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What I’m watching
Wherein our movie critic periodically shares what DVDs he’s been viewing in his spare time …
“Le sang des betes (Blood of the Beasts)” by Georges Franju (1949; France): Franju is best known for the spectacularly unsettling horror picture “Eyes Without a Face,” and this, his first film, is a 20-minute short included on the Criterion DVD of “Face.” The brutal documentary about the slaughterhouses of Paris never flinches; animal lovers will want to avoid it. I got glum watching it, and speeded up the DVD during some scenes. It’s stark, cold, black-and-white realism, a day in the life of horse, cow and sheep killing. Its industrial images, sooty and grime-rimmed, remain powerfully influential (see the film below).
“Eraserhead” by David Lynch (1977; USA): Lynch’s landmark avant-garde debut holds up beautifully. I hadn’t seen it in years, but the images shock and awe in an aesthetically stupendous way. You won’t shake them: the girl in the radiator with the cauliflower face; the piteous shrieking monster-baby; the hissing steam and industrial dystopia. The visuals look borrowed from the above movie and clearly spilled over into Lynch’s next masterpiece “The Elephant Man.”
“A Doll’s House” by Patrick Garland (1973; Britain): Anthony Hopkins, Claire Bloom, Denholm Elliot and Ralph Richardson star in this crisp adaptation of Ibsen’s play (by Christopher Isherwood). I like the play plenty but really rented this to watch the mesmerizing Hopkins, whom I’ve loved since I saw “The Elephant Man” (see above) as a kid. People always crow about Hopkins in “Silence of the Lambs” — he’s great in that — but I still think “Elephant Man” is one of his very best.
Next up on the DVD changer: A stack of Criterion Collection classics, including Bunuel’s “The Exterminating Angel,” Stephen Frears’ “The Hit,” and Nagisa Oshima’s “In the Realm of the Senses” and “Empire of Passion.”
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