Island of Lost Souls
In the intro to Exile Cinema, I lay out the parameters of the book's subject selection process — that the filmmakers "must be alive, and at least potentially productive," and that, in terms of their "visibility in the English-speaking world’s media eye," they should have "as little as possible. The filmmakers’ work could be distributed in the United States, but only sparsely, or badly, or invisibly."
Given that, I go on to vomit out a list of candidates who did not happen to be included: "...Jacques Rivette, Peter Watkins, Abderrahmane Sissako, Wojiech Has, Karoly Makk, Jan Nemec, Judit Elek, Craig Baldwin, Juraj Jakubisko, Claude Faraldo, Artavazd Peleshian, Elia Suleiman, Fred Kelemen, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Miklos Jancso, Alain Resnais, Hur Jin-ho, Soulyemane Cisse, Yvonne Rainer, Jan Jakob Kolski, Jean-Marie Straub/Danielle Huillet, Bruce Conner, Otar Iosseliani, Shinji Aoyama, Manuela Viegas, Gianluigi Toccafondo, Michael Snow, Alex de la Iglesias, Zeki Demirkubuz, Jem Cohen, Darius Mehrjui, Faouzi Bensaidi, Jean Rouch, Tian Zhuangzhuang, Helke Sander, Alexei German (Sr. & Jr.), Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, Fernando Solanas, Jan Lenica, Youri Nourstein, Hans-Jurgen Syberberg, Jean Rollin, Lee Chang-dong, Roy Andersson, Ann Hui, Youssef Chahine, Yim Ho, Peter Solan, Lewis Klahr, Mati Kutt, Nils Malmros, Kazuo Hara, Andrew Kotting, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Nonzee Nimibutr, Pjer Zalica, Goran Paskaljevic, Vera Chytilova, Kira Muratova, Harun Farocki, Werner Schroeter, Lisandro Alonso, Lucrecia Martel, Vitali Kanevsky, Teresa Villaverde, Park Kwang-su, Jang Sun-woo, Keren Yedaya, Marta Meszaros, Wisit Sasanatieng, William Greaves..."
It's an interesting talking point — and the more you talk about it, the more appallingly clear it becomes that American distributors and media keep us pretty much blind and deaf as to what the global medium is producing. I'd love to hear more, as comments — names I left out, arguments for and against — and I'll post 'em.
"...salve for the cineaste’s lonesome fury" -- !!! i love this closing phrase from the description of exile cinema on the suny press site.
as someone who views himself as a furiously lonesome cinephile (g-d forbid i should upset dave kehr on this point, much less others), your point is well-served by the fact that i don't recognize nearly half the names you mention in your intro. and, of those i do recognize, it's hugely embarrassing to note that i didn't realize how many of these directors have been active well into the 21st century -- how many people can name another solanas film after hour of the furnaces?
to this extent, we're all exiles, filmmakers as much as audiences who might be well disposed to embrace those filmmakers if they had any real way of finding out about their work. i mean, how many people have actually SEEN hour of the furnaces, much less solanas' other work? it certainly is an issue of distribution, of reels to theaters as much as to the video stores. even here in the, ahem, "greater new york metropolitan area," the amount of screens potentially dedicated to the work by the directors you list gets smaller and smaller as time wears on. and not to beat up on one of the outlets that publishes your work, but then you have an outfit like ifc, whose exclusive deal with blockbuster equals versions of films "edited" per blockbuster's policy of promoting "unrated" softcore but never anything rated nc-17. maybe something like 4 months may avoid being truncated, but what else would go under the knife, as it were?
it's hard out here for a cineaste/phile, and even with so much information available on the web now, harder still to break through that sense of exile. ask alex cox fans, one name i'd add. hell, you could add godard for that matter...
Reply to this
You've mentioned a couple, but you could add more or less any filmmaker from Africa to that list. Not all are, I think, inherently worth championing just because they're from Africa, but there are fascinating directors out there whose work is essentially invisible. Even when a film gets some mainstream coverage, like Mahamat Salah Haroun's film "Daratt" a year ago, there's no sign of a DVD release, while we can but dream of seeing Cisse's earlier films on DVD. Some films are available through outfits like California Newsreel, but they're not available through Netflix, the kind of thing that would give them wider visibility.
Reply to this
Lav Diaz, Catherine Breillat, Eugene Green, Julio Medem, Pedro Costa, Dariush Mehrjui, Abbas Kiarostami, Wang Bing, Manoel de Oliveira, Lou Ye, Abel Ferrara, Jose Luis Guerin, Fatih Akin, Jia Zhangke, Philippe Garrel, Alexander Sokurov, Tsai Ming-liang, anyone with the last name Makhmalbaf, and pretty much every genre or avantgarde filmmaker who doesn't work in English (and many who do). And while the book addresses some East Asian genre cinema or popular cinema - I'm always happy to see someone writing about Tsui - that material is mostly critically 'safe' as a subject. It's certainly worthy of attention - but so are films by Syed Noor or Daniel Calparsoro or Santiago Segura* or Ashutosh Gowariker, or Abdisalam Aato or...
I'm not trying to be critical, but rather to laud this as a step toward greater representation of these filmmakers, and to recognize that there's much more work to be done (which, of course, you know).
* OK, maybe not Segura.
Reply to this
...Kim Ki-duk, Claire Denis, Olivier Assayas, Agnes Varda...
Very happy to see a chapters on Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Martin Arnold in there, by the way.
Reply to this
I've been eagerly awaiting this book. A few more names deserving wider recognition: Pen-Ek Ratanaruang, Joao Pedro Rodrigues, Julian Hernandez, Brillante Mendoza, Abderrhamane Sissako, and Pere Portabella.
Reply to this
What about: Kim Dae-sung, Vimukthi Jayasundara, Sophie Filleres, David Jarab, Aaron Katz, Catalin Mitelescu, Ryuichi Hiroki, Usama Muhammad, Gu Changwei, Bertrand Blier, Alexei Fedorchenko, Paul Rosdy, Brice Cauvin...
Reply to this