by ·Comments Off on Cartoon College (2012, Josh Melrod & Tara Wray)

The movie was fine, the soul-crushing (if you’re an aspiring artist) story of a graduating class at a comics school. More memorable will be the experience, since I got to run the feature and preceding presentation from the projection room, playing it from a blu-ray I authored and burned.

While working on the disc, I’d tried to avoid spoilers, not watching any full scene for fear that there’d be little in the movie to warrant a second or third viewing on event day. Confoundingly, I ended up enjoying this more than my much-anticipated Photographic Memory. It’s nothing unique from a filmmaking perspective, but competently made and full of pathos in the form of aspiring comic artists in over their heads.

by ·Comments Off on Photographic Memory (2011, Ross McElwee)

“There were always secrets to be uncovered in the most mundane of photographs.”

I’ve waited a long time since the great Bright Leaves with its promising ending. After spending that whole movie looking into the past, Ross shows his son Adrian playing at the beach and looks towards the future. That future is now and Adrian is graduating high school, but Ross being Ross, he retreats back into the past, using his son as an excuse to revisit some people and places from when father was the same age as son, trying to find a place for himself after graduation.

The present segments don’t work for me. Ross plays the old fogey card, telling us he can’t understand his son with all the iphones and the internets and the facebooks, dismissing technology while shooting on a digital camera. Adrian seems to be doing fine, talks to his father plenty and goes on fishing trips, is taking up videography (they help on each other’s projects), so the frame story’s attempts to tell us that the two are unable to connect seem untrue, as do Ross’s claims that his son is lost and aimless, since we see Adrian stunt-skiing, writing films and developing his own media startup.

Ross retreats to France, seeking his old photographer boss (Maurice) and his girlfriend from a few months later (Maud). He marvels at the changes that time brings, finds the late Maurice’s ex-wife and finally finds Maud. Ross and Maud each thinks that they’re the one who ended the relationship, after which she married another photographer. I’m sure it was an extremely cathartic trip for Ross, and it comes off as a reasonably pleasant trip for us, really coming together when Ross gets back home with Adrian in the last few minutes.

by ·Comments Off on Two Years at Sea (2011, Ben Rivers)

Watched this because Rivers is one of Cinema Scope’s 50 Under 50, and because I get him confused with Ben Russell. Rivers thanks Russell in the credits, and when this opened with the long follow-cam on a man trudging through snow I had to remind myself again that this was a different Ben. Now I hear they’ve got a collaborative film in the works. Think I’m gonna keep getting them confused.

Sometimes I don’t know how much advance reading I should do before watching a movie. In this case I did none at all, and was annoyed and bored through most of the movie, thinking it a pretentious, wordless pseudo-doc about a beardy hippie-turned-survivalist, but I retroactively appreciated it upon reading that it’s a real doc about a real hippie-turned-survivalist. So, after Mekong Hotel, this is the second movie I’ve watched this week that I didn’t realize was supposed to be (at least partly) a documentary.

I also appreciate the movie’s utility in putting me to sleep about three times while I had the flu.

Especially during this scene:

The physical film (on my digital copy) lets itself be known through flicker, grain and the occasional messy edit. Whole thing is blurry and indistinct, with a Begotten-processed feel. Natural sound with occasional Indian-sounding music plus one folky song.

Seattle Weekly:

The hand-cranking accounts for the wavering of light and shifting tempo of motion within shots; the homemade processing accounts for the amoeba-like chemical puckers that dapple the image. The lone, almost expeditionary nature of Rivers’ operation matches his involuted subjects, for his is a cinema of privileged moments and stubbornly private people.

Sometimes seems like the documentary equivalent of The Turin Horse, with even the same ending, as a campfire burns out and the scene is gradually enveloped by darkness. But let’s not overuse the word “documentary” here. A half hour in, while the man sleeps, his trailer ascends into the treetops – then stays there, with no explanation. Reminds me of the random rocketship/tightrope scenes in Still Life, but more well-integrated.

Rivers explains the title: “Jake is seen in all seasons, surviving frugally, passing the time with strange projects, living the radical dream he had as a younger man, a dream he spent two years working at sea to realise.”

H. Guest:

Rivers’ major works include a series of hypnotic films – This Is My Land (2006), The Origin of the Species (2008), I Know Where I’m Going (2009) and Two Years at Sea (2011) – that offer sumptuously cinematographic portraits of extraordinary lives lived out of time, lands stubbornly resistant to the turn of the century. Featuring ragged self-made men living in worlds entirely of their own creation, Rivers’ quartet, like Costa’s Fontainhas trilogy, gives cinematic form to the private visions and incantatory fantasies of untethered characters who have floated far from the known mainland. … They reveal Rivers’ neo-Romantic search for a kind of sublime, for lives defined by the danger of rapturous annihilation by a vast indifferent Nature.

by ·Comments Off on Agnes Varda’s Jacques Demy double-feature (and Demy shorts)

Jacquot de Nantes (1991, Agnes Varda)

A pretty good movie about a kid growing up in small-town France wishing to make films – but if you’re a Varda/Demy fan who knows the backstory, that she’s filming her husband’s childhood memories as he’s dying, it becomes extremely wonderful and moving.

The Beaches of Jacques:

You see inspirations for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Donkey Skin, Pied Piper and Lola, family life, the love for music and cinema. Largely black and white with splashes of color. Varda flips between childhood events and the film they’d inspire, flashing a graphic of a pointing hand from the Demy Garage sign in between.

Jacquot 1:

“Seeing my name there when I was so young gave me a sense of the fragility of our existence.”

WWII occupies much of the film. His father helps with wartime manufacturing. The kids see Les Visiteurs du soir instead of Baron Munchausen because they’re not allowed see German films. In September 1943 his town is bombed. “There were dead all over town.” Adult Demy tells us he’s hated violence ever since.

Jacquot 2:

Making La Ballerine:

Young Demy spends a season with the clogmakers, works with puppet shows, decides he wants to manufacture theater and film sets. After tiring of the 8mm Chaplin film he’s given, he scrapes off the emulsion and hand-draws his own war story on the film. After a failed attempt at live-action shooting, he continues making films alone – stop-motion this time.

Jacquot 3:

Demy is sent to trade school but hates it, makes his stop-motion and keeps dreaming of cinema. The movie ends quite suddenly. “Later, Christian-Jaque came to Nantes to present his film D’homme a hommes. Christian-Jaque was kind enough to look at my film.” Demy gets to enroll in film school. “I met a woman filmmaker, we made a few films, then she gave me a fine son, and now I paint.”

L’Univers de Jacques Demy (1995, Agnes Varda)

Varda’s doc about her late husband’s films, with some personal details and stories thrown in, and interviews with key participants. Varda says they didn’t work together until Jacquot de Nantes, “so I’ll be discreet in this documentary.”

Demy on the set of Lola:

Covering all his films, in no particular order: Lola (with Anouk Aimee, Marc Michel and Michel Legrand), Three Seats for the 26th (with Francoise Fabian), Donkey Skin (with footage of Jim Morrison visiting the set). “I wanted to recreate things that Marais did with Cocteau.”

A Slightly Pregnant Man, then flashback to the war, the nazi bombing of his hometown. “After something as horrible as that, you get the feeling nothing worse can ever happen. And that’s when you start creating a fantasy world.” A Room in Town with Michel Piccoli. La Table tournante, codirected with animator Paul Grimault at the end of both men’s careers. A hilarious montage of scenes from 1954’s The Rebels of Lomanach in which Demy plays the soldier who dies first in every battle scene, then assisting Jean Masson and Georges Rouquier, who encouraged Demy by producing his clogmaker short.

Umbrellas of Cherbourg with Deneuve and producer Mag Bodard. Model Shop, which was “Lola in L.A.” and would have starred Harrison Ford if the studio hadn’t insisted on bankable star Gary Lockwood (heh). Varda catches up with Ford and asks Aimee about the sequel. Demy: “I called it Model Flop, which it was.” On to Pied Piper (also in English), The Seven Capital Sins (Demy drew Lust), and his weird-looking 1980’s Orpheus story Parking, “a fairy tale where there’s no fairy.” Back to Bay of Angels, then Lady Oscar and the TV movie La Naissance du jour (“I like it because I thought it was unfilmable”) before ending on a high note with Young Girls of Rochefort.

So, having just heard about them for the first time, I watched some of Demy’s early shorts.

Le Sabotier du Val de Loire (1956)

A solemn documentary about the clogmakers of Demy’s youth – or perhaps a half-documentary with a dramatic story added, including a death and a climactic wheelbarrow purchase.

Le Bel indifferent (1957)

Demy’s first non-hand-drawn color work, based on a Cocteau play about a very desperate and lonely woman, waiting all day for her man to return, but seeming even more alone when he does. Cinematography by Franju regular Marcel Fradetal.

Lead Actress Jeanne Allard appeared in Varda’s Les Creatures.

Ars (1959)

Another black-and-white semi-doc, this time about Jean-Marie Vianney, parish priest of the small town of Ars, who’d be named a saint after his death. Demy films museums and artifacts while briefly telling Vianney’s story, but most effectively he shoots the present-day town as if the events were happening currently.

Also watched Les Horizons Morts (1951) again – a very accomplished student film.

And happily, Demy’s homemade animations are available to watch in full, apart from their appearances in the above two features.

Le Pont de mauves (1944)
Bombing of the bridge.

Attaque Nocturne (1948)
Looks like the mugger is walking past the Demy Garage entrance.

La Ballerine (unknown date)
I love the pinholes tracing her path.

by ·Comments Off on El Sicario Room 164 (2010, Gianfranco Rosi)

Similar to Collapse, in that both are documentaries set in a room where a single subject is speaking to the camera, and both are completely terrifying. Collapse left me aimlessly afraid of the end of the world, this one offers a clear action item: Never go to Mexico.

A former “sicario” (drug cartel enforcer) who has escaped with his family tells about his youth (driving cars full of drugs over the border before he was even old enough to drive), training (at the police academy, where 25% of graduates are already working for the cartels) and 20-year career as a kidnapper, torturer and murderer at the behest of an unworthy man, as the now church-going ex-sicario realizes. The drug business basically runs the government, police, and even military, if this guy is to be believed. Never go to Mexico.

M. Peranson:

More so than Police, Adjective, the film that came to mind when watching El Sicario is the still relevant Chambre 666, wherein Wim Wenders set up a stationary camera in Room 666 of the Hotel Martinez during the 1982 Cannes film festival and asked filmmakers like Godard, Fassbinder, Herzog and Spielberg the question: “Is cinema a language about to get lost, an art about to die?” It’s no coincidence that the directors are framed, like the sicario often is, next to a television set.

by ·Comments Off on Crazy Horse (2011, Frederick Wiseman)

I watched it for the nudity but stayed for the choreography. After a while there are so many breasts you stop noticing them. Excellent behind-the-scenes doc of the preparation of a new season of Paris’s famous nude dancing show.

Antony does a song, making this the second nude-girls doc this year to feature his voice. Also a brief Michael Jackson clip. And lots of original songs, most of them quite bad, which makes it funnier that Ali, the bald creepy assistant director, is obsessed with them.

The three main talking heads: Ali sitting between creative director Philippe and shareholder rep Andree:

Funny: the dancers watch a tape of ballet bloopers to unwind backstage. A never-explained two-man disco tapdance routine takes place offstage. The movie opens with shadow puppets then a recording session of orgasm noises, which twice defeated my attempts to watch this quietly by myself while Katy and Maria were home.

Twin tapdancers:

Moonrise:

I’m sure Wiseman’s Juvenile Court and Domestic Violence and State Legislature are interesting and valueable, but I’ve never tried very hard to watch them. As soon as he made a film full of naked girls, I got interested. Let this be a lesson to all filmmakers everywhere.

M. Peranson:

The dancers’ bodies themselves are cinematic vehicles, either used to produce shadows on coloured backdrops, or as objects themselves onto which light and image is projected. Cinema in essence involves the projection of desire, and what Wiseman cleverly does in Crazy Horse is present desire, illustrate its operation and deconstruct it, with the technical rehearsals of the numbers showing the peculiar sweat and effort required to create this seamless illusion.

by ·Comments Off on America as Seen by a Frenchman (1960, Francois Reichenbach)

America as seen but not heard – the soundtrack seems like a post-sync invention, with a fun Michel Legrand score (one of his first films, the year before Lola). Reichenbach spent a year and a half in the States, filming everyday scenes (carnivals, prisons and churches) and special events, including a prison rodeo, a festival for identical twins, a hula hoop contest, horse diving and striptease school.

“This man committed two murders. He is in for a hundred years.”

Is this illegal yet?

A cool movie as travelogue, anthropology and time capsule. Chris Marker wrote a full narration, but reportedly this was adapted by Reichenbach, who considered it too harsh, so Marker’s name barely appears in the film’s credits and he published his own version in Commentaires as L’Amerique Reve, film imaginaire (American Dream). No hard feelings, I guess, since Marker and Reichenbach later collaborated on The Sixth Face of the Pentagon. Produced by new-wave kickstarter Pierre Braunberger, with an introductory note by Jean Cocteau.

by ·Comments Off on Antonio Gaudí­ (1984, Hiroshi Teshigahara)

A wordless montage of Gaudi architecture and artwork, beautiful and nostalgic of my time in Barcelona. Toru Takemitsu’s usually fine music score got too chiming and ethereal at times. Tiny bit of talking, first a half hour in, then over the climactic Sagrada Familia segment.

First, some Picasso in the square. Facing us: El fris dels Gegants

This is the first thing I always think about when I hear Gaudi’s name:

Sagrada Familia, distant view:

Criterion:

Gaudí’s structures, [Teshigahara] later said, “made me realize that the lines between the arts are insignificant. Gaudí worked beyond the borders of various arts and made me feel that the world in which I was living still left a great many possibilities.”

Wow, we didn’t go here:

The ol’ Parc Guell:

Sagrada Familia, inside view:

by ·Comments Off on Into The Abyss (2011, Werner Herzog)

Herzog, whose voice is too rarely heard, listens to the stories of people affected by a stupid double murder in Texas, mostly the victims’ families but also a few unenlightening minutes with the killers themselves. There’s little attempt to question whether these two (one of whom is on death row; the other avoided execution because his dad cried in front of the jury) actually committed the crimes. And there’s little attempt to make polarizing statement regarding the death penalty, until the end when the movie tries to land hard on the anti- side. But I’ve been on the anti side for years, and the movie almost has me convinced that the death penalty is a great thing, because these kids are horrible and have learned nothing, so they might as well be dead. One of the highlights is a long interview with a former death row prison guard, who walks us through the whole procedure before saying he had to quit after too many executions messed with his head. No mercy from Texas. Music by Soul Coughing’s Mark De Gli Antoni.