Nick Ray at Cahiers du Cinema (circa 1950s)

The TIFF Bell Lightbox is currently running a Nicholas Ray retrospective The Cinema Is Nicholas Ray as part of its Hollywood Classics series. The series is programmed by James Quandt, scheduled over two seasons and is centered on the recent restoration of We Can't Go Home Again*, which will be playing on Sunday October 30th at 4PM and will be introduced by Susan Ray. "Poetic, pessimistic, high-strung and humanist, Ray's films are set in a lonely place and on dangerous ground - the wounded psyches of often solitary nomads, strangers who keep looking for a home in a world to which they "have not been properly introduced,"" Quandt writes in the 180°. These screenings will offer Torontonians a glimpse into Ray's mesmerizing work. We Can't Go Home Again, which has recently been restored, and Susan's own Don't Expect Too Much, a companion-piece documentary on We Can't Go Home Again are the kind of films by Ray that Bill Krohn compares to flying saucers, "you catch glimpses of them or hear about them from people who've seen one." The rare prints and the fact that they are only shown once or twice give these Cinematheque screenings an aura-like quality.

Since the Godard line that "The Cinema is Nicholas Ray" is quoted ad nauseam (The Dreamers, the bulk of journalistic reviews) I thought that I would take the occasion to look at what else the Young Turks had to say about the auteur with whom most of them fell in love with when they first discovered They Live By Night at the Rendez-Vous de Biarritz in 1950. A great resource for their writing** is the anthology edited by Jim Hillier, Cahiers du Cinema - The 1950s; Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave (1985)***. In the book's section on American Cinema there is a dossier on Nicholas Ray which includes reviews by Jacques Rivette on The Lusty Men, Francois Truffaut on Johnny Guitar, Eric Rohmer on Rebel Without a Cause, Jean-Luc Godard on Hot Blood and Bitter Victory, and an interview from November 1958 between Charles Bitsch and Ray (one of the first American directors to be interviewed in the magazines, as the editorial staff had no real contact with the foreign trade press). Within these pages - beautifully translated and with foot-notes by Liz Heron and Tom Milne - you can find what made the French film critics at Cahiers du Cinema so exciting to read at the time - and I believe more importantly - retrospectively and currently.

So what were the films that Ray made in the '50s? There is Born to Be Bad and In a Lonely Place ('50); On Dangerous Ground, Flying Leathernecks and The Racket ('51); Macao and The Lusty Men ('52); Androcles and the Lion ('53); Johnny Guitar and a teleplay High Green Wall ('54); Run for Cover and Rebel Without a Cause ('55); Hot Blood and Bigger Than Life ('56); The True Story of Jesse James and Bitter Victory ('57); Wind Across the Everglades and Party Girl ('58). In terms of his contemporaries, Jacques Rivette in The State of the American Cinema (Cahiers N.54) writes, "At present the undoubted spearheads (...) of the age of the auteurs are Nicholas Ray, Richard Brooks, Anthony Mann and Robert Aldrich," while Truffaut places him in the "Wise, Dassin and Losey generation." Even more so then these other directors, Ray stood at the fore-front of this new generation of Hollywood film-makers that came on the scene after the war. He stood as a harbinger for the modernity that was to be felt in the world of cinema.

From De l'invention (Cahiers N.27), Rivette reflects the magazine's generosity in discussing Ray,

"Without any doubt, the most constant privilege of the masters is that of seeing everything, including the most simple mistakes, turn out to their advantage rather than diminishing their stature. If you are now surprised to see me give the benefit of this law to Nicholas Ray's latest film it means you are ill-prepared to appreciate a work which is disconcerting and asks for, not indulgence, but a little love."

From L'Amirable Certitude (Cahiers N.46), Truffaut writes,

"Nicholas Raymond Kienzle is somewhat, in fact very much, the passionate discovery of the 'young critics'. Nick Ray is an auteur in our sense of the word. All his films tell the same story, the story of a violent man who wants to stop being violent, and his relationship with a woman who has more moral strength than himself. For Ray's hero is invariably a man lashing out, weak, a child-man when he is not simply a child."****

And here is Truffaut at his more aggressive,

"You can refute Hawks in the name of Ray (or vice versa), or admit them both, but to anyone who would reject them both I make so bold as to say this: Stop going to the cinema, don't watch anymore films, for you will never know the meaning of inspiration, of a view-finder, of poetic intuition, a frame, a shot, an idea, a good film, the cinema. An insufferable pretension? No: a wonderful certainty."

In Ajax ou le Cid? (Cahiers N.59), first off Eric Rohmer discusess (see: deplores) the translation of Rebel Without a Cause into French La Fureur de Vivre [The Rage to Live], as well he reads Ray's "masterpiece" as "a genuine drama in five acts," which is a surprising look at the film and an ambitious one. Rohmer, who has always been more conservative than his peers (in terms of both taste and filming approaches), proves to be just as insightful and adventurous in his prose as the other writers,

"It is impossible to attach any convenient label to his [Ray's] position, as one can with John Huston. It isn't problems that interest him, in the manner of Brooks, but human beings. There is not a trace of the psychological complexities so dear to Mankiewicz. None of those instantly dazzling flashes of lyricism, as in Aldrich. His tempo is slow, his melody usually monochord, but its delineation is so precise, its progress so compulsive, that we cannot allow our attention to stray for a moment."

Jean-Luc will be Godard (where at this point in time, he thinks, that D. H. Lawrence's The Plumed Serpant is "the most important novel of the twentieth century"), which means wildly ambitious. Here he is from Rien que le Cinema (Cahiers N.68),

"After seeing Johnny Guitar or Rebel Without a Cause, one cannot but feel that there is something which exists, only in the cinema, which would be nothing in a novel, the stage or anything else, but which becomes fantastically beautiful on the screen."

Though disappointed about Hot Blood he can still find some merits,

"In short, [Hot Blood] is a semi-successful film to the extent that Ray was semi-uninterested in it."

And on Bitter Victory from Au dela des etoiles (Cahiers N.79),

"It is no longer a question of either reality or fiction, or of one transcending the other. It is a question of something quite different. What? The stars, maybe, and the men who like to look at them and dream."

And on the acting,

"Bitter Victory is exceptionally well acted by Curt Jurgens and Richard Burton. With Et Dieu... Crea la Femme, this makes twice one can believe in a character created by Jurgens. As for Richard Burton, who has acquitted himself well enough in all his previous films, good or bad, when directed by Nicholas Ray he is absolutely sensational."*****

To conclude, here is Truffaut from the 1973 documentary I'm a Stranger Here Myself where he further explains this Cahiers obsession towards Ray,

"What attracted us was that there was something European about this man from Hollywood. European in what way? Perhaps in the frailty, vulnerability of his leading characters. His male characters weren't 'macho'. There was this great sensitivity, especially in dealing with affairs of the heart, which lent a sense of great reality. At a time when Hollywood movies were rarely personal or autobiographical, you always had the feeling that the love stories in Nicholas Ray's films were true stories."

*****

* Some new writing on We Can't Go Home Again appears in the latest issue of Cinema Scope (N.48), which includes a piece by Susan Ray, Out of the Box, (Susan also has a long autobiographical introduction in I Was Interrupted: Nicholas Ray on Making Movies), and Gabe Klinger, Nicholas Ray’s Film Maudit Restored. It's also worth highlighting here another overlooked Ray title, The Janitor (which is available on YouTube). Brad Stevens writes about the film,

"What fascinates me about this short is the way it clarifies the structure of Ray's last few films, which are full of clashes between superego and id figures (Walt and Cottonmouth in WIND ACROSS THE EVERGLADES, Tommy and Rico in PARTY GIRL, Inuk and the trooper in THE SAVAGE INNOCENTS, Leith and Brand in BITTER VICTORY, Christ and Barrabas in KING OF KINGS). Here, Ray plays both the id and the superego, suggesting just how personal this theme was to him."

** In addition to the selection of pieces in the book other Cahiers articles of note include Jacques Doniol-Valcroze on They Live By Night, Paul et Virginie se sont maries la nuit (Cahiers N.5), Truffaut on They Live By Night, Les Extremes me touchent (Cahiers N.21), Eric Rohmer on Bigger Than Life, Ou bien... ou bien (Cahiers N.69) and Venise 1957 (Cahiers N.75), Luc Moullet's Filmographie de Nicholas Ray (Cahiers N.89), Fereydoun Hoveyda on Party Girl (Cahiers N.107), Jean Douchet and Jacques Joly Nouvelle Entretien avec Nicholas Ray (Cahiers N.127), Bill Krohn on We Can't Go Home Again (Cahiers N.288), and part of Ray's late period script Mister, Mister with an introduction by Wim Wenders (Cahiers N.400).

*** Other good resources on Ray include Bernard Eisenschitz' peerless Nicholas Ray: An American Journey and Patrick McGilligan's new Nicholas Ray: The Glorious Failure Of An American Director.

**** This passage on hidden narratives is similarly brought up in the magazines contemporary writing, here Jean-Philippe Tesse from his review of J.J. Abrams' Super 8, Leve les yeux (Cahiers N.660),

"Abrams has been to able to reconcile his storyteller-recycler spirit all the while plunging into the childhood cinema experiences of reactivating it's magic. And, certainly, he does this by re-taking brilliantly the secret scenario of all of his films: the curring of the hero by the irruption of the supertural within his neighborhood."

***** Here is Stephane Delorme on contemporary actors from his review of Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan, Requiem pour un reve (Cahiers N.664),

"Like Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, Natalie Portman plays in a sense her life: good comedian, appreciated, who never really craved the screen, child-star (Luc Besson's Leon) reduced to these roles of the princess in the Star Wars films without ever imposing herself (...) The troubling emotion comes from these effortless lost gazes and raised eyebrows of inquietude and concentration. As well we are on Natalie Portman's side, we want her to succeed. Aronofsky is the best American casting director."

On Content

A new guest contribution by Daniel Gallay. – D.D.

Content: A Brief Statement
(or: “You know nothing of my work! How you got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing!”)
I’m convinced that there isn’t a word more accurate than “bankrupt” to describe certain experiences I’ve had in the cinema. There have been films I have seen that as I watched them, I felt a certain suspicion. Not only was I not able to ignore this suspicion, it became the central element of the experience. I felt, almost from the outset, that there was a hollowness to what I was seeing and that beyond the surface of the image lay nothing at all. The images, although imaginative and aesthetically sound, carried with them no substance or presence of any content. In one such film, this was the intent of the director, and there is a story to illustrate why. This director, as was fairly common during the period, experimented with LSD under the supervision of his psychoanalyst (Cary Grant did this also, and praised it as a tool of self-realization). The experience this director had was one where the definition of all things fell away and he was left in a hellish landscape where nothing held any meaning whatsoever. The experience led him to the conclusion that since the definition of any object is always provided and constantly renewed by the viewer of the object, objective meaning, by the very nature of perception, is impossible. He found that this then freed up his ability to create images since he wasn’t bound by having to attempt to instill objective meaning. “The fire and the rose,” he said, “became one.” This is problematic, if only because it is the perfect definition of solipsism, but it brings me to the point of my statement. My point is this: Is there not an element of an experience that is common to all those who experience it? Take this essay as an example. As you experience it, my consciousness (or perhaps, more so, the consciousness of the essay, which may or may not be my own) and your consciousness are present. There is the presence of each independent of the other, but there is also some point at which they touch and overlap. As each person reads the essay, each of their experiences will differ; these experiences will not be necessarily definable, but necessarily existent. That perhaps is a definition of content – the overlapping of one consciousness with another where a personal experience can take place. The infusion of an object with consciousness relies to a great extent on the intentionality of the creator – if the intent is shallow, the results will likely seem shallow; alternately, if the intent is joyous, the results will likely seem joyous. So, as in the story of this director, if there is no intent, there is also likely no content. If there is no content, then the object will be hollow, and the experience of it will be likewise. If nothing is returned for the viewers’ investment of consciousness, bankruptcy results. It’s perhaps the most unforgivable form of thievery – a thievery not just of time, but, more importantly, of spirit.

Daniel Gallay

Festival 2011 (October Editorial)

Socializing at the festival
Well I had a fun at the festival this year. I saw a lot of cool movies – definitively a lot more then last year – partied with friends, and met some interesting film-types like Richard Porton (Cineaste), Matthew Freundlich (Exit Art), Marcus Pinn, Mark Peranson (Cinema Scope), Aaron Graham, Ryan Krahn and Olivier Père (Locarno) - hopefully some of you have started checking out my blog.
There were a lot – read, too many – late parties, some with open bars (who is even paying for these?), which led to some nasty hangovers the following mornings. And as people were commenting that the films included a surprisingly high amount of people getting punched in the face, an analogy was created that cinephilia is also a kind of sucker punch. After the knock-out daze during the festival of balancing films, work, socializing, sleep and chores, one really needs to slow things down and relax a little. Even so, I can’t wait for next years.

Festival Coverage
Jafar Panahi’s This Is Not a Film is a look at what the Iranian filmmaker has been up to since he got arrested, been put on house-arrest and banned from filmmaking. It can be seen as his take on what Lumet did with Making Movies as it also deals with Panahi’s own filming approach as he examines his films. Seeing it at the festival in a small-hall packed with journalist made watching it be like being shared a secret message of something that is truly important to the film community. The sad thing about This Is Not a Film is that since its filming Panahi’s co-director Mojtaba Mir Tahmaseb – along with Nasser Saffarian, Hadi Afarideh, Mohsen Shahrnazdar, Marzieh Vafamehr, Katayoun Shahabi and now Marzieh Vafamehr – have been arrested by the Iranian authorities. It is frustrating adding on names to that list, especially as This Is Not a Film has an almost optimistic quality to it. It is a dangerous situation in Iran; my best wishes go out to all the political prisoners and their families. There is a petition one can sign over at the Cinémathèque Française website, hopefully it can help.
Restless is terrific! Gus van Sant continues his examination of youthful distress and alienation as he explores the serious subject of a young girl Annabel (Mia Wasikowska) dying of cancer. He also gives the material a lightness of touch. Some criticism of Restless that I’ve encountered is that the young girl has no symptoms, which I don’t think is fair as half the film takes place in a hospital (the first significant engagement with the institution for van Sant) and Annie does suffer and unexpectedly collapses, which is a very brutal scene to watch. As well some people did not like the Portland goth Enoch’s (played brilliantly by Henry Hopper) ghost friend Hiroshi, a WWII Japanese kamikaze pilot. Hiroshi adds the weight of history on to these kids shoulders (also hinted at by Annabel’s interest in Darwin). As Tony Judt brings up in his book Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century, “We think we have learned enough from the past to know that many of the old answers don’t work, and that may be true. But what the past can truly help us understand is the perennial complexity of the questions.”
Jeff who lives at home is a disappointment for anyone who was a big fan of Cyrus (as I was), though Jason Segel is good in it. I remember when Cyrus came out in France all of the French critics referred to Jonah Hill as that fat kid.
Bruno Dumont’s Outside Satan is near-sublime. It is just a shame that he came off as pretentious during the question-and-answer period (after my question about what the titled meant, Dumont responded in French, “I don’t know why I would have to explain the title of my own film”).
I really liked Un été brillant, though Monica Belluci is a little annoying in it - do we really need to hear from others how pretty she is? Compared to, say, Pedro Costa’s masterpiece Ne Change Rien that has no commentary on Jeanne Balibar singing; he lets the audience make up their own mind when it comes to the subject.
The Francis Coppola talk was inspiring. He was joking and singing. He seemed equally as interested in hearing from the audience as sharing his experiences from his career. One thing that he brought up that is interesting is how he is all for other directors being influenced by his films and that likewise they will inspire him. Which brings us to Twixt which resonates with Coppola’s recent collaboration with Vincent Gallo. Just as Promises Written in Water shows Gallo picking up certain elements from his work on Tetro - b/w cinematography, dance sequences, more dialogue - Twixt could equally have been called ‘Promises Written in Water’ as Coppola uses the guise of a Corman-like B horror film (with a William Castle use of special effects) to look at the sadness that goes along with the death of a child and in this case by a boating accident, which for Coppola resonates with the death of his own son Giancarlo who died that way at the age of twenty-two. As well Twixt expands on Coppola literary adaptations that includes the authors John Grisham, Mario Puzo, Bram Stoker, S.E. Hinton and now Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne (and a first edition copy of Walt Witman’s Leaves of Grass is also central to the story). While the entire cast is well-suited for their roles: a pudgy Val Kilmer, a paranoid Bruce Dern, a haunting Elle Fanning and a punk Alden Ehrenreich. The best review so far of Twixt is by Olivier Père over at his blog.
I saw Brian De Palma wheezing past me on the street – the legend.
The Cédric Kahn film Une vie meilleure is terrific. Guillaume Canet (Little White Lies) is great here as a wrong man, similar to the character he played in Nicolas Saada’s Spie(s). Yann (Canet) is a line-cook that wants to open a restaurant with his girlfriend Nadia (Leïla Bekhti) and after going through the process of filling the necessary forms and getting credit, things start to go wrong. His girlfriend moves to Canada to find work and then he stops hearing from her. Yann is stuck with her kid and he now has to deal with fatherhood and the mounting social pressures of the dept he is in. Like Hitchcock, Kahn is able to imbue his story with social realities while creating intense moments of suspense, intrigue and bravura filmmaking – this is one film to look out for.
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s A Kid With a Bike is their Doug Lipman film. The action sequence are bustling with energy, you can’t keep this kid calm. And he is even more mobile once he gets back his red-and-chrome bike. Interesting use of music too.
Pina is able to use 3D technology in a brand new way that is unlike anything I have ever seen before. Watching the Pina Bausch dance collective put forth her pieces has a raw quality to them and the movement of the dancers horizontally and vertically in the frame gives the illusion of a puppet show. Michel Ciment’s interview with Wim Wenders in Positif is insightful in regards to what Wenders wanted to achieve.
After the financial disaster of Fear X that nearly bankrupted Nicolas Winding Refn with his new film Drive eight years later it seems like he is successfully transitioning himself to Los Angeles. In Drive he creates a more likeable guerrier silencieux and what makes the movie all the more impressive is that the director does not even have a driving license!
I wished I could have attended the Wavelength series but I was working
The only three films that I am going to do a write-up for are from the Short Cuts Canada section, which are programmed by Alex Rogalski and Magali Simard, and they are Simon Ennis’ Up in Cottage Country, Igor Drljaca’s The Fuse: Or Hose I Burned Simon Bolivar and Sophie Goyette’s La Ronde.
What else to look out for? Two words: Alps and Goon.

***** Cinema Scope used their new online blog to cover most of the films at the festival, which is an ambitious feat as TIFF gets a lot of movies. They succeeded. So now at Scope Online you can find interesting and passionate capsules and reviews of the majority of films that are going to be hitting the screens in North American for the next few months. Kudos. Scope also has an interesting round table with Adam Nayman, John Semley, Mark Peranson, Robert Koehler and Jason Anderson, which was beautifully produced by the MDFF team of Kazik Radwanski and Dan Montgomery.

To better appreciate and understand some of the films that I saw I also liked going through old issues of le bon papier, Cahiers du Cinéma, finding reviews and interviews to correspond with the films.
Here is an extract of Jean-Philippe Tessé’s review of Le Gamin au vélo,

“To say it quickly, the Dardenne’s make a humanist-Christian cinema where the journey of a character, apprehended uniquely through their actions and gestures (it’s a person that is active, see hyper-active), ends with a redemptive climax, or at least with a moment of elevation – an escape.”

Or Stéphane Delorme on Gus Van Sant’s Restless,

“Why do we love a cinéaste? We cannot help but ask this question in front of the beautiful new film of Gus Van Sant. We won’t find the dazzle that, from Gerry to Last Days, in three films made the director from Portland the cinéaste the most important of his generation. But what we find is something no other director is offering today: assurance, confidence, the perseverance of one who makes his oeuvre depending on his desire and the challenges that he wants to, personally, find.”

Or Alexandre Sokourov from an interview in Cahiers (January 2011) on the most anticipated movies of the year,

“In my imagination, in terms of how I saw it, I don’t even know if I will succeed, what I wanted to do with my tetralogy (Moloch, Taurus, The Sun, Faust) is not a literary succession but a circle. Once the loop ties together, this circle would connect characters and moments that are historically very far apart.”

There is Cahiers but, like always, there is also Positif. Going through Positif’s March 2010 issue (N.589) I was able to better appreciate the aggressive genius of the warrior-filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn whose Valhalla Rising sits on that issues cover. The editorial that opens the magazine begins with Frank Kausch, “Taste classes people, said Bourdieu, and classes those that class.” On Valhalla Philippe Rouyer writes, “More so then Bronson, what Valhalla Rising invites then is what Kubrick called a non-verbal experience.” Pierre Eisenreich calls Refn “already a master of European cinema” and refers to Valhalla as his masterpiece (an assessment that I share) as he pits Refn against the other Danes who emerged in the mid-1990’s like Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg and Lone Scherfig. Other then the Refn-o-mania, Yann Tobin offers probably the most generous review of Atom Egoyan’s Chloe highlighting the fairy-tale elements and references in Egoyan’s films that transform contemporary experiences towards universal myth ; Tobin does this by comparing Amanda Seyfried’s character to Scheherazade from the Arabic folk-talk Arabian Nights (One Thousand and One Nights). The issue also includes a Voix-off by Henri Langlois and a book review of Lorraine Mortimer’s Terror and Joy: The Films of Dusan Makavejev. Amongst everything else in the magazine…

***** French Film Blogs: Olivier Père has by far one the best French film blogs in terms of selection, insight, taste and frequency of updates with festival coverage and reviews of new films, DVDs and books. All of this makes his writing an interesting contrast and addition to Stéphane Delorme’s writing in Cahiers. In Père latest few posts he writes about Peckinpah, de Palma, Boorman, Refn in regards to their self-analysis when it comes to the excess and violence in their films. I would include Joseph H. Lewis and Robert Aldrich as directors in this tradition. For English readers, Père reviews Nadav Lapid’s Policeman in the latest issue of Scope. Jean-Michel Frodon’s blog is good. And so is Bertrand Tavernier’s DVD review site ; he seems almost like the French Dave Kehr as his post spin-off into a forum where he comments back to people. But the one blog that looms over all of them is the one by Serge Toubiana. The content of Toubiana's blog is mostly political as he brings to attention government censorship and political uncertainty in world cinema (Egypt, Iran) and how these difficulties affect certain filmmakers. As well Toubiana’s writing is personal as he writes obituaries for deceased film-types like actors, directors and film-critics. This makes it even more pleasant when Toubiana actually writes about films - the one thing that unites all cinephiles. His latest posts are on the films that he saw at the festival Lumière which are William Wellman’s Other Men’s Women (recently restored), The Artist and Maurice Pialat’s Sous le soleil de Satan. Toubiana continues in the lineage of Henri Langlois as the director general of the Cinémathèque Française and his writing expands on his old days as the editor at Cahiers. Even though the platform for his writing is only a blog, he seems to have a looming presence over French film-criticism. Toubiana and Ciment at Positif* seem to be advocating for a generosity and faith towards filmmakers, which is a much-needed antidote to the unnecessary aggression of a lot of English-language ‘serious’ film criticism. Which reminds me here is Jonathan Rosenbaum on some recent “Art” movies.

* For a good example of what Positif can do for a filmmaker I would refer you to Micheal Henry Wilson hot-off-the-press luscious book Scorsese on Scorsese. As well see Positif (N.607) as just when you think the critical community is over a certain director like, say, Paolo Sorrentino. As Film Comment, Cahiers and Cinema Scope all dismissed This Must Be The Place. What does Positif do? It champions him! You can always trust Positif to go against uniformity by finding something to like in a film that reflects a singular intelligence especially in opposition to the thoughtlessness of most commercial fare. As well Positif is auteurist and prides itself on continuing to champion certain filmmakers even if they are no longer à la vogue. Positif is really proving itself to be the real filmmaker magazine, maybe more so then Cahiers**.

** But to be fair to Cahiers their interviews surrounding The Tree of Life and Super 8 is incomparable to anything else that have been written about those films. One gets a clear sense of the process that went into the making of those films through the interviews with the multiple creative agents that contributed to it. As well their feature interviews with Lars von Trier, the New York independent directors and Micheal Cimino are impressive too.

***** New Film Writing: Some of my favorite Toronto film-critics have a few new pieces up: Andrew Parker has a piece on Café de Flore and Margaret for Criticize This!, Andrew Tracy writes about Drive for Reverse Shot and about the Masters of Cinema series in Cineaste, Adam Nayman writes about the Nick Ray retro in The Globe and Mail, James Quandt in the new 180° writes about Ray and Hitchcock and over at Mubi about Raul Ruiz , and Marc Saint-Cyr has a contribution on Tsai Ming-Liang in the latest CineAction. Brad Stevens recommended to me the site She Blogged by Night by Stacia and in particular an essay on the little known The Janitor by Nicholas Ray. Marcus Pinn’s contributes to a two-part overview of TIFF 2011 at The Pink Smoke. David Bordwell’s blog posts on VIFF are terrific, as to be expected. In Film Int. Murray Pomerance has an interview with Evans Frankenheimer – which is a nice addition to his new book on John Frankenheimer. I discovered Ted Hope's blog at indieWIRE who has some really interesting things to say on American independent film (he is also interviewed in the New York diy issue of Cahiers) – I recommend his hour-long Moguls Talk (“Making independent films is a crime.”). On that note, I have to say that I really look forward to seeing the two films that Hope produced that are going to be released soon: Martha Marcy May Marlene and Dark Horse.

Film Listings: There was Ben Rivers’ Slow-Action at Gallery TPW, with an accompanying essay by Michael Sicinski. The Pleasure Dome programmed Patrick Keiller’s Robinson in Ruins which will be on October 15th at 7PM and on the Monday the 17th the Early Montly Segments will be playing the works of Robert Banks and Suzanne Naughton – be there for 8PM. Susan Ray will be introducing We Can’t Go Home Again. And finally there is the Planet in Focus Festival that is going to have the Toronto premier of Werner Herzog’s and Dmitry Vasyukov’s Happy People: A Year in The Taiga, which will be playing on October 13th at 9:30PM at the ROM.

Film Books: Some new books that look interesting include Dear Cary (which David Thomson tears apart in the NYRoB), John Landis’ Monster Movies, Dudley Andrews' What Cinema Is!, TCM Classic Movie Trivia Book, Michael Moore’s Here Comes Trouble, Richard Lindsay-Hogg’s Luck and Circumstance, Murray Pomerance’s Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue, and John Sayle’s A Moment in the Sun.

***** I really need to thank Oded for his terrific review of Hmizu - Oded is by far my favorite volunteer at TIFF and it is always nice to see him in the first couple of rows at the Cinematheque screenings. And it was nice to hear that Saul Austerlitz and Gregg Rickman liked my Woody Allen blog-post, especially as I bring up both of their books in it. And over at the Dave Kehr forum the piece brought out some interesting observations on Allen that I think are worth highlighting:
Gregg Rickman,

“Allen may be mediocre but he’s been nothing if not ambitious, tackling several different European art modes, as well as various American genres, including the not-easy-to-make-work the musical. David, in terms of American film history he is certainly one of the most important figures in screen comedy, important not just on his own merits but as a) a star/director comic in the mode of Chaplin, Keaton, Lewis; b) a huge influence on many successors in film, tv, and stand-up; c) as the reinventor for the post-1960s age of the romantic comedy (I’ve seen ANNIE HALL given great credit for this).”

Jean-Pierre Coursodon,

“The early Allen movies were, yes, rough, and immensely funny. We’ll never see anything like them again, just like we’ll never see anything like the Marx Bros.again. In France back in the seventeenth century Moliere started with slapstick stuff, was enormously succesful (in those days’ terms) then moved on to more “serious” comedy. When he occasionally went back to “low” comedy critics were shocked. Allen seems to be aware of the fact that you can’t go back home again — the home of jokes jokes jokes of his early movies. He feels he has moved away from and beyond them, which is totally normal. I can’t think of any artist who doesn’t feel that way. You don’t even have to be an artist to turn your back to your past. But if you’r an artist, it’s inevitable.”

Brian Dauth,

“Jean-Pierre writes: “Allen’s art is essentially imitative and the distinction between borrowing, influence, parody, and plagiarism is so blurred in his case as to become meaningless.” There it was – Allen’s “certified copies” were just what they appeared to be. He had overcome the modernist imperative “to make it new,” thereby evading the modernist fallacy, and instead Allenized his inspirations (a great term). MATCH POINT is AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY with a different ending, and SCOOP is a satyr play version of MATCH POINT’s story. In these films (and others), Allen hollows out his material and pours his sensibility into it without trying to iron out wrinkles or inconsistencies. Unlike high modernism where one can (should) appreciate the deft blending of the artist’s influences/sources into a new, dazzling whole, Allen lets his sensibility casually rub shoulders with what he is riffing on. In SCOOP, he echoes/quotes NOTORIOUS by lifting plot elements and mixing himself in. In the same way, his character, Sid Waterman, is a 1950′s Catskill’s comedian dropped into London several decades later without any attempt to make the combination mesh. Allen has freed himself (and film) from the demand of modernism that the art object be made with such precision and clever quotation techniques that when the work is placed down on a hill in Tennessee or a street in London, it makes sense of the chaos. Allen’s way of making art encompasses both design and debris (to use John Hawkes’ formulation).”

What am I going to write about next? Some potential subjects for book-reviews include Bill Krohn’s Hitchcock at Work, David Campany’s The Cinematic and Robin Wood’s Trammel Up the Consequence. But I am pretty busy in October as I am going to New York with my girlfriend Arielle to celebrate our one year anniversary together so maybe you will have to wait until November to actually read those.

Have a good month,
David Davidson

Himizu Review

This is the first guest contribution by Oded Aronson. - D.D.

Himizu (Shion Sono, 2011)
**** (Masterpiece)
Ruins lie everywhere. Dust and smashed objects litter the atmosphere. A teenager stands in the middle holding a gun to his own head. The wind gradually becomes louder and dissolves into the sound of a million voices of the dead crying for mercy. The boy shoots himself. Blood streams out of his head, leaving a long red trail. He lies in the field, no longer remembering who he is. Then he wakes up.

The boy’s name is Yuichi Sumida, and his family has been left without any means of income because of a tsunami that has all but demolished his hometown. His family’s business is a boat rental company, which has not had any profits at all since the tsunami. Yuichi’s father is a nasty, abusive harpy who storms home at midnight most of the time and proceeds to beat him up then complain that he never wanted a child. Yuichi’s mother has run away from her husband with her lover due to years of frustration and blood, so Yuichi is left to fend for himself.

His financial situation is so poor that eventually he is forced to leave school so that he can work at the boathouse in the vain hope that someone will rent a boat. One of his classmates, Keiko Chizawa, has had a crush on him for as long as she can remember, and searches for him. Keiko’s family also has their own troubles; her parents want to kill her so that they can collect insurance money, and are in the process of building their own guillotine. Keiko is forced to pass the guillotine every day and notice its development.

For the first two thirds of the story, there is frequent juxtaposition of dark humour and straight faced drama. The attitudes of the two main characters play a role in that juxtaposition. Yuichi has become so emotionally inured due to the beatings he receives from his father that he has retreated into a dark, nearly silent shell. He is almost completely unwilling to open himself up to anyone or anything. On the other hand, Keiko’s lifelong preparation for her upcoming death at the hands of her parents has somehow opened up wells of emotion in her, and she feels as though she has to cheer people up for as long as she lives. Keiko goes far beyond optimism into the realm of desperation, which then becomes so pronounced that it feels like optimism again.

The two clash, but Keiko tries to become friends with Yuichi despite his protestations. Eventually, they end up sharing most of their scenes to the extent that everybody thinks of them as friends. Although Yuichi remains sullen, her presence does seem to have some kind of positive effect on the people other than Yuichi. Keiko tries to revamp the boat house. As a result, it finally begins to have some business. Yuichi’s father comes home for the last time one night and suddenly things become even more complicated than before.

The last part of the movie is emotionally brutal. Not all people will enjoy the descent into darkness, but it is appropriate for the material, and leads to a powerful climax that will be a source of joy for anyone who is in love with the movies. I strongly recommend Himizu, the best of the 25 movies I watched at this year’s TIFF. - Oded Aronson