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風の谷のナウシカ (Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind), Hayao Miyazaki,...

Wed, 13 Jun 2012 23:07:23 -0400

風の谷のナウシカ (Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind), Hayao Miyazaki, 1984.

雨月物語 (Ugetsu), Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953.

Wed, 13 Jun 2012 22:57:03 -0400

雨月物語 (Ugetsu), Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953.

雨月物語 (Ugetsu), Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953.

Wed, 13 Jun 2012 22:48:20 -0400

雨月物語 (Ugetsu), Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953.

HEREMAKONO (Waiting for Happiness), Abderrahmane Sissako,...

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 20:31:00 -0400

HEREMAKONO (Waiting for Happiness), Abderrahmane Sissako, 2002.

fragmentary, elegiac and poetic, Heremakono is the portrait of a small Mauritanian town by the sea, a kind of limbo between Arab-brought religion, indigenous culture and enormous ships that herald contact with the mythic Europe of yore. the lives of the village characters - a broken prostitute, an incompetent electrician, a bright-eyed little youngster, an elderly lady teaching a girl to sing a song passed by oral tradition for milennia on a traditional instrument, and a karaoke-spouting Chinese immigrant - unfurl over small cinematic episodes. the cinematography transforms the barren, desolate landscape into a topography of melancholy and stunning beauty. one of my first forays into African cinema and definitely definitely recommended.

from Slant Magazine: If the film’s Mauritanian port city becomes a desert purgatory between the North and the South then its rootless characters are not unlike ghosts suffocated by their geographic not-being. Colossal sand dunes around the periphery of the town and abandoned ships on the ocean horizon evoke far-off heavens. The town is a vacuum into which this distant civilization drops its cultural baggage (karaoke music, television sets).

LES AMANTS RÉGULIERS (Regular Lovers), Philippe Garrel, 2005. A...

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:13:00 -0500

LES AMANTS RÉGULIERS (Regular Lovers), Philippe Garrel, 2005.

A reflection on the Parisian revolt of 1968, fragmented, quiet. The milieu of the wake of a tempest. The pass of an opium pipe. Hedonistic urges, empty and silent, in the vacuous manor of a rich friend. The unspoken revelation that the revolution has failed. Political radicalism eclipsed by the sensation of youth. A quiet confusion.

I’ve rarely fallen in love with a film character more than I did with Clotilde Hesme. Louis Garrel is, as usual, both sensuous and sensitive, both magnetic and unassuming.

An elegant and poignant film, one of Philippe Garrel’s best.

LA CICATRICE INTÉRIEURE (The Inner Scar), Philippe Garrel,...

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 17:38:00 -0500

LA CICATRICE INTÉRIEURE (The Inner Scar), Philippe Garrel, 1972.

This film could only have been made in its era. It involves Nico as a kind of Old Testament prophet, roaming through the glacial deserts of her subconscious mind and moaning nonsense to anyone who will listen. In this world also roams a nude archer on an Icelandic pony, who seems to be courting the aloof and mysterious Nico. In the film’s most beautiful scene, she preaches to him on a rock on a waterfall, “We can never be here! We can never be here! Not until we die!” The film creates its own mythologies, landscapes, histories. The viewer feels as if a stranger in a very foreign, very beautiful post-apocalyptic country. The viewer is never invited into this narrative, but the glimpse is enough to enthrall.

The film is unbelievably atmospheric - not to mention it features Nico’s face, music and trademark extravagance. Sui generis and unequivocally glorious. (The only extant copy of this rara avis has Japanese permasubtitles and no other language, so to understand the film completely you need to be fluent in English, French and German. But the dialogue’s content isn’t all that important most of the time.)

SANS SOLEIL (Sunless), Chris Marker, 1982.This is the greatest...

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 16:44:00 -0500

SANS SOLEIL (Sunless), Chris Marker, 1982.

This is the greatest film I’ve ever seen, or probably ever will see, and I’m not qualified to talk about it so here are excerpts from a really brilliant essay on it by Catherine Lupton:

”Sans Soleil is Marker’s tour de force as a cinematic essayist, all playful musings and meandering digressions, in which passing observations on such apparently banal subjects as pet cats and video games yield up profound insights into the big issues of twentieth-century civilization: history, memory, political power, the function of representation, ritual and time. The premise of Sans Soleil is a woman reading out letters from a globe-trotting cameraman, who we learn in the closing credits is named Sandor Krasna. Krasna is drawn especially to Japan and to the former Portuguese West African colonies of Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau; he also visits Iceland, Île-de-France, and San Francisco, being obsessed with Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo ….
In Sans Soleil, the avatar of [Marker’s] fascination with digital imagery is Krasna’s Japanese friend Hayao Yamaneko, who designs video games and, as a sideline, obsessively feeds film images into a synthesizer, so that they are transformed into flat, shifting fields of vivid, pixelated color.

In treating images in this way, Yamaneko insists that they are literally marked with traces of the inexorable passage of time, and that memory continually fabricates new versions of past events to suit the immediate interests of the present. This holds a key to this intricately worked film’s central themes and obsessions. Marker has always been concerned in his work to probe what Krasna calls “the function of remembering,” both how memory serves to constitute an individual’s sense of self, and the public or collective process of forging an official version of history. Marker’s films abound with incisive interrogations of the multitude of experiences that get repressed or denied in the interest of manufacturing history and national identity, and in Sans Soleil we find the synthesized images used to show precisely aspects of Japanese culture that don’t officially exist: reasonable, anti-Imperial kamikaze pilots and the burakumin underclass, a vestige of the medieval caste system.

What makes the treatment of memory in Sans Soleil so compelling, though, is that it is never merely the dry object of the essayist’s inquiry but the very impassioned dynamo of the film’s structure and unfolding. The film flits from one idea or visual association to another, and in it we can trace the habits of our own inner processes of recollection, which condense, displace, plunge us abruptly into forgotten recesses of our past. The fugitive allure of Sans Soleil’s images owes much to the feeling that they are something more than simply records of places and events in the world—they are things that have been cherished and remembered by somebody, because they have momentarily quickened the heart, like the list in Sei Shõnagon’s The Pillow Book that Krasna takes to his own heart while filming. Marker is alert to memory’s self-serving distortions, but even more so to our deep human need for memory as a form of protection, a shield that keeps at bay the losses imposed by time, forgetting, and forced obliteration, even as our emotional investment in a memory exists in a direct ratio to whatever absence brought it into being: “Memory is not the opposite of forgetting but its lining.” This is why Krasna cannot find a place for the delicately flickering image of three Icelandic children that opens Sans Soleil until their hometown is destroyed by a volcano. The poignancy of the image only stands out against the blackness, the annihilation, the absence of the sun. ”

SANATORIUM POD KLEPSYDRĄ (The Hourglass Sanatorium), Wojciech...

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 15:48:00 -0500

SANATORIUM POD KLEPSYDRĄ (The Hourglass Sanatorium), Wojciech Has, 1973.

A masterpiece of Polish surrealism, the film follows a young man named Jozef who travels to visit his father at a sanatorium where time is twisted and curved in bizarre ways. Everything is baroque, decayed; people long dead on Earth can still live here in a kind of temporal tor-por. Jozef makes an odyssey through the Jewish culture of his boyhood (hints at its devastation in World War II are everywhere), his eccentric father’s aviary, hints at sexuality, a crumbling palace filled with waxwork politicians of the nineteenth century. A symphony of unconscious epics and narratives, through which Jozef wanders as if a child. His wonder and absorption in this world is contagious. The film creates an entirely new shape to space and time, making rapports between its worlds in strange and chaotic ways. The dialogue is sometimes nonsensical, always metaphysical; the film creates an entirely new language of images that’s often baffling and overwhelming. Always eerily exquisite.