Daily Archives: January 5, 2007

The Wishing Ring

Director Maurice Tourneur (father of Jacques) was far more than a cinematic pioneer; his pictorial and painterly genius (including his use of deep focus, his mastery of decor, and his refined feeling for light and shading) make him one of the creative giants of the silent era. Subtitled An Idyll of Old England, this lovely 1914 feature follows the adventures of an earl’s flighty son (Chester Barnett) who gets expelled from college and, pretending to be a gardener, romances a parson’s daughter (Vivian Martin in her screen debut, doing a nice spin on Mary Pickford). Tourneur and Owen Davis adapted this from Davis’s stage comedy, and though the movie runs only 54 minutes, there’s never any sense of rush. (JR) Read more

Bullshit

The title of this 2005 Swedish video is meant literally: directors Pea Holmquist and Suzanne Khardalian spent two years following Indian environmental activist Vandana Shiva on her various travels and learned, among other things, that bullshit has its practical uses. The same lesson applies figuratively to this documentary, which is clumsily assembled but worth seeing for its information about Shiva’s antiglobalization arguments and activities. 73 min. (JR) Read more

Pitfall

Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara is best known for his second feature, Woman in the Dunes (1964), a collaboration with novelist-playwright Kobo Abe and modernist composer Toru Takemitsu. But Pitfall (1962), the trio’s first project, is no less arty, allegorical, or bold. Combining elements of agitprop, ghost story, and police procedural, it focuses on the murder of an out-of-work coal miner (identified in subtitles as a deserter, but only from the enslavement of his former job) by an enigmatic killer dressed in white. Teshigahara’s visual flair, evident in his sculptural use of wastelands and remarkable superimpositions, is matched by the singular assault of Takemitsu’s unorthodox score, though the film attempts too many things at once to have the impact of its successor. In Japanese with subtitles. 97 min. (JR) Read more