Sight & Sound. June 09.

By David Hudson on 05/10/2009

"It starts with 'Eve,'" begins Sight & Sound editor Nick James. "'It is probably correct to say the film is self-indulgent,' admitted director Joseph Losey more than a decade later. In 1961 however, when he began shooting, this rather paranoid, highly neurotic director believed his time had come.... At the invitation of French producers the Hakim brothers, with 'Eve' he took on the directors whose influence he felt most keenly: Resnais and Antonioni, visual theorists of artifice and architecture.... [I]n this sweeping sketch of the Losey-Pinter years I want to show a positive side to poshlust influence. Many 1960s and 1970s films exploited the licence to artistically astonish that is first found in 'Eve.'" The sections that follow address "The Servant" (1963), "Accident" (1967), "The Go-Between" (1971), Visconti, the Proust screenplay ("With three artistically successful films and a Palme d'Or under their belt, the Losey-Pinter partnership contemplated literature's labyrinth") and Raúl Ruiz's "Time Regained."

Dylan Cave: "From the late 1950s, as Joseph Losey moved towards developing his British arthouse aesthetic, he also forged a secondary career in television and cinema advertising. Ephemeral and workaday, but absolutely professional, the adverts he directed present an alternate yet similarly skewed vision of Britain in that era."

And the print edition features more of the Losey-Pinter special and a Cannes preview package. But onto the reviews online.

"The filmmaker Alex Cox described 'sleep furiously' as 'the least anthropocentric film I have ever seen,'" notes John Banville, "and surely it is. [Gideon] Koppel's vision sets man in his true context, as a part of creation and not lord over it. He has spoken of his admiration for WG Sebald, and 'sleep furiously' is in the line of that new kind of post-humanist but entirely humane art of which Sebald was a leading practitioner before his untimely death in 2001. Now more than ever we need films such as this: grave, measured, subtly comic and beautifully wrought, free of polemic and yet offering a new way of seeing that is as old as Arcady. sleep furiously is, simply, a masterpiece."

Tim Lucas reminds us of the role Michael Reeves's early death has had on his legend and then turns to his debut, now available "after literally 40 years of ultra-grainy, incoherently cropped, VHS-sourced transfers... 'The She Beast' isn't a good film by any stripe: though it runs less than 80 minutes, it feels padded by at least 30, and star Barbara Steele grew so contemptuous of the production (hired for a day, she was worked 22 hours straight) that she spent much of her screen time under a hat and behind sunglasses and didn't speak to producer Paul Maslansky for the next ten years.... For all its faults, 'The She Beast' burrows under the skin thanks to some scenes of unusual power and visual imagination."

"'Before I Forget' is executed with such spareness and thematic concentration that it is certainly no less cinematic than the work of Eric Rohmer or Catherine Breillat," writes Jonathan Romney. "This is a grimly disillusioned film, for sure, in its contemplation of a world underwritten by vanity and acquisitiveness. But [Jacques] Nolot's wry, understated performance imparts an intimacy and an existential urgency that make 'Before I Forget' a moving, courageous act of self-revelation."

"What saves [Lance Daly's] 'Kisses' from stylistic confusion and somewhat clunky second-guessing of its own characters is the quality of the two leads' performances," argues Brian Dillon.

[Photo: Jeanne Moreau and Stanley Baker in "Eve," Kino Video, 1962]

Tags: Gideon Koppel, Harold Pinter, Jacques Nolot, Joseph Losey, Lance Daly, Michael Reeves, Sight & Sound