by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The series is The Story of Film: An Odyssey and TCM has been running episodes every Monday
night, sometimes repeating them on Tuesday (though not this week!), and I’d
been steadily recording them but hadn’t got around actually to watching one
until last night. The one I watched last night was episode 10, called (with the
typically expansive and absurdist title strategies used for this show) “Radical
Directors in the 1970’s Make State-of-the-Nation Movies.” I hope the episode I
watched last night is not
representative of the series as a whole, for what I saw last night was a
surprisingly dull excursion into non-American films of the early 1970’s, some
of them relatively famous (Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist and The Spider’s Stratagem — the latter about the only movie I can think of
ever based on a piece of writing by Jorge Luis Borges, most of whose works deal
so expansively with various levels of consciousness and conceptions of
“reality” they are probably unfilmable — Gillian Armstrong’s My
Brilliant Career, Peter Weir’s Picnic
at Hanging Rock, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
and Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo,
one of the few films on this list I’ve actually seen) and some of them lesser
known, including Black Girl and Xala by Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene
(the latter seems especially interesting because it’s a
meet-the-new-boss-same-as-the-old-boss parable about what happened to Senegal
once it became independent: the new Black ruling class behaved like the same
greedy, power-mad, irresponsible assholes as the French colonial rulers they
had replaced), another African film that was essentially an uncredited
reworking of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play The Visit, a couple of Japanese documentaries (including one about a
particular incident in World War II that ended with the film’s protagonist and
another war veteran literally coming to
blows on camera), a three-part film from Chilean director Patricio Guzmán that
began in the early 1970’s as a project about Salvador Allende’s government and ended
up featuring real-time footage of the coup that overthrew him (one wonders how Guzmán and his film both survived
the maniacally intense repression Allende’s usurper, General Augusto Pinochet,
ordered and sustained for over two decades afterwards), and a few other oddball
movies that seem like they might be worth seeing.
What disappointed me about
this show is that it’s really pretty much just a compendium of film clips, interspersed with a few
interviews with some of their directors (Bertolucci was shown sitting in a
wheelchair; I had no idea he now needed one!) and a
state-the-obvious-with-a-real-sense-of-discovery commentary in a very thick, annoying Scottish accent by the series host, Mark
Cousins. One wonders what he did in the earlier episodes, about films whose
directors are long dead and therefore not
being available for interviews. As an index to what at least one imdb.com
contributor has called “films you should see before you die,” this program has
its merits; as a serious history of cinema, forget it — though I noted that
Cousins seems to go into orgasms every time a director shoots a sequence silent
and then dubs in the soundtrack later. “No synch sound!” he says about movie
after movie — as if that’s somehow not merely a valid technique but a superior one, one which sets an especially artistic film apart from
one that’s just (as Alfred Hitchcock once put it) “pictures of people talking.”
