1946 Poll 2.0

[niminy-piminy]

3 stooges (active 1922–1970) reached their turning point in 1946 because "Curly suffered a debilitating stroke in May 1946" (wiki).
i picked (out of approximately ten 1946 titles) the one called RHYTHM AND WEEP because (based on reading the synopsis) i hoped to watch a suicidal ideation fuelled metafiction (with an overtone of sheer lunacy).
unfortunately, i was fooled.

The stooges are actors who can't seem to find a job, so they decide to jump off a high building and end it all. On the roof top they meet three girl dancers with the same idea. Before they can jump, they meet a millionaire Broadway producer who hires them all for his next show. The rehearsal goes so well that he doubles their salary, but it all comes to naught when they discover that the "producer" is an escaped patient from Dr. Dippy's retreat.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2uxaxv

[niminy-piminy]

what recently used to be told about the internet (i.e. "bringing people closer together") was said in 1946 about the cars! ↓

TRAFFIC WITH THE DEVIL (Gunther von Fritsch, 1946)

This “Theater of Life” series short looks at traffic problems in Los Angeles, California, as described and experienced by Sgt. Charles Reineke, a traffic enforcement officer with the Los Angeles Police Department.

Ironically (or perhaps appropriately), the pacing of this is way too slow.

Oscar-nominated short documentary ... with bits of farcical humour that I believe was not intended as such, that suddenly takes a most unexpected turn and becomes preachy shock horror. Quite a mess.

https://youtu.be/2Uorwb6M-9A

</textareaname="message">

[niminy-piminy]

THE POTTED PSALM (James Broughton, Sidney Peterson, 1946)

The Potted Psalm is a disjunctive, Surrealist narrative, which progresses from the site of a graveyard, to a strange indoor social gathering, and finally back to the original locale. A coherent dramatic structure is avoided.

"That was the greatest film we've ever seen." — a solitary couple at the premiere

https://youtu.be/pCuWLMrOvqc

[greennui]

Spring-y animations

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHwy9K6pVs4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-aMBUqkWLU

[sally]

i saw the existence of spring melodies at the pre-planning stage of 46 viewing but then discovered that the war has extended even here, this film is listed on letterboxd in russian and ukrainian, yet i could not find out enough info about the film to decide in one country's favour, & i can't watch it in case by doing so i passively endorse imperial genocide.

https://letterboxd.com/film/spring-melodies/
https://letterboxd.com/film/film:365188/

but thanks for sakura

[sally]

firstly, i watched the korean hurrah! for freedom and just want to remark that there were some astonishingly good shots but because it's so mangled i had hardly any idea what was going on aside from tracking the usual archetypes: resilient hero, finally-redeemed slut, and the good country-virgin....it's a shame it's not complete otherwise would make my final list...

secondly, speaking of disgusting film festivals in another thread, i have watched cousteau's epaves / shipwrecks - which was lovely (no subs but from my basic french the narration was either technical or v. flowery & can be disregarded) - and learnt the following

On the morning of September 1 [1939] the day the festival was to begin, Hitler invaded Poland. In Paris, the French government ordered a general mobilization, and the Cannes festival was called off after the screening of just one film: German American director William Dieterle’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

(am reminded of the entirety of paul virilio's war and cinema which intimately links the technology of movies with that of aggression)

and so the first cannes film festival was delayed until 1946 and even then they had not entirely got their shit together:

There arose several technical issues, such as the tarpauline cover blowing away in a storm on the day before the winners were to be announced, the reels of Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious shown in reverse order, and Miguel M. Delgado’s The Three Musketeers projected upside-down

it's not a bad line-up, though some fall foul of our imdb rule and others don't have subs/exist (scowling at you, otakar vávra)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1946_Cann ... ompetition

greennui - how have you seen floarea reginei?

[sally]

march of time 11th year no. 13 newsreel series

#13! wry but eugenicist look at the US happiness industry

mechanized and moronic man moves towards extinction

[sally]

AHA! DON'T BE SUPERSTITIOUS!

podkova pro štěstí - karel zeman

[sally]

and following on from zeman.....




beware of pity - maurice elvey

zweig's novel absolutely broke me when i read it in my late teens, it's one of the pillars of tears that occupy my literary landscape so it was total masochism that i chose to watch this, and i was clenched-stomach & blubbing 10 mins in just knowing what was coming. or so i thought, but of course sentimental post-war movie production wouldn't allow anything as cruel as the book - they softened the ending a bit and i agonized too much in advance for the ending to have much effect.

how it looks to someone who hasn't read the book i've no idea - however i'd always had late-career elvey down as a hack, but seeing as at first i was desperately paying attention to anything that wasn't the actual story, i noticed that here he's not that bad a director...

for instance - when cruel reality bursts into the love-nest, it's pierced through the door by the dead pointy antlers



or here, the vitality of able man via the leaping horse penis








not so sure about this tho:

[greennui]

Floarea reginei is on kg but only with hardcoded french subs, which I only realized when I started watching it so it didn't really feel like I watched it.

[karl]

VICTORY OF WOMEN: Not Mizoguchi's finest hour.

[karl]

A favorite of 1946 that no one else seems to have seen:



IRIS AND THE LIEUTENANT (Alf Sjöberg)

[sally]

omg lol, i'll get to it, although to tbh now that evelyn announced 1921 i've completely lost interest in 46

however i have added the chase to delirious PTSD fever dream movies that'll make my ballot.

[St. Gloede]

I have seen that one actually, and from my rating I can tell that I liked it, but sadly it is a bit of a blur.

[sally]

it seems that as well as death-city porn, 1946 was also the year of traffic awareness!

brits were doing proto-horror poems, whilst here, i have no idea - not understanding a word - but it looks like everyone is either cheerfully committing suicide or being harassed by dystopian state authorities because they haven't committed suicide yet. it's just nice tho to see a city that isn't bombed...

nevíme dne… - bohumil vošahlík

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoo8pY4 ... %A1klasika

[niminy-piminy]

nevíme dne… - bohumil vošahlík

nevíme dne… = we don't know the day... (i.e. "we don't know our final day")

first some (1946) statistics...
ca. 15 traffic accidents per day (in Prague)
ca. 500 traffic accidents per month (in Prague)
ca. 200 injured in traffic accidents per month (in Prague)
ca. 8 dead in traffic accidents per month (in Prague)

then, a paradox...
one would expect that irresponsibility is a prerogative of the youth but even elder ppl (of high esteem) tend to violate traffic regulations.

then, a tidbit from transport-evolutionary biology...
a cyclist is an intermediate stage between a pedestrian and a driver.

then, survivors of the ww2 compete to die (or get injured) in the most bizarre ways...


then, about the importance of having realistic expectations...
you can't expect that, while falling from a bicycle, you always gonna land in a wheat field!


ABC from the ACAB psychoanalysis...
if he didn't stop at the police check, it means he has a bad conscience (he has something to hide).

id, ego, superego...
he (driving away) tried to evade his responsibility for killing a pedestrian because he forgot that he is (in the first place) a human being and only then a driver.

the final message...
to whom life is dear, follow good advice (because we don't know our final day).
make sure that the last trace of your life is not the chalk outline drawn on the pavement.

[sally]

thanks for the translation

i came upon that channel during my preparatory 1921 meanderings (there is some there!) and some films have subtitles (most of the ones i've already seen) and the rest don't (most of the ones i want to see) and there's no playlist or anything with all the subbed ones together i think, so you just have to endlessly scroll down until you get bored. which is how i saw this one (there's a couple other 1946 but without language skillz they can't be watched, and i only got excited by the traffic one as rhyme for other nations attempts)

[ofrene]

seen very little but liked most of them so that's that

A Day in the Country
Canyon Passage
My Darling Clementine
Notorious

Duel in the Sun
It’s a Wonderful Life
The Best Years of Our Lives
The Big Sleep

A Matter of Life and Death
Beauty and the Beast
Cluny Brown
Paisan

Panic
The Killers
The Spiral Staircase
Under the Bridges

[sally]

tsk tsk sally, stomping around declaring that you're bored of 46, woman you forgot the greeks

(the men are all handsome brutes, the ladies take no shit)

forgotten faces / πρόσωπα λησμονημένα - yorgos tzavellas


letterboxd review:

Slow, artsy, maudlin,

this jouvet-bogart love-child bad-boy had the dumbest-coolest ending ever.

[sally]

i adore these impressionistic amateur home movies - has anyone got any from anywhere other than britain?

this one is a leeds couple going east thru yorkshire to scarborough again

brompton whit - betty & cyril ramsden

[sally]

odd interlude from the death-city suite of 1946 ruin porn films

barnen är utan skuld – svenska hjälpverksamheten i wien - eduard von borsody
(god knows what its called in german)

ostensibly a swedish charity promo with cursory rubble shots of vienna this time, then it's straight into WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN and up pops willi forst narrating re-enacted scenes of children being sad, whilst he does their voices. okay willi

[niminy-piminy]

brompton whit - betty & cyril ramsden

ha, that was great!

it says "silent" but is it really mute?
i hope i was not deprived of some geo-blocked (flowery speech) voiceover.
https://www.yfanefa.com/record/6200

buttercup valley

a languid stroll through fields of buttercups

a notorious romantic posture (turning back to audience and gazing to a distant horizon) included!!


btw. just a few days ago i learned about the following (related) stress-relief practice...

Use Your Eyes To Reduce Stress

... trick your body into thinking you’re out of danger and that you can now safely relax. Most of us are actually out of danger most of the time, but our bodies don’t always know that in this fast-paced, maxed-out, information-overloaded, oft-polarized world we live in today.
The key here is your body. The exercises don’t require you to change your thinking in any way. When you use these techniques (i.e. "peripheral vision" or "panoramic vision"), you are activating your parasympathetic nervous system, the part of your autonomic nervous system responsible for calming you down (as opposed to the sympathetic nervous system, which kicks in when we’re in danger and/or stressed).
...
The way we use our eye sits in direct relationship to the state of our nervous system. When we’re in fight-or-flight mode, our sympathetic nervous system takes over. One action the sympathetic nervous system takes is to focus our eyes and our attention on the threat in front of us, like when you’re face-to-face with a tiger — or your child who is throwing a tantrum

When your eyes are actively fixated like this, it’s called sharp central, or foveal, vision.

It’s the opposite of peripheral vision, where your eyes are relaxed and taking in large swaths of your environment, like:
— the trees, stars and clouds
— the sand, waves, horizon and ships
— a city skyline with all the human stories boxed into all those little compartments as far as the eye can see

To cultivate a more flexible autonomic nervous system — and to balance out the sympathetic response our always-on culture promotes — we need to find more and more ways to encourage parasympathetic responses throughout the day.

watching this film truly encourages a parasympathetic response!
i expect it's the most "therapeutic" film the year 1946 (when "the murderers were among us") was able to offer.

[niminy-piminy]

i adore impressionistic

only started (more after finishing) to watch another 1946 opus (SYLVIA AND THE GHOST) and can't resist sharing this instantly

[sally]

& yeah, they're all silent

— the trees, stars and clouds
— the sand, waves, horizon and ships
— a city skyline with all the human stories boxed into all those little compartments as far as the eye can see

i guess being a permanent fight-or-flight neurotic explains why those sound like my perfect movies! everything else just looks like:



(one world or none - dir. philip ragan)

[sally]

Spring-y animations

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-aMBUqkWLU

greennui are you still alive??

this was very gorgeous. very parasympathetic

[dominicano1970]

The Bandit (Lattuada)
The Best Years of Our Lives (Wyler)
The Big Sleep (Hawks)
The Chase (Ripley)
Gilda (Vidor)
Great Expectations (Lean)
It's a Wonderful Life (Capra)
Paisan (Rossellini)
Shoeshine (De Sica)
Under the Bridges (Kautner)

Beauty and the Beast (Cocteau)
The Girl I Loved (Kinoshita)
The Killers (Siodmak)
Margie (King)
The Other One (Gavaldon)
Piccadilly Incident (Wilcox)
The Postman Always Rings Twice (Garnett)
Smoky (King)
The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (Milestone)
To Each His Own (Leisen)

[greennui]

greennui are you still alive??

this was very gorgeous. very parasympathetic

I'm alive and well, ma'am, thank you for teaching me the word parasympathetic.

I can't help but find it a little disturbing as well, the butterfly children makes me instantly think of Henry Darger.

[sally]

ah, i would go with jiri's definition, i abused the usage a little.

and i just liked the non-narrative spring loveliness. all the cherry/apple-blossom is falling near me too, and it's gorgeous...it should rain pink petals all the time even if gives me awful hayfever

[sally]

when karl was repping iris & the lieutenant i'm afraid he posted the wrong screenshot. amended.

(yadda yadda yadda the frothing multiple reviews on letterboxd about framing blocking etc just cuz dan sallitt likes it -YUCK - when the film just (of course very well, as many others) swedishized itself to the max for that era - GOD! - ...& even a tasty sweet hint of banketten in the sadistic brother's relationship...YUM)

[greennui]

I knew you were gonna eventually screenshot that scene the minute I saw it!