The Surf Is At Rest

A 1997 video documentary by Reza Allamehzadeh, an exiled Iranian filmmaker living in Holland, about the persecution of Iranian intellectuals by the shah’s secret police. Most of the testimonies here from other Iranian exiles living in Europe relate to the arrest of a dozen writers, artists, and filmmakers in 1972 for an alleged plot to kidnap the crown prince and queen; two were executed, and three others, including Allamehzadeh, received life sentences that were suspended during the 1979 Iranian revolution (although Allamehzadeh’s further difficulties with the new Islamic government led to his exile four years later). Dutch students who protested the original arrests are also interviewed, as are such writers as Ali Akbar Saidi Sirjani, Faraj Sarkuhi, and Abas Maroofi. (JR) Read more

F for Fake

The first of Orson Welles’s two essay films to be completed and released (the lesser-known 1979 Filming “Othello” was the second), this breezy, low-budget 1973 montage–put together from discarded documentary footage by Francois Reichenbach as well as new material filmed by Welles–forms a kind of dialectic with Welles’s never-completed It’s All True; as Welles himself implied, an equally accurate title for this playful cat-and-mouse game might have been It’s All Lies. The main subjects here are art forger Elmyr de Hory, Clifford Irving, Howard Hughes, Pablo Picasso, and Welles himself; and the name of the game is the practice and meaning of deception. Some commentators have speculated that this film was Welles’s indirect reply to Pauline Kael’s subsequently disproven contention that he didn’t write a word of the Citizen Kane script; his sly commentary here–seconded by some of the trickiest editing anywhere–implies that authorship is a pretty dubious notion anyway, a function of the even more dubious art market and its team of “experts.” Alternately superficial and profound, hollow and moving, simple and complex, this film also enlists the services of Oja Kodar, Welles’s principal collaborator after the late 60s, as actor, erotic spectacle, and cowriter. Joseph Cotten, Richard Wilson, and other Welles cronies put in brief appearances; Michel Legrand wrote the wonderful score. Read more

Serie Noire

A 1979 adaptation by French writer-director Alain Corneau of the Jim Thompson thriller A Hell of a Woman (which Orson Welles once adapted for an unrealized feature)one of those tales of desperation escalating into madness and murder that Thompson seemed to specialize in. The late Patrick Dewaere stars as an unsuccessful salesman living in a Paris suburb whose wife leaves him; he then becomes involved with a woman (Marie Trintignant) whose aunt is hiding a small fortune in her house. You can already hear those James Cain wheels turning. Georges Perec collaborated on the script. In French with subtitles. 111 min. (JR) Read more

Drunken Master Ii

A fleet, enjoyable Jackie Chan romp, this belated sequel to the 1979 Drunken Master, which served to launch Chan’s career, brings back his turn-of-the-century folk hero Wong Fei-hong exercising his virtuoso drunken fist sallies against thugs after a long string of provocations. The climactic choreographic rumble is well worth waiting for. The credited director, Lar Kar-leung, who was responsible for the original, was fired by Chan halfway through the shooting, and this appears to be Chan’s show all the way. (JR) Read more

Strawberry And Chocolate

Neither fish nor fowl, Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s touching yet compromised depiction of the persecution of gays in 1979 Havana was directed in collaboration with Juan Carlos Tabio when Alea became ill. It opts for an extremely broad depiction of gay mannerisms and tastes in its treatment of a campy but committed dilettante whom the hero, a university student and ardent communist, comes into contact with. Controversial in Cuba yet only mildly polemical by American standards, this 1993 movie is entertaining and evocative both as storytelling and as a description of intellectual life in Havana, but it also borders on the obvious in certain particulars. Written by Senel Paz; with Jorge Perrugoria, Vladimir Cruz, Mirta Ibarra, and Francisco Calorno. 110 min. (JR) Read more

Self-Indexing and Shifting Spectators in Varda’s VAGABOND

Adapted from a lecture given at the Filmmuseum Pottsdam, July 6, 2016.

It’s unfortunate that Agnès Varda only began to assume the status of a major filmmaker after her husband died and she became known as the custodian of Jacques Demy’s precious legacy. Prior to that, she was mainly known, affectionately but somewhat condescendingly, as a sort of mascot of the French New Wave whose public profile remained almost as superficial as that of her eponymous heroine in Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962). And the troubling, ironic sting at the end of La Bonheur (1965) tended to be either misunderstood or ignored. Thanks to the diversity of her films, stylistic and otherwise, she was easy to overlook due to her reluctance to brand herself, unlike her male colleagues.

One fascinating trait that Varda shared with her late husband, however, was the compulsion to become a tireless indexer and cross-referencer of her own work. But instead of bringing back her fictional characters in subsequent films, as Demy did, she more often brought back her locations and her interview subjects. And she went far beyond Demy in becoming her own explicator and analyst, in effect telling her audience what to look for and even how to find it. Read more

Filming {Othello}

The last completed essay film of Orson Welles, and the last of his features to be released during his lifetime (1979), this wonderfully candid, rarely screened account of the making of his first wholly independent feature offers a perfect introduction to that movie and to Welles’s second manner of moviemaking that was necessary once he parted company with the studios and mainstream media. Significantly, the only part of Othello we see and hear in its original form is from the opening sequence; everything elseusually shown silently with Welles’s narrationinvolves an intricate reediting of the original material. Whether he’s addressing us beside his moviola, delivering new versions of Shakespearean speeches, chatting with his old Irish friends and collaborators Micheal MacLiammoir (his Iago) and Hilton Edwards, or speaking to college students, Welles is at his spellbinding best. (JR) Read more

The Tempest

Derek Jarman’s rarely seen, highly personalized 1979 version of the Shakespeare play, in an assortment of period styles; Caliban is an Edwardian butler, the settings are crumbling abbeys and mansions, and Elizabeth Welch is on hand to sing Stormy Weather. (JR) Read more

The Hunt For Red October

Like many such efforts, this leaden 1990 cold-war thriller, adapted from Tom Clancy’s best-selling novel, tries to make the CIA more competent and sophisticated than it is. Here CIA analyst Alec Baldwin tries to figure out why the Soviet nuclear submarine Red October, commanded by renegade Sean Connery, is approaching North America’s eastern seaboard without authorization. Adapted by Larry Ferguson and Donald Stewart and directed by John McTiernan (Predator, Die Hard), the film mechanically uses the crosscutting technique made famous by Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove without any of its wit or focused energy. With Scott Glenn, James Earl Jones, Sam Neill, Joss Ackland, Tim Curry, Peter Firth, and Courtney B. Vance. 135 min. (JR) Read more

Mountains Of The Moon

Bob Rafelson’s ambitious and elusive 1990 account of the African explorations of Richard Burton (Patrick Bergin) and John Speke (Iain Glen) in the mid-19th century, based on the biographical novel Burton and Speke by William Harrison and the journals of Burton and Speke, and scripted by Harrison and Rafelson. The search for the source of the river Nile, filled with adventures and hardships, makes up most of the film, and it works fairly well (with attractive location photography by Roger Deakins). What works less well is the elliptical account of the two men’s troubled friendship, which eventually supplants the first storysome debatable liberties have been taken with the historical facts to further muddle matters. (Making Burton an anticolonialist and Speke a repressed homosexual are two examples; the depiction of Burton’s wife Isabelnicely played by Fiona Shawis a third.) Rafelson appears to be attempting to make a comment on Burton’s heroic distance from Victorian England, but only certain parts of this strategy register with any persuasiveness. With Richard E. Grant, John Savident, and James Villiers. (JR) Read more

Tap

Gregory Hines stars as Maxwell Washington, the son of a famous hoofer, who’s torn between following in his father’s footsteps and continuing a life of crime. This 1989 dance musical, written and directed by Nick Castle, isn’t everything it might have been—the numbers tend to be disappointingly short, often promising more than they deliver—but on the whole it’s a respectable revival of a sadly neglected genre (very nicely shot by David Gribble) with a lot of lively tapping (choreographed by Henry Le Tang and Hines). Among the strong secondary cast are Suzzanne Douglas, Savion Glover, Dick Anthony Williams, “Sandman” Sims, and Bunny Briggs, and there’s an especially enjoyable turn by Sammy Davis Jr. as Max Washington’s mentor Little Mo. 110 min. Read more

Pretty Woman

A corporate mogul from Wall Street (Richard Gere) rents, woos, and wows a street hooker from Hollywood Boulevard (Julia Roberts) in this 1990 romantic comedy, which proves that the Disney people can sell just about anythingincluding a misogynistic celebration of big business and prostitution. In this case, prostitution’s OK because the hooker’s a likable bimbo who works without a pimp or a boss, grateful for the little crumbs of high culture the suave company buster can sweep her way, and perfectly willing to offer a little therapy for his patriarchal hang-ups in return. He pays her $3,000 and they fall in loveain’t Hollywood grand? Garry Marshall directed a script by J.F. Lawton; with Ralph Bellamy, Jason Alexander, and Laura San Giacomo. 117 min. (JR) Read more