Criterion Sunday 585: Identificazione di una donna (Identification of a Woman, 1982)

This is, to my mind, a sort of distillation of a lot of Antonioni’s themes and obsessions over his career (though he had one more feature film a decade or so later which I haven’t yet seen). However, it has a sort of beautiful classicism to it—or maybe I just mean classiness, given it is still essentially his high modernism—with all its elegant framing, people moving fluidly into and out of the frame, surprising movements from what seem like point-of-view shots to take in the person who was set up as the viewer, sinuous plan sequence shots and some just gorgeous lighting and scenery as you would expect. So really it’s all there, plus there are plenty of glamorous women who flirt with or fall for our enigmatic director character Niccolò (Tomás Milián).

If it doesn’t quite feel like it has the same totemic place within culture that his 60s films achieved, then that’s fair because time has moved on and Antonioni no longer means what people wanted him to mean in his heyday. There is, of course, the sense of a certain older statesman of cinema leering at beautiful women (and a shot of one rolling around naked under some weirdly undulating bedsheets soundtracked to Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark is a particularly odd shot in that respect), but the director character Niccolò also seems quite flummoxed by relationships. He is ghosted by one love, Mavi (Daniela Silverio), almost literally so—given the extensive (and beautiful) sequence in a thick fog after which she departs from his life—only to replaced by another beautiful woman, Ida (Christine Boisson), that he somehow doesn’t even see due to his still unresolved feelings towards Mavi. And even as this is playing out, Niccolò seems to be obsessed as much with a shadowy figure who warns him off her than with Mavi herself (and in a typically oblique touch, this mystery man is introduced in the film before we even see Niccolò’s relationship with Mavi).

The way Niccolò moves through the world and treats these women, as sounding boards for his ideas, as feelings he’s trying to capture in art, can be frustrating to watch. However, an Antonioni shot is never without its pictorial interest, so the film all passes rather easily in that respect.

CREDITS
Director Michelangelo Antonioni; Writers Antonioni, Gérard Brach and Tonino Guerra (based on a story by Antonioni); Cinematographer Carlo Di Palma; Starring Tomás Milián, Daniela Silverio, Christine Boisson; Length 130 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Melbourne, Saturday 30 December 2023 (and earlier on VHS at the university library, Wellington, August 1999).

Criterion Sunday 517: “By Brakhage: An Anthology, Volume Two” (1955-2003)

After a first volume some years earlier, Criterion has added this second one, covering much the same range of years as the first, from some of his earliest works to his very last. I’m not sure if it necessarily adds more depth to the casual viewer’s understand of Brakhage as an artist, but it’s fascinating to see more of these little snatched windows into his life and artistry.

A lot of those early films seem more overtly autobiographical than the more abstract later works. The earliest included here, The Wonder Ring (1955), is a film glimpsed through the windows of a passing train, life reflected on the surface of that image, evoking a world that’s disappearing (this train line soon to be demolished) in a world so far from now and yet so tangibly there. The Dead (1960) takes in Paris, superimposing images of cemeteries (a sort of spectral double vision), a river boat ride and other assorted flashes of the old world, though it didn’t really cohere for me. In Two: Creeley/McClure (1965), the first of two portraits passes in a typical way for early Brakhage, with languorous superimpositions and negative images inserted, but this short piece is all about the second portrait, an all too brief ecstatic experience, literal flashes of a man. Rounding out the first programme of films, 23rd Psalm Branch (1967) is almost an hour long, a frenzied rush of images—of corpses (initially), of bombing, of Nazis, but also tender images of families and home, of being at the beach. But that shock of war and the horrors of conflict (this film was made during and largely as a response to Vietnam) means that even the positive images are pulled down into the darkness of Brakhage’s vision. It feels almost agitprop but of course remains an avant-garde text, a scream of a silent experimental film.

The second programme of films opens with one of his more renowned works, Scenes from Under Childhood, Section One (1967). It seems to me there’s a penetrating darkness to the vision of childhood here, the images snatched from black leader, flashes of red, a strange sense of dislocation and eeriness. Maybe that’s the soundtrack (apparently Brakhage preferred it without, but there’s an optional one and I do prefer it to silence—what even is “silent” as a film concept, really, for those of us who live in the world, where there are constantly noises in the background?). Anyway, this is a potent poetic opening to what is a three-part film (the other two are not included here), as strong as anything in this period of his work. The Machine of Eden (1970) follows it as a bit of a landscape piece with glorious glowering skies, albeit in an impressionistic collage. However, I like the way that Stan Brakhage really mined his domestic life in this period of his filmmaking, reflected in Star Garden (1974). He must have been quite an intense dad to grow up with but he was always there filming his kids, his home, the special reflection of light through blinds, through paper, the edge of a dress, a spectral presence always because isn’t all film ultimately about light? Rounding out the group, Desert (1976) is a short film that I gather is more about the idea of a desert, expertly evoked with the light and filters, except for those brief moments when it just seems grey and suburban.

For the third programme of films, there is a movement towards the abstract, starting with The Process (1972), as images of people both become colour fields and are intercut with flashing blocks of colour suggesting (as I gather it) one’s closed eyelids and the idea of recalling something. There’s death in Burial Path (1978)in the shape of a bird, placed carefully in a cardboard box, and then there’s the recollection of death, the camera moving on to other things before looping back around to the bird. The duplicity in Duplicity III (1980) is presumably the spectacle of theatre as put on by his children and their classmates, but there’s almost an epic quality here. That sense is aided by showing these scenes alongside animals, a sort of contrast between lies and unadorned truth that evokes something essential. Four animals are intercut with one another in The Domain of the Moment (1977), though I don’t think that snake is making friends with the mouse. There’s a mystery and a beauty to his editing here. Of course, maybe you just need to be in the right mood to appreciate any abstract experimental film but Murder Psalm (1980) was very much it when I watched it: a collage of images, textures and grains of film and video, the shock of life and of death, the play of children and of armies, juxtaposing these eternal themes under an evocative title that suggests a continuity of behaviour from the humiliated child onwards and outwards through history. Rounding out the programme, one does wonder how Criterion decided which of the 20 films in Arabic Numeral Seriesto present. Ostensibly 12 (1982) is an abstract series of lights piercing the darkness, shimmering and hazy as if reflected through many layers and then gone. It has its own hypnotic pulse and I wonder again at the deeper meaning.

The fourth programme of shorts presents the four-part Visions in Meditation (1989-90), wherein Brakhage goes on a road trip in a way only Brakhage can, with shakily shot images that nevertheless suggest something deeper and stranger than any travelogue. He evokes mystery of course, with these unexplained images, but perhaps like the title suggests it’s better to just give in to the rhythms. The second film is even stranger and more mysterious than the first , though that may be as much to do with its focus on the ancient Puebloan culture we see at Mesa Verde, these ancient buildings built into the rocks. The way Brakhage shoots makes everything seem even more stranger, immanent, loaded with unknowable threat. This is poetic filmmaking, though at a certain point with I find it difficult to express why I like them. The third involves more images from a road trip, and what I like is the lights and the quality of light and the intersection between the images and also—for a change, since most of his films are silent—a score. It’s all very evocative of something but it feels right to me. There are some lovely images to the fourth and last in the series, which takes us to New Mexico. Glowering skies and threat hovers, but the light plays on the camera and it has a suitably epic feel.

The penultimate programme of films starts with Unconscious London Strata (1982). I don’t see much of London in it; I guess I don’t see much of anything. It feels like a film by someone losing their sight, as though it trades in images of the world, they are so blurry and out of focus that it registers as abstract patterns of colour and light crossing the screen. That’ll be the “Unconscious” in the title, and there’s obviously a dreamlike hazy quality to this, though it had more of a soporific effect on me at the time. There are some lovely sequences of abstract colours creating elaborate patterns in Boulder Blues and Pearls and… (1992), along with images of the world, presumably from around where Brakhage lived. But there’s that constant sense of surprise in the film which I appreciated. The Mammals of Victoria (1994) is half an hour of gentle waves lapping at the Canadian shore, indistinct figures, horizons, some video distortion and painted images. It’s hard to take in properly, but it certainly does have a holiday sort of feel to it, a gentle tranquillity, that perhaps lulled me a little too much (into a bit of sleep). However, some of my favourite of Brakhage’s pieces are the short ones with hand-painted patterns, not least From: First Hymn to the Night – Novalis (1994). These ones are dense and colourful, but they are broken up with the (hard-to-read) words of the poet Novalis.

I do like the hand-painted works that Stan Brakhage did and there are plenty featured in this sixth and final programme of short films within the collection. Watching I Take These Truths (1995), I’m imagining the bright blocky colours of a 90s sitcom credits sequence but there’s something far more majestic about these splashes of colours as they threaten to dissolve into the darkness of the black background. There’s a playfulness that even its almost sitcom-length running time cannot dampen. The realm we see depicted in The Cat of the Worm’s Green Realm (1997) does involve a cat memorably for a few seconds, and I welcome it, though the worm presumably may not. It’s a film of leaves—bright and shining with dappled sun coming through, autumnal, barely perceived in a mulchy green haze—and undergrowth, a worm’s perspective perhaps. As for Yggdrasill: Whose Roots Are Stars in the Human Mind (1997), which is named for the World Tree in Norse mythology, I guess I expected it to be more tree-based, but aside from some hand-painted bits that give a sense of leaves, this is dominated by water imagery, pulsing strangely like constellations.

The textures of the hand-painted frames are different in “…” Reel Five (1998), with a white ground and largely monochrome splashes and swathes of black (with little flashes of other colours). It’s all accompanied by a James Tenney score that leaps about as nimbly as Brakhage’s images. The first three films of the ongoing Persian Series (1999) are also presented here. I’m not exactly clear what the link is with Persian art, but I had some Iranian music on the record player so that made it feel to me a bit more specific. This is a heady wash of colours, as per the other films in this series and Brakhage’s later work. #2 gets my vote for Brakhage’s trippiest film, with the same use of vivid colours as in #1, but here the camera seems to speed through them like a spaceship speeding up through a galaxy of colours, before circling around. #3 is of a piece with #2, but is more frenetic, a bold pulse of constant colours in a visual thrum of intensity. Finally, there’s something very poignant about how Chinese Series (2003) was made, his final work, scratched with his fingernails into the film stock as he died, that commitment to the physicality of film (albeit watched now on Blu-ray). It’s stark, with the black ground dominating the visuals of largely monochromatic scratches that play out until a sudden stop.

CREDITS

As usual for this blog, I don’t put ratings on films that are under 30 minutes in length, but my favourites were Star Garden, Persian #2 and Chinese Series. To save repetition, all films below have the credit of Director/Cinematography Stan Brakhage.

The Wonder Ring (1955) — Length 6 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Friday 18 March 2022.

The Dead (1960) — Length 11 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Friday 18 March 2022.

Two: Creeley/McClure (1965) — Length 4 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Friday 18 March 2022.

23rd Psalm Branch (1967) — Length 67 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Friday 18 March 2022.



Scenes from Under Childhood, Section One (1967) [Rosenbaum 1000] — Length 24 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Saturday 19 March 2022.

The Machine of Eden (1970) — Length 11 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Saturday 19 March 2022.

Star Garden (1974) — Length 21 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Saturday 19 March 2022.

Desert (1976) — Length 11 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Saturday 19 March 2022.

The Process (1972) — Length 9 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Monday 21 March 2022.

Burial Path (1978) — Length 9 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Monday 21 March 2022.

Duplicity III (1980) — Length 23 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Monday 21 March 2022.

The Domain of the Moment (1977) — Length 15 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Monday 21 March 2022.

Murder Psalm (1980) — Length 17 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Sunday 3 April 2022.

Arabic Numeral Series 12 (1982) — Length 18 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Sunday 3 April 2022.

Visions in Meditation #1 (1989) — Length 17 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Saturday 14 May 2022.

Visions in Meditation #2 (Mesa Verde) (1989) — Length 17 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Saturday 14 May 2022.

Visions in Meditation #3 (Plato’s Cave) (1990) — Length 17 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Saturday 14 May 2022.

Visions in Meditation #4 (D.H. Lawrence) (1990) — Length 18 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Saturday 14 May 2022.

Unconscious London Strata (1982) — Length 23 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Saturday 27 August 2022.

Boulder Blues and Pearls and… (1992) — Length 23 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Saturday 27 August 2022.

The Mammals of Victoria (1994) — Length 35 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Wednesday 2 November 2022.



From: First Hymn to the Night – Novalis (1994) — Length 3 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Wednesday 2 November 2022.

I Take These Truths (1995) — Length 18 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Thursday 3 November 2022.

The Cat of the Worm’s Green Realm (1997) — Length 15 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Friday 4 November 2022.

Yggdrasill: Whose Roots Are Stars in the Human Mind (1997) — Length 17 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Friday 4 November 2022.

“…” Reel Five (1998) — Length 15 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Friday 4 November 2022.

Persian #1 (1999) — Length 2 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Friday 4 November 2022.

Persian #2 (1999) — Length 2 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Friday 4 November 2022.

Persian #3 (1999) — Length 2 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Friday 4 November 2022.

Chinese Series (2003) — Length 3 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Friday 4 November 2022.

Criterion Sunday 468: “Science Is Fiction: 23 Films by Jean Painlevé”

The Criterion Collection may generally be known for championing the great auteurs, but they also do some rather left-field choices, whether that’s Michael Bay (albeit early on in their existence; I’m not sure they’d give his films much time now), weird low-budget 50s sci-fi and now this set of short films about animals, which somewhat defy any straightforward description. The first disc presents his “popular films”, which is to say those made for the public (and not academics).

There’s a certain wonder to the first, Hyas and Stenorhynchus (1927), about little weird algae-like creatures with their spindly spines. The photography is obviously not as advanced as now, or even Painlevé’s later films, but there’s something luminous about the grainy, ethereal monochrome of these aquatic close-ups that has a magic to it. Sea Urchins (1954) has a lot of the same tentacles and marine weirdness but is somehow slightly unsettling, perhaps from the pulsating 1950s electronic score or just the better closer photography available. It’s co-directed with Painlevé’s partner, Geneviève Hamon, like a lot of his later films and sadly she seems not to get mentioned much in writing about him and his work. Clearly, though, both had a fascination with jellyfish, or with the category of weird gelatinous and tentacle-y things, because it feels like a number of his films deal with them. How Some Jellyfish Are Born (1960) also shows an interest in some unusual methods of conception and birth, with perhaps some hints towards other orders of gender and sexuality in these creatures which could probably have been developed more.

One of his better works, and certainly the creature with which he’s most linked (given the set’s box art), The Sea Horse (1933) makes clear just how extremely weird these creatures are. Just watching them is like gazing upon some Ray Harryhausen stop motion animated monster, but in a cute sort of way, though maybe there’s a bit of Lovecraft to them. Certainly Painlevé gets much more into the reproduction here, with the males gestating the babies, and seeing the tiny little ones come out is so fascinating (though I could have used without the shock cut to them cutting a pregnant seahorse open, even if I recognise this is ultimately a scientific film). Anyway, this is the kind of thing that Painlevé excels at, the intersection of science and the oneiric, which is also where The Love Life of the Octopus (1967) seems to sit. Truly octopuses are the most terrifying of creatures. Slithering yet smart, and, like so many of Painlevé and Hamon’s scientific studies, they have many tentacles. This particular short sets up our subject before getting into reproduction, and that too is strange and creepy, with thousands of little octopuses swimming away from these loose threads of gestating eggs. I remain properly terrified by this animal.

Further short films continue their fascination. With Shrimp Stories (1964), the directors acknowledge how ridiculous shrimp look with an overtly comic introduction, before we get into these (once again) elaborately tentacled sea creatures. Well in the case of shrimp, less tentacles than waving antennae and frantically moving little feet. If Acera, or The Witches’ Dance (1972) were merely an excuse to orchestrate the delightful aquatic ‘dance’ of these tiny snail-like organisms, then that would be enough (they swirl about, all but hopping up and down), but we also discover their hermaphroditic reproductive rituals and the gestation of tiny new acera. The photography is luminous and, as ever, these animals are strangely compelling. Sadly Freshwater Assassins (1947), despite its title, just seems a little bit duller, more like the orthodox nature shows you might get on TV, with less of the ugly weirdness of his other animals, mostly being just bugs living and fighting under the water in a pond. In Sea Ballerinas (1956), though, there’s a sense of humour, with it ending on a brittle fish seemingly conducting an orchestra, but otherwise there’s a lot of tumbling, shuffling and crawling around.

Stepping away from the sea creatures to watch something far more abstract is Liquid Crystals (1978). This is in fact closer to a late Stan Brakhage film than the kind of natural science pieces Painlevé did earlier on. It’s beautiful, though, as is an earlier film about the blood-sucking vampire bat, The Vampire (1945), which contextualises it in a short history of entertainment before letting it loose on an unfortunate guinea pig. There’s the customary blend here of limpid beauty and a sense of mystery in the photography, an informative voiceover and the dull academic subject matter, but the first enlivens the latter. Back to the abstraction in Diatoms (1968), but partly because the creatures under the (literal) microscope here are single-celled algae-like things, of various shapes, floating around on their own or in colonies. I’m still not exactly clear what a diatom is or does but I certainly got an almost trippy vision of their lives.

The final film on the first disc, and the latest film collected in the set, is Pigeons in the Square (1982). Pigeons get all kinds of bad press, and though this (relatively long) short film has a comical edge to it, Painlevé comes from a science background so he’s not interested in adding to the negative propaganda about pigeons. They are by turns majestic, beautifully patterned, comically silly, strutting, hopping, fluttering and pecking. Sure some of the urban varieties are a bit bedraggled and their seduction attempts wouldn’t pass muster by human standards, but this film just enjoys watching pigeons, and I enjoyed watching this film.

The second disc starts with “early popular silent films”, some of his earliest works. There’s The Octopus (1927), which has sort of a structure, but is mostly just the octopus slinking around (because if there’s anything we learn from the first disc it’s that Jean Painlevé loves a tentacled sea creature). The fragile beauty to these silent films is exemplified by Sea Urchins (1928), a creature he returned to in the 1950s (on the first disc), with luminous oneiric cinematography and no sound to distract (even if I did put some music on). The urchins wave around but also move and burrow. One thing I could do without is watching one get cut open but I guess there is at least some scientific method here. I am, though, prompted to wonder if my response to these short films is related to how much I like the creatures rather than a dispassionate critique of the filmmaking. I mean we may all know and love a seahorse, and even have opinions on octopuses, but what’s a Daphnia (1928)? Still for all its tiny bug like size—and there’s some serious magnification happening here—there’s even a bit of drama when the hydra comes along. A lovely little film.

Under the heading “silent research films”, there are a couple of Painlevé’s scientific shorts included and you can see immediately the difference from his “popular films”. The Stickleback’s Egg (1925) deals with a less than thrilling subject (microscopic organisms) and is pretty dry. There’s some great close-up photography that must have been very advanced for the time, and being silent I was able to put on a jaunty score, but this is mainly interesting as a comparison. Meanwhile Experimental Treatment of a Hemorrhage in a Dog (1930) is only four minutes, and exemplifies his specifically scientific focus in the silent era, but I really did not need to see this. The dog was fine after the procedure the film is clear to point out and that’s good, but it’s pretty graphic.

Unlike his more famous short films about animals (often underwater tentacled ones), Jean Painlevé also made a series of films dealing with various abstract concepts, here collected as “Films for La Palais de la Découverte”. The Fourth Dimension (1936) covers that idea, suggesting ways in which it could be understood, possibly as something beyond our own conception, something almost magical. It’s hard to really get to grips with it but Painlevé is serious and educational and it’s a lot to take in. More abstract scientific ideas are on show in The Struggle for Survival (1937) although this film is heavy on the text, which almost overwhelms the film with detail. He’s talking about population growth and certainly covers some ideas about it. Turning his cinematic attention to the Earth’s place in the universe is the subject of Voyage to the Sky (1937), which seems to conclude that in the grand vastness of space, we humans are almost ridiculously insignificant. It’s a rather bleak conclusion but nicely illustrated. Finally, Similarities Between Length and Speed (1937) is a rather abstruse short film on a topic I don’t really understand (which is to say, anything to do with mathematics). However, Jean Painlevé is an engaging filmmaker and tries to grapple seriously with his subject, which is about how bigger things aren’t exactly proportional.

Finally comes the single film under the heading “animation”, Bluebeard (1938), and it certainly a departure from Painlevé’s other films, being for a start not a scientific study of animals but instead a gloriously colourful Claymation animated film about the bloodthirsty titular pirate, chopping off heads hither and yon. It’s all rather jolly and odd, and dark too and a fine way to round out the set.

CREDITS

My custom on this blog has not been to give ratings to short films, so the list below is just of the films included in the order they are presented. However my favourite was probably The Sea Horse, with the two academic research works and the mathematics film as my least favourite.

Hyas et stenorinques (Hyas and Stenorhynchus, 1929) [silent film] — Director Jean Painlevé; Cinematographer André Raymond; Length 10 minutes. Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Sunday 26 September 2021.

Oursins (Sea Urchins, 1954) — Directors Jean Painlevé and Geneviève Hamon; Cinematographer Claude Beausoleil; Length 11 minutes. Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Sunday 26 September 2021.

Comment naissent des méduses (How Some Jellyfish Are Born, 1960) — Directors Jean Painlevé and Geneviève Hamon; Length 14 minutes. Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Sunday 26 September 2021.

Cristaux liquides (Liquid Crystals, 1978) — Directors Jean Painlevé and Geneviève Hamon; Length 6 minutes. Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Sunday 26 September 2021.

L’Hippocampe ou ‘Cheval marin’ (The Seahorse, 1933) — Director Jean Painlevé; Cinematographer André Raymond; Length 14 minutes. Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Sunday 26 September 2021.

Les Amours de la pieuvre (The Love Life of the Octopus, 1967) — Directors Jean Painlevé and Geneviève Hamon; Length 14 minutes. Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Sunday 26 September 2021.

Histoires de crevettes (Shrimp Stories, 1964) — Directors/Cinematographers Jean Painlevé and Geneviève Hamon; Length 10 minutes. Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Sunday 26 September 2021.

Acera ou Le Bal des sorcières (Acera, or The Witches’ Dance, 1972) — Directors/Cinematographers Jean Painlevé and Geneviève Hamon; Length 13 minutes. Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Monday 27 September 2021.

Le Vampire (The Vampire, 1945) — Director Jean Painlevé; Length 9 minutes. Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Monday 27 September 2021.

Les Assassins d’eau douce (Freshwater Assassins, 1947) — Director Jean Painlevé; Length 24 minutes. Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Tuesday 28 September 2021.

Les Danseuses de la mer (Sea Ballerinas, 1956) — Directors/Cinematographers Jean Painlevé and Geneviève Hamon; Length 13 minutes. Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Friday 1 October 2021.

Diatomées (Diatoms, 1968) — Director Jean Painlevé | Cinematographer Catherine Thiriot; Length 17 minutes. Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Friday 1 October 2021.

Les Pigeons du square (Pigeons in the Square, 1982) — Director Jean Painlevé; Cinematographer Vincent Berczi; Length 27 minutes. Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Saturday 2 October 2021.

La Pieuvre (The Octopus, 1927) [silent film] — Director Jean Painlevé; Length 13 minutes. Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Sunday 3 October 2021.

Les Oursins (Sea Urchins, 1928) [silent film] — Director Jean Painlevé; Length 10 minutes. Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Thursday 7 October 2021.

La Daphnie (Daphnia, 1928) [silent film] — Director Jean Painlevé; Length 9 minutes. Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Thursday 7 October 2021.

L’Oeuf d’épinoche (The Stickleback’s Egg, 1925) [silent film] — Director Jean Painlevé; Length 26 minutes. Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Sunday 10 October 2021.

Traitement éxperimental d’une hémorragie chez le chien (Experimental Treatment of a Hemmorhage in a Dog, 1930) [silent film] — Director Jean Painlevé; Length 4 minutes. Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Sunday 10 October 2021.

La Quatrième dimension (The Fourth Dimension, 1936) — Director Jean Painlevé; Length 10 minutes. Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Sunday 10 October 2021.

Images mathématiques de la lutte pour la vie (The Struggle for Survival, 1937) — Director Jean Painlevé; Length 14 minutes. Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Sunday 10 October 2021.

Voyage dans le ciel (Voyage to the Sky, 1937) — Director Jean Painlevé; Length 11 minutes. Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Sunday 10 October 2021.

Similitudes des longueurs et des vitesses (Similarities Between Length and Speed, 1937) — Director Jean Painlevé; Length 10 minutes. Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Sunday 10 October 2021.

Barbe-Bleu (Bluebeard, 1938) [colour, animated] — Directors Jean Painlevé and René Bertrand; Length 13 minutes. Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Sunday 10 October 2021.

Criterion Sunday 449: Missing (1982)

In a way this film by Costa-Gavras is exemplary of a certain strand of political filmmaking that flourished in the 1980s, finding a way into an epochal event through a human rights case involving (white) Americans, to make it more relatable. Interestingly, of course, the Chilean coup in 1973 that led to the death of the young American journalist Charles Horman (played here by John Shea) is so far in the background that Allende and Pinochet are barely even named, and the Chileans we see are just shady military characters with little to distinguish them.

Costa-Gavras is very much more interested in focusing on the Americans involved, which makes sense given the help they gave to what was an explicitly anti-leftist and militaristic coup, aligning so well with their destabilising influence across Central and South America in this Cold War era. So we are led to see all these events, the disappearance and death of American journalists, as part of an essentially American story of silencing their own citizens as part of enacting geopolitical change that would favour their own national interests.

That said, what I find frustrating about the film is just having to watch Jack Lemmon (playing Charles’s dad Ed) trying to throw his weight around and not understanding his own son’s situation, though it’s all presented as part of a learning curve for him—as someone of a certain age who implicitly trusted his own government finally understanding that he could never trust them again. His character is difficult and has trouble understanding the context, and that can just make him a little bit difficult to watch at times when it’s just variations of him going into rooms and being dismissive of his son’s wife (Sissy Spacek) and friends whenever they speak. Still, it’s a well-intentioned film that did attempt to grapple with some of this geopolitical reality at a time when Reagan had recently been elected.

CREDITS
Director Costa-Gavras Κώστας Γαβράς; Writers Costa-Gavras and Donald E. Stewart (based on the non-fiction book The Execution of Charles Horman: An American Sacrifice by Thomas Hauser); Cinematographer Ricardo Aronovich; Starring Jack Lemmon, Sissy Spacek, John Shea, Melanie Mayron; Length 122 minutes. Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Saturday 17 July 2021 (and earlier on VHS at home, Wellington, September 2000).

Global Cinema 9: Australia – Starstruck (1982)

Australia is of course a huge country, but relatively speaking it’s not so populous. Nevertheless it’s had a long and prosperous cinema, with a number of well-known and highly-regarded directors, not least Gillian Armstrong, who directed the film I’m focusing on in this post. I’m not sure if any one film can sum up Australia, but Starstruck seems to capture something of the spirit of the place, at least in the 1980s.

Commonwealth of Australia
population 25,758,900 | capital Canberra (427k) | largest cities Sydney (5.3m), Melbourne (5.1m), Brisbane (2.5m), Perth (2.1m), Adelaide (1.4m) | area 7,692,024 km² | religion Christianity (52.1%), none (30.1%) | official language none (English) | major ethnicity no data | currency Australian Dollar ($) [AUD] | internet .au

The sixth-largest country in the world by area is an island large enough to be (most of) its own continent, and as such has huge diversity of environments, from deserts to tropical rainforest, and mountains in the south-east, and most of the population is concentrated on the eastern seaboard. The name comes from the Latin terra australis (“southern land”) used since ancient times for an (at that point hypothetical) southern continent, though “New Holland” (explorer Abel Tasman’s name for it) was largely used until the early-19th century. It has been inhabited by indigenous peoples for around 65,000 years until Dutch explorers “discovered” it in the early-17th century. The British set up camp for the first time there in 1788, to establish a penal colony, with further colonies set up in Tasmania (Van Diemen’s Land) and other areas, though South Australia was never a penal colony. Indigenous populations declined in these years, with a policy of assimilating the Aboriginal population that continued until well into the 20th century. The separate colonies federated on 1 January 1901 and independence from the UK declared, with formal constitutional ties ended in 1942. Ties to the US strengthened and immigration from Asia was allowed from the 1970s onwards. It still maintains the British monarch as head of state, with an elected Prime Minister.

Cinema had its beginnings in Australia with screenings in 1896, and anthropological shorts from 1900, with the first feature in 1906 being The Story of the Kelly Gang (the earliest feature-length narrative film in the world, depending on your definitions). Studios were founded (the earliest in Melbourne) and there was a boom of sorts in the 1910s, followed by a decline in the 1920s. Production continued at an uneven pace, slowing down significantly by the 1960s, though the Australian Film Institute was founded in 1958. From the late-1960s onwards, though, government supported film more and various programmes led to an Australian New Wave, as well as a fringe of “Ozsploitation”. The 1990s saw a further entrenchment into the mainstream and worldwide success for a number of titles. Cinema continues to be made, although with less worldwide success against the huge American productions, though a lot of these are filmed in the country.

Starstruck (1982). Obviously Gillian Armstrong’s feature debut My Brilliant Career (1979) is justly lauded, and it’s a fine period film, but with the passage of almost 40 years this, her second feature film, seems almost equally period. It’s contemporary, of course, and it gleefully trades on a certain post-punk new wave spirit of restless energy and vertiginous hairstyles, yet alongside it sits the traditional working class Australia still stuck in the 1950s, tut-tutting at the kids and the noise they make. It’s a slender premise to hang a film around—a TV talent show that could make our heroine Jackie (Jo Kennedy) a big star if only she can somehow inveigle her way on—but yet Starstruck achieves it with single-minded vision. The energy of the musical numbers shares a lot with the kind of art pop of, say, Split Enz, which makes sense given the involvement of that band’s leader Tim Finn in the songs here (and, one imagines, some of the performances too). It’s an energy that sustains the film through all of its madcap plotting, that and the interplay between cousins Jackie and 14-year-old Angus (Ross O’Donovan), who it slowly becomes clear are only so determined at pop success because their family disappoints them so regularly—with the exception of the rambunctious Nana (Pat Evison). This is one of the films I had most looked forward to seeing by Gillian Armstrong and it’s inexplicable that it’s not more widely-available, because it’s not just a precious document of an era (the early-80s) but also a delightful film in its own right.

CREDITS
Director Gillian Armstrong; Writer Stephen MacLean; Cinematographer Russell Boyd; Starring Jo Kennedy, Ross O’Donovan, John O’May, Margo Lee, Pat Evison; Length 105 minutes. Seen at home (YouTube), London, Friday 22 May 2020.

Criterion Sunday 287: Burden of Dreams (1982)

Herzog’s film Fitzcarraldo isn’t in the Criterion Collection and honestly, I’m not sure it should be; it’s fine and well-made as far it goes, but the story of its making—the story told in this documentary—is far more interesting. In a sense, there’s as much colonialist privilege being exerted in the actual making of this Amazonian epic as there is in the text of the film itself, and you can see that coming through, the maniacal drive of Herzog to make his film, to honour his grand and foolish metaphor despite all the destruction it wreaks, and the troubles it causes amongst the tribes people he is using as extras and for labour. Indeed, the film touches briefly on but never gets into the human toll of the filming, though we see him and Kinski, amongst others, slipping and sliding about in the mud. And then of course there are those great Herzogian flourishes of aggrandising whimsy (“the birds here are in misery; I don’t think they sing, they just screech in pain”) as he addresses his evolving situation. It is, and it surely looks like, the very model of the ‘troubled shoot’, and it’s a vastly entertaining documentary, but it’s also a bleak and concerning portrait of a filmmaker gone awry, a man too much in service to his central metaphor to consider whether it’s all worth it.

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CRITERION EXTRAS:

• The main extra is Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, the 1980 short film Les Blank made—the project on which he met Herzog and decided to follow him in making Fitzcarraldo. It documents a promise Herzog made to fellow (aspiring) documentary filmmaker Errol Morris that he’d eat his shoe if Morris was able to make his debut (Gates of Heaven, which will show up later on the Criterion Collection). There are, I suppose, two things going on in this short film, and one of them of course is the German film director eating his shoe. Which is to say, we see him preparing it (stuffing it with bulbs of garlic and onion and spices), cooking it, and then—onstage before a screening of Gates of Heaven and then apparently afterwards in the bar—slicing up little pieces and eating it, with a little bit of help from those who wish to interview him. But the other thing going on here is that it’s a public show of support for a small independent filmmaker who has, with Herzog’s encouragement, been able to make his own film. That film is a great work, but this is all about Herzog honouring his own loud mouthed promises, and supporting filmmaking.
• There’s are some outtakes from Burden of Dreams, via Herzog’s own documentary about Kinski, My Best Fiend (1999), showing Kinski ranting and raving on set.
• Herzog does a long interview 25 years later for the release of the Criterion disc, reflecting back on how he was back then, what was omitted, and how it’s impossible to really capture the making of a film as enormous and foolhardy as Fitzcarraldo. He also draws attention to Blank’s own interests that went beyond the production itself, vignettes of the locals and the rainforest and the wildlife, that somehow make the documentary greater than it would otherwise have been.
• There’s a gallery of some rather stunning and evocative photos taken during the production, primarily by Blank’s editor Maureen Gosling.
• Finally, there’s a short trailer for the documentary.

CREDITS
Director/Cinematographer Les Blank; Starring Werner Herzog, Klaus Kinski; Length 95 minutes. Seen at National Library, Wellington, Wednesday 12 September 2001 (and before that on VHS at the university library, Wellington, June 1996, and most recently on DVD at home, London, Friday 24 January 2020).

Some Films by Women of the LA Rebellion

I’m including this piece as part of my theme week looking at African-American filmmaking and subjects, because that’s really the foundation of a lot of the work of the LA Rebellion. Most of these are short films, collected variously on disc and online (and many can be seen on the UCLA website or YouTube), but some of the directors have had careers in feature filmmaking since.

The so-called “LA Rebellion” was a movement of sorts that arose amongst African-American filmmakers enrolled at UCLA’s School of Film, Theatre and Television in the 1970s, in the wake of the Civil Rights movement and US involvement in the Vietnam War. Their work was challenging the mainstream cinema, which certainly at that time—and you could make an argument for even now—remained a largely closed industry, in the process expanding the range of visual representations of the Black experience in the United States. The most well-known filmmakers to come from this movement remain the men: Charles Burnett and Haile Gerima, most notably. However, there were also a large number of women making films within this movement, some of whom would go on to work elsewhere in the film industry, but none of whom were ever given much of a chance beyond the film school.

Probably the best known of the women associated with the LA Rebellion has been Julie Dash, whose 1991 film Daughters of the Dust may be the single work most associated with the movement, but even she was not given the chance to direct many films (aside from some made-for-TV films). One of her earliest works is the short dance film Four Women (1975), which may be seven minutes of interpretative dance, but there’s beauty and grace, fabric and texture, hair and body, power and defiance in this dance, and in the Nina Simone song that soundtracks it. She followed it a couple of years later with Diary of an African Nun (1977, pictured above), which has a beautiful quality even in the imperfect decaying 8mm grain as it survives in a restored (as much as possible) print. Based on a story by Alice Walker, the film has a dreamy poetic quality that appears as if through a haze, with its central character finding it difficult to reconcile herself to her religious calling. Probably her finest film prior to Daughters is Illusions (1982, pictured at the top of this post), which may be little more than half an hour, but packs a lot into its World War II-era story of Mignon (Lonette McKee), a woman passing for white in a film studio’s production office. Mignon meets a darker-skinned woman employed to dub white women’s vocals in the pictures. The film nimbly enacts the way that race is deployed and erased, sometimes literally (here represented by an army censor), as well as the complex interactions between representation and reality. Plus, it’s beautifully shot and acted.

Another key figure in the movement is Alile Sharon Larkin, who has spent most of her career as an educator, with scandalously few directing credits. Her first student film was The Kitchen (1975), which touches on issues that are still very present and relevant in our own day — topics, indeed, that dominate a lot of the discourse I see online about the treatment of women (particularly Black women and other women of colour). In this film, for example, there’s a sense that Black women are put in institutions and stigmatised with mental health issues for being different within mainstream white society. There’s a lot of play with hair in that respect, and the main character seems to be traumatised by memories of her natural hair being tortured into place with red hot irons, which leads to her donning a wig, directly linked to her being placed into care. These themes are undoubtedly even more visceral to those who live within these beauty constraints, and despite being under seven minutes in length, Larkin’s film captures this well.

Like Dash, Larkin went on to make a longer work a few years later with A Different Image (1982, pictured above). There’s a certain earnestness, perhaps borne of the era in which it was made or the seriousness of its intentions, but this is an affecting 50-minute drama about the way that sexualised images in the environment affect socialisation between men and women. The film is never heavy-handed in the way it deploys this theme, with passing images contextualised by the men looking at them—at first, easy to laugh off, like a young boy laughing at the sight of our leading lady’s underwear, or her (male) work colleague’s interactions with another of his friends (who ostentatiously reads Playboy and wants to know if his friend has got some action yet). Progressively these become darker and more troubling, and the film continues to hint at an inability of men to see beyond women’s sexual attributes. It’s nicely acted and well shot by Charles Burnett.

Another woman within the LA Rebellion is Barbara McCullough, who went on to a career as a production manager (particularly within visual effects), a little older than some of her contemporaries, but who made a number of short films at the time. The one I’ve seen is Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification (1979). There’s real beauty to this short experimental film, beautifully restored on 35mm, as a woman interacts with a sparse, impoverished environment. It’s all fairly oblique but ends in an act of purifying defiance.

Among the lesser-known figures was Anita W. Addison, who went on to direct TV shows in the 1990s as well as getting involved in production, but who died in 2004. I’m not clear if her short film Eva’s Man (1976) was made under the auspices of UCLA, but her name is linked with the LA Rebellion (at least on the Wikipedia page). Her film obliquely tells the story of a woman who kills her husband, with flashbacks to give a sense of why she might have done it, and sustains a nice claustrophobic atmosphere with a bit of free jazz on the soundtrack.

One final filmmaker I wanted to mention is Malvonna Bellenger, who later worked in local television and the recording industry, and who died from breast cancer in 2003. Her short film Rain (Nyesha) (1978) is ostensibly about a rainy LA day, though it’s not exactly about rain per se. Instead it’s about the possibility of a change coming, washing things away that existed before. And it’s about a young woman who seems from her voiceover to be disconsolate who finds herself becoming more certain as the rain comes down and Coltrane plays in the background. It finds its tone somewhere between elegiac and active, and it sticks to it.

CREDITS



Four Women (1975) [short, black-and-white] — Director/Cinematographer Julie Dash; Length 7 minutes. Seen at BFI Southbank (NFT3), London, Sunday 9 June 2017.

The Kitchen (1975) [short, black-and-white] — Director/Writer Alile Sharon Larkin; Length 7 minutes. Seen at home (YouTube streaming), London, Sunday 10 June 2018.

Eva’s Man (1976) [short] — Director/Writer Anita W. Addison; Length 15 minutes. Seen at home (YouTube streaming), London, Friday 15 June 2018.

Diary of an African Nun (1977) [short, black-and-white] — Director Julie Dash; Writer Alice Walker; Cinematographer Orin Mitchell; Length 13 minutes. Seen at BFI Southbank (NFT3), London, Monday 3 June 2017.

Rain (Nyesha) (1978) [short, black-and-white] — Director/Writer Melvonna Ballenger; Length 15 minutes. Seen at Airbnb flat (YouTube streaming), Brussels, Sunday 3 June 2018.

Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification (1979) [short, black-and-white] — Director Barbara McCullough; Cinematographers Ben Caldwell, Peter Blue and Roho; Length 6 minutes. Seen at BFI Southbank (NFT3), London, Sunday 9 June 2017.

A Different Image (1982) [medium-length] — Director/Writer Alile Sharon Larkin; Cinematographer Charles Burnett; Length 51 minutes. Seen at BFI Southbank (NFT3), London, Sunday 9 June 2017.

Illusions (1982) [medium-length, black-and-white] — Director/Writer Julie Dash; Cinematographer Ahmed El Maanouni أحمد المعنوني; Starring Lonette McKee; Length 34 minutes. Seen at BFI Southbank (NFT3), London, Sunday 9 June 2017.

Criterion Sunday 262: Fanny och Alexander [The Television Version] (Fanny and Alexander, 1982)

I started watching this under the impression that, as a “television version” which is ostensibly split into four episodes, it would therefore be watchable in small chunks. However, do not be fooled, for despite its five act structure (plus a prologue and epilogue), and the separate credit roll at the end of each “episode”, this is essentially a single 312-minute film, so I ended up watching most of it in a single sitting.

There are different ways to use this kind of duration and Bergman focuses on the characters. There are essentially three households at the heart of this film: the Ekdahls (with Ewa Fröling as the key figure, Emilie), a rich theatre-owning family in whose company we start the film, as they throw a grand Christmas gathering; that of the austere Bishop Vergérus (Jan Malmsjö); and the Jewish moneylender Isak (Erland Josephson), who is more a passing background character for much of the film. The title may put the emphasis on Emilie’s two children, and their experiences guide the structure of the film (Bertil Guve’s Alexander is the character that director Ingmar Bergman identified with, and whose point of view we mostly adopt), but Emilie is the film’s linchpin.

Intended perhaps to be his swansong, this is a gloriously mounted production, which carefully contrasts the burnished colours, deep rich saturated reds, brocaded fabrics and warm lights of the Ekdahl household, with the gloomy bare prison-like atmosphere of the Bishop’s home, with his wan, dispirited serving women and authoritarian mother. In fact, generally Bergman is pretty savage with this man of the cloth, although religious belief runs throughout the film and is hardly all the kind of dour torture that the Bishop cleaves to, even if that’s the most “Bergmanesque” passage of the film. But it’s mostly a film about family and growing up, a warm remembrance of childhood and of a certain kind of cultured middle-class upbringing. The acting is all superb, too, with a vast roster of talent familiar from many other Bergman works.

But this remains very much a film, not a TV series.

[NB This version was released the year after the feature version, in 1983, although I would consider it an alternate cut of the same film, so I’m sticking with the original release year on the heading of this post.]

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CRITERION EXTRAS:

• There are no extras on this disc, as they are all on a separate supplements disc.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Ingmar Bergman; Cinematographer Sven Nykvist; Starring Ewa Fröling, Jan Malmsjö, Allan Edwall, Bertil Guve, Erland Josephson, Jarl Kulle; Length 312 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), London, Friday 16 August 2019.

Wênd Kûuni (aka God’s Gift, 1982)

While a number of post-independence films in Africa have focused on specific issues related to colonialism and development across the region, a number of filmmakers instead turned to pre-colonial stories of traditional life, perhaps to recall what had been lost, or else highlighting the powerful continuity of traditions that can be recognised even in a continent reconfigured with enforced new religions and political leadership. The Royal Belgian Film Archive has led on a new restoration of the Burkina Faso film Wênd Kûuni, which showed at this year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato festival. It fits nicely into my African cinema theme week.

Although made in Burkina Faso (known as Upper Volta when the film was made), this is set before the coming of Europeans, in a dusty and sun-drenched village. It moves at a gentle pace, as first we hear of a woman whose husband has disappeared, and then we see an abandoned child (Serge Yanogo), apparently mute, taken to a local village by a passing traveller. The villagers look after him as he grows, naming him ‘God’s Gift’ (Wênd Kûuni). The narrative, such as it is, involves his backstory, finding out where he comes from (which brings in local folk narratives, witchcraft and a rather brutal expulsion). However, it also suggests a time when such lives could be lived without the greater threat of the destabilisation created by the outside world, of a lost culture that no longer existed in Burkina Faso.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Gaston Kaboré; Cinematographers Issaka Thiombiano and Sékou Ouedraogo; Starring Serge Yanogo, Rosine Yanogo; Length 75 minutes. Seen at Cinema Lumière (Sala Scorsese), Bologna, Saturday 29 June 2019.

Criterion Sunday 205: Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss (Veronika Voss, 1982)

One of Fassbinder’s final films (indeed, the last to be released in his lifetime), this is a dreamlike reverie of soft black-and-white, specifically an hommage to a presumed golden era of Hollywood (and Nazi-era) filmmaking, flashbacks to which are all starry-eyed lights and slinky fashion. The star of these films is the title character (Rosel Zech), who a decade after World War II is struggling to get work and struggling to keep her fragile sense of identity. She meets a sports reporter (Hilmar Thate) who doesn’t know who she is, and strikes up an affair, during which he discovers she’s being drugged by a rapacious doctor (Annemarie Düringer), and resolves to try and free her. These genre elements though are largely interwoven into a story that’s about the dangerous addiction not just to morphine but to fame itself, with a subtle through line of satire that is difficult to laugh at given the suffocating atmosphere of much of the film. It’s a more admirable piece than one I genuinely love, but thus is often the way with Fassbinder.

CREDITS
Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder; Writers Fassbinder, Pea Fröhlich and Peter Märthesheimer; Cinematographer Xaver Schwarzenberger; Starring Rosel Zech, Hilmar Thate, Cornelia Froboess, Annemarie Düringer; Length 104 minutes. Seen at a friend’s home (DVD), London, Sunday 25 March 2018 (and before that on VHS at the university library, Wellington, April 2000).