Ray Pride

It scares me when art becomes artifact.

In more that one interview with filmmakers, I've seen them describe their burgeoning DVD collections. Some, like the Hughes Brothers, need a dose of cinephilic Ritalin when they talk about how they assemble scrapbooks of frame-grabs of shots they esteem by other directors. Michael Bay uses his as an excuse to talk about his multimillion-dollar home theater, and others have begun to concede that it feels good, really good, to have a profligate swath of film neatly arrayed on shelves in their home. They may never have time to watch them, you see, but there they are, alphabetized, conserved and, let's admit it, lifeless. (Let us not concern ourselves with those who arrange their Criterion Collection DVDs by spine number.) It's the Pantheon as fetish: Mr. Lubitsch and sensei Kurosawa and crazy-mad Terry Gilliam belong to me.

Of recent releases, the most envy I've heard expressed is over Criterion's indispensable "The Adventures of Antoine Doinel," the company's most elaborate box set since "Brazil," which collates Francois Truffaut's four features and a short starring Jean-Pierre Léaud as his alter ego Antoine Doinel, shot over a two-decade period. A successful television director I know couldn't excuse the $100 expense for the set, yet it is there, taunting, shrink-wrapped at Virgin or Tower. Even through the cellophane, you can admire a tear-inducing bit of art direction, a replica of a 1950s style suitcase. Open it up, each individual disk has on its cover a folded piece of clothing to match the character's time in life: a shirt, sweater, jacket, or most affectingly, for "The 400 Blows," a black turtleneck that the young pup-cum-cur Doinel wears in his first misprisions against the law and with love. With interview extras and other supplements, including Truffaut's 1957 short "Les Mistons," it's an embarrassment of riches, embarrassing mostly because it's impossible to find the time to digest it all. The long-unseen "Antoine and Colette" is a major revelation, and I have to agree with Film Comment's Kent Jones, whose essay in the seventy-two page booklet celebrates the simplicity and precision of its story about post-adolescent Doinel becoming obsessed with a girl he sees at a concert. The choreography of their flirtation dazzles, capturing with "amazing fluency and delicacy," as Jones puts it, Doinel (and Truffaut's) lifelong "burning desire for women."

Other new releases of note come from every era. I love that Home Vision Entertainment has issued Robert Flaherty's classic documentaries 1934's "Man of Aran," the extras to which include "How the Myth Was Made," a sixty-minute documentary about the film's making and 1948's "Louisiana Story," with interviews with his widow and collaborator, Frances Flaherty and excerpts from rarely seen films. Film history, in my hand, on my shelf, awaiting that weekend when I want to revisit documentary history.

It's also noteworthy that Criterion's edition of Akira Kurosawa's dense, thrilling, lyrical adaptation of Shakespeare's "Macbeth" has two different sets of subtitles, accompanied by essays from each translator about their approach. (Donald Richie memorably refers to the subtitler's compressive art as "thoroughly compromised" yet the language he chooses for the short bites of telegraphese in the convention of subtitles must be "scrupulously anonymous.") Will I ever watch both versions? I will revisit H. G. Clouzot's voluptuously human hardboiled 1947 masterpiece, "Quai des Orfèvres," having already hoovered up a set of 1971 television interviews with Clouzot and his main actors.

The twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Derek Jarman's "Jubilee," described by the painter, gay and political activist, designer, journal-keeper, designer and gardener's biographer Tony Peake as a "somewhat uneasy mix of exuberance and bleakness," offers a snapshot of the mid-1970s English despair, social and economic, that begat punk. (And with a Brian Eno score.) I flipped desultory through the film's chapters, but gobbled up the extras, including selections from Jarman's annotated script, layered with drawings, Polaroids, calligraphed notes, fallen feathers. A lengthy doc, "Jubilee: A Time Less Golden" revisits the film's making with several of its actors, collaborators and Jarman's friend. (I fear becoming a connoisseur of footnotes.)

Footnotes? Lars Trier's von "Medea," (Facets Video), is an interesting footnote in a career that's going to turn out to have more footnotes than a David Foster Wallace novel. Drawn from an unfinished script by fellow Dane and forebear Carl-Theodor Dreyer (whom the puckish Trier claimed to be in daily psychic communication with), this 1987 video adaptation is a grimy mess that makes for a sorry slog, but prefigures some of Trier's latterday fascination with degraded video and degrading melodrama.

Miklos Jansco's 1974 "Electra, My Love" also from Facets, is an astonishment, a seventy-one minute retelling of the classic myth on an open, desolate Hungarian plain, camera in constant motion, seldom cutting, with galloping horseman, nude choruses and fireworks underscored throughout by a tattoo of drums. Even before Medea is pulled from story's past to some sort of present in a bright red helicopter, you're hypnotized. You've never seen anything like it, partly because Jansco's films haven't been available for a long time. But they're a chapter of film history DVDs can do wonders for. While a notable influence on fellow Hungarian Bela Tarr, Jansco's films are more than footnotes: they're ravishing, physicalized manifestations of an inhabited world that could exist only in cinema. Or, with today's art-house economics, on DVD.

(2003-05-21)

Also by Ray Pride

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After Neil LaBute's detour into post-Tarantino comic brutality ("Nurse Betty") and then tony literary adaptation ("Possession"), he's back to plumbing his vein of deepest inspiration: theatrically derived misanthropy that masquerades as romping misogyny.
(2003-05-07)

Innocence unprotected
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Tip of the Week
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Terror's isms
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Tip of the Week
(2003-04-22)

Short Runs
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For Peet's sake
(2003-04-22)

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