SCREENING LOG - HIGHLIGHTS FROM MARCH, 2005

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1. Menilmontant. If Murnau's SUNRISE can be described as the ultimate achievement of the lost art of silent cinema, one may offer Dmitri Kirsnaoff's 30-minute blast of pure cinema as the pre-climax. In telling a Murnau-esque melodrama about two country women seduced by the same Parisian lecher, Kirsanoff seems to compile all the major aesthetic movements of 1920s cinema and synthesize them into a deliriously compact experience -- limpid French impressionist camerawork clashes with jarring Soviet edits; fresh documentary-style shots of Paris life link arms with long takes of Chaplinesque caricatures. Looking at this, you'd think the French New Wave started in 1926.

2. Lianhua Symphony. For the life of me I can't find any information anywhere about this film that the benevolent Fesch sent to me via DivX. But it's a major discovery in my own personal history of world cinema -- an eight-film anthology of shorts by such pioneering Chinese directors as Fei Mu (SPRING IN A SMALL TOWN), Cai Chusheng (A SPRING RIVER FLOWS EAST), and Shen Fu (NEW YEAR'S SACRIFICE). Each one seems to underscore a common running concern among these filmmakers: to reflect and comment on contemporary Chinese society in a way that connects with its native audience. Supernatural folklore ("The Ghost"), broad comedy (the Stooges-esque "Three Friends"), and Confucian morals ("Two Chiao," "The Stranger") all get employed to illustrate 20th century realities of class inequality, poverty, crime, war and patriotism. As with another Chinese masterpiece of 1937, Yuan Muzhi's STREET ANGEL, you get the impression of a country in the act of discovering itself onscreen. The results are often cinematic, as dialogue is kept to a minimum in most of the shorts, allowing for the pure play of images in motion, best exemplified in Sun Yu's RHAPSODY OF A MADMAN, where an elaborate flashback sequence recalling the downfall of a family is told entirely through stark images set to music.

3. Lady Windemere's Fan. It seems like an impossible task -- how do you make a decent silent film from a play by Oscar Wilde, one of the sharpest, wittiest writers of dialogue in 20th century English theater? Ernst Lubitsch's masterpiece solves the problem by taking the play apart, distilling it to an essential feeling of a world and its people, and rebuilding that world in purely cinematic terms. Instead of Wildean gossip describing a notorious society lady, we see women gathered in gossip mode and their facial expressions and gestures, captured with uncanny authenticity, get the job done. This masterpiece exemplifies the saying that 80% of verbal communication is visual. Few directors have mastered the art of body language, sculpting his characters' gestures, the way a heartbroken woman briefly casts her eyes downward or looks off in to an infinite distance offscreen, in ways that are wholly unique to the character -- they are presented one by one for us to drink in their uniqueness.

4. Mandabi / The Money Order. Of the three Ousmane Sembene films I saw in March (the other two were BLACK GIRL and FAAT KINE), I found this 1969 effort to be the most striking, in how it manages to seem both simplistically primitive and irresolvably complex. Sembene has consistently proven his ability to pull off the double purpose of being didactically educational to a mass African audience (whom he claims is his primary audience) and ideologically and aesthetically provocative to both African and Western intellectuals. Here, he tells the story of a middle-aged Muslim with two wives and a lot of traditional views of human relationships that get ripped to shreds when he tries to cash a money order sent by his nephew laboring in France. To cash the money order, he needs an official ID. To get an official ID, he needs to get his picture taken. Sounds simple enough, but at every step, bureacrats, businessmen, neighbors, distant relatives and street hustlers swindle, connive and beg him out of his cashflow. Our feelings towards the poor sap oscillate from condescension to pity and back, reflecting the radical schizophrenia of an Africa divided between tradition and modernity. The film leaves us with a powerful impression of the moral dissolution resulting from this divide, starkly presented in the final scene.

5. The Aesthenic Syndrome. Kira Muratova's insane fresco of glastnost era USSR falling apart at the seams defies description -- it plays like 2 1/2 hours of in-your-face signal jamming, Andrei Tarkovsky's MIRROR turned convex. It starts off straightforward enough, as a middle aged doctor goes berserk following her husband's death, but then the narrative shoots out all over the place and we get a narcoleptic schoolteacher gorging on cans of caviar, neo-hippie parties featuring nude fantasy photography, and unflinching shots of derelict dogs in abandoned kennels. In retrospect, its demonic vision of dysfunctional society seems to suggest more about the new world order that the pro-Gorbachev Russians were striving to emulate than the old one they had abandoned. Blunt yet unresolved and totally visionary, it's a film that gnaws and bothers.

6. They Were Expendable. Of the three John Ford films I saw (the other two being THE QUIET MAN and SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON), this film is probably Ford's least openly personal, but all the same it betrays a deeply personal ambivalence towards wartime duty, its costs and consequences, ideas that Ford would continue to develop in FORT APACHE. As a war epic, it does the job of blending small personal stories within the overall backdrop of the Pacific Theatre, as John Wayne and Robert Montgomery juggle their personal desires and relationships with their roles as soldiers. Ford's range as a Hollywood filmmaker was rarely more evident, going from intensely realized naval combat sequences to tender romantic interludes. It has the propulsive narrative momentum of a Kurosawa movie, but with more nuance to the characters' feelings.

7. Underworld and Scarface. Seeing these two films close together, it was obvious how much Hawks had borrowed from Sternberg, while at the same time incorporating it into his own developing preoccupation of chaos vs. order. For Sternberg, the central issue was faith and destiny -- as ace gangster and Pillsbury Doughboy lookalike George Bancroft brings his girl and best pal along for his rise to the top of the world, only to question their role in bringing about his subsequent downfall. The piercing, Sternberg gazes, ever so slightly lascivious, are already in full effect, as is the lush mise-en-scene and lighting schemes.

Honorary mention: 2x Michael Snow - I saw my first two Michael Snow fims, his breakthrough WAVELENGTH and his most recent opus *CORPUS CALLOSUM. Boy does he love his tracking shots! I can dig what he's doing conceptually and I can admire his playfulness, though I can't say I was floored by his films. (Though I may have to recuse myself from evaluating WAVELENGTH as the print I saw was in pretty bad shape -- I couldn't tell if the distorted sounds and colors were intentional or not!).

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