Okay, this is definitely not meant to add to my already burdensome film-viewing workload for 2012, but as I was thinking about the idea of cinematic blind spots, I wondered about the idea of larger gaps of knowledge. How many directors are there whose work I have heretofore missed entirely? This could be even more embarrassing than just listing individual films, but I thought it might be entertaining. As well, if you list yours in the comments, maybe we could help each other by suggesting which film for each director might make a good introduction for someone who hasn’t seen a single one of their films. Here are five of mine:

I got this idea from the cover of the latest issue of 180°, the TIFF Bell Lightbox catalogue, so I know that I’ll have a chance to catch some Bresson films soon. Okay, your turn!

Post from: Toronto Screen Shots

Blind Spots: Directors

Years before he was persona non grata at the Cannes Film Festival, I discovered the films of Danish “bad boy” Lars von Trier at the old Cinematheque Ontario. So it’s fitting that the folks behind the Cinematheque are bringing a mini-retrospective of his work to their new digs at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. Beginning tonight and running through November 19, six of von Trier’s earlier films will be shown as a sort of appetizer for his latest, Melancholia, which opens on Friday November 18.

Still from Melancholia (2011)

Though I’m disappointed with the omissions, both obvious (no Antichrist?) and not-so-obvious (The Kingdom would have been perfect running over a few nights, and Epidemic seems not to be shown much), I’m most excited to revisit the (literally) dark early films that were my introduction to his work. The Element of Crime (1984) is a sort of police procedural, with a protagonist who practically goes mad trying to track down a serial killer in a post-apocalyptic and dreamlike environment that just might be the inside of his own head. And Europa (1991), the very first of von Trier’s films I saw, which follows a naive young American working as a porter on a very strange train in post-World War 2 Germany. Both films are dripping with style, evocative images, and dark, dreamlike plots.

Still from The Element of Crime (1984)

I’d also like to finally see The Idiots and Dogville, both of which seemed reliably provocative when I saw clips during Adam Nayman’s excellent class earlier this year at the Jewish Canadian Cultural Centre.

Still from Europa (1991)

Here are the details for the schedule. Don’t forget that in addition to the retrospective, you can see Melancholia beginning Friday November 18.

• Breaking the Waves (1996) — Wednesday November 9, 6:30pm
• The Element of Crime (1984) — Friday November 11, 6:30pm
• Europa (1991) — Saturday November 12, 8:00pm and Thursday November 17, 9:15pm
• Dogville (2003) — Wednesday November 16, 6:30pm
• Dancer in the Dark (2000) — Friday November 18, 6:00pm
• The Idiots (1998) — Saturday November 19, 8:00pm

As always, tickets are available online.

Post from: Toronto Screen Shots

Waiting for the End of the World: Lars von Trier Retrospective at TIFF Bell Lightbox

From October 2nd through December 13th, TIFF Bell Lightbox will present a retrospective of the work of iconoclastic American director Nicholas Ray (1911–1979). It’s a full-scale exhibition in honour of the centenary of Ray’s birth, and will continue into the new year with another selection of his work.

Ray was a unique character, making personal films about alienated youth and vulnerable people within the Hollywood studio system. Perhaps best known for his work with James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Ray had been exploring the same themes from the very beginning of his career. His first feature, They Live By Night (1948), featured two naïve young lovers on the run from the law; it was remade by Robert Altman as Thieves Like Us (1974) and was a huge influence on Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973). Other career highlights screening during the series:

• In A Lonely Place (1950): Humphrey Bogart gives one of his best performances as a man accused of murder who finds love but sees it destroyed by his self-loathing rage.
• On Dangerous Ground (1952): Robert Ryan and Ida Lupino star in this noirish tale of the transforming power of love.
• Bigger Than Life (1956): a Technicolor marvel featuring James Mason in a terrifying turn as a benevolent teacher transformed by the side effects of a drug treatment.
• Bitter Victory (1957): an anti-heroic war film set in the North African desert during World War II, the film pits two British officers against each other in the aftermath of a love triangle.

Ray’s focus on outsiders, on the lonely and misunderstood misfits in our midst, was ahead of its time, and has endeared him to modern directors like Jim Jarmusch (who studied under him at NYU in the 1970s), Martin Scorsese, and many of the figures of the French New Wave, most notably Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut. It was Godard who, in his review of Bitter Victory, provided the quotation that forms the title of the series:

There was theatre (Griffith), poetry (Murnau), painting (Rossellini), dance (Eisenstein), music (Renoir). Henceforward there is cinema. And the cinema is Nicholas Ray.

Tickets for all screenings are now available to order online.

Post from: Toronto Screen Shots

Hollywood Classics: The Cinema Is Nicholas Ray at TIFF Bell Lightbox

Husbands (1970, Director: John Cassavetes): I’m not certain which of the films of John Cassavetes would be the best point of entry for a newcomer, but I don’t think I’d recommend Husbands, which was my own introduction. Considered the godfather of American independent cinema, Cassavetes worked as an actor and director on other people’s films in order to finance his own unique studies of ordinary people acting out. In Husbands, it’s about the mysteries of the middle-aged male psyche, and it’s one loud and crazy ride.

His previous film, Faces (1968) had been an unexpected hit, and so not only did he find someone to help finance the film (Italian producer Bino Cicogna, whom Cassavetes had met while working in Italy on Machine Gun McCain in 1969), but later on, he convinced Columbia to release the film theatrically. Nevertheless, Husbands was a commercial failure, despite some intense performances.

It’s essentially a three-hander. Harry (Ben Gazzara), Gus (John Cassavetes) and Archie (Peter Falk) attend the funeral of the fourth member of their group, and, trying to work through their grief, go on an epic bender, which lasts several days and takes them from New York to London.

Although the tagline is “A Comedy about Life, Death and Freedom,” there are only a few places where I laughed, and uncomfortably at that. Instead, Cassavetes’ examination of male friendship, grief, and midlife crises becomes more and more harrowing as it goes on. This bender is a descent into a sort of howling existential hell.

Not being familiar with the rest of Cassavetes’ work as a director, it was initially difficult for me to tell whether these emotionally-stunted, crass and abrasive characters are meant to evoke our sympathy or not. Their “charm” certainly becomes more transparent the more time we spend with them, and Cassavetes enjoys drawing scenes out to almost absurd lengths. An early scene of a drunken singalong in a bar must run at least 20 minutes, and by the end, with our trio bullying a woman into adding more “passion” to her performance, our opinion of these guys has certainly changed for the worse.

So it’s not a huge surprise when Harry comes home to change the next morning and ends up in a physical confrontation with both his wife and her mother. As the defacto leader of the trio, he’s the most aggressive. Before his ill-fated trip home, he’s told Gus and Archie, “Aside from sex, and she’s very good at it, I like you guys better.” He follows this up with a few repetitions of the phrase, “Let’s go home and get it over with.”

After his violent outburst, he grabs his passport and tells his friends that he needs to get away; otherwise, he’d just go back inside and apologize and he doesn’t want to do that. All these guys seem powerless when it comes to their wives and children and other responsibilities, but their “acting out” just seems to confirm their immaturity, despite the macho trappings.

Under the cover of concern for their friend, Archie and Gus decide to go with him, to “tuck him into the hotel and then come back home,” they assure each other. As soon as they arrive in England, they want to gamble, drink and pick up women, as if these activities are what bind men together. The only member of the trio who tries to communicate anything deeper is Archie, but poor old Peter Falk always seems to end up talking to himself. He’s the sort of actor who seems to end up doing that in almost everything he’s ever done.

There’s another long scene in London, where our three tough guys succeed in getting three attractive women back to their hotel rooms. Gus has picked up a woman who’s mentally unbalanced, and the other two appear to have hired prostitutes, but in any case, the following “seduction” scene is one of the most creepy and joyless I’ve seen in a long time. It is kind of funny to realize that the only people willing to spend time with these guys are either crazy or are being paid.

It’s a strange thing, though. Although I couldn’t wait for the film to end, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it for days. These loud brutes, “drama kings” if I can coin a phrase, are trapped not only in their jobs and marriages, but in their conception of what being a man is all about. Their attempts to connect with each other, to grieve their friend and their passing youth, all end in shouting and violence. Their rage is inarticulate but exposes something, except they don’t have the vocabulary to express this vulnerability. Perhaps I’m reading more into the film, but I want to give Cassavetes credit for forcing the audience to spend two and a half hours in the presence of such unreconstructed brutes. Their humanity comes out not in what they say but in what they’re unable to say. This is no comedy. It’s a tragedy.

Post from: Toronto Screen Shots

Husbands

From July 14–31, TIFF Bell Lightbox is presenting a retrospective of the work of pioneering American independent filmmaker John Cassavetes (1929–1989). It’s the first time in 20 years that such a major exhibition of Cassavetes’ work has taken place in Toronto.

Beginning his career as an actor with roles on stage as well as on television and film (including a memorable turn as Mia Farrow’s husband in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby), Cassavetes always chafed against the strictly economic focus of the studio system, and was one of the first filmmakers to finance, make and exhibit his films outside the existing infrastructure of the Hollywood movie business. Working with a small group of collaborators and friends, including his wife Gena Rowlands, Cassavetes made a handful of films that have had an enduring influence on American filmmaking, including the work of directors as different as Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg.

I am eagerly looking forward to correcting yet another blind spot in my knowledge of American film history, especially since Cassavetes’ obsession with characters rather than plots is right up my alley. In many of his films, his characters are ordinary people facing difficult situations or at major turning points in their lives. He also chose to work with actors who looked and spoke like regular people, using his friendships to challenge them to dig deeper and to give some of their rawest and most direct performances. Some of his regular collaborators (Peter Falk, Seymour Cassel) are among my favourite actors, and I’m especially looking forward to seeing the recently-departed Falk light up the screen again.

Tickets are available online for the entire series, including a very special conversation with Gena Rowlands on July 14th at 6:30pm. She will also introduce her Oscar-nominated performance in A Woman Under the Influence (1974) at 8:45pm that evening, as well as Cassavetes’ second feature Faces (1968) on Friday July 15th at 6:30pm. More information on the series is available on the TIFF Bell Lightbox site.

Post from: Toronto Screen Shots

Masks and Faces: The Films of John Cassavetes at TIFF Bell Lightbox