Robin Wood

The Scarlet Empress, one of Robin Wood's and my favorite films

The death this past weekend of Robin Wood, one of the greatest and most influential film critics, is being mourned by cinephiles all over the internet. Some of the best tributes come from David Bordwell, Girish Shambu, Dave Kehr and Glenn Kenny. I posted a couple feeble comments of my own at Dave Kehr's blog, in the company of such esteemed critics and friends of Wood as Adrian Martin, Kent Jones, Joseph McBride and Tony Williams. His first book, Hitchcock's Films, probably the first serious book of film criticism I read as a budding cinephile back in 1970, was enormously influential to me and countless others. I no longer have that mass-market version of the book shown above, but I'm beginning to reread my copy of Hitchcock's Films Revisited, a major expansion of the original 1965 book which he published in the late 80s.

I had already been reading and admiring Robin Wood's numerous books (on Hawks, Bergman, Chabrol, Antonioni and the Apu trilogy) and articles for several years in the 70s when I came across his famous 1977 article in Film Comment, Responsibilities of a Gay Film Critic. It was a revelation to me, still closeted at the time, that one could be openly gay and also a serious film critic who shared so many of my tastes in film. The next year I attended a memorable screening of Brian de Palma's SISTERS at which Wood discussed the film, part of a series on horror films called "The American Nightmare."

Wood's always elegant, lucid prose style and his passionate defense of his favorite films are what make his work so eminently rereadable. He was a brilliant mind who, from all accounts, was also a truly decent, generous and caring man.

UPDATE: Jonathan Rosenbaum's list of Robin Wood's Final Top Ten, illustrated with some gorgeous stills, is a fitting tribute.

Best of 2009 (New and Revivals)

24 City

Frontier of Dawn

The Beaches of Agnès

Following up on my posts about the best films of the decade and best queer films of the decade, here is my tentative list of the best films I saw theatrically in 2009 (subject to last-minute revisions). The list is divided into Best New Releases, Best Films I Saw at the New York Film Festival, and Best Revivals.

Best New Releases
1. 35 Shots of Rum
2. 24 City
3. The Beaches of Agnes (Varda's appearance at the Walter Reade is the Q&A of the year)
4. The Headless Woman
5. The Limits of Control
6. Bright Star
7. Tokyo Sonata
8. Summer Hours
9. Lorna’s Silence
10. Two Lovers
11. Liverpool
12. Fantastic Mr. Fox
13. A Serious Man
14. The Frontier of Dawn
15. Still Walking
16. Me and Orson Welles
17. Precious
18. Night and Day
19. The Hurt Locker
20. Inglourious Basterds

SPECIAL MENTION: Invictus; The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus; Lake Tahoe; Beeswax; Up in the Air; Gomorrah; Goodbye, Solo; Of Time and the City (Terence Davies's beautiful, very personal documentary, first seen in 2008); Julia (for Tilda Swinton's fearless, breathtaking performance); (500) Days of Summer (for Joseph Gordon-Levitt's performance)

Best of the New York Film Festival
1. Wild Grass
2. To Die Like a Man
3. Mother
4. Everyone Else
5. Ne Change Rien
6. Ghost Town
7. Police, Adjective
8. Independencia

Best Revivals (grouped by venue, not ranked)
The Cloud-Capped Star (Ritwik Ghatak, Walter Reade)
Satyajit Ray Retrospective (Walter Reade)
Viaggio in Italia (Roberto Rossellini, Walter Reade)

Shoeshine (Vittorio de Sica, Walter Reade)
Pyaasa (Guru Dutt, Walter Reade/NYFF)
La Rabbia di Pasolini (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Walter Reade/NYFF)
The Third Generation (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Walter Reade)
La Promesse/The Son (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Walter Reade)
The Red and the White (Miklos Jancso, Walter Reade)
Jeanne Dielman (Chantal Akerman, Film Forum)
Holiday (George Cukor, Film Forum)
Wild River (Elia Kazan, Film Forum)
By Candlelight (James Whale, Film Forum)
In a Lonely Place/Bigger than Life/Wind Across the Everglades (Nicholas Ray, Film Forum)
Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (Jonas Mekas, Anthology)
You and Me (Fritz Lang, Anthology)
Screen Test #2 (Andy Warhol, Anthology)
Blue (Krzystof Kieslowski, BAM) (Juliette Binoche in person)
A Time to Love and a Time to Die (Douglas Sirk, BAM)
King Lear (Jean-Luc Godard, BAM)
The Ceremony (Nagisa Oshima, BAM)
The President/Love One Another/The Bride of Glomdal (Carl Th. Dreyer, BAM)
Playtime (Jacques Tati, MoMA)
Terence Davies Trilogy (MoMA)
The Housemaid (Kim Ki-Young, MoMA)
Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, MoMA)
Il Sorpasso (Dino Risi, MoMA)
L'Argent (Marcel L'Herbier, MoMA)
Vivre Sa Vie (Jean-Luc Godard, Museum of the Moving Image)
Vive L’Amour (Tsai Ming-Liang, Asia Society) (Tsai and Lee Kang-Sheng in person)

Best Queer Films of the Decade

There were a number of great and near-great queer films in the past decade, so in this season of best-of lists I thought I'd try to compile a list of the best queer films released in the last ten years. I'll be updating it as I look back and think of more entries. Some of these, such as those of Tsai Ming-Liang, have only marginal queer content but certainly deserve to be recognized. After the first entry, which stands out for me as the best, they're presented in chronological order.

1. Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004)

The Rest:

O Fantasma (João Pedro Rodrigues, 2000)
Our Lady of the Assassins (Barbet Schroeder, 2000)
Come Undone (Sébastien Lifshitz, 2000)
Water Drops on Burning Rocks (François Ozon, 2000)
What Time Is It There? (Tsai Ming-Liang, 2001)
Hedwig and the Angry Inch (John Cameron Mitchell, 2001)
Y tu mamá también (Alfonso Cuaron, 2001)
His Secret Life (Ferzan Ozpetek, 2001)
Lost and Delirious (Léa Pool, 2001)
Far from Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2002)
The Embalmer (Matteo Garrone, 2002)
Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-Liang, 2003)
Son Frere (Patrice Chéreau, 2003)
Elephant (Gus van Sant, 2003)
Tarnation (Jonathan Caouette, 2003)
Changing Times (André Téchiné, 2004)
Mysterious Skin (Gregg Araki, 2004)
Night Watch (Edgardo Cozarinsky, 2004)
Duck Season (Fernando Eimbcke, 2004)
Odete (João Pedro Rodrigues, 2005)
Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005)
C.R.A.Z.Y. (Jean-Marc Vallée, 2005)
Fuseboy (Guy Maddin, 2005)
Broken Sky (Julián Hernández, 2006)
I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (Tsai Ming-Liang, 2006) (above bottom)
The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros (Auraeus Solito, 2006)
Shortbus (John Cameron Mitchell, 2006)
Glue (Alexis Dos Santos, 2006)
No Regret (Hee-Il Leesong, 2006)
Before I Forget (Jacques Nolot, 2007)
La León (Santiago Otheguy, 2007)
The Witnesses (André Téchiné, 2007)
Chris & Don: A Love Story (Guido Santi and Tina Mascara, 2007)
The Edge of Heaven (Fatih Akin, 2007)
Serbis (Brillante Mendoza, 2008)
To Die Like a Man (João Pedro Rodrigues, 2009)
Raging Sun, Raging Sky (Julián Hernández, 2009) (above top)
Fig Leaves (John Greyson, 2009)

Best of the Decade

I realize that I haven't posted anything in quite a while, in fact I missed the entire month of November, so it's about time I write something new. There has been an avalanche of Best of the Decade lists recently (the 00s, the Aughts, or whatever it's being called), and David Hudson has done a great job of linking to them at the Auteurs Daily. My favorite list so far is the one compiled by the Toronto Cinematheque (TIFF List) from the ballots of a number of film historians, archivists and programmers, and their number one film is Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Syndromes and a Century. I watched the film again for the fourth time to see if it lived up to such a designation and I can't think of another film this decade that gives me such pleasure on so many levels. (Mulholland Drive and In the Mood for Love would be close runners-up, along with Weerasethakul's Tropical Malady (#6) and Blissfully Yours (#13). My cinephile friend Juan doesn't think Joe deserves to have three films in the top fifteen, but we'll agree to disagree about that.) Syndromes is a film that is hard to analyze or appreciate on a strictly narrative level, but it does have real flesh-and-blood characters and things do happen. It's just that the rhythm of the camera movements, the flashbacks, music, and dual narrative structure are so absorbing, and Joe's attitude toward his characters (including representations of his doctor parents) is so loving, compassionate, humorous and sensual, that I find myself transported every time I see it.

Glenn Kenny lists his top 70, and Film Comment has a great list of the top 150 films of the decade.

Wild River

Elia Kazan's Wild River, considered by many critics to be his greatest film, is playing for one week at Film Forum in a beautiful new CinemaScope print. The performances of Lee Remick and Montgomery Clift are among the finest and most moving I've ever seen in a Hollywood film. Jonathan Rosenbaum calls it “The most complex and finely detailed love story in Kazan’s work…a fusion of long scenes with a broad vision that creates the director’s achieved masterpiece.” Clift, an employee of the New Deal-sponsored Tennessee Valley Authority, has the challenge of forcing Remick's grandmother (Jo Van Fleet) to leave the small island property on the Tennessee River that has been her lifelong home. Through his developing love for Remick, he comes to appreciate and sympathize with Grandma's position, although he has no choice but to clear the island (and hasten the old woman's death) to make way for the inevitable flooding caused by the nearby dam. This seemingly irreconcilable conflict between "progress" and tradition is at the heart of the film, and the back-and-forth dynamic of the Clift-Remick relationship becomes incredibly moving as Remick alternates between trying to resist her attraction to Clift and trying to get past his stoic facade and make him admit his love for her. Scenes of Remick singing a hymn as she rides the ferry to the island, or returning to the home where she lived with her late husband, are radiantly shot and powerfully performed, perhaps the richest in a film full of beautifully realized scenes. Just as the success of Clift's assignment means displacing Van Fleet from her home, the success of his relationship with Remick requires displacing her from her home and disrupting his own isolation. The final image, as Clift and Remick are flying back to their new life together in Washington, is an iris-in to an overhead shot of the all-important dam reduced to insignificance in a corner of the wide screen.

Sátántangó

Béla Tarr's Sátántangó, accent marks and all, is playing tomorrow at MoMA in all its 7 1/2-hour, black-and-white, 35mm, long-take, dark, moody, rainy, overlapping-time-structure, whisky-soaked, accordion-accompanied glory. UPDATE: The film looked beautiful, but the sound was distractingly wobbly throughout, and Tarr did not appear to introduce the film as promised. Nevertheless, it was an opportunity for me to finally see this epic masterpiece in its entirety in a single day.

NYFF - Everything Else I Saw

Jacques Rivette's Around a Small Mountain (36 Vues du Pic Saint-Loup)

Claire Denis's White Material

Souleymane Cissé's Min Ye

Todd Solondz's Life During Wartime

Maren Ade's Everyone Else (Alle Anderen)

NYFF - Mother

Bong Joon-Ho's Mother was a last-minute addition to my NYFF schedule and the most pleasant surprise of the festival. The more I read about this film, and its great lead performance by Kim Hye-Ja, the more I realized it was a must-see. Bong is in total control of the mood and mise-en-scene of this mystery/police procedural/perverse family dramedy, framed by two strange, wonderful shots of Kim dancing. In between is a captivating story of a monstrous mother's all-consuming love for her mentally challenged son when he's accused of murder.

NYFF - Ne Change Rien

I'm suffering a bit from post-festival depression now, but still trying to catch up with the flurry of films I saw in the final weekend of the NYFF. Pedro Costa's gorgeous Ne Change Rien provoked far more walkouts than any other film I saw this year at Alice Tully Hall, and I can sort of see why, although I was enthralled from first frame to last. This is a film unlike any other music documentary in its single-minded focus on the work involved in one artist, Jeanne Balibar, recording, rehearsing and performing music. This involves a great deal of repetition of a limited number of songs, so if you can't appreciate the rigorous beauty of Costa's black-and-white compositions and the inherent fascination of the painstaking artistic process depicted, you will indeed become bored at some point. I guess that qualifies Ne Change Rien as the most avant-garde feature in the festival's main slate this year, although it's anything but abstract. One of the best scenes involved cutting back and forth between shots of Balibar with headphones on in which we only hear her singing voice, to the recording booth where we hear the full music and voice together. After the film, Costa and Balibar held a fascinating Q&A which filled in some behind-the-scenes information about the making of the film.

NYFF Masterworks - Pyaasa

Guru Dutt's 1957 film Pyaasa (Thirst) was the opening selection of the NYFF Masterworks retrospective Guru Dutt: A Heart as Big as the World. This was my introduction to the work of the Indian auteur and is considered by many to be Dutt's masterpiece. I found it to be a work of remarkable visual intelligence, with expressionistic, almost Wellesian play of light and shadow. It's also a fiercely angry condemnation of the values of a world that shuns artists except in death, when their posthumous fame is exploited as an opportunity to cash in. This is a very dark vision of a society whose most admirable character is a prostitute, Gulab, who acts purely out of love and admiration for the poet Vijay, played by Dutt himself.

The 1950's was basically the beginning of the Hindi musical film industry that came to be known as Bollywood, and despite my near total lack of familiarity with the genre, I would have to assume that Pyaasa represents the pinnacle of Hindi cinema. There are several wonderful songs throughout the film, but the most powerful and beautiful is a lament by Vijay about the prevalence of prostitution, seeing it as a stain on the honor of the relatively new state of India. The top photo above shows Vijay, with Christlike pose and lighting, returning from presumed death to condemn the hypocritical mourners at his memorial ceremony. There is a sort of compromise happy ending in which Vijay is reunited with Gulab, but they are forced to leave town and head off to an uncertain future together.

NYFF - Independencia

Raya Martin's Independencia is the young Filipino director's seventh film in only five years, and the second in a planned trilogy about the history of the Philippines, each filmed in a style representative of the period it depicts. Thus in Independencia, which takes place during the period of American colonization, Martin creates a highly artificial, obviously studio-set but remarkably beautiful jungle and films in the lush, high-contrast style of some late silent/early sound Hollywood films. In the Q&A Martin discussed the influence of a couple of Murnau's films, Sunrise being the most obvious. There is a brief prologue of a mother and son preparing to flee the imminent arrival of American soldiers. The remainder of the film takes place in the jungle, except for the sudden interruption of a fake newsreel in the middle of the film showing an atrocity committed by the Americans. The film has a bare minimum of story and relies mostly on the power of its sounds and images to present an archetypal Filipino family resisting the American occupation. It's basically a 77-minute avant-garde work, slowly paced, certainly lacking subtlety in the presentation of its villains, but creating a dazzling soundstage world if you're willing to immerse yourself in it.

NYFF - Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno

The documentary L'Enfer d'Henri-Georges Clouzot is film historian Serge Bromberg's look at the troubled production of an unfinished film Clouzot worked on in 1964. Starring the radiantly beautiful Romy Schneider and Serge Reggiani, L'Enfer was to be an experimental drama showing the increasingly insane jealousy of Reggiani's husband toward his wife by filming Schneider in all sorts of distorted ways, switching from black-and-white to color and using various color filters, purple lipstick (!), superimpositions, and other optical effects to present a subjective view of madness. Bromberg gained access to a huge amount of footage from the film, but the soundtrack is lost, which led him to use actors to recreate crucial dialogue scenes. Along with interviews of key crew members from the aborted film, Bromberg has skillfully assembled a fascinating behind-the-scenes story. He's also a very funny and charming person, as evidenced in his lively introduction and Q&A at Alice Tully Hall.

NYFF - Antichrist

I don't have much to say about Lars von Trier's Antichrist that hasn't already been said. Charlotte Gainsbourg's performance is indeed remarkable, a fearless and courageous portrayal of a woman's grief descending into madness. This is also probably the most visually accomplished of Von Trier's films, which alone would make it worth seeing. I think the extremely graphic violence, which actually provoked a seizure in the audience at Friday's screening, verges on the ridiculous and tends to make the last portion of the film fall apart for me. Up until that point, however, there's no denying that von Trier has made a powerful, beautifully textured drama and deserves still to be considered a major filmmaker.

Views from the Avant-Garde - Pier Paolo Pasolini and Apichatpong Weerasethakul

I saw the first and second programs of this year's Views from the Avant-Garde section of the NYFF. La Rabbia di Pasolini (above left) is a fascinating recreation of a film that Pier Paolo Pasolini made in 1962-63 following completion of his first two films, Accatone and Mamma Roma. Pasolini created a feature-length political essay film using the newsreel archives of Italian documentary company Mondo Libero and other sources. Against Pasolini's wishes this was cut to 50 minutes and paired with an extreme right-wing documentary by Giovanni Guareschi. Giuseppe Bertolucci has made an attempt to recreate the missing footage using the same archives and Pasolini's original notes, allowing us to see both the surviving portion and the circumstances surrounding its making. Pasolini's radical vision of historic events from the postwar period up to the early 60s (wars, postcolonial transformations, the distractions of celebrity) is scored to Albinoni's mournful Adagio and accompanied by a fiercely angry poetic commentary that gives us the essence of Pasolini's worldview. After the original La Rabbia, Bertolucci presents some newsreel clips that show the extreme hostility and homophobia that Pasolini provoked in his time. This fascinating context doesn't diminish the power of Pasolini's film but serves to illuminate it.

Apichatpong (Joe) Weerasethakul's A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (above center) may be, frame for frame, the most beautiful film I've seen yet in the festival. This 17-minute digital video short, to quote from Joe's program notes, "is part of the multi-platform Primitive project which focuses on a concept of remembrance and extinction set in the northeast of Thailand. Boonmee is the main character of the feature film of the project. This short film is a personal letter describing my Nabua to Uncle Boonmee. The film comprises of shots of house interiors in the evening. The houses are all deserted except for one, where there is a group of young soldiers, played by some teens of Nabua. Two of them impersonate me by narrating the film."

The repetition of the narration follows the pattern of the doubled or split narrative of his last three features, while looking ahead to the themes of his next feature. The slow, graceful camera movements accompanied by a slightly ominous, droning score, the exquisite textures of light and shadow on various objects, give a sense of exploration, of haunted memories. The result is a profoundly mysterious beauty, a mix of narrative and abstraction, that is the hallmark of Joe's cinema. I can't wait to see his next feature.

NYFF - To Die Like a Man

One of my two or three most eagerly anticipated films in this year's New York Film Festival, Portuguese director João Pedro Rodrigues's To Die Like a Man, premieres tonight. I'll post my thoughts tomorrow but I wanted to put up some photos ahead of time. The top image (reportedly from the latter part of the film), set in a forest and bathed in that eerie red light, tells me that this will be a drag queen movie like no other I've ever seen.

UPDATE: To Die Like a Man far exceeded my expectations. It constantly surprises the viewer with a succession of beautiful scenes and images inspired, as Rodrigues said in his post-screening Q&A, by melodramas such as Minnelli's Home from the Hill (which I had coincidentally just seen the day before) and those of Sirk and Fassbinder, but also by war movies like Raoul Walsh's Objective, Burma! and by Busby Berkeley musicals. On top of these influences, there are traces of the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Tsai Ming-Liang and Jacques Nolot. If this makes To Die Like a Man sound derivative, it is anything but.

In his third feature, Rodrigues has achieved a formal mastery hinted at in O Fantasma! and Odete. The film follows a sort of dream logic all its own, beginning with a closeup of a soldier in the woods applying camouflage makeup (the theme of drag artifice and illusion beginning in a hypermasculine context), but this leads to a scene of graphic sex between two of the soldiers, one of whom turns out to be the estranged son of Tonia, the hero(ine). Nothing is quite what it seems in this movie.

There are certainly similarities to Fassbinder's masterpiece, In a Year of 13 Moons, although Rodrigues shows much greater compassion and forgiveness for his troubled characters. The film alternates scenes of great pain and suffering with hilarious, campy interludes and moments of remarkable peace and serenity. Tonia's journey begins to take on religious overtones, sort of a Stations of the Cross in drag, as in the gorgeous red-tinged scene above where the characters sit still for close to 5 minutes as we, and they, listen to Baby Dee's haunting song, "Calvary."

The title lets us know the final tragic outcome of Tonia's story, but it's impossible to predict just where it will lead along the way, and hard to do justice to Rodrigues's masterful use of color (especially blues and reds), design, camera movement, music, and performances, above all Fernando Santos as Tonia. The last two long takes of the film are connected by a cell phone call from a resurrected Tonia to her dead boyfriend Rosario, as a lovely fado song accompanies the camera as it cranes from the cemetery to a tranquil view of Lisbon harbor. It's one of the film's many transcendent moments.

There's a fine interview of Rodrigues by Michael Guillén at The Evening Class (http://theeveningclass.blogspot.com/2009/09/tiff09-to-die-like-man-evening-class.html).

NYFF - Police, Adjective

Corneliu Porumboiu's Police, Adjective, one of the most highly regarded films at Cannes this year, is a funny, sharply-observed study of a young policeman, Cristi, in a small Romanian town over the course of several days as he stakes out a high-school student on a minor drug-possession case that he clearly thinks is a waste of his time. The long takes convey a sense of the real space, duration and tedium of this surveillance without being the least bit tedious to an observant viewer. As Porumboiu said after the screening, there is always something happening in these shots, even though the film is edited in arthouse rather than multiplex style. The same deliberate pacing is maintained throughout, including scenes of paperwork in the office or at home with his wife in the evening. One of the most interesting structuring elements of the film is the detailed reports he prepares following each day's stakeout, where what we've just witnessed is summed up in meticulous detail. This concern for precise language carries over into hilarious domestic scenes where he questions his wife, a teacher, about the meaning of the words in a silly pop song she listens to repeatedly, and she corrects the grammar in one of his police reports.

When Cristi dares to refuse his boss's request to wrap up the case by arresting the kid on such a petty charge because it goes against his conscience, he is forced to read dictionary definitions of the words "conscience," "law," "moral," "police," on and on until he ultimately relents. The scene is both comic and harrowing, with Vlad Ivanov brilliantly portraying the bureaucratic mindset of this character. The new post-Communist Romania, it's implied, still has quite a ways to go to catch up with Western Europe.

NYFF - Ghost Town

This shot of a statue of Mao standing in the middle of the "ghost town" of Zhizilou comes in a coda sequence at the end of Zhao Dayong's remarkable, nearly 3-hour documentary Ghost Town. Mao's cheerful, waving presence in the middle of an empty town square, seen from several angles, stands in mocking contrast to the harsh realities of life in this remote, abandoned town which we've just witnessed.

In the Q&A following the Film Festival screening, Zhao said that he lived with the residents of the town and filmed them for about a year. The way he decided to structure this material is what makes the film so powerful. It's divided into three sections: 1) "Voices" deals largely with the pastor of the town's Christian church and his father, filling in a great deal of background information about the government's past suppression of religion and showing how central a role the church plays in holding the town together; 2) "Recollections" shows a young couple coming to terms with the dismal economic choices they face, and also poignantly shows a divorced man who has become a pathetic alcoholic now excluded from the church; and 3) "Innocence" follows a 12-year-old boy, Ah Long, who was abandoned by his family and now lives on his own, surviving by trapping and eating small birds or begging for flour to make fried cakes. This final section brings the film full circle with a concluding scene in the church. After we've witnessed the daily struggles he faces, we see Ah Long, with his grimy face, sitting in the back of the church with his eyes tightly shut in prayer, when suddenly his eyes spring open and he glances around like a frightened animal, his innocence long gone. It's an image I will remember for a long time.

NYFF Opening Night - Wild Grass

For the start of this year's NYFF I thought I'd change the design of this blog to something a little easier to read and, I hope, more aesthetically pleasing than the previous bright green.

Opening Night at the New York Film Festival was Alain Resnais's beautiful Wild Grass (Les herbes folles). Richard Pena introduced the producers, composer Mark Snow, actors Andre Dussollier and Mathieu Amalric (it was great to see them from the sixth row center), and finally Resnais himself, who received a standing ovation and gave a brief, charming introduction. This film will probably separate the hardcore Resnais admirers like myself from casual French filmgoers who may see it as a lightweight romantic comedy. It's really much more than that.

A simple story of a stolen purse and wallet that brings together five major characters, in Resnais's hands becomes a richly detailed study of l'amour fou, romantic obsession, cinema and memory. Resnais's graceful camera movements, bright colors and unmistakable editing rhythms are the work of a playful master. Frequent inserts of Sabine Azema's stolen yellow purse flying through the air and of Dussollier's hand picking up her bright red wallet serve to link them together almost against their conscious will. Resnais has expressed admiration for director Arnaud Desplechin, evident here in his use of Mathieu Amalric and Emmanuelle Devos as young sidekicks in the wacky love story of Resnais veterans Azema and Dussollier (with Anne Consigny as Dussollier's younger wife who has no choice but to go along on this strange ride).

This is also an homage to American movies, as Azema and Dussollier first meet outside a cinema and we hear the famous 20th Century Fox fanfare. The fanfare returns in a later romantic scene between the two, with the word fin appearing onscreen as they finally embrace. It's a false ending, however, as they are about to take off in Azema's private plane for a looping daredevil flight which becomes a dazzlingly subjective aerial view, ending in a child's bedroom with a baffling non sequitur line. This time the fin is real. It reminded me of the astonishing ending of Mon Oncle d'Amerique and parts of Providence in its formal daring and beauty.

NY Film Festival Countdown

Just three days to go until the 47th New York Film Festival starts this Friday with Alain Resnais's highly-anticipated (by me at least) Wild Grass. I've added a link on the right to Slant Magazine's annual film-by-film coverage of the festival. While I expect to disagree with many of their assessments, the Slant team is a highly knowledgeable group of young cinephiles (several of whom are openly gay) who do a great job of covering this and other festivals, with a full review (new ones added daily) of each film in the NYFF Main Selection.

The Village Voice used to offer full coverage in the past, but they've been much more spotty in recent years as the Voice has scaled back all of its arts coverage. Voice writers Jim Hoberman, Scott Foundas and Melissa Anderson are all on the festival's selection committee, so I'll be eagerly reading their NYFF section tomorrow. [UPDATE: The Voice's coverage is pretty good, including an overview by Hoberman, a Resnais interview piece by Scott Foundas, an interview of Charlotte Gainsbourg by Melissa Anderson (and a great cover photo of Gainsbourg), plus a roundup of the festival's documentaries by Nicolas Rapold. Consensus is building that the Chinese doc Ghost Town is going to be a fascinating film. I'm curious to see the NY Times's coverage on Friday.]

The other essential source of NYFF coverage is of course David Hudson's Auteurs Daily pieces. He's done a great job of collecting news and critical opinion from Venice and Toronto, and certainly will do the same for New York.

Max Ophüls - Only Superficially Superficial

Recent re-viewings of two Max Ophüls films, Madame de... and The Reckless Moment, prompted me to think about why I love his films so much and return to them so often. I read Molly Haskell's wonderful essay about Madame de... on Criterion's website (http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/547) and found this paragraph that encapsulates the genius of Ophüls: "Ophuls was so famous for his fluid cinematography that James Mason wrote an affectionate poem beginning, “A shot that does not call for tracks is agony for poor old Max.” But the roving camera and the visual glissandos were never virtuoso flourishes for their own sake; instead they were always attached to the movement of characters and revelatory of the movements of their souls."

I've always been fascinated by films with long, Bazinian takes, especially those involving elaborate, fluid camera movement (obvious arthouse examples such as Mizoguchi, Jancso, Bela Tarr, Tarkovsky, but also Orson Welles in what I consider his greatest film, The Magnificent Ambersons, or Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise/Before Sunset, or the ending of Tsai Ming-Liang's Vive L'Amour, or Dreyer's final masterpiece, Gertrud). If Mizoguchi and Ophüls represent the pinnacle of this type of filmmaking, it's because their fluid camera style is inseparable from their consistent themes about the position of women in their respective societies.

Whether making a film noir set in postwar L.A. or a lush costume drama in turn-of-the-century France, his camera follows these women relentlessly as they play out their destinies. As a character in Madame de... says, they're "only superficially superficial."

Claire Denis

White Material

35 Shots of Rum

The thing that makes Claire Denis's films so extraordinary is that she expects her viewers to fill in the narrative gaps and ellipses through the accumulated power of her sensual images (almost all shot by the great Agnès Godard, though not her latest, White Material, because Godard was unavailable), evocative music (by the rock band Tindersticks, plus a few perfectly chosen pop songs), and sensitive performances by actors who develop resonances across multiple Denis films (Isaach de Bankolé, Alex Descas, the gorgeous Grégoire Colin, Béatrice Dalle, Michel Subor, Vincent Gallo). How Isabelle Huppert, star of White Material, will fit into Denis's world remains to be seen. 35 Rhums, based in part on Ozu's Late Spring, has its belated premiere today at Film Forum. I saw it originally at Rendez-Vous with French Cinema back in March. I'll have more to say about this great film after a second viewing.

UPDATE 9/19: A second viewing of 35 Shots of Rum confirmed for me Claire Denis's extraordinary ability to tell a story through hints, indirection, glances and small gestures, while seducing you with the beauty of her images, music and performances. The striking parallels to Ozu's Late Spring are evident to me in two brief scenes: the sequence of the daughter (Mati Diop here, recalling Setsuko Hara in Ozu) looking stunningly beautiful in her wedding outfit, after which her character disappears from the film with the wedding taking place completely offscreen; then, in place of Ozu's famous image of Chishu Ryu alone, peeling an apple, Denis gives us a comparable scene of the father (Alex Descas) alone, finding the rice cooker that his daughter had bought and hidden after he bought one for her the same day, taking it out of the box and putting on the lid. The End. This conclusion gave me chills both times I saw it, both for the resonance with Ozu and the way it perfectly summed up the nature of this particular father-daughter relationship with a simple image.

Another extraordinary scene, which most critics have rightly singled out, takes place in a small restaurant where the characters take refuge after their car breaks down in a rainstorm on the way to a concert. The father and daughter are dancing to the song "Siboney" (for me an echo of Wong Kar-Wai's 2046) when the music changes to the Commodores' song "Night Shift," and suddenly her fiance (Grégoire Colin) cuts in, as if compelled by the music, and begins an extremely intimate, erotic dance which is observed with fascinating, jealous glances by her father. There is so much else going on in this film, but the remarkable soundtrack and the richness of the images complement a very personal story which demands multiple viewings.

The Cloud-Capped Star

I had the rare privilege of seeing Ritwik Ghatak's The Cloud-Capped Star as part of the Walter Reade Theater's Watershed series of films from the period 1958-60 that comprise a sort of international New Wave. Although I had seen Ghatak's masterpiece a few years ago on DVD, it didn't prepare me for the overwhelming power of this film's impassioned social critique, told with an extraordinarily delicate and controlled visual style combined with a radically original use of sound. Ghatak mixes music, dialogue and sound effects in quite unpredictable ways that Jonathan Rosenbaum has rightly described as expressionistic. A train will suddenly burst across the image and the sound of its whistle will completely drown out a conversation mid-sentence. An emotional revelation will be accompanied by the repeated sound of a whip while the music replays obsessively as if the record is stuck. A mysterious rainfall sound seemingly out of nowhere recurs several times. Music and sounds start and stop abruptly a la later Godard.

These radical aural experiments are matched by a visual style that features amazing deep focus compositions (note the three planes of activity in the train image above) or subtle shifts in focus, remarkable use of light, contrast, camera movements and dissolves. Ghatak is long overdue for a New York retrospective, and fully deserving of inclusion with such other Watershed films as L'Avventura, The 400 Blows, Cruel Story of Youth and Shadows.

NYFF/Views from the Avant-Garde/A Letter to Uncle Boonmee

The schedule for this year's Views from the Avant-Garde series at the New York Film Festival is now online, and as I had hoped, master Thai filmmaker Apichatpong ("Joe") Weerasethakul's new 17-minute short, A Letter to Uncle Boonmee, is included. The photos above are taken from Joe's own website, http://www.kickthemachine.com/, where he tells a little bit about the inspiration for the film:

"A few years ago I visited a temple near my home and a monk there gave me a little book called “A Man Who Can Recall His Past Lives.” In it, the monk wrote about Boonmee, who could recall his multiple lives in the cities of the northeast. In 2008, I wrote a screenplay inspired by the reincarnation of Boonmee, and started to travel in the region in search of his surviving offspring and relatives. I met his two sons who provided accounts of their father. In Nabua in December 2008, I located several houses that I thought would be suitable as Uncle Boonmee’s house in the proposed feature film. This short film is a personal letter describing my Nabua to Uncle Boonmee. The film is comprised of shots of the houses’ interiors in the evening. They are all deserted except one house with a group of young soldiers, played by some teens of Nabua. Two of them impersonate me by narrating the film."

I watched another recent Apichatpong short, Phantoms of Nabua, which was briefly available online a few months ago, and was enchanted with it even on my small laptop screen. I expect the new film, seen on the Walter Reade screen, to truly whet my appetite for Joe's upcoming Uncle Boonmee feature.

The screening times of the main selections are also now posted, and I've added another film to my must-see list, the three-hour independent Chinese documentary Ghost Town. According to some critics, the film's director, Zhao Dayong, may be the next major Chinese filmmaker to emerge since Jia Zhangke.

I've narrowed down my essential NYFF choices to about eight films now. Besides Zhao's film, I'll definitely be seeing the new Alain Resnais, Manoel de Oliveira, Maren Ade, Raya Martin, Claire Denis, Souleymane Cissé and Joao Pedro Rodrigues. The maybe column includes another eight, von Trier, Rivette, Breillat, Solondz, Costa, Porumboiu, Bellocchio and Haneke (all worth seeing, though many of them have distributors already).

UPDATED SEPTEMBER 1: With Juan's help I've now ordered all my tickets, a staggering total of 15 programs in 17 days (assuming I get all the tickets I've ordered). I'm seeing all those mentioned above, minus the Breillat, Bellocchio and Haneke (I'll wait for theatrical release), and adding L'Enfer de Henri-Georges Clouzot, a reconstruction of Clouzot's uncompleted 60s experimental film.

Mikio Naruse and Hirokazu Kore-Eda

Following a recent screening of Hirokazu Kore-Eda's wonderful Still Walking at BAM, the director was asked the inevitable question of whether this family comedy-drama was influenced by the films of Ozu. While there is some similarity to Tokyo Story in the film's family gathering at a memorial service, along with some shots of passing trains, burning incense and the like, Kore-Eda replied that while he respects Ozu, he was much more influenced by the films of Mikio Naruse, whose characters he described as "sad and hopeless." Coincidentally, I had just rented the British Masters of Cinema DVD of Naruse's Flowing, which gave me the opportunity to compare these two directors' worldviews.

Kore-Eda said he based his script for Still Walking in large part on extensive conversations he and his sister had with their mother in the months before her death. There is obvious love and affection for this family, but also a clear-eyed look at the casual cruelties inflicted upon the surviving son, Ryota, who fails to live up to the expectations held for the idealized other son Junpei, who drowned 15 years earlier. There is also the shockingly callous revelation that the troubled, obese man whom Junpei saved from drowning has been invited to the annual memorial services in order for them to ridicule and belittle him, in effect to punish him for inadvertently being the cause of Junpei's death. The film takes place in the span of one day and night, except for a short coda several years later that shows the continuity of generations while subtly revealing changes in Ryota's life that were hinted at previously. The visual economy of this final sequence is extremely moving.

Naruse's great film Flowing depicts another sort of "sad and hopeless" family, the various residents of a geisha house fallen on hard times. The characters are constantly counting money or trying to collect old debts, all in an effort to keep this somewhat disreputable business afloat. Naruse regular Hideko Takamine is superb as the owner, and stalwart Mizoguchi heroine Kinuyo Tanaka is even better as the new maid. Takamine's daughter, who has seen too much of the pennypinching misery and drunkenness of these women, is determined to take a menial sewing job rather than follow in her mother's business. The documentary-like shots of the town and the river punctuate the drama with a contemplative, poetic refrain similar to, if less rigorous than, Ozu's famous "pillow" shots. I'm eager to catch up with the rest of the Masters of Cinema Naruse set, each of which has a visual essay by critics Kent Jones and Philip Lopate.

Brit Noir

Hell Is a City

It Always Rains on Sunday

Thanks to Film Forum I'm currently enjoying the opportunity to sample a few of the 40-some selections from a genre I had not previously seen grouped together, namely British film noir from the late 30s to early 60s. Noir is normally associated with postwar Hollywood directors (many of them European) such as Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger, Robert Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer, Jacques Tourneur, Anthony Mann, Andre de Toth, Nicholas Ray, Joseph H. Lewis, Don Siegel, et al. The Film Forum series proves that, while overshadowed by the vast array of talents that American noir had to work with, the Brits were still managing to turn out an impressive body of dark, cynical films that remain largely unknown in the U.S.

Carol Reed's The Third Man and Odd Man Out are well-known and masterful examples of the genre, but a film like Robert Hamer's It Always Rains on Sunday deserves to be recognized as a major work, about a particularly dreary Sunday in the life of lonely housewife Googie Withers (a marvelous actress in a heartbreaking performance). A fugitive convict who was once her lover re-enters her life as she attempts to hide him in her home and facilitate his escape. A brief flashback, in which Withers is seen strikingly as a blonde, contrasts her youthful passion for bad boy John McCallum with her dreary, cramped existence on this particular rainy Sunday. Her dream of reliving the earlier affair is obviously doomed, but she goes to heroic efforts to guard the secret of the stranger in her bedroom. Hamer's complex, suspenseful screenplay is aided by Douglas Slocombe's expressionist lighting, particularly during the final chase in a train yard. The inevitability of the outcome is made all the more tragic by the genuine erotic longing and sense of lost opportunities between these two characters.
Stanley Baker is one of the major stars of Brit noir, appearing in three of the best films in the series, Val Guest's gritty Hell Is a City, Cy Endfield's politically-charged Hell Drivers and Joseph Losey's stylish The Criminal. I haven't seen the latter in a while and plan to catch it on August 30. Other upcoming highlights include tonight's October Man, Brighton Rock (Aug. 28-29), and Michael Powell's amazing color noir, Peeping Tom (Sept. 2-3).