Film Archive

Charlie Chaplin: Fun Facts

By Dan Zambonini, July 21, 2010, 6:51 pm in Film, Past

A portrait of Charlie Chaplin

There’s some fascinating trivia about Charlie Chaplin over on IMDB:

  • He was born four days before Adolf Hitler, in 1889.
  • He had bright blue eyes.
  • His understudy in England was Stan Laurel; they sailed to America together and shared a boarding house when they arrived.
  • In 1925, he was the first actor to appear on the cover of Time magazine.
  • At the height of his popularity, he failed to win a Charlie Chaplin look-a-like contest.
  • His imprints were removed (and subsequently lost) from the Hollywood walk of fame because of his suspected communist views.
  • Although Adolf Hitler despised Chaplin, he was aware of his popularity, and grew the Chaplin moustache to endear himself to the people.
  • He never became a U.S. citizen.
  • He composed about 500 melodies, including Smile.
  • The last film he saw, in 1976, was Rocky.
  • In 1978, his dead body was stolen for over two months. When it was recovered, it was re-buried in a vault encased in cement.

Credit: Portrait photograph of Charlie Chaplin via Wikimedia.

0
Comment Tweet

Imaginary Places: Neil Young’s Greendale

By Amy Thibodeau, June 16, 2010, 8:59 pm in Books, Film, Music, Present

A few months ago, we wrote about John Hughes and the fictional town of Shermer, Illinois, which crops up in almost all of his films. This ongoing fictional relationship an artist has with an imaginary place or set of people is uncommon but, apart from Hughes there are some other great examples: Salinger and the Glass family, the Brontes and fictional world of Angria and Neil Young’s Greendale, has recently been turned into a graphic novel.

Greendale is the name of the last album Young released with Crazy Horse. The ten tracks tell the story of the small California town and some of the people who live there. There is also an accompanying short film about the place, which Young made using an old super eight camera, and a spoken word audio recording about the various characters:

This is a story about a little town called Greendale and a family that lives there – actually, they live outside of town. The Green family lives at the Double E Rancho about two miles outside of Greendale. The Double E is the home of Sun Green, an 18-year-old girl who goes to school in Greendale, and she’s a cheerleader. And she’s a good student. And her mom and dad, Earl Green and Edith Green. Earl Green is a Vietnam vet. (Voice in audience: Why?) I don’t know why, actually. It’s a question that’s been haunting everybody for ages. There wouldn’t be any vets without war, so I guess we have to go back to war. Like most vets, he wanders around trying to forget what he knows. And he’s a painter. He paints psychedelic paintings and he tries to sell them at the galleries around town and in the area, without much luck. He hardly ever sells a painting. (source)

This week Vertigo, a division of DC Comics, released a graphic novel called Neil Young’s Greendale, which “focuses on Sun Green, the great-granddaughter of Jay Green, the man who founded Greendale. Through Sun, the artists tell a story about personal responsibility, war and the environment.” (source) Young, who was a collaborator on the graphic novel doesn’t think this will be last fans see of Greendale, “There are all kinds of things that we talked about doing that aren’t in this book, that have to do with her next episode and her story. These characters have been designed to last a long time.” (source)

Image Credit: Neil Young’s Greendale Graphic Novel Cover, Young Family Trust and DC Comics

0
Comment Tweet

Imaginary Places: John Hughes’s Shermer

By Amy Thibodeau, March 21, 2010, 10:20 pm in Film, Present

John Hughes, who suddenly passed away last year of a massive heart attack, is best known for writing and also often directing films about teen angst. Anyone who grew up in the 80s or even early 90s in North America probably came across The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and, even though some of it is cringe-worthy now, most probably felt some kinship with at least one or two of the characters. Whether you were the princess or the dork, Hughes’s characters are archetypes that resonate with the angsty misunderstood invisibility that many teenagers, even the most well-adjusted and privileged, feel from time to time.

To the less obsessive Hughes fan, these films very much stand on their own as independent productions, but there was a thread that connected most of his characters – they all lived in the imaginary town of Shermer, Illinois, which was based on Hughes’ own hometown of Northbrook. Films set in Shermer include The Breakfast Club, Planes, Trains & Automobiles, Weird Science, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, Uncle Buck, the Home Alone films, and the National Lampoon’s Vacation films.

Hughes’s Shermer was partly Northbrook and partly a composite of all the North Shore’s towns and neighborhoods – and, by externsion, all the different milieus that existed in American suburbia. In Hughes’s mind, the would later say, Molly Ringwald’s upper-middle class character in Sixteen Candles, Samantha, was a passing acquaintance of Mathew Broderick’s Ferris Bueller, while Judd Nelson’s troubled Breakfast Club punk, Bender, came from the same forlorn section of ton as Del Griffith, the hard-knock but relentlessly upbeat shower-curtain-ring salesman played by John Candy in Planes, Trains & Automobiles. (Vanity Fair, March 2010)

When Hughes died, his family found hundreds of notebooks filled with stories and notes – many of them a continuation of the story of Shermer. I would love to know what happened to Samantha Baker.

1
Comment Tweet

How Roger Ebert Got his Voice Back

By Amy Thibodeau, March 9, 2010, 9:55 pm in Film, Medicine, Present

Recently, Esquire published an exquisite cover story on film critic Roger Ebert, who is best known for the decades he spent debating great and not-so-great films with his counterpart Gene Siskel on the popular television programme, At the Movies. Since the article came out last month, people can’t get enough of Ebert. His blog, which was already popular, has developed cult popularity, he has well over 100,000 followers on Twitter, he’s recently created a Fan Club (inspired by an old friend who also happens to be a successful web porn entrepreneur) and he was a guest on Oprah.

Although there are hundreds of hours of footage of Ebert’s voice in At the Movies, it seemed very unlikely, if not impossible, that he would ever be able to speak again, using anything other than an artificial voice that bears no resemblance to the original. Recently, a Scotland-based company called CereProc used archival recordings to recreate an artificial voice that sounds like Ebert. Although it is still in beta, it even has the potential to eventually take on emotional inflection. CereProc is “an advanced voice synthesis company… [which] creates customized text-to-speech software. Instead of producing flat computerized voices, the company says its voices include realistic, animated and emotional dimensions.” (source)

The company undertakes a great deal of research on, what they call, the emotional continuum to stimulate realistic emotional states in voice reproductions:

CereVoice uses two separate techniques to simulate emotional states. The first is to select tense or calm voice quality. This compares closely with the perception of negative and positive emotional states (however, it also has an active/passive effect to some extent). The second is to use digital signal processing (DSP) techniques to alter the speech to active or passive states. Active states involve: faster speech rate, higher volume and higher pitch, Passive states involve: slower speech rate, lower volume and lower pitch. (source)

Pretty inspiring stuff!

0
Comment Tweet

Humphrey Jennings

By Sian Prescott, January 17, 2010, 11:25 am in Culture, Film, History, Past
Humphrey Jennings

Humphrey Jennings

A new exhibition at South Wales based Ffotogallery looks at the work of Humphrey Jennings, the English documentary film maker during the 1940s. The exhibition focuses on his 1943 propaganda film The Silent Village, set in Wales but based on Nazi atrocities in Czechoslovakia.

Humphrey Jennings has often been edited out of analytical cinematic theory, yet his influence should be appreciated as a critical figure in British war-time film making. He was called not only a film maker, but “a poet, a painter, an intellectual and an anthropologist”.

After graduating from Cambridge University with a double First in English, Jennings worked as a painter, photographer and theatre designer. In 1940 he joined the GPO Film Unit, which became the propaganda film branch of the Ministry for Information. Jennings’ films may remain in shadows of appreciation, but their importance to British cinema are paramount. Listen to Britain is often regarded as one of the best British films ever made. However, The Silent Village is perhaps one of his most powerful works.

In the Czechoslovakian mining village of Lidice, on June 10th 1942, 340 villagers were murdered by the Nazis. It was a shocking massacre of human life, either by firing range or suffering the horrors of the gas chambers. The barbaric act sent waves of anger and sympathy across the western world. Just days after Lidice, the Ministry of Information and Jennings set to work on a propaganda film based on the events, only set in the South Wales mining village of Cwmgiedd near Ystradgynlais. Using real villagers of the South Wales community, the miners felt a strong connection to their Czech counterparts.

The drama-documentary film is almost underplayed. Jennings does not use violence or action, which makes it all the more effective. We are shown Nazis taking control of the Welsh village. There’s a clever montage of shots – particularly of the small details – which emphasise the lives of the people, the reality. This is then alongside images and audio (one of Jennings’ technical strengths) of menacing messages to the villagers. The Welsh language is banned; the songs, are forbidden. Slowly, the oppression and fear creeps towards the front; the menace and threat seeps through the threads of mundanity to almost an inevitable horrifying conclusion. The line of innocent children, holding hands, being lead off towards a terrifying fate is one of the most potent scenes in British cinema. Jennings ends the film with the singing of the Welsh National Anthem, sung stoically. It is this British spirit that is captured so triumphantly and sensitively by the director.

That Jennings tragically died so young – in an accident in Greece in 1950 – arguably robbed British cinema of one of its finest ever talents. Like the lives of the people Jennings set out to portray in his films, Jennings himself is remembered in these very works. The poignant drama-documentary film The Silent Village is not only a cinematic tribute to the tragedy in Czechoslovakia, but also a lesson in how propaganda media is still important to study now, for it documents the past, illustrates what we could have lost; a reminder to us all of how these atrocities could easily occur close to home, to anyone of us, wherever we are.

The Silent Village exhibition at Ffotogallery, South Wales runs from 16th January to 27th February 2010.
Illustration by Sian Prescott

3
Comment Tweet
« Older Entries