From The Soho News (June 3, 1981). This is also reprinted in my first collection, Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism. 2022: This remains for me De Oliveira’s greatest work, albeit his most neglected. As a treatise on how to adapt a great novel, it is surpassed only by Greed. J.R.
How can I persuade you that the best new movie I’ve seen this year, the only one conceivably tinged with greatness, is a voluptuous four-and-a-half-hour Portuguese costume melodrama, shot in 16-millimeter? Obviously I can’t. So rather than make you feel guilty about missing a masterpiece — as a couple of my friends managed to do when it was at MOMA last spring — let me assume at the outset that you will miss DOOMED LOVE all ten times that it shows at the Public between May 26 and June 14. Bearing this in mind, the following notes are an account of what you missed, are currently missing, or will miss.
1. If it’s confusing and misleading for some to call DOOMED LOVE an avant-garde film, this seems mainly because of the widespread working assumption that “avant-garde” is a social category above and beyond an aesthetic one. As industry-oriented critics like Kael and Sarris are frequently reminding us (the former obliquely, the latter unabashedly), the crucial professional issue is not what movies we go to as critics but what parties, junkets, festivals, universities, grants, and other circuits of power we have easy access to — not what we see but what we have is our calling card, whereas “taste” is largely a rationalization for the personal erotics of self-gratification, cooperation, conflict, and flattery founded on such a system of exchange. Read more
Jean-Luc Godard’s third feature and first studio production (1960) starts with a subversive premise: a neorealist musical in which the major characters (Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina, and Jean-Claude Brialy) can’t really sing and dance, much as they’d like to. Periodically ravishing to look at (it’s Godard’s first foray into both color and ‘Scope) and listen to (Michel Legrand did the nonsinging score), it’s also highly deconstructive in the way it keeps jostling us away from these pleasures and in the general direction of indecorous reality. (It’s also packed with both subtle and obvious references to other movies.) While its slender plot (stripper Karina wants a baby and turns to Belmondo when her boyfriend Brialy won’t oblige her) can irritate in spots, the film’s high spirits may still win you over. It’s perhaps most memorable for being a highly personal documentary about Karina and Godard’s feelings about her at the time, brimming with odd details and irreverent energies. In French with subtitles. 83 min. (JR)
How could an experimental documentary about the dismantlement of the world’s largest nuclear plant encompass, among other things, a survey of 20th century painting, a political statement, a site for meditation, and a philosophical song about annihilation and creation being parts of the same process? Thirty-five-year-old Lithuanian filmmaker Emilija Škarnulytė shows us how, and her vision is so spellbinding that it demonstrates how the finest lessons of 2001: A Space Odyssey in merging art and science and the early films of Alain Resnais in executing slow, steady, and hallucinatory camera crawls across, into, and around documentary subjects can be creatively applied.
“In my films from the last ten years,” she has said, “I have mostly researched places where contemporary political issues are staged between human and non-human worlds, the shifting boundaries between ecological and cosmic forces. I want to feel out all kinds of non-human and post-human scales in the depths of space and time.” Thus her opening images offerrocks thatresemble planets, a voluptuous nuclear explosion is rhymed with trees, an animated disassembly becomes a Constructivist dance, and a snake slithering around the same circuitry previously traversed by her camera becomes a bold Surrealist encounter.Read more
