Feature by Angus Macdonald
As October approaches, the two weeks of madness known as the London Film Festival rapidly comes round again. It will soon be time to go through this year’s catalogue of films and pull your hair out trying to choose which of the films you can manage to fit into a two week schedule. The decisions made as to which ones are going to be the most interesting, the most worthy, or simply the most entertaining, could mean another year of unknown gems and treats slipping by unnoticed and becoming ‘lost’. Of course, there precisely is the rub when it comes to such an event – it’s just downright impossible to catch all 250 to 300 features, shorts, documentaries and experimental films.
At the National Film Theatre, the season ‘50 Years of the London Film Festival: The Lost Films’ attempts to address this idea by showing work which for various reasons have dropped off the critical or cultural radar since they were first exhibited. In their introduction to the season, Gareth Evans and festival director Sandra Hebron discuss what is meant by the term “lost films” by admitting, “the question is a many-headed one.”
“If a film is ‘lost’, then to who? To a country and community that showed it, or to its source culture? To general audiences or specialist viewers? To the present or to history? Lost in mind or in actuality? And all of these before the issue of how and why a film becomes ‘lost’, due to the changing fortunes of film-makers and nations, the availability and preservation of prints, the ebb and flow of aesthetic and thematic fashions…”
Each of the films being shown represent many of these issues, films from around the world that have either lost the critical favour garnered at the time, or forgotten works from some more established and lauded filmmakers. The selected films include Dakota Road (1992) from British director Nick Ward; Echoes of Silence (1967) by Emmanuel Goldman; the West German director Sohrab Shahid Saless’ Diary of a Lover (1977); Erendira (1982), a French, West German, Mexican co-production from Ruy Guerra; The Holy Innocents (1984) from Mario Camus of Spain; Piravi (1988) an Indian film by Shaji N. Karun; the Russian director Giorgi Shengelaya’s Pirosmani (1971); one of the first (and according to Evans and Hebron’s intro, “one of the best”) films from the Iranian New Wave, The Runner (1984) by Amir Naderi; and Andre Delvaux’s Un Soir, Un Train (1969). Most, if not all, of these films are pretty unknown, or in the spirit of the season, unremembered.
Some of the more recognised directors include Jerzy Skolimowski, who, along with Andrzej Wajda and Roman Polanski (he co-wrote the screenplay for Polanski’s Knife in the Water), was an important figure in the Polish New Wave during the late 50s, early 60s. His film being shown here, Barrier (1966), is certainly one of his best works, representing the excitement of 60s counter-cinema ranging from the French New Wave and the oncoming of American filmmakers such as Arthur Penn and Dennis Hopper.
Chris Marker, whose 57 minute essay-documentary about Israel, Description of a Struggle (Description d’un Combat, 1960), won the Golden Bear for Best documentary at the 1961 Berlin Film Festival, is perhaps one of the more complicated names on the list in that many of his films are extremely difficult to see. While best known for his short science-fiction photo-roman, La Jetee, and his extraordinary essay-film, Sans Soleil, Marker’s body of work, like the director himself (he very rarely does interviews and even more rarely lets his photograph be taken), remains extremely reclusive.
Gillian Armstrong, the director of My Brilliant Career, Little Women and Charlotte Gray, is perhaps the most famous, and certainly the most commercially successful, name on the list. The film selected is her brilliant 1987 drama, High Tide, starring Judy Davis, whose performance won her the Best Actress prize at the Australian Film Institute Awards. This certainly constitutes a gem overshadowed and overlooked within a more well-known body of work.
Most often celebrated as the writer of Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, experimental novelist, screenwriter and director Alain Robbe-Grillet is a major figure in the European avant-garde. His film, Trans-Europ Express (1966), can be regarded as the granddaddy of such self-referential experimental narrative films as Run Lola Run, Memento, Adaptation and A Cock and Bull Story, with its film-within-a-film playfulness.
While perhaps not as well-known to the average film-goer, Jon Jost is an American filmmaker and artist who has been extremely influential within the American independent and avant-garde scene since the 70s. Writing, directing, photographing, and editing his films, they range from the experimental, to documentaries, and essay-films. The film selected, All the Vermeers in New York (1990), is a good example of Jost’s more conventional, although still experimental and at times infuriating, attempts at narrative. Not to everyone’s taste, Jost’s films demand a lot of patience from the viewer.
The one film being shown in this season which could be considered, perhaps, as unjustly thought of as ‘lost’ is Lodge Kerrigan’s Clean, Shaven (1994). The film may not have received the success or popular adulation that could have been hoped for, or which was deserved, but Kerrigan, still relatively a young director with only three films in his body of work, has a strong career ahead of him which will only bring further attention to his previous films. His second film was Claire Dolan (1998), starring Katrin Cartlidge and Vincent D’Onorfio, and his latest release is Keane (2004), which stars Damien Lewis as a man wandering around New York in search of his missing daughter. So far, Keane has drummed up a lot of critical attention and much of this has commented upon the fact that the film is from the director of Clean, Shaven. While one must relish the idea of the film being exhibited again, this is the only film which feels out of place here.
Where this season does succeed in its intentions is by screening films from directors who were once festival favourites but who have unjustly faded from today’s cinematic canon. Two such names are Jiri Weiss and Leopoldo Torre Nilsson.
Weiss was a director from Prague whose main thematic focus was the Nazi occupation of his country. Studying to be a lawyer, he turned to making documentaries after his first, People in the Sun (Lidé na slunci, 1935), won an award at the Venice Film Festival. Escaping to Paris and then London after the German invasion, he continued to make documentaries in Britain such as The Rape of Czechoslovakia (1939), Eternal Prague (1940) and Before the Raid (1943). He was an important filmmaker working in the limbo between the desolate end of WWII and what has since become known as the Prague Spring of 1968, by which time the Czech New Wave of the 60s, including directors Ivan Passer, Jiri Menzel and Milos Forman, had emerged to become the leading lights of the Czechoslovak film scene. The season is showing Weiss’ first feature film, The Wolf Trap (Vlci jama, 1957), a bleak story set in a small town during the 20s, about a young and ambitious politician who falls in love with his wife’s young protégé. Full of untold passion and stilted frustration, and a great example of Weiss’ talents, The Wolf Trap went on to be nominated for the Golden Lion and won the FIPRESCI award at the Venice Film Festival.
Leopoldo Torre Nilsson is another name that has surprisingly been forgotten about. As Evans and Hebron claim, “Few film-makers in this season are as ‘lost’ as […] Nilsson.” Born in Buenos Aires in 1924, he was the son of one of the pioneering Argentine directors, Leopoldo Torre Rios and in the 40s began working on his father’s films. In the 50s he travelled around Europe studying ‘art-cinema’ and his own films were subsequently criticised in South America for being too ‘European’, despite focusing on Argentinean themes and culture. Basing many of his works on the stories written by his wife, the famous writer Beatriz Guido, Nilsson became renowned in film festivals around the world, with his films garnering great critical acclaim. Continuing to direct into the late 70s, many of Nilsson’s films have been forgotten, some have perished and have indeed been ‘lost’, and the director and his work have, according to Evans and Hebron, “all but disappeared.” The chosen film for the season is Summer Skin (Piel del verano, 1961), a story of a young grandmother who talks her granddaughter into going with a dying young man on a trip to Paris. Again co-written with his wife, Summer Skin has been described as showing Nilsson “at his brilliant visual best”, and will hopefully bring Nilsson’s name back into the cinematic consciousness.
To set about the task of selecting a season of films which demonstrate these issues must have been a difficult undertaking and while the seventeen titles chosen do rightly represent the idea of segments of film history that have been forgotten, overlooked and have, in effect, disappeared, there is a sense that several other lists of films would have been just as effective. Of course, this is precisely the point being made. Why would one list be more relevant than another? If a different list had been selected, would the first selection have disappeared back into the forgotten depths like so much of film history? As this years London Film Festival plays for its 50th year, along comes another 300 films destined either to become critically adored, celebrated cult hits, or the future generation of forgotten ‘lost’ works. Let’s remember this when choosing which films to catch and which ones to give a miss at this year’s festival.
The season runs at the NFT until 30th September.
|
