Notes on recent viewings (edited)

I.
Alexei Guerman's My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1984) remains one of the hidden jewels of the late Soviet cinema, screened only rarely as it was last night as part of the Kino summer repertory program at New York's Anthology Film Archives. Guerman, on the evidence of 'Ivan Lapshin and his later opus Khroustaliov, My Car! (1998), deserves to be rated among the most important figures of both the late Soviet and European fin-de-siecle cinemas, remaking the great tradition of Soviet poetical cinema (Barnet, Dovzhenko, Paradjanov, Tarkovsky, Sokurov) with an eye toward the absurdities of Stalinism. His dissent is presented indirectly, in the film's characterizations rather than in the exposition of dialogue. Of course, this impressionistic narrative technique (for a critical voice) was mandated by the Soviet Union's tight control of individual expression; however, the irony of his viewpoint is entirely his own, marking Guerman as a contemporary of the great Bela Tarr in his infusion of black humor into the rhythmic structure of cinema modeled on Soviet master Andrei Tarkovsky's.

II.
One of the scenes set on the frozen steppe landscape achieves an atmospheric tangiblity rivaled by only a handful of films (think La Nuit du carrefour [Jean Renoir, 1932] for instance). Here, the icy winter sky is represented with an exceptional tactility focused by the wafting truck exhaust and the escaping breath of the actors. At moments like these, cinema awakens to a third sense -- touch -- through the power of the film's visuals.

III.
see comments

IV.
Featured among the extras of The Sopranos: Season Five is Peter Bogdanovich's commentary for an episode he directed. Let me just say that as much as his clean, Hitchcock/Hawks-ian style speaks for itself, even on the small screen, his specific justifications for his shot selections remind us just how talented a director Bogdanovich can be: when he isolates Edie Falco's character in a reverse, it is not just a narratological technique but also a spatial expression of relational geometry; he withholds an establishing long until the end of one scene for maximum emotional resonance; etc. I also found it interesting -- and quite insightful -- that he continually singled out Falco, Steve Buscemi, and Robert Iler (Tony Jr.) for their superlative acting abilities. Also, his impressions of the two great auteurs are not to be missed.