San Francisco Silent Film Festival Preview

I'm looking forward to attending the San Francisco Silent Film Festival for the second year in a row the weekend of July 16-18. Some of the highlights for me include Rotaie, a late Italian silent directed by Mario Camerini, G.W. Pabst's Diary of a Lost Girl starring the glorious Louise Brooks, and The Woman Disputed, co-directed by Henry King and Sam Taylor and starring Norma Talmadge. These three and most of the other films in the festival will be screened in 35mm prints (an increasingly endangered species) at the indispensable Castro Theater, which I always return to with a sense of awe.

Cannes 2010

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

The Strange Case of Angelica

Les amours imaginaires

Certified Copy

Poetry

The 64th Cannes Film Festival started on Wednesday, and while this year's edition seems somewhat light on works by major directors, there are several films I hope to see in the New York Film Festival this fall. The most highly anticipated is Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, his first feature since 2006's brilliant Syndromes and a Century. Others I'm particularly looking forward to in the Competition include Ken Loach's Route Irish, Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy starring Juliette Binoche, Lee Chang-Dong's Poetry, and Mike Leigh's Another Year. Highlights of a strong Un Certain Regard lineup include Manoel de Oliveira's The Strange Case of Angelica, which has already screened to very favorable reviews; Xavier Dolan's follow-up to I Killed My Mother, titled Les amours imaginaires; Jean-Luc Godard's Film Socialisme (the trailer to this looks gorgeous); Jia Zhangke's documentary I Wish I Knew; Cristi Puiu's Aurora; and Hong Sang-Soo's Ha Ha Ha. Olivier Assayas's 5-hour docudrama Carlos, a late entry screening out of competition, should be a major film, and I'm also very much looking forward to Gregg Araki's Kaboom.

João César Monteiro - Silvestre

João César Monteiro, currently the subject of a retrospective at BAM, is a filmmaker previously unknown to me. The images above give some idea of the uncanny visual power of his bizarre 15th-century historical film Silvestre, but can't convey the hypnotic power of the long takes and slow tracking shots combined with highly stylized theatrical acting and sets, beautiful music and a radiant performance by Maria de Medeiros in her first film. I'm in the process of watching his delightfully absurd God's Comedy on DVD and plan to see his final film, Come and Go, next week. It's always a treat to discover a major director like this thanks to the resourceful programmers at BAM Cinematek.

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.

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.

Film Comment Selects

A Brighter Summer Day

Un Lac

Like You Know It All

This year's Film Comment Selects series runs from February 19-March 4, and I already have tickets for the following films: Accident (Soi Cheang), an acclaimed Hong Kong action film from Johnnie To's Milkyway Productions; Air Doll, the latest from Hirokazu Kore-Eda; Un Lac, reportedly a dark, challenging experimental film by Philippe Grandrieux, who has been highly praised by many critics whose judgment I trust; Persecution (Patrice Chereau), starring the great Charlotte Gainsbourg and Romain Duris; and best of all, the 4-hour restored version of a masterpiece by the late Edward Yang, A Brighter Summer Day. I'm also looking forward to seeing Hong Sang-Soo's Like You Know It All, Raul Ruiz's Nucingen House, a program of rare short films by and about Jean-Luc Godard, and possibly Brillante Mendoza's Cannes prizewinning Kinatay. This is a great chance to catch up on some of the best in current world cinema and a couple of outstanding revivals.