SCREENING LOG - 5/06--5/12, 2002

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I watched TIME OUT, VENGEANCE IS MINE, TAMPOPO and EARTH. In order of preference:

Earth (1938, Alexander Dovzhenko)

The film event of the week, if not the month, for me, was not a geek swinging through New York in red and blue tights, but this revelatory silent film that kicked off a Dovzhenko retrospective at Lincoln Center, seemingly attended by every Ukranian VIP in the metropolitan area. My favorite guests-of-honor were the Alloy Orchestra, the preeminent silent film composers working today, who unveiled their new score for this film to tremendous effect.

EARTH was meant to be a propagndist hack job to promote technology and collective farming in Communist Russia. Dovzhenko, always eager to outdo his mentor Sergei Eisenstein, created a story that has as much technical brilliance as Eisenstein's POTEMKIN or Vertov's MAN WITH THE MOVIE CAMERA, but exceeds both in its soulful evocation of peasant life and its meditations on how technology can both help and harm both man and nature. A ten-minute sequence in the film, where images of working peasants combine with machines processing food, brilliantly illustrates this paradoxical, conflicted relationship between the mechanical and organic, with an editing style so intense my eyes felt like they would explode. This is a film as full of life and emotion as F.W. Murnau's SUNRISE, and for my money exceeds Murnau in using the cinematic medium to merge realistic images with abstract ideas.

Time Out (2001, Laurent Cantet)

A recently laid-off French businessman cooks up a bunch of scheming lies with his family and friends in order to project an image of success and preserve a sense of self-worth. The remarkable premise suggests that his concocted life really is no less substantial that the clock-punching he did before; if anything it feels more alive and meaningful. Aurelien Recoing gives a devastating performance as the businessman, with an enigmatic grin that registers politeness and panic at once, and seems permanently attached to his face. The ending is both chilling and pat, and reinforces the subtle but vicious digs the film makes at society's petty bourgeois dependance on catch-all values (spending "quality time" with the family; doing "socially-constructive" development work for "emerging markets").

Vengeance Is Mine (1979, Shohei Imamura)

Imamura, arguably my favorite living Japanese director, achieved what is generally regarded as his masterpiece with this unflinching account of the events surrounding a serial killer's exploits in '60s Japan. I can't say it's my favorite Imamura film (THE BALLAD OF NARAYAMA broke my heart), but its view of the killer and his milieu is technically accomplished, managing to curtail the exploitation factor with insights on each character that seem casual but precise. Seems to offer a whole lot to say about Japanese society underneath its stone-faced, documentary-esque surface. The last scene is a real stunner.

Tampopo (1986, Juzo Itami)

My guess is this is the prototypical example of "art-house cuisine" cinema a la EAT DRINK MAN WOMAN, LIKE WATER FOR CHOCOLATE, CHOCOLAT, but I find it rises above the pack for its quirkiness and narrative flair; as such it aspires to the status of the ultimate art-house cuisine movie, THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE (which, incidentally, is the ultimate anti-art-house cuisine movie). A truck driver with a penchant for noodles trains a struggling noodle maker on the art and Zen of ramen. The film has a lot of digressions and sight gags commenting on the Japanese obsession with both food and business, sometimes to the point that the message seems somewhat lost, but never for a moment is the sense of fun obscured. A very enjoyable film that seems to have been swept under the carpet by those eager to dismiss the movies of the 80s as junk food.

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