Both Bela Tarr's The Man from London and Abdellatif Kechiche's The Secret of the Grain are from 2007, obviously a good year for international films. The Hungarian Tarr is a successor of sorts to Miklos Jancso, with long, slow camera movements often lasting many minutes. The Man from London is in beautiful black-and-white, from a Simenon novel, and is about surface textures and family difficulties in a port city. Kechiche's film is also about textures and family life in a port city, this one in France, though Kechiche's somewhat frenetic style is very different from the slowness of the Tarr film. Kechiche was born in Tunis and came to France when he was six and his film is an intense tale about a North African and his French children and their attempt to open a couscous restaurant. I first heard of couscous in Fassbinder's film of 1974 -- Ali: Fear Eats the Soul-- and had no idea then what the homesick man from Morocco meant when he said "I want couscous." Fassbinder is an obvious influence on both these filmmakers and one can relate to the family tensions in both these films, especially this time of year.
I watched both these films on DVD's from the Brooklyn Public Library; along with the New York Public Library in Manhattan it is one of the great resources in New York. I can find almost every DVD or book I am looking for at one or the other and can reserve them online to pick up at my local library, just around the corner. At one point in a budget crunch it was proposed that libraries charge a nominal fee for videos and I would support this if it comes to that, since the primary purpose of libraries is to make books available.
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