Beyond the Multiplex

July 5, 2007 | In a week most of us spend eating potato salad and fishing wasps out of beer bottles, there's an awful lot of indie-film news to cover. We'll start with the good news, though there's also some of the other kind. Werner Herzog, the German-born director of "Grizzly Man" and many other recent genre-busting documentaries, is finally unveiling the first American narrative feature of his long career, "Rescue Dawn." As any Herzog fan would expect, it's an odd and thrilling mixture, and I can't imagine a better Fourth of July present to his adopted country.

"Joshua," a sneaky little Manhattan horror picture that was a sensation at Sundance last winter, is also reaching audiences this week. Some viewers have apparently hated it, but I'm tempted to see that reaction as evidence of the film's effectiveness. "Joshua" is a twisty, chilly vision of haute-yuppie parenting as unrelenting nightmare, an ingenious reworking of the demon-seed genre in which the evil child is not the real villain. Also this week, New Yorkers can catch the theatrical release of Jennifer Fox's six-hour TV series "Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman," an extraordinary personal documentary that's likely to spread like a cultural virus from one middle-class woman to another all over the globe.

I've been out of town for a family funeral, and on the same day we buried my father-in-law came the sad news that Taiwanese-American director Edward Yang had died at 59, after a long battle with colon cancer. Yang was known almost entirely in the United States for his 2000 art-house hit "Yi Yi (A One and a Two)," and it's a damn fine movie to be remembered by. Distilling the intimate domestic realism Yang drew from European sources like Ingmar Bergman and Robert Bresson with his focus on middle-class life in a rapidly changing Taiwan, "Yi Yi" was his definitive work.

It was far from Yang's only worthwhile film and arguably wasn't his best. At this writing nothing else he made -- not the generational epic "A Brighter Summer Day," not the Antonioni-esque murder mystery "The Terrorizer" (my personal fave) and not his early masterpiece of urban anomie, "Taipei Story" -- is available on video in any form. He wasn't alone, of course. Asian art cinema is a particularly tough sell these days, both at home and in the West. Yang's countrymen and contemporaries Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang are only marginally better known than he was. Hou and Tsai will presumably make more movies; Yang's seven features are all we're going to get. (GreenCine Daily has an excellent compendium of links to commemorative essays and tributes.)

Another director deserving of much wider recognition -- and who is, thankfully, still with us -- is Austria's Barbara Albert, whose new picture "Falling" is just now concluding a U.S. premiere engagement at Anthology Film Archives in New York. Especially in contrast to the star-loaded awkwardness of "Evening," Albert's film stands out as a pitch-perfect depiction of female friendship with all its intimacies and deceptions. Wrenching, redemptive and marvelously acted, it's among the best things I've seen this year. Whether it will ever get wider theatrical distribution is anybody's guess, but don't hold your breath.

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