Defending Cinephilia (7) - From near Barcelona freelance critic Adrian Martin chronicles his lockdown year

The title of this annual Film Alert feature – a true highlight on every cinephile’s calendar! – seems to have subtly morphed since its inception. It used to be “Things that Defended Cinephilia”, and that was often mangled (by others, not Geoff) into “Things that Cinephilia Defended”, among other inventive variations. Now we have arrived at a less mangle-able “Defending Cinephilia”. On your marks: I am ever-ready to defend it!*

It has become my personal end-of-year routine (and I am not alone in this) that I provide no less than six versions of this list: to the websites Screenhub and Film Alert in Australia and La Internacional cinéfila (Roger Koza) in Argentina, and to the magazines Desistfilm (Perú), FILO(Korea) and La vida útil (Argentina). I vary the style, the contents and “attack” of my response for each publication or site – sometimes more an essay or a reflection than a list, sometimes something like a letter. And, like everybody – but especially this year – I keep recovering things in my memory that seemed to slip into the cavernous, black hole that collectively enveloped us at the start of March.

 

I begged off all other, more “mainstream” comers – Sight and Sound, IndieWire, Rotten Tomatoes – because it seemed to me that they were asking for the wrong thing vis à vis2020 in their continued fixation on ‘films officially released during the year’. When I mentioned this on Facebook, many people helpfully provided lists of all the films they considered super and mighty in 2020. As if to prove my polemical point, most of them were ‘officially’ from 2019! Those lists would have been rejected by the manic, narrow-minded pollsters of the mainstream.

 

So, here’s what Film Alert gets from me. It might be from 2020, it might be from 2019, it may even be hurling backwards from the distant future if that zany inversion-technology showcased in Christopher Nolan’s Tenet(a film I actually enjoyed) has been successfully switched on yet, for good or for evil. 

 

Zombi Child

First, a couple of feature films that keep returning to assail my mind: Bertrand Bonello’s Zombi Childand Christian Petzold’s Undine. Both films about spirits and haunting, about slipstreams of time and history – but in very different ways, over different cultural and political terrains. Both utterly cinematic, with a real touch of mastery.

 

Michaela Coel, I May Destroy You

There were some terrific TV series. With regards to Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You, I swim in the critical consensus. Two other recommendations from me are less consensual: the wonderful Catalán series The Hockey Girls (two seasons so far, and I found the first with English subtitles); and the frustrating but undeniably disquieting Servant, especially the opening episode directed by M. Night Shyamalan. That one is about to begin its second season in January 2021, with a third season apparently already confirmed. Given the fickle world of neo-TV, we shall see!

 

Marthe Keller, Henry Fonda, Fedora

This would not be Film Alert without the due, loving attention paid to film history and all the discoveries each of us still have to make back there. In 2020, my random probing seemed to concentrate on a time-span set between the late 1950s and early 1980s. Sometimes you re-see something and it just knocks you out like never before: that was Billy Wilder’s Fedora (1978) for me. From the late ‘50s, I finally watched Robert Wise’s stupendous Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), partly scripted by Abraham Polonsky. An audio commentary assignment for the BFI led me to Tony Richardson’s extraordinary Jean Genet-derived Mademoiselle (1966) with Jeanne Moreau, virtually a lost film for decades. Other things led me to Jerry Schatzberg’s amazing Puzzle of a Downfall Child (1970) starring Faye Dunaway. Finally in this batch, a special film from the low-budget production hub of France’s Diagonale, the dedicated company that Paul Vecchiali (still alive and prolifically directing at 90) ran during the ‘70s and ‘80s: Marie-Claude Treilhou’s Simone Barbès, or Virtue(1980) – hilarious, touching, surprising. You gotta see it.

 

Film Alert prizes film criticism in all its forms: essays, books, lectures, introductions to screenings, masterclasses, you name it. The two great film books of the year, for me, were also missives from the grave: the indispensable V.F. Perkins on Movies: Collected Shorter Film Criticism (Wayne State University Press) edited by Douglas Pye; and Claude Ollier’s Ce soir à Marienbad, et autres chroniques cinématographiques (Éditions Yellow Now, Belgium) – collecting all the stuff from the late ‘50s and through the ‘60s that Ollier chose to exclude from his classic Souvenirs écran(1981). I also found two other books fascinating for the ‘insider’ light they shed on the changes in American filmmaking from the 1970s to now: Paul Hirsch’s A Long Time Ago in a Cutting Room Far, Far Away (Chicago Review Press) and Ken Kwapis’ But What I Really Want to Do is Direct (St. Martin’s Griffin).

 

Speaking of the grave, let’s pay tribute to some of the critics, essayists and scholars who left us this year: my Australian friend for almost 40 years, Tom O’Regan; Czech-born Petr Král; James Harvey in USA; Jean Collet (who wrote the first book on Godard) and Pascal Kané in France – the latter whose 2015 collection of essays, Savoir dire pour vouloir faire(Éditions Yellow Now again) has informed much of what I’ve written lately. Film directors tend to receive better and more respectful coverage when they pass on, but let’s especially note here Mexico’s Paul Leduc, maker of (among many others) the remarkable Frida, naturaleza vida(1983).

 

I end this letter of sorts with a personal plea. 2020 was hard on just about everyone, including freelance film critics (I do not, as some mistakenly assume, draw some astronomical university salary from a mythical kingdom of academic cinema studies). I have a Patreon campaign (www.patreon.com/adrianmartin) that helps me maintain and stoke up (every fortnight!) my website of collected and ongoing critical writings (www.filmcritic.com.au); it also helps me and my partner (Cristina Álvarez López’s brilliant blog is at https://laughmotel.wordpress.com/) to eat three meals a day.  I used to have around 80 regular, kindly supporters there, but that has dropped to 65 or less during this troubled year. If you can possibly help out, please do! Especially if you are a living filmmaker I’ve praised anytime in the past 40 years. The dead ones, and those I have not praised, are forgiven in advance for not pitching in.

© Adrian Martin, 20 December 2020 

 

Editor’s Note: I give credit to my friend Robert Koehler for inventing the phrase “Defend Cinephilia!” Previous contributions to this annual Christmas series have been posted. Click on the names below to read the thoughts of. 

 

Rod Bishop

 

John Baxter

 

Geoff Gardner

 

Peter Hourigan

 

Adrian Danks

 

Janice Tong

+ some extras

 

Tom Ryan   

 

...and more John Baxter

 

More to come. Contributions still welcome. Send them to filmalert101@gmail.com

Streaming on YouTube - Tom Ryan recommends a viewing of a little known seasonal treat CHRISTMAS EVE (Edwin L Marin, USA, 1947)

It’s the time of year when magazines and newspapers around the globe haul out their lists of recommended Yuletide films, occasionally stumbling across something made before 1990 (other than It’s a Wonderful Life or Meet Me In St. Louis). I’m sure you’re familiar with most of them, but there’s one that you’ve probably never heard of, made in 1947, the year after Capra’s classic, three years after Minnelli’s, and it’s certainly worth a look.

 Adapted from stories by Laurence Stallings, Richard Landau and, uncredited, Arch Oboler, Christmas Eve is an unexpectedly appealing family reunion frolic written by Stallings, Landau and, also uncredited, Robert Altman… Yes, the Robert Altman. It wasn’t his first involvement in the film business: he’d worked as an extra on The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which was shot in 1946 and released in mid-1947 a month or so before Christmas Eve. Apparently, his input stretched only as far as a contribution to the storyline, one sufficiently minor to deny him an on-screen credit. 

 

The film’s plot is routine Christmastime fare: a rich old woman; an avaricious nephew; the three adult foster sons who’ve asked nothing of her and, for better or worse, gone their own way in the world; the looming Christmas Eve that she hopes will bring them to her home in New York City.

 

We first see Matilda Reed (Anne Harding, above) at her window, nervously peering at the limousine that’s pulled up at her door. Her nephew, Phillip Hastings (Reginald Denny), has summoned Judge Alston (Clarence Kolb) to have her declared incapable of looking after her own affairs and the good judge – as he eventually turns out to be – is about to meet her. Phillip feigns affection: “She’s such a lovely old heirloom, despite her eccentricities,” he says. His real concern is that she’s about to pass her vast wealth on to the three orphans she’d adopted years before and whom she has employed a private detective (Joe Sawyer) to track down. Now they’re fully grown men: George Brent plays Michael, George Raft is Mario and Randolph Scott gets third billing as Jonathan. However, the more we see of Matilda, the clearer it becomes that she’s very well-equipped to deal with her own affairs and has the measure of her wretched nephew.

 

George Brent, Joan Blondell

The film unfolds in three parts with an unofficial prologue – the introductory scenes described above – and epilogue. Each part introduces a brother: Michael is a playboy who has his own money issues and a girlfriend (Joan Blondell) who doesn’t take any nonsense from him; Mario is a gangster living in South America, where his girlfriend, Claire (Virginia Field), has caused him to get mixed up in the nefarious affairs of a Nazi (Konstantin Shayne); and Jonathan, “Johnny”, is an aw-shucks rodeo rider who goes by the name of the Pendleton Kid and who turns out to be a lot smarter than he initially appears.

 

Brent and Raft play it more or less straight, but, in perhaps his best collaboration with journeyman director Edwin L. Marin, Scott delivers an accomplished comic performance, simultaneously oozing charm and knowingly sending up his man-of-the-West persona. When he arrives at Grand Central Station, he’s met by Matilda’s manservant, Williams (Dennis Hoey), but is much more interested in the attractive woman, Jean (Dolores Moran), who’s eyeing him off in the background. 

 

Randolph Scott, Dolores Moran

In a delightfully wacky side-story, she turns out to be a welfare officer investigating an adoption racket and sees Johnny as a likely candidate to play her husband when she visits the home of a suspect, Dr. Bunyan (Douglass Dumbrille). “I picked you out because you look the part of a big, tender-hearted hero,” she explains, and she’s called it right. He does, and he’s only too happy to give himself over to the undercover operation, Scott eagerly seizing the opportunity to play it all for laughs.

When Dr. Bunyan expresses doubts about this couple who’ve arrived on his doorstep, cowpoke Johnny mock-threateningly pulls a gun and tells him, “We’d like to look at some of your yearlings.” To Jean, he then says, “C’mon, honey. Let’s go to the corral and look at his stock,” offering the good doctor an irresistible deal: “A hundred white-faced heifers for one little pink-faced calf.”

 

When he and Jean make their way to the doctor’s nursery, they find three (gorgeous) babies awaiting them. “Why, it’s time you were weaned and given the run o’ the range,” he says to one of them. “Any reduction if I take the whole herd at the rail-head?” he asks. And when Bunyan explains that he’ll need to see proper adoption papers before he does anything more, Johnny asserts himself: “Why? I haven’t seen a brand on any of them.”

 

This segment of the film is its best, written and played in a winning screwball mode and confirming that Scott, had he chosen to look beyond Westerns for his future, was perfectly able to fit comfortably into the fast-talking, wise-cracking romantic comedies that were just as popular as Westerns in Hollywood during the 1940s. He and Moran are terrific together and there’s none of the awkwardness with women that seemed endemic to the roles he played in Westerns.

 

George Raft

Bizarrely, of the trio playing her adopted sons, only Brent (43) was younger than Harding (45) when the film was made. Both Scott (48) and Raft (46) were older. And Reginald Denny (56), playing her nephew, was born a decade before her. The film was Scott’s third (out of nine) with the prolific Marin, who was to die five years later at the age of 52 after a 20-year career in which he made more than 50 features.

Christmas Eve was remade for television in 1986 by director Stuart Cooper, with a cast led by Loretta Young (in the role played by Anne Harding, the character renamed Amanda Kingsley), Arthur Hill (as her only son, Andrew, the equivalent of the original’s nephew), and Ron Leibman (as the private investigator on the case). Based again in New York City, and written by Blanche Hanalis, who adapted Little House on the Prairie for TV, the telefilm also gives her (along with the official writers of the original) a “story by” credit.

 

Earnest and terribly mushy, the remake keeps an approximation of the general structure of the story – although this time the matriarch is trying to track down a trio of grandchildren rather than adoptees – but conjures up entirely different back-stories for them. Here they’re two young men – a musician based in Nashville (Patrick Cassidy, David’s brother) and a draft dodger now living in Canada (Charles Frank) – and their sister, a teacher in Los Angeles (Season Hubley). 

 

However, the film spends very little time with them, beyond establishing that they’re apparently irretrievably estranged from their father. The focus is instead primarily on Amanda Kingsley’s situation as her son tries to take charge of her fortune by having her declared incapable of looking after her own affairs. Adding injury to this insult, she’s also diagnosed as having an aneurysm that could kill her soon and suddenly. What’s entirely missing is the playfulness of the original, the knowing wink that drives the telling of the story. The energy and the sense of fun that the cast, and Scott and Moran in particular, brought to Marin’s original have also gone missing and the film suffers from their absence. 

 

The original Christmas Eve can be found on YouTube if you click here   

Holiday Fun - John Baxter revives memories of the French cinema's specialty, swordplay - LE BOSSU/ON GUARD (Philippe de Broca, 1997)

Philippe de Broca

          Is stage fencing even taught any longer in acting school?  Until about twenty years ago, swordmasters like Bill Hobbs continued to work, despite a dwindling call for their services in a cinema where swordplay consists of hacking at one another with digital broomsticks.  Happily, we can still admire the expertise of Basil Rathbone, who did all his own fights in such films as The Adventures of Robin Hood, the agility of champion tumbler Dave Sharpe, Gene Kelly’s double in the more acrobatic feats of The Three Musketeers, and Fred and Albert Cavens, father and son swordsmen who battled one another in The Prisoner of Zenda.

             That the craft didn’t die entirely is largely down to the French, and to Philippe de Broca in particular.  When Steven Spielberg confessed to François Truffaut that his favourite French film was Broca’s comedy adventure L’Homme de Rio, aka That Man From Rio,Truffaut wasn’t impressed.  Broca, Truffaut’s assistant on Les Quatre Cent Coups,had emerged as the clown of the nouvelle vague. While the debut films of Godard, Chabrol and the other boys in the band viewed existence obliquely and with existential doubt, Broca’s Le Farceur(1960)began with Jean-Pierre Cassel emerging from a girl’s bedroom via a sky-light and escaping across the roofs to breakfast with his eccentric family who make their living modeling as murder victims for a newspaper feature on Great Assassinations. 

            Broca went on to direct a string of action comedies, the gem of which, by common consent, is the 1962 Cartouche. Seldom had swash been so colourfully and stylishly buckled. It wasn’t until 1997 that he again evoked the France of the early 1700s  with similar richness and vigour, but the wait was worth it. 

Daniel Auteuil and the Nevers Thrust
Le Bossu

           Le Bossu – literally “The Hunchback”– isa delicious exercise in cap et épée adapted from an 1857 novel by one of the rivals of Alexandre Dumas père, Paul Féval. The French traditionally regard hunchbacks as lucky with money. Until recently, sufferers loitered outside casinos, selling the opportunity to rub their back for luck.  (Jack Buchanan does so in Ernst Lubitsch’s 1930 Monte Carlo.)  Financiers employed themas accountants, a loophole exploited by the protagonist of Le Bossuto infiltrate the villain’s inner circle.  

            Though filmed in 1923, 1934, 1944 with Pierre Blanchar and 1959 with Jean Marais, the story is relatively unknown outside France, probably because it’s perceived as poor taste to exploit a handicap - though this hasn’t harmed the many versions of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Nevertheless, to protect Anglophone sensibilities, the English version of Broca’s version was retitled On Guard!

            Le Bossu  revolves around swordplay. Broca begins in a salle des armes  where fencers practice in unison the traditional positions of l’escrime. Among them is the dashing Duke de Nevers (Vincent Perez), famous for the deadly “Nevers Thrust” that kills with a point between the eyes.  Another fencer, Lagardere (Daniel Auteuil), challenges  him to demonstrate the manoeuvre. 

Vincent Perez as the Duc de Nevers
Daniel Auteuil as LaGardere

            Watching from the shadows is the duke’s sinister cousin, Count Philippe de Gonzague (Fabrice Luchini).  Gonzague manages the fortune that he expects to inherit, and hides the fact that the duke’s former girlfriend has given birth to a new heir.  Nevers does find out, however, and, with Lagardere, now his friend, crosses France to marry her, only to be murdered by Gonzague. Lagardere escapes with the baby, joins a troupe of actors, and raises her as his own daughter. Disguised as a bossu, he infiltrates Gonzague’s business and wrecks it before killing him in a duel with – of course – the Nevers Thrust.

            Broca fills his period films with authentic detail.Lagardere takes refuge in the Cour des Miracles, that corner of the Marais, also described in Notre Dame de Paris,where, at the end of a hard day’s begging, the missing limbs of the mutilated miraculously reappear and the apparently blind regain their sight. The revolution of 1789 outlawed trading in shares but until then certain streets were Paris’s stock exchanges. Lagardere sidles among the speculators in his bossu costume, murmuring the few incendiary words that will ignite a panic and ruin Gonzague. 

             Marie Gillain is sweet as the grown-up heiress, Aurore, if no match for the incandescent Claudia Cardinale in Cartouche,even when she despatches a would-be rapist with the Nevers manoeuvre. Auteuil’s Lagardere, short, low-born, street-wise and bad-tempered, is a Harvey Keitel clone. He and Perez make amusing bedfellows – literally so, when they have to share one on the road and the duke casually enquires of a startled Lagardere “Are you into sodomy at all?” So that’s why one of the most admired figures of French swashbuckling cinema is called Fanfan la Tulipe.

On Blu-ray - David Hare welcomes a new edition of William Wyler's DETECTIVE STORY (USA, 1951)

 

Kirk Douglas (above) looks across the police van to "Abortionist" George Macready (below) and mutters, "you must have been kissed by a vulture in your cradle", after learning that another one of his botched "patients" has died in hospital letting Macready once again off a rap. 

 

Screens are from Wyler's Detective Story released by Paramount in 1951. The picture broke some small ground with the overweening Breen Office, who initially refused to permit any direct assignation of abortionist to Macready's character, but let loose the absurd "baby seeding" smear in some dialogue which makes the character even more obvious. More importantly the picture finally broke the Hays Code ban on showing cops being killed in the line of duty. In part the movie plays with this new trope inspired largely by the Philip Yordan screenplay with its muted but audible concerns about the rise of an authoritarian police state, with officers unanswerable to the law.

 

The movie also often finds itself cast into the net of faux Noirs, although its antithetical procedural atmosphere and narrative is quite clear. What perhaps leads some viewers to a more poetic reading visually at least is the luscious staging, lighting and close-up photography by the veteran DP Lee Garmes, surely the greatest close-up photographer in American movies, along with Bill Daniels. Interestingly John Seitz, the veteran DoP of so many earlier chiaroscuro Paramount Noirs is uncredited here as second c0ameraman and it's Seitz' work that most likely contributes the few elements of Noir style to the picture. 

 

The title has been released in a very fine quality transfer from what looks like a new 4K scan from Paramount through the Oz label, Imprint.

Defending Cinephilia 2020 (6) - Janice Tong's Ruminations on a Theme, or, an Invitation to Dance

I remember starting 2020 joyful in my defence of cinephilia. I had been rereading a youthful (thus passionate and unfinished and unpublished) essay of mine titled “One-and-one-third second - against Susan Sontag’s The Decay of Cinema” and plundering it for ideas for my novel (also unpublished). It was full of images and descriptions about early Lumière films, and arguments about how cinema itself has to make its meaning elsewhere; outside of studios and with the suggestion that perhaps even the word ‘cinema’ needs to be understood on a different level. So it seems apt that I should end the year in the same vein - defending cinephilia - in whatever morphic form it now appears to us.

 

As I pored through the text, I found a sketchily-drawn silhouette of a person dancing on the margins. Whilst I’ve long forgotten what made me draw this lone dancer - perhaps I was dreaming of the infamous dance sequence in Bande à part, or, the sultry Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita; today, as I studied this image again, it set me off on a daydream - of Babylon Berlin’s superb dance sequence Zu Asche, Zu Staub (To Ash, To Dust), and the cool clip of Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung dancing in one of the outtakes  (image above, click on the link to see it) from In the Mood for Love; both are magical and uplifting. And we all could do with a bit of magic to see us through the last weeks of 2020.

 

Anyhow, the sketch made me think of all those wonderful moments of dance that are in our collective memories, and thought perhaps this was an invitation for me to practice some dance moves.

 

A nod to Mubi, Netflix, SBS on demand and other streaming platforms

 

As a list-maker, I’ve dutifully noted that I’ve watched 210 films thus far in 2020 and with that knowledge, a little too afraid to count how many TV series (mostly British crime dramas or Nordic thrillers) I’ve consumed in this seemingly continuous day-long year. 

 

As lockdown began in March, I’m not sure what I would have done if I was not already a subscriber to a handful of streaming platforms. I learnt to be patient as overseas shipments of DVDs I had ordered were delayed (the Louis Malle box set arrived after a long 4 months) and suppressed my dismay when the French Film Festival that I’ve attended with my husband for the past 20 odd years went on hiatus (we managed to see a few films when the cinemas reopened); and ended with an unwillingness to watch festival films on the computer (you have the draw the line somewhere).

 

It was roundabout then that I decided instead to have a film festival at home. We have a big TV and a handful of subscriptions; and the result was a surprising one!

 

The first, was the discovery of Rita Azevedo Gomes’s films on Mubi - of the four films I saw, A Woman’s Revenge (2012) and Fragile as the World (2001) were absolute stand-outs. One is more formal in structure with glorious tableaux vivants; and both were equally hallucinatory in its portrayal of the dance of life and death.

 

Strange Birds

The next were Élise Girard films, starting with Strange Birds (2017) that I was lucky enough to catch on SBS on demand one night. And I was so taken with this little story - to watch a mature but still commanding and handsome Jean Sorel paired with Isabelle Huppert’s daughter Lolita Chammah, in a charming story of finding your place in the world - so much so that I ordered Girard’s first film Bellevue Tokyo (2010) on DVD straight away. It was this film that in turn led me to a movie theatre in Paris’ 5th called Cinéma le Grand Action. 

 This cinema had to close their doors earlier this year (they reopened on June 22nd after 100 days of lockdown, and sadly had to close their doors again on December 11th, and this time until 2021). During their first closure, they kept screening a film a day in rotation in their theatre rooms. I loved this idea so much that I followed their progress and made a note of the films they screened across May and into June, (see image below). Each film they screened during this time featured a scene that had something to do with film; whether it was showing spectators in the darkened cinema, or outside the theatre with film posters as a backdrop; or at the candy counter or queuing at the ticket booth. I tried to imagine these darkened corridors of Cinéma Le Grand Action where films were being projected to a room without an audience. It held a certain fascination for me - the spirit of film was in the essence of those screenings, and I can’t help but wonder what kind of dance was to be dreamed there?

 

As our home film festival progressed, we watched a bunch of fantastic films that we hadn’t seen before but should have: Louis Malle’s underrated gem The Fire Within (1963) this film induced that same melancholic yearning as Ascenseur pour l'échafaud. Also, Bernard Queysanne, Georges Perec’s absolutely brilliant The Man Who Sleeps (1974), reminiscent of Chris Marker’s essay films, is actually available to Watch on YouTube. A lesser known documentary Rohmer in Paris by Richard Misek (clearly a cinephile) whose film led me to start rewatching Rohmer's entire oeuvre, from his early works in the late 50s (one with André Bazin as the protagonist and J-LG as the journalist, with many scenes shot at Cahiers du Cinéma’s then office) to his Six Moral Tales and Comedies and Proverbs. We are still waiting for the Tales of the Four Seasons to be screened, but count ourselves lucky that both Mubi and Stan are both streaming these films in Australia; or else, you can buy Rohmer’s extravagant box set if you click on this link to Potemkine Films in Paris.

L'Homme qui Dort

  

There were also a handful of films that are just outright exquisite: the wonderful Polish director Zanussi’s latest film Ether(2018) - it affected me as much as the first film I saw of his The Structure of Crystals(1969) though the genres were so entirely different. Lastly, my favourite, Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey into the Night (2018), a layered imagining of forgotten love, the single shot dream-like second half is a hypnotic dance of love and memory, or poppy and recollection after Celan’s poem, as referenced by the director.

 

 

Long Day's Journey into Night

 

Are there such things as ‘new films’ anymore?

 

I’ve always been cynical as to what passes for cinema these days. So I tend to call anything that is not ‘worthy’ of this title ‘movies’, especially the more mainstream blockbusters, and this label even applies to some of the indie films, (well, they’re just not that indie any more). I shall refrain from naming these titles here.

 

Instead, here is a short list of new films that took me by surprise this year. By new, I mean to say they’ve come out in either 2019 or 2020 that I saw this year; be it at the cinema, streamed or on DVD. Ok, I’m counting some 2018 ones as well, as it’s hard to get distribution in Australia for many of these films.

 

Alice and the Mayor (2019) France, Belgium, dir Nicolas Pariser

MS Slavic 7 (2019) Canada, dir Sofia Bohdanowicz and Deragh Campbell

Family Romance LLC (2019) USA, dir Werner Herzog

Prison Architect (2018) Hong Kong, dir Cao Fei

My Octopus Teacher (2020) South Africa, dir Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed

The Bare Necessity( 2019) France, dir Erwan Le Duc

School’s Out (2019) France, dir Sébastien Marnier

 

Small screen’s a charm

 

I’m only recommending one series that I loved in 2020 and would rewatch again immediately - Giri / Hajiwhich is screening on Netflix. So much can be said about this brilliant and captivating series; with a very clever and well cast cross-pollination of actors from the UK and Japan. Even the episode recap is noteworthy - in that is told anime-style. At its heart, this story is a dance of relationships, weaving love, principles, and family in its rhythms. But nothing beats the actual ‘dance’ sequence at the end of the series - not to give too much away, this sequence literally takes your breath away.

 

Giri/Haji

If you’ve already seen this and would like others to while away your time during the holidays, then try the following:

 

Petra (2020) Italian - quirky 4 episode detective mini series

Dublin Murders (2019) UK - gripping and melancholic detective drama

My Brilliant Friend (2018, 2020) Italy - try and savour this brilliant series on friendship, love, philosophy set in Naples in the early 50s.

Savages (2019) France - fast-paced and well-drawn, follows a week of France’s first presidential candidate of Algerian descent

The Capture(2019) UK - fantastic Brit detective drama

Criminal: UK, France, Spain, Germany (2019) Great concept - all 4 franchises in the series (Criminal: UK is in Season 2) are brilliantly scripted and acted.

 

Taking a bow to Michael Lonsdale

 

I’ve been following Opéra national de Paris’ short film series, 3eme Scene  for a couple of years now. At the beginning of this year, director Arnaud des Pallières released a spectacular short film called DEGAS ET MOI  (click on the caps) featuring the formidable Michael Lonsdale (pictured above), who sadly passed away in September this year. This may well be his last film appearance. There are no subtitles for this film, which is set out in two parts, but you can pretty much watch it without understanding the voiceover in the second. In the first part, Lonsdale’s ageing Degas is a total embodiment of the painter, as is Bastien Vivès’ young Degas; who is filmed making sketches in pastels of ballerinas in class. I reached out to Vivès earlier this year, who told me that he gave away his beautiful sketches to the actors and crew that day to say thank you. Dance, beauty, movement, longing, artistry, dreams - are all there in this short 20 mins film (below).

2021: We’re ready for you!

My new year’s resolution is simple: find any opportunity to dance. Because? Well, just because. And I’m thinking of dance in a metaphorical sense too, in our dealings with people, in the dance of the seasons, in my head and in the boulevards on the big screen.

And to do this with a little help from my current playlist, which is set to play songs by Clio. She’s a French chanteuse who sings about Eric Rohmer and Romy Schneider. And also, the dance sequence from Philippe Garrel’s film Les Amants Reguliers, put it on YouTube, on repeat - and LOUD; featuring This Time Tomorrow by The Kinks, it never fails to get you in the mood.

Defending Cinephilia 2020 (5) - Co-curator of the Melbourne Cinematheque Adrian Danks reports on his lockdown year

 

Marlene Dietrich, Dishonored

1.    Dietrich Returns to the Capitol

2020 will be remembered for many things, including as the year many people stopped going to the cinema. In Melbourne, for large parts of the year, you simply had no choice. But in my first entry here I want to remember the first few months before lockdown and, in particular, the stellar opening of the Melbourne Cinémathèque’s second and unexpectedly last season of the year: “Light and Shadow: The Mercurial Stardom of Marlene Dietrich”. This season played to very large audiences in the week’s leading up to the first lockdown in Melbourne, the attendances a barometer of the hunger for film screenings in this city (let’s hope it returns on the other side of the pandemic). Audiences of over 400 watched imported 35mm prints of three films that first screened in Melbourne (and as research has revealed, in Australia) at the same cinema – the Walter Burley and Marion Mahony Griffin-designed Capitol in Swanston Street; decreased in size but refitted by RMIT University – over 80 years ago. This was a wonderful and truly serendipitous occurrence – as the co-curator of the Cinémathèque, I hadn’t realised that the Capitol was the first-release cinema for Paramount, Dietrich’s home studio (though she worked for Universal on 1939’s Destry Rides Again [George Marshall], the vastly enjoyable movie that concluded our final screening) – that underlines the occasional continuity of cinephilia over vast tracts of time. Screening prints of Sternberg’s Dishonored almost 90 years after its first showing on the 27^thof May 1931, and Lubitsch’s extraordinary Angel 83 years after its initial release were my absolute highlights of 2020. Those rare screenings – and by then we knew we would need to close down in the coming weeks – now seem almost as far away as those Dietrich premieres of the 1930s.

Boris Karloff, Isle of the Dead

2.    Lockdown Begins: Isle of the Dead vs. The Lighthouse

Despite the thousands of choices I have at my fingertips, I haven’t found lockdown particularly conducive to film viewing. I’ve spend much of the last nine months reading and listening to music. This has been a somewhat surprising development, but it has revealed that my film viewing is closely related to a broader sense of mobility, even if this is merely a matter of just travelling to a local cinema. The last two years have been marked by my trips to Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna as well as other places and are certainly amongst the richest of my film-going life. But this could also be a matter of the choices I’ve made along the way. The start of lockdown was marked by my decision to watch the recent release The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers, 2019) and the Val Lewton-produced Isle of the Dead (Mark Robson, 1945) back-to-back over two nights. Isle of the Dead, which starts with Boris Karloff’s character vigorously washing his hands (a model of it, really) before warning of an approaching plague (which catches up with him, inevitably, on the Isle of the Dead), is one of the most intriguing and melancholy of the extraordinary run of “horror” films Lewton produced at RKO in the 1940s. It is a strange and poetic film, which features many images of characters in white masks, copious discussions of the encroaching disease, and moments that pinpoint social and physical isolation. Although it was a bit too close to the bone, it certainly had much to recommend it at this moment in time, even a Karloff-calm way of facing approaching calamity. Nevertheless, I’m not so sure how wise it was to follow this up with The Lighthouse, an isolationist nightmare and surreal dream that presents the utter madness of two characters “quarantined” together in the freezing cold “hothouse” atmosphere of the titular lighthouse. For some reason, over the next month or so I placed myself on a strict diet of Jean Grémillon and Joseph Losey movies – gaining a new appreciation for Stanley Baker and Madeleine Renaud, and realising that Losey is also a master of spatial isolation and claustrophobia (I guess I was starting to see it everywhere) – though I never quite got over the clammy, fetid, ghostly calm and nightmarish anxiety of Isle of the Dead and The Lighthouse. Both films are testament to the power of context – of the time and the place in which we experience things – in shaping our response to a particular film. Along with the Dietrich movies above, this was my double bill of 2020.

Amree Hewitt with Tait Brady

Tom O'Regan

3.    Lest We Forget: Amree and Tom

In the general blur of 2020 it is easy to forget that many key figures of world cinema died across the year: Ennio Morricone; Bruce Baillie; Ivan Passer (whose Cutter’s Wayis one of the great post-classical US films); Lucia Bosè; Nelly Kaplan; Honor Blackman and Diana Rigg (always and again joined together by their iconic roles in TV’s The Avengers); Jirí Menzel; the extraordinary Linda Manz (just watch her startling unvarnished performances in Malick’s Days of Heaven[1978] and Kaufman’s The Wanderers[1979]); Max von Sydow; Michel Piccoli (quietly accumulating one of the great filmographies over almost 70 years); Fernando E. Solanas; the last two surviving major stars of classical Hollywood: Olivia de Havilland and Kirk Douglas (just watch them, respectively, in Walsh’s The Strawberry Blonde[1941] and Wilder’s Ace in the Hole[1950], to get a sense of their legacy); and many others. But 2020 also marked the passing of two major figures of Australian screen culture: Tom O’Regan and Amree Hewitt. Both Tom and Amree were models of collegiality and I’ve never heard anyone say a bad word about either of them. Tom, of course, is one of the defining figures of screen studies in Australia, and his outstanding and seminal work on Australian cinema is something that anyone working in the field has to contend with. Amree was one of Australia’s great film curators – her extensive Ida Lupino season at the Melbourne Film Festival in 1996 is one of the defining moments for many local cinephiles. Both are irreplaceable and leave a large hole in the fabric of screen culture in Australia.

Penrod and Sam

4.    Pordenone: “COVID Normal”

As the year went on and I got used to “COVID normal” during Melbourne’s 100-day or so second lockdown, I started to return more productively and extensively to movies and television. Film festivals started to offer more substantial programs online, often at very reasonable prices (not so true of the Melbourne and Sydney International Film Festivals, though). The pick of these was the Pordenone Silent Film Festival. It offered a couple of programs a day for the extremely cheap price of 10 euros for the lot. First up, was a lovely restoration of Penrod and Sam (1923), based on Booth Tarkington’s light-hearted novel. I wouldn’t want to claim it as any kind of masterpiece, but it had a lot of lovely observational detail. It obviously bears some comparison with the Our Gang series (but better), the Australian late silent The Kid Stakes(Tal Ordell, 1927), and Frank Borzage’s far more serious allegory, No Greater Glory(1934). It also has a refreshing range of characters, including three or four substantive and not overly stereotypical African American kids. It’s directed by William Beaudine, who made an extraordinary number of films and TV episodes between 1915 and 1969 and is probably due for a little more attention (though seeing the trees for the wood here would be very challenging). Overall, this was a fantastic and thought-provoking online event – with often stellar restorations – though I think it made me realise that I most like my silent movies leavened with some sound ones. Watching one to two programs each day while working full-time was a bit of challenge – though it did allow me to make it the full festival experience by dozing through a few of the less enticing titles. Aside from the great attraction of seeing Sessue Hayakawa, I found Where Lights are Low (Colin Campbell, 1921) an aptly titled film; the Italian “surrealist” comedy La tempesta in un cranio(Carlo Campogalliani, 1921) tedious; and the last program of Laurel or Hardy movies (note the careful substitution of “or” for “and” there) a clear illustration of who carried the “weight” in that duo (though Laurel’s pretty dire directorial effort, partly rediscovered in the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, made it 2 out 3 for his contributions). The film starring Larry Semon also reminded me of what a charmless comedian he was (I certainly won’t be leading the Semon revival). But aside from this, and the too long but intermittently striking early cinema programs, there was a lot of excellent, often fascinating stuff on offer. My picks aside from Penrod and Samwere Dimitris Gaziadis’Oi apahides ton Athinon(Apaches of Athens, 1930; particularly in its more observational, neorealist moments), Cecil B. De Mille’s A Romance of the Redwoods, and G. W. Pabst’s Abwege(1928) – I’m generally less keen on Brigitte Helm but this had several startling moments including an extraordinary bedroom scene between the husband and wife (isolating spaces, again) as well as characteristically stunning production design. Although I only watched a few of the discussions around the films, they were also expertly done (and you can’t always say that). I hope I can get to the festival one day, but this sure made a worthwhile replacement and suggests some rich possibilities for the future of hybrid events that fuse the local with the global, physical presence with the virtual.

The Beach (top)
I Want to Make a Film About Women

5.    From 1923-2020 – The Year that Was

Any overview would be remiss without a list of terrific and/or intriguing films and TV shows I encountered for the first time in 2020 (some of these, like the Sautet, Savoca and Walsh, had been sitting on my shelves for years). I’ve decided not to comment on films and shows I found particularly lacking, but if I was you I’d go nowhere near Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods (2020), Sofia Coppola’s On the Rocks (2020) or Ian Brennan and Ryan Murphy’s Hollywood (2020; not so bad for the few couple of episodes and then…). Here’s the list of my 20 favourites of 2020, making no distinction between whether a film was first made available over the last 12 months or in 1920. For whatever reason, these are the ones that have stayed with me over this challenging time. It’s been that kind of year.

L’année dernier à Dachau (Mark Rappaport, 2020)

Dogfight (Nancy Savoca, 1991)

Small Axe: Lover’s Rock( Steve McQueen, 2020)

The Criminal (Joseph Losey, 1960)

Gueule d’amour (Jean Grémillon, 1937)

Opfergang (Veit Harlan, 1944)

The Plot Against America (Ed Burns and David Simon, 2020)

Country Music (Ken Burns, 2019) – full-length version, not that screened by SBS

To Each His Own (Mitchell Leisen, 1946)

Penrod and Sam (William Beaudine, 1923)

Un couer en hiver (Claude Sautet, 1992)

The Tall Men (Raoul Walsh, 1955)

The Beach (Warwick Thornton, 2020)

Mustang (Deniz Gamze Ergüven, 2015)

Krakatit (Otakar Vávra, 1948)

Il traditore (The Traitor, Marco Bellocchio, 2019)

The Queen’s Gambit (Scott Frank and Allan Scott, 2020)

The Spook Who Sat by the Door (Ivan Dixon, 1973)

I Want to Make a Film About Women(Karen Pearlman, 2019)

Robbery (Peter Yates,1967)