‘Flames of Wrath’ and the Pioneering African-American Women of Silent Cinema

Beyond the Classics is a bi-weekly column in which Emily Kubincanek highlights lesser-known old movies and examines what makes them memorable. In this installment, she highlights the silent cinema pioneer Maria P. Williams and her film Flames of Wrath. 

---

Recognition for African Americans who shaped early Hollywood cinema has only come about recently. However, while male African-American filmmakers such as Oscar Micheaux are finally getting their due attention, female African-American filmmakers are still vastly underappreciated. Black women have had their hand in nearly every facet of filmmaking from at least the 1920s, but there is still very little research or historical discussion on them and their work.

Maria P. Williams is one filmmaker who illustrates how Black women succeeded in making films when Hollywood wanted to exclude them and why these women need to become a household name. Her first and only film, Flames of Wrath, remains a historical achievement, and her life is just as fascinating as her legacy.

Williams was born Maria P. Morris in Versailles, Missouri, in 1866. Not much is documented about her early life, but it is believed that she was a schoolteacher in the late 1800s as a young woman. While teaching, she traveled around the state of Kansas giving speeches and lectures on “topics of the day,” including politics and social justice.

She finally settled permanently in Kansas City and shifted towards using newspapers as her outlet for social change. She edited the weekly paper New Era as the editor-in-chief. This led her to then edit and publish her own newspaper called Women’s Voice from 1896 to around 1900. Like her lectures, Women’s Voice published stories and essays on “timely topics,” including the freedom of Cuba during the Spanish-American War in 1898.

At the turn of the century, Williams continued to remain an active member of Kansas City’s political area, as she published a short pamphlet on social issues titled “My Work and Public Sentiment” in 1916. Sadly, only the first page is available online through the New York Public Library’s digital collections. This page does show that she discusses her personal life in this pamphlet and was a national organizer for The Good Citizens League.

A portion of the money she made off of the pamphlet went to “the suppression of crime among Negros.” What we do know about Williams is that she was a self-sufficient woman dedicated to creating a difference in her community and spearhead a lot of progressive movements.

The same year she published her pamphlet, she married Jesse L. Williams, an African-American entrepreneur who owned several businesses in Kansas City. These included a movie theater, which Maria managed along with her husband. Their connection to the distribution and release of films for African-American audiences helped her achieve her goal of making her own film.

The couple created a production company, Western Film Producing Co., so that they could distribute the film she wanted to make. Jesse was the president of the company, while Maria served as the secretary and treasurer according to records documenting the company. It is obvious that she did much more than what is written down, though, so her control of her and her husband’s businesses could have been more than what we know.

In 1923, the Western Film Producing Co. released Flames of Wrath, a mystery drama film consisting of five reels and described as a film “written, acted and produced entirely by colored people.” Maria P. Williams is officially credited as writer, producer, and actor in the movie, but her responsibilities for the project could have extended further than that.

The film begins with the murder and robbing of P.C. Gordon. The diamond ring he bought for his wife’s birthday is taken, and one of the thieves, C. Dates, is arrested. A female prosecutor, played by Williams, presents a damning case for Dates, and he is sentenced to ten years in jail. He escapes prison and searches for the ring he buried in a park. But he’s too late. A boy playing in the lot where Dates buried the ring found it and gave it to his older brother, Guy.

Guy shows the ring to a no-good lawyer named William Jackson, who devises his own plan to steal the ring. William’s stenographer, Pauline, gets wind of his scheme, but he fires her before she can get him in trouble. Dates still evades capture years later, and William gains power in the town when he is elected district attorney. He orders the arrest of Guy as revenge for never getting to steal his ring, but with Pauline’s help, Guy is proven innocent. Dates finally gives up on life on the run and he turns himself in, only to be pardoned.

Jesse and Maria Williams knew how to distribute their film to African-American theaters, and Flames of Wrath played in the southeastern US, but much of what we know about the movie stops there. It was considered lost for decades until the UCLA Young Research Library obtained a single frame of the movie in the acquisition of George P. Johnson‘s papers in 1992. Strangely, the Online Archive of California describes Flames of Wrath as a Western, so perhaps there is more to the plot than we know.

Johnson was an African-American writer, producer, and distributor himself from 1916 to 1923, and his collection at UCLA is full of some of the few photographs we have of African Americans in silent cinema. While not being able to watch Maria P. Williams’ film now is a huge loss, it is remarkable that a single frame is able to be preserved as a record of a time so hard to find physical evidence of.

Williams never made another film that we know of after Flames of Wrath. Her husband died in 1923 after they released their film, and she soon remarried. Historians believe she no longer made films after her husband passed, but much of her life after that is still unknown.

In January of 1932, Williams was approached by a stranger who needed help for their sick brother. They lured Williams out of her house but then shot her and left her on the side of the road. She was sixty-six when she was murdered, and to this day, her killer(s) has never been identified. For a woman who did such pioneering social justice work and filmmaking without much remembrance, this tragic death only contributed to her being mostly forgotten.

Thanks to historians including Aimee Dixon Anthony, Kyna Morgan, and Yvonne Welbon, we have not lost Maria P. Williams and other early African-American female filmmakers to the sands of time. They have uncovered what we know about women like Williams and Tressie Souders as well as the films they made.

In researching these women, historians have found that women married to African-American men in silent cinema had a larger hand in their films than they have been given credit for. Women like Eloyce King Patrick Gist and Alice B. Russell wrote, produced, and even directed some of the movies their respective husbands, James Gist and Oscar Micheaux, are known for today.

African-American press in the 1920s was excited to credit women as being “the first African-American woman to…” in filmmaking, but pinning down the true first woman of color in American cinema is difficult. Women could have aided their husbands without credit, and their stories have not been discovered yet.

Women who did make films at this time were not doing so together in one place. African-American women were making films independently from cinema hubs in Hollywood and New York. They stretched from Kansas City to Washington DC, and they were not largely in communication with one another. This isolation and vague record of their work make it hard to find when they really began.

On top of that, the roles of director and producer were not as strictly defined as they are today or even just a decade later in the 1930s. Oftentimes, filmmakers had duties that could have been considered directing or producing but only credited themselves in one role. The Norfolk Journal and Guide lauded Souders as the first African-American woman to direct a film in 1922 with her film A Woman’s Error. It is now believed that Souders might have done the work of both a director and producer. However, a year later, the same publication credited Williams as the first African-American woman to produce a film.

Regardless of their true order or defined roles, Williams, Souders, and the other female filmmakers of color had a huge impact on African-American silent films of the 1910s and 1920s. They pioneered an era of cinema that as a whole is largely lost in time, and even more scarce than their white counterparts. Their contributions to film may have been buried for decades, but we can still unearth their stories today.

Maria P. Williams was a remarkable writer, teacher, activist, and filmmaker. Her life and work deserve to be remembered alongside the African-American men and the white filmmakers of silent cinema. She and other women filmmakers entertained audiences of color by making films about crime, tragedy, family, and empathy, without the help of anyone else. That in itself is worthy of appreciation.

Header image from The New York Public Library via their Digital Collections site.

Read More

How They Shot the Explosive Pole Jump Stunt in ‘Police Story’

Welcome to How’d They Do That? — a bi-monthly column that unpacks moments of movie magic and celebrates the technical wizards who pulled them off. This entry explains how Jackie Chan did the shopping mall pole stunt in Police Story.

---

Without mincing words: Police Story (1985) is the pinnacle of Jackie Chan‘s career.

After three failed attempts to break into Hollywood, Chan attacked Police Story with a vengeance. His most recent Western foray, The Protector, had outfitted Chan as a serious, gun-wielding Dirty Harry-type. But just as Chan wasn’t Bruce Lee…he also wasn’t Dirty Harry. Those molds weren’t his. And Police Story was his opportunity to clarify what kind of action star he wanted to be.

Chan served as Police Story‘s director, writer, star, and stunt coordinator. He even sang the theme song. If there was ever a film dedicated, with every fiber of its being, to stunts, this was it. Police Story has more action in its first fifteen minutes than most films have in their entire runtime. The script was literally written around a grocery list of set pieces. The production even earned the nickname “Glass Story” because the JC Stunt Team barrelled through seven-hundred pounds (Chan’s estimate) of collapsible sugar glass.

Chan plays a cop named Chan Ka-Kui, a hot-headed goof who finds himself neck-deep in the mob after he’s assigned to protect Salina Fong (Brigitte Lin), a witness for the prosecution. In the film’s conclusion, Selina goes to the office of the mob boss (Chor Yuen), which is located in a shopping mall, to steal incriminating evidence. The mob catches on. And because Ka-Kui is following their movements, all parties involved wind up in an all-out mall brawl.

In the ensuing carnage, the briefcase containing the all-important evidence falls to the bottom of the mall’s atrium, where the mob boss retrieves it. From the top floor, desperate and out of options, Ka-Kui launches himself off the guard rail. He slides down a multi-story vertical pole, electricity arcing around him as he slams through string after string of decorative lights. Ka-Kui plummets through a glass plane into an unassuming kiosk, and without missing a beat, he hops back on his feet and detains his adversary.

The pole jump is the biggest stunt of a film defined by big stunts. It’s breathtaking and unfathomable, and yet there it is, unambiguously on the screen. So how did Jackie Chan do it?

---

How’d they do that?

Long story short:

Jackie Chan plain old just did it. They shot the Police Story pole stunt in one take with no rehearsals, wires, or crash pads.

Long story long:

If the pole jump in Police Story looks extraordinarily dangerous, that’s because it was.

As relayed in a 2017 interview with IGN, at this point in the shoot, Chan was sick, and it’s easy to understand why. Chan was shooting Heart of Dragon with Sammo Hung during the day and working on Police Story by night. Even in the context of Hong Kong cinema’s frantic production schedule, he wasn’t so much burning the candle at both ends as hucking the candle into a fireplace.

In an undated interview included with the film’s Criterion release, Chan estimates that his crew had already been shooting in the mall for several months. By the time they got to the pole stunt, the Police Story production was under some degree of pressure from the mall to wrap up. By the time the pole stunt was set up, the sun had begun to rise. There was going to be a lot of broken glass to clean up before the mall opened in the morning. While Chan is somewhat infamous for taking the time to get stunts right, in this instance, there was a real sense of urgency.

Chan and his team did not rehearse the stunt. And as if the stakes weren’t high enough, there were no wires, crash mats, or safety nets. If Chan missed the pole there would be nothing to catch him or break his fall.

The original plan was to power the lights with a low-voltage car battery. But, as they discovered on the day, the car battery just wasn’t able to power the whole structure. So they plugged the lights into wall sockets. This meant that the voltage of the building itself could potentially electrocute Chan. To assuage Chan’s understandable concern, the tech crew assured him that if anything went wrong they would simply cut the power. If you’ve had the pleasure of being electrocuted, you’ll know that shutting off a power source helps but doesn’t exactly undo the fact that you’ve been shocked. And such a jolt could have loosed Chan’s grip. or worse.

Chan perched on the guard rail six floors above his final destination: a prop kiosk shielded by sugar glass. He told the crew that he would give a signal before initiating the stunt (“when I nod, I’m going”). Chan was, by his own admission, rather scared. A member of the JC Stunt Team snuck a good luck totem into Chan’s pocket during a hug.

As Chan tells it, a crewmember mistook a nervous neck motion for the “go” signal. Someone shouted “rolling!” and the deathly quiet atrium filled with the motors of all twelve high-speed cameras. That amount of camera coverage was exceptional at the time, especially within Chan’s own filmography. But they only had one shot at it. And they only had 400 feet of film. Knowing this, Chan let out a scream and jumped.

By Chan’s estimate, the distance from the guard rail to the pole was about eight feet, which he cleared without a running start from an unstable crouching position. During the descent, the string lights did not electrocute Chan. But they did have a different, unforeseen effect. Incandescent light bulbs are hot to the touch. They can even ignite paper and certain kinds of cloth with direct contact. So, when you put a thermal conductor like a metal pole under stage lights and in the middle of a constellation of active bulbs…what you’re going to get is a very hot metal pole.

The heat, coupled with the friction of the descent, resulted in second-degree burns on Chan’s palms. For the morbidly curious (don’t worry you’re in good company), a second-degree burn is any burn that penetrates the dermis, which is where your blood vessels and nerves are.

As notable Jackie Chan fan Edgar Wright underlines, the real kicker of the whole affair is that the instant Chan hits the floor, he gets up and starts fighting. This is all the more impressive considering, as Chan relays in his autobiography, the impact of the fall dislocated his pelvis and caused a back injury that could have been paralyzing. As Chan tells it, his adrenaline was so high that the stuntman he wails on had to tell him to stop. They wrapped the shoot and had a celebratory beer (at six in the morning). Chan then made his way to the Heart of the Dragon set where he promptly crashed.

What’s the precedent?

The pole stunt in Police Story is so remarkable it actually breaks the film’s continuity. As it appears on-screen, the pole jump doesn’t play out just once. In quick succession, Chan shows us the stunt three whole times.

Repeat Cuts are a tool used for visual emphasis. They break the “invisible” flow of editing to maximize a visceral payoff of things like a killing blow, a car crash, or an impressive explosion. It is very difficult to make Repeat Cuts feel diegetic. Though, in all fairness, many never set out to feel diegetic in the first place.

This is, in part, what makes the Repeat Cut in Police Story so interesting. Jackie Chan isn’t just breaking immersion to milk the spectacle of a stunt. He’s making a very bold fourth-wall-breaking point about who he is as an action star. Namely: “Look at how dangerous that was. I did that.”

That isn’t something all performers can claim. And depending on how you feel about on-screen verisimilitude and off-screen safety, that might not even be something you want to claim. But that’s kind of Chan’s point. He is willing to take genuine, life-threatening risks and that’s part of what makes his brand of action special.

On-screen and off, Jackie Chan is compelling because he sweats, takes a beating, and works hard to overcome obstacles. And a part of this appeal (again, on-screen and off) is that you know how hard he works. In part, because he straight up tells you. In case there was any ambiguity, Police Story‘s end credits feature a triumphant montage of Chan directing the film.

Many compare Chan to the likes of Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Fred Astaire, legends whose main special effect was that they could just plain “do the thing.” Project A (1983), Chan’s directorial effort before Police Story, was a love letter to his old Hollywood heroes. In one stunt, emulating Lloyd’s Safety Last! (1923), Chan dangles off a clocktower, dropping through awning canopies before hitting the ground. In the take featured in the end credits, Chan lands distressingly on his head, folding in half like a lawn chair.

All to say, Chan makes a very unique and calculated point to not make his magic tricks look easy. Instead of grace, there is effort. And instead of invincibility, there is cervical spine damage.

Read More

‘Kongzilla’ Must Come After ‘Godzilla vs. Kong’

Welcome to Pitch Meeting, a monthly column in which we suggest an IP ripe for adaptation, then assign the cast and crew of our dreams. In this entry, we’re pitching ‘Kongzilla,’ the perfect ‘Godzilla vs. Kong’ sequel based on the forgotten collectible sculpture from Bowen Designs.

---

Sequels are beasts. Forever tasked with upping the ante, sooner or later, a follow-up will fumble. You gotta give the people what they want without giving them what they already had, even though that’s exactly what they want.

Aliens swerved expectations by crossing genres and multiplying the Xenomorph threat into an infinite horde. Terminator 2: Judgment Day flipped the threat, transforming the original’s killer robot into a badass babysitter. Avatar 2 will topple its predecessor by refusing to stop at one sequel and deliver a whole fistful of flicks.

When crafting a sequel, you gotta ask, what would James Cameron do?

Godzilla: King of the Monsters squashed its originator by opening its battlefield to an array of classic Kaiju beasties from the franchise’s massive monster roster. MUTOs are cool but not nearly as cool as King Ghidorah, Mothra, and Rodan. Point, sequel. This month, director Adam Wingard hopes his new film can stomp the previous entry by introducing another champion from a different franchise, King Kong. It’s a safe bet.

The filmmaker I don’t envy is the one who has to follow Wingard’s Godzilla vs. Kong. Where do you climb once the King of the Monsters squares off against the Eighth Wonder of the World? Well, having already analyzed Godzilla vs. Kong‘s trailer, it seems obvious that the two titans will end their grudge match in favor of a team-up against Mechagodzilla. No doubt they’ll clobber that tin can loser.

In this modern Kaiju era, the next film could go Tom & Jerry on us, inserting an ampersand, making Godzilla & Kong partners, especially violently contentious ones. But, I don’t know. Once you’ve seen them sharing a single screen, a repeat is a letdown. The thrill is gone.

What would James Cameron do? You gotta kick it up a notch. A task that seems hard beneath Godzilla vs. Kong‘s shadow, but the answer rests in an unusual source.

Back in the late ’90s, when the comic book industry was at its lowest, Randy Bowen was still making a killing as the producer of high-end but affordable character statues and busts. Bowen Designs sold an extraordinary line-up including nearly every Marvel character: Black Panther to Fin Fang Foom. No one was too rad or too obscure.

Superheroes were not his only game. Now and again, he would venture out into stranger territories: Solomon Kane, The Goon, and Frank Frazetta’s Death Dealer. He also concocted some original creatures like The Jimmy Legs, Decapitator, and Kongzilla.

Yaaaaaassssssssss. Bowen’s Kongzilla was the stuff of hardcore nerd fantasies. This ridiculous mutation was never realized on screen before (a more apish iteration appeared briefly in the first issue of DC Comics’ horror anthology Plop #1 from 1973), but upon first sight, he felt like an obvious cinematic fit.

Godzilla and Kong are natural-born frenemies. They should take their relationship to the next level. Kongzilla is that next level! As a hybrid beast, Kongzilla sports the best attributes of each warrior. It’s got Kong’s pugilistic frame and stance, implying a lightning limberness never imagined capable by his opponent. Then, it also sports Godzilla’s reptilian armor, complete with razor claws and dorsal plates.

To help realize his fantasy, Bowen hired comic book artist and celebrated monster-maker Arthur Adams. On the side of the figure’s box, Adams illustrated a one-page tale explaining Kongzilla’s origin. The first panel depicts the climactic Tokyo brawl from the original King Kong vs. Godzilla movie. During their battle, chunks of their flesh are torn and flung across the city. In the third panel, we meet a “crazed scientific genius” who unlocks both beasts’ genetic codes and combines them into a new horrific Kaiju: Kongzilla. Those hoping for an erotic love story between Godzilla and Kong must look elsewhere.

The four-paneled comic is not much to go on, but films have built masterpieces from less (Sean Penn’s The Indian Runner sprung from Bruce Springsteen’s “Highway Patrolman,” just one of several films based on a song). With Mechagodzilla hopefully thrashed during Godzilla vs. Kong, Kongzilla makes for a nasty follow-up adversary. Unlike the robo-zilla, Kongzilla is not a mirror based on humanity’s perception of the two titans but an actual biological double. It has all of their strengths, none of their weaknesses. It can take our Kaiju heroes to oblivion’s edge.

The Kongzilla film has to take Godzilla and Kong to an arena of bloodshed not yet experienced by the titular monsters. Maybe not R-rated, but as close to its realm as PG-13 can get. I’m talking the dust bowl once known as Metropolis in Man of Steel. When the credits roll, we should feel uncomfortable. Godzilla and Kong have to do some wretched stuff to put their wicked doppelganger down.

What director could best maximize such fighters and deliver a sequel that could easily dominate those that came before? Clearly, the answer is James Cameron. Or, at least, the James Cameron of thirty years ago. Sadly, he doesn’t exist, and the one that does will never break free from his infinite Avatar stream. We gotta turn elsewhere.

Neill Blomkamp is a director who’s flirted with Cameron in the past. His re-imagined Aliens sequel never found liftoff, but what little imagery we gleamed from the unrealized project seemed tantalizing. There was also that aborted Robocop sequel, and we’re currently waiting on District 10. Let’s get this guy to Skull Island.

Blomkamp’s grunge sci-fi sensibility would work smashingly well inside a Godzilla/Kong composite. Kongzilla’s mad science allows the director to maintain his low-fi sci-fi aesthetic and branch out into untouched fantastical regions. Getting him to hold back on the hard R violence is probably the biggest challenge, but we can always keep his more gnarly bits for the home release director’s cut.

With Blomkamp also comes Weta Digital. Yes, they’ve already traipsed about Skull Island on Peter Jackson’s King Kong remake, but I’ve seen their unused creature designs, and they can easily port them over to Kongzilla. Honestly, there’s not much mucking with Arthur Adams’ drawing. Weta can run wild with the tertiary beasties, but they shouldn’t touch the Randy Bowen sculpture. That’s your maquette. Run with it.

Who do you get to round out the cast? Does it really matter? Okay, sure, probably. Definitely. You don’t love King Kong without Fay Wray. You don’t quake under Godzilla’s feet without Akihiko Hirata or Haruo Nakajima and Katsumi Tezuka under the suit. The people make the beasts.

However, the modern Kaiju era is firmly established with the Godzilla vs. Kong cast. Bring whoever survives into Blomkamp’s Kongzilla. Demián Bichir, Millie Bobby Brown, Kyle Chandler, Julian Dennison, Eiza González, Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry, Shun Oguri.They’re a dynamite group. Accept no substitutes.

Dropping Godzilla and Kong into the same ring for Godzilla vs. Kong is a big deal. These are heavyweights, and schoolyard debates have waged for decades on who would take the other one down given the opportunity. Cinema will probably never reveal a definitive answer because they don’t want to hurt either camp’s feelings. And honestly, do we want to see Kong get squished under Godzilla’s heel? Or vice versa? No, we love them both.

Crushing Kongzilla is an answer of sorts. If Kong or Godzilla can destroy the amalgam, then it’s surmised that they can destroy each other. Taking Kongzilla to the mat bypasses the awkward conjecture amongst fans. We can all leave the theater happy knowing our guy is the winner.

Read More

No Other Actor Can Do What Denzel Washington Does in ‘Malcolm X’

Acting is an art form, and behind every iconic character is an artist expressing themselves. Welcome to The Great Performances, a bi-weekly column exploring the art behind some of cinema’s best roles. In this entry, we examine the Academy Award-nominated performance given by Denzel Washington in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X.

---

When we talk about an actor of Denzel Washington’s caliber, it can be hard to pinpoint exactly why he’s so good. With every role he tackles, whether it’s as a defiant soldier in Glory or a prejudiced lawyer in Philadelphia, he just has a natural presence that resonates with audiences. He has the “it factor” that makes it impossible for us to tear our eyes away from him.

You could argue that’s partly due to Washington’s status as a Hollywood sex symbol, but it’s more than just his magnetism that has given his career longevity. What makes his work so enrapturing is you can see the attention to detail he builds into a multilayered performance like the one he gives in Spike Lee’s 1992 biopic Malcolm X. Washington doesn’t rely on flashy or grueling acting techniques. He takes a quiet approach, informed by countless hours of research, to embody the very spirit of each character he plays.

Washington’s meticulous research is paramount to his portrayal of Malcolm X. His exploration of the iconic figure actually began eleven years earlier, in a 1981 off-Broadway play called When the Chickens Come Home to Roost. Written by Laurence Holder, the two-person show (clips of which you can watch online) is a prolonged conversation between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam. However unrefined his performance appears compared to the film, you can still clearly see the Malcolm he’d later become on screen. It’s in the way he looks and speaks, capturing with pitch-perfect accuracy the cadence of Malcolm’s real voice. Most importantly, this performance gave Washington a stable foundation to continue building upon when he revisited the role a decade later.

All actors walk a tightrope when portraying a real person, especially an iconic figure such as Malcolm X. You must stay true to the person you’re playing while also meeting the demands of a script that may alter – however slightly – the character’s true life. In Lee’s film, Malcolm is introduced to Islam in jail by another convict, yet in real-life his introduction to the religion came from his brother Reginald and half-sister Ella. Malcolm’s siblings, especially Ella, had a profound impact on his life but are conspicuously absent from the film. What may seem like a minor omission can create waves in an actor’s process, with Washington having to create new emotional touchstones that are divorced from Malcolm’s actual experiences.

Where the real Malcolm could look to his family when reflecting on his relationship to Islam, Washington had to build that connection with a composite character written for the film. Due to these discrepancies between reality and fiction, his performance becomes a patchwork of ideas, strung together to create a character that is as faithful to the real Malcolm X as possible, while also existing within the screenplay’s tweaked origin story.

An actor’s research is often strictly used to provide context for a character’s history; a way to fill yourself with their memories so you can inhabit them in a truthful, authentic way. But Washington used his research to majorly inform his character’s physicality, too. With hours of footage of Malcolm’s speeches and interviews at his disposal, he was able to emulate with precision the way Malcolm carried himself and gestured, like the forefinger pressed to the jaw that we see on the film’s poster. He wasn’t just playing Malcolm; Washington was practically becoming him.

And, in a way, he literally did. Washington’s research allowed him to channel Malcolm X in such a way that he was able to give unscripted speeches in-character, continuing well after the cameras ran out of film. As Spike Lee said in an interview:

“All the speeches in the film were Malcolm’s actual speeches. We did the research. So we’re doing this one speech, I had my script in front of me, I’m looking at Denzel, and I’m also looking at the monitor. He’s killing it. So as I’m reading the script along with Denzel and I see that well, the speech is over, I’m going to call cut. But he keeps going, and he kept going for another five minutes until finally, the film ran out of the magazine. And the stuff he said was better than Malcolm’s words. So I finally called cut and I told Denzel, ‘That was great, but where did that come from? I mean, you went on five minutes after what was scripted.’ And he was like, ‘I don’t know.’”

This isn’t something just any actor can do. Washington has an almost preternatural ability to become Malcolm X. His preparation allows him to be so in the moment that Malcolm’s words can flow through him naturally, resulting in his character’s thoughts and emotions entwining with his own. If it all sounds a little mystical, that’s because it kind of is. But it’s an acting magic trick that Washington pulls off effortlessly.

In a career defined by award-winning roles, Malcolm X stands out as a wholly unique performance in Washington’s filmography. The range of emotions he experiences and expresses have never been more dynamic. As we follow Malcolm’s life, reinventing himself again and again, we watch Washington switch emotions seamlessly from moment to moment, scene to scene. He’s truly chilling when Malcolm returns to Boston and flexes his dominance in a game of Russian Roulette, only to show us later in the film a character who is heartbreaking in how happy he is. Seeing Malcolm filled with humor and joy is why the film has helped break the impression many had in their heads of the man.

Washington’s performance in Malcolm X is one that deconstructs the complicated legacy history has painted of the emblematic figure. With a quiet approach to building a character that is practically Shakespearean in its scope, he’s crafted a role that is meant to honor, and humanize, someone who has been repeatedly misunderstood over the last five decades. Malcolm X was a firebrand who lit a fuse that helped Black communities have a voice during a time of unrepentant aggression towards people of color, and in the hands of Washington, we come to understand who the legend really was. As he told the New York Times:

“I’m not Malcolm X, but the same God that moved Malcolm X can move me. This is a story about the evolution of a man. It’s a spiritual, philosophical, political evolution. My prayer is to illustrate that and have that be some kind of a healing for people. Some who knew Malcolm want to put him on a pedestal, but that’s not changing anything. We want to reach that young person who is down and out, who may be wearing the X but doesn’t really understand what it means or what this man stood for.”

Washington’s work in Malcolm X has helped ensure that the icon’s legacy isn’t black and white, but painted in the true spectrum of who he was, not just who he was believed to be. For all intents and purposes, Washington really does become Malcolm X. Sure, an actor can’t literally become their character, but this performance proves that if anyone is ever going to pull off that impossible feat, it’s going to be Denzel Washington.

The post No Other Actor Can Do What Denzel Washington Does in ‘Malcolm X’ appeared first on Film School Rejects.

Read More

The 10 Best ‘Tom and Jerry’ Cartoons

Welcome to Saturday Morning Cartoons, our weekly column where we continue the animated boob tube ritual of yesteryear. Our lives may no longer be scheduled around small screen programming, but that doesn’t mean we should forget the necessary sanctuary of Saturday ‘toons. In this entry, we celebrate the new Tom and Jerry movie’s arrival on HBO Max by ranking the ten best classics depicting their ancient rivalry.

---

Godzilla vs. Kong. Alien Vs. Predator. Freddy vs. Jason. Before all these classic title bouts, there was Tom vs. Jerry. Although it’s not really Tom vs. Jerry, is it? It’s Tom and Jerry. That little ampersand is important. Where Godzilla and Kong can go along their merry way within their own franchises, Tom and Jerry need each other to sell their appeal—the never-ending contest.

Tom and Jerry take turns being predator and prey. Often a character may start as one and end as the other. These karmic, ferocious feuds stir laughter because we know they can take it. Guns, knives, and bombs, oh my. No weapon too dangerous, no action too outlandish.

With Tom & Jerry: The Movie, the ultimate cat and mouse rivalry returns this weekend on HBO Max. Inspired by our heroes dabbling into the semi-live-action realm, we wanted to reevaluate the original 114 Tom and Jerry cartoons written and directed by Joseph Barbera and William Hanna. The cartoons generally run six or seven minutes in length, and while some ideas are repeated or remade, it’s still incredible how much variety these creators mined from their simple versus concept.

Discerning the ten best Tom and Jerry shorts is a little bit like blindly throwing a dart at a board that’s all bullseye. You could land on any dozen and be satisfied, but the ten listed below are my favorite as of today. Yet, I can assure you that nothing could shake my top spot. That cat’s the best. No doubt.

---

10. The Bowling Alley-Cat

• Original Release Date: July 18, 1942

The oldest entry on the list, The Bowling Alley-Cat, is only the seventh Tom and Jerry cartoon, but Barbera and Hanna have already perfected their protagonists’ tantalizing mixture of playfulness and viciousness. The short starts with Jerry wandering into a bowling alley where he transforms its lanes into his own personal skating rink. As the night watchman, Tom can’t stand idly by. He goes to work thrashing the poor mouse, but his instruments of destruction (numerous bowling balls) tend to bounce back hard. The brilliance of the bit is in how Barbera and Hanna turn the environment against their players, crafting pin tables into Play-Doh molds and smooshing Tom’s body into shapes that would make David Cronenberg wince.

---

9. The Egg and Jerry

• Original Release Date: March 23, 1956

The Egg and Jerry is actually a repurposed-for-widescreen version of the 1949 short Hatch Up Your Troubles. The original could easily be on this list, but I chose the CinemaScope remake because the colors are so much more incredibly bright, and its stretched cinematic appearance makes Tom and Jerry’s war gloriously grander…even if it is an illusion. CinemaScope is basically fake widescreen, but who doesn’t appreciate a magic trick every once in a while?

When a mama woodpecker leaves her nest, her egg rolls from the tree and plops under Jerry’s protection. After the little egg hatches, the bird is targeted by Tom. The ensuing battle is absurdly violent, with the attacker taking most of the punishment. The moment where the baby woodpecker escapes Tom’s jaws by shattering his teeth is pure nightmare fuel, but the dang cat deserves it. This brutality is exactly why you come to Tom and Jerry.

---

8. Jerry’s Cousin

• Original Release Date: April 7, 1951

What do you do when you can’t get this cat off your back? You call family. Muscles Mouse is the Dom Toretto of Tom and Jerry cartoons. He’s a beefy, mean-faced brawler who will drop everything to protect his family. When he recieves a plea for help from his cousin Jerry, Muscles stops terrorizing his neighborhood’s cats to bring the pain to Tom. Things heat up when Tom calls in his own beefcake squad, The Muscle Cats. The resulting clash is a total bloodbath.

---

7. The Invisible Mouse

• Original Release Date: September 27, 1947

Taking a tiny detour into the spooky realms of Universal Monsters, Jerry takes a dip into an invisible ink bottle. When he emerges, it’s his time to reign supreme. Tom desperately chases the mouse’s shadow but cannot wrap his claws around his wretched enemy. Jerry is as quick as he is slippery. Thankfully, Tom has seen the same films we have and finds a few solutions to Jerry’s visibility problem. Like the best Tom and Jerry cartoons, The Invisible Mouse is all sight-gags (pun intended). Running seven minutes in length, the short never lets up with the gags, climaxing in a mighty thwack from an unexpected third party.

---

6. The Flying Cat

• Original Release Date: January 12, 1952

Tired of constantly failing to make Jerry a snack, Tom turns his salivating eyes toward a caged canary. Behind bars, surely the little bird can’t pose any problems. Tom, as usual, is proven wrong. The bird escapes Tom’s chompers and flees to the skies. Tom pursues, but Jerry joins the skirmish. Together, Jerry and the canary literally slice and dice the feline. Good thing everyone relies on trusty cartoon biology.

The post The 10 Best ‘Tom and Jerry’ Cartoons appeared first on Film School Rejects.

Read More

Searching for the American Dream in ‘Minari’ and ‘Nomadland’

In modern American cinema, two landscapes juxtapose one another: one is vibrant, saturated, and fertile, while the other is insipid and sterile. In this case, the landscapes belong to Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari and Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland, respectively. Both films battle the ideal of the American Dream through radically different lenses: the outsider devoted to possibility, and the insider jaded by the unreality of the concept. 

Minari tells the story of a Korean-American family in the 1980s after their patriarch, Jacob (Steven Yeun), moves them to rural Arkansas so he can realize his dream of starting a lucrative farm. Having already been in the United States for a while, he and his wife, Monica (Han Ye-ri), have set ideas of what a successful American life should look like. But Jacob’s optimism, alongside his childrens’ veneration of America, stops him from questioning whether the life he is grasping for is even attainable in the first place. 

When immigrants first began settling in the United States, the American Dream consisted of venturing out West and staking out a section of land to call one’s own. The thought was: once you have land and can support yourself, you have attained the ideal American life. But things did not continue that way for very long, and they certainly are not that way now.

During the Dust Bowl, for example, farmers were kicked off their land and subsequently forced to carve out a brand new and unprecedented standard of American life. Enslaved Black people, too, were not presented with the land they were promised when they were finally given their freedom. So Americans were faced with the harsh reality that land, alone, could no longer be the gold standard. The final frontier had to be something new.

Despite moving to a remarkably changed America, Jacob still holds onto this antiquated idea of land as the ultimate signifier of prestige. But his old, settler ideals are at odds with new principles of capitalism; Jacob does not stake out the land to provide vegetables for his family to eat, but rather from which to make money. 

The tension inherent in the American Dream in Minari is presented in the form of Monica’s mother, Soonja (Youn Yuh-jung), who comes to stay with the family to help out with the children. Soonja is not interested in achieving the American Dream but rather is content with holding onto her own traditional Korean roots. 

At first, the children push back against Soonja, especially young David (Alan Kim), whose devotion to America is not dissimilar to his father’s: he wears cowboy boots around the house and drinks Mountain Dew religiously. He is outspoken about his dislike for Soonja and tells his parents he doesn’t want to share a room with her because she “smells like Korea,” though he has never actually been there. He also tells her she isn’t a real grandma because she doesn’t bake cookies, once again categorically rejecting non-American customs.

But Soonja ultimately succeeds where her son-in-law does not. After Jacob fails to grow a sufficient amount of crops due to a lack of water, Soonja scatters Korean Minari seeds by a creek near the family’s house, and they quickly proliferate into rich, leafy vegetables. Perhaps Soonja succeeds as a farmer because she does not insist on transforming gardening into an industry. Or, perhaps it is because she is not intent on veering from her heritage. Maybe it is a mix of both. Regardless – and perhaps most importantly – Soonja does not look to a country that no longer exists, a country where this abstract dream can be achieved by those who simply work hard, keep their eyes down, and pull their boot-straps up. That America died long ago.

At the end of Minari, Jacob’s big plan backfires – literally. The shed where he stores his vegetables catches fire and crumbles into ashes, just like the future that could never really exist. Like at the beginning of the film, he is left with nothing but his family, the same thing he would have had he not embarked on his journey of prosperity. 

Minari is shot in a way that reflects Jacob’s unrelenting optimism. The daylight is almost jarring in its brightness, while the colors are saturated to a point of near surrealism. The soundtrack, too, sweeps through the subconscious of the film like an old Western. 

For the entirety of Minari, Jacob never ceases chasing the American Dream with hope and certainty that only matches up with a caricatured version of the country and that might only be trusted by someone who knows America only from stories and films and has not lived here long enough to be jaded by the deep gullies of capitalism. Jacob’s vision of America is what inspires people to come to America, and stay in America. It is also what allows America to continue being the self-sustaining beast that it is.

Nomadland, on the other hand, pinpoints the American Dream from a more experienced, and subsequently more jaded and pessimistic, vantage point. The film follows Fern (Frances McDormand), who turns to a nomadic, van-dwelling lifestyle after a recession leaves her house-less. Like Minari, Nomadland is heavily centered around land. For nomads, the land is their home. But, unlike Minari, the nomads do not attempt to make anything of the land they live on, nor do they look to it as some sort of American paradise that can make them successful and fulfilled. In fact, the land is not of much interest to them. It is merely the only way they can live, at least in part, outside of society.

Indeed, the land of Nomadland is different from the land of Minari. Unlike the latter, which continually points to its rich, fertile soil, Nomadland‘s landscape proliferates with rocks. Not only are rocks part of a prevalent theme at the emotional core of the film – a rolling stone gathers no moss, as the saying goes – but it also points to the actuality of the state of the American Dream. Nothing can grow on these rocks. The land is just for looking at. Like the country the nomads are in, it is unlikely to give anything back. 

Perhaps a more realistic interpretation of the modern farm in Nomadland is the Amazon warehouse. When we are introduced to Fern, she is a seasonal worker at the company, the layout of which is as close to the equivalent of the demand and profit of a 19th-century farm as one might get in the contemporary world. Zhao depicts the Amazon warehouse as a large, flat rectangle with columns of products, which symbolically mimic rows of fruits and vegetables. 

But, in many ways, Amazon is the polar opposite of a farm. It represents the endgame of industrialization and capitalism, as well as mass uniformity. In an Amazon warehouse, everything is inside boxes. Everything is the same. From the outside, there is no way to really tell what’s inside. But Fern is so jaded from her experience in the capitalistic machine that she really doesn’t seem to have a problem with working for the organization that infamously treats its workers poorly. “It’s a good job,” she says. An irony presents itself here, too, as Amazon is actually presented as a good job in Nomadland. 

This is notably different from the way Jessica Bruder, author of the film’s source material, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, describes what it’s like to be an Amazon worker. Bruder recounts what a seventy-seven-year-old worker told her about their own experience: “They love retirees because we’re dependable. We’ll show up, work hard, and are basically slave labor.” This raises the concern that even Zhao was not able to exist outside of the capitalist matrix when telling the story of nomads. After all, is it possible to realistically portray Amazon in a time when Amazon is one of the main financiers of online film distribution?

The attitude of a hesitancy to speak out against capitalism reflects Fern’s opinion of the American Dream, which is to say she doesn’t believe there is such a thing. Unlike Jacob, Fern does not believe that anything is possible, and she attempts to live outside of society to escape that. But even this outsider model ultimately isn’t possible — the nomads are reliant on government-funded welfare, upkeep on their vehicles, food from the grocery store, and jobs they work along the way. Some nomads might indeed believe that they are achieving true outsidership from the nightmare of the illusory American Dream, but Fern doesn’t seem to fall into that trap. 

The final shot of Nomadland borrows from John Ford’s The Searchers, in which John Wayne famously walks through his doorway and back into the wilderness. This juxtaposition offers insight into just how much America has really changed. The final shot of The Searchers is filled with hope: the frontier was still real in America when Wayne wandered out into it. Fern, on the other hand, finds no such luck. 

But it’s not that self-sufficiency is not possible in contemporary America, it just has a dramatically different model than it used to. Where people used to have the prospect of staking out their own land, they now have to buy that land, which requires being wealthy from the outset. Self-sufficiency is for the upper-class, and the nomads aren’t that. So they settle for the illusion of self-sufficiency while relying on capitalism to keep their heads above water.

The cinematography of Nomadland also reflects its pessimistic nature. Unlike Minari’s vibrant colors, Nomadland is pale and washed out, and shrouds its frames in blacks and greys. But, although they are told from wildly different perspectives, Minari and Nomadland don’t, at their core, diverge from one another. Rather, they are two sides of the same coin. The former tells the story of the beginning of the American Dream when one succumbs to the illusion that anything is possible. The latter tells the story of the end of it, of the precise moment when one realizes that the Dream in question is unattainable.

The post Searching for the American Dream in ‘Minari’ and ‘Nomadland’ appeared first on Film School Rejects.

Read More

‘WandaVision’ Episode 8 Splays Wanda’s Trauma for All to See

WandaVision Explained is our ongoing series that keeps tabs on Marvel Studios’ sitcom saga about TV’s happiest tragic couple. In this entry, we turn our channel to WandaVision Episode 8 (“Previously On”) and consider its final two BIG reveals. Yes, prepare for SPOILERS.

---

What the hell is going on here? We’re not the only ones confused by the hows of Westview. As quickly divulged at the start of this week’s WandaVision, Agatha (Kathryn Hahn) is a real-deal witch, and she’s seen some wild things since her Salem shinanigan days, but she’s never witnessed a creature as confoundingly powerful as Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen). When the Hex first arose in New Jersey, Agatha invaded to uncover a mythical being. She was not disappointed.

WandaVision Episode 8, entitled “Previously On,” is a forced march down memory lane. Magically shackled in Agatha’s basement, Wanda is compelled to retrace the events that lead to the Westview Hex’s creation. We see her sitcom origin story with her family huddled around the boob tube, enjoying The Dick Van Dyke Show before an explosion obliterates the serene setting. We’re there for her first Mind Stone encounter and even glimpse what the Hydra scientists couldn’t: a shadowy yet golden haloed Sokovian fortuneteller reaching toward Wanda from some unknown region. And we’re there when Wanda attempts to claim Vision’s splayed corpse from Director Tyler Hayward (Josh Stamberg) and his S.W.O.R.D. goon scientists.

Wanda fails to recover Vision (Paul Bettany), but before she leaves, she telekinetically probes his mind. “I can’t feel you,” she whimpers and escapes the compound defeated. Traveling to Westview, she enters the empty lot Vision purchased for their home. Scrawled on the property deed in Vision’s handwriting is a tiny heart, and within it, a message reads, “To grow old in.”

It’s an agony too far. After a lifetime of loss, Wanda erupts. Her Hex magic rushes from her body, transforming reality into the sitcom fantasy of her youth. It’s a realm where the greatest threat is “silly mischief,” and true darkness has no place. And along with this new Westview, so too grows a new Vision.

The reveal is what we’ve suspected from the beginning, but Vision’s total fabrication gives pause. Yeah, so the Vision playing house throughout WandaVision is not our Vision. He’s an invented entity crafted from Wanda’s grief and will.

Does that make him a fantasy as well? What about their children? Are they mere figments of Wanda’s imagination? Not necessarily.

Their existence is an astonishment to Agatha. She can manage many supernatural spells and is happy to show them off to her captive. Brainwashing, check. Transmutation, check. Spontaneous creation? Uh, that’s some mojo generally reserved for gods.

WandaVision Episode 8 ends with Agatha calling Wanda out. With Billy (Julian Hilliard) and Tommy (Jett Klyne) on her leash, Agatha dubs Wanda “The Scarlet Witch.” It’s a title joyously tossed around in the comics, but one never before uttered within the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The new moniker requires a reevaluation of Wanda’s origin. She’s not merely a Mind Stone byproduct. There was something witchy about her beforehand, which allowed her to access the Infinity Gem when so many other volunteers previously died upon contact. It’s the same something that possibly paused the Stark Industries rocket from exploding when she and Pietro were cowering children.

Wanda’s comic book counterpart began her life as a mutant. However, when the X-Men became a popular cinematic franchise over at 20th Century Fox, Marvel Comics sought to tinker her biology so that it would align with the characters they still controlled under the Marvel Studios banner. The company concocted a storyline that revealed Wanda’s mutant status as false and that she and her brother were not children of Magneto, but that of Natalya Maximoff, an absurdly potent magician who first took on “The Scarlet Witch” mantle.

By the way, there is also this incredibly strange strand to this story involving Wanda and Pietro as genetic experiments operated on by The High Evolutionary. He’s a wonderfully goofy villain obsessed with creating a flawless Earth by evolving animals into humanoid perfection. When Natalya died in a battle with The High Evolutionary, the madman took pity and returned her children to their Uncle’s family. So, could he be WandaVision‘s Big Bad pulling Agatha’s strings? Mmmm…he’s too crazy. We’re not there yet.

Before Agatha dubs Wanda “The Scarlet Witch,” she also claims Wanda is wielding “Chaos Magic.” This wizardry is some deliciously ancient evil from the comics. It’s the kind of magic used by Elder Gods and Arch-Demons. One of these wretched brutes was present during Wanda’s birth, and when she touched him, a shard of his Chaos ability absorbed into Wanda.

This Arch-Demon is not Mephisto, but Chthon. For eons, he ruled over Earth until he was banished into another dimension. He wrote The Darkhold, which is the scary spellbook briefly mentioned in last week’s recap, that’s also popped up as a McGuffin on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Runaways. If we’re looking for a cameo in WandaVision Episode 9, Chthon is starting to look more and more likely as this series’ last-minute Final Boss.

What we’re witnessing in WandaVision Episode 8 is a similar retcon to the one in the comics. Wanda is a witch, like her mother before her, and mom is most likely not the lady who exploded while watching Dick Van Dyke. Wanda’s mom is that golden-haloed Sakovian fortuneteller we saw in this week’s flashback whom Wanda masqueraded as during the “All-New Halloween Spooktacular!”

Now, returning to the question of who and what are Wanda’s Westview family members: Is her Vision real? Are Billy and Tommy real?

Yes. They appear sentient, the definition of which is something that is “able to feel and perceive feelings.” Vision, Tommy, and Billy all act outside of Wanda’s will. They even reject her point of view and happily challenge her actions throughout their time on WandaVision.

Not only that, but Vision appears to be made of legit Vibranium. Director Hayward was tracking the Synthezoid in the Hex using his metallic signature. Hayward also desperately wanted to get his hands on his sweet, sweet multi-billion dollar body. Vibranium doesn’t grow on trees.

But Vision, based on the horror we experienced at the end of Episode 6, cannot exist outside the Hex. He crumbled when he broke through Wanda’s barrier. Is Wanda witchy enough to sustain her family after her fantasy bubble pops? Right now, that seems unlikely.

So, if they cannot exist in the MCU outside, are they real? Yes, they’re still sentient. Until they’re not. Dead is dead.

Yeeeeaaaah, about that. As we see in WandaVision Episode 8’s post-credits scene, the Vision last observed in pieces on Director Hayward’s laboratory tables is reconstructed. There are, however, a few distinct differences. This Vision is white, and he does not have the Mind Stone powering his forehead.

Using the missile Wanda irradiated with Hex Magic, now known to be Chaos Magic, Hayward’s team can bring the old Vision back online. Watching his eyes open and glow does not bring cheer. It elicits dread.

The comic book Vision has died and returned several times. When he first expired at the hands of the time-traveling Immortus, Dr. Hank Pym (a.k.a. Ant-Man) rebuilt the Synthezoid and slapped him with a fresh coat of white paint. Unfortunately, his original brain patterns were not available, so the new Vision did not have the old Vision’s personality. Without the Mind Stone, it’s a good bet that this Vision will not have the same feelings for Wanda as her sitcom creation.

A happy ending does not seem possible for Wanda. Her Hex cannot stand. Without it, her children and her husband will fade. What will remain is a Vision who will not know her. He’ll be a dark mirror, reflecting all that she’s lost, and she will not be able to bear his sight.

Will she end WandaVision as she began it: alone? No. Wanda has Pietro. Agatha might have a fun nickname for him — “Fietro,” fake Pietro — but he’s not a fake. He’s real. Agatha is not The Scarlet Witch. She cannot conjure humans from nothingness. She grabbed Peter (Evan Peters) from 20th Century Fox. He’s a real boy, and the multiverse is very real. Due to Agatha’s tampering, it could use a strange doctor to suture some cracks, though.

Free from Agatha’s brainwashing, Peter will also experience a crushing solitary inside the MCU. He’ll need support. Wanda will need support. They can find it in each other.

The post ‘WandaVision’ Episode 8 Splays Wanda’s Trauma for All to See appeared first on Film School Rejects.

Read More

Identifying With Space Probes: The Cosmic Solitude of ‘Cassini’

Welcome to The Queue — your daily distraction of curated video content sourced from across the web. Today, we’re watching Cassini, an animated short film by Nate Milton about a space probe finding life in Saturn’s rings

---

Human beings are very good at projecting onto objects. It’s why we see faces in houses and why I once bent down to pet a cat only to realize it was a can of gas.

It’s also why Cassini, a short animated film about an unnamed space probe hurtling towards one of Saturn’s moons, hits like a ton of bricks. Its director, Nate Milton, is keenly aware of this uncanny experience: of finding oneself oddly yet deeply touched by something inanimate and hyperbolically distant.

The short is based on a very real space probe which like its animated counterpart ran out of time after twenty years in space, triggering its programming to self-destruct by dive-bombing into Saturn’s rings. Milton found himself surprisingly affected when he read the news in 2017. And when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, his thoughts returned to that lonely, isolated piece of machinery.

Even without knowing the details of Milton’s inspiration, it is easy to infer and understand the emotional thrust of Cassini. I think we are all especially attuned to rhythms of solitude these days. That Milton teases optimism and determination out of the probe’s story is a generous and ultimately magical choice. It’s hard not to identify with this lonely yet tenacious probe. And it is moving, to put it mildly, to see it find purpose and unlikely company despite the odds.

Watch “‘Cassini’ A NASA probe discovers life on Saturn’s moon“:

Who made this?

Nate Milton, who is an animation director and designer residing in Brooklyn, directed and designed Cassini. You can check out Milton’s portfolio on his website here. The film’s composer, Buck St. Thomas, also provided the voice talent. Kyle Joseph mastered the short’s score.

More Videos Like This

• Want another taste of Milton’s work? Watch the bold, beautiful Sundance short Eli, which is about the experience of a manic episode.
• Here’s Eli‘s behind-the-scenes process feed, via Milton’s Instagram.
• Radiolab asked Milton to make a video based on their episode “Funky Hand Jive.” It’s about Robert Krulwich’s encounter with President Kennedy when he was thirteen.
• Here’s a short film about sentient ocean garbage for the Adult Swim late-night series Off the Air.
• Milton’s animated trilogy about visualizing his emotional experience of Bipolar Disorder: Feelings, Delusions, and Encounters.
• Another from Milton: classic studio logos tweaked to show support for Black Lives Matter.

The post Identifying With Space Probes: The Cosmic Solitude of ‘Cassini’ appeared first on Film School Rejects.

Read More

‘Eremita (Anthologies)’ Harbors Appeal Beyond the Average Pandemic Response Movie

When the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world shuddering to a halt in March 2020, it forced virtually every film set on the planet to shut down, leaving many filmmakers across the globe twiddling their thumbs. In the weeks and months that followed, directors have responded to this enforced downtime the only way they know how: creating.

From Mati Diop’s In My Room and Spike Lee’s New York New York to Martin Scorsese’s quarantine film and the seventeen shorts that make up the anthology collection Homemade, seeing how directors are parsing this unique period is now virtually an entire genre within itself.

Most of these projects have benefitted from the usual post-production processes: sound teams, for example, were able to work on the aforementioned films remotely, a fact that has prevented their credit sequences from running as short as they might have been. But with nearly all of these projects being self-shot, a tacit question lies at the heart of the pandemic-response genre: what about cinematographers?

With Eremita (Anthologies), director and project curator Sam Abbas seeks to answer that very question via the medium of film itself and, in doing so, invert a staple of this new genre: directors flexing their cinematographic skills. An eclectic collection of (mostly) documentary shorts that takes its somewhat esoteric name from the Latin for “hermit,” the movie spotlights the directorial visions of the cinematographers behind such visual stunners as The Florida Project, Madeline’s Madeline, and Siberia: namely, Alexis Zabé, Antoine Heberlé, Ashley Connor, Soledad Rodriguez, and Stefano Falivene.

The most immediate comparison to be made is to Homemade, Netflix’s compilation of shorts directed by the likes of Kristen Stewart, Pablo Larraín and cinematographer Rachel Morrison, but Eremita’s concept also calls to mind a project from the ‘90s: French artist Michel Zumpf’s Le Geographe Manuel, which granted directorial responsibilities to seventeen DPs including the legendary Raoul Coutard and Agnes Godard. Linked only by the fact that they were shot on the same amount of film using the same camera (the 35mm Cameflex, a favorite of the French New Wave), Zumpf organized the resulting collage of responses under one overarching theme: the signs of the Zodiac.

Eremita uses a similar framework. Project curator Abbas gave his collaborators discretion to shoot whatever they liked, but he applied ascetic limits to production: contributors could use only their cell phone cameras, and they were barred from spending any money on equipment. After giving the directors final cut, Abbas then assembled their shorts in a manner that took loose inspiration from Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra, presumably selected because it’s a paean to solitude — the chief theme of the pandemic-response genre.

That connection feels under-explained, however — strained, even. An initial title card briefly declares the book’s enigmatic concept, and some chapter cards borrowed from the book are inserted throughout, but these don’t provide enough information to really establish a correlation, especially for viewers not versed in Nietzsche’s rather esoteric writing. It’s hard to understand why this particular association is forced on the movie, or even why it needs such a cerebral analogy in the first place. That kind of contrived framework might work in an art gallery installation like Zumpf’s film, but to a VOD release seeking a more general audience like Eremita, it just adds an awkward, superfluous layer. It might’ve been wiser to opt for Homemade’s unabashedly grab-bag approach to structure instead.

Thankfully, this framework isn’t exerted too forcefully over the shorts, which are largely allowed to speak for themselves. Eremita remains a compelling watch thanks to its open-ended brief, which lays the groundwork for a sweeping range of responses, both in style and content. Its chapters run the gamut, ranging from the introspective to the voyeuristic and the everyday to the surreal.

Zabé’s vignette, for instance, opens with a crawl along the Venice Beach boardwalk, mostly deserted except for the homeless encampments that occupy the curb. Images of LED street signs flashing official advice – “PLEASE STAY 6FT APART!” – are ironically spliced against survey shots of cramped tents and candid interviews with their residents, a juxtaposition that’s drily reflected in the short’s title: Shelter in Place.

Other chapters go indoors to evoke the claustrophobia of that government order. Heberlé’s short, the only scripted film of the bunch, is an early cinema-inspired piece that depicts the blossoming of a relationship within the confines of an apartment building. Falivene’s slice-of-life short, on the other hand, documents some of the radical changes made to daily life in the past year. Cooped up in the same Roman apartment, he and his family Zoom-school, process the enormity of the pandemic, and commiserate with colleagues over Skype about movie sets’ impossible new guidelines.

Rodriguez’s contribution, Solsticio de Invierno (Winter Solstice), evokes a Rear Window-esque sense of housebound voyeurism. Partly shot through a binocular perspective from indoors, her camera restlessly combs the outside world until it finds something worth watching. Rodriguez’s film is Eremita’s opener, and it’s immediately followed by an interlude shot by Abbas, who trains his static lens on rumpled bed sheets for several minutes as music plays in the background.

The placement of these shorts at the outset of Eremita feels designed to establish a decidedly meditative mood over the anthology and encourage viewer patience, but not every contributed film requires it. Ashley Connor’s A Well Watered Woman is a sharply edited blast of energy: she makes eerie thrills out of the everyday, casting familiar sights like her own body in fresh, wonderstruck ways. Her cinematographic work has often tended towards the intimate; she has a strong instinct for physicality, as demonstrated by her work on movies like Flames and The Miseducation of Cameron Post. Here, that eye is turned on herself, as she shoots her own body with keen sensual awareness, paying close consideration to the way steam rises from her skin in the bath, or to the distorting effects of water and reflections on the body. Extreme close-ups turn her skin into landscape, a surreal contortion that, alongside the film’s experimental ending and ominous electronic score, brings to mind recent iterations of body horror like Annihilation.

Each short in Eremita grants us a precious peek into areas of its editor-director’s creativity that we may not yet be aware of; precious because, for once, it isn’t filtered through the directorial vision of someone else. For at least one of the cinematographers involved, that was the project’s attraction: being able to have “complete ownership” over their work. For us as audiences, Eremita’s role-switching opens up myriad new routes through which to understand these cinematographers and the images they produce. The damning sense of paradox and amplification of marginalized voices in Shelter in Place, for example, suggest its director is driven by a humanistic impulse: a connection that, once made, can help to shed light on Zabé’s work in Fistful of Dirt and The Florida Project, which similarly explores life in the shadows of a fairy-tale city with palpable empathy.

It’s this fascinating lens that extends Eremita’s value beyond that of a pandemic curio. Few projects grant us opportunities like this, to see what some of the most exciting image-makers working in film today would choose to shoot if they were given entirely free rein: no one else’s script to follow, no director dictating over their shoulder. Cinematographers are usually viewed as facilitators of someone else’s art: necessary, but secondary, elements in the filmmaking process. Eremita encourages us to see them as fully-fledged creatives in their own right – a worthy undertaking when even the institutions designed to recognize every contribution to the filmmaking process threaten to relegate cinematographers to commercial breaks. Eremita offers a persuasive corrective to this kind of attitude, making it a film of note for fans of cinema at any time, pandemic or no pandemic.

Eremita (Anthologies) releases on VOD on February 26th, with all profits to be donated to Amnesty International.

The post ‘Eremita (Anthologies)’ Harbors Appeal Beyond the Average Pandemic Response Movie appeared first on Film School Rejects.

Read More

Henry Jackman Cooks Musical Chaos in His Laboratory for ‘Cherry’

Welcome to World Builders, our ongoing series of conversations with the most productive and thoughtful behind-the-scenes craftspeople in the industry. In this entry, we chat with Cherry composer Henry Jackman about blending radical tones into a singular experience.

---

The only thing more satisfying than an established creative partnership is an established creative partnership that continuously erupts in surprise. Henry Jackman began composing films for Anthony Russo and Joe Russo with Captain America: The Winter Soldier, leading to subsequent team-ups on Captain America: Civil War, 21 Bridges, and Extraction. They instantly clicked, and their shared energy became perpetual. They fed each other, and in doing so, they seemed to attain a collective palate. Then came Cherry.

Some movies feel like dares. Cherry dares you to have a good time. It’s a sprawling nightmare blitz through the trauma of growing up in America. Tom Holland‘s protagonist stumbles from teenager to soldier to addict to bank robber. The Russos call the film their most personal work to date, and their obvious passion for cinema throbs through every frame. Why settle for one genre when you can shred a half dozen?

And, by “shred,” I’m talking the Eddie Van Halen kind. Cherry roars from the screen and the speakers. It mutilates expectation and slides through tone like meat through a grinder. Balancing such a mixed dish of vibes requires all hands on deck or all cooks in the kitchen. If one chef faltered, Cherry would crumble. Certainly, if the score couldn’t make sense of the emotional whiplash, the audience would recoil.

Jackman got word of Cherry early on in the process and was told to expect something lightyears apart from the Russos’ Marvel tales. When the script finally dropped on his desk, he was not disappointed. He was a little flummoxed.

“I knew pretty early on,” Jackman says, “from the way they were talking, and the material, and the nature of the story, that this was going to be a long way from Captain America: The Winter Soldier and their Avengers movies. They were definitely heading off in a completely different direction.”

Cherry‘s script contains a lot of story. The film spans years and is chopped into multiple chapters. It’s no mere feat for the autobiographical novel, the medium in which Cherry originated, but it’s a magic trick for a movie contending with a tightly contained budget and runtime.

Propelling themselves from the source material, screenwriters Jessica Goldberg and Angela Russo-Otstot (the latter is Anthony and Joe’s sister) reach for comedy as quickly as they do for terror. They’re going for the whole human experience in two and a half hours. The task is daunting on paper, but it was utterly wonderous once experienced in motion.

“Then I got the first cut,” Jackman continues. “It surprised me. Even having read the script. The bravery of the filmmaking was really quite exceptional. So, then, instead of launching straight into writing specific music for specific scenes, I thought, in order for the music to really achieve something individual and experimental, I had to go into the laboratory for a while.”

The “laboratory” was Jackman’s garage. Given the freedom to poke, prod, and play, the composer tasked his assistant with stuffing the space with every known and unknown musical instrument. Jackman didn’t want to rely on the usual melodies that bubble in his mind. He craved new ones; the weirder, the better.

“I started experimenting with texture,” he says. “Messing things up with production. I was wheeling out all sorts of half-broken hardware equipment from the late ’70s and ’80s. These analog synths. Things that don’t quite work properly and are a bit unstable.”

When Cherry enters Iraq, and Holland’s titular character has his universe forever altered, the film rattles off its emotional hinges. Jackman found liberation in the story’s precarious nature. Solution existed within the chaos.

“Once they go into the PTSD in Iraq,” Jackman explains, “I started to become obsessed by needing inherent instability to the sound. I started fooling around with layering things onto broken cassette machines and laying them back again and laying them into a Roland Space Echo, which is an Echo that’s probably forty years old.”

A Roland Space Echo is an effects unit that records sound onto a loop of magnetic tape. The instrument’s wielder can then distort the sound, producing gnarly delays and reverb. If you’re seeking to replicate a brain under attack, it’s the beast needed.

“There’s a little patch of tape on mine that’s damaged,” he says. “I would time the layering of the sound, so it hit the damaged part of the tape, and then lay it back into the computer. Those sorts of things, unexpected anomalies, create an emotional effect that is something not perfect, something unexpected, something with grunge and noise. You need those accidental imperfections. That non-digital, analog messiness is quite reassuring. It’s quite human.”

Jackman connects Cherry‘s various strands of music using one particular melody. It’s the tune that came to Jackman first while he was fiddling around on the piano. Nothing would make sense, let alone gel, without it.

“My first thought was I’m going to need some basic Cherry theme,” he says. “Even if it’s distorted and mangled and appears on different instruments, I’m going to need one unifying idea.”

The main theme became “The Comedown,” and it warbles in all its glory toward the very end of the film as this sweeping, long track. Before Jackman could tinker on anything else in his laboratory, he had to nail down the film’s emotional climax. Once acquired, he could work backward, and go crazy, and seed “The Comedown” into other places within the musical narrative.

“[The main theme] emerged pretty quickly after watching the first cut,” says Jackman. “I was just left with this very ambiguous feeling that comes out of the filmmaking from that last scene. It’s not a happy scene. It’s not a sad scene. It’s cathartic. It leaves you in this philosophic, ambiguous place that seemed to demand some compositional response. I just ambled up to the piano, not long after seeing that, and I let something start to happen.”

The pandemic added another disordered layer to the endeavor. On Cherry, Jackman could not secure the orchestra he initially expected. He became the sole hand steering the musical ship, and his struggles to master instrumentation concocted further unexpected but whimsical results.

“There’s a piece used for Emily (Ciara Bravo),” he says, “where you hear this ukulele and Andean harp. It’s got this naivety to it. Well, that naivety is because I’m playing all the instruments and I’ve no idea what I’m doing! The way I approached writing that piece of music was in some way hindered by my ability to pluck any of these instruments, but that compositional technique created an unexpected result. That was me locked in a room by myself, going deeper and deeper into the laboratory, which may not have happened, had it not been for COVID.”

In another creative collaboration, lockdown might have proved agonizing, if not utterly detrimental. With the Russos, however, Jackman never lost any time in the process. Whenever necessary, the directors and composer jumped onto Zoom to hash out their notes on the score. With a firmly established working relationship, the unique post-production grind wasn’t much of a grind at all.

“It was nice having my secret laboratory,” says Jackman. “I furtively winged these things down the digital pipes to the guys, who are super tech-savvy and would review it to picture. I could think of all sorts of projects where COVID could really hamper you, but with a combination of the serious experimental nature of the music and me knowing the Russos as I do, and then being really on top of the tech ways of communicating with each other, we really didn’t skip a beat in terms of our usual relationship.”

The next challenge for Henry Jackman and the Russos will be finding a film that can equal or topple Cherry‘s surprises. Not an impossible task, but one that seems unlikely so close after completing a movie that’s emotionally stuffed with six other movies.

---

Cherry premieres in select theaters on February 26th and releases globally on Apple TV+ on Friday, March 12th.

The post Henry Jackman Cooks Musical Chaos in His Laboratory for ‘Cherry’ appeared first on Film School Rejects.

Read More