Amos Vogel: Film as a Subversive Art

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“Sooner or later, everyone who loves movies comes to Ozu. He is the quietest and gentlest of directors, the most humanistic, the most serene.” — Roger Ebert

It took long enough, but I sampled my first Yasujiro Ozu film, Good Morning (Ohayo), and will soon indulge myself with as many of his works as I can locate. At one time, his films were thought to be “too Japanese” and weren’t available in the West, but if Good Morning is any indication of his craft and appeal, Ozu deserves a much wider audience. It’s a film that works at multiple levels, and only artistic geniuses like Shakespeare have been able to pull off such a universal work that works with both down to earth people and with the upper levels of critical audiences equally.Read More »

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In Bernardo Bertolucci’s art-house classic, Marlon Brando delivers one of his characteristically idiosyncratic performances as Paul, a middle-aged American in “emotional exile” who comes to Paris when his estranged wife commits suicide. Chancing to meet young Frenchwoman Jeanne (Maria Schneider), Paul enters into a sadomasochistic, carnal relationship with her, indirectly attacking the hypocrisy all around him through his raw, outrageous sexual behavior. Paul also hopes to purge himself of his own feelings of guilt, brilliantly (and profanely) articulated in a largely ad-libbed monologue at his wife’s coffin. If the sexual content in Last Tango is uncomfortably explicit (once seen, the infamous “butter scene” is never forgotten), the combination of Brando’s acting, Bertolucci’s direction, Vittorio Storaro’s cinematography, and Gato Barbieri’s music is unbeatable, creating one of the classic European art movies of the 1970s, albeit one that is not for all viewers.Read More »

From Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art:
A film record of one of Claes Oldenburg’s celebrated happenings – largely improvised, mysterious or humorous, neo-Dadaist or surreal events, not necessarily causal or meaningful, which sardonically comment on an absurd universe and aim at fusing actor and spectator, art and life.Read More »

Synopsis:
If the entire world is bad, why shouldn’t we be? Adopting this insolent attitude as their guiding philosophy, a pair of hedonistic young women (Ivana Karbanová and Jitka Cerhová), both named Marie, embark on a gleefully debauched odyssey of gluttony, giddy destruction, and antipatriarchal resistance, in which nothing is safe from their nihilistic pursuit of pleasure. But what happens when the fun is over? Matching her anarchic message with an equally radical aesthetic, director Věra Chytilová, with the close collaboration of cinematographer Jaroslav Kučera, unleashes an optical storm of fluctuating film stocks, kaleidoscopic montages, cartoonish stop-motion cutouts, and surreal costumes designed by Ester Krumbachová, who also cowrote the script. The result is Daisies, the most defiant provocation of the Czechoslovak New Wave, an exuberant call to rebellion aimed squarely at those who uphold authoritarian oppression in any form.Read More »

Alain Resnais° wrote:
It remains, I think, the single overwhelming experience I’ve ever had in a cinema. When I first came out of the theater, I remember I just had to sit on the edge of the pavement. I sat there for about five minutes and then I walked the streets of Paris for a couple of hours. For me, every thing had been turned upside down. All my ideas about the cinema had been changed. While I was actually watching the film, my impressions were so strong physically that I thought that if this or that sequence would to go for one more shot, I would either burst into tears or scream or something. Since then, of course, I’ve seen it at least fifteen times like most filmmakers of my generation. I even recorded the whole soundtrack on my tape recorder and it’s amazing how well it stands up well on its own.Read More »

From the New York Times
“This humorous and informative documentary traces the history of cinematic pornography back to the 1915 stag film “The Free Ride.” Sexual attitudes of society have been carefully researched and explained as films from World War up to and including the year 1970 are examined. Stripper Candy Barr is shown in the classic “Smart Alec”, and the mild peep shows of the 1940s and 1950s are examined. All events lead up to the late 1960s where censorship laws were successfully challenged in the courts. The last half hour is a shameless promotion of director Alex de Renzy’s current blue movies and adds nothing to the historical perspective of the feature. Color process is not credited, but few porn films before the 1960s were filmed in color. ~ Dan Pavlides”Read More »

A day in the life of student Andrzej who, between the morning and late afternoon, gives up on his studies, breaks up with his partner, and decides to join the army. Before his departure, Andrzej tries to straighten out his life, and encounters Barbara, who he sees as the woman he always waited for.Read More »

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A documentary about the Khatyn massacre.
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Another example of Adamovich’s struggle against official war memory is a documentary film for which he co-authored the script: Khatyn’, 5km (dir. by 1. Ko-lovskii, Belarusfilm, 1968) was never publicly screened in the USSR because its treatment of the Khatyn theme was considered too negative by state censorship.Read More »

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This Belgian surrealist work consists of two films, one commenting on the other, concerning a young man with a crucifixion complex. Imagining crosses everywhere, he even cuts his fried potatoes in the shape of a cross. Unable to buy a large cross, he settles for sixty francs worth of small ones, which he carries of in a paper bag. When the cross he finds to crucify himself on proves too small, a kindly priest volunteers to nail his feed to the floor. – J.H. Matthews, Surrealism and Film, 1971Read More »