Lost film of a Paul Bowles story recovered
Nov 13, 2010 16:26:48 GMT
Post by bixaorellana on Nov 13, 2010 16:26:48 GMT
[You Are Not I] was named one of the best movies of the 1980s by a critic in Cahiers du Cinéma.
But almost as quickly as it built a cult reputation, the film fell from view, the victim of a leak in a New Jersey warehouse that destroyed Ms. Driver’s negative. That left her with only one film-festival print so battered that it would barely run through a projector. When museums and art house theaters called over the years asking to show it, she would turn them down, not wanting the film to be seen in such bad shape.
Two years ago a film librarian from the University of Delaware traveled to Morocco to speak at a conference. While in Tangier, the librarian, Francis Poole, who knew Bowles well during the last years of his life, was contacted by Abdelouahed Boulaich, Bowles’s longtime butler and his heir. Mr. Boulaich told Mr. Poole that he still had a few of the writer’s things and asked if he wanted to see them. The two took a taxi from Mr. Poole’s hotel to an empty house owned by Mr. Boulaich, who unlocked a door to a small ground-floor salon that smelled as if it had been closed for years.
With a small flashlight and a digital camera, Mr. Poole set about documenting the room’s contents, which included piles of letters and books and two manual Olympic typewriters, one long used by Paul Bowles and the other by his wife, Jane. Below them on a bookcase sat a film box with two reels inside; the label was faded except for a New York return address visible beneath the dust and insecticide.
Click text above to read the full story.
en.riff.is/Films2010/Aboutfilm/you-are-not-i-english
But almost as quickly as it built a cult reputation, the film fell from view, the victim of a leak in a New Jersey warehouse that destroyed Ms. Driver’s negative. That left her with only one film-festival print so battered that it would barely run through a projector. When museums and art house theaters called over the years asking to show it, she would turn them down, not wanting the film to be seen in such bad shape.
Two years ago a film librarian from the University of Delaware traveled to Morocco to speak at a conference. While in Tangier, the librarian, Francis Poole, who knew Bowles well during the last years of his life, was contacted by Abdelouahed Boulaich, Bowles’s longtime butler and his heir. Mr. Boulaich told Mr. Poole that he still had a few of the writer’s things and asked if he wanted to see them. The two took a taxi from Mr. Poole’s hotel to an empty house owned by Mr. Boulaich, who unlocked a door to a small ground-floor salon that smelled as if it had been closed for years.
With a small flashlight and a digital camera, Mr. Poole set about documenting the room’s contents, which included piles of letters and books and two manual Olympic typewriters, one long used by Paul Bowles and the other by his wife, Jane. Below them on a bookcase sat a film box with two reels inside; the label was faded except for a New York return address visible beneath the dust and insecticide.
Click text above to read the full story.
en.riff.is/Films2010/Aboutfilm/you-are-not-i-english