Tag Archives: Sergei Eisenstein

DONNA RIFKIND ON SALKA VIERTEL

The unconcerned sunbathers on the beach [in Los Angeles], their hairless bodies glistening and brown, the gigantic trucks rumbling on the highway, the supermarkets with their mountains of food, the studios with the oh-so-relaxed employees, the chatting extras pouring out from the stages at lunch time, the pompous executives marching to their “exclusive dining room” or the barbershop, stopping to chat with the endearing “young talent”—all these familiar scenes were a nerve-wracking contrast to the war horror…

What the [studio] producers want is an original but familiar, unusual but popular, moralistic but sexy, true but improbable, tender but violent, slick but highbrow masterpiece. When they have that, then they can “work on it” and make it “commercial” to justify their high salaries. — Salka Viertel

Salka Viertel was an Austrian actress and very early exile from Europe’s rising Fascist tide who settled in Santa Monica in 1928 to become a Hollywood scenarist, close friend of Greta Garbo, and catalyst behind an expanding West Coast salon of expats dubbed “Weimar on the Pacific” by Ehrhard Bahr.

As part of UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance virtual program L.A. Omnibus, Donna Rifkind—author of The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood—will discuss Viertel’s achievements within her circle, which included Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann, Charlie Chaplin, Ernst Lubitsch, Sergei Eisenstein, Arnold Schoenberg, Christopher Isherwood, and Aldous Huxley. See link below for details.

As I began to read the histories of the two intersecting arenas where Salka Viertel rang up her accomplishments during the 1930s and 1940s—the film studios of Hollywood’s Golden Age and the gathering places of the antifascist emigration—I found myself asking again and again: where are all the women? I read dozens of thoughtful, entertaining, even groundbreaking works about Hollywood in which women who were not wives, secretaries, or movie stars scarcely make an appearance. Yet women worked in every department of the studios. They were screenwriters, editors, researchers, readers, publicists, costumers, hair and makeup artists. Often below the line and unglorified, women were nonetheless vital to the success of these vast, complex organizations, and some of them wielded genuine influence if not actual power. Where are their stories? — Donna Rifkind*

L.A. OMNIBUS—DONNA RIFKIND

Center for the Art of Performance UCLA

Thursday, October 8.

7 pm on the West Coast; 10 pm East Coast.

*Donna Rifkind, from the introduction to The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood (New York: Other Press, 2020).

From top: Salka Viertel (right) and Greta Garbo at Viertel’s house, 165 Mabery Road, Santa Monica; Viertel in Anna Christie (1931), photograph courtesy and © MGM, via Photofest; Salka Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers, cover image courtesy and © New York Review Books; Donna Rifkind, The Sun and Her Stars, cover image courtesy and © Other Press; Rifkind, courtesy and © the author; Sergei Eisenstein and Viertel in Santa Monica in the 1930s.

IRIS BARRY’S HISTORY OF FILM

Iris Barry was the first curator of MOMA’s Film Library, founded in 1935. The museum’s matinee series IRIS BARRY’S HISTORY OF FILM brings together selections from her early programs.

BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN

Friday, December 20, at 1:30 pm.

DREAM OF A RAREBIT FIEND and THE NAVIGATOR

Monday, December 23, at 1:30 pm.

THE FRESHMAN

Tuesday, December 24, at 1:30 pm.

DRESSED TO KILL

Thursday, December 26, at 1:30 pm.

SHE DONE HIM WRONG

Friday, December 27, at 1:30 pm.

THE LOVE PARADE

Monday, December 30, at 1:30 pm.

TRANSATLANTIC

Tuesday, December 31, at 1:30 pm.

Museum of Modern Art

11 West 53rd Street, New York City.

From top: Donald Crisp and Buster Keaton, The Navigator (1924), with Keaton; Ernst Lubitsch, The Love Parade (1929); Irving Cummings, Dressed to Kill (1928); Fred Newmeyer and Sam Taylor, The Freshman (1925), with Harold Lloyd; William K. Howard, Transatlantic (1931); Lowell Sherman, She Done Him Wrong (1933), with Mae West (right); Sergei Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin (1925), (2). Images courtesy of Photofest and MOMA.

ALICE GUY-BLACHÉ

If Agnès Varda was the mother of the nouvelle vague, Alice Guy-Blaché (1873–1968) was the mother of cinema, period. She was an early viewer of the Lumière brothers shorts and was one of the first filmmakers of either gender to explore the narrative possibilities of the medium—influencing the work of Eisenstein and Hitchcock, to name just two. In addition to directing and producing, she founded and ran Solax Studio out of Fort Lee, New Jersey.

Not that anyone would know these things, considering how her male colleagues in the fledgling industry erased her contributions. Her husband, Herbert Blaché, took credit for Solax, and her boss, Léon Gaumont, failed to acknowledge her in the studio records. Male film historians hardly picked up the slack during Guy-Blaché’s life or since her death.

The new documentary BE NATURAL—THE UNTOLD STORY OF ALICE GUY-BLACHÉ—directed by Pamela B. Green and narrated by Jodie Foster—goes a long way toward righting these wrongs, and is screening in downtown Los Angeles through Thursday.

BE NATURAL—THE UNTOLD STORY OF ALICE GUY-BLACHÉ

Through May 23.

Downtown Independent

251 South Main Street, Los Angeles.

From top: Alice Guy-Blaché directing Bessie Love in Great Adventure (1918); Guy-Blaché directing My Madonna, with Olga Petrova and John Hass; Alice Guy-Blaché, A Fool and his Money (still), one of the first narrative films to feature an African-American cast; Alice Guy-Blaché, Scarlet Woman (still); Guy-Blaché directing My Madonna; Love (left) and Guy-Blaché. Images courtesy and © Pamela B. Green and Kino Lorber.

ALEXANDER KLUGE’S NEWS FROM IDEOLOGICAL ANTIQUITY

NEWS FROM IDEOLOGICAL ANTIQUITY—MARX/EISENSTEIN/CAPITAL—the 2008 film by filmmaker and social theorist Alexander Kluge on Sergei Eisenstein’s unrealized attempt to film Das Kapital—will screen at Human Resources in its full nine-hour length. Come and go as you please, and bring a pillow.

“The film expands in concentric circles as Kluge, his guests, interlocutors, and monologists make associative links on a range of topics that starts from a filmic discussion of Eisenstein’s notes.” — Marty Kirchner*

 

NEWS FROM IDEOLOGICAL ANTIQUITY—MARX/EISENSTEIN/CAPITAL*

Sunday, December 2, from noon to 9:30 pm.

Human Resources, 410 Cottage Home, Chinatown, Los Angeles.

Below: Alexander Kluge.

ANNETTE MICHELSON — ON THE EVE OF THE FUTURE

Art, culture, and film theorist Annette Michelson died this week in Manhattan.

In 1976 she and Rosalind Krauss co-founded October. Michelson’s first collection of essays—On the Eve of the Future—was published last year, and a new volume on Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov is forthcoming.

Annette Michelson, On the Eve of the Future: Selected Writings on Film (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/October Books, 2017).

See Rachel Churner on Michelson.

Book and periodical image credit above: MIT Press/October Books.
Annette Michelson’s bookshelves, New York City, photograph by Babette Mangolte, 1976.
Below: Michelson, circa 1966. Photograph by Peter Hujar.
Image credit: The Getty Research Institute, 2014.M.26. Gift of Annette Michelson. The Peter Hujar Archive, LLC.