Cineaste Summer 08.

In the new issue of Cineaste, the editors lay out a provocative argument: while audiences are, for the most part, ignoring the Iraq War movies, both the narrative features and the documentaries, we "shouldn't assume" that "present or former members of the Bush administration, who figure as possible defendants in future war crimes prosecutions, either in the US or abroad, are unaware or unconcerned about nonfiction films criticizing them and their policies."

The highlight of this issue, though, is its special section on the late critic, author (A Line of Sight: American Avant-Garde Film since 1965), filmmaker and Cineaste Associate Editor Paul Arthur. Again, the editors: "Paul was in no small part aligned with the Angry Young Men, if only in spirit, 'passion' thus the operative word when describing him." And they run three landmark pieces as PDFs so we can see them as they appeared in the magazine: "Unseen No More? The Avant-Garde on DVD," "In the Mood for Love" and "True Confessions, Sort of: Capturing the Friedmans and the Dilemma of Theatrical Documentary."

"Manoel de Oliveira's 2006 film Belle toujours can be said to be many things, from a sequel to Luis Buñuel's classic Belle de jour, to an homage from one artist to another, to a self contained consideration of Oliveira's own signature ideas," writes Nathaniel Drake Carlson. "But perhaps this film's most salient point of distinction is its emphasis on the ultimate inadequacy of adherence to only one particular point of view or vision of truth no matter how thoroughly determined; this is what establishes Belle toujours as its own separate entity and gives weight to its overriding theme of an encompassing sense of loss."

"Of the Huillet-Straub features awaiting DVD presentation, Class Relations is among the best choices to release, since it's among their most accessible and 'entertaining' works," writes David Sterritt. "I put quotes around that word because these filmmakers have stood in career-long opposition to the diversion and distraction that are endemic in commercial cinema; but even abstruse works like History Lessons, not to mention the visually magnificent Sicilia! and the sonically sensuous Moses and Aaron, are entertaining if having your intellect roused and your senses stimulated is your idea of a good time, as it is for me."

Christopher Long on Encounters at the End of the World: "Like a big game hunter, Herzog has made a living for five decades by hunting down and capturing landscapes and cultures on the margin. But a strange thing happened to Werner Herzog on his way to the seventh continent (also the seventh that he has filmed on): he suddenly became interested in people."

"[E]xcept for German film critics, a group of French cinéastes, and connoisseurs of film festivals across the world, hardly anyone has heard of what might arguably be the most important German director of the post-wall era." Marco Abel introduces his extensive interview with Christian Petzold.

"In his exciting and innovative study, Becoming Visionary: Brian De Palma's Cinematic Education of the Senses, Eyal Peretz situates Brian De Palma's importance as a director within a philosophical and psychoanalytic framework of the gaze, arguing that De Palma's cinema allows us to understand the gaze not as mastery of vision but as a blinding rupture within vision itself," writes David Greven. "Fascinatingly, Peretz describes De Palma's cinema as 'a laboratory attempting to isolate, demonstrate, and give a genetic account, in other words, a historical account, of the emergence of various defensive human gazes.'"

Jonathan Murray: "It's worth outlining the possible case against Brick Lane at the outset: there's no better way to make, ultimately, a positive assessment of the film."

Richard Porton interviews Ramin Bahrani, who tells him, "When I compare the ending of my film with the Dardennes', it seems to me that they're very 'moral' filmmakers while I'm not. In other words, I don't put a knife in your stomach at the end with the heavy weight of morality."

"Though there is certainly an opportunism to the timing of the film and even a conservatism of its aims (to make 'peace' with religious dogmas which, like all religious dogma, have worked to control and restrict human behavior and expression) it also has to be said that A Jihad for Love succeeds on its own terms, which are to represent an alternative view of, and approach to, Islam," writes Alisa Lebow.

"Jean-Luc Godard was once quoted as saying, On doit tout mettre dans un film ('you have to throw everything into a film')," notes Royal Brown. "Perhaps none of the films he has made over his long career illustrate this ultimately Brechtian battle cry more thoroughly than Pierrot le fou (literally 'Pierrot the madman')."

Robert Cashill takes in pretty much the collected works of WC Fields on DVD: "Fields's brand of choleric humor has been rechanneled... But it has not been surpassed." Particularly fine is the paragraph on Never Give a Sucker an Even Break: "This near-surreal picture was a career-closing catastrophe, but the star goes out in a lunatic blaze of glory."

Posted by dwhudson at June 4, 2008 1:34 AM