How could an experimental documentary about the dismantlement of the world’s largest nuclear plant encompass, among other things, a survey of 20th century painting, a political statement, a site for meditation, and a philosophical song about annihilation and creation being parts of the same process? Thirty-five-year-old Lithuanian filmmaker Emilija Škarnulytė shows us how, and her vision is so spellbinding that it demonstrates how the finest lessons of 2001: A Space Odyssey in merging art and science and the early films of Alain Resnais in executing slow, steady, and hallucinatory camera crawls across, into, and around documentary subjects can be creatively applied.
“In my films from the last ten years,” she has said, “I have mostly researched places where contemporary political issues are staged between human and non-human worlds, the shifting boundaries between ecological and cosmic forces. I want to feel out all kinds of non-human and post-human scales in the depths of space and time.” Thus her opening images offerrocks thatresemble planets, a voluptuous nuclear explosion is rhymed with trees, an animated disassembly becomes a Constructivist dance, and a snake slithering around the same circuitry previously traversed by her camera becomes a bold Surrealist encounter.Read more
Directed and written by Thom Andersen and Noël Burch
Narrated by Billy Woodberry.
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
When Peter Wollen wrote about canon formation in the English film magazine Sight and Sound three years ago, he conceptualized “a motley set of cultural gate-keepers and taste-makers.” Archivists come first, determining which films to acquire, preserve, and screen; then come the academics and critics, singling out the touchstones and masterpieces; they’re followed by filmmakers and, finally, the audience. As Wollen notes, “The process of cultural negotiation among these many gate-keepers of taste results not only in the surface phenomena of lists and programs, but also in the crystallization of an implicit aesthetic paradigm at a deeper level.”
I can think of several sources critical to the formation of my own canon. When I was in my early teens, the only sources I could find were library books like Arthur Knight’s The Liveliest Art, which is useful as a beginner’s survey, and Agee on Film, which is hampered by its limited coverage. During my freshman year in college I purchased my first film magazine: the Winter 1961-’62 issue of Sight and Sound, which contained the results of an international poll of critics about the ten best movies ever made; I resolved to see as many movies on the composite and individual lists as possible. Read more
Jean-Luc Godard’s third feature and first studio production (1960) starts with a subversive premise: a neorealist musical in which the major characters (Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina, and Jean-Claude Brialy) can’t really sing and dance, much as they’d like to. Periodically ravishing to look at (it’s Godard’s first foray into both color and ‘Scope) and listen to (Michel Legrand did the nonsinging score), it’s also highly deconstructive in the way it keeps jostling us away from these pleasures and in the general direction of indecorous reality. (It’s also packed with both subtle and obvious references to other movies.) While its slender plot (stripper Karina wants a baby and turns to Belmondo when her boyfriend Brialy won’t oblige her) can irritate in spots, the film’s high spirits may still win you over. It’s perhaps most memorable for being a highly personal documentary about Karina and Godard’s feelings about her at the time, brimming with odd details and irreverent energies. In French with subtitles. 83 min. (JR)
Written in Summer 2014 for the seven-disc Criterion Blu-Ray box set, “The Complete Jacques Tati”, and posted on Criterion’s web site on October 28. — J.R.
Even though he was a skilled pantomimist, it’s impossible to imagine Jacques Tati as a film artist without his use of sound, and it’s not always easy to imagine his filmic universe minus color: two of his six features exist in black and white, but only the second of these, Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday(1953), was intended exclusively for that format. Tati had a sense of design in terms of both sound and image that expressed itself in painterly “touches” — strategic dabs that informed and inflected his overall compositions. (This shouldn’t be too surprising from the grandson of the man who framed van Gogh’s canvases.)
The fact that he always shot his films without sound and composed his soundtracks separately made it easier for him to use images and sounds interactively, employing sound in part as a way of guiding how we look at his images, by stimulating and directing our imaginations. This means that any discussion of Tati’s mise en scène has to cope with the reality that he effectively directed each of his films twice — once when he shot them and then once again when he composed and recorded their soundtracks. Read more
