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.