Pier Paolo Pasolini

 The Gospel According to St. Matthew

Arabian Nights

 The Decameron

 Teorema

Before the year ends I want to acknowledge the invaluable complete retrospective of the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini at MoMA, which ends on Saturday, January 5. Besides the opportunity to see many of his films again in beautiful new prints, each film has been preceded by short archival interview material by Pasolini himself relating to that screening. Although I have seen all of the features previously, I had never seen 3 of the 4 location documentaries which were shown yesterday. The 12-minute The Walls of Sana'a, filmed in Yemen at the same time that Pasolini was making his penultimate film Arabian Nights, was especially beautiful and poetic.

Raya Martin

 A Short Film About the Indio Nacional

Now Showing

Independencia

Next Attraction

The Museum of the Moving Image is presenting an essential retrospective of the films of Raya Martin this weekend and next. Martin, only 28 years old but already one of the two greatest Filipino “new wave” filmmakers (along with Lav Diaz), is boldly experimental in style, alternating generally between historical films like A Short Film About the Indio Nacional and Independencia, focusing on the tragic colonial legacy of the Philippines and shot in glorious black and white 35mm, and contemporary subject matter in films like Next Attraction (his coming-out film as a gay man) and Now Showing, which focus on cinema and autobiography and are shot in color video. However, Raya Martin is a director who resists such simple classifications, freely mixing styles, genres and film stocks, blending narrative and experimental film, black and white and color, sound and silent film. His films incorporate the history and love of cinema into the history of the Philippines as well as variations of his own personal story. I have previously seen Independencia, Next Attraction and Buenas Noches, España (shown earlier this year at MOMI) and I’m truly looking forward to this opportunity to catch up on the rest of his films.

I believe I saw Raya Martin in the audience earlier this week at the Museum of Modern Art’s premiere screening of Andy Warhol’s outrageous comedy San Diego Surf, not at all surprising considering Martin's desire to explore cinema’s past and constantly push its boundaries.

Tabu

This glorious image, in luminescent black and white and Academy ratio, is from one of the few Main Slate films in this year's New York Film Festival to be projected in 35mm, Miguel Gomes's Tabu. This will be my last of 17 Main Slate films this year, and looks to be one of the best. The weekend also offers Leviathan and The Last Time I Saw Macao, two other highly-anticipated films. Of those that I have already seen, Abbas Kiarostami's Like Someone in Love and Leos Carax's Holy Motors stand above the rest.

NYFF 2012

 The Satin Slipper

Leviathan

The Last Time I Saw Macao

At last the full 2012 New York Film Festival 50th Anniversary schedule is posted online, and it is overflowing with great films in the Main Slate, Masterworks, Views from the Avant-Garde and this year's remarkable sidebar program, featuring 37 films from the great French TV series about filmmakers, Cineastes de Notre Temps. I laboriously went through the lineup today, prioritizing my choices in order to see as much as possible. I'm delighted that Manoel de Oliveira's 7-hour film The Satin Slipper will be shown early in the festival on Sunday, September 30 and does not conflict with any of my other selections. One critic tweeted that this may be the repertory event of the year, which it may well turn out to be. Oliveira's 1985 film directly follows three other masterpieces based on literary or theatrical works, Benilde, Doomed Love and Francisca, which he made from 1974 to 1981.

From the main slate I'm planning to see the following films:

Amour (Michael Haneke)

Araf - Somewhere In Between (Yeşim Ustaoğlu)
Barbara (Christian Petzold)
Bwakaw (Jun Robles Lana)
Here and There (Aquí y Allá) (Antonio Méndez Esparza)
Holy Motors (Leos Carax)
The Last Time I Saw Macao (João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata)
Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel)
Like Someone in Love (Abbas Kiarostami) and the HBO Directors Dialogue with Kiarostami
Memories Look at Me (Song Fang)
Night Across the Street (La noche de enfrente) (Raul Ruiz)
Our Children (Joachim Lafosse)
Something in the Air (Olivier Assayas)
Tabu (Miguel Gomes)
You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet (Vous n'avez encore rien vu) (Alain Resnais)

The Walker

In addition, Views from the Avant-Garde features Raul Ruiz's 1990 La chouette aveugle, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Mekong Hotel and short films by Tsai Ming-Liang (The Walker) and João Pedro Rodrigues (Morning of St. Anthony's Day).

Pursued

Tabu

Of the many Cineastes filmmaking documentaries, I will definitely see Chantal Akerman by Chantal Akerman and Pedro Costa's Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?, and try to fit in as many others as my schedule and sanity permit. In the Masterworks section, I plan to see again Max Ophuls's exquisite Liebelei and perhaps Raoul Walsh's Pursued. I will update this post in the next few weeks.

The Clock

Christian Marclay's 24-hour film/video/whatsit The Clock, now playing for 2 weeks at the Lincoln Center Atrium, is one of the most compulsively watchable films in recent memory. It can also be quite exhausting after a while, since there is little discernible narrative development other than the passage of time to keep one engaged over the long haul. But those clips are so skillfully edited, and there is such a wealth and variety of films and TV shows utilized, that a cinephile can get a constant adrenalin rush of recognition. The concept of showing a clock or watch with the exact time at least once every minute, matching the real time in which the shot is being screened, is a fascinating one. And the editing rhythm, which varies from fairly long clips to a rush of short shots, makes one continually aware of how time passes in "real" life and how important it is as a narrative element in so many films. After all, a film takes place over a certain length of time, so why not make a film that's about nothing but time?

The Clock uses straightforward editing of the visual elements of the clips, with no added dissolves or fadeouts, but it employs sound bridges and overlaps between different clips to suggest subtle or not-so-subtle connections. My favorite use of this device began with the familiar music from Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut which played for about 5 seconds before the clip actually started, and continued briefly after the clip until a character in the next clip lifted a phonograph needle from a record. The selections and juxtapositions are often quite funny. Marclay made the decision to show all the clips in the same aspect ratio, stretching Academy ratio films and squeezing Scope images. While some cinephiles might object to this distortion, it has the effect of presenting a more homogenous visual field even as it jumps between silent and sound films or black-and-white and color. While most of the clips are in English, there are a sizable number of foreign-language films, none of which contain subtitles.

In my first shift watching The Clock, from 12:23-2:45 pm last Saturday, I was pleased to see several Asian films in the mix, including Tokyo Story, What Time Is It There? and In the Mood for Love. During my second shift, last night from 7:19-8:43 pm, there was a particularly rich auteur period from about 8:30-8:40 that included clips from Resnais's Muriel, Kieslowski's A Short Film About Love and Lang's The Thousand Eyes of Doctor Mabuse. I hope to see more this weekend.

A Burning Hot Summer Weekend

Beware of a Holy Whore (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)

 A Burning Hot Summer (Philippe Garrel)

Moana (Robert Flaherty)

This past weekend began with a rare screening of R.W. Fassbinder's Beware of a Holy Whore. Besides its many behavioral and formal beauties, sardonic humor and painfully honest autobiographical representation of a tortured location shoot, it afforded me one last chance to see Werner Schroeter and his muse Magdalena Montezuma onscreen again following the great month-long Schroeter retrospective at MoMA. Fassbinder gives Montezuma a gorgeous last shot in a boat retreating from the film's turmoil after she's been thrown off the set by the tyrannical director, scored to an aria Schroeter himself might have chosen.

I don't have much to say about Philippe Garrel's A Burning Hot Summer except that it deals with love, death, politics and cinema in intriguing if not completely satisfying ways.

The great revelation of the weekend was Robert Flaherty's remarkable 1926 docudrama Moana, receiving a rare screening at Anthology with the new soundtrack created for it in 1981 by Flaherty's daughter Monica. This new soundtrack attempts to recreate authentic music, sound effects and dialogue to accompany the film's original silent images and succeeds remarkably well. Flaherty manages to place his camera to capture every detail of the island's natural beauty, the light playing on the trees and water, the work rituals and coming-of-age ceremonies, and the casual eroticism of this harmonious Samoan community. The film in many ways anticipates Murnau and Flaherty's 1931 masterpiece Tabu but is far less well known.

Bonus image:

Magdalena Montezuma (right) in Werner Schroeter's The Death of Maria Malibran

Cannes 2012

Amour (Michael Haneke)

Mekong Hotel (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

La Noche de Enfrente (Raul Ruiz)

Holy Motors (Leos Carax)

Like Someone In Love (Abbas Kiarostami)

Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson) and official Cannes poster

 In Another Country (Hong Sang-Soo)

Vous N'Avez Encore Rien Vu (Alain Resnais)

Post Tenebras Lux (Carlos Reygadas)

Although the official critical consensus has been that this was a very disappointing year for Cannes, there are a number of films (both in and out of Competition) that I am quite looking forward to seeing. Members of the New York Film Festival Selection Committee are on record as not liking the new Hong Sang-Soo film, so I don't expect to see that in the 50th edition of the festival. The others above (apart from the superb and already released Moonrise Kingdom) stand a good chance of making the final cut.

Migrating Forms

The annual Migrating Forms festival begins this weekend at Anthology Film Archives, and four films are of particular interest to me. Fritz Lang's The Tiger of Eschnapur (top) and The Indian Tomb, a diptych often referred to collectively as the Indian epic, screens Sunday night. On Tuesday Raul Ruiz's beautiful puzzle of a film, On Top of the Whale, will be followed by a tribute featuring readings and screenings of short Ruiz films.

There are also two selections from the vital and rarely-screened (in New York) Filipino New Wave. First, Khavn de la Cruz's Mondomanila on Friday, and then Lav Diaz's 6-hour A Century of Birthing (bottom), next Saturday.

Le retour de Bresson

The return of the traveling Robert Bresson retrospective to New York is most welcome. The touring series, which began at Film Forum in January and played several other cities (including Chicago, where my cinephile friend Dan caught The Devil, Probably at my urging), is now comfortably ensconced at the less crowded BAM Cinematek in Brooklyn. At last night's screening of Mouchette I was particularly focused on Bresson's extraordinary sound design. The climactic suicide scene gains much of its tragic power from the alternation of the sound of nearby gunshots with an eerie church bell that periodically rings in the distance.

After the film I bought James Quandt's revised, 700-page edition of Robert Bresson at the concession stand, trying not to get greasy popcorn butter on the cover. The first piece I read in the book is a wonderful photo-essay by Mark Rappaport which discusses the homoeroticism of Pickpocket and compares it to other films of the period like The Wrong Man and The Killing. Will I get sick of reading about Bresson after 700 pages? I think he is one filmmaker whose work remains inexhaustible.

New Directors/New Films

 Las Acacias

Neighboring Sounds

Porfirio

I saw only three films at this year's edition of New Directors/New Films, all from Latin America. Pablo Giorgelli's Las Acacias, from Argentina, Kleber Mendonça Filho's Neighboring Sounds, from Brazil, and Alejandro Landes's Porfirio, from Colombia, each reveal a high degree of formal and narrative assurance for beginning filmmakers. Las Acacias and Porfirio are moving examples of what J. Hoberman calls "situation documentary," blending a loosely-structured narrative with elements of documentary, somewhat in the manner of Lisandro Alonso (particularly evident in the opening woodcutting sequence of Las Acacias).

Neighboring Sounds is notable for its superb sound mix, its dark sense of humor and the escalating tension of its interconnected dramas about sex, petty crime, violence and class relations in the city of Recife. It marks the arrival of a major new director.

The Deep Blue Sea

Terence Davies's new film, The Deep Blue Sea, based on a play by Terence Rattigan, receives a special preview screening tonight at BAM, followed by a Q&A with Davies and star Rachel Weisz. It is his first narrative feature since The House of Mirth in 2000. This is my most eagerly anticipated film of the year so far, since I consider Davies the greatest working British director and one of the greatest, period. The Long Day Closes, his masterpiece from 1992, which will have a week-long revival soon at Film Forum, is on my list of the 10 best films of all time. Davies uses a very precise, hypnotic visual and musical style to pull the viewer into impressionistic narratives of remembrance and loss. He is the Antonioni of British repression and bittersweet memory.

UPDATE 4/3:  One of the best pieces I've read about Terence Davies is by Michael Sicinski in Cinema Scope online. It describes the remarkable contradictions between Davies's radical formalism and his very conservative political worldview, which is complicated by class loyalty, his ambivalence about his homosexuality, and his identification with transgressive female protagonists. He says, "Davies is quite obviously an artist at odds with both his times and with what it means to be part of a marginalized group, systematically excluded from absolute belonging with the dominant culture. It is this anxious dislocation, I believe, that makes his films so deeply humane, and The Deep Blue Sea is no exception."

I will be considering Sicinski's ideas when I see The Long Day Closes, my favorite Davies film, again tonight at Film Forum.

2011 Top 20

Here is my official Top 20 film list of 2011 as submitted to Film Comment's annual Readers' Poll. I cheated with my number one choice by selecting a film I had already seen twice before, because I consider it the best film to premiere theatrically in New York last year, as well as representing my choice for best retrospective series of 2011, Edward Yang at the Walter Reade Theater. My runner-up retrospective would be Japanese Divas at Film Forum, which gave me a chance to see several great Mikio Naruse films again (including his masterpiece, Yearning). I also cheated with Skolimowski's Essential Killing, which I saw in January 2012 on Netflix streaming but which first played New York in 2011.

All the other films below I saw for the first time in 2011:

1. A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang)
2. The Turin Horse (Bela Tarr)
3. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
4. The Kid With a Bike (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)
5. The Tree of Life (Terence Malick)
6. A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg)
7. Le Havre (Aki Kaurismaki)
8. Hugo (Martin Scorsese)
9. House of Pleasures (Bertrand Bonello)
10. Weekend (Andrew Haigh)
11. A Separation (Asgar Farhadi)
12. This Is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb)
13. Dreileben (Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf and Christoph Hochhausler)
14. The Day He Arrives (Hong Sang-Soo)
15. Terri (Azazel Jacobs)
16. Pina (Wim Wenders)
17. Essential Killing (Jerzy Skolimowski)
18. Young Adult (Jason Reitman)
19. Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan)
20. Tomboy (Celine Sciamma)

I also want to nominate the reopened Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens as the best New York movie venue of 2011.

The Hands of Robert Bresson

 Une Femme Douce

 The Trial of Joan of Arc

Pickpocket

L'Argent

A Man Escaped

In trying to find something new to say about the films of Robert Bresson, I decided to focus on one particular aspect of his films, the constant recurrence of images of hands. Whether in isolated closeups, covering faces, picking pockets, crossed in submission and handcuffed (the final sublime shot of Les Anges du Péché is the first of several such images in Bresson's work), or grasping objects, the hands of Bresson's characters are used to represent powerful emotions that are not conveyed through conventional acting styles of vocal inflection and facial expression, which he basically abandoned after Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (below).

An awareness of Bresson's complex editing of sounds and images is essential in trying to understand and appreciate his films. I'm still trying after nearly 40 years of watching them. One might say the devil is in the details, probablement.