When I realized that both Method Acting and the Shadows of Russia were being explored on Monday and Wednesday nights respectively for the next few weeks on TCM, all I could think was:

“Why, oh, why, isn’t character actor Vladimir Sokoloff around to sit down with Robert Osborne for a chin wag on these two fascinating topics?”

Such is our fate. As latter day observers of both cultural phenomena, we may ponder the origins of The Method as well as the sometimes wondrous (and just plain odd) movies that emerged from American perceptions of Russian history in the 20th century.

For Sokoloff, these topics were part of his life. He had trained at the Moscow Art Theater as a youth, seen the Russian Revolution sweep the world he’d grown up in aside,  become a prominent actor in German silents during the Weimar years, moved on to a career in France when the Nazis came to power, and finally landed on his agile feet in America.

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There are thousands of film festivals out there, and most of them are small D.I.Y. affairs that lean heavily on digital projection and extremely low-budget projects that happily take up any host that will notice them. And that’s fine. But I’ve also seen an abuse of local media by some of these overzealous festival promoters who know that the over-worked and harried journalists at shrinking newspapers often times won’t question their outrageous claims at being the “Cannes of the (your location here)” or other such nonsensical hyperbole. So it’s with great pleasure that I announce the return of a “reel” film festival that’s been around for several decades and that ambitiously brings in ten days of very eclectic programming, most of which is still on 35mm film: The 2009 Starz Denver Film Festival (Nov. 12 – 22). READ MORE

Four faces of Jean-Luc Godard,  (L-R from 1968, 1970, 1979, and 1980) taken from the tantalizing DVD artifact “JLG in USA”, which accompanies the March/April edition of The Believer (Full Disclosure: Don’t hold it against it the magazine, but my wife and I wrote a brief article in the issue). Compiled by BAM programmer and Film Desk founder Jacob Perlin, it contains four short films of interviews, lectures, and home movies recorded at the cusp of Godard’s experimental video work in the early 70s with the Dziga Vertov Group and beyond, through his return to more personal art films with Every Man for Himself in 1980. This period is still the least understood in his career, and the few films I’ve seen from his seventies work, Ici et Ailleurs (1976) and Numero Deux (1975), are both extraordinary and demanding. For those like myself eager for further info into this part of his career, it’s a fascinating and surprisingly moving look at a man going through artistic and (one assumes) personal upheaval.

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35 Shots of Rum begins inside of a commuter train, the industrial landscape zooming past the conductor’s front window. Then there is a cut to an off-duty transit worker, Lionel (Alex Descas), smoking a cigarette by the tracks.  Director Claire Denis repeats this contrast throughout the opening sequence,  back and forth between the gleaming locomotive and Descas’ impassive face. Soon his daughter Josephine (Mati Diop) enters the montage, an exhausted rush-hour passenger on the way home.  This simple, wordless sequence sets up the central dynamic of the film: Josephine’s drift into adulthood delayed by the centripetal force of family comforts, located in the reassuring solidity of her father and their apartment.

Screened as part of Film at Lincoln Center’s Rendez-Vouz with French Cinema, it is another beautifully textured work from Denis, her first fiction feature since L’intrus (2004). 35 Shots of Rum is a return to a more linear form of storytelling after L’intrus‘ narrative refusal, which used an associative whirl of images inspired by continental philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy (you can read my former academic self’s thoughts on this remarkable film in Senses of Cinema). Denis turned to the family drama because of Yasujiro Ozu and her mother. As she told Robert Davis of Daily Plastic:

it’s the story of my grandfather and my mother. She was raised by her father. And once I took her to see a retrospective of Ozu, and she really had a sort of shock to see that film [Late Spring]. That was maybe ten, fifteen years ago. I told her, “Maybe, once, I will try to make a film like that for you.”

This film is a promise fulfilled, a worthy successor to Ozu’s placid genius and a delicately embossed love letter from daughter to mother. READ MORE

As a classic cinema fan, what image of the French Resistance in World War II clings to your imagination? Is it a poised man in an impeccable white suit sipping a champagne cocktail at a bar in Casablanca while provoking others to sing La Marseillaise louder, drowning out the German boors in the corner?  Or maybe we think of a slinky mademoiselle on a bicycle distracting an obtuse Nazi sentry from his duties, while her compatriots blow up a German train.

In any case, I was reminded this week that the French understanding of this painful period of their history is still evolving, as proved in 2006 when Rialto Pictures released Jean-Pierre Melville’s L’Armée des Ombres (1969) in the U.S.,  37 years after its production. Why so late on the distribution?  While receiving qualified acceptance by the French public at the time of its original release, Army of Shadows was apparently regarded as “out of step” by American distributors in the era.

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For me, and many other film history students, Chris Marker’s short film La Jetée (1962), a film about post-nuclear war and time travel told via a photo-montage, along with his poetic ruminations on culture, memory, and travel in Sans Soleil (1982), were both required viewing. La Jetée got a bit more traction when it later inspired Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys (1995), but… READ MORE

While doing research for last week’s Disney Blogathon, I ran across several commentary lists and blog posts attacking Disney films for being “anti-Mom” because some of the studio’s notable movies feature young protagonists who are orphans or who lose their mothers. The idea that these viewers could arrive at such a superficial and misguided subtext of the films boggled my mind and made me believe more than ever that media literacy should be a required part of school curriculums. Media literacy teaches young viewers not only to be wary of the manipulative power of media but also how to interpret and examine movies in ways that are informative and productive. Of course, there are many ways to look at any given film, and aspects of certain films are deliberately ambiguous, which makes key scenes, events and characters open to debate, but interpretation should involve more than personal opinion. Highly speculative interpretations based on nothing but personal opinion are just confusing and inaccurate. 

While I was reading some of the anti-Mom rants, the French New Wave classic The 400 Blows popped into my mind, because of its thoroughly unsentimental depiction of motherhood. I thought if these viewers think Dumbo is anti-Mom, they would feint dead away if they were to watch The 400 Blows. Then, as coincidence would have it, I discovered that TCM is showing Francois Truffaut’s masterwork at the end of this week. I highly recommend this wonderful film, even if you have seen it several times before, but be prepared to time-shift with your home-recording devices because The 400 Blows airs on December 21 at 3:34am EST.  READ MORE

As usual, I come to praise all things passé today.

Have you made your last run to the store for that much needed carrot, bottle of bubbly, or pearl onion? If not, maybe, like me, you’ll find that mulling over what’s really needed makes you believe you’ll get by without it by now–especially since the rising crescendo of anxious shoppers may peak to a grumpy roar by 3 o’clock today, when people are making one more resentment-filled return to the market. I’ve decided to forgo the hunt for fresh sage and to review a few of those intangibles in my mental pantry today.

Oprah and her myriad acolytes discovered the power of being grateful some time ago, though I’m always a bit reluctant to be a “joiner”. Many of the unenlightened, like me, distracted by the sometimes overwhelming business of keeping our proverbial heads above water, sometimes forget what we’re grateful for in this world. Though I don’t fill my days with kvetching, it wouldn’t hurt to make a point of occasionally taking stock, and noting what has been good about the last year, at least cinematically.  As we try to find ways to express our gratitude for what we have in the here and now, as well as our personal memories, I thought I’d dog it this week and throw out an eclectic and personal list of a few things great and small that make me grateful for classic movies, especially since I recently realized I’ve been pushing a verb up against a noun here at this blog for one year now:

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I recently saw a new 35mm print of Albert Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon (Le Ballon rouge, 1956), and followed that with a screening of Flight of the Red Balloon (Le Voyage du ballon rouge, 2007), by Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien. The former short film (it’s 34-minutes-long) was an obligatory viewing experience for children growing up in the sixties and seventies, making it, according to Michael Koresky (who wrote the essay in the DVD booklet) “the largest-selling non-theatrical print in American history.” By contrast, the latter feature (113-minutes-long) had a limited release beyond the festival circuit and has only been seen by a few arthouse faithful. READ MORE