Famed ethnographic documentarian Jean Rouch died yesterday in an automobile accident. His trailblazing career helped coin the term “cinema veritÈ” and has been largely unavailable on video in the US. (First Run rereleased his landmark 1961 film, Chronicle of a Summer, in select theatres last year.)
Rouch’s work comprises another set of films badly needed on DVD…
I’ve got a special love for genre classics, particularly those in the realms of science fiction or horror because they’re so rarely mounted with genuine ambition. One example of a landmark title was recently released as a beautifully restored DVD last month, Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931). Mamoulian (City Streets, Love Me Tonight, Becky Sharp) was a consummate Hollywood craftsman who pushed the stylistic and technological envelopes in ways that intensified the themes of his films. “In his early films,” critic Tom Milne once wrote, “Mamoulian was a persistent iconoclast, insisting that none of the limitations imposed on the sound camera were really necessary, and many of his experiments have now become common film language.”
Mamoulian’s propensity for invention was aided immensely in Hyde by his collaboration with famed cinematographer Karl Struss (Ben Hur, Sunrise). The opening scenes of the movie, for example, are shot with a subjective camera, as Jekyll plays Bach on his organ, rises, walks through his house, passes a mirror (his visage is briefly reflected), walks outside his home, boards a carriage, travels to a university classroom, and begins to deliver a lecture on human nature. The camerawork intensifies viewer identification, uncomfortably suggesting Jekyll/Hyde is not simply a fiend to cooly judge, but a shadow of the viewer’s own persona. The doctor’s later transformations are astonishingly produced (I won’t give away any secrets) and Fredric March, who played the character, had to spend three weeks in the hospital recuperating from facial damage his elaborate makeup inflicted. March utterly loses himself in the role, creating a leering, lip-smacking humanoid bundle of rage that is one of filmdom’s best–and most terryifing–performances.
I’ve seen a good portion of the Universal horror films of that period (Dracula and Frankenstein were both released the same year as Hyde), but none of them come anywhere near the frightening emotional savagery of Mamoulian’s film, produced at Paramount. If Jekyll is the paragon of English gentility, Hyde is a loathsome creature, instantly primeval and cruel, and a genuine challenge to the new Production Code that was just getting underway. In fact, great portions of the film have been edited out of circulating prints over the years (including the extant VHS), but Warners’ new DVD carefully includes them all. While Jekyll impatiently waits for an opportunity to marry his distant fiancÈe, Hyde preys upon a desparate young woman (marvelously played by Miriam Hopkins), trapping her in a destructive relationship predicated on threats and abuse. The film firmly establishes sexual desires as the central cauldron of conflict, and as Hyde grows more physically revolting with each transformation, he becomes a physical embodiment of a sadistic id.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was nominated for several major Oscars (it won Best Actor) and received audience awards for Most Favorite Actor and Most Original Story at the first annual Venice Film Festival in 1932. The DVD includes an amiable commentary by horror movie scholar Greg Mank, and admirably, Victor Fleming’s 1941 film version starring Spencer Tracy and Ingrid Bergman, which by all accounts is far inferior to Mamoulian’s version, though I haven’t watched it yet. As an added bonus, the DVD includes the witty Bugs Bunny cartoon, Hyde and Hare (1955), directed by Friz Freleng.
Some recent viewing…
Crimson Gold
Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s follow-up to The Circle (2000) is equally impressive in its empathy for social undesirables (in this case, a lower class pizza deliveryman played by a schizophrenic actor). Like its predecessor, Crimson has a circular narrative structure beginning with a long take and a frame within a frame composition: the deliveryman robs a store while a crowd of onlookers gathers outside an open door. But the rest of the film adopts its own visual language emphasizing vertical space, stairways, elevators, and Tehran at various elevations befitting its focus on the tensions between rich and poor and the rage that results from insulting behavioral codes. (In many ways, Panahi could have titled his film High and Low, after the classic 1963 Kurosawa thriller.)
Written by famed Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, the movie isn’t simply a formal exercise–it’s an existential, compelling movie that uses everyday events (driving through congested traffic, shopping, delivering pizzas, being detained by authorities) to enter into the heart and mind of its laboring protagonist. Thematically, the film has been compared to such social vigilante movies as Taxi Driver and Falling Down, but its treatment of violence is much less sensationalistic and its personal affect much less diluted by Hollywood conventions than those two films. It’s another universally important work by this gifted filmmaker.
My Architect
Despite the fact that this film was recently nominated for an Oscar, it’s quite good. Louis Kahn, one of the great American architects of the 20th century, was found dead in the men’s room in New York’s Penn Station, penniless, in 1974. After his death, it was discovered that he was the father of three separate families whom he maintained partial contact with over the years. His only son, Nathaniel, later became an off-Broadway theatre director and independent filmmaker, and this essay film is Nathaniel’s attempt to reconstruct his father’s biography–and reconcile his feelings toward it–through his study of Kahn’s monumental buildings, personal acquaintances, and unfinished dreams which never materialized.
That the film works on so many levels (as artistic analysis, personal confession, and mystery story, for starters) and draws its various threads together into a coherent emotional whole highlighting their interconnectivity is only one of its many strengths. Nathaniel shows how Kahn’s architecture evoked a yearning for transcendence; he shows how that creativity was locked within a paradoxical and complex person; and finally, he carefully reconstructs the details of Kahn’s life through the people who knew him in various contexts, slowly building a multi-faceted portrait as graceful and moving as the remarkable buildings surveyed throughout the film.
Every time I passed my local theatre screening this movie, there was a significant line of people waiting to get in. Whether that’s a sign of the film’s individual popularity or residual run-off from last year’s well-distributed and reviewed documentary scene could be a toss up, but it’s a welcome occurrence in either case.
The Return
Andrey Zvyagintsev’s brooding and poetic drama is uncommonly beautiful–its widescreen vistas of the lakes and forests of its increasingly rural setting help unite the film’s physical and metaphysical concerns. After 12 years of absence, a prodigal father returns home to his wife and two adolescent sons. A meal between them takes on a ritualistic feel that sets the tone for his interactions with the boys: taking them on a camping trip, his efforts to legitimize his authority are met with understandable resistance as the boys oscillate between tentative obedience and open defiance, their journey together gradually becoming a profound rite of passage.
Zvyagintsev creates interpretative tension for the viewer as well by presenting the father’s character through a juxtaposition of religious motifs and human frailty: the family photo is kept in a Bible beside a drawing of Abraham’s intended sacrifice of Isaac and the initial view of the sleeping father is a direct quotation of Mantegna’s painting, “The Lamentation Over the Dead Christ,” but the father’s brusque authoritarianism often seems misdirected, severe, and unempathetic. His efforts to repair the past may very well destroy the future.
In many ways, the film can be compared to another recent movie, Koktebel (2003), which also investigates archetypical father/son issues within the sensuous Russian landscape. (In light of the fact that Alexander Sokurov’s latest film is entitled Father and Son, one wonders if a major thematic concern is developing within Russian cinema.) It’s immersive and compelling storytelling, well deserving of the international praise it has received.
The new issue of the Australian journal, Senses of Cinema, is now online.
Some highlights:
ïMy friend Darren Hughes’ long-anticipated overview of the career of director Hal Ashby (Being There, The Last Detail, Harold and Maude). (Our thoughts are with Darren these days.)
ïA 2003 World Poll, including top tens by myself and Filmjourney participant Acquarello.
ïA review of the book, Japanese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era Through Hiroshima, by Abe Mark Nomes.
ïA review of last November’s AFI Fest, which I never got around to writing about. My favorite of the festival, Wang Xiaoshuai’s Drifters, gets a nice couple of paragraphs: “Drifters belongs to the growing category of mature, disturbing, thought-provoking masterpieces inspired by globalisation.”
ïA lengthy review of a movie I plugged here last October, Jean Epstein’s 1928 impressionist masterpiece, La Chute de la maison Usher.
And a whole lot more I’ve only just begun to read…
Gojira: 50th anniversary
Last week, the Criterion Collection released the first DVD of a key Bresson film in North America, Diary of a Country Priest (Journal d’un curÈ de campagne, 1951). This is my review of the DVD, which has also been posted at the site I co-admin, www.Robert-Bresson.com.
* * * *
The Film
Diary of a Country Priest is a key film in Bresson’s oeuvre for several reasons. It was his first film subsequent to the poorly received Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne released six years earlier. It was his first collaboration with cinematographer LÈonce-Henry Burel (a silent era veteran of Abel Gance, Maurice Tourneur, and Marcel L’Herbier, among many others), who would go on to photograph Bresson’s three subsequent “prison cycle” films, A Man Escaped (Un condamnÈ ‡ mort s’est ÈchappÈ, 1956), Pickpocket (1959), and The Trial of Joan of Arc (ProcËs de Jeanne d’Arc, 1962). Diary was also Bresson’s first adaptation of a novel by Georges Bernanos (1888-1948), his second being Mouchette (1967). And finally, it was an aesthetic breakthrough, Bresson’s first film wholly conceived in the “cinematographic” theory he would refine throughout his career.
Much has been written about the film’s success as an interior drama, a rare cinematic feat accomplished through Bresson’s rigorous commitment to form. It’s a cinema of introversion, depicting the “simplest and most insignificant secrets of a life actually lacking any trace of mystery” and narrated in hushed tones by the priest (Claude Laydu) as he writes in his journal. A variety of scenes convey his insecurity (he backs down from a demanding parishioner, refrains from criticizing another, and agonizes over how he should address an infidelity). “But I think you have the spirit of prayer,” the priest of Torcy (Armand Guibert) tells him after detailing a lengthy list of the priest’s vocational failings, but it’s a bitter irony–through a combination of physical and emotional suffering, the priest of Ambricourt’s dark night of the soul undermines that as well.
The priest’s journal entries resemble confessions to the viewer and reflect the prominent role of writing throughout as personal expression and communion: a note written by the priest’s sole church attendee pleads with him to leave the parish, his key to offsetting the hatred of a young woman, Chantal (Nicole Ladmiral), occurs when he discovers her secret letter to her father, a countess he delivers from grief offers him a letter of gratitude, and even the final words of the film are read from a type-written correspondence. Diary‘s world is one of downcast eyes and hidden motivations, isolated souls and abbreviated expressions, the written word providing the cement that binds viewers to the protagonist, and the protagonist to his diegetic world.
Bresson’s decision to present his story elliptically challenges the viewer to heightened sensitivity and attention. When the priest describes his suffering through a “terrible night,” both of the highly cinematic events he describes are never directly shown: a “shattering” in his breast that induced trembling for over an hour and his decision to lay face-down at the foot of his bed in order to show “complete acceptance.” The viewer is only presented with the moments in between and after these episodes.
The film’s creative use of narration is another of its most celebrated features, a stylistic device Bresson would use in several of his films. As AndrÈ Bazin would write:
“The most moving moments of the film are those in which the text and image are saying the same thing, each however in its own way… It is here at the edge that the event reveals its true significance. It is because the film is entirely structured on this relationship that, towards the end, the image takes on such emotional power. It would be in vain to look for its devastating beauty simply in what is explicit. I doubt if the individual frames in any other film, taken separately, are so deceptive.”
The ambient soundtrack is similarly integral to the film’s affect. So much of the priest’s world is conveyed through offscreen sounds–passing carts, dogs barking in the distance, nearby revelry, hunters in the woods, gardeners raking leaves–all the pitches and timbres carefully evoking a physical world just beyond the priest’s reach. Sounds connect various scenes as well, such as the tolling church bells which ring in the only two scenes in the film involving graveyards.
The paradoxical discovery of meaning in its apparent absence serves as a primary theme of the film as well as its aesthetic model. The compositions repeatedly emphasize restrictive gates, doors, and windows. One of the most mysteriously hopeful scenes in the film occurs when the priest, having reclaimed his spiritual identity, suddenly rises from bed “with the feeling, the certitude that I had heard someone calling me.” He walks over to his window and looks out, “Yet,” he adds, “I knew I wouldn’t find anyone.”
A large part of the film’s intensity derives from its visual style, a mixture of close-ups and medium shots, short tracking camera movements along the lens axis during key moments of many scenes (there are only a handful of panning shots), and the use of dissolves and fades that fluidly merge each episode of the film like a rhythmic fever dream. L.H. Burel explained that he saw the movie as “something rather insubstantial or immaterial” which he wanted to convey without the use of heavy shadows. Originally toying with an idea similar to the high-contrast lighting of Carol Reed’s The Third Man, Bresson was immediately enthused by the soft, “wet” look of Burel’s early test footage produced from having lens diffusers incorrectly attached. “When I saw the rushes, I was appalled,” Burel noted. “It wasn’t diffused, it was out of focus.” But Bresson insisted on the look and the film’s overcast skies and low-contrast interiors lend it a special, luminous quality. High-contrast photography is saved for night interiors, when the priest’s sense of isolation is the most severe.
Seeing becomes a running motif throughout the film, befitting its themes of spiritual enlightenment and self-awareness. A child and her classmates tease the priest for having “beautiful eyes” and later a doctor tells him he has “faithful eyes.” (In a later scene, the priest of Ambricourt admits to sometimes sharing the doctor’s spiritual pain and imagines his sad eyes upon him, “eyes which I feared to read.”) When Chantal expresses a vehement anger toward her governess, she declares, “You get used to her eyes. You imagine they’re kind. Now I’d like to tear out those eyes of hers and stamp on them with my foot!” And a member of the Foreign Legion finally tells the priest, “You should see yourself. Without that black robe, you’d look like any one of us. I could see that right off the bat.”
Watching Diary today allows one to recognize the whiffs of Bressonian wisdom he would expound upon in later years. In one early conversation, the elderly priest of Torcy advises the priest of Ambricourt to “keep order all day long, knowing full well disorder will win out tomorrow,” and we are reminded of Bresson’s preference for the filmmaking title “metteur en ordre” (“one who puts things in order”) rather than the typical French “metteur en scËne,” (“one who stages”). Bresson always gave a great emphasis to the rhythm and interaction of his various elements, writing that “a shot in a film is given its meaning by its context, and each shot modifies the meaning of the previous one.” In a later scene, the priest challenges the countess to examine her inner life and she responds, “An hour ago, my life seemed to me in order, each thing in its place. You have left nothing standing.”
In another scene, Chantal asks the priest what he thinks of her and he claims priest’s have no opinion. “You have eyes and ears and make use of them like everyone else,” Chantal quips, and he replies, “They would tell me nothing about you… You’re always restless, hoping to conceal the truth of your soul or perhaps to forget it.” This statement dovetails neatly into Bresson’s comments on non-professional “models”: “The thing that matters is not what they show me but what they hide from me and, above all, what they do not suspect is in them.”
Diary also differs in some respects from Bresson’s other films. Although his increasing rigor inspired him to eventually dispense with the use of music altogether, Jean-Jacques Gr¸nenwald’s stirring and sensitive score plays throughout this film. It’s a good score, but it’s much more prescriptive accompaniment than Bresson would embrace in later years.
It’s possible the happiest scene in the film occurs when the priest is offered a motorcycle ride from the Legionnaire, an event that reminds him of his youth and freedom. As one of the only modern elements in the film’s rural setting, the speeding cycle and its revving motor serve an inverse function to their destructive connotations in Au hasard Balthazar (1966).
Diary is Bresson’s longest film, clocking in at 115 minutes. Known for his brevity, Bresson’s films often run less than 90 minutes. According to Bazin, Bresson was “forced to throw out a third of his final cut [45 minutes] for the exhibitor’s copy, [and] he ended by declaring with a delicate touch of cynicism that he was delighted to have done so. Actually, the only ‘visual’ he really cared about was the blank screen at the finale.” In America, distributors reportedly cut another ten minutes from the film, but it nevertheless remains Bresson’s only widely-distributed movie in the US (previous to Rialto Pictures’ latest efforts) and even received an award by the National Board of Review in 1954.
The Transfer
Criterion’s high-definition digital transfer for this DVD presents Diary in its original 1.33:1 aspect ratio and mono sound, and was digitally restored from a 35mm print obtained from Studio Canal in France. It’s a positively beautiful presentation of the film that appears more crisp and detailed than any VHS edition by several magnitudes. The film’s silvery, soft tones are beautifully rendered and the format’s technology makes it an ideal resource for chapter stops, freeze frames, and ongoing study.
It includes newly translated and removable English subtitles.
The Supplements
Unfortunately, this is where the DVD could have used some improvement. Given Criterion’s track record of producing many two-disc DVD sets with copious extras and given the fact that this release represents the first key work of Bresson released on DVD in North America, it deserved a more elaborate package.
The disc includes the original trailer for the film restored by the French National Center of Cinematography, which surprisingly contains many alternate takes and scenes from those used in the film.
It also includes an audio commentary by film scholar Peter Cowie, which unfortunately is quite pedestrian. Cowie was the founding editor of the annual International Film Guide for forty years and he’s a dependable historian of world cinema who has written over twenty books, many of which focus on Nordic films. He has provided good audio commentaries for past Criterion releases such as Wild Strawberries and Hiroshima mon amour. But to my knowledge, he hasn’t made any serious contributions to Bressonian scholarship and given the informative but rare English writing on Bresson, I would’ve preferred that Criterion had enlisted a Bresson specialist, even if it would’ve necessitated the subtitling of a French commentary.
The main disappointment of Cowie’s commentary is that he spends vast portions of it reading from Bernanos’ novel in order to compare Bresson’s treatment with the source material, but this requires skipping over many formal details in scene after scene. The information he provides on Bresson seems either too colloquial (comparing Bresson to his favorite New York martinis) or questionable in its accuracy (he asserts that Bresson was an agnostic, thus dismissing decades of Jansenist commentary as well as Bresson’s own varied statements on the subject).
Cowie commendably notes that appreciation for Bresson can and does encompass a wider spectrum than Catholic thinkers alone, but he seems too eager to dismiss the specifically Catholic milieu of Diary for a few nebulous statements on religious values in general. He attempts to justify the film’s universal value by reducing “all the major religions and philosophies” into the same basic idea of enlightenment. While I appreciate his concern for universality, it doesn’t make for very rigorous textual or religious scholarship–I doubt there’s a Buddhist, for example, who won’t cringe as Cowie blithely defines Nirvana as a “state of grace.”
Other quibbles:
Cowie quotes Bresson’s comments about casting his models via phone conversations alone, but that quote was taken from Bresson’s methods in the ’70s.
He makes a confounding dig at Carl Theodor Dreyer en route when he suggests that Dreyer’s editing lacked a proper rigor and often exhibited “that Scandinavian deliberateness of tone that can, in its worst moments, seem like we’re watching paint dry on his ascetic white walls.” To make matters worse, Cowie then unfairly criticizes Bresson by saying, “Not that I’m against Dreyer, he possessed a humorous streak that unfortunately never entered Bresson’s personality.”
Many of Cowie’s observations of the film’s characters are also drawn from the novel rather than the film, thus he provides the sort of “background information” or even psychological detail that Bresson went to great pains to eliminate from his narrative.
Well, well, well.
The Home Theater Forum has just announced this:
INGMAR BERGMAN COLLECTION
MGM Home Entertainment will not be releasing the Ingmar Bergman DVD Collection on Tuesday, February 10 due to transfer problems on two of the discs.
If possible, please hold your reviews until we announce the new street date which we expect to be sometime in May. We will contact you once we have further information.
It’s amazing what a couple of websites and a discerning consumer base can do. As my friend Nick Wrigley put it, “Pre-internet, pre-DVD, [this boxset] could’ve been released as [cropped] VHS tapes and been distributed for years and years without any feedback… it’s amazing the level of communication that the Internet has brought.”
The above screengrab is from MGM’s new DVD of Shame, part of their heavily-touted Ingmar Bergman boxset (Hour of the Wolf, The Passion of Anna, Persona, The Serpent’s Egg, and Shame, along with extensive bonuses)–and it showcases the studio’s shamefully incorrect cropping of several of these titles. As Gary Tooze of DVDBeaver put it, “I can’t believe anyone but my uncle Des would frame this shot.”
Apparently, MGM decided most of the films should be framed at 1.66:1 instead of the proper 1.37:1. Several sites, including Masters of Cinema, are now advising cinephiles to cancel their pre-orders.
Those who would rather not pay over $100 for a boxset of films missing a significant percentage of their footage should take note. The set is due for release on February 10.
Can you name the films above?
This weekend, I had the rare opportunity to view these posters (and many like them) as part of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences new exhibition of Czech film posters. Unlike Western movie posters, which typically feature simple facial collages meant to serve and promote the star system, Eastern European posters once provided a major social and cultural function as public art. During the Cold War, the communist governments of Poland and Czechoslovakia allowed diversions from their “socialist realist” norm and allowed artists to create movie posters that could compete internationally in graphic design exhibitions. The posters drew styles from trends in world art, ranging from surrealist to pop art, grotesque to lyrical, all of it in the service of a film’s thematic concerns. (Today, American distributors ensure that a movie’s ad campaign is internationally homogenous, only allowing typesetting changes according to language differences.)
Part of the fun in viewing these posters, especially for a non-Czech reader like myself, is determining which film each poster represents–without the typical advertising or star promotion, the posters require a more focused interaction and appreciation. The above three posters, for example, from left to right are for Robert Bresson’s Une femme douce (A Gentle Woman) (Olga Pol·ckov·-Vyletalov·, 1970), Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (Josef Vyletal, 1970), and Jan Svankmajer’s Alice (Eva Svankmajer, 1984). In full size, the detail and brushwork of these lovingly-painted designs are positively astonishing.
There are actually quite a few websites dealing with Eastern European film posters and the artists who created them, as well as e-shops that sell reprints. Among the most informative or comprehensive of these sites include ArtScope.net’s historical overview of American Films in Polish Posters, Rene Wanner’s international Poster Page, and the browsable Polish Posters Shop.
The series will continue through April 18, 2004.
(Anonymous, Czech, 1923)
Along with the Academy’s Czech poster exhibition, it has also initiated an exhibition on the life and work of F.W. Murnau, the famed German filmmaker who created landmarks of expressionist cinema (Nosferatu, The Last Laugh, Faust) as well as American silent pictures (Sunrise, Tabu) among many others, before his tragic automobile accident and early death at the age of 43. (Fritz Lang delivered his eulogy.)
The exhibition has been organized by the Berlin Filmmuseum–it was initially presented at the 2003 Berlin Film Festival and includes several video monitors playing clips from Murnau’s films, original letters of correspondence and fragments of hand-marked screenplays, original set designs, photographs from Murnau’s private collection, and even models (the most elaborate of which is a street diorama of Murnau’s set for City Girl, roughly six or seven feet in length).
I was amazed to discover the city seen outside of a hotel’s revolving door in the beginning of The Last Laugh, for example, was actually constructed in forced perspective. As cars recede into the background, smaller and smaller model cars were used, and pedestrians standing in the distant background are actually cardboard cutouts standing before huge building facades in equally diminishing proportions.
Of Murnau’s 21 films, twelve are thought to no longer exist. Most of the others will be screened at LACMA in March/April, 2004.
Murnau’s facility with chiaroscuro lighting, a moving camera, and his attention to social themes are legendary and several of his works have been released on DVD in North America by Kino International, individually and as a box set. (Several of his films have also been released in European region 2 as well, in particular a recent Spanish restoration of Faust.)
Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum published an article in the Guardian last Saturday on Sunrise, and the Eureka region 2 DVD is now on sale in the UK. (The region 1 Fox DVD scandalously can only be obtained via a buy-three special offer–or their box set.)
The Academy’s Murnau exhibition will continue through April 18, 2004.
