Before the summer movie onslaught, check out these quality new releases at home. The summer movie season officially starts any second now, which probably accounts for that stillness you're feeling in the air around your local multiplexes.
Welcome to the Dead Zone. Otherwise known as That Small Window of Relative Inactivity While Hollywood Readies Its Big Guns for the Upcoming Assault.
But what care we about the lack of high-profile movies being released over the next few weeks? Let's welcome the lull before the storm by smiling brightly and simply firing up our DVD players. There are some choice discs waiting to be checked out before the summer onslaught begins, and here are a few of the choicest.
What better way to prepare for Spielberg's upcoming War of the Worlds than by revisiting the man whose famous 1938 adaptation of the same material fooled terrified Americans into believing a radio play about an extraterrestrial invasion was the real thing? Art is all about illusion – something that old magic-lover Orson Welles knew better than anyone – and his final film, F for Fake, is also his final word on the subject. It's a difficult movie to warm up to – dauntingly labyrinthine, densely layered and with a Chinese puzzle-box structure that was postmodern before people even knew what the word meant – but it might just be Welles' most personal work, and it plays far better in 2005 than it did back in 1972. Packed with rapidly edited words and images that scream out for pausing and multiple replays, F for Fake is a perfect movie for the DVD Age.
Ostensibly a documentary – albeit one that just won't behave – F for Fake weaves together the convoluted, often dubious stories of legendary art forger Elmyr de Hory and his biographer, Clifford Irving (who also wrote the famously falsified biography of Howard Hughes), along with secrets and lies involving no less a trickster than Welles himself. It's a deliciously tangled web that Welles weaves, and the mischievous filmmaker leaves it for us to sort out who's telling the truth. By the end, Welles even has us questioning why we value authenticity and veracity so much in the first place.
Criterion's two-DVD edition of F for Fake is so loaded with goodies, it's hard to know where to start. The impeccably restored, high-definition transfer on Disc One is accompanied by an introduction by Peter Bogdanovich; a rarely seen, outrageously provocative nine-minute F for Fake trailer; and an illuminating, intimate commentary by Welles' longtime companion and F for Fake collaborator, Oja Kodar.
Disc Two digs even deeper into the mysteries, beginning with a fascinating, feature-length documentary that concentrates on the great director's last years and the numerous unfinished projects he left behind. A 60 Minutes interview with Clifford Irving from 2000, a relatively straightforward Norwegian-made featurette on de Hory and a '72 phone interview with Howard Hughes (in which he exposes Irving's hoax and offers a few grooming tips) round out a cinephile's dream-set that belongs in the collection of anyone who appreciates the beautiful lies we tell each other.
My Architect: A Son's Journey, Nathaniel Kahn's provocative and deeply poetic exhumation of the famous and impossibly complicated father he barely knew – the great American architect Louis I. Kahn – yields a richly nuanced portrait of a visionary artist and a deeply flawed human being. Nathaniel revisits the old haunts and architectural glories of his father, tracking down virtually everybody who ever knew Louis (from friends and lovers to famous colleagues like architects Frank Gehry and I.M. Pei), offering intimate testimonials that often directly contradict one another. The filmmaker's search for his father assumes the scope of an epic journey, and what is found is something both more and less than what was bargained for.
There are some dead ends here, but that's all part of the journey, and ultimately all we really need to know is revealed through the architect's art itself. We're presented with image after gorgeously photographed image of such breathtaking Kahn achievements as the Salk Institute, the Kimbell Art Museum (a building lit entirely by natural sunlight), and the American Wind Symphony Barge, a whimsically Fellini-esque boat that transforms into a concert stage. What eventually emerges is a film with all the passion, mystery, tears and joy of first-rate, fully fleshed fiction. It's a story all the more fascinating for being true, and one that's considerably richer than most of the meticulously crafted fictions that fill our movie screens these days.
My Architect was shot digitally and transferred directly to disc, resulting in an image on New Yorker's DVD edition that is remarkably sharp, with clear, natural colors that are often simply stunning. An excellent Q&A with the filmmaker is the main supplement here, incorporating several deleted scenes, and there's even a lovely little 12-page booklet included, with dazzling color photographs of Kahn's creations and a thorough timeline of virtually every project he was involved with.
"There is no shortage of ugliness in this world," are the first words we hear in Forough Farrokhzad's The House is Black. "If we closed our eyes to it, there would be even more." It's an entirely appropriate introduction to a film that casts its eye on the malformed inhabitants of a leper colony, finding truth and perhaps even a kind of beauty in ugliness by daring to see it as human.
Farrokhzad was a gifted and notorious figure in 1950s and '60s-era Iran, a proto-feminist poet who scandalized her countrymen with her divorce, her penchant for Western-style clothes and, most of all, with her personal, honest and often sensual writing. Farrokhzad died in her early 30s, in a tragic car crash, but her legacy includes 1962's The House is Black, her only venture into cinema, and a film that has proven highly influential on virtually every great Iranian director to emerge over the past few decades.
The House is Black is only 22 minutes long, but every second is unforgettable. The images are stark and soul-searing, filmed with courage and a poet's eye. A woman stares at her misshapen reflection in the mirror; a room full of the afflicted recite prayers of thanks; a crooked man walks back and forth along the blasted wall of a building as Farrokhzad's off-screen voice intones the days of the week. As powerful as it is delicately haunting, the film evokes emotions that resist articulation. The House is Black is one of the two or three greatest short films ever made.
The Facets DVD of The House is Black includes two other important Iranian shorts that were influenced by Farrokhzad's masterpiece – Mohsen Makhmalbaf's The School That Was Blown Away and Images from the Qajar Dynasty. Makhmalbaf's shorts provide a blast of much-needed light to counter-balance the main feature, with School's lively glimpse of nomad children being taught in a makeshift tent, and Images' collage-portrait of the splendid art and architecture from the Iran of 100 years ago.
The image quality on all the films is a bit rough and grainy but still watchable, and the DVD also includes an interview with Farrokhzad's sister and a 20-page zeroxed booklet featuring excellent essays by Jonathan Rosenbaum and filmmaker Chris Marker. This is one you'll remember long after all those summer blockbusters have come and gone.
lance.Goldenberg@weeklyplanet.com
This article appears in Apr 27 – May 3, 2005.