Grungy documentary outtakes, then a French TV studio – the idea being that Gomis is showing the rushes from a conventional half-hour Thelonious Monk TV appearance. We do get to hear him play more than once, first in a traveling shot around the studio where everyone else is chatting and not paying any attention, then for a few songs in a row after the interviews have gone badly.

A Michael Caine-ish host talks about Monk to the viewers in French while leaning on the piano, then they do retakes of the interview questions until it feels like Monk is caught in a Lynchian limbo. Monk suggests they forget the interview and go to dinner, they can’t have a conversation because the interviewer wants to rephrase everything in French and Monk won’t repeat the same answer twice in the same way. And certain topics are forbidden as “not nice.” This movie landed with good timing for me, as I’m “getting into jazz” and just watched a trio whose latest album is a Monk tribute.

Michael Sicinski on lboxd:

Gomis’s presentation of the material, largely untouched, not only displays the technical mechanics involved in “making TV,” although there’s that. When Monk doesn’t provide satisfactory answers to Renaud’s questions, the crew adopts a plan-b mode, showing Monk playing during extended shots, and then later shooting B-roll with Renaud pretending to listen appreciatively. But more than this, we are seeing how a media apparatus deals with an artist it finds difficult or uncooperative. French TV is trying to sell a product called “Thelonious Monk,” and the man himself is perceived as an impediment to that pandering.

Max Goldberg in Cinema Scope:

Rewind & Play brings to light the violence of getting an artist to say what you want them to say. Not coincidentally, it also centres the musical performances recorded for Jazz Portrait, allowing them to flow together as a solid block of song. Taken together, the two things insinuate a sharp critique of the standard music documentary.

We went out to see three short “city symphony” docs with live music from Hotel X, part of the James River Film Fest. Joris Ivens’ Rain was pretty chill and rainy, the music wandering about aimlessly except for the guy with the rainstick who knew exactly what to do. Manhatta (1921) a sharper movie, while the music had too much melodica. Things really cooked both musically and cinematically with Jean Vigo’s À propos de Nice, then we stayed for a post-movie song with guest guitarist Gary Lucas.

I’ve written about Manhatta before. Was thinking this time that if I lived there/then, I’d like to open a haberdashery, or invent punk rock. Rain/Regen is the story of a rainfall in the city. Ivens catches some nice ripples and reflections in puddles, the downside being that the movie consists excessively of puddle shots. Nice seemed minor when watching all of Vigo’s work at once some years ago, but in this program it really shines – it’s quicker and more clever and more interested in people than buildings and landscapes. I love how many shots end as soon as the subject notices they’re being filmed (or being watched, anyway). Nice gives equal credit to camera/editor Boris Kaufman, who’d go on to shoot famous 1950’s/60’s films such as 12 Angry Men.

Overenthusiastic girl imposes herself on a shabby traveling variety show – this is Lily: Carla Del Poggio, who worked with every 1940’s Italian director I’ve heard of, plus G.W. Pabst, who apparently enjoyed a late Italian phase. She gets hired against the wishes of star Giulietta Masina, and hijacks the show, enjoying her new popularity but getting too big for her britches almost immediately.

We end up following the little-mustached company leader Checco: Peppino De Filippo would pair up with comic star Toto for a series of comedies (including a Fellini parody) and also appear in the cool-sounding Atrocious Tales of Love and Death with Mastroianni and Piccoli. On the street after the company’s destruction, Checco meets a sharpshooter, an American trumpeter and a Brazilian singer, and recruits them to start a new show. But Masina has her own solo gig, and Lily is too ambitious, joins another company behind his back.

Codirector Lattuada made forty-some movies including the Criterion-coronated Mafioso. It’s not clear whether this Fellini debut is the half in since he co-directed, or if the half was a short film, and I’m not looking it up since I’m not a numerically-oriented film viewer. Very good visual drama, too bad the sound was synched by fifth graders.

Buñuel’s least-well dubbed movie, filmed in Mexico and spoken in French. Diamond miners and soldiers are having a showdown when a mysterious stranger wanders into town, but instead of impressing everyone with his skills a la Yojimbo he’s an asshole to everyone – this is Shark (That is the Dawn‘s doctor Georges Marchal), who needs a place to stay so he shacks up with prostitute Simone Signoret, who is beloved of miner Castin (Clouzot regular Charles Vanel).

The miners-vs-soldiers war reaches a climax in a midnight firing squad which leads to a riot. Our heroes escape (with fake priest Michel Piccoli and a mute girl: Michèle Girardon of the earliest Rohmers), getting very lost in the jungle, walking in circles. They reach the promised land, finding a crashed plane full of food and jewels along the way, rescued and rich, but Castin goes mad, throwing his diamonds in the lake and murdering everyone.

Larsen:

Politically the movie may side with the miners, but once this crew forms and heads into the jungle, Buñuel is more interested in exploring the hypocrisies that exist in every human heart. And so the priest is a fraud, the prostitute is an opportunist, and the miner loses his mind … Death in the Garden concludes with a more subversive poetic image: two figures blithely paddling across a South American lake as if they were in a Venetian gondola, when in fact a literal and spiritual wilderness surrounds them.

Oh yes, it’s time to revisit the Lang films. After directing a couple of American West mythology stories, he got a hell of a screenplay with this one. Closely based on a 1939 novel about a hunter’s “sporting stalk” of an unnamed dictator, John Ford’s screenwriter Dudley Nichols did a find-and-replace to insert the name Hitler, this started filming in March 1941 and was opening wide in June.

Walter Pidgeon (wartime drama Mrs. Miniver, later Forbidden Planet) is our hunter, his monocled nazi captor after the pretend assassination is George Sanders from the previous year’s two Hitchcocks. Sanders wants Pidgeon to sign a confession saying the British government sent him, using this to justify war. Failing that, they hunt Pidgeon all the way to Britain after he escapes on a boat.

Tale of two hunters:

Hilarious cabin boy helps him escape, full of “I say, my word, rather” Britishisms. I didn’t know he was Roddy McDowall, but sensed right off that it was someone important. As soon as Pidgeon lands in Britain he hears a Chumbawamba song, which is accurate to my own experience. He gets out of a street-level chase by abducting Cockney Joan Bennett – extremely pretty, but whose awful accent cripples the movie for a while. Wonder if it’s meaningful that her name is Jerry (also a British term for Germans). She finally grows on you, and Lang obviously liked her, casting her in three more movies.

Presumed dead after a subway fight where Pidgeon third-rails the thug holding his passport, Pidgeon hides in a cave in the woods to wait out the hunt, so he won’t be a threat to others – but too late, the baddies track him and bring the arrow-shaped hat pin of the poor murdered girl who loved him. Pidgeon makes an absurd bow and arrow using the pin and his belt, kills Monocle Nazi Sanders with it, and gets grievously injured so we can see Joan again via fever-montage. Finally provoked into admitting that he did intend to kill Hitler after all, he heads to Germany to finish the job.

Dave Kehr:

These are Nazis as observed by someone who knew them intimately. In fact the chief villain of Man Hunt, a Gestapo officer who calls himself Major Quive-Smith, wears Lang’s trademark monocle. Lang was also known for using his own hands for close-up shots, and the finger on the trigger of Pidgeon’s gun may well have been his own.

Twink:

A movie of people standing very still and talking, named after the town where the crime took place in late 2015. Subtly cinephiliac movie – Rama is teaching a lesson on Duras, shows the shaved-head scene from Hiroshima Mon Amour in class – all the white actors in this movie have been in Resnais films. Rama is weird and closed-off around family, never mentions she’s leaving town to witness a murder trial.

The judge was in Mon oncle d’Amérique as a kid:

Laurence is the accused, is quoted as having said that she killed her baby to “make life easier” but pleads innocent: “I don’t think I’m the responsible party.” The judge questions the much-older, married boyfriend, a real shithead, then asks for L’s whole life story. Meanwhile Rama has lunch with the accused’s mom, reveals that Rama is pregnant, and at the hotel she frames through Pasolini’s Medea.

Laurence’s mom: Salimata Kamate of Intouchables

Movie ends, having made its point(s), without wrapping up the trial. But it’s based on an actual trial, which Diop attended in 2016 in the same courtroom where they filmed, and which ended in a 20-year sentence.

Leila Latif for BFI:

The acting is uniformly superb, even when it’s simply dispassionate testimony that’s being dispatched. [Kayije] Kagame plays Rama in a state of continual displacement, ill at ease at dinner with her mother, uncomfortable on the streets of Saint-Omer and conspicuous in the courtroom; [Guslagie] Malanda evokes profound pain through the tiniest cracks in her expressions and voices as she revisits traumatic memories.

AKA the Egyptian chicken movie. A guy setting himself on fire is quite a prologue. During a birthday party magic trick, the husband goes into a box, chicken comes out, embarrassed magician can’t undo it. The wife then mutely chases after the magician, getting screwed over by her landlord and friends and associates. When the chicken gets sick, she helps it recover. When she reports her husband missing so her son can take his factory job, the cops give her a comatose homeless man. We get more than enough shots of her standing perfectly still looking dead inside, and not enough exploration of the chicken-ness of the husband – it’s less a bird movie than a missing husband movie.


Birds of a Feather (1931, Burt Gillett)

Significantly better and more chicken-focused than the feature, one of those early Disneys where all the woodland creatures move and sway in time with the soundtrack, doing little species-specific actions. Belated drama of banding together to rescue a stray chicken from a hawk, including a great POV-attack shot. Minor message that polluted lakes harm the geese, thanx. IMDB says Eisenstein was a fan.

Getting back into Buñuel after recently rewatching Nazarin.

Kids interrupt their game of savagely throwing rocks at each other to help a collapsed woman – this is Angela, wife of slick-haired doctor Valerio. She’s desperately bored with this town, but he won’t leave his post, so sends her off alone. His buddy Sandro also has an ailing wife Magda. But while the doctor takes up with a hot new visitor named Bernadine, Sandro stands by his wife to the detriment of his work, and gets fired by shitty capitalist Gorzon, who he later murders, justifiably. The doctor, always helping people, tries to hide the killer as his wife returns home with her meddling dad, who sniffs out Sandro.

Things people are calling this film: sincere (agree), revolutionary (ehh), a study in morality (sure), anti-capitalist (yeah). IMDB Trivia points out subtle insults against other artists hidden in the visuals. Bunuel’s first French movie since L’age d’or. The Doctor had smaller parts in some major Bunuel movies, Clara starred in a couple of Antonionis I haven’t seen, the capitalist in The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse.

Daniel Fienberg in Hollywood Reporter:

Depending on your level of investment, All That Breathes could be a documentary about climate change and the crucial need to understand how animals are adapting and how humans need to adapt. It could be a spiritual piece about the webs of synergistic connectivity between, well, everything that breathes. It could be a humanist meditation on how we treat each other, how we tear people down by comparing them to animals, but how really we should treat everything and everyone just a bit better. Or it might just be 91 minutes with a couple of brothers who really like birds.


Bird Suite (1994)

Semi-anonymous Australian VHS, following our bird theme. A solid hour of birds doing bird things, with no titles or narration, just symphonic music. Great work showing birds hanging in the air, a good segment showing different species in apparently natural environments in close-up then zooming out to show they’re in a human city. It also made pelicans look graceful, which is an achievement.