30Jul10
There must be something in the air here in New York this week, because the breezy films of Sacha Guitry are making an appearance not only in our new Eclipse set but also on the big screen at the Museum of Modern Art. As part of their ongoing series French Comedy, Gaumont Style, a tribute to the world’s oldest movie company, MoMA is showing Guitry’s snappy costume comedy The Pearls of the Crown on August 1 and 2 and his romantic roundelay Quadrille on August 5. Toronto’s TIFF Cinematheque is in a light Gallic mood as well, as their look back at Rohmer’s Moral Tales goes on, with screenings of My Night at Maud’s (July 30), La collectionneuse (July 31), and Claire’s Knee (August 5). TIFF also continues its retrospectives of Kurosawa and Pasolini with two very different films, Madadayo (August 2) and Salò (August 3), respectively.
Plenty of other Criterion titles are getting the big-screen treatment in the coming seven days. Moving east to west: Boston’s historic Brattle Theater is all hot and bothered with In the Mood for Love (August 5); New York’s Film Forum shows us that Lubitsch touch with The Smiling Lieutenant; the George Eastman House’s Dryden Theater in Rochester takes viewers to a mad, mad world with Time Bandits (August 3); Columbus’s Wexner Center shows its love for Italian cinema twice over with a double feature of Amarcord and Divorce Italian Style (August 5); Cleveland’s Institute of Art dances away with The Red Shoes (July 30–31); the Detroit Film Theatre throws a hell of a dinner party with Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel (July 31); Chicago’s Gene Siskel Film Center goes deep into the artist’s mind with a weeklong run of 8½ (July 30–August 5); Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts takes viewers to Paris (Breathless, July 30–August 1) and way out west (Stagecoach, August 1); and the Flicks in Boise resurrects Harry Lime for a showing of The Third Man (August 3).
Of course, it wouldn’t be a repertory roundup without a little (or a lot of) Kurosawa. Films from the timeless Japanese master can be viewed at Vancouver’s Pacific Cinematheque (The Bad Sleep Well, Dodes-ka’den, Kagemusha, The Lower Depths, July 30–August 5); St. Louis’s Webster University (Yojimbo, Sanjuro, Kagemusha, July 30–August 1); the AFI Silver Theatre in Silver Springs, Maryland (Red Beard, July 30–August 1); Ciné in Athens, Georgia (Seven Samurai, July 30–August 5); Nashville’s Belcourt Theater (I Live in Fear, July 31–August 2); Columbia, Missouri’s Ragtag Cinema (Ran, July 31); Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archives (Sanjuro and Scandal, July 31, and The Idiot, August 4); Rochester’s Dryden Theater at the George Eastman House (Stray Dog, August 5); and the Flicks in Boise (Ikiru, August 5).
A quick look over the Atlantic reveals that Renoir’s The Lower Depths is playing August 1 at Paris’s Cinémathèque française, where Bergman’s The Virgin Spring is also showing, on July 31. And one more out-of-this-world screening to note: The Man Who Fell to Earth beams down to London’s BFI Southbank on July 30 and 31, as part of their Film Science: Future Human series.
Categories:
Screenings
29Jul10
Criterion designer extraordinaire Eric Skillman used a distinctive drawing style of his own devising for our release of Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (and blogged about it here and here). Sitting across from him in a meeting the other day, we noticed that his phone bears an image from The Steel Helmet that he’s given the same treatment—he had his file made into this skin here. If only he’d start a sideline in making these (he won’t); our mouths are watering at the possibilities.
Categories:
On Five
29Jul10
Whenever a major international film festival announces its lineup, we keep our eyes peeled for fresh projects from our favorite filmmakers. New titles by two Criterion-embraced guys will be in competition at the sixty-seventh annual Venice Film Festival, it was revealed today: the first feature by Two-Lane Blacktop’s Monte Hellman in more than two decades, which bears the very Hellman-esque title Road to Nowhere and is reportedly a noirish tale of murder and moviemaking; and Abdellatif Kechiche’s much-anticipated follow-up to The Secret of the Grain, Black Venus, a biography of Saartjie “Sarah” Baartman, a South African woman who became a freak-show attraction in nineteenth-century Europe.
Of course, as with any festival, selections outside of the main competition are just as promising: Catherine Breillat (Fat Girl) introduces her latest fairy-tale interpretation, Sleeping Beauty; Marco Bellocchio (Fists in the Pocket) returns with Sorelle Mai; Martin Scorsese and Kent Jones present their documentary on Elia Kazan, A Letter to Elia; and Hard Boiled’s John Woo blasts back with Reign of Assassins, an action epic set in ancient China and codirected by Chao-bin Su. Coming soon: New York and Toronto!
Categories:
News
29Jul10
A compelling reason to check out the splendid comedies in our new Eclipse Series 22: Presenting Sacha Guitry, from DVD Town’s Christopher Long: “The appeal of Sacha Guitry´s cinema in one word: wit,” he writes in a review of the set. “Whether he was born with it or cultivated it, Guitry was blessed with wit in spades.” Long goes on to laud the way the director, who started in theater, took to the fledgling film medium: “Guitry not only embraced the visual possibilities of cinema, he practically squeezed the stuffing right out of them.
More from the Los Angeles Times’ Dennis Lim, who praises these “dazzling comedies,” and the New Yorker’s Richard Brody, who calls the films in the set “effervescent, extroverted,” adding “Partisans of the long take may marvel at those that Guitry uses to preserve the performances: he routinely lets the camera run for two or three minutes at a stretch in the service of the actors’ theatrical virtuosity and, above all, his own.”
UPDATE: Nicolas Rapold peeks at this "quartet of playful 1930s works" for Artforum.
Categories:
Press Notes
29Jul10
Arthur Agee, the basketball hopeful whose rise to NBA prominence was chronicled in the thrilling 1994 documentary Hoop Dreams, is beginning a “Hoop Dreams tour” across the United States. Along with the basketball marketing company Hoop Connection, the thirty-seven-year-old Agee will visit cities from Sacramento to Orlando to find young people eighteen or older who aspire to play basketball and help them realize their own dreams. In a USA Today story, Agee is quoted as saying “This platform will speak for those people. It’ll give them a voice.” The Hoop Dreams tour will be filmed, and the organizers hope it will make its way onto television in one form or another.
Categories:
News
28Jul10
He’s quested for the Holy Grail, dived headfirst into Hunter S. Thompson’s sixties excess, turned La jetée into a Hollywood action epic (a good one!), and created what is probably cinema’s greatest Orwellian dystopia—what could Terry Gilliam do that would surprise us? How about a concert webcast? Gilliam will direct a live stream of the Arcade Fire’s August 5 performance at Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden that will be available on YouTube. This is the first in a planned series of streamed shows called Unstaged and backed by American Express, Vevo, and YouTube. Check back here at 10 p.m. the night of the show to see whether the director plays it straight or has some of his characteristic tricks up his sleeve.
Categories:
News
27Jul10
Photo courtesy of Posteritati.
Categories:
Posters
27Jul10
Americans got The Secret of the Grain. In France, they got La graine et le mulet (The Grain and the Mullet)—basically, “Couscous and Fish.” Depending on whose table you eat dinner at, the French title can seem as elemental as “Water and Air” or “Heaven and Earth.” If the movie was a tough sell in the United States, it was not because of poor distribution or because no one wanted to see two and a half hours of French Arabs eating and talking and eating and crying and eating and dancing but because that title made the movie sound like a documentary about the keys to harvesting wheat. This bursting drama is something else entirely, a gripping, multigenerational saga that brings you as close as you could hope to get to an aching, dreaming extended family. It begins like Ken Loach and ends like Tolstoy (and thus clearly deserves a title that puts you somewhere other than aisle seven at Trader Joe’s).
But The Secret of the Grain it is. And what a primal sneak attack. You couldn’t know from the serene opening minutes, set on a tourist ferry headed toward the French resort town of Sète (whose screen lineage dates back at least as far as Agnès Varda’s 1956 La Pointe Courte), that we’d end up where we do 150 or so intense minutes later, engulfed in bad news that feels like good news. Locationally, it’s not far from where we began. Emotionally, it’s another universe. Read more 
Categories:
Film Essays
26Jul10
THE STORY OF A CHEAT: BREAKING THE RULES
While most filmmakers arrive at their profession already possessed of a vigorous love of cinema, Sacha Guitry saw the form, at least at first, as a necessary evil. Paris’s most popular and prolific playwright of the 1920s, Guitry felt that the medium was inherently compromised, that it lacked the finesse and excitement of live theater, and that, even in the sound era, it was limited by too many technical and systematic strictures. Yet having reluctantly embraced film after concluding that it would allow him to reach the widest audience possible, Guitry refused to play by the rules, creating a cinema that was not just verbally witty but visually daring—one that would influence artists as aesthetically diverse as Orson Welles, François Truffaut, and Alain Resnais.
A theatrical lineage was a trait Guitry shared with many of his film contemporaries, from Julien Duvivier to Raymond Bernard. He first appeared onstage at age five, for Czar Alexander II (his godfather); his matinee idol father, Lucien Guitry, was then under contract to Saint Petersburg’s Mikhailovsky Theatre. Back in Paris, Guitry struggled with school (chronically expelled, he never got his baccalaureate), family (he had a falling out with his father), and his health (he suffered from rheumatism) before finding his calling as a boulevard theater playwright and performer; his sophisticated, clever plays, from romantic comedies to biographical dramas, made him a sensation. And though he had been vocal in his condemnation of film—he told the newspaper Candide in 1933: “The cinema is lifeless spectacle, conserved theater”—as talkies took off in the 1930s, he thought it wise to jump into the game. Read more
Categories:
Film Essays
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