Shohei Imamura’s brilliant, devastating television documentary In Search of the Unreturned Soldiers in Thailand (Mikikan-hei o otte: Tai-hen) concludes a pair of works begun the previous year with In Search of the Unreturned Soldiers in Malaysia. (Another documentary, Outlaw-Matsu Comes Home, 1973, functions as a coda to the two films.) The second film consists of […]
Monthly Archives: February 2013
From a row of hats on hooks on an office wall, one pops off as though a poltergeist were at play; this fedora is light, whereas the others are dark. Recalling Pudovkin’s The End of St. Petersburg (1927), an overhead shot of workers from this office depart for the day, their stark shadows competing with […]
Among ethnographic or anthropological filmmakers, France’s Jean Rouch was perhaps the only one to rival Margaret Mead and, to the extent that he qualified, Robert J. Flaherty. Horendi is an engrossing, hypnotic, exciting, and surprisingly moving documentation of a seven-day ritual in rhythm and dance, by which Songhai women in western Africa, possessed by spirits, […]
One of Mikio Naruse’s most realistic and piercing works, and one that is intermittently beautifully Ozuvian, Midareru examines the unraveling of a family whose old-fashioned market cannot compete with the new supermarket across the street—an impersonal corporate-owned consumer playground that can offer identical items at a much lower price. Japan’s new killer competitive spirit is […]
Thomas, an old Englishman, has been a teacher at the government-run primary school in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, in the east Indian Ocean, probably since its launch thirty years earlier. It is 2004, the year an earthquake launches something else: a tsunami that kills 230,000 people, Thomas’s wife and daughter among them, and many […]
Delicate and exquisite, Une aussi longue absence, Henri Colpi’s first film as director (Colpi edited Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima, mon amour, 1959, and Last Year at Marienbad, 1961), is a dream of a film. From France and Italy, written by Marguerite Düras and Gérard Jarlot, it shared the top prize at Cannes with Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana. […]
Sylvia Sidney, here exquisitely lovely as well as delicately poignant, gives her finest performance in the title role of Jennie Gerhardt, based on Theodore Dreiser’s 1911 novel. Dreiser, who didn’t think much of the novel, his second, nevertheless admired the film, which he described as “beautifully interpreted.” Director Marion Gering gave this piece of work […]
