684-690, 873-879, 1044-1050, 1142-1148 Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project

[feihong]

My feeling is that the set is worth it for Touki Bouki alone. That movie stunned me.

I just saw The Housemaid a couple of days ago and I thought it was delightful.

So this is definitely a buy....

[Ishmael]

I just saw The Housemaid a couple of days ago and I thought it was delightful.

Delightful? You may have seen a film called The Housemaid, but it doesn't sound like you saw Kim's film of The Housemaid.

[albucat]

Delightful? You may have seen a film called The Housemaid, but it doesn't sound like you saw Kim's film of The Housemaid.

No one who saw the remake would call it "delightful" either, though for completely different reasons.

[colinr0380]

Fantastic news, although the one slight disappointment is that the Korean release of The Housemaid features a full commentary track between film critic Kim Young-jin and Bong Joon-ho. It means that I'll be able to keep that release for the commentary, and I'm presuming that the Bong Joon-ho interview will cover a lot of the same ground, but it is a shame that Criterion were not able to port that commentary over to help introduce the film to an even wider audience.

[gcgiles1dollarbin]

It has been years since I have seen it, and I don't mean to fly in the face of this thread's enthusiasm for the film, but I recall Touki Bouki having a pretty strong homophobic vibe with the inclusion of that comically gay rich fat cat Mory robs. I have only seen this one and Hyènes, and can't say that I liked either, but perhaps someone can speak for his other films or, heh, school me on my hypersensitivities when so much is at stake with one of the few releases of an African film on blu?

[mteller]

Yes, that character is a rather unenlightened stereotype. I still love the film, though. Hyenes too.

[MichaelB]

Why would anyone expect an African film from the 1970s to be scrupulously PC, over a decade before the term was even coined?

[gcgiles1dollarbin]

It's a pretty broad caricature, and it hardly takes fastidious scruples to notice it. I never said it was politically incorrect, whatever that means anymore (or ever meant); I said it was homophobic, which it clearly is. Whether that's a product of the time or the place, I'm not sure, and you're welcome to clue me into the contextualization that would make that character less ridiculous (to say nothing of offensive). Aside from that, I expect nothing of my African cinema from the '70s--I've hardly seen any of it aside from Senegalese films!

[feihong]

I just saw The Housemaid a couple of days ago and I thought it was delightful.

Delightful? You may have seen a film called The Housemaid, but it doesn't sound like you saw Kim's film of The Housemaid.

You didn't find the film a particularly sardonic satire of the (then) new consumer culture? I thought it was full of biting humor. I was laughing with the movie, nearly all the way through.


As for Touki Bouki, I do remember that character but I didn't feel as if the character ruined the movie for me. Yes, it was a caricature, but I felt when I saw it that the character was as much or more a caricature of his class than he was of his sexual identity. For me the film was full of striking images and, of course, a product of its time. In the same year Elliott Gould does a quick parody of a gay character in The Long Goodbye (during his police interrogation), so I wouldn't say that African cinema is exclusively discriminatory in that era.

It's pretty interesting to think about how much one has to ignore or rationalize when watching great movies, though. How can you watch a movie like Stagecoach or Red River without noticing how marginalized the Native Americans are within the picture's narrative?

[MichaelB]

Pretty much any pre-1980s British sitcom requires a fair bit of tuning-out.

In fact, there was a mini-scandal recently when a repeat of Fawlty Towers was censored over a scene that referred repeatedly to "niggers" and "wogs", despite a clearly defensible context (namely, the implicit mockery of the Major's fastidious insistence that there was a semantic difference between the two, and that one appallingly racist term was more appropriate than the other to describe Indians). But as far as current British broadcasting guidelines are concerned, certain words are now totally banned from broadcast before 9pm, regardless of context, whereas they were reasonably common currency forty or fifty years ago

(Talking of which, Till Death Us Do Part, one of the most popular sitcoms of the 1960s, is now virtually unbroadcastable without footnotes - again, Alf Garnett's racism, homophobia and generalised bigotry are implicitly mocked, but not everyone got the joke, and no scriptwriter would dare get away with anything quite so graphic today).

[knives]

And yet its American counterpart is rebroadcast all of the time without a wink.

[MichaelB]

And yet its American counterpart is rebroadcast all of the time without a wink.

All in the Family was significantly toned down by comparison. I suspect Till Death Us Do Part would have been unbroadcastable on US network television even at the time!

[Ishmael]

I just saw The Housemaid a couple of days ago and I thought it was delightful.

Delightful? You may have seen a film called The Housemaid, but it doesn't sound like you saw Kim's film of The Housemaid.

You didn't find the film a particularly sardonic satire of the (then) new consumer culture? I thought it was full of biting humor. I was laughing with the movie, nearly all the way through.

Interesting. Never occurred to me. I guess the awkward framing device could've been a signal not to take the movie at face value, but I didn't read it that way. What I remember from the rest of the film (saw it a couple months ago) was psychological torture and abuse, which turned into physical violence. True, the story wasn't exactly realistic, but that fact in and of itself doesn't mean it can't be emotionally true.

It just occurred to me that The Housemaid is a bit like Fassbinder's Martha in that both feature situations of domestic mental abuse that's exaggerated and self-conscious (perhaps Brechtian is a better descriptor) but yet still ring very true emotionally. I could see both films as satiric, but I don't think that makes them funny at all. Also, I should admit that if The Housemaid is satirizing specific elements of Korean culture, that would've gone over my head, because sadly I don't know that much about Korean culture (yet).

[Michael Kerpan]

I found the end of Housemaid quite similar to the end of Murnau's Last Laugh (which I have also always found quite "subversive").

[gcgiles1dollarbin]

As for Touki Bouki, I do remember that character but I didn't feel as if the character ruined the movie for me. Yes, it was a caricature, but I felt when I saw it that the character was as much or more a caricature of his class than he was of his sexual identity. For me the film was full of striking images and, of course, a product of its time. In the same year Elliott Gould does a quick parody of a gay character in The Long Goodbye (during his police interrogation), so I wouldn't say that African cinema is exclusively discriminatory in that era.

It's pretty interesting to think about how much one has to ignore or rationalize when watching great movies, though. How can you watch a movie like Stagecoach or Red River without noticing how marginalized the Native Americans are within the picture's narrative?

I can juggle love and discernment! I adore Judge Priest for example, in spite of Stepin Fetchit. I guess I should be clearer: I'm not condemning the film for being homophobic, or calling for its destruction because it exhibits an unsavory attitude toward homosexuality, or indicting the continent of Africa for its exceptional gay-bashing. I'm saying, "Look! There it is! Yikes! What was the point of that? I think none!" The introduction of that character was the weakest moment of the film, the point at which dissipated wealth is associated with "perverse" sexuality in contrast to the more idealized and heterosexual relationship between Mory and Anta, who occupy lower class tiers. It was kind of lame and heavy-handed, as I recall in the dim reaches of my memory (as I said, it's been a few years).

[domino harvey]

I haven't seen the film but the post-studio system era of American films (late sixties into the seventies) features a lot of tired gay jokes and stereotypes-- even my ultra-conservative film professor found it to be an excessive recurrence. Perhaps this trend was either mirrored or pre-existent overseas as well?

[feihong]

Certainly Hong Kong film of that era was full of gay stereotypes being used for humor. I don't disagree that the characterization of the wealthy gay man in Touki Bouki is lame and heavy-handed. It does make me think of so many moments of stereotype in striking films, though. The mother of my closest childhood friend used to boycott Disney films because of the moment in Snow White where Dopey stretches his eyelids in order to appear to be Chinese. I mean, it is a disappointing prejudice, worth acknowledging, but the film is also dazzling and effective in other ways, so...I don't know. It's very tricky to think about. Very interesting. I'm not trying to contradict exactly, but just to suggest that Touki Bouki is still very much worth seeing, in spite of its flaws.

I found the end of Housemaid quite similar to the end of Murnau's Last Laugh (which I have also always found quite "subversive").

I liked how at the end of the movie

SpoilerShow

the lead guy could barely even try to recite his off-kilter "moral message" at the end with a straight face.

Or the way in which,

SpoilerShow

once he's poisoned himself, and he crawls back downstairs to his wife, she's asleep at the sewing machine. And what does she do first thing when he wakes her? She goes straight back to sewing! The need for possessions possessed the family members so thoroughly that they weren't able to notice the ways their pursuit was doing them in. She's dying of overwork, and she doesn't notice it. He's dying at her feet, and she doesn't notice it. The drive for new consumerism keeps pushing them on. It's not like there's anything very special or remarkable about the housemaid herself, either. She's not some mystifying seductress. She's not even that clever, on the whole. It's always the family's further desire for wealth and status that keeps encouraging them to take things farther. And the cruelty which everyone in the film (save maybe the crippled daughter) demonstrates seems very tied to class perception as its primary motivator.

It all seemed like pointed satire to me.

[cdnchris]

According to their site it now appears each film in the set is now getting a spine number.

[zedz]

Which makes perfect sense. The last thing Criterion wants, when they finally get around to releasing African films, is to be accused of doing it spinelessly.

[swo17]

According to their site it now appears each film in the set is now getting a spine number.

You're welcome, everyone.

[domino harvey]

Weirdly, Criterion did this in response to HTF sending them their It's a Mad World thread

[jegharfangetmigenmyg]

Wow, I hadn't heard that A Brighter Summer Day had been restored by the WCF! Along with Vidor's The Crowd that the film I've been wanting to see, but still haven't, because of the non-existing or bad quality home video releases. Since Criterion have already released Yi-Yi, I guess one could hope for a stand-alone release, if WCF will be licensing it that is?

On another note, I saw two restored movies at Venice Film Festival a couple of weeks ago. One of them was from the WCF, namely The Treasure which has been dubbed "the greatest Sri Lankan film ever", and it was an underwhelming Satyajit Ray-light fare. So I'm not especially keen on these "hidden milestones" uncovered by Scorsese and Co. Or at least I believe that his presentation of the films should be taken with more than a grain of salt...

OT: The other restoration had nothing to do with World Cinema, it was Friedkin's Sorcerer, but it looked absolutely stunning. No French Connection color fidgeting there. Since Friedkin has the rights to the movie after a long court case against Universal and Paramount (I believe), I guess that it could be his first work to be entered into the Criterion collection... It is certainly one of his more artistically ambitious films and it shouldn't be written off as a simple remake of Wages of Fear. It is completely different in style, sometimes even surreal, and then there's the Tangerine Dream score, too. Still Clouzot's film is better, but that one is also one of cinema's all time greatest, IMO.

[MichaelB]

Since Friedkin has the rights to the movie after a long court case against Universal and Paramount (I believe), I guess that it could be his first work to be entered into the Criterion collection...

Not unless Warner scraps their planned April release and sub-licenses it to Criterion. Which is unlikely to happen.

[FrauBlucher]

Beaver

[manicsounds]

DVDBeaver never put up screencaps of the restored reels from "Housemaid" in the DVD review, and again didn't for the Criterion. I'm still on the fence about which to get, the Criterion or Masters Of Cinema. Price-wise not much different.

Interesting that the Scorsese introductions are different for the 2 releases (as seen in the screencaps).