A column for Caiman Cuadernos de Cine, submitted March 19, 2022. — J.R.
Manny Farber
While preparing a book that collects some of my film criticism, jazz criticism, and literary criticism and tries to correlate certain shared formal attributes of the three corresponding arts, I’ve been lamenting the absence of recordings of the very jazzy and literary lectures on film that Manny Farber gave at the University of California, San Diego in the 1970s, some of which I attended. They seemed improvised, even though he spent a long time preparing them.
Sometimes he delivered portions in voiceovers while the film was still running, as if having an argument with the filmmaker. For those who can now read Farber In Spanish, his breezy, blustery style also seems Influenced both by jazz and the writers he read, although the fact that he hung out with East Coast action painters also left a mark. In short, his writing and his lectures were both performative events full of suspenseful moments and humorous surprises.
J-P Gorin
So is Jean-Pierre Gorin’s A “Pierrot” Primer, a DVD extra on the 2008 Criterion edition of Godard’s Pierrot le fou, which quotes Farber but converts the Farber delivery into a style entirely Gorin’s own. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (November 22, 1996)..– J.R.
Typically British
•
Directed by Mike Dibb and Stephen Frears
Written by Charles Barr and Frears.
2 X 50 Years of French Cinema
Rating **** Masterpiece
Directed and written by Anne-
Marie Mieville and Jean-Luc Godard
With Godard and Michel Piccoli.
I Am Curious, Film
Rating ** Worth seeing
Directed and written by Stig Bjorkman
With Lena Nyman and Bjorn Granath.
100 Years of Japanese Cinema
Rating * Has redeeming facet
Directed and written by
Nagisa Oshima.
Yang + Yin: Gender in Chinese Cinema
***
Directed and written by Stanley Kwan.
To celebrate the “100th anniversary of cinema,” the British Film Institute has commissioned a series of documentaries about national cinemas. Some of them are still being made, but the first 13 are showing at the Film Center as part of a series that started early this month with the three-part A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (excellent) and has continued with documentaries by Sam Neill on New Zealand cinema (witty), by Nelson Pereira dos Santos on Latin American cinema (ambitious but unsuccessful), by Edgar Reitz on German cinema (embarrassing), and by Pawel Lozinski on Polish cinema, realizing an outline by the late Krzysztof Kieslowski (I haven’t seen it). Read more
A wounded Irish revolutionary (James Mason at his near best) on the run in Belfast encounters a cross section of human responses — self-interest, indifference, empathy, and charity — in this arty 1946 English thriller directed by Carol Reed and adapted by F.L. Green and R.C. Sherriff from Green’s novel. This may be Reed’s most pretentious film, but it also happens to be one of his very best, beautifully capturing the poetry of a city at night (with black-and-white cinematography by Robert Krasker that’s within hailing distance of Gregg Toland and Stanley Cortez’s work with Orson Welles). It also has a splendid cast — including Robert Newton, Kathleen Ryan, F.J. McCormick, Cyril Cusack, and Dan O’Herlihy — that wrings the utmost, and then some, out of the quasi-allegorical material. 115 min. (JR)
A low-budget no-brainer, Run Lola Run is a lot more fun than Speed, a big-budget no-brainer from five years ago. It’s just as fast moving, the music is better, and though the characters are almost as hackneyed and predictable, the conceptual side has a lot more punch. If Run Lola Run had opened as widely as Speed and it too had been allowed to function as everyday mall fodder, its release could have been read as an indication that Americans were finally catching up with people in other countries when it comes to the pursuit of mindless pleasures. Instead it’s opening at the Music Box as an art movie.
Why try to sell an edgy youth thriller with nothing but kicks on its mind as an art movie? After all, it’s only a movie — a rationale that was trotted out for Speed more times than I care to remember. The dialogue of Run Lola Run is certainly simple and cursory, but it happens to be in subtitled German — which in business terms means that it has to be marketed as a film, not a movie. Read more
