Monthly Archives: January 2025

The Theme

From the Chicago Reader (April 15, 1988). — J.R.

The Theme

It’s not too much of a surprise that this angry Soviet film by Gleb Panfilov won the Golden Bear prize at the 1987 Berlin Film Festival over Platoon. It’s a more courageous film, especially considering the restrictions in its own country, which help to explain why this 1979 film could only surface after glasnost; it’s also a more impressive piece of filmmaking. Its novellalike plot follows a trip to the country taken by a celebrated middle-aged playwright (Mikhail Ulyanov) who has recently come to feel contempt for the compromises and complacencies of his own career. He develops an interest in an attractive young tour guide (beautifully played by Panfilov’s wife, Inna Churikova), whose low opinion of his work helps to focus his own self-hatred. But this masochistic attraction is frustrated when he discovers that her heart belongs to a young unpublished Jewish poet who, unlike him, has risked his career for his work and who, reduced by the authorities to a job as a grave digger, is planning to emigrate. Panfilov’s narrative style (the hero’s acerbic offscreen narration effectively punctuating the action) and visual distinction (a memorable use of snowy landscapes creating a striking black-and-white effect to play off against the color) keep this powerfully acted drama watchable even when little is happening. Read more

Camera Buff

Cowinner of the grand prize at the 1979 Moscow film festival, this satirical feature by Krzysztof Kieslowski describes everything that ensues when a Polish factory clerk (coscreenwriter Jerzy Stuhr) buys an eight-millimeter cameraincluding his growing obsession with his new toy, his altered relationships with his wife and boss, and the responses of other filmmakers (including Krzysztof Zanussi in a cameo) after he wins third prize in an amateur film competition. Suffused with Kieslowski’s dry wit and intelligence, this early feature provides an excellent introduction to his work. In Polish with subtitles. 112 min. (JR) Read more

Stalker

Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 masterpiece, like his earlier Solaris, is a free and allegorical adaptation of an SF novel, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic. After a meteorite hits the earth, the region where it’s fallen is believed to grant the wishes of those who enter and, sealed off by the authorities, can be penetrated only illegally and with special guides. One of them (Aleksandr Kaidanovsky), the stalker of the title, leads a writer and a professor through the grimiest industrial wasteland you’ve ever seen. What they find is pretty harsh and has none of the usual satisfactions of SF quests, but Tarkovsky regards their journey as a contemporary spiritual quest. His mise en scene is mesmerizing, and the final scene is breathtaking. Not an easy film, but almost certainly a great one. In Russian with subtitles. 161 min. (JR) Read more

The Third Generation

Bulle Ogier and Eddie Constantine join Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s stock company in a dark 1979 comedy predicated on the odd conceit that the West German state secretly supports a terrorist group to mask and offset its own repressions. Episodic, aurally and visually cluttered, and calculated to irritate, but like most Fassbinder films, worth a second look. In German with subtitled. 105 min. (JR) Read more

Kramer Vs. Kramer

Misogynistic claptrap about a divorced husband (Dustin Hoffman) fighting for the custody of and learning to cope with his little boy (Justin Henry)a movie whose classy trimmings (including Nestor Almendros’s cinematography) persuaded audiences to regard writer-director Robert Benton as a subtle art-house director. In this adaptation of a novel by Avery Corman, Benton does manage to get some effective performances from Hoffman and Henry as well as Meryl Streep (the wife who walks out on husband and son) and Jane Alexander, but let’s hope that the slew of Oscars won by this picture (best picture, actor, screenplay, director, and supporting actress) gives the thoughtful some reason for pause (1979). (JR) Read more

Quintet

High allegory in the icy north from Robert Altman; I haven’t seen this 1979 drama, but practically everyone except Altman’s diehard fans seems to find it a grueling slog. Set in a frozen city of the future, it takes its title from a board game using dice that Paul Newman, seeking to avenge some family deaths, winds up playing. With Bibi Andersson, Fernando Rey, Brigitte Fossey, and Vittorio Gassman. 110 min. (JR) Read more

Hearts Of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse

A fascinating 1991 postmortem on the making of Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), mainly consisting of footage shot by Eleanor Coppola in the 70s that has been intelligently selected, augmented, and arranged by Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper. Like the Coppola film itself, this documentary at times seems to value self-styled profundity and rhetoric over observation and common sense; one especially regrets the absence of any thoroughgoing political or historical critique of Apocalypse Now in relation to the Vietnam war. Moreover, this movie only compounds the self-satisfied myopia that regards peasants of the Philippines (where Apocalypse was shot) and those of Vietnam as interchangeable. But the various personalities involvedincluding Marlon Brando, Martin Sheen, Dennis Hopper, and Coppola himselfkeep this watchable. Too bad that Michael Herr, who wrote Apocalypse’s effective narration after the film was shot, is overlooked in the kaleidoscopic clashes of male egos, but it’s nice to see that Orson Welles’s radio and screenplay adaptations of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness are acknowledged as precedents and influences. 96 min. (JR) Read more

H.e.a.l.t.h.

This rather tired and airless 1979 satire, which Robert Altman spun off from his own Nashville and (somewhat less tired) A Wedding, plunks its many oddball characters down in a health-food convention in a Florida hotel and asks us to smirk along with the direction. The cast includes Carol Burnett, Glenda Jackson, Lauren Bacall, James Garner, Henry Gibson, Alfre Woodard, and Dick Cavett (playing himself, and clearly pleased as punch about it). 100 min. (JR) Read more

Avalanche Express

The last film of both director Mark Robson and actor Robert Shaw (1979), and not the best of either, though the distinctive, talented Abraham Polonsky is credited with the script, an adaptation of a Colin Forbes novel. A rather lackluster spy thriller set largely on a train running from Milan to Rotterdam, it also features Lee Marvin, Linda Evans, Maximilian Schell, Joe Namath, Mike Connors, and Horst Buchholz. Because Shaw died during shooting, most of his lines have apparently been dubbed. (JR) Read more

Ticket of No Return

If you’re looking for an alternative to the Chicago Film Festival, here’s a neglected movie from the past that’s better than most of the current festival entries. Of the many films by Ulrike Ottinger I’ve seen, this lovely and deliciously “irresponsible” 1979 camp item has given me the most unbridled pleasure. A nameless heroine (Tabea Blumenschein) arrives in West Berlin on a one-way ticket intending to drink herself to death, and three prim ladies known as Social Question (Magdalena Montezuma), Accurate Statistics (Orpha Termin), and Common Sense (Monika Von Cube) stand around and kibitz. Thanks to the heroine’s extravagant wardrobe, the diverse settings, the witty dialogue, the imaginative mise en scene, and the overall celebratory spirit, Ticket of No Return is a continuous string of delights, worth anybody’s time. This screening will be accompanied by a lecture by film scholar Ilene Goldman. Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Tuesday, October 19, 6:00, 443-3737. Read more

Alain Resnais and the Marquis de Sade: A Letter and Some Speculative Comments About It

1. Letter from Alain Resnais to Richard Seaver
(A “hasty” English translation by Francois Thomas)

Tuesday, October 20, 1970

Dear Dick,

Your letter of October 10 from Southampton [New York] arrived last night. Probably intersected with the one I sent on the 8th, containing answers to several questions you asked me. But — is it a feeling — you don’t seem to be aware of the one I sent you on September 9 (and I remember that you didn’t seem to have received one of the notes I sent from London at the end of July either). Anyway, I’m writing to you without waiting for the French postal workers’ strike announced for next Tuesday.


Perry had told me that he was happy with your letter and the contract and that everything was fine on that side. The distance between rue des Plantes and Dean Street makes it difficult to check. In any case, his silence is inexcusable and you can therefore feel free to have Konecky notify him of the loss of his rights (Unless he telegraphs money to you. That’s always a good thing. Paramount here was still talking about $10,000 as the total budget for a script!)


I always refuse to let a project be read and I had to take a lot on myself to give the material to Carlos [Clarens]. Read more

Letter about Michel Ciment

Cineaste editor Gary Crowdus invited me to write a letter for the Summer 2024 issue commenting on an interview they ran with the late Michel Ciment. Here’s what I sent and what they published. (Note: I was subsequently commissioned by Sticking Place Books’ Paul Cronin to be interviewed for the second volume in the series inaugurated by Michel Ciment and A Shared Cinema. I invited my friend Ehsan Khoshbakht, a programmer at Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, to be my interlocutor, and the result, Travels in the Cities of Cinema, will be out this spring.) — J.R.

The Lasting Influence of France’s Michel Ciment

In N.T. Binh’s interview with the late Michel Ciment, labeled “The Seven Cardinal Virtues of the Critic,” responding to a question about the advice he’d give to an aspiring critic, Ciment replies, “First and foremost, the temptation to be avoided at all costs…is to want a film to be something other than what its author set out to make.” But if I were asked the same question, I’d be tempted to reply, “Above all, don’t con yourself into believing that a work’s conscious or unconscious intentions can be objectively known, even by its author, much less used as a basis for any value judgment.” Read more

Nea

A 16-year-old French girl (Ann Zacharias) writes a best-selling pornographic novel that she publishes under a pseudonym, and when she finds herself financially, sexually, and emotionally exploited by the publisher (Samy Frey), she concocts an elaborate revenge scheme. Like many other Nelly Kaplan features, this 1979 comedy is dominated by audacious fantasies of revenge against manipulative men; it also projects an undeniable eroticismnot surprising given that the plot is loosely based on a story by the author of Emmanuelle, though it’s a far cry from that pornographic model. (JR) Read more

Othello

This is a rare screening of the original version of Orson Welles’s landmark 1952 independent feature–not the so-called restoration released in 1992, but the film as it originally looked and sounded, courtesy of a 16-millimeter print owned by cinematographer Gary Graver, one of Welles’s key collaborators during the last phase of his career. For all the liberties taken with the play, this may well be the greatest of all Shakespeare films (Welles’s later Chimes at Midnight is the only other contender). A brooding expressionist dream of the play made in eerie Moorish locations (in Italy as well as Morocco) over nearly three years, it’s held together by a remarkably cohesive style and atmosphere (and beautifully shot by Anchisi Brizzi, G.R. Aldo, and George Fanto). Welles, despite his reputation in the U.S. as a Hollywood filmmaker, made about 75 percent of his films as a fly-by-night independent in order to regain the artistic control he’d had on Citizen Kane. Othello, the first of these features, is arguably an even more important film in his career than Kane, since it inaugurated the more fragmented shooting style that dominates his subsequent work. The most impressive performance here is that of Micheal MacLiammoir as Iago; Welles’s own underplaying of the title role meshes well with the somnambulistic mood, but apart from some magnificent line readings he makes less of a dramatic impression. Read more

The People Vs. Larry Flynt

It’s somehow characteristic of director Milos Forman that his 1979 version of the prohippie musical Hair bordered on being a conservative attack on the counterculture, whereas, in these conservative times, his tragicomic all-American saga about the life and times of Hustler publisher Larry Flynt (1996) borders on being a piece of hippie irreverence. Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski’s script may in spots be as much of a skim job as their one for Ed Wood, but it’s almost as sweet and as likable, and if the movie can’t ever practice what it and its hillbilly hero preachthe only beaver shot in the movie involves a corpseits heart is certainly in the right place. Woody Harrelson plays Flynt with energy, and Courtney Love does at least as well as his wife; others in the capable cast include Edward Norton, James Cromwell, Crispin Glover, and James Carville. 127 min. (JR) Read more