Global Discoveries on DVD:
Winter Clearance -
(with thanks and apologies to James Agee)

By Jonathan Rosenbaum

Agee: Film Writing and Selected Journalism . A book, not a DVD—one of two recent James Agee volumes edited by Michael Sragow for the Library of America and a costly collectible like some of the DVDs covered below (see The Val Lewton Horror Collection, La maman et la putain, A Donald Richie Box Set, Unseen Cinema, and Written and Directed by Preston Sturges), raising similar spiky issues. LOA is widely regarded as the Criterion or Kino of US literary publishing, or the Yank equivalent to Gallimard, so its edition of Agee is bound to be viewed by many as definitive. Personally, I’m already a tad suspicious of a series that casually omits Nelson Algren, Ernest Hemingway, Ring Lardner, and the Beats from the pantheon of American Lit, but maybe there are logistical obstacles to including them that I know nothing about. Similarly, Sragow may have good reasons for omitting from both volumes (1) all of Agee’s poetry (which is perfectly OK with me), (2) my favourite of all of Agee’s essays unrelated to film apart from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (“America, Look at Your Shame!”—a searing 1943 memoir about racism and his own cowardice on a Manhattan bus that first surfaced, posthumously, in the January-February 2003 issue of The Oxford American, and has already been reprinted in at least three other collections), and (3) a good many of the uncollected movie reviews Agee wrote for Time that I’ve been wanting for years to read, such as the one of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). Did Sragow decide that Agee’s extended reflections about US commercial orchids, cockfighting, Ingrid Bergman, Deborah Kerr, and Gregory Peck, all included, would all be more important to future generations than his responses to racism and Orson Welles? Or were there other issues at stake? I’m grateful for the review of “an early beatnik satire Salome Where She Danced (1945)” cited by Manny Farber in Negative Space. But it’s also hard to avoid a tinge of regret about what’s been exiled from the canon for the foreseeable future.

Anne of the Indies . If you order Jacques Tourneur’s glorious 1951 tale of a woman pirate (Jean Peters) from the German Amazon, as I did, Die Piratenkönigin is the title to look for. Chris Fujiwara grandly calls this movie “a definition of Tourneurian mise-en-scène, a choreography of movements that annul each other, a passionate and bleak study of disappearance and impermanence.” The Technicolor looks almost as lush as it did when I first saw this at the age of eight.

Beau travail. Claire Denis’ only musical, rarely described as such, transcends all its literary and military huffing and puffing whenever its characters or its camera starts to dance. If she employed a choreographer on all her other features, I’d probably like them more, although Judith Mayne’s terrific new book about Denis in Illinois’ “Contemporary Film Directors” series proposes plenty of other good reasons for liking them. New Yorker’s bare-bones edition does nothing to interfere with the hypnotic spell of this 1999 feature, and Denis Lavant’s crazed epilepsy in a disco at the end is almost as good as his grasshopper leaps in the middle of Carax’s Mauvais sang (1986).

Bigger Than Life. A French label promised to bring out this 1956 Nicholas Ray CinemaScope tragedy in August, along with Anne of the Indies. But when last heard from they had delayed Tourneur’s La Flibustière des Antilles for a month or so and bumped the release of Ray’s Derrière le miroir to early November. So when I came across an ad for a pirated American copy of the Ray movie from MikeT579@hotmail.com for $24.99 plus postage, I figured what the hell. Expect a slow delivery and a mono soundtrack, but the letterboxed image looks fine. (I just learned that for the same amount, you can order a Spanish or Mexican edition with “English or Spanish audio options,” Más poderosa que la Vida, from www.xploitedcinema.com.)

Danger—Love at Work. Otto Preminger usually ignored the films he directed prior to Laura (1944), and most critics have tended to follow suit. So the British Film Institute’s release of this obscure 1937 screwball comedy about a spoiled, wealthy lawyer’s encounter with a supposedly eccentric family manages to round out our view of his career without prompting anybody to declare, “ Eureka !” Neither terrible nor especially memorable, this stars Ann Sothern, Jack Haley, and Mary Boland.

The Day I Became a Woman. After discounting Blackboards (2000) and At Five in the Afternoon (2003), I prefer Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s recent work as a producer or writer–producer on films by family members—on The Apple (1998), Joy of Madness (2003), The Day I Became a Woman (2000), and Stray Dogs (2004)—to many of the more recent films he’s directed himself, including Gabbeh and A Moment of Innocence (both 1996), The Silence (1998), and Afghan Alphabet (2002). I realize this is a minority position, but suspect this is at least partially because of standard auteurist reflexes. The two features directed by Makhmalbaf’s wife, Marzieh Meshkini—The Day I Became a Woman and StrayDogs—are particularly striking in the witty way they combine mythic surrealism with social critiques, so I’m glad that the former is now out on DVD from a new label, Olive Films, with an instructive commentary by Richard Peña.

Détective . Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature in stereo (1985)—just two-track, unlike most of his later aural extravaganzas (because, as he explained at the time, “I only have two hands”)—is available that way on a Region 2 PAL release from www.optimumreleasing.com in the UK, even though for some perverse reason it says “mono” on the box. Colin MacCabe offers an edifying introduction.

Gabbeh . Prior to Kandahar , this is perhaps Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s most popular feature—serving, as he undoubtedly knew it would, as an excellent tourist poster for foreigners confronting at least one branch of Iranian folklore. It’s available now from New Yorker, with a useful and conscientiously detailed commentary by Godfrey Cheshire. It may well be the most visual of the works by the major Iranian filmmaker who seems the least interested in images.

Hammett . For years I’ve been hoping to see the original Wim Wenders cut of the feature that I consider his most underrated, even after producer Francis Ford Coppola substantially revised it. Sam Fuller, who acted in both versions and contributed a few ideas to them (such as the shot from under the typewriter keys), told me more than once that the original was incomparably better. So I was crestfallen to learn from Wenders when he visited Chicago last spring that he recently approached Coppola’s company about bringing out a DVD with both versions, only to be informed that the director’s cut no longer exists. A video that was once made of Wenders’ version, taped off a Steenbeck, may still exist somewhere, but the film itself was junked. Since I consider this fictionalized biopic about Dashiell Hammett to be a kind of belated fulfillment of one of the ultimate dreams of the French New Wave—to make a Hollywood film projecting a European view of recycled American pulp (which is probably why Godard praised the Coppola version when it first appeared, in 1982)—it’s an incalculable loss, and one that reminds us that things aren’t so different now from the way they were when studios were slicing up works by Stroheim and Welles. If you want to see what’s left of the film, there’s a Region 4 DVD on PAL of the Coppola version available from www.xploitedcinema.com.

Inside/Out . If one of the ultimate dreams of an American cinephile filmmaker might be to shoot an indie feature in ‘Scope and stereophonic sound with Godard as producer, it’s a little-known fact that writer-director-cinematographer Rob Tregenza actually realized this precise dream in 1997, on his third feature, a very strange black-and-white opus shot in the wilds of Maryland with a minimum of dialogue. Now that it’s out on DVD, available from Tregenza’s own company at www.cinemaparallel.com, you can judge for yourself. Godard’s name doesn’t appear in the credits—presumably because he didn’t want to get a slew of scripts sent to him in Rolle—but two of the lead actors, Bérangère Allaux and Frédéric Pierrot, come directly from his then-current For Ever Mozart. I don’t know if Godard has produced any other films, but I can vouch for the fact that he contributed financing to Marcel Hanoun’s L’authentique procès de Carl-Emmanuel Jung (1966), Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach (1967), and Danielle Jaeggi’s La fille de Prague avec un sac trop lourd (1978)—even though you won’t find a word about this (or about Inside/Out) in MacCabe’s recent Godard biography.

Kwik Stop. As long as we’re talking about special American indie features that you’ve probably never heard of, here’s a gem that’s more recent (2001) as well as more accessible: everyone I know who has seen Kwik Stop likes it a lot, and that includes Roger Ebert. Writer-director and lead actor Michael Gilio’s first feature might be described as a comedy with too many close-ups for a comedy, or as a road movie that goes nowhere, or as a love story that keeps shifting its postulates. But these are all essentially defeated definitions for a movie that happily invents its own rules. You can readily find this DVD on the Internet without any pointers from me.

Three Fritz Lang films. I already have a less than ideal public-domain version of Scarlet Street (1945) and a virtually home-made edition of House by the River (1949) that I once found in New York ’s Kim Video. These are two of Lang’s most underrated Hollywood pictures:Scarlet Street is probably the most ferocious thing he ever did, worthy of Stroheim, while House by the River, apart from being the cheapest (a Republic Pictures release), certainly deserves a lot more attention than it’s received. So it’s very good news that Kino Video has done superb digital restorations of both films (drawn from archival sources) that positively glisten, and have added a commentary to the first by the irreplaceable Langian David Kalat and, to the second, an informed and informative interview with cinephile-critic-historian-distributor-filmmaker and Lang acquaintance Pierre Rissient, conducted by Variety reviewer Todd McCarthy as part of his documentary-in-progress about Rissient. (P.S. You can get a decent-looking DVD of Lang’s Western Union (1941), without extras, from Optimum Releasing in the UK —see Détective, above.)

Last Year at Marienbad . Since I continue to regard Alain Resnais’ second feature (1961), still his only one in ‘Scope, as one of the most thrilling movies ever made—though many critics persist in misreading it as pretentious and sterile—it matters a lot to me how it’s represented on DVD. I haven’t seen the recent French edition, but there’s no question that the recent one from the UK is infinitely better than the unadorned Fox Lorber job in the US , released some time ago. Best of all among the extras is a subtitled version of one of Resnais’ greatest shorts (about the Bibliothèque Nationale), the similarly creepy and hypnotic Toute la mémoire du monde (1958), and second best is a new French documentary about the film that has the wit and insight to cross-reference the film with both North by Northwest (1959) as its major predecessor and The Shining (1980) as its major successor. I’m also delighted with the French trailer, which, unless my ears are fooling me, is narrated by none other than Sacha Piteoff, the film’s sinister sort-of villain. But I’m less happy with the Introduction by Ginette Vincendeau, who rattles on about the film for over 18 minutes, giving plenty of ammunition to all the pretension-mongers without ever hinting that the film is a hilarious deadpan parody of both Hollywood glamour and Hollywood melodrama (I guess she missed the quote from Gilda), and only nominally acknowledging that the film is also both extremely frightening and breathtakingly beautiful.

The Val Lewton Horror Collection . Including a new documentary, there’s ten features on five discs, elegantly served up as double-features. Essential viewing, a joy to behold (I especially like what looks like the original one-sheet posters; and there are audio commentaries on seven of the features, including William Friedkin on The Leopard Man). Yet this is also somewhat frustrating in its packaging if one’s a completist like me. The highly cultivated low-budget producer Val Lewton turned out 11 personal B features at RKO between 1942 and 1946, then only three more features after that—each at a separate studio and with negligible impact. (I’ve seen only the last of these, the 1951 Apache Drums at Universal, which is by no means devoid of interest.) I’m sure it’s asking too much for anyone to include all 14 Lewtons in one box set, given all the rights issues. But why couldn’t we have had all 11 of the RKO features? Most of the nine that are included are only loosely definable as horror films anyway. Yet it’s as a producer of horror films that Lewton is known, even though it’s clear from the documentary that he regarded this more as an obstacle or a challenge than as a badge of honor. (In fact, out of the four masterpieces in the bunch, which are the first four—Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man, and The Seventh Victim, with the last my favourite—only the first of these qualifies unambiguously as horror.) So we get the nine “horror” items while Youth Runs Wild (which I’ve been wanting to see for decades) and Mademoiselle Fifi, two of the three movies he made in 1944, are now most likely to be consigned to oblivion for all eternity. Who, after all, would ever find them worth releasing outside a Lewton context, which is supposedly already “covered”? And of course the new documentary mainly ignores the other two films as well. So genre rules while Lewton himself still goes begging. A commercial pretext for making his work possible in the first place now becomes the only possible definition of it.

Love and Anger . It’s hard to think of any sketch films offering a headier whiff of 1968 (for better and for worse) than the wild Amor e rabbia from Italy, with episodes in ‘Scope by Marco Bellocchio (a tedious political debate in a classroom), Bernardo Bertolucci (an avant-garde collaboration with The Living Theatre), Godard (a bilingual, Franco-Italian experiment called Love that has something vaguely to do with the parable of the Prodigal Son), as well as ones by Carlo Lizzani and Pier Paolo Pasolini that I remember less clearly. I’m not sure if this feature ever made it to North America in 1968; I caught up with it in Paris a year or two later, and recall sticking around long enough to see the Godard segment twice. (It’s one of the richest and most ambitious of all his shorts.) The estimable NoShame has issued this in a two-disc set—giving us, as they typically do, more extras than we could possibly need, which is always preferable to fewer than we might want.

La maman et la putain . If you’re willing to spend a fortune and are sufficiently fluent in French, there’s an excellent edition of Jean Eustache’s 220-minute 1973 masterwork, The Motherand the Whore, available on a single disc from Japanese Amazon, subtitled exclusively in Japanese. Without being very fluent myself, I’ve still been having a grand time improving my French by reseeing the film with the script (published by Cahiers du Cinéma in 1986) in my lap, since I find Eustache’s compulsive verbosity much easier to read than to piece together by ear. In any case, for all you diehard Eustache fans out there, this is only the first volume in a three-disc series: the second has Mes petites amoureuses (1974), the third, Les Mauvaise fréquentations (1963) and Le Père Noël a les yeux bleus (1966).

Ozu Yasujiro: 100th Anniversary Collection . I can happily report that the Hong Kong company that’s been systematically releasing DVDs of Ozu films with English as well as Chinese subtitles, available in North America from such distributors as www.yesasia.com, has finally moved beyond the seasonal titles to some silent features as well as other important items that have previously been ignored. I’m still waiting for them to get around to my two favorite silent features, Tokyo Chorus (1931) and I Was Born, But… (1932), but I recently acquired copies of Passing Fancy (1933) and An Inn at Tokyo (1935), and among the sound features, Ozu’s first talkie, The Only Son (1936), Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family (1941, one of Ozu’s rare forays into upper-class life, and perhaps the most significant), A Hen in the Wind (1948, a powerful look at Japan’s postwar devastation), and his first colour feature, Equinox Flower (1958).

People Will Talk . I’ll say. If you think The Mother and the Whore is compulsively verbose as well as narcissistic, this 1951 mannerist oddity from Joseph L. Mankiewicz, recently issued by Fox—with Cary Grant embodyingthewriter-director’s inexhaustible self-regard while sounding off on all his opinions and pet theories—is the best introduction I can think of to what’s so weird about this auteur and his singular sense of his own wisdom and virtue. It’s supposed to be based on a play by Curt Goetz called Dr. Praetorius, and maybe it is, but the fact that it all appears to be written by Mankiewicz in his sleep surely tells us something no less relevant.

A Donald Richie Film Anthology . Imported from Japan and distributed in North America by the Toronto-based Marty Gross Film Productions (www.martygrossfilms.com), this single-disc release qualifies as a costly collectible because the price is $80 for home use and $125 for institutional use. Nevertheless, it’s an exemplary collection. Half a dozen of Richie’s 35 experimental films have been selected, all of them from the 60s and (typically) without any dialogue, ranging in length from the five-minute Boy with Cat (1967) to the 47-minute Five Filosophical Fables (1970), and also including Wargames (1962), Atami Blues (1962), Dead Youth (1967), and Cybele (1968). Richie himself introduces each one (in English) with a great deal of his lucidity, candor, charm, and laid-back detachment.

Touki Bouki: The Journey of the Hyena . Perhaps the first experimental African film—made by the late, great Djibril Diop Mambety in 1973—has recently been brought out by Kino Video, which has thoughtfully thrown in his still earlier short, Contras’ City (1969). Could that short be experimental as well? I haven’t yet had a chance to check and see, so I hope this historical possibility can be left open, at least for the time being.

Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde 1894-1941 . This awesome seven-disc box set, including 155 films by 100 artists and encompassing about 19 hours—curated by Bruce Posner and released jointly by Anthony Film Archives and Image Entertainment—is one of the key examples to date of DVDs being used to rewrite and expand the parameters of film history. Quite simply, Posner reinvents the American avant-garde cinema so that it now includes Busby Berkeley production numbers and Slavko Vorkapich montages as well as industrial experiments and home movies, meanwhile enriching certain things we already know (e.g., an ideal version of 1924’s Ballet Méchanique that now includes the original musical score and some shots in colour) and making available many more things that were formerly out of reach (including some Joseph Cornell films that have been finally brought into viewable form—that is to say, completed—by Lawrence Jordan.) I can’t pretend to do justice to this monument here, only point to it and gape.

Written and Directed by Preston Sturges . I don’t know whether this qualifies as an accidental fluke or as a coordinated piece of irrationality, but this delicious box set released by Universal in the UK, which folds out like a crazy accordion, contains seven of Sturges’ eight Paramount features from the 40s—Sullivan’s Travels, Hail the Conquering Hero, Christmas in July, The Lady Eve, The Palm Beach Story, The Great Moment, and The Great McGinty—while the eighth, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, was released separately by Paramount in the US around the same time. If one adds to this the Criterion editions of The Lady Eve, Sullivan’s Travels, and Unfaithfully Yours and the cheapo version of The Sin of Harold Diddlebock on www.oldies.com (not to be confused with the inferior version of this film re-edited by Howard Hughes, Mad Wednesday), this would seem to round off the Preston Sturges Story until the end of time as far as most people are concerned. All that remains, at least among the movies Sturges directed single-handedly, is the terrible one he made with Betty Grable at Fox, The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend (1948), and a low-budget overseas indie that almost everyone says is ghastly, The Notebooks of Major Thompson (1955), and which is so scarce nowadays that there’s no way of proving or disproving such a claim. (The 1990 documentary Preston Sturges: The Rise and Fall of an American Dreamer, written by Todd McCarthy and available on the Criterion edition of Sullivan’s Travels, doesn’t even bother to include a clip.) And here’s the rub: about a quarter of a century ago, when I was teaching at the School of Visual Arts in New York, they owned a 16mm print of this feature that I borrowed and watched several times on my 16mm projector back in Hoboken. As far as I was concerned, it wasn’t at all ghastly; it had considerable wit, charm, tenderness, and gallantry, even though it was far from typical Sturges and was clearly as much of a Poverty Row effort as House by the River had been for Lang. And that’s how I still remember it. But I can’t imagine I’ll get many chances to prove my own contention or even test my memory, because it looks like the Preston Sturges Story will survive, if at all, only on DVD, and that this particular story’s already been told. Critical revisionists need not apply.

Articles in this Section

Editor’s Note

Film/Art: Viennale
By Andréa Picard

DVD: Global Discoveries on DVD
By Jonathan Rosenbaum

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