DavidAConrad Reviews

Ten Lives of a Cat: A film about Chris Marker (2023)

A loving letter and coda to Marker's works

[9/10 · 13 December 2023]

This is a thorough and discerning review of Chris Marker's sui generis career, done in eerie and (for Marker fans) thrilling imitation of Marker's own style. Highs like La Jetée, lows like Sunday in Beijing, and efforts beyond easy assessment like the CD-ROM Immemory and a Second Life island each receive patient and persuasive treatment. This essay about cinema's greatest essayist, using Marker's preferred second-person voice, is gratifyingly well-informed about the "petite planète" of Marker's century as well as current conditions in the places that captivated him for so long: Korea, Japan, France, and more. Brief clips from Marker's career - minimal spoilers, inasmuch as spoilers exist for creative non-fiction - punctuate strong sequences of new footage, remarkably well-chosen and edited.

A digression into contemporary Armenian politics is interesting on its own terms, but it fails to get below the surface of that locale or make new connections in the web of humanity as Marker would have attempted. After that, as if searching for a missing piece, the doc turns inward, pulling back the curtain on its process and its gaps. Although this line of inquiry risks straying too far from Marker, the search itself takes on amusingly Markeresque dimensions with the introduction of a game called "Guillaume Caching" and various knocks on the doors of Level 5. If you know you know, and if you don't, this way to learn what you need to learn is well worthwhile.

History of Postwar Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess (1970)

What Ever Happened to Madam Onboro?

[8/10 · 27 January 2023]

This documentary from the peak of the Japanese New Wave is a well-structured and valuable resource for people looking to understand Japan in the years 1945-1970. Imamura progresses chronologically through the political highlights of those years, emphasizing the events that raised or frustrated the hopes of Japanese leftist and student groups. The timeline begins with the surrender in 1945 and progresses through 1952's Bloody May Day, the Ampo protests of 1960, and the troubling presence of American spy submarines and soldiers en route to the unpopular war in Vietnam.

Yet history without characters lacks a sense of reality, so at every stage Imamura lets his "Madam Onboro," a salt-of-the-earth woman named Emiko Takada, give her impression of historical landmarks and augment them with stories from her own life. Her recollections do not always intersect with the events that newsreels covered, but that is the point of this exercise: the rhythm of people's lives, the decisions and mistakes they make, are what history looks like on a human scale.

Imamura's approach covers the political and the personal, but it fails to capture the most significant "event" of the first postwar quarter-century: the "economic miracle" that transformed Japanese standards of living. Emiko's life does illustrate that transformation - she notes that the Korean War boosted her family's income, and she became a business owner after an inauspicious youth shaped by class and caste. Yet neither her interviews nor the newsreel footage that Imamura uses to bridge them addresses the country's economic transformation overtly.

I would love to know what became of Takada after 1970, where the movie ends at a major transition in her life. I have not found anything on the internet or in the digital archives of Japan's largest newspapers. I'm posting this review here and on Letterboxd in the hope that someday, somehow, somebody will find out the rest of her story, or parts of it anyway, and share it. It's just one person's story, but Imamura picked a good one to tell, and I'd love to know how it turns out.

A House Divided: Denmark Vessey's Rebellion (1982)

Tight, smart, loving tribute to heroes cut short

[9/10 · 22 September 2022]

Scarcely an hour long, this treatment of Denmark Vesey's failed anti-enslavement uprising in Charleston, South Carolina is a masterful bit of historically-informed character work. A cross-section of free and enslaved Blacks, brought to three-dimensional life by legends like Kotto, Little, Peters, and the show-stealing Casey and Fargas, have no time to waste in their intellectual and emotional assault on the circumstances of post-Haitian Revolution Charleston. Their perspectives are diverse and complex yet perfectly clear, and the same is true of the perverse world they inhabit, all conveyed by screenwriter William Hauptman with the confidence of one who knows the material deeply enough to explain it simply. Not at all hurt by a made-for-TV budget, this is a finely-distilled example of history made immediate.

Slipstream (1981 Video)

Strong performances of old and then-new Tull songs are captured in an idiosyncratic concert video

[8/10 · 5 March 2017]

Energetic concert performances from Jethro Tull's tour of the "A" album (on the heels of a major personnel changeover within the band) are punctuated by vivid and often funny music videos for past Tull songs. A largely-wordless narrative starring the "Aqualung" hobo character strings the content together. A comparative rarity from an under-appreciated iteration of one of the great British prog/folk bands, Slipstream should be enjoyed by Tull fans, concert movie fans, and fans of early video-era effects.