Repertory film is a hard sell on campus, but last night I watched an advance screener for a multi-layered, black-and-white, French-Italian co-production that’s being re-released by Oscilloscope Pictures next month – one that  reminded me (in part) of my college days, and hopefully it will still connect with both students and general audiences today. The Law (La Loi, 1959), was directed by Jules Dassin just a few years after his celebrated Rififi, and stars Gina Lollobrigida and Marcello Mastroianni. Although the people involved are all adults, the story still pivots around something very common on any campus: lots of lusty emotions, drama, and booze. But it also goes further. READ MORE

In recent years the exciting world of Bollywood cinema has been slowly gaining the interest and admiration of western audiences. The popularity of Danny Boyle’s Oscar winning film SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE (2008) along with the rising interest in Indian actors like the handsome Naveen Andrews (LOST, BRIDE & PREJUDICE, THE ENGLISH PATIENT, BOMBAY BOYS, etc.) seems to have gained Bollywood movies a larger American audience that is willing to put aside cultural differences and embrace the many pleasures of Bollywood cinema. And one of the most wonderful aspects of Bollywood cinema is the colorful movie posters created to advertise each film.

Many of the movie posters made for modern films in India are now produced with digital technology but for over 70 years Indian artists hand-painted their designs. These provocative works of art became an important part of the country’s urban landscape and transformed the city streets into art galleries that promised the possibility of romance and adventure to millions of people. The Indian people love movies with an almost manic intensity and India releases more films every year than any other country in the world. The beautiful and stylized posters that advertise Bollywood films are an expression of India’s culture and rich history.

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Like many people, I first fell in love with Jean Paul Belmondo while watching BREATHLESS (1960). To this day I can remember the exact moment when he won my affection. It happened during a lengthy scene between Belmondo and his beautiful costar Jean Seberg that takes place in a hotel room. After turning a poster into a makeshift telescope Seberg looks through it to see Jean-Paul Belmondo starring back at her. He’s shirtless and a bit disheveled. A half-smoked cigarette rests between his fingers and his mouth appears to be on the verge of a smile. His eyes are penetrating and disarming. Seberg’s character doesn’t say a word but her silence seems telling. It’s easy to assume that she’s surprised by how his steady stare made her feel and so was I. At that moment Belmondo captured a little piece of my heart forever.

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Let’s see if I can describe the disquieting effect of The Unfinished Dance adequately for those who haven’t been exposed to it. The formula for The Unfinished Dance (1947-Henry Koster), a rarely seen film that will be aired at 1:15pm on January 15th, is a heady brew, composed of mysterious elements blended from this:

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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