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Blogs

The New York Film Festival 2008

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Parent Category: Blogs
Category: Jack Angstreich
Published on Monday, 07 September 2009 18:35
Written by Jack Angstreich
The New York Film Festival 2008 opened with Entre les murs, the new film by Laurent Cantet, shot in an informal style with non-professional actors and much improvisation. The admirable rigor and compositional strength visible in Cantet's earlier films has here been replaced with a more exploratory, experimental approach. The result was emotionally moving but less satisfying artistically, as here one encountered less of the formal unity which enhanced, for example, the director's earlier, fine "Time Out".

Jia Zhang Ke's "24 City", a synthesis of fiction and documentary, shot on and presented in video, was difficult to assess on a single viewing. Jia's trademark formal control was evident here as elsewhere and here the director moves into more avant-garde territory than in his previous narrative features but whether this film will bear comparison with the magisterial "Platform" remains to be seen.

The debut film by the young filmmaker, Antonio Campos, "Afterschool", was also distinguished by careful framing and thoughtful employment of long-takes, characterized by a Kubrickian coldness. The foundation for the visual narration is an intelligent screenplay and the film is enhanced by sensitive direction of its mostly young actors. There does seem to be an authorial vision at work in the film's moral-psychological penetration.

The premiere of "Ashes of Time Redux", a "restoration" of Wong Kar-Wai's classic wuxia art-film, aroused eager anticipation but I was unable to endure viewing what appeared to be a digital reworking of the original 35-millimeter material, inevitably degraded by transfer back to the original format.

"Bullet in the Head" by Jaime Rosales was unusually challenging in its spareness, shot mostly with long lenses and largely inaudible dialogue, with an obscure narrative that only becomes clarified in the film's final minutes. Nonetheless, this was a striking work, and a second viewing confirmed the aesthetic rewards dimly perceived in the first. At the press conference, the director defended his unorthodox approach on political grounds but if I find this argument not entirely persuasive, it seems to me irrelevant since the artistic achievement here requires no political justification.

Steven Soderbergh's ambitious, two-part, four-and-a-half hour film,  "Che", was unexpectedly successful in achieving its aims. The film is much aided by an impressive performance by Benicio del Toro. The most significant weakness here was the inability of the digital cameras to produce a sufficiently robust image in bright light. Soderbergh managed to be sensitive to the political complexities of his subject in a meticulously researched script while conveying a sense of both the grandeur of the Cuban Revolution and of the demoralization afforded by the defeat of Guevara's Bolivian campaign.

"Shuga" was another notable work by the distinguished Kazakh director, Darezhan Omirbaev, a personal film of delicate sensitivity and unspeakable sadness. It is difficult to say more after a single viewing except that Omirbaev has remained remarkably consistent in his artistic vision with its affinities to the minimalism of, say, a Robert Bresson, which may be most apparent in the construction of images with a certain neutrality in their valences and in an unaccented quality in the editing.

 "A Christmas Tale" is another eccentric, brilliant, unwieldy excursion of novelistic density by Arnaud Desplechin, again starring the extraordinary Mathieu Amalric in another exhilarating, seriocomic performance. The primary difficulty here was what appeared to be degraded image quality caused by a digital intermediate transferred back to film, a circumstance possibly further aggravated by the shooting of the film in Super 35, a generally inferior widescreen format. Desplechin continues to be one of the most exciting filmmakers working today but one rues the lost of filmic texture in his cinematography.

The long-awaited new film by Jerzy Skolimowski, "Four Nights with Anna", also seemed limited by a video transfer to 35-millimeter, despite a somewhat engrossing and unique narrative, shot with a sometimes thrilling, highly mobile camera. Here, the voyeurism had Hitchcockian overtones; however, Skolimowski's style is observational and unclassical in a European tradition.

"Gomorrah" by the Italian director, Matteo Garrone, also suffered from being shot on video and transerred to 35-millimeter with degraded image quality. It was, however, a stimulating and ambitious work with a highly episodic, complex narrative which provides an expansive portrait of the Italian underworld in Naples and features effective employment of hand-held camerawork, taking full advantage of several scenic locations. A certain jaggedness in the editing also accords well with the uncertainty and abruptness of events of the milieu portrayed in the film.

The new film by Mike Leigh, "Happy-Go-Lucky", was rewarding in its sympathetic humanism and, as usual, was enlivened by some memorable lead performances, where characterization balanced tragic elements with comic dimensions. Visually, however, the sensuous photographic qualities of the filmic material were irreparably damaged by reliance on a digital-intermediate transferred to film. Although Leigh was never a major stylist, many of his works have been considerably strengthened by the attractive images achieved by his director of photography, Dick Pope and one senses that that could have been the case here but for the regrettable reliance on a digital format.

One of the most extraordinary films in the festival was "The Headless Woman" by Lucrecia Martel, a filmmaker who appears to be moving from strength to strength, an artist with a developed worldview and an utterly distinctive visual style by which to convey it. In this film it was ultimately the images which were eloquent, and the relations between images; acting and dialogue are transmuted into organically expressive components by the sheer force of Martel's eccentric and distinctive mise-en-scène, with its unusual camera placement and subtly elusive rhythms. The feature was preceded by a strong short film from Argentina, "I Hear Your Scream", photographed in long-shot.

Another impressive surprise was the debut film, "Hunger", by artist Steve McQueen, a riveting and disturbing account of the imprisonment of Bobby Sands, distinguished by some exceptionally well-written dialogue and by a visually mesmerizing orchestration of all the stations of the cross of the revolutionary's passion. "Hunger" is unforgettable.

"I'm Gonna Explode" by Mexican director, Gerard Naranjo is an absorbing, episodic story of teenagers on the run but was also marred by virtue of its video source being transferred to 35-millimeter film with consequent loss of image quality; however, Naranjo appears to be a promising quantity. The two attractive leads bring considerable force (and pleasure) to the work.

"Parlez-moi de la pluie" confirms the expressive abilities of writer-director Agnès Jaoui who delicately balances satire with poignancy here, as she did in her last feature. Jaoui's widescreen frame is characterized by an elegance inflected by a nuanced visual wit which acts as a counterpart to the meticulous craftsmanship evident in the construction of her scenario, to the delicacy of her direction of actors, and to the pointed dialogue conceived by her and her writing partner, Jean-Michel Bacri.

A restoration of "Lola Montès", the swan-song of supreme master, Max Ophuls, was a highlight of the festival. Some intriguing, previously unavailable footage was visible in this version, with the color superior to that in many prints -- although I still have the sense that this may be a lost film since this print didn't attain the gloriousness of color I imagine for the film. The film itself remains one of the glories of cinema.

Although I found the new feature by Korean director, Hong Sang-soo, "Night and Day" to be a worthwhile experience, with manifold depths and resonances, it does not seem to measure up to the stature of the director who gave us, "The Turning Gate", one of the strongest Korean films I have seen. Hong, in recent work, seems to be foregoing the rigor of his earlier style for a looser, more pragmatic mode but I think this change has arrived at the price of a certain loss in intensity. A further problem is the transfer of video to film which too noticeably diminishes the quality of the image. However, the comic element which Hong seems to be further developing does possess an authentic charm, communicated gracefully by his appealing lead actors.

The enigmatic, high-modernist "The Northern Land", a video by veteran Portuguese director João Botelho, on a single, baffling viewing, appeared possibly to be the strongest new film in the main body of the festival with highly controlled, sometimes intricate compositions but this work will require several more encounters to unlock its complexities and symmetries before it can be comprehensively evaluated.

I did not see Brillante Mendoza's "Serbis" because of the inadequacy of the transfer from video to film, which was a difficulty also with the compelling "Summer Hours" by Olivier Assayas, another Renoirian, novelistic exploration of the contemporary French bourgeoisie, shot in the director's trademark style with a sinuous mobile camera in relatively longer takes. The sensuality of the image, so strong a feature of the director's earlier films, was greatly missed here.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's comically mournful, finally moving -- indeed, haunting -- "Tokyo Sonata" was notable for its unusual narrative tonalities, a trait in line with the distinctiveness of the director's earlier works. Kurosawa successfully manages to orchestrate his incongruous materials into a coherent statement, largely through careful compositions supported by authenticity in performance. I regret to say, however, that this film too is weakened by virtue of its being shot on video and transferred to film, with consequent degradation of image-quality.

"Tony Manero", by Pablo Larrain of Chile, has a very original story, effectively told with notable directorial restraint in a fluid, confident style. This is another film with an unusual tone, a chilling portrait of a psychopath portrayed with strong satirical overtones. Shot in 16-millimeter and blown up to 35, I have questions about whether the imagery may have been weakened by possible recourse to video-processing. It was preceded by an excellent short film, "Love You More", by British artist Sam Taylor-Wood, featuring two charming leads; the events unfold with assurance in the visual storytelling and an attractively lit color image.

"Tulpan" the first fiction film by by the Russo-Kazakh documentarian Sergey Dvortsevoy is an engrossing, neorealistic ethnographic study photographed with observational, verité technique and many non-professional actors deployed with a beautiful ingenuity. The film is shot on the Kazakh steppe with a palpable sense of place. Again, possible recourse to video-processing here seemed to result in a weakness in the cinematographic texture by virtue of a transfer to 35-millimeter.

I did not see "Waltz with Bashir" but Kelly Reichardt's slight, modest "Wendy and Lucy" afforded several minor pleasures such as an evocative feel for the American Northwest and several fine, naturalistic performances, notably a sensitive, heartbreaking turn by Michelle Williams. Reichardt's style is simple, uncluttered, and restrained, with effective color photography, falling back upon the unobtrusive rhetoric of one strain of American independent cinema.

The worst film in the festival was the disastrous "The Windmill Movie" incompetently assembled from material by the interesting, experimental documentarian, Dick Rogers. Whatever merit this film may have lies entirely in its subject-matter and in the intrinsic interest of the original material but Olch's own "creative" decisions only managed to unspeakably disfigure the footage at his disposal. However, Rogers's own "Quarry", an exquisite black-and-white short from 1970 was scintillating in its visual textures and in its poetic, associative editing.

The festival centerpiece this year was Clint Eastwood's disappointing "Changeling" which was not without its minor pleasures by virtue of its preponderantly graceful classical storytelling, its handsome period art-direction, and several excellent performances, notably those by John Malkovich and Jason Butler Harner. However, the film failed to transcend a conventionality of conception and will be esteemed as one of Eastwood's lesser efforts.

The festival closed on a lesser note with the resolutely minor "The Wrestler" by Darren Aronofsky, another too conventional although not unlikable, commercial melodrama happily unmolested by stylistic extravagances. The film features a strong performance by Mickey Rourke, among others, but I would have preferred a work of greater significance to the art of cinema.

Roberto Galvadon

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Parent Category: Blogs
Category: Jack Angstreich
Published on Sunday, 23 August 2009 03:56
Written by Jack Angstreich
In the past several years, various venues in New York — all with consistently poor projection — have undertaken major retrospectives of such masters as Mikio Naruse, Luis Bunuel, Kon Ichikawa, Manoël de Oliveira, Jacques Rivette, amongst others. At the Film Society of Lincoln Center, with its Walter Reade Theatre, one of the best viewing options in the city for its great projection, large screen, and banked seating, we were instead offered a selection of the work of the resolutely minor Mexican director, Roberto Gavaldón. That said, I am still grateful to the Film Society for bringing such relatively obscure works to light, especially in the mostly excellent prints they unearthed for this series. However, with no explanation, the earliest film in the series, La Barraca, was shown in a 16-millimeter print, described as in "fair condition". Possibly, this is the only print which exists in the world; possibly not. Either way, we have no way of knowing because programmers don't seem to feel any compunction to provide such information.

The Other One, with Dolores del Rio in a dual role, proved to be among the most entertaining of the Gavaldón features screened here, with its wild soap-opera plot and exquisite high-contrast photography by Alex Phillips; it was presented in a beautiful UCLA print. The Hollywood influence of something like Robert Siodmak's The Dark Mirror on a film like this proved salutary.

As a whole, Gavaldón's earlier films tended to be better — less heavy-handed, more inspired, and more energetic. Rosauro Castro may be the strongest of those screened, with an excellent performance by Pedro Armendariz, a classical actor in excelsis. The film was slightly limited by an occasionally bombastic score that obtruded upon the atmospheric, Western imagery which was among the film's strong-points.

Night Falls, an imitation noir — also with Armendariz, in fine form — was enjoyable too, particularly for its genre mechanics. Soledad's Shawl, with Arturo de Cordova and, once again, Pedro Armendariz in his trademark role, was magnificently photographed by the extraordinary Gabriel Figueroa and succeeds as a melodrama. Both films were screened in excellent new prints, although possibly too dark.

The later films by Gavaldón were generally more pedestrian. The Littlest Outlaw, a children's film produced by Disney Studios, was almost wholly uninteresting, despite the presence of Armendariz and photography by Phillips. At least the film was screened in a very good IB Technicolor print.

Macario, Gavaldón's most famous film, based on a B. Traven story, is not without some merits, but scarcely an authentic classic, despite being photographed by Figueroa. La Rosa Blanca, a political film based on a Traven novel, ultimately sustained little narrative interest.

A partial exception among the later films was Autumn Days, also based on a Traven story and photographed by Figueroa; it features a moving performance by Ignacio Lopes Tarso who starred in several Gavaldón films. This film has something of the mysterious atmosphere of films like Leopoldo Torre Nilsson's Hand in the Trap or Joseph Losey's The Ceremony. One appealing aspect was the perspective on young working-class women the film offers, contrasting, interestingly, in its warmth with Claude Chabrol's Les Bonnes Femmes, for example.

One would have thought that a film based on a Juan Rulfo short story, and co-scripted partly by both Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Carlos Fuentes, would be more absorbing, at least narratively, than the tedious The Golden Cockerel appears to be. The story was effectively retold by Arturo Ripstein as The Realm of Fortune in 1986. The film was presented in an excellent, new color print.

Film Society Recap of Kawakita Prize Winners

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Category: Jack Angstreich
Published on Saturday, 22 August 2009 22:58
Written by Jack Angstreich
The Film Society of Lincoln Center's salute to filmmakers who have won the Kawakita Prize spotlighted three films each by eight directors, with all the prints imported from Japan.

Akira Kurosawa's absorbing Stray Dog was presented in a print inferior to those shown in New York recently, so I didn't stay to see it again. The print of Rashomon was better, not pristine, but with good tonalities. This work is not quite the masterpiece it is often reputed to be but it has many fine sequences, such as the woodman's walk through the forest at the film's beginning — it is interesting that the image of sunlight seen through the treetops was an early influence on Stan Brakhage. The print of Ikiru — a much more ambitious film — was even more impressive. This film, featuring an extraordinary performance by Kurosawa stalwart, Takashi Shimura, is remarkable for the conflicting reactions it has aroused from formalist critics — praised by the Catholic humanist, André Bazin, but dismissed as a sentimental, metteur-en-scène film by the advocates of la politique des auteurs, yet championed as one of the greatest, postwar Japanese masterpieces by the Marxist, Noël Burch in a radical analysis.

Nagisa Oshima has also been extravagantly praised by Burch, especially for the disjunctive, intense editing of a film like Violence at Noon, long unseen in New York; it was screened in an excellent 35-millimeter print. Formally, this film contrasts with the longer-take styles of Boy and The Ceremony, both presented in good, color prints, although one reel of Boy appears to have been misprinted in soft focus. While the stylistic strategies of Oshima vary greatly, the films are united by a thoroughgoing approach to critiquing modern Japanese society by way of his attraction to extreme material — these films featuring rape, murder, suicide, child-exploitation, incest, etc. Oshima composes sensitively for the widescreen frame, a trademark of the Japanese cinema of the 1960s.

Kaneto Shindo's The Island is also beautifully photographed, in black-and-white; the attractive cinematography is elegantly complemented by rhythmic editing which structures the entire film, unencumbered by dialogue, and reinforced by a fine score. Possibly, more remarkable is Onibaba, Shindo's surprisingly disturbing, poetic horror film, forcefully shot in black-and-white widescreen; the print screened here was outstanding. Discerning a directorial vision uniting Shindo's disparate filmography has thus far defeated this viewer; A Last Note, an odd, quasi-Chekhovian elegy adds to the perplexity. The film is notable as the last appearance of the great Japanese actress and Ozu regular, Haruko Sugimura.

Shohei Imamura's early masterpiece, Intentions of Murder relates its bizarre story by recourse to eccentric, black-and-white, widescreen compositions. After his stylistically innovative works in the 1960s, Imamura shifted to a more classical style, as can be seen in his serial-killer drama, Vengeance is Mine, distinguished by a career performance by Ken Ogata. This classicism reaches its apotheosis in Black Rain; it's a pity that the print of this film was warped, preventing any possibility of having the full frame in focus.

The inclusion of three works by documentarian, Sumiko Haneda, seemed to me to be a questionable choice. I didn't stay through the full three hours of Ode to Mt. Hayachine but it was refreshing to see a film of this kind which eschewed the format of television documentaries. Overall, this sober, straightforward, observational approach was employed effectively in Akiko: Portrait of a Dancer. Haneda's attempt to retell a classic Japanese tale by means of  documentary images in Into the Picture Scroll: The Tale of Yamanaka Tokiwa seemed to this viewer to be an aesthetic disaster.

Kon Ichikawa's vivid and moving A Full-Up Train, photographed in the standdard ratio, now seems exceptional considering the director's expressive engagement with the widescreen frame in his most celebrated works. Ichikawa's left-wing sympathies provide an interesting contrast with the reactionary outlook of the author, Yukio Mishima, who provided the source material for the director's Conflagration. But I was even more impressed to re-see the heart-breaking Her Brother shot with a muted color palette by the great master cinematographer, Kazuo Miyagawa, and graced by gloriously subtle performances by Masayuki Mori and Kinuyo Tanaka; the print it was presented in was lovely.

Yôji Yamada is surely a less distinguished director than the others in this series, with the exception of Haneda; however, the three films by him presented here — Where Spring Comes Late, Tora-san's Sunrise and Sunset, and The Yellow Handkerchief, all featuring the talented actors, Kiyoshi Atsumi and Chieko Baisho — although conventional in approach were surprisingly touching. Yamada clearly has a feel for portraying the Japanese underclass and combining sentiment with humor. Additional pleasures could be found in the moving presence of Chishu Ryu as the grandfather in Where Spring Comes Late and the measured, lead performance of Ken Takakura in The Yellow Handkerchief.

I hope it is not excessively revisionist to speculate that Suzuki Seijun might be the greatest filmmaker presented in this series. Tokyo Drifter is a stylistic tour de force which one imagines Cahiers du Cinèma would have celebrated had the film been screened in France in the 1960s. Branded to Kill, although somewhat slighter and more in thrall to an exploitation formula, was, nonetheless, thoroughly engrossing. Despite the considerable reputation of the director's later, art film, Zigeunerweisen, after two viewings I still find the film, except for a few poetic moments, thoroughly unengaging. All three films were presented in good prints.

Lindsay Anderson Retrospective at Lincoln Center

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Category: Jack Angstreich
Published on Saturday, 22 August 2009 22:57
Written by Jack Angstreich
The Film Society of Lincoln Center's tribute to Lindsay Anderson was centered around Never Apologize, a video-recording of Malcolm McDowell's one-man show about the celebrated director. Although not exactly cinema, this video does frequently entertain and provides some insight into Anderson as an artist. McDowell's impersonations are often memorable as is his human appeal. McDowell's publlc appearances at several shows splendidly enlivened the retrospective.

All six of Anderson's theatrical features were screened. This Sporting Life — shown in a superb, presumably archival print — Anderson's first feature, seemed to this viewer to hold up as his strongest, distinguished by Denys Coop's fine black-and-white cinematography. The film's complex narrative structure, influenced possibly by Resnais, now seems under-appreciated; the film seems a more modernist and less purely naturalistic work than is usually described. The performance of Richard Harris remains spellbinding amidst that of several other excellent players.

If . . . . lost some of its impact by being screened in a less-than-pristine print. I have wondered whether the film might have been stronger if public school life were granted some validity, thus at least provoking a tension for the viewer in appreciating the conflict between the rebellious students and the establishment. As it is, what affection Anderson reportedly retained for his alma mater is visible principally in Miroslav Ondříček's lovely color photography; to this viewer, the monochrome sequences, although effective at creating an ambiguous, quasi-dreamlike relationship with the color scenes, would have been more intense if they had not been printed on color film.

O Lucky Man! would also have considerably benefitted from a newer print. One aspect which held up rather well for me was Alan Price's rock score both as music and as a structuring device. But the film does develop something akin to a worldview in its relationship to If . . . .; however, it is difficult to see how this notion of authorial vision can be extended to the films outside of the Mick Travis trilogy which seem to lack a unifying language.

The wear-and-tear on the print of In Celebration, from Kino, was somewhat less distracting. As a recording of a gripping stage-play, the film communicates something of the interest this must have possessed on the stage but I think Anderson fails to render the material truly cinematic and the abilities of the extraordinary cinematographer, Dick Busch are largely underused. The atmosphere of the house is well conveyed, however, and the actors are all outstanding with Alan Bates as scintillating as he's ever been.

Typically, there was no warning that the color in the print of Britannia Hospital had begun to fade and so I didn't stay to re-see it this time. However, the print of Whales of August had very intense color which brought out the natural splendor of the film's setting on the coast of Maine but, once again, the experience would have been more satisfying if the print had been more pristine — shots of the sky speckled by dirt on the celluloid undermines the effect of the photography. I was ultimately moved by the relationship of the two sisters played by Bette Davis and Lillian Gish and there were a few arresting moments such as cut to a low travelling shot of the feet of the two sisters as they walk out on their porch.

Anderson never became the major figure promised by his early short films. His admiration for John Ford was the occasion for the inclusion of two films by the great master. My Darling Clementine was shown in another damaged print (from Fox) but the tones of Joseph MacDonald's photography were well-preserved. One greatly laments the extensive cuts imposed by Darryl Zanuck whom Ford supposedly admired. The film features one of the few effective roles of  Victor Mature as Doc Holliday while Henry Fonda is magnificent as Wyatt Earp. One of the best war film's, They Were Expendable was shown in a gorgeous, pristine archival print from George Eastman House. Both films feature Ford's melancholy nostalgia, the sense of worlds constantly ebbing into a forlorn pastness as they unfold before our eyes. Ford's often overlooked sobriety can be appreciated when one considers that the Donna Reed character disappears, never to be heard from again in the course of the film, a memory almost as soon as she appears.

2006 New York Film Festival Reviewed

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Category: Jack Angstreich
Published on Saturday, 22 August 2009 22:52
Written by Jack Angstreich

The 2006 New York Film Festival opened with The Queen, by Stephen Frears, which was notable for its excellent performances — especially that of Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth II — but also confirms the view that this director can be a subtle stylist with a real command of visual rhetoric.

Alberto Lattuada's interesting and entertatining Mafioso, from 1962, was revived in a gorgeous new print.

Tian Zhuangzhuang's sumptuously photographed The Go Master seemed to me curiously opaque even after a second viewing — although less so, the second time — but I recommend this to anyone who has followed the career of this remarkable filmmaker.

Woman on the Beach is an engaging new film by the director of the extraordinary The Turning Gate; the film is notable for its peculiar use of zooms for which the director offered, interestingly, little justification in his press conference.

Todd Field's Little Children is a well-made film with some strong acting and a somewhat offbeat, though not unimpressive, visual style.

I didn't see Marc Recha's Autumn Days, but Abderrahmane Sissako's Bamako is an intelligent examination of the economic contradictions of the Third World; its use of video transferred to film is a liability, however.

Otar Iosseliani's humorous Garden in Autumn was more effectively transferred from video and is a delightful work if, probably, not among the director's very finest.

I was unable to see the new print of Warren Beatty's Reds, nor did I see Michael Apted's latest, 49 Up,  but Manoël de Oliveira's Belle Toujours, a kind of sequel to Luis Buñuel's  classic, Belle de Jour, is another elusive but satisfying late work from this great master.

I was not pleased with the video-to-film transfer in the newest opus of the legendary Alain Resnais, Private Fears in Public Places — for which reason I did not stay to the end — and the use of video in Jafar Panahi's Offside was no more acceptable, but this was a charming, if possibly minor, further excursion into feminist territory, this time with a kind of boisterous comedy.

I did not see Satoshi Kon's anime film, Paprika, but Syndromes and a Century, by Apichatpong Weerisethakul, is another exquisite puzzle from this fascinating talent; it featured glorious photography and is notable, again, for its unusual narrative structure.

The festival centerpiece was Pedro Almodovar's very enjoyable Volver but it confirmed me in my view that this director has never truly been a major artist despite his evident and abundant merits.

The Host, by Bong Joon Ho, has, it seems to me, been slightly overpraised and, to my mind, is something of a disappointment as a follow-up to the director's Memories of Murder, one of the greatest of all Korean films but this is certainly worth a look.

I could not accept the video-to-film transfer of The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, by Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn, for which reason I did not stay to the end; nor was I pleased with the use of video in David Lynch's Inland Empire either, but I must confesses that viewing this was a powerful and memorable experience.

Falling by Barbara Albert, partly a meditation on the collapses of radical political aspirations, is a quite fine generational study and should further cement the director's growing reputation.

Triad Election by the amazing Johnny To evinced the usual craftsmanship we have come to expect from this brilliant filmmaker but the film did not have quite the impact of several others among his recent works.

I did not see Our Daily Bread, by Nikolaus Geyrhalter, another disappointing video-to-film transfer, nor These Girls by Tahani Rached, however, I did rather appreciate Climates, by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, another film shot on video — partly a portrait of romantic alienation — but one conceived with considerably subtlety and sophistication.

Emmanuel Bourdieu's Poison Friends was also shot on video, but it benefitted from a very clever and original screenplay and was sensitively and creatively executed.

Sophia Coppola's Marie Antoinette was certainly, visually handsome and was notable for its interesting, paratactic approach to storytelling; I don't yet have a strong view on its ultimate merits but, again, I think it deserves to be seen.

Lino Brocka's powerful, indeed shocking, Insiang, from 1976, a melodrama with a certain political acuity, was revived in a very good print and this was especially welcome since the film has been so difficult to see here for so many years.

Guillermo del Toro's magnificent Pan's Labyrinth was the closing night film; this breathtaking fantasy was perhaps slightly limited in its achievement by a certain simplicity in its dramatization of fascism but this approach has a generic justification in the film's debt to melodramatic forms.

Special events included, among others, a screening (on video) of Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo and also of a beautiful print of the same director's The Holy Mountain, which seemed to me to be mainly a historical curiosity despite its considerable cult reputation.

I attended an excellent Directors Dialogue with Stephen Frears on The Queen.

This year's Views from the Avant-Garde included, among many other impressive works: an excellent Saul Levine program of 8mm films in new 16mm restorations; the landmark films Cat's Cradle and The Riddle of Lumen by Stan Brakhage, presented in disappointing restoration prints, as well as the beautiful, Nodes; a gorgeous new film by Nathaniel Dorsky, Song and Solitude; a program of 35-millimeter Kenneth Anger restorations which varied in visual quality; a beautiful new film by Jim Jennings, Silk Ties; a fascinating retrospective program of the work of the Italian filmmaker and artist, Paolo Gioli; and a very strong Ernie Gehr program with a magnificent new 35-millimeter restoration of Serene Velocity.

This year's retrospective sidebar was a tribute to fifty years of Janus Films, a wonderful series present almost entirely in amazing, newly struck prints.

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea

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Category: Eric Lurio
Published on Wednesday, 31 July 2013 19:19
Written by Eric Lurio

Little kids love dinosaurs. Ages ago, as a little kid myself, I was like everyone else in that regard. I had a Styrofoam T-rex skeleton in my room, some toys and a whole bunch of books on the subject.

One of these was a guide to ancient life published by Little Golden books. Like some of my others, it went back to the beginning of the planet, which meant that it had a little bit on the first four billion years of earth’s history and really started in the Cambrian, where the first fossils came from. I really liked this part. The animals from the Paleozoic were so exotic and weird, especially the invertebrates, which were usually ignored after the Devonian’s fish and amphibians, took the stage and stuff started to look like dinosaurs

But I was fascinated by the invertebrates. I was a trilobite freak. They dominated the seas until the middle of the Paleozoic, and then they petered out, going extinct at the end of the era. But there were others, giant sea scorpions, and echinoderms: starfish, sea urchins, and beautiful and weird stalked things called sea lilies or crinoids. Ah crinoids! a minor childhood obsession that stuck in the back of my mind for a lifetime. Crinoids still exist at the bottom of the seas and I dearly wanted to see one in real life.

Sea Lilies dominated the seas of the Paleozoic, they are some of the most common fossils and in the shallow seas of the time and, there were billions of them, covering the ocean floor like sunflowers in Kansas. One tiny group of them managed to survive into the Mesozoic and they flourished again, but after the dinosaurs died out, they retreated into the deep abyss, well out of range for snorkelers like yours truly.

Then, decades after I gave up hope, an opportunity presented itself.

Roatán is the largest of Honduras’ Bay Islands. G Adventures had a month long tour of Central America that was 20% off, and it being cold up here in New York in December, I had decided to take it. Roatain was one of the stops and it was primarily for the beach. One thing I discovered when I got there was that there was this guy named Karl Stanley, who had a submarine and gave tours of the continental shelf all the way down to the bottom of the Caribbean Sea. The eight year old in the back of my mind screamed out: “There’s CRINOIDS down there and I wanna see ‘em!!!” So the middle-aged rest of me decided investigate whether or not it was practicable or not.

There are lots of dive shops in Half Moon Bay, and they all knew about Stanley’s Roatán Institute for Deep-sea Exploration, but unfortunately none of them could get me a reservation. He makes them himself via his website or in person. It’s either PayPal or cash, and at $600 p.p. is out of most people’s league and I didn’t know it was per person at double occupancy. Still, it was worth a try…

I went to Half Moon Bay’s lone Internet café and sent an email. Then I went to actually find the office. This was a bit harder than I expected, as it was on the second floor of a slightly rundown house surrounded by near identical rundown houses. I found him and introduced myself. He then explained that due to weight distribution on his submarine, it was two passengers or nothing, but there was this woman who wanted a ride. He’d contact here and if she was a go, I was a go. That’s six hundred bucks, IN CASH. Something like Sixteen THOUSAND Honduran Lampiras.

So I went on an expedition to find an ATM that had that much money in it. This required a boat trip to the next town and sneaking into a ritzy resort with guards.

I went back to Half Moon Bay with a huge bulge in my money belt and prayed that I wouldn’t get robbed.

I stopped by the office again and asked Stanly if he wanted my money. He said not yet, he hadn’t heard from the other person. So I went back into town and waited…

So I had dinner and then went to a bar for a bit and went to bed. The next morning, I got up, had some coffee and went to look at the submarine. Stanley came down and told me he hadn’t heard from the other person. I said he should call, in case the guy at the hotel had forgot to give her the message.

It turned out he had: The start of a glorious day.

So we waited while my partner went to get six hundred bucks in cash while we were waiting, Stanley and his crew prepped the boat while he told me his story:

He was a big fan of nature shows as a kid, and in junior high he decided to make a deep-sea submarine in his back yard. That’s sort of like building a Lear Jet, it’s not rocket science, but…no, it IS rocket science. You have to find the right materials, understand propulsion and pressure, and make most of the parts yourself.

I guess he tried it out in a lake or something, he went to a trade show and tried to sell it No buyers, which is understandable, who in his right mind would buy the equivalent of a homemade spaceship from a frigging teenager?

So Stanly went to college, getting a BA in American politics or something. I was pretty amazed because I would have imagined he would have majored in Oceanography. I think he took some courses however.

So he took his midlevel tech toy and went to Roatan. The reason was twofold: The continental shelf was only a couple of hundred yards from the beach, and Honduras didn’t have any regulations regarding submarines. That was 1994.

Since then he’s built a better sub and has gone down thousands of times. He complained that he undercharged National Geographic and Animal planet when they went down with him to film abyssal sea life. He was telling me about the politics of the island when my partner and her boyfriend showed up.

We shook hands; I gave Stanly my money and so did she. We were weighed, signed a waiver (he doesn’t have insurance} and off we wen…no we didn’t. She went into the sub and got a massive claustrophobia attack. She got out and demanded her money back. White as a sheet she was. My dream of crinoids was dying right then and there. I still wanted to go, but without another person, it was impossible. I waited while he got out his cell phone and called another person who was interested. He still was and was thrilled he had just gotten someone else to go with him.

I was stuck. Stanly was out twelve hundred bucks and all the work for the morning’s preparations. I felt sick, but then... then he came up with an idea. He was friends with a retired nurse who ran a clinic on the island for the impoverished residents and had promised to give one of the volunteers a free trip. He made the call. Someone was picked. I would only have to pay the per person fee.

Inner space, here I come!

Continental shelves are something that is rather hard to imagine for us landlubbers. Most people who go to the beach generally find that the ground beneath the sea gradually gets deeper and deeper until one cannot stand up anymore. One doesn’t expect a two-mile high cliff. As we went along the surface of the Caribbean, it was like the glass bottom boats that were available for trips at far less money. Bits of coral surrounded by plants and small fish. It was surprisingly drab. Then we hit the cliff face, went out into the open sea, and started going down.

With our backs to the cliff face, things started getting dark,that was about two hundred feet. Then five. It was totally black and our guide decided to turn on the lights, but that wasn’t much of a help until we passed a thousand then at around 1200 feet we hit bottom.

There was a rock. Stanly told us to look for a beer can on our left. The rock was further away than I had thought, and it was huge. There was a chimera, a kind of shark swimming close by. We didn’t see it for long. However we did see sponges, though, lots and lots of sponges.

As we realized we were actually at the bottom of the sea, Jeremy got us off the bottom, turned our sub around, and began the slow ascent to the surface.

Over the last two million years, the polar ice caps have retreated and advanced many times, and with each advance the depth of the ocean has varied by hundreds of feet, and with no pollution to harm it for most of that time, the coral grew and grew. Coral only thrives near the surface, so the reefs down near the bottom are all fossils, but everything else is still quite alive and mostly sponges and crustaceans. We didn’t see all that many crustaceans, but we did see some fish swimming along the cliff face. They didn’t look as weird as I had hoped, but it was kind of strange to see them swimming vertically instead of horizontally. Then we saw one.

There are two kinds of crinoids: stalked sea lilies and free-swimming, stalkless feather stars. Down where were we were, the stalked kind pretty much had the area all to themselves. There one was in all it’s glory with its fronds hanging out, catching detritus from further up. I’d been waiting decades to see this. For a second I was a kid again, dreaming of the Paleozoic, which was what was sitting right in front of me. Jeremy pointed out a nondescript shell, which, he said was worth ten thousand dollars. It was a Monoplacophoran, which was known only from fossils and down around here. Prior to 1952, it was thought they had been extinct for 250 million years. I’d heard of these and wished they were more interesting looking.

The thing about Jeremy’s submarine was that it had a huge front window. The view of the cliff face was really easy to look out of. Life became more common as we ascended, and I got to see more sea lilies and Coral-like Sea Fans. There was a feather star sitting on a sea fan, which would have made a nice photograph, and all sorts of weird sponges and tunicates, which are vertebrates who think they’re sponges. Then at about four hundred feet we saw a lionfish.

Lionfish are an invasive species that got into the Caribbean area when either hurricane Andrew or Katrina freed some from an aquarium breeding company in Florida or Louisiana. They are currently everywhere between the Carolinas and Venezuela and are THE ecological problem of the region, which is saying something.

All too soon it was over. Had that women not gotten claustrophobia, we would have had an extra hour, but I had seen what I came to see. It would be enough.

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