LE BOTOX (Jean Champi, 1957)

In the 54 years it has taken to officially arrive in this country (this country being, variously, America, the USA, or some virtual construct located in both, either or neither) Le Botox (1) hasn’t aged a day. Its joy is as infectious as ever, its anarchy still as cutting (and cutting still as anarchic) as that of the far more celebrated Godard; and the free-and-easy techniques once described by Andrew Sarris as “of very mixed quality” look not only resolutely masterly but succinctly modern. There is a long shot following Pierre along the street, past the market and crowds, which makes a similar sequence in À bout de souffle look almost contrived; And during the scene in which Paulo (Michele Abbruzzo) serves at the Riviere restaurant, the elegant complication of Champi's tracking shots, weaving like slick ghosts through a staged bustle, couldn't have been guided any more perfectly by anyone else. His later sequence, following a family's departure from Tours and out into the Loire Valley, is studded with such quiet gold as to render the need for such gimmickry as colour, smell and 3-d as almost superfluous. All this without modern lightweight cameras too.

That Champi is not thought of as one of the French directors who 'turned the 20th Century about-face'(2) in the fifties and sixties is the kind of cruel sequence that the director himself conspires in his films, and one which he dealt with phlegmatically. 'True pioneers get lost in the wilderness years before civilization even knows they're gone,' he said at Cannes in 1972, when a campaign to have a new cut of Le Botox shown at the festival failed. But by the time he had come to be convinced of his genius, it had left him. His last two films, Paris Dans L'Ombre (1969) and La Fiction Est Fiction (1971) had failed completely, the thrusting camerawork obstructing the audience's embrace. He surely knew, after that, that Le Botox would be his one masterpiece, never to be bettered. Such knowledge so early in life (Champi was twenty-four when he made Le Botox, and sidled into Cannes two weeks before his fortieth birthday) is a sore test.

Traces of Le Botox can be seen across the contemporary cinematic landscape, as if we still cannot deal with it in its entirety. The subplot in which Paolo, prompted by a writing class exercise follows and becomes obsessed with a woman is blown up to fill the narrative in both David Thewlis' skinny and grim Lecher (2008, in which the director himself plays the man who ends up murdering the girl) and Neil Burger's Exercise (in which Christian Bale follows a girl, only to discover that his wife is paying her to drive him insane by acting out a biography of his fantasies).

Champi's screened illusions, showing us the trickery and wonder of our surround, hover just out of view, despite the microscopic attention thrown over this period of French cinema. He was never as caustic as Chabrol, as aggressive as Godard. He couldn't keep as cool as Rohmer, and he lacked the energy of Truffaut. He could match none of them for stamina. But filmmaker and friend Agnes Varda knew his worth. She describes Le Botox as '... the forgotten vowel of the French cinematic language. If we could only remember it, and remember how to fashion its form on our page and in our mouths, we could complete secret sentences of new perfections.'(3)

Le Botox Directed by Jean Champi Produced by Jean Champi, Michael Ravelle Written by Thomas Brix Starring Michele Abruzzo, Maria Lucho, Francois Truffaut SRV Films 119 mins Release Date UK/Fra: Oct 1957 Tagline: 'Too rich, too poor, Too hungry for more'.

1. Le 'Botox' being a French word for a 'hearty appetite' or an 'eager young boy', according to Merriam-Webster, or a 'hungry young cocksmith' according to Mary M. Webster (citation needed).

2. Sarris' famous phrase included the core group of Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Chabrol and Rivette

3. Sight & Sound, March 2008

ROGER IN AMERRYKA! (Leonard Fitzroy, 1959)

I announce: I have discovered a country: Amerryka!

And with it, life as anecdotal drift. For example: It was 1940; It was 1950; It was 1960. I formed a rock'n'roll trio with two regulation gas attendants, and mewed kicking non-hits like 'Destination Cerebrum', 'Damn Cat' and Pigeon Porch Blues' all over Kentucky and Tenessee, my extracted claws making a screeing guitar holler but lacking subtlety to make pretty chords. Our sets lasted for minutes, but I always charmed a female into taking me home. I always wore a bowtie onstage, and I discovered that cats dressed as humans gets girls all giddy and a flutter. During those years I made love to thousands of cats. I made love with hundreds of human women. I tried it with males, I tried it with dogs. It was an itch I couldn't scratch; I remained candlewick dependent. I swam through ages, never getting older; I drank up the new years while still being able to see, smell and taste the old ones. My double vision became trebled, quadrupled; Olefactory calamity captivated my bronchioles, until I convulsed thrice-nightly. My dreams, seperated from waking by no film of unreality, began to multiply together, spawning horrific orgies between a pantheon of inter-human species, cat people with wings instead of heads, dancing notions pressing gruesome members into each other in an endless diorama of fur and flesh intercourse, sweating, endless and sickening. And in all of it, in my sleep and in my day, I knew I was being watched. The fairground, under the lights, I began to realise I was either being followed or was tailing an unknown suspect for an unknown crime. I was a Trojan Hoss of heightened language, embedded with chiselled horrors and cocaine brained fancy.' Roger the Cat, 'Roger in Amerryka!'

Leonard Fitzroy's Roger the Cat is but one in a long line of feline protagonists with an urbane demeanour. But no cat has surely gone as far as Roger, whose beat prose and sexual neediness marks him apart. The Roger the Cat stories, part science-fiction, part experimental fuzz, part 'awwdon'thelooklikealilman' cuteness always confound and delight equally. Too risque, perhaps, for many sensibilities; for after having the stories rejected by every magazine, periodical and newspaper going, Fitzroy finally self-published the Collected Roger the Cat stories in 1953, and managed to get some attention reading them aloud in Greenwich Village cafes.

The origins tale, Roger and the Author, caused a riot at the Semblance Cafe in Prospect when several of Fitzroy's inebriated writer friends grew annoyed at the implicit criticism of the self-deluding romantic ideals of the titular scribe. They took it to be a mocking of their scene, and flounced accordingly. This led to Fitzroy recording the jazzy single 'Too Beat for Two Beats' under the name 'Roger the Cat', with Landon Horny providing the voice of Roger for the unforgettable chorus:

Too hep for those cats

I'm feline groovy

Blue eyes, no cataracts

My relationship with myself

Is merely platonic

But I'd be lying if I said

I didn't want to take it further'

The success of the song drew attention from Hollywood. Mogul David O Selznick wanted to make an animated picture, telling Fitzroy that his 'cussin' cat causes kids to cry and I want a piece'. Arguments abounded as to the format, before settling on a quite spectacular mixture of tinted live action footage an animation, a psychedelic inversion of the yet to come real-people-in-toontown Roger Rabbit principle.

The film flopped. 'It wasn't Roger's horniness, his affair with Joan Fontaine, his taste for the swears or even smoking that Americans didn't like,' claimed Fitzroy. 'It was the fact that he was an intellectual, and talked alot.'1 Roger's poetic thrust, sexual clamour and propensity for cod-philosophy (and cod philosophy) found him an audience among students throughout the sixties, enough for a sequel Roger Gets Hep (1967) to be made, this time with no attempt to charm the kiddies. His iconic presence was seen on pin badges and banners at Vietnam protests across campuses in America, and in Paris in May 1968. It seems his constantly open spirit and questioning attitude will always find fans, albeit sporadically: A character named Roger the Catt appeared in Cheech and Chong's I Started A Toke (1981), and Roger appeared heavily in Jean-Luc Godard's Mickey Mouse biopic La Souris d'Hollywood (1987). The original film has been remastered and re-released several times, earning praise from Peter Cook who called it 'the result of a boozy seance between Doctors Seuss, Freud and John'. 2

'The truth is, Roger will always be quicker than me,' Fitzroy said in 1994. 'I never managed to pin him down in any story, strip or film. He was always too clever.' 3

'Bewitched by the Americas. Inca cats. The earth is soiled by tattooed spells. There, I was plugged into full cat voodoo, inserted into the mainframe, dispelled to a swirling hexed vortex. The Native Americans claimed that ancient cats, Gugols, were there, in North America, before humanity. They receded when Humans came. If your hive was Africa, ours was America. Inspired, giddy, lovestruck, I saw a ghostly cat that I followed. It looked pretty, pretty as me, and had a familiar gait that I attributed to a wombic memory of motherhood. When I saw her in an alley, I scared away another cat, shadowy and evasive, that slipped into the swampy indeces of the drugged city. The object of my affection did not acknowledge me once; just sidled away, with a follow me turn of the tail. Motherlode, They became expert at disappearing; they became attuned to the wind,. and took off in invisible flights. untailored modes. In the hollows of the man-made fortifications, in the call of the trees, they sing quietly. Dire tunes, terse and bitter some of them, but to a cat those hallowed meccas retune the brain like a lightning rod to the tail. exonerated spirits, The city was a used book, even when fresh metal. It's fifty-storey mountains came retro-fitted with hexes and chants, and weaved in the wind accordingly. Nectared breezes send bitter ghostly spells up Manhattan streets, before expiring in the salt of the Harbour. I was, reader, in a lather. Clutching at the West Virginian meterologies like they were tangible personages, Tom Rain, the firebrand, honest, brave, Lucy Sun, shy, alert, mating in their woozy troposphere boudoir, where further weathers are made, eternal variables of their uncles and aunts who spawn rainbow offspring with mixed metaphor jism. Awakened in a Louisiana hotel to perverse ecosystems, twitching my synapses like arcane texts, to be read aloud, to a matful of bovine schoolherd who would sink into a magical slumber and arise sainted and holy, handsome and wise.'

Roger the Cat, 'Roger in Amerryka!'Roger in Amerryka! Directed by Leonard Fitzroy Produced by David O Selznick, Tom Lord Written by Leonard Fitzroy Starring Landon Horny (voice), Joan Fontaine, Sid Caesar, Milton Berle Selznick International Pictures 92 mins Release Date US: May 1959/ UK Aug 1966 Tagline: 'The Cool Cat's Cool Cat Strikes Back (Hatless)'

1. Paris Match interview, 1986
2. Times interview, May 21 1992
3. The Guardian interview March 1994

QUOTES (Woody Allen, 1989)

Allen: 'Intrinsic to my understanding of history is this: The Witch never said 'You're not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy Gale.'
Minnelli: 'But she did.'
Allen: 'Exactly.'
Minnelli: 'Contrarily, Dorothy did say 'There's no place like home,' several times, but she was lying.'
Allen: 'Of course. Will you marry me?'
Minnelli: 'No-one said anything to make you say that.'
Allen: 'Jimmy Stewart. Philadelphia Story.'
Minnelli: 'Hepburn said no to Jimmy Stewart. She remarried Cary Grant.'
Allen: 'Well we can't all be Cary Grant.'
Minnelli: 'No. Some of us even less so than others.'


Woody Allen and Liza Minnelli in a scene from Quotes.

'The truth is that as a filmmaker (if not as a performer), Woody Allen has almost no personality of his own. Respect him as we may for preferring pastiche (or imitation as the sincerest form of flattery) in a period when the American cinema has capitulated to the whorish charms of parody (or imitation as the sincerest form of derision) , we ought not to elevate a pasticheur's talent into the temperament of an authentic artist. Allen is Zelig, Zelig is Allen. Brought into contact with Bergman, he turns into Bergman (Interiors, Another Woman); with Fellini, he turns into Fellini (Stardust Memories, Radio Days); with Pabst, he turns into Pabst (Shadows and Fog)... and so it has always gone. Zelig however, is the exception that once truly does prove the rule, and so Quotes is a rare stride towards something else, as if there exists in Allen a true original he is straining to supress. Quotes is Allen's career writ large and exploded, a cavalcade of every filmmaker he loves at once, a collection of brilliant techniques that serves to provide a mixed salad, avec dressing, with a small man in glasses sitting in sorrow in the middle.' Gilbert Adair, Flickers

'QUOTES is a blast. Take an inspired idea- the referencing of everybody else, and I mean everybody else- pepper with a gag or two, then stew in wit for aeons, and voila! a Cannes hit that will make minor rewards in Western territories. But Allen, for once, goes further, and his intricate web of references and borrowed dialogue becomes something beyond postmodern or meta.' Geoffrey Standage, The Sunday Times

'Allen alienates adroitly and aims angry arcs at any anti-Allenists (and Allenist alike) attending, acutely aware at all affects an arrogant audience anticipates. A+' Arsula Andress, San Francisco Chronicle

'Allen of course, must know that his presence in his own movie can cheapen his directorial nous somewhat, in that his verbal prodding can sometimes replace what greater directors do from behind the camera. But he is also smart enough to know that this gives him something to, and Quotes allows him to provide a director's cut from within. His character can talk about film style as he himself gives us film that contradicts that style.' Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

''If bad puns a comedian doth make, then Allen is very funny indeed.' Here's one for you: Waiting for Godard.' Blixten Tongstress, Twice Weekly

'Allen never gives us three chords and the truth; three chords and the Truffaut, maybe. Even his tenderest moments are not wrought with any feeling other than nervous self-examination, leaving his voice to be that of a whinnying karaoke singer. Which as we all know, can be perversely poignant.' Mark Kermode, Videodrome

'If we see Allen's work as a schizophrenic dance between Bergman and something sillier, then this boils it down to the barest credentials. Insipid and inspired. A petulant stamp from an undergrown intellectual. Four stars.' Tom Bonnet, Sight & Sound

'Only eternal love between Farrow and Allen would provide the trust necessary for her to don that particular outfit and say those particular lines.' Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun

'Allen used to have a stand-up line that he re-used over and over, he liked it so much: 'I'm not scared of death... I just don't want to be there when it happens'. Well, he has been there when it happened many times: Hollywood Ending, Match Point and Whatever Works, to name but three deaths. But every time I reach back for Annie Hall or Manhattan I only feel sad for an auteur now lost. Only Quotes keeps me excited. It is an enigma, a flashing message not quite understood.' Paul Auster, Notes on Film Signs

'You know, people ask me who I am, and I presume it is a trick question. So then they ask what kind of man I am, and I realize that if they think I'm a man then I've actually tricked them.' Woody Allen

Quotes Directed by Woody Allen Produced by Robert Grenhut Written by Woody Allen, Mia Farrow Starring Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, Liza Minnelli Orion Pictures/Warner Brothers Release Date UK/US: Mar 1989 99 mins Tagline: 'Umm.. I Really Don't... I Gues Yuo Need Something For The Poster... Use Something From Ben Hur.'