D.A. Pennebaker’s groundbreaking 1967 Bob Dylan documentary Dont Look Back begins with a calculated sale: the two-and-a-half minute promotional film for Dylan’s first Billboard-landing single and electric rock anthem, “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” As one of the first predecessors to the music video it’s still a stunner, more Jean-Luc Godard than Dick Clark—committed to crossing over to the pop charts on his own terms, Dylan used the clip to spotlight his hip persona, certainly, but also to call direct attention to his language by nonchalantly holding up and discarding a series of cue cards containing fragments of the absurdist slang of “Subterranean.” Such simplicity, and what a statement! Dylan was so far ahead of the game in ’65 that he already understood the best way to undermine any “natural” relationships between sound, image and performer—long before the ubiquity of music videos and the complicated intersections between art, performance, and commerce they would inherently embody and exacerbate. The “Subterranean” clip thus becomes a semiotic explosion, dicing Dylan’s lyrics into contradictions (“11 dollar bills” on the soundtrack becomes “20” on a card), awkwardly isolated blocks (“head put,” “bed, but”), commentary (accompanying “look out, kid” on the soundtrack: “dig yourself”), silly puns (“suckcess”), accents (“pawking metaws”), and seditious shorthand (“leaders ? ? ?”), all as Dylan falls behind or races ahead of the words playing over him and to the point where the song goes beyond radical, nonsensical rave-up (but man, does it scorch!) to become a thing tenuously attached to its own intended meanings, literal and otherwise, as well as the artist who means them.

Click here for Michael Joshua Rowin's review of Dont Look Back.

For those of us who still think of Jean-Pierre Léaud as we first saw him, on library shelves in films directed by François Truffaut, La Chinoise is a gentle appeal. Without Jean-Luc Godard, would Olivier Assayas have still cast Léaud to drink from a comically oversized three-liter Coke bottle in Irma Vep? Would Tsai Ming-liang, his love for The 400 Blows intact, insist on Léaud’s large overcoat in What Time Is It There?, or on the physical gesture of a phone number passed on a piece of paper?

Léaud, with his easy exasperations, reacts. He asserts his nervousness instead of hiding it; his hands indicate an ongoing, unguarded surprise with his own disruptive emotions. Truffaut increasingly scaled the performances back, but Godard, like Luc Moullet with A Girl Is a Gun, egged Léaud on. With each new season, an old Godard film makes it back into circulation. La Chinoise should be ubiquitous. It anticipates not just the student riots in 1968 Paris but also the greatest in DVD supplements, the archived audition. Click here to read Nathan Kosub on Jean-Luc Godard's La Chinoise, opening this week in a new print at New York's Film Forum.

Is Terrence Davies the greatest living director that no one talks about? There, got your attention. This past weekend, demurely tucked away amidst the current pre-Alexanderplatz Fassbinder hoopla and the post-Imamura blow out of New York film culture, was one of the finest films of the past twenty (or whatever arbitrary number you care to add…thirty? forty?) years, Davies’s The Long Day Closes. A continuation of sorts of Davies’s acclaimed, and still non-DVD’d, Distant Voices, Still Lives (1987), which recounted the director’s traumatic remembrances of his abusive father as a period songbook of sorts, The Long Day Closes focuses exclusively on the relationship between mother and son, not quite dramatized as a series of images and whispers.

Just when you thought you’d seen all this stuff before (dramas of working-class postwar Liverpool, concerning little boys who escape from reality to the cathedral-like confines of the cinema…), Davies transforms rote movie-honed pathos into something that nearly bursts with invention and integrity. Nostalgia, undeniably. Family, cinema, music, holidays, snowfalls, school bullies? For sure. Yet it isn’t some simple “trip into the past”—it may be closer in tone to Woody Allen’s Radio Days than something like Cinema Paradiso, yet it’s more liminal and less distanced than either. The Long Day Closes is immersive, a plunge into the lingering terrors of prepubescent sexuality and the mysterious ways in which memory is concerned more with indefinable rushes of feeling than events. Threadbare as the narrative seems, Davies packs more experience in this film’s short 90 minutes than most directors do with epics of belt-widening girth.

There are seemingly no traditional transitions in the film; from scene to scene, using elegant dissolves or gorgeously distilled graphic matches, it flows from one moment to the next with intuitive nonchalance. There are no scenes, just perceptions; traces and moods rather than defining happenstance. Psychological makeup isn’t established, it’s already a given: at the film’s outset the director’s young surrogate (Leigh McCormack) is seen curiously scoping out a bit of shirtless male musculature from his window with a mix of shame and wonder, the same two emotions he will feel when sneaking peeks at those other mysteries of childhood—cinema, the church. Davies brilliantly uses McCormack as his vessel: he’s not “pensive,” not a passive observer of his family and friends so much as a slowly forming moral being; the child’s pursed lips and eagle stare don’t convey “innocence” (as in other, thuddingly banal portraits of children escaping into dreams, such as, I have to say it, Pan’s Labyrinth) but rather an actual absorbent intellect. Imagine that: kids with the capability of judgment! Davies lets his actor’s face convey this, relegating his dialogue to simple asides and repetitions, like his occasionally asking his mum for movie money.

And such lovingly infrequent dialogue—the most memorable in the film being lines from other films draped across the soundtrack, as they echo in the boy’s mind, the most exquisitely rendered being a snatch of exchange between Judy Garland and Tom Drake from Meet Me in St. Louis, played while he spies his older brother romantically commingling with a girlfriend in glass silhouette behind the front door. (There’s also some Magnificent Ambersons thrown in there, with Orson Welles’s honey-acid narration incongruously telling us of George’s comeuppance—another example of a classical family narrative providing counterpoint.) Even more beguiling are the moments in which Davies abstracts the solitude of childhood to minute drifts across patterned rugs or wallpaper, watching and waiting for the light cast by a window to change with the passing of a cloud, or, in the memorably foreboding opening, an extended glide (heavenly but resolutely earthbound) across a rain-swept street and into an alleyway, bereft of people but pregnant with time and memory.

Anyone who’s seen Davies’s The House of Mirth knows that his dreamlike and ethereal approach to memory is simply a mask for the stuff of true flesh and blood. Ultimately, when Mirth’s Lily Bart succumbs to the oppressive realities of the falsely genteel New York social codes that she had previously floated upon without care or consequence, the effect is devastating, as if a hole had opened up in the earth and swallowed her. Similarly, young McCormack is completely enveloped in darkness by film’s end (an escape? Not so fast, Guillermo Del Toro….), though the future here is undefined. Like many a David Lynch character, he wanders into an open doorway and disappears into a vapor, doomed (blessed?) to become a witness to his own memories played up on a silver screen, whose sun is slowly, slowly fading out.

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.

A confession: I came late to the David Lynch party. Which in some cinephile circles is cause for excommunication. Like not praising Wajda. Or Von Sternberg. Or failing to worship at the altar of Bulle Ogier. I came late to Lynch because I never had a film-obsessed companion to insist that my life wasn’t complete until I’d seen Blue Velvet or The Elephant Man, which seems to be how most burgeoning film critics are drawn into his peculiar universe. That is, until a friend and I decided to go see Lost Highway on one unoccupied high school afternoon. (Canada is very liberal about kids watching this kind of thing). Not knowing exactly what to expect, the film made me furious. It came off as a resounding fuck-you to the audience, because it assiduously avoided coherence or identification. (Incidentally my friend loved it, but he also laughed all the way through David Fincher’s Seven—clearly not a kid to be trusted). So began a crusade against Lynch—mere mention of his name prompted untold vitriol. And then came Mulholland Drive and Blue Velvet, chiefly because people I hold in esteem kept insisting on his brilliance; and while I began to warm to some of his sequences (the too-good-to-be-true Technicolor and decayed underbrush reveal to inaugurate Blue Velvet poked more holes in the myth of bucolic suburbia than all of American Beauty), full-on love didn’t follow. Until it came time to see Eraserhead for this blind-spot symposium. I’m finally beginning to get David Lynch’s aesthetic and intentions (or at least I’d like to think so), and I am willing to profess grand affection for this most idiosyncratic of pompadour’d directors.

Read more from James Crawford's Eraserhead piece from Reverse Shot’s “Fesses Up” issue, and go see the film at New York’s MoMA, where the museum's new restoration of the film plays starting tonight, January 18, at 8:30, and through Wednesday, January 24.

One of the undisputed masterworks of the New German Cinema, Werner Herzog’s The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser (its German title translates as “Everyone for himself, and God against all”), which screens this week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, begins with a series of pastoral scenes of the German countryside. The swelling music and windswept fields evoke the romantic spirit of the early nineteenth century, but the subtitle—an unattributed paraphrase of a line from Georg Buchner’s Lenz—asks, "But can you not hear the dreadful screaming all around that people usually call silence?" The ironies, tensions, and contradictions expressed so potently in these opening moments hardly require explication, and would probably sound hopelessly banal if I tried to offer one, but it should suffice to say that with Kaspar Hauser, Herzog intends on both demystifying and remystifying human experience, to look at the world through the eyes of a man with the mind of a child and to respond with a gasp of wonder and an existential howl.

Kaspar Hauser was a real person, born sometime around 1812, found in the streets of Nuremberg in 1828 holding a prayer book in one hand and a letter in the other. Hauser had spent the first decade or so of his life in complete isolation, chained in a dark room with a toy wooden horse. A few years before he was found, a man began making periodic visits, teaching him a few words and phrases, as well as how to write his name. Known as the “foundling”, Hauser may have been a descendent of the royal house of Baden, though the controversy surrounding his origins rages to this day.

While Herzog dramatizes the wider attention generated by Kaspar’s sudden appearance, he’s ultimately more concerned with the philosophical, intellectual, and moral complexities of Kaspar’s personal experience. Bruno S., a street orphan who had no previous acting experience, delivers a remarkable performance in the lead role, his face registering Kaspar’s confusion, joy, terror, and genius all at once—Kaspar somehow manages to function as a metaphor and siphon and also as a genuinely sympathetic protagonist (his tears of pain, upon touching a flame for the first time, are tremendously moving). Kaspar is constantly offered as contrast to systems of logic, order, power, and language, whether they are clergy, the academy, or the social and political elite. Yet Herzog never loses sight of the beauty of his natural humanness; Kaspar’s heart swells while listening to a friend play music; he pauses, awestruck at his own image reflected in a barrel of water.

As I sit at home (ironically enough, recovering from an acute case of laryngitis, an appropriate malady from which to suffer while pondering this particular film), still haunted by last night’s viewing (my second), I’m struck by both the beauty and boldness of this film. Herzog has always been a rather icy, intellectual filmmaker, and in a way, this film is no exception -- if anyone cares to, I’d be happy to spend hours discussing this film in the context of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (that is, as soon as I get my voice back). But The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser is something more. It has an emotional expanse rare for the filmmaker, becoming altogether, and unexpectedly, devastating as it reaches its astonishing and unforgettable closing scenes.

Sony Pictures Classics kicks off its touring eight-film Pedro Almodovar retrospective in New York today at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas. This is all to prep American audience for the forthcoming release of his latest film, Volver. In honor of Pedro, an always contentious figure in the RS ranks, we begin our second Retro column (following Nick Pinkerton's splendid essays on Frank Borzage) with James Crawford covering Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. We'll be following the series weekly as it expands across the country.

We've also got a new review of Miami Vice, surely one of the summer's, if not the year's, best films.

And our Take One symposium isn't exactly old news yet either...

Happy weekend.

Assembling a perfect portrait of any critical moment in film history is, quite frankly, impossible. Vagaries of distribution and reception will always leave some films under-screened, legally unavailable in certain territories, or worse, almost completely unknown. The overall state of film history’s preservation (thoroughly mediated by commerce) especially at the far corners of the globe makes a recent assertion by one of America’s most prominent filmmakers that there aren’t really any truly great lost films (paraphrasing slightly) seem more than a little absurd. Who really knows what’s out there, lurking in a vault or someone’s closet that could, if not bust up the canon (DaVinci Code-style!), bend it more than a little? Of course, film loving being the immensely personal, unquantifiable act that it is, it bears repeating how questionable the whole canonization process is as a way to view the medium.

An example: Seeing Luc Moullet’s first four features (Brigitte and Brigitte, The Smugglers, A Girl Is a Gun, and Anatomy of a Relationship) last week in succession at the Harvard Film Archive certainly expanded how I viewed the French New Wave, though I’m sure that plenty of folks were left unmoved, or even annoyed by their frenetic primitivism. Before Moullet, I’d never found a true comedian amongst the New Wavers: Godard is often very funny, but never separates his humorous moments from his theoretical engagement with the idea of the laugh; Rohmer’s usually more winsome and intellectually wistful than simply funny; Truffaut too earnest and lacking in that dash of sadism which underlies true hilarity; Rivette too psychologically intense. At times, all of these directors tackle “comedy” in their works but Moullet seems unique (Varda comes closes at times, but her works range across a wide, wide spectrum) in his investment in exploring absurdity and physical comedy.

His first two films Brigitte and Brigitte (1966) and The Smugglers (1967) are his most typically “New Wave”—B&W, location set, formally playful, and highly low-fi, so much so they almost feel like the art brut cousins to comparatively polished films like Breathless and The 400 Blows. I like the grungy ingenuity of both, especially the way the former plays with its completely artificial interior spaces (this thing could have almost been shot entirely in against one wall of one room with furniture changes marking the different locations) just as its follow-up, while ditching the city, still seems like a bunch of folks running around in costume through different parts of the same couple of hills. I also like his willingness to overtly tweak his audience: a character might order another to be quiet, and so Moullet cuts the sound, another digs around under a blanket for papers, exclaims “this is a dark tunnel” and the image cuts to black.

Good stuff, but it wasn’t until his third and fourth (I guess technically post-New Wave) films that I ended up stunned. Calling A Girl Is a Gun (1971) an acid western is to do a movie that finds Jean-Pierre Léaud alternately, playing gunslinger, raving with lovesickness, mad with dehydration, eating dirt and grass, attempting to hang himself with the stump of a noose, scalped, betrayed, and married to a young Native American girl who looked suspiciously French to these eyes, little justice. Keystone Cops+The Searchers+Zabriskie Point+Twentynine Palms--I’ll be damned if I know exactly what to call A Girl Is a Gun besides one of the most wickedly funny, willfully bizarre films I’ve seen in ages. It’s also dubbed poorly into English and features a totally disconcerting droney krautrock score. Both are compliments in this case. Moullet’s third film is most assuredly for aficionados of outré singularities like Rohmer’s Perceval and Malle’s Black Moon.

Anatomy of a Relationship (1976) is initially a more controlled, “typical” nervous comedy of a relationship dissolving under the weight of neuroses and sexual dysfunction, but it explodes itself about 80% of the way through becoming instead an examination of the filmmaker’s (sad-eyed and bearded Moullet stars himself) process of re-creating a real (maybe) relationship with an actress while the actual lover watches from behind the camera. As Moullet piles on the added registers of discourse, the effect is liberating—almost as if we’re being freed from the entire history of romantic drama and invited in to look at the mechanisms that make them work. In Anatomy and Girl Moullet most makes me think of Donald Barthelme, which is to say, one of those rare auteurs who can tell us story, simultaneous to offering an explanation of how it’s being told.

I have no idea how far and wide these battered prints will travel (this mini retro contains two more films and a short), but if they end up in a theatre near you, you won’t be sorry...

David Thomson once wrote, “Movement on a TV set is like a fish moving across a tank, whereas movement on a real screen is that of a great fish passing us in the water.” It may seem a rather blatant defense of cinema as it’s “meant to be seen,” but watching Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven this week on the (relatively) big screen at New York’s Film Forum evoked Thomson’s quote quite literally. There comes a moment late in the film, much lauded, in which Richard Gere drops a wine glass into the river; Malick cuts away in one of his many ruminative gestures of natural contemplation to a magnificent close-up of the glass lying delicately, deep down, on the river’s bed. Seaweed sparkles and floats ethereally all around it. And yes, a fish moves across…no, a great fish passes us in the water.

Coming so soon after the triumph of The New World, Days of Heaven, gloriously large and baffling as ever, is a welcome sight in theaters. A reissue of an important film is never merely just another chance to see a favorite; rather it’s a chance to let your age, maturity, and consideration play catch-up. Whatever misgivings I have had in the past about the film, while perhaps not eradicated, were put into a proper context, both in an auteurist and emotional way. The narrative ellipses and forthright disengagement that once so troubled me now seemed like calculated strengths: that I didn’t feel a connection to the central melodrama seemed less important than the intensity that it nevertheless manages to convey. Yet what’s most spectacular is the sense of discovery that the film is able to maintain from first frame to last, that the magic-hour landscape will always stand in unforgiving opposition to the foibles of those who inhabit it; thus destruction may always be right around the corner. On video, it never seemed clear to me (though that probably has more to do with my viewing habits that the limitations of a smaller screen width), that Days of Heaven a surpassingly frightening film; in which beauty surrounds us but cannot save us.

Just a gentle reminder that the second annual Reverse Shot Presents at Makor is right around the corner. Tickets are available now through Makor's website and a few programs are close to capacity already. Full schedule for those that missed it the first time:

APRIL 22 – 30

Reverse Shot Presents…at Makor
Tickets + Information:
www.makor.org | 212.601.1000
Makor box office @ 35 W. 67th St.

SCHEDULE AT-A-GLANCE

A ROB ZOMBIE DOUBLE FEATURE
POST-SCREENING DISCUSSION WITH ACTOR KEN FOREE
Sat Apr 22 / 8 PM / $20 (includes discussion)
HOUSE OF 1,000 CORPSES (2003) / THE DEVIL’S REJECTS (2005)
Heavy metal rocker turned genre auteur Rob Zombie has become America’s most skilled neo-exploitation filmmaker. With tongue firmly in cheek, Zombie offers this gruesome twosome: a diabolical avant-haunted-house-slasher flick and an unexpectedly gonzo, Peckinpah-ish vengeance western, featuring the same characters in two very different American film genres. Bring a strong stomach and an open mind and settle in for a night of magnificent mayhem.

Following the film is a discussion with actor Ken Foree, who portrays Charlie Altamont in THE DEVIL'S REJECTS. Ever since his breakout leading role as Peter Washington in George A. Romero’s indelible Dawn of the Dead, Foree has been something of a cult phenomenon. His subsequent appearances in Romero’s Knightriders and Stuart Gordon’s From Beyond, have solidified him as a veritable horror movie icon.

[Director: Rob Zombie. Runtimes: 88 min + 109 min. HORROR]

Mon Apr 24 / 7:30PM / $9
NINE LIVES (2005)
In nine precise and rhythmic sliver-of-life segments, Rodrigo García, with the lyrical power of a short fiction writer, tells the stories of nine interconnected women, played dazzlingly by an all star cast including Sissy Spacek, Glenn Close, Holly Hunter, and a brilliant Robin Wright Penn. Garcia renders each woman as if she were the most interesting individual to ever walk the earth. These women are breathtaking, lived-in, flawed; in other words, exhilaratingly human.

[Director: Rodrigo Garcia. Runtime: 115 min. DRAMA]

Tue Apr 25 / 7:30 PM / $15 (includes Q&A)
JUNEBUG (2005)
A moving tribute to family in all its idiosyncrasies and a pitch-perfect evocation of Southern customs, Phil Morrison’s JUNEBUG was the great American film debut of 2005. When Madeleine, a sophisticated art gallery owner (Embeth Davidtz), travels to the South to meet her new husband’s family, it becomes much more than a fish-out-of-water tale. Best Supporting Actress Academy Award nominee Amy Adams is a standout as Madeleine’s pregnant sister.
Features Q&A with director Phil Morrison following the screening.

[Director: Phil Morrison. Runtime: 107 min. DRAMA]

Wed Apr 26 / 7:30 PM / $9
MILLENNIUM MAMBO (2001)
Still underscreened and underappreciated in his body of work, MILLENNIUM MAMBO is Hou Hsiao-hsien’s daring 21st-century update of the pleasure culture examined in his masterwork Flowers of Shanghai. Powered by a gurgling techno beat and a luminescent performance by Shu Qi - whose glow far outshines the masses of red, blue and green neons surrounding her - MILLENNIUM MAMBO is arguably the filmmaker’s most lushly romantic film. See it on the big screen where it belongs.

[Director: Hou Hsiao-hsien. Runtime: 119 min. DRAMA]

Thu Apr 27/ 7:30 PM / $9
THE INTRUDER (2005) (intro by Kent Jones)
In adapting Jean-Louis Nancy's autobiographical text about his own heart transplant, the great French director Claire Denis has crafted a film of crystalline beauty and startling ambition. The story - about an aged soldier of fortune (Michel Subor) journeying from Jura to Pusan to Tahiti in an elaborate gesture of reconciliation towards his estranged son - is related to us as a waking dream. Elliptical, gorgeous, and unforgettable.

The film will be introduced by Kent Jones, editor at large of Film Comment, Associate Program Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and a member of the New York Film Festival selection committee.

[Director: Claire Denis. Runtime: 130 min. DRAMA]

A NEIL JORDAN DOUBLE FEATURE
Sat Apr 29 / 8 PM / $15
BREAKFAST ON PLUTO (2005) / THE BUTCHER BOY (1997)
Neil Jordan’s collaborations with Irish novelist Patrick McCabe resulted in two of his richest works. BREAKFAST ON PLUTO is a candy-colored Dickensian picaresque about a boy named Patrick “Kitten” Brady, who should have been born a girl. THE BUTCHER BOY is a darker yet rocket-paced surrealist narrative about Francie Brady, a deeply troubled preteen growing up amid terrible social and parental circumstances. These films show the triumphs and tragedies of forthright individualism.

[Director: Neil Jordan. Runtimes: 135 min and 109 min. DRAMAS]

PREMIERE
Sun Apr 30 / 5:30 PM / $9
A LION IN THE HOUSE (2006)
Offering a sense of scope comparable to Hoop Dreams, A LION IN THE HOUSE is an unforgettable journey that offers an unprecedented look at struggles of five young people and their families over a six-year period. Award-winning filmmakers Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert bring audiences face to face with the uncertainty of the entire cancer experience and its rippling effects on family, community and professional caregivers. At the core of A Lion in the House is the resilience, courage and wisdom of five extraordinary young people. Features a post-screening discussion with guest speakers TBA.

[Directors: Steven Bognar + Julia Reichert. Runtime: 225 min. DOCUMENTARY]

Tickets + Information:
www.makor.org | 212.601.1000
Makor box office @ 35 W. 67th St.

Mark, just show my fucking movie..."

Ok, so this isn't another post about the Caveh/Cuban debate. And that isn't Zahedi wrapped in bandages in the photo. It is, however, Tatsuya Nakudai starring in Hiroshi Teshigahara's terrific The Face of Another which is now screening on a beautiful new print as part of a mini-retro put together by the fine folks at Criterion. Currently touring with planned stops in Huntington, Vancouver, and Pittsburgh in the Spring, and more to come for the Summer, the retro also showcases his first feeature Pitfall, his most well-known film Woman in the Dunes, and his unique documentary Antonio Gaudí. It's a small series, but with Teshigahara's limited output (he took a lengthy break throughout the 80s to devote himself to flower arrangement), it’s only a few features and shorts shy of complete. And given that all three of the fiction features are based on the writings of Kobo Abe and all four films are augmented by Tôru Takemitsu scores, it’s a terrific opportunity to witness an evolving collaboration.

By all means, if you can only see one film, try Woman in the Dunes. Universally lauded with good reason, Teshigahara’s second adaptation of Abe marks perhaps the highpoint of accessibility for both artists. The allegory of humankind built around an amateur entomologist who becomes trapped at the bottom of a sandpit with a lonely widow may seem stale 40 years on, but what’s truly miraculous is how Teshigahara navigates the close confines of the sandpit, always finding new angles through which to view his intricate pas de deux. It’s claustrophobic, but somehow never limited.

Pitfall, based on a satirical Abe short story shows Teshigahara’s sensibility firmly established from the start even if his command of the same may not be fully in place—it's tonally off from time to time, and his narrative ellipses aren't quite perfectly pitched. But it’s The Face of Another, built around Nakudai’s sensational performance (it may be one of the best to see screens this year) that is the true find. Questions of identity and morality swirl as Nakudai’s horribly disfigured character assumes a lifelike mask and sets out to re-enter society and seduce his wife. Woman, Pitfall and Face all feature moments of startling, visceral carnality that are as crucial to defining Teshigahara’s cinema as his paranoid worldview that seems often unbound by typical cinematic rules and restraints—spaces and identities constantly shatter, and its always at question whether its his characters who are caught in all the allegorical questioning, or his audience. These movies are even more bizarre than most Imamura (that’s saying a lot) and approach the heights of narrative schizophrenia established by Oshima (perhaps saying even more).

The odd duck of the series, Antonio Gaudí, is, as its title would suggest a work about the architect. But instead of presenting a standard biopic, Teshigahara plows through the fantastic shapes and spaces of Gaudí’s buildings, which are like nothing on Earth, while Takemitsu’s score plinks away in the background. I’ll admit that I haven’t seen it in nearly 4 years, so can’t quite remember it fully, but I do know that I caught it after an early morning matinee of Tarsem’s The Cell (starring J-lo) and it shouldn’t be hard to guess which one was the more mind-expanding.

If this isn't on the schedule at your local rep house, lobby for it.