Oscar's Cinema Journal 2005

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Originally posted by oscar jubis
Todd Haynes (Safe, Poison) provides revealing commentary on this Zeitgeist dvd release.

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The commentary was especially recorded for the dvd release (November '04) of this 1993 short film. I don't know whether Haynes has been this revealing before about being gay, about his past, etc. I knew that he was a member of Act-Up. But here, for instance, he openly talks about Jim Lyons (who's edited every Haynes release since Poison) as "my boyfriend for seven years". And he labels himself a "flaming queen". It could be that the autobiographical nature of this little-seen gem made it relevant to discuss these things. I haven't seen Poison since the early 90s, but I bought the dvd a few months ago and I'll be rewatching it soon.

*The festival ended a week ago but I still have to post reviews on about 9 films, report on the awards, and summarize as you suggested.

Monday, Feb. 21nd

The Aviator at AMC CocoWalk
Went to Coconut Grove during the Arts Festival so traffic was a bitch. My concern that the pic would not hold Dylan's interest for 169 proved unfounded. http://www.filmwurld.com/forums/show...=9009#post9009

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I don't know whether Haynes has been this revealing before about being gay, about his past, etc. I knew that he was a member of Act-Up. But here, for instance, he openly talks about Jim Lyons (who's edited every Haynes release since Poison) as "my boyfriend for seven years". And he labels himself a "flaming queen".

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I said I was naive about his being reserved about being gay. I didn't like Poison at all. I have only liked one of Haynes' efforts, Safe. That makes up for the other ones, though. We have discussed this on the website elsewhere.

You didn't have to tell about the traffic but it is helpful to know where and how you viewed the movies you viewed. You don't want to know about the traffic on the San Francisco Bay Bridge. Actually it was light today. Let us know if you take public transportation.

And good luck with your ketchup.

It's comforting to know you're paying attention and having a bit of fun with my entries, CK. I knew you liked Safe but I'm surprised to learn you don't like anything else by Haynes. We do have our taste differences, don't we? and we should be glad. I'm curious about my own reaction when watching Poison again and I hope you can be more specific then about what's wrong with it.

Tuesday February 22nd

The Battleship Potemkin

"Revolutions in form are more important than revolutionary content" (Sergei Eisenstein)

I own several Chinese dvd releases of films directed by Sergei Eisenstein which are the exact replicas of the dvds released in USA at a fraction of the price. The company that puts the out is called Bo-Ying. I plan to re-watch three of his silents. Eisenstein is one of my favorite directors ever. Much has been written and discussed about him, even at this site. (http://www.filmwurld.com/forums/show...=&threadid=636).
Despite the fact that Potemkin, Strike and October were commissioned by the Communist Party of the USSR, Eisenstein was first and foremost an artist, one whose innovations were informed by a variety of disparate artistic sources. These include: vaudeville, cubism, Elizabethan playwrights, the French theatre tradition of Guignol, and agitprop. With the release of Potemkin, his second feature, he achieves full artistic maturity. It features his dynamic editing, which became known as "Soviet Montage", in which he achieves a sort of percussive rhythm by breaking every action into a hail of shots, cutting from medium shots to close-ups of faces or minute, significant details, and stretching out time by flash-cutting to the action elsewhere within the scene. The Odessa Steps sequence is just as awe-inspiring and heartbreaking as when I first watched this film as a college freshman.

oscar has become a film professor!
It's just as well: your comments are highly educational.

Battleship Potemkin is definitely dynamic, and the "Odessa Steps" sequence is as powerful as you say (after all these years... who says silent films are boring?)

Did you see this at the theatre, or on DVD?

And, how do you underline stuff in your posts?

*Underline by putting "u" between brackets.
*I'm watching Eisenstein silents on dvd (imported cheaply from China).
*I'll be watching October soon. I'll provide a link to the thread you started, and post my comments there. Your essay on October remains the best commentary on an Eisenstein film to be found at this site.
*I agree there's nothing boring about silents, to the contrary. I am very upset with TCM for not showing silents for the past three "sundays at midnight" as they had been doing for years.

Wed. February 23rd

Strike

"In art sometimes, the crudest device works best. Never spare the viewer a direct blow between the eyes." (Sergei Eisenstein)

The auspicious debut (1924) of Sergei Eisenstein is chock full of visual experimentation. Words are inadequate to describe the sheer number and variety of visual wonders the viewer is exposed in this tale of a strike at a factory in Czarist Russia (1912) and the massacre of workers at the hand of the Cossacks. I'll discuss just a few interesting aspects.
* A great deal of this film is quite abstract (not intended to forward the plot) so E. provides structure by means of visual motifs, most prominently circular forms and the use of animal imagery throghout the film.
*Parallel cutting is used prominently. Shots of striking workers having breakfast are intercut with shots of owners and bankers doing same. Shots of Cossacks firing on a crowd are intercut with shots of butchers slaughtering a cow (the animal imagery I mentioned earlier).
*Perhaps the most difficult scene to stage takes place in a four story apartment building. Some shots capture significant action at each of the four levels simultaneously.
*The influence of cubism is most prominent in terms of the multiplicity of angles used to shoot a given scene. Prior to Eisenstein, scenes were only shot from angles that correspond to the point of view of a character. E. wants to show the scene from multiple angles as quickly as possible with no concern as to whether the angle of any shot reflects the p.o.v. of any character.
*The use of "relay narration" or "serial montage", such as glimpses of the insides of several's workers' homes one after the other, each scene only long enough to convey the pain and sacrifice of striking workers and their families.
*The disdain Eisenstein had for naturalism, which he believed to create complacency on the part of the viewer. This is the Eisenstein film that reveals most clearly his theatrical roots (vaudeville in particular).
*If you like understatement, you probably would prefer to watch a film by Eisenstein contemporary Alexander Dovzhenko. As the opening quote makes obvious, Mr. Eisenstein wants to make sure every viewer felt something while watching his movies. He is most definitely not above putting small children and animals in peril to produce outrage. He did it here and in Potemkin, and he was still doing this when he made Alexander Nevsky.

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{Originally posted by Oscar Jubis}
I'm curious about my own reaction when watching Poison again and I hope you can be more specific then about what's wrong with it.

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There's a hothouse intense gaynessabout a lot of Haynes' stuff that I as a gay person find icky. Call it internalized homophobia if you like. You get it in the glam rock movie, one of Jonathan Rhys-Meyers' many misfires. It explains the preciousity of Far from Heaven. But Safe is just weird and haunting; for that he set the gayness aside -- or transposed it --into a person uncomfortable in her own skin, allergic to the whole environment. That worked for me. It's unselfconscious and universal.

I see you did say how you watched the Russian silents (on cheap dvd's from China, violating US copyright, perchance?), but Johann seems to have missed that. He also missed "B" in the html coding bars above the posting spot. He's tired.

The Russian silents have the same richness of invention and excitement of the Russian avant garde artists that I love and have modeled a lot of my artwork on the past decade. It was a time when "modernism" was alive. A great time to be alive as an artist, especially in Russia -- well, not for long, but for a little while. A time when each artist was at home with his medium, and the media cross-fertilized each other, artists worked in many media -- still photography, theatrical design, film, architecture, furniture, chinaware, posters, and last but not least, painting. Eisenstein is truly cinematic, intensely aware of the visual and montage aspects of the medium. The disdain for realism you mention is typical of the avant garde. Russian film should be seen in relation to all the other arts of the time. A paradox of the Russian avantgardists is that they are very original, yet also highly in debt to Europe (e.g., the cubists, who came earlier in the century), and very much all like each other. Hence Alexander Dozhenko is unlike Eisenstein in not hitting you over the head as much, but rather like him in other respects.

From Videohound 2000: 4 BONES

Zvenigora (the last entry in the film listings by the way)

1928; dir. A. Dovzhenko

-a lyrical revelation in the face of Soviet formality: a passionate, funny fantasy tableaux of 1000 years of Ukranian history, encompassing wild folk myths, poetic drama, propaganda and social satire.

Originally posted by Chris Knipp
There's a hothouse intense gaynessabout a lot of Haynes' stuff that I as a gay person find icky. Call it internalized homophobia if you like.

I found this "hothouse intense gayness" in Caouette's Tarnation. I know you have other reasons not to like it, but I wonder if words like "distasteful" and "repugnance" in your comments indicate a similar "icky" response.

Russian film should be seen in relation to all the other arts of the time. A paradox of the Russian avantgardists is that they are very original, yet also highly in debt to Europe, and very much all like each other. Hence Alexander Dozhenko is unlike Eisenstein in not hitting you over the head as much, but rather like him in other respects.

I'm afraid the legacy of the cold war mentality still results in both Eisenstein and Dovzhenko being viewed in America primarily as Soviet propagandists. My view is that they were both too much artists to make good ideologues. Even though many still use the word "propaganda" when commenting about Eisenstein's silents, the party was extremely critical of these formal elements you call "avant-garde". It forced Eisenstein into uneasy exile in Mexico and USA, and a taming of his stylistic flourishes upon his return to USSR.
My experience with Dovzhenko is limited to Earth and Arsenal (wish I could watch the film Johann highlights, among others), but it's enough to consider him Eisenstein's equal. He was not only too much the artist, he was too Ukranian to make a good Soviet_he apparently lived under constant surveillance. I agree with your whole post above, but I have ruminated mostly about what makes them different rather than their commonalities. One aspect that informs all of Dovzhenko's work (from what I've read) is the death of 12 of his 13 siblings before they could reach adulthood.

Thursday February 24

Last Life in the Universe on dvd.

The third feature directed by Pen-Ek Ratanaruang (6ixtynine9, Monrak Transistor) features cinematographer Christopher Doyle (several Wong Kar-Wai films and many notables) and the casting of Japanese director Takeshi Miike (Ichi the Killer, Audition). Ratanaruang explains in an interview (dvd extra) that that he wrote the script a long time ago and didn't think it was compelling enough. He states the story is thin and illogical. The frank auteur admits that this film got made because he wanted to work with Doyle, Miike, and Japanese actor Asano Tadanobu. They've met at film festivals and kept in touch over several years. Asano plays a Japanese working at Bangkok's Japanese Cultural Center who wants to die because "death is bliss", it's peaceful. Coincidentally, every suicide attempt is interrupted by a surprise event. He meets a Thai sex worker, and eventually the affectless, neat-freak moves in with her, thus forming a 21st century version of "The Odd Couple" (if you're wondering, there's no nudity and no sex). This picture is #40 in the latest Village Voice's Alternative Critics Poll, so it has its admirers. I find anything lensed by Chris Doyle worth watching, but I had difficulty maintaining an interest in anything but the cinematography.

Eisenstein and Dovzhenko: Of course the long slow decline and repression of the Russian avant garde under the Soviets is a story I prefer to pass over, but the great filmmakers did begin in the great creative aesthetic tradition before they adapted to the repressive propagandists.

Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation: Sure there's a hothouse intense gayness in it, but I don't think I mind that part of it, because I think it's so personal and intimate it seems quite appropriate; the part of it I do mind is the sort of miring in one's own messes, the failure to transcend the grim dysfunctionalities of his family in any way. But I said that this would be an important film and I hope that others will make more positive use of the techniques and approaches Caouette adopted -- and not just produce Tarnation Lite. No, I don't think the hothouse gayness in Tarnation is "distasteful" and "repugnant" at all. And that's different from "icky."

Christopher Doyle with Wong Kar Wai: Let's name them:

Days of Being Wild (which more and more I think is in a class by itself and which has a gorgeous reissue: try to see it in a theatrical screening, I beg of you all).

Chungking Express

Ashes of Time

Fallen Angels

Happy Together

In the Mood for Love

(I didn't mention 2046 because I haven't seen it, but they collaborated on that too. I'm afraid it will not have a theatrical showing for some time?)

In other words, simply Wong Kar Wai's most beautiful work. Without Doyle, Wong Kar Wai wouldn't be Wong Kar Wai. This is the collective cinematic and visual oeuvre of the decade.

And Doyle also did in the same year The Quiet American and Rabbit Proof Fence for Philip Noyce.

Another Doyle-lensed movie I love is Chen Kaige's Temptress Moon.

Friday Feb. 25th

Sergei Eisenstein's October
http://www.filmwurld,com/forums/show...=9123#post9123

Saturday Feb.26

Bashu (Iran, 1986) on import dvd

Playwright/university dean/director Bahram Beisai directed this drama, the only Iranian film I've seen that deals with racism. Bashu is a 10 year old whose village is under bombardment during the Iran/Iraq war. His family perishes. He manages to escape by hiding on the bed of a truck going north. When he wakes up, he finds himself in Northern Iran where the language and the culture are different. He meets a woman, who's husband is away, living in a farming village with her two small kids. Bashu is much darker than everybody else there. Reluctantly, the woman (Susan Taslimi) shelters him despite the negative reaction of most in the village. Gradually her maternal instincts assert themselves over the uncharitable, racist villagers who call him "charcoal". Social Realism except for the traumatized boy's visions of the ghost of his mother. Doing research on this film, I learned that Ms. Taslimi was a major star in Iran, who wrote the script for Bashu but did not get credit. She was forbidden by the Islamic government to collaborate again with Mr. Beisai and moved to Sweden, where she had a career in television. In 2002, Ms. Taslimi directed her first film: Hus i helvete (All Hell Let Loose), starring Melinda Kinnaman (the "boxing girl" from My Life as a Dog).

You don't have to of course but I would like it if you told whether you have purchased or rented the dvd's you report watching. I assume in this case purchased, since "import dvd" implies (perhaps?) not watchable on standard US dvd players?

Up to now you can assume that when I write "import dvd" it's a purchase. But today I joined nicheflix, an import dvd rental site. From now on, I'll specify "rental" when it's an import from nicheflix. Bashu is on NTSC format (like ours). Like many Asian discs, the box says "region 3" but it's actually "all region". So this import is watchable on standard US players.

Sounds like some of us might want to know about Nicheflix but not, so I'm glad I asked. Do many of their offerings require an all region player? I'm assuming that your reason for subscribing to Nicheflix is that it has offerings not otherwise available e.g. not on Netflix?