I found myself considerable more impressed with the features at LACMA on Saturday night than on Friday. All part of the same series (originally programmed by the late Susan Sontag), first up was Fires on the Plain, directed by Kon Ichikawa in 1959. A completely un-heroic war film set in the Philippines during World War II. But unlike any other war movie I can think of, the story is all retreat. The main character, who at first comes off as a sympathetic sufferer of TB, wastes away over the course of the film, but also as the story progresses, our sympathy vanishes for the “hero” as he kills an innocent woman and betrays he companions. In fact, every character in the film is completely unsympathetic - which for me is what helps to make Fires on the Plain an artistic triumph. Beautifully shot in crisp black and whites, this war noir never flinches, and truly puts all the ugly truths of people at their worst (including cannibalism!) onto the screen.

After three fairly heavy and dark films in a row, Pigs and Battleships, directed by Shohei Imamura, came as some relief. Filmed with a comedic edge, and a kinetic, jazzy energy (and soundtrack) in 1961, I thought it was probably the best of the batch. But it’s also hardly a lightweight picture, examining the depravity and corruption that sunk through all levels of society around a US naval base during the post-WWII occupation of Japan. However, it not only shows the dark side of small time gangsters and the sex trade, but also spends some time on the light things and the energy that keeps life going. Mainly the story of a wanna-be-yakuza torn between his get rich quick schemes (gangster lifestyle) and his love and desire for his girlfriend, who just wants them both to get away and into the straight life before it’s too late, the film brilliantly moves through the margins of a culture off the tracks. It’s a picture very much in the film noir tradition (with some truly fantastically composed black and white photography to die for), but the ending in particular, with its stampeding pigs out for revenge, has some of the funniest moments I’ve seen in a long while. Shohei Imamura has made lots of great movies, including The Pornographers (available on R1 DVD from Criterion), and Pigs and Battleships certainly rests comfortably up there with them near the top of what can be done with cinema. 2:39 PM >>> 0 comments

I just barely made it over to LACMA in time last night, as the lights were dimming for Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1947 film The Love of Sumako the Actress. It’s not my favorite place to see movies, because it’s kind of a pain to get there after work - I had to scarf my dinner (coffee and a pastry) in the four minutes I had left in the courtyard before show time. Also the 16mm print they were projecting was in such bad shape, it was harder than usual to get caught up in the picture. The soundtrack was particularly hard on the ears. Perhaps this was the best surviving print available, but it truly sucked. The movie itself was somewhat interesting though. The story focused on a few things, 1. a theater that wanted to present advanced, western theater, like Isben 2. The love affair between a married professor and the actress he discovers 3. Their contemporaries reactions to both. It’s a film that examines the constraints imposed by society on the indivudual, and what happens when you push against those restraints. Even though the movie is sympathetic to those who rebel against the norm, the fate of the two main characters is ultimately bleak. Draw what lessons you would like from that.

They also screened a 16mm print of the 1951 film, Repast, directed by Mikio Naruse, which was fortunately in a lot better shape. This was actually the first film by Naruse that I’ve seen, and I liked it pretty well. I felt like it was very much in the same school as Ozu, especially because it used a lot of the same actors you see in his films, including Setsuko Hara (smiling wonderfully instead of saying anything bad, as usual), and like many of Ozu’s best films, explored the dynamics of family life. In this case, it’s mostly the story of an unhappily married woman. Five years into her marriage, she’s bored to death by everything - her bland husband and life of housework. Like Mizoguchi’s The Love of the Sumako Actress, here also is a film where the main character pushes against what’s expected of her, to break out and follow her own wishes, or at least to try to figure out her own wishes. But also like the earlier film, the rebel accomplishes little. After running back home to mama, she doesn’t quite have the ability to start life a new, or to really follow her dreams. The ending (which seemed a little tacked on) has her going back home to her husband, thinking something along the lines of, “maybe that’s where a woman can truly find her happiness, watching after her husband and taking care of his house, etc.” A little disappointing that neither of these films could break free to a genuinely more modern perspective, although they probably are an accurate reflection of the majority opinion of their times (shit, and maybe of our times, over fifty years later - I don‘t know). 11:45 AM >>> 0 comments

After hearing for so long about how unwatchable the films Jean-Luc Godard made with Jean-Pierre Gorin were, but without ever having the chance to actually see one for myself, I was quite pleased to note that Criterion was releasing their 1972 film, Tout Va Bien. Then, actually watching the DVD, I was quite surprised by its coherence, beauty and humor. Not a difficult ninety minutes to make it through in the least. Starring Jane Fonda and Yves Montand, I found Tout Va Bien to be a quite playful look at revolutionary politics, revolutionary movie-making and of course commercialism. From the first scene, which is a parody of Godard’s most commercial film, 1963’s brilliant Contempt (also available on a wonderful DVD via Criterion), I found this piece to be quite different from what I’d been led to believe, or imagined it might be like. Jane Fonda plays a left-leaning reporter, and Yves Montand is a washed up new-wave film director, now hacking it out making TV commercials. But the bulk of the film is actually a set piece in a sausage factory strike. Rhetoric is spewed, occasionally to excess, but I thought, always with a sense of humor too. As in all the Godard films I’ve seen, things are chopped up, and presented in such a way as to keep the viewer guessing and interested. Never your typical movie making approach. Many of the scenes are wonderfully, and inventively shot - while others are more flat - which made for a nice contrast. Also of special note, the DVD release is surprisingly pristine. In fact, the film looks brand new. After the strike section comes to a conclusion the movie turns its focus more towards Fonda and Montand’s relationships to their own jobs and to each other. These scenes remind one more of the sixties films, like Contempt or Masculin-Feminin. The long, single take scene in a giant supermarket reminds one of the long single-take tracking scene along the highway in Weekend. It’s a hell of an amazing & funny scene. The Criterion disc also includes a ton of extras which I’ve yet to watch - most notably, another hour long film by Godard & Gorin from 1972, called Letter to Jane - which I believe focuses on their impressions of working with her on Tout Va Bien and their feelings about her activities in Vietnam after the shooting of the film, all addressed to a still photograph. Overall, I felt Tout Va Bien plays out as a still relevant piece of theater, even if, or maybe because, some of its rhetoric hasn’t aged particularly well. I still think every day about a lot of the questions asked in the film, even if nobody really seems to asks those kinds of questions in public anymore. 12:22 AM >>> 0 comments

Le Temps du Loup (Time of the Wolf), just recently released on R1 DVD by Palm Pictures shouldn’t be missed (please ignore the shamefully designed cover). This is the latest film from the director of The Piano Teacher, Michael Haneke, and at least in this country it seemed to fly under the radar. I only picked it up tonight on a whim (it was on sale & the movie I’d gone to the store to pick up, Tout Va Bien, was strangely missing). It was a great whim. Le Temps du Loup is one of the most powerful and disturbing films I can recall seeing. Watching it, I felt myself becoming almost completely unhinged, even from the very first scene. I don’t want to write too much about it, because going in blind is probably best for a movie like this - not knowing what to expect, or even what is going on plays a big part in how the movie can get inside you. In a way, it reminded me of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Charisma - some of that same creepy kind of feeling, but with an even more intense, more human, approach. A more meaningful approach. An extremely depressing and unnerving piece of cinema that’s well worth giving 109 minutes to. 12:20 AM >>> 0 comments

Saw two fairly awful movies directed by Josef von Sternberg this evening at the Egyptian. 1941’s The Shanghai Gesture was the worst I’ve seen in a long time. So bad, it was almost good - though that game isn’t really my kind of thing (life is too short). This one truly went overboard with awful, emotionless performances, rubbing shoulders with their opposite, over the top, melodramatic insanity. Filled with horribly made up fake Chinese, racist dialog & dragon-lady costumes, and worst of all, a truly ridiculous plot that might have been rejected from a dime novel. Weirdly enough they followed this with a low budget re-imagining of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Released in 1935 and it looks it. Supposedly set in Russia, but the only way one can guess this is because the main characters worry about being sent to Siberia. The movie instead looks like it was filmed on a left over set from something about Chicago in the 1920s. But it does star Peter Lorre (supposedly in his first “Hollywood” role) and he’s as creepy and compelling to watch as ever - maybe even a little more over the top here than normal - screaming inappropriately even for a man slowly going crazy from guilt and paranoia (I don’t think he played the lead once he got to America too often). In a way this movie felt like, what if Crime and Punishment was written by Franz Kafka after he’d moved into a Hollywood bungalow. And in a way, I kind of liked it, even though, it’s really not very good - if that makes sense. It was certainly enjoyable, compared to the wasteland of The Shanghai Gesture. 12:56 AM >>> 0 comments

I’ve been quite busy with the movies lately - I’ve seen two more Deitrich / Von Sternberg collaborations, Blonde Venus and the best of ‘em all, Shanghai Express. I couldn’t resist its virtuoso opening sequence, the loading of the train (which almost reaches Thomas Woolf train loading heights). Tonight I caught a screening of Godard’s 1965 film Maculin-Feminin, great on the Nuart’s big screen (although the sound was occasionally painfully loud and screechy) - this will no doubt be out on a beautiful DVD from Criterion later this year and I’ll definitely be picking it up. Speaking of DVDs, I’ve somehow found time to watch a few too, and would recommend Claude Chabrol’s La Cérémonie (with Isabelle Huppert and Sandrine Bonnaire!) for it’s amazing ending (and please ignore the DVDs horribly unappealing packaging). I also finally saw Almodóvar’s Talk to Her, which I liked alright - I think he already has a new one out too? I can’t keep up. For some laughs, try Jerry Lewis in The Disorderly Orderly, recently released in a pristine R1 transfer. I’d never seen that one before, and found it to be pretty damn enjoyable.

On the link front, I just discovered The Naropa Institute is archiving all their recordings in downloadable mp3s at archive.org. There are already literally HUNDREDS of hours of stuff up there, including a twenty part, hour and a half long course Ginsberg taught on the Beat literarary history of the 1950’s! There’s also classes taught by the likes of William Burroughs, Steve Lacy, Amiri Baraka, Anne Waldman, Harry Smith and much more. The amount of material available already is fucking overwhelming, and amazingly, it’s apparently just the tip of the iceberg - they claim to be eventually making all 3500+ recording they’ve made since 1974 available. You can browse the archives here, and stream or download the files. 12:43 AM >>> 0 comments

Director Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel is justifiably considered a classic. First, from what I understand, it was the first feature length German sound film, and second (more importantly) it was the film that made Marlene Dietrich a star. Unfortunately all classics weren’t created equal, and The Blue Angel, which I just saw for the first time last night (the German version at the Egyptian Theater), certainly hasn’t aged as well as one would have hoped. It’s definitely more than a bit creaky with age. The overly melodramatic story follows the downward slide of a respected professor (rosy-cheeked Emil Jennings) once he falls for dance hall girl Lola-Lola (Deitrich). While at first appearing to successfully break free from his routine, stuffy life, fired from his job and married to Deitrich, he quickly ends up as nothing more than a sad clown, and drifts into insanity. The scenes with Deitrich still breathe with life, and are for the most part a lot of fun (singing, drinking, smiling & showing some leg), but really the film tells the story of Jennings, and when the movie focuses on him it seems to come to a standstill. Especially during the first half of the film, the scenes filmed at the school with Jennings are too painfully long and dead feeling (this could partially be blamed on the early difficulties of filming for sound). His later scenes, flipping out, clucking like a chicken and trying to kill everybody in site - and eventually being restrained in a straight jacket, are hilariously over-the-top, but not very moving and actually quite silly - including the final torpid scene back at his old desk. The thirty minutes of great scenes with Marlene Deitrich are drowned out by seventy minutes of lifelessness. Thankfully, much greater things were still to come from Sternberg and his star, in their great films of the 1930s. 11:17 AM >>> 0 comments

After a few days off (one of those against my wishes), tonight I headed back to the cinema - this time to the newly restored and re-opened Aero Theater in Santa Monica, which has been taken over by the American Cinematheque, and seems to be essentially mirroring their Egyptian Theater programming, but usually a week or two later. This is nice, because it gave me a chance to see Tarkovsky’s The Mirror, which I’d missed last month in Hollywood.

But first I had an hour to pass in a nearby cafe on Montana Ave. Unfortunately at the tables outside there wasn’t enough light to get in the reading I was looking forward to, but fortunately, this gave me a perfect chance to try out the new, pricey, noise-canceling, earbud headphones I’d recently picked up - and I had a fucking transcendent experience listening Arvo Pärt’s “credo” for piano, mixed choir and orchestra from the Hélène Grimaud CD of the same name, while watching the fog roll in and the airplane lights moving though the darkness. So good!

This was also my first time seeing Tarkovsky’s The Mirror (from 1974), but it fit into the mold of very much how I imaged it would be - i.e. even though it’s listed as only 108 minutes long, it felt much longer. Long, boring, but also beautiful and fascinating. A dream of a movie. In fact, it felt to me more like viewing an endless series of amazing paintings, and less like viewing a movie story. This is good - he has created his own world - his own language. The paintings move through time, from WWII to the present (of the 1970s). The walls drip. It rains, snows and most importantly, the wind blows. All the relationships are already over, drifting through a strange space after love, but without hate. Children watch houses burning down. Adults walk down industrial hallways and across the open fields. Strangely beautiful, long haired women float above their beds. Poetry is recited (yipes!). I didn’t quite feel as engaged as I would have liked, felt more like I was listening to somebody go on and on about their dreams, when that person never got the idea that I wished they’d just stop, but at the same time, while not grasping the personal dream language, I kept listening trying to figure it out. Actually, as I thought about my slightly disappointed impression of the movie (after being so blown away by Andrei Rublev a short while ago), I started to think better of it, and eventually started thinking, damn, I already want to see that again. 12:22 AM >>> 0 comments

This final day of the Maurice Pialat retrospective ended with his last two films, which fortunately were also two of his best. His epic version (158 minutes) of the Van Gogh myth, from 1991, really is a masterpiece, and certainly the most ambitious of his films. Starring 60s pop music icon, Jacques Dutronc as a very convincing Vincent, the film plays looser with the facts of Van Gogh’s life than we’ve seen before, to it’s benefit. The movie doesn’t try to tell the whole story, even though it’s quite long, it focuses its energy only on the last months Vincent spent before his suicide, under the “treatment” of Dr. Gatchet, mixed up between a love affair with Gatchet’s daughter, his troubled relationship to his brother and sister-in-law, and blinging it up with various whores. It was fun to see this version of the painter, a little bit petty, talking trash about some of his contemporaries, frustrated, but not exactly anguished, being called on his own bullshit more than once - the movie feels true and that’s what counts at this point. No false moments. I liked the idea of a Vincent Van Gogh who really thought about and knew what he was doing, instead of the typical mad artist we‘ve gotten in the other film versions of his life.

Even better though was Pialat’s final film, Le Garçu, originally released in 1995. Here, I thought, he has come full circle, engaged in a tale of the “regular” problems of real life, real humanity, but also utilizing all the technical film-making achievements of the period films like Van Gogh and Sous le Soleil de Satan. Again, the star is Depardieu, and again he is great. What there is of a story (like almost always with Pialat, it’s not about “stories,” but about characters and moments) centers around Depardieu’s attempts to figure out what kind of a relationship he wants to have or can have, with his young son after his marriage has fallen apart. But the movie also moves through the all the characters around them, his ex-wife finding a sympathetic new love (or not), his feelings for his ex-wife, his lack of feelings for his various mistresses, work, travel - and how to make all these complicated factors, the mess of real life, come together how we’d like (which of course can’t always happen). It’s a quiet movie, with many great performances, tending back to that documentary feel at times, especially with the children, as in his earlier works like Loulou or Nous ne Viellirons Pas Ensemble. But there’s also a more modern feel, from the soundtrack, which uses music by Bjork and Bob Marley to great advantage, giving the picture that extra bit of energy that wasn’t found in the 60s and 70s pictures, to the look and even telephone rings, which say - we’re in the now. And as in almost all of his films, the ending is typically ambiguous and wonderfully perfect. Maurice Pialat really seemed to know the right moment to stop. 1:20 AM >>> 0 comments

Sous le Soleil de Satan (Under Satan’s Sun) is based on the novel by the novel by Georges Bernanos, who also wrote the book Robert Bresson based his film, Diary of a Country Priest on. It seems to me that with Sous le Soleil de Satan, Maurice Pialat is definitely walking in the shadow of Bresson’s earlier film. It’s actually interesting how little this one feels like all the other Pialat film I’ve seen so far (eight of ten). The mood, style and energy couldn’t be more different.

Instead of a crazy picture of man’s relation to woman, it’s a meditative look at a troubled, early-20th century priest’s relationship to God. I should say, one of my problems with this movie was the same as all things dealing with this subject, deep down I feel it’s a waste of time, or worse (I could write a whole book about that, but for now I’ll spare you). There is some talk that he really wasn’t made out to be a priest, that he’s too old fashioned & pious - even going so far as to torture himself with a hair-shirt. The question is, has he tortured himself into craziness, was he already crazy, or is he not crazy at all, but blessed by God and perhaps even a saint - able to perform miracles - talk to Satan, raise the dead. There are some interesting scenes, especially the long walk the priest (Depardieu) takes through the blue tinted night, and it’s somewhat interesting to see Pialat tackle something so different, but ultimately the picture failed to inspire me much, partially due to it’s too calm Bressonian coldness / objectivity.

Police, directed by Pialat just two years earlier, in 1985, is simply a straight up cop film. Because we’ve seen eight billion other straight up cop films over the years, yet another is hard to get too excited by. One mercy - at least there wasn’t a single car chase. It was a little weird to see two films in a row starring Gérard Depardieu playing rolls that seem to exist in completely different worlds. Police is definitely in a world that isn’t concerned in the least with thoughts about God. Dépardieu plays the typical Dirty Harry style cop alright. You get all the sexism, racism and violence you’d find in any similar film. But you also get a few quiet scenes that manage to transcend the rest of the picture - the quiet love story scenes, the best of which take place in the cramped, muted interior of Depardieu’s car. False arrest, prostitution, drugs, kidnapping, the bad girl gone bad, the dirty lawyer in over his head, one last chance. Enough already! 10:37 AM >>> 0 comments

It seems like it has been a long while since I last went to a concert, so it was nice last night to make it down to REDCAT to hear three modern string quartets perfromed by various combinations of the CalArts New Century Players. First up was the world premier of the not-jazzy at all, first string quartet written by jazz great Yusef Lateef. Actually I thought it was pretty good, but then I felt a little embarrassed for Lateef when his work was immediately blown the fuck away by John Zorn’s amazing Necromonicon. Especially the opening and closing movements, full of intense attacks, overwhelmed one with excitement and power. Sure, I still prefer his more melodic Masada approach and some of his other things, but to hear this masterful piece performed live, finally sold me on Zorn’s somewhat more “classical” approach too. After an intermission an attempt was made to perform George Crumb’s dark 1970 work Black Angels (available on the justly famous recording of the same name by the Kronos Quartet). It’s a tremendously complicated piece, requiring the quartet not only to play their strings, but also do tricky synchronized vocalizations, shake maracas, and play water-filled glasses. I’m no expert, but it seemed the band was slightly overwhelmed by such a complicated piece - and altho I expected to enjoy it the most, I think the Zorn piece actually won the well programmed night. This evening the same group is performing a whole night of just Zorn’s solo and chamber works, including Gri-Gri, Rituals and Shibboleth - I wish I could go too, but I unfortunately have other plans. It’s one of the many nights when I wish I could split myself into two people. 11:38 AM >>> 0 comments

Caught two more Maurice Pialat films down at UCLA the other night, and while both were fine films in their own rights, I was less into them than the ones screened over the weekend, thereby headed home feeling a little let down. Maybe that‘s why they were scheduled for Wednesday instead of in a more glamorous, weekend slot...

L’Enfance Nue (Naked Childhood) was Pialat’s first feature length film and to some extent it shows, mainly in that he’d yet to develop a truly unique approach of his own. It also hurts that the main character looks and acts incredibly similar to Léaud in 400 Blows a decade earlier. Though this film is slightly darker, it also concerns a young boy’s troubled adolescence. In this case the main character is a fairly unsympathetic orphan, whose foster parents continually give him up due to his bad behavior (killing a cat & worse). There are quite a few good scenes, but ultimately, I didn‘t feel like it added up to enough.

1974’s La Gueule Ouverte (The Mouth Agape), is considerably more masterful, but at the same time, overwhelmingly depressing. It’s also the most surprising sedate of Pialat’s films I’ve seen so far - certainly the only without violence. I can hardly even remember a voice raised in anger! The lower key approach is certainly appropriate for this dark look at a small family dealing with the slow, extremely painful death of their mother/wife from that damn cancer. It’s a film seeping with grief, but at the same time, I felt it kept the viewer at a little too much of a distance. Perhaps by working hard to avoid any too obvious melodrama, the movie managed to keep me from caring much about any of it’s too cold characters. So while very depressing, it wasn’t particularly movingly so. A lump of coal in your Christmas stocking kind of thing. 9:19 PM >>> 0 comments

Motorman by David Ohle (originally published in 1971 and just brought back into print last year) is another great, weird book that fits nicely somewhere between Barthelme’s The Dead Father and Wurlitzer’s Nog - books that couldn’t have been written without Beckett & Kafka, but books uniquely inspired by a sort of drugged out, post-hippie, surrealist world. At only 137 pages it’s a perfect book - just the right length to give you a taste of it’s crazy world w/o overloading. The somewhat obscure, mixed-up narrative focuses on Moldenke, lost in a post-war world, filled with multiple fake suns, moons, and bizarre weather (post-nuclear world or post-LSD?), captive or patient of the sinister Bunce / Burnheart / Eagleman / Roquette. If he still had feelings he’d probably be in love with Cock Roberta. Trapped in his room by Bunce’s jellyheads (two or more of which he may have murdered). Escaping & wandering the countryside, meeting the weatherman, driving Shelp’s k-motor, munching the stonepicks, and almost finally, heading down the Jelly on some kind of endless boat trip. It’s a nonsense book for you and me. Great fun! Strangely enough, Ohle apparently published a sequel called The Age of Sinatra thirty-plus years later - and I'll soon be reading it. 1:27 AM >>> 0 comments

Among countless other things, the Getty’s online art collection offers 42 great photos by William Eggleston. You can view them online here. 11:06 PM >>> 0 comments