NY Film Festival Countdown

Just three days to go until the 47th New York Film Festival starts this Friday with Alain Resnais's highly-anticipated (by me at least) Wild Grass. I've added a link on the right to Slant Magazine's annual film-by-film coverage of the festival. While I expect to disagree with many of their assessments, the Slant team is a highly knowledgeable group of young cinephiles (several of whom are openly gay) who do a great job of covering this and other festivals, with a full review (new ones added daily) of each film in the NYFF Main Selection.

The Village Voice used to offer full coverage in the past, but they've been much more spotty in recent years as the Voice has scaled back all of its arts coverage. Voice writers Jim Hoberman, Scott Foundas and Melissa Anderson are all on the festival's selection committee, so I'll be eagerly reading their NYFF section tomorrow. [UPDATE: The Voice's coverage is pretty good, including an overview by Hoberman, a Resnais interview piece by Scott Foundas, an interview of Charlotte Gainsbourg by Melissa Anderson (and a great cover photo of Gainsbourg), plus a roundup of the festival's documentaries by Nicolas Rapold. Consensus is building that the Chinese doc Ghost Town is going to be a fascinating film. I'm curious to see the NY Times's coverage on Friday.]

The other essential source of NYFF coverage is of course David Hudson's Auteurs Daily pieces. He's done a great job of collecting news and critical opinion from Venice and Toronto, and certainly will do the same for New York.

Max Ophüls - Only Superficially Superficial

Recent re-viewings of two Max Ophüls films, Madame de... and The Reckless Moment, prompted me to think about why I love his films so much and return to them so often. I read Molly Haskell's wonderful essay about Madame de... on Criterion's website (http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/547) and found this paragraph that encapsulates the genius of Ophüls: "Ophuls was so famous for his fluid cinematography that James Mason wrote an affectionate poem beginning, “A shot that does not call for tracks is agony for poor old Max.” But the roving camera and the visual glissandos were never virtuoso flourishes for their own sake; instead they were always attached to the movement of characters and revelatory of the movements of their souls."

I've always been fascinated by films with long, Bazinian takes, especially those involving elaborate, fluid camera movement (obvious arthouse examples such as Mizoguchi, Jancso, Bela Tarr, Tarkovsky, but also Orson Welles in what I consider his greatest film, The Magnificent Ambersons, or Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise/Before Sunset, or the ending of Tsai Ming-Liang's Vive L'Amour, or Dreyer's final masterpiece, Gertrud). If Mizoguchi and Ophüls represent the pinnacle of this type of filmmaking, it's because their fluid camera style is inseparable from their consistent themes about the position of women in their respective societies.

Whether making a film noir set in postwar L.A. or a lush costume drama in turn-of-the-century France, his camera follows these women relentlessly as they play out their destinies. As a character in Madame de... says, they're "only superficially superficial."

Claire Denis

White Material

35 Shots of Rum

The thing that makes Claire Denis's films so extraordinary is that she expects her viewers to fill in the narrative gaps and ellipses through the accumulated power of her sensual images (almost all shot by the great Agnès Godard, though not her latest, White Material, because Godard was unavailable), evocative music (by the rock band Tindersticks, plus a few perfectly chosen pop songs), and sensitive performances by actors who develop resonances across multiple Denis films (Isaach de Bankolé, Alex Descas, the gorgeous Grégoire Colin, Béatrice Dalle, Michel Subor, Vincent Gallo). How Isabelle Huppert, star of White Material, will fit into Denis's world remains to be seen. 35 Rhums, based in part on Ozu's Late Spring, has its belated premiere today at Film Forum. I saw it originally at Rendez-Vous with French Cinema back in March. I'll have more to say about this great film after a second viewing.

UPDATE 9/19: A second viewing of 35 Shots of Rum confirmed for me Claire Denis's extraordinary ability to tell a story through hints, indirection, glances and small gestures, while seducing you with the beauty of her images, music and performances. The striking parallels to Ozu's Late Spring are evident to me in two brief scenes: the sequence of the daughter (Mati Diop here, recalling Setsuko Hara in Ozu) looking stunningly beautiful in her wedding outfit, after which her character disappears from the film with the wedding taking place completely offscreen; then, in place of Ozu's famous image of Chishu Ryu alone, peeling an apple, Denis gives us a comparable scene of the father (Alex Descas) alone, finding the rice cooker that his daughter had bought and hidden after he bought one for her the same day, taking it out of the box and putting on the lid. The End. This conclusion gave me chills both times I saw it, both for the resonance with Ozu and the way it perfectly summed up the nature of this particular father-daughter relationship with a simple image.

Another extraordinary scene, which most critics have rightly singled out, takes place in a small restaurant where the characters take refuge after their car breaks down in a rainstorm on the way to a concert. The father and daughter are dancing to the song "Siboney" (for me an echo of Wong Kar-Wai's 2046) when the music changes to the Commodores' song "Night Shift," and suddenly her fiance (Grégoire Colin) cuts in, as if compelled by the music, and begins an extremely intimate, erotic dance which is observed with fascinating, jealous glances by her father. There is so much else going on in this film, but the remarkable soundtrack and the richness of the images complement a very personal story which demands multiple viewings.

The Cloud-Capped Star

I had the rare privilege of seeing Ritwik Ghatak's The Cloud-Capped Star as part of the Walter Reade Theater's Watershed series of films from the period 1958-60 that comprise a sort of international New Wave. Although I had seen Ghatak's masterpiece a few years ago on DVD, it didn't prepare me for the overwhelming power of this film's impassioned social critique, told with an extraordinarily delicate and controlled visual style combined with a radically original use of sound. Ghatak mixes music, dialogue and sound effects in quite unpredictable ways that Jonathan Rosenbaum has rightly described as expressionistic. A train will suddenly burst across the image and the sound of its whistle will completely drown out a conversation mid-sentence. An emotional revelation will be accompanied by the repeated sound of a whip while the music replays obsessively as if the record is stuck. A mysterious rainfall sound seemingly out of nowhere recurs several times. Music and sounds start and stop abruptly a la later Godard.

These radical aural experiments are matched by a visual style that features amazing deep focus compositions (note the three planes of activity in the train image above) or subtle shifts in focus, remarkable use of light, contrast, camera movements and dissolves. Ghatak is long overdue for a New York retrospective, and fully deserving of inclusion with such other Watershed films as L'Avventura, The 400 Blows, Cruel Story of Youth and Shadows.

NYFF/Views from the Avant-Garde/A Letter to Uncle Boonmee

The schedule for this year's Views from the Avant-Garde series at the New York Film Festival is now online, and as I had hoped, master Thai filmmaker Apichatpong ("Joe") Weerasethakul's new 17-minute short, A Letter to Uncle Boonmee, is included. The photos above are taken from Joe's own website, http://www.kickthemachine.com/, where he tells a little bit about the inspiration for the film:

"A few years ago I visited a temple near my home and a monk there gave me a little book called “A Man Who Can Recall His Past Lives.” In it, the monk wrote about Boonmee, who could recall his multiple lives in the cities of the northeast. In 2008, I wrote a screenplay inspired by the reincarnation of Boonmee, and started to travel in the region in search of his surviving offspring and relatives. I met his two sons who provided accounts of their father. In Nabua in December 2008, I located several houses that I thought would be suitable as Uncle Boonmee’s house in the proposed feature film. This short film is a personal letter describing my Nabua to Uncle Boonmee. The film is comprised of shots of the houses’ interiors in the evening. They are all deserted except one house with a group of young soldiers, played by some teens of Nabua. Two of them impersonate me by narrating the film."

I watched another recent Apichatpong short, Phantoms of Nabua, which was briefly available online a few months ago, and was enchanted with it even on my small laptop screen. I expect the new film, seen on the Walter Reade screen, to truly whet my appetite for Joe's upcoming Uncle Boonmee feature.

The screening times of the main selections are also now posted, and I've added another film to my must-see list, the three-hour independent Chinese documentary Ghost Town. According to some critics, the film's director, Zhao Dayong, may be the next major Chinese filmmaker to emerge since Jia Zhangke.

I've narrowed down my essential NYFF choices to about eight films now. Besides Zhao's film, I'll definitely be seeing the new Alain Resnais, Manoel de Oliveira, Maren Ade, Raya Martin, Claire Denis, Souleymane Cissé and Joao Pedro Rodrigues. The maybe column includes another eight, von Trier, Rivette, Breillat, Solondz, Costa, Porumboiu, Bellocchio and Haneke (all worth seeing, though many of them have distributors already).

UPDATED SEPTEMBER 1: With Juan's help I've now ordered all my tickets, a staggering total of 15 programs in 17 days (assuming I get all the tickets I've ordered). I'm seeing all those mentioned above, minus the Breillat, Bellocchio and Haneke (I'll wait for theatrical release), and adding L'Enfer de Henri-Georges Clouzot, a reconstruction of Clouzot's uncompleted 60s experimental film.

Mikio Naruse and Hirokazu Kore-Eda

Following a recent screening of Hirokazu Kore-Eda's wonderful Still Walking at BAM, the director was asked the inevitable question of whether this family comedy-drama was influenced by the films of Ozu. While there is some similarity to Tokyo Story in the film's family gathering at a memorial service, along with some shots of passing trains, burning incense and the like, Kore-Eda replied that while he respects Ozu, he was much more influenced by the films of Mikio Naruse, whose characters he described as "sad and hopeless." Coincidentally, I had just rented the British Masters of Cinema DVD of Naruse's Flowing, which gave me the opportunity to compare these two directors' worldviews.

Kore-Eda said he based his script for Still Walking in large part on extensive conversations he and his sister had with their mother in the months before her death. There is obvious love and affection for this family, but also a clear-eyed look at the casual cruelties inflicted upon the surviving son, Ryota, who fails to live up to the expectations held for the idealized other son Junpei, who drowned 15 years earlier. There is also the shockingly callous revelation that the troubled, obese man whom Junpei saved from drowning has been invited to the annual memorial services in order for them to ridicule and belittle him, in effect to punish him for inadvertently being the cause of Junpei's death. The film takes place in the span of one day and night, except for a short coda several years later that shows the continuity of generations while subtly revealing changes in Ryota's life that were hinted at previously. The visual economy of this final sequence is extremely moving.

Naruse's great film Flowing depicts another sort of "sad and hopeless" family, the various residents of a geisha house fallen on hard times. The characters are constantly counting money or trying to collect old debts, all in an effort to keep this somewhat disreputable business afloat. Naruse regular Hideko Takamine is superb as the owner, and stalwart Mizoguchi heroine Kinuyo Tanaka is even better as the new maid. Takamine's daughter, who has seen too much of the pennypinching misery and drunkenness of these women, is determined to take a menial sewing job rather than follow in her mother's business. The documentary-like shots of the town and the river punctuate the drama with a contemplative, poetic refrain similar to, if less rigorous than, Ozu's famous "pillow" shots. I'm eager to catch up with the rest of the Masters of Cinema Naruse set, each of which has a visual essay by critics Kent Jones and Philip Lopate.

Brit Noir

Hell Is a City

It Always Rains on Sunday

Thanks to Film Forum I'm currently enjoying the opportunity to sample a few of the 40-some selections from a genre I had not previously seen grouped together, namely British film noir from the late 30s to early 60s. Noir is normally associated with postwar Hollywood directors (many of them European) such as Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger, Robert Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer, Jacques Tourneur, Anthony Mann, Andre de Toth, Nicholas Ray, Joseph H. Lewis, Don Siegel, et al. The Film Forum series proves that, while overshadowed by the vast array of talents that American noir had to work with, the Brits were still managing to turn out an impressive body of dark, cynical films that remain largely unknown in the U.S.

Carol Reed's The Third Man and Odd Man Out are well-known and masterful examples of the genre, but a film like Robert Hamer's It Always Rains on Sunday deserves to be recognized as a major work, about a particularly dreary Sunday in the life of lonely housewife Googie Withers (a marvelous actress in a heartbreaking performance). A fugitive convict who was once her lover re-enters her life as she attempts to hide him in her home and facilitate his escape. A brief flashback, in which Withers is seen strikingly as a blonde, contrasts her youthful passion for bad boy John McCallum with her dreary, cramped existence on this particular rainy Sunday. Her dream of reliving the earlier affair is obviously doomed, but she goes to heroic efforts to guard the secret of the stranger in her bedroom. Hamer's complex, suspenseful screenplay is aided by Douglas Slocombe's expressionist lighting, particularly during the final chase in a train yard. The inevitability of the outcome is made all the more tragic by the genuine erotic longing and sense of lost opportunities between these two characters.
Stanley Baker is one of the major stars of Brit noir, appearing in three of the best films in the series, Val Guest's gritty Hell Is a City, Cy Endfield's politically-charged Hell Drivers and Joseph Losey's stylish The Criminal. I haven't seen the latter in a while and plan to catch it on August 30. Other upcoming highlights include tonight's October Man, Brighton Rock (Aug. 28-29), and Michael Powell's amazing color noir, Peeping Tom (Sept. 2-3).