Light Sensitive

Poetry times two

(Serene and plangent: Ozu's box set, from Criterion, of The Only Son and There Was a Father. Images courtesy of Criterion.)

The great Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu was always one of those daunting and unapproachable figures of international cinema whom I didn’t exactly avoid growing up but I found his work, or at least what I sampled, somewhat otherworldly and difficult to assimilate, at least intellectually.

Fortunately, as my vocation evolved from an eager amateur to aspiring professional, I was much more willing and ready to take the plunge on Ozu. A traveling retrospective some years ago helped with efforts at catch up, though there remains a great deal I still haven’t seen.

The Criterion label justifies their reputation and cultural cachet with their work on expanding awareness and appreciation of Ozu. The company has issued six stand alone titles, including the silent and color remake of Floating Weeds, the supreme masterpieces Tokyo Story, Early Summer, Late Spring and the director’s final work, An Autumn Afternoon.

They have also issued on their special Eclipse imprint two essential box sets: Late Ozu (Early Spring, Tokyo Twilight, Equinox Flower, Late Autumn, The End of Summer) and Silent Ozu (Tokyo Chorus, I Was Born, But…, Passing Fancy).

Now, Criterion has just published a new box set of two essential Ozu titles: The Only Son, the director’s 1936 debut sound work and the companion piece, There Was a Father, from 1943 (significantly with The Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family, the only two titles Ozu directed during the Second World War.)

What’s valuable, even essential, about the two titles is what they say and reveal about the Japanese condition during a period of nationalist fervor, economic volatility and an extreme social coercion its citizens lived under, whether they were artists or bricklayers.

The man born and died on the same date, December 12, Ozu was born in 1903 and died in 1963. His life corresponded to his country’s spectacular imperial rise from the time of the country’s startling and convincing military rout of czarist Russia in 1905 through its series of military conquests, territorial expansion and foreign occupation of Korea, China, Manchuria and Taiwan to its ultimately disastrous and humiliating surrender to Allied forces in 1945.

Ozu himself never married and was for much of his formative years susceptible to military conscription. He was first called up for a two-year mandatory national service in the mid-twenties, right after he began his career-long association with the powerful Shochiku studio as an assistant cameraman. Following the completion of The Only Son, Ozu was ordered to serve two years of military service in China.

In 1943, the year the war turned decisively in the favor of the Allies in the Pacific and European theaters, Ozu was dispatched to Singapore to work on a series of propaganda films. Following his country’s unconditional surrender, Ozu spent six months in a British POW camp.

(Interestingly, of the three major directors of Paul Schrader’s Transcendental Style in Film, a work that did a great deal to expand Ozu’s reputation in the West, Robert Bresson served in German concentration camp for eighteen months and Carl Th. Dreyer lived under the Nazi occupation.) 

Naturally, these two Ozu films are of a piece: both are about the often difficult, complex relationship of parents and children, are concerned with guilt, shame and redemption, and both are marked by an almost unsurpassable sorrow and pain never lessened in spite of the oblique manner and off-handed way the emotional particulars are addressed and dealt with.

Loss is the dominant undercurrent: in The Only Son, the father, or patriarch, is dead; in There Was a Father, the memory of the dead mother haunts the work. In both films, the son is introduced as a post-adolescent and the bulk of the story is concerned with his own emotional plight or professional standing in young adulthood. Interestingly, Ozu handles the passage of time differently.

In The Only Son, he uses intertitles to mark the film’s three time breaks and note the passage of the story from 1923 to 1935 and then 1936. In Father, time is revealed more elliptically through the son’s matriculation through school.

The autobiographical shading is also interesting to consider. Ozu’s only previous professional work before his uncle helped him get the job at Shochiku was as a teacher. (In both films, Ozu specialists David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson record illuminating twenty-minute interviews that combine scholarship, criticism and observations with background and context and Bordwell points out some interesting parallels with Ozu’s own father.)

“Is Ozu Slow?” Jonathan Rosenbaum once proposed in a provocative essay and lecture about the director. For me, what comes through most forcefully in the two films is just how dynamic, rigorous and sublime Ozu’s art truly was. Of course, historical context is central to both works. Both films illustrate sharply, unpretentiously the poetry of Ozu, his fascinating use of sound and off screen space, animated by action or behavior, that establishes a milieu or work environment or a shot, like the overturned boat in Father that registers a chilling exactness.

The Only Son is couched in failure and disappointment. There Was a Father conveys a wholly different manner of grief and rupture. The drama develops out of the often excruciating emotional exchanges of these contradictory or irreconcilable positions adopted by mother and son or father and child. On the contrary, the work is not static or embalmed but open and alive and allowed a directness of expression and intensity of feeling Ozu transforms into art of the highest distinction.

They’re pure, direct and brilliant. Watch and rejoice.

 

Slippery people

 

(The man and his art: Todd Solondz. Photos courtesy of IFC Films.)

In his risky sixth feature Life During Wartime, director Todd Solondz yokes together the key participants of his unruly, darkly brilliant third feature Happiness, for this freewheeling and no less disturbing update.

None of the actors from the 1998 original return. Instead, Solondz populates it with entirely different actors, but they are given the same names, behavioral conditions and tragic weaknesses. Like his previous Palindromes, where he brilliantly, suggestively employed different actresses for the main role, the new film is an equally bold look at representation, race and class.

It helps though it is not mandatory to have seen Happiness to fully appreciate this taut and unnerving work that I must admit, grew exponentially more interesting and compelling on a second viewing.

Most of the action has been transplanted from suburban New Jersey of the first feature to Florida. Judging from the credits, the movie appears to have been mostly shot in Puerto Rico, around San Juan presumably, and that only deepens the almost Brechtian stylization and the profound sense of dislocation and disassociation.

The original Chekov-like examination of the byplay and varied emotional circumstances of the three sisters remains in place here. The dominant figure is Trish (Allison Janney), the mother of three whose husband, Bill (Cirian Hinds), the upstanding, loyal therapist, was discovered in the previous work to be an emotionally unhinged pedophile preying on the unsuspecting friends of their then-adolescent son.

Trish is well-adjusted, her oldest son (Chris Marquette) in college, and she is busy tending to her two younger children and newly jolted by a quickly developing relationship with Harvey (Michael Lerner), older, humbler, “normal,” as she puts it. Her younger son (Dylan Riley Snyder) is preparing for his Bar Mitzvah.

Joy (Shirley Henderson), the youngest sister, estranged from her husband, Allen (Michael K. Williams), turns up for some emotional solace. The movie’s opening scene, an uncomfortable dinner sequence, is the filmmaker’s most overt linking of the two films. The startling denouement of the opening is not visual, though aural, the familiar off-key sound of somebody’s voice, that is so unsettling and causes the first of several convulsive exchanges.

The third sister, Helen (Ally Sheedy), a successful television writer, is desperate to remain above the fray, living a hilariously privileged life that separates her from most human contact.

In Life During Wartime, ghosts, demons and spirits return to wreak their particular havoc on these already fragile characters. Joy experiences surreal visitations from a man (Paul Reubens) reanimated from her own tragic past. Solondz choreographs one of the most impressive sequences he has ever committed, a sinewy and long traveling shot that follows Joy as she moves, through the eerie and sinister landscape, en route to her destination, a restaurant that sets up the first of several confrontations with her ghost.

The most significant return is not spectral. Bill is out of jail and he is surreptitiously looking on his old family to make certain they have rebounded from the wreckage he caused. In the movie’s most extraordinary scene, he confronts his older son to make sure he is not afflicted by the same demons.

The movie’s title is not a reference to the iconic Talking Heads’ song, but rather an original song with lyrics by Solondz and music by Marc Shaiman. The new work is much shorter than the original though perversely it is a more panoramic piece. It has a political component new to Solondz, and it is concerned with the state of the world (Israel, post-9/11 hysteria, China) that grounds the material in a particularly difficult and somewhat paranoid register.

Solondz is working for the first time in digital photography. The movie was shot by the great Edward Lachman, who not incidentally also shot Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There (referenced in the movie, as a poster in a college dormitory.)  Solondz imbues each shot with a clarity and rigor.

The movie ends with an act of romantic sabotage that leads to an extraordinary conclusion of a young boy’s search for a father. As I said, rare is the work that grows and deepens with subsequent views. This is one such piece. In this rumination on forgiveness, Todd Solondz has made an unforgettable work.

(Village of the damned: the faces change, the pathology remains.) 

Rivette (en anglais)

(More Birkin and Castellitto, in Jacques Rivette's autumnal Around a Small Mountain. Photo courtesy of Unifrance.) 

Jonathan Rosenbaum writes to say yes, technically, his book on Rivette, is out of print. But most of the contents, as well as key English translations of Rivette’s interviews and major critical essays, are available at the invaluable website, jacques-rivette.com.

On a related note: Check out Jonathan’s site for his typically trenchant and rigorous consideration of Rivette’s magisterial La belle noiseuse. 

Also, the Rivette site, titled Order of the Exile, is cited by Film Comment in their survey of the best film-related analytical, essay or critical review sites. Congratulations to Jonathan, my friend Glenn Kenny, Girish Shambu, the Dennis Lim-edited Moving Image Source, David Hudson’s MUBI notebook and the essential DVD Beaver for making the cut as well.

Auteurist alert: Phil Karlson’s The Phenix City Story, issued this week as part of the multi-disc volume five in the Film Noir Collection, plays at 2 p.m. EST on Turner Classics Saturday.

Finally: Another old colleague, Scott Foundas, has gone to the "other side," as the associate programmer of the Film Society at Lincoln Center. Fortunately, Scott still returns to his old haunts, like this very sharp and incisive profile of Christopher Nolan, writer and director of Inception, in the pages of LA Weekly.

War progress report: My ongoing campaign to average some thirty-five to forty pages a day of the Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace in order to finish it by the end of summer is not exactly moving as planned. Partly, I blame other books, more manageable though no less demanding or difficult for sabotaging the best laid plans. Nonetheless, I stand undaunted and hope to make up the difference this week.

Stop making sense

(Leonardo DiCaprio, in Christopher Nolan's Inception. Photos courtesy of Warner Bros.)

Writing about Memento, the second feature of Christopher Nolan, when it played Sundance in 2001, I concluded a largely positive piece by saying: “I'm not sure Memento could survive repeated or intense observation without its failures becoming more obtrusive.”

With its play on memory, time and recollection, the movie felt like something by Raul Ruiz or Alain Resnais. That was Nolan’s breakthrough film, and he’s taken on increasingly bigger scales and larger productions. Leaping forward Nolan’s brainy, seductive brand of moviemaking has remade the Batman franchise and given him the kind the industry freedom and power to riff on a lot of the same ideas for Inception, his highly anticipated seventh feature.

I like Inception, but I have some pretty profound reservations. Some colleagues and other writers are clamoring for repeat and multiple screenings in order to disentangle the movie’s dream reverie and free associative narrative flow. I suspect further viewings would only dilute the sense of revelation and wonder.

It’s the first film Nolan has taken a sole screen credit, but the story, about a special breed of corporate espionage operatives who invade the dreams of their marks in order to steal privileged information, extends on a lot of the ideas and architecture of Memento. In that film, Guy Pearce plays an insurance salesman turned violent avenger, undone by the rape and killing of his wife, the aftermath stripping him of his short-term memory.  

In Inception, like Memento, the very nature of consciousness -- incident, detail, conversation, emotion, action -- is the ultimate blank space that is continuously erased, manipulated and bent to the demands and vagaries of the moment. 

The story plays like a mélange of Philip K. Dick and William Gibson. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Dom, a man also seriously traumatized and in flight from some past transgression. He’s an “extractor,” who specializes in this coveted though illegal realm of security subconscious. During sleep, the movie explains, people are at their most vulnerable. It’s during that state Dom and his team, by constructing elaborate mazes and labyrinths of dream states delve into the deep subconscious and relieve their mark of some prized personal or corporate information.

Dom’s brilliance, what truly sets him apart, is his capacity for trickery and technical means to convince his mark to submit to even more advanced states of subconscious layers that yield dreams within dreams and so forth. 

Dom’s new client, Saito (Ken Watanabe), a Japanese energy mogul, wants Dom to reverse the process. Instead of stealing an idea, Saito enlists him to implant an idea on a business rival. In return, the powerful, mysterious Saito promises to repatriate Dom to the United States and allow him to reconcile with his two young children.

The opening passages also enable Nolan to chance to sketch in the other players and introduce the key members of Dom’s outfit: his point man Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), his lieutenant and top researcher and muscle; Eames (Tom Hardy), the forger who appropriates other people’s physical identities; Yusuf (Dileep Rao), the chemist who produces the complex sedatives necessary to sustain the subjects’ deep sleep.

The obligatory newcomer, Ariadne (Ellen Page) is the architect who devises the elaborate dreamscape that creates the illusion of verisimilitude. As the outsider, she becomes the far too convenient expositional device that explains and breaks down the story’s physics and ideas.

The movie’s most interesting, contradictory and frustratingly underdeveloped figure is Mal (Marion Cotillard), the key figure from Dom’s life whose past explain the tragedies that line his life. She’s now a reverse avenger, an impossibly beautiful saboteur out to upend his deceptions.

Nolan is certainly very talented, but he’s not necessarily a fluid or natural filmmaker. The rhythms and shape of the opening passages have a pummeling and leaden aspect that slows and at worst, ruptures the early going. As beautifully startling and vertiginous a lot of the imagery is, like a vivid and plangent puzzle like construction where a part of Left Bank folds in on itself, Nolan sacrifices emotional depth and the kick and a corresponding sense of loss and absence is somewhat muted.

Inception is different; but it’s not necessarily new or groundbreaking. Whether intentional or not the Paris locations conjure more fantastic, revealing or dangerously unsettling and original works such as Chris Marker’s La jetée, Godard’s Alphaville, or more recent, Olivier Assayas’s Demonlover.

All the comparisons with Stanley Kubrick strike me at best a reach and at worst just wrong and off. Kubrick posited a wholly different moral vision, both in terms of his essentially misanthropic worldview and his take on humanity and behavior. The comparison also makes little sense aesthetically, especially in regard to production design, camera placement and use of color. 

(Physics and being: walking in space.) 

Indeed, concerned as it is with the moral implications of watching and the freedom and necessity of transference, the movie is much closer to Hitchcock. (Nolan acknowledges as much, studding the movie with references to Vertigo and Marnie.) Nolan even introduces his own MacGuffin, here called “totems,” small, private possessions that help the different operatives differentiate between dream and reality. 

Indeed, the editing is much closer to Hitchcock than Kubrick. The movie’s strongest formal aspect is the dialectical montage, if you will, that bifurcates the different dream levels that Nolan operates around. 

That gives the work the jolt and sense of wonder and awe the material requires. During the key dramatic reveal, Inception cuts between multiple planes of dream levels: a car chase through downtown Los Angeles; a zero gravity hotel corridor; a snowbound chateau fortress; Dom’s fractured, fragile memories of a recovered Eden.

Nolan is like John Huston in some respects in that he has an unnerving instinct for casting exactly the right actors, and he correctly senses how their personas color or deepen the parts. (Thank God he didn’t cast either Will Smith or Brad Pitt, now being reported, in the lead.) Some of the supporting players, especially Hardy, are especially impressive.

I wanted more of Marion Cotillard. Particularly as she’s gotten more comfortable and expressive in English, she’s become an even more intoxicating carnal presence that makes Dom’s conflict and turmoil all the more powerful. (I’m not sure what to make of the movie’s repeated use of Edith Piaf’s “Non, je ne regrette rien,” or that her name is a play on the French word for sick or the Latin for evil.) All the same, Ellen Page is a technically adroit young actress who brings a subtlety and intelligence to all of her parts, but if she remains so sexually neutral all the time, she is going to become  a very limited actress. 

Nolan’s Inception must finally resolve itself, which in this case means moving toward a very emotionally reassuring and conventional ending. I was not always wiling to submit myself to the material. The movie works best when the story is freed of plot and it floats in the extreme, irrational or quite frankly absurd. 

I’m not sure that Nolan ever trusts himself enough to truly let go. In those rare moments when he does, Inception rises to the occasion.

(Sultry and divine: the evil she does.) 

Dance me to the end of love

(The master, Jacques Rivette, with frequent muse, Jane Birkin, from Around a Small Mountain. Images courtesy of Unifrance.) 

“In its energy and dash, the work of youth or early maturity remains a reflection of the movements of everyday life; animated by a different current, it is shackled to time and can detach itself only with difficulty.”

                      Jacques Rivette, “Letter on Rossellini,” Cahiers du cinema, April 1955

The timing is no longer precise, but we are still ruminating in the glorious half-century observation of the French New Wave and the five directors—Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, and Claude Chabrol—who were writers, critics or polemicists at Cahiers du cinema before they started to make their own films.

An unmistakable sadness suddenly hovers around it all. Truffaut has been dead for nearly three decades, and Rohmer’s recent passing marked another end or painful reminder that death is everywhere. Most recently, the great cinematographer William Lubtchansky, an artist as central to the New Wave as other cinematographers like Raoul Coutard or Nester Almendros, died from complications of heart disease.

We have the films, the filmmakers, and we have the texts. Fortunately, the films keep coming. In the last calendar year, all three surviving members, Godard, Rivette and Chabrol (Bellamy), have given us new films. The theatrical appearance of the new film by Jacques Rivette, Around a Small Mountain, is particularly noteworthy.

I saw the film with a select group of American distributors at a festival last year where it was not even part of the program (the French sales agent was adroitly taking advantage of the conglomeration of distributors and writers). I loved the film, but in talking with two executives at what I imagined were the only two realistic American distributors, both said they liked it but though it was so commercially marginal the financial risks for disturbing it were probably too great.

Fortunately, the industrious, ambitious art cinema lovers at Cinema Guild (distributors of recent titles by Kiarostami and Oliveira) jumped into the breach and they just launched the movie in New York. (That’s a better lot than the fate of the director’s 2003 The Story of Marie and Julien, which bypassed theaters and was issued direct to home video platforms.)

Even under the best circumstances, we always trapped by the past, chasing history and unable to fully catch up to the beauty, mystery and astonishing work of this acute and transcendent artist. No matter the time, the place, we are always chasing history. Those like myself, born after the movement started, have due with the fragments. Rivette hovers around us and is part of us, though he is bound to remain the most neglected of the New Wave directors.

(He is a big part of that, given his particularly solitary habits as home and abroad.) Only a fraction of his titles are available on DVD. The uncertain status of New Yorker Films has been particularly cruel in shutting out access to his work. The company had issued a quality edition of La belle noiseuse and they were working on his 1974 masterpiece Celine and Julie Go Boating when the company was shuttered.

As a critic, Rivette was in many respects the most observant and revealing of the critics turned filmmakers. It remains very difficult to acquire English translations of his writing. The book, titled, Rivette: Texts and Interviews, edited by Jonathan Rosenbaum, published by the BFI, is out of print, as are the translated Cahiers anthologies of the period.

Rivette is the best justification I know to own an all-region DVD player. The UK label Artificial Eye published a superb three-disc edition of La belle noiseuse that includes the alternate two-hour cut known as Divertimento. They have also put out the extended cuts of the two-part Jeanne la pucelle. BFI has issued editions of his first feature, Paris Belongs to Us and their own transfer of Celine and Julie.

The ultimate Rivette, what Rosenbaum rightly calls the holy grail, the director’s thirteen and a half hour Out 1, is again, unfortunately, out of reach. (The talk of Criterion issuing the film on their label is apparently just that, a rumor, a wish denied.) The only time I met Rivette was at Berlin three years ago, for a profile that eventually appeared in the LA Weekly.

The cinema of Rivette—mysterious, enveloping, poetic—is colored and shaded by a deeply sensual pleasure, of watching, experiencing, feeling, what is being seen and being shaken and fulfilled in the process. Watching La belle noiseuse again recently, I was reminded of my initial response, the tactile urgency, the visual language of his movies, the jump cuts that leave such an excitement and tenderness.

(All the world's a stage, the players donned in masks and charades: Birkin and Castellitto.) 

Rivette creates worlds, even in cases like Around a Small Mountain, when there is little plot or story to speak of.

The throwaway aspects suggest something easily containable, wispy even, a curio, a divertissement, an epilogue to a much grander and more expansive piece. Having watched it four times over the space of about ten months, I think it much more beautiful and dense. This pastoral and transient work has a lyrical beauty consistent with a master’s late work. Equally, it has a freedom, energy and nimbleness of somebody who has been thinking about and making movies their whole life.

The credits of a Rivette film invariably feature the same white font against a black background; the familiar names, like Lubtchansky or his wife, Rivette’s editor, Nicole Lubtchansky, and the two regular writers, Pascal Bonitzer and Christine Laurent, are now buttressed by others, especially the Lubtchanskys’ daughter, Irina, the new cinematographer.

Several of the actors are credited for their contributions to the scenario, denoting not a humanity or egalitarian spirit, but reflective of a camaraderie and group portrait, in this case the inner movements of a circus troupe in the southwest of France, in the area around Montpelier. Part of Rivette’s genius is to constantly suit the work to the movements, habits and behavioral reflections of the actors. Their bodies and faces are never exempt from some manner of emotional complication or grievance that must be worked out or resolved.

The movie’s French title, 36 vues pic Saint Loup, refers to the name of the mountain. The movie opens with a shot in the beautiful late afternoon light, the camera gracefully moving left to right, as it tracing the outline of the eponymous mountain. A mysterious Italian, Vittorio (Sergio Castellitto), apparently on his way to Spain, speeds past a downed motorist, Kate (Jane Birkin), only to return moments later and helps her restart the engine. During their first encounter, not a word passes between them. He trails her into the village.

“So you talk,” she says upon their first conversation, making one wonder, given her name, the commedia dell’arte setting, if he is a contemporary Petruchio, confident, relaxed, suave, to her coiled and withholding interlocutor. Vittorio has no past to speak of and Kate is desperate to escape hers. The movie has little plot to speak of, just the director’s mesmerizing interplay of light and dark, the real and imagined.

Once the outsider Vittorio is embedded into the everyday texture and rhythms of the other performers, dancers and artists, he ruptures the delicacy of the emotional arrangements. His taming of Kate, therefore, is about summoning and coming to terms with this dark, eventful past. The tension develops, sharply, from her reticence and disavowal to his certainty. Both use words like weapons, and naturally, they become incensed at the other’s certainty, when he says, “Je sais” (I know), or she responds, “A demain” (Until tomorrow).

From the rehearsal space of L’amour fou, the stage whereby Celine performs her magic act to the proscenium that holds the action of Va savoir, Rivette has constantly transformed and animated the frame; it’s a triangulated, free floating desire involving the actors, their art and their audience. The most sculptural of directors, his very output a singular dissection of form and meaning, Rivette turns the work into a dance. Visually, Rivette offers one transfixing dance after another, Jane sashaying down a tight rope as though she were an old MGM ballerina, or Vittorio, stricken, discovers an unfixable melancholy about the world he has invaded.

Rivette allows his actors great freedom in shaping and refining the part, adding pieces from their own lives that acquire an immediacy and spontaneity, even if it somehow threatens the verisimilitude, like the way Birkin, in this film and others, like Love on the Ground, with Geraldine Chaplin, breaks off her speech patterns and suddenly switches to English. If she’s no longer the stunning beauty (that falls to her daughters, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Kate Barry and Lola Doillon), Birkin has aged gracefully, but she projects the sorrow directly, plainly, a mask of plaintive sadness Rivette’s camera manages to constantly catch in isolation or on the move.

Speaking of daughters, the actress who plays the trapeze artist Clemence (Julie-Marie Parmentier), Kate’s daughter, is unknown to me. She’s the wild card, circling and moving around Vittorio, causing a kind of sexual chain reaction, as she begins to fully understand the power she holds over men and how she deals with the onslaught of compliments and favorable responses.

This beautiful and astonishing young actress is like the film itself. She inspires a dance, a movement that leads to surrender. Nothing is easy, but everything is beautiful. Like the director’s entire career, it all counts.

(Dance in time: Castellitto and the entrancing Julie-Marie Parmentier.) 

Taming the monster

Salon's Laura Miller is one of my favorite writers on books and literature, and this recent piece advocates audio formats as an alternative to tackling those monsters of literature, like "War and Peace," or "Don Quixote," those mistresses of fate, that tempt and endlessly seduce us though ultimately defeat our greatest ambitions to subdue them.

I've gone a different route.

I finally opened my copy of the acclaimed Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of the Tolstoy and hope to finish it by the end of August. The Vintage Classics' edition is slightly more than twelve hundred pages. I just started, less than one hundred pages in. (Depending on how well it goes, I might get especially ambitious and take on Edith Grossman's acclaimed translation of Cervantes' book as well.)

Art and matter: Abbas Kiarostami

(Star and rival director, in stunning alliance, in Abbas Kiarostami's Close-up. Image courtesy of Criterion.) 

At Cannes, in 1997, I remember walking directly in front of the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami and his security detail following the late festival premiere of Taste of Cherry. (There was concern about a possibly violent demonstration against either the director or the festival for giving such prominence to a film whose subject, suicide, was taboo.)

I’d met Kiarostami once before, and whether he recognized me or not, I was not sure, but there was an openness and friendliness to the look we exchanged I have never quite forgotten.

A couple of years later, after seeing the director’s superb The Wind Will Carry Us at Venice, I interviewed him for a piece that was published here. Looking at the piece again, I’m struck for a conversation more than a decade old, how relevant it remains to the director’s soulful, poetic and sublime features.

That film marked the end of something; it was the last of his features shot in 35mm. Taking advantage of digital technology, Kiarostami achieved a sharply different formal register of long takes, echoes and recurring patterns that purified his stories to the bone; the governing ideas and philosophical inquiry about man, fate and humanity prevailed, but the form turned increasingly spare, austere and increasingly abstracted.

I liked some of these works, especially ABC Africa and Ten, but some of it pounced on the very qualities his detractors have often labeled against him. At their worst, they were arid and emotionally inert.

I have still not seen Shirin. I regret that immensely because it apparently constitutes an important transition, the presence of Juliette Binoche is a bridge between his experimental period and Certified Copy, which just premiered at Cannes. Binoche won the best actress prize at Cannes. (Shirin is available on Region 2 DVD, and it forthcoming from the industrious and terrific art cinema lovers at Cinema Guild.)

Certified Copy inaugurates Kiarostami’s next wave, a work like Godard’s Sauve qui peut (la vie), that apparently posits a second return to narrative filmmaking. Cannes is over, of course; but IFC acquired the film and it is likely to make the important festival circuit, like Toronto, Telluride or perhaps even New York partially curate their program from other festivals.

I just finished watching the new Criterion high-definition edition of Close-up, the director’s 1989 breakthrough. My friend Ben Kenigsberg was one of the first to point out the formal correlations of the two. One prominent aspect of contemporary cinephilia is how the arrival of a major new work, given a superb presentation on the home video format triggers something vital, personal and important about your own introduction to a movie or director.

In my own case I’d heard of Kiarostami, but I couldn’t say I knew his work until the 1992 Toronto film festival commissioned a major retrospective on the director. It was probably about this time I first met Godfrey Cheshire; he became, with Jonathan Rosenbaum, the go-to critic on Kiarostami and Iranian cinema. So now, almost a full two decades on, a lot of these old friends return with searing brilliance, illuminating a director and his times, in the Criterion presentation. Cheshire contributes a superb essay about the film and Rosenbaum and Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, authors of the first book in English on Kiarostami, compose an essential and revealing commentary track.

(Looking: Juliette Binoche, star of Kiarostami's Certified Copy. Image courtesy of Cannes Film festival.)