GreenCine Daily: <i>Senses of Cinema</i>. 45.

November 27, 2007

Senses of Cinema. 45.

"Try writing an essay on 'leaving the movie theatre' in this day and age." Introducing their new issue, Senses of Cinema editors Rolando Caputo and Scott Murray pick up on the tone set by Chacun son cinéma (To Each His Own Cinema), the compilation of three-minute films by 33 renowned directors commissioned to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Cannes this year: to enter a movie theater now is to pay a 21st century tribute, suffused with respect and nostalgia, maybe even mourning, to a fading 20th century custom as the films themselves slip out onto smaller, more portable screens or harrumph and go all 3D and loud. Nicholas de Villiers reviews the shorts themselves: "It is apparent that many share a strong 'cathexis' to the actual movie hall itself: the red auditorium chairs, the dust-motes in the cone of light from the projector, the architecture of old theatres."

"Curse of the Demon is a subtle exploration of the terror conveyed by the supernatural on the imagination," writes Pedro Blas Gonzalez. "Jacques Tourneur goes through great pains to offer a sophisticated script that raises the level of the film to much more than just a tale of spooks in the night."

"Sam Newfield is, in all probability, the most prolific director in American sound-film history, but very little archival material survives on his career." So Wheeler Winston Dixon does some digging, talks with Newfield's nephews and finds he's been "able to piece together a rough sketch of the man behind such a torrential output of work."

Gertrud "Dreyer wanted mass catharsis, the way Greek theatre did, or maybe the way college basketball does, with thousands of pulses synched to that ball's movements," writes Tag Gallagher. "Curious it is, then, that some people complain Dreyer is slow and intellectual, talkie and dull, Gertrud particularly. They never spot the ball."

"The canonization of Kane as the great film has not only fossilized the film itself. It has fossilized its maker as well." Benjamin Kerstein assesses Orson Welles's last films.

"A self-made filmmaker without any film school education, Paul Thomas Anderson has written all of his films himself; he is the purest auteur of the contemporary movie industry - even obtaining the exceptional right of final cut on his projects," writes André Crous, who examines how "Anderson's tracking shots normalise the extraordinary with equally extraordinary panache."

Virginia Bonner aims to bring Agnès Varda's "documentary work into as prominent a position as her narrative films. I will focus here on Varda's recent and highly acclaimed documentary Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I, 2000) in light of her earlier narrative work and on its own unique terms, but I will begin by demonstrating that documentary practices have informed most of Varda's narrative films; in retrospect, these texts point the way toward Glaneurs."

In the Heat of the Sun "In exploring the relationship between nostalgia and history on film, I would like to look at four Chinese films, made between the early 1990s to the year 2000, that depict modern Chinese history," writes Jie Li. "The first two are both multi-decade historical epics made by two of the most famous representatives of the 'Fifth Generation': Zhang Yimou's Huozhe (To Live, 1994) and Chen Kaige's Ba wang bie ji (Farewell My Concubine, 1993). Against the grain of these two films, I would like to read in greater detail Yangguang Canlan de Rizi (In the Heat of the Sun, 1994) by Jiang Wen and Zhantai (Platform, 2000) by Jia Zhangke. Both Jiang Wen and Jia Zhangke are commonly referred to as members of the 'Sixth Generation' by film critics in China and abroad, but since neither of them willingly identifies with this designation, I shall refrain from using the term. However, I would like to argue that the two younger directors, in spite of huge divergences in style, engage in a more reflective and critical kind of nostalgia than their Fifth Generation forerunners."

"Sigmund Freud theorized that two forms of joking existed: innocent jokes and tendentious jokes," writes Arthur Rankin. "Charlie Chaplin creates a cinematic world where the innocent joke serves to focus of the tendentious comic intent."

There are three pieces in this issue's section on Australian Cinema:

Glen Donnar considers the initial critical reception of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith.
"Australia, a nation with distinctive origins as both a penal colony and an immigrant frontier, negotiates a unique discourse on feminism, race and colonialism, with the three issues often painfully entwined." Lorrie Palmer revisits Flirting.
"Sarah Watt's film Look Both Ways was, at the time of its release in 2005, heralded as a sign of recovery for Australian cinema after several traumatic years of critical gloom and box-office flops," writes David Carlin. "The curative discourse we can detect associated with the film, in relation to the local industry, is apt, I would argue, given the articulation within Look Both Ways of a widespread contemporary preoccupation in Western culture with traumatic memory."

"Phantom India and Calcutta are definitely the major works in a new DVD box set, The Documentaries of Louis Malle, released by Eclipse," argues Peter Hourigan. "However, there are other riches as well."

Avant-Garde 2: Experimental Cinema 1928 - 1954 "is both a revealing and somewhat incoherent snapshot of American and French avant-garde cinema from the late 1920s to the early 1950s," writes Adrian Danks. "It is most valuable as a repository of several seminal and formative works by key figures in film history, and a partial resurrection of some relatively forgotten and under-represented figures like Willard Maas and Sidney Peterson." Special attention is paid here to "Isidore Isou's monumental, egotistical, maddening but undoubtedly influential Venom and Eternity (Traité de bave et d’éternité, 1951)."