The End of the New

Am I the last to know that New Line Cinema is officially, as of Thursday, no longer a freestanding entity? Check out A.O. Scott's eulogy at the New York Times, and think a fond thought for the studio behind the Nightmares on Elm Street, the John Waters Hairspray, The Rapture, My Own Private Idaho, Menace II Society, Blink, Se7en, Boogie Nights, Wag the Dog, Dark City, Living Out Loud, American History X, The Astronaut's Wife, Magnolia, The Cell, Bamboozled, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Birth, The New World, the musical Hairspray, and some movies about some blingy elves. Plus, via its late subdivision Fine Line Features, some production or distribution money for An Angel at My Table, Edward II, The Player, The Ballad of Little Jo, Spanking the Monkey, Short Cuts, Hoop Dreams, Once Were Warriors, Barcelona, Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, Double Happiness, Death and the Maiden, Crash, Gummo, The Sweet Hereafter, The Winter Guest, Passion in the Desert, Hurlyburly, Besieged, Tumbleweeds, Before Night Falls, Dancer in the Dark, The Anniversary Party, The Holy Girl, Vera Drake, Last Days, and Maria Full of Grace. That's a lot to be thankful for.

Something Wicked Awesome This Way Comes

No one works as hard as Gary Tooze, the DVD Beaver, to let the world know about imminent DVD releases, and to help us sort between the wheat and the chaff, down to the finest little decibel of audio quality and the slenderest little margin of image cropping. I'm not as exacting a DVD shopper as Gary, and I wouldn't even begin to know how to be as comprehensive as he is, but so much pure gold has been dropping on the market lately, with even more looming on the horizon, that I felt I needed to say something.

For all of you Barbara Stanwyck fans, or for anyone who wanted to believe my raves about Executive Suite but had no way of verifying them for yourself, Warner Home Video is dropping The Barbara Stanwyck Collection at the end of October. That's a while away—ask any academic, or any student, and we'll scream at you that the beginning of fall is still an eon from now—but it's never too soon to gear up for Barbara. I haven't seen any of the other films in the collection, but Robert Wise's thrillingly tense and sensationally acted boardroom thriller (that's not an oxymoron, if it sounds like one) doesn't pull any punches. Barbara helps, Fredric March is efficiently insidious, June Allyson comes vividly if briefly to life, and Nina Foch actresses at every possible edge, without once making a show of herself. Exquisite.

Even though I dislike their new logo and redesigned packaging (who picked Rancid Mustard for the color on the spines?), I must admit that the Criterion Collection has been exceeding even their own high standards of late. They've honored my three favorite Japanese directors already this summer, with deluxe editions of Mizoguchi's Sanshô the Bailiff (my rhapsodic review here), Shohei Imamura's Vengeance Is Mine, and a box-set of Hiroshi Teshigara masterpieces, so I can finally stop cruising used DVD stores in pursuit of the out-of-print Milestone imprint of Woman in the Dunes, one of the greatest films of all time. (Am I supposed to insert a personal qualifier here?) As if this all weren't enough, coming soon from Criterion are Mala Noche, the highly elusive debut of Gus Van Sant, and a director-approved re-release of Days of Heaven (original review and quick tribute after seeing the restoration in 35mm).

Auteur delights, or at least they delighted me: David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE, which scared the bejesus out of me in cinemas all three times I paid to see it, arrives with even more scarifying footage on August 14th; and Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (reviewed here) gets the 2-disc treatment it always deserved on October 23rd, as do several other Kubrick titles.

My two favorite films of 2007 so far, Ray Lawrence's unnerving and trenchant Jindabyne and Robinson Devor's courageously and compellingly cryptic Zoo, will both reach wider American audiences on DVD than they ever enjoyed in theaters; Zoo arrives on Sep. 16 and Jindabyne on Oct. 2.

On the other end of the historical spectrum, the archivists and the deep-pocketed among you will be ecstatic to hear that those unbeatable compilations of early-cinema rareties and esoterica, Treasures from American Film Archives and More Treasures from American Film Archives, shall be followed in October by the National Film Preservation Foundation's Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900-1934. The thematic rubric is new for this series (the other collections are purposefully and wonderfully eclectic), but there's still plenty of variety included in this new package, despite its pointed and fascinating emphasis on politics. I'll study up on How They Rob Men in Chicago, in case history ever repeats itself, but I'll be even more excited for Cecil B. DeMille's The Godless Girl, the entire disc devoted to female suffrage and "The New Woman," and virtually every other snippet, sideshow, epic, and episode. Here are the full contents, and here's where you can pre-order at the greatest savings (though Amazon has a prettier page). The NFPF has already announced that they'll be hosting another theme party for next year's Treasures IV set, which will be devoted to the American Avant-Garde between 1945-85. (On that same page, you can watch selected clips from the first two anthologies; select Disc 1 to see a full minute of Watson & Webber's mindblowing The Fall of the House of Usher, and try to figure out how two amateurs made this in 1928!)

Finally, apologies for burying the lead, but if you've got a multiregion player—or even if you don't, because here's a reason to buy one—Chantal Akerman's legendary feminist opus Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which has never appeared in any home format anywhere in the world, is now available as part of a French-Belgian DVD package called The Chantal Akerman Collection. "A woman in trouble" if ever there were one, Jeanne (Delphine Seyrig, of Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad and Muriel and Buñuel's Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie) is a Belgian housewife like countless others, preparing breakfast and cleaning her kitchen, and devoting her morning to countless other errands around the apartment...except that Akerman makes us feel the scale of these semi-mindless occupations, their essential fusion of tedium and fascination, by capturing these household tasks in huge 35mm and with unrelenting attention for almost four hours. Three days in the life of Jeanne Dielman, in what would feel like three years in the life of the audience if Seyrig weren't so subtly and unpredictably entrancing, and if Akerman's political platform weren't so fully realized within clear, confident, brilliant aesthetics. And I haven't even said anything about the gentleman caller. Or the ———... because I don't want to spoil them.

See Jeanne Dielman... on a big screen if you ever get any opportunity in your whole life to do so; it makes sense, despite the intense frustration, that Akerman has withheld her legendary masterpiece for so long, because the hugeness of her images in relation to their subject is deeply essential to the project. Still, not everyone is going to have that big-screen opportunity, and those of us who have certainly want to revisit Jeanne Dielman... and figure out how Akerman, Seyrig, cinematographer Babette Mangolte, and editor Patricia Canino pulled it off. If I know you love Todd Haynes' Safe, and by his own admission, that film, like so many others, is impossible without this one. I refer you again to my personal list of the greatest films ever made, and I insist (insist!) that, Treasures III and other anthologies aside, The Chantal Akerman Collection, which also includes the deliriously great Rendez-vous d'Anna and three other titles, is the DVD release of the year.

(Image from Jeanne Dielman c/o this Finnish-language bio of Chantal Akerman)

Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness

This post is a strange non-sequitur after nearly a month of silence, especially with so many threads dangling and so many novelties (like a redesigned website!) looming on the horizon... but this is the weekend of Goatdog's 1927 Blog-a-Thon, and I hate to miss out. Once you see the beautifully illustrated and deliciously detailed showcase of Chicago cinemas in 1927 that Goatdog has prepared as the centerpiece to his feature, you'll want to participate, too.

All the Oscar enthusiasts out there probably know that during the first year of the Academy Awards, honoring films exhibited in 1927 and 1928, the "Best Picture" category was complemented by a second race called "Artistic Quality of Production," designed to honor films that made extraordinary achievements in their overall formal techniques and poetic modes of expression. F.W. Murnau's Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans was the winner, and anyone who has beheld that pearly, rapturous masterpiece would hardly dispute the outcome. Still, rumor has it that the path to victory was cleared for Sunrise by some ideological misgivings about an equally esteemed and durable masterpiece, King Vidor's The Crowd; indeed, the Academy Board had originally anointed The Crowd as the winner until Louis B. Mayer spent all night filibustering against it.

The implication behind this widely accepted Academy lore is that the third entrant in this race, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack's Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness, was a bridesmaid from the beginning. Given the legendary status of its fellow nominees, Chang may well have deserved its bronze-medal finish, but the movie, an enormous commercial hit at the time of its release, deserves a much bigger audience and more vocal critical support than it has tended to elicit. When Andrew Sarris published The American Cinema in 1968 and basically rewrote popular American film studies as a hierarchical constellation of auteurs, he didn't even afford Cooper and Schoedsack their own paragraph or chapter (this despite the critical and commercial colossus of King Kong), and Chang doesn't appear anywhere in his catalogue of 1927's major releases. Image Entertainment, through its Milestone Collection imprimatur, released a splendid and feature-packed DVD of the film back in 2000, but it's hard to find stores that stock it or places to rent it, apart from online behemoths like Amazon and Netflix.

What I love about Chang, a film as exciting and entertaining to teach as it is to watch, is that even a casual viewer can see how Cooper and Schoedsack are simultaneously feeding into the nascent genre of the feature documentary even as they are telegraphing the various short-cuts, contrivances, and white lies (in more sense than one) on which their sentimentally exciting and affectionate ethnographic adventure-yarn depends. Like its obvious model, Robert J. Flaherty's Nanook of the North, Chang introduces us to a genial but hardworking nuclear family who come to stand in for the entire region they inhabit (northern Thailand, in this case) and a vast imaginary field of "custom" and "tradition" that ostensibly permeates the area. Kru, our protagonist, his wife Chantui, and their children live in an elevated cottage with their pet monkey Bimbo (about whom more later). The family mostly live on the food they grow and the animals they hunt, though we also enjoy brief glimpses of a wider village life in which they participate, on the occasions when they leave their isolated home. Chang already makes for beautiful, engaging viewing just on the bases of the radiant location photography, the textures of the foliage, the ground, and the manmade structures, the spontaneous movements of the children and their pets.

As with Nanook, most of the humble "life" and domestic rituals we observe in Chang are recreations of already-outmoded or fanciful practices, enacted by a locally selected cast who were very conscious of performing for the camera. Kru really was married to Chantui, and their onscreen children really were their children, which is more than you can say for Nanook, and as the senior location scout and interpreter for the film crew, Kru himself enjoyed more of the creative process and was perhaps more creatively involved in the staging of his own (mis)representation than was Allakariallak, the Itinivuit man who played Flaherty's "Nanook."* In these ways, Chang captures a family group and a setting that are slightly more "real" than Nanook's, and yet the film flaunts its artificiality much more obviously. Some well-shot and extremely exciting sequences of "spontaneous" leopard attacks are nonetheless blocked suspiciously well toward the sightlines and placements of the cameras; the interior shots of the treehouse, in at least some instances, don't match the exterior perspectives of what is supposed to be the same structure.

Then there is Bimbo, the monkey, who pulls a peculiar triple-duty within Chang's terms as comic relief, as a primary site of audience identification (doting on the cute children, fleeing various predators), and as an uncomfortably anthropomorphized character, blurring the human/animal divide in ways that refract poorly on the film's representations of Kru and his family. If you count the title cards, I believe that Bimbo has the most "dialogue" in the movie, interacting with the family in a fully integrated way. He has some close shaves escaping a leopard and an elephant that make obvious use of rear-projection and other photographic tricks. Cooper and Schoedsack dote on Bimbo in a way that they don't on the human characters, and every viewer has to decide whether this choice relieves the humans of the obligation to be "adorable" or if Chang implies a mental, emotional, and linguistic continuity among the people of Siam and the gibbons in their midst.

Whatever its political implications, Chang (the Thai word for "elephant") is a remarkably efficient entertainment, packing more visual punch and pulse-quickening spectacle into 69 minutes than Trader Horn did, and with less jarring cuts between the personal scenes and the animal footage. Indeed, Chang's cameras get daringly close to several beasts, and though you notice and even relish the clear fictional contrivance of the climactic elephant stampede—it would be horrible if this razing of an entire village, portrayed to us as entertainment, were real—the pure, thundering spectacle of this sequence is quite something to behold. Watching one pissed-off elephant maul Kru's hut when she thinks he's kidnapped her baby is impressive enough, but a sprinting fleet of elephants is something altogether different, without so much as a pixel of special effects.

Chang scored with the public and with the industry. As you'll notice from the copious clippings and press notes included on the DVD, the exotic stories about the filming of Chang—frequently turning on the directors' reckless pursuit of the best, closest footage of their dangerous, unpredictable animals—were almost as crowd-pleasing as the film itself. If Chang's box office earned the duo the opportunity to direct King Kong, Cooper and Schoedsack's reputations as bold explorers and thrill-seeking image-makers certainly played into the Kong screenplay's decision to center the action around Carl Denham, a reckless filmmaker who'll do anything and venture anywhere for the right shot, and who promotes himself just as hungrily as Cooper and Schoedsack did. One tidbit on the Chang DVD includes this injunction from the directors and their studio to the theater-owners across the country exhibiting Chang: "If you are not in the habit of personally endorsing your programs, digress from the straight and narrow path just this once. Chang will live up to anything you say!" The filmmakers also declaim the virtues of projecting Chang inside pet-stores or zoo compounds, so that audiences could ostensibly watch the excited reactions of animals to their own on-screen images.

I haven't tried watching Chang in a zoo, but I have screened it for an auditorium full of restless, pent-up college undergraduates, and their reactions—excited, skeptical, nostalgic, ironic, but universally intrigued—were thrilling to gauge, and Chang's aspirations to "reality," even as it serially undercut its own pretenses in that direction, make it a fascinating time capsule of popular cinema at a moment where talkies were just arriving and the drift toward theatrical, narrative- and human-centered comedies and dramas was not yet graven in stone. Sunrise, in its more delicate and elegiac way, is just as commemorative of cinema's moment of reckoning, after thirty years of evolving traditions and on the cusp of seismic revolutions, ascendant studios, and much more standardized production. Cinema, up to that point, subsisted on a recipe of short "actualities" (acrobats flexing, boats docking, fires, kisses, rescues), nature photography, slapstick humor, formal experiments with light and continuity, and literary narratives. Chang gives you a little of all of this at once, and it's built, shot, and scripted to entertain literally anyone, from a 4-year-old to a nonagenarian member of its own original audience. Give it a whirl, tell your friends, and if you're drafting a film-studies syllabus pretty soon, consider giving the admittedly wondrous Nanook a rest.

* Turns out this family's a fraud, too! (Note the comment below.) Let's at least hope that Cooper and Schoedsack didn't keep filming while Kru and his compatriots cried for help and relief on their seal-hunting mission, as Flaherty allegedly did, and that Kru didn't die of starvation on an ice floe right after Chang came out, as Allakariallak/"Nanook" apparently did. Most of all, let's hope that reviewers like me will stop dropping tidbits of knowledge that turn out to be false, and stick to the center-ring task of reviewing and extolling what's on screen! Mea culpa. —the Management

Images © 1927 Paramount Pictures, 2000 Image Entertainment

Treasure Trove

Sorry to have gone M.I.A. for a bit again. Anyone in any corner of academia knows what time of year this is. Plus, I've got a big event planned for tomorrow morning that I'll post about after it happens.

In the meantime, since there's nothing new to read here, check this out: the Internet Encyclopedia of Cinematographers is a phenomenal resource that I just stumbled upon while doing some research about Alwin Küchler, and maybe I'm the last of all y'all film geeks to find about it, but it is truly a mind-blowing website. Every kind of moviegoer will enjoy reading about what cinematography is, especially if you watch the Oscars every year and silently puzzle to yourself what it all means beyond the prettiness of the pictures. (No shame in that, though, especially since Oscar voters rarely respond to anything besides the prettiness of the pictures, either.) There's a helpful breakdown of all the different jobs within a given film's lighting crew, from the head-honcho Director of Photography to the Focus Puller to the Camera Operator to the Key Grip. If you're the kind who learns best through concrete examples, there's even a behind-the-scenes case study about Michael Mann's Collateral: an inspired choice, not just because the film was shot so impressively, but because it blended 35mm and high-definition digital formats so rigorously, with no compromise in visual quality. Tech heads can also use the site to learn about the pro's and con's of those formats, or a primer in cameras over time, or a tour of the digital processes which are all but inevitable for modern Hollywood films, even those that don't look "digitally enhanced" in any obvious way.

But, starf***er that I am, even though Remi Adefarasin and Emmanuel Lubezki and Amy Vincent would probably chuckle at being called "stars," my favorite part of the website is certainly the massive biographical index of cinematographers, including credits, biographical and schooling information, a wide swath of awards listings, and praisesongs from peers and historians about literally hundreds if not thousands of cinematographers. Go find out why all of us should be laying flowers at the graves of Lee Garmes and Joseph Ruttenberg and Sacha Vierny. Feel glad that you're alive at the same time as Yorgos Arvanitis and Javier Aguirresarobe and Maryse Alberti and Lance Acord, and that's only the A's, honey! Site rating: ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ (x) ∞.

Picked Flick #69: Within Our Gates

The most famously racist movie in American cinema is D.W. Griffith's 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation, a film whose boundary-pushing visual grammar and sophisticated devices for managing parallel narratives are deservedly celebrated, and yet whose white-supremacist mythomania is so overt and passionate that actually watching the film is invariably worse than anything you might hear about it in advance. Until you have beheld the Ku Klux Klan riding valiantly to the rescue of an imperiled white lily of Southern womanhood, you have not experienced the full, gobsmacking force of the racist musculature behind early American visual culture. (Wasn't it kind of me to say "early"?)

Enraged by what he saw in The Birth of a Nation, African-American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux rode to his own rescue and filmed Within Our Gates—one of his two most famous films (the other is 1925's Body and Soul), but nonetheless obscure to most moviegoers, even those who retrospectively recognize the fundamental disgraces in Griffith's movie. This circumstance actually speaks to another American problem, wherein we have better memories for Faustian masterpieces than for exemplary acts of redress. Indeed, Within Our Gates was deemed lost for many years before it resurfaced just over a decade ago, in mislabeled film canisters in a vault somewhere in Spain. Knowing the severe obstacles this film has faced for decades just trying to get itself seen—not to mention the obstacles you'll encounter trying to see it, unless you live near a university library, or unless TCM is having an especially emancipated day—only adds to its blunt force once unveiled. Rather than a white actor in blackface chasing a histrionic Mae Marsh, Within Our Gates sports a harrowing sequence in which Sylvia Landry, its African-American protagonist, is not only beaten and sexually aggressed by a white man, but by one who comes to realize amidst this very encounter that he is her father—speaking not just to his brutishness in the present moment but to an entire history of disavowed sexual violence and natal alienation. Just as thunderous, both in its anger and in its bold execution, is a long flashback sequence that details the lynching of Sylvia's family, a passage which was customarily excised by craven projectionist even when Gates played to American audiences in 1920. The desperate physicality of the actors in these sequences, as well as their comportment in the more serene but equally interesting passages of the movie, are a succinct rebuttal not just to American memories of its racial past but to the dominating aesthetic of American silent features, which usually opted for a gentility and a stylized theatricality that Micheaux frequently eschews. Lead actress Evelyn Preer, a bright light of the African-American stage, has a soft but womanly poise that offers key counterpoint to the willowy fragility with which Griffith tended to shoot Lillian Gish. Furthermore, Micheaux, who worked without a credited cinematographer, is a cunning visualist, alternating abstract and realist backgrounds behind characters in seemingly straightforward dialogue scenes, so as to comment subtly on the varying moral depth of their points of view, their relation to or else their avoidance of the world they mutually inhabit.

Within Our Gates is full of surprises, following a multitude of characters and plotlines without settling into predictable allegiances. Micheaux's critiques of bad habits within the African-American community are as lucid as his indictments of white-supremacist ideology. The film wholly avoids a Manichean division between black saints and white predators, and the introductions of romance and religion among the film's active concerns do interesting things to our views of several characters. The closing scenes are unforeseeably optimistic, and Gates has taken its licks over the years for making this turn, though it seems to me that the thinly motivated dissolve amidst the final shot squares it quite self-consciously in the realm of fairy tale. Of course, the most delicious surprise in Within Our Gates is that it exists at all, against the odds of America's post-WWI self-deification and despite Micheaux's omission from too many debates and film texts where he rightfully belongs. One particularly succulent reward came in 1992, the fourth year in the cycle of National Film Registry inductees, when Within Our Gates entered the Library of Congress' most esteemed collection of American films right alongside The Birth of a Nation. In the national archives at least, but hopefully in other places too, Micheaux can call Griffith's bluff in perpetuity. There is more than one way to write history in lightning. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)