VAL LEWTON BLOGATHON

Welcome to the Val Lewton Blogathon, hosted by The Evening Class in tandem with the Turner Classic Movies ("TCM") premiere broadcast of Val Lewton: The Man In the Shadows, directed by Kent Jones and produced (and narrated) by Martin Scorsese. The Scorsese/Jones documentary premieres Monday, January 14, 2008, at 5:00PM (PT) followed by a 10-film retrospective and an encore of the documentary at 9:00PM (PT). It will be broadcast a third time the following morning Tuesday, January 15, 2008, at 6:15AM (PT). Please check the TCM website for Eastern Time listings (basically three hours later). This affords the opportunity for anyone wishing to participate in the blogathon to catch the films on their own televisions and—for those diehard Lewton fans already familiar with the films—to refresh their perspectives.

The following is the schedule for the documentary premiere and marathon of Lewton classics (all times Pacific; again for Eastern listings please check here).

Monday, January 14, 2008

5:00PM Martin Scorsese Presents: Val Lewton: The Man In the Shadows.
6:30PM Cat People (1942), starring Simone Simon, Kent Smith and Tom Conway.
7:45PM I Walked with a Zombie (1943), starring Frances Dee and Tom Conway.
9:00PM Martin Scorsese Presents: Val Lewton: The Man In the Shadows.
10:30PM The Leopard Man (1943), starring Dennis O'Keefe and Margo.
11:45PM The Seventh Victim (1943), starring Kim Hunter, Tom Conway and Hugh Beaumont.

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

1:00AM The Curse of the Cat People (1944), starring Simone Simon and Kent Smith.
2:15AM The Body Snatcher (1945), starring Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and Henry Daniell.
3:30AM Isle of the Dead (1945), starring Boris Karloff, Ellen Drew and Marc Cramer.
4:45AM Bedlam (1946), starring Boris Karloff, Anna Lee and Ian Wolfe.
6:15AM Martin Scorsese Presents: Val Lewton: The Man In the Shadows.
7:45AM Youth Runs Wild (1944), starring Kent Smith, Bonita Granville, Jean Brooks and Glenn Vernon.
9:00AM Mademoiselle Fifi (1944), starring Simone Simon, John Emery, Kurt Kreuger and Alan Napier.

Likewise, all the films—save Youth Runs Wild and Mademoiselle Fifi—are readily available on DVD, specifically through the Val Lewton Horror Collection boxset, recently amplified to include the Scorsese/Jones documentary. The TCM website for the Lewton festival generously includes TCM's original promo for the marathon plus several clips from the films and the original trailers for I Walked With A Zombie and The Seventh Victim. Several of the other original trailers can be found on TCM's main site. Thus, there are multiple opportunities to view or sample the films and—for those wishing to participate in the blogathon—feel free to notify me of links to your sites at michael.guillen@gmail.com or through the comments section here at The Evening Class. The Val Lewton blogathon will run through Friday, January 18, 2008. I'll be supplementing this entry throughout the week as contributions come in.

Online Resources

For up-to-date news on Val Lewton there's no more comprehensive a site than The Val Lewton B-Unit Website hosted by Erik Weems. Erik's passion for the man and his work is richly evident, no less so than in his seminal bio-essay. He's replicated some wonderful material, most notably Manny Farber's review of Curse of the Cat People for the March 20, 1944 issue of The Nation, as well as Farber's eulogy for Lewton written for The Nation's April 14, 1951 issue. He also lovingly pays homage to Lewton's acting ensemble with separate pages for Simone Simon, Jane Randolph, Sir Lancelot, and Frances Dee (including the following enchanting YouTube photo tribute).



Yet another fantastic source of information on Lewton is the Val Lewton Screenplay Collection, which includes scripts for not only Lewton's more familiar vehicles—Cat People, I Walked With A Zombie, The Leopard Man, The Seventh Victim, The Ghost Ship, The Curse of the Cat People, Isle of the Dead, The Body Snatcher and Bedlam—but, the script for Apache Drums and for The Fact of Murder, a film noir collaboration between Lewton and Mark Robson that was never realized. Further, the Val Lewton Screenplay Collection provides a working biography and filmography, several articles downloadable in PDF format, including the July 1930 Weird Tales publication of a short story by Lewton entitled "The Bagheeta"—a clear precursor to Cat People—and the American Weekly Magazine article written by Inez Wallace cited as the alleged "source" for I Walked With A Zombie. They've also gathered newsclippings regarding the legal controversy surrounding The Ghost Ship, Robert Louis Stevenson's source short story "The Body-Snatcher", and have provided galleries for Arnold Böcklin paintings that inspired (and are featured in) The Isle of the Dead, as well as William Hogarth's work which informed the overall look of Bedlam.

The American Film Institute's tribute page to director Robert Wise includes film-specific pieces on Curse of the Cat People, Mademoiselle Fifi, and The Body Snatcher.

I highly recommend Mark A. Viera's essay on Lewton—"Darkness, Darkness: The Films of Val Lewton"—originally published in Viera's volume Hollywood Horror: From Gothic To Cosmic (Harry N. Abrams, 2003) and reprinted in the November 2005 issue of Bright Lights Film Journal.

In that same issue of Bright Lights Film Journal are two additional essays; the first, Roderick Heath's "Les Fleurs du Mal: The Leopard Man and Le Corbeau" wherein he tracks Tourneur and Clouzot's delivery of "homefront perversity, paranoia, and subversion." Erich Kuersten follows suit with his own ruminations on The Leopard Man: "What It Takes To Make A Softie: Breaking Noir Tradition."

Meanwhile, over at Senses of Cinema, Brad Weisman reviews Cat People and Martha P. Nochimson reviews I Walked With A Zombie.

Rouge 8 (2006) features Donald Phelps' analytical synopsis of The Ghost Ship. "[O]ne is repeatedly aware of [Lewton's] personal concern, a private identification with the significance of ancient beliefs and practices. Although his presentation sometimes falters, Lewton delivers overall a consistent image of our present civilization as fragile and possibly illusory; repeatedly invaded, like a mansion's skeletal remnants, with vagrant visitors from mythology, legend and, above all, religion."

"Bijou" Bob Statzer's two-part overview of Lewton's career (here and here) is likewise informative reading, not the least for providing the term "ailurophobia"—the fear of cats—which rumor alleges Lewton suffered.

Bay Area film scholar Richard Van Busack contextualizes the Lewton oeuvre within the body of the horror genre by noting their sensationalistic titles belie their sophistication and elegance. I envy him the opportunity he had to view these films projected on a large screen at Palo Alto's Stanford Theatre.

The Reeler's Miriam Bale reviewed I Walked With A Zombie when it recently screened at the Walter Reade and caught a few words from director Kent Jones. She also references a telling quote from Lewton champion Manny Farber.

Steve-O, the editor at Noir of the Week raises the question of whether or not The Seventh Victim is film noir.

There are several books on both Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur—which I hope to detail in a separate entry after holding off to see if anyone contributes essays on same—but, with regard to online resources, a satisfying portion of Chris Fujiwara's Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall (John Hopkins University Press, 2001), namely his analysis of The Leopard Man, is available at Fujiwara's website.

One of the talking heads in the Jones/Scorsese documentary is Alexander Nemerov, whose Icons of Grief: Val Lewton's Home Front Pictures (University of California Press, 2005) is reviewed at Senses of Cinema. His thesis culls a pervasive awareness of the losses of World War II informing Lewton's films and he utilizes Lewton's own novels to strengthen his proposition.

Speaking of which, though Lewton's novels are generally out of print and existing copies rare and hard to locate, kudos must be given to Marc Baines at Kingly Books for reprinting Lewton's Depression-era novel No Bed Of Her Own, with hopes that he will secure the rights to publish further volumes. TCM synopsizes No Bed Of Her Own. Weems likewise has a fine overview of critical studies on Lewton.

Blogathon Contributors

Though disappointed in Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows when he caught it at the Walter Reade Theatre, Alok Zembla nonetheless concedes at his site Dispatches From Zembla: "The documentary successfully makes a convincing case of the producer as an auteur—specially finding evidence of his melancholic temperament (it even speculates that it was something 'Russian' in origin) as it found expression in the movies he produced."

At Film Journey, Doug Cummings caught Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows when it screened at the AFI Fest last November. Though debating that it's not much of an improvement over Shadows in the Dark: The Val Lewton Legacy already included with the Lewton DVD box set released a couple of years ago, Doug confirms that "Jones' film trumps its predecessor in its improved pacing and writing." He questions and (fairly) critiques the "bountiful spoilers" in the Scorsese/Jones documentary, wondering "who the intended audience is, Lewton cinephiles (who will probably learn little they don't already know) or Lewton newbies (who likely won't want to know the endings of films they haven't seen)?"

At The Shelf, J.C. Loophole is much more enthused about Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows and supplements his overview of Lewton's career with some key quotes from his recent interview with Val Lewton, Jr.

At Eternal Sunshine of the Logical Mind, Bob Turnbull surveys "the glitter of putrescence" in Lewton's nine-film box set and shapes his rambling thoughts into a comprehensive survey strengthened by screenshots and Werner Herzog ranting on the horrors of nature. Bob earns the Val Lewton Gumshoe Award for noticing that "Arnold Bocklin's painting 'Island Of The Dead' shows up not only in the opening credits of Isle Of The Dead … but also in I Walked With A Zombie which was made a few years earlier." I've not read that anywhere! Good catch, Bob!

I incorporate Merge Divide's Serendipty entry on Cat People and Curse of the Cat People, though not specifically drafted for this blogathon. With a pseudonym like "Merge Divide", I hardly feel he will object.

At Film Forno Joe D'Augustine observes a transitional device used in Cat People that's almost—but not quite—a fade to black and back. He describes it as: "[A]n optical that mimics a shadow passing in front of the camera, like a black panther wiping the lens."

At Films Noir you'll find an effective slideshow on Cat People, "A visual feast and a multi-layered literate tale of darkness." As for Simone Simon? "[H]er engaging performance gives the erstwhile demon a fragile humanity."

Aaron W. Graham at More Than Meets the Mogwai justifies the sensationalist titling (and to some, mistitling) of The Curse of the Cat People by noting that by "today's context, RKO's insistence on retitling takes on a different, elegiac meaning for what these B-movie programmers came to represent: the smuggling in of far more intellectual conceits or ideas than their guise would otherwise suggest. It's a blessing and a curse, but I've come to believe that the unfavorable title is a test for prospective viewers to leave their preconceptions about "these types of films" at the door."

Mrs. Emma Peel appreciates The Body Snatcher at The House of Mirth and Movies: "Few films get under my skin like this chilling and macabre tale of corpses and souls. The delicious irony is that the characters become tradesmen in death, when it seems that's what they fear most."

Peter Nellhaus at Coffee, Coffee, and more Coffee takes a coffee break with Boyd Davis and Richard Dix from The Ghost Ship, and then interestingly considers that Lewton's The Leopard Man may have influenced William Friedkin's most recent venture Bug. Peter observes: "The parody of the 'Lewton style' comes literally from the hands of the first victim's little brother, with his inappropriate penchant for creating a shadow that resembles a fierce creature" and concludes that The Leopard Man truly lives in the shadows where darkness "is a form of sanctuary."

At Tractor Facts Mark Osborn synopsizes that "[w]ith low-rent sets, soft scripts, fresh actors, and green directors (Tournier, Wise, and Robson) Lewton turned the cutting room floor into an artistic device." He then insightfully explores the "murder by audio" in The Leopard Man and underscores the prurience of Lewton's 1943 audiences in the film's implied sexual deviancy.

Over at TCM's Movie Morlocks, Richard Harland Smith amplifies appreciation of The Leopard Man with ample screenshots and conjectures that the film's biggest selling point is its "honest story of misperception, both on a personal level as a denial of driving emotions, and also on a broader level in the way that people see (or fail to see) one another." Richard extols The Leopard Man's "cinematographic legerdemain" through its "bait-and-switch" strategies and meandering narratives.

Josh Bell at Signal Bleed fulfilled one of my hopes: that someone compare Lewton's Cat People with Paul Schrader's 1982 remake. Doing so with wry sensual humor—"As Irena, Nastassia Kinski never passes up an opportunity to take off her clothes, which is much appreciated but makes the movie seem like something that would have gotten a lot of late-night airplay in the early days of Cinemax (and very well may have, for all I know)"—Josh effectively confirms that the remake's excess, explicitness, and overexplanations fail to improve the original formula. It gives one cause for concern with remakes greenlit for The Body Snatcher, I Walked With A Zombie and Bedlam by (shudder) the creators of the Saw franchise, as reported last Summer by Variety.

Anticipating TCM's broadcast, Eric Kohn wrote an overview for the New York Press and has kindly offered it for the Lewton blogathon. In his overview, Eric articulates that "in the era of torture porn and feeble J-horror remakes, Lewton's meticulous creations are a retroactive revelation." He notes: "Lewton tapped into the base ingredients of chilling storytelling by focusing on the precise lack of action—an original formula that imbued any sudden development with powerfully visceral impact."

At Bright Lights After Dark C. Jerry Kutner utilizes Tourneur's directorial absence from The Seventh Victim to characterize the creative collaboration between Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur. "Just as John Lennon's acid cynicism was tempered by the melodic sweetness of Paul McCartney, so the melancholic morbidity of producer/writer Val Lewton was tempered by the subtle spirituality of director Jacques Tourneur. Nowhere is this more apparent than in The Seventh Victim (1943), the first film in the RKO horror cycle that was written and produced by Lewton without Tourneur as director." Kutner distinguishes, "Where The Seventh Victim differs significantly from the Lewton/Tourneur collaborations is in its utter absence of the supernatural or anything suggestive of a spiritual reality behind physical appearances." Intriguingly, he likewise suggests that "the sudden appearance of a cult member behind a shower curtain as [Kim] Hunter is taking a shower prefigures Hitchcock's Psycho."

Marilyn Ferdinand—"Ferdy" at Ferdy on Films, etc.—has published Roderick Heath's erudite essay on Isle of the Dead. Heath—author of the aforementioned Bright Lights Film Journal piece exploring Tourneur and Clouzot—measures the three-film collaboration between Lewton and Boris Karloff: "Karloff's presence threatened to bend Lewton toward the Universal approach, which had degenerated into monster mash hilarity. However, Karloff, a gifted actor, gave Lewton a strong frame around which to build his films, an improvement over Lewton's earlier films, which wobbled with unreliable lead actors." Skillfully synopsizing the events of Isle of the Dead, Heath concludes: "Punctuated by Leigh Hurline's atmospheric score, the best in a Lewton work, Isle of the Dead isn't as symphonic an achievement as The Body Snatcher or as poetic as The Leopard Man and I Walked with a Zombie, but it is the most fully developed metaphoric drama of Lewton's films."

Earlier at Ferdy on Films, etc., Marilyn had tackled another of the Lewton/Karloff pairings—Bedlam—and established that "Bedlam was inspired by the engravings of William Hogarth of London's notorious Royal Hospital of St. Mary's of Bethlehem, an asylum for the insane better known as Bedlam. Indeed, Lewton gave Hogarth (1697-1764) a writing credit, so much does the atmosphere of the picture derive from Hogarth's tortured rendering of Bedlam's inmates in The Rake's Progress." Describing Lewton as "the acknowledged master of the eerie", "Ferdy" characterizes Bedlam's atmosphere as "a first-rate example of the eerie genre that seeks to unsettle and, possibly, to teach" and praises Nicholas Musuraca's cinematography in recreating the look of Hogarth's engravings so vividly on camera.

"What other black actor got to scold a white woman in 1943?" Michael McMorrow stresses in his response to Sir Lancelot's menacing performance in I Walked With A Zombie. Likewise at Cult Film Confidential, Michael cues us in on the subtle joke in I Walked With A Zombie's opening credits.

Before his site Welcome to L.A. bid farewell, Larry Aydlette profiled Skelton Knaggs—yet another of Lewton's remarkable ensemble actors—while strolling the deck of Ghost Ship and listening to its "power of stillness". "[O]ften captured in a luminous, disturbing image that floats in the mind and stays with you long after the film is over," Larry wrote, the power of stillness is "usually a close-up. There is no hurry, as in today's films, to cut away. Lewton is not afraid to linger, to let the disquiet seep in."

At Self-Styled Siren, Campaspe filters her appreciation of Mademoiselle Fifi through a feminist lens and with an admitted affection for Guy de Maupassant whose short stories "Mademoiselle Fifi" and "Boule de Suif" Lewton's screenwriters—Josef Mischel and Peter Ruric—combined to create the screenplay. Retaining "the anti-bourgeois bite of [Maupassant's] short stories, in part by adding lines to make sure no one could possibly miss the point", the Siren praises Lewton's "complex, dynamic treatment of women", specifically in the film's fleshed-out heroine Elizabeth de Rousset (Simone Simon), the "little laundress" (as she is billed in the credits). "She is by far the most principled character in the movie," Campaspe writes, "and she comes into peril only when she allows weaker people to gain influence. In movies, as unfortunately across cultures and centuries, a woman's chastity is drafted into maintaining the purity of all sorts of things that really should take care of themselves—country, race, family. In Mademoiselle Fifi, yes, the heroine stands in for France. She's her own woman for all that, resisting the movie's onrushing allegory even as she resists the leering von Eyrick. She's dealt one blow after another, but picks herself up each time, principles intact. 'I don't eat with Prussians,' she says proudly, and instead of seeming ridiculous or petty that seems like a declaration of human rights."

With the bases loaded, film historian John McElwee scores a triple at Greenbriar Picture Shows and brings all the players on home. I don't know where he digs them up but his graphics alone are worth the price of admission. He scores first with the controversial supposition that the praise Lewton received from champions like Manny Farber, James Agee and David Selznick might have actually done Lewton more harm than good, enflaming jealousies among his compatriots and rankling studio execs whose hands Lewton preferred not to shake. He likewise has a fascinating and detailed account of marquee and theatre lobby dressings promoting The Cat People, many which "looked like Grand Guignol." His reception study of I Walked With A Zombie underscores the obstacles Lewton faced in creating his films.

McElwee continues his study of Lewton's reception with The Seventh Victim. "We must have been the eighth victim; patrons walked out. Business poor. Some of the kids would not sit through it," complained one theatre owner. He then tracks Lewton's budgetary genius in recycling sets and props with a focus on The Ghost Ship, "a wraith largely unseen." And I'm heartened to read that John and I agree that The Curse of the Cat People might be considered Lewton's finest work. He provocatively suggests that The Curse of the Cat People might have had a timely influence upon Vincente Minnelli's Meet Me In St. Louis whose Halloween segment McElwee identifies as "a glossier recap of Ann Carter's frightful walk through the night. Atmospheric, set-bound parallels between the two features are striking." McElwee ends his second piece with commentary on Youth Runs Wild and Mademoiselle Fifi.

McElwee's third piece spotlights the Lewton/Karloff triptych. "We can sit home with our DVDs and think we've seen The Body Snatcher," McElwee writes, "but that's like steak without garnishment compared with banquets 1945 audiences reveled in." McElwee proves his point with some mindblowing photographs recording the take-no-prisoners marquee adornments for Lewton's The Body Snatcher. McElwee then counts up box office receipts for Isle of the Dead and Bedlam. I'm in awe of McElwee's erudition which proves downright entertaining!

Whereas John McElwee discerns a connection between Vincente Minnelli and Val Lewton via Meet Me In St. Louis, Flickhead acknowledges the better-known and well-documented connection between Lewton and Minnelli: "Granted modest budgets at RKO, [Lewton] used low key lighting as a gimmick ostensibly to enhance the mystery of horror stories, but actually to camouflage cheap sets and fabricated backdrops. This part of Lewton inspired the producer 'Jonathan Shields' in Vincente Minnelli's The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), who is observed concocting a picture similar to Lewton's Cat People (1942)." Flickhead, however, qualifies his lack of enthusiasm for Lewton by admitting: "It would be foolish of me to take [Lewton's] defenders to task, as my argument—that Lewton's films are often plodding, dull and consciously morose—stems from a deep rooted childhood dissatisfaction. I loved horror movies as a kid and, conditioned by the crude and boisterous monsters of Universal Pictures, the stuff of Lewton always possessed for me the stodgy lifelessness of a codeine fix." Though conceding that repeated exposure to some of Lewton's films has heightened his appreciation, Flickhead remains attractively contrarian.

Val Lewton was Russian, Jacques Tourneur and Simone Simon were French, and cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca was Italian, so it only seems appropriate that the Val Lewton Blogathon should strive to be international. With Vincent Innisfree's French entry at Innisfree, we achieve just that!

PSIFF08: EKLAVYA—The Evening Class Interview With Vidhu Vinod Chopra

One might say that with Eklavya: The Royal Guard—India’s submission to the Foreign Language category of the Academy Awards—director Vidhu Vinod Chopra has developed the genre of the “melodharma”. Inspired by teachings on dharma from the Mahābhārata, specifically the tale of Eklavya—after whom the protagonist in Chopra’s film is named—the film embraces the symbol of the dharma wheel, which is the central motif in the national flag of India.

Dharma is, of course, complicated to define literally. Chopra seems to lean towards the concept of “duty” or, more, an intention of heart mind and soul that each individual recognizes within themselves and which is, in a sense, their true path; an intention that cannot be known or measured by others. Joseph Campbell might have called this “following your bliss”; a term which has unfortunately been caricatured to mean “doing what feels good”, which is not at all what Joe meant. I think Campbell’s original intention was more in league with a traditional understanding of dharma.

I caught up with Chopra at the Palm Springs International.

* * *

Michael Guillén: Thank you for accompanying your film to Palm Springs. It’s sumptuous in its melodrama. Could you speak to the value of using melodrama to express your story and its meditation on dharma?

Vidhu Vinod Chopra: In India—if you’ve seen Indian films—they use music and melodrama to communicate to the laity. The film was primarily made for my people, which are the people of India. The communication is very transparent in those movies. As it is, not many people in India understood or appreciated this film, unlike my other movies because [there] was already too little melodrama; there wasn’t enough melodrama for them.

Guillén: Wow!

Chopra: They would have liked it if the father had turned around and said, “NOOOO!” But how can you do that, you know? They thought it was too little. What is cinema finally? Cinema to me is an attempt to communicate with your people, with your audience. I’m doing a film here now [in the United States] and certainly it won’t be melodramatic because I have a certain audience in my mind. I don’t need to use melodrama to communicate my idea. But in India, I think that was essential. It was a very conscious decision to go slightly melodramatic. When you understand, when you see cinema from any other country, I think the most important thing—which, unfortunately, most Americans totally overlook—is what is it that entertains people from that country? What is the culture of that country? I mean, [in India] we all sing songs all the time. I remember the first time I fell in love with a girl, I sang a song. The first time I lost a girl, I sang a sad song. Every time. So it’s our culture. Therefore, people say, “Oh the girl is singing. But it’s not My Fair Lady. It’s not Sound of Music. How come [she’s singing]?” In cinema from any country the most important thing is to understand the culture of that country. Then it kind of fits in. So the answer—it’s a long drawn-out answer—but, why melodrama? Because that is the culture of Indian cinema.

Guillén: How in the world did you film that stampede of more than 600 camels?

Chopra: You know with great difficulty. [Laughter.] Camels don’t move. Camels are the most stubborn animals in the world. The reason I think The L.A. Times [said] this film “suggests a lost film by David Lean” is because David Lean had problems with camels and actually in Lawrence of Arabia he did something really horrible to a camel because he’d had enough of camels.

I was mad enough to conceive a shot—which is completely insane—I thought of this car stopping and then I thought of the train coming. That train was a steam engine. It had to [start] at least two miles away in order to gather a speed of 60 miles an hour, because it doesn’t take off at that speed. So just imagine this scenario. I’m standing here; the car has to stop; the camels have to come from some distance because they have to run into the frame; and I’m trying to coordinate that with a train that’s coming from two miles away. Within that frame I have to manage the train entering and then the camels entering. It’s insane! Finally, what I did is something for which I could be jailed in India or anywhere else. When nothing happened, I actually put little blasts in the ground underneath and below all over that camel area. So when the train came and it gained speed and I knew it was about to enter the frame—just in my head, about 30 seconds until the train—I [detonated] all those little blasts. And those camels ran! [Laughter.] And they ran into the frame and that’s how I got that shot.

Guillén: Your film’s palette is saturated with color. Can you speak to the importance of color in both your film and in Indian culture?

Chopra: I’m glad you asked that question because—when I went to the fort [Devigarh, situated in the Arravali Hills of Rajasthan, currently in use as a seven-star hotel]—it was very very bland. All that I wanted was red color. It was fascinating because—while I was filming—there were a couple of tourists renting rooms, from France I think, who walked in and said, “Oh, this is a beautiful red.” And I said, “It’s just cloth. It’s just red.” To me the color red—as right in the beginning of the film—implied blood and implied violence and literally, the thumb that gets cut in the opening animation sequence becomes the color of the fort. Red for me was sacrifice, violence, and the blood of Eklavya. By and large, India—and Rajasthan in particular—is a very colorful place. There are a lot of colors there. And people are colorful. It’s a very warm country and it’s not only warm because of its colors and because of its weather, but because of its people. The people are very warm. So it’s a true representation of that part of the world, except red, which was used for dramatic reasons.

When I do my storyboards, I do them in color so I know the colors I am going to use. When I was a student, Jean Luc Godard—and it stayed with me—somebody asked him, “Oh, there is so much blood in your films” and he said, “Blood? There is no blood in my films. There is just red.” That stayed with me. It’s color really.

Guillén: By contrast to the saturation of color, the scene I found most brilliant was the act of vengeance in the dark with the ghost of the screen. Could you talk a bit about what inspired that? It seemed almost like Hitchcock to me in its mounting suspense and tension.

Chopra: Thank you. Thank you very much because that’s a scene in India nobody understood. People were whistling in the theaters because they were wondering where the image had gone. [Laughter.] People at home could never figure out what went wrong in that scene. See, this is the problem I have: I am trying to communicate with two cultures. There, [they complain the film has] little melodrama and the blank screen—which you kindly appreciated—they just didn’t understand what was going on. But the inspiration for that was Hitchcock. Of course, all the kids in the film school are influenced by Hitchcock.

But to me the thing was, here was a blind man and in darkness he could see. There’s a line that’s badly translated but he says, “I can see your breath so don’t breathe. I can see it.” So the idea here was of a blind man seeing in the darkness. What I was also trying to say, which is slightly complex, is that he—through that—finally sees his own folly, which is when he tells the son in the end, “I was wrong.”

As a filmmaker I quite loved the way the sound travels all over. It’s quite interesting that. You can almost feel his footsteps moving as he comes to the center. It’s a combination of [Udaywardhan] wanting to play with cinema, the sound, and the blind man.

Guillén: What film was Uday screening?

Chopra: That’s my own film. [Laughter.] I would have had problems getting copyright from other people so that’s my own piece from the film I made before this film. So there was no copyright problem. I could use my own film and use the gun shot. All I wanted was gun shots and violence on the screen; the idea being that [Uday], the young prince, sees violence in movies that depicts his own self and he’s drunk and he’s watching these movies. The reason that film was chosen was because it was my own.

Cross-published on Twitch.

PSIFF08: BEN X—Q&A With Director Nic Balthazar

Ben X, Belgium’s submission as Best Foreign Language Film for the 2008 Academy Awards, is about an autistic boy named Ben who retreats into the computer game fantasy world of Archlord to escape bullying. As indicated by Wikipedia: “The film's title is a reference to the leet version of the Dutch phrase “(ik) ben niets”, meaning “(I) am nothing”.

The film won three awards at the 31st Montreal World Film Festival: the Grand Prix des Amériques, the Prix du Public for the most popular film, and the Ecumenical Jury Prize for its exploration of ethical and social values. Nic Balthazar accompanied Ben X to its PSIFF screening and responded to questions from his appreciative audience. Despite some logical inconsistencies, the film gains traction by being such a crowd pleaser. It’s hard not to relate to a loner misfit tormented by bullies.

Balthazar, already a well-known film journalist and television personality in Belgium, was thoroughly charming in his enthusiasm for his first directorial feature. He had the audience eating out of his hand with his gregarious humor, an especially important skill when—as he puts it—he’s the “human marketing machine” promoting his film. Being Belgium’s entry in the Oscar nominations race has put a lot of pressure on him. He feels that he has to win this thing or he’ll be banished from Belgium. “And it’s such a small country,” he laughed, “that you’re easily banished.”

I started out the questioning by noting that the film claims to be based upon true events and I asked if he could qualify which specific events?

Balthazar: Unfortunately, yes, the whole story of this film began with an article in the newspaper. It’s these tales of ordinary horror that you read every day and unfortunately there the story was a lot sadder than we see in the hopeful ending in the film because it was the story of a 17-year-old boy with Asperger’s syndrome that committed suicide in my home town of Ghent. He threw himself off the medieval castle that we have there, and wrote in his last letter that he had been basically bullied to death. There was an interview with the mother that was so heartwrenching where she said, “There is nothing that anybody will ever be able to tell me that will offer me any consolation.”

At that time they had asked me to write a book for young people who don’t read—an immense audience because most of the young people don’t read these days—and I said, “That’s a perfect fit because I’m the author who doesn’t write.” So I started out making up a story with these same ingredients; a story that—if not consolation—would offer [some] comprehension for this family in mourning. So I didn’t quite go to them and ask them about all the specific details.

Unfortunately this is a story that happens a lot with kids, be they autistic or not. One out of three kids is bullied and, unfortunately, the suicide numbers you hear in the film are actually authentic. One out of ten youngsters in Belgium has actually pursued the thought of suicide. This is, of course, staggering and I’m afraid the numbers stateside are not so much better.

So, yes, Ben X was inspired by true events. It was first a novel, Nothing Was All He Said was the title. There was an actor who came up to me and asked me to make a play out of it, a solo. He said, “I found this story and I really want to tell it to people. I want to go around with this story.” I said, “That’s great; but, the boy is autistic. These are not the people who go on stages and tell their stories.” So we made this multimedia kind of play where he was on stage and the people behind him—as so often—tell the story as on television and this is still to be found in the screenplay and in the film.

Frako Loden followed suit by asking if the film would be shown in Japan where bullying and suicide rates are phenomenal?

Balthazar: Yes, and where Archlord the game, which is a South Korean game, is also immensely popular in Japan where this phenomenon of young people who withdraw in their rooms and in this fantasy world is also an incredible reality. The strange thing is that we thought Japan would be our prime target for international sales and they said, “Well, this is not an American film, this is a Belgian film and that will be so hard to market.” Hence, the plans we already have for an American remake because I’m afraid also here autism, suicide, people living in the world of Warcraft—more than they live in their real social reality—are also givens.

A woman asked if there was a chance the film would be shown in schools where it might do some good?

Balthazar: We, of course, sure hope so and we have some offers for a DVD release. But you have to help us on the theatrical release because that’s the way this game is played. It all depends on this Oscar game and it’s a very strange game where we’re up against so many other fabulous films but also fabulous marketing campaigns. I’m like the human marketing machine selling myself here and you are all I have to work with; but, we will work well together, I hope. It all depends on that really, whether we have a theatrical release or not, maybe unfortunately, but I’m sure we would try to make it also with this film.

A gentleman noted that the suicide rate among gay teenagers is much higher than among straights and culled out that in the film Ben is frequently called a “faggot.” He asked if Balthazar thought homophobia had something to do with the way people reacted to Ben?

Balthazar: Absolutely. I wanted the autism to be a symbol, an allegory for all the people who are different and, hence, are often bullied to death, as you say. If people be autistic, or high achievers, low achievers, if they be Black or Gay or anything that makes them stand out and be different, this is also why it’s the harsh realities of life—and I have obviously done quite a lot of research—the homophobia in schools and amongst teenagers is heartwrenching. One of the first insults will always be “faggot” and that’s why we put it in the movie.

Balthazar was asked at what point he became involved in filmmaking and why?

I was on the other side really. I was one of these people they call film critics. I prefer to call myself a film journalist. Godard said a film critic is the one who shoots on his own regiment and I always felt that this wasn’t the case with the true film critics I knew and admired and I tried to be because you belong more to the regiment than anything else. I hope to have shown that filmmakers and film critics are not so far apart as we tend to think. It’s like—if you like good cooking and you go to good restaurants—you’re bound to end up in your own kitchen at a certain moment and, well, courage is everything—the slogan of the film—the courage to try and open my own restaurant at a certain time and, of course, you must know that you are living my fantasy or part of it. Of course being a film critic and then making a film is quite dangerous. We screened the film for the first time at the Montreal Film Festival where my dream began because my dream was: “We’re going to go to Montreal. We’re going to be at the biggest film festival in North America. We’re going to be in competition already and then we’re going to win the festival and we’re going to win the audience award and people are going to love us.” We actually ended up winning the Montreal Film Festival and the audience award and that’s how we came to be here where—thanks to you—we’re going to be winning the audience award, I hope!

It is exciting times with this Oscar thing and this is the place where you can really meet an audience and you know that you do stand a chance because I’m in such awe for the people I contend with. It would also seem presumptuous to say, “I want to win also” but to heck with that, yeah, we need to win! And if we don’t win, it’s all right of course.

Another gentleman praised Greg Timmermans’ strength in the leading role and asked if he was in the stage play and, if not, how long it took to find him for the movie?

Balthazar: Thank you for that question. It’s the only sad story in the making of this film. The play, which ran 250 performances, was with another actor who was fabulous also and who was only 30 years old by the time he came to the 250th performance and said that maybe he was getting a little too old to play a teenager and, of course, in film it shows. He was a beautiful macho kind of guy and it was incredible how he played it on stage; but, you can imagine. Basically, it was like saying good-bye to your wife and having a divorce while you still love her very much and then going to look for a new wife. Bigamy! It’s one of these casting stories of course and they’re always wonderful and often true and this one is actually true. I said, “I need to find a new Ben. How do I do this?” A friend of mine had made one short film with this boy [Greg Timmermans] who came two years out of acting school, no film experience whatsoever except for that short film, which was a multimedia kind of thing. I put it in my computer and I said, “This guy is going to be Ben.” I just knew! I called my producer and I said, “Hey listen, I’m so excited, I just found Ben! We can call off the auditions. I just found Ben!” He said, “You with your enthusiasm, it’s great but it’s annoying, man! We need to do auditions. You know this.” I said, “Okay, we’ll do auditions; but, you’ll see. It’s going to be him.” And, of course, after all the auditions of many talented young actors in Belgium, we knew it was him and the reason is up on the screen. I am now officially a bigamist. I love two actors with all my heart.

A question about knowing how to time subtitles with the pace of the dialogue evolved into comments on the failure of language to serve the autistic.

Balthazar: People with autism have a very interesting way of dealing with language. They take language literally. For them, what you say is true. For example, one of the intriguing things is they cannot lie. It’s difficult for them to conceive that there is something like irony, or symbols, whereas—with most of us—human communication is 30% the words and 70% c’est le ton qui fait la musique, as we say in French, “It’s the tone that makes the music.” They don’t capture the tone. It’s such an intriguing thing for me to suffer—if that’s the word to use—in autism.

One audience member complimented the deft incorporation of the computer game into the structure of the film and asked how—while he was writing the script—Balthazar envisioned that whole story line? Specifically because it wasn’t just a reference of a kid playing a game and his being a gamer, per se, but a folding of the fantasy world of the game into Ben’s real world.

Balthazar: Thank you for that question because this is one of the things that I’m proud of. It was just one good idea. You sometimes have one good idea in one year and this was a good idea. We live in Belgium, which is as small as the Palm Springs desert, I think. We don’t have the budgets they have in Hollywood. Mr. Spielberg would have just called Pixar and said, “Hey guys, I need this video game.” We just basically went the other way around. Archlord is a real existing game, as I said, it’s a South Korean game. Online these things are called MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game), which means all these people are actually connected like in the world of Warcraft or Second Life; you probably know that. People are actually with their avatars in this virtual space.

What we did was—instead of having people make this game—we just went inside of this game, so to speak, and filmed there. I had four gamers sitting around the table and one was playing Ben and one was playing Scarlite and the others played the monsters. It’s your wet dream as a director because I was the camera. With my mouse I could do these fantastic camera movements that go up and down and normally you would need a crane, etc. But that’s what’s so fantastic about cyberspace: it never rains, your actors are for free, they do whatever you want, whatever you tell them, they don’t need a trailer or anything. You can basically organize anything. You can do a Woody Allen comedy inside Second Life for example; you could do it. This is called in the world of these boys—girls also, but it’s mainly boys—who play all the time, it’s called “machinimas”. They take their monsters and have them to do flips and sing “YMCA” or silly stuff like that. I just thought, “Hey, what if I use that to enhance the production value of my film?” Because this was a film that was made in 25 days. 25 days is what they use to do one car chase in The Bourne Ultimatum. That’s the way it was done but the brilliant thing was that we struck the deal with the Korean firm three days before shooting. That was pretty stressful. Now, this game Archlord in the Benelux has gone up 600% and they, of course, were a huge gift for us. I love their artwork and the way then that we tried to make the colors go towards each other. I had a brilliant editor and we basically did the rest.

Cross-published on Twitch.

PSIFF08: SECRET SUNSHINE—Lee Chang-dong On…

On the literary quality of his films.

I started out as a writer and then turned to film so a lot of people comment after watching my film that it’s more like a novel. I would say that’s the special character of my films. In creating my films I tend to reveal what I feel about my culture and what I feel about Korean life but I believe, moreorless, that my purpose is revealed in the films.

On whether his film reflects religious hysteria in Korean society or simply one individual’s experience of grief.

Rather than revealing the current culture of South Korea in my movie, I intended to show a personal experience perhaps involving all of us through the transformations of Shin-ae. Almost stereotypically as you experience the film, it begins as a melodrama, then becomes a thriller, and then it turns into a religious experience; however, I did not really intend to show literally the different phases of this particular woman but rather I wanted to show how all our lives go through a lot of unpredictable things and stages we do not expect.

On the relationship to his actors and how he elicits their performances.

I can’t exactly tell you how I’m different from other directors working with actors. Actually, I just leave them alone and let them do it by themselves. You may think this odd but, first of all, I recommend to actors that they have a sympathy and compassion for the characters they’re playing. What I tell them to do is to not act; do not try to act the character. I do not want actors in my films; I want characters. Not acting, being a character, is the most difficult thing to do. It’s very difficult to maintain principles and carry then out as characters believe they should.

When I direct my film and also when I direct my actors, actors often feel neglected because I leave them alone and sometimes they worry whether they’re doing the right thing or not. The actress who played Shin-ae [Jeon Do-yeon], she had to understand the character she was playing and so she had to experience emotions; she had to understand perfectly and fully the emotions the character was going through. Nonetheless, as the director, I couldn’t teach her how to feel these thing and—because of that—she kind of hated me. In the movie, the character Shin-ae later on in the film starts hating God and I think that hating somebody else in real life helped her act.

There are a lot of elements in making a film but what I think most important is the character. Good films are determined by how the characters are played and how the characters are delivered to the audience through the acting of the actors. When you see a film, especially a good film, you will experience that the characters are being delivered to you live and honest and real and that is what I look for in my films.

Cross-published on Twitch.

PSIFF08: TAKVA (A MAN’S FEAR OF GOD)—A Few Questions For Director Özer Kiziltan and Scriptwriter Onder Cakar

Michael Guillén: First of all, thank you for accompanying your film to the Palm Springs International. Takva is quite a complex, textured depiction of one Muslim’s crisis of faith in the modern world. I’m intrigued —since the two of you are here— how the script was developed and what your challenges were working together as director and scriptwriter presenting this question of faith?

Onder Cakar: We are members of a company in Turkey made up of seven or eight directors who have worked together as a team for the past 10 years. Özer joined us as a filmmaker this year and—though Takva is the company’s fifth movie—it is Özer’s first. When I decided to write the script, I was not really part of the culture and not a believer in Islam. It is foreign to me. But Özer and I visited religious orders all around Turkey researching them in depth and worked for four years developing the script.

Guillén: I imagine the film has had its share of controversy?

Cakar: Within the aspect of cinema, there have been no threats or controversies. It has been welcomed. The people who we expected not to like the film, didn’t like it. There were some big arguments, especially regarding which specific religious order the film was representing. But we were careful about not representing any one religious order. We mixed everything up so that no one specific order could be pinpointed. That might be why the film has avoided any real threats it might have otherwise had.

Guillén: What fraction or percentage of Turkish people would practice Islam as shown in this film?

Özer Kiziltan: The fundamentalists rule the country at this time; the ruling government is a fundamentalist party. I wouldn’t know how to provide you a percentage of how many Turkish Muslims practice Islam in this way because it is forbidden to do so in Turkey. Still, all around Turkey there are roughly 25,000 cults practicing in ways similar to those shown in the film; 250 cults in Istanbul alone. I can’t give you an exact percentage.

Guillén: If it’s forbidden to have orders like this in Turkey, how were you able to conduct your research? Was it necessarily secretive?

Kiziltan: We had the right connections! [Laughter.] We did have to exercise discretion. The actors practiced their movements in our offices at night. One night, the woman living downstairs called the police.

Guillén: Though Takva poses the question of whether or not it’s possible to faithfully practice Islam in today’s modern world, would it be fair to say that your film suggests that the world is in conflict with any religious faith, including Christianity?

Kiziltan: Any religion can drive a man insane in this modern world. It could be Christianity.

Guillén: How has the film been received in Turkey?

Kiziltan: We had good circulation. The numbers and figures were good. When it was shown on TV, it was No. 1 in ratings. At the festivals we’ve attended, we’ve received awards. And it’s Turkey's submission for the foreign language Academy Award. So the film has been well-received. Turkish audiences have liked it.

Guillén: Next film?

Kiziltan: Something about Kurds in Istanbul.

Cross-published on Twitch.

BERLIN & BEYOND 2008—Three Previews From Frako Loden

Ulrich Seidl's Import Export is a frustrating exercise in misery. For all its prolonged exposure to its two unrelated main characters, we don't get too close or feel enough sympathy for them. A young single mother in Ukraine is paid only 30% of her salary as a nurse in a bleak hospital, [which] she has to trudge through the snow in her high-heeled boots to reach. (An early disturbing scene features a wheezing baby.) After a demeaning stint as a webcam sex worker, her decision to seek work in Vienna downgrades her to maid in a private house, then cleaning lady at a geriatric hospital, where her compassionate instincts incur the rage of a jealous nurse.

On a different narrative skein, an aimless young Austrian man is fired from his security-guard job and reluctantly joins his distasteful stepfather in delivering obsolete pinball and gumball machines to Slovakia and Ukraine. I was often distracted by Ed Lachman (I'm Not There)'s camera, which much of the time chooses to sit planted in front of solitary characters in central mid-distance nearly overwhelmed by their deep, gloomy surroundings. Degradation is rubbed into every scene to the point of disgust. Early on we get that Austria and Ukraine are increasingly coming to resemble each other and that neither provides a decent living wage for its young citizens wherever they end up. It's a realization that doesn't need to have indignity after indignity—especially of hapless peripheral characters not meaningfully connected to the protagonists—piled onto it.

Robert Thalheim's And Along Come Tourists (Am Ende Kommen Touristen), while using a more conventional narrative structure than Import Export, understates all of its ambitious implications about genocide, nationalism, historical memory, the nature of transnational work and the tourist industry, and still manages to develop great sympathy for all of its characters. Another aimless young man, this time a German named Sven, decides on civilian service rather than military for his compulsory one-year civil obligation. Although he had hoped for a gig in Amsterdam, instead he's posted to Auschwitz, the former Nazi death camp and now a flourishing tourist attraction. Even worse, he's assigned to look after a grouchy octogenarian former prisoner who insists on staying on and giving eyewitness accounts of his experience to youth groups who can barely stifle their yawns. He also annoys the bureaucratic Auschwitz curators, who think he's ruining—by helping to restore—the suitcases that prisoners were forced to abandon when they entered the camp. Everything about his work reminds Sven of the Holocaust, while the reality of present-day life in the Polish town—not knowing the language, falling in love with a Polish girl, dealing with anti-German sentiment, organizing a memorial donated by a German chemical plant—casts shadows on his attitudes and actions. It's a subtle, supple story with deep-reaching roots.

Pepe Danquart's To the Limit (Am Limit)—not to be confused with the 1995 Anna Nicole Smith caper movie—documents the efforts of two brothers, Alexander and Thomas Huber, to break the speed-climbing record for "The Nose" of Yosemite's El Capitan. To get some idea of how fast these guys go, consider that 3-5 days is the average length while the record they're trying to break is nearly 3 hours. This involves day after day of painful trials before the actual attempt. And "painful" is a ludicrous understatement: At their speed, the slightest misstep or bad handhold could mean a plunge of 3,000 feet—tied together. The brothers' articulate but not overwordy dialogue, as well as contributions from other climbers presumably well-known in the field, reveals what it takes to face one's greatest fears, both physical and emotional, and break through to peace within oneself.

Cross-published on Twitch.

MIKLÓS RÓZSA—An Onstage Tribute

Composer Miklós Rózsa would have been 100 years old on April 18, 2007. Culminating a year's worth of centenary tributes, San Francisco's Castro Theatre initiated the first Miklós Rózsa film festival held in the United States, including his Oscar wins Spellbound and Ben-Hur.

As the Castro program emphasizes: "With a definitive, powerful, and unmistakably individual style, [Miklós] Rózsa's passion and culture offer an exciting intensity to the medium of film. He virtually created the classic sound of 1940s film noir, and was the acknowledged master of the historical epic. As a brilliant composer for the concert hall, he represented a symphonic bridge between classical and film music, sharing his great talent with lovers of music on both sides of the artistic spectrum."

I attended the screening of William Wyler's Ben-Hur (1959), for which Miklós Rózsa received his third Academy Award. Out from Philadelphia to moderate the event was award-winning writer and film historian Steve Vertlieb, who began the program by providing a biography of Rózsa: "It has been said that cinema is the purest visual poetry. If the director supplies the canvas on which his imagery will be realized, then the composer lovingly paints the layered textures of the cinematic palette, bringing the subtle nuances of combined creation and imagination to life. If music is heaven's verse, then Miklós Rózsa was, perhaps, cinema's most eloquent poet, creating and composing 110 motion picture scores between 1937 and 1982, winning 16 Oscar nominations and 3 Oscars for best score of the year.

"Miklós Rózsa was a cultured Hungarian-born composer who fell in love with this country during the filming of Alexander Korda's production of The Thief of Bagdad when the filming of the epic fantasy shifted to the Grand Canyon in 1940 due to war in Europe. The entire cast and crew left England to complete the shooting of the picture in America. Miklós Rózsa remained here after filming had concluded, settling in Hollywood and created some of the most haunting, passionate and unforgettable musical accompaniments ever written for a film."

Among the tributes that Steve Vertlieb received and was asked to present was one by author Ray Bradbury who "adored" Miklós Rózsa. Bradbury wrote the narration spoken by Orson Welles in the King of Kings, just one of the many great films scored by Rózsa. For the recording sessions, before Orson Welles came to do his bit, Ray Bradbury himself came to the recording stage and, for timing purposes, actually spoke the narration while Rózsa conducted the orchestra.

Vertlieb read Bradbury's tribute to the Castro audience and the Rózsa family members on stage: "In all my life I've never had a more complete relationship with a composer than with Miklós Rózsa. When MGM asked me to write the narration for King of Kings, I immediately joined a partnership with Margaret Booth, the film editor, and we became fast friends. The most wonderful moment in my life was when I went on the sound stage to watch Miklós Rózsa conduct the score for King of Kings and then heard my own voice booming out over the orchestra and dear Miklós' head as I spoke the narration. I wish that I had a recording today of my voice with his music because it became a partnership and a great friendship for life. To everyone hearing his wonderful music this week, I send my love and regard to the memory of Miklós Rózsa."

Vertlieb likewise presented and read aloud the official proclamation from the Ambassador of Hungary and the Hungarian Embassy in Washington, D.C.: "On behalf of the grateful people of Hungary on the centennial of his birth, let me express the pride and pleasure we take in commemorating the life and work of Miklós Rózsa. This distinguished composer and native Hungarian brought pride and recognition to his people through the art and artistry of his talent, giving noble voice through the medium of motion pictures and on the concert stage to the rich legacy and firm tradition of Hungarian culture. In a musical career spanning 60 years Miklós Rózsa received honor for his people and recognition by his peers, winning three richly-deserved Academy Awards and 16 Oscar nominations from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his significant contribution to the sound of movies. In joyous tribute to both the man and his music, we join Miklós Rózsa's family and his millions of admirers around the world in presenting this proclamation from the Hungarian people honoring one of our greatest composers on the occasion of his 100th birthday and the first comprehensive film festival ever held in the United States initiated and presented by San Francisco's historic Castro Theatre honoring his wondrous and enduring musical legacy."

Seán Martinfield, the Fine Arts critic for The San Francisco Sentinel, likewise represented Mayor Newsom's office in presenting an equally fullblown proclamation from the City of San Francisco.

Vertlieb then conducted an onstage interview with Rózsa's daughter Juliet, starting off by asking her what were her most vivid memories of her father. After thanking everyone involved in the year-long tribute to her father's legacy, Juliet recalled—within the context of the screening of Ben-Hur—that she and her brother were put in a school in Switzerland for a few months while the film was being shot in Europe. Their father then picked them up and drove them to Rome to visit the arena where the chariot race had been filmed. It was an amazing, haunting sight for her, with the huge statues looming over the abandoned track. She likewise attended some of her father's recording sessions in Rome where, ruefully, she recounted her father's issues with the Italian orchestra whose musicians he felt were "like children". They didn't seem to take the recording seriously. When he would raise his baton to start, there would still be musicians drinking Cokes and talking.

Vertlieb, a friend of Rózsa's for nearly 27 years, recalled a similar circumstance during the recording of the soundtrack for Ray Harryhausen's The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. Rózsa complained at that time as well that the orchestra members were "lackadaisical" and didn't seem committed to rehearsal. Rózsa recounted to Vertlieb that one musician in the back row was reading a newspaper. He chastised the orchestra, "You all speak about religion and say that you're very religious. Well, music is our religion and you have to take it seriously." Unfortunately, the orchestra was thin and Vertlieb recalled that Harryhausen's co-producer Charles Schneer was a notorious penny-pincher who stood there during the recording sessions with a stopwatch. Whenever Rózsa wanted to do another take, Schneer would say, "No, no, no. That's good enough. Let's move on." This was, of course, a source of great frustration for Rózsa. Despite this, Ray Harryhausen adored Rózsa and they had a great working relationship.

Asked to characterize her father, Juliet remembered him "as a very European man, generous and humble." He traveled a lot. One of her most cherished memories was when she was 4-5 and allowed to listen to her father composing at home on his piano, which his contract with MGM allowed. Though his children were not permitted to be in the room while their father was working, she would nonetheless creep up the stairs, sneak quietly into the room and lie beside the family's pet boxer Mowgli underneath the piano. Her father would always find her and ask her to leave. She couldn't understand why she had to leave and Mowgli got to stay. A few hours would go by and the whole thing would go again with her creeping up the stairs and sneaking into the room underneath the piano with Mowgli, being found and asked to leave again. The house was always filled with music. Bizarrely, even when he wasn't home, she could hear his music throughout the house.

She knew even as she was growing up that her father was different than other fathers; that he was special. Already being traditional Europeans, their family did not grow up like other American families. They didn't eat hot dogs and hamburgers. They didn't go to baseball games. When he had free time, her father would take her to the local museum or to a concert. At school the other kids would ask her, "What does your daddy do?" and she would reply, "My daddy plays the piano." It didn't take her long to realize that most daddies don't play the piano. At a very young age she realized they had someone special in the house.

Her father entertained a lot. When she was a teenager, she was delegated to be the official door opener and coat taker. Most of his guests were musicians and directors, occasionally actors—Joseph Cotten, James Mason, and Cameron Mitchell (with whom he was very close)—but mainly musicians: cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, violinist Jascha Heifetz, conductor Eugene Ormandy. "You always heard different languages."

Among her personal favorites of her father's oeuvre, The Killers ranks high because of its main theme, which was later woven into the Dragnet franchise. Vertlieb mentioned the infamous litigation over Walter Schumann's adaptation of The Killers theme for Dragnet, which Miklós Rózsa won in court. Whether Schumann's plagiarism was unconscious or subliminal, Vertlieb noted that in the 1987 spoof of Dragnet with Dan Aykroyd, credit for the theme was assigned to both Rózsa and Schumann.

Juliet offered her affection for the waltz scene in Madame Bovary as well. She felt her father's score for that film caught the frenzy and passion of the time.

Juliet is convinced her father would have been overwhelmed by the year-long tribute celebrating the centenary of his birth. There have been several new recordings of his movie scores (The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, Spellbound), as well as his orchestral pieces. A new recording of his violin concerto is, in fact, nominated for a Grammy and—of course—the yearlong tribute has culminated in the Castro film retrospective.

Of the 110 film scores that he composed, Juliet suspects that Ben-Hur was Rózsa's favorite. He worked on it the longest, almost a year, and was close to the film. Rather than having the film finished and presented to him, he worked on set with director William Wyler.

Though Rózsa won his first Oscar for Alfred Hitchock's Spellbound, he never again worked with Hitchcock, which Juliet doesn't believe her father regretted. As he was working on Spellbound, Rózsa and Hitchcock exchanged few words. Rózsa remained autonomous. Even when Rózsa won his Oscar, Hitchcock said nothing. "He didn't feel he was missing anything by not working with Hitchcock again."

Bernard Hermann—who came to be associated with Hitchcock rather than Rózsa—expressed disappointment when MGM granted Rózsa the contract to score Julius Caesar instead of him, particularly since John Houseman—who was a close friend of Hermann's—produced Julius Caesar. Interestingly, many years later and despite his expressed disappointment, when Hermann compiled and recorded music for the great Shakespearean films, he included Rózsa's overture for Julius Caesar. Juliet recalled that, at the time, her father was a bit surprised by Hermann's concession but emphasized that he and "Benny" Hermann were extremely close friends. Even though Hermann was disappointed with the decision on Julius Caesar, he never held Rózsa responsible; he understood it was a studio decision.

Agreeing with Vertlieb that the score to Ben-Hur was one of her father's most consummate, Juliet recalled that at her father's funeral members of the Hollywood Bowl played the "Parade of the Charioteers."

Cross-published on Twitch.

01/03/08 UPDATE: I received a kind email from Steve Vertlieb: "Dear Michael, I wanted to thank you sincerely for your lovely, thoughtful comments regarding our Miklos Rozsa film festival at San Francisco's Castro Theatre. Your eloquent appreciation of our efforts meant a great deal, both to the Rozsa family, and to myself. I wish I had known that you were in the audience last Saturday evening. I would like to have had an opportunity to say hello on a more personal level. Please do drop a line or two, should you have either the inclination or opportunity."

01/20/08 UPDATE: Andrew Mangravite provides an overview of Rózsa's contributions to the film noir genre in his essay "He Made Film Noir Sing."