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

(Howl, 1968–1970)

MIDNIGHT SCREENING AT THE SILENT MOVIE THEATRE IN HOLLYWOOD ON FRIDAY, 10 APRIL 2009!!!!!!!

Click here to read a really nice promo piece

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 NOW AVAILABLE! THANKS TO CULT EPICS! The 1:1.85:1 transfer at 16×9 is not the best, but don’t blame Cult Epics! That was the best material available. Really. I’m not joking. So don’t gripe. Just enjoy it. If you really feel compelled to gripe, then help out with a proper restoration, and cross your fingers and hope that the master elements still exist somewhere.
click here to see a clip.

CLICK HERE FOR THE MOST INTELLIGENT ANALYSIS OF THIS MOVIE THAT I’VE EVER RUN ACROSS. You see, I don’t like explaining things that don’t absolutely need explaining. When others decide to explicate, that’s fine; they can do it. But I personally don’t want to do it. And so when I wrote a description of this movie, I deliberately kept it as superficial as possible. But now Amy R Handler has done such a beautiful job of getting at this movie’s meanings and purposes that I threw in the towel and deleted much of my own scribblings. So read Amy’s piece, please.

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, when watching movies 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 see 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.

Interesting that these lobby cards illustrate so many scenes that never made it to the final film. I wonder if that footage still exists somewhere....

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”).

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.
NOTE ADDED ON 23 DECEMBER 2009: You see? I am an ignoramus. It turns out that this is by Diego Rivera, entitled “Sueño en una tarde dominical en la alameda central” (1947).
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. (Who is that actor? Giorgio Gruden maybe?)
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
Leda and the Swan would pop up again in Caligula but the humorless bosses would cut it out.	Another motif that would pop up in later movies.
Tinto’s predecessor, Tintoretto, also tried his hand at Leda and the Swan
Taking dictation.	Tino Scotti as The Intellectual.
The hotel’s confessional
Guests in a hotel room.	And why not?
The gentle art...	...of underacting. (That’s Tino Scotti again, this time as a security guard.)
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. (Who is that actress?)
Encountering Diogenes, the American (Edoardo Florio)	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. He also appeared earlier, as one of the threesome in bed at the surreal hotel, but we couldn’t see his face clearly and he was on screen only for the briefest moment. But even in bed he had his helmet on!	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.
“A ha!” I hear you scream at me triumphastically. “The frame captures above show that you’re lying, because they prove that there is a better copy of the movie than what we get from Cult Epics!!! So what do you have to say to that, Mister Know-It-All?” This is what I have to say. The above frame captures are from an Italian cablecast, which was letterboxed 4×3 and with a rather soft focus and pixelation. The broadcast was from some sort of professional videotape, not from a film element. The videotape ultimately derived from a film element that cannot now be located, and which was censored, at times quite severely. Nonetheless, I would like to find that film element. If you know where it is, please write to me. Actually, I would like to find the camera neg and the master audiotapes. If you have any idea at all where they might be hiding, give me a holler. Trims would be interesting too, because so much was shot never made it into the final movie.

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 Argentine friend began to interpret this for me. He spotted a brief glimpse of Gigi Proietti (I can’t recognize him) and he noted that this movie was clearly made by Frédéric Pardo, whom Tina was dating at that time, after having separated from Christian Marquand. The conversation posted beneath the video reveals that the guitarist is a movie director named Philippe Garrel who was filming Tina in another movie at the time, Le lit de la vierge, and that this home movie ties in with that as well. 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. Their friendship was strained when Gigi so much wanted to appear in Caligula, but Tinto said No because his English was too halting. Oh well....

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.

ANICA — Associazione Nazionale Industrie Cinematografiche Audiovisive e Multimediali

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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