Thirty-fourth season

1698.) Vintage: This week I salute a special, unseen-in-decades program for two reasons: because it serves as tribute to the late, great music producer Hal Willner, whose legacies of music production in the studio and onstage are very, very strong, especially here in NYC; and also because it is sublime. The show in question is an outgrowth of Willner’s “Lost in the Stars” Kurt Weill tribute LP entitled September Songs: The Music of Kurt Weill, co-produced by Canadian, Portuguese, and German networks. The show features performances of songs from different periods in Weill’s career, punctuated by historical material about Weill’s career and life. The performers are ideally suited for the numbers they perform: “dark” rockers (Nick Cave, PJ Harvey), an opera diva (Teresa Stratas), a jazz singer (Betty Carter), a torch singer backed w. classical musicians (Elvis Costello and the Brodsky Quartet), NYC legends (Lou Reed, David Johansen), and other surprise guests, including an utterly sublime final number that combines three elements into one scene of low-key magic. The show aired in 1994/5 (in various countries, with the documentary materials presented in different languages) and hasn’t been seen since. (The copies of certain of the numbers “hidden in plain sight” are unwatchable.)

1699.) Vintage: Back to the “things you ain’t seein’ anyplace else” department on the show, this week I feature a discussion of, and scenes from, an anthology film that allowed a trio of arthouse directors to experiment with… the third dimension! 3x3D was created by the town of Guimarães, Portugal, when it was deemed a European “capital of culture.” They funded a short feature (one hour) in which three filmmakers could do anything they wanted, as long as it involved the 3-D process. In this episode, I focus on the first two segments (since the third is by J-L Godard, who always should get his own show). Portuguese filmmaker Edgar Pêra contributed a segment about the relationship between the movie viewer and the movie, explored from several different angles – he coins the term “cine-sapiens” for film buffs and comes up with some great images (although the piece as a whole does become abrasive). The master of historic trickery, Peter Greenaway, contributed a startlingly conceived piece in which we see the history of Guimarães, seen through hallways, arches, plazas, and other places where forgotten history lurks. Greenaway’s segment is the best in the film, as he densely layers the imagery. (Even in 2-D, the video looks 3-D.) Thus, you take a journey through a city’s past while seeing the possibilities for the “enlightened” use of computer effects – they don’t just have to be used to depict superhero fights, giant dystopic landscapes (with a very distant horizon), explosions, and random destruction!

1700.) Vintage: The second of two episodes about the never-seen-in-the-U.S. feature 3x3D focuses on the short work of our fave, Uncle Jean (aka Jean-Luc Godard). I discuss, and show, his contribution to the feature, which is an anthology of three shorts made in 3-D with a budget from the Portuguese city of Guimaraes, which was declared a “European Capital of Culture” and wanted to commemorate that distinction with a film experiment (thus, the feature). Godard’s contribution is a continuation of his “essay films” (which he’d been making since the late Sixties, but which crystalized in the Nineties with his Histoire(s) du Cinema). We thus see film history, “samples” from the other arts (music, painting, literature), and samples of 3-D videography that Godard was doing as a rehearsal for his 3-D movie Adieu au langage. As a bonus, I throw in scenes from other Godard video shorts at the end of the episode.

1701.) Vintage: There’s never an “expiration date” on doing Deceased Artiste tributes in the Funhouse, and so this week I’m saluting Marshall Efron, who died many months ago. In this episode, I discuss his career with the focus on the absolutely wonderful Seventies children’s show “Marshall Efron’s Illustrated, Simplified and Painless Sunday School” (1973-78). Efron co-created the show with his writing partner Alfa-Betty Olsen, and he was the entire cast – a one-man collection of odd yet adorable characters from the Old and New Testaments (and some that were just made up to fit into the framework of the parables). The show was focused on the storytelling aspect of the Bible (as both Efron and Olsen were cited in “TV Guide” as being “not pious”), and it was the single best way to take in these tales when one was a kid back in the Nixon/Carter era. In various makeup jobs and costumes, Efron told the tales in an informal (but still accurate) way, aided by mannequins, dolls, stock footage, drawings, and (then) state-of-the-art video effects. The “Painless Sunday School” has sadly slipped through the cracks of TV history in terms of reruns and DVD releases, but its memory remains strong to to those of us who saw it at the right moment (and posted some episodes on YT, as this former Catholic-school-student-turned-Atheist did when Efron died at the end of 2019 — https://mediafunhouse.blogspot.com/2019/10/simplified-and-painless-deceased.html).

1702.) I return to the “You Ain’t Seein’ This Anyplace Else” department for another film that is worth seeing but is an absolute mess. It’s the star-studded, totally misconceived Otto Preminger film of Porgy and Bess (1959). The reason that you ain’t seein’ it anyplace else on TV, cable, Blu-ray, or in theaters, is that Ira Gershwin doesn’t want you to see it — four decades after his death! Ira wasn’t wrong in thinking that the film was a big mistake, but he decided to pull the music rights and thus the film utterly disappeared from all conventional methods of distribution. (It used to show up in a shortened and altered version on TV until the early Seventies.) What’s wrong with the movie? It’s a generally dated piece that takes viewers adjusting to the sight of all Black characters being criminals or layabouts. It has a cast of very talented performers, all of whom couldn’t sing opera (and it definitely was scored as an opera), so the two stars (Sidney Poitier, who has to perform his handicapped role on his knees, and Dorothy Dandridge) and one of the key supporting players (Diahann Carroll) were all dubbed by opera singers. It also was made by Otto Preminger who, aside from being a generally wretched person to his actors, was just not a good director when not making thrillers. BUT the film has three actors who do their own singing (incl. Pearl Bailey and Brock Peters), and one of those is Sammy Davis Jr., who has two killer numbers and steals the whole goddamned movie. Join me as I discuss the film and show some sequences with dialogue but mostly the musical numbers, which are as odd as you think they’re going to be from the above description.

1703.) Vintage: The feast of St. Jerry occurs again this weekend (“Labor Day” to the rest of the country), and so the festivities commence on the Funhouse. First up is a discussion of Jerry’s death and the subsequent revelation of his disinheriting his first family – and the amazing fact that his first wife (whom he reportedly cheated out of alimony) is still alive and suffering dementia in a care facility. Then it’s on to a Funhouse discovery, a monograph in French on Jerry, written in Dec. 1964, when there was a celebration of the newly minted filmmaker’s first five films (and his being freed from his “handicap” – Dean Martin!). Then it’s time to talk about the auction of Jerry’s possessions – including many things with his logo on ’em, wonderfully crappy clown art, racist props, a stunning oil painting, and 73 (count ’em!) guns that Jerry owned. We close out with a fittingly artsy clip (one that begins in one direction and quickly flies in another). And thus is celebrated Joseph Levitch weekend….

1704.) To commemorate the 25th anniversary of 9/11, I present short films from the undistributed-in-the-U.S. anthology feature 11’09”01 — September 11 (2002). The decision was made to choose 11 directors from 11 different countries; the assignment was then to make a short that run 11 minutes, 9 seconds and one frame. [Not sure why the frame was needed.] As my presentation of moments from the film, I’ve chosen three of the shorts: the American entry creates a fictional character (played by a beloved character actor) affected by the towers’ falling in a small but significant way; the British entry discusses another state of national chaos that began on a Sept 11 in the early 1970s (in a country whose regime was toppled by the U.S…. because we can’t tolerate small countries choosing their own leaders if they aren’t puppets of America); and the Mexican entry presents an audio montage of sounds of September 11 that is an emotional sensory journey.

1705.) Back in the “You Ain’t Seein’ This Anyplace Else” department, I present an episode devoted to the third and final film directed by Juliet Berto, the actress best known for starring in films by Godard and Rivette. Havre (1986) is an intense and unusual fever dream set in the port city of Le Havre, centering around a group of unusual characters having overwrought encounters. At the center is Lili (Frederique Jamet), a young woman whose boyfriend has died, leaving behind an unfinished video game that contains the film’s leads as characters. In the meantime, Lili is cursed by a crazy (white-supremacist) minister who believes she’s a witch — and one other character’s fixation on Lili results in him raping her, which triggers a kung fu fight (!) and a later, truly feverish dance sequence. Havre operates on symbolic and magic realist levels and is without question the best of the three films that Berto directed during her short life. (She died at 46.)