Perhaps the most important DVD release of the year is Jean-Luc Godard’s 1959 Breathless (Criterion). Though it is rarely discussed as either a love story or a political film, Breathless is equally both and continues to exert fascination among viewers and scholars precisely for that reason. In the love story between French bum Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and American adventuress Patricia, Godard’s exhibits a political-romantic ambivalence—toward women, toward America (Hollywood)—that reveals a crucial and basic complexity about what has been called the American century, the century of movies. It is the best way to start a DVD exploration of film history, Movies 101.
Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 Battleship Potemkin (now in a definitive restoration from Kino) ranks as an outstanding illustration of film as a visual, sensual and kinetic media. Eisenstein’s reenactment of a pivotal moment in the Russian Revolution was a revolutionary realization of how movies can be looked and interpreted. He turns a people’s drama into an ever-exciting art object, but one that dances, pulses, jolts and invigorates. This KINO set, complete with instructive extras, is an art and history course in itself, but disguised as entertainment.
When Jean-Pierre Melville directed the film version of Jean Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terrible (Criterion), he set a standard of fluid expressiveness he never again equaled. This powerfully self-conscience story of the perverse, hermetic relationship between a brother and sister Nichole Stephane and Edouard Dermithe, is key to the Cocteau canon but also an important example of how romantically express sexuality becomes a radical, dangerous force. The generations of filmmakers influenced by this film often fall short of its moral rigorous morality and Stephane’s still awesome butch-muse performance.
Focusing on female humanism, Warner Home Video’s Leading Ladies 2 box set finally makes available two of the outstanding female performances in recent cinema: Sandy Dennis as the perplexed New York school teacher in Up the Down Staircase (1967) and Diane Keaton in Shoot the Moon (1982). One social drama, one personal melodrama, each film looks at a public and private institution to show how women function within social circumstance that did create but inherit. The Dennis and Keaton performance still feel relevant.
In today’s torture-porn era, no film is as powerfully unsettling as F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, (Kino) in a newly restored, deluxe edition. The genius of Murnau’s German Expressionist classic shows in images that taps subconscious fear while also leaving one visually breathless. The power of human imagination versus the frailty of human existence, especially in Max Schrek’s unforgettable image as the rodent-like vampire.
André Téchiné continues cinema’s exploration of Western myth in his 1987 Scene of the Crime (Kino) but here the subject is family mythology where Catherine Deneuve’s sexual past exerts terrifying impact on his son and reclaims her own future. Téchiné’s always intelligent about the resonances of film history in contemporary life—each of his movies is a Film 101 film requisite—and Scene of the Crime’s evocation of David Lean’s Great Expectations and Visconti’s Senso makes DVD-watching an investigation of both our film and emotional heritage.
Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 Battleship Potemkin (now in a definitive restoration from Kino) ranks as an outstanding illustration of film as a visual, sensual and kinetic media. Eisenstein’s reenactment of a pivotal moment in the Russian Revolution was a revolutionary realization of how movies can be looked and interpreted. He turns a people’s drama into an ever-exciting art object, but one that dances, pulses, jolts and invigorates. This KINO set, complete with instructive extras, is an art and history course in itself, but disguised as entertainment.
When Jean-Pierre Melville directed the film version of Jean Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terrible (Criterion), he set a standard of fluid expressiveness he never again equaled. This powerfully self-conscience story of the perverse, hermetic relationship between a brother and sister Nichole Stephane and Edouard Dermithe, is key to the Cocteau canon but also an important example of how romantically express sexuality becomes a radical, dangerous force. The generations of filmmakers influenced by this film often fall short of its moral rigorous morality and Stephane’s still awesome butch-muse performance.
Focusing on female humanism, Warner Home Video’s Leading Ladies 2 box set finally makes available two of the outstanding female performances in recent cinema: Sandy Dennis as the perplexed New York school teacher in Up the Down Staircase (1967) and Diane Keaton in Shoot the Moon (1982). One social drama, one personal melodrama, each film looks at a public and private institution to show how women function within social circumstance that did create but inherit. The Dennis and Keaton performance still feel relevant.
In today’s torture-porn era, no film is as powerfully unsettling as F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, (Kino) in a newly restored, deluxe edition. The genius of Murnau’s German Expressionist classic shows in images that taps subconscious fear while also leaving one visually breathless. The power of human imagination versus the frailty of human existence, especially in Max Schrek’s unforgettable image as the rodent-like vampire.
André Téchiné continues cinema’s exploration of Western myth in his 1987 Scene of the Crime (Kino) but here the subject is family mythology where Catherine Deneuve’s sexual past exerts terrifying impact on his son and reclaims her own future. Téchiné’s always intelligent about the resonances of film history in contemporary life—each of his movies is a Film 101 film requisite—and Scene of the Crime’s evocation of David Lean’s Great Expectations and Visconti’s Senso makes DVD-watching an investigation of both our film and emotional heritage.
