Three Films Make A Post: There's the first one. There's the right one. And there's the one you never forget.

Goodnight, My Love (1972): This TV movie set in the classic hardboiled private eye era of the 1940s in Los Angeles prefigures the kind of humour writer/director Peter Hyams – here at the beginning of his career as a feature director - would perfect a couple of years later in Busted and some of his following films. In the film at hand, it’s not quite there yet: the coarseness needed couldn’t really be injected into a TV movie, and the lighter parts of the humour never quite land. What’s left is an atypical role for Richard Boone (with Michael Dunn as his sidekick), a couple of moments where the genre homage actually sings, and quite a few shots that look better than the budget should have allowed.

Baby It’s You (1983): This romance is about as straightforwardly commercial as the film of John Sayles as a director ever got, which is not to say the bad kind of commercial at all. Rather, Sayles’s sensibilities allow him to take a very typical romance set-up and fill it with the kind of life that complicates things while still keeping to the core tenets of the genre (something Sayles always has been particularly good at). So this is a sometimes comedic romance that also talks about class divisions but never lets its interest in the politics of class get in the way. Instead Sayles uses his understanding of these things to strengthen and deepen the story and its characters, thereby getting a stronger emotional resonance. Add two pretty damn great performances by Rosanna Arquette and Vincent Spano, as well as some of the best use of later pop music in a period piece you’ll encounter in a movie life, and you simply have a great film, a romance that’s honest but never wants to be something horrible like an anti-romance.

Into the Picture Scroll: The Tale of Yamanaka Tokiwa (2005): I’m not sure if I should call this a formally atypical documentary or an experiment in narrative filmmaking. Director Sumiko Haneda (who has quickly become a favourite around these parts) retells the story told on one of the most important picture scrolls in Japanese art history with the help of voice work, traditional Japanese ballad storytelling, slow, closely-framed pans over the fantastic art of the scroll, nature shots to establish locations, and some narrative about the life of its creator and how the scroll might mirror some of it.

It’s a fascinating and immersive way to tell a story and the story of the story, turning this into a captivating deep dive into a piece of art and culture that’s also, very quietly and thoughtfully, formally daring. Which appears to have been one of Haneda’s particular talents.

Three Films Make A Post: It’s a Cop-Out!

Meurtres à domicile (1982): I’m not quite sure how “great comics writer Jean Van Hamme and director Marc Lobet adapt a story by great Belgian writer of the fantastique Thomas Owen” turned into this often very farcical end product, but if you enjoy your mysteries on the less than serious side, this one’s probably worth seeking out beyond the very different film I initially hoped for. Lobet is certainly good with putting his inspector (Anny Duperey) through many an encounter with her highly peculiar neighbours, and also hits some of the expected moments of anti-bourgeois humour you expect from French comedy of this style rather nicely, so there’s quite a bit of fun to be had here.

Focus on Infinity (2014): Joerg Burger’s documentary concerns the scientific search for the outer ranges of the cosmos and our existence in it, demonstrating individual perspectives, places, and devices through an awed eye. There’s a lot of room for scepticism towards the whole endeavour – though I’m not completely sure the film chooses the best arguments for it – but also for a deep exploration of the very different perspective very different people can and will bring to the Big Questions of the universe and our place in it.

Visually, Burger has a particular affinity for showing the places where science is done emptied of people, in marked contrast to the the very close and personal way his interviews with various scientists, a scientist-priest and an ex-scientist turned depressed writers work. It’s often genuinely thought-provoking, though I wouldn’t have given the last word to the last one of these interviewees, even in my role as a depressed pessimist.

The Cherry Tree With Gray Blossoms (1977): I have already lavished rather a lot of praise on Sumiko Haneda’s Poem of Hayachine Valley. As far as I’ve been able to read up on it, this short documentary was her first truly independently produced piece of work. It is a focussed, highly poetic and personal in the kind of way that also can become universal, exploration of an ancient cherry tree, the people living around and with it. Haneda uses this to explore personal grief, the idea of – for us humans – great spans of time, and how we as human beings can and do relate to these spans of time in the natural world. She does so rather brilliantly.

The Poem of Hayachine Valley (1982)

aka Ode to Mount Hayachine

Original title: 早池峰の賦

Ostensibly, this long – the version I’ve seen is two and a half hours long but there appears to be a different cut for the Japanese market that adds at least another thirty minutes of material – documentary movie by pioneering, brilliant, female independent documentarian Sumiko Haneda is about the culture surrounding a traditional, devotional folk dance called the kagura as practiced in two villages situated around Mount Hayachine, in Iwate Prefecture (as far as I understand the least modernized part of Japan at the time). It certainly is about the two different versions of the dance the two villages practice, showing long, loving sequences portraying its practice, the way its masks and costumes are prepared (and the important differences between these masks in both villages, and the divergent interpretations they take on), training and education in the dance. Haneko also portrays the way the dance’s meaning to the villagers has shifted over time from religious practice as well as a form of entertainment to a bit of a saleable commodity for people who don’t have many of those.

At the same time, this is also a film about the way traditional Japanese village culture is shifting and changing with the times, containing a degree of sadness and nostalgia for the disappearance of traditional living – as is only right and proper – but – as is just as right and proper - never pretending the past was a perfect place and the influx of modern living is only a destructive force. I believe there’s a reason why Haneda shows a ninety-two year old gentleman early on, sitting and musing at the place where people over sixty-one were – at least according to local lore – left to die in the old times. Tradition, the film suggests without ever actually needing to say it, is wonderful, complicated and yet can also be horrible. The same goes with a more modern way of life.

But – as it is with the lives of the population of these villages – the film is not all about the kagura or a past slowly drifting away, but also the daily life of the people living there, the rhythms of their daily work, all still turning with the changing of the seasons. There’s a meticulous sense of the filmmaking itself shifting with the seasons as well, Haneda changing the calm rhythms of her editing and narration through the year she shows in the film.

As the two English titles suggest, there’s a sense of poetry running through a film that at first glance is just a bit dry and slow, a sense of a less visible but palpable additional quality to it and the quotidian things it shows, a luminescence won through calm and patient observation of human and natural rhythms and their intersections.