The one that got bombed by Strangelove.

“You're talking about a different kind of war.”

– General Stark

Both Lumet's Fail Safe and #Kubrick's #ColdWar comedy came out in 1964, right after the #CubaCrisis. The world was awash with the realisation that the bomb, The Bomb, wasn't merely proverbial flexing. And when crisis happens, there are two options. One is to laugh, the other is to grasp. Sadly for Lumet, and the world, his Fail Safe was released while everyone was still too busy chuckling.

I took a long time considering what to nominate for today's topic. This is not an easy one. And frankly, barely qualifies as as film.

 

In the 1930s, three films (2 British, 1 American) portrayed Jews in a positive light, as victims of persecution through history. When in 1938 the Novemberpogrome took place in (Nazi-occupied) Germany (the term “Kristallnacht” is a horrible euphemism and I won't use it), media was not unanimously jubilant about it. Understanding that violence is not the way to popular consensus, plans were made to change people's thinking about the Jews, using widely available visual media.

 

In 1939, the faux #documentary Der ewige Jude, directed by the leader of Goebbels' #propaganda film department Fritz Hippler, started production. Scenes shot in Jewish ghettos in occupied Poland were intercut with real, but out-of-context documentary footage, giving it a false sense of authenticity./

“Where rats turn up, they spread diseases and carry extermination into the land. They are cunning, cowardly and cruel, they travel in large packs, exactly the way the Jews infect the races of the world.”

– narrator

A recurring theme in Der ewige Jude is disease. Not merely to suggest “the Jew”'s unclean life and religion, but as a synonym of people as a vermin, a parasite to decent (read: Aryan) society. In a chilling demonstration of the Kuleshov Effect, footage of a large group of #rats coming out of a sewer is followed by a crowd of Jews in the Łódź Ghetto, filmed without their consent or knowledge of where this footage would end up.

To support his family, small-town boy Domenico moves to Milan in the hope to find a job. Eventually he's employed, as a clerk in a drab office replacing a senior worker who died. While the days drag on, only interrupted by coffee shop small talk with fellow teenager Antonietta, the Christmas office #party draws nearer.

“My wife gave me a big kiss this morning. I only get kisses once a month, on payday.”

– Sartori

With the dark absurdity of coming out of fascism and having to run a real-world country with a naive ineptitude – represented by the too-large-borrowed-from-father-suits – and pretence childlike bureaucratic procedures, Olmi's Il posto is a wonderfully sharp observation of postwar Italy.

Two American families, adults and their children, go on a #HikingTrip somewhere in the south of France. They find themselves increasingly lost, not only in #nature but also in and among themselves.

 

Supposedly based on a real troublesome event and riddled with much filmmaking adversity, O Território nearly stranded as much as the hikers did. In support, #WimWenders used the same cast for his Der Stand der Dinge (1982), about a film crew's attempt to remake #RogerCorman's Day the World Ended (1955).

 

In a wonderful, unscripted circular way, Corman was one of the executive producers of Ruiz's film.

All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl. Or a girl with a glue gun. Or skip the girl, get yourself a piece of cardboard, some foam latex, and a six pack of beer. Frank Grow's Red & Rosy is the embodiment of a special staple of #DIY culture that appears to be long-lost. Really kids, you don't need much of a budget. Or tomorrows latest equipment. The hottest Hollywood hotshot? Forget about it, ask your drunk uncle to yell at the camera for 10 minutes. You want authenticity? Tape some random medical footage straight from your teevee. Need a shot of adrenal juice?

 

Well, just watch this.

Never was or will I be a fan of Jacques #Tati, the loveable Luddite who wouldn't be as big as he became if it wasn't for the technological wonders of the 20th century. Having said that, his Playtime (1967) holds a special place in my heart.

 

Tati's alter ego Monsieur #Hulot roams a hyper-modern #Paris, actually an enormous soundstage dubbed Tativille. People, buildings and gadgets interact with and against each other, each and everyone as plotless as a prop. In unison, it becomes a perfectly orchestrated symphony of maddening modernism.

 

But Tati wouldn't be Tati if it wasn't for a glimpse of quiet nostalgia. A woman holding the glass-and-steel entrance door of yet another concrete office building. In the glass, a burst of warm light and colour and movement. And then it's gone, and we remember how that tower once was the thorn in the Luddite's eye, that “baroque and mercantile fancy of a builder of machines”.

 

I'm going to take Mr Ebert's words to heart for my long overdue revisit to #Tativille:

”'Playtime' is a peculiar, mysterious, magical film. Perhaps you should see it as a preparation for seeing it; the first time won't quite work.”

– Roger Ebert

Science fiction may be one of those genres that's forever linked to the future and, depending on which side of 2000 you are at, either in a dystopian of utopian fashion.

 

An #Eiffel Tower watchman wakes up to find the world around him asleep. The few ones still awake – the bright, pretty, carefree things – explore, live and loot.

Vérités et Mensonges is what it's actually called, but you may know it as F for Fake. Orson Welles and three uncredited fellow conspirators – Gary Graver, Oja Kodar, and François Reichenbach – delve into the world of #art forger Elmyr de Hory by way of his biographer Clifford Irving.

“Back to the old tricks.”

– Orson Welles

Welles et al free-associate with concepts of art, lies, #deception, and #authenticity. #Houdin, Welles, #Picasso and Hughes, hoaxers, hucksters and artists in their own right. And then it's over: this work of art, this sleight of hand, this demonstration of factuality, an exposé.

There's a handful of notable amateur films in the National Film Registry. One of them is the Zapruder film, another Sid Laverents' Multiple SIDosis.

“In terms of sheer entertainment value, I think that it demonstrated that one eccentric genius alone in his garage can rival the best of the Hollywood studios””

– Ross Lipman, UCLA Film & Television Archive restorationist

Sid Laverents was an airplane engineer and former one-man band vaudevillian who in his fifties joined the #SanDiego Amateur Moviemakers Club. One of his best-known outputs, Multiple SIDosis, took him and his 16 mm #Bolex four years and 1,900 feet of celluloid to make. In it, Sid – and a musical troupe made up of many overdubbed versions of himself – performs the popular and insanely catchy tune Nola.

 

Catch it here.