Image courtesy of The Criterion Collection.

Claire Denis is such a magnificently visual director that no one should miss the opportunity to see her latest film, White Material (2009) on the new Criterion Collection Blu-ray. I only wish that Beau Travail (1999) would receive such luxurious treatment! Working with a new cinematographer (Yves Cape) Denis manages to strike a fine balance between off-the-cuff spontaneity, precisely observed details and the pictorial beauty of the West African landscape. And yet, despite the film’s entrancing visual style, it doesn’t quite come off.

To my mind, the film falters in two areas. First, the main character of Maria Vial (Isabelle Huppert), the head of a coffee plantation on its last legs before the region falls to civil unrest, is too single-minded and unmoving. Her conflicts are wholly externalized; that is, we never see her work through any self-doubts or arrive at any meaningful turning points. This makes the film’s dramatic trajectory too single-minded and ultimately predictable. When she snaps at the end, her act of violence is also patently incredible. That said, Isabelle Huppert does a superb job of bringing the character of Maria physically to life, regardless of the limitations of the script.

The second flaw has do with the director’s decision to set it within “Africa” and not a specific country. Despite Claire Denis’ undeniable gift for establishing atmosphere and drawing fine performances out of even the smallest extras, we wind up with a fairly abstract parable about colonialism: a Decaying Coffee Plantation, the Woman Who Refuses To Leave, the Escaped Rebel, Child Soldiers, and so on. Ironically, as the accompanying interview with Denis makes clear, she draws upon a deep personal knowledge of Africa; details such as the ubiquitous transistor radios are very much grounded in quotidian reality. Even so, the narrative feels schematic. I’m not opposed to parables in principle, but in this particular case the story would have worked better if Denis and her co-writer Marie N’Diaye had grounded it more concretely in a specific context.

The director-and-cinematographer-approved transfer on the Criterion Blu-ray does an excellent job of conveying the look of a film that was shot largely with available light in a beautiful but unforgiving landscape. Special features include interviews with Denis, Huppert and actor Isaach de Bankolé, and a documentary by Denis on the film’s premiere at the 2010 Écrans Noirs Film Festival. White Material may not merit a purchase unless you’re a die-hard Denis fan, but it’s certainly worth seeking out as a rental.

Update (7/1o/2011):

David Denby offers a devastating critique of the film in The New Yorker. Among other things, he writes:

The movie is an attack on white postcolonial arrogance and stupidity, but none of the African characters are more than a handsome face.

This charge is difficult to refute. The critical character of “The Boxer” in particular lacks a meaningful backstory, although viewers closely familiar with African history and politics might be able to draw some inferences about him. The casual viewer (like me) ends up out in the cold with little more than beautiful faces, as Denby astutely points out. I still think the film is worth a look, but I am increasingly inclined to agree with Denby.

Clip from Cave of Forgotten Dreams, courtesy of IFC Films.

A product of the Upper Paleolithic Aurignacian culture, the oldest paintings in the Chauvet Cave date to 30,000-32,000 years ago–the earliest surviving cave paintings and not that much younger than the Venus of Hohle Fels, the earliest known example of figurative art. The Chauvet Cave paintings in particular are astonishing because of the sophisticated manner in which they employ expressive lines and shading, and how they are drawn to suggest movement. Around the same period one can find the first musical instruments such as an ivory flute, making this era the dawn of human culture as we understand it today.

Herzog interviews a number of scientists and thus provides the necessary context for understanding the cave art. And Herzog being Herzog, he also doesn’t shy away from the sheer alienness of the Upper Paleolithic culture and the mystical force behind the paintings. Ernst Reijseger’s otherworldly trance music works better than most scores of that type and certainly fits with the subject matter. I’m still not sure what to make of the ending, which shifts focus to a nuclear power plant and albino alligators; perhaps Herzog means to show the how the climate of that region is again in the process of changing, this time due to human activity. But between this film and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, he seems increasingly obsessed with reptilian points of view.

In order to compare the various DVD editions, it is necessary to take into account the film’s complicated history. As fans of the film know, The Color of Pomegrantes was released in two versions. The Armenian release version, which runs about 77 minutes, is sometimes mistakenly called the “director’s cut” though it is more accurately characterized as Parajanov’s own compromise with the censors. Among other things, Parajanov was forced to remove all the direct references to the poet Sayat-Nova in the main title and intertitles on the grounds that he took too many poetic liberties with the historical figure. So while the working title was Sayat-Nova, by the time the film reached the screen in Armenia it bore the title Nran guyne, translated into English as “The Color of Pomegranates.” (You can find my essay about the film’s production and censorship in a special issue on Parajanov that I edited for the Armenian Review.)

Alexei Romanov, the Chair of Goskino USSR (Moscow), personally disliked the film and refused to allow its distribution outside of Armenia. However, Sergei Yutkevich, an established older generation Soviet director, had served as one of the script readers in Moscow and admired Parajanov’s work. After the film’s release in Armenia, Yutkevich recut the film slightly to convince Romanov to allow distribution in the rest of the USSR. His changes entailed cutting a few minutes of footage (his version runs about 73 minutes), re-arranging a couple scenes and adding explanatory Russian intertitles to make the film more accessible. As far as I know Yutkevich used the camera negative to create this new version, whereas the Armenian release version survives only in a duplicate negative. Thus, theoretically the Yutkevich version should have a superior image quality; the various 35mm prints I’ve seen appear to confirm this.

The four DVD versions are as follows:

Kino’s U. S. 2001 edition of the Armenian release version, the so-called “director’s cut.” This NTSC DVD is based on an old telecine that dates at least back to the early 1990s, when Connoisseur Video released it on VHS. The image is very faded and lacking in detail, and it is (excessively) windowboxed to present the maximum picture area of the original film frame. It features very large, hard-coded yellow subtitles. It also suffers from persistent audio warble in the second half of the film, which may be a flaw in the film element used for the telecine.

The Films sans Frontières French 2006 edition of the Armenian release version. This PAL DVD is based on a newer and presumably better telecine than the Kino edition, but it suffers from the most cropping of all the existing editions and is plagued with excessive contrast boosting and digital sharpening. The resulting image is harsh and lacking in fine detail. In places the midtones and highlights also have too much cyan, at least to my eyes–the whites in the frame grabs below are a good indicator of this problem. I suspect that this may have been an attempt to compensate for color fading. The French disc is an object lesson in dangers of overusing digital filters to hide problems in the original source materials. Like the Kino edition, it suffers from audio warble in the second half of the film. On the positive side, the optional English subtitles are very good and translate passages which are not translated on any other edition.

The out-of-print 2004 Columbia DVD of the Yutkevich version (Japan, NTSC). To my eyes, this is still the best-looking of all the versions on DVD. The print used suffers from color fading and thus has a slight magenta cast. However, it doesn’t look as bad in playback as the screen captures below might suggest. It also preserves much of the film’s fine detail and photographic grain, which is important for a film that is as much about surface texture as it is about color. On the negative side, the reel which contains the scenes of the poet at the court of Erekle/Irakli II and his recognition of his doomed passion for the Princess Ana is darker and has a yellowish hue compared to the rest of the film. The disc contains only Japanese subtitles.

The aforementioned 2010 Russian Cinema Council DVD of the Yutkevich version, available in both NTSC and PAL. (My frame grabs are from the PAL version.) On the whole it looks better than the French and U. S. DVDs of the Armenian release version. However, compared the Japanese DVD all the grain has been filtered away, resulting in a softer, waxy-looking image. Like the French disc, this transfer has an overly cyan hue though not as pronounced. Strictly in terms of image quality, I would rank it below the older Japanese DVD, which has since been replaced in Japan by the same Russian Cinema Council edition.

To sum up, collectors will still want to acquire either the Kino or the Films sans Frontières disc since both contain the longer and somewhat less compromised Armenian release version, though both are seriously flawed image-wise. The Russian Cinema Council DVD of the Yutkevich cut looks better, but it’s not on the level of their other Parajanov releases, which have been repackaged by various distributors worldwide, including Kino in the U.S. If you don’t care about subtitles, it’s worth tracking down the older Japanese DVD for its picture quality. When, oh when will we see a truly decent version of this film on DVD?

Kino NTSC R1

Films sans Frontières PAL

Columbia (Japan) NTSC

RUSCICO PAL

Kino NTSC

Films sans Frontières PAL

Columbia (Japan) NTSC

RUSCICO PAL

Kino NTSC

Films sans Frontières PAL

Columbia (Japan) NTSC

RUSCICO PAL

Yes, the film has cartoon villains and some stock situations, but the script actually is not bad as far as blockbusters go. Cameron is painting in broad, mythic strokes, and it mostly works very well. What I found amusing is the script’s not-so-subtle critique of colonialism: in the most expensive movie ever made, the hero is a soldier who serves a colonial power. He learns to see–literally–from the indigenous people’s point of view and joins their struggle. It helps that the technical crew has made every effort to render the Na’vi faces expressively, so that we can fully empathize with them. The crude motion capture and dead eyes that made the characters in The Polar Express look like sluggish CGI zombies are thankfully a thing of the past. Avatar’s world is certainly worth the visit; I want to see it a second time, only in 3-D Imax.

Actually,  Antichrist was neither as bad as the hostile crowd in Cannes seemed to think, nor was it quite as good as Roger Ebert aruges in his review. The performances by Willem Dafoe and especially Charlotte Gainsbourg are remarkable. Gainsbourg more than earned the Best Actress award at Cannes; if I ever watch the film again, it will be because of her. Their reactions to each other and to the tragedy that engulfs them give the film the emotional credibility it needs to work in the face of extreme, at times ludicriously horrific situations. In a couple places the dialogue falls flat, but I think this is due mainly to Trier working in a second language.

Yes, much of the imagery was beautiful, dark and rich. But in some of the darker scenes the photography had that tell-tale, flat video look. Anthony Dod Mantle is a gifted cinematographer, and the smaller camera probably helped preserve the intimacy that the actors needed to pull off their performances, but high definition video still hasn’t caught up yet with good 35mm stock.

Trier’s view of relationships and the gender divide owes much to Strindberg, but I was also surprised to see a deliberate Medieval sensibility running through the film. Yes, the film is misogynistic, but you have to give him credit for taking the whole thing seriously enough to hire a “Misogyny” consultant. That’s one film credit you don’t see very often.

Still courtesy of Janus Films

I just saw Götz Spielmann’s Revanche (Austria, 2008) at the Landmark Midtown and strongly recommend it. Starting this Friday (July 31) it’s moving to the Plaza Theatre, so there’s still a chance for fellow Atlantans to see it on the big screen.

This is an unusual instance where Janus Films, long known for distributing arthouse classics by directors such as Bergman and Kurosawa, has picked up a new film. Actually, it’s a worthy addition to their catalog and more than deserved its Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Film; I think it will continue to attract a following after it has been released on DVD and (especially) Blu-ray.

Spielmann’s spare, restrained directorial style reminds me of Robert Bresson and the Dardenne Brothers. It’s arguably too long at 121 minutes, but the deliberate pacing does allow for the gradual revelation of character that the film’s underlying conception requires. The plot concerns Alex (Johannes Krisch), an ex-con and a handyman at a brothel, who falls in love with Tamara (Irina Potapenko), a Ukrainian prostitute, and nurtures plans to rescue her by scoring a large sum of money and fleeing the country. After a failed bank robbery, he takes refuge in the countryside, where his aging father (Hannes Thanheiser) lives on a farm. Inevitably he runs into conflict with the neighbors, which include Susanne (Ursula Strauss), a young woman who takes Alex’s father to church every Sunday, and her husband Robert (Andreas Lust), a police officer.

What I have in mind by comparing Spielmann to Bresson and the Dardenne Brothers is a specific set of stylistic devices. First, the film lacks a conventional music score, relying instead on natural sounds which often become significant motifs in their own right. The two most striking examples of this are the buzz saw and the sound of the father’s accordion playing. Ambient sounds also serve to evoke the powerful presence of nature in the Austrian forest.

Another of the film’s Bressonian traits is its use of meticulously composed static shots that recur as visual motifs. At times the stationary camera results in a disconcerting use of offscreen space, such as when Alex walks off camera in the hotel room but we continue to hear his voice, or in another shot in the farmhouse where he suddenly stands up and his head goes out of frame while the camera remains in a low position. (Usually the camera operator will pan or crane up to keep the actor’s head in frame.) Martin Gschlacht’s cinematography is the most beautiful work I’ve seen in a while; it uses mostly natural light to create subtle gradations of light and shadow that function thematically, but not in any overly obvious way. Ultimately, the film’s terse but richly suggestive style serves to underline the deeper spiritual dimension of the film, which becomes apparent as it unfolds. The tranquil closing shot is unforgettable.

However, I don’t want to leave the mistaken impression that Revanche is purely an exercise in style. The performances are vivid and assured across the board, and I loved how Spielmann convincingly depicts the unglamorous daily operations of the brothel. For instance, we see Alex restocking the sheets and the prostitutes chatting in the break room. At the same time, seemingly offhanded remarks by the brothel owner take on unmistakably sinister undertones, reflecting the underlying brutality of the system. If you don’t see this film on the big screen, I recommend at least seeing it on Blu-ray, since its remarkable sense of space and place will inevitably lose some impact on DVD.