I never wanted to be a film critic because it is a crass gig for the most part where arrogant poltroons say thumbs up or down to what the anonymous everyman ought(n’t) to spend his money on a ticket to go see this forthcoming weekend. I don’t have anything whatsoever invested in what movies anybody goes to see. I was angry, bitter, and misanthropic by the age of five; I think we can safely conclude that that ship has properly and definitively sailed. I grew over time to quite dislike notable/notorious Chicago-based film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, but on a couple occasions I have read him argue that the main job of a film critic is to give readers useful information they probably don’t have yet and that is a perspective I very much share. Thus and thusly, I am coming at you in this middling late-morning hour to drop hot intel on some choice cinema-related physical media objects of recent vintage and the very highest quality.
I have recently become a fan and collector of small boutique Blu-ray label Deaf Crocodile who specialize in films from Eastern Europe including collections of Soviet-era Russian animation and a sublime Soviet-era Russian western called White Sun of the Desert (Vladimir Motyl, 1969), which was a massive hit throughout the Soviet sphere of influence. The absolute treasure from among the standing Deaf Crocodile roster, however, is their gorgeous three-disk box of films by super obscure Finnish filmmaker Teuvo Tulio, a director who routinely combines deep, excoriating melodrama and a heightened pictorialism that in 1973’s rapturous Sensuela extends to work with primary colours that might even make the great Doug Sirk’s jaw drop, if only perhaps for a moment. Tulio is the traditional Scandinavian with respect to his frankness concerning the body and sexuality. The early films from the 1940s have some light playful nudity redolent of Harriet Andersson running around the beach in the buff for Ingmar Bergman in 1953’s Summer with Monica. I suspect a massive majority of people don’t know it anymore, but it may be helpful to have oneself reminded that the Swedes, in an age before the ubiquity of porn, actually singlehandedly produced a global market for soft-core erotic movies. You won’t really be surprised by that fact when you see Sensuela, which is less titillating than it is outright eye-popping. The provenance of blue movies may no longer seem so hazy or opaque. Sex frankness is public hygiene. Freud said so and so do the people and the landscapes of Finnland…don’t ask me to explain it, it’s complicated. One person to whom Teuvo Tulio is in no way obscure is contemporary deadpan Finish formalist Aki Kaurismäki, who has long hailed his predecessor as the great master. To get a sense of what Tulio’s work is and what it does it might be helpful to think of the above-established masters Douglas Sirk and Aki Kaurismäki…and then add just a touch of Canada’s Guy Maddin…for the purple prose and green fogs, aye?
It remains a bit of a challenge for me to comprehend, but somehow back in the early ‘00s my girlfriend Corinne had seen a few Takashi Miike films before I had seen even one such film. In part, Miike’s breakthrough with Western audiences and markets was hastened along by the extremely strong response a small package of his features elicited at the Vancouver International Film Festival in 1999, that year’s infamous Audition included. A Pan-Asian film festival in Calgary screened Dead or Alive (also '99) at the Uptown Stage and Screen and even though she’d already seen it Corinne and I checked it out together. My immediate response to the film was that it was probably the most exciting and playfully transgressive genre movie I had ever seen and that it definitely had the best ending ever conceived for a Japanese yakuza movie. I remember asking Corinne why nobody else can make movies like that. As a frenetically active director, Miike takes on everything, working on children’s movies, popular manga adaptations, and shocking transgressive provocations (my highest recommendation extends to 2001’s Visitor Q). A polymath director is usually a puzzle player and a problem solver and Miike strikes me as an artist operating parallel to an arch modernist the likes of Georges Perec. 2001’s Agitator, a variegated yakuza epic recently released on Blu-ray from Radiance (where this already long film is joined by an extended version split into two parts), is guerrilla cinema in the strictest sense because, as Miike points out in a recent interview, no official permits were obtained for any exterior shooting. Miike makes his movie encyclopedic by approaching each scene/sequence in terms of the logic, problematics, and formal considerations of the specific scene or sequence in question. How do you crowd as much of the world as you can into a scene? From a formal standpoint, the main concern is how does everything bind and cohere when it’s this radically elastic? I think what we will tend to find is—as in the films of Alain Resnais and Raúl Ruiz—that the roots and tubers running beneath us and throughout us, per Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, are in fact not a red thread but rather the labyrinth we ourselves run as long as it’s got us hooked and at its mercy.
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