Criterion’s World Cinema Project box sets are all inherently political, illuminating as they do neglected corners of independent and industry cinema around the world. But the fourth volume in the series especially overflows with films of resistance, providing an organizing principle to an assortment of six films from various decades and continents that none of the prior box sets quite have.
Set in the early days of the Angolan War of Independence, Sarah Maldoror’s 1972 feature Sambizanga depicts the subtle methods of communication between members of the growing resistance movement against the brutal regime of the colonial Portuguese government. And it does so through the ordeal faced by Maria (Elisa Andrade), who, after attempting to find her abducted husband, Domingos (Domingos de Oliveira), is plunged into a nightmare of deliberately impenetrable bureaucracy that shuffles her from prison to prison only to keep telling her that her husband is somewhere else.
Yet even as Maldoror builds outrage on behalf of the characters and all of Angola, she also diverts focus into a study of the way that networks of women aid the revolution by providing emotional support to their suppressed communities. Instead of playing up the paranoid anguish that grips Maria, Sambizanga celebrates the manner in which locals around each prison consistently come to buck up her spirits as she teeters on despair. For Maldoror, such contributions are every bit as crucial to the movement as nonviolent protest and armed resistance, and though the film’s ending is bleak, it’s balanced by the hopefulness with which it envisions women’s nurturing instincts infusing all aspects of the revolution.
The foregrounded importance of women to a resistance movement in Sambizanga is echoed in Cameroonian director Dikongué Pipa’s Muna moto, which scrutinizes both the legacy of colonialism and regressive traditions, in this case the custom in Cameroon of requiring dowries from prospective husbands. The story plays out as a bleak romance between the poor Ngando (David Endene) and Ndomé (Arlette Din Bell), whose parents refuse to let their child wed her suitor and instead push her toward Ngando’s villainous, rich uncle, Mbongo (Philippe Abia), who already has several wives but believes them all to be sterile.
It’s a straightforward tale of tragedy, one that Dikongué-Pipa tells in such a way as to emphasize the assumed patriarchal authority of Ngando as much as that of Mbongo, but Muna moto attains an abstract, poetic quality by mixing its verité footage of Cameroonian daily life and ritual practices with elegant, free-floating passages that capture the characters’ piercing, taciturn displays of muted longing and anguish. Even as he caustically attacks his homeland’s moribund traditions, Diklongué-Pipa highlights the beauty of its land and people, using mingled flashbacks and dream visions to create a portrait outside of time.
Compared to the rawer, neorealist style of these films, Mario Soffici’s 1939 Argentine classic Prisioneros de la tierra boasts such a classical aesthetic—all mounted and mostly static takes—that it’s almost a surprise to learn that much of it was shot on location in Argentina’s rainforests. The film plays like a funhouse-mirror distortion of the ghostly existentialism of Howard Hawks’s Only Angels Have Wings, echoing that film’s shimmeringly humid jungle nights and its depiction of the desperation of finding love in a hopeless place.
But where Hawks foregrounded his usual admiration of professional grace under pressure, Soffici crafts a cri de coeur at the plight of his nation’s history of indentured servitude and the impossibility of dignity in labor when under the thumb of a capitalist. But even the baron with a bullwhip (Francisco Petrone) suffers from the intense loneliness of the wilderness that infects all the characters, vying bitterly with an increasingly organized worker (Ángel Magaña) for the same woman (Elisa Galvé). Factory interiors throw jagged and suffocating shadow over characters, while the wild beauty of the outdoors is shot in flattened ways that turn rivers and trees into prison walls. The only thing more suffocating than the heat is the guilt of being alive, and Soffici teases the possibility of a classic happy ending before carrying on for an extended denouement that offers a bleak, amoral reckoning worthy of Cormac McCarthy.
Soffici’s polish is exceeded by the other 1939 feature of the set, André de Toth’s Two Girls on the Street. One of five films de Toth made that year alone in his native Hungary before fleeing WWII for America, this dramedy shows off the visual economy and fleet-footed editing patterns that would characterize his early Hollywood B movies. The story revolves around rich city girl Gyöngyi (Mária Tasnádi Fekete) and farmer Vica (Bella Bordy) rallying together out of their shared torment at the hands of patriarchal judgment, the former for getting pregnant out of wedlock and the latter for daring to dream of a life better than the one her father has known.
De Toth and cinematographer Károly Vass find beautiful ways to show the two women’s individual worlds, all glittering refractions of light off of polished car hoods or glitzy interior décor contrasting with dense compositions of Vica’s fellow bricklayers arranged vertically along skeletal building scaffolding. But as Gyöngyi and Vica come closer together, Two Girls on the Street reorients around their united opposition to the men who hound their every waking moment—a shared resistance that starts to even out their stark class differences.
In harmony with that shift, the film’s images gradually replace the extreme oscillations between working-class poverty and glitzy wealth with the modest but homey community of flats and parlors that single women form into a makeshift community. Things do go pear-shaped toward the end when this engaging story of a feminist support network gives way to generic romance, one that involves the most predacious men in the women’s orbit. Nonetheless, the film’s best moments anticipate the blunt but complex humanism and realist bite of de Toth’s later work.
At the more opulent end of the spectrum is the 1948 epic Kalpana, the only film by dancer and choreographer Uday Shankar, a member of the artistic family that included his brother, the sitarist Ravi Shankar. Kalpana was made during India’s transition to independence and is remarkably frank in its discussion of nationalism, socialism, and the need to reassert art and culture liberated from the enforced Western aesthetics of the British Raj. Indeed, the conflict between the desire to create and the learned veneration of money is spelled out in the very first shot, in which a film studio’s accounting book bears a scribbled title “Box Office – Our God.”
The demands of mass appeal shape Kalpana’s framing narrative, which somewhat tediously recounts Shankar’s own life (he plays a thinly veiled avatar of himself) and rise to fame amid internal romantic and monetary strife. But it comes alive whenever it frequently lurches into dreamlike, superimposition-filled dance numbers that blend the stagy two-dimensionality of musical theater with a purely cinematic rendering of the protagonist’s impressionistic view of his art. As Shankar’s dancer slowly amasses a following of like-minded artists, early dance sequences of his solo reveries morph into colossal, intricately choreographed set pieces involving dozens of performers. Their synchronized dance movements come to symbolize the possibility of a renewed Indian unity in the aftermath of colonialism.
Kaplana’s hopeful vision of a nation at a revolutionary crosswords contrasts with what is likely the marquee rediscovery of this set, Mohammad Reza Aslani’s Chess of the Wind. A pre-Revolution Iranian film assumed lost even by its cast and crew until the negative was discovered in a junk shop in 2014, the 1976 film presents an ossified aristocratic milieu in early 20th-century Iran that Aslani shoots with a mixture of Baroque painter richness and silent-era frame tinting to make the glittering halls of the rich even more literally golden. Its depiction of an old-money family in its death throes and squabbling over what wealth remains to their name invites favorable comparison to the literature of William Faulkner and the cinema of Luchino Visconti. But the real shock comes in the final act, when the film’s stately atmosphere of nobles self-cannibalizing turns into something closer to Gothic horror as we seep into the bowels of the family manor and discover the depraved depths of the people’s own buried sins.
Image/Sound
The image quality varies with each film and the prints used for restoration, but barring the occasional blemishes here and there (most frequently in Prisioneros de la tierra), the presentations are startling, especially for anyone who might have seen any of these in a pre-restored state. Sambizanga, for example, previously circulated in an almost unwatchable print that was plagued by vertical lines and washed-out color. Now it looks as crisp as it must have the day it was first projected, with rich balance and almost no visible debris. The black-and-white films sport clear contrast, while the color features all reveal subtle gradations of their palettes. The audio is similarly excellent across the board, lacking any hisses, pops, and drops. All the soundtracks offer clear and clean dialogue and good reproduction of the musical scores.
Extras
World Cinema Project founder Martin Scorsese offers a brief introduction to all the films in the set, summarizing their narratives as well as describing their aesthetics and place within their respective national cinema. Many of the films also come with newly recorded interviews with their makers or, in cases where the directors are no longer alive, film historians. The most substantive of these, for Chess of the Wind, takes the form of an hour-long documentary made by director Mohammed Reza Aslani’s daughter, Gita Aslani Shahrestani, who pulled together interviews with cast and crew to discuss the film and Aslani’s ambitious artistry, while also charting how the post-revolutionary government suppressed her father for decades. Of the six films, only Prisioneros de la tierra has its restoration detailed, which is unfortunate given the considerable efforts that must have gone into rescuing the films from oblivion. An accompanying booklet contains essays on each film, from critics and scholars Yasmina Price, Matthew Karush, Ehsan Khoshbakht, Aboubakar Sanogo, Chris Fujiwara, and Shai Heredia.
Overall
The most thematically cohesive World Cinema Project box set to date is yet another feather in the cap of both Criterion and the organization that has done such invaluable work in rediscovering and restoring little-seen gems from across the globe.
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