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To my usual morning news mix, I’ve lately added Twitter feeds. I don’t like Twitter and don’t participate myself, but I enjoy checking the streams issuing from Never Trumpers, particularly those allied with the Lincoln Project. Should I join Twitter? Nah. That would take away the small pleasure of typing into Google: Rick Wilson twit, George Conway twit, David Frum twit…

These streams have many virtues. For one thing, they often tip me to scandalous stories before the august papers have caught on. For another, the Never Trumpers attract the sort of disrespectful exchanges that represent the spontaneous genius of the American people. Viz:

Just as attractive to me is the cast of characters. Rick Wilson, striving to become the Dr. Hunter S. Thompson of the 2010s, can write good polemic. His most scabrous stuff is reserved for his Daily Beast column but can be glimpsed in tweet-size doses and heard on the New Abnormal podcast (liberally salted with the f-word, so you know he’s damn sincere). George Conway, mysteriously still cohabiting with the Kraken Queen of the Trump regime, strives for a modicum of dignity. He pursued, with a fervor that he never lets you forget, the startling thesis that Trump is deeply nuts. Steve Schmidt, he of the orotund tones and rolling parallel syntax, wants to come off as a Roman senator daring the barbarians to fling a spear his way.

They all like dogs.

David Frum, who accurately predicted the Trump coronavirus policy (“Take the punch”), has written A Very Serious Book and when not pushing his latest podcast appearance, offers free autographed bookplates. The very conceit that people want books, let alone want sticky paper to paste in them, carries a certain charm. But then Frum comes from Canada.

Wisconsin’s Rush Limbaugh Charlie Sykes, waking up to realize that his listeners were just waiting for him to go full Trump, has left our verdant COVID landscape to run The Bulwark, the newest outpost of desperate neocon hopes. Jennifer Rubin has been a traveler on the anti-Trump train ever since Mitt (Quiet Rooms) Romney fizzled out. Her current WaPo columns make her sound like a 60s protest marcher. A “small-l liberal party” must

defend democratic institutions, address yawning gaps in wealth and opportunity, integrate into a global economy, tackle systemic problems such as climate change and racism, root out corruption and cronyism, and exercise leadership in a world in which illiberal regimes are increasingly aggressive and confident.

No mention of women, LBGQT, or global warming, but give her time. Those columns don’t write themselves. Actually, come to think of it, they do.

Another WaPo fixture, fedora-wearing Max Boot, has seen the light too, and of course produced a book about it. Bringing up the rear is the smirking, reliably ineffectual William Kristol, whose latest hand-wringing column ponders whether the Republican Party should be crushed to powder. Result: Maybe? Maybe not! Who knows?

Many of these Never Trumpers have gained media purchase through the green rooms (now green screens) of CNN and MSNBC. In this last venue, perpetually pert Nicolle Wallace, former fixture of the Bush White House and now surrogate for COVID Moms, blasts fire at the GOP.

Those of us who think that the biggest threats to civilization are guns, religion, and Republicans might believe that we have true allies in this swaggering brigade of old GOP buccaneers. Seeing them Zooming in from luxurious quarters (check Schmidt’s ocean view) paid for in the blood of losing Democratic candidates might be unsettling, but perhaps they deserve the benefit of the doubt. Have they not put their very particular set of skills to the task of unseating Trump? Haven’t they reconciled themselves to installing Biden? Have not some committed their energies to wiping the current version of the Republican Party from the public sphere altogether?

Non-Soviet montage

When not writing columns and filling podcast hours, some are becoming media renegades, launching guerrilla raids through video broadsides. They have joined progressive groups like VoteVets in assailing Trump’s failure. Here the Lincoln Project is the leader, although it’s joined by initiatives from less self-publicizing cadres: Republican Voters Against Trump, The Meidas Touch, and other groups.

I suspect that what has rallied Never Trumpers to Black Lives Matter and the turmoil in the streets are the waves of irrefutable evidence of systematic police brutality. Spinmeisters trying to be public intellectuals, they are supersensitive to the power of images and sounds. They have created viral ads for decades, and now history is giving them a mountain of material to play with. Even if they’re genuinely revulsed by what their former party has done to our society, there’s the itch of  tradecraft: time to try out new blades for shiv-in-the-ribs politics.

What’s fascinating to me as a film researcher is how those efforts exploit the conventions of left-wing agitprop from the silent era onward. True, sometimes they resort to classic documentary techniques, such as the hammering voice-over that instructs you what to think. Here’s one of the most spine-tingling, a Lincoln Project spot going after Trump’s legislative bootlickers.

And here’s the Lincoln Project’s “Mourning in America.”

At the visual level, the slamming cuts and pounding titles recall Soviet Montage techniques. Thanks to these devices, often there’s no need for voice-over at all. The image/ sound juxtapositions do the work, in the manner displayed in Emile de Antonio’s In the Year of the Pig. An instance is the way  the Meidas Touch wields the First Daughter’s voice-over against her.

Sometimes just parallel editing does the trick. In Kino-Eye (1924), Dziga Vertov juxtaposed a sequence showing mental patients with one showing petty criminals working outside the interests of the state. The same tactic of side-by-side comparison can  be repurposed for Internet skirmishes.

Nice to see people who hate Leninism using dialectical montage.

I’d be lying if I didn’t say I enjoy this spray of media shrapnel. Democrats have not understood the nature of the threat posed by Republicans, going way back. The 1964 “daisy ad” was the last time I remember them playing hardball. (Was Hillary, then a Goldwater Girl, traumatized by it?) Michelle Obama said, “When they go low, we go high.” The Never Trumper agitki reply: When they go low, we press their cheek into the pavement, jam our knee on their throat, and glare at the camera, as if to say, “You’re next.”

But let’s remember some things. The Never Trumpers were loyal Republicans through the years of Agnew, Haldeman, Erlichman, Mitchell, Atwater, Luntz, Rove, Ailes, Buchanan, Gingrich,  the two Bushes, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Boehner, Graham, the “Young Guns,” the Tea Party, and early McConnell. They ceaselessly upbraided Obama for golfing and wearing a tan suit, while introducing the public to a word seldom used before.

Wilson worked on the detestable campaign against Max Cleland. While writing hilariously mistaken columns for the Times, Kristol was key in giving us Sarah Palin, the proto-Trump. Another Palin fan, Steve Schmidt was a close ally of Cheney’s and helped install Alito and Roberts on the Supreme Court. Frum’s stint in the Bush White House included vigorous commitment to the Iraq war.

Conway, a Federalist Society stalwart, lived in Trump Tower and with Ann Coulter scrutinized Bill Clinton’s groin anatomy. Choking up in the forthcoming A Duty to Warn documentary Unfit, he says that only recently did he realize that Trump is a racist. Cheerleading Republicans from the ramparts of WaPo in 2015, Jennifer Rubin suspended her support for Mitt (Binders Full of Women) Romney long enough to praise Wisconsin’s own Scott Walker  as presidential timber:

Whether he’s successful or not, the potential addition of Walker to the race is a plus for the GOP and a sign that the party has a new generation of stars ready for the national stage.

True, Max Boot was among the first to use the F-word (no, not that one) in describing candidate Trump.

Trump is a fascist. And that’s not a term I use loosely or often. But he’s earned it.

Yet this assessment didn’t stop Boot from hoping that Trump would correct the Middle East errors of the Obama years. Praising Trump’s choice of  “the thoughtful new secretary of defense, General Jim Mattis”–now long gone–Boot has his fingers crossed:

Let’s hope that the Trump team carefully studies—and with an open mind—what went wrong under Obama.

It’s those open-minded fascists we need.

Coming off the bench

©Steve Sack, at The Week (2017).

A large part of what irks the Never Trumpers is the career criminal’s bodacious bad manners, what the base loves and what the more discreet call his “character.” Run the tape of history backward, though, and delete Trump. If we had President Kasich or President Rubio or President Haley or even President Cruz, we would have the same rollback of regulations, the same planting of incompetent judges, the same tax windfalls for the wealthiest, the same efforts to wipe out DACA and Obamacare, and the same rise in inequality. How many Never Trumpers would object? Trump just brought a machete and noise to the amputations the GOP would have preferred to conduct more surgically in quiet rooms.

Proof of their intransigence is the ceaseless veneration of Reagan. I have yet to find among the Never Trumpers’ voluminous output a single repudiation of this disastrous president. If he came back from the grave, they would be right alongside him, castigating “welfare queens” and declaring, in the midst of tens of thousands of deaths, that “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”  Cute enough to recruit college Republicans, but not a motto for managing a pandemic and a depression.

As for Trump’s criminal conduct, do we need to be reminded of Iran-Contra, or the S & L fiasco, or the 2008 economic collapse? Trump is a gangster, but the GOP has never shied away from the grift. As Brecht puts it: What is robbing a bank compared to founding a bank? And yes, Trump commuted the sentence of Roger Stone–in the grand tradition of Gerald Ford pardoning Nixon and George W. Bush commuting the sentence of Scooter Libby.

I suggest that the Never Trumpers hose themselves down and stop using the “pure conservative” excuse. They should stop bemoaning the loss of the sort of civil debate they never fostered. They should admit that for sixty years the Republican party has been a home to reaction and repression.

In defending their support of conservative “principles,” the Never Trumpers want us to forget that they ignored the practical consequences of putting the GOP in power: the ransacking of civil society undertaken by corporations, lobbyists, and enterprising bandits. The party’s assault on Obama made little sense in terms of principle; he was practically the last Rockefeller Republican left in DC. Moreover, the GOP attacks displayed flagrant racism long before Trump came on the scene.

In the light of this, it’s implausible to think that all those Representatives and Senators suddenly turned pusillanimous on 6 November 2016. Trump’s dialing of everything up to 11 forced his acolytes in the House and Senate to reveal what they have always been, and what they managed to coat with bland politesse for decades.

So the Never Trumpers should stop chattering about rebuilding that infested party or creating something fresh and pure, and admit that all the diversity they claim to prize can be found within the Democratic party and outside it in a range of liberal, radical, and centrist organizations. Right now, in the world we inhabit, the US Republican party is simply an indulgence that no civilization can afford.

More broadly, since they claim to be interested in Big Ideas, the Never Trumpers should admit that conservatism is at bottom simply a defensive reaction to dispossessed and exploited people coming forward to demand equality and a measure of humanity. Blather about “limited government” and “sane fiscal policy” has always been simply cover for the exercise of power–and now everybody but The Bulwark admits it. Trump is not a betrayal of neoconservatism. He came to fulfill it. He embodies the Reagan mandate: “Government doesn’t work. Elect us and we’ll prove it.”

So, yes, savor along with me powerful videos eviscerating Trump and his sycophants. Hope, as I do, that mockery and indignation and sheer fatigue will sway some of those voters who might admit that they were abysmally stupid in 2016. (Those of us who despise the Clintons still saw the difference between herpes and cancer.) And continue to work, however we can, to keep our society from spiraling into despair.

Just don’t treat the Never Trumpers as anything but what they are. They are our Hessians, our Blackwater special ops, our Shock Troops of Death. Eager to crawl to the front lines and slit throats at nightfall, to become relevant once more, they should be praised for coming to our aid. But when we really needed their particular skills was in the decades leading up to our current catastrophe. Then they failed us.

They’re willing to be cannon fodder, and I’m glad. But assuming we come through this, they should be sent back to their beachfronts. The dogs are waiting.

This blog entry was written early in the day of President™ Trump’s 14 July News conference. After that gibbering display, which ought to provide enough lunacy for a dozen opposition ads, I have to say that he may self-destruct before the Never Trumper brigades get the final boot in.

The one Never Trumper I know who has shrieved himself properly appears to be another cashiered GOP hack, Stuart Stevens. He has a forthcoming book (of course) with the intriguingly frank title It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump. I reserve judgment until I’ve read it, but it could point the way toward some truth-and-reconciliation confessionals to come.

Other comments related to the Trump regime are here, here, and here.

P.s. 17 July 2020: In a similar, but nastier vein, there’s this interview with Rick Wilson and some cartoon characters. Thanks to Diane Verma for the link.

P.P.S. 21 July 2020: In the same spirit, from the never-surrendering Elie Mystal.

P.P.P.P.S 22 July: A WaPo interview with a Lincoln project leader in which he “concedes complicity” in bringing us to this state of affairs.

P.P.P.P.P.S 29 July: Stuart Stevens tells all in NYT, as teaser for the book mentioned above.

P.P.P.P.P.P.S. 11 February 2021: Lincoln Project news: $$$, sexual harassment, beachfront home prices. No dog coverage.

P.P.P.P.P.P.P.S. 8 March 2021: I told you they were mercenaries. Dogs not mentioned.

The Lincoln Project National Virtual Town Hall, 9 July 2020.

DB here:

Our  newest installment of Observations is now up on The Criterion Channel. In it I consider how Ozu’s Passing Fancy (1933) exhibits his distinctive methods for treating a scene’s space. Now, here’s a preview for a little bonus that will show up there next week. It’s a short on how Ozu sometimes relied on sound in a silent film.

You probably know about Japan’s katsuben, or benshi. He or she stood alongside the screen and accompanied the film–explaining the action, commenting on it, and imitating the characters’ voices while reciting the intertitles. The benshi were usually given scripts for the titles’ texts, but they were also expected to expand on them.

Benshi became celebrities, as strong an attraction as the movies, and they wielded power over some production companies. Benshi might reedit films to suit the performance they wanted to give. One reason that talking pictures came only gradually to Japan was the resistance of the benshi associations to being put out of work.

Filmmakers who resented the benshi’s power seemed to have sought to make the films as free-standing as possible. One strategy was to have many intertitles, which served to anchor the meaning of a scene. More positively, in Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema I argue that the presence of a benshi gave filmmakers new storytelling opportunities.

Knowing that the benshi would be speaking the lines in the intertitles, filmmakers could make those titles quite short, creating a swift rhythm. (Contrary to some impressions, Japanese silent movies aren’t slow; even dialogue scenes are likely to be cut fast.) Moreover, the benshi could make conversations more compact than what we find in American films. Instead of a pattern of speaker/title/speaker/listener, your shots could run: speaker/title/listener.

Just as important, filmmakers could count on the benshi to fill in things not shown onscreen. That could allow for some unusual interaction between images and speech.

For example, Iwami Jutaro (1937), a swordplay comedy, treats one scene with “offscreen” sound. A bully is watching a kendo match. Cut to the rack of kendo swords, followed by a cry from one fighter, given in an intertitle: “Fool, you’ll be fighting me!”

Cut back to the rack collapsing, as if shaken by the fight. Another title: “I give up!” is followed by a shot of a fallen fighter, beaten.

The shot of the fallen bully anchors the title, but in the flurry of shots we’re invited to imagine the skirmish. Very likely the benshi was shouting the lines while the accompanying music whipped up a burst of excitement. This elliptical treatment of the match suggests that Kurosawa’s Sugata Sanshiro, made only a few years later, was heir to a tradition of off-center rendering of martial-arts combat.

Ozu recruits the benshi for something more ambitious, as I try to show in this bonus. Regrettably, we couldn’t find usable stills of benshi performances from the period, so the stills illustrate modern revivals. Also, I still haven’t seen Suo Masyuki‘s recent Talking the Pictures (Katusben!, 2019), a comedy about benshi culture.

Anyhow, a little analysis of what we have enables us to appreciate how Ozu uses the benshi to emphasize character reactions. The highlight comes in an emotional climax, when the benshi’s sobs would have filled in offscreen action.

Ozu, a fan of Western cinema, would have seen talkies and realized the power of offscreen sound. But I suspect he didn’t need external influences to understand that the benshi’s patter gave directors great freedom in visual narration.

Passing Fancy is one of three masterpieces Ozu released in 1933. (The other two, Dragnet Girl and Woman of Tokyo, are also on the Channel.) The Japanese cinema of this period was one of the glories of world filmmaking, with talent at all levels. Still, very few directors anywhere matched Ozu’s quietly outrageous innovations in form and style, his urge to show us cinema, and so the world, in a poignant, exhilarating way.

Thanks to Kim Hendricksen, Peter Becker, Grant Delin, Erik Gunneson, and the team at Criterion for enabling me to include this clip on our site. Thanks also to Komatsu Hiroshi for information on Iwami Jutaro and Steve Ridgely for correction of one of the intertitles.

For more on the benshi, see the comprehensive study Benshi, Japanese Silent Film Narration, and the Forgotten Narrative Art of Setsumei: A History of Japanese Silent Film Narration, by Jeffrey A. Dym (Edwin Mellon Press, 2003). Fascinating background on the struggles between the benshi and other sectors of  Japanese film culture can be found in Joanne Bernardi, Writing in Light: The Silent Scenario and the Japanese Pure Film Movement (Wayne State University Press, 2001) and Aaron Gerow, Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation, and Spectatorship, 1895-1925 (University of California Press, 2010).

Another intriguing review of Talking the Pictures is Jessica Klang’s in Variety.

Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema is available for free download here. (Be patient; the file is big.) An earlier Observations segment considered Kurosawa’s cutting of martial-arts action, and a blog entry developed that a bit more.

Another way to make a silent talkie is discussed in this entry on The Donovan Affair.

Passing Fancy (1933).

Iron Monkey (1993).

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Another entry (apologies to Ken Jacobs) of little things that cheer up lockdown. Previous entries are here and here. This one, unlike a couple to come, is suitable for all ages.

Why do I get a thrill from watching an apparently frail little boy beat the bejeezus out of unkempt bullies? More to the point, why weren’t there movies like Iron Monkey (1993) when I was a tad?

It’s a wing of the Tsui Hark Wong Fei-hung reboot saga that began with Once Upon a Time in China (1991), putting Jet Li on the world map. This installment is directed by Yuen Wo Ping, master choreographer of Crouching Tiger and The Matrix and no mean director himself. It’s a prequel, showing us the young Fei-hung learning his craft from his apothecary father and the mysterious robinhoodish Iron Monkey.

Before the main course, here’s a snack.

This one minute of graceful movement is one minute more than you find in most of our movies today. Do something short, smart, and crisp, and the camera loves it.

To see Young Wong finding his groove, here’s the scene in which he practices some fancy evasion and defense against heavily armed but fatally dumb thugs.

The subtitles provide a whole other level of diversion.

The whole film, featuring Donnie Yen and other Hong Kong stalwarts, is good dirty fun. Versions are available on streaming, but you should avoid the sanitized Miramax release. There’s also a 1977 kung-fu film bearing this English-language title, but its plot is quite different.

Note: The boy Wong is played by a girl martial artist, Angie Tsang Sze-man, who went on to become a wushu champion.

For an update on the situation in Hong Kong, here is a story in the Washington Post.

I write about the art and craft of Hong Kong martial arts movies in Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment. It explains, among other things, why the subtitles are so weird (p. 78).

P.S. 15 June 2020: Thanks to Radomir Kokes (Douglas) for correcting my misattribution of The Transporter to Yuen Wo Ping. It was of course directed by the great Corey Yuen Kwai.

Kristin here:

Flicker Alley continues to bring out an eclectic and unpredictable series of restored films, from French Impressionist classics to Cinerama films to obscure film noir Bs to early films directed by women, and the list goes on. (Search this blog for “Flicker Alley” and you’ll find many more.)

On May 19, the company released a Blu-ray/DVD dual-format set of Spring Night Summer Night (1967), directed by J. L. Anderson. Anderson is known to  film academics primarily as Joseph L. Anderson, the co-author with Donald Richie of The Japanese Cinema: Art and Industry (1959, rev. ed. 1983), the first substantial English-language survey of that national cinema.

In the mid-1960s Anderson was teaching filmmaking at the Ohio University in Athens. He and his students made some 16mm short films for the university. He wanted, however, to give them experience making a professional-level feature on 35mm, shot in the part of Appalachia located in southeastern Ohio, near Athens. Apart from teaching film technique, Anderson showed his students art films, many of them from Europe. He was particularly fond of Italian Neorealism and wanted to apply its aesthetic approach to a story set in the poverty-stricken milieu of Appalachia in the wake of the closing of the area’s coalmines.

Students undertook the cinematography and other tasks. The main roles were cast with experienced actors, while local people filled the minor roles and worked as extras. One of the students, Franklin Miller, was deeply involved in the filmmaking: he co-produced, co-wrote, and co-edited the film. The pair even did sound-effects recording, combining their name as “Joe Franklin” in the credits.

Local color galore

The film deals with a farming family. The father, Virgil, has a son, Carl, by his previous wife, who died in childbirth. Virgil and his current wife Mae are raising their daughter, Jessie, along with four younger children. Carl and Jessie have fallen in love and despite being half-siblings, yield to temptation, leaving her pregnant. Virgil causes strife in the family by trying to find out who the father is and to force him to marry Jessie. Eventually the couple begin to wonder if they are indeed blood relations, given that Mae is obviously having a long-term affair with another man.

Although the story is involving, the main strength of the film is the remarkably rich depiction of life in an impoverished, largely rural area. Absolutely everything, exteriors and interiors alike, was shot on location. A remarkable pair of scenes in a crowded bar was shot in Athens rather than the main tiny town, Shawnee, but the difference is unnoticeable.

The supplements to Spring Night Summer Night reveal that the bar scene extras were gathered by advertising that anyone attending the bar would be given five dollars’ worth of fake money good only at the bar. Given that bottles of beer were twenty-five cents, the unexpectedly large crowd became quite lively. The filmmakers were able to insert staged bits of action–mainly a fight between the jealous Carl and a boy who dances with Jessie–among the spontaneous activities of the local people without any of the extras seeming to take notice.

The cinematography in all the locations is beautiful, as the images above and at the bottom of the entry show. While the cameras were run by filmmaking majors, the result looks quite professional. As Larue Hall, who played Jessie, says in the Cleveland Cinematheque Q&A supplement, “I never call it a ‘student film’ when I talk about it.” Anderson obviously was a good teacher.

One memorable scene displays the filmmakers’ skill. It’s a single take, four minutes and ten seconds, that takes place in a bar. The camera begins behind a man whose face we never see, then arcs around him to focus on Virgil.

Virgil summarizes his life, including its more prosperous days when the coal mines were the main local employer: “Better believe it was different when the mines was working. Made some good money in the pits.” He describes his two marriages and his life in the military and concludes sadly, “You try to live your life right, but it just don’t work out.” The other man, offscreen for most of the shot, never replies. (The scene as scripted would have lasted longer, but the limitation of the camera’s capacities forced a condensation.)

This release was of particular interest to David and me, since we knew the two people most involved in the various phases of making the film. Anderson himself visited the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the 1980s, in his capacity as an historian of Japanese cinema. He did a benshi performance to a silent Japanese film, which was a rare treat. After his studies finished, Franklin Miller got a job teaching production in the University of Iowa’s budding film division. There David and I met him a few years later when we were both graduate students. Neither of us took a course with him, but it was a small division and we got to be friends. He’s now a professor emeritus, living in Ohio with his wife Judy, who served as the “continuity girl” on Spring Night, and did other jobs as well. Indeed, as Franklin emphasizes in the supplements, everyone in the cast and crew pitched in wherever they were needed.

The Making-of

To me, almost as fascinating as the film is a making-of documentary included as a supplement: Behind-the-Scenes of SPRING NIGHT SUMMER NIGHT. (This is listed in the menu as 16mm Behind-the-Scenes Footage.) It includes a commentary track that is a basically a long conversation between one of the people most responsible for the restoration, Peter Conheim, who also edited the 16mm footage from 1965 into this roughly hour-long film, and Franklin.

This is a very recent interview indeed, since Franklin’s part had to be recorded remotely due to the current pandemic. In it, despite the roughly 55-year interval since the completion of the film, he remembers the names of all the people involved and gives a great deal of information about the filmmaking procedures seen being used in the footage.

(In preparing this entry, I got in touch with Franklin after having had no contact for years, and I am grateful to him for providing some additional technical details that I’ve included parenthetically here.)

The footage and still photos were shot by several members of the cast and crew. As Franklin remarks in the commentary, “If nothing else, if you’re making a film in Athens, Ohio, and everyone on the crew is a photographer, one of the things you’re going to get is lots of documentation.” Indeed, there were so many people hovering around filming the filming that often part of what you see is them doing so.

Having been a jack-of-all-trades on this project, Franklin is seen in the film nearly as much as is Anderson. At 25 during the shooting in 1965, he looks very young indeed. Here he is with the owner of the farm which was used as the location (interior and exterior) for the main family’s house.

One reason the film looks so professionally made is the equipment used. The production was able to rent some Arriflex 35mm cameras which were outdated and sitting around the equipment supplier’s shop. (According to Franklin, these were model 2C, and needed a large blimp; they also required AC motors to shoot sync sound: “Anything that looks handheld and sync was dubbed.”) The black-and-white 35mm results look great.

Some shots do look very handheld, particularly a frenetic chase for an escaped rooster inside the farmhouse and the lively barroom scenes. Much of the sound was indeed post-dubbed.

Often, though, the camera was on a tripod or a dolly rolling on platforms made of plywood. See, for example, the frame at the top of this section. That’s Anderson in the short-sleeved white shirt and dark pants, walking along behind John Crawford as Virgil. Anderson often directed in this fashion, staying close to the actors. In the same frame above, that’s Franklin in the white T-shirt pitching in as usual by pushing the dolly (improvised from “a prototype sports car that the King Midget Company (Athens, Oh) had abandoned,” again according to Franklin.) Judy, in a dark sweater, sits on the dolly with her continuity notebook.

There are also some impressive tracking shots alongside a speeding motorcycle, done with the camera on a platform sticking out the side of an open van.

At one point we see the filming of a night scene of Carl and Jessie in the woods, with Carl scuffling with his father Virgil. Franklin remarks on the commentary that they had only one or occasionally two small units for night shoots. He would have preferred to have more of these to cast some fill light on the surrounding trees. (According to Franklin, “The light that the couple walk toward at the end was a 5-minute magnesium flare.  Three feet long and four inches in diameter. Just like the silent days. Plus it adds smoke.”) As this frame from Behind-the-Scenes shows, the result was very stark indeed, with the glaring light, ostensibly coming from the headlights of Virgil’s car, placing the characters against a dark void.

The result could be said to be more realistic, as woods at night do tend to be very dark. In some shots, though, the low lighting is artistically impressive as well, notably in an extreme long shot of the couple walking in the distance in a patch of dim light that silhouettes some trees, again surrounded by darkness. (See image at top.)

All in all it’s a lovely film, and a major early example of the low-budget regional cinema that later became a staple of the Sundance Film Festival.

A scuppered release

So why have virtually none of us heard of Spring Night Summer Night, which seemed so destined to become a classic when it was finished and ready for release in the late 1960s? Its world premiere was at the Pesaro Film Festival in 1967, and all seemed well. It was scheduled to show at the 1968 New York Film Festival, but for reasons unknown it was bumped in favor of John Cassavetes’ Faces.

As a result, it found no distributor until Joseph Brenner Associates, which specialized in exploitation films, bought it on the condition that some soft-core sex scenes be added. To save the project, Anderson shot these, and the result was released in 1970 as Miss Jessica Is Pregnant. I won’t go into the details of that apparent ignominious end to a project that had been the result of so much enthusiastic, devoted effort by students and local people. It is dealt with in the program booklet accompanying the Flicker Alley release, as well as a supplement, In the Middle of the Nights: From Arthouse to Grindhouse and Back Again, on the discs. After that, the original negative sat in Franklin Miller’s office, and the film was essentially forgotten.

After decades, an effort to restore and reconstruct the original film was undertaken. Again, the full stories of this difficult endeavor are provided in the booklet notes. Anderson and Franklin both approved two small changes that were made to the original film, making this a director’s cut of sorts. (The changes are described on p. 24 of the booklet.) Anderson is now quietly retired in Florida. He was able to participate in the two supplements, Spring Night Summer Night: 50 Years Later and Cleveland Cinematheque Q&A. Unfortunately his health did not permit him to attend when the film finally received its screening, exactly fifty years delayed, at the New York Film Festival in 2018. (For coverage of that event, as well as a good summary of the film’s history, see Chris O’Falt’s piece on Indiewire–which adds a comma, not in the original, to the film’s title.)

The restoration certainly shows no signs of the film’s troubled history and different versions. It’s a beautiful job, and this release should at last elevate Spring Night Summer Night to the status of classic that it deserved from the beginning.

Peter Conheim was co-restorer of the film, along with Ross Lipman, via the Cinema Preservation Alliance. Peter has sent me information on a second planned restoration: “Joe only made one other feature after SNSN, AMERICA FIRST (1972), but it was never released. I actually hold all the original materials on the film and hope to do preservation on it … assuming I can find the funding. It’s a sort-of follow up to SNSN, though very different in tone. Filmed in color, in the same area, but more like ZABRISKIE POINT than SNSN!” Eminent cinematographer Ed Lachman (True Stories, The Limey, A Prairie Home Companion, Carol, Dark Waters, and many more)  began his film career by shooting America First, and he has agreed to participate in the color correction.

Peter also tells me that there was a first pass at preservation by by the UCLA Film and Television Archive back in 2014.

Thanks to Franklin Miller, Jeffery Masino, and Peter Conheim for assistance in preparing this entry.