Festival Film
Name Anita Loos.
Born 26 April, 1888, California. Died 18 August 1981, New York. Who was she? Loos was one of the most celebrated US screenwriters. playwrights and authors of the last century. Over her long life she experienced several careers and comebacks. Having been around at the birth of cinema she worked on scenarios. screenplays and silent film title cards for such legendary directors and stars as DW Griffiths, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. later going on to write some fine scripts for sound pictures. But she is most famous for writing the source novel of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes which was made into a film, twice. She later became a New York-based society journalist, unreliable memoirist and all-round wit.
Films we should catch at this year’s Loos retrospective All of them, natch, but the best ones are: San Francisco. The Women. The Struggle and of course Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). Interesting fact The proper pronunciation of Loos. her French family name, is ‘Lohse', but, unlike the rest of her wealthy family, Loos could never be bothered to correct anyone who said it wrong.
(Paul Dale)
I The List-sponsored Anita Loos Retrospective, Filmhouse, 623 8030, daily, noon, from Fri 77 Aug, £6.50 (£4.55).
PLANET B-BOY (Benson Lee, US, 2007) 101 min 0...
Breakdancing has come a long twat ll‘ the 30 years since its rise alongside hip hop and graffiti in the housing protects of New York City After enJOying a fleeting popularisation in music videos and kitsch moves of the mid-1980s an international, roots- orientated underground lTTO‘.€lTiertt has Sprung up latterlt that is yet to break the sunace of Wldef
42 TIIE LIST FESTIVAL MAGAZINE ‘ C
THE MAN FROM LONDON (A LONDON FERFD (Bela Tarr, Hungary, 2007) 135min 0000
Despite its troublesome and lengthy production history, Hungarian master auteur Bela Tarr’s newest film is another work of elegant despair. Closer to his 1988 film Damnation than the more recent Séténtango’ or Werckmeister Harmonies in its length and narrative development, this adaptation of a Georges Simenon novel explores what happens when one night Maloin (Miroslav Krobot) really believes his
ship has come in.
Maloin’s a night shift signal controller at a seaport who witnesses the disposal of a suitcase of stolen
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get away with the crime? There really isn't much more
to the story than that, but the director's use of off- screen space, of elegant tracking shots and also his ability to use performers less for how they perform than how he chooses to shoot them, gives the film its hypnotic power. Add a typically melancholic soundtrack and we once again have a Tarr film that suggests greed, despair and unrealistic hope conjoin to arrive at a vision of near hell. Invoking the French poetic realist films exemplified by Marcel Carné’s
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for other FILM LISTINGS in Glasgow & Edinburgh see non-Festival magazine