In full Spring, five more movies are out with two being remade for 4K-UHD purposes and three newcomers to the closet. A nearly forgotten movie from sixty years ago is saved for the better here, while a hidden American indie and a more contemporary European drama join Criterion’s greatest hits. In five different countries, in four languages, April’s list is quite a doozy of releases.
I Am Cuba (1964)
As a piece of pro-Communist propaganda, it is still a dazzling reconstruction of a country born from a revolution that changed the island nation forever. Russian director Mikhail Kalatozov went to Cuba and captured a country that had always been crushed by foreign exploitation and massive inequality, now feeling something worth saving was here. Four stories are connected and lifted up by amazing camerawork, courtesy of Sergey Urusevsky, to what Cuba was becoming; however, it was criticized by both Cuban and Soviet officials for being stereotypical, naive, and not radical enough. It was forgotten for thirty years until it reappeared in the United States and a re-evaluation promoted it as an incredible visual masterpiece.
Picnic At Hanging Rock (1975)
The first of two re-editions is Peter Weir’s mystery drama set in a boarding school where schoolgirls go missing at a picnic on Valentine’s Day in 1900. A key piece of the Australian New Wave, Weir mixes the mystery with themes of sexual repression and class differential in the Victorian era. With Rachel Roberts and Jacki Weaver, Weir became a much bigger figure in Australia’s growing cinema which would see him direct films for Hollywood, the first of several directors who would also cross the Pacific to do so.
Dogfight (1991)
A Marine heading for Vietnam (River Phoenix) and an aspiring folk singer (Lili Taylor) meet on November 21, 1963 – the day before President Kennedy’s assassination – and go to a bar to attend a cruel party against the girls who are there. However, the encounter turns into something else as the night goes on between them in a time when innocence was still with everyone. Director Nancy Savoca helms this bittersweet coming-of-age story filled with classic folk music while analyzing American machismo and the status of young people in that time, one day before the darkest of all days befell everyone.
La Haine (1995)
The second re-edition is Mathieu Kassovitz’s brutal story about the racial separation in concrete urban jungles between Jewish, African, and Arab people played by Vincent Cassel, Hubert Koundé, and Saïd Taghmaoui. These three characters who cross paths in the aftermath of a riot against police brutality where one wants revenge on the police, another wants to be a mediator to bring peace in the neighborhood, and a third, whose business was burned down, strongly disagrees with the belief that violence in retaliation is the right way. The film is all about hatred, which is what the title translates to, and what it does to society as a whole.
Werckmeister Harmonies (2000)
Directors Bela Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky (who are also husband and wife) took on László Krasznahorkai’s novel set in bleak, Communist-era Hungary and created a long, fluid trek of unease in the story of a circus who comes into town with a mysterious cloud over them. It is a Lynchian type of movie, black-and-white and with an eerie quality that converts bleak into an ultra-violent fantasy, unexplainable yet beautiful. Tarr built on his reputation for long takes, creating thirty-nine shots, which was then edited by Hranitzky to tie together a nightmare of a visit.
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