The Fanciful Norwegian wrote:Rosenbaum's
(partial) review of the series also mentions a Latin American installment (
Cinema of Tears by Nelson Pereira dos Santos) and a Jean-Pierre Bekolo film on African cinema (
Aristotle's Plot) that was apparently rejected. A Russian outfit called Karmen Video released Oshima's contribution on DVD, which has been fansubbed and is floating around on P2P networks. I don't know if they've released any of the others -- I can't find much information about them, at least not in English.
Yes, both of those were shown in the Century of Cinema series by Channel 4 in 1995-97 when they showed each country's documentary with an associated film
To be more specific they did an enormous season in 1995 to go with the Scorsese documentary - both a season of Scorsese's films that followed each Sunday night segment of his Personal Journey as well as a good couple of months worth of American films in general at every time of the day and night. Then at the end of 1995 they showed the Frears British documentary with a month worth of British films on during weekend evenings. Then in 1996 the bulk of the other programmes were shown late on a week night with one programme and one film representing that country (e.g. Oshima/Japan/Death-Japanese Style; Neill/New Zealand/Crush; Irish Cinema - Ourselves Alone?/High Boot Benny; Scandinavian Cinema - I Am Curious/The Match Factory Girl; Reitz's film The Night of The Film Makers was paired with The Nasty Girl; Cinema on the Road paired with To The Starry Island; Godard's film was paired with Les Amants du Pont Neuf; Cinema of Tears was paired with I-The Worst Of All.
Then without much warning the last few films trickled out in the summer of 1997: Aristotle's Plot paired with Guelwaar and Hyenes; Yan and Ying with Raise The Red Lantern (it sort of made sense to hold this one back since there were tons of China/Hong Kong programmes on British television in that year due to the handover); The Russian Idea paired with Urga and finally Miller's Australian documentary turned up a couple of months later paired with the premiere of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.
I can definitely attest to the Latin American and African programes being in the series as Channel 4 showed it, but sadly I must have missed the Polish documentary - either it wasn't shown on television or I missed it due to the erratic scheduling.
Jeff wrote:I've not seen the Frears film, but it sounds like it has a very different format than the Scorsese.
I'll post my response to Jeff's comment here rather than in the Scorsese thread.
I think the Frears film was constrained by the hour format, reducing many of the clips to uncredited montage sequences (of train sequences, people having a cup of tea after a crisis, that kind of thing!)
Not really the best of the Century of Cinema season as it veered dangerously close to becoming an EPK for the film Frears was working on around that time, Mary Reilly, at the beginning! It didn't really come close to the Scorsese, of course, but also the Godard, Oshima (though Oshima's film also walked a tightrope of merely just using Japanese cinema as something to break up the clips from his films(!) but he talked of how the clips influenced his filmmaking) and Sam Neill's film felt like better 'personal journeys' because they felt, well, more personal!
It has been a while since I last saw it, so I might see it differently now but the Frears film aside from a few moments where he talks about the first films he saw in boarding school, felt rather impersonal and more just a narration of a potted history of British cinema that he was given to read.
It was a difficult series to judge because the truly great films were less about the clips and more about the different individual approaches of the contributors to their idea of their culture and while I could see the point of celebrating the development of cinema in various territories and their unique characteristics there was some concern in the films about whether dividing the film world up by national boundaries might work academically and from a funding point of view but was a wrong-headed approach. It makes a good selling point for the films to deal with Australia or Britain but whenever the films came up against difficult situations such as co-productions with the US etc or of influences from outside the particular country in question the sense that cinema is a bigger concept unconstrained by borders kept recurring. It felt like a good problem to be made aware of though - it felt as if cinema, for all the culturally specific films that are made in every territory, truly can be a more international medium as throughout the series it continually refused to fit neatly into national boundaries!
There was also a difficult balance between wanting to honour cinema through clips or wanting to honour the personal journey idea. It could be argued that the Godard and Reitz documentaries, as well as the Bekolo one, were almost impenetrable to anyone wanting to 'learn' about the cinematic history of the countries involved in an orthodox manner (though the Godard and Bekolo say a lot about the country's wider - i.e. outside of cinephile - attitude to cinema). I guess those documentaries got a lot of flack because they didn't fit into the idea of the series of showing enticing clips of films! (If you want that kind of thing for French cinema you are better off searching out
Les Enfants du Lumiere).
I think the series broadly fell into three categories - excellent, personal documentaries (the Scorsese of course, the Oshima, surprisingly enough Sam Neill's film was a highlight, the Godard (though most of it went over my head as the only 'late Godard' I'd seen at that point!), Yan and Ying)
Average - I'd put Aristotle's Plot here because it is a strange piece(!) but most of the others are average because they fall more into the category of showing clips without too much insight. It therefore fell on the clips themselves to get the viewer excited: the Australian documentary (at the high end of average), The Russian Idea (a solid film that was the most straightforward showcase of film clips in the series), the Irish, Korean and Latin American programmes.
Then there would be the disappointments: Typically British, I Am Curious - Film (I seem to remember feeling the documentary was mostly a disappointment because it lumped all the Scandinavian countries together with the consequence that there's not enough time devoted to any subject, not even Bergman!)
Night of the Filmmakers was certainly the misfiring lowlight of the season - the concept of having all the famous German filmmakers from the past hundred years gathered together in a cinema was interesting but sadly it felt badly handled - the filmmakers were composited into their seats in a rather slapdash manner and the footage of them was looped every few seconds so you got the impression of seeing a lot of people with nervous tics fidgeting about! I think the other problem was that none of participants were identified so unless you were familiar with German cinema (which I confess I'm still not really up with!), there was not really a point of entry. I was left with the feeling that I was at a party were everyone was surely
meant to be there but I didn't know exactly
why!
(Though the German themed night luckily was completely redeemed by the fantastic Nasty Girl!)
Interlaced schminterlaced, as long as I can see the thing in good quality, I don't care.
