The excellent Janus film series has been moving through Los Angeles, but a couple nights ago, the American Cinematheque screened a particularly noteworthy title (one of the films not yet released by the Criterion Collection), Carlos Saura’s CrÌa cuervos (1976). Critics have been summarily referencing Spirit of the Beehive (1973) in reviews of Pan’s Labyrinth, but Saura’s film–at once a sister work to Erice’s classic in theme, tone, even shared actress (Ana Torrent)–is no less rich a reference point.

Torrent plays a young girl named Ana who has to navigate the hushed, repressed adult world of the final days of Franco’s regime, who finds herself oscillating between the present and the past, conflict and speculation, and ultimately, fantasy and reality. Unlike Guillermo del Toro or Erice, however, Saura doesn’t root Ana’s imagination in mythology or folklore, so much as memories. As the film begins, Ana awakens in the night to discover her father (a philandering Franco officer) dead in bed and his panic-stricken lover racing out of the house. Too young to fully comprehend the details and based on her working assumptions, she imagines her own guilt, walking around the dark house, washing a glass of milk, and waiting for the future.

I’m struck by how many of my favorite films that represent childhood–Erice’s movie, Tarkovsky’s Mirror, at least a dozen of Iranian films–were made under repressive regimes with active censors. Hollywood’s commercialism tends to dictate sentimental, cute, awkward children; these other films, however, focus on children in order to explore the contentious adult world, and in the process construct an image of childhood that’s complex, observant, and sober-minded. Saura incorporates flashforwards, and a grown Ana wonders why people associate happiness with childhood when she remembers a lot of sadness and fear.

The household, like Spain at the time, is under transition from old to new (the 40-year dictator, Franco, was on his deathbed during the film’s production), yet with that change comes a lot of repressed baggage, quiet rebellion, and an ambiguous future. Ana’s deeply beloved but fragile and marginalized mother (played by Geraldine Chaplin) soon dies from a painful illness, and as Ana and her two sisters are adopted by their aunt, Ana finds herself remembering or imagining her mother in various moments throughout the film. She finds solace in games reflecting pressures she has endured, heavily criticizing her doll or replaying with her sister arguments her parents had. She finds particular freedom in a catchy pop song by Jeanette, “Porque te vas” (“Because You’re Leaving”), a single that became a major hit in Europe upon the film’s release that emphasizes sadness and loss.

The film’s vaguely uncanny and disquieting tone is due to several factors, including its emphasis on death, loss, and decay: like Clouzot’s Diabolique, Saura uses an empty swimming pool to rich effect, its shadowy, dirt-covered concrete resembling a scar on the landscape, an orifice for the repressed. In many ways, the film is a lament and warning for Spain’s future; its title is derived from the popular Spanish saying, CrÌa cuervos y te sacaran los ojos, meaning “Raise ravens and they’ll tear your eyes out.” Faced with a new world and guardian, the children can only draw from their uncomfortable past to navigate the present; it’s no wonder Ana treasures a secret she feels will offer her ultimate freedom only when all unwanted authorities have died. Yet the film also merges moments of levity and ethereal beauty, providing intimations of hope and escape.

Significantly, the film focuses almost exclusively on women characters (the few males seem wholly defined by the impression they make on the females); once the patriarch passes away, virtually the only major characters are a senile and elderly grandmother, Ana’s aunt, a kindly maid, and the three children (with Ana’s mother making sporadic, imaginary appearances). Saura seems especially attuned to the cost of Franco’s reign on women, their unique difficulties and suffering, and their potential for the future. It’s subversive and moving that he would cloak one of the most progressive critiques of Franco-era Spain in a story about women and children, previous social outcasts with the growing potential to change the world.

Now that Sátántangó has been released on DVD (in the UK), and Histoire(s) du cinéma has once again been delayed by Gaumont (in France), the next holy grail for the widest swathe of home viewing cinephiles might be Leo McCarey’s sublime and shattering Make Way for Tomorrow (1937), the last film screened in the UCLA film archive’s “Curated by… Guy Maddin” series. If anyone knows why Paramount has yet to release this film in any video format anywhere in the world, I’d love to hear the justification, because the film has astonished commentators and filmmakers alike for decades. Two examples: Gilbert Adair called it “the most beautiful, tender, funny, heartbreaking of movies on old age,” and screenwriter Kogo Noda used it as the blueprint for Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953).

Hollywood melodramas do not often compare to timeless masterpieces of world cinema, but Make Way for Tomorrow does, largely through McCarey’s sophisticated blend of tragic pathos, psychological insight, and rich, knowing humor. An elderly Depression-strapped couple, still deeply in love, must sell their home and live with their partially accommodating, but ultimately insensitive adult children; initially, Barkley and Lucy must live in separate cities, but the move only precipitates an unavoidable and final farewell–their future lies on opposite coasts. Paramount hated the ending and asked McCarey to change it; when he refused he was shown the door, prompting him to make The Awful Truth the same year at Columbia, which earned him an Oscar for Best Director. Receiving the award, he famously quipped, “You gave it to me for the wrong movie.”

In his informative essay “‘Recasting’ of Make Way for Tomorrow” in the David Desser collection, Ozu’s Tokyo Story, Arthur Nolletti, Jr. points out that McCarey utilizes the Depression like Noda and Ozu utilize the postwar Japanese economic boom: both milieus ultimately favor young professionals, leaving the elderly to fend for themselves. “But what undermined the family even more,” Nolletti writes, “was the philosophy accompanying industrialization and modern capitalism, the ‘idea of success, individualism, and what might be called ‘the wish to be free.” It is this philosophy that is embraced by the middle-aged children in both films.” Though McCarey was far from anti-capitalist (he tragically named names before the House Committee on Un-American Activities), his Catholic social concern (seen in films like Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary’s) no doubt sensitized him to the need for economic reforms like the Social Security Act of 1935.

Both films make attempts to explain–but not excuse–the grown children’s insensitive behavior. McCarey orchestrates a variety of relationships among his characters that offers ongoing amusement and tension. Lucy is indeed a misfit, failing to recognize the social nuances of her daughter-in-law’s bridge parties, monopolizing the visits of her granddaughter Rhoda’s suitors, and awkwardly spending or saving money where it’s not needed. And though Barkley seems more streetwise, sharing Lucy’s seemingly naive letters with an immigrant shop owner he befriends, he becomes surprisingly crotchety with a young doctor. Lucy may initially seem more simplistic in her understanding, but McCarey includes a final act that demonstrates the depth of her quiet perceptions.

Characters are constantly covering for others, implying politely, or discreetly signaling private understandings; there is much that happens beneath the surface of this ostensible melodrama. One gets the sense that these are real characters with real thoughts and feelings coursing through them. There’s a delicacy to the relationships that fosters genuine emotional connections with them. When Lucy is sent out of the house to chaperon Rhoda to the movies, Rhoda sneaks out the back of the theater for a secret date and returns after the film. “It was a good show, wasn’t it?” Rhoda bluffs. “I liked the boy very much.” Lucy doesn’t miss a beat: “Why, I don’t know, I only caught a swift glimpse of him as you got out of his car.” Yet she promises not to tell her mother if Rhoda promises not to do it again.

(Incidentally, McCarey humorously pokes fun of genre conventions–and happy endings–by an usher’s description of the movie showing in the theater: “It’s the old gag about the guy who takes the blame for a job his pal done; the pal’s a rat and lets the nice guy go to the pen. But when he’s dying and the rat confesses, and the boy and girl end up…” “Look, is it sad in any place?” Rhoda asks impatiently. “Some of them cry when his dog dies,” the usher offers. McCarey has indeed set his sights higher; this tragedy is not predicated on formula or pat sentimentality.)

What keeps McCarey and Ozu’s films from becoming cynical evocations of humanity, however, is their incorporation of significant acts of kindness from strangers or distant relatives. At the end of their rope, Lucy and Barkley spend a day in New York City reliving their youth, and various people–perhaps somewhat shocked to discover such simple people in the hustle and bustle of the city–shift from their roles as wheelers and dealers (a car salesman, a hotel owner, a band conductor) and graciously accommodate them, sensing that the occasion is somehow special. In MoMA’s The Hidden God book, Dave Kehr suggests “in their last day together, they have tasted a kind of paradise, a hint of the ‘eternal return’ that finds youth in old age and life in death.” Make Way for Tomorrow is an uncommonly wise and deeply felt film, where each and every scene seems perfectly, exactly rendered by a filmmaker who cares about what he’s saying.

Last weekend, the UCLA film archive screened one of Roberto Rossellini’s rarest films, India (1958); according to Peter Brunette in his informative book on the filmmaker, the only print available in the US for years was an unsubtitled, black-and-white copy owned by the Pacific Film Archive, so it was a joy to see a rare color print despite its less-than-stellar quality. It’s one of Rossellini’s most acclaimed films; Godard once mentioned it in the same breath with Eisenstein’s Que Viva Mexico, Murnau’s Tabu, and Welles’ It’s All True; like those works, it’s a loving tribute to a foreign land by a traveling artist.

Rossellini’s casual and spontaneous (some say anti-formal) filming style often has the surprising effect of intensifying viewer perceptions, lending screen events the impression of fleeting, precious historical moments. The dominant moment here is 1957, just a few years after India’s independence, during significant technological and social change. Like Paisan (1946), the film is a collection of dramatic vignettes; in between them it plays in documentary mode, complete with an all-knowing, informing narrator. That this objective, third person perspective continually shifts into subjective, first person perspectives (three of the four vignettes are narrated by their protagonists) is one of Rossellini’s structural methods for introducing and immersing Western viewers into the Indian milieu, a method that fuses education, insight and empathy.

As it turns out, the film’s belated North American exposure has another historical resonance: its co-screenwriter–one-time Cahiers du cinÈma critic, human rights activist, and Iranian diplomat Fereydoun Hoveyda–passed away just last November. Though he doubtless had more important things to do than record DVD commentaries, it’s saddening to think what a fascinating cultural, personal, and cinephiliac perspective he could have offered any future video release of this film (or its related French/Italian miniseries.) Alternatively, you can read some brief notes Hoveyda wrote for Anthology Film Archives, here.

The vignette structure suits Rossellini’s organic method of filming, but it’s also an essential part of his multifaceted and integrative approach to understanding his subject. Instead of offering a single, linear investigation or narrative tale, he offers several tales and entrusts their potential for harmony or divergence to the viewer. Yet certain themes emerge: a story of first love is compared with the mating rituals of elephants; a young father helps build a dam but has to leave the city after its completion; an elderly man struggles with his contemplative life when technology intrudes upon the jungle; a man dies and his trained monkey becomes lost between the human and animal worlds. The film is as much a meditation on the stages of life and human existence as it is a questioning look at the effects of modernization, yet none of these themes are schematically rendered. The film develops them in fluid, undefined ways.

Before and after its vignettes, India is bookended by hurried montages of the sights and sounds of Bombay, emphasizing its vast population and masala cultural diversity (an aspect Rossellini’s endlessly curious, magpie mind clearly cherishes) while suggesting a macrocosm for the film’s intermediate magnifications. The anonymous narration of these sequences is dryly informative, yet idealizing, warm, and not without humor: after ruminating on the city’s impressive cultural tolerance, the film inserts a shot of an eccentric building, to which the narrator quips, “They even tolerate this architecture!” Rossellini’s Western romance for India is never in question, but it’s tempered with ironies and conundrums that prevent the film from ever becoming sentimentalized.

India is a difficult film to summarize; its whole is much greater than its parts. Its narratives and narrations are basic and its naturalistic style often seems direct to the point of “artlessness,” but–without wanting to mystify its accomplishment–its structure renders the Rossellian magic that prompts revelations, which appear unforced, spontaneous, and unending; the film has dominated my thinking all week. Even Godard seemed hard pressed to pinpoint its unique affect, cryptically describing it as “the creation of the world” and promising to write about it at length in a future article of Cahiers (which Tom Milne points out he never did). May it some day be more readily available for the repeated scrutiny it fully deserves.

The Tailenders (2006)

I’ve avoided owning a TV for the past 17 years, but I know I miss some good stuff on occasion, one of which is the PBS series P.O.V., which bills itself as “television’s longest-running showcase for independent non-fiction films.” And judging by their recent excellent line-up (My Country, My Country, Maquilopolis, Tintin and I) and upcoming programs (The Camden 28, 49 Up, Wrestling with Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner), they certainly seem to be living up to their mission.

One of their recent programs, The Tailenders, was screened at the Los Angeles Filmforum (specializing in experimental and avant-garde films) a few weeks ago, and it’s easy to see why. Adele Horne’s examination of Global Recordings Network (GRN), an evangelical Christian organization devoted to spreading the gospel to the “tailenders” of world evangelism–people in the remotest regions of the world–is a provocative and beautifully constructed examination of how messages are carried, translated, and received. It is not a critical exposÈ of GRN, but a thoughtful montage of cultural, sociological, and economic questions raised by their activities.

The film is video artist Horne’s first documentary feature, and it combines investigative reporting (interviews, location shooting, historical summary) with metaphorical images (salt vibrating on sound-wave Chladni plates) and poetic narration (“the pulsation of air set in motion by a spoken word sends ever-expanding ripples in all directions”). The film highlights the creative technology devised by GRN to promote its message, including cardboard record players, hand-cranked tape players, and air-dropped portable radios tuned to a single, evangelical frequency. Collapsible buses become digital recording studios, information headquarters, or makeshift movie theaters in just a few hours.

GRN (formed in Los Angeles in 1939) has translated Bible passages and sermons into 5,485 of the world’s 8,000 languages and dialects, dozens of which no longer exist, and hundreds more of which will vanish within a generation or two. Their targets are predominantly poor people living in rural areas who barely survive in today’s global capitalist economy. Horne follows missionaries to Patutiva in the Solomon Islands, where a village has prevented a logging company from coming ashore; such enterprises typically cut trees at twice the sustainable rate and only give locals 5% of the profits.

Ostensibly, the evangelicals trade in ideology (though more than a few tapes have been sold), but they also teach political passivity, encouraging communities to “cope,” or “accept” the “inevitability” of change, and to consider themselves citizens of a heavenly kingdom rather than an earthly one. In Mexico, serious social breakdowns occur in villages that share resources when upwardly mobile converts no longer participate in spiritual traditions or political organizing. (Horne points out that Catholicism has traditionally been more amenable to incorporating indigenous religious beliefs than evangelicals have been, a fact also suggested by the recent documentary The Devil’s Miner.) One convert laments the way neighboring laborers are exploited for little pay, but suggests all he can do for them is pray.

Despite GRN’s immense technical and logistical efforts (including detailed aerial photographs and an organizing system that allows dialects to be identified within minutes of contact), the art of translation proves to be a complicated and inexact science. Locals are enlisted to record translations, which are digitized on site and carefully edited to remove pauses, mistakes, coughs, etc. Others are brought in to double check the accuracy of the translations, and mistakes are common, particularly when translators take it upon themselves to ad-lib humorous or dramatic embellishment, unbeknownst to the recordists.

Horne brilliantly emphasizes the role of sound waves by shooting abstract close-ups of audio program displays or vibrating Chladni boards that arrange salt in geometric patterns according to various electrical frequencies. Communicating ideas requires physical media (like air or water) and just as the environment resonates and changes with this energy, the activities of missionaries and indigenous peoples reverberate and collide with one another, altering the world. In a sense, the salt patterns represent the audio waves, but visually, they have other associations; meaning is both lost and gained whenever energy transfers through media.

Similarly, it’s hard to say just what exactly is being communicated within such cultural interactions. GCN goes out of its way to make enticing technology in vivid colors; many rural people have never seen a cassette player before, and will play a record over and over until the groove is worn down. As Horne puts it, “The strongest message received may be the technology itself.” She highlights the traditionally lucrative relationship between technology and evangelicalism, which helped pioneer mass media in the early 20th century, and suggests that a disembodied voice is larger than life and gains perceived authority simply by its ethereal and intangible existence.

Horne raises such questions throughout the film, which compiles interviews with GRN spokespeople and indigenous people alike. At the same time, she artfully permits room for the viewer to contemplate ultimate ramifications. She doesn’t pass judgment, but identifies both definite and indefinite ways in which cultures shift upon interaction, mutually exclusive entities reshaping and rearranging according to the malleable media they both share.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve seen some pretty knockout documentaries that have been rattling around in my head ever since; each of them offers a penetrating portrait of their subject that expands into larger questions of form or meaning. I’ll comment on two today and two others tomorrow. -Doug

The Legend of Time (2006)

A few posts down, I wrote about what proved to be my favorite film at PSIFF, Albert Serra’s Quixotic (Honor de Cavalleria), but Serra’s fellow Catalan filmmaker, Isaki Lacuesta, may have provided my second favorite film with this seemingly effortless, but enigmatic and deeply engaging observation of modern San Fernando islanders.

Described as a “fictional documentary,” the film begins with a prologue highlighting the flamenco career and 1992 funeral of singing legend Camarón de la Isla. The rest of the movie is divided into two parts. The first (entitled “The Voice of Isra”) focuses on a good-hearted, but rambunctious, gypsy adolescent named Isra, who the camera records going about his daily activities; going to school, arguing with his brother, talking with an old man, flirting with a girl, and–most of all–sorting through his feelings about the recent death of his father. The second part of the film (entitled “The Voice of Makiko”) follows a young Japanese woman who immigrates to San Fernando in the hopes of learning how to sing flamenco music like Camarón, but finds herself doing odd jobs and emotionally working through her feelings regarding her sickly father.

In some ways, the brief prologue contains the heart of the film; the spirit of Camarón so pervades the cultural milieu, aspirations, and longings of Isra and Makiko (on various levels of awareness) that it provides the glue that holds the film together. The title of the movie is taken from the singer’s 1979 album dedicated to Garcia Lorca; Isra was born the year Camarón died and now that his own voice is shifting registers, his future as a singer is uncertain; both protagonists struggle with an absent patriarch as part of discovering who and where they are.

Lacuesta didn’t begin with a script, but rather a set of intentions to get to know the people and the land; the film’s improvised narrative is a combination of the non-professional actors playing themselves and ideas Lacuesta would suggest to them; like Johan van der Keuken, he distinguishes between “spontaneous” and “prepared” films rather than “documentary” and “fiction.” But unlike Kiarostami’s similarly hybrid film Close-Up, the tensions occur across the film rather than through it; instead of questioning the intents and illusions of the medium itself, Lacuesta encourages the viewer to draw his or her own parallels, connections, and contrasts between Isra and Makiko’s stories. It’s a sunny, casual film brimming with loose conversations, unexpected patterns, and compelling insights.

The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (1987)

Faber and Faber published its book on documentaries, Imagining Reality, in 1996 and included Jill Forbes’ Sight & Sound review of Kazuo Hara’s astonishing film (recently released on DVD by Facets Video) that has made me want to see it ever since: “The film’s real strength is not pictorial, but flows from its outstanding impoliteness, its doggedly amoral determination to record its subject’s violent crusade. . . . The result is profoundly ‘unGriersonian.’” If Michael Moore’s antics are too much for some viewers, I wonder how they’d react when this film’s interviewer begins slapping around reticent subjects.

One of the more astonishing aspects of the film (one that also incriminates the viewer) is the fact that the reticence is based on lies and obfuscation, and the violence is rooted in an obsession for truth telling. There’s a shocking moral fury to the conflicts in the film. There’s no question that ex-WWII soldier Kenzo Okuzaki (65-years-old) is clinically antisocial, but to what degree? He shot someone in the ’50s and spent 15 years in jail, and used a slingshot to fire metal balls at the Emperor, spending another year in prison; he now drives a car covered in handwritten, dissident slogans, and often finds himself surrounded by police and security officers. But he calmly discusses his intentions, apologizes for his behavior, and often phones the police himself after a skirmish.

Okuzaki’s behavior provokes genuine, important confessions from his ex-superiors regarding long suppressed Imperial atrocities committed in New Guinea, including assassinations, cannibalism, and cover-ups. (For a searingly dramatic account of the nightmarish final days of the Pacific campaign, check out Kon Ichikawa’s Fires on the Plain, which Criterion is releasing on DVD next week.) Okuzaki simply refuses to acclimate or accept affluent, postwar Japanese society, or embrace its dominant myth of victimhood. He openly blames Emperor Hirohito for the war (occasionally with the help of the speaker mounted on his car), and spends as much time comforting the relatives of victims as he does assaulting those he suspects of crimes.

His journey around Japan to the hospitals, workplaces, and homes of those he wishes to interrogate–many of them aging and infirm–is recorded with rigorous objectivity. Shoehei Imamura (Vengeance is Mine) produced the documentary, and his obsession for misfits and malcontents undergirds director Kazuo Hara’s film, which determinedly records Okuzaki’s crusade with unpolished, hand-held immediacy. Hara leaves it to the viewer to judge the action, to watch or not watch, to grapple with the issues at stake.

Apparently, no distributor would touch the finished film, but it finally proved to be a resounding cultural phenomenon when it was finally screened to the public; doubtless, an eruption of emotion induced by years of cultural freeze. Okuzaki passed away in Kobe less than two years ago, and if web reports are any indication, his death went largely unreported by the Japanese press. Most likely, he was a figure who was much too extreme in his suffering, anger, and vigilantism to warrant national publicity, yet that is precisely why Hara’s unflinching film deserves such serious consideration.