American Nonsense: Frank Tashlin
April 11, 2008 - April 18, 2008
Paramount Pictures/Photofest
“Tashlin is the original pop-culture Pop Artist.”—J. Hoberman, Village Voice
Look at the films of Douglas Sirk through a filter of Warner Bros. cartoons, and you might see something like the comedies of Frank Tashlin. Like Sirk, Tashlin (1913–1972) depicted a fifties America of glaring colors and alienated culture—a world of illusions, imitations of life. But for Tashlin, the gaudy fantasies of a media-saturated public, the visions of consumer excess and packaged sex—travesties of biology—are objects of both parody and aesthetic celebration. He tagged his subject matter as “the nonsense of what we call civilization.”
Tashlin’s first movies, made in the thirties and forties, were cartoons. Later, his live-action films flaunt an energetic disregard for the physical limits of reality; they deploy actors like Jayne Mansfield and Jerry Lewis as living cartoons, exaggerated gestural figures on an abstract ground. And what a ground—Tashlin gave new meaning to the phrase “broad comedy,” exploiting the possibilities of the CinemaScope frame like no other comic director. Our small sampling of Tashlin’s work celebrates that wide, wide screen in films that are even bigger, louder, and funnier than American life.
Juliet Clark
Editor
Friday, April 11, 2008
7:00 p.m. The Girl Can’t Help It
Jayne Mansfield’s cartoon measurements are in perfect proportion with Tashlin’s hyperbolic CinemaScope satire of sex, money, and rock ’n’ roll.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
4:00 p.m. Son of Paleface
Bob Hope and Trigger make strange bedfellows in this thoroughly Tashlin Western, “a cavalcade of sharp, imaginative gags.”—Time Out N.Y.
Sunday, April 13, 2008
5:00 p.m. Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?
Tony Randall in a brilliantly composed ode to and exposé of Madison Avenue, laden with Brechtian gags and pop-modern design.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
6:30 p.m. Artists and Models
The best-ever Martin and Lewis movie is a toon-tinted satire of art, commerce, and comic books.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
8:30 p.m. It’$ Only Money
Jerry Lewis is a TV repairman and would-be detective without a clue.
Friday, April 18, 2008
7:00 p.m. Bachelor Flat
Proper British professor Terry-Thomas is plagued by amorous SoCal co-eds in Tashlin’s ultra-widescreen comedy.
PFA wishes to thank the following individuals and institutions for their assistance with this series: Barry Allen and Emily Horne, Paramount Pictures; Helena Brissenden and Suzanne LeRoy, Sony Pictures Releasing; Schawn Belston and Cary Haber, Criterion Pictures/20th Century Fox; Anne Morra, The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Martin Scorsese; and Mark McElhatten.
