Monday, December 29, 2008

The Pusan International Film Festival (and Busan) In Pictures

This past October, I had the great opportunity to attend this year's Pusan International Film Festival, Korea's huge and sprawling film festival. It was a series of firsts for me: my first trip to Korea, my first international film festival coverage. Beyond my jet lag, general lack of sleep, and a few logistical problems, it was a tremendous, overwhelming, and exciting experience, one which I hope to repeat next year, hopefully for longer than the few days I was able to spend this year. I'm still working on some more pieces I hope to publish soon. In the meantime, over at my regular haunts at Meniscus Magazine, you can find my festival overview/travel guide, and reviews of two festival films: Roh Gyeong-tae's lovely film Land of Scarecrows (my favorite of the fest), and Claire Denis' exquisitely textured 35 Shots of Rum. As a supplement to this material, I thought I'd post here some pictures I took during the festival.

First, here's a view of Busan from my hostel window:



Haeundae Beach, Busan's main tourist attraction:



The entrance to the PIFF Pavilion, where festivalgoers can relax, have some coffee, do a little shopping, and enjoy a leisurely stroll along the beach between screenings:


More photos from the PIFF Pavilion:







Outside the SfunZ (Special Fun Zone) shopping mall in Haeundae, home of the Megabox Haeundae multiplex, one of the main PIFF venues:





Not too far from SfunZ and Haeundae Beach is the Haeundae Market, where besides shopping for clothes and other items, you can find some great fried seafood stalls and some great little restaurants:






The entrance to the Outdoor Theater, PIFF's open-air screening venue located at the Busan Yachting Center, following the screening of Shinobu Yaguchi's latest film Happy Flight:




Introducing Happy Flight were, from left to right, director Shinobu Yaguchi and actors Seiichi Tanabe and Haruka Ayase:



And finally, here's the Happy Flight trailer:


Friday, December 26, 2008

The Bourne Cinema Filmography: Martin Scorsese, "Who's That Knocking at My Door" (1967)


Who's That Knocking at My Door (aka I Call First). 1967. Directed by Martin Scorsese. Written by Martin Scorsese and Betzi Manoogian. Produced by Haig Manoogian, Betzi Manoogian, and Joseph Weill. Cinematography by Richard H. Coll and Michael Wadleigh. Edited by Thelma Schoonmaker. Sound by John Binder and F. James Datri Jr.

Cast: Zina Bethune (Girl), Harvey Keitel (J.R.), Lennard Kuras (Joey), Michael Scala (Sally Gaga), Anne Collette, Tsuai Yu-lan, Saskia Holleman (Girls in dream fantasy), Harry Northrup (Harry), Bill Minkin (Iggy), Catherine Scorsese (Mother).

The opening moments of Scorsese’s first feature encapsulate the iconography/obsessions that would inform the rest of his career. Over sharp booming sounds that reverberate like the hand of God, these images occur: a set of Catholic figures adorning a mantle; a mother (Scorsese’s own mother Catherine, of course) bakes and serves food to her children; and over a burst of 60’s pop music, a gang fight is shot with a restless camera. The associative, free-form editing, derived from the French New Wave that broke just a few years before, binds these images in an iron bond. The mother figure, which doesn’t appear again until a brief shot at the end of the film, exists outside of time – it is unclear whether this is a flashback or present scene – and becomes a vision of ideal, pure womanhood, which in the mind of the film’s protagonist J.R. (a baby-faced Harvey Keitel), is unattainable for any other mortal woman, including to his disappointment his girlfriend (Zina Bethune, standing in for the Hitchcock blonde epitomized most memorably by Kim Novak), known here as simply “The Girl.” That the main female character isn’t even given a name epitomizes the film’s sexual politics in a nutshell, a rather crude Madonna/whore dichotomy that would resurface again and again in Scorsese’s subsequent films. Arguably, he’s never fully transcended this rubric; he’s simply dressed it up in ever more sophisticated cinematic technique.

The film’s original title was I Call First, referencing a scene in which J.R. and his pals argue over who will be the next to bed two women they have lured to an apartment. J.R.’s childish and unsophisticated relationships with women make him a very distasteful character and keep us at a distance from him, most disturbingly in the way he reacts to The Girl’s tale of rape, first blaming her for it, then obsessively replaying it in his mind, and finally, after telling her “I forgive you, and I’ll marry you anyway,” and after she rebuffs him, calling her a whore. All of which is to say that such details will hardly please feminists. But beyond this, the film exhibits an infectious energy that retains its freshness, which its stylistic lapses (including an awkwardly inserted sex scene included at the behest of the film’s distributor) only serve to enhance. The roving camera, as it would do so often in Scorsese’s other films, is a prominent co-star, and the film contains rehearsals of movement that would culminate in such later celebrated set pieces as Ray Liotta’s nightclub trip in Goodfellas and the camera literally following the money in Casino. The movie-madness of Scorsese is also in full force: J.R. and the Girl meet-cute in a lengthy scene of dialogue while waiting for the Staten Island ferry, which includes J.R. excitedly discussing John Wayne and The Searchers; later he takes her to see Rio Bravo. Of course, it is no accident that these are both films revered by the famous gang of Cahiers du Cinema critics-turned-filmmakers. As Roger Ebert famously foresaw, Who’s That Knocking at My Door was not only a significant film in its own right, but a harbinger of greater things to come.

Who’s That Knocking at My Door is part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Scorsese Classics,” which runs until December 31. The film screens again on Dec. 29 at 7:15.

Here is the film's most impressive sequence, a party scene set to Ray Baretto's "El Watusi," the camera circling the room in languorous slow motion with overlapping dissolves as the scene descends into violent chaos. The end of this scene culminates in a brilliant bit of editing (one of many great ones by Scorsese's editor Thelma Schoonmaker) which leads from John Wayne and Dean Martin to Junior Walker and the All-Stars' "Shotgun" (although that last bit is missing from this clip).


J.R.'s dream, set to the Doors' "The End" (also famously used in Coppola's "Apocalypse Now"):