Rouge. 9.

Look to the bottom right-hand corner of each new issue of Rouge lately and you'll find "RougeRouge," a breakdown and analysis of a film sequence accompanied by a series of stills that flicker in a rough approximation of that sequence; the effect is dangerously hypnotic. This issue, Adrian Martin, frequently referencing Jonathan Rosenbaum, has a wonderful read on Fritz Lang's Spione (Spies).

Already in 1928, Lang was counting upon his audience's capacity to assume, deduce and associate on the basis of a swift sequence of often enigmatic and disembodied gestures - a sketched or notional sequence of actions and sensations assembled and cohering as much as a result of the spectator's reactions (at various conscious, half-conscious and unconscious levels) as of anything in the film itself. In a striking formulation that captures this dream-like interlocking of text and spectator, Rosenbaum describes the film as structured upon "irrational continuities."

Adrian Martin's piece on the essay films of Robert Kramer is as fine a segue into the issue proper as any: "The challenge thrown out to the spectator is: orient yourself." Hironobu Baba "delves into the relationship between Kramer's Jewish background and his life and work." Related: Keja Kramer and Stephen Dwoskin discuss the making of their film, I'll Be Your Eyes, You'll Be Mine.

A second pair: Nicole Brenez and Michael Witt's introduction to Jean-Luc Godard: Documents, the catalog to the exhibition Alex Munt writes about in the current issue of Senses of Cinema, and Dominique Païni's contribution to Documents, an assessment of what Godard originally had in mind for the event.

A third pair, and again, the echoes reverberating between recent issues of film journals are remarkable. Felipe Furtado introduces and annotates two essays by Jairo Ferreira, "a frequent collaborator of many of the most obscure and inventive names of the Brazilian film scene, as a writer, assistant or actor," the first on the state of cinema in general as well as in Brazil, the second on Shohei Imamura.

A fourth pair, this one pairing Abbas Kiarostami and Víctor Erice twice. Alain Bergala argues that their personal histories (they were born just one week apart) are "inscribed within the more painful History of their respective countries." And yet: "They share the same conviction that cinema is first and foremost an art of singularity, that of the human beings whose story they tell and the actual world around them: their house, their neighbours, their landscape, their way of life. They are obviously aware that these modest, ordinary lives (the only ones in their eyes that are worth taking the trouble to recount) are partly determined by the overall situation of the society in which they are active." Miguel Marías addresses the occasion for the pairing, the exhibition Erice-Kiarostami: Correspondences, "inviting the curious visitor to think about a series of urgent and serious issues that each year fewer directors stop to wonder about."

Yvette Bíró considers the "new suspense" conjured by the "Fullness of Minimalism":

It is not only the already paradigmatic films by Wong Kar-wai (In the Mood for Love, 2000, Days of Being Wild, 1991, "The Hand" in Eros, 2004), Hou Hsiao-hsien's delicate Café Lumiere (2003) and Three Times (2005), the solitude of Tsai Ming-liang's protagonists, the wise irony of Kiarostami, or the newly met Koreans, Kim Ki-duk's Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring (2003), and 3-Iron (2004) and Hur Jin-ho's April Snow (2005), that address us in this same quiet, purified voice. Even sensitive European or American filmmakers, like the Dardenne brothers, Aki Kaurismäki (The Match Factory Girl, 1990), the unexpected Kazakh Darezan Omirbajev, or the young New Yorker Lodge Kerrigan< venture to use this method and the force of their restricted language became truly strong.

Thierry Jousse argues for "the superiority of cable" over the DVD, which is "on the side of fetishism and reification, but also - perhaps above all - on the side of knowledge and materialism (which is not entirely free of idealism)."

Another pair: Roland Fischer-Briand examines a storyboard by Dziga Vertov: "To date, no comparable example is known in which the glowing champion of documentary film made a preparatory list of camera shots, picture contents and compositions and extensively commented upon them." And Barbara Wurm introduces Dziga Vertov: The Vertov Collection at the Austrian Film Museum. Related: the Ukrainian poster for Entuzijazm: Symfonija Donbasu (Enthusiasm).

Donald Phelps reflects on Eddie Albert: "Not only Albert's image, but his performances – one might say, his corporate performance - riveted the eye with an apologetic complexity."

And finally, a 1981 piece from VF Perkins on several remarkable choices directors have made - and why.

Posted by dwhudson at August 5, 2006 6:48 AM