that they enjoyed it just as much.

    Personally, I thought “Cock and Bull” while true to the Shandean spirit in some ways, was more about itself than that spirit or that book, so I give it a thumbs down. I didn’t say it was EASY to film anything – certainly not the great, inimitable, Tristram Shandy!

  4. jahsonic

    I had been waiting to see Cock and Bull for a long time but was disappointed like yourself.

    Filmability: I think that the advent of film has changed the reading experience, as well as the novels being produced since.

    But then again, maybe I am just one of those ‘cheating’ on classic novels.

    The book I’d like to see most of all in film is Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis.

    Jan

  6. lichanos

    Re: NOW

    Race is still central to American politics – the legacy of Reconstruction lives on. If it weren’t for the Jim Crow south, the religous right would never have taken power these last 25 years. I am hopeful that its heyday is past.

  7. jahsonic

    …I’m waiting on Gravity’s Rainbow, The Movie…

    Me too! I hear it’s a very difficult read, viewing it must be a lot easier and get you at least acquainted with its ideas and sensibilities.

    Thanks for the Jim Crow pointer, I was unfamiliar with the concept.

    Race seems more and more a topic in European politics these days, witness the Geert Wilders thing http://www.fitnathemovie.com/:

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    See the film here

  8. lichanos

    A lot of Americans don’t know about Jim Crow either, I think.

    Is controversy about Islam really about race? Nevertheless, I’m sure that race per se is a topic in Europe now among some.

    I recently read Europa, Europa, the English translation of the memoir on which the 1990 film was based. I have never been so struck by the similarity of racial segregation in America to the 1960s with the ideology of the Nazis.

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