Video Essay – Page 30 – Press Play Video Blog

VIDEO ESSAY: Sight & Sound Film Poll – Vadim Rizov on Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s THE ANTHEM

As discussed in part three of Press Play's preview of the Sight & Sound film poll, if you look at the results of the last poll, you would think that the last 40 years of cinema amounted to a dark age following the golden era of the 50s and 60s, with hardly any films from that period showing up in the top results. In contrast, each of the videos produced so far for Press Play's Sight and Sound Critics Picks series has featured one post-1970 film: Roger Ebert praised Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972), Jonathan Rosenbaum picked Satantango (1994), and Molly Haskell selected Claire's Knee (1970). But what films from the last decade are worth consideration? Is it "too soon to be sure" if these films truly rank among the greatest, as David Jenkins wondered in part two our discussion?

Critic and Sight & Sound contributor Vadim Rizov submits his answer with his selection of a film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, one of the pre-eminent directors to have emerged in the past decade; with his first feature Mysterious Object at Noon released in 2000, he can be considered one of the first true post-millennial filmmakers. Rizov takes his selection further by not choosing one of Apichatpong (aka Joe)'s most critically vaunted features, Tropical Malady (2004), Syndromes and a Century (2007) or Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010). In fact, Rizov doesn't select a feature film, but Joe's short film The Anthem, co-commissioned by Frieze Projects and LUX in 2005. The short, intended as a "cinematic purification ceremony" to be played in movie theaters at the start of a screening, takes its inspiration from two ceremonial fixtures in Thai culture: Buddhist purification rituals and the playing of the Thai royal anthem at the start of film screenings and other public events. Rizov explains his selection in the video: "If I had to choose one film to show someone who was completely unfamiliar with arthouse cinema of the last 10-15 years what they had been missing in five minutes, I would choose Joe's short film The Anthem."

The selection of a short as one of the all-time greatest films may be more significant than selecting a film that is only seven years old. Shorts are all too often overlooked; I've spoken with more than one poll participant who was surprised to learn that short films were even eligible for consideration. But the first Sight and Sound Poll in 1952 placed a short film in the top ten: Jean Vigo's Zero for Conduct. Since then, no short film has come close to that ranking, though 1992 featured an especially strong showing of short films in the top 50: Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon, Humphrey Jennings' Listen to Britain, Alain Resnais' Night and Fog and Luis Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou. All of those shorts fell in the 2002 balloting, excet for Un Chien Andalou, the only short in the top 100, and along with Chris Marker's La Jetee, the only short to receive three votes or more.

My own 2012 ballot features two shorts: Farough Farrokzad's The House is Black (1962) and Peter Tscherkassky's Outer Space (1999). I don't expect either of these to place well in the aggregate results, but that doesn't stop them from being two of the most stunning films I've seen: Farrokhzad's is a supreme fusion of non-fiction, essay and poetry; Tscherkassky's is a horrifying, spellbinding eulogy to the end of 20th century celluloid cinema. They do more in ten minutes than most films can do in 100.

Special thanks to Bill Georgaris of They Shoot PIctures, Don't They? for the Sight and Sound poll statistics cited in this entry.

Vadim Rizov is a freelance film writer based in Brooklyn. His work regularly appears in Sight & Sound, the L Magazine, the LA Weekly and the AV Club, among others. Follow him on Twitter.

Kevin B. Lee is Editor in Chief of IndieWire’s PressPlay Video Blog, Video Essayist for Fandor Keyframe, and contributor to Roger Ebert.com. Follow him on Twitter.

VIDEO ESSAY: Cruel Summer: ROCKY III (1982)

This video essay is part of the "Cruel Summer" series of articles; this series examines influential movies from the summers of the 1980s. The previous entries in the series covered THE BLUES BROTHERS (1980) and STRIPES (1981).

[The following is the working script of the video essay above. It was modified during the editing process.]

He’s one of cinema’s most beloved heroes. He represents strength, decency, and determination. Born and raised on the streets of Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love and the birthplace of democracy, Rocky Balboa stands for all that is good about America.

Taken together, the first two ROCKY movies tell a human-sized story of triumph, with the original ROCKY as a Bicentennial fairy tale about a bum winning his pride and the love of his girl, while ROCKY II shows him becoming a man and champion.

But how do you continue a story that everyone assumed was complete? Well, if you’re writer-director-star Sylvester Stallone, you look within yourself, and the rapidly changing tastes of the movie-going audience, and you come out ready to ROCK.

ROCKY III continued an American tradition by transforming the stage of Rocky into a 4^th of July fireworks show. It used compact storytelling and groundbreaking montage editing to create a new kind of fist-pumping summer crowd-pleaser.

The opening montage recalibrated the viewer’s ability to take in multiple pieces of information simultaneously. Made nine months after the launch of MTV and one year before FLASHDANCE, ROCKY III is the first instance of a major Hollywood entertainment embracing MTV-style editing. A kind of ROCKY 2.5, the sequence caught us up with our favorite characters, introduced the themes of fame and becoming soft, and kicked the story into motion by letting us see the villain all but stalking Rocky—with everything held together by Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger,” a piece of working-class pop perfection.

Stallone used his overnight success following the release of ROCKY to inform ROCKY III’s portrayal of how celebrity can lead one to be isolated and lose touch with everyday life. Rocky—and Stallone—had become such outsized characters that some self-criticism was necessary.

But Stallone places all this thoughtful reflection in the background of the movie. What’s front and center is keeping the movie in constant motion. Shorn of nearly 30 minutes, ROCKY III compresses its story without sacrificing emotion. Some viewed this as an indication that audiences' attention spans were growing shorter, but what it really said was that audiences were able to process events and plot points at a quicker pace.

The story of ROCKY III shows Rocky getting a comeuppance courtesy of street fighter Clubber Lang, who’s enraged by Rocky’s softening. Rocky takes the challenge, but his trainer Mickey knows it’s a bad idea.

It’s only the 30 minute mark when Roc loses his title and, in a plot twist that shocked audiences back in ’82, Mickey dies from a heart attack. Normally these events would’ve occurred at the halfway point of the movie, but ROCKY III was so relentless in its pacing that the movie felt halfway over by this point. The death of the beloved Mickey gave weight to the remainder of the story, reminding us of the dramatic pull the ROCKY movies have on audiences.

The rest of the movie shows Rocky returning to the top, as former adversary Apollo Creed offers to train him. Apollo wants Roc to go back to the beginning, to get back in touch with his roots as a street fighter. How does he plan on doing this? He teaches him rhythm—to dance around the ring.

It must be noted that a lot of the elements of ROCKY III—from the cocky hero to the musical montages to the shaking of the hero’s confidence from an early defeat to the death of a friend—would become key elements of several popular movies throughout the 1980s. ROCKY III created a template for success.

Everything leads up to THE SHOWDOWN, which, following the car chase, became the defining movie sequence of the 1980s. What made the climax of ROCKY III different from all the others is that it’s the only one that doesn’t compress the final fight into a montage. Instead, it plays out in something approximating real time. It’s a three-round action sequence that pummeled the audience into submission, as ROCKY III set a new standard in summer entertainment. ROCKY III trained us to demand more bang for our buck.

San Antonio-based film critic Aaron Aradillas is a contributor to The House Next Door, a contributor to Moving Image Source, and the host of “Back at Midnight,” an Internet radio program about film and television.

A critic, journalist and filmmaker, Matt Zoller Seitz is the staff TV columnist for New York Magazine and a finalist for the Pulitzer prize in criticism. He has worked as a movie critic for The New York Times, New York Press, and New Times Newspapers, and as a TV critic for The Star-Ledger of Newark. His video essays about Terrence Malick, Oliver Stone, Kathryn Bigelow, Budd Boetticher, Wes Anderson, Clint Eastwood, Michael Mann and other directors can be viewed at the The Museum of the Moving Image web site. Seitz is the founder of The House Next Door, a website devoted to critical writing about popular culture. His book-length conversation with Wes Anderson about his films, titled The Wes Anderson Collection, will be published in fall 2012 by Abrams Books.

VIDEO ESSAY: Sight and Sound Film Poll – Molly Haskell on CLAIRE’S KNEE

Press Play presents Sight & Sound Film Poll: Critics' Picks, a series of video essays featuring prominent film critics on films they selected for Sight & Sound magazine's poll of the greatest films of all time. New videos will premiere each week until the poll results are announced later this summer.

I first met Molly Haskell and her husband Andrew Sarrris when they spoke at the 2008 Moving Image Institute, a weeklong program for emerging film critics organized by the Museum of the Moving Image. Ever since then I've wanted to collaborate with them on a video essay. Not so much because of their stature as two highly influential thinkers on cinema, but because of something they expressed at the Institute: their curiosity and slight puzzlement about film culture in the online era. For Haskell and Sarris, both of whom have resisted those hand-wringing "death of cinema" theories embraced by their contemporaries, the profusion of movie websites, blogs, videos, etc. over the past decade was something new, exciting and a little overwhelming. At the time, I felt qualified to help steer them through the flood of content; four years later, I feel just as inundated by all that is out there. But infusing their insights into the realm of online video is one thing I still feel capable of doing, and the Sight & Sound Film Poll video series provides the perfect opportunity to explore one of Haskell's favorite films, Eric Rohmer's Claire's Knee.

Listening to Haskell speak about the film conjures visions not only of the film, but also of an era that it reflects: a late '60s-early '70s generation in the throes of a massive cultural shift, discovering new ways to engage with cinema and with the opposite sex. Those impulses are still as present as ever, but perhaps one important distinction between then and now, which the film reflects, is an exquisite sophistication and delight in oral communication that may be endangered in the era of text messaging and tweeting. At the same time, there's something in the written traces of that era's film culture that distinguishes it from those of the present. This became apparent to me when, in the middle of our recording, Haskell brought out Sarris' original 1971 review of Claire's Knee published in the Village Voice and read passages from it. There is something both rigorous and relaxed in Sarris' prose that reflects a time when alternative print media was at its mightiest, when writers weren't pressed to mind wordcounts or angle for pullquote-worthy soundbites, and were freer to ruminate memorably on how a film, or even a knee that appears in a film, could reflect the essence of cinema. I write all this knowing that it may all amount to a nostalgic, Midnight in Paris-like projection of present disappointments upon an idealized past that may never have been as good as I make it out to be. But that doesn't stop those ideals from being worthy of aspiration.

I'm very pleased that I was able to incorporate Haskell's reading of Sarris' review, and also to visualize it with a shot of the review as first printed in the Voice. Juxtaposed with the distracting image of Claire's sensually sunlit knee, it was a fun way to visualize the relationship between a critical text and its subject, one surface expressing the essence of another surface, itself a beguiling decoy diverting the attention of both the film's protagonist and its audience from the film's true beauty.

For additional insights into the film, read Haskell's essay on Claire's Knee published in the Criterion Collection DVD release of the film.

Molly Haskell is a film critic, author of many books, including From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, and former co-host of Turner Classic Movies's The Essentials.

Andrew Sarris is a film critic and author of many books, including The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968.

Kevin B. Lee is Editor in Chief of IndieWire’s PressPlay Video Blog, Video Essayist for Fandor Keyframe, and contributor to Roger Ebert.com. Follow him on Twitter.

VIDEO ESSAY: Maurice Sendak: Outside Over There

On May 8, 2012, Maurice Sendak died. Shakespeare’s dead, too, and Melville, and Emily Dickinson. In fact, come to think of it, so are most people who have ever lived. But most people aren’t lionized after death in the press as one of the great Fathers of Children’s Literature.

Ironic, considering that Sendak was a child until he died at the age of 83—and I mean that in the best way.

All the best children’s authors are children. The most horrid thing that can happen in children’s books, aside from a Grown-Up deciding to Write A Book For Children, is for that book to actually get published.

If you’re scratching your head wondering who I am, you’ve never heard of me. Several of my children’s books have been published, so I’m an actual author of children’s books, but the fact that you know all about Maurice Sendak and nothing about me is kind of important here, because Mr. Sendak and I have a lot in common. Just not what you think. I understand him in a different way.

Journalist Emma Brockes, in an October 2011 edition of The Guardian, claimed that millions will always think of Sendak as “young, a proxy for Max in Where the Wild Things Are.”* Other writers have variously described him as “Grumpy.” “Angry.” “Fierce.” Names that tend to evoke the faces of the monsters that glare out of the pages he created.

Were any of these true? I really couldn’t say. I never met him in my life, and never really wanted to. I’m not much on meeting authors, for reasons I now understand—though when I first started writing seriously, this theory of reading sent me sprawling: That no matter how hard the writer or the artist tries to convey his or her message, no matter how perfect the execution of what lives in his or her mind, once the reader reads the work, the true message is the reader’s and the reader’s alone—even if it’s not exactly what the author meant. This is hard, hard, hard for a creator to accept, and doubly so when that creator finds himself equated personally with the creation.

When a reader meets an author, the author becomes a clay figure upon whom the reader pastes his or her feelings, dreams, desires, and impressions. Suddenly the author finds he is expected to live up to everyone’s expectations. That’s enough to make anyone Grumpy. Angry. Fierce.

Sendak was, in some ways, the poster child (as it were) for children’s books in a way that mildly irritated many in the profession, through no fault of Sendak’s. When speaking to most any member of the public, about books to get for children, one invariably and repetitively heard: “Oh, how about Where the Wild Things Are? Get Where the Wild Things Are. My kids loved Where the Wild Things Are.” It was brilliant, true, but it’s also the only thing most people know, and Sendak was only one among a massive chest that holds an embarrassment of visual and literary riches, unguessed by most, and never found by the majority of children.

Yet passes Sendak, and in the press it is as in Outside Over There when “Ida played a frenzied jig, a hornpipe / that makes sailors wild beneath the ocean moon.”

I do not know whether Sendak was a humble man or proud. That he wrote from his child’s heart, which he somehow kept intact through a life that did its damnedest to drag him into the gray and cynical adult world, is plainly evident. When I speak of his “child’s heart,” I mean the heart that is still in love with wonder—a heart that is brave and wild and young and still unconquered by the terror and the ugliness in the world. It’s a heart that finds the world a very difficult place to live in in spite of—and because of—its excruciating beauty. That is the kind of innocence Maurice Sendak had, and that he shared with the world. It’s a contrast to the adult-imagined innocence of Peter Pan, a story that Sendak and I mutually despised.

There’s absolutely no denying the ground-shaking societal impact of Where The Wild Things Are, In The Night Kitchen and, in a quieter way, Outside Over There—they are the great post-Victorian children’s manifesto of rebellion. They are the Declaration of Monstrosity that freed children from the starched expectation that they were somehow less beastly than the adults who spawned them. Sendak rightly recognized—and to the abject horror of many, actually went so far as to illustrate—the reality that these delightful little sweetings had a nasty ego-flavored center.

Just like the rest of us.

Make no mistake—Sendak did not write for children. He wrote for himself. So do I. Our writing is for a single purpose—we yearn to be understood in a world that is wild and roaring. We feel compelled by some inner urge to convey a message.

As a writer, I am not proud of my published work because I see my role as that of a messenger only. I will never be a Sendak, and that’s fine—that’s not what I was meant for. My messages are modest; he had a transcendent message to deliver, and the talent to do it. But in the end, as we find ourselves pasting our own Maxes, Mickeys, and Idas onto Sendak, is it not possible that the message is more important than the man? All our messages, than the messengers themselves?

Regardless, Maurice Sendak, for all his gifts, will now give us no more. He is gone.

In this he and I differ, though: He believed that nothing happens after death; we simply cease. I prefer to think that he still is, Outside, Over There.

*Brockes, Emma. “Maurice Sendak: ‘I refuse to lie to children’.” The Guardian. 2 October 2011, 13:30 EDT <http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/oct/02/maurice-sendak-interview?intcmp=239>.

Tres Seymour is the author of thirteen books for young people, including Hunting the White Cow and Life In The Desert, a 1993 American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults He lives in Munfordville, Kentucky.

VIDEO ESSAY: War Movies for People Who Don’t Like War Movies

https://vimeo.com/42781372

There’s no such thing as a truly anti-war film, Francois Truffaut once said. By depicting the adventure and thrill of combat, war movies can’t help but glorify their subject, fueling fantasies of spectacular, heroic violence. It’s a case where the sensational beauty of cinema works against our humanist impulses rather than for them. I’m not a fan of war movies as a general matter of principle. But in recent years, I’ve seen a couple of films with unique approaches to the war movie, and that bring humanity back into focus.

Originally published on Fandor Keyframe. For a full transcript visit Keyframe.

Kevin B. Lee is Editor in Chief of IndieWire’s PressPlay Video Blog, Video Essayist for Fandor Keyframe, and contributor to Roger Ebert.com. Follow him on Twitter.

VIDEO ESSAY – Hijacking Michael Haneke

With Michael Haneke‘s winning his second Palme d'Or following the triumphant Cannes premiere of his new film Amour (Love), I thought it a fine occasion to revisit his earliest works. Re-watching Haneke’s first five features, The Seventh Continent (1989), Benny’s Video (1992), 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994), The Castle (1997) and Funny Games (1997), the dominant impression left by the great precision in these works—whether in their narrative, dramatic or visual construction, even while depicting cataclysmic dysfunction in individuals, families or society at large—is that one is in the presence of a control freak without equal in the contemporary cinema.

Not everyone thralls to Haneke’s exacting approach, especially when they feel the jerk of his chain a bit too violently. It was 15 years ago that Haneke made his Cannes competition debut with the original Funny Games. Its infamous “kitchen” and “remote control” scenes elicited vehement boos and bewildered applause in equal measure. That film sought to deprogram viewers from their knee-jerk habits while watching action thrillers; it made them reflect on the underlying class and social assumptions that govern both the real world and the movie world. But Haneke’s mission of liberation is paradoxically one programmed on his own terms, with the audience led down a strictly delineated path to arrive at a state of abjection. Or, to put it in his own words, he intends to “rape the viewer into independence.”

That quote from a 2007 interview with The New York Times exposed the issues underlying Haneke’s relationship with his audience. Like a dictator, he works under the premise that he knows what’s best for his people. Perhaps it’s the same premise that leads to our willing submission to all the artists we embrace. But something in Haneke’s hyper-controlled filmmaking makes the equation feel unbalanced. Maybe it’s Haneke that could use a little liberating, and or a taste of his own medicine. So in the spirit of Peter and Paul in Funny Games, this video is abducting a few fragments of Haneke’s films, playing with and poking at them to see what makes them tick. There is no grand scheme or end result to these fragments, except to tear a hole into their painstaking construction, so that some fresh air might get in.

Notes:

The Castle (1997). When I mentioned this video essay to Daniel Kasman at MUBI, he suggested doing something with the many tracking shots of Ulrich Mühe walking in the snow. These shots are practically the only ones shot outdoors in a film that’s set within a series of confining interiors, but they end up feeling as claustrophobic. Put together it also becomes apparent how physically punishing these snowy scenes must have been for Mühe to shoot.

Funny Games (1997) This is an obvious riff on the “remote control” moment that follows the shot chosen here, but with the aim to dissect one of the film’s most disturbing moments (that’s also the most cheer-inducing for the audience). Instead of blood and guts exploding from Frank Giering’s midsection, we see some special effects paraphernalia: a safety pack on his belly to protect him from exploding gunpowder, and some impressive coordination between the explosion effects both in front of and behind him. What’s also impressive is his posture as he receives the blow. Most people would flinch, cower, or curl, but Giering stands erect, practically heroic; all the better for the particles to fly from his chest.

The Seventh Continent (1989): How telling that in the film’s most cataclysmic sequence of a family’s feature length journey of steady self-destruction, every shot is precisely patterned, moving from one series of related images and objects to the next. Haneke himself can’t succumb to chaos without a blueprint – one that also provides the components for this one minute fugue of mayhem.

71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994): This segment is fairly self-explanatory: Each clip is played at roughly 1000x speed, all of them centered at the midpoint, so the variety of their length is evident. The film is a confounding puzzle of causality vs. non-causality and remains such within this layout.

Benny’s Video (1992): I find “The Girl” (she doesn’t even have a name!) played by Ingrid Stassner to be the most tragic and affecting of all of Haneke’s characters. Maybe because she’s the most like us (or how we like to think of ourselves) when watching a Haneke movie: an innocent bystander unexpectedly implicated in the diabolical designs of someone wielding a camera. Let her fate be a cautionary tale for all of us: To see Michael Haneke films (much less “enjoy” one), we must be prepared to see through them.

Originally published on Fandor.

Kevin B. Lee is Editor in Chief of IndieWire’s PressPlay Video Blog, Video Essayist for Fandor Keyframe, and contributor to Roger Ebert.com. Follow him on Twitter.

VIDEO: The Magnificent Andersons

Wes Anderson has established himself as an irreplaceable and elusive American storyteller. At age 43, Anderson has already made films about the romance of crime (Bottle Rocket), a philanderer's gullibility (Rushmore), the unraveling of a family unit (Royal Tenenbaums), another family’s vitality (Life Aquatic), existential self-examination (Darjeeling Limited) and the impermanence of existence (Fantastic Mr. Fox–in animated form!). Anderson’s new film, Moonrise Kingdom, tackles the perils of young love.

Yet, for a director who addresses such heavy themes in his work, Anderson himself remains an enigma. His public persona—sporting a hipster-ish corduroy and scarf-laden wardrobe—suggests that he is quiet, quirky, and undeniably cerebral. His films all share the borrowed visual scheme of his “pantheon of artistic heroes” (Martin Scorsese, Mike Nichols, and Orson Welles, among others). But trying to create a unified director profile for him is trite. Although Anderson seems quite the beaming poster-boy auteur, his films all contain a powerful undercurrent of much darker truths (the negligent father, the denial of failure, 21st century fatalism). If one looks past all the nifty camerawork, droll humor, and spot-on folk-rock soundtracks in the Anderson filmography, it’s obvious that Anderson is conveying the great American narrative of today: a narrative that follows fatherless children, refusing to grow up in an increasingly absurd world.

Nelson Carvajal is an independent digital filmmaker, writer and content creator based out of Chicago, Illinois. His digital short films usually contain appropriated content and have screened at such venues as the London Underground Film Festival. Carvajal runs a blog called FREE CINEMA NOW which boasts the tagline: "Liberating Independent Film And Video From A Prehistoric Value System."

VIDEO – PLAY DIRTY with Alejandro Adams: NO BLADE OF GRASS

Press Play introduces Play Dirty, a series in which filmmaker Alejandro Adams brings his unkempt insight and usual disregard for propriety to the video essay form, occasionally dragging along a guest to savage or praise a given film.

In this inaugural installment Alejandro points out some unique structural devices in No Blade of Grass (1970), which is available from Warner Archive.

Alejandro Adams is the director of three feature films (Around the Bay, Canary, Babnik).

VIDEO ESSAY: Sight and Sound Film Poll – Jonathan Rosenbaum on SATANTANGO

Press Play presents Sight and Sound Film Poll: Critics' Picks, a series of video essays featuring prominent film critics on films they selected for Sight and Sound magazine's poll of the greatest films of all time. New videos will premiere each week until the poll results are announced later this summer.

From a personal standpoint, it is fitting that the second video of this series, following the opening tribute to Roger Ebert, features Jonathan Rosenbaum. It was through Ebert that I discovered Rosenbaum's writing 14 years ago, when his weekly reviews for The Chicago Reader made Ebert's list of "20 Essential Movie Websites." Since then, no writer has done more to expand my knowledge and develop my sensibilities on cinema. To explain why, let met me point to one of several possible examples: Rosenbaum's 1990 article "A Bluffer's Guide to Bela Tarr," one of the very first articles written in English on the Hungarian director. On a basic level, the article serves the essential function of film criticism: to introduce its readers to new and exciting work. But it goes a critical step further by identifying the inherent problems of encountering and understanding new films, especially from other parts of the world, and the uncomfortable reality of being confronted with one's ignorance of certain contextual realities (cultural, historical) that may have led to their creation and may be important to their appreciation. The title of the article implies that one can "bluff" their way to posing as an expert on such films, but what Rosenbaum does is the opposite: he systematically and transparently outlines his limited knowledge of Bela Tarr and Hungarian cinema; identifies the elements in Tarr's films that fascinate and confound him, employs sharp formal analysis to vividly describe what's happening on screen; and offers some interpretative possibilities while resisting reductive conclusions. It's an object lesson in how to actively engage with everything in cinema that is new and strange.

In the two decades since, Rosenbaum has become a leading authority on Bela Tarr's films, a progression that is all the more fascinating for the extent to which it is documented. One can get a sense of Rosenbaum's growing familiarity and evolving position with Tarr's films: from the 1990 "Bluffer's" piece to his 1994 review of Satantango, to his 1996 assessment of Tarr's opus coinciding with and the filmmaker's first career retrospective in Chicago, and a 2001 conversation with Tarr published in Cinemascope. Most of these articles are available on Rosenbaum's website. Later this year his commentary track will accompany the Cinema Guild DVD of The Turin Horse, reputed to be Tarr's final film. His interest now extends into investigating the literary work of Laszlo Krasznahorkai, author of the novel Satantango and co-writer of Tarr's last five films.

When we discussed the making of a video essay on Satantango, one idea was to juxtapose a scene from the film with Jonathan's reading of a passage from the Krasnahorkai novel describing the same scene. We recorded this footage, and while I wasn't able to bring it to a result that fully satisfied me, I am fascinated by the idea of comparing a cinematic work with its source text and hope to pursue this further. We settled on another idea by Jonathan that plays in its own way with the distinctive qualities of the film. – Kevin B. Lee

Jonathan Rosenbaum is an American film critic. Rosenbaum was the head film critic for the Chicago Reader from 1987 until 2008, He has published and edited numerous books, most recently Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture in Transition (2010).

Kevin B. Lee is Editor in Chief of IndieWire’s PressPlay Video Blog, Video Essayist for Fandor Keyframe, and contributor to Roger Ebert.com. Follow him on Twitter.

VIDEO ESSAY: MEN IN BLACK: Three Reasons for Criterion Consideration

VIDEO ESSAY: Three Reasons: MEN IN BLACK

For this month’s Criterion Consideration, coming up with a suitable equivalent to Barry Sonnenfeld's latest film, Men in Black III, was a bit of a challenge. In many ways, the franchise can’t be compared to other films of the genre. How exactly would you categorize MIB? An odd couple buddy-cop sci-fi comedy? Immediately I thought of Ghostbusters, which has been threatening recently to corrupt its origins with an unnecessary sequel, but Ghostbusters had already had its day in the sun when Criterion was still pumping out laserdiscs. I could easily have tried to loosely tie a thousand different titles to MIB III, but really, the only reasonable association is the first film in the franchise. Like most things, the original is always the best, leaving its successors in the dust. It's been a decade since we all sat through the utterly intolerable MIB II, and no matter how fresh and shiny Sonnenfeld's latest effort may attempt to be, it will ultimately only remind us of the power of the original film.

Based on the comics by Lowell Cunningham, the original film was an inventive reworking of the Men in Black mythology, a phenomenon that emerged in American pop culture shortly after that supposed UFO-crash incident in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. Sonnenfeld took further inspiration from the resurgence of conspiracy theory permeating 1990's pop culture. The paranoid visions that pervade The X-Files are rendered to ridiculous extremes as Earth's resident aliens hide in plain sight. What makes Sonnenfeld's film work is the business-as-usual approach that the Men in Black take toward in their daily routine. The black-suited men of mystery are merely intergalactic immigration officers, content to anonymously survey all alien activity in the New York area. Contrary to the shameless marketing strategies that would befall the franchise, the film's offbeat deadpan sensibilities were a welcome break from those of the mainstream blockbusters of that time.

This perfect combination of elements made MIB exceptionally ambitious and artistically innovative. Sonnenfeld's experience behind the camera (notably with the Coen Brothers' early films) brought a subtle visual wit to an otherwise flashy elaborate blockbuster. The decision to cast underrated comedians in minor character roles also added class to seemingly minor scenes. Ed Solomon's writing provided some endlessly quotable one-liners, and helped reinforce the chemistry between Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith. The way they play off each other appears genuine, with Jones' straight-faced delivery pitted against Smith's posturing wisecracks. Rick Baker, the special effects wizard behind every notable sci-fi/horror film from the past thirty years, is allowed to let his imagination run wild, creating some remarkable alien life.

Oddly enough, the qualities that made the first MIB so engaging are exactly what killed its first sequel. The formula for its success became so immediately apparent that even the original risked losing its charm. Celebrities quietly suspected of being aliens were now given needless cameos, CGI took over most of the creature effects, and although the relationship between Agent K and J still works quite well, the rest of the film does not. Early reviews of MIB3 have been mixed, but overall the formula remains unchanged. Try as Sonnenfeld might to neurolize any trace of Men in Black II, his latest installment might very well be the long-awaited end to a nearly forgotten franchise.

Robert Nishimura is a Japan-based filmmaker, artist, and freelance designer. His designs can be found at Primolandia Productions. You can follow him on Twitter here.