Wong Kar-wai, Ashes of Time Redux, 2008, still from a color film in 35 mm, 93 minutes. Ouyang Feng (Leslie Cheung).

If Wong Kar-wai’s Ashes of Time Redux (2008) is not the most beautiful movie ever made, then at least its beauty is sufficient to obliterate, for the moment, the memory of all others, including Wong’s own ravishing In the Mood for Love (2000) and 2046 (2004). Beauty and its memory, along with regret for lost love, are Wong’s subjects, and Redux, notwithstanding its martial-arts derivation, is the distillation of his swooning romances. It is also the materialization of his ongoing Proustian project—to revivify the past in all its sensory richness and capture the one that got away. In this case, the elusive object of desire is not a woman or a man but a movie in its entirety.

The original Ashes of Time (1994) was the third feature Wong put into production and the fourth he completed. Taking time off from the lengthy, difficult postproduction of Ashes to have a fling with screwball comedy, he completed the effervescent Chungking Express (1994) in record time—three months, start to finish. Ashes of Time, which was released in various versions (one for Hong Kong, another for Taiwan) later the same year, could not have been further from Chungking’s carefree spontaneity. It suffered from soporific pacing that never varied despite Wong’s attempt to amp it up with Eisensteinian edits synced to the beat of a tinny synthesized genre score. The editing jolts clashed with the images, which were both murky and washed-out, or at least that’s the way they appeared in the various 35-mm prints and video dubs that made their way to festivals and a handful of art houses. I fell asleep in three countries trying to watch Ashes of Time, and you may share that experience in your own home if you rent the version available from Netflix.

Based on Louis Cha aka Jin Yong’s The Eagle-Shooting Heroes, a series of novels published in Hong Kong in the late 1950s, Ashes of Time is set in the parallel world of the wuxia pian (martial-arts movie), where master sword fighters have power over the elements and laws of nature. Not only can they fly, but, in Wong’s version of wuxia storytelling, they can cause the earth to quake and lakes to spout. When Wong discovered that the original film materials and prints were decomposing—becoming themselves “ashes of time”—he embarked on a five-year project using new digital tools and his mastery of cinematic rhythms to produce a lysergically colored world of aquamarine skies and windswept deserts in myriad shades of yellow-orange, where time contracts into swirls of color or expands in gestures of infinite yearning. With its anamorphic close-ups of exquisitely chiseled faces and its desert tableaux vivants, Redux is closer to a Sergio Leone spaghetti western or the melodrama of King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946) than it is to a traditional wuxia pian or even a recent art film–wuxia hybrid like Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers (2004).

Wong Kar-wai, Ashes of Time Redux, 2008, still from a color film in 35 mm, 93 minutes. Huang Yoshi (Tony Leung Ka Fai).

Redux’s episodic narrative, replete with flashbacks, spirals like a dream that you grasp in its entirety only for a fleeting moment on awakening, and is no easier to follow than the original. It doesn’t hurt the experience when seeing the movie for the first time to get lost in its beauty alone. But perhaps it is helpful to know that the story is filtered through the consciousness of Ouyang Fei (Leslie Cheung), a temporarily retired master swordsman living in an inn on the edge of the Gobi Desert, where he acts as a go-between for warriors and their clients. Like nearly all the characters in the film, Ouyang is haunted by the memory of a failed romance. Afraid of rejection, he abandoned the woman he loved (Maggie Cheung), who then married his brother. Once a year, Ouyang is visited by another great swordsman, Huang Yoshi (Tony Leung Ka Fai), who secretly is in love with the same woman. Huang was a childhood friend of still another wandering swordsman (Tony Leung Chiu Wai), who is now going blind. The blind swordsman knows that his wife, Peach Blossom (Carina Lau), has had an affair with Huang, but nevertheless he dreams of surviving long enough to see her once more. In a film in which eroticism is most strongly evoked through the sense of touch, one scene is unforgettable. In the midst of what is to be his final battle, the blind swordsman sees in his mind’s eye (or in the cosmic simultaneity of all time and space) Peach Blossom, standing in a pool of water, her hands stroking the neck of a horse whose head is bent toward her breast.

The actors, most of them international stars and regulars in Wong’s films, magnificently negotiate the mythic aspects of their characters and the lovesickness that makes them all too human. In particular, Maggie Cheung’s grief-stricken final monologue is the heart of the film and goes to the core of all Wong’s work. Ashes of Time Redux ends with a montage as transcendent as that of Dziga Vertov’s Man with the Movie Camera (1929). When I get my hands on the DVD, I’ll play it as a bedtime story every night.

— Amy Taubin

Ashes of Time Redux opens today at selected theaters in New York and Los Angeles. For additional information, check your local listings.

Eric Rohmer, Place de L'Etoile, 1965, still from a black-and-white film in 35 mm, 15 minutes. Right: Jean-Marc (Jean-Michel Rouziere). From the anthology film Six in Paris, 1965.

Six in Paris (1965) is a collection of vignettes filmed by the era’s leading French directors and produced by Barbet Schroeder, who, with Eric Rohmer, had formed the production company Les Films du Losange three years earlier. Rohmer’s own comic contribution to the anthology portrays the fastidious Jean-Marc, a former runner now working in a clothing shop near the Place d’Etoile, who thinks he may have accidentally murdered a drunk in a mild street tussle. It’s the anomaly in a collection otherwise dedicated to love’s squabbles.

The temporal compression heightens the melodrama. Claude Chabrol, in his view of La Muette, plays a disgusting upper-class husband who fights with his constipated wife so much that their son takes to wearing earplugs, with disastrous consequences. Schroeder himself stars in Jean Rouch’s portrait of the district around the Gare du Nord; an argument with his wife, played by Nadine Ballot, precipitates a dramatic encounter for her on the street. Jean-Daniel Pollet’s tender sketch portrays the awkward interactions between a no-nonsense prostitute and a childlike john who works as a dishwasher in a nearby restaurant. And Jean-Luc Godard inserts into Montparnasse a Canadian girl who tries to game her two lovers—one wields a blowtorch as a sculptor, the other as an auto detailer—and ends up losing them both.

Tricks, cons, romantic vicissitudes, all set against the kinetic backdrop of the City of Light: The six shorts are certainly emblematic of New Wave style, but not of Schroeder’s career as a whole. He went on to direct films of his own, including 1970s-era documentaries on Idi Amin Dada and Koko, the infamous “talking” gorilla, and the Hollywood hits Reversal of Fortune (1990) and Single White Female (1992). He acts, too: Mainstream American audiences may remember him as the mechanic in Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited (2007). The “Mad Obsessions” series surveys Schroeder’s peripatetic and malleable output; but hurry to see Six in Paris, which screens only until tomorrow.

— Brian Sholis

"Mad Obsessions: The Films of Barbet Schroeder" runs at the BAMcinématek in Brooklyn until October 21. Six in Paris screens as part of the series through October 9. For more details on the series, click here.

Max Ophüls, Lola Montès, 1955, still from a color film in 35 mm, 115 minutes. Lola Montès (Martine Carol).

TOWARD THE END of Lola Montès (1955), Max Ophüls’s last and perhaps greatest film, the eponymous heroine, a nineteenth-century dancer, goes backstage at the theater in which she has just performed to meet with the king of Bavaria, whom she is attempting to seduce. The king, obviously infatuated, tries to persuade her to stay in his country under the pretext of learning more about her “revolutionary” “Spanish” dancing (in truth, she is not skilled enough to dance in the classical style), while she feigns ignorance of his intentions, insisting that she must move on for professional reasons. They are surrounded by props, flats, and other stage paraphernalia, and the king remarks that she has “won” her “place in this theater.” Just in case the viewer misses the theatricality of the interaction—they are self-consciously playing their parts in a game of erotic pursuit—Ophüls places a rope between the camera and the actors; it swings conspicuously back and forth from the rigging above.

This is not the first time Ophüls resorts to this unusual technique. In the opening scene, as the circus master and jugglers prime the audience for Lola’s entry to the ring, where she will reenact scenes from her “sensational” life, a fake crown is lowered on a rope in front of the camera. In general, Ophüls takes pains to remind the viewer of his artifice through a panoply of devices: a mise-en-scène that employs props, setting, and translucent curtains and screens to create a highly patterned image; objects that block our view of the characters; an iris that imitates a curtain opening and closing; and manifestly flat back projection and oversaturated colors.

Artificiality and performance, in other words, are major concerns of this film, both on the level of the narrative, with characters playing literal and metaphoric roles, and, more reflexively, on the level of the film itself. It arguably turns Lola’s life into a cheap spectacle, one that satisfies the prurient desire of its audience for sensation much as the circus and Lola herself do. Lola Montès is one of the most scrupulously honest films in the history of cinema, shining a light—long before political modernists of the 1960s such as Jean-Luc Godard and Nagisa Oshima—on the filmmaker’s and viewers’ willing complicity in the fabrications of the film’s characters.

And yet, not everything is inauthentic. For just as viewers can feel genuine emotions toward characters while remaining fully aware that they are fictional, so sometimes do the characters themselves exhibit real feelings. After being forced to flee Bavaria, Lola confesses that she loved the king, and from the opening moments of the film, Ophüls demonstrates that, behind the illusion of a powerful, beautiful femme fatale, there is an exhausted woman who has been made ill by her lifestyle. Pretense shades unpredictably and sometimes tragically into reality, the film seems to say, a point confirmed by its devastating final scene, in which men line up to touch Lola, now protected (and imprisoned) by bars.

Although Ophüls explores this theme to a greater or lesser extent in all of his last four films, which he made on returning to France after working in Hollywood during and immediately after the war, 1950’s La Ronde (recently released by Criterion on DVD along with Le Plasir [1952] and The Earrings of Madame de . . . [1953]), the first of the four, is more lighthearted. Once again, reflexivity abounds, this time in the form of a narrator who addresses the camera, which he leads onto and off the film sets. He also initiates and occasionally intervenes in the highly artificial narrative, in which a character meets (and usually makes love to) another character, who meets another character, and so on until the tenth encounters the first and the “rounds of love” are completed. Rivaling many of those who experimented with narration in modernist and postmodernist fiction, Ophüls has great fun with the narrator, showing him, for example, censoring the film by cutting out a lovemaking scene from the print with scissors, and in general the characters, as they “all dance to love’s tune,” do not suffer like Lola. Unfortunately, this was not to be the case with Ophüls himself, who died from a heart attack in March 1957 following the financial failure and subsequent reediting of Lola Montès by its producers.

— Malcolm Turvey

Lola Montès screens at the New York Film Festival on Saturday, October 4. For more information or to buy tickets, click here. The film then runs at Film Forum in New York from October 10 to October 30. For more information, click here. La Ronde, Le Plaisir, and The Earrings of Madame de . . . are available now from the Criterion Collection.

James Benning, RR, 2007, still from a color film in 16 mm, 112 minutes.

“AVANT-GARDES HAVE ONLY ONE TIME; and the best thing that can happen to them is to have enlivened their time without outliving it.” Guy Debord throws down this critique near the end of his last film, In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978), a 100-minute Niagara of images stolen from cinema and magazines, détourned into illustrative counterpoint for an anti-masscult philippic interwoven with autobiographical self-reflection. Debord’s films have long been banished to a shadow economy of bootlegs, but now In girum resurfaces at the New York Film Festival’s “Views from the Avant-Garde” sidebar in a freshly subtitled 35-mm blowup. Encountering Debord’s words today, as they further an elaborate military analogy spoken atop footage from a cinematic depiction of the Crimean War, it is impossible not to reinterpret his language now as an autodestructive maneuver, deftly undermining his own twenty-first-century legacy as academic commodity in the nostalgia trade of May ’68 philosophical memorabilia.

Yet this week’s context also raises the question of what constitutes avant-garde film as it enters its second century. For Debord, found-footage tinkering serves to articulate a cultural negation and an anti-aesthetic: “This film disdains the image scraps of which it is composed,” he declares. Such a sentiment clashes harshly with the predominantly Anglo-American tradition of experimental film and video showcased elsewhere during “Views,” which in its current incarnation wholeheartedly savors moments of optic beauty and rejects an overt engagement with theory in favor of a more Deweyan practice of art as experience. Which is not to say that the transatlantic avant-garde has no politics, as witnessed by the curators’ retrospective tribute to the late Bruce Conner, who remixed stolen images of mainstream mindlessness into rhythmic mental benders of deep-punk subversion like A Movie (1958), Report (1967), and America Is Waiting (1982). Contra Debord, Conner had his Pop and ate it, too.

Fittingly, the program also showcases the newest feature by Bay Area underground stalwart Craig Baldwin. A man who could pass for Debord and Conner’s love child, he is known for stitching together fragments from old industrials, B movies, and other celluloid detritus into feature-length derangements of American culture that conjure up the bugaboos of the nation’s own paranoid narratives. Baldwin’s first digitally edited work, Mock Up on Mu (2008), spins a lurid sci-fi fairy tale around the true-ish story of occult dabbler and aerospace pioneer Jack Parsons, invoking a menagerie of his real-life confidantes, including self-proclaimed Antichrist Aleister Crowley, New Age progenitor Marjorie Cameron, and Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard.

Baldwin’s high-impact machine-gun montage couldn’t be further from the languor of his contemporary James Benning, who will screen what he claims will be his final 16-mm film, RR (2008), a collection of precisely calibrated long takes of trains passing through sublime stretches of American landscape. Both an unabashed paean to the beauties of the machine age and a stealth metaphor for the chugging, linear mechanics of cinema, RR nevertheless includes its own gestures toward cultural disquiet, including audio of readings from the Book of Revelations and a recording of Eisenhower’s denunciation of the military-industrial complex. Benning’s endorsement of unhurried acts of looking stands as an implicit critique of the attention-deficit age, and even here one might circle back to Debord: In one segment of RR, an off-camera radio plays snatches from a classic jingle for Coca-Cola, providing Benning with his own détournement moment. “That’s the way it is and the way it will stay,” a woman’s voice sings. “What the world wants today is the real thing.”

— Ed Halter

"Views from the Avant-Garde" screens at the 46th New York Film Festival from October 3 to October 5. For more information, click here.

Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O'Connor, Obscene, 2007, still from a black-and-white film, 90 minutes. Barney Rossett.

If you need another reminder that book publishing and New York City aren’t what they used to be, you could do worse than to immerse yourself in Obscene (2007), an affectionate documentary portrait of the life and times of Grove Press and Evergreen Review publisher Barney Rossett. A thinking man’s perv with a patrician air, Rossett almost singlehandedly challenged the stultifying cultural puritanism of 1950s America through his publication of and landmark legal victories in defense of previously censored or criminally “obscene” books by D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and William S. Burroughs.

As an early advocate of Beckett and the Beats, Rossett did as much to inspire the personal politics and social upheavals of the ’60s as Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol. Over the years, driven by amphetamines, Cuba Libres, and a hungry eye for erotic excess, he married and divorced Abstract-Expressionist painter Joan Mitchell, had his office bombed by anti-Castro fanatics, brought the steamy Swedish “art film” I Am Curious (Yellow) to these shores, published The Autobiography of Malcolm X, was monitored and harassed by the CIA, and made and lost fortunes several times over. Unabashed and unbowed in a far less interesting city, Rossett still lives in a fourth-floor walk-up on Union Square.

Filmmakers Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O’Connor weave this envy-inspiring narrative from archival footage, Rossett’s own amazingly well-preserved 8-mm films and reel-to-reel tapes from the ’30s through the ’60s, and new interviews with Amiri Baraka, Jim Carroll, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Erica Jong, Ray Manzarek, Michael McClure, John Rechy, Ed Sanders, John Sayles, Gore Vidal, John Waters, and Rossett’s editorial colleagues and acolytes from Grove’s glory days.

— Andrew Hultkrans

Obscene opens at Cinema Village in New York on September 26 and in Los Angeles on October 24.

Lee Anne Schmitt, California Company Town, 2008, still from a color film in 16 mm, 76 min.

LAST YEAR, the CIA reported that if California were to become an independent state, it would have the tenth-largest economy in the world. Despite the state’s steady rise as an important center of production, there still exist a number of severely depressed and abandoned towns scattered just outside the county lines of California’s largest metropolitan areas. These sites—former boomtowns established around specific industries and occupied by laborers—are the subject of Lee Anne Schmitt’s haunting new film, California Company Town. Since 2003, Schmitt has been researching, visiting, and filming these outlying areas, which are depicted in the film with a quiet restraint that to some may seem like indifference. Shot on 16-mm film, the twenty-odd towns that Schmitt profiles appear as they really are—as vacant buildings, abandoned graveyards, warning signs, and tourist spectacles; as spaces where marginal inhabitants move under the muted blue-gray of polluted skies. As the film progresses, one town becomes nearly indistinguishable from the next. Accompanied by Schmitt’s earnest narration, these images quickly become an essay on privatized land ownership, the failure of cooperative labor, the effects of industrial fallout on the environment, and, underlying it all, the American dream. Recounting facts and using archival film and audio, the artist cautiously fleshes out short, contained narratives to hang on the bones of each town; the Japanese internment camp of Manzanar, for example, is brought back to life with propagandistic film clips created by the US War Relocation Agency (footage that has also been employed by video artists Bruce and Norman Yonemoto). The desolate streets of Eagle Mountain are set to a requiem that, we are told, is a recording of the last student concert held in the town. In Keene, we catch glimpses of scattered ephemera at the abandoned United Farm Workers headquarters while a Cesar Chavez speech plays briefly on the sound track. Schmitt’s strength as a filmmaker is precisely this balance between composed documentation and efficient storytelling. While each shot moves at a steady, somewhat eerie pace, each company (be it McCloud Lumber, Standard Oil, or the United States government) is rendered through uncomplicated testimony. The effect of this rationalist drift through a facet of twentieth-century economics is powerful.

— Catherine Taft

California Company Town receives its world premiere on September 22 at REDCAT in Los Angeles. For more information, click here.