Published online on October 12, 2017 by the British Council. — J.R.
Stillness and Life: Abbas Kiarostami’s 24 Frames
24 Frames (2017), the last film by Abbas Kiarostami, is a feature length experimental work comprising twenty-four vignettes, each four-and-half minutes long and shot mostly in black and white. The majority of these vignettes take place in natural surroundings. In fact, the first shot, of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting The Hunters in the Snow (1565), establishes the template for most of the following scenes, which portray different kinds of animals and birds moving around in snowy landscapes. Elsewhere in the film, hunters are kept offscreen but we hear their gunshots. In one instance, they kill a bird and in another, a peaceful fawn. Other segments of the film focus on interior spaces, represented by large, dark windows that reveal only a limited view of the natural world beyond them (birds, or trees, or their shadows). With the exception of the homage to Bruegel, all of the segments are based on Kiarostami’s own photographs.
In 2015, Kiarostami confirmed that he was working on the project, which he began after completing his previous feature, Like Someone in Love (2012). His death in July 2016 meant the film remained unfinished.
April 7: The Story of Three Loves (1953) at the Regency. It’s been over 27 years since I last saw this luscious, kitschy technicolor trio of thematically related sketches — awkwardly and arbitrarily stitched together on an intervening ocean liner — and it impresses me even more now than it did at age 10. Its terrain is neither Hollywood nor Europe, exactly, but a glossy MGM compromise between American dreams of Europe and European emigré dreams of America. And the fascinating thing about it today is the degree to which pop existentialism composes its principal form of hard aesthetic and social currency, in all three of its delirious parables about love and art.
In the London-based “The Jealous Lover” (scripted by John Collier, directed by Gottfried Reinhardt), ballerina Moira Shearer learns she has a weak heart that prohibits further dancing. Subsequently inspired, however, by the florid imagination and genius of director James Mason, she devotedly and ecstatically dances herself to death.
“Mademoiselle” offers Vincente Minnelli’s mise en scène of a Rome-based fantasy about an 11-year-old Ricky Nelson patterned somewhat after Daisy Miller’s twerpy kid brother. Secretly infatuated with his governess, Leslie Caron, he is enabled by the magic of an obliging American witch (Ethel Barrymore) to become Farley Granger for one enchanted, Cinderella-tense evening.
Written in October 2011 for the Blu-Ray released by Music Box Films. It seems like the gift of Ruiz never stops giving: a film cosigned by him and his widow Valeria Sarmiento suggestively called The Wandering Soap Opera turned up on a few South American ten best lists for 2017 as well as MUBI. — J.R.
It was disconcerting to see a passage from a 1997 article of mine about Raúl Ruiz (1941-2011) quoted in some of his mainstream obituaries: “Ruiz is the least neurotic of filmmakers; he doesn’t even seem to care whether what he’s doing is good or not.” Not because this was false when I wrote it but because it related to my earliest encounters with his work and its seeming challenges to film commerce, not to his better known big-budget efforts such as Marcel Proust’s Time Regained (1999) and Klimt(2006).
This is why some of these latter films disappointed me, pointing towards what Ruiz himself frankly described to me in a 2002 interview as a “capitulation”. But Mysteries of Lisbon shows that he may have gained as much from these bigger budgets as he lost, and I’m not speaking about pocket change. What he actually broadened was his film vocabulary, especially his employments of long takes and camera movements.
How much of the pain of Sadaf Foroughi’s first feature — winner of one of my Fipresci jury’s two prizes at the Toronto International Film Festival, a film from Iran — is the pain of being a teenager, and how much is it being a teenager at a particular place and time? How much is personal and how much is institutional, familial, cultural, social, political, architectural?
These are the questions raised by Foroughi’s exquisite, unorthodox framings and reframings of her characters, each one posing a separate inquiry. [9-20-17]
From Cineaste, Spring 1993. I must say that I continue to be stupefied that a very respected academic French film critic reviewed this book favorably in Sight and Sound. But I’ve come to value Truffaut far more as a critic than I did in 1993, so I’m delighted that his writing for Arts was recently and belatedly collected in France. My favorite of all his pieces — an early piece about Hitchcock called “Skeleton Keys”– has yet to be collected in either French or English, although Film Culture and the short-lived Cahiers du Cinema in English both ran an English translation back in the 1960s.– J.R.
The historical amnesia currently infecting much of film scholarship, in academic and mainstream publishing alike, is so pervasive that it might be said to affect our sense of the present as well as the past. In theory, then, the most valuable thing about this annotated collection of early film criticism by François Truffaut would be less what it has to tell us about individual films than what it has to impart about film criticism itself in Paris during the Fifties. In practice, however, it proves to be highly problematical on both counts. While I would find a first volume in English of the criticism of Serge Daney, Jean-André Fieschi, Luc Moullet, Claude Ollier, or several other French critics immensely more valuable than a second Truffaut collection (after The Films of My Life, not to mention his collected letters and many other related books in English), additional samplings of his critical work are still certainly welcome. Read more
Commissioned by Iranian Film Magazine in early December, 2017. — J.R.
It might be argued that domestic melodramas are often based on contrivances. This is true of both Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman (2016) and Mohammed Hamzei and Ehsan Biglari’s Azar (2017), two of the better Iranian domestic melodramas that I’ve seen in recent years. But the different ways in which these films handle their contrivances is instructive.
Farhadi — whom I tend to regard as the Elia Kazan of Iranian cinema, for better and for worse, typically generating more heat than light in his most popular works, as Kazan did in On the Waterfront and East of Eden — is more conventionally skillful with his Big Scenes than the team of Biglari (writer) and Hamzei (director) are with theirs. This is because Farhadi knows how to disguise his contrivances so that they don’t seem contrived at all, but dramatically inevitable, such as the sexual impropriety that spurs most of the action in The Salesman as well as the various dramatic confrontations that result from this.
By contrast, the Big Scenes in Azar tend to be awkwardly unconvincing (notably, the accidental death of Saber from a brief scuffle with his cousin Amir arising from a financial dispute), or played down (the uncle of Amir smashing windows in his nephew’s pizzeria with his fist), or else omitted entirely (the pivotal meeting between Amir and his uncle in prison). Read more
Having no desire to revisit the adolescent, macho-military hijinks of The Last Detail (1973) or read the Darryl Ponicsan novel on which it was based, I had some forebodings about this screen adaptation of Ponicsan’s 2005 sequel, even though the movie was cowritten and directed by the smart and resourceful Richard Linklater. Fortunately the movie belongs mainly to its fine lead actors — Steve Carell, Bryan Cranston, and Laurence Fishburne — playing buddies from the Vietnam war who reunite for a funeral in 2003 after one of them loses a son in Iraq. The movie asks whether Americans unable to share a country or a conviction can at least agree to share a symbol (whether it’s the Stars and Stripes or an unmerited military funeral), and even Linklater and Ponicsan seem divided and uncertain on the question. This has its moments, but it ends, like its characters, in sentimental confusion. — Jonathan Rosenbaum
From the February 19, 1993 Chicago Reader. I may have underrated this movie. — J.R.
THE MATCH FACTORY GIRL
** (Worth seeing)
Directed and written by Aki Kaurismaki
With Kati Outinen, Elina Salo, Esko Nikkari, Vesa Vierikko, Reijo Taipale, and Silu Seppala.
Here’s what Finnish writer-director Aki Kaurismaki has written about The Match Factory Girl:
“Suddenly, last spring, I was running aimlessly around the city, talking too much and twisting and shaking my head in the most ridiculous way.
“The next day I spent lying silently under my bed and hated myself bitterly. In revenge I decided to make a film that will make Robert Bresson seem like a director of epic action pictures.
“Later, I named this piece of junk The Match Factory Girl (Tulitikkutehtaan Tytto), as the name is long enough to be easily forgotten.”
A few glosses on the above:
(1) It’s typical of Kaurismaki, who’s given to dandy’s gestures, that we don’t know what he means by “revenge,” though we certainly know what the film’s mousy title heroine, Iris (Kati Outinen), means by it.
(2) The statement clearly asks to be read as a series of hip disclaimers: “running aimlessly,” “talking too much,” “twisting and shaking my head in the most ridiculous way,” “this piece of junk . Read more
This review appeared in the November 6, 1987 issue of the Chicago Reader. J.R.-
MAMMAME
**** (Masterpiece)
Directed by Raoul Ruiz
Choreographed by Jean-Claude Gallotta
With the Emile Dubois Dance Company.
The more attention is paid to stylizing the screen, to make the quality of how it looks convey the meaning, the closer you get to dance, which is precisely that — the communication of meaning through the quality of movement. — Maya Deren
While it seems plausible, even likely, that Raoul Ruiz is currently the most inventive filmmaker working in Europe, one does not ordinarily go to his work looking for masterpieces. An obsessive doodler — in the same serious way, one should add, that the cartoonist Saul Steinberg is, combining philosophical and metaphysical wit with a penchant for rethinking the world so that it encompasses his boundless energies — Ruiz is blessed and cursed by never knowing when to stop. Indeed, one could argue that his interest in producing lively work, combined with his disinterest in producing masterpieces, has made him the most prolific and proliferating idea man to have emerged in the cinema since Godard. Born 11 years after Godard (1941) in Chile, Ruiz started work on his first feature the year after Breathless (1960), but it wasn’t until he became an exile in France, following the Chilean military coup of September 1973, that his career began to accelerate to Godardian proportions. Read more
Written for MUBI, who published it in January 2024.
According to the literary scholar Fredric Jameson, who contributes an enthusiastic preface and afterword, Reading with Jean-Luc Godard — a compendium of 109 three-page essays by 49 writers from a dozen countries — launches “a new form” and “a new genre”. It can be described as a user-friendly volume designed to occupy the same space between academia and journalism staked out by MUBI while proposing routes into Godard’s work provided by his eclectic reading — a batch of writers ranged alphabetically and intellectually from Louis Aragon, Robert Ardrey, Hannah Arendt, and Honoré de Balzac to François Truffaut, Paul Valéry, A.E. Van Vogt, and Virginia Woolf. (Full disclosure: I contributed one of the two pieces on Truffaut, devoted to how his best piece of Alfred Hitchcock criticism helped to shape Godard’s and why Truffaut omitted that major text from his own books.) Some authors, such as Marguerite Duras, Martin Heidegger, and Edgar Allan Poe, get more than one entry, and coeditor Timothy Barnard wrote all four of those devoted to André Malraux. Indeed, he and coeditor Kevin J. Hayes are responsible for almost half of the entries.
One of the book’s fringe benefits is canonical, offering a list of writers that includes many obscure names worthy of discovery. Read more
This review was published in the June 1985 issue of Video Times. Criterion has brought out an excellent Blu-Ray edition of this film that I can highly recommend — along with Thomas Pynchon’s Foreword to the 2003 Penguin edition of Orwell’s novel. — J.R.
1984
(1984), C, Director: Michael Radford. With John Hurt, Richard Burton, Suzanna Hamilton, and Cyril Cusack [see below]. 110 min. R. USA, $79.95.
***½
Director Michael Radford’s 1984, filmed in England between April and June of 1984 (the same period during which the action of George Orwell’s famous 1949 novel takes place), is a film adaptation that succeeds brilliantly. In one fell swoop, it repoliticizes the novel — translating it into terms that speak directly to the present. Paradoxically, it pulls off this singular feat not through any spurious “updating” of Orwell’s terrifying novel but by situating the novel squarely in its own period. Consequently, the film’s action can be said to unfold simultaneously in three separate time frames: the past (specifically the 1940s, during which Orwell conceived and wrote his novel), the future (as we postulate it in this decade), and the present (the mid-1980s). Emerging from the interplay between these three contexts is one of the most rigorous and faithful literary adaptations in the history of cinema — a 1984 that one feels sure Orwell himself would have recognized and appreciated. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (December 13, 1996). — J.R.
Mars Attacks! ***
Directed by Tim Burton
Written by Jonathan Gems
With Jack Nicholson, Glenn Close, Annette Bening, Pierce Brosnan, Danny DeVito, Martin Short, Michael J. Fox, Rod Steiger, Tom Jones, Lukas Haas, Natalie Portman, Jim Brown, Lisa Marie, and Sylvia Sidney.
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
As light entertainment, Mars Attacks! gave me more pleasure than most other recent movies I’ve seen, including Daylight, The English Patient, Independence Day, Jingle All the Way, 101 Dalmatians, Space Jam, Trees Lounge, and 2 Days in the Valley. Maybe this is because it achieves the level of nonseriousness so many of its competitors aim for, a level the mass media have been touting as the ideal for big-time movies. If that ideal is to keep you enthralled for a couple of hours and leave a minimum of aftertaste, then Tim Burton’s SF comedy pretty much fills the bill. It also made me laugh.
Part of what kept me so absorbed — apart from the neatly designed effects and a few of the actorly turns, including Jack Nicholson’s — is the sense the film conveys of postmodernist free fall through the iconography of 50s and 60s science fiction in relation to the present: a singular sense of giddy displacement that clearly locates the movie in the 90s, but a 90s largely made up of images and cliches from previous decades that are subtly turned against themselves, made into a form of camp, affectionately mocked, yet still revered as if they had a particular purchase on the truth. Read more
I believe this is the last of my reviews of early Hitchcock films for the Monthly Film Bulletin that I’ve transcribed, after The Ring, Blackmail, and Number Seventeen; this one appeared in the July 1975 issue. –J.R.
Murder
Great Britain, 1930 Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Hitchcock has described Murder as his “first and only whodunit”, accounting for his antipathy to the form with the complaint that it “contains no emotion”, and bringing to mind Edmund Wilson’s comparison of reading several with unpacking “large crates by swallowing the excelsior in order to find at the bottom a few bent and rusty nails”. Certainly the most evident lack in this 1930 movie — apart from the creakier aspects of the play which it adapts — is the sort of emotional continuity and momentum of controlled viewpoints which sustained Blackmail so brilliantly the previous year, and the more dubious cerebral rewards offered in their place are not quite enough to fuse its comparable experiments into a consistently workable style. After an effective, rather UFA-inspired opening (prompted, no doubt, both by Hitchcock’s work at the German studio in the mid-Twenties and by the fact that he concurrently shot a German version of Murder entitled Mary), which features a lengthy dolly past the windows of neighbors responding to a mysterious commotion, the film mainly tends towards a stagier conception of dialogue units which the various stylistic departures often inflect rather than unify, thus usually registering as isolated “touches”. Read more
This review originally appeared in the October 1974 issue of Monthly Film Bulletin. —J.R.
Juggernaut
U.S.A., 1974 Director: Richard Lester
A disconcerting aspect of Richard Lester’s last feature, The Three Musketeers, was the evidence of a director trying to play several separate games — and please several separate audiences — at the same time, often leading to a diffusion of interest as the film briskly bounced from one tone or style to another. Juggernaut, clearly designed as nothing more or less than yet another ship-disaster blockbuster, is a marked improvement in this respect, because however unoriginal its base ingredients, it hardly ever slackens its pace or diverts attention from its central premises. After a rather deceptive Petulia-like opening — the camera panning up the legs of a girl trombonist in the band celebrating the Britannic’s launching, followed by a string of typical Lester vignettes extracted from the surrounding fanfare (mainly “overheard” one-liners singled out on the soundtrack and disembodied somewhat from the visuals, giving them a certain resemblance to comic-strip bubbles) — the plot settles down to the cross-cutting techniques common to the genre, and the short gags (e.g., two children on the boat playing a flipper machine called “Shipwreck”) are used thereafter a bit more sparingly. Read more
This is the 8th bimonthly column I’ve published in Cahiers du Cinéma España; it ran in their September 2008 issue. — J.R.
Ever since I retired from my twenty-year stint as a film reviewer at the Chicago Reader, I’ve been reluctant to see new releases, either as a freelance reviewer or as an ordinary spectator. One reason for this attitude is a reaction to having been obliged for so long to see many hundreds of films I had no personal interest in, many of which I gratefully forgot about shortly after submitting my reviews. Another motivation is that I’m usually so happy seeing or reseeing older films, most often on DVD, that it’s hard to find many new films that are equally enticing.
Undoubtedly my age and physical laziness both play roles in this bias, but I honestly think that the diminishing quality of commercial releases also has a significant influence. I’m not saying that there’s been a decline in cinema more generally — apart from such factors as the eclipse of the Hollywood studios or (for example) the increasing censorship in Iran — because I think it’s arrogant to make such sweeping generalizations on the basis of the tiny fraction of what gets made that one has access to. Read more
