Review - God Speed You! Black Emperor (1976)

Before crystallizing the existential themes that would define his narrative films - spare, neo-Bressonian studies of outsiders, punctuated by bursts of cathartic violence - Mitsuo Yanagimachi made this gritty 1976 documentary about Tokyo's Black Emperors motorcycle gang. Shot in inky 16mm, it trails the group's teenage members as they swarm through the city on their bikes, stumble through school and familial obligations, and clash with traffic police, as well as each other. Far from Hells Angels or modish delinquents, the film's subjects are a ragtag assortment of dropouts, latchkey kids and Shinjuku bums, united behind a dubious, but frankly understandable enterprise. After all, they have nowhere to go, nothing to occupy their time and energy, and no one but their gang elders to look after them. Yanagimachi's prying camera reveals an inner-hierarchy not dissimilar to the larger society that the bikers reject; young pledges soon discover that even Emperors have to put up with pushy superiors, sternly lecturing about "shared hardships." At first, the droll observation evokes Frederick Wiseman-esque vérité, but as in each of the director's subsequent works, the tone gradually and subtly shifts, from frivolity to silent desperation. As jokes and silliness give way to psychological intimidation and intra-gang violence, the editing becomes more oblique, and tension mounts. The boys' joyride is transformed into a two-wheeled tour of urban alienation.

Review - Méditerranée (1963)

A landmark of experimental filmmaking, Jean-Daniel Pollet's intoxicating masterwork is an attempt at a cinema without narrative, genre or other such conventions, a purely visual and aural experience. It's a dreamlike journey, a travelogue with no apparent itinerary that spans Greece, Italy, Spain and Egypt, with only the haziest distinction between authentic footage and staged scenes. Dramatic ruins, rustic landscapes, strikingly posed statuary and the bloody climax of a bullfight are included in the parade of evocative, seemingly unrelated imagery. Pollet, a New-Wave outlier previously noted for his exuberant depictions of dancers in full swing, adopts the slow-tracking camera movement of his contemporary Alain Resnais, gliding through each vista with a ghostly deliberation. Like the meditative works of Resnais, Pollet's film explores the interstices - between documentary and mythology, unyielding history and ever-shifting memory, the concreteness of an image and the ambivalence of its symbolic content. It baffles and entrances, and in a scant forty-three minutes, suggests an entire world of visual poetry yet unseen. Antoine Duhamel (who would go on to compose the jarring music for Godard's 'Weekend') provides the ancient-sounding score, and Nouveau Roman writer Philippe Sollers pens and recites the cryptic narration.

Review - Les Rendez-vous d'Anna (1978)

A stoical sister-film to Peter Handke's 'The Left Handed Woman' (another nuanced study of a female adrift released the same year), this mesmeric drama from Chantal Akerman filters an intensely personal subject through a distinct structural lens. Anna (Aurore Clément, presumably standing in for Akerman) is a Belgian filmmaker on a seemingly endless promotional trip across a colorless, homogenized Western Europe. She travels via train through Cologne, Brussels and Paris (all virtually indistinguishable from one another), and has a series of brief, telling encounters with figures - from her past, as well as strangers - with whom she struggles to express herself, or develop any sort of meaningful connection. Rendered in perfectly symmetrical compositions and long, static takes, the working life of the réalisatrice becomes a dull, mechanical march, a solitary endeavor not unlike the stultifying housework undertaken by the heroine of Akerman's 'Jeanne Dielman...' This, however, is a far less grim portrait, substituting the oppressiveness and allegorical heft of the earlier feature for an introspective melancholy that feels much closer to the heart of the director, and is not without an aesthetic appeal. For all their rigor, the slow, hypnotic shots possess a wistful beauty, particularly those of passing landscapes from train windows and darkened cities seen from taxi cabs. The subdued, observational style simultaneously recalls Jackie Raynal's radical feminist film 'Deux fois,' and anticipates the meandering procedurals of Jim Jarmusch.

Review - Three Days and a Child (1967)

A jewel of the blink-and-you-missed-it Israeli New Wave, Uri Zohar's stylish, charmingly desultory feature follows Eli (Oded Kotler), a shiftless graduate student living in Jerusalem who agrees to babysit the three year-old son of a former lover. Over a hectic late-summer weekend, he entertains the boy, contemplates abandoning him, rescues him from danger, and considers whether the child may in fact be his, an unsettling prospect for Eli that prompts him to reexamine his past, and question the specious comforts of perpetual bachelorhood. While he undoubtedly draws on early works from the likes of Truffaut, Varda and Rozier for visual inspiration, Zohar's weighty themes are decidedly personal, and spring largely from biography. The protagonist is defined not just by his youthful urbanity, but also by stints of compulsory military service, and time spent in a kibbutz, or farming cooperative. This specificity of characterization - along with the unusually frank examination of issues like masculinity, sex and familial responsibilities - set this effort apart from others works of a similar mold. As a photographic document, Zohar's film presents striking views of Jerusalem in the time of the Six-Day War. Shot in crisp, high-contrast black and white, it offers surprisingly nuanced depictions of an individual, an incipient nation and an era.

Review - Imagine the Sound (1981)

In this delightfully intimate documentary shot in the early 1980's, four figures formerly at the vanguard of the 60's free-jazz explosion recall the pivotal era, and in an act of cinematic conjuring, invoke the exploratory spirit that animated their early groundbreaking works. Pianists Cecil Taylor and Paul Bley, trumpeter Bill Dixon and saxophonist Archie Shepp - as diverse and articulate a panel of artists one could ever hope to cross-examine on the subject at hand - give candid interviews that touch on their beginnings on the avant-garde scene, the considerable challenge of earning a living while continuously pushing creative boundaries, and their enduring love for their craft. The testimony, alternately funny, impassioned and thought-provoking, is intercut with footage of the musicians playing in different configurations, from extended solo improvisations (by Taylor and Bley), to pieces for trio and quartet (by Dixon and Shepp, respectively). As enlightening as the anecdotes are, the extemporaneous performances offer the deepest insight. Captured with a rapt gaze by director Ron Mann, they manifest that which the interviewees can only allude to, or express in intellectual terms that prove inadequate: the insatiable yearning for new and hitherto unheard sounds that drove them to experiment in the heyday of "the new thing," and continues to drive them presently. For those rating the players, Mr. Taylor steals the show handily, with his moonstruck musings, sequined sweatsuit, and impossibly energetic, violently percussive pianism.

Review - Out of the Blue (1980)

Nearly a decade after the debacle of 'The Last Movie,' a critical and commercial flop so ruinous that he was effectively banished from Hollywood for making it, Dennis Hopper helmed this minor masterwork, possibly the finest moment of his turbulent directorial career. It's a portrait of a broken family, torn apart by a tragic accident then reunited years later, only to be shattered irrevocably by seemingly inescapable circumstance. Patriarch Don (Hopper, all manic energy and howling sorrow) is released from prison after serving a five-year sentence for crashing his truck into a school bus full of children. In his absence, wife Kathy (Sharon Farrell) has taken up with her boss at the local luncheonette and developed a nasty drug habit, shooting up and ignoring her teenage daughter Cindy (Linda Manz). The neglected Cebe (as the girl is affectionally known) gravitates to the burgeoning punk rock scene, puffing cigarettes, swilling beer, tattooing herself and running away from home in open rebellion against her derelict mother and absentee father. Don's return precipitates a catastrophic chain of events, old wounds and deep-seated dysfunctions reemerge, and any chance the family had for happiness, or completeness, is dashed.

Hopper stumbled into the low-budget directing assignment, replacing the film's screenwriter at the last moment, but his signature preoccupations and iconoclastic spirit are evident in all its aspects - from the patchwork rock soundtrack that recalls 'Easy Rider,' to the alienated protagonists like those that appear throughout his oeuvre, usually portrayed by Hopper himself. The conflicted Don Barnes mirrors the director especially closely; both are aging troublemakers, returned from exile and forced to wrestle with their obsolescence in the face of the latest counter-cultural wave. ("I'm a punk," Don sneers at the sight of his daughter's band posters.) What separates this from the filmmaker's earlier, self-indulgent efforts is a newfound restraint, and a masterly control of resources. The brutally honest performances, stoked to their feverish limits, evoke the cinema of John Cassavetes, and are matched by the dynamic photography of cinematographer Marc Champion. His camera stalks nimbly, changes direction suddenly, and circles its subjects as if ensnaring them, only stopping to rest on the most haunting, indelible images. Another telling sign of Hopper's maturation: he cedes the spotlight to young actress Linda Manz, whose soulful, defiant yet deeply vulnerable turn as CeBe is one that is not easily forgotten.

Review - Ghost Dance (1983)

Part cine-philosophical tract, part free-form fiction, Ken McMullen's audacious feature blends 'Celine and Julie Go Boating' style feminist romp with graduate-level dialectics, though not particularly successfully. Pascale (Pascale Ogier) and Marianne (Leonie Mellinger) travel the shadowy streets of Paris and London in search of "ghosts," not the spirits of the deceased, but traces of people and events from the past that echo endlessly throughout our lives. They consider various phenomena that dredge up those figures and ideas - recordings, photographs, oral histories, the cinema - and how these phantoms invariably reappear and influence, or "haunt" the present. Along the way, the pair encounter several Carroll-esque characters (a phone-chewing electronics salesman and a weather obsessed drummer), consult a preeminent philosopher (Jacques Derrida, whose sagely observations and fourth wall prodding may be the highlight of the film), channel ancient warriors and visit a ruined future world.

Sadly, what could have been a fanciful inquiry into an intriguing subject is confounded by didactic passages that clash with the storyline, and slow the overall pace to a crawl. McMullen interjects opaque narration, interpretive performance pieces and other pretentious asides that try desperately to emulate film essayists like Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard, but fail to capture their eccentric poetry, or sense of wonderment. The high-flown discourse and dreamlike plot never coalesce either, making for a wildly uneven viewing experience. Still, it is worth seeing, if only for a number of provocative images that mystify, and reveal ethereal connections. The opening and closing shots, which are repeated, resonate especially clearly; on a wintry beach, Marianne tries futilely to throw a large, poster-sized photograph of Pascale into the ocean, but the tide repeatedly washes it back in. Actress Pascale Ogier (whose mother was Rivette regular and 'Celine and Julie' co-star Bulle Ogier) would tragically die soon after the release of the film from a heart attack. By means of associations seen and unseen, in the past and yet to occur, Marianne's task is transformed into a symbolic burial, a prophetic ritual that illuminates the interconnectedness of generations. If only the director let the images speak for themselves more often.