Cinema Scope. 32.

"John Gianvito's Profit motive and the whispering wind recovers the lost history of class struggle in America by filming, in simple, static shots, the monuments left behind: commemorative plaques, statues, and, most often, cemetery headstones," wrote Darren Hughes from Toronto. "Fascinating." Gerald Peary, too, writing in the Boston Phoenix, is impressed with this "pensive and beautiful" doc: "'I was making this film looking for hope and inspiration,' [Gianvito] told the Toronto audience. 'Lots of the people buried in these graves we don't know. But because of them, we have the eight-hour work day, child-labor laws, integration.'"

Now, in the new issue of Cinema Scope, Michael Sicinski talks with Gianvito, noting first: "Inspired by Howard Zinn's magisterial People's History of the United States, Gianvito's leftist vision is righteously ecumenical, encompassing Eugene V Debs and Frank Little, Sojourner Truth and Malcolm X, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Cesar Chavez, and many, many others whom mainstream historical accounts have buried far more comprehensively than their undertakers. In addition to forging a radical remapping of the American terrain, Gianvito's film provides its audience with the rare opportunity to pay our respects by proxy."

"We Own the Night features some of the best American filmmaking currently on display, a virtuosity tied directly to its understanding of the possibilities offered by classical narrative," writes Andrew Tracy, introducing his interview with James Gray. Earlier: Reviews from Cannes.

Jason McBride on Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg: "Of course, this is no way to dispatch ghosts. And that's not really Maddin's aim. What he's really trying to figure out is how Winnipeg made him and how he, in turn, made it.... It's an incubator, a refuge. The train he rides keeps chugging along, its lethargic passengers lost in their dreams." Earlier: Reviews from Toronto.

"Though often acknowledged as one of the most important avant-gardists of his generation in Europe, Alexander Kluge does not think of himself as such," writes Christopher Pavsek:

He considers himself a partisan of an "arriere-garde" whose project is not to push into new aesthetic territory or be the vanguard of a new kind of film art, but to "bring everything forward" - to bring forward all the lost utopian aspirations of past political and aesthetic projects, all the wishes and hopes that history has left unrealized. His is a project of redeeming past failures.

[...]

Kluge's influence on German cinema extends far beyond the formal or stylistic influences he has exerted over filmmakers such as Harun Farocki. Without Kluge's untiring activism on the part of the newly emerging Young German Film in the 60s, the system of public funding and training infrastructure that helped produce some of the most recognizable names in German cinema - Herzog, Wenders, Schlöndorff - never would have come into being.

"[I]f one's cognitive abilities are in full working order, it becomes immediately apparent upon seeing I Just Didn't Do It that the film's fetishistic attention to the policies and procedures of the Japanese court system is precisely what gives it an added layer of perverse fascination if you happen to be watching it through foreign eyes," writes Scott Foundas. Earlier: Previews from the New York Film Festival.

"[I]t's always interesting to consider what gets canonized or else excluded from consideration just because it is or isn't available on DVD," writes Jonathan Rosenbaum in his latest "Global Discoveries on DVD" column, this one opening with a relatively longish riff on Adam Curtis, "trilogy about intellectual perversion in the West and what it's wrought has the potential of elevating our discourse about a great deal of what's currently ailing us."

"Bruce McClure is an artist both increasingly known and unknown," writes Andréa Picard, introducing an interview. "His pieces are unique, but not in the sense of an object d'art, rather as an ephemeral experience.... McClure has been called a para-cinema artist, a proto-cinema artist, an expanded-cinema artist, and even a vaudevillian."

"La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo (The Shining Trench of Chairman Gonzalo) is an improbable re-enactment of daily life in a Peruvian prison, circa 1989, among women inmates, combatant followers of Abimael Guzman's Maoist revolutionary-terrorist group Sendero Luminoso (the Shining Path)," writes Jay Kuehner. "Grounded in historical record, the film nevertheless reflects the director's desire for 'the bootleg video that I would have wanted to find in a market in Lima.'... La Trinchera sees [Jim] Finn's nearly-patented sense of irony bordering on sincerity for the duration: so firmly has the director's oft-quoting tongue become embedded in cheek, any traces of a smirk have taken on the appearance of a scowl."

The Darjeeling Limited "is foremost a male weepie (as one farseeing commentator wrote of 2001's The Royal Tenenbaums), chronicling an aching love lost and won between three men," writes Edward Crouse. "As a wigged-out affecting text built boldly on uncertainty, it takes cues from other odd melodramas: Renoir's The River (1951) (accidental epiphanies in a ribbony freefloat); Cassavetes's Husbands (1970) (the grief of three professional men gangways into a surreal Olympian bender, pushing women away and around); and Rossellini's Voyage to Italy (1954) (ugly, petty tourists stumbling onto a vision about themselves via some earthy, 'spicy' place)." Earlier: Reviews from Venice and previews from the NYFF.

"In a kind of unexpected loop back to [David Cronenberg's] past, [Eastern Promises'] vastly ranging social contexts of in-grown Russian émigrés, isolated Turkish circles and thoroughly Anglicized Russian ethnics acknowledges a far larger world and communities of people that's visible in his early horror films from The Brood to Scanners (1981) and Videodrome (1983)," writes Robert Koehler. Earlier: Rounds 1 and 2.

Posted by dwhudson at September 27, 2007 4:34 AM