My 20th Century [dir. Ildiko Enyedi]

At 2017's MAMI film festival, I saw Ildiko Enyedi's On Body and Soul, an engrossing narrative in which two individuals see each other as animals in a common Gaia dream world. The concept was lucidly unfolded in the narrative and the film ended upon a wonderful pivot, which left me wondering about the possible future for the characters. In my limited viewing window of that year's fest, it was one of the best experiences, eclipsing more name ventures like Hirokazu Kore-eda's underwhelming The Third Murder and Luca Guadagnino's overrated festival darling Call Me By Your Name.

Her first feature film, 1989's My 20th Century, which I just watched on the UK blu-ray, is less successful for me in terms of narrative flow and clarity of vision. It begins promisingly, taking us to the time when Thomas Edison had pioneered the electric bulb, bringing the light of the stars within the grasp of human beings. In a conceit that doesn't work for me at all, the stars function as a sort of Greek chorus commenting on and even calling out to the characters in the film. But right from the first frame the film has style in spades. Shooting in B&W, Enyedi uses several visual tricks associated with the silent film era. Remember, this was before Guy Maddin became famous for movies that paid homage to the years of vintage cinema.

Our first view of the main characters is when we see a woman (Dorotha Segda) delivering twin babies. There is a vein of humor in how this is depicted though; after her labor pains, she appears to discover the babies already swaddled in bedclothes just lying beside her. The twins are orphaned early and take to selling matches to survive (nod to Hans Christen Andersen's The Little Match Girl, which incidentally had been adapted several times in cinema's early days). They come across a young donkey who could be a spiritual cousin of the famous Balthazar from Robert Bresson's film. Later on, when lying asleep on the street, they are each picked up by a gentleman and carried to a different fate.

As adults, the daughters are also played by Dorotha Segda. They could be regarded as the two halves of a Freudian split. Dora is a calculative seductress and con artist, looking for men that will furnish her with luxuries in return for a good time. Lily is a naive emotionally rooted revolutionary, willing to die for the cause. In an early sequence, they are both aboard the Orient Express. Of course they don't meet here - Lily is huddled with the other third class passengers, while Dora is courted by well-heeled suitors in the deluxe dining car. But there is a moment when a tipsy Dora has a brief glimpse of Lily boarding the train; this precedes a similar scene in Krzysztof Kieslowski's The Double Life of Veronique.

For the longest time in the narrative our connection with Lily and Dora is through Z (Russian actor Oleg Yankovsky). Z is a gentleman of somewhat ambiguous standing. He is first taken up with Lily and makes aggressive overtures, for which he is roundly rebuffed. Later, on a luxury cruise, Z comes across Dora who he assumes to be Lily. Naturally, he is puzzled by her new persona. She in turn picks Z as a likely mark and propositions him for some cavorting; she even pinches money from his wallet. At a later point when Z meets Lily again, his behavior towards her is sneering, reflective of his judgement of her as a duplicitous whore.

The film even appears to make a smirking comment on this duality when we accompany Lily to a lecture by a self-important male philosopher. This speaker is at first hailed by the all-woman audience for endorsing the suffragette cause, but he soon dispels their enthusiasm by loudly repudiating the assumptions of intellectual equality between men and women. According to him, women are incapable of pure logic and philosophic purpose, their lives driven by feelings and physical desires. Academic Jonathan Owen, who contributes an essay on the film for the Second Run release, cleverly contrasts this declamation with the characters of Lily and Dora: Lily, who has aimed to live by a (revolutionary) doctrine appears to be questioning her own position (and we later see her softening her stance to Z). Dora on the other hand lives a life based on pure (selfish) logic, which probably places her higher as a philosophic creature in this man's estimation.

After some near-explosive events (a scene where Lily runs around with a lighted bomb brought to mind a similar moment from the Adam West Batman movie) the film returns to surreal territory when our lead characters run into a literal Hall of Mirrors; Balthazar's cousin re-appears here, not looking any worse for the 20 year gap, as does Edison.

I found myself heartily nodding to The Disapproving Swede's evaluation of the film as "too whimsical and literally all over the place". It's got some cracking moments, visual and thematic, and Dorotha Segda bats fine on all fronts with her triple role. But the kitchen sink approach led me to lose the emotional connection with the characters. In the end, it became more of an elaborate puppet show where the puppeteer's hands are all too apparent.

A few words about the Second Run blu-ray:

At the time of release (2017), this blu-ray proudly advertised its transfer as a "2K restoration from original materials, under the supervision of director Ildikó Enyedi and cinematographer Tibor Máthé". In general, it's a good transfer and the B&W imagery is often strikingly good, but there are also elements of film damage (I do not know if some of them are an intentional homage to silent era celluloid), grain resolution is less optimal than desired and the grayscale is compromised on account of what seems like black crush. The audio is Hungarian mono in lossless format, and sounds fine enough. Extras include a  more recent half hour interview with Ildiko Enyedi by Peter Strickland (Berberian Sound Studio, Duke of Burgundy) and the afore-mentioned booklet essay.

 In 2020, Kino Lorber put out their blu-ray, which was based on a newer 4K master. In screenshot comparisons the Kino release is easily the winner - it has a much better balanced contrast/grayscale range and grain is finer. It includes all the on-disc extras of the SR disc and throws in a director's commentary. So if you can play North American (region A) discs, this is definitely the better option. As I am unlikely to visit the film again, I shall not be upgrading.

Dawson City: Frozen Time [dir. Bill Morrison]

Sometime towards the end of the 19th century, a little town in the Canadian Yukon territory shone brightly for a brief spell as a gold-mining hub. In its salad days, the town had bulged with an ecosystem of tens of thousands of gold-hunters and others that lived off the prospecting boom. But it wasn't long before that shine dimmed and the population dwindled to barely a couple of thousand.

During the first three decades of the 20th century, Dawson city also experienced the magic of the cinema by way of film reels - including features, shorts and newsreels - that reached there after traveling a long way through America. After exhibition, these were generally dumped in Dawson because it was not viable for them to be sent back all that distance once their screening value was over. The film stock primarily used in this era was nitrate based, a flammable material which quite often spontaneously combusted, leading to major fires in movie houses and places of storage. After being shunted between different locations, the reels that were not disposed of by burning or throwing into the river were buried under the local ice rink. They were rediscovered in the late 70's and sent to Canadian and American film archives for preservation.

Bill Morrison's documentary starts with the story of the excavation that led to the discovery of these films, but the bulk of Frozen Time is a history of Dawson City itself, visually depicted by a marvelous splicing together of clips from all those reels that were originally buried there. The excerpt from Charlie Chaplin's original release of The Gold Rush, showing a serpentine queue of prospectors trudging up the snowy hills, is the most easily recognizable. Obviously the attempt is to have the feel of a silent film, with those vintage clips super-imposed with explanatory titles that tie them together into a heart-felt ode to this once vibrant settlement. The marks of damage and decay in the celluloid sources become a part of the film's artistic grammar, emphasizing the transience of human experience. The concept is terrific and one must give kudos to the film-makers who have sequenced images from so many different films and sources to provide a coherent and poetic journey.

If I have one complaint, it is that the film at 2 hours is quite long for an image-focused experience. A certain amount of repetition comes in - I realize it was a deliberate way of showing how fires from nitrate film and other materials were a constant and accepted hazard of life in those days, but when you see the 5th or 6th time a movie house or other building burns down set to a new age drone score, it starts to get a little old. It was the primary reason for me to split the viewing into two sessions.

While I did not love it as much as I hoped I would, Frozen Time is still an admirable painstakingly executed artistic effort that deserves to be seen.

Mulholland Drive [dir. David Lynch]

I had seen MH long long ago, and considered it at the time an arbitrary and pretentious movie whose critical acclaim hinged solely on its being made by David Lynch. The blu-ray was therefore an experiment in re-evaluation, to see if I had by chance missed the significance of the film.

Turns out, I had. I am still not ready to list this among my favorite films, but there's definitely a twisted dream logic to the proceedings that unlocks along with the opening of the MacGuffin blue box in the film. I cannot describe the film in great detail here for fear of spoiling it for people that have not yet seen it, but it starts off as a neo-noir mystery thriller centered on the two female leads (Naomi Watts and Laura Harring, both smoldering) with what seem like barely connected detours featuring other characters and situations, but in the last 15-20 min of the film, Lynch pulls off a coup of reversal that has you rethinking on all you have previously seen. And I imagine this will induce greater re-watchability to the film even if some individual events (the diner episode and the espresso episode in particular) still seem contrived in their weirdness. It helps to know that some of the feeling of disconnect and paucity of character development possibly stems from the fact that MH was first developed as a TV series, and after the studio developed cold feet over the pilot, re-purposed with additional funding from Studio Canal as a standalone feature film. Lynch is not apologetic over the loose ends because as he proposes, dreams have lots of loose and dead ends, and the film operates on a dream logic.

Studio Canal's blu-ray gives a solid presentation. The video has some significant amount of manipulation in terms of light exposure and softness so it's not reference material, but generally looks very good and assumedly faithful to the director's intentions. The soundtrack is quite brilliant, both in terms of sound effects and Angelo Badalamenti's atmospheric score. I am a little annoyed about the lack of English subs on this release because one problem is that the dynamic range of the audio is VERY HIGH, meaning it can go from barely audible whispers to room rocking crash-bangs, making it necessary to adjust the volume during playback, not convenient. There are a bunch of extras, with behind-the-scenes footage during the shoot, as well as various film-makers waxing on the greatness and importance of MH (* These extras are present on the digibook release of the film, but may have been removed from the armaray case re-issue).