Global Discoveries on DVD:
All that Avant Garde

By Jonathan Rosenbaum

For the second year in a row, Il Cinema Ritrovato, a festival devoted to archival restorations put on in early July by the Cineteca di Bologna, presented a series of DVD awards, and I was again privileged to serve on the jury. My fellow jurors this year were Peter von Bagh, the festival’s artistic director; Hervé Dumont, director of the Cinémathèque Suisse; David Meeker, former archivist of the British Film Institute (who masterminded the formidable BFI Classics book series); and Italian film critic Paolo Mereghetti.

It’s logical that professionals concerned with preserving and restoring archival films should be concerned with how DVDs are changing film culture. But it’s also understandable that their interest would carry certain misgivings and dark forebodings—an attitude that von Bagh gave voice to in a statement that accompanied our awards. Part of this reads, “The present young generation has in most parts of the world grown up without having seen a single ‘classic’ film in normal circumstances. This means that the perception of the world thus far helped by the miracle of cinema in its real artistic form is vanishing with a terrifying speed. A new kind of film culture is certainly being born, but possibly as some kind of bottomless, imitative version. More and more important restorations are performed—but only digitally, without any perspective—to produce a definitive film copy. All film festivals, including Il Cinema Ritrovato, know that films are being offered to us more and more in digital versions, often with the understanding that the existing film version can’t any longer be given out in any circumstances. The joy about the achievements of DVD culture is thus deeply ambivalent, with a shadow of the death of cinema as we have proudly known it.”

Peter’s statement points to a notable difference between the predilections and attitudes of most consumers of restorations and those of most of the individuals who bring them about. For me they suggest some of the difference between Ingmar Bergman’s insistence that his Saraband (2003), shot in digital video, be projected exclusively in that format, and the lack of awareness or interest on the part of most viewers regarding whether it’s on film or on video. Blushing to admit that most of the time, I probably come closer to most ordinary viewers on this issue than I do to professionals like Bergman and various archivists, I also have to admit that the strongest aspect of Saraband for me derives from what I take to be Bergman’s contempt for video as opposed to film—leading to a lack of polish in the visual transitions of Saraband that reminds me of someone like Ed Wood in their privileging of the most primitive forms of content over style. Despite my customary hatred for Bergman’s content, regardless of his stylistic mastery, this for me gives Saraband a kind of existential authenticity that I find lacking in most other examples of late Bergman—what Raymond Bellour, writing about Fritz Lang’s The Tiger of Eschnapur (1959) and The Indian Tomb (1959), once called “an inability to lie carried to the point of tragedy.”

Of course, until DVDs came along, references in English to those particular Lang films often registered as nothing more than cultish genuflections towards arcane French criticism. It’s gruesome to recall that the most widely read Anglo-American response to the diptych was probably Pauline Kael’s brutal dismissal of the films and their defenders in her celebrated attack on Andrew Sarris, “Circles and Squares,” in her first book, I Lost It At the Movies—unconcernedly equating them with the “ugly stupidity” of Journey to the Lost City (1959), which re-edited and conflated the two films into a travesty roughly half as long which Lang himself disowned. “It is an insult to an artist to praise his bad work along with his good,” she wrote; “it indicates that you are incapable of judging either.” But I would venture that it’s even more insulting to equate a distributor’s butchery with a filmmaker’s artistry—and that Kael’s lack of elementary scholarship on this matter, which invalidated her criticism, is ultimately more consequential than whether one now sees Lang’s films in 35mm (still virtually impossible these days) or on DVD (in the excellent editions available on both sides of the Atlantic). Of course, the fact that these films are available on DVD in North America and yet remain virtually unknown seems equally pertinent.

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Although some of the 2005 selections of the DVD jury at Il Cinema Ritrovato have already been cited in this column, it’s worth mentioning all of them. Our choice of “best DVD” went to the two-disc set available from Arte in France containing both Chris Marker’s The Last Bolshevik (1992) and Alexander Medvedkin’s Happiness (1932) in English as well as French versions. Our “best rediscovery” was Éditions Montparnasse’s four-disc Jean Rouch collection, including Les Maîtres fous (1956), Mammy Water (1956), Moi, un noir (1959), La Pyramide humaine (1961), Les Veuves de 15 ans (1965), La Chasse au lion à l’arc (1965), Jaguar (1967), Petit à petit (1971), Les Tambours d’avant (1972), and Un lion nommé l’Américain (1972). (All of these, alas, are unsubtitled.)

Our “best series”: “More Treasures from American Film Archives 1894-1931,” including three discs and a book. Our “best bonus” award was a three-way tie: “John Cassavetes: Five Films” (Criterion, eight discs) was cited “for its alternative materials (a different opening for Faces, 1968; two separate versions of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, 1976) and its diverse documentary materials—above all, a unique series of audio interviews with Cassavetes conducted by Michel Ciment. Criterion’s “Stage and Spectacle: Three Films by Jean Renoir” (The Golden Coach, 1953; French Cancan, 1955; Eléna et les hommes, 1956) was singled out “for its inclusion of many interviews from the legendary TV series Cinéastes de notre temps and a documentary about Renoir.” And Warners’ four-disc edition of Gone with the Wind (1939) “for its amazing range of extras, including a documentary about the film’s production and makeup, costume, and camera tests, and a rare Fred Zinnemann short about the Deep South.”

Four more DVDs got special mentions: Warners’ two-disc The Big Red One: The Reconstruction (1980), “for permitting us to look over the shoulders of the restorers and, if we want, to arrive at separate conclusions from theirs.” A two-disc Fassbinder package (Raro Video, Italy) “for the attention with which they have been able to restore the quality of the first black and white films of Fassbinder (The City Tramp, 1966; The Little Chaos, 1966; and Love Is Colder Than Death, 1969), including his contribution to a major early short film by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet (1968’s The Bridegroom, The Actress, and The Pimp—available, like the Fassbinder films, with English subtitles), and for the accuracy of the restoration job, also thanks to the invaluable contribution of the Fassbinder Foundation to protect the work of the German director.” And finally, a “special mention for film heritage” to the Danish Film Archives’ label Danimarca, “an example of a national archive fostering awareness of films that are rare and are now, on DVD, finally achieving an international profile: Benjamin Christensen, Carl Dreyer, and the actor Valdemar Psilander.
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Meanwhile, new releases of old classics have been far too plentiful lately for me to keep up with all of them, except mainly to note my pleasure that they exist. After a large period of quiescence regarding their substantial holdings, New Yorker Video is finally beginning to make some serious headway in making them available. I’ve already noted in this column their Robert Bresson releases, which are starting to improve both in terms of the quality of the transfers and the quantity of the extras. More recently, they’ve been starting to release the works of Africa’s greatest filmmaker, Ousmane Sembène, commencing with two early features that I’m ashamed to admit I still haven’t seen, Mandabi (1968) and Xala (1974)—although I’ve read The Money Order, the beautiful Sembene novella that the former is based on—and continuing this fall with the still earlier 20-minute Borom Sarret (1963) and the hour-long La noire de... (Black Girl, 1966), a particular favourite. (The lack of extras on these precious releases is quite unimportant; to complain about this would be tantamount to lamenting the absence of flavours in one’s oxygen.) As I write in early August, I’m also eagerly awaiting New Yorker’s imminent release of Jia Zhangke’s Platform (2000). And with Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968) expected in September, I’m wondering if Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1976) isn’t far behind.

While awaiting both titles, it’s worth adding that Straub-Huillet’s En rachâchant (1982) and Cézanne (1989) are coming out without subtitles in the next issue of the biannual French journal Cinéma, which boasts a DVD as part of every issue (look for Cinéma 10, to be precise). Akerman’s most recent feature, Demain on déménage (2004), is now out in Kino Video’s Kimstim collection, which has also just released five Claude Chabrol thrillers: Poulet au vinaigre (Cop au vin, 1984), its sequel Inspecteur Lavardin (1986), Betty (1992), L’enfer (1994), and Au Coeur du mensonge (1998). Kino, meanwhile, has brought out the indispensable two-disc “Avant-Garde: Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and ‘30s,” a treasure-trove from the Raymond Rohauer Collection including two of my favorite Jean Epstein films, the very different La glace à trios faces (1927) and Le Tempestaire (1947)—the former with an effective English voiceover—as well as other classics by Duchamp, Dulac, Eggeling, Ivens, Kirsanoff, Léger, Man Ray, Richter, and Strand, among many others. There are also some sharp and informative onscreen notes by the inimitable Elliott Stein.

Other releases you should know about: my all-time favorite Hong Kong art film, with my favorite Maggie Cheung performance, Stanley Kwan’s 1992 Center Stage (also known as Actress and Ruan Ling-yu) has finally become available in its full version with English subtitles, from the Hong Kong label Fortune Star. (In my essay on the film in my collection Essential Cinema, which mistakenly reported that this version was virtually lost, I rightly or wrongly gave the running time as 146 minutes; this DVD rightly or wrongly says it’s 154.) NoShame, an exciting new US label specializing in Italian classics, has released excellent two-disc sets with restorations of Michelangelo Antonioni’s first feature, Cronaca di un amore (1950), and the four-part Boccaccio ’70 (1962), with episodes by Vittorio De Sica, Federico Fellini, Mario Monicelli, and Luchino Visconti. (The Monicelli segment was deleted from the contemporary version released in the US.) The British Film Institute has recently issued fine if relatively unadorned editions of Kurosawa Akira’s Drunken Angel (the 1948 film that made Toshiro Mifune famous) and The Bad Sleep Well (1960).

I’m not enough of a Rossellini specialist to choose readily between the separate editions of the recent Italian restoration of his 1950 film about St. Francis just issued by Masters of Cinema in the UK and Criterion in the US. In a pinch I’d probably opt for the former, though completists will surely want to have both. Masters of Cinema identifies the film by its Italian title (Francesco guillare di Dio, meaning Francis, God’s Jester), gives the running time as 83 minutes, includes as supplements the prologue added for the US release, an introduction by critic Maurizio Porro, a documentary about the restoration, and a handful of stills from a sequence involving a prostitute that Rossellini decided to omit, while its 32-page booklet, apart from new texts by Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Lomax, mainly emphasizes the historical record about St. Francis. Criterion calls the film The Flowers of St. Francis, gives the running time as 87 minutes, and includes as supplements the US prologue and video interviews with Isabella Rossellini, Adriano Aprà, and Father Virgilio Fantuzzi, while the 36-page booklet offers a new text by Peter Brunette, a reprinted essay by André Bazin, and excerpts from an interview with Rossellini.

Two other notable recent offerings from MOC are Yamanaka Sadao’s Humanity & Paper Balloons (1937) and Shindo Kaneto’s The Naked Island (1960), both with copious extras. And two other recent Criterion releases, which I’ve been able to spend more time with, strike me as definitive: Jean Renoir’s Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932) and François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (1962), the latter in a two-disc set. The valuable extras in both are too numerous to cite here, but let me note in particular the superb critical commentaries on Boudu by Christopher Faulkner, Jean-Pierre Gorin, and Jean Douchet with Eric Rohmer, and the many television interviews with Truffaut in the latter set.

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During a panel discussion in Bologna about DVDs and some of the issues raised by Peter von Bagh’s statement, I upset a few distributors in the audience by defending the purchase of pirated versions of films on DVD. This isn’t quite the same thing as defending their sale, though I suppose the distinction for many is largely academic. To belatedly respond to the charge that such sales deprive independent filmmakers of revenues, I can only reply that (1) I was mainly thinking of Hollywood studio releases that are highly unlikely to ever appear on DVD otherwise, given the ignorance of most studio employees about what they possess; (2) many of these studios also cheat independent filmmakers out of revenues (admittedly a lesser argument); and (3) regarding independent works, this charge becomes true only if and when these works become available on DVD from more legitimate sources.

Bearing these considerations in mind, I’d like to conclude by noting that www.noirfilm.com responds seriously to serious inquiries about acquiring important films for study purposes that are unavailable and likely to remain so; and that fairly acceptable versions of Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964) and Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó (1994), both of which are likely to come out eventually in legit versions that will be even better, are currently available from www.superhappyfun.com.

Saraband

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Global Discoveries on DVD
by Jonathan Rosenbaum

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