Rouge. 10.

A Japanese thread runs through about a third of the new issue of Rouge, so the opening piece is perfectly placed: "One cannot ignore the pioneering nature of Kimiko's showing in New York," argues Kiyoaki Okubo. Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon is widely thought to be the breakthrough for international recognition of Japanese cinema, but Mikio Naruse's 1937 film, now known as Wife! Be Like a Rose! appeared more than a decade earlier in the US - and was bludgeoned by reviewers, becoming "not only a stain on Naruse's record, but also an obstacle to the international distribution of Japanese cinema." Oddly enough, though, one of the film's severest critics may have, consciously or unconsciously, borrowed from it when he helped write the screenplay for John Ford's Donovan's Reef.

Updated through 1/18.

"The only director since Ford who has had an unfatherlike man walk a long way with a newborn infant in his arms is Pedro Costa," writes Shigehiko Hasumi in an essay on, among other things, how Costa's shots are only growing longer. And the Pedro Costa seminar held in Tokyo in 2004, which one could once read at Andy Rector's Kino Slang, is now here.

And a photograph from Selina Ou: Virgin Cinema Attendants, Roppongi Hills, Tokyo.

In this issue's "RougeRouge" section, the close analysis of a scene illustrated by a semi-animated (and always compulsively watchable) series of stills, Alain Masson examines the way the interior of the Hollywood villa where Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) lives and realizes that there's hope for his career after all, thanks to a brainstorm from Cosmo (Donald O'Connor), and breaks into the "Good Morning" number in Singin' in the Rain is revealed bit by bit - "the set's mise en scène is established through human movement."

The point of a film set is probably to conjure up a site, to give credibility to a mere appearance through the sheer particularity of its features. The originality of Lockwood's house comes from the fact that the more Hollywood-like a set is, the more fictitious it becomes. We accept its reality of make-believe. "This is it," we think, for it has no substance and is no more than a game of clichés.

"It's hard to imagine what Sunset Boulevard looked like and felt like at the time it was released," writes Mark Rappaport in a piece that all but luxuriates in the abundance of the film's allusions before pausing to ask, "So what does all of this mean, if anything?"

It adds a texture and an underpinning to Sunset Boulevard that is unparalleled in movie lore. Its self-referentiality is not only proper and earned; it grounds the film in the real tinsel beneath the tinsel in tinseltown. We are watching two films at the same time: the one on the screen, and the associations that are triggered by the extra-curricular references it alludes to - suggesting, more than is usually the case, the possibility that the feverish melodrama being presented is entirely plausible.

Grant McDonald interviews Paolo Cherchi Usai, who tells him: "Passio is a follow up to my book The Death of Cinema. I am increasingly dissatisfied with the question, 'What do these images mean?' I'd like to know more about the reasons why we want to produce and view artificial images at all; way too many of them, as it has now become clear."

After a few words on Russian Postmodernism segue into recognition that many have seen Ilya Khrhzanovsky's 4 as "the first decadent film of post-Soviet era," Julia Vassilieva tells us she aims "to provide a more constructive reading of the film by explicating the tropes, archetypes and symbols it uses to make a statement that goes beyond a social and psychological portrayal of Russian life in decline. In so doing, I also seek to delineate both the parallels and the distinctions between a postmodern approach in the West and in Russia, where it not only has distinctive aesthetic stylistics but also different functions."

"It is hard to find the decisive, dramatic moment when things happen in [Terrence] Malick's films," writes Adrian Martin. "Malick likes to skip the middle of any story, any action, any state of mind or mood..." And earlier: "There is a touch of Stan Brakhage (who was a fervent Malick admirer) in this poetic ambition: to film the things of the world (people, animals, flora and fauna) before they acquire their names, before they coalesce into firm shapes, objects, identities ... Indeed, Brakhage made a film called The Animals of Eden and After - and could there be a better title for the cinema of Terrence Malick, with its obsessive central myth of Eden before and after the Fall?"

"We can read the [Chantal] Akerman-room as a sort of artist's installation, a reduced stage on which the filmmaker re-enacts her agency as artist," writes Ivone Margulies. "Despite the affinity of this room with other video and performance images, la chambre Akerman can be found only in her films. For this room gains its performative raison d'être from its relations to other spaces. The primary impetus for the room is its erection of a separate, rigorously demarcated space for the self."

Nicole Brenez: "The brilliant work of Peter Lorrimer Whitehead, full of an incomparable energy, pulverises the false barriers between formal research, documentary reportage, psychedelic cinema, cinéma engagé, pop cinema and auteur cinema.... From plastic abstraction to documentary reportage, from psychic investigation to political pamphleteering, from the autobiographical essay to a demonstration of the powers of montage, from graphic and textural work to militant revindication - Whitehead's work accomplishes an exceptional synthesis, open to every different dimension of avant-garde cinema, tending towards percpetual explosion and euphoric fusion with phenomena."

Yvette Bíró argues that Jasmila Zbanic's Grbavica "will doubtless remain one of the memorably genuine and upsetting films about the true nature of war."

Jonathan Rosenbaum explains why it's "tempting to imagine that [Ritwik] Ghatak in effect created [his] features at least twice - once when he shot them, and then once again when he created their soundtracks."

Miguel Marías dedicates a photo essay to Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub.

Adrian Martin and Guillaume Ollendorff offer an appreciation of sorts of Libération columnist Louis Skorecki. I'd never heard of him before; you've simply got to read this.

Update, 1/18: Jonathan Rosenbaum introduces Rouge, "the best film magazine going that's exclusively online," to his readership at the Chicago Reader.

Posted by dwhudson at January 16, 2007 12:14 AM