In Praise of Rensais

Muriel

Last Year at Marienbad

Le Chant du Styrene

New York Film Festival Preview II

Ne Change Rien (top), Independencia (middle), To Die Like a Man (bottom)

Here are images from three more of my must-see films, all by important directors making their belated New York Film Festival debuts this year.

The lovely black and white shot of actress Jeanne Balibar is from Ne Change Rien, a very personal documentary about Balibar's singing career by Pedro Costa, director of the extraordinary Colossal Youth. It's certain to be a visual treat.

Then there's a film by a very different Portuguese director, João Pedro Rodrigues, To Die Like a Man. This is Rodrigues's third feature but the first to appear in the festival, for which I credit Dennis Lim, a newcomer to the festival Selection Committee this year and a major champion of Rodrigues's work. See his fascinating article/interview in the recent Cannes issue of Cinema Scope magazine. (http://www.cinema-scope.com/cs39/spot_lim_rodrigues.html) I loved Rodrigues's first two films, O Fantasma and Odete (Two Drifters). He specializes in movies about marginal or outsider gay characters, and Lim compares To Die Like a Man, a feel-bad film about an aging drag performer, to one of the best recent gay films, Jacques Nolot's frankly autobiographical Before I Forget. Expect some audience walkouts with this one, which as my friend Juan says is part of the fun.

The festival chose not to include the controversially violent Cannes best screenplay winner, Brillante Mendoza's Kinatay, in favor of another emerging Filipino director, Raya Martin's Independencia. The program describes it as a "stylized tale of a mother and son hiding in the mountains after the US takeover of the islands." I'm eager to see this work by the acclaimed, if virtually unknown, Martin. Independencia and To Die Like a Man are the kind of challenging works that the festival should be applauded for including alongside more mainstream arthouse favorites like Almodovar (predictably grabbing the Closing Night slot with Broken Embraces) and Haneke.

The Centerpiece film is the highly regarded Sundance feature with the unwieldy title Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire. Also promising are Min Ye, Malian director Souleymane Cissé's first new film in over a decade, and Maren Ade's Everyone Else, which comes highly praised by Kent Jones in the current Film Comment.

To wrap up, there will be a screening of what is purportedly the oldest surviving Korean film, Crossroads of Youth, a 1934 silent film which will have live music and a benshi-style offscreen narrator. This should be a memorable event. With so many interesting films, many without a distributor, I will probably set a new record this year for the number of films I attend.

There are also sidebars on classic Chinese cinema and Indian musical director Guru Dutt. The films are yet to be announced, as is the lineup for Views from the Avant-Garde and perhaps a couple revivals at the Walter Reade Theater. Stay tuned.

New York Film Festival Preview

Police, Adjective (top), Antichrist (middle),
Wild Grass (bottom)

The lineup for this year's 47th New York Film Festival has just been posted (http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff/nyff.html) and it looks to be one of the strongest in years. Considering the rather disappointing selections from Cannes this year, at least from major directors in the competition, the NYFF's selection committee has done a mostly outstanding job this year. My biggest regret is the absence of Hong Sang-Soo's Like You Know It All. Last year the NY Times's Manohla Dargis trashed Hong's wonderful Night and Day, criticizing alleged "programmer loyalty", which may have played a part in Hong's exclusion this year. Night and Day sadly remains without American distribution. I would also have liked to see Ken Loach's Looking for Eric, Jane Campion's Bright Star, and Lou Ye's Spring Fever in the festival, but there are still plenty of films to look forward to. [UPDATE 11/3: Night and Day has been distributed by IFC Films and recently played at Anthology Film Archives; Bright Star opened theatrically in September.]

Most eagerly anticipated for me is the Opening Night selection, Alain Resnais's Les herbes folles (Wild Grass). Resnais is probably my favorite still-active director from the era of the Nouvelle Vague, although technically not part of the Cahiers du Cinema group that included Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Chabrol, Rivette, et al. If I treasure Resnais above even Godard today, it's because of his unequaled mastery of a beautiful and highly formalist mise-en-scene coupled with a profound sympathy for his characters. This carries through from his 60s masterpieces Hiroshima Mon Amour, Last Year at Marienbad, Muriel and the underrated Je t'aime, je t'aime, all of which played with the nature of time in thrilling ways, through Providence and Stavisky in the 70s, to a highly theatrical masterpiece like Mélo in the 80s and up to the recent Coeurs. Since the 80s Resnais has worked repeatedly with the great Sabine Azéma and André Dussollier (pictured above), who star in Wild Grass along with Arnaud Desplechin regulars Mathieu Amalric and Emanuelle Devos. I've always avoided the overhyped opening and closing night films at the NYFF but I'll make an exception this year.

Second on my list is Claire Denis's White Material. The festival failed to include Denis's previous film, the great 35 Rhums (opening this fall at Film Forum), so I give them credit for snagging this one before it has even premiered at Venice. Denis returns to some of the themes of her debut film Chocolat as, in the words of the festival blurb, "A handful of Europeans try to make sense of--and survive--the chaos happening all around them in an African country torn apart by civil war." Isabelle Huppert and Denis icon Isaach de Bankolé star.

My third choice would be the highly acclaimed film Police, Adjective (top left) by Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu, director of the beautifully observed comedy 12:08 East of Bucharest.

Cahiers veteran Jacques Rivette also has a film in the festival, 36 Vues du Pic Saint Loup. Other notable auteurs represented are Lars von Trier with Antichrist (above right), the scandal of Cannes, which is probably worth seeing if for no other reason than the prizewinning performance of Charlotte Gainsbourg; Catherine Breillat's Bluebeard; Michael Haneke's Palme d'Or winner The White Ribbon; Marco Bellocchio's Mussolini biopic Vincere; and 100-year-old Manoel de Oliveira's Eccentricities of a Blonde.

More to come in a second post.

The Return of David Hudson

Andrei Zviyagintsev's The Return

David Hudson, formerly of GreenCine Daily and then the short-lived IFC Daily, returns with the third incarnation of his invaluable roundup of links to the world of internet cinephilia, now called The Auteurs Daily. http://www.theauteurs.com/notebook/posts?author_id=55 David's posts can be found at The Auteurs Notebook, but he is now sharing a page with several other contributors. He is also launching a Twitter feed as a companion to this new enterprise, to which I quote David Ehrenstein's comment, "Tweets are for birds." Others may find that particular innovation more valuable than I do. Anyway, the return of David Hudson after a well-deserved month's vacation is great news to everyone in the online cinephile community.

Jonathan Rosenbaum's Alternate 100

Bulle Ogier in L'Amour Fou

Jonathan Rosenbaum, probably the best film critic working in America today, has reprinted a 1998 article in the Notes section of his blog in which he proposes an alternate list of the 100 greatest American movies, a provocative response to the American Film Institute's list that came out around the same time. http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?cat=9 It's a fascinating list, informed by a wide-ranging knowledge of what the American film canon should look like, in opposition to the AFI's lackluster list. He admits that there are "25 titles on the AFI list that I probably would have included on my own if I hadn’t wanted to create an all-new list for polemical purposes." The Magnificent Ambersons and Sunrise rank at the top of my own 10-best list but amazingly are absent from the AFI's list. I've seen 92 of Rosenbaum's Alternate 100, most of them multiple times. The 8 I have yet to see mostly fall in the avant-garde or experimental category and are therefore harder to come by, but I plan to catch Jonas Mekas's Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania at Anthology Film Archives soon. However, even a masterpiece like John Cassavetes's Love Streams and several other of these titles remain unreleased on Region 1 DVD.

I won't waste space posting the AFI list, but I'd like to present Rosenbaum's Alternate 100 both for my own easy reference and as a challenge to conventional wisdom.

Ace in the Hole/The Big Carnival (1951)
An Affair to Remember (1957)
Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
Avanti! (1972)
The Barefoot Contessa (1954)
Bigger Than Life (1956)
The Big Sky (1952)
The Black Cat (1934)
Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
Broken Blossoms (1919)
Cat People (1942)
Christmas in July (1940)
Confessions of an Opium Eater (1962)
The Crowd (1928)
Dead Man (1995)
The Docks of New York (1928)
Do the Right Thing (1989)
Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (1974)
11 x 14 (1976)
Eraserhead (1978)
Foolish Wives (1922)
Force of Evil (1948)
Freaks (1932)
The General (1927)
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)
Gilda (1946)
The Great Garrick (1937)
Greed (1925)
Hallelujah, I’m a Bum (1933)
The Heartbreak Kid (1972)
Housekeeping (1987)
The Hustler (1961)
Intolerance (1916)
Johnny Guitar (1954)
Judge Priest (1934)
Killer of Sheep (1978)
The Killing (1956)
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976)
Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
The Ladies’ Man (1961)
The Lady From Shanghai (1948)
Last Chants for a Slow Dance (1977)
Laughter (1930)
Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948)
Lonesome (1929)
Love Me Tonight (1932)
Love Streams (1984)
The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
Make Way for Tomorrow (1937)
Man’s Castle (1933)
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)
Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
Mikey and Nicky (1976)
Monsieur Verdoux (1947)
My Son John (1952)
The Naked Spur (1953)
Nanook of the North (1922)
The Night of the Hunter (1955)
The Nutty Professor (1963)
The Palm Beach Story (1942)
Panic in the Streets (1950)
Park Row (1952)
The Phenix City Story (1955)
Point Blank (1967)
Real Life (1979)
Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1971)
Rio Bravo (1959)
Scarface (1932)
The Scarlet Empress (1934)
Scarlet Street (1945)
Scenes From Under Childhood (1967)
The Scenic Route (1978)
The Seventh Victim (1943)
Shadows (1960)
Sherlock Jr. (1924)
The Shooting (1967)
The Shop Around the Corner (1940)
The Sound of Fury/Try and Get Me! (1950)
Stars in My Crown (1950)
The Steel Helmet (1951)
Stranger Than Paradise (1984)
The Strawberry Blonde (1941)
Sunrise (1927)
Sylvia Scarlett (1935)
The Tarnished Angels (1958)
That’s Entertainment! III (1994)
This Land Is Mine (1943)
Thunderbolt (1929)
Tom Tom the Piper’s Son (1969)
To Sleep With Anger (1990)
Track of the Cat (1954)
Trouble in Paradise (1932)
Vinyl (1965)
Wanda (1971)
While the City Sleeps (1956)
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957)
Woodstock (1970)
The Wrong Man (1957)
Zabriskie Point (1970)

UPDATE 7/28: Today in the Notes section of his blog Rosenbaum reprints a short item about the recent popularity of retrospectives of so-called "difficult" directors like Bresson, Tarkovsky and Rivette. He mentions a 2006 screening of Rivette's 4-hour L'Amour Fou at the Museum of the Moving Image that I was lucky enough to attend, at which he led a discussion of the film. There is an eager audience out there. I think the continued success of revivals in general depends on a combination of support from traditional media (New York Times, Village Voice) and the online community. The huge turnout for the Nicholas Ray series is a case in point.

Bigger than Life/In a Lonely Place

According to Jean-Luc Godard, le cinéma, c'est Nicholas Ray. Look at these images from two of Ray's masterpieces, Bigger than Life and In a Lonely Place. Notice how the framing of Bogart dominates Gloria Grahame anxiously standing in a doorway, with noir shadows adding the appropriate atmosphere of foreboding. Of course this is hardly a typical film noir, but an intensely romantic, autobiographical exmination of a relationship torn apart by Bogart's violent nature at war with his love for Grahame, never better as the would-be redemptive figure who can't save this tortured screenwriter from his own self-destruction. The shamelessly sentimental lines spoken by both Bogart and Grahame rank among my favorite dialogue in any Hollywood film: "I was born when she kissed me, I died when she left me, I lived a few weeks while she loved me."

Five years later Ray, now exercising his mastery of the Cinemascope frame, goes all out in depicting the psychosis of James Mason's suburban American dad terrorizing his son with the help of towering shadows, askew angles, broken mirrors and the like. Jonathan Rosenbaum has said, "It's hard to think of another Hollywood picture with more to say about the sheer awfulness of 'normal' American family life during the 50s." It's also hard to think of a better embodiment of the 50s zeitgeist in American cinema than Nicholas Ray, whose retrospective runs at Film Forum through August 6.

Top Ten Lists

Even though I'm embarrassed by some of my naive wording in the brief descriptions, I'm posting a link to my 2004 Ten Best List from Senses of Cinema, the Australian online film journal. I would change the rankings around a bit, probably substitute Sansho the Bailiff for Ugetsu, etc., but I stand by all my choices today. I'd also like to make room for a few great films I've re-seen in the past year or so, namely Leo McCarey's Make Way for Tomorrow, Jacques Rivette's Celine and Julie Go Boating, and Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman...

http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/top_tens/archive04.html#gerow

And perhaps I'll post a list soon of my favorite films since 1990, focusing particularly on the Iranian, Latin American and Asian renaissance represented by Abbas Kiarostami, Lucrecia Martel, Carlos Reygadas, Lisandro Alonso, Julian Hernandez, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Tsai Ming-Liang, Jia Zhang-Ke, Edward Yang, Wong Kar-Wai, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Hong Sang-Soo and Lee Chang-Dong.