DVD of the Week: "Tony Takitani" (Jun Ichikawa, 2004)

by Chuck Williamson

Adapted from Haruki Murakami’s short story, Tony Takitani is an elliptical and glacial mediation on isolation, melancholia, and loss that, through its visualizations/externalizations of psychic trauma, surpasses its source material. Few cinematic representations of trauma encapsulate the sort of stasis and inertia—not to mention the psychic wreckage of loss and grief—that, from beginning to end, dominates the life of the film’s eponymous protagonist. Branded as an outsider by his strange gaijin name—the byproduct of his father’s post-occupation paranoia—Tony (Issei Ogata) seems predestined from birth to a life of isolation and loneliness. Indeed, his is a life defined by fixed, metronomic rhythms and interminable seclusion, a self-constructed prison where Tony goes through his daily motions as if in an anesthetized daze. Ichikawa externalizes the alienation and latent melancholia that dominates Tony’s day-to-day existence through muted, monochromatic compositions, a drained and minimalist mise-en-scene framed in claustrophobic long shots and punctuated by the slow, languorous rhythm of a continual left-to-right pan. Such formal strategies further immerse us in Takitani’s hermetically sealed shell of a world, giving us visual access to its monotony and loneliness.

But Takitani’s world opens up—formally and thematically—after a chance encounter with young fashionista Eiko (Rie Miyazawa), triggering in him not only a dormant desire to love and be loved, but also the sudden recognition of his own loneliness. In contrast to Tony’s ascetic isolation, Eiko’s shopoholic materialism marks her as a woman engaged with the world, if not consumed by it; she endures the same emptiness that Tony has grown accustomed to, but attempts to fill the void with designer clothes. As Tony says to his father after their marriage, “It’s as if she were born to play dress up.” But when a sudden twist of fate puts a permanent end to this domestic bliss, her clothes transform into corporeal representations of his internal trauma. Isolated within the confines of her walk-in closet, Tony is surrounded by the physical reminders of her absence—hundreds of designer outfits, accessories, and shoes—that, paradoxically, linger like ghosts that make “letting go” an impossibility. These objects take on a special significance for Tony, transforming his trauma into something more tactile and palpable; they are tangible reminders of her absence that make it more difficult to come to terms with his loss. Even when Tony hires a female assistant—a doppelganger for his deceased wife—to wear his wife’s old clothes to “grow accustomed to her absence,” Tony’s sense of loss and loneliness deepens and, by the end, completely consumes him.

As the film sinks into the deepest recesses of Tony’s sadness and seclusion, it gives us privileged access to both the physical and psychic spaces that define his experience with loneliness and loss. In the film’s final moments, we see Tony retract even further into his shell, surrendering to what the narrator describes as “the prison of loneliness.” The cumulative effect is chilling.

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DVD of the Week: "Loren Cass" plus an Interview with Director Chris Fuller

Loren Cass has already been reviewed on the site by Brandon Colvin (you can read it here), but, in honor of its DVD release, we all thought it deserved another mention. Plus, Brandon was lucky enough to interview director Chris Fuller about the film. A special thanks to Mr. Fuller for taking the time to talk to us. It's a hell of a film. You can buy it here. Interview after the break.

Brandon Colvin: From inception to finish, it took nearly a decade for Loren Cass to be fully realized. What about the project caused such a protracted production period? What sorts of obstacles (both creative and practical) did you face as a first time independent filmmaker and how were you able to successfully circumvent the temptation to throw in the towel?

Chris Fuller: I’d been working toward this particular project for a long time so there was never really any temptation to throw in the towel. We knew it was going to be a long road and just kept on going. We did the best we could when it came to the obstacles that were presented to us. As for the length of time it took to complete the project, it’s due to a number of things. I spent a long time working on and refining the script. Then financing took probably somewhere around 3 years, it’s just not easy as a filmmaker of any kind to secure the amount of money necessary to make a good run at a major project. Then, from a creative standpoint, I felt like we needed to get back out there and pick up some footage I felt I was missing. We ended up doing 3 re-shoot days spread over the course of a few years. The sound mix took about a year and a half. When you don’t have the money to devote to certain things, work just gets done when there’s spare time, and isn’t necessarily the full-time focus of everyone involved. That’s just the way it’s got to be when you’re working on an extremely low budget, independent film. We had to make things happen any way we could, however long it took, and we knew we’d eventually get it finished and be able to put it out there. There’s always going to be obstacles when you’re working on a film, but the limited means and resources certainly make the problem-solving that much tougher.

BC: Loren Cass is a very specific film in that it concentrates on a particular city at a particular time – St. Petersburg, 1997. How did the local community impact the creation of the film, and how did you preserve such a vividly real representation of a certain place and time that was constantly receding into the past as the film’s production progressed?

CF: The setting is extremely important for a film and I think a vivid, detailed back-drop is a vital step toward making a film that feels real and has some truth to it. Too often it seems that the layers of a film that are necessary to build a real world for the characters are neglected in favor of a hyper-focus on the events taking place on the surface of the film. Obviously those are important too, but you have to build the thing from the ground up. One of the things I always tell people when they’re asking about the film and the length of time it took to make it and all that, is that I didn’t spend twelve years screwing around, we were working on the details of this thing the entire time in one way or another. And that’s how I think it should be. Everything is important, and everything is an opportunity to evoke the story, whether it’s the color of something, a prop, the camera angle or movement, and so on. Every detail is a chance to tell your story that much better and make it that much more real. I definitely credit the focus on multiple layers to the film, the story, the characters, for the final representation of that particular place during that particular time.


BC: The sense of reality in Loren Cass operates on many levels. A few of the most striking ways the film taps into this are your integration of documentary materials from other media (both visual and audio recordings) and your use of non-professional actors and actual locations. How do you view these documentary elements, and what role do they play in enhancing, or even commenting on, the film’s fictional narrative?

CF: I really think that the best way to approach a feature film is with a combination of the two. Obviously it is art, and it needs to have an author, so the pre-determining of things is a necessity. But you can definitely blend that with certain things from the documentary world, particularly when it comes to the actors and the events taking place between them. There’s such a vastly different feel to something that is genuinely taking place between people and something that is staged and ultra-controlled. A good example of what I’m talking about are the fight scenes in Loren Cass. It’s faster, easier, safer, whatever, to stage them like every filmmaker stages every fight, but that’s just ridiculous in my opinion. People have been fighting since the dawn of time and getting punched in the face, particularly in service of your art, something that will long outlive you, seems like a small sacrifice. I think you can apply this to so many aspects of people and their relationships, to events and things that are often portrayed in films, and get something that’s a perfect synthesis of narrative fiction/art and documentary. That’s what I think the goal should be regardless of what you’re presenting, it’s just how they all films should be made no matter what’s on the surface. You’re already manipulating the story, the setting, the interactions, so much before you even get started, because it’s the nature of things, but that shouldn’t preclude you from trying to depict those events as realistically as possible and doing what’s necessary the make the best film possible, something that people can get totally immersed in. Reality on that level will allow viewers access to the other levels, or layers, in the film, which is where the meat is.

BC: Your film presents a certain formal aesthetic that has been compared to a rather wide group of filmmakers, ranging from Robert Bresson to Harmony Korine. You’ve also cited Schopenhauer as a broad non-cinematic influence. How did you develop the stylistic and philosophical principles of Loren Cass? Especially as a first-time filmmaker, how much did you rely on intuition and/or improvisation?

CF: Your intuition definitely does and should, in my opinion, play a huge part in it. My scripts are fairly detailed and I have real concrete ideas about what I want to do heading into something, but some of the best things happen unexpectedly and you definitely need to be open to that or the film can pass you by. The freedom to confidently do that sort of thing comes from a good understanding of the material, it allows you to make unanticipated choices on the fly that you know are right for the film. It’s all in the preparation, but that doesn’t mean you can’t alter a word or a movement or whatever it is here and there when it feels right. I can’t remember who it was but some filmmaker, when asked what’s the best feeling he’s had on a set, said something to the effect of “When I’m surprised.” You can’t go into a project without rock-solid ideas and a dedicated approach, but if you don’t let instinct play a role and let the film breathe a little bit while it’s being made I think it’ll end up missing its soul.


BC: I’ve read before that you believe every film should have an “author,” and you are clearly the author of Loren Cass, serving as screenwriter, editor, director, actor, and producer. Do you see yourself always playing so many roles in the production of your future films? What has your multi-faceted experience taught you about the different responsibilities involved in making a film, and which role do you feel most comfortable in?

CF: I’ll definitely continue to perform all of those duties on my films. It seems kind of silly going over each particular title, they’re really all part of one thing from my perspective. Each of those, especially writing and editing, have so much to do with what the final picture is that I can’t really imagine handing them off to someone else and not doing all of those things.

As far as which role I feel more comfortable in...I’m pretty comfortable with all of them. Going back to what I said above, being a “filmmaker” sort of encompasses all of those things to me, so I don’t really separate them that much, it’s all part of making a project real.

BC: How important is it for Loren Cass to be seen by the citizens of St. Petersburg? What sort of reception has the film experienced thus far from people living there? Does the local audience differ from the (inter)national audience?

CF: We screened a rough cut of the film here in 2006 and it did really well, so we’re excited to bring the film back to where it all started and give more people a chance to see it. We actually had to turn a number of people away at the ’06 screening because we ran out of space. The reaction has definitely been passionate around here, I’m sure there’s a slightly different effect on an audience when you recognize certain locations, places that are a part of your day-to-day life, or remember certain things that happened over the years.

BC: With the DVD release of the film and your inclusion in Phaidon Press’ upcoming book Splice, which highlights 100 of the world’s most promising filmmakers, I have to ask – what’s next?

CF: I have a lot of things planned for the future but I’m developing two particular scripts right now which I’m hoping to get moving fairly soon. Unfortunately, I can’t really get too into the details at the moment but in the coming weeks and months I’ll be able to put some more information out there on what they are.
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DVD of the Week: "Au Bonheur des Dames" (Julien Duviver, 1930)

by Chuck Williamson

In Au Bonheur des Dames (1930), director Julien Duviver relocates Emile Zola’s nineteenth-century bildungsroman into the age of mass consumption, automation, and modernization. Made at the end of the silent era, the film identifies the metropolitan space as the locus of both industrial and capitalist power and uses the novel’s department store romance in the employ of a bold visual reinterpretation that mixes social realism, conventional melodrama, and complex cinematographic strategies. In effect, Duviver’s film does not merely illustrate Zola’s novel, but reinvents it, enhancing the novel’s social and political vivisections of modern Paris through bold, virtuosic cinematic technique.

Duviver’s film follows Denise Baudu (Dita Parlo), an orphaned girl who moves to Paris to live with her uncle, a beleaguered fabric merchant whose business is threatened by a gargantuan luxury department store called Ladies’ Paradise, where Denise will later gain employment as a “live mannequin.” Eventually, Denise is caught in an ideological tug-of-war when an unexpected romance with ruthless storeowner Mouret (Pierre de Guingand) forces her to reconcile true love with the encroaching force of capitalist monopolization. But this slight, near-quotidian plot—a melodramatic, narratively-convenient love story punctuated by class conflict and contrivance—does not account for the film’s challenging, avant-garde aesthetic. In fact, the film works best when it widens this disconnect between story and discourse, as conventional bourgeois melodrama clashes with its fragmentary, enstranging modernist design. The opening sequence, for instance, portrays the metropolis as the site of psychic dislocation, as jittery, vertiginous cinematography, multilayered double-exposures, and elliptical editing reinvent Denise’s entry into the city as a harrowing subjective journey through both inner and outer spaces. With the unconventional fusion of modernist visual tactics and rote melodramatic narrative, the film’s aesthetic at times overpowers the wafer-thin plot, crafting visual representations of the sort of psychic dimensions denied by its surface narrative.

Even the controversial conclusion—which many critics have written off as a pro-capitalist cop-out—merely highlights the corrupting, coercive influence of both capitalist and patriarchal systems of power. Even as the machinery of melodrama attempts to disrupt such an interpretation, the ideological about-face made by its characters can be read as a representation of the ways various structures repress and dehumanize the subject through the removal of human agency. If anything, the crass monopolism and soppy, reductive romance featured in the conclusion seem like parts of a self-made prison, constructed through a pre-written script that is as artificial as the matte backdrop that enframes the lovers’ final reconciliation.

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An Interview With Stewart Copeland- Director of "Jennifer"

Following up yesterdays post, and serving as the DVD (err...online video) of the Week this week, I recently conducted Out 1's first ever director's interview with Jennifer filmmaker Stewart Copeland. If you have further questions about the film that I didn't ask, or you just want to dig a little deeper, please ask the questions in the comments and hopefully Stewart will stop by and be able to answer your questions. A big thanks to PBS for picking up the film and helping it be seen by a larger audience. And an even bigger thanks to Stewart for taking the time to talk to us. On with the interview!


JH: How did you get started in documentary filmmaking?

SC: I had a professor at in film school who was teaching the beginning film course and after reading all of our proposed scripts he said, “All of you should be making documentaries because none of you know anything about reality,” thinking back on it he was probably just trying to insult us, but I took it seriously. I’m very glad I did though, he was right.

JH: What is it that draws you to the documentary form?

SC: Documentary is really difficult. You only have so much to work with, so it’s a challenge to peace together a story with limited materials. It’s like taking a plastic bag full of jigsaw puzzle pieces and having to figure out what the bigger picture is. I prefer that process much more then narrative filmmaking where you’re constructing something from scratch. When someone makes a narrative they have to construct an experience, but documentary is an invitation to have an experience, one where you meet people, travel new places, and challenge yourself.

JH: Tell us a little bit about how Jennifer started?

SC: After my mother passed away I moved back to Tennessee from Saint Louis where I was going to school. I was working on a documentary for my thesis project for college, but I decided to scrap it and make a film about my mom. I decided to focus on one moment in her career as a science teacher when her students got to speak to astronauts aboard the international space station.

JH: Jennifer is an unquestionably personal film for you. What made you want to share something that intensely specific?

SC: I don’t know how aware I was of sharing the film when I started working on it. It felt like it was just me and the movie. I worked on it for about 5 months before I went back to Saint Louis to finish school and the film, and at that point I did a lot of work with my mentor on the project, Mike Steinberg, and that’s when we started talking about the film’s ability to relate to the viewer. Before that, in the early stages of the film, it was just kind of an exercise or therapy. That’s the beautiful thing about documentary, the process of making a film teaches you about the subject and yourself.


JH: I suppose some people may lump Jennifer into the mode of experimental film practice, although I think in just as many ways (and this isn't a complaint, by the way) it fits into a more classic essay approach. Do you think about these traditions at all? Do you associate yourself with one approach or another? Or does it matter for you?

SC: That’s a really great question. I think a lot about documentary form and tradition when I’m working on a piece, but in the end, there has to be an even relationship between the subject and the filmmaker. You can’t force a subject to fit a form, but if you’re too passive, then you loose your authorial voice. The film is about my mother, but to be more precise, it’s about remembering my mother. I suppose a film about memory is intrinsically experimental. The moments where the film feels the most like a classic essay doc are in the moments that require that structure. I know that sounds like a silly statement, but filmmakers often try to force an aesthetic or style on to a subject. I always try to be aware of style, but never commit to anything completely and allow a project to evolve before the audience.

JH: Although the film is only five minutes, I wonder how much footage you worked through before it got to the final form?

SC: There was only about 15 or 20 minutes of actual footage from the student’s conversation with the space station. However, I didn’t want the film’s narration to be describing what you were seeing; I was looking for video that enhanced what you were hearing. So the film is mostly composed of stock footage and unrelated b-roll, and that resource seemed limitless. It took 9 months to piece the film together, so I had a lot of time to search out the perfect stock footage and animations to achieve the final look.

JH: I think there is a pretty fascinating structure to the film as a whole. What were your ideas, and how did you work through, the varying structural concepts in the production process?

SC: I wanted the final piece to feel like a memory. So I thought about different attributes of memory. First, it is difficult for me to remember things in chronological order. So to accomplish this sensation in the film, I book ended it with an identical footage of birds flying. I felt like that helped confuse to viewer. I mention towards the end of the film that my mother has passed away, but I wanted the audience to think that they knew that the whole time, that no information in the film was revealed, just remembered. Secondly, some details of my memories are vivid, but other particulars seemed to fill themselves in with unrelated recollections. For example, I might remember the exact way the house I grew up in smelled, but when I try to remember what it looks like, all I can see is an old photo of my brother eating a birthday cake. That was the inspiration for using the stock footage.



JH: You say in the film's narration that your mother had "a fascination with the living world" and that teaching was, maybe, a way of sharing this fascination. Not to totally project my own take on the film, but, for me, this seems the central concept, which is underscored, quite beautifully, throughout. Can you talk a little bit about this idea and how (or if) you tried to embed this within the narrative?

SC: I used a lot of 1950’s science videos in the piece. All of that footage has this surreal energy and look to it. Probably because it’s trying to teach kids something and also entertain them. All the footage I shot myself of her school and our house has a very specific look too, I’m not sure how I would describe it, the camera seems almost mesmerized. My mother was a science teacher, and science is, as far as I can tell, a method by which we are able to gain a deeper understanding of phenomena. Through science and scientific method we can determine how and why and predict when and were. For most people, a greater knowledge of how something works can be demystifying, it can transform an experience from magical to clinical. But for my mom, knowledge of a subject made it even more spectacular and miraculous. I absolutely inherited this attribute. Knowing how a magic trick works doesn’t ruin it for me, it enhances it. I guess that perspective or attitude or whatever you would call it, is so deeply embedded in the film because that’s just how my mom and I are. Fascination leads us to study and study leaves us fascinated. It’s a good way to be.

JH: Your visual methodology, if I can call it that, reminds me in some ways of a couple great a-g filmmakers - Ben Rivers and Nathaniel Dorsky. I don't know if you're familiar with them, but I mention them for two reasons: one, for high praise, and two, I want to end with a quotation from Dorsky's book "Devotional Cinema" and get your response to it. Jennifer isn't operating in all the same traditions, but I couldn't help but think of it after watching Jennifer a few times.

(Excuse the long quote)

"When a filmmaker is fully and selflessly present, the audience becomes fully and selflessly present. The filmmaker’s physical relationship to the world manifests as the camera’s relationship to the image and becomes the audience’s relationship to the screen. To the degree that a filmmaker can relate directly to the heart of an object, the viewer will also connect directly to the heart of the object. The audience will see the screen as the camera sees objects, and a great unity of heart will take place between filmmaker and audience."

I guess I'm just interested in your reaction to this and if you think Jennifer and your relationship to filmmaking might be similar. Or am I stretching a little?

SC: That’s a truly beautiful quote. It’s still feels strange to talk about Jennifer, and it’s themes and structure and my approach and process. The film is about the person I love more than anyone else on the planet, so in the end, any editorial decision I made was driven by that love. I guess the greatest accomplishment any filmmaker could experience would be “a great unity of heart.” I don’t know if Dorsky and I share the same means, but I think we’re after a similar end.
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DVD of the Week: Gaumont Treasures 1897-1913

by James Hansen

Allow me to nerd out this week with a DVD I haven't seen yet, but which is a must have for any early cinema lover. The Gaumont Treasures 1897-1913 box set has just about 600 minutes of silent films that most everyone hasn't even had the chance to see until this point. With notable films from early directors Alice Guy Blache, Louise Feuillade, and Leonce Perret, the release continues the ongoing critique and expanded understanding of all that was going on during the early days of cinema. This box, at least from the titles, looks a major addition to an always growing and always of interest period in cinematic history. Major kudos to Kino.

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DVD of the Week: "Chronicle of a Disappearance" (Elia Suleiman, 1996)

by Chuck Williamson

As the formation of Israel seemingly put an end to centuries of Jewish diaspora, a single nationalist slogan encompassed for many the spirit of the time: “A land without people for a people without a land.” But such myopic platitudes did little to accurately explicate the region’s complex reality, instead exemplifying the sort of rhetoric used to legitimize Jewish claim to the land and invalidate Palestinian nationhood. In Chronicle of a Disappearance, director Elia Suleiman investigates this disconnect between convenient myth and political reality. Rather than center on a literal “disappearance,” as the title suggests, Suleiman’s film focuses on the systemic erasure of a national identity—both personal and political—that has becomes a daily reality for the Palestinian people.

Mixing the choreographed physical comedy of Keaton with the languid, sun-blasted photography of Kiarostami, Chronicle of a Disappearance is composed of a series of non-linear, loosely interrelated vignettes, each soaked in the textures and rhythms of Palestinian life. Suleiman himself plays the veritable “man without a home,” a stone-faced silent clown who, like Buster Keaton, uses acrobatic physical comedy to combat a hostile and authoritative social order. In one of the film’s funniest set-pieces, a mid-morning police raid in Suleiman’s flat transforms into a comedic, choreographed dance where visual gags and vaudeville acrobatics theatricize the indignities and subjugations experienced by Palestinians. But even as Suleiman’s slapstick routine disrupts the authority of his oppressors, he remains a man without a state, invisible and powerless. In a parallel narrative, a young Arab woman named Adan (Ola Tabari) takes more proactive measures to protest the occupation. Here, the film inverts the iconography associated with geopolitical terrorism to comic effect, transforming guns and grenades into toys and cigarette lighters, suicide bombs into firework displays. Chronicle reduces political violence into performance art pranksterism, culminating in a scene where Adan uses a stolen IDF walkie-talkie to orchestrate a series of comically illogical police raids, occasionally interspersing her dispatches (delivered in “perfect Herbrew”) with sardonic renditions of the Israeli national anthem.

But even during its most anarchic and comedic sequences, Chronicle of a Disappearance focuses on the repetitious rhythms of daily Palestinian life. In this respect, the film remains a singular piece of political filmmaking, an abstract, minimalist tableau detailing the social fragmentation and political dissolution faced by the Palestinian people. By rejecting all forms of demagoguery, Suleiman’s debut feature film compresses the personal and the political, creating an abstracted collection of impressionist images that encapsulate the conditions of a people with a land.

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DVD of the Week: "Los Muertos" (Lisandro Alonso, 2004)

by James Hansen

Editors Note: Between traveling and other reviewing duties, our DVD of the Week series took the month of August off. Thankfully, its back now and will make its return on Tuesdays rather than Fridays, so as to not interfere with weekend film releases. Thanks for your patience!

In anticipation of his terrific new film Liverpool, which opens at Anthology Film Archives this weekend, our pick for this week is Lisandro Alonso’s 2004 film Los Muertos. This may be all you want to know according to Nathan Lee, who starts his review for the Village Voice saying, “See Los Muertos with virgin eyes; this cool-headed enigma is best approached cold, ignorant of everything but the title. "The Dead" is an ironic appellation for a movie so fiercely alive, though perfectly apt for what turns out to be a strange sort of horror film.” So, if you want to stop there and queue it on up, go for it. But I’ll continue anyways for those curious. (And certainly please read Nathan’s stellar review as well, if you wanna go into it “all the way” as he does and suggests is required in reviewing it.)

A slow, methodical, and extremely sharp work, Los Muertos may be some kind of cousin to Jim Jarmusch’s wonderful (yet much derided) new film The Limits of Control. Los Muertos tracks the journey of Vargas (played by nonprofessional actor Argentino Vargas), a man recently released from prison for the murder of his brothers. Closely following his trek down the Yacare River in a borrowed boat through the Argentinian jungle, Los Muertos lets the landscape absorb into its characters which help shape the underlying violence and existential quandary. Alonso’s direction to his nonprofessional lead actor? Don’t look into the camera and don’t make any facial expressions. Sound familiar? This Bressonian minimalism combined with the endlessly fascinating traits of a fiction/documentary hybrid provide Los Muertos with its casting glance into unseen places and spaces, all the while burying a deep emotion that is triggered within an engaged audience rather than displayed by the characters on screen.

This brief description should let you all know if Los Muertos is your cup of tea or not, although several unmentioned, more confrontational moments are likely to stir anyone – especially those affiliated with any form of animal rights group. All the same, even these brisk, stunning moments contribute to expanding the scope of the largely hidden world at work within Los Muertos. Or maybe the whole world is there all along. Glistening all around Vargas, and us, as the shimmers of light, fades to green, and non-chalant violence shows us everything we need to know about the nature of the places that surround us. Make no mistake – Los Muertos is a full blown display of an up and coming artist at work.

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DVD of the Week: "Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?" (William Klein, 1966)

by Chuck Williamson

Directed by ex-pat fashion photographer William Klein, Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? is an anarchic confection of pop-art percolations, ribald comic set-pieces, and counter-cinematic abstraction.  Staged as mock-verite docudrama, the film follows the eponymous Polly Maggoo (Dorothy McGowan), a supermodel who doubles, for both diegetic and intra-diegetic spectators, as a blank slate, a sussied-up, two-dimensional tabula rasa on which lewd, fairy-tale fantasies are projected. For the French television crew that follows her, she represents little more than a facile variation of the Cinderella narrative: a rags-to-riches heroine in need of a prince.  But as the documentarians’ bungled, reductive response fails to answer the title’s central query, the film counters with a dazzling, deconstructive display that uses its fashion-industry trappings in the employ of an acerbic social satire of fame, gender, politics, mass media, and the so-called “society of the spectacle,” where the constant consumption of mass-produced images has corroded human relationships.

An absurdist farce, Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? bristles with comic energy and explodes with an orgiastic, near-manic visual design.  Resembling the experimental cinema of Godard, the film combines baroque costumes and symmetrical set-design with spastic, unmoored cinematography and jagged, jump-cut-heavy editing.  But the film’s success cannot be boiled down to its radical aesthetic design.  Above all, Polly Maggoo can be described as a caustic, near-flippant middle finger of a film, lacing its multi-layered social critique with biting, laugh-out-loud comedy.

Or as Polly herself might say: “Beep-beep!”

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DVD of the Week: "Eureka" (Shinji Aoyama, 2000)

by Chuck Williamson

Spanning a dreamily paced 217 minutes, Shinji Aoyama’s Eureka 
begins with the violent hijacking of a commuter bus—a cold, antiseptic sequence that ends with machine-gun editing—and concludes with the survivors’ arduous journey toward emotional and spiritual repair, a journey that culminates in a literal cross-country road trip through the decaying Japanese countryside.  Photographed through a monochrome veil of distortion, Eureka constructs a nightmare vision of Japan as a purgatorial wasteland, a diseased, sepia-tone world that externalizes the collective trauma shared by the three bus-jacking survivors: a pair of reserved siblings, Naoki (Masaru Miyazaki) and Kozue (Aoi Miyazaki), and the shellshocked bus-driver, Makoto (Koji Yakusho).  These deep psychic wounds ultimately draw the three of them back together.  Withdrawn from the world around them, they embark on an aimless expedition that promises to mend their wounds.  As Makoto later tells the children, “We need some time to find ourselves.”

Minimalist by design, Eureka belies its epic length and “from-the-headlines” plotting with its restrained, near-glacial cinematography.  The film visualizes the silence and stillness that punctuates every moment of its characters’ shared trauma through long, languid takes and elegant, meticulously composed images; formally, the film recalls the work of Tarkovsky and Ozu. But it is the film’s deep humanism that gives those images their thematic and emotional heft, turning what could be an empty formal exercise into one of the decade's richest and most rewarding films.  Eureka resonates with pathos and poignancy and pulses with life, weaving into its picaresque narrative scenes that are both stirring and spellbinding.  Like any good road trip, it is a transformative, damn-near-transcendent experience.

Because of the dissolution of Shooting Gallery Pictures, Eureka has never been released domestically on DVD.  However, it is available on a region-two disc released by Artificial Eye.

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DVD of the Week: "Mr. Smith Goes To Washington" (Frank Capra, 1939)

by James Hansen

The DVD of the Week was purposefully delayed this week, as to make it land on the holiday. Although it might not have a ton of stars and stripes and fireworks shooting in the air, but Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes To Washington is still one of the most well defined, uplifting movies about the power of America's system of government and proof that each person can make significant changes if they keep working and stick to their beliefs. Jimmy Stewart is just terrific, as always, and Capra's direction, taking a single place and building an ecstatic amount of nervous energy leading to a couple of the best courtroom-type scene ever filmed, was never sharper. Mr. Smith Goes To Washington is a celebration of America and its individual citizens without the oftentimes annoying, blatant fanfare that drowns other Fourth movies in tired nostalgia. Forget Yankee Doodle Dandy. Mr. Smith is the man for me.

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DVD of the Week: A Trio of Picks

DVDs of the Week





Short Film You Must See (Again): Thriller (Michael Jackson, 1985)

Perhaps unexciting picks, but certainly worth revisiting amid what has taken place this week.


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DVD of the Week: "The Boston Strangler" (Richard Fleischer, 1968)

by Brandon Colvin

Flipping through the guide listings on my Dish Network cable package, I came across the info blurb for The Boston Strangler, a late 60s genre film about the infamous titular serial killer starring Henry Fonda as investigator John Bottomly and Tony Curtis as confessed murderer Albert DeSalvo (not to mention George Kennedy in a great supporting role as Detective Phil DiNatale). “Looks like it could be good,” I thought. I set it to record on my DVR. Weeks later, keeping in mind of the crapshoot that recording and watching random movies can be, I started the film, warily. I finished it with a blend of amazement and incredulity. “Did that just happen? Because I’ve never seen that before.”

What I’m referring to is the most remarkably original technique of director Richard Fleischer’s proto-slasher/thriller/mystery – the inventive and playful use of aspect ratio, masking, and split-screens, resulting in a general derangement of the accepted concept of the stable frame. The boldness of The Boston Strangler’s experiments is startling considering its classical Hollywood stars and sensationalist pulp material. Zeroing in upon details, carefully excluding information, juxtaposing contrasting elements, and offering simultaneous action from multiple angles, the film’s frame manipulation serves the purpose of transforming the narrative into a series of fragments, clues – sometimes they dead end, sometimes they contradict one another, sometimes they are incomplete; we never get the whole story. Superlatively cohesive in form and content – perhaps the only cinematic detective story that rivals its stylistic unity is David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007) – The Boston Strangler is one hell of a find. You might come for the funky framings, but you’ll stay for the lurid violence, sexual deviance, social commentary, and gritty performances.

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DVD of the Week: "Death Race 2000" (Paul Bartel, 1975)

This selection is somewhat self-explanatory – the death of an important actor or actress is always an immediate call to go back and see more of their work. In this case, you might as well start with the nasty fun of the 1975 cult film Death Race 2000. Sure its a bit dated now, but anything that ever received a zero star review from Roger Ebert is worth your time in one way or another.

Even though I prefer the more recent incarnation (which featured a voice over cameo by Carradine), Death Race 2000 features David Carradine in a highly memorable performance as the unbeatable Frankenstein. Taking place in the year 2000 (funny how things work out, eh?) the United States has been destroyed by a financial crisis and has become a fascist police state. The Transcontinental Road Race, a violent race across the country where you get points for hitting specific groups (and even more for pedestrians!), is a main source of entertainment for the blood thirsty citizens. Some crazy shit goes down between Frankenstein and his rival Machine Gun Joe (Sylvester Stallone). Cars wreck. Things explode. And the State is taken over by, well, Frankenstein. Long live Le Cinema!

Not all that sleek or smooth, Death Race 2000 serves its 70s grunge well. And although its not his more “refined” performance, Carradine is commanding as ever.

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DVD of the Week: "The Beat That My Heart Skipped" (Jacques Audiard, 2005)

by Chuck Williamson

If award prognosticators are to be believed, this year’s Cannes Film Festival was little more than a two-horse race between Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon and Jacques Audriard’s A Prophet. Of course, the Palme d’Or ultimately went to Haneke, but Audriard’s film nonetheless sent shockwaves through the croisette and became a festival sensation. The film went on to win the Grand Prix and, according to Indiewire, was unofficially named the festival’s top-rated film by critics. With this post-festival buzz in mind, I think it would be a good time to revisit Audriard’s last film, which I believe might be one of the best films of the decade: The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005). Loosely adapted from James Toback’s little-seen cult oddity Fingers (1978), the film mixes two-fisted pulp with haunting mediation, pulsing with nervy, near-volatile energy but pausing long enough to capture the tortured romanticism and artistic longing of its protagonist.

Filled with grainy, handheld camerawork and jagged, arrhythmic editing, The Beat That My Heart Skipped visualizes the tense, broken-down Parisian underworld where Tom (Romain Duris), a low-rent thug working for his sleazy slumlord father (Niels Arestrup) as a brutal enforcer and debt-collector, seems predestined to follow the family legacy of crime and corruption. But when a chance encounter awakens his long-dormant aspirations of following his deceased mother’s footsteps and becoming a classical pianist, Tom soon finds a means to channel his rage into music—and soon finds himself struggling between familial duty and artistic fulfillment. Featuring blistering, hyperkinetic action interspersed with quiet moments of introspection and development—not to mention a charismatic, irrepressible lead performance from Duris—The Beat That My Heart Skipped is an intoxicating cocktail that remains a singular cinematic experience.

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DVD of the Week: "Europa" (Lars Von Trier, 1991)

by Brandon Colvin

In the wake of the recent Cannes tumult over his apparently incendiary horror film/Strindbergian chamber drama/brutally ironic comedy, Antichrist, Lars Von Trier has proclaimed himself (with a certain amount of sarcasm) the “greatest filmmaker in the world” – a controversial statement from the man who might be cinema’s most outrageous enfant terrible. My favorite Von Trier film, however, isn’t as transgressive as his Dogme and Dogme-esque films (Breaking the Waves (1996), The Idiots (1998), Dancer in the Dark (2000)) or his experimentations with the stage and artifice (Dogville (2003) and Manderlay (2005)). Instead, Europa (1991) – the last film in Von Trier’s early trilogy also containing The Element of Crime (1984) and Epidemic (1987) – is a film that presents a classical Hollywood aesthetic wrapped in a Kafkaesque dream, a film that Entertainment Weekly fittingly described as “one part Casablanca, two parts Eraserhead.” Astonishingly, Europa actually lives up to its pedigree.

Finding the Danish auteur operating in a more robustly traditional mode of cinematic storytelling, Europa unravels the twilight reality of a surreal post-WWII Germany as American neutralist Leopold Kessler (Jean-Marc Barr) takes a job as a sleeping car conductor on the Zentropa railway via the nepotistic actions of his uncle, a former Nazi. Photographed in vigorous and precise black-and-white, Leopold’s journey into the twisted circumstance of a defeated, yet defiant Germany is complicated by his romance with Katharina Hartmann (Barbara Sukowa), a relationship that plops him in the middle of an entanglement with a group of nationalistic terrorists known as the “Werewolves” and plunges Leopold into a power struggle that coaxes him out of his pacifistic complacency. Receiving less attention that many of Von Trier’s later, more abrasive works, Europa is disappointingly underrated (despite its recent Criterion release) in Von Trier’s oeuvre, and is relatively unseen considering its availability. I would advise queueing it up on Netflix to tide you over until Antichrist hits the states. I promise that by the time Max Von Sydow finishes his opening narration, you will be utterly hypnotized.

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DVD of the Week: "Walden- Diaries, Notes, and Sketches" (Jonas Mekas, 1969)

Hell, I haven't even seen this, but how could it not be our DVD of the Week? Mekas, or any experimental film for that matter, on DVD is a rarity. This may be expensive, but its an immediate must buy. 150 page booklet!? Are you kidding me??? This is a cinephile's dream DVD.

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DVD of the Week: "Cutter's Way" (Ivan Passer, 1981)

by Brandon Colvin

Okay, okay. So, there is this slacker dude who just sits around and gets high all day, who is like the protagonist in this movie, and he’s played by Jeff Bridges, and he like gets tangled up in this noirish web of intrigue involving a wealthy guy. And the slacker dude has this eccentric best friend who is like a bit of a paranoid conspiracy freak who gets really into this whole mess – a Vietnam vet who is totally obsessed with the fact that he was in the war and has a bit of a martyr complex about it. And, like, they get involved in all sorts of shady, criminal mischief as their already strained friendship is tested and pushed to the limit while they attempt to navigate a convoluted psychological maze of mystery and confusion. Oh, and it takes place in L.A.

No, contrary to what the above informal plot summary may suggests, the film in question is not The Big Lebowski (1998). Rather, it is a much darker tale of amateur detectives coming to grips with post-Vietnam nihilism, the reprehensibility of corporatism, and the impossible conundrums of epistemology – Czech director Ivan Passer’s under-seen and masterful Cutter’s Way (1981). Starring Bridges as small-time gigolo and big-time underachiever, Richard Bone, and featuring John Heard giving the performance of a lifetime as the troubled Alex Cutter, Cutter’s Way undoubtedly influenced the now-classic Coen Brothers comedy, yet it delves into similar subject matter with such unsparing cynicism that it feels downright disturbing in comparison. Exploring suicide, alcoholism, mental illness, murder, corruption, emotional disconnection, and the relativity of truth, Passer’s film is rife with jarringly powerful insights and pitch-black gallows humor, making it one of the bravest, most tonally risky films I have ever seen. Certainly worth a watch and emblematic of the bevy of unjustly neglected 1980s cinematic gems that are being reappraised in the age of Netflix, Cutter’s Way is a film whose legacy can only grow in stature.

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DVD of the Week: "Our Daily Bread" (Nikolaus Geyrhalter, 2005)

by James Hansen

A big apology to everyone for the long delay in posts. I feel like I’m having to say this all the time these days, but I was out of town all last week and hadn’t manage the site particularly well for the week. And, in the meantime, I missed writing a couple reviews I should have written and whatnot. But, onward we trudge! Back up and running at full speed henceforth.

This will start with our DVD pick of the week Nikolaus Geyhrhalter’s 2005 documentary Our Daily Bread. While I anxiously await the arrival of his new film 7915 KM, I have been thinking about Our Daily Bread – a clinically obsessive look at the step by step process of the food industry. The sharp photography collides with the still camera, as Our Daily Bread patiently observes a dedicated, yet oftentimes disturbing process.

But more than being a doc to scare us all off of meat (although, admittedly, I was a vegetarian when I saw it) Geyrhalter’s craft is more what interests me now. Without succumbing to the handheld personal process behind most 21st century documentaries (not that those are all bad), Geyrhalter seems at once classically tuned and radically challenging. Along with Hukkle, Gyorgy Palfi’s amusing 2002 film which would be a fun sort-of companion piece, Our Daily Bread wants the audience to think and feel for itself. Perhaps that is why I have heard many varying reactions to both of the films. More than the content within the film, Our Daily Bread requires a disciplined discourse as part of its process. Although some may disagree, it is a factor that any active audience member should appreciate and, perhaps, adore.

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DVD of the Week: "Tongues Untied" (Marlon Riggs, 1989)

Sorry to everyone for this being a day late. Reviews of Miss March, Last House on the Left, Watchmen, and Hunger are in the works.


by Chuck Williamson

Tongues Untied, the 1989 video collaboration between media artist/queer activist Marlon Riggs and poet/essayist Essex Hemphill, has been burdened for too long by its legacy as a polemical culture war product. When it was first broadcast on public television, the documentary became the target of evangelical moralists and right-wing politicians—particularly Pat Buchanan, who used footage from the video in a presidential campaign ad accusing Bush of funding “pornographic art.” Thus, some might assume that Tongues Untied can only be appreciated as a timely polemic and historical footnote. However, the video defies such criticisms, as it represents both a moving and incisive mediation on the experiences of black gay men and a radical reinvention of the documentary form.

more after the break

As Riggs has stated, “Tongues Untied tries to undo the legacy of silence about Black Gay life.” Foregoing any traditional documentary approach, the video opts for a more experimental method. Blending spoken-word poetry, confessional interviews, and queer performance, Tongues Untied constructs its counter-discourses in response to the reductive, prejudiced view of black gay men, who are doubly-Othered and marginalized within both black and white culture. Through footage of dive bars, voguing balls, snap! performances, pride rallies, and on-the-street interviews, the video documents the cultural happenings of the black gay scene of the late eighties. But the video ultimately moves away from the limiting confines of an objective, journalistic discourse; instead, it fuses fact with fiction, personal testimonial with poetic recitation, on-the-street verite footage with experimental montage. Tongues Untied alternates between interviewed confessionals and prosaic poetry readings, documentary footage and staged homoerotic spectacle. These discursive strategies make the video’s explorations political and personal, thus adding to its urgency and poignancy. In its most powerful sequence, Marlon Riggs delivers a monologue that mixes poetic mediation with pained confession, as he speaks on the intersections of homophobia and racism, and the prejudices that exist within both black and white society. “Silence is my sword,” he says. “It cuts both ways—silence is the deadliest weapon.”

But Riggs’ voice is just one of many. Through the collaging of sound and image, spoken word and visual antecedent, the film transforms silence into a cacophonous roar—and it is a roar that includes many voices. In Tongues Untied, the experiences of black gay men cannot be viewed as singular or monologic, and the video demonstrates this by stitching together its various discourses into a polyphonic tangle that gives the viewer access to a broad spectrum of emotions and experiences.

Out-of-print for over a decade, Tongues Untied has finally been released on DVD by Frameline Pictures.
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DVD of the Week: "Regular Lovers" (Philippe Garrel, 2005)

by James Hansen

Although he has been an important filmmaker in Europe for quite a long time, American audiences are still becoming acquainted with French director Philippe Garrel. And, if you do not live in New York or Los Angeles, it is highly likely that you missed his two most widely distributed features: Regular Lovers (2005) and J'entends plus la guitare (1991, yet distributed for the first time in the US in 2008) which may have been the most devastating film I saw last year. With his latest feature Frontier of Dawn opening in New York this week (expect a review sometime next week), it seems like an appropriate time for everyone to catch up on as much Garrel as possible. Unfortunately, there are still not very many features to choose from (unless you have a region free player). However, that is not to infer that Regular Lovers is not an absolutely extraordinary feature that has already become essential viewing – not only for its thorough and absorbing account of the May 1968 student riots, but also for being, as far as I can tell and from all I have heard, pure Garrel.

(more after the break)


Regular Lovers lingers through its 178 minutes running time – quite a task for some – yet manages moments of crushing clarity and powerful beauty. William Lubtchansky’s luscious cinematography, shot in the highest contrast black-and-white you may ever see, provides a perfect counterpoint to the dreamily troubled ideologies of love and revolution pondered throughout the film’s titular lovers Francois (Louis Garrel) and Lilie (Clotilde Hesme). Although it may have been fixed on the DVD, I recall seeing the film in theaters and the subtitles often disappearing into the bright whites of the landscape. But somehow, rather than become frustrated, every element of the film and its scenario (collaborated on by Garrel, Arlette Langmann, and Marc Cholodenko) continued to flow and slowly reveal itself even without the language spelled out. That is a truly rare cinematic experience. Garrel’s strong directorial command predicates itself on the personal and abundantly heartfelt tone which is fully realized from frame one. Without being annoyingly ostentatious, Regular Lovers is daringly original and seductively transforming.

If you have yet to see any films directed by Garrel (and are a bit adventurous...I know the readers of this site are!), do yourself a favor and check out Regular Lovers. You may be joining the cult of Garrel before you even know it.
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