The Cherry Picker
T Rex - Cadillac with Michael Imperioli on bongos
The Auteurs 3 Free Luis Buñuel Films
The Auteurs is now showing 3 films by Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel for free in the US to celebrate the release of the beautiful remastering of the filmmaker’s unheralded 1956 French/Mexican co-production Death in the Garden, shot in gorgeous Eastmancolor and starring Michel Piccoli, Simone Signoret, and Charles Vanel.
Death in the Garden and two classic Buñuel films from his earlier and most vividly surreal period, Un chien andalou (1929) and L’âge d’or (1930) are available to watch for free in the US. The Auteurs is presenting the 1956 film alongside more renowned films made before and after to put it on the context of his career.
Four Nights Of A Dreamer
Four Nights of a Dreamer is a loose adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s novella White Nights, with the action transposed from 19th century Russia to modern-day France. One night, Jacques (Guillaume Des Forets), a young man with artistic aspirations, sees a girl (Isabelle Weingarten) trying to commit suicide by jumping from a bridge. When he prevents her from jumping, Marthe tells him that she has become desperate waiting for her lover, who left her almost a year ago but promised to return. Jacques asks Marthe to meet him by the bridge the next night and the girl agrees. They spend the following three nights wandering through Paris, and Jacques tries in vain to cure Marthe of the memories of her elusive lover. The same story was previously filmed by Luchino Visconti as Le Notti Bianche.
The Johnathan Rosenbaum review
Robert Bresson’s Four Nights of a Dreamer transforms Dostoevsky’s “White Nights” into a graceful poem about romanticism and solitude. It also suggests that Bresson’s style is far more flexible than many of us have assumed. Relocating the original story in contemporary Paris and objectifying its plot into an inventory of elegant surfaces, his adaptation is no less lyrical in its depiction of youthful passions and sorrows. Jacques (Guillaume Des Forêts) shelters his love for Marthe (Isabelle Weingarten) within an ideal mental universe charted by the op art canvases of faceless figures he paints and the soliloquies he recites into a cassette recorder. Bresson’s encounter with both characters seems to liberate him from the uncertainties of his last film [Une Femme Douce, 1969], and it came as no surprise to learn, in his press conference, that he wants to work with young people again. The use he makes of Des Forets and Weingarten, however untheatrical, effective turns their luminous presences into performances — the latter, in particular, brings the spring, flat-footed Bresson-walk to a kind of perfection. With a hero even more isolated than the one onPickpocket, and a determined heroine whose flowing black cape seems to carrus all the way back to Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, Bresson finds himself completely at home in the world of their fragile spirits. If the interpolated “texts” in Une Femme Douce — scenes from Hamlet and Benjamin, noisy TV images — were somewhat cryptic interruptions, the interludes that function similarly in this film are even stranger: two pages of an erotic book, a film-within-the-film that hilariously parodies melodramatic movie violence, two atrocious folk-pop songs in English and a surprisingly pretty one in Portuguese. The latter is heard from a tourist boat on the Seine, whose mysterious passage provides a few of the most beautiful and magical moments in all of Bresson.
When Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse was first released in 1971, so the legend goes, Spiro Agnew himself called Atlantic Records to complain about the album’s incendiary lyrics. Promotional efforts dried up, and since then, the album has become one of the great rare gems of the funk era. With this first-ever CD release from Label M, it is available again in all its strange, eclectic glory. McDaniels had earned his living as a producer and songwriter for artists like Roberta Flack and Gladys Knight, and was in all honesty not much of a singer, but somehow his clumsy lyrics and dry delivery combined to carry his message across. In an unthreatening manner that hardly warranted a call from the White House,McDaniels warns that man’s struggles against each other are pointless, as some dark sinister force controls us all (“Headless Heroes”), and that protest without action is futile (“no amount of dancing is going to make us free,” he sings in “Freedom Death Dance”). With a dry wit he recounts an episode of everyday racist brutality in “Supermarket Blues,” and finds simple carnal pleasures in the acoustic folk-flavored “Susan Jane.” It all gets wrapped up in an appealing stew that draws from rock, funk, folk, soul, and even free jazz. Considering the number of times McDaniels’ sinewy beats and chunky guitar riffs have been sampled over the years, it’s about time a proper re-release allowed listeners to hear the whole picture.
