I’ve been complaining about Film Comment for the past few years, its silly sarcastic newsbriefs and short fiction, its efforts to sacrifice meaningful coverage for “hip” mainstream criticism, etc. But I chanced across the latest issue, and it’s actually got me sitting down and reading:

ï Joan Rivers’ Guilty Pleasures (just kidding!)

ïAn article on early Iranian cinema (pre-Kiarostami, who the author, Sohrab Shahid Saless, suggests is “Bazin-compatible” and therefore more popular in the
West; incidentally, Kent Jones makes a similar argument in defense of Olivier Assayas’ “non-Bazinian” work in the latest Cinema Scope)

ï An analysis by Godfrey Cheshire of one of my favorite undistributed films
from last year, Ross McElwee’s essay film, Bright Leaves. (Which First Run Features has now acquired.)

ïA solid article on Jacques Tati by Richard Combs

ïAn article on “making of” DVD featurettes and a list of the author’s
favorites: Dr. Strangelove, Contempt, Peeping Tom,
Finding Nemo, Man of Aran, The Pianist, American Movie, Moulin Rouge, and North by Northwest

ïCannes summaries by Amy Taubin, Kent Jones, Richard PeÒa, and Gavin Smith

ïThe usual collection of capsule reviews, DVD recommendations, etc.

(Some of these articles, or parts of them, are available online, here.)

The new issue of the redesigned Senses of Cinema is online, and noteworthy contributions by Filmjourney discussion participants include Acquarello’s article on “A Divine Tragedy: Kim Ki-duk Searches for Redemption in The Samaritan Girl,” Darren Hughes’ piece on “The New American Old West: Bruno Dumontís Twentynine Palms,” and Michael Kerpan on Ozu’s Passing Fancy (Dekigokoro). Enjoy…

Multi-region DVD players (allowing you to watch DVDs purchased from around the world) are becoming cheaper all the time. One of the latest units is the Cyber Home CH-DVD 300, a player that can be purchased from Best Buy in the US for $32.99. Ted Mills writes his review at DVDBeaver.com.

I’ve also recently had good results on my OS X Mac computer with the freeware player, VideoLAN, which can be downloaded from Apple’s site or www.videolan.org.

I know it’s a bit early, but consider this fair warning to mark your calendars and stock up on pre-orders: September will be Carl Theodor Dreyer month for cinephiles. In addition to the cable retrospective scheduled by Turner Classic Movies, Image Entertainment have just announced their long-awaited DVD restoration of one of Dreyer’s best and most rarely-seen films, The Parson’s Widow (1920), to be released September 21. Don’t let its year of production fool you–its playful narrative, enticing dose of macabre humor, and philosophical sophistication might convince someone it was made years (or decades) later than it actually was.

From Image’s site:

One of the world’s greatest directors, Carl Theodor Dreyer has long been hailed for such masterpieces as The Passion of Joan of Arc, Vampyr, Day of Wrath and Ordet. Now we meet a different Dreyer who engages with broad humor, then gradually guides to a wise, bittersweet resolution. . . . Called “the first real Dreyer film,” The Parson’s Widow (aka The Witch Woman) prefigures key themes in his later work. Beautifully photographed in the 17th-century museum village of Lillehammer, Norway, the film’s original luminous quality is captured in this digitally mastered edition from a 35mm camera-negative print. Plus two rare Dreyer shorts! They Caught the Ferry (1948, 12 mins.) adapts the technique of Dreyer’s horror/fantasy Vampyr to a chilling and unforgettable miniature on driver safety. Thorvaldsen (1949, 11 mins.) uses the long lenses and confrontational style of The Passion of Joan of Arc to illuminate the search for truth in the work of the greatest Danish sculptor, which turns out to have a surprising affinity with Dreyer’s own cinema. All three films digitally mastered from 35mm archive prints. The Parson’s Widow is speed-corrected and tinted, with new music compiled by Neal Kurz from the works of Edvard Grieg.

I’ll wait to write about these films in depth, but in the meantime, check out Acquarello’s comments on The Parson’s Widow and plenty of other Dreyer films here at his site, Strictly Film School.

The website for the 29th Toronto International Film Festival (September 9-18) has officially gone live today, and I couldn’t be more delighted as I’m planning to attend this year. Passes will go on sale July 19 and in-person sales will begin on July 26.

While the official line-up won’t be announced until August 24, the site has already mentioned some titles to look forward to, including Jean-Luc Godard’s Notre musique, Chantal Akerman’s Demain on dÈmÈnage, and Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers, among many others.

Let’s hope it’s the beginning of a stellar line-up this year…

A few weeks ago, the American Film Institute in Washington, D.C. sponsored a Val Lewton retrospective that included such films as Cat People (1942), The Leopard Man (1943), and I Walked with a Zombie (1943), three of Lewton’s most famous productions, all directed by Jacques Tourneur. In many ways, Tourneur’s reputation has always struggled to free itself from Lewton’s name since the RKO producer made a series of inventive, low-budget horror films which emphasized shadows and mystery, offscreen space, and a strong sense of theme. (Working with other directors, Lewton also produced such classics as Curse of the Cat People and The Seventh Victim, along with a string of films Warner Brothers is currently preparing for a DVD box set.)

But Tourneur’s “auteurist” talents were to be further confirmed outside his Lewton associations in such films as the western fable Stars in My Crown (1950), the horror classic Night of the Demon (1957), and a quintessential film noir, Out of the Past (1947), released last week on DVD as part of Warner Home Video’s new film noir collection, another example of Tourneur’s work being packaged as a genre piece rather than the work of a key artistic voice.

Jacques was the son of Maurice Tourneur, a successful French filmmaker with a background in illustration and graphic design who began making films in 1912. Maurice then directed a string of films in America from 1914-1926, revealing a visual flair in works like The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917) and The Blue Bird (1918), but became disillusioned with the Hollywood system and returned to Europe. In Germany, he made Ship of Lost Men (1928) starring Marlene Dietrich, a film which gave Jacques his first production experience as an assistant and editor.

Jacques then moved to Hollywood himself and began working as a second unit director for MGM, for such pictures as A Tale of Two Cities (1935), where he worked alongside Val Lewton. After their MGM contracts expired, Lewton hired Tourneur to direct Cat People for RKO–and the rest is history.

Out of the Past was a strong entry in the film noir genre in the late-’40s, but its reputation grew in later years as a prime example of noir iconography (the private eye, the femme fatale, the chiaroscuro lighting and world-weary dialogue) and particularly the genre’s use of flashbacks, emphasizing the imprisoning past and doomed future.

One of the best and only books written about Tourneur is Chris Fujiwara’s 1998 study, The Cinema of Nightfall. In it, he pinpoints the importance of the film as an auterist work:

“If Out of the Past seems in some ways like a typical film noir, this is only because Tourneur’s constant preoccupations–the unreliability of appearances, the helplessness of people to resist their obsessions and avoid becoming the victims of an apparently impersonal fate–are also those of the genre. Tourneur places these concerns within a context marked by his realism, humanism, and love for aesthetic fascination and mystery.”

Robert Mitchum excels as the laconic protagonist who seems impervious to fate, acknowledging his self-destructive tendencies with matter-of-fact lucidity. As he shambles from scene to inexorable scene, attempting to bring closure to his past, he merely ensures his doom–and never seems to mind all that much.

The DVD boasts a luminous transfer and an amiable commentary by James Ursini.

This week, Miramax video released Martin Scorsese’s moving four-hour documentary on postwar Italian cinema, My Voyage to Italy (1999). I’ll never forget seeing the film in a packed Castro Theatre in San Francisco a few years ago and the raucous applause that followed it. It’s a personal tribute to internationally acclaimed films by Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and others–films Scorsese remembers his family gathering around the TV to watch when he was a child. Interspersing a brief reconstruction of his family’s milieu with many clips from the films, Scorsese confirms again why I appreciate him more as a cinephile than a filmmaker–expansive, passionate, and sensitive to questions of style, he communicates an infectious love of cinema and humanity that is inspiring and illuminating.

Scorsese begins with Rossellini’s Open City (1945), and describes the movement known as neorealism:

“By the time the war ended in 1945 the entire Italian movie industry was in shambles. The Germans had confiscated all of the film equipment and they converted Cinecitta, the film studio, into warehouses. And, of course, these were promptly bombed by the Allies. After the Germans had retreated from Rome, the studio became a refugee camp. So Italian filmmakers were sort of on their own with very, very precious few resources. And the nation of Italy itself needed to be reborn. . . .

If you ever have any doubt about the power of movies to effect change in the world, to interact with life and fortify the soul, then study the example of neorealism. So what was neorealism? Was it a genre? Was it a style? Was it a set of rules? More than anything else, it was a response to a terrible moment in Italy’s history. The neorealists had to communicate to the world everything their country had gone through. They needed to dissolve the barrier between documentary and fiction and in the process, they permanently changed the rules of moviemaking.”

The film provides extensive plot summaries and thematic encapsulations for a wide range of films, including poorly-distributed gems such as Rossellini’s The Flowers of St. Francis (1950) and Europa ’51 (1951). It examines the Italian epics that influenced D.W. Griffith, the “white telephone” films of the Fascist period, Rossellini’s films with Ingrid Bergman and his late historical works, De Sica’s humanist classics, Fellini’s moving early works, Visconti’s aristocratic period films, Antonioni’s meditations on alienation and the modern world.

I find myself of two minds regarding the documentary: on the one hand, it offers a passionate overview of postwar Italian cinema and many rarely-screened works, but on the other hand, its narrative approach is full of spoilers for anyone who hasn’t already seen these works. In other words, it’s introductory criticism, but it’s also akin to randomly skimming these films. I would recommend seeing as many of the films it addresses as one can beforehand–Open City, Germany Year Zero, Bicycle Thieves, Umberto D, and many of Fellini’s early works are available in North America on DVD, for example. But if one considers narrative revelations a minor price to pay in one’s filmic education, Scorsese’s overview is a rousing and invigorating tribute.

For those who have been wondering about my recent absence, I went to a music festival with some friends last week and was surprised to discover I didn’t have Internet access for a few days. Stay tuned for several updates…

After I arrived back home yesterday, I learned of Terrence Rafferty’s piece on Robert Bresson in Sunday’s New York Times, an article that fails to generate much enthusiasm for Bresson’s work and perpetuates ho-hum and presumptious ideas about the filmmaker’s “darkening” tone and “loss of faith” in his later films. Whenever interviewers asked Bresson about his increasing lack of redemptive endings and suggested a change in his worldview, he always seemed genuinely mystified by their suggestion, and he was right to do so in at least one sense: if the grace glimpsed in his work was always present and dependable, it would cease to be noteworthy. Grace and the lack of grace go hand in hand; one doesn’t preclude the other.

Rafferty quotes Paul Schrader, whose writing on Bresson also tends to suffer from a tendency to force the filmmaker into certain philosophical straightjackets:

Schrader: But in your last three films, the colour films, Une femme douce, Four Nights of a Dreamer, and Lancelot, I feel a new direction in your films which I don’t fully understand and . . .

Bresson: Because they are in color?

Schrader: No. My supposition is that in the earlier films there was an effort to create, if not saints, the possibility of saintliness in a world without God, to use Camus’ phrase, and I sense that in the most recent films that you are trying to create a kind of saintliness in a world without theology.

Bresson: You can’t say that about Lancelot.

Schrader: I feel that from Diary of a Country Priest to Balthazar, you were working off a given theology, and now you are forging new terrain. I can understand creating a saint without God, but I can’t understand creating a saint without theology. Does this make any sense to you?

Bresson: No, no, because the more life is what it is–ordinary, simple–without pronouncing the word “God,” the more I see the presence of God in that. I don’t know how to quite explain that. I don’t want to shoot something in which God would be too transparent. So you see, my first films are a bit naive, too simple. It is very hard to make a film, so I did it with great simplicity. The further I go on in work, the more I see difficulty in my work, the more careful I am to do something without too much ideology. Because if it is at the beginning, it wouldn’t be at the end. I want to make people who see the film feel the presence of God in ordinary life, like Une femme douce in front of death. . . . But there is the presence of something which I call God, but I don’t want to show it too much. I prefer to make people feel it.

Schrader: Do you sense this change?

Bresson: The change in my work? Of course. I said that in the first film it was too obvious. I don’t want it to be.

Schrader: Maybe that’s what I mean when I say that in your later films, I don’t feel a sense of theology.

Bresson: Not in Lancelot?

Schrader: You seem to be creating your own theology rather than work off a previous theology.

Bresson: I see another way to answer your question. Ideology is the moral. I don’t want to be ideological. I want to be true, I want to have a certain way of being on top of life, and I don’t want to show you anything especially. I want to make people feel life as I do: that life is life, and in everything, the most ordinary, the most material, I see ideology.

–May 17, 1976