BEFORE SCROLLING TO THE WEB PAGE BELOW ABOUT L’URLO, 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

Avant-Garde, Underground, and Guerrilla Filmmaking—Continued

(The Cry, 1968–1970)

Artwork by Piero Iaia for what appears to be a proposed English-language release, which never happened (From Dott. Lorenzo Codelli et alia’s Nerosubrass, p 68.)

DVD FORTHCOMING FROM CULT EPICS. MORE DETAILS TO COME.

Are you in the mood for something a little out of the ordinary? Well then, this one’s for you! Edvard Munch’s painting Skriket (The Scream) and Alan Ginsberg’s poem Howl, along with the omnipresent countercultural movement, inspired Brass to make this movie, which stars Tina Aumont and the great Italian clown Luigi “Gigi” Proietti. Below is a bare-bones summary which contains spoilers that really aren’t spoilers because even if you know they’re coming they’ll still surprise you. The movie is brim-full of social and political commentary, but when you see it, you can figure all that out on your own. No description can possibly do this film justice!!!!! The synopsis is only here to give you the smallest hint of what you will witness. Rent the movie, and you’ll see what I mean! It’s a one-of-a-kind movie, and I still find it it the most exciting movie I’ve ever seen.

I’ve watched this movie countless times. Now, I can’t speak, read, write, or understand Italian. I need to spend just a few months in Italy to pick up the language. In the meantime, I can struggle a bit and get the gist. But not with this movie. Finally I got a translation of the dialogue. And now I understand why I could never understand it before. Here’s an example. A priest is performing a wedding ceremony:

PRIEST: Can the bird of Paradise strike against the annihilated consumed tree of your sap without a parachute?
GROOM: Yes.
PRIEST: And can the tired turtle fly fast in the months of July on Wednesday?
BRIDE: Um.
PRIEST: Ergo I lengthen a box on tip-toe, figs and cloves of breath. Anise.

And what did the lion tell Coso and Anita in the cemetery?

Stop. Don’t play the game of the cemetery too. Block the communication circuit with barbed wire. Is he there? Will he be there? When will he be back? Clean-cut and resolute. An obol to the obelisk, a somersault in the middle of the night, piercing a syringe in the nose. Two perfumed fingers in the anus to draw syntactic, semantic and orthographic eggs. Hey, what are you doing? Pulling my leg? Then you didn’t understand a damn thing. Stop or I’ll eat you.

Well, I still feel stupid. But I don’t feel that stupid anymore.

SPOILERS: England, 1969. All the inhabitants are Italians except for one American who wears a barrel. Anita has been incarcerated for participating in an anti-war riot, so her bourgeois fiancé Berto bribes the police commissioner for her release. Berto immediately proposes that they set their wedding date for Sunday. At the ceremony, in a dump and with the officiating priest wearing a shrunken head on his necklace, Whatshisname (“Coso” in Italian) chances by and smiles at Anita. Before she can say “I do” she runs off with him and catches a London double-decker bus (driven by Tinto Brass) that drives out to the countryside. The passengers occupy the bus and set it aflame in time for the Keystone Kops to arrive. Anita and Whatshisname somehow escape from prison and hitch a ride with another incarnation of Berto and Anita to an ultra-mod Bosch-like hotel where Anita runs into another incarnation of herself as a guest. The next morning the hotel’s cowardly nightwatchman chases after them into a field, where they are all accosted by The Greatest Philosopher, attired in a loincloth and periwig, who invites them to his unbuilt house in a field where he offers them a freshly cooked man for lunch. Before they become the next guests’ meal, Anita and Whatshisname run off to catch a train. While Whatshisname threatens to eat Anita, a priest stabs a masturbating passenger, and Whatshisname, made up as a sad clown, tearfully muses on the bitterness of dreams and then tries to eat a corpse. Anita and Whatshisname jump off the train and end up in a battlefield, for England is being invaded by the Nazis, the Blackshirts, and the Vietnamese. Anita is assaulted by Berto’s troops, and Whatshisname meets the assassinated-but-resurrected Intellectual who pretends to direct him to her. In the midst of the battlefield, a piano player who speaks in sound effects promises Whatshisname that he can find Anita by singing. They are rounded up by a firing squad who somehow manage to miss Whatshisname. Anita finds him and together they locate the dictator, a wind-up midget wearing a Napoléon costume and a Hitler mustache who conducts his hymns from a foley studio, while the atrocity sequence from NEROSUBIANCO is projected on the screen behind him. They machine-gun him and Anita takes over the microphone, causing the resistance to gain the advantage. The war over, Anita and Whatshisname party with some hippies in a sewage tunnel, steal a motorboat that immediately explodes, and are caught in a fishnet by medieval minstrels who place them back on shore where, after hearing Michelangelo speak to them from a rock, they liberate a prison that’s run by Berto and a pig disguised as a lion. The prisoners worship Anita as a goddess but then unceremoniously dash away as soon as they find the exit door. Anita and Whatshisname converse with dead historical figures in a graveyard that Berto tends, and are scolded by a lion for disturbing the repose of the cemetery. In a field, decorated with motionless people and a trio who play invisible instruments, Whatshisname tells Anita to start over again. She steals a car and drives away. Anguished at the prospect of her future, she loses control of the car and dies. Whatshisname nonchalantly tells us that Anita was intelligent but crazy. He walks off into the distance to catch a bus.

Interesting that these lobby cards illustrate so many scenes that are not in any video version. Were these cutting-room casualties? Were they censored? Are the videos abridged?

Okay now, who wants to top that? Brass doesn’t want to leave his audiences feeling indifferent. Well, unless you’re a hopeless bore, this won’t leave you feeling indifferent, that’s for sure. The costumes (and the unexplained and impossible costume changes) are a wonder to behold. Much or most of the film was obviously improvised, written as it was being made. That helps. Many of the locations look nothing like England, and according to Cinema X (vol 1 no 4 [1969?]), in addition to England, the film was made “on location in Rome, Naples, Berlin, Paris, and on a nudists’ island.” Filming began at the end of September 1968 and wrapped by or before April 1969. The budget, as with Heart in His Mouth and NEROSUBIANCO, was close to zero. This was Brass’s first collaboration with the fabulous Fiorenzo Carpi, whose music is infectious, especially his upbeat theme song, “It’s an Evil World; It Won’t Tolerate Love” (“È un mondo cattivo non tolera l’amor”). L’urlo received its world première a year later at the Berlin Film Festival on Saturday, 27 June 1970.

Edvard Munch, Skriket

Hieronymous Bosch, Garden of Earthly Delights

Yes, I know I’s an ignoramus because I don’t know who painted this. De Chirico maybe? What’s the title?	Whatshisname catches someone’s attention
Escape	Tinto Brass as the bus driver can take no more
Remember those days?	The Keystone Kops come to the rescue
Occupation	Hitchhiking
Berto is everyone	Hotel regulations: “We are in a free country and whoever pays can have whatever he wants — all in advance, please”
Who is this? Bonifacio by any chance?	’Twould never be
Hovering over...	...Spike Hawkins’s Tree Army Poem: Alert ruin! They shout from the trees stupid bloody acorns. That’s it. That’s the whole poem.
Some of the hotel’s guests
The woman-and-swan motif would pop up again in Caligula but the humorless editors would cut it out	Another motif that would pop up in later movies
Taking dictation	Tino Scotti as The Intellectual
The hotel’s confessional
Guests in a hotel room	And why not?
The gentle art...	...of underacting
The Greatest Philosopher	Thanking Mother Nature
Entering the home of The Greatest Philosopher...	...who prepares a meal
Inside the philosopher’s home
How to rescue a deleted scene	Who on earth is this actor?
Awakened from a dream	A political discussion
Encountering the American	Commentary
Geloni = chilblains = swellings caused by exposure to cold (to say nothing of the decapitated head mounted onto the cello)	Realizing that something is amiss
The Intellectual resurrected	Line-up for the firing squad. Goes by so quickly you can hardly make out what’s happening: The musician plays a recorder and a member of the firing squad brings a chair for the little old lady
At long last, they discover command headquarters...	...operated by a wind-up doll
The return of Bonifacio B? I swear that’s Sady Rebbot	Take over
Anita ends the war
Who wants to convince me that Richard O’Brien never saw these stills even though they were published in England in 1969?
Party time
	They’re homeless, and their only property is a lunch box, so where do they get all the costume changes and make-up and new hair styles?
Mondo cattivo!	Rescue by roving minstrels
A place of expiation
and a place of Redemption!
Why can’t we dress like this at the office?	The Prison Warden and his lackey
Anita liberates the prison (Where on earth was this filmed?) NOTE ADDED ON FRIDAY, 24 NOVEMBER 2006: As he so often does, Marco Fornier answered my question. This is the prison on the island of Santo Stefano, off Ventotene Island, which you can see and read about at Ventotene & S.Stefano and at Wikipedia: Isola di Santo Stefano. Remember back in school when we had to learn about Jeremy Bentham and his new Utilitarian idea for prison construction, which he called the Panopticon? The Panopticon simply demonstrated to me that Bentham was out of his bloody mind. Interestingly, there was also another Panoptikon, an invention by Grey and Otway Latham, along with their father, Major Woodville Latham — which, of course, leads us into the story of the Latham Loop and the Motion Picture Patent Wars which were settled in 1908. Why am I interested in this stuff? And why did Americans back then have such unusual names?
Cemetery	The tail end of an otherwise-deleted segment
The wedding that never happened
A deleted sequence

How could a movie like this miss? Simple—the Italian censors banned it. Brass could have compromised by cutting the film, but he stuck to his principles. By the time the censors cleared the film for release in 1974, the grooving hippie scene, which had inspired this film, had pretty much vanished, and so the movie died.

The Cry seems to have been planned at one time as the official English title, and then, as you can see above, a logo gave the title as Howl, but since the film was seemingly never released internationally, that hardly matters. Various journalists have referred to L’urlo as The Howl, The Shriek, The Screech, and The Scream. Take your pick.

ASTONISHING YOUTUBE VIDEO! While L’urlo was being filmed, someone made this little 16mm home movie. An Argentinian friend began to interpret this movie for me. He spotted a brief glimpse of Gigi Proietti, and he noted that the guy playing the guitar was pop singer Frédéric Pardo, whom Tina was dating at that time, after having divorced Christian Marquand. Take a look!

NOTE: Luigi “Gigi” Proietti also worked on four more Tinto Brass projects: he appeared in Dropout, he sang two songs in La vacanza, he was to have starred in a never-made movie called Punch, and he also directed the Italian dubbing of Salon Kitty. So I guess they’re friends.

After you see this movie you’ll be a Gigi Proietti fan. So here are some web sites:
Gigi Proietti Home Page
Gigi Proietti in The Full Monty
Katia Ippaso, “Intervista a Gigi Proietti”
DEAD LINKS THAT MIGHT COME BACK TO LIFE SOME DAY:
http://www.raidue.rai.it/raidue/schede/9000/900062.htm
http://www.intrage.it/interviste/proietti/

ANOTHER NOTE: Brass does several voices, including that of Karl Marx.

AND YET ANOTHER NOTE: Please don’t be too put off by the bits with the mouse and the goslings. When I saw a bootlegged videotape, it really looked like the hotel proprietor killed the mouse on camera. Now that I’ve finally seen a clear, sharp, colorful store-bought original tape from Italy, it is apparent that the dead mouse had been dead for some time before the cameras started rolling. So I don’t know if they killed the poor little thing. (I adore mice—I like mice more than I like most people, actually.) And the cook who prepares goslings for dinner was obviously dealing with a gosling that had been freshly killed. Still disturbing to watch, though. The movie would have been a thousand times better without those two little bits. By the way, there were even more disturbing scenes in two later Brass films: Salon Kitty with its very brief slaughterhouse scene, and Caligula with its animal carcasses. Ugh! But please, even if you’re an animal lover like me, watch L’urlo anyway. It’s easily one of the best and most imaginative and most upbeat movies ever made.

HOMAGES: In the midst of clips of war atrocities are clips from Roberto Rossellini’s magnificent Paisà, which had appeared previously in Chi lavora è perduto. I’m sure that in addition to this and the references to Munch and Bosch and Ginsberg and “The Tree Army Poem” and probably hundreds of other things that I’ll never be able to recognize, are some items that you out there in Internet Land can fill me in on. Yes?

QUESTION: Sometimes movies make me feel stupid. I guess I’m supposed to recognize the French revolutionary hymn, but I don’t. Can anyone tell me what it is? (I’m familiar with La Marseillaise and Ça ira, as well as with Eugene Pottier’s communist hymn L’internationale, but I guess there were hundreds of others too.)

ANSWER: Thanks to Serge Bromberg and the Alliance Française of Los Angeles, I now have the answer. The tune was taken from a Russian song composed by Anna Marly. The French lyrics were composed in London in 1943 by Joseph Kessel and Maurice Druon. The communist hymn was called “Le chant des partisans,” and it was once proposed as the national anthem.

MORE PICTURES:
FILM.TV.IT

I COULD BARELY BELIEVE IT WHEN I HEARD THAT TINA AUMONT HAD DIED. What’s the world coming to? Here are the obits:
Cinememorial: Aumont Tina
Décès de Tina Aumont, figure du cinéma italien au destin mouvementé
Morta in Francia Tina Aumont
Tina Aumont, nuit sans étoile: La comédienne égérie du cinéma underground s’est éteinte samedi à 60 ans
Little did I realize that her mother was Maria Montez, who became a central character in Gore Vidal’s mind-bendingly surreal novel Myron. Tina’s late husband, of course, was Christian Marquand, who misdirected Buck Henry’s script of Candy (he misunderstood the American slang — oh well).

These Italian videos without subtitles are long out of print. Try your luck. They are PAL VHS, which will not play on US equipment.

Lion Film presenta un film di Tinto Brass

L’urlo

Distributed by Titanus International
World premiere on Saturday, 27 June 1970 — Released in 1974
Running time: 93 minutes (at 24fps)

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