“Nobody shoves dirty money in my mouth.”The Naked Kiss (Samuel Fuller, 1964)
Jul
4
1961

A desk calendar reading July 4, 1961, with dirty, crumpled dollar bills thrown on top of it. DP: Stanley Cortez.
– Candy
@settima@zirk.us
“Nobody shoves dirty money in my mouth.”The Naked Kiss (Samuel Fuller, 1964)
Jul
4
1961

A desk calendar reading July 4, 1961, with dirty, crumpled dollar bills thrown on top of it. DP: Stanley Cortez.
– Candy
Divorzio all'italiana [Divorce Italian Style] (Pietro Germi, 1961)
Jul
3

A closeup of a man's hand holding up a diary. It's the third of July. DPs: Leonida Barboni & Carlo Di Palma.
Additionally, IMDb writes that “director Pietro Germi filmed a close-up of the front page of a newspaper announcing Yuri Gagarin's flight around the earth on April 12th 1961.”
“You've won a doll and a kiss. I'll give you the doll and your girl can give you the kiss!”Lonesome (Pál Fejős, 1928)
Jul
3
Sat

An alarm clock informs us it's 7:15 while the calendar adds that it's the 3rd on a Saturday. Next to the alarm a crumpled up ladies' magazine. DP: Gilbert Warrenton.
– Coney Island barker
“What I sought in 'Pacific' was not the imitation of the sounds of the locomotive, but the translation of a visual impression and a physical enjoyment through a musical construction. It starts from objective contemplation: the quiet breathing of the engine at rest, the effort of starting, then the progressive increase in speed, to arrive at the lyrical state, the pathos of the 300-ton train, launched in the middle of the night at 120 km/h.” Пасифик 231 [Pasifik 231 / Pacific 231] (Mikhail Tsekhanovskiy, 1931)
Jul
2

Musicians superimposed over the locomotive's pistons. DP: Leonid Patlis.
A mode of transportation to get me to my ideal vacation destination*. And yes, I would travel to an island by transcontinental locomotive
– Arthur Honegger, Dissonances. Revue musicale indépendante (1925) (via)
Hinted on in Abel Gance's La Roue (1923), composer Arthur Honegger's Пасифик 231 follows the narrative of a stream train ploughing through the night. The conductor's gestures mirror the fireman's and slowly, the machine comes to live. The music becomes abstract, machine-like, in its rendition of pistons and valves. Using double exposure and Soviet montage theory, music and movement become one. The Futurists, if not opposed to the Soviets that is, would have had a field day with this outing.
* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for July is, for unknown reasons, mostly not date-related and follows some sort of vacation narrative.
Il mare [The Sea] (Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, 1962)
Jul
1

The actor (Umberto Orsini) looking out over the island. The claustrophobic framing of the hotel windows contrasts sharply with the openness of the sea. DP: Ennio Guarnieri.
My ideal vacation spot, country, city, town, or resort*
An island, in this case Capri (granted I've never been there), off-season, in a space and time lost in the mists. It'll occasionally rain and it's cold enough to dress up.
* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for July is, for unknown reasons, mostly not date-related and follows some sort of vacation narrative.
“The house takes care of itself.”Burnt Offerings (Dan Curtis, 1976)
Jul
1

The chauffeur (Anthony James). DP: Jacques R. Marquette.
– Roz Allardyce
Farewell, Etaoin Shrdlu (David Loeb Weiss, 1980)
Jul
1
1978

All set for the July 2, 1978 edition of The New York Times, hot off the press.
Production of the last hot type copy of The New York Times on the nigh of July 1, 1978. The ETAOIN SHRDLU in the title refers to the accidental string of letters that sometimes would end up in print when using the hot type method.
That Linotype setting, and narration, was provided by Carl Schlesinger. That same old, but now digitally set New York Times, provided a lovely farewell when the man passed. Read it here
“But this art of total synthesis that is Cinema, this fabulous newborn of Machine and Sentiment, is beginning to cease its moans and is entering its infancy. Its adolescence will soon arrive, seize its intelligence, and multiply its dreams; we ask that we hasten its development, precipitate the advent of its youth. We need Cinema to create the total art toward which the other arts have always tended.“Combat de boxe (Charles Dekeukeleire, 1927)
Jun
30
Mike Tyson – 1966

One of the fighters receives a direct hit. The camera is so close that we see abstract shapes, texture and contrast before recognising the scene. DP: Antoine Castille.
A [favourite] athlete in a film role for Mike Tyson's birthday
– Ricciotto Canudo, Gazette des sept arts, 1923 (via)
The match you see is real, between two actual fighters. Paul Werrie's rhythmic poem served as the basis. Everything else is illusion made flesh with what was available. An empty painter's studio, a few friends, footage of a crowd, a deep comprehension of the Kuleshov effect and rapid Soviet-style editing. Dekeukeleire places us from the safe world of the spectator right in the line of fire. But there's no release like in James Williamson's The Big Swallow (1901). Without that gimmick, cinema enters Canudo's realm, as the seventh art.
蠱 [Gu / Bewitched] (Chih-Hung Kuei, 1981)
Jun
30

Exorcising demons. DP: Hsin-Yeh Li.
“We Malays, we Filipinos, are not governed by the concept of time. We are governed by the concept of space. We don't believe in time. If you live in the country, you see Filipinos hang out. They are not very productive. That is very Malay. It is all about space and nature. [...] In the Philippine archipelago, nature provided everything, until the concept of property came with the Spanish colonizers. Then the capitalist order took control. [...] The concept of time was introduced to us when the Spaniards came. We had to do oracion [pray] at six o'clock, and start work at seven. Before it was free, it was Malay.”Florentina Hubaldo, CTE (Lav Diaz, 2012)
Jul
29
International Day of the Tropics

A small river in the outskirts of the jungle. A young woman sits in the water cradling an older woman, like a Pietà. A man, in the same water, is slumped in a wooden chair. A third woman is standing there, looking at us, her head slightly tilted. DP: Lav Diaz.
A film set in a tropical location for the International Day of the Tropics
– Lav Diaz, via