Entries associated with the tag "Alain Resnais":

As more and more buried treasures have been brought to light on the Internet, half a dozen recent finds seem especially worthy of notice:

 1. We still don't have access to the original version of John Cassavetes' Shadows after critic Ray Carney tracked down the only existing print and showed a video of it twice at the Rotterdam Film Festival in early 2004. I was lucky enough to see it at the time, and even though I regard it more as a fascinating and historically important curiosity than as a lost masterpiece, I agree with Carney, and disagree with Cassavetes' widow, Gena Rowlands, that it should be available to the general public. In the meantime, however, Carney has posted three clips of this version on his website (scroll down a bit). What he's made available is only a little over four and a half minutes from the film, and Carney's name and URL are stamped on every frame, but it's still enough to give one a taste of Charlie Mingus's eccentric original score (especially during the credit sequence)--and enough to support Carney's thesis that this is a finished film, flaws and all, and not a mere work print.

2. On the same site, higher up, one can find links to an invaluable Danish web site with links to a good many interviews with filmmakers and critical pieces (including, I've just discovered, a couple of my own, on Alexander Dovzhenko and Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinema). There are also several filmed interviews on the same site and, even better, trailers by Godard for eight of his own features.

3. The treasures to be found at YouTube appear to be endless: Alain Resnais' first major short, Les Statues meurent aussi (1953, see photo), written by Chris Marker—admittedly without subtitles (though I've never seen a subtitled print);

4. Orson Welles's unreleased nine-minute trailer for F for Fake, starring his late cinematographer Gary Graver;

5. And three videos of the great jazz pianist Lennie Tristano playing at the Half Note in Manhattan, 1964, in a quintet with his two most gifted pupils, Warne Marsh (tenor sax) and Lee Konitz (alto sax). The visual quality of the videos may be atrocious, but I'm still grateful for these precious mementos, having caught this amazing group around the same time at what may have been the same gig.

6. Finally, as Dave Kehr recently reminded me on his own web site, you can access most of Orson Welles's major radio shows between 1937 and early 1940  for free at another excellent site.

In an April 1998 review of Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry in New York magazine, David Denby scoffed at the idea that other critics were calling it a masterpiece. "This is a movie of great interest—an original work,” he said, “but it lacks the courage, the surprise, the ravenous hunger for life, of a serious work of movie art.” Almost nine years later, in the New Yorker's listings, Denby promotes a Kiarostami retrospective at MOMA by calling the same film one of  Kiarostami’s best, noting that he “redeems humanism by combining it with enchanting formal play” and “can turn the simplest action into a philosophical quest.”

It’s not quite a reversal, acknowledged or otherwise, but it does suggest a changed attitude, and a welcome one, perhaps spurred along by a desire to counter Bush's demonization of what he chooses to call "Iran." Or perhaps Denby has decided that a nonserious work of movie art can also be a philosophical quest that combines humanism with "enchanting formal play." Still, there is one strange recurring element in his account of the film: his claim that the protagonist “tries to induce strangers to help him commit suicide." This is a curious and decidedly nonhumanist description of a project he described accurately in another review. In fact, the protagonist offers to pay each stranger he meets to retrieve him from a hole in the ground if he’s still alive the next morning or to bury him if he’s dead.

In 1998, around the same time that Denby's New York review appeared, he was lamenting the alleged decline of the art film in a long New Yorker piece called "The Moviegoers." More recently he's held forth on what he calls the new narrative disorder in movies. Noting that Alain Resnais "played the most extreme (and infuriating) games with time and narrative" in his early features but apparently remaining cool as a cucumber when it comes to a recent Resnais knockoff such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (which owes a great deal to Resnais' Je t'aime, Je t'aime) or an antihumanist crossword puzzle like Memento, Denby shows nothing but awe and admiration for Pulp Fiction. Presumably Quentin Tarantino could teach Alain Resnais and Abbas Kiarostami a thing or two about "the courage, the surprise, the ravenous hunger for life, of a serious work of art."