SCREENING LOG - 12/04/2006-12/10/2006

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Last week I got last-minute word about an exhibition of digitally projected silent films from the turn of the last century at a gallery near NYU. FINALLY, I figured, this was my chance to seal the deal on a pet project to watch at least 10 films from every year of cinema history going back as far as 1895. The only gaps I had left were for 1899 and 1902, gaps which happily were filled by some of the films included in the rather abundant offering of short film clips, none going longer than 3 or 4 minutes.

Those familiar with cinema from that period know the major players. In France it largely broke down between the documentarians like the Lumieres and trick cinema pratciticioners like Melies. In the U.S., the Edison Studios did a bit of both. as exemplified by the extremely talented W.K.L. Dickson, who was responsible for some of the very first films (1891), as well as the first sound film (1895!). On this occasion he made the deepest impression with "A Nymph of the Waves," a superimposition of a floating Aphrodite-like fairy over natural footage of sea waves, that had a haunting, sensuous quality that went beyond mere antiquated quaintness.

It was thereby crowned my new #1 film of 1899, that is until I watched a seemingly innocuous film called "Brooklyn to New York Via Brooklyn Bridge." Basically a minute of footage from a camera mounted on a vehicle moving across the famous bridge -- but tilted upwards towards the massive, multi-cabled structure of the bridge, this simple artefact took on the properties of modern structuralist art a good 30 years before that movement came to the fore, and made for a dazzling visual experience quite unlike anything of its time.

Indeed, most of the films on display didn't come close to evoking this feeling of artfulness. Most amounted to historical artefacts showing how people lived, worked, ate, and played over 100 years ago. That in itself is fascinating in the way that Bazin described when he asserted that cinema was an artform that held unprecedented power in its ability to preserve real moments with mechanical exactitude and reanimate them, to bring our reality to life again and again. It's that kind of thrill that must have surged through the veins of the first filmmakers, to discover the ability to capture reality like fireflies in a jar. And watching these old films you can still get a sense of that feeling of what it was like to look at the world with this intense desire to preserve it for all posterity; to achieve nothing less than immortality.

My gf observed that watching these little films was like watching a 1900 version of YouTube. Indeed, spending 10 or 20 minutes on YouTube and witnessing the sheer overabundance of stuff to watch, and by extension, the sheer amount of human activity involved in making all these videos, I feel that the spirit of those filmmakers has proliferated far beyond they could have imagined, and it is now in everyone's hands, from New York to London to Beijing to Nairobi, to see what everyone else is doing and respond in kind. As 2006 draws to a close, it may very well go down in history as the year in which "cinema" as we know it ended, and a new kind of cinema, one that traces its roots to the first filmmakers, began its ascent, on its way to infiltrating civilization around the world.

Merrily We Go to Hell (1932, Dorothy Arzner)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0023213/
Early career effort by Hollywood's first major female director, about the ups and downs of a showbiz couple. Like in her most famous film DANCE GIRL DANCE, Arzner's laid back directing of dialogues creates a loose, proto-Altmanesque vibe between the actors. Gets pretty melodramatic at the end but there's enough throughout to sustain enjoyment, not the least an early career sighting of Cary Grant.
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Pick 3 4 Me 2 See Pick of the Week:
The Man with the Golden Arm (1955, Otto Preminger)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0048347/
Not as good as later Preminger films -- I much prefer his clinically observant long takes to this expressionistically melodramatic downward spiral for Sinatra's junkie. Not even Preminger could resist the same lure of go-for-broke junkie filmmaking that makes films like REQUIEM FOR A DREAM so boorishly unbearable. Still I can respect it mostly for being ballsy in its own time, back when it was probably still controversial to make a movie like this.
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and now, back to Shooting Down Pictures!

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1959, Fritz Lang)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049006/
TSPDT #893
Wasn't terribly impressed by the stripped down, low-budget look of this film, and the story was a touch more implausible than I wished it to be. And of course I saw the first twist coming, the death of one of the key characters. But the 2nd and final twists, wow, I was floored! Lang takes Hollywood conventions and our impulse to identify with designated heroes and heroines and he stabs us in the back. Perhaps a bit contrived, but if you go along with it it feels bloody brilliant, like a man burning his bridges with Hollywood storytelling and all its limitations (it was his last Hollywood film).
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Antonio das Mortes (1970, Glauber Rocha)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064256/
TSPDT #894
The piss-poor VHS that I watched this on no doubt constrained my enjoyment of this film -- about a third of the subtitles were unreadable. But sonically it's got a rich soundtrack, thanks especially to the Brazilian folk music that, like the films predecessor BLACK GOD WHITE DEVIL, provides a stirring narration that gives the movie an extra jolt of energy. The story, focused mostly on ace hitman/ capitalist stooge Antonio's emerging crisis of conscience is a little less compelling than BLACK GOD WHITE DEVIL, but again, it could be because of the crap tape I watched it on. This looks like it was meant to have a rich color palette but if so much of that effect was lost. I will say that some of the scenes, esp. those with the oppressed villagers, seemed to approximate Parajanov's COLOR OF POMEGRANATES, which came out the year before. And the conclusion with Antonio walking right into modern Brazil seems like it was cribbed from Pasolini's OEDPIUS REX. Hope I can see this in an optimal format someday (a Rocha retrospective is rumored to be in the works); having now seen three Rocha films, I consider him my major personal discovery of this year.
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Nouvelle Vague (1990, Jean Luc Godard)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100274/
TSPDT #895
Possibly Godard's most visually luxurious film, in terms of color and texture and camera movement. Appropriately it's about the lives of rich people, so it feels kind of like a Lexus commercial seen through a warped lens and extended beyond just the driving through the countryside scenes to many other locales where rich people work and frolic while their servants verbally and physically abuse each other. I doubt I got half of what's in the movie the first time around, and wouldn't mind seeing it again. My understanding is that all of the dialogue can be traced to over a hundred different literary sources, though I'm not sure what the significance to that is other than that's a helluva neat trick and typical for the director, a notorious bookfiend.
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