Jacques Tati: Composing in Sound and Image

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

Ten Best Lists, 1990-1994

The third list to be posted, in a series of six. –J.R.

Chicago Reader, 1990 (ranked):

Sweetie (Jane Campion)

City of Sadness (Hou Hsiao-hsien)

To Sleep With Anger (Charles Burnett)

White Hunter, Black Heart (Clint Eastwood)

The Icicle Thief (Maurizio Nichetti)

Pump Up the Volume (Allan Moyle)

The Plot Against Harry (Michael Roemer)

Texasville (Peter Bogdanovich)

Mr. Hoover and I (Emile De Antonio)

tied: The Freshman (Andrew Bergman), Miami Blues (George Armitage)

Chicago Reader, 1991:
L’Atalante (restoration)(Jean Vigo)
An Angel at My Table (Jane Campion)
White Dog (Samuel Fuller)
Ju Dou (Zhang Yimou)
My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant)
Chameleon Street (Wendell B. Harris, Jr.)
Europa Europa (Agnieszka Holland)
Camp Thiaroye (Ousmane Sembene)
Hangin’ With the Homeboys (Joseph P. Vasquez)
For the Boys (Mark Rydell)

Chicago Reader, 1992:
A Tale of the Wind (Joris Ivens)
Actress (Stanley Kwan)
Rhapsody in August (Akira Kurosawa)
Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami) + Life and Nothing More (Abbas Kiarostami)
The Famine Within (Katherine Gilday)
Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (Mark Rappaport)
Naked Lunch (David Cronenberg)
Close My Eyes (Stephen Poliakoff)
La Belle Noiseuse (Jacques Rivette)

Chicago Reader, 1993:
Nouvelle Vague (Jean-Luc Godard)
The Puppet Master (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
Night and Day (Chantal Akerman) + From the East (Chantal Akerman)
Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg)
Bitter Moon (Roman Polanski)
The Story of Qiu Ju (Zhang Yimou)
The Passing (Bill Viola) +
Histoire(s)du Cinéma (Jean-Luc Godard)
Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (Mark Achbar/Peter Wintonick) + It’s All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles (R. Read more

Ten Best Lists, 1980s

A list of lists, the second in a series of six. –J.R.

Chicago Reader, Best Films of the 1980s (chronological):

Out of the Blue (1980, Dennis Hopper)

Sans soleil (1981, Chris Marker)

Blade Runner (1981, Ridley Scott)

Passion (1982, Jean-Luc Godard)

The King of Comedy (1983, Martin Scorsese)

Love Streams (1984, John Cassavetes)

Manuel on the Island of Wonders (1984, Raul Ruiz)

Shoah (1985, Claude Lanzmann)

The Horse Thief (1985, Tian Zhuangzhuang)

Mix-Up (1985, Francoise Romand)

Mélo (1986, Alain Resnais)

Brightness (1987, Souleymane Cisse)

Housekeeping (1987, Bill Forsyth)

A Story of the Wind (1988, Joris Ivens/Marceline Loridan)

Distant Voices/Still Lives (1988, Terence Davies)

Film Comment, 1981 (alphabetical):
Amor de Perdição (Manoel de Oliveira)
Cutter’s Way (Ivan Passer)
Gal Young ‘Un (Victor Nunez)
Hardly Working (Jerry Lewis)
India Song (Marguerite Duras)
Mommie Dearest (Frank Perry)
Numéro Deux (Jean-Luc Godard)
Reds (Warren Beatty)
Shock Treatment (Jim Sharman)
Taxi Zum Klo (Frank Ripploh)

Chicago Reader, 1987 (ranked):
The Horse Thief (Tian Zhuangzhuang)
Mammame (Raúl Ruiz)
Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick)
Mélo (Alain Resnais)
The Last Emperor (Bernardo Bertolucci)
Ishtar (Elaine May)
Landscape Suicide (James Benning)
Tough Guys Don’t Dance (Norman Mailer)
From the Pole to the Equator(Yervant Gianikian/Angela Ricci Lucchi)
Black Widow (Bob Rafelson)

Chicago Reader, 1988 (ranked):
Mix-Up (Françoise Romand)
Yeelen (Brightness) (Souleymane Cissé)
Housekeeping (Bill Forsyth)
Repentance (Tengiz Abuladze)
Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders)
Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Robert Zemeckis)
King Lear (Jean-Luc Godard)
Talking to Strangers (Rob Tregenza)
Uncommon Senses: Plain Talk & Common Sense (Jon Jost)
Hairspray (John Waters)

Chicago Reader, 1989 (ranked):
Distant Voices/Still Lives (Terence Davies)
A Short Film About Love (Krzysztof Kieslowski)
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (Terry Gilliam)
Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee)
High Hopes (Mike Leigh)
Golub (Jerry Blumenthal/Gordon Quinn)
Rembrandt Laughing (Jon Jost)
sex, lies, and videotape (Steven Soderbergh)
Forevermore: Biography of Leach Lord (Eric Saks)
Say Anything… (Cameron Crowe)

[1/6/10] Read more

Ten Best Lists, 1972-1976

A list of lists, the first in a series of six, first posted on December 21, 2009. Some time ago, Eric Johnson kindly went to the trouble of compiling many of my old ten-best lists and placing them on his web site. I’ve pasted these in here with some corrections regarding sources and precise titles, and added a few others. (Beware of a few anomalies and oddities below, such as the films by Mizoguchi and Renoir that I’d happened to see those years in London. I’m sure I must have had some polemical slant in mind, but I’m no longer able to define this slant more than vaguely.)

In mid-June 2015, I’ve just discovered that Charley Varrick, #7 in my Village Voice list of 1973, was originally misspelled by me as Charlie Varrick. Having just reseen this very impressive masterpiece on a new German Blu-Ray, I can only add that it deserves a lot more recognition than I was able to give it at the time. — J.R.

The Village Voice, 1972 (ranked):

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Luis Buñuel)
L’amour fou (Jacques Rivette)
The Central Region (Michael Snow)
Such Good Friends (Otto Preminger)
Phantom India (Louis Malle)
Umbracle (Pere Portabella)
Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo Bertrolucci)
Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (Jonas Mekas)
Fat City (John Huston)
Frenzy (Alfred Hitchcock)

The Village Voice, 1973  (ranked):

Playtime (Jacques Tati)
A Page of Madness (Teinosuke Kinugasa)
Who is Beta? Read more

ABBAS KIAROSTAMI: A Dialogue Between the Authors (Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa & Jonathan Rosenbaum)

 This appeared originally in Senses of Cinema, issue 17, November 2001. The book it appears in has subsequently reappeared in an expanded second edition.  — J.R.

The following is an extract from Abbas Kiarostami by Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa and Jonathan Rosenbaum (University of Illinois Press, 2003) – one of the initial books in a series edited by James Naremore that is devoted to neglected contemporary filmmakers. Abbas Kiarostami contains separate essays by Rosenbaum and Saeed-Vafa followed first by this dialogue, then by an extended interview with Kiarostami conducted by both authors.

***

September 3, 2001, Chicago

JONATHAN ROSENBAUM: You were the one who originally had the idea of proposing that we do this book together. And maybe we should both consider why we thought it was a good idea.

MEHRNAZ SAEED-VAFA: Basically, as far as I remember, we had a lot of interesting dialogues about Iranian cinema and Kiarostami, and I thought it would be a great idea to put our effort into a book. We started our dialogue in 1992, at a time when Kiarostami was still was getting discovered in France, but unknown in the United States. And I respected you highly as a critic and I knew that you were respected among other readers outside the United States as well as inside. Read more

Praxis du cinéma by Noël Burch

For its 100th issue (Winter 2o16), the French quarterly Trafic asked its contributors to select a particular book that had a formative influence on him or her. Here is my contribution. — J.R.

I still have the original Gallimard edition, probably the most tattered and thumbed-through French book that I own, published in 1969, the same year that I moved to Paris from New York — the title missing the article (Une Praxis du cinéma) that is now found on the 1986 edition. I can even recall purchasing this book at Le Minotaure, a Surrealist bookstore on Rue des Beaux Arts, a short distance from my rented flat on Rue Mazarine, and the ridiculous advertising slip (against which Burch rightly protested), “Contre toute théorie,” that enclosed it.

By this time, I’d already read — or at least tried to read, back in New York — earlier drafts of some of the chapters when they had appeared in Cahiers du Cinéma, and may have also read Godard’s praise of one of those chapters in one of his interviews. Due to a crippling disability in learning languages, much of which I still suffer from today, I had to read those chapters with the aid of a French-English dictionary, even though Burch’s French—the French of an American émigré — was far easier to follow than the French of Roland Barthes in Le plaisir du texte, published four years later, which eventually became my other key French text of this period. Read more

Godard — A critical anthology (1968)

From Film Society Review, Vol. 4, No. 4 (December 1968). — J.R.

****************************************************

JEAN-LUC GODARD: A critical anthology

edited by Toby Mussman. New York: E. P.

Dutton & Co.,1968., 319 pages,$2.45 (paperback).

***************************************************

For most people interested in Godard, Toby Mussman’s collection of writing on his films is bound to be useful. For this reader, it manages to be both indispensable and exasperating. For its range and its better pieces, it far outflanks the two previously published books on Godard in English — Richard Roud’s GODARD (Doubleday) and THE FILMS OF JEAN-LUC GODARD (another anthology, edited by Ian Cameron and published in England by Studio Vista). But like its predecessors, it suffers from wildly uneven displays of taste and judgment.

To take a case in point, one is grateful for the seven pieces by Godard in the book, which throw considerable light on his work and are fun to read besides; included are the scenarios of A WOMAN IS A WOMAN and VIVRE SA VIE, a fascinating monologue on PIERROT LE FOU, and a reply to critics of LES CARABINIERS. But the English translations of most of these pieces are grotesque. Unless the reader knows the French titles of American films, references to LA CROISIERE DU NAVIGATOR (Keaton’s THE NAVlGATOR) and “the ‘Aurore’ trolley” (the trolley ride in Murnau’s SUNRISE) are likely to appear meaningless; the English rendering of “Feu sur LES CARABINIERS” — “Taking Pot Shots at THE RIFLEMEN” — is a product of the translator’s cuteness, not Godard’s. Read more

Life Size (1975 review)

From Oui, March 1975. –- J.R.

Life Size. A wealthy dentist (Michel Piccoli) buys a shapely, life-size female doll and immediately falls hopelessly in love with it. He dances with it, gently places it in a dentist’s chair to go over its bridgework, takes showers with it, talks to it and masturbates into its working orifices. When his indulgent mother (Valentine Tessier) finds him curled up in bed with it, she chuckles, dresses it up in old-fashioned clothes and briefly adopts it as a knitting companion. When lsabelle (Rada Rassimov), his wife, starts imitating the doll out of desperation, he dumps her into a closet and moves into a new flat with his synthetic bride. He even video-tapes their mock wedding for his amusement. But when his video-tape machine reveals that a Spanish repairman has been using his beloved for more immediate and less romantic purposes, he starts to “punish” his doll. The trouble with Luis Berlanga’s exhaustive movie is that what he has to say could probably be squeezed into about ten minutes without much sweat. -– JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

Read more

The Danger of Putting Our Cultural Destiny in the Hands of Business

From The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 17, 1998. –- J.R.

Ever since a Barnes & Noble bookstore opened in my neighborhood in Chicago, I’ve been cultivating the habit of hanging out there, a bit like the way I used to frequent the public library in my hometown as a teenager. I often stop there not with a particular purchase in mind, but on my way to someplace else – a movie at the same shopping center, a nearby restaurant — or on my way home from work. The relaxed idleness offered by the roomy store and the various incentives to linger — the generous selection of hardcovers and paperbacks, the current magazines, the tables where you can spread your stuff out and read for as long as you want to, the Starbucks coffee bar, not to mention various appearances by authors and periodic meetings of discussion groups — create an alluring kind of community space.

It’s a kind of space that I haven’t found in public libraries in recent years, especially since the removal of card catalogues and easy chairs. Some younger people I know, who harbor no fond memories of public libraries, are enjoying visits to places such as Barnes & Noble as a new kind of experience altogether, a theme park that features words instead of rides. Read more

Mamet & Hitchcock: The Men Who Knew Too Much

From Scenario, Vol. 4, No. 1, Spring 1998. –- J.R.

“Hitchcock lives!” I was inspired to write at the head of my review of House of Games, David Mamet’s first feature, in 1987. Ten years later, Mamet’s fifth feature, The Spanish Prisoner, boasts plenty of Hitchcockian elements of its own. But this time I’m not as prone to employ the same assertion.

The difference has less to do with Hitchcockian influence than with the use of that influence — the issue of whether Mamet is borrowing something substantive from the Master of Suspense, or drawing upon Hitchcock only when it suits his strategies. But one of the salient differences I find between reading the script of The Spanish Prisoner and seeing it realized is the difference between finding a Hitchcockian thriller on the page and not quite seeing one on the screen. Both are clearly Mamet creations, but the first comes closer to showing Hitchcock’s special qualities in tandem with Mamet’s, whereas the second shows them shooting off in separate directions.

Put somewhat differently, the distinction has a lot to do with issues that seem central to any evaluation of Hitchcock as well as Mamet -– namely, the ethics and aesthetics of deception, which are intimately tied to the ethics and aesthetics of representing a real world where deception becomes possible. Read more

Raymond Durgnat’s IMAGES OF THE MIND

While eagerly awaiting the publication of the aptly named Images of the Mind: The Essential Raymond Durgnat, a definitive collection edited by Henry K. Miller that the British Film Institute will apparently publish later this year, I’ve just found time to experience the pleasure of a remarkable 1992 documentary with half of the same title, Jarmo Valkola’s 45-minute Images of the Mind: Cinematic Visions by Raymond Durgnat — a film now available at newly revamped Durgnat web site that manages to be both a wonderful portrait of the greatest of all English film critics (1932-2002), speaking as both a fan and as a friend over the last three decades of his life (as well as one-time house mate, circa 1977-78), and a brilliant lecture by Ray about the nature of film, the history of the English character in the 20th century, and the art of Michael Powell. Indeed, the only thing that can be said to be dated about this remarkable film is the fact that it cites Durgnat’s still-unpublished book about Powell as one of his publications. Otherwise, it impressively predates the recent film criticism on film that can be found in the work of Kevin Lee and Volker Pantenburg, among many others. Read more