Cambria Productions: On the Lips of Syncro-Vox
by Josh Measimer

Cambria Productions, founded in West Hollywood in 1958, was largely a collaboration between cartoonist Clark Haas, who had been an assistant for a few series at King Features Syndicate as well as the creator of his own series Sunnyside, and cameraman Edwin Gillette, who created the Syncro-Vox animation technique.

Syncro-Vox was developed in 1952, intended to cut down the costs of animating mouth movements, specifically on animals in TV commercials. What Syncro-Vox basically did was that the lips of a voice actor would be filmed as they read their lines, and then take the footage of their lips would be edited onto an image to visually simulate speech.

The average cost of animating mouth movements onto the commercial animals prior to this had been approximately $11,000 per minute. Using his Syncro-Vox technique, Edwin Gillette dramatically decreased the cost to just $500 per minute. In 1956, Gillette would gain a patent for his invention, and in 1958, he was contacted by Clark Haas about joining a new animation studio he was starting up called Cambria Productions.

The use of Syncro-Vox was Cambria’s biggest claim to fame (or infamy), though they also used other techniques to lower costs, including shaking the camera on a static frame and splicing in live-action footage (such as of a waving flag) to simulate more movement than there was in reality.

Clutch Cargo: The Low-Budget Cartoon Phenomenon

 

 

Clutch Cargo (1959–60)

The first series produced by Cambria starred Clutch Cargo (voiced by TV and radio announcer Richard Cotting), a tough adventurer with handsome looks who’s regularly sent off on dangerous missions across the globe. Clutch typically flew around in an airplane, inspired by creator Clark Haas’s time as an early jet pilot. With him are his loyal red-headed sidekick Spinner (voiced by Margaret Kerry, the real-life model for Tinker Bell in Disney’s Peter Pan) and their dog Paddlefoot (voiced by actor Hal Smith in one of his earliest roles). Sometimes the team was also helped by their ally Swampy (also voiced by Hal Smith).

Clutch Cargo, for all intents and purposes, was the first of what modern cartoon viewers would call an “action” cartoon—excepting perhaps the NBC Tele Comics series years earlier. While serialized cartoons on TV weren’t a new thing (going as far back as the first TV cartoon, Crusader Rabbit), unlike those series which were comedic at heart, Clutch Cargo drew more directly from the film serials of old by actually taking itself seriously. The heroes often found themselves in real danger against villains who meant them harm. Clutch and Spinner were forced to overcome these nemeses through ingenuity and teamwork. Future action cartoons would follow in its footsteps, bringing more serious storytelling to animation.

Clutch Cargo made its debut on March 9, 1959, running in weekday syndication on local children’s shows. Each of its 52 adventures consisted of five 5-minute shorts (260 total) which ran Monday through Friday, and in some markets would be rerun all together over the weekend as a half-hour show. While even back when it premiered it was ridiculed for its animation, Clutch Cargo gained a solid following for its storytelling for those who could see past the lips.

Clutch Cargo: The Haunted Castle

CLUTCH CARGO: Mystery in the Northwoods

CLUTCH CARGO: Big X

 

 

Space Angel (1962–64)

Space Angel was Cambria’s second series, created by Dick Darley (who directed the early ’50s sci-fi TV show Space Patrol) and animated by former DC Comics artist Alex Toth. Centered around the eyepatch-wearing astronaut Scott McCloud (voiced by Ned Lefebver), he would don his helmet take on the identity of the hero Space Angel when the day needed saving.

Employed by the Earth Bureau of Investigation, he, along with the mechanic Taurus and navigator Crystal (voiced by Hal Smith and Margaret Kerry respectively), made up the Bureau’s Interplanetary Space Force operating aboard the spaceship Starduster. The most frequent alien force they faced were the Anthenians, a race of space-faring aliens with a society nearly identical to that of ancient Rome, frequently launching attacks to conquer other planets and enslave the inhabitants. There was also Queen Zora; physically resembling Nefertiti, she’d constantly try to create new weapons to terrorize the galaxy, as well as directly target the Interplanetary Space Force.

Space Angel, in certain ways, may have inspired elements of later, more well-known science fiction series. For example, in the “Space Hijackers” story of Space Angel, there is a docking scene that mirrors the famous docking sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey, despite Space Angel premiering a full seven years before 2001 was released.

Space Angel: INCIDENT OF THE LOUD PLANET

Space Angel: VISITORS FROM OUTER SPACE

Space Angel: COSMIC COMBAT

 

 

Captain Fathom (1965)

The last in the trilogy of Syncro-Vox series was Captain Fathom, beginning in 1965 and lasting a mere 17 stories (or 85 five-minute episodes). The series focused on Bill Fathom (voiced by artist Warren Tufts), the captain of the submarine Argonaut who’d go on various adventures with his crew. Like the previous series, the designs and animation were done by Alex Toth.

This series is not too fondly remembered (or remembered at all for that matter), and for good reason. By this time, the standards of animation on television were a bit higher than they were six years earlier when Clutch Cargo premiered.

Audiences just couldn’t see past the unsettling lips and bare minimum animation (as Haas once said, he didn’t consider his shows “cartoons” but rather “motorized movement”), especially when there were better options from studios like Hanna-Barbera (who had no less than six shows in production in 1965) and Total Television Productions (the studio behind shows like Tennessee Tuxedo). Cambria Productions was quickly falling into irrelevancy.

Captain Fathom: Voyage to the Stone Age

Captain Fathom:Pisastros Private War

Captain Fathom: Eye of the Mountain!

 

 

Moon Mullins: failed TV pilot excerpt

In the end, despite their efforts to stay alive, Cambria Productions quietly closed up shop by the end of the ’60s, remembered primarily as a relic of an odd time in television animation. Clutch Cargo continued to play off-and-on in syndication into the ’90s, seeing airplay on networks like Comedy Central’s predecessor, The Comedy Channel.

In fact, Clutch Cargo was forever immortalized in Pulp Fiction, just before Christopher Walken’s infamous watch speech. A young Butch (Bruce Willis’ character) is sitting in front of the TV when a weird looking cartoon character says, “Him think totem pole alive!” Space Angel and Captain Fathom, however, have disappeared from the collective public consciousness, only seeing the light of day as dollar bin DVDs.

The Making of Clutch Cargo

 

 

In Her Own Words: Margaret Kerry and Cambria Productions
from Cartoon Research

Jim Korkis: So why was the studio called Cambria?

Margaret Kerry: That was the name of Richard’s (her husband producer Dick Brown) A.P.A. ship when he was in the Coast Guard during World War II. He was stationed on the Pacific Coast. At one time he was patrolling the beach at Bodega Bay with a watchdog. We all tried to convince him to name the studio after himself but he was just so stubborn. I still think it was a big mistake.

JK: I found an article in a trade paper that stated that in 1965 Cambria was going to take Hanna-Barbera to court for $1,050,000, claiming the Jonny Quest series “uses, copies and appropriates substantial parts and portions of Cambria’s ‘Clutch Cargo’ and its pilot film, ‘Captain Fathom,’ including their principal cartoon characters.”

MK: No, we never sued. We never had the money. We wanted to sue. We were developing this action series with this young boy with red hair. Kay Wright was working with us at the time and he was working at Hanna-Barbera and he told them about the project and the next thing we knew they had hired some of our artists and took some of our concept art. You know that they were sometimes referred to as “Heist and Borrow” in the business.

We didn’t have the money to do the project so I doubt we sued. We were syndicated so we were always operating in deficit. People forget we were the first studio to do animation on television with human characters rather than squashed cats and mice.

JK: I know you announced many different animated projects that never got made like one with actor Cliff Arquette playing his “Charley Weaver” character in 1965.

MK: That was called “Get Cracken!” Cracken was the name of the mayor of this small rural town like Weaver’s Mount Idy but he was never where he was supposed to be so when something went wrong people would shout “Get Cracken!” Joe Cutter and Dave Detiege scripted the pilot and Clark Haas did the art direction. Charlie Weaver was going to narrate the thing. I still have a piece of artwork for the Weaver character design.

JK: And then Golden Eagle in 1967.

MK: How do you know all these things? That was about this young blonde World War I pilot. Again, it would be five minute segments but this time we were not going to use Synchro-Vox. We had a deal in place with Trans-Lux. My kids were playing with a Ouija board at the time and it said we would never start production on it and we didn’t.

Ed Gillette had these eight foot glass platens that moved by motors so the clouds could go one way and the planes the other. We were over on Melrose when we were working on that. He didn’t feel it was steady enough so he drilled down to anchor the device and hit the aquifer and gallons of water gushed up and it took two and half days to cap it.

JK: Any other oddball projects?

MK: I wrote a script called “The Company We Keep” about life in an animation studio and then another company produced “The Duck Factory” that was so similar. We did some animation of a wiseacre football called Freddy the Football voiced by Hal Smith for some Superbowl and we still own the rights to that character. We had a contract with The Human Fly, the Canadian stuntman who was briefly popular at the time. We were also pitching a Laurel and Hardy show and some other comedy team I can’t remember now.

We also did a pilot based on the comic strip “Moon Mullins”.

JK: Didn’t you work on a public service spot?

MK: That’s right. It was a fifteen minute animated film for the state of California on earthquake preparedness. I saw they were offering a grant and I figured I had been in an earthquake so I submitted and we got the job. My son came up with the name “A Quake…Don’t Let It Shake You”.

I haven’t seen it since. I wrote the script. Kay Wright did some work on it. Later the local CBS television station wanted us to do something similar for them.

JK: Of course, everyone wants to know about Clutch Cargo.

MK: We had a budget of only $3,600 for each five minute episode. Here’s something interesting. Dick Cotting who did the voice of Clutch could not say “Whew!” He would struggle with it and I can’t even imitate how it would come out so Hal Smith stepped in and would do it.

For one episode, Hal and I did eight different characters. Things were so tight money-wise that Hal and I stood at the same microphone.

I never got paid for any of my work on Clutch Cargo. My husband just assumed it was the family business and I should do it. I did get paid for Space Angel and Captain Fathom.

My husband had a falling out with Clark Haas and there was bad blood but I never knew what it was all about because he never said. I think Haas’ son took some Clutch Cargo artwork to Mike Van Eaton at his gallery and told him the story but I never heard it.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Misanthrope, I’ll try to get a glimpse. I think we might take weekends off, I’m not sure yet. Excellent outcome with your doc today, I guess it goes without saying. ** David Ehrenstein, She’s definitely among the great French actors ever, and such a resume. ** Tosh Berman, Hi. Wow, I don’t remember you telling me that Seyrig was your neighbor for a bit. That’s crazy! Even if your memory can’t illustrate it. Wow. ** _Black_Acrylic, Cool, happy she caught your eye, etc. ** bruno msmsmsm, Hi, welcome! Good to meet you, and thanks a lot. Yeah, ‘Dielman’ is unimpeachable. How and who are you? ** Jeff J, Hi, Jeff. Sight for sore eyes. Literally sore eyes, what with the editing. We’ve jumped into the editing, but Zooming would be good. Let’s find a mutual window. Weekends should be somewhat free if not totally. Amazing about the Bookworm book. I didn’t know about that. I wonder if that’s the same book that McSweeneys was supposed to publish years ago. I saw your email, and, yes, of course, it would totally amazing to have that post. Yes, please. Obviously happy the surgery seems to have righted your elbow. Nice festival there. Radigue was actually there in person? I’m going to see Sparks in a couple of weeks, but I think that’s all there is gig-wise for me at the moment. Although Nuit Blanche is on Saturday and a Ukrainian experimental electronic label is doing some big free sound/projection shebang at Gaite Lyrique, so I’ll probably wander into that. You’re into revising the trilogy now? That’s great! So you made a lot of progress during the residency? I’m good, very headlong into the film/editing, which is looking so incredible so far. In my little spare time I’m still fiddling with that possible small book of short, weird fiction things from the past ten years. It’s looking a little more probable at the moment, Great to see you, pal! ** Nick., Hi. I’m trying to imagine what a cute graveyard would look like. I keep ‘seeing’ something Japanese. Uh, for the most part I always did journalism to make extra money, but that was back when magazines and so on actually paid decent money, which doesn’t seem to be the case now. Otherwise, hm, I don’t know, something that requires physical input or your presence but leaves your mind free to stay on the art/writing/etc. thinking track, whatever that would be? For me, writing is my only real talent, so my extra gigs have pretty much always leeched off of my writing in some way. Fun story … uh, I just found an escort for an upcoming post whose offered service is to blow his nose in men’s handkerchiefs or mouths or cupped hands. That seemed kind of fun? ** Okay. Some of the credit and/or blame for today’s post goes to d.l. Jamie who inspired it. Thanks, Jamie, and see you all tomorrow.

* (restored)

 

‘Thanks to the two most famous roles of her career—the enigmatic woman referred to only as A in Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad and the middle-aged widow stuck in domestic routine in Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles—Delphine Seyrig is often thought of as an inscrutable performer. But this versatile French actress was also capable of great emotional immediacy and openness in her roles.

‘The daughter of an archaeologist, Seyrig was a cosmopolite at a young age, having already lived in Lebanon, New York, and the south of France by the time she was twenty. She then studied acting in both France and the United States (at the Actors Studio). Her first screen performance was in the 1958 beat generation short Pull My Daisy, also featuring Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, shot in New York. A few years later, Last Year at Marienbad—in which Seyrig plays a woman wandering the fever-dream-like interior of a château, where she may or may not have been before—made her an icon of the French New Wave.

‘Seyrig would go on appear in films by François Truffaut (Stolen Kisses, one of her most romantic parts), William Klein (she was never more delightfully off-kilter than in the satiric Mr. Freedom), Luis Buñuel (as the ever-gracious hostess in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie), Joseph Losey, Jacques Demy, Akerman, and other important film directors of the sixties and seventies.’ — Criterion Collection

‘Delphine Seyrig was born into an intellectual Protestant family. Her Alsatian father, Henri, was the director of the Beirut Archaeological Institute and later France’s cultural attaché in New York during World War II. Her mother, Hermine de Saussure, was Swiss, and the niece of linguist/semiologist Ferdinand de Saussure.

‘Delphine was the sister of composer Francis Seyrig. Her family moved from Lebanon to New York when she was ten. When the family returned to Lebanon in the late 1940s, she was sent to school at the Collège Protestant de Jeunes Filles, which had been founded by Protestant pacifists and social justice activists in 1938. She attended the school from 1947 to 1950.

‘As a young woman, Seyrig studied acting at the Comédie de Saint-Étienne, training under Jean Dasté, and at Centre Dramatique de l’Est. She appeared briefly in small roles in the 1954 TV series Sherlock Holmes. In 1956, she returned to New York and studied at the Actors Studio. In 1958 she appeared in her first film, Pull My Daisy. In New York she met director Alain Resnais, who asked her to star in his film Last Year at Marienbad. Her performance brought her international recognition and she moved to Paris. Among her roles of this period is the older married woman in François Truffaut’s Baisers volés (1968).

‘During the 1960s and 1970s, Seyrig worked with directors including Truffaut, Luis Buñuel, Marguerite Duras, and Fred Zinnemann, as well as Resnais. She achieved recognition for both her stage and film work, and was named best actress at the Venice Film Festival for her role in Resnais’ Muriel ou Le temps d’un retour (1963). She played many diverse roles, and because she was fluent in French, English and German, she appeared in films in all three languages, including a number of Hollywood productions.

‘Seyrig may be most widely known for her role as Colette de Montpelier in Zinnemann’s 1973 film The Day of the Jackal. In turn, perhaps her most demanding role was in Chantal Akerman’s 1976 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, in which she was required to adopt a highly restrained, rigorously minimalistic mode of acting to convey the mindset of the title character.

‘Seyrig was a major feminist figure in France. Throughout her career, she used her celebrity status to promote women’s rights. The most important of the three films she directed was the 1977 Sois belle et tais-toi (Be Pretty and Shut Up), which included actresses Shirley MacLaine, Maria Schneider, and Jane Fonda, speaking frankly about the level of sexism they had to deal with in film industry. She also directed with Carole Roussopoulos an adaptation of the SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas. In 1982 Seyrig was the key member of the group that established the Paris-based “Centre Audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir”, which maintains a large archive of women’s filmed and recorded work and produces work by and about women. In 1989, Seyrig was given a festival tribute at Créteil International Women’s Film Festival, France.

‘Seyrig died in Paris in 1990, aged 58, from ovarian cancer (although some sources simply state “lung disease” or “following a long illness”). She was interred there in Cimetière du Montparnasse.’ — collaged

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Delphine Seyrig Filmography
Delphine Seyrig page @ Facebook
Delphine Seyrig: The Eternal Return
Delphine Seyrig @ The Fashion Spot
‘delphine seyrig is fucking amazing’ @ chained & perfumed
Delphine Seyrig @ Wikipedia
Mais qui est Delphine Seyrig?
DELPHINE SEYRIG, INCONNUE CÉLÈBRE
Delphine Seyrig @ The Criterion Collection
Audio: Le secret professionnel de Delphine Seyrig et des divas en voie de disparition
DELPHINE SEYRIG – CINESTRANGER
À propos de «Delphine Seyrig, portrait d’une comète»
Dephine Seyrig, de Marienbad au féminisme
MES INTERVIEWS IMAGINAIRES : DELPHINE SEYRIG
Delphine Seyrig @ Find a Grave

 

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Extras

C’était quoi Delphine Seyrig?

Delphine Seyrig on feminism (in French)

Delphine Seyrig sings ‘Une fourmi et moi’ (1971)

Agnès Varda avec l’actrice Delphine Seyrig (1972)

Tombe de Delphine Seyrig au cimetière de Montparnasse

 

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Interview
from Sight and Sound

 

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21 of Delphine Seyrig’s 50 films

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Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie Pull My Daisy (1959)
‘In January 1959 Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie started production on Pull My Daisy. It was a defining moment for Robert: a statement of an artist continuing along his own path, seemingly changing horses in midstream. His book of photographs The Americans had just been published the year before. As a still photographer, Robert had previous directorial experience working with models and settings for assignments and advertising work in the magazines. He had also started a few experimental personal short films. Pull My Daisy brought together neighbors and painters from the local downtown art world who had agreed to perform in a scene from a Jack Kerouac play (the Beat Generation which was never produced). It was an odd mixture of beat poets, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Peter Orlovsky, who played themselves, and painters such as Larry Rivers playing Neal Cassady (Milo), his wife Carolyn played by ‘Beltiane’ who in reality was a famous European actress Delphine Seyrig (Last Year At Marienbad). Others in the cast included the Bishop ‘Mooney Peebles’, really Dick Bellamy, an artist’s dealer and gallery director, the bishop’s mother played by Alice Neel, a painter, the Bishop’s sister played by Sally Gross, a dancer, musician David Amram playing jazz legend Mezz McGillicuddy, and a touching appearance by Robert Frank’s little son Pablo. After the film was edited, Jack Kerouac came in and recorded a voice-over narration, which is a classic in spontaneous improvisation.’ — John Cohen

the entire film

 

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Alain Resnais Last Year at Marienbad (1961)
‘Hailed as a triumph of the modernist aesthetic, Last Year at Marienbad is formally severe and utterly modernist. Its characters are nameless and locked in a zone of their own, a zone that may not even be of this world. At a baroque resort, an unnamed man “X” tries to convince an unnamed woman “A” that they had an affair last year and agreed to meet at the resort and leave her current paramour “M”. She doesn’t remember him at all, but what he tells her has the power to create a past for her and to blend it into her present. They are all caught up in a surreal loop of disjointed time. The characters move like somnambulists through a hermetically sealed world that seems totally surreal. Reading the obsessively thorough screenplay, one gets the feeling that Alain Robbe-Grillet is striving to remain faithful to some unnamed rubric whose invisible influence shapes every move his characters make.’ — Senses of Cinema

Trailer

The Making of ..

 

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Alain Resnais Muriel, or The Time of Return (1963)
‘Alain Resnais’s Muriel, or The Time of Return, the director’s follow-up to Last Year at Marienbad, is as radical a reflection on the nature of time and memory as its predecessor. The always luminous Delphine Seyrig stars as an antique shop owner and widow in Boulogne-sur-Mer, whose past comes back to haunt her when a former lover reenters her life. Meanwhile, her stepson is tormented by his own ghosts, related to his service in France’s recently ended war in Algeria. Featuring a multilayered script by Jean Cayrol and inventively edited to evoke its middle-class characters’ political and personal realities, the fragmented, emotionally powerful Muriel reminds viewers that the past is always present.’ — Criterion Collection

Trailer

the entirety

 

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Joseph Losey Accident (1967)
‘Here we have the most successful film by the strongest English exponent of the ‘Art’ picture in the ’60s, Joseph Losey. When Accident came out it was heralded as a masterpiece, the finest work yet from the American left-wing director who started over again in England after being blacklisted in Hollywood. As much a Harold Pinter creation as Losey’s, Accident is an intriguing drama among some unusually tight-lipped people, perhaps weighed too heavily in the direction of Meaningful Emptiness, but always engaging and emotionally suspenseful.’ — DVD Savant

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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Francois Truffaut Stolen Kisses (1968)
‘”[It is] quite simply a film that hopes to resemble a song,” Truffaut said of Stolen Kisses, and it was a measure of Truffaut’s dedication to cinema (or indifference to the world) that he produced this insouciant work as Paris erupted in the student riots of 1968. Kisses sends the director’s alter ego Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), now a gawky 20-year-old, on a twin search for the perfect woman and the ideal job — he must chercher la femme and chercher le boulot. Kicked out of the army, Antoine finds employment as an apprentice detective, and is hired by a man to find out why nobody likes him. The chic, vivacious Delphine Seyrig plays the unhappy man’s wife, with whom a bedazzled Antoine falls head over heels in love. Watch for the sly opening homage to Psycho, along with other typically Truffautian cinephilic jests. “Strong, sweet, wise and explosively funny” (Vincent Canby, The New York Times); “Entirely beguiling … tender, hilarious, graceful, reticent” (Penelope Houston).’ — TIFF

Excerpt

the entirety

 

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Luis Buñuel The Milky Way (1969)
‘The first of what Luis Buñuel later proclaimed a trilogy (along with The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The Phantom of Liberty) about “the search for truth,” The Milky Way (La voie lactee) daringly deconstructs contemporary and traditional views on Catholicism with ribald, rambunctious surreality. Two French beggars, present-day pilgrims en route to Spain’s holy city of Santiago de Compostela, serve as Buñuel’s narrators for an anticlerical history of heresy, told with absurdity and filled with images that rank among Buñuel’s most memorable (stigmatic children, crucified nuns) and hilarious (Jesus considering a good shave). A diabolically entertaining look at the mysteries of fanaticism, The Milky Way remains a hotly debated work from cinema’s greatest skeptic.’ — The Criterion Collection

Trailer

Excerpt

 

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William Klein Mr. Freedom (1969)
‘William Klein moved into more blatantly political territory with this hilarious, vicious Vietnam-era lampoon of imperialist American foreign policy. Mr. Freedom (John Abbey), a bellowing good-ol’-boy superhero decked out in copious football padding, jets to France to cut off a Commie invasion from Switzerland. A destructive, arrogant patriot in tight pants, Freedom joins forces with Marie Madeleine (a satirically sexy Delphine Seyrig) to combat lefty freethinkers, as well as the insidious evildoers Moujik Man and inflatable Red China Man, culminating in a star-spangled showdown of kitschy excess. Delightfully crass, Mr. Freedom is a trenchant, rib-tickling takedown of gaudy modern Americana.’ — Criterion Collection

the entirety

 

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Jacques Demy Donkey Skin (1970)
‘Jacques Demy’s original musical fantasy Donkey Skin offers many delights, from its opulent set and costume design to the luminous Catherine Deneuve in a dual role (playing both the Queen and her daughter Princess “Donkey Skin”) and Jean Marais, still effortlessly commanding the screen a quarter century after Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast. In fact, this film allows Demy to pay loving tribute to Cocteau, one of his favorite filmmakers, whose spirit permeates almost every frame. Demy wrote both Donkey Skin’s screenplay and lyrics directly for the screen, collaborating with his longtime musical collaborator Michel Legrand, who scored ten of Demy’s fifteen features, including The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. In this film, Seyrig is given, metaphorically, only one note to sing as the Princess’s sassy supernatural helper. But Demy seems less interested in giving the Lilac Fairy any kind of a resonant characterization than in paying homage to an even earlier (French) tradition of film fantasy, namely, the pioneering special effects of Georges Méliès (1861–1938). Note the many times the Lilac Fairy “magically” changes costumes during her patter song: Demy, like his distant predecessor, simply stops the camera, has Seyrig change costume, then continues shooting.’ — Jim’s Reviews

Excerpt

the entirety

 

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Harry Kümel Daughters of Darkness (1971)
‘Made in 1971, Daughters of Darkness feels a lot more like Nicolas Roeg’s thriller Don’t Look Now than anything Hammer was making at the time. Set in an off-season Belgian seaside resort hotel, the film has a very small cast and a relatively low body count, but it has an air of gloom and doom and strange surrealism permeating the entire film. Director Harry Kümel used historical events of real so-called vampires and weaved them in with a story about very disturbed individuals who seem perfectly happy at first but then their true proclivities come to the surface when a vampire countess and her familiar. Daughters of Darkness lacks the violence and gore of many of its vampire contemporaries but ends up being exceedingly more troubling and interesting. The vampires are shown to be the evils of high-society, the excesses of Western aristocracy turned into blood rituals. Countess Bathory isn’t depicted as deviant because she’s a lesbian but rather because she manipulates and corrupts the youth of the world for her own use. Ilona isn’t her friend but her slave, and Valerie isn’t a love interest but a prize to be won. It’s a strange, troubling, and thought-provoking movie.’ — The Nerdist

Trailer

Excerpt

 

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Luis Bunuel The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)
‘The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is an episodic savaging of the well-to-do French middle-class. An old surrealist, Bunuel builds a puzzle box of a movie, full of stories within stories, dreams within dreams. At several points, we cut to one of his dyspeptic gentlemen waking from sleep, horrified by what he–and by extension, we–just saw. Amusingly, the dreams often go several scenes back, including another guy waking up in bed, so that the second dreamer was actually imagining the first dreamer and his disturbing vision. Not unlike watching a film where the characters might suddenly become aware they are being watched. Or if the viewer could turn around and discover that he or she is being filmed.’ — Criterion Collection

Trailer

Excerpt

 

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Don Siegel The Black Windmill (1974)
‘The Black Windmill is a 1974 British thriller directed by Don Siegel, based on the novel Seven Days to a Killing by Clive Egleton and starring Michael Caine as MI-6 agent John Tarrant whoes son is kidnapped. The ransom is half a million pound sterlings in uncut diamonds which is the exact amount that MI-6 prepared for funding some operation. Only special service personnel is aware of the diamonds, and Tarrant’s boss Cedric Harper (Donald Pleasence) suspects that Tarrant himself staged the kidnapping.’ — imfdb

Trailer

the entirety (in Italian)

 

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Chantal Akerman Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1976)
‘Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is Chantal Akerman’s masterpiece, a mesmerizing study of stasis and containment, time and domestic anxiety. Stretching its title character’s daily household routine in long, stark takes, Akerman’s film simultaneously allows viewers to experience the materiality of cinema, its literal duration, and gives concrete meaning to a woman’s work. We watch, for three hours and twenty-one minutes, as Jeanne cooks, takes a bath, has dinner with her adolescent son, shops for groceries, and looks for a missing button. Each gesture and sound becomes imprinted in our mind, and as we are lulled by familiar rhythms and expected behavior, we become complicit with Jeanne’s desire for order. The perfect parity between Jeanne’s predictable schedule and Akerman’s minimalist precision deflects our attention from the fleeting signs of Jeanne’s afternoon prostitution. They nevertheless loom at the edge of our mind, gradually building unease. Jeanne Dielman constitutes a radical experiment with being undramatic, and paradoxically with the absolute necessity of drama. Made in 1975, when the artist was only twenty-five years old, the film upped the ante on neorealism’s mandate of “social attention.” Akerman’s real-time, matter-of-fact presentation of a woman’s everyday seemed to mock the timidity of the neorealist demand for “a ninety-minute film showing the life of a man to whom nothing happens.” In postwar film and video, banal kitchen scenes (in Umberto D., 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, Semiotics of the Kitchen) are signs of an inclusive realism, a new politicized energy. Akerman’s “images between images,” those scenes neglected in conventional representation, gave this impulse a strong feminist accent. But more than a corrective to traditional cinema, Jeanne Dielman is a lesson in structural economy: the full visibility given to daily tasks exacts, as its cost, the more sensational scenes of Jeanne’s prostitution. These encounters last the time it takes to cook dinner.’ — The Criterion Collection

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Jeanne Dielman (1975) filming

 

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Marguerite Duras India Song (1975)
‘Of all the films that Marguerite Duras wrote and directed over two decades – from La Musica (co-directed with Paul Seban) in 1966 to Les Enfants in 1985 – India Song was the only one to enjoy any sort of popular success. A small box-office hit in France in the mid 1970s, it remains a minor cult movie to this day. It is easy or, rather, impossible not to be seduced by the film’s lustrous visual surface and its deceptively hummable tango-inflected score. A quintet of swooningly gorgeous actors, led by an impossibly chic Delphine Seyrig, drift about in a lavish Art Nouveau villa. They sip champagne from crystal goblets, puff languorously on cigarettes and dance sedately to Carlos D’Alessio’s catchy tunes. They slip, at odd moments, out of their clothes (courtesy of Cerruti 1881) to pose in some vaguely eroticised tableaux vivants. None of the actors speak; instead, voices from off-screen comment on the action in hushed, reverent tones. Whoever these unknown speakers may be, they seem to enjoy the wondrously outré spectacle as much as we do. To quote David Thomson, India Song has “levels of nouveau roman and fashion show” that no fan of hardcore cinematic glamour could hope to resist.’ — Senses of Cinema

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Carole Roussopoulos & Delphine Seyrig SCUM Manifesto (1976)
‘Scum Manifesto is the title of a 1976 short film based on Valerie Solanas’s manifesto/book of the same name, and directed by Carole Roussopoulos and Delphine Seyrig. In the film, Seyrig reads several passages from a French translation of Solanas’s manifesto.’ — collaged

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Marguerite Duras Her Venetian Name in Deserted Calcutta (1976)
‘A deeply sensitive introspection around the themes of presence and absence, memories, life, love, death and permanence. Not a movie to see, but sensations to live. Something about what can’t be said or show. If you don’t like it, your are only half living. If you like it, you are already half dead. A unique magical object. Sad and beautiful. Pure poetry.’ — IMDb

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Marguerite Duras Baxter, Vera Baxter (1977)
‘Writer-director Marguerite Duras creates a languid drama on the travails of love. In contrast to the slow-moving tale about the love life of a lethargic woman, Vera Baxter (Claudine Gabay), a long-suffering mom of three, there’s the snazzy flute score by Carlos D’Alessio that plays throughout and it starkly contrasts the downbeat story.’ — Dennis Schwartz

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Ulrike Ottinger Freak Orlando (1981)
‘Freak Orlando is a trip into what cinema can be if you are uncompromising enough to be daring: A feast for the eyes and a chain of creative explosions of art direction, mise-en-scène, costumes, situations, associations, citations, imaginations and insanity. Based loosely on the Virginia Woolf novel Orlando and Tod Browning’s 1932 cult film Freaks, the film sends the unique Magdalena Montezuma (who you might know from the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder or Werner Schroeter) on a journey of constant transformation and change. Some stations of her odyssey are a nightly park filled with illuminated electric stoves, a banquet on the top of a gasometer, a psychiatric home and, finally, a contest for the ugliest people of “Freak City”. Ottinger uses the freak as a metaphor for society’s outsiders when she draws from art and film history, sociology, women’s and gay rights and creates a truly queer exploration of sex, gender and the body. She uses these as sites of cinematic constructions and fantasies. Bearded women and self-scourging leather gays are accompanied by Japanese dancers and so-called midgets. Disabled bodies, Siamese twins and old men in black wedding dresses belong to Ottinger’s enigmatically crazy inventory as much as crucified opera singers, hermaphrodites and naked servants who are all part of a festive congregation in an abandoned, half-filled indoor pool. All this is arranged as a form of theatrical performance that is seen through the camera eye of a photographer and arranged as tableaux of great attraction and beauty that are cinematically orchestrated like an opera.’ — Toby Ashraf

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Delphine Seyrig Be Pretty and Shut Up (1981)
‘In 1976, French actress Delphine Seyrig interviewed 22 actresses (Ellen Burstyn, Maria Schneider, Juliet Berto, Jane Fonda, Shirley McLaine, et al) about their role in the movie industry, and the demand to “be beautiful and shut up”.’ — MUBI

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Chantal Akerman Golden Eighties (1986)
‘After her successes in the 1970s, Chantal Akerman turned toward the pleasures of popular cinema with a playful series of comedies and love stories, culminating in this extraordinary multi-character musical, set entirely in a shopping mall. A stylish, bittersweet look at the romantic tribulations of an assortment of shop owners and retail workers, the film evokes The Umbrellas of Cherbourg in its charm, but with a distinctly feminist bent. With songs co-written by Akerman and Marc Herouet, the film leads us through the tangled predicaments of clothing-shop owner Jeanne (Delphine Seyrig), who finds herself torn when her long-lost G.I. love, Eli (filmmaker John Berry), looks her up after 40 years; her son Robert (Nicolas Tronc), who is infatuated with Lili (Fanny Cottençon), a salon manager who in turn is having an affair with its owner, married gangster Monsieur Jean (Jean-François Balmer); hairdresser Mado (pop singer Lio), who has a crush on Robert; and coffee-bar proprietor Sylvie (Myriam Boyer), who pines for her boyfriend who’s gone to work in America. For this utterly delightful passion project, which she described as a postmodern cross between women’s cinema, Jewish literature, and musicals, Akerman collaborated with an extraordinary/unlikely dream team of writers—Desperately Seeking Susan screenwriter Leora Barish, veteran Truffaut/Rivette/Resnais scenarist Jean Gruault, former Cahiers du Cinéma critic Pascal Bonitzer, and filmmaker Henry Bean (The Believer).’ — Film Society Lincoln Center

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Chantal Akerman Letters Home (1986)
‘Akerman’s rarely screened adaptation of Rose Leiman Goldemberg’s off-Broadway play, based on Sylvia Plath’s letters to her mother, is a compelling example of stage-to-film transcription. Enacted by Jeanne Dielman star Delphine Seyrig and her niece Coralie Seyrig, this exposition of one of the director’s key themes—the bond between mother and daughter—is rich with personal resonance.’ — BAM

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Ulrike Ottinger Joan of Arc of Mongolia (1989)
‘In this tri-lingual epic, seven western women travel in the Trans-Siberian Railroad and are kidnaped by a tribe of Mongolian female warriors. As fantastic as this tale sounds, it is as much substantiated by historical and ethnographical research as it is just another one of Ottinger’s fictions of transformation, metamorphosis and the problem of dealing with otherness. In this film these strands are most benignly brought together and woven into a scintillating tapestry of cultural interrelation. Where railroad and caravan meet – both metaphors for trans-formation – the intitial clash, the fear of the uncertain other continent, turns into festivities as a result of receptive and accepting attitudes. Instead of combatting each other, customs and costumes reflect each other as in a mirror.’ — Frieda Grafe

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p.s. Hey. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. So sorry about the panic burst, hope you’re mellowed now. No, the pace of editing is going to vary wildly, I think. Right now we’re working on a long sequence that has a lot of dialogue, and with the dialogue heavy scenes we tended to do a large number of takes and angles/shots, so it gets laborious. Yesterday we spent most of the day working on one relatively short scene, and we still weren’t able to finish it. Bug chasing is definitely still a thing, but my impression is that a lot of the chasers are on prep so it’s more like fantasy bug chasing. ** _Black_Acrylic, Yes, who would have that thought that little porn had it in him? ‘Succession’ blab has wiped Tina Turner blab off the top of the social media topics chart, at least in my feed. ** Misanthrope, Sleep is everyone’s mama. I have yet to peep at Alcaraz because RG is unfortunately occurring at the same time as RT editing, so there is hardly a margin. I’ll look for Holger Rune — what a good name — but it sounds like I won’t have much trouble picking him out. ** Nick., Hi! I can count he number of times my knees have buckled at the sight of someone else on one hand so it sounds serious, ha ha, but seriously. Really? I’ve never seen ‘Almost Famous’ but I thought, yeah, it would be endearing or something. You were totally coherent but remember that I’m a big fan of experimental writing. ** David Ehrenstein, Video not available. That was fast. ** Bill, Isn’t that Buggles song sort of like ‘Home on the Range’-style eternal or something? Psst, he got responses, but they were boring, and I thought he deserved better aka nothing. The editing slowed to a crawl yesterday, but that’s reality. ** Mark, Dave Eggers started it? Huh. Dude’s all over the place. Exactly, about the animations. Yeah, I try not to think about it, but Fales’s destruction/censorship of my scrapbook still does make my blood boil. And its crudeness suggests it was done in a rage or something. Fucked up. Thanks for the commiseration. ** Okay. I’ve restored an old post about the great, great French actor Delphine Seyrig for you today. She rules. See you tomorrow.