Victor Erice's The Spirit of The Beehive

Erice is one of those directors that very little is known about them. He made three movies only, one of them is a documentary. The other two are "The Spirit of The Beehive" and "The South". Only Beehive (Erice's very first long-feature work) is available in the US (thanks to Criterion) and it is a superb work.
In one line, it's about Anna: a little girl who lives a traumatizing experience. But the film is an excellent study of childhood via Anna and her sister Isabel, one of the best I've seen. Adding to this is the superb (painting-like) cinematography and the visual settings that Erice used in the movie.
The cinematography was done by Luis Cuadrado who started to suffer from a blinding illness during the shooting of beehive, he ended up with total blindness a few years later.

I hope the movie will play one of these days on a big screen in NYC so I can watch it the way it is supposed to be watched. His other work (South) is supposedly a masterpiece too, Criterion should consider acquiring it, meanwhile I will not pay $100+ to get it from France or Spain.
The movie is available on Youtube (though not the way it should be watched), I re-watched it tonight on Hulu (on a big-screen TV).

Links for the DVD extra (Criterion) and the movie itself:

Criterion And Other Foreign DVDs

Aside from the ridiculous coding of regions for DVDs, probably the most annoying thing about foreign DVDs is that they are usually so expensive to buy vis-a-vis the films released on DVD by Hollywood. Is it any wonder more people watch Michael Bay films in this nation than those by Theo Angelopoulos or Bela Tarr?

There seems to be almost a cult that has formed to keep high quality foreign films out of the hands of American DVD collectors.

Even worse, is that so few companies go the extra mile to dub the DVDs into English. First, as film is a visual medium, it is incredibly annoying to have to read subtitles. No dubbing job- even at 1960s Godzilla film levels, is anywhere near as distracting as having up to a third of your visual field blinkered by subtitles. Worse is when black and white films are subtitled in white fonts that lack borders. This is one of the great sins of The Criterion Collection. It simply does not cost any more to put subtitles into crisp gold lettering.

In fact, for only a few thousand dollars, qualified stage actors can be hired to read the lines of foreign actors, and avoid the whole mess of subtitles to begin with. Acting has very little to do with mouth synchronization, and the greatest actors act with small parts of their bodies, and the whole. That some actors can actually 'act' when reading dialogue for cartoons proves how silly the arguments against dubbing is-a-vis subtitles is.

Furthermore, if one watches classic foreign films from the 1950s and 1960s, which were routinely dubbed for American audiences (often retained in DVD releases), one can see how superior dubbing is. As example, Ingmar Bergman's Spider Trilogy is dubbed, and the fact that different actors and voices are used for the characters played by Max Von Sydow actually enhances all the characterizations, for we really get that it is not Max Von Sydow in all three films, but characters who merely look like Von Sydow, but sound different, even down to the peculiarities of their emotional vocal choices.

Another flaw that Criterion has, especially since it rebranded itself with the semi-circle C logo a few years back, is that they have really skimped on audio commentaries. Realistically, this is the single greatest advantage DVDs offer over old VHS tapes. That they have cut back on the bread and butter of the industry bodes not well for Criterion, nor for future foreign film novices with a will to want to learn. Simply put, commentaries are very cheaply made and produced, for next to nothing.

So, now that I've gotten that out of mys system, here's hoping that companies, like Criterion, that specialize in foreign films, actually start exploiting the market better, for there is big money to be made by NOT underestimating the viewing public; as strange as that sentiment might seem coming from me.

George Washington

Last week I saw David Gordon Green’s film George Washington. Like All The Real Girls, this film is one that could have taken a more predictable turn, but instead focused on characters instead of obvious plotting. By this, I mean that it isn’t hard to see how the accidental death of a young man could have turned into a predictable Hollywood film.

I think that overall All The Real Girls is probably the better of the two, but this one shares many of the later one’s positives, including a unique approach with dialogue, good characterization that avoids stereotypes, and a poetic approach to the presentation of images, where the eye can linger on a shot as it would on a poetic line.

Here is a snippet of Dan’s review of the film, where he discusses the narrative approach of the film, as well as how the film achieves its poetic effect in its contrast of dialogue and images.

“That said, this film is not really a narrative, more of a simple series of linked vignettes that trace a several week period over a summer, which opens with a dreamy panoramic and poetic monologue spoken by a young girl named Nasia (Candace Evanofski), that weaves poetry out of the banal snippets that drift in and out of even the most prosaic minds, such as, ‘I like to go to beautiful places where there’s waterfalls and empty fields.’ This is not immanently poetic, but juxtaposed with the camera work it takes on a heightened, almost ecstatic, state. Some criticize the film by stating real children do not speak that way, but, a) I’ve known them, and a read of Anne Of Green Gables shows they’ve always been around, and b) the poesy is not of the character, but what the character says in relation to her station on life.”

Here is a taste of the film courtesy of Youtube: