The other film I'm currently enjoying is Bela Tarr's Satantango , 7 hours, black and white, long shots. Opens with a static camera shot of a herd of cows, I think in the rain, for 5-10 minutes. Whole thing shot on a decaying collective farm in Hungary, the setting is basically a character in the film.
I've added the Rankin-Bass Last Unicorn and Hobbit to my film queue after looking around a little on my own for other colorful fun.
I grew up with a black and white TV, and when I see any of the Sid + Marty Krofft stuff, or I dream of Genie, in color, it's also mindblowing.
The comment about colors makes me think of this analysis of the colors in Garfield: http://wondermark.com/garfield-color/
One thing Garfield doesn't get enough recognition for is truly bonkers, impressionistic color choices. This sidewalk is pink and yellow. Jon wears purple pants. Every panel is like an Easter basket. (Click any image for a closer look.)
(hat tip Yawnoc)
2:. That should be expressionistic or Fauve not "impressionistic", right, art historians?
I almost mentioned that when I was putting the OP together over the weekend! I remembered you linking it and then couldn't find it instantly.
Maybe not in this league, I haven't seen The Nutty Professor, but The Court Jester was fairly eager in its use of color.
Are the colors intensified post-production, by any chance?
The opposite really, recent films are digitally color graded and are known (and often lamented) for dulling down the colors. It's a big deal on film twitter and among film critics when a recent film actually has noticeable color. And remember the orange and teal craze that began in the 90s? Also The Nutty Professor was shot on Technicolor which really makes colors pop.
re: 7
Yeah, It's the same with still photography, too. Kodachrome and other early-ish colour transparency film stocks have really intense colours. People's own memories of colour photographs are often shaped by terrible quality 35mm colour film from the 60s and 70s that has then faded with time. Those don't represent what colour photography could actually do, even in the 1940s, similarly the resolution of good quality photography from that period is a world apart from our folk memories of family photographs.
There's a famous set of Kodachrome transparencies shot for the Office of War Information during WWII where the colours are amazing. Shorpy has a load of older colour photographs including those, but also lots of others, and the colour is intense.
https://www.shorpy.com/alfred-palmer-photographs-ww2
https://www.shorpy.com/Large_Format_Kodachromes
https://www.shorpy.com/node/23880
https://www.shorpy.com/node/12951
I was fortunate to catch Hitchcock's Vertigo on a 35mm IB Technicolor print. The IB process is known for keeping stable colors and wow, it was beautiful. There's this one scene where Kim Novak appears in a dark green dress in a red wallpapered hotel bar and I wasn't the only one who audibly gasped.
8 That's a great site. Had never heard of it before.
I started Can't Get You Out of My Head last night, and now I'll pay attention to the colors a little more. Mostly cheap film, though, I'm sure.
Has anyone else been watching this?
No. I've been watching a Swedish guy build a log cabin on the YouTube.
Someone smarter and more diligent than me could lead a pretty good thread on the series.
Links in 8 are great and 3. Is definitely worth 3 points
We watched Secret of the Kells last night, and really enjoyed it.
I was just talking up some of Frank Tashlin's live-action movies; if you've never seen e.g. his Lewis-and-Martin movie Artists and Models or Rockabye Baby, his loose remake of The Miracle at Morgan's Creek, they are in fact almost exactly what you'd imagine if I told you that he got his start as an animator for Warner Brothers. (His non-Jerry Lewis Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? is better than most of his Jerry Lewis work, unsurprisingly.)
I can barely watch anything with Jerry Lewis in it. Or, Adam Sandler.
1: This is a real plate of shrimp moment, lw, but the Snyder Cut led to me talking about Satantango earlier today! I saw it in the the theater, in its entirety, in 2019. (It was split up over three nights but I thought the effect would be lessened by not enduring the entire butt-numbing thing.) The experience of a movie that long (with Tarr's glacially paced shots, e.g. that 9-minute or whatever tracking shot of the Doctor walking the muddy path to the tavern to get more brandy) does really wild things to your experience of time; I told Rft after seeing it that the tavern scene was essentially a vision of hell.
If you want something with crazy color to watch and you have the Criterion Channel, can I recommend Tokyo Drifter?
I'm not going to lie to you, Moby: you're probably better off. (Artists and Models is fun, though. Do check out Rock Hunter or the similarly non-beLewised The Girl Can't Help It (with musical numbers by the young Little Richard).
Never, ever watch "Hubie Halloween. "
I just looked it up on IMDB and assumed that it was directed by the founder of CourtTV. Steven Brill, CourtTV founder, must find it frustrating when people assume he gets work because he's pals with Adam Sandler.
I will post my Satantango viewing story soon, but not now. It was at Facets in 2002, all in one sitting.
18, 23. at about hour 2 I realized that I could use the faucet to orient how the buildings and windows are situated. Not done yet. Watching would definitely be very different on a big screen with other people and no pause button. There's a Guardian interview that claims the cat lived with Tarr a few years after filming. I found myself wondering what fraction of views are on still smaller screens, on smartphones or laptops in cafes or subway cars, or in village taps like the one in the film. There's a place that looks similar to the bar in my aunt's village- a little less battered and more commercial, the proprietor sells loosies that he has lined up in a row on the shelf above the till.
16 & 19 are promising, thanks!
23. Facets' founder, Milos Stehlik, passed away a couple of years ago, sad news. It's an inspiration to me that a shoestring organization like that can make a difference. Those weren't especially comfortable seats at least in the eighties, maybe the space got improved?
Yeah, I think there is zero way I could get through Satantango at home, even ignoring the intentionally horrible cat scene. One ninety-second shot of an empty room and I'd be pulling out my phone to check NBA highlights on Twitter. (That tavern sequence alone was genuinely punishing.)
Here's John Waters on The Girl Can't Help It. I'm only a minute or two in; hoping to get some shots of Mansfield's fire-engine dress (and Tanshin filming the men in the movie like they have cartoon wolves' tongues rolling out of their mouths).
If you want something with crazy color to watch and you have the Criterion Channel, can I recommend Tokyo Drifter?
I haven't seen it, but I can recommend another Seijun Suzuki movie -- Tattooed Life is pretty great with a bravura final fight.
25. Yeah at home I can skip that. Dipping into it for 30-60 minutes at a time is soothing, punctuated by bits that are closer to a normal movie or the dialogue. There's not that much plot, so it's not like interrupting Memento.
I'll watch train cab videos or videos of the sun sometimes, I definitely have times when I don't need a plot.
14: We haven't watched The Secret of Kells yet, but have seen the next two in the conceptual trilogy (Song of the Sea and Wolfwalkers), and Lord, both of those entranced the child and made the grownups cry.
20: How do I love Rock Hunter. We have I think a mutual friend who's an evangelist for Son of Paleface, and as much as I appreciate the uniqueness of that movie, it is um its own niche thing.
Tokyo Drifter
Will I understand it if I haven't seen "The Fast and the Furious"?
Okay. I went to a marathon viewing of Satantango at Facets in 2002, my last year of college. It was broken into thirds; there was a short intermission after the first third, and a longer intermission of an hour after the second third, to allow people to go and get dinner. It should be noted that I was not so good at remembering to eat in college, and this exciting day of movie-watching was no exception, so by the allocated dinner hour I was rather faint.
But wait: why did I do this? I was generally a fan of Hungarian art and literature, but I had also been to Tarr's screening of Werckmeister Harmonies at the Chicago International Film Festival in 2000. I was young and sensitive and it blew me away, and then the Q&A was so paralyzingly stupid-- none of these idiots who drove in from the suburbs to see a bunch of sex farces in foreign languages had any idea what they'd just seen-- that I got very worked up. So as my partner at the time and I left the theater, we turned and Tarr was just standing in the "lobby" (does Ida Noyes have a lobby? idk). Partner looked at me as if to say: go on, tell him you loved the film. No, no, I demurred, I could not. He went right up to Béla Tarr, shook his hand, and said, sir, my girlfriend here was incredibly moved by your film. At this point (and perhaps all points), Tarr did not speak especially good English-- in trying to find words to convey the enormity of the Holocaust, I remember, he gesticulated in vain for a few seconds and then came out with something I remember as "The Holocaust is... is... is shit fucking." So he just clasped my hand and smiled, and I smiled and was utterly at a loss for words myself, and the moment lasted for about ten seconds of stammering, and that was that, but I'll remember it forever.
Down the street from Facets, there was a Thai restaurant, which was great news-- in addition to Hungarian cinema, I enjoyed eating at Thai restaurants-- and a group of us filmgoers descended on it, got a table, placed our orders, and talked in general bafflement about the in-progress film. Alas, sixty minutes fly past in a heartbeat, and sometimes kitchens get backed up, so in the end we all had to ask for our food to go and schlep it back to the Facets cinematheque, where they obligingly let us bring in our bags of aromatic Thai food for the final three hours or whatever. I was growing increasingly lightheaded and spent the first few minutes trying to access the food bag with painstaking, Satantango-like slowness, to avoid rustling. As soon as I cracked open one of the clamshell containers, waves of curry fragrance poured out, and I knew it was a lost cause. There was popcorn for sale for cash, but I had no cash. So I spent the final woozy hours of the film swaying lightly back and forth, and it was all very well until a stray subtitle rendered a presumably Hungarian phrase into English as "a cosmic virt-shaft." That pretty much finished me off: I stuck my head between my knees and convulsed in silent hysterics. What the fuck was art? What was life? What was language? What was I going to do when the movie ended?
After the credits rolled, one of my dinnermates took pity on me and offered to drive me back to Hyde Park. We chatted in the car: he was an architect, and in fact the first year or two of his career was spent working with Mies van der Rohe, after which it was more or less all downhill. It was a great environment, he said: they all had so much freedom. Sic transit gloria mundi. He dropped me off at my apartment; I went inside, stuck the curry in the microwave, sat down, and thought: well, that was sublime.