Research finds

I came across this video about two months ago. This is from the television show What's My Line?. I don't think it is necessary to describe the rules of the game show. This video had an interesting impact on my current research project on the cross-cultural exchange that took place between Italian and American cinema via the film star. This particular episode aired in 1953. Anna Magnani was in New York to promote the Visconti film Bellissima (which was receiving its American premiere despite being released in Italy in 1951). What is most striking is that the celebrity panel knows Magnani and her work. This is before Magnani appeared in and won the Oscar for The Rose Tattoo. The fact that an Italian actress could come on American television and be recognized as such was surprising. This episode provided much food for thought for my research project.

And while Anna Magnani being identified is surprising, it is not shocking. After all, Open City was a huge success in the New York area. Rossellini's short The Miracle also caused a huge scandal in with American Catholic groups. What is shocking is that Silvana Mangano, a star who never achieved the international fame of Anna Magnani, Sophia Loren, or Gina Lollobrigida, appeared on the show roughly three years after Magnani and was correctly identified. Also, halfway in the video Robert Lewis makes a comment about all of the foreign stars being Italian. This is from August 1956 and it seems unlikely that Brigitte Bardot would have been well known in America as And God Created Woman was released in France that year. Both of these videos, but especially the Silvana Mangano, have opened my research questions to an interesting direction.

Oshima

I saw an early Nagisa Oshima film, Cruel Story of Youth, this week in my Japanese new wave class. Now I am on an "I-want-to-see-tons-of-Oshima-films" kick. To satiate my appetite for Oshima I bought a R2 copy of Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence. I shall probably head to the Film Studies Center sometime within the next few weeks to watch some more Oshima. I'm almost certain that my final paper for the class will be on Oshima.

My top 10 of the decade

I may be a little late in doing this but I will still give my top 10 films from the past decade (ordered chronologically)

* EDIT: I saw Antichrist last week (2/14) and feel compelled to add it to my list.

1. Yi Yi (Edward Yang, 2000)
2. Fat Girl (Catherine Breillat, 2001)
3. The Triplets of Belleville (Sylvain Chomet, 2003)
4. The Dreamers (Bernardo Bertolucci, 2004)
5. Cache (Michael Haneke, 2005)
6. This Film is Not Yet Rated (Kirby Dick, 2005)
7. 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu, 2007)
8. Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, 2007)
9. Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Woody Allen, 2008)
10. Antichrist (Lars von Trier, 2009)
    

I'm no longer disappointed about missing the Jonathan Rosenbaum-introduced screening of Araya. I found out that Tom Gunning will be introducing Au Hasard Balthazar!

Eric Rohmer (1920 - 2010)

As I was eating my dinner I logged on to my twitter and saw a tweet by Criterion. Eric Rohmer, French New Wave director and Cahiers critic, passed away today. The news was quite surprising because just before I got home from my Italian cinema class (a screening of Fellini's La Dolce Vita) I stopped to see what the Film Studies Center has planned for this quarter. They started the quarter with Hôtel du Nord (Marcel Carné, 1938). The first three weeks of the quarter are part of French series. This Friday they will be showing Au Hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966), which I will be attending despite the Chicago premiere of Araya with an introduction by Jonathan Rosenbaum taking place at the same time across campus (the Bresson screening is for a class). But I've digressed just slightly. Anyway, the week after next the Film Studies Center will be showing Eric Rohmer's most recent film, Romance of Astree and Celadon (2007). It was quite a jolt to come home and read that Rohmer had passed away after seeing the screening schedule and thinking how great it is that he, the oldest of Cahiers bunch, was still an active filmmaker.

I got my first taste of Rohmer through the first and second films of the Six Moral Tales. I found The Bakery Girl of Monceau quite charming and totally in the spirit of the early films of his Cahiers colleagues. After seeing the next film in the series I did not return to Rohmer until last winter. One of the perks of winter vacation at my undergraduate university was the length. We were given a month off. Obviously, this month encouraged me to watch and read as much as possible. I decided to watch some more of Rohmer's Six Moral Tales. I distinctly recall sitting in my room and being totally enamored with Claire's Knee. I was so enamored that I had to watch Love in the Afternoon immediately. More often that not I find films with too much dialogue dull, which is due partially to the trite dialogue in a lot of American films. What really bothers me with dialogue-heavy films is that it runs the risk of being a crutch for the filmmaker. Dialogue has the tendency to shift the viewer's attention from the eye to the ear. Rohmer's films are notoriously talky, yet he never degrades the visual. His work (at least what I am familiar with) is centered on human relationships but is intimately tied to the space of encounters. Just as one, as I openly admit, can fall in love with his characters, it is equally plausible to fall in love with his landscapes. It does not matter where Rohmer is -- be it the heart of Paris or a village off of Lake Annecy. The relationship of character to space is every bit as intimate as it is between characters.

His work departs from the "New Wave" style visually but it (again, in what I have seen) respects one of its underlying principles. Nothing in Rohmer ever seems forced. His dialogue is bound with a freedom and spontaneity that resists a specific trajectory. Anything seems possible. Ideas, tones, gestures emerge out of nowhere and take conversations (or internal monologues) into different directions.

This scene from Love in the Afternoon (1972) is a great example of the Rohmer style.


Adieu M. Rohmer.