(An old article, reprinted--call this a reminder that there's still stuff to find out there, somewhere.
Some updates: Akumulator 1 available on PAL; Bakit Bughaw ang Langit is online but unsubtitled here; Chimes at Midnight is on PAL; Killer of Sheep is available (yes!) on DVD; King and the Bird is on French DVD; The Orphan Brother is available in Region 2 DVD; Salo is available on DVD; good luck trying to get the rest)
Ten treasures
Sometimes you don't want what's easily
available by the dozens at your local video chain, or in the nearest
multiplex; sometimes you want something rare, difficult, even
impossible to find.
Here are ten excellent-to-great films
in alphabetical order that are either little-known or are not
commercially available on video (sometimes both).
A
nicely ominous title. The film, the most expensive Czech production
ever at the time, tells the story of Olda, who learns that he's a
human battery, an 'accumulator,' able to draw energy from nature,
wood, art, sex and other people, with only one Achilles' heel--the
television set. Filmmaker Jan Sverak combines striking visuals with a
wildly original, deftly applied sense of humor; his film is full of
images inspired, as he put it, by Tim Burton and Federico Fellini
(nice combination), not to mention dizzyingly sudden shifts of
perspective--at one point, he cuts to a high-angle shot of Olda
looking at a lightbulb, photographed from inside the bulb looking
down; at another Olda hurtles over Prague's gorgeous cityscape like a
concentrated bolt of the film's delirious high spirits.
Mario O'Hara's small-scale drama, about
Nora Aunor as a put-upon young woman forming a bond with Dennis
Roldan as a mentally damaged young man, is O'Hara at his most
neo-realist--in my opinion as good as if not actually better than
anything the better-known Lino Brocka has ever done. The film
features finely wrought performances by both Aunor and Roldan, set
against the background of a large apartment complex. Occasionally, a
scandal will bring the apartment dwellers out in a kind of impromptu
"people's trial," where the people involved air their dirty
laundry in public; O'Hara's staging of these "trials," his
quiet condemnation of them, and his precisely observed portrayal of a
teeming community life is just about peerless.
Batang West Side (West Side
Avenue, 2001)
Lav Diaz's five-hour film follows two
narrative threads: a Filipino youth's arrival in America and his
subsequent shooting, and a Filipino-American detective's
investigation of the youth's death. Along the way we are given a
sweeping yet intimately detailed view of an entire community, from
the poorest working stiff to the wealthiest housewife, from an
elderly grandfather to a group of young "shabu" (crystal
meth) addicts. Diaz asks hard questions about the Filipino Diaspora
and the children that have been born out of that outward movement of
individuals and entire families; the picture--comprehensive, comic,
surreal and tragic--is in my opinion Diaz's masterpiece (better even
than his more ambitious, ten-hour "Ebolusyon ng Isang Pamilyang
Pilipino (2004)), and one of the best recent Filipino films ever
made.
(No DVD or even commercial theatrical
run has been done, though there have been occasional screenings)
Campanadas a medianoche
(Chimes of Midnight, 1965)
Orson Welles' adaptation of Henry
IV parts 1 and 2, with scenes from Henry V and The
Merry Wives of Windsor thrown in--sixteen or more hours of
Shakespeare, boiled down into a hundred and twenty minutes by years
of staging and rewriting (Welles had been working on this material
since the late 1930s). The film, marred by poor sound
synchronization, contains what may be Welles' finest performance,
playing Falstaff as a tragicomic figure; includes what may be the
single greatest battle sequence ever filmed (the Battle of
Shrewsbury); is perhaps one of the finest (if not THE finest) film
adaptation of Shakespeare ever; and is considered by a small but
growing number of people (including myself) as one of the greatest
films ever made.
Frost (1997)
Fred Kelemen's film moves
slowly, for an impossible two hundred minutes. The story is simple
enough to follow, even without subtitles: a woman (Anna Schmidt) is
beaten by her husband; she leaves him, taking her son with her, and
walks through vast wintry landscapes, ending up in a city where she
takes up prostitution to support herself and her child. Kelemen shows
a stubborn, freakish discipline in drawing out his narrative; at one
point the camera following mother and son pans ahead, taking in the
hugely empty horizon little by little until it comes back to
them--only then do you realize just how much more frozen land they
have to walk through, just how much more emptiness they have to
endure. Kelemen seems determined to record the minutest details of a
human soul that has felt so much pain it's beyond feeling the pain,
only an immense, enveloping numbness.
(The director had fought with the
producer, so for years there had been only one existing print of the
director's cut; they have since reconciled, and a subtitled print is
available from the German TV channel ZDF)
Killer of Sheep (1977)
Charles' Burnett's film arguably did
for African-Americans in early '70s Los Angeles what Mean
Streets did for the Italian Americans in New York: introduce an
ethnic community in memorably cinematic terms. Beautifully shot in
black and white, I prefer Burnett's debut film to Scorsese's
better-known one for at least two reasons: Burnett seems to have a
better understanding of the women in his films than Scorsese does,
and Burnett is able to tell his story without resorting to the kind
of overtly dramatic elements Scorsese does (gang violence,
shootings). Burnett's visual style isn't flashy, but he does include
the odd surreal image: a shot of clear sky with rooftops at either
end, and kids leaping across the empty stretch; shots of a
slaughterhouse, where sheep carcasses hang like corpses in a
concentration camp.
Paul Grimault and Jacques
Prevert--better known for his legendary collaborations with Marcel
Carne (in particular "Les enfants du paradis" (Children of
Paradise, 1945))--collaborated on what was supposed to be the
first-ever full-length French animated film. The production fell
through; a mangled version was released without permission. Grimault
would spend the next thirty years of his life trying to finish the
film, with Prevert helping, until his death in 1977. The result,
finished in 1979, is perhaps one of the loveliest animated films ever
made, about a malevolent king (Charles V + 3 = 8 +8 = 16) who chases
a shepherdess he loves and a chimney sweep who loves her up and down
and in and out of the vast reaches of his kingdom. The film is as
influential as it is beautiful, having inspired images in Hayao
Miyazaki's Kariosutoro no shiro (Castle of Cagliostro,
1979) and Tenku no shiro Rapyuta (Laputa, Castle in the
Sky, 1986) as well as Brad Bird's Iron Giant (1999).
Anju to zushio-maru (The
Orphan Brother, 1961)
Taiji Yabushita's animated adaptation
of Ogai Mori's novel Sansho Dayu, about a young woman and
her brother taken from their parents and oppressed by a heartlessly
powerful government official (the novel is also the basis of Kenji
Mizoguchi's 1954 film). Yabushita's images have a distinct Japanese
flavor to them--think of Disney animation as drawn by Hiroshige--and
he manages to tell the story in fairy-tale terms, at one point
implying a character's fate through a magic transformation so sad and
enchanting the tragic implications are clear.
(No US release; a Japanese DVD can be
found here: http://www.cdjapan.co.jp/detailview.html?KEY=DSTD-2123.
No English subtitles)
Salo
Pier Paolo Pasolini's final completed film, based
on the Marquise de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, is "final"
in many other ways. It's possibly the final word in shock
cinema--highlights of a hundred and twenty days of sexual perversion,
torture, and death, set against a luscious background designed by
Dante Ferretti, photographed in voluptuous colors by Tonino Delli
Colli, and scored to the music of Fredric Chopin, Carl Orff, and
Ennio Morricone. It's an unflinching examination of final
consequences, of what happens when you allow sexual ennui caused by
bourgeoisie oppression to reach unnatural extremes. And it is perhaps
a final, fatal work for Pasolini himself, who, despite official word
on the subject, was possibly killed for making this film (authorities
have only recently re-opened the case on his murder). But even if he
wasn't killed for this it's difficult to imagine what
else Pasolini can possibly say; in many ways the picture is
Pasolini's final word on everything.
Tadhana (1978)
Nonoy Marcelo directed himself and
sixty other Filipino artists for three months to create this,
arguably the first Filipino animated feature ever, based on a
multi-volume history of the Philippines officially written by former
president Ferdinand Marcos (unofficially written by a team of
historians). While the effort hardly sounds impressive (Disney
employs hundreds of animators working for years to produce a
feature), it's unheard of in Philippine cinema, and the results are
ingenious and passing strange, to say the least. Marcelo takes the
production's many limitations--small manpower, limited time,
miniscule budget--and turns them into a distinct style, an
idiosyncratic interpretation and unabashed satire of official
Philippine history. A real head trip.
(As far as I know and as of this time
of writing, there is only one VHS copy of the film in all of
existence, taped off the original TV broadcast)
(First published in High Life Magazine,
August 2005)
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