New Releases From Kino Appeal to the Cinephile

Avant-Garde 3 (1922-1955)

Kino has released the third in its series of avant-garde films, this newest editi

on containing 20 films produced between 1922 and 1955. These collections feature rare but valuable films that demonstrate the outer reaches of cinema, a seemingly boundless medium in the hands of artists making films with no consideration for the commercial market—art for art’s sake. Avant-Garde 3 draws from the collections of Raymond Rohauer and George Eastman House in an effort “to illuminate the degree to which cinema’s evolution has been influenced by those filmmakers who occupy its periphery.”

In addition to its historical value, Avant-Garde 3, like its predecessors, provides a fascinating, eccentric and eclectic viewing experience. The films range in length from two minutes to 65 minutes and in subject matter from Edgar Allan Poe adaptations to home movies.

$29.95. www.kino.com.

How to be a Woman and How to be a Man (1950s)

A series of 1950s short educational films provides an instructive glance at who we once were and what we thought our children should be—and how they should be taught what they should be.

These films from Kino can be seen in several ways. At the simplest level, they’re entertaining, both on their own merits and as a time capsule of film production techniques and acting styles. But one cannot help but ask questions

as well. For instance, do these films represent a progressive embrace of a new medium, designed to tackle tough topics in a way teacher-student and parent-child interactions could not? Or do they mark the beginning of the abnegation of these duties, of a tendency to let the screen—first film and later television—to impart the lessons of adulthood? It’s a strange lesson indeed, to remove person-to-person contact from instruction in person-to-person

conduct.

$19.95 each. www.kino.com.

Gaumont Treasures 1897–1913

Kino has released another in its series of historical film collections. Following on such impressive and important releases as The Movies Begin and the Thomas Edison collection, the company has put together a

three-disc set called Gaumont Treasures 1897–1913, compiling more than 75 films from the early French studi

o, the Gaumont Film Company.

Each disc is devoted to one of Gaumont’s esteemed artistic directors. Disc one features the work of Alice Guy, whose contribution to the evolution of the art form places her among the ranks of Edwin Porter and her fellow countrymen George Melies and the Lumiere Brothers. The 60 films on this disc range in length from a few seconds to two and three reels and include early experiments in sound and hand-coloring.

Disc two features the work of Louis Feuillade, best known for Les Vampires and as an early mentor to Abel Gance. Though Feuillade made nearly 800 films for Gaumont, relatively few survive. This collection of 13 films includes his work in a range of genres, including comedy, tragedy, fantasy, social commentary and historical epic.

Disc three showcases the work of Leonce Perret, a man who had a profound impact on the advancement of French cinema but whose work is largely unknown in the United States. This set contains two films, the 43-minute Mystery of the Rocks of Kador, and the 124-minute Child of Paris, in which Perret demonstrated a mastery of the form that critic Georges Sadoul claimed was more expert and refined than that of the celebrated D.W. Griffith.

$79.95. www.kino.com.

Brand Upon the Brain!

Guy Maddin’s latest film is another avant garde piece, a pseudo-silent film that employs striking imagery, dubbed sound effects, intertitles and spoken narration in the creation of a unique and fascinating experience. Brand Upon the Brain! is a strange film that seems to exist in no particular era or idiom. It is both timeless and out of time, a film and a story that seemingly could have occurred anytime and anyplace, yet in no particular time or place that ever existed.

Maddin uses some of the effects of the silent era, but filters them through memory, through the ravages of time. While films of the silent era were generally of excellent photographic quality, easily on a par with much of today’s imagery, they have been most often seen by succeeding generations only in degraded, shabby prints, with soft images, blurry text, and unseemly jumps where frames have been misplaced or simply disintegrated. Maddin takes this approach to his film, deliberately infusing his images with a shadowy, high-contrast glow and jump cuts that suggest the movie was found in a long-forgotten vault rather than produced in modern times. The effect is that Brand Upon the Brain! harkens back not so much to the golden-era silents of the 1920s but to the German Expressionist films of the late 1910s, such as Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Even the intertitles and chapter headings flash quickly in blurry letters, and repeat themselves as though the negative fell in pieces to the cutting room floor and was hastily stitched back together by an errant hand.

The story starts simply and progresses to absurdity, embracing the melodramatic aesthetic of the German Expressionist classics, yet with a decidedly 21st century attitude. The protagonist, Guy Maddin (played in his youth by Sullivan Brown and in adulthood by Erik Steffen Maahs), returns to his childhood home, an orphanage run by his parents on a remote, fog-shrouded island. He is there to grant his mother’s last wish, that he return to the island and give the lighthouse and orphanage a couple of fresh coats of paint. The walls are dirty and scarred with the troubled memories of his youth, and no amount of paint can cover the pain of those remembrances as they come flooding back in a mad rush. And thus begins a strange tale told in flashback of Maddin and his sister (San Francisco native Maya Lawson) and their mad, mad parents.

The film is not a true silent. There are plenty of sound effects, which grant the proceedings an eerie and evocative atmosphere. The sounds are stylized however, not realistic; they are isolated sounds that suggest the dream-like reveries of memory, in which only the most necessary sounds are supplied while ambient noise recedes and disappears. An excellent score by Jason Staczek brings a strong atmosphere to the film as well, lending it a classical air.

But most effective of all the elements Maddin throws into this eclectic mix may very be the spoken narration provided by Isabella Rossellini, in which the actress sometimes repeats the intertitles but more often complements the onscreen words with fuller description, emphasis and affect. This technique comes from another quadrant of silent film history, from a Japanese tradition in which an actor, known as a benshi, would accompany the film with live narration and dialogue, acting out the roles of each character on the screen and relating the action to the audience.

Taken together, these disparate ingredients form a highly original whole, one that deserves a far greater audience than it is likely to reach.

Brand Upon the Brain! Directed by Guy Maddin. Photographed by Benjamin Kasulke. Edited by John Gurdebeke. Starring Erik Steffen Maahs, Sullivan Brown, Maya Lawson, Gretchen Krich, Katherine E. Scharhon, Andrew Loviska. 96 minutes. Not rated.

Belle du jour: The Films of Buñuel and Carriere

The name Luis Buñuel is familiar to even those with only a passing interest in movies, largely due to the success of his satiric films of the 1960s and ’70s. But when the great director made his seamless transition from experimental Surrealist filmmaking to commercial narrative work, he did so with the help of a slightly lesser-known talent: screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere.

Carriere was instrumental in helping Buñuel to shape his cynical satires, working closely with the director in the writing of screenplays both original and adapted. The result was a lasting partnership, one that generated six films and even extended to the writing of Buñuel’s autobiography, My Last Sigh, published just before his death in 1983.

The San Francisco International Film Festival presented Carriere with its Kanbar Award for screenwriting this year for a distinguished career in which he worked with some of the world’s greatest directors, including Buñuel, Jean-Luc Godard and Louis Malle.

Pacific Film Archive will show Belle du jour (1967), a Carriere-Buñuel collaboration, as part of a series of movies from the International Film Festival at 5 p.m. Sunday, April 30, with Carriere making an in-person appearance. PFA will then follow up with four more Carriere-Buñuel collaborations on May 5 and 6, beginning with Diary of a Chambermaid (1964). Other films in the series include The Milky Way (1968), Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), and Phantom of Liberty (1974).

Diary of a Chambermaid was the first film in which Carriere and Buñuel worked together, adapting the novel by Octave Mirbeau. The story had been brought to the screen once before, by Jean Renoir in 1946, but Buñuel refused to see it for fear that it might color his perceptions of his own work. Carriere and Buñuel took certain liberties with the novel, shifting the time period to the 1930s and altering several plot points.

The result would serve as a sort of template for future Carriere-Buñuel collaborations: The film examines and satirizes the dark underbelly of bourgeoisie society and features a wide-ranging assortment of fetishes, vices, hypocrisies and subterfuge. As with their later fims, Buñuel and Carriere do not judge these characters. They are presented from a certain distance; we watch them, we gain a certain understanding of them, but we are not made to either identify with them or be repulsed by them. Buñuel and Carriere merely present them as they are and allow the audience to come to their own conclusions.

Jeanne Moreau plays the role of the chambermaid as an inscrutable blank slate. The other characters, as well as the audience, are left to project onto her their own interpretations of her motives and emotions. When she first comes to work at the Monteil estate, she is somewhat defiant toward these decadent aristocrats, flouting her mistress’ rules and looking upon the family with condescension. Yet gradually her behavior starts to change, and it is difficult to understand why. When she eagerly goes to bed with a suspected child-murderer, we wonder whether her lust for him is genuine or just a device by which she hopes to frame him. Or perhaps it is both; perhaps she is seeking justice while conveniently satisfying her own particular fetish.

Only at the end does it become clear that somehow, for reasons unexplained, the chambermaid has decided to become one of them; that, whether due to opportunism or some darker motivation, she has managed to ensconce herself in a throne-like bed in her own castle-like mansion, safely and blithely indifferent to the rising forces of fascism in which her new husband plays a significant role. In the end she is as bored, stagnant and self-indulgent as the family she once mocked.

The Carriere-Buñuel themes take a darker and more personal tone with Belle du jour, starring Catherine Deneuve as the frigid wife of a young surgeon. They are happy together, but they keep separate beds even a year after their marriage. Gradually we learn that the young bride, Severine, is anything but frigid and in fact has an active fantasy life. It’s just that conventional lovemaking within a marriage is not sufficient to arouse her libido.

And this is where the familiar themes come in.

Belle du jour is about fetishes, appearances, fantasy and restraint. Severine is overwhelmed by fantasies of being taken by force, of being humiliated, abused and denigrated in strange rituals. Flashbacks suggest that these desires stem from incidents in her childhood, but the fetishes themselves are wisely never explained, for nothing robs a fetish of its allure than an attempt to explain it.

Severine’s fetishes, which are often subtly infused into the fantasy sequences, seem to bring her to a frenzy. Like a Pavlovian dog, she harkens to the sounds of ringing of bells and mewing cats. And in her dreams she is objectified and treated cruelly to a soundtrack of primal noises.

Her desires lead her to take a job as a prostitute, arriving at the whorehouse each day dressed in black, as though in mourning for the life she is leaving behind, and returning home each day by 5 to her unsuspecting husband.

One scene involves a man entering the bordello with a little black box. We do not see what is in it, but it is enough to cause one prostitute to refuse to do his bidding. Severine accepts, however, enticed by whatever fetish he carries in the box. And his excited ringing of a tiny bell only seals the deal, coaxing an excited smile from her.

Deneuve is often discussed as simply a great beauty, but she is far more than that. Her acting in Belle du jour is subtle and effective. She is able to consistently demonstrate the duality of Severine’s existence: the trepidation, shame and fear combined with passion and desire, as well as the bliss of masochistic fantasies fulfilled.

The film’s conclusion is ambiguous and probably has a number of valid interpretations. At first glance the final 20 minutes seem like a 1930s American film under the Production Code, with a wild woman bringing ruin to herself and to those she loves because of her lurid behavior. But another interpretation takes the film in quite another direction. Severine has her fetish: to be defiled, abused and humiliated. Hussan, a friend of Severine’s husband, has his fetish: to defile his friend’s seemingly virtuous young bride. The gangster Severine becomes entangled with has his fetish: to live the life and die the death of an outlaw, disrupting the social order and going out in a hail of gunfire. And the husband can be said to have a fetish as well: a virtuous wife by day, a sexual animal by night.

The ending, with Hussan revealing Severine’s secret to her paralyzed and unresponsive husband, provides a bit of satisfaction for everyone, for Hussan gets the chance to expose Severine’s tawdry dark side, thereby defiling her in the eyes of her husband; the gangster gets his tragic, romantic death in the streets; and Severine ends up sitting quietly under the mysterious gaze of her husband, exposed and vulnerable, just as in her fantasies—a “slut,” a “whore,” waiting for the “firm hand” to administer punishment. And the husband now has his virtuous and apologetic wife, but an all-new and improved version, for this one just might share his bed.

A final dream sequence concludes the film, with the husband forgiving his wife for her actions. Is this a vision of the future, or is it a new kind of fantasy for Severine, one in which her husband finally grants her the forgiveness and understanding her guilty conscience craves? Or perhaps it’s simply a new twist on the old fantasies, with Buñuel and Carriere taking one last swipe at the bourgeoisie as they infuse the dream once again with the ringing of bells and the mewing of cats—everything a good society girl needs to keep her happy.

The Films of Jean-Claude Carriere and Luis Buñuel

Belle du jour (1967)

5 p.m. Sunday, April 30

Diary of a Chambermaid (1964)

7 p.m. Friday, May 5

The Milky Way (1968)

9 p.m. Friday, May 5

Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)

6:30 p.m. Saturday, May 6

Phantom of Liberty (1974)

8:30 p.m. Saturday, May 6

Pacific Film Archive. 2626 Bancroft Way. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu.