In his first American picture (1987) Scottish director Bill Forsyth adapts Marilynne Robinson’s much-acclaimed novel about two orphaned sisters (played by Sara Walker and Andrea Burchill) who share their ramshackle house with their eccentric aunt (Christine Lahti). The setting is the Pacific northwest in the 1950s, and Forsyth does a remarkable job with period detail and the beautiful natural settings, assisted by his own UK crew of cinematographer Michael Coulter, production designer Adrienne Atkinson, costume designer Mary-Jane Reyner, and editor Michael Ellis. But the most impressive thing about this haunting fable is Forsyth’s fluidity and grace as a storyteller, which gives this understated tale some of the resonance one associates with Terrence Malick’s Badlands and Days of Heaven. The story suggests a kind of feminist version of Huckleberry Finn, with the sisters playing Huck and Tom to their aunt’s Jim; the performances by all three actresses are impeccable. A film to be savored rather than gulped. (JR) Read more
This essay — commissioned originally in the mid-1990s by Alexander Horwath for a collection in German published by the Viennale, and later published in 2004 by the Amsterdam University Press as The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema of the 1970s, coedited by Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Horwath, and Noel King — overlaps with various other pieces of mine, and is obviously out of date in some of its details, but it seems worth reprinting for some of the arguments it draws together. And it’s been fun hunting up illustrations for it on the Internet. — J.R.
“New Hollywood” and the 60s Melting Pot
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Let me begin with a few printed artifacts, all of them from New York in the early 60s: two successive issues of the NY Film Bulletin published in early 1962, special numbers devoted to Last Year at Marienbad and François Truffaut; and three successive issues of Film Culture, dated winter 1962, winter 1962-63, and spring 1963. Cheaply printed but copiously illustrated, the two special numbers of the NY Film Bulletin are the 43rd and 44th issues of a monthly, respectively twenty and twenty-eight pages in length. The Last Year at Marienbad issue consists exclusively of interviews with Alain Resnais, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and editor Henri Colpi, all translated from French magazines, and a briefly annotated Resnais filmography. Read more
The main problem with Jacques Doillon’s 1987 filmdevoted exclusively to the problems encountered by a couple when the woman starts to imagine the man’s previous affairs in his country houseis that the script doesn’t offer us or the actors more to work with. Jane Birkin and Alain Souchon both attack the premise gamely, but the fact remains that two-actor films are notoriously difficult to sustain, even with the best talent available: The Four Poster, Sleuth, and even Carl Dreyer’s seldom seen Two People all have related difficulties, and it doesn’t seem coincidental that all three are adaptations of plays. Comedy! was written for the screen, but nevertheless seems just as stagy as the others. Still, for those interested in following Doillon’s development, it remains an instructive and occasionally enjoyable experiment. (JR) Read more
