Most Meaningful First Viewings and Re-Evaluations of 2013 Part 3: The "C"s

Carlos Reygadas
(Japón (2002), Battle in Heaven (2005), Post Tenebras Lux (2012))
Reygadas has always been interesting, but these three films show a fascinating trajectory for the director. Japón, a thing of great beauty yet sadly besmirched by the final sequence, on a railway line, that is exploitative. Battle In Heaven is a prickly, difficult film whose virtue is this personality. Clear influences from other directors have been noted, but from seeing them all now, only Silent Light (2007) really retains this potential criticism, and its only really for the clear reference in the finale, while the rest of the film is completely its own. But with Post Tenebras Lux the progression to an important working director has now been completed. The journey over three films to that stage is impressive.

Chronicle of Ann Magdalena Bach/Sicilia! (Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, 1968/1999)
A mere taste of what to see from Huillet and Straub. Patient, delving into the material, in many ways simplistic in creation but inherently cinematic both of them. They're far from difficult art films than merely shrugging cheap artifice in favour of depth. 

Chronicle of a Summer (Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, 1961)
The types of film getting released in the United Kingdom, closing in on dual format packs with the more interesting DVD distributors, are getting immensely rich and distinct. If this is the last few years of physical media, although we forget that some people are still using VHS tapes, and not for nostalgic reasons, we can at least see a marked increase of films that deserve the gamble rather than the usual material. Probably the years of boutique collections is becoming more and more closer. An account of life, which goes as far as auto-critiquing itself, this fascinating document is both still seen in documentaries of now in its presentation, but feels more honest and deeper than a lot of work being done today.

La Ciénaga (Lucrecia Martel, 2001)
I think of a hand being cut open. A ladder against a wall. Oppressive heat. Murky green swimming pool water. A family that from the looks of them at said pool are disarrayed. Years later the director's own The Headless Woman (2008) would take this from frayed family relations to complete paranoia.

Claire Denis
(Chocolat (1988), The Intruder (2004), 35 Shots Of Rum (2008))
Slowly coming another of the most important working directors for me, if not potential a key one in consistency. Even 35 Shots of Rum, which I felt cold to rewatching it again this year, is growing for me. Denis' cinematic style, after viewing these films, is one that is not comparable to any other person I've seen the work of so far, time and structure in her films connected together in a calmed, observational tone that is not just about the whole of events but the smallest parts being of immense power. The Intruder (so far) is the film she went the furthest in this, fragmented but her concern with the emotions lingering in the elaborate pieces of the narrative. A brief moment by itself and in context of something at the same time has power in her films. Basterds (2013) sounds like a continuation of this hopefully.

Claude Chabrol
(Que la bête meure (1969), Juste Avant La Nuit (1971), Alice or The Last Escapade (1977), Merci Pour le Chocolat (2000))
Another French auteur, unfortunately no longer with us. Aside from the blot that was Dr. M (1990), my acquaintance with Chabrol has been as significant. He is not just a creator of great thrillers and murder stories in these films, but just as obsessed with the meaning of morality, existential plays on human behaviour which put them above many in this genre. And even the odd film out here, Alice or The Last Escapade (1977), is a great shift in tone the same way Black Moon (1975) was for Louis Malle.

The Color of Pomegranates (Sergei Parajanov, 1968)/The Legend of The Surami Fortress (Dodo Abashidze and Sergei Parajanov, 1984)
The last two major films of Parajanov's career finally caught up to. Works that can be confirmed as not being like anything else. What's left for me is to look through the lesser known fragments and materials to create the full collage of the man.

The Cremator (Juraj Herz, 1968)
Disturbing. Just disturbing. Banality of evil at its most potent meets the invention of Czechoslovakian (Czeck) cinema. The films I have seen from this country stand as completely original and of a style of their own.

Crows Zero/For Love’s Sake (Takashi Miike, 2007-12)
Reassuring me that the director I admired as a teenager is still able to make good. Flawed, but his better earlier work was as erratic and admirable for it. As long as he stays with punks and melodrama burning passion, instead of generic samurai and superhero films, I'll be fine.

The Curse of Kazuo Umezu (Naoko Omi, 1990)/Sword for Truth (Osamu Dezaki, 1990)/Sailor Victory (Katsuhiko Nishijima, 1995)/Twilight of the Dark Master (Akiyuki Shinbo, 1997)

The straight-to-video anime of yesteryear, OVAs, affectively disappeared from the Millennium on for the most part, and they are missed, both for the fact they actually meant creativity and high budgets in quite a few cases, but that they lead to fascinating creations. They could be cheesy. Dumb. Potentially offensive. Mere promotion for the manga with no endings. Not given another chapter to actually finish the story. Or have no story at all.  But they allowed people to test themselves. And for me, even the non-masterpieces are something to admire for how unpredictability even with obvious and generic material could take place. I can search through the archives of these long forgotten, or dismissed, works and yet (for the most part) find something with virtue, talent in the creation of them, or utter lunacy, the pop cultural id of anime.

The eighties, when they came to be to fill in the space in the new market for video, was their golden era, when there was money for anything to be made, and with a lot of work to find and see, anything truly was made. But the nineties OVAs stand out for me because, along with the erratic production times, they also reflect a decade where ever pop cultural idea that existed in the 20th century seemed to enter into itself for the last push of that century. Horror, a rarity surprisingly for anime, that is limited in animation and stories, but looks completely different and stands out because of its rarity. A truly talented director, Osamu Dezaki, dropping the ball but spectacularly so, trash samurai exploitation anime, before Ninja Scroll (1993) did it more majestically, made more insane by the erratic English dub. Two episodes of a work, which completely changed the setting and tone from the previous two first ones, a parody of anime, which were released by themselves in America of all thing without the others. And more horror, combined with science fiction dystopia, body horror, kinky and transgressive sexuality, mythology, and an atmospheric tone of darkness and street lights. Other OVAs are on this list, from the nineties too, but these ones together, all under sixty minutes each, fit together. No matter how many flaws they have, I cannot help but find virtue in them even if its unintentional. Tone, visual and character designs, ideas, anything. And having been too young, born in 1989, to have grown up in the generation of video tapes of this sort of thing, I'm going back to them not for nostalgia, but the excavate the idea pool that has been neglected, stuff that feels sorely missed now in their lack of conventional and predictability. It says so much when a work as obscure as The Curse of Kazuo Umezu, never released in the West and probably long forgotten in Japan, was resurrected, from an original Japanese VHS, and given subtitles by an anime fan. Such titles like it are having the same treatment and being made free to find online. The whole, personally unexplored, world of anime the fans are making available, to compensate for their lack of it, is exactly the same as cinephiles travelling to far our cinemas to find obscure b-movies. Not a lot of them will be masterpieces, but even the bad ones are allowed a moment in the sunshine for once even if it's to be skewered.

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Images From The Following Sources:

http://www.qagoma.qld.gov.au/__data/assets/image/0013/107203/Battle_in_Heaven.jpg

http://www.newyorkerfilms.com/administrator/movie_images/1311880855Anna_Magdalena_5.jpg

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