Chasing Light

Sergio Leone | The Surrealist Western

Sur·re·al·ism: the principles, ideals, or practice of producing fantastic or incongruous imagery or effects in art, literature, film, or theater by means of unnatural or irrational juxtapositions and combinations.

He gave back to the actors from the USA, the confidence that a western can be a great movie.

-Bernardo Bertolucci

When I go to the cinema, I’m often frustrated because I can guess exactly what is going to happen about ten minutes into the screening. So, when I’m working on a subject, I’m always looking for the element of surprise.

-Sergio Leone

A Sergio Leone film is an Ozu-esque journey into an arid, surreal land. The stories unfold at a pace that allows you to feel the passing of time like the best of post war Japanese cinema. The landscapes of the face, the expressions of the land, the scratchy gaze of taciturn men, Morricone’s wild, melodramatic score filling the dry air.

To watch a Leone film is to wait. The payoff will arrive, Sergio will always deliver, but you must wait and watch and wrap yourself in the languid pacing until the violence explodes in a flash. Then, it is time to wait again.

Leone was a big admirer of painters, especially the surrealists and Giorgio De Chirico in particular. You can see in De Chirico’s canvases that same bleak austerity that infuses Leone’s every frame. Leone shot many of his scenes on the same locations that Salvador Dali used in many of his nightmarish images from the 1930s. After filming the desert torture scene in The Good, the Bad, the Ugly, Leone later told  cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli that it was shot “in a way that was worthy of the great surrealist painters.”

His slow hand is so far away from what is being show in theaters today with the emphasis on showing continual loud, explosive pay-offs, dispensing with the whole notion of earning a climax through suspense. Once Upon a Time in the West, the film I consider to be the height of Leone’s career, features about 15 pages of dialogue for a film that is well over three hours, following the maxim laid down by John Ford that true cinema is short on dialogue and long on action.

I’m a pessimist by nature. With John Ford, people look out of the window with hope. Me, I show people who are scared to even open the door. And if they do, they tend to get a bullet right between the eyes. But that’s how it is.

-Sergio Leone

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo) 1966

One of the best cinematic introductions of a character, Tuco makes his first appearance in the film, glass in his hair, mouth full of food, bottle of wine, leg of chicken, bursting through a window after having just killed three men that tried to ambush him.

Props like a simple mule-driven water wheel become gothic mechanisms in Sergio’s hands. Little details such as the need for the boy to duck twice during each rotation make a commonplace contraption into a bizarre device.

Designed and built by Carlo Simi, Leone’s interiors are substantial, heavy, and overbearing sometimes, with compositional motifs running throughout. There is a weighty permanence throughout the production design of all of his movies that differs from the clapboard, transient feel of Hollywood westerns.

The long torture scene in the desert is accessorized with Tuco’s pink parasol.

Shot like most Spaghetti Westerns in Almeria, Spain, Sergio, unlike other directors did not make the landscapes try to appear like the American West. He shot them as disturbing, alien terrains.

The ghost stagecoach appearing out of the desolation, carrying its cargo of the dead.

Each scene in a Leone film just feels slightly (sometimes overtly) bizarre, as if things real and recognizable, are just somehow, slightly, disturbingly off. His choice of props only help to build this tone. Here, Blondie plays with a kitten before he gets up to kill a man.

The iconic bathtub scene is one of the funniest moments in the film with Tuco telling the fallen assassin, “When you have to shoot, shoot. Don’t talk.” Eli Wallach, as he played the scene straight, said he never understood why everyone thought it was funny.

Leone’s attention to details and historical accuracy was famous but these elements were rendered so large and melodramatic, that they felt unreal in his hands, enough so that he had to show source photographs to some skeptics.

There was a degree of realism in his movies, as surrealistic as they were, that always seemed to be missing from the Hollywood westerns of the thirties, forties and the fifties.

-Quentin Tarantino

The introductory shot to the Ecstasy of Gold sequence. It took two weeks and scores of men to make all of the graves.

The final showdown, a triangle of shooters in the circular plaza with the radiating spokes of graves.

The main motif of the movie, the hangman’s noose, frames Tuco’s transformation from joy to anger in a slow reveal as the camera cranes upwards, letting both the viewer and Tuco discover the rope.

Once Upon a Time in the West (C’era una volta il West) 1968

What they [Leone, Dario Argento, Bernardo Bertolucci during the writing of Once Upon a Time in the West] were doing was something that is very common now but in 1967 was very uncommon, which is films about films. And in fact, the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard has called Leone the first postmodernist film director for this reason.

-Sir Christopher Frayling

One of the greatest opening sequences , the long languid set up of the arrival of Harmonica at the train station sets the pace for the rest of the film with exquisitely framed compositions, three legendary western character actors and a thick palpable tension as we wait. Almost no dialogue, Morricone’s natural ambient sounds score a’la John Cage; Jack Elam and the fly, Woody Strode and the dripping water, the sea of railroad ties. Sublime.

The greatest scene he ever directed was the opening sequence to Once Upon a Time in the West. It’s like a haiku poem, it’s flawless. I mean it’s extraordinary filmmaking.

-James Woods

The famous mittens in Monument Valley filmed over and over again by John Ford. Shot by Leone, the landscape has never felt so enormous while at the same time, so much less majestic and picturesque than Ford’s treatments.

The way station is part stable, part saloon, part inn and is a baroque space, massively constructed. The alternating light and dark spots within the crowded heavy space gives this long scene a continual sense of unease.

The slaughtered family laid out on gingham picnic tables with wildflower garnish.

Jill (Claudia Cardinale) in front of Sweetwater Ranch. Designed and built by Carlo Simi, the massive structure, which still stands today in Almeria was made using lumber from Orson Welle’s failed Falstaff production. The formidable ranch does not even resemble a home at all. A Leone film is no place for a comforting, inviting homestead as in a typical western.

Jill shot through the lattice of the lace canopy which was a very unusual and original framing. Shots like this lent credence to the school that called Leone’s films ‘art westerns.’

Figures either appear magically out of landscapes like apparitions or are swallowed up by them.

The fight sequence in the unfinished town has the most obvious Dali references with the painted clocks and the cheeky High Noon reference.

The hanging bed in the pueblo for the lovemaking/rape scene is bizarre and to Leone’s credit, it somehow makes sense and the viewer never questions why anyone would construct such a thing.

One of the best sight gags in all of his movies, Jason Robard’s revolver in a boot.

We’d have wonderful long lunches. Charlie Bronson would say ‘Wait, wait a minute, what is this? Why don’t we get back on the set and get working.’ Hank Fonda  and I would say, ‘Relax, Charlie. Relax. You’ll never get it like this again.’ It was a great atmosphere there.

-Jason Robards

Crippled and stuck in his self-imposed prison inside a luxury train car, a gothic gold cage descends from the ceiling, allowing Morton (Gabriele Ferzetti) to move around.

The arresting, out of focus image of the ghostly figure appearing out of the haze of the desert is repeated throughout the three hour film. Teasing the viewer, the mystery of the lone haunting figure is finally revealed during the final duel between Harmonica and Frank as the image finally comes into focus. One of the best pay-offs in the history of cinema, Leone takes the ultimate western cliche, that of revenge, and makes it as melodramatic and as epic as only he can.

The function of the flashback is Freudian…[Y]ou have to let them wander like the imagination or like a dream.

-Sergio Lenoe

There is a zoom shot into Charles Bronson’s eyes at the moment, the flashback of why he’s there on his mission, is told. That may be the biggest close-up of an actor’s eyes I have ever seen in my life. They completely fill the screen.

-John Carpenter

When I say give me a ‘Sergio Leone’, I’m implying the feel that I want. It’s not just an extreme close-up. It’s not just a frame.

-Quentin Tarantino

…the eyes are the most important element to me. Everything can be read in them…

-Sergio Leone

Duck, You Sucker (Giù la testa) 1971

You can’t shoot a film as if you were putting a salami into its skin. From a project like [Kurosawa's] Ran or Once Upon a Time in America, you come away dry in the mouth, with your head in flames and your soul in shreds.

-Sergio Leone

The Clergy, American Big Business and Italian Upper Class rolling in the mud of a pig sty.

He had a huge canvas on which he worked, psychologically, historically, even in terms of the economic understanding of the development of America because you know that triptych, starting with Once Upon A Time in America, Duck, You Sucker, Once Upon A Time in The West…I mean there’s sort of the European- Marxist view of the founding of America at the hands of robber barons and organized crime. It’s not far from wrong by the way, if at all.

-James Woods

A little al fresco dining between Rod Steiger and James Coburn.

At one point, James Coburn slips away from Steiger, leaving only his mule and hat behind as a taunt.

These humorous and surreal moments come effortlessly and often in Duck, You Sucker.

I think a case can easily be made that Morricone and Leone may be the greatest composer-director collaboration in the history of film. Even as wonderful as the Hitchcock- Bernard Herrman collaboration was, it almost even isn’t comparable to how important Morricone was to Leone and Leone was to Morricone. You can’t even imagine the movies without Morricone’s music.

-Quentin Tarantino

James Coburn’s Irish partisan Sean tends to exit scenes with big bangs.

The [John] Ford film I like most of all…is also the least sentimental, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance…Ford finally, at the age of almost sixty-five, finally understood what pessimism is all about. In fact, with that film Ford succeeded in eating up all his previous words about the West…Because Liberty Valance shows the conflict between political forces and the single, solitary hero of the West…He loved the West and with that film at last he understood it.

-Sergio Leone

A hundred years from now, Leone will be one of the great, you know, he’ll be unequivocally up there with the greatest of them all.

On my deathbed, when someone says, ‘What was the greatest artistic experience you’ve ever had?’, it was working with Sergio Leone. There’s no doubt about it. It was the Everest of my life, you know. I never got a chance to tell him that because I was too young or confused or too shy to call him up and sort of say it. One of the reasons I wanted to do this interview was to say it so someone could hear it.

-James Woods

Utagawa Kuniyoshi | Battle at Gojo Bridge

There is an amazing show of Utagawa Kuniyoshi’s woodblock prints at the Japan Society on East 47th St. Go now, as the show closes June 13th.

One of my favorites from the the collection:

The legendary warrior monk Saitō Musashibō Benkei dedicated himself to collecting 1,000 weapons for the Buddha by challenging every swordsman crossing the Gojo Bridge in Kyoto. On his thousandth duel, he fought Minamoto no Yoshitsune then only in his teens. Yoshitsune, who was called Ushiwaka in his youth, defeated Benkei, making him his vassal, and the old monk became the devoted servant of Ushiwaka.

The two became warriors of legend until Benkei’s death at the siege of Koromogawa, where he died standing on the bridge to the castle protecting Yoshitsune as the latter committed suicide inside. Benkei was so renowned and had killed so many men that day, that the soldiers dared not cross the bridge to challenge him. It was only until his body fell over that they realized that he had been dead for some time.

Frank Frazetta | 1928-2010

The great pulp painter Frank Frazetta died yesterday. His brushstrokes were the literal entrance into the world of pulp novels when I was a kid. A Frazetta cover would herald the different worlds inside those cheap mass market pages, enthralling me as a suburban kid, reading Robert E. Howard and Lovecraft and others.

He may have been the first artist I actively sought out, not to buy paintings or monograms but to purchase cheap Dell paperbacks with those fantastic luminous covers.

Here are some of his more famous paintings. I will post a collection of his sketches, pencil drawings and pen and ink work which I always favored, maybe because the deftness of his hand was so readily apparent.

Rest in peace, Frank. And thank you.

Note: two great articles in the Los Angeles Times on Frazetta, one by Lance Laspina, the director of Frazetta: Painting with Fire and one by Guillermo del Toro

When it came to my art, I went my own way and did not follow the trends.

-Frank Frazetta

By the time I was a teenager, I knew I wanted to be an artist. I was a born draftsman and liked all forms of art, so I just knew that’s what I wanted to do.

-Frank Frazetta

Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving were my big days. I guess I drew more Santa’s, bunnies, and turkeys on blackboards than anyone could count. At the insistence of one of my teachers, my parents enrolled me in the Brooklyn Academy of Fine Arts when I was eight. The Academy was little more than a one floor/three room affair with a total of thirty students ranging in age from eight–me!–to eighty. I still remember the Professor Michele [Michael] Falanga’s look of skepticism as I signed in. He was rolling his eyes and you could almost see the thought balloon over his head, “Oh no! Not another child prodigy!” He sat me down with a pencil and paper and asked me to copy a postcard featuring a group of realistically rendered ducks. When he returned later to see how far I had progressed, he snatched up my drawing exclaiming, “Mama mia!” and ran off waving it in the air, calling everyone over to look at it. I thought I was in some kind of trouble.

-Frank Frazetta

He [Falanga] died when I was twelve, right about the time he was making arrangements to send me off to Italy at his own expense to study fine art. I haven’t the vaguest idea of whether it would have really affected my areas of interest. I don’t know, but I doubt it. You see, we never had any great conversations. He might look over your shoulder and say. “Very nice, but perhaps if you did this or that…” He spoke very broken English and he kind of left you on your own. I think I learned more from my friends there, especially Albert Pucci. Falanga would look at some of the comics stuff I was doing and say, “What a waste, what a waste! You should be in Italy and paint the street scene and become a very famous fine artiste!” And that didn’t thrill me! After he died the students tried to keep the school going; we had become such close friends that we couldn’t bear to close up shop so we all chipped in and paid the rent and continued to hold classes. I did nude life drawings and still lifes; we’d paint outdoors. It was all totally different from the way I work now, but it taught me a lot about brush technique and perspective and helped me to develop my own style.

-Frank Frazetta

When I was about 15 someone in my family introduced me to John Giunta. He was a professional artist who was working for Bernard Bailey’s comics publishing company and he really wasn’t a very personable guy. He was very aloof and self-conscious and hard for me to talk to, but he was really very talented. He had an exceptional ability, but it was coupled with a total lack of self-confidence and an inability to communicate with people. Being around him really opened up my eyes, though, because he was really that good. He had an interesting style, a good sense of spotting and his blacks worked well. You can see a lot of his influence even today in some of my ink work.

-Frank Frazetta

I hope my work has inspired young artists. I have always tried to maintain my freedom as an artist and I feel it is one of the main reasons I have been successful.

-Frank Frazetta

When Ralph [Mayo] took over he pulled me aside and said, “Frank, you stuff is great, but you need to learn some anatomy.” When I was in school with Falanga the emphasis was on feeling, not on the nuts and bolts, so I really didn’t understand what he meant by ‘anatomy.’ So Ralph handed me an anatomy book and when I went home that night I had decided to learn anatomy. I started with page one and copied the entire book – everything in one night, from the skeleton up. I came back the next day like a dumb kid and said, “Thank you very much, I just learned my anatomy.” Of course Ralph fell over and roared with laughter. “Frankie, you silly bastard! I’ve been studying for ten years and I still don’t know anatomy, and you went home and learned it last night?!” But the thing was I had learned an awful lot. I had the ability to absorb things and he saw an improvement in my work right away. It amazed him and that meant a lot to me. From that point on I developed pretty rapidly: I started to do things with figures that made sense. I worked for Mayo and Standard for a few years, doing things like “Looie Laziebones” and all the funny animal stuff.

-Frank Frazetta.

What I do is create images, period.

-Frank Frazetta

Joe Sorren | Big Holiday Print Sale

Thanks to Kristi for the notice that Joe Sorren is having a sale for the holiday season. All of his prints at 30% off and can be purchased online at his site www.joesorren.com. Here are some of the prints that are being offered.

Go buy one for yourself and one for me.

Joe Sorren’s Paintings

I first became aware of Joe Sorren’s work at Storyopolis in West Hollywood, that amazing children’s bookstore which has since relocated to the valley. What other kids book store has original Dr. Seuss drawings and vintage New Yorker cartoons?

There were two pieces hanging on a column at Storyopolis that caught my eye. They were the two posted below, “Those Two Guys…” and “Opus” which are now available at La Luz de Jesus gallery in Los Feliz. Sorren’s work reminds me of those completely rare picture books I read as a kid that instead of simple adventures involving backyards and rabbits, were stories that were surreal and wild and scary and took me to places beyond what I could have imagined.

His paintings are a gentle moment of LSD lucidity with broad strokes of humor and playfulness and in each, underneath the surreal patina, a touch of something darker and sadder.

I love the fact that all bets are off when you paint; the idea that anything can happen captivates me.

-Joe Sorren

I usually enter a painting with no ideas, and just begin applying paint to see what arrives. I find art to be most engaging when I am surprising myself. As long as I stay open for whatever to arrive, anything can show up for dinner.

-Joe Sorren

Arnold Newman

Photography is 1% percent inspiration and 99% moving furniture.

Arnold Newman, the master of the environmental portrait.

Portrait of the Artist’s Wife, Jeanne Hebuterne, 1918 | Amedeo Modigliani

My favorite Modigliani is in one of the great gems of Los Angeles, the permanent collection in the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. Many times I would pay the eight dollar admission, ignore the rest of the museum and just sit in front of this portrait with its tragic caption:

This work depicts Jeanne Hebuterne, wife of the artist, whom he met in 1917. Modigliani died of tubercular meningitis in 1920. Despondent over his death, Jeanne committed suicide the following morning. She was nine months pregnant with their second child.

Now that I am in New York, there are many more Modigliani’s, especially at the Met. But none come close to the one in Pasadena, the one with the slate grey eyes.

“Draw, Antonio, draw, Antonio, draw and do not waste time.”

“One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something will arise for later, something better. These things fill in from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

“After Michelangelo died, someone found in his studio a piece of paper on which he had written a note to his apprentice, in the handwriting of his old age: ‘Draw, Antonio, draw, Antonio, draw and do not waste time.’”

– Annie Dillard, The Writing Life