Thanks for the Use of the Hall

Unfinished Business: Anthology Film Archives, Saturday and Sunday, January 28-29, 2012

2012-01-27T22:23:00.002-05:00

Anthology Film Archives seemingly just decided they wanted to show some Gregory La Cava films this weekend, and I applaud the impulse, especially as one of the movies is the 1941 Unfinished Business, one of Old Hollywood's most mature and nuanced achievements. (The other La Cava on display, She Married Her Boss, is also well worth seeing, with an extremely nice last half-hour.) You've missed the first screening, but the film turns up again tomorrow, January 28, at 8:30 pm, and on Sunday, January 29, at 6:30 pm. To get you in the mood, here's David Cairns' very nice piece at the MUBI Notebook; and here's a link to a little research I did some years back on the film's unknown but clearly exceptional screenwriter, Eugene Thackrey.

First experiences with old films in 2011

2012-01-24T22:53:00.004-05:00

The MUBI Notebook just published a short piece I wrote for their "Out of the Past" series, in which I describe a few very good older films that I crossed paths with in 2011 for the first time.

Julia Leigh's Sleeping Beauty

2012-01-16T11:05:00.002-05:00

It's left NYC theaters, but Julia Leigh's Sleeping Beauty was one of my favorite films of 2011. Few seemed to agree; my heartfelt defense is published at the MUBI Notebook.

The Inside and the Outside

2011-12-29T17:39:00.002-05:00

A lot of my interaction with film buffs these days occurs on Twitter, where disagreements are argued out by the score every day. Whether I intervene or not, I find that I often want to say the same things to different combatants. For instance:

One can evaluate the behavior in a movie in two different ways.

According to the internal workings of the film universe. An example would be to praise or criticize behavior according to its trueness to the overall psychological portrait of the character, or to a general perceived social or psychological idea of how people are likely to behave.

According to the effect of the behavior on the viewer. In this game, it tends to be the filmmaker, not a character, who is pitching, and the viewer, not another character, who is catching.

I've written about this dichotomy before, but it's tricky to fit the two methods of evaluation into a unified field theory. Obviously both approaches can be abused. The "internal" approach, despite the appeal to the authority of the soft sciences, is no more or less likely to get bogged down in subjectivity than the more obviously subjective "external" approach. You'd think that it would mean something when a critic says "As a former construction worker, I can testify that the film's portrait of construction workers is accurate." But one learns in one's youth that such statements are 100% subjective and have no bearing on anything at all.

I'm tempted to talk about these methods in terms of "two-ness," which, in this case, would mean meeting the criterion of internal plausibility while at the same time creating a worthwhile external effect. And this is certainly the ideal of a kind of classical storytelling that adheres to notions of social or psychological realism. At the least, verisimilitude and observational insight will always be a valuable arrow in the cinema's quiver.

However, it doesn't do to beat a film with the stick of verisimilitude. When we like a bit of abstract behavior, we forgive its departure from documentary realism because the abstraction gives us something valuable. It's only when we don't get anything from an abstraction, or when we get something we don't like, that we are tempted to say "No one behaves like that." And so the internal approach isn't a completely independent criterion: to make a just criticism of a failure of internal coherence, we have to take external factors into consideration. "No one behaves like that" is never a valid condemnation when taken in isolation from other factors.

More and more I feel that the external approach to evaluation is the larger and more philosophical viewpoint, the one that provides context for issues of internal verisimilitude. And yet it's rare to hear people talk about a movie as if it's a moment-by-moment feed of information and pleasure from the filmmaker to the audience: we are much more likely to try to praise or condemn a movie according to whether we believe the characters, even though we know that the characters are merely the filmmaker's tools.

The main pitfall of external evaluation is obvious: it's not immediately obvious why one viewer's response to a filmmaker's stimuli should be of any use to a different viewer. Any attempt to identify objective elements of form that create one's subjective responses is highly likely to devolve into rationalization, even when one brings some rigor to the process of identification. But hey - if it were easy to talk about art, everyone would do it. It's by no means impossible to argue that the delivery of certain experiences is inscribed into a film's form, even if many others don't receive the experience, even if one doesn't receive the experience oneself. There's something up there on screen that is the same for all of us, and that's where the job begins, even if one must proceed with the utmost caution in trying to build a model of pleasure delivery upon the relatively solid foundation of formal analysis.

Improvisation in Joe Swanberg's Silver Bullets

2011-10-23T00:38:00.014-04:00

I have become friends with Joe Swanberg over the years, which may cast suspicion on the journalistic value of this piece. I hope the analysis below may be of some use anyway.

As per Swanberg's usual working methods, Silver Bullets (which begins a week run at the reRun Theater on Friday, October 28) is improvised, with the performers receiving at best a story outline and guidelines for individual scenes. The improvision is not simply a means to arrive at a piece of fiction: Swanberg's goal is not to find new ways to get good performances, but rather to use the fiction as a tool to document the performers' states of being.

I'll look at a few key scenes from the film, all single-shot long takes, all conversations between a couple in crisis: Ethan (Swanberg), a filmmaker, and Claire (the extraordinary Kate Lyn Sheil), each of whom is at work on projects with other artists.

1) In a laundry room, Claire is folding clothes and listening to Ethan voice complaints about his work: new forms are needed, he says, and the films he's been making don't turn out as innovative as he intends them to be. Claire tries to reassure him, at some length: all endeavors realize their conception only partially, and this doesn't mean they're bad. Ethan stares down and doesn't respond. Claire continues to fold clothes; as his silence grows, she realizes that she has not helped, that her argument means nothing to Ethan. So she wipes the slate clean and engages again: "It's not a new form," she says, acknowledging his unhappiness. "No," he says firmly, his first utterance in a while. The two have common ground again. "So what is?" she asks. "I don't know," says Ethan, and is full of words again, struggling with the difficulty of giving a concrete form to his aspiration. The battle is a small one, but the scene shows in its totality a successful attempt by one person to overcome an obstacle to intimacy with another.

2) In bed at night, Ethan hovers in out-of-focus foreground, drinking a beer and not making eye contact, with Claire in focus and center frame, sitting up in bed and looking at him. Before the start of the scene, Ethan dropped a bombshell: he wants to make a movie featuring Claire's friend Charlie (Amy Seimetz), whom he had just met. The scene follows the process of Claire grasping and clarifying her negative reaction. It begins in mid-conversation, with Claire protesting that Ethan has given her no legitimate way to respond. It's a true enough claim, as Ethan is passive, seemingly waiting for Claire's anger to subside before proceeding on his course; yet her response doesn't get to the heart of her distress. Left with time to think, Claire tries again and hits closer to the mark: in mentioning his plan so casually, Ethan is pretending not to know that casting Claire's friend opposite himself in a sexually themed movie is provocative. She errs slightly in saying that Ethan is casting Charlie as Claire; when Ethan corrects her, she refines her position instead of sticking to it: "No, she'd be playing herself. Your new girlfriend." Knowing that she risks losing perspective, Claire momentarily abandons her protest to find common ground: "I'm not saying that you shouldn't do it. I'm also not saying that she wouldn't be great in it - I think that she would. I'm just asking you to acknowledge the fact that it would be weird for me." Ethan sees her gesture of understanding and raises her with an intensifying adverb - "Fully acknowledged" - and meaningful emphasis. But the terms of this peace accord are too unfavorable to Claire, and they both know it. "But you still want to do it?" asks Claire pointedly, knowing the answer, and choosing to leave the wound unhealed.

3) Sitting side by side in a wooded outdoor location, two years after the main action of the film, Ethan and Claire, now separated, take up the topic of their past together, making only occasional eye contact. Ethan confesses that Claire was the only girlfriend that he considered his equal or even better than him, and that he had found this difficult. This tribute corresponds poorly to Claire's experience: without raising her voice, she says that Ethan did a pretty good job of making her feel worse than him. Bitterness will clearly always be within easy reach for the couple. Ethan responds in kind: the low self-regard was her own work, he says; he won't accept responsibility for it. The conversation eventually seems to wind down, with neither person having become too angry or too affectionate. After a silence, Ethan clearly wants to say something large and new to Claire: "Is the work enough, do you think? Is the work we made together enough to justify all this?" Claire just stares at the ground: "I don't know what you mean," she says, almost angrily. Ethan repeats the question with emotion, several times. He has found a genuine way to express his troubled feelings, but this formulation is not valuable at all to Claire, and she will not answer it. When Ethan drops the offending context at one point and simply asks if the work speaks for itself, Claire quietly affirms that it does - but she remains silent when Ethan returns to his theme, unwilling to weigh the relationship on this scale. The improvisation has led to a subtle but identifiable gap between the characters, and the actors sense and maintain the continuity of their character's feelings, even when this leads to the kind of dead air that makes bad improvisers uncomfortable.

In all three instances, we see the actors recovering from starts in the wrong direction. False starts are a necessary consequence of any improvisation; being able to see the mental work that goes into correcting the errors is a much rarer pleasure. Even more noteworthy is the way that all these improvisations refuse to sacrifice the integrity of the characters' positions for easy effect. The feelings underlying the characters' stances are sufficiently complex that the characters naturally waver or double back on themselves under the pressure of relating to each other, and yet are sufficiently consistent that the duels lead to standoffs, to silences that require effort to dislodge.

The scenes also suggest one of the functions of Swanberg performing in his own films. In all the examples above, he creates a tension or an imbalance by starting an action or taking a position. To an extent, Swanberg the actor carries out Swanberg the filmmaker's agenda, setting up scenes that other performers must react to. A corollary of this idea is that Swanberg invariably hands his films to his actresses on a silver platter. As the principal reactor in the film, Sheil is continuously on center stage, and the value of the improvisations largely depends on her sensibility. The scenes above are hitched less to her acting skill than to her intelligence and her emotional balance. Like all Swanberg's films, Silver Bullets requires a level of creativity from its performers beyond what any scripted film can elicit.

Assorted Screenings in NYC: October 2011

2011-10-15T01:12:00.002-04:00

1. MoMA's ninth annual To Save and Project festival includes a few strong Italian films that could be better known. The pick of the October screenings is Elio Petri's startlingly good 1961 debut L'Assassino (Sunday, October 16 at 5:45 pm and Thursday, October 20 at 7:15 pm), starring Marcello Mastroianni as a shady operator whose life is shaken up by a police investigation. Petri's stock on the international film scene would peak almost a decade later with his excellent 1970 Investigation of a Citizen Under Suspicion; but the more classically constructed L'Assassino, with its impressive command of point of view, still seems to me Petri's greatest achievement. More modest in scale, Alberto Lattuada's 1954 La Spiaggia (Friday, October 28 at 4 pm and Monday, October 31 at 8:30 pm), built around the visual appeal of Martine Carol, the Riviera, and carefully composed Academy-ratio color photography, is a melancholy, atmospheric film that first tipped me off to the talents of this underrecognized director, who is probably best known as the co-director of Fellini's 1950 debut Variety Lights.

2. The Doomsday Film Festival & Symposium, held at 92YTribeca and dedicated to movies about the end of the world, has a strong lineup this year. Steve DeJarnatt's 1988 Miracle Mile (Friday, October 21 at 8 pm) has become a bit of a cult film since I caught it on its fleeting first run, but is rarely revived in theaters. If memory serves, the film takes a while to establish its tone, but never loses track of its casually affecting love story as it whips through the decline and fall of Los Angeles in 87 minutes. Screening the same evening (Friday, October 21 at 10:30 pm), Don McKellar's appealing 1999 Last Night has no problem at all scaling the apocalypse down to an opportunity for two total strangers to have a really good first and last kiss. Colossus: The Forbin Project (Saturday, October 22 at 6 pm) was made for TV but deemed worthy of a 1970 theatrical release, and was the first clear sign of director Joseph Sargent's talent for tense, fast-paced ensemble work. The film could have used a good computer science technical advisor, but Sargent and scriptwriter James Bridges keep the focus small and human despite the fascination of malevolent supercomputer Colossus. Wrapping up the catastrophic weekend is one of Larry Cohen's best films, 1977's crazy but compelling God Told Me To (aka Demon) (Sunday, October 23 at 7 pm).

My Old Movies on Amazon Instant Video

2011-10-10T10:32:00.004-04:00

I've recently made my movies Honeymoon (1998) and All the Ships at Sea (2004) available for rental or download at Amazon Instant Video. Prices are as low as I could set them: $1.99 for rental, $2.50 for purchase. If you try it, let me know how it works.

Both films are still available on DVD from CreateSpace:

...but I get the feeling CreateSpace is phasing out its DVD sales in favor of its parent company Amazon. The filmmaker gets a bigger cut of the sale at CreateSpace, not that either income stream is going to put my imaginary children through college:

Nikkatsu

2011-10-04T17:07:00.003-04:00

This year’s sidebar program at the New York Film Festival is so exciting that it threatens to overshadow the main slate: a retrospective of the Japanese studio Nikkatsu, whose opportunistic shifts of focus always seemed to open doors for some of Japan’s most creative filmmakers. Compare film magazine Kinema Junpo’s 1999 and 2009 lists of all-time greatest Japanese films to the Lincoln Center series schedule, and count the overlaps.

You’ll have to move quickly to catch my strongest recommendation in the series, Sadao Yamanaka’s delightful 1935 Sazen Tange and the Pot Worth a Million Ryo, which screens once more on Wednesday, October 5 at 8:45 pm. Yamanaka, who died before his 29th birthday, made only three films that survive today, but the evidence that he was one of the greatest of filmmakers is present in any five minutes of his work. A Pot Worth a Million Ryo is a class-crossing light comedy, not especially interesting on paper, that shows off Yamanaka’s comprehensive command of cinema: contained, somewhat distant compositions with unusual architectural elements that often narrow the frame horizontally or vertically; an irreverent use of psychology to modify familiar character types; confident timing that owes something to American comic rhythms; a gentle sense of the absurd and outrageous that is unobtrusively pitted against social quietude; and a throwaway flair for action direction.

Screening just before the Yamanaka, on Wednesday, October 5 at 6:20 pm, is Tomu Uchida’s impressive Earth, which I wrote about last year at the MUBI Notebook.

Most film buffs won’t need to be pointed to Shohei Imamura’s superb 1964 Intentions of Murder, playing Tuesday, October 11 at 8 pm and Friday, October 14 at 4:30 pm. But this film buff, at least, wasn’t hip to the considerable talents of Tatsumi Kumashiro until a few days ago. Best-known for his work in the “pink film,” the soft-core pornography that Nikkatsu churned out in the 70s, Kumashiro inhabits the genre so naturally that there is no conflict (well, almost none) between its commercial requirements and his semi-immersed, semi-detached artistic personality. His remarkable 1973 The World of Geisha, which screens once more on Friday, October 14 at 1 pm, shows the social and psychological repercussions of a single night of sex, which is extended through two-thirds of the film’s length with the aid of interpolated material and a superimposed layer of Brechtian play. Honestly erotic yet shot through with chilly pessimism, the film shows simultaneously the mundane destructiveness and the lingering gravitational pull of heterosexual coupling, with something of the tone of the Fassbinder of Pioneers in Ingolstadt or The Merchant of Four Seasons. Advance word is good on the other Kumashiro film in the Nikkatsu series, 1979’s The Woman With Red Hair, screening on Friday, October 14th at 9 pm and Sunday, October 16 at 6:20 pm.

Of the many films in the Nikkatsu series that I haven’t seen, I’m most excited by 1985’s Love Hotel, a pink film by the superb Shinji Sômai (Moving, Wait and See), whose fluency with scene-long tracking shots is well matched with his interest in quirky characters who preserve their mystery. Love Hotel screens only once, on Saturday, October 15 at 6:30 pm.

All films mentioned here, and all but one of the remaining films in the Nikkatsu series, will be projected in the 87-seat Howard Gilman Theater in Lincoln Center’s new Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center.

Toronto 2011

2011-09-11T17:35:00.007-04:00

I'm covering the Toronto International Film Festival for MUBI.com this year. I'll probably post about five hastily-written reports from the festival, and will add them to this blog entry as they go up.

Top 100 Films of the 00s

2011-07-31T22:44:00.002-04:00

Sorry to keep you all waiting! but I calculated that my list of favorite films of the 2000s wouldn't settle down until mid-2011 at least. And here we are.

I didn't try very hard to make this list a lot different from the 1999-2008 list that I posted amid the decade-end hurly-burly. But I allowed myself a few impulses that don't quite match my published lists of favorites.

1. Michael Clayton (Tony Gilroy, USA, 2007)
2. Esther Kahn (Arnaud Desplechin, France, 2000)
3. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, Romania, 2005)
4. Night and Day (Hong Sang-Soo, South Korea, 2008)
5. Vera Drake (Mike Leigh, UK, 2004)
6. Le doux amour des hommes (Jean-Paul Civeyrac, France, 2002)
7. The Child (Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Belgium/France, 2005)
8. Fat Girl (Catherine Breillat, France, 2001)
9. The Tracey Fragments (Bruce McDonald, Canada, 2007)
10. Raja (Jacques Doillon, France/Morocco, 2003)
11. Late Marriage (Dover Kosashvili, Israel/France, 2001)
12. Stella (Sylvie Verheyde, France, 2008)
13. The Sopranos: "Made in America" (David Chase, USA, 2007)
14. The House of Mirth (Terence Davies, UK/USA, 2000)
15. La face cachée de la lune (Robert Lepage, Canada, 2003)
16. The Son (Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Belgium, 2002)
17. Far from Heaven (Todd Haynes, USA, 2002)
18. The Forsaken Land (Vimukthi Jayasundara, Sri Lanka/France, 2005)
19. Ana and the Others (Celina Murga, Argentina, 2003)
20. Primer (Shane Carruth, USA, 2004)
21. Le Père de mes enfants (Mia Hansen-Løve, France, 2009)
22. The Exploding Girl (Bradley Rust Gray, USA, 2009)
23. Sita Sings the Blues (Nina Paley, USA, 2008)
24. Bled Number One (Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, Algeria/France, 2006)
25. Still Life (Jia Zhang-ke, China, 2006)
26. Ballast (Lance Hammer, USA, 2008)
27. Sangre (Amat Escalante, Mexico, 2005)
28. The Wayward Cloud (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan, 2005)
29. Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico, 2007)
30. A Week Alone (Celina Murga, Argentina, 2008)
31. All Around Us (Ryosuke Hashiguchi, Japan, 2008)
32. Une Vieille Maîtresse (Catherine Breillat, France, 2007)
33. Japon (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico, 2002)
34. Waking Life (Richard Linklater, USA, 2001)
35. Bully (Larry Clark, USA, 2001)
36. Vibrator (Ryuichi Hiroki, Japan, 2003)
37. Crashing (Gary Walkow, USA, 2007)
38. Tout est pardonné (Mia Hansen-Løve, France, 2007)
39. Darling (Johan Kling, Sweden, 2007)
40. Eighteen (Jang Kun-jae, South Korea, 2009)
41. Triple Agent (Eric Rohmer, France, 2004)
42. Chopper (Andrew Dominic, Australia, 2000)
43. Platform (Jia Zhang Ke, China, 2000)
44. Zero Day (Ben Coccio, USA, 2003)
45. Happiness (Hur Jin-ho, South Korea, 2007)
46. Lady Chatterley (Pascale Ferran, France/Belgium, 2006)
47. La Donation (Bernard Émond, Canada, 2009)
48. Woman on the Beach (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea, 2006)
49. The Garden of Earthly Delights (Lech Majewski, UK/Italy/Poland, 2004)
50. Or (Mon Tresor) (Keren Yedaya, Israel, 2004)
51. Toutes ces belles promesses (Jean-Paul Civeyrac, France, 2003)
52. Ken Park (Larry Clark and Ed Lachman, USA, 2002)
53. Ten (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran, 2002)
54. Barbe Bleue (Catherine Breillat, France. 2009)
55. Jealousy Is My Middle Name (Park Chan-ok, South Korea, 2002)
56. Shara (Naomi Kawase, Japan, 2003)
57. The World (Jia Zhang-ke, China, 2004)
58. Roberto Succo (Cedric Kahn, France, 2001)
59. Îles flottantes (Nanouk Leopold, Netherlands, 2001)
60. Be My Star (Valeska Grisebach, Germany, 2001)
61. Face (Tsai Ming-Liang, France/Taiwan, 2009)
62. Avant que j'oublie (Jacques Nolot, France, 2007)
63. The Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson, USA, 2007)
64. Grain in Ear (Zhang Lu, China/South Korea, 2005)
65. Nights and Weekends (Joe Swanberg and Greta Gerwig, USA, 2008)
66. Mid-August Lunch (Gianni Di Gregorio, Italy, 2008)
67. Turning Gate (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea, 2002)
68. Wolfsbergen (Nanouk Leopold, Netherlands, 2007)
69. Jesus, You Know (Ulrich Seidl, Austria, 2003)
70. Morphia (Aleksei Balabanov, Russia, 2008)
71. Paris: XY (Zeka Laplaine, France, 2001)
72. The Believer (Henry Bean, USA, 2001)
73. All or Nothing (Mike Leigh, UK, 2002)
74. Crimson Gold (Jafar Panahi, Iran, 2003)
75. No Rest for the Brave (Alain Guiraudie, France, 2003)
76. Forty Shades of Blue (Ira Sachs, USA, 2005)
77. C.R.A.Z.Y. (Jean-Marc Vallée, Canada, 2005)
78. The King of Escape (Alain Guiraudie, France, 2009)
79. Rain Dogs (Ho Yuhang, Malaysia, 2006)
80. Catastrophe (David Mamet, Ireland, 2000)
81. The Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (Hong Sang-Soo, South Korea, 2000)
82. She, a Chinese (Guo Xiaolu, UK/France/Germany, 2009)
83. Johanna (Kornel Mundruczó, Hungary, 2005)
84. A Tale of Cinema (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea, 2005)
85. Brick (Rian Johnson, USA, 2005)
86. Beat (Gary Walkow, USA, 2000)
87. Head-On (Fatih Akin, Germany/Turkey, 2004)
88. Boogie (Radu Muntean, Romania, 2008)
89. Hannah Takes the Stairs (Joe Swanberg, USA, 2007)
90. The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, USA, 2001)
91. The Fluffer (Richard Glatzer and Wash West, USA, 2001)
92. To Die Like a Man (João Pedro Rodrigues, Portugal, 2009)
93. The Paper Will Be Blue (Radu Muntean, Romania, 2006)
94. The Banishment (Andrei Zyvagintsev, Russia, 2007)
95. Dog Days (Ulrich Seidl, Austria, 2001)
96. Harmful Insect (Akihiko Shiota, Japan, 2001)
97. The Days Between (Maria Speth, Germany, 2001)
98. Four Nights with Anna (Jerzy Skolimowski, Poland, 2008)
99. The Return (Andrei Zvyagintsev, Russia, 2003)
100. Cinema, Aspirin and Vultures (Marcelo Gomes, Brazil, 2005)

The Sleeping Beauty: IFC Center, Now Playing

2011-07-17T21:41:00.004-04:00

My piece on Catherine Breillat's La belle endormie (Sleeping Beauty), my favorite movie of the last few years, is up at the MUBI Notebook.

Round Table on Silent Naruse

2011-05-30T13:06:00.003-04:00

MUBI.com just published a lengthy email round-table discussion between Danny Kasman, David Phelps and me about the five silent Mikio Naruse films that were recently released on DVD by Criterion.

Mint Julep: Theatre 80 St. Marks, June 8 through 10, 2011

2011-05-27T15:34:00.003-04:00

One of my favorite American indies of recent years, Mint Julep, will have its long-delayed New York premiere at Theatre 80 St. Marks, screening from Wednesday, June 8 to Friday, June 10 at 7:30 pm each night. My review of the film, with a few comments on its unusual history, is up at MUBI.com.

All the Ships at Sea at the Wexner Center, Columbus, OH, March 17, 2011

2011-03-13T10:06:00.002-04:00

My 2004 movie All the Ships at Sea will screen this week as part of a series of "21st Century Independents" at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. Ships plays on Thursday, March 17 at 8:50 pm, on the tail end of a bill with Jennifer Reeder's short Seven Songs about Thunder and Damien Chazelle's Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench. The entire series is very well curated: I especially like the March 24 double feature of Lance Hammer's Ballast and Andrew Bujalski's Beeswax.

La belle endormie (The Sleeping Beauty): IFC, March 6, 2011; Walter Reade, March 8, 2011

2011-03-05T12:30:00.002-05:00

Catherine Breillat's fans probably don't need a nudge to see her films, and her detractors should ignore all recommendations. But: wow, her 2010 La belle endormie (The Sleeping Beauty) is a major work even by her high standards. Starting from the premise of Perrault's fairy tale, Breillat contrives that the titular princess shall fall victim to her sleeping curse at age six (Carla Besnaïnou, showing off Breillat's distinctive manner of directing young children) but awaken at age sixteen (Julia Artamonov), and that she shall enjoy an active dream life. Once the plot is sprung, Breillat plunges into dreamland, and the film takes on more resemblance to Chabrol's Alice ou la dernière fugue (1977) or even Resnais' Je t'aime, je t'aime (1968) than to her more modest Perrault adaptation Barbe Bleue (2009). But not until the credits roll can we be completely sure that Breillat is after bigger game than fairy tales or even dreams... Her wide-ranging, tender interest in the contradictory twists of the human psyche is fully engaged by the unrestricted subject matter - and she has never made a film that demonstrates more clearly her great gift for operating on multiple levels of abstraction, a game that for her has always meant breaking the cage of narrative closure instead of seeing us safely to solid ground. Practically a trailer for our second viewing, La belle endormie screens twice more in the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema series: on Sunday, March 6 at 1 pm at the IFC Center, and on Tuesday, March 8 at 1:30 pm at the Walter Reade. And I believe it's been picked up by Strand for a spring 2011 theatrical release.

Bas-Fonds: Walter Reade, Saturday, February 19, 2011

2011-02-18T23:05:00.002-05:00

I have no time to write about this at any length, but if you can muster some tolerance for in-your-face cinematic depictions of depravity and malevolence, you should really try to see Isild Le Besco's remarkable third feature (barely so, at 68 minutes) in the Film Comment Selects series at the Walter Reade. I personally didn't think I could bear keeping company with these characters for a whole film, but Le Besco's control of the experience is extraordinary: on one hand, she stylizes her people into absurdist archetypes, and on the other she carefully disengages the spectacle from drama and identification. The crazy dichotomy between the behavior shown and the religious tone introduced via voiceover commentary is gradually and inevitably resolved. Bas-Fonds screens once more, on Saturday, February 19 at 4 pm.

2010 Manhattan One-Week Premieres

2011-01-25T23:32:00.004-05:00

I might still catch a first-run 2010 movie or two, but I think I'm ready to make a ten-best list. This list is for films that played at least one week in Manhattan for the first time in 2010 - which, as I complain every year, is a pretty arbitrary grouping. But I'm in no position at all yet to make a list of 2010 international releases.

(I exclude films that were made too long ago to feel contemporary.)

1. The Father of My Children (Mia Hansen-Løve)
2. The Exploding Girl (Bradley Rust Gray)
3. Bluebeard (Catherine Breillat)
4. Mid-August Lunch (Gianni di Gregorio)
5. Between Two Worlds (Vimukthi Jayasundara)
6. Audrey the Trainwreck (Frank V. Ross)
7. Life During Wartime (Todd Solondz)
8. Anton Chekhov's The Duel (Dover Kosashvili)
9. Barking Water (Sterlin Harjo)
10. How Do You Know (James L. Brooks)

Honorable mention: Animal Kingdom (David Michôd). And I'll add two others that could go up or down after another viewing: Tiny Furniture (Lena Dunham) and Unstoppable (Tony Scott).

Special category for a uniquely confusing film: Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky). In the unstable transition period following this film's challenge to my aesthetic system, I can imagine putting it in any of the categories above or below.

Films with a lot going for them, in alphabetical order: Another Year (Mike Leigh), Around a Small Mountain (Jacques Rivette), The City of Your Final Destination (James Ivory), Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos), Enter the Void (Gaspar Noé), The Ghost Writer (Roman Polanski), Hadewijch (Bruno Dumont), The Illusionist (Sylvain Chomet), Never Let Me Go (Mark Romanek), Open Five (Kentucker Audley), Soul Kitchen (Fatih Akin), The Strange Case of Angelica (Manoel de Oliveira), Sweetgrass (Ilisa Barbash & Lucien Castaing-Taylor), True Grit (Joel Coen & Ethan Coen).

Films with something going for them, in alphabetical order: Ajami (Scandar Copti & Yaron Shani), All Good Things (Andrew Jarecki), The Anchorage (C.W Winter & Anders Edstrom), Breaking Upwards (Daryl Wein), Delta (Kornel Mundruczó), Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold), George A. Romero's Survival of the Dead (George A. Romero), I Am Love (Luca Guadagnino), Inspector Bellamy (Claude Chabrol), The Kids Are All Right (Lisa Cholodenko), Lourdes (Jessica Hausner), Mesrine: Killer Instinct (Jean-Francois Richet), Mundane History (Anocha Suwichakornpong), Ne change rien (Pedro Costa), Tirador (Brillante Mendoza), Women Without Men (Shirin Neshat).

Films that mostly didn't work for me, in alphabetical order: Alamar (Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio), Daddy Longlegs (Josh Safdie & Benny Safdie), Due Date (Todd Phillips), Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl (Manoel de Oliveira), Everyone Else (Maren Ade), Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy), The Fighter (David O. Russell), Get Low (Aaron Schneider), Greenberg (Noah Baumbach), Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno (Serge Bromberg & Ruxandra Medrea), I Love You Phillip Morris (Glenn Ficarra & John Requa), The King's Speech (Tom Hooper), Leaving (Catherine Corsini), Lebanon (Samuel Maoz), Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1 (Jean-Francois Richet), The Milk of Sorrow (Claudia Llosa), Mother (Bong Joon-ho), Our Beloved Month of August (Miguel Gomes), Outside the Law (Rachid Bouchareb), Red Riding: 1980 (James Marsh), Secret Sunshine (Lee Chang-dong), Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese), The Social Network (David Fincher), Somewhere (Sofia Coppola), Spring Fever (Lou Ye), Trash Humpers (Harmony Korine), Vincere (Marco Bellocchio), Welcome (Philippe Lioret), White Material (Claire Denis), Wild Grass (Alain Resnais), Winter's Bone (Debra Granik), You Wont Miss Me (Ry Russo-Young).

A lot of directors I admire placed films in the last category, which must mean that I'm an unusually fickle sort of auteurist.

Mister Cory

2011-01-19T20:08:00.002-05:00

I wrote a piece on Blake Edwards' Mister Cory (my favorite Edwards film, along with The Tamarind Seed) for issue #7 of Undercurrent. Basically, I expanded two sentences from the middle of my review of the film for Jaime Christley's Unexamined Essentials.

2010 Wrap-Ups at MUBI

2011-01-14T17:31:00.001-05:00

I made two contributions to MUBI's 2010 wrap-ups: an item in this compilation of present/past fantasy double features; and a top-five list of "new old movies" seen in 2010.

My Girlfriend's Wedding and Pictures from Life's Other Side: Union Docs, January 15, 2011

2011-01-14T17:28:00.001-05:00

Sorry about the short notice, but tomorrow, January 15, I'll be participating in a discussion of Jim McBride's films at Union Docs in Williamsburg after a 7:30 pm screening of McBride's documentaries My Girlfriend's Wedding (1969) and Pictures from Life's Other Side (1971). Jed Rapfogel of Anthology Film Archives will lead the discussion.

Hideko Takamine

2011-01-04T21:30:00.002-05:00

I put up a few words at the MUBI.com Notebook in commemoration of the great actress Hideko Takamine, who died on December 28.

Lamont Johnson, 1922-2010

2010-11-06T01:33:00.003-04:00

I tend to avoid commemorative pieces: anything sorrowful one writes about a death seems pale. But Lamont Johnson, one of America's best directors, died a few weeks ago with little fanfare, and I wanted to talk him up a bit.

Johnson started as an actor, and had a large supporting role in Joseph H. Lewis's very good 1952 Korean War film Retreat, Hell!. As a director, he put in a decade or so of hard work on television series and specials before getting a few no-prestige theatrical features in the late 60s. If memory serves, Johnson's theatrical debut, 1967's A Covenant With Death, a cheap-looking suspense film with George Maharis and Red Line 7000's Laura Devon, was surprisingly good against all odds, taking its characters more seriously than the genre required. 1968's Kona Coast wasn't nearly as successful, but 1969 saw Johnson acquit himself well in the emerging TV-movie format with Deadlock, a Leslie Nielsen cop drama. By this point Johnson had arrived at something like his mature style, combining dramatic intensity with fast and informal performances that discharged rather than built up the drama.

1970 was an important year for Johnson, on both the TV and theatrical fronts. The TV movie was carving out its own audience, which gravitated to topical subject matter with prestige actors; and Johnson caught the wave with My Sweet Charlie, a strikingly good drama with a racially charged plot reminiscent of The Defiant Ones, and a star turn from Patty Duke. Emmys went to Duke and to writers Richard Levinson and William Link, who were to become the Aurenche and Bost of 70s TV drama; and Johnson was permanently established as an A-list TV director. A string of successes in that medium followed, including 1972's That Certain Summer and 1974's The Execution of Private Slovik, both written by Levinson/Link. Though Johnson's prestige TV dramas of the 70s are probably his best-known work, most of these efforts are handicapped by the form's ostentatious social relevance.

Like other prestige TV directors, Johnson couldn't get arrested in theatrical features. But, a few months after his TV score with Charlie, Johnson released the POW drama The McKenzie Break, a tense, memorable acting duel between Irish officer Brian Keith and German prisoner Helmut Griem. Cultivating an interest in extreme characters that suited his explosive yet swallowed-up style, Johnson churned out a number of strong films over the next few years: 1971's A Gunfight, with Kirk Douglas and Johnny Cash; 1972's The Groundstar Conspiracy, with George Peppard as a charismatic American fascist; and 1973's The Last American Hero, a car-racing film with a potent Jeff Bridges performance. Few paid much attention, but Andrew Sarris put McKenzie, Groundstar, and American Hero on his runners-up lists, and a small, largely auteurist cult coalesced.

Johnson, and other filmmakers of the time who lacked clout, were clearly the beneficiary of the looseness of American film before the Tax Shelter Law of 1976, and as far as I know, he never made another theatrical film to equal McKenzie and American Hero. 1977's One on One with Robby Benson is the best of his later efforts; after 1983, he never tried his hand at theatrical again. TV movies were a different story, and Johnson continued to rack up Emmys and nominations into the 90s. Given an opening, Johnson never lost his ability to find unexpected excitement at the nexus of character and drama: for my money, the unheralded 1982 Dangerous Company with Beau Bridges stands with Charlie as Johnson's best work in the medium.

I lost track of Johnson's career after the effective, award-winning biopic Lincoln in 1988. He isn't the only good filmmaker whose reputation was written on the wind of the TV movie: perhaps someday we'll have the access and the interest to go back to the important TV work of John Korty, Joseph Sargent, Daniel Petrie, William Hale. I'm thinking Johnson may have been at the top of the pile, though.

Frivolous Lists: Latin America, 2000-2009

2010-10-28T23:24:00.004-04:00

Cinema Tropical recently polled 35 experts to create a list of the ten best Latin American films of the decade, and the IFC Center screened the ten winners last week. No one asked me for my list, but:

1. Ana y los otros (Ana and the Others) (Celina Murga, Argentina, 2003)
2. Sangre (Amat Escalante, Mexico, 2005)
3. Japón (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico, 2002)
4. Stellet licht (Silent Light) (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico, 2007)
5. Una semana solos (A Week Alone) (Celina Murga, Argentina, 2008)
6. Cinema, aspirinas e urubus (Cinema, Aspirin and Vultures) (Marcelo Gomes, Brazil, 2005)
7. Mutum (Sandra Kogut, Brazil, 2007)
8. Huacho (Alejandro Fernández Almendras, Chile, 2009)
9. Os Inquilinos (The Tenants) (Sergio Bianchi, Brazil, 2009)
10. 40 dias (40 Days) (Juan Carlos Martín, Mexico, 2008)

Runners-up (in alphabetical order): Amorosa Soledad (Victoria Galardi and Martín Carranza, Argentina, 2008); Aniceto (Leonardo Favio, Argentina, 2008); Cochochi (Israel Cárdenas and Laura Amelia Guzmán, Mexico, 2007); El custodio (Rodrigo Moreno, Mexico, 2006); Drama/Mex (Gerardo Naranjo, Mexico, 2006); Los guantes mágicos (The Magic Gloves) (Martin Rejtman, Argentina, 2003); Hamaca Paraguaya (Paraguayan Hammock) (Paz Encina, Paraguay, 2006); Jogo de cena (Playing) (Eduardo Coutinho, Brazil, 2007); Liverpool (Lisandro Alonso, Argentina, 2008); O céu de Suely (Suely in the Sky) (Karim Aïnouz, Brazil, 2006); Parentésis (Time Off) (Pablo Solís and Francisca Schweitzer, Chile, 2005); Voy a explotar (I'm Gonna Explode) (Gerardo Naranjo, Mexico, 2008); Y tu mamá también (Alfonso Cuarón, Mexico, 2001).

Of course there are a great many contenders that I haven't seen. Of those, I especially wish I had caught Los bastardos (Amat Escalante, Mexico, 2008) and Madame Satã (Karim Aïnouz, Brazil, 2002).

Two scenes from Eric Rohmer

2010-10-18T23:17:00.002-04:00

A short piece I wrote on two favorite scenes from Eric Rohmer's Four Seasons cycle is up at the MUBI Notebook.

Hwioribaram (Eighteen): MoMA, September 30, 2010; BAM, October 2, 2010

2010-09-27T23:26:00.002-04:00

Jang Kun-jae's debut feature, which took the Dragons and Tigers award at Vancouver 2009, wastes no time announcing its filmmaker's authority: its first image, a city vista that eventually transforms into a vehicular tracking shot, establishes Jang's visual ambition; and the cut that starts the movie proper ("Three months earlier...") is both disorienting and faintly absurdist. As we watch a pair of young lovers, Tae-Hoon (Seo Jun-yeong) and Mi-Jeong (Lee Min-ji), painfully making their way back to Seoul from an ill-considered, unauthorized weekend escapade, Jang lays out his stylistic cards: the passion that motivates the underage couple is concealed behind a convincing behavioral surface of passivity, exhaustion and denial; once established, the dramatic hook of impending confrontation is deferred in favor of a compelling and detailed documentation of each phase of the journey home; when the drama is finally fulfilled, it is filtered through deadpan absurdist humor that highlights the casual ineptitude intrinsic to the childrearing process. In Jang's hands, young love gives us little opportunity for pleasurable identification: the lovers are forced into a continuous stream of lies and petty swindles, and we neither get the emotional cues that would tell us how to interpret their often irresponsible behavior, nor are given reason to regard the couple as anything but normal, red-blooded Korean kids. Jang paints a portrait of late childhood as an extreme and unsustainable condition that nonetheless must be sustained indefinitely: under the pressure of this unbearable contradiction, the film's naturalism gives way at around the two-thirds point, and Jang audaciously allows the narrative to fragment and reconstitute along more abstract, subjective lines. Naturally a difficult object for audiences in search of the bittersweet pleasure that the young-love genre promises, Hwioribaram (Eighteen) is the most exciting debut I've run across in some time. It plays twice more in the New York Korean Film Festival: at MoMA on Thursday, September 30 at 4:30 pm; and at BAM on Saturday, October 2 at 4:30 pm.

The Rule of Escalating Action

2010-08-24T07:43:00.003-04:00

While watching John Flynn's 1980 Defiance recently, I noted a storytelling pattern that has been honored almost without exception by commercial action films since the dawn of cinema. The duration and intensity of action scenes are generally allowed to vary somewhat over the course of a story, but filmmakers are expected to fashion a big action climax according to certain specifications:

1. The duration of the final scene is expected to be substantial. In most genres, a simple confrontation is not enough: the battle generally is segmented into multiple parts, if for no other reason than to achieve great length without tedium.

2. Whether or not any other action scene in the film has contained much suspense, the final scene generally should drag out a few moments in which the hero is on the brink of extinction, even though the audience usually cannot be expected to doubt a favorable outcome.

3. If at all possible, the final confrontation should come down to a hand-to-hand battle between the chief hero and the chief villain, no matter how military or large-scale the offensive.

A week prior to watching the Flynn film, I noted the same three elements in the climax of Hugo Fregonese's 1953 Blowing Wild, a considerably better film than Defiance. I also recall mentioning this pattern in a review of William Friedkin's 2003 The Hunted, a strong film made from an unambitious script. I name these few examples off the top of my head; I trust that the reader will acknowledge the dominance of this template, which I will call "the rule of escalating action."

The problems with the rule of escalating action are obvious. One can perhaps argue that it enforces a modicum of good dramatic practice; but too often the items on this laundry list are in conflict with the needs of the movie or with common sense. And, of course, any narrative structure that becomes a rule, however sound, is an obstacle to surprise and invention. Nonetheless, the pattern is going strong after a century, and probably precedes cinema in some form. I don't believe that it is merely a habit that has been retained out of commercial superstition: it's too old and too powerful to be an unmotivated sign.

There's an underlying principle that sheds light on this phenomenon. Fiction can always be considered on two levels: internally, according to the needs of the world being depicted and of the people who inhabit it; and externally, in terms of the audience's reactions, which are crafted according to laws of drama. With many issues of fiction - not just the rule of escalating action - we can observe that the prevailing approach, followed slavishly by conventional works and substantially even by most adventurous works, involves harmonizing the internal level of the fiction, by force if necessary, with a known and desired pattern on external level.

The implication of this convention is that a well-made film would be designed so that internal and external logic are worked out at the same time with the same gestures to generate the standard action climax in an organic fashion: no mean feat, but a valid goal. And the rule of escalating action, which becomes bothersome when this perfect structure cannot be achieved, is the result of a kind of automatism, a need to impose a default dramatic shape regardless of where the internal needs of the film universe might take the story.

(For another issue of fiction that involves subordinating the internal level to the external, look in the middle of this 1984 article I wrote for the L.A. Reader, where I discuss the rules governing audience mourning for the death of characters with different levels of billing.)

Obviously the rule of escalating action is a matter of statistics: some people are irked when a well-known, conventionally fleshed-out dramatic shape trumps internal logic; but the paradigm has enough support to flourish over the long haul. It's not surprising that hand-to-hand conflict should have an appealing symbolic clarity, nor that we should enjoy the same dramatic flow in a movie that we like in a sports event. And it would be too hasty to conclude that the internal existence of the film universe carries little weight: audiences are notorious for docking films when they perceive internal conflicts, even minor ones. It's easy to imagine many viewers finding the climactic Tommy Lee Jones-Benicio del Toro knife fight in The Hunted silly, and at the same time not really wishing for a more plausible but unconventional ending.

I'm willing to speculate only that there seems to be great comfort for many viewers in this kind of canonical dramatic structure - a comfort that is increased by, but is not entirely due to, its historical repetition and familiarity.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

2010-08-14T11:08:00.005-04:00

Hawks fans have always been divided on Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: some rate it high, others have trouble seeing much of Hawks' personality in it. It's difficult to find a similar film for purposes of comparison, which is the first hint that Hawks didn't simply fill out a genre form. The closest I can come is the Mansfield-Tashlin collaborations The Girl Can't Help It (1956) and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957): films in which a new-to-market sex symbol plays a sex symbol, presumably a studio strategy to enhance the value of a brand name. All three films share an awareness that they are not only deriving comedy from the subject of the women's extreme effect on those around them, but also presenting the women for the audience's delectation.

Tastefulness is hardly an option here, but Hawks manages to combine audacity with analytical intelligence. The film's amazing opening shot sets the bar high: with no opening credits, Lorelei Lee (Marilyn Monroe) and Dorothy Shaw (Jane Russell), in bright red sequined gowns, emerge from behind a blue curtain and begin their first song before a second of screen time has elapsed. Any story that follows must be subordinated to this startling abstract manifestation of hypertrophied femininity and clashing primary colors. As the women maneuver their way through a world of staring, wolf-whistling men, Hawks and screenwriter Charles Lederer (who apparently inherited little plot from the revue-like 1949 Fields/Loos Broadway play) take advantage of the project's parodistic tone to dodge or deflect the moral issue of gold digging, and preserve an amoral perspective right up to the outrageous ending, which scores Lorelei and Dorothy's double wedding with the gold-digging anthem "Two Girls from Little Rock."

The intrinsic exaggeration of Monroe's acting style makes it difficult to perceive that Hawks has engineered yet another of his comedies in which a powerful solipsist (Lorelei) is juxtaposed with an exasperated representative of the reality principle (Dorothy). This time the pair are allies instead of opponents (as opposed to, for instance, the teamings in Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday), but Dorothy's function is primarily to establish a realistic baseline from which Lorelei's departures from normality can be measured. Not that nearly everyone else in the film doesn't help build this baseline by butting his or her head against Lorelei's serene obliviousness - but Hawks likes to keep a character around the set that he would enjoy hanging out with.

Monroe's girly persona, which we enjoy associating with stupidity, is here inflected to accommodate Lorelei's mastery of every situation. As splashlessly competent as a Hawks action hero, she is only the more effective for being ignorant of, or unconcerned with, society's moral codes. From the early scene in which she uses Sherlock Holmes-like logic to suss out the gift she is about to receive from her beau Gus (Tommy Noonan), Lorelei is on top of every situation, whether exploiting a maître d's exploitation of her shipboard popularity, or planning a multi-pronged assault on the detective Malone (Elliott Reid) who is hired to get the goods on her. In the end she bests Gus's disapproving father (Taylor Holmes) in an old-fashioned intellectual debate on the gold-digging ethic, after laying out the case in admirably extreme terms: "I don't want to marry him for his money - I want to marry him for your money." Playing up the usual style gap between Monroe's acting and everyone else's, and playing down her often-cited vulnerability, Hawks oversees a remarkable comic performance, with terrific line readings like beat poetry ("Sometimes Mr. Esmond finds it very difficult to say no to me") and bits of business that hint at a bizarre inner life (confronted for the first time with a diamond tiara, Lorelei can barely restrain her hands from pouncing inappropriately; after the tiara's departure, she happily improvises a scenario of future possession, using a napkin ring encircled by a necklace as a stand-in).

Hawks claimed to have had no interest in directing the film's two big musical numbers, "Ain't There Anyone Here for Love?" and "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend," and apparently was not even on the set when Jack Cole shot them. (Presumably he had something to do with conceiving the numbers; and "Ain't There Anyone Here for Love?" was written for the movie by Hawks' friend Hoagy Carmichael, along with Harold Adamson.) But all the smaller numbers - "Two Girls from Little Rock," "Bye Bye Baby," "When Love Goes Wrong," and the courtroom reprise of "Diamonds" - are executed on the pleasingly intimate scale that Hawks uses for any group recreation. All four of these songs feature spectators clapping to lay down a back beat for the performer; the players provide verbal cues and gesture to each other to signal musical transitions, creating a mood of real-time collaboration, much as in the "Drum Boogie" number from Ball of Fire or the Bacall-Carmichael piano rehearsals from To Have and Have Not. In "Bye Bye Baby," Hawks uses an economical fast pan to pass from the Olympic girlfriends' four-part harmony verse to Russell's solo verse; when Lorelei and Gus sneak away to another room and take the tempo down to romantic ballad, Dorothy and the athletes spot her from the doorway, signal each other to prepare an intervention, then pound out a beat on the door frame to swing the song again. The film's musical highlight, "When Love Goes Wrong" (another Carmichael/Adamson composition), is a digressive mini-story in itself, with the women's dejected mood dissipating gradually during the song and dance, and a circle of friendly Parisians bonding so effectively with Lorelei and Dorothy that the last verse slows and quiets down for a melancholy farewell as the women's taxi pulls away.

A few unexciting scenes crop up as the film marks time between the big "Diamonds" number and the finale. Still, Gentlemen is too good to be relegated to the margins of Hawks' career. Our difficulty in coming to terms with Monroe's distinctive comic talent (odd that we are tempted to regard such a stylized performer as an authentic sexpot struggling with the rudiments of craft) impedes us from regarding Gentlemen Prefer Blondes as we do other Hawks films, where genre material and performances are purified, pushed to extremes, and mixed liberally with the director's distinctive ideas about what should and shouldn't be called entertainment. Coming as early in her starring career as it does, Gentlemen is generally regarded as a defining film for Monroe; if it is less rarely recognized as her finest moment - well, that's more or less par for the course for Hawks-directed performances.

I Was a Male War Bride

2010-07-29T00:08:00.002-04:00

Many have noted that Howard Hawks' comedies are often based on the disorientation and humiliation of the protagonist. It's less frequently noted that, having created this unhappy state of affairs, Hawks and his writers add to the films an equal and opposite character-based reaction: the stymied male protagonist becomes single-mindedly concerned with restoring his lost dignity, and at least intermittently attains a certain stature by his reactions to the disintegrating situation.

The earliest instance of this self-rectifying comic behavior is probably found in Twentieth Century: not in the matching solipsism of the protagonists, but in Oscar Jaffe's hapless sidekick Oliver (Walter Connolly), who rises from his submissive position and grabs Jaffe by the lapels (while stuttering in fear the whole time) in a last doomed attempt to restore the rule of sanity. David Huxley (Cary Grant) in Bringing Up Baby, and his close relative Roger Willoughby (Rock Hudson) in Man's Favorite Sport, are prime examples of this Hawksian comic paradigm: increasingly victimized and disempowered by the "screwball" genre and by solipsistic female forces of nature, they respond with an angry but self-aware appraisal of their plight that slips easily into sarcastic humor. The sex change of His Girl Friday modifies the formula - Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) is not as humiliated as her male counterparts, and therefore does not have to reclaim as much lost dignity - but Hildy too feels the need to restore some of her power with a continual scathing commentary on the Walter Burns-inspired chaos that has overtaken her life. The key aspect of this paradigm is that the comic perspective attained by the disempowered characters results in them grabbing many of the funniest lines in the films, and the audience is invited to laugh with their perspective and not merely at their disempowerment.

Hawks seems to be gratifying different levels of his psyche at the same time with this model. Part of him obviously gravitates toward extremes of humiliation and disempowerment that are unusual even by the regressed standards of comedy; and yet he also gets considerable pleasure from allowing his beleaguered characters to battle back with all the dignity of one of his action heroes. On reflection, the unusual thing about this bifurcation is not that Hawks contains opposing internal psychological forces - which amounts to a basic observation about human nature in general - but that he can so easily express his psychology on multiple levels without departing from tested commercial filmmaking practice.

I Was a Male War Bride is the purest incarnation of this Hawksian dichotomy. Unlike all the films cited above, it largely eschews "screwball" comedy and familiar conventions of farce: most of its humor stems from the characters' distinctively Hawksian reactions to the most disempowering scenario that Hawks and his writers (Charles Lederer and Hagar Wilde, working from a script by Leonard Spigelgass that was based on the autobiographical magazine serial of Dr. Roger R. Charlier) could concoct. A hit at the time of its release (Todd McCarthy reports that it tied with The Snake Pit as the third biggest film of 1949, after Jolson Sings Again and Pinky), its dialogue often drowned out by audience laughter even today, War Bride is nonetheless as weirdly and sublimely personal a film as anything the art houses can offer.

Largely shot in postwar Germany ("No other comedy, surely, has looked so drab," wrote Robin Wood) and partaking slightly of the pseudo-documentary vibe in vogue at Fox at the time, War Bride divides into two sections: the first a vision of love fueled by conflict and hostility; the second about the individual at the mercy of wartime bureaucracy. Both struggles create terrible problems for French officer Henri Rochard (Cary Grant), but, despite the continuity that his reactions impose, the movie's two halves do not integrate seamlessly from a thematic point of view. Hawks, always smart about people, instinctively compensates by keeping the focus in the second half on the now-united but still volatile couple, who could be forgiven for collapsing under the strain imposed on them by Public Law 271. Sometimes Rochard and Lt. Catherine Gates (Ann Sheridan, wonderful) exhibit a convincing enmity that transforms into love as smoothly as a gear change - as when Catherine learns that her Army pal Jack (William Neff) has intentionally held up her marriage paperwork, and slams him on the head with a metal tray without the slightest recollection that she had talking breakup five seconds earlier. Other times the couple take turns breaking down under the ordeal, with one able to provide comfort and humor for the other until the next crisis switches their roles. From a real-life perspective, one can legitimately wonder whether a love so deeply rooted in sex warfare can last for long without blowing up; but Hawks is no more interested in the sociology of a good marriage than he is in condemning the Army bureaucracy for the prolonged torture it inflicts on his heroes.

Rochard immediately projects a self-possession that is identifiably Hawksian, and that runs somewhat counter to comedy conventions. His early triumphs over confusion - such as his repeated demonstrations of perfect colloquial English in the face of American assumptions to the contrary ("See you in church," he replies to Jack's stilted French farewell) - are pulled off with a deadpan aplomb that doesn't desert Rochard in moments of embarrassment. Confronted by a curious WAC as he lingers mistakenly by the ladies' room door, he keeps a straight face and beats a leisurely retreat; later, when Catherine catches him eyeing a passing woman, he holds his ground without a beat of apology. Catherine's description of Rochard as a wolf is borne out by his behavior throughout the film's first half: no matter how hostile his relations with Catherine, he declines no opportunity for physical contact with her, feigning nonchalance effectively, yet advancing with grim resolve. (I can't think of many other comedies that have depicted sexual desire devoid of romance or the pretense thereof.) Hawks prefers not to disturb Rochard's poise by undermining his authority, even when loss of authority is the default comic reaction. Near the end of the first half, Hawks brokers an interesting power negotiation: Catherine's refusal to free Rochard from the clutches of the German police is the cruelest prank in the film; unwilling to let the offense vanish into the flow of comic incident, Hawks and the writers require an overt, unprecedented demonstration of submission from Catherine to balance the scales and allow the romantic sparring to continue.

But the most extraordinary depiction of the Hawksian instinct for self-rectification is saved for the film's second half. Each of Rochard's angry outbursts against the bureaucracy that neuters his marriage and leaves him homeless quickly yields to a controlled sarcasm that is a form of mastery. Left speechless by the marching orders that make specific provisions to destroy his wedding night ("This would never happen in the French army!"), Rochard recovers sufficiently to console his tearful bride before shuffling off to sleep in the bathtub, his automatic assurances gradually turning sarcastic as Catherine slips out of earshot: "It's all right…I'll be quite comfortable…I'll just turn on the cold water." Appalled to learn that Public Law 271 requires him to assume female status, he still manages a smooth exit at scene's end: "Brides first, please." After a while, he is no longer fazed by confused functionaries telling him that the paperwork he had filled out is intended for his wife - "According to the US Army I am my wife" - or even by being rousted from the only bed he has successfully negotiated for - "You will note that I have not taken off my clothes in anticipation of that." In the end his ritualized emasculation becomes a game to be played well: "It's a very natural mistake, you're not the first to have made it."

I Was a Male War Bride can be seen as Hawks' first solo flight, a move away from the genre formats that were always central to his art, and a venture into a looser realm where the projection of the filmmaker's personality takes center stage. Something in the air in the 1945-1950 period was encouraging established Hollywood filmmakers to step out in front of their films and assume the mantle of authorship; unlike some of them, Hawks did not sacrifice his grip on the box office with his self-assertion, at least not until the 50s. Still, the confident foregrounding of the Hawksian ethos in Male War Bride is in some ways closer to the ambient pleasures of late films like Hatari! and Man's Favorite Sport than to Hawks' earlier comedies and action films.

Audrey the Trainwreck: reRun Theater, through July 29, 2010

2010-07-27T00:43:00.002-04:00

Wow, here's an interesting twist on the (admittedly loosely defined) mumblecore concept: lightly guided, improvisatory performances, encased in an almost transparent but carefully engineered formal structure. Frank V. Ross, whose four earlier features I haven't seen, tells a story that is dramatically charged but fragmented by elisions: a young man with a dead-end job (Anthony Baker), in some kind of intense relationship with his male roommate (Danny Rhodes), arranges meetings with a series of women, one of whom (Alexi Wasser) gradually emerges as a potential partner. Story connections are not underlined: it's possible that a second viewing would unearth more clues to the workings of this mysterious triangle. What is underlined is a system of stylistic coups that create emotional harmonics outside the story. Ross's formal ideas are almost direct address to the audience, asking us to reformulate our feelings or to assume a commentative position on events. Example: the protagonist opens the refrigerator door, and an egg rolls to the edge of the shelf and stops; much later in the film, his roommate opens the same door, and the egg breaks on the floor. Or: in one of a series of scenes in which the protagonist meets different women in restaurants, Ross surprisingly switches his attention to another couple in the room, who take over the movie with their conversation until the end of the scene, when they are never seen again. Or: on her rounds as a delivery person for a FedEx-like company, the woman is mysteriously menaced by a passing car whose close approach to her is heighted with editing and soundtrack manipulation, though the incident has no consequences. The suggestion of incipient violence in this last example is not isolated: unsettling incidents rend the fabric of mundane life from the first scene to the odd ending, which both makes urgent demands on our empathy and enforces a comic distance. I'm still not sure about how to respond to that ending, but, like so many other moods that the film engenders, the overtones of violence are largely perpendicular to story and character, existing in a philosophical fourth dimension that Ross creates purely through style. Audrey's mumbly surfaces conceal, at the least, a director of great ambition and unusual virtues. The film screens at the new reRun Theater in DUMBO through Thursday, July 29.

She, a Chinese: Asian American International Film Festival, July 19, 2010

2010-07-14T23:15:00.002-04:00

One of the best films on the 2009 festival circuit, Guo Xiaolu's She, a Chinese, will have its New York premiere at the Asian American International Film Festival. In my Senses of Cinema wrapup for Toronto 2009, I wrote:

"The Golden Leopard at Locarno went to She, a Chinese, the second feature from the expatriate Chinese novelist Guo Xiaolu. Advance word skewed toward the negative, and a flashy trailer increased my pessimism. But the film dazzled me. It becomes clear almost immediately that its organizing principle is not story or even style, but the force of Guo's personality, which whips together diverse materials into a fluent commentary that transcends form. As the sullen, deadpan young protagonist Mei (Huang Lu) rides over assorted trials in rural China with a combination of strength and obliviousness, and then bolts from a guided tour to try her survival skills in the UK, Guo narrates her passage with funny chapter-heading intertitles, bursts of loud rock music (John Parish's score is excellent), and comically rushed transitions. The emotional gap between the story upheavals and Mei's inner life reminded me of several major filmmakers: Godard for the playful exploitation of the audience's distance from the fiction; Sternberg for the loving fascination with surfaces that reveal nothing; and Renoir for the way that philosophical perspective is used to lighten a dark story's mood. I have no idea why Guo's considerable talent is lost on so many critics."

She, a Chinese screens on Monday, July 19 at 6 pm at the Clearview Chelsea Cinema.

Tsuchi (Earth)

2010-07-03T21:20:00.002-04:00

A piece I wrote on Tsuchi (Earth), a celebrated 1939 film by Japanese director Tomu Uchida, has been published at the Mubi Notebook.

Keeping Up with Naruse

2010-06-27T22:50:00.002-04:00

A great many previously unavailable films by the great Japanese director Mikio Naruse are being subtitled in English by dedicated fans. I continue to post reviews of all the Naruse films I see at the Google group NaruseRetro; here's a list of Naruse films that I've reviewed recently.

Five Men in a Circus (1935)
The Actress and the Poet (1935)
The Girl in the Rumor (1935)
Tochuken Kumoemon (1936)
The Road I Travel With You (1936)
A Woman's Sorrows (1937)
Learn from Experience, Parts I and II (1937)
Avalanche (1937)
Hideko the Bus Conductor (1941)
The Way of Drama (1944)
Spring's Awakening (1947)
The Angry Street (1950)
Dancing Girl (1951)
Okuni and Gohei (1952)
The Stranger Within a Woman (1966)
Hit and Run (1966)

Le père de mes enfants: IFC Center, starts May 28, 2010

2010-05-21T00:14:00.005-04:00

I hesitate to proclaim Mia Hansen-Løve's Le père de mes enfants (The Father of My Children) the best film of the year so far, or Hansen-Løve as the strongest French director to emerge in the last decade: not because I have doubts, but because her films creep up gradually, and might be harmed by excessive fanfare. Still, publicity first.

Like Hansen-Løve's equally good first feature, 2007's Tout est pardonné (All Is Forgiven), Le père de mes enfants devotes its entire first half to a development that only in retrospect can be perceived as prologue. French film producer Grégoire Canvel (Louis de Lancquesaing), modeled after the late Humbert Balsam, is introduced via a comic device - as he wanders the streets of Paris and drives to his provincial home, Hansen-Løve cuts between his mobile phone conversations with a myriad of professional contacts - that synopsizes his character, creates expectations of forward narrative motion, and, along with soundtrack music, sets a light-hearted tone. Charming, intelligent, reasonably sincere, and seemingly impervious to chaos, Grégoire oversees three simultaneous productions while trying to stave off a financial crisis, the dimensions of which are only gradually revealed. His wife Sylvia (Chiari Caselli) and his three daughters inevitably must make do with the leftover scraps of his time. But Hansen-Løve characteristically mixes her signals here, sometimes showing Grégoire's bond to his family in a pleasing light, other times emphasizing the strain that his consuming work life places on Sylvia.

If you haven't seen the film, stop reading, as I'm about to spoil the entire plot. (Spoiler space follows.)

The flow of the story in the first half almost suggests a relaxed American comedy marking time before its second act breaks into hijinks or plunges us into drama. When it arrives, the story break is not a plot escalation, but a startling game-changer. In retrospect, we can see that we had been amply prepared. But the foreshadowing does not feel like prophecy, due to Hansen-Løve's taste for letting contradictory information pile up without authorial comment. Because she does not like to organize information about people into thematic shapes, she subtly undercuts the fiction's predictive power.

Facing bankruptcy, Grégoire shoots and kills himself on the street, right on the splice of one of Hansen-Løve's disarmingly casual cuts. Hansen-Løve's elisions deny us access to his deliberation or hesitation. Before the act, he burned some personal papers; we will never learn what they were.

Grégoire has been in every scene thus far: where does the film go now? As it happens, the film truly begins here. Deprived of its motive force, the unbound story line expands and diversifies until the keynote of Grégoire's struggle merges into the background noise of life. Sorrow and anguish dominate at first (one of Grégoire's young daughters is especially unnerving to watch, in that her raw pain is not aestheticized to match the grade of audience reaction); but Grégoire has left behind a raft of practical matters that must be attended to in haste. Sylvia steps into the breach, with the aid of Grégoire's friend Serge (Eric Elmosnino), to assess the dire financial situation and to decide the fate of the stranded productions, which Sylvia sees as Grégoire's legacy. All the pieces cannot be put back together again; but the family's effort to process its loss produces some good results as well.

Hansen-Løve's observational skills were apparent in the film's first half, but they are on center stage in its second half. She is a brilliant director of actors, specializing, not in big emotions that drive the fiction, but in coaxing out detail and ambience across large casts, and in selecting key moments that provide convincing randomness. A single example: Sylvia mentions to Serge, in front of her two youngest children, her desire to move back to her native Italy, observing that her middle daughter is dead set against the idea, but that the youngest might want to go. Asked for confirmation by Serge, the youngest wrinkles her face and says, "No, not really," with just enough diffidence to confirm the mother's judgment.

Unsurpassed as a director of children, Hansen-Løve takes a particular, and optimistic, interest in teenage female characters. In Tout est pardonné, the burden of carrying on in the face of loss fell lightly on the shoulders of a 17-year-old, played wonderfully by the non-professional Constance Rousseau; here, the focus of the family's renewal is Grégoire's oldest daughter Clémence (Alice de Lencquesaing). Working through an understandable anger at the problems that Grégoire has left behind, Clémence begins to sneak away from her family to pick up the scent of her father's passage through the world. Discovering a half-brother from one of Grégoire's prior affairs, she visits his home, without agenda; she starts watching her father's films in Paris theaters, showing signs of budding cinephilia; and she forms a possibly fleeting relationship with a young filmmaker (Igor Hansen-Løve) whom Grégoire had wanted to produce. None of these physical and mental peregrinations affects the story: Clémence is set in motion because she is of the age to be set in motion, and to transform her pain into self-discovery. The heart of the film is the plotless scene in which Clémence, having left a note and crept away from her first night with the still-sleeping filmmaker, sits alone by a window in a café, stumbling over her coffee order, then waiting and reflecting in the light of dawn.

It's a sign of Hansen-Løve's stature as an artist that she is as intrigued by the intricacies of Grégoire's film business as by the dynamics of his family. In a quiet but superb scene near film's end, Grégoire's heroic accountant (Antoine Mathieu) recounts for Sylvia and the stakeholders of the company the details of the financial apocalypse, with a rundown of what can and cannot be salvaged. As usual, the imperatives of fiction do not seem to have any bearing on the outcome: some of the projects that Sylvia and Hansen-Løve have devoted the most time to are unceremoniously pronounced dead; a few small achievements stand out among the general wreckage. Grègoire's children, having recovering their capacity for happiness, joke with the liquidator as they pay a final visit to the doomed production office on Faubourg-Saint-Denis, before a taxi whisks them away from the city that we have seen Grégoire pace out. On the taxi radio, we hear the first famous song used in the movie: Doris Day singing "Que Sera Sera."

Barking Water: MoMA, May 12 through 17, 2010

2010-05-11T22:31:00.003-04:00

Sterlin Harjo's films might be a tough sell to hardcore cinephiles: they tell emotionally direct stories that verge on sentimentalism, and their visuals aren't especially formally ambitious. Still, Harjo is one of the most appealing American directors to come along in recent years, and Barking Water, which premiered at Sundance 2009, is even better than his 2007 debut Four Sheets to the Wind. The personal story, of a dying Native American man (Richard Ray Whitman) who enlists his estranged lover (Casey Camp-Horinek) to help him cross Oklahoma to pay a last visit to family and friends, dovetails beautifully both with the conventions of the road movie and with Harjo's understated vision of a community scattered across space and struggling against its inevitable unraveling. Harjo has a rare knack for weaving fictional and documentary elements together so that the seams are hard to spot: presumably the cast is a mixture of professional and amateur performers, but the fine, effortless lead performances blend so perfectly into the ensemble that it's hard to be sure where acting takes over from existence. Barking Water screens at MoMA six times this week: Wednesday, May 12 at 6:30 pm; Thursday, May 13 at 4:30 pm; Friday, May 14 at 7:00 pm; Saturday, May 15 at 2:00 pm; Sunday, May 16 at 2:30 pm; and Monday, May 17 at 4:30 pm.

Norrtullsligan (The Norrtull Gang)

2010-05-05T21:15:00.003-04:00

My big discovery of the Walter Reade's Northern Exposures series was the remarkable 1923 silent film Norrtullsligan (The Norrtull Gang), directed by Per Lindberg. In addition to the usual risk of film history losing track of excellent films, this one may have faced the disadvantage of not quite fitting in with the internationally acclaimed Swedish cinema of the time, which was nearing the end of its golden period. (1923 and 1924 were the years that Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller made their last silent films in Sweden before going to Hollywood.)

Lindberg, a shadowy figure in film history, was well known in Sweden as a theater director. He made Norrtullsligan and one other film in 1923, took a long break from the cinema, then shot seven features between 1939 and 1941, dying a few years later. Thanks to the participation of Ingrid Bergman, Lindberg's 1940 Juninatten (June Night) is by far his most widely seen film today, though there seems to be a consensus that the 1941 Det sägs på stan (Talk of the Town) is his best work. In Richard Roud's Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, Edgardo Cozarinsky made a case for Lindberg as a major director, prompting a puzzled Roud to observe that Lindberg was the most obscure filmmaker covered in the book.

Norrtullsligan was adapted by Hjalmar Bergman, Sjöström's frequent writer, from Elin Wägner's 1908 novel about the lives of four working women who room together in Stockholm and confront often harsh economic and social conditions. Wägner was a feminist and ecological activist, and synopses of the novel's plot (which was titled Men and Other Misfortunes in English) make it sound like more of a social critique than the movie, which uses ellipsis and psychology to blunt the story's pathos.

Whether Wägner's book was faithfully or freely adapted, it is incorporated into the movie in an unusual way. To see Norrtullsligan is to realize how rarely silent movie intertitles served a literary function. Certainly a portion of the artistic ambition of silent filmmakers went into title writing. Still, whether that ambition resulted in witty and informative text, or in overwrought prose (often the case with great filmmakers), titles were generally subordinated to images, providing commentary and narrative connection only. This is not so surprising, given that the moving image is the cinema's selling point, and that prevailing critical thought of the time saw titles as an impurity that would ideally be dispensed with. Not until Bazin would the idea of cinema embracing its impure status gain any traction with film thinkers. In retrospect, all that screen time devoted to titling in silent movies seems like an undefended beach vulnerable to a literary invasion.

Norrtullsligan is as close as silent films came to a hybrid of literature and cinema. This is not just a result of the quality of the writing (unfortunately, I can't find copies of the book or the intertitles to quote), though I admired the gentleness and reflective tone of the prose. It's more due to the text of the titles having a certain independence from the story. The film is narrated in the first person by Pegg (Tora Teje), and the lengthy titles convey, in addition to story, her feelings and reactions to events, and background information to help us share her opinions, so that the film takes on a diaristic quality. (In the custom of silent movies, the main actors are credited at the bottom of the title cards when their characters are introduced - but Pegg's credit reads, "Me...Tora Teje.")

The length of the intertitles does not diminish as the film progresses, and the story is told differently because of the literary context they provide. The dramatic force of plot developments is generally muted; loose ends are frequently not tied up. One of the biggest difficulties that silent film makers faced is that they had to devote so many of their stylistic resources to pantomiming a narrative. (The arrival of sound had the effect of offloading the burden of storytelling onto the soundtrack, which I consider a great liberation.) Here, Lindberg and Bergman take a distinctive approach to the problem of being expressive while performing their narrative chores. Rather than restage Wägner's meditative descriptions of the women's lives, they give these descriptions a verbal life of their own in the title cards, and then essentially create a parallel work of art with images, selecting details or moods to stage for the camera with no worries about orienting the viewer.

Despite the originality of its concept, Norrtullsligan would not be as noteworthy if Lindberg did not display such delicacy in his direction of actors and his staging. All the actors refrain from signposting their crises - and there are actually more and bigger crises in the film than we might tote up, because Lindberg's evenness of tone sacrifices incident for a slightly nostalgic tone of a remembered past. Devoid of the exterior long-shot beauty that silent Swedish cinema was known for, Norrtullsligan unfolds in a network of apartments and offices, observing the reactions of characters who are neither saintly nor detached, but who transcend their limitations via a grace and quiet humor that the filmmakers impart.

The final scene will do as well as any to convey the psychological detail of the performances. Sitting in a parlor with a group that includes her sometimes supportive, sometimes severe aunt, Pegg coyly lets show the wedding ring that she has just received. As her aunt leans forward to get a better look, Pegg folds and withdraws her hand to make the view more difficult. At the end of the charade, Pegg smiles and accepts her aunt's embrace. The scene is not unusual in itself, but it feels fresh for two reasons. First, Pegg has up until now been direct and without dissimulation, so the act registers, not as mere playfulness, but as a mild expression of anger. Second, Lindberg scales down Pegg's expression and draws out the charade with daring languor. The little game plays out with an odd sense of theater, and Pegg's embrace of her aunt at the end does not dispel our sense that an edge of antagonism motivated her gloating display.

Should the Tradition of Quality Be Rehabilitated?

2010-04-26T21:34:00.002-04:00

It's been years since American film buffs backlashed against Andrew Sarris's quarantine of a number of celebrated English-language filmmakers in the"Less Than Meets the Eye" category in his book The American Cinema. Now I sense a growing rebellion in the blogosphere against the Cahiers critics' earlier but similar dismissal of the French "Tradition of Quality." That Sarris and Truffaut both publicly retracted many of their excommunications in later years (as alluded to in my last blog entry) gives ammunition to the rehabilitation movement.

(For those playing without a scorecard: the phrase "Tradition of Quality" originally referred to the post-World War II "psychological realism" associated with the screenwriters Aurenche & Bost and directors like Claude Autant-Lara, Jean Delannoy, René Clément, Yves Allégret, and Marcel Pagliero. Popularly, it is often used today to refer to all prestige French filmmaking that the Cahiers critics did not uphold, including prewar filmmakers like Marcel Carné, Julien Duvivier, and Jacques Feyder who had little in common with the Aurenche & Bost crowd.)

I am basically an antirehabilitationist, and would even like to roll back the rehabilitation of the "Less Than Meets the Eye" directors. But I want to step carefully around the issue, to avoid slipping into conformism or reaction. In fact, I am required to step carefully, because I have a few revisionist causes of my own. Even I would like to reclaim two directors from "Less Than Meets the Eye": Lewis Milestone (who I don't think ever fit there) and Elia Kazan (who had a "Less Than Meets the Eye" half of his personality, definitely). On the French side, I'd defend Jean Grémillon and Henri-Georges Clouzot, at least, among the filmmakers who were not in favor at Cahiers.

So I really have only one small point to make about canon revision, which is that revision means taking a side, not correcting an injustice. Auteurism is, more than anything, a historically established set of preferences. The Cahiers critics, and Sarris after them, set out to trash an existing canon and raise another in its place. The various auteurist movements have had good luck imposing their old canons on the cinephile culture at large, but that's all they imposed. They certainly were unable to promulgate the philosophical and aesthetic and political assumptions that underlay those canons - if for no other reason than that those assumptions were quickly lost or customized as auteurism went large. So auteurism has made no substantial change in the movie-watching world, except that most filmgoers now take Sirk and Fuller seriously instead of dismissing them. There is no reason to believe that undiscovered Sirks and Fullers, past or present, would fare as well, unless they landed in a category that we've already learned how to deal with.

Auteurist choices were controversial: most people didn't agree with them then, and everyone shouldn't be expected to agree with them now. In his 1968 essay "Toward a Theory of Film History," Sarris observed the unbridgeable gap that had opened up in the 50s and 60s between different camps of film lovers: "Again, these propositions cannot be seriously debated. One kind of critic refuses to cope with a world in which a movie called Baby Face Nelson could possibly be superior to The Bridge on the River Kwai. The other kind of critic refuses to believe that a movie called Baby Face Nelson could possibly be less interesting than The Bridge on the River Kwai." The mere fact that Baby Face Nelson is now an easier sell cannot have eliminated all those old differences in what filmgoers choose to value in films.

Of course it's a good thing for every filmmaker to be reevaluated. But when I decide that Milestone or Clouzot is a good director, I shouldn't necessarily assume that the old-time auteurist canon makers got it wrong. I should at least assess the possibility that I have aesthetic preferences that are different than those of the canon makers. And, if I decide that lots of filmmakers in "Less Than Meets the Eye" and the Tradition of Quality are good, then I should really assess that possibility.

Auteurist backsliding

2010-04-22T00:39:00.003-04:00

Those of us who wear our auteurism on our sleeves are occasionally informed, sometimes in a unkind tone, that many of the folk who formulated auteurism renounced their folly as they became older and wiser. This is not an argument that auteurists have to deal with - it's not an argument at all - but there's some truth to the charge, and I do occasionally wonder whether the auteurist stance is intrinsically unstable.

Here's a thought on the subject. There are as many variations on the auteurist aesthetic as there are auteurists, but they all cluster around the idea that the value of movies derives largely from the quality of their direction. Of course, one can engage in director analysis without any valuation; but auteurism as a movement has always been an array of likes and dislikes on the directorial level.

As such, the auteurist stance implies a critique of a prevailing industrial system of filmmaking. If the industrial system were functioning well for auteurists, if it were an effective generator of the value that we look for in movies, then the director's importance would be greatly minimized. A strong auteurist position is necessarily based on the conviction that the system, though it has money to buy craft and talent and the freedom to deploy them to best effect, is highly likely to produce a mediocre product unless a good director intervenes.

So, in theory, auteurism is at odds with a general, all-purpose love of movies. The auteurist, mild-mannered though he or she may be, walks around with a reserve of negative energy directed at the system. Without this negative energy, the auteurist will be absorbed back into the fascination of the silver screen, which inhibits revolution if we receive enough pleasure from it.

And therein lies a procedural problem. Because all areas of film studies draft their soldiers from among the ranks of congenitally compulsive filmgoers. People who are turned off by routine cinema product usually take up a different profession. Furthermore, auteurism has traditionally placed a special emphasis on mass consumption, on sifting through piles of neglected films of the past in search of glimmers of personal directorial expression. Where does the auteurist find the drive to undertake this sort of cultural research project if he or she doesn't get a contact high off of the dream factory?

In practice, the auteurist often has a split personality. Part of that personality simply loves watching moving images in a dark room, gets low-level indiscriminate pleasure from industrial film forms; another part judges more harshly and constructs aesthetic criteria that exclude some of the pleasure that he or she is capable of receiving.

A split personality can, with proper care and maintenance, remain in working order for a lifetime; but it's also not uncommon for the auteurist to wake up one middle-aged morning, overcome with guilt that he or she has been writing horrible things for years about films that he or she secretly loves.

But that doesn't mean that those films are actually good...

Assorted Screenings in NYC: April 2010

2010-04-19T23:33:00.002-04:00

Just a few quick recommendations for end-of-the-month action on the NYC film circuit:

South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-ok made her debut in 2002 with Jiltuneun naui him (Jealousy is My Middle Name), a droll, intelligent movie with fascinating characterizations, which struck me at the time as the best Korean film not made by Hong Sang-soo. Paju, Park's second feature, premiered earlier this year at Rotterdam, and advance word has been good. It will screen four times at the Tribeca Film Festival: Thursday, April 23 at 6:30 pm; Saturday, April 25 at 1:30 pm; Sunday, April 26 at 6:45 pm; and Thursday, April 30 at 1 pm. The first three screenings are at the Village East; the last is at the Clearview Chelsea.
My very favorite Swedish films were made, not by Bergman, Stiller or Sjöström (though those guys did some pretty fair work too), but by Alf Sjöberg, a once-celebrated director whose reputation waned after his disciple Bergman ascended to art-film superstardom. One of Sjöberg's greatest works, 1949's Bara en mor (Only a Mother), screens in the Walter Reade's valuable Northern Exposures series on Saturday, April 24 at 9:15 pm and Monday, April 26 at 1 pm. Built around a powerful lead performance by Eva Dahlbeck (Smiles of a Summer Night), Bara en mor strikes an exciting balance between pictorial and social realism (the story is set in the world of migrant farm peasants) and a theatricality that spotlights the emotional struggles of its beset but formidable protagonist.
In The American Cinema, Andrew Sarris wrote that "nothing much happens" in Phil Karlson's career until 1953's 99 River St.. But research reveals several distinctive works in Karlson's early filmography, with at least one - 1952's Scandal Sheet - that ranks for me with Karlson's best. The film is based on Samuel Fuller's novel The Dark Page, but Fuller's personality is somewhat diluted in the adaptation, whereas Karlson's abrasive but humanist brand of urgency is in full flower. Scandal Sheet plays in Film Forum's series "The Newspaper Picture" on Friday, April 30 at 1, 4:35 and 8:10 pm.

Barbe Bleue (Blue Beard): IFC Center, until Thursday, April 15, 2010

2010-04-14T21:41:00.010-04:00

Catherine Breillat now has a solid international reputation, but I wish she was regarded less as a sexual provocatrice and more as an artist whose powerful personality filters and interprets all aspects of experience. Barbe Bleue (Blue Beard), her most recent work, helps the cause, in that it is based on a Perrault fairy tale, and shows Breillat imposing her world view through a story written for children.

Here is a checklist of moments I noted in Barbe Bleue that are strongly inflected by Breillat's sensibility, that other filmmakers would be unlikely to write or direct the same way. My impulse here is analytic rather than synthetic, but patterns will no doubt emerge: identifying them is left as an exercise for the reader.

There will be plot spoilers below.

1. The heartless Mother Superior (Farida Khelfa) who dominates the film's first scenes is cast against type as a young, beautiful woman.

2. The sisters in the fairy tale, Anne (Daphné Baiwir) and Marie-Catherine (Lola Créton), shed tears upon being given unceremonious notice of their father's death. They are then expelled from their convent school and sent home in a carriage. Showing the process of departure would for many filmmakers provide an excuse to ramp down the film's level of sadness, so that the sisters' grief will be nearly as moderate as the audience's when we next encounter them. But Breillat prefers to resume the story in the carriage with the sisters weeping, showing the audience the mourning that it has already gotten over. Only then does Breillat ramp down the grief, by letting the sisters veer into a discussion of marriage and the future. By placing the transition from mourning to the mundane in mid-conversation, Breillat makes the sisters own the mood change, which now seems slightly unfeeling. Acknowledging the dissonance that she has created, Breillat lets the sisters name it: "We shouldn't laugh. Papa just died." "It's nerves."

3. At home, the differing reactions of Anne and Marie-Catherine to their father's death are emphasized by Breillat and given equal weight, even though Anne is not a structurally important character. It is unusual for a supporting character not to have a supporting opinion. Breillat is making a small break with narrativity, digressing into a mode she likes, in which sisterly conflict resembles warring aspects of the same mind.

4. And both these opinions are uncomfortable, expressing forbidden aspects of the parent-child relationship. Anne violates the spirit of mourning with her fury at her father, who died saving a stranger's life. Whereas Marie-Catherine fetishizes her dead father, clearly enjoying the power she now has over him: "You aren't intimidating now. I love you." Breillat maintains sympathy for both characters; neither emotion seems to alienate her.

5. Even while she reproaches Anne, Marie-Catherine understands her, and explains to both her mother (Isabelle Lapouge) and her dead father that Anne's insults are the result of her pain.

6. Barbe Bleue's emissary (Adrien Ledoux), who informs the family that the rich noble wishes to choose a wife from among the young women of the area, is a handsome, arrogant young man, an attractive predator who will have no occasion to cross swords with any woman in this story. As in the case of the Mother Superior, Breillat invests with sexuality even the most functional representatives of power.

7. The sisters in the modern story, Catherine (Marilou Lopes-Benites) and Marie-Anne (Lola Giovannetti), while quarreling over the fairy tale that they are reading, have a brief but digressive discussion of free will versus determinism, in which Marie-Anne blames her squeamishness on her head ("cerveau"). "Your head is you," says the younger Catherine. "No, I was born with it," protests Marie-Anne. As usual, Breillat does not seem to want us to take sides, or to characterize the sisters via their opinions: the dispute merely shows that the sisters encompass both sides of the issue.

8. Slipping away from Barbe Bleue's reception, Marie-Catherine whiles away the time in the fields surrounding the castle, playing with a praying mantis, then watching the beheading of a chicken. The camera lingers upon the death agony of the unfortunate chicken: the gaze of the camera is presumably Marie-Catherine's gaze. Breillat, and by extension Marie-Catherine, seem interested in and accepting of the horror.

9. Meanwhile the youth of the area take part in a group dance outside the castle. I can't vouch for the authenticity of the music and the dancing, but the film at least suggests that the instruments and the choreography are of the period. Breillat focuses on the saucy dance moves of the young women, who smile and wag their fingers ceremonially at their male partners. She seems to enjoy emphasizing that the old ways look modern, that these people acknowledge and play with sexuality much as we do today.

10. The massive and scary-looking Barbe Bleue first talks to Marie-Catherine while resting under a tree. He is surprisingly unthreatening in his demeanor, suggesting a tame bear. His voice is soft and gentle.

11. Discussing the fairy tale in the modern story, precocious Catherine insists that, in the old days, women could get married even at age 5. "It's not like adult marriage," she says in qualification. Pressed for details by Marie-Anne, Catherine demonstrates that she's vague on the whole subject. Like much of the modern story, this scene exists only to show the children's imagination reaching out boldly into the world of sex.

12. Marie-Catherine's engagement to Barbe Bleue is simultaneously a weapon against her older sister Anne and the sad occasion of their separation. Breillat likes to compress the two feelings. After a harsh outburst against Anne, Marie-Catherine suddenly hugs her tenderly.

13. Similarly, as Marie-Catherine is leaving her home with her new husband, Anne says to her, "Now we needn't fight anymore." Marie-Catherine replies, "But I liked that." Hatred and love between the sisters are repeatedly depicted as compatible emotions, not requiring resolution.

14. At the sisters' post-wedding goodbye, Barbe Bleue sits silently on his horse in the background, waiting for his new bride like a liveryman. In the spirit of counterpoint, Breillat will depict the fairy-tale monster as gentle and domesticated throughout the film.

15. In the modern story, Catherine shows off her incorrect understanding of the word "homosexuality." Her exasperated older sister gives her the correct meaning, but Catherine is obstinate. Again, the subject connects to the narrative only in that it shows the young girls' interest in sex.

16. As she is installed in Barbe Bleue's castle, Marie-Catherine suddenly becomes imperious and demanding about her living arrangement, trying to assert her power over her husband. Marie-Catherine is not generally characterized as imperious, and does not test her power in this fashion again. Breillat seems to assume that a war for power lies just under the surface of love relationships. The filmmaker shows no sign of disapproval, and our identification with Marie-Catherine is not affected.

17. Sneaking around the castle at night, Marie-Catherine peeks in her husband's room and spies on him removing his tunic and sitting on his bed bare-chested. The gigantic Barbe Bleue does not provide the sort of nudity that movie audiences are likely to welcome. Both Marie-Catherine (who is not yet sleeping with her husband) and Breillat have no reaction to the naked man other than fascination with the spectacle; Marie-Catherine's feelings toward him do not seem to be altered.

18. In the modern story, young Catherine insists that she is more intelligent than her older sister Marie-Anne, and mercilessly exploits Marie-Anne's having stayed back a grade because of illness. Marie-Anne has no good defense, and seems beaten. The conflict will have no obvious repercussions.

19. Marie-Catherine confides to her husband, "I miss my sister, but I'm glad to be rid of her." The contradiction does not require resolution.

20. Breillat repeatedly puts visual emphasis on the absurd difference in size between the gigantic Barbe Bleue and his tiny wife Marie-Catherine: for instance, by framing them side by side at the dinner table. Though the couple will have no sexual contact in the film, that outrageous, unspoken fantasy is the motor of the story. Never one to avert her gaze, Breillat forces us to imagine such an act.

21. After a time in the castle, Marie-Catherine tells Barbe Bleue that she is now accustomed to luxury. The statement does not signal a problem with Marie-Catherine's values; Breillat seems accepting, as she so often is.

22. After a solar eclipse gives Barbe Bleue the opportunity to display his knowledge of history and science, an impressed Marie-Catherine says to him avidly, "Teach me everything you know." Marie-Catherine shows no other interest in learning: she seems to regard knowledge as a form of male power that she wishes to acquire for herself.

23. After Marie-Catherine discovers the bodies of Barbe Bleue's other wives, she must hide the discovery from him and eat dinner with him upon his return from a trip. The tone of this scene is difficult to fix. Barbe Bleue has become threatening to us; and Marie-Catherine begins to lie to him in self-protection. However, Breillat declines to give us images of Marie-Catherine's presumed fear and repulsion. Further, Marie-Catherine participates willingly in the communal aspect of dinner, taking bites out of the huge leg of lamb that her husband shares with her. Though the story mandates that Marie-Catherine now fear Barbe Bleue and regard him as an enemy, Breillat manages through Marie-Catherine's behavior to create the interesting impression that the horrible murders have not destroyed the marital bond.

24. Breillat gives us a bare indication that the accidental death of Marie-Anne at the end of the modern story is the fantasy of the traumatized Catherine: surely Catherine's mother would have spotted Marie-Anne's body on the floor below if the fall had actually occurred? False alarm, all is well, except that Catherine's desire to kill her older sister has been made manifest.

25. Breillat ends the film with an image of Marie-Catherine caressing the severed head of her husband. She is victorious, and simultaneously she is sad.

26. The sad music accompanying this gruesome ending yields, as in other Breillat films, to happy dance music under the end credits. Like her characters, Breillat will not pretend that contemplating her atavistic impulses is gloomy business.

Barbe Bleue is scheduled at the IFC Center only until tomorrow, Thursday, April 15.

La maman et la putain (The Mother and the Whore): NYU, Monday, March 22, 2010

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If any of you have three and a half hours to spare on the evening of Monday, March 22, I'll be giving a ten or fifteen-minute introductory talk at a ciné-club DVD screening of Jean Eustache's monumental 1973 film La maman et la putain (The Mother and the Whore). The show starts at 6:30 pm at NYU's 20 Cooper Square building (at Bowery and E. 5th St.), in Room 471. The notice for the screening says, "ALL WELCOME. Refreshments - stiff, copious - provided."

Xunzhao zhimei gengdeng (The Search): Maysles Cinema, Saturday, March 20, 2010

2010-03-16T22:07:00.003-04:00

I didn't find out about the Tibet in Harlem series until today, its opening day. One of the titles in the program, Pema Tsaden's Xunzhao zhimei gengdeng (The Search), made an impression on me at last year's Toronto Film Festival. In my Toronto 2009 wrap-up for Senses of Cinema, I wrote:

"Screened at Locarno after winning the Grand Jury Prize at the Shanghai Film Festival, Pema Tseden's Xunzhao zhimei gengdeng (The Search) is allegedly the first Tibetan film made openly in China. Structured around a film crew's search for rural performers for an adaptation of a traditional Tibetan opera, Xunzhao zhimei gengdeng is actually an elaborate riff on the theme of performance, stringing together stories within the story and impromptu auditions, and exploring various dryly comic ways to interrupt, contextualize, or serialize them. Tseden's remote visual plan, keyed to the expansive terrain and hanging back at important moments, is gradually revealed as a important component of his mission to restore the uncanny aspect of performance by subtracting its direct appeal to the audience. (In the film's climactic scene, we see that the film crew's cameraman has a more conventional dramatic sense than Tseden, slowly zooming in on the singer that the film crew has been pursuing, while Tseden's camera remains stubbornly locked-down.) By the time the search reaches its conclusion, song and theater seem to be springing unbidden from the Tibetan landscape. The print of Xunzhao zhimei gengdeng that screened in Toronto contained awkwardly translated English subtitles that improved after fifteen minutes or so, but made it difficult to perceive the film's formal and verbal intelligence."

Xunzhao zhimei gengdeng shows at Maysles Cinema (at 343 Lenox Ave., two blocks away from the 125th St. stop on the 2/3 trains) on Saturday, March 20 at 7:30 pm. I haven't seen the other films in the series, but two other Tseden films are included: his 2005 feature Lhing vjags kyi ma ni rdo vbum (The Silent Holy Stones) on Wednesday, March 17 at 7:30 pm; and his 2004 short The Grassland, as part of a program on Friday, March 19 at 7:30 pm. Kevin Lee (who will be doing a Q&A with Tseden after the Wednesday screening) compares Tseden to Abbas Kiarostami, and I can see the connection: both filmmakers hide a droll, cerebral formalism behind naturalistic surfaces.

Le Roi de l'évasion (The King of Escape): Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, March 15-16, 2009

2010-03-14T13:40:00.003-04:00

Little by little, the international film community is catching on that French director Alain Guiraudie is one of the most distinctive and confident voices in today's cinema. His latest film, 2009's Le Roi de l'évasion (The King of Escape), can look like either a bold surrealist gesture or the last gasp of classical widescreen filmmaking, depending on where one focuses. A plot description - a gay, plump, 40-year-old tractor salesman (Ludovic Berthillot) in the south of France yields enthusiastically to the overtures of the beautiful 16-year-old daughter (Hafsia Herzi) of his boss - doesn't begin to convey Guiraudie's wild, rapid storytelling style, nor the extraordinary ease with which the filmmaker depicts a set of social groups that even adventurous filmgoers are unlikely to encounter on screen often. There is an amazing opposition, almost a contradiction, in Guiraudie's approach: he stylizes the social landscape into an idealized vision of sexuality freely expressed and tolerated; and yet the comic compression of the plot suggests a paranoid dream of punishment and persecution for the slightest and most concealed sexual impulse. That Guiraudie is aware of this bizarre split, and presents it to us simply and lucidly without resolving it, marks him as a major artist. Le Roi de l'évasion (The King of Escape) plays twice more in the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema program: on Monday, March 15 at 3:45 pm at the Walter Reade, and on Tuesday, March 16 at 9:30 pm at the IFC Center.

Assorted Screenings in NYC: February-March 2010

2010-02-27T12:08:00.007-05:00

1. I've gotten in the habit of looking at online trailers for upcoming screenings in NYC - admittedly an iffy way of deciding whether to see a film, but better for me than all the other iffy ways. In case you're interested in sharing the iffiness, here are trailers or clips that piqued my interest:

Make Yourself at Home, in the Korean American Film Festival: Sunday, February 28 at 4:30 pm at the SVA Theatre at 333 W 23rd St. (The screening is sadly opposite A Brighter Summer Day at the Walter Reade that afternoon.)

Le bel âge (Restless), in the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema Series: Tuesday, March 16 at 7 pm at the IFC Center; Wednesday, March 17 at 1 pm at the Walter Reade; and Thursday, March 18 at 8:45 pm at the Walter Reade.

Polytechnique, in the Canadian Front Series: Friday, March 19 at 4 pm and Sunday, March 21 at 12:45 pm at MoMA.

2. I caught the Larrieu Brothers' Les derniers jours du monde (Happy End) at Toronto 2009, and it seems even more audacious and appealing upon reflection than it did at the time. It's one of the lower-profile entries in this year's edition of Film Comment Selects at the Walter Reade: screenings are at Monday, March 1 at 3:30 pm and Tuesday, March 2 at 6:15 pm. Here's what I wrote in my Toronto 2009 wrap-up for Senses of Cinema:

"Presented in Locarno's Piazza Grande ten days before its French theatrical premiere, Arnaud and Jean-Marie Larrieu's Les derniers jours du monde, which witnesses the destruction of Europe via virus, nuclear attack, and assorted other implements of destruction, was sensibly programmed on TIFF's last night. As usual in this genre, we are allocated an identification figure (Mathieu Amalric) - but this audience surrogate is not quite standard issue, in that he has lost an arm as a result of his adulterous sexual fixation on an androgynous sex worker (Omayrah Mota), who cannot be dislodged from the top of his priority list even as death rains down around him. The end of the world according the Larrieus is light on exciting violent spectacle, but full of beanballs thrown at our delicate psyches: sometimes via the wholesale abrogation of sexual barriers, sometimes by confronting us with unsettling evidence of the fragility of the body. For the characters as well as the filmmakers, the apocalypse is about freedom, about the falling away of social and psychological constraints - and if the Larrieus sometimes treat the apocalypse rather casually, they take sex very seriously. Among the film's many pleasures is the best role in years for the admirable Karin Viard, as the protagonist's abandoned but not forgotten wife."

3. Catherine Breillat's excellent Barbe Bleue (Blue Beard) has a preview screening on Wednesday, March 3 at 7:30 pm at Anthology Film Archives (as part of their Bluebeard on Film series) before its March 26 opening at the IFC Center. Once again Breillat dissolves the gap between a literary property (this time Perrault's fairy tale) and her own sensibility, effortlessly finding a paradoxical emotional angle on every primal event. A modern-day framing story, featuring two sisters reading the tale in their attic, provides a running comic commentary while simultaneously delving into life-and-death conflicts of its own. One can perhaps argue that the fairy tale's focus on the anxiety of disobedience, which requires creating a monster, is somewhat at odds with the sympathy that Breillat characteristically extends to all her sexual combatants. Still, it's fascinating to watch her erase distinctions between mundane and mythic subject matter.

4. Hilary Brougher's distinctly underappreciated 2006 drama Stephanie Daley returns for a one-off screening at 92Y Tribeca on Friday, March 5 at 7 pm, with the filmmaker in attendance. There is a faintly metaphorical aura to the film's story - a teenage girl (Amber Tamblyn), in denial about her belatedly terminated pregnancy, perplexes a forensic psychologist (Tilda Swinton), herself pregnant - that probably led to it being pigeonholed as a topical work. Easier to miss is the unusual density of Brougher's filmmaking: she seems determined to cut out all the ordinary moments in life and move briskly from one insight to another. And she seems to have a lot of detailed observations up her sleeve about both teenage anguish and pregnancy. It's rare to see an American film that adopts a familiar investigation/mystery format and yet comes across as a continuous stream of personal expression.

5. The surprise of last year's Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, Sylvie Verheyde's Stella, is screening at Symphony Space on Saturday, March 6 at 7 pm and Saturday, March 13 at 8:45 pm at as part of the New York International Children's Film Festival. The story of a tentative but self-sufficient young girl (Léora Barbara) trying to transcend the restrictions of her déclassé upbringing, Stella has few formal chops, doesn't look so great, overuses its effects - and I loved it anyway. Verheyde is a wizard at not letting fictional forms get in the way of facts about people, and she effortlessly generates compelling complexity while dodging every bullet of the coming-of-age genre. The film's scale is so modest and human-centered that one doesn't tote up its achievements immediately: nearly every scene is a standout, nearly every performance is incisive.

6. Just in case you need recommendations for Film Forum's Victor Fleming series: 1935's The Farmer Takes a Wife (on Tuesday, March 9 at 1, 4:45 and 8:30 pm) and 1938's rather Hawksian Test Pilot (on Wednesday, March 10 at 1, 5:30 and 10 pm and Thursday, March 11 at 1 pm) are both pretty good. Also Red Dust (on Friday, March 5 at 1, 4:30 and 8 pm, and Saturday, March 6 at 2:50 and 8 pm), but you probably know that one already. (Too bad Film Forum couldn't get 1935's Reckless, which is probably my favorite.) Fleming isn't always able to show his talents, but he's a smart director, with distinctive visual habits: he likes short lenses, slightly depressed angles, and characters approaching and leaving the foreground on diagonals. He favors exaggerated acting and action, has an interesting taste for violence and iconoclasm, and likes visual overcrowding and excess.

7. I haven't seen anything in this year's Rendez-Vous series, but I'm very much looking forward to Alain Guiraudie's Le roi de l'évasion (The King of Escape): playing Saturday, March 13 at 9 pm at the Walter Reade; Monday, March 15 at 3:45 pm at the Walter Reade; and Tuesday, March 16 at 9:30 pm at the IFC Center. On the basis of 2001's Ce vieux rêve qui bouge (That Old Dream That Moves) and 2003's Pas de repos pour les braves (No Rest for the Brave), Guiraudie seems one of the most inspired filmmakers on today's scene. He's not exactly unknown, but none of his films have gotten US theatrical distribution as far as I know. The new film sounds like light comedy (a gay middle-aged salesman has an opportunity with Hafsia Herzi, and decides to go for it), but Guiraudie can blend light and heavy tones in the oddest ways. I'm also interested in Philippe Lioret's Welcome, which got some attention on the festival circuit: Lioret's Je vais bien, ne t'en fais pas (Don't Worry, I'm Fine) marked him as a talent to watch. It plays Friday, March 12 at 1:15 pm at the Walter Reade; Saturday, March 13 at 6:30 pm at the IFC Center; and Sunday, March 14 at 3:30 pm at the Walter Reade.

8. Gianni Di Gregorio's wonderful Pranzo di ferragosto (Mid-August Lunch), which I wrote about when it played New Directors/New Films last year, gets a theatrical premiere at Film Forum on March 17. The film presents itself as one of those life-affirming films with lovable eccentrics and lots of cooking scenes, and I guess that's true enough. But it's also pure personal filmmaking.

9. MoMA's Canadian Front series is looking pretty hotsy-totsy this year. The most exciting title is Bernard Émond's sublime La Donation (The Legacy), which plays Thursday, March 18 at 4 pm and Saturday, March 20 at 8 pm. Here's what I said in my Senses of Cinema Toronto 2009 wrap-up:

"Though a notch lower in prestige than Venice, Cannes and Berlin, the Locarno Film Festival, which takes place a month before TIFF, provided a disproportionate number of my favourite films this year. At the top of the list is La Donation, the high point to date of Quebecois filmmaker Bernard Émond’s career. Set in the small town of Normétal in the Abitibi-Ouest region of Quebec, and haunted by the clear gray skies and dark wooded areas that seem ready to reclaim the settlement at a moment’s notice, La Donation is the continuing story of Jeanne Dion (Elise Guilbault), the embattled doctor of Émond’s La Neuvaine, whose search for meaning leads her to a trial period as the impoverished region’s only physician. Casting a number of residents of the area, and directing his professional actors to match the quiet stoicism of the amateurs, Émond arrives at an uncanny evocation of the mood of Bresson’s Journal d’un curé de campagne (Diary of a Country Priest, 1950), in which the performers are less documented for their reality than enlisted as principles of existence. As a follower of Émond since his first feature La femme qui boit (2001, also starring Guilbault), I had begun to fear in recent years that he was settling into a reflex solemnity that was yielding diminishing returns. To my delight, La Donation recasts Émond’s art in new terms, not so much dispelling his heaviness as offering it to us, contextualising it with brisk pacing and a strong narrative hook, exposing it to the skies and cold winds. Now would be the perfect time for programmers worldwide to give Émond greater exposure."

A tougher sell is Sherry White's Crackie, about which I wrote in the same article:

"Labrador-based director Sherry White premiered her film Crackie at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival in July before bringing it home to TIFF and a subsequent Canadian theatrical run. Set in a rural part of Newfoundland that seems dominated by scrap yards and garbage dumps, Crackie is the story of 17-year-old Mitzy (Meagan Greeley), suspended between her tough, practical grandmother/caretaker (Mary Walsh) and the worthless mother she idealises (Cheryl Wells). The film is a bit broad and schematic around the edges, but subtle and affecting at its centre: Greeley’s wonderfully simple performance scales the girl’s reactions down so that both her vulnerability and her inner strength seem in harmony with her hardscrabble environment. White portrays Mitzy’s first sexual experiments frankly and without sentiment, and gets emotional mileage out of her turbulent relationship with the eponymous dog who figures in her transition to adulthood."

Amoureuse

2010-02-21T22:46:00.002-05:00

My piece on Jacques Doillon's little-known and amazing 1992 film Amoureuse is up at the Auteurs' Notebook.

The Youth of Chopin: Walter Reade, Sunday, January 10, 2009

2010-01-09T09:36:00.002-05:00

Polish director Aleksander Ford is one of those names who pop up in film history books, but rarely appear on American screens to take the test of time. His 1952 The Youth of Chopin, which screens once more on Sunday, January 10 at 3 pm in the Walter Reade's brief celebration of Chopin's bicentenary, has everything going against it: not only the unrewarding conventions of the biopic, but also an apparent governmental mandate to cast Chopin as a people's revolutionary. And it's a knockout anyway, a film that only gradually reveals how unorthodox and experimental it is. The project's central problems are confronted by writer-director Ford with unusual intelligence and formal transparency. The historical narrative is not so much blended with great-man mythology as juxtaposed with it, with self-aware cuts and tracking shots shifting Chopin and the class struggle from foreground to background and back again. Even more strikingly, Ford embraces the episodic aspect of biography, and the film often takes the form of a series of dazzling, disconnected set-pieces, with supporting characters bearing much emotional weight, then vanishing like comets. In some ways, Ford calls to mind the great French director Jacques Becker, in that his visual skill and sensitivity to ambiance is in the service of sharp but unbiased social observation. I could easily have been persuaded that Becker was responsible for the beautiful scene where Chopin attends a Paganini concert, or for an orgiastic party scene in which a political assassination is counterpointed with frenzied dancers ripping off their shoes. Still, Ford is somewhat more inclined to symbolism than Becker, more likely to turn the flow of reality into coolly observed friezes. I've never seen anything else by Ford, but it's hard to believe that a director who is at once so analytical and so instinctive could not have made many other worthwhile films.

2009 Manhattan One-Week Theatrical Premieres

2010-01-03T23:33:00.002-05:00

Here are my favorite films that received their first one-week theatrical run in Manhattan during 2009. (I exclude films that were made too long ago to feel contemporary.)

1. Night and Day (Hong Sang-soo)
2. Sita Sings the Blues (Nina Paley)
3. C.R.A.Z.Y. (Jean-Marc Vallée)
4. Desert Dream (Zhang Lu)
5. Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone)
6. Broken Embraces (Pedro Almodovar)
7. Me and Orson Welles (Richard Linklater)
8. Chelsea on the Rocks (Abel Ferrara)
9. Paradise (Michael Almereyda)
10. Medicine for Melancholy (Barry Jenkins)

More than half of these films received no national distribution, barely squeaking out one-week runs at NYC specialty venues. Which underlines the arbitrariness of a Manhattan premiere list...but whatever. (I keep a running list of my favorite films by date of international release.)

Honorable mentions (in alphabetical order): Beeswax (Andrew Bujalski); I'm Gonna Explode (Gerardo Naranjo); Liverpool (Lisandro Alonso); Lorna's Silence (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne); Tokyo: "Merde" (Leos Carax); Two Lovers (James Gray); The Vanished Empire (Karen Shakhnazarov).

Films with a lot going for them: California Dreamin' (Cristian Nemescu); Extract (Mike Judge); Frontier of Dawn (Philippe Garrel); The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow); Il Divo (Paolo Sorrentino); Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino); The International (Tom Tykwer); The Merry Gentleman (Michael Keaton); Perestroika (Slava Tsukerman); Pontypool (Bruce McDonald); Revanche (Gotz Spielmann); A Single Man (Tom Ford); Tokyo Sonata (Kiyoshi Kurosawa); Treeless Mountain (So Yong Kim); Tulpan (Sergey Dvortsevoy); The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke); You, the Living (Roy Andersson).

Films with something going for them: Adoration (Atom Egoyan); The Brothers Bloom (Rian Johnson); Cargo 200 (Alexei Balabanov); Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson); Flower in the Pocket (Liew Seng Tat); Goodbye Solo (Ramin Bahrani); The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel); Serbis (Brilliante Mendoza); A Serious Man (Joel Coen & Ethan Coen); Somers Town (Shane Meadows); Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas); The Sun (Alexander Sokurov); 24 City (Jia Zhang-ke); Up in the Air (Jason Reitman); Ward No. 6 (Karen Shakhnazarov & Aleksandr Gornovsky).

Among the films I couldn't get into: Adventureland (Greg Mottola); Afterschool (Antonio Campos); Avatar (James Cameron); Birdsong (Albert Serra); The Box (Richard Kelly); Cheri (Stephen Frears); Duplicity (Tony Gilroy); The Girlfriend Experience (Steven Soderbergh); Home (Ursula Meier); Hunger (Steve McQueen); Import Export (Ulrich Seidl); Jerichow (Christian Petzold); Lake Tahoe (Fernando Eimbcke); The Limits of Control (Jim Jarmusch); Loren Cass (Chris Fuller); Megane (Naoko Ogigami); Moon (Duncan Jones); Munyurangabo (Lee Isaac Chung); My Dear Enemy (Lee Yoon-ki); My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (Werner Herzog); Paris (Cedric Klapisch); The Pope's Toilet (Cesar Charlone & Enrique Fernandez); Public Enemies (Michael Mann); Shall We Kiss? (Emmanuel Mouret); Taxidermia (Gyorgy Palfi); 35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis); Tony Manero (Pablo Larrain); Tyson (James Toback); Unmade Beds (Alexis Dos Santos); The Young Victoria (Jean-Marc Vallée).

Sita Sings the Blues: IFC Center, through January 5, 2010

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The distribution of Nina Paley's 2008 animated feature Sita Sings the Blues has famously been obstructed by music publishing copyright protection. WNET-TV broadcast the film via a loophole in the copyright laws for public television: I'm not sure whether its screening at the IFC Center (through this Tuesday, January 5) is a defiance of copyright law, or a side-effect of the WNET alliance. The film is freely available on the Internet, but it's actually a terrific film to watch with an audience: many of us in the theater interacted vocally with the screen, but at different moments and in different ways, as befits the complexity of the work. And, for a film that Paley presumably hand-crafted, it's a surprisingly spectacular big-screen experience.

Not to mention a great movie. From the first few moments, where a campy but oddly droll and restrained tableau of Indian goddess with phonograph player suddenly explodes into the dynamic credit sequence, we are in the presence of an artistic personality with so many dimensions - purely formal play, cerebral comedy, parody of popular storytelling modes, balance among personal and cultural perspectives - that we reduce it by considering any one of them at a time. Paley's Rube Goldberg postmodern conception/contraption is ultimately a demonstration of her ability to integrate an uncontrollable variety of effects into a complex but whole sensibility.

Toronto 2009

2010-01-01T02:31:00.001-05:00

My coverage of the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival is now online at Senses of Cinema.

Uncovered

2009-12-11T12:45:00.000-05:00

Earlier this year, I decided that Jim McBride, whom I had always considered a very good director, actually had the sensibility of a great director, if not the control over his career that a great director would hope for. And so I set out to obtain DVD or VHS copies of all his films that I hadn't seen. One of these, Uncovered (1994), instantly and improbably joined David Holzman's Diary (1967) and Breathless (1983) in the ranks of my favorite McBride movies.

McBride's career breaks up fairly neatly into three parts:

Late 60s and early 70s: He receives critical acclaim for David Holzman's Diary and enjoys a brief period of impoverished autonomy as an independent.
80s: He tries making films within the commercial system, and strikes pay dirt with his second film of the decade, The Big Easy (1986). But the subsequent failure of Great Balls of Fire! (1989) seems to damage his prospects.
90s: He manages to string together a series of feature works, mostly television genre projects of little prestige, barely noted by anyone.

On paper, Uncovered would seem to be as unpromising an idea as any McBride had been saddled with. Based on a mystery novel by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, the script (presumably written first by Michael Hirst, then worked over by McBride and his frequent collaborator Jack Baran) is about a young art conservator named Julia (Kate Beckinsale) trying to solve a 15th-century murder by analyzing a chess game depicted in a painting. Soon people associated with the painting's restoration are being killed by someone who is using the likely progression of the chess game to select victims.

This plot has nothing and can have nothing to do with the characters except to engage their curiosity, a quality that, not coincidentally, is also the audience's hoped-for condition. McBride had just managed to make good movies from an urban-vampire comedy-thriller (Blood Ties, 1991) and a film noir retread (The Wrong Man, 1993), so we already knew that he had a way with seemingly doomed projects. But Uncovered has a nimbleness and sense of freedom that lift it above the other films of this period.

Part of McBride's approach to projects like this is to treat the plots very lightly, to minimize weighty emotions associated with them and move them along quickly. This distance from thriller plots naturally creates a comic tone, and McBride directs genre assignments as comedies whenever possible. (The 90s McBride films that don't work well for me - The Informant (1997) and Dead by Midnight (1997) - are the ones with subject matter so grave that McBride couldn't in good faith play them for laughs.)

If McBride doesn't bother pretending that his plots are important, he turns out to be surprisingly sympathetic to other audience-pleasing genre elements. It's plain that he enjoys sex in a general, almost polymorphous way, and lacks the usual American inhibitions about taking simple sexual pleasure. (McBride came of age during that brief period in the 60s and 70s where it seemed as if American cinema might actually be experiencing a sexual revolution, and he has never lost the calling.) He dotes on romance between attractive people, and he's even got a flair for action and violence. (His Elmore Leonard adaptation Pronto (1997) contains an exceptional scene in which a somewhat comical U.S. Marshal, played by James LeGros, takes unexpected and lethal command of a threatening situation.)

More than any particular kind of story, McBride enjoys people, and no genre exercise is so contrived that he doesn't try to fill it with surprising, unpremeditated behavior. One of the prerogatives that a director almost always has, that few overseers are clever enough to prohibit, is to take characters who are designed to fulfill audience fantasies, and reconceive them so that they become the mysterious subject of our gaze as well as the receptacle for our identification.

Kate Beckinsale is at the center of Uncovered, and McBride clearly enjoys just being in the same room with her, being paid to photograph her. This Kate bears almost no resemblance to the rather formidable, shielded beauty who now graces our screens. McBride encourages her girlishness, her permeability. Her Julia occupies the role of the investigator, the problem solver, the righter of wrongs; but she lopes awkwardly through the streets of Barcelona, munching on carrots or apples; she stares at the painting she is restoring as if she were a child in a schoolyard encountering a new playmate. There is no fixity to her state of being: she comes easy to anger, easy to embarrassment, easy to fascination. Though she is smart, her connection to life seems simple and sensual, not much mediated by intellect.

McBride breaks down the boundaries between Julia's different functions and modes: he wants to mix everything together. Example: the first of the killer's victims is a former lover Julia still has feelings for. After she discovers his body and deals with the police, she returns to her apartment. This genre film will of course not treat the death with the gravity that it would deserve in life; and, in fact, the script is ready for a nude scene. To the accompaniment of atmospheric music, Julia enters the apartment and strips off her dress, so that she is naked except for panties. McBride isn't shy at all about his commercial obligations here: he pans, then tracks backwards to keep Julia in the camera's fixed, sensual gaze. Now that the film has shifted into an erotic mode, McBride and Beckinsale make a connection to the previous events: the topless girl shudders with a sob, still grieving. The scene is no longer purely an erotic set piece: it now exists between two narrative functions. At this moment, Julia looks at the painting in her living room that she has been restoring, and moves closer, as if noticing something new about it. The scene's function shifts again, back to the film's central inquiry, as Julia approaches the painting, her sorrow temporarily muted. McBride isn't fazed that Julia is still half-naked and exposed to our gaze as the mystery of the painting is evoked: Julia as sex object and Julia as driver of the narrative go together for him with no strain.

As much as the film revolves around Beckinsale's magnetism, it's an ensemble piece, and it contains at least two other memorable performances: by Paudge Behan as Domenec, the street-gamin chess expert who overcomes Julia's hostility, and by John Wood as Julia's queeny lifelong friend and guardian Cesar. Wood in particular does a terrific job of steering clear of cliché. He camps it up as hard as any gay best friend in the cinema, but he and McBride channel his exhibitionism into the character's life instead of brandishing it as a distraction for the audience: we quickly understand that Cesar must be taken seriously at all times, though he does not sacrifice his flamboyance to that end. Nearly the entire cast partakes of the film's diffuse but overt erotic vibe: man or woman, sympathetic or unsympathetic, everyone gets to strut before the camera and try to seduce it.

The plot is wrapped up tidily; the characters' lives less so. Julia's first line of dialogue, a spontaneous "Fuck me!" as she discovers the covered-up inscription on her painting, feels a touch provocative and open-ended, coming from this still slightly unformed woman-child. And her last line of dialogue is a refusal of closure: an impatient "Sssh!" to her new lover Domenec as she eats a pastry and watches with absorption the auction of the painting that had so occupied her. The impatience does not make us question the value of the love relationship: it merely suspends Julia, and us, in the eternal present.

My 100 Favorite Films of 1999-2008

2009-12-07T22:47:00.001-05:00

Everyone is making lists of their favorite films of the 00s, and I've been feeling left out. I do enjoy a good list, but not when it feels premature; and the vagaries of international distribution make it impossible for all but a few ardent festival-hoppers to know yet what has happened in 2009. Even my list of 2008 favorites is just stabilizing.

A solution finally occurred to me: exclude 2009 from my decade list, and include 1999, which was shafted in the last round of decade-end list making.

My 100 favorite films of 1999-2008, in very, very approximate order of preference.

1. Michael Clayton (Tony Gilroy, USA, 2007)
2. Esther Kahn (Arnaud Desplechin, France, 2000)
3. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, Romania, 2005)
4. Night and Day (Hong Sang-Soo, South Korea, 2008)
5. Vera Drake (Mike Leigh, UK, 2004)
6. The Child (Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Belgium/France, 2005)
7. Fat Girl (Catherine Breillat, France, 2001)
8. M/Other (Nobuhiro Suwa, Japan, 1999)
9. The Tracey Fragments (Bruce McDonald, Canada, 2007)
10. Raja (Jacques Doillon, France/Morocco, 2003)
11. Late Marriage (Dover Kosashvili, Israel/France, 2001)
12. The Sopranos: "Made in America" (David Chase, USA, 2007)
13. The House of Mirth (Terence Davies, UK/USA, 2000)
14. La face cachée de la lune (Robert Lepage, Canada, 2003)
15. The Son (Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Belgium, 2002)
16. Far from Heaven (Todd Haynes, USA, 2002)
17. The Forsaken Land (Vimukthi Jayasundara, Sri Lanka/France, 2005)
18. Ana and the Others (Celina Murga, Argentina, 2003)
19. Primer (Shane Carruth, USA, 2004)
20. Topsy-Turvy (Mike Leigh, UK, 1999)
21. Bled Number One (Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, Algeria/France, 2006)
22. La Puce (Emmanuelle Bercot, France, 1999)
23. Still Life (Jia Zhang-ke, China, 2006)
24. Ballast (Lance Hammer, USA, 2008)
25. Sangre (Amat Escalante, Mexico, 2005)
26. The Wayward Cloud (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan, 2005)
27. Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico, 2007)
28. A Week Alone (Celina Murga, Argentina, 2008)
29. All Around Us (Ryosuke Hashiguchi, Japan, 2008)
30. Une Vieille Maîtresse (Catherine Breillat, France, 2007)
31. Japon (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico, 2002)
32. Waking Life (Richard Linklater, USA, 2001)
33. Bully (Larry Clark, USA, 2001)
34. Vibrator (Ryuichi Hiroki, Japan, 2003)
35. Crashing (Gary Walkow, USA, 2007)
36. Tout est pardonné (Mia Hansen-Løve, France, 2007)
37. Darling (Johan Kling, Sweden, 2007)
38. Triple Agent (Eric Rohmer, France, 2004)
39. Chopper (Andrew Dominic, Australia, 2000)
40. Zero Day (Ben Coccio, USA, 2003)
41. Happiness (Hur Jin-ho, South Korea, 2007)
42. Lady Chatterley (Pascale Ferran, France/Belgium, 2006)
43. Woman on the Beach (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea, 2006)
44. Haut les coeurs! (Solveig Anspach, France, 1999)
45. The Garden of Earthly Delights (Lech Majewski, UK/Italy/Poland, 2004)
46. Or (Mon Tresor) (Keren Yedaya, Israel, 2004)
47. Toutes ces belles promesses (Jean-Paul Civeyrac, France, 2003)
48. Ken Park (Larry Clark and Ed Lachman, USA, 2002)
49. Ten (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran, 2002)
50. Jealousy Is My Middle Name (Park Chan-ok, South Korea, 2002)
51. Shara (Naomi Kawase, Japan, 2003)
52. Return of the Idiot (Saša Gedeon, Czech Republic, 1999)
53. The World (Jia Zhang-ke, China, 2004)
54. Roberto Succo (Cedric Kahn, France, 2000)
55. Be My Star (Valeska Grisebach, Germany, 2001)
56. Avant que j'oublie (Jacques Nolot, France, 2007)
57. The Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson, USA, 2007)
58. Stella (Sylvia Verheyde, France, 2008)
59. Grain in Ear (Zhang Lu, China/South Korea, 2005)
60. Nights and Weekends (Joe Swanberg and Greta Gerwig, USA, 2008)
61. Mid-August Lunch (Gianni Di Gregorio, Italy, 2008)
62. Turning Gate (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea, 2002)
63. Wolfsbergen (Nanouk Leopold, Netherlands, 2007)
64. Jesus, You Know (Ulrich Seidl, Austria, 2003)
65. Paris: XY (Zeka Laplaine, France, 2001)
66. The Believer (Henry Bean, USA, 2001)
67. All or Nothing (Mike Leigh, UK, 2002)
68. Crimson Gold (Jafar Panahi, Iran, 2003)
69. No Rest for the Brave (Alain Guiraudie, France, 2003)
70. Forty Shades of Blue (Ira Sachs, USA, 2005)
71. C.R.A.Z.Y. (Jean-Marc Vallée, Canada, 2005)
72. Rain Dogs (Ho Yuhang, Malaysia, 2006)
73. Catastrophe (David Mamet, Ireland, 2000)
74. The Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (Hong Sang-Soo, South Korea, 2000)
75. Johanna (Kornel Mundruczó, Hungary, 2005)
76. A Tale of Cinema (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea, 2005)
77. Brick (Rian Johnson, USA, 2005)
78. Beat (Gary Walkow, USA, 2000)
79. Head-On (Fatih Akin, Germany/Turkey, 2004)
80. One More Day (Babak Payami, Iran, 1999)
81. The Sopranos (pilot) (David Chase, USA, 1999)
82. Boogie (Radu Muntean, Romania, 2008)
83. Hannah Takes the Stairs (Joe Swanberg, USA, 2007)
84. The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, USA, 2001)
85. The Fluffer (Richard Glatzer and Wash West, USA, 2001)
86. The Paper Will Be Blue (Radu Muntean, Romania, 2006)
87. The Banishment (Andrei Zyvagintsev, Russia, 2007)
88. Platform (Jia Zhang Ke, China, 2000)
89. Dog Days (Ulrich Seidl, Austria, 2001)
90. Harmful Insect (Akihiko Shiota, Japan, 2001)
91. The Days Between (Maria Speth, Germany, 2001)
92. Idle Running (Janez Burger, Slovenia, 1999)
93. Four Nights with Anna (Jerzy Skolimowski, Poland, 2008)
94. The Return (Andrei Zvyagintsev, Russia, 2003)
95. Cinema, Aspirin and Vultures (Marcelo Gomes, Brazil, 2005)
96. Qui a tué Bambi? (Gilles Marchand, France, 2003)
97. The Tuner (Kira Muratova, Russia, 2004)
98. Mutum (Sandra Kogut, Brazil, 2007)
99. The Embalmer (Matteo Garrone, Italy, 2002)
100. Palindromes (Todd Solondz, USA, 2004)

The decade shows its strength in long lists like this. The 00s had a great bench: talent showed up in more places than ever before, and in as great quantity as in any period of cinema history.

Experimentalism in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)

2009-12-03T20:58:00.003-05:00

Alfred Hitchcock's 1956 American remake of his 1934 British thriller The Man Who Knew Too Much does not attract as much critical attention as several other Hitchcock works from this period. And yet it reveals quite plainly a growing artistic abstraction in Hitchcock that comes close to blowing his cover as an entertainment filmmaker.

The Sedative

After an unexceptional exposition, in which the protagonists are characterized as rather stodgy Midwestern tourists in Morocco, the plot mechanism is sprung when the McKennas' child Hank (Christopher Olsen) is kidnapped to keep his parents from revealing incriminating information that they have stumbled upon. Having received word of the kidnapping first, Dr. Ben McKenna (James Stewart) must break the news to his wife Jo (Doris Day).

Ben insists that Jo take a sedative before he tells her what has happened. This scene so outraged the feminist sensibility of the students in a Hitchcock class I took at UCLA in 1978 that it's been marked in my mind ever since as a political football, and it wasn't until last week that I watched it without a particular ideological reaction. What I saw was something of a spiritual exercise, not unlike the scene in Torn Curtain in which Hitchcock illustrates just how hard it is to remove life from a healthy human body.

Hitchcock's reasoning in conceiving the scene probably went something like this: "Here the characters must undergo an unbearably painful experience before they can recover their ability to act, and the plot can advance. It is usual in moviemaking to pass over this pain, or to stylize it with a brief evocation of pathos. But I don't feel right about dodging this scene: it renders this movie superficial if I minimize the parents' ordeal. What if I conceive the scene as a problem? The doctor must break the bad news to his wife, but he knows that she will be devastated. How can he get from A to B with as little anguish to her as possible?"

And so the scene must depend on duration: ellipsis will defeat the purpose. And it must confront the mother's agony. It will take much longer than a brisk suspense plot would usually permit. Jo is smart, and cannot easily be fooled. The scene is subtly structured from Ben's point of view: we see his calculations, his reformulation of plans. He tries to push a sedative on his wife with no justification, but it doesn't work: she has taken a pill too recently, she perceives that his behavior is odd, and she resists his attempt to use his professional authority to bully her into drugging herself. He therefore has to hurt her a bit: he lets slip that something bad is going on. Despite his euphemistic phrasing, she is instantly alarmed. "Here's the price of finding out," he says, holding out the sedative. Desperate for information, she takes the pill. Now Ben must drag the story out to give the drug time to enter Jo's bloodstream. She is impatient, but he manages to dawdle until she shows signs of weariness. The bomb is dropped. It's as if the sedative did nothing at all: Jo shrieks in terror and must be restrained. After this unnerving moment, Hitchcock finally permits himself an ellipsis. We see Jo lying in bed numbly as Ben packs a bag, and we realize that the drug has probably softened the blow after all.

It goes without saying that experiments in duration were not common in the American entertainment cinema at this or any other time, and that Hollywood's Master of Suspense was in fact rather an arty guy. But no doubt some regard this scene as an exercise in sadism...and it would be disingenuous to dismiss this imagined charge lightly. There is no doubt that we are being put through a painful experience at a quite leisurely pace. And yet, there is a sense that Hitchcock is putting himself through the experience with us. The scene is more about the discomfort of dealing pain than it is about actual pain or even our anticipation of it. The artist's energy is principally deployed to make us share Ben's problem, his discomfort in using unpleasant tactics on his wife. It is a little fanciful to interpret the scene as being about the filmmaker's dilemma in hurting his audience - but the conceit has some dimension.

The Concert

At the film's climax, Hitchcock once again goes experimental on us. The assassination attempt that the McKennas have inadvertently uncovered is to take place during a concert at the Royal Albert Hall. Earlier, Hitchcock shared with us the assassins' plan to fire a gun in synchronization with a particular cymbal clash in Arthur Benjamin's Storm Clouds cantata. He even played the passage with the cymbal clash three times, in order to familiarize us with the moment when the gun will fire - though we are given no information about how long the piece is or where the cymbal clash occurs in it. As Jo and Ben arrive independently at the hall, with imperfect knowledge of what will happen, we realize that Hitchcock intends to show the performance of the piece (with his composer Bernard Herrmann at the podium) without ellipsis: a nine-minute stretch.

This experiment in duration is not as emotional as the earlier one. The intended victim is an anonymous minister of a foreign country; we are encouraged to share Jo and Ben's horror at the assassination attempt, but the stakes are relatively abstract. During the performance, Hitchcock must keep a few balls in the air: he must show Jo gradually realizing where the key players are and what is likely to happen; he must show Ben arriving, and position him for his role in the action dénouement; and, above all, he must find enough variety of form and content, and create enough development, that the nine-minute visual accompaniment to the music doesn't bore us. The musical performance is elaborately documented, with various elements of the rather large orchestra and chorus highlighted at different times, and many shots of Herrmann conducting and of the fatal cymbalist preparing for his big moment.

Here the effect of the scene does not depend on the exact structure of the visual accompaniment - Hitchcock could have sequenced the footage in any number of ways - but rather on the mere fact that the entire piece is played. All suspense depends on an appropriate elongation of time, but this elongation goes well beyond the demands of suspense. Hitchcock wants us to take home some art with our entertainment: not just Benjamin's music, but the cinematic art of confronting the intractability of time.

Frivolous Lists: Italy

2009-11-10T00:25:00.002-05:00

As I'm attending the Neorealism series at the Walter Reade, I idly put together a list of my all-time favorite Italian films - one film per director.

Paisà (Roberto Rossellini, 1946)
L'Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960)
Alfredo, Alfredo (Pietro Germi, 1972)
La signora di tutti (Max Ophüls, 1934)
L'Assassino (Elio Petri, 1961)
Io la conoscevo bene (I Knew Her Well) (Antonio Pietrangeli, 1965)
Pranzo di ferragosto (Mid-August Lunch) (Gianni Di Gregorio, 2008)
Dillinger è morto (Dillinger Is Dead) (Marco Ferreri, 1969)
Banditi a Orgosolo (Bandits of Orgosolo) (Vittorio De Seta, 1961)
Kaos (Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, 1984)

Without a one-film-per-director rule, Viaggio in Italia, Cronaca di un amore, and Il grido would no doubt have shoved their way in. The newest film on my list, Pranzo di ferragosto, is slated for a theatrical premiere at Film Forum on March 17, 2010.

Návrat idiota (Return of the Idiot): Walter Reade, October 24 and 27, 2009

2009-10-21T00:11:00.002-04:00

No sooner do I discover my all-time favorite Czech director than I learn that he's dropped out of sight. Does anyone know where Saša Gedeon has been keeping himself for the last ten years? He was just 24 when his wonderful short feature Indiánské léto (Indian Summer), an adaptation of Fitzgerald's short story Bernice Bobs Her Hair, was released to national acclaim. He followed in 1999 with the Dostoyevsky adaptation Návrat idiota (Return of the Idiot), which confirmed his star status in the Czech Republic, and even made its way to A-list festivals. Since then, nothing, except for a short segment in the 2004 omnibus film Visions of Europe. He turned 39 this August.

I hope some of you will visit Návrat idiota when it plays the Walter Reade on Saturday, October 24 at 8 pm and Tuesday, October 27 at 4 pm in the "Ironic Curtain" program of recent Czech cinema. In a sense, Gedeon continues the tradition of 60s Czech comedy, with its focus on the inarticulate eccentricity of its characters. But he has an immense gravity that moves his films away from outright comedy and toward a tone of revery and melancholy. Návrat idiota stays close to Dostoyevsky's paradoxical view of human nature, and Gedeon's excellent script maintains the mystery and dignity of a large cast of characters who circle the eponymous, naive hero (Pavel Liška). This is a major work from a director who should be much better known outside the Czech Republic.

Bam gua nat (Night and Day): Anthology Film Archives, October 23-29, 2009

2009-10-19T23:47:00.002-04:00

My favorite film of the last two years, Hong Sang-soo's Bam gua nat (Night and Day), is getting a one-week run at Anthology Film Archives, starting this Friday, October 23. It screens each day at 6:30 pm and 9:15 pm, with added Saturday and Sunday screenings at 3:30 pm.

I noted in my previous blog entry on Bam gua nat that Hong had restrained in this film his usual impulse toward narrative doubling, and adopted a more conventional narrative structure. The spine of the story resembles that of Rohmer films like Le genou de Claire (Claire's Knee): protagonist Sung-nam (Kim Yeong-ho) is emotionally committed to his life with his wife Sung-in (Hwang Su-jeong), who is primarily a telephone presence in the film, thanks to Sung-nam's temporary exile in Paris for fear of drug charges. The main focus of the film, however, is Sung-nam's transitory emotional life in Paris, and particularly his intense, dubious passion for young artist Yu-jeong (Park Eun-hye). Therefore the story creates a tension between what matters most to the protagonist (his married life in Korea) and what matters most to the audience (the Parisian interlude which is developed in detail for us). Somewhat surprisingly, Hong diligently follows the narrative rules of this format: the phone calls to Sung-in occur at regular intervals, and give us enough information that we should be able to predict Sung-nam's behavior at the film's climax. Hong also develops the theme of life in exile with regularly spaced observations about cultural differences between Korea and France, and about Sung-nam's reactions to the life choices that face an expatriate. It's odd that Hong should take up an almost literary organization of his material at this stage of his career.

Hong's approach to generating content is much the same as in his earlier films, but the surprises and disjunctions that he loves take on a slightly different contextual meaning here: they are subsumed in Sung-nam's story and reflect the vicissitudes of his inner life, whereas often in earlier films Hong's formal play is from an authorial stance, a manipulation of story lines rather than an acceptance of their confines. As usual, Hong's raw material is so freeform and arbitrary that we suspect that he took the events directly from real life. What's most unusual about the almost random flow of quotidian occurrences is that Hong coaxes out the latent narrativity in each scene, and presents each event with the emphasis usually given to plot points, even though most of these storytelling seeds will fall on barren ground and have no narrative consequences. There's skill involved in balancing the presentation of these micro-events, which can be construed either as bits of characterization or as red herrings in a surrealist mode. For instance, when Sung-nam picks up a Bible after hearing a stranger talk about its life-changing properties, we are getting a droll glimpse of Sung-nam's thought processes, half-inquisitive and half-superstitious; and we are also getting a potential story development. In this particular case, Hong's emphasis on the Bible is mostly red herring: all Sung-nam does with his experience is to use it to strengthen an excuse not to have sex with his former lover Min-sun (Kim Yu-jin). But Hong will generate many such emphases over the course of the film. Some will go nowhere at all (like Sung-nam taking up tai chi); some will develop large-scale story momentum (like Yu-jeong's exaggerated fear of people plagiarizing her art work). All these small but weighty developments harmonize with or reveal the characters' psychology: Hong is a psychologically accountable director. None of the developments, perhaps, affect the narrative deeply enough to change the film's outcome. If we take a long enough view, all these portentous events can be said to be red herrings, and Hong can be placed in a surrealist tradition.

This ambiguity – are the disjunctions merely a reflection of the disorder of real life, or are they sabotage of good storytelling practice? – is at the heart of Hong's style. If he were not a faithful recorder of the messiness of human behavior, his rather hostile play with form might not be very interesting; if he didn't use narrative tricks to create absurd story shapes, his insights into people might be less compelling.

NYFF/Toronto Podcast

2009-10-19T01:19:00.003-04:00

John Lichman and Vadim Rizov invited me to participate in a podcast about the Toronto and New York film festivals for Current.com's movie blog. Among the most discussed films are Tsai Ming-liang's Visage (Face), Bruno Dumont's Hadewijch, and Jacques Rivette's 36 vues du Pic Saint Loup (Around a Small Mountain).

Chelsea on the Rocks: Cinema Village, Now Playing

2009-10-10T15:23:00.003-04:00

A very pleasant surprise. Abel Ferrara's documentary on the Hotel Chelsea is an inside job, as the director is a former resident, and clearly upset with the hotel's slow transformation from an artists' asylum to a more conventional for-profit business. His interviewees, ranging from famous figures to bohemian characters, add up to a pleasing picture of a New York subculture that is thinned by time but still going about its business and hanging on to its 400 square feet. What's wonderful about the film is how unerring are Ferrara's instincts for how he should insert himself into this tapestry. No invisible interviewer, he irrupts into conversations from the other side of the camera with opinions and obscenities, probably much as he would under any circumstances. Eventually he shows up in the frame, playing a song in Dan's Guitars or delightedly showing a crew member the secret passageway from El Quijote to the Chelsea lobby. Yet there is no sense of Ferrara stealing the show: he is more than generous to the parade of aging hipsters on display, and has a witty way of balancing his sense of showmanship with his pleasure in revealing the filmmaking mechanism. Though former Chelsea proprietor Stanley Bard is the hero of the film, Ferrara does not cut away from the residents' occasional negative reminiscences of him; nor does he excise his own weird outburst at one point. Beneath Ferrara's persona of filmmaker-as-curmudgeon is a powerful and by no means simplistic attitude toward how to be a filter and how to be a mirror. Chelsea on the Rocks is currently at the Cinema Village, with shows daily at 5:20 pm and 9:55 pm.

Al Momia (The Night of Counting the Years): Walter Reade, Friday, October 9, 2009

2009-10-05T22:57:00.003-04:00

A fixture on lists of the greatest Arabic films, rarely screened in the US, Al Momia (1969; released here in 1975 with the lovely title The Night of Counting the Years) is the only completed feature film by one Shadi Abdel Salam, who had previously served as an art director and costume designer in the Egyptian film industry. Set in the 1880s, the film is based on the real-life story of a Egyptian rural community who survive by raiding ancient tombs and selling the antiquities to foreign black-marketeers. Roberto Rossellini, who employed Abdel Salam as set designer for his Mankind's Fight for Survival TV series, is said to have helped the director find backing for the film; but its contained compositions, striking use of shadow and light, and stylized performance style (the actors are obliged to use classical Arabic) place Abdel Salam more in the tradition of Murnau. If you can't make it out to the Walter Reade for Al Momia's screening this Friday, October 9 at 6:15 pm, you can find English-subtitled versions of the film on Google Video (parts one and two) and at the Internet Archive.

Life During Wartime: New York Film Festival, October 10 and 11, 2009

2009-10-05T22:54:00.000-04:00

I'll be writing about a number of Fall 2009 films in my Toronto wrap-up for Senses of Cinema, so I don't want to scoop myself. But, if you've ever liked Todd Solondz (that should weed a few of you out), catch his new film Life During Wartime (a sequel to Solondz's 1998 Happiness) at Alice Tully Hall on Saturday, October 10 at 9 pm or Sunday, October 11 at 11 am. It's my favorite among the New York Film Festival slate so far.

Land and Sons: Scandinavia House, October 1 and 3, 2009 (screenings cancelled)

2009-09-26T16:06:00.010-04:00

Scandinavia House, whose fine weekly screenings are one of the better kept secrets of the NYC film scene, is showing Ágúst Guðmundsson's 1980 Land og synir (Land and Sons) as part of its current Icelandic film series. I saw the film at Filmex 81, and wrote about it in the L.A. Reader at the time: "An intelligent, quietly graceful debut by director-screenwriter Ágúst Guðmundsson, which deserves better than to be known as the most successful Icelandic film. The story deals with a subject also treated in Bergman's Faro Document 1979: the younger generation's unwillingness to continue working the often-unprofitable farms that were a way of life to the parents. A restless son (Sigurður Sigurjónsson), prepared to leave Iceland for the Danish mainland, is given pause by his awareness of tradition and his awakening love for his neighbor's daughter (Guðný Ragnarsdóttir). The film's great virtue is the calm and gravity with which it treats this dilemma: Guðmundsson's thoughtful, literate script provides each of the characters with his or her own respectable justifications, and the awesome Icelandic landscape and the parable-like narrative unobtrusively create a mood of universality. Land and Sons is not the type of film to create a stir at a film festival, but it manages to be effectively entertaining as it slowly unfolds its understated despair." It screens on Thursday, October 1 at 6:30 pm and Saturday, October 3 at 3 pm.

Later that same day: thanks to Kevin Helfenbein for pointing out to me that Scandinavia House has cancelled its screenings of Land og synir, and has substituted Guðmundsson's 2001 Mávahlátur (The Seagull's Laughter), which had a brief theatrical run in NYC in early 2004. Mávahlátur isn't a bad film at all, actually: the story, about a small Icelandic town adjusting to a now-glamorous native daughter returned from the US, could have easily skewed noncomformist/middlebrow, but Guðmundsson fills it with nice behavioral touches. Still, I'm sorry not to get another look at Land og synir.

La vie de famille: BAM, September 22, 2009

2009-09-21T23:54:00.004-04:00

Those of you who missed the amazing Jacques Doillon retrospective at FIAF this spring should make an effort to get to BAM on Tuesday for Doillon's 1985 stunner La vie de famille, screening in BAM's Juliette Binoche tribute and by no means guaranteed to make future NYC appearances. (The screening was originally scheduled for Wednesday, September 23, but moved to the 22nd.) A sunlit road movie that transposes the last-romantic-couple formula to accommodate a father (Sami Frey) and his precocious young daughter (Mara Goyet), La vie de famille is a fantasy of cross-generation communion that stylizes its characters' verbal fluency in order to peer more deeply into the painful tangle of familial emotion. Among the film's many virtues is an evolving use of video diary to push intimacy to the point of fulfillment/exhaustion/sorrow. Showtimes are 4:30 pm, 6:50 pm, and 9:15 pm.

Only Angels Have Wings

2009-08-26T00:21:00.003-04:00

Only Angels Have Wings is an annunciation: already a major director, Howard Hawks here becomes a definition of cinema. And yet Angels is not radically different from previous Hawks films, nor a model of seamless perfection.

One's first thought might be that Hawks benefitted from an evocative visual plan, courtesy of Lionel Banks' art design and Joseph Walker's dazzling, Oscar-nominated cinematography. But Hawks exploits that plan with a directorial freedom greater than he had previously permitted himself. More than ever before in his work, we experience the set as an actors' hangout, a place to linger over drinks, to come together in musical interludes, to catnap while waiting for the mail plane to return.

Hawks always liked to send strong genre signals, in order to increase the frisson when acting and action play out quicker, quieter, more informally than the genre backdrop leads us to expect. And the beginning of Angels is a genre pileup of major proportions. The traffic and bric-a-brac of the port of Barranca are swirled together with lively non-stop south-of-the-border music, and main characters are introduced gradually as the party travels from the streets into the Dutchman's lively restaurant/hotel/airport. Hawks and his screenwriters (Jules Furthman gets the credit, but a host of others participated, including Anne Wigton, who seems to have devised the basic story concept) introduce the love story and the comic relief early, but instinctively hold off on the film's really distinctive elements until its first set piece, the tense team effort to guide Joe Souther's plane home. The extraordinary impact of this scene depends upon Hawks discarding genre trappings a bit at a time, stripping the set and the performances of adornments, leaving us exposed to darkness and fog. The peak moment is when airline boss Geoff Carter (Cary Grant) impatiently orders that the musicians in the café stop playing: the order is passed along in the background, and after a few seconds the movie's chief genre signifier drops off the sound track, leaving ominous silence.

Only Angels Have Wings has an unusual structure that bodes well for Hawks' future career. The film's first and last thirds are devoted to lengthy, well-orchestrated dramatic interludes, centered on action and suspense while weaving in other story threads. No doubt Hawks' most dazzling coup is the Joe Souther interlude, with its surprising and understated expansion of the character of Kid (Thomas Mitchell), Geoff's second-in-command, who reveals both an unusual skill at tracking Joe's plane and an uncanny symbiosis with Geoff. If the biplane flight at the climax is inevitably less evocative and suspenseful, it takes us closer to the film's emotional center, with wild-eyed Thomas Mitchell and pulled-in Richard Barthelmess shoved together in a tiny cockpit, neither one revealing all his mystery, different acting styles checking each other out, competing archetypes of Hawksian existentialism.

Between these two integrated dramatic interludes, the film's middle third, alternating between chit-chat at the Dutchman's and adventures in the flying trade, is more meandering and lighter on plot than any previous Hawks passage. Yet this looser middle section points the way into Hawks' future: it contains the highest concentration of uninhibited behavioral play, the reflexive fun-on-a-movie-set that Hawks would hang onto after he had stripped away every other component of his style. Geoff and Kid wrestling for possession of Kid's double-headed coin, or Geoff patting the Dutchman's head while talking baby talk to him, belongs to a non-narrative, almost Warhol-like layer of the Hawks universe that can be regarded as either foreground or background, depending on where we focus our eyes.

As Hawks' directorial personality flowers in Angels, so do his idiosyncrasies. Love interest Bonnie Lee (Jean Arthur) perhaps suffers from the competing subplots that flourish in this relaxed environment, to the point where she has to draw a gun on Geoff at the climax to regain lost dramatic stature. The odd character dynamic between Geoff and the disgraced Kilgallen (Barthelmess) - Geoff has great empathy for Kilgallen's plight, yet treats him with contempt to his face - will surface again in later Hawks films, where it will sometimes be mysteriously labeled as a form of therapy. Angels also sees Hawks beginning to convert his world view into an ethos, with both Bonnie and Kilgallen's wife Judy (Rita Hayworth) forced to capitulate to Geoff's ideas of right and wrong. Some viewers may be fazed by the full revelation of Hawks' personality - and yet this is what we have to deal with when an artist becomes so confident and so comprehensive that the cinema becomes subordinate to him instead of the other way around.

Ramrod and Pitfall: Anthology Film Archives, August 18, 2009

2009-08-17T18:52:00.003-04:00

A piece I wrote on André de Toth's Ramrod (1947) and Pitfall (1948) is up at the Auteurs' Notebook. The films play once more in Anthology Film Archives' One-Eyed Auteurs series, on Tuesday, August 18: Pitfall at 7 pm, Ramrod at 9 pm.

The Small Back Room

2009-08-11T23:02:00.005-04:00

The 1949 The Small Back Room may be Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's best film (the competition is Black Narcissus, I'd say), but it lacks the exotic or fantastic subject matter with which the filmmakers are associated, and in fact makes a concerted effort to hunker down in the midst of everyday, tedious life. It's fun to describe it as a film about an alcoholic bomb defuser, but that logline misses the mood altogether.

The title points the way: the protagonists work in a tiny, barely furnished, anonymous office in 1943 London, for a government entity that exerts influence on the 1943 British war effort but escapes scrutiny. Explosives specialist Sammy Rice (David Farrar), still not adjusted to the loss of a leg and the relentless pain of wearing a prosthesis, is hiding in back-room life, hesitant to emerge from the shadow of his bosses, battling alcoholism, and unable to accept fully the love of his girlfriend and coworker Susan (Kathleen Byron).

The mundane world envelopes and practically mocks Sammy; and yet P&P characteristically give it a stylized appeal. Sammy is introduced sitting at a very crowded pub, appearing at the end of a low-angle tracking shot that follows a jostled bartender delivering a message. When Susan and an Army captain (a young Michael Gough) arrive at the bar to find Sammy, an overhead shot shows them taking the wrong path in the labyrinth of pubgoers before the bartender points Sammy out. There is no narrative reason for the wrong turn, but the mood of good-natured, oblivious, encompassing quotidian life will be developed, in restaurants where functionaries seek Sammy out for tidbits of information, or in clubs attended routinely by the lovers on Wednesday nights. One of the most striking scenes takes place in a lurching underground train where Sammy and Susan huddle in their seats, Sammy trying to ignore the pain in his leg. The camera surprises us by tracking in and out on the couple in the confined space, as hordes of Londoners evacuate the foreground of the shot at stops, then fill it again. Eventually the couple stand up, and the scene ends with the train light momentarily blinking out, casting Sammy and Susan into semi-darkness as the camera withdraws and the car hurtles on. This visual drama is expended on a rather simple and unassuming scene. In a way, P&P are playing at expressionism, externalizing the suffering of the fellow in the corner seat. But the routine of rush hour underground travel is unthreatening and depicted with amusing human detail. The mundane environment is not just a backdrop or a metaphor: it's part of the film's subject.

The Small Back Room is probably P&P's most intimate and human-scaled film, attentive to the ebb and flow of Sammy and Susan's struggle for survival as a couple: the small humiliations of office life; the uneasy symbolism of the man and woman's adjacent, connected apartments; the way pain is banked and nurtured when breakup becomes a possibility. But the profusion of scaled-down observation is the cover for a capital-R Romantic battle for Sammy's soul, rendered by Farrar and Byron with full-bodied emotionality. Farrar, an actor who naturally projects force and virility, alternates here between bitterness and a childlike vulnerability: Sammy clenches Susan's hand to ward off pain, or crumples on her breast with a barely audible sigh.

Just when alcohol and self-destructiveness are about to claim the love relationship, a slow-building suspense story emerges from among the subplots, announcing its primacy with a beautiful, unreal image: a lonely moonlit beach, with an unexploded German bomb protruding from the sand, marked with a flag and guarded by a soldier. The image speaks of paradise, of the bomb waiting for Sammy at the edge of the known world, far from the torture of his daily life. Beneath the beauty, there is a threat - the bombs have taken several lives already, and we have witnessed the last agonies of their most recent victim - but beneath the threat there is more beauty, as Sammy is plainly receiving his final wake-up call. The climax of the film, played out with the sound of the ocean and seagulls for counterpoint, manipulates point of view to place us, with Sammy and the bomb, on a peaceful metaphysical plain where all mundane concerns drop away. And if this intense transformation of the film's form should make us feel that Sammy's personal transformation might be possible as well, then so much the better for the drama.

The Garden of Earthly Delights

2009-08-08T00:31:00.004-04:00

Lech Majewski's beautiful 2004 feature-length video The Garden of Earthly Delights is at the same time a clear piece of storytelling, albeit in a modernist mode, and a remarkably free exercise in the association of images and sounds. The film's beauty is the result of these two layers being carefully and continually linked.

The gimmick (not too strong a word, because it requires sleight of hand to pass it off as plausible; the work occasionally shows) is that a couple videotapes themselves almost continuously, partly because they are creating an experimental video piece based on the eponymous Bosch painting, partly because of the man's habits, and partly because of a dire medical problem which the video helps them come to terms with. We are introduced to the complexities of the situation gradually, with information doled out as it enters the visual field of the camera.

But the film's appeal is not conceptual: it grows from the power and density of Majewski's audiovisual images. One sees the actors handling the camera in a number of scenes, but Majewski gets the cinematographer's credit, and the seemingly casual video work is tunneled through with labyrinthine depth compositions and striking color and texture juxtapositions. Complicated pan-and-zoom movements are bracketed with simple home-movie visual language. The accumulated effect of the subtly larger-than-life imagery is to impart a sense of grandeur to the travails of the game but afflicted couple.

The premise of amateur self-documentation justifies a great deal of randomness and even confusion in what images are presented. It's fascinating that the tiniest dose of narrative is enough to alter our relationship (mine, anyway) to the torrent of sights and sounds. At any rate, by allowing us to piece together a story, Majewski lifts from the imagery the burden of providing unity to the movie, and assigns to it the role of providing entropy.

Enjoying the discipline of providing linkage between form and fiction, Majewski marks each evolution of the story with a small style shift, starting with the surprising pan that reveals the video camera in a mirror. Playing off the essentially exhibitionistic nature of the couple's project, Majewski chooses to reveal the illness story through the surprising mise-en-scene of the woman trying for once to avoid her lover's camera.

The Garden of Earthly Delights is, among other things, a strikingly physical rendering of a heterosexual relationship. The man (Chris Nightingale) and the woman (Claudine Spiteri) disrobe and couple frequently in the course of their Bosch-based charades, and the remote, unattended camera both justifies their shyness and heightens the tactility of the sexual imagery. In addition, the contemplation of death in this movie is expressed in bodily, even chemical terms. The nonprofessional actors are chosen to some extent because their physiques lend themselves to a pictorial allegory of classical male and female beauty. And yet Majewski manages to give the characters psychology, albeit in large strokes that do not compromise their symbolic status. Though the woman is both the visual and narrative center of the film, the man is the more mysterious and ultimately the more poignant character: while the woman confronts death with a philosophical quest, the man reacts with mute pain and withdrawal, and with a desire to cross the gender barrier and merge with the beloved object. That Majewski is as engaged with people as he is confident about form marks him as a major filmmaker and not just a talented one.

I do not believe in a sharp division between film and video: if Bazin could find identity between cinema and the process of making death masks, I think we should be able to appreciate the common ground between emulsion and pixels. But it was my pleasure to see two films last month in quick succession - the Majewski, and Jun Ichikawa's 2008 short feature Buy a Suit - where unpolished video images take on a beauty that is partly due to the narrative utility of the video, to the appropriateness of using an inconspicuous, consumer-affordable recording device for these particular stories. Of course, the beauty is partly due as well to a spatial and compositional authority that crosses media.

Jules et Jim

2009-08-05T00:21:00.003-04:00

There's not much new left to say about this magnificent, well-appreciated film after all these years. Still, Truffaut doesn't get enough credit for finding the passageway to a form of cinematic expression that puts narrative and the artist's commentary on a fluid continuum. As a punishment for making postmodernism look easy, Truffaut is too often pegged as the McCartney/Donovan to Godard's Lennon/Dylan, where it might be more accurate to regard him as a Joyce or Proust to Godard's Brecht.

Truffaut's way of making experimentalism commercial was to create a brazenly impressionistic cinema of the mind, and then to include, as casually as an afterthought, the cinema's traditional role - the documentation of reality - as one component of mental life. So the representational is present in Truffaut, but encapsulated, so to speak, in a container of shifting subjectivity.

In this light, we can understand why Truffaut does not have and does not need a strong sense of space, why his compositions need not come together, why the sequencing of shots in his films can be quite arbitrary. Truffaut merely alludes to external reality. He sacrifices the camera's authoritative rendering of the world in favor of a more abstract description of mental states. The elongation of time via overlapping cuts (i.e., Catherine jumping into the Seine - a common figure of style in Truffaut) and the intensification of the camera's gaze via a barrage of unexpected, jaggedly edited closeups (i.e., the depiction of the Adriatic statue, or the later comparison of Catherine's smile to the statue's) are blatant declarations that the film's form is refracted through and scattered by memory and emotions.

Truffaut's expression of subjectivity is strongly linked in Jules et Jim and other films to his bold enlistment of literature on the cinema's behalf. Putting the words of the novelist on the soundtrack in abundance is a way of telling the audience that the fascination of storytelling, which induces a present-tense state of mind, has already been accomplished in another medium. Whereas Truffaut's filming is anything but novelistic, and suggests rather the phantasmagoria of experience that swirls around our orderly narrative-making impulse.

The film's script (here's an online transcription of the dialogue in English), by Truffaut and Jean Gruault from Roché's novel, is a startling and brilliant amalgam of literary description and highly abstract passages of poeticized dialogue. (Read the "Catch me!" scene, where Catherine begins her colonization of Jim, to see how purely stylized and absurdist Truffaut and Gruault's dialogue can be - and then recall that it precedes and follows scenes that devote many minutes to establishing the line of the narrative.) When Jules recites the entirety of the Marseillaise over the phone to demonstrate that he has lost his Austrian accent, or when he describes Catherine's background to Jim ("Her father's a noble, her mother's a commoner. He's from an old Burgundy family. Mama was English. So she's not average. And she teaches." "What?" "Shakespeare!"), actor and director are united in a playful acknowledgment of their desire to inflect the story with the grandeur of private mythology. Truffaut happily intensifies such dialogue with music or closeups, creating Welles-like coups de théâtre that he uses as scene transitions. As often as Truffaut has been compared to Renoir, and as often as he invoked Hitchcock, he is probably closest to Welles in the way that his films are marked continuously and openly with the amplifications of memory.

If some programmer would screen Jules et Jim annually on the anniversary of Truffaut's birth or death, I'd try to clear my schedule in perpetuity.

Cheri, and the Curious Case of Stephen Frears

2009-06-30T23:10:00.002-04:00

Following Stephen Frears' career has not been much fun for me for the last twenty years or so, but I feel as if I owe that much to the director of One Fine Day (1979), Bloody Kids (1979), My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), and Song of Experience (1986). For a few years back then, I considered Frears one of the world's greatest filmmakers.

If there was a shift in Frears' sensibility after the success of Laundrette and his graduation from British TV to international theatrical releases, it's not that easy to detect. He always considered himself an interpretive artist, subordinate to the writer's vision. Around the time of Afternoon Off (1979) or One Fine Day, he began to enjoy master shots, started moving his camera more deliberately, and seemed struck by a new awareness of the space around people. Technique is merely the handmaiden of artistic sensibility, of course, and the fact that Frears' films no longer look the same is not an indictment. But, in his best films, Frears' technique took him to an interesting, contemplative place. He intuitively grasped that his camera style lent itself to a demonstration of the psychological inaccessibility of characters, and found angles on his scripts that allowed him to emphasize the unknowable aspects of people.

This directorial attitude pretty much evaporated upon contact with the world of theatrical distribution and international acclaim. In retrospect, I suppose that Frears never wanted to brandish such an attitude, and remained true to his conception of the director's role. But there's a practical problem with a director subordinating himself or herself to the writer. A script is a solid thing that can be passed around, an object that every producer and investor can and does scrutinize and try to modify. By committing himself to an interpretive role in an industrial context, Frears risks becoming the servant of a larger, more commercial agenda. And that's exactly what the trajectory of Frears' career suggests to me. It's not as if his recent films lack judgment or taste, but he's no longer negotiating a settlement between what a comfort-loving audience wants and what the filmmakers choose to give. The inscrutability and visual recessiveness that gave such power to his late-television period would not necessarily poison the commercial prospects of the films that Frears now supervises. But someone would need to make the decision not to take the safest possible route.

Cheri, Frears' new movie of Christopher Hampton's adaptation of two Colette stories, offers the audience a number of genre pleasures: lavish décor and costumes, the pleasure of bitchiness as a recreational sport, a self-confident grande-dame protagonist who strikes poses and gets a lot of conspicuously witty dialogue. While I was watching the film, I mostly registered Frears' cooperative attitude toward these tropes. The project certainly has points of interest, most notably the elusive character of Cheri, quite well played by Rupert Friend: unaware of what he wants or even feels, and yet possessing an assertion and vigor that is wholly ineffective in the absence of self-knowledge. In fact, Cheri is exactly the kind of randomly bouncing pachinko ball that Frears might have enjoyed setting free in the shifting visual field of his earlier style. If Cheri feels relatively shallow, it's because the filmmakers want the audience to receive familiar genre pleasures, not because the material doesn't contain depths. The raptures of love are dilated upon with large acting and music cues; likewise the self-aggrandizing sorrow of renunciation. The ambiguity of response and the irresolution that lies between these poles, the only emotional terrain in the film that might really repay exploration, could only be probed at the risk of throwing the audience off its comfort.

Assorted Screenings in NYC: June-July 2009

2009-06-24T19:31:00.005-04:00

Less and less sure that anyone is reading this blog, I think I'll recommend a few films I haven't even seen.

The Hola Mexico Film Festival, at the Quad through Sunday, June 28, isn't exactly suffering from media overexposure. On top of that, the festival buried its most remarkable screening in the fine print of its Special Events pages: Jaime Humberto Hermosillo's first feature, 1972's La verdadera vocación de Magdalena (The True Calling of Magdalena), on Friday, June 26 at 5 pm. Hermosillo, probably best known in the US for 1985's Doña Herlinda y su hijo (Dona Herlinda and Her Son), has gone through a lot of changes in his long career, and I can't say that I've been wild about his recent work, which tends toward camp-tinged fairy tale. But in the 70s he took melodrama and genre more seriously, creating tension between the extremism of his stories and the blank solemnity of the camera's stare. I've never seen Magdalena, but at least two of Hermosillo's 70s films - 1976's La pasión según Berenice (The Passion According to Berenice) and 1977's Matinée - are among my all-time favorites.
Japan Society's annual Japan Cuts series, rather uncomfortably affiliated with the earthier New York Asian Film Festival, contains a few titles I've been waiting for. Ryosuke Hashiguchi's 2008 Gururi no koto (All Around Us), screening at Japan Society on Thursday, July 2 at 8:45 pm and Sunday, July 5 at 2:45 pm, is getting more attention than the director is accustomed to, taking the #2 slot in the Kinema Jumpo awards and performing well at the Japanese box office. Hashiguchi received a little international attention in the 90s, but has made only two films in the last 14 years. After seeing his intelligent 2001 comedy Hush!, I'm eager to track down the rest of his work. In addition, the late Jun Ichikawa's last movie, the short feature Sûtsu wo kau (Buy a Suit), screens in Japan Cuts on Sunday, July 12 at noon. Ichikawa made an impression on me with 2004's atmospheric, visually stylized Tony Takatani. Before that, he kept a low international profile; but he'd been making features since 1987, and some devotees of Japanese film (Michael Kerpan, for instance) regard his work highly.
Moving on to a few films I've actually seen: Marie Losier continues her wonderful programming at French Institute/Alliance Française with the currently running Michel Piccoli retrospective, the highlight of which is Michel Deville's 1973 La femme en bleu (The Woman in Blue), screening at Florence Gould Hall on Tuesday, July 21 at 12:30, 4 and 7:30 pm. The first film that Deville made after the end of his long collaboration with Nina Companéez, La femme en bleu allayed the reasonable fear that Companéez would take the “Deville touch" with her: the film is breezy yet full of cruelty, experimental without effort, light about dark things. Unlike many Deville films, La femme was available in the US on a subtitled DVD, from Pathfinder, that unfortunately compressed the image horizontally - I'm looking forward to a projection in the proper ratio.
Anthology Film Archives has scheduled a week run for Austrian director Ulrich Seidl's latest provocation, 2007's Import/Export, on July 31-August 6, and will precede it with a retrospective of Seidl's earlier work on July 24-30. Seidl is just the sort of filmmaker from whom I usually recoil, with a harsh vision of humanity that is right next door to condescension. And yet I generally end by admiring the directness of Seidl's gaze, and taking it as a needed challenge to the barriers that we erect between ourselves and others for our own comfort. (Import/Export seemed to me rather too energized by the cruelty that it depicts…but I owe it another chance.) My favorite of Seidl's films is the 2003 documentary Jesus, Du weisst (Jesus, You Know) (Saturday, July 25 at 9:15 pm; Monday, July 27 at 7:15 pm; Thursday, July 30 at 9:15 pm), an experiment in tonal juxtaposition that starts out like Jerry Springer and ends up like Carl Dreyer. But I'm also impressed by 2001's Hundstage (Dog Days) (Friday, July 24 at 6:45 pm; Sunday, July 26 at 8:30 pm; Tuesday, July 28 at 6:45 pm) - a fiction film, but the difference between fiction and documentary isn't so significant in Seidl's universe - and 1992's Mit Verlust ist zu rechnen (Loss Is to Be Expected) (Saturday, July 25 at 4:15 pm; Tuesday, July 28 at 9:15 pm).

L'Enfant: Walter Reade, Saturday, May 30, 2009

2009-05-29T23:03:00.003-04:00

When I first saw Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne's L'Enfant (The Child) at the 2005 New York Film Festival, I didn't completely grasp what it was trying to do. I wrote in my journal at the time, "Beautifully executed, with a powerful story hook, as usual for the Dardennes - but I feel less inevitability in the second half, and the ending seemed a bit obligatory." The principal reason that I was looking for inevitability is that the Dardennes' previous films, and especially 2002's Le Fils (The Son), which immediately preceded L'Enfant, develop their stories with an almost syllogistic rigor. Whereas L'Enfant ejects its ne'er-do-well protagonist Bruno (the superb Jérémie Renier) at the film's midpoint onto the unwelcoming streets of Seraing, Belgium, where he plies his unwholesome trade without noticeably advancing the plot.

On my second viewing, at last year's Dardenne retrospective at Anthology Film Archives, it was suddenly easy for me to accept the structure of L'Enfant on its own terms. My guess is that the Dardennes were thinking of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, where the first part of the novel places the character of Raskolnikov in a psychological or spiritual force field, after which change is effected in him in a subterranean way while he goes about the business of life. Dostoyevsky understood that real change in people is ineffable, and that using drama to express a character's change runs the risk of exposing the change as mere fiction-based wish-fulfillment. In L'Enfant, the Dardennes likewise avoid crystalizing Bruno's moral crisis by giving it dramatic shape, but instead contrive a dramatic pseudo-climax within a secondary story: the alarming scene in which a botched purse-snatching nearly leads to an icy death for Bruno's 14-year-old accomplice Steve (Jérémie Segard, in another standout performance). According to the practices of fiction, our intense response to drama creates within us a small-scale simulacrum of the character's upheaval, and helps make plausible to us the character's subsequent change. That the drama here does not relate directly to the change that Bruno must make points up that the flow of fictional pleasure can only simulate an explanation of change.

L'Enfant certainly does not try to recreate the vivid subjectivity of Dostoyevsky's style, and in fact the Dardennes would be the last filmmakers whom I would nominate for such a task. The cinema lends itself readily to impurity and to the importation of effects from other art forms, but, among great directors, the Dardennes have perhaps the purest conception of cinema. All effects in the Dardennes' films are pegged to the phenomenology of photography, to the exterior viewpoint that the photograph enforces on the most interior events. Even the performance style in the Dardennes' movies (and they are underrated as directors of actors) is calibrated to the limitations of the image in revealing inner life. (Bresson often comes to mind when one contemplates the Dardennes - there's some similarity in the way both oeuvres combine subjective, abstract subject matter with filmic styles that deny us the signifiers of psychological or spiritual revelation. But comparison with the Dardennes highlights how much less pure Bresson's style is, how his direction of actors and his decoupage are conceived in opposition to theatrical or dramatic values and therefore depend upon them.)

The Dardennes' effects are incremental, and the beauty of L'Enfant is in the way that these effects evolve out of a descriptive style. The brothers' remarkably expressive camera work starts from the limitation of a cinéma-vérité handheld viewpoint, and then exploits that limitation to create sudden, surprising compositional shifts. Time and again the camera doggedly tracks a character in closeup, only to pan a few degrees in response to a voice or an event and capture an extreme foreground-background opposition. Just as the camera style conceals its remarkable variety behind its documentary origins, so Renier's performance conceals the character's gradual transformation behind his propensity for dogged forward motion, which takes on only a hint of weariness as Bruno's ebullient street hustle carries him into a long, dark night of the soul.

I saw L'Enfant for a third time on Wednesday on the opening night of the Walter Reade's currently-running Dardenne series (which includes a number of early features, shorts and documentaries never before shown in NYC), and I now think it is the most mature and most perfect of the brothers' films, the one that moves most splashlessly beneath the surfaces of quotidian life. Repeat viewings only enhance the amazing scene of Bruno commencing the business of selling his child: as carefully as we gather clues, watch the elements of the situation fall into place, home in on the exact moment of decision, we remain stymied by the inability of the camera to give us an exploded view of Bruno's thought process, and by Renier's and the Dardennes' unwillingness to playact at rendering the unrenderable.

Is it possible that the Dardennes' aura is too 1990s to capture the imagination of today's art-film buffs? I strongly recommend that all of you camp out at the Walter Reade for the next few days. L'Enfant screens once more there, on Saturday, May 30 at 8:30 pm.

Fort Apache and the Fordian Container

2009-05-10T14:18:00.002-04:00

The FIPRESCI web site Undercurrent, edited by Chris Fujiwara, has just published a new issue that includes a special section on John Ford, with 18 Ford films discussed by different writers. The issue includes my piece, "Fort Apache and the Fordian Container."

Cluny Brown

2009-05-08T00:58:00.003-04:00

The Auteurs' Notebook has published my short piece on one of my favorite films, Ernst Lubitsch's 1946 Cluny Brown.

The 50 Greatest Films

2009-05-05T22:46:00.001-04:00

Iain Stott's blog, the One-Line Review, is conducting a poll of "The 50 Greatest Films," and I have submitted my entry. Unless one revisits all the candidates within a short period of time, polls like this are bound to be exercises in "individual whimsical expression" (can anyone name the movie on my top-50 list that this quote comes from?), so please take my list in the spirit of fun. By the way, Anne and Muriel is the UK title of Les deux anglaises et le continent (Two English Girls).

Auteurism Is a Taste, Not a Theory

2009-04-29T23:14:00.005-04:00

No two people who call themselves auteurists will agree on what the term implies. I persist in regarding auteurism as an aesthetic taste, or rather a collection of aesthetic tastes that are somehow related to the concept of film direction. Historically speaking, one can make a strong case that the Cahiers critics, Sarris, and other prime exponents of auteurism advocated real canon change by demoting acclaimed filmmakers and promoting relatively unsung ones. Apart from this evaluative goal, it's difficult to point to tenets of theory that truly belong to the historical auteurist movements.

Nowadays auteurism sometimes seems too obvious to bother proclaiming, and sometimes seems too vague to be worth proclaiming. And yet film direction remains a controversial concept, if one looks at it from the right angle.

If I am about to try to restore some controversy to the idea of film direction, it's not because I want to establish a pure and objective standard for auteurism. I've pretty much given up on that goal: there's no trademark, anyone who wants the word can have it.

Case 1: Gone with the Wind

Depending on your accounting method, Gone with the Wind is either the most popular film ever made, or one of the most popular. As is well known, producer David O. Selznick included the work of five directors, plus a lot of second-unit footage, in the released product. A fair number of theatergoers seemed not to mind.

A few years ago, I posted to the a_film_by group a brief account of my attempt to decipher this bizarre experimental film. (The thread that follows my post contains the usual heated debate about who the "auteur" of the movie is. I am not interested in this issue: I don't believe that a film has a single "auteur.")

Here we have a nontrivial test of the importance of film direction. Possibly as a result of my cinematic indoctrination, Gone with the Wind seems to me positively incoherent. Not that I think it's a bad film: there are some strong sections, and the project in general has an interesting slant. But it feels like different movies from scene to scene. If I were watching a rough cut in Selznick's screening room, I would have said, "David, for God's sake, you can't release this thing! It's all over the place." And yet, for many viewers (and certainly not just unsophisticated ones), Gone with the Wind gives a high level of satisfaction and does not seem incoherent. In this case, monitoring the tone of the direction induces a response that diverges dramatically from the norm.

So I hypothesize that Gone with the Wind creates a significant divide between viewers whose appreciation is closely bound to film direction, and viewers who are at least capable of falling back to a different mode of appreciation.

Case 2: Television Series

Most of the critical acclaim for serial television goes to the series creator, who is often one of the chief writers as well. My impression is that directors are generally engaged on a short-term basis in TV, sometimes for single episodes, sometimes intermittently throughout a season or series.

I don't even have cable, and am not up to speed on TV developments. But, when I do watch TV, I don't seem to be able to suppress my interest in direction, even though the director of a TV series is just a poor thing.

I still think that "Beavis and Butt-Head" is the greatest sustained artistic achievement that I have encountered in the television medium, but, more recently, I've had some very good experiences with "The Sopranos." I first spotted series creator David Chase back in 1986, when he wrote (from a story by Clark Howard) and directed an unusually controlled and expressive episode of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" titled "Enough Rope for Two." Chase kept a low directorial profile until the excellent pilot episode of "The Sopranos," then didn't direct again until the series' final episode, the enigmatic "Made in America." Whether or not directing is a high priority for Chase, "Made in America" left no doubt that he had become one of the most accomplished filmmakers in America, with a light editing touch, a wild surreal humor conveyed through the slightest exaggerations and dislocations, and a melancholy sense of time slipping away through storytelling holes.

I've seen only two other episodes of "The Sopranos," both written or co-written but not directed by Chase. I thought they were both interesting, but didn't feel as if I was in the same universe as that of the Chase-directed episodes.

Of course, one can't expect that a hired director, presented with an existing story line and characters and presumably unable to influence script and editing, be able to compete with a series creator directing his or her own creation. The criterion I'm interested in here is not quality or freedom, but coherence. Because of my tastes, I can't imagine making general claims about a series: swapping directors creates discontinuities too great for me to regard the series as a unity. And yet a great many sophisticated viewers praise or deride TV series on a larger scale, as if the contributions of the series creators were able to keep series from flying apart as the directors are shuffled. Is this another criterion for separating the stubborn partisan of directorial style from the more aesthetically flexible viewer?

Hyazgar (Desert Dream): MOMA, through April 20, 2009

2009-04-16T20:56:00.002-04:00

Zhang Lu, the Chinese-Korean director who garnered international attention with 2005's impressive Mang Zhong (Grain in Ear), has developed one of the most distinctive styles in world cinema, formalist almost to a fault, obtaining its effects via the internal development of autonomous, highly organized shots. His second feature, Hyazgar (Desert Dream), premiered at Berlin 2007 and received a mixed response on the festival circuit. It's a bit demanding on one level, in that its story - of an idealistic environmentalist (Osor Bat-Ulzii), tirelessly planting trees on the steppes of Mongolia, whose journeying family is replaced by a refugee North Korean widow (Seo Jung) and her son (Shin Dongho) - is more ambient than eventful, and necessarily light on dialogue, as the main characters do not speak the same language. And yet Desert Dream is highly eventful from a formal point of view: barely a shot goes by without springing on the viewer an interesting surprise, a visitation of the uncanny out of the stillness of the Mongolian landscape. Typically Zhang uses sound or offscreen space to create an alternate focus for our attention, then pans repeatedly to create a dialectical tension within the visual field. He is so stubborn about refusing to follow action with his pans, even when the material begs for it, that his formalism can sometimes seem mannered. But there is nothing academic about the intricate balance of comedy and bleakness in Zhang's work: comedy from his quantization of events and his deadpan revelations of the unexpected; and bleakness from the way that his characters inevitably find the solitude and emptiness that the compositions have been promising since frame one.

Desert Dream will be at MOMA for the rest of the week: Friday, April 17 at 7 pm; Saturday, April 18 at 2 pm; Sunday, April 19 at 4 pm; and Monday, April 20 at 6 pm. For those of you who become Zhang fans (I rate only Jia higher among mainland China filmmakers), the Walter Reade will show his two most recent features, both made in 2008, as part of its upcoming China on the Edge series: Chongqing on Friday, April 24 at 6:45 pm; and Iri on Sunday, April 26 at 8:45 pm.

The Films of Jim McBride: Anthology Film Archives, through April 13

2009-04-09T08:28:00.002-04:00

Anthology Film Archives is drawing welcome attention to the admirable American director Jim McBride with a retrospective of his early work. Best known for the delightful, lucid 1967 David Holzman's Diary, McBride soldiered on with the occasional independent project through the early 70s, then found his way to a marginal place in the commercial film industry, where he acquitted himself valiantly, finding worthwhile angles on unpromising material even as he drifted into made-for-TV work in the 90s. Other than David (screening Friday, April 10 at 7:15 pm and Saturday, April 11 at 9:15 pm), all the films in the series screen rarely: my picks from among the harder-to-see titles would be the eccentric 1971 sci-fi/hippie drama Glen and Randa, co-written by Rudy Wurlitzer (screening Friday, April 10 at 9:30 pm; Saturday, April 11 at 7 pm; and Monday, April 13 at 7 pm) and McBride's then-maligned, exuberant 1983 remake of Breathless (screening Thursday, April 9 at 7 pm; Sunday, April 12 at 9:15 pm; and Monday, April 13 at 9 pm). Here are scans of parts one and two of a review of Breathless that I wrote for the L.A. Reader on 20 May 1983.

The Exploding Girl: Tribeca, April 23, 25, and 28 and May 2, 2009

2009-04-07T23:33:00.002-04:00

Once in a while a film coheres around an acting performance in such a way that it's difficult to tell whether the director's sensibility is radiated through the actor, or whether the actor's contribution is comprehensive enough to qualify as direction. Zoe Kazan is a phenomenon as the rather ordinary college girl Ivy in Bradley Rust Gray's The Exploding Girl: she acts so completely from within the character that her smallest, least significant bits of business are as vivid as her dramatic peaks. Either Kazan is Ivy - unlikely, as the character is sweet and sensitive but probably not reflective enough to play herself - or her powers of observation and assimilation are uncanny. While we're waiting for clues about Kazan's acting range, we note that her co-star Mark Rendall, as Ivy's best buddy who is secretly in love with her, is also quite good, which suggests that Gray is able to nurture ambient, pseudo-documentary performances that nonetheless have dramatic structure. His verité-style camera is pleasingly simple, a little more stable than the norm, landing on attractive telephoto compositions at key moments. The Exploding Girl has a slight and familiar John Hughes-like story that will probably disqualify it at art in the eyes of many. Yet the drama too is simplified to the point where its one unusual element - Ivy is an epileptic - is deployed so transparently that the story almost becomes a structural commentary on storytelling. The Exploding Girl has four Tribeca Film Festival screenings, all at the AMC Village VII: Thursday, April 23 at 7:45 pm; Saturday, April 25 at 2:45 pm; Tuesday, April 28 at 7:00 pm; and Saturday, May 2 at 5:45 pm.

Pranzo di ferragosto (Mid-August Lunch): MOMA, April 4, 2009

2009-04-04T09:01:00.003-04:00

On the slender chance that any of you are checking your blogs this morning before deciding which New Directors/New Films screening to attend this afternoon, let me put in a strong recommendation for Gianni Di Gregorio's Pranzo di ferragosto (Mid-August Lunch), showing once more at MOMA at 3:45 pm on Saturday, April 4. Making his directorial debut, Di Gregorio, one of the writers of Garrone's Gomorra, places himself in the tradition of filmmaker/stars like Sacha Guitry, Jacques Nolot, late Chaplin: a tradition in which the force of the artist's on-screen personality is used to inflect cinematic conventions, so that drama or farce is nudged toward a level, reflective tone that one suspects one would also encounter in the director's drawing room. I have no time for details now, but you will also see: four wonderful octogenarian or nonagenarian actresses who don't fake anything; a casual, natural lighting scheme that brings out the beauty of the Roman summer sunlight; the best on-screen cooking scenes I can remember; and, if the director attends, a charming and informative Q&A.

Assorted Screenings in NYC: Late March 2009

2009-03-25T16:02:00.002-04:00

A few notes on end-of-the-month screenings that might fly under some people's radar.

1. I haven't yet seen anything in this year's New Directors/New Films program, but an unusual number of the films look interesting, judging from reviews and trailers. The screening I'm most excited about is Alexey German Jr.'s Bumaznyj soldat (Paper Soldier), playing at MOMA on Saturday, March 28 at 6 pm and the Walter Reade on Tuesday, March 31 at 9 pm. On the basis of German Jr.'s somber, atmospheric 2003 Posledniy poezd (The Last Train), I'm hopeful that he will emerge as an important director. Bumaznyj soldat took the Silver Lion at Venice 2008, which has helped get its director out of the shadow of his famous father (My Friend Ivan Lapshin; Khrustalyov, My Car!). I'm also looking forward to Barking Water, the new film by Sundance regular Sterlin Harjo, whose Three Sheets to the Wind was a thoughtful, nicely scaled depiction of American Indian culture. It plays the Walter Reade on Thursday, March 26 at 9 pm and MOMA on Saturday, March 28 at 3 pm.

2. Joe Swanberg's new feature Alexander the Last, which just premiered at South by Southwest, was acquired by IFC for its Films on Demand cable outlet. But a few NYC screenings cropped up post-SxSW, including one this Saturday, March 28 at 92YTribeca. Given the weird, distracting reactions to Swanberg's work, it's amazing that the guy manages to stay focused on the cinematic subtleties that interest him. Swanberg typically pursues the abstract by means of the concrete in Alexander: he puts a lot of energy into observing the reactions of his characters and the way that light falls in rooms, then again into editing blocks of film into a rhythmic structure. The story emerges from the intersection of these two activities, like a musical overtone - and sometimes Alexander seems the dream of its confused, yearning protagonist (Jess Weixler), whose subconscious desires and fears ebb and flow with the sequencing of scenes. Still striking me as something like the American Pialat, Swanberg here moves into Rivette territory, alternating between life and theater à la L'Amour fou or Out 1 - and Rivette couldn't have improved on Alexander's deliciously artificial final shot, an unexpected detour into the House of Fiction.

3. Dreyer's Gertrud, at BAM on Thursday, March 26 at 4:30 pm, 6:50 pm, and 9:30 pm, no longer flies under film buffs' radar, but it just seems right to mention it anyway. Here's Andrew Sarris from a more polemical time: "'But this isn't cinema!' snort the registered academicians with their kindergarten notions of kinetics. How can you have cinema when two people sit and talk on a couch as their life drifts imperceptibly out of their grasp? The academicians are right, of course. Dreyer simply isn't cinema. Cinema is Dreyer."

Leave Her to Heaven: Film Forum, through March 12, 2009

2009-03-10T11:58:00.003-04:00

John M. Stahl's 1945 Leave Her to Heaven is an extraordinary film, but I'm thinking at the moment about what could be called one of its limitations: that it was made at a time when American commercial cinema was beginning to show interest in psychology but had not yet overhauled its genres and conventions to accommodate psychology fully.

Gene Tierney's Ellen Berent is a psychological conception, in the sense that the film makes an effort to motivate her actions by revealing her particular psychology. At various times in the film, she describes her desires, her past, even her dreams to the other characters; and all this background information helps us understand why she does what she does.

One couldn't describe any of the other characters in the film as psychological conceptions. More generally: any character that performs a familiar narrative function that gratifies the fantasies of the audience can't be described as psychological. Cornel Wilde's Richard Harland is a traditional romantic hero, steady in his convictions and conventional in his desires. He runs into an unexpected narrative barrier when he discovers that he has married an unacceptable woman; but the filmmakers do not connect the confusion and passivity that befalls him with any of his personal traits. His inability to fulfill his narrative destiny is due to structural, not psychological obstacles.

In life as in art, the roles that are created for the fulfillment of our social ideals do not permit the exercise of psychology. To the extent that we embody these roles successfully, our motivations are not particular to us.

Hollywood's interest in psychoanalysis was burgeoning at the time when Leave Her to Heaven was made. Films of the period like Spellbound (1944) and The Secret Beyond the Door (1948), experiments in adapting the Freudian therapeutic narrative to a fictional context, seem to indicate that psychology was knocking on Hollywood's door. A generation of Stanislavskian actors lay in wait to reap the benefits of psychology's ascendance.

Leave Her to Heaven was not an experiment like the films I named above. It was a mainstream melodrama made from a best seller, and a major hit for Fox. It's slightly surprising that a character like Ellen Berent could occupy the center of a big commercial genre film; probably it wouldn't have happened a few years earlier. But it's not surprising that said commercial film didn't turn experimental in an attempt to assimilate her.

The makers of Leave Her to Heaven seem to know that psychological characters were a threat to the Hollywood structures they were using. Within the world of the film, Ellen Berent must be a villain: her psychology makes her unpredictable, hostile to genre forms, impossible to assimilate. In this context, all psychology must be abnormal psychology.

What's striking to modern audiences, more conditioned to tolerate psychology, is how real and normal Ellen Berent seems. She acts like people we know: she strikes the wrong tone in gatherings, gets too upset to hide her emotions, is impatient with social constraints, tries to confide in people about her inner conflicts.

I certainly do not believe that the filmmakers (director Stahl and screenwriter Jo Swerling, working from Ben Ames Williams' novel) covertly support Ellen and condemn the socially sanctioned values that the story affirms. But they show enough sensitivity and honesty to take Ellen seriously as a human being, even when humanizing her raises questions about the film's assumptions. Time and time again, we see Ellen trying to speak frankly about her unacceptable desires to a representative of society, who instinctively identifies her as a threat and withdraws into coldness. In each of these scenes, Stahl makes the social representative impassive and judgmental, sometimes using lighting to give him or her a formal, unfriendly mien (i.e., Chill Wills' Thome listening to Ellen describe her dreams). Stahl seems to understand that it is a strain for us to exclude Ellen, that it makes us hard and impassive to cast her away.

No one else in the film is or can be remotely as interesting as Ellen, and the filmmakers deserve credit for making her as sympathetic and familiar as they do, even if they cannot make the leap to accepting her as one of us.

All the Ships at Sea in Park Slope, Brooklyn

2009-03-06T00:17:00.002-05:00

My movie All the Ships at Sea will be screened (on DVD) on Sunday, March 15 at 7:30 pm at Congregation Beth Elohim, 274 Garfield Place (at 8th Ave. in Park Slope), Brooklyn. Series co-programmer Keith Uhlich and I will select one or two short films to be screened before the feature, and will lead a discussion. The suggested admission price is $5.00.

On Realism, Beauty, and "Exposure Crisis"

2009-03-03T14:27:00.005-05:00

As a quarrelsome discussion about the merits of Joe Swanberg was dying down on Glenn Kenny's Some Came Running site, I put my two cents in, and in the process made the following, perhaps excessively ambitious claim:

"…on the subject of the beauty or ugliness of compositions, I'd like to point out that "beauty" and "realism" are opposed concepts, that they will always be defined by their relationship to each other. Realism is always relative to prevailing practices, and the energy and newness that it aspires to, the ability to revivify the mystery of the photographic image, is totally dependent upon tearing down or neglecting or violating something that we've come to expect. When Rossellini or de Toth decided to let the camera shake, they were a) consciously or unconsciously evoking the newsreel footage that came out of WWII; and b) inviting criticism for undermining the beauty of the composed image. Ditto Cassavetes finding inspiration in cutting that evoked the tension of live TV when the control room punches up the wrong camera for a second; ditto Kubrick shining lights at the camera as if he were a street photographer unable to control light sources; ditto countless other attempts to make the image seem alive again. In each case something nice-looking was destroyed; in each case a new generation of filmgoers learned to find the innovation nice-looking."

The point, which I left as an implication, was that comparing Swanberg's visuals to YouTube uploads was not necessarily an insult. This subject is interesting enough that I didn't want it to get lost in a busy comments section, though I'd like to dial down that authoritative tone, which seems inappropriate on subjects as elusive as "beauty" and "realism."

The idea that realism is relative to prevailing practices is pretty well established, at least in my mind. In this longish 2003 post from a_film_by, I summarized my thoughts about the relativism of realism, during an attempt to establish a baseline for a difficult discussion I was having with Tag Gallagher.

(Apropos the examples from that post, here's a brief excerpt from André Bazin's article "Will CinemaScope Save the Film Industry?" published in Esprit in 1953 and translated in Bazin at Work: "It would be equally naïve to believe that the filmic image tends toward total identification with the universe that it copies, through the successive addition of supplementary qualities from that universe. Perception, on the part of the artist as well as the audience of art, is a synthesis - an artificial process - each of whose elements acts on all the others. And, for example, it is not true that color, in the way that we are able to reproduce it - as an addition to the image framed by the narrow window of the screen - is an aspect of pure realism. On the contrary, color brings with it a whole set of new conventions that, all things considered, may make film look more like painting than reality.")

The motion in the opposite direction, from realism (based as it is on a renunciation of expressive possibilities) to beauty, is difficult to nail down. If one considers beauty as relative to anything at all, one is cast adrift on a sea of subjectivity. I tried to get around this issue in that comment on Swanberg by making an appeal to consensus, giving only examples of visual ploys that are widely regarded as attractive.

If I move away from consensus, and risk irrelevance by permitting unqualified subjectivity, the example that is most on my mind lately has to do with the limitations of the recording process. Very often, when an image strikes me as uncommonly beautiful, I note that the filmmaker has challenged the ability of celluloid or tape to register a full range of light or color values. This idea first occurred to me ten or fifteen years ago, when filmmakers began using faster stock that could record twilight landscapes without supplementary lighting while still avoiding an excessively grainy look. These images necessarily hover on the black side of the black-white continuum; but I have an immediate emotional reaction to crepuscular displays of contrasting colors, and I think I have the reaction precisely because the colors cannot be brought into the middle-range sweet spot of exposure.

I was reminded of the "beauty via exposure crisis" theory after a recent screening of Jacques Rozier's wonderful, too-little-seen Du côté d'Orouët (which has recently become available on English-subtitled Region 2 DVD as part of a Rozier box set). In one scene, Rozier uses a subjective shot through the windshield of a car to show his protagonists driving to a remote rural tavern, with the wooded terrain barely illuminated (perhaps only by the car's real headlights). I didn't immediately realize why the darkness in this image felt so primal and threatening. Easier to process was a later, stunning scene of a day-long sailing trip, where Rozier did not (or could not) adjust his 16mm exposure to prevent his characters' faces from glowing an unnatural red as the sun went down over the water behind them.

Shortly afterwards, I saw Raymond Depardon's Une femme en Afrique, in which the filmmaker lets the detail in sunlit images vanish into white to convey an unusually vivid sense of desert light and heat.

Other countries are generally more willing to flirt with exposure problems than the US, but the remarkable oneness of the interior and exterior scenes in last year's Ballast is largely due to the exclusive use of "God's own natural light," as Lance Hammer put it.

Assorted Screenings in NYC: March 2009

2009-02-23T23:07:00.003-05:00

1. If you aren't attending the Jacques Doillon retro at the French Institute (every Tuesday through the end of March), you're missing out: the films are even better than I remembered. I wrote a series summary a few weeks back for the Auteurs' Notebook.

2. Y'all probably don't need to be sold on the one-week revivals of Marco Ferreri's Dillinger è morto (Dillinger Is Dead) , at BAM from February 27 to March 5, and John M. Stahl's Leave Her to Heaven, at Film Forum from March 6 to 12. Each is probably the best film by its director. Here's a little teaser for Dillinger that I wrote a while back:

"The exposition of Dillinger Is Dead feels a lot like other expositions: Glauco (Michel Piccoli) drives home from his job as a manufacturer of industrial masks, greets his wife who is in bed with a headache, sits down to a prepared meal, then decides that he'd rather eat something special. As we follow Glauco around his house and watch him play idly with objects or make small decisions about what to do next, we wait for the event that will get the narrative ball rolling. But the event is slow in coming, and we start to wonder how long director/co-writer Marco Ferreri plans to stretch out this meandering introduction. Glauco browses in a cookbook and begins making a late-night gourmet dinner, listening to the radio while he cooks - and as the film chains little causes and effects together and teases our story expectations, three songs play from beginning to end, complete with disc-jockey chatter. This extraordinary use of stasis on the soundtrack (stasis but not tedium, thanks to Ferreri's narrative sleight-of-hand) shifts us to an indeterminate state of spectatorship: we now know that Ferreri is capable of leaving the film on this mundane level forever; but he continues to open new storytelling doors. In fact, while looking for a spice, Glauco opens an actual closet door, rummages around, and finds...a gun. Does this time-honored Chekhovian signifier mean that a suspense film is finally beginning? Perhaps, but Glauco still has a meal on the stove to attend to...."

3. Celina Murga's Una Semana solos (A Week Alone) is by far the title I'm most excited about in the Walter Reade's Film Comment Selects series. Murga's 2003 Ana y los otros (Ana and the Others) was one of the best debuts of recent years, a gentle mystery story with a keen eye for good performance moments. Rohmer's influence on Murga's first feature was so strong that the film almost seemed an homage, but it's hard to think of another homage this good. Una Semana solos screens on Monday, March 2 at 8:30 pm and Tuesday, March 3 at 6:30 pm, with another screening in the Young Friends of Film series on Wednesday, March 4 at 7:30 pm.

4. Czech director Ivan Passer gets a short retrospective at MOMA on March 6-13. I'm a bit sad that the series doesn't include either Silver Bears or Crime and Passion, the films I'd most readily cite to make a case for Passer's peculiar mixture of Forman-like drollery and unexpected bursts of emotional revelation. Of the films on display, I most recommend Cutter's Way, showing Friday, March 6 at 8 pm and Sunday, March 8 at 6 pm. The rarest film in the series is certainly 1974's bizarre Law and Disorder, with Ernest Borgnine and Carroll O'Connor - I never thought I'd see that projected again. It plays Sunday, March 8 at 1:30 pm and Friday, March 13 at 6 pm.

5. BAM's Focus on IFC Films series on March 6-12 is of special interest because some of these films may go to IFC's Video on Demand instead of receiving theatrical releases. I'm looking forward to Gerardo Naranjo's Voy a explotar (I'm Gonna Explode), as I was an admirer of Naranjo's 2006 Drama/Mex. Voy a explotar screens Saturday, March 7 at 9:30 pm.

6. Jean-Marc Vallée's 2005 Quebecois film C.R.A.Z.Y., playing MOMA on March 18-23, was a hit in Canada, but issues with music rights kept it out of US theaters. I wrote about the film in my 2005 Toronto wrap-up for Senses of Cinema:

"A well-deserved smash hit in Quebec before its screenings at Venice and Toronto (where it won the Best Canadian Feature Film award), Jean-Marc Vallée's C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005) has a narrative sweep that is unusual in the Quebecois cinema, where modesty of scale is the rule. A first-person, decades-spanning account of a young man's turbulent coming-out in the ‘60s and ‘70s, C.R.A.Z.Y. dwells nostalgically on period details and on the boy's memories of his family, a crazy quilt of Catholicism, machismo and hipsterism. Working off of the rhythms of the voiceover and the copious music selections (which both characterise the protagonist and serve as the film's true scenario), Vallée and co-scenarist François Boulay arrive at a dramatic depiction of the boy's inner life, which is shot through with the magical thinking and grandiose mythology of early childhood. Playing the charismatic, androgyne hero in his older incarnation, Marc-André Grondin is surprisingly able to hold his own in his lifelong power struggle with veteran Michel Côté's ultracool patriarch."

7. Pontypool, Bruce McDonald's follow-up to his remarkable The Tracey Fragments, plays MOMA on Thursday, March 19 at 6:15 pm and Saturday, March 21 at 8:45 pm in the Canadian Front series.

Stahl vs. Sirk

2009-02-16T12:39:00.002-05:00

I wrote a wrapup piece on Anthology Film Archives' "Imitations of Life: Stahl vs. Sirk" series for the Auteurs' Notebook.

Bam gua nat (Night and Day): ImaginAsian Theater, February 12, 2009

2009-02-08T20:33:00.004-05:00

Hong Sang-soo's superb 2008 film Bam gua nat (Night and Day). which I wrote about last fall, has been acquired by IFC Films for video on demand, and therefore may not get a theatrical release. But the Korean Cultural Society is sponsoring a screening of the film this Thursday, February 12 at 6:30 pm at the ImaginAsian Theater (at 239 E. 59th St.), with Hong doing a Q&A afterwards. No word on the format; let's hope it's 35mm and not DVD. Admission is free if you RSVP to 212 759 9550.

Jacques Doillon: French Institute, February 3 through March 31, 2009

2009-01-30T00:30:00.005-05:00

For those of you who are interested in the Jacques Doillon retrospective coming to the French Institute on February 3 (and I hope all of you are), I wrote up a sort of scorecard for the series for the Auteurs' Notebook.

The House of Mirth

2009-01-24T08:54:00.007-05:00

As I watched Gillian Anderson and Eric Stoltz sparring in the early scenes of The House of Mirth, I thought of Josef von Sternberg, because of the way Terence Davies exaggerates social behavior into abstraction. But the resemblance is superficial. Sternberg opens up a big space between the characters and the way they behave, and then fills that space with his own awareness. (I used to resist Susan Sontag's categorization of Sternberg as camp, but now it seems to me fairly accurate, if one allows that camp can be a serious business.) Whereas Davies loves the idea of behavior as ceremony, and fully commits his characters to it. The cross-currents and complexities in their personalities may eventually be revealed (more later about how they are revealed), but in the moment the actors represent a central idea very clearly and very forcefully.

The beauty of the careful compositions and the elaborate decor also seems to express the same emotional commitment to surfaces. A fascinating aspect of Davies' artistic personality is that he is willing to undercut all the sources of his and our pleasure: not just the joys of elegance and the love of ceremony, but also any delight to be had in the catfighting power struggles that organize the fiction. Some filmmakers might take a compensating spiritual pleasure in Lily Bart's hardwon but Pyrrhic moral discipline as she approaches her destiny - Davies takes none. Thus the remarkable bleakness in Davies' work: beyond the beautifully dressed women and the opera music, there is only absence and death. Perhaps there is a masochism at work here to make Sternberg's look trifling by comparison.

There is an elaborate psychological schema at work in this movie. Lily is not merely bushwhacked by predatory society: she is deeply complicit in her own downfall, reacting so violently against the part of her that desires social position that she destroys her own ability to cope and survive. This theme is present everywhere in the narrative; it does not require inference. The interesting thing is that this psychology barely manifests in Gillian Anderson's performance: Davies wants from her a tragic and ceremonial demeanor, not tipoffs. It's actually quite hard to tell whether there is a disconnect between the material and Davies' directorial sensibility, or whether Davies rigged the story to express the psychology (he did adapt Edith Wharton's novel, after all) and then suppressed that same psychology on the set.

In many writer-directors, one feels that the writing and the directing are of a piece, that they are aspects of the same process. Davies may be a test case for another paradigm, according to which the roles of writing and directing would be separated, and even opposed.

2008 Lists (Long Version)

2009-01-18T18:38:00.007-05:00

Okay, I'm getting tired of tracking down 2008 releases - it's time to move on. So here's my wrap-up of films that received their first one-week theatrical run in New York during 2008. (I exclude films that were made too long ago to feel contemporary.)

The ten-best list that I published at the Auteurs' Notebook needs modification, because I saw Silent Light a second time and got more excited about it. And also because I guess I'll stop my list at nine.

1. The Tracey Fragments (Bruce McDonald)
2. Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas)
3. Ballast (Lance Hammer)
4. Still Life (Jia Zhang-Ke)
5. Une vieille maîtresse (The Last Mistress) (Catherine Breillat)
6. Nights and Weekends (Joe Swanberg and Greta Gerwig)
7. Woman on the Beach (Hong Sang-soo)
8. Before I Forget (Jacques Nolot)
9. The Wackness (Jonathan Levine)

Any film on this list of honorable mentions (in alphabetical order) could fill the tenth slot: Beaufort (Joseph Cedar), Entre les murs (The Class) (Laurent Cantet), In the City of Sylvia (José Luis Guerín), Leatherheads (George Clooney), Opera Jawa (Garin Nugroho), Paraguayan Hammock (Paz Encina), Poor Boy's Game (Clement Virgo), Stuff and Dough (Cristi Puiu).

Films with a lot going for them: Alexandra (Alexander Sokurov), Burn After Reading (Joel Coen & Ethan Coen), Ne touchez pas la hache (The Duchess of Langeais) (Jacques Rivette), The Edge of Heaven (Fatih Akin), Encounters at the End of the World (Werner Herzog), Good Dick (Marianna Palka), Hamlet 2 (Andrew Fleming), Milk (Gus Van Sant), My Brother Is an Only Child (Daniele Luchetti), Romance of Astree and Celadon (Eric Rohmer), Shotgun Stories (Jeff Nichols), The Silence Before Bach (Pere Portabella), Son of Rambow (Garth Jennings), Summer Palace (Lou Ye), Take Out (Sean Baker & Tsou Shih-ching), Waltz With Bashir (Ari Folman), (Naissance des pieuvres) Water Lilies (Céline Sciamma).

Films with something going for them: Alice's House (Chico Teixeira), Appaloosa (Ed Harris), Be Kind Rewind (Michel Gondry), Beauty in Trouble (Jan Hrebejk), Brick Lane (Sarah Gavron), Canary (Akihiko Shiota), The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (David Fincher), Elite Squad (Jose Padilha), Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-hsien), Four Christmases (Seth Gordon), 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu), A Girl Cut in Two (Claude Chabrol), Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh), La Question humaine (Heartbeat Detector) (Nicolas Klotz), I Served the King of England (Jiri Menzel), Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson), Love Songs (Christophe Honoré), The Man From London (Bela Tarr), Mukhsin (Yasmin Ahmad), My Blueberry Nights (Wong Kar Wai), My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin), Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant), The Pleasure of Being Robbed (Joshua Safdie), Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (John Gianvito), Reprise (Joachim Trier), Roman de gare (Claude Lelouch), Slingshot (Brillante Mendoza), Standard Operating Procedure (Errol Morris), Stuck (Stuart Gordon), Warsaw Bridge (Pere Portabella), Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt), Wonderful Town (Aditya Assarat), Yes Man (Peyton Reed).

Films that some people liked but I couldn't get into: Baghead (Jay Duplass & Mark Duplass), Che Part I (Steven Soderbergh), A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin), Frownland (Ronald Bronstein), Diary of the Dead (George A. Romero), I've Loved You So Long (Philippe Claudel), JCVD (Mabrouk El Mechri), Jellyfish (Shira Geffen & Etgar Keret), La France (Serge Bozon), Liberty Kid (Ilya Chaiken), Married Life (Ira Sachs), Mary (Abel Ferrara), Momma's Man (Azazel Jacobs), My Father, My Lord (David Volach), Noise (Henry Bean), Of Time and the City (Terence Davies), The Other Half (Liang Ying), The Pool (Chris Smith), Rachel Getting Married (Jonathan Demme), La Graine et le mulet (The Secret of the Grain) (Abdellatif Kechiche), Snow Angels (David Gordon Green), Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman), Taking Father Home (Liang Ying), Tehilim (Raphael Nadjari), Times and Winds (Reha Erdem), WALL*E (Andrew Stanton), The Wedding Director (Marco Bellocchio), The Wrestler (Darren Aronofsky), XXY (Lucía Puenzo), Yella (Christian Petzold).

Stellet Licht: Film Forum, through January 20, 2008

2009-01-15T19:15:00.014-05:00

Amid the first wave of response to Carlos Reygadas's remarkable Stellet licht (Silent Light), I seem to have been primarily interested in structural issues when I wrote about the film in my 2007 Toronto wrap-up in Senses of Cinema:

"Mexican director Carlos Reygadas' Stellet licht (Silent Light) is one of the acclaimed Cannes titles that has already received extensive coverage - and yet commentators have had difficulty finding a conceptual framework to integrate such hot-button aspects as its conspicuous borrowings from Dreyer's Ordet (1955), not to mention the seemingly self-sufficient virtuoso tableaux that begin and end the film. It's becoming increasingly clear that Reygadas skews more postmodernist than modernist, and perhaps his suggestions of a unified aesthetic enterprise (like the clock that is stopped early in the film and started again after the climax) are red herrings. The extraordinary physicality of his camera style, and his fascination with large-scale systems (natural, organic and mechanical), serve largely to defamiliarize the world; and his visuals can be seen as an attempt to remove camera movements and compositions from their traditional interpretive role, and to invest them with a weight and a physics that renders them autonomous."

After a second, exciting viewing at Film Forum last week (and after a year to get over the shock of Reygadas's nervy appropriation of the Ordet ending), I am less inclined to regard the "autonomy" of Reygadas's images as an aid to postmodernism, and more inclined to regard it as a stylistic end in itself. No matter how structured or unstructured a story he might work with, the impact of his cinema will always reside at the level of the image, of the moment. For some filmmakers, one would need to show an entire movie to provide evidence of their greatness; for others, a scene or a stretch of dialogue; for others, a juxtaposition of elements. For Reygadas, a single image, almost any image, will do. The power of his films does not have to accumulate.

If, as I wrote in Senses of Cinema, Reygadas uses shot duration and editing to ensure that his images are not the servants of the narrative, this can probably be attributed to an instinct for purification. Having attained an exceptional imagistic power, Reygadas prefers to simplify around this power in order to showcase it, rather than to complicate it by an accrual of effects and purposes. As a result, even when a cut in his films is noteworthy, the individual shots on either side of the cut have a sufficient existence of their own; editing in Reygadas does not create sequences that are more than the sum of their shots.

What's going on in these self-sufficient shots?

Unlike many contemplative directors, Reygadas likes short lenses. When he films a thing – a person, or an animal, or a piece of machinery; the same effect obtains in all cases – he gets the slight but palpable effect of space bending around the thing, as if the thing exerts a gravitational force that appropriates the image.

Reygadas cares about placing the thing within the visual context of the world: the landscape or the background is almost always clearly depicted in the shot. But the dominance of the foreground thing in the composition is increased by the short lens.

The stature of the foreground things is often given an added monumental quality by camera angles, both upwards and downwards.

Having given such weight and physicality to the foreground thing, Reygadas then sustains the shot longer than needed to convey information. Often he suspends the movie in a contemplation of the thing, without other compelling narrative interest. He conveys powerfully the feeling that every object he films merits solemn consideration.

For me, the power of Stellet licht isn't necessarily a function of how engaging the story is, despite Reygadas having swiped one of the most compelling story resolutions in the cinema. One of my favorite scenes in the film is almost abstract: an extended sequence of the family's children bathing in a swimming pool, with only a small connection to the story established near the end of the scene. The contrast between the children's easy improvisation and their imposing, otherworldly mass in the frame is uncanny.

Reygadas doesn't take much from Ordet except for the ending. Interestingly, the story of Kaj Munk's play and Dreyer's film is essentially about faith, whereas Reygadas's story is essentially about love and commitment. The ending of Ordet is more of a piece with themes established earlier; the ending of Stellet licht is a more of a radical transformation of the story that went before.

Assorted Screenings in NYC: January 2009

2009-01-07T17:35:00.004-05:00

While NYC film buffs await the French Institute's Jacques Doillon retrospective in February and March, they can distract themselves with a few interesting items on the January special screenings circuit.

1. The four-film Teuvo Tulio retrospective that played BAM in November is moving over to Anthology Film Archives in mid-January. And this time I know which ones to recommend: The Song of the Scarlet Flower (Thursday, January 15 at 6:45 pm; Saturday, January 17 at 2:45 pm, and Sunday, January 18 at 8:30 pm) and The Way You Wanted Me (Friday, January 16 at 7:15 pm, Saturday, January 17 at 7:15 pm, and Sunday, January 18 at 4 pm). Scarlet Flower, which I wrote about in November, is my favorite, and the only one that could be described as arty; The Way You Wanted Me is closer to straight melodrama.

2. Terence Davies gets a short retro at MOMA in mid-January. (The showtimes that were first posted on the MOMA web site have been changed – check the site or the calendar for the new times.) I'm always up for another chance to see the wonderful The House of Mirth (Friday, January 16 at 7 pm and Saturday, January 17 at 4:30 pm) and Davies' grim trilogy of early short films (Thursday, January 15 at 6 pm and Saturday, January 17 at 2 pm).

3. The Global Lens series, at MOMA in the second half of January, seems to me to be mainstreaming a bit in recent years, which is a shame. But I'm still planning to investigate a few titles, and at least one of the films, Sandra Kogut's Mutum (Saturday, January 17 at 4 pm and Friday, January 30 at 8 pm), is terrific. I wrote about Mutum in my 2007 Toronto wrap-up for Senses of Cinema:

"Another assured work from the Directors' Fortnight, Sandra Kogut's Mutum is an adaptation of a classic Brazilian novel by João Guimarães Rosa about the life of a poor family in an obscure rural area, and particularly about the lively, inquiring consciousness of one of the family's male children (Thiago da Silva Mariz). Kogut has a flair for evoking the natural environment, and Mutum grabs attention with its compelling visual and aural depiction of quiet sunlit afternoons and violent rainstorms, gently contrasted with cuts across time. But even more striking than her sensitivity to ambience is Kogut's remarkable achievement in leading a group of non-actors to a simple, full-bodied acting style that shows no sign of either camera-consciousness or staginess: a far cry from the just-say-the-line-and-stand-there approach favored by art filmmakers in the post-Bresson era. Always considered somewhat peculiar by his own family, the young protagonist's real issues are illuminated only at story's end, in a beautiful sequence that plays to Kogut's strengths as a filmmaker of the senses."

4. I imagine that readers of this blog do not need to be urged to attend Anthology's Stahl/Sirk series on January 28-February 1. Stahl's When Tomorrow Comes (Wednesday, January 28 at 7 pm and Saturday, January 31 at 4:30 pm), the best film in the series for my money, is incredibly rare – as far as I know it hasn't even shown on TV in America since the 80s. (I wrote about it a few months back.) Sirk's remake Interlude is quite rare also, but my recollection is that it's far from his best. The two versions of Imitation of Life in the series are generally thought to be superior to the corresponding versions of Magnificent Obsession, which is really a tough story to put over. But I'm going to see everything.

5. I always have a hard time convincing people that Larry Clark is a major director, and I used to assume it was because everyone thinks he's a dirty old man. But Clark's artier provocations Kids and Ken Park have at least some critical following, whereas his superb genre films Another Day in Paradise and Bully are pretty much ignored in the US. Maybe Clark's deromanticized, participatory egalitarianism bores people more than his unabashed interest in sex offends them. Anyway, Another Day in Paradise plays the Walter Reade on Saturday, January 31 at 9:15 pm and Wednesday, February 4 at 3:45 pm as part of a "Positif Celebrates American Cinema" series. Apparently a longer European version of the film will screen.

Naruse films on French Television

2009-01-06T19:25:00.004-05:00

During the life-changing Mikio Naruse retrospective at Film Forum in October-November 2005, I started the Google group NaruseRetro, where a group of regulars compared notes on the series as it unspooled. NaruseRetro has been mostly inactive since then, but Michael Kerpan and I organized the writings as best we could for easy access by film title, and over the years I continue to post all my Naruse-related thoughts there.

In 2008, the French cable network Ciné Cinéma Classic screened a number of previously rare Naruse films, with French subtitles newly created for the occasion. Copies of four of the films are floating around the cinephile community, and I can read French subtitles well enough. I've posted short reviews of Whistling in Kotan (1959), Evening Stream (1960), As a Wife, As a Woman (aka The Other Woman) (1961), and A Woman's Story (1963) at NaruseRetro.

The Big Sleep

2008-12-31T11:49:00.004-05:00

The Big Sleep is a great film – and yet it exposes so many potential problems with the Hawksian process. As a rule, genre is a painted backdrop in Hawks' films, a set of comfortable signifiers that create audience expectations with which Hawks and his actors can then play. The detective genre is a good candidate for the Hawks treatment, based as it is on the perceptual divide between the protagonist and the environment that he or she must navigate and interpret. It's easy to translate this perceptual divide into a Hawksian map of the project: the world that Philip Marlowe explores will become so many genre trappings, and Marlowe himself will move against that cinema-bound world with a lightness and informality that will make him seem more real by contrast.

In fact, the genre is so appropriate for Hawks that it pushes him to a posture that almost resembles parody at times. With so much of the film universe marked off as genre signification, and the protagonist left alone on stage center, the Hawksian urge to have fun can sometimes seem frivolous and even contemptuous. Rarely have the goofy scenes in Hawks films seemed so purely goofy: Marlowe playing a prissy book collector in Geiger's bookstore, or Marlowe and Vivian Sternwood bedeviling a policeman over the telephone, strike me as too strenuous and inorganic a form of reflexive fun. The running theme of Marlowe being irresistible to a stream of beautiful female supporting characters and bit players, likely a send-up of the male fantasy associated with the genre, doesn't come across as much less of a fantasy than what it's sending up. Even the film's opening scenes in the Sternwood mansion play a little too much like a trip to the funhouse: the general's monologue is too literary and scene-setting to let the character breathe; and each of the Sternwood daughters is little more at this point than a genre exhibit that gives Marlowe a chance to show his wit and detachment. (This is not to deny the Hawksian beauties of this opening section: not just the appealing underplaying of Marlowe sweating in the general's hothouse, but also the wonderful reverse tracking shot of Marlowe entering the mansion, framed in that ineffable Hawksian style that conveys both a movie set and an intelligence sizing it up.)

I think the best way to understand the film's greatness is to ask the question, "What causes Marlowe to get personally involved in the case?" For his early detachment gives way to fierce emotionality by the last act. Marlowe forcing Eddie Mars out to face his own gunmen is a driven man; and just before that is the startling concept of Marlowe's hands trembling in fear as he loads his gun in preparation for Mars' arrival.

I don't believe there is a single sufficient answer to that question. Here are some of the components of Marlowe's response.

1) To a large extent, Marlowe is motivated by a spirit of inquiry. This is a reflexive motivation, one that belongs primarily to the film audience, and for which Marlowe acts as our agent. But Hawks is adept at blurring the line between the fictional impulse and character motivation. The film really takes off with the long scene of Marlowe arriving just too late at the Geiger house and finding an array of clues: a corpse, a hopped-up Carmen Sternwood, a concealed camera. Marlowe moves freely about the set like a video game avatar, laying out the available facts for our inspection; Hawks enjoys his time in the house, declines to compress the time it takes for Marlowe to wander the room or search for evidence. The scene is about Marlowe investigating more than it is about the results of the investigation.

One of my favorite scenes in the film is, on the face of it, purely informational: detective Bernie Ohls stops by Marlowe's apartment at 2 am to tell him that Owen Taylor's car was found in the ocean. Marlowe volunteers to accompany Ohls to the crime scene; and asks Ohls a few factual questions as he retrieves his hat and coat: "How's the weather?…What time did that call come in?…What kind of a car did you say that was?" It would have been commonplace for a genre film to fade out as soon as Marlowe's departure was established. The ten or fifteen seconds that Hawks tacks onto the end of the scene are quite relaxed, with Marlowe moving off microphone as he walks to an adjoining room. On the one hand, it's as if Marlowe is using the few moments before "Cut!" to strengthen our grasp on the plot; on the other hand, the rhythm of the scene is peculiarly independent of the story's momentum. Hawks is playing in the space between the fascination of the fiction and the process of creating it.

By the time we get to the familiar pause at the middle of the traditional detective story – then the case is completely closed, I hope this amount is satisfactory, we're very grateful to you. Mr. Marlowe– Hawks feels no need to show Marlowe hesitating over the too-pat solution. Having exposed Marlowe's role as master of the fictional process, Hawks isn't tempted to play a game that he has already tipped us off to. Marlowe goes forward because we want him to, or because he wants to – the difference is hard for us to make out.

2) The Big Sleep is, among other things, a love story, and a rather good one. And Marlowe's object of desire, Vivian Sternwood, is somehow beholden to Eddie Mars, and can't escape his clutches without Marlowe's intervention. Marlowe cites this motivation on a few occasions: "I'm beginning to like another one of the Sternwoods."

From a plot point of view, this motivation is sufficient to explain Marlowe's emotional involvement. But Hawks and his writers are canny enough to know that the love story is not important enough to dominate the film, that the general tone of genre awareness militates against Marlowe falling too hard. Characteristically, Hawks turns this structural prohibition to his advantage, letting Marlowe and Vivian Sternwood drift together calmly and inevitably, dialing down the destabilizing aspects of the relationship (including Vivian's repeated acts on Eddie Mars' behalf) and emphasizing the lovers' quiet, mutual pleasure. The film's final, gentle joke – "What's wrong with you?"- is another way of saying "You may have looked like a plot problem on paper, but you never really were."

3) Interestingly, a much less important character – Jonesy, the penny-ante hood who sacrifices himself for his unworthy lover Agnes – is also cited in the script several times as a reason that Marlowe is determined to take Eddie Mars out of action. Jonesy is treated much more brutally by Mars than is Vivian; and yet it's an indication of how much the love story is muted that this minor character can compete with Vivian on Marlowe's hierarchy of motivations.

There is a reflexive angle here that boosts Jonesy's importance. He didn't just die: he died with Marlowe standing helplessly by in the next room. Marlowe's powerlessness during this incident is clearly a goad to him, as Marlowe himself states. It's a motivation that we, the audience, understand well: the hero is our power, our vehicle to traverse the narrative; any check on his power has dire consequences for our pleasure. So Marlowe's desire for revenge doesn't have to be explained too carefully in terms of his character, as we feel the slight along with him. The subject comes up again as Marlowe loads his gun with trembling hands in the film's penultimate scene: he tells Vivian, "Mars has been ahead of me all the way, way ahead." The pleasure of the genre depends on Marlowe reversing that trend.

Marlowe's various motivations are skillfully meshed. There is enough character-based motivation to let us parse the film on purely internal evidence. And yet the energy that drives Marlowe to ever greater levels of involvement doesn't completely feel like a result of the characterization. In Hawks' films, the balance between the pleasure of fiction – the direct bond between the filmmakers and the audience – and the internal imperatives of the depicted world is a carefully managed trick, almost a matter of sleight of hand. You could call this blend inorganic; and perhaps it can be justified only as an acknowledgement, and a gentle underlining, of the intrinsically inorganic nature of art.

2008 Lists

2008-12-23T15:00:00.003-05:00

The lists of my favorite New York one-week theatrical releases of 2008, and of my favorite 2008 international premieres, are up at the Auteurs' Notebook. Sometime in January, after I've seen all the 2008 theatrical premieres I'm likely to see, I'll post a more detailed breakdown of my year's theatrical experience. The international premiere list will change a lot over the course of the next year or 18 months; I'll post updates periodically on my running list of favorite films.

Je veux voir

2008-12-15T16:19:00.006-05:00

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige's 2008 film Je veux voir (I Want to See), which had a one-off NYC screening as part of MOMA's "The Contenders" series, didn't get nearly as much critical attention as it deserves when it premiered at Cannes in the Un Certain Regard section. Some unkind reviewers took it for a sort of UNICEF documentary on post-war Lebanon, with Catherine Deneuve lending her prestige to a worthy cause. This wouldn't be a completely inaccurate appraisal if it were stripped of its negative connotations, and if the film's extraordinary formal intelligence were acknowledged.

At Toronto 2005, I made note of Hadjithomas and Joreige's A Perfect Day, writing the following in my Senses of Cinema Toronto wrap-up:

"The Lebanese film A Perfect Day (2005) (which won the FIPRESCI prize at Locarno) is an interesting combination of lucid, intelligent direction and evanescent material. The film follows a recessive young man (Ziad Saad) over the course of a single day in Beirut, during which he attempts to have his missing father declared dead, is diagnosed with apnea, dodges the phone calls of his needy mother (Julia Kassar), and pursues a beautiful girlfriend (Alexandra Kahwagi) who has decided to end their relationship. Far from action-packed, the film dawdles over random sensory input and everyday social detail, and the various plot threads seem either too dramatic or too inconclusive, depending on which direction one wants to push the film in. Directors Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige seem quite confident about their strategy: they have a strong sense of location and sound, and their subjective rendering of the protagonist's perceptions is so precise and abstract that they sometimes seem to be making a conceptual movie about the nature of experience. Can Hadjithomas and Joreige apply their considerable skills to a more classical story structure? Or will their future films reveal that such drifting, attenuated material is a necessary condition for their art?"

Perhaps it was my prejudice that led me to contemplate Hadjithomas and Joreige's potential as old-fashioned narrative filmmakers in my little thought experiment. In any case, Je veux voir finds them in a more postmodernist stance, and they wear it well.

Je veux voir blatantly, wittily asks us to imagine its origins as a production. One supposes that Deneuve offered her services to the Lebanese couple, who then had to come up with a project that could contain her. And so, in the film's first scene, the directors and unseen production staff argue in an office about whether or not to take Deneuve on an improvised day-long shoot to the south of Lebanon, though she has come to the country only to attend a gala in Beirut that night. A bemused Deneuve stares out the window as the staff worry that they cannot ensure her safety. Finally she interjects, "I want to see" – the film's title. The directors, playing themselves, load Deneuve into the shotgun seat of a car driven by Lebanese actor Rabih Mroue, whose IMDb credits consist entirely of films by Hadjithomas/Joreige and by Ghassan Salhab (Terra Incognita), the other major figure of today's Lebanese cinema. The filmmakers and their cinematographer train their camera on the stars from another car, and the convoy is off, with the actors left alone to transmit the initial stages of their acquaintance over radio microphones.

The simple plot concept sets up a confusion that the filmmakers use productively. The outer movie, which we are watching in a theater, and the inner movie, shot while the cars traverse broken roads on their way to the Lebanon-Israel border, share the same stars and crew. They also share the same subject, and very often the same compositions and soundtrack. The effects of this confusion can flow in both directions. Events in the inner movie are written large by our awareness that they also pertain to the outer movie and its mythological star. Every glitch in the filmmaking process or awkwardness among the cast members bounces back and forth in our minds between fiction and reality. Conversely, the practical difficulties that disrupt the inner movie register as wild narrative discontinuities in the outer movie. For instance, an unseen official who physically harasses the cinematographer when the car makes an unplanned stop is simply one more obstacle for the guerrilla inner movie, but he punches a sudden and unexpected hole into the story line. Hadjithomas and Joreige play with these levels, finding new ways to lull us into forgetting the inner movie, then to refocus us. It's their way of driving home the age-old question – is there room for art in the face of real-world crisis? – with wit and flair, and yet to preserve a tentative justification for the stubborn persistence of fiction during hard times.

But what really gives emotional solidity to this postmodernist concept is the precision and beauty of the filmmakers' visual-aural plan. Hadjithomas and Joreige give the impression of having premeditated every shot, and their particular interest is in point-of-view decoupage: the separation between a character who watches and the world that is being watched. Deneuve looking through the car windows at the passing beauty and wreckage of Lebanon is filmed with such Hitchcockian intentionality that the film becomes about looking: not just a celebrity looking at an experience she has been shielded from (the inner movie), but beyond that, the gap between direct sensory experience and the state of mind that it engenders (the outer movie). Often the filmmakers cut to a reverse shot in such a way that it barely seems to belong to the same space as what came before – and this anti-Bazinian system is exactly what is called for in a movie about the distance between the protagonists (and us) and the physical/political/phenomenological world. On occasion Hadjithomas and Joreige relax into a more spatially unified mode of shooting – as in the scene where Mroue gets lost amid the ruins of his own childhood village, and Deneuve in turn is separated from him. Whenever this spatial unification of viewer and viewed, mind and matter, occurs, we can be sure that the filmmakers will use it to render us vulnerable to another dislocation. In this case, the visual and emotional bond forged between Deneuve and Mroue is extended into an intimate conversation, in which the younger actor reveals that he can quote Deneuve's dialogue from Belle de jour. As distracted by this overture as we are, Mroue drives the car off the approved route into an area that has not been checked for landmines….

My only reservation about Je veux voir is with the endpoint of the journey through Lebanon: feeling the need for an emotional event that will cap the expedition and turn the car around, Hadjithomas and Joreige resort to a verbal and visual lyricism that feels to me more conventional than the formal play that took us south. But the film recovers with a superb ending, as Deneuve makes it back in time for her gala, where she searches for the disconnected reverse shot that will preserve the experience of the film in her mind. Je veux voir is not only a major-filmmaker alert, but also the last bit of evidence needed to proclaim Lebanon as a hot spot in today's increasingly decentralized cinematic culture.

Bazin on Documentaries, Real and Imaginary

2008-12-12T14:01:00.003-05:00

The welcome recent revival of interest in the writings of André Bazin is already beginning to expand the range of Bazin resources available to English-language readers. Last month saw two fascinating Bazin articles translated into English for the first time and published in well-read magazines.

The more unusual of the two pieces is "Every Film Is a Social Documentary," a relatively early (5 July 1947), short article originally published in Les Lettres françaises, and translated by Paul Fileri in the November-December 2008 issue of Film Comment as part of a commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Bazin's death. Lying somewhat outside the major currents of Bazinian thought (at least as these currents have been defined for English readers), the piece makes a quick nod to "the realist destiny of cinema – innate in photographic objectivity" that has been the tentpole of Bazinian thought at least as far back as 1944's "The Ontology of the Photographic Image." Then Bazin shifts to a contemplation of the dreamlike quality of cinema on the cultural level, a quality that requires the realism of the image, but perhaps only as a vehicle, a carrier. Bazin's description of the resemblance between cinema and dream recalls the principles of surrealism (a word not mentioned by Bazin here), which embraced the cinema precisely because it could give the stamp of realism to the most fantastic and disconcerting images. Surprisingly, however, Bazin's interest here is the cinema's ability to embody the mythologies of the mass audience, an enterprise of which "the sole objective criterion is success." Pivoting again in his long final paragraph, Bazin reveals his optimism that the ciné-club movement and the mainstreaming of film culture will help audiences resist social agencies who would use the oneiric aspect of cinema to manipulate them. Certainly an odd little item for Bazin, but among other things a reminder that cinema's intrinsic realism was less the endpoint of his thinking than a tool that he deployed to other ends.

Much closer to our conception of Bazinian thought is "The Evolution of the Film of Exploration," a piece published in Monde nouveau sometime in the 50s. Cahiers du cinema, which has been reprinting a Bazin piece in each issue for nearly a year, published the first half of this article in its November 2008 issue (failing to give its original date of publication, unless I'm missing it); the second half will be published next month to conclude the Bazin series. Bill Krohn translated for the English version of Cahiers.

This article is nearly a duplicate of the familiar "Cinema and Exploration," a composite of two France-Observateur pieces that Hugh Gray translated in What Is Cinema? But "Evolution" is perhaps more focused and instructive, and introduces one particularly interesting example of cinema gone wrong.

In "Cinema and Exploration" Bazin cites Charles Frend's 1948 Scott of the Antarctic as an example of a poorly conceived hybrid of fiction and documentary; in "Evolution," he uses as his negative example Howard Hill's 1952 Tembo (without citing it by name), and this time his objections could not be stated more clearly. I quote Bill's translation:

"Here's a typical sequence: Our champion is supposedly advancing at the head of a line of porters in search of big game. In the foreground an enormous python coiled around a limb lets its little triangular head hang over a water hole, while three hundred feet away, upright in a canoe, the unconscious hunter heads straight for him. Happily a negro sees and points the hideous beast out to him. In an instant the monster's head is pierced by an arrow. Another sequence, even more significant. We arrive in the forest village of the Pygmies. The little men, frightened, first flee at the approach of the Whites. The camera shows us their flight – better still, it shows us two or three shots of fearful Pygmies hiding in the brush. I'll pass over the shameful murders of a panther, a lion and an elephant with arrows. The poor animals, captured in advance, were visibly tied up and struggling at the end of their leashes, Saint Sebastians of the animal kingdom. I am still astonished by the absence of any protest from critics of the period against a film that presupposed a contempt for animals and for the honor of the hunt equaled only by its contempt for the audience, but after all, the audiences that accepted it deserved no better. In any case, it's easy to see how this presentation implicitly destroyed its own purpose. Each of these scenes that pretended to be raw documents was in fact elaborated and prepared by the mise en scene, and the trick could be deduced from precisely the elements in the mise en scene that were supposed to prove the spontaneity of the event. It is obvious, for example, that in order to place the camera several feet behind the serpent, so that it would appear huge and menacing to the spectator, it was necessary not only to know of its existence but also, in all likelihood, to carry the poor animal, condemned to death, to the ideal spot for a composition with lots of depth of field. But even if we admit that the obviousness of the fakery partly justifies it in this case, because it is in some sense a documentary reenactment, that could in no way be the case with the Pygmies, because if, as the commentary says, they are frightened of the Whites, they should first of all be frightened by the camera so that it couldn't be there to film their fright, much less to move closer to film (with what lights?) the fear on their faces. These images not only prove that the Pygmies in question did not flee, but that they were so unafraid of the Whites and the cinema that they let themselves be directed for this mise en scene, to the point of simulating fear."

I note in passing the deadpan wit of the writing, largely a function of the ease with which Bazin combines multiple grievances into short phrases; and also the persistence of Bazin's suppressed but angry response to the plight of animals. But what interests me primarily about this passage is that it is the most basic statement that I can recall of Bazin's objection to certain kinds of "fictionalizing" film technique, and that the objection here is couched in terms of the integrity of the documentary format. The techniques that are called on the carpet here include expressionist camera placement, editing, and even lighting; and Bazin's point is that these techniques, as used, betray the spirit as well as the letter of the contract between documentarian and audience.

Especially when placed in the context of the entire piece, the above passage bears a strong resemblance to Bazin's famous argument in support of Albert Lamorisse's refusal to use cutting to show the balloon following the child in Le Ballon rouge. This argument, from "The Virtues and Limitations of Montage" (another composite article from What Is Cinema?) also cites a negative example – Jean Tourane's Une Fée pas comme les autres – which Bazin believes makes inappropriate use of technique to portray spatial relations. And in this case neither of this films under discussion are documentaries: on the contrary, they are both highly fanciful children's films. I quote a key passage from "Virtues and Limitations":

"It is very easy to imagine Ballon Rouge as a literary tale. But no matter how delightfully written, the book could never come up to the film, the charm of which is of another kind. Nevertheless, the same story no matter how well filmed might not have had a greater measure of reality on the screen than in the book, supposing that Lamorisse had had recourse either to the illusions of montage or, failing that, to process work. The film would then be a tale told image by image – as is the story, word by word – instead of being what it is, namely the picture of a story or, if you prefer, an imaginary documentary.

"This expression seems to me once and for all to be the one that best defines what Lamorisse was attempting, namely something like, yet different from, the film that Cocteau created in Le Sang d'un poète, that is to say, a documentary on the imagination, in other words, on the dream. Here we are then, caught up by our thinking in a series of paradoxes. Montage which we are constantly being told is the essence of cinema is, in this situation, the literary and anticinematic process par excellence. Essential cinema, seen for once in its pure state, on the contrary, is to be found in straightforward photographic respect for the unity of space."

The memorable phrase "imaginary documentary" links the two pieces. Bazin is clearly moved to the same objection by a work of fiction as by a documentary. And I believe that the aesthetic preference that I have chosen to highlight is in no way atypical of either Bazin's tastes or of his legacy. The point that I want to emphasize is that the Bazinian aesthetic sees fiction, at least some of the time or in some cases, as having the same obligations to the audience as does documentary.

Of course, I do not mean to imply that Bazin saw a simple equivalence between fiction and documentary, nor that he rejected montage and other fictionalizing techniques across the board. (It's interesting that Bazin's description of the offending shot of the python in Tembo calls to mind the composition of the shot of Susan's suicide attempt in Citizen Kane, which Bazin greatly admired as a demonstration of the qualities of deep-focus photography, and analyzed in detail in his book on Welles.) Indeed, the next few pages of "Virtues and Limitations" immediately attempt to provide context for the Bazinian injunction against montage and to limit its application.

But I wonder whether it might be accurate to say that the Bazinian aesthetic requires that the cinema document something, and that whatever "something" is chosen should be rendered with appropriate stylistic abnegation. An interesting piece to read in this context is "Cinematic Realism and the Italian School of the Liberation" (collected in What Is Cinema? as "An Aesthetic of Reality: Neorealism"), and particularly the section "From Citizen Kane to Farrebique," which suggests that comprehensive documentation in cinema is impossible, that "one is compelled to choose between one kind of reality and another."

La Fille aux yeux d'or

2008-12-03T18:26:00.002-05:00

Jean-Gabriel Albicocco's 1961 debut feature La Fille aux yeux d'or (The Girl with the Golden Eyes ) had a small residual reputation when I was a youngster, but seems to have dropped off the critical radar in recent decades. Albicocco made five feature films between 1961 and 1971 before taking a job as a Gaumont executive in Brazil, where he passed away in 2001 without further cinematic issue. I finally caught up with La Fille last night at the French Institute, and I would very much like to put Albicocco's name back in circulation.

La Fille is a modern-day adaptation of the same Balzac novella that Catherine Breillat was slated to shoot a few years ago, with Laetitia Casta in the title role, before the project presumably fell through. The material is right up Breillat's alley, and I'm really sorry that she didn't get a shot at it; but Albicocco's version would have been hard to top. As in Jacques Rivette's recent Ne touchez pas la hache, Balzac's cabal "the Thirteen" lurk around the edges of La Fille, establishing an ominous mood in the opening scenes, then reappearing in the last reel to help the dark protagonist Henri Marsay (Paul Guers) pull off an action exploit. But the swagger of Balzac's criminal heroics is muted in Pierre Pelegri and Philippe Dumarçay's intelligent (and seemingly quite free) adaptation, and held at a remove by Albicocco's distinctive pictorial style. What remains of Balzac's tone is mostly embodied in Henri's contemptuous treatment of his mysterious, nameless mistress (Marie Laforêt, Albicocco's wife at the time). This roughness, part of a pervasive aura of sadomasochism, serves as a seasoning to make Albicocco's visual romanticism a bit more astringent.

Aided by his cinematographer father, Albicocco throws off dense, beautiful images effortlessly, often using too much or too little light to give the aestheticized compositions an overtone of modernist realism. Sometimes the imagery flirts with artifice and symbolism – like the flock of birds fluttering around the girl's apartment during the lovers' first tryst. Other times the camera incorporates depth of space and natural sound to stunning effect. Angled rooftop shots of a geometric, traffic-laced Paris cityscape threaten to overwhelm one of the film's key confrontations, much like the aquarium scene in Welles' The Lady from Shanghai; the final act is introduced by a dazzling travelling shot of the Thirteen flying down a highway in a fleet of convertibles, with a real rainstorm pounding the cars and graying out the image.

The reference to Welles isn't completely arbitrary, because Albicocco attains a fable-like tone (too bad "fabulous" was turned into just another superlative by word inflation) that can't completely be attributed to the choice of subject matter, or even to the qualities of the script. I was also reminded of the modern fables of Michel Deville, who shares with Albicocco a tendency to speak the language of romanticism in order to arrive at a more modern and contemplative vantage point. (My earlier post on Deville gives more information.) Like both these directors, Albicocco uses a wide variety of camera and editing techniques, clearly interested in the effect of the variety as well as the effect of the particular devices. He gives the impression of great precision in organizing shots, but the cloud of visual effects that he creates does not seem to be motivated by service to the story.

I'll describe a scene from La Fille by way of example, though it may be hard to follow without visual aids. Trying to gather information about his willfully mysterious lover, Henri explores her apartment with a flashlight, unaware that the girl is lurking and watching him.

Albicocco places his camera at the back of a previously unseen room as Henri enters, pushing the door open. The girl is hiding from him inside the room, and the door conceals her as it opens to reveal him. The long shot of the two is stationary and a bit eerie, almost Murnau-like, both because of a certain expressionism in the actors' poses and in the way they appear and disappear in the center of the frame.
As Henri enters the room and heads toward the wardrobe, Albicocco cuts to a reverse shot of him, still in as full a shot as the little room allows. While Henri explores, the girl's hand enters the foreground of the frame, holding onto a bedpost. The shot does not clearly signal whether she is approaching Henri or not, or abandoning her cover; it is abstract, in the sense that the gesture is more distinct than its narrative meaning.
A few shots later, as Henri finds a vast array of dresses in the wardrobe of the girl (whom he had believed was impoverished), he begins laughing gleefully and cynically. As the laughter mounts, the anguished girl yells out for him to stop, and Albicocco cuts to a big closeup of her. There is no transition from hiding to not hiding; it is not clear when Henri first became aware of the girl's presence. The closeup occurs as if the interaction between the two had already been established.

The scene is shot and cut with care, but with a mixture of effects: a kind of expressionism that evokes suspense, then character-based drama enhanced by closeups. Both categories of effect are not completely rooted in narrative: the story doesn't quite give the visual conventions a familiar home. We are somewhat surprised even by effects that we know well from prevailing cinematic codes. The effects therefore become somewhat reflexive and commentative, and the film's style is partly characterized by the gap that opens between story and technique.

The idea I'm working on is that the fable-like qualities of films by Albicocco, or Deville, or Welles, are related to such freedom in selecting effects. Perhaps what makes a fable feel like a fable is the presence of a storyteller; and perhaps we feel the presence of a storyteller more strongly when technique is not completely subordinated to the needs of story.

I haven't mentioned the excellent performance of Françoise Prévost as the third vertex of the film's love triangle. In general, Albicocco wedges a lot of nuanced, expressive, scaled-down acting into the nooks and crannies of a film that might otherwise feel airy and fantastic.

Another film by Albicocco, Le Grand Meaulnes, will screen at Florence Gould Hall on Tuesday, December 9 at 12:30, 4:00, and 7:30 pm.

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2008-11-15T18:48:00.004-05:00

This page will become the current site of Thanks for the Use of the Hall at the beginning of Decenber 2008. Until then, I'll continue to post at the blog's original site.