Oscar's Cinema Journal 2005

*Two Israelis commenting about Campfire on IMdb posted thoughts like "Cedar decided to indict his origins" and "religious/settlement people will hate this movie". This is because, although the film doesn't argue for or against the policy, those who select who lives in the settlements are portrayed unsympathetically. The film is not focused on the politics or morality of the settlement policy and, even though I am very much against the policy, I wouldn't want to damn Campfire because of that. Moreover, a major portion of this film concerns issues between parents and teenagers, and a widow beginning to date again, which are handled extremely well.

Monday July 25th

Fighting Elegy (Japan, 1966) dvd
I've always found Seijun Suzuki's films extremely satisfying to watch because of the daring visual and aural inventiveness, but I have had difficulty becoming engaged by inane genre plots about yakuzas and killers-for-hire. What elevates Fighting Elegy is the historical background (1935 Japan, just before the failed coup d'etat inspired by Ikki Kita) and its relentless satirical criticism of the militarization and imperialism prevalent in Japan until the end of WWII.

Xala (Senegal, 1975) dvd

Tuesday July 26th

Camel(s) (South Korea, 2002) on import dvd
Black-and-white film written and directed by Ki-Yong Park about a pharmacist in her late 30s spending a day (and night) with a 45 y.o. customer at a resort town. They are both married to other people. They drink. They fuck. They eat. They sleep. They eat. They part. Long takes, minimal dialogue. Somber and restrained to a fault.

*I'll be in NYC for about a week with my family, which means sightseeing, Broadway musicals, a Yankees game, a day at MOMA. Will try to fit in some film-watching and post upon my return.

I'll be posting on films I've watched during the past week. The one below I watched at home before I left to New York.

Wed. July 27th

Detective (France, 1985) PAL dvd
A commercial film, but exclusively as defined by J.L. Godard, which means it uses popular genre conventions and features a recognizable cast_the opening titles name some under the heading of "acteurs" while others are labeled "stars". I believe Godard never stopped being a film critic and that his reviews for "Cashiers" reveal a writing style that corresponds to that of his films. Detective is not a whodunit, although it features Jean Pierre Leaud investigating a shooting. It's a presentation of the component parts of a murder mystery set entirely at the Hotel Concorde St. Lazare after Godard has taken it apart. It functions as a critique of the genre in which Godard experiments with juxtapositions between images and brief, intense passages of classical and jazz pieces. Formally, this is very interesting. Just don't come here looking for the comforting, familiar pleasures of the genre.

Friday July 29th

The Beat That My Heart Skipped (France, 2005) at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, NYC.

That answers my question about where you saw it.

Thanks for your assessment of Detective.

That's a great point about his film criticism and style of making movies. Godard has always stayed true to Godard's Laws.

He demands admiration. He challenges the viewer, and not with pretention as so many claim. He's deeply passionate and a serious film artist. His films are blessings, and when he dies cinema will lose one of it's saints.

I'm sure someone could write a thesis or book that explains and illustrates the massive impact he's had on the medium- an impact that regular movie-goers are ignorant of. Godard's influence has reached into the strangest of places...

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I'm sure someone could write a thesis or book that explains and illustrates the massive impact he's had on the medium

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You can be sure someone has, various someones in fact, though even in Europe the greatest interest would be in his early work, and a lot of his later films don't seem to be available on DVD even in France, much more on VHS. I can get a US tape of Detective used on Amazon for $5.

*I also have great admiration for this cinema saint, Johann. I have yet to come across a book that specifically "explains and illustrates the massive impact he's had on the medium", which would be a very worthy endeavor. Of course there are many books about the artist and his films. I propose that he will continue being a major influence on cinema years after he stops making films because these will become increasingly available to future generations of filmmakers. Many of the innovations/formal experiments contained in his films have yet to be properly digested by the culture at-large thus have not achieve full impact yet.

*Maybe Chris is right when he writes that "even in Europe the greatest interest would be in his early work". This implies nothing negative about the quality of his "later" work. It has more to do with the nature of cinephilia and distribution/marketing realities at the time the films were released. Some well-known critics, particularly Americans, have done a disservice to the understanding and appreciation of Godard's films released in the past three decades. The excerpt below, from an article by Craig Keller posted at Senses of Cinema, concerns this very issue.

The first instance grants that Godard's body of work can be read as a movement that passes through many aesthetic phases but never fails to constitute an oeuvre that examined from any point, yields a poetic and cinematic value consistent with or building upon those films that have come before. It is the second standpoint, however, that has been so consistently adopted by a number of prominent (that is, visible) critics. This flank, whose American roster includes but is not limited to Roger Ebert, Anthony Lane, Andrew Sarris, and David Thomson, have long confused the evolution of the artist Godard with some kind of fundamental betrayal. For this group, Godard is a filmmaker who will forever be associated with pop-art palettes, love-and-guns on the run, and the intellectual exuberance of a breezy, pre-Vietnam 60s youth; but who will never be forgiven for discarding the early use of Hollywood reference points (which the filmmaker's latter-day antagonists had perceived in any case not as aesthetic critique but as blank cool cultural homage), exhibiting overtly political tendencies, exploring in his two tv series the possibilities of a different medium, and then settling on a mode of filmmaking that incorporates narrative cadenzas, historical scrutiny, visual poetry, literary citation, and a dominant mood of elegiac contemplativeness.
In short, Godard has evolved from making films of great complexity and beauty to making films of even greater complexity that frequently approach the sublime. Godard's crime, that which the impatient soul and the Philistine alike deem the greatest felony of all: that Godard is an artist of tremendous agency and authority within his medium, and through the uncompromised expression of his aesthetic and, therefore, moral convictions, demonstrates as little concern for the satiety of the "audience that might have been" as Beethoven or Joyce before him.

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...this cinematic saint....

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At least you're open about your hagiography.

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Godard's crime, that which the impatient soul and the Philistine alike deem the greatest felony of all: that Godard is an artist of tremendous agency and authority within his medium, and through the uncompromised expression of his aesthetic and, therefore, moral convictions, demonstrates as little concern for the satiety of the "audience that might have been" as Beethoven or Joyce before him.

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Wow! Now that's what I call writing! (He misuses the word satiety though.)

I incorporated the term used by Johann in my response to his post. I had initially put it between quotations. Then I decided to remove them thus taking responsibility for its use, however borrowed. I figure...if catholics can designate hundreds as saints, cinephiles can have at least fifty of our own. A polite provocation: those who wouldn't include Godard among those fifty probably love storytelling more than they love cinema.

Saturday July 30th

5th Avenue Girl (USA, 1939) at MOMA, NYC.

Gregory La Cava is known for directing My Man Godfrey and Stage Door, most of his other films are rarely screened. Fifth Avenue Girl, seen as part of a retrospective of the director's filmography, provides evidence that La Cava deserves as much recognition as Capra and Cukor, better-known contemporaries whose work often deals with similar subject matter. 5th Avenue is one of those witty depression comedies about what happens when a working class person enters the world of the rich. Ginger Rogers meets a middle-aged CEO in Central Park and becomes a catalytic agent who transforms him and the members of his family. This is only my third La Cava film but I'd say he seems to allow more ambiguity into his narratives than Cukor and his view of the poor is less romanticized than Capra's. Oh, and Chelsea and I found 5th Avenue Girl very funny. We didn't stay for the next La Cava film on today's schedule because we had tickets to the new Broadway show "Lennon". Maybe someday I get to watch other films from this director such as Primrose Path and She Married Her Boss.

Monday August 1st

9 Songs (UK, 2004) at the Angelika, NYC.
Michael Winterbottom (24-hr Party People, Butterfly Kiss) is apparently guided by an agenda in his low-budget latest: to normalize the depiction of sex in mainstream cinema. The film opens with Matt (TV actor Kieran O'Brien) flying over Antarctica. Matt's voice-over implies his affair with Lisa (newcomer Margo Stilley) has ended. 9 Songs flashes back to Black Rebel Motorcycle Club performing the first of the titular rock songs. Matt and Lisa meet at the show then go to his place for sex. The minimal dialogue is banal. Most of the 66 minutes concern the couple going to rock shows and fucking. Some scenes are as explicit as porn but shorter and untouched. The sex is not realistic, it's real. Imagine a home movie depicting what goes on inside the apartment of a couple who are having a casual relationship based on sexual compatibility and a shared appreciation for rock. There are couples who do this on the net. It's perhaps historically significant that Winterbottom managed to get 9 Songs shown in theatres. But given the minimal context and character detail, all the audience gets is the satisfaction of subsidizing socio-cultural progress.
*This Monday screening was nearly sold-out. The Village Voice had a still from it on the front cover, which doesn't hurt the b.o. It's going wider on August 12th, if you're curious. I found it unambitious thus can't recommend it.

Too bad, seems not a fortunate choice. I wonder if you went to Film Forum, or Quad Cinema? Maybe not so much right now at either place, though John G. Young's The Reception at Quad Cinema looks good. Oyster Farmer less so. Nothing much new now at Film Forum, except a documentary about Chechen children. Have you seen Darwin's Nightmare? I haven't. It's at the IFC Center on Sixth Avenue and W 3rd St. Otherwise at Angelika maybe better: Broken Flowers (the new Jarmusch!!!), Junebug (good US inde?), Tony Takitani (Japanese, "A delicate wisp of a film with a surprisingly sharp sting..."," Manohla Dargis), and Secuestro Express (Miramax) which would all be new to me.

Oscar, have I missed your trip? I have been completely swamped and out of town and forgot entirely that you were in the city... how rude. Hope you all are having a great time. Email me if youre still around.
Peter

*I'm back in Miami, Peter but I'll send e-mail to you and Chris soon.
*Broken Flowers and Junebug will open here soon. I had free tickets to a screening of Secuestro tonight with the director in attendance. I passed, based on the trailer. Wish I had seen Tony Takitani or the re-released The Conformist (a personal fave) instead of 9 Songs.

Wed. August 3rd

Rear Entrance (Hong Kong, 1959) on import dvd
I've seen few non-Japanese Asian films made before 1970 so I decided to take a chance on this winner of Best Film at the 7th Asian Film Festival (?). I found this melodrama, about a childless middle-aged couple adopting a neglected 7-year old girl, crudely written and otherwise unremarkable. Direction by Han Hsiang Li (The Burning of Imperial Palace, Enchanting Shadow).

Tout Va Bien (France, 1973) Criterion dvd
The final title at the end of Week-End read END OF CINEMA/END OF THE WORLD. Jean Luc Godard proceeded to form the Dziga-Vertov Group, named after the Polish-born Soviet director who proposed that cinema could instill mass revolutionary consciousness. Prominent among its members was Jean-Pierre Gorin, an avowed Maoist who collaborated closely with Godard, primarily on the scripts of films Godard directed between 1968 and 1974. Generally, these films had an obvious political agenda. In the US, they were primarily shown during Godard and Gorin's tours of American Universities and Film Societies.
Tout Va Bien is perhaps the most commercially viable of the films made during this period, because it features Jane Fonda and Yves Montand, and there's a semblance of plot. It's a meditation on the role of the artist/intellectual in effecting revolutionary social change. Godard has spoken about the pitfalls of attempting to speak for the workers/oppressed/working classes. Fonda and Montand are a married couple who serve as Godard's surrogates. She works for an American TV network and is assigned to report on a strike at a sausage factory. He plays a writer-turned-director who was prominent during the New Wave but finds himself directing commercials to pay the bills. He accompanies her to the factory where she's scheduled to interview the manager. Upon arrival, they learn some workers have occupied the administrative offices. The workers are keeping the manager hostage and decide to do the same to the visitors. The offices and factory are shown as a dollhouse set, with the front wall removed like Jerry Lewis did for his The Ladies Man. The union reps, mangement, several workers, the reporter and the director get to face the camera at several points to present their perspective on the events. The last segment of Tout Va Bien takes a tangential detour into a large department store. The camera pans slowly along multiple checkout lanes back and forth as a consumer riot gradually erupts.

I guess my recommendatons were a bit late. I forgot the length of your New York stay. Sorry you missed even talking to PMW. but I'm sure you did a lot of good stuff and things that your family loved too and I'll enjoy hearing about. I was hinting Secuestro sounds 'Miramaxical.' If I'd been on a quick trip to NYC I'd have skipped 9 Songs because it's coming here shortly, and because I never saw 24-Hour Party People which is the one of his movies people (party people I guess) really loved (and somehow, I didn't mind missing it from what I heard; I thought maybe it was for another generation). Anthony Lane reviewed this new one in last week's New Yorker and said, "There is a fine film to be made about the retreat from worldly obligation into erotic rite, and Brando and Bertolucci made it in 1972......This is an awkward stumble for Winterbottom, who made the wonderful 'In the World' (2002)...Only one aspect of '9 Songs' was a shock to me, and that was the music....the cream of current bands, supposedly, although the unitiatied may wonder why most of the cream sounds like a cow giving birth in a wind tunnel."

I did see Machuca finally the other day and will write a review of it.

Now that I may be committing to Netflix (which I'm not at all sure isn't a mistake on my part) I've received a copy of "Le Cercle rouge" and written an evaluation of the expanded version on DVD (from Netflix) .