Who Gives Good Commentary?

[Orlac]

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Just found out there's an old man film forum where a group of about 5 old men regularly bitch and moan about me "only talking about feminism" on my blu-ray commentaries, and all I can think is how broken would your dick be to give a shit about what a 5'2" Australian woman thinks

I don't recall any negativity about of her work on here (let alone regular airing of grievances as with Welles/Armond/Svet), so I guess we're off the hook.

There's a couple on Blu-ray.com who seem weirdly and negatively obsessed with her.

[Maltic]

Did they not like her Uncle Buck commentary (with Josh Nelson)?

[beamish14]

Heller doesn’t just read IMDB tidbits on a film and call it a commentary like Lee Gambin

[MichaelB]

The last two commentaries of hers that I edited and mixed (both duos with Josh Nelson, with whom she has a terrific rapport), for Indicator's The Taming of the Shrew and And Justice for All, are flat-out superb.

In fact, The Taming of the Shrew is pretty close to my definition of what a perfect audio commentary should be - it dives deep into the film, the Shakespeare play and the real-life Burton-Taylor marriage, and grasps some pretty tricky nettles along the way, most notably when Heller-Nicholas eloquently defends the film's more than mildly problematic ending. And given who's doing the defending and therefore the position one might have instinctively expected her to take, this carries real weight.

I can also confirm, on account of having created written transcripts of both commentaries for Sony, that the word "feminism" isn't uttered at all in the one for And Justice for All (or any other word beginning "femi"). Obviously, it is brought up in The Taming of the Shrew, but it would arguably be a dereliction of duty if it hadn't been, given its subject!

But looking at the instances more closely, they're largely incidental. For instance, this is literally every time that Heller-Nicholas utters the F-word:

And, like you said, people come out and they gun it as this radical feminist text, or they come out and they gun it as this epitome of misogyny. And I’m actually not really compelled by either argument.

I don’t think it’s about submission to men. I don’t think it’s about the rise of the patriarchy. But at the same time, I don’t know whether I can make a “feminist” take on this film in the way that some critics have. To me, it’s just about Taylor and Burton. And because Kate and Petruchio’s relationship in the film is a public display.

Every other instance is either courtesy of Josh Nelson, or a third-party quotation.

[MichaelB]

Chris's Altered States review raises an issue with which I've unsurprisingly been wrestling with myself:

I’ve generally enjoyed Deighan’s tracks—especially her collaborations with Kat Ellinger—and thought her solo effort for Godzilla vs. Biollante was quite strong, but this one left me a bit mixed. She’s at her best discussing the film’s tumultuous production, particularly how writer Paddy Chayefsky’s iron grip on the screenplay clashed with director Ken Russell (brought in after Arthur Penn was dismissed), eventually prompting Chayefsky to remove his name from the credits. She also digs into the film’s striking visuals and situates it among other late-’70s and early-’80s explorations of body horror, which fits nicely. Where the track falters is in its tendency to drift into career summaries for each actor as they appear. It’s fair enough with William Hurt, Bob Balaban, Blair Brown, and even John Larroquette and Drew Barrymore, but it becomes a bit of a crutch in the film’s back half. To her credit, she avoids simple IMDb recitations and regains focus during the climax when addressing the effects work. Still, the track ultimately feels uneven, and I can't say I felt myself as engaged here as with some of her other efforts.

As a regular editor and mixer of other people's commentaries, I'm well aware of the "IMDB recitation" tendency - as, I suspect, is Samm Deighan - but it's a tricky balancing act. I think it would be a dereliction of duty to ignore the actors altogether, although when I recorded Allonsanfàn for Radiance, at a very early stage I said "Obviously that’s Marcello Mastroianni on the right, one of the most instantly recognisable faces in European cinema even under a scraggly beard, and I don’t propose to insult your intelligence by rattling off a biography that you’re almost certainly familiar with already" - although I did go into more detail with regard to the less familiar actors, particularly if they had interesting biographical info over and above their filmographies (for instance Benjamin Lev, whose career was abruptly curtailed in the mid-1970s following a drugs bust).

But I haven't recorded that many commentaries for English-language films, and hardly any with major stars - Mastroianni is one of the biggest names - and quite a bit of the time the info I give wasn't previously available in English (this is particularly true of eastern European films). Although I'm well aware that a filmography recitation involving titles that are mostly unknown in the English speaking world would be the last word in terminal boredom, so I don't go down that route - instead, I'll emphasise colourful details such as (from The Round-Up):

Now, the man on the right here with the rather Napoleon hairstyle is Attila Nagy, who was as famous for his political activities as he was for his acting ones. In 1958, he was even sentenced to death for his part in the 1956 revolution, although that was commuted to twelve years, and in the event he was freed before that. He was also a member of parliament in Hungary’s first post-Communist government, a role he still occupied when he died in 1992. And the man who’s just replaced him is Zoltán Basilides, who started out as an opera singer, but his bass voice increasingly put him in demand for stage, film and television roles.

Now, I think that that's striking more or less the right balance (another crucial thing is that I consciously keep these capsule biographies pretty short) - but what works for the rest of you? I have four new commentaries to record and deliver over the next three weeks, so I'll be taking your answers very seriously!

[EddieLarkin]

I liked how Adrian Martin described it in his controversial takedown of other commentators:

I can put my worry about this matter in the following nutshell. If you took the vast majority of currently employed freelance audio commentators and told them: “In two weeks time, you will have to give a two-hour lecture on such-and-such a film to an assembled, knowledgeable audience at Oxford, Harvard and the Sorbonne”, most of them would run screaming, out of fear, in the opposite direction. But the prospect of gabbing for the same duration, at a moment’s notice, on a digital audio track destined (potentially) for an even wider public, leaves them seemingly unfazed. There is a definite disconnect here: it is as if the private (or chummy-chummy) podcast recorded at the kitchen table has suddenly morphed into the seemingly “authoritative” discourse of and for the masses. Give ‘em a stage, and these bulls will rage …

That is what I expect a commentary to be like, something aimed at an already knowledgeable film literate audience, with the definite aim of educating the audience via the commentators own analysis, thoughts and conclusions. You aren't going to ever get this by just brushing up on each actor's profile.

And I don't want a commentary aimed at a casual viewer who just wants to hear people chat over the film, though I guess a lot of people are happy to hear Kim Newman and Barry Forshaw do exactly this again and again, and maybe there are plenty of interesting nuggets and entertaining banter, but the major problem of any audio commentary is that it's by definition as long as a feature film. I am simply not going to trade 2 hours of my life for such scant returns; I could be spending that time with my wife and kids, or at worst (and shamefully, more likely), watching another bloody film.

On the otherhand, Kim Newman's 20 minute video pieces are always great, because that's a better place for the basics, and I don't feel I'm giving up too much of my time. Leave commentaries to the experts, particularly those with a specific area of expertise.

[MichaelB]

That is what I expect a commentary to be like, something aimed at an already knowledgeable film literate audience, with the definite aim of educating the audience via the commentators own analysis, thoughts and conclusions. You aren't going to ever get this by just brushing up on each actor's profile.

Well, you're not going to get this by only doing that, but it seems wilfully perverse to ignore a film's contributors - especially since a commentary typically involves 15,000 words plus, so you have plenty of space.

I mean, in my recent commentary for Une Femme douce, I start from the assumption that anyone buying Radiance's disc will already be well aware of who Robert Bresson is and the kind of films that he made, so I don't include any kind of beginners' guide to his methods, or much in the way of biographical info, apart from potentially unfamiliar stuff such as Bresson's flirtation with Surrealism in the 1930s. But even then, I try to tie it into something scene-specific, for instance:

There’s a fascinating chapter on Une Femme Douce in Brian David Price’s 2011 book Neither God Nor Master: Robert Bresson and Radical Politics that amongst other things identifies where the pawnshop is by piecing together tiny scraps of information – we can glimpse the Brasserie Lipp and the café Les Deux Magots in the 6th arrondissement, suggesting that the pawnshop is in the Saint-Germain-des-prés area. But what’s just as interesting is that those two cafés were among the regular haunts of the Surrealists in the 1920s and the Left Bank intellectuals at the turn of the 1950s – Bresson was very much included in the latter group and Colin Burnett also points out that while he was never a member of the Surrealist Group, during the time that he worked in advertising and fashion photography in the 1930s Bresson was certainly a Surrealist fellow traveller, forming a particularly close relationship with the English Surrealist Sir Roland Penrose, who funded some of Bresson’s earliest artistic efforts, including the 1934 short film Affaires Publiques. So Bresson would have been very familiar not only with the area but also those specific cafés – which by the late 1960s had become, according to Price, spaces that no longer connote intellectual culture but the reification of that culture.

Similarly, while I obviously bring up Dominique Sanda's subsequent career (again, it would have been perverse not to have done so), I don't offer a potted overview - in fact, I'm pretty sure I don't mention any of her films beyond The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and The Conformist, which made her a star mere months after Bresson's film was released.

However, I'd argue that it would have been remiss of me not to mention that the doctor is played by experimental novelist Claude Ollier, and then give a rather more detailed biographical sketch than I did with Sanda (since it's a reasonable assumption that listeners wouldn't be familiar with Ollier's work - he was part of the nouveau roman movement alongside Alain Robbe-Grillet), and similarly talk about the relationship between Bresson and his producer Mag Bodard, who made her name with The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, a phenomenally risky venture that was only her second film, and whose success underwrote similarly adventurous projects, including three of Bresson's - indeed, it was Jacques Demy (who worshipped Bresson) who brought them together in the first place.

I think the crucial thing is to be constantly aware of whether or not such details are used to enhance the commentary or whether they're mere padding. In which respect, I recall deleting a paragraph about Mag Bodard that included Agnès Varda's vivid visual description of her - I think I cut it at quite a late stage, and it wouldn't have done any harm to have left it in, but in looking over the transcript I presumably cut it because something scene-specific was coming up that I had to prioritise. (The way I work is that I often record the non-scene-specific stuff first, but it often doesn't find its final resting place until a very late stage, when it often needs trimming.)

Come to think of it, there is one filmography recitation - in contrast to Bresson's usual approach with his "modèles", the nurse is played by veteran bit-part player Dorothée Blanck, who appeared in a similar capacity in a rather impressive number of 1950s and 1960s classics; I don't mention all of them as you can easily look them up yourself, but I do mention "Jean Renoir’s French Cancan, Jean-Luc Godard’s Une Femme est une Femme, Agnes Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7, and above all multiple films by Varda’s husband Jacques Demy, including all the famous ones." Although in that particular case I was conscious of the fact that this was a highly unusual approach for this particular commentary, given that the modèles generally had no screen careers to speak of!

[MichaelB]

Another crucial point is that there are varying degrees of film literacy. I always assume a minimum level (let's face it, nobody's going to buy the kind of films I record commentaries for without that), but by the same token when I'm recording pretty much any of my eastern European commentaries I suspect I'm right to assume that the listener most likely won't be especially familiar with the film's makers or the wider cultural context.

Perhaps the most extreme example of this is the Lithuanian rock musical The Devil's Bride, where I strongly suspected that I'd be dealing with a near-blank slate as regards the US-based listener's prior knowledge of the film, its makers, its literary source and Lithuanian culture in general, and nobody's said anything since that disc's release that suggests otherwise. Ditto the films of Polish dystopian sci-fi specialist Piotr Szulkin (for whom I've recorded three commentaries for labels based on both sides of the Atlantic), who until really startlingly recently was all but unknown outside the tiniest niche circles outside his native Poland - in this case I assumed prior familiarity with the work of, say, Krzysztof Kieślowski (a useful anchor point given that Kieślowski's favourite leading man Jerzy Stuhr also appears in many Szulkin films), but not with Szulkin himself.

On the other hand, when recording a commentary for Miloš Forman's Black Peter, I didn't go into overmuch detail about Forman's post-Czech career, because that's easy enough to look up. In fact, most of the stuff about his later work and indeed early biography was crammed into this brief section near the end:

Now this is the second longest scene in the film, and rather more narratively and psychologically pivotal than the dance, not least because it runs the whole of the final thirteen minutes. It’s mostly a heart-to-heart between father and son with only occasional interjections from Mum and, later, Čenda, and in the process it reveals a huge amount about both characters – and, arguably, about Forman himself. There are a lot of similar scenes in Forman’s films, revolving around a relationship between the protagonist and some authority figure – not necessarily the parent, but someone who has temporarily assumed that role. Think of Andula, the blonde in love, and her sobering encounter with her would-be boyfriend’s parents, or the witty inversion of a similar theme in Taking Off, in which it’s the parents who are the irresponsible ones and their daughter’s unsuitable hippie boyfriend turns out to be a successful musician with hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank. Later on, there’s the relationship between R.P McMurphy and Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and between Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and both the Emperor Joseph II and Antonio Salieri, his older but less talented rival. Peter Hames has speculated that this interest in quasi-parental authority figures might well stem from Forman’s own status as an orphan, or at least that’s what he thought he was for most of the two decades leading up to this film. His mother had been killed in Auschwitz in 1943, when Miloš was only eleven, and the man he believed was his father died under Gestapo interrogation the following year. A friend of his mother’s eventually contacted him to say that she’d asked her to tell him about his real father, but although Forman had a brief correspondence with him round about 1963 or 64, so either just before or after making this film, he decided not to meet him.

It's a constant guessing game, of course, and my Szulkin commentaries would have turned out very differently if I'd been primarily targeting a Polish audience - but hopefully I've got the balance more or less right. But every time I limber up for another one, I find myself constantly thinking about what I did in the past, why I did it, and whether I'd do it differently today, which is why I find threads like this so helpful (with apologies for unavoidable self-indulgence on my part).

[mrb404]

For anyone interested in audio commentaries and other supplemental features produced for home-video releases, I started putting together a series of Letterboxd lists, each dedicated to a specific author:

• Film commentary: Michael Brooke
• Film commentary: Samm Deighan
• Film commentary: Kat Ellinger
• Film commentary: Troy Howarth
• Film commentary: Tim Lucas
• Film commentary: Kevin Lyons
• Film commentary: Adrian Martin
• Film commentary: Tony Rayns
• Film commentary: Jonathan Rigby
• Film commentary: Imogen Sara Smith

The lists are organized chronologically, with the earliest feature work first, based on the street dates of the physical releases.
The “Read notes” option lists the physical release(s) on which the feature appears for each film (date of release, label, format, relevant details).

Most of the lists focus on audio commentaries and other A/V supplements (interviews, video or audio essays), though I’ve begun including written essays in the newer lists I completed.

[spectre]

This is a great resource, thanks!

[Peacock]

Thanks MrB.

Any future plans to add Kalat and Rosenbaum?

[domino harvey]

I had no idea Martin did a commentary on that Burt Reynolds Truffaut remake, I can only imagine what that one must be like!

[Maltic]

Apparently, he's getting in on the action: Soi Cheang's Accident (2009) coming on bluray from Chameleon and with a Martin commentary.

I don't recall him ever even mentioning a Hong Kong film, actually, in writing or commentary. Though I'm bound to have sought out his newspaper reviews for John Woo and WKW at some point.

[Maltic]

Thanks MrB.

Any future plans to add Kalat and Rosenbaum?

The commentariography can't be too long for Rosenbaum: Metropolis, Touch of Evil, Citizen Kane, Ambersons, Close Up, the Koker Trilogy, The Wind Will Carry Us, The Turin Horse?

[mrb404]

This is a great resource, thanks!

Thanks MrB.
Any future plans to add Kalat and Rosenbaum?

With pleasure! I'm actually working on a list for Jonathan Rosenbaum! In his case, essays are going to be an important part of the list.
And David Kalat is an upcoming project.

The commentariography can't be too long for Rosenbaum: Metropolis, Touch of Evil, Citizen Kane, Ambersons, Close Up, the Koker Trilogy, The Wind Will Carry Us, The Turin Horse?

Yes, the list is quite short. There’s also a few video essays he worked on : Red Angel, Black Test Car/Black Report...

[Maltic]

There's a Breathless Rosenbaum video essay too that I remember was a revelation to me back in the day.

And a shorter Gertrud vs The Sun Shines Bright comparison.

Here's a challenge: Kim Newman

https://johnnyalucard.com/non-fiction/dvd-notes/

[domino harvey]

In the Martin list you have Afterglow as part of the John Huston box, but it’s a single title release (by Alan Rudolph)

[mrb404]

In the Martin list you have Afterglow as part of the John Huston box, but it’s a single title release (by Alan Rudolph)

fixed. thank you!

[mrb404]

Here's a challenge: Kim Newman
https://johnnyalucard.com/non-fiction/dvd-notes/

started that one too, and, yes, it's intense!

[domino harvey]

Great work btw, looking forward to Kalat’s list

[Maltic]

Heller-Nicholas did the work on LB herself, as you may have seen.

Here's David Cairns' oeuvre, though it's a blog post from 2021.

[MichaelB]

I genuinely can't remember doing quite a few of the things on my list—in particular, I remember absolutely nothing about contributing to the BFI's Woodfall box set, let alone actually writing a 1,500-word essay for it called 'Contemporary Young Pups'. (That rather leaped out at me because the Letterboxd list attaches a collective essay to multiple individual titles.)

But a Spotlight search of my hard drive turned up the original Word doc, there seems to have been associated email correspondence, and it definitely reads like my work. It's actually quite a good piece, but I can only assume that I wrote it so smoothly and quickly, most likely in one sitting (it was about the original literary sources of the Woodfall films, a subject I already knew very well) that I blanked the experience from my mind.

[mrb404]

I genuinely can't remember doing quite a few of the things on my list—in particular, I remember absolutely nothing about contributing to the BFI's Woodfall box set, let alone actually writing a 1,500-word essay for it called 'Contemporary Young Pups'. (That rather leaped out at me because the Letterboxd list attaches a collective essay to multiple individual titles.)

I figured I would attach the essay to all the titles given that it's a global piece that touches all the films. Thank you so much for your work!

And the David Kalat and Jonathan Rosenbaum lists are online and (hopefully) complete... for now.

[Lowry_Sam]

Here's a challenge: Kim Newman
https://johnnyalucard.com/non-fiction/dvd-notes/

started that one too, and, yes, it's intense!

Just happened to pull out my copy of Shout's Trog which I saw has a Kim Newman interview but is not on the list.

Organizing his list into seprate ones for commentary, interviews & notes might make it easier to tackle.

Requests: Eddie Mueller, John Waters (probably not too long)

[okcmaxk]

Banking off a mention in the Lenny thread—what’s the consensus on Kremer’s commentaries? His tendency to bank on anecdotes involving someone from the film he met/became friends with has me hesitating to get new Imprint releases that he’s on. Are his tracks with cast and crew (Sydney Furie, etc) any better?