It ought not be a surprise that the greatest cinematic study of American iconography, both tangible and nebulous, was unearthed by a German. That film is not Kings of the Road, a sort of slantwise proving ground for greater things to come. It was Paris, Texas, a later film by Wim Wenders and a film whose name evokes the sentimental but bristling irony of a slice of Europe in America. Wenders was that slice, always infatuated with American cinematic styles and moods but trapped in the mortal coil of separation from his ideological homeland, with an unforgiving body of water blocking his way to the land that his heart so clearly desired. Continue reading →

I have written before that, more than any other cinematic movement, the French New Wave was a line in the sand. If so, Jean Esutache’s The Mother and the Whore is very likely the only film ever to divide up the line, or to redraw it. Not only that, but it draws on the face of the New Wave mythology by casting the mask most commonly associated with the movement – Jean-Pierre Léaud – as a blasé, wandering pseudo-intellectual with an endless pool for inhuman pontification but precious little wells of human warmth. He falls for a nurse named Veronika (Francoise Lebrun), less out of any joy found lurking in her personhood than in a blank need for sex that circles around his personhood like a vulture. He lives with his girlfriend Marie (Bernadette Lafont), who provides the lion’s share of his money, but he plays her as he plays Veronika; as objects and passive beings for him to use as he sees fit. Then, play is a questionable word. That would imply a passion in his heart, but from the beginning of the film until the very end, all we find is timidity and a pregnancy of nothing. Continue reading →

Due to ease of access, I’ll be covering 1974 and 1975 before 1973.

Martin Scorsese has returned to the poisoned well of his proving ground far too often. Mean Streets was a vivacious, convulsing snarl of Catholic guilt and post-French Connection inner-city rot. Taxi Driver deepened his fixation on perverting classical Hollywood with a clanking, cantankerous pile of scrap metal as his weapon of choice. Raging Bull perfected all of his pet themes, themes he would relapse to a decade later when things got difficult and he needed a genuine corker of a gangster pic to build up a little good will again. Since then, having earned his cred already, he has too often made the fatal mistake of drinking the water of his own making again and again, and he’s built up a resistance that makes his new films on the same subject seem ironclad in a certain respectable distance and stateliness that devours their energy and liveliness. When he made The Departed, a fine film, he was doing nothing but reheating old leftovers that tasted better thirty years before. The genuine shape and form was still there, but the fascinatingly pungent odors and the sharp acid of the taste was gone. Continue reading →

Due to ease of access, I’ll be covering 1974 and 1975 before 1973. 

Robert Altman, bless his soul, has probably done more to review and rekindle American genre cinema than any other American director. He was, in his own less radical but no less effective or warped way, a Godard of the American vernacular, which means both that he released films like he woke up in the morning and that his knowledge of cinema history was prismatic and unencumbered by the mortality of mere humans. Remember, he was older than many of his American New Wave counterparts, and his awareness of the past was more fully grown than even Scorsese’s, a far more famous filmmaker but not necessarily a better one. If you put a gun to my head, Robert Altman would probably be my favorite director at work since the 1970s (Terrence Malick is the only other possibility). Continue reading →

Solaris is many things, but it is most of all the greatest answer film in all of cinematic history. By 1968, Andrei Tarkovsky had already earned the cinema’s eternal respect and humility by debuting as a major world director with the greatest film ever released about the nature of spirituality as it exists in relation to humanity, as it is felt in the senses. He clearly saw the light in Andrei Rublev, but it asked him not to falter or recede, but to continue to preach his gospel. Eying Stanley Kubrick’s eternally cryptic, disquieting, rigidly and pointedly mechanical work of genius, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Tarkovsky plainly grasped the film as a battle cry, as I certainly am not the first to notice. It was Western, for one, and scripturally infested in machines and production, and Tarkovsky was so fundamentally a bleeding-heart humanist that even the early Soviet focus on labor and metal had no use for him, let alone a Western focus on materialism. With 2001 shaking its head at humanity’s ambition and positing a certain greater humanity found in space we could never hope to understand or know, Tarkovsky no doubt refuted the ghostly specter and vast, echoing void of inhuman spaces in Kubrick’s film. Tarkovsky, essentially, felt a calling to bring out the guiding light for humanity once again. Continue reading →

Luchino Visconti sort of had it all, huh? A chameleon by trade, he spent a few decades hop-scotching from proto-Nouvelle Vague Italian Neo-Realism (Rocco and his Brothers) to ghostly melodramas (Senso) to gravid poetic epics with long takes like nitroglycerin by way of molasses (The Leopard) to out and out scorching the Earth with Molotov cocktails of Grand Guignol (The Damned). But his final masterwork was not a picture of succulent opera or intentional, declamatory fire or ice. It was simply a story of an elderly man, played by Dirk Bogard with melancholy sangfroid and still emptiness battling with impenetrable longing in his eyes, and the boy he comes to love while on vacation in Venice. It is an almost wordless work that consists almost exclusively of that man walking around and that boy walking around, and the two sometimes crossing paths with nary a word spoken between them. It is not necessarily Visconti’s best film, but it is his most misread, and possibly for the same reason, his most human. Continue reading →