Coverage updated and concluded with reviews of The Milky Way (Moullet, France), Charly (Le Besco, France), and Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (Gianvito, USA).
Hou Hsiao-hsien again travels abroad to make a film, and his Parisian fable takes the director to a minimalism that emphasizes the rich, allusive ambience of light, quiet joys, and gentle loneliness.
Wong Kar-wai’s My Blueberry Nights, his first film in English and set in America, is kind of costume jewelry. A refresher, deep-breath after the fractured convolution in production and final result of his last film, 2046, My Blueberry Nights has more than a passing resemblance to the early career break Wong took during the epic task of making Ashes of Time—a little ditty called Chungking Express.
Ruby Gentry(Vidor, 1953) Viewed May 4, 2008 | FILM
Screened at Anthology Film Archive's Luc Moullet Selets series.
I'm a bit upset, because Luc Moullet in his blurb for this program really just says everything that should be said. So I'm just going to cut and paste, for your enjoyment:
"Perhaps Vidor’s greatest film. It begins relatively conventionally, but gradually, with each successive reel, takes off for increasingly flamboyant heights, culminating in a mind-blowing, stupefying final half hour. The last two sequences – the return to Ruby’s birthplace and the chase through the marshes – are, in my opinion, among the greatest in the history of cinema. This film is a comprehensive statement from Vidor, a man of the marshes if there ever was one: highly-wrought, post-expressionist black-and-white photography, haunting music featuring a unique leitmotif for guitar, bold editing which takes hallucinatory shortcuts through the plot, a story highlighting the eternal struggle between earth and water (a major motif in Vidor’s cinema), a vitriolic vision of ambition and hypocrisy in small-town America, a frenetic, inventive eroticism which cleverly runs rings around the censors, a hymn to delirium and l’amour fou: RUBY GENTRY, the perfect woman’s film, the ideal case study in flamboyant melodrama, has everything. It’s a low-budget picture, but it remains far more moving than any super-production."
Child Bride(Revier, 1938) Viewed May 4, 2008 | FILM
Screened at Anthology Film Archive's Luc Moullet Selets series.
NOT as Moullet describes, but pleasurable in a different way. In this series, three of which I've seen, only this reminds me directly of Moullet's work. This is in the expression of things cinematically through awkwardness (of content), amateurism (of technique), and weirdness (their combination). Poetry and feeling emerging from the craggy holes in a rock, termite art through and through. Except for this film the pleasures are so haphazard they must be accidental, whereas in a Moullet there is a wry intentionality lurking, almost lurking.
Brig, The(Mekas, 1964) Viewed May 3, 2008 | FILM
Screened at Anthology Film Archive's Luc Moullet Selets series.
Master Spearman, The(Uchida, 1960) Viewed April 30, 2008 | FILM
More sedate than most of the Uchida I've seen, but working yet another angle of diametric opposites clashing, this time with a heroic warrior seeing the hypocrisy of bushido and giving up his status of samurai, only to be drawn back in. The highlight is a theatrical seppuku staging, exploring all the showmanship and paradoxes involved in the ceremony, and intrinsically involved in society as a whole. A final act embrace of warrior-hood is hardly believable, and the film begins to take a nose-dive from that point on, but up until then this unusual Uchida has a strange mixture of charm and humor in the way it scoffs at samurai pride and hypocrisy. Also includes a riverside-at-sundown set whose beauty, depth, and artificiality is right up there with the Shaw studio productions of the 1960s.
