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A sublime short which, like The Great Dictator, poses Chaplin as simulataneously in power and without, a rich man and a tramp, a callous drunk and a sentimental, carefree spirit. Some very sly social and iconographic commentary at work here, which he would later explore more explosively in that feature. Amusing, subtle mockery of the rich; Chaplin emphasizes not the absurdity of activities (golf, masked balls) but of the attitude in which people partake in them, and the difference between the Tramp’s attitude and that of the rich around him to “activities” but really life: love, leisure, pleasure, kindness, games, friendship, etc.

The most abstract of the Tourneurs I’ve seen, and some proof against the necessity of Val Lewton to produce a masterpiece for the director. The pleasures are neither plot nor character based but far more nebulous: atmosphere and tone. A great sense of foliage, of the wind through reeds, of silent, vast forests; of the insular isolation living and hiding within the wilderness, of the war being gaseously everywhere, prevalant, but unseen, darkness a viscous force, forever slowly seeping in. And when seen, strange: horses patrolling through woods, love making after sabotage, so many moon-lit pools of water, muffled lines and whispered aphorisms. The whole movie is one long shadow-dappled whisper under one’s breath, a whisper of passion and need, a powerful desire for reason in this lonely outpost in the middle of a losing war. Fantastic and very, very odd.

The majority of this wonderful short is thematically focused on sea-sickness and nausea. For Chaplin, many of the gags seem unusually mean and perverse, but its ferry-set centerpiece is still spectacularly funny and technically quite clever (movement of the boat is accentuated by a constantly tipping camera).

Thoughts coming eventually (probably during the upcoming Oshima retro)...

I respect Aldrich, but on the whole I'm not sure how much I like him. The thing that most attracts me to cinema, clear form, isn't really his concern. His films are jagged, wearily energetic, brutally cynical. It is hard to imagine a filmmaker who more successfully conjures up a moral worldview when creating a film, one of the "old" descriptors for the 1950s, Cahiers du cinema version of mise-en-scene.

Because of the exquisite idiosyncrasy of vision of Tarkovsky, one tends to group him with such filmmakers as Ozu, Bresson, Antonioni and Dreyer, whose films are so clearly the product of a single artistic vision that the works are preternaturally complete, sealed off, objects of contemplation. That impression is most assuredly incorrect (except maybe for Bresson's films, from Diary of a Country Priest on), and it is startling to watch this film again and realize how ragged and ill-composed it is, yet what wondrous expression and unexpected connections Tarkovsky is able to make in his "found" film, a film that clearly found itself every step of the way throughout its pre-production, production, and post, never, ever settling down to become exactly what it was planned in the mind of the filmmaker before the cameras started rolling.

Extensive thoughts to come...

Music by Ennio Morricone:

Screened at MoMA's Zeitgeist: The Films of Our Times.

Easily one of the greatest films of the 1990s, a film-about-filmmaking with none of the grandoise hubris and introversion of most entries in that genre. Insights come not from the set but the interrelations between people; spectacle is not in filming or in egos, but in the flux and length of a late night dinner party with one of the greatest music cues in cinema suddenly revealing a hidden choreography to the dance of people and talk; or likewise in the brutal flurry of a post-screening exodus, cast and crew fleeing the scene in a mad osciallation of cars and headlights bending in short parabolas towards the long lens of Assayas camera. Oh: and one of the greatest, most profound endings in all of cinema as well.

Screened at the Film Forum's Nakadai series.

Something coming soon...

Screened at the Film Society of Lincoln Center's William Holden: A Different Kind of Hero series.

Supposedly "minor" Ford, but you won't hear any complaints from me: its episodic narrative gives the sense of a perpetual and forever on-going series of incidents (and indeed, the war itself), and while the supporting cast isn't grand, the main three more than do their duty. Some incredible location photography. Now having a better appreciation for Ford's compositions through Straub/Huillet and Costa, I am curious about how he achieves his effects. What was his normal lens used I wonder?

Seen at the 2008 New York Asian Film Festival.

Review coming soon...

Screened at the Film Forum's Nakadai series.

Screened at BAM's The Directors’ Fortnight at 40 series.

Review coming soon...

A Herzogian re-cap, only without the curiosity or energy that goes into the more singular and expressive of Herzog's documentaries. Yet not poor by a long-shot, just scattered and without oomph. As always, Herzog's "take" on the truthfulness of documentaries is fascinating to watch: witness him prompting scientists to put their ears to the ice to hear seal calls (echoing the ice-gazers of Bells of the Deep), overriding an interviewee's story with his own "summary" in voice-over, and, in the movie's best scene, his crafting of a story about a (possibly fictive) penguin suffering from human-like, existential death-driven dementia. Would benefit, I would think, from digital projection, as most of the film's presumably lovely images come off smeary and blown out. Interesting above all conceptually (the Antarctic town/mine/dystopia, the location function as a cross-roads for the outsiders, eccentrics, geniuses, the curious, etc.).

Seen at the 2008 New York Asian Film Festival.

Seen at the 2008 New York Asian Film Festival.

Unconnected to Love on Sunday, except the director (Hiroki) and the focus on a high-school age female protagonist. Same pleasures to be found in the first film can be found in the second, except the four-some of the first film, which strained dramatic plausibility, here receives a welcome breath of air through a focus just on two: the terminally ill girl and the mid-20s boy she used to live near and be friends with and now returns to in order to strike up a love or confess her sickness, or reconcile herself etc. et al. Suffers from a very poor choice of dramatic emotional catharsis that rings false on a number of levels, but is otherwise, like its predecessor, a very nice film.

Seen at the 2008 New York Asian Film Festival.

See Full Review.

Something coming soon...

Seen at the 2008 New York Asian Film Festival.

See Full Review..

Seen at the 2008 New York Asian Film Festival.

See Full Review..