Category Archives: Historical Movement / National Cinema Primers

March 25, 2013

A Mainland Chinese Cinema Primer

As far back as I can remember, I’ve always preferred films from Hong Kong and Taiwan to those from mainland China. This is in part because movies from the mainland have traditionally been subject to stricter censorship laws and have also been more likely to fall under the heading of propaganda. In the 1990s especially, my formative years as a budding cinephile, the films of so-called “5th generation” directors like Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige seemed simultaneously bloated, self-important and aesthetically safe, while the most exciting filmmakers from Taiwan (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Edward Yang, Tsai Ming-Liang) and Hong Kong (Wong Kar-Wai, Johnnie To, Stanley Kwan) seemed to be making vital state-of-the-planet addresses that were also on the cutting edge in terms of form. In more recent years, however, I’ve made a concerted effort to expand my knowledge of mainland Chinese movies, both new and old, and have come to admire many more of them, a lot of which are more artistically daring than I ever would have imagined. The following dozen titles encompass the silent era up through the present day.

The Goddess (Wu, 1934)

Ruan Lingyu is the most famous Chinese actress to have only worked in the silent era and, among her films that survive today, The Goddess is generally regarded as the best. (Although she starred in many movies until her death in 1935, they were all silents; as with most countries, sound film production began much later in China than in the U.S.) The Goddess tells the story of a noble single mother who prostitutes herself by night in order to raise her young son in relative comfort. Director Wu Yonggang offers both effective melodrama and potent sociological analysis as the ironically-named title character must contend with the physical assaults of a brutal pimp as well as the prejudice of the parents of her son’s classmates. Ruan’s emotive performance is both realistic and heartrending; one memorable scene was recreated exactly in Stanley Kwan’s superb Maggie Cheung-starring Ruan biopic Center Stage.

Song at Midnight (Ma-Xu, 1937)

Song at Midnight is what might result if you crossed Ozu’s Floating Weeds with The Phantom of the Opera. It concerns a traveling opera troupe that sets up shop in a spooky, old small-town theater. One young singer is having trouble performing but receives coaching from an unlikely source: a local former opera star who is hideously disfigured and haunts the shadowy theater like a ghost. A lengthy flashback reveals the origins of this “Phantom” character, which then ties back into the present-day plot, as the same villain sows trouble in both stories. This influential film (it spawned both a sequel and a remake) is good early Chinese horror crossed with a romantic drama; it boasts an intriguing and sympathetic monster-hero, wonderful make-up and a poetically creepy atmosphere. Well worth a look for aficionados of the genre.

Street Angel (Yuan, 1937)

Any plot synopsis of Street Angel would make it sound like a typically serious “social problem” picture: two sisters living in Shanghai eke out an existence as a prostitute and a teahouse singer, respectively. The younger sister, the singer, catches the eye of a local gangster, who conspires with her landlord to force her into prostitution as well. A charismatic trumpet player and street magician named Young Chen comes to the rescue by providing refuge to both sisters, but the gangster eventually finds their whereabouts . . . Incredibly, this scenario is played mostly as exuberant comedy, some of which gets downright slapsticky (e.g., Chen’s interactions with his “street friends”) and the whole thing is full of wonderful cinematic conceits from start to finish (from the montage of Shanghai nightlife that opens the film to the use of a sing-along bouncing ball above the Chinese subtitles during the musical numbers to the impressively fluid camerawork throughout). A one-of-a-kind masterpiece.

The Spring River Flows East (Cai/Zheng, 1947)

Movies don’t get any more devastating than this epic tragedy about the lives of ordinary people torn apart by war. The premise is that, after the Japanese invade China, a man, Zhang (Jin Tao), leaves behind his wife, Sufen, and their young son, to fight at the front. The family ends up separated for years, during which time Zhang eventually moves to Shanghai and marries another woman, while Sufen and their son endure one hardship after another. Zhang is reunited with his original family when, through a series of cruel twists of fate, Sufen gets a job as a maid in his new bourgeois home. Among the narrative arts, I’ve always felt movies can convey the passage of time — and thus scenes of reunion — exceptionally well. The heartbreaking reunion scene that concludes this film is worthy of being ranked alongside the finale of Mizoguchi’s Sansho the Bailiff.

Spring in a Small Town (Fei, 1948)

My favorite Mainland Chinese movie of all time is Fei Mu’s Spring in a Small Town, oftentimes invoked as the prototype for Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love. This intimate chamber drama follows the lives of four characters: a tubercular young man, Liyan, who lives in rural China with his wife, Yuwen, and his teen-aged sister, Meimei. Liyan’s childhood friend, Zhang, a city doctor who also happens to be Yuwen’s childhood ex-boyfriend, comes to stay for a visit, an event that soon plunges all of their lives into turmoil. Fei’s masterstroke was to tell this story primarily from the point-of-view of Yuwen (Wei Wei, in a remarkable performance), and the end result is poetic (it’s a portrait of “spring” as much as anything else), beautiful, highly emotional and even erotic. Tian Zhuangzhuang remade it more than 50 years later but, engaging as his film is, it can’t hold a candle to the original, which stands as one of the greatest post-war films made in any country.

Crows and Sparrows (Zheng, 1949)

Zheng Junli’s Crows and Sparrows has a special place in my heart; it was the first “classic” Chinese movie I ever saw (on VHS tape via the old International Film Circuit label) way back in the 1990s. This urban drama, directed by Zheng Junli (one of the co-directors of The Spring River Flows East), was completed before the Communist takeover in 1949 although Communist ideology is arguably present in the allegorical story of poor tenants banding together and standing up to their corrupt Nationalist landlord (who was also a traitor during the Sino-Japanese war). This works as a compelling drama in its own right but also functions as a fascinating window into a key transitional period of 20th century Chinese history.

Two Stage Sisters (Xie, 1964)

I had been aware of this film for years but it wasn’t until I recently saw the ravishing excerpts featured in Mark Cousins’ documentary The Story of Film, as well as interviews with director Xie Jin, that I finally got around to hunting it down and watching it. The plot, spanning the years 1935 – 1950, deals with the differing fortunes of two members of an all-female opera troupe, one of whom becomes involved in the Communist Revolution while the other marries the troupe manager and ends up leading a life of Western-style materialism (i.e., decadence). In spite of its obvious propagandistic aims, this was still condemned by the government for condoning “bourgeois values” and banned — although perhaps what it really objected to were the hints that there might be something more than friendship between the female leads. This beautiful color film is what I imagine would have resulted had Vincente Minnelli been working in the PRC circa 1964. Or, as my friend David Hanley would say: “The best communist loosely-based-on-true-story period piece melodrama revolutionary musical ever!”

Yellow Earth (Chen, 1985)

Many Western viewers first became aware of Chinese movies with the breakthrough international successes of Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou in the late 1980s. These “5th generation” directors, so named because they were roughly the fifth generation of filmmakers to emerge since the birth of Chinese cinema, graduated from the Beijing Film Academy in 1982 and revitalized an industry that had been lying dormant since before the Cultural Revolution. My favorite film of this movement is Yellow Earth, written and directed by Chen and shot by Zhang (who I wish had remained a cinematographer instead of becoming a director himself). This story of a Communist soldier collecting folk songs in rural China and befriending a family of peasants unfolds less through dialogue than through songs, beautiful landscape photography and patient editing rhythms, a style Chen would soon regrettably eschew in favor of Hollywood-style melodrama. Nonetheless, Yellow Earth is a landmark of world cinema that remains a treat for the senses.

The Horse Thief (Tian, 1986)

Even more bold than Yellow Earth as a non-narrative experience is Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Horse Thief, a film set in a gorgeous but remote area of Tibet where the thievery of the title character, the Buddhist Norbu, causes him to be exiled from his tribe and, amidst the harshest natural elements, he must fight for his family’s survival. There is virtually no dialogue in this film, which paradoxically resembles both a documentary as well as the most lyrical of narrative silent movies. Tian, who would later be banned from filmmaking for nearly a decade following his controversial film The Blue Kite, was always the most political of the fifth generation directors and The Horse Thief is no exception: in addition to its aesthetic and spiritual value, it also serves as a potent illustration of how poverty is the root of crime.

In the Heat of the Sun (Jiang, 1994)

My favorite mainland film of recent decades is this astonishing debut from actor/director Jiang Wen. Set in Beijing during the 1970s (though narrated by the main character from the vantage point of the present), this coming-of-age drama revolves around the shenanigans of the reckless teenage children of absentee Army-officer fathers, as they wile away an endless summer without supervision or consequences. This can be seen as a kind of mainland counterpart to Edward Yang’s masterpiece A Brighter Summer Day, as Jiang puts his alter-ago protagonist, “Monkey,” through the paces of both gang-fights and the pangs of first love. But what really sets this movie apart is the voice-over narration (provided by Jiang himself), which continually and cleverly reminds us that everything we see is a highly romanticized memory. The narration, combined with the bright, slightly overexposed images and excerpts from Mascagni’s Cavaleria rusticana on the soundtrack, ends up conveying — much better than most films — what it means to be alive.

Blush (Li, 1995)

Li Shaohong is one of the few women among China’s fifth generation of directors and I would say, based solely on this film (the only work of hers I’ve seen), one of the most talented. Blush is a piercing period melodrama about two women, “sisters” at the same brothel, who are forced into a re-education camp following the Communist takeover. Both eventually became involved with the same man, a former brothel client, leading to tragedy before concluding on a note of bittersweet resolution. The acting by the lead performers is terrific, and Li proves to be a director of uncommon visual sumptuousness: her extensive tracking shots, use of color and tightly packed compositions will linger with you for days.

The World (Jia, 2004)

Jia Zhangke is regarded by many critics as one of the key directors of the 21st century. While I can’t say I share this view of his filmography as a whole, I do regard his 2004 film The World as an unqualified masterpiece. Set in a Beijing theme park named “The World,” which boasts scale model replicas of the world’s most recognizable landmarks (the Eiffel Tower, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, etc.), and tracking the lives of the alienated workers within, this is both a powerfully realistic and ironic portrait of modern “global culture.” Jia’s use of long takes and long shots is masterful, the latter of which recalls Ozu (to whom Jia pays explicit homage by including a snatch of the Tokyo Story score on his soundtrack), and the use of animated interludes to represent cellular communication is inspired. Even if I don’t find any of his other movies on this same level, The World alone is enough to mark Jia as an important historian of the present.

This post is dedicated to my friend David Zou, a Chinese film blogger who insisted I watch In the Heat of the Sun.

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4 comments | tags: Blush, Cai Chusheng, Chen Kaige, Crows and Sparrows, Fei Mu, In the Heat of the Sun, Jia Zhangke, Jiang Wen, Li Shaohong, Ma-Xu Weibang, Song at Midnight, Spring in a Small Town, Street Angel, The Goddess, The Horse Thief, The Spring River Flows East, The World, Tian Zhuangzhuang, Two Stage Sisters, Wu Yonggang, Xie Jin, Yellow Earth, Yuan Muzhi, Zheng Junli | posted in Historical Movement / National Cinema Primers

February 11, 2013

A Sound-Era Soviet Cinema Primer

By michaelgloversmith

This is meant as a companion piece to my silent Soviet cinema primer from last year. It covers Soviet films from the beginning of the sound era – which, even more so than in most European countries – began much later than in the U.S. – through the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. As with most of these primers, I am limiting myself here to only one film per director. I will soon have a separate primer for movies made in Eastern Bloc countries outside of the Soviet Union that cover the same time span.

Enthusiasm (Vertov, 1931)

Dziga Vertov’s follow-up to the revolutionary Man with the Movie Camera was also his first sound film and, while less well-known than its predecessor, is in many ways just as astonishing. It begins with a memorable sequence in which a woman is listening to the radio on headphones; we hear a cacophony of music and sound effects that rhythmically interact with a series of documentary shots of urban Soviet life that feel almost as if they could be outtakes from Man with the Movie Camera (though the aggressively anti-Christian nature of some of the images mark it as a more explicitly propagandistic work). What eventually emerges is a celebratory portrait of Stalin’s first five-year plan, focusing specifically on coal miners and factory workers in the Donbass region (the film’s subtitle is literally translated as Symphony of Donbass). Vertov’s silent movies featured pounding editing rhythms but the addition of literal sound in Enthusiasm arguably leant his art a greater, more symphonic complexity. An essential work by one of cinema’s great avant-gardists.

Deserter (Pudovkin, 1933)

It seems somewhat curious that Vsevelod Pudovkin, a great director and film theorist, is less famous than Sergei Eisenstein (whose career spanned roughly the same time frame). In both the silent and early sound eras, Pudovkin showed just as much of a flair for associative montage as Eisenstein but, unlike his more theoretically-minded countryman, Pudovkin was more interested in wedding his radical editing techniques with traditional approaches to characterization and story construction. The story of Deserter, Pudovkin’s first sound movie, concerns Karl Renn, a German shipyard worker who “deserts” his striking co-workers and is consequently sent to the Soviet Union so that he can observe the virtues of proletarian solidarity firsthand. The use of sound is primitive (the film is often completely silent until an important sound effect or line of dialogue is required) but its implementation is still more creative than the strictly realistic use of sound being employed concurrently by Hollywood. Also notable for containing scenes that take place in Germany and feature German characters, unusual given the widespread anti-German sentiments in Russia at the time.

Outskirts (Barnet, 1933)

Although active as a director until his death by suicide in 1965, Boris Barnet is probably best known for his silent film work (e.g., The Girl with the Hatbox and Miss Mend). Outskirts (AKA The Patriots) was Barnet’s first sound movie and remains an unjustly underseen masterpiece of its era. The film is a comedy/drama about the residents of an unnamed town in rural Russia in the days leading up to World War I. It starts off as a comedy that boasts a delightful and innovative use of sound (where animals and even inanimate objects are given voice) but becomes increasingly serious after the war breaks out. Most surprising of all is the tender love subplot that develops between a Russian peasant girl and a German POW. Hopefully, Outskirts will someday receive the loving home video release it deserves and become much better known among cinephiles.

Aerograd (Dovzhenko, 1935)

The Ukrainian Aleksandr Dovzhenko was arguably the greatest narrative filmmaker working in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s and this early sound-era propaganda piece is one of his finest works. The plot is about the construction of an air field in remote far east Russia and, more specifically, the conflict it engenders between modern-day Bolsheviks and the rural and backwards “old believers” (read Orthodox Christians) who are being spurred on by Japanese saboteurs. But you don’t watch Dovzhenko for the plot, much less the propaganda. You watch him for his famed passages of incredible – and purely cinematic – lyricism: a briskly edited scene of a Russian sharpshooter chasing Japanese spies through a dense forest, beautiful nautical and aerial photography (including a thrilling climax involving paratroopers), and even quiet moments like the radiant smile on the face of a Chinese woman after she’s given birth to the son of her Russian-pilot husband. Operatic and sublime.

Ivan the Terrible, Parts I and II (Eisenstein, 1944-1958)

Sergei Eisenstein’s final movies were the first two parts of an unfinished trilogy about the life of the 17th-century military leader who crowned himself the first tsar of Russia. The films deal with Ivan’s attempts to unify his homeland while fending off both foreign invaders and would-be usurpers within his own inner circle. This has all of the virtues of Alexander Nevsky (spectacle, pageantry, a poetic view of history-as-myth, and a stirring Sergei Prokofiev score), minus the earlier movie’s more dubious pro-militaristic elements. Plus, in the second part (the release of which was delayed by a decade due to Stalin’s personal objections), there is a beautiful color sequence that resembles early two-strip Technicolor, and even a proto-campy musical number. This has my vote for being Eisenstein’s finest achievement.

The Cranes Are Flying (Kalatozov, 1957)

Veronica and Boris are young lovers in Moscow whose lives are interrupted by the outbreak of World War II. He is drafted and sent to the front while she becomes a nurse and is pressured into an unhappy marriage with his cousin. This film, a kind of bleak Russian cousin to King Vidor’s The Big Parade, was groundbreaking in terms of form and content: the extensive use of handheld camera was revolutionary for a pre-Nouvelle Vague narrative feature, and it is not only remarkably propaganda-free but also taboo-busting as a social document of life during wartime in the Soviet Union. If one wants to understand Andre Bazin’s theory of the relationship between long-take, deep-focus images and “realism,” this masterpiece from the legendary Mikhail Kalatozov (Salt for Svanetia, I am Cuba) could handily serve as “Exhibit A.” The title refers to shots of birds in flight that bookend the film but it might equally refer to the epic crane shots that Kalatozov employs throughout, which give the film an awesome sense of fluidity.

Hamlet (Kozintsev, 1964)

As much as I admire Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh’s versions (not to mention Michael Almereyda’s underrated postmodern take), Grigori Kozintsev’s 1964 adaptation remains far and away my favorite film adaptation of Hamlet. It strikes me as being the most realistic as well as the most cinematic: the action is captured almost entirely in long and medium shots via beautiful black and white ‘Scope cinematography and, combined with the stunning locations (including a real beach and a massive castle set that took six months to construct), they conjure up a gloomy, atmospheric mood perfectly suited to the story. Interestingly, Kozintsev stages Hamlet’s soliloquies as internal monologues; the “To be or not to be” speech is presented as voice-over narration as Hamlet wanders alone along a barren, rocky shoreline. This is also in many ways a uniquely Russian production: the script is base on a lauded 1941 translation by Boris Pasternak (Doctor Zhivago) and the great original score was composed by none other than Dmitri Shostokovich.

Andrei Rublev (Tarkovsky, 1966)

Andrei Tarkovsky’s austere, epic biopic of the famed 15th century icon painter is for my money the greatest movie ever made about the life of an artist. Told in vignette fashion, Tarkovsky depicts Rublev’s story against the turbulent backdrop of medieval Russia during the Tatar invasions. The highlight is the climactic sequence where Rublev, who has sworn a vow of silence in protest of the horrors he has seen, witnesses a mere boy overseeing the arduous process of the casting of a giant bell. The boy saves himself from government execution by successfully casting the bell in spite of the fact that he doesn’t really know what he’s doing. At the conclusion of this awe-inspiring 30 minute scene, the depiction of a miracle that feels like a miracle of filmmaking, Rublev is inspired not only to speak again but to continue painting and to create his greatest works.

The Color of Pomegranates (Parajanov, 1968)

Sergei Parajanov’s biopic of the 16th-century Armenian poet Sayat Nova is probably the least conventional take on its subject one could imagine. This might be better referred to as a work of poetry in its own right rather than a film about poetry – a series of fragmented, lyrical, incredibly beautiful scenes from the life of the famed poet (played by actor Sofiko Chiaureli, who also plays four other roles) that employ a purposeful, symbolic use of color, and contain barely any dialogue. This was, unsurprisingly, heavily censored (and even retitled) by Soviet authorities upon its initial release. The homoeroticism, religious imagery and overall abstract nature apparently made them very nervous. But you can’t keep a good film down: the uncut version of The Color of Pomegranates was re-released to wide acclaim in the 1980s and is a frequent staple on the “best of” lists of many critics and cinephiles.

The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath! (Ryazanov, 1975)

A lot of the films on this list are dark, heavy, serious and slow-paced dramas (especially those immediately preceding and following this entry). This is partly a reflection of my personal taste and partly due to the way Russian and Ukrainian art films have always tended to receive wider distribution internationally than the movies that have been more popular domestically. I am, however, delighted to include at least one crowd-pleasing comedy on this list, Eldar Ryazanov’s legendary The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath!. This feel-good, sentimental rom-com is paradoxically both Russian-to-the-bone and universal in its broad appeal: the screwball premise is that Zhenya, a shy doctor, is about to be engaged. After binge-drinking with friends on New Year’s Eve he ends up passing out in an apartment in Leningrad that he mistakenly believes is his own Moscow apartment (it looks the same and even has the same street name and number). Hijinks ensue when the apartment’s true tenant, Nadya, comes home and discovers this strange man in his underwear in her bed. The confusion engendered by this “compromising position” causes problems for not only Zhenya and his fiancee but Nadya and her fiancee as well. What starts off quite farcical (who knew that the uniformity of Brezhnev-era architecture could yield such comic gold?) slowly, almost imperceptibly, turns into a moving romantic drama. I’m told that this still plays on television in Russia every New Year’s Eve, holding the same beloved place in their culture that It’s a Wonderful Life does in America.

The Ascent (Shepitko, 1977)

Larisa Shepitko was a director of enormous intelligence and integrity who tragically died in a car accident at the young age of 40 (with many more great movies undoubtedly ahead of her). The final film she completed before her death is this harrowing, indelible masterwork about the persecution of partisans in Nazi-occupied Belarus during World War II, which some feel is the finest Soviet film of the 1970s. In adapting a novel by Vasili Bykov – about the two Soviet soldiers and their futile mission to find supplies in a bleak, snowy landscape populated by Nazi collaborators – Shepitko has crafted an experience so austere, and infused it with so much Christian symbolism, that she makes Tarkovsky look both secular and populist. The drastically different way that her two protagonists meet their fates allows for Shepitko to engage the viewer in a dialogue of uncommon moral complexity. For sheer intensity, this wartime drama is topped only by her husband Elem Klimov’s Come and See from eight years later (see below).

Come and See (Klimov, 1985)

Veteran director Elem Klimov’s final testament, Come and See, is the single most disturbing, and therefore effective, war movie I have ever seen. This tackles somewhat similar terrain as The Ascent, the final film of Larisa Shepitko (Klimov’s late wife) in that it concerns the conflict between Belarussian partisans and their Nazi occupiers during the height of World War II. What makes this film so unsettling and unforgettable is that all of the events are seen through the eyes of a little boy, a Belarussian peasant who joins the partisans and thus witnesses horrors that no one should ever have to face, least of all a child. Before the horrors begin however, there is a mesmerizing, almost unimaginably lovely sequence in which Florya, the protagonist, witnesses a young girl dancing on a tree stump in the rain, as well as a surreal coda in which images of Hitler’s life are shown in reverse order from adulthood all the way back to when he was himself a child. Without these bookending sequences, the film’s depiction of unending suffering might well be unwatchable. Klimov said he lost interest in making films after Come and See, stating, “Everything that was possible I felt I had already done.” He’s not exaggerating.

6 comments | tags: Aerograd, Aleksandr Dovzhenko, Alexander Dovzhenko, Andrei Rublev, Andrei Tarkovsky, Boris Barnet, Come and See, Deserter, Dziga Vertov, Eldar Ryazanov, Elem Klimov, Enthusiasm, Grigori Kozintsev, Hamlet, Ivan the Terrible Part I, Ivan the Terrible Part II, Larisa Shepitko, Mikhail Kalatozov, Outskirts, Sergei Eisenstein, Sergei Parajanov, The Ascent, The Color of Pomegranates, The Cranes are Flying, The Irony of Fate, The Irony of Fate or Enjoy Your Bath!, Vsevolod Pudovkin | posted in Film Reviews, Historical Movement / National Cinema Primers

January 14, 2013

A Bluffer’s Guide to Indian Cinema

By michaelgloversmith

India has – and has had for most of cinema’s history – the second most prolific film industry in the world behind the United States. I confess, however, that I don’t know very much about Indian movies, in large part because any enthusiasm I’ve felt towards Bollywood, the insanely popular mainstream Hindi-language film industry known for their epic musicals, has always been tempered by a certain befuddlement. Something in me is always baffled by their unique and nutty combination of extreme melodrama, strict censorship and 15-minute song-and-dance numbers; some culture gaps, alas, feel well-nigh insurmountable. Nonetheless, I am a fan of Bengali art cinema and I have seen just enough Hindi movies that I do admire that I was able to put together not so much a national cinema primer but what is probably more appropriately referred to as a bluffer’s guide to Indian film. I can wholeheartedly recommend the following dozen movies, the best I have seen to come out of one of the world’s most celebrated and interesting film industries.

Awara (Kapoor, 1951)

Raj Kapoor both directed and starred in this outrageously contrived Dickensian melodrama, considered one of the essential Hindi films of the Fifties. There are elements of Neorealism, Surrealism and Hollywood-style star-crossed romance in this story of a judge who disowns his pregnant wife, believing her to be unfaithful. The child grows up to a be a charismatic, Chaplin-esque thief unaware of his true father’s identity. Eventually he meets and falls in love with Rita (the sensual Nargis Dutt), a beautiful young female lawyer who turns out to be – you guessed it – the judge’s adopted daughter. My favorite sequence in the film’s three hour-plus running time is a wild musical number/dream scene featuring massive sets depicting heaven and hell that look like they could have been designed by Salvador Dali. But all of the scenes between Kapoor and Dutt delight in their eyebrow-raising eroticism.

The Apu Trilogy (Ray, 1955 – 1959)

Satyajit Ray began his film career by creating this celebrated trilogy of films released over a span of five years. It consists of Pather Panchali (1955), Aparjito (1956) and The World of Apu (1959), although the movies work so well as a whole it is arguably more meaningful to consider them that way as opposed to stand alone works. Over the course of these films we witness the coming of age of Apu, a little boy in a rural Bengali village, his growing awareness of both death and the outside world, his unlikely success at school, his blossoming career as a writer and, eventually, his own experiences with marriage and fatherhood. As much as any great work of art, these humane, wise, ultra-realistic and heartbreaking films capture the very essence of what it means to live. The soundtrack for each also features an excellent original score by Ravi Shankar (RIP).

Pyaasa (Dutt, 1957)

One of the key films of the golden age of Hindi cinema is this dark melodrama/musical about an unemployed alcoholic poet named Vijay and his relationships to two very different women – the college girlfriend who left him for a man with better financial prospects (and thus inspired much of his poetry) and the prostitute with the proverbial heart of gold who supports his burgeoning literary career. Director Guru Dutt, who certainly must have identified with his tortured-artist protagonist, is credited as the first director of Hindi musicals to seamlessly integrate songs into his storylines (not unlike what Vincente Minnelli did in Hollywood). Stylishly shot in black and white, this shows a better grasp of film aesthetics than any Bollywood film I’ve seen in more recent decades.

The Cloud-Capped Star (Ghatak, 1960)

Next to Satyajit Ray, the most prominent exponent of Indian art cinema is the Bengali director Ritwik Ghatak, whose film The Cloud-Capped Star is generally regarded as his finest work. It tells the story of a family of Pakistani refugees living on the outskirts of Calcutta. The protagonist is Nita, the beautiful youngest daughter of the family, who sacrifices her education, her fiance and, eventually, her life, to ensure the well-being of her brothers, sister and parents. This study of female suffering and self-sacrifice is like an Indian version of one of Kenji Mizoguchi’s mature masterpieces – minus, of course, the prostitution. In other words, an overwhelming emotional experience.

Mughal-E-Azam (K. Asif, 1960)

This impressive period drama is based on a popular Indian folk tale about a 16th century Hindustan prince who falls in love with a slave girl (well, more like a lowly “court dancer”) over the objections of his Emperor father. This conflict eventually causes the prince to incite his father’s army into rebellion, causing a full-blown civil war. While all of the narrative ingredients of this film are familiar from Hollywood, what really makes it noteworthy is the ridiculously epic scale: opulent set and costume design for which no expenses were spared, a battle scene with thousands of extras that feels like something out of Eisenstein, and, best of all, ravishing Technicolor sequences for some of the musical numbers. Director K. Asif only directed one other film besides this and it’s no wonder; it took him the better part of a decade to complete. A milestone in Indian cinema.

Charulata (Ray, 1964)

My favorite Satyajit Ray film is this 1964 masterpiece, the title of which is sometimes translated as The Lonely Wife. It tells the story of Charu, a housewife with an interest in literature, whose wealthy husband is preoccupied with his business of running an English language newspaper. The husband’s younger brother comes to visit and forms an instant intellectual bond with Charu that threatens to turn into something more serious. The psychology and emotions of the characters are vividly captured by both a flawless cast of performers as well as Ray’s atypically daring use of film form (i.e., camerawork, editing and even optical effects) that suggests the influence of the French New Wave; highlights include the impressionistic swing set scene and the unforgettable final freeze frame.

A River Called Titas (Ghatak, 1973)

Ritwik Ghatak adapts a popular Bengali novel by Advaita Malo Barman for this powerful neorealist study of one of the poorest regions in India. The film’s unusual and complex story proceeds in fits and starts, following a diverse group of characters including a woman who is kidnapped by pirates the day after her wedding, her husband who goes mad as a result, and the child she is forced to raise alone. After becoming assimilated into a desolate fishing village whose inhabitants are at war with the local capitalist landowners, the mother dies and the son is raised by an “auntie” who coincidentally also lost her husband immediately after marrying. What makes this film so memorable is Ghatak’s poetic feeling for landscapes and the ordinary villagers whose lives play out against its cyclical, natural rhythms.

Sholay (Sippy, 1975)

I would characterize most of the Bollywood films I’ve seen as hokey, sloppily made and just downright bizarre (and I say this as someone who thinks the populist Hong Kong cinema of the late 20th century arguably represents the greatest era for any regional cinema ever). However, even I was overawed by this legendary “curry western” about an ex-cop who hires two notorious but good-hearted thieves to hunt down the vicious bandit who massacred his family. Director Ramesh Shippy liberally borrows from Sergio Leone, Sam Peckinpah and Seven Samurai (or is it The Magnificent Seven?) in crafting an outrageous action/revenge epic with a uniquely Indian flavor. This has it all: endearing protagonists, a memorably hateful villain, broad comedy, a love subplot, terrific action set pieces that boast impressive stunts, crisp editing and slow-motion, as well as vibrant color cinematography and, yes, musical numbers. For anyone curious about yet unfamiliar with Bollywood, this is the movie you should see first.

Purana Mandir (Ramsay/Ramsay, 1984)

Made by the famous Ramsay brothers, this batshit crazy horror/comedy/romance/musical hybrid begins with the origin story of an ancient curse placed on a royal family by a demon. The curse prohibits any of the family’s female heirs from marrying lest they die in childbirth. The film then flashes forward to the present where a recently-engaged female descendant travels with her fiance and another couple to the old temple where the demon, Samri, is buried, in an attempt to break the curse. This ridiculous concoction mixes low-comedy with big scares (Samri’s make-up is genuinely creepy), and features, yes, many musical numbers besides. Think of a Bollywood version of The Evil Dead and you’ll have some idea of what the Ramsay brothers are up to – though the filmmakers also manage to improbably shoehorn in plot elements borrowed from Sholay and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Ajit Singh’s musical score, which alternates between romantic ballads and atmospheric horror movie music, is a consistent delight.

Lagaan (Gowariker, 2001)

In the late 19th century, British colonialists strike a deal with the impoverished Indian villagers under their rule: if the natives can defeat the Brits in a game of cricket (a sport heretofore unknown in India), they won’t have to pay “lagaan” (i.e., land tax) for the next three years. But if the Indians lose, they’ll have to pay triple the amount they usually owe. It is up to Bhuvan (producer/lead actor Amir Khan), a humble but courageous farmer, to teach his fellow villagers cricket for the big match to be held in just three months time. This is considered one of the best Bollywood films of the 21st century and it’s certainly one of the most accessible to non-devotees: there are no abrupt tonal shifts or out-of-the-blue climactic fistfights that mar so many films from this industry. What you have instead is a rousing, three-and-a-half-hour underdog sports drama – think Rocky with musical numbers – crossed with the rousing, anti-colonialist message of something like Tsui Hark’s Once Upon a Time in China.

3 comments | tags: A River Called Titas, Aparajito, Ashutosh Gowariker, Awara, Charulata, Guru Dutt, K. Asif, Lagaan, Mughal-E-Azam, Pather Panchali, Purana Mandir, Pyaasa, Raj Kapoor, Ramesh Sippy, Ritwik Ghatak, Satyajit Ray, Sholay, Shyam Ramsay, The Cloud-Capped Star, The World of Apu, Tulsi Ramsay | posted in Film Reviews, Historical Movement / National Cinema Primers

December 3, 2012

A Scandinavian Cinema Primer

By michaelgloversmith

For most international movie aficionados, including me, the Swedish maestro Ingmar Bergman has long been seen as the dominant “commercial face” of Scandinavian cinema, with the more austere Dane Carl Theodore Dreyer lurking in the shadows just behind him. Creating today’s post was a great excuse for me to delve much deeper into Scandinavia’s rich cinematic heritage, especially for the chance to see many more classic films from Norway and Finland. Enjoy.

The Phantom Carriage (Sjostrom, Sweden, 1921)

My favorite Swedish movie ever is this silent classic by Victor Sjostrom that masterfully combines melodramatic conventions with gothic horror overtones and proved a major influence on both Ingmar Bergman and Stanley Kubrick (the latter of whom clearly took his climax for The Shining from here). The irresistible premise is that the last sinner to die on New Year’s Eve must drive the “phantom carriage” that collects the souls of the dead for the next calendar year. A masterpiece of moody atmospherics with special effects that still impress today. The Criterion Collection’s Blu-ray, featuring an intense experimental score by the band KTL, is a wonder.

Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (Christensen, Denmark, 1922)

Benjamin Christensen’s fascinating documentary/narrative hybrid begins by alternating static shots of paintings and drawings with intertitles that provide a historical overview of witchcraft and devil worship in medieval Europe. This is followed by a lengthy section dramatizing the practice of witchcraft as well as the witch hunts they inspired. The final section cleverly denounces the witch hunts by comparing the behavior of medieval “witches” with women suffering from “hysteria” and other mental illnesses in the present day of 1922. Essential viewing for anyone interested in horror and the occult.

The Saga of Gosta Berling (Stiller, Sweden, 1924)

Mauritz Stiller’s terrific romantic drama charts the picaresque adventures of the title character, a disgraced former minister who becomes a tutor at the home of a wealthy countess. Gosta ends up romancing both the countess’ stepdaughter and daughter-in-law, sewing tragedy in the lives of the individual family members and spelling disaster for their large estate as a whole. Director Stiller executes many impressive set pieces, the most prominent of which is the climactic inferno, over the film’s epic three-hour running time. Lars Hanson as Gosta Berling and Greta Garbo as the daughter-in-law are both magnetic performers who would unsurprisingly soon wind up in Hollywood.

Day of Wrath (Dreyer, Denmark, 1943)

The first sound film that Carl Dreyer made in his native Denmark is this great work of art about religious intolerance, hypocrisy and persecution in the 17th century. While “witches” are being burned at the stake, a beautiful young woman marries an elderly pastor and then embarks on an affair with his son, leading to Gosta Berling-style tragedy for everyone. This is no stolid “period drama” however but rather a vital piece of filmmaking with incredibly atmospheric cinematography, restrained but razor sharp performances and a story that brims with obvious parallels to the question-and-torture methods of the Nazis. One of the essential films of its era.

Cross of Love (Tulio, Finland, 1946)

Teuvo Tulio was a master of the Finnish melodrama (he apparently had the same influence on the Kaurismaki brothers that Douglas Sirk had on R.W. Fassbinder) and Cross of Love is considered in Finland to be his finest hour. Here Tulio loosely adapts a Pushkin story in this chronicle of a lighthouse keeper’s daughter who runs away to the big city with a shipwrecked businessman who has ignoble intentions. Seduced and abandoned, she soon finds herself walking the streets as a prostitute but can she find redemption in the love of a naive young artist? Of course not. This is a more extreme and sexually frank variation on the kinds of melodramas coming out of Hollywood at the time. Blonde Bombshell Regina Linnanheimo justifiably won a Jussi (or “Finnish Oscar”) for her lead performance. Has Guy Maddin seen this? If not, he should.

Kon-Tiki (Heyerdahl, Norway/Sweden, 1950)

Thor Heyerdahl was a Norwegian scientist who believed that the Polynesian Islands had been settled by South American natives (not Asian explorers as had been assumed for hundreds of years previously). To prove his theory, he travelled to Peru with a team of five other men, constructed a primitive raft of Balsa wood (the only kind that pre-Columbian Indians could have used) and sailed across the Pacific Ocean to Polynesia in a trip lasting 101 grueling days. He also brought along a motion picture camera and recorded the extraordinary expedition for posterity. The end result, which the beloved Heyerdahl (he was voted “Norwegian of the century” in a poll of his countrymen) not only directed but wrote, shot, edited and narrated, is simply one of the best and most awe-inspring documentaries I’ve ever seen.

The White Reindeer (Blomberg, Finland, 1952)

Now here’s something different: a Finnish horror film based on a folk tale about a woman who transforms herself into a white reindeer-vampire and feeds on the male members of a tribe in remote Lapland. What’s most interesting about the scenario, aside from the stark photography of the bleak and frozen landscapes, is how the reindeer woman is treated as both monster and object of pity: the transformation occurs after the lonely woman visits a shaman and asks him to cast a spell that will bring her frequently traveling husband back home to her. Credit for this refreshingly sympathetic take on the “other” probably belongs to the stunning actress Mirjami Kuosmanen who also co-wrote the script with her husband, director/cinematographer Erik Blomberg.

Ordet (Dreyer, Denmark, 1955)

Carl Dreyer’s penultimate film is this transcendentally uplifting drama adapted from a play by Danish pastor Kaj Monk. The slowly, exquisitely paced story takes place in a rural farming community and centers on the Borgen family, which consists of a widower father and his three grown sons. Issues of faith, love in many forms, and repression are profoundly explored when the wife of the eldest son dies and the middle son, a religious fanatic who believes he is Jesus, claims to have the power to bring her back to life. This is not merely a film about religion; it is a spiritually intense experience unto itself, one that can even – or perhaps especially – be appreciated as such by an old atheist like me.

The Unknown Soldier (Laine, Finland, 1955)

This incredible Finnish war movie should prove a real eye-opener to North American viewers. It chronicles the “Continuation War” of 1941-1944, which took place concurrently with WWII and involved Finland attacking the Soviet Union to try and regain territory that the Russians had occupied for the previous several years. In adapting a novel by Väinö Linna, director Edvin Laine has created a realistic war film centered on a machine gun crew that features a terrific ensemble cast, a healthy dose of black comedy and a powerful musical score. In short, The Unknown Soldier trumps most contemporary war movies – even those with much higher budgets and gore quotients.

Nine Lives (Skouen, Norway, 1957)

The amazing true story of Jan Baalsrud, the lone survivor of a Nazi attack while on a sabotage mission with other Finnish soldiers during WWII. Fleeing his Nazi pursuers on foot, Baalsrud traveled for weeks through the snowy mountain terrain of northern Norway to reach neutral Sweden. Along the way, he went snowblind, cut off his own frostbitten toes and relied on the kindness of random strangers for food and lodging. Through it all, as Baalsrud puts it in a memorable line of dialogue, nothing seems capable of killing this old fox. Nine Lives was impressively shot on real locations that make one feel cold just watching it. In 1991, Norwegian television viewers voted this the best Norwegian movie of all time.

The Seventh Seal (Bergman, Sweden, 1957)

Everyone has personal tastes that are idiosyncratic and subjective and that is as it should be. In spite of the fact that Ingmar Bergman is almost unanimously critically acclaimed as one of the greatest directors of all time, I’ve never been able to warm up to his work (in spite of trying repeatedly). His films strike me as too self-consciously serious and their merits more theatrical and literary than cinematic. Nonetheless, I would be remiss if I didn’t include one of his movies on this list. I’m choosing The Seventh Seal not only because it has more humor than most of Bergman’s dramas but also because it has been so massively influential on an international scale: the image of Max Von Sydow as a knight during the crusades literally playing chess with the Grim Reaper conjures up the notion of a foreign language “art film” more succinctly than any other. Everyone with an interest in movies, whether I like it or not, should see The Seventh Seal.

Gertrud (Dreyer, Denmark, 1964)

Carl Dreyer’s final film is an adaptation of Hjalmar Soderberg’s 1906 play of the same title and its deceptively theatrical character is also reminiscent of Ibsen (a protoypical feminist heroine) and Strindberg (the eternal conflict between men and women). But there are few films as truly and wonderfully cinematic as Gertrud, whose unique combination of stillness, slowness and whiteness is perfectly suited to capturing the title character’s near-religious view of romantic love as an uncompromising ideal. A lot of men seem to love Gertrud but none love her as much as she requires and so she chooses to live alone – without regrets. Unforgettable for its use of long takes (one of which clocks in at 10 minutes) and Nina Pens Rode’s luminous lead performance.

Hunger (Carlsen, Norway, 1966)

Henning Carlsen’s adaptation of Knut Hamsun’s famous autobiographical novel of the same title tells the story of a starving writer’s attempts to find love, food and a publisher for his novel. Although it lacks the ferocious intensity of its first person literary source, this is still crucial viewing, especially for Per Oscarsson’s tremendous lead performance as the writer Pontus whose mental state increasingly collapses as he wanders the streets of Christiana (soon to become Oslo), living the credo of an absurdly idealistic artist and vainly refusing all charity. A fresh and compelling take on the stereotype of the tortured artist.

8 comments | tags: Arne Skouen, Benjamin Christensen, Carl Dreyer, Cross of Love, Day of Wrath, Det sjunde inseglet, Edvin Laine, Erik Blomberg, Gösta Berlings saga, Gertrud, Haxan, Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages, Henning Carlsen, Hunger, Ingmar Bergman, Kon-Tiki, Korkarlen, Mauritz Stiller, Ni Liv, Nine Lives, Ordet, Rakkauden risti, Sult, Teuvo Tulio, The Phantom Carriage, The Saga of Gosta Berling, The Seventh Seal, The Unknown Soldier, The White Reindeer, Thor Heyerdahl, Tuntematon sotilas, Valkoinen peura, Victor Sjostrom, Vredens dag | posted in Film Reviews, Historical Movement / National Cinema Primers

September 24, 2012

A Silent French Cinema Primer

By michaelgloversmith

Following my French cinema primers covering the Nouvelle Vague and the pre-Nouvelle Vague sound era, today’s post covers what I think are the most essential French movies of the silent era. Although I normally only write about feature films in these primers, I’m going to make an exception for this one so that I can cover some of the most influential French films of the era.

Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (Lumieres, France, 1896)

Bertrand Tavernier has referred to this Lumiere Brothers masterpiece as the “first horror movie” because, as legend has it, early audiences reacted to the image of a train moving towards the camera by fleeing in terror. This is a simple “actuality” that depicts just what the title states in a single shot lasting approximately 42 seconds. But it’s also a good example of how well made the Lumiere Brothers’ films were: the dramatic contrast of the black and white cinematography, coupled with the diagonal perspective of the composition, makes the film an aesthetically pleasing experience even when viewed today. It can be seen in its entirety on YouTube by clicking the image above.

A Trip to the Moon (Melies, France, 1902)

Georges Melies was the polar opposite of the Lumieres; he made narrative films in the fantasy genre that showcased trick photography and special effects. He also shot all of his movies in an ingeniously constructed glass-walled studio in Paris. Melies’ most famous film is A Trip to the Moon, a 14-minute sci-fi adventure about astronomers making a maiden moon voyage, where they do battle with the moon’s alien inhabitants before triumphantly returning to earth. This gained renewed fame when it became a major reference point in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo and was subsequently re-released in a splendidly restored color version. I’m including a link to a YouTube video above but please note that the image quality here is far inferior to what you will find on the magnificent Flicker Alley blu-ray released earlier this year.

The Life of Christ (AKA The Birth, the Life and the Death of Christ) (Guy, France, 1906)

Alice Guy, a true movie pioneer, began her directing career in 1896 and is sometimes credited as the first person to make a narrative film (as opposed to Lumiere-style actualities). A DVD compilation of her work released by Kino in 2009 is a revelation: it contains stunt comedies, panoramic views of exotic places, and fascinating early experiments with sound and color. My favorite of her films that I’ve seen is The Life of Christ, which recounts “the greatest story ever told” in 25 single-shot tableaux-like scenes that, at 33 minutes, made it relatively epic in 1906. Especially effective is the climactic resurrection, which is bolstered by a beautiful score on Kino’s DVD. This is my second favorite Jesus movie after Pasolini’s.

A Child of Paris (Perret, France, 1913)

Also included in Kino’s “Gaumont Treasures” DVD set is a an entire platter devoted to Leonce Perret, an important director previously unknown in the States. The major revelation of the set is A Child of Paris, a feature film from 1913 that is shockingly sophisticated in terms of its cinematography (including the kind of camera movements and oblique compositions that wouldn’t become commonplace for years to come). The Dickensian story concerns a little girl who becomes an orphan, is sent to a boarding school, runs away and then is kidnapped by a gang of thieves. The acting is surprisingly naturalistic for the time and the use of real locations – in Paris and Nice – is impressive in the extreme.

Les Vampires (Feuillade, 1915-1916)

The brilliant, prolific Louis Feuillade directed over 600 movies, many of them multi-part serials, before his death at 52. Les Vampires, which is not about vampires but rather a gang of nocturnal thieves who call themselves “The Vampires,” is one of the highlights of his career. The leader of the gang is a woman named Irma Vep (played by the ferocious, outrageously sexy actress Musidora) who finds herself matching wits with ace newspaper reporter Philippe Guérande and his comical sidekick Oscar Mazamette. This was much beloved by the Surrealists for its evocation of an elaborate criminal network festering beneath the surface of mainstream bourgeois society as well as, one presumes, a capture-and-escape narrative loop structure that stands in opposition to the typical closure of Hollywood. Nearly a hundred years later, this 10 part mystery serial has lost none of its power to entertain for the entire duration of its nearly 7 hour running time.

Tih Minh (Feuillade, 1918)

Jacques d’Athys, a French adventurer, returns to his home in Nice after an expedition to Indochina where he has picked up a Eurasian fiancee and a book that, unbeknownst to him, contains a coded message revealing the whereabouts of both secret treasures and sensitive government intelligence. This makes him the target of foreign spies, including a Marquise of mysterious Latin origin, a Hindu hypnotist and an evil German doctor, who will stop at nothing to obtain the book. Louis Feuillade’s 12 chapter, 7 hour serial is overflowing with action, thrills, humor and romance, and is a strong contender for the title of the most purely entertaining movie that I have ever seen from any era.

Coeur Fidèle (Epstein, 1923)

My favorite French silent feature is Jean Epstein’s Impressionist masterpiece about a young woman, Marie, whose cruel foster parents force her into a marriage with an unemployed, alcoholic thug ironically named “Petit Paul.” Marie nonetheless continues to pine for her true love, Jean, a local dockworker. This romantic triangle is infused with sublime visuals from beginning to end (including a highly poetic use of superimpositions, rapid-fire cutting and close-ups) that make the film a crushing emotional experience when viewed today. The famous merry-go-round sequence, with its striking imagery and musical rhythms, is one of the glories of the silent cinema.

Ménilmontant (Kirsanoff, 1926)

Dmitri Kirsanoff’s astonishing 38 minute short is arguably the most modern-looking film produced anywhere in the silent era. The story, told without intertitles, revolves around two sisters who, as children living in a small town, tragically witness their parents being murdered. Then, Kirsanoff flashes forward to years later as both sisters are living in Paris and become involved with an evil seducer. But no plot description can do justice to the way Kirsanoff uses his camera like a paintbrush to capture images of incredible beauty and emotional depth. The film’s tempo ranges from fast, Soviet-style montage to a deliberately arty languorousness depending on the mood of the characters, and contributes to an atmosphere of almost unbearable intensity. Finally, there is the brilliantly understated lead performance of Nadia Sibirskaïa (Kirsanoff’s wife) who, in the film’s most celebrated scene, contemplates suicide before changing her mind when a complete stranger offers her bread in a public park. Ménilmontant is on my short list of near-perfect movies.

Napoléon (Gance, 1927)

First, I must confess to having only seen this on VHS tape in a controversial restoration overseen by Francis Ford Coppola that was both incomplete and transferred at the wrong speed. The arguably nationalistic and pro-militaristic content of the film also strikes me as somewhat dubious. But . . . as an insanely gargantuan, impossibly ambitious work of pure cinema, this has few equals. Gance’s film begins with Napoleon as a child engaging in a snowball fight at a military academy and proceeds through many visually astonishing episodes before climaxing, unforgettably, with a three-panelled widescreen sequence that shows Napoleon at the height of his powers invading Italy as the head of the French army. One of my fondest cinephiliac desires is that silent historian Kevin Brownlow’s most recent restoration, which has now swelled to five and a half hours, will make its way to blu-ray soon.

The Little Match Girl (Renoir, 1928)

Although it wasn’t until the sound era that Jean Renoir directed the films that made him immortal (e.g., Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game), I think The Little Match Girl, a 40 minute adaptation of a Hans Christian Anderson story, is one of his best and most affecting films. The title character is a waif forced to sell matches on the streets in the dead of winter in order to earn her livelihood. While literally freezing to death, the match girl looks through a toy store window and fantasizes that she is inside and that the toys have magically come to life all around her. The dream-like visuals and fantasy element are atypical for Renoir, the humanism is not.

The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, 1928)

After a successful run of films in his native Denmark, Carl Dreyer headed to France for his last silent film, a beautiful dramatization of the life of the beloved saint. Instead of showing Joan’s heroism in battle the way you would expect a biopic to do, Dreyer focuses instead only on the last days of her life as she is tried and executed by an English court. The film’s most notable characteristic is its relentless use of extreme close-ups, which capture every wrinkle on the judges’ evil faces and every nuance of Renee Falconetti’s highly emotive performance in the title role, which remains one of the finest ever captured on celluloid.

Un Chien Andalou (Bunuel, 1929)

Luis Bunuel’s directorial debut, based on a script he co-wrote with Salvador Dali, is the most famous Surrealist movie ever – and for good reason. It opens with the shocking image of a man slicing a woman’s eyeball with a straight razor (a shot that is graphically matched with a cutaway image of a cloud drifting in front of the moon) before jumping ahead to “Eight Years Later” and focusing on a new set of characters in scenes that are equally bizarre. But, since Bunuel plays the man with the razor, the function of the prologue is obvious: to announce an all-out assault on the viewer, whose sight, after all, is the most important sense in experiencing a film. Bunuel and Dali’s rule when writing the screenplay was that Un Chien Andalou should be nonsensical to the point of not being interpretable; legions of critics and historians, including me, have ignored their intention ever since.

À propos de Nice (Vigo, 1930)

À propos de Nice is the exceptionally promising debut film of Jean Vigo, whose career was tragically curtailed four years later when he died of tuberculosis at age 29. This begins as a conventional “city symphony”-style travelogue of the title locations before expanding its scope to offer surreal stylistic flourishes and a satirical/critical view of Nice’s wealthy citizens. In 25 minutes, Vigo and his ace cinematographer Boris Kaufman offer up more ideas, visual invention and wit than what you see in most features; the slow-motion, low angled shots of women dancing are particularly memorable for their eroticism.

6 comments | tags: A Child of Paris, A Propos de Nice, A Trip to the Moon, Abel Gance, Alice Guy, Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, Carl Dreyer, Coeur Fidele, Dmitri Kirsanoff, Georges Melies, Jean Epstein, Jean Renoir, Jean Vigo, L'arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat, L'enfant de Paris, La passion de Jeanne d'Arc, La petite marchande d'allumettes, La vie du Christ, Le Voyage dans la lune, Leonce Perret, Les Vampires, Louis Feuillade, Luis Bunuel, Lumiere Brothers, Menilmontant, Napolean, The Life of Christ, The Little Match Girl, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Tih Minh, Un Chien Andalou | posted in Film Reviews, Historical Movement / National Cinema Primers

August 22, 2012

An African Cinema Primer

By michaelgloversmith

As with my Classic Latin American Cinema Primer, I had to do an extensive amount of research prior to writing today’s post. That’s because, although I was previously familiar with some of the key works of African cinema (such as Touki Bouki, Brightness and the movies of the great Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene), it was necessary for me to watch many more in order to come up with something approaching a well-rounded overview. The following list of thirteen titles encompasses films spanning over fifty years and many diverse countries across the African continent, including Egypt, Senegal, South Africa, Mali, Burkina Faso, Tunisia and Chad. To delve into these wonderful movies is to realize yet again how much richer world cinema is than what American film distributors and the media would lead you to believe. And, while I fully acknowledge it is problematic to yoke together such disparate titles (some of which have nothing in common other than that they happened to be produced in roughly the same part of the world), this was nonetheless a great excuse for me to write about films to which I otherwise might never have gotten around.

Cairo Station (Chahine, Egypt, 1958)

Youssef Chahine’s remarkable film, a hard-to-describe multi-genre hybrid, tells the story of a crippled newspaper seller working in the title location who becomes obsessed with a blonde bombshell (Hind Rostom, the “Marilyn Monroe of Egypt”) selling soft drinks nearby. The blonde, in turn, ignores the vendor in favor of a brutish, virile union organizer. This romantic triangle plays out against the backdrop of a series of grisly murders, while scenes of labor unrest offer a fascinating peak into the Cairo politics of the time. But this is probably most interesting today as a surprisingly erotic vehicle for the awesome star power of Rostom who is doused with water in one memorable scene and dances to what sounds like an Egyptian-flavored version of “Jump, Jive an’ Wail” in another.

The Nightingale’s Prayer (AKA The Curlew’s Cry) (Barakat, Egypt, 1959)

Unlike Cairo Station, an art film that was banned in in its native country, The Nightingale’s Prayer was a mainstream hit produced within Egypt’s Hollywood-like studio system. Yet this awesome tragedy is no less startling in its artistry and penetrating insights into human nature. Director Henry Barakat adapts a novel by Taha Hussein whose key ingredients are a family forced into exile, adultery, rape and multiple murders. Amna (Faten Hamama, the real-life wife of Omar Sharif), a maid from the country, hatches a revenge plot against the engineer who brought “dishonor” to her sister, resulting in her death. But, in a plot worthy of Mizoguchi (and with camera movements that rival the Japanese master to boot) this plan only leads to more tragedy. Egypt clearly had a thriving film industry in the mid-twentieth century and the dearth of titles available with English subtitles is cause for bitter regret.

Black Girl (Sembene, Senegal/France, 1966)

This auspicious debut by the great Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene was also the first feature film made by a black African filmmaker. The title character is a young Senegalese woman who gets a job as a nanny for a white French family. She accompanies them back to France where she experiences a subtle, insidious racism that inspires feelings of dislocation and loneliness, before returning to Senegal with tragic results. This is beautifully austere, vital filmmaking whose impact is all the more disturbing at a swift and compressed 65 minutes.

Touki Bouki (Mambety, Senegal, 1973)

A wonderfully colorful, vibrant and occasionally surreal lovers-on-the-lam crime/road movie (think of an African Pierrot le Fou), Touki Bouki was only the second of three feature films in the career of its great director Djibril Diop Mambéty. The story concerns the relationship between a female college student, her motorcycle-riding boyfriend and their various schemes to make some easy money and escape to the mythical paradise of Paris, France. Like Senegal’s other legendary filmmaker Ousmane Sembene, Mambéty loads this up with social criticism (in which both Senegalese and French characters are unspared) but, unlike Sembene’s more classical approach to narrative, this is a wild, experimental journey for both characters and viewer alike.

Alexandria, Why? (Chahine, Egypt, 1979)

Youssef Chahine created a scandal with this taboo-busting autobiographical epic that recreates, with impressive detail, his hometown of Alexandria during the outbreak of World War II. The story interweaves the lives of many characters, chief among them Yehi, a student and movie lover (and stand-in for the director) who nurses his first stirrings of creativity as an actor and director in local theatrical productions. But the personal story is always juxtaposed with a wider political and historical context, as Chahine uses stock footage of the war and depicts air raids, black market activity and interactions between Egyptian civilians and soldiers of the occupational British army, in this supreme masterpiece of world cinema.

The Gods Must Be Crazy (Uys, S. Africa/Botswana, 1980)

James Uys’ cross-cultural comedy became an unexpected international sensation after its 1980 release and it’s easy to see why; this good-natured, universally appealing story concerns a “bushman” living in the Kalahari desert who discovers an empty Coke bottle and believes it to be a gift/curse from the Gods. This event serves as the catalyst for a plot that sees the bushman come into contact with a bumbling scientist, a sexy missionary and a band of revolutionary political terrorists. Some critics have derided the premise as racist but they’re missing the point entirely – the very subject of Uys’ satire is first world perceptions of third world countries. If that isn’t funny enough, there is also a healthy amount of excellent silent movie-style slapstick, in which animals and machines are allowed to be as funny as the humans.

Yeelen (AKA Brightness) (Cisse, Mali, 1987)

Perhaps my favorite African movie ever is Yeelen, a hypnotic, deliberately paced art film that has all of the deceptive simplicity, power and beauty of a primeval myth. Niankoro is a boy living in rural West Africa who must undergo various rites of passage in order to become a man, which culminates in challenging his evil sorcerer father in a duel to the death. Western critics are fond of invoking Oedipus Rex when reviewing writer/director Souleymane Cissé’s masterpiece but all of this film’s potent and elaborate symbolism is apparently based on local folklore without being influenced by outside sources.

Yaaba (Ouedraogo, Burkina Faso, 1989)

A little boy living in a small town in West Africa makes friends with an old woman whom the rest of the townspeople believe to be a witch. When the boy’s cousin becomes sick, he claims that only the old woman’s medicine can save her. This is a simple, touching story about intergenerational friendship that also effortlessly paints a fascinating societal portrait of African village life. The sentence “She has her reasons” is uttered twice in the film by two different characters, a touching, Renoir-esque reminder of the importance of tolerance in any society. I could watch this beautiful movie seven more times.

The Silences of the Palace (Tlatli, Tunisia, 1994)

Alia is a female nightclub singer in the newly independent Tunisia of the 1960s. She revisits the imperial palace where she had grown up in the previous decade as the daughter of a servant when the country was under French colonial rule. The objects within the palace (a lute, the shards of a broken mirror, etc.) bring back a flood or memories for the time when Alia, as an adolescent, first became aware of class and gender politics. This tough feminist film, from first time director Moufida Tlatli, is of equal interest as an emotionally involving character study and as a lament for the silence of female suffering in a patriarchal Arab Muslim culture.

Faraw! (AKA Mother of the Dunes) (Ascofare, 1998, Mali)

The only narrative film of Malian poet Abdoulaye Ascofare chronicles the trials and tribulations of the strong, resilient matriarch of a struggling rural family who must provide for a mentally handicapped husband, disobedient sons and a daughter who has dropped out of school. The mother goes to great lengths to avoid having the latter become exploited by “foreigners” in this powerful allegory of self-reliance, a key theme of many African movies. Ascofare poignantly dedicated Faraw! to his own mother, the inspiration for the main character, who died while the film was still shooting.

Moolaade (Sembene, Senegal/Burkina Faso, 2004)

Collé is a Muslim woman living in a traditional village in Burkina Faso who incurs the wrath of her neighbors when she dares provide shelter to young girls trying to avoid “female circumcision.” Ousmane Sembene’s last film, and arguably his very best, transforms a frankly horrifying subject into a story that, without pulling punches, manages to be warm-hearted, humorous and inspiring – qualities that owe a lot to the performance of Fatoumata Coulibaly, who unforgettably plays Collé as a force of nature. The film’s final symbolic image, of an antenna on the roof of an ancient building, succinctly evokes the clash between modernity and tradition central to Sembene’s entire filmography and provides a fitting epitaph to his career.

Bamako (Sissako, Mali, 2006)

Abderrahmane Sissako’s provocative and angry satire combines documentary and narrative techniques into an overall essay-like form that is unlike anything else I’ve ever seen. The “plot,” such as it is, details the city of Bamako (the capital of Mali) putting the World Bank and IMF on trial, which allows the writer/director to regale the audience with all manner of disturbing and eye-opening facts about third world debt. Interspersed with these scenes is the melodramatic story of the disintegration of a marriage between a female singer and her unemployed husband, a couple of spirited musical numbers and even a parody of the western genre featuring a cameo by executive producer Danny Glover. This fascinating and trenchant commentary on globalization is a must-see for adventurous viewers.

A Screaming Man (Haroun, Chad, 2010)

Adam, a veteran employee of a posh hotel in civil war-torn Chad, finds his life turned upside down when the hotel’s new Chinese owners demote him from pool attendant to gate keeper and give his former post to his son, Abdel, instead. This begins as a story of social humiliation a la The Last Laugh before turning into a Claire Denis-style commentary on European colonialism in Africa – but one that is all the more impacting because it is coming from an insider’s perspective. “Our problem is we put our destiny in God’s hands,” one character wryly observes early on, which seems to spur Adam into making a rash decision involving Abdel that turns the whole scenario into one of shattering moral complexity. This third feature from the prodigiously talented Mahamat-Saleh Haroun deservedly won the Jury Prize at Cannes and marks the writer/director as someone to watch in the future.

6 comments | tags: A Screaming Man, Abderrahmane Sissako, Abdoulaye Ascofare, Alexandria Why?, Bamako, Black Girl, Brightness, Cairo Station, Djibril Diop Mambéty, Faraw!, Henry Barakat, Jamie Uys, La noire de . . ., Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Moolaade, Mother of the Dunes, Moufida Tlatli, Ousmane Sembene, Souleymane Cisse, The Curlew's Cry, The Gods Must Be Crazy, The Nightingale's Prayer, The Silences of the Palace, Touki Bouki, Yeelen, Youssef Chahine | posted in Film Reviews, Historical Movement / National Cinema Primers

June 15, 2012

A Classic Latin American Cinema Primer, Pt. 2

By michaelgloversmith

Below is part two of the classic Latin American cinema primer that I began last week.

Black God, White Devil (Rocha, Brazil, 1964)

Glauber Rocha’s auspicious debut film begins roughly where Vidas Secas ended: with a poor laborer living in the harsh landscape of northeastern Brazil being cheated out of his wages by an exploitative boss. Unlike his compatriot Nelson Pereira dos Santos however, Rocha is not content to portray this conflict in a simple Neorealist style; instead, he sends Manuel, his protagonist, on a picaresque, occasionally hallucinatory journey where he first falls under the sway of a self-appointed religious prophet named Sebastião (the “black God” of the title) and later a charismatic proletarian bandit named Corisco (who christens our hero “Satan”). Hunting all of these characters is the government-and-church appointed assassin Antonio das Mortes, who gives the film dramatic shape and allows it to build to an awe-inspiring climax. An excellent example of how politically-committed filmmakers used cinema to engage socio-political problems as Marxism swept across Latin American in the mid-twentieth century.

Chronicle of a Boy Alone (Favio, Argentina, 1965)

Like an Argentinian version of Zero de Conduite or The 400 Blows, Leonardo Favio’s first feature uses the microcosmic story of mistreated children rebelling against the adult world (school teachers, parents, police) as an allegory for friction between individuals and society as a whole. As a political statement though, it is arguably more effective than its predecessors because it was actually produced in an “authoritarian-bureaucratic state,” which responded by promptly banning the film. As in Italian Neorealism, this features an incredible child performance by Diego Puente as Polin, an eleven year old boy who escapes from a state-run orphanage and runs away to the city. Once there, he goes skinny dipping, spies on a prostitute, witnesses the accidental death of a friend, smokes countless cigarettes and has an unforgettably poetic interaction with a horse-drawn carriage, all in the course of one long day before being re-captured. Plotless and meandering on the surface, this is actually political filmmaking of the most powerful and vital kind.

Simon of the Desert (Bunuel, Mexico, 1965)

In one of Luis Bunuel’s wackiest tall tales, the title character decides to live atop a giant column in the middle of the desert in order to be nearer to God and to avoid the worldly temptations. Satan repeatedly tempts Simon to come down from his pedestal, including once in the guise of a topless Silvia Pinal (which is worth the price of admission alone). This short feature clocks in at a mere 45 minutes because Bunuel allegedly ran out of money while filming and yet, ironically, the end result is probably all the better for it. Simon of the Desert is like a short, well-told joke with a great punchline (albeit one that involves Bunuel’s heretical attitude towards rock and roll) that provides a fitting conclusion to the director’s great “Mexican period.”

Memories of Underdevelopment (Alea, Cuba, 1968)

The most famous film of Cuba’s most well-known director, Tomas Gutierrez Alea, is this unforgettable chronicle of Sergio, a bourgeois intellectual who chooses to remain in his native Havana from the pre-Revolution era through the rise of Fidel Castro, the Cuban Missile Crisis and beyond. Far from being a work of Communist propaganda like one might expect from a Cuban film of the 1960s, this is instead a deeply ambiguous character study and a brilliantly fragmented work of cinematic modernism. It looks and sounds like a kissing cousin of the contemporaneous French New Wave while also functioning as a vivid portrait of a specific time and place in Cuban history.

Antonio das Mortes (Rocha, Brazil, 1969)

Glauber Rocha’s masterpiece is this semi-sequel to Black God, White Devil in which the earlier film’s villain is converted to the cause of the working class canguaceiros and turns against the vicious capitalist landowners who’ve hired him as an assassin. This socialist fable and visionary western is the midway point between The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and El Topo, a film that succeeds as much for its filmmaking smarts (a beautiful and symbolic use of color, the favoring of Brazilian folk music over dialogue) as it does for its political messages. A singularly hypnotic experience that deservedly won Rocha the Best Director prize at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival.

Macunaima (de Andrade, Brazil, 1969)

Cinema Novo’s penchant for radical political content and form is pushed to a delirious extreme in Joaquim Pedro de Andrade’s adaptation of Mário de Andrade’s quintessential modernist novel. Andrade confronts racism and neo-colonialism head-on in a bat-shit crazy comedy about an old white woman living in the jungle of Brazil who gives birth to the title character, a full-grown black man. After taking a bath in a magical fountain that turns his skin white, Macunaima heads to Sao Paolo where he becomes mixed up with a variety of strange characters including a left-wing female terrorist and a wealthy cannibal who is in possession of a priceless pearl. The cannibalism = capitalism metaphor is a bit too pat and some aspects of this are dated but there is also ferocious and highly original filmmaking: some of the sight gags (such as the goose that lays golden eggs) are hilarious and the use of brilliantly colorful sets and costumes makes this a provocative live action cartoon for adults.

How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman (Dos Santos, Brazil, 1971)

Nelson Pereira dos Santos takes his super-realistic style and applies it, fascinatingly, to a 16th century period piece in this incredible account of the European colonization of Brazil. A French explorer is captured by an indigenous Brazilian Indian tribe who make him their guest of honor for eight months prior to killing and eating him. During his captivity, the Frenchman attempts to assimilate to the tribe in hopes of being able to escape but his attempts are all in vain. Once controversial for its near-constant depiction of full frontal nudity (male and female), this feels at times like a documentary made by an ethnographer with a time-machine. Hollywood filmmakers, including Terrence Malick (whose The New World covers similar terrain to lesser effect), could learn a lot from watching this.

Painted Lips (Nilsson, Argentina, 1974)

Argentina’s Leopoldo Torre Nilsson is one of the most unjustly neglected major directors in the history of world cinema. His masterpiece is Painted Lips, also known as Boquitas pintadas or Heartbreak Tango, an adaptation of an equally fine epistolary novel by Manuel Puig (often translated into English under the title Heartbreak Tango). The film is a haunting comic melodrama set primarily in the 1940s about Juan Carlos, a tubercular Don Juan-type, and the four women who are doomed to love him. Since much of the movie’s dialogue consists of the voice-over narration of letters, and the denouement flashes forward thirty years later to a deathbed scene involving one of Juan Carlos’ lovers, Nilsson turns the whole enterprise into a great, innovative “memory film” along the lines of the best of Alain Resnais.

Dialogues of the Exiled (Ruiz, Chile/France, 1975)

Modeled on Brecht’s Conversations in Exile, this wry piece of political cinema was the first film made in exile by the great Chilean director Raul Ruiz following the CIA-backed military coup of Augusto Pinochet. It consists almost entirely of dialogue-based interior scenes (all of which have a semi-improvised feel) of Chilean expatriates attempting to assimilate to their new existence as political refugees in France. One particularly amusing subplot details a rather benign kidnapping of a touring Chilean pop singer named Fabian Luna by exiles attempting to win him over to their cause. Dialogues of the Exiled is a modest, no-budget comedy but a crucial document of the Chilean diaspora and essential viewing for fans of the director.

Diary of the War of Pigs (Nilsson, Argentina, 1975)

Leopoldo Torre Nilsson’s penultimate film is a fascinating quasi-sci-fi parable about growing old. Sometimes referred to as taking place in the future, this actually begins with a title crawl stating that it’s based on a diary from the year 1969 (which would make it more of an alternate reality movie rather than a futuristic dystopian one). The premise is that Argentina’s youth have formed marauding gangs who exterminate the country’s elderly after having become fed up with senior citizens who seem to be of no use and are merely living off of social security. The story is seen from the point of view of Isidro, a middle-aged man who dares to take a young lover and thus makes himself a target of the “revolution.” Torre’s unique tone is intriguingly pitched somewhere between the profoundly unsettling and the surprisingly erotic.

The Passion of Berenice (Hermosillo, Mexico, 1976)

The Passion of Berenice is a deft updating of the kind of melodramas that characterized the Mexican cinema’s epoca de oro, not least because the male lead is played by Pedro Armendariz, Jr. (who looks uncannily like his pop, albeit with with long hair and a 1970s mustache). The story concerns Berenice, a young woman with a scarred face and a troubled past who lives with and takes care of her elderly godmother. Berenice is haunted by nightmares involving flames and horses that she can’t quite make sense of and there are rumors that she murdered her first husband. She embarks on an affair with the son of her godmother’s doctor in what starts out as a straightforward romantic drama but grows increasingly mysterious and eventually becomes downright scary. A lot of the credit belongs to Martha Navarro who offers an unforgettable portrait of a woman who always appears chillingly aloof.

Xica (Diegues, Brazil, 1976)

In the 18th century, Joao Fernandes de Oliveira is a contractor sent by the King of Portugal to oversee diamond mining in Brazil and to root out corruption within the local government. Upon arrival, however, he falls in love with Xica da Silva, a black slave who is renowned for her sexual prowess. Soon, Oliveira will stop at nothing to give Xica what she wants, including luxury items from around the world and even has a man-made lake constructed just for her. In spite of the serious subject matter, the tone of the film is kept light and amusing throughout. Xica is essentially a trickster figure, similar to the protagonists of other slave narratives, who pretends to be a subservient fool in order to get what she wants. I’ve heard it said that she is supposed to represent the spirit of Brazil and, when viewed in that light, this weirdly touching love story becomes even more complex and provocative. The funky, anachronistic score is also a delight.

The Place Without Limits (Ripstein, Mexico, 1977)

Arturo Ripstein, considered by some to be Mexico’s greatest living filmmaker, is probably best known in the States for his superb 1996 serial killer melodrama Deep Crimson but his lengthy film career extends back to the early 1960s when he began as an assistant to Luis Bunuel. The influence of Bunuel can be strongly felt on The Place Without Limits, a 1978 drama that offers a fascinating, colorful portrait of small town Mexican life while also subtly critiquing Latin machismo and homophobia. Robert Cobo (who, as a child, played the worst of the delinquents in Los Olvidados) stars as “La Manuela,” a gay brothel owner who is torn between selling his business to local bigwig Don Alejo or capitulating to the wishes of his daughter, who manages the brothel, and keeping things status quo. Complicating the scenario is the return of Pancho, a hotheaded truck driver who had violently attacked Manuela the year before but who appears to be equally attracted to both father and daughter alike. Like many of Ripstein’s films, this is a literary adaptation, but the film’s chief pleasures (including Cobo’s unforgettable flamenco dance) are those that could only come alive on the screen.

8 comments | tags: Antonio das Mortes, Arturo Ripstein, Black God White Devil, Boquitas pintadas, Carlos Diegues, Chronicle of a Boy Alone, Como Era Gostoso o Meu Francês, Crónica de un niño solo, Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol, Dialogues of the Exiled, Diary of the War of Pigs, Diálogos de exiliados, El lugar sin límites, Glauber Rocha, Heartbreak Tango, How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman, Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, La guerra del cerdo, La pasión según Berenice, Leonardo Favio, Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, Luis Bunuel, Macunaima, Memorias del subdesarrollo, Memories of Underdevelopment, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Painted Lips, Raul Ruiz, Simón del desierto, Simon of the Desert, The Passion of Berenice, The Place Without Limits, Tomas Gutierrez Alea, Xica, Xica da Silva | posted in Film Reviews, Historical Movement / National Cinema Primers

June 4, 2012

A Classic Latin American Cinema Primer, Pt. 1

By michaelgloversmith

I’ve heard it said that the best way to learn about something is to teach it and, after teaching film studies classes for three and a half years now, I have to concur. Sometimes I feel as though I learn almost as much from my students as they learn from me. A case in point is the subject of Latin American cinema, which I was only marginally familiar with prior to teaching. Because so many of my students are first or second generation immigrants from various Latin American countries, I have made a concerted effort to learn more about movies from Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Cuba in order to better connect with them. (I’d like to give a special shout out to Fernando and Evelyn here for hipping me to Cantinflas.) Similarly, one of the great things about running a film studies blog like this one is that it provides me with a great excuse to constantly be studying different aspects of film history for the sole purpose of writing new blog posts.

My classic Latin American Cinema Primer is split into two posts of thirteen titles apiece. Part one concerns films made from the beginning of the early sound era through 1963. Part two, to be published next week, will span the years 1964 – 1979.

Tango Bar (Reinhardt, Argentina/USA, 1935)

Carlos Gardel is considered one of the greatest tango singers of all time. He was also a movie star and this delightful Spanish language musical, directed in the U.S. by the Hungarian John Reinhardt but written and performed by Argentinians, was the last film he made before he tragically died in a plane crash at age 44. The story has something to do with Gardel’s character, Ricardo, leaving Buenos Aires for Barcelona on a boat after a streak of bad gambling luck. En route, he meets Laura (Rosita Morena), a beautiful woman whom he romances and saves from the clutches of gangsters. But the slender plot of this one hour feature is really just an excuse for the elegant Gardel to sing a bunch of songs including the rousing “Por Una Cabeza,” which both opens and closes the film.

Let’s Go with Pancho Villa (De Fuentes, Mexico, 1936)

Considered by some to be the greatest Mexican movie ever and the one that single-handedly inaugurated the Mexican film industry’s “golden age,” this astonishing wartime drama follows six peasants known as “Los Leones de San Pablo” who join Pancho Villa’s army during the Mexican revolution. Director Fernando de Fuentes takes care to paint each character distinctly, showing the warm camaraderie that exists between each individual and the rest of the bunch, which makes the film genuinely tragic when their numbers start to gradually dwindle. But what really impresses about this film is Fuentes’ jaundiced view of Villa and the revolution itself, which the director sees as complex and messy and marked by a terrible human cost, the exact opposite of the hagiographic approach one might expect.

Dona Barbara (De Fuentes/Delgado, Mexico, 1943)

Written by Venezuelan author Romulo Gallegos (adapting his own novel), this epic melodrama made a screen goddess of lead actress Maria Felix in the title role. Beautifully photographed in high contrast black and white, the story concerns a kind of love triangle between the vicious, eponymous ranch owner Barbara, her illegitimate daughter and the civilized doctor who attracts them both. This movie belongs to the incredible Felix, a force of nature whom I’ve described elsewhere on this blog as combining the fierceness of Joan Crawford with the sexiness of Ava Gardner. She practically burns up the screen when she says “I use men at my convenience. I spit them out when I’m done.”

Maria Candelaria (Fernandez, Mexico, 1944)

Before Luis Bunuel migrated over from Europe, the most important director of Mexico’s golden age was Emilio “El Indio” Fernandez. Maria Candelaria, a melodrama set among the indigenous people of Xochimilco, is one of his masterpieces. A journalist visits a famous, elderly artist in his studio and asks him about the painting of a naked Indian woman. The artist tells the story of the painting’s subject, which is then seen in flashback: the good-hearted title character (Dolores del Rio) is shunned by her fellow villagers because she is the daughter of a prostitute, which dooms her relationship with her fiance Lorenzo (Pedro Armendariz), the honest and hard-working peasant who loves her. This powerful tale of love and intolerance is similar to (and in my opinion infinitely preferable to) Lars Von Trier’s Breaking the Waves from a half century later.

The Pearl (Fernandez, Mexico, 1947)

Emilio Fernandez’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel about Quino, a Mexican diver who discovers a priceless pearl at the bottom of the ocean. Unfortunately, what should be his family’s ticket to a better life inspires jealousy in the surrounding community and Quino soon finds himself a wanted man on the lam. Fernandez and his great regular cinematographer Gabriela Figueroa were heavily influenced by Eisenstein’s Que Viva Mexico and here they’ve captured comparable images of silvery, spellbinding beauty: low-angle close-ups of the protagonists lend the characters and story a resonant, near-mythological power while longer shots juxtapose them against the beautiful landscapes of rural coastal Mexico. Fernandez is also notable for being the only film director to ever shoot a film critic.

Los Olvidados (Bunuel, Mexico, 1950)

The first masterpiece of Luis Bunuel’s Mexican period is this unforgettable tale of juvenile delinquents living in the slums of Mexico City. The main characters are Jaibo, the leader of a gang, and Pedro, an impressionable boy who wants to do good but becomes enmeshed in gang activity after being repeatedly rejected by his own mother. There are many aspects to this film that are similar to Italian Neorealism, including the documentary-like visuals and incredibly naturalistic child performances, but Bunuel, being true to his roots, continually pushes the material in a more dream-like and surreal direction. An uncompromising film that was way ahead of its time, Los Olivdados feels like it could have been made yesterday.

El Bolero de Raquel (Delgado, Mexico, 1957)

Mario Moreno Cantinflas is known as “Mexico’s Charlie Chaplin” because he was a genius comedian who specialized in playing working class underdogs while also sporting baggy pants and a distinctive mustache. El Bolero de Raquel is a great vehicle for the actor’s comedic chops; here, he plays a shoeshiner who finds himself, much like Chaplin in The Kid, unwittingly playing foster father to a young boy following the death of a close friend. Cantinflas is primarily known for his intricate wordplay (specifically for his tendency to ramble on while essentially saying nothing) but this non-Spanish speaking viewer will most remember El Bolero for a couple sequences of primarily visual humor: one involving the application of suntan lotion and one where our hero ruins the dance routine of a beautiful nightclub performer by attempting to dance with her against her will. Both scenes had me laughing like an animal.

Tizoc (Rodriguez, Mexico, 1957)

Tizoc (Pedro Infante) is a poor Indian laborer who falls in love at first sight with a wealthy Mexican woman named Maria (Maria Felix), initially mistaking her for the virgin Mary. Infante, the most famous Mexican actor ever, is at his best as the simple but noble title character. His mistaken belief that Maria wants to marry him, and his subsequent realization that he is wrong, lead to a series of tragic events in this beautiful Technicolor musical melodrama from Infante’s favorite director Ismael Rodriguez. The most memorable scene features Tizoc singing to Maria that he loves her “more than his eyes,” which causes her to weep. Angry at himself for making her cry, Tizoc hits himself in the mouth with a rock. Released after Infante’s untimely death in a plane crash at the age of 42, this is a great love story.

Black Orpheus (Camus, Brazil/France, 1959)

Prior to the rise of Brazil’s celebrated “Cinema Novo” in the 1960s, the most significant movie produced in Brazil was this contemporary musical adaptation of the Orpheus myth directed by the Frenchman Marcel Camus. Charges of racism and colonialism have occasionally been levied against it (including by some Brazilians who have objected to their culture being portrayed as a non-stop party) but I think that’s an overreaction. For one thing, Camus’ film, which expresses a genuine love and respect for Brazilian culture and music, never claims to be anything approaching a definitive statement about the soul of a people. For another, it’s an adaptation of a play by Brazilian writer Vinicius de Moraes that already views Brazil through the lens of another culture (ancient Greece). The music, widely credited with popularizing bossa nova outside of Brazil, is incredible, the cast of local performers is infectiously energetic, and the Eastmancolor cinematography employs color more purposefully than 99% of all other color films.

The Skeleton of Mrs. Morales (Gonzalez, Mexico, 1960)

Luis Alcoriza wrote the script for Rogelio Gonzalez’s wicked black comedy about Dr. Morales (the great Arturo Cordova), a taxidermist who murders his insufferably pious wife. In a scenario reminiscent of Bunuel and Hitchcock (there is a healthy amount of Catholic-bashing to go along with the humor and uxoricide), Dr. Morales informs family and friends that the Mrs. has gone on vacation even as he puts her skeletonized remains on display in his shop. Alcoriza also wrote the screenplay for many of Bunuel’s best Mexican films and if Gonazalez doesn’t push this to quite the surrealist extreme that Don Luis would have, no matter. This is still an essential comedy from the tail end of the golden age of Mexican cinema.

The Exterminating Angel (Bunuel, Mexico, 1962)

One of the best and most vicious satires of Luis Bunuel’s career is this 1962 comedy built on the irresistible premise of a group of upper class friends getting together for a dinner party and then, for no explicable reason, finding themselves unable to leave. After several days, the facade of not only the aristocracy but civilization itself is stripped away as each of the characters ends up revealing a primitive, essentially bestial core. Is this a satire of an entire class of people or of the tragic absurdity of existence itself? Or is it just a bunch of meaningless nonsense? In the best Surrealist tradition, that’s up to each individual viewer to decide.

The Unscrupulous Ones (Guerra, Brazil, 1962)

Criminally unknown (in the U.S. at least), this 1962 feature from first time writer/director Ruy Guerra is one of the best Brazilian films I’ve seen. Clearly inspired by the French New Wave, Guerra’s story follows a couple of amoral petty criminals from Copacabana who hatch a blackmail plot that involves taking nude photographs of a young female acquaintance. Pretty soon she’s helping them to perpetrate the same scheme on her cousin. This film is startling in so many respects (the use of handheld camera, the nihilism, the critique of machismo, the full frontal nudity and casual drug use), it’s hard to believe that someone could have made this movie anywhere in the world as early as 1962. The big bang of Cinema Novo.

Vidas Secas (dos Santos, Brazil, 1963)

A man, his wife, their two children and a dog lead a nomadic existence, constantly in search of work, food and shelter, in the most barren region of northeastern Brazil. The man of the family eventually hires on at the home of a wealthy cattle farmer, where he ends up being grossly exploited, before inevitably moving on. Fueled by a sense of social outrage and inspired by Italian Neorealism, Nelson Pereira dos Santos wrote and directed this bleak, starkly beautiful black and white film (which might be more appropriately referred to as a “white and black film”) that stands as one of the crown jewels of Brazil’s Cinema Novo.

16 comments | tags: Black Orpheus, Dona Barbara, El ángel exterminador, El Bolero de Raquel, El esqueleto de la señora Morales, Emilio Fernandez, Fernando de Fuentes, Ismael Rodriguez, John Reinhardt, La Perla, Let's Go With Pancho Villa, Los Olvidados, Luis Bunuel, Marcel Camus, Maria Candelaria, Miguel Delgado, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Orfeu Negro, Os Cafajestes, Rogelio A. Gonzalez, Ruy Guerra, Tango Bar, The Exterminating Angel, The Pearl, The Skeleton of Mrs. Morales, The Unscrupulous Ones, Tizoc, Vamonos Con Pancho Villa!, Vidas Secas | posted in Film Reviews, Historical Movement / National Cinema Primers

May 11, 2012

A Classic French Cinema Primer, Pt. 2

By michaelgloversmith

A continuation of the list of essential pre-Nouvelle Vague French sound era movie titles that I began earlier this week. This part of the list encompasses films released from 1946 – 1959.

La Belle et la Bete (Cocteau, 1946)

Jean Cocteau, with an uncredited assist from Rene Clement, directed this beautiful and poetic adaptation of the well-known fairy tale about a young woman, Belle, who sacrifices herself to a grotesque half-man/half-beast creature in order to save her father’s life. But the more she gets to know the beast, the more she realizes his hideous exterior conceals a sensitive soul . . . This was a belated follow-up to Cocteau’s Surrealist classic debut, The Blood of a Poet, and it was worth the wait. A million miles from the Disney-fication of such material, Cocteau’s film begins with the unforgettable title card “…and now, we begin our story with a phrase that is like a time machine for children: Once Upon a Time…” and then proceeds to capture the true essence of fairy tales, with all of the darkness that implies.

Jour de Fete (Tati, 1949)

Jacques Tati’s underrated first feature is a delightful slapstick comedy about Francois (Tati himself as a forerunner to his beloved M. Hulot character), a rural postman who becomes obsessed with delivering mail efficiently after viewing a documentary on the high-tech U.S. Postal Service. Although there is dialogue in the film, it remains secondary to Tati’s incredible sight gags, which rival the best of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin in their sheer ingenuity (the runaway bicycle scene is a standout). This was shot in a primitive color process known as Thomson Color though not seen that way until 1995 when Tati’s daughter oversaw the development of a new version that restored the film as closely as possible to her father’s original vision. A revelation.

Le Silence de la Mer (Melville, 1949)

Jean-Pierre Melville was a spiritual godfather to the Nouvelle Vague not only because his work expressed such an obvious love of cinema but also due to the fierce independence evidenced by the low-budget/shot-on-location/documentary-style aesthetic of his early films. This self-financed World War II drama concerns a German soldier (Howard Vernon) who takes up residence with an elderly Frenchman and his niece while convalescing from a wound. Neither of the French characters speak a word as the German regales them with verbose monologues but the niece eventually falls in love with the soldier, a feeling on which she will never be able to act. This austere and intimate chamber drama is played out as a series of carefully orchestrated glances aided by a use of voice-over narration that would clearly influence not just the New Wave but Robert Bresson as well.

Casque d’Or (Becker, 1952)

Jacques Becker’s magnificent recreation of La Belle Epoque is an exquisite romantic melodrama about a gangster’s moll (a terrific Simone Signoret) who also becomes the object of affection of two other men – with predictably tragic results. But Casque d’Or (the film takes its title from the nickname of Signoret’s character) is less about plot than atmosphere. All of the period details feel correct but it is the beautiful cinematography of Robert Lefebvre that elevates this to the front rank of the best French movies ever; the almost overly-bright, poetic, Impressionistic images lend the movie a nostalgic tone even when, or perhaps especially when, the story is at its darkest.

The Earrings of Madame de . . . (Ophuls, 1953)

Austrian-born director Max Ophuls made what are arguably the most elegant movies of the classic French cinema; his much beloved tracking shots find their perfect complement in narrative structures that continually circle back on themselves, like a waltz, before resolving in a typically tragic denouement. Letter from an Unknown Woman, from Ophuls’ brief stint in Hollywood, is my favorite of his films but I think Madame de . . . is the masterpiece of his lengthier French career. The unnamed title character is the wife of a general in the French Army who sells her most expensive pair of earrings to pay off a debt, an act that becomes a catalyst for a chain of events bringing about her ruin. Apart from the aforementioned formal grace, the lead performances (from Daniel Darrieux, Charles Boyer and the very suave and refined-looking Italian director Vittorio de Sica) are sublime.

Mr. Hulot’s Holiday (Tati, 1953)

Jacques Tati’s classic comedy, the first outing for his legendary M. Hulot character, opens with a sly title card asking the viewer not to expect a plot since the movie is about a holiday and holidays are meant to be fun. From there we follow the bumbling title character as he arrives at a beach-side resort hotel and, in a series of plotless and near wordless scenes, proceeds to comically wreak havoc everywhere he goes. (Especially memorable is Hulot’s riotous visit to the tennis court.) Not only a very funny film but, thanks to Tati’s eye for the geometry of the frame, a very beautiful one as well.

The Wages of Fear (Clouzot, 1953)

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s masterpiece of machismo details the harrowing adventures of four down-on-their-luck European expatriates in Venezuela who agree to the extremely dangerous job of transporting truckloads of nitroglycerine across South American mountain roads in exchange for a large sum of money. This is a gritty, tense, brutal and undeniably exciting adventure movie that also offers, in the character of an anti-union American oil company boss, an intriguing critique of capitalism besides. The Wages of Fear deservedly made Yves Montand an international star and went on to exert a big influence on Sam Peckinpah who tipped his hat to the opening of this film with a similar children-torturing-insects scene at the beginning of The Wild Bunch many years later.

French Cancan (Renoir, 1954)

After a 15 year exile, in part due to the Nazi occupation of France, Jean Renoir’s homecoming saw him reunite with actor Jean Gabin to create the most distinctly Gallic film of his famed career. French Cancan tells the story of Henri Danglard (Gabin at his most charismatic), the womanizing impresario who founds the Moulin Rouge and helps to inaugurate the Cancan dance craze while staying just a half-step ahead of his creditors. Françoise Arnoul and Maria Felix play Danglard’s rival romantic interests, both of whom realize that they will have to take a back seat to the scoundrel’s true love: his career. Renoir’s gorgeous visual style takes its cues from the lithographs of Toulouse-Lautrec, most impressively in the Cancan climax, which I’ve described elsewhere on this site as a “near orgiastic riot of form and color.”

Touchez Pas au Grisbi (Becker, 1954)

Jacques Becker segues from the underworld of La Belle Epoque in Casque d’Or to the gangsters of the modern world in Touchez Pas au Grisbi, a massively influential crime/noir film that laid down a template for Jean-Pierre Melville and many others to follow. The plot centers on Max (Gabin again, this time in world-weary mode), an aging gangster whose retirement after a last big score proves short-lived when his former partner is kidnapped and he is asked to put up their loot as ransom. Marvelous black and white cinematography compliments what is essentially a love story between two men, plus Gabin gets to slap a lot of people around. Look sharp for future stars Lino Ventura and Jeanne Moreau in minor roles.

Lola Montes (Ophuls, 1955)

The true story of the infamous slut of the title (Martine Carol) whose sexual appetite was so voracious that she wound up becoming a 19th century circus attraction. As Rafael Nadal once said, “How crazy is the life?” Max Ophuls’ great final film features an ambitiously non-chronological structure, a la Citizen Kane, that alternates between present day scenes where the circus ringmaster (Peter Ustinov) recounts Lola’s exploits with flashback scenes to her youth, beginning with a tryst with Franz Liszt and continuing through many other men. Ophuls’ trademark bravura visual style is taken to an almost freakish extreme with the addition of Eastmancolor but Carol’s performance is the key here; she and Ophuls conspire to make Lola a figure of intense sympathy and identification throughout. Unfortunately, Lola Montes was a commercial disaster upon release and was soon heavily recut from its original 140 minute version. The recent restoration, which can be seen on Criterion’s magnificent 115 minute blu-ray, is the most complete the film is ever likely to be.

Bob le Flambeur (Melville, 1956)

The film where Melville became Melville. With a tip of his fedora to The Asphalt Jungle, the brilliant French writer/director tells an irresistible shaggy dog heist story about one Bob Montagne, an aging gangster/gambler who dutifully maintains an impeccable sense of personal style even when on a losing streak. Eventually, Bob’s bad luck causes him to hatch a scheme to rob the casino in Deauville, a journey to the end of night that leads to one of the wittiest punch lines in cinema. Melville’s depiction of the Montmartre demimonde is so pungent you can smell it and his mise-en-scene, with its chiaroscuro lighting and emphasis on black and white checkerboard patterns, set a new standard for cinematic cool.

A Man Escaped (Bresson, 1956)

Robert Bresson’s minimalist drama, based on the memoir of a real life French Lieutenant’s escape from a Gestapo prison, unforgettably conveys one man’s relentless desire to regain his freedom. Eschewing the easy thrills so common to the Hollywood treatment of this type of subject matter, Bresson instead zeroes in on the specific process of how Lieutenant Fontaine acquires, creates and utilizes the tools that enable his escape plan to work. The stringent use of close-ups of hands at work, accompanied by a use of heightened sound effects and an extensive employment of first person voice-over narration, draws the viewer into Fontaine’s world to an almost unbearably intense degree. This is on my short list of near-perfect movies.

Pickpocket (Bresson, 1959)

Robert Bresson’s loose adaptation of Crime and Punishment transposes Dostoevsky’s novel to contemporary Paris, replacing Raskolnikov’s senseless murder of an old woman with the story of a young man who drifts into a life of crime for which he was not made. What remains the same are the hero’s confused Nietzschean beliefs, the cat-and-mouse game he plays with the local police inspector and the hint of spiritual rehabilitation that is triggered by the love of a young woman. The actual pickpocketing sequences are virtuoso pieces of camera choreography but, as in all of Bresson’s movies, the sum is greater than its individual parts, resulting in a deeply moving, spiritually exultant work of art.

5 comments | tags: A Man Escaped, Beauty and the Beast, Bob le Flambeur, Bob the Gambler, Casque d'Or, French Cancan, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Jacques Becker, Jacques Tati, Jean Cocteau, Jean Renoir, Jean-Pierre Melville, Jour de Fete, La Belle et la Bete, Le salaire de la peur, Le Silence de la mer, Les vacances de Monsieur Hulot, Lola Montes, Madame de . . ., Max Ophuls, Mr. Hulot's Holiday, Pickpocket, Robert Bresson, The Earrings of Madame de . . ., The Silence of the Sea, The Wages of Fear, Un condamné à mort s'est échappé | posted in Film Reviews, Historical Movement / National Cinema Primers

May 7, 2012

A Classic French Cinema Primer, pt. 1: Beyond the “Tradition of Quality”

By michaelgloversmith

The pre-Nouvelle Vague French cinema remains unjustly neglected in a lot of critical and cinephile quarters today, in part due to the contempt shown for it by the Nouvelle Vague directors when they were still critics for Cahiers du Cinema in the 1950s. Francois Truffaut’s famous dismissal of the French cinema’s “tradition of quality,” which he contrasted with the more ostensibly personal and cinematic films coming out of Hollywood during the same period, has given an unfortunate and lasting impression that French cinema in the early sound era was a barren field. I would argue that, since the birth of the movies, France has consistently been one of the three greatest film producing nations – along with the United States and Japan. This list, which encompasses the early sound era through the birth of the New Wave (a separate silent French cinema primer will be posted in the future) is meant to spotlight just a few of the most essential and exciting French movies made during this period.

The list will be broken into two parts. Today’s post encompasses the years 1930 – 1945. Part two, to be published later this week, encompasses 1946 – 1959. As a self-imposed, arbitrary rule, each half of the list will contain no more than two films by the same director.

L’age d’Or (Bunuel, 1930)

Luis Bunuel’s first feature-length film is this hilarious Surrealist portrait of a man and a woman who repeatedly attempt to get together and have sex but are continually prevented from doing so by members of respectable bourgeois society. This is full of famously bizarre images, which still retain their awesome, funny, unsettling power today: a woman shoos a full grown cow off of the bed in her upper-class home, a groundskeeper arbitrarily shoots his son, a woman lasciviously sucks on the toe of a statue, a man throws various objects, including a burning tree, a bishop and a giraffe, out of a second story window. Like a lot of great works of Surrealist art, this was deliberately meant to counter the rising tide of fascism that was sweeping across Europe at the time.

Marius (Korda, 1931)

The first and best installment of Marcel Pagnol’s “Fanny Trilogy” (followed by Cesar and Fanny) is a sweet comedy/melodrama about the goings on in a Marseilles port-side bar. Marius is a young man who manages the bar owned by his father Cesar. He has an affair with local girl Fanny who, holding out hope for a marriage proposal, turns down the hand of the older, wealthier Monsieur Panisse. But, alas, like the song says, Marius’ life, love and lady is the sea. Hungarian born director Alexander Korda does a wonderful job of “opening up” Pagnol’s play, making a deft use of real Marseilles locations. Charges that the movie is “filmed theater” are misguided; Pagnol and Korda’s very subject is the theatricality inherent in human nature.

A Nous la Liberte (Clair, 1931)

Mostly known today as the inspiration for Chaplin’s Modern Times, Rene Clair’s classic comedy follows the exploits of two escaped cons, one of whom becomes a factory owner and one of whom becomes a worker in the same factory. Is there any real difference, Clair asks, between a prisoner and a lowly factory worker? The equation between capitalism and criminality is a bit heavy handed but this is never less than a total visual delight, from the slapstick humor to Lazare Meerson’s stunning Expressionist-influenced art direction (which, atypical for a “foreign film” of the time, received an Oscar nomination).

Zero de Conduite (Vigo, 1933)

Jean Vigo’s penultimate film, an unforgettable tribute to the anarchic spirt of youth, documents the rebellion of four pre-adolescent boarding school students and is based on the director’s own childhood memories. Vigo was way ahead of his time in blending experimental filmmaking techniques with narrative storytelling (check out the poetic use of slow motion during the pillow fight scene) and the end result is beautiful, strange, beguiling and unmissable.

L’atalante (Vigo, 1934)

L’atalante tells the story of a newly married couple, a barge captain and his provincial wife, and their tumultuous honeymoon-cum-cargo delivery trip along the Seine river. The simple boy-meets-girl/boy-loses-girl/boy-finds-girl plot is merely an excuse for director Jean Vigo and ace cinematographer Boris Kaufman to serve up an array of rapturously photographed images, all of which correspond to the emotions of his protagonists. In a legendary supporting role, Michel Simon’s portrayal of a tattooed, cat-loving first mate is as endearing as it is hilarious. Vigo’s final film is one of the cinema’s transcendental glories – endlessly rewatchable, always uplifting.

Grand Illusion (Renoir, 1937)

Grand Illusion is a comedy and a drama, a war movie and a prison break film and, finally, thanks to an 11th hour appearance by the lovely Dita Parlo, a very touching love story. There is also a healthy dose of social criticism in the story of an aristocratic German Captain (memorably played by Erich von Stroheim) who shows favoritism to an upper class French captive, indicating that the bonds of class can sometimes be tighter than those of nationality. But this is just one of many examples of Renoir explicating the “arbitrary borders” made by man in one of the few films that deserves to be called a true anti-war movie.

The Pearls of the Crown (Guitry)

In this witty, innovative, trilingual take on the history film, three narrators – an Italian, an Englishman and a Frenchman – each tell the story of how four pear-shaped pearls ended up in the British crown. Writer/director Sacha Guitry manages, in a head-spinning hour and forty one minutes, to trace the pearls from one owner to the next over five hundred years of European history, allowing hilarious cameos by famous figures like Pope Clement VII, Catherine de Medici, Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth, Mary Stuart, Napolean and Queen Victoria. But in a movie whose real subjects are language and storytelling the pearls themselves are nothing more than a MacGuffin. Guitry himself plays the French narrator as well as three other characters in the flashback sequences; as he wryly notes, “We always lend our faces to the heroes of the story.”

Pepe le Moko (Duvivier, 1937)

One reason why French film critics were so quick to identify and appreciate American film noir in the 1940s is because it distinctly resembled, tonally and visually, many of the great French crime films of the late 1930s. One such film is Julien Duvivier’s fatalistic Pepe le Moko, the story of a charismatic Parisian gangster (wonderfully played by Jean Gabin) hiding out in the Algiers’ Casbah, and the police inspector who attempts to reel him in. Algiers, an equally interesting Hollywood remake with Charles Boyer and Hedy Lamarr, followed just one year later.

Le Jour se Leve (Carne, 1939)

One of the high water marks of the movement known as Poetic Realism (under which many of the titles immediately preceding and following it on this list also fall), Le Jour se Leve has it all: working class characters – with Jean Gabin as the doomed hero and Arletty as his love interest, atmospheric locations, a tragic crime plot, poetic dialogue by Jacques Prevert, and taut direction by Marcel Carne. Also like a ton of great French films of the era, this was soon banned by the Vichy government on the grounds that it was “demoralizing.” Maybe so but sometimes hopelessness can be romantic too.

The Rules of the Game (Renoir, 1939)

This is Jean Renoir’s masterpiece and the grandaddy of all films about an assortment of friends and couples getting together for a weekend-long party in the country. The “rules of the game” are the rules one must abide by in order to get along in society, which involves a considerable amount of dishonesty. Fittingly, the one character who is incapable of lying, the earnest, heart-on-his-sleeve aviator Andre, is also the character who dies “like an animal in the hunt.” Like the best works of Shakespeare or Chekhov, this humanist tragicomedy captures timeless truths about the inner workings of the human heart.

Le Corbeau (Clouzot, 1943)

A series of anonymously written poison-pen letters are sent to various prominent citizens of a small French village. Chief among the targets of “The Raven,” the mysterious author’s pseudonym, is a doctor who is accused of adultery and performing illegal abortions. Both rumors and hidden secrets are brought to light by the letters, which threaten to tear the fabric of the community apart. Director Henri-Georges Clouzot made this for a German production company during the Nazi occupation of France. Sensing that the movie in some way allegorized them, the Nazis promptly fired Clouzot and banned the film. When the occupation ended, Clouzot was prohibited from making movies for an additional two years by the French government because he had collaborated with the Nazis! The director would go on to achieve much greater fame for The Wages of Fear and Les Diaboliques in the 1950s but this refreshingly dark and bitter thriller, a film far nastier than its Hollywood counterparts of the time, remains my personal favorite.

Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (Bresson, 1945)

Robert Bresson’s second film features star performances (most notably a ferocious turn by Maria Cesares), an original diegetic musical score and relatively ornate dialogue written by none other than Jean Cocteau – all elements the director would soon eschew in the major movies for which he became best known. But Les Dames du Bois de Bolougne is still a terrific and very Bressonian film about a woman who hatches a revenge plot against her ex-lover that involves arranging a marriage between him and a prostitute. The timeless, dream-like atmosphere is alluring (the story takes place in the present but feels as if it could be taking place in the 19th century) and the ambiguously redemptive ending packs a wallop precisely because of Bresson’s de-dramatized treatment.

Les Enfants du Paradis (Carne, 1945)

The pinnacle of the Marcel Carne/Jacques Prevert collaborations is this epic tale of doomed love set in the world of 19th century Parisian theater. Baptiste is a mime who falls in love with aspiring actress Garance. His shyness prevents their affair from being consummated and they go their separate ways until, years later, fate brings them back together for one last shot at romance. Both the behind the scenes look at theater and the depiction of 19th century France are lovingly detailed and passionately executed. This is sometimes referred to as a French Gone with the Wind but it’s actually much better than even that would suggest. One of the all-time great French movies.

16 comments | tags: A Nous la Liberte, Alexander Korda, Children of Paradise, Grand Illusion, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Jean Renoir, Jean Vigo, Julien Duvivier, L'age D'or, L'atalante, La Grande Illusion, La règle du jeu, Le Corbeau, Le Jour se Leve, Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, Les Enfants du Paradis, Les perles de la couronne, Luis Bunuel, Marcel Carne, Marcel Pagnol, Marius, Pepe le Moko, Rene Clair, Robert Bresson, Sacha Guitry, The Pearls of the Crown, The Raven, The Rules of the Game, Zero de Conduite | posted in Film Reviews, Historical Movement / National Cinema Primers

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A Mainland Chinese Cinema Primer

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A Classic Latin American Cinema Primer, Pt. 1

A Classic French Cinema Primer, Pt. 2

A Classic French Cinema Primer, pt. 1: Beyond the “Tradition of Quality”

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