2008 has turned out to be something of a watershed for longtime Terence Davies fans like myself; not only has the BFI finally released his visually and aurally astonishing British works on region-2 DVDs with commentaries and interviews, but Davies has also completed his first film in eight years: Of Time and the City.  Fortunately, it’s showing all week in Los Angeles as part of DocuWeek, a program of films the International Documentary Association is screening in commercial theaters to qualify them for Academy Award nominations.

Of Time and the City is Davies’ first documentary, and it’s a brooding, passionate, and often sardonic essay film that tributes the working class Liverpool of his childhood, and charts–with rueful adult hindsight–its cultural milieu.  The film is largely comprised of archival footage from the era (Davies was born in 1945 and left Liverpool in ‘72) that is layered together with a supremely evocative soundtrack that includes broadcasts, classical music, pop tunes, and atmospheric sound effects with Davies’ own narration. His raspy, effusive delivery oscillates between his memories, musings, and quotations from the likes of James Joyce and T. S. Eliot.  (Much like his absorbing DVD commentaries.) The latter poet is no surprise for those familiar with Davies’ autobiographical films: his trilogy of shorts, Distant Voices Still Lives (1988), and The Long Day Closes (1992) are all constructed as overlapping, circular memory films, snatches of scenes that fluidly merge in time and space, visually expressing Eliot’s idea that “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past.”

There are no direct depictions of his family this time, only bits and pieces of Liverpudlian actuality, assembled through a highly personal perspective that emphasizes Davies’ private experiences, passing joys, and deep regrets. (It takes as its cue such classic British works as Humphrey Jennings’ Listen to Britain, building a portrait of an era through poetically rendered images of ordinary people in their daily lives.) Rather than tell the story of his family, he tells the story of his place, and the sights and sounds of Liverpool offer constant markers of his status as both insider and outsider: the devout, Irish Catholic schoolboy repressing his homosexual urges; the slum resident during the lavish coronation of Queen Elizabeth II; the devotee of passé love songs during the reign of the Beatles.

Davies always seems askew of his epochs. He bookends his film with gleaming imagery of Liverpool’s state architecture and heroic sculptures (accompanied by Handel’s stuffy “Music for the Royal Fireworks”), implying that his own view of the city is inherently subversive.  In her excellent 2004 British Film Makers book on Davies, Wendy Everett comments on “the alien masculinity of the public architecture of Liverpool” in the filmmaker’s short works. “Upright, rigid, complacent, such buildings automatically define [the protagonist] as ‘other’, and position him outside their space.”  One of the film’s biggest laughs occurs when Davies quotes a historic legal sentence: “Not only did you commit an act of gross indecency,” said the judge, “but you did it under one of London’s most beautiful bridges.”

Davies’ films are always structured emotionally, yet he never descends into sentimentality or nostalgia for its own sake, often preferring a tone of lament that is felt in full force here.  Like Buñuel, he thanks God he is a “born-again atheist” after years spent praying for a heterosexual transformation that never occurred.  (According to interviews, he loathes being gay.) Much of Davies’ bitter humor is directed at the spectacle of the Church set against the economic squalor of the times (one striking pan connects a crumbling neighborhood wall with the splendorous steeple of the Metropolitan Cathedral rising in the background).  But the filmmaker’s profound sense of the sacred in the everyday pulses throughout the film, perhaps most movingly in a sequence where he adorns lyrical, black-and-white images of dilapidated housing tracks with a soaring aria.

The film also finds indelible beauty in images of lone children playing in rubble, and elderly men and women sauntering through weathered streets, shielding themselves from the wind. A sequence that superimposes images of amusement park lights in the seaside resort of New Brighton (a favored family destination) creates a mesmerizing visual texture. And many impressionable cuts need no narration at all, like when Davies meshes a British Airways billboard (”Now the world is yours”) with a bedraggled family pushing a pram down the street. In general, a lot of the slum footage compellingly emphasizes children, and one can almost hear Davies wondering aloud if they ever discovered their own happiness. Like The Exiles, this film documents a lost world, a fully lived-in domestic realm cleared by city planners, leaving nothing but memories in its place. “The golden moments pass, and leave no trace,” Davies quotes Chekhov. Fortunately, they’ve left a bit of cinema, and Davies snatches and arranges the fragments with masterly craft and conviction.

The news that one of America’s greatest film critics, Manny Farber, has passed away is triggering deserved tributes (well-documented by David Hudson at GreenCine Daily), so I feel it’s a good a time as any to remember Christopher Petit’s 1999 essay film/meditation on Farber, itself titled Negative Space (the title of Farber’s reissued and expanded compendium).

Petit has a history of biographical tributes to filmmakers, and given the dearth of films about the critical process or its practitioners, Negative Space is a welcome 39-minute tribute. For the same reason, it’s also a bit frustrating–given the privileged occasion, does Petit really have to devote so much footage of his road trip from Texas to California, or so much screen time to talking head art critic Dave Hickey (engaging as he is)? I understand the British filmmaker is attempting to make a productive comparison to Farber’s elucidation of screen space (and burrowing, exploratory approach to writing) to traversing the vast American landscape, but I quickly found the travelogue, locations, and titles cards (presented like digitally composed polaroids) somewhat distracting.

Petit does include ongoing clips of a conversation with Farber, but one wonders if these are representative declarations or simply the best sound bites culled from a single interview? To Petit’s credit, Farber comes across as mulling and freely associative in person, a temperament his friend, editor Robert Walsh, accurately describes in his 1998 introduction to Farber’s book as inching “along by layered reiteration.” In person, Farber methodically muses and drops anchors of observation along the way, and his writing represents a craftily compressed version of this process. (Walsh again: “Always ‘process-mad’–his phrase–Farber seems to have trained himself to experience, as though microscopically and in slow motion, contradictions within a film”; “just one result of his inveterate habit of repeated viewings and reconsiderations of a given film, his attempt to go beyond his private reactions to accommodate plural perspectives, and the fact that he is admittedly ‘unable to write anything at all without extraordinary amounts of rewriting.’”) In any given sitting, I imagine one only got partial flashes of Farber that shifted and reformulated over time.

My hesitations about Petit’s film, however, probably say more about what I wish it provided rather than what it does–in general, I did find it stimulating. Petit admirably includes film clips (The Big Sleep, Out of the Past, Psycho) to illustrate Farber’s writing, and juxtaposes Voyage to Italy and Breathless when Farber compares the driving scenes in them, articulating his preference for Rossellini’s precise visual geography versus Godard’s flashy, chaotic montage.

Through the film’s juxtapositions and his own Marker-like, musing narration, Petit is also adept at emphasizing Farber’s “ambidextrous” background–carpenter, critic, painter, teacher–a wide ranging experience with creative construction that helped produce his brilliant sensitivity to the way films are assembled, the idiosyncratic way each of their varied pieces work (or don’t work) together. For this reason, Farber remains a favorite critic for cinephiles; his writing digs beneath the widely regarded surfaces of plot, character, and theme to ruminate on details of form or unexpected moments of fleeting cinematic pleasure. In Petit’s film, Farber is a little self-depricating when he recalls his phrase “termite art,” suggesting the label was a “corny” and “sentimental” way of getting people’s attention, but Petit nails the beauty of Farber’s writing when he suggests Pauline Kael’s prose always seemed like a substitute for a film, but Farber’s writing enticed readers to look for themselves.

Petit captures Farber complaining about recent cinema (particularly Spielberg’s “wrong” choices of color and composition, though he was known to champion Hou Hsiao-hsien and Alexander Sokurov) and conflates it with Petit’s own concerns for the demise of a certain kind of cinema, an ending that becomes all the more funereal given the critic’s death this week. “It doesn’t bother me that much,” Farber half-jokes. “It’s just that I’m going to be dead [laughs] in five years, and I feel sorry for the people who’ll come after me.” Narrating over the unearthing footage of the doomed Vesuvian couple in Voyage to Italy and titles stating the lifespans of George Sanders and Ingrid Berman, Petit closes with this thought:

“Cinema, whose flickering dreams always carried within them a sense of departure, increasingly becomes a long list of the dead. And now, as the century ends, it’s fashionable to talk of the death of cinema, as though this was somehow premature rather than just a part of the process in a wider technological revolution.”

I’m not convinced the millennium marked any kind of major transition of media, myself, but as old and new technologies continue to intermingle and coexist to varying degrees, the rooting, unpredictable, and demanding criticism of Manny Farber will continue to inspire as long as sounds and images are correlated.

Forty-seven years after its premiere, Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles (1961) has finally returned to its iconic setting of Los Angeles; a newly restored print begins a week-long run at the UCLA film archive tomorrow and is being used to promote at least one historical tour of Bunker Hill. Although the new print premiered in Marseilles and New York City, you’ll have to pardon Angelenos like myself if we act proprietary about the movie, rebirthed in the wider cinephiliac consciousness by CalArt’s Thom Andersen, whose Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) claims, “better than any other movie, [The Exiles] proves that there was once a city here, before they tore it down and built a simulacrum.”

Los Angeles is often described as a sprawl of suburbs connected by freeways; its downtown has become a prime example of dysfunctional city planning, urban renewal that demolished decades of residential history for shining steel skyscrapers that close at dusk. There’s a movement underway to repopulate downtown, but so far it seems rooted in the kind of gentrification that emphasizes luxury lofts that the majority of Angelenos still can’t afford. The Exiles documents a lost epoch when immigrants and working class people lived downtown and spent their evenings socializing, cruising the streets, and dreaming of a better tomorrow.

The film is receiving justifiable praise for its documentary aspects, but it’s more than a historical record: Mackenzie (who passed away at 50 in 1980) was a serious filmmaker and The Exiles is an observant, empathic, and haunting film with a street poetry all its own. Its nighttime photography is astonishingly vivid and immersive, perfectly capturing the architecture, faces, and bodies of its teeming urban setting. The film played at several international festivals (Edinburgh, Venice, San Francisco, New York) but never received theatrical distribution; Mackenzie (who studied film at USC) counted among his inspirations the work of Joris Ivens, Humphrey Jennings, and George Rouquier, and he offers the same kind of grounded lyricism. In the film’s original pressbook (reprinted by Milestone), Mackenzie explains his goal:

“Instead of leading an audience through an orderly sequence of problems-decisions-action and solution on the part of the characters, we sought to photograph the infinite details surrounding these people, to let them speak for themselves, and to let the fragments mount up. Then, instead of supplying a resolution, we hoped that somewhere in the showing, the picture would become, to the viewer, a revelation of a condition about which he will either do something, or not—whichever his own reaction dictates.”

It’s a perspective that now defines much of modern art cinema. Filmmaker Charles Burnett has offered a gracious endorsement: “[Mackenzie] was ten years ahead of me. I started in the late Sixties and he started in the late Fifties. . . . It’s too bad he wasn’t known. I think it would have saved all of us a lot of experimenting.”

Mackenzie didn’t want to film the story of American Indians living on Bunker Hill from his white, educated, middle class perspective; he wanted to film it from theirs. After exploring and researching the area, he selected three people to be the focus of the film. He consulted Yvonne, Homer, and Tommy while writing the script and used their recorded interviews as voiceover monologues in the film. With a loose sense of dramatic action, Mackenzie filmed his actors crowding together in a small apartment, gazing out the windows, walking around the neighborhood, traversing street markets, hanging out in bars, and partying it up in the late night hours. It’s a transient, escapist life for Tommy and Homer, but a claustrophobic one for Yvonne, Homer’s pregnant wife. Mackenzie attempts to capture the various shades and tenors of their lives, describing them without judgment.

The filmmaker’s desire to represent rather than dictate is the aesthetic and ideological inverse to the social manipulations that form the subtext of the film. It opens with a montage of Edward S. Curtis photographs and a narrator who describes the Indian way of life, how it became increasingly restricted with fewer opportunities at each forced transition from the open prairies to the Reservations to the cities. Artfully cultivated throughout the film–and highlighted in one sequence in particular–is the sense of faceless authorities and elusive powers; police patrol the fringes of crowds, their dark silhouettes hovering like vultures waiting for the most advantageous moment to strike. Knowing the imminent future of this neighborhood onscreen, its civic demolition and dispersal of lives–one more stage of desperate social transition–only makes its forlorn drama all the more poignant.

I’ve learned these special events related to the screenings at UCLA have just been finalized:

Friday, August 15 @ 7:30 p.m.
A panel discussion following the screening with:

• Ross Lipman /  UCLA film preservationist
• Ben-Alex Dupris  / Experimental filmmaker, poet, Lakota tribe member
• John Morrill  /  Cinematographer
• Erik Daarstad  /  Cinematographer
• Norman Knowles  /  Saxophonist with The Revels, wrote most of the film score
• Merl Edelman  /  Crew member
• Lawrence Silberman  /  Crew member

Saturday, August 16  /  7:30 p.m. screening only
Post-film, Richard Schave of Esotouric will give a fascinating slide-show presentation on the storied Bunker Hill neighborhood.

Friday, August 22 & Saturday, August 23  /  all screenings
The Exiles will be preceded by the short:

Bunker Hill (1956)
DIR: Kent Mackenzie. CINE: Robert Kaufman. EDIT: K. Mackenzie, R. Kaufman.
“Kent Mackenzie made this short documentary while he was a student at USC.  The film documents the unique and vibrant low-income neighborhood and several of its residents—mainly retirees who had lived there for decades—before it was bulldozed in one of the most notorious urban redevelopment schemes in the city’s history.” (UCLA) 16mm, 18 min.

Just as I was grumbling that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s recent announcement of a Rohmer retrospective in September includes less than a dozen films–all of them readily available on DVD (not even The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque?)–LACMA has unveiled its October line-up, which more than makes up for it:

• October 3
Happy-Go-Lucky, a preview screening of Mike Leigh’s new comedy

• October 4 through 25
Four Masterpieces by Edward Yang (That Day On the Beach, Taipei Story, A Brighter Summer Day, Yi Yi)

• October 7
Ashes of Time Redux, a preview screening of Wong Kar-wai’s revamped classic

• October 17 through 24
Spotlight on Miklós Jancsó (The Round-Up, Silence and Cry, The Red and the White, Red Psalm)

Let’s hope A Brighter Summer Day is the director’s cut that screened at UCLA last year. I’ve only seen Jancsó’s Silence and Cry and Electra, My Love, but given the visual force of those films, I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to see more of his work on the big screen. Kudos to LACMA’s Ian Birnie for programming one of the most exciting months at the museum in some time.

I sometimes complain about events at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (mostly for its industry-heavy programming, security procedures, and scary metal detectors), but the Academy provides more interesting fare than you might imagine. Last Sunday, they completely outdid themselves: for $5, the public was treated to catered wine and Asian food, a conversation with Canada’s National Film Board composer/sound designer Normand Roger (interviewed by Ratatouille composer Michael Giacchino), a pristine 35mm screening of four animated masterpieces, an interview with NFB animation legend Frédéric Back plus an exhibition of his artwork, and a Back-designed poster given on the way out the door. Try beating that at your local multiplex.

Normand Roger may not be a household name, but I quickly discovered he is a major artist who has spent nearly 40 years creating soundtracks for the NFB (plus documentaries, commercials, installations, even the PBS Mystery! theme) in addition to European and Japanese productions. Two of the films shown at the Academy were already on my all-time favorite short list–Back’s Crac! (1981) and Michael Dudok de Wit’s Father and Daughter (2000)–and the other two films are technically astonishing–Eugene Fedorenko’s Every Child (1979) and Alexander Petrov’s The Old Man and the Sea (1999).

Roger was born in Montreal in 1949 to a butcher who owned a grocery store; dabbling in music, he studied orchestration when he was 17 and began “scoring” abstract art, which eventually landed him a job (at 22) at the NFB working in animation, known for its forays into Norman McLaren-style experimentation. Roger explained to us that the NFB had a tradition whereby the sound effects and music are essentially created by the same person; when there is a budget big enough to accommodate an orchestra, it usually only includes 20-24 musicians, often (thanks to overdubbing) playing more than one part. Roger–a soft-spoken and charming gentleman–shrugged as he recalled his career, emphasizing his willingness to adopt new techniques and crafts, constantly learning on the go, and he was particularly proud of his creative diversity.

Every Child is an eccentric, six-minute film for UNICEF about an orphan baby being moved from house to house that illustrates a principle of the Declaration of Children’s Rights insisting on a person’s name and nationality. The soundtrack was created entirely through the vocal chords of two mimes from Montreal and was artfully layered together by Roger to produce a beguiling and hilarious alternate world. (A highlight for cinephiles is the duo’s impassioned rendition of a Michel Legrand tune from Demy’s Umbrellas of Cherbourg.)

Roger has designed the soundtracks for all of Frédéric Back’s films since Illusion (1975), and Crac! is a movie that only gets more complicated and expansive the more I see it. Ostensibly the story of a rocking chair carved from a forest tree, used for years by a growing family, and eventually discarded only to find itself in a museum, the film is also the story of Quebec development, its native cultures and rural origins and eventual urbanization. In between these two narratives, it manages commentaries on traditional customs, indigenous music, child rearing, mass media, and even modern art. Created by Back’s inimitable pencil sketches on frosted cels (his expressionist wedding dance, all whirling blues and reds, is a high point), the film is an epic without dialogue; the images are held together by a musical theme Roger slowly develops over time.

Alexander Petrov is probably the world’s greatest paint-on-glass animator, as last year’s impressionist, Oscar-nominated My Love attests. His adaptation of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea was designed for IMAX theaters, and its 29,000 oil compositions–painted by fingertip rather than brush, on multiple panes to simulate depth–create an overwhelming experience on the big screen, brought to even greater life by Roger’s thrilling sounds and music. But while Petrov is a master of lush and photorealistic detail, his films occasionally suffer from a romanticized sense of human emotion, particularly in his dialogue: in this film, a boy tells his wounded grandfather, “Get well fast, for there is much to learn and you can teach me everything.” It’s pretty much straight out of Hemingway, but it’s delivered with a kind of wooden sincerity that makes the sentiment ring hollow. By and large, however, this is powerful storytelling. Roger told us the most important points in any score are those in which the music starts and stops, and the musical pauses in Petrov’s film are among the film’s most evocative moments.

Michael Dudok de Wit, on the other hand, is a master of minimalism and emotion (as his Prix Robert Bresson award in Droue sur Drouette attests), and Father and Daughter is likely his most potent work. Again without dialogue, the film traces the life of a small girl who separates from her father at a nearby lake and returns to wait for his return year after year as she grows older. Dudok de Wit’s visual style renders patches of the landscape and silhouettes of his characters that reap deep emotional rewards in the service of the narrative. He asked Roger to score the film with the famous Romanian tune “The Waves of the Danube,” and even though Roger knew the song has different connotations in Europe (Old World nostalgia) than it does in America (wedding anniversaries), he agreed to use it, and the arrangement–which changes according to various chapters of the daughter’s life–works beautifully.

Frédéric Back

The 84-year-old Back is killing two birds with one stone this week with his appearances at both the Academy exhibit and SIGGRAPH. I’ve written about Back before, but it was especially pleasing to see examples of his work up close, the detail, soft renderings, and particularly his vibrant use of color. (One inspiration for him is the Quebecois painter Clarence Gagnon [1881-1942], whose love of realism and luminous, natural shades can be easily seen in Back’s cinema.) Original cels as well as preproduction artwork make up the bulk of the exhibition, but it also contains some surprises: sensitive animal drawings Back made when he was 17, political posters for various groups, and even contemporary activism created in the past year. Less like his lyrical film animation, his series of satires of famous paintings (like Botticelli’s Birth of Venus turned into a 1970 visual parody) bristle with outrage at a society with destructive values.

“Frédéric Back: A Life’s Drawings” continues in the foyer of the Academy’s Linwood Dunn Theater (1313 Vine Street in Hollywood) until November 1.

A few weeks ago, e-tailers announced a long-awaited two-disc DVD collector’s edition of The Night of the Hunter (1955), Charles Laughton’s expressionist masterpiece about the resiliency of children in a nightmarish adult world, but as quickly as cinephiles could get excited, the release was abruptly postponed. The movie is well-deserving of special edition treatment, not only because its original barebones DVD is incorrectly formatted as 1.33×1 open matte (the film was composed for 1.66×1), but also because it is often described as the only classic Hollywood film for which many of its rushes (nearly eight hours worth) still exist; this is in large part due to Laughton’s directorial method, in which he left the camera running for extended periods of time while actively coaching his performers through multiple line readings. Similar to Kiarostami’s working method today, Laughton would effectively play the roles offscreen so that he could personally shape the performances being filmed. Thus, he might intone Harry Powell’s lines while filming Billy Chapin (playing John Harper) and then turn the camera around and recite Harper’s lines while filming Robert Mitchum (playing Powell), and then edit the two together.

The rushes also exist thanks to the tireless, 20-year effort of film preservationist Robert Gitt, who in the ’70s initially collected the outtakes from Laughton’s widow, Elsa Lanchester, and later rescued them from “[AFI students who] were using the picture and magnetic sound trims as ‘fill leader’, padding for assembling work-prints for their own film projects.” In 2002, Gitt presented a three-hour compilation of the restored outtakes at UCLA entitled Charles Laughton Directs The Night of the Hunter along with live commentary. I wasn’t able to attend the event and have regretted it ever since . . . but this past weekend, Gitt offered his presentation once again. It would be a major disappointment if any future special edition DVD didn’t include this fascinating program.

The same year Gitt debuted his presentation, Preston Neal Jones published Heaven & Hell to Play With: The Filming of The Night of the Hunter, a book about the making of the film that is largely a compilation of interviews with the cast and crew and a nearly scene-by-scene summary of the outtakes; it also includes many illustrations by Davis Grubb, who wrote the novel on which the film was based. Grubb had a close working relationship with Laughton, who asked Grubb to draw many scenes as he originally pictured them. These weren’t used as storyboards, but as basic inspiration; Laughton depended more on his brilliant cinematographer, Stanley Cortez (The Magnificent Ambersons), whom he had met on the set of 1949’s Man on the Eiffel Tower (portions of which Laughton ghost-directed), to create the film’s striking look. Cortez described his approach to Jones:

“The sharp contrasts in this picture, that was strictly my invention, and fortunately Charles agreed with that interpretation. . . . [Film stock] Tri-X had first come out around then, and I had used it on Black Tuesday [1954], where I experimented with a scene shot entirely by the light of one candle. I understand Mr. Kubrick is saying that Barry Lyndon is the first feature to shoot scenes with nothing but the light from some candles, but actually our scene with just one candle was the first. Anyway, the sensitivity on the Tri-X was faster than on the [filmstock] we were used to using. I used it on The Night of the Hunter not because of the technical phase but strictly for its dramatic properties. I wanted those deep blacks, because I felt that it would give me an added dramatic punch in there when a sequence called for it. I’m a firm believer in black. I don’t want to use the word ’startle,’ but it holds you, like a diamond and its reflections, it magnetizes you.”

I’ve heard a lot of rumors about this film over the years–that Laughton hated James Agee’s script, that he hated the child actors, that Mitchum largely directed the children, etc. Now that better scholarship is coming out on the film, these legends are revealed as half-truths at best; for example, Agee had written a massive, experimental and unfilmable script so that Laughton ultimately had to write his own shooting script. (Though Agee kept the writing credit.) And anyone who watches the outtakes will see how personally invested Laughton was in the children’s performances; Mitchum merely offers a word here or there for support.

What comes across most in Gitt’s presentation is Laughton’s complete devotion to the material and his desire to invest deep feelings directly into every aspect of the production. He delivers an offscreen performance that’s worthy of appreciation in itself. During a particularly intense scene–when Powell confronts his wife (played by Shelly Winters) about her “snooping” and summarily slaps her–Laughton smacks something offscreen to time the slap; Winters flings her head to the side but then turns it back and dreamily delivers lines about faith and suffering in delusional bliss. Laughton repeats this action over and over again, insisting on a specific annunciation between two words as Winters visibly borders on exhaustion. (One wonders if the annunciation was really so pivotal or if Laughton was manipulating Winters, who had studied under the filmmaker before, to evoke the emotional tenor he sought.) This technique resurfaces several times in the rushes, and contributes powerfully to the brooding, dreamy tone of both the characters and the film in general. “If you can inhabit the world of the little boy, you’ll come off a thousand percent,” he tells an actor at one point. “You’ve got to live in the world of the little boy,” a fantastical perspective evoked throughout the film.

Some of the rushes are true outtakes–Laughton’s preamble, for example, in which he introduces the themes of the movie (which he eventually replaced with Lilian Gish), or Emmett Lynn’s performance as Uncle Birdie (who was eventually replaced by James Gleason); other rushes are simply the unused line readings and actions that surround the moments that were actually used in the film. Gitt strings them along, inserting stills for his own introductions and comments, focusing on specific moments and techniques that shed considerable light one of the most artistically successful films by a first and only time filmmaker. (The Night of the Hunter‘ s initial critical and commercial failure impacted Laughton severely, canceling his preparations to adapt Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and ensuring that he wouldn’t direct another film again.)

As a matter of fact, I’m attending a press screening of Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles later today, and very much looking forward to it.  As you might imagine, the rediscovered film has special poignancy in its native Los Angeles, and UCLA Film and Television Archive will offer a rare week-long run next week from August 15 through 20.

Given the pervasiveness of prequels, it’s not so unusual that French director Philippe Ramos’ second feature imagines the early life of Moby Dick’s dark, enigmatic Captain Ahab. (Melville provides scant backstory himself, but alludes to Ahab’s orphaned childhood and late marriage.) But Captain Ahab (which won Best Director and a FIPRESCI award at Locarno last year) is far from the typical plot-in-reverse exploitation of popular narrative; conceived as a tribute to mid-19th century Americana (particularly Romanticism and Mark Twain), it’s a personal meditation on childhood, nature, and fate. Like the book, Ramos presents his protagonist through the eyes of an observer (five of them, to be exact, corresponding to one act each) and Ahab registers more in tragic, emotional terms than strictly psychological ones. Thankfully, this prequel offers impressions and suggestions that expand the viewer’s imagination rather than a simple catalogue of references that collapse into a finite story.

Captain Ahab is lush and scenic; its measured pace, lyrical narration, and sense of irony (not to mention its misadventurous hero) could all be compared to Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, but it’s a more intimate film, emphasizing the life of a boy who never truly knows a home as he’s traded from hand to hand. Ahab’s mother dies in childbirth (the film’s first shot is her naked, white pelvis–literally where his story begins—as she is covered in a white shroud; throughout, white remains a symbolic color for Ahab) thus setting in motion a series of caretakers: an oafish father, a puritanical aunt, a cruel dandy, a seaside pastor. Each person who adopts Ahab attempts to remake him into his or her image, so it’s no surprise that the hidden passions of this smoldering youth eventually erupt into maniacal obsession when he becomes master of the high seas. But Moby Dick prevents even this identity and status, nearly fatally wounding Ahab and tasking the aging wanderer to a final confrontation.

It’s a wonder that Ramos recreates New York’s Adirondack wilderness by shooting in France and Sweden, but he does so very effectively, inspired by a scouting trip he took to America and his use of rural locations that feature winding rivers and endless forests. It’s an enchanting landscape evoking the Romantic tone of the film; nature is idealized and revitalizing. But Ramos also embraces contrasts–warm or selfish characters against Ahab’s remoteness, exteriors and interiors, romanticism and realism. For the latter, he quotes Huckleberry Finn in at least one scene, when criminals accost the runaway Ahab in his river journey towards freedom. Some of the film’s most vivid lyricism occurs after this, when Ahab is carried downstream in his small boat, surrounded by the riches of the natural world in a prolonged sequence that immediately recalls Laughton’s Night of the Hunter.

Laughton’s film seems a likely source for another inspiration: the iris that occasionally frames the action, reminiscent of a telescope or porthole, but also references early cinema (like Laughton evoking Griffith), reinforcing the pioneering spirit of Ramos’ story. The film’s sole whaling sequence (apart from the climax) is either taken from early-century “actuality” footage or made to look like it, complete with tinted monochrome, false projection speed, and copious scratches. If Ramos equates Romanticism with Whitman, why not cinema with its early practitioners? The comparison seems apt.

The film is an enticing compendium of contrasts and ellipses befitting its ensemble structure. Like Melville’s Ishmael, the narrators in the film relay plot points they don’t always personally experience, thus throwing the narrative into a realm of potentiality that’s perched between fact and fiction. Ramos’ eclectic score—including English folk music, classical pieces, and sailing ditties—is particularly evocative in establishing the mood without insisting on aesthetic unity. Likewise, his plot starts and stops to highlight intriguing moments in Ahab’s life (and not necessarily the most obvious), sometimes recounting his journey in detail and other times skipping ahead thirty years. (Interestingly, Ramos makes Ahab’s connection to the sea a late-blooming affair, represented visually through a striking image of Ahab sleeping under a beached whale skeleton; like the biblical Jonah—a story central to Melville as well as Ramos—the boy finds his calling in the belly of a whale.) These varied tonalities and ellipses create an impressionistic narrative with a lingering power; artfully disjointed, the story beckons the viewer to muse and interpret much like the whale beckons Ahab.

I’m always proud of the resources Trond Trondsen and I provide at Robert-Bresson.com, and our latest project–years in the making–is an exclusive online Bresson Bibliography that uses Jane Sloan’s 1983 out-of-print bibliography and Shmuel Ben-Gad’s recent bibliographies as a starting point.

As we note on the page: “Users who want to correct or extend the bibliography, or report dead links, are invited to send their comments to Frank Blaakmeer. If you do, and if you agree, your name will be added to the list of contributors at the bottom of the bibliography and the community of Bresson scholars and aficionados will be sincerely grateful.”