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Alain Resnais' Night and Fog (1955) is perhaps the first true "Holocaust" documentary and may yet still be the finest. Dubbed by Francois Truffaut the "greatest movie ever made," one of its most striking accomplishments is its length; a mere 31 minutes. The visual elements; black-and-white stock footage of atrocities, blended with Resnais' contemporaneous color camerawork of Auschwitz in ruins, coupled with a mordant commentary written by Jean Cayrol, conspires to deliver a devastating essay on the horrors of mankind. Criterion's presentation also isolates Hanns Eisler's immensely beautiful music score, which is poetic and elegiac and perfectly complementary.
Criterion also releases Alain Resnais' first feature Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) which builds upon his preoccupations of war and its aftermath by placing an interracial love story in the heart of the shattered city. Just as Night and Fog revisited the Holocaust a mere decade after it happened, the Hiroshima of Resnais' film is vividly alive in its despair and desire to heal the devastation heaped upon it. Emmanuelle Riva is captivatingly tragic as the French woman of "dubious" morals, whose extra-marital affair with a solemn young Japanese businessman is delineated across a span of 24 hours. Prefacing his later works of dense impenetrability like Last Year at Marienbad (1961), Hiroshima unfolds formally, with its precise framing and staging integral to the doomed allegory. Criterion's disc adds some nice features; an (as usual) expert and informed audio commentary by Peter Cowie, excerpts from Marguerite Duras' screenplay, an isolated music and effects track (Giovanni Fusco's score is terrific) and a very detailed 32-page booklet.
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One of the world's greatest filmmakers, Vittorio De Sica, sees two of his classics issued by Criterion this month as well: Umberto D (1952), a masterpiece of Italy's neorealist period, and Terminal Station a.k.a. Indiscretion of an American Wife (1954). Umberto D is a heartbreaking study of loneliness and penury during Italy's postwar recovery. With his only companion, a small dog, Umberto ekes out a living in an increasingly alienated and alienating environment. One of the disc's treasures is a recent 55-minute documentary on De Sica entitled That's Life. Terminal Station is a rare opportunity to compare the director's cut with the better-known international version Indiscretion. Butchered by producer David O. Selznick after poor test screenings, Indiscretion runs barely more than an hour! Supplemented by a preposterous short, this disastrous hybrid found no admirers. De Sica's original runs 90 minutes and although a heated melodrama, this doomed love affair between a married American woman (Jennifer Jones) and an Italian teacher (Montgomery Clift) has some real moments to savor. Entirely set in the station while waiting for her exit train, Jennifer Jones endures wild emotional swings while the teeming life of a busy Rome terminal seethes all around her. Historian Leonard Leff places the whole failed enterprise in context in his commentary, and is very well worth seeking out.
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If you go to www.davidlynch.com you'll find a very elegantly designed site. Upon further exploration, navigating round to the shopping section, you'll be able to purchase for yourself a rare treat. The director has released, under his own auspices, a superb DVD of his seminal breakthrough film, Eraserhead. Shot over a period of four years, 1972-76, and finally experiencing limited exhibition in 1977, this strange, beautiful, black-and-white dream of loneliness, confusion, encroaching mechanization and the terrors of being a parent, is as potent now as it ever has been. Eraserhead has quite simply never looked this good in home video form, and the quirky adventures of the hapless Henry Spencer (John Nance) literally leap out of the screen at you. Mastered from the finest available materials, Eraserhead's stark images and brilliant sound design are fantastically sharp. In addition, David Lynch talks on camera for a full 90 minutes about the film's long gestation and realization in the refined Beverly Hills environment of the AFI's Center for Advanced Film Studies, a program which Lynch had joined in 1970. The chat is remarkably candid and informative, revealing much of the director's methodology and penchant for eccentricity. Obviously comfortable, Lynch's reticence recedes and this interview is a marvelous companion piece to the film. The DVD itself comes packaged in a box design that makes you wonder if the director labored over the choice of cardboard and color, as well as supervising the posting and packing with equal care.
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An early influence on David Lynch was surely the eerie, bizarre, textural, tactile films of Stan Brakhage who now gets the deluxe treatment with Criterion's by Brakhage: An Anthology which across the course of its two discs gives the viewer an astringent insight into the surreal world of this resolutely non-mainstream filmmaker. Twenty-six shorts are presented here, ranging in length from the nine-second Eye Myth (1972) to the almost 32-minute The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes (1971), an incredibly disturbing study of an autopsy in progress. From the mid-1950s to the early 2000s when Brakhage passed away, his stunning visuals, which include elements being scratched and daubed onto the actual celluloid itself, have virtually come to define avant-garde in movie terms. The 26 films in this set were chosen by Marilyn Brakhage and Bruce Kawin under the "direction" of Stan, and the results run the gamut of his art. There isn't the space to describe for those unfamiliar with these works what one is in for — think the "Main Titles" of David Fincher's Seven (1995) as an example of an homage to Brakhage — and incidentally, he is so revered in some quarters that his name has become a verb. Brakhaging alludes to the scattered use of leader, numbers and other shreds of film applied as transitional material in another's project. To Brakhage is a pure extension of one man's art as applied to another, and by Brakhage is undoubtedly one of this year's absolutely must-have discs.
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Shohei Imamura's The Pornographers (1966) is another early effort from a now highly regarded director, and its comically subversive undermining of various taboos, such as the making of pornographic films, incest and various other kinky activities is a delightful counterpoint to the more repressed Japan of cinema tradition. Imamura's career is based on his observation of idiosyncratic oddity hiding behind the skirts of propriety and his clever, sexy, affecting widescreen camerawork draws us in to a very seductive and off-kilter universe.
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Also strictly left of center, if not totally out of left field, is Leonard Kastle's whacked-out flick The Honeymoon Killers (1970), one of those very independent one-off, once-in-a-lifetime endeavors from individuals never again to participate in making movies. Based on a true story, and intended as some kind of low-budget Bonnie and Clyde (1967), the movie features Tony LoBianco and Shirley Stoler as murdering con artists flitting their way around '40s America, kissing, loving and perpetrating heinous crimes. Shot in gritty, grainy black-and-white, with a dialog track that is all but inaudible, the cast of mostly non-professionals go about their incomprehensible business. Apparently a favorite in movie-buff circles, Criterion's treatment of the film is solid with the usual essays, cast biographies and a video interview with the film's auteur, Leonard Kastle.
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Edward Dmytryk's Christ in Concrete (1949) has finally surfaced on All Day Entertainment. Variously known (in England) as Give Us This Day and in the United States as Salt to the Devil, this practically unknown film is a curio because the blacklisted Dmytryk shot in London (standing in for New York) and the film subsequently suffered copyright and distribution problems. Starring Sam Wanamaker and based on the novel by Pietro Di Donato, this ferocious little drama of immigrant poverty is none too subtle but nevetheless quite effective. Along with Dmytryk, Sam Wanamaker and screenwriter Ben Barzman were also victims of the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee, and the trio suffered for years as a result. Of the three titles by which this film is known, Give Us This Day is the most gently apropos; Christ in Concrete, as the main character discovers, is a bit too obvious and far too on the nose! |
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