Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Wild River
Friday, October 23, 2009
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.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
NYFF - Mother
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.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
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.
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
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.
Monday, October 5, 2009
NYFF - Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno
Friday, October 2, 2009
NYFF - Antichrist
Views from the Avant-Garde - Pier Paolo Pasolini and Apichatpong Weerasethakul
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."