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Some great news! IFC Films has picked up U.S. rights to Lars von Trier's Cannes competition entry Manderlay.
IFC has scheduled a 2005 release date.
Statement from IFC:
"Von Trier is a lightning rod for controversy and there is no denying that Manderlay will provoke and engage audiences upon its release. Love him or hate him, Lars von Trier is unarguably one of the world's great auteurs."
Couldn't agree more.
What happened to Lion's Gate?
I think Lion's Gate is distributing it in Canada.
Tommy Lee Jones' The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada, which won the awards for Best Actor (Jones) and Best Screenplay (Guillermo Arriaga), still doesn't have a U.S. distributor. The film is scheduled to open in France in August.
Trailer (possible spoilers): http://www.threeburials-lefilm.com/f...urials_640.swf
(Macromedia Flash format/High Bandwidth required).
Cinema-Scope has just posted its Cannes report on the web. Here it is. (C'mon Film Comment.)
Film Comment - not for another week and a half Id say...
Looking forward to it. The "editor-in-chief" is certainly getting the opportunity to write lengthy reviews for Scope; he called A History of Violence one of Cronenberg's best!
The question of violence and its representation in movies is a kind of ideological parade float, so big that it obscures everything else in sight. What's interesting is that even the most elevated and morally engaged responses to the question, like Rivette's famous condemnation of Pontecorvo's innocuous pan across the electrified fence in Kapo (1959), amount to all-or-nothing propositions. One wrong move, and your film has been disqualified from serious consideration on moral grounds. Examinations of what can and cannot be represented in the cinema are eternally relevant, but they almost always lead those asking the questions down a blind alley. Not to mention a stunted form of critical thinking. When I was young, the complaint that a film or filmmaker had "glorified violence" was often heard, as was the similar, if not identical, complaint that the violence in a given film was "violence for violence's sake" (a mouthful, thus not heard quite as often). Similarly, one became used to such condemnations as "psychological," "sentimental," "sexist" "racist," "manipulative," or that old chestnut, "fascist". Such words were, and occasionally still are, carelessly thrown into the stew and just as carelessly ingested, as a kind of low calorie substitute for actual thought. Cinema studies students, born again Christians and aspiring politicians employed them with equal abandon.
I don't mean to imply that racism or sexism or even fascism have never existed in the cinema, or that filmmakers have never exploited the emotions of their customers or the potential of their subjects. What I'm getting at is the way that moviegoers fall so easily into the role of moral watchdogs, no matter what their political affiliation. There are the Michael Medveds of this world, and there are the Jean-Marie Straubs. And if Straub gets the benefit of the doubt because (a) he's a great artist and (b) he doesn't have a silly moustache, I think he's just as tone-deaf to the intricacies of movie watching and thus lovemaking - when the movie is made by someone other than himself and his wife, that is. The reactionary European communist and the reactionary North American conservative share the same core belief: that the road to perdition is paved with morally unaccountable movies, meaning movies that offer an imperfect, unfinished or skewed (consciously or not) vision of the world.
Let us now say goodbye to Mr. Medved and M. Straub (and to Armond White, in whose criticism these two extremes are improbably united), and have a chat with M. Godard. Some years ago, perhaps ten, Godard did a television broadcast in which he addressed the topic of filming war. He offered us newsreel footage, and, in contrast, sequences from Full Metal Jacket (1987)-war as filmed by a great director. Anyone familiar with Godard and his recent preoccupations will correctly guess that Kubrick came out on the losing end. It's been years since I've seen the program, and I don't recall the particulars of Godard's argument as clearly as I'd like to. If I remember correctly, it all boils down to this assertion: that the proximity Kubrick offers us with his slow motion and squibs and reconstruction of Hue in a deserted London gasworks can only be a false proximity. From there, a hop, skip, and a jump to Deleuze's false consciousness. The idea is that the creation and placement of every image, and the corresponding act of receiving those images, is a moment of truth. Ideally, every image must exist at a proper moral distance from its viewer, without promising a form of communion that can never be. Noble? Perhaps. Not to mention untenable.
And now on to Cronenberg. Whose new film, A History of Violence, offers communion and distanced reflection at the same time. It is indeed "a movie that could drive you crazy," as Jim Hoberman put it in his 'Voice' appreciation-"you" being Straub, Medved, Godard. my mother, whoever. It looks and even behaves like a fairly satisfying revenge melodrama, featuring that old Western standard, the retired gunslinger who breaks his promise to himself and avenges himself against past demons who have returned to plague him and his loved ones. It also features two quick, remarkable special effects shots that wouldn't be out of place in, say, Van Helsing (2004), not to mention an early Cronenberg movie: anatomically detailed close-ups of two faces, one half blown off and the other smashed in so far that it resembles a Francis Bacon painting. If someone were to approach me in outrage and inform me that Cronenberg had 'glorified" violence, I'm not so sure that I could find reasonable grounds on which to disagree. Come to think of it, I'm not at all sure that the film even "condemns" or "critiques" violence. Most damningly of all, it not only refuses to deny the satisfaction of violence, but it actually makes such satisfaction a focal point. It's as if Cronenberg were saying, "See how much this movie looks like other movies you know, and how much it doesn't, and then see where the difference leads."
Cronenberg is not showing us air excess of violence in order to make us see its essential ridiculousness (De Palma's Scarface, 1983), or rubbing our noses in its spectacle as a proof of how desensitized we've become (Irreversible, 2002; Funny Games, 1997). Those all seem to me to be losing or at best ineffectual strategies, variations of that old standby, shock value-always heavily dependent on the surrounding context, of which the shock element quickly becomes a constituent part. Cronenberg is actually telling us, quite reasonably, that violence is an all-too-human response, and that we would do better to understand it as such rather than waste our time condemning it or denying its satisfactions. Only Eastwood has approached the question of violence as seriously, but never with such clarity. Watching A History of Violence was, for me at least, like stepping out into the sunshine after a month of rain, and seeing the world from a fresh perspective.
[I am not including the part of his review in which he discusses the film in quite a bit of detail]
A History of Violence presents us with a vision close to Bunuel's, in which sanity and normalcy are not pure states but compromises with madness, and where everyone finds themselves trapped and dizzily looking for the escape hatch, failing to notice that the front door is wide open. As in Bunuel, the internal consistency is as extraordinary as the lack of outward signals of abnormality or aberrance is potentially disconcerting. One might place Cronenberg's film close to Wuthering Heights (1954) or Los Olvidados (1950), which, based on their plot outlines and basic imagery, can be easily dropped into the readymade categories of romantic melodrama and social conscience. But Cronenberg has his own sense of grandeur. Unlike the upper-middle-class phantoms who populate Bunuel's later films, Cronenberg's people actually have a grasp of the absurdity of their own positions, and an awareness of their inability to untangle the mess they're in. Which brings his greatest films, including A History of Violence, close to genuine tragedy.
Thanks to Amy Taubin and Nathan Lee
Cinescope Magazine
Summer 2005
Thank you for this. I hope we can get hold of Kent Jones's detailed description of the Cronenberg film by the time when History of Violence becomes available for general viewing in the fall. Nor having followed Cannes reports as closely as you and not even having read (till just now) Hoberman's (partial, Cannes-related) review, I hardly even know what the content of the film is like. One thing this excerpt seems to omit mention of: the "unexpected humor" others, including Hoberman, quoting Cronenberg himself ("It's funny") have spoken of in the film; apart from that: what the experience of watching the film is like.
Guided By Voices - Chris Chang on the sounds of Gus Van Sant's Last Days.
The cover of the latest edition adorned by Ziyi Zhang has left me speechless. Great choice, P.
Originally posted by Chris Knipp
I hardly even know what the content of the film is like. what the experience of watching the film is like.
Why would you want to know about the content of the film beforehand?
Why would you want to know what the experience of watching the film was for anyone before having your own personal experience watching it?
Ha!
A trap?! Shoulda known better.
"Since its heyday—probably defined by Abbas Kiarostami’s Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1997—Iranian cinema has become increasingly repetitive, returning again and again to formulaic plots involving children, Afghan refugees or both. The filmmakers, of course, haven’t had it easy. The reform movement that loomed so promisingly a decade ago has been pretty much stymied by the increasingly entrenched clerical autocracy, and the effects of that have not filtered down into what had become Iran’s best-known cultural export, the cinema."
I couldn't agree more.
CANNES: UNEASY RIDERS
I must be fair, when you see older Iranian films there does appear to be a greater diversity but at least Kiarostami himself is showing a greater variation both in his film making and his screenplays. Perhaps others will start showing a bit more variety in their output as they mature.
I recently watched a short documentary on Irans one and only rock group "The Flying Misters" it showed it's a tough life in Iran if you want to try and do something a little different especially when it is seen as something "Western" and likely to cause excitement. We don't need a constant supply of films from the Middle East that highlight the problems of this or that group, people do live relatively normal lives in these countries as well and I'm sure there are stories to be told that don't rely on the plight and suffering of a certain group whether Kurds, Afghani's, children, women et al.
Cheers Trev.