10Jul09
The final, resolutely unfashionable film from grand old master Carl Theodor Dreyer, Gertrud was met with dismissal in 1964 and continues to be somewhat overlooked even today. But this week, Jonathan Rosenbaum reminds us of its unique beauties and unconventional approach to narrative and character. On his website, the critic has posted his brilliant, rigorous analysis of Dreyer’s film from the winter 1985–86 issue of Sight & Sound. In it he argues that the director’s biogaphy, in particular his regard for his lost mother, played a major part in the film’s conception and in its subtle deviations from the 1906 source play by Hjalmar Söderberg. Rosenbaum’s post is also full of lovely, crisp images from the film.
10Jul09
In the epic table talk à clef that is My Dinner with André, André, a theater director (played by theater director André Gregory), tells his old friend Wally (played by playwright and actor Wallace Shawn) about a long journey he took in search of enlightenment. A key figure for André in this quest was the Polish experimental theater director Jerzy Grotowski, who in real life was the most important influence on not only Gregory’s Manhattan Project theater company but also Joe Chaikin’s Open Theater, Richard Schechner’s Performance Group (which evolved into Elizabeth LeCompte’s Wooster Group), and the work of British director Peter Brook. On Grotowski and His Legacy, four programs of films documenting Grotowski’s work, will play at Walter Reade on July 11 and 12. The series includes James McTaggert’s Acropolis (1968), a film recording of the piece that brought Grotowski worldwide recognition, in which the actors, playing Auschwitz prisoners, build a crematorium wall around the audience. Just as important, if more roughly assembled from separately recorded picture and sound elements, is the reconstruction of Grotowski’s staging of The Constant Prince, in which Ryszard Cieslak gave one of the most riveting performances this former actor ever saw. The film has no subtitles, but my memory of the New York performance is that you didn’t need to understand a word that was said to be utterly transported by Cieslak’s presence. One of the touchstones of My Dinner with André is André’s infinitely patient wife, Mercedes (an unseen “Penelope,” based on Gregory’s real wife). Who knew that the actual Mercedes Gregory was a documentary producer and director in her own right? The series includes her Art as Vehicle (1989), a look at Grotowski’s Workcenter, and also the intimate documentary With Jerzy Grotowski, Nienadowka (1980), directed by Jill Godmilow and produced by Gregory, in which Grotowski travels to the village where he and his family were hidden during the Nazi occupation. —Amy Taubin
8Jul09
I’ll never forget that first step on the moon. I was at the home of a high school classmate in Fort Worth on the evening of July 20, 1969. The Eagle had landed that afternoon, and we’d been waiting for hours for the men inside to venture out. Hamburgers grilled on the backyard patio, twenty feet from the TV in the living room, and I wandered back and forth as the moon slowly rose in a clear sky.
The launch of Apollo 11, three days before, had been precisely scheduled so that Neil Armstrong would have the sun behind him, at an angle between 7 and 12 degrees, as he made his approach to the Sea of Tranquility. This was the optimum angle to cast long shadows from crater lips and boulders and help define the treacherous alien landing site. And because that rocky sea was in the eastern lunar quadrant, it meant I looked up at a quarter moon in the Texas sky. It seemed as far away as it always had.
The television showed people like me around the earth, all waiting breathlessly for Armstrong and Aldrin to emerge. I’d watch for a while, listening to experts and commentators attempt to describe what was happening, then I’d walk back outside and look up. It was hard to reconcile the familiar TV image with that remote world; I couldn’t wrap my head around it. The event was at once too close and too distant, too transcendent for my boyish mind to swallow whole. A sense of unreality developed as the evening passed.
3Jul09
It’s often said that there’s never been a movie quite like Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad. But in paying tribute to this French New Wave landmark on the occasion of its release in Criterion DVD and Blu-ray editions, some critics have noted that its unique style has been so influential on other films that it now might seem . . . strangely familiar.
This “graceful, haunting movie puzzle . . . , photographed in widescreen black and white by the great Sacha Vierny,” has “a visual texture that has exerted an influence over everything from Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations to Ridley Scott’s commercials,” writes Dave Kehr in the New York Times. And in his Los Angeles Times review, Dennis Lim adds to the list of descendants of this “sumptuous . . . unrivaled conversation starter”: “You can detect its imprint in the death-haunted reverie of Chris Marker’s La Jetée, the mazelike structures of Peter Greenaway’s puzzle-box films, the sinister corridors of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and David Lynch’s Inland Empire.” (The L’s Cullen Gallagher also picks up on that Kubrick connection.)
IFC’s Michael Atkinson, however, sticks with the source, writing that “Resnais’ saturnine masterpiece remains exactly the film experience it was originally intended to be: a dream inside a puzzle inside a story that never actually takes place. Is there a better, more eloquent way to define movies?” And Time puts it most simply, on its “Short List of Things to Do”: “It’s still ravishing, confounding, and fun.”
Related: At Paste, Sean Gandert takes a closer look at Resnais’ documentary shorts legacy, specifically two works featured on Criterion’s Last Year at Marienbad editions: Toute la mémoire du monde and Le chant du styrène.
And heads up: Critic John Powers will be on NPR’s Fresh Air today to discuss Last Year at Marienbad (in New York the show airs on WNYC at 3 p.m.). Check back here for the podcast if you miss it!
3Jul09
“If you want a break from all the summer bombast, My Dinner with André is out . . . in a fabulous new two-disc package,” suggests NPR’s Glenn McDonald in a review of the new Criterion special edition of Louis Malle’s 1981 high-minded gabfest. “Here’s a movie that more or less does the impossible: it consists entirely of two friends having a quiet conversation over dinner, and it’s riveting.”
Joining in the dialogue about this “fascinating, deceptively simple movie” is the National Post of Canada’s Chris Knight: “The film flies in the face of the show-don’t-tell rule of moviemaking, but so expertly that, even though you have just spent two hours watching two guys eat dinner, your mind’s eye will take away ideas, images, even sounds that exist only as spoken words.” Jen Chaney, in the Washington Post, writes that My Dinner with André is “cinema’s quintessential conversation.” And perhaps most persuasive is the Dallas Morning News’s Chris Vognar: “Listen to what André Gregory and Wallace Shawn actually say over their epic dinner, and you might just get your mind blown.”
You can also listen to critic Amy Taubin discussing the film on Blogtalkradio’s Back to Midnight program, broadcast Tuesday night and available now in a podcast. In the interview, Taubin (who wrote an essay for the release) analyzes the much-acclaimed (and parodied!) work from a film-critical and personal perspective: she was an actor in the sixties and early seventies and knew actor-writer Shawn and theater director Gregory, and the experimental-theater-world they discuss, well. She also shares her evolving feelings about the film. Today, she says, even more than at the time, “I’m incredibly moved by that idea of a passionate quest to find a transcendental experience, a meaning in life.”
Update (7 JUL 09): André is “one of Obama’s favorite movies,” according to André Gregory in a new interview in the San Francisco Chronicle.
2Jul09
This week, Agnès Varda’s beguiling new film, the autobiographical documentary The Beaches of Agnès, makes its U.S. premiere at New York’s Film Forum, and for the occasion A. O. Scott has profiled the indefatigable eighty-one-year-old auteur in a splendid article in the New York Times. In the spirit of her latest movie’s poignant and whimsical journey into the past, Scott takes a look back at the fifty-five-year career of this most introspective artist, beginning with her debut, the groundbreaking New Wave precursor La Pointe Courte (the making of which is prominently featured in the new documentary), and at her marriage to the late Jacques Demy. It’s a worthy tribute to one of our greatest living filmmakers.
Plus, while making the rounds in New York to promote this latest, delightful piece of cinécriture, Varda sat down with Filmmaker magazine for a nice long chat. In the interview, she talks about cinematic risk taking, the importance of traveling, and the film essay.
1Jul09
Almost thirty years have gone by since Wallace Shawn and André Gregory sat down for dinner on the Upper West Side and talked (and talked) their way into film history. So for our new special edition DVD of that encounter, Louis Malle’s My Dinner with André, we thought it essential to get those two prodigious pontificators talking on camera again, about their experiences making the movie. For these new interviews, Wally and André chose as their interlocutor filmmaker and friend Noah Baumbach, who came by our offices with his personal crew to talk to each of them, separately. Here’s a taste of the interview with Wally, in which the actor and playwright discusses the impetus for My Dinner with André and those parts of himself he wanted to “destroy” in writing and playing his character.
30Jun09
Quick, how many directors can you name who have pulled a 320-ton steamship over a mountain? Yes, that megalomaniacal masterpiece Fitzcarraldo is just further proof that Werner Herzog stands alone in the annals of filmmaking. And though this tireless artist is still regularly creating vital works, that 1982 film’s legendary production continues to fascinate like no other. Now you can learn all about it firsthand with Herzog’s new book, Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of “Fitzcarraldo,” a diary of his three-year journey in the Amazon to realize his outsize vision. Read more about the book, and Herzog, from the Los Angeles Times’s Lawrence Levi, who writes that Conquest “reveals him to be witty, compassionate, microscopically observant, and—your call—either maniacally determined or admirably persevering.” (And Janet Maslin just posted her review at the New York Times, along with an excerpt from this “mesmerizingly bizarre account.”) And, of course, you can see for yourself the arduousness of the Fitzcarraldo shoot, as documented in Les Blank’s extraordinary Burden of Dreams.
30Jun09
With the fortieth anniversary of the first lunar landing nearly upon us (which we’re celebrating at Criterion with new DVD and Blu-ray special editions of the 1989 documentary For All Mankind), the brave men of the Apollo missions are once again making headlines. And as a recent New York Times profile by James C. McKinley Jr. reminds us, few have stood out for their postspace lives like Apollo 12 moon walker Alan L. Bean, who hung up his astro-boots in 1981 (after eighteen years with NASA) to become a full-time painter. The article—written on the occasion of a show of his work in July, during the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum’s anniversary commemoration—looks back at Bean’s artistic aspirations and how they finally coincided with his outer space experiences, and also provides a slide show of his canvasses and images of him at work in his studio. (Our new For All Mankind releases also include a video program about Bean’s artwork, with its own gallery of paintings.)
Also read about another out-of-this-world guy in a short and sweet Q&A with Buzz Aldrin from the New York Times Magazine, in which the second man to walk on the moon chats about the future of NASA and his new memoir, Magnificent Desolation.
26Jun09
Seemingly nonchalant, impeccably crafted, borderline delirious, My Dinner with André is the result of an inspired collaboration among its actor-writers, Wallace Shawn and André Gregory, and its director, Louis Malle. In the nearly three decades since its 1981 debut, this tiny independent movie has inspired myriad prose pieces and a slew of witticisms that riff on its title. Nothing, however, captures its eccentricity and perhaps the reason for its effect on viewers as neatly as this line from Vincent Canby’s New York Times review: “At times,” Canby wrote, “My Dinner with André suggests a reunion of Christopher Robin (Mr. Gregory) and Winnie-the-Pooh (Mr. Shawn) thirty years after each has left the nursery to pursue separate careers in the theater.” And, indeed, the film evokes the exalted space of childhood friendship, where confidences are exchanged and imaginations run wild without fear of judgment.
The film is a deceptively simple two-hander. A playwright and actor named Wallace Shawn (played by playwright and actor Wallace Shawn) walks through the dilapidated streets of a not-yet-gentrified SoHo on his way uptown to have dinner with the theater director André Gregory (played by the theater director André Gregory) in a sleekly appointed restaurant of André’s choosing. On his way to this meeting with a man he once regarded as a close friend and his most valued colleague in the theater but whom he hasn’t seen in many years, Wally, as he is known to his friends, muses about how much he dreads seeing André again. He’s heard that the director is in a bad way; having spent the last few years traveling around the world in search of transcendent experiences, he has recently been seen sobbing on the street and talking to trees.
