BEFORE SCROLLING TO THE WEB PAGE BELOW ABOUT TINTO BRASS, PLEASE TAKE A LOOK AT THESE NEWS ITEMS, WHICH ARE FAR MORE IMPORTANT THAN ANYTHING I’VE EVER HAD TO SAY:

AMY GOODMAN:     A little-noticed story surfaced a couple of weeks ago in the Army Times newspaper about the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team. “Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months,” reported Army Times staff writer Gina Cavallaro, “the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.” Disturbingly, she writes that “they may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control” as well. The force will be called the chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive Consequence Management Response Force. Its acronym, CCMRF, is pronounced “sea-smurf.” These “sea-smurfs,” Cavallaro reports, have “spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle rattle,” in a combat zone, and now will spend their 20-month “dwell time” — time troops are required to spend to “reset and regenerate after a deployment” — armed and ready to hit the U.S. streets....

FOR THE FULL STORY, CLICK HERE.

It gets worse:

NAOMI WOLF:     On October 1, 2008, President Bush deployed a brigade — which means three to four thousand warriors — somewhere in America. We do not know where they are deployed though citizens have informally reported to me having seen military vehicles and troops in Georgia and Alabama. We do know that their official mandate according to the first report is “crowd control” as well as action in the event of a mass civilian catastrophe. Initial reports described their technology “module package” as involving Tasers and rubber bullets.... The First Brigade is Bush’s force: they are not answerable to Congress or to the Governors of states: they are answerable to the Commander in Chief. In an Alternet posting, I interviewed Air Force Colonel (retired) David Antoon who noted that the troops must obey the president, even if he asks them to arrest Congress or fire on civilians or attack media outlets. If they do not obey orders, he notes, they face five years in prison.... Antoon himself calls the deployment “ominous.” Troops on our streets makes us something less than a democracy: one definition of a police state is when a leader sends his own military units into civilian streets. Meanwhile the civilian policing of citizens is becoming more brutal. Hundreds of preemptive arrests took place in St Paul, dozens of journalists were arrested.... In St. Paul, funds were sent in advance to pay off the lawsuits against police forces that were guaranteed to arise from the planned abuse of citizens. This sort of thing is happening across the country. The tactic has established a closed circle that has turned citizens’ law enforcement agencies into contractors of a state that is directing acts of increasing severity against US citizens. Now a military brigade is being deployed....

FOR THE FULL STORY, CLICK HERE.

Click here to see an interview with Naomi Wolf conducted in early October 2008.

For the past five years or so I hve been hearing rumors that Halliburton has been building (and has now finished building) 800 prisons throughout the USA, not yet functioning, but just waiting for the right crisis. I have not found reliable evidence for the specific quantity, readiness, functionality, locations, or details, but you might be interested in taking a look at page 5 of this Halliburton press release dated 26 January 2006: KBR has been awarded a contract announced by the Department of Homeland Security’s United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) component. The Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity contingency contract is to support ICE facilities and has a maximum total value of $385 million over a five-year term. The contract provides for establishing temporary detention and processing capabilities in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the United States, or to support the rapid development of new programs.... Now, really, what are the chances of “an emergency influx of immigrants into the United States”? And what are the “new programs” that could come under “rapid development”?

FOR THE FULL PRESS RELEASE, CLICK HERE.

NOW, BACK TO THE MAIN PART OF THE WEB PAGE:

Did you happen to record Monty Python’s Flying Circus when it was shown on PBS back in the 1970s?
Do you still have the tapes?
Is there a TIME-LIFE logo at the end?
If so, please write to me. Thank you!

THE WORKS OF TINTO BRASS

Part 4
AVANT-GARDE, UNDERGROUND, AND GUERRILLA FILMMAKING

Jump ahead to:

NEROSUBIANCO

a.k.a. Black on White
a.k.a. Attraction
(1967–1968)

The Italian poster, designed by Renato Casaro	Another Italian poster, designed by someone or other
And here’s yet another poster, which popped up on eBay (item 360102413543). Oh how I wish I had placed a bid, but I was traveling and low on money....
The Australian and German posters. The black man has been deleted, except for his hand, which has been changed into an indecipherable abstraction. (Don’ want to put off the customers now, do we?)

This is where the creators of MTV got all their ideas. But nothing I’ve ever seen on MTV comes close to the mastery of this original from the late 1960s.

After Heart in His Mouth, producer Dino De Laurentiis offered Brass a chance to make a smaller and even more daring film. Brass chose to update a script he had written in early 1964 immediately after completing In capo al mondo. He had apparently become enamored of the avant-garde filmmakers and decided to one-up them all. He again hired his friend, cartoonist Guido Crepax, to draw the storyboards and to create graphics. Shooting began in October 1967 and the result, NEROSUBIANCO, which premièred at the Cannes festival in May 1968, was a carefully wrought and meticulously structured orgy of free-association. To help explain what is or isn’t going on, disembodied voices occasionally break through saying, in both Italian and English, “Qualcosa come un sogno” — “Something like a dream.” A song goes further: “Didn’t you know that your misty eyes haven’t seen? They’ve been telling lies in dreams.” Anticipating Brass’s later works, the visuals, and even more so the voice-overs, are bluntly sexual — more blunt than even we today are accustomed to experiencing.

The title has a double meaning — or actually a triple meaning. The Italian equivalent of “black and white” — as in “Read it for yourself; it’s all there in black and white” — is “nero su bianco,” which literally means “black on white.” The main situation in the film is the unspoken mutual obsession of a black American man and an Italian housewife in London.

Which, if any, of the characters are supposed to be real, and in whose imagination(s) any of this occurs, is open to probably any interpretation. My interpretation is that none of the characters is supposed to be real, and that the entire film is Tinto’s stream of consciousness. There is little dialogue, and most of the film is accompanied by a rock group called Freedom, who serve as a sort of a Greek chorus.

Tinto Brass directs the little old lady on how to machine-gun hippies	The transformation begins
Umberto di Grazia’s consciousness laboratory
An unusual camera move

Again, the breathtakingly fast editing reveals the six-perf splicing tape. Many of the images are probably too far out to qualify as surreal. Umberto di Grazia’s consciousness lab becomes almost a carnival ten-in-one, with subjects’ responses measured on an enormous oscilloscope. Husband Paolo is ready to go to sleep when he discovers that his wife Barbara has turned into a cow. A few scenes later, after Barbara compares him to a monkey, Paolo turns into two oranges and a banana. A little old lady machine guns a line-up of hippies. Freedom plays several songs while perched in a tree. The film is filled with negative images, monochrome images, multiple takes, overcranking, undercranking, unexpected sound effects, and nonstop mixing of new film with archive film, cartoon drawings, and billboards.

Brass utilizes some of the war-atrocity footage he had gathered for Ça ira to create a shattering sequence when Paolo reappears as a ghoulish priest in Luna Park’s love tunnel, proclaiming that love scenes are forbidden because they’re dangerous, but that scenes of war are permitted and will now be shown instead. Yes, the idea is simplistic, but its summary of civilization’s insane disconnect is terrifyingly true and presented so directly and forcefully that it’s impossible to put it out of one’s mind.

HOMAGES, INSPIRATIONS, OR PLAGIARISMS? At the end of the film we see a mass of people in Hyde Park, some of whom are outlandishly dressed, running from behind the film crew’s camera into the distance. This is unquestionably where Monty Python got the idea for their sketch about Ken Russell’s Gardening Club. There are also two brief glimpses of the black man’s hands folded in front of the white woman’s breasts—the same image that Spike Lee used for the poster of Jungle Fever.

IN ENGLISH, ONCE AGAIN. Though Anita Sanders and Nino Segurini spoke Italian on screen, the bulk of the film was shot in direct sound in English, and it is the English version that Brass prefers. He even dubbed a voice-over line himself: “Pornography of violence.” The Italian edition is a mix of the two languages, without subtitles.

SOMETHING ALWAYS GOES WRONG: NEROSUBIANCO was well received at the Cannes trade festival, but was banned by the Italian censors in November 1968. Producer De Laurentiis couldn’t file an appeal because he had just fled the country to escape the clutches of the tax collectors, hence neither his name nor the name of his studio appears anywhere in the credits. The Italian Inland Revenue then confiscated the De Laurentiis studio, Dinocittà, and all its holdings, including NEROSUBIANCO. Despite all this, Ceiad Columbia somehow managed to release the film briefly in Europe in early 1969 to what Variety called “fair returns for a way-out pic.” The international prints were trimmed by 10 minutes—and it was not the censorable material that was cut! In October 1969, Radley Metzger’s distribution company, Audubon Films, released the original English-language 89-minute version in the US under the title Black on White, and then put the 79-minute international version, under the title Attraction, into wider release. It bombed. Later he reissued it under different titles: The Artful Penetration and The Artful Penetration of Barbara. I’m sure that anyone who put on his raincoat and sunglasses and snuck into a showing ended up being terribly disappointed. Metzger finally restored the international title Attraction, but it continued to die at the boxoffice. In 1996 or 1997 I happened to meet Metzger at the Syracuse Cinefest. He told me that he thought the film exceptionally fine, and that he was saddened that it had never found its audience. He still holds the license for the US rights to the English version, but he ran into complications in his plans to release the film on DVD. (Thank you so much, Radley, for allowing me to see your copy of the film!) A severely censored 59-minute English version, entitled Attraction, was shown in England briefly in late 1973, and it was possibly this same version that was shown in Australia. The film has rarely been shown since that time. Some sources mention another release, somewhere on this planet, under the title Shameful. If this is correct, then whoever retitled the film misunderstood it perfectly.

ELUSIVENESS: Among the rare showings have been television broadcasts, which not only crop the 1:1.85 width to fill the screen, thus rendering many of the images incomprehensible, but they also hack it to pieces, resulting in a running time of 66 minutes at PAL speed, about 20 minutes short of the original. To top things off, many of the tasteful nude scenes and other supposedly objectionable images are obscured by spinning spirals and cross-hatches. Yet even in that form it’s a magnificent work. (Thank you Jönas for supplying a copy!)

TUNES: The music Brass commissioned from Freedom — and in later films from Fiorenzo Carpi, Pino Donaggio, and Riz Ortolani — is masterfully synched to the emotions and rhythms of the films. I doubt any other filmmaker/composer teams have done such exquisite work in matching sound to image as these teamings.

For those who are interested, Freedom consisted of four members, two of whom had just been fired from Procol Harum. Before Freedom had even had time to prove their worth by composing a single measure of music, Brass commissioned them to write fourteen songs for this film. According to enthusiasts of psychadelic rock, these are the only songs by Freedom that were any good — and they are now considered among the cream of the crop of the genre. Freedom, though, led a jinxed existence. Strangely, the group had not known about the existence of the rare Italian LP until circa 1999. By the way, I’m no rock fan, to say the least, but I find these fourteen songs irresistible and have listened to the CD re-issue probably hundreds of times now. Yes, I know, the musicianship is rather inept. But I like it anyway.

The original soundtrack LP, which Freedom didn’t even know had been issued, was on the Atlantic label, ATL-LP 08028, and is now quite the collector’s item. It was reissued on vinyl twice, first in 1994 by Tenth Planet, a British/French label, in a limited edition of 500 copies, label TP011. The cover was monochrome, and the accompanying booklet amusingly stated the the film “appears to have been abandoned. Whether the film was complete or not is difficult to ascertain, but it does not seem to have received a general release (although given that de Laurentiis is alleged to have financed more than 500 films, it’s unlikely that even he noticed its non-appearance). However, the intended soundtrack album eventually emerged in June 1969, a full eighteen months after the band had started work on the project.” Finally there came a third issue, a limited edition of 1,000 copies from Merry-Go-Round Records of South Korea, “Hidden Archives Series No.1,” label MGRL 0001, taken from the master monaural (!) tapes, with the addition of two extra “dry” tracks. Nowadays you can get the CD reissue from Moving Image Entertainment, a division of Comet Records, label MIE 012.

The British CD reissue, identical to the Korean LP reissue, from Angel Air Records, label SJPCD028, which is sadly out of print.

“The Truth Is Plain to See” Left to right: Bobby Harrison, Steve Shirley, Ray Royer, Mike Lease

CURMUDGEONS: The critics were totally clueless. Howard Thompson of the New York Times (10 October 1969, p. 36) wrote:

Radley Metzger, a tireless promoter of sensationalized sex movies, often with a wisp of artistic camouflage, has scraped a British barrel and come up now with something called “Black on White.”... As entertainment or art, this Technicolor picture is garbage [actually it was Eastmancolor—RJB].... The rock ’n’ roll score, boinged out by some seedy-looking hippies we first see perched in a tree like a bunch of vultures, is terrible.... The exhibitors of “Black on White” themselves have given the import a rating of “X — persons under 17 cannot be admitted.” Younger movie-goers can take that as a compliment. This time that X means excruciating.

“Kent” in Variety (15 October 1969):

Pretentious exploiter that fails to deliver enough sex or shock values to score.... The whole thing is punctuated by an utterly forgettable rock score.... The direction is strictly pedestrian.

I give both critics a thumbs down, zero stars. No imagination at all! And I bet they’re lousy conversationalists too. With raves like theirs it’s little wonder that no one bothered to take a look. Better reviews and a stronger promotion could probably have turned this into a midnight favorite quite easily. Oh well. Modern audiences, after twenty years of NEROSUBIANCO’s lame bastard child, MTV, would surely be more attuned to the film’s eccentricities. Since this movie was made, the only advance in the music-video genre of which I’m aware can be found at http://www.nata2.info/humor/flash/hatten.swf. (If the link doesn’t work, search Google for "hatten.swf".)

The tagline above was Radley Metzger’s invention

We are offering a bounty for a good-quality, complete video of NEROSUBIANCO (89 minutes at 24fps, 86 minutes at 25fps, 1:85:1 camera matte). If you know where we can get one, write to us. Many thanks!

MUSINGS: Terry Carter: From Phil Silvers to Tinto Brass? What a jump! Yes, he was in The Phil Silvers Show: You’ll Never Get Rich (a.k.a. Sergeant Bilko). And then Battlestar Galactica? What an odd career. He had learned Italian when he fell in love with and married his Italian tour guide in the early 1960s, shortly after which he switched careers and became the first black newscaster in the USA. When he received the offer to appear in this film, he took a leave of absence from his regular job, which led to an epiphany, for this odd little movie taught him that his first love was indeed acting, and so he switched careers again. Anita Sanders quickly fell off the map. She was later credited as an assistant director on the English-language version (but not on the Italian version, strangely) of Fellini’s Casanova (1976). I bet there are stories there, and I wish I knew them. After this and L’urlo, Nino Segurini never appeared in another Tinto Brass movie. I guess he got tired of being likened to flea-picking baboons. (Thank you, Marcel, for filling me in on Terry Carter’s career, but Yahoo destroyed all our correspondence; so please write to me again. Thanks!)

REQUEST: There are hundreds of extras in this film. (Hey, after all, many of the shots were “stolen,” to use movie lingo. That simply means that Brass and his crew wandered around London and spent much time just filming things and people that they happened to see. And I bet that a bunch of the folks who followed the script were people that Brass spontaneously picked out of crowds.) If you can identify any of the folks on screen, please contact us. Thanks!

POSTSCRIPT ADDED ON MONDAY, 8 JULY 2002: I just learned that Nick Saxton, production manager on this film, later directed some of the earliest pioneering music videos. See his obituary for more details. Well, I haven’t seen his works, but now I know something more about the evolution of this cultural phenomenon. Sounds like he was a fascinating guy! The obituary, written by his longtime friend Bruce Miller, mentions also that Saxton worked on another Tinto Brass movie called Separation. I strongly suspect that something got garbled and that he actually means to refer to a movie by Jane Arden and Jack Bond, which you can learn about at “Separation (and Procol Harum).” Thanks to Roland at ‘Beyond the Pale’ for referring me to this site and probably solving a mystery.

FOR MORE INFORMATION ON NEROSUBIANCO AND FREEDOM, SEE:
Freedom—Black on White: SJPCD028
Bobby Harrison
Solid Silver—Bobby Harrison & Mezzoforte (1986/1987)
The Dinosaurdays, 17 June 2001
DEAD LINK THAT MIGHT COME BACK TO LIFE SOME DAY:
http://www.geocities.com/alexquo/freedom.htm

Lion Film presenta un film di Tinto Brass

NEROSUBIANCO

Distributed by Ceiad Columbia

CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE

Click here to return to beginning