Recently in Directors & direction Category

There, that wasn't so painful, was it? After all the hype coming out of Cannes (and especially since Harvey Weinstein got his mitts on it for U.S. distribution/Oscar promotion), I'd been kind of dreading "The Artist." Like "Hugo," it just sounded too "charming and delightful" -- and, to paraphrase Lou Grant, I hate "charming and delightful." (Usually because, for me, that ends up translating into "strained and unctuous.") But "The Artist" turns out to be a fairly benign, occasionally clever little musical/romantic comedy/melodrama. (I would not consider it, strictly speaking, a "silent," since it relies on synchronized Foley effects in some scenes -- to pointedly dramatize the Invasion of the Talkies -- and even a few words of recorded dialog.)*

I can understand why it appeals so much to Academy voters: It displays great affection for actors and a nostalgic love for the lost grandeur of the movies in general; it addresses anxieties about how new technologies are once again changing the movie business; it's the only Best Picture nominee shot entirely in Los Angeles (something TWC's Oscar campaign is playing up, big-time).

I would never want to read a screenplay before seeing the movie based on it. As a critic, in fact, it would be a violation of my responsibilities (and ethics) to do that. The film has to be seen on its own, as a completed work; a critic shouldn't rummage through the drafts before experiencing the finished piece -- whether it's a movie or a painting or a symphony. I'm even ambivalent about reading certain books before seeing the movie versions, too, and for the same reason that I don't like to see trailers, particularly of films I'm likely to write about: I don't want to harbor preconceived ideas (even unconscious impressions) when I watch the picture. As we all know, it's hard enough to get a clean look at a movie after all the advertising and interviews and seasonal previews and reviews...

But if you want to gain some understanding of how movies are actually made (movies in general and any movie in particular) it's often enlightening to go back and take look at how the screenplay (or various drafts, re-writes, polishes) evolved into the movie that eventually wound up on the screen. Some filmmakers like Clint Eastwood often claim to simply shoot a script "as written" (though he and Dustin Lance Black did some re-working, including adding a voiceover, on the "J. Edgar" screenplay). But it can be fascinating to see how the writer(s), director(s) and editor(s) shape the material throughout the entire process -- and how moving (or removing) images and lines from one context and placing them in another changes their meaning. This is now easier to do than ever before, because so many screenplays are available online -- legitimately (For Your Consideration at studio sites) and otherwise.

"The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" has been a 2005 book (the first part of the late Stieg Larsson's "Millennium Trilogy," translated into English in 2008), a 2009 Swedish-language feature film by Danish director Niels Arden Oplev, and a 2011 English-language Hollywood movie. In 2012 it will also become a DC graphic novel, but my feeling while watching the new movie was that the material had reached its apotheosis as A David Fincher Film.

I haven't read the novels (I've paged through some of "Dragon Tattoo" in English), but even fans I've talked to don't make any claims for Larsson as a great writer (albeit in translation), and the Swedish movie version struck me as little more than a straightforward work of adaptation: "OK, we're going to take this story and put it on the screen." It did that, but except for the presence of Noomi Rapace as the titular Lisbeth Salander I didn't find it very exciting to watch.

So, I wasn't particularly looking forward to seeing another version of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo." I was only curious because of Fincher, whose "Fight Club," "Zodiac" and "The Social Network" I think very highly of. I saw the Fincher movie The Way It Was Meant To Be Seen™ (in Sony 4K Digital Video projection!) and, I admit, I was literally rocking out in my rocking theater seat from the first riffs of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's biting cover of Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" -- an icy blast of frigid air over a deep black credits sequence in which our Girl Lisbeth endlessly shape-changes into various forms and substances -- all of them integral to who she is. ("Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! We come from the land of the ice and snow, from the midnight sun where the hot springs flow..." Too on-the-nose? Maybe. But the squall of sound practically rips open the screen.)

"Would you believe in a love at first sight?"
"Yes, I'm certain that it happens all the time."
"What do you see when you turn out the light?"
"I can't tell you but I know it's mine."
-- Billy Shears, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

Sometimes I can pinpoint the very moment I first fall in love with a movie. It may happen in the first shot (Bong Joon-ho's "Mother"; Michael Haneke's "Caché"), or may be clinched in at the very end (the terminal instant of Rahmin Bahrani's "Man Push Cart"), but in many cases there is an identifiable point at which I know that I am in love, even while the movie is unspooling, and by that time it's not likely there's any going back, unless the movie simply implodes.

Here are a few of those times from 2011 when I realized I was falling hard...

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

There's not so much snow as in director Tomas Alfredson's previous feature, "Let the Right One In," but it gets plenty chilly here, in Cold War London, Budapest and Istanbul. The emotional iciness sneaks up on you: by the end, as the strands of loyalty and betrayal unravel, leaving characters exposed to some very cold realities, I found it uncommonly moving. (Yes, I cried -- more than once.) Not unrelatedly, "Tinker Tailor" (no commas in this title) is one of the most hauntingly and imaginatively composed movies (both in terms of framings and shot sequences) that I've seen since... maybe the last Coen brothers picture. Early on, it catches you a little off-guard when, in the midst of a hushed, paranoid conversation in a musty apartment, there's a cut to a monochromatic, neo-Gothic Eastern European skyline (punctuating John Hurt's use of the word "Budapest" -- a word that will become code for loss, failure, disgrace).

Did somebody say "ambiguity"? I'm a big fan. Generally speaking, I much prefer movies with a little uncertainty, or a little emotional ambivalence, to those that spell everything out and tell me exactly how I should feel about it. Most of my favorite movies of 2011 thrive on ambiguity, open-endedness, a sense of the fluidity (or "slipperiness" as I like to call it) of time and space: "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives," "Certified Copy," "Margaret," "Meek's Cutoff"... But sometimes resonant inconclusiveness slips into deliberate laziness, substituting opacity for meaning. And when that happens, it's a shame.

Or, as Ignatiy Vishnevetsky writes, sometimes it's "Shame," the movie by Steve McQueen starring Michael Fassbender and Carrie Mulligan:

... McQueen... opts to shroud the movie in vagueness. This goes beyond the characters--Fassbender as the barely-sketched lead, Mulligan as the generic broken woman (tellingly, her sex life is played as comedy while Fassbender's is played as grand tragedy), Beharie as the foil whose attraction to Fassbender is never explained--and their relationships; Shame is a Choose Your Own Meaning movie, full of blank spaces that a sympathetic viewer can fill with their own interpretations (this culminates in a lengthy sex scene between Fassbender and two women, with Fassbender's facial expression serving as a sort of Rorschach blot).

It's smart filmmaking--and also totally duplicitous and self-serving, the arthouse craftsmanship nearly hiding the film's middle-brow triteness (see also: I Am Love), every scene ladled with big dollops of cinema's most respectable cop-out: ambiguity. When McQueen isn't marking time with exercises in post-slow-cinema aesthetics (as in the long tracking shot of Fassbender sternly jogging to his bitchin' Glenn Gould playlist), he elides and defers. Shame wears its emptiness like a badge of honor; McQueen is trying for banal blankness, and though he succeeds in that respect, you kind of wish that a filmmaker (and one with a background as an artist at that) would aspire to do more than just say nothing.

In his splendid Salon.com interview with David Cronenberg focusing on "A Dangerous Method," Andrew O'Hehir begins by noting that Cronenberg is "a beloved interview subject for film journalists" -- both because of the richness of his work and the stimulating quality of his conversation. I can testify to this, having interviewed Cronenberg several times over the years (starting with "Dead Ringers" in 1988, which in retrospect seems to have begun the second phase of his career). As O'Hehir says, Cronenberg is "a genuine intellectual in a realm crowded with poseurs and pretenders. He can talk easily about almost any topic you bring up; if he hadn't turned out to be one of the premier cinematic visionaries of his generation, it'd be easy to imagine him as a writer or philosopher or historian." Few filmmakers are as articulate about their own work.

What immediately struck me about the five paragraphs I'm about to quote -- in response to O'Hehir's first suggestion -- is the breadth and depth of Cronenberg's understanding of his own filmmaking process... and even the impetus and history behind auteurism. Cronenberg is a man who thinks when he speaks, exploring and refining his ideas as he communicates them. In the fast-serve business of media-coached mini-interviews and rigid, publicist-enforced talking points, that's a rarity.

O'Hehir raises an idea from Charles Drazin's book, French Cinema, "where he talks about the difference between old-school French movies, what they used to call the 'tradition de qualité,' mostly literary adaptations and historical dramas, and the auteurism of the New Wave, where you had to be a writer-director. It struck me that in your career you've almost gone backward, from the second kind of cinema to the first."

Cronenberg responds:

[This was originally published at MSN Movies in 2006, but MSN has taken down their archives.]

"You don't make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit, and you know it."
-- Charlie (voiceover by Martin Scorsese) in "Mean Streets" (1973)

If I do bad things, am I a bad person? Can I be a good person despite the bad things I've done? Can I compensate for the sins I commit in one part of my life by doing good works in another? Is forgiveness possible? Is redemption achievable? Or does it even matter if there's not really anyone, or anything, watching over us and keeping track?

Those are some of the Catholic concerns that have preoccupied filmmaker Martin Scorsese throughout his career. His latest film [circa 2006], "The Departed," is based on "Infernal Affairs," a 2002 Hong Kong thriller directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, about two moles: an undercover cop who has infiltrated a criminal gang, and a crook who is embedded in the police department. So, who's the good guy and who's the bad guy? Frank Costello, the gangster kingpin played by Jack Nicholson, says: "Cops or criminals: When you're facing a loaded gun, what's the difference?" And what about when you're pointing one? In the cosmic sense, we're all facing that loaded gun, and brandishing one, every day. And the difference -- if there is any -- is what Scorsese makes his movies about.

Watching certain Scorsese pictures today ("Mean Streets," "Taxi Driver," "Raging Bull," "The Last Temptation of Christ," "GoodFellas," "Casino" and others), you can appreciate the ways they both reflect and question the prevailing moral climate in early 21st-century America. It's a topsy-turvy universe in which the President of the United States himself insists that judgments about "goodness" and "badness" are not to be based upon actions, but are simply pre-existing existential conditions. Good or bad, right or wrong -- it just depends on which side you're on.

"People who are just getting 'seriously interested' in film always ask a critic, 'Why don't you talk about technique and "the visuals" more?' The answer is that American movie technique is generally more like technology and it usually isn't very interesting. [...] The important thing is to convey what is new and beautiful in the work, not how it was made - -which is more or less implicit."
-- Pauline Kael, "Trash, Art and the Movies" (1969)

"By neglecting to analyze technique, Miss Kael can do no more than assert that a given film is new, or beautiful, hoping that her language will provide the reader with something parallel to the qualities implicit in the work of art."
-- Charles T. Samuels, reviewing Kael's 1970 collection Going Steady (which includes "Trash, Art and the Movies") in the New York Times Book Review

"It is this implacable ignorance of the mechanics of filmmaking that prevails in all Kael's books. Yet she is never called on it. The reason, of course, is that her audience knows even less of these mechanics than she does, and professional film people do not wish to incur her displeasure by calling attention to it. She seems to believe that films are made by a consortium of independent contractors -- the writer writes, the cutter cuts, the actor acts, the cameraman photographs. In effect she is always blaming the cellist for the tuba solo."
-- John Gregory Dunne, reviewing Kael's Deeper Into Movies (1973) in the Los Angeles Times Book Review

"To me, a good review, good criticism -- whether it's in the Cahiers du Cinema or Film Comment -- would be trying not to say, 'I don't feel,' or 'I don't see it the way you saw it,' but, rather, 'Let's see it. Let's bring in the evidence.'"
-- Jean-Luc Godard, debating Kael in 1981 and challenging her approach to criticism

"Listen, you miserable bitch, you've got every right in the world to air your likes and dislikes, but you got no goddam right at all to fake, at my expense, a phony technical knowledge you simply do not have."
-- director George Roy Hill in a letter to Kael (quoted in Brian Kellow's biography, "Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark")¹

- - -

In her 1969 Harper's essay "Trash, Art and the Movies," Pauline Kael made her case for trash, saying semi-famously: "Movies are so rarely great art, that if we cannot appreciate great trash, we have very little reason to be interested in them." But what separates "art" from "trash" (whatever she means by those labels) and is it really an either/or question? What if the differences have something (or everything) to do with "technique" (by which Kael, depending on which sentence you cite, might mean anything from technology to professional craftsmanship to directorial style)? After all, her favorite filmmakers (Altman, Peckinpah, De Palma, Godard, Spielberg) are stylists whose artistic vision (trashy vision?) is inseparable from their distinctive techniques. Even at a glance, you're not likely to mistake these auteurs' films for anyone else's.

So, I'd like to look into how the term(s) "technical" and "technique" are used by Kael (mostly in "Trash, Art and the Movies") and in those cherce quotations above. Way back when, Sidney Lumet said he considered Kael one of the most "perceptive and articulate" reviewers to come along in years, but that, like most critics, she lacked "any technical knowledge of how a movie is made." That mattered to him -- maybe especially after she said in his presence (after many spirited libations) that her job was "to tell him which way to go."²

Dunne, the occasional screenwriter, observed: "Few critics understand the roles of chance, compromise, accident and contingency in the day-by-day of a picture."³ I'd add that a failure to recognize the collaborative back-and-forth of the creative process -- and the industrial process -- of making movies (including contractual measures and union guidelines) also contributes to embarrassing critical misunderstandings that regularly find their way into print.

I've always felt Orson Welles' second feature, the memory-movie masterpiece "The Magnificent Ambersons," got a bad rap because: 1) it isn't "Citizen Kane"; and 2) it isn't the perfect creation Welles intended it to be because, as we all know, RKO re-cut and re-shot parts of it, including the last two scenes (which are so not Welles they don't really affect you much; they're like background noise that wakes you out of a deep sleep). Well, OK, "Ambersons" isn't "Kane" -- it's not as much fun as "Kane" (few movies are), but it's every bit as accomplished and it goes deeper into its characters and its evocation of the past. And, yes, I'd give my (fill in portion of anatomy here) to see the lost footage restored (although you can read the cutting continuity of the unfinished 132-minute version Welles left behind when he went to Brazil in March, 1942, and see stills of the missing scenes -- so you can imagine the finished movie, even if you can't actually see it).

All of this is to say that AltScreen has published a long piece I just wrote about this, one of my favorite movies. It begins with a more-or-less shot-by-shot analysis of the nine-minute prologue, and how it sets up everything else in the movie. You can read it here: "The Magnificent Ambersons: The Past is Prologue." The film has only recently been made available on Region 1 DVD (and even then as an Amazon-only bonus with the new Blu-ray of "Kane," though it shows up on TCM occasionally). A few excerpts, to give you a taste:

"Melancholia" is now available On Demand; in theaters November 7.

Of the Four Bodily Humours -- sanguine (blood), choleric (yellow bile), melancholic (black bile) and phlegmatic (phlegm) -- Lars von Trier has probably been most closely associated with the choleric, as expressed in angry, violent, inflammatory, irritating and caustic films such as "Breaking the Waves," "The Idiots," "Dancer in the Dark," "Dogville," "Manderlay," "Antichrist"... The latter felt to me like a glossy fashion magazine's idea of a horror movie ("Evil Vogue" -- all it was missing were the scratch-n-sniff Odorama perfume ads), but von Trier¹ claimed it grew from deep inside a cocoon of depression.

"Melancholia" strikes me as a more focused and harrowing portrait of clinical depression, a glowing, black-bile-on-velvet portrait of despair so bleak that it destroys the entire planet. Two planets, in fact: one is Earth and the other (quite similar looking but much, much larger) called Melancholia, a kind of massive-planet-sized anti-matter particle which we see collide with and engulf the Earth (from deep in space) in the opening montage... and again, from a terrestrial perspective, at the end.

If Terence Malick's "Tree of Life" is, as I described it earlier in the year, "a movie about (and by) a guy who wants to create the universe around his own existence in an attempt to locate and/or stake out his place within it," then "Melancholia," by my reckoning, is a movie about (and by) a person whose depression is so inescapably great and soul-destroying that it envelops and annihilates the world. Because it has to. There's nowhere else for it to go. Also, it's important for the depressed character/filmmaker to firmly assert that the only life in the universe is on Earth, and that all of it is annihilated. Hope of any kind is not an option. Besides, anything less that than the obliteration of absolutely everything would spoil the perfection of the happy ending for von Trier and Justine (Kirsten Dunst), his Bride of Oblivion.

WARNING: Big-time spoilers in the above video.

From the introduction to my fully explicated video, "Chinatown: Frames and Lenses," at Press Play, Chapter 4 in a week-long series: LIFE'S WORK: THE FILMS OF ROMAN POLANSKI:

Roman Polanski's "Chinatown" is a Panavision color film noir--a ghost story, really--about flawed vision and the inescapable resurgence of the past, made in 1974 and set in 1937.  Private eye Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) thinks he knows what's going on, but as Noah Cross (John Huston) tells him, "Believe me, you don't."  We see what Jake sees, and it's invariably filtered or blocked--viewed from a distance through binoculars, or from outside through a door or window that obscures a more complete perspective. Photographs--snippets of time recorded on film, one of the tools of the detective trade--are potentially misleading because they don't--can't--capture what's going on outside of the frame, beyond the moment. 

This video montage is a hymn of praise to a film that had a profound effect on me when I first saw it as a 16-year-old in 1974, and that I've lived with, haunted, ever since. It's also an unabashed love poem to the desperate, damaged and determined Mrs. Mulwray (Faye Dunaway). 

Like "close-up," which I did in 2007, it's a free-associative critical essay/dream sequence, based on themes and images (and sound and music) from the movie. Although, like a lot of creative pursuits, the process of assembling it (from pieces of film that were already floating around in my head) was largely unconscious, I now (at least in retrospect) think I understand why each fragment is where it is.

So, I thought I'd turn around and look back at "Chinatown" through the lens (or frame or door or window, if you will) of my video essay, using it as a way of translating the film's images into critical prose. Because, in "Chinatown," every image is loaded with meanings, associations, resonances. If you're familiar with the film, you'll immediately see that this reflection on "Chinatown" isn't structured chronologically. Scenes, themes, moments and images keep circling back in fragments... not unlike they do in the film, but in a more condensed and less linear form...

I've been enjoying reading Dave Kehr's book, When Movies Mattered: Reviews from a Transformative Decade, a selection of pieces he wrote between 1974 and 1986. One of them, his choice for best film of 1976, is a review of Alfred Hitchcock's 53rd and final feature, "Family Plot," which I hadn't seen since the 1970s. Boy, did I enjoy the re-visit. The structure (screenplay by Ernest Lehman ["North by Northwest"], based on a 1972 novel, The Rainbird Pattern, by Victor Canning) concerns two couples: a "spiritualist" and her taxi-driver boyfriend (Barbara Harris and Bruce Dern), amateur sleuths trying to track down the lost heir of a rich client; and a pair of slick jewel thieves (Karen Black and William Devane, who sounds -- and sometimes looks -- so much like Jack Nicholson it's scary!). Their plots intersect at a point involving a case of... not mistaken identity, but concealed identity.

Kehr wrote: "There are things in 'Family Plot' that we haven't seen in an American film in a long time; things like care, precision, and detail. 'Family Plot' is probably the most beautifully crafted, thematically dense film that we're going to see this year."

Also, there are some fun Hitchcockian puns/jokes (DK has a lovely account of the spilled white "blood" that becomes a clue). Here are a few of them, just for the enjoyment of it:

We've been discussing (with regard to "In the Cut Part I: Shots in the Dark (Knight)" what kind of film grammar Christopher Nolan was using (it's traditional narrative continuity editing -- most of the time). One of my key questions was: Is it, "as the filmmakers have said, more concerned with realism -- photographing real objects, including actors and miniatures, in real space? We can see how it does what it does. The question is: What's the result? How do these stylistic choices enhance or diminish the impact of the movie?"

Just came across this 2005 interview with Nolan (by Sean Axmaker, for GreenCine), talking about his approach to reviving the Batman movie franchise. In a word? Realism, according to Nolan:

For me, the exciting opportunity was that you had a studio with this phenomenal character, wanting to re-introduce the character to the big screen and looking for a fresh way to do it. I felt I had never seen a superhero story tackled with a real degree of reality, of seriousness, in a way, and Batman, to me, as the most mortal, the most ordinary in terms of abilities, of superheroes -- he has no super powers -- he's the natural choice for trying to tell a superhero story in a realistic manner. I just felt that would be something I've never seen before and something that would be really fun and exciting to do. [...]

It presents enormous physical challenges for the crew, particularly because I insisted on doing things for real rather than employing visual effects, so there was a tremendous amount of stunt work and so forth. And I insisted on doing everything main unit, not using any second unit action crews. We wanted the whole film to have a consistency that applied to the action set pieces as well as to the character scenes.

When I saw, and immediately wrote about, Nicolas Winding Refn's "Drive," I knew almost nothing about it except the title and that Ryan Gosling was in it. I remembered that it had received acclaim at Cannes back in May (I did not recall that Refn had won the best director prize) and, as it turns out, I hadn't seen any of Refn's previous films -- although "Bronson" and "Valhalla Rising" had been recommended to me by friends. Since then, I've been reading up on "Drive" and have discovered so many fascinating little tidbits (many of which confirm my first impressions) that I decided to put together this little primer.

I recommend that you refrain from reading this until you've seen the movie, though.

Cited influences include: Grimm's Fairy Tales, John Hughes ("Sixteen Candles," "Pretty in Pink"), Sergio Leone, Alejandro Jodorowsky...

On the title font:

Refn: Me and Mat Newman, who edits all my movies, we stole that in the editing table from "Risky Business."

-- from an interview with Scott Tobias at The A.V. Club

Fandor is hosting a Guy Maddin Blogathon all week (September 19-23). As part of it, Fandor Editor-in-Chief Kevin B. Lee and Press Play's Matt Zoller Seitz have collaborated on a fascinating NSFW (silent film nudity!) video essay exploring Maddin's 2004 "Cowards Bend the Knee," which they say might be his masterwork: "It feels like a signpost work, a summary of his techniques and obsessions." A hockey player for the Winnipeg Maroons, Guy Maddin, whose aunt runs a combination beauty parlor and abortion clinic called the Black Silhouette, finds himself the victim of a sinister plot when his girlfriend becomes pregnant. You can watch the essay, "Cut Up in a Dream: Guy Maddin's Cowards Bend the Knee" above (listen closely to the pastiche of popular classics that serve as the musical score); or see the entire feature at Fandor.

In the Cut: Piecing together the action sequence
Part I: Shots in the Dark (Knight)
Part II: A Dash of Salt

The third part of my series of video essays about action sequences is called "I Left My Heart in My Throat in San Francisco," because it delves into two great car chases shot on the twisted streets and roller-coaster hills of the City by the Bay -- one famous (Peter Yates' 1968 "Bullitt") and one not-so-famous (Don Siegel's 1958 "The Lineup"). There's also a taste of the celebrated chase from William Friedkin's 1971 "The French Connection" -- and a very brief recap of the techniques examined in Part I ("The Dark Knight") and Part II ("Salt").

As I say in my intro over at Press Play:

In response to the first two parts, some have complained that "nobody looks at movies this way" -- which is demonstrably untrue, since the evidence is right here in front of you. What they are really saying is that they don't want to look at how action sequences are put together this way, and that's fine. Nobody is forcing them to. (In addition to pressing PLAY, you can press PAUSE or go to another page.) Far worse are the movie-nannies who are saying: "I don't want to look at filmmaking this way and neither should you," an attitude that's as insufferably arrogant as it is absurd.

To reverse the old "forest-for-the-trees" metaphor, if you always looked at the forest from a distance, you'd never discover all the different kinds of trees it's composed of. You don't examine the individual trees exclusively, or every single time you behold the forest, but you can learn from examining the elements up close. As I've said before, studying film is like studying literature or music or painting: it's helpful to look at words, sentences, paragraphs; notes, bars, passages, movements; brush strokes, colors, compositions... and how the pieces relate to one another.

Can a bad movie have some good filmmaking in it -- or vice-versa? If you have to ask that question, you haven't seen very many movies. In the Cut focuses on one thing and one thing only: the construction of action sequences. Those sequences were chosen not because these are the greatest (or worst) movies ever made, but because these specific sequences offer opportunities for illustration and discussion.

Fasten your seatbelts. It's gonna be a bumpy and exhilarating ride....

"In the Cut" is presented by Press Play, Scanners and RogerEbert.com. Part I (on "The Dark Knight") is here. Part II (on "Salt") is here.

Chaos Cinema Part 1 from Matthias Stork on Vimeo.

Matthias Stork, a German film scholar now based in Los Angeles, has created a most stimulating two-part video essay on a subject near and dear to my heart: "Chaos Cinema." At Press Play, it's given the sub-head "The decline and fall of action filmmaking," while an analysis at FILMdetail considers it from the angle of technology: "Chaos Cinema and the Rise of the Avid." Stork, who also narrates his essay, describes his premise this way:

Rapid editing, close framings, bipolar lens lengths and promiscuous camera movement now define commercial filmmaking.... Contemporary blockbusters, particularly action movies, trade visual intelligibility for sensory overload, and the result is a film style marked by excess, exaggeration and overindulgence: chaos cinema.

Chaos cinema apes the illiteracy of the modern movie trailer. It consists of a barrage of high-voltage scenes. Every single frame runs on adrenaline. Every shot feels like the hysterical climax of a scene which an earlier movie might have spent several minutes building toward. Chaos cinema is a never-ending crescendo of flair and spectacle. It's a shotgun aesthetic, firing a wide swath of sensationalistic technique that tears the old classical filmmaking style to bits. Directors who work in this mode aren't interested in spatial clarity. It doesn't matter where you are, and it barely matters if you know what's happening onscreen. The new action films are fast, florid, volatile audiovisual war zones. [...]

Most chaos cinema is indeed lazy, inexact and largely devoid of beauty or judgment. It's an aesthetic configuration that refuses to engage viewers mentally and emotionally, instead aspiring to overwhelm, to overpower, to hypnotize viewers and plunge them into a passive state. The film does not seduce you into suspending disbelief. It bludgeons you until you give up.

It seems to me that these movies are attempting a kind of shortcut to the viewer's autonomic nervous system, providing direct stimulus to generate excitement rather than simulate any comprehensible experience. In that sense, they're more like drugs that (ostensibly) trigger the release of adrenaline or dopamine while bypassing the middleman, that part of the brain that interprets real or imagined situations and then generates appropriate emotional/physiological responses to them. The reason they don't work for many of us is because, in reality, they give us nothing to respond to -- just a blur of incomprehensible images and sounds, without spatial context or allowing for emotional investment.

Watching Martin Scorsese's Rolling Stones concert movie "Shine a Light" (2008) for the first time the other night, it struck me that Scorsese has always been extremely good at shooting and cutting musical sequences not only as if they were action set-pieces, but as narratives. Whether it's the big-band saxes and brass blowing the camera across the ballroom like a balloon in "New York, New York," or Harry Nilsson's "Jump Into the Fire" feeding the coke-fueled paranoia of Henry Hill in "Goodfellas," or the opening beats of the Ronettes' "Be My Baby" (cut, cut-cut) launching us into Charlie's troubled psyche at the start of "Mean Streets," Scorsese uses the instruments of cinema the way a musician would.

Music videos are typically cut to the rhythm (which quickly becomes tedious) and are designed to tease the viewer/listener with frustratingly brief glimpses of tantalizing images. Space and time are deliberately fractured. This has the effect of keeping the viewer hooked, always looking for that next feel-good visual fillip. In contrast, watch (and listen to) what Scorsese does in "Shine a Light." He'll pick a moment -- the strum of a guitar or a glance from one of the players -- as punctuation, to get from one shot to the next. (Also, the sound is mixed like a movie: Whoever's on the screen is usually brought forward in the mix for the duration of the shot.)

The way I see it, Jerzy Skolimowski's "Four Nights with Anna" is small-scale masterpiece about voyeurism, movies, and the limits of perception -- including what we think we can know about people from observing their behavior. The thing is, this 2008 movie never received a theatrical release in the U.S. (though it played the Cannes, Toronto and New York film festivals), and remains, incredibly, really hard to see (I ordered a Polish all-region DVD because I wanted a copy so badly). But it's playing this weekend as part of the Museum of the Moving Image's Skolimowski series, so if you're in New York, here's your window of opportunity, as it were. I wrote about "Four Nights with Anna" when I first saw it at the Toronto Film Festival, and I delve a little deeper in this piece ("I, Witness") at Alt Screen:

"Four Nights with Anna" -- such a romantic title, conjuring wistful images of a brief but passionate affair that its impetuous young lovers will cherish for a lifetime. Well, yes and no. This is a movie that very much belongs to its director, Jerzy Skolimowski, so at some point things are bound to plummet off the deep end.

As it turns out, the subversive Polish filmmaker's 2008 return to directing (after a 15-year hiatus), is a heartbreaking romantic black-comedy in which the obsessed lover (Artur Steranko) is smitten as can be, but his beloved (Kinga Preis) isn't conscious of their trysts. (What do you expect from the guy who got his start co-writing Knife in the Water with Roman Polanski?) Though they share precious hours together at her place, she spends them in a drugged slumber, which puts her at a disadvantage, fling-wise. OK, it's an unconventional relationship -- intense, intimate, unbalanced, mortifying -- but it's also touching and oddly sweet. You just sense from the title that it probably doesn't have much of a future.

Turner Classic Movies is saluting the June 30 birthday of director Anthony Mann with day of his films -- including 1949's "The Black Book" (aka "Reign of Terror") an Austro-Hungarian Expressionist film noir take on the French Revolution, photographed by one of Mann's frequent early collaborators (and one of the noirest of black-and-white cinematographers), John Alton. At Straight Shooting (bookmark it), Richard T. Jameson surveys the career of a filmmaker who

acquired a passionate cult among connoisseurs of film style for having made some of the most lucidly and powerfully visualized films in American cinema. Few filmmakers have equaled his genius for fusing landscape and dramatic action, and his heroes--in the films noir of the late Forties and his majestic Westerns of the Fifties--are a compellingly conflicted lot. [...]

Was Anthony Mann a director of the first rank? Not when the touchstones are Lang, Ford, and Hawks.... But his best work goes a long way toward making film noir and the Western our two richest genres, and his relentless pursuit of dynamic images ensures him the esteem of anyone who believes that movies should be worth looking at, minute by minute, frame by frame.

Let's start with the big picture: As near as I can divine, Terrence Malick's movie "The Tree of Life" is about itself, and that statement probably sounds as confounding and imposing as viewers will find the experience (as a whole or in part) of watching it. What I mean (if I can take another flying leap at it) is that the movie expresses the drive behind its creation, somewhat like the way that "Days of Heaven" embodies the peeling and unfurling process of its own making... but, OK, not exactly. This is a movie about (and by) a guy who wants to create the universe around his own existence in an attempt to locate and/or stake out his place within it.

In other words, it's not a modest motion picture. The ambition on display here is Tarkovskian¹ or Kubrickian in scale: think "Solaris," "Stalker," "The Sacrifice," "2001: A Space Odyssey," "Barry Lyndon" -- journeys to the far reaches of space and time that are also explorations of worlds within: memories, desires, fantasies, the exercise of will and intelligence. What it comes down to, then, is that "The Tree of Life" is the story of one family (and one filmmaker) projected infinitely outward in all dimensions. (3D is so trifling, comparatively.)

The multiple narrators whispering in our ears are sometimes (but not always) identifiable as members of the O'Brien family, with the strongest voice being that of Jack (Hunter McCracken), eldest of three sons of Mr. and Mrs. O'Brien (Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain). Jack is also played as an adult by Sean Penn. The family's story isn't told chronologically, but covers umpteen billion years, give or take, from the origin of the universe to the dissolution of our solar system, with most of the action taking place in Waco, Texas, in 1956 or thereabouts, when Jack is around 11. (I got some of those factoids from the press notes, some from other published material about the film. Consider them guideposts. They may or may not be literally true, and Malick isn't particularly interested in nailing down these kinds of specifics within the film itself -- including the names of all the O'Briens, some of which can be found only in the end credits. But it helps to have a few solid points of reference on hand when discussing the movie.)

If you've recently re-watched, as I have, Steven Spielberg's "Jaws" (1975), "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" (1977), " "E.T. -- The Extra-Terrestrial" (1982), or any of his kid-friendly fantasy/adventure/science-fiction pictures -- or the later, harsher "A.I. Artificial Intelligence" (2001) and "War of the Worlds" (2005) -- you'll quickly recognize that J.J. Abrams' Spielberg-homage "Super 8" (co-produced by Spielberg himself) is a mere shadow of the work that inspired it. The aforementioned Spielberg movies still dazzle, shock and inspire awe -- not only in their justly famous set pieces, but in the richness and sophistication of their shot-by-shot inventiveness. They're spellbinding because they always show you more than you realize you've seen.

Spielberg is a prodigiously adroit filmmaker; Abrams is a guy who has a lot of genuine affection for Spielberg's movies. And, for me, that at least makes "Super 8" far more watchable than, say, Richard Donner's desultory 1985 Spielberg clone "The Goonies," though it's nothing as lively or inventive as Joe Dante's 1984 "Gremlins," either (and, yes, Spielberg is listed as a producer on all three of these pictues).

Spielberg's popular entertainments do tend to feature suburban kids, fractured families, monsters, and such -- but that's not what the movies are about. Beneath the surface (and what gorgeous surfaces they are), these are sophisticated cinematic works. (I long ago made the case that "E.T." and "Close Encounters" are daring abstract experimental films that just happened to be thrilling and moving narrative movies, too.)

"Troops of nomads swept over the country at harvest time like a visitation of locusts, reckless young fellows, handsome, profane, licentious, given to drink, powerful but inconstant workmen, quarrelsome and difficult to manage at all times. They came in the season when work was plenty and wages high. They dressed well, in their own peculiar fashion, and made much of their freedom to come and go.

"They told of the city, and sinister and poisonous jungles all cities seemed in their stories. They were scarred with battles. They came from the far-away and unknown, and passed on to the north, mysterious as the flight of locusts, leaving the people of Sun Prairie quite as ignorant of their real names and characters as upon the first day of their coming."

-- Hamlin Garland, "Boy Life on the Prairie" (1899), epigraph for Terrence Malick's screenplay for "Days of Heaven," revised June 2, 1976

At some point in 1976, "Days of Heaven" was a screenplay that contained conventionally discrete scenes, developed exchanges of dialog and a fairly straightforward (melo-)dramatic narrative structure. Principal photography took place that year in the plains of Alberta, Canada (standing in for the Texas panhandle shortly before World War I), and the movie that emerged in 1978, after two years of editing, did away almost all of it. What the movie became -- as everyone couldn't help but notice at the time of its original release -- is a film in which the "background" (nature, the landscape) moves into the foreground and the human characters recede into macrocosmic expanses of earth and sky, and microcosmic observations of flora and fauna. And bugs.

Terrence Malick's vision is reflected in his process, whereby an enormous amount of material -- scripted and unscripted, A-roll and B-roll -- is pared down, peeled back, opened up.¹ Camera operator John Bailey, in an interview on the Criterion Blu-Ray edition of "Days of Heaven," describes how the so-called "second unit" work. The close-ups of animals or plants, or the pastoral images of trees or streams are "very, very inserty-type shots, and yet they have the same kind of dramatic impact" as the spectacular wide shots -- or, for that matter, the scenes involving the lead actors. Some complained about that at the time -- that the film was gorgeous but insufficiently developed as human drama, that characters were cyphers, that the technique was "intolerably artsy" and "artificial."²

... and Germans and Jews and Albert Speer and Susanne Bier, etc., at the post-"Melancholia" press conference at the Cannes Film Circus. The quotations I've seen in print have been fragmentary and/or inaccurate, and understandably can't convey tone. This isn't the whole press conference, either, but, for the record, it should give you a better idea of how the thing actually unraveled, and how it played in the room. It's excruciating to watch somebody flounder and dig himself in like this (how much of it is meant to be a provocative joke? a perverse publicity stunt? an artistic confession?), but from this angle you can also see Kirsten Dunst squirm in mortification. She and the moderator try to interject and rescue him, but he won't give up.

To me, it appears he has some vague idea of where he's going (something about understanding the worst in human nature, perhaps?), but gets hopelessly lost on the way there -- until, in apocalyptic von Trier fashion (hey, he just made a movie about the end of the world), he throws up his hands and drops the bomb in a desperate attempt to dissipate the gathering tension by saying exactly what everybody is fearing (or hoping) he'll say... And what was the question again?

UPDATE (05/19/11): The festival has now declared von Trier "persona non grata," though what that means is not entirely clear. Ben Kenigsberg of Time Out Chicago reports from a post-press conference gang-bang interview with von Trier:

The challenge: Pick the five best and five worst Woody Allen movies from the 40-something features he's directed since "What's Up, Tiger Lily?" (the Japanese spy movie he re-dubbed and re-cut in 1966). Here are my choices, loosely ordered, for MSN Movies. (Having just re-re-re-re-watched "Another Woman" for an Opening Shot entry -- I can't pull myself away from it once it starts -- I might now rank it higher than "Crimes and Misdemeanors," I think....) I recently caught up with or re-visited all the movies on my lists and quite a few more (yes, I sat through "A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy" again, though I confess I only made it through the first half hour of "September -- more than enough to confirm my memories of how wooden it was.) From my introduction to the full story at MSN Movies:

"I've contributed my share of mediocre and very bad films, just like everybody else. I've been working on the quantity theory. I feel if I keep making films, every once in a while I'll get lucky and one will come out OK. And that's exactly what happens."
-- Woody Allen, in Robert Weide's film "Woody Allen -- A Documentary," to be released in the fall as part of PBS's "American Masters" series

In case you don't remember, there was a time when Woody Allen was kind of a big deal. From the late 1970s through the early 1990s -- roughly from "Annie Hall" to "Bullets Over Broadway" (the last time he received an Oscar nomination for Best Director) -- Allen was considered by many to be one of the most vital and interesting American auteurs. His reputation as a serious (though often comedic) filmmaker seemed all the more impressive coming from a former TV gag writer and stand-up comic.

If his achievements seem less significant from the viewpoint of the 21st century, there are likely several reasons.... [from his advanced age to the Soon-Yi scandal]

Woody Allen's "Another Woman" (1988) begins with a shot that is the whole movie in miniature. As followers of the Opening Shots Project know, that's one of my favorite approaches, and I think "Another Woman" is one of Allen's best movies.

A woman (Marion Post, played by Gena Rowlands) appears at the far end of a dark hallway and strides toward the camera, passing in and out of light. She is wearing a long coat, and she puts a scarf around her shoulders as she walks. She's a woman who knows where she's going. We don't get a good look at her until she moves into medium close-up, adjusts an earring and comes face to face with herself in the mirror. (Bergman reference intentional.) Her reflection is obscured from our point of view, but for a moment we see her look directly into her own eyes.

Marion, who has recently turned 50, thinks she knows herself and what kind of life she has led. But what she encounters when she steps out the door will overturn her establish notions of who she is and what she has done with her life: her memories of the past, her marriages, her lovers, her friendships, her relationships with her own family... Everything she though was solid and certain is swept out from under her feet and she goes into free-fall. With wit and insight, the movie details her unexpected investigation into what she's made of herself. And as the illusions crumble around her, she notices her mother's tear stains on the last line of a favorite poem, Rainer Maria Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo," which reads: "... for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life."

David Lynch's ad for his coffee. Starring David Lynch's hand and a Barbie head.

(via Steven Santos)

Facing the jungle, the hills and vales, my past lives as an animal and other beings rise up before me.
-- inscription at the head of "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives"

I am head-over-heels in love with "Uncle Boonmee."

Apichatpong "Joe" Weerasethakul's "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives" is the kind of movie that big screens (theatrical and HD) and Blu-ray were made for. I can't think of cinematic worlds more "immersive" (in current 3D parlance) than Apichatpong's last three features, "Tropical Malady" (2004), "Syndromes and a Century" (2006) and "Uncle Boonmee" (2010) -- all of which I have only recently encountered. (They're all on DVD, and "Uncle Boonmee" is now opening in U.S. theaters and is available on Region 2 Blu-ray.)¹

Talk about blissful: Apichatpong's pictures (say that five times real fast) are awake and alive to the joy of existence like few others I've seen. Sorry if that sounds too, you know, giddily "life-affirming," but I feel like Joe's movies sharpen and expand my senses while I'm watching them -- not unlike the peak experiences/memories I've had in the garden, or walking in the woods with my dogs, when I feel I'm living more intensely, soaking up more of the life within and around me. And in the case of these movies, there's the added thrill of Joe framing it all! What can I say? Apichatpong movies make me very happy. (They're really funny, too.)

Few other films or filmmakers have stirred this kind of awe-mixed-with-happiness in me. Seeing "2001: A Space Odyssey" at age 11 was the first time I can recall. (Joe's last three films have reminded me of various sections of that movie, in which you feel you're experiencing something both primally human and alien at the same time.) Wim Wenders' "Kings of the Road" also explores what I called, upon first seeing it in the late 1970s, "the strange familiarity of unfamiliar places" -- that feeling of entering a/the world that's both new and intimately recognizable, uncanny and ordinary. I get it from the Coens sometimes -- in "No Country for Old Men" and "A Serious Man," especially -- and Terence Malick ("Days of Heaven," "The New World") taps into it occasionally, too. It has something to do with the light, the air, the shapes, the sounds, the extraordinary mythology of the everyday seen with new eyes (yours, through Joe's).

For the last month, I've been watching almost nothing but Abbas Kiarostami and Apichatpong Weerasethakul movies -- and it's been the best run of good-to-great movie-watching I've had in years. How did this happen? Well, I was beguiled by their most recent pictures: Kiarostami's "Certified Copy" and Weerasethakul's "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives" -- both prize-winners at last year's Cannes Film Festival (best actress for Juliet Binoche, and the Palm d'Or, respectively). For reasons I'll get into in a bit, the only Kiarostamis I'd seen before were two of his biggies, "A Taste of Cherry" (1997) and "The Wind Will Carry Us" (1999); and the only Apichatpong (just call him "Joe") movie I'd seen was "Blissfully Yours" (2002).

The films of both these directors have been widely (mis-)characterized as "difficult" (please see Girish Shambu's excellent rumination on that term here, if you haven't already), but that's not why it's taken me so long to familiarize myself with more of their work. I don't have any good reasons, but I'll be honest: I was put off by the critical hype for Kiarostami, which in the art-cinema world was exceeded (in my perception) only by that for Quentin Tarantino in the pop-art-cinema world. Also, I remember the press screening for "The Wind Will Carry Us" at the Toronto Film Festival and, during the final shot (which was nice but a little too on-the-nose for me), a critic behind me let out a rapturous sigh intended to be overheard by everyone in the vicinity: "Masterpiece!" I admit (I'm only human) that made me a little nauseous, and some of my critic friends who were much more involved in the festival scene than I was at the time were outspoken Kiarostami naysayers, so I didn't feel particularly motivated to seek out more of his work.

Take a look at all that's going on in the image above. Who is talking? What are the relationships between the characters? How much is packed into this one frame?

Since it came out last fall, I'd almost forgotten what an exhilarating information-overload experience David Fincher's "The Social Network" is. Cut and composed and performed with breathless, jittery speed, it's a movie that consists of virtually nothing but conversations in rooms (the attempted, missed, short-circuited, coded connections that struck me when I first saw it). It's action-packed -- enough to give you whiplash, watching all the elements interacting within the 2.40:1 widescreen frame -- even though there are no "action sequences" (car chases, shootouts, fist fights, acrobatic stunts, etc.); the filmmaking is charged with energy without falling back on today's routinely frenetic, handheld run-and-gun/snatch-and-grab camerawork (the camera is generally mounted on a tripod; when it moves, it's on a crane or a dolly -- often for establishing shots or a shift in perspective that brings a new element into the frame). Smart, quick, efficient.

The crunchy guitar riff starts over the Columbia Pictures logo and then the crowd noise comes up, the music drops down, and before the logo fades to black and the first image appears, we hear Mark (Jesse Eisenberg) speaking the movie's opening line -- a question that's also a challenge: "Did you know there are more people with genius IQs living in China than there are people of any kind living in the United States?" What follows is a blisteringly fast-paced screwball comedy exchange ("His Girl Friday" through a 64-bit dual-core processor) between Mark and his girlfriend (not for very much longer ) Erica in which nearly every line is a misunderstanding (intentional or unintentional), a sarcastic jab, a leap of logic, a block, an interruption, a feint, an abrupt shift in the angle of attack, a diversion, a retreat, a refinement, a recapitulation (I'm sure there are many fencing terms that apply to the various conversational strategies employed here)...

Andrea Arnold's "Fish Tank" was shot in Essex and several boroughs outside of London (IMDb lists Barking, Havering and Tower Hamlets among them) and these landscapes -- variously industrial, suburban, undeveloped -- look as chilly and otherworldly as anything in Antonioni. Only shabbier. It took me all year to get around to seeing "Fish Tank," but as an admirer of Arnold's nightmarish 2006 "Red Road," I'm not terribly surprised to discover that it's one of the most vividly directed US releases of the year. And I say that even though it consists almost entirely of hand-held camerawork (which is not a style I generally appreciate). Through Arnold's lens, this slice of soggy Britain takes on the surreal look of a dream, or science fiction.

The film follows (literally, much of the time) 15-year-old Mia (Kate Jarvis), who lives in a run-down apartment complex with her thirtysomething party-girl mum and bratty younger sister. Mia is headstrong, abrasive, foul-mouthed (did I mention she's 15?) and always seems to be storming off, exiting one situation and headed somewhere with a purpose in mind -- though we rarely know what it is until she gets there. Sometimes she's not so sure herself, even after she appears to get where she's going. Her refuge is an empty flat in one of the apartment towers where she surreptitiously practices hip-hop dance routines.

I'm not going to say much more about the story, except that I think "Fish Tank" would make a fine double-bill with "Winter's Bone," as they're both movies about teenage girls looking for their daddies, as it were. In Mia's case, though, it's not her father -- it's her mum's new Irish boyfriend (Michael "Hunger" Fassbender), and her desires are no more familial than his are parental.

When Andy Samberg (as Mark Zuckerberg) asked Oscar nominee Jesse Eisenberg how he played Zuckerberg in "The Social Network" (shortly before the real Zuckerberg joined them onstage during the opening monologue on "Saturday Night Live"), he said: "I speak in short, clipped sentences and I keep my head very still."

David Bordwell has an ingenious look at The Social Network: The faces behind Facebook at Observations on film art that examines the film's direction and performances in terms of its emphasis on facial expressions and body language.

Anybody who's seen Eisenberg before (say, in "The Squid and the Whale" or "Adventureland") will recognize that his Zuckerberg is indeed a stylized performance. And anybody familiar the real Mark Zuckerberg will recognize that Eisenberg's work is not based on the actual Facebook founder, but on the character created in Aaron Sorkin's script. (In fact, Eisenberg and Zuckerberg had never met until Saturday. Watch how eager for approval Zuckerberg is, smiling and repeatedly turning to the audience in expectation of laughs during his backstage bit with Lorne Michaels. That is not something the movie character would ever do.)

This is the subject of endless inquiry for me (can there be only one quality that separates the good from the not-good?), but I can say that -- all other things being A-OK -- it all comes down to directorial concentration and economy: camera placement, movement, composition and (as I detailed in that Spielberg piece from 1982) how adeptly the movie gets from shot to shot to shot. You can have a terrific story, script, cast, "beautiful cinematography" and all that, but if the director doesn't know how to convey information and emotion through composition and cutting, then the movie is going to feel flat.

Rarely have I seen these ideas enumerated so effectively and wittily as in A D Jameson's "Seventeen Ways of Criticizing Inception," a piece from August that was recently brought to my attention by David Bordwell (who found much to admire in the same movie).

[Quotations from Jameson are indented and in boldface.]

Now, before you get defensive, just forget about "Inception" and Christopher Nolan for a moment. They are used here as examples (feel free to substitute the Bryan Singer film of your choice), but what's important above all are the principles Jameson is outlining. He appreciates some of the clever story and structural elements in Nolan's films, but regrets the endless, insistent speechifying and paint-by-numbers cinematic imagination in the storytelling itself (criticisms I had of "The Dark Knight," too):

The LA Times' 24 Frames blog quotes Matt Damon on Steven Soderbergh's plan to retire from directing after three more films:

"He wants to paint and he says he's still young enough to have another career," Damon said. "He's kind of exhausted with everything that interested him in terms of form. He's not interested in telling stories. Cinema interested him in terms of form and that's it. He says, 'If I see another over-the-shoulder shot, I'm going to blow my brains out.' "¹ [...]

"After I worked with Clint [Eastwood] I went back and said, 'Look, Clint is having a blast and he's going to be 80 years old.' And Steven says back, 'Yeah, but he's a storyteller and I'm not,'" Damon recounted. "If you're an actor or a writer or someone working in film, it's such a waste. For me, I'm going to spend the next 40 years trying to become a great director and I will never reach what he's reached. And he's walking away from it."

- - - -

¹ I know the feeling.

In the new issue of American Cinematographer, Darren Aronofsky (whose film "Black Swan" is heavy on close-ups) is quoted saying:

We used a lot of close-ups. For me, the close-up is one of the great inventions of the 20th century; it allows an audience to sit in a dark room and stare into the eyes of a person who's emoting without being self-conscious.

A primal fascination of the cinema, I'd say. A few weeks back I wrote:

When I stepped up to buy my ticket for "Hereafter," the woman in the booth (who has worked there for many years) said, "This movie's directed by Clint Eastwood." I know, I said. "He's not in it," she said. "I guess it hasn't been getting very much publicity."

I don't know if it has or hasn't, but it got me to thinking: I'm not sure I could identify a Clint Eastwood movie on sight. Is there an identifiable Eastwood directorial vision or style, apart from a certain willfully "classical" gloss applied to a professional reserve that sometimes borders on indifference? Is he like a William Wyler or a Robert Wise, a journeyman, capable of making some very good movies, whose sensibility is identifiable primarily through the combined talents of his collaborators? Who is Clint Eastwood, the director?

Eastwood hires top-of-the-line folks (after all, he can), has them do their things, and prides himself on shooting the script as written, on time and on (or under) budget. Some very good directors I know don't consider what he does to be direction so much as project management, because they don't see anything particularly distinctive in the results, film after film. Still, Eastwood can get movies made that perhaps nobody else could, based on the strength of his commercial reputation and long association with Warner Bros.

Some critics I greatly admire find his work impressive and moving. Many of those who've worked with him describe the atmosphere Eastwood fosters on the set as his greatest contribution to the picture: He creates the conditions he needs to get the movie he wants from he people he's hired -- which is, to a lesser or greater extent, what all good directors must do. (See Robert Altman for a striking example.) But, when watching a post-"Unforgiven" Eastwood picture, I frequently detect a peculiar detachment, a feeling that I'm watching something coasting along on auto-pilot without any particular human or artistic vision to guide it.¹ I respond to directors who have been accused of glacial misanthropy -- from Antonioni to Kubrick -- and that is integral to their worldview. With Eastwood, I simply sense an almost mechanical disengagement from his material. Parts of some of these movies seem to have been made by robots.

After the devastating news of Sally Menke's death last week, I read some moving and heartfelt tributes to her... and yet, some of them didn't seem to understand what an editor actually does, or what made Menke's work in particular so remarkable.

I suppose just about anybody could string together a rough assembly of a movie. All you have to do is follow the script and put things in the right order, as Sir Edwin, the great Shakespearean actor played by John Cleese, said of words in a play: "Old Peter Hall used to say to me, 'They're all there Eddie, now we've got to get them in the right order.'"

We have in the past examined my stunning and unforgettable cameo appearance in David Mamet's 1987 directorial debut feature "House of Games." What you may not know is that I also co-starred with Kris Kristofferson, Keith Carradine, Genevieve Bujold, Lori Singer, Joe Morton and Divine in Alan Rudolph's 1986 "Trouble in Mind," which was also shot in Seattle. Well, OK, I appeared in the background of a few shots. But I did share screen space with Singer ("Footloose," "Short Cuts") -- and Kristofferson, for at least a few 24 fps frames. As you can see above.

Here's the behind-the-scenes set-up: I was having the time of my life booking first-run "art films" at my friend Ann Browder's 250-seat Market Theater, formerly the Pike Place Cinema in the cobblestone Lower Post Alley in Seattle's historic Pike Place Farmer's Market. I can't remember how I had met Alan Rudolph, but I had interviewed him a few times and he had the world premiere his first film, "Welcome to L.A." (1977) in Seattle at the Harvard Exit Theater. (Robert Altman made one of his many trips to Seattle for that premiere, and hosted the world premiere of "3 Women" at the same theater.) "Choose Me" had also been a smash at the Seattle International Film Festival, of which I was a co-director/programmer. Anyway, this all comes together, trust me...

In his appreciative review of Ben Affleck's "The Town" this week, Roger Ebert perfectly describes the feeling of disengagement I often notice in modern action sequences: "... I persist in finding chases and gun battles curiously boring. I realize the characters have stopped making the decisions, and the stunt and effects artists have taken over."

That is precisely the way I feel about those sections of obligatory, unfocused movement in most movies. They're almost like little intermissions shot by the B-team to give you a snack and potty break ("Let's all go to th lobby..."). We know nothing consequence is going to happen. The movie has entered cruise control and for the next few minutes we'll be watching one near-miss/narrow escape after another.

But this wasn't (and isn't) always so. David Bordwell looks to Hong Kong, and compares James Bond and Jackie Chan (by way of Sly Stallone), to show us how it's done.

Above and behind. That is the dominant position for watching, for following, for shooting, for f***ing, in Anton Corbijn's "The American." Corbijn, the Dutch photographer and director best known for his music videos (U2, Nirvana, Depeche Mode) and his Joy Division biopic "Control," places his camera high in the sky, looking straight down at the landscape that resembles an intricate maze or a mosaic; or behind the central character Jack (George Clooney) as he walks through the crooked cobblestone streets of the medieval mountain village of Castel del Monte in the Abruzzo region of Italy; or in front of him, positioned so that we can glimpse behind him what he senses but can't see: that he's being observed...

"The American" (with a few last-act lapses) locks us into the justifiably paranoid state of mind of Jack (who's also known as Edward, Signore Farfalle and plain old Mr. Butterfly), a man on a mysterious and deadly mission. We don't know what the mission is, we just watch him wait, and watch him watch, and watch him go through the process of whatever it is he's doing. The obvious comparison is to Jean-Pierre Melville's "Le Samourai," in which Alain Delon plays an ascetic hit man. But I would consider "The American" a virtual remake of Jim Jarmusch's "The Limits of Control," starring a major international movie star instead of Isaach De Bankolé. Both mine the aesthetics of 1960s and 1970s European art films (notably Melville, Antonioni, Bertolucci) -- and it's no wonder that the mainstream American audiences who made it the top-grossing picture of the weekend (I saw it at a jam-packed Labor Day matinee) hated it.

The first time I remember seeing Lesli Linka Glatter's name was in a directing credit on "Twin Peaks." She directed four episodes of David Lynch's television masterpiece, 13 installments of "E.R.," eight of "The West Wing," five of "Gilmore Girls" and segments of other series, including "Freaks and Geeks," "House, M.D.," "Law and Order: SVU," "Numb3rs," "Weeds," "The Mentalist," "The Unit" and "True Blood." She's worked a lot. "The Crysanthemum and the Sword" is her sixth episode of "Mad Men" -- and the one that reminded me the most of "Twin Peaks," mostly in little visual touches.

(Although, come to think of it, she also directed the episode with the riding lawnmower accident, which could be seen as a Lynchian in-joke about "The Straight Story"...)

A few images, and then a few thoughts about other possible "Twin Peaks" connections:

"Mad Men" has always been about compartmentalization: personal and professional, past and present, city and suburbia, accounts and creative... At first I didn't much like the new, glass and monochrome office spaces, about which silver fox Roger Sterling (John Slattery) remarked: "I feel like with my hair you can't even see me in here." Leave it to director Slattery to make the most out of these spaces in one of the finest episodes of the series (and leading contender for my favorite movie of 2010), "The Rejected" (Season 4, Episode 4). I put together this little wordless video essay about doors, windows, mirrors, transoms, hallways, pillars, screens, reflections... and I'm working on a frame-grab photo essay that gets into more detail about the exquisite direction and composition.

I've deliberately left out huge, important chunks of the episode that don't take place in the office -- but had to include Pete's magnificent shrug (with mirror, bar, decorative screen, and the unseen room down the hall), to contrast his apartment with his office, and the small framed mirror with the wall-sized observation mirror at work. The episode is mostly about Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) and Pete (Vincent Kartheiser) going in different directions, discovering new ways to open or close doors between their work and personal lives, contrasted with Don Draper (Jon Hamm), who begins the episode chain-smoking and drinking during a four-way phone call, his office a tangled web of coiled cords. Notice all the cross-sight-lines communication going on (horizontal, vertical, diagonal) -- people watching other people, exchanging glances or sight-unseen, through various frames in their separate compartments -- culminating in Don's seduced-and-ignored secretary Allison (Alexa Alemanni) staring the wrong way through the two-way mirror and looking Don right in the eye, unsettling him by seeing him for who he really is.

Both Pete and Peggy find themselves banging their heads against work surfaces in frustration/resignation, but the episode gives them a moment of grace, through glass doors in the reception area, in a brief, wordless coda I've included almost in its entirety. Peggy is leaving for lunch with some of her new boho friends; Pete is standing around with some suits ("new" clients, including his father-in-law), waiting for Don so they can have a business lunch. (BTW, I couldn't squeeze it in, but the shot of Pete knocking his forehead against the post in his office is followed by a shot of Peggy getting into the elevator -- much like the last shot here -- in which she first meets the LIFE photo editor who introduces her to the Village crowd who come by to get her at the end.) Man, what a terrific movie this is!

After some movie-critic friends and I came out of Lisa Cholodenko's "The Kids are All Right," we just had to have a steak dinner -- because the one in the movie looked so delicious. It's that kind of "hang-out" movie, one that leaves you feeling that you've just spent some time with friends (who, OK, can be sometimes be a little annoying and unreasonable and even unlikeable) and wanting to extend the experience.

The film stars three of the best actors in the known universe -- Annette Bening, Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo -- along with two excellent young performers, Mia Wasikowska (with whom I was already smitten after her role as the testy teenage gymnast in "In Treatment") and Josh Hutcherson, as the titular "kids." But what we found ourselves talking the most about was how well-made a movie it was -- how smartly written, directed, shot and edited. There were times you would have thought we were talking about the techniques of a complex action-thriller or science-fiction extravaganza.

(Spoilers ahead!)

Looks like people still feel like discussing "Inception" and its relationship to other Christopher Nolan movies... Among the observations most frequently made in the hundreds of comments here (and they're still coming in) are those to the effect that the dreams in the movie aren't supposed to be particularly dreamlike because: 1) they're controlled, architecturally designed experiences; 2) not everyone has the same dreams; and, 3) they are supposed to be "realistic," so that the dreamer doesn't know he's dreaming.

Now, I've only seen "Inception" once, and I suppose all of these suppositions may be valid, given the world Nolan has created for the film, but rather than mollify my reservations about the movie, they only deepen my sense of dissatisfaction. Why would Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) guide their new architect Ariadne (Ellen Page) through such nifty surreal dreamscapes as the exploding neighborhood cafe, the origami Paris and the Escher staircase if she's not allowed to create any such environments herself? Why would Nolan intentionally stick the movie's most tantalizing images up front, instead of saving them for when the real action gets underway? Wouldn't it have made for a better story (and better showmanship) if the dreams got more spectacular as the movie went along? Wouldn't a chase through the streets of a folded city be more dazzling than, say, regular old gridlock (even if somebody does throw a runaway locomotive into the middle of it)?

This is what @dcairns gets at in a most illuminating Shadowplay post:

"You look at the first Fellini movie and you can see the seeds of all of Fellini there," said David Cronenberg in a 1999 interview with Sean Axmaker (connected to the release of "eXistenZ"). He was using the example to speak of any filmmaker with a discernible vision, including himself: "Everything is filtered through my own sensibility and my experiences of life and so on, and I'm going to continually be drawing from the same pool of imagery and themes I'm sure, with modifications and adjustments to the angles and of course I'm learning different things about myself, but the connections should be there."

You can certainly see the seeds of Christopher Nolan's later work in his 1998 debut feature "Following," which I just saw for the first time and quite enjoyed.* And I'm not just referring to the auspicious Batman sticker on the door of its protagonist's flat (how could he have known... unless the past and the future were somehow folded together... ?) or the hommage to Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining" (another movie in which past, present and future intermingle) next to the guy's typewriter.

Few movie mannerisms annoy me as much as the gratuitous zoom, which modish hack directors have been using since the 1960s to underline and over-punctuate their shots. For a number of years (particularly in the late '60s to mid-'70s), the ubiquitous zoom, having no correlative to any function of the human eye, was most often deployed as a cheap substitute for actual camera movement. And yet, in the hands of, say, certain French New Wave filmmakers, the zoom could feel refreshingly free and spontaneous, like guerilla documentary footage. Or it could signify varying degrees of counter-cultural psychedelic grooviness, from "Laugh-In" to "Easy Rider" to... "Austin Powers." (Meanwhile, directors such as Altman and Kubrick have been known to use the zoom's telephoto properties with purpose and intelligence -- though the former used it to open up the frame and the latter to lock it down.)

Any device can be used or misused, but not even such egregious clichés as the now-ubiquitous snatch-and-grab and shaky-cam techniques, or the endlessly circling twirly cam, irritate me as much as the wanton zoom. Which is why I found this passage from Glen Kenny's piece on the Duplass's movie "Cyrus" to be both amusing and gratifying. (It doesn't matter if you or I have seen "Cyrus," or how zooms are used in that film; it's the precision of Kenny's bullshit-detector argument that I appreciate.) He observes:

I do not know what Jean-Luc Godard's "Film Socialisme" does because I haven't had the opportunity to see it. But the initial reviews from Cannes are, incredibly, the same ones he's been getting his entire career -- based in part on assumptions that Godard means to communicate something but is either too damned perverse or inept to do so. Instead, the guy keeps making making these crazy, confounded, chopped-up, mixed-up, indecipherable movies! Possibly just to torture us. Many approach the films themselves as though they are puzzles designed to frustrate (and to eventually be "solved"), then they blame Godard for not doing a better job of solving them himself because they're too hard. Herewith, a sampling of New York Times reviews over the years. Just about any of them could be about any of Godard's movies -- and, positive or negative, some are noticeably more perceptive than others. A key with the "answers" (who wrote what about which film) is at the bottom.

1. Mr. Godard sometimes makes his storytelling more difficult than it needs to be.

2. And neither can Mr. Godard make us understand why the wife in his drama suddenly tells him she has contempt for him and decides to leave. Has she lost faith in him? Is she bored? Or is she just fed up with watching him wear his hat all the time?

Evidently, Mr. Godard has attempted to make this film communicate a sense of the alienation of individuals in this complex modern world. And he has clearly directed to get a tempo that suggests irritation and ennui.

"For me, the border between feature films and documentaries has always been blurred. 'Fitzcarraldo' is my best documentary and 'Little Dieter Needs to Fly' is my best fiction film. I don't make such a clear distinction between them -- they're all movies."

-- Werner Herzog, interview with Index Magazine, 2004
- - - - - - - - - -

"Aguirre, the Wrath of God" was the first Werner Herzog film I ever saw, back when it was released in the United States in 1977. It was one of the first films I ever reviewed, too (for my college newspaper, the University of Washington Daily). All I knew about Herzog at the time was what I'd read in an extraordinary profile by Jonathan Cott in the November 18, 1976, issue of Rolling Stone, which portrayed Herzog as a mad visionary in search of new images, not unlike the obsessed outsiders at the heart of his movies.

I couldn't stop staring at the haunting photograph that surrounded the article, from (as I recall) such films as "Signs of Life," "Even Dwarfs Started Small," "Aguirre," "Kaspar Hauser" and "Heart of Glass." They certainly didn't look quite like any movies I'd seen before. And essential to the spectacle was the knowledge that Herzog had gone to remote and exotic places in order to capture these images and bring them back into the cinema. They were unquestionably photographical realities (imagine Herzog speaking that phrase), not optical tricks created in post-production. The boat in the tree in "Aguirre" -- the one the feverish characters could no longer recognize as real -- was an actual boat in an actual tree, not a miniature or a matte painting. Even the photographic effects -- the time-lapse clouds flowing through the mountains like a river around boulders in "Kaspar Hauser" "Heart of Glass"; or the high-speed "ski-flying" (high-altitude, long-distance ski-jumping) footage that allowed Walter Steiner to float through the air in "The Great Ecstasy of the Sculptor Steiner" -- were actual recordings of real-world phenomena.

"People should look straight at a film... That's the only way to see one. Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates. And film culture is not analysis, it is agitation of the mind. Movies come from the country fair and circus, not from art and academicism."

-- Werner Herzog, 1978 interview quoted in
John Sandford's book, "The New German Cinema" (1980)

We knew it was going to be interesting. Seeing "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" (1972) for the first time in 25 years (even though I'd seen it many times before) with Werner Herzog, Ramin Bahrani, Roger Ebert and a Conference on World Affairs Cinema Interruptus audience in Boulder, CO, last week reconfirmed that not only is Herzog a magnificent, instinctive director, but a first-class showman in the carnival tradition, a compelling speaker and storyteller, and a wonderful actor. Some of the wild tales he related to the audience in Macky Hall are, I'm told, also on the director's commentary track of the American DVD of "Aguirre" -- and some I've heard him tell many times over the years, but there's nothing quite like hearing Herzog spin his spiels in the flesh -- even (or maybe especially) when he's a booming voice in the dark.

We tend to remember long takes that call attention to themselves as such: the opening shots of "Touch of Evil" or "The Player"; the entrance to the Copacabana in "GoodFellas"; all those shots in Romanian movies, and pictures directed by Bela Tarr and Jia Zhangke... And then there are the ones you barely notice because your eyes have been guided so effortlessly around the frame, or you've been given the freedom to explore it on your own, or you've simply gotten so involved in the rhythms of the scene, the interplay between the characters, that you didn't notice how long the shot had been going on.

For this compilation, "Deep Focus," I've chosen eight shots I treasure (the last two I regard as among the finest in all of cinema). They're not all strictly "deep focus" shots, but they do emphasize three-dimensionality in their compositions. I've presented them with only minimal identifications so you can simply watch them and see what happens without distraction or interruption. Instead, I've decided to write about them below. Feel free to watch the clips and then re-watch (freeze-frame, rewind, replay) the clips to see what you can see. To say they repay re-viewing is an understatement.

F.X. Feeney, writing in the L.A. Weekly, thinks so: "... relentless in its suspense; funny when you least expect it; above all, deeply conscious of political power and its corruptions." The film was in the final stages of post-production when Polanski was arrested in Switzerland (he finished it while under house arrest) and Feeney sees in it themes that lead, as all Polanski themes must, through the filmmaker's life and, inevitably, back to "Chinatown":

Noah Cross (owing to Robert Towne's superb screenplay) could proclaim a demonic philosophy when cornered, saying: "Most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and right place, they're capable of anything." [Tom] Wilkinson's smooth operator conceals what he's thinking at all times, usually behind an inscrutable grin and lighthearted (if poison-tipped) reproaches: "A less equable man might find your questions impertinent."

And when?

UPDATE (3/11/10): Answer below...

I'm not particularly fond of the snatch-and-grab, shaky-cam style Kathryn Bigelow employs in "The Hurt Locker" -- or those fusillades of twitchy, punch-in and recoil zooms, either -- but I got past it pretty quickly. Unlike many other films in this style, "Hurt Locker" is guided by a steady hand and a solid intelligence. As Kathleen Murphy writes at MSN Movies:

... few recent films have been as consciously and masterfully directed, in real time and space, as "The Hurt Locker." Script, sound, cinematography -- every aspect of this movie serves clarity and coherence, forcing us to feel, in all of our senses, the awful vulnerability of flesh and blood, and the randomness of its destruction. Calling to mind tough art like Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises" and Picasso's "Guernica," "Locker" is not a pretty picture.

Bigelow delivers three-dimensionality the hard way: She moves and cuts her camera through a complex arena of wartime action as precisely as a sculptor's tool, exposing multiple forms of visceral fear and sudden death. Every inch of her dusty, sun-scorched Iraqi streets is wired to deliver nonstop tension; the human software threatened by instant dissolution in these badlands can't anticipate, post-blast, blithely slipping into a brand-new suit of flesh.

No modern director is more in love with the artifice of filmmaking than Martin Scorsese, or more overt in his expression of it. From the "drunk-cam" in "Mean Streets" (1973) to the self-consciously stylized performances in films like "Raging Bull" and "King of Comedy," the William Cameron Menzies opening of "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore" to the ersatz two-strip Technicolor of "The Aviator" to the 1954 Hitchcock psychodrama look of the current "Shutter Island," Scorsese packs his frames with dense layers of Hollywood history.

Sometimes, as in "New York, New York" (my favorite of his films, along with "King of Comedy," "After Hours" and "GoodFellas"), he contrasts '40s, '50s and '60s studio gloss with the no-less-mannered "naturalistic" improvisational acting favored by Kazan and Cassavetes from the same era. Likewise, in films like "Shutter Island" he immerses himself and his audience in a world that never existed outside of the movies. "Raging Bull," for example, isn't just a boxing picture and a showbiz biopic, it's a study of boxing pictures and showbiz biopics. "GoodFellas" isn't just a gangster film, it's a movie about gangster films. Has any other director offered a nearly four-hour "Personal Journey... Through American Film" (a 1995 guided tour beginning with clips from "The Bad and the Beautiful" and "Duel in the Sun"), followed by another four-hour personal essay on Italian cinema (1999's "My Voyage to Italy")?

To salute the surprise success of "Shutter Island" (top of the box-office for two weeks running), I took some excerpts from an introductory interview Scorsese did for the now out-of-print 2005 MGM DVD release of "New York, New York" and interpolated frame grabs from that movie and others. The result might serve as a primer on how to watch any Martin Scorsese picture.

The prow of the ferry in the first couple shots of Roman Polanski's "The Ghost Writer" isn't like any I've seen before. It raises up, like the visor on the headpiece of a suit of armor (or the crusher arm on a garbage truck), to let the cars on and off. It's just a little bit... odd, the sort of detail you'd expect Polanski would include -- not necessarily unsettling on its own but somehow menacing when seen through the lens of Roman Polanski. Moments later, the vehicles begin to disembark, with the exception of a car in near the front of the center lane that blocks traffic, creates a nuisance, and imparts dread. There's nobody in it. So, where did the driver go?

A few scenes later, a private plane lands at a small airport and we're given a shot of the fuselage framed around the (closed) door on the left and the first two windows on the right. Cut to a reverse angle of people waiting on the tarmac, and then back to the same basic configuration. The door pops open and it's one of those kind with the hinge on the bottom that folds down into a little set of stairs. The motion of the mechanism visually echoes the prow of the ferry. But there's something else in this shot that will come back to haunt us: the company name Hatherton, meant to recall Halliburton. It's just there, and it pops up in other shots throughout the movie, but it doesn't quite click into place until a Google search that hyperlinks pieces of various characters' pasts late in the film.

Look up at this commercial. Look down at the interview about how they made it. Anything is possible when your man smells like Old Spice and not a lady. And if you're really going to put that message across, you have to respect the integrity of the frame-space. This hilarious bit is accomplished in one shot (requiring three days and quite a few takes), with only one obvious use of CGI (the appearance of the product itself) and one invisible use (erasing a piece of equipment from the shot at the end).

Buster Keaton would approve -- though he probably would have found a way to do everything in-camera.

How They Did It:

I just want to say: Wow! Here are frame grabs from three shots in Kenji Mizoguchi's 1936 "Osaka Elegy" ("Naniwa erejî") that strikingly illustrate what in-depth staging and deep focus are all about. In the first one, we see Ayako (Isuzu Yamada), a switchboard receptionist at Asai Pharmaceutical, in her glass operator booth. The image has an Art Deco sheen to it (highlights on shiny objects twinkle with little starbursts) and the frame is soft around the edges, but in the center the focus is deep. I don't know if the blurred edges are a separate artistic choice or simply an optical property of this particular lens.

Anyway, this is our introduction to Ayako, who appears in a close-up profile on the left side of the frame. She notices a woman enter the office to speak with Susumu Nishimura (Kensaku Hara), a young man with whom, we will learn, she has an undeveloped romantic friendship. Ayako places a call and we realize who she's calling when Susumu -- that's him in center frame -- answers it. (He may look a little out of focus in this particular frame, but that's only because he's moving his head.) She turns her face away from us to make eye contact with him across the room, and as she does so we see her face reflected in the glass of her booth. Fantastic! It's a spectacular composition, but it develops without seeming contrived, leading your eye from place to place in the shot quite naturally as you discover what's going on.

Quentin Tarantino told a BAFTA audience in London last month that he'd like to remembered for a body of work, like Howard Hawks.

This sparked a discussion between Anne Thompson and Jack Mathews of moviefone.com over at the indieWire-hosted Thompson on Hollywood (cross-posted at Slate Film Salon) -- a "dueling blog" about whether Tarantino (who told the New York Times that he worked quickly to get "Inglourious Basterds" ready for Cannes because he "wanted to have a masterpiece before the decade's out") can be said to have produced "a legacy of greatness":

JM -- ... No question, he has proven his greatness to his hardcore fans, among whose numbers many critics and film scholars can be counted. But in the 16 years since "Pulp Fiction," he has not come close to matching that film's brilliance. His movies, while enjoyable to watch, are self-indulgent games for him. If "Inglourious Basterds" is a great war movie, "Blazing Saddles" is a great Western. They're both fun but that's all they are.



AT --Wow. Do movies have to educate us?

In 1959 Jean-Luc Godard famously proclaimed that tracking shots are a matter of morality -- an inversion of fellow Cahier du cinéma critic Luc Moullet's formulation that "morality is a matter of tracking shots" ("morale set affaire de travellings," sometimes translated as "morality is in the tracking shots"). The evangelical theorists behind what became known as the French New Wave had a tendency to ascribe moral values to cinematic style and technique.¹ André Bazin and the late Eric Rohmer, especially, championed the moral as well as aesthetic superiority of mise en scène over montage, of Hawksian "invisible cutting" over dictatorial Eisensteinian editing, and of deep-focus over a more selective, shallow depth-of-field. Bazin praised directors such as Orson Welles and William Wyler (in collaboration with cinematographer Gregg Toland) for staging shots so that "the viewer is at least given the opportunity to edit the scene himself, to select the aspects of it to which he will attend."

As David Bordwell summarized:

Their "deep-focus" style, he claimed, produced a more profound realism than had been seen before because they respected the integrity of physical space and time. According to Bazin, traditional cutting breaks the world into bits, a series of close-ups and long shots. But Welles and Wyler give us the world as a seamless whole. The scene unfolds in all its actual duration and depth. Moreover, their style captured the way we see the world; given deep compositions, we must choose what to look at, foreground or background, just as we must choose in reality. [...]

[Bazin wrote that deep-focus] "forces the spectator to participate in the meaning of the film by distinguishing the implicit relations" and creates "a psychological realism which brings the spectator back to the real conditions of perception."

Click above to REALLY enlarge...

UPDATED 01/28/10: 2:25 p.m. PST -- COMPLETED!: Thanks for all the detective work -- and special thanks to Christopher Stangl and Srikanth Srinivasan himself for their comprehensive efforts at filling the last few holes! Now I have to go read about who some of these experimental filmmakers are. I did find some Craig Baldwin movies on Netflix, actually...

Srikanth Srinivasan of Bangalore writes one of the most impressive movie blogs on the web: The Seventh Art. I don't remember how I happened upon it last week, but wow am I glad I did. Dig into his exploration of connections between Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds" and Jean-Luc Godard's "History of Cinema." Or check out his piece on James Benning's 1986 "Landscape Suicide." There's a lot to look through, divided into sections for Hollywood and World Cinema.

In the section called "The Cinemaniac... I found the above collage (mosaic?) of mostly-famous faces belonging to film directors, which Srikanth says he assembled from thumbnails at Senses of Cinema. Many of them looked quite familiar to me, and if I'm not mistaken they were among the biographical portraits we used in the multimedia CD-ROM movie encyclopedia Microsoft Cinemania, which I edited from 1994 to 1998, first on disc, then also on the web. (Anybody with a copy of Cinemania able to confirm that? My Mac copy of Cinemania97 won't run on Snow Leopard.)

"It's important to always try to tell a story in a way where there are several credible possible explanations. Explanations that can be totally contradictory!"
-- Michael Haneke

(This is a follow-up to a previous post: What is hidden in Caché?)

Andrew O'Hehir at Salon.com asks Michael Haneke about the surface mysteries -- the MacGuffins, as I like to think of them -- in "Caché" and "The White Ribbon":

AO: You spoke earlier about using the black-and-white photography and the narration as a distancing mechanism, a way to remind the viewer that the film is an artifact. There's another sense in which you are challenging the audience. As you did in "Caché," you lead us part of the way toward a solution of the central mystery: Who is committing these violent acts, and why? And then you seem to suggest that solving the mystery is not actually important.

MH: Those are the least important questions. In my previous film, "Caché," the question of who sent the videotapes isn't important at all. What's important is the sense of guilt felt by the character played by Daniel Auteuil in the film. But these superficial questions are the glue that holds the spectator in place, and they allow me to raise underlying questions that they have to grapple with. It's relatively unimportant who sent the tapes, but by engaging with that the viewer must engage questions that are far less banal.

In his recent Great Movies review of Michael Haneke's "Caché," Roger Ebert writes of a shot he believes may hold the key to the film's mystery:

How is it possible to watch a thriller intently two times and completely miss a smoking gun that's in full view? Yet I did. Only on my third trip through Michael Haneke's "Cache" did I consciously observe a shot which forced me to redefine the film. I was not alone. I haven't read all of the reviews of the film, but after seeing that shot I looked up a lot of them, and the shot is never referred to. For that matter, no one seems to point to a conclusion that it might suggest....

No, he's not talking about the final shot: "You will find it on the DVD, centering around 20:39," he says. "You tell me what it means. It's the smoking gun, but did it shoot anybody?"

I just wanted an excuse to publish a frame-grab from one of my favorite Rohmer movies, "Perceval." There's never been anything like it. I once double-billed it with its stylistic opposite, Robert Bresson's earthy "Lancelot du lac" (1974), but I'd also like to show it with a similarly soundstage-stylized biography of innocence, Alain Cavalier's "Thérèse" (1986), about St. Theresa of Lisieux.

"Rohmer's adaptation of Chrétien de Troyes 12th century Arthurian poem is a unique film, combining cinema, theatre, medieval music, iconography, mime and verse to create a stylised and surprisingly coherent spectacle: shot totally in the studio, its sets alone are worth the price of a ticket. But more astonishing, perhaps, is the way in which Rohmer translates the text into a moral investigation which frequently resembles his contemporary comedies as selfish young innocent Perceval, whose very naiveté literally disarms his enemies, undergoes a sentimental education in the codes of Chivalry, Courtship, and Faith. His odyssey is observed with ironic wit and revealing distance; not surprisingly for Rohmer, a key stage in his development occurs when he learns the dangers of talking too much or too little..." -- Geoff Andrew, Time Out

The ever-reliable David Hudson tracks the Rohmer tributes at The Auteurs Daily.

I recall seeing Rohmer's last film at the Toronto Film Festival in 2007:

Eric Rohmer has made a career out of chronicling the rituals of romance (and Romanticism), from the 6th century to the present, and from his celebrated film series, Six Moral Tales (1963 - 1972), Comedies and Proverbs (1981 - 1986), and Tales of the Four Seasons (1990 - 1998). And then there are those elegantly contrived period pictures that don't fit into the series, like "Perceval," "The Marquise of O," "The Lady and the Duke" (which I haven't seen) and now "Les Amours d'Astrée et de Céladon" (known in English-speaking Canada as "The Romance of Astrea and Celadon").

Two of my favorite Rohmer films (perhaps my two very favorites) seem to be among his least-mentioned: "Perceval" and "Summer" (aka "Le Rayon vert") -- the former completely artificial (shot on a painted soundstage) and the latter an equally charming portrait of a romantic klutz.

"Les Amours d'Astrée et de Céladon" is a Rohmerian delight, another ritualized romance (highly mannered behavior, poetic language) played out in a naturalistic pastoral setting (an unblemished slice of French countryside around the River Lignon)....

(Continued here.)

"Up in the Air" director Jason Reitman (known for his pie charts documented the whirlwind experience of his latest press tour in a movie (above) posted on Vimeo and /Film.

UPDATE: Reitman was nominated for a DGA award this morning, along with fellow directors Kathryn Bigelow, James Cameron, Lee Daniels and Quentin Tarantino.

I've been reading Mitchell Zuckoff's "Robert Altman: The Oral Biography" before going to sleep each night, and it's reminding me of how much he influenced my life -- from the life-changing epiphany of "Nashville" in 1975 to the first time I met him in 1977 to the countless hours I've spent living with (and in) his films, writing about them, talking about them with people who knew him and knew his movies...

Reading this, from Julian Fellowes (Oscar-winning screenwriter for "Gosford Park"), made me feel the loss acutely once again -- and kept me awake, wandering down memory-trails, for hours:

The standard thing in Hollywood is to direct the camera with a movement on the scene. The dog goes down the walk and the camera follows the dog, and it leads to the body. With Bob, the dog goes one way and the camera goes the other. He creates this illusion in the mind of the spectator that they are directing the camera. It becomes an autonomous being that is moving around the room. Because you are the viewer, you take responsibility for the image. You are given the impression that you are exploring this film.

"You take responsibility for the image." Was there ever a director who offered his audience so much freedom, trust, responsibility (and everything that word implies)?

Of course, Altman's camera did sometimes "follow the dog," but more often than not both the dog and the frame would continue moving, allowing new elements to enter and exit so that you were fully aware of the world that extended beyond the edges of the frame. The frame wasn't just a proscenium, but a permeable membrane through which life continually ebbed and flowed...

Why don't more directors do this -- congratulate their fellow filmmakers on their favorite achievements? We know that movie-mad Quentin Tarantino loves movie lists as much as anybody. Last week he gave the Hollwywood Reporter's Heat Vision blog his list of the best films of 2009 (not including "Inglourious Basterds") -- and he seems pretty serious about it. He admits he hasn't seen some of the possible contenders ("Avatar," "The Lovely Bones," "Invictus") and feels there are a few more he'd like to see again before he firms up the list ("Bright Star," "District 9"). I know how he feels: I just caught up with "Bright Star," "Still Walking" and "Anvil! The Story of Anvil" this weekend, got second viewings of a couple others ("Liverpool," "35 Shots of Rum")... and I'm still playing catch-up.

Watch the video above for QT's presentation of his Top 8 (so far), or see the list below...

Let us give thanks for Matt Zoller Seitz, who cooked up this luscious banquet -- entitled "Feast" -- for our delectation in this season of gustatory revelry. It is available on the Moving Image Source site in two flavors -- straight up and annotated. Matt writes:

Writer-director Paul Schrader has said that sex and violence are the vicarious pleasures that drive the vast majority of commercial films, and he's right. But food is arguably just as alluring, and in its way, its appearance on screens -- and when it does appear, it's often as lovingly lit and framed as a reclining nude -- might be even more revelatory and pleasurable, because its appeal isn't solely based on unattainable fantasy. It's not bloody likely that any of us will ever be able to bed a movie star or save the universe from evil. But if we study and practice the culinary arts (or are lucky enough to know somebody who's already an expert) we can experience delights that are as astounding as any mouth-watering scenario that food-obsessed filmmakers can devise. Every plate of food that appears onscreen is a dream that could come true.

This film, "The Knife" by Mario Balducci,¹ was made for Nic Clear's Unit 15 course, "Crash: Architectures of the Near Future" at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. It consists of four sections, involving re-imagined images from Hitchcock's "North by Northwest": The Knife, The Cliff, The Cafeteria and The Forest.

So, it evidently has something to do with J.G. Ballard and his architecture criticism, but I don't quite know how to look at it that way. What I see is something strangely compelling, presenting recurring nightmarish highlights from "North by Northwest." With additional fish. And dotted lines and arrows that map out or suggest movement within the frame. OK, I can't explain it, but I kinda like it.

* * * *

¹ NOT based on the novel "Push" by Sapphire.

Richard Schickel wrote a book review of Robert Altman: The Oral Biography by Mitchell Zuckoff. Except that, rather than review the book, he chose to review Robert Altman's capacity for drinking and dope-smoking:

It appears that from the beginning of his career until almost its end (when illness slowed him), Robert Altman never passed an entirely sober day in his life. When he was not drinking heavily, he was smoking dope -- often doing both simultaneously. When he screened dailies on location, he insisted the cast and crew gather to view them in a party atmosphere, with the merriment rolling on into the night.

Shocking, isn't it?

I'm in the process of tracking down, rescuing and reposting all my video essays that disappeared along with iKlipz when the latter died unexpectedly earlier this year. This one, about M. Night Shyamalan's "Unbreakable," came to mind when posting Richard T. Jameson's comments on framing and John Carpenter's "Halloween."

"You may think you know what you're dealing with, but believe me, you don't."
-- Noah Cross, "Chinatown"

Roman Polanski gets under people's skin. Not just his movies, but there's something about him that dredges up deep, dark, disturbing feelings. I hope you've seen Marina Zenovich's 2008 documentary "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired" (trailer below), the biographical film that recounts the sex charges brought against Polanski in 1977, the resulting media melee, his guilty plea to a lesser charge of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor, and his escape to France before sentencing. Watching the film, you may find yourself feeling a little like Rosemary Woodhouse, disoriented by the bleeding together of dreams, paranoia, irrationality, ambition, drugs, sex... and movies. ("This is really happening!") The tagline for the doc was "The truth couldn't fit in the headlines" -- and that's the case now, too.

"As a sequence is being cut, the cutter should know where a particular setup most effectively presents the information needed for that particular part of the scene. In other words, he will stay with the shot as long as that shot is the one which best delivers the required information and cut to another shot only when the new cut will better serve the purposes of the scene, whether because the size is more effective, the composition is more suitable, or the interpretation is superior.... In short, as long as the scene is playing at its best in the selected angle, leave it alone!"
-- veteran Hollywood director Edward Dmytryk ("Murder, My Sweet," "Crossfire," "The Caine Mutiny"), On Film Editing (1984)

Steven Boone at Big Media Vandalism says he gave up on film criticism (for the fourth or fifth time) this year:

I quit film criticism because somebody has banished the shot from mainstream commercial cinema.

The shot, man.

That unit of film composition which lends film its cumulative power and structural integrity.

In place of the shot, like a leaky sandbag in place of a brick, somebody put... Well, what to call it, this fragment of film that has more in common with a spontaneous cutaway during Monday Night Football than with the ruminative, kinetic moving image discovered by Kuleshov, Porter, Griffith, et al? I once jokingly called it a gotcha-fragment, but that doesn't quite get it. The word for "shot" in the new century shall be...

Snatch.

I hope you're enjoying all the arguments swirling around "Inglourious Basterds" as much as I am -- not just here, but all over the place. Since I posted "Some ways to watch Inglourious Basterds [sic]," I've been reading other people's reviews and comments and interviews about the movie and, hell, even Quentin Tarantino doesn't always agree with Quentin Tarantino about what the movie's up to. (And why should he? Like all of us, he contains multitudes.) It's not about the Holocaust, but it is about the Holocaust; it's not real, but it's real; it's not fantasy, but it's fantasy; it's not history, but it's history; it's not amoral, but it's amoral; it's not moral, but it's moral...

What some people have difficulty with is exactly what others delight in: "Inglorious Basterds" is never situated in one reality or another reality. It's always juggling various combinations of reality and unreality -- history, alt-history, war movie (platoon movie, mission movie, spy movie, detective movie, propaganda movie, European art movie...), cartoon, folklore, satire, comic book, revenge fantasy, etc. -- and the combinations change from one moment to the next. And that, I think, is its subject. I don't think there's anything more to it than QT trying to create movie-moments. He does, and some of them are superb. I don't blame people who find its story and characters thin, or factual liberties preposterous, or generic conventions twisted, or (a-)morality ambiguous, or humor offensive, but he's got no reason to apologize for creating his alternative historical universe in a Hollywood movie -- a world in which all of the above are woven into its warp and woof.

Because "Inglourious Basterds" provides so much to talk about and to interpret, I thought I'd put together some fascinating observations (some of which I wish I'd made myself; some of which I think are off-base, but nevertheless revealing of something about the film) and set them bouncing off one another to get your own analytical juices flowing, starting with QT's (and others') takes on the nature of the world in which it unreels:

"I stop short of calling it a fantasy. I present it in this fairytale kind of thing as far as for the masses to take in, but that's not where I'm coming from. Where I'm coming from is my characters changed the course of the war. Now that didn't happen, because my characters didn't exist, but if they had existed, everything that happens in the movie is possible."
-- QT, after a Museum of Jewish Heritage screening in Manhattan

From a Quentin Tarantino interview with Ella Taylor in the Village Voice:

Film criticism is in a strange place. Talk about 17 years later! [After "Reservoir Dogs."] I could never have imagined that print film reviewing would be dying. It's unfathomable to me. I don't like reading film criticism on a laptop. I like holding it in my hand.

You're a geezer, Quentin.

Exactly. It seems to me from reading a lot of the film criticism that came out of Cannes this year that the few print critics that are left writing are so busy combating these Internet bozos that there's a new formalism, a new self-seriousness among remaining critics, to prove they're professionals. Even some of the younger critics who are still writing in print--well, they're not that young--are coming across like young fogies. There are some good online critics, but then there's these fanboy types: "Ooh, this sucks balls." It's a little bit like '78, '79, '80, where exuberance in filmmaking is not getting its due anymore. For example, "The Blues Brothers" never got any respect. Now, it truly is beloved, as it goddamn well should be. I mean, it's sad to think of what happened to John Landis after "An American Werewolf in London," but in those two movies, he was the first fanboy director making movies out of his head.

And, regarding his favorite movies of all time in life:

I can tell you now. This got picked up on from [your] piece [17 years ago] for the next five years, those top three in particular: "Taxi Driver," "Blow Out," and "Rio Bravo." I've changed. I know I was cagey about it before, but my favorite movie of all time is "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly." That's the best movie ever made. I can't even imagine myself doing better; that's how much I love it. I would also throw "His Girl Friday" in there. The fifth will always be however I feel at the moment. So I'll throw in "Carrie," give De Palma a shout-out.

(Above: Tarantino dances up the red carpet at Cannes, 2009. AP photo.)

I'll be in the hospital most of Friday for my AV node ablation (see my latest film -- a little thing I like to call "Biventricular Implantable Cardioverter-Defibrillator" -- at right), but should be out this evening, when I will make an effort to approve comments. So, please, keep 'em coming in.

Meanwhile, although it might not have been the natural choice on the eve of a surgical heart procedure, I watched "Kill Bill Volume 1" last night, an experience I found thrilling (Tarantino and Robert Richardson know how to create images), though not at all involving. But that's the kind of movies Tarantino makes. They are abstract art, not strong stories, not emotional experiences. I thought of Hitchcock, who said his films are not slices of life but slices of cake. Tarantino makes candy necklaces, tasty chunks strung together -- little climaxes without much overall dramatic shape. Sometimes it's a little like ADD De Palma (love that split-screen sequence in the hospital), but Tarantino does not waste a single shot. Every single image has a place, a reason to exist in that particular context (see Dogme 09.8 #1, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10), and it's so satisfying in contrast to the random mish-mash action editing of... well, you know the movies I'm talking about. Tarantino's eye makes me delirious with movie love.

Best of all, in Volume 1 there's not much stilted, wordy dialog to distract from the excellence and exuberance of the filmmaking. I'd like to see Tarantino do a silent film someday -- only music on the soundtrack. His music selections, as always, are dynamite, though sometimes too short and inconsequential (see Dogme 09.8 #6 about "segues using snippets of pop tunes that fade out just as they're getting started"). I'd like to see him really stretch out and develop more whole sequences around a piece of music instead of just a tiny piece of a piece of music. (Only reservation: the music during the first part of the fight in the snow between Uma Thurman and Lucy Liu was too slight and slick to fit the gravity of what should have been the climactic confrontation of Volume 1.)

More on Volume 1, Volume 2, "Inglourious Basterds" and other topics of interest after my ablation. (Sing along with the Ramones: "I wanna be ablated!")

JE: Back from hospital, in recuperation mode. I'm feeling much better... Not dead yet!

I started making movies before I was a teenager. Making movies on actual film, that is. I was always making movies in my head, but it wasn't until my dad lent me his 8mm Kodak Brownie wind-up movie camera and a light meter that I and some friends started actually putting things on celluloid. Our early efforts had titles like "Gores Galore" [sic], "Land of the Giants," "The Murderer" and "Potpourri" (a title we took from "Laugh-In" for a hodge-podge of stunts and gags we just made up as we shot them). For special visual effects we used a lot of extreme camera angles (low and high), miniatures (Matchbox cars, army men), smoke bombs, fireworks, dummies stuffed with newspapers, red food coloring, Vampire Blood™, and cooked spaghetti for innards.

If I remember correctly, the total running time of one exposed reel was about three to five minutes. You bought the film in double-width form and loaded it into the camera, then had to go into a dark room (or deep shade) and flip the reel to re-load halfway through shooting. The lab would cut it down the middle when you mailed it in for developing and send it back to you as an 8mm reel with one glue-splice that strung it all together. (This was not the new Super 8, which was too fancy and expensive, even though it was only one millimeter wider.) They were all silent, of course, though we made syncrhonized 3-inch-reel tape recorder "soundtracks" with music and narration by simply running the film, playing records, and speaking into a microphone.

Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds" (that's QT's spelling for you) has been greeted with love and hate since it played Cannes last spring. It opens Friday, and to prepare for the occastion, Matt Zoller Seitz, with an able assist from Keith Uhlich, has composed "Quentin Tarantino: Words in Action for L Magazine. It's very well put-together, and it lets Tarantino riff in his own words.

I find QT's work alternately exhilarating (his fluid direction) and exhausting/embarrassing (his cutesy, over-written dialog that all sounds the same -- a monolog divided up among "characters"). You can see and hear the whole range in this montage.

Matt writes:

Bottom line: unfair as it probably sounds, Tarantino's still not quite the director I'd personally like him to be -- the Tarantino-influenced South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-Wook, whose movies are equally artificial but more emotionally engaging, is much more my speed. But while re-watching QT's films, I did find myself admiring elements that had previously bugged the hell out of me....

"The images that surround us today are worn out, they are abused and useless and exhausted. They are limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution."
-- Werner Herzog

Dogme 09.8 has the expressed goal of countering "certain tendencies" in the cinema today. In the spirit of Lars Von Trier's "The Five Obstructions," it acknowledges a fundamental truth -- that new constructive discipline is needed in filmmaking.

Dogme 09.8 is a rescue action!

In 1995 enough was enough. The movie was dead and called for resurrection. The goal was correct but the means were not! Dogme 95 proved to be a secondary ripple that washed ashore and turned to muck. Purity turned to laziness. Obstacles became crutches. Babies were thrown out with bathwater. It was fun but very silly, and the results, filtering into every aspect of filmmaking worldwide, have been counterproductive and deadening.

To Dogme 09.8, cinema is individual!

A "NCFOM" spin-off from "Chacun son Cinema," ("To Each His Own Cinema"), Cannes 2007. Starring Josh Brolin. Written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen.

(tip: Baris Azman)

As we all know, the films of Buster Keaton are the most profoundly funny, and profoundly beautiful, in all of cinema. (I know that, anyway.) In this terrific video, film historian and silent film accompanist Ben Model takes a close look at the various cranking speeds Keaton used as a grace note (he's all about grace), to achieve perfection in timing, tempo and fluidity of movement.

This is a lost art in the world of sound cinema, though occasionally you'll see the equivalent of "undercranking" (slowing the speed of the film through the camera to make it seem faster when projected) done badly via computer in some modern chase or action sequences. Keaton's films are essentially dance numbers, and he made film itself part of the exquisite choreography.

Is there a more achingly resonant movie title than "The Hurt Locker"? Fortunately, the movie lives up to it. To say that Kathryn Bigelow's film is the most accomplished white-knuckle action movie of this young century, or that it is the most fully realized Hawksian picture in recent memory, is not to say that it's a movie about chases or explosions (though it features both, and puts the last several years of big-budget summer "spectaculars" to shame) or that it is anything other than a Kathryn Bigelow movie. It's all those things.

On "My Life as a Blog," Reid Rosefelt recalls how he became friends with Bigelow in the late 1970s (that's him below, after the jump, between Hannah Schygulla and Bigelow!) and how he knew from the beginning that she was destined to make intelligent, gut-wrenching, boundary-bursting, medium-expanding movies:

She had a tremendous fascination with how violence could be portrayed in the cinema, particularly as seen through the filter of a French writer and philosopher I had never heard of named George Bataille. I got the sense that Bataille was some kind of mélange of surrealism and eroticism and de Sade-like cruelty, but the precise way he blended them and what he put in of his own was vague to me then, and even more vague to me now. But what I did understand was that Kathy wasn't just looking back to the styles and techniques of Hitchcock, Peckinpah, Romero, Argento, etc.--she was attempting to build on a highly aestheticized foundation. She didn't want to ape anybody else, she wanted to make a kind of movie that hadn't been made before. This I understood well, as it was a commonplace in European cinema for filmmakers like Godard and Resnais to use literary ideas as a means to "reinvent" cinema. The difference, and it was a huge one, is that Kathy was reading different books. What she wanted to create was more visceral and stomach-churning--more of a punch to the stomach and a battering of the subconscious than a detached and modish Brechtian challenge for the mind. [...]

Here's a question for you: Can a movie ruin a good review? Conversely, can a review actually improve upon a movie? Sure, good criticism (whether positive or negative) should encourage you to see a film in new ways you may not have recognized before. Just as cinema itself is a way of looking at the world through someone else's eyes, criticism is a way of looking at movies through someone else's eyes. Yet, the movies themselves don't change -- only our perceptions of them (we'll put aside William Friedkin's "French Connection" Blu-ray for the moment). On the one hand, a piece of film criticism is kind of like an adaptation. It offers an interpretation of the original, but does not replace it. Other "versions" still exist, just as they always did.

I can think of several examples of criticism that I think is superior to the work being criticized, in the sense that the critic is writing about an idealized version of what's on the screen -- the movie we might wish was on the screen, rather than (or in addition to) the one that's actually there. A clarification: This has nothing to do with whether the critic is divining the filmmaker's intentions or not. It has everything to do with what the critic is seeing in, and getting out of, the film.

"I just think that the young filmmakers today should take advantage of the opportunities and technology that they have now, that I didn't have, or the generations before me. 'Cause now you have no excuse.... If you want to be a filmmaker, there it is."
-- Spike Lee, interview with Digital Camera Magazine

The means of production and promotion are in the hands of filmmakers in ways they have never been in the medium's history. As Spike Lee, director and tube-sock salesman (anybody remember the campaign for "She's Gotta Have It"?) has said, there are no excuses anymore. If you want to make a movie and get it seen, the tools are right there at your disposal. You don't need massive studio resources and hundreds of thousands (or millions) of dollars; all you need is a video camera, a computer, some software and access to the Internet and you've got a whole vertically-integrated world at your disposal: production, marketing, exhibition. A few well-targeted e-mails, some YouTube clips, a Facebook or MySpace page -- even an old-fashioned web site -- and suddenly thousands of people know about you and your film. A service like Withoutabox allows you to enter film festivals all over the world in a jiffy, right from your keyboard -- without so much as a trip to the post office until you know if you've been accepted or invited.

Over many years of interviewing filmmakers I've often asked them how they have the energy to make a film once they've managed to raise enough money to go into production. And I've wondered how they have enough stamina to work on getting their films seen once they're finished. Specialized film publicist extraordinaire Reid Rosefelt is amazed by the power of new technologies, but asks: "What Happens to the Filmmakers Who Can't Market Themselves?" At his blog, Shake Your Windows, he writes:

I admit that I am also ambivalent about marketing, because I am someone who loves movies first and promotes them second. I don't want a director to tell me what a movie means. I don't want to be saddled with the director's insistence that the reason they made the film defines what the movie is. In a lot of ways, the reason that a director thinks he or she made a film is irrelevant. They may not fully understand themselves as human beings, let alone understand their movie. Mysterious things come into play that they don't understand. That's the miracle of it, really.

Some filmmakers are very skilled about how to play the game of talking to the media. They have a natural facility for giving great quotes without giving away the store. Some, like Jarmusch, have a strong image that works into the way you perceive their movies, expanding and not contracting your reactions. Some are a hoot, like Almodovar, and draw you in with their high spirits. Some invent their own myth out of whole cloth, like Herzog. Many of the people who last the longest in pop culture are shape-shifters, like Dylan, Madonna and Robert Redford--they are omnipresent, hiding in plain sight, and the more you think you know about them, the less you do.

UPDATED with more examples -- and questions -- after the jump.

Can one bad shot ruin a movie? I can't think of any examples off the top of my head -- I don't think it happens very often -- but I do believe it's possible. I'm not among those who think the final shot of Hal Ashby's "Being There" takes a marvelously sustained balancing act and kicks it to the ground. But I can understand how somebody might feel that way.

But how can just one bad decision -- maybe on screen for just a second or two -- deflate a full-length motion picture? Well, roughly the same way a pinprick in a balloon can, I guess. It can puncture the thin membrane that's sustaining the thing. Without shape and purpose, there's nothing to keep it aloft any longer.

Try thinking of a movie like a pop song. One misplaced note in the melody, one cheesy chord, one tacky lyric, one mispronounced word ("Yes, I hate the way he says 'don't diszgard me' too," Robert Christgau wrote of Elton John's "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me" in 1974, and I still remember him mentioning it 35 years later) can render the whole record unlistenable, depending on how sensitive you are to the particular offense.

Or think of a movie as a piece of architecture. A misplaced brick of the wrong color or texture, a sloppy corner, a window stuck in the wrong wall -- could conceivably demolish the overall effect of an otherwise well-designed building. Leave out a stone, or put in one of the wrong size or shape or strength, and all or part of the structure could come crashing down.

Or think of a movie as your face. With one festering pimple right there. And it's permanent. It doesn't take up a lot of facial real estate, but it mars the visage so that it's all anybody notices.

Here you go: An episode from the original "Star Trek" TV series ("Space Seed," 1967) directed in the flashy, shaky-cam style of the 2009 movie!

(tip: Ali Arikan)

... and, on the other hand, there's this:

A few notes on the obnoxious visual style of the otherwise mildly enjoyable new "Star Trek" movie:

Let us agree on one thing: No lens flares on the bridge of the USS Enterprise, OK? It's stupid, it's distracting, it's ugly, it's a pointless waste of cinematic energy, and (like much of the overactive camera- and CGI-work in the new "Star Trek" movie) it makes multi-million dollar sets and effects look unbelievably chintzy.

"Star Trek," Gene Roddenberry's great humanistic science-fiction enterprise (original network TV series, Earthdate 1966-69; original Kirk/Spock movie series, 1979-91), always featured cool technology (phasers, transporter room, warp drive) but it wasn't mainly about the science and it certainly wasn't about sophisticated eye candy. The characters were the primary special effects and the best scenes took place on the main set, the cockpit of the ship.

"Star Trek" offered a hopeful, Kennedy-esque vision of mankind's noblest space-travel aspirations -- motivated by goodwill, curiosity and a thirst for knowledge to seek out new life and new civilizations. We felt the future was in good hands because Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Uhura, Sulu, Chekov, Nurse Chapel and the crew were good people.

J.J. Abrams' "Star Trek" reboot movie gets some things right, beginning with fresh and appealing faces as the rookie Enterprise crew on the ship's maiden voyage. (John Cho as Sulu! Yeah!) But, damn, could this movie use a director. (I know, I said the same thing last summer about "TDK," and I meant it then, too.) Abrams began as a screenwriter ("Regarding Henry," "Forever Young," "Armageddon") and has become a one-man network television franchise as a series creator and producer ("Felicity," "Alias," "Lost"). But if you ever want to see what a movie directed by someone with the soul of a producer looks like, start with the works of Irvin Winkler ("Guilty By Suspicion") and then catch this one.

Don't get me wrong -- it's a fairly pleasurable if less-than-engaging trip, but Abrams has no idea of what to do with the camera other than to keep reminding you that it's always there, always screaming "Hey, look at me!," always obtrusively inserting itself between you and whatever it is you'd rather be looking at. I came away from this movie feeling frustrated, like I'd spent the whole time trying to peer over, under, or past a camera operator who was constantly standing in my way, blocking my view of the action. (See clip above. Actors: fun. Camerawork: annoying beyond all logic. However, there is a good reason Spock is so full of emotion in this scene -- and it's not just because he has a headache from that Costco lighting, which was on Kirk's dad's ship, too.)

The announcement of a pristine, digitally enhanced Blu-ray release of Edgar G. Uhlmer's grimy 1945 noir "Detour" got me thinking in granular terms...

The first CD I ever bought was Ennio Morricone's soundtrack to Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time in America." I had hundreds (thousands?) of LPs by that time, but it was the first thing I got on CD -- because of the dynamic range of the music and the recording, and the really quiet passages that always showed off the flaws in the vinyl pressing (rumble, ticks and pops from imperfections, static, scratches, dirt, etc.), no matter how careful you were with the record. There was a vinyl shortage in the 1970s, and most American records sounded terrible. Vinyl was mixed with cheaper plastics and additives (don't get me started on RCA Dynagroove), LPs got thinner and less uniformly flat, contaminants (like bits of label from recycled records) got pressed right into the grooves... I got used to the idea that I'd have to take back one out of every three or four records I bought for audible -- and often visible -- defects.

Those who doubt how thoroughly the sensibilities of the French New Wave have been absorbed into the work of today's filmmakers (see discussion of the recently posted Opening Shot for Truffaut's "The 400 Blows") should check out Matt Zoller Seitz's series of video exploring the "scavenger-hunt" sensibility of Wes Anderson, "The Substance of Style," at Moving Image Source. Part 1 (of five) has been posted, with the rest to follow over the first week in April.

Matt -- as writer, editor and narrator -- not only compares images that Anderson has lovingly quoted and reinterpreted from the works of François Truffaut, Orson Welles and Charles Schultz (and Bill Melendez, director of the Peanuts television specials), but teases out subtler influences at play in Anderson's work -- his features ("Bottle Rocket," "Rushmore," "The Royal Tennenbaums," "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou," "The Darjeeling Limited), shorts and commercials, including his famous American Express ad based on the Opening Shot of Truffaut's "Day for Night." (Coming in Part 2: Martin Scorsese, Richard Lester and Mike Nichols.) Says Matt:

Anderson draws much inspiration from French New Wave filmmakers, including Jean-Luc Godard, a clear influence on his cutting, and Louis Malle, whose "Murmur of the Heart" heavily influenced the tone of all his films. But towering over the rest is François Truffaut, an impresario in the Welles tradition, but a warmer and more earthbound auteur.

A bleak January moviegoing week was rescued for me by an eight-year-old film from M. Night Shyamalan: "Unbreakable," which I just happened to run across on Starz HD On Demand (via Comcast -- also available through Netflix On Demand), finds just the right tone for its comic-book tale of a depressed and disillusioned man (Bruce Willis) discovering who he really is. Virtually every composition displays a cool use of space, and some revealing piece of detail, that makes it exciting to watch. The movie draws you in, piques your curiosity, zaps your senses and engages your rapt attention.

(NOTE: I don't recommend watching the Starz HD version, because it has been chopped down from anamorphic widescreen [2.37:1] to generic 16x9, resulting in cropping and panning-and-scanning of some crucial images, which drains them of some of their compositional voltage. Get/rent the DVD or Blu-ray disc. See examples after jump.)

or: Ways to Fall (in one or more pieces)

The first part of this little movie provides an overview of different approaches filmmakers from Buster Keaton to Alfred Hitchcock to Christopher Nolan have taken to shooting falls and/or jumps from high places. (It wouldn't do anyone much good to fall or jump from a low place.) The second part examines, in vital but nit-picky detail, a twelve-shot sequence from "The Dark Knight" and makes suggestions for improving it, based solely on what's already there.

TWO WARNINGS: Part I includes possible spoilers for "In Bruges" (two reminders of what makes it one of the best-directed films of the year), "The Fall," "The Tenant" and "Infernal Affairs" -- as well as not-so-spoily clips from "Vertigo," "Superman," "This Gun for Hire," "Our Hospitality" and "The Dark Knight." Some parts are a little gruesome, too. Part II delves into a brief segment of "The Dark Knight" repeatedly, shot by shot. If that places unreasonable demands on your time or patience, you're at the wrong place on the Interwebs, so don't subject yourself to it. There's a little button at the lower left of the movie player that will stop it. You have been warned (and will be again).

Some notes about falling down:

Remembering Robert Altman (February 20, 1915 - November 20, 2006). This piece, revised and expanded from a Scanners post, was published in the German film magazine steadycam in a 2006 tribute issue, "Der Spieler Robert Altman: Zocker, Zyniker, Provokateur, Bluffer, Genie."

Well, we must be doing something right
To last... two hundred years!
-- Haven Hamilton, "200 Years"

It begins with a cheesy, hyper, K-Tel-style TV commercial for itself, segues into a libertarian political spiel by the presidential candidate for the Replacement Party, and then into a rousing Bicentennial anthem sung by a toupeed country-western singer in a white rhinestone-studded outfit.

Robert Altman on the set of "A Prairie Home Companion." Photo by Virginia Madsen.

At RogerEbert.com, Virginia Madsen has written a lovely remembrance of playing the "angel of death" in "A Prairie Home Companion," the final film directed by Robert Altman, who died two years ago this month. An excerpt:

He never knew where or when the "angel" should appear to haunt or float. Sometimes he would just look at me for a long time. I always held his gaze and often wondered what he was thinking. these were always quiet moments, in the midst of all the fun and chaos of a working set. He would sometimes hold my hand and then let it go as he went on to direct. [...]

... [He] always wanted me to move in such a deliberate way.There would be take after take sometimes, with Bob saying, "Do it again but this time even slower" Not an easy task for me because my physicality and that of all the other performers was so animated! He even briefly entertained the idea of having me pulled along on wheels so I would really appear to float. He also designed my big hair and white trench. Guess that was angelic to a man like him! Or film-noir angelic anyway. He gave me a copy of "The Long Goodbye."

Along with a few anecdotes, she offers her thoughts (and remembers Altman's) on the gorgeous photo above. Read the whole thing here.

A few of my own Altman memories, and an appreciation of Madsen's final moments in the film here . I think I know what I'm going to be revisiting tonight....

I saw Oliver Stone's "W." a week or two ago, and I almost forgot. Believe me, it felt even more worn out before the election. I kept thinking I'd seen it before in some other form. Not just as in every day for the last eight years, or as in some other slab of Stone. This one reminded me of Woody Allen's "Zelig" or Robert Zemeckis's "Forrest Gump" -- about a nobody who stumbles into history. Then I realized it was more like a reworking of Hal Ashby and Jerzy Kosinski's "Being There" -- the story of a vacancy.

That impression was magnified Tuesday night as I watched Barack step up to fill it. In that one solemn but hopeful election night speech in Grant Park he did more to steady, strengthen and solidify the union for tough times than I've seen any president do in my lifetime. It wasn't just a matter of commanding screen space or being ready for his close-up (although the camera loves him). But after so many years of looking at a skittish hamster-in-the-headlights, squinting or staring blankly into the lens, how dramatic it was to see somebody there at last -- a solid somebody with a firm sense of who he is, and what it means to lead and to strive and to inspire. No smugness, no self-congratulation, no condescension, no desperation. A grown-up. I felt an enormous sense of confidence and relief. And I didn't feel alone in feeling that.

Which brings me back to the hollowness of W. and "W."...

The communal Parallax View film criticism blog, coordinated by Sean Axmaker, has resurrected Richard T. Jameson's provocative, penetrating "Apocalypse Now" review, originally published in the Seattle Weekly (then known only as The Weekly) October 17, 1979. I think it's the most lucid thing anyone's ever written about the movie, and should be required reading after every screening as a way of ensuring substantive discussion.

Jameson's piece illuminates essential truths about "Apocalypse" (and, I think, about Coppola's body of work), with a precision few critics have been willing or able to explore. You may want to argue with it (and by all means go ahead!), but if you read it closely I think it will show you things you may already have felt, even if you never quite noticed them before. That's true for me, anyway. I've just re-read it for the first time in almost 30 years, and I feel it's been there, under my skin, the whole time:

"Apocalypse Now" is a dumb movie that could have been made only by an intelligent and talented man. It pushes its egregiousness with such conviction and technical sophistication that, upon first viewing, I immediately resolved to withhold firm judgment until I'd seen the film again: perhaps I'd missed some crucial irony, some ingenious framework that, properly understood, would convert apparent asininity to audacity. I didn't find it. It isn't there. What is there is the evidence of a reasonably talented filmmaker having spectacularly overextended himself -- Francis Ford Coppola who, having had a toney pop epic widely accepted as great cinema, felt he was ready to make "Citizen Kurtz."

Ever since 1977, George Lucas has been talking about making those "small, personal" movies he's always dreamed of making. You know, like "Revenge of the Sith." He did direct a small, personal movie in 1973, it was called "American Graffiti," and it is his most impressive directorial achievement. Since then, it's been nothing but "Star Wars" and "Indiana Jones" (with the occasional executive producing jobs on fantasies and friends' movies, just to lend his name to them).

At MSN Movies I have a small, personal essay that should win me lots of friends. My thesis is that, after the 22-year gap between "Star Wars" and "The Phantom Menace," Lucas has shown that the "Star Wars" universe is his most personal project. And yet he's still talking about directing those "little movies." I say: Don't bother:

It wasn't very far into "The Dark Knight" that the feeling first took hold of me: All this movie needs is a script and a director and it could be really, really great!

By the end I'd had a good time, and I already know I'd like to see it again. Maybe, I've been thinking, it's kind of like a good album that's been haphazardly sequenced, with a few lackluster (or even bad) songs and occasionally dumb lyrics, muddled arrangements, or klutzy production choices. But, you know, after a while you're willing to overlook the parts that don't work in order to enjoy the parts that do. At first exposure, those rough spots stick out and even hurt. Later on, you just accept them, get used to them, or even choose to ignore them.

Two and a half weeks into its theatrical release, is it still a sacrilege to believe, for any reason, that "The Dark Knight" is less than the greatest whatever ever? I sure hope not, because I wanted it to be great as much as anybody else. So, I front-loaded this post with my tempered impressions of "The Dark Knight" only to contrast them with the consensus opinion, which is, you might say, considerably more enthusiastic.

Ty Burr of The Boston Globe, one of our best newspaper critics in my opinion, wrote a provocative, nuanced piece about the response to "The Dark Knight" ("The 'best movie of all time'? Who wants to know?") in which he described being at a memorial service when "word got out among the teenagers and college kids that there was a movie critic present. One by one, they came up to me and asked the same question, with almost the same wording: Is "The Dark Knight" the best movie of all time?"

(Part 1 of these ruminations about "greatness" in art can be found here.)

I don't hear NPR's movie critic Bob Mondello all that often anymore ('cause I'm not in my car as much as I used to be), but I've never heard him more excited than when he reviewed "Journey to the Center of the Earth" last week. Not the new Brendan Fraser 3D one, but the 1959 version with James Mason, Pat Boone, Arlene Dahl and Diane Baker.

Although Mondello's greatest enthusiasm by far is for the 1959 film, his best lines describe the 2008 production: "It's considerably more "real"-looking -- in a differently fakey way.... It'll just show you what Hollywood used to do, and do well, done well." Well put. As I was saying about movie blood, what we accept as "realistic" isn't necessarily realistic at all. It's as much a convention of the times we live in as anything else. Much of the groundbreaking CGI of today isn't much better than it was ten years ago, and a lot of the old CGI -- which seemed so convincing at the time -- now looks... well, better than the rubber octopus in "Ed Wood," but dated nevertheless. Even some of the great special effects movies like "Jurassic Park" (1993) don't look much more sophisticated than "King Kong" (1930) these days.

Meanwhile "Wall-E" (and "Finding Nemo") writer-director Andrew Stanton sounds like a really savvy filmmaker. He told Terry Gross on Fresh Air about a lot of the brainstorming that went into "Wall-E," and I had another one of those NPR "driveway moments" during this part of the interview:

There's no action
No no no there's no action
-- Elvis Costello, 1978

When I was four years old I went to the 1962 Seattle World's Fair -- the one where Elvis and Joan O'Brien were, according to the ads, seen "swinging higher than the Space Needle" in "It Happened at the World's Fair" (Norman Taurog, 1963). There was a roller coaster called the Wild Mouse, but I was too afraid to ride on it. I did, however, like The Scrambler, which whirled you around in a logical geometrical pattern (although it felt pretty wild when you were on it) that looked really cool when seen from directly overhead, up on the observation deck of the Space Needle. (For years I had nightmares about falling off of the Needle, and if I'd ever hit the ground I would like to think I would have been extra-scrambled by the Scrambler.)

Matt Zoller Seitz, long one of my favorite film writers and the pioneering architect of the priceless House Next Door, is moving into full-time filmmaking. That's great news, and sad news for those of us who always look forward to his byline -- and, especially, the wit and insight that unspools beneath it. I want to compile a little "best of" sampling for Matt, just in case you haven't been following him, but I'm a little in shock right now. When I consider the exceptional, collegial atmosphere among our extended network of movie bloggers, and how much we learn and grow through exposure to one another's work, there's nobody of whom I'm prouder to consider myself a "colleague." You can read more about Matt's plans at the House:

Well part of it is… you know I produced a feature film, a low-budget thriller, a few years ago and then went on and directed a little movie myself. I have been working on projects that are in various stages of completion since then and it’s been slow going for a variety of reasons. But I would like to concentrate on that exclusively. I want to concentrate on filmmaking exclusively for a while and see how it goes because I’ve never given it my all. The two features that I’ve been associated with were done while I had a full-time job and a part-time job. So my thinking is, “well if I am not doing anything but filmmaking, what might I be able to accomplish?”

Whatever it is, I'm there. We'll catch up some other time. Meanwhile, we can all be glad that Keith Uhlich is in the House.

Yesterday, Matt posted a beautiful short film called "Some Other Time" in memory of his late wife Jennifer Dawson. The moment I saw the title I knew he'd chosen the version -- the greatest recording of one of my two or three favorite songs -- and he's set the music to movie with grace and understated eloquence.

This day was just a token,
Too many words are still unspoken.
Oh, well, we'll catch up
Some other time.

Just when the fun is starting,
Comes the time for parting,
But let's be glad for what we've had
And what's to come.

See and hear it here...

After the screening of Bill Forsyth's long-unavailable masterpiece "Housekeeping" at Ebertfest (about which more later) somebody asked him why he used the word "moving" in a key piece of dialog rather than novelist Marilynne Robinson's word-of-choice, "drifting." Forsyth said he didn't remember for certain, but imagined it was because "drifting" was simply "too on-the-nose," too "poetic" sounding. Actress Christine Lahti, who played the character speaking the line in question, and who joined Forsyth on stage (neither of them having seen the movie, or each other, for 21 years) confirmed that "drifting" works beautifully on the page of a novel, but wouldn't have sounded right if spoken aloud on the screen. So much artistry is reflected in that simple explanation. What seemed at first like kind of a dumb, nit-picky question was justified by the answer.

Forsyth spun another tale of adaptation that mirrored the oblique and inevitable comic structure of one of his movies:

The first time I interviewed Martin Short (one of my "SCTV" idols) in 1987, he told me an anecdote about his experiences in Hollywood. A typical encounter with studio executives would begin with something like, "Wow! We love you! You did this and you did that and we think you're great!" Followed, almost immediately, by, "And now that we've hired you, don't do that stuff anymore because that's not what we want from you. Just do it our way."

Here's director Kimberly Peirce on why nearly ten years elapsed between her last feature, "Boys Don't Cry," and her latest one, "Stop Loss":

... After "Boys Don't Cry," Hollywood came and offered me some very expensive projects, some very good stuff.... I had one project that I got almost to fruition, "Silent Star," about the unsolved murder of [the silent movie director] William Desmond Taylor in the 1920s. It was wonderful - the story of how Hollywood was built on an unsolved murder and a cover-up. We had it cast and ready to go, and the studio ran the numbers and they said, "We want to make it for x amount of money." And I said, Uh, all right. But then they said, "We don't want to spend that much, we want to spend 10 million dollars less." I said, Well, I don't know if that's a good idea, but I'll go ahead and make the adjustments I can. And they said, "Well, we don't want to see the version of the movie that we're prepared to pay for. We want to see the version we're not willing to pay for."

Perfectly circular bureaucratic logic -- so beautiful in its impeccable shape that Franz Kafka and Joseph Heller must be laughing so hard they're crying....

Ramin Bahrani's first two features, "Man Push Cart" and "Chop Shop," live and breathe like few other films these days. (That's why they're two of my favorites of the current century.)

In an interview at IFC Blog, Bahrani gives a beautiful description of the kinds of movies he values -- and, in the process, indicates what makes him such a fine filmmaker. Of course, I also happen to feel the same way about movies, so no wonder I like his so much:

Film is really 24 frames a second in the present, and I realize when you leave certain gaps, it allows space for the viewer to enter the film. That requires a viewer who wants to be engaged, who wants to have an emotional connection to a film, which should not be confused with films that elicit emotions like weeping and whatnot. You watch a certain movie, and the director puts you in a headlock through ways of dramaturgy, music, camera moves and excessive acting. It hits certain synapses in your brain and makes you cry, then you leave, and the next day you're having a hamburger and you don't really remember what the film was. Despite that those are the kinds of films that get lots of accolades and attention, it doesn't attract me as a person nor as an artist. I'm more interested in the ones — because of your participation — [that] seep into you, and two months later, are still a part of you. I don't know if I've accomplished this, but it's what I'm striving for.

What he describes -- that space that allows the viewer to enter the film -- is a quality I particularly treasured when going through "No Country for Old Men" with the audience at the Conference on World Affairs last week. Although the first time you see it you're aware of pulse-pounding tension, suspense and unforseen eruptions of violence, the movie is really full of breathing room. Long wordless sequences encourage you to get inside the heads of the characters and see things through their eyes, to experience what they're thinking and feeling moment by moment: the opening sequence (which I played once without sound so we could simply look at the progression of images, then see and how they play off of Ed Tom's voiceover); Lleweylyn following the trail of blood to the two trees in the desert; Llewelyn methodically assembling the tools he will need to place the satchel in the vent; Chigurh tending to his wounds in the motel bathroom...

This may be my favorite strip so far in Peet Gelderblom's comic "Directorama," which is being serialized at The House Next Door. In case you haven't been following it, and you should (see Webcomics Nation for the whole series), it's described as a weekly chronicle of "the afterlife of a pantheon of legendary directors.
Their mission: To inspire the film-makers carrying the torch back on Earth." After hearing today that Japanese director Kon Ichikawa ("Fires on the Plain," "The Burmese Harp," "An Actor's Revenge") had died today at age 92, I imagined him standing just outside these frames...

From Alexander Jacoby's essay on Ichikawa at senses of cinema"

Of the few Japanese directors who command an international reputation, Kon Ichikawa remains perhaps the least known and the least well understood.... While Ichikawa's work lacks the obvious integrity of Ozu's, Mizoguchi's or Kurosawa's, its outward variety belies an overall unity, revealed as one probes (in Tom Milne's phrase) “beneath the skin.”

From McSweeney's Internet Tendency: If Werner Herzog were a guest entertainment pundit on the VH1 TV series "Best Week Ever," discussing the success of "Juno," by Michel Duchampbuffet:

The Phenomenon of Pregnancy creates in the Physiognomy of the Host the Epitome of humanity's Displaced Cannibalistic Desires: one believes oneself to be engaging in the act of Creation, only to discover, behind the Blinding Cloak of Elation, the Insidious Mask of Suicide. One need not be reminded of the Mating Habits of the Appalachian Dung Beetle to realize that Pregnancy is merely an act of Self-Immolation, veiled by the Momentary Pleasure of Copulation so as to dispel the one Elemental Truth of Human Existence: that we are provoked not by the desire for Preservation but rather by the need for Destruction....

"Tim Burton has made a miniaturist 'Sweeney Todd.' Wispy, anemic, paper-thin, sanitized. Petit Guignol. Teeny Todd..."

Those were among the first notes to myself that I typed after returning from a December screening of "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street." Before that, it had seemed to me that Tim Burton (the Tim Burton of "Batman" and "Batman Returns," not "Mars Attacks!" or "Nightmare Before Christmas") might be, hypothetically, an ideal choice to make a film of Stephen Sondheim's musical-thriller masterpiece about a vengeful barber who conspires with a randy pie-shop proprietress to bake his victims into meat pies. Surely Burton would make it his own, a movie that wouldn't have to compete with the stage version because it would be a Tim Burton Film, existing in parallel to, but apart from, Sondheim and Harold Prince's achievement.¹

Not quite. It's one thing to Devoid of passion, grandeur, ghastly humor and operatic lunacy, Burton's "Sweeney Todd" is a plastic wind-up toy, a fast-food tie-in trinket. It belongs on a little gingerbread tchotchke shelf, next to your collectible "Macbeth" action-figurines. The best that can be said for it is that nobody's yet adapted the title property for film, so maybe that's something we can still look forward to.²

Sondheim himself has done a fine job of explaining why the filmmakers made the choices they did in bringing this "Sweeney" to the screen (New York Times: "Sondheim Dismembers 'Sweeney' .") And they're all perfectly good reasons. I understand the difficult choices that had to be made. How do you squeeze the show into less two hours? Slash some numbers, condense others, speed up the tempos. Do the performances (and the voices) have to be as strong and idiosyncratic for film as they do on stage? Not necessarily....

A dog bounding into a river in "No Country for Old Men." Bob Dylan's harmonica wail in the last shot of "I'm Not There." A traveling shot down a suburban street in Vallejo, CA, from the window of a car on July 4, 1969, in "Zodiac." These were among the moments that brought me unexpected waves of euphoria in 2007 -- and, as you can see, they don't necessarily have anything to do with "content." One is shocking and suspenseful (like Hitchcock's famous illustrations of the sudden explosion versus the ticking time bomb, both condensed into a few electrifying seconds). Another is ineffably mournful and joyful at once, like the sound of a whistling freight train that it purposefully invokes. Another is kinetically exciting to watch, but with a poignant, semi-nostalgic mixture of order and chaos that suggests both innocence and ominousness (accompanied by Three Dog Night on the radio singing their hit single, "Easy to Be Hard," from the tribal Aquarian love-rock musical "Hair": "How can people be so heartless / How can people be so cruel?").

And then there's Mike Parker in Gary Hustwit's "Helvetica." He's sitting in a brick room, next to a window with venetian blinds, in medium close-up, talking to the camera, or someone just next to it. And what emerges is joy, from the soul of an artist. In this clip, he speaks for about 51 seconds. Watch his eyes sparkle as he describes the figure-ground relationship in Helvetica, where the air around a character holds it, so that it lives in "a powerful matrix of surrounding space." (It occurs to me he could be talking about the use of frame space in a Fritz Lang or Stanley Kubrick movie -- in contrast to, say, a Howard Hawks or Robert Altman movie.) Every time I see it, I can feel my eyes widen and the edges of my mouth curl up like the title character at the end of Chuck Jones' "Grinch" cartoon. Euphoria.

All four of the movies mentioned in this post leave me feeling that my relationship with the world around me has been sharpened, re-tuned, re-invigorated. That feeling doesn't hit me all that often, but when it does, I hold onto it for dear life.

(Footnote: I doubt that Mike Parker, despite his successful career in typography, would describe himself as an "artist." But if we accepted as artists only those -- or all those -- who chose to identify themselves as such, we'd be a lot poorer.)

Dear David Fincher:

Just a note to say how much I appreciate your film "Zodiac" -- especially its use of 1960s and 1970s analog technologies and strategies. Cryptograms, city grids, travel distances, postmarks, calendars, trailer stall numbers, gun calibers, meal schedules, geographical jurisdictions, faxes, date books, phone numbers, addresses... well, I've expressed my admiration of how your film works and plays with these signs (no, I'm not a semiotician) before, and Manohla Dargis does a fine job of it in today's New York Times, too. (I particularly like her observation that: "'Zodiac' is about thinking, it’s about working things through intellectually, hazarding guesses, trying to solve puzzles (the killer largely communicates through ciphers) and about the dawning of awareness, which encapsulates the experience of watching it." That's one way I like to describe a good movie: It not only teaches you how to watch it, but becomes about the experience you have as you watch it.)

In a movie about obsessive detail, and the life-or-death importance placed upon even the tiniest, one little thing has stood out to me from my first viewing as being slightly... askew. Prominently displayed by the desk of San Francisco Chronicle reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) is a campaign button for Richard Nixon. The problem is that this button reads: NIXON. It has always struck me that Avery would have done what so many of us did at that time, which is to flip the button (or bumper-sticker or whatever) upside-down so that it read NOXIN -- a simple visual gag that's also a kind of cryptogram, and maybe a malformed counter-cultural pun (NIXON = TOXIN). We found it amusing that the monolithic GOP (or the RNC or CREEP or the FBI or some other Republican Establishment entity) had unwittingly, through the use of simple block letters, made it so easy to turn their message on its head. Mild subversive gestures were rarely so delightfully effortless. Best of all: 100% analog!

Anyway, I hope you have already made this little adjustment in your Director's Cut of "Zodiac," which I am about to watch. Just in case, I've taken the liberty of making a slight freehand PhotoShop tweak to the still, above.

Many thanks again,

jim

"Adapted from what is generally considered a minor Cormac McCarthy novel, 'No Country for Old Men' is a very well-made genre exercise, but I can’t understand why it’s been accorded so much importance, unless it’s because it strokes some ideological impulse."

-- Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

Here's where I agree with Jonathan Rosenbaum on the Coen brothers' new movie: 1) it is based on a ("minor") novel by Cormac McCarthy; 2) it is a very well-made genre picture; and 3) Rosenbaum does not understand why it has been accorded so much importance. When Rosenbaum says the only way he can account for the critical response to "No Country for Old Men" (and "The Silence of the Lambs" before it) is to assume it's "because it strokes some ideological impulse," I believe he means what he says even though I don't know what he thinks he's trying to say. [Rosenbaum responds, in comments below that "the core of my argument [is] the occupation of Iraq and the daily killings and torture that we simultaneously support and strive to ignore."]

His review is based on the assumption, stated in the third paragraph, that "No Country For Old Men," is a "psycho killer" movie like "Silence of the Lambs," which it most emphatically is not. It is a genre movie, but Rosenbaum gets the genre(s) wrong. It's a noirish crime thriller and a western and a detective story. (The Library of Congress catalogues the book under "drug traffic," "treasure-trove," "sheriffs" and "Texas.") But the motives of Chigurh (Javier Bardem's character) have nothing to do with the psychology of a serial killer like Hannibal Lecter or Norman Bates or Michael Meyers. There's no psychologist on the scene to explain him ("What does he seek?," as Lecter puts it), because he is not compelled to kill and he derives no pleasure from it and he does not choose his victims or his methods according to some profile or pattern.

Chigurh is out to retrieve a MacGuffin (briefcase full of cash), and he simply eliminates anything or anyone that gets in his way, using whatever means are available to him. The plain fact that he favors an efficient tool for quickly dispatching cattle (something not uncommon in Texas ranch country) reinforces how little emotion he attaches to the killing of most of his victims. He'll just as soon strangle them or shoot them. Or maybe he won't, if he has nothing to gain. He doesn't fit Rosenbaum's profile any more than he fits the ones Law Enforcement initially tries to impose upon him in the movie.

As for Rosenbaum's confession -- "I can’t understand why it’s been accorded so much importance, unless it’s because it strokes some ideological impulse" -- I can only wonder what that ideological impulse might be, but it's clear Rosenbaum does not succumb to it. Do those who accord the film importance even know that their response is based on an ideological impulse?

I remember writing something similar about "Rambo: First Blood Part II" and "Back to the Future" in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan presented us with "Morning in America," which meant that the way to face the present and the future was to return to an idealized fantasy version of the past. Heck, it wasn't even too late to retroactively win in Vietnam! (Never mind that John Rambo was a psychologically disturbed Vietnam vet in the first movie.)

Rosenbaum compares Chigurh to the Misfit in Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," which is an illuminating comparison, though not necessarily for the reasons he gives:

In O’Connor’s vision, perfectly captured in a mere 16 pages, the Misfit is an emblem of religious despair, but in the less considered genre mechanics of Cormac McCarthy and the Coens, religious despair is nothing more than an alibi for violence. It’s invoked as a way of covering all the bases, tapping into fundamentalist fatalism without really buying into it.

"Religious despair"? "Fundamentalist fatalism"? Loaded terms, but they reflect a very limited reading of O'Connor and McCarthy and the Coens, of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" and "No Country for Old Men." Perhaps if Chigurh needs to be reduced to an "emblem" of something, it's ruthless, indifferent force in the single-minded pursuit of any goal (religious, financial, political, genocidal). Some people would define that as the nature of "evil."

I've read two or three other bewildered reviews of "No Country for Old Men" that concentrate on the plot and/or Javier Bardem's haircut, or how the stuff they think is supposed to be funny isn't funny to them. And everybody -- even those who really don't approve one bit -- want to assure their readers that the Coens and DP Roger Deakins are technically proficient, which tells us almost exactly nothing except that they think it has "beautiful cinematography" or something equally meaningless. But, fine, if that's what somebody feels the need to write about in response to this movie, then that is evidently what they have to say about it, and that's that.

I have more to say, but I would like to refresh my memory of the movie, which I saw once last September near the beginning of the Toronto Film Festival. Here's something from my initial (preemptively defensive) response back then:

"No Country for Old Men" is one of those movies I think provides a critical litmus test. You can quibble about it all you like, but if you don't get the artistry at work then, I submit, you don't get what movies are. Critics can disapprove of the unsettling shifts in tone in the Coens' work, or their presumed attitude toward the characters, or their use of violence and humor -- but those complaints are petty and irrelevant in the context of the movies themselves: the way, for example, an ominous black shadow creeps across a field toward the observer ("No Country" has a credit for "Weather Wrangler"); or a phone call from a hotel room that you can hear ringing in the earpiece and at the front desk, where you're pretty sure something bad has happened but you don't need to see it; or the offhand reveal of one major character's fate from the POV of another just entering the scene; or... I could go on and on. To ignore such things in order to focus on something else says more about the critic's values than it does about the movies. It's like complaining that Bresson's actors don't emote enough, or that Ozu keeps his camera too low.

Those words were written in the thrall of the movie, and I stand by them. Rosenbaum begins his review with a quote from George Orwell:

The first thing we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up. If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp.

So... "No Country For Old Men" should be pulled down because it is a cinematic concentration camp? What of those who don't recognize a good wall when they see it, and mistake it for something it is not? What if they think they're pulling down a concentration camp wall, but it's actually a New Orleans levee and there's a hurricane on the way? What if they think it's a terrorist outpost and they bust down the walls only to discover it's really the home of an Iraqi family? What if the sturdy walls and magnificent arches of the Mezquita de Cordoba are left standing after the Moors are vanquished and the Christians build an elaborate Baroque Cathedral smack in the middle of the mosque?

Enough word games. More later...

No filmmaker has more daringly and relentlessly explored what it means to be human than David Cronenberg.

Two weeks ago, critic Robert Horton and I discussed Cronenberg's work as part of Robert's Magic Lantern Series at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle. This short film, conceived as a self-contained critical essay/appreciation, has been expanded and refined from the seven-minute version I assembled the night before that occasion, tracing Cronenberg's thematic obsessions and the development of his artistic vision across 40 years of filmmaking. "From the Drain" to "Eastern Promises" (neither of which are included here), it's all one big Cronenberg movie, no matter what the genre: horror, science-fiction, fantasy, biography, crime thriller...

Clips from nine chapters in the ever-mutating cinematic saga of David Cronenberg ("The Brood" to "A History of Violence") are interwoven to illuminate some of the director's major themes: technology (and art) as an extension/expression of the mind and body (guns, game pods, television, cars, computers, typewriters, eyeglasses...); the human appetite for extreme sensations; violence as sex, and sex as violence; the evolution of humankind beyond biology, and the inevitable dissolution of the flesh through mutation, disease, aging; corporate co-option of the intellectual property behind new technologies... all in only 12 minutes!

I warn you, it's going to be a wild ride...

Consider: If a filmmaker like, say, Brian De Palma, had used actual images of dead and injured Vietnamese war casualties in one of his fictionalized, semi-pseudo-documentary features like "Greetings" (1969) or "Hi, Mom!" (1970), would he or the films' producers or distributors have run a significant risk of being sued by the victims or their families? Are the legal or ethical issues any different now, with the carnage in Iraq? Why or why not? A few things to mull over regarding the latest "Redacted" scandal/controversy/promotional gimmick:

I suspect that De Palma was quite consciously out for publicity at the New York Film Festival press conference for "Redacted" Monday, when he accused Mark Cuban of HDNet and/or Magnolia Pictures of "redacting" the images of actual war casualties in his film's final montage. And it worked. Here's a movie about documentary reporting and amateur video and blogging of the occupation of Iraq and... look! IFC has posted a viral YouTube video of the NYFF confrontation between De Palma and Magnolia Pictures president Eammon Bowles that has been featured (even embedded) on sites such as Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, Movie City Indie, GreenCine Daily, spout blog, jürgen fauth’s muckworld and I don't know how many other outlets including... well, the site you're looking at right now.

How much more meta do you want to get?

Bowles denies he was in on any "staging." But De Palma? Isn't that what he does? He provokes, he fakes, he toys with what's genuine and what's phony to the point where the distinctions become tricky or even meaningless. If his role in the press conference, at least, wasn't part of a "Be Black, Baby" performance piece (see "Hi, Mom!") then it sure ought to have been. And even if it wasn't, it still is. Spontaneous, pre-meditated, both, neither -- it's still a spectacle designed for the cameras and the audience.

But that's not really the most important issue, is it? De Palma says he got the images for the montage sequence either off the Internet or otherwise, and that they are photos of real people, with real injuries, that photographers took in Iraq. Except for a couple pictures created specifically for "Redacted" -- an wounded pregnant woman featured earlier in the movie and the victim of the fictionalized, (re-)enacted rape and murder -- the photos are meant to be perceived as shockingly unfiltered, and/or to further the movie's strategy of pushing the viewer to question what is real (I suppose I really should put quotation marks around that word in this context) and what has been composed for the movie you're watching. In the version of "Redacted" shown at the Toronto and New York Film Festivals, and perhaps in Venice and elsewhere, the faces of the actual victims have been blacked out -- as if someone had taken a marker and scribbled over their eyes to conceal their identities. (The logo of a YouTube-lookalike site shown in the movie has been similarly "redacted.")

De Palma says he wants to use the montage with the unredacted faces. Bowles says (in comments posted at Movie City Indie):

the sole reason that the photos are redacted, is that it is legally indefensible to use someone's unauthorized photo in a commercial work. any claim to the contrary is either hopelessly naive or willfully false. And any indemnification does not preclude getting sued, and considering the asset bases of cuban and wagner versus depalma, there's no issue about who's purses will be attacked (not to mention the presumption of agreeing to the image of one of your loved one's mutilated body living on in the world wide media).

Brian De Palma is neither naive nor stupid. He knows what Bowles says is true -- and that even if a suit went to court and the producers were able to successfully argue that their use of the photos was journalistic in intent, even within the context of a non-documentary commercial feature film, the cost of fighting such a lawsuit would be significant. In fact, "Redacted" announces itself as a "visual document" of "imagined events" (I'm not sure I remember the exact language used in the opening titles, but I believe that's close), and as such does not attempt to present any factual documentation for those events. De Palma also knows that, while "Redacted" plays with documentary, web, home video and other techniques and formats, it can't help but be an exploitation movie too, no matter how serious its concerns. It's right there in the title: Come see what has been forbidden for you to see.

Again, that's what De Palma does....

Steven Boone over at The House Next Door has seen the latest -- er, "Final" -- cut of what may now, 25 years after its debut, be "Ridley Scott's" "Blade Runner," in the new version premiering at the New York Film Festival. Above all, Boone was wowed by the digital presentation:

"The Final Cut" is remastered from original 35mm elements and transferred to High Definition digital video at 4K (4096 horizontal pixel) resolution. Projected in HD at 24 frames a second for this year's New York Film Festival, this "Blade Runner" has no visible grain, dirt or scratches, stuttering frames, reel-change "cigarette burns" or soft-focus moments when the film gets loose in the projector gate. Funny how I thought I'd miss all those things, their "organic" qualities, but this restoration gives us a pristine image without sacrificing warmth. The picture even fooled our editor, who at first thought he was looking at a 35mm projection. This "Blade Runner" removes every barrier to getting lost in Scott's fire-and-rain Los Angeles short of presenting it as interactive theater.

I saw the original version first-run in 70 mm at Seattle's Cinerama Theater in 1982, and grain was evident, probably for a couple reasons: 1) many of the visual effects involved multiple, non-digital exposures; and 2) the film wasn't actually shot in 70 mm, but was blown up from 35 mm.

According to an extensive, multi-sourced Wikipedia article on the film, the 1990 version advertised as a "Director's Cut" and shown at the Nuart in LA and the Castro in San Francisco was actually a 70 mm workprint. (In the days before digital, effects were often done in 70 mm, even for 35 mm releases, for better optical quality.) Scott approved the 1992 Director's Cut, but wasn't entirely satisfied with it. Wikipedia offers comparisons of the various versions, citing the primary changes as:

* The removal of Deckard's explanatory voice-over
* The re-insertion of a dream sequence of a unicorn running through a forest
* The removal of the studio-imposed "happy ending," including some associated visuals which had originally run under the film's end-credits.

It was apparent from the beginning that the voiceover was a big problem -- and Harrison Ford (who didn't get on with Scott, much less the studio execs who were calling him in to read narration) has said he did it badly and begrudgingly, hoping they wouldn't even be able to use it. (It's that cringe-worthy at times.) Scott, however, says he wasn't taken off the picture, and that he completed the original release version after it tested badly with audiences.

But the movie was a theatrical flop anyway, producing rentals of only $14.8 million at roughly the same time "E.T." was on its way to zooming past $300 million. According to a definitive piece by Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times Magazine (September 13, 1992), the film may have died then and there. But the new home video market extended its commercial termination date:

"Blade Runner's" availability on video kept it alive in the eyes of the always loyal science-fiction crowd, and gradually, over time, the film's visual qualities and the uncanniness with which it had seemed to see the future began to outweigh its narrative flaws. Scott says he saw the interest rise, "And I thought, 'My God, we must have misfired somewhere; a lot of people like this movie.' " And not just in this country. In Japan, where the film had always been successful, "I was treated like a king," art director [Snyder reports. "The fans would be too in awe to even look at you." The film's look began to show up in art direction and design: Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" and the stage design for the Rolling Stones' Steel Wheels tour were influenced by "Blade Runner." And when laser discs appeared on the market, "Blade Runner" was one of the films that everyone just had to get. It became Voyager's top-selling disc immediately upon its release in 1989, never losing the No. 1 spot.

(Are spoiler alerts now becoming unfashionable because we should just assume everybody's seen the movie or knows the ending? I don't care. This is one.)

In Sunday's New York Times ("A Cult Classic Restored, Again"), Scott says of Ford's character, Deckard: “Yes, he’s a replicant. He was always a replicant.”

Consider this a kind of expanded "Opening Shots" entry -- from the titles sequence of Peter Greenaway's "A Zed and Two Noughts" (1985), one of the director's taxonomy films -- in a category with "The Falls" (92 mini-bios of people whose names begin with F-A-L-L), "The Draughtsman's Contract" (twelve architectural drawings), "The Belly of an Architect" (nine months), "Drowning by Numbers" (1-100) -- about the ordering and classification of things, including images.

There's a story: Twin brothers Oswald and Oliver Deuce (played by identical twins Brian and Eric Deacon) are shattered when both their wives are killed in a collision with a pregnant swan outside the London Zoo. They become obsessed with death and decay, making time-lapse photographic studies of decomposition, beginning with an apple and continuing through the alphabet to a zebra... and then beyond. They both become sexually involved with Alba Bewick (Andréa Ferréol), the only survivor of the accident, who has lost one leg because of it. The other is later removed for the sake of symmetry.

There also a character named Venus de Milo (Frances Barber, with two arms) and a mysterious, black-clad character called Van Hoyten (Joss Acklund). The film is narrated by the great voice of BBC nature documentaries, David Attenborough.

That's the skeletal outline. "ZOO" is about ways of processing grief and facing the reality of death, and about photography as a means of recording and preserving the processes of change and decay. It's also extremely funny (emphasis on "extreme," in every way), full of visual and verbal puns and puzzles. And it's a study in mortification (again, in all senses of that word). It is also ravishingly beautiful, in a striking and painterly fashion (photographed by Greenaway's frequent collaborator, Sacha Vierney, 1919 - 2001). Greenaway's most recent film, "Nightwatching" (which I unfortunately missed in Toronto), is a deconstruction of Rembrandt's famous painting, "The Night Watch," and the murder mystery behind it.

At right: The opening of "A Zed & Two Noughts," by the numbers Some shots are separated by blackouts with film credits on them. A shot or two is left out of the sequence, for the sake of asymmetry...

When I reviewed Darren Aronofsky's "The Fountain" last year, after having first seen it at TIFF 2006, I wrote:

"The Fountain" is a science-fiction historical adventure-fantasy about a man's (or Man's) struggle to face the incontrovertible fact of death.

It begins with Tomas (Hugh Jackman, a boy a long way from Oz) as a 16th century Spanish conquistador exploring the land of the Mayans in search of the biblical Tree of Life at the behest of Queen Isabella (Rachel Weisz). The movie slips into the 21st century, where Tommy (Jackman) is a surgeon and research scientist desperate to discover a cure for the tumor in the brain of his wife, Izzi (Weisz), who is writing a fairy-tale book called The Fountain that includes the 16th century story.

Surging forward another few millennia into the 26th century, the film finds Tom (Jackman) as a kind of zen astronaut hurtling through space in a big bubble with a dying tree and the ghost of 21st century Iz (Weisz) on their way into a mysterious nebula. The three stories flow into and out of one another.

I got that bit about the "26th century" from the press kit, not from the movie itself, but I was attempting to be careful in how I described the relationship between the three intertwined "stories" in the film. Yes, they are set in three different time periods, but are they really meant to be chronological stories of the same (or different) characters? Not only do I, as a viewer of the film, not know -- I don't care. Nor should I.

Roger reviewed "The Fountain" last week (he gave it half a star less than I did), and observed -- here be spoilers:

Did I have it figured out? It didn’t take me long, and here was my thinking: Since there is not a single element in the film claiming that the same man is alive in all three time periods, he obviously is not. There is a critical belief that you should not bring story elements to fiction that cannot be found there. The fictional identity of the first man is explained by Izzy’s novel, in which she would obviously visualize her own lover as the hero. The fictional nature of the third man is explained because, hey, people don’t go floating through the cosmos inside a bubble while levitating and eating bark, even in “the future.” There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy, but not that. Stephen Hawking will back me up. The film’s central section is unalloyed realism, and generates the fantasy of the first and third. Since Izzy dies in it, magic isn’t allowed. Fiction sets its rules.

RogerEbert.com reader Matt Withers to write in with his own theory about "The Fountain," which we printed as a guest commentary here:

... I was struck by what an amazing tale it told. A quick Google search later led me to believe that so far no one has given it credit as a story that makes much sense; I found simply a mass of possible interpretations. I actually believe there is a very clear and linear story being told (albeit in a "Pulp Fiction"-y kind of timeline). Since I have not come across any explanation similar to my own, I thought I would share it -- film fan to film fan.

To begin our exploration of just what the hell is going on in "The Fountain," our first task is to determine which, if any, of the three story lines presented is real.

You'll have to read the piece for Withers' interpretation of what's "real" (and not) in the movie -- but Marc Caddell isn't buying it. He writes in with his own interpretation (which you can read at the above link).

Me, I think either of these readings are fine (whatever floats your bubble), but I think they are utterly beside the point. In a movie of this sort, the movie is the experience, and it's reductive to try to say one story is more "real" than another. I wrote an article about this subject on RogerEbert.com a few years ago (about "Fight Club" and "Taxi Driver" and "The Wizard of Oz" and "American Psycho" and "Eyes Wide Shut" and "Citizen Kane" and "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie"...) called "Head Trips: Movies Inside the Skull":

It’s silly how many moviegoers and critics insist upon making an artificial distinction between what is “real” and what is “unreal” in a movie – often at the expense of what the film itself is actually about. It’s as if, to them, the predominant idea behind any given picture boils down to nothing more than: Did It Really Happen Or Was It All In His/Her Head? Well, look at it this way: If it’s on the screen, it’s there for a reason – to convey something about character, story, theme. And that is all that matters.

A movie consists of nothing more or less than the images in front of you, and what you go through while you watch them. Consider: Does it honestly matter if Dorothy really goes to the Merry Old Land of Oz, or if it was “all a dream” – or, for that matter, if her “trip” was the result of a concussion, or magic Munchkin mushrooms? Of course not. As any child can (and will) tell you, the important thing about Dorothy’s journey to Oz and back is what she experiences along the way, and what she gets out of it, not whether she physically travels anywhere....

Of course, in "The Wizard of Oz" (1939), the distinction between “reality” and “fantasy” is made pretty explicit because, as we all know, Kansas is a monochromatic state (of mind) and Oz is a horse of a different Technicolor. (I’m not so sure I picked up on that, though, the first time I saw the movie as a small child – watching it on black-and-white broadcast TV.)

It's always the theme, and the imagery, that matters to me in a movie, not so much the Point A to Point B trajectory of the plot. I guess if I were to describe "The Fountain" in story terms, I'd use not just the image of the tree, but maybe the one of the bubble: The movie is the bubble. Whatever you experience is inside the bubble, and that's all that matters. Whatever's outside the bubble is, as Roger writes, only speculative because it's not actually in the film.

Want to dip your toe in this argument? Or float your own theory about the structure of "The Fountain"? Dive in....

That's right. Either from beyond the grave ("Anything that says there's anything after death is ultimately an optimistic story," Kubrick said of "The Shining"), or from within it, Stanley Kubrick responds to a critic who accuses him and his films of nihilism:

Is this, I wonder, because he couldn't actually find any internal evidence to support his trend-spotting? If not, then it is extraordinary that so serious a charge should be made against [my film] (and myself) inside so fuzzy and unfocussed a piece of alarmist journalism.

The accuser is Fred M. Hechinger in the New York Times, the movie in question is "A Clockwork Orange," and the date is February 27, 1972. "A Clockwork Orange" was the subject of red-hot debate all over the place, celebrated as a masterpiece and condemned as everything from "fascistic" to "anarchistic" to "nihilistic."

(Oh, and If you haven't already, be sure to "bone up" on the spirited discussion of Kubrick below. Is he just a big ol' human-hater?)

I'd never read this letter before today, when I found it while searching through the New York Times archive. Naturally, one should always trust the art and not (just) the artist, but Kubrick has to much to say here about about his view of humankind, and this is so revealing of the vision expressed in his films, that I'm going to quote him at length:

Hechinger is probably quite sincere in what he feels. But what the witness feels, as the judge said, is not evidence -- the more so when the charge is one of purveying "the essence of fascism."

"Is this an uncharitable reading of the film's thesis?" Mr. Hechinger asks himself with unwonted, if momentary, doubt. I would reply that it is an irrelevant reading of the thesis, in fact an insensitive and inverted reading of the thesis, which, so far from advocating that fascism be given a second chance, warns against the new psychedelic fascism -- the eye-popping, multimedia, quadrasonic, drug-orienting conditioning of human beings by other beings -- which many believe will usher in the forfeiture of human citizenship and the beginning of zombiedom.

Make what you will of Kubrick's stated intentions, but note the value he places on humanity and free will. He continues:

It is quite true that my film's view of man is less flattering than the one Rousseau entertained in a similarly allegorical narrative ["Emile"] -- but, in order to avoid fascism, does one have to view man as a noble savage, rather than an ignoble one? Being a pessimist is not yet enough to qualify one as a tyrant (I hope).... [Times film critic Vincent Canby] classified "A Clockwork Orange" as "a superlative example" of the kind of movies that "seriously attempt to analyze the meaning of violence and the social climate that tolerates it." He certainly did not denounce me as a fascist, no more than any well-balanced commentator who read "A Modest Proposal" would have accused Dean Swift of being a cannibal. [...]

Kubrick continues...

The most superficial and shopworn cliché about Stanley Kubrick is that he was a misanthrope. This is up there with calling Alfred Hitchcock "The Master of Suspense," and leaving it at that. The cliché may contain a partial truth, but it's not particularly enlightening. It's just trite.

In the free Seattle weekly tabloid The Stranger, Charles Mudede writes about a local Kubrick series, and begins by stating: "Kubrick hated humans. This hate for his own kind is the ground upon which his cinema stands." This is a nice grabber -- particularly for readers who don't know anything about Kubrick, or who want to feel the thrill of the forbidden when reading about him. ("Imagine! He hated humans!")

Unfortunately for readers, this is Mudede's thesis, and he's sticking to it. Here's his summary judgement of "2001: A Space Odyssey":

As is made apparent by "2001: A Space Odyssey," his contempt was deep.

It went from the elegant surface of our space-faring civilization down, down, down to the bottom of our natures, the muck and mud of our animal instincts, our ape bodies, our hair, guts, hunger, and grunts. No matter how far we go into the future, into space, toward the stars, we will never break with our first and violent world. Even the robots we create, our marvelous machines, are limited (and undone) by our human emotions, pressures, primitive drives. For Kubrick, we have never been modern.

OK, that's one interpretation (though it gets the direction of the movement entirely wrong), but I think it's a facile misreading of the film. Is there really something un-"modern" about portraying the raw, simple fact of evolution, with a little otherworldly nudge?

And why does Mudede have such contempt for apes and "animal instincts"? Is he going to apply "Meat is Murder" morality to primates? (Besides, they're so dirty!) Or does he not feel the awesome and primal beauty in the whole "Dawn of Man" sequence? If he doesn't, I suppose it's no wonder he sees no wonder in the rest of the movie.

The invention in the early 1970s of the camera stabilizer popularly known as the Steadicam (actually a brand name, like Kleenex or TiVo) was a milestone in the technology and aesthetics of film. The freedom and fluidity with which the camera could "float" through a scene was astounding. It was first used in films such as "Bound for Glory" and "Rocky" -- but try to imagine "Halloween" or "The Shining" without it. (On the other hand, the "Shaky-cam" created by Sam Raimi and crew for "The Evil Dead" -- which involved bolting a 16 mm camera to a two-by-four carried by two grips running through the woods -- had a lesser historical impact, but was comparably effective for its purposes.)

Woody Allen and cinematographer Carlo Di Palma used old-fashioned hand-held camerawork for "Husbands and Wives" (1992) -- most noticeably in the opening scene, which became notorious because it made some moviegoers dizzy or nauseous. Theaters posted signs at their box office windows warning people that the movie could induce motion sickness.

Roger Ebert has received a lot of Answer Man mail about all the jittery camerawork in Paul Greengrass's "The Bourne Ultimatum" (see "Shake, rattle, and Bourne!"). And now David Bordwell, in a characteristically well-researched and fun-to-read post on his and Kristin Thompson's blog ("Unsteadicam chronicles"), says: "A spectre is haunting contemporary cinema: the shaky shot."

... Some viewers and critics think the jarring quality of ["The Bourne Ultimatum"] proceeds from rapid editing. The cutting in "Bourne Ultimatum" is indeed very fast; there are about 3200 shots in 105 minutes, yielding an average of about 2 seconds per shot. But there are other fast-cut films that don’t yield the same dizzy effects, such as "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" (1.6 seconds average), "Batman Begins" (1.9 seconds), "Idiocracy" (1.9 seconds), and the "Transporter" movies (less than 2 seconds). [...]

To put this in perspective, check out the Cinemetrics database (to which, of course, Bordwell is a contributor), and you'll find the average shot length of the late Michelangelo Antonioni's "L'Avventura" is 18 seconds, while that whiz-bang "L'Eclisse" has a zippy 11.9-second average. (See Bordwell's article at Cinemetrics here.)

But as Bordwell explains, when it comes to the disorienting effect of some shots, it ain't the meter, it's the motion:

The late Merv Griffin (July 6, 1925 - August 12, 2007) was in "Cattle Town" (1952), "So This Is Love" and "The Boy From Oklahoma" (both 1954) and Paul Simon's "One Trick Pony" (1980). He played (or voiced) himself in other movies, including George Cukor's underrated "Rich and Famous" (1981) and two Steve Martin comedies, "The Man With Two Brains" (1983) and "The Lonely Guy" (1984). Backed by Freddy Martin & His Orchestra, he had a #1 hit in 1950 with "I've Got A Lovely Bunch of Coconuts." His popular daytime TV talk show, where the likes of Orson Welles used to stop by for a chat, ran (with a few brief interruptions, including an abortive shift to late-night) from 1962 to 1986. Not only was he nominated for Emmys (he also won some) and Golden Globes, but he owned the Beverly Hilton Hotel (among others) where the Globes and other award shows were mounted and telecast.

He was one of the richest people in Hollywood, but for a while he was perhaps most famous for "dating" Zsa Zsa Eva Gabor, if you can believe that. He was also the subject of a recurring impression by Rick Moranis ("Show us your lining... We'll be right back!) on "SCTV" -- perhaps most memorably the "Special Edition" episode in which "The Merv Griffin Show"" metamorphosed into "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

But Merv's most enduring legacy (somehow it seems right to call him "Merv") was that he created game shows: "Wheel of Fortune" and the king of 'em all, "Jeopardy" -- both of which remain on the air today.

I love "Jeopardy." But back in early April, I was greatly disturbed by the disgraceful (lack of) contestant responses to a Double Jeopardy category called "Foreign Cinema." First, guess which two (TWO!) they got right. Then let me know how you scored:

1) This Taiwanese director's films include "The Wedding Banquet," "Pushing Hands" & "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."

2) The submarine models for this 1981 German film were also used in "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

3) In this 1957 Ingmar Bergman film, a knight back from the Crusades challenges Death to a chess game for his life.

4) Truffaut provided the story for this 1959 Godard film in which Belmondo plays a hood who kills a cop.

5) This 1963 Fellini film was the basis for the 1982 Broadway musical "Nine."

Doo-doo, doo-doo, doo-doo doooo...

Click below for answers -- er, questions.

While I was gone, the New York Times printed a magnificent appreciation of Michelangelo Antonioni written by Martin Scorsese, called "The Man Who Set Film Free." This piece, which begins with Scorsese recalling the profound effect of seeing "L'Avventura" for the first time in 1961, is so moving, and so perceptive, that I think it ranks with the best work Scorsese has ever done in any medium. Reading it brings tears to my eyes -- like a great film does.

Scorsese traces how the film keeps redirecting, reshaping, and dissolving the narrative before our eyes. Is it an "adventure" or an intrigue, as the title suggests? Or a missing-person mystery? Or a detective story? Or a love story? Or a betrayal/revenge story?

But right away our attention was drawn away from the mechanics of the search, by the camera and the way it moved. You never knew where it was going to go, who or what it was going to follow. In the same way the attentions of the characters drifted: toward the light, the heat, the sense of place. And then toward one another.

So it became a love story. But that dissolved too. Antonioni made us aware of something quite strange and uncomfortable, something that had never been seen in movies. His characters floated through life, from impulse to impulse, and everything was eventually revealed as a pretext: the search was a pretext for being together, and being together was another kind of pretext, something that shaped their lives and gave them a kind of meaning.

The more I saw “L’Avventura” — and I went back many times — the more I realized...

Sean Axmaker talks to David Lynch about digital video in general, and the new DVD of "Inland Empire" in particular, over at MSN Movies:

You have, of course, never done a commentary track, but the "Stories" section of the "Inland Empire" disc could almost be a stand-alone commentary because you talk about so many things around the film.

I believe talking is OK separate from a thing, but a commentary track that goes along through a film, I think, is maybe the worst possible thing a person could do. From then on, the film is seen in terms of the memory of that commentary and it changes things forever.

You have about 70 minutes of deleted footage in the "More Things That Happened" section and you've edited them so they play like their own dreamlike film.

Right. There are things in "More Things That Happened" that give a feeling that could be like a brother or sister to the film. It's like if you know a family, but you haven't met the sister yet. You go over to Ohio and meet the sister, and it adds more to the feeling of the whole family.

In the "Stories" section of the "Inland Empire" supplements, you go on a rant about people watching movies on their phones. So how do you feel about the huge explosion of home theater?

I feel great about the home theater. It's so hopeful. It's a counterpart to the telephone experience, or the computer screen, but a lot of people are going to see their films on computers and phones and they will think they saw the films, but they will not have seen the film. And that's a sadness, as I say in "Stories," that's a real sadness. It's very hard to sink into a world when the picture is so small. I hope that the home-theater big screens at home will be something they embrace so they can feel and think in the world -- not have all this distraction around it.

I'm waiting for my DVD of "Inland Empire" to arrive. (I almost always watch them at night, with the lights off, on a 55" Sony LCD projection HDTV with surround sound.)

Even if you haven't seen Lynch's latest magnum opus ("Twin Peaks" was similarly big and deep), you can still check out my review, which was written as a sort of "Viewers' Guide to 'Inland Empire,'" suggesting various ways of looking at it. A synopsis would be impossible, anyway...

Watching Ingmar Bergman's "Shame" over the weekend (which I was pleased to find that I had not seen before -- after 20 or 30 years, I sometimes forget), I recalled something that happened around 1982. Through the University of Washington Cinema Studies program, we brought the now-famous (then not-so-) story structure guru Robert McKee to campus to conduct a weekend screenwriting seminar. McKee, played by Brian Cox in Spike Jonze's and Charlie Kaufman's "Adapation." as the ultimate authority on how to write a salable screenplay, has probably been the single-most dominant influence in American screenwriting -- "Hollywood" and "independent" -- over the last two decades. Many would say "pernicious influence." (Syd Field is another.)

It's not necessarily McKee's fault that so many aspiring screenwriters and studio development executives have chosen to emphasize a cogent, three-act structure over all other aspects of the script, including things like character, ideas, and even coherent narrative. Structure, after all, is supposed to be merely the backbone of storytelling, not the be-all, end-all of screenwriting. But people focus on the things that are easiest to fix, that make something feel like a movie, moving from beat to beat, even if the finished product is just a waste of time.

The film McKee chose to illustrate the principles of a well-structured story that time was Ingmar Bergman's "The Virgin Spring."

"Shame" is another reminder that Bergman's movies weren't solely aimed at "art" -- they were made to appeal to an audience. Right up to its bleak ending, "Shame" is a rip-roaring story, with plenty of action, plot-twists, big emotional scenes for actors to play, gorgeously meticulous cinematography, explosive special effects and flat-out absurdist comedy. I don't know how "arty" it seemed in 1968, but it plays almost like classical mainstream moviemaking today. (And remember: Downbeat, nihilistic or inconclusive finales were very fashionable and popular in mainstream cinema in the late 1960's: "Bonnie and Clyde," "Blow-Up," "Easy Rider," "Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry"...),

It's important to remember that Bergman and his fellow Euro-titan Michelangelo Antonioni, who both died on the same day last week, were big-name commercial directors -- who also helped moviegoers worldwide see the relatively young, originally low-brow, populist medium in a new light: as a (potential) art form. (The Beatles, who in 1964-'65 were the most popular youth phenomenon on the planet, even wanted Antonioni to direct their second feature, after "A Hard Day's Night"!) And if they hadn't been so popular and famous, they would not have been so influential. These guys won plenty of high-falutin' awards at film festivals, but they were also nominated for Oscars in glitzy Hollywood.

Director Edward Yang, perhaps most familiar to US audiences for his 2000 epic "Yi-Yi" (which won him Best Director honors at the Cannes Film Festival), died Friday at age 59, another victim of colon cancer. The Shanghai-born, Taipei-raised filmmaker died in Beverly Hills.

In the latest issue of cinema scope, Jonathan Rosenbaum writes:

For $17 you can acquire Edward Yang’s greatest film, "A Brighter Summer Day" (1991) with English subtitles from www.asiafilm.com. On the back of my copy, one can read, “This masterpiece film is not currently being distributed in any video format worldwide, so we are making this available as a service to film lovers. If you know how we can contact Edward Yang to try to distribute BSD on DVD in North America, please contact us at (940) 497-FILM. Thank you and enjoy!” The only problem with all this is that this one-disc edition is perversely subdivided into only two chapters while the $15, two-disc version available from www.superhappyfun.com, also subtitled, has more normal chapter divisions. (The four-disc English-subtitled VCD version, which has no chapter breaks at all, no longer appears to be available.) Also, the asiafilm version is 228 minutes long, whereas IMDb rightly or wrongly lists the film’s original running time as 237 minutes. I can’t vouch for the running time of the two-disc version, except to point out that it starts and ends in the same way as the asiafilm version. (The inferior three-hour version, which Yang was originally talked into editing in order to get the film released in any form, appears to have vanished, like the two-hour version of Jacques Rivette’s "L’amour fou" [1969]; I say good riddance)

"Yi-Yi" is available in a Criterion Collection DVD edition.

Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule has the best coverage anywhere of the whole "I (Heart) Huckabees" on-set "maelstrom" (as proprietor Dennis Cozzalio calls it), including the now-infamous YouTube clips of the battles between Lily Tomlin and writer-director David O. Russell. There's also an excerpt from the Playboy interview with George Clooney discussing various meltdowns during the shooting of "Three Kings," and an appearance by Tomlin and co-star Dustin Hoffman on "Good Morning America," promoting "Huckabees." Plus, there's a fantastic string of comments that you won't find anywhere else.

Dennis wonders:

Can working with a volcanic director actually be good for the creative process? If not, why (besides the money) would actors and crew members tolerate such behavior? Is this kind of threatening, off-the-rails, abusive behavior somehow actionable? And if not, why would anyone want to work with Russell again? "Huckabees" may be brilliant, it may be a mess, but one could hardly call it complacent—it’s in there scrapping for slivers of enlightenment and understanding right along with the people who made it and the audiences who choose to see it and run with it, and perhaps some of this striving, searching, reckless clashing of tones and spirits that are vital to the movie can be directly traced to this kind of passion, however misplaced it might seem. These are the questions. I have no answers.

Over at The Hot Blog, David Poland cites a few excerpts from Sharon Waxman's 2004 New York Times set-visit piece on the turmoil of "Huckabees" ("The Nudist Buddhist Borderline-Abusive Love-In"). Here's another piece from that story that sets the scene for one of the clips:

Every now and then, there comes a time to make a pilgrimage to a sanctuary, a place of retreat where one can let oneself float unhindered in a sanative state. Now -- yes, right now -- is one of those times, and among my most beloved wellsprings of renewal and re-invigoration is "My Last Sigh" by Luis Buñuel, the most reverie-like of all directorial memoirs. (I think of it as my Buñuelian bible, and would never want to live without it.) Buñuel liked to have his reveries in bars, stimulated by a little alcohol (I reprinted the recipe for the Buñuel martini some time ago), but similar conditions can also be enjoyed with the aid of books -- or movies.

And so, a few (more) inspirational passages from "My Last Sigh":

... [The] proliferation of gutter words in the work of modern writers disgusts me. They use them gratuitously, in a pretense of liberalism which is no more than a pathetic travesty of liberty....

* * *

Foreshadowing "Fight Club": ... I've seen only one pornographic movie in my life -- provocatively called "Sister Vaseline." I remember a nun in a convent garden being f---ed by the gardener, who was being sodomized by a monk, until finally all three merged into one figure. I can still see the nun's black cotton stockings which ended just above the knee. René Char and I once plotted to sneak into a children's movie matinee, tie up the projectionist, and show "Sister Vaseline" to the young audience. O tempora! O mores!

View image Portrait of the artist as a young man. (by Dali, 1924)

* * *

I've often wondered why Catholicism has such a horror of sexuality. To be sure, there are countless theological, historical, and moral reasons; but it seems to me that in a rigidly hierarchical society, sex -- which respects no barriers and obeys no laws -- can at any moment become an agent of chaos. I suppose that's why some Church Fathers, Saint Thomas Aquinas among them, were so severe in their dealings with the disturbing aspects of the flesh. Saint Thomas went so far as to affirm that the sexual act, even between husband and wife, was a venial sin, since it implied mental lust. (And lust, of course, is by definition evil.) Desire and pleasure may be necessary, since God created them, but any suspicion of concupiscence, any impure thought, must be ruthlessly tracked down and purged. After all, our purpose on this earth is first and foremost to give birth to more and more servants of God.

Ironically, this implacable prohibition inspired a feeling of sin which for me was positively voluptuous. And although I'm not sure why, I also have always felt a secret but constant link between the sexual act and death. I've tried to translate this inexplicable feeling into images, as in "Un Chien Andalou" when the man caresses the woman's bare breasts as his face slowly changes into a death mask. Surely the most powerful sexual repression of my youth reinforces this connection.

View image Those lips, those eyes...

* * *

You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all, just as intelligence without the possibility of expression is not really an intelligence. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing....

Our imagination, and our dreams, are forever invading our memories; and since we are all apt to believe in the reality of our fantasies, we end up transforming our lives into truths. Of course, fantasy and reality are equally personal, and equally felt, so their confusion is a matter of only relative importance.... I am the sum of my errors and doubts as well as my certainties.

C. Jerry Kutner's contribution to the Contrarianism Blog-a-Thon ("Why Murch's 'Touch of Evil' Doesn't Make the Cut!") is generating some discussion over at Bright Lights After Dark. You should look into it.

Meanwhile, Jerry offers an update:

As it turns out, I wasn't the first person to object to Murch's version in print. Someone who commented at our blog noted that:

Chris Fujiwara covered some of this ground on the late, lamented, Hermenaut.

And after reading Fujiwara, I agree with him about Murch's intercutting Susie's first encounter with the Grandi's with a scene between Vargas and Quinlan: "One wonders whether if Welles had been allowed to recut the sequence as he wanted, he might not have struggled with it only to conclude that the Susie scene played better uninterrupted." - Another reason not to like the Murch cut!

The specific changes that were made [from Welles' memo] are detailed by Laurence French -- though oddly no mention is made of the recropping -- which I consider to be the Murch cut's most unforgiveable flaw.

I've read that "Touch of Evil" was shot "open aperture" (as many films are) at the standard "Academy ratio" (of 1.33:1 -- or 1.37:1 for sound films, from about 1932 through 1953) even though the "intended" ratio when projected may have been 1.66:1 (mostly a European standard) or 1.85:1. The latter format was used for the 1998 "Touch of Evil" DVD which, Kutner argues, chops the top and bottom off Welles' carefully composed full-ratio 35mm images. Normally, if a 1.85:1 film is improperly projected at the standard ratio, filling the screen from top to bottom, one usually sees boom microphones protruding into the upper part of the frame and other indications that one is seeing things that weren't intended to be seen. That's how you know it's the projectionist's fault, not the filmmakers'. But this was never the case with "Touch of Evil." (Stanley Kubrick ["Eyes Wide Shut"] and James Cameron ["The Abyss"] are among the directors who, it is claimed, have composed at least some of their video-era films in wide screen and "full screen" ratios simultaneously, so the image would fill pre-16:9, non-HDTV television screens without losing anything.)

Indeed, in a May 24, 1958, letter to the editor of the New Statesman of London (reprinted at the bottom of French's second page), Welles writes:

There was no attempt to approximate reality; the film's entire 'world' being the director's invention. Finally, while the style of TOUCH OF EVIL may be somewhat overly baroque, there are positively no camera tricks. Nowadays the eye is tamed, I think, by the new wide screens. These 'systems' with their rigid technical limitations are in such monopoly that any vigorous use of the old black-and-white, normal aperture camera runs the risk of seeming tricky by comparison. The old camera permits use of a range of visual conventions as removed from 'realism' as grand opera. This is a language not a bag of tricks. If it is now a dead language, as a candid partisan of the old eloquence, I must face the likelihood that I shall not again be able to put it to the service of any theme of my own choosing.

As I read this, Welles states his clear preference for the "old black-and-white normal aperature" over the "new wide screens" that were introduced in the 1950s (along with new widescreen processes such as VistaVision, CinemaScope and the like) -- and with regard to "Touch of Evil" in particular. The question (as one correspondent has posed it) was whether Welles really thought he could get away with making a 1:33:1 picture in the late 1950s. But even if he didn't, he knew the prints would retain that ratio. And the 16mm prints shown by universities and film societies were full-frame. So, he must have known that the film was being seen that way before he died in 1985. I wonder if either of the early versions of "Touch of Evil" was on VHS or laserdisc by then...

UPDATE: Christian Liemke offers some 1:33:1/1.85:1 "Touch of Evil" frame comparisons here.

As part of the Contrarian Blog-a-Thon, here's a chance to really vent your spleen (in a rational and persuasive way). Please cast your vote below, and then elaborate on your selection in Comments. Give your reasons. Try to change our minds. I happen to have a great deal of affection for all of the below, but I chose these because they have passionate partisans and detractors. (And, besides, nobody doesn't like Howard Hawks... RIGHT?!?!) Defend your favorites -- or explain why you'd choose a filmmaker who's not on this abbreviated list. (BTW, although a valid e-mail address is required to post a comment, it won't be visible to the public and nobody will send you any mail as a consequence. It's just a way to help filter out some of the vast quantities of comment spam that comes in.)




P.S. Do you know which of the above is still alive?

UPDATE (3/19/07): I can't believe I forgot to include Ingmar Bergman, once considered the greatest living filmmaker by so many. I'm not so sure I know where his reputation stands at the moment...

In honor of Martin Scorsese's victory at the Director's Guild over the weekend, here's another poll using a different software application. This one's more compact: Just use the drop-down box and enjoy. When you view the results, you have to click your browser's "back" button to return here. This isn't an easy choice for me (probably between "New York, New York" and "King of Comedy")...

What is your favorite Martin Scorsese Picture?

Mean Streets Italianamerican Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore Taxi Driver New York, New York The Last Waltz Raging Bull The King of Comedy After Hours The Color of Money The Last Temptation of Christ GoodFellas Cape Fear The Age of Innocence Casino Kundun Bringing Out the Dead Gangs of New York The Aviator The Departed

View Results

Free poll from Free Website Polls

It is possible that many people would not describe David Lynch's movies as "straightforward," but they're really pretty simple to grasp if you think of them as meditations on states of consciousness rather than chronological narratives (or, uh, "straight stories"). They still have beginnings, middles and endings and they take you from one place (or way of seeing) to another. "Inland Empire," for example, is about a Hollywood actress (who may or may not be unfaithful to her husband -- but is tha