Lencho of the Apes wrote: ↑Tue Feb 18, 2020 10:10 pm
I have to disagree, Renault -- unless you lived in Paris or NYC, arthouse/repertory programming back through the late 70s was limited to "Bergman, Bunuel etc" and (at least in USA) to Hollywood films canonized for their quality as star-texts or a few Sarris-endorsed directorial signatures.
"Rocha, Brocka, Sembene and/or something like Valerie and Her Week of Wonder"s were never that highly visible; 1985 or so, a Tarkovsky screening in Washington DC was such! a! big! deal! that people planned their weekend around it.
Fair enough Lencho. My only point is I get the impression directors like Brocka and Sembene were more heavily acclaimed in their 'time' than the subsequent neglect of their work throughout the 90s and 2000s before the 2010s 'rescue job' would suggest. That's all.
But yes, even today, Tarkovsky's films get screened fairly regularly on the Paris repertory circuit. Even some of the first-run cinemas in Paris will occasionally run new restorations of classical canon films like Belle de Jour or Walkabout and, in some instances, even Insiang and Satantango. I even watched the restored version of Taipei Story in what's normally a first-run cinema (same cinema in which I watched The Revenant and Little Women), so the line can sometimes be murky between what's a repertory cinema and what's a first-run cinema. And some of the cinemas that are mainly repertory will occasionally do first-runs. That was the case with Pain & Glory and Inherent Vice for instance. But I think that's the case in New York as well. Film Forum and The Metrograph do both first-run and repertory stuff.
If by "heavily acclaimed," you mean "shown on the festival circuit, praised in a few specialist journals, and unavailable to the bulk of cineastes in most of the world," then I agree with you. Otherwise, you're holding the impression of something that -- by virtue of having lived through that period -- I can tell you isn't true.
But you have every right to hold any impression you wish to hold, I won't interfere with your belief system.
My point about Tarkovsky was not that his work is accessible today, but that even someone who today is considered as central to the film canon as he is was basically inaccessible to any audience as recently as the mid 1980s, beginning of the home-video era.
If you would like to form a more accurate idea of what films were being shown to the most discerning audiences, I'd suggest you look through old issues of The New Yorker; between their listings for theatre screenings and for museum programming you can get a clear idea of what was available. New York was the most advanced film culture in the country, of course, other places were served correspondingly less well, and I don't know where to retrieve similar information for other countries.
I'd say more that there was a real incoherence to the idea of important films for much of the late sixties through eighties era as that was when the "canon" was essentially being developed as more people started taking movies seriously as art. The early years had people make claims for the art of film via names like Chaplin, Griffith, Disney, Eisenstein and the Russian's experimentation with montage, German Expressionism and so on, but it was a fairly limited appreciation based on standing up for film itself as an artform more than "autuerism" per se. When the Cahiers mob and other sixties critics started to talk more about the director as auteur, then some of the familiar big names became noted as important artists, like Bergman, Antonioni, De Sica and so on along with the US commercial directors like Ford and Hitchcock. After that though there wasn't much coherency and different areas could screen films based on what some individual film programmers found interesting and gain local notice for those works, which usually were found by reading about film festival choices and whatever the programmers liked and thought would sell tickets.
I started going to an independent arthouse/repertory movie theater in the late seventies that would play all sorts of odd films that, from today's perspective, may lack a sense of artistic history for a more varied and "cultish" approach. I don't recall Valerie and Her Week of Wonders playing specifically, but I know The Beast did several times for that mix of art and sex that they found sold tickets. The same way Radley Metzger and Russ Meyers, among others, also got regular play. Tarkovsky was shown and The Sacrifice was something of a big deal in '86/'87 when it was released to the US, with Siskel and Ebert talking about it, the same for Ray's The Home and the World in '84/'85 and a lot of other odd little choices that did get some notice like Rappaport's Imposters in '79 or somewhere in the early 80s for release, but didn't hold it as the idea of film history and canons increasingly gelled. In Minneapolis, screening The Tree of Wooden Clogs was a Christmas tradition for many years at one theater, noted for having a particularly well informed and hard headed programmer.
The movie going experience in Minneapolis, New York, Chicago, LA, and some other towns that had repertory theaters could be really different as those theaters were often playing new releases, or newish given the long delays some had in traveling along with selections of older movies from Hollywood and around the world, limited to what they could get and what had enough notice to catch a programmer's eye. Ichikawa, for a while, was more shown than almost any Japanese director outside of Kurosawa and Honda, with Ozu and the others coming on a little later after more Japanese film history was becoming known to the west. Lencho is right about how the bulk of attention worked, a few movie journals and critics did a lot of the heavy lifting along with what caught notice at major film fests, but it did vary a lot from place to place and between critics, which made the era difficult to pin down over what was getting seen and acclaimed outside the juggernauts like Bergman, Kurosawa, and Hitchcock. It's actually not all that different in some ways now in terms of trying to define the important movies and history of film, just that now it's because of so many voices and opportunities to see movies that didn't exist before. I think movie history was really only considered more or less stable from the eighties to the end of the century, the rest of the time its been in flux.
Well today you do have the internet so the films of Lav Diaz, Carlos Reygadas, Pedro Costa et al. can be easily accessed, even on itunes, although they don't have the Fontainhas Trilogy. And a lot of these coterie contemporary filmmakers still get plenty of ink on sites like They Shoot Pictures, Don't They, so...
Of course, seeing a Reygadas or a Tarr on the big screen is a different matter outside NYC and Paris, and maybe London(?)
I've never seen a Reygadas, Costa, or Diaz on the big screen myself, and I live in Paris! I've seen Tarr on the big screen though.
