This had been hanging around my must-see list for so long as to curdle into vague assumptions and baffled expectations. The result was so out of left field that even the film’s rather extreme sense of time and tedium was not enough to click into its mindset. I can say that this should be sandwiched between L’Amour fou and Zabriskie Point as one of the more epic studies of late-60s revolutionary youth. Yoshida's exceedingly cryptic use of Japanese history was borderline impenetrable to me, or maybe it didn’t matter; half of the film’s focus is on a revolutionary/anarchist/feminist couple in the 1910s but instead of focusing on their nationalist or humanist politics Yoshida is interested in their social politics. But perhaps that’s even a misnomer, for, like the other half of the film that sets its sight on two wanton, wandering revolutionary youths in 1969 Japan, struggling against and for the same things as those in the past with seemingly no progress made except in how each can express their turmoil, Eros Plus Massacre’s actual angle of attack is very obscure. It certainly isn’t psychological drama, and I don’t think it is even representational in its depiction of humans, which makes the near-kammerspiel-like approach to the 1910s section truly baffling and abstract. Combine this with Yoshida’s ultra-rare quality of truly baring Antonioni’s torch of extreme, two-dimensional graphic compositions—the framing throughout is nearly catastrophically off-center—as to really ask fundamentally questions like "why?" Utterly perplexing, but clearly utterly requisite. I haven’t quite figured out why it is either of those things, at least not yet.

I feel like in describing a certain kind of movie, that where the narrative supposedly travels with an object rather than a character, the descriptions over-emphasize how literal this conceit is. Yes, Winchester '73 and Madame de... are sort of structured around a rifle and a pair of earrings respectively, but it isn't until I saw this film, which is narratively structured around the movements of a caterpillar around Japan, that the purity of the idea, as well as its failings, come to light. The episodic content is mostly lame, and despite Kuroki's exuberance in filmmaking this is his debut feature) , really needed someone smartly, slyly subversive like Oshima or Masumura to both reign in a degree of stable intelligence to the story and the style, as well as clarify it for greater political oomph. That being said, the final reel, where the caterpillar seems to precipitate the re-militarization of Japan, inspire gang wars, and perhaps trigger an atomic bomb detonation point towards these object-narratives as being most exciting when the non-empathetic inspires the non-empathetic, objects precipitating a pleasurably distanced unfolding of uninvolved events.

If we can describe Maurice Pialat's movies as raw-raw, I venture to say that Jacques Doillon's are, after seeing 1996's Ponette, are sleek-raw: the emotion is there as frighteningly strong and frontal as Pialat's, but Doillon's characters put a face on top of that emotion. It is not a mask per se, but it is a face of someone constantly thinking, constantly considering. We see them feel, but before that we see them thinking about what they are feeling. It puts a layer between their truest emotions and the world around them, as if they have to first process the drama, process the situation that is happening to them right now before they can absorb it and feel something. In fact, Ponette, which is about the eponymous girl (eerily, affectingly and effectively played by Victoire Thivisol), is entirely about watching this young girl process, absorb, fight, and come to terms with the fact that her mother just died. The plot has her grasp at and discard a variety of quasi-religious, quasi-mystical attempts to recapture her mother: unable to conjure her up at night, she turns to God to try to speak to her mother, but unable to speak to God she then tries to conjure up God. While on paper the story seems like it could be a tritely allegorial tale of the rationale behind searching for and being disappointed by different kinds of faith, Doillon's attention is entirely turned to how Thivisol (as the character but perhaps more disturbingly as an actress) thinks, considers, and is consternated and frustrated by her feelings and her thoughts and her inability to rectify them with the world. This is why practically the entire movie is shot in long lens with the characters constantly moving back and forth sideways along the x-axis of the frame: pursuing and fleeing one another, always thinking, always on the move, processing, trying to figure the thing out, whatever the thing may be. I'm actually surprised the film can hold up it's 90-some-odd-minute run time, for, all due consideration given to Doillon's story, Ponette is simply about the way Ponette thinks (and the look and feel of this thinking) as she walks back and forth.

Review coming soon...

Not as interesting as Argento’s previous three movies—it could really use about 20 minutes of trimming, all related to David Hemmings toodling around a rather wonderfully designed mansion during the last half of the movie, like some sort of requisite payoff after being given permission by the mansion’s owner to film there—but quite beautiful, especially in terms of architecture and interior design (an image series will be coming soon to The Auteurs following this theme). Also, the ending takes to a rather wonderful extreme (see also Four Flies on Grey Velvet, whose similar ending is on YouTube in terrible, terrible quality) the particularly insane habit of Argento at this time to not have his protagonist capture/kill the maniac who terrorizes him/her throughout the movie but rather to have a totally random and absolutely, grotesquely over the top urban accident kill him/her instead. In that film it was a decapitating car crash, in this the suspected killed is bumped into by a passing garbage truck and then dragged by the truck several blocks—repeatedly cracking his head against passing curbs and light posts—before having his head run over by a passing car. Argento’s vision of the ubiquity of murder and mayhem in society is really chilling, especially the way it continues to exist only until the killer is caught/killed, upon which the movie immediately ends, with not even a reaction shot from Hemmings (except in a frozen pool of blood).

Dullsville. Some thoughts coming soon to The Auteurs.

Wait, hold on, ur-poet of the irrational and the melancholy Jacques Tourneur directing an upbeat, mostly cheery, and eventually optimistic film about a friendly small town pastor for MGM? An odd beast, this, but also truly great. That nebulous atmosphere of Tourneur's thrillers, horror, and war films—never sure what is outside the frame, outside the room, outside in the world—is here in spades, but with a different tone: it is a gaseous quality of warmth, neighborliness, and compassion that is out there, somewhere surrounding everything. At first. Then a rationalist doctor arrives in town, jump-starting the usual Tourneur theme of rational/irrational fights of fan(tasy)cy, typhoid strikes the town, and a lynch mob wants to hang an elderly black man to get his land. Oh, good Christian values and behavior triumph, but not before the usual Tourneur world is glimpsed fighting within the heart of every man, and within the world itself. Also: every single shot in this film is a model of cinematic beauty, pictorialism that transcends simply framing a pretty picture.

The first ten minutes or so are a real pleasure, back in the realm of Moulin Rouge!'s epilepsy-inducing barrage of style and tone. It takes us a while to find our footing, and even after Nicole Kidman settles down on the ranch it seems like Lurhman will keep up the frisky vibrancy. His direction of Kidman during this first reel are among both artist's finest moments: she is like a cartoon character, director and actress using her gawky long arms and mobile eyes to stretch out comedy bodily with a good deal of zaniness (climaxing with the Rouge-reference of having Kidman warble a terrible rendition of "Over the Rainbow"). And at first plot and style match, but in due course the whole film swerves down a path as overblown as it is surprisingly boring. (Jackman as an actor has no character to speak of, especially compared to Kidman, though she too is eventually buckled down into blandness after a while; and even more disappointing, especially considering the cast of Moulin Rouge!, Australia seems a study in the supreme absence of terrific character actors in the movies anymore, nearly every secondary and tertiary role, including the villain, are cast and directed in utmost forgettable form.) Bonus points for using grandiose, somewhat fake looking CGI tableaux to replace Old Hollywood's massive background matte paintings; minus points for being as particularly offense re: aboriginal Australians as such a "liberal" film could be. David Gulpilil was in this and Ten Canoes?

Small piece coming to The Auteurs, stay tuned.

A magnificent film, and a forceful argument that perhaps the ideal film is around 60 minutes. It is a cartwheel of a film, acrobatically flipping with as much athletic grace as awkward, up-and-over lurch. Social and financial and romantic, grim and uplifting: speed and satiric persistence opens up the world and lets America in the 1940 (and probably in-now too) spill in. Sturges, not usually known for his cinematics (he’s more of a Hawks-like stylist, groups of people milling around with energy to spare), stages one of the greatest of cinema’s camera movements in the long crane tracking shot following our fella and his gurl as they walk across a New York rooftop after a fight in the middle of the night…

Ah Borzage. How many Hollywood directors have reached so high that have also fell so low? Perhaps more than any other director, once you get past Borzage's clear masterpieces, a fan must search amongst the rubble of many-a-indistinguished (and indistinguishable) Hollywood factory products to find those beloved Borzagian moments. In terms of story and in terms of character this film is a complete mess, and it concludes seemingly a reel too early. Yet Kay Francis and George Brent have a very nice twenty or so minutes of light-hearted, tragedy-tinged domestic squable in the middle of the film which not only reads as realistic but also as somewhat whimsical (or fantastic, as much of Borzage romance is) and somewhat sad. And as often as the script falls down (or more accurately, never even stands on its knees), it is rather replete with delicious dialog. An avid hunter can be rewarded.

Finally seen in proper condition (a very yellow-tinted but nonetheless "restored" print) declares Argento's first film a masterpiece. Removing the shabby print quality to a great degree removes the shabby, tacky aesthetic label Argento seems perpetually tagged by. This film is as precise as anything Hitchcock ever made.

Argento's second film seems quite different from his first, with a greater emphasis on acting, on humor, and on dialog sequences (with intermittent success); far less horrific set-pieces. Yet his flair is still there, even in the unending (and real time) grave robbing sequence, tedium and flatness becomes justified; Morricone's score is one of his funky best; the emphasis, as in all early Argento, on modernist Italy architecture and spaces is incredible; features one of the strangest and coldest of all film love making sequences; downplays one of the greatest of all conceptual plot lines (a research scientist discovers he is genetically predisposed to commit violent crimes, and upon threat of discovery he must become a serial killer to hide the fact he is genetically predisposed to commit violent crimes); and the rooftop ending is worth of Feuillade.

Longer piece coming soon to The Auteurs.

Maybe a C+, not sure (does it matter?). Thoughts coming to The Auteurs soon...

Simple, but not simplified Truffaut. Has influences of both Bresson and Straub/Huillet (thanks TWITT!) in the way the director is honing his production and his mise-en-scene for the sake of stark clarity. Even within this construct, there is overwhelming ambiguity; the ending, one of cinema's briefest and finest, is positively devastating in how, with an utter ease of style, Truffaut evokes the joy and the sorrow of the teacher's boon and the child's decision.

A pivot point in Desplechin's career, it seems (I haven't seen most of the films in the first half of his career for some time now, I admit), plunging him into the deep end problematics of Playing 'In the Company of Men' and emerging refreshed and anew as a filmmaker with Kings and Queen and his new film this year, A Christmas Tale...all of which I have serious problems with though certainly recognize the mastery within. The mystery is how the film that contains the pivot, the film that clearly moved the filmmaker onto another stage of his art and craft is, in itself, perhaps not just the key to his filmmaking but also the greatest film he has made. And one of the most mysterious ever; and one of the best evocations of late 19th century London; and one of the best evocations of the mysteries of the stage; and...

Program included:

Ingreen (1964)

Pneuma (1983)

Triste (1994)

Small piece on this coming to The Auteurs soon...

Screened at BAM's Howard Hawks retrospective.

A small thing on this coming to The Auteurs soon...

Screened at BAM's Howard Hawks retrospective.

An incredible film, I'm really not quite sure what to say. I might, at least as a small note, point towards two particularly lovely sequences, where Griffith cross-cuts with an ambiguous impressionism. The first is between one character's dark, restless dream, and the awful experiences Lillian Gish, who the dreamer does not yet know, is having at the same moment. Griffith is linking two characters, two feelings, two spaces, that have no literal or even symbolic link in the film. A later moment is less brash but far more beautiful: a destitute and homeless Gish has been wandering the countryside looking for work. She stops in front of the dreamer's house, looking at it with pessimistic dismay. She moves along the road, continuing to stop and look at the farm, uncertain at every juncture whether to be put through another rejection or to continue on. Cross-cut with Gish's pitiful uncertainy are shots of the dreamer, who is actually just a hundred or so yards away, facing away from Gish (that is, not looking at her, and not aware she is there). Leaning against the porch pillar, the dreamer seems to think of something, seems to feel something: an impression flickers across his face in the several shots Griffith gives him. It is as if he senses something of Gish' presence, just like, instead of passing the house by, Gish herself feels a draw to the location. But any sense of literal connection between the two, and sense of Griffith grounding this editing, this conflation of people, impressions, feelings, spaces, and consciousnesses, is ambiguous. And it is all the more lovely and suggestive for it.

Kay Francis' lanky elasticity is almost uncontainable by the square American Shots of this era, even under the agile stylistics of Dieterle, a director never afraid to move a camera or be disjunctive to get an effect off. Also pleasurable for the sheer brazen attitude of its pre-Code morality, there being literally no moral quandry about William Powell openly making love to the married Francis.

Screened at the Film Forum's David Lean retrospective.

Interesting mostly for the ambiguity it draws on for about 2/3 of its running time until the movie finally reveals why there is a strange sense of oddity in the air, most especially in Ann Todd's performance. And then the movie takes pains to explain why it created the ambiguity (to make the audience uncertain whether our heroine had committed a crime, or, in a more Hitchcockian/Langian appraoch, whether she was simply capable of committing a crime) in a lengthy trial sequence. Once explained, the movie seems drained of the mystery, as if the preceeding film was calibrated to almost artificially (I say almost, it is not as bad as all that) keep the mystery up, in a way quite similar to the narrative problems of Nolan's The Prestige.