March 13th 2013. Pick Of The Day.
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Godard's followup to his BREATHLESS debut winds down its weeklong appreciation from the movie temple on West Houston. LE PETIT SOLDAT screens today and tomorrow unless repreived by Film Forum. I'm betting no.
MOMA's Auteurist History of Film series resumes this week with a three-day booking of Andrzej Wajda's early neo-realist gem ASHES AND DIAMONDS. No pun intended. The Wadj broke onto the world stage with his war trilogy, which began with A GENERATION, continued with KANAL, and concluded with today's offering at Abby Rockefeller's indulgence. Great flick. Not my Pick.
BAM's month-long trib to the ethereally beautiful Isabelle Adjani today offers the aching portrait of love and the artistic tempermant CAMILLE CLAUDEL. Adjani plays the eponymous sculptor and lover of Gerard Depardieu's Auguste Rodin, who should'a done a little more thinkin' himself it seems. Her raw interpretation of tempestuous passion bagged the great actress a well deserved Oscar nod. REALLY tempts, but not today's Pick. No, today I choose yet again a film I've never seen, and hope to rectify that oversight at around 7pm. A work well-regarded or at least hotly debated to this day, by an acknowledged cinematic master/fraud/both. And I choose on this blustery March day a director from a clime associated with a New York season we hopefully have now left behind, and representative of a temperment forged by eternal winter. Read on.
Ingmar Bergman declared Andrei Tarkovsky the inventor of a new film language. Read into that accolade what you will. The Soviet era auteur attended film school in Moscow during Premier Khrushchev's relaxation of Russia's cultural blockade, and the burgeoning filmmaker was among the first of his generation to be exposed to the works not only of the Italian neo-realists but the emerging acts of brilliance from the entirety of world cinema, including Satyajit Ray, Akira Kurosawa and the aforementioned Polish auteur, then under strict Soviet rule, Andrzej Wajda. The auteur theory was of particular interest to him at this stage of his eductaion. A Russian artist embracing a dictatorial stance as neccesary to the artistic process? Shocking!
That theory stood this genius in the making in good stead. After several short student films Tarkovsky inherited the troubled IVAN'S CHILDHOOD, a WWII tale told through the eyes of a young boy, and reversed its fortunes to the tune of a Golden Lion win at the Venice Film Festival and sudden personal prominence on the world stage. Which cache he used to push through projects which other filmmakers may not have dared attempt under a totalitarian regime with a few gulags to its name. Sophmore effort ANDREI RUBLEV, a biopic of the great Russian painter, met with decided frowns from his government run film studio, Mosfilm, but his fellow Soviet citizens dug the flick, and the world was now watching as well, so an out-of-competition Cannes screening was booked and the film deemed a masterwork. Then came SOLARIS, which has been discussed to death. You know how you feel about it, whether you've seen it or not, so I won't go over it again here. What's undeniable is the esteem the filmmaker was held in at this point, how his chafing under the constricts of Soviet dictates, deemed petulant by his country's power elite, earned sympathy from artists and governments worldwide. So after two flicks set in his country's past and one in its future, all of which commented in ways perhaps subversive on his country's present, he decided next to explore an entirely new territory; human memory. His own, precisely. Combining different film stocks to assemble a loosely connected narrative, it was an attempt to replicate the frailty of human recollection, the corruptive influence of emotional pain and physical hardship on our cognitave abilites. A look at his own youth during the second World War, and what may or may not have bee true then and now. Some call this his masterpiece. I'm gonna find out tonight.
THE MIRROR screens at the Mid-Manhattan Library at 7pm tonight. Extra shushing has been approved by the Mayor.
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Be safe and sound and make sure the next guy is too, Stockahz! Back tomorrow with the day's Pick! Excelsior!
-Joe Walsh
