Night in the Lens

Soviet Union / 1990 / Russian

Directed by Aleksandr Burtsev

With Igor Ageev, Elena Kovaleva, Dmitri Shagin

In a small town train station at night, the friends of a young painter named Volodya Savrasov see him off on a train bound for Leningrad. They are boisterous, having already been drinking for a while, and one of them drops the jug of beer they were going to give him. Once he is safely aboard, the remaining three head back to their dreary, provincial lives the only way they know how. They go to Timur’s house where they sit around the table, chowing down on onions and potatoes, and knocking back vodka while the wife and baby try to sleep in the next room. The men do a crossword puzzle and talk about people they know, one of whom just bought a VCR. Their momentary jealousy gives way to satisfaction: “it’s not compatible with Soviet TVs anyway.” Read the rest of this entry »

India / 1948 / Hindi

Directed by Uday Shankar

With Uday Shankar, Amala Shankar, Lakshmi Kanta

Dancer and choreographer Uday Shankar’s only film, Kalpana, begins self-consciously, with a man wearing Gandhian homespun visiting the office of a film producer, trying to sell him a story. The producer is adamant that it can’t be filmed, that the studio must keep its box office in mind. Romance is what sells, he says, not high ideals and crazy dreams. But the man pleads with him to think of the children watching those films, as though the future of the young nation rested in his script. But the studio bosses are afraid of taking any chances. And they are right to be so; Kalpana doesn’t follow a conventional pace, but melts from one scene into the next, from one bold and enchanting image to the next, an almost continuous montage. Its first half hour of it slips by  at a bewildering clip, and even after having smoothed out a bit, it continues to spin off furious digressions both fast and loose. It’s not incoherent at all, but flows very much at the density and logical viscosity of a dream, hallucinations nested in layers within flights of fancy. Read the rest of this entry »

Yugoslavia / 1961 / Croatian

Directed by Fadil Hadžić

With Vesna Bojanic, Tatjana Beljakova, Jasenka Kodrnja

The secret agent stubs out a symbolic last cigarette. Starting tomorrow Vera must drop any appearance of sophistication or urbanity and pass as a peasant woman. It is 1943, and the Yugoslav partisans waging war against the fascist government and their German masters has been infiltrated by unknown spies, their secrets spilling out and causing losses on the battlefields. They know that a certain CEO of a top bank, a man named Bolner, is involved in relaying information to and from these agents. Vera’s mission will be to pose as a housekeeper and live in the man’s apartment. There she will collect documents and make sketches of the individuals involved in the espionage against the partisans. Under an assumed name and occupation, she infiltrates the household. Read the rest of this entry »

Sweden, Denmark & Norway / 2017 / Swedish & South Sami

Directed by Amanda Kernell

With Lene Cecilia Sparrok, Hanna Alström, Maj-Doris Rimpi

Three generations sit in a car driving north: an old woman, her son and granddaughter, headed to Lapland, to attend the funeral of her sister Njenna. The son promises her that they will only stay for a short while, but the old woman is still resistant, sullen and fuming. On the way he puts on some music in a Sami dialect, from her homeland of Lapland. But she doesn’t appreciate the gesture. “So shrill,” she says, of the singing on the tape. “And they lie and steal. And they whine.” She sounds like any crotchety and narrow-minded elder, but there is an affected vehemence in her bigotry, an overt need to push the subject away, and keep it away. Read the rest of this entry »

USA / 1978 / English

Directed by Rawn Fulton

“I’m growin’ old and feeble / my sight is getting dim / my work upon this earth is nearly done / ol’ massa has departed, I soon will follow him / my friends have crossed the river one by one.”

As the old man recounts the past, it’s unclear if he’s talking about his childhood specifically or an indistinct span of his life. But it clearly isn’t recent. Things, after all, are different now. He talks of how they lived self-sufficiently, making everything: pork, beef, potatoes – just a plow, some sugar and a jug of molasses they bought. “There was no welfare business then,” he says. “It was either root, hog, or die.” The phrase used as the title of this film is from an old custom of letting pigs roam in the forest to fend for themselves, but in this case has come to apply to farmers trying to hack it in the countryside. There seem to be three options (scrounge, feast or starve), the combination of which could vary from year to year. Read the rest of this entry »

Hong Kong / 1938 / Mandarin

Directed by Wu Yonggang

With Butterfly Wu, Xi Mei, Wang Cilong

A jar of powdered milk sits on the vanity, next to containers of make-up. Dresses of different floral and bamboo patterns hang on the wall. A woman makes sure her baby son is asleep before quietly turning off the lights and leaving the apartment. She tells her older sister to listen for any cries from the baby while she is out working. On a Shanghai street corner she stands, trying to entice customers but not meeting with any luck. One young man, when she approaches him, turns out his empty pockets to demonstrate how poor he is. She isn’t getting by on her looks. Either no one can afford her or they are simply indifferent to her. Instead it is the butcher who has a captive audience; young men watch hungrily as he divides a cut of meat. The street is full of the usual nighttime characters: thieves, prostitutes, shoppers, hawkers, gawkers, and a young policeman walking around scowling at everyone. Read the rest of this entry »

The Films of Dominique Dubosc

In as short film by French documentarist Dominique Dubosc, simply called Jean Rouch, First Film (1990) the eponymous cineaste is enamored of the idea of a director’s first film possessing a kernel of all of the themes that they would develop in their subsequent work. Rouch comments that  Marcel Carné’s entire career is anticipated in Nogent (1929). “The first film really is like the ‘moment of truth’ in a bullfight,” he says. The context is a screening of Rouch’s first film for a group of African film students, but let us apply this theory to Dubosc’s own career, which now spans some fifty years. A term that Dubosc refers to, “the cruelty of observing and tenderness of the gaze” is an inversion of the negative connotation of the word “gaze” in cinema. The gaze is what connects who is behind the camera with who is before it. If his debut film (not to mention the decades of filmmaking that followed) were reduced to this dichotomy, it would surely reveal observation and gaze not to be two poles but a continuum. Dubosc’s films are perhaps about a transformation from observation to the gaze, transforming the cruelty of reality with the tenderness of insight. Read the rest of this entry »

Bulgaria / 1971 / Bulgarian

Directed by Metodi Andonov

With Katya Paskaleva, Anton Gorchev, Milen Penev

The peasant couple and their young daughter slowly wake up in the bed that they all share. The only sound is birdsong, but the mother looks troubled. Although this scene radiates contentment, it takes place in a hostile, aggrieved land. This is Bulgaria, sometime during the nearly five hundred years of Ottoman rule. The family goes about their daily chores, feeding the animals and baking loaves of bread to sell. The father leaves with pack horses, taking his herd of goats up into the mountains to graze. This opening sequence takes place with hardly any words. The rest of the film has a similarly non-lingual tone, dominated by grunts and shouts. While this is meant to convey the brutality, the bluntness of the age in which it takes place, it also brings focus to the subtlety in the ardor, to the need for listening closely. The characters hear noises from far away; the skitter of a loose pebble could signal a landslide, just as a twig snap could mean a group of bandits, and the silence of the hills indicates that each animal can be accounted for. Read the rest of this entry »

Sweden / 1957 / English

Directed by Arne Sucksdorff

With Ginjo, Riga, Chendru

In the Bastar region of Central India, the colorful outdoor markets attract tourists who come to look at the handicrafts made by Adivasi (tribal) people, who converge from nearby villages to sell their wares. At one such crossroads of cultures we meet Ginjo, a hunter from the Muria tribe. His wife Riga is also there, a woman of a different tribe. While intermarriage is often looked down upon, Ginjo and Riga have already gone through that fight with their families, and won. While the buyers and sellers haggle in different languages, children ride the ferris wheel and play games; old men watch a cockfight while women make jewelry. An English voice-over tells us that the weekly market is “the Muria’s most tangible meeting with civilization.” From this tourist’s-eye-view we are brought somewhat closer, following Ginjo and his fellow Muria as they take their bullock carts home, into the jungle, far from the roads and railways. Read the rest of this entry »

Mexico / 1945 / Spanish

Directed by Julio Bracho

With Arturo de Córdova, Gloria Marín, Julio Villarreal

A prominent surgeon, Dr. Alejandro Mangino is in a state both extremely disturbed and electrified by a sense of duty. He seems a man at the end of a very frayed rope. A stack of copies of the memoir he has just published gets delivered to the university where he teaches, to be handed out to his medical students. He arrives at the hospital where he is scheduled to perform surgery that morning, and tells another doctor that he cannot work. Then he travels to the grave of his recently departed friend, the architect Molina. While opening in the present day before setting up an explanatory recollection is standard in melodramas, Twilight sets up multiple false starts in its first fifteen minutes before the true flashback can begin. Read the rest of this entry »