Wednesday, April 7, 2010

The Long Day Closes


This Thursday, April 8 at 8:00 there will be a free screening of Terence Davies's masterpiece, The Long Day Closes. The event is being sponsored by noted film critic and blogger Kevin Lee, and it's the final film in a project he started several years ago of seeing and writing about each of the 1000 greatest films listed at a site called They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? This list, which is updated each year, was compiled from a number of sources, one of which is the Senses of Cinema Top Ten lists. My own Senses of Cinema list includes The Long Day Closes so I like to think I may have played a small part in nudging this great film onto the list. I first saw the film at the 1993 San Francisco Film Festival, followed by a Q&A with Terence Davies, and I immediately fell under the spell of its slow, hypnotic rhythms, associative music and sound editing, and semi-autobiographical portrayal of an adolescent gay British schoolboy and his family. The film uses powerfully apt audio clips from films such as The Magnificent Ambersons, and in its greatest sequence Davies edits together a series of matching overhead tracking shots which link the boy Bud at home, at school, in church and at the cinema, all set to the song "Tammy's In Love" sung by Debbie Reynolds. Since that first screening I've seen the film perhaps 5 or 6 times thanks to a VHS recording I made from HBO, but this will be the first time since '93 I'm seeing it in a theater, this time with an invited audience of cinephiles, so it should be a very special occasion.

Saturday, April 3, 2010

A Wife Confesses

Yasuzo Masumura's 1961 film A Wife Confesses, shown last night at Japan Society, is one of the best revivals I've seen in some time. This shot conveys a little of Masumura's greatness at composing and framing for the wide screen, clearly showing the influence of Antonioni with whom he studied at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. The film combines noir, melodrama and modern alienation to tell the story of a woman on trial for murder following a mountain-climbing accident involving her abusive older husband and the handsome younger man she loves. Did she kill her husband deliberately and cold-bloodedly or in self-preservation? Jonathan Rosenbaum has ranked this as one of the 100 best films ever. It's a riveting, beautifully composed but rarely seen masterpiece.

New Directors/New Films


The Father of My Children
Northless
The Last Train Home
I Killed My Mother

Dogtooth

I Am Love
I'm long overdue for a new post so here are some images from the films I saw at this year's New Directors/New Films.