Screened at BAM's The Talking Pictures of Manoel de Oliveira series.

Screened at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and MoMA's New Directors/New Films series.

A nice example of why I tend to shy away from a lot of American indie: competent, safe, unchallenging.

Screened at the Film Society of Lincoln Center's Film Comment Selects series.

Features a surprisingly casual monologue-as-soundtrack by Jena Malone that nicely twists celebrity culture and transgender identity into a whirligig stream of consciousness lament that impossibly blends identity, but the visuals remind me of a sub-sub-sub-inspired version of the indulgent closeted apartment visions of Ken Jacobs films Blonde Cobra and Little Stabs of Happiness, here a mostly disconnected and unspecified series of forgettable and uninteresting "fragments from a life."

Screened at MoMA's The Age of Chevalier series.

I wish I had time to comment on this double-feature, but instead I need to hand the ball to Dave.

Screened at MoMA's The Age of Chevalier series.

I wish I had time to comment on this double-feature, but instead I need to hand the ball to Dave.

This got me thinking about what is characteristic of Assayas' style, although I certainly haven't seen enough of his films recently enough to be able to fully describe. He seems very closely in tune with Wong Kar-wai, using a kind of impressionism that I find very rare: an impressionism of the narration/narrator, not one extending from characters. Not that the impressionism remains distanced from the characters, as their worries, neuroses, and activity definitely comes into contact with Assayas' style, case in point being the last scene in this film where Amalric's distracted, energetic state clicks with the director's long lenses, partially unmotivated camera movements, and jump-cutting, scattered-seeming editing. Moving around, that's what the style seems to "amount to," yet I think the intended effect of this is that the audience must figure out or sense what it is moving around.

Screened at MoMA's Ernie Gehr: Moving Image Minimalist series.

Not quite the Be All And End All of post-Out 1 Jacques Rivette I had expected, this near-four hour opus on Michel Piccoli painting Emmanuelle Béart is far from the summation of the artist (Rivette) or the Artist (painter or filmmaker) I had thought. Instead, it is a causal work, as painful, of course, as Rivette can get, but also so relaxed and easy in its length, so natural and spontaneous. The directness of the plot in regards to Rivette's interest in collaboration and performance as consumptive things, dangerous and fruitful, is so strong that much of the film's power is surprisingly displaced off that central relationship and onto the more than apt shoulders of Jane Birkin, who plays Piccoli's wife, in surely one of the best screen performances of the 1990s. Expect some screen captures to come...

Wow! What the heck is going on with this movie? Rarely have I seen a film so directly take a hit--and then absorb it--from budgetary limitations and what is clearly near total confusion from a script and production stand point. This is without a doubt the flattest and most abstract of the Val Lewton-produced films I've seen, with somnambulist actress Kim Hunter leading a pack of actors playing some of the most desolate, lonely individuals in classical Hollywood. Everyone's missing someone, their love (gone insane!), their sister (missing!), their inspiration (curdled into hate!), their fiance (a satanist murderess!); everyone is single and solitary, finding solace only in satanism, suicidal thoughts, fatal illnesses, back alley intrigue, and what has to be the least aggressive missing persons investigation in history. Everything seems off-screen, vaguely referred to and partially not believed in, making all relationships, all tangents of action, energy and interest, kind of drop off like an incomplete, mumbled sentence. Vagueness rules the day, and what with the supremely mediocre direction by Robson one would think the film would be a total bore. And yet it is its very blankness that lends a kind of horror to it, and it has a number of stellar sequences: the odd background piano music of a (vaguely) ominous soirée, hesitancy during a night time break-in, a nice sense of the eerie threat of empty New York City subways at night and the mystery of people absorbed in their nighttime activities, a long and most lovely chase sequence through the, again, flattest, emptiest "city" streets one could possibly imagine. What a picture of World War II era city life, what sorrow. What a bizarre, shortcut ending, declarations of death abound: A stranger: "I am going to die," "No!" "Yes..." and are embraced. Weird, so very weird, and so very worthwhile.

Screened at the Museum of the Moving Image's John Ford at Fox series.

What a fantastic film, which I had not even previously heard of. Maybe it's coming off art house stylistics in Last Year at Marienbad and the Weerasethakul shorts, but how fulfilling to be submerged in the work of a studio master, where attention is given to things such as the many ways (and kinds of) people can kick up their feet, discard a cigarette, hold themselves and their work clothes in medium-shots, redeem themselves with a split second flick of the eyes; in essence, move a mountain with sublime details of humanity in action, in emotion, at work, thinking, feeling. As Dan Sallitt so correctly pointed out to me before this screening, Hawks must have been taking furious notes on this for his masterpiece Only Angels Have Wings (1939), which is a remake of this through and through. And perhaps Ford's artistry (which I am tempted to capitalize with an A, when compared to the more self-effacing Hawks) can be seen by a comparison, where Hawks gives us an aviator of charm and derring-do, a girl of fight and singularity, and even a kind of a plot. Not so with Ford, who gets a cast of character actors to build a professional milieu, a sense of what its like to work this job (not live this job, which is what Hawks shows), and in this work live a life of honor or love or bitterness, or whatever drives one. So instead of a Grant jabbering around and owning everything, our pleasures, which of course abound in Hawks but with little of this overt poetry, are in the location of a stovepipe and swinging gate our flyers have to navigate around in their office, the immense meaning and feelings Ford gets playing at the windows that look out at a real flying field, the movement, threat, and emotions that can be seen through them, in the inner sadness of these people, even the ones doing the thing right, the ambiguous compassion Ford gives to the woman and man who would normally be coded as the villains of the piece, and the plainness, even vacuousness of the central hero and his woman. And let's not forget special effects that are some of the best ever made in cinema, and Karl Freund's photography, so drawn to weather and night, to realism in expressionism and visa versa. A masterpiece that I really hope gets seen more.

Statues and architecture and narrative and games; all as memory. Art as material + impression, body and soul. Looking at the narrative, Fritz Lang (Mabuse) pivots to become Hitchcock (Vertigo), pivots to become Resnais (Last Year in Marienbad), pivots to become Kubrick (The Shining).

Screened at the Japan Society's NO BORDERS, NO LIMITS: 1960s Nikkatsu Action Cinema series.

Masuda's other film I saw in this series, 1967's Like a Shooting Star, exhibited a level of promising competency and craft with the camera and editing, as well as strong architectural and stylistic attributes, but much of this was squandered by delusions of gravity and seriousness beyond the reaches of its silly plot. Red Handkerchief, released 3 years earlier, exhibits similar grandiose sentiments in a B-level plot, Nikkatsu's A-level budget and star clearly at odds with a formula more suited for Seijun Suzuki. Ishihara Yujiro plays a cop who shot and killed a suspect who grabbed the gun of his partner and started firing wildly. Despite the life-threatening nature of this incident, Ishihara and his partner are disgraced by the "accidental" death of an "innocent" civilian. This is compounded, as it must be since the moral wrong of the situation seems non-existent, by the fact that Ishihara had just met and presumably fell for the victim's daughter hours before the gunfight. Outside the metal factory she works at, the girl curses Ishihara where he stands, and Masuda cuts to the thundering clap and fire of the metal factory. The ex-cop retreats to the mountains to dwell on his moral banishment, while unbeknownst to him, his ex-partner becomes suspiciously rich and marries the fatherless factory girl.

A typical story of moral wrongs righted and petty revenge, maybe. And given too much consideration and not enough emotional depth for that consideration, that too Masuda's film suffers. But even more than Like a Shooting Star, Red Handkerchief is a stylistic triumph. Not knowing the film's date, I assumed it must have been the late 1960s, somewhere around The Conformist, as I had never seen such self-aware visuals, lessons from Hollywood's 1950's Technicolor films and 1940's noir and applying so knowingly, creatively. This is in terms of a whole range of the production, from the photography by Mine Shigeyoshi (who worked mainly with Suzuki), to Masuda's deliberate close-ups, camera movement, and rich, luxurious production design. In terms of look, the film often resembles Jean-Pierre Melville's color films, but without their distance and coolness. They are both informed by the same kind of careful study and inspired application of Hollywood genre stylistics. But Masuda can go beyond this, the film is not just a beautiful looking pastiche of style. To begin with, in 1964 I cannot think of another film that not just looked quite like this, but also that moved with such sophistication and contemporariness in craft.

To give an example, when Ishihara leaves the police station to find the suspect's daughter, we get a shot of him leaving the interrogation room. I believe the next shot (I could be mistaken in the transition, but that's not the point) is of a lower-middle class back alleyway, an establishing shot of the alley in which the two will meet. The difference is that the shot starts out as empty space, on the cut there is the alley and the camera slowly tracks backwards with nothing in the frame. A beat or two later Ishihara enters, walking away from the backing-up camera. I have no idea when such an autonomous camera movement was so consciously used so early, to my knowledge Antonioni and Godard were just getting there around this time themselves. The girl runs out of her house to meet the tofu man and Masuda shows us her running in tight medium close-ups shot against a black background, clearly abstractly shot in the studio, rather than the location the previous shot, and the rest of the scene, play out in. Such a style, close to impressionism, but also very aware of itself, should not be ignored.

An indication of this film's A-level budget, along with Masuda's unusually focused approach, would be the sequence where Ishihara is living in exile, helping build a dam in the snowy mountains. The sequence includes a great deal of wonderful location footage, almost documentary like, including a scene driving down the mountain when Ishihara and a curious detective converse. Masuda shoots a banal conversation in the open air, on the back of a truck, in the mountains, and in the middle of falling snow! Yet Masuda isn't quite going for pictorialism, nor is he just going for a deeply stylized world. I sense an uncertainty in him, an attraction to these potent aesthetics but an uncertainty on why he is including them in his film, other than their inherent sense of cinematic interest. It may in fact be part of Masuda's desire to invest a flat plot with seriousness, as the direction and the visuals connote care, consideration, and beauty, yet are not sufficiently unified or directed to invest this flatness with that seriousness. Masuda seems to have the skill enough to imply, but not enough to evoke. I would love to see a work of his that owned up to the thinness of the material and used the director's obvious talent as a filmmaker (though not necessarily as a great one) to really jazz it up, break it free and give it something special.

Then again, we already have a Suzuki Seijun, and he certainly is a great artist, case in point, the contemporaneous Tattooed Life (1965):

Click here for some thoughts. Also, there's this.