Criterion has just announced the release of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert on Blu-Ray (and DVD) in June. Now I get to cross this exquisite film off my 10 Most Wanted on Blu-Ray list. My others? Hmmm…

1. Jason and the Argonauts

Not that it will look all that spectacular in Blu-Ray (Harryhausen’s films rely heavily on process shots, and are thus much grainier than other films from their era), but given that it’s my favorite film of all time, having it in my collection in the best possible presentation will somehow make my life a little more complete. Bring on the grain, I say.

2. Black Narcissus

One of Powell and Pressburger’s most visually ravishing color films seems to exist outside of time, and is indeed one of the finest films ever made. It simply must be released in high definition. Speaking of P&P…

3. A Matter of Life and Death
…do this one too.

4. Yellow Submarine
Although I would also love to see the Beatles’ other films released in Blu-Ray – in particular Let it Be, which has been out of home video circulation since an early-days-of-VHS release – Yellow Submarine would likely look the most spectacular in high-def format. The DVD release was nice, but, alas, non-anamorphic. Chances are that a Blu-Ray is already on the way, as Sir Paul hinted recently at the Golden Globes.

5. Le Notti Bianche
Luchino Visconti’s film of Dostoevsky’s White Nights remains one of my favorite films, a gorgeous Cinema Italiano fairy tale. Criterion released an excellent DVD, but a Blu-Ray would be even more welcome. And speaking of Marcello Mastroianni…

6. La Dolce Vita
…do this one too.

7. The Darjeeling Limited
I held off on purchasing this wonderful Wes Anderson film, expecting a high-def release to follow. Unfortunately, it was released just prior to Blu-Ray “winning” the high-def wars, and before studios began a standard practice of releasing each of their major new releases on Blu-Ray. I’m still waiting for my Darjeeling, released on DVD a mite too soon.

8. Conan the Barbarian
Although fundamentally flawed (John Milius was intent on casting based on physical type, not acting skill, which is why the real actors of the film – James Earl Jones and Max Von Sydow – seem to tower over the film’s leads – a bodybuilder, dancer, and surfer), this is an impressive fantasy film, inspired by Frank Frazetta pulp illustrations and Japanese period pictures such as The Seventh Samurai and Kwaidan, coupled with one of the best film scores ever composed.

9. Supervixens
If I had to pick just one Russ Meyer film, it would be this one, a live action Looney Toon which can’t be taken seriously for either its sex or its violence, though the tone varies wildly from scene to scene. The bathroom standoff, featuring deranged cop Charles Napier tearing down a bathroom door before beating and electrocuting a woman in a tub, even drew the admiration of Alfred Hitchcock for its over-the-top intensity. Don’t count on this one anytime soon, since RM Films is notoriously stingy with its catalogue.

10. Juliet of the Spirits
A female–and very, very COLOR–take on 8 1/2, and one of my favorite Fellinis.

It’s a little Bakshi kick I’m on to revisit American Pop after watching Blue Underground’s spectacular Blu-Ray of Fire & Ice (and anticipating the BD release of his Lord of the Rings [1978] in April). A couple years ago I wrote a career survey of Bakshi’s films, which you can read here; I did not, however, rewatch more than a scene or two of American Pop when writing that essay, since I felt I knew the film pretty well. That was a mistake, as seeing it again has brought its flaws more into focus. But first let’s put it out there that this is one of the most unusual, and one of the most ambitious, animated films ever made, and that has to be understood before any criticisms are levied. It is still a significant point that Bakshi was a pioneer of the form, believing that animation should not belong exclusively to children; and to this day, long after he’s retired, the majority of animated films made for adults are not American, but Japanese. Therefore, the list of films he produced during the 70’s and early 80’s remain utterly unique, and still pack a strangely disorienting punch.

I was aware of Bakshi from a young age because of The Lord of the Rings: I have a vivid memory of standing outside of some storefront in a mall, with televisions stacked in the window on display, all of them showing Bakshi’s Tolkien adaptation, and becoming mesmerized and frightened by the Black Riders (rotoscoped–actually, literally Xeroxed–from live action, to creepy effect). I also remember Lord of the Rings merchandise still being sold years after the film had come and gone (flopping)–Frodo and Sam buttons, and such. And my mother would tell me in a low voice that she knew he’d done Fritz the Cat, “an X-rated cartoon,” which, as you’d expect, inflamed my imagination with all sorts of ideas that were well beyond anything that film actually contained. The only other film of his I was really familiar with as a child was Wizards, which disturbed my undeveloped brain with its swearing, violence, and hints of sex. Into my adolescent and teen years, I still didn’t get Wizards (I’ve come around a bit), but enjoyed Fire & Ice when I was just the right age for it and, when I was a bit older, deeply admired his angry and semi-autobiographical film Heavy Traffic. Somewhere around that time I noticed, in TV Guide, that Cinemax was running a late-night showing of a rare Bakshi film, one I’d never heard of before. Two stars, it said, and it was called American Pop. I set the VCR. I suspected the film might be similar to Heavy Traffic or Wizards–anarchic, stylish, cartoonish–but the last thing I thought it would be was a semi-classy animated epic, rotoscoped in the “realistic” style of Lord of the Rings and Fire & Ice. (In fact, this seems to form the second installment of Bakshi’s trilogy of realistically-rotoscoped films.) I was surprised at the scope of the film–flowing through multiple generations of fathers and sons to cover almost a century of history, ostensibly also telling the story of how popular music has evolved, from George M. Cohan tunes to Sex Pistols punk. As the film rushes from one brief setpiece to another, cultural touchstones are checked off (WWI and WWII, beatniks, hippies, and so on), characters grow older or die unexpectedly, and a harmonica is passed down as an unintended heirloom, representing a geneological connection to music, just as each of the four central male characters seek out a career in popular music, yearnings usually aborted by reality, or otherwise leading to disaster.

In college I would show my battered tape to friends and they would usually be astonished that the film existed–and then, at a certain point, bored to tears as it dragged on. I did not believe the film was perfect by any means, but I held to it as some rare artifact, a forgotten piece of cult movie trivia. “Hey, look at this weird cartoon! It has a hippie addicted to smack, and The Doors are playing!” After Heavy Metal–another adolescent favorite of mine–was released on VHS, and then DVD, in the late 90’s, American Pop shortly followed, in similar silvery packaging and also boasting about its rock and roll soundtrack. They might both be R-rated animated movies held back from video release due to music rights issues, but that’s about all they have in common. Heavy Metal is an ideal midnight movie, both juvenile and trippy, with an emphasis on over-the-top sex and violence. American Pop, on the other hand, could not be more serious in its intentions. Really, it is Bakshi’s stab at the Great American Novel. He would never extend himself as far again.

“If you love movies…pop in American Pop!” says Gene Shalit on the box of the 1999 DVD release, so I did as his moustache asked and inserted it into my Sony Blu-Ray player, upconverting the image via HDMI to my new 50″ plasma TV. Now this, I thought, should be interesting. And then I realized that this was, after all, just a DVD from 1999 – the cover image shows one of the American Pop characters standing astride a photo of a DVD, so new and nifty was the technology back then. The back of the box did not specify it was anamorphic. I couldn’t really expect much from the picture, could I? Luckily, the widescreen side of this flipper disc (full screen on the other side, something rarely done anymore) was indeed anamorphic, and the image was quite good. At least this film, which probably won’t get an upgrade of any sort anytime soon, looks just fine as it is; certainly better than any VHS tape from an old late-night cable showing, which is probably what most Bakshi fans relied upon prior to this DVD release. The film itself, on the other hand, remains an interesting oddity while aging a bit poorly.

The story structure, hopping as it does from one scene to another while spanning a century, has two curious effects. One is to make the film seem much longer than it actually is (it’s about 90 minutes, but feels to be at least two hours long). The other is to distance the viewer from the characters emotionally. It doesn’t help that the dialogue is often cliched, sometimes deliberately so (I suspect) to give an impression of the era into which we’ve just been dropped, in lieu of actually telling us what year it is. One scene, in which two shy newlyweds step into their new, ridiculously oversized home–purchased by mob-connected parents–would be rather sweet if their dialogue weren’t pared down so severely. They speak the basics, the scene ends. That scene, as with so many others, is reduced to a type of moment rather than a specific moment. American Pop wants to be a grand epic, but it needs to be built from recognizable and precise characters to succeed. From time to time, it comes close to achieving this. I really like a scene in which an older brother, high on beat-poetry and inflated righteousness, berates his younger siblings for watching TV. There’s a nice balance between his self-infatuation and the resigned tolerance of the children, who somehow come off as more mature than he is. It’s a real moment. (It benefits from Bakshi’s canny use of voice actors; the film, typical of his style, leans frequently upon improvised dialogue, lending an authenticity to his animation.) There are also some fine character details in the early scenes, where we see life backstage at a vaudeville show, although the real high point of American Pop comes just under halfway through, with a dance montage, set to Glenn Miller, which turns the rotoscoping movements into a fine art, before dissolving into an unusually moving scene set during WWII, where an American soldier and a Nazi share a brief bond over music before death ensues. For that stretch, American Pop really works, and you can see what Bakshi was aiming to achieve. In the back half of the film, we get the usual 60’s rock bio cliches, as a Janis Joplin/Grace Slick-style singer and her songwriter fall in love, and struggle with drug addiction. As tired as this storyline is, it’s actually handled fairly well and the animation is nicely rendered. Plus, we finally get a chance to spend a sustained amount of film time with a single character – which helps. But there’s a strange hiccupping quality, even to these scenes, as if too much has been cut from the story. We ought to know these characters better. In animation terms, we need more fluidity, more in-betweens.

Oddly, if we do view LOTR, Pop, and Fire & Ice as a trilogy, it’s the last one, the least narratively ambitious, which is the most successful. Fire & Ice has smoother animation, and with its almost crudely simplistic storyline and minimal cast, it can achieve exactly what it sets out to do. American Pop ought to be the greater film. But, as with Lord of the Rings, Bakshi strains against his means–one genuinely feels he blew most of his budget on getting a great soundtrack, as so many scenes feature static backgrounds and only one or two characters moving at a time. It’s easier for me to take pleasure out of watching LOTR as well, since Tolkien cares for the storytelling duties. Of the three, American Pop is the most purely Bakshi. That extends, alas, to its glaring flaws.

With our tax refund this year we bought a new TV, a 50″ Samsung plasma television and a significant upgrade from our previous television, an early HD-ready set, much smaller but not flat-screen, that weighed about a thousand pounds.  This, in conjunction with recently inheriting my parents’ cast-off surround-sound speakers, has resulted in a “home theater,” I believe the kids these days are calling it.  It was fortuitous that Amazon shipped our television the very day of Winter Olympics opening ceremonies, so we can see HD programming in all its splendor.  My last TV was set up to receive HD through a receiver in our Tivo, so the image we used to have wasn’t bad at all; however the colors were not as vivid as a plasma TV can provide, and the smaller monitor meant less detail.  Significantly, I can now more easily detect a difference between a standard DVD and a Blu-Ray…and now I am rapidly becoming a Blu-Ray advocate.  The difference is stunning.  Any curmudgeon who rails against having to adopt a new format I can only presume has not upgraded his system.  If you have a smaller TV, DVDs are fine.  At 50 inches (he said, sucking in his chest), wowza but that’s a nice picture.

Now, I am painfully aware that my personal library of DVDs has grown out of control.  It fills two giant bookshelves in our living room, and has stretched to a shelf in my den.  There are two reasons it’s grown so large over the last ten years: (1) the many opportunities to buy a cheap DVD, and (2) my borderline-absurd habit of purchasing a film simply because I like it and want to display it on my shelf as some sort of “evidence” of this otherwise abstract affection.  Now that I’ve gone broke splurging on this television, it gives me an opportunity to start revisiting this collection, to make good on my ten-year-long investment and actually watch the films in my library.

I had planned on making the Inglourious Basterds Blu-Ray the inaugural film for my new TV, but alas, I’ve yet to get around to it (though of course I’ve seen the film, and love it).  At a friend’s request we watched Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder first.  Prior to calibrating the TV, the brightness and contrast was cranked high, and the color was especially vivid, or vivider than vivid.  Naturally it looked gorgeous, if eye-straining.  Some research online and my wife and I calibrated the TV on our own, hoping to prolong the TV’s life.  It still looks fantastic, but animation looks especially grand.  I had previously been skeptical that an animated film would be worth releasing in Blu-Ray, thinking that there were limits to the detail that could be seen; however, after watching first the Futurama film and then Ralph Bakshi’s Fire & Ice on the HD format, I now believe that animation in Blu-Ray can look even better than live action film.  Simply put, the colors in animation are not meant to mimic reality, not even in a rotoscoped film like Fire & Ice.  Bakshi’s film, with its designs by acclaimed pulp illustrator Frank Frazetta and background paintings by James Gurney (later of the Dinotopia books) and a then-unknown Thomas Kincaid*, on this presentation really capture the quality of a vividly backlit painter’s canvas.  I doubt this film could ever look better – the impression was of seeing an image exactly as the director intended, with an accurate and subtle color range.  I also did notice details I hadn’t seen before, most likely because of the size of the set, such as the bite marks on a “beast-man”’s arm after he removes a slug-like creature; even a humorously smutty nipple slip which some animator snuck in while illustrating the scantily-clad princess.  Although a superior presentation will never turn the pulpy and pleasingly-adolescent Fire & Ice into a great film, the new factors at play here (including the 5.1 remix) did engage me in a way which the film never had before.  I recommend it, in particular to fans of fantasy illustration.

After this, it was spending a weekend doing the obligatory sampling of modern Hollywood blockbusters – I chose to rewatch the X-Men trilogy in BD.  As opposed to the animation I’d screened, the colors now were of a more subdued quality (partly a choice of the directors), and obviously the flesh tones were more subtle and realistic.  At this point, I was more accustomed to the presentation and found nothing earth-shattering, although I did become more emotionally involved in the action–in particular the series’ high point, the second film–in a way which I had not experienced since watching them in the theater, where the size of a screen creates a certain subjective impact during the viewing experience.  Later in the week, I watched the 2009 indie horror film House of the Devil and found that, despite the film’s self-conscious use of grain (it is set in the early 80’s, and in many ways imitates the style of genre films from that period), the film’s use of black shadows and long subjective shots of wandering through an “old dark house” had a visceral impact heightened by the presentation.  This is a film which relies upon putting the viewer in the protagonist’s shoes, seeing a threatening world through her eyes: the larger the screen, the more powerful is this effect, which heightens the suspense.

But if I was going to work through my library of titles, that meant watching those DVDs–many of which will likely never get a BD upgrade.  Thanks to the “upconverting” effect of watching a DVD on a Blu-Ray player connected via an HDMI cable, even the 80’s TV show “Cheers” looks just great, or as good as it ever will.  (At this point in any article of this kind, the reader will begin to judge the writer’s viewing habits.  You are perfectly welcome to do so.)  But my Blu-Ray player is not region-free, and unless I care to laboriously rearrange my cables each time I want to watch a non-Region 1 disc, the upconverting effect, as well as the 5.1 surround, is not present for that circumstance.  Nevertheless, I wanted to see how the French film Asterix and Obelix: Mission Cleopatra looked on a bigger monitor.  This wonderful live action comic book adaptation–never released in the States, since the Asterix comics here are known to few–actually looked quite good, even when connected by “mere” component cables.  The colors were especially good, particularly in shots of sunsets or bright blue skies over the desert.  However, although faces looked just fine, technology failed when it came to representing the desert sand.  The grains were a pixelized mess, something which BluRay would be especially adept at rendering.  (It was a marked contrast with watching so much Olympics coverage in HD, where I felt that I could reach out and sink my hand into the snow.)  Despite this shortcoming, I doubt I’ll be seeing this film released in a Region 1 Blu-Ray anytime soon, so I’ll keep my U.K. DVD of this very entertaining film.

Back to high definition, I decided to test an older film by watching Criterion’s The Third Man, which went out-of-print almost as soon as it was released on BD.  At first, spoiled, perhaps, by Olympics coverage and more modern films, the grain was distracting.  (This, from a film enthusiast!)  I had read, on websites such as dvdbeaver.com as well as in Video Watchdog, that Blu-Ray makes film grain more pronounced, one of the potential downsides of HD.  High definition is meant to capture tiny details, and when it comes to a film made in the 1940’s, grain as part of the negative will make up much of those “tiny details.”  But I quickly grew accustomed to what I was seeing: those swimming particles on the image actually brought me closer to when I first saw this film, on the big screen during its revival circa 1999.  I found that it brought a curious warmth to the film, perhaps of nostalgia, but also for the nature of film.  There is a different quality to watching an older film in high definition – it evokes not the details of “reality,” or even the heightened colors of artificial reality, but rather the intimacy of cinema, as well as the tangible quality of the medium (being film).

As I continue to explore my library, I promise my next entries on this subject will be more about the films themselves.  Watching these movies again, they come alive in new ways.  When it comes to cinema, bigger really is better.

*Painter of Light (TM).

Susana (Mexico, 1951)
D: Luis Bunuel

Criterion’s relatively-new Eclipse series releases box sets of overlooked films, free of special features but cheaper than a Criterion Collection “special edition” equivalent. My wish list of what Eclipse should cover is growing. I would still like them to do a Jacques Rivette set, but oh, how I would relish a survey of Luis Bunuel’s Mexican period – that decades-long period of exile in which the famous Surrealist produced low-budget, crowd-pleasing melodramas with delicious touches of fetishism, black comedy, and subversion. Many of these films are still unavailable on DVD, but I take what I can find: like a screening of Bunuel’s Hitchcockian comedy The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz at the University of Wisconsin’s Cinematheque in the fall of this year (paired deliriously with Pedro Almodovar’s Live Flesh, which quotes the film); or a StudioCanal box set, imported from the U.K., which rigorously covers Bunuel’s late period but also includes his Mexican (and English-language) film The Young One. Then there’s Susana, which I just watched on a DVD from Cinemateca, with a crude menu, no special features, and subtitles so small they’d be more effectively used for an eye exam. So entertaining is this bizarre little B-picture that you soon forget your complaints; or maybe that’s because you’re not reading the subtitles at all, but admiring the visual storytelling that renders the subtitles irrelevant. Or perhaps you’re simply gazing at Susana’s enticing legs.  During his Mexican-studio years, Bunuel would occasionally let slip a personal work, a masterpiece (Los Olvidados, Nazarin, The Executing Angel), but more commonly he would need to settle with contorting the conventional into a slightly odd new shape, but in such a subtle fashion that many wouldn’t notice. He wasn’t making movies for the editors of Film Comment – he had no reassurances his films would ever be seen outside of Mexico. But there is a personal touch to these pictures which is unmistakable once you’ve seen enough Bunuel; he is always present in his films, winking at you, as though his whole filmography is sustained on the back of one very strange private joke.

Blonde bombshell Susana (Rosita Quintana) is introduced inhabiting, by all appearances, a Universal monster movie: imprisoned in a cell filled with straw, surrounded by unwholesome creatures to which she immediately likens herself (improbably, a tarantula, rats, and a very large bat that hangs from the ceiling), she pleads to God to be set loose in nature, at which point, immediately, the cell bars come free in her hands, and she climbs to freedom by flashing lightning and rolling thunder, screaming madly with joy, crawling upon her belly in the mud to escape razor wire – she is wild, man-destroying lust, a monster on par with Frankenstein’s, Dracula, or The Wolf Man.  Soon she discovers an idyllic Mexican ranch, overseen by the stern Don Guadalupe (Fernando Soler), his scholarly son Alberto (Luis López Somoza), and the matriarch Dona Carmen (Matilde Palou).  Guadalupe is upset because his prize mare has given birth to a stillborn, and is now herself on death’s door – and will remain so while the story unfolds, for the ranch has fallen under an unspeakable curse.  Little do they know that the ill omens are warning them of Susana, who arrives with the terrible storm, and is glimpsed staring at the frightened household through the window, a ghostly apparition straight out of Turn of the Screw.  Integrated into the family as a servant, she soon begins behaving diabolically, first enflaming the eager, studly ranch-hand Jesus (Víctor Manuel Mendoza), then working her wiles on the virginal Alberto.  (She pretends to be shocked at the sight of male nudity in one of his books, before he explains that it’s a classical depiction of Apollo, god of poetry and the arts; within the minute she is covering him with passionate kisses.)  She’s climbing a ladder, with her eyes ultimately set upon Don Guadalupe, although this simple storyline is never actually stated, and is delivered rather incoherently.  In Bunuel’s hands, Susana is the story of a succubus set loose, acting as an agent of chaotic lust in the farm, setting one against the other to no apparent strategy until we finally see Guadalupe prepared to throw his wife out, and then we have to intuit, okay, this must be what she was after.  Yet one event does not follow the other through ordinary cinematic logic.  Bunuel is simply not interested.  He is interested in Susana, in particular her body, in particular her legs.  Those inclined to track his personal fetishism will be greatly amused at the amount of screen time given to Susana’s lower limbs: here draped in mud, there splattered with egg yolk.  Given that the film is ostensibly moralizing (the evils of temptation, and the dangers of Woman in particular), it’s nothing but delightful that Bunuel clearly doesn’t buy any of it, nor does he particularly care if you do.  The film, of course, is no more a straight-up drama than Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.  It shows its true colors in that opening scene in the cell, and most particularly in the repetition of Susana, each time she wants to make an impression, lowering her blouse off her shoulders with great fuss.  It’s a costume change akin to Clark Kent stepping into a phone booth.  Eventually the men in the white coats do show up, at just the right moment, and we get a wonderfully phony resolution – Dona Carmen forgives her husband and son, Jesus is welcomed back, the mare recovers - which is so perfect that it is utterly insincere.  As the years progressed, Bunuel would refine his skill in creating subversive “happy” endings, such as sneaking a menage-a-trois reference into the last line of Viridiana, or strongly implying that Belle de Jour has not been forgiven by her husband, but slipped back into a dream (or insanity).  A modern viewer of Susana can relish the sophisticated camp, and the fact that Bunuel, temporarily beholden to commercial interests, never lost his bite.