On Blu-ray - David Hare enthuses over the 'pure Sternbergiana' of Criterion's edition of Josef von Sternberg's DOCKS OF NEW YORK (USA, 1928)

Betty Compson

Ferocious emotion in Sternberg. 

In the history of movies there has long been a select group of masterpieces nominated over the years from the silent picture era which always rise to the surface, time after time and with good reason. Sjostrom's The Wind, Murnau's Sunrise, Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, Chaplin's The Circus, King Vidor's The Big Parade and Sternberg's 1928 The Docks of New York. 

Docks, made at Paramount, brings together cameraman Hal Rosson and screenwriter Jules Furthman with original material by the great John Monk Saunders, who would shortly pioneer the aviation picture genre, starting with Hawks’ Dawn Patrol, Ford's Air Mail, Leisen's Eagle and the Hawk and many others.

George Bancroft

The tone and texture of Docks is pure, distilled Sternbergiana with signature compositions of characters against bare chipped walls, and ornamentation entirely composed of a flimsy nightie and cigarette smoke, through to densely layered choreographed riots of crowds whom only a rapidly travelling dolly can break up with its own fervent search for the essential subject of the sequence. 

Betty Compson, Olga Baclanova

In this case for the last two screens, the "heroine", Mae a broke prostitute whom Bill (George Bancroft) has just rescued from the New York harbor and a failed suicide attempt. The "other" woman is Lou (Olga Baclanova) who befriends Mae, with the preternatural knowledge from her own life to see the abysmal future in store for Mae. The embrace between the two women in the last two screens is one of the most moving moments in Sternberg, perhaps equalled only by Keiko's ghost appearing at the airport to honor the men returning to Japan, living and dead who shared her life on Anatahan, in that final masterpiece, 

Both George Bancroft and Betty Compson were hugely popular stars in the day in what the French used to call “alimentaire” or popular genre films, and here they’re giving startlingly nuanced performances, often with nothing more than their eyes in shots that last up to twenty seconds, creating a depth of acting so shaded no post-war 20th century acting school could have ever come near it for subtlety and expression. 

Olga Baclanova, Betty Compson

Sternberg takes Bancroft's natural physicality and directs him to play scenes often rigid or still, with just one arm or a leg moving in distraction. Elsewhere with only title cards to provide dialogue which happily Furthman has written so everyone can "get it" before it's even read, Jo gives us the central organic truth that only cinema can reveal. It's the human face, and for his entire career, everything Jo created, assembled, wrote, devised, cut, moved around and photographed was the human face. With everything else in the frame - from a bare wall, to smoke, water and birds, to massive levels of chiaroscuro and disguise, mask, feather, lattice, foliage, costume - all totally subservient to the central meaning of every shot. As he insisted, nothing in the frame is superfluous. Everything points to one meaning. 

The screens are from Criterion's reissue, finally in Blu-ray of the three great last Paramount silents first released on DVD in 2010 including Docks, Underworld (1927) and The Last Command (1928.)

Chris Luscri and Bill Mousoulis present a new season of UNKNOWN PLEASURES in Melbourne

Editor's note: You have to admire the sheer indefatigable spirit of Bill Mousoulis and Chris Luscri and their dedication to getting low-budget indie cinema onto a local screen. Below are details of the next screenings. These follow a sold-out season last month.

Unknown Pleasures: Australian independent cinema

curated and presented by Chris Luscri & Bill Mousoulis, at the boutique venue Long Play in Melbourne 

WEBSITE:  http://www.pureshitauscinema.com/unknown_pleasures.html

"Unknown Pleasures: Australian independent cinema" is a series of semi-regular screenings curated and presented by Chris Luscri & Bill Mousoulis, featuring the best of Australian indie cinema, both new and old, narrative and non-narrative, with discussions with most of the film-makers, presented in the boutique venue Long Play Cinema in Melbourne. It is an attempt to throw some light on under-represented films and film-makers, and also an attempt to foster a sense of community, to create a movement toward a more intimate, local model with film-makers closely and passionately engaged with their audiences.  

PROGRAM FOR Oct/Nov/Dec is now released, we are pleased to present some quite special events to conclude the year:

Mon Oct 21 - Marie Craven will be in town from Qld to present a "Poetry + Video" program, with one poet performing.

Sun Nov 10 - Under-appreciated Melb indie Mark La Rosa will present two of his works, including The Captives (2005, 57 mins).

Thu Nov 14 - Gillian Leahy will be in town from NSW to present and discuss (with John Hughes) her classic essay film My Life Without Steve (1986, 53 mins).

Sun Dec 8 - We have an End-of-Year special, with a rare screening of Bert Deling's Pure Shit (1975, 86 mins).

A Cry from the Heart from DVD Beaver

Folks

There is no need for me to say anymore. One of the great sites devoted to the reception and consideration of Blu-rays and DVDs is asking for help.

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On SBS World Movies channel - John Snadden recommends three major titles from Asia DETECTIVE DEE: THE FOUR HEAVENLY KINGS, DEPARTURES and I AM NOT MADAME BOVARY

World Movies, an SBS digital channel now free to air, has a small but worthwhile selection of Asian cinema this week. DETECTIVE DEE: THE FOUR HEAVENLY KINGS (2018) is the third in this ongoing series which have all been directed by Tsui Hark. The film is the usual flurry of convoluted story-lines and impressive CGI. Although the pic revolves around the Sherlock Holmes-like skills of the title star, I actually prefer the ongoing role of the Dowager Empress which Carina Lau has made her own.

DEPARTURES (2008) is a Japanese drama which follows a young couple moving from the city to the country mainly for financial reasons. Obviously, it's much more than this and the departures become a major part of their lives. A human drama of the finest order which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film the following year.

Towards the end of the week sees the mainland film I AM NOT MADAME BOVARY (2016) programmed, and is one of my all-time favourite Chinese movies. It's a sly and beautifully observed tale about a Chinese nobody taking on the bureaucracy. A major film from superstar Fan Bingbing and director Feng Xiaogang. Unfortunately, of late both have fallen out of favour with the CCP and life has been made very difficult for them.

Maybe a case of lost in translation....This arvo I picked up some HK blu rays from a Chinese DVD seller in Box Hill, who I know pretty well. She's a businesswoman with many fingers in many pies. In our conversation today she asked : "You want to go Hong Kong? I can get veeeeery cheap ticket now". I replied "Not particularly with all the riots, fire bombings and police shootings" With a dead serious look she said "No, no you won't miss any of that - that all go on for long time!"

Images of Fan Bingbing, I am not Madame Bovary

A new venue for screening experimental work in Sydney - The Film Group presents the Australian Premiere of LINEFORK ( Vic Rawlings and Jeff Daniel Silva, USA, 2016)

The Film Group Screening 1

When: Thursday 17 October at 7.30 pm

Where: "Archies"
Archway 4, Jubilee Park Oval
Chapman Road 
Annandale/Glebe NSW 2038

Admission: FREE


Landscape I: LINEFORK (2016) by Vic Rawlings and Jeff Daniel Silva.

An immersive meditation on the passage of time and the persistent resonance of place, Linefork follows the daily rituals of an elderly couple living in Kentucky’s Appalachian Mountains. Now well into his eighties, Lee Sexton is the last living link to the distant past of a regional American music. A retired coal miner with black lung, Lee and his wife, Opal, continue to farm the land where he was born. Together they face encroaching health concerns and stark economic realities. Recorded over three years, Linefork is an observational film documenting their marriage, their community, their resilience, and the raw yet delicate music of an unheralded banjo legend, linked to the past yet immediately present. For more information click here to go to the film's website

“...a gentle and conscientious ethnography that borders on both home movie and art film...It presents a graceful portrait of a couple whose lives are, above all, oriented toward each other...This depiction of being-with-each-other is not romanticized, yet it permeates the film." — Sander Hölsgens, Cultural Anthropology

“The film’s power derives from the same thing that made the first moving pictures so mesmerizing: the spectacle of life passing before your eyes, in all its tedium and strangeness, including the strangeness of life drawing to its end.” — Peter Trachtenberg, Los Angeles Review of Books

"Exquisite...each shot so absorbing, I watched the whole thing with a kind of suspense." — John Jeremiah Sullivan, Oxford American

John Baxter's Adventures in the Movie Trade (5) - MICHAEL POWELL and EMERIC PRESSBURGER.

Pressburger (left) & Powell

 Australia was an improbable location for a film-maker like Michael Powell, but when he made They’re a Weird Mob and Age of Consent there in 1966 and 1969 respectively, he had little choice. Although Peeping Tom in 1960 was blamed for ending his career, its distributor pulling it from British cinemas after only five days, Tales of Hoffman in 1952 was really his last film of note. Had James Mason not thrown him a lifeline by helping to finance the two Australian films, it’s hard to see how he would ever have worked in features again.

        

Powell and Walter Chiari on the set of They're a Weird Mob

 We met in Sydney during the making of They’re a Weird Mob when I and my fellow editors devoted an entire edition of our magazine Film Digest to his films. “Aloof” best describes his manner, which reflected the formality of such characters as the impresario Lermontov in The Red Shoes and the patriotic fetishist played by Eric Portman in A Canterbury Tale.

He was more animated when we met next, in London. For a festival devoted to British films – a creditable but finally disastrous decision by its backers, Camden Council – Powell agreed to introduce one of his least distinguished post-Peeping Tom films, a German-produced version of Bartok’s opera Bluebeard’s Castle. Except for some decorative echoes of The Red Shoes, the film showed little of Powell’s flair, and a lacklustre audience reaction made me hesitant to approach him again for an interview in connection with The Hollywood Exiles, a book I was writing about the foreign communities in Hollywood. 

         

Bluebeard's Castle

As it turned out, he was quite amenable – perhaps he appreciated that Film Digest tribute more than I thought. However, the meeting took some arranging, as he no longer owned a house, but preferred to live in a caravan, parking it in various beauty spots around Britain. Personal encounters took place in the headquarters of the Society of Authors in Albemarle Street, around the corner from the Royal Academy. Even allowing for his customary outfit of beige corduroy trousers, desert boots and fisherman's sweater, the Regency elegance of the locale made it easier to see him as an artist of international significance.

         He never worked in Hollywood but visited there in the nineteen-forties with his partner Emeric Pressburger. Many Europeans were bored by the long train trip - Twentieth Century Limited from New York to Chicago, then three days on the Super Chief to Los Angeles - but Powell was enthusiastic. 

The Twentieth Century Limited leaves Chicago

"Fritz Lang was on the train. We had never met him but he came along and introduced himself. We had a drawing room, so we spent most of the three days telling stories and cracking jokes with Lang, who was a lovely person. We were going through marvelous places like Albuquerque and Santa Fe. No, my dear fellow - it's the only way to travel." 

(There is probably an essay to be written on the uses to which cinema people put the four-hour stop-over in Chicago between the arrival of the Twentieth Century Limited and the departure of the Super Chief. Some were interviewed for the radio program Who’s On the Chief? Edgar Wallace spent the time schmoozing with local newsmen, from which he gathered enough gossip to write his hit gangster play On the Spot. Josef von Sternberg visited an art gallery and bought a George Grosz painting. One person gave me a you-must-be-kidding look. “We got drunk. What else?”)

         Powell was more impressed with the train journey than by what lay at the end of it. 

"California is a hell of a place to live. Miles from anywhere. In those days it was much further than it is today. We were Europeans. We liked to be near theatres and opera and ballet and galleries and people. There weren't any of those things in California. The reason why these highly intelligent people who went to Hollywood immersed themselves in their work and just made film after film after film was, I think, because....Well, what could they do in California? No theatre, no opera - until radio and television came in, it must have been the end of the earth. And people too....Europeans love people. It's talk as much as anything that keeps things going in Europe, particularly central Europe, where most of these people came from. Where was the café life in California?"

          

Emeric Pressburger

One could scarcely find a better example of the talk-loving European than Powell's long-time collaborator, Emeric Pressburger. Born in Rumania, he found himself a Hungarian after the redrawing of borders following World War I. After making his name in Budapest, he gravitated to Berlin, then Paris, where he met Powell. In 1974, however, his address was almost archetypally English; Shoemaker's Cottage, on the outskirts of a village in Suffolk, the county in which, as it happens, I also lived at the time.

         White-painted and sitting on a slight hill outside the village, his cottage looked oddly austere, even forbidding. There were bars on the windows, and the living room where we spoke was almost bare; just a card table, a couple of chairs, and, on the wall, a ceramic plaque by Picasso. I later learned that his most recent companion had decamped not long before, taking most of the furniture. 

         Initially Pressburger had little to say about his days as an itinerant screenwriter in nineteen-thirties Europe, but a casual reference to the New York Cafe, a favourite Budapest theatre hangout, turned some mental key, and the stories gushed out; tales of Molnar, Lengyel, Biro, Bus-Fekete and of a world that ceased to exist with the rise of Nazism.

         He was particularly voluble about his days in Paris, where he arrived, broke and stateless, in March 1933, one of the numerous Jewish artists ejected by the Nazis.  "France was entirely different to Germany. Haphazard. A contract didn't mean anything. I worked first for a small film producer who also owned a racing stable. Friends of mine said 'You know, he will never pay you,' But they told me to learn the names of some horses he owned, and look in the paper to see when they were running. I would go to the race-course and when his horse won I, with one or two other people, would go up to him and say 'Look, I need the money very badly and it is sixteen months I am waiting for it.' And he would put his large hand - he was a very large man - into his pocket, which was full of banknotes, take out a handful and say 'Count that.' " 

         

Pressburger, incidentally, was able to authenticate a story about Ferenc Molnar (right) that appears in S.N. Behrman’s essay about the great playwright. When MGM lured Molnar from Hungary, they put him up at the Plaza in New York. Shortly after, an equerry arrived with a draft contract. So great was the esteem in which he was held, said the Metro man, that they had not even indicated his remuneration, but rather filled that space with a dash. Molnar examined the dash and shook his head. 

“Too short.”

         For all the apparent English-ness of A Canterbury Tale and I Know Where I'm Going, Powell's European roots were never far from the surface. A sense of alienation permeates his work, evident in his collaboration with Pressburger and his use of such Continental performers as Anton Walbrook, Albert Bassermann and Conrad Veidt, as well as the inclusion in his creative team of designers Alfred Junge and Hein Heckroth, and cinematographers Erwin Hillier and Georges Perinal. There is a certain appropriateness in Powell ending his professional career as an ornament to the court of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola – an honoured outsider, but an outsider nevertheless. 

The Current Cinema - Rod Bishop examines the career of Xavier Dolan (after viewing THE DEATH AND LIFE OF JOHN F DONOVAN, Canada, 2018)

Xavier Dolan

You’re 30 years old and screening your eighth feature film at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival. 

During the past 10 years, six of your films have been invited to Cannes and you’ve won a total of eight awards on the Croisette.

Your latest film is in Official Competition and you’ve just woken up to the reviews. Jon Frosch of The Hollywood Reporter is bellowing at you:

“He's baaa-aaack. After the spectacular one-two stumble of his forays outside Canada — to France and America — world cinema’s poutiest auteur, 30-year-old Xavier Dolan, returns to his native Quebec for … a dramedy of repressed homosexual desire. If only it were a return to form.”

World cinema’s poutiest auteur? Spectacular stumbles? Films about repressed homosexual desire?

For most of the last decade, Xavier Dolan had been the Cannes wunderkind. 

In 2009, when he was 19-years-old, Dolan’s first feature I Killed My Mother won three awards in the Directors Fortnight. The following year Heartbeats took out the Regards Jeunes Prize in Un Certain Regard. A year later, Laurence Anyways won the Queer Palm Award and Best Actress (Suzanne Clement) in Un Certain Regard.

In 2014, appearing for the first time in the Official Competition, Mommy shared the Jury Prize with Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye to Language. 

In his acceptance speech, Dolan paid tribute to Jury President Jane Campion:

“To Jane Campion: as far as I can remember, The Piano is the first film I watched when I asked my step-mother: What should I watch? And she said: The Piano. It was the first of many, many films that I watched and defined who I am and how I love…and to stand today on the same stage with you is nothing short of extraordinary. Your Pianomade me want to write roles for women, beautiful women with soul, and will, and strength. Not victims, not objects.”

Then he spoke to his generation of filmmakers:

“…I just want to tell you that, despite people who are entitled to their own taste and will dislike what you do, and some who will dislike who you are, let’s hold on to our dreams because together we can change the world, and the world needs to be changed. Touching people, making them cry, making them laugh, can change their minds. And changing minds, changes lives slowly, and changing lives means changing the world. Not only politicians and scientists can change it, but artists as well. They’ve been doing it forever.” 

Two years later, in 2016, the Cannes tide turned dramatically on the wunderkind.

Despite winning the Grand Prix in the Official Competition, It’s Only the End of the World received scathing reviews. 

Canada’s own Globe and Mail:

“This year, however, it seemed that the sheen had come off the golden boy as critics labelled It's Only the End of the World a "frequently excruciating dramatic experience” (Variety) and "disappointment, even for the Dolan faithful" (Hollywood Reporter).

 “A stellar cast of French actors is mainly left to run lines and hyperventilate.”(The New Yorker)

“The enfant-terrible director Xavier Dolan is at his most irritating in It's Only the End of the World.” (The Times of London)

“It's not, as the mockery goes, the end of the world for Dolan, but it's hardly something we wish to remember this golden boy by, either.” (Bangkok Post)

Before Cannes had finished in 2016, most of the reviews were out. Dolan reportedly told the press to “chill out”. Incensed, when Dolan’s prize was announced at the Awards Ceremony, the press room at Cannes burst into a loud chorus of boos.

What happened here? How do you go from Cannes golden boy to an object of vilification in two years? How do you win the Jury Prize in 2014 and then in 2016, the Grand Prix (Cannes’ second most important award) and have the press room greet the announcement in an eruption of boos? 

Is it that bad? Of course, it isn’t. How did it win the Grand Prix? Because the Jury, led by George Miller, thought it deserved to win. 

Perhaps Dolan had been walking a critical knife-edge for all of his short, prodigious career. 

A glance through the reviews of his first five films reveals a lot of adulation for the multi-hyphenated director-actor-writer-producer-editor-costume designer. He had, more than once, been compared with Orson Welles as “prodigiously gifted”, a “genius”, creator of “masterpieces”. 

But there were also negatives, even from critics who liked the films: “indulgent”, “arduous”, “immature”, “repetitive”, “overheated”, “self-important artistic masturbation”.

It didn’t take much for those who had previously praised his work to turn against him.

Is it a coincidence that Mommy, his breakthrough into the Cannes big-time in 2014 is his least “gay” work? That his talents were so undeniable, the “gay stuff” just had to be put up with? Fassbinder, with whom Dolan shares many sensibilities, made gay films and he was venerated as a filmmaker. But were Fassbinder’s gay films the source of his reputation or did that come from his many non-gay works?

Mommy aside, Dolan doesn’t make non-gay films. And his gay sensibility is very in-your-face. It’s a rage. It’s the same rage shown in Andrew Haigh’s Weekend (2011) with its simmering distain at gayness not being accepted as normal the way heterosexuality is thought natural.

I don’t know if latent homophobia among film critics is to blame. It seems too simple an answer, but in the absence of others, it’s a thought hard to avoid. 

Dolan certainly doesn’t have the same problem with heterosexuality. Acting in Joel Edgerton’s A Boy Erased, he has said: “But when I read the script for “Boy Erased,” I was so impressed that Joel would adapt this story as a heterosexual. That he would feel such a deep connection with the story moved me in a way that felt like a departure from something.”

Dolan skipped Cannes in 2018 and debuted his next, the $35 million The Death and Life of John F. Donovan in his home country of Canada at the Toronto International Film Festival.

The knives came out again. 

“A work of stunning technique eclipsed by its increasingly jaw-dropping solipsism … How Deep Into Xavier Dolan’s Navel Dare We Gaze?”(Variety)

“[A] half-baked, cumbersome, overlong psychodrama…The story climaxes with The Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony," a blowhard fanfare of hollow triumphalism masquerading as a profound commentary on the human condition. The parallels with Dolan's latest film hardly need spelling out here.” (The Hollywood Reporter)

“Dolan’s English-language debut whinges about personal neuroses rather than probing homophobia or celebrity.” (The Globe and Mail)

Poster for the four hour version

Anyone lucky enough to have seen The Death and Life of John F. Donovan knows this is exactly what Dolan’s film does – it consistently probes homophobia and the constraints placed on film celebrities by press and audiences who claim ownership over their very lives.

I say lucky enough, because these reviews and many other vivisections by so-called critics have left the remarkable The Death and Life of John F. Donovan - one of the best films I’ve seen in a while - on the shelf for over a year. That is, apart from one screening on French television. 

Dolan’s response? Now 30-years-old and with eight features in the can, he shows no interest in this recent critical mauling. He immediately made the low budget Matthias and Maxime, a film about two friends (one played by Dolan) who kiss on screen during a student film shoot. Dolan’s character is about to leave for two years in Melbourne but the two friends find the emotions raised by their kiss have destabilized their lives.

Debuting in Cannes this year*, the reviews for Matthias and Maxime were the usual mixture of condescension, admiration and loathing. Apart from being accused of personifying “world cinema’s poutiest auteur” and not having a “return to form”, others read:

“Matthias & Maxime is filmed all in tightly pressed close-up, faces looming, constantly erupting into furious rows, shouting and shrieking. It’s like being at the worst party ever.”(London Evening Standard)

 “Matthias and Maxime marks his return to French language film making after his debut in English, The Death and Life of John F. Donovan… which even Dolan’s fiercest defenders would concede as a disaster … Dolan may not have made his masterpiece, but this is more than fine for now.”(The Sunday Times)

“A wistful, low-key love-and-friendship study, and something of a back-to-basics reset after his elaborate English-language misfire The Death and Life of John P.[sic] Donovan,it feels at once younger and older, sweeter and more seasoned, than Dolan’s last few films… A decade into a lively career, the enfant terrible has become his own master.”(Variety)

You’d think if you were going to declare an enfant terrible had become his own master, you’d at least spell the name of his previous “misfire” correctly.

*Matthias and Maxime also screened at this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival.