Thanks to Mark Rappaport for recommending Sergei Loznitsa’s extraordinary 2018 Donbass, available for $5 (a one-day pass) at https://easterneuropeanmovies.com/drama/donbass, which offers the most gripping and elucidating portrait of what’s happening now in Ukraine that I’ve encountered anywhere. Many of us have already encountered Loznitsa’s expertise as a documentary storyteller, but this film is a veritable eye and ear-opener. [5/6/22]
From the Chicago Reader (August 23, 2002).
In 1952 beat painter and filmmaker Alfred Leslie wrote a play based on an argument he witnessed between art critic Clement Greenberg and abstract expressionist painters at a celebrated hangout in Greenwich Village. The text was lost in a 1966 fire that also consumed most of Leslie’s paintings and films, but 20 years later he reconstructed it from memory and added songs, and in 1997 a staged reading was videotaped with three cameras. Leslie found the results visually boring, so he decided to insert an enormous quantity of found footage from newsreels, porn films, and Hollywood movies, either to illustrate or to play against the ongoing discussion. The opening clip, a clown singing in squawks and squeaks that are subtitled with some invective from critic Hilton Kramer, sets the tone perfectly; like many fine filmmakers who’ve worked with found footage in recent years (such as Jean-Luc Godard and Mark Rappaport), Leslie is an expert indexer, and his taste for the silliest, sexiest, and most surreal manifestations of American culture is so infectious that the debate about artists and critics in this 2001 video improbably becomes infused with joy. 84 min. (JR) Leslie, the festival’s guest of honor, will attend the screening to introduce and discuss his work. Read more
From the February 20, 1998 Chicago Reader. — J.R.
Apart from the eye-filling black-and-white video Oriental Elegy, Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov’s painterly, visionary side has seldom been more evident than in this gorgeous 1997 contemplation of a son caring for his dying mother. The story is minimal, but the color images are so breathtaking that there’s never a lax moment; even when the already slow action is reduced to a virtual standstill, Sokurov’s intensity insures that something is always happening, both on the screen and inside us. (This is only 73 minutes long, but if you’re hungry for plot, it will seem like an eternity.) In his taste and his patience, Sokurov may be our only truly 19th-century avant-gardist — which means in effect that his works are timeless. Music Box, Friday through Thursday, February 20 through 26.
Written for the January/February 2012 Film Comment. — J.R.
Unforgivable
(André Téchiné, France)
Téchiné’s best films (Wild Reeds, My Favorite Season, Thieves, Unforgivable) have two major signifying traits: all the characters are major fuck-ups, and the co-writer-director loves them all equally. Some of those in his latest film, set in and around Venice, include a macho novelist (André Dussollier), his flighty daughter (Mélanie Thierry), his real-estate agent and subsequent wife (Carole Bouquet), and one of her former lovers, a detective (an especially memorable Adriana Asti), whom he hires to go looking for his daughter. The multiple crisscrossed emotions and lives are every bit as intricately and beautifully plotted and tracked as those in Thieves.—Jonathan Rosenbaum
The following article was partially written as a way of conserving space
while editing This Is Orson Welles (1991). A particular problem I had
throughout that project was having more material that I wanted to use
than I had room for. So I figured that if I could write and publish articles
elsewhere that incorporated portions of this material, all I had to do in the
book was allude to them.
Mr. Arkadin has always been the most difficult to research of the
Welles films that were finished in some form while he was alive —
partially because it remained such a painful memory to Welles due
to his friendship with Louis Dolivet, the producer, that he avoided
discussing it. Indeed, there was barely any material at all about it
in the tapes and drafts for This Is Orson Welles that I had
to work with. So as I tried to expand what I had via research,
I eventually hit upon the idea of publishing a piece in Film
Comment. (This appeared in January-February 1992.)
By necessity, much of what I included in this article was provisional.
(The same applies to a lesser extent to the dual commentary I
recorded with James Naremore in early 2005 to the film’s “Corinth
version” [no. Read more
Has anyone ever commented on the symmetries between A Letter to Three Wives and The Honey Pot? Having just reseen the former on “the first Saturday of May” (a key phrase in the film) a short time after reseeing the latter, I’m thinking not only of the similar letters sent to three former girlfriends in The Honey Pot, but also of the numerous guessing games and various false-herring clues liberally scattered through the clever dramaturgy of both films, not to mention the respective roles played by Shakespeare (Twelfth Night) in the earlier comedy and Ben Jonson (Volpone) in the latter movie. Of course the differences are just as important as the similarities: the three wives are all friends and the letter sent to them is from an unseen narrator who propels the action; the three girlfriends are rivals and summoned to Venice by a very present Rex Harrison. But the attraction for Mankiewicz of returning to the principle of three women (with an absent temptress and Maggie Smith playing the respective roles as jokers) must have been irresistible. [5/7/22]