I Dream Of Dali

May Flowers In Bloom

JA from MNPP here. Today would've been the 107th birthday of the flower man-child seen above, Salvador Dali. While he's best known as a painter - the melting clocks, the over-abundance of inappropriately-placed eyeballs - he of course made several well-known and loved contributions to the cinema too. And no, not just that movie with Robert Pattinson doing the gay stuff uncomfortably. Where would we be without Un Chien Andalou's edit from a razor at a woman's face to a cloud slicing through a moon?

He and Luis Buñuel wrote that script in a cafe in 1929 while Buñuel directed; they would go on to work together on L’Âge d’Or the next year, where they supposedly had a falling out over some of the anti-clerical content in the film, which was an attack on religion and politics alike. And so a pattern was set - it seems every time Dali tried to jump into film-making, difficulties would follow. In 1945 he was brought on board the contentious set of Alfred Hitchcock's film Spellbound by producer David O. Selznick; Hitch and Selznick were not getting along. Hitch had nothing to do with its shooting at all, but Dali shot a twenty-minute dream sequence for the film. It eventually got edited down to under three minutes, and you can see it here.

It's easily the most interesting part of one of Hitch's least interesting films. Then in 1945 Dali and Walt Disney attempted to work together on an animated film called Destino, but budget concerns canned that effort before it even got off the ground. 17 seconds were made. That effort did have a somewhat happy ending though, because Roy Disney picked up the project 58 years later and finished it as best as they could using Dali's storyboards. It was released for the first time as an extra on the Fantasia BluRay just last year. You can watch it over here.

Happy Birthday, Celluloid!

JA from MNPP here, with your cinematic history lesson of the day. On this day one-hundred and forty-two years ago, the inventor John Wesley Hyatt patented a process of mixing together cellulose nitrote and camphor, which he'd meant as a means of producing cheap billiard balls (which had up til then been made strictly of ivory). They'd actually purchased the patent from a British inventor, Alexander Parkes, who'd gone bankrupt twice over trying to figure out a good use for his substance (including creating a line of waterproofed clothing) - lawsuits inevitably followed between them once the plastic began to take off, but it was Hyatt who's credited with calling it celluloid and figuring out its final composition.

Although the process began ten years later, it wasn't until another ten years after that, around 1888, that celluloid began being sliced down into sheets for photography (check out Hannibal Goodwin and his five million dollar winning lawsuit against Eastman Kodak over that), which by 1889 made their way into Thomas Edison's grubby hands and the rest is cinematic history.

Unfortunately celluloid had some disadvantages. It doesn't age well, and a lot of early films were ruined because of it. And it turned out to be highly flammable - the supposedly regal movie-house in my tiny upstate NY hometown actually burned to the ground back in the 1940s because of it - and it'd started being replaced by acetate and polyester by the 1950s (and now of course everything's digital). Still, even if the substance itself hasn't lasted, the word itself still carries weight.

This award is meaningful because it comes from my fellow dealers in celluloid."
-- Alfred Hitchcock in his AFI Lifetime Acheivement Award speech, March 1979 

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Hit Me With Your Best Shot: "PSYCHO"

In this weekly series "Hit Me With Your Best Shot", we look at a pre-determined movie and select what we think is the best (or at least our favorite) shot. 

 Let's stare this down right away.

The best shot in Alfred Hitchcock's immortal Psycho (1960) comes from arguably the most famous single scene in cinema's 100+ year history. It's that devastating slow clockwise turn (mirroring blood swirling down the drain) paired with a slow zoom out. Marion Crane is dead or thereabouts. Dying in the shower allows her final posthumous tears.

In what is arguably Hitchcock's most brilliant decision in a film filled with them, this moment turns the movie's fabled voyeurism (and explicit understanding of cinema's very nature) back at the audience. We've been staring at Marion Crane, foolish bird-like Marion, for 49 minutes watching her squirm in her "private trap". We couldn't (didn't want to?) save her. Now it's her turn to stare back.

How much death does the cinema need?
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