Book ReMarks: Film and Video

Reviewed by Ken Hopson, Manager, Media and Reserve Services

Overheard, during the recent triple digit heat index, two perspiring library patrons comparing their tolerance of extreme temperatures on both ends of the thermometer, and I was reminded of a blustery video vignette titled The Blizzard. The Blizzard is one of eight visually stunning representations of personal dreams spun together as a single narrative film called Dreams (Yume), by noted Japanese director Akira Kurosawa.

All eight dreamlike stories in the film are metaphoric, with elements of Japanese folklore, and move so slowly that the viewer is practically forced to appreciate the artistic composition. In particular, The Blizzard is guaranteed to surpass your hard-working air-conditioner, leaving you apt to step out for some warmth. The story starts with a group of mountain climbers trying to find their way back to camp during a blinding snow storm. As they succumb to the cold and begin to collapse, the leader of the exhausted group encounters a snow woman. I won't give away the ending, but this story, along with the other seven, are visual and auditory masterpieces individually, and collectively.

Cabell Media and Reserves - PN1997 .Y86 2003 (DVD)

Celebrating Black History Month at the VCU Libraries

Long ago during slavery, Faubourg Tremé was home to the largest community of free black people in the Deep South and a hotbed of political ferment. Here black and white, free and enslaved, rich and poor co-habitated, collaborated, and clashed to create much of what defines New Orleans culture up to the present day.

Founded as a suburb (or faubourg in French) of the original colonial city, the neighborhood developed during French rule and many families like the Trevignes kept speaking French as their first language until the late 1960s. Tremé was the home of the Tribune, the first black daily newspaper in the US. During Reconstruction, activists from Tremé pushed for equal treatment under the law and for integration. And after Reconstruction's defeat, a "Citizens Committee" legally challenged the resegregation of public transportation resulting in the infamous Plessy vs. Ferguson Supreme Court case.

New Orleans Times Picayune columnist Lolis Eric Elie bought a historic house in Tremé in the 1990s when the area was struggling to recover from the crack epidemic. Rather than flee the blighted inner city, Elie begins renovating his dilapidated home and in the process becomes obsessed with the area's mysterious and neglected past. Shot largely before Hurricane Katrina and edited afterwards, the film is both celebratory and elegiac in tone.

Cabell Media and Reserves DVDs F379.N55 F28 2008

Note: Quick Picks are new to the collection. Some may not yet have reached the shelves. If you want to check out an item that is not yet available, click the "Is this item available?" link in the catalog record, then click the "Request" link.

A multi-layered work featuring animation, archival footage and interviews with the likes of William Burroughs, Carolee Schneemann and Richard Hell, Who's afraid of Kathy Acker by Austrian artist Barbara Caspar and co-produced by Annette Pisacane (Nico Icon) and Markus Fischer, is a thoughtful and creative film biography/essay on the late outlaw writer and punk icon, whose formally inventive novels, published from the '70s through the mid-90s, challenged assumptions about gender roles, sexuality, and the literary canon.

Cabell Media and Reserves DVDs PS3551.C44 Z9 2008

Note: Quick Picks are new to the collection. Some may not yet have reached the shelves. If you want to check out an item that is not yet available, click the "Is this item available?" link in the catalog record, then click the "Request" link.

Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

Alfred Hitchcock was one of the best known directors of suspense films in the twentieth century, and this early film shows the skill he had attained years and even decades before his signature works. In this 1940 Oscar-winning film based on the 1938 novel of the same name, a young woman marries the secretive Maxim de Winter after a chance meeting in Monte Carlo, then returns with him to his estate in Cornwall and its house, Manderley. The plot follows the bride, whom we learn early on is the second Mrs. de Winter, as she attempts to escape the overpowering presence of her predecessor. From beautiful cinematography to spot-on acting, this movie has the power to surprise seventy years after its release.

This Criterion Collection edition contains commentary by film scholar Leonard J. Leff; isolated music and effects track; screen, hair, makeup and costume tests including Vivien Leigh, Anne Baxter, Loreeta Young, Margaret Sullavan and Joan Fontaine; Hitchcock on Rebecca, excerpts from his conversations with François Truffaut; phone interviews with Joan Fontaine and Judith Anderson from 1986; behind-the-scenes photo gallery; production correspondence and casting notes; deleted scenes script excerpts; 1939 test screening questionnaire; footage from 1940 Academy Awards ceremony; re-issue trailer; three hours of radio show adaptations.

Cabell Media and Reserves DVDs PR6007.U47 R42 2001
Cabell Library PR6007.U47 R4 1938 (novel)

Reviewed by Nia Rodgers, Evenings and Weekend Services Coordinator, RIS

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood is a long title for a book, and an even longer title for a film. Adapted from a book of the same title by Peter Biskind, this documentary combines still photos, film clips, and live interviews with a pantheon of acting notables – Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Cybill Shepard, as well as numerous screenwriters, producers, and directors.

The basic premise of the film and book is that television was killing the Hollywood studios until the mid-1960s, when wunderkinds like Roman Polanski, Peter Bogdanovich, Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, and George Lucas arrived on the scene. An exploration of the idea of auteur primacy in the creation of a film is balanced by the various reactions of these highly pressured individuals, including heavy drug use and suicide. The interviews feel intimate and honest, but some of the interviewees are clearly hostile to one another and less inclined to travel down memory lane.

There are only two downsides to this film. The first is that Coppola, Spielberg, and Lucas do not appear in the film (they did allow interviews for the book). This is especially glaring in the case of Steven Spielberg, who created the first modern blockbuster with Jaws and has been the most commercially successful director to date. The second is that this is not a serious history of film. Many films, and filmmakers, are left out of this production, giving it a gossipy feel that might not appeal to some.

Overall, this film provides an excellent opportunity to hear a variety of personal anecdotes from a remarkable set of people who changed forever how Americans see film.

Cabell Media and Reserves DVDs PN1998.2 .B562 2004

Cabell Library PN1998.2 .B56 1998 (book)

Reviewed by Renée Bosman, Reference Librarian for Government and Public Affairs and Reference Collection Coordinator

In her first novel, Jhumpa Lahiri addresses themes of cultural identity and the immigrant experience with a quiet grace. Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli are Bengali immigrants living near Boston with their American-born children Sonia and Gogol, the namesake of the title. The novel follows Gogol Ganguli from birth through early adulthood as he struggles with his identity, embodied by an Indian surname, a Russian pet name that was never meant to be his first name, and his desire to be an average American boy. Gogol tries to distance himself from the Bengali immigrant community to which his parents remain tied by changing his name and traveling first to Yale and then to New York, where he works as an architect and dates Maxine, a woman whose upbringing and lifestyle is vastly different from his own. He appears content, yet the question of identity continues to haunt him – “he is conscious of the fact that his immersion in Maxine’s family is a betrayal of his own” – and throughout the entire novel Gogol searches for a place where he can truly belong.

Lahiri is a master at conveying so much in the small details and infusing her seemingly ordinary characters with depth and warmth. After reading the novel, check out the critically-acclaimed movie directed by Mira Nair.

Cabell Library PS3562.A316 N36 2003
Cabell Library Media and Reserves DVDs PN1997.2 .N3647354 2007

Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

The story of Sweeney Todd goes back at least to the 1840s, when the serial story The String of Pearls was first published. The "Demon Barber of Fleet Street" has run through pages and on stages, as well as appearing on screens big and small over the years. In 2007 he slashed his way across London and into our hearts in Tim Burton's theatrical adaptation.

Johnny Depp brings a manic gleam to the well-worn role of the bloody butcher, with Helena Bonham Carter as his pie-baking partner in crime, Mrs. Lovett. They sing and glide through scenes with mournful, homicidal grace, planning the barber's revenge against Judge Turpin, played by the talented Alan Rickman. As musicals go, Sweeney Todd is an odd one, but the music is well-integrated into the movie. If you hate music, this might not be the movie for you, but if you stayed away because you like the story or actors but couldn't bring yourself to see a musical, check it out. Above all, this is (and feels like) a Tim Burton film.

Cabell Media and Reserves DVDs PN1997.2 .S94 2008

Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

Election is elegant, funny, and eminently readable at 200 pages, and it made me want to read more of Tom Perrotta's work. The story is an engrossing stew of angst, backstabbing, politicking, jealousy, ennui, and sex, all set in the midst of a high school election. For various reasons the election turns out to be unusually hotly contested, and readers get to watch the lives of various students, teachers, and parents implode and expand in a variety of colorful ways.

Perrotta's style will quickly draw you into the narrative, and the reader's viewpoint rotates between several different characters. The events look much different, depending on who's talking at any given time, whether it's the overly entitled Tracy Flick or the hapless Mr. M. Among all the electioneering and typical high school drama, there's also a substantial amount of sleeping around and inappropriate relationships, teacher-student and otherwise. Perrotta presents his characters as humans, warts and all, and these entanglements are handled neither with simple finger-wagging nor with Nabokovian glee. This novel also inspired a film adaptation starring Reese Witherspoon and Matthew Broderick.

Cabell Library PS3566.E6948 E43 1998 (novel)
Cabell Media and Reserves DVDs PN1997 .E44 2006 (film)

Celebrating Black History Month at the VCU Libraries

Reviewed by David Folmar, CLUAC Member

The book is a subversive statement in itself, masquerading as a book of graphics about the last great age of illustrated movie posters. It is really an examination of the so-called “Blaxploitation” movies of the 70’s and what they meant to the community of filmmakers then and now. The poster art is beautiful in a way that modern poster art for movies is not. It is heroic and informative and showcases the best of the illustrator's art of the period. The book, however, is so much more. It is a collection of interviews with the artists who made the black movies of 70 and the artwork that helped define them.

The interviewees include stars of the period like Pam Grier, Rudy Ray Moore and Isaac Hayes as well as movie makers like modern creative forces Ice-T, Samuel L. Jackson and Quentin Tarantino. They educate they reader about how the black movies of the 70’s were both a breakthrough for the black community and a chance for black actors to get work that let them star inside the Hollywood system. They hold that, far from being simply exploitative of the black community, they were part of a film movement that helped a lagging Hollywood system and proved a breakthrough for the black actors of today like Will Smith and Denzel Washington. The movies themselves also gave voice to a community that previously had no voice, and myths to a people who lacked heroes that were not just imitations of established, white-accepted roles for the black community.

Cabell Library PN1995.9.N4 M32 1998

Reviewed by Ken Hopson, Manager, Media and Reserve Services

Most Westerners grew up hearing the word Gypsy, understanding it to portray a colorful sort of people who travel in caravans and read palms. In reality, they are an ethnic group of at least 15 million people, properly called "Romani." They have their own language and government, though no home country. Originally from Northern India, the Romani have spent the last millennium migrating to all parts of the world, eventually assimilating into communities where they feel comfortable. Throughout their history, the Romani have faced the xenophobic, which is among the topics approached in this film.

Tony Gatlif , of Romani ethnicity himself, has directed a film that is part personal journey, part love story and part exposé of a misunderstood people. Gatlif won numerous international awards for this film, which employed only two non-Romani actors.

Gadjo Dilo tells the story of Stephane (Romain Duris), a young Parisian, who travels to Romania in search of a female Gypsy singer who is on a cassette tape his father had given him before he died. Taken under the wing of the constantly intoxicated and overly excited Isidor (Izidor Serban), Stephane is eventually accepted by the Romani community and experiences both their jubilation and tribulation first hand. He also finds that the singer he has been seeking may not be the woman on his father's tape, but an altogether different Gypsy, the unconventional Sabina (Rona Hartner) sitting right next to him. This movie will make you happy and sad, offend and enlighten you, and fill your ears with some of the most unique music in the world.

PN1997 .G34 1999

Note: This is a VHS video, available for in-house use only, except for faculty, graduate and honors students. See the VCU Libraries Borrowing Privileges webpage for details.

Reviewed by Ken Hopson, Media and Reserves Manager

Chris Marker’s 1962 28-minute La Jetée is a masterpiece in unconventional delivery. It's a post-apocalyptic story of memory, love and time travel told in bleak narration through a series of grainy monochromatic stills, giving the film a surreal effect appropriate to the subject. Trevor Duncan's haunting score employs appropriately placed ambient noises, reverberations, voice and sound effects.

The story follows a man chosen to be a lab-rat in time-travel experiments devised by scientists living underground below a post-World War III radioactive Paris. Most interestingly, the vehicle for traversing time is not a machine, but the use of hypnosis, memories and drugs. The man is repeatedly sent to the past in an attempt to secure aid for the present, and eventually to the future, where he finds it. The heart of the plot revolves around a memory of a shooting that the man witnessed as a young boy, his obsession with the distraught woman who was present at the scene and the man's efforts reconcile his memories with reality. To sum it up, if Ingmar Bergman had directed an episode of The Twilight Zone with a broken camera... Incidentally, and almost always noted, La Jetée was the inspiration behind Terry Gilliam's monumental time-travel feature, Twelve Monkeys.

Shorts 2: Dreams (DVD)
Cabell Media and Reserves DVDs PN1995.9.E96 S4242 2000

La Jetee and Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (VHS)
Cabell Media and Reserves Film and Videos PN1995.9 .S26 J47 1993

Twelve Monkeys (VHS)
Cabell Media and Reserves Film and Videos PN1997 .T84 1996