Film Journey

Shortly before leaving town for the Toronto film festival, I had the pleasure of taking in a preview of Francisco Vargas’ debut feature, The Violin (2006), at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Latin American Cinema Weekend. I was impressed by the series’ line-up (Alea, BuÒuel, Ripstein, etc.), but what I didn’t realize until I arrived was that the series was offered free in conjunction with the museum’s new exhibition on Latin American art–and the film’s line snaked its way through the museum grounds around so many buildings, corners, and walkways I thought I’d never get in the door.…

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 …

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, …

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdkRpPr7_II&hl=en&fs=1]

If you backed me into a corner and forced me to name my favorite contemporary filmmaker, I might blurt out the Dardenne brothers, and not just because I was lucky enough to interview them a couple years ago. Dans l’Obscurité, their new, three-minute short above (for the Chacun son cinéma omnibus film celebrating Cannes’ 60th anniversary) reinforces many reasons why, but as with all art–particularly minimalist or essentialist works–identifying style too often sounds like recipe rather than revelation; and this isn’t about a formula. Their assignment was to express their current state of mind in regards to …