by ·Comments Off on Through the Olive Trees (1994, Abbas Kiarostami)

Part one was a straightforward drama, part two was a reenactment of events that took place after filming that drama, and part three is a reenactment of the filming of part two, whew.

It spins off into a side drama, as the actors cast as And Life Goes On‘s newlyweds know each other – Hossein wants to marry Tahereh, her family says no, and she won’t say anything at all. After filming he follows her and… something happens in extreme-wide-shot which I simply couldn’t make out on the VHS when I first watched this, but seemed clearer now, before Godfrey Cheshire further complicated it.

Or possibly all three Koker movies were made to explore AK’s deep interest in homework, and we’d more accurately call it the Homework Quadrilogy.

Watched all the box set extras. The included Cinema de Notre Temps episode is fantastic, a precursor to 10 on Ten. Crew follows him around as he drives familiar routes and looks for people he knows and interacts with random pedestrians. He finds the Friend’s Home kids yet again, catches up with the star of The Traveler, and teases them all about their acting… talks about truth and fiction, philosophically and in the specifics of his films.

by ·Comments Off on Life and Nothing More (1991, Abbas Kiarostami)

A city filmmaker is driving post-earthquake with his kid – per the commentary this is a re-enactment of a trip the director made with his son in the days after the quake – talking to his son with more patience and respect than young Ahmed ever got in the previous movie. For the first half hour they don’t give away the reason for the trip, then he finds a guy from Koker and shows a picture of Ahmed.

So we’re in a new fiction film responding to real events that involve the previous fiction film – but it gets more complicated. “A film has its own truth.” They find the guy who played the slow hunchback in part one, now playing “himself” with his house still standing after the quake, but he breaks character and calls this his “movie house,” says his real house was destroyed and he lives in a tent.

The kid, not understanding the scope of the situation, wants to buy a coke then complains that it’s warm. Later, to a mourning mother: “your daughter’s lucky she died – she’ll never have to do homework.” But the kid getting distracted from his dad’s trip and wanting to hang with some locals and watch soccer gives the movie its title: “The World Cup comes once every four years, and life goes on.”

One of the blu extras opens with an admiring quote from the other AK. Kiarostami made some 200 advertisements before working on features, and he supervised road repairs, which makes a lot of sense.

by ·Comments Off on Dogra Magra (1988, Toshio Matsumoto)

The Funeral Parade of Roses guy two decades later has turned to narrative… but it’s super-meta-psycho-narrative, at least. In the 1920s an institutionalized amnesiac is given conflicting stories by a hairy Dr. Detective and a bald Wacky Doctor, and instead of piecing together the real story, he either goes on a killing spree, or doesn’t.

Which of these doctors would you trust:

Labyrinth of Dreams was based on the same author’s work, and I wondered if the novel was an influence on Shutter Island. The boy went on to be a voice actor, most notably dubbing Leo in Titanic, and the not-bald doctor/detective Hideo Murota is in all the Kinji Fukasaku movies. Unsurprisingly this cinematographer also worked with Terayama.

by ·Comments Off on The Second Act (2024, Quentin Dupieux)

Meta-movie where the actors keep “breaking character” between takes because they are playing actors who are appearing in the first movie directed by AI (represented by a button-down man in a white void on a laptop screen). Louis Garrel is meeting Léa Seydoux for a date, she brings her dad Vincent Lindon, Louis brings his friend Yannick, who he’s hoping Léa can date instead. Manuel Guillot the waiter can’t handle the performance pressure and kills himself in his car (in character), then after the shoot he kills himself in his car. As a final meta-touch, it closes by showing us the extremely long track setup for the opening tracking shot. Filipe: “It does not really have much to say about AI or industry, but as a vehicle for a terrific group of actors who are as usual all-in in the filmmaker’s concept, this a very good time.”

by ·Comments Off on Scream 2 (1997, Wes Craven)

Wes Craven got sent to diversity training after the first movie, and this time Drew Barrymore and her doomed bf are played by Jada Pinkett (Demon Knight) and Omar Epps (Dracula 2000), who get killed during the premiere of the movie Stab based on Cox’s character’s book about the events of part one. This sort of meta-spiral inevitably leads to the Cinderhella scenes in Detention.

Neve is at college now, even more traumatized than she was in the last movie, with boyfriend Derek and roomie Hallie, who will both end up in Mission to Mars after failing to survive this movie. Also not surviving: Jamie Kennedy (this is for the best, he’s much less charming here than in part one) and sorority sister Buffy, who gets a big solo scene.

Or maybe Buffy is the Drew Barrymore, I dunno:

Arquette comes to campus after the killings start, crippled from getting stabbed in the first movie, as does Cox of course, and they are cute together. Her new cameraman Joel (Duane Martin of The Faculty) quits his job before getting killed, amazing. Jamie explains the sequel rules (bigger setpieces, higher body count) and Wes leans into the clever references with Friends jokes and generic Hollywoodized scenes of his own movie in Stab (feat. Luke Wilson as Skeet Ulrich), and there’s even a play-within-the-play (Neve is playing Casandra for drama teacher David Warner), which gives us a location for the final showdown.

They’ve kept the tradition of ghostface getting beat up in every encounter, and that of ghostface being two people. Everyone thinks it’s Neve’s boyfriend again but he’s innocent, fake-tortured by frat guys to a Jon Spencer song then murdered by film student Timothy Olyphant (Dreamcatcher), the crazy Lillard-type partner of Skeet’s revenge-seeking mom Laurie Metcalf. The ending needs work – we are asked to believe that a high-stacked pile of stones in a college theater production is made of actual stones. Liev Schreiber, wrongly imprisoned for Neve’s mom’s murder before part one, just wants TV interviews and fame and cash, keeps getting overlooked because of the second wave of killings so he will presumably get fed up and become the killer in part three.

Liev found your cat:

by ·Comments Off on Scream (1996, Wes Craven)

Opens with long takes stalking an increasingly upset Drew Barrymore, who tells the horror-trivia mystery caller/killer that the first Nightmare on Elm Street was great but the rest sucked, a confident/funny move from Craven. I last watched this the week before it opened wide, and liked it. But 1996 being the greatest year in human history for music and cinema (aka when I was 18), and having seen tens of thousands of teenagers murdered in horror movies since then, it’s hard to remember anything that happened past Drew’s terrible death, or to know whether this will still hold up (it does, now looking forward to the sequels).

Killahs:

Students who are vaguely bummed after the death of Drew and her barely-seen boyfriend: chaste ’96 Neve and her ever-patient boy Skeet, Rose and her boy Lillard, and lone wolf Jamie Kennedy, very funny as Randy the horror guy. Neve is still recovering from her mom’s violent murder a year ago, and being bothered about it by reporter Courteney Cox, who’s befriending Rose’s brother Deputy Arquette for access. Then they all start getting calls and visits from ghostface killahs and slinging blame around (to Jamie: “Maybe your movie-freaked mind lost its reality button”). Also good from Rose: “You’re starting to sound like some Wes Carpenter flick.”

Wes Carpenter, school janitor:

The kids always have alibis because the killer is both Skeet and Lillard. If I watch this again I’ll have to see if either of them walks with difficulty after the fight scenes, because Ghostface gets hit in the nuts in almost every encounter. So it’s a fun twisty mystery horror-comedy, with some absolute psychopaths at the center – they kill Neve’s mom and the school principal, kidnap her dad, and intended to slaughter everyone at the climactic party. I would’ve risked death to be at that party (Republica on the stereo, Prom Night on VHS, popcorn and original flavor Doritos).

Not returning in the sequels due to their deaths: Matthew Lillard, who went on to be Shaggy and also SLC Punk… Rose McGowan, who was only doing this between Araki films… Skeet: The Newton Boys then Ride With The Devil then nothing… Cox’s cameraman W. Brown: Deadwood… Drew Barrymore: Donnie Darko… and Henry “Winkler” Fonzarelli: Barry.

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 1973-ish Shorts

A follow-up to last year’s program, with some non-’73 films added for context.

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Heavy-Light (1973, Adam Beckett)

Video ghosts pong across the screen then engulf it, again and again with different RGBs and forms, sometimes in sync to the electro-spectral music. Adam seems cool – he was an animation pioneer who worked with the Hubleys and on Star Wars, and died young in a fire. Music by Barry Schrader, president of the electro-acoustical music society, who has recently worked with Wadada Leo Smith.

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Evolution of the Red Star (1973, Adam Beckett)

After a Chairman Mao intro we get rippling pen and paper red/blue line worms slowly blobbing across the screen, the shining red star and other geometrical pulsars holding fast in their spots. In the second half someone seems to be tweaking the settings on their tube TV until the rich color of the red star is restored and takes center stage again. Music by another electro-acoustical pioneer, Carl Stone, whose last few albums made some major top-tens.

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Diary (1974, Nedeljko Dragic)

Man is walking, then driving, going through as many transformations as the animator can dream up. Party and city scenes, mouse chasing cat, wild color shifts. English words and letters threaten to transform all people into language, but abstract forms win the day, and the man looks miserable about it. Better music than usual, always changing forms to suit the visuals. Won the grand prize at Zagreb.

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Production Stills (1970, Morgan Fisher)

Simply a film documenting its own making in real-time. We hear the crew working and discussing and see flashes as someone takes polaroids then pins them to the wall in front of the film camera. Reminds me of Michael Snow’s book.

P. Adams Sitney on Fisher: “Very quickly he became the most academically reductive practitioner of minimalist filmmaking … steadfastly resisted the sublime. Instead, he invented cinematic paradoxes.”

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Picture and Sound Rushes (1973, Morgan Fisher)

Fisher gives a a film technique lecture about picture and sound sync, reading from notes at a desk while an 11-miute timer counts down. We keep losing either sound or picture or both, as he explains why this will happen, breaking down the film’s structure – we lose sound and can’t hear the full description, but we’re also seeing it in action, so we can piece together the missing information. Self-reflexive structural pranksterism – the film is a lecture on itself and a demonstration of its own techniques.

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The Wilkinson Household Fire Alarm (1973, Morgan Fisher)

One-minute take of a rotating fire alarm which starts spinning then loses momentum like a wind-up toy.

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De?licieuse catastrophe (1970, Piotr Kamler)

Very blobby 3D scenarios. Person wearing bootleg liquid-engorged optical-illusion sweater engages with the Q-Bert bouncing sphere and plays his horn for a dust sprite until the electro-score gets stuck in a loop and the whole world overflows. The music is by – you’re not gonna believe it – an electro-acoustical pioneer, Robert Cohen-Solal. Kamler was Polish but his whole film career was in France

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Cours de secours / Heart of Relief (1973, Piotr Kamler)

Ornate cut-out cyclist balancing act upon a tug-o-war rope. Chess players atop the circus stack escape via light-balloon to correct imbalance caused by clockwork romantic pursuit so they can return to their game. Score by Francois Bayle, a “major figure” in electro-acoustical music.

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Le Pas (1975, Piotr Kamler)

Papery sheets peel off from the gleaming pink surface of a cube and land neatly in a new spot until the entire cube is transposed. A couple sheets stay airborne caressing each other in a film-edit lock-groove but eventually rejoin the cube. The sound is ethereal shimmers by Bernard Parmegiani, whose diverse body of work is mainly dedicated to electro-acoustical music.

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Orb (1973, Larry Jordan)

Following up Our Lady of the Sphere, more play with cut-out illustrations. Epilepsy-sun becomes balloon, ancient statues join an RGB disco, everything kinda floats away into space.

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Once Upon a Time (1974, Larry Jordan)

The same colors from the last movie with more direct music and less direct visuals. Narrated story about hearing a bird. Another voice, now it’s a radio play with a woman asking a bird for help finding the missing prince – she locates him in the bardo and says he must be born again.

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World (1970, Jordan Belson)

Sphere-lens smoke, the universe in a crystal ball. Sunflower spot patterns, TV static eyes, ink-blot anemone. A really good one. Wiki says Belson and Harry Smith got their start at the same time, but it’s Larry Jordan who reminded me of Smith… also says Belson did effects for The Right Stuff, that movie keeps coming up lately. P. Adams Sitney says this one is constrained “by a banal musical soundtrack,” says the abstract geometry recalls Allures.

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Meditation (1972, Jordan Belson)

Symmetrical spark shower, crashing waves, a human diver, then back into the ether, sphere-blobs slowly becoming other terrains and galaxies, the audio striking bells ringing long notes.

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Light (1973, Jordan Belson)

Piano score, very water-surface-looking light patterns, then wind, then rising sun. Blooming patterns as the music turns dark and electronic, harp with abstract forms in outer space, finally lens flare leading to fiery apocalypse. Can’t figure out how he did any of this.