Two recent Japanese animated features – Yasuhiro Yoshiura’s Patema Inverted and Keiichi Hara’s Miss Hokusai – and Caltiki: The Immortal Monster, an early low-budget horror from Mario Bava, illustrate the range of styles and content available to fantastic film.
Criterion have released a gorgeous restoration of Ermanno Olmi’s 1978 masterpiece The Tree of Wooden Clogs, supplementing this immersive epic of 19th Century peasant life with several epics which explore the origins of the project and Olmi’s methods of working with his remarkable non-professional cast.
Brief thoughts on some genre movies released on Blu-ray by Arrow Video, plus a couple of interesting books about the making of Cy Endfield’s Zulu and Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid.
Recent viewing ranges from smart B-movie horror to magic realist-inflected neo-realism, with excellent disks from Blue Underground, Shout! Factory and Arrow Video.
Another eclectic selection from my recent viewing, from an old fondly remembered BBC sci-fi series to an unsettling French psychological thriller, from a nasty John Frankenheimer thriller to a pair of atypical Rossellini features striving to break out of the confines of neorealism.
Criterion’s Blu-ray release of Antonio Pietrangeli’s I Knew Her Well (1965) reinforces the impression that this filmmaker has been almost criminally neglected as a major figure in Italian film.
Giuseppe De Santis’ Bitter Rice (1949) expands the possibilities of neo-realism by incorporating elements of melodrama and film noir into the lives of women working in the rice fields of northern Italy.
Although I saw fewer movies in theatres than ever, this year offered a rich array of films on disk, belying continuing prophecies of the medium’s demise in the face of on-line streaming.
Ettore Scola’s A Special Day (1977) is a subtle, emotionally resonant chamber film featuring Sofia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni in two of their finest roles as people struggling against socially-imposed roles in fascist Italy.
While Mario Bava paved the way for Italian horror, directors who followed him pushed the limits of violence, foremost among them Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci.