I’ve just spent the last few days enjoying the company of my Canadian friend, Candace, who alerted me to the unorthodox release of Mark Moskowitz‘s documentary, Stone Reader (2002), via Barnes & Noble’s exclusive distribution. Candace joined many critics in enthusiastically lauding the documentary after she recently encountered it at the Calgary International Film Festival, and last night a few of us got together and screened the new DVD.

The film is the debut feature of Moskowitz, an enthusiastic and driven creator of political commercials, part salesman and part investigative journalist. But he relegates his professional career to the background of this film, which focuses instead on his lifelong love affair with reading. Browsing his home library and spontaneously commenting on its organization, Moskowitz revels in fiction from around the world: he loves French novels, offers a brief nod to the Brits (“you already know who they are”), and concedes he has lumped an entire section of books together for no other reason than because they simply fit together in his mind.

Filmed and edited in a charmingly straightforward manner that befits Moskowitz’s direct persona, the movie recounts his obsession with one book in particular: Dow Mossman’s The Stones of Summer, a book describing three decades in the life of a fictional teenager growing up in the ’50s that earned a few rave reviews in 1972 and then…disappeared. Mossman never wrote another book, and the novel soon became out-of-print. Moskowitz decides to document his dogged attempts to track down the elusive author and anyone remotely associated with the novel (the New York Times critic who reviewed it, the artist who designed the cover, the photographer who shot the jacket photo, the agent who promoted the book–even the person to whom the novel is dedicated) in an attempt to discover how the book managed to slip through the cracks of history.

What follows is a wholly engaging film that delves into subjects rarely discussed in such personal terms in American culture: the impact of reading a great novel, the unpredictable vagaries of the publishing industry, the accessibility of culture, the business of art making, the arduous process of writing a novel, and above all, the beautiful and mysterious bond that exists between author and reader. Moskowitz presents himself as a literature fanboy, someone with a burning need to immerse himself in the pleasures of reading as an almost existential compulsion. He’s seemingly less likely to pontificate on a book’s themes than he is likely to buy every copy of the book he can find just so he can adore its shelf position, offer it to friends, and enjoy its physical presence as a perpetual reminder of its personal impact.

What struck me the most about the film was the universality–or convertibility–of its specifics: watching Moskowitz spend hours online searching through forgotten names, used titles, and obscure publishers, and establishing a personal crusade to rescue the novel from oblivion reminded me of my own adventures tracking down films and videos which have somehow elided mass consumption, but that nevertheless deserve the spotlight–or at least a second viewing. It’s so easy to merely accept the corporate structures that define and package art in this country that it takes considerable effort and eccentricity to adopt a self-directed approach to cultural engagement, refusing to acknowledge commercial constraints and discover one’s own passions and interests and buried treasures of forgotten art.

In a year of standout documentaries, Stone Reader is an inspiring and refreshing depiction, not only of the joys to be found in reading, but also the pleasures to be discovered in taking an active role in one’s cultural journey and how such endeavors can sometimes even impact the world at large.

Awful news from indieWIRE:

After six years in business, Cowboy Pictures has closed its doors. The New York based indie distribution company, which was founded by John Vanco and Noah Cowan, recently let go of its employees and last week filed for bankruptcy. Greg Williams and his Lot 47 team joined Cowboy at its Laight St. offices this summer and he remains with Lot 47 following a split with Vanco and Cowboy.

“We’ve had a great run and I’m extremely proud of the wonderful films we’ve brought to audiences across North America,” said Vanco. “Cowboy could have never grown into a full fledged company without the efforts of many talented people, and I wish to take this opportunity to salute my former partner Noah Cowan and the talented and passionate employees who worked with us, especially Julie Fontaine, Emily Gannett and Sarah Finklea.”

In a brief conversation with indieWIRE on Tuesday, Greg Williams indicated that Lot 47 remains “active and in business” at the Laight St. office, but he directed inquiries regarding Cowboy activities to Vanco. In Tuesday’s announcement, Vanco indicated that he will detail additional plans in the coming weeks.

Cowboy Pictures had planned to release Elliot Greenebaum’s “Assisted Living,” which won awards at the Slamdance, Gen Art and Woodstock festivals. In a conversation with indieWIRE on Tuesday, the film’s producer Alex Laskey indicated that he and Greenebaum are pursuing other distribution options for the movie. The film will screen this Saturday, Sunday, and Monday at the Hamptons International Film Festival on Long Island, New York.

The company (originally known as Cowboy Booking International) has released more than 40 titles, including “Gigantic (A Tale of Two Johns),” the recent “Movern Callar” and “The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition.” Cowboy’s library of nearly 400 movies includes most of the key work of Akira Kurosawa, D.A. Pennebaker, and Ingmar Bergman. Cowan left the company last year and later was involved with the formation of the Global Film Initiative.

…I suppose this also nixes the planned national tour of a certain Yasujiro Ozu retrospective that Cowboy was also mounting.

There’s always a bit of tension as movie studios release film classics on DVD. The technology should offer an ideal introduction to the films if a 35mm print isn’t handy–I mean, the resolution and freeze frame capabilities and multiple, removable subtitles, CD-quality sound, and special features are always trumpeted any time Digital Versatile Discs are ever mentioned, right?

Unfortunately, studios often don’t treat the classics with the care they deserve and cinephiles are inevitably caught in a Catch-22: do we recommend these discs because the films are landmark works of art and we hope to support their availability, or do we tell people to wait for a decent representation of the film by a company that cares?

The reduced screengrab above is from Columbia Home Video’s upcoming new release of Satyajit Ray‘s Pather Panchali (1955), a universally championed film about the plight of a poor Indian family and its quest for happiness. According to the informative DVDBeaver.com Reviews page, this DVD looks simply awful, with an unrestored print, fuzzy video transfer, nonremoveable English subtitles, silly menus, and no extra features whatsoever. And with a $30 list price, that’s simply insulting.

Granted, the last two criticisms are relatively minor in the grand scheme of things, but I had the priviledge of seeing a newly restored print of this film at the L.A. County Museum of Art just a couple of years ago and the clarity and detail were a wonder to behold. Columbia has simply decided not to expend any effort in tracking down this print (or those of its two sequels) and preserving it on DVD for a new generation of videophiles, opting instead to toss off what may even be a transfer from a video master (which would account for the decrepit resolution) rather than an original film print.

Bear in mind that studios acquire rights for distribution in each region, so no one else (like, for instance, the Criterion Collection), will be able to release the film in the Region 1 market for some time to come regardless of how much of a technical improvement their DVD might conceivably be.

This is very disappointing news. To buy or not to buy? For North Americans who want to see this remarkable film, I’d recommend renting the Columbia VHS edition of this film, or better yet, buying an all-region DVD player and purchasing the Region-2 Artificial Eye Apu Trilogy box set from the UK, which also includes some interesting bonus features. (You can read a review, here.)

And if anyone has contact info for Sony/Columbia/Tristar Home Video, let me know what it is, because their Help page only tells me how to be a contestant on Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune.

Just a few updates today:

ïYes, Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar has finally opened at the Film Forum in New York and I can’t wait for its release in Los Angeles on December 12. In the meantime, check out J. Hoberman’s review here (“Robert Bresson puts the ass in classic with his 1966 masterwork about a saintly donkey”).

Dave Kehr offers a brief interview with its lead actress, a nonprofessional who grew up to be an author, here. An excerpt:

“When I first met [Bresson], I was very much impressed and fell very much under his charm,” Ms. Wiazemsky recalled, speaking in French from her home in Paris. “Because, even if he was an older man, he was really very, very handsome. He spoke very softly, with a slight stutter, and that made me laugh ó the seriousness of his speech, the beauty of this man, and then his little stutter. That made me feel at ease with him right away.”

ï I saw Mystic River this weekend, intending to write about it this week, but as with Lost in Translation, I felt its parts were better than the whole. Predictably powerful performances by Sean Penn and Tim Robbins, Clint Eastwood’s slick direction, and interesting themes about history repeating itself give the film considerable heft, but I found the “mystery” plot elementary, the tone too often heavy-handed, and its overall ambiguity fairly unproductive. In the end, it just didn’t move me that much. Any dissenting opinions?

ïHowever, I did get around to seeing Tengiz Abuladze’s Repentance (1984) via Ruscico’s new PAL DVD and was blown away by its sophistication and passion. (For those who are curious, my inexpensive all-region Cyber Home 500 DVD Player allows me to watch non-region 1 DVDs without a hitch.)

Repentance, a key film of Soviet (or more specifically, Georgian) glasnost personally promoted by Gorbachev in 1987 through sold-out screenings across the country, plays like a cross between Tarkovsky and late-Fellini: a spiritual parable about the horrors of Stalinism that is wildly anachronistic, surreal, and deeply rooted in accessible human personalities. I plan to write a lot more about the film later in the week…

ïAnd be sure to check out John Torvi’s final update for his Calgary International Film Festival capsule reviews, here. I’ve particulary enjoyed his commentary on the animated films he’s seen at the fest, and his latest entry is no exception.

On Monday, National Public Radio featured a story on Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, whose latest film, Crimson Gold, has screened at the New York Film Festival this week. It has inspired comparisons to Panahi’s earlier accomplished and searing social critique, The Circle (2000), in part because both films were banned in his native country.

But Panahi didn’t attend NYFF this year. The last time he bothered visiting American soil, he was arrested and chained to a wooden bench at JFK airport for sixteen hours for being an Iranian citizen and refusing to be fingerprinted and photographed for US immigration. You can read his official statement, here.

Although the NPR story has the gall to claim the incident was “covered widely in the media,” I only heard about it through a couple of focused international film listservs I was active on at the time. (Not to mention, as far as I can tell this is NPR’s first coverage of the incident, nearly two years after it occured.) The broadcast manages a sound bite from NYFF director Richard PeÒa (who, incidentally, also offers a commentary on the recent DVD release of Manoel de Oliveira’s contemplative I’m Going Home):

“Here is a situation with someone who has clearly taken a courageous stand for expression, for liberty, for many things that we as Americans should support. And rather than encouraging someone like this, we punish him along with everybody else. So because of that, it really does set up the image that really what the US is against is Islam or Muslims and not particular people who hold particular political positions. So to reject an Abbas Kiarostami or to reject a Jafar Panahi, even if one says, well they’re not rejected, they just have to go through a laborious process of three months of investigation and then fingerprinting, is really, I believe, cutting off your nose to spite your face.”

Well said, Mr. PeÒa. Those with Real Audio can listen to the segment, here.

Maybe it’s the onset of October, or maybe it’s the experience of enduring the California gubernatorial last week, but either way, I’ve been thinking of horror lately. I’ve always appreciated atmospheric forays into the darker recesses of the human consciousness, so along with the many articles printed this time of year suggesting great horror films, I’ve decided to provide my own Top Ten. My criterion is that they must be “overlooked” gems of the genre, and although that term may convey different implications depending on the cinematic circles one frequents, these films should at least take some effort to track down.

One more caveat is that I’ve shied away from shocks and emphasized films with menacing tones, bravura filmmaking, and attention to theme. There may be a few jolts in my list, but by and large, these are elegant films by noteworthy filmmakers–movies that slowly envelop the viewer and settle uncomfortably into the imagination.

Listed alphabetically:

The Black Cat (US, 1934)

Universal’s famous horror cycle of the ’30s was already deeply influenced by German expressionism with its shadowy visual style recreated by the many German technicians who emigrated to Hollywood to escape the growing Nazi regime. Edgar G. Ulmer, a filmmaker who assisted Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau (see Faust, below), concocted this film–ostensibly based on a story by Edgar Allan Poe–but was an original creation all its own.

Uniting Bela Lugosi (Dracula) and Boris Karloff (Frankenstein, The Mummy) for the first time, Ulmer fashioned a dour tale that merges the old world with the new, both realms infused with death. Traveling in Hungary, some newlyweds meet Wedergast (Lugosi), a psychologically scarred prisoner of WWI who, after 15 years, has returned to take revenge on his betrayer, Poelzig (Karloff), a general who seduced Wedergast’s wife and daughter. Polzeig now lives in an elaborate art deco mansion on the ruins on a historical battlefield, and the two obsessive men clash in a battle of wills using the newlyweds as their pawns.

Trained as an architect, Ulmer emphasizes the unnatural angles and strict symmetry in every room of Polzeig’s mansion in a manner that externalizes the cold tension between Wedergast and Polzeig. Karloff is a surprising model of understated turmoil and Lugosi’s gentlemanly persona barely masks a simmering rage. When their confrontation finally erupts, its Grand Guignol violence is infused with a palpable sense of tragedy. Ulmer’s expressionist lighting and graceful camera moves lend the film an uncommon beauty which perfectly captures the dark, timeless emotions that swirl within it.

Carnival of Souls (US, 1962)

Filmmaker Herk Harvey spent years making industrial documentaries before directing this ultra-low budget marvel which somehow transcends its rough production values to offer a bizarre and unsettling portrait of illusion and fate. A young woman survives a car crash and moves to a small town in Utah, where she plays the organ for a church and experiences schizophrenic visions of an elderly man with a wild stare, random sounds and music, and an irresistable urge to loiter in an abandoned amusement park.

The film disarms the viewer through its low-key, even amateurish, approach to characters and setting, but this sense of comfort is undermined by baffling shifts in the film’s realism conveyed through bold manipulations of sounds and visuals. In one of the creepiest scenes, the protagonist drives down a dark road as organ music mysteriously begins on the radio. She begins changing the dial, but the music eminates from every station–and that is when she notices the face outside her window. The bizarre phantasmagorical intrusions are continually chilling and unexpected yet there’s a poetry to it as well, and intimations of lost romanticism.

The film developed a cult following over the years, and it’s a good example of how movies can affect audiences through inventive techniques despite the lack of traditional polish. Director Harvey claims he wanted “the look of a Bergman” and the “feel of a Cocteau,” and in its own strange mixture of mundane Americana and art house intensity, it remains a unique and frightening picture.

Night of the Demon (Curse of the Demon) (UK, 1957)

In the early-’40s, RKO producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur made a series of horror films with budgets so low they were forced to depend on careful chiaroscuro lighting and suggestion in place of actual monsters. As a result, they specialized in the fear of the unknown, ancient myths that prowled the modern world. Their films are among the most elegant, unsettling, and timeless to have ever been produced in Hollywood, so if you haven’t seen Cat People (1942), I Walked With a Zombie (1943), or The Leopard Man (1943), add them to this list.

Night of the Demon marked Tourneur’s return to the genre in the late-’50s. An American psychologist, Holden, travels to Britain to debunk rumors of sorcery but his dogmatic rationalism is put to the test when a series of seemingly supernatural events befall him. As Chris Fujiwara writes in his excellent study of Tourneur, The Cinema Before Nightfall, “the film repeatedly undermines Holden’s point of view” through unexpected elements (such as a raging storm on a sunny day or a mysterious hand on a shadowy banister that only appears sporadically). Tourneur’s exquisite lighting offers a constant visual metaphor for the tension between the seen and the unseen, the rational and the irrational, and the film balances these polarities with a sophistication that belies its budget.

Despite a couple of compromises (the producer insisted on showing the monster–clearly a man in a rubber suit–and then radically cut the American version by 13 minutes), the film remains literate and scary. Thankfully, Columbia released a DVD containing both versions of the film earlier this year.

The Fall of the House of Usher (La Chute de la maison Usher) (France, 1928)

Jean Epstein was not only a progressive filmmaker of the ’20s, but also one of the art form’s first theorists, writing such works as Bonjour CinÈma in 1921, a treatise that criticized narrative filmmaking and championed experimentalism. This silent film combines two Edgar Allan Poe stories, The Fall of the House of Usher and The Oval Portrait, to offer a haunting tone poem.

A man is summoned to the Gothic mansion of his dying friend, Roderick Usher, who is madly consumed with painting his wife’s portrait. Both of Poe’s original stories are dense mood pieces which go to great lengths to describe their disquieting settings:

The room in which I found myself was very large and lofty. The windows were long, narrow, and pointed, and at so vast a distance from the black oaken floor as to be altogether inaccessible from within. Feeble gleams of encrimsoned light made their way through the trellised panes, and served to render sufficiently distinct the more prominent objects around the eye, however, struggled in vain to reach the remoter angles of the chamber, or the recesses of the vaulted and fretted ceiling. Dark draperies hung upon the walls. The general furniture was profuse, comfortless, antique, and tattered. Many books and musical instruments lay scattered about, but failed to give any vitality to the scene. I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all. (Usher, 1839)

Epstein adheres to such literary imagery with remarkable translation. Incorporating frequent use of slow motion, superimpositions, and ethereal lighting, the film draws explicit connections between creativity, life, and death. Taking its cue from the incident in The Oval Portrait when a man mistakes a painting for a real person, Epstein occassionally replaces Roderick’s painting with the actress playing the wife within its frame, but it’s an effect that’s pleasingly subtle rather than shocking. As Usher maniacally rushes to the complete his work, marveling at its lifelike qualities, he comes mysteriously closer to paradoxically sapping the life from his beloved.

Usher was recently released on DVD by All Day Entertainment with an experimental score and French intertitles spoken by Jean-Pierre Aumont with an aged, ominous inflection. The surrealist filmmaker Luis BuÒuel actually assisted Epstein on the picture, and its abstract force lingers.

Faust (Germany, 1926)

Having directed the great Nosferatu (1922), director F.W. Murnau is no stranger to horror movie aficionados, but through his short and magnificent career, he also provided this freewheeling expressionist fantasy, which visually rivals anything Tim Burton has accomplished well over half a century later. With an opening act featured the skeletal Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse galloping through moonlit clouds and a heavenly wager between an archangel and Mephistopheles regarding the fate of humanity, it could only lose steam–which it unfortunately does once it descends into middlebrow farce for its second act. But the first thirty minutes (not to mention the grand finale) are worth any rental, as Murnau’s elaborate Ufa sets, imaginative costumes, and stunning cinematography are genuinely spellbinding.

The German actor Emil Jannings (The Last Laugh, The Blue Angel) portrays Mephistopheles as a crafty and larger-than-life figure who delights in evil and travels at will between the earthly plane and the celestial spheres.

For various reasons, there are actually five different versions of Faust floating around, though the only one currently available on video in North America is the version released by Kino International, which features a marvelous Wagnerian score by Timothy Brock. Spanish filmmaker and historian Luciano Berriat˙a has restored a more definitive version of the film and made a documentary about it, but this version is only currently available on a Spanish DVD release. (See DVDBeaver‘s comparison page for more information.)

Kwaidan (Japan, 1964)

This film is actually four short adaptations of Japanese folk tales involving ghosts. The films are highly stylized and deliberately artificial, the first color project by director Masaki Kobayashi filmed on mammoth sets constructed in an abandoned airport hangar. The sound was dubbed afterward and the effect is one of unnerving minimalism: each scene, whether a palace exterior, a cabin in the woods, or a chaotic battle on the sea between opposing samurai, has a carefully wrought selection of sonic textures that intensifies the drama and generates an overall sense of otherworldliness.

It’s a long, elegant anthology shot in stunning cinemascope and vivid hues. The initial two stories are morality tales: the first is about a man who leaves his lover to seek fame and fortune but later decides to revisit her ghost, the second concerns a secret, horrific vision that a snowbound survivor witnesses. The third portrays a deceased clan of samurai ghosts who seek the skills of a musician storyteller to aid their restful existence in the afterlife.

But in many ways my favorite may be the last, with its absurd tale of a man who continually perceives another man’s reflection whenever he peers into a bowl of liquid. Mystified, he stares at the other man, who stares back–a wry smile crossing the apparition’s lips. The scene is pure cinema, no dialogue whatsoever, just the opposing images of two men staring each other down in a moment that is at once absurd and everyday. The macabre humor is also refreshing after the somber tales that precede it.

Onibaba (Japan, 1964)

Based on a Japanese fable about an aging woman and her daughter-in-law who ruthlessly lure samurai to their deaths in a deep hole in the ground to scavage loot, and the drifter who disrupts their symbiosis and fosters sexual tension, this is a film atmospherically and thematically on par with the Japanese classic, Woman of the Dunes, also released in ’64. With its hypnotic setting amid endlessly blowing reeds and a highly-charged erotic component, the film works its moody scenes to a fevered pitch before suggesting aspects of the supernatural–the tall reeds obscure more unseen threats than the deadly hole in the ground, a hole that becomes a perfect metaphor for the moral vacuum at the heart of the film’s characters.

Director Kaneto Shindo was an assistant to Kenji Mizoguchi, and was described by Audie Bock as “Japan’s first successful independent film director.” Using minimal dialogue and depending on eerie sounds and a seemingly incongruous jazz score, the film portrays human isolation, greed, and lust with frightening immediacy.

The Spirit of the Beehive (El EspÌritu de la Colmena) (Spain, 1973)

Of all the films on this list, this one qualifies as “horror” only in a general thematic sense. The first feature of the remarkable Victor Erice, it takes place in a village in Catilia in 1940 immediately following the Spanish Civil War and focuses on the imagination of two young children, who create a rich inner life separate from the world of their loving but distracted parents. A roving cinema drives into town and screens James Whales’ 1931 Frankenstein and the children, particularly the younger Ana, are struck by the scene when the monster drowns a little girl. Her older sister explains that no one really dies in movies and that the monster’s spirit lives outside the village, and this child logic inspires a poetic and mysterious journey for Ana.

Erice described his film as having a “fundamentally lyrical, musical structure . . . whose images lie deep in the very heart of a mythical experience.” Somber and beautifully wrought, with little dialogue, the film captures a child’s imagination without condescension and layers it among recurring visual motifs of solitude, communal life, and the effects of a distant war. It’s an evocative assembly of images, open-ended and yet fully-realized–a film that encourages meditation.

Often compared to the American filmmaker Terrence Malick (Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line), Erice has a similarly lyrical and sparce oeuvre–three films in 30 years. (His other two features are 1983′s The South and 1992′s Dream of Light, which was recently voted the best film of the ’90s by an international poll of film programmers.) Watching Beehive recently reminded me just how overdue we are for another entry by this talented filmmaker. (I reviewed his latest short film, here.)

The Unknown (US, 1927)

Tod Browning, who proverbialy ran away and joined the circus as a child, grew up to become an actor and eventually a director specializing in the macabre. After 1931′s stodgy Dracula, his most famous film is certainly the masterful Freaks (1932), a movie which exhibits remarkable compassion for a circus community and the physically deformed people who are victimized by “normal” people with cruel hearts. The Unknown is one of his silent films with Lon Chaney, the actor noted for his painstaking costuming and makeup.

Chaney plays Alonzo, who pretends he’s an armless knife-thrower who dexterously uses his feet for everything from flinging knives to lighting and holding cigarettes. He’s secretly in love with Nanon (Joan Crawford), his female assistant, who has an irrational fear of being touched by men. When the local Strongman begins to woo Nanon, Alonzo confesses his love–and amputates his arms–thus setting in motion a story that is horrifying in its violent emotions of jealousy, anger, and dread. It’s not only one of the strangest love stories to eminate from Hollwood, but also one of the most emotionally resonant.

The Unknown will be included in a Lon Chaney DVD box set on October 28 by Turner Classic Movies, which will include a new electronic score by the Alloy Orchestra, which I happened to hear on TCM several years ago and recall as being pitch-perfect in its swirling, mesmerizing tones.

Vampyr (France, 1932)

Although Carl Theodor Dreyer‘s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) is universally considered one of the greatest films in history, it was not enthusiastically received and Dreyer developed a reputation as a difficult and demanding artist, which kept him from making another film for several years. That film eventually proved to be Vampyr, his first sound film, which Jean and Dale D. Drum describe in their wonderful Dreyer biography, My Only Great Passion, as “a world in which shadows leave their owners and commit murder, a man witnesses his own funeral from within his casket, and the machinations of vampires, so often made ludicrous in other movies, becomes real, incarnate evil.”

Dreyer had been living in Paris for a number of years and spoke of being highly influenced by innovative movements in abstract art during the ’20s (cubism, dadism, surrealism, etc.), which probably accounts for the film’s striking use of dream logic and imagery. (“I wanted to create a daydream on film,” Dreyer said.) The dreamlike narrative suggests a traveler who encounters a series of bizarre events surrounding an old chateau and its various inhabitants who struggle with a mysterious illness, strange visions, and the presence of a buried vampire in a nearby churchyard. When “really happens” in the story is probably anyone’s guess (even film historian David Bordwell has written that the film is remarkably difficult to simply follow), but the movie offers one eerie and beautiful image after another, intensified by Dreyer’s decision to film through a gauze to create ethereal, foggy visions.

The world is in need of a good restoration of Vampyr, but in the meantime, Image Entertainment’s DVD is passable (albeit with horrendously rendered subtitles), especially given its excellent bonus feature, Ladislas Starewicz‘s 26-minute, stop-motion animation film, The Mascot (1934).

The Calgary International Film Festival reviews just keep rolling in. Be sure to check out John Torvi’s entire thread, as well as Candace Elder’s incisive comments at the end of this thread… even if neither one of them enjoyed The Son as much as they should have.

Meanwhile, I’m keeping an eye on the American Film Institute’s AFI FEST in Los Angeles in November, which is supposed to announce its line-up sometime today. –Doug

* * * *

Day 7, Thursday, October 2, 2003

By John Torvi

My Life Without Me

I wasn’t really sure of the other movies in the same time block as this film, and I had seen the trailer at Apple’s site. So I decided to go with the more mainstream of the choices, even though it would probably show up at the theatres at a later date.

Sarah Polley stars as a young woman who finds out she has a short time to live and decides to make the best of it by doing some of the things she wouldn’t have done. She drinks and smokes as much as she wants. She has an affair with another man. She speaks honestly and directly with everyone, for she feels she has nothing to lose. She also tries to tie up all the loose ends with her family, although not burdening her family and friends with the news of her illness. She tries to be productive in the short time that she’s got, rather than spend it in hospitals getting poked and prodded.

I liked the non-naval gazing attitude that the main character took when she found out that she was dying. It was different and life-affirming. Also when she discovered how odd the normal everyday things are, and how ‘safe’ people seem to live without realizing that life is really short. The Elvis Costello song reference lightly salting the film, and having Deborah Harry as the heroine’s mom, weren’t bad choices either. Bring hankies.

Bus 174

Somewhere around this time, I was really interested in seeing films from somewhere else besides North America. I had seen a bunch already and was interested in getting my film fest experience just a little more well-rounded. I also wanted to see a film that didn’t involve death. Not that I minded it, but I had seen enough to munch on. Doug had also recommended this.

Bus 174 co-relates the cyclic relationship between poverty and crime, and the consequences of a society that chooses to ignore that association. This is shown through the documenting of Sandro do Nascimento, a street kid who held a group of people hostage in a bus in Rio de Janeiro, after failing to rob it’s occupants. The film intersperses the hostage taking, with a background into his life.

What a moving and engaging film. The movie demonstrates the pitfalls of a penal system which locks up it’s so-called problems and expects things to get better by it. It does this effectively by telling Sandro’s personal story, rather than just a bunch of graphs, charts, and statistics.

Day 8, Friday, October 3, 2003

Hollywood North

Hollywood North is a ficticious story during a real time in Canadian filmmaking history. In the 1970s, filmmakers in Canada were given tax write-offs in the effort to help foster a small but potent film industry. Hollywood North is about that making of a Canadian film in which everything that could go wrong, does. The person making the documentary about the movie steals film for the making of her own movie which she films in her own time. The American star, who was requested by the film’s investors, only accepts the part on the condition that he is allowed to make huge re-writes to the screenplay (which is originally based on a famous Canadian novel). The investors feel that the American actor has “star” power, and would give the film a better chance at being successful at the box office. The film is doomed from the get-go, eventually becoming nothing like the novel that it is supposed to be based on. The problems come to a climax, when the author visits the set and finds out her novel has been turned into a pro-American action film.

There are a few good chuckles in this film, and there is the irony that Matthew Modine, an American, is cast as the lead role in the film as the film’s producer. Even though it was suppose to be set in the ’70s there wasn’t really enough there to make me believe that–it seemed it was almost a contemporary film. Just didn’t feel right.

Ojos Que No Ven (What The Eye Doesn’t See)

The film festival featured a mini-retrospective on Peruvian film maker Francisco Lombardi. Having never heard of him, I thought this might be worth taking a risk on. Ojos Que No Ven is the story of Peruvians from different walks of life and how their lives intertwine during a time when video tapes become public that belong to a presidential advisor that feature all the people he bribed to gain support.

I found the film to be like Soderbergh’s Traffic(2000) with a sort of South American flavour. Lombardi really weaves together a tale of corruption and greed that seeps through the Peruvian social classes.

The director was available afterwards for questions and commented that there was no funding for this project outside of the cast and crew. It was quite an accomplishment even on that note alone.

Edi

What a great surprise. Not on my list of films to see, I decided to watch this film since the line for it wasn’t too long. A film from Poland, Edi is about two scrap metal collectors who live out of an abandoned factory. Edi is a homely, yet quite intelligent man, who reads books which he keeps in a broken down refrigerator. And his friend, Jurek, a simpleton, feels they might be better off if they had some of finer amenities, like a TV. They spend their days collecting scrap metal from around town so they might be able to afford some drinks later in the evening. Trouble arises when the “brothers,” two psychotic bootleggers, ask Edi to tutor their sister so that she might get her high school diploma.

I liked the use of slow side camera pans (ala Tarkovsky) and overhead shots, the paint peeling off the walls. The film had a sort of ‘found object’ rustic beauty to it. I might pick this up again if it comes out on DVD–much of my time was spent trying to look through other people in the seats in front of me, to try and read the subtitles, though, so it might be nice to go through this once again, now that I know the whole story. Beautiful. Just beautiful.

Hell’s Highway

Finishing off the day was this documentary on the films of the Highway Safety Foundation. Through the ’60s and ’70s, the foundation created many of the films that were watched in driver’s education classes. Relying heavily on shock value, the films used actual car accident scenes to try to push the point home about driver safety. A unique amateurish film style, the films are spoofed in movies and TV shows like The Simpsons. It’s hard to take these films seriously. Although sincere in their promotion of highway safety, there are the oddly scripted transitions like the one involving two cops who wait outside the home of a teenager’s house to tell the mother that her son died–the somber scene is interjected with the cops cheerfully flipping a coin to see who will tell the mother the bad news. The documentary also notes that many of these films have become available on home video, and there are even parties where people go just to watch these films.

The director of this documentary was fair in his portrayal of the people from the highway safety foundation–the film splits between talking with the people who made the highway films and film critics who comment on the place that these films now have in popular culture.

Coming soon… Day 9 and 10…

As with so many aspects of world culture, religious dialogue in pop America tends to be woefully shallow. Politics and religion are often cited as the two primary subjects to be avoided in “polite conversations” and it’s almost standard protocol on film discussion boards to ban any explicit mention of the two realms.

But given contemporary world events and the public language used to describe them, I personally can’t think of more vital subjects to identify in art these days, especially since intelligent and productive examples of this are few and far between.

For ten years, the City of the Angels Film Festival has brought together a wide spectrum of theologians and religious organizations in the hopes of screening important films and sensitively addressing spiritual and social issues in a variety of post-screening dialogues. I’ve attended a few times over the years, and have usually found the event to be intelligently devised, without the sort of indoctrinating or grandstanding approach one might expect. (Even the alternative L.A. Weekly has sung its praises.)

For its 10th anniversary (October 23-26), the festival has chosen to screen “the most revolutionary films from each decade of cinematic history” based on results from its online poll, and even if I don’t think its line-up comes anywhere near to justifying this claim (my friend Darren Hughes notes there are no Asian films at all–neither are there Middle Eastern or Eastern European or Central/South American films), at least somebody’s trying.

I’ve been invited to serve on the panel discussion for FranÁois Truffaut‘s The 400 Blows (1959), and although I’d argue Godard’s Breathless or Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour or Cassavetes’ Shadows (all three released in 1959) are more “revolutionary” aesthetically, historically, and ideologically, I admire Truffaut’s film a lot and hope it will give me an opportunity to mention AndrÈ Bazin and the underpinnings of the French New Wave, subjects which remain close to my heart.

After spending an enjoyable weekend with visiting family, I’m playing catch-up today. Here are some interesting links to keep you occupied while I plan my viewing week:

ïThe new issue of Senses of Cinema is up. Among many items of interest are a series of articles on Chuck Jones, recent Chinese documentaries, and a succinct (and SPOILER) look at some of the religious themes in Carl Th. Dreyer‘s Ordet (1955).

ïMy cohorts at Masters of Cinema, Trond Trondsen and Jan Bielawski, have posted a highly informative article focusing on the problems of video overscan on consumer TVs.

ïAcquarello has begun his New York Film Festival capsule reviews at Strictly Film School.

ï The Film Forum in New York continues to update its Au hasard Balthazar (1966) page with Rialto’s press kit and assorted links to the film which easily gets my vote for the most exciting theatrical rerelease of the year. (Oct. 17)

Reports keep coming into filmjourney regarding the Calgary International Film Festival. Be sure to check out the entire thread here.

First up is John Torvi. –Doug

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Day 3 – Sunday, September 28, 2003

by John Torvi

The first part of the day didn’t go so well today. I woke up finding out over the phone that I had missed some of the animation workshop with Chris Hinton, an Oscar-nominated animator who does films for the National Film Board of Canada. But I quickly got ready and headed down to the Quickdraw Animation Society, an animation co-op here in Calgary, to catch the last half.

At this point, I’m going to cheat. I’m going to write about films that weren’t officially at the festival but we got a glimpse of in class.

Flux

When I went to the Animated Shorts program yesterday and saw Chris Hinton’s X-Man, my gut reaction was, “It’s like Stan Brackage on crack: a total chaos of really bright colours.” No narrative, just a lot of images moving around to a very free-form, abruptly chaotic piano piece. It was cool–don’t get me wrong–but I really hadn’t made my mind up about the style. A lot of animators go the non-narrative experimental route, and I was wondering what was it about Chris Hinton’s style that made him different.

Flux is a little different in the sense that it has a narrative, but it’s still pretty crazy as far as animation goes. Gone are the rules that you have to make precise line drawings. Gone are the ideas that set changes have to be tightly cut. The lines are sloppy. The set changes just morph into each other. You would think this style would be annoying, but it just has so much life to it (if you could call life –more like “organized chaos”).

Flux, storywise, deals with the changes people go through in life. Growing up, getting married, having kids, the kids falling off swingsets, the family taking a ride in the car, getting old, and dying. There is that certain melancholy feeling to the piece that seems to pervade whenever animators deal with this sort of subject matter. Not every person necessarily has all of these moments happen in their life, some are lucky even only to have a few. But for those who do, it’s easy to lose sight of some of the humour, the silliness of how we act sometimes, especially in some of the darker moments.

Mt. Head

An Academy Award-nominated film, Mt. Head was one I have been waiting to see for about a year. The story is about a man who eats some strange cherry seeds and the next day he has a cherry tree sprouting out of the top of his head. This is based on a traditional Japanese story which has been set in present day Tokyo.

The main medium used is what looks like paper cutouts. However, it was pointed out in class that there was also a lot going on with subtle water and cement effects.

The narration is in Japanese and there are no subtitles, but it really doesn’t matter with this one. Much of the spoken humour can be derived and understood from the emotions the narrator brings to the main character.

Un Jour

“One day a man entered my belly.”

“The next day, since he was still there, I realized that I would have to get use to him.”

This is the premise for Un Jour, a film by Marie Paccou in which a relationship is represented by a man fitting perpendicular through a woman’s belly. They are inseperable, they co-exist, they are one. Relationships which don’t work are the ones where the man doesn’t fit in her belly, or the man becomes abusive.

This is certainly a subjective perspective and I don’t think it is meant to espouse an ideal, that is, to find the “perfect fit.” At the end of the film (SPOILER) even the ‘perfect fit’ leaves and the woman, who is the narrator, comments on how much of a surprise it was to find that he wasn’t there anymore.

Even though it was done on a computer, the style of this film seems more influenced by woodcut engravings.

The master class was over, and I headed out once again to get my head back in reality, and watch some “normal” films.

The Corporation

This approximately three-hour film (yes, three hours) deals with the role and nature of multinational corporations in the world. It is an exhaustive look at the state of corporate responsibility. And I loved it. It is arguably the most important film that I’ve seen this year.

Partly directed by Mark Achbar (and also Jennifer Abbot and Joel Bakken), who was also partly responsible for Manufacturing Consent, the 1993 documentary on Noam Chomsky, The Corporation starts with defining what corporations actually are and how they came to be. Much of the content comes from interviews with CEOs, business people, and anti-corp icons such as Naomi Klein (author of No Logo) and Michael Moore. It then outlines the problems with corporations, giving some frightening examples of how corporations can go wrong. It goes into possible outcomes and some of the positive things that are happening to change the ‘machine’.

Achbar was in attendance at this screening and took questions (when the projector broke ten minutes into the film) and asked for comments. He did say that several distributors were vying for the rights to distribute this in the US. In Canada, it’s going to be played on Access Television.

If it does come to your neck of the woods, it is highly recommended viewing.

Editor’s note: Karen Neudorf offers her informative comments on the film as well:

I saw The Corporation today. Of course there are similarities with Bowling for Columbine and  Manufacturing Consent (Mark Achbar is one of three directors on The Corporation and was the director of MC). There’s a lot of 1950′s stock footage, graphics and news clips to keep the audience engaged. Bright orange section titles ( Case Histories, The Pathology of Commerce, Mindset, Boundary Issues, etc.) keep the audience from getting too lost. There are so many ideas to keep track of.

The Corporation is well thought out, progressing through history, from when and how corporations took on the rights of a person to present day as corporations expand their powers globally and dilute democratic governments’ responsibility for the public good. Although the filmmakers obviously had their bias, there were interviews with various CEO’s. (If you don’t believe in transformation or the power of an idea, you need to see this film just to hear the story of Ray Anderson, CEO of carpet manufacturer, Interface.) There is also commentary from Naomi Klein, Maude Barlow, Vandana Shiva, Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, and many others. It was enthusiastically received by the crowd of mostly young adults who gave a resounding round of applause that sounded like an “Amen!”.

The film is much too long at 2 hours and 45 minutes. Achbar was available for a question and answer period. He handed out a questionnaire with a list of scenes asking us which ones should be cut so hopefully, the next version will be much tighter and easier to digest. Towards the end, I grew tired of all the black and white stock footage and longed to hear the stories of the commentators, slightly back lit against a black background, without any cute visual material. (Mark Achbar goes into detail about his interview set up at http://www.thecorporation.tv/filingcabinet.html.)

The question and answer period was amusing as various students tried to show how much they had studied in history class by asking “Why didn’t you put this in?” and “Why aren’t there any comments on the fall of communism?” and on and on. Achbar said “Because it’s already too long and I only have one film.” And then, a bit frustrated, “Can we talk about what is actually in the film now?”

He has been working for six years on The Corporation and figures he has one and a half years to go with promotions and festivals, “So that I can think about the bottom line which for us is about lessening debt.” (As an independent magazine publisher, I can relate.) I think he really wants to start a conversation. He talked about making a “kick-ass educational DVD” with a study guide to keep people engaged.

I spoke with Mr. Achbar in the lobby for a few minutes and he seemed tired but very passionate about his film. I hope he makes his cuts and gets his wish for a larger discussion. The ideas in the The Corporation are definitely worth talking about.

These were all the films that I was able to pack in for day 3, and so I headed home.

* * * *

Day 4, Monday, September 29, 2003

Modern Times (1936)

One of the nice things about this film festival is the restored classics – especially ones that you’re going to see for the first time on the big screen. I would admit that I haven’t seen Charlie Chaplin‘s Modern Times before. Again, another treat.

I can only guess at this point what sort of role this movie had in cinematic history. I have seen Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. (1924) and Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) and would notice that Keaton’s characters find life rather strange and surreal, while Chaplin’s are more impish, and are more interested at times in creating havoc. A first time observation, but I’m not saying it’s a bad thing either.

The Guy in the Grave Next Door
(Grabben i graven bredvid)

A city librarian who enjoys the finer things in life. A country dairy farmer who finds great joy in the proper construction of a manure pile. She likes classical music and art galleries. He enjoys playing the harmonica. A chance meeting at a cemetery, of all places, makes each wonder if a relationship is possible. Tired of being single, they make a brave attempt even though they have very little in common.

An import from Sweden, this film milks (pardon the dairy pun) the couple’s severe cultural differences to their full comedic worth.

Emile

A Canadian film starring Sir Ian McKellan, of Lord of the Rings fame. An elderly ecologist who lives in England, is forced to face the extended family he abandoned years ago when he has to stay with them in Victoria, B.C., when he receives an honourary degree from the university there.

McKellan joins a strong cast. The mom, played by Deborah Kara Unger, had some good angst moments, as her character finds it hard to trust people, which she attributes to her grand uncle (played by McKellon) abandoning her when her father was killed in an accident. Her daughter in the film has some good deadpan comedic moments.

I grew weary, though, of the dream sequence shots of McKellan wandering around to the soundtrack of slow, minimal piano tones. Strangely, many of the films that I’ve seen here at the festival use the exact same technique, almost if it was a piece of “clip art” that you can download off a website. (“Ah–Anxiety101.mov, that’s the one I need for my film!”) I might think that it was because of most of the films I’ve seen have dealt with death or anxiety, but there are those as I found out later (day 5 and 6 entry) that don’t follow the norm.

After a long day of screenings, I was in the mood for short films that wouldn’t require serious engagement, so I peered below the 49th parallel to what the Americans were doing. Some highlights:

Tom Hits His Head…

…And it brings on panic attacks which affect Tom’s grasp on reality. Special attention to be paid to the crude devil baby who informs Tom that he is the anti-Christ–he’s just pure independent cinema.

Blissfield

A young woman who endlessly carries around a tape recorder wonders if anyone from high school remembered her and goes to her hometown to find out…