Rent or Buy (From The Oxford Times)

Rent or Buy

8:01am Thursday 5th November 2009

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Although we seem to be spoilt for choice, DVD watchers in this country get short shrift when it comes to screen classics. The market is stuffed with American dross, as Z-grade horrors and actioners clutter up the release schedules along with disease of the week teleplays and biopics of non-entities who once made the front page of a scandal rag. But where are the gems from Hollywood's golden age or those quaintly amateurish indigenous efforts our grandparents used to watch?

With fewer oldies being shown on terrestrial or satellite television, DVD is now the only place we're likely to find the hits of yesteryear. But you only have to check online to see how better served our overseas cousins are, particularly in France and the United States, when it comes pictures by actors and directors whose entire catalogues should be readily available on demand, as is already the case with recording artists, via CD and downloads. The sooner film institutes around the world reach an agreement to place their entire archives online at affordable prices the better!

It's not all gloom, however, as a handful of companies are still devoted to issuing the past masters and this week's crop provides a handy introduction to half a century of world cinema.

Jean Renoir once described The Golden Coach (1952) as 'a translation into English of a French film in the Italian style'. Based on a play by Prosper Merimée and inspired by the music of Vivaldi, the first part of Renoir's theatrical trilogy - which was completed by French Cancan (1954) and Elena et les Hommes (1956) - is also a highly cinematic comedy, whose disregard for narrative convention anticipates the nouvelle vague.

Set in 18th-century colonial Peru, the storyline is pure whimsy, as commedia dell'arte star Anna Magnani steals the hearts of a Spanish viceroy, a toreador and a fellow troubadour. Some of the support playing is a little stilted, but Magnani is as ravishing as Claude Renoir's photography and Mario Chiari's décor, while the direction audaciously toys with the notion that the whole world is a stage. Indeed, with the sets becoming increasingly stylised and Magnani directly addressing the audience, it's impossible to distinguish between artifice and reality. Powell and Pressburger similarly excelled at this filmic theatricality, but Renoir surpassed them for wit, artistry and sheer joie de vivre.

The mood is more sombre, however, in Georges Franju's La Tête contre les Murs (1959). Adapted by star Jean-Pierre Mocky from a Hervé Bazin novel with the intention of creating a Gallic Rebel Without a Cause, this was singer Charles Aznavour's first acting assignment and he steals the show as the epileptic whom the well-heeled Mocky befriends after he is committed to an asylum by lawyer father Jean Galland for irrationally vandalising his desk. Frustrated at being treated as a guinea pig by competing psychiatrists, maverick Paul Meurisse and traditionalist Pierre Brasseur, Mocky talks Aznavour into escaping to Paris, where he hopes to find sanctuary with girlfriend, Anouk Aimée.

Mocky has originally intended to direct himself, but Franju (who was venturing into features on the back of several acclaimed shorts) contributes an oppressive sense of enclosure and ennui that is decidedly missing from the melodrama. He is much assisted by cinematographic veteran Eugene Schüfftan, whose use of brooding contrasts of light and shade to convey the complexities of the psyche is, in turn, complemented by Maurice Jarre's disconcerting mix of lyrical orchestration, chiming bells and abrupt percussion.

Released the same year, The Bridge was one of the first West German films to reach an international audience. Although the country produced many features in the 1950s tackling the aftermath of the Second World War - including the so-called `rubble films' that are long overdue a DVD release - few dealt with the conflict itself.

Actor Bernhard Wicki made his debut as writer-director with this docudramatic reconstruction of an actual incident, about seven teenage recruits who were ordered to defend a strategically irrelevant bridge in the last days of the American advance. Rarely has the rigidity of Nazi discipline or the futility of warfare been as powerfully exposed as in this Oscar-nominated drama, which is not only forcibly directed, but also impeccably played by its suitably inexperienced cast.

This must have been a thrilling time to be a filmgoer, as not only were New Waves beginning to break across Europe and Latin America, but screen titans like Luis Buñuel, Akira Kurosawa and Satyajit Ray were still at the peak of their powers. Two key features in the latter's artistic development are now available to rent or buy.

Examining religious fanaticism, Goddess (1960) was Ray's first film after the completion of the Apu trilogy that made his name. It was briefly banned for being disrespectful towards the goddess Kali. But this is as much a study of rural superstition and the passing of a traditional way of life as a calculated assault on the Hindu faith.

Exceptionally played, if occasionally melodramatic, it also explores the position of women in Indian society, as Chhabi Biswas destroys 17 year-old daughter-in-law Sharmila Tagore after becoming convinced she is a divine reincarnation. Departing from his customarily rigorous realism, Ray enhances his story with some hauntingly stylised imagery, which is delicately photographed by Subrata Mitra.

Satyajit Ray was a huge admirer of Rabindranath Tagore and he made Two Daughters (1961) to mark the centenary of the author's birth. There were originally three vignettes, but `Monihara' was cut from export prints as the limited budget prevented the subtitling from being completed to deadline.

The remaining tales charmingly explore the difficulties faced by young women in love. In `Postmaster', an orphaned girl becomes attached to her employer, who repays her affection by helping with her education. `Samapti' focuses on a young man who rejects an arranged union, only to discover that his own choice of bride resents being forced into matrimony. Tagore's skill as a storyteller is never in doubt. But the film's success is due as much to Ray's observant eye and the gifted playing of Anil Chatterjee and Chandana Bannerjee in the first segment and Soumitra Chatterjee and Aparna Das Gupta in the second.

If Ray depicted a conservative society stubbornly resisting change, French cinema was in the vanguard of the socio-cultural forces that were transforming the West. Yet even some of the most significant French pictures of this period remain largely unknown, including Serge Bourguignon's Sundays and Cybèle (1962), which was the first feature from the nouvelle vague to be nominated for, and then to win, an Academy Award (for Best Foreign Language Film). With incredible central performances from Hardy Krüger and 12 year-old Patricia Gozzi, it is a truly touching tale of two stricken souls finding solace and innocent love in each other's companionship.

Based on Bernard Eschassériaux's novel, Les Dimanches de Ville d'Avray, the story follows Krüger's war-scarred bomber pilot, who has returned from a tour of duty in Indo-China and retreated into semi-seclusion in Paris in the hope of coming to terms with accidentally killing a Vietnamese girl on crash-landing his plane. One evening when he is spending time at the railway station, he sees a young girl pleading with her father not to take her to the orphanage that will be her new home. A few days later, the chance presents itself for Krüger to pose as her parent, which he does. She gets to spend her Sundays outside of the confines of the orphanage, he finds satisfaction in making her happy. Both of them discover a trusting, innocent love in their time together and begin to put their scarred pasts behind them. Inevitably though, their make-believe world is threatened when a neighbour spots them together and word spreads among Krüger's acquaintances about his illicit relationship - along with doubt regarding his motives.

In many ways, this is the sentimental, though never mawkish, equivalent to Louis Malle's madcap romp, Zazie dans le Métro (1960). Indeed, there is considerable charm in Krüger and Gozzi's interaction, with Gozzi having a more intuitive understanding of the man's pain than his nurse girlfriend, Nicole Courcel. The sequence in which Krüger risks his neck to get Gozzi a church weathervane as a Christmas present is particularly heart-rending, with Henri Decaë's discreet monochrome naturalism counterpointed by Maurice Jarre's mellifluent score. A sensitive tale of the redemptive possibilities of love, this is genuinely a lost gem.

Jacques Tati's Trafic (1971) is also overdue reappraisal, if only because it contains the final appearance of Monsieur Hulot, who is detailed to escort a revolutionary camping-car from Paris to a motor show in Amsterdam. However, he is waylaid by a series of increasingly bizarre mishaps and is fired for arriving after the exhibition is over.

Having been bankrupted by the failure of Playtime (1967), Tati was considering a series of Hulot comedies for television when Dutch documentarist Bert Haanstra persuaded him to make another feature. Having commissioned around a dozen cartoons based on motoring mayhem, the pair agreed to collaborate on a picture in which Tati would star and that Haanstra would direct (in order to secure Dutch subsidies).

However, while Haanstra was shooting location footage in Amsterdam, Tati prevaricated over his screenplay and flirted with another backer who could ensure his artistic independence. Thus, with Haanstra quitting in disappointment, Tati was forced to close down Yes, M. Hulot! in December 1969. Yet he was back at work on Trafic the following summer, even though he needed director-to-be Lasse Hallström and the Swedish TV crew shooting a `making of' documentary to muck in during the last three days.

Considering how much comic business was improvised during the production, this is a surprisingly structured and cogent satire, whose mockery of the motoring mentality, the faddishness of gadgets and society's growing inability to communicate makes it still seem modern and relevant over three decades later. Although it's typically packed with moments of incidental amusement, Tati also devised two striking set-pieces. The first depicts a gaggle of besuited, self-important businessmen resembling a secondment from the Ministry of Silly Walks as they step over the strings marking out the exhibition hall, while the second reclaims the car crash from Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend (1967), as Tati even slows down the Sennett-like carnage to show a Citroën DS performing a balletic two-wheeled leap (which is only spoiled by the reversing cars in the background betraying how the stunt was achieved).

Although it can't always be heard above the cacophonous traffic, the score was composed by Charles Dumont, who had written `Je ne regrette rien' for Edith Piaf. It proved a happy coincidence, as Tati had risked his private happiness to make his films and it's somewhat apt that Hulot, at least, was allowed to disappear into the crowd with Maria the PR girl (Maria Kimberly) for a possibly happy ending.

Tati would have recognised the unsung Polish maestro Wojciech Has's genius for subverting time, space and truth. `In the dream that is a film,' Has once stated, `one often has a singular time loop. Things of the past, issues long gone, are overlaid on to current reality. The subconscious invades reality. Dreams thus allow us to reveal, to show the future.' He certainly made dazzling use of such temporal, spatial and psychological Cubism in The Hour-Glass Sanatorium (1973).

Five years had passed since Has completed his first colour venture, The Doll (1968), during which time he had become fascinated by the writings of the Polish Kafka, Bruno Schulz, who had been shot on the street by the Gestapo in 1942. Incorporating the journey motif that had recurred in all of Has's finest films, this palimpsest of Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass follows Jan Nowicki as he boards a decepit train to visit dying father, Tadeusz Kondrat. However, once Nowicki arrives at the crumbling, cobweb-strewn clinic abutting a graveyard, he seems to enter a new dimension, as Dr Gustow Holoubek - who has discovered a way of reactivating the past and, thus, keeping Kondrat alive - has sent time into reverse and Nowicki finds himself recalling his own childhood in a Hasidic shtetl, as well as dreams, thoughts and fantasies that he had long forgotten.

From the moment he settles into a compartment filled with somnolent Jews and topless women, sexual, biblical and historical allusions jostle for Nowicki's attention, along with the Emperor Maximilian, some mechanical soldiers, a band of spear-wielding natives, waxwork figures who become animated with the help of a stamp album, and nurse Janina Sololowska, vamp Halina Kowelska and waif Bozena Adamek. Even the Three Wise Men appear to offer Nowicki advice on buying on credit.

The blind ticket collector who sees all is one of many sinister portents of the genocide to come, but Has never strains to convey the imminent decimation of Yiddish civilisation. Indeed, cinematographer Witold Sobocinski and production designers Andrzej Plocki and Jerzy Skarzynski invest the temporal and spatial transitions with the seamless logic of a subconscious reverie, while simultaneously reinforcing the dizzying aura of decay, dislocation and dejection that permeates every scene. Wilfully impenetrable, this defies repeated viewings. But it's thrillingly evocative and provocative in equal measure and leaves an indelible impression.

Just as Has deserves to be better known in this country - The Noose, Farewells (both 1958) and How to Be Loved (1963) are surely worth issuing on disc alongside The Saragossa Manuscript (1965) - so does the doyenne of Hungarian cinema, Marta Mészáros.

The winner of the special jury prize at Cannes, Diary for My Children (1982) was the first part of a superb `Diary' quartet that was completed by Diary for My Loved Ones (1987), Diary for My Father and Mother (1990) and Little Vilma: The Last Diary (2000) - all of which will hopefully follow in due course. Based on Mészáros's own experiences in early 1950s Budapest, the film presents such an accurate snapshot of a nation coming to terms with the strictures of Communism that it was long withheld after incurring the wrath of the censors.

Following the death of her parents in exile in the Soviet Union, teenager Zsuzsa Czinkóczi comes to stay with her mother's friend, Anna Polony, and quickly forms a bond with her new `grandfather' and `uncle', Pál Zolnay and Jan Nowicki. However, as Polony begins to rise through the ranks of the local Party (despite some guilty secrets in her past), Czinkóczi feels herself coming under surveillance and takes solace in regular visits to the movies. Eventually, however, she asks the maverick Nowicki to help her escape Polony's increasingly authoritarian regime.

Strikingly photographed in melancholic monochrome by Nyika Jancsó (who was Mészáros's son with the iconic director Miklós Jancsó), this is a challenging mix of historical reconstruction and personal memoir. Mészáros makes few compromises as she cuts between archive footage, flashbacks and intense passages of domestic drama. Yet she succeeds in capturing both the mood of a nation in the grips of Stalinist tyranny and the impact that such unceasing suspicion and suppression had on a spirited young woman's intellectual and psychological development.

In 1976, Ingmar Bergman also fell foul of the state when he was accused of tax evastion. He was bitterly hurt by his hounding by both the authorities and the press, especially as it was clear that he was not personally responsible for the irregularities. Feeling betrayed and deeply ashamed by his public humiliation, he came close to a nervous breakdown and decided to quit Sweden for West Germany.

Bergman's anger and disappointment coloured his first venture in exile, The Serpent's Egg (1977), which prompted director Kjell Grede to ask him why a man with such a passionate love of life made films that were so melancholic and fatalistic. So, while back on the Baltic island that had been his home for a decade to make Fårö-Dokument 79 (1979), Bergman began writing a screenplay that drew on his childhood as the son of the chaplain to the Swedish royal family and amounted to `a huge tapestry filled with masses of colour and people, houses and forests, mysterious haunts of caves and grottoes, secrets and night skies'.

As he wrote in his journal: `By playing, I can overcome the anguish, loosen the tension, and triumph over destruction. I want at last to show the joy that I carry within me in spite of everything, joy that I have so seldom and so poorly given life to in my work. Being able to portray energy and drive, capability for living, kindness. That wouldn't be so bad for once.' The picture that restored Bergman's faith in himself and the wider world was Fanny and Alexander (1982).

The opening segment revolves around a family Christmas in the opulent home of an Uppsala theatrical family in 1907. Ten year-old Bertil Guve and his younger sister Pernilla Alwin watch with fascination, if incomprehension as the grown-ups over-indulge in pleasures that are more carnal than Christian. But the festivities are curtailed by the death of the children's father and their lives take a further turn for the worse when mother Ewa Fröling marries martinet bishop Jan Malmsjö. Stifled by their stepfather's Lutheran austerity and hypocritical tyranny, the two siblings are rescued from virtual captivity by Jewish moneylender Erland Josephson, who, along with his puppet-making nephew, restores them to a world of magic and imagination within the safety of his antique shop.

With its obvious references to past and present traumas, Bergman clearly intended this sprawling saga to exorcise some ghosts. But he was also determined to wreak allegorical revenge on those who had driven him from home, while also confounding the critics who had declared him a spent force after From the Life of the Marionettes (1980). Yet even though he announced that this would be his last picture, Bergman found funding hard to come by, especially as he wished to make a five-hour television version of the story in addition to a 188-minute feature. Finnish friend Jörn Donner, who was head of the Swedish Film Institute, eventually brokered a co-production deal for the $6 million required for a period extravaganza with some 60 speaking parts and 1200 extras. It proved money well spent, as the film won four Academy Awards and revived Bergman's critical reputation.

Pedro Costa has never enjoyed a particularly high profile outside the most rarefied arthouse circles. But the release of his first feature, O Sangue/ Blood (1989), will finally afford armchair aficionados the opportunity to appreciate the Portuguese master's distinctive talent.

The story centres on brothers Pedro Hestnes and Nuno Ferreira, who are largely left to fend for themselves by their ailing father, Canto e Castro. When he dies, Hestnes decides to protect his 10 year-old sibling from the truth and relies on the help of teacher Inês de Medeiros to keep both their creditors and uncle Luís Miguel Cintra at a safe remove. However, Ferreira is eventually taken to live with his cousin Miguel Fernandes, leaving Hestnes to dream of one day reuniting his family with De Medeiros.

From its arresting opening, when the screen plunges into disconcerting darkness after Casto slaps Hestnes in the face as he leaves to begin a course of treatment, this elliptical and elusive film keeps the viewer on the defensive. It's impossible to know what is going to happen next or who may simply disappear from the narrative without warning. Indeed, the characters feel as ethereal as the audacious monochrome images that are masterfully marshalled by unsung editor Manuela Viegas.

But while the near-miraculous photography of Martin Schäfer, Acácio de Almeida and Elso Roque abounds with allusions to such cinematic greats as Murnau, Dreyer, Cocteau, Maurice and Jacques Tourneur, De Sica, Bresson, Nicholas Ray and Truffaut, this is never anything less than Costa's unique vision of a country still struggling to find its identity after four decades of António de Oliveira Salazar's dictatorship. It's a fiendishly difficult watch. But it makes an indelible impression and leaves one hoping that the release of Bones (1997), In Vanda's Room (2000) and Colossal Youth (2006) won't be far behind.

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