Araya
(1959/Milestone DVD)/La Rabbia (aka The Anger/1963/Raro DVD)/Shoeshine (1946/E1 DVD)
Picture: B-/C+/C+ Sound: C+/C+/C Extras: B Films: B/B-/B
Up next
are three important foreign films you should see, including two that have been
recently rediscovered and restored.
Margot
Benacerraf’s Araya (1959, roughly
pronounced ah-rye-ya) is a landmark film in the cinema of Venezuela shot at the
title location, which is essentially a desert, but with one very valuable
product: salt. Centuries ago, salt was
as valuable as gold and it is still a very important substance for obvious
reasons, but at the time a whole poor working community formed in this area to
get the salt out of the ground, the sea and into world markets.
Benacerraf
gets almost endlessly amazing shots of the land, the ivory white of the salt
itself and focuses on several actual workers to tell the story of their way of
life as long as it lasts. At 82 minutes,
you enter another world in the middle of nowhere that suddenly becomes somewhere
because of the people and the need for the salt and fish they can gather. By the end, machines and mechanical
industrialization start to enter the picture, but by that time, Benacerraf has
created a priceless portrait of life and our planet that is as valuable and
powerful as it ever was.
Extras include her great 1953 short film Reveron
with and about the title artist, feature length audio commentaries on both of Benacerraf
films by Benacerraf and Dennis Doros (scholar and founder of Milestone Films),
PDF downloadable press kit for Araya
+ separate Benacerraf scrapbook, Araya
American Trailer, two separate TV interviews with Benacerraf and 2007
documentary The Films Of Her Life: Araya. Milestone delivers yet another winner.
Originally
started as an interesting concept film about polar opposites of Italian
Politics, La Rabbia (aka The Anger/1963) had the Marxist famed
director Pier Paolo Pasolini and Right-Wing Giovannino Guareschi making
separate films that would be combined in the same film, but the project did not
work out and the film was pulled for reasons unknown. Now, Raro Video has issued the reconstructed
version of the first release and it makes for a very interesting clash of ideas
with their accuracies, inaccuracies and limits.
They never
knew what each other was working on and both let loose on their thoughts on why
there is anger in the world. Pasolini says
it is class struggle, the white world finally giving way to people of color,
the U.S. rising out of the victory of WWII with a reference to Marilyn Monroe
and among his other observations concludes (in a contradictory fashion) that
spirituality is on the side of communism (?) and ends his film with the (now
defunct) USSR being the first country to make it to outer space and that bodes
well for the future of communist and mankind including nice footage of a camera
recording a rocket takeoff. Of course,
the U.S.
would enter the Space Race and win it, so his whole path of thinking seems
flawed.
Guareschi
pro-Fascist diatribe is just as wacky, starting with how WWII changed the
world, was an unjust war, the winners are as bad as the losers (he has more
contempt for the U.S. than Pasolini, which may be why the film was ultimately
banned, including going after The Kennedys months before the assassination of
JFK) and continues by bashing consumerism, communism, Marxism, Britain having
to leave Africa in ‘disgrace’, the USSR having to back down form making Cuba
into a nuclear missile base and he attacks the formation of The Berlin Wall.
Both
offer the French being pushed out of Algeria
and Guareschi adds the Vietnam
failure. There is also similar incidents
in France
of men cross-dressing as women as a sign of the fall of the family. Both are concerned about the rewriting of
history and are abler to go after the Catholic Church for their own
reasons. However, they likely both
realized the overlap and considered two revised versions, but they were never
made and Guareschi died in 1968.
Pasolini was infamously murdered in 1975 by Italian Fascists unhappy
with his ultra-critical film Salo,
up next as a Criterion Blu-ray.
They both
had bold viewpoints for their time and some parts of each still are, but seeing
some of this rarely seen footage (including some that may be censored otherwise
or at least avoided to this day) make this film worth your time. It is far more interesting than cable TV
political debates.
Extras
include a booklet with informative texts, illustrations, statements and
histories of the film and the makers, while the DVD adds the documentary La
Rabbia I, La Rabbia II, La Rabbia III… L’Arabia
(68 minutes) about how the film was lost, found and reconstructed, a set of
various trailers for La Rabbia and a
short film by Pasolini entitled Le Mura di Sana’a (17 minutes).
Last but
not least is Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine
(1946 aka Sciuscia) about two young
poor Italian boys who badly want a hose they cannot afford and shine the shoes
of U.S. GIs just to get by. They get the
chance to make a quick buck that could afford them the horse, but they turn out
to be pawns in a larger scheme for which they are scapegoated and land up in
the prison system. It changes their
lives forever and becomes a metaphor for lost youth in immediate post-WWII Italy. Made in the neo-Realist style De Sica helped
to pioneer, the film, has few professional actors and it remains remarkably
powerful to this day. I had not seen it
for a while and was surprised how well it endured, so it is really nice to have
it on DVD.
Extras
include the original theatrical trailer and a fine feature length audio
commentary by author Bert Cardullo that should be heard after seeing the film
and is college-level caliber.
The anamorphically
enhanced 1.66 X 1 black and white image on Araya
is the best transfer of the three by being the newest and offers some fine
detail for the format, while its gray scale is impressive. The 1.33 X 1 image on the other two films
have minor issues, as Rabbia has
more than its share of stock footage and Shoeshine
is very old and the print (still the bets I have seen of the film to date)
shows its age. All deserves High
Definition Blu-ray releases. The Dolby
Digital 2.0 Mono sound on all three are good for their age, though Shoeshine is more brittle and older, so
it is going to sound older. Add the
practice of post-production dubbing and expect various sonic limits, but E1 has
done their best in this case.
- Nicholas Sheffo
