d+kaz

Director: Jacques Tourneurmebeli. Country: USA. Year: 1944. Format: Digital.

Reminds me less of Tourneur than of Lewton, and specifically Lewton’s The Seventh Victim (directed by Mark Robson), where the front side of the film is all stolid interiors, talk talk talk, and convoluted plot, and the other side–the side we never see but is constantly alluded to–is a void of irrational fear and danger. I suppose one could say this is very Tourneur-like, but the banality of the majority of this movie does not resemble the director, and it is not exactly off-screen space that Tourneur alludes to but off-screen abstraction, a mostly undefined and dangerously amorpheus grouping of dreams, stories, and neuroses. Perhaps is a good study for how much of what makes a great film can exist almost totally out of the film itself and in the mind of the viewer.

For all my coverage of the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, please click the following links.

The Milky Way (Moullet, France)

Charly (Le Besco, France)

Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (Gianvito, USA)

Redbelt (Mamet, USA)

Idiots and Angels (Plympton, USA)

Let the Right One In (Alfredson, Sweden)

Director: Jean-Luc Godard. Country: France. Year: 1963. Format: Film. Screened at Film Forum’s Godard’s 60s series.

Reminds one that, along with, say, Paris Belongs to Us, and the Tiger films by Charbol, that there is an unheralded sense of the Cold War in some early New Wave films, eventually and quickly overtaken by Vietnam, May ‘68, and other political/international/national concerns. But this film is a still an oddity, even in the Godard canon, and can be grouped with Les Carabiniers in a category of films whose styles and tones are often forgotten when talking about Godard in the 60s. While that film is caustic and bitter, this one is grave, subsumed by its spy game atmosphere of automotive threats, fear/danger of photography and audio (so ironic this was banned for an audio/radio reference to Algeria), random assassinations, and, uh, Anna Karina. Godard most under the influence of Lang, and by way of him very Rivette-like. Godard’s cinematic playfulness conjures not positive potential, as in magical Rivette, but cinematic playfulness as an amorpheus danger in the real world (verite, but at a remove). This is a movie that may almost be scared at the state of the world.

Director: Harry Revier. Country: USA. Year: 1938. Format: Film. Screened at Anthology Film Archive’s Luc Moullet Selects 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.

Director: King Vidor. Country: USA. Year: 1953. Format: Film. Screened at Anthology Film Archive’s Luc Moullet Selects 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.”

Director: Jonas Mekas. Country: USA. Year: 1964. Format: Film. Screened at Anthology Film Archive’s Luc Moullet Selects series.

Director: Uchida Tomu. Country: Japan. Year: 1960. Format: Film. Screened at BAM’s Tomu Uchida: Discovering a Japanese Master series.

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.

Director: Uchida Tomu. Country: Japan. Year: 1933. Format: Film. Screened at BAM’s Tomu Uchida: Discovering a Japanese Master series.

Starts out fairly rote, with a very typically 1930s Hollywood story of two best friends, one a cop and one a gangster, but then it moves in a very different direction. Instead of following the parallel tracks of morality and immorality, the film focuses on the betrayal of friendship that arresting the gangster would imply for the cop. The film spends an inordinate amount of time having the cop accumulate evidence until he cannot possibly ignore the fact that his friend is guilty. Meanwhile, Uchida is doing wild and crazy things with cinematic space here, as cops and gangsters bob and weave, chase and dodge each other within the projects, and long takes and fast camera movement tracks them as they disappear around one corner and a whip pan finds them emerging several yards away down another alley. This all climaxes in the masterpiece of a final sequence, a police raid on a very vaguely defined group of young conspirators, that takes the extremes of Lang’s final Mabuse showdown and bursts that siege out into the streets, spreading to spotlight covered rooftops and amazing flights on foot, an expressionist/impressionist hodgepodge of amazing energy, action, and space.

Director: Uchida Tomu. Country: Japan. Year: 1960. Format: Film. Screened at BAM’s Tomu Uchida: Discovering a Japanese Master series.

By now my enjoyment of Uchida is in full swing, if almost totally unarticulated. So here is another very different movie, also with a dynamic use of space, also with a rhetorically interestingly told narrative, and also, as has become apparent here and there in the series, with an active social conscience (the main character is a provincial factory owner who works along with his employees, and whose life, until he meets a certain geisha, is honorably and respectably and warmly intertwined with them). It’s just such an unusual pleasure to watch, even if I can’t quite say why: curiously, smartly told story, and likewise the cinematics. Oh, and the ending! First the unveiling of the courtesan, told through an incredible rhythm of music, editing, and movement, and then: violence! An explosion of color and motion, in seems like a habitual Uchida moment, of a significant change in a character’s development prompting a heightened stylization and theatricality of the mise-en-scene (see also the character turnaround in The Master Spearman).

Director: Phil Karlson. Country: USA. Year: 1953. Format: Film.
Screened at the Film Forum’s United Artists 90th Anniversary series.