Link Round-Up: Post Cannes, Pre-Apocalypse

I gotta get a better system of making sure I update this...

My first book, Approaching the End: Imagining Apocalypse in American Film, is still due out in October. Here is the list of films I'll be tackling in it: Kiss Me Deadly, The Lady from Shanghai, The Big Heat, The Rapture, God Told Me To, Days of Heaven, Strange Days, The Terminator, They Live, and Southland Tales. There is also extended talk of Out of the Past, In A Lonely Place, In The Mouth of Madness, and The World's End.

I went to the Cannes Film Festival for the first time, and it was a truly spectacular experience. You can see my Top films of the festival here (and a complete ranking on Letterboxd), and a special Cinephiliacs episode recorded at the Palais. There were a few films I never got around to writing about (Techine, Lapid, and Ostlund in particular), but I did manage to write about the following films...
-Winter Sleep (Ceylan, Turkey) - Competition, Palm D'Or Winner
-Foxcatcher (Miller, USA) - Competition, Best Director
-Mr. Turner (Leigh, UK) - Competition, Best Actor Award (Timothy Spall)
-Maps To The Stars (Cronenberg, USA/Canada) - Competition, Best Actress Award (Julianne Moore)
-Goodbye To Language (Godard, Switzerland) - Competition, Jury Prize
-Mommy (Dolan, Canada) - Competition, Jury Prize
-Leviathan (Zvyagintsev, Russia) - Competition, Screenwriting Award
-Grace of Monaco (Dahan, France/USA) - Opening Night
-Timbuktu (Sissako, Mali) - Competition
-The Captive (Egoyan, Canada) - Competition
-The Homesman (Jones, USA) - Competition
-Welcome To New York (Ferrara, USA/France) - Marketplace
-National Gallery (Wiseman, UK) - Director's Fortnight
-Saint Laurent (Bonello, France) - Competition
-Amour Fou (Hausner, Austria) - Un Certain Regard
-Jauja (Alonso, Argentina) - Un Certain Regard
-Two Days, One Night (Dardennes, Belgium/France) - Competition
-Lost River (Gosling, USA) - Un Certain Regard
-The Search (Hazanavicius, USA/France) - Competition
-Hard To Be A God (German, Russia) - Marketplace
-The Tale of Princess Kayuga (Takahata, Japan) - Director's Fortnight
-Clouds of Sils Maria (Assayas, France) - Competition

Catching up with Cinephiliacs episodes, I've got two episodes from Philadelphia with Carrie Rickey on Clueless and Sam Adams on The Long Goodbye, and then Philip Loppate talking Charulata and Reverse Shot's Michael Koresky on The Seventh Victim.

And then there's my Criterion reviews! I've got looks at Riot In Cell Block 11, an investigation into the two different cuts of Red River, and a look at an essential bonus feature on the Blu of All That Heaven Allows - Mark Rappaport's Rock Hudson's Home Movies.

Two more Masters of Cinema Blus are on the way with booklets edited and compiled by yours truly: Elia Kazan's Boomerang! and John Cassavetes's Too Late Blues. More information on those at a later date.

Some stuff on Letterboxd: 
-New Stuff: Godzilla, The Amazing Spider-Man, Riddick
-Old Stuff: White Threads of the Waterfall, Utamaro and His Five Women, The Little Foxes, Melo, In Harm's Way

Aleksei German (1938-2012)

            In March of last year, I took a chance by watching a film I knew nothing about, based on a passionate post written by cinephile par excellence and friend Glenn Kenny. The film had the bizarre title of Khrustalyov, My Car! And I knew more or less nothing going in besides some plot revolving the night in which Josef Stalin died. Emerging two hours later, I still had no idea what I watched, but I knew the cinematic voice I had just seen was an authorial presence that didn’t just hold my hand, but shoved me in front of him while wearing a blindfold. I was barely able to process the images I had watched, but felt rapturously connected to them.

            In film history, German has always played a second fiddle to Andrei Tarkovsky in the way Mizoguchi has played fiddle to Ozu, though even Mizoguchi is a better known quantity in comparison. His films are impossibly notorious to track down. Not on DVD in either the States or Europe. Torrents and YouTube streams are sparse.

            But they are works of visceral cinema, exploring Soviet history from a Soviet perspective. This makes them feel inaccessible in a way to the Western viewer, but it is in that inaccessibility that I found myself in a trance by his absurdist dark humor, expressionist cinematography, and intensely swerving tracking shots. There are cultural clues throughout, one that I missed when I watched his films, and will continue to miss throughout my life. Tarkovsky’s films are universal—I dare a viewer to feel nothing as the bell rings out at the end of Andrei Rublev. German’s films are specific, built on a nation’s history of contradictions. But one doesn’t need to have lived Soviet history to feel the pains of those who did. I think of the pain in the protagonist’s face in Trial on the Road as he realizes the suicide mission he must commit. I see the pain in the young boy of My Frined Ivan Lapshin seeing what is happening in his society. And I see it in the utter confusion of the Doctor General of Khrustalyov, realizing how little power he has. The pain is not one for myself but of another, an entire country that is both distant and alien, yet all too human. In Tarkovsky, you see your own struggles. In German, you see that of another.

            I’m no expert on German, but when I learned he passed away in Russia yesterday, I felt a real loss in a way no director had made me feel. Perhaps because German’s films remain an unknown quantity-a sect of cinephilia still only left to those lucky enough to have taken a chance. My hope is that this feeling won’t remain.

The Filmic Discoveries of 2012 (Part II)

This is the second part of my list of films I watched for the first time in 2012. Read an explanation and the first 25 choices here.

25. Duck, You Sucker!, Directed by Sergio Leone (Seen on 35mm at Film Forum; June 19^th) 

An explosive film that lives up to the amount of dynamite it delivers, Duck, You Sucker! seen completely cold. But since you’re hear reading this capsule, just know that it’s both Leone’s most fun film (the closest to a screwball comedy he ever made) and his most political. The fact the film “accidentally” switches genres and stakes forty-five minutes into the film is a complete Coup d'état of Leone, leading to the brilliant sequence where Rod Stieger leads a daring heist but instead becomes a revolutionary leader. It’s a bitter film to swallow, suggesting the lack of agency of any individual in a political battle, but it’s also pure visual pleasure, and now my favorite Leone. 

24. Show People, Directed by King Vidor (Seen on 35mm at Film Forum; January 23^rd) 

The good people at Film Forum could not have chosen a better time to show this great silent comedy than the height of last year’s Oscar season, as Show People is essentially The Artist made by the people The Artist was portraying. It’s also 1000 times better (fact). Instead of the divide between sound and silents, Vidor’s film shows the movements of a young Marion Davies from slapstick comedian to serious drama actor, while her love interest William Haines remains at the bottom. Vidor captures with authenticity the difference between stars and actors with a jibing sensibility, and peppers his film with plenty of cameos that make for a number of gags that rival the best of the screwballs. Vidor’s work with actors makes this a timeless classic about the importance of termite art.

Screening Log: All Russian All The Time Edition

          No real notes of interest before this week’s screening log, but I’m very glad I sort of on a whim decided to attend Film Society’s Aleksei Guerman retrospective, whose films are completely unavailable on DVD (even though My Friend Ivan Lapshin was a dud after the first half hour and never really improved). Also of note, I was able to see Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia on 35mm at Film Society, and it is shocking how even not a particularly nice print can be better than any DVD (as in comparison to the embarrassing DVD of Stalker I saw last week). But before this becomes my latest rant against digital projection, let’s get to the films:

-Nostalghia, 1983. Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. 35mm Projection at Film Society of Lincoln Center.

-Khrustalyov, My Car!, 1998. Directed by Aleksei Guerman. 35mm Projection at Film Society of Lincoln Center.

-Trial on the Road, 1971. Directed by Aleksei Guerman. 35mm Projection at Film Society of Lincoln Center.

-My Friend Ivan Lapshin, 1984. Directed by Aleksei Guerman. 35mm Projection at Film Society of Lincoln Center.

             It’s really interesting to write about Guerman’s Khrustalyov, My Car!, a whirlwind trip through all 9 layers of hell during the end of Stalin in the USSR, because it’s the type of film in which I’m not sure its viewers should have all the context or none whatsoever. What I mean is Khrustalyov, My Car! doesn’t particularly play perfectly for those who aren’t extremely familiar with the history of Russian culture. However, not knowing any of these details still made the film a vivid and inspiring masterpiece in my eyes, perhaps the best film I’ve seen in at least a month (and I’ve seen some real classics).