Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

When you mention Grave of the Fireflies to someone who’s seen it, they give you a rueful grin. “Saddest movie ever,” they say, or something like that.

I’ve seen Grave of the Fireflies three times: most recently in advance of a screening happening at TIFF Bell Lightbox, here in Toronto, next month. I don’t know if I’ll be attending that screening or not, but I did want to write about it, to help promote the film, and hopefully entice you, if you haven’t seen Grave of the Fireflies, to go. Because sometimes, it’s good to be sad. And when it comes to being good, and very, very sad, Grave of the Fireflies is nearly unparalleled.

The Act of Killing (2012)

Anwar Congo is an older man: dark skinned, grey haired, slight, but fit. He smiles easily. Asked to explain how he forgets his troubles, he is forthright: “Good music, dancing…a little alcohol…a little marijuana…a little—” he struggles to find the word he wants. “—Ecstasy.” In any other documentary, Anwar would be a charmer. But in this one, he is not. The troubles he must forget are his nightmares. And he has those nightmares because he killed over 1,000 people.

Red Sorghum (1987)

Red is everything in Red Sorghum. It places the elements that matter most to the film along one continuum: binding the sacred, like ceremonial garb, to the profane: crops, wine, sex, and blood. It symbolizes birth and death—the big concepts—but also the living in between. It is everything.

Red Sorghum marked the directorial debut of Zhang Yimou, a man who appreciated the power of colour. A noted cinematographer, Zhang had brought his vision to Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth three years before. He’d distinguished that film’s vast landscapes from an equally vast sky with forceful use of yellow, green, and brown against blue. Now, helming a film of his own, he chose a scarlet pallet both lurid and violent.

The Goddess (1934)

Ruan Lingyu’s career was short, but she spent it building a memorable body of work. Her starring role in The Goddess may be her greatest. A prostitute who is blessed with a young son but beset by cruelty and bigotry, it was the quintessential sympathy-part, but by no means an easy one. It takes a fine actress to keep a role like this from collapsing into schmaltz. And Lingyu was more than fine—she was fantastic.

The Horse Thief (1986)

I saw The Horse Thief on DVD, two nights ago. “You should see The Horse Thief,” I told my friend, over coffee, one night later. She’ll have the chance: the film is screening at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox this June 29th. And she’ll probably see it for free, because she works there.

But time is money. And so she wanted to know what made it so great—so worth her time—and that I found tricky to explain. For while it would be easy to make a case for the quality of Tian Zhuangzhuang’s direction, or a little tougher, but with research, still possible, to explain the film’s significance within the Chinese cinematic canon, for me these were not the reasons to see it. It was the film’s moodiness that set it apart. I wanted her to be unsettled by it, as I had been. As you would be, I think. 

Yellow Earth (1984)

To describe places or inanimate objects in a film as “actors” is cliché. Writing about Yellow Earth, I’m tempted to do it anyway. The landscape shot by cinematographer Zhang Yimou—made of bobbing, bowl-like valleys, treeless and vast, across which one might still see a friend or enemy walking, hours after they’ve been abandoned—seems like more than a setting to me. It contains the players; holds them together; thwarts them. It forms a pocket universe, isolated from the very busy and fraught time in which the events of the film occur. It is doing something.

The Grub Stake Revisited

When you attend a silent film screening with live accompaniment, you can’t be sure that the music you’re going to hear will be to your taste. It’s rare that the music is actually bad—but sometimes it seems wrong for the film you’re watching; or at least, wrong for you. This is a risk you take, mitigated by the possibility that you’ll hear an expertly delivered, revelatory score instead. One that approaches the film in ways you hadn’t considered. I’ve been to such screenings. They’re wonderful.

Last night wasn’t one of those nights.

I Declare War (2012)

I’m not sure what most informs my opinion of I Declare War. It could be the school shootings we’ve heard and read about for years now. It could be the memory of war games that me and kids like me played—in our own backyards and in nearby woods, many years before that. Maybe it’s the current video game debate. But I know I found I Declare War to be a frustrating film: compelling, memorable, disturbing, but not always good. Not everything it had the potential to be.

The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)

The Toronto Silent Film Festival opened last night in a big way: with a live-accompanied screening of Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc. Joan is a masterpiece, and the subject of one of my earliest posts.

Flowing (1956)

Some say Otsuta needs a man. What they really mean is that Otsuta needs money.

Money, and how to get it, is the ongoing concern in Flowing, Mikio Naruse’s tale of down-and-out geishas in mid-century Tokyo. Otsuta’s geisha dwelling, Tsuta House, is deep in debt, and it’s her fault: the result of her love-affair with a man who took more than he gave. But Tsuta House still survives, and that, too, is thanks to Otsuta (Isuzu Yamada), whose fame, beauty, and mastery of traditional geisha arts continue to draw customers to her business.

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960)

‘Mama’ is only 30-years old. But in Mama’s line of work, that’s old indeed. She’s a hostess in a nightclub in the Ginza, a wealthy section of Tokyo, and over the five years she’s worked there she’s built a reputation as one of the loveliest, most engaging members of her profession around. The trouble is, no one wants to be a hostess for five years.

Dragnet Girl (1933)

To those of us who have seen Yasujiro Ozu’s masterpieces (Tokyo Story being the most famous of them), the silent films he made early in his career can seem strange. Ironically, it’s their familiarity that makes them so. Ozu’s mature works are famously minimalist: conservative in style, slow and contemplative in pace, alike in subject matter. But much of his early work, influenced by Hollywood and his own studio masters, has a more populist feel. This was an artist in search of himself.

He did not find what he was looking for with Dragnet Girl, a gangster (!) film with characters more reminiscent of Mikio Naruse’s later work than Ozu’s. But though Dragnet Girl is an anomaly even among Ozu’s silent films—and far from the best of them—it is still interesting to watch. Especially when considering the roles Ozu assigned to both women and children later on.

Early Summer (1951)

A relative of mine, who would never claim to be a literary scholar, on the subject of Jane Austen, once offered me this: ‘for someone who never married and had no kids, that woman sure understood how families work.’

She meant power games, and the pressures family members place upon one another, and the conflicts between different generations, and even between different families. And she was right: Austen had rare insight into those things. But it was also interesting, to me, that she saw the single, childless Austen as an outsider looking in; as though, without those additional life experiences, one could not normally be expected to understand how families really worked.

Austen was close to her family for the entirety of her short life. Yasujiro Ozu was close to his, too. He died at 60, in 1963, having predeceased his mother, with whom he lived, by only a couple of years. He, too, left behind no spouse, and no offspring. But the director did leave behind a body of work profound in its examination of the family dynamic—the comforts, cruelties, and most importantly, inevitabilities of a life lived with others.

Among Ozu’s acknowledged masterpieces (a canon that also includes Late Spring (1949); Tokyo Story (1953); and Floating Weeds (1959)) it is Early Summer that focuses most fixedly on family structures. The household in Early Summer is a relatively happy, stable, and normal one, composed of two elderly parents, their unmarried daughter, their married son and his wife, and two young grandsons. And several pet birds. The family members get along, mostly; everyone is healthy, and money is good.

Camp 14: Total Control Zone (2012)

About halfway through Camp 14: Total Control Zone, its subject, 30-year-old Shin Dong-hyuk, shows us his arms. They look hyper-extended at the elbow joints, as though they’re being bent backwards. This is how they look at rest. His whole body bears the effects of torture, he tells us; but this is the only example he’ll offer to the camera.

New Nanook

So the good joes at Flicker Alley (the ones behind the Chaplin at Keystone boxset, which I own and you should own) are releasing a new version of Nanook of the North. Ever fascinating, ever problematic, Nanook is one of my favourite silent films. This release includes some interesting extras, including a rare Norwegian talkie, The Wedding of Palo, which explores similar themes.

I posted a blog entry about Nanook a little while back. It was based on a live screening I'd attended at TIFF Bell Lightbox, in Toronto. The screening was accompanied by an Inuit throat-singer. Though the presentation wasn't entirely successful, it was certainly a memorable night.

David Copperfield (1913)

I have not read David Copperfield. This put me at a disadvantage yesterday afternoon, when I sat down to watch the second-ever film adaptation of Dickens’ novel, directed by Thomas Bentley. It is to Bentley’s discredit that I can say this; after all, a work of art should be able to stand on its own two feet. While this 1913 version of the story is coherent, at 67 minutes, it offers only brief snips of an involved tale, and little development of the men, women, and circumstances within.

The Indian Tomb, Parts One and Two (1921)

When the European public of the 1920s imagined India, what did they conjure in their minds? Was it a realistic picture? Could it be? Certainly, most of them had never seen the place.

Presumably, some of the filmmakers whose work the public consumed, had. But filmmakers, for the most part, seek to entertain. So when they set a film in India, they made this India the stuff of fantasy, with beautiful dancers and ecstatic priests, and heathen monuments hewn from rock, all of it encroached upon by jungles filled with terrible beasts. This place was defined by its otherness to the West. Its people were outsiders, even when depicted in their own land.

Halloween (1978)

I may have been doing this too long—watching Halloween the other night, I was reminded of silent film.

Dial M for Murder (3-D) (1954)

Grace under pressure.

That would have (and probably did) make a clever headline for some reviewer back in 1954. It’s an apt description of Margot Wendice, Grace Kelly’s falsely accused beauty in Dial M for Murder. But it describes Margot’s husband, Tony, even better. Few have Tony’s poise; fewer still could retain that poise in the tense seconds after a master plan had gone awry. But he can, and does, more than once.

Blancanieves (2012)

Blancanieves begins with a series of stills: black and white images of urban Spain in the late-1920s. They prepare us for the journey to come. But look carefully and you’ll see that the stills move: gentle ripples of water in one, rustling leaves in another, and so on. This, too, prepares us. Blancanieves, even its quietest moments, pulses with life.