“Movie Ghosts”: the ghosts of Hollywood | LeMagduCine

Bamboo editions publish Movie Ghosts, by Stephen Desberg and Attila Futaki. Highly referenced, moored in the City of Angels, the album features an investigator who has the particularity of… conversing with the dead.

Billy Wilder, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, David Cronenberg, David Lynch: at all times, Hollywood has been the subject of little descriptions to its advantage, directly or indirectly. Stephen Desberg in turn looks at the capital of American cinema and, more broadly, at the City of Angels which hosts it. Jerry Fifth, its main character, is an investigator dragging his spleen through those legendary bars where Bogart and Gardner once went. He laments there about women, pours out his tinnitus and meets a man, Cornell, who sees nothing less than the expression of these “minds torn from their hopes”. Because Los Angeles counts them by the thousands, these stillborn talents, barely arrived already disappeared. Could it be their distant grievances that Jerry perceives indistinctly?

Beautifully imaged by Attila Futaki, whose hues often lean towards pink-mauve, Movie Ghosts takes the reader from the Millennium Biltmore to the villas of Beverly Hills, from the Walk of Fame to Sunset Boulevard, from trendy bars to cinemas showing old Orson Welles films (The Thirst for Evil in this case). Jerry first investigates the murder of former star Louise Sandler, before leaning, at the request of Louis B. Mayer, into the secret diary of Hollywood columnist Gilda Ghitis. In background : romance, manners, McCarthyism and “a special relationship with the beyond” which makes the salt of the album and will make Jerry say, now in liaison with an actress who committed suicide sixty years earlier: “Our relationship is the perfect reflection of the Hollywood illusion, the indefinable union of two beings separated by a screen, their feelings filtered by a silver canvas. »

A diptych titled Movie Ghosts could only be the pretext for a reexamination of Hollywood history. This goes through multiple references, from comparisons with Jean Harlow to posters by Spielberg, Romero or Hitchcock, not to mention the famous blacklists in which the studios discreetly participated in the time of McCarthyism. Stephen Desberg and Attila Futaki plunge Jerry Fifth into a long-term investigation, where the world of cinema resonates with frenzied anti-communism. Louis B. Mayer is no more than diffuse smoke announcing a blazing fire. The drawing flatters the eye, the cinephilia pulsates on each page and the irruption of the fantastic reveals a less than rosy story of post-war Hollywood. And in the middle of all this: an impossible, painful love, awakening passions but harbinger of failure.

Movie GhostsStephen Desberg and Attila Futaki
Bamboo, April 2022, 72 pages