by ·Comments Off on The Suspended Vocation & Of Great Events (1978, Raoul Ruiz)

The Suspended Vocation

Very nice photography of a monk in a black-and-white film crosscut with his counterpart in a color film. Unfortunately “interchurch quarrels over dogma and religious practice” is not a topic that keeps me alert and engaged. The lead monk is played by Cahiers critic Pascal Bonitzer in color, and Didier Flamand (one of the Dalis in the new Dupieux) in b/w. Based on a novel from Pierre Klossowski, a biographer of Nietzsche and de Sade.

Ruiz in Rouge:

This book talks about all the quarrels inside the church, of different factions in the Catholic church. This was not very different from the discussions and quarrels inside the Left movement in Latin America. Which is not so strange when you think that this movement was composed of ex-Catholics. They transposed old Catholic quarrels into the Left; this is one of the ways you can read the political movements in Latin America.

–
Of Great Events and Ordinary People

That’s more like it – the truefalsiest movie. It announces itself as a doc on Paris’s 12th during election season, but it’s really a doc about making that doc, then a doc about making docs in general, as it gradually swallows itself.

I think Ruiz has seen News From Home, since he opens a slow 360+ degree pan on its poster, and Adrian Martin points out the movie’s closing Le Joli Mai parody.

Martin:

Ruiz increasingly spices up this cubist lesson in documentary deconstruction with surreal elaborations – such as progressively shorter re-edits of the entire film, avant-garde decentrings of image and sound, and crazy runs of ‘secondary elements’ such as particular colours, angles, gestures and camera movements (collect all shots that pan to the right …). The critical agenda tends to merrily lose itself – which is a mercy in our remorseless age of rigidly theory-driven essay-films.

by ·Comments Off on Vogel 10: Red Psalm & Robert Fulton

Amos Vogel, from the Moving Camera chapter:

The concept of the moving camera is more closely associated with the visual filmmakers and the avant-garde (both independent and commercial) than with the earnest craftsmen of the large studios whose mandate was to produce safe entertainments within a matrix of pseudo-realism. To move the camera is a revolutionary act. It introduces an element of “hotness,” instability, emotional entanglement, and implicit anarchy. A period of social imbalance and unrest (from the twenties on, and as yet unresolved) characterizes its emergence; and it is the high-strung outsiders or critics of bourgeois society – Antonioni, Godard, Bertolucci, Brakhage – who use it more than the Fords, the Wylers, or the many Hollywood artisans, content with the stability exemplified by the fixed camera.

–
Red Psalm (1972, Miklós Jancsó)

Dubbing is sometimes dodgy, compensated by the awesome choreography of the visuals, all editing within the shot, if that’s not a term I just made up. Practically a musical between that choreography and all the songs. But what is happening… a committed band of commie farmers is confronted by police and landowners and internal struggle. They pray all the time but also burn down a church. My favorite bit is when a landowner is discussing supply-and-demand pricing with them then says “excuse me” and lies down and dies. I think the cops do finally kill all the commie farmers, but I’d thought that a couple times earlier too. Woman in red dress then kills the entire army with a pistol. It’s all very symbolic.

Vogel: “Jancsó has reached the apotheosis of his style and theme: the constantly shifting relations between oppressed and oppressor, the role of violence in human affairs, the necessity for eternal revolution and (perhaps) eternal repression. Here the theme has become totally abstract – a cinematic ballet … against a background of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary ritual, chants, and mass ceremonies … its subversive aspect seems muted and subsumed by a curiously abstract, left- wing romanticism.”

It’s also a good bird movie:

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Robert Fulton

Since Vogel calls out Robert Fulton (“Here, at last, is a prototype of the new space-time continuum on film”) and I’d never heard of the guy, I dug up his 1979 Screening Room interview with Robert Gardner, which they do with Fulton’s films playing on the greenscreen behind themselves. Fulton had a new work which he’s showing in sections, Street Film, says he’s interested in “the street”, and the paradox of motion pictures. Then they play the first 15 minutes of Path of Cessation (1974) beginning with a long gong-trance intro in Nepal. He ran high-contrast film through the camera six times to make super-duper-imposed scenes – flickers through patterns and fabrics a la Jodie Mack, then slow closeups of faces. Looks awesome but we return to Street Film, which Fulton says he’s made after losing confidence in his understanding of time, light, images, and sound, rethinking his approach to all these in his cinema. After a flicker-montage of palm trees and landscapes, “I’m more interested in making things incomprehensible, because what I know isn’t very interesting to me.” Finally, they project a segment of Street Film and his earlier short Chant simultaneously, overlapped, and instead of talking further about the movies, Fulton plays saxophone. Between his demeanor and sunglasses and the high-level art discussion and the films themselves, this could’ve come off as one of the most pretentious hours ever televised… I thought it ruled.

Path of Cessation:

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Vineyard IV (1967)

Jumpcutting through craggy trees, then crosscutting surf with dunes. Short, a nice brainwash after a work day.

Kata (1967)

Even more anxious camerawork in the middle of a casual football game, and extremely frantic cutting. Suddenly an entire city and a couple seasons have gone by in a minute. Too much happening on the visual to recap, but the soundtrack maintains a piano jazz tune. Katy: “I think the editing is too fast.”

Vineyard III (1967)

Another mad rush of images, the surf and rocks and now a cow. These are cool.

Chant (1973)

Travel and nature footage, probably hours and days of it, plants and bugs and nude persons, supercut together into five silent minutes. Some very short time-lapse scenes, those shots having the same accelerated-time sense that the fast cuts are bringing, and overlapping images at the end.

Running Shadow (1972)

Some familiar characters (dunes, bugs) and now in addition to the strobing edits and time-lapse, the camera is flying and swooping and spinning. More peaceful than the others, or maybe I’m used to their high-energy destruction by now. Starts with a voiceover but I wasn’t sure if we were supposed to pay attention to the words since the tape kept cutting off, then piano jazz, then the sound of the surf.

Vogel:

An extraordinary example of a work entirely based on constant camera movement. A soaring third-consciousness exploration – in purely visual terms – of the shapes and patterns of nature, in which camera tilts, upside-down shots, single frame, and trucking shots at great speed register not as gimmicks but as structurally determined components of a visual poem.

by ·Comments Off on You, The Living (2007, Roy Andersson)

Despite the tuba on the poster I wasn’t expecting this movie to swing so hard. Currently my vote for best Roy movie – I didn’t get it but I don’t especially get any of his movies, and this one had the most fun soundtrack. In Cinema Scope 32 Andersson says he was inspired by Bicycle Thieves to portray people in humiliating moments.

by ·Comments Off on Poetry (2010, Lee Chang-dong)

Grandma (major 60s/70s actress Yoon Jeong-hee) takes care of grandson Wook, whose friend group raped a classmate until she suicided. She tries to get enough cash from the rich disabled guy she attends for the payoff to the dead girl’s mom. Her Alzheimer’s diagnosis adds to her inner struggle but doesn’t affect the plot. When she visits the dead girl’s mom but talks only of apricots is it because the disease made her forget her reason for coming there, or was she distracted by the poetry or nature, or is she avoiding hard conversations. I have no qualms with her fellow poets but the employers, the fathers, the kids – most people in the movie are living comfortably, contemptibly.

I spend at least an hour a day saying this:

Robert Koehler in Cinema Scope 43:

There is no simple cause and effect between the initially cautious [Alzheimer’s] diagnosis and her decision to sign up for a poetry class … That doesn’t mean, however, that the viewer is denied such a cause-and-effect reading if they choose one, and Lee isn’t a filmmaker to either encourage or discourage it. This is perhaps the most notable aspect of the evolution of Lee’s screenwriting – rewarded at Cannes with the screenplay prize – starting from the unmistakable determinism of Green Fish and the elegant but closed geometrics of Peppermint Candy. Like his camera, which allows viewers to make their own compositions and choices within the larger frame, his narrative approach trusts in granting characters their own lives, so much so that one gets the sense that they frequently surprise Lee himself with the choices they make.

Auteurist foreshadowing:

by ·Comments Off on The Music Lovers (1970, Ken Russell)

Russell is the only person who should be allowed to make artist biopics. He loves the music, doesn’t care about historical truth, and never gets so caught up in plot that he forgets to make wonderful images.

Peter Tchaikovsky (Richard Chamberlain of The Last Wave) has got a boss who doesn’t like his compositions (Max Adrian, title star of Delius), a patron who does (Izabella Telezynskan of at least two other Russell biopics), a libidinous new wife (Glenda Jackson), and a gay lover he can’t be seen with (Chris Gable, Strauss in Dance of the Seven Veils). And I’d just like to point out that Peter’s playwright brother is Kenneth Colley, Life of Brian‘s Jesus. Ends downbeat, Peter dying in hospital after suicidally drinking cholera water, Glenda in a madhouse, both of them obsessed with the question of whether he ever loved her.

Ebert called it “irresponsible” and Kael called it “vile.” Russell wrote a piece in the Guardian, says his life was changed by Tchaikovsky’s music, and twenty years later he succeeded in honoring the man in film. “Great heroes are the stuff of myth and legend, not facts. Music and facts don’t mix. Tchaikovsky said: ‘My life is in my music.’ And who can deny that the man’s music is not utterly fantastic? So likewise the movie!”

by ·Comments Off on The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (1974, Werner Herzog)

Werner as sports announcer, not comfortable in his onscreen role. I just “read” (listened to) his autobiography, which helped greatly with the ski-jumping context of this movie, and left me wanting to watch more Herzog films. Good music with big crashing drums by Popul Vuh.

by ·Comments Off on Once Upon a Time in China (1991, Tsui Hark)

Wong Fei-hung is trying to run his martial arts school while the master is away and fulfill their dream of expelling the foreigners, along with his men – strong Porky Wing, stuttering bilingual So, and guy without qualities Kai – but everyone keeps getting mad at him. Scarface and his Shaho gangsters terrorize the town, burn down the school, and kidnap Wong’s young 13th Aunt to sell to the Americans. After causing much trouble Scar ends up thrown in a furnace by his kidnappees. The British and Chinese governments want Wong arrested. Then mercenary superfighter Iron Vest Yim comes to town, gains a disciple in fired theater worker Foon, and keeps challenging Wong. He ends up shamed for his hidden knife technique, roundly defeated in ladder combat, then murdered by the whites. The Brits have their own kung fu champ, who takes a Wong-thrown bullet to the brain – victory.

Our series stars: Jet Li, who wasn’t anybody until this came out, and Rosamund Kwan, who’d been in the Jackie/Sammo/Lucky Stars group. I didn’t realize the disciples wouldn’t be regulars – Porky Wing (Kent Cheng Jak-Si of Sex & Zen and Crime Story) will return in part 5. Jacky Cheung, in the middle of his WKW era, had better prospects than playing Bucktooth So. Yuen Gam-Fai (Kai) continued playing guys without qualities, hitting the height of 7th-billed-in-Burning Paradise. Iron Vest Yen Shi-Kwan is the evil master of Heroic Trio. His boy Foon is Yuen Biao, also from the Lucky Stars gang. And Scarface would appear in a Charlie Chan action-mystery called Madam City Hunter.

Porky, Kai, So, Jet, Rosamund:

The signage… it’s trying to tell us something:

Tony Rayns: Hark returned to HK from NY, made his three angry young man films (ahem), those made no money and he reinvented himself as a family entertainer in early 1980s with Zu and some comedies. Chose Jet Li from the mainland for his action skills and old-fashioned dignity. OUATIC is the English title, original is just Wong Fei-hung, and OUATIC2 is called Wong Fei-hung 2: A Man Must Rely on His Own Strength.

Ladderdance:

Hairknife:

by ·Comments Off on It Must Be Heaven (2019, Elia Suleiman)

A film about a Palestinian filmmaker leaving home, traveling to meet with producers, who don’t understand his film (“not Palestinian enough”), returning home. Includes a highly relatable bird scene. Don’t know if it meant much of anything but I get positive vibes from Suleiman’s scene composition and onscreen persona, need to watch more of these.