Geeking over film.
Das kleine Chaos // dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Saul Bass: The Origins of the Vertiginous Forms in Vertigo
I was browsing through the remainder bin in a Third Avenue bookshop. I leafed through a book and was stunned by some beautiful images. They were by Lissajous, a French mathematician of the late 1800s.
From a Swiss scientist’s later description of these images and how they were made, I was able to reconstruct a device used by Lissajous to create them. It consisted of a recording pendulum with an attached and smaller free-swinging eccentric pendulum which introduced variables into the motion of the recording pendulum. The recording device was a tiny brush with an ink reservoir and a stop cock regulator. Very tricky to operate. But when it worked the images were extraordinary. Watching them grow as the pendulum swung, not knowing what their final form would be, was a magical experience. I made a batch. Sat on them for years. And then Hitchcock asked me to work on “Vertigo.” Click!
I did not invent them, they had already existed, but were not fully recognized for their aesthetic potential since they were mainly seen as scientific expressions. You could say I was obsessed with them for a while — that I had fallen in love with them — so I knew what Hitch was driving at. [x]
“You know what I did this morning? I played the voice of a toy. I play a planet. I menace somebody called Something-or-other. Then I’m destroyed. My plan to destroy Whoever-it-is is thwarted and I tear myself apart on the screen.” [x]
——
Welles was 70 at the time and in poor health. His last released film was 1987’s “Someone to Love,” but that was shot before Welles lent his voice to “Transformers.” Late in his career, Welles often took to commercials and narration work as a source of income.
Author Barbara Leaming spent many days with Welles in his last three years for her book, “Orson Welles: A Biography.” She recalls Welles telling her shortly before he died that he had spent the day “playing a toy.”
“That was for him a way of earning a living and a way of trying to finance the films that he wanted to make,” says Leaming. “Obviously in those years, there’s a tremendous sadness except that the thing he used to always say to me was, ‘The one thing that’s helped me to survive is that I’m not bitter.”’ [x]
Huw Wheldon: The fact is, you’re in love with the movies, aren’t you?
Orson Welles: That’s my trouble! You see, if I’d only stayed in the theater, I could have worked steadily, without stopping for all these years. But, having made one film, I decided that it was the best and most beautiful form that I knew and one that I wanted to continue with. I was in love with it as you say, really tremendously so.
“Wes Anderson has a very special kind of talent: He knows how to convey the simple joys and interactions between people so well and with such richness. This kind of sensibility is rare in movies.”
Martin Scorsese on Wes Anderson (born May 1, 1969)
The Tin Star // dir. Anthony Mann
The Passion of Joan of Arc // dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer
Rhapsody in August // dir. Akira Kurosawa
