I wish I could catch Susan as well--the trailer has some fun moments and it can't be as bad as Madonna's followup film, the deservedly reviled Shanghai Surprise. But instead I'll be at the PFA watching Miklós Jancsó's Red Psalm and Otto Preminger's The Moon is Blue.
The Jancsó films I've seen, The Red and the White and The Round-Up, have featured dramatically composed roving black-and-white cinemascope photography of sparse landscapes on which play out conflicts laying bare the basest human impulses. The characters, barely more than cyphers, perform a dance of betrayal in which individuals, ideologies, and space itself are denied coherence. In Red Psalm an element of hope threatens to make an appearance, as does color!
Moon was Preminger's first foray into independent production and a groundbreaking assault on the Production Code--it dared to talk about, to be about sex. Changing times have by all accounts dulled the impact of its salaciousness, but all the better for us to concentrate on the verbal gymnastics and the patient Premingerian fleshing out of fleshly issues that await, even if there be no money shot.
The Red Vic features over the next four days two of this year's outstanding, if tainted, films. Friday and Saturday: Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. QT isn't to everyone's taste, but he knows cinema and loves it, and I can dig that. In one shot containing both a theater marquee and a woman, it's difficult to tell which one the camera is making love to. He's come out in the past as opposing the digital intermediate, but as on his last few films has been compelled to use one all the same. My sense is that the long, exquisitely sinuous camera movements are just that, not Childen of Men-style patched-together shorter takes, but I can't be absolutely sure of all of them. There is a shot very near the end that should be experienced as a transcendently euphoric cinephilic moment, but I just can't believe in it. Digital fakery! You'll see what I mean. But all-in-all, this is a bold, supremely confident work. Quentin milks dialogue scenes for all they're worth. There are payoffs, good ones but brief, but relish the set-ups. One of my favorite scenes, one of the few with no dialogue whatsoever, features perhaps the most improbably perfect use of an anachronistic pop song in a period film.
Then on Sunday and Monday: Jane Campion's Bright Star, a near-perfect film recounting the love affair between John Keats and Fanny Brawne. It is not perfect only because its lovely photography, awash in the romantic glow of light, has been all but ruined by digital postproduction and sloppy printing (judging by the print I saw). Was it worth it for the one anomalous landscape shot showing, off in the distance, a decidedly pre-modern and phony-looking London? No, it was not. Nonetheless, I was taken with the Malickian sense of being present in the present, of discovering the moment and reacting genuinely. Abbie Cornish, star of 2004's best film, the all-but-ignored Somersault, once again delivers a stunning performance in a film filled with them. She risks being upstaged by little Edie Martin as her delightfully unprecocious and unwise younger sister, whose naive perceptions provide a counterpoint to the prevailing emotions of the film, until even she is swept up in the great tragic love. I was overcome.
But let us backtrack. Saturday the Silent Film Festival takes over the Castro. I've seen all the films except Abel Gance's J'accuse (which I will be attending) and the short accompanying Buster Keaton's Sherlock, Jr. (which I'll be skipping, but can heartily recommend!).
After the Gance, it's back to the East Bay for the PFA's screening of Preminger's Saint Joan, the film debut of young Iowan Jean Seberg. Like Falconetti in Dreyer's telling, who was punctured and issued real blood on camera, Seberg would submit to the suffering befitting this role. She absorbed bravely her daily directorial beratings, only to barely avoid actual immolation on her pyre due to a technical malfunction. Supposedly, the horrified reactions of onlookers made it into the final cut.
Sunday and Tuesday will find me back at the PFA for Exodus, Preminger's epic fictionalized (based on the book by Leon Uris) account of the founding of Israel, and Alain Resnais's La guerre est finie, which I suspect I've seen before, but only a viewing can confirm. The PFA's notes suggest I'll be treated to one of his confoundingly fractured narratives, this one gussied up in the trappings of a political thriller.
Thursday offers an opportunity to reëvaluate Hitchcock's Marnie, which left me cold first time around but has since been recommended by others whose opinions I respect. But what to see first: the 35mm restorations of Kenneth Anger's Fireworks, Rabbit's Moon, Scorpio Rising, and Kustom Kar Kommandos at MOMA, or 16mm prints of Curt McDowell's Boggy Depot, Confessions, Fly Me to the Moon, Nudes (A Sketchbook), and Tasteless Trilogy at ybca? Both filmmakers embrace the perverse, Anger homoerotically, with an occult, mythical bent, McDowell explicitly sexually, with a melodramatic bent. I've seen the Angers (except Kommandos), so I think I'll have to go with the McDowells, none of whose titles click in my imperfect memory.