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.

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.

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."

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.

Screened at Anthology Film Archive's Luc Moullet Selets series.

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.

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.

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).

Screened at the Film Forum's United Artists 90th Anniversary series.

Screened at MoMA's Jazz Score series.

Doesn't hold up to the stunning youthfulness and freshness of, say, Bergman's contemporaneous Monika. But there is a surprising amount of ambiguity and variety in the close-ups of cypher actress Kitahara Mie, an unfathomable combination of surprise, pleasure, perplexity, assuredness, and perhaps contempt. And the ending takes the normally detrimental melodramatic side of the film to a wonderful height it always should have been operating on for maximum effect.

I don't know how this cool and totally collected western escaped my awareness all these years (especially as Robert Ryan is my favorite American male star of the 1950s), but hurrah here is is and it should be seen as soon as possible! I'm sure praise has been heaped on the final third of a film, an awe-inspiring and almost entirely location-shot trek through a snowy wilderness with only death at the end of the line, but that mini-film is preceded by its own mini-film (which is almost totally concluded by the time the gang leave for the mountain pass), a precisely calibrated chamber drama, De Toth all about medium shot observation and precise, almost geometric blocking. Fantastic, minimal acting by Burl Ives, the very definition of presence, who mostly just has to stand there to generate a character, an atmosphere, and an authority.

Screened at BAM's Tomu Uchida: Discovering a Japanese Master series.

From in to out, Twilight Saloon's containment to The Outsiders extensive setting on location in the Hokkaido boonies, and yet another indescribable entry in Uchida's filmography. It fails on all accounts of completeness: ethnography of Ainu culture, melodrama of miscegenation and outsider/insider love affair, wild Robin Hood-influenced Western, liberal racial/cultural paean. But it succeeds wildly in creating a film world where these things are all possible and included, if never developed or completed. Indeed, it's almost like Uchida gave us a film that attempts to contain all films that could be made in this area, on this subject. And admitting that it cannot fulfill the liberal ambitions of the project, Uchida gives himself over widescreen, color location photography. (It is no coincidence, though, after Twilight Salloon, that the best scene in this film is an extended scene in a cramped bar room.)

Screened at the French Institute Alliance Française's Jean Eustache’s Circle series.

Cute, but it's impact is considerably less after Hollis Frampton's Nostalgia. I do like the subtlety of the progression of describing the photos, from pretty close to accurate to downright talking about something else.

Screened at the French Institute Alliance Française's Jean Eustache’s Circle series.

Exemplary in the way modest, matter-of-fact filmmaking can achieve the grandeur, lyricism, and meaning of more ambitious aims and means. I'm not sure what exactly it is about beyond its subject, though I'm tempted to say the wholesomeness of process, as well as a low-key but very present aura of horror as a day-to-day part of human routine and livelihood.

Screened at BAM's Tomu Uchida: Discovering a Japanese Master series.

Uchida is really turning into one of the most ungainly directors I've ever tried to get my mind around, even more so than Skolimowski, who at least had a continuity of off-kilterness. Uchida seems to mutate with each film, the only constants being a constant but low-key morphing of tone scene-by-scene and an incredible but almost undefinable sense of cinematic space. This film really underlines these two qualities; it takes the form of a very American-style film, limiting action and drama to a single night in a giant tavern, where Uchida can have a field day with cranes, deep space, and extensive use of fore and background. And the tone is all over the place, even if the thematics are solid (favorite moment of that: two old armymen singing an anthem, recognizing the song being sung outside and thinking an infantry brigade is marching by, only to realize that it is a striking labor union that is using the same tune). Here, in this closed environment, Uchida's dynamic (in the sense of roving tone and also in the sense of a continual, moment-to-moment attempt to find something interesting to do in terms of camera position and movement in physical space) has the most stable and literally closed environment, giving over a more unified and "justified" pleasure in the director's strangeness.

I've been unable to really penetrate Masumura, who keeps me on the outside of his works in a manner that reminds me of two of the first Imamura's I saw, The Pornographers and Intentions of Murder. This is a psuedo-sequel to Masumura's own Giants and Toys, except without the humor: corporate existence in Japan being a continuation of the militarism that carried Japan on high from the early 1930s to the end of the Pacific War. Corporate espionage is the name of the game, and Masumura approaches the subject with a comic-book sensibility of graphic two-dimensional composition and paneling in some of the richest chiaroscuro photography I've ever seen. The style, I think, encourage and attitude of distanced analysis on the part of the spectator, as it really isn't until the final five minutes we are given someone with whom to identity. A very sinister film.

Screened at the French Institute Alliance Française's Jean Eustache’s Circle series.

I wanted to write a longer piece on this masterpiece but haven't found the chance or the inspiration. Shorthand compels me to describe it as an entry in the heavily used 1970s European genre of auteur films about the director's youthful sexual awakening. But Eustache, approaching the film with a combined mixture of Rohmer and Bresson (simple realism of the mise-en-scene, clean, easy camerawork emphasizing natural light and realistic space + a performative and narrative style emphasizing emblematic and unrealistic gestures, words, curtailed events and actions) avoids the nostalgia that tends to drag down many of those works.

I very much like the few Chor Yuen films I have seen. This, like Killer Clans (1976) has a surprisingly abstract attitude towards plot, deploying it as a series of conspiratory-based staged fights. Using the resplendent studio artifice of the Shaws backlot and interior stages of the time, Chor eliminates any sense of a world outside of the main character's myopic forward momentum: everyone encountered is essentially a potential traitor, and eventually reveals him or herself to be yet another assassin hired to kill our hero. Likewise, every setting, every location, will inevitably be ground to be fought over.

Screened at the Film Forum's Unitd Artists 90th Anniversary series.

Screened at the Film Forum's Unitd Artists 90th Anniversary series.

Screened at BAM's Tomu Uchida: Discovering a Japanese Master series.

I wish I had more time to dig into this film, which I presumptuously posit as a meeting place between the classical theatrical artifice of Kinoshita's Ballad of Narayama (1958) and the more unhinged work of Seijun Suzuki in the 1960s, whose extreme artifice went as far to break the diegesis as one could go without reflexively referencing filmmaking itself. Uchida's wonderful film is narratively as ungainly as a Suzuki film is aesthetically: unrolling as a horror/disaster film, turning into political thriller, then into family melodrama, and finally, in the second half, embracing a story of insanity, mythology, and bestial and maddening perils of love. The form likewise goes from rationally strange (overwhelming red filters for a storm brewing over Mt. Fuji, elaborate, dramatic spatial games for the filial-sexual melodrama) to increasingly gutsy in how to represent this uneven story: a mixture of animation, stage-bound and explosively colorful dream sequences (very Suzuki), and theatrical artifice as literally theater, by the film's end. Really, just a delight in form engaging wildly with uneven and perhaps even incoherent material.

Screened at BAM's Tomu Uchida: Discovering a Japanese Master series.

Screened at the French Institute Alliance Française's Jean Eustache’s Circle series.

Thoughts coming soon...

Screened at the French Institute Alliance Française's Jean Eustache’s Circle series.

Screened at the French Institute Alliance Française's Jean Eustache’s Circle series.

I haven't really had time to bite into this diptych, but a superficial analogic analysis suggests this: the film is in two halves, one half being a fictionalized retelling of a "true story" with actors; the second half being apparently a documentary of that true story being told by the person who experienced it to an audience of non-actors (including Eustache). The story, which I won't detail, involves a man peeping into a woman's toilet, and realizing that from that position he could see each woman's soul, regardless of her outer appearance. To my mind, the analogy might be that in this film there is a relatively stable element (both films are telling the same story; all women have the same body parts) but Eustache's approach invoking realism is subtly different. It is then up to the audience to find out which part of the speaks more to them than the other? Are we to look at all films and see their relationships to a stable reality, and then observe the divergence points and be moved, or judge (or not) accordingly?