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Richard Manning. Is
he, in fact, related to the Manning of Manning Chapel, or Manning Street?
I still don’t know, but those of us studying MCM, and those of us
who simply like to watch movies, know him well. He’s the man in
the Yo La Tengo t-shirt at every French Film Fest screening at the Cable
Car, the guy reclining on the couch in MCM reception critiquing the most
recently released cinematic endeavors, the archivist with a personality.
Richard knows everything there is to know about film, but what is there
to know about Richard? I intended to find out...
SK: Can you remember
the first film you ever saw?
RM: This is gonna be good. I think the first film I saw was Pinocchio,
with my Dad and brother, on a Sunday matinee in The Palace Theater in
Flint, Michigan. My Mom probably stayed home and cooked. I can also remember-and
this is getting really bizarre—there was a small theater, called
the Della. One week they were screening [chuckles] Marnie, Hitchcock’s
1964 film, and my Mom wanted to see it, and we went, and I must have been
like seven...I can remember Bruce Dern getting clubbed to death with a
fire-poker. This was like thirty years ago. My Mom was more the movie
person than my Dad or brother. She and I, again, went to either the Palace
Theater in downtown Flint or the Capital Theater to see Where Eagles Dare.
It’s this mid-60’s film starring Richard Burton and Clint
Eastwood, in which Clint and Richard almost single-handedly wipe out most
of the Third Reich. [Laughs]... I can also remember staying up late at
night with my Mom and brother, watching horror movies, and it would be
a double bill, and they would go to bed after the first one and we would
have to check the closets and under the bed because my brother would get
scared. Then I would go back into the living room and watch whatever they
were showing next. It might have been like Dracula, Invasion of the Saucer-Men,
Robot Monster, or Plan Nine from Outer Space, and the film would end like
two in the morning and I would just turn off the lights, go to bed, not
have any nightmares...
SK: What did you think of this year’s French Film Festival?
RM: Well, in terms of box office, we drew more this year than ever before.
In terms of the content of the films, it was just a touch lighter, a little
less intense... a few less real edgy films, like last year we had films
like Fat Girl, Trouble Every Day, the Claire Denis urban vampire flick
with Vincent Gallo, Intimacy. Last year there was more French angst going
on. Every year at the festival there’s like a core audience of people
not obviously connected to Brown or RISD, say between the ages of thirty
and fifty, that really wanna see different kinds of movies, and they come—that’s
good. But like this year, I’m slightly disappointed by the student
turnout, especially RISD. And the artsy crowd from Providence—the
other side of the freeway, White Electric, or even this side of the freeway—the
AS220 crowd. We’re not reaching them. One thing I thought is that
we could aggressively try to track down French experimental films, and
like have a program that would be all experimental short films, and see
if that could draw on that crowd.
SK: What’s your opinion on Demonlover?
RM: Wildly mixed. I liked the excess. The only way it was going to work
for me was to just be as excessive as possible. It contrasts markedly
with the last film he made—Sentimental Destinies—which is
this early 20th century French period piece that is so restrained.
SK: Can you talk about all these objects in here? [Points at dead bird
on office wall]. What is that?
RM: That’s a pheasant. It was a gift from a couple who saw it at
a flea market in Maine for five dollars and they thought it would be perfect
for my office. Most of the stuff is gifts, although there’s a few
things that I had. Liza and Susan [MCM staff] have bought some stuff for
me. Have you seen this one? [Pulls out a plastic toy—a girl submerged
in a bathtub]. I don’t know whether it still works. [Puts a coin
on the edge of the tub, presses a button, and the girl’s foot emerges
from the water and sweeps the coin into the tub, with a loud grinding
sound].
SK: [Laughs]. That’s amazing. So that was a gift?
RM: That was a gift. And this was a gift, but he’s empty right now.
[Pulls out a similar toy, this one a man in a shower stall]. You’re
supposed to open it and he turns and urinates on you.
SK: I wanted to ask about you, as a viewer.
RM: Me as a viewer? What’s that all about? I watch movies. Let’s
say that there have been some years when I’ve seen a thousand movies
in a year.
SK: Do you count? Like do you have a list?
RM: Yes. Nobody sees it. They will see it when I’ve died. Generally
it’s been handwritten, and it’s uneven, meaning that there
might be a stretch when it’s just simply the film title, and then
there might be a stretch when there’s like, notes, about the film.
Where I live there’s a couple of very messy stacks of all these
notes on paper of varying sizes and shapes and colors. I mean it’s
nothing that’s going to be, obviously, published posthumously. They’re
not gonna say this guy was some kind of a genius film scholar because
I’m not, you know, I’m just your average person in terms of
watching movies. [Laughs]. I’ve probably seen—it’s approaching
twenty thousand movies, but that’s screenings, so there are repeats
in there. So say if I’ve seen Vertigo nine times...I don’t
have a limit. There’s definitely some films that I could watch over
and over again. And why I’m watching them at a particular point
probably has nothing to do with any sort of intellectual enhancement.
It’s usually entirely an emotional and visceral thing. If I’m
in certain mood I might watch Animal Crackers with the Marx Brothers for
the sixteenth time, or Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer for the ninth
time.
SK: Do you have a top five or a top ten?
RM: Well, one film usually somewhere in my top hundred is The Passenger.
The 1975 film, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. Just because generally—this
is gonna sound silly—I can really identify with the Jack Nicholson
character. He’s a foreign affairs journalist for some British radio
or television station and he’s burnt out, and his most recent tour
of duty is some unnamed African country, covering yet another revolution
or a coup, and he’s clearly frustrated and in a mid-life crisis,
and he meets this person who looks a little bit like him, who dies of
a heart attack. So he switches identities with this guy, and literally
assumes his itinerary, and it turns out that he’s some gun-runner
who gets weapons for a number of terrorist or anti-terrorist organizations
throughout the world. It takes him to Spain...and of course he meets Maria
Schneider. That always helps. She’s an architecture student studying
Gaudi. So there are some interesting shots of the Gaudi stuff. Actually
I went to Spain about four years ago, with a woman I was dating, and she
and I tried to pose on some of the Gaudi things the way Maria Schneider
and Nicholson were in The Passenger. [Laughs].
SK: Did you take pictures?
RM: Yeah, I don’t know where my pictures are. Maybe I burnt them
all. [Rummages around in desk drawer to find manila folder with stack
of old photos inside] Oh, you’re gonna get lucky. [Holds out a photo].
There’s the Parc Guell. Maybe that other one I burned because she
was in it. Yeah, maybe I...no, I can’t have burned it... There,
that one we were trying to do a scene from The Passenger. What a crazy
time that was.
SK: Has watching many films made you nostalgic for a past you never experienced,
or for something that you’ve only experienced via cinema?
RM: Why say nostalgic rather than desirous of something? If I’m
sitting watching The Passenger for the eighteenth time and I’m in
a particularly stressed out mood, and I’m thinking I wanna be Jack
Nicholson in that film. Is that desire, or nostalgia, or what? Or do I
watch Where Eagles Dare and think I wish life now were simpler as it was
when I saw it with my mom? Like, back then when I was six or seven years
old, and a lot of things were taken care of for me. And I had parental
love. Both my parents are dead, so there could be movies I see when I
realize, I saw this with
my mom. I remember seeing The Unbearable Lightness of Being with my mom.
My mom and I always would get into an argument because she couldn’t
deal with sex on the screen, and I could. So she might whisper to me during
the film, “Why do they have to show that?” And I would usually
respond, “Well, maybe they were trying to tell you something about
the characters by showing that.” I know my mom and dad both hated
The Shining. [Chuckle] I think after seeing The Shining my dad vowed he
didn’t wanna see a movie again.
SK: Do you like The Shining?
RM: I love The Shining. I could watch that, like, every other month.
Sarah Kessler B’03 has archive fever.
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