The Screengrab : honore de balzac

Half Measures: Paul Clark's Favorites of the First Half of '08

Paul Clark — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Last week, Screengrab’s Andrew Osborne shared with you his favorite movies from the second quarter of 2008, so I figured that I might as well get in on the act as well. Unlike Andrew, I’ll be writing about my favorite releases dating back to the beginning of the year, mostly because I didn’t write one of these back in April. But I’d like to concur with Andrew’s statement that the moviegoing year, like so many others, started slowly but quickly improved in quality as it continued, with both big-budget blockbusters and limited-release arthouse fare making strong showings thusfar.

My top five:

1. The Duchess of Langeais- had Jacques Rivette not made a film called L’Amour Fou forty years ago, he very well might have given his most recent film that title. Based on a novel by Balzac, Duchess often plays like a mirror image of The Age of Innocence- only this time, the knowledge (and flouting) of propriety only serves to drive an emotional wedge between the two lovers. The Duchess (Jeanne Balibar) and her officer (Guillaume Depardieu) must play games with each other in lieu of an actual relationship, and almost imperceptibly their innocent courtship spirals out of their control. All the while, Rivette’s formal boldness remains intact, resulting in his best film in over a decade- no mean feat for a master of Rivette’s standing.

2. WALL*E- speaking of masters, was anyone really surprised that Pixar’s latest turned out as wonderful as it did? In perhaps their most experimental gambit to date, much of WALL *E is practically dialogue-free, as director Andrew Stanton and his team make most of their points visually. And what visuals! So beautifully-rendered is the dusty Earth future of the film’s first half that the more traditionally eye-popping second half (with its interstellar mega-mall) looks almost chintzy by comparison, like all the life and heart was drained from it. Which is of course the point, as WALL*E’s message isn’t so much anti-corporate as anti-complacency, celebrating the industriousness and determination of its robotic protagonist while despairing of those who would content themselves with having their decisions made and lives lived for them.

3. Stuck- like The Duchess of Langeais, Stuart Gordon’s latest film tells the story of a man and a woman locked in a tragic, fateful duet. The difference is that this one is about a guy who gets stuck in a windshield. There’s nothing pretty about Stuck, from Gordon’s grimy visuals and grayish color palette to the behavior his film portrays, as the film’s anti-heroine (played by Mena Suvari) hides the accident victim (Stephen Rea) in her garage rather than risk jeopardizing the insignificant promotion she supposedly has coming to her. Stuck is a film born of its working-class setting, in which the poor fight over the scraps the rich give them, with little regard for the lives of those who get in their way. It’s ugly, harrowing stuff, but it’s also thrilling like the best exploitation films are, and Stuck is one of the best movies of this kind to come along in ages.

4. Paranoid Park- for years, Gus Van Sant has specialized in films about outsiders, but this is the closest he’s come thusfar to seeing the world through an outsider’s eyes. Much of the credit goes to the subjectivity inherent in Van Sant’s favored style, which he perfects with this film, as he follows a marginalized teenager (newcomer Gabe Nevins) who views his world- his parents, his peers, his girlfriend- from a distance, even before the killing he may or may not have been responsible for causes him to sever emotional ties from them altogether. He would sooner escape into his own mind as find a place for himself in this world, a point Van Sant makes most vivid in the scene where the protagonist takes a shower as the soundtrack becomes overrun with rainforest sounds. Simultaneously nightmarish and poetic, Paranoid Park is a major work by a filmmaker who remains as experimental as ever.

5. Speed Racer- yes, really. I sort of wonder if the overwhelming critical drubbing that was afforded the Wachowski Brothers’ adaptation of the animated series was due to the directors’ key inspirations- comic books, video games, Saturday morning cartoons- not being part of the critics’ pasts. Granted, I too was skeptical about the film going in, but it didn’t take long for it to win me over. I’ll be damned if I can find a subtext, but with its dazzling array of eye-popping colors, deliberately unrealistic effects, and snazzy edits (Ang Lee could take a lesson in the latter from the Wachowskis), that scarcely matters. The racetrack scenes alone gave me that rush that all big summer movies promise but which few deliver, playing like the Day-glo daydream of a Pixie Stick-fueled kid racing and smashing up Matchbox cars. Plus there are ninjas, and as any young boy can tell you, ninjas make every movie better.

Screengrab Review: The Duchess of Langeais

Peter Smith — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 17:30:00 GMT

It's rather unfortunate that Jacques Rivette's latest film is being released here with a title that conveys generic period stodginess à la Masterpiece Theatre, since the original French title — Ne touchez pas la hache, or "Don't Touch the Axe" — better conveys the razor-sharp edges of this superlative, expertly calibrated battle of wills. Faithfully adapted from Honoré de Balzac's novella, it opens in and around a Spanish convent, where gimpy, sullen war veteran Armand de Montriveau (Guillaume Depardieu, son of Gérard) seeks an audience with a Barefoot Carmelite nun who calls herself Sister Theresa (Jeanne Balibar). Their brief, impassioned interview, conducted under the suspicious eye of the Mother Superior, abruptly concludes when an agonized Sister Theresa cries out, "Mother, I have lied to you! This man is my lover!" At which point the film jumps back five years in order to recount the torturous quasi-courtship of the nun — now revealed as the titular Duchess — and the general, an affair characterized by elaborate, courtly head games that amount to a 19th-century equivalent of The Rules.

Nobody understood the maddening allure of the almost attainable better than Balzac, and Rivette matches the author's emotional precision with one subtly stunning composition after another, buttressed by a handful of short yet heartbreaking lateral pans that move us from master to close-up without the violence of a cut. (It's the cut afterward that draws blood.) He also makes much more effective and perverse use of textual intertitles than did Patrice Chéreau in Gabrielle, a film that now looks even more overwrought and mannered by comparison. Balibar's wily, impassioned performance was a given — her best work to date was as the star of Rivette's 2001 effort La Savoir — but I hadn't expected such muted volcanic ardor from Depardieu fils, who practically broods a hole in the floor of every room he enters. And while I'm weary of the structural device in which we open with the penultimate scene and then flash back to see the events that led to this crisis/impasse, here the device is absolutely crucial, tainting every bit of gamesmanship that follows/precedes it. Indeed, I desperately hoped that the film would end without returning to the convent, and was somewhat disappointed when there turned out to be an epilogue of sorts. But even that perfunctory flourish slices clean. — Mike D'Angelo

The Thirteen Greatest Long-Ass Movies of All Time, Part 2

Peter Smith — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 19:00:00 GMT

LITTLE DORRIT (1988) Running time: 360 mins.

Charles Dickens, who peaked at the time of the serialization craze in English fiction, got paid by the word, and it's easy to imagine that's the reason for the vast, sprawling length of his many novels. But when writer/director Christine Edzard created her ambitious movie version of his Little Dorrit, she was determined not to short-change the complex richness of the narrative simply to bring the production in at a tidy two hours. After all, if Dickens took the time to make his legions of characters and mountains of subplots all come together like clockwork, why shouldn't she extend him the same courtesy? Clocking in at around six hours, Little Dorrit isn't just long for length's sake: it's in service of a cleverly ambiguous plot, split into two often conflicting points of view. Everyone brings their best game to Little Dorrit, from the set designers to the cinematographer, but especially the actors: for those who have a low tolerance for Dickens' wicked excess, twisted excursions and talky supporting characters, it's the acting, featuring a veritable Who's Who of quality British actors of the 1980s, that keeps you in your seat. Edzard may have learned her lesson — she never directed anything as ambitious again after this — but she did what she set out to do: create the most intricate, essential, and faithful recreation of a Dickens novel ever made.

WAR AND PEACE (1967) Running time: 414 mins.

Due to the limited commercial prospects for extra-long movies, most of the films on this list are relatively low-budget. But this wasn't the case for actor/director Sergei Bondarchuk's epic adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's literary masterwork. Far from it, in fact — the film had what was referred to as an "open budget," which basically meant that the entire Soviet film industry shut down to work on it. Estimates in 1967 put the budget of War and Peace at about $100 million; forty years of inflation puts it at no less than seven times that amount. But as the saying goes, every cent is up there on the screen. If nothing else, War and Peace is the biggest, grandest epic of all, boasting tens of thousands of actual soldiers in the battle scenes, some of the most opulent sets ever committed to film, and an awe-inspiring re-creation of the siege and burning of Moscow by Napoleon's army. But Bondarchuk's epic vision didn't stop with the size of the production. Instead, every frame of War and Peace represents the director's tribute to the irrepressible spirit of the Russian people, which managed to survive even the threats posed to it by Napoleon. Each of the film's larger-than-life performers reflects this idea, none more so than the incandescent Ludmilla Savelyeva, a ballerina who turned out to be the most perfect choice imaginable for the film's pivotal role of Natasha. War and Peace is huge but not plodding, a thrilling, emotionally satisfying populist drama that just happens to be seven hours long. It is that rarest of cinematic creatures — a film that actually does credit to the literary masterpiece that inspired it while standing as a masterpiece in its own right.

HITLER: A FILM FROM GERMANY (1978) Running time: 442 mins.

Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's seven-hour, twenty-two minute Hitler: A Film From Germany — or Our Hitler, as it was retitled for its American run — is a multi-part experimental feature consisting largely of monologues (performed by actors representing Hitler and others) meant to explore the meaning of Hitler's legacy and the sources of his appeal and fascination to the German people. Taking a page from Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, one of the film's avenues of exploration is Nazism's banality, and Syberberg, a disciple of both Brecht and Richard Wagner — he followed this film up with a four-hour, fifteen-minute movie version of the opera Parsifal — has no fear of examining banality at a length and degree of detail that some might consider above and beyond the call of duty. Heralded by praise from Susan Sontag, and "presented" by Francis Ford Coppola, it arrived on these shores in 1980 as the official brainiac cinema experience of the year.

SATANTANGO (1994) Running time: 450 mins.

For years, Bela Tarr's seven-and-a-half-hour Satantango has been one of the great rites of passage for the serious cinephile. But while a long-ass black-and-white movie about a Hungarian farming commune might lead the uninitiated to expect a massive slog, the truth is that Satantango isn't nearly the frightening behemoth its reputation would suggest. To begin with, Tarr's style is gorgeous, with masterful use of long takes and silky-smooth Steadicam that gives the film a surprising amount of momentum. Tarr rarely keeps his camera still, following his characters on their journeys through life. The results can be hilarious (as in the famous barroom scene), or unbearably sad (like a scene between an ill-fated girl and her cat), or just plain hypnotic (who can forget a follow shot of three men walking down a road while discarded newspapers blow all around them?) But Satantango isn't simply an empty exercise in bravura filmmaking. Tarr's film is nothing less than a postmortem for Communism in Eastern Europe, the story of an aimless band of farmers who are inspired by a charismatic local to follow him, only to be suddenly abandoned, separated and scattered to the four winds. Satantango has been described as "not so much a movie as a place you visit," and it's a destination every true lover of film should make a journey to at least once.

EMPIRE (1964) Running time: 484 mins.

Watch the YouTube clip that accompanies this entry. Then watch it eighty more times. That's a rough approximation of the experience of watching Andy Warhol's silent-film triumph, Empire, which consists of over eight hours of a single shot of the Empire State Building, taken from late one evening until early the next morning. Even more maddening, the film is meant to be screened at a slower speed than it was filmed — the actual footage is only about six hours long. The first question that springs to everyone's mind upon hearing about Empire for the first time is: "Why would anyone want to film a skyscraper for eight hours?" To which the answer is: "Why would anyone want to paint a bunch of soup cans?" And the answer to that is: "Why would anyone want to make a bunch of soup cans?" Part of Warhol's particular genius, and the reason that he is such an important figure in modern art, is that he forced us to look at the things we had made, to see them with new eyes. In a sense, of course, like much conceptual art, Empire is something you know about, not something you actually sit down and watch: but if you give it the chance, it's a film that can almost literally hypnotize you with its simple beauty and repetitiveness. Warhol was trying to establish, as Tom Vick writes, that "the camera is a machine capable of paying attention to anything for any length of time." Warhol throws down a gauntlet with Empire, as he quietly did so often in his career, and asks us to watch our creations doing what we made them capable of doing.

SHOAH (1985) Running time: 503 mins.

Claude Lanzmann's nine-hour film about the Holocaust attempts to redefine the documentary form and the whole accepted approach to its subject, allowing its interview subjects long, long takes in which to discuss their experiences and observations. When released to theaters in this country, the movie seemed to consume all the cultural oxygen in places, inspiring tributes that spilled over from the arts sections to the op-ed pages. Since then, Lanzmann has expanded it by six minutes while tinkering with its outtakes: he's carved two subsequent interview films, A Visitor from the Living (1997) and Sobibor, Oct. 14, 1943, 4 P.M (2001) out of the mountain of footage from which Shoah was assembled. (And Lanzmann himself can be seen onscreen in Marcel Ophuls's four-and-a-half-hour documentary Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie, a film that shows his influence.)

OUT 1 (1971) Running time: 773 mins.

When you're making a list of great long films, not including at least one selection by Jacques Rivette is unthinkable. After all, here's a guy who regularly makes movies that are more than three hours long. But Out 1 is mammoth even by Rivette standards, an eight-part, nearly thirteen-hour beast of a film that's catnip for Rivette fans and damn near indecipherable for just about everyone else. Taking as his starting point Balzac's History of the Thirteen, Rivette begins the film with two rival theatrical troupes (one of which is staging Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes despite the fact that it only has six members), plus a con-artist and layabout played by Juliet Berto, and Jean-Pierre Leaud as a deaf-mute who plays an off-key harmonica for people in the street until they get annoyed enough to give him money. The narrative, such as it is, involves a shadowy organization called "The Thirteen," with various characters that are either part of The Thirteen, wish to join The Thirteen, or want to probe the mysteries of The Thirteen. Given Out 1's running time, you might think Rivette would provide some closure, but you'd be sorely mistaken. In Out 1, the narrative digressions and dead-ends ARE the story, and there are some real corkers — a theatre rehearsal that degenerates into animalistic grunts, an interview with a pompous Balzac expert played by Rivette's fellow critic-turned-filmmaker Eric Rohmer, an extended search and fruitless search for a larcenous troupe member — leading up to a final shot that's a cross between a winking grace note and an extended middle finger. Frankly, Rivette's fans (masochists that we are) wouldn't have it any other way. And if that's not good enough for you, there's the ever-lovely Berto, who spends much of the film running around in a pair of super-foxy striped jeans.

BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ (1980) Running time: 939 mins.

It's a bit unfair to call Ranier Werner Fassbinder's masterful adaptation of the Alfred Döblin novel the longest narrative film ever made, as some critics do. Berlin Alexanderplatz was conceived of and executed as a television mini-series (making tremendously long, ponderous TV movies was apparently all the rage in Germany around this time; Edgar Reitz's eleven-hour Heimat was made only four years later), and it's unlikely that even a provocateur like Fassbinder intended for anyone to sit through the whole thing at one go. Still, it's a brilliant piece of filmmaking regardless of your method of intake: marked by tremendous acting and incredibly inventive direction, Berlin Alexanderplatz is both a step away from Fassbinder's twisted takes on melodrama and a refinement of methods used in his previous films, most especially clever camera movements and long, discursive conversations. Following in the footsteps of Erich von Stroheim, Fassbinder attempted to make an absolutely faithful filmed version of his source novel, using a number of the book's interesting narrative techniques to create a digressive yet highly focused sense of place and time. This isn't the best place to start with Fassbinder, but it may be the best place to end: it was, in many ways, the movie he'd waited his whole life to make.

HONORABLE MENTION:

GREED (1924) Semi-Restored Running time: 239 mins; Original Running time: Long As Fuck

Anyone wondering why Erich von Stroheim became the model for the modern stereotype of the film director as demanding, egomaniacal slave-driver (complete with puffy pants, monocle, and thick Teutonic accent) need look no further than Greed. The first feature-length film produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was meant to be of standard length — then, as now, around two hours — but von Stroheim would have none of it. So impressed was he by Frank Norris' novel of a love triangle destroyed after the sudden windfall of a lottery win, that he set out to recreate it, scene by scene and word for word: not as an adaptation, but literally as a visualization on screen of the entire novel. This necessitated, among other things, hiring a huge cast, defying the studio by shooting on location whenever possible, and spending a then-unheard-of half million dollars before turning in the completed product. And even then, MGM's troubles were just beginning: von Stroheim's initial cut of Greed was an astonishing ten hours long, likely the longest movie ever submitted to a major studio. The enraged executives demanded a new cut, and von Stroheim submitted an edit (which he considered a huge compromise) that was still over four hours long. The studio essentially banished him from the project after that, eventually releasing a two-hour cut that eliminated so many characters and subplots that it was nearly incomprehensible, and widely panned by the critics. Turner Entertainment released a 'restored' version of the second, four-hour cut of Greed a few years ago, using surviving footage, script, and still photographs, that suggests how good the original might have been. But we'll never really know — the vast majority of the reels from the ten-hour version were accidentally destroyed over fifty years ago by an MGM maintenance worker.

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce