History of Film Criticism: Andrew Sarris on Orson Welles

Andrew Sarris in The American Cinema – Directors and Directions: 1920 – 1968 divides the American film cannon into a hierarchy of different categories. The highest one is the Pantheon Directors which are,

“These are the directors who have transcended their technical problems with a personal vision of the world. To Speak any of their names is to evoke a self-contained world with its own laws and landscapes. They were also fortunate enough to find the proper conditions and collaborators for the full expression of their talent.”

The other categories include: The Far Side of Paradise ("These are directors who fall short of the Pantheon either because of a fragmentation of their personal vision or because of disruptive career problems."), Expressive Esoterica ("These are the unsung directors with difficult styles or unfashionable genres or both. Their deeper virtues are often obscured by irritating idiosyncrasies on the surface, but they are generally redeemed by their seriousness and grace."), Fringe Benefits ("The following directors occupied such a marginal role in the American cinema that it would be unfair to their overall reputations to analyze them in this limited context in any detail, but a few comments may be in order."), Less Than Meets The Eye ("These are directors with reputations in excess of inspirations. In retrospect, it always seems that the personal signatures to their films were written with invisible ink."), Lightly Likable ("These are talented but uneven directors with the saving grace of unpretentiousness."), and Strained Seriousness ("These are talented but uneven directors with the mortal sin of pretentiousness. Their ambitious projects tend to inflate rather than expand.").

Sarris brought to English film criticism many tenets from French film criticism and especially the "Auteur theory". It is gratifying and also a little surprising to see Sarris cite so many French articles, both from Cahiers and Positif, since in today's (regrettable) mainstream film criticism context the idea of citing French writers seems either unnecessary or even worse retrograde. But it is this burgeoning internationalism, which is inspired by the obsessional French movie love, that is at the heart of The American Cinema and its lasting influence on the Sarrisites. There should be a more direct relation between the film writing in both languages to enlarge the conversation and to share opinions, information and ideas.

Having already published Sarris' entry on John Ford, here he is on Orson Welles:

*****

That Welles, the aging enfant terrible of the American Cinema, is still the youngest indisputably great American director is an ominous symptom of decadence in the industry as a whole. It can even be argued that Welles’s films are now less American than European in outlook and that in ten years or less there may be no American of great artistic significance. It is more likely, however, that we are too dazzled by the phantasms of the sixties to perceive their ultimate aesthetic contours.

            With Mr. Arkadin  and The Trial, Welles’s career took a curious turn. This man from Mars who projected radio dynamics to that RKO-Radio classic Citizen Kane went surprisingly sour on the sound track. The ear of the expatriate had lost contact with the nuances of American speech. It may be no accident that Welles has gradually turned away from psychological density of the fictionalized biography (Citizen Kane) and the filmed novel (The Magnificent Ambersons) to the psychological abstractions of fantasy (Lady from Shanghay), allegory (Touch of Evil), fable (Mr. Arkadin), hallucination (The Trial), and reverie (Falstaff).

            Welles seemed to have been rehearsing all his life for Falstaff, and it is not surprising that he should be carted away in a coffin like one of Murnau’s vampires in Nosferatu. Indeed, Welles has been the foremost German expressionist in the Anglo-Saxon world ever since Citizen Kane infected the American cinema with the virus of artistic ambition. The conventional American diagnosis of his career is decline, pure and simple, but decline is never pure and never simple. Welles began his career on such a high plateau that the most precipitous decline would not affect his place in the Pantheon. Citizen Kane is still the work that influenced the cinema more profoundly than any American film since Birth of a Nation. If the thirties belong to Lubitsch’s subtle grace and unobtrusive cutting, the forties belong to the Wellesian resurrection of Murnau’s portentous camera angles. The decade of plots gave way to a decade of themes, and the American cinema had lost its innocence and charm forever. From the beginning, Welles imposed a European temperament on the American cinema. Even today, Arthur Penn acknowledges the influence of Welles. Certainly the cinema is no poorer for having inspired a young man from Wisconsin to act out his Faustian fantasies on the screen until they consumed him.

            The Wellesian persona looms large in Wellesian cinema. Apart from The Magnificent Ambersons, in which his presence was exclusively vocal narration, every Welles film is designed around the massive presence of the artist as autobiographer. Call him Hearst or Falstaff, Macbeth or Othello, Quinlan or Arkadin, he is always at least partly himself, ironic, bombastic, pathetic, and, above all, presumptuous. The Wellesian cinema is the cinema of magic and marvels, and everything, and especially its prime protagonist, is larger than life. The dramatic conflict in a Welles film often arises from the dialectical collision between morality and megalomania, and Welles more often than not plays the megalomaniacal villain without stilling the calls of conscience. Curiously, Welles is far from being his own best actor. Actually, no actor-director in history has been as generous to his colleagues. Through less than a dozen films the roll call of distinguished performances is long indeed: Joseph Cotton, Dorothy Comingore, Ray Collins, Everett Sloane, George Colouris, Agnes Moorehead, Dolores Costello, Anne Baxter, Richard Bennett, Edward G. Robinson, Glenn Anders, Suzanne Cloutier, Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh, Joseph Calleia, Akim Tamiroff, Peter Van Eyck, Michael Redgrave, Suzanne Flon, Katina Paxinou, Romy Schneider, John Gielgud, Keith Baxter, with extraordinarily honorable mention to such limited performers as Tim Holt (as the last of the Ambersons) and Rita Hayworth (as the spectacularly mythic Lady from Shanghai shattered irrevocably in a hall of mirrors, a superb metaphor for the movie career of Orson Welles).

            French critics, most notably André Bazin, hailed Citizen Kane after the war for its single-take, deep-focus scenes as improvements upon the traditional Hollywood crosscutting (or champ-contre-champ) inside a master scene. However, most moviegoers tend to identify Welles stylistically more for his eccentric camera angles and swooping camera movements than for the relative stability of his staging. The world of Orson Welles is the world of the runaway artist who pauses every so often to muse over what he has lost or left behind. Quiet and frenzy alternate in this world, as do nostalgia and adventure. There is stylistic alternation as well between dynamic progressions through the plot and décor and very formal compositions of the characters. Mark Shivas has established a Welles-Hitchcock contrast both thematically and technically with the observation that Welles is concerned with the ordinary feelings of extraordinary people and Hitchcock with the extraordinary feelings of ordinary people. Whereas Welles flourishes in baroque settings, Hitchcock functions in commonplace settings. To a limited extant, at least, Wellesian cinema is as much the cinema of the exhibitionist as Hitchcockian cinema is the cinema of the voyeur.

            The Trial deserves a derisory footnote all its own, but with reservations. Since everything Welles had done since Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons had been denounced as a betrayal of his talent, it is possible to sympathize with his decision to hurl Kafka at the culture-mongers. The final irony of this absurd situation is that The Trial is the most hateful, the most repellent, and the most perverted film Welles ever made. What seemed even to his steadfast admirers a glorious opportunity has dissolved into a fatal temptation. Welles asserts in the prologue that his story has the logic of a dream, but Welles of Kafka, like Mondrian’s white on white, is less logical than superfluous, less a dream of something than a dream of a dream of something. Indeed, The Trial is in its brilliantly accomplished way as much of a dead end as Minnelli’s Ziegfeld Follies, which demonstrated that the most hackneyed backstage plot was preferable to no plot at all, and as Resnais’s Last Year at Mariebad, which demonstrated that ambiguity was less appealing as a subject than as an attitude. Paradoxically, what have always seemed thee least meaningful elements of a movie – the surface plot, the apparent subject, the objective background – are also the most necessary. Once a director soars off into time and space without a calendar and an atlas, he loses the force of gravity without which a movie cannot address itself to an audience. By this standard and many others, Touch of Evil and The Lady from Shanghai are superior to The Trial.

            The key to the director (as well as Mr. Arkadin) is revealed when Orson Welles (alias Gregory Arkadin) tells the story of a frog and a scorpion meeting by a river. When the scorpion asks to ride across the river on the frog’s back, the frog demurs: “If I take you on my back, you still sting me, and your sting is fatal.” The scorpion responds with a plausible argument: “Where is the logic in that? If I sting you, we both will drown.” The Frog, a logical creature, then agrees to transport the scorpion, but he no sooner reaches the middle of the river than he feels a deadly sting in his back. “Where is the logic in this?” croaks the dying frog as he begins to sink below the surface. “This is my character,” replies the doomed scorpion, “and there is no logic in character.”

Andrew Sarris

Orson Welles' CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT (1965)

John Ford: Multiple Perspectives (Costa, Comolli, Gallagher, Straub)

In discussing John Ford with David Jenkins at Mubi, Pedro Costa praises Ford for his film's documentary and poetic quality, "It makes me dream and it makes me come back. I felt so right when I saw a film by John Ford and I'm in front of those people. It was a dream thing. It was a real thing." It's hard to isolate what exactly makes Ford's film so special and why his influence is so vast. Throughout the history of cinema there has been a plethora of of diverse directors that have praised Ford's cinema: Orson Welles, Ingmar Bergman Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, Jean-Marie Straub, Maurice Pialat, and the Ross Brothers (River). To just name a few. And, of course, Ford is equally as polarizing, and other directors, like Sam Peckinpah or Quentin Tarantino, have reacted against him.

In an interview with by Daniel Fairfax with Jean-Louis Comolli, "Yes, we were utopians; in a way, I still am...", Comolli brings up Ford in the his recounting of the conflicts between Cahiers du Cinéma and Cinéthique in the late 60's,

"They distinguished themselves by radically rejecting practically the entire cinema. Personally, I have always been concerned with saving the cinema, including the most ideological films. The idea behind "Young Mr. Lincoln" was to save Hollywood. [...] "We proceeded from the idea that, if forms have a meaning, it could be – and this is the case with the great Hollywood directors – that this meaning is not that of the characters, or the story the film tells. It could be that this meaning comes from the mise en scène, and there, all of a sudden, forms take on a meaning at odds with the énoncés of the film’s logic. In the end, Young Mister Lincoln is particularly striking because it is a film which, if you read it rapidly, tells us of the Lincoln myth, of bourgeois, mercantile America. Everything is there, justice, absolutely everything. But as soon as you dismantle it, as soon as you deconstruct it, you perceive that it is infinitely more perverse than that, and that the filmmaker manages, on the basis of his work, or his own genius, to endanger, and even squarely overturn, the énoncés which are in the film. This can lead to a much more subtle reading, which in the end shows the film as fiercely critical of Lincoln’s position. This is what is interesting: Lincoln is there, like a statue, and at the same time he is something much more problematic, none of his weaknesses are concealed."

In an interview by Toni D'Angela with Tag Gallagher for La Furia Umana, Gallagher speaks about Ford in regards to the structure of his films,

"He made “experimental films” (at least according to Straub and me). Sometimes he experimented more in one direction, sometimes in another. [...] Ford is virtually the only filmmaker in Hollywood between the wars who exposes and denounces racism and the nature of the military, […] more Brecht than Brecht, as Jean-Marie Straub says."

Gallagher might be one of Ford's staunchest defender and in his writing he ocasionally brings up Jean-Marie Straub admiration for Ford’s cinema. 

In Gallagher’s incredible John Ford: The Man and His Films (University of California Press) he further elaborates on Straub's describtion of Ford as "Brectian" in Footnote #703 (pg.566-567). 

Here it is: 

***

Any effort persisted in becomes corrupt. The sense of duty that sustains

Ford’s individuals (and also their sense of faith) commonly leads them astray

into aberrations or death. Duty-bound, they invade others’ privacy, and

arrogate knowledge of higher good, right and judgment: judges, ministers,

soldiers, outlaws, priests. Thus racism, war or any form of intolerance

becomes a function of society. In tracing Ford’s pictures (particularly Judge

Priest, How Green Was My Valley, This Is Korea!, The Man Who Shot Liberty

Valance) we have seen how people (and governments) act from feeling, not

from logic. People are made of dreams as much as reality. And we have

seen how Ford, in awakening around 1927 to cinema’s ability to be art

through total stylization, awakened simultaneously to his art’s high task: to

help us free ourselves from determining ideologies. Art, after all, has the

capability of making us understand things through emotion that we would be

absolutely incapable of understanding through the intellect. Within a determining 

milieu, particularly when that milieu is challenged, free will,

human nature, life’s worth, a benign divinity’s existence, all must necessarily

be posed in question. And so Ford pictures ideally construct in minute detail

a social set of apparent homogeneity (thus often military-like) in order to

analyze that society within its historic moment, and in order to demonstrate

how the garments of society, together with history itself, operate on the

individual. It is for these reasons that Jean-Marie Straub has called Ford the

most ”Brechtian” of all filmmakers.703

703. When Straub made this remark to the author in 1975 (after seeing Pilgrimage

and Donovan’s Reef) he was referring not so much to Ford’s acting style —in that

sense no films are truly Brechtian — as to Ford’s manner of stripping naked social

ideologies that are elsewhere unacknowledged. To Joseph McBride, Straub said Ford

is the most Brechtian of filmmakers, “because he shows things that make people

think...by [making] the audience collaborate on the film” (McBride and Wilmington,

John Ford, p. 108). McBride analyzes Fort Apache in this light, pointing out how

Captain York donning Colonel Thursday’s hat at the end is a Brechtian device [like

the cardinal donning the Pope’s robes in Brecht’s Galileo], and that we see clearly

that an insane system needs the dedication of noble men to perpetuate itself.) Less

simply, one might call Ford Brechtian because every element in his cinema is

engaged dialectically with every other element (whether one speaks of elements of

— or between — style, content, myth, ideology, or whatever), with the result that

Ford’s movies are self-reflexive and transparent in their workings.

This notion — essentially the thesis of this book — flies violently in the face of a

recent [1980] critical tendency to regard the “classical” cinema of Hollywood as a

monolithic system that sought to mask its “codes” (e.g., its montage) in order to

create an apparently unmediated representation of the real world; it sought to

entertain passively and left unacknowledged its own governing ideology. (Cf.,

Stagecoach: my argument with Browne (“Spectator-in-the-Text”); also Burch,

Distant Observer; Robert Phillip Volker, The Altering Eye [New York: Oxford, 1983];

Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres [New York: Random House, 1981]). “Modernist”

(i.e., some post-1960) cinema, on the other hand, subverts our absorption in

emotion, story, or character, and exposes its “codes” (e. g., by showing the camera,

discordant editing, having an actor speak directly to us), in order to force us to relate

intellectually rather than through emotional identification.

In these circles, Straub is admired as epitomizing “modernist” cinema, while Ford

is often derided (although not by most of the above-named critics) as a sentimental

reactionary. Thus Straub’s comparison of Brecht and Ford caused considerable

head-shaking. It is, of course, generally agreed that many movies cater exclusively

to an audience’s desire for passive spectacle (e.g.. Star Wars, some of Hitchcock);

and all research shows that audiences generally watch movies in order not to think.

Nonetheless, the fallacies of “modernist” critics are multitudinous (even including

their arrogation of the label “modern”). Firstly, their premise of a monolithic

classical system is a pure fantasy that reveals little sensibility for the complexity of

pre-1960 cinema and almost no acquaintance with the actual films themselves.

Secondly, they naively assume that audiences can be forced to think, whereas

“modernist” techniques soon lose their initial shock and audiences happily reimmerse

themselves into the fictional worlds of even the most determinedly

antipathetic movies. Thirdly, because their basis is exclusively materialist, they, like

Grierson and Aristarco before them, distrust emotions and aestheticism and would

destroy the art of cinema in favor of a cinema of political propaganda.

An examination of Brecht’s 1930 table, in which he gave cursory comparison

between the (bad) “dramatic” and the (good, Brechtian) “epic” theaters, will, in the

light of Straub and this book, show Ford very much on the “epic” side — the

“modernist”:

Dramatic Theater                                           Epic Theater

plot                                                                  narrative

implicates spectator into drama                         makes spectator an observer

wears down his capacity for                             action arouses his capacity for action

provides him with sensations                            forces him to make decisions

provides experience                                         provides a picture of the world

involves the spectator                                       confronts the spectator

suggestion                                                         argument

feelings are preserved                                        feelings are propelled into perceptions

man is assumed known                                      man is the object of inquiry

man unalterable                                                 man alterable and altering

suspense about the outcome                              suspense about the progress

each scene exists for another                             each scene for itself

linear development                                            in curves

evolutionary determinism                                   evolutionary leaps

the world, as it is                                               the world, as it becomes

what man ought to do                                       what man is forced to do

man as a fixed point                                          man as a process

his instincts                                                       his motivations

thought determines being                                   social being determines thought

(Brecht did not intend, obviously, that epic theater be absolutely one way and not at

all the other way; it is a question of tendency.)

Tag Gallagher

Two Rode Together (John Ford, 1961)

  "Puisque nous avons la chance d'avoir affaire à un des rares cinéates qui méritent vraiment le beau nom de classique, les meilleures raisons d'aimer Ford seront encore les simples; et le fait est qu'elles ne sont pas sensiblement différentes de celles qui faisaient Delluc s'embraser pour Rio Jim, il y a quelque quarante-cinq ans. Ce sont donc des raisons vieilles comme le cinéma lui-même. Mais, dans Les Deux Cavaliers, non seulement il n'y a nulle contrainte, mais Ford nous offre son film le plus débridé, le plus désinvolte, en un mot, le plus libre. Le classicisme y appraît comme ce qu'il est vraiment: la souveraine maîtrise d'un art, le libre épanouissement qui autorise l'abandon des contraintes jadis utiles, et dont il est la suprême conquête. N'ayant plus rien à apprendre, le créateur se livre tout à la joie de sa création, et donne, sur le tard, ses oeuvres les plus surprenantes: les dernière pièces de Corneille, le Second Faust. Ainsi Les Deux Cavaliers sont-ils à La Chevauchée fantastique ce que Suréna est à Polyeucte." - Philip d'Hugues (Cahiers du Cinéma, N.127)

Love 'Em or Hate 'Em: Controversial Directors in Nayman's Terms

The film class Love 'Em or Hate 'Em: Controversial Directors in Nayman's Terms is going on through the month of May to early June, each Mondays (except for the 20th) at 7PM at the Miles Nadal JCC. The class on Paul Verhoeven on May 27th will be the highlight since Adam Nayman has been working on a book on Showgirls (ECW Press).

Emerging Women Filmmakers: McKenzie, Goyette, Bohdanowicz, Litz, Supnet

Two of the following films When You Sleep and Le Futur Proche will be playing at 8:00PM on May 10th at the Innis Town Hall as part of the Breakthrough Film Festival, which is devoted exclusively to short films by emerging female artists. - D.D. 

*****

The Nova Scotian filmmaker Ashley McKenzie has made two short-films and is currently in post-production on a new project Stray. Her films are made with her artistic collaborator Nelson Macdonald through their production company Grassfire Films.

McKenzie's short-film's Rhonda's Party and When You Sleep at first appear to be very different but a closer look reveals some similarities. Even though their settings are a world apart - a nursing home and a low-income apartment building - what is explored are women in moments of crisis. Both of these films center on a death - Margaret's and a rats - and how they effect the people around it.

In Rhonda's Party the principal leads are Rhonda, a reclusive nursing-home resident who is grieving over the death of her friend, and Amy, the inexperienced young nurse who needs to comfort Rhonda while still doing her job. In When You Sleep the principal leads are the young adults Jesse, whose messy apartment has a rat infestation, and her boyfriend Lee, who is being a jerk.

To better understand McKenzie's films a good point of comparison would be with the films of Mike Leigh. The two share an observational filming style that poetically presents bleak social realities. The hospital scenes in Rhonda's Party are reminiscent of the ones in All or Nothing. The gritty living conditions in When You Sleep are reminiscent of Leigh's kitchen sink realism. While the lead characters in McKenzie's films seem cut from the same cloth as Poppy in Happy-Go-Lucky or Mary in Another Year.

*****

In the Québécois film magazine 24 Images, Sophie Goyette’s newest short-film Le Futur Proche was included as one of the top ten Québécois films of 2012. Philippe Gajan writes about it, 

“Like in her previous short films (La Ronde, Manège), Goyette captures an intermediate state in the lives of her protagonists, an instant suspended between a before and an after, which are never really evoked. If this cinema appears at a first glance to be realistic or psychological, it is especially impressionistic.” 

The other films included in the 24 Images list are Rebelle, Tout ce que tu possède, Trente tableaux, Laurence Anyways, Pieces and Love All to Hell, La mise à l’aveugle, Le grand ailleurs et le petit ici, Camion and Sur le rivage du Monde. Helen Faradji would also include Sophie Dupuis' Faillir.

I would actually compare Le Futur Proche more to Denis Côté's Bestiaire, another great Québécois film from 2012, for how they blend documentary with fiction. In Côté's Bestiaire a narrative is created around a rural zoo through its filming style which blends a Wiseman institution overview with a Benning use of long-takes. In Goyette's fiction film Le Futur Proche the story of a pilot at an aerodrome is treated like a seventies NFB documentary of a professional at work.

The pilot of Le Futur Proche flies a small plane for industrial and personal customers. The pilot Robin describes the world as chaotic from the ground level but beautiful from his plane. What elevates Le Futur Proche to a higher level, in terms of quality, is its aerial subject and scope. The film is full of impressive aerial photography of the rural and urban, which is effective on an aesthetic and a character level.

Like in La Ronde, the protagonist of Le Futur Proche shows subtle signs of depression over the death of a parent. Robin's sorrowful underpinnings are illustrated through small visual cues. There is one screw on the plane that is loose and which needs tightening. There is a shot of a gyrating ceiling fan which is held for an extended duration. Robin is distant from his peers and he eats his lunches all by himself. His maintenance duties are performed with a silent authority that recalls some of Tony Scott's blue-collar heroes.

Robin perceives memories of his parents everywhere. Le Futur Proche ends with Robin taking an older couple over Montreal to celebrate their 40^th anniversary. There is special moment experienced as Robin flies his plane over some fireworks with this nice and familiar couple. This scene seems to represent the character's optimism for the future that are paradoxically saddened by memories of the past. Or as Robin puts it, “Je suis en route pour quelque que chose d’autres, mes je ne sais pas encore quoi.”

*****

Sofia Bohdanowicz’s three credited short-films are Falling with Force, Dundas Street, and the newest Modlitwa. Her most famous short-film is Dundas Street which is inspired by Bohdanowicz's grandmother Zofia Bohdanowiczowa’s (1895-1965) poems. It is less a narrative than they a visual poem. There is also a religious quality to it that recalls the recent films of Terrence Malick.

Dundas Street, which is co-directed by Joanna Durkalec, is narrated by an elderly Polish woman who is unable to adapt to her new urban landscape. It follows her efforts to find meaning in a inhospitable and unfriendly city. She speaks fondly of the fruit merchant Cornelius. In one stunning shot as he is cashing out, the lighting brightens, and he sings a sorrowful song.

Modlitwa stars Maria Bohdanowicz (1930-2012), who the film is also dedicated too. Modlitwa builds upon the former through Bohdanowiczowa's poetry. Its Catholic wisdom is humbling: “Be Kind to those who suffer, oh good Lord. To those who labor through life toward death.” Maria's routine of taking care of her urban residence is contrasted with that of a dream of a nature and peace. Its imagery is as equally as touching and beautiful as that of Dundas Street.

*****

The actress-turned-director Nadia Litz has an impressive resume. She has worked with Reginald Harkema (Monkey Warfare), Daniel Cockburn (You Are Here) and Nicolas Winding Refn (Fear X). Her first feature Hotel Congress, which she co-directed with Michel Kandinsky, was made as part of Ingrid Verninger's 1K Wave. Its setting offers one of its first surprises as it takes place at the real Hotel Congress in Tucson, Arizona. An American setting is surprising for any Canadian film but especially one with such a small budget.

Hotel Congress is described as "a romantic film for the unromantic," and as a study of women and men relations it belongs up there with the films Ingmar Bergman, Woody Allen, and Eric Rohmer. The film beings with an intertitle that describes the story in short-form:

“A man and a woman meet at a hotel in Tucson. One of them believed in true love and found none. One of them didn’t believe true love was possible and found it. Both of them were stuck in the desert.”

The woman Sofia (Nadia Litz) and the man Francis (Philip Ricio) both have romantic partners but decide to test their love by escaping with one another to have an affair. What makes the plot interesting is how it isn't cynical and the two of them don't cheat. Instead they have many great conversations which has an emotional cathartic effect on them. The conversations include just about everything but most prominently romance, philosophy, and culture. The witty conversations and the great performances give life to a sophisticated script. In some ways Hotel Congress plays out like the reverse-shot and the missing dialogue track from Malick's To The Wonder.

*****

Leslie Supnet makes these great short animated videos and super 8 films. The animated graphics are cute and simple. They're of these women characters that are working through their personal demons and there is a fantastic quality to them that is reminiscent of Hayao Miyazaki. They are made in collaboration with Clint Enns who does the sound design and edits them.

Supnet has made over a dozen short videos, in varying lengths, but the ones that are the most visually stunning are: You Are Here, which was made as part of a Helen Hill tribute, and is full of cute imagery of death; Gains + Losses, which is full of situational vignettes of day-to-day anxieties; and Fair Trade of a girl sitting on a bench and where she scratches open her stomach and then all of her bad thoughts come out.

Supnet's newest projects are the collaborations with Glen Johnson, The Idea and A Time is a Terrible Thing to Waste.

Jeunes cinéastes français on n'est pas mort ! (Cahiers, N.688)

The dossier in the April issue of Cahiers du Cinéma (N.688) is Jeunes cinéastes français on n'est pas mort! which is about a new generation of young French filmmakers who are incorporating a new lyricism in their films. These new directors are in the process of completing their first or second full-length feature and have previously only made short films.

"This group isn't exclusive, but it just goes to show that a new spirit is being created, and that Cahiers is in demand for this newness," writes Stéphane Delorme. And he elaborates on the magazine's position, "this is why here at Cahiers we will not accept the label that we are too severe. No. It has to precisely do with these other films, that are not being made or shown, and by supporting these young filmmakers, who would otherwise loose their force and spirit, from not finding any allies. This forces us not to lower our standards."

This is one of Cahiers' best recent issues as it seems to epitomize their championing of an open-aired lyricism against the asphyxiation of cinematic academicism. Every article in this particular issue, and within the magazine in general, seems to address this issue, in some way, and what is impressive is its consistency.

The feature article that best addresses this is Delorme’s Comment redonner de l’élan au jeune cinema français: Du lyrisme!. Building upon their Onze stations pour une histoire poétique du cinéma français (N.682), Delorme traces the history of a poetic lineage in French cinema, from Leos Carax’s Holy Motors to its roots, with its developments and pitfalls, along with its accompanying intellectual life and attitudes. Delorme is arguing for a shift in tone for the films. Similar to their Les dix tares du cinéma contemporain (N.684), instead of French filmmakers solely making naturalistic dramas about class and social issues, Delorme is arguing for films to be made with breathing room that allow for improvisation and poetry: des films quite chante. One of Delorme’s points is that “To sing, one must be able to love; and that today, there is a grand inability to love.” This is a crisis not only for cinema but in life, too.

Some of Delorme's points are (and you can also hear him talk about it on France Inter, though he is unfortunately cut short):

"The observation of social classes give certain filmmakers the impression of being political. But it is lyricism that is revolutionary! [...] The great political cinema is lyrical: Eisenstein, Marker, Godard, Rocha. [...] In France, it is the older filmmakers that are truly lyrical! Coeurs, Sicilia!, Les Plages d'Agnes, Histoire(s) du Cinema. [...] That isn't right! Are we only good for this? Where are the grand, generous, enthusiastic, and tragic gestures? Where are the films that push the limits? [...] Naturalism and auto-fictions, hand in hand, have reduced lyricism to practically nothing, it is reduced to narcissistic confidences and wining. [...] Une trousse de secours pour brulers au second degrer, si le cinema n'est pas ca, a quoi bon en faire?"

The Événement: Jeunes cinéastes français is full of articles and it is illustrated with behind the scenes pictures, stills, and director portraits. It is divided in several sections. À l'attaque! (on seven young filmmakers who are finishing their first features): Yann Gonzalez (Les Rencontres d'après minuit), Justine Triet (La Bataille de Solférino), Djinn Carrénard (Donoma, Faire l’amour), Guillaume Brac (Un monde sans femmes, Tonnerre), Antonin Peretjatko (La Fille du 14 juillet), Thomas Salvador (Briques, Vincent), and Rebecca Zlotowski (Belle Épine, Grand Central). There is a text manifesto Le SMS de Cologne by the actor-director Vincent Macagine A section on four actors Têtes folles (who have acted in the previously mentioned director’s films): Estéban/David Boring, Laure Calamy, Laetitia Dosch, and Nicolas Maury. There is a section for five short-film directors: Jonathan Vinel, Shanti Masud, Mati Diop, Vincent Dietschy, and Louis Garrel. These texts are written by some of Cahiers’ important writers like Delorme, Jean-Philippe Tessé, Jean-Sébastien Chauvin, Nicolas Azalbert, Joachim Lepastier, and Florence Maillard.

The issue seems to coincide with Cannes as on their Facebook page Cahiers posted that Rebecca Zlotowski's Grand Central will be in Un certain regard, Antonin Peretjatko's La Fille du 14 juillet will be in la Quinzaine des réalisateurs, Yann Gonzalez's Les Rencontres d'après minuit will be in la Semaine de la critique, Justine Triet's La Bataille de Solférino will be in l'ACID, and that the acteur Vincent Macaigne will be at the Croisette in three films: La Fille du 14 juillet, La Bataille de Solférino and 2 automnes, trois hivers by Sébastien Betbeder (ACID).

The April's Cahiers critique, to cite Stéphane Delorme’s ratings, are: Promised Land by Gus Van Sant (***), La Belle Endormie by Marco Bellocchio (***), Mud by Jeff Nichols (**), Les Amants passagers by Pedro Almodóvar (*), Clip by Maja Milos (**), and Orleans by Virgil Vernier (**). And in their Notes sur d’autres films section they review 18 other films including The Act of Killing, The Grandmaster, Hannah Arendt, Paradise: Faith & Hope, Pietà, La Playa D.C., and Survivre.

There is a dense Le Journal section: an inteview with Isabelle Glachant on Chinese cinema, a review of the Berlin festival, coverage of the film festival in Bobigny, an article about Israeli cinema, a spotlight on how Cahiers was censored in Algeria (for a still of In the Realm of the Senses), a memorial for the former Cahiers du Cinema-Japon editor Yoichi Umemoto by Thierry Jousse, a memorial for David Dewaele by Druno Dumont, a memorial for Alexeï Guerman, articles about Adolfo Arrietta's Flammes, Mario Monicelli’s Larmes de joie, and Howard Hawks’ Red River; articles about Paul Wendkos and Serguei Paradjanov; and their new two-page international film news section.

Finally there is also an interview with the producer Saïd Ben Saïd, a dossier on Philippe Garrel, and an inteview with Jean-Francois Chevrier (L'Hallucination artistique) whose unique reading of Bazin brings him towards surrealism and hallucinations.

The May issue of Cahiers has now been announced and it will be interesting to see how they build upon this previous issue. The table of contents already lists the Événement to be Cannes 2013 and Convention Collective, the Cahiers Critiques are for the new Kurosawa, Peretjatko and Gondry; and there is a multi-article dossier on the South by Southwest film festival.