Review - Seven Men From Now (1956)

Notable for drawing the unlikely praise of cinema theoreticians like André Bazin and Paul Schrader, Budd Boetticher's lean, low-budget western packs a loftier punch than the average cowboy revenge picture. Randolph Scott stars as the steely Ben Stride, a former sheriff tracking seven bandits who murdered his wife during a gold heist, a turn of events for which the lawman blames himself. Accompanied by a couple seeking passage to California (Gail Russell and Walter Reed) and a criminal-turned-tenuous ally (Lee Marvin, slick as oil and in top form), Stride crosses a treacherous outback en route to his inevitable showdown with the killers, and presumably, his absolution. The film's rarefied appeal can be attributed to its protagonist's atypically internalized conflict - a moral tug-of-war played out beneath the surface, revealed by minute gestures and terse dialogue - as well as the stark staging, which underscores the archetypal struggle of morally fickle men against an unforgiving elemental backdrop. Boetticher and screenwriter Burt Kennedy don't reinvent western tropes as much as sublimate them; dualistic heroes and villains are portrayed as facets of the same character, plot twists evince a cruelly absurd universe at play, the quest for vengeance becomes a pilgrimage to grace. Of course, no amount of transcendental cachet and auteurist angling can replace old-fashioned thrills, but fortunately for the casual filmgoer, there are a few of those too.

Review - The All-Around Reduced Personality aka Redupers (1978)

Helke Sander's first and best film, made in West Germany in 1977, is a harrowing yet heartening portrait of a woman colliding with the glass ceiling in slow-motion. The woman (played by Sander) is Edda Chiemnyjewski, a photographer and single mother juggling artistic ambitions with work and parental duties, and the ceiling is an actual physical barrier. The Berlin Wall, a looming presence established in a long tracking shot that opens the film, effectively embodies the impediments and partitions that Edda and her all-female photography collective must navigate. Their planned project, a series involving the wall and the citizens on either side, is repeatedly rejected for being too political, and not reflective of traditional "women's issues." The runaround continues, culminating at a particularly exasperating gallery reception, a gauntlet of condescension that leaves Edda sickened, figuratively and literally. Rather than give in to frustration, Sander seeks solace in the ritualistic pleasures of the photographer's craft, specifically the repetitive, strangely hypnotic processes of developing and printing. She also interjects alleviating humor, via a steady stream of wry, intelligent dialogue, and episodes that highlight the subtle absurdity of the workaday balancing act. Sander's films, as ingenious as they are, still have yet to receive the consideration they deserve. In her first go-around, she exhibits the saint-like equanimity required to continue creating in lieu of that consideration.

Review - Radio On (1979)

A laconic loner traverses a bleak, post-industrial England via automobile in Chris Petit's moody, monochrome road movie, the first feature from the critic turned director. After learning that his brother has died under mysterious, possibly sordid circumstances, late-night radio DJ Robert (David Beams) drives from London to Bristol in search of answers, unaccompanied but for a tastefully selected stack of cassettes from Bowie, Kraftwerk and Devo. While he finds little in the way of an explanation, he does encounter a series of forlorn characters - including a disturbed army deserter fleeing service in Ireland (Andrew Byatt) and a German woman searching for her estranged daughter (Lisa Kreuzer) - that personify the despondency and doubt gripping late-70's Britain, soon to be exacerbated by impending Thatcherism. An overt cinephile, Petit packs his debut with visual and thematic allusions to decidedly un-British arts films like 'Two-Lane Blacktop,' 60's Antonioni, and most prominently, the road movies of Wim Wenders, who, not coincidentally, serves as a producer here. The music-obsessed, highway-bound protagonist could easily have drifted out of one of Wenders' psychic landscapes, but Petit still deserves a great deal of credit. No English film before or since has skated the line between dreary realism and arthouse aesthetics with such easy elegance, or punk insouciance.

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.