Thursday’s Palace #3: Les Arènes de Chaillot (CLOSED BY PARIS POLICE DEPT.)

On the Internet, you should mark your trail with bread crumbs, which wouldn’t work in the catacombs of Paris (all those hungry rats...). Here is my trail of crumbs leading from a Wikipedia “Did you know...” article which caught my eye yesterday, to today’s rather unusual featured Movie Palace:
a) The Covering of the Senne River and urban renewal in 19th Century Brussels. Which links to Wiki’s entry on
b) Haussmann's renovation of Paris which in turn reminded me of the
c) Paris catacombs. Which in turn linked to
d) this item, which is the coolest thing I‘ve discovered on the Internet this year bar none. A mysterious, clandestine cinema in the bowels of Paris, complete with bar, kitchen (couscous only), plumbing, electricity and closed-circuit TV to watch for ze copairs. The cinematheque of my dreams. And ze copairs returned the next day only to find the space abandoned, hastily emptied except for a note which read “DON’T TRY TO FIND US.”

The secret cinephiles turn out to be a group of urban explorers known as La Mexicaine De Perforation (The Mexican Perforation). Further Googling turned up a little more information on the Perfs and their cinema lair. Much of the Parisian Catacombs was carved out of limestone, a Roman-era quarry for the foundations of Paris itself. The location of the Perfs’ cinema was choice, and quite deliberate: a subterranean chamber mere meters from the legendary “above-ground” palace of French cinema, La Cinémathèque Française which is itself also built on the foundations of le Palais de Chaillot. This was pointed out by filmaker and Perf spokesman Lazar Kunstmann in a 2004 interview with Greg of greg.org.

For all their resourcefulness, secrecy and flouting of authority, La Mexicaine De Perforation seem to be no more subversive or dangerous to society at large than your average nihilistic film nuts, judging from their film programs, which Greg posts here. Naturally they show a preference for films about the hidden, clandestine and subterranean. Good stuff, with enough obscure selections to keep me Googling for some time (1996's Moebius by director Gustavo Mosquera sounds particularly intriguing — a cross between The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 and Aronofsky's π — and currently unavailable in the U.S. in any format). Since the the posted programs only cover their 2003 and 2004 “seasons” (2004's “Urbex Movie” series was interrupted by the police raid), I wonder whether they had ever previously had the chance to screen the 1935James Whale horror classic Bride of Frankenstein. The dinner scene between the Monster and the sinister Dr. Praetorius in the underground crypt would have been pitch perfect for the skeleton-jammed Parisisan catacombs:

Dr. Pretorius: Do you know who Henry Frankenstein is, and who you are?
The Monster: Yes, I know. Made me from dead. I love dead... hate living.
Dr. Pretorius (peering happily around at the skulls and bones): You are wise in your generation. We must have a long talk, and then I have an important call to make.

PHOTO CAPTIONS/CREDITS
Top: Bones from the old Magdeleine Cemetery deposited in the Catacombs in 1859 (Wikipedia)
Bottom: possible image of Les Arènes de Chaillot cinema (thanks to willamina at Stars in the Gutter. Originally found at Answers.com, though, oddly, not at Wikipedia)

Walter Salles: Road Movies in the Rearview Mirror

Walter Salles, the director of the upcoming film adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, penned a nice essay on the history of the road movie which appears in today’s New York Times Magazine. In it, he traces its origins, first back to Homer’s Odyssey, then, at the prompting of Wim Wenders, further back to “our nomadic roots, in mankind’s primal need to leave an account of its passage on earth,” making the cave paintings at Lascaux and Altamira the earliest trace of the narrative impulse.

I suppose that ultimately that would depend on whether the cave paintings function as documents of Cro-Magnon life as well as ritual tools. Salle himself draws an interesting parallel between road movies and documentary film: “The road movie is not the domain of large cranes or steady-cams. On the contrary, the camera needs to remain in unison with characters who are in continual motion — a motion that shouldn’t be controlled. The road movie tends, therefore, to be driven by a sense of immediacy that is not dissimilar from that of a documentary film.” This naturally dovetails with the reports of his On the Road being filmed with hand-held cameras (which in turn led me to draw parallels between Kerouac’s spontaneous prose and the mumblecore aesthetic in a previous post).

Salle must know what he's talking about, being the director of two very individual and critically well-received road movies, 1998’s Central Station and 2004’s The Motorcycle Diaries. “In doing different road movies, I also came to realize that a good screenplay grants you more freedom to improvise than a weak one. It’s like jazz: the better the melody, the easier it is to wander away from it, because it will also be easier to return to it later.” I like how Salles slips in another Kerouac trademark here, jazz as the essence of improvisation, only unlike Kerouac he emphasizes the importance of the core melody, or theme. Which parallels, interestingly enough what screenwriter champion David Kipen says (and which I reference in another recent post): a director without a strong screenplay may very find himself or herself on some very questionable back roads.
PHOTO CREDIT: Wim Wenders

Thursday’s Palace #2: The Loew’s Jersey

This is my second post in the last 24 hours to feature a Loew’s Wonder Theater; scroll below for a glimpse of Manhattan’s 175th Street Theater as re-purposed by Reverend Ike. I'll get around eventually to featuring the three remaining ones (the Paradise in the Bronx, the Valencia in Queens, the Kings in Brooklyn) in future Thursday’s Palace posts, as they have all miraculously survived the test of time — but what is truly special about the Jersey is that it's the only one still actively screening films.

In an era which has seen the demise of nearly all the pre-cineplex movie houses in New York City, the Loew’s Jersey is a precious gem for New Yorkers; a mere 15 minute PATH train ride from downtown Manhattan across the Hudson, it offers a novel alternative for busy people who've only been able to catch Golden Age classics on the Turner channel or through a Netflix queue. It was a treat for me to see and hearThe Maltese Falcon there a couple of years ago; the cathedral vastness of the theater, its incredible ornamentation and the sheer sound reverb (Bogie’s voice, gunshots booming through the space and in your gut) added up to a viscerally different movie experience. I even liked the heavy pop on the soundtrack at each reel change.

This Saturday November 10, they are hosting an 80th anniversary screening of The Jazz Singer, the very first talkie and an notorious touchstone for enduring racial stereotypes in American popular culture. It will be accompanied by a presentation in conjunction with the Afro-American Historical & Cultural Society of Jersey City. Next week on November 16th and 17th the Jersey will be screening a trio of noir thrillers by director Otto Preminger: Where the Sidewalk Ends starring Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney, Angel Face with Robert Mitchum and Jean Simmons, and last but not least the classic Laura, again with Tierney and Andrews.

Visit the Friends of the Loew’s website for more information on these shows as well as the history of the theater and the valiant/gargantuan efforts by a community of volunteers to salvage it in the face of overwhelming red tape and politics: something of a noir thriller in its own right.


SITES LINKED TO IN THIS POST:
JaySpace, Bright Lights After Dark, Noir of the Week

From Plato’s Cave to Ike’s Church

Most of my quasi-religious experiences have happened in movie theaters, not churches. It’s no mystery, really. One sits in the dark, preferably a cavernous space, where one senses the presence of other souls, only you and they are focused on the visions before you, as intimate as dream, or memory. Or, in the case of the popular re-tellings of the Exodus story, as intimate as God speaking to you from out of a Burning Bush.

Actually, the first time I heard God at the movies He was awesome and terrifying. It was the late 60s, and my father had taken me to see a holiday revival of De Mille’s The Ten Commandments at the Loews Paradise on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, one of the five Loews Wonder Theaters in the New York area. The decor of the place was impossibly lavish, even pagan. It was an “atmospheric” movie palace, meaning that the vast barrel-vault ceiling of the auditorium was designed to imitate the open sky, a deep blue which faded to night when the show started, tiny electric lights winking on to evoke the stars. The audience of thousands sat in the midst of a ruined Roman villa, its broken columns silhouetted against the artificial twilight along the walls on either side. My dad and I sat in the lower of two balconies piled high above the orchestra seats. After the film was over and the house lights went up, or rather, when the artificial dawn arrived, I looked down over the brass rail on the teeming, milling masses below. It was a sea of people, like De Mille’s Israelites, huddling under the towering walls of water in the cleft of the Red Sea.

That was the point of the Wonder Theaters. You didn't go to the Paradise for Cassavetes’ earthbound human dramas, but for De Mille's spectacle, for Ford's sweeping vistas, even for the tortured camera angles of Hitchcock. You went to have an out-of-body, almost spiritual experience, helped along by the temporal displacement of being in an ancient outdoor ruin, or a pagan temple. The movie palaces of the 1920s were going for the vestigial memories of mankind unreeling their imaginations in ritual spaces, what was known as theater to the ancient Greeks but which still had an odor of burnt offerings. It's no accident that the earliest movie theaters, the nickelodeon arcades and bijous, were essentially magical caves.


In fact, the very history of the 20th Century movie theater resembles a super-compressed history of western religion: the caves and grottos gave way to lavish temples and imperial palaces, which fell into neglect and ruin during the Dark Ages of the Great Depression. Many of the palaces were razed to the ground to make way for purely secular office towers, but a few, including some of New York's Wonder Theaters, survived to become places of Christian worship.

The transcendent sensory experience of early 20th Century American moviegoing found a ready counterpart in the postwar religious revival. Reverend Ike, for instance, purchased the Loews 175th Street Theater (see picture at the top of the post) and transformed it into his United Palace Church, keeping this most elaborate of the Wonder Theaters in a state of near perfect preservation. Its gilded interiors are an appropriate setting for exalted states, whether of enthralled movie audiences or ecstatic evangelicals. Today, it is rare to see a movie in such grand surroundings; but I still believe the big screen offers a better chance at epiphany than our home theaters, laptops and iPods, the Lumiere Manifesto notwithstanding.

The second time I heard God at the the movies, it was in the featureless black box of a modern multiplex. His voice was gentle and soothing. Once again he called to Moses from the Burning Bush, but this time it he was a God of persuasion, not of command. De Mille's blinding atomic bush had become a gently iridescent shrub. "Moses," God whispered, almost inaudible in the desert breezes. And while I don't consider myself a religious person, per se, I wept. Because of the intimacy of scale, it was a powerful little scene in an otherwise run-of-the-mill animated musical (Dreamworks’ The Prince of Egypt): on the big screen, in that dark room, the message is aimed right at you, only at you.

POSTSCRIPT
While researching this post, I found a clip of the scene on YouTube ... only to find no trace of the original power. The flame, it seems, burns brightest in the temple.

Thanks to Strange Culture for hosting the Film + Faith Blogathon, November 7-9, 2007.

The Schreibers Strike!

“The writer is the most important person in Hollywood. But we must never tell the sons of bitches.”
– Irving G. Thalberg, legendary production honcho at Universal and MGM

Every few years the film industry feels the wrath of its unsung auteurs — or schreibers, as author David Kipen calls them. We are now in the midst of a new screenwriters strike, and the effect has been immediate, at least on television, as the late night talk shows (scripted — who knew?) go into reruns. I think this is as good a time as any to recommend Kipen's little manifesto The Schreiber Theory, which bestows ultimate creative ownership of a film on the screenwriter — a formal refutation of the auteur theory (director-as-auteur) popularized by American film critic Andrew Sarris, which of course is as solid as the theory of evolution amongst film critics and fans alike. The few writers with any real recognition or following are themselves directors or have, like David Mamet, made a name for themselves outside of film altogether.

Needless to say Kipen's thesis is controversial (even "perverse" as a film/culture critic friend has suggested). Yet his detractors seem to brandish the same pantheon figures (Hitchcock, Ford, Fellini, Bergman) in defense of the auteur theory. One could counter that these are in essence dependable "blue-chip" directors, who would never even begin to plan a film without a solid script. It's worth looking at Kipen's examples of celebrated directors who ultimately fall from grace through acts of hubris such as coming to rely on style over content, or employing editor as fixer and partner-in-crime. Ultimately, even if you don't agree with the Schreiber Theory, Kipen's index at the back of the book listing classic studio films by screenwriter rather than director is a fascinating cross-reference of Hollywood history and will have a salutary effect on your Netflix queue.

The Writers Guild of America's list of 101 Greatest Screenplays