Bergman's Dreams

I am sharing this beautiful video essay on the theme of dreams in the films of Ingmar Bergman, recently posted at Criterion's website by Michael Koresky and Casey Moore.

Venezia 70 – Future Reloaded

Having just returned from Venice myself (the city, not the festival), I discovered a collection of 70 very short films (approximately 90 seconds each) by directors who have had films shown at the Venice Film Festival during its 70-year history. From this group of films collectively called Venezia 70 - Future Reloaded I have chosen 8 by some of my favorite directors, 5 of whom will have new films at the upcoming New York Film Festival.

Jia Zhang-ke

Wang Bing

Lav Diaz

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

João Pedro Rodrigues

Hong Sang-Soo

Nicolás Pereda

Catherine Breillat

 

They range from various forms of documentary to avant-garde to humorous narrative, but I am very interested in how great directors can compress their essential cinematic style into such a short format.

NYFF 2013 -- Documentaries and Revivals

 Manakamana (Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez)

 

What Now? Remind Me (Joaquim Pinto)

 

 Providence (Alain Resnais)

 

Manila In the Claws of Neon (Lino Brocka)

 



The New York Film Festival has announced a large selection of documentaries and revivals to play alongside the Main Slate discussed previously. The two most interesting documentaries, both prizewinners at the recent Locarno Film Festival, are Manakamana, the newest film from the Sensory Ethnography Lab that made last year's Leviathan which is set entirely inside a mountain cable car in Nepal, and What Now? Remind Me, an intimate personal diary film by gay Portuguese director Joaquim Pinto.

There are a number of great revivals, including Lino Brocka's gritty Manila In the Claws of Neon, Alain Resnais's exquisite Providence, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's first feature Mysterious Object at Noon, Cy Endfield's politically charged film noir Try and Get Me, two great Nicholas Ray films, They Live by Night and The Lusty Men, and Leos Carax's first two films, Boy Meets Girl and Mauvais Sang.

NY Film Festival 2013

The main slate of the 2013 New York Film Festival was announced today, with a record 35 films screening this year. Recalling the films from Cannes which I was hoping to see at the NYFF, I can't think of any that didn't make it into this year's program. I think Kent Jones, the new head of the Festival Selection Committee, and Dennis Lim, the Film Society's new Cinematheque programmer, are having a very positive influence on the direction of the festival in its 51st edition. Among my must-sees in this year's lineup are the following:

 Norte, the End of History (Lav Diaz)

Stray Dogs (Tsai Ming-Liang)
 

A Touch of Sin (Jia Zhangke)

 

Like Father, Like Son (Hirokazu Kore-eda)

 

Nobody's Daughter Haewon (Hong Sang-Soo)

 

The Stranger by the Lake (Alain Guiraudie)

 

Bastards (Claire Denis)

 

Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch)

 

Near the top of my list is Tsai Ming-Liang's Stray Dogs, which will have its world premiere this month at Venice. I couldn't find any stills yet but the trailer looks very powerful. Apichatpong Weerasethakul has tweeted his love for this film, which makes me even more enthusiastic.

 

The festival's Special Presentations, Retrospectives and Views from the Avant-Garde programs are still to be announced.



Dwan and Ozu

On the surface, Allan Dwan and Yasujiro Ozu seem like they could hardly be more dissimilar as filmmakers, yet both of them had long, prolific careers stretching from the silent era to the early 60s and developed distinctive visual styles within the very different conditions of their respective film industries. They are receiving simultaneous, overlapping retrospectives at Film Forum (Ozu) and MoMA (Dwan), necessitating a lot of picking and choosing and shuttling back and forth between the two venues for the next several weeks. I have previously seen almost all of Ozu's films, which have become widely available recently via Criterion and Hulu, but I've seen only a handful of Dwan's films so far.

Dwan's early sound films (Man to Man and Chances) have been revelatory, and I look forward to many more opportunities to explore the full range of his career. Dwan is very fond of tracking shots to situate characters in relation to their locations, as was Ozu in his silent period. While Dwan generally seemed to use the tracking camera to follow his characters' progression through space, or to move from a medium shot to a closer view, Ozu, in addition to following characters' movements, often used tracks to follow a row of stationary people or objects (a coatrack or a row of students' desks), lending a bit of dynamic observation to a still setting. While Ozu continued to refine and minimize his style, reducing and finally eliminating camera movement as his career progressed, Dwan (on the evidence of just a few of his hundreds of films) seems to have maintained a fairly consistent visual rhythm across a wide variety of genres, studios and production circumstances. I'm eager to see more of Dwan's 50s color films produced by Benedict Bogeaus and photographed by John Alton. A comparison with Ozu's late color films may be instructive.

This happy accident of New York repertory programming is an opportunity, increasingly rare these days, to sample and compare a large portion of two major directors' work.

Booed at Cannes ― Gertrud

Carl Theodor Dreyer's final film, Gertrud (1964), was screened yesterday as the opening selection of a wonderful series currently at BAM Cinematek called "Booed at Cannes." It was shown in a superb 35mm print from a German archive and received a gratifyingly respectful reception from the cinephile audience, a far cry from when I originally saw it in the 70s at a 16mm college screening where it provoked a mixture of boredom and derision. Time has been kind to Dreyer's masterpiece.

Considered hopelessly old-fashioned and stagy by most of its original Paris and Cannes audiences, it was praised by the young critics-turned-filmmakers of the Nouvelle Vague as well as by Andrew Sarris at the time of its release. Dreyer has stripped his style down to its essentials, using minimally decorated sets and highly subjective lighting, long takes (only 89 shots in 2 hours), and extremely stylized positioning of his actors. The long two-character theatrical dialogue scenes are punctuated by two flashback sequences which are blindingly overexposed to emphasize their artificial distance from the present action. The final scene, set many years in the future, employs the same bright lighting to set it apart from the rest of the drama. There are also two scenes of Gertrud and her young lover set in a park beside a reflecting pool (also clearly a studio set), again to contrast with the heaviness of the other dialogue scenes.

The beauty of Dreyer's masterful visuals and Nina Pens Rode's performance alone would be enough to make this a great film, but the drama of Gertrud's interaction with a series of men who will all disappoint or betray her in one way or another builds to an almost unbearable melancholy. There is an amazing scene of Gertrud's preparation for her seduction by the callow young pianist she is obsessively in love with, filmed in one take in which she enters the bedroom, pulls down the shade, lets down her hair, moves out of frame and begins undressing as seen in silhouette, before the camera tracks back to the main room to frame her lover in closeup waiting in a chair, fading out on that image. The final shot of the film simply focuses on the door to Gertrud's room after she goes back inside, slightly pulling back and then resting for several seconds on this lonely image. This is the film of an old man looking back perhaps at his own life and loves with a mixture of joy, regret and finally resigned acceptance, channeling more than four decades of refinement of his art into this radically unfashionable testament in which he says, "Gertrud, c'est moi."

Repertory Cinema Coming Soon

 While Paris Sleeps (Allan Dwan)
from Allan Dwan and the Rise and Decline of the Hollywood Studios, MoMA, June 5-July 8

Petition (Zhao Liang)
from Chinese Realities/Documentary Visions, MoMA, May 8-June 1

Origins: Revisiting the Beginnings of New Queer Cinema with B. Ruby Rich
Film Society of Lincoln Center, May 2

Equinox Flower (Yasujiro Ozu)

from Ozu, Film Forum, June 7-27

The Best of 2012

Here are some of my cinematic highlights of 2012, modified from comments posted at Dave Kehr's indispensable blog:

The Best New Films (alphabetical):

Almayer’s Folly (Chantal Akerman)
Barbara (Christian Petzold)
A Century of Birthing (Lav Diaz)
Holy Motors (Leos Carax)
In Another Country (Hong Sang-Soo)
In the Family (Patrick Wang)
Life without Principle (Johnnie To)
Like Someone in Love (Abbas Kiarostami)
The Master (P.T. Anderson)
Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson)
Neighboring Sounds (Kleber Mendonça Filho)
Night Across the Street (Raúl Ruiz)
A Simple Life (Ann Hui)
Tabu (Miguel Gomes)
Walker (Tsai Ming-Liang)

Runners-up: Las Acacias (Pablo Giorgelli), Bernie (Richard Linklater), The Cabin in the Woods (Drew Goddard), Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg), Damsels in Distress (Whit Stillman), Dark Horse (Todd Solondz), The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies), Elena (Andrei Zvyagintsev), Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Véréna Paravel), Magic Mike (Steven Soderbergh), Unforgivable (André Téchiné), You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet (Alain Resnais), Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow)

Repertory:   The year was bookended by two essential retrospectives, Robert Bresson at Film Forum in January and Pier Paolo Pasolini at MoMA. While I had seen all of these directors’ feature films previously, I was grateful for the chance to see so many of them again in that dying medium of 35mm.

I discovered the films of Keisuke Kinoshita thanks to a series at the Walter Reade. I’ve seen about ten of them thus far and am continuing to work my way through his many films available on Hulu Plus. I would single out two, PHOENIX and WEDDING RING, for their sublime performances by Kinuyo Tanaka. (The latter also featured two scenes of Toshiro Mifune in a bathing suit that, as they say, are worth the price of admission.)

The other major auteur discovery this year was Pierre Etaix, especially for LE GRAND AMOUR, YO YO and the brilliant vampire episode in AS LONG AS YOU’RE HEALTHY. Long unavailable, his films have been digitally restored and are currently making the rounds. Etaix's use of camera placement and sound for comic effect are comparable in some ways to Jacques Tati and Jerry Lewis, but there is also an undercurrent of melancholy running through the best of his films which is enhanced by his acting persona.

 

Other top repertory films first seen in 2012:

The Satin Slipper (Manoel de Oliveira)
La chouette aveugle (Raul Ruiz)
The Man Who Left His Will on Film (Nagisa Oshima) (RIP Oshima-san)
Hotel du Nord (Marcel Carné)
Coeur Fidèle (Jean Epstein)
Pièges (Robert Siodmak)
Malina, Dress Rehearsal, Eika Katappa and Willow Springs (Werner Schroeter)
Feu Mathias Pascal and Le Bonheur (Marcel L’Herbier)
Max et les ferrailleurs (Claude Sautet)
Moana (Robert Flaherty)
The Walls of Sana’a and The Paper Flower Sequence (Pier Paolo Pasolini)
San Diego Surf (Andy Warhol/Paul Morrissey)
Unfinished Business (Gregory LaCava)
The Loves of Pharaoh (Ernst Lubitsch)
Lumière d’été and Le ciel est à vous (Jean Grémillon)
Chung Kuo China (Michelangelo Antonioni)
A Short Film About the Indio Nacional and Autohystoria (Raya Martin)
Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? (Pedro Costa)

Finally, THE PERFUMED NIGHTMARE (Kidlat Tahimik): I actually first saw this many years ago, but Tahimik’s one-of-a-kind performance piece/Q&A after the screening, in which he discussed his “indie-genius” filmmaking philosophy, qualifies as the directorial appearance of the year.