I’ve been playing catch-up this week, so there haven’t been any updates, but I did pick up the Frankenstein: Legacy Collection (a five-film DVD box set, of which I’m only interested in James Whales’ two classics, but at $20 for the whole collection, it’s impossible to pass up) as well as the Criterion Collection’s new Ozu films. A new print of Fellini’s La Dolce vita (1960) opens today in Los Angeles, and the Visual Communications FilmFest will be screening films by and about Asian Pacific Americans this weekend. On Monday, renowned choreographer and experimental filmmaker Yvonne Rainer will present Film About a Woman Who (1974) and After Many a Summer Dies the Swan: Hybrid (2002) at the REDCAT.

Look for commentary on all of these events and more in the coming days…

I’m very pleased to announce that my cohorts and I at Masters of Cinema have entered into an agreement with the independently-owned Eureka Video in the UK to distribute a collection of DVDs, The Masters of Cinema Series, representing classics of world cinema. Future titles will include Arnold Fanck’s The Holy Mountain (1926), Carl Theodor Dreyer’s MikaÎl (1925) (undistributed on video in the US), and F.W. Murnau’s Tartuffe (1926). Eureka has a great relationship with the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation in Germany, and we look forward to collaborating with them on future releases.

All of the titles in the series should have excellent transfers, lovely covers designed by my friend Nick Wrigley, and specially written booklets.

The last few years, I’ve taken advantage of the fact that the San Francisco International Film Festival falls on my birthday in late April, and this year is no exception. I needed little convincing to attend the oldest film festival in the US, and even less reason to take a vacation in one of America’s most beautiful cities.

After arriving yesterday afternoon, I managed to see the latest works of two masters, Tsai Ming-liang (Goodbye, Dragon Inn) and Raoul Ruiz (That Day [C'est jour-l‡]).

Tsai’s film is a continuation of his themes of urban alienation, evoked through his inimitable conflation of wry, deadpan humor, long minimalist takes, delapidated interiors, and unexpected hints of the supernatural. Dragon Inn contextualizes these elements around the cinema itself–literally, as the entire film takes place within an actual cinema (the one featured in his previous film, What Time Is It There?), and figuratively, as it depicts the constant tension between movies and audience, communal experience and individuality, and person-to-person relations. Tsai renders each of these subjects with an emphasis on their lack of cohesion, but as with all things, the absence of something is unavoidably attached to its existence–a paradox at the center this film and much of Tsai’s work. Characters gather together in a darkened theatre to ostensibly watch a Hong Kong action film, but their annoying viewing habits only serve to distract one another; a ticket-taker journeys throughout the labrynthine complex searching for the absent projectionist; audience members gather in various parts of the theatre hoping for, but failing to achieve, romantic couplings; the aging ghosts starring in the Hong Kong actioneer appear to watch the film as well…and then disappear.

Throughout, Tsai’s combination of sound design and space chrystallizes his thematic concerns: the echoing footsteps and crunching snackers say more about these characters and their interactions–or lack of them–than entire pages of dialogue might. In this milieu, where each detail counts as a major piece of a complex social puzzle, the choices people make in determining how to stand next to each other or select their seats in a nearly empty theatre become definitive personal statements.

Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a film that will undoubtably benefit from repeated viewing and contemplation, and I look forward to seeing the film again soon. I know of no other film that has foregrounded the existential experience of movie watching and the miniature social world within a movie theatre with greater poignancy.

As counted by the Internet Movie Database, Raoul Ruiz has made 90 films in the last 43 years and I’m sorry to say that I’ve only seen one of them–his avant-garde masterpiece, The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (1979). That Day has convinced me I’d better start playing catch-up pretty quickly. It’s a playful and sharp-edged black comedy that charmed even me, someone who tends to be cynical about cynical comedies.

Set “in the near future” in Switzerland, the film details a man’s elaborate conspiracy to murder his superstitious daughter with the consent of his lawyers and local police, who release a serial killer from prison assigned to the deed. What follows is a highly-watchable combination of stylized performances evoking an unbalanced world treading a narrow line between reality and fantasy, sanity and insanity, power and weakness, love and betrayal.

Ruiz’s plot twists and turns with countless reversals, and yet somehow manages to seem thematically unified by the end, with a strange coupling of romantic innocence prevaling over evil machinations and self-destruction. Having said that, the less plot you know beforehand, the better, so I won’t indulge in any more narrative description. The screening at SFIFF was followed by a Q&A with the film’s star, Ruiz regular Elsa Zylberstein, who suggested the film was an exceptionally personal one for Ruiz, who was “revealing his heart” more clearly than ever before.

(Incidentally, the film was programmed with a wonderful companion piece, Patrick Bossard’s 5-minute, one-take short film, Life and Death of a Boring Moment, a wryly humorous depiction of an attempted robbery during the shooting of a pretentious art film.)

Among the highlights scheduled for today, Eric Rohmer’s Triple Agent and dinner at Foreign Cinema.

This weekend, I attended the Russian Nights film festival, which features a smattering of titles gleaned from the touring Russian International Film Festival (RIFF) organized by the Stas Namin Center in Moscow (an arts organization championed in the West by such musicians as Frank Zappa and the Scorpions). I wasn’t able to attend last year’s gala festival here in Los Angeles, but this weekend I was able to purchase the handsome coffee table book that commemorated the event, The Exhibition of Russian Cinema: 100 Movies & 50 Directors of 20 Century in Russia.

I say it’s a handsome book, and indeed it is with its glossy pages, large production stills, and vintage poster reproductions. However, the writing unfortunately reads as if the Russian text was processed through Google’s translation engine and the results were printed verbatim. (On Dovzhenko’s poetic Earth (1930): “A Ukranian village witnesses how a new life comes along with a steel tractor to replace strong oxen that used to plough rich lands. A young white-teeth man Vasil is a tractor driver. He ploughs the side-land of kulak Khoma who gets angry at him fiercely. Finally, one summer night Khoma basely shots dead Vasil.”) But to be honest, despite the poor translation, I find the writing somehow charming and comprehensible–particularly for those films I’ve already seen–and valuable for its authentic Russian perspective.

The film I watched was Alexander Sokurov’s debut feature, his VGIK (State All-Union Institute for Cinematography) student thesis entitled The Lonely Voice of Man, which was completed in 1978 but was immediately shelved by the Soviet authorities for its blatant formalism and melancholy “pessimism.”

Thus marked the beginning of a seven-year period from ’80-’87 in which Sokurov’s work was inevitably banned from being screened at all in his native country. “Those seven years were a dreadful experience for me,” Sokurov has said, “but in no way did they succeed in forcing me to capitulate.” It was only through Gorbachev’s glasnost and the efforts of the Soviet filmmakers union–as well as public support from artists like then-expatriate Andrei Tarkovsky–that Sokurov’s films began to receive distribution.

Lonely Voice is a moody and strikingly filmed work loosely based on the writings of Andrei Platonov (1899-1951), a suppressed writer. Its long takes and carefully composed images take advantage of rural locations and dusty cottages, late afternoon sunlight streaming through windows, and trees rustling in the breeze. It conveys the experience of Nikita, a veteran of the Russian Civil War who returns home to a life of tranquility he can no longer engage. Although he clearly loves one woman, he courts another, and when the two decide to marry, their consummation remains achingly beyond his emotional reach. It’s a mood piece exemplifying grief, loss, and solitude while never completely abandoning hope.

Like many Soviet filmmakers, budgetary constraints forced a mishmash of film stocks to be used–color, black-and-white, monochrome–but also like his compatriots, Sokurov transformed this limitation into a strength, juxtaposing the color and absence of color into an intriguing visual rhythm. Sokurov also intercuts stock footage and archival photos from Soviet life in the ’20s (the film was initially conceived as a short documentary before it was expanded into a dramatic feature). Most strikingly, his use of an atonal score jarringly underscores various scenes, revealing the turbulent emotions that often remain hidden beneath the calm surface of his characters.

The Stas Namin Center’s book suggests that Russian cinema virtually disintegrated with the collapse of the Soviet Union, struggling through the nationalization of its various regions and offering artists a welcome but daunting freedom. As it continues to evolve and crystallize within its new sociopolitical context, it’s good to see at least a few representatives of Russian cinema acquire Western distribution (like Sokurov’s own Mother and Son, Russian Ark, or upcoming Father and Son, or Andrei Zvyaginstev’s excellent The Return). It will be exciting to see what lies ahead.

After a couple of years of rumors and delays, New Yorker Video is finally scheduled to release one of my all-time favorite movies, Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped (1956), as well as Bresson’s Lancelot du lac (Lancelot of the Lake) (1974) and potentially L’Argent (Money) (1983) on DVD on May 25th. Amazon.com is already pre-ordering the first two.

I’ll hold off extended commentary on these magnificent films until they’re released, but all I can say is that it’s about time someone finally started releasing Bresson on DVD in North America–the technology is only seven years old.

No details on extras at the moment, but fingers crossed that New Yorker will deliver pristine transfers, at the very least.

Edit: I just read Darren Hughes’ blog entry and since the nearest book to me happened to be Bresson’s diminutive Notes on the Cinematographer, I thought I’d play along:

“My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.”

The new 12th edition of the Time Out Film Guide has recently been published, and for my money it’s by far the best collection of capsule reviews in book form that’s widely available. Utilizing an extensive group of UK writers and covering a spectrum of films that far surpasses the Leonard Maltin or Martin/Porter guides–with more provocative writing–it’s a wonderful quick reference when browsing your cable schedule or local video store.

The latest edition has been especially spiffed up, with color page inserts and alphabetical markers. It also has an admirable DVD buyer’s guide organized by country, which suggests significant DVDs from all regions and even provides an informative plug for the multi-region DVD player industry.

This is International Week here at Caltech, and organizers have been showing a variety of noteworthy films, including Mike Leigh’s Life is Sweet, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Clouds of May (more on this later), and Satyajit Ray’s Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1968), otherwise known as The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha.

Ray’s film is a true anomaly: unavailable on video in this country, it was by far his most financially successful film, and one of his least typical. Although Indian cinema is known for its Bollywood musicals based in Bombay and filmed in the Hindi language, Ray’s cinema was rooted in Calcutta and the more realist-inclined Bengali cinema. (Sometimes termed Tollywood, and not to be confused with Kollywood.)

Ray’s oeuvre in the ’50s and ’60s was internationally famed for its intimate dramas and aesthetic sensitivity, but Ray’s multi-talented approach to the arts included a love of music and graphic design. Adapting a story written by his grandfather, Ray fashioned Goopy and Bagha as his first musical comedy, an epic tale of two rural musicians and their whimsical misadventures with the King of the Ghosts, magic spells, and two kingdoms waging war. Goopy and Bagha have been compared to Tom Sawyer and Huckelberry Finn, but the silly nature of the film, its random creativity, and the relatively dim-witted exploits of the two heroes also makes it a kind of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (though Ray’s writing is far less scatological).

Although Ray, who composed the film’s music, conceived the film as an epic tale children could enjoy, a formal experimentation is on full display, notably in a sequence when Goopy and Bagha meet the spirit world deep within the woods. Ray uses negative processing and various shadow puppets superimposed over shots of the forest, and the sequence is not only an engaging musical number, but a visually inventive one as well.

Goopy and Bagha played for a record fifty-one straight weeks and in Ray’s later writing, he seemed bewildered at the experience of hearing the songs he wrote being sung by virtually every child in town. For me, it was especially rewarding to see the film with a largely Indian audience, who immersed themselves in the film despite its poor video dub and laughed the whole way through. It’s a playful, joyous picture, and one that deserves greater exposure.

Speaking of which, Goopy and Bagha is one of thirteen Ray films that has been restored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at the initiative of the Satyajit Ray Film and Study Collection at the University of California, Santa Cruz. They’re currently working on Three Daughters (1961) and Kanchenjunga (1962). All of Ray’s films have been in danger of being lost (and some original negatives have been), so their work is of the highest importance. A recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle offers a good overview of RayFASC’s laudable efforts.

All this just in time for the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles, which began last night.

It’s not often that I find myself wholly embracing contemporary thrillers–I’ve seen enough of them to recognize formulas in the trailers alone; their emphasis on gruesome aesthetics and heavy-handed shock tactics, sexy serial killers, or cops who decide that this time, it’s personal.

Happily, I can fully recommend two exemplary thrillers currently getting some play: Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things (2002), just released on DVD, and the first installment of Lucas Belvaux’s Trilogy (2002) series, On the Run (Cavale), which I just saw last night. Both films benefit from an almost old-fashioned love of character and formal construction, leaving most of the violence offscreen while emphasizing psychological and thematic concerns.

Frears’ film, with its justifiably Oscar-nominated screenplay, is set in working class London. A medical doctor and illegal immigrant from Nigeria, Okwie (Chiwetel Ejiofor), drives taxies during the day and works at the front desk of a hotel at night, offering random favors to his employers in order to remain hidden from authorities. His closest friends are a prostitute, an Asian coroner at a nearby hospital, and Senay (Audrey Tautou), a Turkish immigrant also trying to lay low. Each character navigates the thorny ethical realm between personal compromise and desperate initiative, and Frears contextualizes their struggle through acutely observed locations: secluded offices, empty basements, and cluttered tenement housing. Fast-paced and sensitively wrought, the film is a riveting and inspired portrait of the shadow world society creates (and feeds upon) and the people trapped within it.

Belvaux, a Belgian actor appearing in French cinema throughout the ’80s and ’90s, has written, directed, and starred in his latest project–three different genre films (thriller, comedy, and drama) centered around the same characters. The US release of Trilogy has been delayed for almost a year but all three films will be showing in L.A. by the end of the week.

The offscreen sounds of a jailbreak accompany On the Run‘s title sequence over a black screen, and a series of jumpcuts from within the getaway car convey the subsequent escape. As the escapee, Bruno (Belvaux), hides out in Grenoble near the French Alps and assembles his plan for striking back against those who betrayed him, the details slowly emerge. Bruno is a violent, militant leftist who arms himself to the teeth and ingeniously devises ways to circumvent the police, committing himself to a one-man revolution. The dramatic irony is that the more Bruno attempts to force a communist reality, the more he isolates himself from human community.

The film spends a lot of time with Bruno, both in his elaborate activities and shootouts and in his privacy, eating ravioli from cans warmed over Sterno flames and assembling/disassembling his weaponry to pass the time while hiding in a storage shed. This approach might have proved wearisome to the audience (which, of course is part of its raison d’Ítre), but Belvaux fills his scenes with immediate physical action in the tradition of Bresson or the Dardennes in a way that perpetuates interest. Bruno is always traveling, collecting, manipulating, forcing–and getting nowhere.

Along the way, Bruno encounters various other characters in dire straights, one of whom provides an alternative hiding place for him but is herself suffering from drug addiction. Typically, Bruno’s solution is utilitarian–deprive or supply her with drugs so long as she can be useful to him–but his ambivalence whenever necessity isn’t dictating reveals him to be a genuine, if severely misdirected, idealist. His criminal obsessions thus take on a tragic tone a la Il Bidone (1955) or Pickpocket (1959).

Word on the street is that Trilogy is uneven in quality, but if so then On the Run must surely be one of its high points. It’s a taught and intense portrait of the destructive consequences of merging cutthroat tactics with visionary utopianism, and one that maintains its steady, sober gaze upon the frail human beings at its center. It’s certainly the most engrossing thriller I’ve seen in a while.

While breezing through Roger Ebert’s site this morning, I was surprised to see his three-star (good) rating of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s mesmerizing Distant (2003), a film he indirectly panned ¹ last year in his disparaging remarks toward the Cannes Film Festival.

Occasionally at Filmjourney, I’ve critiqued Ebert’s populist dismissals of highly regarded art cinema in light of the fact that he continues to be one of the few mainstream critics who actually attends film festivals and writes about them and offers at least a modicum of sensitivity toward film history and analysis with his Great Films essays or Overlooked Festivals or DVD commentaries. He should know better.

Clicking on Ebert’s (brief) review, I was amused to read about his change of heart toward the film:

How is it that the same movie can seem tedious on first viewing and absorbing on the second? Why doesn’t it grow even more tedious? In the case of “Distant,” which I first saw at Cannes in 2003, perhaps it helped that I knew what the story offered and what it did not offer, and was able to see it again without expecting what would not come. . .

. . . The film, directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, is shot with a frequently motionless camera that regards the men as they, frequently, regard nothing in particular. It permits silences to grow. Perhaps in the hurry of Cannes, with four or five films a day, I could not slow down to occupy those silences, but seeing the film a second time, I understood they were crucial: There is little these men have to say to each other and — more to the point — no one else for them to talk with.

I find it hard to believe that any genuine art devotee would be surprised at how creative works can reveal greater depths and intricacies upon extended reflection or recurring engagement, but given Ebert’s journalistic function as a thumb-proclaimer and consumer guide, I suppose this fact shouldn’t surprise me. One of his role models, Pauline Kael, was famous for her impassioned, off-the-cuff responses to movies; she proudly proclaimed her general policy of watching any given film once, and once only. (And critics expected to view every single studio release in their neighborhood from week to week doubtless have the time or energy for extended reflections anyway.)

I’m glad Ebert gave Distant a second look and I’m glad he has the integrity to admit his previously inadequate response. So many of my favorite films are movies that initially bored or confused or even repelled me the first time I saw them. Without second glances or encountering other opinions, I would have dismissed them completely and subsequently never developed as a film viewer, or even perhaps as a human being. For those of us who consider our engagement of art a crucial aspect of our life journey–an opportunity to contextualize the world and establish new perspectives from those we cherished as adolescents–second glances are essential.

1. Ebert railed against two filmmakers in particular, Abbas Kiarostami and Theo Angelopoulos–though his subsequent description was clearly indebted to Distant–”with their fashionably dead films in which shots last forever, and grim middle-aged men with mustaches sit and look and think and smoke and think and look and sit and smoke and shout and drive around and smoke until finally there is a closing shot that lasts forever and has no point.”

   Ebert’s vague mishmash of disdain can also be attributed to the fact that he has seen/reviewed so few movies by either of these filmmakers. Perhaps if he deigned to revisit some of their films as well, he would be pleasantly surprised if the subtleties and complexities of their work suddenly begin to blossom before his very eyes?

A few blogs back, I noted the latest issue of Cineaste includes the editors’ Ten Favorite Historical Films and sneaking in at tenth place is Francesco Rosi’s Salvatore Giuliano (1961), a film which has recently been released as a 2-disc DVD from the Criterion Collection.

Its subject is a notorious mountain bandit who was recruited to lead the fight for Sicilian independence immediately following World War II. After the island was declared an autonomous region of Italy in 1946, Giuliano waged terrorist acts against communists until 1948 when conservatives took office, after which he engaged in various criminal activities until he was ostensibly shot by cabinieri police in 1950.

The trial of his captured men that followed, however, revealed a number of surprises: Giuliano was probably shot by one of his own lieutenants and the public account of his death was a staged coverup to keep troubling alliances between the local politicians, police, mafia, bandits, and Giuliano’s activities a secret.

Godard once famously remarked that the best way to critique a film is to make another one, and Rosi’s film poses an argument for a proper cinematic approach to historical films in rigorous terms. Rosi stylistically constructs a careful fiction that remains as true to the facts as possible. (“You cannot invent, in my opinion,” he once said, “but you can interpret.”)

Although the film is titled with the bandit’s name and he is indeed the key figure around which the plot hinges, Giuliano (Pietro Cammarata) rarely appears onscreen alive, and when he does it’s merely as a fleeting figure with his back to the camera or seen in long shot. Rosi doesn’t invent any drama through, say, an imaginary campfire soliloquy, or endow Giuliano with any sentimental ideologies; the outlaw remains a discernable yet mysterious figure throughout, just as he is to historians.

Rosi borrows several elements from neorealism–nonprofessional actors and real locations, deep focus photography and long takes–but he adopts an austere structure with a complex timeframe that provocatively avoids narrative embellishment and the usual emotional padding one might expect from a “historical film,” as if to say “this is all we know–take it or leave it.” (Neorealism, he would suggest, concerned itself with depicting reality; he wanted to go one step further and critique reality.)

Despite this formal rigidity, the film addresses some of the significant social problems that affected the agricultural people of Southern Italy after the war and stages several scenes of raw emotionality. When the Italian military conducts sweeping arrests in a town sympathetic to Giuliano, the women of the town rush through the streets en masse in protest; when Giuliano’s mother (a local nonprofessional actress who had lost her own son to violence) identifies Giuliano’s body, her intensive sobs were so genuine, Rosi claimed he reduced the number of takes out of concern for her well-being.

In presenting the facts of this era through strenuous research and a provocative structure that stresses evidence over explanations, Salvatore Giuliano succeeded in revealing many details previously hidden to the public and continues to prompt reflection. (The Criterion DVD helpfully includes a newsreel from the era that illustrates the extent to which the official version of events differed from, or obscured, many of the facts.) It’s a film that helped inaugurate the “political cinema” of the ’60s and particularly influenced Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966)–both films even shared the same screenwriter, Franco Solinas.

The film also presents a troubling historical moment that foreshadows many future events. The guerilla tactics of Giuliano’s men aren’t so far removed from future battles fought in Algeria or Vietnam, and the propensity of established powers to surreptitiously recruit revolutionaries and thugs for their causes, only to watch the violence escalate beyond their control is a tragedy that has become all too pertinent in recent times.