Paul Schrader, Anthony Quinn, Nitrate
Sitting in that packed theater on a Sunday morning, every time Judy Garland began to sing, I started to cry.
Did you know that Anthony Quinn -- the Mexican actor who won two Oscars, one for playing French painter/exploiter of young Tahitian girls Paul Gauguin in Vincente Minnelli's Lust for Life -- had a sideline as a post-Cubist painter and sculptor? I didn't, until I was in the Air France lounge at JFK a couple of days ago, where they were on display.
Also, did you know that you can draw a line from early Hollywood mogul/Sunset Boulevard co-star/namesake of the honorary Golden Globe (which Quinn won in 1987) Cecil B. DeMille to Jim Carrey in six degrees, using Quinn as the fulcrum point? Cecil's adopted daughter Katherine was married to Anthony Quinn. Quinn's son Danny, from his next marriage, married actress Lauren Holly, who, in the mid '90s, married her Dumb and Dumber costar Carrey. These connections are actually some of the least interesting details about Quinn's life and career, and as far as I can tell, there has never been a serious biography published about him. I am on the hunt for a copy of his out-of-print 1995 autobiography.
Anyway, I was at JFK and in the presence of Quinn's art on my way back from a ten-day trip to New York, about half of which I spent upstate in Rochester, visiting the George Eastman Museum and attending their annual Nitrate Picture Show. This festival is kind of the Telluride of classic movies: over the course of one long, intense weekend, they show a carefully-curated lineup of films on nitrate stock, the famously flammable and long-obsolete material that casual cinephiles probably know best as the instrument of revenge against the Nazi's in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (here is an excerpt of an interview in which Tarantino discusses the symbolism of nitrate in that film).
I'm a relatively recent convert to the cult of nitrate. Aside from its rarity and the fact that there are a limited number of nitrate prints in existence and they are constantly slowly deteriorating (even under ideal preservation conditions, the prints shrink over time, eventually becoming unprojectable), one appeal of it is that a well-preserved nitrate print gives the viewer a better sense of how a film would have looked in its original release than any other format. A great nitrate print of a black and white film can feel slightly silvery, maybe a little cloudy, but with incredible detail; a color print can be vivid and true to its intended palette in a way that you've likely never seen it before. An example of the latter that was shown this past weekend is Minnelli's Meet Me in St. Louis, which I've seen many times, but mostly on VHS -- a travesty to a film that, while Minnelli's version of "domestic realism," is as vibrantly and gorgeously art directed as any of his dream ballets. Sitting in that packed theater on a Sunday morning, every time Judy Garland began to sing, I started to cry.
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