JonathanRosenbaum.com

From Iran With Love

From the Chicago Reader (September 29, 1995). — J.R.

Homework

**** (Masterpiece)

Directed by Abbas Kiarostami

Through the Olive Trees

*** (A must-see)

Directed and written by Abbas Kiarostami

With Hossein Rezai, Tahereh Ladanian, Mohamad Ali Keshavarz, Farhad Kheradmand, and Zarifeh Shiva.

At the Toronto film festival earlier this month Canadian filmmaker Clement Vigo recalled the memorable response of Winston Churchill to pressure to cut state arts funding during World War II: “If we cut funding for the arts and culture, then what are we fighting for?” It’s a question I’ve been pondering ever since.

A month earlier, while I was in the middle of looking at close to 100 films as part of the New York film festival’s selection committee, I had the rare privilege of being able to fly for a weekend to still another festival, in Locarno, Switzerland, to serve on a panel devoted to Godard’s Histoire(s) de cinéma. Locarno had two ambitious sidebars this year — one devoted to Godard’s video series, the other to Iranian women filmmakers and the first virtually complete retrospective of work by Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami ever held anywhere, including an exhibition of his color photographs of landscapes and two very beautiful paintings. Some of the films shown were the only existing copies. I’m told a shorter version of this retrospective will circulate if duplicate prints can be made, and the Film Center hopes to show it.

Both Godard and Kiarostami could be described as creatures of state funding, hence representatives of what Churchill argued a country should fight for and what Newt Gingrich would contend we can and must learn to live without. Interestingly enough, in a letter to the New York Film Critics Circle last January, Godard paid tribute to Kiarostami, lamenting his inability “to force [the] Oscar people to reward Kiarostami instead of Kieslowski.” Without question the best films I saw over three days in Locarno were all by Kiarostami, apart from an untranslated 21-minute film about a leper colony (The House is Black, 1962) by the great Iranian woman poet Forugh Farokhzad (1935-’67), an extraordinary poetic reverie I don’t expect to forget anytime soon.

Thanks to the Locarno windfall and some previous screenings in Chicago and elsewhere, I’ve now seen over half of Kiarostami’s oeuvre, including his earliest and most recent films — seven of his dozen features and five of his ten surviving shorts — and I’m more convinced than ever that he’s one of the giants of contemporary world cinema. (For what it’s worth, Akira Kurosawa feels the same way; a year or so back he said that Kiarostami was perhaps the only living filmmaker who could fill the gap left by the death of Satyajit Ray.)

It’s too bad that Miramax, which is distributing his most recent feature, Through the Olive Trees, doesn’t agree — or, more precisely, has been ensuring that most Americans won’t know who Kiarostami is. Judging from its behavior, Miramax’s notion of a giant coincides with Gingrich’s — someone who pulls in a profit by any means available, not someone whose art and vision changes the way we experience the world. Not surprisingly, after Miramax unceremoniously dumped Kiarostami’s film — the first and so far only Iranian film ever to receive U.S. distribution — in New York last spring, without any press shows or ads to speak of, most of the press and public ignored it. One of the major art-house programmers in Chicago tried to book the film, only to be told it wasn’t available because Miramax was withdrawing it from distribution. The Film Center did succeed in booking it for two screenings, this Saturday and Sunday, to launch its current Iranian retrospective. (Kiarostami’s documentary Homework, which fortunately isn’t in Miramax’s clutches, will also be shown on both days.) But when the Film Center tried to get a print of Through the Olive Trees early enough to screen for the press — or, barring that, a video for preview purposes — they were less lucky. So to write about it I have to depend on my memories of the film, which I saw twice more than a year ago.

Many critics would simply accept Miramax’s judgment that the greatest of all Iranian filmmakers isn’t worth bothering with, and write instead about one of its inferior offerings whose ad campaigns are already burned into our retinas. Some people would argue I have a moral obligation to do this too, because, after all, muck like Kids is what everybody wants to see anyway. But given the self-serving prophecies that drive the movie business, how can anybody possibly tell what people want to see? For the past year I’ve been hearing that Pulp Fiction is some sort of grassroots, word-of-mouth sensation, but I’ve also been hearing that Miramax spent as much money advertising it as producing it. You can’t have it both ways: either the audience discovered it, or the audience got sucked in by the ad campaign (though one wonders whether it’s even possible for audiences today to discover anything that millions haven’t already been spent promoting).

Of course if making money is all that matters, then you can appear to have it both ways, because that’s the tried-and-true agenda of advertising: deception, lies, and bad faith. This helps explain why it’s convenient for the New York Times – which works hand in glove with Miramax in promoting many of its favorite goods, most of them antihumanist (like Kids and Woody Allen and Pulp Fiction), and trashing or ignoring some of its less favorite goods, most of them humanist (like The Glass Shield and Through the Olive Trees) — not to inform the public that it sponsors the Sundance film festival, so that when the Times offers “in-depth” coverage of Sundance every year it’s essentially promoting its own operation. That’s the Gingrichian alternative to arts funding — low-key (i.e., half-hidden) corporate sponsorship, which makes it impossible for us to determine what is and isn’t advertising, so that we’ll be fooled even more by the studios and their old-boy networks. Sundance, after all, is already known as the festival for Hollywood agents, designed to facilitate the selling out of American independents to the studios in a ski-resort setting (I’ve heard that cellular-phone conversations can sometimes be heard during screenings). So the festival allows the Times to affect a critical aloofness and at the same time keep its hands deep in the muck.

In any event, I can happily report that a year after Through the Olive Trees turned up at Cannes, a first feature by longtime Kiarostami assistant Jafar Panahi, The White Balloon, showed there and won the Camera d’Or. It’s been picked up by October Films, a small but ambitious distributor, and whether the Times reviewer likes it or not, it was so popular in Cannes it’s almost sure to get a commercial run in Chicago. Without being in any sense an imitation of Kiarostami, it has many related virtues. Unfolding in real time, it recounts the comic adventures of a seven-year-old girl in Tehran in the 85 minutes prior to the New Year’s Day festivities, and is easily as good a children’s movie as Babe.

Born in Tehran in 1940, Kiarostami trained in the graphic arts and worked designing posters, illustrating children’s books, making TV commercials (more than 150 between 1960 and 1969), and designing credit sequences for a few Iranian films before he was invited to set up a film unit at the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults in 1969, a state-supported arts and education organization started by the shah’s wife and now known as Kanun that has produced practically all of his films to date. The first film he made there — the delightful Bread and Alley (1970) — is a ten-minute narrative about a boy carrying a loaf of bread home through an alley and trying to get around an unfriendly stray dog. Shot without dialogue, the whole thing is deftly accompanied by Paul Desmond’s jazz version of the Beatles’ “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” and it already marks its director as a master of integrating landscape and action, as well as merging documentary and fiction. The same could be said for the subsequent Recess (1972), whereas the more experimental Two Solutions for One Problem and So Can I (both 1975) are remarkable conceptual miniatures that recall the imaginative freedom of early Jane Campion. (The first is a hilarious fictional essay about feuding schoolmates; the second, combining animation and live action, records the responses of two little boys to cartoon animals.)

I haven’t seen The Experience (1973), Kiarostami’s first feature, but it’s clear from the second and third, The Traveler (1974) and A Wedding Suit (1976), that his principal narrative mode from the outset is a kind of comic neorealism centered on little boys — a mode that continues in Where Is My Friend’s Home? (1987), the next Kiarostami feature I’ve seen, and beyond. Then come two documentaries, Homework and Close-Up (both 1990), and two fiction films, And Life Goes On… (1992) and Through the Olive Trees (1994). Close-Up and And Life Goes On… are most likely Kiarostami’s greatest films to date, but Homework and Through the Olive Trees are fascinating, accomplished forays in their own right. And they highlight the same strains found in the other two — “controlled” documentary with some of the techniques of fiction in a congested urban setting, and “open” fiction with some of the freedom of documentary in a lovely rural setting.

On the surface at least, Homework shows Kiarostami’s documentary methods at their simplest. (It’s the only one of his 16-millimeter features I’ve seen, though there are three others, one of which is also a documentary.) “It’s not a movie in the usual sense,” we hear him saying offscreen to another adult as we see several boys on their way to school. “It’s a research work. It’s a pictorial research on students’ homework.” He goes on to explain that he got the idea to do this while helping his own son with his homework, and shortly afterward we see the boys reciting elaborate religious chants while performing calisthenics outside in what looks like winter weather. (Because the sexes are segregated, no girls are in sight. In fact, we never see any females in the film; we only hear one woman later on, delivering expository narration about questionnaires sent by the filmmakers to the boys’ parents.)

Then the movie settles down to its main bill of fare: interviews with a succession of grammar-school boys by Kiarostami himself about how they do their homework — whether their parents help, punish, or encourage them, whether they like doing it more or less than watching cartoons on TV, and so on. The most striking thing about these interviews is their formal presentation: the boys are filmed frontally, as in passport photos, and though Kiarostami is heard more often than seen, there are periodic cuts to the camera and cameraman supposedly filming the boys.

I say “supposedly” because there obviously has to be a second camera to film the first, and because we never see this second camera, these inserted shots are fictional: what we’re seeing is not what the boys are seeing at that moment, though the editing implies that it is. (In fact, Kiarostami has noted that he shot these inserts after the interviews, though he interspersed them with the shots of the boys as if they were occurring simultaneously.) This adds a layer of irony to Kiarostami’s remark in an interview about Homework that several boys lied to him about preferring their homework to cartoons, since Kiarostami’s documentary film rhetoric invariably entails a lie as well. Inadvertently or not, this becomes another way of saying that he doesn’t see himself as superior to the kids he’s filming; his attitude throughout seems anything but authoritarian. (The same attitude can be found at key moments in Godard’s interviews with children in his 1977-’78 TV series France/tour/détour/deux enfants, in which he asks a little girl about sound and music and a little boy about image in each episode. One key exchange I’ve always treasured is Godard asking, “Isn’t a shop window the same thing as a TV set?” and the little boy calmly replying, “No.”)

In telling contrast is the still ironic but clearly authentic celebration by Mohsen Makhmalbaf of his own authoritarianism and sadism while auditioning movie actors in his recent documentary Salaam Cinema, showing in the Film Center’s Iranian retrospective on October 21 and 22 — a film that should be read in part as Makhmalbaf’s reply to Kiarostami’s Close-Up, as a statement about the social status of cinema for ordinary people. Though it has been argued that Makhmalbaf’s interviews with eager hopefuls, laced with insults and humiliations, constitute a courageous exposé of his profession as well as himself, I found it much too glib about its “wisdom,” like Oliver Stone’s too-easy riffs on the media in Natural Born Killers. (The dialectical and at times symbiotic relationship between Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf, the two leading figures in Iranian cinema, is in some ways comparable to the relationship between Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang in Taiwanese cinema. Close-Up is a documentary about the trial of an impostor who pretended to be Makhmalbaf, and Kiarostami persuaded Makhmalbaf to let himself be filmed meeting the impostor at the end of the picture. Similarly, the capsule history of Iranian cinema via clips at the end of Makhmalbaf’s Once Upon a Time, Cinema concludes with an emblematic landscape shot from Kiarostami’s Where Is My Friend’s Home?)

Late in Homework there’s an even more ambiguous and ironic play with documentary film rhetoric than the inserts of the camera when the film returns to the boys’ extended Islamic chants and calisthenics outdoors. Offscreen the narrator, presumably Kiarostami, says, “In spite of all the attention of responsible people to arrange this ceremony properly, it was not performed correctly. So in order to show the proper reverence, we preferred to delete the sound from the filmstrip.” At this point the sound is abruptly turned off as the camera pans across the crowd of boys thumping their chests and declaiming, eventually arriving at the figure of the male teacher leading them in the foreground. It’s impossible for me to judge how sincere or hypocritical the pretext for this act of censorship is. But the effect is both analytical and aesthetic, displaying what amounts to a reverence for reality in its objectification of ritual that exists quite independent of any reverence (or subtle irreverence) for Islamic fundamentalist dogma.

In short, it’s a moment of lyrical beauty as well as a moment of clarification, and the cinema of Kiarostami abounds in such moments. As simple and charming as most of Homework is, it winds up telling us a great deal about Iran in the 90s — everything from what some little boys think of Saddam Hussein in neighboring Iraq to what some Iranian parents think of education in America and Canada. (According to one father interviewed, homework is never assigned at American and Canadian schools.) There’s also the boy who cries during his interview, in part because he’s frightened of the filmmakers. (Kiarostami also reportedly filmed his own son, though it’s unclear whether he appears in the picture.)

Through the Olive Trees is usually described as the concluding feature in a trilogy, preceded by Where Is My Friend’s Home? and And Life Goes On…, but it’s important to note that each film was conceived and planned separately, and that Kiarostami has recently spoken about plans to make a fourth feature in the series. (The Chicago International Film Festival showed the trilogy in its entirety last fall.) In any event, you don’t need to have seen any of the preceding features for this one to register fully; the important thing to bear in mind is how organically, logically, yet unexpectedly Kiarostami’s oeuvre develops from one film to the next, each work containing the seed of its successor.

In fact, Where Is My Friend’s Home?, a comedy set in the mountain village of Koker in northern Iran, can be regarded as a kind of spin-off of Homework. The plot involves a poor schoolboy searching in a nearby village for the house of a friend who inadvertently walked off with his notebook containing all his homework. Three years after the release of that film a major earthquake devastated the region, and a few days later Kiarostami drove there with his son in an effort to find the child, a nonprofessional, who starred in that film; And Life Goes On… is a fictional re-creation of that journey, filmed in the same memorable landscape, again largely with nonprofessionals. Through the Olive Trees, which is again shot and set around Koker and again uses many nonprofessional actors, is either a fictional re-creation of an incident that occurred during the shooting of And Life Goes On… or an invented anecdote grounded in the real experience of shooting that film. I’m not sure which it is, but I’m not sure it matters.

Either way, the film affords Kiarostami yet another chance to reflect on the theme of Close-Up – the encounter between the world of cinema and the lives of ordinary people — without in any way repeating himself. After a young actor playing a newlywed husband keeps blowing his lines, in a hilarious extended sequence of fumbled takes worthy of Truffaut’s Day for Night, the director — Mohammad Ali Kershavarz, ostensibly playing himself but clearly standing in for Kiarostami — replaces him with an illiterate local mason who happens to be madly in love with the woman playing the wife, a young woman from a well-to-do family who refuses to speak to the mason in between takes. Most of the comedy is in the mason’s dogged, obsessive efforts to propose marriage to her despite her refusal to speak to him, and in the ambiguous roles played by the filmmakers and the film they’re shooting in this process. (One of the filmmakers is the assistant director — the only woman with an extended speaking part in either Homework or Through the Olive Trees.) In And Life Goes On… a filmmaker and his son learn something about surviving a disaster from ordinary people, and in this film ordinary people learn something about how to conduct their lives from filmmakers. (The director here serves as a kind of fatherly adviser to the mason.)

Once again Kiarostami’s use of the surrounding mountainous landscape is visually as well as dramatically breathtaking, culminating, as his previous film did, in an extended take that films the actors from such a vast distance it becomes a kind of comic and cosmic overview of the world — a vision that calls to mind that of Tati’s Playtime transposed to a rural setting. Like the brief suppression of the sound track toward the end of Homework, this shot reveals an almost mystical, open-ended sensibility that carries the film to a deeper, more mysterious level.

As beautiful, tender, funny, and profound as this vision is, it hinges on a calculation that seems less evident in the previous Kiarostami features I’ve seen — a calculation that seems to involve his international as well as his domestic audience. (There’s also an archness and cuteness that might be found in Where Is My Friend’s Home?, but not in Homework or any of the other Kiarostami features I’m familiar with.) Even the comic muteness of the heroine plays a role in this calculation, a ploy, perhaps, that circumvents the problem of how to deal honestly with women in a movie without offending the dictates of Islamic fundamentalism. It’s a knotty problem, and not one any of the Kiarostami pictures I’ve seen ever confronts directly. To get some measure of the sort of questions about women that Kiarostami’s films systematically avoid, you might want to turn to Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa’s 20-minute personal video essay A Tajik Woman, one of the prizewinners in the Festival of Illinois Film & Video Artists that’s showing Saturday night at Chicago Filmmakers, a program that conflicts with both of the Saturday Kiarostami screenings. But if you happen to see this video before seeing the Kiarostami films on Sunday, you’ll get a pretty comprehensive picture of what it means to be Iranian at the moment.

Devil in a Blue Dress

Carl Franklin (One False Move) directs his own adaptation of a Walter Mosley mystery novel set in Los Angeles in 1948, and what’s most memorable about it is the period flavor, including a detailed and precise account of the jim crow complications blacks had to contend with. Denzel Washington is hired to track down a white woman (Jennifer Beals) who hangs out with blacks and finds himself pulled into a complicated intrigue; with Tom Sizemore and Don Cheadle. Ford City, Biograph, Bricktown Square, Broadway, Golf Glen, Esquire, Old Orchard.

Sound and Vision (Films by Marguerite Duras)

From the September 15, 1995 issue of Chicago Reader. —J.R.

Films by Marguerite Duras

It’s surely indicative of the scarcity of Marguerite Duras movies that even a dedicated fan like me has managed to see only seven of them — and for one of those I had to drive 100 miles, from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles. No Duras film has been distributed in the United States for years, and in preparing this article I wasn’t even able to obtain a complete filmography; my own provisional list includes 20 titles, stretching from La musica in 1966 to Les enfants in 1982.

If one extends this list by adding adaptations (by herself and others) of Duras literary works, the scripts she wrote for other directors, and two films by Benoit Jacquot revolving around Duras, the figure is 31 films, most of them features. So it’s no small achievement that Facets Multimedia (which, thanks to the efforts of Charles Coleman, has recently featured such adventurous fare as Manoel de Oliveira’s Valley of Abraham and an exhaustive Nanni Moretti retrospective) will be showing a dozen films from this list over the next couple of weeks, most of them in brand-new prints and most of them four to six times. I’ve seen the five features in the series that were written and directed by Duras and the two written by her and directed by others; Facets will also screen three adaptations and the two Jacquot films. Though I regret many of the missing titles, the two missing Duras-directed items that I’ve seen are relatively expendable. La musica, codirected by Paul Seban, is so conventional compared with her other films that it looks more like an adaptation than her own work. And the 1976 Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta desert (”Her Venetian Name in Calcutta Desert”) — which combines the prodigious sound track of her India Song with soporific camera moves around an abandoned, decaying house — has got to be one of the most boring movies ever made, a false “good idea” if there ever was one.

Of course, there are plenty of critics who will assure you that all of Duras’ movies are boring. The on-screen action in those I’ve seen tends to be both minimal and as slow as molasses, but that certainly doesn’t add up to boredom for me in such films as Nathalie Granger, India Song, and Le camion (”The Truck”). There’s plenty going on in these movies at every moment –in their sound tracks more than in their images, but above all in the interplay between sound and image. In Agatha, ou Les lectures illimitées (1981) and Les enfants [see below], where there seems to be less going on, boredom is a more plausible reaction, but even in those films I find myself more gainfully occupied than I am at most narrative movies.

Duras’ narcissism — she often speaks her own texts during the films — has been held against her, yet it seems to be every bit as germane to her art as the purely physical narcissism of John Wayne, Cary Grant, and Toshiro Mifune. This narcissism is evident whenever one hears her reciting her own prose, which happens in at least four of the Duras-directed features showing at Facets. (It’s been too long since I’ve seen Les enfants for me to recall if she speaks in that film, but her voice can be clearly heard at the other end of a telephone in Nathalie Granger, offscreen in India Song and Agatha, and triumphantly on-screen and off in Le camion.) When I met this short, formidable woman about 15 years ago in New York, what impressed me most her was her Brahman-like relaxation and pleasure in her own strength and authority, partially expressed in the warmth and economy of her phrases. The fact that she’s attracted a mass audience with some of her fiction (most famously The Lover, the only one of her novels I’ve read) and persuaded many of the best actors in France (including Gerard Dépardieu, Daniel Gélin, Michel Lonsdale, Jeanne Moreau, Delphine Seyrig, and Bulle Ogier) to star in her marginal independent movies must be galling to some of her avant-garde competitors. Some people even peevishly try to use her commercial success to discredit her Marxism. Of course women as sure of themselves as Duras are bound to be viewed with suspicion and perceived as troublemakers.

Duras, who turned 81 last April, was born near Saigon in what was then French Indochina and is now Vietnam and remained there until she was 18. Though prolific as both a writer and a filmmaker, she didn’t publish her first novel until she was 29, and she didn’t start working in film until she was in her mid-40s, when she wrote Hiroshima, mon amour for Alain Resnais; her first solo feature as a director, Destroy, She Said (1969), was made when she was 55. So it shouldn’t be surprising that memory plays a central role in her work. Her political past includes work in the Resistance and membership in the French communist party; a central facet of her work is its embrace of leftism, which is no less consequential than her preoccupation with form.

“Faulkner plus Stravinsky” was Jean-Luc Godard’s description of Hiroshima, mon amour shortly after it shook the film world in 1959, forming the first real cornerstone of the French New Wave. One could interpret in numerous ways what he meant by Stravinsky — the clashing juxtapositions of a contemporary interracial love story set in Hiroshima, the powerful atonal score by Giovanni Fusco, the jagged yet musical editing. But when it comes to Faulkner, it’s pretty evident that Godard was thinking of the coexistence of past and present. The film’s French heroine — an actress making a pacifist propaganda film in Hiroshima — tells her lover, a Japanese architect, the story of her traumatic affair during the war with one of the German soldiers occupying France. He was killed, and she was persecuted by her neighbors because of the affair. What was most innovative about Resnais’ first feature was its rejection of flashback conventions: when the twitching hand of the sleeping architect reminds the heroine of her German lover’s dying convulsions, Resnais cuts immediately from the former to the latter, without the warning of a fade-out or dissolve accompanied by a musical cue — demonstrating how the past can be as immediate as the present in the heroine’s consciousness.

It’s worth adding that Duras’ writing is as distinctive as Faulkner’s: her musically shaped dialogues, composed of short sentences, are as recognizable as his rhetorical monologues composed of long sentences. In their formal experiments, both writers tend to circulate compulsively around the same themes, emotions, characters, and settings, as if trying to express an obsessive romantic content unreachable by more conventional means — a content derived from tribal transgressions, from incestuous and interracial love. In fact the experimental “new novel” that took root in France after the war, a movement Duras has always been identified with, was arguably less “purely” formal and more an effort to confront the emotional traumas and moral crises produced by French colonialism and the German occupation of France. Various sexual taboos often overlapped with these historical facts: Duras has often discussed her emotional intimacy with her two brothers in Indochina in terms of incest, and Agatha directly addresses incestuous desire between a brother and sister.

No doubt this is an oversimplification of a complex and far-ranging literary movement. But if one considers the colonial background and sexual obsessions of Alain Robbe-Grillet (the “new novelist” who scripted Resnais’ second New Wave feature, Last Year at Marienbad) and the importance of the German occupation to Jean Cayrol (the new novelist who scripted Resnais’ third feature, Muriel, as well as a short about the concentration camps, Night and Fog), this supposedly formalist movement begins to take on a certain ideological shape. The hero and narrator of Cayrol’s novel Foreign Bodies, for example, is both a compulsive liar and a former Nazi collaborator, so the periodic deconstruction of the narrative that occurs whenever he exposes his own lies to the reader might be said to correspond to the moral and spiritual deterioration of French citizens during the Occupation.

To my mind Hiroshima, mon amour – Duras’ first work in film — is the greatest film she’s been associated with. But because of its relative familiarity Facets is giving it only two afternoon screenings this weekend. (It’s giving the same treatment next weekend to Jean-Jacques Annaud’s 1992 adaptation of Duras’ The Lover, her autobiographical novel about a teenager who has an affair with a Chinese businessman in Vietnam. I haven’t seen this film, but Duras devoted an entire book, The North China Lover, to repudiating it; I’m only guessing, but I suspect this is the worst film she’s been associated with, though it’s almost certainly the most familiar to contemporary audiences.) You shouldn’t pass up Hiroshima, mon amour, however — especially if you want to see Such a Long Absence (1961), for which Duras also wrote the script.

Such a Long Absence is coscripted by Gerard Jalot and directed by Henri Colpi, an obscure figure who edited Resnais’ first two features and wrote an interesting and comprehensive early study of film music. Its main source of interest today is the dialectic it forms with Hiroshima, mon amour. Both films are structured around an extended dialogue between a couple that might be called psychoanalytical — one partner attempts to dredge up the other’s repressed, painful memory of the war. In Hiroshima it’s the man who assumes the psychoanalyst’s role, and he succeeds. But in Colpi’s melancholy feature — set in a dingy Paris suburb and attractively filmed in black-and-white ‘Scope — it’s the woman, and her effort basically fails.

Played by Alida Valli, the woman in Such a Long Absence runs a working-class bar and is still grieving the loss of her husband, who was deported to Germany and presumably killed. She convinces herself that an amnesiac derelict in the neighborhood (Georges Wilson) is in fact her missing husband, lures him to her bar, and tries to jog his memory in various ways. Sadly, her success in restoring his identity becomes indistinguishable from the man’s recollection of his own humiliation and defeat — holding up his hands as if under arrest when his name is called, for instance — and the catharsis of Hiroshima is categorically denied. Ironically, though the innovative Hiroshima won only a couple of secondary prizes at Cannes in 1959, the doggedly old-fashioned and defeatist Such a Long Absence won the grand prize at Cannes in 1961: new thinking must have been about as popular back then as it is today. Decidedly pre-New Wave, this picture undoubtedly belongs in the same category as Peter Brook’s Moderato Cantabile (1960), one of the films in the Facets series I haven’t seen, coadapted by Duras from her own novel and starring Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Paul Belmondo. What was loosely called New Wave in 1960, these films indicate, probably looks more like Old Wave in 1995.

If Hiroshima is the first film to show Duras’ greatness as a writer, Nathalie Granger (1972) may be the first to show her greatness as a director. The uncredited producer is the neglected critic and filmmaker Luc Moullet, and it seems that some of his deadpan, melancholy wit has been imparted to this production. A minimalist feminist comedy in black and white that’s all about presence and absence, structured around drifting camera pans and tricky sound cues, it involves two women (Jeanne Moreau and Lucia Bose) and their mainly absent little girls — one of them called Nathalie Granger — in a country house. (There’s also a husband, who appears briefly in an early scene and then disappears without explanation.) One hears radio reports about a police manhunt for two teenage male killers and kidnappers in the area and sees a couple of cats in the house and backyard.

About the only scenes qualifying as “action” are two ineffectual visits to the house by a nervous but eager washing-machine salesman (played hilariously by Gerard Dépardieu in one of his earliest screen appearances) and the piano lessons given to the two girls once they appear. Additional contenders are an uneventful boat ride in the pond behind the house, an equally uneventful bonfire in the backyard, and a brief encounter between a girl with a baby carriage and a cat. But thanks to Duras’ masterful composing of sounds and images, Nathalie Granger kept me spellbound throughout and amused much of the time.

The minimal dialogue is all in sync, so the tricky sound cues have to do mainly with the piano, which is frequently heard offscreen when the girls are absent and it’s clear the two women couldn’t be playing it either. (At one point a cat proves to be the culprit; and later in the movie, when we finally see the keyboard during a piano lesson, part of what we hear being played is still offscreen.) The radio reports about the teenage criminals and intercut scenes of a teacher expounding on Nathalie’s “violent” misbehavior conjure up another kind of offscreen space, where it might be said that action is no less present just because it’s heard about rather than seen.

A typical deadpan, absurdist gag occurs when the phone rings, Moreau answers, and the woman on the line complains that “the oil hasn’t arrived yet.” “There is no phone here, Madame,” Moreau explains, then hangs up. Later on she confounds Depardieu in the midst of his spiel by declaring, “You’re no salesman.” He tries to prove otherwise by showing his business card, but she and Bose are adamant: “No, no,” they say over and over, though they don’t mind at all if he wants to come back later and try again, so he does.

Many consider Duras’ best films to be India Song (1974) and Le camion (1977). Duras’ talent for sound tracks reaches its apotheosis in India Song: the sheer sensuality and density of the voices, music, and sound effects are so rich that the languorously beautiful 16-millimeter color visuals, which often involve actresses in evening dresses (including Delphine Seyrig) dancing with tuxedoed men (including Michel Lonsdale) in front of mirrors or reclining in despair on the floor, have to be taken mainly as accompaniment. This is surely the film in which Duras’ colonial erotics gets its fullest and most emotionally complex workout (over half the film takes place at a reception held at Calcutta’s French embassy in 1937), and the feeling of camp excruciation is held in perfect equipoise with the glamour and the class guilt by Carlos d’Alessio’s haunting “India Song Blues,” undoubtedly the most memorable tune ever to be heard in an avant-garde movie.

In contrast to Nathalie Granger, all the voices here are pointedly out of sync with the on-screen action, even though some of the people seen may be on the sound track. Duras gives us two versions of the past at once, one aural and one visual, and the audience has to negotiate between them as well as make various conjectures of their own. (This is one of the few films in the history of movies whose sound track was put together before shooting; in fact, the sound track was played back during filming so that the actors could coordinate their silent movements with it.) Agatha is marked by a similar division between sound and image, but its relative lack of richness in both the sound track (two voices, Brahms waltzes, and waves) and the visuals (empty beaches, Bulle Ogier, and Yann Andrea, Duras’ companion) ultimately leads to some monotony.

If memory serves, Le camion consists of only two kinds of narrative material: Duras reading aloud to Gerard Dépardieu a text about a film that might be made about a truck, a male truck driver, and a female hitchhiker; and a truck moving through a French landscape, accompanied at times by Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations and by Duras reading aloud from her text. Just as India Song situates itself in the painfully remembered past, Le camion plants its stakes in the conjectured future, where the audience is already waiting for it.

The best review of Le camion I know also happens to be the nerviest column Pauline Kael ever wrote for the New Yorker. To read it properly, you must go not to Kael’s recent compendium For Keeps, where the review is slightly shortened and deprived of its original context, but to her 1980 collection When the Lights Go Down: here her highly appreciative (albeit feisty) seven paragraphs about Le camion immediately follow a two-paragraph dismissal of Star Wars, which premiered in the same week. (When you’re finished reading that pungent combo, you might turn to Michel Chion’s Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, a fascinating book published last year: in a single lucid paragraph he explains why India Song is cinematic and Le camion is televisual.) You might say that 18 years ago Duras and Kael both knew that Le camion had more to do with the future of movies than Star Wars, but nobody else was paying much attention. Now’s a good time to catch up with what these women were saying.

The Seventh Victim

Though not directed by an auteurist-approved figure (Mark Robson has never attracted any cult to my knowledge), this is arguably the greatest of producer Val Lewton’s justly celebrated low-budget chillers (rivaled only by his 1942 Cat People)–a beautifully wrought story about the discovery of devil worshipers in Greenwich Village that fully lives up to the morbid John Donne quote that frames the action. Intricately plotted over its 71 minutes by screenwriters Charles O’Neal and De Witt Bodeen, this 1943 tale of a young woman searching for her troubled sister exudes a distilled poetry of doom that extends to all the characters as well as to the noirish bohemian atmosphere. (As a fascinating intertextual detail, the horny psychiatrist clawed to death by an offscreen feline in Cat People–played by Tom Conway, George Sanders’s brother–is resurrected here.) Not to be missed; with Kim Hunter, Evelyn Brent, and Hugh Beaumont. Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Friday, September 15, 6:00, 443-3737.

Living in Oblivion

A very funny 1994 comedy by New York writer-director Tom DiCillo, the cinematographer who shot Stranger Than Paradise, about the nightmares of shooting an American independent feature. The story comes in three acts, and even though the first is funnier than the second and the second funnier than the third, the whole thing is still pretty entertaining. The comedy here recalls at times Truffaut’s Day for Night, though the characters are much thinner. With Steve Buscemi, James LeGros, Catherine Keener, Dermot Mulroney, and Danielle von Zernick. Fine Arts.