Adam Hartzell's Oshima Reading Guide

Brian here. Lots of cinematic happenings on Frisco Bay this week! The Another Hole In The Head festival of indie horror, sci-fi and other genre film opens Friday at the Roxie; it's been heavily previewed by Jay Blodgett, though I liked Coming Soon more than he did I think. The SF Film Society Screen at the Kabuki cranks into gear again starting the same day with a week-long booking of Carlos Saura's Fados. But for me, the most exciting events occur in Berkeley at the Pacific Film Archive, where critic and programmer James Quandt will be in attendance for two evenings of screenings in the Nagisa Oshima retrospective that began last weekend. I shamefully have only seen two Oshima films so far (at least one of them, Death By Hanging is clearly a masterpiece even to a newbie like myself). But since my buddy Adam Hartzell is one of the most devoted fans of this living legend that I'm aware of, I'm absolutely thrilled that he has offered to provide a guide to navigating the Oshima ocean that this retrospective may appear to be, and to share with Hell on Frisco Bay readers. He shows me up starting from his first sentence, using the proper Japanese name order (surname first, personal name second) that I haven't trained myself to adopt. Here's Adam:

The Pacific Film Archive is in the realm of Oshima Nagisa for the next month and a half. James Quandt of the Cinematheque Ontario has done the hard work of rounding up the prints and rights to screen a all but one of Oshima’s feature films, along with a couple his documentaries. Having taken his series on the road, we had to wait until the end of the run to get our chance to see Oshima films rarely screened anywhere in North America before, let alone the Bay Area, such as Three Resurrected Drunkards, or films screened occasionally, but since they aren’t available on (English-subbed) DVDs yet, one is completely reliant on screenings to re-view them, such as two of my favorite Oshima films Death By Hanging and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. (Why that latter film is not on DVD with English subtitles yet is completely confounding since it features David Bowie and composer Ryuichi Sakamoto in a sublimated Gay love story and also features Beat Takeshi.)

But rather than recommend more films from the series, I wanted to take this time to recommend a reading list instead. So here are the books in my library that I recommend you seek out to help you formulate your own theories and questions while watching a treasure trove of Oshima’s oeuvre on hand this early summer.

Maureen Turim – The Films of Oshima Nagisa: Images of a Japanese Iconoclast (University of California Press, 1998)

This is the definitive book on Oshima and the one that has made me so anxious for this retrospective. Turim discusses so many films to which I have yet to have access. But thanks to Quandt and the PFA, I can now compare Turim’s arguments with what I see when watching, A Town of Love and Hope, Shiro Amakusa, the Christian Rebel, Pleasures of the Flesh, A Treatise on Japanese Bawdy Songs, Diary of a Shinjuku Thief, Three Resurrected Drunkards, Dear Summer Sister, and the documentary Yunbogi’s Diary. (Two other films I have yet to see that will be screening, but not addressed in Turim’s book, are Band of Ninja and Double Suicide: A Japanese Summer.) Thanks to Quandt and PFA, I can revisit films I once owned on VHS, Cruel Story of Youth, The Sun’s Burial, Violence at Noon, In the Realm of the Senses, and Empires of Passion after which I can then revisit Turim’s commentary. (I say ‘once owned’ because money concerns recently had me cashing them in at Amoeba. So if you want to snag them, they are likely still there. Thankfully, I held on to Max Mon Amour, Oshima’s fully French-funded film that features actress Charlotte Rampling playing an upper-class woman who has begun an affair with a chimpanzee. Sadly, this is the only Oshima feature film not on offer at the retrospective Quandt has compiled.) I can also revisit both film and theory with Night and Fog in Japan, The Catch, Death by Hanging, Boy, The Ceremony, the Man Who Left His Will On Film, and Oshima’s contribution to the British Film Institute’s Century of Cinema project, 100 Years of Japanese Cinema, films that had previously shown at the PFA, SFMoMA, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. (Gohatto will also be part of the retrospective; it was released in the Bay Area but it was made after Turim’s book was published.)

Oshima Nagisa – Cinema, Censorship and the State: The Writings of Oshima Nagisa (The MIT Press, 1992)

Or perhaps you want to become acquainted with Oshima’s own words on his own films. If so, then you’ll definitely want to check out Cinema, Censorship and the State. In this collection of Oshima’s writings you will find valuable complimentary commentary on Oshima’s trips to impoverished South Korea, (this was pre-economic-miracle, when South Korea was nothing like it is today), a nice companion piece to the screening at the retrospective of the documentary Yonbogi’s Diary. Also, invaluable to the screening of In the Realm of the Senses, is Oshima’s commentary on the obscenity trial that followed that film. Ironically, it appears it was never screened, ehem, uncut in Japan until 2000.

And speaking of In the Realm of the Senses, if you haven’t heard it spoken of before, it is Oshima’s take on the Abe Sada story. If you’re a film fanatic, you surely have already heard about the significant moments that occur within this film. But spoiler ethics keep me from going into too much detail. Let me say this though. Do not go with a date, unless you are very, very comfortable with that person. Also, don’t bring your parents or grandparents. Finally, let me say, as a man, I have seen this film roughly five times, and although I can keep my eyes open during the mid-climaxes, I have yet to be able to keep my eyes open at the final climax. I agree with many who argue In the Realm of the Senses is not just a glorified porno flick. (In Japanese, it’d be better to compare this film to a ‘Pink Film’, which are considered separate from what most of us intend by the moniker ‘porno’.) Many consider it a film of high quality and one that makes significant commentary on the encroaching Japanese empire of the time in which the film is set. The British Film Institute felt similarly, and included In the Realm of the Senses in its film monograph series. Joan Mellon does the honors for this monograph and includes a nice short overview of Oshima’s work and themes. Another British publishing house, Wallflower Press, includes an essay on In the Realm of the Senses by Samara Lea Allsop in The Cinema of Japan and Korea, part of their 24 Frames world cinema series. (This is where I’m obligated to say I also have an essay in the same book. Mine is on Hong Sangsoo’s The Power of Kangwon Province (1998). And this is also where I’m obligated to apologize for the personal plug.)

Finally, before or after the PFA’s screening of The Catch, you might want to read the Oe Kenzaburo story on which the film is based. Oe, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994, is my favorite fiction writer. I have read every book by him that has been translated into English. His novel A Personal Matter is one of the few books I’ve read more than twice. (Another is Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. And the reason I was so strongly drawn to both authors was limned when I read Oe’s Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age. Ironically, it’s not the William Blake reference of the title that stuck out for me but the confirmation in the novel that the ethical quandaries of the Abraham and Isaac story were indeed a concern throughout Oe’s oeuvre.) 'The Catch' is a story that explores the theme of racism as transference where a Japanese village’s psychosexual issues are thrown upon an African-American soldier whose plane crashes into their village during World War II. The translation I have of ‘The Catch’ is actually entitled 'Prize Stock', a title I find more in sync with the story’s theme, and is found in a wonderful collection of Oe's short stories entitled Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness (Grove Press, 1994).

So there are some titles to checkout either at the library or one of the many independent bookstores in the Bay Area to enhance the already wonderful experience the Pacific Film Archives is providing for us cinephiles.

Adam Hartzell: Sugar Ball

Brian here. By now, Adam Harztell is a familiar enough contributor to Hell on Frisco Bay regular readers that he really needs no introduction. But since I haven't bothered figuring out how to turn this into a functioning "team blog" he's getting one anyway. He recently wrote pieces on the Mosque in Morgantown and the cricket angle in Slumdog Millionaire. Now I'm excited to present his latest piece on Sugar, the newest film by the writing/directing team responsible for Have You Seen This Man? and Half Nelson. It's currently playing exclusively at the Embarcadero Cinema and the Camera 12 here on Frisco Bay. Here's Adam, after the image (supplied by Sony Pictures Classics, along with others in this piece):

Like a good wine at dinner, I like to compliment my films with a good book. Just as I read books from the countries where I travel while I’m traveling there, I seek out films and books of related topics to experience those mediums in tandem. I want these texts to talk to each other within me. If some scholar hasn’t already named what I’m talking about, let’s call it "Intentional Intertextuality".

So when I found out there was a pre-screening of Sugar (directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck) that I could actually attend, I immediately sought out Playing America's Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line by Adrian Burgos, Jr. An assistant professor of History at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, I had heard a fascinating interview with Burgos Jr. on Dave Zirin's Edge of Sports Radio show about the baseball academies in Latin America. After hearing the interview, I added his book to my checklist of books to check out one day. And now that Sugar, like Major League Baseball, is upon us, this was the book I needed to provide the proper context for the film.

Although I acquired the book within two days of searching, the search included failed efforts to find it at Bird and Beckett in Glen Park, Green Apple in the Richmond District, and Books Inc. in Laurel Village. The latter was particularly ironic since they had a major display of baseball books to celebrate opening 2009, just not the one I was looking for. My commitment to independent bookstores over Amazon was rewarded when after my wife and I caught a matinee of Tokyo Sonata at the Clay on Fillmore we found Playing America’s Game waiting for me in the shelves of Browser Books.

Sugar the film follows the baseball dreams of an eponymously nicknamed "Sugar", real character name Miguel Santos (debut performance by Algenis Pérez Soto). We meet Sugar at a baseball academy in the Dominican Republic. Although the film provides various theories for why Miguel is named "Sugar", it seems equally plausible that his name came from Alan Klein’s book Sugarball, where Klein has this to say about these academies – "The academy is the baseball counterpart of the colonial outposts, the physical embodiment overseas of the parent franchise. It operates...like the subsidiary of any other foreign country: it finds raw materials (talented athletes), refines them (trains the athletes), and ships abroad finished products (baseball players)" (quoted in page 227 of Burgos Jr.’s book). This isn’t a metaphor. That is how some scholars literally see these baseball academies. It is Sugar's carpentry that is the metaphor for the reality of the human bodies as raw material refined into product that the baseball academies enable under the guise of 'opportunity' for the aspiring ballplayers, 'opportunity' being a code word for your employer wanting access to your labor at a reduced rate.

Wow! That sure sounds dehumanizing, doesn't it? The quote and my extension of the argument seem to strip all agency away from the ballplayers at these academies. It’s the pull-quoting that's the problem. There's a lot more context provided in Burgos Jr.'s book, (and I’m sure Klein's) since "it illuminates Latinos as actors, not just people acted upon" (p 268). He focuses in on the agency of the players, how they negotiated the racial and economic impositions of their particular time in history through each man's attempts to play organized baseball. And that's what Sugar seeks to do too: humanize a composite of the experience of ballplayers from the Spanish-speaking Americas. It seeks to humanize by seeking to sympathize. It shows the players as actors through actors. And it’s Sugar's actions later in the film that lead some reviewers to point out how the film steps away from the clichés of the genre of the sports film.

Where Sugar the film works for me is in its moments of tenderness, such as those Sugar experiences with a local waitress. It works for me when the camera juxtaposes images of the cityscapes of New York, Sugar's home in the Dominican Republic, and the fields of Iowa. It works for me in the blurring of the background as Sugar enters the collapsing maze and oppressive pings and whoops of a casino.

Sugar is a movie that wears its politics with its sympathy. It name drops Latino heroes such as Roberto Clemente and Vic Power. (I grew up well-versed in Clemente lore since my father grew up outside of Pittsburgh and thus a Pirates fan. The lore was later enhanced with research provided by David Maraniss' excellent biography Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero, a book I learned about again from Zirin. Whereas, I had only been familiarized with the controversies surrounding Vic Power through passages from Burgos Jr.'s book I’d finished reading just before heading into the screening.) It is at these political talking point moments the film doesn't have the subtlety I prefer. It's moments like these where Sugar seems forced. Sugar the movie is not Burgos Jr.'s book. Burgos Jr. has the space to lay out a more nuanced argument about the history of peoples from the Spanish-speaking Americas in organized baseball.

And this history is much longer than is often recognized, from Cuban Esteban Bellán in the 1870s to the Venezuelan rookies debuting this year. And Playing America's Game seeks to remedy that by laying out the forgotten or misunderstood histories of the many Latino players. He contextualizes where they came from and how they negotiated their way into organized baseball before and after Jackie Robinson broke through the color line. Transnational links were established from Havana to DC via the Washington Senators cost-cutting efforts in the early years of the 20th century. So when similar links were established from Santo Domingo to San Francisco and our Giants in the later years of the century, this was nothing new, just a modification of previous ventures. Each Latino player had his own way of negotiating the linguistic, political, racial and economic obstacles of their sojourns, whether it be Ted Williams who didn't publicly acknowledge his Mexican ancestry while playing, or Roberto Clemente who confronted racism and poverty head-on, or Reggie Jackson who resisted the press by briefly insisting on only speaking Spanish, or Felipe Alou’s response to the racism of a San Francisco talk-show boast. Sugar does not speak for all of these players. It is a composite of the issues these players face. It works hard, sometimes too hard.

Burgos Jr.'s book offers more to me than Sugar right now, but that's because books in general are offering more to me than film. Just as baseball offers more to some than football, cricket more to some than rugby, basketball more to some than hockey. If you're one of those who value baseball, Sugar just might be the sweet spot on the glove that baseball films have been pounding for so long. For those of you who don't want to be taken out to the ball game, I do wonder if this would be the film for you. You won’t be disappointed, it’s a decent film. But I have much more to say about Burgos Jr.'s book than I do Sugar. But at least I finally got around to reading the book thanks to Sugar.

Yes We Canyon

This weekend, I attended two out of three Frisco programs put together by experimental film writer/teacher/interviewer/programmer extraordinaire Scott MacDonald, in town for the first time since the publication of his book Canyon Cinema: the Life and Times of an Independent Film Distributor. He proved to be, not unexpectedly, a very affable, approachable, and of course knowledgeable guest host at the 9th Street Independent Film Center where the legendary film distributor's Canyon Cinema's offices are currently located, and where the first two screenings were held.

The first screening was dedicated to the work of Canyon's two most instrumental filmmaker-founders, Bruce Baillie and Chick Strand. It's always a treat to see Baillie's Castro Street in a great 16mm print, and the other films were all new to me. In fact I'd never seen any Chick Strand film before now. MacDonald pointed out after the screening that though the two never collaborated on making a film together as they had collaborated so heavily on creating Canyon, some of their films seem as though they're speaking to each each other. For my part I noticed that Strand's Kristallnacht seemed to be connected in some ways to Baillie's To Parsifal- most obviously through the way each filmmaker photographs water. It was also interesting to see these homemade films speaking with the commercial cinema of their day as well; what does it mean that To Parsifal's images of seagulls are as crisp and full of movement as those found in Hitchcock's the Birds from the same year (1963)? Or that the man in the middle of a Mexican desert in Strand's 1967 Anselmo seems to beckon to Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West from a year later?

MacDonald said he divided the second and third programs along gender lines in order to show how the women Canyon filmmakers were in some ways responding to the mens' films. This made me particularly regret that prior commitments prevented me from attending the third set, which other than Gunvor Nelson's amazing Kirsa Nicholina and an encore screening of Kristallnacht was a completely unfamiliar slate: films by Abigail Child, Diane Kitchen, Anne Severson and Shelby Kennedy as well as others by Strand and Nelson that I have not seen. But I did get to watch the Y-Chromosome informed set, including more films by Baillie, rarely-seen works by Larry Jordan, Will Hindle, and Dominic Angerame, a pair of gut-busting films by Robert Nelson (my first exposure to his work), and two favorites by the man who initially sparked my interest in avant-garde film, Bruce Conner.

This was my first time seeing any of Conner's films at a public screenings since his death four and a half months ago. It was my fifth or sixth time seeing Cosmic Ray but it always feels like a new experience. This time I hung a bit on a lyric from the Ray Charles song used as the film's soundtrack, "See the girl with the red dress on." The fact that the singer cannot literally "see" a girl with a red dress on, or without one (like the go-go dancers in Cosmic Ray and Breakaway, the other Conner film on the evening's program) doesn't prevent him from singing about her with passion and enthusiasm. Neither can the origin of the disembodied voice be seen on the screen. The filmmaker controls the sensory experience of the audience, even from beyond the grave. This is basic stuff, I suppose, but it's rare to be reminded of it while watching such an exuberant, upbeat film.

Conner's films have become difficult to see of late. They're no longer part of the Canyon distribution catalog- he withdrew them some time before his death, for reasons that MacDonald writes about in the Canyon Cinema book. The highly-pixelated video shrink-downs of certain of his films that were easily accessed streaming in cyberspace not so many months back have also scurried into their hidey-holes-- more information on that in these fascinating posts. So, though it's probably too late in the day for anyone reading this to act on it, it's worth noting that Cosmic Ray will play in 16mm again tonight, at a fourth Scott MacDonald-hosted event this time across Frisco Bay at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley. Most of the films on the program are repeated from one of the three Canyon screenings; for instance Kristallnacht, Castro Street and Robert Nelson's Oh Dem Watermelons.

And the PFA will also be tributing Conner with an evening solely dedicated to his films two weeks from tonight (December 9th). This is one worth purchasing advance tickets for as it spans a very diverse cross-section of his work: his debut a Movie, his longest film Crossroads, two rather rarely revived films Valse Triste and America is Waiting, and his last completed film Easter Morning.

Finally, Saturday, December 20th at Artists' Television Access, Other Cinema will remember Conner by including a clip from George Kuchar's Tempest in a Teapot, in which both filmmakers appear, as part of its program.

Bruce Conner (1933-2008)

Bruce Conner has died.

A local artist and filmmaker with global impact, his work meant a lot to me, and I feel lucky that I got to hear him speak before film screenings three times in the past several years. Though I'd seen a few samples of experimental/personal filmmaking before then, always on VHS tape, I can credit a viewing of Conner's film the White Rose at the De Young Museum in 1996 with lighting the fuse that would eventually explode my interest in exploring this particularly expansive cavern of cinema. My first visit to SF Cinematheque was to see a program of his films, and I've been back countless times.

Enough about me, though. Here's Conner talking about himself and his mid-1960's peers in a 2001 interview, as published in Scott MacDonald's indispensable book Canyon Cinema: the Life and Times of an American Independent Distributor:

A lot of the people involved with Canyon were living at a level that people working in film today would see as poverty. But many of us had decided that this was the life we had to live if we were going to be artists or filmmakers. It was almost like taking a vow of poverty in a religious order, and we had a faith that this was one of the more important things in life. We did not consider what we were doing as a career -- unlike people who go to school today and take film classes or video or art classes and consider this preparation for a career. That idea didn't exist then, at least not among us. We were people who were willing to suffer a lot of indignity and deprivation, and to withstand things that might damage our health or well-being or standing in society, to do this type of work -- we dedicated ourselves to art. There were people going to jail because of what they were doing as artists and filmmakers. It was a social environment that's very hard to convey to people now.

Image is from Easter Morning, shot in the 1960s, completed this year, and internationally premiered at the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes, 2008. A collection of Conner's still photography is currently on display at the Berkeley Art Museum. I'll be visiting it soon.

Take the 5:10 to Meme-land

I've been tagged with a meme. Thom Ryan, the mastermind behind one of my very favorite blogs Film of the Year, has selected me, along with four other bloggers (a distinguished group, I might add), to follow some simple instructions for a post on my site, and to pass on the instructions to five more bloggers. Like a chain letter, except without the curse of bad luck at the end if the recipient doesn't participate.

I've been tagged with memes before, and though I've always felt honored to be thought of, I've also felt enough resistance to the idea that I've never complied. This time, I'm in the mood to do so, for several reasons. One, I've lately been more inclined to embrace the myspace-y, facebook-y aspects of the blogosphere rather than pretend that what I do here at Hell on Frisco Bay is so fundamentally different from the activity on those and other social networking sites. Two, with my blogroll currently missing from this blog while I complete my redesigned reconstruction, I'm more compelled than usual to give shout-outs to some of my fellow travelers (though I'm happy to report that my archive, and blogroll, has been recovered by blogger and can be found here until I complete the transition back to this url.) Three, this particular meme gives me an opportunity to point to a book I've been meaning to mention here since I bought it and started paging through it a couple months ago.

That's right, this is a book meme. Here's the instructions Thom sent:

1) Pick up the nearest book.
2) Open to page 123.
3) Locate the fifth sentence.
4) Post the next three sentences on your blog and in so doing...
5) Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

OK, Thom!

1) So, when I received this tag, I was mere feet away from Scott MacDonald's Canyon Cinema: the Life and Times of an Independent Film Distributor, filled with primary source material concerning the venerable Frisco Bay institution that grew out of Bruce Baillie's film exhibitions in Canyon, California by Redwood Regional Park.

2) I can't resist giving a little bit more context. The opposing page 122, it so happens, reprints a fan letter to Canyon Cinema filmmaker Bruce Conner (and a current research subject, the reason why this book was so close at hand this afternoon) from none other than John Lennon, in response to Conner's dazzling Looking For Mushrooms. As he explains in an interview later in the book, Conner sent the film to Lennon because it included a Beatles song as its soundtrack, and he wanted the composers' blessing so he could legally show the film.

3) It's page 123 that we're concerned with at the moment, however, and it's got a letter from a Frisco Bay filmmaker I'm less familiar with (having seen only one of his works, Six Loop-Paintings), Barry Spinello. He's writing about how his 1969 film Soundtrack was influenced by a 1938 John Cage text found in Silence.

4) The three sentences:

Any image (his example is a picture of Beethoven) or mark on the soundtrack successively repeated will produce a distinct sound with distinct pitch and value - different from the sound and value of any other mark. The new music, he says, will be built along the lines of film, with the basic unit of rhythm logically being the frame. With the advent of magnetic tape a few years later and the enormous advantages it has in convenience and speed (capacity to record and play back live sound, and erase) the filmic development of electronic music initially envisioned by Cage was completely obscured.

5) Now, to select the five bloggers I'm to pass this meme to. I'm going to stay local here...
Max Goldberg of Text of Light comes to mind because he wrote a terrific review of the MacDonald book a few weeks ago.
Michael Guillén of the Evening Class comes to mind next, as he's the one who let me know about Max's blog.
Sister Rye comes to mind because I wish she would post a little more often.
Ryland Walker Knight of Vinyl Is Heavy comes to mind because I owe him an e-mail right now.
Rob Davis of Errata comes to mind because he's only going to be local for another week or so. Frisco Bay's loss is Chicago's windfall.

Thanks again, Thom!

Wuthering Heights

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How many ways are there to segue from a Blog-A-Thon on William Wyler to one on Luis Buñuel? More than you might think. Flickhead, the host of the latter 'Thon, has illustrated one pathway by posting a terrific photograph with the two men posed less than a yard apart from each other (Wyler's standing next to George Cukor, who's standing behind Buñuel). It was not the first time the directors had rubbed elbows. In 1971, in celebration the Cannes Film Festival's 25th edition, both men were among a group of twelve international auteurs honored. The others were Lindsay Anderson, Michaelangelo Antonioni, Robert Bresson, Rene Clement, Frederico Fellini, Vojtech Jasny, Masaki Kobayashi, Orson Welles (who was not present at the festival) and Serge Youtkevitch. You may say, "wait a minute, that doesn't add up to twelve!" Blame the New York Times article of May 13, 1971 from which I obtained this list, for coming up one short. Wyler biographer Jan Herman wrote that there were five directors honored, not twelve: Wyler, Buñuel, Fellini, Ingmar Bergman and Rene Clair. Obviously further research on this gathering is merited.

Another clear path between the two directors is that they, with apologies to Yoshishige Yoshida, Peter Kosminsky, Suri Krishnamma, Robert Fuest, A.V. Bramble and Jacques Rivette, directed the two most enduring film versions of Emily Brontë's novel Wuthering Heights. It seems Buñuel had the idea first, as the book was a favorite of his surrealist crowd in the early 1930s. According to Francisco Aranda's Luis Buñuel: a Critical Biography he worked with Pierre Unik, and briefly with Georges Sadoul as well, to write a screen adaptation shortly after the completion of Land Without Bread in 1932. But Buñuel would not have the ability to get the project off the ground until after he'd established himself as a director of narrative features in Mexico. Wyler's Wuthering Heights was released in 1939, earning numerous Oscar nominations and establishing Laurence Olivier as an international star. Buñuel would not begin revising his old script until 1952. The film was shot in 1953 and released in 1954 under the title Cumbres Borrascosas (the title the Brontë book was known by in Spanish translations). Later it was retitled Abismos de Pasión.

Both the 1939 American version and the 1954 Mexican version of Wuthering Heights were filmed in their respective countries' Southwestern scrub desertlands. Wyler's version had its outdoor scenes shot in the still-rural outskirts of Los Angeles. Buñuel, according to biographer John Baxter, shot the film

at the hacienda of San Francisco de Quadra in the barren uplands of Guerrero, near Taxco. Critics noticed immediately that this was pretty odd country. Thunderstorms crash and flare each night, but dawn reveals a land as parched and bare as the slopes of Paracutin. Most of the trees are dead, but Eduardo, the effete Hindley character, still finds plenty of butterflies and insects for his collection.

But Buñuel's Wuthering Heights makes no reference to geography, and indeed changes the names of its characters so that Cathy becomes Catalina (played by Irasema Dilián), and Heathcliff becomes Alejandro (Jorge Mistral). If Wyler's version attempted a recreation of Brontë's Yorkshire, down to the vast quantities of Calluna vulgaris imported from England and planted on the hillsides, Buñuel's version seems set in its own unique landscape if not land, an arid one all the better to inflame the illogical passions of the characters.

Buñuel wanted to enhance the l'amour fou aspects of Brontë's novel, and one way he achieved this was by beginning the film at the moment of Heathcliff/Alejandro's return upon having made his fortune. By spending so much time with Heathcliff, Catherine and Hindley as youths, Wyler's film explains the tragedy of the romance quite plausibly. He shows how the connection between Heathcliff and Cathy is sown, and also how their class differences must keep them apart. Buñuel, by contrast, simply drops us into a world in which the fundamental bonds and barriers between the characters have long since been established, and insists we pay attention instead to just how they are resisted. As Sue Lonoff de Cuevas has so succintly put it, Wyler's version of the romance is "sentimental" and Buñuel's "anti-sentimental."

This despite a romantic-style musical score adapted by composer Raul Lavista from Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. Buñuel had used this music before, in both Un Chien Andalou and L'Age D'Or. When discussing these two films, and specifically in reference to the latter, Peter Conrad has written, "An orchestra happens to be playing Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, which treats love as a mystical rapture; for Dali and Buñuel, it is more like a demented regression." In Wuthering Heights Wagner's themes are rapture and regression all at once, the Liebestod endowing the final sequence in particular with a great deal of its disturbing resonance. Watching it recently, I found myself wondering if it was at all possible that Bernard Herrmann might have seen Buñuel's film before being inspired to masterfully borrow the same theme to signify the l'amour fou of Vertigo. Vincent Canby, in his 1983 review of Buñuel's Wuthering Heights, suggests that the film had not played in New York City (Herrmann's lifelong home) until 1976, except perhaps at one of the city's Spanish-language theatres. It's intriguing to imagine the composer catching a Mexican Buñuel film at a place like the Elgin (which played only Spanish-language films in the 1950s), but the connection is most likely to be happy coincidence, I suspect. Yet, apart from its placement in the final scene, Buñuel was not happy with the music in Wuthering Heights. At least, he said as much later in life. Aranda quotes him:

It was my own fault. My negligence. I went to Europe, to Cannes, and left the composer to add the musical accompaniment; and he put music throughout the film. A real disaster. I intended to use Wagner just at the end, in order to give the film a romantic aura, precisely the characteristic sick imagination of Wagner.

But Baxter notes that the director did not leave for Europe until April 1954, after the music track for the film had already been fixed in place. And Aranda quotes Buñuel again, this time from an interview that took place while he was in Cannes that year serving on the jury that selected Gate of Hell as top prizewinner: "For Cumbres Borrascosas I put myself into the state of mind of 1930; and since at that time I was a hopeless Wagnerian, I introduced fifty minutes of Wagner." Here Buñuel seemingly is taking personal credit for the abundance of music in the film, and in the context of a discussion of how much he generally dislikes film music, too. So did he change his mind, or just his tune? Another subject for further research, it appears.

More reviews of Buñuel's Wuthering Heights well worth reading include: Ed Gonzalez's take at Slant, Fernando F. Croce's capsule at CinePassion, and a review newly-written for this very Blog-a-Thon by Robert Monell of I'm In a Jess Franco State of Mind.

And if you're in the Frisco Bay Area wondering when your next chance to see a Buñuel film on the big screen might be, it looks like you may have to wait until December 17th, when Belle de Jour will be brought to Artists' Television Access along with a post-film discussion. It's part of a series devoted to silver screen sex workers presented by Whore! Magazine to benefit the health care efforts at the Mission District's St. James Infirmary. This fall at ATA looks particularly busy with interesting screenings in general, including the Other Cinema fall program, the ATA Film and Video Festival October 10-12, a continuing series of Guy Debord films, a stint as a venue for the 11th Arab Film Festival (which has just released the full contents of its program), and an October 26th evening of music and film entitled Roman Meal that you really do not want to miss. Trust me on that one.