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Small, Striking Moments

A quick note: Blogger is forcing me to migrate to a new setup. It will likely happen within the next week or two. If the website experiences any convulsions or seizures, you'll know why! I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that it all goes well.

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Teaching a film class for the first time has meant that I've been watching the assigned films with an extra-fine toothcomb. Before the semester started, I thought I knew these films intimately. But I've been constantly surprised by new and previously unsuspected wrinkles and folds in, for example, Marnie, Safe, or The Gleaners and I.

I've resurrected the practice of maintaining a film journal, and have been keeping notes on all the films I see, not just the ones for class. Particularly, I've been recording "small, striking moments" -- those that arrest you (without always signaling their full import right away) but fly out of your head in a few weeks if you don't consciously capture them in writing. I'm defining these moments broadly: they may have to do with performance, or gesture, or movement, or camerawork, or editing, or any number of things. These moments have also proved valuable in class, providing new and unexpected 'angles of entry' in order to talk or write about a film.

For a past issue of World Picture, Christian Keathley wrote an essay [pdf] on Otto Preminger that excerpts a valuable exchange between film scholar Andrew Klevan and philosopher Stanley Cavell. Their conversation takes up this idea of "small, striking moments":

AK: I find that after I’ve watched a film I normally have a few
moments or maybe just one moment that really strikes me.

SC: Start there…

AK: Yes, I’ll start there. […] It feels intuitive. Anyway, I’ll have
only a dim sense of what it is about that moment. I’ll just go ‘hmmmm.’

SC: A moment you care about, however apparently trivial, can be
productive. Why did the hand do that? Why did the camera just turn
then?

AK: And why is this niggling me? Our direction of thought here
reminds me that you have discussed Emerson’s feeling that primary
wisdom is intuition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions. The
occurrence to us of an intuition places a demand for us on tuition. You
call this wording, the willingness to subject one self to words, to make
oneself intelligible. This tuition so conceived is what you understand
criticism to be, to follow out in each case the complete tuition for a given
intuition. There’s a moment that really struck me in Frank Capra’s Mr.
Deeds Goes to Town (Frank Capra, 1936, US). I read your piece on the film
after re-watching it, and was pleased to see you mention this moment. It
is when Mr. Deeds (Gary Cooper) is lying on his back on his bed talking
to Babe Bennett (Jean Arthur) on the phone. He has his right calf and
ankle resting on the knee of the other leg, and he’s playing with his foot
while he’s talking to her. The camera is behind his head so that most of
his face is obscured (this shot is repeated a number of times). Then when
the phone call is over you see him playing his trusty tuba and his face is
even more hidden than in the previous version of the shot. Why did they
think to execute it like that…like that?

SC: Like that…

AK: And why was I drawn to these shots? […] I didn’t only
think the shots were unusual, or striking, I thought they were gently
mysterious, and that they were significant. They asked questions of me.
As the film continued, the memory of the shots kept returning. My
intuition was that because the shots were like that they might give me a
key to the whole film, and open it up in new and rewarding ways.

* * *

I'm curious to know: Do you keep notes on the films you see? What sorts of things might you record there? Do you find them helpful in the long run? Also: any recent encounters with such "small, striking moments"? Please feel free to share.

The Genius of the System

The rich discussion on auteurs and auteurism in the previous post thread has me humming with questions. Let me take up one particular line of inquiry in this post.

I think it would be uncontroversial to assert that our present moment is not the Golden Age of American Cinema -- especially so in comparison with Hollywood's aesthetic zenith at the height of the studio era from the 1920s to the 1950s.

For example, here is a small subset of Andrew Sarris' list for best films of 1956: Ford's The Searchers; Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much and The Wrong Man; Nicholas Ray's Bigger than Life and Hot Blood; Budd Boetticher's Seven Men from Now and The Killer is Loose; Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows, There's Always Tomorrow, and Battle Hymn; Fritz Lang's While the City Sleeps and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt; Vincente Minnelli's Lust for Life and Tea and Sympathy; Frank Tashlin's The Girl Can't Help It; George Cukor's Bhowani Junction; Stanley Kubrick's The Killing; Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers; George Stevens' Giant; Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments; and many more.

What was in place -- what combination of factors existed -- during that moment in Hollywood, and in America, that allowed a thousand good movies to bloom? One early answer came from Andr? Bazin, who cautioned the 'young Turks' of Cahiers, like Truffaut, Rohmer and Rivette, against creating a "personality cult of the auteur". Instead, he defended the fertile context composed of industry, genre, and tradition he called "the genius of the system":

What makes Hollywood so much better than anything else in the world is not only the quality of certain directors, but also the vitality and, in a certain sense, the excellence of a tradition...The American cinema is a classical art, but why not then admire in it what is most admirable, i.e., not only the talent of this or that filmmaker, but the genius of the system, the richness of its ever-vigorous tradition, and its fertility when it comes into contact with new elements.

David Bordwell adds:

Bazin's point struck the Cahiers writers most forcefully only after his death, partly because the decline of the studio system faced them with mediocre works by such venerated filmmakers as Mann, Ray, and Cukor. 'We said,' remarked Truffaut bitterly, 'that the American cinema pleases us, and its filmmakers are slaves; what if they were freed? And from the moment that they were freed, they made shitty films.' Pierre Kast agreed: 'Better a good cin?ma de salarie than a bad cin?ma d'auteur.'

I think that the fine arts during the Renaissance and theatre during Elizabethan times might provide two parallels to Studio-era Hollywood. In all three periods, we had large numbers of artists who produced work of great collective volume for a single, sizable audience. The scale of the system could support and nourish a large number of artists and craftsmen, permitting them to work towards a technical mastery of skills. Further, genres flourished as conventions were created, elaborated, modified, transformed and regenerated in a continual and vital process of exchange with a mass audience.

Two more analogues of such "systems" spring to mind, both of which, like Studio-era Hollywood, thrived in the first half of the twentieth century. First, the era of the "Great American Songbook," with its brilliant roster of songwriter/composers including Irving Berlin, George & Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Rodgers & Hart, Shwartz & Dietz, Hoagy Carmichael, and dozens of others. The institutions that made this great flowering possible included Broadway, Tin Pan Alley and Hollywood itself.

Second: Comics -- both comic books and newspaper comics. The Comics Journal, the leading US publication that focuses on comics as an art-form, conducted a large poll in 1999 of the "100 best comics of the century" (scroll down about half-way). Their results are revealing: while a good number of contemporary "art-comics" make the list, the uppermost reaches are occupied by works of popular art from earlier in the century like George Herriman's Krazy Kat, Charles Schulz's Peanuts, Walt Kelly's Pogo, Winsor MacCay's Little Nemo and Carl Barks' Donald Duck (all in the top 10).

So, to draw the circle back to where we started. We all know that American movies are still Big Business. Viewership is high. The industry has seen rapid technological development, with a concomitant expansion of palette for artists and technicians. What, then, accounts for today's American films not being in the same league as those made during the '20s to the '50s? How are the two eras -- then and now -- crucially different? And what role might "the genius of the system" play in all of this?

I realize that I've advanced more questions than answers in this post, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on any of these issues. Thank you!

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Some recent reading:

-- I've respected and learned from Cineaste associate editor Thomas Doherty's writings over the years, but his new piece at The Chronicle of Higher Education, "The Death of Film Criticism," is disappointingly glib, lazy, and inaccurate (as others have pointed out). See Chuck Tryon's and Jim Emerson's responses to the piece, and Jonathan Rosenbaum's comments on the Chronicle post thread.

-- The new issue of Cineaste has about a dozen pieces available to read online, including a few "web exclusives."

-- Adrian Martin at Filmkrant: "For my part, I often return to a key article of 2004 by the young Brazilian critic Filipe Furtado which...begins with a fine gesture: it juxtaposes Kiarostami's Ten (2002) and McG's Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle (2003) while sharply lamenting, 'the fact that it seems impossible to talk about them together struck me as a shame.'

-- Zach Campbell at The Auteurs on the extras and supplements for Criterion's DVDs of "Rossellini's War Trilogy."

-- Kevin Lee puts up Jia Zhang-ke's 1998 essay "The Age of Amateur Cinema Will Return."

-- David Hudson looks ahead to several new films including Secret of the Kells; and a tad late but no less interesting for its delay: Doug Cummings at Film Journey has put up his list of favorite films of 2009.

-- Several new posts at prolific Jeffrey Sconce's blog, Ludic Despair.

-- Craig Keller posts notes on several new Masters of Cinema DVD releases.

-- The Self-Styled Siren mounts a defense of Sam Wood; and Glenn Kenny takes up auteurism in his "Topics/Questions/Exercises of the Week" column at The Auteurs.

-- Is there a harder-working film-blogger than Michael Guillen of The Evening Class? Recently: he interviewed James Benning.

-- A nice overview of the career of Sergei Parajanov by Ian Christie in the new Sight & Sound.

Journey of a Word

A New York Times article last week anointed Steve Jobs as an "auteur":

Apple represents the “auteur model of innovation,” observes John Kao, a consultant to corporations and governments on innovation. In the auteur model, he said, there is a tight connection between the personality of the project leader and what is created. Movies created by powerful directors, he says, are clear examples, from Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” to James Cameron’s “Avatar.”

At Apple, there is a similar link between the ultimate design-team leader, Mr. Jobs, and the products. From computers to smartphones, Apple products are known for being stylish, powerful and pleasing to use. [Apple's "design restraint"] is evident in Mr. Jobs’s personal taste. His black turtleneck, beltless blue jeans and running shoes are a signature look.

How far we've traveled in 50 years. When Truffaut, Godard and other Cahiers du Cinema critics originally formulated their "politique des auteurs," they meant for it to particularly apply to Hollywood filmmakers like Hitchcock, Hawks or Nicholas Ray who managed to imprint their films with a personal vision and stylistic signature while working within an industrial system of production. Crucial to this "politique" was a politics of resistance that was manifested in at least 3 ways:

(1) A select few Hollywood filmmakers resisting (through aesthetic tactics grouped under a sign called "mise-en-scene") the powerful standardizing forces of the Hollywood system.

(2) A corresponding gesture of resistance on the part of the French critics themselves: one aimed at the dominant and respectable homegrown "Tradition of Quality" cinema.

(3) These French critics also combating the notion that Hollywood cinema, because it was a mass-culture product, was not worth taking seriously as art.

In the 1960s, Peter Wollen resituated the notion of the auteur with the help of structuralism. (See the essay "The Auteur Theory" in his book Signs and Meaning in the Cinema.) This move could also be seen as a gesture of resistance -- in this case, against an overly romanticized notion of the auteur with near-mystical powers of individual genius. The auteur, for Wollen, became a site, an "unconscious catalyst," a collection of themes, oppositions and traits that could be read, then inventoried and grouped under a name within quotation marks: "Hitchcock," "Hawks," "Fuller," and so on.

The term went into decline, at least in the formal study of film, in the 1970s and 1980s, but it has seen a resurgence -- in a reconstructed form -- since the 1990s. It was around this time that "independent cinema," as an industry category, began to show sizable commercial promise. In the last 15 years or so, we've seen the industry (first independent, then the mainstream) seize the term and deploy it -- not with any kind of resistance in mind but, plain and simple, as a strategy for product differentiation. Directors -- independent or mainstream, at the multiplex or the film festival, talented or mediocre -- are indiscriminately dubbed "auteurs" in a move that automatically attempts to bestow upon them quality and distinction, a brand identity. Especially when wielded by the industry and the media, the word has been diluted to the point of insubstantiality. It represents little more than the commodification of a set of product attributes in search of a market niche. The original animating values of resistance and critical polemics have slowly disappeared from the word since its appropriation. What does remain vitally useful today (especially for cinephiles) is the reading strategy we call "auteurism."

Your thoughts about the evolution of the word "auteur" over the last few decades, and its usefulness today? I'd love to hear them.

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What was "independent cinema" before it became a commercially lucrative market segment about 15-20 years ago? We can find some answers in the fascinating 100-page catalogue [pdf] that accompanied a month-long, 150-film retrospective Independent America: New Film 1978-1988 at the Museum of the Moving Image in 1988. Jonathan Rosenbaum's essay for the catalogue, "Myths of the new narrative (and a few counter-suggestions)," can be found at his blog. Chief curator David Schwartz writes:

Before the commercial success of Sex, Lies, and Videotape and Pulp Fiction (and before the rise of home video), independent filmmakers made and showed their films in a world truly apart from Hollywood. To get their work seen, they would travel for months, with their 16mm film prints in tow, to colleges and media arts centers across the country. The commercial success of Sex, Lies, and Videotape marked the beginning of the end of this era. Last year’s big “independent” hit, Juno, was distributed by Fox Searchlight, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., and it made more money than any other Best Picture contender. Juno’s virtues were not in its artistic independence; but precisely the opposite ― it was a well-written, well-directed, well-performed, and utterly conventional movie.

Rosenbaum’s essay, and the entire Independent America film series, capture a time when the label “independent” was truly up for grabs, indicating a genuine alternative to mainstream commercial cinema.

New Year, New Venture

I'm teaching a film class for the first time. It's an undergraduate course titled "Philosophy and Film," and I'm doing it in partnership with my colleague Tanya Loughead, who is a Continental philosopher. Rather than being a course that uses films--or slivers of films--simply to illustrate philosophy, we've designed the course to accord equal time and importance to both areas. On the philosophy side, we'll read Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, De Beauvoir, Foucault, Butler, and Derrida. For film, we've picked about 10 well-known, canonical titles including Ray's Pather Panchali, Bresson's A Man Escaped, Sirk's All That Heaven Allows, Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats The Soul, Denis' Chocolat, Haynes' Safe, and Varda's The Gleaners and I. This being our maiden voyage into teaching cinema, we've chosen (conservatively) films with established reputations, films that have been amply discussed and written about. In addition to exams and papers, we've designed the course to include an in-class, small-group discussion component. My own primary role in the course will be to work to provide students with a basic grounding in film form, style and aesthetics. It promises to be an exciting--and unpredictable--venture.

We'd appreciate greatly any suggestions or advice from film teachers who happen to be reading. We are particularly curious about the experiences of others in using small-group discussions. But, really: any words of wisdom will be most welcome. Thanks!

* * *

The recent film I most want to see is Miguel Gomes' Our Beloved Month of August. An excerpt from Adrian Martin's essay on it in the new issue of Indian Auteur:

Is every important, progressive film of today a remake of Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie (1943)? Almost every Pedro Costa film, for instance, seems to return to it; and ghosts or zombies of every material sort seem to stalk or sleepwalk through the work of Albert Serra, Lisandro Alonso, Tsai Ming-liang, B?la Tarr … But Our Beloved Month of August takes us back to a very particular moment of Tourneur’s masterpiece: the scene in which the previously subservient, glad-handing, guitar-strumming, nightclub entertainer with the wonderful name of Sir Lancelot breaks his subaltern role and strides forward to gleefully accuse the drunken, guilty white man with his deceptively lilting ditty: “Woe is me / Shame and scandal in the family …” [...]

The great Czech-born philosopher Vil?m Flusser once mused on the difference between a screen wall and a solid wall ? for him, the convenient key (like so many mundane, everyday phenomena, of the kind that Gomes also alights upon) to understanding our civilisation and its discontents. The solid wall marks, for Flusser, a neurotic society ? a society of houses and thus ‘dark secrets’, of properties and possessions. And of folly, too, because the wall will always be razed, in the final instance, by the typhoon or the flood or the earthquake. But whereas the solid wall gathers and locks people in, the screen wall ? incarnated in history variously by the tent, the kite or the boating sail ? is “a place where people assemble and disperse, a calming of the wind”. It is the site for the “assembly of experience”; it is woven, and thus a network.

It is only a small step for Flusser to move from the physical, material kind of screen to the immaterial kind: the screen that receives projected images, or (increasingly) holds computerised, digital images. From the Persian carpet to the Renaissance oil painting, from cinema to new media art: images (and thus memories) are stored within the surface of this woven wall. A wall that reflects movement, but itself increasingly moves within the everyday world: when I was a little child and once dreamed of taking a cinema screen (complete with a movie still playing loudly and brightly upon it), folding it up and putting in my pocket so I could go for a stroll, I had no idea it was a predictive vision of the future, the mundane laptop computer or mobile phone.

* * *

A couple of links:

-- At the Guardian: "Haiti's only film school was destroyed in the earthquake, but the mini-movies that its students have made since are a living chronicle of the still-unfolding crisis and will serve as enduring testaments to the power of cinema to inform and move."

-- At Sight & Sound, several critics and curators pick (and display) their favorite online videos of 2009.

-- Senses of Cinema World Poll 2009.

The Film Criticism of Tim Hunter

(Thank you to sleuthing super-cinephile Adrian Martin!)

Tim Hunter is probably best known to film-lovers as the director of the classic teen drama River's Edge (1986). In addition to two other good youth-centered films (Tex, 1982; Sylvester, 1985) he notably co-wrote Jonathan Kaplan's Over the Edge (1979), a film that looks stronger with each passing year.

Hunter's father, the British screenwriter Ian McLellan Hunter, fronted for Dalton Trumbo on the original story for Roman Holiday, and was later himself blacklisted. The family went into exile in Mexico, and then to New York. Hunter grew up mostly around blacklistee kids. He then attended Harvard from 1964 to 1968. He ran a film society there, quickly developing into a precocious cinephile and budding filmmaker. American auteurism, spearheaded by Andrew Sarris, was in the air, and it was an exciting time to be a movie enthusiast. On the strength of several student films, Hunter was admitted to the AFI Center for Advanced Film Studies in the early '70s, where he studied alongside Terrence Malick, Paul Schrader and David Lynch.

At Harvard, Hunter was film critic and arts editor for the student publication, the Crimson. It turns out that 42 pieces he wrote for the publication (mostly in the mid-to-late '60s when he was an undergraduate student) are now available on the Internet. What a surprise: especially given his tender age, it's a collection of sharp, thoughtful and knowledgeable film criticism that also gives us a good sense of the film culture of the period. The most remarkable quality of these pieces, in my view, is their keen awareness of cinematic craftsmanship and style--the choices that filmmakers make (or the opportunities they miss), and how those formal choices work to make meaning in a film. Let me share a few excerpts.

Here Hunter expresses dissatisfaction with The Graduate:

Cinematically, the chief influence on Nichols remains the photographer of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Haskell Wexler, also cameraman on In The Heat of The Night. When the sun shines, Nichols points his camera at it; if a car approaches the camera, Nichols bounces the headlights off the lens; should a character jump into the water, Nichols makes the camera jump into the water; and as mood becomes essential, well, Nichols can always shoot it with a shaky hand-held camera.

The problem goes deeper than Nichols' consistent substitution of trickiness for style. A great director, Rosselini or Hitchcock, plans his film as a totality, understanding instinctively how each shot relates to the film as a whole; a competent director of narrative films like Michael Curtiz (Casablanca) plans shots with relation to the entire scene. Nichols, however, cannot plan past a given shot, and although a frame may contain an effective gimmick, camera angle, or background detail, the scenes themselves are purposeless and disconnected, largely due to awkward and self-conscious editing.

On why the first half of Torn Curtain is much better than the second:

The importance of the first half, however, cannot be overestimated, as it shows Hitchcock at a point of maximum control of his medium. Breaking new ground in color photography, he has filmed Torn Curtain without direct lighting. Instead, he has used reflected light, bounced off a white screen on the set. This reduces the color contrasts, putting much of the film into lush soft-focus, and almost eliminating unnecessary shadows.

He continues in Torn Curtain to experiment with visual romanticism: Julie Andrews is chastized by Newman on an airplane and as she lowers her head sadly, the camera while dissolving to the next scene begins to blur, as if tears were clouding the lens. Suddenly Hitchcock cuts sharply to the airplane door loudly opening, revealing the East Berlin airport. It is an unnerving return to reality, a visual refusal to give his heroine any means of escape.

He's bowled over by Chabrol's The Champagne Murders:

The implications of the finale are fathomable on a script level, then obscured by the zoom pull-backs that serve as the final shots. Chabrol makes no judgments at the ending and leaves the three in limbo, either to destroy one another or to form a new menage substituting Audran for Christine. The optics of a fast zoom shot are wondrous in that the audience is left with a feeling of simultaneous movement toward action and away from it. At the same time that we move to a higher vantage point with a wider angle of vision, we are jerked away from the luxury of watching action in sharp focus detail. The effect is one of ultimate suspension, in every sense of the word, and the greatness of the ending is a consequence of the perfect optical realization of attitude and theme.

On why Huston's The African Queen doesn't work:

The odyssey of cockney mechanic Allnut (Humphrey Bogart) and missionary Rose (Katharine Hepburn) down uncharted African waters suggests tense comedy-melodrama: they must, after all, evade rifle fire, skirt rapids, fix boilers, swat flies, brave swamps, remove leeches, blow up German cruisers, and fall in love. Regardless, Huston injects the action with mechanical uncaring: Allnut and Rose talk genially in medium close shot, one of them looks off-screen, says "Look!", and Huston cuts to what they see; he resorts to this lethargic montage in introducing enemy troops, the fort, all rapids, and the boat Louisa. The repetition of dramatic technique promotes an episodic quality that defeats a build-up of suspense or tension; there is no attempt to vary action and the middle third of The African Queen concentrates solely on rapids: a small rapid, a big rapid, and--out of the blue--a great big surprise rapid, spaced neatly at five minute intervals.

Ken Russell's Billion Dollar Brain makes a surprise appearance on his list of ten best films of 1967:

In a period marked increasingly by acceptance of lack of craft (witness the reception of Mike Nichols' mediocre The Graduate), Billion Dollar Brain stands out as a low-level case-book of cinematic efficiency. Russell's camerawork is frequently tantamount to cutting: he will start on a medium shot of Michael Caine, swing up to a sign on a building, down to people leaving the building, and back to Michael Caine--all so quickly we might have seen four separate shots...

And so does Otto Preminger's Hurry Sundown:

Bernard Shaw postulated that great playwrights by definition write great plays, and this is certainly the easiest way to defend Preminger's' Hurry Sundown, a difficult and dramatically unrewarding film. Like most of the great European directors who work in Hollywood, Preminger, takes little of America for granted, and his films are marked by a distinctly individual way of seeing the world. [...] In Preminger's films, there are no point-of-view shots; Preminger never cuts to what a character sees, instead putting both the watcher and the watched in the same shot. Though Preminger tends to ignore the dramatic world of his films, his camera defines the personality and function of a character by the amount of space placed around him, and by the way he is moved with relation to the frame. The more space Preminger has to work with, the more complex his films become, and predictably, Preminger is a master of wide-screen cinematic technique. At best, Preminger creates a network of conflicting spatial relationships from the many people in his best-seller-based sagas, and his films work on a level far transcending the dramatic material. From this specialized, perhaps perverse, point-of-view, Hurry Sundown is close to Preminger's best film.

In the last 20 years, Hunter has worked mostly in television, directing episodes of shows like Twin Peaks, Homicide, Law & Order, Mad Men, Dexter and Nip/Tuck.

* * *

David Hudson at The Auteurs is maintaining an updated post of Eric Rohmer tribute links.

Framework on Cinephilia, etc.

-- The new issue of the journal Framework has a cinephilia dossier edited by Jonathan Buschbaum and Elena Gorfinkel. I joined several others, including Jonathan Rosenbaum, Adrian Martin, Nicole Brenez, James Quandt, Zach Campbell, Chris Fujiwara and Laura Mulvey, in contributing a piece to it. For those with institutional access, the contents of the issue are available via Project Muse, Proquest, etc.

-- I haven't seen the film yet but Jim Emerson and Martin Anderson write about Avatar 3D causing eyestrain and headaches if the viewer looks away from the areas of the frame where the filmmaker wants you to look. Andr? Bazin famously believed in the value of the spectator assuming an active role by scanning the film frame and choosing what to pay attention to. Avatar seems to be mandating the very opposite--by punishing viewer choice and agency with physical pain to the eye and the head!

-- The new season of the Cinematheque in Toronto features one of the films I've most wanted to see: Joris Ivens's A Tale of the Wind (1988). But alas, it's scheduled on a night when I teach. The European Foundation has assembled a 5-DVD Joris Ivens set which is rumored, at some point, to get a US release.

-- There's a new issue of Screening the Past, in two sections--of essays and reviews. Also: Senses of Cinema has a new issue.

-- A refreshingly candid interview with Manohla Dargis on women and Hollywood. Also: a reflection by her in the NYT on moving-image entertainments of the digital age.

-- At The Auteurs: Inspired by Manny Farber, B. Kite puts up a "Petite Mannyfesto"; and Zach on the book Manny Farber proposed in the 1970s but never wrote.

-- Sukhdev Sandhu has a brief piece in The Telegraph on "the decline of American cinema" during the decade. (via Jonathan Rosenbaum.)

-- At Jonathan's place, book reviews from the archives: Noel Burch's Theory of Film Practice; Citizen Sarris: American Film Critic; Rudy Wurlitzer's Slow Fade; and Susan Sontag's Under the Sign of Saturn.

-- Two reviews of Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor's Gamer make me want to see it: Ignatiy Vishnevetsky and Steven Shaviro.

-- Michael Sicinski's latest reviews include the new films by Soderbergh, Herzog, Reitman and Tom Ford.

-- David Bordwell on why Akira Kurosawa was a "problematic auteur."

-- Jos? Neves has a list of films old and new (many unfamiliar and interesting) seen at the Lisbon Cinemateca during the year. (via Matthew Flanagan, who covers the London Film Festival in the new Senses issue.)

-- Several good posts at the prolific Jeffrey Sconce's blog, Ludic Despair.

Robin Wood, 1931-2009

Film criticism has lost one of its giants: Robin Wood has died. He was 78. Catherine Grant has assembled a wonderful collection of links as a tribute to him. Armen Svadjian summarizes Wood's career and interviews him in a piece from 2006. David Hudson collects links to reactions around the film blogosphere.

Wood was a prolific and impassioned critic with a broad range and deep convictions. He was an inspirational writer and yet he was sure to provoke occasional disagreement and exasperation in even his most loyal followers. Most notably, he declined to keep his criticism at a remove from his personal life. (A well-known instance is his piece "Responsibilities of a Gay Film Critic" [pdf].) When Hitchcock's Films Revisited was released in a revised edition in 2002, he included a 33-page preface that was pure autobiography. Joe McElhaney's review of the book is a wonderful example of the deeply felt, searching, and sometimes ambivalent response that Wood was often capable of provoking.

My one memorable encounter with Wood occurred about 10 years ago at a limited Hitchcock retrospective in Toronto. He wrote the essay accompanying the series, and appeared in person to lecture on Marnie immediately following the screening. I suspect most of the audience had not read him and didn't know who he was, but nearly everyone stayed--electrified--for an hour while he held forth on the film. At the end, someone asked him about the T-shirt he was wearing. He swelled his chest out and pointed to it so everyone could see. It had a picture of a crystal ball with a photograph of Barbara Harris on it. It was, he explained, a protest shirt: he was wearing it in defense of Family Plot, which had been left out of the retrospective.

In addition to the Hitchcock book, my own favorites among his work include his writings on Howard Hawks (the book he wrote in 1968, the more recent BFI Film Classics monograph on Rio Bravo), and his collection Personal Views. But really, the moment I put that down, I realize how unfair and inadequate my selections are. It's impossible to winnow down his enormous contributions to just a couple of titles.

So, your reflections on Wood and his work? Any favorites among his writings? Please feel free to share them.

Best of the Decade

Just as they did ten years ago, James Quandt and TIFF Cinematheque (n?e Cinematheque Ontario) have conducted a worldwide poll of film curators, archivists, historians and programmers for best ("most important") films of the decade (scroll down for the compiled list). It's a heady and wonderful list that militates unashamedly and polemically for film as art. There are 54 films on the list, and four of the top 5 are Asian. Here's the top 10:

1. Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand)
2. Platform (Jia Zhang-ke, China)
3. Still Life (Jia Zhang-ke, China)
4. Beau Travail (Claire Denis, France)
5. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-Wai, Hong Kong, China)
6. Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand)
7. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, Romania); and Werckmeister Harmonies (B?la Tarr, Hungary).
8. ?loge de l'amour (Jean-Luc Godard, France)
9. 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu)
10. Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico)

One of the purposes of such a list is to stimulate conversation and debate. So, let me make a few comments about it; I invite you to do the same.

-- Just 5 of the 54 are women-made films: Beau Travail and L'Intrus (Claire Denis); The Gleaners and I (Agnes Varda); The Headless Woman (Lucretia Martel); and Longing (Valeska Grisebach). Missing women filmmakers include Chantal Akerman, Catherine Breillat, and Jennifer Reeves (among many others).

-- The list privileges narrative, feature-length films. Avant-garde/experimental cinema is almost wholly absent (save Ken Jacobs, and Apichatpong, whose work straddles narrative and avant-garde modes). Thus, for instance: no James Benning, Peter Tscherkassky, Nathaniel Dorsky, Michael Robinson, or (again) Jennifer Reeves. Also: no short films except Guy Maddin's The Heart of the World.

-- The decade was marked by an explosion of the documentary form, which had a profound influence on fiction filmmaking and even made great incursions into the mainstream. But documentaries (except the Varda) go missing on the list.

-- By explicitly advancing the cause of art cinema, a poll such as this automatically marginalizes the aesthetic merits of commercial cinema. So, from Hollwyood to Bollywood, popular cinema barely registers here.

-- A personal aside: My own cinephilia peaked during this time. I attended TIFF throughout the decade, and caught most of the films on the list at the festival. There's exactly one film here that I didn't care for at the time: Roy Andersson's Songs from the Second Floor (2000). Time to give it a second look.

-- I wonder: are all filmmakers represented here by their most worthy work of this decade? There are two Tsai Ming-Liang films on this list but not What Time is it There? (2001), which, to my mind, is a key film in his oeuvre, a kind of summation of his themes and a compendium of his style. I have no quarrel whatsoever with Pedro Costa's Colossal Youth or In Vanda's Room (astounding films, both!) but I miss the inclusion of his Straub/Huillet documentary, Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? Finally, I wonder: is Lucretia Martel's The Headless Woman her best film--better than The Holy Girl or La Cienaga?

Let me conclude by adding a handful of personal choices that are not on the list: La Captive (Chantal Akerman, France), RR (James Benning, USA), Remembrance of Things to Come (Chris Marker, France), Man Without a Past (Aki Kaurismaki, Finland), and Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (Peter Tscherkassky, Austria).

I'd love to hear your reactions to the Cinematheque list--and your ideas for "best films of the decade" that don't appear on it.

A Handful of Reads

-- Cinematheque Ontario is doing a series, curated by Jean-Pierre Gorin, on essay films. Also: Andrew Tracy on essay films at Moving Image Source.

-- Glenn Kenny on Cinemascope at the Auteurs Notebook; David Bordwell is among those who weigh in after the post.

-- Bordwell: on the sexual use of bedposts in movies; on Shaw Brothers widescreen cinema; and on four little-known but interesting Hollywood films from 1933.

-- Dave Kehr in the NYT: two horror film articles (one and two); on new Sirk and Bu?uel DVDs; and on Robert Zemeckis' A Christmas Carol. (Also: Dan North on the Zemeckis.)

-- From the Viennale, Gabe Klinger reflects on film festivals. Also: Gabe on the AFI Fest.

-- Jonathan Rosenbaum: on "recycled cinema" (Rivette's Divertimento and Stone's Natural Born Killers); a dialogue between Jonathan and Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa on Kiarostami's Shirin; on Resnais and Marker's Statues Don't Die; and on his favorite Ford film, The Sun Shines Bright (1953), which I've never seen but just found online in a used VHS copy.

-- An autodidact's joy: "250 Free Courses from Top Universities," all online.

-- Catherine Grant: links to some introductions to film studies; a collection of studies of the close-up; and writings in phenomenological film and media studies.

-- Chris Cagle evaluates several currently used film history textbooks.

-- Michael Guillen assembles a large post of Robert Beavers' comments to audiences during the filmmaker's recent 2-week residency in San Francisco.

-- Ben Sachs relates Michael Mann to 19th century painting at The Auteurs Notebook.

-- Michael Anderson at Tativille offers an essay on the "taxonomy of the 360-degree panorama."

-- Michael Byrne at The Nation on the films of Dusan Makavejev.

-- Pedro Costa discusses his Jeanne Balibar documentary, Ne Change Rien, with Scott Foundas: “When the Lumi?re brothers did a shot, the movement inside the shot is almost impossible to re-create today [...] I am always very afraid when I see a little dog crossing the street in a Lumi?re brothers film, afraid it’s going to be crushed by a Model T. It’s something very concrete, this menace. Then Chaplin did the same thing consciously, and Stroheim took it further. We could see so many things in those films that, today, you only see in some Filipino or Chinese films, or sometimes on TV, in some documentaries. Everything beautiful and everything dangerous and everything that has to do with society disappeared a little bit from films. I’m becoming very reactionary, but Straub would say you have to go back to the past to push things forward.”

-- Newly discovered blog: Matthew Holtmeier's Cinema Without Organs.

pic: Chris Marker's Sans Soleil (1983), in Jean-Pierre Gorin and Cinematheque Ontario's essay film series.

Lines of Inspiration: Popular Cinema to Art Cinema

One of the best and most fascinating things about cinema is the tension between its status as art and its status as industry. There is nothing new about this idea. But the way we construct the categories of 'popular cinema' and 'art cinema'--in starkly opposing fashion--holds them further apart than they really are or should be. It's good to be reminded of this on a regular basis.

So, my ears always perk up when I hear art filmmakers claim popular filmmakers as inspirations and influences. Let me relate a recent instance. Last month, of the 25 or so films I caught at the Toronto International Film Festival, the most memorable was To Die Like A Man, by Portuguese director Jo?o Pedro Rodrigues.

To Die Like A Man is a rich but challenging film about an aging drag queen/cabaret singer on the brink of a sex change operation. She has volatile and difficult relationships with both her junkie lover and her young, psychologically unstable son. The film is challenging because it never settles into a single comfortable narrative mode; it's forever shape-shifting. At various points, it becomes: melodrama, "queer realism," a musical with songs (but frequently without musical accompaniment!), a Wizard-of-Ozian fantasy, a breathtaking ode to silent cinema, and (in one brilliant moment) a medical documentary in which a doctor demonstrates a sex change operation using origami.

But here's the important thing: These shifts don't resemble the collage and pastiche practices that we sometimes associate with a certain kind of popular "postmodern cinema". To Die Like A Man presents itself to us, with no confusion, as an art film.

In the Q&A after the screening, someone asked Rodrigues about the film's unusual opening, resembling a war movie, in which a squad of soldiers moves through a forest in the darkness. It was inspired, he answered to everyone's surprise, by Raoul Walsh's Objective, Burma! He added that he screened Douglas Sirk films for the cast during production. I would not have dreamed, without being told, that this film held classic Hollywood as an important forebear.

This isn't an isolated, freak example. In 1995 the journal Projections, in collaboration with Positif, devoted an issue ("Film-makers on Film-making") to mark the one-hundredth anniversary of cinema. In this issue, each filmmaker contributes an essay, big or small, devoted to her or his signal inspirations in cinema. The number of art filmmakers choosing to speak about popular films or filmmakers is eye-opening.

Chris Marker turns in an impassioned 8-page essay on his all-time favorite film, Vertigo. Catherine Breillat performs an insightful analysis of Elia Kazan's Baby Doll, which affected her powerfully and spurred her to write 36 Fillette. And arch-modernist Greek director Theo Angelopoulos writes of growing older and refashioning his personal history of cinema in the form of fragments: a few faces, gestures, shots, and words. Turns out they all belong to popular cinema:

The cry 'I don't want to die!' in Michael Curtiz's Angels With Dirty Faces; Orson Welles' damaged face in Touch of Evil; the young Irish girl dancing with Henry Fonda in My Darling Clementine; Ingrid Bergman's face full of love in Notorious; Peter Lorre's monotonous whistling in M; these short moments, shots cut out of the films they belong to, make up the one film which marked me, the film which still does.

One the best accounts comes from Raul R?iz. He tells the story of seeing Edgar G. Ulmer's The Black Cat for the first time, and experiencing an utter revelation: here was a film that was an unconscious inspiration, a proto-R?izian narrative unbeknownst to him.

Several times I had been linked with Edgar G. Ulmer and I usually disagreed [...] People as different as J?r?me Prieur, John Zorn and J. Rosenbaum had compared me to him. Now at last recognition came to me, and as in an old melodrama, I exclaimed: "Father!' and he replied 'My son!'

For at least twenty of my films find their source in The Black Cat. Each scene in the film is transformed, and completed, into one of mine.

A couple more examples. Jonathan Rosenbaum writes about Straub's admiration for Chaplin:

Over a decade ago, Jean-Marie Straub made this startling observation: “A lot of people think that Eisenstein is the greatest editor, because he has some theories about it, but this is not true. Chaplin was greater, I think, in editing, only it is not so obvious. Chaplin was more precise than Eisenstein, and the man after Chaplin who is the most precise is surely Rivette.”

What Straub had in mind, I think, is Chaplin’s and Rivette’s ability to edit in relation to content: emotional content, narrative content, performance content. For both directors, editing is a precise answer to the question of what a particular shot’s meaning is?where this meaning begins and where it ends.

Finally, Pedro Costa's love for Jacques Tourneur is well-known, and is also evident in his first feature, O Sangue.

So, I wonder: can we collect some examples here of art filmmakers who have held up popular cinema as an important inspiration or influence?

pic: Boris Karloff in Edgar Ulmer's The Black Cat (1934). Also: here are two valuable interviews with Jo?o Pedro Rodrigues, by Michael Guillen and Dennis Lim.

Catching up on Interweb Reading

I spent a week at the Toronto film festival--more on that in a post coming up next week--and then came down with 'festival exhaustion'. Now I've now been catching up on all the Internet movie reading I missed in the last few weeks. Let me collect some of it here:

-- At Slow TV, a terrific debate on the new Tarantino film featuring Adrian Martin and three other critics/scholars.

-- Zach Campbell: "Mad Men is good, but it's not even close to Tashlin's critiques. It remains exquisitely tasteful, on the surface, and ultimately middlebrow. Therein lie a few of the problems." Also: Zach on Inglourious Basterds: "Quentin Tarantino has an incredibly unphilosophical mind, and this is both his strength and his problem. Not even in his most mature work (Jackie Brown) does he really question anything. The root of his cinema is pleasure, a deeply tactile, visceral, and memory-based pleasure for which, presumably, there are no limits worth abiding (in quantity or quality)."

-- Several pieces at Jonathan Rosenbaum's: Sally Potter's The Gold Diggers (that appeared in Camera Obscura); Fatal Attraction ("Fear of Feminism"); Paris Journal for Film Comment (1971) on Demy, Pollet, Franju, Tati and Rivette; two Alan Rudolph films, Remember My Name and Mortal Thoughts.

-- New issues of: Cinema Scope; Senses of Cinema; Film Quarterly.

-- From the Toronto International Film Festival: Darren Hughes at Long Pauses; Richard Porton at Cineaste; B. Ruby Rich at SF360; Also: David Hudson collects a master index of TIFF reviews at The Auteurs.

-- Recent Dave Kehr writing in the NYT DVD column: "Tradition of Quality" films; Jacques Demy's Model Shop, Nikkatsu Noir; The Wizard of Oz.

-- A wealth of links from the valuable, indefatigable Catherine Grant, including this post on classical cinema.

-- Igantiy Vishnevetsky is among the most thoughtful of today's film bloggers. Here, at his site, Sounds, Images, are links to his recent writings and posts.

-- At Moving Image Source: Kevin Lee's two-part essay on Chinese cinema of the Cultural Revolution; Joshua Land on "The female Christ figures of Lars von Trier's films"; Jonathan Rosenbaum on Manny Farber.

-- Jeffrey Sconce on the Rotten Tomatoes' "worst of the worst" films of the decade.

-- Frieze runs a series in which artists and filmmakers talk about films that are important to them. Latest in the series is Tacita Dean; other entries can be found in the sidebar.

-- Matthew Flanagan's Landscape Suicide is one of the most original and stimulating places in the film blogosphere. See this recent post on forests.

-- David Bordwell on summer movies: one, and two.

-- Sally Potter's Rage is the first film made for cell-phone release. Here's an interview with Potter.

-- Marc Raymond on melodrama in Korean cinema.

-- Danny Kasman's review makes me eager to see the new Rivette film.

-- At Dennis Cooper's: David Ehrenstein presents "Rainer Werner Fassbinder Day."

-- Newly discovered blogs: the Indian site The Edit Room (at the Wide Screen Journal); Putney Debater, run by filmmaker/scholar Michael Chanan; Iranian cinephile Ehsan Khoshbakht's Notes on Cinematograph.

Any other recent, good reading you'd like to recommend? Please leave a link in the comments.

For Nika, For Alexis

It was a tragic week: two valuable, inspiring figures of film culture, cinephilia and film criticism are with us no longer. Below, Adrian Martin pens a moving tribute to them. -- Girish.

* * *

For Nika, For Alexis

Adrian Martin

There are some people you like straight away. Nika Bohinc, editor of the Slovenian magazine Ekran for several years, was one of these people. I first met her in July 2007, at a film event in Zagreb inspired by Movie Mutations, the book I co-edited with Jonathan Rosenbaum. She had made the trip from Ljubljana with several of her comrades ? just one sign of the enormous dedication of Slovenia’s current generation of intellectual cinephiles. Nika liked the way I introduced films (by Ruiz and Garrel), and so ? impulsively, empathetically, definitely, the way she seemed to decide so many things in her life and work ? I quickly became part of her plan for a Summer School on Independent Cinema, held as part of the Ljubljana International Film Festival three months later.

I shall never forget the moment I arrived at the Festival centre. I looked up from the registration desk and saw Nika’s face ? with that warm, grateful, complicit, cheeky smile I came to know well. Her instant embrace told me that mere comradeship was over; friendship had begun. Indeed, the entire Summer School turned out to be organised around Nika’s friends: Christoph Huber, Neil Young, Gabe Klinger, an unlikely coalition of critics from Austria, UK, Australia and USA. Plus one other key speaker whose relationship to Nika had moved past friendship: Alexis Tioseco, raised in Canada, resident of the Philippines. Nika told me, in a private moment outside a club, about her excitement, mixed with nervousness, about leaving Slovenia to live with Alexis in the Philippines.

Nika, almost 30, and Alexis, 28, are dead ? victims of a gruesome murder in Manila on September 1. Shot in the doorway of their house by thieves, their death resonates eerily with the recent short film, Butterflies Have No Memories, by Lav Diaz ? one of the Philippine filmmakers tirelessly championed and promoted by Alexis. Where Nika felt only intermittent closeness to her national cinema ? she once boasted to me how she had managed to feature a certain new Slovenian release in Ekran without betraying her low editorial opinion of it ? Alexis had taken up the New Philippine Cinema, indeed Southeast Asian cinema as whole, as his cause. The recognition that Philippine cinema has gained over the past few years belongs to filmmakers such as Diaz, Raya Martin, Khavn De La Cruz and Sherad Anthony Sanchez ? but it also belongs to Alexis, who was the fervent critical spokesman for that movement. I can look up from my computer right now and, like many cinephiles around the world, see all the DVD copies of key Philippine films, new or old (but all independent) that Alexis sent to me.

I had first heard from Alexis, via email, in 2004. I spotted him in the audience a year later, in Singapore, at a conference on Hou Hsiao-hsien: like Nika, he was a committed follower of film culture, wherever it took him. Alexis was harder to get to know than Nika: he had a quiet, reserved, excessively polite side. But he was also a joker, with a fine antenna for gossip, and a matter-of-fact willingness to tell you if you had got something wrong. I chided him when, in 2005, he launched his invaluable website Criticine by citing Olaf M?ller’s hysterical attack on Movie Mutations (in a pre-Nika issue of Ekran!). But Alexis, in fact, made Olaf’s point made more eloquently and rightly: “It is necessary that the written word of writers native to a country’s cinema reach the world at large, for their insights ? that can only be gleaned from one that lives and breathes the history, culture, and air of the work’s origin ? is important. Cinema must be dialogue.”

In a public letter that has been widely distributed on the Internet since that tragic day, Alexis declared to Nika: “The first impulse of any good film critic, and to this I think you would agree, must be of love. To be moved enough to want to share their affection for a particular work or to relate their experience so that others may be curious. This is why criticism, teaching, and curating or programming, in an ideal sense, must all go hand in hand.” Both of them lived by that creed.

Both of them too, spent the short span of their adult lives fighting against the film bureaucracies of their respective countries ? overbearing in the Slovenian instance, indifferent in the Philippine case. They experienced disillusionment with their myopic, local, national film cultures (as do we all), but found solace in a wider world, a fragile community of like-minds and soul-siblings discovered through Film Festivals, publishing and the Internet. Ekran, under Nika’s guidance, pursued this fine ‘line of flight’ ? her final issue (February-March 2009), for instance, heralded Miguel Gomes’ Our Beloved Month of August, a Portuguese film she (like me) dearly loved, on its front cover. In 2007, Nika and I brainstormed a project, somewhere between a magazine and a website: we would ask people from all over the world to write about, precisely, the indescribably beautiful bit of their local cinema which had never been imported onto the Festival or art-event circuit, the precious part that resisted such easy ‘translation’ or commodification. The closest Nika came to this dream was the blog page Ekran Untranslated; a glance at the people, stories and cultural experiences represented in these ‘postcards’ from critics and filmmakers, printed in their original languages, will give you a sense of the internationalist dream she lived. And her unforgettably poignant union with Alexis was another part of the same dream, extended into the most intimate realm of love.

Alexis, I am proud to say, picked up on a quotation I fondly recycled in Ljubljana: Godard’s remark that cinema is “the goodwill for a meeting” ? to which JLG added, “it is the love of ourselves on earth”. Cinema must be dialogue, and it must be love. I learnt this, more deeply than I realised, from Nika and Alexis.

? Adrian Martin September 2009

* * *

I never met Nika or Alexis face to face but knew them through correspondence, the blogosphere, and Facebook. Their warmth and generosity, and the way in which they incarnated for us the powerful spirit of global cinephilia, were ever palpable in my exchanges with them. Their inspiration will live a long life inside of us.

Let me collect here a few of the tributes and reflections that have appeared in the last few days: Gabe Klinger at the Auteurs; Jonathan Rosenbaum; Noel Vera at Critic After Dark; Glenn Kenny at The Auteurs; Jason Sanders at Filmmaker; Raymond Phathanavirangoon at TIFF; Kim Voynar at Movie City News.

Please feel welcome to share any reminiscences or thoughts of Nika and Alexis here. Also, please feel free to post links to any tributes if you like. Perhaps we can build Nika and Alexis a small 'virtual memorial' here.

Photo: Jason Sanders at Filmmaker

TIFF 2009 Films

The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) has posted its entire film list. Here it is, at Darren's TIFF blog, 1st Thursday. As in previous years, I expect to spend a week at the festival, driving back in between to teach my classes.

The avant-garde program, Wavelengths, looks very strong, with new films by Ben Russell, Michael Snow, Jean-Luc Godard, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Jean-Marie Straub, Ernie Gehr, Lisandro Alonso, Harun Farocki, Heinz Emigholz, Jim Jennings, and others.

In addition, I'm targeting the following films:

White Material (Claire Denis), Les Herbes Folles (Alain Resnais), Face (Tsai Ming-liang), Police, Adjective (Corneliu Porumboiu), Independencia (Raya Martin), Irene (Alain Cavalier), La Danse: Le Ballet de l’Opera de Paris (Frederick Wiseman), Women Without Men (Shirin Neshat), The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke), Hadewijch (Bruno Dumont), Like You Know It All (Hong Sang-soo), Lourdes (Jessica Hausner), The Time that Remains (Elia Suleiman), Between Two Worlds (Vimukthi Jayasundara), A Prophet (Jacques Audiard), Air Doll (Hirokazu Kore-eda), Antichrist (Lars von Trier), Bright Star (Jane Campion), The Window (Buddhadeb Dasgupta), Broken Embraces (Pedro Almod?var), Enter the Void (Gaspar No?), Mother (Bong Joon-ho), Melody for a Street Organ (Kira Muratova), Le P?re de mes Enfants (Mia Hansen-L?ve), La Donation (Bernard ?mond), Hotel Atl?ntico (Suzana Amaral), Vincere (Marco Bellocchio), L'Enfer de Henri-Georges Clouzot (Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea), Capitalism: A Love Story (Michael Moore), The Hole (Joe Dante), Vengeance (Johnnie To), Nymph (Pen-Ek Ratanaruang), To Die Like a Man (Joao Pedro Rodrigues), and A History of Israeli Cinema (Raphael Nadjari).

Any thoughts, suggestions or recommendations of films or filmmakers on the TIFF film-list? I'd be most eager to hear them. Thank you!

A Few Links

-- Jonathan Rosenbaum's "A la recherche de Luc Moullet: 25 Propositions" is a 1977 piece that will appear in his upcoming book Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia, out from University of Chicago Press next year. Also: there are several interesting entries in his Notes section.

-- Two recent blog discoveries: Jeffrey Sconce's Ludic Despair; and Damon Smith's The Hands of Bresson.

-- Dennis Cozzalio has a lengthy interview with Joe Dante.

-- The New York Film Festival has announced its lineup; it includes new films by Resnais, Denis, Rivette, Breillat, Costa, Almodovar, von Trier, Oliveira, Haneke, etc.

-- Lots of new reading at The Auteurs, including Ignatiy Vishnevetsky on D.W. Griffith (who is "always modern"); David Cairns on Nicholas Ray's You Can't Go Home Again; and a roundtable on Alejandro Adams' Canary with Ignatiy, Michael Sicinski, Craig Keller and Dave Macdougall.

-- Dave Kehr on the 1986 film Combat Shock ("one uncompromising picture, a movie so eccentric and so relentless that no mere profit motive could possibly explain it.")

-- Doug Cummings provides illuminating excerpts from Hayao Miyazaki's Starting Point: 1979-1996, a compendium of Miyazaki’s writings and conversations.

-- Dana Polan at Moving Image Source on "The generous pedagogy of Julia Child and The French Chef."

-- I've been reading, with great pleasure, the new collection Vincente Minnelli: The Art of Entertainment, edited by Joe McElhaney.

Any other web reading you'd like to recommend? Please feel free to suggest in the comments.

pic: Alain Resnais' latest, Les Herbes Folles, is playing at the New York and Toronto film festivals, and just got picked up by Sony for US distribution.