Robert Todd's Evergreen

Before it's too late, I'd like to call attention to the New York Underground Film Festival's 1:30pm, Sunday screening of the shorts program Natural High. As the title hints, the films contained therein are thematically linked by their cinematic/videomatic interpretations and modulations of the natural world. In Jason Livingston's July Fix a 16mm camera mimics the movement of a bee vis-a-vis its desired flowers, bobbing to and fro as the soundtrack likewise fades abruptly in and out to anxious, unnerving effect. Robert Todd's Evergreen is an extended, medium-paced montage of urban nature portraits that accumulate and rhyme in the fashion of Bruce Baillie, though Todd's work may be even more subtly powerful. A more mythic, iconic journey takes place in John Standiford's Fading Star, a just-a-bit-too-long Lewis Klahr-style animation of pop culture cut-outs and found sound that has a cowboy embarking on a railroad voyage through the history of America and its physical and psychic landscapes. My personal favorite of the program, and maybe of the festival (of what I've seen), however, might be Michael Robinson's The General Returns from One Place to Another, an unclassifiable assault on Thoreauvian transcendentalism. Combining distant sounds of gunshots, blurred, ghostly 16mm-to-video images of rustic scenery and a couple of dazed rural explorers, and a reconsideration of the evil roots of beauty (both in art and nature) in some terrifically worded subtitles, among a few other clashing elements, The General disturbs the idealization of nature to arrive at an unsettled juncture between man and the world.

Over the past three decades, Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep has become the stuff of cinephile legend. Shot on location in Watts, Los Angeles, mostly with amateur actors, Burnett's 16mm student-film never received a theatrical release, in part because of the substantial cost involved with clearing its music rights. Despite occasional screenings at festivals and museums in the 30 years since it was finished, Killer of Sheep has been nearly impossible for most people to see, theatrically or otherwise, but those who managed to track the film down have been vocal in their praise. A few years after finishing his second feature, My Brother's Wedding, Burnett won a MacArthur genius grant, and in 1990, the National Film Preservation Board selected Killer of Sheep for inclusion on the National Film Registry - honoring the rather obscure entry alongside such venerable American classics as The Great Train Robbery, Fantasia, and The Godfather. Yet its reputation as a great film has continued to be just that - a reputation - as Killer of Sheep has remained a cause célèbre for the lucky few who have actually seen it and a phantom masterpiece for everyone else.

Click here to read the rest of Chris Wisniewski’s piece on Charles Burnett’s masterpiece. And still more to come this weekend on Reverse Shot.

Man? Or God?

On my way to the opening night of the 2007 New York Underground Film Festival last night I passed by graffito written on a Bleeker Street wall that read, simply, "Film ≠ Cinema." A puzzling equation (or inequation, as it were), but one that means a great deal after a moment's thought. Namely: "film" can be defined as a whole bunch of things; "cinema" can only really mean the transcendent potential of the motion picture medium. "Film" is derived from the Old English fell, for "skin" or "hide" -- in other words, something that covers or shields. "Cinema" is derived from the Greek kinein, for "to move." Film keeps us out; cinema takes us places we've never been.

All of which is a pompous way of saying that one man's moving pictures are another man's protecting images. I couldn't help feeling that way, and doubtful of my own convictions, when I listened to most of Anna Biller's Q & A after the screening of her Viva, and after gauging the various reactions to it. My view contrasted dramatically with the many who saw Viva as "superficially superficial" (as one spectator put it by quoting The Earrings of Madame de . . .) -- on the surface glib but on a deeper level a critical take on a genre and the politics of sexual experimentation. While I stick by my review, I now see that Billar's precisely undertaken film is a Rorschach-esque experience good enough to at least generate debates regarding intention, tone, and reception -- not just for Viva but cinema in general.

By now you're probably asking, "What's this have to do with the greatest fielding major league first baseman of all time and one of the veteran cornerstones and catalysts of the 1986 World Championship New York Metropolitans -- the greatest team in the history of the sport -- whose picture you attached to your post?" Glad you asked. See, I'm Keith Hernandez, a short film by Rob Perri, screens tonight in the NYUFF's "Fierce Creatures" shorts program. The film, a fast-paced, irreverent, and very funny rundown of Keith at his best (clutch hitting in the World Series, a legendary Seinfeld appearance, never forsaking his power-enhancing moustache) and his worst (drug use, porn acting, kowtowing to Ronald Reagan), is supposed to "discuss how male identity is shaped by TV/film, sports, advertising, and pornography." It's a little too silly to follow through on this weighty thesis, but I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt for featuring that shocking porn footage, noting the hypocrisy of professional athletes' anti-drug advocacy, bringing up some interesting ideas about how sports distract from political reality (Game 6 diverting attention from Iran-Contra?), and allowing me to relive '86 for the one billionth time. Why sympathy for this and not Viva? We all have our soft spots, and this critic admits complete bias when it comes to anything involving my Mets. Opening day is three days away, and I'm Keith Hernandez makes a perfect inaugurating film for those who understand the brilliant absurdity of our national pastime, and the absurdly brilliant men who play it.

Honestly, what planet are these people inhabiting?

Now is as good a time as any to climb aboard this week’s traction-gaining Killer of Sheep bandwagon. All of the words used to describe this one-of-a-kind American masterwork (including “dreamlike,” neorealist,” “gritty,” and a host of other words that desperately try to set up some sort of visual or generic equivalent that just might not exist) can’t quite grasp Burnett’s utterly unpretentious, artistically pure approach. It’s audacious yet never pushes for effect; it seems to contain a world of sadness in its every breath yet it so fully understands its milieu that it never needs to emphasize it with overextended melancholy or melodramatics.

We’ve been singing its praises for a while at Reverse Shot (as in Chris Wisniewski’s 2006 piece, which you can read here) with much more to come this week. And we couldn’t be more pleased that not only is this film finally being released in a new 35mm print after over thirty years of being little more than a whisper on the lips of many but that it’s also become something of a cause for film critics to rally around. J. Hoberman’s lovely piece in the Village Voice this week stated, rightfully, “In retrospect, it can be seen that the two great independent features of the late '70s were Killer of Sheep and Eraserhead,” while Nathan Lee got the ball rolling in his spring preview a few weeks back by exclaiming: “The film of the season, if not the year.” Time Out gave the film its coveted six stars (lol) this week, and even Entertainment Weekly couldn’t help but sneak it in between 300 shout-outs: “Killer of Sheep is one of those marvels of original moviemaking that keeps hope of artistic independence alive.”

It’s all good news--aside from an alarmingly wrongheaded capsule in L magazine by Jesse Sweet that deems the film a “neo-realist silent comedy talkie” (WTF?) and manages to mention in its Donald Bogle-esque opening paragraph that the film incorporates the “trends” of “urban tragedy” and the parallel “comedy in the hood that runs from Amos N’ Andy through Dave Chappelle” (eek, why, oh, why did you have to go there, Jesse?). Oh and I didn’t realize that “the film alternates between feral children in the alley and the adults’ constant search to hustle up some more action.” So, one of the most sensitive and tactile and honest films ever made by an African-American filmmaker is really about two things first and foremost: “feral children” and adult “hustlers.” Like, ravenous beasts and pimps? Wow. Double-wow.

Annnnyway, I digress (two phenomenal Reverse Shot staff writers have been regular critics there for some time, and the film editors at L have been on a singularly impressive upward climb ever since the biweekly’s induction a few years back in terms of amassing fresh voices, so forgive and forget?). Oh, by the way, it got four out of five L’s.

To look on the bright side, critics are doing their job, not trying to one up each other with a cute turn of phrase but to get the motherfucking point across: Go see Killer of Sheep. Will it be this year’s Army of Shadows, i.e. a sensation created by waves of critical adoration and the senselessness of its long unavailability? One can only hope.

Where have all the flowers gone? Viva, the 2007 New York Underground Film Festival's opening night (tonight) film, perhaps provides incriminating evidence that the current crop of underground directors are more interested in retro DIY rather than untrodded fields of creativity. Opposed, positive signs abound in this NYUFF's arsenal, but there's a definite security in Viva, a tongue-in-cheeker about the 70s' sexual revolution that plays as a condescending/reverent homage to Playboy After Dark and other swinging antiques from a more "innocent" era of pornography, pop art, and interior decorating. Director-lead actor Anna Biller shoots Viva as wall-to-wall eye candy, reimaginings of jet set catalogs circa 1971: color coordinated outfits and decor, mod fashion and hairstyles, and -- to send it all over the top -- purposely awkward line readings (including a constant stream of vacuous guffaws) and anonymous pseudo-lounge rock that in the second half morphs into kitschy musical numbers. Does plot even matter here? Barely. It has something to do with Barbie (Biller), a gorgeous housewife married to a corporate mannequin (Chad England), venturing out into "liberated" universes of free love, from hippie nudists to Warholesque art scenesters. Like the quasi-naive Barbie, who refashions herself as the aspiring title vixen, Viva is a contrived invention, offering nostalgic fabulousness for an underground generation longing, perhaps, for the Garden of Eden of pre-AIDS sex (and, in order to hold its libido in check, ends with a conservative return to a monogamous, materialistic dream life). The film is supposed to be a retelling of this era from a woman's perspective (Viva's escape from bourgeois boredom only lands her in the chauvanistic playground of male entitlement), but how can such a critique carry weight the whole film is so cartoonish and the swinging milieu so clearly coveted by the camera as to distract from any feminist message? Biller, an underground filmmaking vet, offers enough ironic cheesecake (and eats it) to please an audience only looking to take their counterculture so seriously, and in this sense Viva is poised to be a crowd pleaser.

Which brings us to the question posed by Nathan Lee in this week's Voice: "If the underground is defined not only by economic status but aesthetic opposition to mainstream culture, where are the escape routes in a mainstream culture that instantly commodifies and co-opts?" Allow me a tentative answer. The underground should challenge and provoke, but the people -- even underground people -- get what they want. If a largely hipster audience outside the realm of museums and galleries -- where "aesthetic opposition" remains largely contained within academic confines -- demands vicarious hedonism, then the audience has spoken. This audience. There exist countercurrents inside countercurrents, and the NYUFF is diverse and rich enough to provide more substantial fare beyond the accessible, palatable "works of homage, pastiche, and appropriation" which, yes, remain the underground's easiest sources of amusement and targets of criticism. Trust me, there's more, and better to be seen at this year's NYUFF. Keep checking back here this week for further tips.

We’re not theatre critics here at Reverse Shot, so I hope any who happen to cruise by here will forgive a brief indulgence: I spent my Saturday with a few Reverse Shot pals, Tom Stoppard, and the cast of his The Coast of Utopia trilogy and it was a bit of a monster.

This is not to say that his nautically inflected trilogy (Voyage, Shipwreck, and Salvage) about the exploits of the erstwhile crew of Russian thinkers and would-be revolutionaries circling around the lesser-known figure of Alexander Herzon doesn’t falter or lag across is nearly nine hours of length. This is largely to be expected. But even when the humor flattens out, the expository dialogue grows unwieldy, and historical accuracy jumps the shark, the entire project coasts (pun intended) on a forceful perspective and historical sweep that’s all too rare these days in any art form. I can’t imagine not seeing Utopia in a single afternoon—the bits that rhyme across plays would most likely be forgotten, and more importantly, the salvage act Stoppard performs on his group would be far less apparent, and less affecting because of it.

The Coast of Utopia captures that moment in the mid 1800s when a seismic societal change seemed possible, even likely to many, and folks like Herzon, Mikhail Bakunin, Karl Marx and others actively worked to foment upheaval. Of course, 1848 didn’t work out the way any of these thinkers had planned, and Stoppard (no fan of Marx) spends much of the time in his first two plays poking at the hypocrisies of the intellectual class waging hypothetical battles on behalf of the proletariat. But, it’s in his third act, where dreams have long been shattered, and hope mostly lost, that he tosses Herzon a victory in the form of the Russian emancipation of the serfs. In this, the playwright allows his characters a measure of redemption and fully recasts their struggles in the first two plays—maybe foolish and misguided, but often well-meaning, these folks loved an idea of what their Russia could be and finally, unexpectedly helped bring about some kind of change. It’s a message to take to heart.

Oh, and there are lots of famous people in it: an astonishing Billy Crudup, a furiously mugging Ethan Hawke, Josh Hamilton, Martha Plimpton. See the marathon if you can…the performers were visibly excited to have accomplished nine hours of theatre, as was the audience. This is probably old news by now, but it’s running for a few more months, so any of you out there who are on the fence should give it a shot.

A restored print of Lionel Rogosin’s one-of-a-kind snapshot of that "mile of pavement between Astor Place and Chatham Square" circa 1955, On the Bowery, which somehow managed to win an Academy Award for Best Documentary, despite both its quality and the fact that it's hardly a conventional documentary at all, starts today at downtown NY's Anthology Film Archives. And RS staff writer Nick Pinkerton has your essential viewing companion all ready to go:

"Under the steelwork silhouette of the Third Avenue El, bums splay out across doorjambs in mid-afternoon; anyone who has scraped together enough money already has their binge underway. It’s a few stops downtown from P.J. Clarke’s and Don Birnam’s apartment in The Lost Weekend, but formally it’s another universe—shots of winos being scooped into police vans seem cut-in direct from life, seemingly surreptitiously filmed; people, buildings, everything in sight shows marks that could only come of long, terrible attrition. There are no open-armed, redemptive Jane Wymans here, only men, specimens in advanced states of decay, in-and-out-of-Bellevue types not quite able to fill out their rusty, piss-scented trousers. Enter a new guy, Ray (Ray Salyer), whose biceps still fill out his sleeves, his chest not yet concave, looking preoccupied as he enters the Confidence Bar & Grill. He’s railroaded into buying a round of drinks, learns a few names, and just like that he’s part of the Bowery."

Click here to read of Nick Pinkerton's Glasses Full of Rye in its entirety.

As usual, screens of varyingly inappropriate sizes around New York are competing for quality-hungry cinephiles this weekend—with Max Ophuls’s magnificent The Earrings of Madame De… still gliding across Film Forum’s downtown shoeboxes, cute little BAM’s Imamura retro hitting its peak on Saturday with his 1983 Palme d’Or winner The Ballad of Narayama, and Jafar Panahi’s Offside hitting U.S. theaters via the East Village dumping ground called the Quad (…but still, God bless you, Quad!), it’ll be tough to choose which masterpiece to see with which cramped viewing experience. With David Fincher’s video-velvety procedural Zodiac still showing in crisp, elegant digital projection at the Ziegfeld behemoth, it’ll be tough not to pitch a tent in that dying 53rd street movie palace all weekend. Best to enjoy them all, even if flanked on all sides by inappropriately giggling Film Forum middlebrowers, overly reverent Brooklynites, trenchcoated villagers who thought they bought a ticket for a movie called “Backside,”or out-of-(mid)towners looking for a little “spectacle” (and then getting pissed off that Fincher dares not provide it…for two hours and 45 minutes).

RS: Can you talk about the design of the monster? It seems like the opposite of Peter Jackson’s anthropomorphized King Kong—it has no clear personality.

Bong Joon-Ho: The design is based on a fish, so it has less personality than King Kong, who is a mammal. But I tried to achieve some humanness through its behavior patterns. It was important to give the impression that the monster is somewhat clumsy—like when it misses its footing or rolls down the slope when it first attacks people. So I wanted it to be clumsy and violent and even hysterical—a character without charisma. Not like Hannibal Lecter, who’s full of charisma in The Silence of the Lambs, but like Steve Buscemi in Fargo. Actually, my creature designer and myself often thought of Steve Buscemi while working on the design.

Well, we certainly hadn't thought of Steve Buscemi while watching the monster gallop and lurch across the park and tromping and stomping on passersby...but now that you mention it....

Click here to read all of Adam Nayman's interview with The Host director Bong Joon-Ho, before or after seeing the terrific movie, now in theaters.

If you've seen even one frame of The Innocents, you know that it's one of the best shot films in Hollywood history...screen so wide it seems to go on forever, every nook and cranny expressively crammed or drained, always reflective of its characters' inner torments and external fears. The film's brilliant director of photography, Freddie Francis, Academy Award winner for 1960's DH Lawrence adaptation Sons and Lovers and 1989's Glory, has died this week at age ninety. With a distinctive and varied career as both a cinematographer of some of the world's best loved, most visually memorable films of the British New Wave (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Room at the Top) and beyond (The Elephant Man, The French Lieutenant's Woman), and as a director in his own right for Hammer Films and then at the Hammer-esque horror production company Amicus (Torture Garden, Tales from the Crypt), Francis proved himself one of our most adept film stylists. I'm unlikely to ever forget those shattering final moments in the The Innocents' gothic statue garden, the opening drift down from the tree brances of The Straight Story, or even Robert DeNiro's lightning and fire-streaked face as he blathers in tongues at the end of Cape Fear.

Some images to remember.

...you need to watch it before youtube takes it down.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=LzqjimUs2RU

http://www.maximumfun.org/blog/2007/03/lily-tomlin-v-david-o-russell-holy-shit.html

Why bother comparing a delicate yet trenchant social allegory about young Iranian female soccer fans with a massive, dunderheaded "epic" about ancient Sparta warding off legions of evil Persians tinted with all the lovely colors of an oil slick? Well, not only does Offside's very contemporary look at Iranian youth culture act as a nuanced corrective to Zack Snyder's conveniently "unintentional" Iran invasion propaganda (Iran was known before the mid-Thirties as, you guessed it, Persia) but also both films are literal calls to action -- Offside for young women to assert their independence in a hideously patriarchal society that's ever so slowly evolving due to burgeoning youth activism; 300 for Americans to stomp, slice, and hack their way through anything, or anybody, of a different color. The choice should be simple.

Click here to read all of Michael Koresky's review of Jafar Panahi's Offside, which we've certainly been encouraging that you go see for long enough. Finally, your chance is here.

I’m gonna keep beating a horse. Because it…just…won’t…die…. After I emerged ashen-faced and a little dumber from a screening of 300, I was ready to stop watching movies altogether. Luckily, the next night I was able to catch an advance look at that film’s polar opposite, Sarah Polley’s truly lovely and, for me, wrenching winter poem Away from Her. Elegant and lucidly told, even as it jumps around a bit chronologically, Away from Her, is a remarkably rich debut feature from Polley, who has remained one of the most consistently valuable adult actresses in film for well over a decade. Her mixture of honesty and tremulousness translates beautifully behind the camera with this character-fueled examination of individual and collective memory and loss; she directs with an unemphatic yet undeniably cinematic style. The premise (an elderly husband and wife dealing with her gradual succumbing to Alzheimer’s) didn’t quite prepare me for the complex approach the film would take to its characters’ perspective, a darting, dancing look at the mysteries of the mind and heart, expressed solely in the humane faces of its actors, notably Gordon Pinsent and the astonishing Julie Christie. Much more on this film from Reverse Shot in the coming months.

Ken Loach's camera pans and tilts its way through The Wind that Shakes the Barley, as though its wandering gaze is in search of a fixed center, adrift in a world of shifting allegiances and gruesome violence. The off-the-cuff naturalism of Loach's technique proves something of a blessing here, blunting the impact of the film's brutality and giving it an intimate, human scale. Barley, which was a surprise Palme d'or winner at last year's Cannes Film Festival, looks at the anti-British uprising in Ireland in the early 1920s through the experience of two brothers, Damien and Teddy O'Donovan (Cillian Murphy and Padraic Delaney). Their ever-morphing attitudes give Loach and screenwriter Paul Laverty a way into the broader conflict, but the focus here remains resolutely personal, on how ordinary people experience political occupation and the devastating consequences of violence perpetrated by people on both sides of the cause.

Click here to read more of Chris Wisniewski’s review of Ken Loach’s “vital and engrossing” new film The Wind That Shakes the Barley.

With the success of 300, I don’t want to say that American film culture has hit rock bottom, per se, so let’s just say it’s reached further down into the stinking, shit-filled toilet so that its fingers are just barely scraping the bottom of the porcelain while pieces of fecal matter float and drift about and get caught up in its cuticles. We’ve certainly gone into enough detail at Reverse Shot about why 300 is best left for the war-mongers, those who fear the darkies, and drooling morons, and we certainly don’t need more evidence (a non-delighted “told ya so” is in order) as to why the film certainly should never have been made in this political climate, so let’s just have a moment of silence for a once-great medium that’s devolved into a sewage pit of all of its worst tendencies, from Leni Riefenstahl grandiosity to teenage-boy pandering. A very, very reliable source tells RS that director Zack Snyder is no slouch in the ultraconservative department, so any misgivings you may have had about his Dawn of the Dead remake can be safely validated, while those who just casually accepted its thorough dumbing down of one of horror cinema’s great allegorical works (”Hmmm…like, I guess I don’t miss the political undercurrent of the original because well, those zombies just move so awesomely fast. Dude!”) can watch 300’s similar bravado-without-critique with the same head-in-the-clouds obliviousness. Fuck you and die, 300, thanks for making this world a worse place.

Aren't you glad it's not that same photo of the guy with the shock-blond hair and the green sweater pointing off-screen?

In the waning days of the Toronto International Film Festival, it was rare for an afternoon to pass without somebody—a colleague, a volunteer, a stranger in line for popcorn—inquiring about the film, programmed in this neck of the woods as a “Midnight Madness” selection. Generally, the Midnight Madness films in Toronto are a greasy-mixed bag of winking splatter-fests and serious-minded sado-porn: films that are fun to read about and taxing to watch. On one hand, it was nice to have The Host around to elevate the overall level of the programme, but it was also annoying to see so lucid and novel a piece of work ghettoized as something best watched after dark in the company of gore-hounds.

Read the rest of Adam Nayman’s article on The Host…and then go see it.

"One step above the sublime makes the ridiculous, and one step above the ridiculous makes the sublime again."
-Thomas Paine

The abovementioned describes the spectrum over which Jean-Claude Brisseau's filmmaking hopscotches, and it's the tension in that risk-taking that makes him essential—even (especially?) when he produces a frustration like The Exterminating Angels. François (Frederic van den Driessche), a middle-aged filmmaker, burrows into a vaguely defined new project that aims to excavate mysteries of intimacy: generally, the feminine sexual imagination; specifically, the female orgasm. Such a film being necessarily a collaboration, he begins an unusually rigorous audition process: actresses masturbate in front of him and, inhibition uncorked, encouraged by their director's stoical receptivity, reveal intimate details of their sexual history.

Read the rest of Nick Pinkerton's review of Jean-Claude Brisseau's Exterminating Angels.

OMG, bros, I just got back from a PREVIEW screening of the TOTALLY AWESOME 300...and let me TELL YOU, it was WORTH THE WAIT!!! For N-E-BODYwho was a fan of the Graphic Novel (like me!), this won will come as a NICE suprise...not only is it ENTERTAINING and FAITHFUL to the book but it also teaches you a LOT about ancient times and the olden days. [P.S. I liked the cool big rhino...LOL! :)

So if you're like ME and you LIKE to just BE entertained, and you thought that movie about the Japanese D-Day invasion by Clint Eastwood was like TOTALLY BORING, then FINALLY HERE"S a movie for you! ANd Gerard Butler is going to be a BIG BRIGHT SHINING STAR! Mark my words, you saw it here FIRST!

Click here for some RAD NEW "300" WALLPAPER!

This can't be real, right? No self-respecting studio hack would be so crass as to be quoted saying:

"If you get past the Milton of it all, and think about the greatest war that’s ever been fought, the story itself is pretty compelling”

or:

“Less Adam and Eve and more about what’s happening with the archangels...In Eden there’s the nudity problem, which would be a big problem for a big studio movie.”

or, the capper:

"This could be like ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ or bigger."

Aw hell, one more for the road:

"[It would be] made with total adherence and respect to any of the three religions’ involvement in the story of God, the Devil and the archangels. [But] it’s a war movie at the end of the day”

So, it'll be like Gettysburg meets The Loss of Sexual Innocence? Holy crap, that's the best idea ever. I hope they get the team who put together 300 involved!!!

----------

But, since this isn't real, and could never happen on this Earth...NY Times, thanks for the Sunday morning LOLs.

Hey, guess what's under my hat?

“Pimps, Prostitutes, and Pigs” is about as accurate a title as one’s likely to find heading up a retrospective of the works of the recently deceased Japanese master Shohei Imamura. A filmmaker who trained under Ozu, but whose maxim “I am interested in the relationship of the lower part of the human body and the lower part of the social structure” is actively woven throughout a body of work which relates to Ozu’s only in opposition, Imamura’s films are indeed populated by pimps, prostitutes and pigs, and that’s just a very small part of what’s on offer. Step into an Imamura movie and you’re likely to run across anything from an uncomfortably detailed examination of the zany home life of a two-bit pornographer, to a wife murderer establishing an unusual relationship with an eel, to a mushroom cloud morphing into the shape of a giant, molten liver, to a woman whose prodigious ejaculate brings life to flora and fauna alike. Or, on a more harrowing note—a truly devastating depiction of the physical and societal fallout from the atomic destruction of Hiroshima.

Given the company he keeps, it probably says more about me than I’d like to admit that Imamura is easily my favorite filmmaker from Japan. While having spent more time with Ozu, Kurosawa, and Naruse thanks to recent retrospectives, I’ve only been able to catch up a handful of Imamura’s movies, but each one, with their madcap blends of genre and wild tonal shifts has left an indelible impact—seeing The Eel and Dr Akagi when I did had an unquantifiable impact on how I watch movies. Less overtly intellectual than contemporary Nagisa Oshima, but no less intelligent, Imamura’s films exist in a truly unclassifiable space defined by post-war Japan, but are far from bound by it. The relative unavailability of his works here has long been a source of frustration, so thanks to the folks at BAM for putting together a comprehensive program which runs from tonight until the end of March. Our picks of the series would have to be “all of them,” but Imamura’s rare documentary A Man Vanishes has us especially excited. In the face-off between the filmmaker he once shared the Palme d’Or with up at MOMA, I’ll give a personal edge to Imamura, unless someone can point me to an instance in Kiarostami’s films where a charming young prostitute performs a bit of unspeakableness with a hardboiled egg and a piece of anatomy that Imamaura seems to take special interest in. A filmmaker who’s sorely missed (even if he did give Miike his start), here’s a golden opportunity to find out what we’ve all been missing.

Barf.

Thanks to Reverse Shot contributor and bang bro Leah Churner for bringing this to my attention.

So, lookee here, it's Hanna Schygulla. Being magically levitated. By... Rainer Werner Fassbinder? To the strains of Kraftwerk's 'Radioactivity' On some manner of television program.

Huh.