Global Discoveries on DVD:
Weird Stuff From All Over

By Jonathan Rosenbaum

From Austria : Technically precise and somewhat austere in packaging, two ambitious new DVD labels from Vienna command attention. Österreichisches Filmmuseum’s edition of Dziga Vertov’s 1930 Entuziazm(Simfonja Donbassa)—or Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbass—is a two-disc set giving us Vertov’s first sound film before and after Peter Kubelka resynchronized much of the sound and image in 1976, under the conviction that the then-existing Russian prints had unwittingly screwed all this up. And the main event on the second disc is Kubelka at an editing table in 2005 offering a point-by-point argument and defense of his controversial restoration—a painstaking demonstration that significantly has the same running time as Vertov’s wacky film, 65 minutes, and draws upon the same theoretical notion of cinema replicating the human head that informed Kubelka’s design of the “Invisible Cinema” at the original headquarters of Anthology Film Archives at New York’s Public Theater.

So far, this is the Austrian Film Archives’ only DVD release, but their bare-bones web site (www.edition-filmmuseum.de), which hadn’t yet mentioned any price the last time I looked, is promising four more titles in 2006, including Eric von Stroheim’s Blind Husbands (1919), and cites a dozen more releases in preparation, by filmmakers ranging from Hellmuth Costard to Eisenstein, Pabst, and Welles.

Meanwhile, www.index-dvd.at—a joint effort of www.medienwerkstatt-wien.at and www.sixpackfilm.com, each of which has its own impressive website—already boasts four experimental film titles, none of which is cheap, but each of which is exemplary (and comes with a 20-page illustrated booklet in English and German): Valie Export: 3 Experimental Short Films, Kurt Kren: Action Films, Kurt Kren: Structural Films, and Peter Tscherkassky: Films from a Dark Room. As happy as I was to find Tscherkassky’s Outer Space on Experiments in Terror: Abstract and Experimental Horror in the U.S. (see the end of my column in Cinema Scope #22 for further details), the transfers of this and three more of his jaw-dropping 35mm black and white Cinemascope shorts on Films From a Dark Room are downright inspirational.

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From Belgium: My selection of Rendez-vous à Bray (1971) by André Delvaux (1926-2002) as the best box set of the year in Masters of Cinema’s end-of-the-year poll as well as one of the best in DVD Beaver’s (even though they point out that it was technically released in late 2004) prompts a bit of explanation. When I reviewed this period mood-piece for the April 1976 Monthly Film Bulletin, my appraisal began as follows: “An appealing foray into ambiguity that uses ellipsis as a kind of erotic invitation, Rendezvous at Bray largely wins one over because its more modest ambitions are so gracefully realized. Derived from a short story by Julien Gracq—a writer whose rather specialized terrain seems midway between the Gothic novel and Surrealism—its boundaries are clearly marked by its cozy range of cultural references and its attractive period atmosphere, both of which allow for fireside reveries more nourishing to the imagination than to any prolonged analysis.”

The erotic spells of Anna Karina and Bulle Ogier in the film as well as other virtues must have wound up counting for much more than my demurrals, because when I first heard about a box set devoted to this film last fall, in a post by Fred Patton to the excellent chat group “a film by” , I was amazed at how vividly the sensual allure of this film remained firmly lodged in my memory, and I decided I had to hunt down a copy. With Patton’s help, I was able to find a way of ordering this set (with two DVDs, a CD, a paperback book, and a pamphlet) online from Belgium at www.mediadis.com . (There’s also a detailed review in French available at www.cinergie.be . )

I’m still trying to decide whether Rendez-vous à Bray is something major or just a beguiling enchantment, but at this point I’m prone to call it at the very least a major enchantment. Mostly it charts a mysterious night in 1917 spent by a Luxembourgian pianist and music journalist (Mathieu Carrière) who’s been summoned by a friend, a soldier and composer (Roger van Hool), to his house in a Paris suburb. The friend inexplicably never puts in an appearance, but the woman (Karina) who prepares dinner, whose identity is never clarified, eventually takes him to bed. This narrative is periodically punctuated with flashbacks involving the two friends as well as the soldier’s girlfriend (Bulle Ogier), a character who doesn’t exist in Gracq’s story. Though it’s in colour rather than black and white, beautifully shot by the great Belgian cinematographer Ghislain Cloquet (who also did outstanding colour work for Demy, Bresson, Polanski, and Penn), Rendez-vous à Bray is closer in spirit to something like Gertrud (1964) in its haunted silent-movie textures (including many irises) and its sexy absences and intervals than it is to something like Jules et Jim (1962)—which it more superficially resembles, at least in the flashbacks. (Maybe the fact that Dreyer wanted to shoot Gertrud in colour is relevant.)

The multilingual box set, most of it in French, Flemish/Dutch, and English—prepared with Delvaux’s input a few weeks before his death—is an exquisite labour of love. Philippe Raynaert’s graceful 24-minute intro, “Rendez-vous with André Delvaux”—which comes closer to a nourishing prolonged analysis than my 1976 review suggested was possible—spells out the contents, designed to show Delvaux’s close involvements with painting, music, literature, and cinema. All of these are evident in the feature, explicated in Raynaert’s lecture, and further represented, respectively, by Delvaux’s half-hour With Dieric Bouts (1975); his 20-minute Moviola (1985) about Frédéric Devresse (a composer he often collaborated with) plus a CD with music (including Brahms and Franck) and dialogue from the film; a paperback edition of Gracq’s 78-page story, in French only, with a preface by Gracq about Delvaux; and Delvaux’s seven-minute 1001 Films (1989), dedicated to the former director of the Belgian Cinémathèque. (Delvaux used to perform piano accompaniments to silent films there—as the hero of Rendez-vous is seen doing in one of the flashbacks, at a commercial screening of Feuillade’s Fantômas.) The pamphlet is an illustrated interview with Delvaux in French and Flemish, and there are also some extras relating to the feature, including a couple of TV documentaries of the period. (One of these, labeled an interview with Karina, is in fact mostly an interview with Delvaux while she gazes at him with unbridled affection.)

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From France: Ever since I published “A la Recherche de Luc Moullet” in the November-December 1977 issue of Film Comment, I’ve been impatiently awaiting the day when this important critic and filmmaker—the most neglected of all the major French New Wave figures associated with Cahiers du Cinéma—finally starts to get his due in North America. I even used to dream about a sequel to my article to celebrate this event, to be entitled “Moullet Retrouvé”—though so far, it’s possible that the closest he’s come to global recognition is the moment in Godard’s Le mépris where Brigitte Bardot is seen reading his book on Fritz Lang in a bathtub.

Happily, thanks to the initiative of fellow Moullet enthusiast Michael Chaiken, some belated Moullet-spotting should finally be taking place around the same time the column appears, when a traveling Moullet retrospective with subtitled prints will start to circulate at a few selected venues. And as backup, let me call attention to one of the Moullet features showing in this retrospective, La comédie du travail (1987), which has recently become the first Moullet feature to appear on DVD, albeit without any subtitles, in the blaq out collection (www.blaqout.com)—which also boasts titles by Merzak Allouache, Otar Iosseliani, Sally Potter, Fernando Solanas, Béla Tarr, and Karen Yedaya. (The fact that its “coming soon” section is blank doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in its longevity.) Also included is Moullet’s brilliant 1984 short Barres, with no dialogue at all—an encyclopedic comic inventory of the many ways one can enter the Paris Métro without paying—and a half-hour interview with Moullet. (P.S.: The forthcoming Cinéma 11, published by Léo Scheer, will include a DVD with two Moullet shorts—his inspired and hilarious 1991 tribute to slag heaps, La cabale des oursins, and Le fantôme de Longstaff.)

Given how hysterically funny most of Moullet’s films are (I’m aware of only two non-comic titles in the 30-odd items in his filmography—his brilliant 1978 essay Origins of a Meal and his 1996 Henry James adaptation, Le fantôme de Longstaff), it’s surprising how dour he is in the interview, although his deadpan manner is also an essential part of his equipment as a comic performer. A director of economy in every sense of the word, Moullet essentially began his career without much polish or technique of any kind—a lack which he used as a kind of political provocation—and then gradually developed an awesome mastery as both director and comic performer. La comédie du travail—possibly, along with his first feature Brigitte et Brigitte (1966), the Moullet work that relates most specifically to France, in this case to its welfare system—was made at a point when this mastery was fully achieved, and it concludes with some of his finest mountain landscapes (a Moullet specialty). It’s also one of his most tender films.

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From Italy: The latest film of Abbas Kiarostami that I’m aware of, made and released last year, is the unnamed centerpiece of a three-part, 105-minute Italian feature called Tickets, all set on the same train traveling from central Europe to Rome, preceded by an Ermanno Olmi episode and followed by a Ken Loach episode. Employing what appears to be a skillful professional actress (Silvana De Santis) and a very beautiful way of filming the passing landscapes while elliptically following the two main characters through several cars (the cinematographer is Mahmoud Kalari, who also shot The Wind Will Carry Us), it’s something that might be regarded as a return to form, but it’s so far attracted little attention apart from its premiere at Berlin last year and other European venues. (I’m still curious to know how Kiarostami managed to write—or “write”—and direct a short in which a great deal of Italian is spoken.)

The feature is helpfully reviewed and synopsized in the December 2005 Sight and Sound, and if, like me, you don’t speak Italian, this information is likely to come in handy once you manage to track down the DVD, which appears to be both Italian and Chinese, with subtitles in each language but not in English. (The Loach episode is in English, but it employs accents that aren’t easy to follow for Yanks like me.) My own copy of the DVD is a gift from someone who bought it on the Internet, and a spot check with Google just revealed a used Region 2 copy going on ebay for just $11.95 plus postage.

It’s an interesting commentary on art-cinema fashion that Kiarostami managed to downgrade his international market value by first turning to DV in 10 (2002) and then making the non-narrative Five (2003). The latter has still never made it to Chicago , and perhaps never will unless some gallery or art museum volunteers, though it did show in 2004 as a kind of courtesy gesture at the Toronto film festival. But it would appear that Kiarostami’s indifference to his commercial standing (which seems quite reasonable, given that he has the means to make whatever films he wants to without it) led to the much more commercial Tickets being ignored by Toronto, and because it premiered in the US at the Tribeca film festival, the New York film festival passed over it as well—not to mention North American distributors, as far as I can tell. So the very fact that it has to be hunted down now on an unsubtitled DVD is telling.

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From Russia : The last time I checked, a Russian DVD of Josef von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express (1932) and a German DVD of his earlier camp-colonialist outing with Marlene Dietrich, Morocco (1930), could both be ordered from www.xploitedcinema.com. Though the latter is cheaper ($18.95, as opposed to $24.95), I opted for the former because of its more luscious and shimmering visuals, and I wasn’t disappointed with the transfer. Don’t be put off by the Russian voice translating all the American dialogue, which can easily be removed by hitting the audio button on your remote. Browsing through the DVD’s principal bonus—an extended documentary on studio divas like Dietrich, Ingrid Bergman, and Vivian Leigh, available only in Russian, and clearly designed to publicize a DVD series—I was taken aback by the discovery that all the clips from Gone with the Wind are in black and white, even though For Whom the Bell Tolls gets the full Technicolor treatment. Recalling Ted Turner’s odd suggestion towards the end of the Cold War that enabling every Russian to see Gone with the Wind was one possible route towards achieving world peace, I started wondering whether this form of technical sabotage might have been inspired as a kind of rejoinder to his demented proposal.

As for the politically incorrect Shanghai Express—as right-wing as most kinky fantasies tend to be—it’s worth looking up Harry Alan Potamkin’s indignant New Masses review (included in the invaluable Potamkin collection The Compound Cinema), which even manages to link the film’s anti-revolutionary “slander” to Sternberg’s well-publicized fondness for black shirts.

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From Spain : Emir Kusturica’s only Hollywood film, Arizona Dream (1993). As I wrote many years ago for the Chicago Reader when a print turned up briefly in a non-theatrical venue, this film “illustrates the truism that the biggest difference between European and American directors using America as a site for fantasies is that the Europeans are likelier to know what they’re doing.” For my Euros, Vincent Gallo’s Rocky Horror-like duplication of Cary Grant’s flight from a crop-spraying plane at a screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest is every bit as transgressive as anything in The Brown Bunny. Combined with the cross-pollination of Johnny Depp, Faye Dunaway, Jerry Lewis, Lili Taylor, Paulina Porizkova, Michael J. Pollard, stacks of Cadillacs, homemade airplanes, and slices of Arizona landscape that call to mind Krazy Kat comic strips, this turns out to be a view of American madness that lingers like an acute form of clarity, if not exactly sanity.

The DVD actually offers more than it claims to on the box. The director’s cut—for once, the only version included—runs for 142 minutes and the box says it’s “approximately” 134. What’s called an “interview with Johnny Depp” is actually a warm and relaxed 38-minute conversation between him and the film’s producer, Claudie Ossard, conducted in a mixture of English and subtitled French, and conveying a lot of concrete information about the film’s history, production, postproduction, and reception—which in North America still mainly consists of non-reception. And what’s called “deleted scenes” on the box and “deleted scene” on the menu is actually an entire sequence, and quite a remarkable one, that runs for about 15 minutes and is even loonier in some ways than anything in the film, most of it filmed in a single virtuoso take. (I assume it’s a dream sequence, though given the wildness of the film as a whole, it’s hard to be sure.)

I found my own copy of this treasure at an enterprising DVD store in Barcelona known as Freaks; the last time I looked, it was also available for about $12 from the UK branch of Amazon.

Some other interesting items found in Spain : (1) My favorite films by Ozu Yasujiro and Mizoguchi Kenji, I Was Born, But... (1932) and Tale of the Late Chrysanthemums (1939), respectively. As near as I can tell, these so-so editions of HeNacido, Pero... and Historia del último Crisantemo, with Spanish subtitles only, on the DeAPlaneta Home Entertainment label, are the only versions of these films to be found so far on DVD, at least in the Western hemisphere. P.S.: I started my long overdue acquaintance with Naruse Mikio only after my visit to Spain, but I noted when I was there that you can also find his Nubes flotantes, Nubes dispersas, Cuando una mujer sube la escalera, and Madre in the same series; check out www.fnac.es for more details, as well as more titles by Mizoguchi, Ozu, and other Japanese masters.

(2) A uniquely perverted DVD of Providence (1977), one of my favorite Alain Resnais features, released by Manga Films—in this case, conceivably the only commercial DVD of the film to be found anywhere—that allows you to choose between the French and Spanish dubbed versions with or without Spanish subtitles but blithely omits the English-language original. For whatever it’s worth, Resnais scholar François Thomas informs me that Resnais “closely supervised the French dubbing, with actors he chose and directed,” valuing their expressive qualities over the lip-sync.

(3) Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s intricately plotted and absorbing riff on Volpone, The Honey Pot (1967), better known in Spanish as Mujeres en Venecia (which faintly recalls the film’s working title in English, Anyone for Venice?). Auteurists looking for directorial cross-references will note that Rex Harrison gets to speak briefly from beyond the grave here, recalling his shared title role in Mankiewicz’s much earlier The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.

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From the UK: Two essential pairs of discs on the BFI label, though any of these four discs can be bought singly: Charlie Chaplin: The Mutual Films, Volumes 1 and 2 (which work their way backwards from the 1916-1917 Behind the Screen, The Rink, Easy Street, The Cure, The Immigrant, and The Adventurer to the 1916 The Floorwalker, The Fireman, The Vagabond, One A.M., The Count, and The Pawnshop, respectively) and two Alex Cox double features, Straight to Hell (1987) and Death and the Compass (1996) + Highway Patrolman (1991) and Three Businessman (1998). With the probable exception of Highway Patrolman, it’s likely that Cox’s commentaries with key collaborators on all four are more interesting than the films by themselves, but thanks to all the concepts, people, and anecdotes involved, one can have quite a bit of fun with these. As for the priceless Chaplins, I’m sure they don’t need my recommendations, though I wish some of the Carl Davis scores didn’t try to overwhelm them.

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From the US: After nodding with vigorous approval at “The Essential Egoyan” in a three-disc Zeitgeist Video box set (three early shorts, the first three features, and the quintessential Calendar (1993), with many commentaries, interviews, and other extras) and Criterion’s definitive Ugetsu (with a separate disc devoted to Shindo’s essential 150-minute 1975 documentary about Kenji Mizoguchi and a 72-page booklet), I’d like to report some other good news. It’s encouraging to compare the full-frame Fox Lorber DVD of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Puppetmaster (1998) with perfunctory extras released by Winstar in 2001 to the letterboxed DVD of Hou’s Café Lumiere with superb, illuminating extras released four years later by Wellspring, which developed out of Winstar. (The main extras are several interviews and an excellent French “making of” documentary called Métro Lumière.)

In previous columns, I’ve noted comparable upgrades in the DVD releases of New Yorker. Having established that we can now generally expect better things from this company’s DVDs, I’d like to make some distinctions between three of their more recent and most welcome releases in terms of their historical value.

On the highest plane, I’d place their edition of Jean-Marie Straub’s Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1967)—released before Straub and Danièle Huillet began co-signing their work more equitably (though she’s credited here as co-writer, co-editor, and production designer). For its windowboxed transfer, the inclusion of a fascinating and previously inaccessible 20-minute Dutch “making of” documentary from the period, and six pages of liner notes (including material by Straub, performer Gustav Leonhardt, Richard Roud, and a new essay by Armond White, as well as a detailed Bach chronology and a breakdown of the music played in all 20 scenes), it’s an impeccable job.

I’m also quite happy with the material included on the release of Emile De Antonio and Dan Talbot’s groundbreaking 1963 documentary (or found-footage assembly) of the TV record of the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, Point of Order!, though a little less certain about how some of this material is used. As in certain Disney releases, sound recordings of the auteur speaking have been posthumously edited—in this case De Antonio rather than Disney, being interviewed at length about the film (in 1978, by Warren Green)—and then used as a supposed or would-be audio commentary, when it really isn’t and shouldn’t be that at all. Of course you can always ignore the image and just listen to the interview, whereas including the audio without the picture wouldn’t have allowed you that choice. Nevertheless, it seems a little creepy to take something precious in its own right—“De” speaking at length about his first film—and utilize this in a fashion contrary to his own original intentions, and more distracting than rewarding as an actual commentary (especially since it can be followed only by suppressing most of the film’s original soundtrack).

Finally, in the case of Ousmane Sembène’s first two films, Borom Sarret (1964), and Black Girl (La noire de..., 1965), I already expressed my conviction two columns back that it would be churlish to protest the absence of extras; the fact that the birth of African cinema is now available to all is infinitely more important. But one nagging question remains. Friends who saw Black Girl during or shortly after its initial release have told me that a brief part of the film—I’m not sure which part—was originally in colour. The fact that none of the film is in colour on the DVD could and should have been explained or accounted for somewhere, but it hasn’t been. Maybe Sembène decided later to exclude this segment or print it in black and white, or maybe the distributor did this for budgetary reasons—which I assume is what happened when the colour hallucinations in Samuel Fuller’s Shock Corridor (1963) lost their colour in most subsequent prints. Whatever the reasons and circumstances, it would be good to know something about them, particularly for the benefit of students hearing about the film for the first time and for people like me who have been waiting for years to have this minor mystery solved. But like the mystery of Gertrud’s suppressed intertitles (and who suppressed them), this issue has been glossed over and avoided, and I wish it hadn’t been.

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Some feedback and updates relating to previous columns. From Michael Sragow: “Hi, JR! Thanks for the ink, but [James] Agee never reviewed [The Magnificent] Ambersons...If he did, I’d have been sure to put it in [the Library of America’s edition of Agee’s film criticism]! I made it a goal to include unpublished stuff on important directors of many schools, like Hawks, Siodmak, Hitchcock, De Sica, and Lean. Even after he did become the Time film critic in 1942 (and his very first review was Wake Island , as included), he didn’t write all the Time reviews. If Time did review Ambersons (and it may have been before he started, I don’t have time right now to check the dates), it wasn’t Agee. I went by the records in Time’s (now-closed) archives.”

From me: “Thanks a lot, Michael...I guess my error on this score must have come from references I read to Agee’s [unsigned] review of the film in Time—and which must have been somebody else’s....” Postscript: So far I’ve managed to track down one of these references, which I should have already known to mistrust: David Thomson’s compendium of false information about Welles, Rosebud, which informs us that “James Agee was sure of its [Ambersons’] greatness.” And how does Thomson know that? Speak up, please.

From Samuel Bréan in Paris : “ I am as disappointed as you are by the non-availability of the non-fantastic Val Lewton-produced films in the latest (and otherwise excellent) box set. However, even though you may be aware of it, Editions Montparnasse released a DVD of Mademoiselle Fifi (1944) not long ago. It is reviewed here.

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After prematurely heralding the appearance on DVD of one of my all-time favorite films, Françoise Romand’s unclassifiable Mix-Up (1985) three columns back, I hope I can be forgiven now for drawing attention to its belated appearance and where you can order it from: www.lowave.com, a small French label.

Since I’m interviewed on this DVD about why I like the film, I won’t repeat my reasons here. But in the interests of both full disclosure and shameless self-promotion, I hope I can be forgiven for listing all the other DVDs I’ve contributed to so far, so I won’t have to worry about not mentioning them again.

An interview with me also appears on the Canadian trailer for The World, which Zeitgeist Films includes on the film’s DVD in the US . Forthcoming from Criterion is a box set devoted to Mr. Arkadin, with a commentary on one of the three versions included that I did jointly with James Naremore, and liner notes on the same version; and forthcoming from the Second Run label in the UK, where I’ve already done notes for In the Land of the Deaf, will be my notes for David Holzman’s Diary. I’ve furnished notes for Criterion’s Drôle de drame, Eclipse, F for Fake, “Stage & Spectacle: Three Films by Jean Renoir” (The Golden Coach, French Cancan, Elena and Her Men), and The White Sheik; The House Is Black (Facets Video); Martha (Fantoma); the Home Vision Entertainment editions of La Cérémonie and Mikey and Nicky; in the UK., the Masters of Cinema editions of Metropolis and Spione; and in France, a brief preface to the book La Vie nouvelle, Nouvelle Vision: à propos d’un film de Philippe Grandrieux (Éditions Leo Scheer) which includes a DVD of the film in question. ‘Nuff said.

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Global Discoveries on DVD
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