Damnation

Even before Google, when I’m looking for a hard-to-find video, the first place I turn to is Chicago’s legendary Facets. Founded in 1975, this nonprofit media arts organization stocks an astonishing array of movies and other video programming that most distributors won’t bother with. They even have their own label for independent and world cinema that deserves to be seen, even if they’re not likely to sell more than a few thousand of any given title. Some recent releases:

DAMNATION—On the surface, Bela Tarr’s movies don’t sound very inviting. They’re usually filmed in black-and-white, and set in small Hungarian villages in which it rains all the time and the streets are mud. The stories are minimal, there is almost no dialogue and each shot lasts for several minutes with very little action in the frame. And did I mention that the characters are all sad sacks? So it is a shock to discover that the experience of seeing his films is utterly riveting and hypnotic. In Damnation (1987), a man has an affair with a cabaret singer and plots to have her husband hired and sent away on a smuggling assignment. That’s the basic storyline, but it’s only a slender pretext for what is a slow and luxuriant sensory immersion in a small industrial town. Sometime after talking pictures were invented, most filmmakers forgot that movies used to be, first and foremost, about the power of images. Damnation, like another of Tarr’s movies, Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), also being released on DVD, is a visual feast with eye-popping compositions and unforgettable images. The camera is the true star of these movies. (Note: Tarr’s seven-hour Satantango, one of the most sought-after films of the 1990s, will be released on DVD by Facets later this year.)

—girish shambu

ENIGMA SECRET—It would be a Polish joke of another sort entirely if the story Roman Wionczek’s movie tells is factual. While some British and Americans have quietly been contesting the right to claim credit for breaking the German Enigma code during the Second World War (there’s even a fanciful Matthew McConaughey movie), the Poles seem to have been harboring some resentment. This 1979 feature argues that it was three Polish mathematicians, working in the Polish Cipher Bureau, who first cracked the code, and then gave it to the British and Free French. The former may have built an improved code-reading machine at Blechley Park under Alan Turing’s direction, but it was Poles who made this possible. Since it was a Polish diplomat, Jan Karski, who tried to warn the uninterested Churchill and Roosevelt about the unfolding Holocaust, this might be true, although the film could be more gripping. It plods some, in a neo-Socialist Realism way, and it has the least impressive Hitler impersonation I’ve ever seen.

—george sax

LEMONADE JOE—Like France and England, Czechoslovakia experienced a “New Wave” of filmmaking in the 1960s, gaining a worldwide audience for films like The Fireman’s Ball, Shop on Main Street, Closely Watched Trains and Loves of a Blonde from filmmakers including Milos Forman, Ivan Passer and Jirí Menzel. This 1964 comedy directed by Oldrich Lipsky is a goofy parody of cowboy movies with songs and a bit of Marxist subtext. At the Trigger Whiskey Saloon, brawling seems to be the preferred form of amusement. A visiting temperance worker is harassed by the drunks until the appearance of Lemonade Joe, a clean-living vision in white whose shooting prowess so impresses the local cowboys that they adopt his habit of drinking only Kolaloka lemonade. (What they don’t realize is that Joe actually has the territorial rights to distribute Kolaloka, a reference to the European fear of the time of “Coca-Cola capitalism.”) Don’t expect too much in the way of hard satire, though—Lipsky’s likeably silly film resembles a family-friendly Blazing Saddles with a strain of Road Runner cartoons, all played so broadly that it could almost be a silent slapstick comedy.

—m. faust

SOMEWHERE IN EUROPE—Geza Radvanyi’s 1947 film is a poignant curiosity, both because of its often involving content and the historical circumstances in which it was made. It’s a striking, if sometimes sentimental, reflection of the turbulent and desperate conditions in post-war Hungary, and a fervent visionary abstraction from them. The film follows a band of dispossessed war orphans of various ages as they wander the devastated countryside, scavenging, stealing, starving, and being repelled and attacked by citizens and the authorities. When they take refuge in a ruined, hilltop castle they encounter a strange, sage older man, an orchestra conductor who fled to this crumbling redoubt from the madness of a war-convulsed world. Making common cause with him, the band of urchins seems headed for a more peaceful and happier existence when a local, formerly fascist official seeks to evict and arrest them as an anarchic criminal element. Somewhere in Europe has been compared to the 1940s Neo-Realist Italian films, and in its first third or so, which follows the kids’ wretched road odyssey, it does sometimes resemble this work. But Radvanyi’s Expressionistic compositions and montages recall Eisenstein and G.W. Pabst, and his film also becomes reminiscent of Jean Renoir’s humanism (“La Marseillaise” even figures in it), particularly from the 1930s Popular Front period. This is painfully ironic since a year later, Radvanyi left Hungary after the brutal Stalinist regime took over. His movie remains a martyred reminder of a brief and extinguished hopeful historical moment.

—george sax