Nyff 2010

[Chris Knipp]

Tues. Sept. 14 P&I screenings:
Fernando Fuentes. Three films in the NYFF a sidebar program:

Prisoñero 13 (76m) 1933
A corrupt colonel orders an execution and finds he has unwittingly sacrificed his own son.
El Compadre Mendoza 85m) 1934
In this witty and intelligent satire, a landowner tries to mollify government and zapatistas alike.

Let's Go with Pancho Villa (92m) 1936
The stunning megaproduction revisits Pancho’s legend, following six loyal enlistees to their doom.
(Masterworks: Fernando de Fuentes' Mexican Revolution Trilogy)

Nice looking cleaned up prints, fair subtitles. These had a lot of charm. Presumably the look of people, uniforms, etc. was not inaccurate. Not great films but historical documents. Fuentes was a Mexican pioneer. And each of these films is successively looser and more inventive.

Wed., Sept. 15 P&I screenings:
More samplings of the NYFF sidebar material.
The first two are from the series:
MASTERWORKS: Elegant Elegies: The Films of Masahiro Shinoda. The 12-film series (mostly from the Sixties) runs from Sept. 25 – Oct. 10. The two shown to P&I (with FSLC summaries) are:


Pale Flower (Kawaita hana 1964, 96 min)
Shinoda’s dazzling breakthrough film follows a gangster (Ikebe Ryo) who gets released from jail, only to find his old yakuza gang merged with their former rivals. Disillusioned and without allies, he becomes drawn to a gambler (Mariko Kaga) and resolves to commit murder for her viewing pleasure.

As influenced by the Nouvelle Vague as the popular Japanese yakuza genre, Shinoda crafts a visually stunning and unapologetically nihilistic vision of the underworld and its inhabitants, with a memorable use of music by Purcell.

“The daily life of an assassin interests me more than the assassination. The routine of coming home and daydreaming or sitting still and thinking about what you’ll do next is what I wanted to capture.” —Masahiro Shinoda

Silence (Chinmoku 1971, 129m)
A 17th-century Portuguese missionary’s betrayal of his beliefs under torture conveys the extraordinary, insidious toll of religious persecution on mind and spirit. As part of Japan’s policy of sakoku (a system of restrictions on foreign trade set up to reduce Iberian influence), Christianity was considered a punishable offense. Within this hostile milieu, Shinoda focuses on the attempt by two missionaries to bolster an underground Christian sect in a small fishing village, yielding a nuanced exploration of faith, culture clash, and guilt. Adapted from the revered novel by Shusaku Endo and featuring a hybrid score by Toru Takemitsu.

The third film is a documentary about the cinematographer, Jack Cardiff. NYFF summary:


Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff (Craig McCall, 2010, UK; 86m)
As wonderfully informative as it is delightfully entertaining, Cameraman traces the eight-decade career of cinematographer Jack Cardiff. A child actor who found his true calling on the other side of the camera, Cardiff was the first European to be trained in shooting Technicolor; a few years later, Michael Powell promoted the ace cameraman to full-scale cinematographer for A Matter of Life and Death. Soon, cinematic history would be made: together, Powell and Cardiff set the standard for the creative use of color in classics such as The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus. Craig McCall traces the development of Cardiff’s art on both sides of the Atlantic, detailing his constant interaction with the painters and paintings he admired while offering a treasure lode of Cardiff anecdotes about Marlene Dietrich, Orson Welles, Marilyn Monroe and a host of other legends. A Strand release.