Monthly Archives: October 2004

Kuroneko and Jigoku

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While the popularity of Japanese horror films has recently penetrated these shores, the genre has its share of classics, many from the ’50s and ’60s, when Japan’s studio system (like Hollywood’s) was beginning to crumble and smaller studios were experimenting with edgier (and sometimes downright sensationalistic) fare. This weekend, the American Cinematheque has been screening its mini-series, Black Cats and Haunted Castles: Classics of Japanese Horror and the Supernatural, and I’ve managed to see Kaneto Shindo’s atmospheric follow-up to his wonderful 1964 Onibaba (recently released on DVD by Criterion) entitled Black Cat in the Forest (Kuroneko), and two startling films about the netherworld, Shiro Toyoda’s Portrait of Hell and Nobuo Nakagawa’s Hell. As the screening notes for the mini-series suggest, “While current Japanese horror movies are primarily set in the modern world, kaidans ["stories of strange things"], often set in period, utilized age-old legends, folk tales or erotic/grotesque kabuki plays as their source material–yarns of disfigured, black-haired female ghosts wronged by their samurai lovers, tales of cat-ghost vampires, disembodied phantasms, female snow spirits and specters of murdered masseurs.”

Black Cat in the Forest (Kuroneko, 1968)

I’ve previously only seen two Kaneto Shindo films and both were superb, Onibaba and the sublime Naked Island (1965), both films utilizing scant dialogue and rendering vivid portraits of human beings struggling within a desolate physical landscape; the former makes highly intense use of tall, swaying reeds and the latter is lyrically set on a deserted island. Shindo is known as a politically-engaged leftist, and has said, “You should not forget that we are dealing intimately with the political when scrutinizing a man’s individual nature, needs, and problems.” This includes sexuality, a subject of interest in several Shindo films; Onibaba‘s erotic atmosphere highlights the way sexual politics determine much of the action between its isolated characters, a microcosm of human society.

Kuroneko is both an extension of the themes of Onibaba as well as a more bittersweet and even romantic film. Both films involve a peasant mother and her daughter who prey upon samurai, but the later film transposes the conflict from the realm of lust, attraction, and sexual competition to class conflict and duty versus love. The two women are raped and murdered in Kuroneko‘s opening scene by a band of roving samurai; later they haunt the area as physical ghosts who transform into murderous black cats, and one by one, lure each of the samurai into their deadly claws. However, one samurai turns out to be the daughter’s missing husband, who has himself become a revered samurai, and their love for each other is foiled by the divides between life and death, code and compassion (the daughter has sworn to destroy all samurai; her husband has sworn to destroy all ghosts).

Shindo underlines the class struggle between the peasants and the samurai throughout: as each of the samurai are killed, the ghosts deposit them in the woods and poor villagers strip the corpses of their possessions; all the while, the local samurai warlord demands revenge while gloating in his powerful fortress and savoring the aristocratic pleasures of his geishas. The ghosts’ cat nature underlines their lowly position, as the feline has traditionally been regarded as a lazy pest in Japanese culture, a creature who mythically arrived so late when the zodiac was being created that it missed out entirely.

Kuroneko also substitutes the reed-congested marshes of Onibaba with a tall forest of bamboo trees, a transposition that visualizes the thematic difference between the chaotic, primal energy of Onibaba and the social order of Kuroneko. Kuroneko‘s shadowy compositions, elegant use of sound and silence, slow-motion, and stylized violent confrontations–all rendered with a clear eye for class struggle–is imaginative, suspenseful, and compelling.

Hell (Jigoku, 1960)

It has been said that Nobuo Nakagawa (1905-1984) is Japan’s most celebrated horror director, and if Jigoku is any indication, his style can be loosely described a conflation of Luis BuÒuel and Hammer films. The movie is not a suspense picture, its mixture of realism and outlandish twists of fate makes it a never-ending string of surprises, more a Grand Guignol black comedy about the human condition than a horror film of dreaded anticipation. Its title sequence sets the tone as scantily clad women pose in brilliantly-hued backgrounds with intense jazz rumbling on the soundtrack; like a parody of a James Bond opening, the sequence establishes the film’s gleeful evocation of guilt and punishment, exemplifying a diabolical celebration of damnation found in art from medieval tapestries to the Squirrel Nut Zippers.

Shiro (Shigeru Amachi) is a young student who’s engaged to his professor’s daughter. But he recently met a mysterious man with a malevolent grin named Tamura (Yoichi Numata), and the film begins with the two of them mired in blame–the previous night they had randomly hit a drunken yakuza with their car and sped away to escape notice. Tamura is nonchalant; Shiro begins his descent into agonizing guilt, particularly when his own random comments and decisions continue to result in the deaths of people around him (in often absurd and darkly humorous fashions). Eventually, Shiro finds himself in a senior citizen’s home where his father flirts with a young lover as Shiro’s mother lies dying in the next room. A party breaks out and chaos surrounds the drunken revelers…until time stops, and they all descend into a Dantesque-Buddhist, multi-leveled Hell.

At this point, the film becomes a series of shockingly gory vignettes but never loses sight of its visual ingenuity or the inner world of its characters as Shiro wanders from one scene of eternal torment to another, encountering the people of his life suffering among hundreds of lost souls swarming in the river of blood, the field of swords, the waterless desert, etc. People are lacerated and skinned alive, but the effects are Hammeresque and theatrical, more like a local haunted house enactment than anything approaching verisimilitude. The vision of Hell, in its detailed scope and lurid colors, impressively rivals any other cinematic interpretation, and would serve as a benchmark long before the CGI-enhanced imagination of something like Vincent Ward’s ideologically-tepid What Dreams May Come (1998).

Jigoku, however, is a film more about the theatricality of its horrors and its playfully cruel take on Fate than anything else. It may not be Dostoevskian in its thematic exploration of guilt, but as a stylish, remarkably original morality tale that manages to balance its sensationalistic terrors with cutting social critique, it’s a one-of-a-kind achievement.

Updates…

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The gravity of the upcoming US election makes it difficult to concentrate on a lot of movies this week, but stay tuned for at least a couple more reviews. In the meantime:

ïThe new issue of Senses of Cinema is now online.

ïThe excellent Canadian film magazine, Cinema Scope, now has a nice website.

ïWhy I continue to respect Roger Ebert despite the fact that he often subordinates his cinephilia to mainstream mediocrity.

ïLastly, Masters of Cinema has offered its editorial election endorsement.

Lifeline and Ten Minutes Older

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Short film compilations commissioned for a theme have been a staple genre of the festival circuit for years, and although they rarely achieve artistic cohesion, they sometimes have their stand-out works and a few of them even manage to get released on video (for example, ’60s collections like Rogopag or Six in Paris or more recent entries like LumiËre and Company or 11’09″01). I’ve watched the first of the two-part Ten Minutes Older (2002) series entitled The Trumpet (the other is The Cello), recently released on DVD in Korea, and found it to be a typical compilation of world-renowned filmmakers, highly conceptual sketches, and mixed results in attempting to illustrate an abstract principal–this time, time itself.

Fifteen directors were asked to create ten-minute films revealing their unique interpretation of “time,” seven of which contributed to The Trumpet. Aki Kaurismaki delivers an engaging, if slight, deadpan sketch about a romance in crisis; Werner Herzog offers an eccentric documentary about the modernization of a remote tribe in Brazil; Jim Jarmusch creates a tepid piece about an actress in her trailer during a production break; Wim Wenders communicates what an unexpected acid trip might look like on a desert road; Spike Lee offers a straightforward account of the illegal purging of thousands of voters in Florida’s 2000 presidential election; and Chen Kaige presents a derivative absurdist tale about workers hired to move the contents of a seemingly imaginary apartment.

But the film that stands out from them all is Lifeline by Victor Erice, the poetic Spanish filmmaker whose only features to date are The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), El Sur (1983), and Dream of Light (The Quince Tree Sun, 1992). Most of the cinephiles I know are dearly hoping this new piece won’t be his only cinematic contribution to the first decade of the 21st century, as it merely confirms his exceptional talent–it’s one of the most beautiful films I’ve seen all year.

The film, shot in luminous black-and-white, offers only the barest narrative situation through evocative dissolves connecting people and objects on a quiet afternoon in the Spanish countryside. A young boy draws a watch on his arm and imagines its tick-tocking, aided by the sounds of a real clock and the rhythmic labor of people around him: an elderly woman kneads dough in the kitchen, men scythe tall grass outside; young women scrub shoes. Beyond these people, children play in a parked car; an elderly man plays solitaire and next to him, a middle-aged man sleeps with the remnants of a cigar perched between his limp fingers. A mother sleeps beside her newborn infant, and there is an atmosphere of stillness and peace. Erice dissolves between the characters and various visual details, some nostalgic (family photographs from Cuba) and some menacing (a newspaper article describing Nazis in Spain). The news and decor place the film within a mid-century timeframe and remind the viewer of Franco’s close relations with Germany during World War II.

Suddenly, a dark stain appears on the baby’s blanket and begins to spread. No one, however, seems to notice. Time moves steadily forward as the danger looms. At a critical moment, however, the mother wakes up and cries for help; everyone drops their chores and rushes to her aid. The young boy wipes the image of the watch from his wrist.

Lifeline unfolds in sublimely poetic fashion, soft dissolves connect its beautifully-lit interiors and strong exterior compositions. Its visual and aural textures are lovingly merged and it’s clearly the work of someone who has lived this life and remembers it vividly.

I’ve watched the film a number of times now, and it’s a deeply compelling mixture of elements–rural life and historical detail, physical labor and a child’s imagination–that continually unveils new meaning. On trying to parse the relationship between its disparate elements, Erice’s own comments on the film have been helpful: “Chronos, with its watchful eye, attempts to control life… but life drains away.”

Chronos, of course, was the Greek god of time who devoured his children because he was told one would eventually slay him. (Unfortunately, he was tricked into forgetting one named Zeus.) Moreover, the ancient Greeks used two words to describe time: chronos (measuring the ever-diminishing quantity of time) and kairos (measuring the quality of time in special, unique, restorative moments). Erice’s citation of Chronos suggests the real philosophical conflict at the heart of his film: chronos identifies Spain at a moment in the early-’40s on the brink of war while an infectious danger spreads beneath its ritualized home life, and kairos interrupts that flow and ushers in a defining moment of hope. Such an interplay could describe that specific historical moment of the people of Spain as well as its larger historical experience. Like Erice’s previous work, Lifeline poetically asserts the relationship between personal meaning and history through its intoxicatingly potent sights and sounds that ultimately convey a love of human resilience.

The Cow

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My friend Mike Hertenstein has outdone himself and written a wonderful review of Dariush Mahrjui’s landmark Iranian film The Cow (1969) as part of his coverage of the Chicago International Film Festival, and to commemorate the film’s release this week on DVD:

“An awareness of at least two sides to every story is a hallmark for Mehrjui ó even a burden; as a director schooled in the West, Mehrjui has been especially attuned to both sides of the old conflict between city and country, clearly overlaid for him with the contrast between Iran and the West. His career after The Cow seems both driven and affected by the multiple worlds he has tried to occupy. Mehrjui tried to continue working under the Shah’s schizoid policy of support and banning, then bounced himself between the West and Iran as his nation swerved violently into Islamic Revolution. It is said that a viewing of The Cow converted the Ayatollah Khomeini from a traditional Muslim resistance to cinema to a believer in the “educational” possibilities of film; it took further convincing before the clerics were to allow film directors to go back to being artists and not propagandists. But by the mid-1980s, the way was opened for the first blossoming of the New Iranian Cinema. The pressing need to navigate the Islamic Production Code had actually helped create a national cinema that took the film world by surprise, and even by storm.”

You can read the full article, here.

Like Andrei Tarkovsky and so many other filmmakers working in countries with censorial governments (or distribution industries), Mehrjui’s story illustrates why the international film community and its various festivals are so crucial in spreading depictions of reality, supporting the artists, and calling for social renewal. Although Tarkovsky had a notoriously difficult time making films and getting them distributed in Russia, his international prestige allowed him a greater degree of liberty than, say, a filmmaker like Sergei Paradjanov, who was sent to a hard labor gulag in Siberia for several years. (Where he would have stayed indefinitely had the international film community not loudly petitioned for his release.) Other Soviet-era filmmaker fared even worse.

Similarly, many films deemed “non-commercial” in the US for their political or artistic challenges have benefitted enormously from international acclaim. From a whole slew of international “art house” films to an American film like Fahrenheit 9/11, many movies have been distributed in the US almost purely on account of their international notoriety.

The beauty of international prestige is how dissident filmmakers become both a source of pride and a target of vitriol for their governments. The more such a filmmaker is suppressed, the more famous he or she simply becomes.

Incidentally, this is one of of the reasons why I was so thoroughly underwhelmed with Zhang Yimou’s Hero (and skipped The House of Flying Daggers at TIFF), because I was truly disheartened to see such a fine, dissident filmmaker, who had spent years throughout the ’80s fighting to make socially-challenging dramas in China and establishing his artistic independence, reverting to a piece of dialogue-light, escapist eye-candy extolling the virtues of the state. The embattled director of Red Sorghum, Raise the Red Lantern, and To Live wouldn’t have approved.

White Nights (of a Dreamer)

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“It is the hour when practically all business, office hours and duties are at an end, and everyone is hurrying home to dinner, to lie down, to have a rest, and as they walk along they think of other pleasant ways of spending the evening, the night, and the rest of their leisure time. . . . and so at that hour our hero, who has not been wasting his time, either, is walking along with the others. But a strange expression of pleasure plays on his pale and slightly crumpled-looking face. It is not with indifference that he looks at the sunset which is slowly fading on the cold Petersburg sky. When I say he looks, I’m telling a lie: he does not look at it, but is contemplating it without, as it were, being aware of himself, as though he were tired or preoccupied at the same time with some other more interesting subject, being able to spare only a passing and almost unintentional glance at what is taking place around him. He is glad to have finished until next day with all tiresome business. He is happy as a schoolboy who has been let out of the classroom and is free to devote all his time to his favorite games and forbidden pastimes.”
–from White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevky

As enjoyable as the life of a cinephile is, it can have its drawbacks, particularly in the age of video and the Internet. I love the fact that I can write to people all over the world, order DVDs from around the globe, read English sites and struggle through French ones–not to mention blog about my notable discoveries from week to week. But let’s face it, such endeavors prescribe a certain degree of isolation; in order to engage the world, a contemporary film buff must virtually lock himself at home in order to watch videos or surf the Net, devoting herself to a cinephile’s “favorite games and forbidden pastimes.”

I’ve already written fondly of my recent social experience in Toronto, but as Los Angelenos begin spending more time indoors than out (our first rain since April patters against my window as I write this), it’s easy to fall into introverted habits; particularly someone like me who has always savored solitary, creative endeavors like drawing, reading, writing, or random contemplation. As the awkward joys of relationships and concerns like the upcoming, alarmingly crucial presidential election and its myriad implications prove, it’s important to step away from the keyboard and stack of DVDs every now and then.

These thoughts occurred to me this past weekend when the UCLA Film & Television Archive continued its Luchino Visconti retrospective on Sunday by screening the filmmaker’s White Nights (1957), his adaptation of Dostoevsky’s 1848 confessional short story about an impromptu romance initiated on the streets of Petersburg. Dostoevky’s narrator is a shy “dreamer,” a marginally successful businessman who spends the majority of his free time isolated in his apartment, lost in the narratives of his reading (“his imagination is once more ready for action, excited, and in a flash a new world, a new fascinating life, once more opens up enchanting new vistas before him”) so that his eventual return to reality seems like a letdown; something to be avoided. Thanks to the extended “white night” dusks of Petersburg, however, the narrator ventures outside his home and encounters Nastenka, a lively and attractive young woman who seeks advice for her troubled relationship with another man who hasn’t returned from an extended business trip. The story recounts their conversations over the course of several nights and is renowned for its evocative portrait of the protagonist’s emotional turbulence; in fact, it’s often seen as a precursor to the seminal Notes from the Underground, which Dostoevsky wrote seventeen years later.

I was already familiar with the story through Robert Bresson’s 1971 adaptation, Four Nights of a Dreamer, a film that can only be seen on atrociously grainy bootleg videos at the moment. Nevertheless, it’s a very charming film, one of Bresson’s most whimsical and even humorous works despite its tragic denouement. So at my friend Girish’s prompting, I resolved to read the original text and watch Visconti’s adaptation, and briefly allude to their similarities and differences here.

Both film versions adhere closely to the original narrative, although they stylistically diverge like equal halves of Dostoevsky’s romantic story–Visconti’s lush melodrama and Bresson’s deeply-felt, impenetrable introversion. Both films are overlooked works in their filmmakers’ respective oeuvres (much like Dostoevsky’s short story itself), full of unique and compelling touches.

Although Visconti was a contributor to classic neorealism with films like Obssessione (1943) and La Terra Trema (1948), he became increasingly known for his aristocratic refinement and visual polish and White Nights was a key transitionary work. Filmed completely inside the studio, the film recreates the foggy canal-lined streets of Livorno and the rabble-rousing social outcasts who frequent its shadows. The two lovers (Marcello Mastroianni and Maria Schell) meet on a picturesque, arched bridge and their romantic musings promise salvation. Giuseppe Rotunno’s chiaroscuro cinematography and Nino Rota’s passionate score embellish the moody ambience and underline every emotional point of the narrative.

By way of contrast, Bresson’s film is a paradoxical and understated depiction of modern Parisian youth. Bresson makes his protagonist an amateur painter named Jacques who seems to perpetually work on his paintings in fits and spurts, more ritual than vocation. He’s played, of course, by a non-professional actor who models his character’s behaviors and embodies a hidden soul forging existence through the tangible elements of his surroundings. (Bresson’s characters are much more physical and sexual than Dostoevky’s or Visconti’s.) As Lindley Hanlon describes the protagonist in Fragments: Bresson’s Film Style:

“Throughout the film, Jacques’ straight face, his bizarre daily activities and his slightly reticent posture conveys his character . . . certain repeated gestures and rhythms mark his handling of these objects: lying back on his bed and listening to the tape recording of his own voice, pivoting back and forth between paint cans and canvas, which he dabs, tossing a rag away, piling up dishes in the sink, reaching surreptitiously into his jacket to turn on the tape recorder, and systematically turning his canvases to the wall, the supreme act of self-effacement.”

Both films have standout set pieces. Visconti stages a rousing dance sequence in a small cafÈ that embodies Mastroianni’s feelings of inadequacy and yearning for romance with every move. Bresson humorously provides a faux action film seen in a theatre that plays like a ludicrous conflation of movie conventions and his own minimalist sensibilities: a roaring gunfight occurs; a man stoically knees another man and turns around, only to be machine-gunned at close range; dramatically falling to his kness, he then slowly crawls toward a gun lying next to a pool of blood on the floor, but his assailant mercilessly shoots him at the last suspenseful moment; as he lays dying, the music swells and the man silently pulls a photo of a young woman out of his pocket and kisses it. It’s a hilarious conglomeration of Bressonian faux pas: onscreen violence, melodramatic deaths, obvious suspense techniques, nondiegetic music, and sentimental clichÈ. “We have fallen into a trap,” a young spectator whispers to her mother, “Let’s go.”

In the final analysis, I find myself valuing Bresson’s quirky, perplexing piece over Visconti’s emotional wave; Four Nights of a Dreamer is a film that will continue to reveal nuances whereas I feel Visconti’s film has breathed its last wonderful sigh to me. But that may simply betray my deep love of Bresson’s style. Both films are solid conceptions that work well on their own terms, and both deserve extended review as serious interpretations of Dostoevsky’s classic text, a provocative critique of the cozy, secluded comfort of illusions.

Time Out mention

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I’ve mentioned the Time Out Film Guide before as being my favorite capsule review book in print, so it’s a real pleasure that they have included a plug for Masters of Cinema in their newest 13th edition. They also highlight the sites of several friends, including (obviously) DVD Beaver and Acquarello’s Strictly Film School.

It’s great to see the cinephile web community starting to be recognized in print.

Star Spangled to Death

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Although Stan Brakhage died in 2003, another icon of Beat Generation experimental filmmaking, Ken Jacobs, has just released the latest iteration of his Star Spangled to Death, a fabled project he began in 1957 but didn’t complete, reworked as a performance piece in the ’70s, and decided to go ahead and finalize on digital video for last year’s New York Film Festival with new footage from the 2003 anti-war demonstrations in New York; my screening of it this week at the REDCAT theatre in L.A. included George W. Bush’s comments opposing an International Criminal Court during the presidential debate of September 30, as well as Jacobs’ critique. By my informal estimate over seven hours long, the film incorporates the footage Jacobs shot in the late-’50s involving Jack Smith and Jerry Sims performing improvised abstract performances in the back alleys of New York juxtaposed with archival footage (from Mickey Mouse animation to US propaganda films to musicals to Richard Nixon’s “Checkers” speech) that offers a grab bag portrait of 20th century media and American culture. Compulsively watchable even at its extraordinary length (with three built-in intermissions), Jacobs’ film is a strident protest against corporate media and its popular illusions, with a special focus on racist stereotypes and religious mediocrity.

“Star Spangled to Death is an epic film costing hundreds of dollars!” Jacobs begins his screening notes, and one can appreciate the truth of that statement on seeing the film. Allowing most of his found footage to run its individual lengths with little commentary (although later clips, like the Nixon speech, are laced with mocking sound effects), Jacobs saves his authorial voice for streams of texts raging against the capitalist system, texts which on many occasions have been recorded on individual frames of the film and flicker unlegibly for mere fractions of a second, suggesting he has much more to say than time allows. “I would happily greet cheap DVD home distribution (when my flash-texts can be read)” he writes in his notes, and attributes the advent of DV filmmaking as the sole reason the film was completed. “In the winter of 1959 editing facilities were two nails in a wall holding two film reels and an enlarging glass and in 2003 a G4 with Final Cut Pro. . . . At age 71, I have to attend to cine-demands other than matching film to video.”

The film is a lively concoction, jumping from one clip to another while sporadically returning to its narrative in counterpoint, and at times, its stylization makes it nearly impossible to comprehend. Smith apparently plays The Spirit Not of Life But of Living and cavorts in alleys wearing intensely bohemian garb and celebrates Suffering, played by Sims, two “clowning” responses to an America that seems entirely removed from their everyday plight, caught up in its own diversions and greedy interests. “Here, in these notes, ” Jacobs writes (and he might as well have included his acerbic textual diatribes contained in the film), “you get gravity. The movie achieves levity.”

But the film’s intentional Beat messiness also has its patterns and recurring motifs. It begins with a ’50s documentary describing a safari that treats the African people and their customs with the same patronizing preciousness that it regards the exotic flora and fauna around them. Just when the footage seems like one of many random parts to the film (apart from its obvious datedness and the Western cultural solipsism it conveys), Jacobs returns to to it in later sections of his overall work, juxtaposing it with clips of Al Jolson singing or extravagantly mounted blackface musicals, conveying an expanding image of implicit racism. One of the latter productions shamelessly depicts blacks singing in heaven, where roasted chicken and watermelon is offered aplenty.

Jacobs cuts from the droning narration of the safari documentary to a heartrending scientific film depicting Harry Harlow’s notorious psychological experiment with infant monkeys and substitute wire “mothers” to study the effects of attachment and deprivation. The certainty of language and coldly inhumane treatment of the monkeys seen on CBS is virtually shocking by today’s media conventions, but the connection between the safari’s Western pride and Harlow’s self-satisfied analysis of “love” through imprisoned creatures is readily clear.

In fact, a large part of the moral force of Star Spangeled to Death is precisely its watchability: from exuberant, racist cartoons to Jolson’s melodious voice to the eerie religious rhetoric of television faith healers, the clips are perversely engaging viewing, fashioning their drama with undeniably virtuosity while embodying scandalously poisonous or sensational content. It’s a critique of pop culture that allows room for the viewer to do the critiquing. “It was supposed to lie in a jumbled heap,” Jacobs writes, “errant energies going nowhere, the talented viewer inferring form. A Frankenstein that fizzled but twitching and still dangerous to approach.” Given Jacobs’ penchant for continual additions, we may not have yet seen the final version. At present, it’s a stimulating, labyrinthine experience provided by a master of the American avant-garde and an historical artifact that is nevertheless piercingly contemporary.

Latest Update…

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I’m flattered to have just been invited to join Cinemarati: The Web Alliance for Film Commentary as a member critic. The organization is a “professional guild for film writers whose work appears primarily on the Web” that includes folks like my friend Acquarello of Strictly Film School and Ed Gonzalez of Slant. I’m looking forward to interacting with them.

Speaking of Acquarello, he’s starting his commentary for the New York Film Festival today, so keep an eye on his site; you won’t want to miss it.

And another friend, Mike Hertenstein, has begun adding some thoughtful reviews of the Chicago International Film Festival, which began yesterday. Apart from Elem Klimov’s modern classic Come and See (1985), his favorites so far appear to include Yoav Shamir’s Israeli documentary, Checkpoint, Iranian director Mohsen Amiryoussefi’s Bitter Dream, Bahman Ghobadi’s Turtles Can Fly, and a personal favorite of mine this year that I haven’t blogged about yet, Zana Briski’s and Ross Kauffman’s Born Into Brothels.

The UCLA Film & Television Archive has finally announced its Yasujiro Ozu retrospective, which it will offer in conjuction with screenings at LACMA. Disappointingly, it’s only a portion of the full series shown at last year’s NYFF.

And lastly, AFI FEST 2004 Presented By Audi (yes, that’s its official name), which will occur here in Los Angeles in a few weeks, has announced its full line-up. If anyone has any recommendations, I’m all ears . . .

Battle of Algiers DVD

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What must surely be the best film (re)released in theatres this year has become what could also be the best single-title DVD package of the year, Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966). The Criterion Collection doesn’t disappoint with its three discs of material and 55-page booklet to be released next Tuesday. I reviewed the film last January when it played on Los Angeles screens, so I’ll simply highlight the DVD extras that impressed me the most. In addition to the following four programs, the DVD includes a new 51-minute documentary on the making of the film, a collection of filmmakers (Spike Lee, Mira Nair, Julian Schnabel, Steven Soderbergh, and Oliver Stone) praising the film, and “»tats d’armes,” a 28-minute excerpt from Patrick Rotman’s 2002 documentary, L’Ennemi intime.

Overall, the extras provide a multi-faceted look at the film’s artistic and historical significance, and while I could have done with fewer clips from Pontecorvo’s film in each and every segment, the material helps to illuminate what many have described as one of the most important political films ever made. The film’s subject matter–the French occupation of Algeria and the violent insurrection it spawned–has many clear parallels to current events, and while the DVD extras aren’t quite as directly provocative as I might have hoped in this regard, there’s certainly more than enough grist for the mill. For the most part, Criterion have obviously decided to provide commentaries on terrorism, occupation, violence and freedom and allow viewers to draw their own conclusions.

The first extra I’d like to mention is Gillo Pontecorvo: The Dictatorship of Truth (1992), a thoughtful and surprisingly touching documentary presented by the late film critic Edward Said that recounts Pontecorvo’s biography juxtaposed with scenes from his filmography. From his years as a twenty-something leftist leader of the Italian Resistance against the Fascists to his career as a filmmaker (beginning with his assistance on films in the mid-’50s and his first major directorial success in ’59, KapÚ, to The Battle of Algiers and Burn! in the ’60s and his surprising inactivity of the ’80s and ’90s), the film paints a nuanced portrait of a committed and uncompromising, but insecure artist.

Several of Pontecorvo’s friends (composer Ennio Morricone, cinematographer Marcelllo Gatti, writer John Francis Lane) talk about his perfectionism and inertia, and all speak hopefully about the possibility of yet another Pontecorvo film. Lane succinctly puts it, “You’d have to ask his analyst to know why he feels insecure. I mean, a director who has made such a great film. I suppose it’s a burden.” One of the most eloquent interviewees is producer David Puttnam (The Killing Fields), who suggests that a primary reason for Pontecorvo’s inactivity could be his interest in making overtly political films in a contemporary, commercially-driven film market: “[It might be that] he feels that his particular type of voice doesn’t have a home in Europe; certainly not a home in the United States if it doesn’t have a home in Europe.”

“Yet at the end,” Said concludes, “I think his films leave us with a lot of questions. Questions like, Can empires be defeated? Is there a possibility for relationships between Western societies and non-Western societies that are not based on oppression and discrimination?” Indeed, those questions remain just as potent today.

In 1992, Pontecorvo worked as a correspondent for an Italian TV program and revisited Algiers during a time of intense political strife. The result is the 55-minute Return to Algiers. It’s a genuine pleasure to watch the 73-year-old filmmaker energetically investigating various areas of the city enmeshed in turmoil, engaging in arguments, offering empathy, and later presenting his findings to the country’s president, Mohamed Boudiaf. Boudiaf was a co-founder of the FLN who later became one of its foremost critics, spending three decades in exile before being militarily installed as president–he was unfortunately assassinated shortly after Pontecorvo’s visit.

Like much of the current political milieu in Iraq, early ’90s Algeria was on the brink of civil war as the one-party FLN rule for thirty years had suddenly dissolved, leaving an over-populated, highly unemployed country with significant social unrest as various political factions struggled for power. The initial vote in a series of popular elections–the first in the country–gave the winning hand to the Islamic Salvation Front (ISF), a fundamentalist political group, so the pro-democracy government canceled the second round of elections, claiming “Algerian democracy is too young” to choose for itself.

For himself, Pontecorvo’s recalls that his “trip down memory lane” began on a sad note: the prison where he had filmed a scene for The Battle of Algiers that depicted the execution of a political prisoner. Pontecorvo notes that after they had shot the scene, he turned around and noticed his entire Algerian crew was in tears. In 130 years, he says, the French had obviously taught the Algerians many things, “but what remains indelibly impressed upon the Algerians are memories of episodes like the [execution] scene [in the film]. The prison is in operation once again” with 5,200 political prisoners.

At first, Pontecorvo finds himself embroiled in several heated exchanges–in the Casbah, a man angrily demands he not film so close to a mosque and at a university, students vehemently oppose his Western camera by issuing a string of accusations: “We don’t need to air our dirty linen in public . . . We don’t need your camera or your advice. They came from the West to give us the usual distorted message. We’re adults. We can take care of our own problems. . . . Our Palestinian brothers are being killed every day but you don’t talk about them, you talk about Kuwait. When 100,000 Iraqi children were killed, no one talks about that. . . . When you turn on the TV all you see is Israelis being killed. Arab deaths don’t count, do they?”

On the Italian TV program, Pontecorvo’s interviewer makes a flippant remark about Islamic intolerance, and Pontecorvo beautifully responds:

“I want to explain something. I didn’t say there weren’t dramatic flare-ups of fanaticism. I said it was a dangerous mistake for the West to say or think, ‘Islam is genetically backward, genetically terrorist, genetically intolerant.’ This is completely false. Look at history. We talked about it earlier [in the program]. From a certain time on, above all with colonialism in the last century, such blows, such pain was inflicted on these people, that they still have open wounds. And every time this ever stronger, ever more powerful Western world presents itself as a united force, sometimes paternalistic and full of advice, sometimes brandishing arms, they can’t help it, and their reaction is uncontrollable, even frenzied. . . We can’t allow ourselves the luxury of such a contentious relationship with 500 million people.”

However, Pontecorvo’s relationship with the citizenry changes drastically in the documentary when the Algerians realize who he is, and recognize him as having made a truthful film about Algerian independence. Crowds gather around him, smile, and thank him for his cultural contributions, culminating in their invitation for Pontecorvo to film an Islamic funeral at a local cemetary. “I think we’re the only Westerners who’ve been allowed to do this,” Pontecorvo notes.

Remembering History (2004) is a very well-produced documentary by Criterion which offers hard facts, detailed maps, archival footage, and well-lit, candid interviews with participants and scholars detailing Algeria’s history with the French and the subsequent revolution. It’s a highly informative piece that could’ve easily been released as an independent feature documentary or broadcast on PBS.

Among the many facts it notes: the French occupation of Algeria actually began in 1830 under King Charles V, many pied-noirs (French colonists) were refugees of the Franco-Prussian war in the 1870s who emigrated to Algiers–France’s actual “pacification” of the country therefore took about 40 years. In addition, Algiers became an actual district of France, not simply a colony (as was Morocco and Tunisia) and was therefore much more difficult to abandon. However, a system similar to apartheid was erected, as Algerians were continually treated as second class citizens; elections were constantly rigged by the French to protect their interests.

Nevertheless, Algerians had fought and died for France during both world wars, so after victory in Europe, they began to demand their rights, particularly when the United Nations declared that all colonies should be granted self-determination and France began losing its other colonies (most notoriously in Vietnam). In 1945, a large French massacre of Algerian demonstrators ensured a renewed battle against them.

One of the intriguing aspects of the documentary is its interviews with ex-terrorists/freedom fighters who are now Algerian public officials. Djamila Bouhired, who as a young woman planted bombs in Algerian public spaces, defends her actions: “After 50 years of struggle during which we had accomplished nothing, it was time to find another way and that was armed resistance. We were forced into it.”

One of the film’s eloquent scholars, Alistair Horne, describes the revolution:

“They immediately convey to the Arab world, and the rest of the world, the meaning of their action, the purpose, the principle that they’re fighting for, the principle of self-determination. However, in practical terms on the ground a lot of actions launched by the FLN were, while good enough to get headlines, actually in military terms, failures. It’s ineffective in Western Algeria. It’s also ineffective in Eastern Algeria. It’s enough to impress the French police because it’s coordinated, but militarily speaking it’s a flop, it doesn’t have a big impact on public opinion. It is only when we see the FLN demonstrating their capacity to stay in business, to evade repression, to come back, to strike again and to strike harder–a capacity they only really demonstrated in 1955–that people really begin to think that this is a historic change in the situation in Algeria.”

Another scholar, Hugh Roberts, pinpoints some of the French ideological confusion in the way they conflated “communists” with “revolutionaries” stemming from their experience in Vietnam. “These people were not communists they were nationalists,” Roberts explains. “And this really impeded the French intelligence because they were fighting the wrong enemy.”

Roberts also addresses the strategic escalation of violence, a principal that should give current war hawks in the US Administration some pause in their fight “against” terrorism:

“There was a horrendous massacre in Philippeville where a large number of French families–men, women, and children–were massacred, their throats slit in a very brutal way by members of the FLN. Well, this was extremely effective for the FLN because it naturally produced a terrible backlash from the French settlers and from the French army and many innocent Algerians were caught up in what the French called a ‘rat hunt’ and were killed. That’s where you get an atrocity, a reprisal, and a reaction against the reprisal.”

Saadi Yacef, the FLN leader during the war and whose account of it inspired Pontecorvo’s film, amplifies, “With [the French] atrocities, their torturing and killing of citizens, it was easy for us to gain followers. It was a stroke of luck for us. If you kill someone, they have a brother and a cousin, and they would join the FLN. So during that period from ’56 to ’57, the FLN grew from having 50% of the population’s support to 95%.”

This principle of provoking a violent reaction in order to bolster one’s cause is also a central topic of The Battle of Algiers: A Case Study, which features a new interview by ABC’s Christopher Isham with former US counter-terrorism officials Richard Clarke and Michael Sheehan.

It’s nice to hear articulate, informed terrorism experts insightfully discussing the general precepts of terrorism without the usual dramatic overtones or politicized sound bites such information is usually packaged within. While Isham ensures that the participants shy away from direct critical analysis of the Bush Administration’s policies (for that, refer to the recent book by Clarke, who headed US counter-terrorism for Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, and Bush Jr.), their comments are incisive and to the point.

On the topic of the cycles of violence, Sheehan notes:

“I think some of the lessons of Algiers are quite well-known to modern insurgents that will use terrorism for just that, to provoke the response. To provoke the heavy-handed response that will hopefully in their eyes, although it’s very calloused, kill civilians and further legitimize their movement and further delegitimize those they are fighting against.”

And on the topic of the goals of a war against insurgents:

“The French had to figure out, what did they really want their relationship with Algeria to be? They couldn’t cling to this notion of empire, which certainly was not sustainable in the late-’50s and early-’60s. They had to come up with a new vision for what they wanted. And from there, your military, police, your economic strategies are subsets of that.”

When Isham addresses the issue of torture and asks is it’s ever necessary despite being illegal and immoral, Clarke responds:

“These conversations usually begin by someone saying, ‘If there’s a nuclear bomb about to go off in Washington DC, and if by torturing you I can prevent that, would I do it?’ And, everyone’s supposed to say ‘Yes.’ But that’s an academic question. It never happens that way. And I think once you begin to go down the path to ‘the Dark Side,’ it’s easy to justify lesser and lesser [standards], and the threshold drops. And eventually, you find precisely that you’ve lost the strategic standing that you want because word leaks out that you’re doing it and you’ve lost moral standing and you lose popular support.”

The interview is a strong ending to an exemplary DVD package. Not to be missed.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan

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The Small Town (Kasaba)

I try not to get too cynical about the cultural constraints enforced by popular film discussion, but here in Los Angeles, one of the NPR radio stations hosts a high-profile and thoroughly middlebrow program entitled Air Talk, which includes a weekly summary of opening movies called Film Week. The show’s faux-intellectual discourse wouldn’t bother me too much if it didn’t aggressively promote itself as the personification of cultural engagement. (“Join [host] Larry Mantle,” its website says, “weekdays at 10:00 a.m. for lively and in-depth discussion of city news, politics, science, entertainment, the arts and more.”)

A typical exchange occurred last week during its review of Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s Distant (Uzak, 2002), one of the most visually striking, profound, and internationally acclaimed of recent films.

After spending the bulk of the show talking about releases like The Forgotten, Shaun of the Dead, The Last Shot and the Star Wars DVDs, the show briefly considered Distant. Guest critic Jean Oppenheimer of the New Times summarized her take on the film:

“This is a story about two men who are very lonely, very isolated, very unhappy, but unable to talk about it, unable to share their feelings or their sadness with one another. It’s told in very lengthy, very static shots. There’s little dialogue but a lot of ambient sound. And I thought that the film actually beautifully captured that sort of frustration and despair of these guys and their ennui, and I think it’s actually saying something about Turkey and Turkish politics . . .”

Host Larry Mantle paused for a beat and then replied in his relaxed, skeptical manner, “Well . . . does it work for an American audience, though? Do you think it will be of interest to the average listener of Film Week?”

“Well, I . . . it’s definitely an art film,” Oppenheimer quickly qualified, “an art house film. And I think that if you want to go to something that’s quiet and will make you very slowly start to feel things, and you’re interested in isolation, alienation . . . yes, I do.”

“All right,” Mantle mused in a doubtful tone, and moved on with his program.

With cultural gatekeepers like this, it’s little wonder that Distant came and went with scant attention, having just completed its dismal one-week, one-theatre engagement in Los Angeles.

At the same time, L.A.’s fractured cultural milieu revealed itself by the fact that LACMA (the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) decided to program the early films of Ceylan last weekend in order to coincide with the local debut of Distant–even though the film had already vanished from L.A. by the time of their screenings.

However, I was delighted to see Ceylan’s films (which have already been released on DVD in Europe) on the big screen, and while they individually may not achieve the complexity of Distant, they are extraordinary in a cumulative sense. Ceylan begins with a short film, revisits its location and, possibly, characters in his second film, and references the shooting in his third film. In many ways, Distant shares enough situational and character similarities as to make it a virtual continuation of the story. Ceylan’s oeuvre begins in a rural setting and slowly expands to Istanbul’s urban winter.

Cocoon (Koza) (1995)

Ceylan’s 20-minute short film, with its meditation on faces (of his parents, Mehmet Emin and Fatma Ceylan) and poetic black-and-white images of nature, immediately reveals the influence of Tarkovsky, whom Ceylan directly homages in Distant. Lacking any dialogue, the narrative is beautifully suggested by the compositions–often an isolated face in the foreground being observed from someone in the background–and the way the two aging characters relate to one another, separate but together, questioning their relationship in intimate silence. The location was chosen from Ceylan’s youth and he films the swaying trees and grassland in atmospheric, loving ways.

The Small Town (Kasaba) (1998)

Based on an autobiographical story by his sister, Ceylan’s first feature fashions the images and setting of his short film into a study of Turkish provincial life. It’s arranged around the four seasons, and the beginning presents winter through the interactions within a children’s classroom. Ceylan’s quiet observation of the children’s behaviors as they ostensibly recite their studies is masterful. Cutting between the teacher gazing out the window at an increasing snow storm and the various unexpected moments of distraction within the classroom, Ceylan crafts a touching portrait of childhood.

Later, the film follows one of the schoolgirls and her younger brother as they play in the woods during the spring and attend a family camping trip in the summer. The latter scene is a vivid juxtaposition of characters as they address the path of their lives and debate such issues as chance and fate, faith and rationality. The young girl’s cousin, Saffet (Mehmet Emin Toprack, Ceylan’s cousin, who will star in the filmmakers two successive films before tragically dying in an automobile accident), is out-of-work and aimless, dreaming of seeking his fortune in Istanbul. In one scene, Saffet wanders around an amusement park, and the air-bound riders on a whirling swing revolve above his head like the many possible personifications of his uncertain future.

The film is again beautifully shot and evokes a rich autobiographical feel that stems not only from the offscreen realities of Ceylan’s cast but also from its aesthetic intensity shifting between the faces of his family and the natural details of their setting with equal, knowing clarity.

Clouds of May (1999)

Ceylan’s first film in color is also his warmest in tone. Shot amongst the golden fields and swaying forests of rural Turkey, the story concerns a filmmaker (Muzaffer ÷zdemir) who casts his parents (again, Ceylan’s own) in a film he is making; one of the scenes is a direct recreation of the camping scene in The Small Town. The filmmaker also has a cousin, Saffet (Toprack), who is looking for a job and like the Saffet of the earlier film seems caught somewhere between ambition and resignation.

Ceylan uses the similarities in his films as nuanced motifs. He’s not simply treading the same water again, but reframing issues in slightly different contexts. If Ceylan’s earlier work evoked Tarkovsky, this one harkens to Kiarostami, both in its film-within-a-film touches of contemplative irony (his parents argue that they cannot “act” despite having appeared in family videos) and in his focus on the charmingly simple exploits of a ten-year-old boy.

Ceylan is clearly part of the Bazin-Tarkovsky-Kiarostami aesthetic tradition, emphasizing everyday observation of people and nature in ways that challenge the viewer to ask immersive philosophical questions about the human condition. He’s definitely a filmmaker to watch.