Category: Special event

For the War to End, the Walls Should Have Crumbled

The Cinematheque Ontario is screening five documentaries by the Dardenne brothers this week–the first time the films have been exhibited in North America (outside of Montreal)–and I’m hanging out for the event. I’ve attended Toronto’s international film festival the last couple years, but this is my first non-fall visit to the city, and its bare trees, icy winds and cloudy skies are a far cry from its warm Septembers. (For a thin-blooded Angeleno like myself, it’s positively freezing.)

But that hasn’t kept employees of the Cinematheque from working hard the …

In precise and elegant scribbles, a robust party comes to life filled with folk dancing and social rituals; peasant couples in colorful dress twirl and part, women in rocking chairs sway in time to joyous fiddles, children watch from the top of a stairway. A man takes a drink and sprouts antlers, shadows flicker across the candlelit room. And the image itself can hardly contain the energy as the “camera” constantly shifts to capture as much of the action as possible, finally tilting up to the chandeliers while continuing to rotate in its own private exhilaration.

An avant-garde film? No, …

Repast

One of the last things Susan Sontag did before she passed away last December was program a sequel to her last touring series of classic Japanese films. Of the nine titles in the new series now playing at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, I’ll remark on the Mikio Naruse selections here. (And I’ll catch up with The Story of the Last Chrysthanemums at the American Cinematheque’s upcoming Kenji Mizoguchi retrospective in the next couple weeks.)

Repast (1951)

Although he is considered a major filmmaker by any measure (critic Audie Bock includes him with Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu …