Cinema of the World

The Man Who Invented Gold. 1957

Quote:

The Man Who Invented Gold, very different from The End, is fully as masterful. It focuses on a modern-day alchemist whose zombielike neighbors think of him as "madman" while he aspires to become "goldman." Again Maclaine narrates, likening the quest to create gold to a quest for the "world of light"; the editing is as disjunctive as in The End but arguably has a much more optimistic meaning, bringing to the forefront the Gnostic longing to escape substance and recover light that underlies parts of The End.

The filmmaker Jordan Belson, who shot The End, shot part of The Man Who Invented Gold before he tired of Maclaine's antics and quit. Forced to operate the camera himself, Maclaine could no longer play the alchemist. His "solution" was to have not one but two other actors play the lead. Further, while Belson filmed Maclaine in color, Maclaine filmed his actors in black and white, later intercutting color, black-and-white, and black-and-white negative images of the "madman." He also cut from one actor to the other as if they were the same man, even appearing to match motions across the cuts. Of course all these techniques undercut viewer identification with the alchemist, though they're entirely appropriate to a film by and about a madman. The narrator's references to alchemy are accompanied by cuts to abstract images, scratches made directly on the film or colored powders dropped on the floor in what look like abstract expressionist patterns — images that make it clear that destructive cutting can also transform. Maclaine realizes the alchemist's gnostic goal not in the film's story — the protagonist ultimately turns only eyeballs into gold — but in the film itself: abstract bursts of color, light streaming in through a window, or the tiny yo-yo a character carries near the end represent the brief moments of visual magic that lift us out of imprisonment in the material world...
from Fred Camper writing in the Chicago Reader.


Beat, 1958

Scotch Hop, 1959

Fred Camper again:

Quote:
The wonderful Scotch Hop (1959) is something of a letdown only after seeing his first two staggering, shattering masterpieces. In that film Maclaine intercuts a small band of bagpipers with other scenes, making some costumed young women appear to dance to the bagpipes' rhythms. Scotch Hop is animated by a tension between synchronicity and asynchronicity — the rhythms of the images and the music converge, then diverge. Each image feels as if it were perched on a knife-edge between a world of smooth, lyrical dance and a world about to be torn apart. Beat (1958) is weaker, an odd if sometimes powerful essay on alienation whose lack of emotional focus seems to prove that Maclaine's films need some sort of center, if only for their fragments to fly away from.

http://www.rarefile.net/5imxuz03rdue/Maclaine.rar

http://filepost.com/files/1f81859m/Maclaine.rar

Source: PAL VHS (Re:Voir)
DVD Format: PAL
DVD Audio: English
Program: PAL VHS digitized as PAL DV, Converted to PAL .m2v via Apple Compressor with progressive frame and de-interlace options. DVD created with DVD Studio Pro.
Menus: Simple front menu added. Films are in one track, separated as chapters, to which the menu buttons link.
Video: see above
Audio: converted from 48k PCM to AC3
DVD extras: none