Webpage on Killer's Kiss
mgene...@my-deja.com
boaz...@my-deja.com wrote:
> In article <8p8ee6$si7$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>,
> mgene...@my-deja.com wrote:
> > I have a webpage [part of a larger website] devoted to the
> > dancer/dancing scene in "Killer's Kiss." This page includes
> information
> > on the avant-garde film by Hans Richter "Dreams That Money
Can Buy"
> > (1946).
> >
> > This webpage will be expanded as time allows.
> >
> > If you are interested, the address is:
> >
> >
http://home.earthlink.net/%7Emgenevieve/filmappearancesindex.h
tml
> >
> > M.Genevieve
> > ***********
>
> Nice work, Gen. The photos look pretty good. "Killer's Kiss" is a
> largely underappreciated film and it's good to see you have
something
> devoted to it.
>
> Boaz
Thank you, Boaz.
I think "Killer's Kiss" is quite underrated myself. After all, it was
Kubrick's first full-feature film. And the shots of New York City,
particularly of the chase scenes are quite good, don't you think?
And the boxing match is also impressive.
Best,
Gen
****
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
thor...@my-deja.com
surprise to see that Sobotka was in the Richter film. This was
difficult enough to get on 16mm way back when, but have you found that
it's available on viddy or 'digey'?
Thornhill
Spiritus
wrote:
> > Nice work, Gen. The photos look pretty good. "Killer's Kiss" is a
> > largely underappreciated film and it's good to see you have
> something
> > devoted to it.
> >
> > Boaz
>
> Thank you, Boaz.
> I think "Killer's Kiss" is quite underrated myself. After all, it was
> Kubrick's first full-feature film. And the shots of New York City,
> particularly of the chase scenes are quite good, don't you think?
> And the boxing match is also impressive.
>
> Best,
> Gen
> ****
>
Liked especially the fast negative flight down city streets, which
"someone?" said harkens to the later "stargate sequence", and what do
you know.... it does.
sp
David Kirkpatrick
Perhaps Killer's Kiss could be seen as an overture preceding Kubrick's
10-film opera.
It begins with a flashback - The Killing
The boxing ring loss forshadows Paths of Glory.
The strained father-daughter relationship described during the ballet
sequence suggests Lolita.
The insecurities of Gloria's "sugardaddy" suggests perhaps Dr.
Strangelove.
Then there is KK's "stargate sequence", as you point out.
Then fastforward from Davy's dance studio rendevous to Clockwork
Orange's droog battle in an abandoned theatre. And the conventioneers
acting like middle-aged delinquents.
Then match the card game of Gloria's abductors to Barry Lyndon.
Then match the rooftop chase scene to what might be Kubrick's only other
chase scene: in the Shining.
Then match the mannequin fight to the violence of Full Metal Jacket
Then note that Eyes Wide Shut has the happiest ending since Killer's
Kiss. The only other Kubrick film ending with "boy and girl getting
together again".
I believe I've got everything in proper sequence here.
How about a Kubrick film festival where each later film is preceeded by
the corresponding section of Killer's Kiss? Call it "Postlude to a
Kiss". :-)
David
mgene...@my-deja.com
Are you mocking me? :) Thanks, Thornhill, Have you checked out the
entire *website* There is a lot more...especially in the area of
bibliography and "Marriage to Stanley Kubrick."
> What a
> surprise to see that Sobotka was in the Richter film.
Sobotka (who was Viennese) had a lot of German, Austrian emigre and
avant-garde friends. Man Ray took some extraordinary photographs of her,
if I remember correctly. I believe I saw a few of them in the Dance
Collection at the New York City Public Library - which, incidentally,
owns a few Kubrick photographs on the NY City Ballet. Kubrick was
occasionally backstage.
> This was
> difficult enough to get on 16mm way back when, but have you found that
> it's available on viddy or 'digey'?
>
> Thornhill
>
Yes, "Dreams That Money Can Buy" is finally available on video, however,
it is $100.00. That's one-hundred dollars. Are you still interested in
where you can purchase it? I was going to put that on the *webpage*
also, but I will post the address here. Let me find it again.
Back soon,
Genevieve
********
mgene...@my-deja.com
Yes, that was an extraordinary if not revolutionary scene in KK - had it
ever been done before? There are a number of interesting scenes in
"Killer's Kiss," and some humour, intentional or not.
Genevieve
thor...@my-deja.com
mgene...@my-deja.com wrote:
> In article <8p9mj0$de6$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>,
> thor...@my-deja.com wrote:
> > There's a *serious* Web page (footnotes and everything)!
>
> Are you mocking me? :) Thanks, Thornhill, Have you checked out the
> entire *website* There is a lot more...especially in the area of
> bibliography and "Marriage to Stanley Kubrick."
Mocking?? I NEVER mock! (might "Smock", a la Steve Allen, but never
"mock")
> Sobotka (who was Viennese) had a lot of German, Austrian emigre and
> avant-garde friends. Man Ray took some extraordinary photographs of
>her,
> if I remember correctly.
I have a personal interest in Ray and his circle of friends, so if you
turn up something on those pics, that would be of great interest to me.
>I believe I saw a few of them in the Dance
> Collection at the New York City Public Library - which, incidentally,
> owns a few Kubrick photographs on the NY City Ballet. Kubrick was
> occasionally backstage.
Again, neat-o.
> Yes, "Dreams That Money Can Buy" is finally available on video,
>however,
> it is $100.00. That's one-hundred dollars. Are you still interested in
> where you can purchase it? I was going to put that on the *webpage*
> also, but I will post the address here. Let me find it again.
Well, I'm not going to rush out today, but for future reference...
I spent a little time on the site, and may have missed some avenues.
Will return.
Thanks,
Thornhill
David Kirkpatrick
>
> In article <8p9mj0$de6$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>,
> thor...@my-deja.com wrote:
> > There's a *serious* Web page (footnotes and everything)!
>
> Are you mocking me? :) Thanks, Thornhill, Have you checked out the
> entire *website* There is a lot more...especially in the area of
> bibliography and "Marriage to Stanley Kubrick."
A very good website indeed. I particularly enjoyed your rebuttals to
the Daily Mail article.
> > What a
> > surprise to see that Sobotka was in the Richter film.
>
> Sobotka (who was Viennese) had a lot of German, Austrian emigre and
> avant-garde friends. Man Ray took some extraordinary photographs of her,
> if I remember correctly.
I'm sorry I didn't notice her at the Man Ray exhibit at the Art Gallery
of Ontario last week. Actually, I think I did, but forgot about it. (Saw
some interesting films of his, though.)
David
mgene...@my-deja.com
thor...@my-deja.com wrote:
> In article <8patve$pdc$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>,
> mgene...@my-deja.com wrote:
> > In article <8p9mj0$de6$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>,
> > thor...@my-deja.com wrote:
> > > There's a *serious* Web page (footnotes and everything)!
> >
> > Are you mocking me? :) Thanks, Thornhill, Have you checked out the
> > entire *website* There is a lot more...especially in the area of
> > bibliography and "Marriage to Stanley Kubrick."
>
> Mocking?? I NEVER mock! (might "Smock", a la Steve Allen, but never
> "mock")
OK, Mock or smock is fine :)
>
> > Sobotka (who was Viennese) had a lot of German, Austrian emigre and
> > avant-garde friends. Man Ray took some extraordinary photographs of
> >her,
> > if I remember correctly.
>
> I have a personal interest in Ray and his circle of friends, so if you
> turn up something on those pics, that would be of great interest to
me.
Me too! I'm posting a description below about the film and how one may
buy it in the UK or US. - Genevieve
<snip>
contact: video...@bfi.org.uk
In the US, go to: www.arthouseinc.com/dreams.html
Dreams That Money Can Buy
Richter / USA / 1946
Colour and black and white / 80 minutes
Price £15.99
How to order this video
Released 17th April 2000
Berlin-born Hans Richter - Dadaist, painter, film theorist and filmmaker
- was for four decades one of the most influential members of the
cinematic avant-garde. Richter assembled some of the century's liveliest
artists as co-creators of Dreams That Money Can Buy,
his most ambitious attempt to bring the work of the European avant-garde
to a wider cinema audience. Joe, a young man down on his luck, discovers
he has the power to create dreams, and sets up a business selling them
to others. The 'dreams' he gives to his clients are the
creations of Max Ernst, Fernand Leger, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp,
Alexander Calder and Richter himself, and the
result is by turns playful, hypnotic, satirical, charming and
nightmarish.
This video is one of a relatively new series from bfi Video: A History
of the Avant-Garde. This series of video
releases from the British Film Institute is to feature the best of
radical and innovative filmmaking from the first
hundred years of cinema, and was launched with The Cinema of
Transgression.
Dreams That Money Can Buy is the second release in this series. The
relaxed playfulness inherent in the film
anticipates elements of post-modernism, and it is not surprising that a
director like David Lynch, himself an
archetypal exponent of 'crossover' movies, should have expressed a
fondness for the work. Aside from the
framing story (a parody of film noir) there is a good deal to enjoy in
this 1946 rarity.
Richter, who seems to have known almost everybody, roped in some of the
century's liveliest artists as his
co-creators. Dreams includes episodes devised and directed by Ernst,
Duchamp, Leger, Alexander Calder and
Man Ray, with music by (among others) Duke Ellington, Milhaud, Cage,
David Diamond and Paul Bowles. Several
of the sections allow the artists involved to reprise their favourite
motifs in cinematic form. Calder creates a
charming ballet for his puppet-like mobiles,as if Miro had collaborated
with animator George Pal. Duchamp works
variations on his Nude Descending a Staircase, interspersed with
hypnotically spinning discs. Man Ray satirises
the cinema itself, with an audience treating the film they are watching
as a series of instructions to be
obediently followed, while Leger wryly sends up the conventions of
popular romance with a courtship enacted by
shop-window dummies.
Like much surrealist art Dreams draws strongly on Jungian themes, and
the film's most effective episodes are
those which best evoke the disjunctive logic of dreams. Richter's own
section has a man stigmatised as an
outsider (his skin turns blue) and pursued through a nightmare urban
landscape. Max Ernst creates a miniature
costume drama of amour fou, shot in livid colours; its fevered eroticism
recalls Buñuel's L'Age d'or. Ultimately,
Dreams That Money Can Buy provides a diverting and historically
revealing snapshot of the more user-friendly
end of the avant-garde at the mid-point of the 20th century.
Cast and Credits
Dreams That Money Can Buy
A film in seven segments
Cast
Joe/'Narcissus' Jack Bittner
The Girl Dorothy Griffith
Credits
Overall Director, Writer, Editor Hans Richter
Photography Arnold Eagle
Producers Hans Richter, Peggy Guggenheim, Kenneth
Macpherson
Production Company Art of This Century Films
Desire
Director, Writer Max Ernst
Music Paul Bowles
The Girl with the Prefabricated Heart
Director, Writer Fernand Leger
Lyrics Jean Latouche
Sung by Libby Holman Josh White
Ruth, Roses and Revolvers
Director, Writer Man Ray
Music Darius Milhaud
Discs
Director, Writer Marcel Duchamp
Music John Cage
Ballet
Director, Writer Alexander Calder
Music Paul Bowles
Circus
Director, Writer Alexander Calder
Music David Diamond
Narcissus
Director, Writer Hans Richter
Music Louis Applebaum
Hans Richter
Hans Richter (1888-1976)
Dadaist, painter, film theorist and filmmaker, for four decades Hans
Richter was one of the most influential
members of the cinematic avant-garde. Born in Berlin, he joined the
newly-founded Dadaist group in 1916 after
being invalided out of the German army. Initially his interest lay in
painting, but in 1920 he also turned to
cinema. His earliest films, which featured abstract designs similar to
those being explored around the same time
by Walter Ruttman, Oscar Fischinger and Viking Eggeling, developed out
of his interest in scroll painting and
show the influence of Klee and Mondrian.
Even so, Richter himself considered music, rather than art, his
'principal inspiration' as a filmmaker. Eggeling,with
whom Richter was closely associated for a while, continued to insist
that painting was an essential primary step
towards making an abstract film; Richter came to see film as an
autonomous art with rhythm as its key quality.
Indeed, Film ist Rhythmus (1921) was the title of his first completed
film, later retitled Rhythmus 21. He followed
it up with Rhythmus 23 (1923), which caused a near-riot at its premiere
in Berlin, and Rhythmus 25 (1925),
considered to be the first abstract film in colour.
From the mid-Twenties Richter began to move away from pure cinematic
abstraction. Filmstudie (1926) featured
surrealist motifs such as floating eyes, while Vormittagspuk/Morning
Ghosts (1928), with an orchestral score by
Hindemith, was a zany Dadaist spoof featuring Richter and his friends
wearing joke beards, and random floating
objects - ties, coffee cups, bowler hats - that foreshadow Magritte.
Alles dreht sich, alles bewegt
sich!/Everything Turns, Everything Moves! (1929), a lively collage of a
Berlin street carnival, caused a clash with
the Nazis over its 'modernism'. Ironically, the film was awarded a prize
for artistic merit by the Nazis seven years
later; but by then Richter had long quit Germany.
During the Thirties Richter tried to get various feature film projects
off the ground: an anti-Nazi documentary
about strike-breaking; an updating of Voltaire's Candide to modern-day
Europe; an ambitious version of Baron
Munchausen.
In 1941 Richter moved to the USA, where he was appointed director of the
Institute of Film Techniques at New
York's City College. During more than a decade at the college Richter
became spiritual grandfather to a host of
American experimental filmmakers including Maya Deren and Jonas Mekas.
He continued making films: besides
the ambitious Dreams That Money Can Buy he completed 8 x 8 (1957), a
study of his favourite game, chess;
Dadascope: From Dada to Surrealism (1961); and Alexander Calder: From
the Circus to the Moon (1963). He also
wrote extensively in art and cinema, notably Dada : Art and Anti-Art
(1963), and Der Kampf um den Film, written in 1939 but not published
until 1976. In the mid-Fifties, he moved to Switzerland, where he
continued painting
until his death at 88.
***************************************************************
mgene...@my-deja.com
David Kirkpatrick <dak...@home.com> wrote:
> mgene...@my-deja.com wrote:
> >
> > In article <8p9mj0$de6$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>,
> > thor...@my-deja.com wrote:
> > > There's a *serious* Web page (footnotes and everything)!
> >
> > Are you mocking me? :) Thanks, Thornhill, Have you checked out the
> > entire *website* There is a lot more...especially in the area of
> > bibliography and "Marriage to Stanley Kubrick."
>
> A very good website indeed. I particularly enjoyed your rebuttals to
> the Daily Mail article.
Oh, thank you, David. That article was so insipid!
>
> > > What a
> > > surprise to see that Sobotka was in the Richter film.
> >
> > Sobotka (who was Viennese) had a lot of German, Austrian emigre and
> > avant-garde friends. Man Ray took some extraordinary photographs of
her,
> > if I remember correctly.
>
> I'm sorry I didn't notice her at the Man Ray exhibit at the Art
Gallery
> of Ontario last week. Actually, I think I did, but forgot about it.
(Saw
> some interesting films of his, though.)
>
> David
I am so envious, David! Fortunate you.
Anyway, in reference to your earlier post, I see shades of Killer's Kiss
in EWS...but I don't know quite how to explain it, although I could be
projecting my historical knowledge/views on EWS.
Best,
Genevieve
*********
boaz...@my-deja.com
The chase scenes in NY are quite good, considering Kubrick's relative
inexperience as a director. He was obviously influenced by Jules
Dassin's "The Naked City." Kubrick's raw, unglamorous cinematography
quite often recalls that film. In fact, it was films like "Naked City"
that helped establish the "New York look" to post-WWII films shot there.
(And I have to say from my own experience that I too love to shoot
black and white in New York; more than any other city in the U.S., it
lends itself best to black and white photography.)
The boxing scenes were very well done, too. One can see the influence
of such films as "Body and Soul" (which many of the boxing scenes were
shot in the ring by the late, great James Wong Howe, using a Bell &
Howell Eyemo while manuevering around the two boxers on roller skates).
Naturally, Kubrick had his own experience to draw on: the film "Day of
the Fight," and his photo essay for Look Magazine on Walter Cartier, who
was the subject of DOTF.
Boaz
mgene...@my-deja.com
I'll have to see this "The Naked City" again. Cannot remember it .
> (And I have to say from my own experience that I too love to
shoot
> black and white in New York; more than any other city in the U.S.,
it
> lends itself best to black and white photography.)
Oh yes, it is such a great city in which to take b/w photographs.
So is Chicago!
> The boxing scenes were very well done, too. One can see the
influence
> of such films as "Body and Soul" (which many of the boxing
scenes were
> shot in the ring by the late, great James Wong Howe, using a
Bell &
> Howell Eyemo while manuevering around the two boxers on
roller skates).
> Naturally, Kubrick had his own experience to draw on: the film
"Day of
> the Fight," and his photo essay for Look Magazine on Walter
Cartier, who
> was the subject of DOTF.
Wasn't there talk (in the late 1950s) of Kubrick and Harris doing a
Civil War film? Now that would have been interesting.
Genevieve
***********
boaz...@my-deja.com
There was something in the works that Kubrick/Harris was going to do
about Mosby's Raiders, but like many projects, it probably ended up in
development hell, especially as MGM was undergoing changes even in the
late '50s. It would be interesting someday for someone to do a study
and find out just how many movies from, say, 1930 until 1960 went into
development but never got made. I mean the studios actually spending
money and hiring writers and designers and even bringing in actors and
directors at some point, only to cut them loose when the project is
shelved. It would be interesting not only from the perspective of just
what was considered and then never done but also in seeing how much
money was actually spent and how those expenses eventually were written
off or accured.
Boaz
mgene...@my-deja.com
That would be a great book, Boaz. I guess you should write it. You
already have a great title! Development Hell.
Best,
Gen
*****