The Past Comes Alive in Rossellini's History Films

When Roberto Rossellini set aside fictional narratives for educational films, he immersed himself in the world of history and knowledge. But his goal was not to teach in the pedantic sense. Rossellini wanted to give the viewer a more complete experience, to imbue his studies of historical figures with the essence of life in the times in which they lived.

Criterion has released three of the Italian director’s films—Cartesius, Blaise Pascal, and The Art of the Medici—as part of a boxed set, Rossellini’s History Films. It is the 14th volume in the company’s Eclipse series, spotlighting overlooked films in inexpensive, pared-down editions that feature restored prints and thoughtful essays, but no supplemental features.

Cartesius (1974) tracks the life and life’s work of Descartes in his relentless pursuit of reason and science over emotion, faith and perception. Descartes is always wandering, always leaving one place for another. He arrives in a town, takes in its culture, and soon tires of it, moving on to another place with different people, different customs, different perspectives. It seems that half the scenes begin with someone telling Descartes how glad they are to meet and talk with him, and asking how long he’ll stay. The answer is always some version of, “Not long, I’m afraid. Tomorrow I set out for....”

Rossellini depicts Descartes as driven yet somehow lifeless. He has little expression and little joy, and indeed little companionship to offer to others, beyond intellectual discussions of scientific theories. He rarely partakes of the life around him but instead spends much of his time retreating into solitude after repeatedly thrusting his head into the spotlight. His life is an endless quest for empirical evidence, and, though Rossellini finds much to admire in that, he highlights the toll it takes on Descartes, crippling the philospher-scientist with a lack of love and grace.

In the end, Descartes comes to a solemn conclusion: “Science has prevented me from living.”

Though Blaise Pascal (1972) was made before Cartesius, it serves as something of an antidote to the later film. Pascal, too, is in search of reason and logic, but he is also searching for something more, something higher than facts, something not so much to believe as to believe in. He feels his quest for the hard truth of science is empty without a faith to encompass it.

Rossellini even stages a (fictional) confrontation between the two men, where Pascal questions the older Descartes after a lecture. It is a study in contrasts, as the earnest Pascal embodies youth and grace and love as he challenges and rebuts the cold, stolid facts of the seemingly depleted older man.

Rossellini’s history films were made for television, not for the big-screen experience of the theater. And that fact, combined with their subject matter and an emphasis on education rather than entertainment, makes for films that are more expository than cinematic, consisting primarily of conversations and dialogue as opposed to action.

Blaise Pascal and Cartesius employ virtually the same score, an evocative if mysterious tolling of chimes that at times sounds like the ambient noise of church bells filling each scene. And, when each philospher-scientist begins one of his many monologues, a quiet, creeping, almost chilling minimalist theme sets in, as though to cue the viewer that a key intellectual argument is being made. You can almost see classrooms of students hurriedly taking out their notepads at Ros-sellini’s signal.

Criterion. $59.95. www.criterion.com.

Newspaper Noir: San Francisco's Noir City 7

The struggle of World War II and the triumph of its conclusion brought to the silver screen a vision of a nation bold and patriotic, wholesome and optimistic. From propaganda films to brassy celebratory musicals, Hollywood’s program of A-list releases rolled out a bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked presentation of Norman Rockwell’s America.

But there was another side to the story.

Not everyone could forget the horrors of war, could ignore the blood and mud stains of battle, could wipe away the imagery of the Holocaust and the atomic bomb. Many found it impossible to simply lay down their weapons and retire to the suburbs; for them the terror of the war lingered, and in Hollywood that creeping malaise manifested itself in the form of an anxious, fearful and pessimistic cinema—the stuff of B movies.

More than a decade later the French would give a name to it: film noir. But in America, during the genre’s heyday of the 1940s and ’50s, it had no name. Crime dramas, they were simply called, but it went deeper than that. The urban angst that was allowed no expression in the can-do spirit of mainstream film gave rise to a genre that went beyond mere crime in the depiction of a pervasive moral corruption and a spiraling spiritual decay. Living in the shadow of the Holocaust and under the cloud of imminent nuclear annihilation, there were, as William Faulkner once said, no longer problems of the spirit but only the question: When will I be blown up?

Noir City, the San Francisco film festival that celebrates this era of cinematic darkness, perversity and mayhem, presents its annual 10-day orgy of angst beginning this Friday at the Castro Theater. The festival screens a double bill every day through Feb. 1.

The stark, gloomy, high-contrast imagery of noir came from overseas, carried across the Atlantic by filmmakers who left Germany just ahead of Hitler’s stormtroopers. The expressionism of 1920s and ’30s German cinema, replete with its shadows, darkness, and undercurrents of psychic decay, infiltrated the Hollywood studio system and merged with the American gangster genre of tough-talking wise guys inspired by the pulp fiction of the 1930s. This hybrid genre introduced a stock of dramatic characters: the dangerous and brooding urban gangster-villain; the tormented innocent caught up in nefarious circumstances beyond his control or comprehension; the icy, diabolical femme fatale; and an array of edgy protagonists ranging from the introspective, world-weary anti-hero—think Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep—to the twitchy, slippery, would-be hero, the third-rate, small-time hood looking to get ahead in a hostile world for which he is ill-equipped—think Richard Widmark in Night and the City.

Eventually the netherworld of noir infiltrated the A list, its blackness spreading like spilled ink on porous newsprint. Billy Wilder, one of the many European refugees who worked in the genre, perfected it with the star-studded Double Indemnity (1944), and the style became so prevalent and nearly respectable that only a few years later, in 1950, Wilder saw fit to take it down a peg, satirizing noir and Hollywood itself with impish glee in Sunset Boulevard.

Noir City impresario Eddie Muller has crafted another program of classics and rarities, cleverly centered for maximum publicity on a theme guaranteed to bring him plenty of ink: “Newspaper Noir.” For with newspapers themselves currently immersed in their own noirish melodrama—jobs on the line and the fate of the medium in doubt—what film critic could resist a chance to wallow in that uncertainty by delving into Muller’s festival of fear and loathing?

For beleaguered journalists, the pleasures are many, beginning with the temptation to indulge in the nostalgic fantasy of the old-school newspaperman, a gumshoe reporter gazing skeptically from beneath the brim of a jaunty fedora, coldly examining the facts through the drifting smoke of an angled cigarette. No white-collar J-school grad, he; his sleepless nights are spent roaming rain-soaked streets and decadent nightclubs, trash-strewn alleys and cut-rate motels—places where anything can happen, and often has, just before he arrives. But enough of romance; the flip side of this coin is a dose of hard-boiled reality served with a dash of existentialist nightmare, as the modern-day journalist is more akin to Widmark than Bogart—cowering, doomed and anxiety-ridden, forever on the run from controlling forces poised to dispense a fate worse than a pink slip.

The festival begins with the former. Deadline USA (1952) is a bold and elegiac story of old-school journalistic integrity. Editor Bogart battles the avarice and ignorance that leads two spoiled and spiteful heiresses to put his paper on the block, and worse still, to sell it to an unworthy, scandal-mongering competitor who doubtless intends to bolster his own tawdry tabloid by closing down the competition. It’s a familiar story here in the Bay Area as the MediaNews chain has gobbled up a string of once-proud papers, large and small, to encircle the metropolis with a newspaper empire that consolidates its profits in Denver by cutting local staff and starving its newspapers of news. As rumors circulate about an impending MediaNews takeover of the only remaining Bay Area prize, the ailing San Francisco Chronicle, and as publicly traded corporations continue to run the nation's smaller independents out of business, Deadline USA only gains in relevance.

The festival closes with a look at the underbelly of the news world with the classic Clifford Odets-penned Sweet Smell of Success (1957), in which Burt Lancaster, as gossip columnist J.J. Hunsecker, toys with Tony Curtis in a demonstration of the heady abuse of power acquired through the pen. And between there are several more classics—including The Killers (1946), another Lancaster vehicle—but many more rarities, most not available on DVD, including Beyond a Reasonable Doubt and While the City Sleeps (both 1956), two wrongly neglected noirs by another towering figure of German cinema, Fritz Lang, whose early work was instrumental in shaping the genre.

Occasionally the selections veer slightly from newspapers into other media. The Unsuspected (1947), for example, stars Claude Rains as a radio personality who manages to maintain his celebrity as those around him begin to mysteriously die off. Directed by Michael Curtiz, the Hungarian director best known today for Casablanca (1942), and scored by German émigré Franz Waxman, the film is produced with a deft touch, including a lovely expressionist motif in which the killer’s reflection, upside down and ominous, always appears just as he commits his crime, drifting into focus in the glass top of a table or in the black wax of a record—a succinct visual cue that the world is out of kilter.

Desperate (1947), a quick and dirty thriller, features the always suave and menacing Raymond Burr tracking innocent Steve Brodie to exact revenge over the execution of Burr’s hoodlum brother. Director Anthony Mann sets the tone in the first few minutes with a classic mise en scene that shows a darkened gangster hideout illuminated only by a swinging lamp, set into motion by the flailing arms of man sent flying with a right hook from Burr’s ruthless gangster.

Noir City 7. Friday, Jan. 23, through Sunday, Feb. 1 at the Castro Theater, 429 Castro St., San Francisco. www.noircity.com.

The Continuing Adventures of Scott Walker

Scott Walker: 30 Century Man begins by building up the myth of Scott Walker, the narrator informing us of the elusiveness of the man, including the years of silence in which the singer rarely allowed himself to be photographed, at least not without customary sunglasses and visor pulled low. But if the opening of Stephen Kijak’s film seems a bit portentous, perhaps we can afford to be forgiving, as the music he documents has that same blend of grandiosity, mystery and sweeping melodrama. 

But once he is on screen, humble, shy and thoughtful at the age of 60, the myths not only disappear but seem downright silly. In his appearance and his politeness and his reticence, the still boyish-looking Walker bears resem-blance to Beck, an artist 30 years his junior whose elegiac, string-laden 2002 album Sea Change evoked the same gloomily atmospheric grandiosity that Walker pioneered. 

The film, opening Friday, Jan 23, at Shattuck Cinemas, provides an efficient if quick overview of Walker’s career: Noel Scott Engel, born in 1944, was just another pompadoured teenager in the age of rock and roll before joining a group called the Walker Brothers, a successful trio of heartthrobs that contained no brothers and no Walkers. Scott was not the band's lead singer at first, only taking the microphone for moody ballads to which his fluid baritone was better suited. But he soon become the band's frontman as their singles climbed the charts, their popularity in England putting them on a par with The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Just a couple of years later, the band dissolved and Walker went solo with a string of Top Ten albums—Scott, Scott 2, Scott 3—that featured a mix of covers and original material. 

Scott 4 was his best yet, an album of all original material in which Walker fully met his potential, incorporating classical music, European literary influences, and a richer, more personal sense of melancholy. The songs were unique, even daring, and to this day Scott 4 is looked upon as perhaps his best work. But quite surprisingly, considering the great success of its predecessors, it failed to make a dent in the charts. 

The commercial failure of the album alarmed his record company, and perhaps Walker too, and for his next four albums, whether by choice or by force, he shelved his own songs in favor of covers. Walker now looks upon these as lost years and refuses to allow any of these records to be rereleased. 

Though the situation kept him on the margins of the music world, and though his resurgence was some years off, Walker's appeal still burned brightly among those in the know, and there were plenty to champion his work. Most notably, Julian Cope, an English musician who rose from the punk scene of the 1970s, set a new wave of Walker appreciation in motion by producing a compilation of Walker’s songs, replete with a blank cover, so as to introduce the music without preconception or prejudice to a new generation. (Director Stephen Kijak might have taken a cue from Cope with this approach to the music, as one of the annoyances of Scott Walker: 30 Century Man is the decision to illustrate Walker's songs with silly, screensaver-like graphics, all pulsating lines and floating electronic ephemera. A better approach would have to been to play the songs over a black background or perhaps a still photograph of Walker himself; music like this requires no help from Mac graphics software.) 

Walker reunited with his old band for a few albums in the late 1970s before resuming his solo work, but he has released only three albums since 1980. The documentary concludes with footage of Walker’s sessions for his most recent album, The Drift (2006), and these scenes both magnify and defuse the myth and mystery even further. Unusual methods and instruments—flower pots, lead pipes, garbage cans and butchered meats—are employed in sessions in which the ballcapped singer, far from the shady, elusive figure of legend, appears not only amiable, friendly and forthcoming, but even familiar. Though music of startling originality emanates from the man, he seems just like the boy next door. 

It may be painful for a shy, nervous man to open up his process for scrutiny; it may be deflating to see his shrouded reputation laid bare and made commonplace; and greater fame and mainstream attention may deprive his fans of a bit of the prized cult status which they’ve enjoyed for decades. But Scott Walker: 30 Century Man will hopefully bring wider appreciation to a unique musical talent who deserves a spot among the exceptional popular musicians of his time.

Touch of Evil: Three Versions of an Orson Welles Masterpiece

Textual authenticity is a central issue in the work of Orson Welles. The director saw so many of his films altered in the editing room by his producers that only a few of his completed pictures can be said to fully represent his original intentions. 

This has made the prospect of releasing "restorations" of Welles' films on DVD a bit complicated. Some of his pictures exist in multiple versions; some exist only in a single, bastardized version; and many of his films were never completed at all. 

The Criterion Collection set the standard for Welles releases a couple of years back with the company's three-disc set of Mr. Arkadin. There was no single version of that film that could be said to represent the director's original vision, so Criterion released all of them, including a "composite" version which attempted to recreate the film according to written evidence and best guesses as to the director's intent. None of these versions are the final word; Criterion simply put all the material out there for viewers to make of it what they will. 

Universal's new 50th anniversary edition of Touch of Evil follows this model, and the two-disc set is precisely the sort of release that is sorely needed for the Welles canon. Containing all three extant versions of the film, it provides an excellent perspective on the shape and scope of this 1958 noir masterpiece. 

Among the many Welles films that were altered and re-edited without his consent, Touch of Evil might be said to have fared the best, or perhaps suffered least. The studio-sanctioned version, released in 1958, was a lesser film than what Welles had intended, but studio interference could not subdue or destroy the power of Welles' imagery and narrative. 

However, years later, a longer cut was found, and for decades this version supplanted the original version, as it was believed to be at least slightly closer to Welles' intent. 

In 1998, Rialto released a new version, re-edited in accordance with a 58-page memo Welles sent to Universal after having previewed the studio's truncated version of his film. The restoration was not a "director's cut," for Welles never completed his own final cut before the studio removed him from the project. Nor was Welles' memo a plea to return entirely to his original design. Welles' memo took into account new footage shot by the studio without his involvement, dismissing some of it yet praising some of it as well. The memo was essentially an attempt at cooperation and diplomacy, saying to the studio, "Given what we have now, here's how we can make this a great picture." 

The restored version is, for the most part, a significant improvement. Welles' editing patterns were restored, including his elaborate cross-cutting between two story lines; the score and soundtrack were reshaped in accordance with his requests; and the credits were moved from the opening sequence to the end, offering an unobstructed view of one of the most spectacular opening shots ever filmed. 

Critics still found plenty wrong, suggesting that the pacing in the second half of the film was too slow. Some preferred one of the previous versions to the new, but until now the restoration was the only version available on DVD. 

To finally be able to see all three side by side, to compare the repercussions of every edit and adjustment, is a gift for Welles fans. Hopefully similar releases will follow, with multiple versions of his landmark works: Hamlet and Othello, both before and after their soundtracks were altered; The Stranger and Lady From Shanghai, with descriptions, stills, storyboards and shooting scripts to explain Welles' original visions for those films and how they were dramatically cut and reshaped by his producers; and perhaps one day someone will finally discover missing footage of The Magnificent Ambersons, and we may perhaps get an approximation of the masterpiece that might have been. 

Universal's Touch of Evil stands in contrast to Image Entertainment's release of Welles' unfinished opus, Don Quixote, which offers a 1992 recreation — a purely hypothetical one — of what Welles intended with this highly amorphous project. 

It is not Image's fault that so little of Welles' Quixote footage is available. The company has endeavored to present us with what is essentially the only available home video release of Quixote, and there is merit in that. But what's available is, unfortunately, a butchered and largely discredited restoration project undertaken by a one-time Welles associate who had nothing to do with this particular film. 

Don Quixote was indeed a quixotic adventure for Welles, a project he worked on for decades. He was questioned about it so often he threatened to release it under the title When Are You Going to Finish Don Quixote? It still isn't quite certain if he ever intended to finish Quixote. Writers and painters have works they keep for themselves, he once said; why not filmmakers? 

Shot independently and often on the fly over many years, Welles outlived the two principal actors—Francisco Reiguera and Akim Tamiroff—and in fact, never had a final script. The film was largely improvised, using available locations, actors and conditions to fashion his narrative. 

In 1992, Jess Franco, who served as an assistant to Welles on Chimes at Midnight, obtained as much Quixote footage as he could, re-recorded much of the dialogue and music, and edited the footage into something resembling a film. Though there are many excellent shots and scenes, and plenty of evidence of good performances and dialogue, the result is not the least bit impressive. 

The odds were against Franco, but indeed the odds were so bad that there was really no reason to go through with the project. Legal battles kept him from obtaining much of the footage, including perhaps the most arresting scene—available for viewing on YouTube—of Quixote in a movie theater, drawing his sword and stepping up to rescue a celluloid maiden by slashing the screen to ribbons. Without the film's most innovative and famous scene, how could any completed version claim relevance? 

But even without these omissions, the project should not have been attempted. After all, Welles himself claimed that he kept the footage scattered in various storage facilities to prevent a project like this one from being attempted without his consent. He didn't want some hack to try to assemble this, his most cherished and personal film, into some dim-witted, half-formed movie. His was a unique and idiosyncratic vision that could not be replicated, even with the best of intentions. 

One day perhaps this film too will be given a decent DVD release. Done properly, it would simply gather all the existing footage like a documentary, grouping scenes for clarity but otherwise with no attempt to structure it as a narrative. It wouldn't make for a great commercial success certainly, but rather it would present us with something of a historical document, allowing us to see Don Quixote as it exists — as a mass of footage lovingly shot but never fully edited. In other words, leave the incomplete film incomplete and let us imagine, as we must with so many of Welles' films, what might have been. 

Touch of Evil (1958). 95 minutes / 109 minutes / 111 minutes. Universal. $26.99. 

Orson Welles' Don Quixote (1992). 115 minutes. www.image-entertainment.com. 

Widescreen Suspense: Kurosawa's High and Low

Akira Kurosawa, more than any other filmmaker, is strongly associated with the samurai genre. And with a body of work that includes Yojimbo, Sanjurio, Throne of Blood, Rashoman, Seven Samurai and Ran, it is certainly understandable. But Kurosawa was not limited to period pictures.

High and Low, Kurosawa's gripping adaptation of a novel by Ed McBain, could be called a genre masterpiece, and yet it is hardly limited to any particular genre. Tense psychological drama gives way to police procedural which in turn gives way to noirish, expressionist melodrama.

The film begins with a long sequence that never ventures outside the protagonist's home. Toshiro Mifune is introduced as business tycoon Kingo Gondo, and quickly enough the plot develops — a child has disappeared, though as it will turn out, it is not the right child. An unknown kidnapper seeks ransom from Gondo but has accidentally abducted the child of Gondo's chauffeur. No matter — the extortion plan will continue as planned.

What follows is an extended sequence of beautiful widescreen compositions within a room full of people — Gondo, his wife and chauffeur, and a bevy of policeman on the case. Kurosawa choreographs a tour de force of shifting compositions as actors move across the space, their relationships and dilemmas exemplified as they turn toward and away from each other, move forward and recede and traverse the wide frame, crossing, blocking and boxing each other in.

A moral dilemma is being systematically examined here, and Kurosawa sticks with it, milking every bit of tension, every scheming angle to full effect. It is a dilemma of some complexity: Is one child more valuable than another? Is a child's life worth a man's dreams and goals and wealth? Can Gondo be expected to throw away the dreams of a lifetime with no certainty of recompense, or of even of getting the child back? Kurosawa fills the frame with people, using his camera to make their relationships manifest. And the panoramic view of the city from Gondo's house on a hill reminds us of his vulnerability. The man who once seemed to stand above the city like a lord is now held captive by an unseen enemy below; the house on the hill is no longer a watchtower, but a cage that can be assaulted from any angle.

To this point the film has essentially been a chamber piece, but once Gondo makes the decision to pay the ransom the film leaps into action with a breathtaking sequence aboard a train. Kurosawa insisted on a real train, with real cramped passenger cars and real scenery rushing past. He used eight cameras to capture the action almost entirely in real time. The result is a stunning sequence of taught action, compelling drama and unyielding suspense. And once the sequence comes to its emotional conclusion, at the film's one-hour mark, it is the end of a chapter and the beginning of what amounts to an entirely new film.

In the next hour High and Low becomes a gripping police procedural, following investigators as they follow leads and report their findings. Their excursions into the field are interspersed like flashbacks much like in Fritz Lang's M. Gondo slips out of the spotlight as the plot shifts to the battle between the police inspector and the kidnapper, one dedicated to ensuring Gondo's sacrifice doesn't go unavenged, and the other bent on the great tycoon's destruction.

Kurosawa maintains the tension throughout, as clues unravel into facts and facts lead to the criminal. Credulity may be strained slightly with the police delay the kidnapper's capture in order to hit him with more serious charges, resulting in a death, but the film never lets up. And once he is apprehended, the film once again adopts another tone, delving further into social commentary as the kidnapper and Gondo confront one another before the window slams shut and the film comes to an end.

High and Low (1964). 143 minutes. $39.95. Criterion Collection. www.criterion.com.

Cinematic Haiku: An Autumn Afternoon

By contrast with the dynamic action of his better known contemporaries, Yasujiro Ozu sought to minimize the kinetic drama of his films. Ozu does not reach out and grab ahold of the viewer with startling compositions and frenetic movement; he holds his camera still and makes the viewer come to him. 

Ozu's style is like haiku. His imagery, his characters and dialogue are stripped to their essence; performances are purged of nuance, of subtley and naturalism, reduced to precise movements. Endless takes where the director chiseled away at his actors' mannerisms might have resulted in stilted performances, but instead Ozu and his company produce pure, streamlined poetry. Like the decor and architecture surrounding them, the actors are spare and minimalist by design, and Ozu uses similarly spare and minimalist camerawork to film them, keeping his camera as still, as zen-like and as patient as he asks his actors and his audience to be. 

The reticence of his characters and the austerity of his style may leave the impatient viewer a bit restless. The first 20 minutes or so of an Ozu film may seem both slow and confusing as characters are introduced almost in mid-conversation. Ozu doesn't insert clumsy expository introductions into his characters' mouths to help orient the viewer. Instead he thrusts us directly into the scene and allows relationships and connections to gradually become clear. On the surface it may appear that we are simply listening in on a series of polite conversations, broken up here and there by a few of Ozu's characterisitic transition shots — still life images of rooms, hallways, furniture, streets and buildings. But situation piles upon situation and character upon character until a full and rich world has been created, almost imperceptibly, and suddenly it dawns on us that not only do we know these characters, we care about them and have somehow become invested in them. 

This is not the identification that comes from cheap pandering or directorial manipulation, from simpering, soft-focus close-ups or crescendos of tear-jerking orchestral notes; it is instead the measure of Ozu's artisanship, of his unique talent for rendering a film with the depth of a novel — his ability, as both a writer and director, to fully and eloquently express the thoughts, dreams, emotions and desires of his characters to the point that we cannot help but take an active interest in their welfare. 

An Autumn Afternoon, Ozu's final film, reflects his late-career interest in the shift to post-war modernity. Japan's increasingly Americanized culture is a central issue in the director's later work, with new attitudes, priorities and interests widening the gap between old and young, between parents and their adult children. The nation's newfound prosperity simultaneously enriches, distracts and destroys the lives of the middle class; wealth purchases convenient appliances and luxury goods but opens the door to the creeping malaise of materialism and threatens to undermine the old social order. 

An Autumn Afternoon dwells on a theme he had worked before, that of a parent facing the unwelcome decision to marry off a daughter and thus embrace a new life without her presence. Ozu's films often deal with such generational issues, of the young leaving behind the aged. It is one of several themes that he returned to in film after film throughout his career, using different characters and situations to more fully examine the complexity of the issues at hand. It is a common joke that Ozu's films are essentially interchangeable, in style, in theme, and in the similarity of their titles: Early Spring, Late Spring, Late Autumn, Autumn Afternoon, etc. And while there is some truth in that observation, once you immerse yourself in Ozu's world you see that though nearly all of his films share a certain aesthetic, they are remarkably distinct from one another, each as rich, as engaging, as distinct as the faces of the actors he photographed. 

Criterion has released many of Ozu's films on DVD over the years, both in stand-alone editions and in the more recent line of Eclipse box sets. The "Silent Ozu" collection presented three of his early silent family comedies, and "Late Ozu" presented five of his late-career films. But Criterion did not include An Autumn Afternoon in that collection, opting instead to release it as a separate title. It was a good decision. While all of Ozu's later films are excellent, An Autumn Afternoon is essentially the culmination of a directorial style that evolved over several decades. The spaces Ozu leaves between scenes and between characters are deftly handled, wistful and open-ended; his compositions are as balanced and precise and idiosyncratic as ever; his use of color bold yet understated, with blacks and whites offset by strategic dashes of red; and his everyday themes as sincere, as universal, and as heartrending as the medium will allow. 

An Autumn Afternoon (1962). 113 minutes. $29.95. Criterion Collecton. www.criterion.com. 

Kenji Mizoguchi's Fallen Women

Director Kenji Mizoguchi secured his international reputation in the early 1950s with such films as Sansho the Bailiff, The Life of Oharu, and Ugetsu. His output was prolific and varied, but the plight of women was a recurring interest throughout his career, with many of his films centered on strong, resilient women characters. 

Criterion has released "Kenji Mizoguchi's Fallen Women," a box set in the company's Eclipse series that features four films that focus on the plights of women among the lower strata of Japanese society. 

The set includes two of Mizoguchi's early sound films (Osaka Elegy and Sisters of the Gion, both from 1936), a mid-career gem (Women of the Night, 1948) and the great director's final film (Street of Shame, 1956). All use the topic of prostitution to examine the hardships faced by women in a patriarchal society that renders them helpless without the aid of men. 

Sisters of the Gion follows two sisters and their vastly different approaches to life and their profession. Omocha (Isuzu Yamada) is ruthless, manipulative and grimly pragmatic, determined to use whomever she can to claw her away above her meager station. Her bold, gritty crassness calls to mind Barbara Stanwyck's Lily Powers from the 1934's Baby Face. Omocha's sister Umekici (Yoko Umemura) is far more fatalistic, resigned to her station in life. Neither approach works out too well in the end as the women are still unable to get ahead and are finally reduced to despair. 

Mizoguchi's final film, Street of Shame, was originally to be shot with a documentary approach, taking his camera and crew to the Yoshiwara, Edo's red-light district. However, ongoing political battles seeking to ban prostitution made brothel owners wary of participating in a project that would bring them unwanted attention at a sensitive time, forcing Mizoguchi to return to the studio. 

Street of Shame tracks the lives of five prostitutes at a brothel called Dreamland. Again, one is manipulative and ruthless; Yasumi lends money to her colleagues at ever-increasing interest rates, and entices a young, lovestruck businessman to embezzle from his employer with the false hope that she will one day marry him. Mickey, a brash young beauty who dresses like a 1950s American high school girl, has sought the geisha life as an almost welcome reprieve from life under the oppressive reign of a neglectful and possibly abusive father. Yorie clings to the idea of marriage as her salvation, but when she finally takes the plunge she finds she has only escaped into a life of loveless drudgery. Hanae has a young child and an unemployed husband and is thus the only breadwinner in the family. When her husband attempts suicide, she tackles him and hits him, demonstrating with her wordless fury that his supreme act of self-pity would have rendered moot the enormity of her sacrifice. Yumeko left the country to work as a prostitute in order to support her son, hoping that he would be able to support her when he grew to manhood. Now a young man, the son comes to the city to inform his mother that he will be taking a job at a factory, but when he learns how she has been supporting him over the years, he turns on her. 

Street of Shame was a commercial success and a few months after its release, prostitution was outlawed in Japan, with many attributing at least some of the credit to Mizoguchi and his final film. 

Kenji Mizoguchi's Fallen Women. $59.95. Criterion Collection. www.criterion.com. 

Osaka Elegy (1936). 71 minutes. 

Sisters of the Gion. (1936). 69 minutes. 

Women of the Night. (1948). 74 minutes. 

Street of Shame. (1956). 85 minutes. 

2008 Berkeley Video and Film Festival Showcases the Indie Spirit

Time and time again we’ve seen the word “independent” co-opted by the very corporate forces the independents claim independence from: “indie” record labels engulfed by a corporate parent; “indie” film festivals that draw Hollywood’s A-List roster to remote Western boomtowns. 

Well, there’s at least one independent film festival that has not only retained its true indie character, but prides itself on a “celebrity-free” environment. 

East Bay Media Center’s 17th annual Berkeley Video and Film Festival starts Saturday at Landmark’s Shattuck Cinemas in downtown Berkeley, running Friday through Sunday and screening more than 50 films. Shows start at 7:30 p.m. Friday and at 1 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday, and continue to nearly midnight each night. 

This year’s program features the usual eclectic blend of wide-ranging fare, from student films to experimental short subjects to feature-length films with a high-gloss sheen—all of them truly independent and all of them unlike anything showing at your local megaplex. 

Things get off to an offbeat start Friday with Emma Strebel’s 45-second Self Portrait, an art project she says developed from “a radical intervention to remedy my head lice.” Get your popcorn early. 

Next up is Eli Akira Kaufman’s California King, a surprisingly moving tale of a mattress salesman who uses his lofty position to bed his more attractive female customers. That is, until he meets one that stirs more than his libido. Like a minimalist short story, the 22-minute California King manages to convey much about its characters with little or no background information; we know their states of mind without needing to know the details. It’s a pared-down love story, with no frills and really no surprises; it simply tells a simple story well. 

Another short subject, Attila Szasz’s Now You See Me, Now You Don’t (30 minutes), takes us in another direction entirely with a story that employs a touch of science fiction in a sort of dark parable of marriage and parenthood. When a work-a-holic scientist uses a formula to make his son invisible, he widens the rift between father and mother and child with tragic results. 

Screening between those two short films are two even shorter films, together adding up to just five minutes, but which open up a brand new world of filmmaking. George Aguilar, who created one of the best films in last year’s festival (The Diary of Niclas Gheiler), returns with two examples from his series of virtual films. Aguilar has immersed himself in the online world of Second Life and has used his avatar, an artist-borg by the name of Cecil Hirvi, to create a series of cinematic poems. The first film, Virtual Starry Night, shows Hirvi stepping into a 3-D world constructed by Second Life users based on the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh. The second film, First Love of a Borg, consists of camera movements that sensually trace the contours of a metallic sculpture of a ballerina on display in a virtual museum. 

Festival director Mel Vapour may have to put an asterisk behind his “celebrity-free” claim this year when poet Michael McClure makes an appearance Friday night. McClure will be on hand to answer questions following a screening of Rebel Roar: The Sound of Michael McClure, a 34-minute film that features that Beat Generation poet reading his own work and offering perspectives on his contemporaries. 

The festival’s opening night concludes with Fix (93 minutes), a feature by Tao Ruspoli. Shawn Andrews carries the film with a charismatic performance and a devilish grin that conveys love and arrogance and dissipation all at once. The film’s conceit—a cinephile films every aspect of his life, even as he ventures to Los Angeles to bail his drug-addict brother out of jail and get him into rehab—wears thin after a while, as the device of the first-person camera requires that much screen time be spent defending and justifying it. And the technique lends far less sympathy to the characterizations than Ruspoli probably hoped for. But when it works it strikes an almost voyeuristic tone that makes some scenes come to life. 

Saturday’s screenings include two documentaries. The first, Road to Bonneville (60 minutes), follows two hot-rod builders as they trek across the country in their homemade vintage race cars to the salt flats of Utah, spouting homespun, geeked-out hot rod jargon all the way. Documentaries can bring us into close contact with subcultures we might never otherwise encounter, and Road to Bonneville does just that, giving us a glimpse of a unique and highly specialized world. 

Stop the Presses (80 minutes) is another kind of documentary, giving us an extensive cataloging of a vexing societal problem, in this case the slow-motion death spiral of the newspaper industry. Mark Birnbaum and Manny Mendoza traveled the country and conducted more than 100 interviews to produce this examination of the shifting American media landscape and what it portends for the future, for an informed citizenry, and for the First Amendment. It’s hardly news to news industry insiders of course, but it elucidates for the uninformed the ramifications for democracy once the watchdogs have been put down. 

Tate Taylor’s feature Pretty Ugly People (100 minutes) closes out the festival’s second night. An animated prologue introduces us to Lucy, an overweight woman who undergoes gastric bypass surgery and stages a dramatic reunion to surprise her friends with her new body. But while attempting to enjoy the good and svelte life with them on an extended camping trip, a series of encounters with each friend’s dark side shows her that life isn’t necessarily all that better for the trim and fit. 

Also included in this year’s program are two Chilean features. Just to make things confusing, Sabado screens on Domingo, depicting a real-time drama of a marriage that falls apart just as it is about to begin. The film, with the exception of a single edit, appears to be shot in real time, using its 63 minutes to follow a would-be bride as she discovers her fiancé’s secret, confronts him with it, and then concocts a plan for moving forward, documenting it all with the help of a student cameraman. As with Fix, the first-person camera can be trying at times, and again the script and actors are called upon to continually justify its presence, but it adds up to a fun little experiment in cinema verite. 

The best feature film of the festival is also the strangest. Malta con Huevo is another Chilean entry and it’s quirky from the start as Vladimir, a sketchy cad-about-town, wakes up to find that he has somehow jumped ahead in time a few weeks. Yet when he sleeps and wakes again, he’s back where he began, and no one seems to know what he’s blathering about. We suspect early enough that his signature beverage of malt beer and raw eggs is playing tricks on his mind, but soon enough the film takes a stark left turn as a more nefarious and absurd comic-horror plot reveals itself. 

Berkeley Video and Film Festival. One-day passes ($13, $10 for students and seniors) are available starting Friday at the Shattuck Cinemas box office, 2230 Shattuck Ave. 464-5980. One-day and three-day passes ($30) are available in advance at East Bay Media Center, 1939 Addison St. 843-3699. www.berkeleyvideofilmfest.org.

Vampyr: The Indelible Imagery of Carl Th. Dreyer

Ten years after the release of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), the first and greatest of all vampire films, Carl Th. Dreyer released Vampyr (1932), the next great vampire film, and one that took the genre in a new direction. Vampyr is the vampire film reduced to its essence, to an unrelenting flow of eerie imagery, off-kilter camera movements and a hushed soundscape consisting of sparse, enigmatic dialogue and a muted, foreboding score. Less plot than impressionist montage, the film is an almost surrealist blend of unexplained actions and haunted faces. Imagine Dracula as presented by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali. 

Criterion has released the film in a two-disc DVD set, complete with bonus features that include an interview with Dreyer, a commentary track, and a book containing the original script and the novella on which Dreyer claimed the film was based—though the final product bears little resemblance to its source. 

The film itself looks superb, though it is still not quite the film Dreyer would have wanted us to see. It’s a sound film—the director’s first—produced in several different languages. Dreyer shot Vampyr silent, his actors reading the lines in several languages and later synching the different scores for release in various countries. However, the only version that currently exists in a form suitable for restoration is the German, and thus we are left with something he tried mightily to avoid: his mesmerizing images are overlaid with the distraction of subtitles. Still, given the fate of other Dreyer films, we’re lucky to have any version at all. 

At the time, Vampyr seemed a most unlikely project for Dreyer. While it was certainly within reason to expect another masterpiece from this uncompromising filmmaker, Dreyer isn’t the first name that comes to mind when discussing the horror film. After all, this was the man who made The Passion of Joan of Arc just a few years earlier, a powerful and uncompromsing avant garde film that to this day remains one of cinema’s artistic masterpieces. 

Dreyer made just 14 films in his career and no two of them alike, altering his style and approach, often radically, to fit his subject matter. He began his career in the silent era in his native Denmark, creating several well-regarded works before venturing into the greater European film industry in search of more plentiful resources and increased autonomy. One of his films from this era, Mikaël (1924), a German production that showed at this year’s San Francisco Silent Film Festival, is considered one of the landmarks of early gay cinema. 

But nothing in that oeuvre would quite prepare a viewer for what came next. 

Dreyer went to France to make a film based on the trial of Joan of Arc. Joan had only recently been sainted after centuries of excommunication, and though the French were eager to see a film about her, they were more than a little chagrined to find the task handed over to a Dane, and the role of Joan given to an Italian. Rene Falconetti was a stage actress and a very successful one; The Passion of Joan of Arc would be her first and only screen appearance, and thus for decades she has been associated in the public mind with this role, a stunning performance of grace, passion, dignity and sorrow. 

Stylistically, it is a radical departure, not just from Dreyer’s previous work, but from virtually anything that came before it. Dreyer relied almost exclusively on close-ups and text to tell the tale, relegating the vast sets to relative obscurity, only allowing them to be glimpsed in a few sequences. The film was a commercial failure, and was recut and altered into many different forms, depending on the prevailing political forces in whichever county it was being presented in. The original negative was lost to fire, and Dreyer re-composed the film from alternate takes; that version too was lost to fire. For decades Passion then was considered lost forever, with no surviving prints of Dreyer’s original film known to exist, until one was accidentally discovered in 1986 in a supply closet in a Norwegian mental institution. 

After observing the fate of Passion, Dreyer sought a bit less controversial and more commercially viable project for his next film, and settled on horror as a genre which was not only popular, but conducive to artistic independence; horror films of the silent era had managed to go relatively untouched by censors while remaining uncompromising in artistic merit. 

The result is a moody, atmospheric film modeled on the horror genre but more restrained, more obscure and more elliptical in its examination of terror, mystery and the occult. Dreyer’s expressive camera work involves wonderfully disorienting movements that shuttle the camera from one indelible image to another. As the camera circles around rooms, the lens distorts the field of vision, causing walls to appear to shift and move, leaving the viewer at all times on uneven ground, with little in the plot or in the visual terrain to anchor oneself. This is not your typical horror film; it is a dreamlike and hallucinatory experience that is content to leave much of its mystery unresolved. 

Consecutive commercial failures left Dreyer unemployed for more than a decade afterward, either unwilling or unable to mount another production. He returned in 1943 with Day of Wrath, followed by Ordet (1955) and Gertrud (1964), all of which, along with The Passion of Joan of Arc, are also available in Criterion editions. 

Vampyr (1932). 75 minutes. $39.95. Criterion. www.criterion.com. 

Anthony Mann's The Furies

Ambition, deception, manipulation and dispossession: The Furies (1950), Anthony Mann's genre-defying noir-epic-western-melodrama, has enough treachery and love and treacherous love to fill several pictures. 

Mann brought everything he had learned during his apprenticeship in the world of noir — even his cinematographer — to this, one of his first forays into the western, a genre to which he had long aspired. Also completed and released that same year was Winchester '73, one of the more famous and accomplished of Mann's westerns, and the first of many collaborations with Jimmy Stewart. 

Winchester '73, along with Mann's later westerns, especially the ones featuring Stewart, has long overshadowed The Furies. And while there may be plenty of justification for that fact — Mann having matured greatly as a director over time — The Furies does not deserve to be overlooked. For while it is certainly a flawed film, it has more than its merits: fascinating dynamics, superb photography, and excellent performances by Walter Houston and Barbara Stanwyck, two formidable actors at the peak of their talents in their portrayal of a father-daughter relationship so Freudian that it borders on incest. 

Houston, in his final screen appearance, delivers a delightfully hammy portrayal of a ham-fisted tycoon, a lordly lord of the manor forever seeking to re-establish his prowess and power. Houston plays it for all it's worth, making his T.C. Jeffords into a brawling blowhard, full of bluster and braggadocio. As with his celebrated role in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Houston manages to walk the line of histrionic bombast without quite slipping into caricature, rendering Jeffords by turns a tyrant and a fool, but always a man—human, humane and fallible. 

Stanwyck is at her steely, brassy best as Jeffords' daughter, a wild, tempestuous siren of a tomboy and heiress to his sprawling New Mexico ranch. Stanwyck manages once again to defy her era's gender stereotypes; her Vance Jeffords is strong-willed, wily and tough as the rugged landscape she oversees. And yet her beauty, sensuality and charismatic self-confidence, even arrogance, make her as alluring as any eye-batting southwestern belle. 

The bond between father and daughter is as sexual as it is familial, and as ruthless as it is tender. T.C. and Vance admire each other with a curious gleam in their eyes, looking upon each other with equal parts fascination and wariness. The proud T.C. does not want to give up an inch of his domain, while Vance is eager to prove herself every bit as much a ruthless tycoon as her father by taking over his role. Mann squares them off in face-to-face compositions, each leaning toward the other in shots that convey both aggression and love. T.C. is frequently pictured in his office, where mounted bull horns on the wall perch just above his head, signaling both his swaggering arrogance and his susceptibility to the feints and jabs of the stoic Rip Darrow, played by Wendell Corey with the haughty stillness of a matador. 

Criterion has given the film the full treatment, with an excellent (if phallic symbol-obsessed) commentary by film historian Jim Kitses, and a pressing of the novel by Niven Busch on which the film was based. 

The Furies (1950). 109 minutes. Criterion Collection. $39.95. www.criterion.com.