Monthly Archives: April 2010

IndieLisboa’10: Days 3 & 4

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By Robert Koehler

Revolution Day! 25 April marks the 36th anniversary of Portugal’s liberation from the corrosive Salazar dictatorship which had been the country’s yoke for decades. I didn’t even plan to wear a color-appropriate t-shirt for the occasion–just tossed on whatever was hanging in my hotel room closet. This is a mere block from my hotel, looking south down Ave. de Liberdade from Marques Pombal square. The annual parade/demo/manifestation begins at this square, and proceeds south down Liberdade, past the Sao Jorge cinemas where the festival begins and ends. Note the red flags in the background…



A mother brings her child to 25 April, walking down shady Liberdade. That’s the revolution’s trademark carnation that the child is waving. The lovely tilework lines the sidewalks throughout central Lisbon.

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An old veteran of the Revolution returns to the scene of victory 36 years ago….

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A tank from the Revolution leads the march down Liberdade. This guy had an effectively booming voice, leading the charge….

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One of the tank’s tires, appropriately decorated…

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The march begins a moment after this was shot, as a breeze catches the Portuguese flag…

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Marching down Liberdade, 25 Abril is in full red….



The two-screen Londres cinemas are one of the festival’s central spots, especially with the Magnolia Cafe (our common lunch and dinner spot) just steps away under the same roof. This is the door handle leading to Theatre Two, where I had just viewed Peter Mettler’s characteristically amazing cinema–in this case, his mid-length Petropolis, commissioned by Greenpeace Canada, observing Canada’s vast oil tar sands refinery project, so vast that it can only be perceived from an airborne helicopter, which is precisely what Mettler does. It is unforgettable and terrifying viewing.

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The lobby of the Londres, with the Magnolia Cafe off to the right, leading off to the screens….



The Londres, between Theatres 1 and 2….



In the Londres lobby, leading to the Magnolia Cafe, with a poster for one of the International Competition films: Goran Devic’s and Zvonimir Juric’s The Blacks, which will soon appear in Los Angeles at the Southeast Europe film festival….



The cafe off the Londres, through a frame…



Still the film of all films this year (we’re nearly a third done, folks), James Benning’s Ruhr is the kind of work that IndieLisboa was built for: to confront audiences with genuinely independent cinema, made by the sensibilities of the filmmaker(s) alone. The festival lacks the sufficiently large screen for which Ruhr is best suited, the conditions under which I saw it in Rotterdam (at the Pathe). But the larger point is that Benning is being screened, and that Ruhr is traveling beyond Rotterdam and Berlin. Los Angeles viewers, for once, already know what the rest of the world is discovering: Digital cinema has now fully come into its own….



The poster in the Londres lobby of Pelin Esmer’s 10 to 11, screening here in the International Competition. Have yet to see, but Esmer has reportedly trimmed ten minutes from the version which world premiered in Turkey…



And steps down from the Magnolia Cafe, the gallery Micro Arte….



There is this myth that Lisbon is built on seven hills; a lie. More like 700: hardly a street is level, and instead gently slopes uphill or downhill, and often within the same block. This is classic Lisbon building colors, pastels, tilting toward lovely taupes and pinks…



Guess what this is…

TCM Classic Film Festival and Wild River (1960)

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45-year-old Jo Van Fleet as octogenarian Ella Garth in Wild River.

The three-and-a-half-day TCM Classic Film Festival wraps up today with the North American premiere of the newly restored Metropolis (1927) tonight. The Festival has been somewhat of an experiment in its first year, screening good prints of well known films in the heart of Hollywood for a high fee ($20 per screening if seats are available, or $500 passes). Most Angelenos think the Festival is prohibitively expensive, but that may be because we can see titles like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Playtime in 70mm here on a regular basis.

The Festival seems well attended (though by no means sold-out), virtually everyone has a pass around their neck, and line conversations revolve around hotels and air flights. A man seated next to me yesterday (from New Orleans) speculated that maybe only 10-20% of the audience was local. That’s all well and good for TCM and those who can afford festival tourism in this economy, but it does raise questions about film festivals and their relationships with host cities in general.

More interesting for Angelenos, the program has included a few rare or recently restored films. The highlight for me has been Elia Kazan’s Wild River (1960), purportedly the first color film set in the Depression South. In 2002, it was added to the National Film Registry–a decided improvement over the indifference with which it was initially greeted–and it was recently restored by the Film Foundation (with help from the Academy Film Archive and Fox). It begins unconventionally with a montage of black-and-white documentary footage depicting devastation caused by the flooding of the Tennessee River, capped by a heartrending interview with an exhausted survivor who stands in the mud and describes family members who have drowned.

What follows is a dramatization of the newly formed Tennessee Valley Authority and its efforts to acquisition the river and surrounding land from private owners to build a network of dams that will usher in technological progress but erase local history. Such themes are more widespread in movies from other parts of the world–Jia Zhang-ke’s 2006 masterpiece, Still Life, about the Three Gorges Dam in China, springs to mind–but less prevalent in American cinema. (Apparently, Kazan worked on a labor documentary in 1938 close to the setting of Wild River, and nursed the feature for 25 years through an assortment of writers.)

Montgomery Clift plays Chuck Glover, a bookish, emotionally withdrawn TVA employee who has to convince the last private landowner, 80-year-old Ella Garth, to sell her island before the waters rise. He is utterly stymied, however, both by the elderly woman’s steely resolve not to sell, and by the region’s racial politics when he offers good-paying jobs to Garth’s black workers and upsets the local businessmen. Fortunately, Glover’s budding romantic relationship with Garth’s widowed daughter-in-law (Lee Van Cleef) becomes an empowering and provocative force in his life and those around them.

Increasing the sense of a world transitioning from old to new is the story’s chilly autumnal setting; the leafless trees, misty river, and overgrown grasses of Garth’s island are captured in stark CinemaScope, making it seem near the brink of death even before it submerges forever. Late-career Clift is ideally suited for expressing the subtle modulations of Glover’s awkward interactions with others; his nervous ticks reach a fevered erotic pitch in conjunction with Van Cleef’s passionate, unbridled earthiness. The film is a simmering character study for much of its length, hinging on difficult exchanges perennially caught between private/public, urban/rural, male/female tensions, fighting to emerge from deep within the characters’ psyches as they try to give expression to feelings they cannot define. It’s likely that its first audiences thought it was emotionally convoluted and slow-moving with little release, and it is–which is precisely why it’s also gripping and lingering.

IndieLisboa’10: Day 1 (Cont’d)

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By Robert Koehler

You just can’t stop Lu Chuan, whose City of Life and Death I programmed last year in Los Angeles and has travelled widely on the festival circuit. This is the Chinese one-sheet hanging in the central hallway of the Culturgest headquarters for IndieLisboa. Lu’s film is in the festival’s Observatorio section, and is unofficially the most controversial film in the pages of Cinema Scope magazine. (See Shelly Kraicer’s initial highly critical review and Tony Rayns’ response and defense of Lu’s film. Tony and Shelly are co-programmers of Vancouver festival’s Dragons & Tigers competition.)



Another one-sheet in the Culturgest hallway: Herzog’s unfairly neglected other film from a fecund 2009, My Son My Son What Have Ye Done?, with Michael Shannon staring back at you. Note the presenting director, playing the role formerly performed by Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. IndieLisboa is showing double Herzog, including Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, which I programmed in Los Angeles last year.



IndieLisboa’s Mr. Crow waiting for a late-arriving friend at the festival meeting point….

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At IndieLisboa’s front desk at Culturgest, the video screen above staffers shows one of many absurdist “action” scenes from Alejo Moguillansky’s sublime Castro, which is in the international competition. I programmed Castro in Los Angeles last year. Moguillansky, unquestionably one of Argentina’s most interesting young filmmakers, is preparing his third feature, The Submarine War.



The IndieLisboa Big Board in the Culturgest entry lobby, adjacent to the main public box office. The modified grid schedule is clean and easy to read, with each day in no more than eight venues, including two screens at Culturgest.



Looking north at the Duque de Saldanha plaza to Avenida de Republica, one of Lisbon’s central grand boulevards. Lisbon is a markedly older city, with decades and centuries-old architecture (and monuments) dominating the center and not ceding to modernist corporate designs that have crept, American-style, across more and more European cities. Still, cranes are visible as construction is all over the place. Lisbon so far strikingly resembles what I first saw in 1980, but more cranes will change all of that. Continue up Avenida de Republica, turn right, and you arrive at Culturgest, the new headquarters for IndieLisboa after a move from the smaller Forum Lisboa, where the festival was housed for its first six years.



Get ready for May Day. This poster is all over the city, with a hipper design than most May Day promotions. May Day also marks closing night for IndieLisboa.



Audrey in Funny Face is the sight that faces me as I get on the elevator to my room at the Hotel Florida, a boutique number in central Lisbon styled in Hollywood nostalgia. My Jacques Tati room is something of an exception. The hotel walls are covered in movie quotes, such as “Top of the world, Ma!” from Raoul Walsh’s White Heat.



My room entry at Hotel Florida in central Lisbon. The only other French director I’ve spotted with his own room is Truffaut; much better to be inside Tati…



And here’s what it looks like inside the Jacques Tati room. Three-sheet versions of these same posters are visible in the hallway of the Cinerama cinemas in Rotterdam, one of the venues for Intl Film Festival Rotterdam. The black lump in the corner of the image is my black backpack, my perpetual companion at festivals…



While writing at my hotel room desk, CNN International begins airing the live edition of Thursday night’s second UK election debate. It features the Liberal Democrat’s Dickensian-sounding Nick Clegg, who shot to international prominence after he blew away Labour’s Gordon Brown and the Tories’ David Cameron in the first debate. Clegg held his own well enough; he won most late Thursday polls among viewers. Gordon Brown tried and failed to bounce back, while David Cameron continues to be dull. Cameron is your typical Tory in a younger package, but any American viewer can’t help but be struck at how Cameron’s conservatism would be drummed out of today’s GOP as “socialist”–so rightward is the GOP shift that the standard-bearer of its British counterpart is far to its left. Cameron reminds that no major party in the world’s major industrialized nations is as rightwing as America’s Republicans….



Opening night of IndieLisboa at the Sao Jorge movie palace, as the crowd assembles to watch Joao Canijo’s ironic found-footage film, Lusitania Fantasy. Note the open-air balcony, and the wall-sized banner on the side of Lisbon’s oldest operating cinema, a home to eclectic, non-commercial programming during the year.



The Sao Jorge movie palace fills as opening ceremonies begin, with IndieLisboa’s iconic image projected on the screen–along the ubiquitous crow mascot beamed onto the walls adjacent to the screen curtain. There was no red carpet–take note, American festivals. Director Joao Canijo’s opening remarks at the podium (flooded here in lights) elicited a loud and supportive reaction from the audience. My friend and chief critic of the weekly paper Expresso, Francisco Ferreira, will be providing me with a general translation/summation of Canijo’s remarks, which he says were highly critical of the current state of Portuguese cinema. The crowd clearly concurred….



Several one-sheets of films in the IndieLisboa lineup in a glass case in the Sao Jorge lobby. On the left is a poster for Canijo’s Lusitania Fantasy, IndieLisboa’s opening night film, while in the center is the poster for Javier Rebollo’s superb Woman without Piano, in the international competition here. I programmed Woman without Piano in Los Angeles last year.



One of two different three-sheets in the Sao Jorge cinema’s entry lobby of Joao Canijo’s week-received opening night film, Lusitania Fantasy. Note the poster’s deliberately anachronistic design, which is of a piece with the film’s cinematic strategy, to assemble found footage from the wartime 1940s that recorded the elaborate rituals, celebrations, events and actions by Portugal’s fascist Salazar dictatorship which attempted to promote a nostalgia for Portugal’s former worldwide dominance with a pathetic form of nationalist romanticism. Canijo’s film is rife with bemused irony, not anger, a tone unthinkable from any comparable film which may be made in a found-footage mode from filmmakers in other countries still struggling with their dark pasts, from Germany to Greece to Argentina to the U.S.



A few blocks away from the Sao Jorge and around the corner from my hotel is the Portuguese Cinematheque, whose lovely facade and elegant illuminated sign truly touched me in the late-night hours. The place exudes a sense of being a palace of cinephilia. Upcoming screenings this week include Antonioni’s Professione: Reporter and Walsh’s The Revolt of Mamie Stover, starring the great Agnes Moorehead.

IndieLisboa’10: Day 1

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By Robert Koehler

Here’s your first sighting outside the IndieLisboa (International Independent Film Festival) headquarters at Lisbon’s vast cultural center, Culturgest. The festival’s poster design this year plays on the same Ben Day dots style which Roy Lichtenstein imported into his form of Pop Art nearly 50 years ago. This style plays through in the festival’s overall graphics system, which really is the first thing that hits a viewer at any film festival–perhaps even more than the program lineup itself.



Turning left from the poster banner in the previous image is this northern view up Culturgest headquarter for IndieLisboa. Note another aspect of a festival’s graphic system: Pole banners, featuring this festival’s chosen animal mascot. Berlin had its bear, Locarno has its leopard and Rotterdam has its tiger–and Lisbon has its crow.



Staff is busy preparing for opening night in the spacious Culturgest headquarter offices.



In another office and in the still uncrowded hallways, IndieLisboa staff gets things ready for the April 22 start.

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The festival fosters a childrens program alongside a notably sophisticated cinephilic main program. Here’s the lively poster art promoting the sidebar. In this way, IndieLisboa’s inclusiveness for children exactly parallels BAFICI’s own kids program, “Baficito.”

The Man Beyond the Bridge (2009)

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The 2010 Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles debuted last night and will continue through Sunday, April 25th. It’s one of the better produced local festivals and takes place in Hollywood at the posh Arclight Cinema. It aims to strengthen ties between filmmakers of Indian descent, audiences, and industry people, so its line-up emphasizes popular hits and Bollywood films, but it also includes documentaries and the occasional art film.

A standout with elements of the latter category this year is The Man Beyond the Bridge (screening Sunday), Laxmikant Shetgaonkar’s FIPRESCI-award-winning drama, fresh from Berlinale’s Forum section. It’s a fascinating story set in Goa, India’s smallest state nestled in the Western Ghats mountain range, a biodiversity hotspot threatened by human development.

An isolated and weary forest service guard named Vinayak (Chittaranjan Giri)–who’s spent fifteen years chasing away poachers and who recently became a widower–faces a new crisis when villagers (across a bridge) decide to erect a temple in the forest. The villagers are quickly rallied by the combined tactics of a politician and a religious guru who assert the right to use the forest to protect it from their own sense of moral contamination. “This land belongs to the people,” they contend. “We came first, the government came later; this temple is an ultimate symbol of our culture, tradition, and humanity.” Meanwhile, the construction whittles away at the dwindling preserve.

The plot is further complicated when Vinayak, almost in spite of himself, begins to shelter a mad and mute woman (Veena Jamkar) whom the villagers have completely shunned. Vinayak–whose day to day activity largely consists of shouting at poachers–initially treats her like a stray animal, leaving her food on the doorstep of his meager stone house and literally dragging her into a washhouse. But a bond slowly develops between the two social outcasts that gradually offers them human companionship and love. Their unconventional relationship enrages the villagers, however, and a final confrontation mounts between the nonconformists and the religious mob.

The film is based on a short story by Konkani writer Mahabaleshwar Sai, and it skillfully balances an array of tensions between control and freedom, cultural heritage and moral claiming rights, natural resources and development, public piety and personal transformation. While some of the dramaturgy and camerawork feels conventional–the periodic use of crane shots unnecessarily inflates what is essentially a rural character drama–Shetgaonkar is a master of the long shot in which a detached and wider perspective gives rise to thematic contemplation, and the film’s cinematography is beautfully naturalistic without devolving into the merely picturesque.

There’s a fascinating emphasis on costuming as well; the colorful saris of the villagers contrast with the outcasts’ brown garments and Vinayak’s preference for plain t-shirts and quick changes into uniforms whenever his superiors show up becomes a telling motif for a man exhausted by his sisyphean task.

The Man Beyond the Bridge was years in development due to the vagaries of Goan film funding, but the time spent refining its screenplay shows in the way the film artfully builds its narrative conflicts. It’s an accessible movie but one whose degrees of import and subtle dualities expand with the kind of attention they richly deserve.

Update on LACMA Film

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“Where’s the significant fine art?” Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Lakeside Landscape (1889) and Jean Renoir’s A Day in the Country (1936), courtesy of the excellent Landscape Suicide.

After several months in which the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was presumably doing good on its promise to re-prioritize and promote its threatened film program, my Save Film at LACMA partner, Debra Levine, and I have posted a new update on the museum’s progress: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, or “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

LA Weekly Preview of COLCOA

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Pierrot le fou‘s digital restoration will receive its post-Cannes international debut on Friday.

The LA Weekly has published my preview of the City of Lights, City of Angeles (COLCOA) French film festival, which begins in full force today and plays through Sunday, April 25th. Of the handful of screeners I watched, I was particularly moved by Alain Cavalier’s Irène, and this may be your only chance of seeing it.

For COLCOA’s full line-up and many events, be sure to check out its website. In addition to the restored Pierrot le fou, I’m also excited about the panel discussion following it about the influence of the New Wave on American film, moderated by David Ehrenstein and including Monte Hellman, Anna Karina, and the Cinémathèque Française’s Serge Toubiana.

Earth (1930)

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Mr. Bongo Films in the UK is releasing a DVD of Alexander Dovzhenko’s Earth (1930) “fully restored and in its full-length version” next month, and it’s a beauty to behold. Appreciating a silent film sometimes requires that we adjust our modern reflexes to engage it on its own terms, but this monumental and passionate work is one of the exceptions, the last and most poetic entry of Dovzhenko’s loose silent trilogy about the violent social forces sweeping through peasant Ukrainian lives in the first decade of the Soviet Union. Rhapsodic and intensely lyrical, the film dramatizes the deep tensions that erupted in farming communities between kulak private interests and the industrialized, collectivist efforts following Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan in 1928.

According to Russian historian George O. Liber’s informative 2002 biography, Alexander Dovzhenko: A Life in Soviet Film, the filmmaker, himself the son of Ukranian peasants, began making Earth–which clearly supports the dreams of collectivization–in the summer of ’29, some months before the Soviet authorities ordered “the liquidation of the kulaks as a class” and began rounding them up and shipping them off to Siberia. Yet the film was far from politically correct; Dovzhenko was harshly criticized for emphasizing the eternal beauty of nature rather than stoking class fury, and indulging in poeticism (a Stalinist shift from the Soviet experimentation of the ’20s). Liber writes:

“When Dovzhenko began to shoot Earth in 1929, his political message conformed to the Communist Party’s interpretation. By the spring of 1930, however, this same message had become suspect. In reaction to his search for harmony in an increasingly violent and brutal environment, Dovzhenko’s critics began to question his political motivations.”

The censors demanded that he cut three scenes from the film: farmers urinating in a radiator to keep a tractor moving; a woman ripping off her garments in grief; another woman grimacing as she gives birth to a child. Dovzhenko refused, but the cuts were made anyway. The film was restored years later, and although Kino’s current DVD in the US (taken from a 1971 Mosfilm print) includes all three scenes, it suffers heavily from a dark, grainy transfer, an incorrect (speedy) projection rate, and dramatic cropping of the frame. This latter problem is most severe given Dovzhenko’s penchant for compositions emphasizing majestic skies and low horizons. Below are a number of comparisons I’ve made between the Mr. Bongo DVD (apparently a port of the German absolut Medien Arte edition) and the Kino DVD:

This last comparison illustrates how a gorgeous shot of moonlight streaming down from the clouds has been rendered virtually unrecognizable in the Kino edition. Dovzhenko shot the film with his longtime cinematographer, the brilliant Danylo Demutsky (who was arrested and exiled to Kazakhstan soon after the duo’s subsequent 1932 film, Ivan), and the bucolic imagery of later filmmakers like Andrei Tarkovsky or Terrence Malick is almost unthinkable without their precedent.

The Mr. Bongo DVD trumps the Kino edition (originally produced on a microbudget in the ’90s as part of its “Red Silents” series) on every count: it runs 78 minutes (presumably at the correct projection rate) compared to Kino’s 73 minutes (including its custom text preface). The Bongo DVD subtitles the original Russian intertitles, whereas the Kino adds new English intertitles (and exhibits slightly different editing of the intertitles at times, wrecking havoc with Dovzhenko’s rhythms). And the Bongo contains a very impressive high-fidelity score that is clearly tailor-made for the film; my only complaint is that the review disc I received doesn’t contain any documentation or even credit the score, which is presumably by Alexander Popov and originally recorded for the German release.