Chicago Reader

January 15 - 21, 1999

JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

--Jonathan Rosenbaum

In a fascinating review of THE THIN RED LINE by T. Malick, in this week's
edition of the CHICAGO READER, Rosenbaum also discuss' INSIDE/OUT.
www.chireader.com/movies/archives/1999/0199/01159.html.  There was also a short
review of INSIDE/OUT in the "Critic's Pick" section


Quotes from that review follow. The entire review can be found at www.chireader.com


"A person could more profitably compare The Thin Red Line,
currently playing at McClurg Court, with Rob Tregenza's
Inside/Out, playing in a one-week run at Facets Multimedia
Center (and Inside/Out is a Critic's Choice this week in
Section Two). But the parallels between these two epic
experiments are pretty striking. Each is the third feature of
a prodigiously talented middle-aged eccentric and original
thinker with a background in existential philosophy that
informs every artistic move he makes. Both films are shot in
wide-screen 35-millimeter with Dolby sound (though Tregenza's
film is in black and white). And both filmmakers are
passionately (and unfashionably) devoted to the aesthetics of
silent cinema: The Thin Red Line makes as many visual
references to F.W. Murnau's Tabu (1931) as Days of Heaven
makes to Murnau's Sunrise (1927) and City Girl (1930), and
Tregenza, who likes to film pantomimes in long shot, includes
on his Web site a beautiful quotation from Luigi Pirandello
that applies almost as well to Malick's film: "The screenplay
should remain a wordless art because it is essentially a
medium for the expression of the unconscious." The films
share narrative strategy as well. Both discard the
conventions of a central character and a single story,
running a relay between many disparate characters in the same
rural setting, none of whom is subjected to any moral
judgment. And both are a little too long for what they can
achieve dramatically--Tregenza's film is just under two
hours, Malick's just under three--but that's because both are
overly ambitious. If you agree with me that 90 percent of the
movies made nowadays are insufficiently ambitious, being
overly ambitious is a shared flaw that deserves our deepest
respect. Both filmmakers value physical environment as much
as "action" in the ordinary sense, and both--albeit in very
different ways--use the cleavage and disruptions produced by
World War II to reflect on the second half of the 20th
century.

Yet they're playing to different audiences in radically
different venues. Inside/Out--made for a tiny fraction of the
other picture's budget, with no stars to speak of--has had
too limited and piecemeal a national release since its 1997
premiere at Cannes to qualify even as a minor contender in
any present or future NSFC awards, even in the experimental
category. No articles about Inside/Out will show up in Vanity
Fair or Premiere, no reviews will grace mainstream magazines
or TV shows, no qualifying Oscar screenings will be held
anywhere. Economically and culturally speaking--which in this
country generally amounts to the same thing--the two pictures
are never going to be permitted to inhabit the same universe.
The fact that Tregenza's distribution company, Cinema
Parallel, has allowed us to see Michael Haneke's The Seventh
Continent, Bela Tarr's Satantango, Jacques Rivette's Up Down
Fragile, and several recent films by Jean-Luc Godard locates
him in a separate cosmos as far as most critics are
concerned. So any context that can accommodate him and Malick
has to be created by the audience."

 Malick's intimate acquaintance with the aesthetics of silent
cinema reaches well past Murnau. The punctuating shots of nature 
in the midst of combat--a wounded bird, a riddled
leaf, a hill of waving grass--are pure silent-movie syntax,
as is the notion of a collective war hero (often found in
films and fiction about World War I; William March's 1933
book Company K is one distinguished example). The poetic and
philosophical internal monologues of Malick's various
soldiers, often paired with a sustained and soulful close-up
of the character, are the structural equivalent of
intertitles in silent films of the teens and 20s. This is a
precious legacy that most major filmmakers of the 90s
(excepting Godard, Tarr, Tregenza, Manuel de Oliveira, and a
handful of others who live outside the Oscars sweepstakes)
have either forgotten or never discovered in the first
place--a sensibility that frees images from the tyranny of
the sound track, allowing them to register in all their
primordial power--and the major achievements of The Thin Red
 Line would be unthinkable without it."

	copyright J Rosenbaum Chicago Reader

CRITIC'S PICK OF THE WEEK.

" An uncredited Jean-Luc Godard produced this 1997 third feature
by the singular American independent Rob Tregenza (Talking to
Strangers, The Arc), and along with Hungarian filmmaker Bela
Tarr, Godard is certainly a presiding guru over this powerful
if enigmatic view of life in and around a psychiatric hospital
somewhere in rural, snowbound America. Shot by Tregenza himself
(one of the best cinematographers on the planet) in
black-and-white 35-millimeter 'Scope--mainly in extremely long,
choreographed takes that transpire with a minimum of dialogue
but with an extremely inventive and original Dolby sound
track--the film offers not so much a plot in the usual sense as
a series of interlocking characters and events governed, like
the film's title, by polarities: sound and image, interior and
exterior, sanity and madness, freedom and institutional
captivity, society and isolation. According to clues planted in
the clothes and decor (especially the cars), the action begins
around 1945 and ends in the present or near future, but to
confuse matters further the characters and their behavior
remain unaging constants. Tregenza's background in existential
philosophy serves him well: every shot comprises an event, and
most of them were shot only once, in a single take (as in
Talking to Strangers), allowing change and contingency to shape
the material. Art conceived as both adventure and
confrontation, Inside/Out requires a certain amount of creative
energy from the audience but grandly repays the effort. Facets
Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton, Friday, January 15, 7:00
and 9:15; Saturday and Sunday, January 16 and 17, 2:30, 4:45,
7:00, and 9:15; and Monday through Thursday, January 18 through
21, 7:00 and 9:15; 773-281-4114.