My suggestions would be "Carry on camping" followed by "Whity" by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
I've had this idea recently about how there is a connection between the films of Gerald Thomas (Director/Producer of the Carry Ons) and those of RWF.
Here's a few of my points to support this pairing:
I've had this idea recently about how there is a connection between the films of Gerald Thomas (Director/Producer of the Carry Ons) and those of RWF.
Here's a few of my points to support this pairing:
- Only difference between them is that one of the crew won the war.
- Sex as hidden and closeted in the Carry Ons (not only do you have a dressing gown, but you have pyjamas as well) versus this feeling in Fassbinder of do whatever.
- But crucially, the same sets, the same farm of actors in differing roles
- There's an interiority/claustrophobia present in both - not many outdoor shots. Presumably budgetary constraints
- Sex comedy vs sex tragedy? That is basically the difference.
- The colours, the costumes, the lighting, the make up, the set design, everything other than the direction but even that's the same
- Carry ons make a good use of montage. They are actually very cinematic films: there's dialogue but it's musical, you could possibly watch these with the sound off. Lot of visual gags.
- Sid James, not even English, but British, more English. Sid James as a eugenic creation, an example of what you can do with an empire. Like in Fassbinder, where anyone not German becomes the object of desire, epitomised in Querelle. Sid James maps onto Ali.
- Single sets, panning camera. Long shots.
- The Joan Sims vs Barbara Castle dynamic, repeated in Fassbinder with the differing woman archetypes.
- There's always a guy goosing a woman. In England, they won and they can do it. In Germany, they lost and they can do the same.
- The Carry Ons explore class and propriety. The Fassbinders explore life in the absence of these strictures.
- Separate beds, caramel and sky blue bedding. But something about the swirls of colour in the painting on the wall.
- It's important to consider the legacy. Gerald Thomas who directed most of the carry Os, his nephew is Jeremy Thomas of RPC, who produced a significant output of art films, though strangely no one can remember any of them (eg bertoluccis last emperor) as though he was trying to expunge his avuncular father with art?
- There's a party at the end of every carry on where it all comes together and apart.
- Unlikely couplings.
- Basically all shot in a master, on a 50mm lens. Like bresson. All mids and masters, no close.
- The eyes. Whity's eyes and Barbara Windsor's eyes are the same eyes. And he's dressed all in red. Both of them in their own ways autopsies.
- There's a severity in fassbinder which is admittedly not present in the carry ons. The Fassbinder is slower, there's pulling of focus, deliberate use of silence.
- He's black, she's red and they are in the centre, in the distance. And everyone around them foregorunded are blue and yellow and nothing.
- Cartoon Chaplinesque violence in the fassbinder and the carry ons.
- But the ensemble cast, the colours, the general thrown together nature, they do have that in common.
- Ridiculous literally Carry On violent scenes in Fassbinder though.
- And despite the Fassbinder's being regarded as "slow", they tend to have the same run times as the Carry Ons.
- RWF did the same thing as the Carry Ons, "trying on" different genres but remaking them in his own way - Whity as his cowboy movie, Ali Fear Eats the soul as his homage to Sirk, the detective genre etc. In the same way, the Carry Ons locate the same characters in different settings.