Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
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Now that jazz is no longer assumed to be automatically synonymous with decadence and the forces of darkness, it can finally be experienced and evaluated on its own terms, and we
can begin to look back on a century-long partnership of jazz
and film with a certain objectivity. Both are relatively new arts
roughly contemporaneous with the 20th century, having grown
out of socially disreputable origins and having fought for serious
recognition.
Part of this partnership has yielded the jazz film, a subgenre
basically devoted to the recording of performances. But there
are also successful collaborations between the expressive possibilities of jazz and film. And the ways in which jazz has been
used in movies invariably tells us a great deal about the social,
ethnic, aesthetic, and cultural biases of diverse societies and
periods. The various responses of film producers to integrated
jazz groups in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, provide a kind
of thumbnail social history. Sometimes black musicians were
forced to play off-screen while white stand-ins mimed their solos
and sometimes white musicians were kept in the shadows to
appear black.
Perhaps the first known conjunction of jazz and the fiction film
took place in the same year that the first jazz recording was
made, when The Good for Nothing (1917), a now lost silent
comedy showed the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. Leaping
ahead to the sound film, we come upon Black and Tan Fantasy, a remarkable short made in 1929 by Dudley Murphy. Later
on, while Soundies saw jazz films mass produced and turned
into jukebox attractions, the dream of a pure jazz cinema was
made a reality in films made by artists with a background in
animation or photography.
Some directors are more adept at using jazz than others. Directors who like to improvise on occasion seem to have a special
feeling for the music. In the movies of jazz aficionado Howard
Hawks, musical get-togethers between allies always have strong
communal functions. Only Ball of Fire (1941) and its remake,
A Song is Born (1948), use unadulterated jazz explicitly to
advance the mood of fellowship in the plot, but the principle is
the same in the songfests of some of his best films.
Private torments as well as collective euphoria infuse the atmospheric surfaces of such fiction films as All Night Long (Basil
Dearden, 1961) and When It Rains (Charles Burnett, 1995),
while Bert Stern and Aram Avakians exuberant Jazz on a
Summers Day (1959), a documentary filmed at the Newport
Jazz Festival, finds the same euphoria in the audience as well as
onstage. Finally, Big Ben: Ben Webster in Europe (Johan van
der Keuken, 1967) presents a portrait of a jazz great in exile.
Ehsan Khoshbakht and Jonathan Rosenbaum
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I film di finzione che usano coerentemente il jazz sono pochi e sporadici, mentre i jazz film che fanno della
musica un uso finzionale sono forse
ancor pi rari. La singolarit di Black
and Tan Fantasy, oltre a segnare la
prima apparizione cinematografica di
Duke Ellington, sta nel riunire le due
categorie sviluppando una sorta di sintesi poetica che proprio agli inizi del
cinema sonoro dimostra come le due
nuove forme artistiche del Ventesimo
secolo non debbano necessariamente
soffocarsi a vicenda. Scritto e diretto da
Dudley Murphy, che quellanno aveva
girato un altro cortometraggio con
Bessie Smith (St. Louis Blues) e in passato aveva messo in immagini le idee
di Fernand Lger in Ballet mcanique,
Black and Tan Fantasy ricorre a invenzioni pseudoartistiche e a una trama
tortuosa, ma possiede un senso della
forma abbastanza netto da trasformare
in vantaggi queste debolezze. Perfino
gli stereotipi razziali usati a fini comici
allinizio del film sono controbilanciati alla fine da un radicale rifiuto dello
sfruttamento messo in atto dal pubblico bianco. Se il terreno pi inesplorato
dei jazz film la capacit di mostrare
musicisti e cantanti mentre si ascolta308
BALL OF FIRE
USA, 1941 Regia: Howard Hawks
Ball of Fire
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Soundies
I GOT IT BAD AND THAT
AINT GOOD
USA, 1942 Regia: Josef Berne
Int.: Duke Ellington, Ivie Anderson, Rex
Stewart, Wallace Jones, Ray Nance,
Lawrence Brown, Sam Nanton, Juan Tizol,
Johnny Hodges, Barney Bigard, Sonny
Greer. Prod.: Sam Coslow 35mm. D.: 3.
Bn. Versione inglese / English version
Da: UCLA Film & Television Archive
Restaurato da / Restored by UCLA Film &
Television Archive
TILLIE
USA, 1945
Regia: William Forest Crouch
F.: Don Malkames. M.: Leonard Weiss.
Scgf.: Sam Corso. Int.: Louis Jordan, Eddie
Roane, William Austin, Al Morgan, Alex
Razz Mitchell, Nicki ODaniel, Richard
Huey, Joan Clark. Prod.: Berle Adams
35mm. D.: 3. Bn. Versione inglese / English
version
Da: UCLA Film & Television
Archive
Restaurato da / Restored by
UCLA Film & Television Archive
covered cabinet to ensure the image produced for the viewer was correct.
The installation of 4,500 Panorams
meant there was a great demand for
Soundies, which were produced on both
the East and West coasts. Though producers were less concerned with the quality
of the Soundie than with cashing in on
the popularity of an artist, the recordings
documented and preserved on film some
of the best jazz acts of the 1940s including Big Joe Turner, Billy Eckstine, Count
Basie, Sarah Vaughan, Cab Calloway,
Meade Lux Lewis, Lena Horne, Louis
Armstrong, and Nat King Cole.
There were also some longer films produced by the Soundie Corporation of
America, such as the feature-length Pot
o Gold (1941), which were intended
first for cinemas before the musical numbers were split up into individual Soundies. Tillie is an example of a Soundie
produced by cutting a longer film; it was
re-edited from the two-reel Caldonia
(1945) directed by Soundie specialist
William Forest Crouch.
In retrospect, Soundies are notable for
having captured uninterrupted jazz
performances on film in the classical
era and beyond even if the music was
pre-recorded and seldom live. The rise of
TV as well as other war-time restrictions
led to the demise of the Panoram and its
counterparts. In 1947 the production of
Soundies ceased. When they were sold
to TV stations later on, for use as programme fillers, they proved to be valuable moving picture documents of jazz
history for generations to come.
Ehsan Khoshbakht
splashing an abstract extravaganza in order to keep up with him. This is the first
National Film Board of Canada short I
ever saw, and it remains my favorite.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
ASCENSEUR POUR
LECHAFAUD
Francia, 1958 Regia: Louis Malle
A spirited, riotous eight-minute duet between jazz pianist Oscar Peterson and
Canadas premier animator doodling and
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musicians is equally casual and resourceful; the improvised duet between Dave
Brubeck on piano and Charlie Mingus
on bass, notably titled Non-Sectarian
Blues, was the first time these two musicians played together, and reportedly both
were delighted as well as pleasantly surprised by the friendly dynamics of their
encounter. The dozen or so musicians
playing themselves also include two major stars of the British jazz scene, Johnny
Dankworth (alto sax) and Tubby Hayes
(tenor sax and vibes), and the atmospherics provided by the dockside warehouse/
mansion serving as an impromptu jazz
club, designed by Relph, and cinematographer Ted Scaife, are pungent.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
WHEN IT RAINS
USA, 1995 Regia: Charles Burnett
Sog.: Charles Burnett. Mus.: Stephen
James Taylor. Int.: Ayuko Babu, Florence
Bracy, Kenny Merritt, Juno Lewis,
Charles Bracy, Brittany Bracy, Soul, Billy
Woodberry. Prod.: Chantal Bernheim per
Leapfrog Production DCP. D.: 14. Col.
Versione inglese / English version Da:
Milestone Film & Video
Der Leone Have Sept Cabeas di Glauber Rocha), produttore (Era notte a
Roma di Rossellini), organizzatore (la
Rassegna del Cinema Latinoamericano). Innamorato del Brasile, dove gir
il suo primo lungometraggio (Tropici,
1968), stato aiuto regista di Jean-Luc
Godard che gli dedicher il capitolo sul cinema italiano allinterno delle Histoire(s) du cinma per Vento
dellest. Molti suoi film, a partire dal
cortometraggio desordio Noi insistiamo!, recano il segno della sua passione per il jazz. Il suo ultimo progetto,
rimasto incompiuto, fu un film su
Django Reinhardt scritto con JeanLouis Comolli ed Enzo Ungari. La
vera vita altrove, scriveva Rimbaud.
Gianni Amico era altrove, l dove
Django sfuggiva alla storia (Comolli).
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Noi insistiamo! monta immagini fotografiche in bianco e nero, componendo un trittico dedicato ai musicisti jazz da anni allavanguardia nella
lotta per la libert della razza negra:
unopera mondo, dove le responsabilit dei bianchi appaiono nella loro
feroce evidenza. Eppure, lo stupore
per la liberazione trascende lideologi316
Hawkins on saxophone), the film magically combines images with music: skilled
cinematographer Carlo Ventimiglia ensured the images were of high quality,
and Amico, with his love of music and
his sensitivity, deftly handled the music. A productive dynamic between image and sound in which the latter is not
referential accompaniment of the former
but rather an ally in creating new perspectives of meaning. Between Roachs
angry surges, the flashing montage and
bursts of Abbeys voice, it is hard to tell
who is behind a demand for social justice
and who behind a much vaster rebellion
[...]. Suffice it to say that the viewer is
spellbound and this ability to captivate
is both equally the work of the musicians
and the filmmaker (Jacques Bontemps).
All of it admirably balanced by the editing work of Perpignani, who noted how
Amicos films were rooted in the reality
of feelings midway between observation
and participation. Looking at life while
inside it, and perhaps the inability to convey something that is not actually a matter of experience. His aristocratic nature
perhaps also consisted in this.
Marco Bertozzi