The Criterion Collection continues to provide a vital service in partnering with Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project, launched in 2007 to preserve and restore important but neglected films from mostly economically marginalized countries. The distributor just released its fifth box set of titles from the World Cinema Project ($79.96 Blu-ray), and while these collections probably don’t see as well as, say, an American classic or a French New masterpiece, they are paramount in furthering Criterion’s inherent advocacy for a cinema without borders. At least three of the four titles in Volume Five are well worth the time of the adventurous cinephile.
Though overshadowed in film history by its neorealist cousin The Battle of Algiers, Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina’s Chronicle of the Years of Fire (1975), released nine years after Battle, widens the lens of the Algerian War for Independence, exploring how the nation’s peoples reached the boiling captured in Gillo Pontecorvo’s earlier classic. A passion project encompassing 15 years across six chapters and 178 minutes, Chronicle is a commitment, but once you’re in the right headspace, it’s an engrossing, fast-moving historical drama that doesn’t require an advanced degree in cinema studies to appreciate. Indeed, Lakhdar-Hamina’s mainstream narrative leanings are as foregrounded as his dedication to truth in filmmaking, and as a hero’s journey and a parable of the human condition, the leap to a film like a Star Wars is more linear than it might initially seem.
That hero is a common herdsman, husband and father of two named Ahmed (Yorgo Voyagis), and his story serves as an effective microcosm for the millions of his fellow countrymen who suffered under a colonial regime and ultimately rebelled against it. Fleeing his native village after a devastating season of drought and famine, he arrives at a nearby town, where he finds work as a day laborer for a callous French colonialist. In the shadow of World War II, Ahmed endures a typhus epidemic and an increasingly hostile occupation, conditions worsening until a violent revolution seems the only solution.
While Lakhdar-Hamina is clear-eyed about the miseries of occupation, his film is not without humor and even occasional whimsy in the form of Miloud, a ubiquitous figure who, as portrayed by the director, functions as town crier, local eccentric, voice of conscience, Greek chorus and philosophical preacher. As a filmmaker, the influence of Sergio Leone looms large in Lakhdar-Hamina’s visual approach — a neo-Western-inspired contrast between close-ups of weathered humanity and wide shots of an unfeeling desert canvas.
There are enough extras populating his vision to rival that of Cecil B. DeMille’s epics, and one cannot help but think of Sergei Eisenstein during the climactic uprising, when a renegade approach to formalism — jump cuts, repeated shots and other dissociative editing techniques — mirror the rebels’ disruptive actions. Similarly, compared to the spartan dialogue of the film’s first half, the use of language grows more baroque in the later passages, as the Algerians gain their voice amid the resistance. Only in its lush, romantic score, by Philippe Arthuys, does Chronicle of the Years of Fire occasionally dip into commercial sentiment.
In his introduction to Kummatty (1979), Scorsese praises it as “one of the most poetic children’s films ever made,” and he’s spot-on. The fourth feature from largely unsung Indian director G. Aravindan, it’s set in a rural village populated by impish children who enjoy making mischief with the endlessly patient adults; the adorable tykes are straight out of Yasujiro Ozu films such as Good Morning.
Eventually they encounter a stranger: the kummatty, or “boogeyman,” of the title, an elderly pied piper with noisemakers and a fake beard who purports to have magical powers. After days of chanting, slumbering by a tree trunk Rumpelstiltskin-like, and distracting the children from their studies, he promises to show his merry followers his final trick before departing: transforming the kids into various animals for a short time. But for one child, Chindan, who changes into a terrier, the conversion holds, leaving Chindan voiceless, save for the occasional bark and whimper, until the magician can be summoned back to remove the spell.
Kummatty is based on an Indian folk tale, and the story is a touching, universal parable: One cannot fully appreciate freedom until they are deprived of it. But it’s Aravindan’s technique that has ensured the movie’s endurance. Rapturous to look at even when narratively “slow” — every frame feels painted — Kummatty is directed with an unhurried pace. Everyday life is captured in extended long shots, with Aravindan, as if bound by a philosophy of noninterference, hanging back and simply observing an idyll of enormous skies, placid waters, fields of gold and lush green mountains.
Indeed, the director populated the movie with nonprofessional actors and shot the film without a script; even the paucity of dialogue feels largely unnecessary. But there is enough singing and dancing to qualify Kummatty is a musical, part of an infectious aural tapestry that spans from birdsong to a ritual drum circle. The result is a marriage of fiction and documentary, the mundane and the fantastic, that is singularly jubilant.
The conflict at the heart of Yam Daabo (The Choice), the 1986 debut feature from Burkina Faso’s Idrissa Ouédraogo, is as old as Shakespeare: Two men have fallen in love with the same woman, resulting in attendant assaults, jealousies and revenge plots. But the film is as much wry comedy as it is domestic tragedy as it is stealth thriller, and its slipperiness of tone is one of its chief assets.
It follows a family of four struggling to survive in a desert climate where water is scarce and their entire belongings fit on a single donkey cart. A trip to a nearby city’s marketplace leads to an unspeakable accident that’s seemingly untethered from the central story, in which the eldest daughter, Bintou, is pregnant with the child of her boyfriend Issa while also being pursued by the aggressive Tiga, the ne’er-do-well son of a neighboring family.
In his introduction, Scorsese lauds the “quiet of the picture.” Like Kummatty, Yam Daabo is in no rush to foreground its plot points, taking time to inhale its surroundings and immerse itself in its characters’ agrarian existence. Ouédraogo’s matter-of-fact presentation of the exigencies of their fate is evident early on, when a death is captured by the sound of car wheels screeching to a halt followed by a cut to the digging of a grave. There is no time for sentiment amid the harshness of the Sahel.
Furthermore, this is a film in which nothing is telegraphed, and that therefore thrives on the unexpected. You may end the picture waiting for another shoe to drop, a tendency also embraced by directors such as Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi. Like these disruptive masters, Ouédraogo treats his audience as participants in his storytelling.
The box set concludes with a rarity in the Criterion canon — a dud. The Fall of Otrar (1991) is a passion project from first-time Kazakhstani director Ardak Amirkulov about the events leading up to, and including, the Mongols’ 13th-century destruction of the once-thriving city of Otrar. While the other films in this collection exude a universality that transcends time and borders, The Fall of Otrar requires a degree in Central Eurasian studies to make it through the opening text scroll, to say nothing of the convoluted story, which follows a slave-turned-warrior’s reconnaissance mission to prevent Genghis Khan’s historic sacking of his homeland. Or something like that.
Amirkulov, whom one Redditor, in a flight of pleasant alliteration, referred to as the “Kazakhstani Kurosawa,” is indeed a wondrous imagist. He’s a master of deep-focus mise-en-scène, with a particular aptitude for gorgeous compositions framed through palace doorways and bunker gaps. The experience of watching The Fall of Otrar is, nonetheless, about as enjoyable as a colonoscopy, from the impenetrable narrative to the overwrought style of much of the acting.
The battle scenes, which dominate the back half of the film, are impressive in their scope and brutality, but so are the ones in Mel Gibson’s movies, if that’s what lights your fire. For me, at the risk of being labeled a philistine, this was 157 minutes I won’t get back.