Daily Archives: January 28, 2025

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