Two essential items in Jean-Luc Godard’s much-neglected video work. The first, made in 1982, is one of the video treatments he started making for each of his film features around 1980, and possibly the best of the lot; running 54 minutes, it’s built around Godard as image maker, facing his editing equipment, projecting images, and discussing his conceptual ideas for Passion with rare lucidity. Soft and Hard, a highly intimate 48-minute video made by Godard and Anne-Marie Mieville for English television three years later, shows Godard and Mieville at their home in rural Switzerland. In many ways the most intimate and domestic of Godard’s works, it broaches the matter of what distinguishes film from video. Both works can be viewed in retrospect as necessary preludes to his recently completed magnum opus, the eight-part Histoire(s) du cinema. (JR) Read more
A personal and personable hour-long documentary by Israeli Dan Katzir about his search for a girlfriend during 1994 to 1997, set against and alongside political events such as the signing of the Jordan peace treaty and the assassination of Rabin. You might be reminded in spots of Ross McElwee, but Katzir has a personality and intelligence all his own. (JR) Read more
John Farrow’s 1956 remake of his own 1939 Five Came Back follows the victims of a plane crash stranded in the South African jungle. Only 5 of the 11 will be able to fly back to civilization, and the question is which five. With Anita Ekberg, Robert Ryan, Rod Steiger, and Phyllis Kirk. Read more
What makes Rob Tregenza’s second feature (after Talking to Strangers) a bit of a letdown is the fact that its conceptual program is much harder to follow than the achronological series of ten-minute takes that make up its remarkable predecessor. Once again, the main connecting thread is a single character (played by Jason Adams), viewed chronologically this time in discontinuous fragments over the arc of several years and various locations — ranging from Baltimore, where we first see him as a welder, to the southwest, where he appears to die and undergo a resurrection. The formal treatment of the material ranges from rapid montage (in the opening sequence) to more conventional editing to lengthy takes without any apparent consistent pattern. Tregenza remains a master cinematographer throughout, and the various ellipses between sequences are often as provocative as the sequences themselves. But the dialogue and the direction of the actors create zones of ambiguity that seem less functional here than they did in the existential encounters in Talking to Strangers; at times they seem to be pointing to a religious or spiritual subtext. The results are certainly original — Tregenza clearly has a vision and an approach all his own — but also somewhat hermetic. Read more
The latest adventures of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, starring Peter Ustinov as the Belgian detective. The murder this time occurs on a luxury cruise ship bound for Jerusalem. Consummate hack director Michael Winner, who also coscripted, is at the helm, and Lauren Bacall, Carrie Fisher, John Gielgud, Piper Laurie, Hayley Mills, Jenny Seagrove, and David Soul are among the others on board. Read more
Half a dozen documentary shorts made by Michelangelo Antonioni between 1947 and 1953, these are mainly the apprentice works of the greatest living Italian filmmaker, though no less impressive and commanding for all that; the only conventional and fairly forgettable one is the last in the program, The Villa of Monsters (1950)to be shown, unlike the others, only with French and German subtitles. Perhaps the most significant stylistic trait to be found in most of the work here is the pan suddenly linking foreground with background, the animate with the inanimate. The other films are People of the Po (1947), Street Cleaners aka N.U. (1948), and my three favorites: Superstition (a perfect subject for Antonioni given his feeling for omens) and Lies of Love (a somewhat sarcastic look at fumetti, Italy’s live-action comic books), both made in 1949, and Antonioni’s remarkable and disturbing episode from the anthology Love in the City (1953), Suicide Attempt.’ A group of women, responding to an eerily unseen male questioner, are persuaded to recount and partially reenact their attempted suicides. The ambiguous and complex interplay here between objectivity and subjectivity, fact and fictionas in one chilling moment when a 19-year-old woman lying on her bed unconvincingly pretends to slit her wrist, then suddenly shows us the scar left by her genuine suicide attemptseems decades ahead of its time. Read more
Edward James Olmos (Stand and Deliver) stars in, produces, and directs a grim, sluggish, and sincere picture about the life of a Mexican American (Olmos) from East Los Angeles who becomes a gang member as a teenager, gets an education in crime and buggery at Folsom prison, and becomes a drug dealer when he gets out. Scripted by Floyd Mutrux and inspired by a true story, this is an ambitious attempt to analyze the self-perpetuation of ghetto crime, in a story that covers three generations while stretching from 1943 to the late 70s. Apart from some softening of the extreme violence (through manipulations on the sound track) and some fancy intercutting, this is every bit as unpleasant as Olmos can make it, but occasionally edifying as well. (JR) Read more
