Monthly Archives: January 2005

Updates…

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Gearing back up for some blogging this week after the PSIFF and an enjoyable offline project, writing the DVD liner notes for Tartan Video’s upcoming second Ozu boxset in the UK containing The Record of a Tenement Gentleman (1947) and The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (1952).

I attended a couple fun screenings last week, including a showing of Jacques Tourneur’s superlative Night of the Demon (1957) in a small art venue, the Sponto Gallery, a few feet from the sands of Venice Beach. About 30 people crowded into the increasingly stuffy gallery (renamed the Seven Dudley Cinema for the evening) and the Columbia DVD was projected onto a wall. But the highlight followed the film, as random walk-ins began parsing the film’s metaphysics and drug references. Leading the discussion in a more academic vein was Michael Henry Wilson, the author of the recent French book, Jacques Tourneur ou La Magie de la suggestion, and the co-writer of A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies as well as Scorsese’s upcoming documentary on British cinema. Wilson emphasized Tourneur’s love of the term fantastique to describe his worlds beyond the rational. The discussion was lively and eccentric and I’m looking forward to the Seven Dudley’s future screenings, which promises to include a “live dumpster diving fashion show” with AgnËs Varda’s The Gleaners and I.

PSIFF diary 4

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Hawaii, Oslo (Erik Poppe, Norway)

The last film I’ll review for the PSIFF is perhaps my favorite, and solidifies the strong Scandinavian presence at the festival this year. The last couple of years have produced a number of ensemble films offering post-Altman, interwoven stories (two examples are Germany’s Lichter [Distant Lights] and Peru’s What the Eye Doesn’t See) but Hawaii, Oslo is the latest and most impressive of the bunch. It has been an enormous popular success in Norway, Variety has called it “one of the best Norwegian films made in many years,” and it’s the country’s official submission to the Oscars. But beyond these potentially dubious distinctions, it deserves all the praise it can get. (My Masters of Cinema cohort, Trond Trondsen, recently affirmed that “mass appeal” in Norway can be far different than “mass appeal” in America, pointing out that he remembered the time Norwegian television broadcasted Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage “and there was, literally, not a single soul in the streets of Tromso.”)

The film is apparently the second movement in a loose trilogy about Oslo co-written and directed by Erik Poppe; PSIFF offered its international debut (look for it in competition at the upcoming Rotterdam and Berlin fests). It’s popularity is no doubt partially due to its intricate interweaving of narrative strands in an emotionally captivating manner, and its performances are uniformly authentic and compelling.

But it’s also a masterfully designed film with impressive thematic reach. Each of the stories portray a moment of physical and/or emotional crisis requiring pivotal decision-making. Many of these situations are unified in time and space by an empathic character named Vidar (Trond Espen Seim) who works at a mental institution and who possesses exceptional intuition toward people he meets, suggesting a larger metaphysical perspective so endemic to Scandinavian art. It’s neither an exaggeration nor a mark against the movie to suggest that it resembles a companion piece to Kieslowski’s The Decalogue compressed into a two hour feature. And like Kieslowski’s work, Hawaii, Oslo is less notable for its aesthetic innovations than for its emotional clarity and ethical complexity.

I’m hesitant to describe the various plots to any great degree as discerning who the characters are and what his or her major conflict is comprises a large part of what makes the film so involving. (Avoid the distributor’s official English summary–and the various festival write-ups that merely paraphrase it–because it contains overt spoilers. Given its tight construction, the less you know about it the better.) Suffice it to say that the characters are all working class people and the settings revolve around everyday locations such as hospitals, prisons, churches, and cafÈs, captured with a sense of visual immediacy by Lukas Moodyson’s cinematographer, Ulf Brantas.

The film contains a number of stylistic quirks which could be perceived as flaws (such as the overly pictorial kaleidoscope imagery used for transitions and a muted electronic score that resembles something Vangelis would have written 20 years ago), but I didn’t find them distracting in the long run and actually began to appreciate them as the unique aesthetic identity of the film.

Hawaii, Oslo was recently released on region-2 DVD in Norway with English subtitles, so readers with multi-region players might consider tracking it down.

PSIFF diary 3

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Forgiveness

More from PSIFF…

Breath (Sandeep Sawant, India)

Told with vivid emotional clarity like the best of mainstream Indian cinema, this debut by director Sawant (filmed in the cinematically-rare Marathi dialect) is a deeply compelling story about a rural boy and his grandfather who travel to a city for medical treatment. The boy is suffering from serious vision impairment and their confused interactions with the modern medical establishment and growing awareness of the severity of the boy’s condition are truly riveting thanks to exceptionally convincing performances from the entire cast. Regecting simplistic melodrama, Sawant keeps the narrative brisk and the boy an incorrigible rascal, and counters the tragedy of the situation with clear-eyed medical perspectives. The film creates an enjoyable contrast between village and urban worldviews that’s intensified by striking cinemascope images of the Indian countryside versus the clinical urban environment. The film was definitely an audience favorite here and is India’s nominee for the 2004 Oscars, but its craft extends well beyond that potential outlet (seen by the fact that it has already received over 40 awards). I’ve watched several mainstream Indian films recently and their cheery air often seemed too mannered–the film succeeds as a world-class drama, perfectly balancing its hope and pathos. A special screening in Los Angeles is currently raising money for tsunami victims.

Forgiveness (Ian Gabriel, South Africa)

Adopting a burnished, high-contrast and desaturated visual style, this extremely immersive and philosophical thriller is a festival highlight–I don’t think it takes a false step from beginning to end. Dramatizing personal interactions following South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on apartheid, the film portrays a white ex-police officer (played by Arnold Vosloo, a dead ringer for Nicholas Cage) who attempts to contact the black family of a “terrorist/freedom fighter” he arrested, tortured, and murdered ten years earlier. The film admirably balances any flighty or idealistic notions of forgiveness with detailed descriptions of the human rights offenses and emotional scars left in the wake of apartheid, and explores the rage and unresolved questions simmering beneath official declarations of amnesty. Yet the film refuses to let go of its attempts to explore ideas of reconciliation, navigating its tricky terrain with sensitivity and never labelling any character as Good or Evil. Forgiveness has been described as setting oneself free from injustice rather than forgetting it, and this film exemplifies that notion with such stylistic and narrative grace that it bears comparison to another moody masterpiece of recent years, Shinji Aoyama’s Eureka. A major festival standout, it deserves substantial US distribution, especially given that it alternates between South African and English dialogue.

Singing Behind Screens (Ermanno Olmi, Italy)

Olmi’s avant-garde epic is virtually impossible to categorize, but it’s one of the most entertaining films I’ve seen in a long while, a movie that is equal parts Chinese theatre, pirate adventure, and, probably, some sort of social commentary on the illicit pleasures of the idle rich during the 1930s. (I was too captivated by the film’s immediate charms to think about it too hard.) A Chinese brothel-theatre stages a 19th century legend about a female pirate sailing the high seas and Olmi fluidly alternates back-and-forth between the theatre’s production to cinematic restagings of the story. The production design (complete with several massive Chinese sailing vessels with working canons) shines with enchanting costumes and props depicting an aesthetically rich historical period, and its lush cinematography is breathtaking. Yet the film remains a fairly cohesive drama with serious thematic ambition concerning the ethics of warfare and the chivalric code in an age of new weapons technologies (a theme previously explored in Olmi’s Profession of Arms). My screening was poorly attended and the film’s unique stylization seemed to baffle the audience until a few people began to catch on to the film’s humor about halfway through. In its sly comedy, widescreen extravagance, and theatrical milieu, the only movie I can think of comparing it to is Kon Ichikawa’s An Actor’s Revenge. If Tarantino still wants to persuade American distributors to release inspired spectacles paying tribute to Chinese history and folklore, I’d watch this movie several times over another Hero.

Click here for the final part of the PSIFF summaries.

PSIFF diary 2

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Cold Light



More from the Palm Springs International Film Festival:



Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand)


Weerasethakul’s latest film is one of the best puzzle films I’ve seen in years: a brilliantly cinematic depiction of supressed sexual desire carefully alluded to through the suggestive body language between two young men (a lackadaisacal worker and a soldier on leave) and its evocative juxtaposition of night and day, urban and rural, civilization and nature, narrative and non-narrative. The first part of the film basically follows the implicitly erotic friendship between the two men as they explore the city and surrounding nature; the film then inserts a blank screen for at least a quarter of a minute (invariably provoking outraged viewer comments about whomever the unfortunate projectionist happens to be) and then appears to present a number of haunting vignettes based on Thai folklore that only gradually begin to connect in odd ways to the initial part of the movie. A thoroughly thought-provoking and teasing film that will inspire countless interpretations for years to come.



Cold Light (Hilmar Oddsson, Iceland)


Of all the films I’ve seen at the festival so far, Oddsson’s poetic and compelling film (an adaptation he planned for 15 years) has impressed me the most–but that could largely be due to the fact that I encountered it with absolutely no expectations. It’s possible that it has minor flaws (in the pacing of its third act, for example) but these are merely quibbles against a film that is unusually insightful regarding childhood imagination, and such themes as the role of art in emotional journeys and the ambiguous relationship between Man and Nature. It’s based on an Icelandic novel that begins with a sensitive young boy who navigates life with his close-knit family in a fishing village by sketching abstract images merging the people he loves with portentous fears. Later, the boy grows up and finds himself emotionally crippled on account of a tragic past. However, instead of telling the story linearly, as the novel does, the film expertly juxtaposes the past and present throughout, drawing complex parallels between them and culminating with the dramatic climax of both eras simultaneously. Gorgeously shot on location with the Scandinavian light and warm interiors in counterpoint, the film is a thematically nuanced and emotionally powerful character study. Keep an eye out for it.



In the Realms of the Unreal (Jessica Yu, USA)


This documentary about the life of Henry Darger–a Chicago janitor who was so reclusive that his few associates disagree on how to pronounce his name–is a technically impressive feat. It compiles layers of carefully-animated montages revealing Darger’s juvenile but elaborately detailed fantasies he wrote about and illustrated in secluion for 40 years. But while the premise is intriguing and the connections between Darger’s autobiographical writings (narrated in the film) and his creative work would keep a psychologist entertained for years, Darger’s mixture of military worship, religious populism, and idealization of gender-ambiguous little girls grows pretty tedious after a while. In fact, the film has a slightly suffocating feel as the viewer is immersed in Darger’s work in place of a more objective critical probing. One promising angle, the idea that a person’s economic standing ensures his or her social acceptance, is merely touched upon when an interviewee states, “If you’re poor, you’re considered ‘crazy;’ if you’re rich, you’re considered ‘eccentric.’”



Days and Hours (Pjer Zalica, Bosnia)


Zalica’s film is a very accomplished and observant family drama reminiscent of last year’s Since Otar Left with their similar stories of a family coming together after the loss of a member and quietly working through the emotional difficulties left in its wake. In this case, the absent family member is the son of an aging Bosnian couple, a soldier killed in the Bosnian war seven years earlier, and the drama revolves around their relationship with their nephew, Fuke, who arrives in their home to repair their hot water heater. The repair, however, requires extra parts and Fuke’s rickety car keeps him stranded for a while at their home. Thus, the house becomes the film’s primary setting and the characters spend their time talking amongst themselves and their neighbors, attempting to surmount technological breakdowns and heal historical wounds; the film slips easily into a microcosmic portrait of cultural renewal and perseverance. It’s perfectly cast and its beautifully lit interiors and colorful Bosnian neighborhood come richly into focus.



La Femme de Gilles (Frederic Fonteyne, Belgium)


I had a very mixed, if largely negative, reaction to this film; although I appreciated its formal qualities (a pronounced lack of dialogue and a communication of emotion and narrative through composition and body language alone), it suffers from several jarring aesthetic decisions (rare but overdone emotional outbursts and atonal music) and an overall masochistic plot about a suffering innocent woman. I have the same resistance to many of von Trier’s films, as if the characters and plot exist merely to rub the audience’s nose in cruelty and pain, and which often add insult to injury by suggesting the dramatic construct is supposed to be cathartic or restorative for the viewer. Fonteyne’s film tells the story of a pregnant woman in 1930s Belgium who is married to a factory worker who she suspects is having an affair with her sister. As the situation grows more intense, she dutifully turns a blind eye to the affair in order to spare her marriage and begins a descent into selfless tragedy. Again, Fonteyne’s mis en scene is exquisite–I’d like to see more of his work–but the film’s one-note defeatism left me cold.

Click here for the third part of the PSIFF summaries.

PSIFF diary 1

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Strings

Palm Springs may be famous as a desert resort, but I’m writing this as I wait in line at the city’s annual film festival, huddled under an awning while rain pours down around me. Not that I mind; I’m enjoying the Southern California deluge this year and it enshrouds the surrounding mountains in a beautiful mist–it also keeps the rush lines shorter than usual.

Summarizing my Friday night and Saturday viewing (with more to come this week):

Downfall (Oliver Hirschbiegel, Germany)

Despite the fact that this has swept German awards, I found it to be a fairly average ensemble piece suffering from an aura of self-congratulatory prestige. It’s being lauded as the first German feature to center on Hitler since G.W. Pabst’s The Last Act (1956), recreating the last days of Hitler’s life in his crowded bunker with the Russian army blasting into Berlin. But part of the problem is that the film opens and closes with clips from Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary, a 2002 documentary shot with a video camera that did nothing more than record Traudl Junge’s first-person recollections; yet I found the documentary revealed more contradictory impulses, confessions, and rationalizations than anything in this straightforward dramatization, which resembles a German variant of a Spielbergian historical exercise–a lavishly-mounted spectacle with star cameos, overt emotional cues, graphic violence, and dramatic moments designed to emphasize the importance of the project rather than offer any new or challenging perspectives.

Strings (Anders R¯nnow Klarlund, Denmark)

I doubt I’ll see a more visually impressive film this year; an epic adventure tale of a king’s tragic suicide and his scheming underlings who attempt to thrust his kingdom into war–performed entirely with marionettes. The figures inhabit richly-detailed sets infused with Rembrandt lighting, immersive sound effects, and textured atmospheric elements (rain, wind, snow, etc). With refreshingly subtle digital makeover, the film is not only a fully-realized creative fantasy on the level of Miyazaki or last year’s The Triplets of Belleville, but a wonderfully physical film with all of its strings proudly showing. (The movie even incorporates the strings into the world of the story, inflecting them with metaphysical implications.) The plot is standard adventure fare and contains a few minor flaws (a bizarre pet character, sporadically awkward dialogue, an overactive score) but overall, this is a supremely imaginative film that deserves a very wide audience, especially given its polished British dubbing. One of a kind.

Exiles (Tony Gatlif, France)

Although Gatlif has a body of work celebrating Gypsy culture this film concentrates more on the other half of his Gypsy-Algerian cultural heritage. The film won the best director’s award at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and it’s easy to see why: it maintains a beautiful tension between its reckless, free-wheeling plot (involving two young european lovers returning to their Algerian birthplace) and its thoughtful cinemascope compositions, framing the evolving landscape with a deep sense of enthusiastic discovery. Energized with techno and flamenco music, among other genres, the characters propel themselves through an inner and outer journey, seeking to find themselves in their roots. Gatlif allows the mystery of this process to remain closed to explanation, and the film builds to a visual frenzy with a scene of a mystical Sufi dance filmed in one extended take that earned a spontaneous round of applause from the audience for its cinematic tour de force. It’s an energized and sensual film with subtantial momentum, supported by a reflective and deeply-felt yearning for self-awareness.

The Other Side of the Street (Marcos Bernstein, Brazil)

This film represents the directorial debut of one of the screenwriter’s of Central Station, and it’s about what you might expect. Well-written with standout performances, it’s an easygoing character study about an aging, lonely woman and her misdirected desire to compartmentalize her life and strictly divide people between the Good and the Bad. The protagonist is charmingly played by Central Station‘s acclaimed Fernanda Montenegro, who manages to express both her character’s kind ambitions and cutting suspicions in a fluid, compelling manner. The film also offers a strong alternative to the younger-skewing trends in most narrative films with its playful, engaging, and even romantic vision of late-middle age. Even if it sometimes flirts with melodramatic sensibilities, it nevertheless remains an observant drama.

Click here for the second part of the PSIFF summaries.

Le moindre geste

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A few recent gems from France:

Screenville‘s Harry Tuttle has sent in his enticing review (perhaps the first in English) of the recently-restored Le Moindre geste, a film with a complex, 40-year history that just received its official release in France.

And Franck Poncelet wrote us at Masters of Cinema about a real find, the DVD release of 1963′s Un Roi sans divertissement (A King Without Distraction), a film directed by FranÁois Letterier, the lead “model” of Bresson’s 1956 A Man Escaped. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t contain English subtitles, but Poncelet assures us that “like good wine, [it has] aged superbly.” –Doug

* * * *

Le Moindre Geste (The Least Gesture) (1970/2004/Fernand Deligny/France)

By Harry Tuttle (with English translation help by Doug Cummings)

Mesmerizing like a silent avant-garde experiment, powerful like a biopic documentary, this film (part fiction, part documentary) is a fantastic hymn to the weakness of humanity on both sides of the autistic wall. Throughout this disturbing journey into madness, a glimpse of how complex and overbearing the universe of autism can be is suggested with stunning simplicity.

Yves, an autistic young man (played by Yves Guignard, an autistic actor), runs away from an oppressive mental institution and meanders across the dry and barren landscape of the CÈvËnnes rocky hills in southern France, bathed in sunlight. Yves is joined by Richard, a 13-year-old child from a nearby village, who locks Yves in an enclosure in a derelict pasture.

As Yves tears down the bottom of an old door and crawls his way out of the prison Richard left him in, he turns around and continues to slam the door from outside. Instead of challenging Richard for his mean trick, he hits the object that kept him from moving. This reaction might sound misdirected, but the release of anxiety is no different than a “normal” person who demolishes the phone upon reception of bad news…

Later, however, Richard falls into a hole and screams for help while Yves strives to rescue him to the best of his ability, totally mindless of the emergency.

This deliberately-paced cinematic journey offers a difficult yet poetic allegory on the mental impairment of a walled-in being. Minimalist in form, with fragmented montage and de-contextualized soundtrack, the film wonderfully illustrates the lack of communication in a world disconnected from any surrounding concerns and limited by short term memory and attention spans. The story portrays the occurrence of an emergency crisis in the life of an autistic child and tragically depicts how the concept of danger is trivial to him, generating a series of anachronistic events barely integrated by word association.

Once Richard screams “Yyyyyyyyves” (offscreen) from the bottom of his dark hole, Yves follows his flawed logic without being able to abstract himself towards a projected future, or a recalled past, which explains the timing of his responses. Instead of reaching for help, he first installs a barricade in front of the ruin as a cautious warning. Then he proclaims his death, and proceeds with a symbolic funeral, piling up stones around a wooden cross.

Only later will he look for a rope, and waste precious time trying to attach two pieces of a broken string together. The never-ending noises coming from a close quarry attracts his attention, but he falls into catatonic contemplation. Finally he drags along a cable found on a railroad, but falls into a compulsive tremor when the cable gets stuck to a tree. These moments of a “peaceful panic” tell the struggle of an introverted soul attempting to grasp a hostile environment

Yves demonstrates a remarkable obsession to control each new situation despite the shallow scope of his personal awareness. He’s like a fly hitting a window without understanding why the path to freedom is denied, why reality refuses to be subdued to his will. Even his motion is a fight against his own body. We observe his quest with emotion and worry, every step of the way, while Richard is abandoned to his fate.

Yves’ dialogue, always uttered loudly with an unexplainable rage like a narrator talking to himself, constitutes long-winded speeches truncated into portions of unfinished phrases assembling a patchwork of ideas: a lifelong witness of an absurd environment recorded incoherently in a mad mind. We can discern his words from TV, political propaganda (General De Gaulle’s speeches), automated prayers (from Catholic lectures), furious insults (of the institution guardians), etc. But unlike the parrot’s mimic, the human sensitivity emerges through a collection of words that obviously don’t belong to him: a textbook practice of “automatic writing” venerated by the Surrealists and Sigmund Freud because the subconscious speaks its own infra-language between familiar images.

Yves’ profound resentment against humanity arises after a while thanks to telling phrases: “They locked me up at the mad house, locked up all the way [talking about his own body], that’s as much as they could do, bunch of savages”; “the coffin of our childhood”; “The mad house, it’s like hell, it’s like communists, it’s like the dead”; “The dead don’t cry, they weep”; “The dead when they dream they phone”; “The dead bless themselves.”

The juxtaposition of this layered discourse with such an overwhelming dramatic gesture makes this docudrama a tremendously thought-provoking revelation.

When first-time filmmaker and psychologist Fernand Deligny met Yves Guignard in 1958, Yves had been locked away in a mental institution for five years, a traumatic experience leaving him in a prostrated posture blocking any interaction with the outside world. It took years of compassionate patience and watchful attention for Yves to even articulate his disordered monologues. As in the film, Deligny’s peculiar method apprehended the imperceptible expressions beneath language because he believed in restoring the dignity of infra-human behaviors. In his eponymous book published in 1979, Les dÈtours de l’agir ou le moindre geste, he clearly states that the intention to act or to behave is more important than the accomplishment of doing. Other books on the same subject are lyrically titled These Autistic Children Whose Project Escapes Us or The Efficient Vagabonds. This is a serious evolution in the conception of mentally challenged behaviors that are apparently eccentric, whimsical or unpredictable. Le Moindre Geste is an admirable testimony to experience the impossible autistic world from inside by piecing together the remnants of a lonely daily life.

Deligny treated people who were labeled “incurable” by the academic community and he developed an alternate therapy involving dramatization, games, and creative activity contrary to the usual procedure based on drugs, shocks, isolation, and mistreatments. A simple project to play with Yves in 1962 by studying his preoccupations turned out to become a feature film with the help of FranÁois Truffaut (Deligny was an advisor on The 400 Blows in 1959–he actually suggested its closing sequence on the beach–as well as on The Wild Child in 1971). Psychology can be a social art, introducing play into the tyrannical routines of autism, helping us understand its shuttered world and reminding us of the dignity and humanity hidden inside.

This film was improvised on location for two years with a non-professional crew of four, and they revealed an extraordinary understanding of cinematic language. Sumptuous 35mm black & white photography artistically composed by JosÈe Manenti (who had never used a camera before), largely comprised of silent, uneventful lingering shots are intensified by images of ruins and a desolate environment. A discontinuous soundtrack overlaps Yves’ soliloquy and creates the most experimental aspect of the film. Image and sound were neglected until Jean-Pierre Daniel edited the film in 1969 into something of a narrative (following Deligny’s storyboard) out of 20 accumulated hours of footage. Unexpectedly, what Deligny called a “monster-film” wound up selected for the Cannes Film Festival (Critic’s Week) in 1971! Lost again later, the film was resurrected with the help of Chris Marker to be released commercially only today.

Mentally impaired people have been featured in Ordet, Oasis, and The Best of Youth, films that rehabilitated the gestures and speech patterns of abnormal behavior usually dismissed by politically correct statements or simply ignored. Here, the autistic child is the sole protagonist and owns the entirety of the story. Yves is the first-person narrator, the onscreen hero, and the subjective camera. The disturbing topic of mental illness and its incapacity is treated frontally without distracting melodrama, external commentary, or supporting cast.

Best of 2004

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Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow

I’ve been traveling a bit during the holidays, and combined with the devastating news of world disaster, it has been difficult to blog about movies the past couple of weeks. Now that the new year has begun, however, and Los Angeles seems especially prepped for good screenings the next few weeks (including the Palm Springs IFF and retrospectives of Graham Greene, Maurice Pialat, Guy Maddin, Von Stroheim, Von Sternberg/Dietrich), I will be posting regularly again.

First up is my top ten lists for 2004, and I should note that these are all films that either premiered in Los Angeles or that I saw at festivals last year. The listings are alphabetical; starrred titles are links to Filmjourney blog entries.

New Releases

1. Before Sunset

I reviewed Before Sunrise (1995) ten years ago for my university newspaper, and even then Linklater’s fluid merging of intelligent, free-flowing dialogue, romanticism, and responsibility touched me. This follow-up, co-scripted by lead actors Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, is no less impressive. It conveys the emotional weight and ethical nature of life decisions and gently and deftly invites the audience to share in its complexities.

2. Distant (Uzak) (2002)

Like Before Sunset, this is the story of two individuals trying to find their place in the world and the tense relationship between them, only this time it’s two cousins rather than former lovers, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s film is as cold and regional as Linklater’s film is sunny and international. Set in Istanbul in the dead of winter, the movie explores the struggling aspirations of two lonely souls with quiet aplomb, offering a mesmerizing array of urban, snow-encased settings.

3. CafÈ LumiËre *

Taiwanese Hou’s tribute to Ozu is more a question of theme than style; he echoes Ozu’s bittersweet depictions of the breakdown and evolution of the Japanese family through his own meditative, extended mastershots. Along the way, he provides a mirror reversal to his own project through his protagonist, a Japanese woman studying a Taiwanese artist. The film establishes its themes by calmly charting their reverberations through everyday life in Tokyo, much like the inquisitive young man who records the sounds of trains crisscrossing the city. Slightly sad, but also inspiring and acutely observational, the movie quietly resounds with considerable charm.

4. The Keys to the House

Gianni Amelio could be the most world-renowned filmmaker who continually remains absent from official canons. (In the latest issue of Film Comment, Olaf Mˆller dismissively compares Keys to Denis’ experimental L’Intrus, which he claims is “cinema at its most perfect, and most Italians, afflicted by the cine-nostalgia embodied by Gianni Amelio, hated it.”) But if “cine-nostalgia” means a film as emotionally reserved, character-driven, and wise toward human behavior as Amelio’s latest film is, I’ll continue to suffer from hindsight. The movie expresses the difficulty of relating to mentally- and physically-challenged loved ones, and exhibits a tremendous amount of hopeful compassion and clear-eyed sadness.

5. The Holy Girl (La NiÒa santa) *

Lucrecia Martel’s film is downright intoxicating in its tight compositions and heavy attention to its sound design, particularly the quiet, subjective nuances of a teenager’s perceptions, such as the ambient sounds of dripping water or uncertain breathing. Its subject is adolescent sexuality and faith and adult transgression, all of which is conceptually intensified by its immersive atmospheric effects.

6. Maria Full of Grace *

This remarkably solid double-debut (by writer-director Joshua Marston and actress Catalina Sandino Moreno) navigates a careful path avoiding melodrama or clichÈs about drug culture while focusing on the real-life emotional and political ambiguities faced by the Columbian people and ÈmigrÈs. Like the best of neorealist cinema, it formulates both a very effective narrative and an ethically complex look at current social trends. It’s also as accessible and intelligently nuanced as any American release this year, so it’s a real pity the Oscars have disqualified it from their Foreign Language category (over Columbia’s endorsement) because it was directed by a US citizen.

7. The Return (2003) *

One of the most visually powerful and allegorical films to come out of Russia since the Soviet era, Zvyaginstev’s film received tragic notoriety when, as with Distant above, one of the film’s principle young actors died shortly after filming. But the film thankfully stands on its own terms, telling its emotionally intense tale of the difficulties of reunion, redemption, and rebirth with profound control. Many Russian films of late seem to deal with father/son relationships, and this is one of the most successful at bridging precise dramaturgy with universal meaning.

8. Star Spangled to Death *

Renowned Beat experimentalist Ken Jacobs finally managed to complete his six-hour-plus magnum opus after decades of fiddling; the cut I screened featured extracts and commentary from a Kerry-Bush debate a couple weeks after it occurred. Like a mini film festival punctuated with stream of conscious text decrying the corruption of the capitalist system and George W. Bush in particular, the film provides a montage of media and personal commentary in provocative, surprising ways that never tires despite its monumental length.

9. The Story of Marie and Julien (Le Histoire de Marie et Julien) (2003)

Jacques Rivette’s latest film is a haunting metaphysical puzzler about a clockmaker, a mysterious woman he attempts to blackmail, and his enigmatic lover who may or may not exist in his imagination. Its layers of carefully-managed dreams and realities build into a suspenseful story working within its own dramatic rules. A teasing and provocative experience with a lot to say about time and the healing of wounds (or not) and the darker undercurrents of romantic love. (Look for the UK DVD in February.)

10. Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow *

My single favorite picture of the year, Angelopoulos’ emotionally overwhelming epic follows a Greek family as it interacts with the turbulent political climate of the early-to-mid century Mediterranean. Angelopoulos plots the drama through a series of visually astonishing set pieces: refugees huddle together in a honeycomb of tents within an ancient theatre; revelers celebrate throughout a labyrinthian house; musicians mount a political protest in song while being strategically hidden by flapping linen. The film offers original and iconic images at every turn–most impressively in retrospect, Angelopoulos’ recreation of a terrifying flood that destroys an entire village, while immediately charged with unforgettable power, is made all the more emblematic and representative of human tragedy this year after the Asian tsunamis. It’s a film that visually encapsulates the human experience in ways Tarkovsky or Bergman were attempting in the ’60s.

New Documentaries

1. Born into Brothels

This deeply moving and inspiring portrait of the children of prostitutes in Calcutta’s Red Light district isn’t nearly as dreary as it sounds–it focuses on a photojournalist’s efforts to teach them photography as a means of self-expression and emotional liberation. Since I first saw the film, there have been two interesting publications: 1) a book presenting the children’s work, and 2) a charming essay by one of the film’s co-directors for Landmark Theatres’ upcoming release.

2. Control Room *

Jehane Noujaim’s Direct Cinema documentary contrasting the American and Arabic media (particularly Al-Jazeera) and their diverging coverage of the US invasion of Iraq is one of the few even-handed accounts of the contemporary Arabic world to enter the American mainstream. Its depiction of the TV station’s Western-trained journalists and their relations with the international community (even the US press corp) is revelatory and refreshingly balanced.

3. Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire

Of the slew of theatrically-distributed documentaries last year that were critical of the Bush administration’s policies, this film by the Media Education Foundation was the most level-headed, well-researched, and informative that I saw. It charts the fearmongering history of the neoconservative agenda from the Project for a New American Century in the Clinton years to 9/11 through the invasion of Iraq. Essential viewing, and the recently-released DVD offers a great deal of extended material.

4. Long Gone (2003)

One of my favorite documentaries of recent years is Dark Days, a film about the underground homeless residing in an abandoned subway tunnel in New York City. This film by Jack Cahill and David Eberhardt takes a similar approach and records several years in the lives of hobos who live by extensive train-hopping. Easily appropriating its moody Tom Waits score, the film constructs a deeply touching portrait of complex personalities, frail yet strong, living on the fringes of society. Visit the film’s official site, here.

5. The Models of Pickpocket (2003)

Babette Mangolte’s rich essay film is both a casual tribute to Robert Bresson’s 1959 film, a critical appreciation of it through the eyes of its nonprofessional actors many years later, and a personal journey as she travels from Paris to Mexico City while attempting to reflect on the impact of art on life. It’s a very welcome addition to the limited world of Bressonian discourse and a quietly touching investigation of the trail of people left by a film, scattered to the wind.

6. My Architect (2003) *

Nathaniel Kahn’s essay film exploring his deceased father’s monumental architecture and life history is a strong example of the recent spat of first-person, therapeutic films. An inspiring artistic analysis as well as a compelling portrait of a family (or several families) attempting to come to terms with their history and with themselves. Look for the US DVD in February.

7. Prisoner of Paradise *

There are so many Holocaust documentaries that it’s easy to begin to take them for granted, which of course, is something that should never be done. Nevertheless, every now and then one comes along that finds a new angle on Nazi terror, and this film is one of them. It follows the life and career and eventual deportation of Kurt Gerron (perhaps most memorable to US audiences for his performance in Von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel). Gerron was an entertainer by trade and the camp he was assigned to was Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia, a concentration camp posing as a vacation resort, where he was forced to make a Nazi propaganda film. This movie effectively recounts Gerron’s story and highlights the twisted ethics at its core.

8. Proteus

Reportedly over 20 years in the making, this documentary about the life of 19th century artist and biologist Ernst Haeckel is entirely comprised of etchings from the era, including kaleidoscopic montages of Haeckel’s own wonderfully detailed illustrations of radiolarians and other microscopic marine life. Filmmaker David Lebrun compiles Haeckel’s life and times using Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” for atmosphere. Visit the film’s official site, here.

9. ScaredSacred

Winner of several Canadian awards, this inspiring NFB film was directed by Velcrow Ripper, a seasoned documentary professional who recently designed the sound for The Corporation (a film I’ve regretfully missed to date). It’s another essay film, as Ripper travels throughout the world to places of suffering (Bhopal, India; Bosnia; Ground Zero in New York City; etc.) in order to register the pain yet look for opportunities for hope. Meeting artists and activists around the globe, Ripper’s film manages to be uplifting without being naive. Visit the film’s official site, here.

10. The Story of the Weeping Camel (2003) *

A hybrid documentary and fictional feature, this lovely film from Mongolia harkens back to Flaherty with its ethnographic study of an isolated culture. Beautifully lensed, its real-life drama is perfectly shaped into a film with a solid dramatic arc.

Region-1 DVDs

1. The Battle of Algiers *, John Cassavetes: Five Films, The Rules of the Game, The Story of Floating Weeds/Floating Weeds

I’ve grouped all of my favorite Criterion Collection DVDs together so they don’t overrun my top ten list, but as a whole, Criterion remains the company whose output continues to represent the best transfers, films, and extras known to man.

2. Diary of a Country Priest *, A Man Escaped *, Lancelot du lac *

2004 was the year Robert Bresson films finally began making their way to DVD, and while the results were mixed (Criterion’s Diary boasts a jaw-dropping transfer but contains a middling commentary, and the two New Yorker releases suffer from PAL-to-NTSC blurring and speed-up sans extras), it’s nice to see the titles in better quality and availability than their VHS incarnations. Keep an eye out for the French MK2 set in March.

3. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde *

Toss out any notions you might have about monster movies, this is a electrifying 1932 film by Rouben Mamoulian, full of dramatic texture and visual invention, and this Warner DVD includes not only a solid commentary by Greg Mank, but also Fritz Freleng’s Hyde and Hare Looney Tunes short, and the inferior 1941 remake starring Spencer Tracy.

4. La Face cachÈe de la lune (The Far Side of the Moon) *

Although purists may decry the average video transfer given that the film was digital to begin with, this Canadian DVD represents the latest success by Robert Lepage and boasts a French audio commentary by him, as well as a short documentary on the film’s fascinating production. It’s a philosophical and imaginative gem of a movie, too.

5. Freaks *

Speaking of tossing out monster movie notions, Tod Browning’s banned masterpiece set in the early 20th century’s age of circus sensationalism continues to set the standard for using the auspices of genre (in this case, horror) to address deep questions regarding the complex relationship between inner and outer lives. The DVD includes a commentary and documentary.

6. Haibane Renmei *

This 13-episode Japanese television series on four DVDs received a steady disc-by-disc release by Pioneer from August 2003 to February 2004, but I consider it my major find of the year thanks to recommendations in Filmjourney discussions. With its genuinely imaginative alternate world, focused exploration of age-old philosophical questions, and a painterly visual style representing details of the everyday, Yoshitoshi ABe’s animated saga may be the first truly transcendental anime I’ve seen, and has replaced Grave of the Fireflies as my all-time favorite work of Japanimation. Its characters, setting, and questions continue to linger and inspire.

7. Kieslowski collection: The Scar, Blind Chance, Camera Buff, No End

Purists will point out that Kino’s series of pre-Decalogue Kieslowski films (along with A Short Film About Killing and A Short Film About Love) are merely slightly flawed PAL-to-NTSC ports of European DVDs, and they’re right. But once again, having these films on the shelves and stocked at online rental outfits available to Americans for the first time is an achievement not to be underestimated. Plus, they’re packed with extras. Now all we need are Kieslowski’s documentaries…

8. More Treasures from American Film Archives *

If it wasn’t for the timeliness of The Battle of Algiers, I’d call this towering release the best single DVD package of the year. Three discs, fifty films, reams of text and commentary, eclectic and entertaining viewing, and a lot of historical preservation.

9. Paris, Texas

Wenders’ heartfelt film about the difficulties of relationship and healing mysterious hurts that linger from the past is one of his best films; the fact that this impressive DVD also contains a Wenders commentary and deleted scenes and can be readily purchased for less than ten bucks (online) makes it a must have.

10. The Parson’s Widow

Any Dreyer release is a major event for cinephiles, but the fact that this is one of his most whimsical and entertaining silent films makes it all the more welcome. Bundled with two virtually unseen shorts, They Caught the Ferry and Thorvalsden: Denmark’s Greatest Sculptor.

Non-Region-1 DVDs

1. Au hasard Balthazar, Mouchette (Nouveaux Pictures, UK)

Bresson’s two heartbreaking, mid-period masterpieces are given luminous video transfers by Nouveaux Pictures from recently restored prints. Additionally, Mouchette has long been out-of-print on VHS in the US and Balthazar has never been issued.

2. The Complete Vigo (Artificial Eye, UK)

Artificial Eye outdoes themselves with a two-disc collection of Jean Vigo’s entire output (1930-1934): the romantic and masterly L’Atalante, as well as ¡ propos de Nice, Taris, and ZÈro de Conduite. Vigo died from leukemia at the ripe old age of 29, and the cinema will forever contemplate what it lost the moment he passed away. The DVD set also contains a flurry of documentary features.

3. King Lear * (Ruscico, Russia)

For my money, Ruscico’s major release of the year is Kozintsev’s 1969 epic adaptation of Shakespeare (or, more correctly, Boris Pasternak’s version of Shakespeare). Using a black-and-white widescreen canvas and rendering deep-focus compositions, Kozinstev’s film neatly combines strong performances with visual flare, accentuated by Shostakovich’s dramatic score.

4. The Lady of Musashino (Artificial Eye, UK)

While the fact that this Mizoguchi film has never been released on video in the US should entice you alone, it’s also a prototypical work of the Japanese master, starring Kinuyo Tanaka as a troubled wife of a philandering husband in postwar Japan. Mizoguchi’s classic “feminism” (described by critic Audie Bock as a Japanese fascination for women as much as any desire for political reform) is on full display as Tanaka’s character suffers indignities and refuses indulgences, thus becoming a moral and spiritual paradigm for the men in her life. This is a bare bones DVD with a merely passable video transfer, but the film is a lost gem rediscovered.

5. Le Roi et l’oiseau (Studio Canal, France)

One of the giants of animation was Paul Grimault (1905-1994), who has been associated with Max Ernst and Jacques Tati. Beginning as a graphic artist and moving into advertising animation, it wasn’t until after WWII that he embarked on a collaboration with writer Jacques PrÈvert and produced La BergËre et le ramoneur, a film that was never completed due to lack of funds but in 1952 was released to the public anyway. In 1967, Grimault obtained the negative and began a full-scale redesign of the entire film, working for years on the project until 1980, when it was finally released as Le Roi et l’oiseau (The King and the Mockingbird). The film is an exhilarating art deco fantasy with supremely imaginative settings (notably, an impossibly huge castle and a giant robot) and surprisingly absurd touches amid an emotionally satisfying story. Studio Canal’s two-disc special edition is a joy to behold even if it doesn’t contain English subtitles; the plot is perfectly discernible without them.

6. El Sol del membrillo (Dream of Light) (Rosebud, Spain)

Victor Erice’s third and most recent feature was famously voted as the best film of the ’90s by a poll conducted by the CinemathËque Ontario, and its quiet, philosophical charm is poetic and evocative. Documenting the artistic process of creating a single still life painting of a quince tree by Antonio LÛpez GarcÌa, the DVD is packed with extras, including a 40-page booklet in Spanish that makes it difficult to close the disc case. A rare VHS by Facets exists in the US, but this disc is substantially better quality.

7. Triple Agent * (Blaq Out, France)

Blaq Out offers a very fine DVD of Eric Rohmer’s latest film, one that has so far eluded North American distribution, but is nevertheless an engaging and compelling work by the octogenarian filmmaker. The DVD includes a host of subtitle options as well as an informative interview with two historians.

8. Until the End of the World (Mondo Home Entertainment, Italy)

This three disc Italian set offers Wender’s roughly five-hour director’s cut of his extended cyberpunk drama, and although it doesn’t contain English subtitles, most of the film is in English anyway. A quick write-up on the disc can be read here.

9. Werckmeister Harmonies/Damnation (Artificial Eye, UK)

Cinephiles have been clamoring for the work of Hungarian BÈla Tarr to appear on DVD and last year, it finally did as this double bill with 2000′s Werckmeister, Tarr’s most recent film, and 1998′s Damnation, the first film to fully exhibit the aesthetic approach of his recent magesterial, black-and-white tone poems. Impressively, the DVD also includes a 40-minute interview with the normally reticent director.

10. Whistle Down the Wind (Carlton Visual Entertainment, UK)

This is a simple pleasure, a nice presentation of a British classic directed by Bryan Forbes (Seance on a Wet Afternoon) that became the basis for an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. The film is a prime example of magical realism, capturing the idiosyncrasies of rural life in northern England in its tale of three children who discover a wounded man hiding from the law in their barn and mistakingly wonder if he’s Jesus Christ. The potential melodrama of the premise is completely avoided, making the film a carefully observed and deftly handled parable that deserves a wider contemporary audience.

Theatrical Revivals

1. The Battle of Algiers *

2. Chantal Akerman documentary retrospective *

3. Kuroneko (Black Cat in the Forest) *

4. The Lonely Voice of Man *

5. La Noire de… (Black Girl) *

6. Nuri Bilge Ceylan retrospective *

7. Orson Welles retrospective

8. Playtime *

9. Salt of the Earth *

10. Yasujiro Ozu retrospective