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• High Definition (1080p) Blu-ray™ presentation
• Original uncompressed mono audio
• Newly translated English subtitles
• New video appreciation of the film by author and critic Philip Kemp
• Image gallery
• Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Ignatius Fitzpatrick

domino harvey wrote: Wed Sep 06, 2017 2:05 am

L'Amérique insolite (François Reichenbach 1960)
Reichenbach visits the States and reveals an unexpected look at America in the late fifties as seen from outside. We are now so removed from the fifties that the film functions as much for us as it did the French at the time, in providing a wholly alien look at the melange of cultures and practices of the era. Unusually shot in ‘Scope, the doc give us a multitude of unexpected vantages and shots that are frequently fascinating. If all the film did was capture amusing novelties like pie eating contests (complete with a hilarious Michel Legrand song in which the lyrics namecheck the composer) and the like, it would be of some interest. But there’s a lot going on here. Early in the film, Reichenbach bridges a scene of lovers embracing at a campsite to lovers embracing in the waves of a beach. He then reveals these new lovers are models, complete strangers paid to pretend to fall for each other, and then shows that by the end of the shoot, the models themselves appear to by their fiction and start making out for real. It is the film’s greatest moment, and one that gives a key for reading the picture as a whole: America as conscious and self-furthered fiction. Reichenbach does not directly attack the country or culture. Rather, with the assistance of Chris Marker, who co-wrote the narration, he talks around it. At first the narration comes off as too cloying, too cute. However, it soon becomes clear that the film is offering a variation of the ethnographic documentary, and the narration that tends to go with it. Reichenbach presents us with an unusual product: a Western ethnography as seen by Western filmmakers for Western audiences. We (American or French) recognize the patronizing tone of this piece because for all its alien aspects, the world is recognizable and comparable to our own. Yet, do we check ourselves as easily when we see the travelogue of Tahiti or rural China? Reichenbach’s film causes a Western audience to examine their own cultural assumptions by turning strange that which is not, really, that foreign.

It’s interesting to note how carefully Reichenbach avoids direct critique. If you were a foreigner traveling to America in the late fifties, surely one of the first things you would notice is the self- and state-sanctioned segregation. Yet the film never says one word about this— directly, at least. We get plenty of shots of black children playing together, footage of the black carnival in Mardi Gras, and so on to accompany the footage of white teenagers blowing bubblegum bubbles on the beach and what not. The film even offers us a helpful explanation that America has two races: dogs and cats. But by its obvious exclusion, the film draws increased attention via this lack. Reichenbach’s film is too outwardly genial to be openly hostile, but the film is fundamentally incredibly negative in its portrayal of American society. When we see a bizarre prison rodeo in which bullriders compete for reduced sentences, Reichenbach doesn’t need to pat our hand and let us know he agrees it’s barbaric. He shows the process, overlays some pat commentary, and points out how some of the participants are there even without the promise of reducing their sentence, an even greater indignity. It is, I think, so clever a critique that one could imagine this playing in American theatres to local audiences and having the film received at face value with no offense taken (well, were it not for all the nudity in the film…).

literally “unusual America”

swo17 wrote:I just watched Concert of Requests on the Kieślowski set and that was presented in a pretty compromised form, but thankfully that didn't stop them from including it. I suspect it's more likely a rights or cost issue

Cash Flagg wrote: Fri Jun 26, 2020 10:42 am So the extras are only worth one star, and yet the 23-minute featurette is ‘really interesting’?