Perusing the IMDB user comments (on the film Privelege), I encountered the following:
A film society at my school showed this movie for free in a lecture hall last night. Though nothing beats a free movie, the guy running the whole thing introduced it as one that had been totally panned by critics, never released on video, etc., which didn’t make it sound very promising.
Funny… for me, a film that is a) ignored in its time or b) never released on video or c) both is usually an occasion for obsession. Part of it is the attempt to capture the lost cultural object and its moment (that old Lacanian equation: desire = lack). Part of it is the joy that comes with reevaluating previous critical judgments and seeing things afresh. Part of it is simply a fondness for a refinement in cinematic expression that flowered in the 1960s but soon became forgotten. I’ve simply seen too many films that are unavailable on video but are simply wonderful…
Twice a Man, Gregroy Markopoulos
Je t’Aime, Je t’Aime, Alain Resnais
Tale of Late Chrysanthemum, Kinjo Mizoguchi
La Pointe-Courte, Agnes Varda
Harvest 3000 Years, Haile Gerima
Crimson Kimono, Sam Fuller
…and that doesn’t count the ones, like Privilege, that I’ve heard about but never seen. Sometimes a rereleased film fails to live up to expectations (Dreyer’s Micheal comes to mind), but from the cinephile’s perspective (which I realize is a limited one), the lack of public interest says as much about the public as about the film.
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