In a stroke of well-orchestrated timing, given that September happens to be when school goes back, this month sees the DVD and theater release of La loi du collège (School Law), by Mariana Otero (in stores on the 16th) and the Golden Palm at the last Cannes Film Festival, Entre les murs (The Class), by Laurent Cantet (released on the 24th in France).

The first pioneered a new genre, the documentary series, in relating in six episodes the 1993 school year at the Garcia Lorca Junior High School in St Denis, in the suburbs of Paris.
The second is fiction that takes a school as its setting. For his fourth feature film (after Human Resources, Time Out and Heading South), Laurent Cantet has adapted the book of the same name by François Bégaudeau, which described a French teacher’s year at a junior high in the north east of Paris.

Two “classroom movies”
“Classroom movies” are practically a genre in their own right. Among those that spring to mind, there are comedies (Les Sous Doués (The Under-gifted) by Zidi, Kindergarten Cop by Reitman: the classroom as a backdrop for fooling around), and tragedies (school as the first of oppressive institutions – Young Torless by Schlondorff, If by Lindsay Anderson, etc.). In the second case, sometimes a teacher who is “not like the others” lets in a breeze of freedom (a romantic version as in Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society, or libertarian style as in Seeking Asylum by Marco Ferreri). Sometimes, too, things are reversed and the violence of the outside world bursts in (Blackboard Jungle by Richard Brooks back in 1955, Class 84 by Mark Lester, It All Starts Today by Tavernier or in a completely different style, Elephant by Gus Van Sant…).
Logically, this fertile playground most often attracts filmmakers interested in political and social issues or groups (Ferreri, Kiarostami, Philibert, Tavernier, Wiseman…).
Mariana Otero and Laurent Cantet undeniably belong here. But School Law and The Class do not fit into these categories. Heirs of a complex world in which “big causes” have disappeared, these two films make do with presenting characters grappling with the complexity of their situation. Both of them see school as a watching ground for “human chaos”. Mariana Otero says she did not want to make a film about learning, but about the law: how it is laid down, negotiated and practiced. Cantet’s film is in the same style. What matters here is language. He looks at how speech circulates and the relationship to power and authority, rather than a depiction of learning in the strict sense. For both filmmakers, school is where people confront one another, size each other up, show respect and try to get along. These films are “team players” (The Class ends with a game of soccer between teachers and students), which doesn’t stand in the way of a few close-ups on certain characters. It’s not easy for a film to give equal airtime all the way.

A similar structure: the issue of time and space
To render this confrontation, the two of them chose to be both radical and modest. Both opted for the same “time and space”: a school year and the closed environment of a junior high school.
Classroom, staff room, corridors, yard and school principal’s office: it all happens here, in a life governed by bells (which sound strangely like an alarm at Garcia Lorca Junior High). Inside this space, there is a lot of noise and cameras are on full alert – 3 cameras for Laurent Cantet’s film and the flexibility of a small crew for Mariana Otero. They share an objective: revealing classroom drama by taking their time. One was filmed over a period of a whole year. The other was constructed around (separate) workshops for students and teachers.
By keeping off-screen the private lives of both teachers and students, psychology and overly obvious determinism is avoided. This was particularly risky for the fiction because the film gives little opportunity to identify with the characters, preferring to explore situations of interaction rather than inner worlds.

Fiction / Documentary
In Laurent Cantet’s film, we leave the school grounds only once: at the start of the film, François Marin has a coffee at the bar of a café, then enters the school with two colleagues. The same is true in Mariana Otero’s documentary: a group of teachers, tired of strikes that don’t get anywhere, decide, as a last resort, to visit the School Inspectorate.
The out-of-school scene in The Class is individual. In School Law it is collective. This difference indicates contrasting approaches. For the sake of efficiency, Cantet focuses on the individual, structuring the film around attentive close-ups on faces. During the film, a story emerges. The teacher veers onto slippery ground. Drama slowly builds. The film ends with the expulsion of a student. For Otero, the camera is hand-held. She films the yard and the meetings. There are more people per shot. She takes in the “whole” school.
Paradoxically, the strength of each film lies in its ability to take on the characteristics of the “other” genre. In School Law characters disappear or reappear depending on events. Stories follow on from one another, which makes relevant the use of the series. On the contrary, in The Class, the actor-students and Bégaudeau, who plays the role of the teacher himself, contribute extra reality to the fiction.

Similar intentions
It is no accident that the classrooms chosen were in junior highs with a reputation for being difficult. In junior highs, the whole process of social sorting has not yet taken place. And in so-called tough neighborhoods, the issue of “getting along” is even more urgent.
These films use school to reflect their era, assuming that the outside will invite itself in – starting with the issue of identity and origins. As Khoumba and Esmeralda say to their teacher François Marin, why use the name Bill in an example, rather than Aïssata?
Furthermore, both of them incidentally raise the fundamental (and unresolved) question of what school can pass down today and reveal a world grappling with a possible breakdown in meaning.
We hear over and over, “You move, you run, you shout, you fly, why do you come to school?” looping a teacher’s sentence like a nursery rhyme in the credits of School Law. Fifteen years later, Henriette echoes her in The Class by saying to her teacher at the end of the year, “I didn’t learn anything this year. I don’t get what we’re doing.”
Through François Marin and the staff at Garcia Lorca Junior High neither of these two films gives an answer but they both give the question a real workout.

Emmanuelle Mougne.

More details about School Law available now on DVD and VOD.
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Not adding subtitles is a choice. It’s the one that Xavier Brillat, Dancing’s co-director with Patrick Mario Bernard and Pierre Trividic, has made for Haruki Yukimura & Nana-Chan, in VOD on Dissidenz after its screening in many film festivals like the very precious International Documentary Festival of Marseille (FIDM). It’s useless to bring more precisions than the director gives to the spectator – anyway, on Brillat’s own accord, nothing is said here but very common things, shibari master’s indications to his model, actors directions and commentaries for the foreign film crew and the photographers of the magazine SM Sniper. We enter Xavier Brillat’s movie with no back reference, like any stranger in Japan : fascinated by the art, by the traditions shown little by little through the moves and the codes, a whole living world we just don’t know nothing about, or so few.
Not subtitling, is not continuing to propagate the idea of a strange Japan, ununderstandable, but it is a way to enter a culture by the most concrete and immediate path : moves, noises, intonations. It was the description of Roland Barthes in Empire of the signs, his famous essay about Japan : Orient must be discovered by its signs and its rustles, by groping, as a blind. We enter here in Japan by the trembling of the fluorescent trees that surrounds the house, by the creaking of the ropes that the master ties around the body of Nana-Chan – Shibari is the name of this as artistic as erotic art – by the focused look of Yukimura and the pleasure and effort masks of his model. Brillat films the work of the performance : a web is spined, a picture is drawn which will be shown in a final shot. Figures are done and undone, nothing lasts long, incomfort is temporary, attention focuses on knots, folds and links. These links which ties the audience to the object of his desire : elastic distance put by the device of Xavier Brillat which permits to breifly catch fragments of Japan.

Antoine Thirion

Buy the DVD or download the film here.

Straub & Huillet’s complete works should be available within two years in four boxsets thanks to French DVD publisher Editions Montparnasse. For now, let’s pay tribute to the release of the first boxset that gathers five of the couple’s German films: their first two films that derived from Heinrich Boll’s stories -Machorka Muff in 1962 and Not Reconciled or Only Violence Helps Where Violence Rules in 1964-65- and three films in relation with composer Arnold Schoenberg -Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg’s Accompaniment to a Cinematic Scene (1972), Moses and Aaron (1974) and From Today Until Tomorrow (1996). It’s natural to begin with these films: i) in Germany, which was the couple’s first country of adoption, with the couple who straightaway permit the dialectique to take place in life, ii) with the horror of Nazism, which formed the core of their cinema from the beginning, iii) with the music that has always had a crucial importance in their work. To be continued with the release of an “Italian period” coming soon in about a year…

Bastien Hader

In order to adapt La Duchesse de Langeais, Jacques Rivette and his co-writers Pascal Bonitzer and Christine Laurent have been looking for one of the first titles of Balzac’s novel : “Don’t touch the axe“. These words, which had been pronounced by a guardian in Westminster in order to warn a visitor who was curious of the weapon which served to behead King Charles the First, were used by Balzac for rising a political statement. At the time of French Restoration, aristocracy flew from the popular neighborhoods of Paris, concentrated power in fancy Faubourg Saint-Germain and used it for itself. Then, separated from the people, aristocracy was less powerful than it thought and could be chopped more easily than if it was in good terms with the nation.
Something remains from this statement in Rivette’s movie: the choice of a an actress of character, Jeanne Balibar, and of a more physical actor, Guillaume Depardieu. One is diaphanous and ethereal whereas the other is fiery and rough. Both are astonishing in the parts of an aristocratic femme fatale and a bonapartist general, torn by a passion which will never turn concrete. In fact, the novel has been chosen according to the actors.
In the bonus materials, Depardieu says he was surprised that Rivette didn’t submit him to his usual method, improvisation, and that he had to follow a very precise script. The fidelity to Balzac’s literature was equal to the respect of the actors’ identities. We have rarely seen such an embodiment of literature and History.

Bastien Hader

The more Climates will be seen, the more Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s methodical and drastic personality will become legendary. After Kasaba, Clouds of May and Distant, the movie depicts the breaking off of a couple, performed by Ceylan and his wife. The director proves he’s one of the worthiest sons of Antonioni : like in L’Avventura, nothing will remedy to this rupture. Each feeling that tries to recover the memory of this lost love won’t be anything but violent, absurd, irrational, almost grotesque. That’s why only one season misses in these climates, the spring when things can be born again. Instead, Isa shows how cruel and cutting he can be toward each new woman he meets, while his wife Bahar seems to freeze and disappear in the white snow of a Turkish winter.
Precise, scrupulous : these adjectives don’t apply less to the director than to the image itself. It made the movie’s fame after its HD screening in Cannes, where he won a prize in 2006. Ceylan has taken the most of the extravagant sharpness of digital technologies, which make every hair, every pore of the skin, visible. This sharpness talks by itself. That’s why the french DVD studio, Pyramide Video, doesn’t insist on it with more than a making-of, prefering to interview instead the sound editor, Olivier Do Huu, on the sound’s equal sharpness. Doing the exact opposite of what we expected allows us to learn that everything here is artificial. The fact that these Climates are far from the naturalism the title suggests makes the rupture more violent and sublime.

Antoine Thirion.

See the DVD details

Irezumi (Tattoo) may not be Yasuzo Masumura’s most famous movie, but it is one of his most emblematic ones. Masumura, an atypical and precursory film maker under contract to Daiei Japanese studio, studies for three years at the Centro Sperimenrale della Cinematografia in Roma. When he comes back to Japan in 1957, his stories of desire and asserted perversions pave the way to the New Wave of Oshima and Imamura. But he is still a studio film maker who sometimes has to be content with ridiculous conditions of shooting and learns to master them perfectly.
1966 is his most prolific year. He directs four movies, among which the famous Red Angel and the deliberately inflammatory Irezumi, an adaptation of two short stories written by Junichiro Tanizaki, a most important writer having shared Ozu’s path and his taste for the West. Masumura makes a diagnosis on Japanese society: overburdened with the ideological pressure of their modern governments, the Japanese have sacrificed their desires of their own accord. In Irezumi, young Otsuya is forced to work in a geisha’s house by unscrupulous men. As if she was under the influence of the spider tatooed on her back, she soon makes of her customers the victims of a revenge all the more devastating as it seems to be irrepressible, systematic, instinctive and with no selfish motives. The terrible beauty of the movie comes from a technicolor reduced to the red and black of the tatooist’s inks. Or also from its Cinemascope format which, for once, does not aim imposing panoramas, but at catching the lascivious and poisonous lying body of Ayako Wakao, with whom Masumura had a tempestuous relationship and made his greatest movies.

Retrospective at the French Cinémathèque from August 22nd to October 14th.
Available in a set released by Ciné Malta, along with The Blind Beast.
Also available are Seisaku’s Wife and Passion.

Antoine Thirion.

This summer, for the French moviegoer in search of a little heat, Delirious was a possible destination. The diehard independent filmmaker Tom DiCillo recounts the meeting between a small-time paparazzi (Steve Buscemi) and a homeless youth who becomes his assistant (Michael Pitt). To teach him the trade, he simply opens the trunk of his car with pride and shows him where he stores all the equipment and accessories necessary for his next scoop.

The Photomobile

Has this existed since the dawn of time? No, only since the time of Weegee, an American photographer who was born in Eastern Europe in 1899 and died in Manhattan in 1968, and to whom the Musée Maillol has dedicated a retrospective from June 20 to October 15 of vintage prints gathered with passion and patience by the collector Hendrik Berinson. Weegee made two self-portraits: one in 1941 in a grungy darkroom that he renamed “my headquarters”, and the other the following year, sitting on a stool in front of the open trunk of a Chevy Coupe fitted out as a photomobile. “My car became my home. (…) I kept everything in there, an extra camera, cases of flash bulbs, extra-loaded holders, a typewriter, firemen’s boots, boxes of cigars, salami, infra-red films for shooting in the dark, uniforms, disguises, a change of underwear, and extra shoes and socks. I was no longer tied to the teletype machine at police headquarters. I had my wings. I no longer had to wait for crime to come to me; I could go after it. The police radio was my life line. My camera… my life and my love… was my Aladdin’s lamp.” (Lire la suite…)

Forbidden Planet is one of the most important landmarks in Science Fiction movies history. Adapted from William Shakespeare’s Tempest, the movie starts with a rescue team searching for the survivors of an exploring crew left on Planet Altair IV decades ago. They’ll meet there the only survivor, Dr. Morbius, living here with his daughter born and raised on the hostile planet… Forbidden Planet was the very first science-fiction movie of the MGM and the very first picture of the genre shot in cinemascope and in colors. It also was the first movie in history to feature an entirely synthetic soundtrack. From design to themes, Forbidden Planet was a major influence for science-fiction films and is still now one of the most brilliant productions of the genre.

The collector DVD which is presented here contains three movies featuring the legendary Robby the Robot (Invisible Boy and an episode of The Thin Man TV series), a miniature reproduction of the robot, many documentaries about the making of Forbidden Planet and his heritage, deleted scenes and much more ! A wonderful package for all the lovers of this unforgettable classic and for all curious to discover this truly remarkable work which for ever changed science fiction movies history.