December in Review

PRO:

The Strange M. Victor (Jean Gremillon, 1938)
My first Gremillon, and an amazing movie. He’s a first-class filmmaker: even extra-narrative shots contain remarkable background-foreground tension. He’s also a dramatist to rival the Dardennes, with daring and effective narrative ellipses, and a central character whose burden lies suspended between benevolence and guilt.
The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (Preston Sturges, 1944)
The Man in the White Suit (Alexander Mackendrick, 1951)
My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946)
Blood Relatives (Claude Chabrol, 1978)
8 Million Ways to Die (Hal Ashby, 1986)
Stands out like a sore thumb from Ashby’s filmography, but he’s a natural at the redemptive thriller: his trademark self-deprecating, hedonistic sense of humor inflects a rather sincere representation of Alcoholics Anonymous, and Andy Garcia’s laid-back, wise-cracking drug lord (“The white stuff? Isn’t that a movie about… astronauts, or something?”) is a perfect villain.
99 River St. (Phil Karlson, 1953)
Prelude (Michael Snow, 2000)
Fascinating: perplexing, yet graceful. Snow’s films are like a very skilled ongoing argument with Bazin, and this short is no exception.
Sex Is Comedy (Catherine Breillat, 2002)
A Life of Her Own (George Cukor, 1950)

pro:

Sarabande + Winter + Alaya (Nathaniel Dorsky, 1976-1987)
I mused during this screening that there’s perhaps no other director, avant-garde or no, so readily identifiable by looking at a single shot as Dorsky. (Tsai?) His intuitive method is constant and aggressive, especially in the later works: give the viewer complex visual information indicative of some connective relationship, but obscure just what that relationship is. I asked Dorsky if he considered this process unique, and he name-dropped The French Connection (!!), Shoah, Joseph Cornell, Warren Sonbert, Bruce Conner, the poems of John Ashbery, and perhaps most emphatically, Dziga Vertov, which made me wince, although Dorsky himself acknowledged that Vertov’s politics were unsatisfying. (Dorsky is generally a pretty brilliant speaker, by the way, and I think the real answer to my question, albeit unstated, is “Yes, I do.”) Anyhow, as much as I enjoy his films—and these ones are just about as gorgeous as Song and Solitude—I enjoy them so much on the basis of each individual shot that any kind of meaningful editing scheme tends to elude my comprehension.
Night Moves (Arthur Penn, 1975)
Diane (Alan Clarke, 1975)
Milk (Gus Van Sant, 2008)
After the somewhat vague, arty aloofness of Paranoid Park, I was surprised by the precise, unresolved tension between private and public spheres Van Sant derives from Milk’s campaigning methods, particularly his imploring for others to come out. Although GVS’s allegiances are clear, a surprising amount of energy is expended giving homophobes dignity and our hero crassness.
Night Train (Yinan Diao, 2007)
Beloved Enemy (Alan Clarke, 1981)
The most audaciously prosaic movie I've ever seen.
Age of Consent (Michael Powell, 1969)
Adieu Philippine (Jacques Rozier, 1963)
A good movie that I can’t quite revere, and one of the more commercial exponents of the French New Wave, with a jazz-laden soundtrack and cross-cutting that uneasily treads the line (or perhaps intends to bridge the gap) between broad, comic effect and contemplation.
Sirens (John Duigan, 1994)
Moloch (Alexander Sokurov, 1999)
The Night of Truth (Fanta Regina Nacro, 2004)
Hotel Imperial (Mauritz Stiller, 1924)
Adua and Her Friends (Antonio Pietrangeli, 1960)
Allonsanfan (Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, 1973)

mixed:

A Tree in Tanjung Malim (Tan Chui Mui, 2005)
Tan is a pretty good director: she usually puts the camera in the right place, and clearly enjoys long takes in service of her material. A few scenes are promising: the iffy way characters express themselves is Bujalski-esque. Unfortunately, she occasionally breaks concentration on mode of expression, apparently trying to enter into some direct, Joe-esque communion with the audience. (E.g., the sing-off.)
The Seagull’s Laughter (Ágúst Guðmundsson, 2001)
The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel, 2008)
Martel’s compositional obliquity is omnipresent, as is an inscrutable relationship between narrative and performance. Some will say it’s beguiling and mysterious; I say that with a few faint exceptions, it’s unrewarding and deliberately unobservant.
The Southerner (Jean Renoir, 1945)

con:

The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008)
Ledger is the sole point of interest here; Nolan is pretty much a non-entity in terms of directing actors, emphasizing action in an interesting way, etc.
Changeling (Clint Eastwood, 2008)
Did the 1920s-era LAPD kill Clint’s cat or something? A promising movie in the first reel: perhaps a better director could have made a bit more out of making Jolie unsympathetically emotional, and the police surprisingly rational.

CON:

The Devil’s Backbone (Guillermo del Toro, 2001)
Wolf Creek (Greg McLean, 2005)

DNF:

Australia (Baz Luhrmann, 2008) [0:40]
As if I’d ever have finished this. That said, not as painful as I’d suspected—Luhrmann is many things, but pompous is not one of them, and while as far as tonally jarring goes he’s no Bong c. Memories of Murder, at least this doesn’t quite fit the traditional mold for these sort of projects.
Birdsong (Albert Serra, 2008) [0:10]
The beauty of Serra’s compositions is a hushed, abstracted, plastic thing that doesn’t seem worth trying to penetrate. On the bright side, I’m now more comfortable knowing that Serra is an asshole in person.
Gran Torino (Clint Eastwood, 2008) [0:10]
The Quarterly Balance (Krzysztof Zanussi, 1975) [0:45]
Baal (Alan Clarke, 1982) [0:40]
Clarke’s most overtly distanced movie, understandably suited to the Brecht material but lacking the vigor of his better work. Bowie’s deliberately bland “songs” are in keeping with a sense of muffled creativity in service of the play.
Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc. (George Landow [Owen Land], 1966) [0:02]
This is something like 5 minutes long, and still I could not finish it. Some kind of imperceptible shift in hue seems to occur along the filmstrip, which wasn’t quite pleasurable enough for me, I suppose. I may revisit Landow, as I’ve heard his other works are more dynamic. (Why is it that I have such an easy time with some a-g artists, e.g. Dorsky or Kyle Canterbury or Bruce Baillie, and such an impossible time with guys like Landow or Michael Robinson or Bruce Conner or, much of the time, Brakhage? Perhaps I’ll have to write my own history of avant-garde cinema one day…)

And as for literature...

PRO:

Jude the Obscure (Thomas Hardy, 1895) [2nd reading]
The Eternal Husband (Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1873)
The Charterhouse of Parma (Stendhal, 1839)
Far From the Madding Crowd (Thomas Hardy, 1874)
The Wings of the Dove (Henry James, 1902)
Late James, for me, is the literary equivalent of Akerman: rough going, and at times outright dislikeable, but astonishing anyway. One unfortunate extreme of James’s personality is blind adoration of social tact (i.e. unironically time and time again labeling composure "wonderful"), and the other is inconsistently employed narrative obscurity, in which the reader is called upon to dig through pronouns for clues. On the other hand, he’s totally adept at reshaping the reader’s moral perspective.

pro:

Joseph Andrews (Henry Fielding, 1742)