•Stereo Sanctity•

Film Capsule: Jacques Rivette's Paris Belongs to Us (1961)

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Thu, 18 Feb 2016 01:04:00 +0000

Paris Belongs to Us (1961)
Directed by Jacques Rivette

Filmed over a period of years as the political paranoia of the 1950s gave way to the social and artistic retaliation of the 60s, the first feature by the one-time editor of Cahiers du cinéma plays like the spiritual commencement of the nouvelle vague, so prescient its perspective and sense of generational anxiety. Whether an outgrowth of this civil consciousness or simply a coincidental convergence of creative and cultural tides, the film even more impressively triangulates what can now be seen as Rivette’s primary thematic preoccupations. Amidst an eerily unpopulated Paris, a troupe of amateur actors rehearse Shakespeare’s “unstageable” play Pericles as gossip concerning a friend’s apparent suicide flowers into an invisible conspiracy of performative and political intrigue, leaving one idealistic student (Betty Schneider) to bear the weight of an ambiguous yet palpable post-war ennui. At once an urban morality play and a work of meta-cinematic interrogation, Rivette’s debut captures a city in the throes of transition as the past stubbornly yields to the demands of an evermore metropolitan modernity. (December 15, 6:30pm; December 18, 3:30pm at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s “Lynch/Rivette”) [BKMag]

Los Angeles Repertory Recommendations: December 2015

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Thu, 18 Feb 2016 01:01:00 +0000

CLAIRE DENIS ON 35MM AT CINEFAMILY | 611 N. FAIRFAX AVE.

French master Claire Denis continues to work with a frequency rarely afforded her female contemporaries (whether in Europe or America), but her older films remain a rarity on the big screen, particularly in Los Angeles. It’s an unexpected delight, then, to see two of the director’s least appreciated films make their way to Cinefamily this month. A new 35mm restoration of Denis’ 1988 debut, Chocolat, has three remaining screenings (Dec. 4-6), while her 1996 film Nenette and Boni, receives a single-night showcase on Dec. 8 as part of the ‘La Collectionneuse’ series of classic French films. Together these two works encompass many of Denis’ thematic interests –– from the violence of colonialism, to the eroticism of the human body, to the nuances of feminine identity –– while likewise speaking to the depth and power of her ever-maturing and elusive stylistic vision.

ARCHIVE TREASURES AT THE HAMMER | 10899 WILSHIRE BLVD.

For the past two months the UCLA Film and Television Archive has been showcasing some of their most beloved restorations –– everything from The Red Shoes to My Darling Clementine to Paths of Glory –– and the series continues through mid-December with some of its most tantalizing offerings. On Dec. 6, Barbara Loden’s seminal work of small-town neo-realism, Wanda, is appropriately paired with American iconoclast John Cassavetes’ debut feature, Shadows, while Dec. 11 brings together two even rarer works of micro-budget cinema: Billy Woodberry’s exemplary “L.A. Rebellion” title Bless Their Little Hearts and Efrain Gutierrez’s vital piece of Chicano heritage cinema, Please, Don’t Bury Me Alive!. And finally, closing out the series on Dec. 19 is an early-‘30s double bill of auteurist delights, with Josef von Sternberg’s Blonde Venus –– starring Marlene Dietrich as a wife driven to unfortunate lengths to provide for her ailing husband –– proceeding the Ernst Lubitsch musical The Love Parade, featuring Maurice Chevalier as a philandering Count and Jeanette MacDonald as the Queen drawn in by the young man’s lascivious charm.

JOHN FORD DOUBLE-BILL AT THE NEW BEVERLY | 7165 BEVERLY BLVD.

Buried amid the New Beverly’s genre and holiday-heavy December schedule is an essential 35mm double feature of lesser-known films from two otherwise storied eras of directorial titan John Ford’s unimpeachable career. Opening the evening on Dec. 30 is the 1934 WWI drama The Lost Patrol, starring Victor McLaglen and Boris Karloff as soldiers attempting to lead a splintered troupe across the Mesopotamian desert following the death of their commanding officer, while the back half of the bill is given over to the vivid 1955 Technicolor drama The Long Gray Line, in which Tyrone Powers’ reckless West Point protege is forced to personally and professionally mature on his way to becoming a storied military instructor.

WEIMAR-ERA CLASSICS AND BING CROSBY FAVORITES AT LACMA | 5905 WILSHIRE BLVD.

A diverse selection of titles highlight a busier-than-usual month for the film program at LACMA. On Dec. 11, the museum finishes up their overview of Weimar-era German cinema with a digital restoration of Fritz Lang’s revered serial killer parable M, followed on Dec. 12 by a tantalizing 35mm presentation of F.W. Murnau’s silent chamber drama The Last Laugh. Meanwhile, the weekly Tuesday Matinee series features a quartet of Bing Crosby films, including the Dixieland Jazz chronicle Birth of the Blues (Dec. 8), the seasonally themed musicals Holiday Inn (Dec. 15) and White Christmas (Dec. 22), and, closing out the year on Dec. 29, the dark character study Country Girl, in which the iconic singer plays a washed-up alcoholic who uses his wife (Grace Kelly) as a pawn to keep his fading career afloat. [THR]

Film Capsule: Robert Bresson's Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945)

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Thu, 18 Feb 2016 00:56:00 +0000

Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945)
Directed by Robert Bresson

“I’ll have my revenge.” So vows Hélène (María Casares) in the opening moments of the darkly sumptuous second feature by the then-emerging French artist and aesthete. Spurred by the cowardly admission of her lover Jean’s (Paul Bernard) lost passion, Hélène’s quest for comeuppance quickly grows perverse as she attempts to lure her former suitor into a doomed romance with Agnès (Elina Labourdette), a young proletarian whose salacious past would, if discovered, bring shame to any potential relationship. The ensuing drama––both coerced and manipulated by Hélène, to ultimately futile ends––enfolds not simply vengeful maneuvering and situational irony, but also social satire and spiritual consciousness, rendering what would otherwise be a traditional melodrama into a modern morality play replete with near-metaphysical implications. And in that sense, the film is less an outlier in Bresson’s increasingly austere catalogue than a clarion call for a new way of considering human behavior and the frame by which such fate is made manifest. (November 27, 9pm; November 29, 3pm at Anthology Film Archives’s “Jack Smith Selects [From the Grave)]”) [BKMag]

Best of the Avant-Garde 2015

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Fri, 20 Nov 2015 22:12:00 +0000

This is the third iteration of this annual roundup of the year in avant-garde, and it has only gotten more difficult over that span to narrow down an entire twelve months of noteworthy accomplishments into an arbitrary list of favorites. For one, the term avant-garde, as broad and malleable as it’s ever been, is still a wholly subjective designation. Can a documentary be avant-garde? Can narrative shorts be avant-garde? Can widely travelled features be avant-garde? The answer is, of course, yes. So in the spirit of the proceedings, I haven’t placed any restrictions on the list you’re about to read, other than limiting it to eight selections, a number arrived at for no other reason than it happened to pop up on a few occasions as I began considering titles.

And this year, that pool of titles was larger than ever. I’ll certainly never claim any list to be definitive, but I will say that I watched more “avant-garde” films than ever this year: Essentially everything from Crossroads, Wavelengths, and Projections, with a number of select titles from Images and Ann Arbor and the odd regional program. Which is to say, a lot of excellent work was necessarily left out. So, before we begin, a quick tip of the hat to Scott Stark (Traces/Legacy), Eric Stewart (Wake), Mary Helena Clark (Palms), Ben Russell (Greetings to the Ancestors), Jonathan Schwartz (3 Miniatures), Lewis Klahr (Mars Garden), Blake Williams (Something Horizontal), Björn Kämmerer (Navigator), Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc (Sector IX B), Laida Lertxundi (Viva para Vivir), Margaret Honda (Color Correction) and Madison Brookshire (About 11 Minutes).

∞

8. Park Lanes / Kevin Jerome Everson (Rotterdam: Signals 24/7; Images Festival; MoMA: Documentary Fortnight)

Following a string of small-scale suburban surveys, Kevin Jerome Everson began 2015 with something far more ambitious: Park Lanes, an eight-hour observational portrait of an anonymous group of urban factory workers meant to replicate the shape and experience of an entire work day. Arriving at dawn in the film’s first scene, the team of mostly African and Vietnamese American laborers proceed straightaway in constructing what will only eventually be revealed as the component parts of a bowling lane. Shooting in a manner reminiscent of direct cinema pioneers Frederick Wiseman and Robert Gardner, Everson silently tracks the workers’ many tasks—which range from the menial and repetitious to the elaborate and intensely physical—pausing to capture lunch breaks and conversations between the staff with the same attention to the nuances of language, behavior and cultural identity that has come to define this commendably empathetic filmmaker’s sociological interests. In more ways than simply its more immediately appreciable qualities (the film’s scope and seamlessly integrated structure tell only part of the story here), this may be Everson’s most impressively comprehensive evocation of American life yet.

7. Neither God Nor Santa Maria / Samuel M. Delgado and Helena Girón (Toronto: Wavelengths; New York: Projections)

Part ethnography, part mystic cinematic mirage, this beautiful and evocative portrait of Yé, a remote village on the island of Lanzarote, is a paradoxically opaque work of tactile pleasures. Shot on expired 16mm celluloid, the film makes a virtue of its degraded textures, granting its images of flora and fauna, coastal vistas and mountainous contours, the look of an excavated travelogue, with scratches and imperfections resonating on the soundtrack as ambient accompaniment to the vast topographical phenomena peering through the fog-shrouded atmosphere. Meanwhile, audio recordings made in the late-sixties by the ethnographer Luis Diego Cuscoy act as ominous narration, the voices relating stories of witchcraft and the occult that, over centuries, have taken on local legend. With an acute eye and ear for natural detail and speculative history, directors Samuel M. Delgado and Helena Girón have constructed both an oral diary and an archaeological account of a far-off land, all the more vivid for never quite coming into focus.

6. The Two Sights / Katherine McInnis (New York: Projections)

Inspired by the Book of Optics, Muslim scientist Ibn al-Haytham’s 11th-century tome concerning the capacity of human vision and its relation to the physical world, this brief but bracing work by Katherine McInnis is, in the words of the filmmaker, a “false translation” of this ancient text. Comprised of vintage images from Life Magazine, The Two Sights’ formal presentation is deceptively simple, utilizing an elemental arsenal of flicker effects to visually stimulate its still life subject matter, in turn setting up a dialectal study in the perception and movement generated between individual frames. The sensory impression McInnis achieves is not unlike that provoked by Scott Stark in his contemporary classic The Realist (2013), but rather than a bombastic display of reanimation, McInnis’ montage suggests a more mournful fate for its subjects, as the paranoia of midcentury America bursts forth in affectless images of scientific and social experimentation, the at once nervy and naive facade broken ever further with each flash of light and shift in perspective.

5. The Exquisite Corpus / Peter Tscherkassky (Cannes: Directors’ Fortnight; Toronto: Wavelengths; New York: Projections)

The avant-garde has a not-unfair reputation of self-seriousness. But there are fun films out there as well, and Austrian veteran Peter Tscherkassky’s first film in five years is one very fine example, a playful amalgam of vintage erotica let loose as a fever-dream of cinema’s less refined past. The humor of The Exquisite Corpus is, in one sense, intrinsic to its source: faces charged with ecstasy and pleasure, un-ironic come-ons delivered in affectless timbres—it’s the stuff of late-night softcore lore, all black lace and unkempt nether regions. However, in the hands of Tscherkassky, these images are granted a dimension of burlesque theatricality, its dead-girl framework eviscerated at once by a hyperactive montage—achieved via the analogue employment of various masking, superimposition and re-photography effects—and an additional layer of orchestral bombast, the tactile texture of the celluloid filmstrips themselves appearing to buckle under the attendant sensory stress. It would make for an appropriate double-bill with Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson’s The Forbidden Room, regenerating as it does bygone imagery while staging the resultant drama as a funhouse of the exotic.

4. Something Between Us / Jodie Mack (New York: Projections)

Jodie Mack topped the inaugural edition of this list in 2013 with the left-field triumph Let Your Light Shine. In the interim she’s produced a few films, all of which I’m fond of but which nevertheless feel like fairly prescribed reiterations of established strengths. Something Between Us feels like a proper follow-up, as well a genuine step forward for this ever-exciting artist. The opening moments of the film, a sort of bucolic lakeside pastorale, represent new territory for Mack, though the irregular intrusions of rolling bracelets and swinging bits of jewelry quickly break the reverie, repositioning us firmly within the filmmaker’s artisanal headspace. Mack proceeds to play these two forces—the natural and the manufactured—off one another brilliantly, the bedazzled trinkets producing prismatic light formations as they spin before an artificial light source, just as the sunlight streaming through the morning mist spills forth a rainbow of organic hues. Eventually, the two environments bleed into a single spectrum of aquatic illuminations and iridescent refractions, accompanied by the accumulating sound of bells and chimes, themselves gathering into a joyous music box medley. All told, the single most beautiful film yet from an artist with no shortage of striking visions to her name.

3. Night Without Distance / Lois Patiño (Locarno: Fuori concorso; Toronto: Wavelengths; New York: Projections)

Galician artist Lois Patiño is, in a broad sense, a landscape filmmaker—and, even at only 32 years of age, one of the very best. But if prior works such as Mountain in Shadow (2012) and Coast of Death (2013) relied largely on the grandeur and inherent beauty of their geologic subject matter, his latest, Night Without Distance, blatantly intervenes between the natural environment and the viewer’s perspective. Filmed in the Gerês Mountains on the border of Portugal and Galicia, the film essentially amounts to a series of languid shots of human bodies set amidst various topographies, the “characters,” as such, conspiring quietly about a vague smuggling operation. This is all backdrop, however, to the film’s visual palette, which Patiño produced through negative reversals, a common enough technique which here takes on an alien beauty, all vivid purples, deep greens, chromatic grays, and radioactive shades of white. Patiño’s camera then proceeds to tracks slowly, at times imperceptibly, through the landscape, generating an eerie sense of calm as previously unseen figures begin to reveal themselves within the rocky terrain. There’s something to be said for establishing a narrow set of aesthetic and formal boundaries and attempting to fully engage the cinematic potential offered therein. And in that sense, Night Without Distance is all but flawless.

2. Engram of Returning / Daïchi Saïto (Toronto: Wavelengths)

The year’s most visceral audio-visual experience, Daïchi Saïto’s bracing eighteen-minute trip across a volatile expanse of unidentified landscapes once and for all brings his working method into direct communication with his subject matter by dispensing with both context and any immediately readable means of expression. Where do these images come from? How has Saïto stitched them into a breathing aesthetic object when the material property of the images themselves appear to be losing ground to the encroaching crepuscular emanations of an untraceable source? Rather than submit these images to a structuralist strategy in a manner familiar to much of his recent work, Saïto instead allows each measure of visible topography to respond organically to his hand-processed photo-chemical effects and re-photography methods, the composite frames thereby gathering a tangible weight and a vividly saturated spectrum of inky pigments (indeed, what I casually identified in my report from Wavelengths as the employment of dyes is nothing so blatantly intrusive). The effect is one of locomotive momentum brought to a nightmarish intensity by the subterranean saxophone accompaniment of Jason Sharp, whose circular breathing technique produces an audible respiratory response which Saïto utilizes as conceptual compliment to the physicality of the geographic constituents. This is a film that plays on our most basic cognitive conceptions, rendering any sense of reality and its attendant distractions wholly obsolete.

1. 88:88 / Isiah Medina (Locarno: Signs of Life; Toronto: Wavelengths; New York: Projections)

On its own aesthetic and formal merit, 88:88 would be a worthy choice for the top spot of any year-end list of similar ordinance. But this a work that has already taken on a unique life of its own outside the confines of the cinema, the very act of supporting its advancements and upholding its ideology representing a rare instance in the advocation for something undeniably progressive—potentially even entirely new—in the cinematic medium. Certainly no work in recent memory has generated as much in debate in the experimental sector as Isiah Medina’s first feature, a film, for the sake of classification, we might identify as a sixty-five-minute montage comprising the director’s family and friends and the various Montreal haunts they call home. But what Medina has done is take the act of filming—something, based on the evidence at hand, he must vigorously partake in—and turned it into a statement of both political and cinematic unrest, one in which every frame and every cut bespeak a previously untapped means of human expression. It can be difficult at times to even attempt to keep up with the sheer onslaught of voices and images, articulations of cultural identity and civil liberty compressed into fleeting pleas for the dispossessed, images piling into collages of everyday beauty and banality alike. The film’s revelations, then, are tied up wholly in its means of expression, its themes byproducts of Medina’s highly intuitive process. 88:88’s unchecked energy is thus entirely appropriate—this is the rare film that feels truly inexhaustible. [Fandor]

Feature: Natto Wada's Punishment Room (1956)

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Fri, 20 Nov 2015 22:01:00 +0000

This piece was written for Reverse Shot's 'Unauthorized' symposium.

Rewriting History
Natto Wada's Punishment Room

One of the great ironies of the auteur theory is that in its elevation of the director to the level of cinematic architect, it correspondingly neglects the efforts of its namesake initiate: that of the author herself. And in a primarily visual medium, the work of the screenwriter is of particularly precarious prominence. It’s much easier to appreciate the achievements of, say, a cinematographer or a visual effects team than it is to parse the contributions of what is ostensibly the emanating agent for all narrative cinema. Indeed, it can be difficult to quantify such influence on even a single film––for every Casablanca or Network, where the script is of equal, if not greater, notoriety than the more appreciable aesthetic aspects of the work, there’s a John Ford or Stanley Kubrick film of which little is noted with respect to its expositional elements. Attempting to trace a screenwriter’s sensibility over multiple films—to say nothing of a career—is, then, what we might call a potentially futile exercise in creative and critical categorization.

Nonetheless, there is something to be gleaned from such an inquiry. One of the more curious authorial elisions with regard to the work of a major filmmaker—and one that has fascinated this writer for many years—is that of Natto Wada, wife and collaborator of celebrated Japanese director Kon Ichikawa. Both employed at Toho Studios in the early 1940s, Ichikawa and Wada (birth name Yumiko Mogi) married in the spring of 1948. They immediately began working together—he as director; she as screenwriter—and the following year would release Passion Without End (1949), the first of what would amount to over thirty collaborations. Wada’s case is fascinating for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the scarcity of similar husband-wife pairings over such an extended period of time in the history of cinema. But from a completely creative standpoint, her presence and perspective appear to be the single greatest influence on Ichikawa’s artistry. In retrospect, it’s almost remarkably convenient how one can correlate Wada’s contributions with that of her husband’s achievements. Despite not nominally accounting for Wada’s individual efforts, the cinematic-historical record generally situates Ichikawa’s most fertile period as stretching from the early 1950s to 1965’s Tokyo Olympiad, the last Ichikawa film Wada would contribute to in any significant way (with but a few exceptions, she would write or cowrite all of Ichikawa’s films over this same period).

So why the lapse in recognition for an artist who was not simply an inspiration for her personal and professional partner but the literal author of some of the best films ever produced in the East? The answer may be as routine as auteurist indifference or Western deference to established hierarchies, but on evidence of Ichikawa’s standing in the mid fifties/early sixties, a time typically considered the golden age of Japanese cinema, it’s clear a cause cannot be ascribed to any one film. Film scholar James Quandt, in his forward to the 2001 Cinematheque Ontario monograph Kon Ichikawa, describes the director as an “impediment to auteurist analysis” for two primary reasons. First, the diversity of his interests and breadth of his occasionally compromised filmography (he’s credited with directing over 80 films, many of them studio assignments); and second, “the formidable influence of his wife and scenarist, Natto Wada, whose withdrawal from writing his scripts in the mid-sixties marked a turning point in his career.” In the same introduction Quandt summarizes both the acerbic demeanor (the “black wit”) of many of their best films together, as well as Wada’s penchant for literary adaptations. “There is no question,” he writes, “that Ichikawa’s post-Wada films are markedly less sardonic,” noting that the process of “extricating Wada’s influence is one of many factors that makes ‘the case of Kon Ichikawa’ so confounding.”

One might add that their fifteen-plus years as creative partners were almost perfectly split between black comedies and equally dark dramas, the former significantly less known in the West. Rather than aim to reconcile the two periods (a task for a much larger essay), it may be worthwhile to simply investigate the most readily available materials, the films that by and large continue to define Ichikawa’s practice over a half-century later. For the purposes of analysis, we can roughly situate this era between The Heart (1955)––the first film of Ichikawa’s “mature” period, and one that Wada curiously did not script––and Tokyo Olympiad, a document of the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo and her final credit before retiring from screenwriting. This is the period during which Ichikawa would produce The Burmese Harp (1956), Conflagration (1958), Odd Obsession (1959), Fires on the Plain (1959), The Broken Commandment (1962), and An Actor’s Revenge (1963), among many less recognized titles.

What these films have in common, besides their literary origins and generally bleak perspective, is a sharply satirical tone, a quality running through both Ichikawa’s comedies and melodramas, and as such something that appears a distinct result of Wada’s vision. Thus, while the director’s subjects and characters don’t easily evince a female perspective or speak to generally accepted notions of femininity, there’s a certain sensibility––sometimes explicit, other times more difficult to gauge––at work in Ichikawa’s best films that one must grant to Wada’s presiding influence in order to gain full understanding of the director’s oeuvre, whether it’s in the aforementioned notes of satire and cynicism, or something less immediately perceptible, such as situational, social, or domestic designs within the narratives proper. Of their collaborations, Ichikawa’s Japanese New Wave–stoking 1956 classic Punishment Room offers a particularly rich case study in the pair’s working relationship and the extent of Wada’s impact.

Despite being an expert technician with an acute compositional eye––and further, an early experimenter with aspect ratios, lens filters, and theatrical staging strategies––Ichikawa is not as obvious a stylist as other major Japanese directors of the period. His images lack the monumentality of Kurosawa, the fluidity of Mizoguchi, and the rigor of Ozu. As philosophically divergent as they are, his closest counterparts may in fact be Mikio Naruse and Shohei Imamura, though he lacks similarly singular thematic concerns, instead working in a manner familiar to either or both (it’s no wonder Ichikawa has just as often been described as a humanist in the vein of former, as he has a cinematic entomologist to equal the latter). Indeed, nearly each film found Ichikawa trying new techniques, approaching previously unexplored subjects and accepting new challenges, which may account for the topical rather than formal recognition even his best-known films receive. It’s when we look closer at these themes and how they’re articulated in the dialogue and scenarios of Ichikawa’s films that Wada’s contributions begin to take on added weight. In Punishment Room, a film about youthful rebellion and the symptomatic sense of disaffection which spread swiftly through postwar Japan, these subjects were imbued with the topical energy of the period, an era of generational discontent that proved of great personal interest to Wada and Ichikawa, themselves young parents caught between the currents of the past and present.

By contrast, Odd Obsession, one of Ichikawa’s darkest, wryest films, presents its story of a sexually frustrated husband orchestrating an affair between his wife and future son-in-law with a comically incidental air, as if each party is not only privy to the other’s perversions but also secretly longing for the arrangement to develop/devolve into consented, familial consummation. In lieu of such hedonistic passion, Ichikawa and Wada offer a socially scathing climax, allowing a working class representative of the family’s twisted obsessions to administer deadly comeuppance. Inbred trauma likewise incites the wayward protagonist of Conflagration to set fire to a Buddhist temple at film’s end––similarly symbolic fates for members of troubled social castes. Compare these to The Heart, a quite beautiful work in its own right and another film about a family living with unarticulated guilt (but again, one not scripted by Wada), and the difference in disposition becomes apparent. The Heart concludes with an emotional, even devastating, admission from husband to wife, but there’s little dimension to the revelation beyond what’s inherent in the discourse and the ancillary effect it will have on the couple themselves.

Though Punishment Room represents what is likely the fatalistic extreme of the Ichikawa-Wada worldview, the brand of earnestness embodied by The Heart eventually won out in a number of films written by Wada as well, such as The Burmese Harp and The Broken Commandment, period pictures that foreground the humanism coursing through even the most bitter of their collaborations, and in which the social and political issues depicted offer key present day parallels. The former, an adaptation of Takeyama Michio’s 1946 novel of the same name, follows an increasingly disillusioned World War II soldier who, in the wake of Japan’s surrender, assumes the role of a monk and proceeds to bury the bodies of his dead comrades. There’s a distinct lack of cynicism in Ichikawa and Wada’s representation of the soldier, which stands in direct opposition to, say, the caustic defiance which propels the protagonist of Fires on the Plain, a very different sort of antiwar film which translated Shōhei Ōoka’s 1951 novel into a brutal yet strangely comedic portrayal of ideological sanctity. The Broken Commandment, made toward the end of Ichikawa and Wada’s partnership, centers on a young grade-school teacher also living under false pretenses. As a member of the socially outcast burakumin class, the man, if discovered, risks being removed from his job and banished from the community he’s attempting to nurture.

This simultaneously specific and crosscultural attention to the perseverance of the human spirit seems to be what drove Wada in her choice of source material. That she would even attempt to locate such elusive bits of humanity in texts as acidic as those which inspired Punishment Room or Odd Obsession speaks at once to her understanding of a maturating postwar cinematic consciousness and her keen awareness of its capacity to reflect contemporary social temperaments. In an essay by Audie Bock included in the aforementioned Ichikawa monograph, he cites Wada’s disenchantment with the overriding misanthropy of Japanese cinema in the mid-sixties, then at the height of its progressive yet unflaggingly pessimistic New Wave movement, as perhaps the cause of her withdrawal from screenwriting. “She doesn’t like the new film grammar, the method of presentation of the material,” Bock quotes Ichikawa as saying. “She says there’s no heart in it anymore, that people no longer take human love seriously.” Thanks to her husband, Wada’s humanization of dark social themes took on a variety of forms over the years, but it’s ironic that the cynicism that they together helped usher in would be the very same attitude that would, ultimately, wither their own creative morale. “That [Wada] was responsible for many of the excellent qualities of Ichikawa’s films,” writes Donald Richie in his 2001 book A Hundred Years of Japanese Film, “is evident in a certain decline in their quality after her death.” Indeed, few screenwriters seem to have yielded such a lasting effect on two dovetailing eras of cinema.

Few of Wada’s own words survive—at least in English—but a number of key insights into her process are thankfully preserved in an essay she wrote in 1956 (published in 1962 and also available in the Cinematheque Ontario collection) in response to an addition she made to her and Keiji Hasebe’s script for Punishment Room, which was an otherwise faithful adaptation of Shintaro Ishihara’s controversial novel Season of the Sun. The book––one of the first popular pieces of taiyozoku (“Sun Tribe”) literature, a subgenre that dealt with the rebellion of postwar Japanese youth––Wada explains, provided a shocking realization for many of her generation not privy to the escalating manifestations of sexuality and violence against authority in youth culture. Released the same year as Kō Nakahira’s seminal Crazed Fruit (which sports a screenplay by Ishihara himself, adapted from his novel of the same name), the film charts the casually nihilistic lifestyle of a young university student named Katsumi (Hiroshi Kawaguchi), whose rebellious acts range from physically harassing his teachers to intimidating strangers who just happen to cross his path. The drama hinges on Katsumi’s premeditated rape of his classmate, Akiko (Ayako Wakao), whom he eventually drugs and victimizes. The morally unambiguous nature of this situation is then complicated by Akiko’s growing attraction to—and professed love of—Katsumi, whose defiant attitude she finds alluring. With Ichikawa’s stark and unsentimental treatment of these events and Katsumi’s inevitable recompense, the film is suitably provocative and pessimistic, even compared to the director’s other work during this period.

In light of Punishment Room’s subject matter, Wada’s addition of a maternal figure to Ishihara’s story seems rather uncontroversial, though it reportedly raised objections on behalf of those invested in the novel. In her own words, Wada’s intention in adapting Ishihara’s book was to “understand these young men, as a woman and as a mother.” In that respect, giving Katsumi a mother is an understandable act of representation for both Wada and, by extension, an audience of women who might otherwise feel alienated by this largely testosterone-fueled film. But there’s an additional, perhaps more important, reasoning at work here. The Confucian philosophy of filial piety is a foundational cultural concept in Japan, one which taiyozoku art and entertainment directly attempted to rebuke. Because Wada added a second parent and additional figure of sympathy to the proceedings, Katsumi’s actions take on an additional dimension of critique, as acts potentially fostered by social sedition as much as they are familial subjugation.

In “A Taiyozoku Masterwork: Punishment Room,” one of Japanese film historian Tadao Sato’s many contributions to Quandt’s monograph, he describes how Wada and Hasebe “stress the antagonism of the students toward their parents by emphasizing the portrayals of the vulgar teacher and the weak, ineffectual parents, so that the film makes rebellion credible.” He then goes on to note (emphasis mine) how such generational and social delineations facilitate the film’s two-fold capacity for both empathy and evaluation: “In contrast to the original story, which glorifies the youths’ irritation with and rejection of the impoverishment and cowardice of contemporary society, the film also powerfully shows the pain of those under critique. This complexity is its primary strength.”

It’s in such a deceptively minor gesture that Wada’s primary contributions can be most deeply felt across Ichikawa’s expansive oeuvre (even in a film as stylistically anomalous as the fantastical An Actor’s Revenge, extra-cinematic references to then-current and historical atrocities work to shade the day-glo theatricality). As one final point of reference, one might consider the director’s best known post-Wada film, The Makioka Sisters (1983), a rather lovely adaptation of Junichiro Tanizaki’s novel that nonetheless feels notably less substantial––not to mention less subversive––than much of what preceded. In fact, the director is said to have consulted an ailing Wada, who would pass away soon after the film was completed, regarding the script’s ending, and the noticeably crestfallen tone of the entire production can feel at times inextricable from the couple’s own imminent reckoning.

Ichikawa spoke many times over the years of Wada’s input and their combined working method, which saw them collaborate in nearly every aspect of the research and development process, with Wada finally tasked with writing up the actual screenplay, an arrangement which seems to have suited the sensibilities of each but which may indirectly account for the authorial imbalance of their prescribed legacy. In the end, however, it may be a single remark Ichikawa made to Donald Richie, quoted in his profile of the director from the spring 1996 issue of Sight & Sound, that most simply and definitively outlines Wada’s enduring impact on her husband’s career: “Her influence is absolutely crucial,” he offers matter-of-factly. “Without her there wouldn’t be any Ichikawa film.” [RS]

DVD Review: Julien Duvivier in the Thirties (1930-1937)

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Fri, 20 Nov 2015 21:50:00 +0000

The first thing one notices upon encountering the world of Julien Duvivier is the mobility of his camera. Graceful and inquisitive, the French filmmaker's lens proved an instrumental tool not only in the formal conception of his films, but even more so in their narrative construction. Like many directors tasked with transitioning between the silent and sound eras of cinema, Duvivier was first and foremost a visual storyteller, a trait he didn't forfeit as he embarked on a fruitful career which stretched from the late-1910s well into the '60s. Though he was reluctant to capitulate to the mandates of sound, having made dozens of films over the decade prior, one rarely senses in his films from the 1930s an unsure hand, or detects a stubborn vision of cinema's evolving identity. In fact, his best work from the period so wholly integrates the converging capacities of the medium that it can be tempting to retroactively classify him as one of the progenitors of modern cinema itself.

Duvivier's penchant for cynical, even comically mordant subject matter likewise speaks to his prescient perspective. His first film of the sound era, 1930's David Golder, is indicative of this sardonic worldview. Starring the imposing stage actor Harry Baur, in his first of seven roles for the director, the film tells a tale of patriarchal strife in which a callous Jewish banker (Bauer) is emotionally and fiscally victimized by his hostile ex-wife (Paule Andral) and uncaring daughter (Jackie Monnier). Duvivier, working from his own adaption of a 1929 novel of the same name by Irène Némirovsky, handles such potentially melodramatic material with a careful balance of sympathy and scrutiny, never allowing his characters' malicious actions to completely overshadow their sense of shared humanity. This simultaneously objective and empathetic eye is reflected in the delicate demeanor of Duvivier's compositions, which shift, often in a single camera move, from long shots of characters casually conversing in richly ornamented interiors to close-ups mapping the psychological dimensions of their frayed relationships. If, in the end, Baur's title character must meet an inevitable fate, it's not without a redemptive plea, rendering Golder less a monster than a martyr for a family he never truly knew.

Baur assumes another parental role in 1932's Poil de Carotte, as the neglectful father of a young boy name François (Robert Lynen), otherwise known not-so-affectionately as Carrottop—in reference to his head of unkempt red hair. But if Francois's father is simply inattentive, preoccupied with his own business endeavors, then his mother (Catherine Fonteney) is downright tyrannical, verbally and physically abusive and of little remorse. Carrottop therefore steers clear of his countryside home, opting to rabble-rouse and innocently arouse mischief with the town locals. His mind is understandably prone to bouts of reverie, waking fantasies which Duvivier visualizes with an intrepid imagination all his own, utilizing superimpositions and primitive printing effects to stage elaborate approximations of Carrottop's internal struggle.

As he did with the opulent manors of David Golder, Duvivier keenly captures the exact opposite in Poil de Carotte, his penchant for long establishing shots and serenely roaming camera movements a perfect complement to the expansive countryside locales and antiquated farmhouses perched across the landscape. Despite the sun-dappled settings and generally carefree tone, the film builds to an unforgettably harrowing climax, with Carrottop's crippling disenchantment forcing an intervention of unexpectedly tender proportions.

No such comfort is offered in 1933's La Tête d'un Home, a dark and morally complex crime procedural which found Duvivier's stylistic acumen reaching new heights of expressive brilliance. Based on the Georges Simenon novel A Man's Head, the film stars Baur as the Belgian author's most indelible creation, Inspector Maigret, here on the trail of a Czech immigrant presumed responsible for the murder of an American aristocrat living in Paris. Maigret is cool and collected in the face of potentially dangerous discoveries, leaving Radek (Valéry Inkijinoff), the prime suspect of the killing, to stew in his accumulating guilt, two contrasting psychologies which Duvivier pits against one another with methodically intensifying precision.

The urban backdrop and macabre subject matter allow for a noirish atmosphere to take hold early, which Duvivier accentuates with an omniscient camera, exaggerated angles, and confined, vaguely gothic spatial settings. In a fashion familiar to many of Duvivier's less desirable characters, Radek is granted something of a tragic arc, devolving from a potentially misunderstood foreigner to an exasperated sociopath trapped in the prison of his own mind. Duvivier's visual articulation of this fall from grace is the film's most impressive trait, lending a discomfiting sense of empathy to a man whose fate is ultimately out of his own hands.

By 1937, Duvivier had risen to the front ranks of French filmmaking as one of its most tireless workhorses and most bankable assets. That very same year would bring two even greater successes, Pépé le Moko and Un Carnet de Bal, very different films that nonetheless exemplify the range of Duvivier's talents. The latter, though significantly less known, is perhaps his most painfully romantic and deceptively ambitious work. Adapted from Jean Giraudoux's 1924 novel Juliette au Pays des Hommes and starring Marie Bell as Christine, a lonely rich widow attempting to reconcile the joie de vivre of her youth with the encroaching sorrow of middle age, the film mounts an elaborately episodic narrative which attempts to encapsulate nothing less than an entire lifetime's worth of regret and unrequited passion. The film's title translates as “Dance Card,” in reference to a handwritten list of young men a teenaged Christine entertained at her first ball, and that which she consults while traveling across France in search of these long lost suitors.

As one might expect, these men—which include a doctor, a mountain guide, a town mayor, and, most memorably, a melancholy priest played by Baur—are now of various vocational and romantic standing, and each encounter is attentively depicted by Duvivier with a delicate sense of remorse and nostalgia. Here his tracking shots seem to replicate a kind of slow waltz, surveying the characters as they reminisce of times since forgotten. But as Christine proceeds to make peace with her past, an uncommon sense of hope prevails, one unique to the director's films from this period. In fact, the refinement and poetic grandeur of the film feels emblematic of the strides French filmmaking on the whole took over this period, and though he would soon move on to a brief stint in Hollywood, Un Carnet de Bal shines like a light at the end of a tunnel not only for Duvivier, but for an industry on the precipice of gaining a stronghold on world cinema.

Image/Sound:
Unsurprisingly for films now over 80 years old, the transfers of the four Julian Duvivier films comprising Criterion's latest Eclipse set are at the mercy of the available materials. These are unrestored transfers, and thus show inevitable signs of wear, with scratches and artifacts and unstable frame rates all in evidence. Nevertheless, the natural film grain remains pleasing to the eye, as does the solidly delineated contrast, lending a tactility to the images that could otherwise be lost to digitization. Sound, meanwhile, presents similar obstructions, with hints of background noise and the odd audible pop emerging on the soundtrack, occasionally interfering with the various scores. Voices remain relatively clear, however, upfront and discernible in their single channel mono mixes. All in all, these are perfectly watchable—perhaps even better than they should be, considering the age of the films—with no egregious audio/visual deficiencies.

Extras:
Like all Eclipse sets, no digital supplements are offered. There are, however, excellent liner notes included for each film, written by Michael Koresky.

Overall:
riterion's latest Eclipse set, dedicated to the 1930s work of the near-forgotten Julien Duvivier, reveals an artist whose deceptively delicate touch helped French filmmaking transition into a new era of modernity. [Slant]

Film Review: Gaspar Noé’s Love (2015)

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Fri, 20 Nov 2015 21:43:00 +0000

Director Gaspar Noé’s reputation has been built on what one might generously deem the less dignified aspects of the human condition. If the Argentine-born filmmaker is by this point a “name” in international cinema, it’s in the most literal sense, as a headline-generating, controversy-stoking star of his own conception. Having already pushed the boundaries of violence, misogyny, and drug abuse (among other delightful subjects) in such purposefully provocative films as 1998’s I Stand Alone, 2002’s Irréversible and 2009’s Enter the Void, it makes a certain kind of sense that Noé would not only one day arrive at a full-blown sex flick, but at a full-blown 3D sex flick. In light of such considerations, that Love––née Gaspar Noé’s Love––fulfills all the titillating tenets of said genre is unsurprising; that it’s as simultaneously tender, touching, and even tasteful as its title implies is, for this filmmaker, the most shocking development of all.

To be clear, Love retains many of the stylistic hallmarks that make Noé’s filmmaking so frustrating; this time, however, these same gauche aesthetic flourishes are tempered by a genuine sense of humanity and, most importantly, a heretofore unacknowledged sense of humour. The seeming irony of Noé making a 3D porno called Love is lost on absolutely no one, least of all the director, who goes to great lengths to prove just how unironically he views this story. The narrative, therefore, is equal parts earnest and enervating, tracking in flashback the romantic and sexual passions of a young couple from the throes of a breakup to their early days as star-crossed lovers. We watch (and watch) as Murphy (Karl Glusman) and Electra (Aomi Muyock) make love with numerous people, in a variety of places and positions, the pair enjoying the strength of their youthful libidos even as their emotional bonds appear to grow evermore tenuous. Later, when Murphy turns a ménage à trois with their neighbour, Omi (Klara Kristin), into an ongoing sexual liaison, his infidelity results in an unexpected pregnancy and ill-equipped foray into parenthood.

If the plot sounds like bad daytime television, it is so by design––everything about the film seems to speak in the most base vocabulary possible. The performers––Glusman a working actor in his first significant role; Muyock and Kristin non-actors plucked by the director from a night club––while committed, seem as if they were selected as much for their unpolished qualities as their willingness to engage in unsimulated sex. Their dialogue manages to transcend any language barriers by conveniently returning to the viewer to a universally pubescent perspective. Likewise, Noé’s manner of visualising the film is, by his standards, rather conventional, shooting most of the expository scenes in medium-length two-shots, and the sex scenes in either static set-ups or from overhead angles emphasising the intimacy of the proceedings. For better or worse, few of the familiarly garish sequences or elaborately choreographed tracking shots of Noé’s past work are in evidence here.

All of which begs the question of why Noé chose to shoot the film in 3D. His less demonstrative formal approach, coupled with the stereoscopic lensing, occasionally lends a pleasing depth to the image, exploited most expertly in a neon-lit club sequence and a number of near-hallucinatory scenes set outside the confines of the bedroom. But otherwise the technology does little to deepen the sensory effect of watching these actors’ bodies communicate and commingle in uninhibited displays of eroticism.

It may simply have been the most obvious way to subvert expectations, which, thankfully, Noé only rarely gives into––most memorably with an inevitable “shot” pointed right in the face of the audience––instead opting to stress the film’s almost playfully self-conscious demeanour. The posters of controversial films (Salò, The Birth of a Nation) decorating Murphy’s bedroom walls, for example, are downright subtle compared to when he and Omi decide to name their newborn son (wait for it…) Gaspar. And if that’s not enough the director himself shows up as Electra’s sleazy ex-boyfriend, joining in on the fun with a silhouetted sex scene all his own. Whether you find these flourishes indulgent or ingratiating will likely come down to your patience for Noé and his self-styled persona. At the very least it’s nice to see him finally having a little fun at his own expense. [LWL]

Los Angeles Repertory Recommendations: November 2015

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Fri, 20 Nov 2015 21:36:00 +0000

JACQUES RIVETTE’S 13-HOUR NEW WAVE MASTERPIECE AT CINEFAMILY | 611 N. FAIRFAX AVE.

Less than six months after enthusing about the unlikely appearance of Jacques Rivette’s Duelle at Cinefamily, an even rarer work by the French new wave master is taking over the same venue for an entire weekend in mid-November. On Nov. 14 and 15, the thirteen-hour long Out 1: Noli me Tangere, one of the most infamously elusive, sought-after pieces of auteurist cinema, will screen in a new digital restoration, its eight parts divided over two days with designated bathroom breaks and a potluck of culinary delights to appease and appetize those brave enough to commit to such a gargantuan viewing experience. However, the film itself, a contemporary riff on Balzac’s History of the Thirteen starring a who’s-who of nouvelle vague icons (Jean-Pierre Léaud, Juliet Berto, Michael Lonsdale, and Eric Rohmer, among others), in its radical commingling of meta-cinematic improvisation and conspiracy theory dramatics, should provide more than enough visceral pleasures to reward the undertaking.

JOHN CASSAVATES: ACTOR TRIBUTE AT THE NEW BEV | 7165 BEVERLY BLVD.

Nowadays John Cassavetes is most closely associated with the dozen films he made over three decades as a director, mostly independently financed works produced with a close group of friends and family. But Cassavetes also had a secondary career as an actor, which he maintained in order to fund his filmmaking and protect authorship over his work. Throughout November, the New Beverly Cinema pays tribute to Cassavetes the actor with a sixteen-film series featuring an array of beloved and less-recognized titles which speak not only to his underrated skills as a thespian, but also his collaborative acumen. Highlights include double bills of Andrew Stone’s The Night Holds Terror and Don Siegel’s Crime in the Streets (Nov. 4 and 5); Elaine May’s Mikey & Nickey and Giuliano Montaldo’s Machine Gun McCain (Nov. 11 and 12); Paul Mazursky’s Tempest and John Badham’s Who's Life Is It Anyway? (Nov. 18 and 19); Siegel’s The Killers and Robert Parrish’s Saddle the Wind (Nov. 22 and 23); and, finally, a two-night showcase of Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen (Nov. 27 and 28).

LATE-‘80s AGNÈS VARDA AT THE ROYAL | 11523 SANTA MONICA BLVD.

Beginning on Nov. 13 at Laemlle's Royal Theater, digital restorations of two little-seen films by the veteran French filmmaker Agnès Varda will each receive week-long engagements. Made back-to-back in 1986 and ’87, both Jane B. par Agnès V. (never before released in the U.S.) and Kung-Fu Master star international icon Jane Birkin. Her self-reflexive role in the former finds Varda placing her muse against a number of surrealistic backdrops as they playact and deliberate on the role of the performer, while in the latter, as a kind of surrogate figure, Birkin plays a woman approaching middle-age who unexpectedly falls in love with a teenage boy. A contrasting pair in both style and subject, the films also work as companion pieces of a sort, outlining the range of Varda’s thematic interests as well as her deft touch when interweaving elements of fiction and nonfiction into narratives just exotic enough to feel strangely familiar.

52 YEARS AFTER JFK AT LOS ANGELES FILMFORUM | 6712 HOLLYWOOD BLVD.

On Nov. 22, Los Angeles Filmforum presents a tantalizing selection of vintage films which cinematically respond to the JFK assassination in a variety of personal and provocative ways. Along with pioneering vérité filmmaker Robert Drew’s Faces of November, a document of President Kennedy’s funeral as told through the faces of his friends and family, there will be two films––Report and Television Assassination––by experimental icon Bruce Conner, a rare screening of Robert Russett’s collage animation Under the Juggernaut, as well as a hybrid piece entitled The Eternal Frame, in which director T.R. Uthco and the Ant Farm collective reenact the events originally captured by the camera of Abraham Zapruder at the site of the actual assassination. The evening, hosted at Filmforum's usual home at the Egyptian Theatre, will then conclude with a reading from Don DeLillo’s Underworld and an edited presentation of the Zapruder Film itself. [THR]

Film Capsule: Frederick Wiseman's Model (1980)

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Thu, 22 Oct 2015 04:59:00 +0000

Model (1980)
Directed by Frederick Wiseman

This mid-period standout by the veteran vérité filmmaker brought to the field of fashion and design the same curiosity and critical eye which so exactingly excavated such earlier, sociologically significant environments as basic training camps, welfare offices, and psychiatric wards. Locating a symbiotic method of craft and visual conception in the work of affluent media and advertising artisans, Wiseman is able, with nary a deviation from his observational methodology, to construct both a consumerist exposé and a working allegory for the cinematic process itself. Capturing the day-to-day bustle of photo shoots, dress rehearsals, and runway campaigns, the film nimbly yet thoroughly notes the behind-the-scene efforts of those who work to turn blank subjects into glamorous enigmas. And like many of the director’s New York chronicles, Model holds an equally detailed peripheral interest, documenting Ed Koch’s Manhattan as it transitioned from the post-punk squalor of the late 70s to the new-wave facade of the impending 80s. (October 24, 3pm at the Museum of the Moving Image’s “Frederick Wiseman’s New York”) [BKMag]

Film Capsule: Maurice Pialat's Le garçu (1995)

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Thu, 22 Oct 2015 04:57:00 +0000

Le garçu (1995)
Directed by Maurice Pialat

The final work by the great French filmmaker scaled back the narrative and thematic immensity of his two preceding landmarks, Van Gogh and Under the Sun of Satan, opting instead for a return to the highly personal, familial-minded interests of his formative years. Starring the director’s long-time surrogate Gérard Depardieu as a middle-aged philanderer simultaneously navigating obligations to his young son (played by Pialat’s own son, Antoine) and the affections of both his ex-girlfriend (Géraldine Pailhas) and current lover (Fabienne Babe), the film instills autobiographical detail into a casually nimble temporal framework, compressing a lifetime of broken promises and emotional transgressions into a painfully recurrent present tense. With his uncommon sense of intimacy and ability to keenly negotiate the nuances of human behavior, Pialat unfolds an unassumingly devastating tale of misplaced passions. The film’s final image, a moment of tear-stained resignation to an impossible plight, is as stirring an artistic encapsulation as any, and one last poignant flourish in a career defined by them. (October 18, 7pm at the Museum of the Moving Image’s Pialat retrospective) [BKMag]

A Love Letter to Chantal Akerman

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Sun, 11 Oct 2015 20:28:00 +0000

This piece originally appeared in issue 60 of Little White Lies. Chantal Akerman subsequently passed away on October 5, 2015.

I fell in love with Chantal Akerman somewhere between East Germany and Moscow. Not literally, of course, though it may as well be, so evocative and transportive is her 1993 masterpiece D’Est. Essentially a visual diary of the Belgian director’s travels across the former European communist bloc, the film (whose title translates as ‘From the East’) in many ways encapsulates the many modes and methodologies with which Akerman worked throughout the most prolific phase of her career (which this work could further be said to mark the end of). Composed primarily of meditative tracking shots captured as sequenced tableaux through unidentified urban and countryside locales, D’Est documents with an outsider’s eye a very specific moment of cultural transition, as the thaw of the Cold War opened to a newly liberated, modern iteration of Soviet society.

Like many of Akerman’s films, the politics of D’Est are embedded in the contextual details of its production, or felt in the margins of the narrative, rather than explicated in traditional storytelling terms. She’s one of the most political filmmakers I know, and yet not a single one of her films is about politics, or an overriding issue, or anything so blatantly topical. She approaches her subjects from a variety of (usually fixed) angles, often choosing to simply observe activities and the incidental development of the resultant dramas. Her most celebrated film, 1975’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, is a three-plus hour domestic diorama wherein the title character, a single mother, attends to routine household duties while prostituting herself between tasks to provide for her and her son. Nothing much is made of these circumstances––not the peeling of potatoes, nor the servicing of local businessmen––and even less is pronounced in the film’s rigorous mise-en-scène. And yet few films carry such cumulative impact or offer such a pointed, nuanced articulation of feminine autonomy.

Akerman’s style is modernist in its temporal conceptualisation yet somehow almost classical in its negotiation of physical and geographic space. A number of her films––including 1972’s Hôtel Monterey, 1977’s News from Home, and D’Est––are about actual places, and as such stand as uniquely first-person meditations on public environments. But if the formalist frameworks and mundane nature of her chosen settings seem to suggest static cinematic experiences, Akerman’s best work manages to generate an internal dynamism wherein narrative and aesthetic economy work toward locating a nascent power in the actualities of our everyday surroundings. Whether working in fiction or documentary, this elemental strategy elicits similarly involving, lingering effects. Thus, an essay film such as News from Home is rendered of equally intimate, perspicacious vision as the nostalgic coming-of-age chronicle Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 1960s in Brussels––and is just as personal as a result. Akerman hasn’t been as been as productive in recent years, producing only a single narrative feature, the sterling 2011 Joseph Conrad adaptation Almayer’s Folly, in the last decade. But as that Malaysia-set, ’50s-era psychodrama re-attests, when she does return, it will be with a fully realised sense of time, place and self-possession. [LWL]

Film Capsule: Lawrence Schiller and L.M. Kit Carson's The American Dreamer (1971)

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Sun, 11 Oct 2015 20:18:00 +0000

The American Dreamer (1971)
Directed by Lawrence Schiller and L.M. Kit Carson

Filmed during the editing of his infamously outré Hollywood disaster The Last Movie, this captivating docu-fiction portrait of director Dennis Hopper at the peak of his drug-fueled, quasi-mystic phase of ass-backward fame and fortune is both companion piece to a ceaselessly fascinating film and a standalone revelation all its own. Capturing Hopper at work and play in the New Mexico desert, the film consists primarily of stream-of-conscience insights and inanities from one of cinema’s great charlatans, here elevating his persona into the pantheon of acid-fried geniuses. Episodes of the director waxing philosophical on the artistic process (at one point off-handedly comparing his sure-to-be-misunderstood latest to The Magnificent Ambersons) sit side-by-side with orgiastic displays of group foreplay and creatively cleansing experiments in public nudity. Hopper’s natural charisma and slyly self-reflexive nature turn what could be a mess of pretension into a revealing mediation on creativity and the precariousness of inspiration. (October 11, 5pm at BAM; Q&A with Schiller follows screening of new digital restoration) [BKMag]

Los Angeles Repertory Recommendations: October 2015

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Sun, 11 Oct 2015 20:15:00 +0000

JEAN GRÉMILLON AT THE HAMMER | 10899 WILSHIRE BLVD.

In a month with no shortage of horror titles to choose from, a selection of potentially more startling discoveries are on offer in the UCLA Film and Television Archives’ retrospective of the great French filmmaker Jean Grémillon. Running from Oct. 17 to Nov. 21, the series surveys the breadth of the poetic realist’s career, from early silent experiments to his eloquent dramas and short documentaries of the 1940s and ‘50s. Each evening features one treasure or another, but the rarities hold the most promise for adventurous cinephiles, particularly the Oct. 18 presentation of the proletariat parable Maldone, and an Oct. 25 double bill of early ‘30s social indictments La Petite Lise and Daïnah la métisse.

3D HORROR AND LADIES OF THE ‘80S AT CINEFAMILY | 611 N. FAIRFAX AVE.

Cinefamily’s annual Halloween bonanza plays host throughout October to any number of cult and outré efforts from the golden age of VHS shlock. Two of the month’s sub-programs, however, feature particularly unique offerings. First, the ‘Unseen! Unscreened!! Obscene!!!’ weekend brings with it the likes of such self-explanatory efforts as Hack-O-Lantern and Night Feeder. Highlighting the weekend, however, is an Oct. 10 screening of the restoration of the surreal 3D strangler classic The Mask, from Canadian director Julian Roffman (era-authentic “Magic Mystic Masks” will be provided). Later in the month is the ‘Ladies of the ‘80s’ series, a three-day, eight-film selection of thrillers directed by women. An Oct. 24 quadruple-bill of Humanoids from the Deep, Slumber Party Massacre, Sorority House Massacre, and Stripped to Kill is the obvious centerpiece. But just as enticing is the following night’s (Oct. 25) double-feature of Jackie Kong’s Blood Diner and Genie Joseph, Thomas Doran, and Brendan Faulkner’s Spookies, a notoriously troubled work which has lived on far longer than anyone involved could have anticipated.

AUTEURIST THRILLS AT THE NEW BEV | 7165 BEVERLY BLVD.

This season’s Halloween selections at the New Beverly impressively run the gamut from horror comedies to giallo thrillers and back again. But most enticing is a generous serving of genre offerings by big-name auteurs, presented, as always on 35mm. On both Oct. 7 and 8, a pair of early David Cronenberg classics, Shivers and The Brood, will screen back-to-back, followed on Oct. 14 and 15 by two of George A. Romero’s most underrated films, Day of the Dead and The Crazies. Elsewhere, on Oct. 25 and 26, you’ll find John Badham’s Dracula and Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu, a pair of remakes which arguably outpace the originals. And finally, on Halloween night, Oct. 31, three of the most influential: Jacques Tourneur’s Curse of the Demon, Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls, and Romero’s genre-defining Night of the Living Dead.

CLASSIC HOLLYWOOD HORROR AT LACMA | 5905 WILSHIRE BLVD.

Alongside thematically, if not necessarily seasonally, appropriate screenings of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (Oct. 16) and Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (Oct. 17), this month’s Tuesday matinee series at LACMA features many less recognized Hollywood horror pictures. Three of the films––The Wolfman (screening Oct. 6), Ghost of Frankenstein (Oct. 13), and Weird Woman (Oct. 27)––star Lon Chaney Jr, paired along the way with such names as Bela Lugosi, Ralph Bellamy, Evelyn Ankers, and Claude Rains. Between these, on Oct. 20, is Son of Dracula, directed by the great journeyman filmmaker Robert Siodmak, who, as in the best of these films, elevates a potentially tired concept into the realm of the truly morbid curiosity. [THR]

TIFF 2015: Wavelengths Features

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Sun, 11 Oct 2015 20:04:00 +0000

Visual artist Mark Lewis’ first feature, Invention, is something of a quintessential Wavelengths selection. Considering the section’s modus operandi, it’s not surprising that every couple of years would bring with it a film indebted to the program’s namesake work. A Canadian working in the realm of media art, Lewis has wisely made little attempt over the years to forsake allegiance to his most celebrated artistic compatriot, avant-garde figurehead Michael Snow. And while certainly a descendant of Wavelength (1967), Invention is perhaps of even more direct stylistic lineage with another of Snow’s major works, namely La Région Centrale (1971). Like that landmark of structuralist cinema, Invention uses the cinematic frame to reshape the viewers perception of space, time and the environment through which the camera, as a physical object, tilts, twirls and travels in unencumbered motion.

Shot in various locations throughout Toronto and São Paolo (with a quick stop over at the Louvre in Paris), the film transpires like an elevated tour through the metropolitan sprawl of these far-flung locales. With methodical precision, Lewis’ camera advances as an airborne apparatus, floating amidst the architecture of each cityscape while breathing in the expanse of the (un)natural surroundings. Proceeding largely in silence, the film itself seems to stand in awe of what’s been captured, surveying the material world with an untethered freedom as it tracks the exterior features of glass-paned skyscrapers and stone-walled monuments, then examining the minute details of paintings and statues as we make our way indoors. With an omniscient sense of space, the camera twists and dives and pushes (with some computer-aided editing techniques) across these locations in an unhurried yet often thrilling manner, finding impossible angles and fashioning depth-defying spatial compositions reminiscent of Ernie Gehr’s San Francisco city symphony Side/Walk/Shuttle (1991). Lewis is said to have pieced together this eighty-seven-minute feature from a number of short films, accounting—somewhat ironically—for its seemingly arbitrary structure, but at its best Invention proposes fresh ways of looking at a familiar world.

In fact, a number of selections from this year’s Wavelengths features program offer insights from otherwise unassuming scenarios. Two of the simplest setups yield strong emotional returns in both Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie and Tsai Ming-liang’s Afternoon, late works from established masters which use the act of reminiscence as a pledge for the future. Akerman’s film, her first feature in a half-decade and a kind of retroactive companion piece to her cross-continental filial correspondence News from Home (1977), takes on the signifiers of a home video recording to delve deep into the recesses of memory. Filming her mother, an Auschwitz survivor, at home as she slowly approaches death, Akerman presents the film as a series of conversations between parent and offspring, which she gathers from everyday discussions that transpire both in person and over Skype. Mother and daughter fondly recall stories of their younger selves, discuss old friends and family, and even argue about matters both mundane and harrowing in a manner only those intimately familiar with one another are able. There’s a ghostly atmosphere roaming the house, which is visualized by empty bedrooms, austere hallways, and half-glimpsed heirlooms, accompanied only by natural ambiance and the occasional, guttural cough from the elder Akerman. Interspersed with lengthy shots of the wind-blown Israeli desert, a gesture connecting history to hermitage, No Home Movie is a powerfully personal portrait of unbreakable bonds.

Afternoon is likewise centered around conversation; in fact, Tsai’s latest digital missive is just that: a midday discussion between the great Taiwanese director and his long-time muse and surrogate lead actor, Lee Kang-sheng. Shot over the course of a day but pieced together as one single, serene long-take, the film finds Tsai and Lee sitting opposite each other in the dilapidated upper level of their remote mountainside home. For a filmmaker whose characters tend to speak very little, Tsai proves to be an eloquent, verbose, and emotional conversationalist, steering the discussion from the pair’s working relationship to their sexualities to their philosophies on art and life, and how those twin forces brought them together. For his part, Lee is a figure of more stoic insight, listening and smoking and generally only speaking when asked a direct question. The small crew occasionally makes itself rather conspicuously known, acknowledging the director’s inquiries and allowing the boom mic and other equipment to creep into the frame. Which is all to say that, being a Tsai film, Afternoon amounts to more than its modest construction might suggest. The camera’s single angle, positioned slightly to the left of its subjects, encompasses two large, open-air windows which allow bright rays of sunshine and thick foliage to spill into the room, bringing the outside and inside worlds into direct communication, a kind of secondary conversation transpiring in harmony with the touching repartee of our featured players.

Along with Tsai and Akerman, Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa is one of the few veterans amongst this year’s Wavelengths features class. Following last year’s Maïdan, a mammoth observational document of the recent protests in Kiev, Loznitsa’s latest nonfiction film, The Event, probes further into Soviet history through archival footage of a failed 1991 coup d’état in Moscow which nonetheless brought the communist party to its knees. In the manner of Maïdan and the majority of the director’s documentary work, The Event is presented as a straightforward montage of on-the-ground footage (much of which was shot by documentary filmmakers of the time), with zero contextual information offered as to what is transpiring on screen. Instead, the viewer is left to glean particulars from within the melee itself, dropped directly into the protests with only handmade banners (“Fascism will not prevail!”) and the occasional rallying cry (“Down with junta!”) offered as narrative markers. The images and the cause they capture are stirring in energy and clarity of purpose, but Loznitsa’s ever so slight aural additions (utilizing the main theme from Swan Lake to punctuate each movement) and disjunctions (offsetting sounds and voices across the mix) lend the film an elegiac air, subtly acknowledging the retroactive developments which saw such passionate acts give way to another, equally unfortunate era of oppression.

Elsewhere, the ever en vogue commingling of narrative and nonfiction elements takes on strange new dimensions in both Ben Rivers’ new feature, The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers, and Pietro Marcello’s Lost and Beautiful. The former, the British-born Rivers’ first solo feature since Two Years At Sea (2011), is a hybrid in every sense, mixing a making-of documentary premise with a psychedelic rite-of-passage narrative, its bipartite structure autonomous yet feverishly nested. Typically languorous, the film’s first half documents an on-location shoot in the Moroccan desert, observing the preparations and production of a film by Spanish director Oliver Laxe. Following the cast and crew around the sun-bleached landscape, Rivers builds an ominous sense of anxiety via uncomfortably tense passages pairing heavy drone and metal sonics with his typically impressionistic 16mm imagery. Appearing to grow frustrated with the shoot, Laxe slowly separates from the production, embarking on what initially suggests a metaphysical journey but in actuality develops into an unsettling crisis of colonialism. This second section, inspired by Paul Bowles’ short story “A Distant Episode” (also the title of Rivers’ latest short, which I discussed in my overview of the Wavelengths shorts), features some of the most hallucinatory images and inscrutable episodes of the director’s career. Textually dense, highly referential, and genuinely surreal, The Sky Trembles… is a film of both immediate pleasures and lingering power.

In contrast to Rivers’ approach—which seems, even at its most obtuse, to follow a largely predetermined course—Italian director Pietro Marcello’s new film Lost and Beautiful took shape in an organic manner, which informed the very constitution of its formal construction. In broad terms, Marcello works in the field of nonfiction, and is a noted practitioner of archival material and montage aesthetics. Lost and Beautiful features elements of both, but is otherwise highly unique amongst his work to date. What began as a small-scale documentary about an unassuming shepherd named Tommaso Cestrone, who once served as the caretaker of the grand Carditello palace in Campania, was reconstituted with fictive elements following Cestrone’s unexpected death. From this interview footage, which appears in the film’s opening section, emerged a shapeshifting narrative concerning the Commedia dell’arte character Pulcinella, tasked with rescuing Cestrone’s beloved buffalo from the palace stables. Perspectives and modes of address shift throughout, but it’s through the eyes (and words) of this ill-fated bull that we gain understanding of a country slowly crumbling under the weight of history and corruption alike. The tone of the film, fantastical yet becalmed, finds an aesthetic analogue in the expired 16mm celluloid on which it’s shot, lending a soft, bucolic look to a work that functions at once as intimate portraiture and spiritual pastorale.

Perhaps the most exciting of this year’s features, however, was a deceptively small work of digital detritus that, in its own highly idiosyncratic way, harbors an ambition equal (if not greater) to that of such elaborately mounted festival (and Wavelengths features) favorites as Miguel Gomes' Arabian Nights or Guy Maddin's The Forbidden Room. A hypermodern articulation of generational unrest and social sedition, Canadian wunderkind Isiah Medina’s first full-length work, 88:88, confronts provocative issues and ideologies with an aesthetic audacity which merges montage with the marginalia of the digital age. Comprising untold hours of footage shot on a variety of formats, the film resembles a diaristic collage of experiences and emotions, featuring fleeting glimpses of the director’s friends and family, which he then spins through a poetic, self-reflexive prism of texts and testimonies. The rigorously cut-up and layered imagery, which resembles late-period Godard in its collisions of vivid color and natural light, is matched to a soundtrack pulsing with snatches of words and phrases and verses which fall in and out and across the mix in a dizzying reflection of media overload. The title refers to the numbers displayed on a reset digital clock when electricity is cut and then restored, a comment on poverty and social stratification which the filmmaker has seen destroy those close to him. Medina’s radical admixture of the experimental and experiential has yielded a unique work, one unbound to tradition and with very few contemporaries. [Fandor]

TIFF 2015: Wavelengths Shorts

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Sun, 11 Oct 2015 19:46:00 +0000

Film festivals, by their very conception, are inherently curatorial endeavors. Particularly with regards to a festival as sprawling as the Toronto International Film Festival—this year celebrating its 40th anniversary—such program initiatives and individual delineations can prove imperative in negotiating the sheer number of films on offer. In the case of the festival’s experimental Wavelengths program, and in specific the Wavelengths shorts programs, these curatorial efforts are concentrated—even heightened—by the narrow interests they serve. This year’s programs, spread across four nights over the festival’s first weekend, above all else continued to exemplify lead programmer Andrea Picard’s continued attention to the art of curation, not simply in the typically stellar selection of films, but also in the careful grouping of works within individual programs. The program’s first evening, for example, while featuring films from artists both young and old, from a diverse array of cultural and cinematic backgrounds, proceeded in beautiful synchronicity, with each film speaking to one other in alternately subtle and overt fashion.

A pair of 3D experiments defined the boundless creativity on offer in the first night’s program. A recently discovered and restored film from the late American avant-garde artist Paul Sharits, simply titled 3D Movie, opened the evening, while Something Horizontal, the latest anaglyph work by the Toronto-based artist Blake Williams, updated the technology for the digital age. Sharits’ film, a silent piece composed of microscopic colored light forms dancing frame by frame, with subtly depth-defying reach, utilized its three dimensions to create internal patterns within a slowly modulating color field. The effect brought to mind everything from rippling waves to swarming static, manipulating the mind’s eye into mentally conceiving of a potentially infinite holographic spectrum. The program was bookended by Peter Tscherkassky’s recent Cannes standout The Exquisite Corpus, the latest work of found footage ephemera (in this case clips from vintage erotica films) from one of the few veterans in this year’s program.

Between these was something different—Something Horizontal. In contrast to Sharits’ film, Williams’ fourth anaglyph work compliments its optical effects with a narrative structure built around a recurrent temporal framework (a closing quote from Robert Frost’s “For Once, Then, Something” furthers the notion beyond the confines of the film). Inspired by one of Maya Deren’s most intriguing theorems—the title refers to the idea that the more poetic forms of cinema cascade upwards (which is to say, vertically), while the narratively-inclined proceed linearly (or horizontally)—the film commences with a brief scene of EMTs tending to an accident victim, the hyper-radiant lights from their emergency vehicle immediately calling to mind the artist’s previous film, Red Capriccio. Perspective quickly shifts indoors, however, with Williams cutting together a rapid montage of doors, windows, and skylights, with exterior light creating interior shadows as dissonant noise skips hypnotically on the soundtrack. When, soon after, a timeline is established via humorous intertitles, the film begins to open up, jumping back through previous images, locales, and even films (a brief image from Leopold Jessner and Paul Leni’s 1921 Backstairs reiterates Williams’ structural conceit while offering a different, more ahistorical perspective from which to view piece), and then forward into rapidly moving shots from the window of a car. The 3D field of space, therefore, becomes just one of multiple channels for Williams’ geometric expression.

Collaborations, in their many iterations, tied together the second evening’s program. Both Ben Rivers and Ben Russell's individual practices are rooted in collaboration—collaboration with their subjects, with their crews, and even, on occasion, with each other. Rivers’ new short, shot on black-and-white 16mm scope, is at once a kind of compliment to his new feature film, and, to hear him tell it, a kind of vampiric work, taking from friends and films alike. Much of it is composed of on-set footage of a fellow filmmaker’s science fiction film, filled with eerie images of actors, dressed as spacemen, rehearsing on a beach in Morocco. Early on, a low, resonant hum pervades the background, but these scenes soon shift to an abandoned film set, which only adds to the apocalyptic sense of dislocation. In a final flourish, Rivers places the gentle, almost idyllic score from Pere Portabella’s Vampir-Cuadecuc (1970) atop these untraceable images, a contradictory gesture which defines the otherworldly atmosphere of his best work. The incredibly titled Yolo, shot in Soweto, South Africa by the ever-prolific Ben Russell, is, by comparison, one of his “modest” films, in which a shard of glass rotates before the camera lens, capturing objects, foliage and the limbs of a young boy from above and below as it twists in an undefined pattern. Feedback and chattering voices bridge the gap to a short scene of reversed footage of the boy and his friends playing soccer, revealing the component (and collaborative) parts comprising this small town chronicle.

Analysis of Emotions and Vexations, meanwhile, proved one of the second evening’s most singular and serene pieces, a work of painstaking animation by the consistently intriguing Polish animator Wojciech Bakowski. Slowly morphing pencil drawings of ships and buildings and trains materialize on screen as Bakowski narrates in contemplative tones (“The depths of my thoughts…”), figuratively filling in the negative space surrounding the sketches with thoughts both personal and vaguely political. A monologue of a different temperament graces Bunte Kuh, an evocative audio-visual diary of a holiday stay-over in Berlin by the directorial trio of Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour and Ryan Ferko. A male voice speaks in measured cadence as footage of pedestrians and vacationers documenting the city takes on a surveillance-like quality. As images of the surrounding landscape work up into a flickering montage, the audio mix grows similarly busy, with found sounds pitched into powerfully repetitious phrases. It’s the sound of nostalgia for lived experience flooding to the forefront of the senses, indistinct but palpably alive.

The highlights of the third evening proved harder to parse, though the program’s title, “Light Space Modulator,” provides a handy enough descriptive analogue. Björn Kämmerer’s Navigator worked with aspects of all three notions, with the director, who shot the film in a lighthouse, placing his camera in the center of cascading display of mirrors. The resulting effect lends a fluidity to the glass surfaces as they rotate through the frame, with missing pieces and other aesthetic defects breaking the otherwise perfect curvature of the formation. Also in the program were two new works by filmmakers responsible for a pair of highlights from last year’s festival. Palms, a typically restless and unsettling work by Mary Helena Clark, starts as a fairly literal translation of its title, with infinitesimally edited images of hands placed against a white backdrop, before diving into a nocturnal space of vanishing headlights along a lonely highway, and from there to whip pans of an outdoor tennis court to the image of a rippling black cloth framed in the shape of a circle. On a single pass it’s difficult to figure how each movement speaks to one another, but Clark’s confidence in piecing together such seemingly disparate episodes is one of the things that makes her work so rewarding to reconsider. Much more linear is Calum Walter’s new film, Terrestrial, which ups the anxiety of last year’s car-crash reverie Relief, by literally moving from ground level in opposite directions, to the clouds above and, eventually, into the depths below. The opening images of blue-hued, three-dimensional digital landscape cartography lends a suitably ominous atmosphere which Walter proceeds to deconstruct through images of airport terminals, subway trains and people-moving platforms. The film concludes with security footage of a derailing train, confirming Walter’s macabre interests even as he expands his narrative scope.

Previously thought lost, Philippe Garrel’s Actua 1, another of the year’s major restorations, opened the final night of shorts after premiering earlier this year at Cannes. Filmed in Paris amidst the turmoil of May 1968, the film is structured as a kind of conversation between a young man and a young woman, ruminating in voiceover on the nature of violence in politics, as on-the-ground footage from the riots and protests of the day unfold on screen. Almost a half-century on, Garrel’s images retain a rare vitality and immediacy, making this less a time capsule than an all-too-relevant call to action. It’s an invigorating way to begin a shorts program, but the pace slowed soon after with two undemonstrative yet highly personal works from Behrouz Rae and Ephraim Asili. Working in miniature, Rae, whose Untitled was actually the second of two one-minute films he presented in Wavelengths (the first, The Reminder, played in the second night’s program), utilizes the very basics of representation—pictures and perspective—in an effort to elucidate intimate details of his background and biology. Rare are films of this length that so ably disclose so much of their creator. Meanwhile, with Many Thousands Gone, Asili confronts the African diaspora with images of young people performing and dancing and DJing in various Harlem and Brazilian locales as hand percussion and wheezing wind instruments soundtrack the activity. The combination of his subjects’ movements, often slowed on screen, and the increasingly dissonant soundtrack works to produce an arhythmic aesthetic experience, measured but charged.

It was two very different films, however, that sent the evening out on a high note. First was Neither God Nor Santa Maria, an impressionistic work by Spanish filmmakers Samuel M. Delgado and Helena Girón, which utilizes expired 16mm film stock to create a distressed look for what amounts to a kind of mythological ethnography of Lazarote, a remote section of the Canary Islands. Built around the words of the ethnographer Luis Diego Cuscoy, the film’s voiceover passages revolve around witchcraft and other strange historical occurrences in the region. Visually, Delgado and Girón are working in muted (almost pastel) tones and soft textures—occasionally the look is so faded that it can be difficult to make out what’s on screen, with mountainous regions and female laborers appearing from within dense patches of fog and through the film’s heavy grain and degradations. It’s an evocative, tactile work, one of distinct cinematic and cultural design.

And finally there was the 35mm CinemaScope experiment Engram of Returning, by Japanese filmmaker Daïchi Saïto, the most purely visceral and thrilling audio-visual work of the entire festival. Essentially a series of aesthetic abstractions, Saïto’s latest pits scintillating visuals—color dyed emulsions of what appear to be various unidentified topographies, which fade from pitch blacks to searing primaries in an approximation of what it must be like to doze off in the face of the sun—against an improvised piece of atonal free jazz composed by Jason Sharp, whose low tones and circular breathing techniques are similar to that of Colin Stetson (in fact, I initially assumed it was Stetson). It’s unclear if Saïto means to impart any sort of larger narrative beyond what can be gleaned from the pure sensory overload of the piece, but it accomplishes the latter so powerfully that by the end a certain implicit drama has arisen from the din. The placement of the film at the end of not only the program, but of the entire Wavelengths shorts weekend, speaks further to the curatorial acumen of this annual event: Attempt to schedule Engram of Returning before another film and it would swallow anything in its wake. [Fandor]

Film Review: Pedro Costa's Horse Money (2014)

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Sun, 11 Oct 2015 19:33:00 +0000

This piece originally appeared in issue 61 of Little White Lies.

Pedro Costa’s Horse Money, the Portuguese filmmaker’s first fiction feature in over eight years, crescendos with an intensely cerebral 20-minute sequence set inside an elevator in which a flood of dialogue works to collapse an entire history’s worth of personal and political tragedy in one virtuoso display of accumulated aggression. Undeniably bracing, the scene––a slightly reworked version of Costa’s 2012 short Sweet Exorcism (originally featured in the Centro Histórico omnibus film)––is but the final and most violent example of the film’s foremost allegorical conceit, that of indoor space as physical manifestation of repressed cultural memory. In Costa’s cinema, the act of representation is an act of exorcism in itself––or, as he put it in an interview with Cinema Scope magazine, a means to fully leave the past behind: “Some people say they make films to remember. I think we make films to forget.”

It’s a declaration as weary yet sober-minded as this film is unsurprising, especially in light of Costa’s intimidating oeuvre, which carries the weight of both cultural and cinematic history in every deeply felt frame. Starring Ventura, the real-life Cape Verdean lead of this film’s loose predecessor, 2006’s Colossal Youth, as a lightly dramatised version of himself, Costa’s latest follows his ever-enigmatic collaborator through a succession of scenes and settings with an air of the purgatorial––a sense which the director encourages and exaggerates by way of abstract narrative chronology and highly symbolic depictions of institutional spaces.

When we meet Ventura, he’s lumbering down a dimly lit, cave-like corridor in his underwear, before awakening in a hospital bed surrounded by infantrymen who speak of the violence transpiring just beyond the walls of this unidentified sanitarium. Ventura is visibly sick. His hands shake, he struggles to walk. When he speaks he often returns to the memory of a horrific 1975 knife fight, from which he still bears physical and psychological scars. From here he proceeds to encounter many mysterious figures, each an apparent manifestation of a past friend, acquaintance, or colleague. The most striking of these is Vitalina, a fellow Cape Verdean transplant who has arrived for her husband’s funeral, an event we never see but which is deliberated upon at length when she and Ventura meet on a rooftop in the dead of night, the only light emanating unnaturally from the windows of an adjacent apartment building.

It’s evident in its elliptical presentation and somewhat episodic construction that Horse Money’s narrative transpires in a realm beyond traditional notions of reality. The film could thus be read any number of ways: as a portrait of the afterlife, or a death rattle hallucination, a vision of Ventura as he passes from one existence to the next, or as a waking nightmare precipitated by years of unrelenting trauma. Whatever the interpretation, Ventura’s journey feels inexorable, proceeding through a succession of spaces that are recognisable yet gutted of any tangible associations. Hospitals, catacombs, forests, warehouses––they functionally correspond to everyday conceptions of a troubled psyche, but fail to offer even the coldest of comforts.

The film’s largely nocturnal settings and stark, chiaroscuro lighting design, coupled with the actors’ ghostly incantations and generally defeated demeanours, suggest characteristics of the horror genre. Costa’s affinity for the style’s more outré practitioners––Jacques Tourneur, Edgar G. Ulmer, Charles Laughton––has long been apparent (his debut feature, O Sangue, from 1989, set its tale of sibling struggle in a monochromatic wasteland that could have easily been shot on midcentury studio sets). With Horse Money, however, such aesthetic inclinations reach new heights of expressionistic elegance. Costa frames each shot like a static mural, draping figures and objects in gulfs of darkness which spill forth from beyond the measure of the frame. These digital images, beautiful and grotesque, conjure a sense of apocalyptic grandeur at eye level, capturing dilapidated interiors at impossible angles and moonlit clearings with disarming austerity.

It all builds to the final encounter in the hospital elevator, in which an unknown, undead, unmoving solider––a kind of living statue––speaks to Ventura through the voices of the dearly departed. A ghost of the Carnation Revolution and a cipher of Portugal’s post-war industrial decimation, the soldier stands at the literal and figurative threshold of Ventura’s spiritual transference. Where he’s arrived and to where he’ll proceed at the film’s end is unclear, but the startling final image, in which Ventura and the weapon which so painfully haunts his memory find themselves stacked within the same cramped frame, suggest the wounds are far from healed. [LWL]

Film Capsule: Roberto Rossellini's Fear (1954)

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Fri, 09 Oct 2015 02:06:00 +0000

Fear (1954)
Directed by Roberto Rossellini

Befitting its title, this psychodrama, the fourth of five collaborations between Rossellini and his then-wife Ingrid Bergman, trades much of the metaphysical mystery of the pair’s prior projects for a visceral immediacy, transposing years heavy media scrutiny into a self-reflexive thriller. Bergman plays Irene Wagner, the privileged wife of a German scientist (Mathias Weiman) whose extra-marital affair turns ugly when her husband’s former girlfriend (Renate Mannhardt) begins to blackmail Irene in a display of apparent jealousy. This tangled web of infidelities unfolds before a backdrop of post-war Munich, cinematically reconstituting the industrial wasteland the director so memorably detailed in his earlier Germany Year Zero. With his wife as both muse and instrument of ideologic intensity, Rossellini was, in less than a half-decade’s time, able to redefine notions of neorealism, conceive of an integrated moving image infrastructure which Gilles Deleuze would later term the “time-image,” and, with Fear, offer an economical but unmistakably passionate rejoinder to the tired tenets of the genre film. (September 9, 7:30pm at MoMA’s Ingrid Bergman centennial) [BKMag]

Film Capsule: Sterlin Harjo's Mekko (2015)

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Fri, 09 Oct 2015 02:03:00 +0000

The once fresh idea of integrating a vérité sensibility into drama has grown, in recent years, into one of the most recognizable trends in independent cinema. Adding to this modest lineage is Mekko, an agreeable if unremarkable work of indigenous realism whose familiarity of form is ably offset by the singularity of its milieu. Directed by the Native American filmmaker Sterlin Harjo, the film centres on Muscogee-bred ex-con Mekko, just released from a 19-year prison stint for murder, as he attempts to re-establish himself in contemporary Oklahoma, where communities of mostly homeless Creek Indians continue to persevere against a backdrop of drugs and urban development.

Played by Rod Rondeaux (a Hollywood stuntman whose ethnic background has mostly relegated him to the background in genre films such as 3:10 to Yuma [2007] and The Lone Ranger [2013]), Mekko is hulking yet gentle, soft-spoken yet articulate. He’s enough of a galvanizing presence to anchor some of the film’s more fantastical forays, which largely manifest themselves in ruminative, vaguely existential voiceover passages which intermittently take the film away from the small-scale Americana of Minervini (whose new film The Other Side, also screening at TIFF, touches on similarly bleak subject matter in a corresponding Midwest locale, to much stronger results) and towards the astral realm of Malick. By and large, however, the rural realism of Minervini works as a handy aesthetic analogue for Harjo’s approach, which is generally unobtrusive in its inquisitiveness. An unexpected third-act turn into a kind of violent revenge fantasy confirms that this young director is at his best when simply allowing his feel for the rhythms of the real to guide his course. [CS]

Film Capsule: Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Mustang (2015)

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Fri, 09 Oct 2015 02:00:00 +0000

As a film about adolescent girls, told from the perspective of adolescent girls, Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s debut feature Mustang immediately stands out amidst the largely male-dominated efforts of contemporary cinema, its concerns distinctly feminine in constitution, its context specific in circumstance yet universal in scope. In a secluded Turkish village along the banks of the Black Sea, five orphaned sisters are being raised by their grandmother and uncle in an atmosphere of sexual, religious, and ideological repression. They’re physically reprimanded and verbally chastised for harmlessly cavorting with their male classmates, kept under strict house arrest during the summer months, and forced to submit to virginity tests as their guardians furiously arrange for their individual marriages to local Muslim boys. In an early scene one of the sisters forlornly describes the house not as a home, but as a “wife factory.”

Strange and involving, the opening act of the film proceeds something like a culturally reconstituted The Virgin Suicides (1999) or perhaps a less arch, more pastoral Dogtooth (2009). In this case the girls prove to have little trouble fooling their elders, and embark on a series of youthful exploits outside their domestic confines. One of the best sequences in the film finds the sisters lying and bribing their way across the city and into the crowd at a FIFA game, a moment which calls to mind Jafar Panahi’s Offside (2006). But Ergüven seems less interested in the political than the personal, focusing on the familial and psychological ramifications of the sisters’ situation and their attempts at rebellion (the adults, by contrast, essentially remain caricatures). Each girl responds in a different way to the tyrannical treatment, and the narrative moves accordingly from comedy to tragedy to, in the case of the two youngest and most restless sisters, epiphany. All told it’s an understated, undemanding journey, and if the worst one can say about a film by a first-time director is that it (not unfavorably) resembles other, better films, then that bodes well for Ergüven’s future. [CS]

Film Capsule: Grímur Hákonarson's Rams (2015)

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Fri, 09 Oct 2015 01:56:00 +0000

Rams, the second narrative feature by Icelandic director Grímur Hákonarson, represents the kind of thematically familiar, stylistically anonymous filmmaking that comfortably achieves consensus sympathy. Indeed, the film won the top prize of the Un Certain Regard strand at Cannes this year, and against some rather formidable competition at that. As per this breed of fest-feted cinema, aesthetic interest consistently yields to conceptual scenario in this story of two aging brothers (played by the believably grizzled Sigurður Sigurjónsson and Theodór Júlíusson) who live and raise their prize sheep on neighbouring farms in the remote Icelandic countryside.

For reasons that are gradually and undramatically revealed in the film’s methodically unfolding narrative, the brothers haven’t spoken a word to each other in 40 years, tolerating one another’s company only on the occasion of the annual livestock contest or when one is forced to assist the other through their nightly drunken stupours. Of course, a dilemma outside their control—in this case a valley-wide outbreak of the neurological virus known as scrapie, a disease which threatens to infect the brothers’ entire flock—must inevitably bring the two together in a reluctant display of fraternal synergy. Despite a certain pictorial elegance and an admittedly stirring final image (courtesy of cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grovlen, who manned the ambitious single-shot thriller Victoria, also playing at TIFF), Rams is the kind of film whose evident craft belies its lack of adventurousness; its virtues are mostly predictable, its revelations far from revelatory as it plods inexorably from one situational hurdle to another. [CS]

Film Capsule: Éric Rohmer's The Marquise of O... (1976)

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Fri, 04 Sep 2015 04:31:00 +0000

The Marquise of O… (1976)
Directed by Eric Rohmer

This exquisite mid-70s German production, the first of three successive period films by the late French New Wave sophisticate, is at once the most regal and least arch of the director’s theatrically mounted trilogy. Proceeding from the announcement of the widowed title character’s (Edith Clever) unexpected pregnancy, the film unfolds through a procession of meticulously staged, largely interior tableaux, wherein the family of the expectant mother deliberate on the social and moral codes precipitated by their beloved’s potentially wanton behavior. While they surmise everything from illness to immaculate conception, a dashing count (Bruno Ganz) steps forward to offer his hand in marriage, the continued refusal of which prompts an emotional and spiritual reckoning within the Marquise, whose destiny is ultimately summoned through obligations outside her own control. While Rohmer’s style, at once densely detailed and starkly artificial, knowingly accentuates the chamber aspects of the drama, it’s his attention to the emotional dimensions of the material which renders this one of his most powerful character studies. (August 28-September 3, showtimes daily, as the headliner of BAM’s “Period Rohmer”) [BKMag]

DVD Review: Agnès Varda in California (1967-1981)

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Fri, 04 Sep 2015 04:18:00 +0000

If adaptability is one of cinema's great intangible skills, then Agnès Varda has proven the utmost emblem of versatility for well over half a century. Narrative features, nonfiction shorts, essay films, and cinematic self-portraits—seemingly nothing has proven outside the Belgian-born director's reach, no subject too unfamiliar (or, for that matter, personal), no milieu too foreign. Following no less than a dozen short films and Nouvelle Vague-stoking features throughout the late '50s and early '60s, Varda would relocate to Los Angeles in 1967 with her husband, Jacques Demy, who had been summoned to Hollywood to embark on his debut studio production, Model Shop, inspiring the first significant creative reorientation in a career marked by them. Considering the breadth of topical interest on display in the work produced during Varda's initial California exodus as well as, later, her second West Coast sojourn in the early '80s, there's no doubt that in each case the timing was, at the very least, fortuitous. Nevertheless, Varda has consistently been drawn to social margins and to eccentric subjects, her knack for finding herself at one cultural crossroads or another too poetically and politically apt to dismiss as sheer serendipity.

While her husband struggled with executives at Columbia Pictures, Varda spent the latter half of the '60s working autonomously, on a trio of personal and political films that found the director exploring coastal and urban enclaves from the Hollywood Hills to the Bay Area and back again. Varda's first two California films, both shorts, are intuitive experiments which find the director inserting herself into unfamiliar situations, training her camera on unknown variables in an effort to gain firsthand knowledge of unique subjects. In Uncle Yanco, she documents her arrival in Sausalito, where she plans on meeting her father's long-lost cousin, Jean Varda, for the first time. This visit to her uncle's houseboat is filmed and edited in a kind of patchwork fashion; she observes intimate moments before re-staging and arranging the scenes in recurrent patterns. The elder Varda is, uncoincidentally, a collage artist and aging vagabond, and much of the 20-minute film is given over to detailed examinations of his color-coated canvases and first-hand ruminations on the artistic process.

More conventionally structured, but equally inquisitive and exceedingly urgent, the following year's Black Panthers forgoes the playful formal measures of Uncle Yanco in favor of observational energy and objective tact. Centered on an Oakland chapter of the radical racial organization, the film flits between on-the-ground dispatches from the frontline of protests, performances, and rallies, to interviews with an imprisoned Huey P. Newton, a founder of the Panthers then recently accused of killing a police officer. On the one hand a powerful time capsule of the burgeoning civil rights movement (Martin Luther King Jr. would be shot just months later), the film is, on another, an all-too-relevant reiteration of an ongoing struggle for equality.

One of the era's other dominant counterculture movements is dramatized in Lions Love (...and Lies), one of Varda's most expert cominglings of fact and fiction. By the time of the film's release in 1969, this new generation of progressively minded youths, unaffectionately known as hippies, had reached its tipping point. Just two months prior to its premiere, the Manson murders had unveiled a dark side of free-thinking, drug-addled culture, while the impending Altamont Free Festival would punctuate the decade with one final flourish of violence. It's against this rising tide of turmoil that Lions Love transpires. Starring James Rado, Gerome Ragni, and Viva—the former two riding a wave of notoriety following Hair, the latter part of Andy Warhol's rotating troupe of actresses—as a ménage à trois of friends, partners, and half-baked artists living and loving in a secluded Hollywood chateau, the film paints an at once playful and painful portrait of privileged life lost in haze of ignorance and inebriates.

Varda frames this unanchored existence as a film within a film, with underground filmmaker Shirley Clarke arriving at the trio's home as a director hoping to locate a narrative in their mess of indulgent activities. In slyly self-reflexive fashion, Clarke, playing an obvious Varda surrogate, quickly grows exasperated of her subjects—whose ceaseless debates recall the stream-of-conscience jabbering of Warhol's more character-driven films, such as Chelsea Girls—while across town her producers debate the parameters of her artistic control. As the film progresses, reality continues to exert its unruly influence, culminating in a cold-water moment for the characters (not to mention the cast and crew) as they sit and watch the news of Senator Robert Kennedy's assassination unfold on TV. A work of small moments and grand tragedies alike, Lions Love is that rarest of retroactive landmarks, a film which both reflects its cultural moment and anticipates its cinematic offspring.

Following Lions Love, Varda would return to France, where she continued to work for the better part of the 1970s, before being called back to Los Angeles to commence production on a new film concerning escalating police violence, a project which would ultimately never get off the ground. Instead, she would channel the frustrations into a pair of quintessential L.A. films. Released in 1980, Mur Murs bears the marks of an artist fascinated by her surroundings. A largely observational compendium of L.A. county street art, graffiti, and the large-scale murals peppering architecture from Venice Beach to the farthest reach of the inner city, the film plays at once as a geographical topography of a city in transition and a meditation on artistic expression and its sociological outgrowth. Created by a combination of professional and amateurs alike, many of whom Varda tracks down and allows to elaborate on their process and inspirations, these highly detailed and largely working-class stylizations once stood as visual representation of all the colorful character and cultural diversity of greater Los Angeles. And though new iterations continue to paint certain regions of the city, the early '80s stood at a specific flashpoint of creativity and nascent racial tension which would soon spill over into national view, rendering these works especially fascinating for their simultaneous beauty and attention to urban unrest. The result is thus quaint in its relaxed course through neighborhoods of various ethnic majorities, and vaguely unnerving with regard to the injustice which would soon plague these vibrant locales.

Varda's next project, the more narrative-driven Documenteur, grew directly out of the experience of making Mur Murs (it even begins with the same shot which closed its predecessor) and, despite its largely fictitious framework, again captures aspects of the city otherwise lost to time. Starring Sabine Mamou, the editor of Mur Murs in her only acting credit, as a single mother named Emilie, emotionally adrift and left to care for her young son (played by Varda's own son, Mathieu Demy) during a particularly chilly winter, Varda's final California film is also, perhaps, her most personal. Emilie works for a film production company, appears to have aspirations to advancing her talents, and at one point even contributes voiceover narration to a film which bears unmistakable resemblance to Mur Murs. But otherwise she seems disenchanted with her life, ruminating in voiceover about the existential and emotional crossroads she feels she has reached. Her state of mind is ably reflected in the overcast pallor of the film, and as such plays as both a companion piece as well as the direct inverse of the vibrant Mur Murs. Varda, no matter the impressive quality of her output out west, appeared at his point ready for a change of scenery. The opening titles describe Documenteur as "An Emotion Picture," a cunning play on words that also functions as an apt characterization of all her California films. The deeply felt passion coursing through these works speaks not to an outsider's perspective, but to someone whose insatiable curiosity and creativity inspired unique and natural expressions of itinerant living.

Image/Sound:
Criterion's 43rd Eclipse set brings together all five of the films Agnès Varda produced in California, in a DVD collection boasting the most recent restorations undertaken at the L'immagine Ritrovata laboratory in Italy. The picture quality of each film is therefore rather strong by the measure of standard-definition transfers. Colors, particularly in Uncle Yanco and Mur Murs, are vibrant, while contrast is nicely balanced in the moodier passages of Documenteur and Lions Love. Texture appears authentic, with noticeable grain and the more filmic attributes of the picture looking well preserved. Audio, meanwhile, is kept to original monaural soundtracks, with adequate depth and little extraneous noise to note. For the most part these films are rather serene sonic experiences, but the soundtracks are often busy with voiceovers. Dialogue is thus appropriately foregrounded and easily audible. And when the action does escalate, as in some of the more passionate displays in Black Panthers, sounds and voices comes through in sharp, robust fashion.

Extras:
As per the Eclipse ethos, there are no digital supplements. However, another batch of well-researched and insightful liner notes by Michael Koresky are offered for each film.

Overall:
The five films Agnès Varda made during two stints in California remain among her most inspired, finding her at a succession of cultural and cinematic crossroads which evidence her uncommon adaptability and insatiable curiosity. [Slant]

Los Angeles Repertory Recommendations: August/September 2015

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Sat, 29 Aug 2015 19:30:00 +0000

FRANK BORZAGE ROMANCES AT THE HAMMER | 10899 Wilshire Blvd.

The UCLA Film and Television Archive has spent much of the summer surveying the career of director Frank Borzage, cinema’s quintessential helpless romantic, whose career spanned from the silent era to the golden age of Hollywood. Among many highlights, the final month of the series brings with it some of Borzage’s most beloved sound pictures, including an Aug. 29 double bill of two films made in 1934, Little Man, What Now? and No Greater Glory, followed on Sept. 9 by a pairing of 1936's Desire (starring Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper) and 1937's History is Made at Night (with Charles Boyer and Jean Arthur).

BLACK INDEPENDENTS AT THE HAMMER | 10899 Wilshire Blvd.

Running concurrently with the UCLA Archive’s Borzage retrospective is a very different series entitled "Tell It Like It Is: Black Independents in New York, 1968-1986." A number of provocative and illuminating selections have already been featured, and the last weeks of August are no different, bringing a trio of rarities to Los Angeles for long overdue presentations. A double bill on Aug. 21 pairs two early ‘80s titles: Will, by female director Jessie Maple, alongside Bill Gunn’s Personal Problems, both films which excavate the dark sides of professional and familial life. Closing the series on Aug. 23 is William Miles’ I Remember Harlem, a sweeping four-part, four-hour nonfiction portrait of the titular New York borough extending from its late 17th-century origins to its 20th-century racial uprisings.

JAZZ, NOIR, AND BEATNIKS AT CINEFAMILY | 611 N Fairfax Ave.

Cinefamily’s month-long "Pulp My Daisy: Jazz, Noir & Beatniks" series closes out August with three screenings of appropriately seductive and vulgar delights. On Aug. 16, the Belle Époque romantic tragedy Casque d’Or, by underrated French director Jacques Becker, is set to disarm with its mix of beauty and brutality. Meanwhile, successive Saturday matinees of underground legend Shirley Clarke’s jazz-laced, New York junkie drama The Connection (Aug. 22) and Allen Baron’s seminal, stylish crime thriller Blast of Silence (Aug. 29) will bring things to a most devastating conclusion.

CHAPLIN AND HITCHCOCK CLASSICS AT THE NEW BEVERLY | 7165 Beverly Blvd.

Along with its typical slate of cult and exploitation fare, the New Beverly Cinema continues to prove dedicated to highlighting films from the heyday of the Hollywood studio system. And a duo of remaining August double features are given over to perhaps the two most popular expatriate filmmakers of all time. First is Charlie Chaplin, whose iconic silent features The Circus and Modern Times will screen together on both Aug. 23 and 24. The following weekend is given over to Alfred Hitchcock, whose early American film Suspicion (starring Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine) and mid-'40s classic Notorious (co-starring Grant and Ingrid Bergman) will grace the marquee on Aug. 28 and Aug. 29. [THR]

Film Capsule: J.L. Anderson's Spring Night, Summer Night (1967)

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Thu, 13 Aug 2015 01:12:00 +0000

Spring Night, Summer Night (1967)
Directed by J.L. Anderson

The first and only feature by director J.L. Anderson, this progressive and prophetic midwest familial drama confronts the taboo with uncommonly topical sweep and insight. With measured, empathetic attention to the social and political particulars of small-town, midcentury America, Anderson chronicles the plight of a pair of siblings caught between illicit passion and an ambiguous lineage which together threaten to ostracize the young lovers from a community ill-equipped to negotiate a post-war youth culture which was then being forced to find refuge in more metropolitan, coastal confines. Captured on location in southeast Ohio, in rich shades of 35mm black-and-white, the film at once preserves a bygone vision of virginal Americana and predicts the personal, uncompromising projects of regional micro-budget cinema, forging an unlikely continuum from its counterculture contemporaries such as Faces and The Last Picture Show, to the coming likes of Killer of Sheep, Stranger Than Paradise, and The Color Wheel. (August 14, 16, 7pm; August 19, 9pm at Anthology Film Archives’s “One-Film Wonders”) [BKMag]

Film Capsule: Edgar G. Ulmer's The Amazing Transparent Man (1960)

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Fri, 31 Jul 2015 21:40:00 +0000

The Amazing Transparent Man (1960)
Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer

In the annals of American International Pictures, few films stand as valiantly lame as this shoestring sci-fi drive-in novelty by the virtuoso of no-budget genre productions, Edgar Ulmer. Shot in under a week in the Dallas desert, the film mounts a ludicrous plot concerning a notorious safe-cracker (Douglas Kennedy) sprung from prison and sent to a remote farmhouse where a mad US Army major (James Griffith) conducts invisibility experiments which he plans on utilizing to blackmail the government into enlisting a legion of untraceable minions. With just a few locations and the most primitive of special effects, the cast and crew is able to rather heroically exceed these limitations while pushing past the narrative’s inherent absurdity. Ulmer was, as Andrew Sarris once noted, the unintentional master of the maudit, and this charming oddity, like nearly all of the director’s work, rises impressively from its own ashes. (August 1, 5pm; August 4, 9:15pm at Anthology Film Archive’s AIP tribute) [BK Mag]