Month: August 2007

Kapurush (The Coward)

The UCLA film archive is in the midst of its Festival of Preservation, and last weekend, it exhibited two rare short features Satyajit Ray released in 1965 as a double bill: Kapurush and Mahapurush (The Holy Man). Sixteen of Ray’s films (deteriorated by India’s humid climate) have been restored since 1993, but you wouldn’t know it given the abysmal dearth of Ray’s cinema on DVD in the US, which amounts to four films (including the Apu Trilogy) that were unceremoniously dumped on barebones discs by Columbia. Living in Los Angeles, I’ve had the …

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I spent the past weekend experiencing Jacques Rivette’s magnificent, nearly 13-hour Out 1 (1971) at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, a film B. Kite recently described in Cinema Scope as having “joined that pantheon of broken and vanished objects ([The Magnificent] Ambersons, Greed, once and still to some extent Smile) in which, even against our better judgment, we place some unspecified hope of a definitive experience, maybe a bit too good for the world, as indicated by the fact that they live in a half-light, next door to oblivion.” It was the 1990 Rotterdam cut, …

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