Due to the serious nature and subject matter of our features today, we will dispense with our usual shorts and show our feature presentation. Please join us next week when we will resume with another Looney Tunes cartoon
We've picked two fantastic (yet difficult) short documentaries from the excellent reference book, 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die by Steven Jay Schneider. One of our choices today is relatively unknown; the other world famous - Jean Rouch's 1955 Les Maîtres Fous (The Mad Masters) and Alain Resnais' 1955 sobering documentary, Night and Fog.
Les Maîtres Fous (The Mad Masters) is a controversial docufiction examines the Hauku religious cult practices in Ghana and Niger from the 1920s to the 1950s. It is a very tough film to watch, scenes include animal sacrifice and spirit possession and yet you can clearly see the profound effect the film had on artist like, Jean Genet who wrote his play The Blacks in which blacks assume the role of masters, and Peter Brook’s staging of Peter Weiss’s play Marat/Sade was influenced by the theatricality and spontaneous language of Hauka possession. Indeed, the film was so controversial that it was banned first in Niger, and then in British territories including Ghana. The film was considered offensive to colonial authorities because of the Africans' blatant attempts to mimic and mock the "white oppressors". On the other hand, at the time, African students, teachers, and directors found the film confirmed every stereotype held by Westerners about “savages.” With that fair warning, The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour would like you to encourage you to watch this odd film, Les Maîtres Fous.
(closed captions in English are available)
After a disastrous screening at the Musee De L'Homme where Rouch spoke a live commentary and his mentor Marcel Griaule advised him to destroy the work, the director was put in touch with émigré American director Jules Dassin who found him an editor and suggested the completed film be blown up to 35mm.
Our second feature tonight is the 1955 documentary by Alain Resnais, Night and Fog. It was made ten years after the liberation of Nazi concentration camps, making it one of the first documentaries to openly deal with the Holocaust. The documentary features the abandoned grounds of Auschwitz and Majdanek while describing the lives of prisoners in the camps. Night and Fog was made in collaboration with scriptwriter Jean Cayrol, a survivor of the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp. The title is taken from the Nacht und Nebel program of abductions and disappearances decreed by Nazi Germany. It goes without saying that the film's subject matter is intense and may be difficult for some to watch. While the film faced difficulties with French censors unhappy with the portrayal of the collaboration of french authorities with the Nazis, Night and Fog was released to critical acclaim in France and worldwide. Again with a warning about the serious nature of this documentary, The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour would like you to encourage you to watch this historical significant film, Night and Fog.
Jean Cayrol found the project immensely distressing to work on, given the fact that he had been a concentration camp inmate. How he got round it was not to provide text, segment by segment, to Alain Resnais, who would normally have edited the images around it. Instead, Cayrol wrote an initial text based on his recollections of Resnais' first cut. Resnais' assistant Chris Marker then reordered the script to match the sequence of shots and returned the restructured script to Cayrol, who then rewrote the script.
And so it goes.
No comments:
Post a Comment