Hal Hartley revisits his feature debut, The Unbelievable Truth, now available in a [gulp] twentieth anniversary edition. Oh, and keep your eyes peeled for Kelly Reichardt. Yeah, that Kelly Reichardt.
Joe Queenan is actually on-the-nose funny for the first time in, well, it's been a while since his theory of part 3s. His target? The art cinema.
The arthouse film is not interchangeable with the foreign film. Many excellent foreign films are merely commercial films that happen to be in a foreign language. A basic rule of thumb: if Jean Reno stars in a film, it is not an arthouse film. If Penelope Cruz is speaking English on screen, it is not an arthouse film. If she is speaking Spanish, it almost certainly is. There are a few examples of arthouse films that include martial arts – Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon – but not many. In fact, that may be the only one.
Typically, an arthouse film has an intrusive, overbearing soundtrack that won't give the audience a chance to relax for one second. Often these films are scored by the remorseless minimalist Philip Glass, whose music is at least as annoying as anything that takes place on screen. Integral components of a good arthouse film are a song or two by Leonard Cohen, Björk, tango master Astor Piazzolla and perhaps something introspective by Bach, though Albinoni will do in a pinch. You will rarely hear Slade or the Four Seasons or Wham! in an arthouse film. You are unlikely to hear Mariah Carey. And if you do, the director is being malevolently ironic.
Finally, so many clever-boots critics invoked "the cinema of attractions" in reviews of that 3D nonfiction flick burning up the box office, I thought it'd be servicey to share a recent University of Chicago interview [by an old classmate, as it happens] with the man who formulated the phrase that pays, Tom Gunning. An excerpt:
Do you feel taken seriously in film studies, at the University and more broadly? No. It's still a struggle. And I'm not sure it won't always be a struggle. I sometimes think it's generational. I don't think it ever occurs to younger people that film is not an art form.
When I first came to Chicago, I was talking to someone in History—I won't mention the name. I said, "I'm kind of a historian. I'm a film historian." And he said, "Hah! And that makes you a historian?"
Do you remember the first movie you ever saw? Yes—Escape from Fort Bravo (1953). I remember the scene where a group of cavalrymen are crawling through the desert, and Indians are shooting at them. My memory was literally a shower of arrows. I thought later, I'm sure that was my kid memory. But it came on television, and sure enough, it was almost exactly the way I remembered it.
But you always wonder what's the "first" of anything. Because I work with early film, there always used to be this habit of [trying to identify] "the first close-up" and so on. And I tell my students, no one will use that word in this class, because we don't know. You could say "the first you've seen," or "the earliest one that's being discussed" but to say "the first" doesn't work, even with your own memory.
Do you watch movies for fun? Are you able to stop working and have the escapist experience? Do I ever turn my brain off? Certainly, but that's probably when I watch the news. I really do enjoy movies. I go for the pleasure. Avant-garde movies are pleasurable to me. Sometimes that pleasure is not a massage. It's a real challenge and it's difficult.
This is something that you encounter, particularly among undergraduates: "I don't want to take your course, because I want to just have fun at the movies, and you're going to ruin the fun." But I would say, "If I ruin some type of fun, I'm going to give you another type."
