As foreign film sightings and bold independent movies become an increasingly rare phenomenon in movie theaters all around this country, DVDs have swiftly moved in to take up the slack. In just a few short years, the DVD format has truly become the adventurous film buff's best friend, offering a steady stream of affordable, digitally immaculate editions of movies made in virtually every time and place, even as our local theater bookers have become more and more reluctant to take a chance on anything subtitled or too culturally exotic.
There's a great big world full of movies out there, a world that exists somewhere over Hollywood's rainbow. Now, thanks to the efforts of some very forward-thinking DVD companies, we can all sample at will from that incredible international smorgasbord. Here are some titles on heavy rotation at my house at the moment:
With all the ugliness exploding across the Middle East these days, what better way restore our perspective on the Arab-Muslim world than by dipping our toes in the deep, sparkling pools of Iranian cinema — one of the best the world has to offer. Close-Up is a film like no other, not quite fiction and not quite documentary, but a fascinating blurring of the two. In 1990, a man named Hossain Sabzian was arrested for impersonating Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Kandahar) and conning an upper class Tehran family out of a goodly amount of money and hospitality.
Always a lover of human mysteries and foibles, the great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami (A Taste of Cherry) approached the players in this bizarre drama and persuaded them essentially to "re-enact" the story for his camera, which he then scrambled and intercut with real-life footage of Sabzian's trial and his eventual, highly emotional meeting with the man he had been impersonating (who, in fact, turns out to be the great hero and inspiration of the con man's life).
Close-Up is messy, minimalist and richly layered, a fascinating investigation in which it becomes difficult to say where the drama of reality ends and the dream of cinema begins. Now available on DVD from Facets, Close-Up includes an enlightening interview with Kairostami, taken from the documentary Friendly Persuasion, in which he discusses his enduring affection for the film.
Lovers of extreme Japanese cinema, remember the name of this movie: Fudoh the Next Generation. Alternately brutal and classically elegant, the film tells of the ultimate showdown between a cruel Japanese crime boss and his son, Riki Fudoh (Shosuke Tanihara), a screwed-up boy who's had it in for his old man ever since he witnessed his own brother being beheaded by dear old Dad for some minor infraction.
Now Riki's a high school kid lording over a gang of gun-wielding kids (one of whom prefers shooting deadly darts from her vagina) and the oedipal sparks in the air threaten to ignite an all-out underworld gang war. Fudoh can be an extraordinarily gory and violent proposition, but even the most devastating moments are stylized and transformed into something more than watchable by the gorgeous imagery of cinematographer Hideo Yamamoto (Takeshi Beat Kitano's Fireworks).
Fudoh was the breakthrough film of prolific and relentlessly button-pushing Japanese director Takashi Miike (Audition, City of Lost Souls, Ichi the Killer), and it looks just fine in the crisp, widescreen version presented on the new DVD edition by Media Blasters.
Simply put, Russian filmmaker Alexander Dovzhenko's Earth is one of the most beautiful movies ever made. An ode to the members of a Ukranian farming community might not seem to most conducive subject to engaging our senses (not to mention our interest), but Dovzhenko manages to turn the very ordinariness of his material into something larger than life and transcendent.
The film has its political agenda, to be sure (a product of the 1930 Soviet Union, how could it not?), but Earth is first and foremost universal, sensual and profoundly mystical — as perfect an example as you'll find of the pure poetry of the cinema (and specifically, the poetry of the silent cinema). Lyrical, exquisitely composed and fluidly edited shots of land, sky and the bounty of the earth give the film an elemental feel that's nothing short of pantheistic, a hymn to nature that's never been equaled on screen.
There are a number of age-related flaws on the version presented on Image's new DVD edition, but, overall, the disc is a joy to behold. Even more welcome is the addition of Bezhin Meadow, a 31-minute partial restoration of an unfinished film shot in 1935 by Sergei Eisenstein. Bezhin Meadow's focus on the lives of Soviet collective farmers makes it a perfect companion piece to Earth, and the single-still frames included on the DVD (the footage was destroyed in World War II) provide a palpable sense of a film that never was.
In its own hypnotic and curiously clinical way, the Hungarian masterpiece The Red and the White shows us the absurdity and horror of war in a way that's just as effective as more bombastic, modern Hollywood efforts such as Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down. Director Miklos Jancso focuses on the Russian Civil War of 1918, tracing a series of brutal encounters between the revolutionary army and government forces. The narrative, such as it is, amounts to a series of random events — battles, atrocities, imprisonments, escapes — all of which simply begin and then end (when the film ends), without any particular sense of resolution or finality.
Jancso gives us few real characters to sympathize or identify with, making most of the players virtually indistinguishable from one another, and often killing people off almost as quickly as they're introduced. It's all quite senseless and somewhat surreal, stunningly depicted in a series of long, slow takes and captured by the relentlessly moving camera and almost obscene grandeur of master cinematographer Tames Somlo's widescreen images. The sharp, contrast-rich transfer on the new Kino DVD adds immeasurably to the film's ability to shock and mesmerize.
Meanwhile, a perfect palate-cleanser for all this high-minded cinephilia can be found back in the good old USA. The new Something Weird/Image Entertainment DVD of Satan in High Heels offers a remarkably good-looking version of this hugely enjoyable 1962 exploitation classic, as well as tons of unusual extras. The movie itself unfolds like an ultra-low-rent Pandora's Box, with trashy carnival stripper Stacey Kane (Meg Myles) ripping off her junkie boyfriend and then heading for the big city, where she proceeds to seduce, exploit and destroy everyone in sight, most memorably a squirrelly lesbian nightclub manager named Pepe (Dark Shadows' Grayson Hall).
Satan in High Heels is nasty, outrageous and a hoot from start to finish — everything great trash cinema should be. Among the numerous extras is the hour-long 1962 feature The Wild and The Naked, an extensive gallery of sexploitation art and audio rarities, a couple of plotless shorts (one entitled Latex She-Devils), and no less than nine trailers for movies with titles like Confessions of a Bad Girl and Satan's Bed, which features an early, pre-John appearance by none other than Yoko Ono. Trash of the most indispensable sort.
This article appears in Mar 13-19, 2002.