684-690, 873-879, 1044-1050, 1142-1148 Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project

[Aunt Peg]

Chess of Wind in playing on MUBI but it is good enough to recommend a blind-buy.

[L.A.]

Beaver’s review for the fourth set.

[colinr0380]

Just wanted to add a couple of nerdy statistics. Out of the twenty individual countries in the WCP boxset releases so far Mexico, India, Turkey, Brazil and Iran each have two films represented in this series (Iran and India reached that mark with the fourth volume). In terms of years, releases have spanned from 1931 to 2000 - 5 from the 1930s; 1 from the 1940s; 1 from the 1950s; 4 from the 1960s; 8 from the 1970s; 4 from the 1980s; and 1 from 2000. The years 1939, 1972, 1973 and 1976 are those which have had two films released.

[FlickeringWindow]

Might want to also include the stats of the individually released WCP films...

Black Girl (1966, Ousmane Sembène) [Senegal] - 2017 release
A Brighter Summer Day (1991, Edward Yang) [Taiwan] - 2016 release
The Cloud-Capped Star (1960, Ritwik Ghatak) [India] - 2019 release
The Color of Pomegranates (1968, Sergei Parajanov) [Armenia] - 2018 release
Manila in the Claws of Light (1975, Lino Brocka) [Philippines] - 2018 release
Memories of Underdevelopment (1968, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea) [Cuba] - 2018 release
The Phantom of the Monastery (1934, Fernando de Fuentes) [Mexico] - 2022 release from Indicator US/UK

and per the WCP website, here's what remains to be released:

Alyam, Alaym (1978, Ahmed El Maanouni) [Morocco]
Badou Boy (1970, Djibril Diop Mambéty) [Senegal] - 56 min
The Boys from Fengkuei (1983, Hou Hsiao-hsien) [Taiwan]
Contras' City (1968, Djibril Diop Mambéty) [Senegal] - 22 min short
Chronicle of the Years of Fire (1975, Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina) [Algeria] - 177 min
Eight Deadly Shots (1972, Mikko Niskanen) [Finland] - 4-part television series
Él (1953, Luis Buñuel) [Mexico]
The Eloquent Peasant (1969, Shadi Abdel Salam) [Egypt) - 21 min short
Kummatty (1979, Aravindan Govindan) [India]
The Night of Counting the Years (1969, Shadi Abdel Salam) [Egypt]
Lucia (1968, Humberto Solás) [Cuba]
Lumumba, Death of a Prophet (1990, Raoul Peck) [France]
Los olvidados (1950, Luis Buñuel) [Mexico]
Pickpocket (1997, Jia Zhang-ke) [China]
Raid Into Tibet (1966, Adrian Cowell) [United Kingdom] - 28 min short
Thamp (1978, Aravindan Govindan) [India]
The Treasure (1973, Lester James Peries) [Sri Lanka]
The Woman With the Knife (1969, Timité Bassori) [Cote D'ivoire]

Most of these seem to have 4K restorations. Also looks like the two Govindan films and Él survive with heavily compromised film elements (theatrical prints, dupes of prints). 14 feature films, three shorts, and one miniseries.

[swo17]

Lucia is in one of the WCP boxes and Contras City is on Touki bouki

[colinr0380]

The Boys From Fengkuei has also received a release in the UK, in the Masters of Cinema Early Hou Hsiao-hsien Three Films 1980-83 set.

[therewillbeblus]

I made my way through vol 4, and it's a mixed bag per usual with these (vol 3 is still far and away the best and most consistent set). I thought Prisioneros de la tierra and Muna moto were pretty paint-by-numbers melodramas that weren't as off the beaten track as they wanted to be. Sambizanga fared better, though it's hard to give it a strong recommendation, since the strengths ultimately get drowned out by its funneled messaging. I admired the curious switching of surrogates to invade corners of this milieu in search of information via personal and collective quests, and there was a raw intimacy to some of the formal choices, but overall it didn't really fulfill its ambition with cohesion. It's unfair to critique the last act's devolution into didactic propaganda since the art is being used as weaponry for this function, but the transformation away from cultural depths and toward political simplicity erases a lot of the sprawling examination that made the picture special. Oh well. The score is great too.

Improving from there, Two Girls on the Street is a strong early entry in the classic Women's Picture subgenre. Its politics are progressive, material risqué, it's well-acted, technically proficient, and attentive to the layers of platonic rapport in same-sex dynamics. Tragic and jovial edges complement one another to arrive at a smooth depiction of fluid social-emotional engagement. It's not extraordinary, but close to a best-case scenario for a meal prepared with these ingredients at this time. Stage Door, this is not, but that masterpiece is not where the bar is. Chess of the Wind is the hidden gem everyone is claiming it to be, though I'm not sure I adored it as much as others. For the majority of its runtime, the film functions as a gothic noir as imagined by Manoel de Oliveira, oscillating between murder mystery and family melodrama before descending into a wallop of a final act that slowly bleeds out with psychological menace. The sustainment of this key change rivals most horror films' finales, and it's not even a genre-qualifier!

Even more impressive is Kalpana, whose premise+runtime may appear as an endurance test on paper, but it’s an incredibly-involving dance fantasy epic. Although occasionally hokey, the film continually uproots expectations as it postures at dead-ends of banality, only to deliver unpredictably experimental flourishes and narrative turns that coast on that rhythm until the film shifts into another bizarre fugue state. The middle portion plays things straighter than its punk-rock first hour of madness, and occasionally extended sections of plot outstay their welcome, but the entire effort is very creative and surreal while maintaining a groundedness to the delicate corporeal pleasures of showmanship. It's kind of like Fantasia if it weren't a cartoon and set in India, and it's particularly cool if you know what was happening in this country at the time the film was made, where expressions of liberation and oppression take on entirely new meaning (although this is outright proclaimed in the film's final moments, it doesn't take away from the less literal nuance sewn into the celluloid preceding it). I don’t think every choice works, but there are so many more choices being made here than in your average movie, so it’s hard to fault it for running away with its imagination and not landing a perfect record.

[Matt]

Limite is playing on TCM right now and I’m wondering if anyone knows about the choice of music for the soundtrack. It’s all fashionable, modernist classical (Debussy, Satie, Stravisnky, et al) that would have been 20-30+ years old in 1931. Was this how it would have been presented at the time of its release, or were these selections made at the time of the restoration (circa 2010)? For me, it detracts from the originality of the film, and I wish it had something more in line with its South American origins (thinking Villa-Lobos if not an original score).

[Ogre Kovacs]

Limite is playing on TCM right now and I’m wondering if anyone knows about the choice of music for the soundtrack. It’s all fashionable, modernist classical (Debussy, Satie, Stravisnky, et al) that would have been 20-30+ years old in 1931. Was this how it would have been presented at the time of its release, or were these selections made at the time of the restoration (circa 2010)?

According to the details on Criterion's release:

This avant-garde silent masterpiece centers on a man and two women lost at sea, their pasts unfolding through meticulously orchestrated flashbacks propelled by the music of Erik Satie, Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky, and others.

Remastered digital soundtrack of Limite created almost entirely from archival recordings of the same musical performances director Mário Peixote and his musical arranger Brutus Pedreira originally selected to accompany the film, presented in uncompressed monaural sound on the Blu-ray

Not sure exactly what "originally selected" refers to in terms of time frame but hope this helps a little.

[Matt]

Thank you! I’m sure Shazam is not infallible, especially when it comes to popular orchestral selections with hundreds of recorded performances, but it identified a couple of the recordings as coming from the 1980s and was completely unable to identify some others. I did imagine that the film could have been “soundtracked” for screenings by someone disc-jockeying a bunch of 78s. That’s what was done for Un Chien Andalou before an authorized sonorization was made.

[Gregory]

Yes, Limite had a cue sheet so that whoever was screening it could use widely commercially available Gramophone discs, but after the premiere in 1931 the film failed to be picked up for commercial distribution, and (as far as I've read) Peixoto went into seclusion in remote areas of the country for years, bringing the sole copy of the film with him.
But Matt, in 2011 a group called Ensemble Cine Mudo did something a lot like you were wishing for, creating a new score for the film using Villa-Lobos (specifically the Piano Trio no. 2), choros, etc. Only a fragment is available on the Internet Archive, not the complete score, but it gives us an idea of how different it could have been.

[Matt]

The restoration of Mario Soffici's PRISIONEROS DE LA TIERRA (1939) will be streaming free via the Film Foundation’s website the weekend of April 8. Pre-registration is required

[dadaistnun]

Chess of the Wind soundtrack now available.