Most film criticism is historically divided into two eras: before the French New Wave and after the French New Wave. Until the ’60s, serious writing on film was hard to come by, but the passion, encyclopedic movie knowledge, and bountiful imagination of the Cahiers du cinÈma critics and others ushered in the world of film theory, academia, and a worldwide culture of cinephilic scribblers.

When Pauline Kael, an icon of the more popular latter era, died a couple years ago, there was a lot of press devoted to her career. Icons previous to the ’60s, however, tend to receive much less attention even though their historical influence may have actually been more pronounced. John Patterson offers a brief commentary on film critics and particularly one such writer from its beginnings, Robert Warshow, for the Guardian. And last Sunday, the Los Angeles Times offered a feature profile of another pioneer, Manny Farber, who has turned to painting the last few decades and is opening his latest exhibition in San Diego. (The link may require registration.) Farber was one of the early mavericks, a piercing wordsmith who engaged movies from the ’40s to the ’70s in publications like The New Republic, Commentary, and The Nation and sifted them through his eccentric intelligence.

Farber was known as an early champion of the American action film and Hollywood stylists like Howard Hawks, Don Siegel, Samuel Fuller, and even Chuck Jones. During the ’40s, when film criticism was largely a formal mediocre affair with commentary like, “Mr. So-and-So directs this picture professionally with a sure and steady hand,” Farber would feverishly laud the work of, say, Warner Brothers cartoonists:

Some of the best movies of the year are seven-minute cartoons called by names like All This and Rabbit Stew or The Fighting 69th 1/2, which come on as unheralded transitions in the double bill and feature the notorious Bugs Bunny, a rabbit that not only performs physical feats of a Paul Bunyan magnitude but is equally sharp with his mind. . . Despite the various positions on humor (Tex Avery is a visual surrealist proving nothing is permanent, McKimson is a showbiz satirist with throwaway gags and celebrity spoofs, Friz Freling is the least contorting, while Jones’s specialty, comic character, is unusual for the chopping up of motion and the surrealist imposition: a Robin Hood duck, whose flattened beak springs out with each repeated faux pas as a reminder of the importance of his primary ineptness), the Warner cartoonists are refreshing iconoclasts because they concentrate on so many other humor antecedents besides brutal mishaps, cultural punning, balletlike sadism. (1943)

Farber was no less eloquent when it came to features, as this paragraph from his comments on Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1948) reveals:

Though there is an unfortunate alliance here with [screenwriter] Graham Greene’s glib encapsulation of people, and the feeling here that Reed is deserting intelligence for a lyrical-romantic kick, the precocious use of space, perspective, types of acting (stylized, distorted, understated, emotionalized) and random, seemingly irrelevant subject matter, enlarges and deepens both the impression of a marred city and a sweet, amoral villian (Welles), who seems most like a nearly satiated baby at the breast. But it bears the usual foreign trademarks (pretentious camera, motorless design, self-conscious involvement with balloon-hawker, prostitute, porter, belly dancer, tramp) overelaborated to the point of being a monsterpiece. It uses such tiresome symbol-images as a door that swings with an irritating rhythm as though it had a will of its own; a tilted camera that leaves you feeling you have seen the film from a foetal position; fiendish composing in Vuillard’s spotty style, so that the screen crawls with patterns, textures, bulking shapes, a figure becoming less important than the moving ladder of shadow passing over it. (1950)

As the quote suggests, Farber had a passion for spatiality (“the most dramatic stylistic entity”) and how it was represented in film in terms of “1) the field of the screen, 2) the psychological space of the actor, and 3) the area of experience and geography that the film covers.” Many of his essays have been published in the 1998 expanded version of his 1971 Negative Space, a book praised by cultural voices as diverse as Susan Sontag and William Gibson. Reading it generates a potpourri of cinematic images mediated through the unexpected twists and turns of Farber’s imaginative language.

Those lucky enough to visit his art exhibition in San Diego will only gain additional perspectives into the heart and mind one of the major American film critics of the 20th century.

Day
1 – Friday, September 26, 2003

By John
Torvi

It
is really quite advantageous if the city that you live in has an
international film festival. No airplane ticket. No hotel fees. It’s
really great to be able to easily watch 2-3 movies per day (with a few
more on the weekends), most of which would probably never even make to
art houses. So I took advantage of this opportunity and have been going
to the Calgary International Film Festival for
the past few days.

Many
of the film venues are situated pretty close together
within walking distance. And if you don’t want to walk there’s always
the public transit “C-Train” which closes the gap pretty
sufficiently.

Having said that I started off my
local film festival experience with two films, The Fog of
War and
On_Line.

The Fog of War

A very gray (foggy?)
documentary depiction of Robert
MacNamara.

Errol Morris
successfully plays with the audience’s head in this
one–half-biography/half-American history lesson–McNamara
recounts his life, the private (that he will let us see) and the
public, fighting the war in Japan, working for Ford, and as defense
secretary under two US presidents. There are times that
you feel a slight respect for the person, seemingly a deep thinker, and
dedicated to the jobs and appointments that he had. Then there are
other times where McNamara just has to say a few words about his
defense secretary days and what he ‘doesn’t want to talk about’ to
leave you to wonder what exactly he means by that. The Phillip Glass
score really helps at this point to make you feel
uncomfortable.

What
I get out of McNamara (which is really scary) is that he really just
wants to do his job well, whether that’s saving lives by
installing seat belts in cars or being a more efficient war
machine. And he doesn’t seem to see (or reveal) the difference
between the two.

At the end of the film (SPOILER
ahead)
McNamara is asked if he could comment further on the war in Vietnam and
he responds by saying that he could say many things on it but that he
worried that people would construe it or misinterpret his meaning. The
director (off-camera) then says, “Well, I guess you’re damned if you
do, and damned if you don’t.” McNamara responds: “Well, I’d rather be
damned if I don’t.” We could at least say it was an honest reply, and
perhaps McNamara in this film shows more of his human side (whether
this is his intention or not) than many would care to in
public.

This could contrast with the The
Trials of Henry Kissinger (2002) in which Kissinger only
shows his ‘good side’, or at least tries
to.

On_Line

I
remember from last year’s festival skipping some of the films I felt
were way out in the forbidden zone as far as my tastes were concerned.
I decided to take the risk with On_Line which deals
with two
gents who operate a sexcam operation out of their apartment. Oh boy.
The film deals with the sexual voyeurism of both the users of the site
and site’s featured um… artists (?), as well as the search for
relationship all entangled within that.

Halfway
through the film I’m thinking, “this is a low-budget film
trying to be an art film.” But there started to be some really
honest, genuine, and quite funny moments to it. Part of
the struggle of the characters is wondering if the on-line fantasy
could ever carry over into real life–most of the time it doesn’t and
ends up being more disappointing to them than anything
else.

There
is the question of “what is honest reality?” provoked between the
webcam voyeurism of “seeing real people as they really are” versus what
people will only let you see. In the end, the movie doesn’t offer any
simple
answers.

Day
2 – Saturday September 27, 2003

Saturday
was a real treat. It was all about the animated shorts–and being an
animation devotee, I was looking forward to
it.

There
were some international and Canadian entries this year, and even a
local artist’s animation was in the program. Here are some
highlights:

Tim
Tom

I’ve always been really impressed with
stuff that comes out of the
Supinfocom
school in France. A real good handle on technology and original
storytelling. I can say that I’ve grown to be a fan of their stuff
since attending the 2001 and 2002 SIGGRAPH computer graphics conferences.
Tim Tom
doesn’t disappoint. The simple story of two characters trying to meet
each other, all the while being obstructed by a higher
power.

I
love the different mediums that are used in this film–CG and hand
drawings for representing facial expressions on their coil ring
notebook heads. Really great–a very entertaining
film.

Showa
Shinzan

A National Film Board (NFB) entry,
Showa Shinzan
is the story of a Japanese woman recalling an event from her childhood.
Her parents were killed during the World War II, forcing her to live
with her grandparents. During this time her grandfather is the only
person, being that everyone is involved and concerned with the war
effort, to witness the birth of a new mountain in
Japan.

Combining
elements such as CG characters, historic film footage, and Japanese
bamboo brush paintings gives a unique quality to the animation. The
historical footage says that this has taken place in the context of
something that most people know about (WWII), but the ‘modern’ CG
animation suggests a more contemporary context. It brings the viewer
into a story that could’ve happened yesterday.

What
I get out of this is that miraculous events like the birth of
mountains are extremely rare and yet they do happen, so you are blessed
if you happen to witness
them.

F.E.D.S.

Director
Jennifer Drummond employs the same proprietary
software that made Waking Life
(2001) come alive to go behind the scenes of FEDS, the people who dish
out free food samples at grocery stores (Food Education Demo
Specialists). I’m not sure this has the same ‘wow’ impact that
Waking Life had, where there was just so
much of this technique in one movie. But I liked the real-ness of the
characters, these could be people that you see in your grocery store
down the
street.

How
to Cope With Death

An
elderly women is visited by the Grim Reaper, only the Reaper gets it in
end. Given its aesthetic look, one might think it is 3D computer
animation rendered by a computer and then hand-painted. Nope. The whole
film is hand-drawn. The
timing is great, even down to the little details where grandma adjusts
her… accoutrements. It’s just so good to laugh at Death… in the
face.

The
Toll Collector

Wow. This is an incredibly
beautiful film with a heart of
gold. A deformed lonely woman who longs for happiness and
companionship feels that somehow she is unworthy because of her
deformities. A fan of Tim Burton, Rachael Johnson
crafts a personal masterpiece of puppetry animation. The disturbingly
beautiful imagery, which I think is probably a Burton trademark,
evocatively describes the pains of loneliness, without being clichÈd
about
it.

* * * *

I was
pretty tired after I left the theatre that day–earlier in the day I
had spent time at the animation co-op here in
Calgary as part of a workshop with NFB animation director
Chris Hinton
(who I will get to in Day 3). I needed food and to be honest I hadn’t
really planned out my day well enough in advance to know what I wanted
to see next. I had decided to go home, but the downtown train line had
maintenance crews working on the tracks, so I decided to head further
up the line to catch my train home. My stomach grumbled along the way
and I decided I could spare the time to grab a bite to
eat.

I
passed by one of the other theatres for the film festival and noticed
that there was another film playing there in a couple of hours. So I
grabbed a bite to eat at Sam’s Deli and window shopped some of the
stores in the area then got in line.

American
Cousins

I think this was probably what I
needed that night. A warm quirky comedy much in the same vein as
something like Waking Ned Divine
(1998). The story is about two Italian American mobsters running from
the Ukrainian mob, who go into hiding in their cousin’s fish and chips
shop in Glasgow, Scotland. The cousin operates the shop with the help
of his grandfather and a waitress (who he’s in love with, but is too
shy to tell her). Much hilarity ensues as these two cultures clash and
learn from one another. I liked how the mobsters didn’t fit the mold of
the dumb tough mobster type–there was warmth and intelligence in their
characters, even if they were involved organized crime. I found the
film warm, hopeful, and funny.

Then I finally
boarded the train and went home to sleep.

By J. Robert Parks

British director Michael Winterbottom is one of the most eclectic filmmakers I know. He’s done literary adaptations (Jude), political docudramas (Welcome to Sarajevo), wintery Westerns (The Claim), trippy pomo biopics (24-Hour Party People), and futuristic, sci-fi love stories (Code 46, to be released next year). But his bravest and most successful film to date, In This World (2003), is inspired by a country most Americans associate with the “axis of evil.”

As I’ve written many times in this space, the Iranian New Wave is one of the most important cinematic developments of the last decade. Directors like Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf have had an enormous impact on the rest of world cinema. They adapted Italian neorealism (with its portrayals of urban youth) and documentary techniques like nonprofessional actors, handheld cameras, and natural light, and fused those with a purified storytelling that belied its apparent simplicity with extraordinary force. Indeed, you can’t talk about the Dogme movement in the West or the explosion of the master shot form in China and Taiwan without looking first at what’s happened in Iran since the late ’80s.

After watching In This World, it’s clear that Winterbottom’s been paying attention. His movie is a virtual homage to Iranian cinema, though it has more than enough creativity to stand on its own. The story concerns sixteen-year-old Jamal (Jamal Udin Torabi) and his older cousin Enayat (Enayatullah). Afghan refugees, they live in a Pakistani camp but dream of a better life in London. That’s the dream of their families as well, who scrounge up the money, by killing a prized cow among other things, to send them. The problem is that the route is a long, dangerous one over land, and nowhere along the way do they have proper documentation. Only by going through shady smugglers do they have a chance. It’s their only chance, though, so they take it.

In This World is basically a road movie, following our protagonists through the hills of Pakistan, into the urban milieu of Tehran, across the snowy mountains that divide Iran from Turkey, and beyond. Jamal is the only one who speaks English, so he acts as the leader despite his youth. Winterbottom does a fantastic job of conveying how difficult and scary it must be to navigate your way in a place you’ve never been before. At times, the two meet wonderful people who take them in and care for them. At other times, they meet not-so-wonderful people who take their money and send them packing. Through it all, the two hold on to the hope of a better life.

Winterbottom uses handheld digital cameras to chronicle their odyssey. I was disappointed at first, as some of the landscape imagery would be spectacular on film but feels dull and lifeless on video. As the movie goes on, however, Winterbottom and cinematographer Marcel Zyskind manipulate their video images to striking effect. Many of the night shots take on an almost abstract quality, dots and lines of light against the darkness. I realize the use of digital video was primarily an economic decision, but after a while it creates a mood that fits the neorealist narrative. The use of ambient sound adds tremendously as well.

If In This World were just a road movie, it’d be an interesting tale. By situating it, though, in postwar Afghanistan and Pakistan and then threading through the Middle East, Winterbottom forces his Western audience to confront the human dimension of places we only seem to bomb, to understand the people whom we stereotype and vilify. The refugee problem is an international crisis, and yet most Westerners don’t have a clue or choose not to have one. This film is a powerful portrayal of what we try not to see.

All of which is why taking an Iranian approach is both strikingly appropriate and effective. Iranian cinema has consistently stripped its stories down to their bare essentials, focusing on normal characters confronted with a problem. No fancy effects, no distracting subplots. Instead, we watch a child try to deliver some homework, we watch a woman try to find a job, we watch a family try to cross the border. The simplicity of Iranian cinema has infuriated critics like Roger Ebert, who see it as miserablism in the extreme. Yet, that misses the power of seeing a story told with economy and verve, of being confronted with the lives of people whom we never see on the six-o-clock news. By adopting that approach, Winterbottom not only honors those who’ve gone before him (with direct quotations of Bahman Ghobadi‘s Time for Drunken Horses and Kiarostami’s documentaries) but recognizes that the form of a story must match its content.

I can’t talk about the ending of In This World without giving far too much away. I’ll just say it’s one of the more powerful conclusions I’ve seen this year. In particular, the film’s title takes on great and poignant significance. A friend of mine saw it and wondered what the point was, arguing that the film seemed unfocused. My response was that the movie achieves three of the highest goals art can accomplish–to portray the lives of real people, to tell stories we otherwise wouldn’t hear, and to move us to thoughtful prayer and action on behalf of those less fortunate than us. And it does all of this with beauty and grace. In This World is a tremendous artistic achievement.

4.5 stars (out of 5)

(Ed. note–Human Rights Watch offers an informative webpage devoted to worldwide refugees as well as a page devoted to the current human rights situation in Afghanistan.)

So I saw Lost in Translation this weekend and, like the critics are saying, I enjoyed its witty charms and mature sensibilities regarding its unusual relationship between a middle-aged actor (Bill Murray) and a photographer’s disillusioned young wife (Scarlett Johansson) after they meet while dejectedly passing through Tokyo. I found Murray’s stoic sarcasm endearing and Johansson’s adorable frumpiness fetching, and Sofia Coppola‘s observant writing and direction was intensified by her exceptional aesthetic bond with Johansson’s every move.

However, throughout the film I had an uneasy feeling that arose every time the characters looked wistfully out of their highrise hotel windows at the distant cityscapes, in the many scenes which joked about the Asian English accent (“l”s instead of “r”s!) or pronounced social roles, and the way the city seemed perpetually so remote and strange that even in social clubs, the Japanese people merely sat anonymously in the shadows–the most exhilarating discovery by the Americans in the streets of Tokyo was their own image on a passing bus.

Now, this isn’t simply my PC-notation, but a genuine sense that the relationship I admired in the film was inseparable from its cultural isolation and the film’s ability to cocoon its viewers within it. The Tokyo setting was merely an excuse to romanticize this isolation–a thriving city with an expansive culture which might as well have been the wild outback of Walkabout or the windswept rocks of L’Avventura. Murray and Johansson’s characters reminded me of the sort of people who travel to other countries and then sit inside hotel rooms, watching foreign videos (in their case, Fellini’s La Dolce Vita) while complaining about the otherness of their environment. I think I would’ve appreciated their relationship more if I hadn’t felt the dramatic cards were stacked in order to make them the only humans in town, and I would appreciate the critical raves more if I didn’t question the film’s alleged cultural salvation at a time when American isolation seems to be such a critical issue.

If Lost in Translation doesn’t offer a nuanced view of Japanese culture, another film I watched this weekend, Satoshi Kon‘s elegant anime, Millennium Actress, thoroughly makes up for it. A major competitor against Spirited Away in 2001 for top animation awards, to my knowledge, it’s also the first international film Dreamworks has picked up for (limited) distribution with a DVD release planned for next month.

The basic premise involves the destruction of a historic Japanese movie studio and the efforts of a documentary filmmaker to track down its retired star, Chiyoko, who unexpectedly disappeared from the public eye many years before. Now in her 70s, she is given a key that was found within the crumbling studio and holding it, reminisces about her career, the various films she starred in, and the long lost, mysterious young man who initially gave her the key.

Beyond that premise, plot summary is virtually impossible, because director Kon presents the narrative as a whirlwind, reality-bending genre montage which not only incorporates the documentary filmmaker into Chiyoko’s memories, but also reimagines each of the central characters of her life (including herself) in various dramatic guises according to each film in her career. This gestalt method of picturing and projecting one’s life through history and its cinematic representation–the past, present, and future hopelessly and beautifully blended together–creates a moving statement on the way movies shape our notions about ourselves and the world we live in.

This structure also offers an affectionate look at Japanese genres through the ages–Chiyoko’s films span samurai epics and science fiction utopias, period dramas, martial arts actioneers, and shomin-geki melodramas. (Although director Kon claims Chiyoko’s character isn’t based on any Japanese actress in particular, he notes that the character has similarities to Setsuko Hara, who appeared in many films by Yasujiro Ozu before abruptly retiring.) Citing George Roy Hill’s freewheeling Slaughterhouse Five (1972) as a major influence, Kon offers a briskly-paced flurry of cultural memories and unrequited love, beautifully rendered in subdued colors and mesmerizing, cool tones.

Doing our best to perpetuate the world of Internet polling, the moderators over at Masters of Cinema will be seeking votes for DVD of the Year. We won’t be tallying actual votes for a couple of months, but you may wish to start thinking about which disc you’ll pick. The DVD can be from anywhere in the world but must have been released sometime in 2003, and note: this award is not for the DVD with the most extras, but for the most important DVD release of the year.

While you’re there be sure and take a look at Nick Wrigley’s review of Eureka’s new Region 2 special edition release of Fritz Lang‘s M (1931), the landmark crime thriller that followed soon after Lang’s Metropolis (1927). European and Japanese viewers–as well as those with all-region DVD players–won’t want to miss this extraordinary 2-disc set, which features a newly restored print and many extras.

This also seems like an opportune time to plug a recent acquisition of mine, the formidable coffee table book Fritz Lang: His Life and Work, Pictures and Documents published by the Filmmuseum Berlin in 2001. Large format, hardback, and over 500 pages long, it’s a small workout to carry it from my bookshelf, but it fortunately offers hefty content as well.

Written in German, with included English and French translations, the tome offers a meticulously researched examination of Lang’s biography (1890-1976). Illustrated with a wide assortment of large photographs–from Lang’s Vienna birth certificate to sketches he made in the trenches of World War I revealing enemy positions, to storyboards and personal letters–the book functions as a lavish collection of memorabilia. One learns the details of Lang’s college enrollment, his military promotions, the mysterious evidence surrounding the death of his first wife in 1920 (shot in the chest in their home, her death certificate merely declares her death an “accident”), and even reveals documents of the FBI’s surveillance of Lang in America. Among other details:

Lang had a weakness for stuffed monkeys. His first one was probably a present from Gerda Maurus in Berlin. Even in production stills, a monkey can often be seen perched on a camera . . . Lang had a rather touchingly tender, sentimentally boyish relationship to Peter the Monkey: he took him with him on trips, put him to bed, dressed him up and posed in pictures with him. In the countless letters he exchanged with his lifelong friend Eleanor RosÈ, there are many passages devoted to Peter: for example, greetings from him for Magali, Eleanor RosÈ’s favorite cat; or letters directly addressed to Peter or “written” by Peter to Eleanor. “Peter sends his warmest regards. He is meditating a great deal and enjoying the California sun. He loves martinis, smokes a long pipe now and again, and has taken to chewing gum. He sends his compliments to Magali and wishes her the best.” (Fritz Lang to Eleanor RosÈ, July 30, 1963, Filmmuseum Berlin archives.)

But such information functions more than anecdotally. Lang exhibited a fondness for tall tales and personal elaborations which make it difficult to separate the man from the myth. His most famous story–one recounted in film books for years–involved a fateful encounter between Lang and Goebbels in March of ’33 when the Minister of Propaganda purportedly asked him to oversee the Nazi film industry, which ostensibly provoked Lang’s flight from Germany that very night. In fact, Lang was the only witness to this encounter and the incident never appears in Goebbels’ diary. There is also evidence to suggest Lang continued to visit Germany at least until July ’33.

The book also offers an informative examination of Lang’s artistic career. For M, it provides an essay Lang wrote on the film (“Anyone who makes the effort to read closely the newspaper reports about major homicide cases of the past few years…will find a strange similarity of events in most instances”), a critical jousting match between Gabriele Tergit and Rudolph Arnheim, a description of how the Nazis appropriated the film for anti-Semitic propaganda, a historical account of police procedures (including the new use of fingerprinting), and a description of the German debate on capital punishment during the early-’30s.

In short, this is a highly informative and picaresque journey through the life of a cinematic giant, both a historical record and a substantial tribute.

Those interested in delving into Lang’s extraordinary work shouldn’t pass up three DVD restorations, Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922), Die Nibelungen (1924), and Metropolis, as well as many other Lang films offered on DVD and VHS. Senses of Cinema offers an essay on his life and career, here. Kino International offers a website devoted to their theatrical rerelease of Metropolis, here.

Jurgen Fauth and Marcy Dermansky over at About.com‘s Guide to Independent and World Film have just informed us that filmjourney.org has been selected as one of their top 15 Best Movie Blogs. (Additionally, a site that I co-admin, Masters of Cinema, also made the list.) We’d like to think of this as a challenge as much as a confirmation, and hope to continue offering informative and useful content in the days ahead.

Speaking of which, be sure to check out J. Robert’s latest Toronto update, which he termed “Good but Flawed” films.

J. Robert continues to send in his informative Toronto fest reviews, and here’s his latest batch. Be sure to visit his entire thread for the complete series. -Doug

* * * *

Tuesday, September 9, 2003
Day 5 — Hump Day

by J. Robert Parks

By day five, I feel like an old hand. I know exactly where to go, how much time to allow myself, and how to navigate the various lines. People ask me for directions, and I know where to point. Not that I need it much, but I can even navigate the subway system. Mike Hertenstein will be happy to know I wore my Flickerings shirt today and received positive comments from
several total strangers. I haven’t mentioned the weather before, but it has been spectacular every single day. Sunny, mid-70s, no humidity. Absolutely perfect. I’m not sure what it says about me that I’m spending this perfect weather by going inside dark rooms for long periods of time. More on cinephilia later.

The day begins at 9 a.m. (ugh!) with a film from Georgia (that’s the former USSR) called Since Otar Left (2003). At the movie’s conclusion, the woman behind me turned to her neighbor and said, “That was lovely.” And I have to agree. But it’s not just a crowd-pleaser; I think there’s something more there.

It’s the story of three generations of women in a small Georgian town. The grandmother is 90, the mother is a middle-aged widow, and the youngest is a skinny but pretty woman who speaks fluent French but has no real prospects for either a job or marriage. The unseen character is Otar, the grandmother’s son and the mother’s brother, who has left for Paris seeking
work.

The film does a beautiful job of portraying these women and their family ties: how they do and don’t get along, how they adapt to and yet irritate each other. I’ve been impressed by a number of the family films here at the festival. That sort of real, inter-generational family bond doesn’t always appear in American cinema. The acting is absolutely top notch, too. Esther
Gorintin as the grandmother will get most of the kudos given her age, but it’s Dinara Droukarova as the youngest woman who really stands out. Well worth your time if comes around to your neck of the woods.

Every day seems to have one movie that stinks, almost as a contrast to the rest of the films I’m seeing (would I know what a good film was if there weren’t bad ones?). Free Radicals (2003) is today’s stinker. An Austrian movie that tries to tell a whole series of inter-locking tales (ala Kieslowski), it instead ends up being a frightful mess. I suspect if the director Barbara Albert had focused on just three or four characters, the movie might’ve held up. But not the ten to twelve different stories we get. The soundtrack is fun, with a particularly nice use of contemporary music, and some of the acting is solid. But the script has no sense of pace, as major characters disappear for far too long. A little blonde girl is supposed to
signify something, but that never takes shape. And the by now cliched airplane and car crashes (both of them!) are trotted out to offer some metaphor for destiny and chance. Unfortunately, the film itself exhibits too much evidence of blind chance and not enough destiny.

Les Triplettes de Belleville (2002) is a genuinely delightful animated film from France that acts as a beautiful homage to Jacques Tati, silent cinema, and children’s picture books. With a
style that evokes a gorgeous watercolor wash, the film is a joy to behold. And the sight gags are full of both wonder and laughs. I was nervous that the movie might descend into a crude anti-Americanism, but it refrains from all but a few jokes (the Statue of Liberty becomes a waitress with a hamburger) and balances those out with some hilarious jibes at the French
(their fondness for frogs, especially). The film has a dark streak that should make parents cautious, but that adds a nice contrast for us adults. It balances the whimsy and gives some heft. I heard someone compare this to Delicatessen; and though it’s certainly not that dark, that gives you a little bit of an idea. Another one that’s well worth your time if it plays
near you.

Spring, Summer, Winter, Fall…and Spring (2003) has simply the most amazing cinematography I have seen (or will see) at the
festival. Kim Ki-duk makes striking use of his set–a Buddhist temple floating on a pond in the bottom of a valley. I can’t remember when I’ve seen more spectacularly beautiful images. Kim’s use of the water’s reflection is masterful, his low-shots skimming across the water’s surface are stunning, and his long shots from the hills around are magisterial. Add
in the changing seasons–red leaves in fall, ice and snow in winter–and you have a cornucopia of splendid colors and compositions.

The story is a rather simple tale, taking place over a series of decades as an old monk trains up a young boy into a man. I loved the first (spring) and third (fall) sections, as they seemed to present something deeply universal about the Buddhist faith: the power of devotion, the difficulty of passing on a tradition. But the fourth sequence becomes almost evangelistic, and the Buddhist worldview isn’t one that resonates with me. A growing sense of fatigue might also explain my lack of interest. Nonetheless, this is worthwhile just for the exquisite craft on display. You won’t see this many beautiful images in another film this year.

Good Bye, Dragon Inn (2003) is a masterpiece, no matter what anyone else says. Since the film seems to have few defenders among people I know and respect, I thought I would write
a more formal review. Unfortunately, any sort of in-depth discussion requires spoilers. These aren’t necessarily detrimental to your own enjoyment; in fact, I hope that my insights will provide for a fuller experience if you ever get a chance to see it. But be forewarned, I do give certain things away.

Tsai Ming-liang‘s latest work is a profound meditation on the reasons why we watch movies as well as a stirring defense of his own approach to cinema. It is certainly a slow, difficult work but one that richly rewards those who can appreciate Tsai’s approach.

The film takes place entirely in a run-down movie theater, where a screening of Dragon Inn, the 1967 King Hu martial-arts classic, is taking place. The opening shot places us in various locations in the theater, as the movie runs. Almost as if Tsai is asking us, where do we like to sit when we watch a film? We also notice that where you sit makes a difference in how you see. Do we watch from the balcony? Up front close? By ourselves or in the middle of a bunch of people? Each one affects the viewing experience. Other scenes continue this theme, and cinephiles will take great delight in Tsai’s humor. One hilarious sequence involves a young man intently watching the movie only to be distracted by a couple eating loudly nearby. The man moves to get away, only to be beset by patrons who choose to sit right next to him, despite the presence of numerous empty seats.

Good Bye, Dragon Inn is a genuinely funny movie in places, with Tsai using static, long takes to humorous effect. One shot in a men’s bathroom is wry just because it goes on so long, but then it tops it off with a fantastic visual joke.

The central character in the film is a female ticket-taker/manager. She has a club foot, which hinders her as she makes her rounds around the theater–checking in on the bathrooms, the projection booth, the back hallways. Tsai’s camera follows her around, making us wonder about her and why she does this job. In an early sequence, she torturously walks up flights of stairs to deliver a rice bowl to the unseen projectionist. Near the movie’s end, she cleans up the theater before turning off the lights. There’s a deep sense of melancholy about her and not just because of her injury.

Other characters include various patrons, though there aren’t many of those. An older man and his grandson, a mysterious middle-aged man who gets teary-eyed near the end, a hooker who seems to have come just to get out of the rain, a few younger men more interested in hooking up with each other
than watching the film. Only a few people actually pay attention.

So, what’s all this about? Why is this such a masterpiece? Especially when the movie requires you to sit through minutes-long scenes where absolutely nothing happens.

A pivotal moment occurs around the 30-minute mark. The ticket taker, on her rounds, opens the door behind the screen. She’s framed inside the doorway, while the screen looms to the right of her. It’s an amazing composition, as the visceral swordplay on the screen acts as a counterpoint to the lack of size movement in the other “frame.” And then happens one of the most startling series of edits you’ll ever see. Tsai cuts to the ticket taker’s face in profile. Her face is lit up with the reflection of the movie as she
stares in wonder. Less than a second goes by, and Tsai cuts to the movie itself, where a heroine is wielding a sword with gusto and skill. Quick cut back to the ticket taker. Quick cut back to the movie heroine. Quick cut back to the ticket taker. In a movie filled with takes that literally go on for several minutes, this series of multiple cuts in a span of a few seconds is mind-blowing. And with it, Tsai focuses our attention on these two women: one from 1967, one from today.

This series of cuts certainly contrasts one woman with the other, but Tsai is also equating the two, arguing that the ticket taker is just as much a heroine as the martial artist, just as interesting and compelling a character. She too has hopes and dreams, as we see in some movingly poignant scenes in the middle and end of the film.

And this brings us to Tsai’s central point: that one type of character is just as worthy as another type and, therefore, one type of story is just as worthy as another. In that, Good Bye, Dragon Inn becomes a powerful defense for the kind of movies Tsai makes, films in which marginalized characters
struggle with apparently banal difficulties. They’re not superheroes, they’re not martial artists, they’re not saving the world. And yet they are worthy of our attention. In East Asian cinema, which has become dominated by the martial arts and horror genres, this is an incredibly bold assertion.

It’s not that Tsai is arguing his style is better than all the others. For Good Bye, Dragon Inn is also a beautiful tribute to King Hu and the martial arts movies; two of the actors from the original Dragon Inn turn up as themselves to watch it again. Rather, Tsai is arguing for a multiplicity of styles, a whole range of stories and techniques. Yes, let’s have exhilarating King Hu-like films, but let’s also create a space for the kind of movies Tsai makes, ones in which perfect camera placements force the
audience to look, not just watch. Ones in which the use of sound (echoes, subtle clicks) is fundamental. Ones in which apparently not a lot is happening and yet the whole world is taking place.

Near the end of Good Bye, Dragon Inn, after the ticket taker has cleaned the theater, Tsai holds a shot of an empty theater for what seems like several minutes. The audience in Toronto started to giggle nervously after a while, it was so long. It is an incredible metaphor, this image of an empty, dilapidated theater; and the longer it went on, the more I liked it. And when it turned out not to be the end of the film, I was disappointed.
That is, until the actual ending of the film occurred a few minutes later.

The final shot of Good Bye, Dragon Inn is simply perfect. The ticket taker has closed the theater for good; we just saw its last screening. Her dream has apparently ridden away. She opens her umbrella (there is, of course, a driving rainstorm in this Tsai film). She walks slowly towards the camera. And as she approaches the camera, the music begins to swell, as it always does for our heroes. Good Bye, Dragon Inn is heroic cinema, confronting issues and themes that are fundamental to why we watch movies.

(Ed. note: for more about Tsai, check out Darren Hughes’ excellent article about the filmmaker for Senses of Cinema. –Doug)

ïThe Film Forum in New York has announced its premiere of Rialto Picture’s new print of Robert Bresson‘s masterpiece, Au hasard Balthazar (1966), for October 17-30, 2003. The film will then travel to other cities in the ensuing months. (And eventually appear on DVD.)

Their description:

A little donkey is suckled by its mother, then baptized
ìBalthazar;î a girl and boy say goodbye at the end of summer:
a vision of paradise. Years pass and the now-teenaged Marie
(Anne Wiazemsky, later Godardís wife and star, and today a
celebrated author) finds herself drifting into more and more
destructive situations, including involvement with a local
juvenile delinquent; while Balthazar moves from owner to
owner, some relatively kind, some cruel, some drunkenly careless. But, as critic J. Hoberman pointed out, ìthis is the story of a donkey in somewhat the way that Moby Dick is about a whale.î God, as ever in the work of legendary filmmaker Bresson, is in the details: the elliptical editing, with its
abrupt cuts, off-screen space, and as much focus on the hands of the non-pro cast as on their faces; sound design alternating between classical music and natural sounds; the accumulation of cruelties endured by Marie and Balthazar; and the religious symbolism, from baptism to martyrdom–with the silent Balthazar
transformed into a patient, long-suffering saint (ìthe most
sublime cinematic passage I knowî –Hoberman). In a
body of work known for its purity and transcendence, Balthazar is perhaps the most wrenching of Bresson’s visions, voted 19 in the 2002 BFI Sight & Sound critics and filmmakers poll
of all-time great films.

ìBressonís greatest film and one of the masterpieces
of the 20th century.î –Molly Haskell

ìAbsolutely magnificent . . . one of the most significant events of the cinema.î –Jean-Luc Godard

ìExtraordinary sensuality. . . it stands by itself.î –Andrew Sarris

ïThe latest issue of Film Comment has been released and thankfully it’s better material than the magazine has generally offered the past year. Its article on Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963) and his centennial celebrations is particularly of note, particularly since it’s online.

ïAnd speaking of centennials, famed filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl died at 101 this week, a supremely talented film technician and trailblazing woman whose work is notoriously difficult to reconcile with its function as Nazi propaganda during the ’30s. (“I always admitted that, yes, in the beginning I was fascinated by Hitler. I never denied that. But I had no idea what Hitler was doing,” she was to write in 1987, a variation of statements she made ad infinitum for the second half of the 20th century.) Reed Johnson offers a middling essay on Riefenstahl and the conflict between art and propaganda for the Los Angeles Times, here.

ïI picked up the new DVD of Alexander Sokurov‘s Russian Ark (2002) last night but so far have only managed to watch the documentary on the making of the film (don’t worry, I’ve already seen the picture), which I found highly enjoyable. Among other things, one learns that Sokurov was so frightened of the camera’s lense fogging as the crew moved from sub-zero temperatures outdoors to the warm interior that he actually lit a candle and prayed for a clear lense, and that cinematographer Tilman B¸ttner (wearing 90 pounds of equipment) decided to collapse 2/3 of the way into the film, but the sight of the grand ballroom filled with hundreds of costumed extras so impressed him, that he miraculously discovered his second wind.

Look for a full review of the film in the coming days.

J. Robert continues to send in his informative Toronto fest reviews, and here’s his latest batch. Be sure to visit his entire thread for the complete series. -Doug

* * * *

Monday, September 8, 2003
Day Four — A Day of Rest…and Masterpieces

by J. Robert Parks

Before Toronto I was talking with fellow Chicago critic Patrick McGavin. Now Patrick goes to Cannes every year and either Venice or Toronto most years. Sundance sometimes, Berlin other times. In other words, he’s a festival hound. So I asked him how he dealt with the inevitable fatigue that comes from seeing so many movies in so many days. He mentioned that he
likes to take an afternoon off in the middle of the festival and recharge the batteries. After two five-movie days in a row, I’m ready for that break.

Fortunately, my first screening isn’t until 1:15 p.m. Hello, sleep and a decent breakfast. I even have a chance to catch up on some writing. And then I’m off to one of my most-anticipated films.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (2003)

In a foreign policy filled with numerous low points, the Bush
administration’s approach to the 2002 coup in Venezuela is one of its most despicable. It of course has been US stated policy for decades that it supports democracy and opposes all military coups and dictatorships. But when the Venezuelan military, working with wealthy oligarchs, overthrew the democratically elected (by an enormous majority) Hugo Chavez, Bush and the
State Department threw their support behind the plotters and hailed it as an advance for Venezuela. That this set back American foreign policy in Latin America by a decade is an understatement.

Irish documentary filmmakers Kim Bartley and Donnacha O’Briain were in Venezuela at the time, making a documentary on Chavez and his attempts to bring reform to Venezuela. Given enormous access during the coup’s critical 48 hours, Bartley and O’Briain have constructed a documentary unlike anything you’ve ever seen. It is heroic journalism and explosive filmmaking. Their footage of the coup’s opening moments–when the anti-Chavez forces provoked a confrontation between opposing sides–is absolutely gripping.

But even more incendiary is how they expose the plotters’ extraordinary duplicity. Using the confrontation as a front, the plotters had placed snipers around the presidential palace and started firing into the pro-Chavez crowd. When chaos broke out, they continued firing, killing many. Then they used the private media, all of which is owned by the wealthy oligarchs, to broadcast that it was Chavez’s troops that had fired on the anti-Chavez forces. That became the premise for the
military to seize power and for the US to support the coup. The
documentary exposes the utter falsity of those claims with amazing footage that completely undermines the images showed on the private TV stations. It then contrasts that with the American media’s wholesale acceptance of the deeply biased, anti-Chavez media in Venezuela.

But the most amazing parts are still to come, as the documentary takes us inside the presidential palace where Chavez and his ministers are holed up while the military threatens to bomb them. I won’t give anything away for
those who don’t know the story, but the movie is incredibly powerful. The film is clearly a case of being in the right place at the right time, but Bartley and O’Briain have also edited their footage for maximum effect. It is absolutely riveting and will be an entertaining eye-opener for both the novice in world affairs and the jaded veteran.

In the Q&A which followed the screening, someone asked Bartley how the people in the countryside had received important information that contradicted what the private media was showing. She mentioned that, under Chavez, local neighborhood radio stations and newspapers had been organized independent of both the state and the oligarchs. That media had been able to alert listeners and readers of what was actually happening, which provoked millions to flood the streets. I was reminded of the Bush administration’s claim that more corporate control of media will actually lead to a greater variety of independent voices. That CNN, Fox, and many others continue to parrot that claim is indicative of our current state.

The revolution will not be televised. Fortunately, it was filmed and an amazing film it is. Absolutely a must see.

Rating: 4.5 stars (out of 5)

The Fog of War (2003) is another piece of evidence for the incredibly rich year in documentaries.

Errol Morris‘s masterpiece, and that it is, is a look at the life and career of Robert McNamara. McNamara is most famous for being the Secretary of State under Kennedy and Johnson and is most closely associated with the acceleration of the Vietnam War. Culling from over 20 hours of interviews with the now 85-year-old statesmen as well as rich archival material, Morris has constructed a brilliant documentary, one that has both rich historical value and searing contemporary relevance.

The score by Philip Glass is beautiful, jaunty in some places and elegiac in others. It supports Morris’s editing, which has a powerful rhythmic quality. The film, which covers some rather dry material, is nevertheless always gripping. The interviews are powerful and compelling, as McNamara wrestles with his own role in history.

In the post-film Q&A, Morris defended McNamara, remarking “it is harder to examine error than to apologize for it.” Indeed, this doc examines the very core of power and how it’s used. When is it right to go to war? How can we wage war responsibly?
How can we avoid mistakes, and what do we do when they occur? And how can we work to prevent war in the future?

Morris, whose liberal credentials are well-established, has clearly edited his material to draw attention to the parallels between McNamara’s career and our present-day situation. While this may irritate some viewers, the issues McNamara raises are fundamental, no matter what your political
persuasion. That we must learn from the lessons of history is axiomatic.

The Fog of War is a rich and entertaining place to start.

Rating: 4.5 stars (out of 5)

After seeing two masterpieces back to back, I had high hopes for 21 Grams, my third and final film of the day. I was originally scheduled for four, but I bailed on Identity Kills (2003) after hearing some negative buzz. Besides, I needed the rest. Turns out I got some more downtime while waiting in line
for 21 Grams. While most of the films in Toronto have started on time, this one was almost an hour late. And if I had to guess, I’d say that celebrity culture was the culprit. Though Sean Penn was in town, he couldn’t be bothered to even show up. And director Alejandro Gonz·lez IÒ·rritu admitted
before the movie that he was “a little drunk.”

Still, the wait was pleasant as I had a chance to talk with Michael Wilmington, lead critic for The Chicago Tribune. Michael is a movie fanatic in the best sense of that phrase. Though he could certainly coast at this point, he still sees more movies than almost anyone I know. So it was fun to pick his brain about
what he’d seen and hear his stories. Unfortunately, Michael also likes to sit right down front when he sees a movie, which isn’t my favorite place. So when we entered the theater, we headed for a rather, to my mind, uncomfortable location. Still, I got used to it, and the company was good.

The movie is also good, though certainly neither a masterpiece nor up to expectations. The film focuses on three characters–played by Sean Penn, Benecio del Toro, and Naomi Watts–struggling with death. Sean Penn desperately needs a heart transplant, Watts has lost someone close to her,
and del Toro…well, I better not give too much away. Told in an even more fragmented style than IÒ·rritu’s Amores Perros, the movie skips back and forth across time. For the first 45 minutes, it was genuinely difficult to figure out how these characters were related and what was going on. By the second act, it was a little easier, but the time shifts still provoke a
sense of uncertainty.

Unfortunately, they also provoke an incredible sense of distance. Since I had to spend so much effort figuring things out, I found myself alienated from all of the characters. Though they’re going through extraordinarily painful events, I couldn’t empathize with either their plight or their decisions. And this is in spite of the fantastic acting on display. Penn won the Best Actor prize at Venice, but it’s Watts who really steals the show. She has a flashier role, which I don’t usually care for, but she takes center stage and holds it for the entire film. Penn and del Toro are
just giving us their usual anguished intensity. Don’t get me wrong; they do that very well. But it’s not anything we haven’t seen before. The direction is fine, though after seeing so many films with brilliant cinematography, 21 Grams seemed rather pedestrian. Still, there’s much to like here, and my friend Garth was enthralled. But it’s no Fog of War.

Rating: 3.5 stars (out of 5)

We’re back to five films on Day Five, including yet another best-of-year contender. Look for that later today.

Slowly catching up but you won’t see me complaining…

“Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.”

–Paul Theroux

One of my sporadic interests is reading travel books–not the sort of glossy tourism guides that litter the discount racks of large bookstores, but the adventurous, personal nonfiction of established novelists (like Theroux) exploring the world in their own terms. And in the cinema, there is one filmmaker who has made this a genre all his own: Chris Marker. Though he, too, often doesn’t seem to know where he’s going, his powers of visual and aural juxtaposition and literate, poetic commentary are such that I don’t care–I’ll gladly tag along just for the ride. Whether it’s a political portrait of world events (A Grin Without a Cat) or the life and work of a colleague (One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich) or both (The Last Bolshevik), whether it’s a sprawling time capsule of life on planet Earth (Sans soleil) or a cultural summary drawn from a single artist’s oeuvre (Remembrance of Things to Come), Marker’s essay films are among the most personal and evocative media documents of the 20th century.

Paradoxically, this most subjective of artists is also one of the most invisible–the above photo is one of the few photographs that exists of him, and if his off-centered pose in frame right reflects his anonymity, it fails to suggest his fame. Born in 1921 in either France or Outer Mongolia (both have been cited) and having created films for over 50 years, Marker has garnered a passionate and loyal following. In Cinema: A Critical Dictionary (1980), Richard Roud writes: “More than any other director, Marker fulfilled [Alexandre] Astruc’s famous prophesy of the camÈra-stylo, writing films as one writes a book.” “We do not yet send letters to our friends that are sixty-minute films as informative, entertaining, and personal as Marker,” adds David Thomson in The Biographical Dictionary of Film (1976), “But we will, otherwise we must leave reports of foreign lands and strange ideas to the strident opinions of documentary TV, which invariably forsakes experience, research, and soul.”

Marker often uses a detached, ironic perspective, but it’s to record and complicate subjects we think we know rather than belittle them. His touches of humor enliven his seriousness of theme and his cerebral meditations on time, memory, and the visual image. Marker is an auterist enigma, however, a supremely idiosyncratic voice who employs actors to read his narrations in serene modalities. His presence is both immediate and absent, essential and teasingly elusive, like cats and owls, the nocturnal animals that frequently appear in his work. According to the credits of A Grin Without a Cat, the film has no director or writer–merely an editor and soundtrack creator named Chris Marker.

An early devotee of home computers and digital graphics, Marker lovingly utilized his Apple IIgs computer for many projects and even developed a multimedia CD-ROM, Immemory, for the Macintosh in 1998.

Last weekend, the American Cinematheque screened several of Marker’s better known works. Here are my summaries:

Statues Also Die (1953) 27 min.

This early short film in Marker’s career was co-directed by Alain Resnais (Marker also edited Resnais’ Night and Fog) and while its tone is somewhat dated, its message isn’t, offering a critical look at cultural imperialism through France’s conquest of Africa and its reshaping of African art and culture. Marker wrote the narration, which suggests that statues and other works of sacred art “die” when they’re removed from their cultural origins and placed behind glass in European museums. The film grows progressively more didactic towards the end and it’s little wonder that it wasn’t screened in France in its completed form for fifteen years.

La Jetée (1962) 30 min.

“This is the story of a man marked by an image of his childhood.” Conceivably the most famous (and acclaimed) short film of all time, as well as Marker’s only wholly fictional work, this haunting science fiction narrative about time travel, love, and death is really a poetic meditation on images and their ability to plunge us into the past or propel us into the future while leaving us in the present. Virtually the entire film is comprised of evocative still photographs edited into a hypnotic rhythm and accentuated by sound effects with a magisterial score taken partly from the Russian Liturgy of the Good Saturday. Remade by Terry Gilliam in 1995 as the Hollywood pseudo-art film, Twelve Monkeys, you can easily guess which of the two films exhibits the purest form and most lingering affect.

A Grin Without a Cat (1977, 1993 coda) 180 min.

Its original title, Le Fond de l’air est rouge, is an untranslatable French idiom meaning something is “in the air” but hasn’t quite “solidified” yet. In this case, it’s the worldwide social revolutions of 1967-1977 (what Marker terms “the third world war”) sparked by international outrage against the US war in Vietnam. Grin is a three-hour compilation film of diverse footage (protests, interviews, speeches) that has been described as a cinematic encyclopedia–and anyone who isn’t already familiar with such subjects as the US and French student protests (and those in Mexico City and Japan), Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba, Che Guevara’s guerilla warfare in the Congo, the CIA coup in Chile, Mao Tse-tung’s Cultural Revolution in China, the Czech Prague Spring, Watergate, and much more, will probably find themselves hanging on with a tenuous grasp. The film blazes along from one end of the globe to the other detailing the rise of the New Left which, for numerous reasons Marker suggests, never fully materialized. As he eloquently puts it, the inspiration was “a spearhead without a spear, a grin without a cat.” It’s an invigorating, expansive mosaic of political impressionism.

Sans soleil (1982) 100 min.

If Grin is an encyclopedia, Sans soleil is a hyperlinked multimedia blog of global culture, jumping spontaneously from such places as Guinea Bissau, Tokyo, San Francisco, and Iceland, collecting odd points of interest and developing philosophically along the way. The premise is an elaborate fiction: a freelance cinematographer travels the world and writes letters to a female friend (who reads them aloud), the footage is sometimes digitized by a Japanese artist, and Chris Marker decides to (in his own words) “grab hold of the situation” and assemble the elements “like a musical composition, with recurrent themes, counterpoints, and mirror-like fugues.” The result is a densely-layered and beautiful portrait of the world and its inhabitants, often cited as Marker’s magnum opus and one of the greatest documentaries ever made.

The Last Bolshevik (1992) 120 min.

Filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin was born in 1900 and every year of his life numerically corresponded with Soviet history: the ’17 revolution, Stalin’s five year plan in ’27, the German invasion of ’41, Khrushchev’s seven year plan in ’59, Brezhnev’s five year plan in ’66, the invasion of Afghanistan in ’79, Gorbachev in ’85, and Chernobyl in ’86. But he died in ’89 just one year before the collapse of the Soviet Union, so Marker dedicates his film to Medvedkin in the form of six posthumous letters to his friend and colleague. Medvedkin was a maker of controversial satires (namely, 1934′s Happiness, a forgotten film Marker helped introduce to the West in the ’70s), an idealist whose work was constantly rejected by the authorities but who nevertheless never lost hope in his country’s potential–a bolshevik to the end. Marker’s film is both a tender reminescence and a critical overview of Soviet history, a moving and highly informative portrait of an artist in his time.

One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich (2000) 55 min.

Another Soviet-era filmmaker, but one radically different in tone, Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) created some of the most lush and lyrical films in the history of the cinema and tragically died of cancer at the age of 54 in a Paris clinic. Marker respectfully documents his friend’s last days (in which, among other things, Tarkovsky was reunited with his son for the first time since defecting from his homeland in 1982). Marker intercuts this footage (which also includes Tarkovsky making editing decisions for his final film, The Sacrifice, from his deathbed) with a career-spanning critical interpretation of Tarkovsky’s work that is both sensitive and observant, mystical and adoring–qualities intrinsically appropriate for the spiritually-commited Russian filmmaker. While it’s no substitute for watching Tarkovsky’s films, it’s a substantial commentary and a nuanced, loving tribute to a cinematic poet.

Remembrance of Things to Come (2001) 42 min.

Marker’s latest film, which he made at the age of 80, is a typically dense and multi-faceted work, which focuses on the many photographs of Denise Bellon (1902-1999) and her images from the ’30s, a period just after one world war and just before another, offering Marker ample opportunities to do a bit of La JetÈe-style time traveling of his own. Composed entirely of Bellon’s photos, every subject seems to comment simultaneously on a past culture and a future catastrophe. Parachutists will become paratroopers, disfigured victims of the war will become images of the Holocaust, a rare photograph of Henri Langlois‘ collection of films stored in his bathtub (“the first cinÈmathËque,” Marker notes) prefigures the way reels were smuggled in Nazi-occupied France within baby carriages. Co-directed with Bellon’s daughter, Yannick, the film is an illuminating montage of a world in transition and Marker’s narration ennobles Bellon’s photography by peering deep within it, one world traveler to another.

For more information about Chris Marker, visit the silverthreaded Chris.Marker site and Adrian Miles’ Chris Marker W.W.W. Site.