Zeitgeist Films

[Tribe]

A postcard with the new release of Maddin's Careful:

[Tribe]

I'm thrilled that Odilon Redon's included. I traded my Short Cinema Journal disc ages ago, and really miss that film. Ya know, it's not just an homage to that Symbolist guy; it's also an ADD-sufferer's remake of Gance's "La Roue".

I had never seen Odilon Redon until a few minutes ago. Man, what a little gem that short is! It's a brilliant little piece that reminds me of Maddin's The Heart of the World. Sure they are very different films, parodying and/or inspired by different film movements, but both so frenetic, so full of symbols and meanings...and both are an absolute hoot.

The inclusion of Odilon Redon makes me happy I retired my older Kino release of Careful for this version. Zeitgeist has done a very nice job with this package.

[Ovader]

Details are now up on Philippe Garrel's I CAN NO LONGER HEAR THE GUITAR and EMERGENCY KISSES from Zeitgeist Films to be released May 26.=D>

DISC ONE: I CAN NO LONGER HEAR THE GUITAR:
- French press book excerpts, including a handwritten letter from Jean-Luc Godard
- Vintage lobby cards
- French trailer for Garrel’s Regular Lovers

DISC TWO: EMERGENCY KISSES:
· Philippe Garrel, Artiste (1999): A rare 50-minute documentary made for the French television series Cinéma, de notre temps
· French press book excerpts, including a note from filmmaker Leos Carax
· Vintage lobby cards

Plus, a new essay on both films by The New Yorker’s Richard Brody

[Tribe]

Details are now up on Philippe Garrel's I CAN NO LONGER HEAR THE GUITAR and EMERGENCY KISSES from Zeitgeist Films to be released May 26.=D>

Anyone seen this release yet? Any comments?

[kaujot]

DVDTalk has some thoughts.

[Tribe]

Thanks for the tip, kaujot. Too bad about the transfers on this, but I'm still looking forward to seeing this...I got into Garrel after blind ordering Regular Lovers. If these are even half as good as that, I'll be happy.

[Tribe]

Dave Kehr's take in the NY Times regarding the Garrell set:

One Man’s Love Life
By DAVE KEHR

PHILIPPE GARREL X 2

After decades of neglect in the English-speaking world the French filmmaker Philippe Garrel, 61, has recently been enjoying a revival, the most concrete manifestation of which is “Philippe Garrel x 2,” a double DVD set from Zeitgeist Films that contains two of his moody, discursive, semi-autobiographical features.

“Emergency Kisses” (1989) and “I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar” (1991) evoke two periods in Mr. Garrel’s tumultuous love life. “Guitar,” shot in color and played by a largely professional cast, describes the endgame of Mr. Garrel’s 10-year relationship with the model, singer and Warhol superstar Nico. Here named Marianne she’s played by the Dutch actress Johanna ter Steege (“The Vanishing”) as a darkly romantic, self-destructive figure, addicted to heroin and abrupt departures.

Though made before “Guitar,” the black-and-white “Emergency Kisses” describes the aftermath of the Nico years. It finds the Garrel figure (named Mathieu, and played by Mr. Garrel) living with Jeanne (Brigitte Sy, Mr. Garrel’s wife when the film was made), an actress whose enveloping, unconditional love is the emotional opposite of Marianne’s flighty affection but poses problems of its own.

The two already have an adorable child, Lo (Louis Garrel, their real-life son who would grow up to star in Bernardo Bertolucci’s 2003 film “The Dreamers”), but the bosomy, maternal Jeanne also wants to conceive a film with Mathieu, in which she will play her own role. He has another actress in mind for the part, the more lighthearted Minouchette (Anémone, a well-known performer who was a teenage friend of Mr. Garrel). Messy, bohemian complications ensue.

At a time when commercial filmmaking is dominated by impersonal, computer-generated entertainments, Mr. Garrel’s work — just a step or two away from home movies, as he himself has often observed — holds an obvious appeal. The images seem caught on the fly, and display no interest in compositional beauty. The narratives sputter along in the fits and starts that we associate with realism (although Mr. Garrel is careful to slip in the expository information we need to follow the story line). And the performances have a raw, unmodulated quality, as if everyone were simply pouring out their thoughts and feelings.

At times Mr. Garrel seems to have discovered an early, Gallic form of the mumblecore movement. Resisting technology, he hopes to recover the texture of unorganized experience. But, by definition, no work of art can consist purely of random data, and Mr. Garrel does finally impose a shape on his material — usually a triangular one, in which he or his surrogate (in “Guitar,” his role is played by Benoît Régent) stands passively between two demanding women.

On one side is the elusive dark lady who tempts him with drugs and oblivion, and on the other the fleshy presence who smothers him with motherly possessiveness. That’s not much of a choice, and Mr. Garrel’s protagonists often seem frozen in place.

In “Emergency Kisses” Mr. Garrel frequently seems more childlike than his mop-topped son, an impression he reinforces by casting his own father, the accomplished actor Maurice Garrel (wonderful in Arnaud Desplechin’s 2004 “Kings and Queen”) as his father in the film. As an actor, the senior Garrel dominates his son completely, all but driving him from the frame during an extended philosophical conversation in a cafe. Later the younger Garrel sits by himself in dejected silence, eyes downcast as a mournful saxophone solo plays on the soundtrack. He seems to have been expelled from his own movie.

It’s this passivity that sets Mr. Garrel apart from his two more famous contemporaries, Jean Eustache (“The Mother and the Whore”) and Maurice Pialat (“À Nos Amours”), whose similar attempts to seize a sloppy, unmediated reality were energized by compulsive intellectualizing (Eustache) and an explosive temperament (Pialat). Mr. Garrel’s work projects a sweetness, an innocence, that makes it more superficially appealing than Pialat’s violent outbursts or Eustache’s taste for bitter paradox. He’s the nice one, though ultimately the brutes are better company. (Zeitgeist Video, $34.99, not rated)

[Murdoch]

Can anyone comment on the quality of the Egoyan box? I'm interested in seeing his pre-Exotica films and this seems the perfect set for it (despite the heavy price tag)

[Tribe]

Can anyone comment on the quality of the Egoyan box? I'm interested in seeing his pre-Exotica films and this seems the perfect set for it (despite the heavy price tag)

I've enjoyed them, but don't expect perfect and pristine transfers and I don't find the movies themselves up to the standards of Egoyan's later bigger budgeted films. However, these early Egoyan films are quirky and good enough that you shouldn't pass them up if you are an Egoyan fan. It seems like you should be able to find a better price through eBay or a 3rd party on Amazon.

[Murdoch]

Can anyone comment on the quality of the Egoyan box? I'm interested in seeing his pre-Exotica films and this seems the perfect set for it (despite the heavy price tag)

I've enjoyed them, but don't expect perfect and pristine transfers and I don't find the movies themselves up to the standards of Egoyan's later bigger budgeted films. However, these early Egoyan films are quirky and good enough that you shouldn't pass them up if you are an Egoyan fan. It seems like you should be able to find a better price through eBay or a 3rd party on Amazon.

Thanks for the info. I haven't seen many of Egoyan's more recent stuff but after rewatching Exotica recently my interest in him has been piqued.

[MoonlitKnight]

Honestly, "Family Viewing" is probably my second favorite film of his, after "Exotica." "Next of Kin" and "Speaking Parts" are both pretty high up there for me, too. Anyone even more than passively interested in Egoyan should definitely seek out this box set. His early shorts are pretty funny, too.

[Tribe]

Coming From Zeitgeist later in 2010: Le Combat Dans L'ile (Alain Cavalier, 1962) with Jean-Louis Trintignant and Romy Schneider. Anyone familiar with this movie?

EDIT: After I posted I found this relatively recent rave review by A. O. Scott. It sounds quite interesting.

[Tribe]

The cover for Le Combat dans l'ile...release date is June 22.


EDIT: A. O. Scott's take on the same:

June 12, 2009
French Political Thriller as Allegory, but There’s a Bazooka in the Closet

By A. O. SCOTT
In “The Conformist,” Bertolucci’s 1970 film about the moral corruption and aesthetic decadence of Italy under Mussolini, the French actor Jean-Louis Trintignant laid bare some of the psychological dimensions of the Fascist personality with a sinister precision rarely matched before or since. Admirers of that performance will find a precedent in “Le Combat dans l’Île,” a curious and fascinating French film from 1962 in which Mr. Trintignant in effect rehearses, in his native language, the creepy and seductive mixture of sadism and insecurity he would translate into Italian eight years later.

In “Le Combat dans l’Île,” directed by Alain Cavalier and produced by Louis Malle, Mr. Trintignant plays Clément, a factory owner’s son who is involved with a clandestine group of right-wing militants. Their ultimate aims are mysterious, but this small, armed cadre is disciplined and serious enough to plot the assassination of a prominent politician and to acquire for that task a bazooka, which finds its way into Clément’s coat closet.

It is found there by his wife, Anne, played with heart-stopping capriciousness by Romy Schneider, who was never lovelier and who is capable of distracting everyone in the film, and the audience above all, from whatever grave political matters are afoot.

Whether these are topical, allegorical or merely atmospheric can be difficult to assess. There is no doubt that the ambiguous shadow of France’s experience in World War II lingered into the early 1960s and beyond, and that tremors of domestic social unrest and war in Algeria can be discerned hovering outside the somber, elegant frames of this film. But it also seems that the movie’s main source of energy lies elsewhere, in the electromagnetic forces of desire, jealousy, violence and cinema itself.

The plot wanders with a marvelous, slightly demented freedom from Paris to the countryside, from political thriller to romantic melodrama. Clément, cold and domineering with his wife, nonetheless expresses a kind of neurotic devotion to her and holds onto her loyalty despite (or perhaps by means of) his icy volatility. Until that is, he entrusts her to the care of his old friend Paul, a printer who lives in a charming mill and a state of equally alluring bohemian bachelor rusticity.

Paul is played by Henri Serre (Jim from Truffaut’s “Jules and Jim”), and the contrast between him and Clément would hardly be clearer if “Le Combat dans l’Île” were a superhero comic book. Large and loose-limbed, with flowing dark hair and a warm, rugged, full-featured face, Mr. Serre is a perfect visual foil for the fair, compact, tightly wound Mr. Trintignant. And the temperamental differences between their characters seem to follow from these physical traits. Paul is a natural democrat, with easy manners and an intuitive appreciation for both hard work and honest pleasure, while Clément is punctilious and intolerant, perverted by his own self-repressing will and his unacknowledged guilt.

While the film, like Anne, gravitates toward Paul, there is sympathy left for Clément, partly because Mr. Trintignant never loses sight of this foolish, angry young man’s essential humanity. Of the three, though, it is Anne who emerges as the most interesting character, since she is less burdened with symbolic and ideological baggage than the two rivals for her affection.

“Le Combat dans l’Île” is the latest in what seems to be an endless parade of obscure or half-forgotten French films to find their way to Film Forum. If it is not quite a lost masterpiece on the order of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s “Quai des Orfèvres” or Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Army of Shadows,” it is nonetheless intriguing and absorbing — and also, thanks to Pierre Lhomme’s silvery and smoky cinematography and the natural gorgeousness of the cast — beautiful to behold.

[Tribe]

Newsletter from Zeitgeist today announces that Zeitgeist is distributing the Kimstim collection as of August 1. From Image Entertainment to Kino to Zeitgeist...

[What A Disgrace]

Well, maybe Zeitgeist will give Mirror and the Suzuki trilogy the respect it deserves.

[Ashirg]

Well, maybe Zeitgeist will give Mirror and the Suzuki trilogy the respect it deserves.

Zeitgeist only distributes their releases - Kimstim collection still produces their own discs and I doubt they will revisit any of their titles.

[oldsheperd]

Anyone seen any of the films from Jamie Travis? The Patterns Trilogy is out next Tuesday from Zeitgeist so I'm curious to know the digs on this guy's stuff

[Tribe]

Here's an article on Travis and the forthcoming release:

AUGUST 3, 2010, 4:00 PM
The Patterns of Jamie Travis

By MEKADO MURPHY

Jamie Travis may be one of the most visually minded contemporary filmmakers you’ve never heard of. With passionate stories of suburban woe and obsession played out against surreal, hyperdesigned backdrops, Mr. Travis’s films feel a bit like a mixture of work by David Lynch and Douglas Sirk.

To date, Mr. Travis, a 30-year-old Canadian director, has made only short films, a format that generally isn’t conducive to theatrical distribution. But this week, Zeitgeist is releasing “The Patterns Trilogy and Other Short Films” on DVD, giving more viewers a chance to see his work outside of the festival circuit.

Over the past eight years, Mr. Travis has made two trilogies. “Patterns” tells an offbeat love story through minimal dialogue and, ultimately, song. The “Saddest Children in the World” trilogy looks at the troubled lives of children within their home and school environments.

In a recent telephone interview, the director spoke about the styles and ideas that shape his work.

A Flair for Design

Meticulous production design inspired by 1960s styles has been a significant element of Mr. Travis’s work, as shown in this scene from “The Armoire,” the third installment in the “Saddest Children in the World” trilogy.

“I think the décor of my childhood has really messed with my head,” he said. “I grew up in a suburb of Vancouver in a house that had royal blue carpet, gold foil fern-printed wallpaper and bright red velvet furniture. And I think that at a young age that just was normal to me. When I’m writing my films, I’ve often started with the production design and the environments that the films take place in. I’ve often taken my inspiration from the early ’90s suburban décor that is such a mix of ’60s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. And have added my own flair to that.”

Childhood Isolation

This birthday party scene from “The Saddest Boy in the World” characterizes the downbeat mood of Mr. Travis’s “Saddest Children” trilogy:


“With the ‘Saddest Children’ films, I always get the question, ‘Were you the saddest boy in the world?’ ” he said. “I’ve always said my childhood was fine. My mother was great. Though I think that I might have been sadder than I thought I was.

“I think the thing about my childhood is that I was quite isolated. I was a very melodramatic child, obsessed with soap opera and I had this wild imagination. But the thing about my imagination is that I was always alone there and I can see that now. These films add up to this subconscious confession.”


Musical Interests

Each of Mr. Travis’s films contains a musical number, and the third installment of “The Patterns Trilogy” is imagined as a full-on musical:


On “Patterns 3,” Mr. Travis said: “I’ve seen it with many audiences now and no one seems to mind that you don’t get answers from that movie. And there’s something about taking questions and addressing them as questions with a giant musical number that allows you to just move on and accept it.”

“I also love the musical format and I intend to make a musical again in my future,” he said. “I worked with a composer, Alfredo Santa Ana, in Vancouver, on that project and we just have the greatest working relationship in which I can be very involved from the start of the music.”

Mr. Travis does plan to expand to features, but said that the stories he’s had to tell to this point have worked better in the short-film format.

“I like being able to tell a complete story in 10 minutes or 20 minutes,” he said. “I think it’s appealing to me because I can make these films that are so design-oriented and idea-oriented. I think that feature films have to be so much more about story, which is something that was probably the most intimidating thing to me about filmmaking.”

[Ashirg]

Zeitgeist will issue The Quintessential Guy Maddin! on DVD this Dec. 14 for a suggested retail price of $49.99.

A four-disc set of films and shorts by the noted Candadian auteur Guy Maddin, the collection boasts five feature-length films, all of them hallucinatory and all of them hilarious. (How else to describe a body of work that includes wretched swan feeders, beauty-parlor noir, incestuous psychodramas, ghostly patriarchs, fascist butler academies, midnight-summer fantasia and hyperbolic Soviet montage?)

The films, which span some 20 years of Maddin’s career, are Careful (1992), Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997), Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2003), Cowards Bend the Knee (2004), and Archangel (1990).

Also part of the package is this impressive array of special features:
* Five audio commentaries with Maddin + crew members
* A 60-minute documentary on Maddin’s early career, narrated by Tom Waits
* Six shorts, including Odilon Redon (1995) and The Heart of the World (2000)
* Three behind-the-scenes featurettes
* “Imagined” audition reels
* Radio interviews
* Production design collages and storyboards
* Vintage photos from Maddin’s personal collection
* 5 collectible postcards of original poster Art.

[Tribe]

Ashirg, do you know if Twilight of the Ice Nymphs and Archangel will be re-mastered for this edition?

[Tribe]

The Maddin box is now up at the Zeitgeist site. It looks like none of the films will be re-mastered for this set, aside from Careful, which was already re-mastered when Zeitgeist re-released it last year.

[Tribe]

Todd Haynes' Poison is being re-released in theaters very soon. A likely candidate for a Zeitgeist DVD, yes?

[justeleblanc]

I've been tipped off that the Film Desk will be releasing Rivette's Pont du Nord. This may mean it will see a DVD release from Zeitgeist soon after.

[FerdinandGriffon]

I've been tipped off that the Film Desk will be releasing Rivette's Pont du Nord. This may mean it will see a DVD release from Zeitgeist soon after.

Or from Criterion, as I happen to know that the Film Desk shops its titles to the CC. So if Zeitgeist does indeed release the Rivette, we'll have fairly solid confirmation that Criterion snubbed it. This goes for another recent film Desk rerelease, Godard's Sauve qui peut (la vie), as well.

Prepare to be disappointed, I'd say.

[rockysds]

Susan Sontag's Promised Lands coming February 15.