Joseph Morder 4 films Collection ( El Cantor / L' Arbre mort / Mémoires d'un juif tropical / Romamor ) ( The Cantor / Memories of a Tropical Jew )

Joseph Morder 4 films Collection (DVD) (*)

~~$65.99~~ $59.97

Original Title: El Cantor / L' Arbre mort / Mémoires d'un juif tropical / Romamor
Alternate Title: The Cantor / Memories of a Tropical Jew
Language Selections:
English ( Dolby Digital 2.0 )
English ( Subtitles )
French ( Dolby Digital 2.0 )
Spanish ( Subtitles )

Product Origin/Format:
France ( PAL/Region 0 )

Running Time:
354 min

Aspect Ratio:
Widescreen (1.85:1)

Special Features:
3-DVD Set
Box Set
Documentary
Featurette
Interactive Menu
Scene Access
Short Film

Movie filmed in 1988-2005 and produced in:
France ( France, Benelux )

Directed By:
Joseph Morder
Cast

Written By:
Harold P Manning
Joseph Morder
Philippe Fano

Actors:
Lou Castel ..... Clovis Fishermann
Luis Rego ..... William Stern
Françoise Michaud ..... Elizabeth
Talila ..... Tania
Alexandra Stewart ..... Edna
François Desgeorges ..... Adam (as Pierre-François Desgeorges)
Rosette ..... Paula
Lucette Filiu ..... La psychanalyste
Abraham Leber ..... Monsieur Spiegelman
Solange Najman ..... La mère de William
Robi Morder ..... Le libraire
Henri de Camaret ..... Moshé Fisherman
Nicolas Le Bihan ..... Le facteur
Claude Duty ..... Monsieur Pondu
Harold P. Manning ..... Le rabbin
Philippe Fano
Benjamin Lemaire
Rosette
Nicole Tuffeli
Françoise Michaud
Vincent Tolédano
Joseph Morder

Synopsis:

El Cantor / The Cantor:
Intentionally or unintentionally molded after the eccentric deadpan comedies of Jim Jarmusch and Aki Kaurismaki, the quirky slice-of-life feature El Cantor unfolds amid the day-to-day of western European Jews. William (Luis Rego), a dentist living in the French port city of Le Havre, receives a telegram from his long-absent cousin, Clovis (Lou Castel), indicating that the latter will soon be docking and needs a place to reside. He's an itinerant Jew without a permanent home, nicknamed "The Cantor" by his parents for his obsession with imbibing as much Yiddish as possible during childhood. As a youngster, Clovis constantly played the prankster by teasing William and others, yet remained affable to generally everyone (including William). Sensing a rekindled closeness, William - to the chagrin of his wife Elizabeth (Francoise Michaud), who is still grieving from the recent loss of her father - obliges Clovis's request. This prompts Elizabeth to do everything in her power to persuade Clovis to leave, shy of physically throwing him out the door. Clovis remains, however, and soon accompanies William on an eventful trip into the city that neither will ever forget. Director Joseph Morder segments his film into distinct chapters with fade-outs in-between.

L' Arbre mort:
Ostensibly framed as a postwar melodrama that loosely evokes Leo McCarey's Love Affair in its story of a shipboard encounter between two emotionally unavailable people, Joseph Morder's L'Arbre mort is also a tone piece that seeks to reconcile the space between love and death, history and memory, documentary and fiction. This duality is suggested in the diffused opening image of Jaime (Philippe Fano) abstractedly looking out into the open waters from the deck of a ship that plays out against an asynchronous, voiceover narration describing his long-awaited return to South America after completing his medical studies in Europe. With little to do on the transatlantic voyage home, Jaime strikes up a conversation with a fellow expatriate named Laura (Marie Serrurier) who has left her husband behind in Paris (played by Morder) to visit her widowed aunt and belatedly mourn the unexpected deaths of her parents during the war. Connected by a sense of ambivalence over their delayed homecoming, Jaime and Laura spend their idle time in each other's company before going their separate ways when the ship reaches its destination. But having returned to his seemingly idyllic, privileged life with his family and his beautiful fiancée, Sofia (Rosette), Jaime begins to grow more aimless and distant, wandering the streets in an attempt to recapture Laura's memory (and who in her desolation has, in turn, begun to search for a former lover who disappeared during the war). Fatefully meeting at a grand ball on the eve of revolution, Jaime and Laura soon find themselves at an intersection once again, torn between grief and rapture, past and present, home and exile. In its brooding, elliptical tale of loss, separation, and displacement, L'Arbre mort shares kinship with Marguerite Duras's India Song and Jonas Mekas's diary films, where the impossibility of returning home is sublimated in a haunted quest for an elusive object of desire. Similar to Mekas's cinema, Morder's use of silent, Super 8mm film in conjunction with a separate narrative and musical soundtrack creates a disjunction between image and sound (which Duras also incorporates in India Song) that reinforce the distance and impreciseness of human memory. This disjunction is further reflected in Morder's rapid cut framing that reveal Jaime's disorientation and uncertainty over his alienating homecoming (most notably, in his isolated shot during the family reunion and subsequently, standing at a gateway in search for Laura). Ironically, it is in this state of disorientation - a descent into the unknown that is implied in the image of their Orphic journey down a winding staircase - that Laura is figuratively liberated from the realm of the dead: shedding the ghosts of an irretrievable past to emerge in the light of an uncertain, new dawn.

Mémoires d'un juif tropical / Memories of a Tropical Jew:
In this avant-garde exercise in self-reflection, director Joseph Morder reminisces about his youth in Guayaquil, Ecuador, where his Jewish parents settled after they left Poland. The heat of August in Paris brings forth memories and at the same time the adult Morder is involved in a love affair. There are no scenes from Ecuador here, and none of the images in the film are used to carry the narration; instead they vaguely illustrate what Morder happens to be saying at the moment.

Romamor:

El Cantor / The Cantor:
William Stern leads a quiet life with his wife, Elizabeth, and their son Adam. But then a telegram annoncing the arrival of Clovis Fishermann, William's cousin, throws a spanner in the works. William hasn't heard from Clovis for thirty years and is overjoyed at the news, for in their younger days they had wild times together. Elizabeth is not in the mood to tolerate the cousins' fun and games. Clovis is the son and grandson of the famous Cantors. After so many years' absence, just what is he after?

This product was added to our catalog on Sunday 15 March, 2009.

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