The presumption behind most ten-best lists is that they include items available to everybody. One can always look at such lists and say, “Too bad I missed such and such. Maybe I’ll catch up with it on video.” But few people seem to be aware that they may never catch up with a film, because it never made it to Chicago at all–either to theaters or to video stores. In a consumer culture like ours we aren’t supposed to think too much about what merchandisers choose to put in front of us; it’s better for business if we assume that new movies just fall from the sky into theaters and video stores–and that those that don’t make it don’t deserve to. However, I see a certain number of movies in other countries every year that don’t make it to town, and sometimes they’re better than the movies that do. Why this happens so often is a matter worth exploring briefly.
That’s why it seems to me that most ten-best lists, not to mention the Academy Awards, function as ratifications of a narrow list of choices; they’re meant to mask our lack of freedom in this process. It reminds me of the scam practiced by a Florida-orange-juice stand advertising “all the orange juice you can drink for a dollar”: you’re given just an ounce, then told, “That’s all you can drink for a dollar.” Each of our ten-best lists and Oscars represents merely a chunk of all we can see for seven dollars, and what we can’t see–no matter how good or important–isn’t even in the running.
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I saw the Spanish version on video, unsubtitled, in Paris last August, but at two separate Welles conferences four years apart–one in New York in 1988, the other in Rome last October–I was able to see about an hour of the extraordinary original edited footage, about half of which has sound. (The voices of both Quixote and Panza are dubbed by Welles himself, who also figures at times as narrator.) To complicate matters further, part of what I saw in Rome was edited footage that doesn’t belong to the Spanish film archives and is therefore currently part of a lawsuit. Whether this footage will ever become available over here is uncertain, though the Italian media obviously have a different sense of priority about such matters–portions of it have already been screened on national TV.
The bitter truth is that no Taiwanese feature has ever received any art-house distribution in the U.S., and only one or two (not including A Brighter Summer Day, alas) have ever shown at the New York film festival. Given our present isolationist climate, this situation is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. How good any particular Taiwanese movie is or how much it might have to say to us is, strictly speaking, irrelevant. To all appearances, distributors and most programmers have decided in advance, probably on the basis of past experience, that “we” couldn’t care less about any feature from Taiwan. (“We,” I should add, omits the Chinese American viewers who can see Taiwanese features, usually subtitled in English, in Chinese theaters or rent them from Chinese video stores. Because English titles that would identify these films are usually absent, the only people likely to seek them out are those who read Mandarin.) The only way A Brighter Summer Day could conceivably turn up here outside of Chinatown is through the Chicago International Film Festival, the Film Center, or Facets Multimedia; having failed to materialize for whatever reasons at any of these venues, it hasn’t much chance of being shown here. Let’s try to be optimistic: maybe it’ll come out here on video before, say, the year 2001. But I wouldn’t take bets on it.
Antigone. If Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet’s latest feature is to reach these shores, it will have to be subtitled. Efforts are being made to raise enough money to carry out this work on Antigone and on Straub and Huillet’s short Black Sin. (In the case of their hour-long Cezanne, which the filmmakers are unwilling to have subtitled, some other form of translation will have to be undertaken.) Considering the difficulty of their films, this is an uphill battle to say the least; but if such dedicated academic supporters of their work as Barton Byg on the east coast and Thom Andersen on the west coast can sustain their passionate project, we’ll eventually get to see these beautiful and uncompromising films in Chicago. (Perhaps the Goethe-Institut, which was responsible for bringing us the exciting and invaluable Haroun Farocki programs early this year, can be enlisted.)
The Day of Despair. Another film shown in Locarno, this world premiere was a curious yet compelling twilight work by the greatest of all Portuguese filmmakers, Manoel de Oliveira, none of whose films has ever been distributed in the States (though nearly all of them have shown in Chicago at one point or another–mainly at the Film Center and more recently at the Chicago International Film Festival). Now in his mid-80s, de Oliveira is the only working director I can think of who began his career during the silent era, but the modernism of The Day of Despair and most of his other work since the 70s shows that he is anything but old hat. Based on the correspondence of the famous and prolific Portuguese writer Camilo Castelo Branco (1825-1890) during the last years of his life, when he was going blind, this is a mellow chamber work about the inner struggle that eventually led to his suicide. Not a great work on the level of either Doomed Love (de Oliveira’s four-hour 1978 adaptation of Castelo Branco’s most famous novel) or Francesca (another de Oliveira feature about this writer’s life, made in 1981), this is still a stirring and serious film, considerably better than his Divine Comedy (1991), a painfully empty exercise shown at the Chicago festival this year. Let’s hope they remember The Day of Despair when the next festival rolls around.
