giovedì 9 aprile 2015

Ramon Rojo. in memoriam

Gian Maria - Ramon - Volontè

09/04/1933 - 06/12/1994

mercoledì 8 aprile 2015

martedì 7 aprile 2015

Acid, electric, strangest of all, Elvin Jones: Zachariah

By Daniel Spicer

The psychedelic period of the late 1960s/early 1970s produced a number of movies that sought to incorporate youth music with film. From the elegiac tragedy of Easy Rider to the Monkees’ Day-Glo comedy Head, the best of these represented and reflected the era’s curious mix of turbulence and naïveté.

And then there was Zachariah. This head-scratcher from 1971 was directed by George Englund (who’d previously worked with Marlon Brando on 1963’s The Ugly American) and featured a script by cult US comedy troupe The Firesign Theatre, with a storyline loosely based on Herman Hesse’s hippy-pleasing novel of spiritual discovery Siddhartha. It tells the tale of the improbably beautiful and white-toothed Zachariah (played by John Rubinstein) who, with his equally dreamy young friend, Matthew (a 21-year-old Don Johnson, later of Miami Vice fame), sets out to pursue the glamorous life of a gunfighter. Clearly, the film broadly falls into the genre of Acid Western, alongside classics such as Peter Fonda’s The Hired Hand, released the same year, and Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garret and Billy the Kid from 1973: movies that attempted to address countercultural concerns (Zachariah and Matthew’s first scene together has them sharing a joint), within the Western milieu. But, while most films of this genre explored serious themes and maintained an element of verisimilitude, Zachariah blasts off somewhere else entirely. Almost singlehandedly creating a new genre, the publicity blurb excitedly trumpeted it as ‘the first and only Electric Western.’

In this instance, ‘electric’ essentially means ‘psychedelic rock.’ The opening scene captures power trio The James Gang rocking-out in the desert with huge amps plugged right into the sand, while Zachariah runs around firing a pistol into the air. It’s the kind of temporal incongruity you might find in Thomas Pynchon’s epic Western novel Against the Day, in which dynamite-chucking anarchists get bombed on peyote and hallucinogenic explosive putty. But Zachariah becomes still more disorientating as its protagonists’ adventures lead them into surprising encounters with a range of real-life musicians. San Francisco’s psychedelic pioneers, Country Joe and the Fish, play The Crackers – a gang of inept outlaws whose performances induce unrestrained go-go dancing in respectably attired frontierswomen; fiddler Doug Kershaw – aka The Ragin’ Cajun – makes a lightning cameo with a yodelling piece of plot exposition; and, strangest of all, Elvin Jones, arguably the greatest jazz drummer of all time and veteran of the late John Coltrane’s Classic Quartet, turns up as the suave gunslinger, Job Cain, shooting a man dead before bashing out a drum solo.

The result is oddly surreal – but not in the way that Jodorowsky’s nightmarish Western allegory, El Topo(released in 1970) is surreal. In tone and execution, Zachariah seems closer to the closing scenes from Mel Brooks’ screwball Western spoof, 1974’s Blazing Saddles, in which the cast spills off the set and into the bustling streets of downtown 1970s Burbank. Zachariah’s fairly negligible storyline makes a half-hearted lunge at profundity – clumsily advocating pacifism and brotherhood – but it’s so flimsy that, in the end, all that’s left is the music: an eclectic mix of rock, pop, folk and jazz that fails to hang together with the conviction of the equally wide-ranging soundtrack to Antonioni’s 1970 countercultural lament Zabriskie Point.

Ultimately, the fact that the soundtrack to Zachariah has been out of print and unavailable for so many years hardly seems to matter. You probably had to be there.

L'originale è qui:

http://www.soundandmusic.org/features/sound-film/found-soundtracks-zachariah

lunedì 30 marzo 2015

Asili in Calabria

OGGI

in contemporanea con

http://daplatiaciurrame.blogspot.it/2015/03/bambini-del-sud-reg-michele-gandin-1959.html

L'asilo di Platì

Bambini del Sud (tit. originale), 1959

Soggetto: Umberto Zanotti Bianco

Sceneggiatura: Paolo Balbo, Michele Gandin, Giuseppe Isnardi

Organizzazione: Luciano Pesciaroli

Commento: Stelio Martini

Fotografia: Dario Damicelli (A. I. C.)

Musica e adattamenti: Mario Nascimbene

Voce: Riccardo Cucciolla

Regia: Michele Gandin

giovedì 26 marzo 2015

Western Siddharta

La visione di Zachariah (1971) di George Englund fa ergersi nella mente del mangiatore di film tutta una serie di accostamenti con altre opere cinematografiche sue contemporanee o anteriori. Esse abbracciano lavori di autori intellettuali europei come di abili commercianti hollywoodiani. Ma questo dato è comune a tutti i film della counterculture sia che venissero realizzati nella coste west o east statunitensi. Zachariah è pressoché inedito in Italia. Non attirò dapprima i distributori italici come successivamente i canali televisivi. Per fortuna c’è il “ vostro/nostro tubo “.

Per alzare il tono gli autori fanno ricorso a Herman Hesse, scrittore molto in voga tra i giovani di allora. Zachariah cerca l’avventura e il rischio per colpa della sua pistola comprata per corrispondenza, finendo col meditare sulla vacuità e vanità degli uomini.

Oggi a noi interessa l’aspetto musicale del film che si amalgama bene col progressivo svolgimento delle immagini, facendo uso ora di partiture originali di Jimmie Haskel, ora di musica roots alla maniera di Dug Kershaw, ora di un arrangiamento velocizzato dell’overture del Guglielmo rossiniano, ora della folk-psichedelia di Country Joe and the Fish, dell’acid rock della James Gang e, infine, data la presenza del bronzeo Elvin Jones esecutore di un tellurico assolo di tamburi, del jazz d’annata. Non poteva essere altrimenti data la mole di contaminazioni dissipate nell’opera da parte di chi ha scritto e sceneggiato Zachariah.