Movie Enthusiast Issue 55: French New Wave Diaries IV, Bergman Centennial II, RIP Claude Lanzmann
Watching
The Virgin Spring (1960)
By my own admission I am not the biggest fan of filmed adaptations of medieval folklore. This one I actually warmed to! Ingmar Bergman won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1961 for this movie (he would win it again the very next year for Through a Glass Darkly). The Virgin Spring is adapted from an 13th-century Swedish ballad about the death of the youngest, unmarried daughter of a village family and her vengeful father. The movie’s a brisk 90 minutes, everyone learns a lesson in keeping their Commandments, there’s an Odin-worshipping woman who pointlessly stuffs a toad inside a loaf of bread. Just like in Wild Strawberries, Bergman judges every shot just right. The Virgin Spring isn’t as full of lyrical gestures, though that feels appropriate to the story being told. A sign of a good director is knowing when to exercise restraint when a given movie calls for it, rather than aspiring to top previously successful flourishes with something even grander with each successive movie. (You hear that, Alejandro Iñarritu?)
Leave No Trace (2018)
Several years ago I watched Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone with my parents. My mother still talks about this movie—unfavorably—and the infamous scene where Jennifer Lawrence fishes her father’s ice-dead hand out of the water.
I am pleased to report that Granik’s newest narrative feature (she made a documentary in the intervening 8 years) is a much warmer film than her breakout, and one that I even recommended, sans reservations, to my mother. I suppose it's such an easy film to recommend because the father-daughter relationship at its heart is the inverse of the one in Winter’s Bone. Thomasin Mackenzie plays the daughter here, and she’s great in the way that young up-and-coming actresses in their breakout roles in quiet American independent films are at once uniquely good and yet somehow interchangeable. Ben Foster plays the dad; I’ve never been able to recognize him or form opinions on him even though he always plays some variation of the same grizzled, lone wolf-y dude in every movie I remember I’ve seen him in.
Leave No Trace is working in a style of social realism that’s pretty au courant among American indie filmmakers lately. Chloé Zhao does something similar with The Rider, out earlier this year. I think Granik is much better filmmaker in all the areas where Zhao is weak—crafting naturalistic dialogue, getting out of the way of her non-professional actors so they can better live their performances, to name a few. At the same time, no moment in Leave No Trace ascends to the heights that The Rider reaches. They’re both good movies, and you should see them both so then we can have a deeper discussion about the directors’ respective successes and shortcomings in depicting rural American communities they themselves aren’t originally part of.
Pierrot le fou (1965)
This was a fun little Bastille Day hatewatch. I saw it at Suns Cinema in Columbia Heights, an instantly beloved community fixture in some guys’ apartment (they’ve cobbled together a screen and some seats in the second floor of their house, operate a bar downstairs, and include an intermission in every film they show—no matter how long—to maximize on their concessions profits and keep the business going).
It’s always much more bearable to watch a Godard film with company. I made the mistake of watching 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her by myself in college once and was so incensed at its pretensions that I dragged my roommate outside with me afterward to march around our apartment complex in the cold so I could blow off steam. (He claims not to remember this incident.)
Pierrot le fou is at least a much more fun movie, although you can only put up with so much anarchic energy before the chaos becomes tedious in its own way. I will not soon forget the stupidly astonishing genius of the opening credits—the letters of the alphabet dramatically reveal themselves in order to spell out JEAN-PAUL BELMONDO ET ANNA KARINA DANS PIERROT LE FOU UN FILM DE JEAN-LUC GODARD, or the way those multicolored lights pirouette across the windshield in those night driving scenes. I am aware that I lack the requisite knowledge of Samuel Fuller movies (and—surprise—the Algerian War) to fully appreciate everything going on in this film, though I have seen Johnny Guitar and am tickled pink by the throwaway line about it being good for a child’s education. For once I may agree with Godard on something.
Writing
All of my friends hated First Reformed, which I can’t begrudge them. It’s an easy movie to dislike—ridiculous priest-turned-terrorist plot, highly affected aesthetics, super mopey and at times irritating main character. I wasn’t about to be swayed quite so easily from my initial opinion that the movie is, if not a masterpiece, then at least unintentionally excellent. In my debut for Commonweal, I broke out my toolbox of Orthodox theology to articulate why I found Paul Schrader’s latest to be quite theologically profound.
Reading
The older I get and the more films I see, the more I realize cinema isn’t and cannot be primarily a narrative art, but primarily a lyrical art. That, of course, doesn’t mean cinema must be non-narrative, at all, just like a huge part of poetry does narrate stories or situations. What it means is that cinema cannot aspire to the complexity of detail of a novel, because it doesn’t have all those pages to explain in detail the characters’ or the author’s thoughts. Of course film has voiceover, but if a film entirely explained the director’s thoughts or the characters’ thoughts in voiceover we would deem it bad. Film has to synthesize meaning and emotion through images that convey as many meanings as possible, and that elicit as many emotions as possible (or, if they’re not many, as intense an emotion as possible). In that sense, film is much closer to poetry than it is to novels. Images (and their relation to other images through editing, given that film is a succession of images) have to be emotional, metaphorical, synesthesic, evocative.
—my favorite cinephile mounts a defense of silent films
Mr. Lanzmann, a son of assimilated French Jews, took everything at full tilt. At 18, he led a Communist youth Resistance group, risking his life by smuggling small arms under the eyes of the Gestapo in Clermont-Ferrand, in central France. He became a figure of the intellectual Left, a protégé of Jean-Paul Sartre, the lover of Simone de Beauvoir for nine years, and a colleague of them both at the cultural review Les Temps Modernes, where he was editor in chief for many years.
With “Shoah” — Hebrew for catastrophe — Mr. Lanzmann upstaged everything he had done before. From its release in 1985, the film was internationally recognized as both an important historical record and an original, even beautiful, work of art — a nine-and-a-half-hour movie without a single frame of the by-then-familiar footage of the gas chambers or the living skeletons that Allied forces discovered in the Germans’ death camps.
—Claude Lanzmann (1925–2018)
—How Kodak Ektachrome film is made
Coming Soon
It’s been 5 years since Under the Skin and Jonathan Glazer finally has a new project in the works. He says it’ll be set in and about Auschwitz, and should be ready by 2020.
Jim Jarmusch has begun production on The Dead Don’t Die, a “zombie comedy” with Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Tilda Swinton, Chloë Sevigny, Steve Buscemi, and Selena Gomez.
The Criterion Collection will release a 39-film box set of Ingmar Bergman’s films, including 18 new to the Collection, this November.
Speaking of Bergman (get used to it), Mia Hansen-Løve has begun production on Bergman Island with Greta Gerwig, Mia Wasikowska, and John Turturro. The film, set on Bergman’s home island of Fårö, will be Hansen-Løve’s English-language debut, and reportedly may be inspired by her relationship with fellow filmmaker Olivier Assayas.
First trailers for Mary, Queen of Scots and Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite, which I’m sure will make for an intriguing double bill this winter.