Even though much of this early piece of mine about Ruiz (also available in my collection Placing Movies), originally published in separate versions in 1987 and 1990, is out of date by now, and also incorrect in spots, I’ve decided to reprint and illustrate it here, over three decades later, because of the way Ruiz inspired me to play various games of my own, as he did several years later when I wrote about him at some length again (here). (August 2011, shortly after Ruiz’s tragic death, I’ve also updated the illustrations for my 2002 interview with him for Cinema Scope.) — J.R.
Preface
The sheer otherness of Râúl Ruiz in a North American context has a lot to do with the peculiarities of funding in European state-operated television that make different kinds of work possible. The eccentric filmmaker in the United States or Canada who wants to make marginal films usually has to adopt the badge or shield of a school or genre — art film, avant-garde film, punk film, feminist film, documentary, or academic theory film— in order to get funding at one end, distribution, promotion, and criticism at the other. Ruiz, however, needs only to accept the institutional framework of state television — which offers, as he puts it, holes to be filled — and he automatically acquires a commission and an audience without having to settle on any binding affiliation or label beyond the open-ended rubric of “culture” or “education.” Read more
In contrast to the relative timelessness of Elaine May’s first three features, Ishtar (1987) is a satirical farce plainly grounded in the era of Ronald Reagan, where a peace settlement between a North African dictator and his rebellious populace can be negotiated by a cynical American show-biz agent (Jack Weston) on behalf of his talentless songwriter clients. These are Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman, both cast against type as a gauche Texan without sexual confidence and a self-styled stud calling himself The Hawk.
Yet the most striking thing about the disastrous U.S. reception of this comedy was the blindness of its audience to its political target — American stupidity in the Middle East, whether innocent (Beatty and Hoffman) or corrupt (Charles Grodin’s CIA agent), years before our dimwitted American assaults on Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan yielded much bad music of their own. May’s unique capacity to make all her monstrous characters (along with Isabelle Adjani’s “leftist” rebel) weirdly lovable is what keeps this movie tender even when its ridicule is at its most corrosive. And the fact that May, Beatty, and Hoffman all collaborated with Paul Williams on composing their awful/wonderful songs only proves how much competitive team spirit prevails. Read more
From the March 22, 2002 Chicago Reader. I’ve seen a good many more Apichatpong Weerasethakul films since then, including many of his early shorts, and he continues to amaze me with his range, versatility, and poetics. — J.R.
Mysterious Object at Noon
*** (A must-see)
Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Written by Thai villagers
With Somsri Pinyopol, Duangjai Hiransri, To Hanudomlapr, Kannikar Narong, Kongkiert Komsiri, and Mee Madmoon.
In America the cultural objects we know consist mainly of things publicists know how to advertise, journalists know how to describe, and teachers know how to classify. This might not be so bad if publicists, journalists, teachers, and the organizations they work for didn’t have fairly rigid ideas about cultural objects — about where they come from and what we’re supposed to do with them. Movie entertainment, we’re told, is produced in this country and Hong Kong; movie art is more apt to be produced in Europe. So when Spanish director Alejandro Amenabar makes an arty thriller — such as the 1997 Open Your Eyes — it gets shown here in a few art houses; when his film is remade as an even artier, though not as good, Hollywood thriller — last year’s Vanilla Sky — it winds up in thousands of shopping malls. Read more
I seem to be in the minority in considering Erich von Stroheim’s 1928 extravaganza to be less than a masterpiece. It’s a bit obvious and redundant (apart from a brilliantly edited and extended mutual flirtation sequence), and it doesn’t compare with Blind Husbands, Foolish Wives, Greed, The Merry Widow, or Queen Kelly. But it’s exceptionally subtle and witty at times (one highlight is an early sequence in two-strip Technicolor), and even minor Stroheim is considerably better than most other filmmakers’ major work. The director, also one of the great silent actors, plays the lead, a flirtatious prince who agrees to marry for money to help his parents (ZaSu Pitts is the expectant bride, a crippled heiress) but falls in love with a poor woman (Fay Wray) shortly before the wedding. At great expense Stroheim re-created the decadent splendor of the Vienna of his youth, then saw his film mutilated by Paramount; the first half of the story is all that survives today in any form. 113 min. (JR)
With Patricia Arquette, Tim Robbins, Rhys Ifans, Miranda Otto, Robert Forster, Mary Kay Place, Rosie Perez, and Miguel Sandoval.
The energizing comic wackiness of Being John Malkovich made me wonder what to expect next from screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze. But their latest collaboration, Human Nature — which Kaufman wrote, Michel Gondry (a music video director, like Jonze) directed, and Jonze produced, along with three other people, including Kaufman — is disappointing. It’s almost as wacky in spots as Being John Malkovich, and at first I found it funny and provocative. But by the end of the ride I felt I’d been taken for one. Then I remembered that Being John Malkovich had also left me with a somewhat sour feeling; ultimately Kaufman had overplayed his hand.
The diminishing returns may have something to do with the filmmakers’ postmodernist approach — the flip attitude that puts somewhat mocking quotation marks around everything, so that a more apt title of this movie might be “Human” “Nature.” This makes me wonder if the TV backgrounds of Kaufman, Gondry, and Jonze have something to do with their built-in skepticism. Read more
A word of advice to film artists who want to get ahead: don’t move around too much. Film history often gets subsumed under national film history, so filmmakers who keep moving risk getting lost. And stay out of politics, since getting into them invariably puts you on either the winning or the losing side. If you’re on the losing side, many national film histories will write you out entirely; if you’re on the winning side, chances are your film will date faster than last week’s newspaper.
These somber reflections are prompted by what I’ve been able to piece together about the extraordinary career of the Dutch-born leftist documentary and experimental filmmaker Joris Ivens (1898-1989) — who lived in so many places, did so many things, and made so many films he’s come dangerously close to being shut out of history. From the vantage point of America in 2002, I suppose he’d have to be assigned to the losing side, as mainly a mouthpiece for Marxist party lines from the 30s onward, though that would grossly oversimplify his career. Some of the causes he devoted part of his life to, including Stalinist Russia and Maoist China, are now discredited, with good reason, but that doesn’t mean the films he made on their behalf can simply be dismissed or are without interest. Read more
From The Soho News (June 10, 1981). I posted the first part of this, on Raiders of the Lost Ark, some time ago, but this, belatedly, is the full column — and, in my opinion, the best of my “Declarations of Independents” columns for The Soho News. (I believe there were ten of these in all.) Note: The film stills from Of Light and Texture are copyrighted by the Estate of Andrew Noren. — J.R.
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Cheech & Chong’s Nice Dreams
History of the World, Part I
Of Light and Texture (Museum of Modern Art)
As the most gifted and congenial by far of all the New Hollywood tyros, Steven Spielberg may be the only consummate master of the post-TV movie spectacular — the blockbuster that’s diced out into bite-size narrative units like Chicken McNuggets (every structural hint of bone or body part processed out of existence, every juicy piece a separate unique experience, designed to vanish without a trace). Aspiring to the condition of continuous action as if that were a delirious state of grace — borne aloft by superbly timed jolts and impossibly narrow escapes, usually in three to five-minute setpiece doses — Raiders of the Lost Ark (rated PG for pretty good) all but bypasses character and logic for a string of stunning rides through Disneyland, one right after the other, each one a visceral treat. Read more
From the June 7, 2002 Chicago Reader. This is also reprinted in my book Essential Cinema. — J.R.
Landscapes of the Soul: The Cinema of Alexander Dovzhenko
When I speak of poetry, I am not thinking of it as a genre. Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality….Think of Mandelstam, think of Pasternak, Chaplin, Dovzhenko, Mizoguchi, and you’ll realize what tremendous emotional power is carried by these exalted figures who soar above the earth, in whom the artist appears not just as an explorer of life, but as one who creates great spiritual treasures and that specific beauty which is subject only to poetry. Such an artist can discern the lines of the poetic design of being. He is capable of going beyond the limitations of coherent logic, and conveying the deep complexity and truth of the impalpable connections and hidden phenomena of life. — Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time
It is possible that we are still in a pre-historic stage of cinema, for the great history of cinema will begin when it leaves the frame of ordinary artistic representation and grows into a tremendous and extraordinarily encompassing perceptive category. — Alexander Dovzhenko, 1933
Ukrainian writer-director Alexander Dovzhenko may be the most neglected major filmmaker of the 20th century. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (November 25, 2005). — J.R.
Jean Renoir, The Boss: The Direction of Actors
**** (Masterpiece)
Directed by Jacques Rivette
With Jean Renoir and Michel Simon
In 1966 Jacques Rivette made a three-part TV documentary titled Jean Renoir, Le patron (Jean Renoir, the Boss), and its 90-minute centerpiece has rarely been seen since. “A Portrait of Michel Simon by Jean Renoir, or A Portrait of Jean Renoir by Michel Simon, or The Direction of Actors: Dialogue,” screening on DVD this week at Alliance Francaise, is a missing link that’s key to understanding Rivette’s work. It’s a raw record of the after-dinner talk between one of the world’s greatest directors and his greatest actor, both in their early 70s, punctuated by clips from the five films they worked on together — Tire-au-Flanc (1928), On Purge Bébé (1931), La Chienne (1931), Boudu Saved From Drowning (1932), and Tosca (1941). It also includes occasional remarks by Rivette, the documentary’s producers (Janine Bazin and Andre S. Labarthe), and the stills photographer (the distinguished Henri Cartier-Bresson). The joy Renoir and Simon clearly share at being reunited is complemented by Rivette’s determination to exclude nothing, so that the “direction of actors” applies to him as much as to his two principals, each of whom can be said to be directing the other. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (November 1, 1996). — J.R.
An honorable failure, this intelligent adaptation of one of Kurt Vonnegut’s best early novels falters in part because it rejects Vonnegut’s narrative structure of alternating several time frames for more chronological flashbacks. This plays havoc at times with the book’s delicate ordering of facts about Howard W. Campbell Jr. (Nick Nolte) — a successful German-American playwright living in Germany who decides during the rise of Nazism to work as an American spy, knowing that for security reasons his masquerade as a Nazi can never be revealed. The invaluable moral of the novel, placed in the first paragraph of the introduction, is We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. By placing it less prominently in the narration, director Keith Gordon and adapter Robert B. Weide grant it a lesser function, so that the powerful literary irony established in the film’s first half — all the more valuable in the context of Schindler’s Listand its suggestion that there were good ways of being a Nazi — is eventually dissipated, and the improbabilities of the original become much more vexing without the author’s exquisite expositional strategies.Read more
Who could have guessed that Frederick Wiseman’s second fiction feature –- a mesmerizing, meditative masterpiece made at age 92, only two months after the death of his wife of 66 years, Zipporah Batshaw Wiseman (whose first name has served as the name of his production company) –- would resemble in some particulars some of the late works of Jean-Marie Straub? It’s an audiovisual fugue consisting of (a) a monologue performed by Nathalie Boutefeu, adapted by Boutefeu and Wiseman from diary entries and letters written by Leo Tolstoy’s wife Sophia about her estrangement from her husband and (b) the vibrant settings she wanders through, a lush seaside garden on the French island Belle-Île off the coast of Brittany. It even features “the wind in the trees” that D.W. Griffith found missing from modern cinema but which Straub has placed front and center in his own landscape art. But of course the differences from Straub are every bit as pertinent as the similarities: a devastating personal autocritique by a documentarist who has devoted his career to what he has called “reality fictions”, his ravishing widescreen compositions, and the services of a skilled professional actress (whose credits include Irma Vep and Kings and Queens). Read more
The following, which I wrote circa March 2004, was commissioned for a Criterion box set; my thanks to Liz Helfgott, my editor there, for giving me the go-ahead to reprint this. — J.R.
Jean Renoir’s Trilogy of Spectacle
by Jonathan Rosenbaum
Movie trilogies can be created by either filmmakers or critics. When Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote and directed The Decameron (1971), The Canterbury Tales (1972), and Arabian Nights (1973), he made no bones about calling them his Trilogy of Life. But when Michelangelo Antonioni followed L’avventura (1960) with La notte (1961) and L’eclisse (1962), the intention was mainly apparent in the titles and a few echoes noted by critics, such as the presence of building sites at the beginning of the first and at the end of the third. As for the so-called Koker trilogy of Where is the Friend’s House? (1986), Life and Nothing More… (1992), and Through the Olive Trees (1994), Iranian writer-director Abbas Kiarostami explicitly refuses to yoke them together in this fashion—–which hasn’t prevented many critics and programmers from doing so. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (November 20, 1987). — J.R.
The four films to date of independent Chicago filmmaker Peter Thompson form two diptychs: not films to be shown simultaneously side-by-side, but successive works whose meanings partially arise out of their intricate inner rhymes and interactions. Two Portraits (1982), which has already had limited exposure in Chicago, describes the filmmaker’s parents: Anything Else, devoted to Thompson’s late father, combines stop-frame images of him, in an airport and outdoors, with a painful recording of his voice taken in a hospital and a multifaceted verbal portrait delivered by his son; Shooting Scripts juxtaposes the filmmaker’s mother, Betty Thompson, reading from her own diaries with a minimalist view of her sleeping on a beach chair, alternating stop-frames with privileged moments of movement. Together these films create a rich tapestry, but the more recent hour-long pair, Universal Hotel and Universal Citizen (1987), receiving their premiere here, create a still more ambitious and dense interweaving of objective and subjective elements. As Thompson puts it, this diptych deals with three main themes: “the emotional thawing of men by women, the struggle to disengage remembrance from historical anonymity, and nonrecoverable loss.” In the first film, Thompson describes his involved research about medical experiments in deep cold conducted on a Polish prisoner and a German prostitute by Dr. Read more
Written for A Man Called Ermanno: Olmi’s Cinema and Works, published by Edições Il Sorpasso (in Lisbon) in May 2012. A French translation of this essay has been published in Trafic #91, automne 2014. — J.R.
For me, the cinema is a state of mind and a process of analysis from a series of detailed observations. — Ermanno Olmi, from a 1988 interview (1)
1
Ermanno Olmi first became well known as a filmmaker during the period in the early 1960s when the Nouvelle Vague and, more specifically, François Truffaut’s formulation of la politique des auteurs, were near the height of their international influence. Yet it seems that one factor that has limited Olmi’s reputation as an auteur over the half-century that has passed since then is his apparent reluctance and/or inability to remain type-cast in either his choice of film projects or in his execution of them. Indeed, the fact that he repeatedly eludes and/or confounds whatever auteurist profile that criticism elects to construct for him in its effort to classify his artistry results in a periodic neglect of him followed by periodic “rediscoveries”. And these rediscoveries are confused in turn by the fact that each rediscovery of Olmi’s work seems to redefine his profile rather than build on the preceding one. Read more
Published, in a slightly shorter version, in the August 2014 Sight and Sound. — J.R.
JEAN-LUC GODARD, CINEMA HISTORIAN
By Michael Witt. Indiana University Press, 276pp. £20.65.
paperback, ISBN 9780253007285
Reviewed by Jonathan Rosenbaum
There has been a slew of important books lately devoted to post-60s Godard, including Daniel Morgan’s Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema, Jerry White’s Two Bicycles: The Work of Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, and Godard’s own Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television, translated by Timothy Barnard — the latter including Michael Witt’s introductory, 55-page ‘Archaeology of Histoire(s) du cinéma’. But none seems quite as durable, both as a beautiful object and as a user-friendly intellectual guide, as Witt’s superbly lucid, jargon-free book about Histoire(s) du cinéma, Jean-Luc Godard, Cinema Historian.
Copiously illustrated with frame enlargements that complement the text without ever seeming redundant, this examination of the philosophical, historical, and aesthetic underpinnings of Godard’s masterworkisn’t only about a four and a half-hour video; it’s also about the work’s separate reconfigurations as a series of books, a set of CDs, and a 35-millimeter feature of 84 minutes (Moments choisis des Histoire(s) du cinéma). Read more
