World on a Wire (1973)

Posted in DVD review by Doug Cummings

One of the most exciting DVD releases of the year occurs Monday in the UK, when World on a Wire arrives as a two-disc edition from Second Sight. The cult science fiction TV movie by Rainer Werner Fassbinder had scarcely been seen since its 1973 broadcast, but a new restoration wowed critics at the Berlin film festival and MoMA earlier this year. The film deserves to enter the pantheon of great SF movies.

It’s a close adaptation of Daniel Galouye’s 1964 Counterfeit World, a virtual reality novel years ahead of its time; although human connections to machines and alternate realities occasionally appear in SF literature, it wasn’t until the 1980s that cyberpunk emerged as an identifiable genre. Which explains why those of us even moderately familiar with authors such as William Gibson or Bruce Sterling found The Matrix (1999) an arduous slog, notable more for its photogenic violence and digital effects than anything approaching “new ideas.”

World on a Wire is set in the near future (Fassbinder and company shot the film in “futuristic” looking places they found in Paris, Alphaville-wise). A cybernetics company programs a supercomputer to simulate a population of “identity units” with artificial intelligence that will predict human behavior in the real world. When the company’s lead designer commits suicide under mysterious circumstances, his successor, Fred Stiller (Klaus Lowitsch), takes on the job, but soon faces his own mental breakdown when strange events and logical inconsistencies begin to haunt him.

Shifting details, names, and events force Stiller to question his perceptions: is the psychological stress of his new position (intensified when his employer courts private interests on the sly) taking its toll, or is he on the verge of a more unsettling discovery? Aside from a few budgetary omissions (flying cars, a revolution in the streets), the three-and-a-half hour film reproduces the book–which is more significant for its themes than its literary style–nearly scene-for-scene.

There have been a few reviews of the film in recent months, but I haven’t read any that really probe its most notable quality–its baroque visual style. While The Matrix and its ilk suggest artificial reality through the overt use of digital effects, Fassbinder and his cinematographer Michael Ballhaus use everyday objects, props, and mise-en-scène to suggest a fabricated world, and the results are both more subtle and compelling. Some standout motifs (with clickable examples):

· Mirrors and a variety of glass and window panes that fragment and complicate space in the film. Many directors use mirror shots occasionally (with notable exceptions, such as Hitchock’s famous use of doubling reflections in Psycho), but Fassbinder–channeling Douglas Sirk–creates a virtual funhouse of duplicate imagery, invisible barriers, ambiguous spaces, and constant replications that emphasize the tricky division separating “real” and “artificial” realms.

· Visual clutter on par with the work of Josef von Sternberg (whom Fassbinder homages with a Marlene Dietrich double twice) or Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. The plethora of props and competing abstract patterns on carpets, wall art, and glittering surfaces, suggest not sensory overload so much as handmade, randomly filled, manufactured space.

· Spaces are often divided up by arbitrary lines: window blinds or screens, obfuscations dictated by the choice of camera angles. Like the slanting shadows of so many films noir, the visual lines suggest entrapment and a breaking up of space into puzzle-like mosaics.

· Fassbinder enjoys filming his protagonist in long hallways and tunnels, as he passes through offices and city streets in a maze without end.

Some of these motifs overlap and reinforce one another, and there are more, such as the long and brisk tracking shots that isolate figures by emphasizing their surroundings, the often present canned muzak that intensifies the world’s sense of artificiality, and a motif in which background extras (“identity units”?) stand idly in statuesque poses. In fact, virtually every shot in the movie riffs on one or more of the elements cited here, yet it never feels studied or academic; it’s a movie that plays with the limitations and freedoms of the television format with a great deal of energy and vigor.

World on a Wire is a major work with a dense construction that rewards close examination. It’s also one more reminder that our knowledge of film history is constantly evolving as important works arrive but vanish, awaiting rediscovery. The fact that such an ambitious work from such a well-known filmmaker could elude genre discussions for so long might be depressing if the excitement of finally seeing it wasn’t so substantial.

12Apr2010

Earth (1930)

Posted in DVD review by Doug Cummings

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.

2Mar2010

Best Films of 2009…and the Decade

The current issue of Film Comment has been on news stands for a few weeks, and it includes best-of-the-year and best-of-the-decade polls to which I was invited to contribute. I moved to Los Angeles in 2001 and starting blogging in 2003, so in many ways, pondering the decade has encouraged me to reappraise my writing here (though by no means have I written about every film I watched!), which has proven to be an enjoyable exercise.

The categories and numbers of titles requested were limiting, of course, but even restricting myself to one film per director (preventing a pile up of, say, films by Richard Linklater or the Dardennes), I’ve had to leave out a lot of singular achievements I will continue to cherish for years. (And I’m sure I don’t have to mention how the strange vagaries of distribution influenced my lists, especially for the years 2000 and 2009.) The lists emphasize features over short or experimental works, and I assumed many masterpieces were shoo-ins for the poll, so I made an effort to emphasize a few titles I didn’t want to be overlooked. The ordering is ranked roughly in terms of personal attachment, but it’s pretty fluid; I could easily be talked into rearranging most of it on any given day.

10 Favorite Films of 2009

1. Extraordinary Stories (Mariano Llinás, Argentina)
The most unconventional narrative feature I saw this year was also the most riveting: clocking in at over four hours and juxtaposing three main stories with countless mini-stories in each–all featuring wall-to-wall narration–and shot on what looks like consumer-grade video, this microbudget film still feels bigger and more expansive than Avatar. Taking supreme delight in the telling of its stories (which dabble in multiple genres), the film has been aptly compared to Louis Feuillade, Jorge Luis Borges, and Tristam Shandy for its free-flowing, episodic, patchwork structure, and its cumulative effect is thrilling. Describing Llinás, the esteemed Argentine critic Quintin wrote in Cinema Scope: “…in his capacities as director, producer, writer, editor, actor and teacher, he has opened up a new path for the country’s filmmaking community and a new direction for its cultural milieu.” Bravo.

2. Police, Adjective (Corneliu Porumboiu, Romania)
The latest masterpiece from Romania is a sly and slow-boiling (rather than hard-boiled) detective story documenting a young policeman’s monotonous surveillance of a pot-smoking teenager and the policeman’s aversion to his job because he fears the criminal punishment would be too severe. (Having traveled a bit, he also knows pot-smoking isn’t even a crime in other places.) He’d rather catch the unknown supplier, but in a tour-de-force confrontation in the film’s final act, his older superior insists that duty is duty. It’s part of the film’s brilliance that this conversation amplifies the way virtually every one of the film’s conversations pivots around ideas of process, language, and justice; the policeman’s crisis has as much to do with his country’s general moral trajectory as it does with his job. This is a movie that seems innocuous and then lingers in your mind for months.

3. United Red Army (Koji Wakamatsu, Japan)
One of the best cinematic convergences I experienced last year was when I saw Wakamatsu’s blistering dramatization of Japanese student protests just as I was exploring Nagisa Oshima’s life and work, which is haunted by the death of Sixties radicalism. Wakamatsu’s film focuses on the formation and cult encampment of the United Red Army and its eventual 1972 ten-day standoff with the police and media in the Japanese Alps. The film is a commanding and at times almost unbearably frank account of the way paranoia, group dynamics, and sloganeering festered into psychodramatic “self-criticism” that led to the group torturing and executing half of its own members. Yet this is no simple exposé–Wakamatsu, who has personal ties to the group and mortgaged his home to finance the film, directs with a profound commitment to emotional authenticity and an aversion to judgment.

4. The Beaches of Agnes (Agnes Varda, France)
As she proved with The Gleaners and I, Varda has a particular genius for autobiography and the essay film, with its freeform sense of play and spontaneity, and she confides in the viewer like a friend. Rather than a cause this time, she explores her own past, and utilizes a fascinating array of new footage, film clips, recreations, and old photos, as the width of her frame shifts from snapshots to widescreen splendor. “Cinema is a game,” she says, and recounts her life through an array of digital tricks, impromptu installations, and an assortment of cardboard cutouts. She explores the people and locations of her past and in the process discovers them anew.

5. Lorna’s Silence (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Belgium)
It’s difficult not to acknowledge the wide, and in some ways unlikely, influence the Dardennes have made on contemporary cinema with their handheld, intimate studies of enigmatic characters in personal crises. The mild backlash that greeted their latest film–accusing it simultaneously of doing the same things and doing different things (something of which their hero, Roberto Rossellini, was no stranger)–wasn’t too surprising. What is clear is that the Dardennes are serious about exploring their themes in new ways rather than falling back on proven templates. It may be their most heavily plotted film in years, but it ends with their greatest psychological mystery, a provocation that suggests a moral conscience born unconsciously might invent its own reality.

6. Un Lac (Philippe Grandrieux, France)
Despite his undeniable technical mastery of dark and blurry imagery that is by turns baffling, beautiful, and gut-wrenching, Grandrieux’s first feature, Sombre (1998), didn’t change my mind about the meagre merits of dramatizing the lives of serial killers, and I’m still processing his brilliant but confounding follow-up, La vie nouvelle (2002). But Un lac captivated and moved me, its deliciously opaque narrative–as equivocal as the bulk of the film’s images–about an unusually intense relationship between a brother and sister living in seclusion becomes a platform for a deeper and more emotionally nuanced parable about human attachment and loss.

7. It Felt Like a Kiss (Adam Curtis, Britain)
Curtis’ most avant-garde film (at least, the one with the least amount of narration and the most ambiguity) served as the basis for a theatrical installation in Manchester. It exhibits his typically brilliant, impressionistic montage of archival footage tracing developing cultural and political ideas. But freed from his usual BBC rhetorical constraints, the film is a Godardian juxtaposition of text, sounds, and images linking seemingly disparate Fifties personalities (Rock Hudson, Saddam Hussein, Lee Harvey Oswald, Enos the chimp, and “everyone above Level 7 in the CIA”) to world calamities today. Highly thought-provoking and enthralling to watch, it reinforces Curtis as one of the world’s leading film essayists.

8. Beeswax (Andrew Bujalski, USA)
With the passing of Eric Rohmer earlier this year, Bujalski seems poised to take the reigns as cinema’s master of naturalistic portraits of intelligent young adults pondering their hearts in confusing times. Don’t confuse him with his mumblecore imitators, whose calculated slacker mannerisms often seem more concerned with qualifying them as genre pieces than revealing complex personalities (it’s no surprise that Bujalski tends to cast longtime friends). Developing the post-collegiate setting of his two previous features, this film reflects the tensions, bonds, and crises prompted by the demands of business, while remaining as breezy and infectious as ever.

9. Me and Orson Welles (Richard Linklater, USA)
Linklater’s love letter to the Mercury Theatre, New Deal creativity, and youthful idealism was well worth the wait on its distribution; its host of convincing performances is topped by Christian McKay’s uncanny interpretation of Welles, which stresses intensity and fluidity over mimicry, and thereby picks up unexpected nuances along the way. As warm and clever as Linklater’s previous works but boasting an almost epic period sweep and poise, it never devolves into nostalgia or hamming, investing its coming of age story with a genuine depth of feeling.

10. The Secret of Kells (Tomm Moore, Ireland)
Los Angeles seems to be one of the only US cities where Moore’s film has played (qualifying it for an Oscar nomination), which is unfortunate because it’s one of the most visually inventive and compelling animated features I’ve seen. Evoking the feel of illustrated manuscripts and having fun with its medieval two-dimensional representations of space, it recounts the turbulent history of the Celtic tome that many consider Ireland’s greatest artistic accomplishment. The film tells its story in broad strokes suitable for adolescents without dumbing down the mysticism, barbarity, and human cost of the middle ages.

10 Favorite Discoveries of 2009 (Not a Film Comment submission, but a Film Journey tradition–in no particular order.)

• A City of Sadness (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1989)
With all the attention our Save Film at LACMA campaign received, it’s easy to overlook the stellar programming Ian Birnie and Bernardo Rondeau continued to provide (several films on this list were courtesy of LACMA), not least of which was this brand new print of Hou’s masterpiece commissioned at their initiative.

• The Crimson Kimono (Sam Fuller, 1959)
Long unavailable on video or repertory screens until it appeared this year on DVD in Sony’s Samuel Fuller Collection, this typically (for Fuller) tabloid drama with progressive and heartfelt undercurrents offers an unusually authentic portrait of Los Angeles locations (Little Tokyo, Koyasan temple, Evergreen Cemetery) and ethnic tensions. Two detectives, a Caucasian and a Japanese American, fall in love with the same woman while investigating a stripper’s murder.

• Léon Morin, Priest (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1961)
Melville takes a situation ripe for sensation–a beautiful atheist develops a crush on a handsome priest during wartime, and they frequently meet in private–and though he’s obviously attuned (as they are) to the sexual tensions, Melville presents both characters as complex, intellectual human beings unwilling to succumb to simple clichés. The film’s hushed intensity is aided greatly by the sympathetic performances of Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Paul Belmondo.

• Ivan the Terrible, Parts I and II (Sergei Eisenstein, 1944 and 1958)

• Boy (Nagisa Oshima, 1969)
LACMA and the American Cinematheque offered the most important film series of the year with their co-hosting of James Quandt’s Oshima retrospective.

• L’Enclos (Armand Gatti, 1961)
After hearing Gatti cited for many years as a major influence on the Dardennes, I was very happy to track down this French DVD.

• Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
The kind of cinema, like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Lawrence of Arabia or Playtime, for which the big screen was invented.

• The Power of Nightmares (Adam Curtis, 2004)
I first heard about the BBC’s Adam Curtis on our local Pacifica radio station a couple years ago (when the host compared him to Guy Debord, it got my attention); catching up with his work was one of the highlights of my viewing year. This was the second of his three-hour miniseries, and it compares the evolution of the neoconservative movement in the US with the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East, highlighting their shared victories (Afghanistan), clashes (9/11), and fear-based legacies. Tightly weaving together images and ideas–with music clips from a whole string of John Carpenter movies–it’s an invigorating and mind-expanding experience. (You can view the film here.)

• L’Idee (Berthold Bartosch, 1920)

• Black Rain (Shohei Imamura, 1989)
AnimEigo’s DVD release proved to be an ideal digital presentation of Imamura’s atypically reserved–but deeply moving–black-and-white family drama about the long term social and physical aftereffects of the Bomb; in particular, the inclusion of a philosophical alternate ending (shot in color) in which the forlorn protagonist, Yasuko (Yoshiko Tanaka), leaves her domestic life behind and becomes a Buddhist mendicant. It’s a decided shift in tone, and Imamura was probably right to drop it, but it’s one of the DVD’s many fascinating extras, including historical footnotes that can also be found on the distributor’s website.

50 Favorite Films of the Decade (Links to longer reviews when available.)

1. The Son (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2002)
2. La Commune (Paris, 1871) (Peter Watkins, 2000)
3. Waking Life (Richard Linklater, 2001)
4. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, 2005)
5. The New World (Terrence Malick, 2005)
6. Still Life (Jia Zhang-ke, 2006)
7. In Vanda’s Room (Pedro Costa, 2000)
8. Honor of the Knights (Albert Serra, 2006)
9. The Circle (Jafar Panahi, 2000)
10. Oxhide (Liu Jiayin, 2005)
11. Paraguayan Hammock (Paz Encina, 2006)
12. Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2006)
13. Star Spangled to Death (Ken Jacobs, 2004)
14. Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006)
15. Peppermint Candy (Lee Chang-dong, 2000)
16. Yi Yi (Edward Yang, 2000)
17. In Praise of Love (Jean-Luc Godard, 2001)
18. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000)
19. Distant (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2002)
20. Shadow Kill (Adoor Gopalakrishnan, 2002)
21. Funny Ha Ha (Andrew Bujalski, 2002)
22. Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, 2008)
23. The House of Mirth (Terence Davies, 2000)
24. One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich (Chris Marker, 2000)
25. The Gleaners and I (Agnes Varda, 2000)
26. Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thom Andersen, 2003)
27. Taxi to the Dark Side (Alex Gibney, 2007)
28. When the Levees Broke (Spike Lee, 2006)
29. Extraordinary Stories (Mariano Llinas, 2008)
30. In the City of Sylvia (Jose Luis Guerin, 2007)
31. Faat Kine (Ousmane Sembene, 2000)
32. Munyurangabo (Lee Isaac Chung, 2007)
33. Regular Lovers (Philippe Garrel, 2005)
34. Heartbeat Detector (Nicolas Klotz, 2007)
35. Liverpool (Lisandro Alonso, 2008)
36. Opera Jawa (Garin Nugroho, 2006)
37. Russian Ark (Alexander Sokurov, 2002)
38. Ana and the Others (Celina Murga, 2003)
39. The Romance of Astree and Celadon (Eric Rohmer, 2007)
40. I’m Going Home (Manoel de Oliveira, 2001)
41. Eureka (Shinji Aoyama, 2001)
42. Still Walking (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2008)
43. Tokyo Sonata (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2008)
44. Woman on the Beach (Hong Sang-soo, 2006)
45. Shara (Naomi Kawase, 2003)
46. Happy Here and Now (Michael Almereyda, 2002)
47. Tony Takitani (Jun Ichikawa, 2004)
48. Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001)
49. Take Out (Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou, 2004)
50. Sita Sings the Blues (Nina Paley, 2008)

10 Best Reissues of the Decade

• 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)
• Au hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966)
• The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)
• The Exiles (Kent MacKenzie, 1961)
• Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, 1977)
• Lola Montes (Max Ophuls, 1955)
• Out 1, noli me tangere (Jacques Rivette, 1971)
• Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967)
• When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (Mikio Naruse, 1960)
• Winter Soldier (Collective, 1972)

27May2009

Armand Gatti and L’Enclos (1961)

Posted in Commentary, DVD review by Doug Cummings

gatti

“When I studied, I met a filmmaker who decided for me, in a way , what I was going to become. It was Armand Gatti who brought us together.” –Jean-Pierre Dardenne at his 2009 Cannes masterclass

“Film is a system that allows Godard to be a novelist, Gatti to make theater, and me to make essays.” –Chris Marker

The name Armand Gatti hovers in the background of many filmmakers today. One of the most acclaimed theater writer/directors of the 20th century, Gatti was originally a member of the informal Left Bank group of filmmakers that included Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Agnès Varda, Henri Colpi, and Jean Cayrol, but due to the fact that none of his films have been released on video in the US, he remains an elusive figure for many cinephiles. He appears in Resnais’ Toute la mémoire du monde (1956) and in Marker’s Immemory CD-Rom (reprinted this year); he wrote China (1956) for Marker’s Petite Planète collection and traveled with Marker in the making of Letter from Siberia (1957), which inspired his book Siberia — Zero + Infinity the following year.

According to his 1989 biographer, Dorothy Knowles, Gatti was born in 1924 in a shantytown in Monaco (his Italian anarchist father, who escaped murder in a Chicago slaughterhouse because of his political activities, fled Mussolini’s reign); during WWII, Gatti joined a small French resistance maquis. Captured, tortured, and sentenced to a concentration camp in Hamburg where he was forced to work in a diving bell at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, Gatti eventually escaped and joined a British SAS special forces team. After the war, he worked as an award-winning journalist for many years until he traveled with Marker, published his first plays, and directed his first film, The Enclosure (L’Enclos, 1961).

L’Enclos was screened out of competition at Cannes but it was hailed by Truffaut, Resnais, Cocteau and others. It’s available on DVD in France from Doriane Films. (My review follows.) Gatti went on to write and direct the satirical El otro Cristobal in Cuba in 1963 (which won the Critic’s Prize at Cannes but was never distributed in Europe), Der Übergang über den Ebro for German TV in 1970, a couple of video series for French TV in the late-’70s, and The Writing on the Wall (Nouse étions tous des noms d’arbe) in Ireland in 1982. While making these films, Gatti also established himself as a leading figure in the experimental popular theater, producing plays developed in “collective writing” workshops at universities, factories, youth rehab centers, and prisons. (As late as 2006, he wrote and directed a play at the Ville-Evrard psychiatry ward outside Paris.)

The Dardennes met Gatti in 1971 when Jean-Pierre was an acting student at the Institute of Diffusion Arts (IAD) at the Catholic University of Louvain in Brussels. Gatti had been invited by the student coordinator Henry Ingberg, who writes in the 2005 Belgian Dardenne program L’image, la vie that he spoke to Gatti about the “very strong desire to leave classic production behind in favor of a participative approach of research, encounter and dialogue with people, with militants, weirdos, suburbanites, and so forth; in short, of this desire to forge a bridge between the poetic creation and a world generally considered to be incompatible with it.” The rise of video technology encouraged this approach and the production research resulted in the student plays The Durutti Column (1971) and Adelin’s Ark (1972). Later subsidy-funded workshops allowed the Dardennes to expand this experience into ongoing documentary work, of which they eloquently spoke last week. (Their association with Gatti continued with The Writing on the Wall; Jean-Pierre served as assistant cameraman, Luc served as assistant director, and both were co-producers.)

lenclos

From its bravura opening shot that disorients the viewer by rotating and tilting down from a picturesque cloud to a rock quarry, the credit sequence of L’Enclos is its most visually striking: lines of concentration camp prisoners silently trudge over the desolate landscape, the black-and-white imagery emphasizing the dry, dusty terrain and harsh shadows. (The cinematographer, Robert Julliard, had previously shot Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero and Clément’s Forbidden Games.) The muted sounds of crunching stone and falling gravel intensify the sense of physical toil, but the setting exists in an abstracted space with compositions that fragment prisoners and relegate guards to the background–a world both immediate and removed.

The first scene asserts the danger and cruelty of camp life when a kapo orders a prisoner to kill a weaker one or be killed himself–the classic prisoner’s dilemma–but unlike The Dark Knight, the scene is presented with such sobriety and naturalism that it registers as sad desperation rather than a thrilling plot device. An observing Nazi guard recommends the same strategy be used on a Communist German inmate suspected of harboring secrets, and soon an enclosure is populated by the burly Karl Schongauer (played with world-weary presence by Hans Christian Blech) and David Stein (Jean Negroni), a Jewish watchmaker. Stein is told he has twenty-four hours to “prove he is at least half a man” and kill or be killed; the Nazi commanders bet on who will win.

Gatti’s abstraction situates the action at a fictional camp called Tatenberg. His goal isn’t to document the grisly details of camp life (which he felt were unfilmable) but to highlight the culture of fear and psychological dehumanization that pervaded all the camps. “Before killing a man one kills his dignity,” he has said, and the film extends the active dispiriting of prisoners to the usage of signage hung from their necks and sexual slavery. Most of the drama pivots around the dialogue between the two men in the enclosure and their ultimate decisions. Gatti has attributed his survival of WWII in part because of his ability to retain his sanity, and impressively, the film isn’t an escape drama (though it does highlight organized resistance in the camp); rather, it asks whether it’s possible for a person to maintain his or her humanity in the face of certain death, perhaps the kind of question that only a survivor could pose with utter conviction.

21May2009

The Dardennes and Lorna’s Silence

Posted in DVD review by Doug Cummings

lorna

If last week seemed like a windfall for Chris Marker, this week the torch has been passed to Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. Tuesday at Cannes, the Belgian filmmakers gave a truly fascinating two-hour masterclass that is already available online, which features extended discussions of key scenes in each of their films. The brothers’ filmography–including many of their rarely seen documentaries–is also screening at the Harvard Film Archive beginning this week, and the program begins at the Walter Reade Theater the following week.

In the US, Sony Classics isn’t releasing the Dardennes’ 2008 film, Lorna’s Silence, until August, but it’s already available on DVD in France and the UK. The French Blaq Out DVD includes a unique prize: Jean-Pierre Limosin’s addition to the Cinema de notre temps series, The Home Cinema of the Dardenne Brothers (2006), in which the filmmakers stroll through their neighborhood in Seraing while pointing out filming locations and discussing their work; the episode–previously packaged with Jacqueline Aubenas’ recent collection of French essays–includes Dutch subtitles.

Lorna’s Silence won the best screenplay award at Cannes last year, but its overall critical reception was decidedly muted, if not mixed. Having seen the film, I can only presume this response had more to do with a kind of backlash (the Dardennes are among a select few to have won Cannes’ Palme d’Or twice) or a misreading of its ambiguous ending: the Guardian asserts that the “narrative machinery simply seizes up,” the World Socialist Website questions the film’s lack of “social impulse,” and Screen International complains that the film “spins into an unexpected and unsatisfying conclusion.”

But none of these criticisms address what actually occurs in the final act of the Dardennes’ most heavily plotted film to date. As always, equally attuned to their protagonist’s inner and outer lives, the story unfolds on two levels. Lorna (Arta Dobroshi) is a young Albanian woman in an immigration scheme that involves her marriage to a Belgian drug addict (played by an emaciated Jérémie Renier) whom her employers hope will die soon so that she can marry a Russian mobster. At first, Lorna sees the scheme as her only hope for success in post-industrial Liège, and the Dardennes are adept at suggesting the ways in which modern relationships are governed by money. (Like Bresson’s L’Argent, which features an ATM machine behind its opening credits, the first image in Lorna’s Silence is bills being counted.)

However, as much as Lorna’s steely resolve attempts to deny the human costs at stake, her silence masks a tangle of emotions slowly growing within her. While the trafficking plot dominates most of the film, Lorna’s suppressed conscience gestates in spite of herself, and as the Dardennes’ visual focus builds intensity, the viewer is brought deeper into the mystery of Lorna’s inner life, identified by her increasing attempts to physically and psychological free herself from a plot of her own making (or at least acquiescence). The narrative doesn’t seize up or spin out of control, it simply becomes secondary to Lorna’s nascent and all-consuming perceptions and convictions.

The French DVD also includes an informative interview with the Dardennes by filmmaker Sólveig Anspach; among other things, the filmmakers reveal that they wrote eleven different versions of the film’s script before settling on their final one, and they discuss their lengthy rehearsals and continuity shooting methods. It’s rare that filmmakers not only have a powerful command of film technique but are eloquent enough to discuss their methods in detail while still leaving room for interpretation and discovery. One often gets the feeling that the Dardennes consider themselves explorers, probing their films with the same combination of observation, speculation, and inquiry they inspire in their viewers.

12May2009

A Grin Without a Cat (1977, 1993)

Posted in DVD review by Doug Cummings

grin

Last week, Icarus Films released the latest DVD in their excellent Chris Marker series, A Grin Without a Cat (originally released in 1977 but shortened with an added coda in ’93). Not only is this one of his most acclaimed documentaries, summarizing the decade of the New Left worldwide as well as his own globetrotting SLON collective filmmaking period, the DVD also comes amid a flurry of new Marker events:

• Cannes Classics has announced it’s debuting a new and restored print of Far from Vietnam (1967), the protest film Marker organized and edited with contributions by Joris Ivens, Claude Lelouch, Agnes Varda, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, and William Klein (who, along with Raymond Depardon and many others, also contributed footage to Grin). Given that Marker begins his history of the New Left with international outrage against the Vietnam war, this is a timely restoration.

• Harvard Film Archive is featuring a series of Marker’s best-known films this week, and will culminate on Saturday, May 16, with a Marker-led Q/A tour of his Second Life cyber museum (which will be dismantled later this year) set in the virtual realm of Ouvroir. (You can watch a preview here courtesy of Les Inrockuptibles.)

• The Peter Blum Gallery in New York City is offering an exhibition of Marker’s Owls at Noon installation (which Rob Davis reviewed here) beginning this Saturday.

grin2

Marker begins A Grin Without a Cat with a moving, tour-de-force credit sequence (set to a rousing march by Italian composer Luciano Berio) that juxtaposes images from the famous Odessa Steps scenes in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) with first-hand footage of demonstrations that Marker and his SLON colleagues amassed over the years, forging a universal archetype of the clash of peaceful protesters versus state militia. It’s one of the great editing sequences of the cinema and showcases the rhythmic ingenuity that Marker (who only credits himself with editing and sound) has demonstrated in all of his work since the early-’50s.

As in Marker’s later The Last Bolshevik (1993), which begins with a newsreel clip of a parading Tsarist ordering the poor to remove their hats and bow to the rich, Grin opens with the face of injustice in its most crystalized form: an American bomber bragging in his cockpit about the spectacle of terrified Vietnamese people fleeing from his napalm. Though the antiwar resistance (especially in France) is often dated from May ’68, Marker shows how it began in ’67, noting in his extensive liner notes provided with the DVD:

“Perhaps too much has been made of the famous editorial by Pierre Viansson-Ponté in Le Monde, March ’68, ‘France is bored’–a moody column from which rose the consensual idea that May had been a thunderbolt in a clear sky, that no one had seen it coming. As for me, I wasn’t bored at all, and to discern the waves of the seism that began to shatter our planet you really didn’t have to be prophetic.”

Using multiple narrators (including Simone Signoret and Yves Montand), the pseudo-anonymous Marker charts how self-determination sentiments merged with the workers’ movement to create new critiques and demands within established power structures. The film winds together workers’ strikes in France, demonstrations against the Shaw of Iran in Berlin, interviews with Fidel Castro in Cuba and Regis Débray in a Bolivian prison; it remembers riots in Santiago, Prague, and Mexico City, where police killed hundreds of students in the Tlatelolco massacre just days before the 1968 Summer Olympics, after which “not one country refused to attend.”

The film captures the excitement and promise of the times, which became a grin without a cat as competing factions of the Left–Stalinists, Trotskyites, Maoists, union organizers, Communists, Socialists, radicals–failed to unite (or sold out to middle class interests), and assassinations and coups prevented many revolutionary dreams from fully taking shape. Marker wryly points out that one of the biggest victories for the Left–Nixon’s resignation–came about not by political protests but by television. The film is also a cogent preview of postwar corporate issues that would become increasingly dire: “Until recently,” the narrator says, “those in power oppressed or killed directly. Today, death or madness could be a simple by-product of their activity.” Marker shows a heartrending protest at a Chisso board meeting in Minimata, Japan, due to the company’s mercury poisoning of the public water supply.

In contrast to the idealism and beauty of the film’s opening montage, the bulk of the film is comprised of bits and pieces of found footage and hastily shot protest films and newsreels, and edited at a breakneck pace, emphasizing the fluid, unformed chaos of the times, yet it’s never without grace and wit. Marker brilliantly transitions from a playful digression about cats (comparing their clear-eyed watchfulness to the shifty eyes of people in power) to a Belgian parade honoring felines to a sickened cat in Minimata, then cuts to footage of the town’s human victims. In similar fashion, the film links major global events with humor, outrage, and compassion, and serves both as a potent time capsule and a call to arms that can still be heard ringing around the world.

15Jan2009

Robert Koehler’s Best of 2008

Posted in Commentary, DVD review, Film review by Robert Koehler

The Golden Age Continued: The Films That Matter in 2008

By ROBERT KOEHLER

It’s always dangerous to assume anything, but I figured that by now I would have been teased—somewhere, by someone—for having argued more than once over the past couple of years that we are living in a new golden age of film. This position runs so counter to the prevailing mood and sentiment (dour may be one word to describe it) that I know more than ever that I’m right, just as I know that such a contrarian position opens one up for attack. Hasn’t happened. Yet. Maybe it will this time, especially when some films that seem so wildly and widely loved aren’t listed among the year’s films that matter (say, for the helluva it, WALL-E). Perhaps part of the reason for the critical exercise in listing a year’s survey of films is to offer a counter to the pack mentality that swamps North American movie criticism today. (Not a golden age there.) But the central reason is to stake a position in the field of cinema, to defend it, to cite the films made by filmmakers who fathom that we’ve entered a time where cinema’s essence of a greater understanding and feeling for reality through image and sound, a time that runs full circle to the silent era, liberated from literature, from theater, from all of those alien projects that have nothing to do with cinema.

After putting down these titles, especially this year, I scanned down them one more time, hit by a rush of memories: from the (literally) smoke-filled cinemas in Buenos Aires during a horrible brushfire that engulfed the city; to Serge Bozon playing pop records on three continents; to the frozen, exhausted, hulking survivors of yet another year at Sundance; to the shock and dismay at the news of the collapse of FICCO and the excitement of the news of Locarno snatching Oliver Pere from the Quinzaine; to the thrill of the first ten minutes of Ballast and Tulpan and Rail Road Crossing and Afterschool and Hunger and A Good Day to Be Black & Sexy and El Camino and Knitting and a bunch of other astounding films by first-time narrative directors; to the sight of Nicolas Klotz and José Luis Guerín sharing a video camera when Guerín’s was stolen; to the silencing poetry of a new Straub or Reeves in Toronto’s “Wavelengths” section reminding one what beauty actually is; to watching AFI Festival revive and explode as one of North America’s most important festivals after many years in the doldrums; to the complete fun of watching (and hearing news of) my friend and Cinema Scope colleague Mark Peranson gradually make his first film out of the winds of the Canaries and the world created by Albert Serra; to Serra, just Serra, walking around, talking; to the personal frustrations of not being able to share time with my juries in Miami and Mexico City as well as friends in Cannes; and above all, to my wife Marjaneh, who has taught me new levels of courage as she successfully battles breast cancer. (2008 was, in the words of Harvey Pekar, our cancer year.) Being home, with her, and with a ton of screeners from festivals and beyond, made me love the DVD as never before; near to the one I love the most in the world, and able to interact with films in a way—and perhaps, even depth–not possible in the cinema. Make no mistake: the DVD as cinema object is a wonderful thing.

So, after the memories, a sensation: awe. It’s hard to believe that there were so many extraordinary films in one year, so many new voices that came out of nowhere, though perhaps not as hard to believe that so many that have barely been seen in North America, where fewer good films are shown than anywhere else. And still, the films that actually made it to Los Angeles (an increasingly feared destination for small and independent distributors)….and, even more, the films that made it past Homeland Security officials (though not to Los Angeles—thus, the separate US list)….perhaps I should term it the “New York” list, since that’s where those films played more or less exclusive national engagements. As for the World list, a total of 91 is a record. Beware of top ten lists: They reveal nothing about what the critic has seen that year, nor where the critic stands. If you watch all or part of well over 700 films, 91 is relatively brief. Note that some films on the World list have US distribution planned for 2009; I always item films in this section in the year I first viewed them, and if they make it to the US in a subsequent year, I’ll list those fortunate ones again, accordingly. The films are listed in order of preference. Such orders are, like many other things, fluid.

Los Angeles:

Gomorra (Matteo Garrone, Italy)
Ballast (Lance Hammer, US)
My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, Canada)
Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant, US)
Man on Wire (James Marsh, UK)
Still Life (Jia Zhang-ke, China, 2007)
Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredsson, Sweden)
Momma’s Man (Azazel Jacobs, US)
The Unforeseen (Laura Dunn, US, 2007)
Hunger (Steve McQueen, UK)
Alice’s House (Chico Teixeira, Brazil, 2007)
A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin, France)
The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, US)
Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, US)
‘Tis Autumn: The Search for Jackie Paris (Raymond De Felitta, US, 2006)
Times and Winds (Reha Erdem, Turkey, 2007)
The Duchess of Langeais (Jacques Rivette, France, 2007)
The Witnesses (Andre Techine, France, 2007)
Shotgun Stories (Jeff Nichols, US, 2007)
The Pool (Chris Smith, US/India, 2006)
Up the Yangtze (Yung Chang, Canada)
A Good Day to be Black & Sexy (Dennis Dortch, US)
Role Models (David Wain, US)
Wonders Are Many (Jon Else, US, 2007)
The Voyage of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao Hsien, France/Taiwan, 2007)
JCVD (Mabrouk El Mechri, France)
Irina Palm (Sam Gabarski, Belgium/Luxembourg/UK/France, 2007)

US:

In The City of Sylvia (Jose Luis Guerin, Spain, 2007)
La France (Serge Bozon, France, 2007)
The Silence Before Bach (Pere Portabella, Spain-Germany)
Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (Wang Bing, China, 2007)
The Secret of The Grain (Abdelatif Kechiche, France, 2007)
Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico, 2007)
Frownland (Ronald Bronstein, US, 2007)
Heartbeat Detector (Nicolas Klotz, France, 2007)
Paraguayan Hammock (Paz Encina, Paraguay, 2007)
Tirador/Slingshot (Brilliante Mendoza, Philippines, 2007)
Opera Jawa (Garin Nugroho, Indonesia, 2007)
The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (Eric Rohmer, France, 2007)
Wonderful Town (Aditya Assarat, Thailand, 2007)

World:

Liverpool (Lisandro Alonso, Argentina/Spain/Netherlands/France/Germany)
El cant dels ocells/Birdsong (Albert Serra, Spain)
Tulpan (Sergey Dvortsevoy, Kazakhstan)
Still Walking (Hirokazu Kore-eda, Japan)
Il Divo (Paolo Sorrentino, Italy)
Revanche (Götz Spielmann, Austria)
Good Cats (Ying Liang, China)
The Feature (Michel Auder/Andrew Neel, US)
Survival Song (Yu Guangyi, China)
Our Beloved Month of August (Miguel Gomes, Portugal)
Delta (Kornel Mundruczo, Hungary)
Night And Day (Hong Sangsoo, South Korea)
When It Was Blue (Jennifer Reeves, US/Iceland)
RR (James Benning, US)
United Red Army (Wakamatsu Koji, Japan)
Rail Road Crossing (Pere Vilà, Spain, 2007)
Le Genou d’Artémide (Il Ginocchio di Artemide, Jean-Marie Straub)
Circus School (Guo Jing/Ke Dingding, China, 2007)
El Camino (Ishtar Yasmin, Costa Rica)
Respite (Harun Farocki, South Korea, 2007)
Perfect Life (Emily Tang, China-Hong Kong)
The Longwang Chronicles (Li Yifan, China, 2007)
Correction (Thanos Anastopoulos, Greece)
La vie moderne (Raymond Depardon, France)
This Longing (Azarr Rudin, Malaysia)
Jalainur (Ye Ziao, China)
Now Showing (Raya Martin, Philippines)
Four Nights With Anna (Jerzy Skolimowski, France/Poland)
Tokyo Sonata (Kurosawa Kiyoshi, Japan)
Drifter (Cao Guimarães, Brazil, 2007)
Afterschool (Antonio Campos, US)
All Around Us (Hashiguchi Ryosuke, Japan)
Better Things (Duane Hopkins, UK/Germany)
Megane (Naoko Ogigami, Japan)
La Rabia (Albertina Carri, Argentina)
Crime and Punishment (Zhao Liang, China/France, 2007)
35 Rhums (Claire Denis, France/Spain)
Knitting (Yin Lichuan, China)
Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas, France)
Revue (Sergei Loznitsa, Germany/Russia)
Where Are Their Stories? (Nicolas Pereda, Mexico/Canada)
Treeless Mountain (So Yong Kim, South Korea)
The Juche Idea (Jim Finn, US)
Los Bastardos (Amat Escalante, Mexico)
Loos ornamental (Heinz Emigholz, Austria/Germany)
Waiting For Sancho (Mark Peranson, Canada/Spain)
Lake Tahoe (Fernando Eimbcke, Mexico)
Sweet Food City (Gao Wendong, China)
Los Herederos (Eugenio Pogolvsky, Mexico)
Chouga (Darezhan Omirbaev, Kazakhstan/France)
Megatron (Marian Crisan, Romania)
We (Huang Wenhai, China)
The Infinite Border (Juan Manuel Sepúlveda, Mexico)
süden (Gaston Solnicki, Argentina)
Cry Me A River (Jia Zhang-ke, China/Spain/France)
She Unfolds by Day (Rolf Belgum, US)
mime-mime (Sode Yukiko, Japan, 2007)
Jogo de cena/Playing (Eduardo Coutinho, Brazil, 2007)
10+4 (Mania Akbari, Iran, 2007)
Fragments of Conversations with Jean-Luc Godard (Alain Fleischer, France, 2007)
Sonetàula (Salvatore Mereu, Italy/France/Belgium)
Como estar muerto (How To Be Dead) (Manuel Ferrari, Argentina)
Plot Point (Nicolas Provost, Belgium, 2007)
Largo (Mark Flanagan/Andrew van Baal, US)
Manila in the Fangs of Darkness (Khavn, Philippines)
Historias Extraordinarias (Mariano Llinas, Argentina)
Voy a explotar/I’m Gonna Explode (Gerardo Naranjo, Mexico)
The Rebirth (Kobayashi Masahiro, Japan, 2007)
The Rabbit Hunters (Pedro Costa, South Korea, 2007)
The Equation of Love and Death (Cao Baoping, China)
Correspondences (Eugene Green, South Korea, 2007)
Kaza-ana (Uchida Nobutero, Japan, 2007)
Jerrycan (Julius Avery, UK)
The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel, Argentina)
Possible Lovers (Raya Martin, Philippines)
Box Office: Next Attraction (Raya Martin, Philippines)
Recycle (Mahmoud Al Massad, Jordan/Germany/Holland)
Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell (Matt Wolf, US)
Stranded: I’ve Come From a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains (Gonzalo Arijon)
Goliath (David Zellner, US)
L’Aimee (Arnaud Desplechin, France, 2007)
Years When I Was a Child Outside (John Torres, Philippines)
Parque Via (Enrique Rivero, Mexico)
Quemar las naves (Francisco Franco, Mexico, 2007)
24 City (Jia Zhangke, China)
Return to the Scene of the Crime (Ken Jacobs, US)
The Legless Boy Cannot Dance (Michel Lipkes, Mexico)
Dernier Maquis (Adhen) (Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, France/Algeria)
Mock Up on Mu (Craig Baldwin, US)
Sonic Youth: Sleeping Nights Awake (Michael Albright, US)
God’s Puzzle (Miike Takashi, Japan)

8Jan2009

Tops Tens of 2008

Posted in Commentary, DVD review, Film review by Doug Cummings

Birdsong

This past year was a difficult one for me, schedule-wise, but I still managed to squeeze in a good number of films at the Palm Springs, COLCOA, Los Angeles, DocuWeek, and AFI festivals, UCLA, the American Cinematheques, AMPAS, Cinefamily, LACMA (check out Bernardo Rondeau’s top ten list here), REDCAT, and the Filmforum, not to mention the commercial Landmark and Laemmle theatres. Los Angeles remains a vibrant setting for cinephiles even if its dispersion and middling public transport often require a tolerance for long commutes and a commitment to keeping a close eye on screening calendars, limited runs, and fleeting opportunities. Staying abreast of world cinema often feels like scavenging, but it always pays off in the end.

Here is my list of ten new films that made the biggest impression on me, in alphabetical order, plus ten favorite older films I discovered for the first time.

• Birdsong (Albert Serra, Spain)

I chose Serra’s previous film, Honor of the Knights, as my favorite film of 2006, so I was delighted to see his latest–similarly meditative but funnier and more cosmic–receive greater critical exposure. Ostensibly telling the biblical story of the journey of the magi, the film is more interested in its experiential affects than its narrative details, utilizing the powers of long takes and long shots to explore and illuminate barren landscapes, the passage of time, and fragile but resilient human activity. It feels like the ending of Rossellini’s Stromboli expanded into a feature. Serra’s a unique talent, combining a lofty vision with an earthy temperament and a heavy doses of spontaneity (readily captured in Mark Peranson’s fascinating documentary, Waiting for Sancho, which conveys more than any other film I’ve seen the “hurry up and wait” process of filmmaking). I was shocked to learn that the movie was shot in DV, which is further proof that aesthetics owe as much to the handling of technology as the technology itself.

• Captain Ahab (Philippe Ramos, France)

A strangely overlooked film in this country, perhaps because it’s a French tribute to American Romanticism, the sort of impulse that’s often received with grudging criticism or indifference, as if Moby Dick–which this film serves as a kind of prequel and re-envisioning summary–can only be invoked on proprietary terms. Its freedom with the text and brilliantly anachronistic score are original and compelling and it exhibits a keen sense of atmosphere and elliptical structure; its themes of physical and moral freedom, obsession, and fate quietly smolder throughout.

• The Exiles (Kent MacKenzie, 1961)

This may not be a new film, but Milestone’s new release of this previously undistributed masterpiece of social observation in the Native American community living in downtown Los Angeles is a potent and moving document of a bygone era.

• Heartbeat Detector (La Question humaine) (Nicolas Klotz, France)

Another bold French narrative experiment, this austere and rhythmically mesmerizing portrait of corporate dehumanization is carried along by a basic thriller plot but makes its point using associative visual motifs: smoke and smokestacks, ashes, a sterile Kubrickian cleanliness, and dim fluorescent green lighting, all of which merges Holocaust tropes with modern systemization. It also manages to suggest the effects of music on communities and its potential to unite or separate people as social ritual. “Perfectionism belies an appalling fear of emptiness,” remarks a character, and the protagonist’s growing awareness of this maxim is pointed and absorbing.

• Hunger (Steve McQueen, UK)

Artist McQueen, who cites Vigo’s Zero for Conduct and Warhol’s Couch as personal influences, has delivered a debut feature that is astonishing in its attention to physical surfaces, materials, and bodies. With almost no exposition, the movie thrusts the viewer into the daily life of IRA prisoners in 1981 during a hunger strike, and focuses on their violent relationship with British guards. The constant beatings, decrepit settings, and closely observed aspects of starvation would likely be unbearable were it not for the film’s unflinching regard for the beauty and dignity of the human body in all its myriad states of suffering and crisis, forging a vision that is at once sympathetic to prisoners and guards alike. The justly celebrated scene between prisoner Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbinder, frighteningly frail) and an Irish priest brings the drama’s ethical dimension to the fore in a two-shot that, amazingly, manages to be as visceral and commanding as the rest of the film.

• Sita Sings the Blues (Nina Paley, USA)

For my money, Paley achieves more with this beautiful, hilarious, and touching Flash Animation feature than any number of mainstream CGI extravaganzas combined. Animation might be the most laborious filmmaking around, so the film’s playful intertextuality (combining autobiography with archival jazz recordings with the tale of Ramayana), improvised line readings, and general creative spontaneity is rare and infectious. Is there a distributor brave and intelligent enough to release this in commercial theaters?

• The Secret of the Grain (La graine et le mulet) (Abdellatif Kechiche, France)

Though it has been nearly a year since I saw this, Kechiche’s utterly engrossing examination of two generations of immigrants in Sete remains vivid in my mind as much for its lack of sentimentality as for its close observations and deep empathy. Its rich characterizations and sensitive treatment of culture and tradition combine with a wicked sense of irony to offer a suspenseful narrative that, for once, deepens our emotional connections rather than simply quickens our pulses. Judge for yourself–it was released on DVD in the UK a few months ago (under the title Couscous).

• Take Out (Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou, USA)

It’s fitting that my favorite new indie film (made in 2004 but not distributed until this past year) alphabetically comes right after Kechiche’s film, as both movies offer revealing portraits of immigrants struggling in food professions to preserve their past while integrating into a foreign culture. It’s fast paced and immediate with sweaty cooking montages you can practically smell, and it culminates in a twist ending that surprises for the ethical weight it carries.

• Tokyo Sonata (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan)

The 2008 economic meltdown is global, and Japan is in the thick of it. Kurosawa’s family drama–about a salaryman who loses his job but hides the fact from his family in fear of losing face–couldn’t be more timely in its depiction of problems erupting from Japan’s political and economic relationship with the international community. It’s a highly sensitive and carefully drawn depiction of a typical Japanese family, often depicted from crowded angles within a home in ways that emphasize the sense of obscurity and trespass; each family member carries his or her own secret, and chaos erupts when they are revealed. The beauty of them film lies in its embrace of the chaos and its suggestion that life might just persist beyond it.

• Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, USA)

Like a contemporary Umberto D (and I don’t make that comparison lightly), this film dramatically uses the bond between a dog and its owner to expose the human implications of a person on the fringes of society–what that means to the individual and the decisions they make and, by implication, what that means to society at large. It’s easy to focus on Michelle Williams for her low-key and vulnerable performance, but the movie is full of interesting characters and interpretations who reject, stymie, control, or assist Wendy in her enigmatic but desperate journey to find her place in life. Co-writing with Old Joy collaborator Jon Raymond, Reichhardt succeeds in sketching out an ordinary place (much of the film occurs in a Walgreens parking lot) that seethes with interpersonal assessment, judgment, and response, pulling the viewer into a quiet maelstrom of everyday interaction.

(Honorable mentions go to Afterschool, Ballast, The Class, Lake Tahoe, Liverpool, Summer Hours, and Tulpan.)

Top Ten Discoveries of 2008:

• Acto da Primavera (Rite of Spring) (Manoel de Oliveira, 1963)

UCLA offered the best retrospective of the year with its 14-film summary of the career of Oliveira, who’s now 100 years old and still working; Acto da Primavera proved to be the highlight for me for its rarity, its importance to Oliveira’s career, and its early provocative fusion of documentary and fiction. The film records an outdoor passion play performed in a small village in Curalha with its original participants, but Oliveira restages it for the camera, intercutting footage with shots of the surrounding town and his own crew, and assembling a climactic montage with modern war footage. Like a multifaceted prism, the film is fascinating from a variety of angles.

• The Albatross (Paul Bush, 1999)

Paul Bush is an exciting experimental filmmaker in the UK, and his dual DVDs on the LUX label contain a number of impressive shorts, including this scratch-film version of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Using actors, location footage, miniatures, and famous engravings by Dore, Bush scraped the emulsions of each frame to produce cohesive graphic imagery that shifts and crackles with a lively, handmade energy. It’s a beautiful and unique rendition of the poem and I’m looking forward to seeing his future works.

• The Call of Cthulhu (Andrew Leman, 2005)

Like the kind of Lovecraftian plot on which it’s based, this DVD showed up in an unmarked package on my doorstep one morning without explanation (other than being a birthday gift) and judging by its cover, I assumed it was some kind of tongue-in-cheek parody of old movies. Fortunately, I was wrong–the film is a serious and competent tribute to silent expressionist cinema made on a micro-budget with lots of love. While it’s tempting to stress its tape and cardboard production, the film looks a lot better than anyone has any right to expect, and several effects (particularly a miniature swamp) completely fooled me. It’s a close adaptation of Lovecraft’s early signature story from 1926, and it’s a stroke of genius that the filmmakers (cobbled together from a Lovecraft fan club) chose to film it as if it had been made in 1926. A genuine accomplishment that’s loads of fun.

• The Decay of Fiction (Pat O’Neill, 2002)

Experimental filmmaker and master of the optical printer O’Neill offers this tribute to the famed Ambassador hotel in Los Angeles, and it’s a thrilling technical and atmospheric achievement with actors superimposed over location footage of the dilapidated hotel shortly before it was demolished. The actors are processed in degrees of transparency to resemble ghosts, and camera movements through the ornate hallways have been arduously choreographed to create a fluid and convincing merging of the various visual sources. The brilliant soundtrack is the final tour de force, a layered compilation of film noirs and original recordings to fashion a phantasmagoric portrait of history lingering in the shadows.

• I, Pierre Riviere, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister, and My Brother… (Rene Allio, 1976)

UCLA also programmed a retrospective of the impressive documentary films of Nicolas Philibert (well known for In the Land of the Deaf and To Be and To Have). His latest film, Back to Normandy, is a first-person essay film that revisits the town where, thirty years earlier, he assisted director Rene Allio in the making of I, Pierre Riviere…, also screened at UCLA. Allio’s film recreates the 1835 true story (famously analyzed by Foucault) of a troubled youth, the triple murder he commits, and his subsequent legal proceedings. No simple thriller or police procedural, Allio’s film uses the original locations and many town residents to re-enact the drama, creating a strong sense of authenticity, but he also finds unexpected beauty in the rural landscapes and peasant faces. This is a multilayered film ripe for rediscovery, and Kino is releasing Philibert’s documentary (which includes clips from Allio’s film) on DVD in March, though it’s hard to imagine watching it without having seen Allio’s film. (Both movies are available on DVD in the UK. You can listen to Graeme Hobbs’ review of the DVDs here.)

• Lola Montès (Marcel Ophüls, 1955)

I’ve long waited for an opportunity to see what is widely considered Ophüls’ masterwork on the big screen, and this astonishingly good restoration was just what the doctor ordered. Justifiably praised for its sumptuous costumes, painterly color schemes, and lush compositions, the film simultaneously celebrates and critiques spectatorship, particularly the male gaze in its desire to capture and possess female beauty. Shun the Fox Lorber DVD like the plague and treat yourself to this restoration in all its CinemaScope splendor.

• Rat-Trap (Adoor Gopalakrishnan, 1981)

I first encountered Gopalakrishnan’s work at Toronto in 2007 with his film Four Women, where Girish recommended I check out the only extant Gopalakrishnan DVD in the US, Shadow Kill (2002), a fascinating account of a crisis of conscience that befalls a rural executioner. Second Run’s UK DVD release of Rat-Trap offered me further evidence of the Kerala filmmaker’s mastery. Like Ray’s Jalsaghar, it tells the story of a wealthy landowner who systematically loses the people and property closest to him, largely due to his inability to adapt to the times or even work for his own good. Gopalakrishnan presents the tragedy with an acute sense of visual and aural detail, structuring the film around the idea of fear and entrapment, and carefully assembles his narrative like someone stalking their prey. Second Run’s release was delayed by a few months in order for them to record a new interview with Gopalakrishnan, who proves to be very articulate in describing the details of his sound design (the doors in the film creak like traps) or his elaborate color scheme.

• Reconstruction (Lucian Pintilie,1968)

Pintilie is a hero among contemporary Romanian filmmakers for making this Camera Buff-like examination of the political hypocrisies of its day, a film that was banned in Romania shortly after it was released, and only received its due after the fall of Ceausescu twenty-some-odd years later. It depicts the punishment of two youths caught in a drunken brawl who must reconstruct (with dramatic embellishment) their actions in a propaganda film about the evils of alcohol. Pintilie takes this set-up and runs with it, presenting the director as a lazy dictator, an aging critic as drunkenly ineffectual, and the youths as unwitting pawns in a public hoax that threatens to rob them of their idealism and vitality. Yet the allegory never feels heavy-handed, largely due to the film’s freewheeling, cinema-verite style, emphasizing the meandering interactions of the cast and crew between takes and the usual frustrations involved in the making of any film. It’s a potent example of the power of subtext to reach out and throttle its audience.

• Taxi to the Dark Side (Alex Gibney, 2007)

By far the most comprehensive and probing documentary on the torture policies of the Bush Administration, this film played here for a week in 2007 before justifiably winning an Oscar for Best Documentary last year; it continued to play at festivals in 2008 and was finally released on DVD in September about the same time as the DVD of Errol Morris’ tepid, overproduced, middlebrow examination of the same subject hit the streets. Gibney’s far-reaching but methodical approach traces the story of Dilawar, an innocent Afghan taxi driver who died at the hands of American interrogators in Bagram in 2002. The film (which takes its title from Dick Cheney’s public advocation of “working the dark side” in the war on terror) branches out from this event to look at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and the White House masterminds behind the Administration’s laissez-faire and deliberately vague orders that subverted, as Gibney’s father (an ex-WWII soldier) suggests at the film’s end, core American values.

• La Vie des morts (Life of the Dead) (Arnaud Desplechin, 1991)

I only recently caught up with Desplechin’s wonderful Kings and Queen, and I enjoyed A Christmas Tale for its similarly entertaining mix of comedy and pathos, but seeing his first feature at AFI FEST proved to be a greater revelation. With his first feature, Desplechin already establishes his finesse with narratives about maladjusted families reuniting around the imminent death of a loved one. And he demonstrates (briskly, in a mere 54 minutes) his talent for spinning a tapestry of characters who resound off one another, coupling and separating in a fluid array of emotional registers. It’s also fun to see faces that would become familiar in his later films, such as Marianne Denicourt, Thibault de Montalembert, and of course, Emmanuel Devos. This film suggests the impetus for his current family sagas has been in the making for many years.

16Oct2008

Sita Sings the Blues and Azur and Asmar

Posted in DVD review, Film review by Doug Cummings

Sita Sings the Blues

Azur and Asmar

As a fan of animation, I’ve embraced the digital era, but my enthusiasm for mainstream three-dimensional CGI has been waning for some time. It seems like computer animated films (shorts as well as features) can increasingly be divided into two groups: those that explore the potential of the medium, and those that settle for a more commercially established, “photorealistic” (but artificially pristine) synthetic verisimilitude, offering one toy story after another. Given this trend, it’s exciting to see digital animators returning to the roots of visual design–graphic art, illustration, and painting–to create films that are less interested in simulating realities than providing unique experiences with line, color, and texture.

Two new films set a new bar for digital animation: Nina Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues (which I saw at the REDCAT earlier this week) and Michel Ocelot’s Azur and Asmar (a 2006 film released on DVD in the UK that opens in New York City on Friday). Although Ocelot’s film represents his first venture into 3D animation, the creator of the charming Kirikou films still prefers a flat, decorative, largely two-dimensional aesthetic that emphasizes patterns and textures over dimensional space. The idea of animation as a graphic art dates back to the earliest experiments in the medium, but as a setting for narrative features, it was first seen in Lotte Reiniger’s thrilling The Adventurers of Prince Achmed (1926), a silhouette film Ocelot himself paid heavy tribute to in Princes and Princesses (recently released on DVD).

Despite their similar accomplishments (including the fact that both films bring ancient myths to life), the two films are substantially different. Paley’s is a solo production made with high-resolution Flash animation that’s geared for adults (but it’s colorful and whimsical enough that many children may not even register the marital fidelity themes). Ocelot’s is a family film commercially produced in France, and it’s a straightforward epic about heroes on a mythic quest (but with anti-colonial and multicultural themes that will impress adults). Structurally, Paley’s film is more experimental and Ocelot’s is more accessible, but both films feature dazzling graphic visualization and detail.

Apparently conceived during a crisis in cartoonist Paley’s life after her husband left her for a job in India, Sita Sings the Blues layers together music she was listening to at the time (1920s jazz tunes by Annette Hanshaw), the Hindu myth of Ramayana (shades of Garin Nugroho’s Opera Jawa), and her own autobiography. The three strands form an aesthetic braid of styles–a clever collection of shapes and caricatures for the musical segments, scanned watercolor paintings and Indonesian shadow puppets for the narration of Rama and Sita’s tragedy, and jittery, minimalist line art for modern events. (There’s also a highly expressionist sequence involving a rotoscoped dancer that’s rendered with a great deal of intensity and graphic embellishment.)

The graphic invention of the film is constant, with stylized illustrations forming ever-changing backgrounds for a pageant of eccentric characters–including holy men, a multi-headed demon king, an army of monkeys, even Mother Earth–and all of them are respectfully but playfully depicted. Paley can’t resist adding comical, contemporary touches to the fable’s gender archetypes (particularly as they apply to her personal story) but she never adopts a condescending attitude toward the material. Even more fun is the ongoing dialogue between the shadow puppets (another Reiniger homage?), lip-synched to a lively, spontaneous recapitulation of the myth by Indian friends with competing memories and interpretations; Paley animates every recollection and half-remembered clarification, “erasing” and adding as needed, mirroring the entertaining wordplay.

In the end, like the erratic musings of our daydreams, the masala elements are emotionally fused into a cohesive whole; even the film’s self-referential ending compliments the circular form of Hindu cosmology. It’s an utterly unique film, an epic accomplishment for an individual artist using home computers and widely available software.

Ocelot’s narratives tend to be culturally specific morality tales told with distinct clarity, and Azur and Asmar is no exception. The title characters are young boys, one white and privileged and the other dark-skinned and the son of the nanny who raises them. The boys are playfully competitive but they’re separated by their class for many years; when they eventually reunite (searching for a legendary fairy), the long years of separation have fostered genuine tension. Like Kirikou, the preternaturally intelligent African baby hero of Ocelot’s previous films, Azur and Asmar rise to a series of challenges–both moral and physical–and the plot unfolds with little fuss or intrigue, reaching its denouement with straight-arrow determination.

Influenced by Persian miniatures and Renaissance paintings, Ocelot visualizes the film through highly decorative backgrounds filled with intricate textures; the digital tools are used to increase the details, filling fields with thousands of carefully drawn flowers or the hallways of palaces with ornate tapestries that frame the action like illustrated manuscripts. Whenever possible, figures are composed laterally, sometimes in silhouette, and even the settings are flattened and transformed into highly pictorial, two-dimensional evocations of nature. Ocelot uses his own visual “braiding,” combining flat costumes with 3D hands and faces with intricate jewelry rendered in multifaceted, sparkling detail. The effect is one that’s closer to a handsome storybook than a mainstream CGI film, lending the narrative a significant degree of visual enchantment.

7Oct2008

Touch of Evil (1958)

Posted in DVD review by Doug Cummings

I have long championed the critical recording by James Naremore and Jonathan Rosenbaum on Criterion’s The Complete Mr. Arkadin as being one of the most pleasurable and informative DVD commentaries of recent years, and their new tag team recording on Universal’s 50th anniversary edition of Touch of Evil (released today) is a worthy followup. By and large, Naremore follows the content of his Touch of Evil chapter in his excellent book, The Magic World of Orson Welles, broaching such topics as the Civil Rights era, Welles’ formalism, moral ambiguity, and the use of fair lady/dark lady stereotypes, while Rosenbaum (Discovering Orson Welles) elaborates and clarifies, and offers particular insights into specific shots. Yet their conversation is fluid and far from rigid–it’s the result of two passionate cinephiles and Welles scholars who are also gifted communicators.

Their commentary accompanies the “Preview” version of the movie that was discovered in 1976, which includes some of the changes Welles requested after he was shut out of Universal’s editing process, as well as some of the studio’s own additions (most dramatically scenes shot by another director). I believe this is the version that was available on VHS for many years; the new DVD also includes the original 96-minute theatrical cut (1957) and the 111-minute “restored” version (1998). It’s a long-awaited and beautifully put together release (I was particularly pleased that the featurette I watched wasn’t full of movie clips, a DVD convention that has become tedious and repetitive) although there will certainly be some outcry about the presentation of Welles’ 58-page memo, printed in its entirety here for the first time but made to resemble an “authentic” document in miniature size that has been hastily stapled together. I was relieved that the pages were still intact after a single reading.

Touch of Evil presents Charlton Heston as a Mexican narcotics officer who has to divide his time between his new American bride (Janet Leigh) and upholding the law against a corrupt border cop (Welles) who tries to frame an immigrant. As Naremore and Rosenbaum point out, Welles often staged stories that pitted a liberal character against a fascist one, and though he sympathized the most with the former, he often portrayed the latter and thus humanized him. The critical duo is perceptive in pointing out ways in which Heston’s character increasingly becomes more fascist after his wife is threatened, the viewer is provoked by interracial rape fears that recall the work of D.W. Griffith, and how Welles’ character shows vulnerability and victimization of his own. As Naremore writes in his book, “[The film requires us] to distinguish between feelings and judgments, never allowing us to fall prey to an easy righteousness.”

The film was initially categorized as a pulp movie, but Naremore correctly rejects both Heston’s description of it as a “B movie” (there’s too much A-list talent involved) and Paul Schrader’s labeling it as a “film noir” (it’s less romanticized) to suggest that it’s something more–a quasi-neorealist examination (with its fine use of dilapidated, late-’50s Venice/Los Angeles locations) of racial fears and policies just four years after the Supreme Court’s desegregation ruling that many police refused to enforce. “The policeman’s job is to enforce the law,” Welles pointedly told the press, “not to write it.” Watching the film again this year, it’s a stunning example of socially relevant dramaturgy that centers not only on immigration issues that still dominate the headlines, but also highlights issues such as the ethics of tyrannical power and torture versus criminal rights and legal procedures that have been (or should have been) equally front and center in the mainstream conscience the past five years.

A few weeks ago, I managed to see The Dark Knight, a movie extolled for tackling questions about the ethical limits of strongarm tactics and surveillance against crime, but upon close examination, the film totally squanders its topicality for emotional and rhetorical effects rather than extended, coherent, or even rational exploration of its issues. Welles’ film does a much better job of delineating the same terrain with clear-cut precision and sharply provocative shadings. The characters played by Heston and Welles represent opposite ends of a coherent ethical spectrum—evidence and shared legality versus intuition and unilateral power—that represents an ideological border brought into tension by the story’s physical border between nations, people, and classes.

Rosenbaum points out that although the film’s four-minute-plus opening tracking shot (parodied in Robert Altman’s The Player) may be its most famous tour-de-force moment, it actually pales in many respects to two other extended shots in the film that detail the interrogation of a suspect and the collection of evidence within a cramped apartment. Both are well over five minutes long in duration, and involve a highly choreographed movement of actors, both in front and behind the camera, a plethora of exact positions constantly in flux, as well as subtle camera movements. The actors shift around into so many different configurations that it provides a kind of innate “cutting” that distinguishes one conversation from another, but the preservation of the integrity of the space emphasizes the nefarious evidence planting that occurs “beneath the viewer’s gaze.” (Typical of Welles’ love of illusion.) It’s this kind of brilliant sense of space–and so many subsequent examples, such as when Welles mounts a camera to Heston’s car and films the actors as they literally speed through town–that immediately identifies Universal’s added footage, filmed as a typical two-shot between Heston and Leigh or as back-projected landscapes on studio automobile props. (Additionally, Rosenbaum and Naremore justifiably compare the scenes’ overlapping dialogue to a brilliant musical score in its rhythms and varying levels of volume.)

Rosenbaum also describes a camp perception of the film in the early-’60s that is completely missing in contemporary reactions by viewers who have become accustomed to the film’s semi-comical, even grotesque, wide-angled visual exaggerations, eccentric supporting roles, and villains who resemble comical buffoons. I’ve always considered Touch of Evil the best Coen movie not directed by a Coen brother, and the film’s sense of irony was easily thirty years ahead of its time; it also highlights the facile nature of today’s winking detachment in which nothing is taken seriously enough. Welles was undercutting Hollywood cliches, not perpetuating them, and unlike today’s cynical-hipster cinematic climate, as Rosenbaum points out, “Everyone has their moment, no one is really dismissed.” Naremore suggests that Welles’ playfulness heightens awareness of the issues it raises, placing the viewer both within and outside the film at the same time and creating a kind of dual perception. In a way, it’s just one more border the film enthusiastically crosses.

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Category Archives: DVD review

World on a Wire (1973)

Earth (1930)

Best Films of 2009…and the Decade

Armand Gatti and L’Enclos (1961)

The Dardennes and Lorna’s Silence

A Grin Without a Cat (1977, 1993)

Robert Koehler’s Best of 2008

Tops Tens of 2008

Sita Sings the Blues and Azur and Asmar

Touch of Evil (1958)

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