Criterion’s sets of Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project were something I looked forward to since the project began. These boxes collect restorations of classic films from byways of world cinema, largely untraveled and unknown even to those of us who seek out “foreign films” made far from Hollywood. In countries that tend to dominate the narrative of cinema, the notion that films get made in Peru, Algeria, and Kazakhstan can seem like a distant, locked wing of the world.
As the Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project seeks under-seen and under-protected gems from countries without strong preservation efforts, so far, four sets have been released on disc. The first volume came out in 2013, the second in 2017, the third in 2020, and the fourth in 2022, only two years later. Maybe that got me too excited, for I was getting antsy at the passing of four years before another set appeared.
Patience is rewarded. Here comes Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 5, and I choose not to be alarmed that it’s only got four movies instead of the previous set’s six each. I’m just grateful. Let’s look at the films, as presented on three Blu-ray discs in chronological order.
Chronicle of the Years of Fire/Waqaa seneen al-jamr (1975) – Directed by Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina
Chronicle of the Years of Fire was both the first Arab-made film and the first African film to win the highest honor at the Cannes Film Festival, and remains the only example to do so. Algerian filmmaker Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina created a three-hour epic that follows one quiet peasant farmer from the beginning of WWII until he fires some of the first shots in 1954 for Algeria’s war for independence from France’s colonial rule.
That makes Chronicle of the Years of Fire the second prominent film to address Algeria’s struggle after Gillo Pontecorvo’s more famous The Battle of Algiers (1966), and that fact makes it almost impossible not to compare these very different films. Scorsese’s introduction, the bonus interview with film scholar Ahmed Bedjaoui, and the excellent booklet essay by critic and curator Joseph Fahim can’t help using the comparison as a launching point.
That’s understandable. For one thing, both films have the same director of photography, Marcello Gatti. Lakhdar-Hamina met him while working on Pontecorvo’s film and hired him for that reason, although Lakhdar-Hamina insisted on being Gatti’s camera operator himself. The camera-trained Lakhdar-Hamina had a precise idea about the style he wanted for his sweeping narrative.
In contrast to Pontecorvo’s rapidly edited, highly kinetic use of black-and-white, imitating newsreels and documentaries, Chronicle of the Years of Fire is a widescreen color film of long, majestic shots over the landscape, as if David Lean were making an epic of Algeria. Gatti lights and prepares these shots in a way that keeps the film a continual visual treat.
Also bringing to mind Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Lakhdar-Hamina casts a central actor who rather resembles Omar Sharif. This is Yorgos Voyagis, a Greek actor who didn’t speak Arabic and had to be dubbed. He’d made his debut in a supporting role in Zorba the Greek (1964), an international hit from Michael Cacoyannis, and his long, busy career would include playing Joseph in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1977 miniseries Jesus of Nazareth.
The casting of Voyagis as the central Ahmed met some criticism from the authenticians (a word I’ve just invented), but Lakhdar-Hamina felt the need for a tall, dark, handsome, rugged, mustached, professional matinee-star type to carry the epic. The filmmaker knew that his all-Algerian production was his own baby and fully reflected his point of view, so he made it his way with an eye on the box office.
He cast himself as Miloud, the ragged “madman” and truth-telling fool who speaks in rhyme. Along with Ahmed, he dominates the narrative, becoming a kind of one-man Greek chorus and storyteller. Further making Chronicle of the Years of Fire a personal affair, Lakhdar-Hamina cast his own children as Ahmed’s, while Ahmed’s wife is played by Moroccan actress Leila Shenna, whom Bedjaoui identifies as Lakhdar-Hamina’s wife. Only two years later, she wielded a gun as a “James Bond girl” in Lewis Gilbert’s Moonraker (1979). How’s that for a commercial move?
Making features since the early 1960s, not to mention many short films, Lakhdar-Hamina used cinema to participate in his country’s struggle. Fifteen years after the formal independence of 1962, he felt the need to stake out an explanation of the long, slow, inevitable, tragedy-laden slog toward the war itself to dominate that narrative in the public imagination. One insight can be found in Ahmed’s question, “France, Hitler, Americans, what difference does it make for us?”
Chronicle of the Years of Fire is that highly effective film, which rewards the viewer’s patience with a vivid force that distills historical tides and political dialectics into personal terms. Animal lovers should be warned that in one early scene, villagers perform an atavistic sacrifice of a donkey to the gods during drought, notwithstanding that they’re Muslim. Such traditional ideas are shown to be part of an old way of life, while guerrilla tactics against the oppressors will ultimately prove more fruitful.
An opening statement declares that, among three distinct cuts of Chronicle of the Years of Fire, the version restored here is the one that won the Cannes prize in 1975.
Yam Daabo/The Choice (1987) – Written and directed by Idrissa Ouédraogo
Yam Daabo is the feature debut of one of Africa’s most important filmmakers, Idrissa Ouédraogo. His country, Burkina Faso, had been a French colony called Upper Volta. In a revealing comparison with Chronicle of the Years of Fire, both films open with a family choosing to leave a drought-stricken region in the hopes of literally greener pastures. That decision embodies “the choice” implied in the title, a choice to spurn dependence on international famine aid, as delivered by trucks to waiting villagers, in search of self-sufficient tillage.
The family in Yam Daabo successfully finds a nice place amid woodsy greenery with fresh water. As they build a place to live, the film presents a montage of work in the form of actors frozen in poses, as though they are posing for still photos. This modern narrative device feels borrowed from Jean-Luc Godard, but with a different purpose. Godard did that kind of thing to mimic comics panels or movie photo-books, while Ouédraogo is fancifully emphasizing the camera’s calm, carefully placed, pictorial approach to the narrative.
The story elements are traditional. A pair of lovers doesn’t have the girl’s father’s permission. A worthless rival is jealous and wants to claim the daughter for himself, so he plots murder. The worst thing that happens is a shocking, elliptically presented death by vehicle that occurs when a boy is distracted by a movie poster for a foreign martial arts film.
Within an essentially positive, fable-like story of renewal, this death is part of Yam Daabo‘s dialectic comparing the perils of congested city life, where poverty dominates, with the retreat of rural simplicity. This urban-rural tension reflects the tensions of traditional and modern lifestyles, and it’s a common device in the films of Ouédraogo, Senegal’s Ousmane Sembène, and other African filmmakers. As scholar Chrystel Oloukoi states in an essay, Ouédraogo didn’t confine himself to that theme or present it as a simple equation of good and bad.
The first Ouédraogo film I was privileged to see was his next feature, Yaaba (1989). I saw it in Paris, and you can be sure I love saying that. It was so good, I can’t believe it’s never been on disc in Region 1 either. Let’s hope that the African Heritage Project, which has overseen the restoration of Yam Daabo and Chronicle of the Years of Fire, turns its attention to other films by these two filmmakers.
Kummatty (1979) – Directed by G. Aravindan
Nothing happens in G. Aravindan’s Kummatty except beauty, magic, and music. The title refers to a kind of mythical bogeyman, not unlike the Pied Piper, who obsesses the village children in India’s Kerala region. They seem to live among the trees, as if they were monkeys or sprites themselves, dancing through tall grass and singing about Kummatty. The closest we see to a mundane existence is when they’re jammed into a cramped little half-classroom receiving lectures on voting and microbes from a faceless instructor.
Kummatty appears in the guise of a traveling old man with a fake beard, carrying masks and other impedimenta. He shaves. He swims. He hands out animal crackers. He continually sings and prances. Fifty-minutes into the 90 minutes of Kummatty, he temporarily transforms the kids into animals via magical masks. Our main boy gets turned into a dog and runs away before the old man can turn him back, and the dog must wait a year or so until the man shows up again on his rounds.
This seemingly improvised, off-handed narrative coalesces around the gloriously beautiful landscape shots of verdant forests, shimmering water, and brightly colored clothing. Kummatty is an example of Slow Cinema existing in its own magical space, according to its own rhythms and folk rituals.
Working in Malayalam, Aravindan’s distinctive films are rooted in his native Kerala, India’s southwestern tip. His collaborators on Kummatty include other distinctive artists: the theatrical writer Kavalam Narayana Panicker and the musician and performer who plays the title role, Ambalappuzha Ramunni.
If all the films in Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 5 showcase filmmakers whose entire output deserves restoration for the balm of our jaded sensibilities, and they do, Kummatty offers the most direct and unapologetic sensual pleasures. Aravindan cries out for his own box set.
The Fall of Otrar/Otyrardyñ küirewi (1991) – Directed by Ardak Amirkulov
In the 13th Century Kazakh city of Otrar, a loyal subject named Unzhu (Dokhdurbek Kydyraliyev) returns after seven years as a spy sent to infiltrate the court of Genghis Khan, where he commanded over a thousand men. Nobody in Otrar, including the powerful leader or his scheming aunt, wants to believe what he tells them about Khan’s intentions to invade and take over.
The first 90 minutes or so of Ardak Amirkulov’s The Fall of Otrar consist of disorienting sequences of internal politics, torture, reversals, and plottings among myriad characters. The last hour is the brutally violent war and the titular fall of the city. People are sworded, set a fire, and fall picturesquely from battlements. One guy gets a facial from hell.
The style’s the thing. Partly influenced by Andrei Tarkovsky (who also influenced Aravindan), the restless camera work of The Fall of Otrar consists of dense layers of confusing activities and textures, usually in sepia but now and then full color, that immerse the viewer in the sheer “foreign-ness” of distant history while paradoxically rendering that alienation as immediate experience. Some of the more elaborately busy shots are reminiscent of another filmmaker named Alexei German, and that’s no coincidence. German and his wife, Svetlana Karmalita, wrote the script.
Years in the making, The Fall of Otrar is the debut feature of Amirkulov, who was part of the Kazakh New Wave of the late 1980s and ’90s that began making a splash at festivals. The cruelty and devastation it documents with such aesthetic vigor can be seen as a veiled critique of the country’s years as a Soviet satellite and as a broader comment on history as a battlefield between overweening powers that see their citizens as expendable while expecting loyalty.
The nature of this subject is inherently bleak, but film buffs will find their meat and drink in the sheer physicality of the enormous production and the sensory registry of the design, photography, and editing. If a film like this were in 3-D, it would leave the audience dead.
To sum up, the four features in Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 5 are presented with the utmost care of restored sound and image. Scorsese offers a short introduction for each film, and each comes with about 20 minutes of discussion and analysis. In addition, a booklet offers very useful essays on each film’s background and reception, as well as its place in its filmmaker’s work. This is another sterling set of films that deserve the attention of world cinema fans. We eagerly await further volumes and respectfully hope the next one won’t take as long to arrive.