Program Notes

There is a category of writing that is valuable to film culture but is unfortunately ephemeral: I’m speaking of program notes, written to accompany screenings and retrospectives. 

The early, formative days of my cinephilia were fueled in no small part by the essays and capsule reviews penned by James Quandt at the Cinematheque in Toronto. The program calendars had strong production values, with creative graphic design that put blocks of text into conversation with large, powerfully evocative images. I wish these program books were archived and available online today.

Quandt's versatility is well known.  He is an ace curator, he has written essays both short- and long-form, and he has edited several terrific collections. And his work in the mode of program-note writing exemplifies the form at its best. His aim is to simultaneously stir cinephiles while sparking the interest of the uninitiated. His writing is always aware of its crucial role as teaching, while being in possession of a style that is personal and elegant. And all of his program notes radiate an erudite, cinephilic excitement that is intensely appealing.

But there specifically two qualities of Quandt’s program notes that I find particularly striking. First, he has a centrifugal impulse that is forever moving outward from the filmmaker or films at hand, seeking to make unexpected or unlikely links with art, history or thought that is not immediately proximate. For example, in the essay to accompany his large 2002 Godard retrospective, he speculates on the director’s Swiss forebears:

Godard’s most important Swiss antecedent, though, is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the eighteenth-century philosopher whose Émile is the basis for Godard’s watershed film Le Gai Savoir. A Swiss Protestant (like Godard) who converted to Catholicism (with which Godard is fascinated), Rousseau called himself “Citizen of Geneva.” There are many parallels between his life and thought and Godard’s: the authoritarian moralism of his condemnation of theatre as a corrupting force, for example, bears comparison with the puritanism of Godard’s Dziga Vertov period, and their interest in knowledge and education is similar. Brilliant and combative, both men often estranged their supporters as well as the authorities they attacked. Rousseau’s Social Contract was as reviled by the church as was Godard’s Hail Mary, both works considered products of the anti-Christ by the faithful. Rousseau and Godard both moved from Paris and ended up in a kind of Swiss exile, the former on the isolated island of St. Pierre, the latter in the village of Rolle where, he jokes, even Federal Express does not deliver. Solitude offers solace, and for both, nature is a refuge from and requital for the horrors of humanity.

Second, in addition to making such productive links, he is frequently driven to form networks, often tracking a surprising or seemingly minor element through a number of works, as here:

Late Godard is full of whispering, stuttering, stammering, and silence: Isabelle Huppert’s speech impediment in Passion, the irregular responses of the children in France/Tour/Detour/Deux/Enfants, the stretches of speechlessness in Six Fois Deux, the actress caught on one word in For Ever Mozart, even the delay between the typing and the production of the words in Histoire(s) du Cinéma. Godard, seemingly resigned to the incapability of language to express anything concrete and real, says in Mozart: “Knowledge of the possibility of representation consoles us for being enslaved to life. Knowledge of life consoles for the fact that representation is but shadow,” which recalls Roger’s assertion in Two or Three Things I Know About Her, “Ce n’est pas le réel que nous pensions. C’est un fantôme du réel.” (It is tempting to suggest that Godard displaced language to Miéville; her films bristle with aphorisms and elaborate speech.)

And here he is, on the influence of classical painting on the films of Alexander Sokurov:

…especially the nineteenth-century Russian tradition of Tropinin, Vrubel, and the Perevedvizhniks. Better known than these, but not by much, is Hubert Robert, the eighteenth-century painter of classical ruins. The fog, smoke and vapour that drift across Sokurov’s images can be related to the “visual legacy of sfumato” as Lauren Sedofsky recently pointed out, and his compositions quote Holbein, Rembrandt, Wyeth, Russian icons and Byzantine miniatures, Goya in The Second Circle, Piranesi in Whispering Pages, and the German romantic Caspar David Friedrich in Mother and Son (whose white ship and sails at the end recall the maritime abstractions of Turner).

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Nicole Brenez has written about cinephilia being the ability to dream an entire film — from a single still image. Leafing through old program notes can be an exercise that invokes memory and triggers fantasy. Recently, I saw a still from Mireille Dansereau’s La Vie Revée (1972), Quebec’s first feature directed by a woman. (It screened as part of a program called “Made in Quebec: The Influence of JLG” in 2002.) Even upon reading the plot description, I wasn’t sure if I had seen this film or was imagining certain scenes from it. I had to go check my box of ticket stubs to confirm that I had indeed seen it. Which parts of the film in my head were ‘real’ and which were imagined? I’ll probably have no way of knowing, especially with such a rare and obscure film. Still, I’m thankful to old program notes and their role as aide-memoires.

I’d love to hear from you: Do you save program notes and material — and do you have any that you particularly cherish? Is any such material available online as a film-cultural resource (as, for example, in the case of Harvard Film Archive’s program notes dating back to 1999)? And finally: can we think of examples of valuable but long-vanished film writing for program notes that deserve to be resurrected and re-published today?

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Some recent reading:

-- Biggest news of the past fortnight: David Hudson is now at Keyframe Daily. Here is the page that collects the archives of the Daily; and here is his new Daily page on Twitter.

-- Translator Ted Fendt now has a blog, Howling Wretches, with recently posted pieces on Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer.

-- Two Olivier Assayas books from the Austrian FilmMuseum: a collection of essays edited by Kent Jones; and Assayas' memoir, A Post-May Adolescence, co-translated and with an introduction by Adrian Martin.

-- In Chicago last week, I enjoyed chatting about jazz with Jonathan Rosenbaum. He has just posted his essay "Improvisations and Interactions in Altmanville" (from his collection Essential Cinema). Also: Jonathan told me he's been posting a review/essay every single day on his site. A lot of work for him -- but great for us.

-- The third Film Preservation Blogathon focuses on Hitchcock: Check out the many blog entries at Marilyn Ferdinand's place. And via the Siren, I discovered the site Dial M for Movies, that collects the final frame of every surviving Hitchcock film.

-- The French feminist group La Barbe has attacked the Cannes film festival for featuring an all-male competition line-up: "Women, mind your spools of thread! and Men, as the Lumière Brothers did before you, mind your film reels! And Let the Cannes Film Festival Competition Forever be a Man's World!"

-- Film scholar Paul Willemen has died. Here is an interview with him at Screening the Past titled “The Double Access, Film Culture and the Ossification of Film Studies”.

 -- Via David Hudson: an interesting interview with Kiyoshi Kurosawa at the site EG; and the Tumblr site, "Celluloid on Canvas," with paintings of filmmakers.

-- Günther Kaufmann, of Fassbinder fame, has died. Here is a clip, on YouTube, of the finale of The American Soldier (1970), with Kaufman crooning, Jim Morrison-like, the song "So Much Tenderness".

-- Ashish Rajadhyaksha writes in Outlook India: "The portrayal of Ray as Indian cinema's greatest iconic genius has its problems."

-- Lorraine Gamman on "gangster suits and silhouettes" at Moving Image Source, an essay that first appeared in a "fashion in film" catalog a few years ago.

-- Ed Howard on the six documentaries made by Maurice Pialat on his 1964 trip to Turkey.

-- Via Matt Zoller Seitz: "23 Shockingly Sexist Vintage Ads".

-- I recently discovered this piece by Nick Cave, "I wept and wept, from start to finish," written after he saw Sokurov's Mother and Son.

-- MoMA has just kicked off its Werner Schroeter retrospective. There is an essay on his films by Ulrike Sieglohr in the new issue of Film Comment. I'm hoping this series passes through or close to my neighborhood.

pic: poster art for Olivier Assayas' upcoming film.

 

Real Musicians in Fiction Films

It's a special pleasure to have friend, super-cinephile, and editorial comrade Adrian Martin visit me in Buffalo for a few days this week. I'm enjoying every minute of the non-stop movie talk. Adrian and I will head to Northwestern University in Chicago later in the week for a panel discussion on "film criticism and its relationship to academia." — G.

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Having been an amateur musician all my adult life, I’m always intrigued when films — specifically fiction films — feature real musicians.

I’m especially interested by films that take the documentary presence of real musicians — and their music-making abilities — and put it into interaction with the fiction. When done imaginatively this documentary charge can accomplish things — can be used to signify — in certain special, resonant ways that wouldn’t quite be possible otherwise. Let me give you a couple of examples to indicate what I mean.

(1) In 1980, Paul Simon wrote and starred in a little-known film called One-Trick Pony, directed by Robert M. Young (Nothing But a Man, The Plot Against Harry). Simon plays a down-on-his-luck musician, once successful during the 1960s counterculture era, but now reduced to touring with his band in a beat-up van, playing small gigs or opening for newer, younger acts. His band, on both the record and in the film, contains several gifted 70s jazz/rock musicians like Tony Levin, Steve Gadd, and Eric Gale.

As the film opens, Simon and his band perform the title song at the Agora Ballroom in Cleveland. The mise en scène studiously captures both the vocal and instrumental labors of the group (there's a significance to this dual attention), with close views of the kick drum and guitar fretboards: this is a group with musical talent. Also, when the scene begins, we are mid-set, and every band member is in full concentration, dripping with sweat: this is a serious, industrious group.

They finish the tune to a lukewarm reception and file off stage into the dressing room. The audience begins to chant, and the headliner, the band it really came to see — the B-52’s — bounds on stage and opens the set immediately with the ebullient "Rock Lobster". Simon briefly watches from the wings, then turns away. As we will learn, he and his band feel only contempt and resentment for all the “new stuff” of that musical moment — punk, new wave, and disco — all of which they throw together into the same commercial, novelty-seeking category.

But here's the revelation of the scene: While we hear Simon's song performed in its entirety, the B-52’s only get a minute or so in the film. The camera focuses on no instrument players, we see brief medium shots of only the singers, Fred Schneider in his eye-catching and "feminine" bright yellow pants and purple T-shirt (Simon has on good old-fashioned "masculine" American blue jeans), and the two women in beehive do’s. But there’s something, thanks to the unique powers of cinema, that all of Simon’s intentionality as writer and performer can’t erase: the irrepressible, explosive, punkish energy of the B-52’s in performance, evident instantaneously from the visible, documentary evidence captured automatically by the camera.

(2) Straub/Huillet’s The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968) is surely one of the richest, most thought-provoking fiction-documentary hybrids in the history of cinema. The film documents by means of documents — notated scores, letters, engravings, drawings, maps — not all of them “authentic” (e.g. Anna’s diary, which forms the core of the voiceover narration). The documentary quality is enhanced by the way in which the filmmakers respect the wholeness and integrity of the musical performances by recording and filming them in their entirety, without cuts, a practice that defies industry norms in both cinema and music.

The result of these sustained, single-take musical performances by actual musicians — prime among them the recently deceased Dutch harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt, who plays Bach — is the way in which our concentration becomes sharpened and focused on the smallest details of music-making: its labors, its gestures, its accidents.

Straub commented on this in a 1968 interview with Filmkritik magazine:

They say when people saw Le déjeuner de bébé or L’arroseur arrosé by Lumière, they didn’t cry out: Oh! bébé is moving, or l’arroseur is moving. They said, the leaves are moving in the trees. The bébé who moved they had already seen in the magic lantern. What was new for them was precisely that the leaves were moving. The “leaves” in the Bach film are the fingers and hands of the musicians and the unbelievable gestures of Leonhardt…

I also see echoes of this respect accorded the work of music-making in the films of Aki Kaurismäki. Recall the bands that perform in The Man Without a Past or The Match Factory Girl, for instance. Their performances are not recorded in single, unbroken takes but he uses real musicians and records them live, so their fingerings, movements and gestures match the music that issues from the screen. Why is this important? Not because we desire some kind of literalism, but because it recognizes the activity of musical performance as something that is important, worthy of attention in itself. In other words, at these moments, music doesn’t exist to serve the images or the narrative, but becomes something truly autonomous.

(3) There is a 5-minute musical sequence in Howard Hawks’ Ball of Fire (1942) that gives us a striking contrast between ‘theatrical’ and ‘non-theatrical’ modes of cinema.

The Gene Krupa Orchestra, featuring Krupa on drums, performs its signature tune “Drum Boogie” with Barbara Stanwyck singing. (Her voice is dubbed by Martha Tilton, who comes remarkably close to the actual singer in the band at the time, Anita O’Day.) The orchestra is on a nightclub stage, and we see the performance from afar, with a large audience. But after the song concludes, Stanwyck calls Krupa up from behind his drum kit way up on top of the bandstand, and they both come down into the audience. She pulls up a table; Stanwyck and Krupa sit down; she gives quick instructions to the audience, now crowded around the table, on what vocal parts they should sing. She counts off, and, as the camera watches from a mere foot away, Krupa plays the tune again, this time on a matchbox with two matchsticks. He spins intricate syncopated rhythms, all the while, miraculously, not letting the matches catch fire until the very end, when he climaxes the performance with a little burst of flame.

By staging the same tune in two arrangements — one theatrical and the other non- or anti-theatrical — we find ourselves witnessing a lesson in the powers of intimacy of the cinema, bolstered by the documentary event of Krupa's presence and performance experienced at impossibly close quarters.

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Any examples of the use of real musicians in fiction films that you find interesting? I'd love to hear them.

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Some recent reads:

-- Amos Vogel has died at 92.

-- Cinema Scope's 50th issue has a special feature called "50 Filmmakers Under 50," with a capsule essay on each by a different film critic. Also in the issue: an interview with J. Hoberman; and Jonathan Rosenbaum's "Global Discoveries on DVD" column. Related: Hoberman on Luis Buñuel in The Nation.

-- "How To Rip DVD Clips": Jason Mittell at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

-- Ignatiy Vishnevetsky on Hong Sang-soo's use of space.

-- Adrian's column at Filmkrant: "Across the Great Divide".

-- Jonathan Rosenbaum has a post on Straub/Huillet's Écrits.

-- Catherine Grant rounds up four issues of the journal Image [&] Narrative.

-- Zach Campbell: "Workers, Potters," part one; part two; and part three.

-- Srikanth Srinivasan on Alec Guinness' white suit, one of his "records of material objects in the cinema."

-- Three recent pieces on Carmelo Bene: Nick Pinkerton at Moving Image Source; Celluloid Liberation Front at MUBI; and Ara H. Merjian at Artforum.

-- Recent discoveries: Nicholas Rombes' The Happiness Engine; and Fredrik Gustafsson's Fredrik on Film.

Filmmaker-Teachers

Perhaps it’s my vocation that makes me interested in this question, but I’m wondering: In the history of film culture, are there accounts of filmmakers who were also great teachers and mentors?

At the SCMS conference last month, I heard a fascinating paper by Eric Rentschler on “The German Prehistory of the Berlin School.” In it he identified several key influences upon the School, among which was the Berlin Film Academy (dffb), where both teachers and students shared a common cinephilic culture, kept alive and energized by regular group screenings.

Important and influential faculty at dffb included filmmakers like Harun Farocki and Hartmut Bitomsky. Rentschler noted that the “technological lyricism” of their films had a profound impact on the films of students such as Christian Petzold. (“Technological lyricism” is Christoph Hochhäusler’s term for the aesthetic allure of capitalist landscapes and environments in Petzold’s films. See Marco Abel’s essay on the DVD of Yella for more.)

Rentschler added:

Another lesson Petzold learned from Farocki has to do with the importance of body language. In German film, argues Petzold, there has always been too much “facial expression, eyebrow play, and theatrical language.” (His commentary brings to mind Michael Klier’s astute critique of acting styles in the New German Cinema, the 2001 short film Gesten und Gesichter/Gestures and Faces.) [Petzold recalls that] while working on his dffb diploma film (Pilotinnen/Pilots, 1995), his mentor Farocki was completing the film essay Ausdruck der Hände/The Expression of Hands (1997). As a result, Petzold found himself very interested in the creative capacity of human hands and acutely aware of how much physicality is lost in most German films, where the dialogue and actor’s visage dominate so strongly that they, quite literally, efface the rest of the human body. German actors do not need to visit New York for lessons in method acting, Farocki quipped; rather, they should go to Switzerland and have their face muscles surgically altered.

In Marco Abel’s Cineaste interview with Christian Petzold, “The Cinema of Identification Gets on my Nerves,” there is an interesting bit that speaks to the challenge faced by every student: how to absorb the lessons and examples of a teacher and, at the same time, discover how to navigate an original path that will require the student to depart from the initially inspirational model of the teacher.

Cineaste: You were taught by filmmakers who cannot be said to make narrative cinema, yet your films qualify as narrative cinema. Was following Farocki and Bitomsky into the avant-garde or documentary tradition never really an option for you?

Petzold: Only briefly. During my time of crisis I made two shorts, which were more or less 'essay' films. But I quickly realized that I could not work that way. In this kind of filmmaking the editing bay is like a desk; you essentially collect material to work on it later, in isolation. The loneliness of Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Marie Straub, Farocki, and Bitomsky—which in many ways is self-imposed by them—that was not the kind of work environment I desired. I cannot work this way. I did this for five years as a literary scholar; I did not start making films to emulate this experience. But it should be noted that both Farocki and Bitomsky love narrative film. If you look closely at their films you see that theirs are films that actually desire narrative cinema, while perhaps simultaneously being about the impossibility or crisis of narrative cinema. But I did not want to pursue their path. I still learned more about the art of narrative from them than from people who are so-called storytellers, but do not interrogate themselves.

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British film director Alexander Mackendrick (The Man in the White Suit, The Ladykillers, The Sweet Smell of Success) retired from the industry in the late 60s and spent almost 25 years as a faculty member teaching filmmaking at the California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts). The book On Film-Making: An Introduction to the Craft of the Director collects his writings — mostly handouts he prepared for his students — and it makes for great, insightful reading. (For more on his teaching strategies, see this page.)

Martin Scorsese writes about Mackendrick’s credo as a teacher:

“Process, not product” was his mantra to his students. The creative process — not the creative method, or the creative system […] I’m not implying that he was an anti-intellectual Hollywood pro — all you have to do is leaf through this book, with its references to Ibsen and Sophocles and Beckett and Levi-Strauss, to dispel that notion. This book takes on everything from Dramatic Irony to Mental Geography, the relationship between the director and his actors to the structural soundness of Last Year at Marienbad. But on almost every page, Mackendrick lets the reader know that all of it, from the lessons about crossing the axis and the condensation of screen time to the techniques for cultivating ideas […] is worth nothing without practice.

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The Harvard Film Archive recently announced a fascinating retrospective titled “The Films and Legacy of António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro.” Reis was an influential Portuguese filmmaker-teacher who co-directed, with his wife Margarida Cordeiro, a psychologist, four poetic-ethnographic works that are held in high regard. Here’s an excerpt from the program notes:

Admired by the likes of Joris Ivens, Jean Rouch and Jean-Marie Straub, the films of Reis and Cordeiro invented a poetically liberated and hypnotically cinematographic film language, a style and sensibility that set the course of Portugal’s lasting tradition of radical cinema, exerting a formative influence, for example, upon João Cesar Monteiro. Yet equally important was Reis’ career and legacy as a long-time senior professor of film production and aesthetics at Lisbon’s Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema. As a tribute to Reis’ inspiration of the most important talents in contemporary Portuguese cinema, this retrospective includes a selection of works by Reis’ students including Pedro Costa, João Pedro Rodrigues and Joaquim Saphino.

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I wonder: Are there accounts in film culture of filmmakers who were also good teachers and mentors? Do any former students have experiences to share about being in classes taught by filmmakers? Also: We would have to include in this discussion directors who were teachers or mentors outside a classroom setting, on film projects. Any thoughts — or stories? I'd love to hear them.

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Some links:

-- There's a Jerry Lewis dossier in the new issue of La Furia Umana, with pieces by many notable critics and cinephiles. Also: Zach Campbell, who is part of the dossier, reviews, at MUBI, the new edition of the Bresson book edited by James Quandt. Finally: in a MUBI post, David Phelps pairs images from Godard and Jerry Lewis.

-- At Catherine Grant's place: Studies of cinematic pastiche; a round-up of the new issue of Vertigo, which focuses on Godard; and a collection of Godard links.

-- "How to account for the intensity of feeling this film inspires?" asks Dennis Lim on Bresson's The Devil, Probably in Artforum.

-- (via David Hudson) Iris Veysey's "Costume and Identity in Hitchcock's Vertigo"; and at Cine Europa: a story on Ingmar Bergman's huge VHS collection, which included The Blues Brothers and other unlikely titles.

-- An interview with Terence Davies I found unsettling: "Being Gay Has Ruined My Life," in The Irish Times. Please also see: Michael Guillen's interview with Davies, "Memory as Mise-en-scène"; and Michael Sicinski on The Deep Blue Sea at Cinema Scope.

-- Andy Rector posts an account of a John Ford interview with Colin Young in Film Quarterly (1959). Via Andy: an interview with Jacques Ranciere about (and around) his recent book Les écarts du cinéma. Also: A post at Diagonal Thoughts about this book.

-- Rowena Santos Aquino's introduction to the Czechoslovak New Wave at Next Projection.

-- At e-flux, Irmgard Emmelhainz on Godard's 1969-1974 period of militant filmmaking.

-- Since I put up my last post 2 weeks ago, a discussion has sprung up in the comments section [scroll down] on topics such as "philosophy" vs. "theory" and the recent "philosophical turn" in cinema/media studies.

pic: Aleander Mackendrick

Some Thoughts on SCMS

A personal note about the blog: I’d like to try a new experiment. I’m giving myself a deadline to post regularly every 2 weeks — on every other Monday. No matter how much or how little material I’ve accumulated each time, I’d like to stick to this magazine-style posting schedule and put up what I have. We'll see how it goes!

I recently returned from an energizing four days at the SCMS (Society for Cinema and Media Studies) conference in Boston. The highlight of the trip was spending time in extended conversations with fellow cinephiles — friends both old and new such as Chris Keathley, Catherine Grant, Zach Campbell, Joe McElhaney, Victor Perkins, Nico Baumbach, Steve Shaviro, Dave Johnson, Michael Talbott, and Jenna Ng. (I thank them all for the long, fun conversations!) I participated in two panels: one on film criticism and cinephilia put together by Steve Rybin, and the other on the “video essay” spearheaded by Chris and Catherine.

I was struck by the sheer size of the conference: it was common for as many as twenty-five panels to be taking place at the same time. The cinema/media studies field has expanded promiscuously over the last couple of decades, and the topics for the panels included such areas as TV studies, gaming, radio studies, production histories, reception studies, technological histories, fan cultures and practices, historical research methodologies, early cinema, global media industries and infrastructures, digital media, and more.

This was my second trip to SCMS — the first was to New Orleans last year — and I am eager to return to the conference each year. The conversations and social aspect alone make the trip eminently worthwhile.

But I can’t get away from the fact that I have a slightly peculiar relation to SCMS. I’m not a research professional within the cinema/media studies field. Instead, I approach the conference as a cinephile who is passionate about two broad strands of activity: (1) Individual films themselves, their concrete details, their analysis and interpretation, their evaluation, extending then to filmmakers, performers, genres, etc., and (2) Theory, by which I mean film theory but also, more broadly, philosophical thinking that is on some level politically motivated (structuralism, Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, and so on, and the broad field one loosely labels post-structuralism). Thinking about cinephilia and film criticism is also, for me, part of this theoretical curiosity.

(1) and (2) are crucially related in that the former is primarily criticism and the latter is primarily a speculative, philosophical kind of activity we call theory: each feeds and responds to the other, and each activity sharpens and deepens the practice of the other. Doing either criticism or theory exclusively, without close and constant relation to the other, seems insufficient and unappealing to me.

Given the vast scope of the cinema/media studies field today, the majority of the panels weren’t directly related to my two primary areas of interest. But it was easy to find, in each time slot at the conference, at least two or three strongly interesting sessions.

The field has been through its share of upheavals since its establishment in the 1960s: auteurism, the “Screen theory” of the 1970s, the turn to history in the last couple of decades, and two developments that I personally find especially interesting: the emergence of cinephilia and film criticism as itself an object of close study in the last 10 years; and a “philosophical turn” which is surveyed by recent books like John Mullarkey’s Philosophy and the Moving Image: Reflections of Reality and Robert Sinnerbrink’s New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images. The fact that this “film-philosophy” project has reached a certain critical threshold of interest is signaled by the fact that Sinnerbrink’s book aims to effect a sort of synthesis of two broad philosophical traditions — analytic and Continental — within film studies, and proposes a kind of pluralist film-philosophy that tries to draw together what is best and most useful from both traditions in order to do so.

I’m very curious to hear from those working in the field: Are there certain areas within cinema studies which are seeing an increase in interest? And in terms of the two broad areas of cinephilia/criticism and film-philosophy, are there certain directions that appear to hold particular promise? Any speculations or predictions about the future of the field? Or the future of SCMS? I’d love to hear them.

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Links to recent reading:

-- Caboose has announced the release of Jean-Luc Godard's Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television, translated by Timothy Barnard, and has made available a sample chapter for download.

-- Nicole Brenez in Sight & Sound on the revolutionary, activist film The Hour of the Furnaces: "Taking the Marxist concept of praxis seriously, The Hours of the Furnaces wages its battle not only on the Argentinian political front but also on the aesthetic and theoretical fronts [...] As Jean-Luc Godard once said about Solzhenitsyn: “We already knew all about what he wrote, but he was listened to because he had style.”"

-- At Film Quarterly, Jonathan Rosenbaum reconsiders A.I. Artificial Intelligence.

-- Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin exchange letters in Spanish on the Rotterdam film festival at Cine Transit. Also: Adrian on Lynne Ramsay's We Need to Talk About Kevin. Via Adrian: an issue of the journal New Readings with the theme "Truth Claims in Fiction Film"; and "10 Photographers You Should Ignore" at Wired magazine.

-- In the new Senses of Cinema, two interesting pieces by Daniel Fairfax: an interview with Jean-Louis Comolli; and an essay on director Artavazd Pelechian. Also, an article by Comolli, "Ginette Lavigne’s La belle journée," which first appeared in Trafic, now translated into English by Fairfax.

-- A recent blog discovery: Steve Rybin's Cinephile Papers. Also, via David Hudson, the cinephile Tumblr site This Must Be The Place. Related: I notice that Steve has put out a call for essays for the book project "Cine-aesthetics: New Directions in Film and Philosophy."

-- After having followed her blog for almost 10 years, it was a treat to meet Amy Monaghan in person at SCMS.

-- Steven Shaviro's SCMS paper, "Post-Continuity," is now available at his blog.

-- Via Catherine Grant: A 7-minute video essay by Omar Ahmed on the representations of Naxalism in Indian cinema.

-- Trevor Link whets our appetite for Abel Ferrara's new film, 4:44 Last Day On Earth. At Fangoria: an interview with Ferrara.

-- Good news: friend, cinephile and filmmaker Dan Sallitt's latest, The Unspeakable Act, has been chosen to play the BAM Cinemafest in NYC.

-- Michael Sicinski on Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein at Fandor.

-- I've been checking in regularly on Nicholas Rombes' terrific "Blue Vevet Project": he posts 3 times a week, spurred each time by a frame from the film.

-- Owen Hatherley at The Guardian on "How Patrick Keiller is mapping the 21st-century landscape".

-- I've heard through the grapevine that a North American Werner Schroeter retrospective is in the offing. Does anyone have additional information to share? I'd love to know more.

Links to Recent Reading

A handful of recent reads:

-- At Lumière, several artists and writers including Nicole Brenez, Luc Moullet, Nathaniel Dorsky, Matthew Flanagan, Ted Fendt, Andy Rector and Edwin Mak pick the cinema events and highlights of 2011.

-- Nicole Brenez was in New York recently.

-- Using a series of images, Daniel Kasman draws intriguing parallels between William Wellman's Midnight Mary (1933) and John Carpenter's They Live (1988).

-- At Cine Transit: "Avatars of the Encounter" by Adrian Martin, in English and Spanish, the translation performed by Cristina Álvarez López in collaboration with Adrian. Also: "In-Flight Movie," this month's entry in Adrian's regular column for Filmkrant.

-- Via Adrian: Donald Reid on Film Socialisme at n+1; Andrew Gallix on the "death of literature" in the Guardian.

-- As always, Catherine Grant has been super-productive in the last couple of weeks: (1) A video essay comparing sequences from the silent and sound versions of Hitchcock's Blackmail (1929); (2) She has started a new video essay column at Press Play called Audiovisualcy; and (3) She has new posts on ""Dangerous" Cinematic Women Studies" and "practice-led research" in audiovisual film studies.

-- Nico Baumbach's essay "What Is, or Was, Cinephilia?" in Film Comment, is now available online in three parts: One; Two; and Three. Also at Film Comment: Jonathan Rosenbaum remembers Gilbert Adair.

-- At ArtInfo, J. Hoberman is now the proprietor of a blog called Movie Journal.

-- The new issue of Framework has two dossiers on "work," guest edited by Elena Gorfinkel and Ewa Mazierska respectively.

-- Great news: V.F. Perkins' BFI book on The Rules of the Game will be out this summer.

-- David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson are partnering with Criterion to create an hour-long set of 20 videos on various aspects of filmmaking.

-- (Via Andrew Klevan) Edwin Davies on the show Luck and the future of serialized television.

-- Ubuweb puts up an interview with Ornette Coleman by Jacques Derrida [PDF]. (Via Rowena Santos Aquino, who runs one of the best cinephile/criticism pages on Twitter.)

-- Cinema retrospective news via Chris Mason Wells: Anthology Film Archives is running programs of films by Carmelo Bene and Sara Driver.

-- The Andrzej Żuławski retrospective in NYC has generated a lot of interest. David Hudson rounds up the pieces and interviews.

-- I've been enjoying the new translation (by Richard Howard) of Roland Barthes' Mythologies.

pic: Sara Driver's Sleepwalk (1986). See AltScreen's collection of links on the film here.

Video Essays

I'll be attending the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) conference in Boston next month. I made my first trip to this conference last year, when it was held in New Orleans. It turned out to be a lot of fun and very rewarding, both socially and in terms of the diversity of conference presentations I was able to catch. I resolved to become a regular and return each year.

This year, Catherine Grant and Christian Keathley asked me to join them on a panel called "The Video Essay". Especially with the efforts of critics such as Matt Zoller Seitz, Kevin Lee and Jim Emerson, this form of criticism has witnessed a great flowering in the last few years. Press Play, the site published by Matt and overseen by Kevin, has been remarkably prolific. Catherine's site Audiovisualcy has gathered a great and diverse group of pieces, and is growing steadily. I'm looking forward to a stimulating conference session on this topic. (The entire conference program is available on PDF via this page.)

* * *

In the recent collection "The Language and Style of Film Criticism," edited by Andrew Klevan and Alex Clayton (I blogged about the book a few months ago), Chris Keathley has a chapter on the video essay. In it, he proposes that video essays work in two modes: explanatory and poetic.

The explanatory mode, while being extremely valuable, is also the more common. It is guided by language, both written and spoken. "Images and sounds," he writes, "are subordinated to explanatory language."

He then quotes Adrian Martin's Filmkrant piece "A Voice Too Much":

It is instructive to compare both DVD audio commentaries and video essays to what Jean-Luc Godard does in his massive Histoire(s) du cinéma. In fact, Godard has complained in an interview that he hates it when the voice - the law of the written/spoken text - dominates in a filmic 'essay': there is a lot of vocalising in Godard, but it is always displaced, decentred, at war with all the other elements of the work. It is not a voice which legislates or pontificates, which closes down meaning.

Keathley adds:

Godard's video uses language (both spoken and written), but it is one component among many, and these components are not unified into any explanatory discourse. Explanation vies with poetics in a collage of images and sounds, words and music, sometimes gaining the upper hand, sometimes losing it.

Keathley provides a couple of examples of video essays that work in a different register, that of the poetic mode. One of them is Paul Malcolm's "Notes to a Project on Citizen Kane" (2007), available at archive.org. Another is Victor Burgin's "Listen to Britain," originally a 2001 gallery installation piece but now available on the Criterion DVD of Powell/Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale (1944).

Practitioners of the video essay form, Keathley proposes, need to take up and explore both modes in order to truly mine its potential.

* * *

I wonder if you might recommend some of your favorite video essays -- examples of the form that you find particularly interesting or illuminating or useful. We might be able to draw upon these examples during our discussion at the conference. Thank you!

* * *

Links to recent reading:

-- David Hudson's "Daily Briefing" posts at MUBI are simply the essential cinema reading for me each day. Here is a link that takes us to several of the most recent posts. Also: David collects links to pieces on Theo Angelopoulos, who died recently. And here is a group of recent Robert Bresson posts at MUBI. It includes Danny Kasman's post on two mysterious edits by Bresson (with an interesting discussion in the comments that follow).

-- Mike D'Angelo's post "Why I Pirate Movies: A Self-Justification" has generated a vigorous, interesting discussion in the comments.

-- Ben Sachs of the Chicago Reader has quickly become one of those critics whose pieces I eagerly look forward to and enjoy without fail. Here is a collection of his recent columns on subjects that include Zalman King, George Kuchar, Neveldine/Taylor, Mikio Naruse and Yilmaz Güney. Speaking of Guney, as the retrospective makes its way around the country, Bilge Ebiri's post on his films is sure to come in handy.

-- The new issue of Filmkrant features its annual "Slow Criticism" section, which is introduced by Adrian Martin and Cristina Álvarez López. I join several other critics, including Chris Fujiwara, Richard Porton and Gabe Klinger, in contributing a piece to the section. David Hudson rounds up the pieces for us, with links.

-- (via Zach Campbell) Hilarious: Hennessy Youngman's "What is Post-Structuralism?". Also: "Gallo vs. Clooney" by Chris Fujiwara.

-- J. Hoberman in the Guardian: "Hugo and the Magic of Film Trickery"; Robert Kolker on Hugo at the OUP blog (via Kevin Lee); and Hoberman's "A New Obama Cinema?" in the New York Review of Books. At Film Comment, there is an interview with Ken Jacobs and his former projectionist Hoberman.

-- Nicole Brenez has curated a series called "Internationalist Cinema for Today" for Anthology Film Archives in NYC.

-- Several fascinating pieces at Jonathan Rosenbaum's blog, including reviews of films by Shohei Imamura, Zhang Yimou, John Sayles, Nina Menkes and Danny De Vito.

-- At Sight & Sound: Filmmakers such as Olivier Assayas and Bruno Dumont on the influence of Robert Bresson on their work; Graham Fuller on Jean Vigo; and B. Kite on David Lynch's Mulholland Drive.

-- Adam Nayman and Trevor Link both make me want to run out and catch the new David Wain comedy, Wanderlust. Via Trevor: Allan Fish's "A Plea for Criterion Eclipse Sets of the Future".

-- Stumbled upon this: "80 mainstream movies from the last 30 years that were either commercially or critically buried".

-- The new issue of Cineaste magazine.

-- Serge Daney's piece "Nick Ray and the House of Pictures" has been posted in the comments section at Kinoslang by Laurent Kretzschmar.

-- Ignatiy Vishnevetsky takes "a close look" at the new Michael Mann/David Milch series "Luck"; and notices an unusual shadow in Rivette's Paris Belongs to Us.

-- (via Anuja Jain at NYU) A 1981 Cineaste interview with Satyajit Ray.

-- (via Phil Coldiron) At n+1 magazine, an interview with Pedro Costa during his visit to Indiana University, Bloomington, for a retrospective of his films.

-- A fresh set of Michael Sicinski reviews up at The Academic Hack.

-- At the Film Comment blog: Robert Koehler's report from Sundance; and Violet Lucca's post "On SOPA and the Future--and the Past--of Film".

-- Catherine Grant has a post on "Alexander Kluge Studies"; and Candace Wirt interviews Alexander Kluge at MUBI. Also: Catherine's recent post "Pandora's Box? On Digital Conversions and Rebirths".

-- (via Brian Darr) A detailed interview with Frank Tashlin about his animation work.

-- Dennis Lim reports from Rotterdam at Artforum.

-- Fergus Daly at Experimental Conversations: "Under the Paving Stones, Redondo Beach: Post '68 French Cinema in the 80s and 90s".

-- At Frieze: "Nine Theses on Slapstick" by Brian Dillon; and "Call Yourself a Critic?" by Sam Thorne.

-- Richard Brody discovers a 1926 Virginia Woolf essay on cinema.

-- (via David Hudson) Rob Latham in the Los Angeles Review of Books on the career of Philip K. Dick.

-- At Film Quarterly: A discussion between Rob White and Amber Jacobs on Todd Haynes' Mildred Pierce.

-- An entertaining 2002 interview with Abel Ferrara by Scott Tobias.

-- I learned from the essay "German Desire in the Age of Venture Capitalism" by Marco Abel, available at the Cinema Guild site, that Christian Petzold's character Yella was named for Yella Rottländer, the unforgettable child actor from Wim Wenders' Alice in the Cities (1974).

-- (via the Celluloid Liberation Front) The archives of the film magazine Vertigo.

-- At Putney Debater, Michael Chanan revisits "the theory/practice debate".

-- David Phelps on William Wellman at MUBI; Nick Pinkerton on Wellman's pre-code films at Moving Image Source.

-- A conversation with Adam Curtis at e-flux.

-- Ehsan Khoshbakht interviews Geoff Andrew about Abbas Kiarostami.

-- At IndieWire: Peter Bogdanovich on Red River and My Darling Clementine.

Robert Bresson's Une Femme Douce (1969).

Criticism and Context; Jia Zhangke

One of the most intriguing aspects of the Movie Mutations project is that it brought together a number of film critics of a certain generation who were geographically dispersed across multiple continents and yet shared a lot of common ground in terms of taste. The films and filmmakers they treasured and championed were often equally (if not more) dispersed in terms of nationality and culture, and yet there was often significant agreement among these critics about their worth. When I first read Movie Mutations, I remember thinking: Does lack of knowledge of context — social, historical, cultural, economic, political, artistic — pose no barriers to the appreciation of a filmmaker’s work as it travels around the world?

My own position on this is simple: Contextual knowledge is not a prerequisite for appreciating cinema, but it definitely can, whenever available, contribute to a deeper and wider understanding of both the film at hand and its place within multiple larger structures — social, historical, political, etc. In other words, I’m rarely nervous about expressing praise for a film I like, no matter its global source, simply because I lack the contextual knowledge to appreciate it fully. The fact that it appealed to me for certain reasons is enough for the moment. But there’s a part of me that continues to be curious — for new knowledge and insight, both contextual and critical, that might revise, rethink, or even just elaborate, in ways large and small, my appreciation.

Case in point: I’ve enthusiastically followed the films of Jia Zhangke for almost a dozen years now but a fascinating piece in a recent issue of New Left Review — “Poetics of Vanishing: The Films of Jia Zhangke” by Zhang Xudong — deepens my view of his films by situating them in certain revealing particularities of background. (The piece is available online for a fee.)

Zhang describes how ‘Fifth Generation’ filmmakers like Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige were responsible for breaking Chinese cinema into the global culture market. They rejected the studio-bound socialist-realist tradition that preceded them, and instead chose to evoke a mythologized past with a visual reliance on “sweeping, dehistoricized landscapes”:

The elevated style of these films, reifying what they depicted into something ‘timeless’, seemed distant from the concrete experience of their own times, and failed to represent or recount the ongoing, epic social transformation of the country itself in the era of Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms […]

Where the Fifth Generation sutured together a mythological whole—embodied by vast, empty shots of a pristine, ahistorical landscape, from Shaanxi’s loess plateau in Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth (1984) and Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum (1987) to the icy mountain ranges of Tibet—the Sixth was eager to portray the shabby, formless texture of everyday life in county-level towns, where socialist underdevelopment meets the onslaught of marketization.

Specifically, Jia’s films, Zhang tells us, portray a very particular kind of place: they are set in xiancheng, or county-level cities. There are over 2400 such cities in China, but they are extremely under-represented in film and literature. Zhang writes:

To focus on xiancheng is, whether consciously or not, to zoom in on the underbelly of China’s socialist modernity and its Reform Era. Nominally part of ‘urban China’, xiancheng stands apart from the fantasy of a pristine and authentic, custom-bound rural world […] On the other hand, xiancheng is decidedly not a metropolitan area: if anything, it offers the opposite of urban sophistication, white-collar jobs and access to national cultural and political power […]

In terms of material or symbolic capital, then, xiancheng is proletarian China par excellence. In terms of urban forms and their visual representation, xiancheng is usually found to be shapeless and unattractive. […]

In other words, this is the in-between, generic area where the daily reality of contemporary China is laid bare. With no clear-cut boundaries or sharp distinctions between rural and urban, between industrial and agricultural, between high and low cultures, xiancheng becomes a meeting place for all kinds of forces and currents, whether contemporary or anachronistic.

Jia’s “hometown trilogy” (Xiaowu, Platform, Unknown Pleasures) marked the ‘discovery’ of xiancheng in Chinese cinema, Jia even referring to himself as a “cinematic migrant labourer”. After being so closely identified with this milieu, he tried to move beyond it in the setting of The World. Zhang comments:

But this setting [of The World] is in fact a xiancheng within the nation’s capital, at once a migrant labourer’s village and a xiancheng imagining of a globalized world. Indeed the ultimate irony of the film is aimed not at the Disney-style theme park, but at Beijing or even China itself: a giant xiancheng, whose concrete, contradictory realities co-exist with a virtual, mirage-like unity.

Finally, he makes this ironic observation about the reception of Jia’s work:

The idea that Jia’s films are representations of working-class life that only high-cultural audiences can understand, or that they constitute laments about urban demolition funded by the demolishers—24 City, for example, was funded by the very developers behind the project featured in the film—are ironies not lost even on Jia’s supporters.

* * *

Jonathan Rosenbaum has long advocated for the crucial place that information occupies in film-critical writing. His book on Kiarostami, co-written with Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, is a good example — as is so much of his other work — of this element of critical practice. Iranian politics, history, poetry, and cultural tradition are all summoned to the task of helping to explicate Kiarostami’s work.

Another example that comes to mind is Andrew Horton’s book on the films of Theo Angelopoulos, which attempts to draw upon centuries of Greek history and culture, Byzantine iconography and ceremony, Greek music hall traditions, and shadow puppet theatre to help sketch a broad context for the director’s art.

I’m wondering: Are there other examples of books, essays or even documentaries that perform this film-critical work of helping to provide any kind of context to better appreciate certain films or filmmakers? I’d love to hear any recommendations.

* * *

Some recent reading:

-- A lovely joint piece by Adrian Martin and Cristina Álvarez López, "Secret and Impossible," available in both Spanish and English, at Cine Transit.

-- The new issue of the journal Experimental Conversations contains a terrific essay by Fergus Daly called "Sidney Lumet: Experimental Filmmaker?". David Hudson handily rounds up the issue for us. David also collects links to pieces on David Cronenberg on the occasion of his NYC retrospective. Also: Jim Emerson's 12-minute video essay, "Written in the Flesh: A Crash Course in David Cronenberg".

-- A fantasy double features piece at MUBI penned by several writers.

-- Matt Zoller Seitz's "Vertigoed: A Press Play Mashup Contest" has almost 100 participants including Catherine Grant, Jason Mittell and Kevin Lee. The contest required them to take the same Bernard Herrmann cue -- "Scene D'Amour," used in a memorable moment from Vertigo -- and match it with a clip from any film.

-- The Village Voice lays off J. Hoberman: David Hudson has a post that collects links. Hoberman's "year in film"; and in the NYT, he talks about the Village Voice and film culture.

-- Jonathan Rosenbaum and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky on Bresson's Affaires Publiques. Also: Ignatiy on Tomas Alfredson's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

-- Kent Jones and Jonathan Rosenbaum discuss Bresson and Godard. Also: Kent has an essay on Jean-Pierre Gorin's films on the occasion of the new Criterion/Eclipse box set.

-- With this post on Diary of a Hitman (1991), Zach Campbell launches a new series of pieces at MUBI.

-- David Bordwell on the expressive use of hands and hand gestures and why they are comparatively rare in cinema today. Also: his post "Tinker Tailor: A Guide for the Perplexed".

-- This Onion story is pretty funny: "Miranda July Called Before Congress To Explain Exactly What Her Whole Thing Is".

-- The Academy sounds an alarm about the fragility of digital production media.

-- The Senses of Cinema 2011 World Poll.

-- A brilliant video montage set to Lionel Richie's "Hello". For a "key" to where the clips are drawn from, see this post.

-- At Moving Image Source: Patrick Keiller on "landscape cinema and the problem of dwelling"; and a group of essays by several critics on films in the "First Look" program at the Museum of the Moving Image.

-- Several links via Adrian: Claude Chabrol on adapting La Ceremonie; A great interview with Bob Dylan by John Elderfield; "What If": movies imagined for another time and place"; The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest; Anne Bilson in the Guardian: "Why restyle Great Women of History as cockamamie feminist role models?". Related: Laura Flanders on The Iron Lady at Truthout.

-- Ben Sachs in the Chicago Reader on Adam Curtis' All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, which can be viewed online.

-- An epic essay and music mix by Trevor Link, "Pop Utopianism: A Manifesto"/"We Need to Talk About K-Pop: A Mix"; and, via Trevor, a discovery of Cinefiles, a large and valuable database.

-- Olivier Père will be curating a complete Otto Preminger retrospective at the Locarno film festival this summer.

-- At The Guardian: a piece on the birth of UK film criticism, 100 years ago.

-- At the MUBI Notebook: "The Lost Pasolini Interview"; "The Posters of Robert Bresson"; and Dan Sallitt's defense of Julia Leigh's Sleeping Beauty.

-- Rowena Santos Aquino on filmmaker Kim Ki-duk.

-- Via the Film Doctor's blog: At Filmmaker magazine, "6 Filmmakers Talk About Documentary Films in the Digital Age"; a story on the "found-footage horror movie" at The Atlantic; an interview with Frederick Wiseman at Filmmaker; and at Observatory, "Reassessing the Saul Bass and Alfred Hitchcock Collaboration".

-- At Little White Lies: Yusef Sayed on F.J. Ossang; Hong Sang-soo; and Philippe Grandrieux.

-- The current issue of the Director's Guild of America Quarterly includes pieces on Michael Mann and Leo McCarey.

-- Time magazine proclaims Godard's Histore(s) du Cinéma "the DVD of the year".

-- An interview with Nouvelle Vague cinematographer Raoul Coutard at the Film Comment blog.

-- Completely unrelated to cinema (or is it?): I finally know the difference between dork, geek, dweeb and nerd.

pic: Jia's Still Life (2006).

Film: The Critics' Choice

It’s rare to find a coffee-table book about cinema that is truly of value to both the casual reader and the serious cinema-lover. One of them is French New Wave (1999), edited by Jean Douchet. I’ve just discovered another: Film: The Critics’ Choice (2001), edited by Geoff Andrew, with a foreword by Bernardo Bertolucci (Billboard Books, 2001). It’s out of print, but used copies are going for under a dollar at Amazon.

The book has a simple, clean structure that invites browsing. There are ten sections, each written by a different critic. Each critic takes on about 15 films. Every film gets 2 pages, one of which is devoted to a mini-essay and the other to a large still photograph.

The sections include “The Silent Era” (David Bordwell); “America: The Studio Years” (David Thomson); “America: Years of Change” (Philip French); “America: The Modern Era” (Amy Taubin and Kent Jones); “Europe: The Golden Age” (Gilbert Adair); “Europe: The New Waves” (Jonathan Rosenbaum); “British Cinema” (Peter Wollen); “Europe: A New Fin de siècle”; “International Cinema” (Tony Rayns); and a final section on animation (Paul Wells).

The essays are unusually insightful, especially given that they are working within the constraints of the coffee-table book format, and some of the film choices are pleasantly startling in their unlikeliness. There’s lots to savor here, but let me limit the scope of this post by reproducing, as a tribute, some passages by the recently deceased Gilbert Adair.

Adair on Fritz Lang’s M (1931):

Here is a curiosity: The sinister prominence with which the letter “M,” one tailor-made for the branding iron, figures in Fritz Lang’s filmography. His best known, although far from finest, film was Metropolis (1927), whose heroine’s name was Maria. His most celebrated creation, the protagonist of two silents and one late sound feature, was the verminously arachnoid mastermind Dr. Mabuse. Three of his most memorable Hollywood productions were Man Hunt (1941), Ministry of Fear (1944), and, long the favorite of cultishly minded Langians, Moonfleet (1955). (A whimsical case can even be made that the title of another work from the American period, The Woman in the Window, 1944, contained two inverted Ms.) Lang himself made a moving valedictory appearance in 1963 in Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris.

On Julia Solntseva and her 1970 film The Enchanted Desna:

Solntseva was the widow of Alexander Dovzhenko, a great filmmaker and a matchless celebrant of the Soviet Eden, whose loyal helpmate she had been throughout his life. When he died in 1956, she proceeded to film, one after the other, his handful of unrealized scripts almost as if they had been bequeathed to her, as if she were executing his deathbed request; and when there were no more left to film, she simply downed tools and retired.

If ever a film were a poem, it is The Enchanted Desna. A pantheistically phosphorescent hymn to nature as equally to the gleaming tractors and plows which were destined to transform it (and a personal favorite, intriguingly, of Jean-Luc Godard), it must be, at just 81 minutes, the briefest of cinematic works to ever have been shot in the 70mm wide-screen process [...] The visual motifs that we have to come to associate with Dovzhenko's cinema--the skies so low-hung we feel the characters will have to hunker down on all fours to crawl beneath them, the cornfields waving goodbye in unison (Dovzhenko himself once said that his was "a cinema of farewells")--are just as present in The Enchanted Desna.

On Manoel de Oliveira's first feature, Aniki-Bobó (1942):

...whose mystifying title is a Portuguese variant on "eeny-meeny-meiny-mo," it is a film about, and to some degree for, children. Set in Oporto, the director's native city, its slight plot centres upon the rivalry--for the affection of the local stunner--of a pair of matching mop-haired tots, one of whom, a blond cherub who might have stepped down from a Tiepolo altarpiece, is unjustly accused of having shoved the other onto a railroad track. [...]

What makes Aniki-Bobó unique, though, is its blatant theatricality, a word scarcely ever used to describe children's films. As witness the endearingly actorish performances which Oliveira coaxes from his diminutive performers, his film is unequivocally a melodrama. And even if its loose and deceptively artless shooting style (it was filmed wholly on location) seems to anticipate the revolutionary strategies of neorealism, the result is less reminiscent of De Sica's work, say, than of Pagnol's Marseillais trilogy, Marius, Fanny and Cesar (1931, 1932, 1936), by virtue of both the dockside setting and the tiny if nevertheless eternal triangle so solemnly, so touchingly played out before it. Like Pagnol's own films, what Aniki-Bobó offers is a persuasive illustration and defense of cinema as open-air theater.

* * *

Any suggestions of good coffee-table books on cinema--books that might contain something of interest for both the casual film buff and the more serious film-lover or film critic? I'd love to hear them.

I know that publishers such as Taschen and Phaidon have produced a number of cinema books in this format, although I know only a few of them. I recently picked up a couple of volumes in Phaidon's recently released budget series--on Hitchcock and Kubrick (both by Bill Krohn) and Lynch (by Theirry Jousse)--and they look interesting and insightful.

* * *

Some links:

-- Sight & Sound has made available a great little trove of Gilbert Adair's writings online. David Hudson's post at MUBI collects a number of pieces on Adair.

-- Adrian has a tribute to Adair at Filmkrant. And here's a wonderful text that is a critical 'duet': Adrian and Cristina Álvarez López's two-part, dual-language essay on Philippe Garrel at Cine Transit.

-- At Moving Image Source, critics, writers and artists share their highlights of 2011: part one; and part two.

-- As usual, plenty of recently posted, wonderfully engaging reading at Jonathan Rosenbaum's place on subjects as diverse as middlebrow cinema, Errol Morris, Iranian politics, black cinema, and Samuel Fuller.

-- Polls for best films of the year: Indiewire's round-up; and Film Comment's best released films and best unreleased films of the year. Also: Cahiers du Cinéma's top ten of the year; Andréa Picard's choices for best experimental films of the year; and Reverse Shot's best films of the year. Finally: Michael Z. Newman's "Faves, 2011."

-- The new issue of Cineaste has several web-exclusive pieces but is particularly worth picking up for a fascinating symposium (not online) on "the prospects of political cinema today" featuring such figures as John Gianvito, Travis Wilkerson, Sally Potter, Kelly Reichardt, John Sayles, Pere Portabella and John Hughes.

-- A new DVD release that seems to have slipped under the radar: Gilles Deleuze from A to Z, available for the first time with English subtitles. The translation is by Deleuze scholar Charles Stivale. (via Jason LaRiviere)

-- A wonderful close analysis of the prologue to Melancholia by Manohla Dargis.

-- The new issue of Senses of Cinema includes articles by Jacques Rivette and Murray Pomerance, and a roundup of the Toronto film festival by Darren Hughes. Also: the new issue of La Furia Umana is just out; it includes this Luc Moullet piece on Eric Rohmer in conjunction with MUBI.

-- Film Studies for Free's "Favorite Online Film Studies Resources in 2011".

-- The new issue of Film-Philosophy includes essays by Steven Shaviro and Rowena Santos Aquino, and a review of a recent collection of writings by Alain Badiou on cinema.

-- Ignatiy Vishnevetsky puts up a post collecting 22 capsule reviews he wrote this year for the Chicago film weekly Cine-File.

-- Ben Sachs, at Chicago Reader, on his best films of the year.

-- At Moving Image Source: Chris Fujiwara on "The contradictions of Cuba in the work of Nicolás Guillén Landrián"; Bilge Ebiri on the use of language in Malick's The New World; and an excerpt from Jordan's Mintzer's recent book on James Gray in which Gray is interviewed about The Yards.

-- Charlie Kaufman's next project is ... a musical about online film criticism??

-- At Artforum: Tony Pipolo on Robert Bresson; and on Jean-Marie Straub.

-- Links to several recent articles by film scholar David Rodowick (srcoll down). Also via his page: the archives for Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image.

-- "Passionate Utterances: Learning from Stanley Cavell," at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

-- A restoration and revival of the films of French comedian Pierre Étaix.

-- Zach Campbell on some "recent commercial cinema." Also: Zach is now on Twitter.

-- Kent Jones on the documentaries of Vittorio de Seta.

-- Gilberto Perez on Alexander Dovzhenko in Film Quarterly.

-- The Anthology Film Archives just concluded the fascinating retrospective "Anarchism on Film" curated by Cineaste editor Richard Porton.

-- B. Kite and Alexander Points-Zollo's complete "Vertigo Variations".

-- Jonathan Romney on the recent DVD releases of films by Miklos Jansco.

-- In The Guardian: "Friedrich Kittler and the rise of the machine."

-- Via Adrian: Writings on Indian cinema at Projectorhead magazine and Silhouette.

-- The new issue of the journal World Picture.

-- At eFilmCritic: "2011 Whores of the Year."

-- At The Nation: "The Making of the 99%" by Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich.

Links to Recent Reading

-- RIP, Ken Russell. Any personal favorites by this filmmaker? I've seen just a small fraction of his work.

-- Joan's Digest, a new feminist film quarterly edited by Miriam Bale. Also: Bale interviews Cronenberg on A Dangerous Method at Moving Image Source.

-- At MUBI, translated by Ted Fendt: "Jacques Rancière, Philippe Lafosse and the public in conversation about Straub-Huillet."

-- At Cine-Tourist, a collection of framegrabs of about 20 hand-drawn maps from films.

-- Image-posts: "The Striped Shirt in Cinema" (Cynthia Lugo) and "The Scarves of Grey Gardens" (Srikanth Srinivasan).

-- At Occupied Territories, Trevor Link's Tumblr page: "Depression, Melancholia and Me: Lars von Trier's Politics of Displeasure"; and a conversation about Terence Davies' The Deep Blue Sea.

-- How I wish I could catch this Edward Yang retrospective currently playing in NYC: David Hudson gathers links to pieces on Yang's films.

-- (via Andrew Klevan) Yakuza Graveyard is an interesting image-filled Tumblr page featuring posts such as this collection of images of teapots in Ozu's films.

-- The Film Quarterly site is featuring several web-exclusive pieces.

-- via Catherine Grant, a video: "The Cinema According to Luc" [Moullet]. Also: Catherine posts links to sample chapters from over 50 new Palgrave Macmillan/BFI film books.

-- At Serge Daney in English: some postcards Daney sent to actor Melvil Popuad.

-- At Press Play: "Pictures of Loss," a personal series of pieces by Peter Tonguette on grief and mourning in film.

-- An article on gender inequality in Hollywood, both in front of and behind the camera.

-- This new book by Jordan Mintzer, Conversations with James Gray, looks wonderful.

-- Amy Taubin and J. Hoberman discuss Melancholia and J. Edgar.

-- An interesting re-take on Francois Truffaut by Richard Combs in the new Film Comment.

-- David Phelps on "The silent cinema of [UC Davis] Chancellor Katehi's slow walk of shame".

-- Olive Films is releasing a number of classic Hollywood titles on DVD in 2012.

-- "The End of an Era Arrives as Digital Technology Displaces 35mm Film in Cinema Projection"

-- Great news: BFI is putting out a 4-DVD box of Ozu's silent "student comedies".

-- I notice that Straub-Huillet's Moses and Aaron is being released on DVD by New Yorker Video in a couple of weeks. Is New Yorker back in business? If so, great news.