#804: A Brighter Summer Day

(Edward Yang, 1991)

"You can't even tell real from fake. How can you make movies?"

Art is objects made to look like symbols, or perhaps the other way around. Ceci n'est pas une pipe. In cinema, this takes the form of actors and sets and music and title cards, but the most interesting thing in film has always been the illusion of fantasy made real; the rudimentary science fiction of A Trip to the Moon; the Depression-fighting glamour of The Thin Man; the television-fighting Christian epics of The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur; the current kid-fantasy comic book deluge. All of these genres are wildly different and intended for different audiences. But they represent the history of cinema as an artform primarily concerned with the artificial and imagined conceits of society turned literal on screen.

The real and the fake constantly bleed together in Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer Day, his four-hour masterwork finally available in the US on home video (or any kind of wide release) after 25 years of bad bootlegs and fleeting repertory screenings. The blurring starts at the top. Taiwan itself is a simulacrum of China, a "republic" in exile, convinced that it will return to claim its country. The generation that lost China's civil war, represented as parents in the film, dreams of  retaking the mainland, yet seems more intent on displaying to themselves their readiness than actually delivering on it - a false show of force rather than the implementation of it.

The implications of this myth - and the dependence upon it - are all around the characters of the film, despite the fact that the movie's core story is not overtly political. S'ir's family lives in a house formerly occupied by the Japanese, a constant reminder that Taiwan is a nation in flux and without the ever-present history of their former country. Tanks roll down the street to nowhere in particular. The night school S'ir is demoted to uses military-style uniforms that mask the ganglife reality of its students (a layer of deceit later extended by Honey's return, where he wears a military uniform to avoid the police).

Within this context, it's no wonder that S'ir and his classmates would turn to American culture, a worldview created by the children of immigrants in a land where tradition is constantly erased. Elvis's disciples in the film, particularly Cat, present renditions of his work that are difficult to visually reconcile: young Chinese men and boys singing like, posturing like, hoping to move like American rock-and-rollers. Cat, subtly one of the most important characters in the movie, does not understand the words but uses phonetic translations of the music to recreate nearly perfect renditions. Is it "a brighter summer day" that Elvis sings, S'ir's sister wonders? The film's English title, it seems, could itself crumble under closer scrutiny.

S'ir and Ming are the false lovers at the center of this story of misunderstood run-ins and quiet injustices. The relationship is built out of imagined connections, mainly because Ming is so obtuse that she allows any boy (or man, in the case of the doctor) to ascribe to her whichever need they have the urge to satisfy. In the case of S'ir, this plays out as the role of protector. Ming's early acquiescence to this dynamic illustrates the typical peril women face in innocent games; what is taken as flirtation and innocence by S'ir is actually Ming's defense against the already typical pull men feel toward her. In Ming's shoes, their interactions are superficially meaningful. She is drawn to S'ir because she thinks he doesn't want precisely what her attention is stirring within him. Look at the final crime that brings their dalliances to a final tragedy: S'ir does not intend to stab her until the very moment he does it. This crime of passion was originally (presumably) intended for Ma (whose own power over Ming by employing her mother casts further tragic light on the girl's facility for choice outside the intentions men place on her). Even this most-real moment is something far different than it looks. As S'ir stands over Ming's body, with the surrounding shoppers as oblivious to what has just happened as they are to the world of teenage games that we've lived with for nearly four hours, he looks down and screams at her that she is not dead. It's hope for reality to pull him out of his nightmare despite the fact that we know it's the other way around.

This final moment couldn't have come without the interrogation S'ir's father experiences. In the most jarring narrative shift in the film, Yang cuts from the white-knuckled terror of the pool hall massacre to the White Terror of Taiwan's purging of suspected Communist sympathizers. This rug pull is addressed in the essay accompanying the Criterion release, though Rayns seems to take it at face value. It doesn't seem like a coincidence that Yang timed the massacre for the halfway point of his epic, nor does it seem surprising that he would follow it with the rest of S'ir's world crumbling around him; this film is a symmetrical arc with a second half that descends into emotional chaos for father and son alike. But the fact that Yang chooses to avoid any of the immediate aftermath of the massacre is the mark of a true storyteller. Like, Ozu, Hitchcock, or Resnais, Yang knows when his viewer can make a narrative jump more elegantly than the average filmmaker does. And here, too, the film's reality bumps up against artifice.

S'ir's father is of course a good citizen of the Republic of China. Though he's taken the same kind of hit most middle class former Chinese men have in the move to Taiwan, there's no indication in the film that he regrets his decision. We even meet a woman whose husband opted out, returning to Mao's China in the 50s to attempt to open up the country during the Hundred Flowers Campaign. This is also why Zhang is interrogated, of course. He happened to be friends with the wrong people, who are really just the people that anyone would know in a messy separation like that of the Communist revolution (mirroring the lower stakes HUAC era in the States). Zhang is a true citizen of Taiwan's Chinese government, yet fear of Communism has turned citizens into spies. Zhang's friend Wang talks a big game, but it's not clear if he is able to back up this posturing; S'ir's mother wonders aloud to her husband if he wasn't behind the kidnapping himself. The ultimate façade crumbles as Zhang is pulled from his interrogation room to glance in on another interrogation - just like his own - taking place in the next room over. It's an assembly line of false confessions, designed to blur the line between truth and fiction and serve up a generation of traitors to excuse the sorry state of the resistance, long since exiled to a tropical island.

As the film's devices extend into metaphor, so too does the push and pull between real and fake. The most overt example of this is the flashlight, a wonderful display of Yang's deliberate plotting and delicate hand with symbolism. S'ir steals the flashlight in the early moments of the film from the movie studio that sits next to his school. From there it winds its way through the plot as doggedly as S'ir himself, almost immediately playing a key role in illuminating Sly's makeout session, but then bleeding into events at school, encounters with Ming, and perhaps most notably in the chilling massacre S'ir is witness to at the pool hall. In the commentary included with the film, Rayns posits that S'ir initially intends to steal the flashlight simply to read in his bed. But this seems far-sighted for a clearly impulsive kid like S'ir, who likely just grabbed the first thing of value on the guard's desk when he was unattended to. Still, the ways in which S'ir (and others) use the flashlight are often childlike and innocent, even when what it reveals is more sinister. S'ir returns the flashlight (where he says the line at the beginning of this post) just before his final act; he's put away childish things and turned toward his fate.

Flashlights are frequently metaphors for truth, shining a light on what was dark. Yet their light is artificial, cutting through the natural darkness to glare at things that were meant to be hidden. The pool hall massacre takes place in the dark because the Taiwanese government is unable (or more likely unwilling) to keep the lights on. S'ir's flashlight cuts through this darkness to reveal the truth hidden by his government. As the tanks roll by, Ming turns the light on and off, bouncing the fake beams off the giant machines lumbering through their world. A war has become a game (just as the doctor accuses Ming of turning love into a game), and the normalization of violence persists. The flashlight's origin in the movie studio extends the metaphor: this light is from a temple of light, a place where without exposure there is nothing. The coincidence of the flashlight motif and the concept of a brighter summer day no longer seems so coincidental.

Yang's basic premise for A Brighter Summer Day, using a real-life tabloid murder from his childhood to construct a wholly fictionalized narrative about his and his father's generation, is filled with potential for exploring the battle between real and fake. Of course, the very nature of cinema, referenced literally in the studio subplot of the film and in the quotation at the beginning of this post, is ripe for examination of the duality - the technical process of individual frames implying motion is just as much of an illusion as the developed method of storytelling within the medium (editing, set design, acting, post manipulation, etc.). Yet there are many conscious and unconscious layers of narrative piled on top of reality. The film's Chinese title is "The Murder Incident of the Boy on Guling Street," yet the boy is not the boy (his used name in the film is not his "real" name in the movie - yet his "real" name is the real name of the actor who plays him, just as his fake father is played by his real father) and the street is not Guling street, but rather an elaborate set constructed for the film. Real-life events are either inserted into the film to anchor the fictional story to history (the Nixon/Kennedy election) or altered to fit the narrative's momentum (the massacre that serves as its turning point is loosely based on a real-life crime that occurred years after the film is set).

The concept can be extended to Yang's directorial style, one that was in line with many of his peers in New Taiwan Cinema. Long takes, amateur actors, and stories that detail the real lives and political context of everyday life are all devices frequently used to eliminate the "lies" of cutting, method acting, or wish-fulfillment and/or pure entertainment in mainstream films. This was not necessarily the conscious intention of these filmmakers, many of whom took their influences directly from previous titans like Ozu, whose frames within frames are on full display here, and Herzog, who showed Yang that film can be deeply personal and need not conform to commercial standards. But they nevertheless reject both Hollywood and what the filmmakers were seeing within their own industry, where romance pictures and war propaganda were being churned out by a tired studio system out of touch with the realities of second- and third-generation life in Taiwan.

The real/fake relationship can be felt everywhere in the film, both literally and metaphorically. The implications of this dichotomy, pulled throughout the film's mammoth running time, are less straightforward. What does this continual process of illuminating obscured truths say about the world Yang wants to depict? Rayns mentions on the commentary that Taiwan's history was tightly controlled through the first thirty years of its history under Chinese rule, to the point where huge massacres like the one that inspired the pool hall incident were not even covered in the paper. So perhaps Yang's intentions were political, a statement about the struggle of Taiwanese 2nd and 3rd generation children to decode their past. Told lies and half-truths for so long, it would seem cathartic to experience a film like A Brighter Summer Day. This political slant ties nicely into the rest of the New Taiwan Cinema movement, where films shed light on similarly papered-over but significant events like the February 28 Incident where thousands of native Taiwanese were massacred by the Chinese government.

However, I think Yang's intentions were much more personal, and therefore universal. At the end of his brilliant commentary, which, as would indicate its impressive scale, I've already referenced quite a bit, Tony Rayns says that he believes the film is about both father and son and their inability to reconcile their own personal system of beliefs with that of the authoritarian state under which they live. This is as good an explanation of the film's larger purpose as any that I have heard or read, but I'll offer one more.

A Brighter Summer Day seems to be not so much about the individual versus a social or political structure as it is about the fundamental nature of identity - "who am I?" not "how can I be myself?" The rocky path father and son find themselves on is not laid exclusively by the powers that be, but partially by their own doing. One of the key moments in the film is Zhang telling S'ir "if a person will apologize for the things he didn't do, he is capable of anything." This is directly relevant to the situation both find themselves in, where the father is accused of sympathies he does not harbor and the son is associated with the gangs to which he does not belong. But it's also indicative of their internal struggle to make a place in the world. Yang once said that the film was made to address the unspoken choice Taiwan must eventually make, to declare independence or reintegrate into China. Either approach is an acceptance of defeat, and for me this is why the film is not so much about the destruction of the individual as it is about the struggle for a moral and certain dignity within any state, though particularly an oppressive one.

In this regard, both men have fought a losing battle by the second half of the film. Zhang is a shadow of his former self walking home from his son's former school, recreating the scene from earlier where he laid down his stand against false confession. As Rayns notes, S'ir himself is pushed out of the film by the camera, depicted either outside the frame or with his back to us for the final stretch. This is not the oppression of the state - we've seen that come down on him for the first three hours of the film -  but the elimination of identity, his final chance for redemption pushed aside with him. The movie opens with S'ir's fate being discussed by other people as he sits outside. The value of education in the world of the film makes clear the role the radio broadcasts of graduating students play in the film's bookends: this is tragedy of lost potential, of sacrifices made that were never redeemed. Of course, virtually none of the children we've met during the film will be included in any broadcast like the ones we hear, so there are certainly social implications here, the idea of a lost generation. But the continuation of the Zhang family's household chores (and the absence of the men) in the final moments points toward a more personal tragedy. S'ir's cinematic dissolution is a democratic call to Yang's generation, and a tribute to the failed struggle of his father's. These are statements with far-reaching political implications, but they apply first to the individual.

Many people have talked about the novelistic qualities of A Brighter Summer Day; the detail in the setting and plotting; the huge number of speaking parts; the many threads of story that are intertwined so tightly that the running time could not be reduced without sacrificing key moments, a rare case of a four-hour film without any fat. In the modern era, this is most reminiscent of the praise surrounding The Wire, David Simon's five-season examination of the American City at the turn of the 21st century. I am not the first to compare this film to The Wire (on the day of the blu-ray release, Tony Zhou of Every Frame a Painting made an illuminating comparison chart of gang names on Twitter) but I do so here because the theme of the individual within a system, as A Brighter Summer Day also alludes to, was at the heart of that show's run. But where the two works part ways is on the issues of identity that I think are so vital to the purpose of this movie.

Unlike the father and son of A Brighter Summer Day, the characters of The Wire were unapologetic about who they were. McNulty, the central character of the series, is almost wholly driven by his inability to play by the rules, yet the small amount of impact the wire has on both the drug system and/or policing in Baltimore comes directly from the supreme confidence in his own nature. In fact, attempting to pretend your identity can be altered is often punished. Many of the most significant deaths in The Wire  - Wallace, Omar, Stringer - come when the character attempts to change and get out of "the Game." But their deaths do not come from the system, they come from their own conscious choices to drift back into their old habits, their true identities. There are of course exceptions to the rule; Bubbles and Pryzbylewski have significant character arcs in the show where their identity becomes an awakening. But these exceptions are intentional, and point to the insidious nature of the system, where expectation of even the most revolutionary individuals (McNulty, Marlo, Carcetti) is baked in.

Ultimately, The Wire is a cynical show, not about human nature but about the economic and political structures humans have created. People are people in The Wire, not good, not bad, but flawed and resilient. Partially because it's set in the past, A Brighter Summer Day is something else entirely. The individuals in the film have long since passed the point of change, but it's not too late for the 90s. The movie's events seem so detailed and familiar that they must be real. But they are not. They are constructed around a false memory and lost identity that does not need to be fate and the individual alone can transcend. Yang is telling the viewer that honesty can change Taiwan.

The comparison still continues to hold water because the superficial comparisons are also apparent - a portrait of society as told through its young gangs, storylines we enter midway with a narrative uninterested in providing exposition to ground the viewer, sprawling casts with fully realized biographies just offscreen. It's these elements that in many ways make the two works so appealing (and so seemingly authentic) to such a wide number of people, despite the fact that they never make any attempt to adjust people to lives of the characters - they simply are, and in so being, we recognize humanity. But these similarities - the ones that make them still so popular and vital to outsiders - belie the individuality of each work. These complex, richly symbolic narratives thrive on their dedication to the truth of their characters and the hyper-local world that surrounds them. Unsurprisingly, A Brighter Summer Day was embraced by the Taiwanese youth on its release, just as The Wire found favor with inner-city drug dealers in the 2000s. Specificity and detail go a long way toward tearing down the barriers between real and fake.

---

The basic premise of this blog (which was never expected to last long enough to need to stick to any sort of premise) is to record my thoughts immediately after my viewing of a film without any additions or editing beyond typos in a second pass-through (many don't even get this low level of editing as you may have noticed). I've broken this rule a handful of times, usually with something like Last Year at Marienbad or Shoah that affected me a great deal but required more reflection to translate my feelings into words (though both went largely unedited - I just took my time writing them). A Brighter Summer Day is so complex and thought out that both approaches seem unworthy of the movie, which is what prompted me to write what I have written here after seeing the film a second time with commentary and watching some of the extras, not to mention spending a few weeks sitting with it. While I don't consider the observations I've made here to be the final word on the meaning behind the film, I haven't seen this aspect of the movie explored yet, and I think it's an approach to the sprawling story told here that helps illuminate the psychology behind both this film and Taiwanese cinema in general. Any movie with such a rich tapestry of characters, plotlines, and consciously implemented symbols (the radio, the flashlight, the baseball bat, the use of knives and swords, basketball, Elvis, etc.) leaves room for many interpretations. But this is a particularly impressive feat here because Yang's execution is so detailed and both time- and place-specific.

I don't think any of us fully comprehend the impact this film will have in the coming decades now that it is widely available, not just to an American audience, but to international viewers (including those in China) who are willing to import it. Although Yang is not doing anything particularly revolutionary with his camera work or story structure, the complexity and depth of his achievement here unlock the door to cinematic perfection through brute force. Furthermore, his dedication to the world he constructed and his insistence on the specific without concern for internationally familiar context should serve as an inspiring roadmap for developing cinema all over the world. In the last Sight and Sound poll, A Brighter Summer Day ranked #84 overall and placed behind only In the Mood For Love in terms of Chinese films. I expect to see it grow in estimation with its newfound exposure, similar to the current #1 film (and long my go-to choice for my own personal favorite movie), Vertigo, which was also "lost" for decades. In fact, I expect to see this movie in the top ten by the 2032 poll. It's that good, that massive.

One final thing - I don't particularly care to compare the film to Yi Yi, Yang's more successful (internationally) and widely available final film, because they are very different works and are intended to reach the viewer in different capacities. That later movie had a deep emotional impact on me and it continues to be a personal favorite. A Brighter Summer Day is the more important film, however, and this Criterion release will cement its reputation as Yang's masterpiece. As this post likely implies to the reader, I'm perfectly fine with the distinction.

#782: The Apu Trilogy

 (Satyajit Ray, 1955-59)

After more than 800 spine numbers and nearly twenty years, there are few titles that can compete with The Apu Trilogy for the title of most significant achievement in the Criterion Collection. As the spectacular (but brief) documentary on the supplements explains, the three films' negatives were heavily damaged in a fire, leaving Criterion and its partners with a painstaking task of restoring the damaged film and/or reconstructing a master print from various prints sprinkled throughout the world (the process used most generally for Apur Sansar). The finished versions of the films we see on these blu-rays are absolutely stunning, especially Pather Panchali, the crown jewel of the set. This film - certainly one of the ten or fifteen most important works in cinema history - has been transformed from a barely functional relic of a forgotten era to a pristine jewel in cinema's rich history. There have been glorious transfers in Criterion's day. But it is quite clear that nothing compares to this.

But what's most amazing about the story behind these restorations is that the stature of the films themselves is equal to this remarkable product. These are living breathing artifacts of a crucial turning point in cinema, monuments to a new era yet every bit as relevant today as they were when they were released. Quite simply, if you are receptive to the average Criterion film, The Apu Trilogy will have an enormous impact on you. It's the kind of movie experience that brings to mind only a handful of comparisons that can compete with its humanism, its cinematic sophistication, and its importance to one of the five major centers of filmmaking. You owe it to yourself to watch these movies.

Links to individual reviews:

783. Pather Panchali
784. Aparajito
785. Apur Sansar

#785: Apur Sansar

(Satyajit Ray, 1959)

The final chapter of The Apu Trilogy is the most affecting. This is partially because of the commitment already put in to this character, the emotional stakes that come with four prior hours spent with a human and watching him grow from his first moments to a grown man. But the film also features the biggest gut punch of a death in an already formidable line of gut-punch deaths. Compounded by the fate of the relationship between Apu and his new son, the film's central turning point is quite overwhelming. But even as the film turns toward a poetic third act and a hopeful ending, the emotions of the thing never feel forced or manipulative. Apur Sansar is heartbreaking and uplifting. This trilogy is, like Yi Yi, the story of what encapsulates all of human experience in the era of cinema - family, modernity, art in an age of technology, love, education, belief, and most of the all the individual struggling with all of this to grasp at meaning in existence.

As the father of a boy who is about to turn five, Apur Sansar is a complex emotional ride. On the one hand, I've watched Apu's whole life - I've seen the loss that has come from being close to people, and I've seen his struggle to define himself as an individual. Through this experience, the impact of his wife's death hits so hard that it isn't a surprise that he walks away from the son he hasn't met - nor is it a move that turns me against him. Yet I know the joy and rewarding existential moments he is missing by rejecting his child. I also know the dependence of a child on their parents and the bond between a father and a son, so his logical decision is nevertheless tragic. I cried through the second half of this movie, both for Apu and for his son.

Apu says that he abandons his son because he couldn't bear to be reminded that he lived because his mother died. It goes much deeper than this, of course, back to his home village and the death of his sister, through to the moment when he had no one and nothing and decided to do something he deemed honorable in a naïve and romantic moment of foolishness. It's impossible for virtually anyone reading this post or watching this Criterion release to fully understand Apu's motivation, yet Ray has lent his life such a universal humanism that it's impossible not to relate. The final moment does not feel forced because we know this human, we know it is inevitable he will open his heart to this boy, and we root for them as they walk off into the distance even though there is almost certainly more heartbreak to be had.

#784: Aparajito

(Satyajit Ray, 1956)

Aparajito is the middle film in the Apu Trilogy, but like Pather Panchali before it, it was not assumed there would be a follow-up. This makes the film different from the majority of second films in a trilogy, even though it also has a bit of the abrupt ending that many middle films have. One similarity it does share with such movies is the leap in technical skill on display that often come from maturity, larger budgets, and a confidence to take risks borne of success. I mentioned the talent and sophistication Ray brought to Pather Panchali in my thoughts on that film, but a small budget and the enormous challenge of doing the shoot in the village where it was set meant some things were destined to be compromised. Aparajito has significantly fewer barriers, and as a result it is a slicker and more complex film - though not necessarily a better or more important one.

The pacing of Aparajito is particularly noteworthy. The film starts out with Apu not much older than he was in the final moments of the first film, still spending his days exploring and getting into harmless trouble. However, this time it's in the streets of a well-populated town where his father has moved the family to make a better living. The first half hour or so of the film is spent establishing his new life and that of his mother's while building up the signifiers and thematic underpinnings of what is to come both in this movie and the next. (Many of these signifiers needed explanation for me, provided by the solid short special feature on the disc.)

The movie takes a dramatic shift when (spoiler etc.) Apu's father dies, and this is really where the momentum for the rest of the trilogy gets going. Apu's journey into adulthood through education and independence is a story of modernity and the toll it takes on humanity, something that comes into focus even more in the evolving relationship with trains in the third film. But it's also a humanist story of a cultural awakening in the midst of a changing society. This is the core strength of Aparajito on its own, and the film would be quite impressive separated from its beginning and ending chapters simply because it depicts this evolution so gracefully.

#783: Pather Panchali

(Satyajit Ray, 1955)

I watched Pather Panchali a few years ago in a version that was so bad that I decided to wait for the restoration to watch the next two films in the series. The quality of the film's image - which was worse than many budget restorations of silent films I have seen - was so bad that it was difficult to get into the story even. So when I blind bought the trilogy at the most recent B&N 50% sale, I decided I had to rewatch Pather to get the full effect. I was absolutely right - this viewing was a revelation of the kind you rarely get, and Pather Panchali is certainly one of the great films of cinema.

Pather Panchali begins before its supposed protagonist is born, and in many ways the film is a passing of the torch from one Ray child, the sister who steals fruit from an orchard that once belonged to her family, to another, Apu, a young boy whose watchful eye and innocent perspective are a stand-in for that of the viewer's own lens. Although my own children are younger than this pair and reversed in gender order, the relationship is immediately recognizable, comprising both battle-weary enemies and siblings with an unbreakable bond of love. The sad deaths that consume the final third of the film are of the gut-wrenching variety, though the simple poetic framing of Ray's camera gives us the big picture and never lets us forget the larger story at work.

The fact that Ray didn't initially plan on making the other two films in the trilogy lend the final moments an ambivalence that the knowledge of subsequent films has replaced with hope and a sense of beginnings. Apu only knew this world for a short time and it will be difficult for him to recall many of the things that shaped him. As a complete story, however, the film's structure shifts away from establishing details to a portrait of a family struggling to free themselves from poverty. Until Apu finds the necklace, the true protagonist of the film is the mother, desperate to transcend the shame her daughter and husband have brought upon her and struggling to make a life in difficult circumstances. She is a remarkable character only because Ray chooses to make her remarkable, and it lends the film its humanist qualities, a trait that defined world cinema post-Rome, Open City and pre-Breathless.

But even in the context of a thriving international film community, Pather Panchali is striking. The movie stands out immediately just by nature of its subject matter, swimming in a wave of European and Japanese films that crashed into American arthouse theaters in the 50s. But the film distinguishes itself actively rather than through its mere existence. Perhaps the two things that stand out most to me are the sophistication of Ray's technique and the intimacy of his depiction of rural India. Although they are linked, it is worth addressing each separately.

Ray's technical proficiency was by no means predestined. Though he came from a distinguished family with a tradition of artists, he had never made a film when he began work on Pather Panchali, using his own money in initial shooting. The fact that India was almost non-existent on the international film scene further underscores the uphill battle Ray faced. Although Indian cinema began producing neorealist work after independence, Ray's film was the first to generate any notable attention in the West, meaning he no roadmap for this kind of success (which is not to imply he was expecting it or crafting the film with this in mind). His crew had little experience, his actors were mainly amateurs, and his funding meant that many techniques and multiple takes were often unavailable. Still, the film manages to deliver a style that was both elementary and intellectual. The way Ray blocks his characters and the moments he chooses to move the camera have rarely been improved upon in the ensuing 60 years. Many of his shots in the fields and the forest are stunning displays of black and white cinematography. I was particularly struck by his balance of Japanese formalism, often with minimal cinematic flourishes when in intimate household moments with the family, and Western naturalism, both in his scenic shots and in the way that the village sinks into the forest and water around it. The camera is both the documentarian and poet

Ray was famously inspired by Bicycle Thieves to make movies, and this is clear in his depiction of the family's struggles in his debut film. Yet the jump for De Sica from his stature in Italian society (he was raised in poverty in Lazio outside of Rome) to the world of Antonio and his son in Bicycle Thieves is not hard to contemplate. Although it was certainly impossible for Ray to ignore poverty in his own country, the jump from his own bubble to the world of Apu is extraordinary. That Ray was able to enter this world without presenting it as "separate" from that of the viewer is even more impressive. Part of this is the proximity of such living conditions - Ray only needed to go a few miles outside of the city to shoot Pather Panchali, something that would be difficult to achieve in Europe or America. But most of it stems from his gentle hand with the camera and his dedication to the universality of his characters' struggle. Pather Panchali is not about a poor Indian family any more than Home Alone is about the difficulties of life in the wealthy Chicago suburbs. Yes, this is a world very different from our own (and from Ray's), but it is also about people who love, work, gossip, mourn. They are petty or angry sometimes and elated and entertained others. The way Ray reserves judgement allows us to see these emotions through their eyes instead of through our own or Ray's. When Apu goes to see the train, we begin to feel what it must have been like to see a train for the very first time anywhere in the world, what power and beauty one could experience with the revelation of industry. It frees the moment from a contrast in societies and allows it to simply stand. It's consequently one of the great scenes I've ever seen.

I won't be watching these in close viewings - I've decided to space them out over a few weeks to give each film time to breathe. But I am certainly looking forward to the next two films, and I remain grateful that Criterion and its partners put so much love into the finished product. Pather Panchali's place in history can be hard to overstate and seeing it look this beautiful reminds even the most jaded cineaste that there are still treasures to be uncovered and rediscovered.

#684: Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project

(Various)

Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project is a vital project with distinctly Western mindset. The notion that six films as diverse and distinct as these could be grouped together under any banner other than "cinema" is reductionist. Yet the care given to each and the spotlight shone on them by Scorsese's name and organization is impossible to dismiss as exoticism. The films in this collection (an assumed first in a series considering the 1 on its cover) are all unique and deserving of their restorations, and if the "world cinema" label ghettoizes them it is done while simultaneously elevating the value of perspectives different from what we typically see in film. Like world music, the title hopefully becomes a call for more diverse voices in cinema (in this case cinema history) and a tacit admission that the accepted canon is not definitive but instead sorely lacking perspective.

All six of these films (with the possible exception of The Housemaid) put their respective cultures at the center of their themes and subject matters in a way only rarely seen in the US. The similarity of the films stop there, however, as the stories range from music documentaries to experimental dramas to studio suspense. Of the bunch, Dry Summer stood out for me as the masterpiece. I was hooked on the story from the beginning, and the technique on display was more compelling than Hitchcock's Marnie, made the same year. But overall this box is a great release worth digging into, and the thought and effort put into preserving these films and giving them a wider audience is arguably the best thing Scorsese has done since Goodfellas.

Links to the individual films:

685. Touki Bouki
686. Redes
687. A river Called Titas
688. Dry Summer
689. Trances
690. The Housemaid

#687: A River Called Titas

(Ritwik Ghatak, 1973)

If there is a standard criticism of the most famous masters of the East, most notably Akira Kurasawa and Satyajit Ray, it is that they are deeply affected by the presence of the West. There is a sense that these directors have either been so deeply influenced by the Western concept of cinema or are so conscious of the Western gaze that their work is not truly representative of not just their national cinema but of their countries at large.

I tend to reject such criticism - unwrapping the influences and flowing ideas of international cinema is as difficult as separating the contributions of R&B and country to rock's creation. But watching a film like A River Called Titas makes it harder to ignore the idea that there are films that have a stronger national identity. Ritwik Ghatak's film documenting the lives of a small group of people living along the river Titas is a definitively Indian experience, as unconcerned with conforming to outside aesthetic rules as it is dedicated to its subjects' quiet lives and stark landscapes.

The most remarkable films of this nature can be invigorating, but even the greatest can be difficult to approach from a Western perspective. Without cultural touchstones, films can be as indecipherable as the language their protagonists speak. Consequently, A River Called Titas is not easy to fall in love with on first viewing. What can be appreciated, however, is Ghatak's love of his subject, the beautiful care with which he treats the manmade and natural surroundings he captures. Halfway through the film I grew tired of the melodrama of the story and spent most of my time simply living in the world A River Called Titas depicted. This is an underrated power of cinema; underutilized because viewers are so rarely exposed to films of this nature and resisted because of preconceived ideas about what movies should provide.

I didn't fully stay with A River Called Titas, but I took away from it a profound sense of place. It's the idea that each film I see makes the world a bigger and more complex living organism that draws me to a film like A River Called Titas, even when I have difficulty translating its appeal to fit my Western expectations.

#688: Dry Summer

(Metin Erksan, 1964)

Dry Summer is my favorite film in the World Cinema boxset so far. The film features one of the great villains in Criterion - Osman is a true piece of shit, the kind of character that makes your skin crawl and wish you could climb into the movie so you could smack the shit out of him. At times I hated him so much (and he seemed so over-the-top despicable) that I felt uncomfortable watching the film. But the incredible direction and suspense of the final sequence won me over.

One of the most interesting things about the film is how Erksan is able to take a socialist premise not dissimilar to that of Redes and create a timeless morality tale laced with Hitchcockian suspense. The movie's themes are reminiscent of The Treasure of Sierra Madre, though Bogart and friends are arguably more admirable than Osman prior to the discovery of the gold, and the way in which greed and hubris overtake the respective protagonists seems guided by an invisible hand - just not the one such craven capitalists pray to. Dry Summer might not be the towering parable Huston's film is, but it is a grand statement from an under-explored corner of the cinematic globe.

#690: The Housemaid

(Kim Ki-Young, 1960)

The Housemaid is a strange convergence of cultures. The film is vaguely erotic but structured like a morality tale. It's got plenty of the outrageous melodrama that Korean films have come to be known for in the modern era but it also has subtle moments of psychological intrigue and complex emotion. The movie's jazz soundtrack is reminiscent of Western films of the era (Criterion movies like Elevator to the Gallows and Anatomy of a Murder spring to mind) but the aesthetic and technique of the film is notably more Asian.

All these battling elements might make for a total mess of a film, but The Housemaid is a pretty tight ship. In fact, what makes the film so good - and, I would guess, so highly regarded - isn't that it is an especially remarkable story or tells such an impressive story (really, it does neither) but simply that it's executed so well. The way the story is told is rather cunning, and I was left guessing even who the housemaid would be early in the film, and then how the husband would extricate himself from the situation as the climax approached.

One thing that is especially interesting about The Housemaid, particularly in the context of this boxset, is that the film was so clearly a product of a studio system that mirrored Hollywood. Obviously there are elements here that wouldn't work in the US (the ending standing out as a clear example), but the way the film is presented and structured is obviously professional and somewhat workmanlike, a clear style that separates studio work from something like Touki Bouki, which was so obviously the work of an artist, or Redes, which clearly developed outside of an assembly-line mentality. It's a reminder that even if the US has the towering center of commercial film, there are plenty of studios spread out across the globe that are producing film with the same balancing act between art and commerce. Often one can learn just as much about a culture from what they produce when money is on the line than from what they do for the love of it. The Housemaid is an excellent example of this, and it makes a fine addition to the Collection and this box.

#669: Charulata

(Satyajit Ray, 1965)

It was unlikely that Charulata would impress me as much as The Big City did, but ultimately these are two very different movies, despite sharing a star and a director. Madhari Mukherjee here plays a woman totally separated from her character in The Big City. Although the two films share Ray's sympathetic perspective on the female condition, Mukherjee's character here is more akin to the titular character of The Earrings of Madame de..., secure in her wealth, but trapped in her life. Ray's work here is flashier, too - though of course nowhere near Ophüls level excess - most obviously in the film's enigmatic and stylized final moments meant to pay tribute to the source material's open ending.

Despite the beautiful and lyrical direction, Charulata is ultimately less satisfying for me than The Big City because of its overwhelming melodrama. The climax seems so overblown that I had a hard time reaching the emotional epiphany Mukherjee's character does, unlike the similar moments in The Big City. It's important, too, to note the similarities between this film and The Music Room. Like that early Ray masterpiece, Charulata uses a palace as a prison, deftly winding his way through its rooms and slowly but forcefully demonstrating the inevitable doom of the ruling classes of India's past. The main character in each film is very different, but both are perfectly calibrated for what each film wants to say.

I think Charulata might grow on me with subsequent viewings, but for now it ranks a notch below the other two Ray films currently in the Collection. Of course, I continue to anticipate many more films being added from this master, just as I hope Ray is not the only Indian to receive such attention.

#668: The Big City

(Satyajit Ray, 1963)

I loved The Music Room far more than I expected to, but it took watching The Big City for me to give Satyajit Ray the respect he deserves. At this point, I've only seen three Ray films: The Music Room, Pather Panchali, and The Big City, but it's the last one which showed me what I should have known already - Ray is his country's Kurosawa, a master humanist and technician whose ability to craft a reflection of his society into universally understood cinema was rarely matched in cinema history. The Big City is such an impressive work of art that it's almost criminal that I have been kept from it for so long. Certainly, as I wrote in my review of Ray's first entry in the Collection, his omission from the Western canon has been long overdue for correction, and while non-Japanese Asian cinema has leaked into American movie culture in slow drips (mostly due to Hong Kong's love affair with the shoot-em-up action movie), India has for too long been ignored with only Ray's Apu Trilogy mentioned in hushed tones.

The Big City is a great film for many number of reasons, but what I most loved about it was Ray's ability to depict a fully fleshed out female character who is certainly empowered and brave, but often scared and uncomfortable and always conflicted in her new modern role. Despite the fact that she stayed within her own country, I was often reminded of was El Norte, a movie about a changing culture struck by economic desperation that really couldn't be more different in terms of specifics. But the component both share in spades is humanity, an acute sense of these people and sympathy for their struggles. Ray's film is especially noteworthy because he chose to focus on a woman (who is by the way played by the startlingly beautiful Madhabi Mukherjee, whose screen presence rivals Setsuko Hara and Barbara Stanwyck) and tailored his film to make a specific point about gender relations in an evolving India post-revolution. When combined with the contempt Ray's story has for Mukherjee's father-in-law, his feminist perspective is crystal clear, and his desire to modernize India at this early stage in its development should be eye-opening to anyone unfamiliar with India's history. But it's the way he tells the story that is so impressive.

The Big City isn't perfect. There are moments that play too melodramatic, and I don't know that I entirely buy the husband's turnaround in the final moments of the film, as well-intentioned as it was. But these choices are intentional and point towards Ray's focus on appealing to his audience rather than preach to them. The Big City is not a radical film, which is part of what makes it so noteworthy socially. It's Ray's quiet self-assurance that makes it so impressive technically, and this masterful touch and clear intention manifested in such pure form that elevates him to the ranks of the great directors. Quite clearly, The Big City is Criterion's call for Ray's immortality.

#339: Yi Yi

(Edward Yang, 1999)

Yi Yi was the second-to-last "feature" film in the first 650 Criterions I have to watch. Unlike the final movie, Salo, I was not putting off Yi Yi because I had little interest in seeing it. Instead, I was waiting for an opportunity to fully digest this three-hour epic on my LED TV in blu-ray without any distractions - a stretch that does not come along every day when you have a one-year-old - because I had a sneaking suspicion I would love it and I didn't want a casual viewing to get in the way of my appreciation.

Well, I found that opportunity last night and I was totally right: Yi Yi is an unquestionable masterpiece. I love making grand statements, but I try to make them only when I really mean them, so I don't take it lightly when I say that I think (think) Yi Yi might be the best movie of the last 25 years. At the very least, it's up in the stratosphere with In the Mood for Love, Fargo, Blue, and the string of 2007 masterpieces that can go toe to toe with the all-time greats.

This statement is kind of an awkward fit for a movie that is as unassuming in its storytelling as Yi Yi, even if the film is three hours. But the basic premise of following a middle-class Taiwanese family over the course of a few months hardly gets at what the film is really about, and it belies the extraordinary ambition of Yang's visual approach. What's most impressive about both the simple but profound storytelling and Yang's camerawork is how effortlessly - and often seamlessly - the two complement each other. Yi Yi is a movie about families, modern living, and love in ways that are both specific to Taiwan and universal, but it's also about these individual characters and their quiet emotional journeys just as much as it is about cinema and its ability (or lack thereof) to emulate reality. Yang's elevation of this unremarkable family calls into question our own experiences both in and out of a movie theater and asks us to evaluate the value of both. Like many of the greatest movies ever made, Yi Yi speaks to the human condition without forgetting the experience of viewing a film, and Yang manages to incorporate all of this into his film's aesthetic and narrative equally.

I could spend quite a bit of time talking about things I loved about this movie, but one point I really want to make is how thoughtfully varied yet unified Yang's compositions are. As noted by the beautifully mysterious and accurate Criterion cover, Yang uses the flat, straight-on shot with both people and objects (and even incorporates it into the story of the young boy and his camera) but contrasts this with side angles of urban spaces - both interior and exterior. His rooms are small but connected to a series of others, forming a maze-like perception of Taiwan's buildings that are cluttered with walls and doors keeping people apart even as they live in tight quarters. Conversely, his exteriors are often balanced with human reflections on the pristine glass of the towers that make up city living. We are constantly reminded of the intimate moments and emotions contained within what other directors have dismissed as cold and inhuman. Yang does not do this to draw contrast between the characters' lives and their surroundings, he does it to achieve unity and highlight the indivisibility of our modern lives. His camerawork is emphasized by the score, which subtly invokes classical music to balance between the modern and the timeless. The film is not flashy, but this impeccable craftsmanship is a reminder that the typical style of American directors in particular - who so often pick one specific style for a film and insist on seeing it through to the end - can often render a movie lifeless. Its effect is often the opposite of what was intended: the film's thematic thrust gets in the way of the storytelling that is key to its success at generating any real meaning. The movie is rendered an experiment in style instead of an exploration of reality.

Of course the balance of Yang's technical prowess is his storytelling, and the film is just as successful in this regard. Yes, this is a three-hour film and, yes, a lot of people are going to be put off by the rhythm and pacing of the storytelling. Although Yi Yi begins at a wedding and ends at a funeral, the moments are somewhat arbitrary cutting off points. And while the film encompasses at least two stories in full (the core couple's marital waverings and the daughter's first experiment with love) and is framed by another (the grandmother's coma), there are threads that never receive full attention and a handful of unresolved relationships. Of course, that is exactly what life is - but doesn't that sound cheesy when it's written down! Yi Yi defies description in this regard. It's a rare movie that can't be described in prose without losing most of its message. Certainly there are truly moving scenes and storylines here that would work in any medium or context - for me, the most intense were certainly the scenes between the father and his video-game-designer prospective business partner and the scenes with his lost love, especially their last encounter which is so unbearably heartbreaking that it's hard to think about. And the final twist in the daughter's story is probably the only moment in the film when the story feels manufactured, even if it's believable enough and compatible with the rest of the movie. But really there aren't any stories here that are less appealing (unlike other similarly sprawling films) and the way Yang overlays their developments - most clearly with the father's reflections on early love being spoken over his daughter's first date - strengthens each in kind (and further deepens his visual layering). I would say the movie rewards the effort required to maintain attention throughout its running time to pull in viewers who might be turned off by the pacing, but I have to be honest and say I was totally enraptured from the start. Within five minutes I could see that I was in remarkable hands.

So yeah, I really liked Yi Yi. I could probably go on and lead myself down the path towards an understanding of the film's real message about life and family and the individual, but I won't because I think the effectiveness of the movie lies not in the specifics of what Yang is saying but in how it speaks to you personally. There's something gracefully beautiful about Yi Yi's ineffability that can only be dissolved by translation. I think that's often what makes art in any medium great, but Yi Yi shows just how powerful film specifically can be.

#573: The Music Room

(Satyajit Ray, 1958)

India is famous for being one of the most prolific filmmaking countries in the world, often making over 1000 feature length films in a year. It's also home to over a billion people, and is increasingly developing into an economic powerhouse. Yet Criterion features just two Indian movies in their 600+ spine numbers: Monsoon Wedding (made by Mira Nair, who lives in the US) and this one, the recently released The Music Room. (China, just as relevant as an economic power if not as a cinematic one, technically has just one, In the Mood for Love, since The Last Emperor was an international production and, of the other four Chinese films in the Collection, three were made in Hong Kong before it reverted back to Chinese hands and one was made on the disputed island of Taiwan.)

Part of the reason for the lack of Indian films in the collection (along with all the licensing issues associated with any difficult-to-reach corner of the film world) is that most of the films made in India are not very good. Like music, film in India has an entirely different grammar and set of building blocks to construct a movie out of - only unlike music, these elements were borne out of populist success and cultural limitations. This makes the majority of film from the country bogged down in meaningless dance sequences (nevertheless set to awesome music) and love stories that lack even kissing. This goes a long way towards explaining why Satyajit Ray - unquestionably the most highly regarded Indian filmmaker in the world - never got a particularly strong reception in his home country, unlike Kurosawa who was frequently criticized as having a Western slant but remained justifiably revered in Japan until his late-career skid.

But Ray's film isn't in the Criterion Collection because they needed more Indian films, and it wasn't selected because it felt more Western. In many ways, The Music Room is a response to the culture of Indian film at the time; it may have even been intended as a way forward for an industry that had yet to gain respect on a grand stage. It's also not, as some have argued, a consolation prize for the assumed impending Apu Trilogy Criterion release. The Music Room stands on its own as a powerful depiction of a dying class and one man within it. It's also beautiful and haunting, a great film that deserves this release on quality alone.

I think what I liked most about The Music Room was the house Ray used and the way he used it. His protagonist floats through it like a ghost, already resigned to his fate as a disappeared creature, the last of his kind. No one wants to be the one to close up shop, and the slowly decaying house around him is constant reminder of these final days. Small touches like the spider on the portrait, the cobwebs and dwindling candles in the chandelier, and the slowly cracking walls are just perfect for the film's elegiacal tone. The technical work of The Music Room is perhaps not as sophisticated as what was coming out of Europe at the time (nor is it as overblown as what was coming out of Hollywood), but Ray is obviously a powerful force behind the camera, and I'm looking forward to the Apu trilogy, whether or not we get that dream Criterion set that would help make amends for their sins of omission to this point when it comes to virtually every country from the Asian mainland, but India in particular.

#576: Secret Sunshine

(Lee Chang-dong, 2007)

Secret Sunshine is a great movie for a large number of reasons. The most obvious is the performance at the center of the film: Jeon Do-yeon is in almost every scene, and the range of emotion she must cover is so vast - and her character's reactions so (understandably) extreme - that the viewer might not even noticed how technically complex and subtle her performance is. I don't think it's an exaggeration to call this one of the best performances in the Criterion Collection.

The next thing the viewer might notice about Secret Sunshine is Lee Chang-dong's naturalistic cinematic style. The film's aesthetic is almost ugly in its realism, but Lee's restraint prevents the film from veering into a stylistic representation of "realism." His style isn't about shaky cameras, gritty exposures, or bad lighting. It's a very conscious choice to create a look that carries the viewer into the story without effort, leaving as little as possible between the characters and the viewer.

But what's most impressive about Secret Sunshine is how visceral the experience of watching it is. Even though big things happen in the film (murder, attempted suicide) this is at its core a philosophical drama about loss and emotional rebirth - a small character piece, not a thriller. Despite this, I was on edge for every minute of the film because I had no idea what was going to happen next. Jeon's path from despair to an ending that ostensibly signals that she is ready to move on is constantly surprising. It both engages the viewer and challenges expectations. Yet standing back and looking at the story as a whole doesn't make me see tricks or winding curves in the plot like so many mysteries or thriller one might typically find unpredictable. Instead, the film feels entirely natural and cohesive. It's a remarkable accomplishment for a movie that, while watching it for the first time, seems almost purposefully divergent.

This is where all of these elements finally come together to create an impressive whole. Secret Sunshine is an immersive look at the reality of one woman, and all this technique and craft seem to fall away without any fingerprints left behind. Much has been made of movements like Cinema Verite and Dogma 95, but works produced by these movements have often seemed overly conscious of their style. Much more often, the work that hides its creator's hand is the one that has the most technique, skill, and most of all work behind it. Secret Sunshine is that kind of movie, and it's a great representation of the talent coming out of South Korea, something that will hopefully be better represented in the collection in years to come.

#612: Certified Copy

(Abbas Kiarostami, 2010)

Occasionally, the selection process of Criterion becomes the subject of controversy. This is usually related to the films they select (see: Armageddon, Tiny Furniture) rather than the films they pass on, since the rights negotiations are often kept secret until films are actually announced. Certified Copy was the subject of a rare non-release controversy, however, as a rumored exchange between one internet poster and Criterion's Peter Becker revealed that the latter supposedly considered the film "minor Kiarostami." A few months later, when Criterion did finally announce the film's imminent release, they referred to it as "a major work" on their Twitter account, a sly nod to the uproar caused by the rumor.

As someone who had yet to see the film - and who had admired Kiarostami's other works in the Collection, particularly Close-up - I listened to the complaints with a great deal of interest, and was excited to see the film announced if only because it made my drive to see the film that much stronger. After watching it, I can see what all the fuss was about: Certified Copy deserves a place alongside L'Avventura and Last Year at Marienbad as one of the great cinematic mysteries in the Collection.

The basic premise is as simple as the one at the center of those films: an author comes to Italy to give a talk on his new book where he meets up with a woman who was interested in speaking with him about his thesis. They engage with each and take a brief excursion around the countryside a la Before Sunrise/Before Sunset. As their meeting goes on and the film gets deeper, there begins to seem like there is more to their relationship than has been revealed.

I won't go too far into the "Are they or aren't they" debate at the center of the movie; needless to say there are bits and pieces here or there which make the case either way, and I don't think that's the point of the film any more than the end of The Sopranos was about whether or not Tony died. Certified Copy is about the nature of art just as much as it is about the nature of relationships. The film has an oddly cool tone that is countered perfectly by a consistent struggle by the two leads to break through and make an emotional connection. This effort is much more obviously made by Juliette Binoche, who once again gives a spectacular performance. But William Shimell's character is the more interesting specimen, and his emotional arc in the film is much more difficult to pin down. On the surface, his demeanor matches the film's tone, particularly at the beginning when he seems to be simply passing time before his train. But regardless of one's opinion about the nature of their relationship, there must be a point at which Shimell's character is no longer along for the ride, to observe and dissect - or perhaps, depending on your viewpoint, merely dismiss and ignore - his companion. If he is playing along with her, what is his fascination with their game? If he has conversely finally given up their charade, is his contempt an indication of his failure or of hers?

The movie is deepened by the questions of authenticity that are presented at face value. Just as we question the nature of their relationship, we question the nature of the film. This uncertainty is doubled over on itself by the intellectual argument within the film that the fake can be just as satisfying as the real - even more so. Like the ending of Kiarostami's A Taste of Cherry, this film is constantly reassuring the viewer that they are watching a movie. The fact that our protagonists have become unreliable midway through the film only enhances this reminder. Again, the film doubles over on itself, exponentially increasing its layers until all that is left are the questions.

Like Last Year at Marienbad, Certified Copy is a movie that needs to be seen more than once to fully digest it, and I plan on watching it again soon. For now, the questions linger in my head, and Kiarostami's unique eye and amazing ability to mine new material out of arguments that many consider passe (or at least precious) continues to impress me.

#601: Letter Never Sent

(Mikhail Kalatozov, 1959)

Like its predecessor, The Cranes Are Flying, Mikhail Kalatozov's Letter Never Sent is one of the most visually stunning films in the Criterion Collection. In terms of story, the film is a simple tale of survival and (no surprise from the USSR) sacrifice for the common good. But the film stands out because of its visuals, created by Kalatozov and his cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky, with whom Kalatozov worked on both The Cranes Are Flying and the later masterpiece I Am Cuba, arguably Kalatozov's best film.

Unlike those films, however, the elemental story allows style to completely overtake substance. When the style is this compelling, this isn't necessarily a bad thing; there are moments in this film which are so strikingly beautiful that it makes you forget there isn't much here to make a connection to. Certainly, there's a direct visual line between Letter Never Sent and Tarkovsky's masterpiece debut Ivan's Childhood made a few years later. And much of what Urusevsky was able to accomplish here was expanded upon in I Am Cuba. This makes Letter Never Sent a near classic despite its storytelling shortcomings, and certainly places it alongside the other two Kalatozov/Urusevsky films as must-see examples of the outer boundaries of cinema's potential.

#519: Close-up

(Abbas Kiarostami, 1990)

Close-Up is an enigma, a film that is simultaneously the vanguard of the post-modern response to the cinema and an immaculate conception of an isolated film culture. Abbas Kiarostami is probably the most famous director to come out of Iran - though he rose to fame during the 1990s, a decade full of astonishing output for a country that was and remains to this day an extremely difficult environment for expression. Yet in comparison with some of his contemporaries - Majid Majidi who made Children of Heaven, for example - Kiarostami rejects the neorealist tendencies found most often in work produced in countries which have a less developed cinema system.

Close-Up is Kiarostami's masterpiece by most accounts, and while I can only compare it to A Taste of Cherry, I certainly agree that it is a towering work. Mixing documentary footage and reenactments featuring the actual people who experienced the moments the first time around, Close-Up tells the story of a man put on trial for claiming to be a famous Iranian director, thus gaining the trust and respect (and potentially money) of a well-to-do family. The plot shifts back and forth between the real-life trial of the man and the recreated backstory of his deception and subsequent arrest. It features both the journalist who wrote an article detailing the crime and Kiarostami himself, asking for permission to film the trial.

What's most interesting about Kiarostami's work from a Western perspective is the complex interplay between the familiarity of his meta themes and the foreign nature of both his setting and culture and -much more importantly - his cinematic language. Close-Up - which is primarily concerned with cinema vs. reality, making it Kiarostami's quintessential work - might seem gimmicky from an American director, primarily because the temptation to tie the film's themes to the greater culture at large would be too great. But Kiarostami's film is such an unqualified success because it is stubbornly contained and oddly personal. I found myself moved both by the characters (slash subjects) of the film and by the film's interaction with my expectations. Close-Up manages to appeal to the heart and the head in such a primal way that it avoids the greatest trap of meta work - that it becomes too clever for its own good.

#45:Taste of Cherry

(Abbas Kiarostami, 1997)

“I understand how difficulty you have comprehending the last scene of this movie. I sympathize with you. But this has been deliberate on my part. In "Taste of Cherry” I have tried to keep a distance between my spectator and the protagonist. I didn’t want spectators emotionally involved in this film. In this film, I tell you very little about Mr. Badie, I tell you very little about what his life is about, why he wanted to commit suicide, what his story is I didn’t want the spectators get engaged in those aspects of his life. For that purpose I had to keep Mr. Badie away from the audience. So he is a distant actor in a way. First I thought to end the movie at the point when he laid down on his grave but later I changed my mind. I was uncomfortable to end it at that point because I was very concerned, and am always concerned, about my spectators. I do not want to take them hostage. I do not want to take their emotions hostage. It is very easy for a flim-maker to control the emotions of spectators but I do not like that. I do not want to see my audience as innocent children whose emotions are easily manipulable.
I was afraid that if I ended the movie where Mr. Badie laid down on his grave the spectator would be left with a great deal of sadness. Even though I didn’t think the scene was really that sad, I was afraid that it would come out as such. For that reason I decided to have the next episode where we have the camera running as Mr. Badie was walking around. I wanted to remind spectators that this was really a film and that they shouldn’t think about this as a reality. They should not become involved emotionally. This is much like some of our grandmothers who told us stories, some with happy and some with sad endings. But they always at the end would have a Persian saying which went like this "but after all it is just a story! . . . The very last episode reminds me of the continuation of life, that life goes on, and here the audience is confronted with the reality they had hoped that Mr. Badie would be alive and there he is a part of nature and nature still continues and life goes on even without Mr. Badie. And if one could really think about being or not being present in life, or if one thinks about it in terms of the real implication of such presence, one might not in fact engage in committing suicide at all. The person committing suicide might think that s/he is taking revenge from the society, nature, life, powers to be, and so on. But s/he don’t realize that after a suicide life still goes on and things stay the way they are. I could interpret this in a different way. If my audience is as creative as I imagine them to be, they can take this in a variety of interpretations and I can sit here and every time make a different interpretation of it, as every time one can creatively reinterpret the reality. "

#8: The Killer

(John Woo, 1989)

I had watched The Killer years ago on VHS, and like far too many Chinese films released on the thankfully now-archaic format, the color quality and subtitles were basically shit. And that's all before you take into account the pan-and-scan, which took Woo's best strengths, his framing, lens-usage, and operatic action, and made them almost unrecognizable.

So I was glad to take this opportunity to have another look at the film, this time on blu-ray. Unfortunately, the rights were taken away from Criterion years ago, and it's really a shame, because while this copy is light years beyond what I watched on VHS, it's still a pretty embarrassing showing for the format of the future. The transfer seems to be almost completely untouched. I doubt they did anything but upres the print they already used for DVD, and the thing looks pretty much like it might have in 2000 on a DVD player. I'm not nearly an expert on video quality (and my TV is only 720p), but this looked like junk even to my untrained eye. Why won't these shitty companies have a heart and give the films back to Criterion, where they would be cared for and given the treatment they deserve?

Anyway, the film itself is a masterpiece of Hong Kong action, an almost non-stop array of shootings and car chases that wallows in its own excess in the way only an 80s film can do. I prefer Hard Boiled (which I actually own), but this film clearly sits next to it as the one-two punch that cemented Woo's legacy as one of the great action directors ever (I also love Face/Off, btw, which of course referenced the climactic dove/church shoot out in its own final fight). If you like action movies, this is as essential as it comes.

#422: The Last Emperor

(Bernardo Bertolucci, 1987)

The most obvious flaw in The Last Emperor is that everyone seems to not only speak English, but communicate exclusively in it. There aren't many other flaws. The winner of best picture in 1987, The Last Emperor is a minor epic in scope (David Thompson calls it Lean-meets-Ozu, and I get that) but a major work in 1980s cinema. Watching it again, I was struck by just how luscious the cinematography is, how personal the depiction of the emperor is, and how understated just about everything in this movie is. It's delicate and focused where many historical epics of its time were weighty and overserious (Reds comes to mind). And the performances are all really excellent. A fine film.

A note on the Criterion controversy: The current blu-ray version of the film is in a 2:1 ratio, while the movie was traditionally shown in the wider and more traditional 2.35:1 ratio. Criterion claims that this was because the filmmakers (the cinematographer and the director specifically) claim that this was their original intention for the film. I have to agree with the masses who are disappointed in this decision. I believe movies should be seen in their original release version, and I highly doubt that, had Bertolucci wanted the film to be shown in this narrower ratio originally, it wouldn't have been shown that way. If they must, it would be acceptable to release both versions, but this would of course mean another disc to avoid sacrificing quality, which means more price. But in general, I believe once a film is released, that version belongs to the public, and should not be altered.