I’m sure most readers here have received their fair share of movie predictions from any number of websites, ranging from the accurate to the absurd. A few months ago, Amazon.com actually sent me this email: “As someone who has purchased or rated The Philadelphia Story, you might like to know that Furry Hamsters From Hell is now available.” This wasn’t a practical joke, it was a real attempt to persuade me to click on their website and spend $19.95. On the other hand it sometimes gets it right, like when it told me that based on my previous purchases, I might be interested in the upcoming Alamar (2009) from Film Movement.

“Recommend a Movie, Win a Million Bucks” (it’s a PDF) is written by Joseph Sill, an analytics consultant who spent “the better part of a year” competing with programmers around the world, hoping to discover the right statistical combination that would generate the most accurate predictions by July 26, 2009. The article is a fun–even suspenseful–and informative read, a crash course in machine learning rife with movie references.

I’m very proud to announce the September publication of Bert Cardullo’s Committed Cinema: The Films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne; Essays and Interviews, which includes two pieces that I wrote. You can pre-order and preview the book at Amazon or at Cambridge Scholars Publishing, who describe it as “the first book in English to treat the work of the Dardennes, [which] features the best essays and interviews (supplemented by a chronology, a filmography, film credits, and a bibliography) published to date on the two brothers’ memorable films.”

Cardullo is a longtime critic and scholar currently teaching in Izmar, Turkey; I’ve been particularly indebted to the excellent translations found in his 1997 Bazin at Work, which offers a lot of Bazin’s writing that was previously unavailable in English.

The CSP site offers a PDF of the Table of Contents, Cardullo’s Preface, and the first two essays by Jonathan Rosenbaum and Mike Bartlett (the other essayists are myself, Emilie Bickerton, Robin Wood, Cardullo, and David Walsh). I’m looking forward to reading the full collection.

Hayao Miyazaki made an appearance at AMPAS a couple weeks ago, and participated in a Q&A that included clips from his films. In general, he was soft spoken and not especially forthcoming with his answers (my wife assures me he was playing the part of the distinguished Japanese gentleman), but I found several of his comments illuminating, particularly on the subject of his multifaceted villains.

In most cases, Miyazaki’s films are notable for avoiding Good and Evil stereotypes, emphasizing instead the limited and selfish reasonings behind human conflicts. During the Q&A, he told us his primary reason for doing this was because in their efforts to visualize faces, animators often mimic the expressions of the characters they draw for days on end, and he simply didn’t want to create Evil characters who would plunge him into long periods of grimacing and frowning. I thought this was a funny but insightful position, especially if it inspired more nuanced stories. (For more coverage of Miyazaki’s California tour, check out Michael Guillen’s excellent round-up of links.)

Miyazaki’s latest film, Ponyo, opens in US theaters this week, and even though I found it a disappointment after the ambition and complexity of his most recent works–Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and Howl’s Moving Castle–its release has occasioned VIZ Media’s English translation of the excellent Starting Point: 1979-1996, a compendium of Miyazaki’s writings and conversations. The book’s most notable feature is probably the diversity of sources (essays, lectures, interviews) and topics (history and aesthetics, reviews, memories, confessions) that offer a wide-ranging portrait of the animation master who studied economics and political science and worked his way up the ranks of Japan’s anime industry. Miyazaki is a thoughtful and eloquent writer, as passages like these reveal:

• Advice for beginners: “One of the things about drawing is that, if you put in serious effort, you will become good at it, at least to a certain extent. But that’s all the more reason to study a variety of things that interest you while you have time, before you enter the professional world, in order to develop and solidify such fundamentals as your own viewpoint and way of thinking. If you don’t do this, your life will be treated as just another disposable product.”

• “. . . when I talk with American animators, I sense that they tend to interpret objects in a very different way. They tend to want to look at the volume and the three-dimensionality of objects first. But we Japanese tend to think of the lines used to represent the objects.”

• “You may have to draw explosions when creating animation, but you have to draw a lot of other things too. The most important thing of all, it seems to me, is to have an interest in people, in how they live, and in how they interact with things. . . . But if you’re creating an animated work just to get the chance to draw explosions or airplanes, I have to say that your thinking is a bit warped.”

• Notes for The Man Who Planted Trees Japanese laserdisc: “In the cel animation production we are currently working on, we’ve found drawing plants to be very difficult. If we draw just the plants waving in the breeze, it looks formulaic. Plants exist in the weather and light rays that surround them–waving in the wind, shimmering in the sunlight. I am always puzzling over how to draw such things. . . . But Back has taken this problem head on and mastered it. For that alone, I say, ‘Hat’s off!’ His imagery is beautiful.”

• 1991: “I had thought that, thanks to us having lost the war, we Japanese might have finally become a little more skeptical about national claims of ‘righteousness’ and ‘just causes.’ Watching [George H. W.] Bush, I can only think he is possessed by the ghost of John Wayne, telling him that ‘this is the way a real man should act.’ Saddam Hussein’s sense of righteousness is the same.”

• For the Ikiru Japanese laserdisc: “There are many memorable scenes in Ikiru, but to me the essence of the film is composed in this single shot, of a man stamping a mountain of documents. If [this shot] had just been some silly way to ridicule working in a government office or leading a meaningless life, the scene would never have the emotional impact it does. . . . If you consider the scene to be meaningless, you have to consider how much difference there is between a life spent stacking up a mountain of documents and a life spent stacking up film cans.”

• “There is, first of all, the reality that I’ve been powerfully influenced by [Osamu] Tezuka. When I was in elementary and middle school, I loved his manga more than those of anyone else. . . . [However,] I found myself disgusted by the cheap pessimism of works like Ningyo (Mermaid), or Shizuku (The Drop) . . . What had once been imaginative for the creator between 1945 and 1955 had simply become another trick in his toolbox.”

• Project plan in 1986: “My Neighbor Totoro aims to be a happy and heartwarming film, a film that lets the audience go home with pleasant, glad feelings. Lovers will feel each other to be more precious, parents will fondly recall their childhoods, and children will start exploring the thickets behind shrines and climbing trees to try to find totoro. This is the kind of film I want to make.”

Despite his fame as an anime director, I believe Miyazaki’s greatest artistic accomplishment is his seven-volume manga, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, which has been compared to such genre epics as Dune and Lord of the Rings. Miyazaki wrote, illustrated, and serialized the manga’s fifty-nine episodes from 1982-1994 (his classic 1984 film adaptation is only based on the first two volumes). Starting Point includes some surprising revelations, such as how much of the manga was improvised: “In the beginning, it was a work that I wasn’t sure I could complete. But since I had decided that I could stop working on it at any point, you could also say that I was able to create the story without worrying about the future. . . . I was always under the pressure of lots of tight deadlines; several times I didn’t realize until much later the true significance of what I had actually written.”

The manga’s darker and more complex tone might be attributed to his attitude in the early ’80s at the height of Japan’s economic success (“In addition to being upset by environmental problems, I was also concerned about where humanity was headed, and especially about the state of Japan; most of all, I suspect, I was angered by the state of my own self”), and his narrative was later informed by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Bosnian War.

“I actually feel as though working on Nausicaä may have made it possible for me to create those films,” he says. “Of all these works, Nausicaä weighed the heaviest on my shoulders. Going back to the world of Nausicaa after stopping work on it was so difficult that I found myself not wanting to. . . . I won’t go so far as to say that because I had something as heavy as Nausicaä to work on, I deliberately created lighter works. I do think, however, that if I didn’t have Nausicaä to work on, I probably would have been floundering about, trying to incorporate somewhat more serious elements into the films.”

I was asked to contribute a chapter in a new book from Cambridge Scholars Publishing in the UK, Faith and Spirituality in Masters of World Cinema, edited by Kenneth R. Morefield. Faith and spirituality are large and ambiguous topics, of course, but they’re frequently reduced to marketing terms for niche publishing groups, something I have no interest in perpetuating. Fortunately the chapters I’ve read in the book (including standout essays by Darren Hughes and John Caruana) feature philosophically and aesthetically informed analysis with a universal readership in mind.

Given how often the word “spiritual” is used to describe the work of the Belgian brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, I chose to explore their philosophy and aesthetics primarily through the copious names and references that appear throughout their 2005 diary, Au dos de nos images (On the Back of Our Images) and their many articulate interviews (including one I did myself). Luc was a philosophy student and Jean-Pierre studied acting before they met the French political activist, foreign correspondent, playwright, and theater and film director Armand Gatti (a member of the famed Left Bank group) and started making documentaries and eventually feature films.

“[We had] a strong Catholic upbringing,” Jean-Pierre told Dennis Lim, “until we were in our teens and rejected what our father had imposed on us. But despite the coercive, puritanical elements of religion, our education taught us to acknowledge other people as human beings.” The brothers’ primary influence appears to be the Lithuanian French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who maintained that the face-to-face encounter with the other (irreducibly mysterious but in close proximity) demands a necessary response.

The spirituality of the Dardennes is very much rooted in this inner process by which people (primarily youths) develop a conscience and a sense of responsibility through the face of an other, whether that be Igor via Assita in La Promesse (1996), Rosetta via Riquet in Rosetta (1999), Francis via Olivier in The Son (2002, though their relationship is more complex), or Bruno via Sonia and Steve in The Child (2005). I don’t mean to suggest a reductionistic template for the fascinating, suspenseful, and moving relationships these characters express, only that the Dardennes have a consistently profound interest in exploring the face-to-face, inner development of characters in a socially depleted, post-industrial setting, the brothers’ hometown of Seraing. (Due to Sony Classics’ lethargic distribution, I haven’t yet seen the Dardennes’ 2008 film, Lorna’s Silence.)

A production sketch by The Child’s set designer, Igor Gabriel.

Given their thematic concerns, it’s no surprise that the Dardennes’ “model film” is Roberto Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero, which I use in the essay to bridge the theme of adolescent moral/spiritual development in the absence of social/family structure with a two-pronged aesthetic that combines Rossellini’s proximity (tracking, doting camera) with the alterity (mystery and ellipsis) of Robert Bresson, another filmmaker to whom the brothers have paid tribute. This creates a kind of Levinasian visual grammar that, in turn, encourages the viewer’s own encounter with a cinematic other.

Of course, this is all laid out in much more detail in my essay, “The Brothers Dardenne: Responding to the Face of the Other.” Check it out if you’re interested.

This past weekend, LACMA began its new film series–“Torn Curtain: The Two Germanys on Film”–impressively filled with a number of unusual and rare titles; I’m particularly excited about the inclusion of Straub-Huillet’s first film, Not Reconciled (1965). The series is also at the center of a web of fascinating links and events.

The first two titles of the series were key “rubble films,” The Murderers Are Among Us (Wolfgang Staudte, 1946) and the lesser known (outside Germany) In Those Days (Helmut Käutner, 1947), two of the earliest films shot on location in a bombed Berlin with the task of addressing the nation’s postwar poverty, guilt, and confusion. I found myself having a mixed response to the films: while they make some strides in acknowledging the past and their current historical moment, they seem stymied by their commercial intents and social pressures, making them less like exposés and more like coping strategies. Neither contain the wide systemic critique or plea for renewal embodied in a film like Roberto Rossellini’s rubble film, Germany Year Zero (1948), a difference Robert Schandley pinpoints in his book, Rubble Films: German Cinema in the Shadow of the Third Reich (2001):

“The rubble films were forced to seek out a film language strong enough to confront recent German history while avoiding a confrontation with their German audiences. . . . [Italian] neorealism should not be used as a yardstick for German rubble films. They arise out of entirely different conditions. Neorealism in Italy originated under fascism as an aesthetic resistance movement, showing from the start a willingness to take not only aesthetic but also political risks. German filmmakers in the late 1940s show no will toward taking political risks and little toward taking aesthetic ones. . . . If they expressed resistance, it was against the conditions under which they worked, in which they lacked autonomy, material necessities, and moral authority. Their films are confined to describing the environment and telling small stories of small lives. In some sense, they resist realist tendencies, aspiring instead to an idealism that ignores the basic facts about the past that they are discussing.”

The Murderer’s Are Among Us, the first film by East Germany’s DEFA studio, has a provocative premise in which a disillusioned war medic becomes obsessed with bringing his ex-commander to justice after the war for the slaughter of prisoners one Christmas. (Two of the film’s best moments reveal the hypocrisy of Christmas carols and religious sentiment masking war crimes.) Yet the film is comprised of second-rate, expressionist visuals that seem hastily assembled, with an inconsistent use of low-key lighting and canted frames. The film’s central romance between the medic and a concentration camp refugee (who looks as glamourous as any mid-century movie star) is equally flimsy, blossoming as it does between the medic’s drinking binges and angry outbursts. Finally, as pointed as the story is, its drama is predicated on an evil authority figure and a conscientious but powerless underling, which seems like an overly convenient way of schematizing the previous twelve years.

I had the pleasure of seeing Käutner’s previous film, Under the Bridges (1945) a couple years ago, and its quiet romanticism made a favorable impression on me, so I was looking forward to seeing his first film after the war. (Particularly after reading Christoph Huber’s enthusiastic portrait of the filmmaker. Interested Angelenos should know that the Goethe Institute media lounge lists a handful of Käutner DVDs with English subtitles under New Acquisitions.) In Those Days is certainly a more refined film than The Murderers Are Among Us–its elegant structure follows seven owners of an ultimately junked car that literally narrates the action–but it’s even less politically engaged, choosing instead to offer a warm, humanist portrait of apolitical citizens during the Nazi years. A young woman must choose between two suitors; a young girl learns her mother is having an affair with a blacklisted composer; another woman discovers her husband and her sister are having an affair and are plotting to leave the country. Käutner is a master of tone, and some of the episodes have a rich, tragic poignancy: a Jewish shopkeeper and her husband face anti-Semitic business policies and growing public danger (with a quiet emotionalism worthy of Borzage); two German soldiers race through the Russian front under the cover of darkness (with a hard intensity worthy of Clouzot). On the other hand, the film studiously avoids commenting on Nazi policy or ideology despite framing the story explicitly during the rise and fall of National Socialism.

With free hindsight, it’s perhaps easy to critique these films for their tendency to pull their political punches at a time when the filmmakers were lucky to be making films at all. (According to Schandley, “Käutner is reported to have broken down in tears on the set, fearing his project would never come to fruition for want of the bare necessities of his cast and crew and the lack of raw filmstock.”) Further, it’s not likely that the occupying powers would have endorsed controversial or highly provocative films. Yet The Murderers Are Among Us appears at the top of many German film polls, such as the Kinemathekverbund’s “100 Most Significant German Films”, and it’s undeniably important as the first DEFA film.

DEFA collapsed in 1992 after German reunification, and its catalogue has been slowly spreading to the rest of the world through a number of retrospectives and festivals. First Run Features has released a whole line of DEFA films on DVD (two of which, The Second Track and Berlin–Schönhauser Corner are part of LACMA’s series).

Lastly, LACMA’s Ian Birnie introduced the screenings last weekend, telling us about two fascinating organizations. The first is the Wende Museum in Los Angeles (dedicated to the Cold War), which I discovered is featuring its own film series beginning this month at venues around Los Angeles, “Wende Flicks: Last Films from East Germany”. The second is the DEFA Film Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which was founded by German film scholar Barton Byg. Amazingly, it describes itself as the only archive and study center outside Europe devoted to the study of a broad spectrum of filmmaking by East German filmmakers or related to East Germany from 1946 to the present.” (Apparently, they have recently released a DVD of the classic 1932 film of the German Left, Kuhle Wampe.) If any Film Journey readers want to recommend films from the Wende series or the DEFA Film Library holdings, please do!

I’ve recently enjoyed reading David Beronä’s book, Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels (2008), which describes (with select examples) the work of early-20th century woodcut storytellers such as Frans Masereel and Lynd Ward. Beronä makes glancing suggestions that these initially small publications (descended from block-books and playing cards) are the missing link between the cinema and modern day graphic novels. “When Thomas Mann,” he writes, “winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929, was asked what movie had made the greatest impression on him, Mann replied, ‘Passionate Journey.’ Although Mann’s reply sounds like the title of a film by D. W. Griffith, it was, in fact, a novel in woodcuts by Frans Masereel.”

Beronä contends that the prevalence of German expressionist woodcuts, the popularity of silent film (in particular its heroes like Chaplin, and visual achievements like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Last Laugh), and the rise of political cartoons in newspapers set the stage for the woodcut novel. Beronä writes: “For a public already familiar with black-and-white pictures that told a story, worldess books offered the public, in one sense, silent cinema in a portable book that they could ‘watch’ at their leisure.”

Fittingly, the German publisher of Masereel’s 1920 The Idea (83 woodcuts visualizing an idea as a naked woman enraging elites but inspiring the masses) commissioned an animated adaptation. He turned to Berthold Bartosch, the Czech-born Berlin filmmaker who created many of the atmospheric effects in the world’s first animated feature, Lotte Reiniger’s brilliant The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926). Bartosch was not only a perfect artistic and technical choice, like Masereel (who was a member of the Red Cross and the international pacifist movement during World War I) he was a leftist who counted among his friends Reiniger, Carl Koch, Jean Tedesco, and Jean Renoir.

Bartosch emigrated to Paris in 1930, where he created his 25-minute adaptation, also entitled The Idea (1932), which his future friend and colleague (and brilliant animator in his own right) Alexander Alexieiff called “the first serious, poetic, tragic work in animation.” (The film is also noted for Arthur Honegger’s score, which is thought to be the first to utilize an electronic instrument, the ondes Martenot.) Alexieiff’s statement is no hyperbole: Bartosch’s film, with its adagio pacing, multiple layers of foggy (actually soapy) luminescence, and evocative urban detail, is a stunning achievement even today. Not content with simply animating the woodcuts (even if that were possible), Bartosch constructed an original vision that draws directly from Masereel’s imagery but re-envisions it as moving graphic illustrations extracted into deep space, its detailed cityscapes, swirling atmosphere, and dramatic superimpositions fusing together fantasy and reality. Appropriately for a film based on a “worldless book,” Bartosch shuns the use of intertitles except for a brief prologue extolling the durability of ideas.

From 1935 to ‘39, Bartosch worked on an epic anti-war film, but according to Robert Russett and Cecile Starr (who shares the copyright with Bartosch’s widow on The Idea’s 1976 print) in their seminal book, Experimental Animation, “about 2,000 feet of film had been shot when Bartosch and his wife were forced to flee Paris at the time of the Nazi occupation. All negative and positive material of the uncut film was deposited in a vault of the Cinémathèque Française; none of it was found again. Only a few test strips were saved…”

Alexeieff picks up the story in an interview reprinted in the book:

“When I had to leave Paris in 1941, I gave Bartosch up for lost. The occupation of the Sudentenland had made him a German. The Nazis were aware that Bartosch had refused their passport, that during his Viennese period he had worked on films on Thomas Masaryk’s theses, and that he had begun an anti-Nazi film as propaganda against Hitler (1938). [Physically] lame as he was, not knowing how to speak French, he was far too distinctive and vulnerable to escape being quickly spotted.

When I saw him again in 1947 on the Boulevard St. Germain, and when I greeted him in German, with my Russian accent, he answered me in French: ‘Now I don’t spik Cherman anymore, I spik Franch.’ I asked about his film. ‘When they came to look for me,’ he told me, ‘they didn’t find me, but they found my film and they destroyed it.’

He planned to make a third film, a film still more grandiose, on the Cosmos. During the twenty last years of his life, he set about putting together all the details of this new film, whose secret he carried to his grave, November 13, 1968. . . . The destruction of the second film had been too hard a blow, even for Bartosch’s will of iron. He never complained about it, but I think that for the rest of his life he merely played with the idea of resuming his creative film work, while doubting his power to bring back to life what the war had crushed.”

One final note: in searching for an online version of Bartosch’s film, I came across Short Animated World, an excellent website that links many online versions of the titles chosen for Annecy Festival’s 2006 “100 Films for a Century of Animation” created by a worldwide poll of thirty specialists. Some of the links have been removed, but most of them remain, and are well-worth clicking through. The Idea comes in at ninth place. As you might expect, the films get less canonical the further down the list they appear, but most are still worth your time. The links tend to be unsubtitled versions of the films, but in many cases this is only a minor hurdle.

Among my personal (and available) favorites:

004 Crac! (Frederic Back)
005 The Man Who Planted Trees (Frederic Back)
006 Tale of Tales (Yuri Norstein)
008 A Color Box (Len Lye)
010 The Street (Caroline Leaf)
018 Tango (Zbigniew Rybczynski)
020 Begone Dull Care (Norman McLaren)
023 Father and Daughter (Michael Dudok de Wit)
025 The Hand (Jiri Trnka)
027 The Nose (Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker)
031 The Cameraman’s Revenge (Ladislaw Starewicz)
036 Composition in Blue (Oskar Fischinger)
041 Free Radicals (Len Lye)
042 The Ride to the Abyss (Georges Schwizgebel)
044 Franz Kafka (Piotr Dumala) . . . although I definitely prefer Dumala’s Crime and Punishment
046 Two Sisters (Caroline Leaf)
048 Balance (Christoph and Wolfgang Lauenstein)
049 Hedgehog in the Fog (Yuri Norstein)
050 When the Day Breaks (Wendy Tilby and Amanda Forbis)
051 Rooty toot toot (John Hubley)
054 Frank Film (Frank Mouris)
057 Mindscape (Jacques Drouin)
058 Jumping (Osamu Tezuka)
060 The Wrong Trousers (Nick Park)
063 Fast Film (Virgil Widrich)
066 Ryan (Chris Landreth)
070 Mt. Head (Koji Yamamura)
073 The Sinking of the Lousitania (Winsor McCay) . . . in spite of its flagrant warmongering

. . . the Kentridge and Borowczyk films should be seen in better quality . . .

Last week, CVM and UCLA screened over a dozen films representing a half-century of animation and “visual music” from the 1920s to the ’70s, many of them recent preservations. Visual music is a genre that’s hard to define, but the best single book I know that summarizes its history (with hundreds of color photos) is Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900, published in conjunction with the 2005 MOCA/Hirshhorn exhibit. It traces a fascinating historical path through a variety of media as artists, inventors, and filmmakers “experimented with color and abstract forms suggestive of limitless space, motion, rhythm and the unfolding of time,” and it offers a fascinating example of cinema’s relationship with an intermedia art form. Examples abound from the films of Viking Eggeling and Hans Richter in the ’20s to later sound and color productions by Fischinger and Len Lye to the technological advances of the Whitney brothers (whose slit-scan technology was appropriated by Douglas Trumbull for the climax of 2001: A Space Odyssey) to modern digital media.

Single Wing Turquoise Bird Light Show Film

The UCLA screening was a rare and at times exhilarating opportunity to not only see some key works on celluloid, but also to hear from local filmmakers (Michael Scroggins, David Lebrun and Peter Mays) who were members of the troupe Single Wing Turquoise Bird (1968-’75) that created live, multimedia backgrounds for major rock concerts and art venues. Hearing them describe their typical set-up–including multiple high-resolution and high-speed projectors, liquid overhead projectors and film slides–while emphasizing the live, organic, and freeform aspects of their work suggested a kind of visual jazz performance that would have been remarkable to see. As a facsimile of sorts, we screened the 5-minute Single Wing Turquoise Bird Light Show Film (1971) a 16mm representation of a typical light show (but lacking the key live components and high resolutions). When the subject of contemporary VJs came up, Lebrun cited the emotional range of the light show movement and suggested that it was probably richer and more expressive than today’s relatives.

Lebrun’s own nine-minute Tanka (1976) was a standout in the program, an arduously arranged compilation of flickering images from the Tibetan Book of the Dead that suggest animated forms set to a feverish, original jazz score with an Indian inflection (thanks to the use of sarod and tabla instruments). The impression of highly ornate gods and demons in a wild dance is alternately funny and frightening.

Cibernetik 5.3

Another high point of the program was the seven-minute Cibernetik 5.3 (1965), the only film by John Stehura and a classic of computer animation that he completed as a student in the earliest days of digital film recorders. Stehura programmed the film with punch cards on a computer that didn’t even have a screen, and didn’t see the results until the film was finished, an amazing feat considering how visually rich and textured it is, with cascading colors and patterns culminating in footage shot with a fisheye lens in UCLA’s botanical garden. It also incorporates throbbing, atonal selections from electronic music pioneer Tod Dockstader’s acclaimed Quatermass (1964) recording.

For me, the other highlight was onetime CalArts animation scholar William Moritz’s 1993 recreation of Fischinger’s R-1 en Formspiel multiple-projector show that Fischinger performed in the 1920s. Moritz utilizes a triptych of three frames running concurrently: a central frame surrounded by two outside frames that mirror one another’s tinted montages of geometric shapes and billowing clouds of wax and liquid. It’s probably not a terribly exact reproduction of Fischinger’s show, but it is visually powerful, and definitely gives the viewer a sense of what Fischinger was up to in the early days of visual music performance.

Over the holidays, I spent some time indulging in a periodic hobby of mine–science fiction literature. After poking around, I discovered that Orion Books in the UK has been printing a series entitled SF Masterworks for a number of years (with decreasing frequency), putting out major works by authors from Bester to Stapledon to Wells that have been long out-of-print in the UK (and in many cases the US). What grabbed my attention was one of their last additions, Roadside Picnic, the 1972 novel by the Russian brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky that inspired Stalker (1979), Andrei Tarkovsky’s haunting and visually influential film. Arkady was an editor who studied English and Japanese, and Boris was a computer mathematician; they began writing science fiction together in the late-’50s.

The SF Masterworks’ Roadside Picnic is a paperback edition with an evocative cover–the entire series boasts striking art–but it’s cheaply printed without extras, which keeps it affordable. Back in the ’70s, Macmillan in the US published a “Best of Soviet Science Fiction” series that included novels by the Strugatskys (along with Bulychev, Bilenkin, Savchenko, and others) with introductions by Theodore Sturgeon. Strangely uncredited, the SF Masterworks’ Roadside Picnic reprints Antonina W. Bois’ gripping 1977 English translation, of which Sturgeon wrote: “Russian I do not know; fiction I do; and I must honor anyone who can so deftly pass emotion, character dimension, even conversational idiom, through so formidable a barrier.” (Bilingual readers can judge for themselves by comparing the Russian and English translations, here.)

Six Zones on Earth contain bizarre and dangerous extraterrestrial artifacts that first appeared twenty years earlier in a line around the planet as it rotated; the authorities have evacuated and militarized these Zones, which are carefully explored by officials during the day and infiltrated illegally by “stalkers” at night, their treasures smuggled out and sold to the highest bidder. A mercenary-like stalker named Redrick periodically sneaks into a Zone that’s located in a backwater town in Canada, where he has to balance the idealism of a researcher friend with the dangers of the Zone, his cynical dealings with shady characters on both sides of the law, and his need to care for his wife and daughter, an ever-mutating girl mysteriously affected by his Zone incursions. Red is a hard-drinking, violent, and dispassionate stalker, but deep within him stirs intimations of love, idealism and commitment, and the Strugatskys are adept at suggesting this inner turmoil.

I was impressed with the book’s descriptive sense of atmosphere, vivid characterizations, and surprisingly tough, hardboiled tone. That’s not to say that it’s a detective story; most of its alien mysteries remain unexplained while the authors explore human psychology. (The title itself suggests aliens visiting Earth might not even notice humanity, much less attempt to communicate with us, merely littering the landscape with incomprehensible debris.) The Strugatskys’ prose is muscular and direct, with a cutthroat sense of urgency and an offhanded poetry that suggests a complex world just beyond the grasp of their characters:

“He braked immediately. Good reflexes, I was proud of him. I took Tender by the shoulder, turned him toward me, and smacked him in the visor. He cracked his nose, poor guy, against the glass, closed his eyes, and shut up. And as soon as he was quiet, I heard it. Trrr, trrr, trrr. . . . Kirill looked over at me, jaws clenched, teeth bared. I motioned for him to be still. God, please be still, don’t move a muscle. But he also heard the crackle, and like all greenhorns, he had the urge to do something immediately, anything. “Reverse?” he whispered. I shook my head desperately and waved my fist right under his visor–cut it out. Honest to God, with these greenhorns you never know which way to look, at the field or at them. And then I forgot about everything. Over the pile of old refuse, over broken glass and rags, crawled a shimmering, a trembling, sort of like hot air at noon over a tin roof. It crossed over the hillock and moved on and on toward us, right next to the pylon; it hovered for a second over the road–or did I just imagine it?–and slithered into the field, behind the bushes and the rotten fences, back there toward the automobile graveyard.”

The novel also has a fascinating structure comprised of a prologue and four chapters presenting distinct moments in an eight year period with large gaps of time in between. The first chapter is narrated by Red, the subsequent chapters are not, and one focuses entirely on a secondary character, creating a kind of teasing, impressionistic summary of events the reader must connect and interpret. Such opacity has prompted Western critics to assume the authors are being politically cagey, but the Strugatskys ultimately seem less interested in allegory than in capturing a general sense of how it feels to work under the radar in a police state. If anything, they seem acutely aware of the dangers of free market entrepreneurialism, with powerful technology seeping unregulated into the hands of high-paying opportunists. The Strugatskys may have possessed a keen sense of irony and Slavic pessimism, but they weren’t notable dissidents.

Despite my love for Tarkovsky’s film, I never tracked down the Strugatskys’ book until now, partly due to the filmmaker’s dismissive comments about how different his movie is from the book: “the script for Stalker has nothing in common with the novel,” he told Tonino Guerra in 1979, “except for the two words, ‘Stalker’ and ‘Zone.’” Yet anyone familiar with the movie will immediately recognize numerous overlaps even in my brief summary above. It’s true that the plot of the film pretty much restricts itself to the novel’s final chapter, which involves a trip into the Zone to discover an artifact rumored to grant one’s wishes, but it’s a more complex adaptation than one might assume given that fact.

There’s no doubt that the film script is a loose adaptation–Tarkovsky not only reworked the Strugatskys’ own script (adapted from their novel) multiple times, he also had to re-envision the film halfway into production after his working footage was destroyed in the lab. Tarkovsky’s stalker is finally (in his words) “a very honest man, clean, and intellectually innocent.” “The last of the idealists . . . as if he were a priest of the Zone, the stalker leads men there to make them happy.” In other words, he’s less a hardboiled smuggler than a kind of Tarkovskian “holy fool” of the kind seen in Andrei Rublev (1964), Nostalghia (1983), or The Sacrifice (1986); a social outcast whose depth of vision separates him from humanity but also provides the key to its spiritual renewal. In both the book and the film, the mysterious object (or Room) ostensibly grants one’s innermost wishes (rather than those simply stated) and thus highlights the limits of mankind’s self-awareness and moral tensions in the face of the unknown. Tarkovsky emphasizes the more fable-like nature of his adaptation by separating the tensions into three bold archetypes–the idealist Stalker, the exploratory Writer, and the ruthless Scientist–but both the book and the movie suggest that the counter argument to the destructive potentials, ambitions, and obsessions in the Zone is love and selfless dedication.

I’m really glad I tracked the book down, and I highly recommend it to fans of Stalker or many of the ideas the film grapples with. It’s science fiction of the highest caliber, written with rigor and stylistic flourish, creating an imaginary but plausible world that’s a pointed reflection of our own, and peopling it with complex and compelling characters. I’m looking forward to tracking down more Strugatsky fiction.

I don’t know how I missed this until now, but the wonderful Cinefamily revival group–presenting “interesting and unusual programs of exceptional, distinctive, weird and wonderful films” at the Silent Movie Theatre in Hollywood–commissioned famed comic artist Chris Ware to illustrate the cover of their current Nov/Dec calendar, a beautiful tribute to Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953).

The Theatre’s co-owner, Sammy Harkham, is a comic artist who also owns the nearby Family graphic arts bookstore. Cinefamily’s calendars are always visually striking and the film descriptions are equally evocative even if, given their highly eclectic programming, I often go through extremes of enthusiasm or indifference when browsing their schedules from week to week. (Which is probably a good thing.) Though it’s only about a year old, Cinefamily has quickly become a cherished part of Angeleno film culture . . . let’s hope they continue for years to come.

• The Masters of Cinema label I helped form and Criterion have released Martin Koerber’s beautifully restored Vampyr (1932) on DVD with a lot of shared supplementary materials. MoC includes a commentary by Guillermo del Toro; Criterion includes Dreyer’s original script. I managed to see the restored print at UCLA a couple of years ago (with German subtitles that required a live translator), so it’s great to finally have this version on DVD, and the extras on both editions offer many extended hours of enjoyment.

• The Danish Film Institute has announced a new website devoted to Dreyer. It claims the site is a work-in-progress that won’t be finished until 2010, but even its preliminary offerings are fascinating. Apparently, it’s digitzing “relevant materials” from the manuscripts, letters, production-related documents, newspaper clippings, personal notes and records, books, images, and research materials in the DFI’s Carl Theodor Dreyer Study Centre in Gothersgade, Copenhagen. You’ll want to bookmark this.

• James Schamus, co-writer of many Ang Lee films and CEO of Focus Features, is also an academic who teaches at Columbia University, and he has just published a new monograph entitled Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Gertrud: The Moving Word that elaborates and expands upon his essay in Jytte Jensen’s 1988 book that coincided with a Dreyer exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Gertrud was a shock to many in 1964 for its actors’ statuesque poses and adagio pace, but a few perceptive critics recognized it as Dreyer’s final masterpiece, and their number has grown over the years. At the time, Jonas Mekas wrote: “From all the films shown at the [NYFF] festival, [Gertrud] was by far the most perfect artistic statement, the most perfect expression of an artist’s moral and aesthetic attitude. . . . It is so far above the other films shown at the festival that it isn’t even fair to discuss it within the standards of the festival.”

Schamus focuses on one of the film’s most striking but equally mysterious images–a background tapestry portraying a naked woman being attacked by wolves, a scene Gertrud had previously dreamed–and uses it to address his own concentric circles of themes and associations. As you might expect from a professional dramatist, Schamus is particularly sensitive to Dreyer’s attitudes on adaptation, especially his commitment to the authority of a text, an original text (like the transcript of Joan of Arc’s trials, or the real woman–Maria von Platen–who inspired Gertrud’s playwright) and the inspirations as well as restrictions, even oppressions, that arise from written source materials.

In a dense and associative style (intensified by his short chapters), Schamus explores some pretty fascinating ideas, such as the urge for realistic art to achieve a separate life of its own, the way in which words and texts preserve patriarchal systems, the way images can wage war against such texts (particularly in Dreyer’s cinema), issues of ekphrasis and interpretation, even the history of hysteria. In an interview last year, he remarked, “I try to place my students in relationships to texts and to intellectual traditions that they don’t necessarily think are the norm for film studies and film theory,” which is a good description of the paths he charts here, some of which seem more useful for continued Dreyer exploration than others. I particularly enjoyed his sections on the probable inspiration for the tapestry (The Decameron) and Botticelli’s series of paintings that combine different narratives into a single space in opposition, Schamus points out, to Western single-point perspective: “Gertrud is an extended meditation on the emptiness of Albertian [single-point perspective] space,” Schamus writes, “and on the constituent disconnect between word and image that emptiness always calls on us to overcome as we try, from the margins, to fill it with story.”

• Speaking of exhibitions (and reaching a bit further back in time), in 2006/2007 the Ordrupgaard Museum near Copenhagen and the Centre de Cultura Contemporània in Barcelona (CCCB) co-mounted a long overdue exhibition focusing on the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864-1916) and his influence on Dreyer. The filmmaker himself acknowledged his debt to the painter (and James Whistler)–particularly in reference to the visual style of his first film, The President (1919)–in Jørgen Roos’ 1966 documentary included on both of the new Vampyr DVDs, but his friend and interpreter Ebbe Neergaard wrote about the similarities between the two artists as early as 1940, and many critics, such as David Bordwell, have pointed out that Hammershøi’s minimalist aesthetic, low-key interiors, and uncanny merging of realism and abstraction also resurfaced in Dreyer’s two last films, Ordet (1955) and Gertrud (1964). In his essential 1981 book length study, Bordwell suggests Hammershøi’s visual style “might be regarded as the reductio ad absurdum of the entire chamber [art] tradition,” noting that the artist “spent years painting pictures of chairs, bookcases, sofas, blank windows, open doors, figures quietly reading or discreetly turned from the viewer, even completely empty corridors and parlors.” (Bordwell also goes on to suggest parallels between Brueghel and The Passion of Joan of Arc, Böchlin and Vampyr, and Flemish masters and Day of Wrath, and uses Hammershøi and Dreyer to articulate his ideas on cinematic tableau.)

I don’t believe the exhibition has traveled much (and its award-winning design may not be portable), but thankfully the Ordrupgaard Museum has published a handsome catalogue entitled Hammershøi > Dreyer: The Magic of Images, which not only includes many featured paintings and film stills, but a number of intriguing essays. Anne-Birgitte Fonsmark sets the historical stage for Dreyer’s encounter with Hammershøi’s work, namely the painter’s comprehensive 1916 retrospective in Copenhagen, which Dreyer almost certainly would have attended, and highlights the prominence of mothers, psychological complexity, and sense of isolation in both artists. Casper Tybjerg (known for his Dreyer DVD commentaries) quotes references to help encapsulate the filmmaker’s sense of the unspoken and the absent as being paradoxically evocative: “The two artists shared an understanding of how, through simplification, reduction, and meticulous composition, they could open doors for the spectator’s imagination…” Annette Rosenvold Hvidt reverses the dominant paradigm by suggesting that Hammershøi might have been influenced by photography in his use of soft edges, washed-out colors, and “blurring materiality.” Jordi Balló (whose CCCB also curated another “dialogue” in 2006 between Victor Erice and Abbas Kiarostami) highlights similarities (“interiors which are, at one and the same time, protection and prison”) as well as differences (Dreyer’s cinematic use of field as well as counter-field) to discuss the exhibition’s challenges:

“One of the most interesting and innovative questions arising from the museographic challenges of recent years stems from the repeated inclusion of films in temporary exhibitions or in the permanent collections of museums. The presence of film is, first and foremost, a result of the ineluctable conviction of experts and public alike that film is an essential part of the history of images, and it cannot continue to be marginalized from any visual discourse that seeks to obtain a broad, fair and balanced vision of the iconographic dialogue which includes art from 20th century onwards. The fact is that exhibiting film and painting is not the same, and cinematic narrative cannot be reduced to its single iconographic function.”

As a footnote, I should mention that Hammershøi (who is widely unknown outside of Denmark) was also the subject of a recent exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, and the show’s website offers several fascinating video analyses of his paintings that are well worth watching.