2009: The year in DVD

There were countless great movies released on DVD in 2009, so what follows isn’t “the best” of them so much as the ones that seemed to cry out most urgently for a wider audience, some quite old, some unjustly forgotten, some previously ill-served on video, all of them very much worth your while.

The Whole Shootin’ Match
Gorgeously packaged and generously supplemented, Watchmaker’s release of Eagle Pennell’s lost 1978 debut reminds us how seldom we see resonant stories from the vast America existing between the costal metropolises. Alternately despicable and deeply endearing, old pals Sonny Carl Davis and Lou Perryman—who was sadly murdered in his Austin home earlier this year—are forever stumbling between get-rich-quick schemes and humbling disasters, between bouts of drunken revelry and bursts of terrifying lucidity. Theirs is a rambling, fumbling, comically inspired waltz across Texas.


Husbands
Another chronicle of male friendship by turns appalling and touching, this 1970 feature is among the best of John Cassavetes, the father of modern American independent film. Following the death of their fourth musketeer, Peter Falk, Cassavetes and Ben Gazarra undertake one long, lost, wasted weekend, getting as far as England before they even realize what the hell happened.

Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
Criterion’s typically deluxe release of Chantal Ackerman’s 1975 ultra-slow-building, devastating debut about three days in the life of a single mother and prostitute is impeccably preserved and encourages hypnotic revisits. Its observance of everyday banalities is so exacting and immersive as to make high drama of the smallest event, and to invite compassion and repulsion in equal measure. It also makes you wonder if Delphine Seyrig isn’t one of the great unheralded actresses of cinema history.

The Exterminating Angel, Simon of the Desert

Two crowning achievements from Luis Buñuel's prolific and under-appreciated Mexican period, the former (1962) finds Mexico City's snotty elite huddling together inexplicably in a house that they just can't seem to leave, while the latter (65) is an outrageously bizarre biopic about a saint who has to contend with Silvia Pinal's Satanic minx tempting him from his pedestal in the desert. It ends with them trapped in a cabaret where young folks gyrate to a dance called 'Radioactive Flesh.' I'm definitely performing a reenactment this New Year's Eve.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle
When you spend as much time as I do compulsively gazing at the young, handsome, sleepy-eyed face of Robert Mitchum in his many films of the 1940s and 50s, it comes as something of a shock to see him as the palpably world-weary protagonist in Peter Yates’ wonderfully detailed, downbeat, Boston-based crime drama, originally released in 1973 and newly resurrected from oblivion by our dear friends at Criterion. Mitchum’s so damned good here as the titular gunrunner trying to retire, one more shifting point in the film’s wintry geometry of crime and punishment.


The Walking Dead
The diamond hiding in Warner’s otherwise pretty negligible Karloff and Lugosi Horror Classics box, this melancholy tale, released in 1936, of a lonely man framed and sent to chair, only to be resurrected and thus able to exact his revenge, is endowed with far more poetry than its generic premise would have you believe, thanks in part to director Michael Curtiz and in part to Boris Karloff, one the true greats, who makes us believe in a sadness that follows us beyond the grave.


A Matter of Life and Death
The astonishingly beautiful use of Technicolor in Powell and Pressburger’s 1946 masterpiece is only one reason to own this sublime Sony reissue. A fantastical romance perched on the edge of mortality—one sufficiently attuned to the strange workings of the mind as to garner accolades from Oliver Sacks—it finds a British WWII pilot tumbling to earth and miraculously surviving, only to be shot heavenward by his love for an American radio operator. Will the celestial tribunal allow this trans-Atlantic couple to stay together?

Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics, Vol. 1
The Sniper (1952), The Lineup (58), Murder By Contract (58): none had been on DVD before, and every one of them is a gem, encapsulating much of what was thrilling, fascinating, daring, and deliciously nasty about the final years of the classic noir cycle. Add Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (53) into the mix and you’ve got yourself one of the best noir collections ever released. Your image of genteel 1950s America will never be the same.


Pigs, Pimps & Prostitutes: 3 Films by Shohei Imamura
Among the most woefully under-represented of Japanese directors in the West, Shohei Imamura was lovingly devoted to the seedy, the undigested, the vulgar, and the desperate masses living at the bottom of the social totem pole, a rather outrageous way to shape one's career in postwar Japan. This trio from Criterion are perhaps not my absolute favourites, but they're nonetheless crazily entertaining, terrifically perverse, often strangely beautiful tales of sex, murder, crime and obsession.

Animals, criminals, labyrinths of desire: three by Shohei Imamura

Sometimes it seems it’s the sheer unruliness that makes it so enduring, this still-underappreciated oeuvre with its gleefully grubby chaos and quasi-anthropological fixation on a postwar Japan inundated with foreigners and overrun by undesirable elements, a mélange that so audaciously breaks away from the officially sanctioned decorum and exquisite classicism exemplified by the films of the revered Yasujiro Ozu. But Shohei Imamura (1926-2006) apprenticed under Ozu, working up through the system as was demanded back then. So while his cinema reads as fiercely antithetical to the Ozu model, it’s equally informed by its discipline and moral query. Imamura was indeed a rebel in the Japanese cinema, an iconoclast and genuine mischief-maker, a middle-class kid obsessed with perversion, “the lower depths,” and basic instincts. But his rebellion had a cause and one hell of a technique. We can see it ripen in the breakthrough films collected in Criterion’s new Pigs, Pimps & Prostitutes: 3 Films by Shohei Imamura.

Set in the port town of Yokosuka, the wildly entertaining Pigs and Battleships (61) is crowded with US troops looking for diversion and locals doling it out, their unease with American vulgarity offset by envy. The title aligns Americans with brute machinery, the Japanese with swine, but comparing people to animals in Imamura should never be reduced to derision. In this cruel world where puppies are drowned, where heads get smashed through windows and dunked in gasoline, where sharing of a can of pineapple rings is the best a girl can expect from her boyfriend in the immediate aftermath of her abortion, regarding human behaviour as animalistic feels somehow affectionate.

Haruko (Jitsuko Yoshimura) works in a bar. Her goofball boyfriend Kinta (Hiroyuki Nagato) joins an extortion gang starting a pig farm. Much of what drives Pigs and Battleships is Haruko’s gradual acceptance of the lack of prospects in her current situation. It’s her escape that lends the story its battered optimism. Yet Kinta also has his journey of self-discovery. “Advised” to take a rap on behalf of a superior, he instead takes a stand in a magnificent climax where men are swallowed up in a sea of swine and a hail of bullets. In collaboration with cinematographer Shinsaku Himeda, Imamura captures the mounting absurdity in captivating camerawork that echoes the jazzy dynamicism of Sam Fuller, trailing hungrily after the action as it careens away.

Haruko became a prototype for Imamura’s heroines, tough, take-no-shit women who typically outfox and outlive the insecure men who attempt to govern them. Tomé (Sachiko Hidari), heroine of The Insect Woman (63), is remarkable not only for her endurance but her adaptability. Raised in a nest of incest and squalor, she survives alternately as a factory worker, labour organizer and prostitute, and the massive economic and ideological shifts undergone by Japan over the course of Tomé’s life are subtly reflected in the lessons she learns through experience.

The film’s original title translates as Japanese Entomology, and this may bring us closer to the heart of Imamura’s perspective. As embodied by Tomé, a people known for their traditionalism are shown as perfectly changeable when faced with issues of survival. Like the insect struggling to traverse a hillside in the film’s opening moments, the final image of Tomé trudging up a muddy country road is a portrait of dogged vitality. Imamura’s camerawork further emphasizes this sense of portraiture through the unpredictable use of freeze-frames, halting scenes not for aesthetic so much as studious pleasure. He lingers on fragments of action, intrudes on the continuity of spectacle. Perhaps it’s also a way of relieving pressure. Just as her father relieves the ache in the nursing Tomé’s under-milked breasts through his infantile suckling, so Imamura eases back and break the image apart when the narrative becomes too weighty.

Intentions of Murder (64), arguably the masterpiece in this superlative trio, appropriates several of its predecessor’s themes and hones them into something less carnally comical but more focused. Sadako (Masumi Harakawa, stunning) is a plump, uncultivated maid who becomes a common-law housewife after her employer impregnates her. Imamura puts Sadako through some harrowing but transformative experiences, arriving at a very strange yet satisfying form of catharsis. She’s assaulted in her home by a bumbling thief. She fends him off impressively, and the fight in her seems to arouse the thief. Rather than commit a straightforward rape however, the thief loosens Sadako’s bonds and attempts to generate something like consent. Their coupling is fraught with ambiguity to say the least. No one films a sex scene quite like Imamura. His bodies seem always to be feverishly clenched by repression and urge.

In keeping with cultural codes, sex with the thief leaves Sadako initially planning suicide before desperately craving food. Hunger trumps tradition. Eventually, despite being stalked by the now romantically obsessed thief—actually a middling nightclub drummer with a fatal heart condition—despite the abuse of her asshole husband—an asthmatic librarian—Sadako will develop a new inner fortitude. And the final section of the film especially, perhaps prompted by a haunting, vertiginous dream sequence, finds Imamura exploring newly expressionistic terrain, a cinematic poetry built upon snow, trains, distance and dread. It’ll leave you wondering where he’ll go next. The answer can be found in The Pornographers (66), also available from Criterion, which rewards expectations generously.

The sound of the mountain: the sublime baseness of Imamura's Ballad of Narayama, now on DVD

It begins and ends with a mountainous landscape buried in snow, and it’s in between these winters that the story unfolds. Orin (Sumiko Sakamoto) is 69-years-old and in superb physical and mental condition. She’s nimble, good humoured, works hard, and has an impressive mouth full of teeth that her eldest son Tatsuhei (Ken Ogata) admiringly refers to as “rock-like.” Yet Orin’s fortitude is a source of embarrassment, something her fellow villagers in fact hold against her, because, to be aligned with local custom, at her age a body should be breaking down. At her age it’s time to say farewell to one’s family and climb on up to Mt. Narayama.

My guess is it’s a mixture of things: honour, superstition, and this agrarian community’s considerable poverty and general bad luck probably all contribute in some way to this ritual that has every member of the village being taken up to neighbouring Narayama by the age of 70 to die. This Darwinian spin on the old folks’ home seems at once brutish and in its way mystically comforting, with the image of Narayama being cultivated as one of heavenly togetherness. Before Orin finally makes her journey to Narayama we’re given a series of highly engaging impressions of just what sort of life she’s leaving behind, one of hardship, struggles against the cruel dictates of nature, and base satisfactions, from hunting and fishing and eating to violence and fornication and the release of bodily waste—the very first piece of action in the film finds two brothers running out of their hovel into the cold morning to piss in the mud and snow. Yet however primitive we deem these characters lives to be, there’s never the slightest implication that they’re any different from the modern audience watching their story unfold. The camera never looks down on them but rather looks them square in the eye.

The Ballad of Narayama (1983), though based on Shichirô Fukazawa’s stories, is classic Imamura, unsentimental but rife with pathos, casually vulgar, emphatically equating man with animals, observant of ritual and absurdities in every sort of scenario. As the master filmmaker, who died in 2006, famously said, “I am interested in the relationship of the lower part of the human body and the lower part of the social structure.” Of course you’d be forgiven for not even knowing who Shohei Imamura is, since his prolific body of work—multiple-award-winning, spanning some 45 years, and of enormous significance to both Japanese and world cinema—is so rarely revived and still so woefully under-represented on DVD. Fortunately Animeigo’s recent release of The Ballad of Narayama makes one of his very best works, winner of the 1983 Palme d’Or, available to a larger audience.

Dead baby litter, bestiality, thievery, vandalism, patricide: the “simple folk” in Imamura’s world are not condescended to or treated as any less corrupted than the rest of us. While the primary narrative here concerns Orin’s preparations for Narayama—preparations that include everything from teaching her daughter-in-law how to fish to secretly knocking out her own teeth!—the film is essentially about examining how a community works, a pursuit that underlies a great deal of Imamura’s films, from his documentaries to The Pornographers (1966), his celebrated porn industry chronicle, to Black Rain (89), his devastating exploration of the lives lived by survivors of the atomic bomb, to his sprawling, magnificent box office bomb The Profound Desire of the Gods (68), a film set on a backward island that’s slowly being consumed by tourist industry, which in certain ways was a rehearsal for The Ballard of Narayama. In every case, how people, however sophisticated, are driven by fear, anxiety, desire and mythical thinking was of central concern to Imamura, and a tremendous, enduring source of humour, insight and resonance.

That Orin’s younger son Risuke (Tonpei Hidari, hilarious) stinks and can’t get laid, that hawks scoop up carrion intended for the villagers, that a ghost lingers shivering behind a tree even after rifles are fired at it, that crops don’t grow or families don’t get along: these are the everyday bursts of chaos that have to be reckoned with in The Ballad of Narayama. The danger with such storytelling is that things get so dispersed it becomes hard to connect with individual characters, but each of the leads here is lovingly detailed and textured, and, in particular, the development of Orin and Tetsuhei’s bond as their days together dwindle builds to a moving conclusion in the film’s mostly wordless final passages, an effect intensified by the weary, troubled but ultimately helpless subtext of Ogata’s performance. Best known in the west for his work in films like Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (85) or Imamura’s Vengeance is Mine (79), Ogata really does have one of the most expressive faces in modern Japanese film.