n Songs from the North
South Korean director Soon-Mi Yoo’s film is less a documentary or travelogue than a poetic visual collage of North Korea. Sometimes openly, sometimes surreptitiously taken footage from his trip to the north is juxtaposed with programs taped from that country’s television broadcasts. North Korea is seen as steeped in queasy Communist kitsch, more socialist saccharine than socialist realism—a sort of Sound of Music dedicated to the country’s “Eternal Father,” the late Kim Il-Sung.
n Padre Padrone / The Night of the Shooting Stars / Kaos
Childhood magic clings to The Night of the Shooting Stars (1982), built around the extended reminiscence of the summer of 1944 from a woman who was 6 at the time. The Americans are pushing toward her Italian village, the Germans and the Fascists plan to dynamite the town and a band of villagers escapes to the countryside amid the surreal confusion. Shooting Stars appears on Blu-ray with two other films by directors Paolo and Vittorio Taviani.
n Welcome to L.A.
Little wonder Robert Altman “presented” and produced this 1976 film by writer-director Alan Rudolph. Welcome to L.A. was Altmanesque, with a cast of interlocking characters wandering from scene to scene. Not unlike Altman’s Nashville , Welcome to L.A. felt for the pulse of a particular music mecca and found it irregular. “That’s what L.A. is about—daydreams and traffic,” goes a memorable line. Featured were such rising young stars as Harvey Keitel and Sissy Spacek.
n The Southerner
Picking cotton looks almost idyllic until an old laborer collapses in the field. He’s too poor for a tombstone. French director Jean Renoir made The Southerner (1945) in Hollywood with a little help from William Faulkner on dialogue. Based on George Sessions Perry’s novel, The Southerner reveals the dire poverty of the rural South in the mid-20th century, yet protagonists Zachary Scott and Betty Field can’t help but look like movie stars playacting at sharecropping.
