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SCREENING LOG
-7/26-8/01, 2004
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The Black Pirate (1926, Albert Parker)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0016654/
yes - Every bit a swashbuckling entertainment as PIRATES
OF THE CARIBBEAN. It's interesting though that the seeming
rogue who occupies the protagonist's role has to reveal himself
as an outcast nobleman -- why couldn't he just be a bad-ass
pirate like Johnny Depp and leave it at that? This may reflect
the mores of the times, that there was no real such thing
as an anti-hero. The two-strip Technicolor ain't bad at all,
and (on video at least) it makes the scenes feel more lifelike
than its black-and-white contemporaries. #3 for 1926 between
SCAR OF SHAME and FLESH AND THE DEVIL
Beautiful Duckling (1965, Li Hsing)
This film not listed on IMDb
mixed - One of Taiwan's biggest pre-1980s New Wave films,
concerning the lives of duck farmers, and a father who doesn't
want her daughter know that she was adopted so he lets the
girl's biological brother extort him to no end. The plot seemed
melodramatically trite to me and only got worse as it went
along, but the opening moments were full of promise -- for
some reason I had expected a state-sponsored propaganda piece
about noble villagers and farmers, but there was plenty of
raw documentary realistic footage to delight me, enough to
see how this may have influenced the likes of Hou Hsiao-Hsien
(who pays an onscreen homage to this film in DUST IN THE WIND).
Before Sunrise (1995, Richard Linklater) - second
viewing
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112471/
yes - A great film for sure, but now I can say for sure that
I don't like this quite as much as BEFORE SUNSET; seeing this
again after seeing the sequel only slightly enhances my appreciation
of the first film -- though put together they make one heck
of a diptych. It doesn't feel as intensely concentrated on
moments as the sequel and it feels like there's less at stake
(at least up until the end when real life catches up with
the lovers with a sudden and genuine sense of loss and instant
longing -- the endings of both films are the best things about
them). For the most part it's a lot of talking that feels
largely inconsequential and occasionally annoying, but also
refreshingly playful. The characters and performances seem
to flirt with who they are and who they might be -- they often
joke about how they are defined or how the other person might
perceive them, as they constantly issue minor thrusts and
parries in defining what each person is supposed to mean to
the other in the brief moments they have together. What's
interesting is its weird blend of boldness and casualness
-- looking at the story it seems like the kind of audacious
experimental-yet-commercial-friendly pitch that indie film
execs eat up, but Linklater handles it with a certain nonchalance
that makes it hard to pin the film down, it just goes along
its merry path and keeps on going. I guess that's what I mean
by there being less at stake -- it's a very free film, but
I think the specter of finality that runs counter to this
freedom is the thing that makes for drama, and it's far more
apparent in BEFORE SUNSET, even though it's discernible in
certain moments in BEFORE SUNRISE (the cemetery, the park
where they sleep, the train station). The ending and the way
it revisits the sites of all the previous scenes is supposed
to evoke that sense of instant nostalgia when you feel you've
come to the end of a momentous experience -- the problem is
that, prompted to think back, I just didn't remember in detail
all that much about what they had gone through, specific things
they talked about. But then again, I don't remember a lot
of what I talked about with my own college buddies or girlfriends
-- I just miss those times and the tremendous sense of possibilities
and freedom they contained, which is really what this movie
is great at conveying. Here's an online magazine that devoted
an entire issue to Linklater's films and career, with particular
emphasis on BEFORE SUNSET.
Reading through the articles, one becomes aware of how Linklater
has really become one of the pre-eminent American directors
of the past decade: http://www.reverseshot.com/intro.html
I also watched several shorts by D.W. Griffith, circa 1912,
and they all but cemented my opinion that he is one of the
top three most important contributors to cinematic narrative.
Comparing them to another series of shorts produced around
the same time by Thanhouser studios in New York, it was all
too obvious how Griffith was generations ahead of his time.
The Thanhouser shorts had their virtues, with socially progressive
themes and otherwise intriguing subject matter (I was particularly
amazed by one about a dog that follows his beloved girl master
to the grave -- it has the best performance by a dog in a
film I've ever seen!), but their stories are told in simple
linear terms, one thing leading to the next. Meanwhile Griffith
was doing amazing things with multiple narratives, and he
figured out the neat trick of making them converge in such
a way that creates both dramatic suspense AND philosophical
inquiry -- it's hard to think of many other Hollywood directors
who so consistently treated the action suspense genre as a
meditation on fate, as well as a revelation of how society
is made of different elements moving through their own preoccupations,
until circustances bring them to irreparable collisions. This
probably all sounds too abstract without any examples, so
I'll just recommend films such as Death's Marathon,
The Burglar's Dilemma, and One Is Business, The
Other Crime. The latter two are particularly interesting
in how they examine how the rich and the poor act on a similar
impulse towards committing crime, with dramatically different
results.
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