Scott Walker, Film Season Curator
IN 2012 Streaming service Curzon On Demand Scott Walker to curate a season of online film screenings. Walker was a famous cinephile, and the selections offer a telling insight into the singer’s tastes. Michael Haneke’s punishing 2009 film The White Ribbon and Paolo Sorrentino’s 2008 political thriller Il Divo both feature. Finnish absurdist Aki Kaurismaki is also repped twice – not surprising, given Walker’s predilection for mordant humour. Mizoguchi and Angelopoulos also feature.
A note that accompanied Walkers 10 choices reads:
First of all let me say what a privilege it is to be asked to curate this mini season of films for the Curzon Cinema. An invaluable establishment that has over the years offered and offers still to myself and countless other cine files,the very finest of cinematic treasures in the most conducive surroundings.
Though this choice hardly represents a definitive list of my all time favorite films and is conditionally drawn from the Curzons embarrassingly impressive catalogue. It nevertheless contains some unmissable glories and current works that have impressed.
A film like Angelopoulos, The Travelling Players, is a work I’ve not seen in years but have fond, if hazy, memories of. So the impulse here is re-acquaintance of which I’m very much looking forward.
There are others like Le Quattro Volte. A film that truly casts a spell. Extraordinary, as for stretches of time, seemingly nothing much is happening and there is virtually no dialogue. Still you find yourself utterly absorbed from beginning to end, only later to be left wondering quite how this magic was achieved. Or, The White Ribbon. A meticulous essay on the making of a Nazi. Haneke’s one of the great film makers of our time and this film in my opinion is his finest.
Those familiar with the legendary works of Mizoguchi like, The Life Of Oharu or Ugetsu Monogatari, will be able to witness one of his greatest, influential pre-war films, The Story Of The Last Chrysanthemum as well as the later wonderful tale of a ‘floating world’ artist, Utamaro And His Five Women.
There is Chabrol’s Le Ceremonie. A work that has two outstanding central performances from Isabelle Huppertand Sandrine Bonnaire. A compelling crime drama that Chabrol has joked is “the last Marxist film” where once again the bourgeois get there’s in style.
Ive included Match Factory Girl. Possibly my favorite Aki Kaurismaki film though I am spoiled for choice as I find his work particularly appeals to my sense of humour. He’s Bresson with laughs. Not easy to pull off. I’ve also chosen his Take Care Of Your Scarf Tatiana. A must for caffeine addicts everywhere. There’s Il Divo. This is really what great cinema is all about. The director Paolo Sorrentino has taken a subject who’s interest could easily find itself confined to Italy and the parameters of Italian politics and yet through amazing film making technique and fascinating use of sound, transforms into an unforgettable dream work that must be seen. And finally, Bela Tarrs beautiful, spare, cinematic farewell,… The Turin Horse. I wouldn’t hold him to it though.
Enjoy.
Scott Walker
The Travelling Players
Director: Theodoros Angelopoulos, Release Year: 1975, Runtime: 230 minutes
Le Quattro Volte
Director: Michelangelo Frammartino, Release Year: 2010, Runtime: 88 minutes
The White Ribbon
Director: Michael Haneke, Release Year: 2009, Runtime: 144 minutes
The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum
Director: Kenji Mizoguchi, Release Year: 1939, Runtime: 143 minutes
Utamaro and His Five Women
Director: Kenji Mizoguchi, Release Year: 1946, Runtime: 95 minutes
La Cérémonie
Director: Claude Chabrol, Release Year: 1995, Runtime: 112 minutes
The Match Factory Girl
Director: Aki Kaurismäki, Release Year: 1990, Runtime: 69 minutes
Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatiana
Director: Aki Kaurismäki, Release Year: 1994, Runtime: 62 minutes
Il Divo
Director: Paolo Sorrentino, Release Year: 2008, Runtime: 110 minutes
The Turin Horse
Director: Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky, Release Year: 2011, Runtime: 156 minutes
GREAT SCOTT - My Favourite things
The Independent - May 2007
In 2007 Scott Walker curated a season of films for the Ritzy cinema in London. Here, he writes exclusively for The Independent ‘ABC’ about his favourite films.
Memory plays a considerable role when it comes to this particular choice of films coupled with an unashamed curiosity about certain images that have haunted but remained unobtainable since the initial encounter. Some of these go back several decades when I’d sit mesmerised at the bleached open plains of ’The Roundup’ or the shattering central performance of Per Oscarsson in ‘Hunger’ an actor who literally starved himself to a break-down for the part. It’s surely up there with Brandauers ‘Mehphisto’, Brando’s Terry in on ‘The Waterfront’ or Lancaster’s Elmer Gantry.
During their runs I would see these films many times over. I’ve also frequented silent films over the years and have chosen 2 that I consider to be most beautiful, ‘Sunrise’ by Mernau and ‘The Wind’ by Sjostrom starring the greatest film actress of her time Lillian Gish – she’s extraordinary as a Virginia girl who goes to live on the rough and windy Texas prairie. It’s absolutely terrifying. Dreyer and Bresson two of my favourite directors are also included. The choice of works representing them was difficult as the standard is so incredibly high but I trust you’ll approve. Robert Bresson’s A Man Escapes is the first film where his ‘style’ is almost fully realised especially in the incredible use of sound. At this point he hasn’t completely done away with music: later he will realise that music especially what he calls “glorious music” Mozart, Bach, Lully etc, actually makes the images seem flat whereas a sound effect will give them depth. But no other director makes us concentrate more on the bare enigma of the human being.
There’s ‘Hellsapoppin’. Originally a smash hit review on Broadway in the thirties. It features the wonderfully elastic Misha Auer and the woman with the world’s biggest mouth, Martha Rae. It matches the Marx Brothers for mayhem. There are people with shotguns bringing down birds from the theatre ceiling and fat women screaming in the audience and as far as filmic imagination, it goes one better in the finale featuring hell itself. There’s also Shemp Howard one of the Three Stooges as an optically challenged projectionist. I would love to see someone take this on today in the West End or even the National Theatre perhaps featuring as the two incompetent leads, Gervaise and Merchant or McColl and Foley. The chaos would be amazing.
Earlier I mentioned Burt Lancaster. I am forever trying to convince those who have fixed in their minds a grinning, acrobatic pirate (“The Crimson Pirate”) a grinning, acrobatic gunfighter (“Vera Cruz”) or Kirk Douglas’s “Siamese” of what a heart-rending stoical dignity Burt Lancaster possesses. He is surely the most beautiful mover of all of Hollywood’s major film stars. The two James’s, Cagney and Coburn run him close but Lancaster is in a league of his own and for grace and stillness witness him lighting a cigar while considering his fate in an ante room away from the throng of the main ballroom in The Leopard. Or speaking to the birds in The Birdman of Alcatraz. There are countless other examples which the space here doesn’t allow however I’ve chosen him in The Swimmer another film that hasn’t been around much of late as a man ‘on his way home’ via a series of swimming pools.
Newer films on offer are Bella Tarrs funny and riveting ‘Werckmeister Harmonies’ and ‘Hidden’ by Michael Haneke the keeper of the flame when it comes to great European cinema directors. The opportunity to see the rarely screened Orson Welles masterpiece ‘Chimes at Midnight’ is a very exciting prospect. It includes one of the great battle scenes of all time often imitated never bettered, and for me the perfect embodiment of Falstaff.
I’m forever endebted to cinema – it’s always been there for me in all manner of ways. I would not have lived my life here in Europe without it. Now and then I’ve found myself wandering aimlessly in dark towns or cities rather like those depicted by Kaurismaki (whose films are also represented here) and have turned a corner and there was salvation looming before me in the form of a movie house; they all seemed to have had a late night screening of ‘The Third Man’ but what could be better?
So it’s a great pleasure to be able to respond to this unique opportunity and I am grateful to the Curzon for their request. It is however a shape-shifting business and given the task another time, another place I’m certain that the selection would probably be quite different. How fortunate am I.