The following, a revision and substantial expansion of liner notes that I wrote for the Criterion DVD of Day of Wrath several years ago, was written for the Australian DVD, which came out in 2008 on the Madman label — as did my essay on Ordet. (One can order DVDs from Madman’s site, and by now they have quite a collection.) My thanks to Alexander Strang for giving me permission to reprint this. — J.R.
Figuring Out Day of Wrath by Jonathan Rosenbaum
I first encountered Carl Dreyer’s work in my teens, but it wasn’t until my 40s that I started to be ready for it. I mainly had to rely on lousy 16-millimeter prints, so ruinous to the sounds and images of Day of Wrath that I could look at that film only as a form of painterly academicism, a repressed view of repression. The film defeated me with its unalleviated Danish gloom and its dull pacing, which I associated with Dreyer’s strict Lutheran upbringing. Most of this was sheer nonsense, as I discovered once I had access to better prints, information, and reflexes. For one thing, contrary to many would-be reference works, Dreyer’s upbringing was neither strict nor Lutheran, and he was born a Swede, even if he grew up in Denmark. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (January 12, 2007). — J.R.
Letters from Iwo Jima ****
directed by Clint Eastwood
written by Iris Yamashita and Paul Haggis
with Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Ryo Kase, Hiroshi Watanabe, and Takumi Bando
The Dead Girl ***
directed and written by Karen Moncrieff
with Toni Colette, Rose Byrne, Mary Beth Hurt, Marcia Gay Harden, Brittany Murphy, Kerry Washington, Giovanni Ribisi, Piper Laurie, James Franco, Mary Steenburgen, Bruce Davison, Nick Searcy, and Josh Brolin
Given my usual aversion to war and slasher movies, I wasn’t instantly won over by either Letters From Iwo Jima or The Dead Girl. Both films display a fundamental decency and seriousness from the outset, but both are unrelievedly grim and full of booby traps. (At press time I was told that The Dead Girl may not open for another week or so.)
Letters From Iwo Jima, directed by Clint Eastwood, one of the finest directors alive, looks at the World War II battle of his recent Flags of Our Fathers from a Japanese perspective. Letters From Iwo Jima opened in Japan around the same time its counterpart opened here, evidence of the nobility of his intention to address the people of both countries, not just us. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (April 20, 2007). The severe sentencing of Jafar Panahi, the director of Offside, after this article was published made his remarkable (and earlier) filmmaking more vital and relevant than ever. — J.R.
BLACK BOOK ****
DIRECTED BY PAUL VERHOEVEN
WRITTEN BY GERARD SOETEMAN AND VERHOEVEN
WITH CARICE VAN HOUTEN, SEBASTIAN KOCH, THOM HOFFMAN, HALINA REIJN, WALDEMAR KOBUS, AND DEREK DE LINT
OFFSIDE ****
DIRECTED BY JAFAR PANAHI
WRITTEN BY PANAHI AND SHADMEHR RASTIN
WITH SIMA MOBARAK SHAHI, SAFAR SAMANDAR, SHAYESTEH IRANI, M. KHEYRABADI, and IDA SADEGHI
The recent successes of such films as Pan’s Labyrinth, Volver, and The Lives of Others at multiplexes is a welcome sign that art-house ghettos aren’t the only places for foreign-language films anymore. Art houses, like multiplexes, tend to foster certain expectations about the movies we go to see in them, and sometimes we miss out on what a film has to offer as a consequence. Paul Verhoeven’s big-budget drama Black Book, which opened last week at the Music Box and is now also playing at some more commercial venues, and Jafar Panahi’s low-budget comedy Offside, which opens this week at the Music Box, both confound expectations. Read more
This article appeared in the Winter 2008-2009 issue of Film Quarterly. The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein remains for me one of the key American independent American features of the past decade or so, and it’s hard for me to think of another that’s more personally important to me. — J.R.
HISTORICAL MEDITATIONS IN TWO FILMS BY JOHN GIANVITO
by Jonathan Rosenbaum
It’s been gratifying to see the almost instant acclaim accorded to John Gianvito’s beautiful, fifty-eight-minute Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (2007), especially after the relative neglect of his only previous feature-length film, the 168-minute The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein (2001).
The more recent film — a meditative, lyrical, and haunting documentary about grave sites that won the grand prix at the Entervues Film Festival in Belfort in 2007 and both a Human Rights Award and a special mention at the Buenos Aires Festival of Independent Film in 2008 — also received an award at the Athens International Film and Video Festival in Ohio and was named the year’s best experimental film by the National Society of Film Critics. (Full disclosure: I nominated Profit Motive for the last of these awards, and headed the jury of the same Buenos Aires film festival in 2001, which gave The Mad Songs its top prize.) Read more
I hardly ever watch sports of any kind, so it isn’t surprising that I don’t generally watch sports films either, much less pretend to evaluate them. But I just saw a bouncy and personal debut effort about marathon running by a longtime pal of mine, Cheryl Ross, whom I mostly know and cherish as a colleague (initially as a fellow Chicago Reader writer and staffer), as a fellow movie buff, and as a sometime guest when she returns to Chicago for some of her marathons. I enjoyed watching her first film because I like Cheryl a lot, and also because she almost always accomplishes whatever she sets out to do, including in this case to become a filmmaker. If you’d like to check it out, here’s a link:
The raison d’être for this three-part 2004 anthology was finding a project for ailing Italian master Michelangelo Antonioni, in his early 90s, whose segment, The Dangerous Thread of Things, is drawn from three sketches in his book That Bowling Alley on the Tiber. It’s clumsily acted and closer to standard porn than anything else he’s done, though it’s also characteristic of his late work in its sensitivity to modernist architecture and its fascination with the silences and antagonisms of an unhappy couple. The one masterpiece here is Wong Kar-wai’s moving The Hand, a visually exquisite and highly erotic period piece about a prostitute (Gong Li) and her tailor (Chang Chen). The complete washout is Steven Soderbergh’s flashy Equilibrium, a heartless, unerotic, and ultimately pointless black comedy with a 1950s setting. I guess one out of three ain’t bad. In English and subtitled Mandarin and Italian. 108 min. (JR) Read more
Arguably, one of the more questionable and limited practices of film historians is the classifying of films and filmmakers according to a certain form of tribalism known as nationality. The problem with this admittedly convenient and obvious method of cataloging is that important elements–perhaps even essential ones–that elude or defy tribalism may get lost in the shuffle.
For starters, many of our greatest filmmakers – Chaplin, Dreyer, Hitchcock, Jancsó, Murnau, Renoir, Sirk, Stroheim, Welles — can’t be tied to a single country or tribe without being drastically oversimplified in the process. And even though most of what we call neorealism is Italian, this tends to overlook the fact that comparable examples can be found elsewhere in the world, not only in the 20th century but in the new millennium as well.
In the two short films that Nemes Jeles László made for the Inforg studio in 2007 and 2009, Try a Little Patience and The Counterpart, one can already find not only the same camera techniques, themes, and even emotions that will characterize his 2015 masterpiece Son of Saul — such as a mise en scène constructed in relation to close-ups, the experiences of a war prisoner, and a male adult’s feeling of tenderness towards a boy — but also, even more fundamentally, a sense of universality that goes beyond nationalism and tribalism. Read more
This 2006 feature by Tsai Ming-liang (Goodbye, Dragon Inn) is a departure in many respects — perhaps too many. His first film to be shot in his native Malaysia, it alludes to the homophobic persecution of deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim in the late 90s, to the large number of foreign workers stranded after the country’s economic crisis, and, according to Tsai, to Mozart’s The Magic Flute as well. Lee Kang-sheng, Tsai’s perpetual star, plays both a paralyzed hospital patient and a homeless worker who becomes the apex of a bisexual triangle involving another immigrant who takes care of him and a coffee-shop waitress. Despite the overload, Tsai remains resourceful. In Malay, Mandarin, and Bengali with subtitles. 118 min. (JR)
Richard Quine, a sometime actor best known today for his career as a director at Columbia in the 50s and early 60s, never became a cult hero, but a surprising number of his pictures hold up pretty well. This is one of them, a 1954 noir item with echoes of Double Indemnity. An aging cop (Fred MacMurray) falls in love with a bank robber’s girlfriend (Kim Novak in her first major role, and if you’re as much of a pushover for her early work as I am, you can’t afford to miss this.) Adapted by Roy Huggins from two novels — Thomas Walsh’s The Night Watch and William S. Ballinger’s Rafferty; with Phil Carey, Dorothy Malone, and E.G. Marshall. (JR)
Chambers’ may appeal after his suit against God is tossed out
BY CHRISTOPHER BURBACH
WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER
You can’t sue God if you can’t serve the papers on him, a Douglas County District Court judge has ruled in Omaha.
Judge Marlon Polk threw out Nebraska Sen. Ernie Chambers’ lawsuit against the Almighty, saying there was no evidence that the defendant had been served. What’s more, Polk found “there can never be service effectuated on the named defendant.”
Chambers had sued God in September 2007, seeking a permanent injunction to prevent God from committing acts of violence such as earthquakes and tornadoes.
The senator said today that he is considering an appeal of Polk’s ruling.
“It is a thoughtful, well-written opinion,” Chambers said. “However, like any prudent litigator, I want to study it in detail before I determine what my next course of action will be.”
Polk dismissed the lawsuit with prejudice, which means it can’t be refiled. But his ruling can be appealed.
Although the case may seem superfluous and even scandalous to others, Chambers has said his point is to focus on the question of whether certain lawsuits should be prohibited.
“Nobody should stand at the courthouse door to predetermine who has access to the courts,” he said. Read more
One of the more puzzling features by the puzzling Manoel de Oliveira, this placid travelogue (2007) was adapted by him from an autobiographical book by Manuel and Silvia da Silva. A Portuguese man (Ricardo Trepa, the director’s grandson) emigrates to the U.S. in 1946, becomes a doctor, and returns home in 1960 to marry. In 2007, he and his wife (Oliveira and his own wife) tour various American and Caribbean historical sites to confirm his curious theory that Christopher Columbus was a Portuguese Jew; turning up at all these sites, and visible only to the viewer, is a mute, female angel carrying a sword and a Portuguese flag. Like some of Oliveira’s other minor works (The Letter, Belle Toujours), this intermittently suggests a poker-faced joke without a punch line. In English and subtitled Portuguese. 70 min. (JR) Read more
The following is taken from the online Moving Image Source, and the first introductiion is by David Schwartz. –J.R.
This essay was commissioned by the Museum of the Moving Image in 1988 for a catalogue accompanying the month-long, 150-film retrospective Independent America: New Film 1978-1988. The ambitious series, which took place during the Museum’s inaugural season, was an attempt to make a statement not just about the state of experimental filmmaking at the time but also about the Museum’s wide-ranging programming philosophy.
The underlying idea was to showcase films that were cinematically inventive, works that broke boundaries in form and content, subverted conventions, and created new hybrid forms. In this way, the series revealed the inadequacy of such confining labels as “avant-garde,” “fiction,” and “documentary,” and it also tried to reinvigorate the notion of what it means to be “independent.”
Before the commercial success of Sex, Lies, and Videotape and Pulp Fiction (and before the rise of home video), independent filmmakers made and showed their films in a world truly apart from Hollywood. To get their work seen, they would travel for months, with their 16mm film prints in tow, to colleges and media arts centers across the country.Read more
Why wasn’t a single reference to George W. Bush made by anyone — including Ellen DeGeneres in her gently laid-back stand-up routines? Probably for the same reason that I rarely heard Bush mentioned by anyone in conversations when I was recently in Rotterdam, Toulouse, and Paris. Why beat a dead horse?, the deceased in this case being the fate of the world, or perhaps innocent civilians in Iran, not a spry but clueless leader. Once it’s become accepted and mutually acknowledged that the overall will of the world’s population and the will of the American people — insofar as either will can be correctly inferred — has almost no bearing on what Bush decides to do, speaking out of rage and impotence about a stupid dictator’s whims won’t accomplish very much. So instead of cracking jokes about how Clinton risked impeachment for getting a blow job while Bush risks nothing but a little wrist-slapping for endangering the survival of the planet as well as his own country, DeGeneres brings out a vacuum cleaner. The closest she ever got to evoking Bush was implying at one point that more of the American public voted for Al Gore.
Who could it be at Vinegar Syndrome Films in the U.S. and/or Powerhouse Films in the U.K. who decided I was an aficionado of Mexican and/or Canadian wrestling? I haven’t been able to discover if Vinegar Syndrome and Powerhouse are distantly or closely related to one another—or if, on the contrary, separate publicists at each company arrived independently at the notion that I was an actual or potential wrestling buff. But the fact remains that unrequested check discs of Santo vs. Evil Brain and Santo vs. Infernal Men (both 1961) along with two more unrequested check discs devoted to an Italian Western with an equally unidiomatic, pidgin-English title (The BigGundown, 1966), all from Powerhouse, turned up in my mailbox early this year, and these were soon followed by a finished Blu-Ray wrapped in cellophane of the no less unrequested and undesired Hitman Hart:Wrestling with Shadows, a 1998 Canadian documentary from Vinegar Syndrome.
Even if I accept the more probable and less paranoid explanation that much of our planet is currently undergoing a collective nervous breakdown over identity politics, leading to many mistaken surmises and false assumptions that each of us is making about the identities and interests of everyone else, I can’t fathom what might have inaugurated this trend in “restored” digital releases.Read more
This short article was written for the Barcelona newspaper La Vanguardia and published there in Spanish on January 9, 2008. Portabella’s 1970 Vampir-Cuadecuc was written about by James Naremore in the Summer 2008 issue of Film Quarterly as his second favorite film of 2007. And Portabella, who has his own web site, ihas released a sizable DVD box set devoted to his work.
Portabella in the U.S.
by Jonathan Rosenbaum
It was over 36 years ago, in Cannes, that I first encountered the singular cinema of Pere Portabella, a revelation that came via his second feature, Vampir-Cuadecuc. Living at the time in Paris, I knew absolutely nothing about Catalan culture under Franco, and had only the film’s sounds, images, and Portabella’s wit in juxtaposing the two as my guides. The only contextual information I had was that Portabella was one of the producers of Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana, and that he couldn’t be present because the Franco government had taken away his passport as punishment for this caprice.
In my festival coverage for the Village Voice, I described Vampir as “the most original movie at the festival and the most sophisticated in its audacious modernism.” A year later, I praised Portabella’s Umbracle [see illustration below] in the same newspaper. Read more
I first encountered Carl Dreyer’s work in my teens, but it wasn’t until my 40s that I started to be ready for it. I mainly had to rely on lousy 16-millimeter prints, so ruinous to the sounds and images of Day of Wrath that I could look at that film only as a form of painterly academicism, a repressed view of repression. The film defeated me with its unalleviated Danish gloom and its dull pacing, which I associated with Dreyer’s strict Lutheran upbringing. Most of this was sheer nonsense, as I discovered once I had access to better prints, information, and reflexes. For one thing, contrary to many would-be reference works, Dreyer’s upbringing was neither strict nor Lutheran, and he was born a Swede, even if he grew up in Denmark. Read more 
