Just for the fun of it, I've embedded a slideshow featuring some of my favorite paintings (drawings, etchings, etc.), from all eras, all artists, and in all styles. Last summer I spent weeks searching favorite artists and/or works on the internet - while I may have dropped the ball in a few cases (cropped images, even imitations) most of the selections are quality images. As you'll see, my taste is fairly eclectic; using lists assembled from art books and museum visits I googled all the artists whose work personally struck me (a very, very subjective barometer) and the result leaps from wildly avant-garde abstractions to hyperrealistic academic paintings to unconsciously bizarre medeival holy works to delightful 18th century portraits to impressionistic dreamviews to surrealistic nuggets of subversion. Although the image size is rather too small and the slideshow moves a bit too fast (couldn't figure out how to slow it down), I enjoy the wild juxtapositions.

And below, as a bonus I've included a chronological illustrated list of 90 artworks that, at this very moment, I wanted to include. No other criterion applied. Hope you enjoy them as much as me...

In the famed Kuleshov experiment, conducted in the Soviet Union immediately after the Russian Revolution, it was demonstrated that audiences would react differently to the same exact shot depending on what shots followed or preceded it. The actor in close-up was interpreted as mourning, for example, when intercut with the image of a corpse, or hungry when alternated with food, or even happy when juxtaposed with a child laughing. There were obvious implications for the theory of montage, but it isn't only editing that alters viewers perception this way: camera position, movement of camera, and movement of actors within the frame can all subtly alter an audience's impression of the same scene, while the more circumstantial elements of a film - like art direction, lighting, or color scheme - can ironically have an even stronger effect.

And then there's the soundtrack, one of the subtlest yet most effective ways to manipulate a viewer. It's an especially problematic element in the case of silent films, whose musical scores were often up for grabs - dependent on what the house organist felt like playing, in later years reliant on whatever generic recordings the video distributor was able to use. That's just music - what of an actual narration, imposed upon the material that orginally "spoke visually"; is such an imposition blasphemy or merely a logical, technological update?

When he re-released The Gold Rush in 1942, Charlie Chaplin nervously cut down his 1925 box-office smash, eliminated the intertitles, composed a new score, and added a playful (self-recorded) voiceover. Mindful that audiences used to talkies might grow restless, Chaplin had taken a sharp turn from his earlier position; for years he had been Hollywood's most (ironically) eloquent voice on the lost art of pantomime, resisting the onset of sound so stubbornly that he waited a dozen years after The Jazz Singer before allowing himself to speak onscreen. Yet apparently Chaplin (along with audiences and critics) was pleased with the results, labelling this cut "definitive" and allowing the original version to disappear from circulation.


Recently, the Criterion Collection unveiled a new edition of The Gold Rush on DVD and Blu Ray, containing both versions of the movie (the silent version is a painstaking '92 reassembly) so now home viewers can quickly decide which they prefer. Myself, I vote for the earlier, silent version. Somehow the voice speaking on the soundtrack, however gently, however silently when it's time for physical gags, sets the wrong tone for the film. It puts an artificial frame around the material, saying, "Look, I'm old." Music can do this too, with an especially creaky organ establishing a nostalgic, distanced air yet that "organ effect" seems different, as if setting the images in relief, making us aware of their age yet still able to peer through the mists of time. Chaplin's narration on the the other hand is caught between anxiously, almost apologetically, acknowledging the obsolescence of the original technique and trying to overcompensate for that obsolescence. At any rate, I found myself distracted from enjoying the story, out of rhythm with the original pacing, and more restless than when I watched the silent film, whose spell was easier for me to fall under.

I also think the shortened ending is a mistake, and for the same reason as the narration: it's a compromise that makes the worst of both worlds. In the silent version, the film ends with a comic, romantic moment in close-up (after posing awkwardly for a photographer, Chaplin's Lone Prospector, now wealthy, embraces Georgia, the girl of his dreams; up till now his affection has been unrequited) where the update closes things off rather abruptly and embarrassingly as the Tramp and Georgia ascend to the ship's deck. It's been suggested that Chaplin wanted to cut down the overly optimistic conclusion, but in fact the axed ending is a very wry, human moment (allowing Georgia to accept Charlie's assumption that they are to be engaged). Like the famed last shot of The Graduate (and indeed, like the celebrated what-does-it-mean expression of Charlie at the end of City Lights), the moment is both romantic and ambiguous, albeit in a more subtle fashion than those other two examples - it's easy to read it as an uncomplicated fairy-tale happy ending, as Chaplin himself may have even intended it.

Yet in close-up, Georgia looks rather baffled by the turn of events. Until now, she has been portrayed as charming but shallow, with a touch of tenderness and sensitivity easily overcome by her brash worldliness and self-damaging attachment to a brutish boyfriend. Though James Agee, in his otherwise favorable assessment of the movie, scathingly dismisses her "atrocious, dated, kittenish antics" I couldn't disagree more. In fact I think Georgia is the key to the movie, what makes it a brilliant example of Chaplin's talent for extracting humor from pathos (and vice versa) rather than just a string of funny gags. I'm also not sure what's so "dated" about her coquetry which could easily be transplanted from the 19th-century Yukon (or 1920s silent cinema) to a twenty-first century high school or college without losing much in the translation. She one of the most grown-up and independent heroines in Chaplin's cinema, and because she represents a flesh-and-blood woman with ideas of her own, rather than a fantasy-projection of a passive (Virginia Cherrill) or spunky (Paulette Goddard) gamine there is real bite and tragedy to Chaplin's unrequited love.

Georgia (the namesake of the actress who played her, Georgia Hale) is emphatically a big girl, wiser and even taller than the earnest little hobo, and in comparison it's the Tramp who seems poignant and pathetic in his eager desire to be noticed by her, even if only with a flavor of ironic condescension. Chaplin's '42 narration notes this explicitly; the most effective (if still rather unnecessary) passage of the voiceover arrives when Georgia and her friends tease the Lone Prospector with sarcastic affection in his cabin. (A side note on that cabin: rather than reflecting a simple rags-to-riches transformation, The Gold Rush's narrative follows a steady progression from starvation to eventual success - and the cabin, on loan from a generous local resident, represent the middle-class phase in this rise, in which Charlie can finally forego problems of the stomach for problems of the heart.) Narrating, Chaplin astutely analyzes the motivations and emotions of each character, perhaps reinterpreting the original scene in the process. We're told that the girls are masking their pity with cynical cruelty (the performances alone do not indicate any such pity - except fleetingly, on Georgia's part), and also that the poor fool actually knows he's being teased but accepts the attention anyway.

Perhaps Chaplin intended this explication as a substitute for the ending (initially required to show that Georgia had finally accepted the Tramp as an appropriate lover, with her smile and kiss). Yet I still contend it's a loss. As originally conceived, the couple pose in a strangely stiff tableau which seems to reflect the sham of their "marriage" (stemming from a misunderstood note Georgia sent her lover, which he then forwarded to the Tramp in a bout of malicious mischief which is, not so incidentally, also cut from the later film). Then, slowly, their eyes meet, they smile, and lean in for a kiss. Yet what's really going on here? Has Georgia realized that she loves the little loser after all, or is it merely dawning on her that she's - pardon the expression - struck gold? Helping the Tramp when she thinks he's a stowaway, we know she has some perhaps motherly affection for him but there's never been any indication she harbors romantic feelings which match or even approach his own.

Unlike in Kuleshov's experiment, putting these two particular faces together - side by side in a single frame instead of back to back through cutting - generates rather than dissolves ambiguity. More subtly than the openly unsettled conclusions of Modern Times or City Lights, the film leaves us with the impression that perhaps the Tramp's problems have not ended despite his material and apparent romantic success; in a way, it's a more tragic ending than those films (a tragedy completely elided in the '42 recut, since apparently Chaplin himself did not realize or care what he'd wrought!) because the Tramp lacks the awareness he finds there. At the end of The Gold Rush, the Lone Prospector is no longer alone and no longer seeking his prospects. Yet perhaps he's only fallen into a fantastical facsimile of success less fundamentally sound, although more superficially satisfying, than that trek into the sunset of Modern Times, hand-in-hand with another tramp, as free of illusions as he is full of hope.

You can take the baby boomer out of the sixties, but can you take the sixties out of the baby boomer? What's more significant - that sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll became staples of the mainstream pop culture by the early eighties? Or that political commitment to improving society and challenging social structures grew more marginalized in those same years, occupying niches in the arts and the academy but elsewhere drowned out by the chorus of Reaganism? Is the lasting image of the boomer the middle-aged (now nearly senior citizen) professional striving to balance practical concerns with idealistic commitments, familial responsibility with a looser lifestyle? Or is it the narcissistic yuppie, giving lip service (and sometimes not even that) to a diluted liberalism which only proves that the original revolutionary rhetoric was a better measure of fashion than commitment?

Lawrence Kasdan's The Big Chill (1983) and John Sayles' Return of the Secaucus Seven (1979) are early entries in this debate, their differences as telling as their similarities. Both revolve around reunions of college buddies, a decade or more after the events, politically charged, that made their youth so vivid. Both play on the disparities within the group despite the bonds that hold them together against a misunderstanding outside world ("it's so nice not to have to explain your jokes to everyone," one character in Secaucus remarks when her friends arrive). Both take place in idyllic, sequestered communities, away from the demands of the "real world" where the characters can pause and assess their lives. Both see characters struggling to figure out how much they should compromise between professionalism and idealism, both set up intricate romantic engagements as characters swap lovers and recall ancient picadillos, both use drugs to reawaken excitement and nostalgia.

Yet in one similarity there is a notable difference: both films begin with a settled, relatively secure couple anticipating their weekend guests, but The Big Chill ends with hearty laughter and a rock-scored group shot, while The Return of the Secaucus Seven sees everyone leave town, most in a glum mood, and concludes as the hostess sighs, "What are we going to do with all those eggs?" The Big Chill seems to think it has all the answers (or many of them anyway), while Secaucus Seven knows that there are only more questions. Some of this is explained by differences in filmmaker backgrounds (both were experienced screenwriters, but Kasdan was embraced by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, while Sayles - initially - labored on the margins with Roger Corman) and circumstances of shooting (Big Chill was a studio production, hesitantly approved by executives, while Secaucus Seven was shot on a shoestring by Sayles and a cast out of summerstock, and has been credited with unintentionally spawning America's independent film movement). And yet the most important distinction may be when the films were released; between 1979 and 1983, the national culture and a generation's self-identity had shifted dramatically, in a way we are still feeling the ramifications of today.

To understand how, first we have to take a long look back at the era in question, dimly reflected in the rear-view mirrors of these two films, all the more evocative for being offscreen. Be warned, this is a very long piece, maybe my longest ever. If you don't share my enthusiasm for extensively analyzing the sixties zeitgeist, I'd recommend jumping just to the sections labelled with the movie titles.





The funny thing about my opening questions is that they have less to do with the sixties than with the eighties (with an important prologue in the seventies). First off, trivially but interestingly, the term "sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll," now ubiquitous in titles of sixties books, documentaries, and TV shows arose in a completely different, even antithetical context, to sixties radicalism. "Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll" was the title of an Ian Dury single in 1977, and was originally associated with the punk rock movement, a rebellion against the bombast and pathos associated with the legacy of sixties rock (meanwhile it embraced other, more forgotten, legacies of the era). Conveniently catchy, the phrase came to retroactively characterize an earlier era, and to sum up the spirit of a generation. Yet the real sixties slogan would have been "sex, drugs, and revolution." Of course, rock is now more socially acceptable than political radicalism, which is probably why, in tailoring its message to as broad a demographic as possible, advertisers and other media figures have tried to make the sixties legacy more about VWs and electric guitars than burning draft cards.

More important than that etymological distinction, nobody called anybody a "boomer" in the actual sixties, or the seventies for that matter. The term "baby boomer" wasn't even coined until 1980, when Landon Y. Jones wrote Great Expectations: America & the Baby Boom Generation, described as "the story of 75 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964, a baby boom so extraordinary that it has affected every aspect of our society, from fads, fashions and music, to education, crime rates and Social Security. From the first, the post-World War II baby boomers were endowed with great expectations: they would be the biggest, richest, best educated generation America has ever known. They made the '50s a child-oriented society, the '60s a period of stormy adolescence, and now their adult concerns have become national obsessions." Since then, the terms "baby boomers" and "sixties generation" have been used interchangably.

Let's examine this assumption for a moment. Hardly any mover and shaker of that era was a baby boomer, whether we're dealing with older figures like Timothy Leary, thirtysomething late-bloomers like Abbie Hoffman, or younger avatars like Bob Dylan or the Beatles, who just missed the cut. Undoubtedly, "the sixties" as we think of them today did not even begin until the late sixties - indeed, "sixties" is another term I'll re-examine in a moment - and since by 1968 all undergraduates were boomers, their importance can't be pushed aside. Yet they were important as audience and enabler. In an era which proclaimed "power to the people" this is a key role (indeed, the significance of sixties movements vs. those that came later is the extent to which they reached critical mass), yet it is also, in some ways, a more passive role than it appears. Boomers did not make movements, they staffed, motivated, and grew them. Since they did not make movements they could not unmake them, and hence a lot of the guilt (as well as self-congratulation) of later years seems excessive.

But isn't this precisely the point of the boomer mythology, whether conscious or unconscious - to overlook the unique, larger-than-life circumstances, as well as the actions of earlier, older figures, which spawned the sixties, and thus turn it into a pop carnival which is either a natural, repeatable extension of youthful energy, or  merely, in Jones' words, "a period of stormy adolesence"? For those who celebrate the sixties, the era becomes something "we" created, an achievement that could be repeated if the misguided, misbegotten youth of today (or yesterday, or the day before that - by this point, anyone under 60 has been subjected to this critique) would only get up off of their asses. For those who criticize the sixties (either as too irresponsible or too limited a commitment), "they" get the blame, those narcissistic boomers whose objections to the Vietnam War can be reduced to cowardice, whose experiments with different lifestyles can be summarized as spoiled hedonism, whose shifting consciousness can be blamed on bad drugs or bad parenting.

"The sixties" - there's the final term we need to re-examine, though I'll continue to use it for its ubiquity and (despite the misleading implications) appealing suggestiveness. It's a fairly commonplace observation that what we call "the sixties" did not begin precisely on Jan. 1, 1960 (although the first sit-ins followed the turn-of-the-decade with remarkable speed) or end on Dec. 31, 1969 (despite the symbolic apocalypse of Altamont only a few weeks prior). In fact, while not wishing to brush aside the importance of Kennedy's rhetorical break with the past or the significance of the civil rights generation for later activists (Kennedy and civil rights are really the only direct connection the late sixties have to the early), nor the cultural revolution in fashion and pop music whose seeds were planted in the British Invasion of the mid-sixties (contemporaneous with the escalation of the Vietnam War and the first dawn of sexual and narcotic experimentation), we can safely say that "the sixties" as we know and stereotype them are based almost entirely on events and images gleaned from 1967 to 1970 (and especially the period beginning with the Columbia rebellion of April '68 and ending with the student boycott following the Kent State shootings in May '70).

This is important for several, somewhat contradictory reasons. On the one hand, using "the sixties" to suggest a coherent, extended era stretching for about ten years, suggests a sustainability to the times which simply wasn't there. There's a joke saying that "if you remember the sixties then you weren't there" but aside from the freaked-out winkiness implied, it seems to have more general implications. The times were so exciting, so transformative, that fictional accounts often forget how quickly it all happened and turn it into one long blur of love beads, acid rock, joints by a fireside, picket signs with defiant slogans, and sex acts performed in grassy fields. In fact, long hair wasn't de rigeur until the decade was almost over; meanwhile the hippie movement's golden moment had already peaked. It may have been fast-paced, but developments were not simultaneous and there was a definite chronology. On the other hand, this doesn't mean that the era - however short-lived - was insignificant. That's the other trick of using "the sixties" as a shorthand; it reduces all the developments of that era to fads, fashion, and childish whimsy. The fifties had hula-hoops and coonskin caps, the seventies introduced leisure suits and disco; in between we had fringe jackets and Peter Max posters. Such notions make for easy nostalgia, a pleasing tidiness, and an overall impression of triviality. Yet the fact that "the sixties" transcends its position in time, that it continues to haunt and define later eras, should give us pause before reducing it to cultural artifacts equal in importance to those of any other era.

How did it all happen? The "Summer of Love" in '67 gave birth to the countercultural imagery of the era, still capitalized on in insurance, credit card, and automobile ads, but it was the following summer that married this alternative lifestyle to a political commitment, left-wing but only tangentially related to radical activism of the past. There were deep historical roots for this - for over a century, the twin impulses of bohemianism and political radicalism had intertwined and separated, dancing back and forth between the demands of the former's libertarian, individualist nature and the social concerns of the latter. Yet never before had the two come to seem so conjoined; as Carol Hanisch noted in a feminist manifesto of 1970 (as a year, the mirror image of '67, since now the political cart was leading the countercultural horse) "the personal is political." The legacy of this sentiment (co-opted, if not coined by the boomers - Hanisch, like the others listed above, was born before 1946) has been the culture wars of the eighties and nineties, which still flicker up every now and then.

Yet these were two separate strands, however wound together they came to seem. Due to the power inherent in that moment of union, personal liberation and social good have been confused ever since. The inherent differences between "doing your own thing" and "doing the right thing" (as well as the differences between each of those and "do the safe thing") is one of the major, and surprisingly unacknowledged, paradoxes haunting the so-called sixties and the generation that thinks it wagged that dog.


I've noted previously, in a piece on Field of Dreams, how the late eighties saw a renaissance of sixties nostalgia and boomer self-definition, due in large part to the boomers' ascension to positions of pop cultural (and eventually political) power. The early eighties paved the way, although there was still a tendency to see the sixties narrowly as "our" (that is, the boomer's) property rather than as "all of our" property (see how later films or TV shows, like Field of Dreams or "The Wonder Years", recontextualize the era in terms of familiar, all-American tropes like baseball or coming-of-age in suburbia). As Reagan took power, while fashion and entertainment shifted directions from sixties trends (which the seventies had largely continued), there was a measure of both defiance and defensiveness in the self-appointed custodians of sixties culture. The seventies saw less of this tendency (in part because, for a while at least, people weren't even really sure if "the sixties" had ended), turning instead to the fifties for readymade nostalgia and treating the sixties as something still unresolved.

Some of the first few films about the sixties (Four Friends and A Small Circle of Friends come to mind) looked back from a more conventional era - Small Circle opens with a reunion of college buddies, one a lawyer and the other a jogger (!) literally running into one another. Yet they largely took place within the era itself, unafraid to represent it directly, even if already several stereotypes had infiltrated first-hand memories. Significantly, both films relish the slow transformations that occur, as well as acknowledging the extent to which outside society remained unaffected by the revolts and crises of the young - Small Circle in particular has extended sequences in which you don't even know what year it is (could already be the seventies, or still the pre-counterculture sixties) until an event pops up to remind you. The films have a sense of humility about the era as well as a respect for its larger-than-life yet still grounded actualities. It will take nostalgia/reunion films or shows, taking place in the present but recalling the past, to mythologize the era - to turn it into the "Mr. Wu" of Orson Welles' theatrical anecdote (in which a mysterious Mr. Wu is alluded to throughout a play, only entering the stage space as the curtain closes; on leaving the theater, the audience compliments the remarkable performance of Mr. Wu).

Just as the self-perceived "dangerous" seventies sought comfort in a supposedly "safe" era (the fifties celebrated in "Happy Days" and Grease), so the eighties, more "secure" - at least for the upper middle class which manufactures pop culture - dredged up a desire for something more unsettled and exciting, albeit perceived from a distance that airbrushed some of the elements that were too unsettling. In the process, the politics of the sixties becomes vague and rather mushy; undoubtedly it was for many participants (hence the aw-shucks acquiescence of most viewers to this strategy), but to see the activism of the era as all about making the peace sign and maybe breaking a few windows is to miss the fact that, for many people, a real awakening about the state of the world took place in those years (even if that awakening sometimes took ugly shape or went in wrongheaded directions). To obfuscate the political tenor of the sixties is a particularly American tendency - you don't see this same impulse in, say, French or Italian or German films in which cultural transitions are decidedly second-fiddle to political consciousness (or rather, are seen as one and the same but the second definitely defining the first).

This is partly due to the class dynamics of the American Sixties, which differ somewhat from the situation elsewhere. In Europe as well as the United States, the most vocal and eventually violent of the activists tended to be the offspring of bourgeois families - but in Europe they consciously threw their lot in with a preexisting class struggle highlighted for years by active Communist Parties and other socialist or anarchist groups. There was a stronger continuity between young and older radicals in Europe than in America. In May '68, when the students rebelled, the workers joined them in the streets of Paris. Eventually, the groups drew apart - the unions accepted De Gaulle's compromise, and average workers had never shared the middle-class students' fondness for drugs, apocalyptic violence, or sexual frankness (which went further in France than other countries; in the seventies, many on the French left even dabbled with accepting pedophilia). Yet European leftists continued to operate in the framework provided by Marxism, a framework unbroken by the Cold War and legitimized despite the conservative blowback of the seventies and eighties.

In America, revolutionary rhetoric more often took a "don't-tread-on-me" tone. New Left activists like David Gilbert argued that the working-class had sold out and become petit-bourgeois, and that students were the true "proleteriat." Most American activists (either casual or deeply committed) did not accept this logic, at least not in those ideological terms, but they did tend to see the conflict more in generational, cultural terms than economic. The central crisis was the Vietnam War - unlike European youth, American radicals faced the anxiety of being drafted into the enemy's cause - and when it petered out so did protest. Since the terms were less abstract and theoretical for Americans than for Europeans, the change in practical conditions also saw a shift in political priorities. Meanwhile, the Nixon-supporting "hardhats" who belligerently attacked antiwar protests made it difficult for students to connect their personal dissatisfaction with the struggles of a wider community, and heightened the extent to which rebellion seemed more truly personal than political. The American radical community was also more initially divided than the Europeans - divided right down the middle by race in an era when "Black Power" came to mean a new form of separatism.

In short, I posit (at the risk of over-simplifying and falling back upon generalizations similar to those I'm overturning) that from the beginning, the American New Left was more embattled, the odds against it greater than for the Western Europeans. It was confronted more openly with its inadequacies (since European students did not have to confront their racially privileged position in the same direct fashion) and it faced a more hostile society than in France or Germany or Scandinavia. Its cultural roots lay in individualistic creeds and sensibilities rather than the collective action or systematic analysis of Marxism and so it was more vulnerable to self-doubt. Hence, in retrospect, many members of the sixties generation didn't know which compromises mattered, and ran the risk of confusing growing up with selling out. The term "baby-boomer," with its somewhat infantalizing tone and its over-explanatory context, came into fashion right at the moment that many members of the sixties generation were most doubtful about their future and their place for history. It provided both an excuse and a reprimand, and it's been in fashion ever since.

When John Sayles shot The Return of the Secaucus Seven in the fall of 1978, there was no such thing as a "baby boomer." And it shows. The characters in the film are products of a specific era yet they are not imprisoned by it. Most notably, the tide of history has faded to leave them, not representative of a new epoch (unlike the characters in The Big Chill, whose jobs - entrepreneur selling out to corporation, writer for People Magazine, TV action star - scream "eighties"), but rather embedded in a web of normalcy. A few have distinctively post-sixties traits - the teacher politicizes his classroom, the country singer has the wanderlust romantically associated with the counterculture, the drug counselor dabbles with drugs himself. Yet we also see how tightly they fit in with their local communities, with the working-class drinkers, and young housewives, and high school athletes-turned-gas-pumpers; they had some unique experiences but they are not especially unique people.

Furthermore, the gathering is casual, not spurred by any huge event (The Big Chill reunites its group at a funeral for one of its members). The low-key dramatic stakes, plus the casual ambling style of the filmmaking, makes for a scenario that truly feels like a slice of real-life. Mike and Katie (Bruce MacDonald and Maggie Renzi) are two teachers living together in North Conway, New Hampshire, where they've invited newly 30-year-old JT (Adam LeFevre), newly broken-up Jeff (Mark Arnott) and Maura (Karen Trott), doctor-in-training and love-seeking Frances (Maggie Cousineau), and Senatorial aides (thus potential sell-outs) Irene (Jean Passanante) and Chip (Gordon Clapp). Chip is the odd man out, as straight-edged as his name suggests (well, apparently - it's actually his weed that gets everyone high) and nervous about the impression he'll make on Irene's old pals.

At one point Mike explains the group's interlocking dynamics and history to Chip, and (humorously) the explanation is just as confusing for the audience as for the bewildered straight man. But we don't need to keep track of the individual details to understand the general impression: they met through a variety of college experiences, sexual relationships, and volunteer programs (VISTA, specifically) which suggest a social concern, an adventurous spirit, and a healthy American libido. The characters still have their libido - eight of the nine (including pump jockey and snowmobile enthusiast Ron, played by David Strathairn) will get laid over the course of the film. Only Jeff, who at film's beginning is still living with Maura, is sexually unlucky - perhaps that's why he attacks those logs with such gusto in the film's poignant conclusion. Meanwhile, conversations touching on sexual history, birth control, and abortion establish the characters' wariness toward conventional marriage and child-rearing (unlike in Big Chill, none of these characters are parents).

The adventurousness of their spirit is a trickier matter. Jeff is still unsettled (ostensibly occupied with getting addicts off drugs, he eagerly shows a vial of heroin to Mike, who seems uncomfortable with it), but it's JT who most pointedly represents that still flickering flame of their youthful excitement. And he's quite aware, and uncomfortable, with this fact. Whereas the others are settling into careers and communities, JT continues to drift - he's planning a big trip to L.A. to crash the music business, and throughout the film we can't help but shake the feeling that he isn't going to make it. His more well-off friends want to help him out but JT moralistically declines. Observing that every bar has that one loud, drunken, live-for-today guy who can't support himself, but whose friends fund his irresponsible lifestyle out of guilt for assuming their own commitments, JT shakes his head: "That guy always gives me the creeps."

As for that first trait of the group's youth, the social concern, this is clearly their most depleted, and most vulnerable, feature. After all, the title of the film Return of the Secaucus Seven both references their former activism and manages to poke some fun at it. The opening credits unfold over mug shots of the group circa 1970, with longer hair and more defiant expressions. It's an effective way to ever-so-slightly give us visual evidence of who these people were once (something The Big Chill never attempts - heck, it doesn't even let us see the departed member, a JT-like drifter, who was played by Kevin Costner in deleted scenes). We don't find out how the title relates to the mug shots until near the end of the film, when a slightly different group of seven (Chip vs. Frances, who's off sleeping with Ron) winds up in a police station due to a misunderstanding, and Mike explains "the Secaucus Seven" to Chip.

Seems that nearly a decade ago, the seven friends were on their way down to a Washington, D.C. demonstration against the war - "one of the last," Mike says - when they were pulled over in Secaucus, N.J. in their borrowed car with, unbeknownst to them, a rifle and some marijuana in the back. Since this was just after the notorious trial of the "Chicago Seven" (Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, and five others prosecuted for "inciting a riot" by planning the notorious demonstrations at the Democratic Convention of 1968), the seven nobodies kid one another with jokey references to countercultural pop heroes and gangster films they saw on TV as a kid, doing impressions of James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson. The anecdote is both down-to-earth and evocative; despite the self-mocking wisecracks, the group obviously cherished their willingness to act and cause trouble as young students.

Their present sojourn in the slammer ends before it began, when a local drunkard (a former ref at Mike's school, and an out-of-work veteran of factories - in other words, a member of the working class whose struggles did not end when campus activism went out of fashion) takes the fall for the seven thirtysomethings, admitting that he killed the deer they were accused of jacking. It's hard not to see some larger significance in this: even this farcical round-up ends with a retreat into personal problems. Soon after everyone is departing, leaving on their separate ways, and Jeff is in the backyard angrily taking out his frustrations on the chopping block, a helpful chore turned in to a failed attempt at catharsis.

Jeff is the one who seems most attached to the group's former political identity; he argues extensively with Chip about whether the Democratic Senator he works for is a sellout (it seems telling that, pre-Reagan, the most right-wing character is a soft-spoken liberal establishment type). And when they're held at the police station, as Mike kids around and the other characters look bored or concerned, Jeff proudly proclaims his long rap sheet including a serious-sounding prosecution for destruction of federal property. In almost all cases, however, the charges were dropped (as tonight's will be) and we get the sense that he regrets this escape hatch; he'd rather it be all or nothing. Here, in a nutshell, we have the conflicted identity of many radical activists: committed to complete rebellion in their youth, they escaped the consequences of their commitments, and hence feel guilty (others, from less privileged backgrounds, were not so lucky) and confused by their luck.

When Maura is asked for her record she notes that it's the same as Jeff, with one exception - "we got separated" she notes of one occasion where Jeff was arrested and she wasn't. Another layer is suggested in the breakup between her and Jeff: it's the final and fatal crack in the facade of their political commitment. For the most part, the friends don't discuss politics, particularly outside of what might be called bourgeois social issues (the only exception is Mike's spiel about teaching the Boston Police Strike in high school, and again the intent is mostly self-deprecating). There's an enticing ambiguity to their sense of grief - what exactly are they mourning? Their former dedication to justice? Or, more broadly, the pride and confidence that were the result (and perhaps the cause) of this commitment? The identification with a larger culture and society, a feeling of membership in a huge mass? Or their membership in a very visible, very personal community, a community of seven with connections and acquaintances shooting off in all directions, connecting them to a larger sense of what was going on? Do they miss, specifically, the charged atmosphere of the late sixties? Or do they miss their youth in the same way all generations do?

The fact that these questions seem so hard to separate from one another sums up the ambivalence of a generation (that blurb from Landon's book notes this very uncertainty on the cusp of the eighties), and the fact that they remain mostly unvocalized is a sign of the time, a time which would end quite soon.

Whatever the issues of the characters in The Big Chill, vocalizing their problems isn't one of them.




Context is everything. Seen in relation to the small-scale humility of The Return of the Secaucus Seven, The Big Chill appears almost vulgar in its slickness. Its iconic status assured by its wall-to-wall rock soundtrack (complete with a dancing-in-the-kitchen sequence that inspired numerous cliches), its big-name stars (most, admittedly, on the cusp of fame rather than already established), its swanky Virginia plantation setting, its clever dialogue and stylized filmmaking, and especially its almost entirely upwardly mobile cast of characters, all suggest a Hollywoodization of the Boomer experience. Yet at the time the film was very difficult to get off the ground, at least according to writer/director Lawrence Kasdan; it was only the success of his debut, Body Heat, combined with prodding from the huge names he'd worked for as a writer on The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark, that convinced Columbia to cautiously greenlight the movie.

The film belongs neither to the quirky, realistic indie world Sayles helped birth nor to the mega-blockbuster environment in which Kasdan made his name, but to an older type of film which once defined what people meant by "the movies." From the thirties to the seventies, mainstream movies were made for adults, centered around dramatic themes (usually adapted from "serious" plays or novels) or comedic ensembles (also often adapted from plays) which, for all their rooting in the real world, remained decidedly romanticized, stylized, and glamorized. The Big Chill was not assembled loosely, strung together like Sayles' debut effort (which often has the raw homemade quality of a student film) but handled with an extensive professional cast and crew, with industry money, and with a screenplay diagrammed with an almost obsessive-compulsive concern for structure. Kasdan's writing partner, Barbara Benedek, notes that Kasdan's screenplay was the most meticulously prepared and charted-out story she'd ever worked on, and it shows.

The film begins, like Secaucus Seven, in the bathroom. But there's a big difference: in Sayles' film we watch Mike plunge his dingy toilet, while Kasdan introduces us to Harold (Kevin Kline), as he's bathing his son in a spacious bathtub, handing him toys and singing "Joy to the World (Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog)." This comfortably yuppie moment is interrupted by a call from the past: Sarah (Glenn Close) picks up the phone, and then approaches Harold with horror in her eyes. We don't find out what's happened until after the sly opening credits, laid over "I Heard It Through the Grapevine," in which various characters reacting to the bad news are intercut with shots of someone getting dressed: a corpse as it turns out. Alex, an old friend (significantly, never seen by us) has killed himself in the country home where Harold and Sarah were letting him stay.

The ambitious cross-cutting, fusing dramatic development, character revelation, and musical evocation, continues at the funeral where, over the strains of "You Can't Always Get What You Want" (played in full) we meet narcissistic tabloid writer Michael (Jeff Goldblum), drug-fueled impotent Vietnam vet Nick (William Hurt), shallow but well-meaning television actor Sam (Tom Berenger), biologically-ticking corporate lawyer Meg (Mary Kate Place), and bored bourgeois housewife Karen (JoBeth Williams). Karen's husband Richard (Don Galloway) stays one night before heading home, and from then on, we're left with the seven friends, plus Chloe (Meg Tilly), Alex's very young and very unself-conscious girlfriend.

The similarity, even numerical, to Sayles' film is duly noted, and it should be observed that there's even a Chip here, or rather two Chips. That character's squareness is captured (less compassionately) by Karen's Richard, whose observations would sound pretty sensible if they weren't presented in such a self-satisfied way ("Nobody ever said life would be fun. At least they never said it to me."). Meanwhile, Chloe demonstrates Chip's goofy, innocent outsider status; unlike Chip, she becomes a kind of Greek chorus, giving voice to the self-critical tendency of boomer mythology which had not cropped up yet in '78 (she stifles a laugh when one character notes that Alex would tell them all to "shut up" about their neurotic self-analysis). Meanwhile, the other seven characters sleep together, recall old times, and ponder their future, in similar terms to the Secaucus Seven.

But there's a big difference on display in The Big Chill: these characters have far more money, success, and security. One of them is famous, another writes about famous people, at least four are quite wealthy, and the hosts of the whole party are living in a mansion before he's even sold out his company (he's also a jogger and, natch, inside trainer). As a result, they're quite a bit farther along the path to sacrificing the ideals of their youth than were the outlaws of the Secaucus gang - only Alex clung to his ideals at all, and apparently it killed him. Nick's and Michael's views of sixties idealism are retrospectively jaundiced and cynical, while Harold doesn't bother to disguise his exasperation at "bleeding heart" critiques of materialism and law and order (interestingly and probably accurately, he's also the most attached to sixties rock and pop music). Where do these folks stand in those three central features which also marked the values systems of the Secaucus characters - sexual freedom, individual adventure, and political commitment?

Well, if anything, they're even hornier than the characters in Sayles' movie. Both films share a fondness for their characters' complicated and intertwined sex lives but Big Chill seems far more sanguine about the emotional fallout, cheerfully endorsing guilt-free adultery and even wifeswapping. In this film it's only Michael who gets left out (of course, since he pursues sex like a predator instead of a liberated spirit); even the unable-to-perform Nick gets a romantic interlude of sorts with Chloe. The characters still have relatively relaxed lifestyle values, despite their social responsibilities (Sarah tells her kids over the phone to do something because she says so, and then sighs to Meg, "I can't believe the things I hear myself saying sometimes.") They get high - not just pot, but pills and coke make an appearance (Nick, a drug dealer, arrived for the weekend fully stocked) - and act like swingers, albeit with an appropriate conscience, since Sarah offers Harold to Meg not for kinky thrills, but so she can have a baby: even sexually, these are liberals rather radicals.

In terms of individual adventurism, The Big Chill's book seems far more closed on the matter than Secaucus Seven. There is no JT, ready to hit the road in pursuit of his dreams (Michael speaks of opening a nightclub and eventually writing a novel, but we're pretty sure he'll stay wherever the money's good). Alex died for refusing to anchor himself down (his principled objection to a scientific fellowship is much lamented throughout the movie), and Nick - the character closest to Jeff in Secaucus Seven - is invited to stay with Harold and Sarah at the film's end, in the hope that he will be domesticated, not just with the help of their money, but also by the companionship of Chloe (who listened to his disingenuous radio-shrink routine when she was a teenager in the seventies). Nick will have a long way to go before he jettisons the bitterness which adds much-needed bite to the film's sometimes smug camaraderie, but it's suggested that he won't end up like Alex after all. Since the characters here are a bit older than those in Secaucus Seven, and since the decade was more materialist and upwardly mobile than the previous, it's unsurprising that Big Chill has its characters settling down and even seems, despite some reservations, to endorse the process.

As for the political commitment, this is the most fascinatingly chimerical aspect of The Big Chill. The characters in this film talk far more about the previous political activities than did the characters in Secaucus Seven, despite its title. They're also all alumnus of Ann Arbor, a hotbed of activism and the birth (undoubtedly before their time) of the Port Huron Statement, so it can be assumed they all came to political consciousness together (rather than assembling themselves from disparate crossing paths like the Secaucus crowd, which called to mind that now politically incorrect saying of the early New Left, that "the movement is held together by the tip of a penis.") We're told that Sam, before using his performance skills to hop into a convertible and bed two chicks on network television, gave rabble-rousing speeches on campus, while Michael wrote radical columns with "just the right amount of ideological fanaticism," and hooked up with Meg at the '67 March on the Pentagon. Harold was also a natural student leader in his day, a fact that now earns mixed admiration and embarrassment from him.

Yet somehow all these anecdotes remain slightly unconvincing. They shouldn't; plenty of boomers made the journey from fashionably radical in the sixties to simply fashionable in the eighties. Yet the stridency with which these yuppies proclaim their past commitments seems slightly canned, much like Kevin Costner's character in Field of Dreams sandwiching "I marched" in between "I smoked a lot of grass" and "I tried to like sitar music," or the character in "thirtysomething" who loudly proclaimed "Gee, it's so weird to be in a park without the smell of teargas!" as if she was a female Rip Van Winkle who hadn't been out in public for two decades. The characters' radical pasts seem conveniently imagined from a present vantage point, perhaps because Kasdan assumed his audience could fill in the dots, and signifiers would suffice to suggest a political history. At any rate, I never really found myself believing that these characters belonged to SDS or that they seriously humored the prospect of "revolution."

Part of the reason is that social concern seems to play such a small part in their present lives, even in its absence. Apparently Meg and Alex were the only ones to carry their principles into the working world, for a while at least - we're told Alex left a social-service job in '78, and Meg admits that she gave up being a public defendant in disgust at who her clients actually were - (her delicacy is playfully mocked by Michael; when asked who she thought they'd be, Nick remarks in a serious tone, "Huey and Bobby"). Otherwise, few of the characters have consciously given up on their ideals; instead, their commitment has been diluted into vague generalities. When Sam says, "I thought because people looked and talked like us, they'd share our values," or Meg and Sarah affirm that they still believe in or care about "people" to Nick, the idealism takes on a personalized tone, more about relating within previously existing circles than expanding these circles. The characters have passed through the "Me Decade" and seem to be looking back on the sixties through that prism.

Naturally, given its period and background, Big Chill heads towards a happy ending. After a night of sexual re-acquaintance, the gang gathers around the breakfast table, make plans to head home (Kathy, having bedded Sam, is now returning to Richard, infidelity having made her more bourgeois than ever), and Michael jokes, "Actually, we've discussed this already. We're not going home. We're never going home." The characters break into laughter and the cheerfully nonsensical refrain "Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog" picks up where it left off in the first scene, when it was interrupted by the bad news. Only now, we sense, a few days after the official funeral, has Alex truly been buried. The film ends with the characters paused before their final departure, together forever like Butch and Sundance. In The Return of the Secaucus Seven, everyone's already left and the lonely hosts are left with a derelict volleyball net, a backyard full of decimated wood fragments, and a kitchen full of uneaten eggs.

"But if Return of the Secaucus 7 is a secret handshake, The Big Chill is a self-satisfied slap on the ass, one where the filmmakers exploit their audiences' nostalgia for 'Ain't Too Proud to Beg' as if it were a countercultural samizdat rather than one of the most famous songs of all time. All these devoted music fans talking about the good old days, and not one apparently owned anything other than greatest hits albums?" - John Lingan, "Take Two #3: Return of the Secaucus 7 (1980) and The Big Chill (1983)"

In his astute, clever (and, ahem, economical) piece comparing the two films, Lingan closes with this observation: "The characters [in Secaucus Seven] contend with stymied careers and hopes in an era without a proper, grand title, after having gone through one that positively burst with professed importance...The Big Chill, despite all its '60s trappings, is really a monument to another, less exciting occasion: The Day the Yuppies Took Over Hollywood." Indeed, the big difference between the two films is that one is a post-sixties film, and the other is an eighties movie. The Big Chill has crossed over to the other side (Lingan again: "people who have grabbed their piece of the pie but still feel pangs of remorse when they sift through old clippings from The Michigan Daily"). The Return of the Secaucus Seven exists, unceremoniously suspended between past and future. Even if we can now look back and pinpoint the era Secaucus Seven belongs to, with its Carteresque malaise and timid but insecure stabs at domesticity, the film is about people no longer conscious of living in history. Most of the past forty years have been like that for Americans, which is what made the sixties so unique.

Like many viewers, torn between enjoyment of The Big Chill's slick charms and a kind of empty feeling left by that same style, I can be a bit tough on the film. It fascinates me and is compulsively watchable, yet ultimately does not really satisfy - like a meal that's more presentation than substance. I want more. In a way, this is a good thing; Kasdan has penned characters interesting enough that I want to know what they were really like as sixties activists. I want to meet Alex, and I want to track the experiences of Nick. (Nick is by far the most interesting character to me, partly because he's edgier and darker than the rest - his Vietnam experience, unlike the others' campus activism, has no "reset" button - and partly because William Hurt nails that edgy darkness so well. The moment when Chloe takes his hand, he asks if she knows he can't do anything, and she nods, is one of the few sequences in the film I find genuinely moving, conveying not just a facsimile of emotion but the real deal). Yet, notably, I'm not really particularly interested in what happens next to these characters. I could leave them laughing at that kitchen table and never look back. Everything interesting about them seems to be in their past; Kasdan has done to good a job winding up all his meticulously plotted storylines and there remains little left to explore.

Return of the Secaucus Seven is a different story. Yes, I'm interested in the characters' pasts. I would like to travel along with them on their interlocking paths, watch them meet for the first time and savor their intoxication with the zeitgeist as well as their increasingly solitary paths as they dispersed into the seventies. But I'd settle for hearing about these memories; what I really want to see is where they go next. Does JT make it in L.A.? Will Jeff remain a wounded soul, will he get hooked on the very stuff he's trying to get others off of? Will Irene launch her own political career, or maybe support Chip's (that boyish awkwardness has a way of seeming natural in a politician)? Will Mike and Katie stay together? Get married? Form a conventional family, or their own version thereof? These are characters I've ended up caring about and what beckons is not their storied past, but their uncertain future. That, I think, is the sign of great characterization.

Of course, both Big Chill and Secaucus Seven are relatable in some sense, and they present us with characters and situations which are universal, despite being anchored in a very particular era (there's a fantastic IMDb thread on this very subject). This is art, not sociology, however easier it is to write about the latter. Nonetheless, I remain fascinated by how these two films, in their focused ways, reflect history, both that of their own time and that of later. Like all works of history, they have a tripartite function: to record events passed, reflect present attitudes, and shape future perceptions. As a child of the nineties (when history supposedly ended), born of boomer parents in the very year The Big Chill was released, I obviously did not experience the sixties firsthand, and I have long been fascinated not only by the era itself, but by how it was interpreted by later eras. Together these films provide pieces of the puzzle from a time that birthed the subsequently dominant mythology of the boomer-created "sex, drugs & rock roll" decade.

In this we see the transformation of three major aspects of the sixties, aspects which did not only affect those born after World War II (however disproportionately they were affected) and certainly were not led or created by that age group, but which later were claimed by the pop culture as belonging to them. The first, social experimentation, experienced some reaction and rollback, but ultimately (as the films suggest) revealed themselves as the sturdiest pillars of the counterculture. Sex and drugs are now staples of pop culture. While hard drugs are generally frowned upon and monogamy was never truly smashed (although it was serialized), pot is now a rite of passage and premarital sex is quite openly the norm. When advertisers or greeting-card writers want to signify the sixties, they go for these easy punchlines, as if those years were just one long, groovy party. Undoubtedly, it was, yet the sixties were more than just the Roaring Twenties on acid.

The "personal liberation" and "expanded consciousness" meme has a bit more substance to it. It undoubtedly gets to the fundamentally inner nature of what made the period so significant. This is what sixties veterans probably mean when they say "You had to be there" while sixties artifacts - books, movies, especially music - seem to offer those of us who missed out a "contact high." Perhaps it's just our imagination but we feel at times we can taste the flavor that our parents took for granted in their youth. Then again, maybe it's not imagination - after all, a mystical awareness is not the prisoner of any chronology; in this sense that ineffable "sixties spirit" is actually one of the period's most universal, timeless qualities. The individual quests to drink from these waters connect the sixties with a rich stream of American inner and outer lives: the country has always been a nation of dreamers. This is one reason the American sixties has proven both more elusive and more pervasive than its European counterparts: it is rooted in the American soil yet its quality is so hard to pin down that when you don't feel it, it's as if it never existed.

Oddly enough, neither film bothers to dwell on the sixties' mystical, transcendent side, except allusively (as in JT's westward journey or Alex's mysterious pain and eventual death). There are no eastern meditations or acid trips (I can recall only one reference to "hallucinations" between the two movies, and it's in a party context). The characters hardly ever refer openly to quests for self-realization even though that's implicitly what most of them are either seeking or running away from, or trying to dimly remember.

Finally, there's the political commitment, the elephant in the room. If the mainstream culture knows what to do with the pleasure-seeking hedonism of the teen and college rebels, and has a kind of understanding with the personal quests of the hippies, it seems utterly bewildered by the ideology. It's too ubiquitous to ignore (though usually debates about the "political legacy of the sixties" get diverted into personal-life "social issues"), but pop representations reduce it to broad slogans or symbols, the peace symbol, the marches and singing, a Black Panther shouting "off the pig", a mad bomber or two. Both films in question acknowledge the political tenor of the sixties, but in a fashion so casual and indirect that past radicalism is simply taken for granted.

It should be noted sixties activism, while certainly left-wing, also transcends conventional definitions of left and right, one reason its legacy has been so tangled. Sixties radicalism combined a strong sense of liberterian individualism with a powerful social commitment, a pronounced concern for the underdog and disenfranchised with a deep-seated suspicion of big government and mainstream liberalism. One reason conservatism has been so powerful for the past forty years is that it has managed to re-orient its rhetoric from defending the status quo to defying "elites" and liberating the (entrepreneurial) individual; in doing so, it peeled some of those countercultural values away from the others, managing to confuse opponents whose attachment to the sixties creed had been mostly instinctive; suddenly they were caught off-guard.

One can sense this confusion in both The Return of the Secaucus Seven and The Big Chill. The tide has gone out, and the characters are stranded; they remember what they once felt like, but can't recapture the memory. Yes, part of it has to do with getting older (hormones have an awful lot to do with a romantic attitude towards life) and certainly economic and social decisions have eliminated that old feeling of liberation. Yet possibly what truly haunted the sixties veterans, and the whole notion of "the boomer" that grew up around them, was the loss of power, or worse, the realization that it never really existed, at least not in the quantity originally believed. For a group of people who defined tehselves as "activists," the realization that they were actually passive riders of one of Tolstoy's historical waves, rather than active generators of these waves, must have been very sobering indeed - the biggest chill of them all. Disappointment came early to those who later considered themselves baby-boomers (and we all know that bust follows boom) but it didn't come early enough. It allowed them too much time to enjoy their seeming freedom before swooping in to take it away. This is a generalization, and a mythologizing one at that, yet films like the two I've discussed here are testament enough to its (perhaps self-fulfilling) truth.

If there's a silver lining here, it may be not for the boomers, but for their children, the kids the Secaucus Seven finally decided to give birth to: my generation, which perhaps needs a myth of its own. We were at once raised in and mystified by the attitudes our parents took for granted. Largely raised in comfort and idealism similar to that of our parents' childhood it was in young adulthood that we parted ways with their paths. Confronted by hidden wars rather than nightly broadcasts from the battlefield, dealt an increasingly failing economy rather than taken-for-granted prosperity, immobilized by awareness of our impotence rather than motivated by delusions of collective grandeur, we never had a chance to partake in giddy illusions of everlasting community or thrilling revolutionary fervor.

Any illusions we might have had were nipped in the bid by the inability to face 9/11. There were moments of optimism - the age of terror was also an age of exploding technology, whose full creative potential has yet to be tapped, and the election of Obama provided many a much-needed outburst of positive energy. But by and large the outlook has been grim, which means if the boomers had nowhere to go but down, we've nowhere to go but up. This could mean a future activism (in a broader sense that the term usually takes these days) based not on the illusory and fleeting bravado of youth, nor the false comforts of economic "security," but rather on a deeper understanding of life's challenges and our own humble status. From this standpoint, it's easier to relate to the weary, struggling, yet somehow still defiant Secaucus Seven than the comfortable, navel-gazing Big Chillsters. Chopping up endless logs may be a futile gesture, but hey...at least it's a gesture.

I like that title. I like that picture. They probably deserve a post that's more than, essentially, a link, but for now that's what I've got.

Like Clint Eastwood, I often find myself in imaginary conversations though - the state of the American politics being rather depressing - they more often revolve around the cinema than the presidency. Sometimes, however, that topic can be equally downbeat. I think we are living in a golden age of cinephilia, but a dark age of mass movie appreciation.

Jason Bellamy addressed this subject recently, from a somewhat different angle, in a widely-circulated piece on the recent Sight & Sound Top 10 poll. It has 43 comments at present, including 10 from me. The last five of mine, in particular, are what led me to write this post on the dead of a Saturday morning. Besides, I'm tired of looking at The Big Chill post atop the page (while I'm happy with some of the insights, it was a bit of a chore to write and I fear it may be a bit of a chore to read), and I don't want to put up my periodic placeholder post (in this case an end-of-summer incantation to, as ever, explore my blog via colorful directory pages) until after Labor Day weekend. Plus, I spent all yesterday compiling a quixotic reorganization of my Cinema of Pictures post which I ultimately deleted, so I want to put something up.

So, for now, I encourage you to reflect on the topic of whether and how cinephiles have "failed" cinema, and to read what Jason and his readers have to say on the subject. The aforementioned quintuplet of comments I left began when I woke up this morning, and after an hour of hammering away on my iPhone I wisely moved to my roommate's computer and (relatively) quickly finished my thoughts. They had to be split into several different comments, which should indicate how much this whole discussion triggered thoughts that had been circulating in my mind for a while. Well, it beats ranting at a chair.

Without further ado:


And because it seemed like a good idea, I've reprinted my entire comment after the jump. Typos and all.

Joel Bocko said...

Ok, I see what you are saying about film recognition. Does the casual movie buff at least KNOW OF these films. On that test I'd say the very, very casual buff - say, the average younger moviegoer (say 40/45 or under) who would say, yeah I like movies (rather than just shrug) has only heard of Citizen Kane and 2001, and maybe Vertigo. MAYBE Searchers and MAYBE maybe 8 1/2. Of these films they've probably only seen 2001 (and chances are maybe 50/50 they liked it).

For more discerning buffs, or slightly older filmgoers raised in a more film-conscious time (or when some of these classics were relatively now, or for those with a budding interest in classics, I'd bet on recognition for all the American films, plus 8 1/2 and at least a passing familiarity with the existence of Passion of Joan of Arc. Maybe if they have read a book or two touching on film history, they recall references to Rules of the Game and possibly Tomyo Story - and it's just feasible they know of Sunrise as the first Best Picture winner (although I remember the first Oscar books I read making it sound like the Wings prize was the top award). That leaves Man with the Movie Camera as the biggest outlier but since it's only just shot up on the list (and thus in critical consciousness) give it time; before long it will probably start appearing in more references and on more lists (which, like it or not, is actually one of the main ways exposure occurs).

When you get to someone who has a strong interest in classic movies, I'd be surprised if they aren't readily familiar with all of these titles, except perhaps Movie Camera, and most likely they've seen all of the American ones, and a good chunk of the foreign titles (they could at least tell you what country, era, and probably director they come from).

Now, of course, the real question becomes, what to do about this knowledge/exposure or lack thereof? And that's where it gets tricky. Hold on a sec, I think I'm going to need a new comment to finish this thought!

September 1, 2012 1:05 PM 

Joel Bocko said...

(continued)

And frankly, I'm not sure that it's fair to accuse cinephiles of 'failing' cinema. To the extent they are, it's due to circumstances that would have made past cinephiles fail as well.

When it comes to other 'hot' interests - food is the perfect example of a cultural concern barely on the radar 15 years ago but now widely embraced and follows, with best sellers written about it, countless show and even channels devote to it, and even hit films like Julie & Julia made about it - public interest doesn't have to be stirred up, just cultivated and maintained, and experts in the field are greeted with respect and awe. Though I don't have stats in hand, I'd guess increasing numbers of people are going into the field, either as chefs or writers/critics or whatever. In all aspects it's a growing field.

Something like music is a steady field. There hasn't been a lot of development on the contemporary front in the past decade (or 2 really, since the death of Cobain and the co-option of hip hop, what vital figures have emerged to widespread recognition?). However, the technological explosion has fostered a compensatory appreciation for the past; it isn't at all uncommon to hear a kid today cite the Beatles or Doors as their favorite band, groups that (believe it or not) their grandparents would have listened to at their age. Popular music, at least from the rock era on, has a certain timelessness to it.

Film has also seen a technological explosion, and the digital revolution has also improved the availability and condition of classics. Yet there isn't remotely the same appreciation for the past. 'Old' movies are discussed in ways no one would discuss 'old' music. I've known people who would gladly listen to esoteric music, and read highbrow books, who scoff at the notion of 'arty' films and throatily proclaim their affinity for superhero movies above all else. At a time when Netflix has made classic cinema available at ones doorstep, the taste for it has evaporated for all except the initiated. A few films break through this ghetto - Godfather most notably, and 80s+ cinema enjoys the kind of continuing currency granted 60s+ rock music. But casual movie fans are far more likely than casual music fans to dismiss older icons as 'dated', to grow restless with the aesthetic of 'serious' attempts at art, and to instinctively define the whole enterprise as one of gut reaction rather than more sensitive appreciation (the 'it's awesome' syndrome Brody somewhat unfairly assigned to your argument).

Consequently, this attitude ossifies the approach new movies take, as they fall increasingly out of line with past traditions and gravitate toward new media for inspiration and validation. It also discourages people from seeing movies as an exciting (vs. merely glamorous) field, and something they could actually do themselves (the DIY aspect is a big part of food's and music's appeal). Less enthusiasm in turn creates less opportunities (a winnowing field might briedly improve the odds but eventually gatekeepers will rightly assume there isn't much to be mined and close up shop). This has pretty dire consequences for the state of the art. Outside of the marginalia of mumble core and neo-neorealism can you name any young directors? I can't. Ours is the first generation this has happened to in decades.

Was the attitude conditioned to create the current marketplace? Is the marketplace a response to 'naturally' arising cultural conditions? Which came first, the chicken or the egg? All I can say for certain is that the cultural conditioning and the seemingly natural inclinations (or disinclinations) are mutually reinforcing. For whatever reason, our zeitgeist does not favor the art of cinema.

So with that in mind, what's a poor boy to do in sleepy cinephile town? Oh, I'm not done yet... ;)

September 1, 2012 1:45 PM 

Joel Bocko said...

(continued)

Ugh, my iPhone accidentally signed me off while I was composing an epic Part 3. I've switched to my roommate's computer; maybe it's a good thing and I can try to economize my point a little bit!

Ok then...I would submit that rarely has widespread appreciation of classic cinema been fostered directly by film criticism. Usually it's through pop osmosis or word-of-mouth - more people will hear of Citizen Kane through a Simpsons reference or via a friend's video collection than because the New York Times ran a piece on it.

Individually, talking about Man with a Movie Camera or Passion of Joan of Arc on blogs directed at primarily the third, and nominally the second type of movie buff I mentioned won't make much of a dent in the larger conversation. If we each focus on ways to reach larger audiences, I think collectively the conversation can turn a little bit, although for the dam to really burst larger conditions - which we have little control over - will have to change. In the mean time...

The most important issue, I think, is connectivity. Connecting classic cinema to contemporary (particularly mainstream) cinema. Connecting content to readers in forms they will find appealing. Connecting movies to the larger cultural conditions, and connecting enthusiastic cinephiles directly with the casually curious.

Forgive me if I talk aloud to myself here; no doubt others have grappled with these issues more extensively than myself, but hopefully my musing can be somewhat illuminating or helpful.

First up, connecting the classics and the contemporary. I know that personally I came to Godard after dabbling in foreign cinema, which I approached after beginning to explore Hollywood classics, which I turned to when I saw their connection to the blockbusters of my youth I enjoyed. There was a direct connection between watching Indiana Jones movies on VHS with my father and sister in first grade and sitting down in a Queens theater for two 7-hour shifts to watch Rivette's Out 1 a year after I graduated college. It's what I speak of above - in noting how all films contain elements of the cerebral and the visceral - and as evangelical cinephiles it's our job to establish the fact that "everything is cinema."

I think a lot of people who might otherwise be curious about more esoteric fare, are turned away when advocates of that fare sneer at popcorn spectacles. The curious think to themselves, "Oh, well I guess their love for movies is of a different (and, it would appear, more ossified, less enjoyable) nature than mine, and therefore I'm not really interested."

Of course linking up contemporary blockbusters with past classics can be difficult; CGI, shorter attention spans, the influence of video games and comic books, and the penchant for griming up entertainment with faux-"realistic" grittiness have all made mainstream aesthetics seem further distanced than ever from past styles, in a way Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark (however up-to-date) did not.

But in a way, that sensibility - which I certainly share - just proves that I'm one of those people I'm complaining about. Whatever its drawbacks, there's obviously something in those films that appeals to large groups of people. As someone who would like to see those same people at least curious about classic movies, it would behoove me to find out what that is and tap into it, showing them how the older films share these qualities too. After all, it worked for me.

September 1, 2012 3:03 PM 

Joel Bocko said...

(continued)

Then there's the matter of HOW we present this material to them. This question has probably haunted me more than any other in the 4 years I've been blogging. Partly by accident, because it's just how a scatterbrain like me is naturally inclined, I discovered the virtue of diversity, cataloging, and a visual approach. Some people like to read long essays. Others want a short capsule. Still more are primarily visual, impatient with dancing about architecture but eager to see for themselves what a film looks or feels like, via images or clips. And yet more want the content to be as creative as what's discussed - seeking new ways of combining words, images, videos, quotations. People want an experience as much as the information.

Presentation is very important too, but I've found this to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, as I've more heavily designed my own site it seems to have drawn visitors from outside the somewhat incestuous blogosphere - most of my hits are via Google image searches, and while the vast majority must be casual drive-bys, some obviously stick around and (helped by extensive and highlighted directories) even leave a comment on an older piece. On the other hand, in the fast-paced mobile age of Twitter, Tumblr, and iPhone, content has to be malleable. When I finally got an iPhone recently, I discovered how little my site lends itself to a mobile platform. I haven't figured out yet how to balance between these two qualities and am not sure I can. Ultimately, because of my own taste, I will probably chose presentation over malleability but it will cost me and if I really want to evangelize I'll have to find a way to compensate.

The third connection, connecting the film world to other interests and topics, is frankly something I haven't figured out how to do yet, although it may be the most important key. One thing that frustrates me about movie-blogging, or any blogging really, is the feeling of preaching to the choir. That isn't really true; the cinema revival tent is a fairly unruly cavalcade with lots of opportunities to debate, expose, and excite. But still I yearn to reach the unconverted...

In a way (and apologies for the increasingly personal nature of these reflections) I am not well-equipped to serve this evangelical role. I have (as these comments more than evince) a tendency to ramble on and overanalyze, qualities which most readers don't especially seek, especially in casual perusals of the blogosphere. There's still a place for it, but I need to balance it with pithier (yet still piquant) pieces. Just as a reader surfing for a cool image of Roger Rabbit might stick around to read my review, so the casual cinephile drawn in by a capsule on, say, The Big Lebowski, might be willing to dive deeper for a marathon piece on Lawrence of Arabia.

Of course that's only part of the problem - the bigger issue is reaching outside the already-baptized initiates who are usually the people to stumble upon movie blogs in the first place. Again, I really don't have an answer for this I just know it's a problem, and suspect there's a solution. In the past, TV shows and newspaper articles on film could lure in the viewer or reader who came to the channel or opened the paper for something else. But the internet is probably too big for that kind of bait-and-wait approach; it lends itself too readily for niche-ification. Increasingly, we're a society of individual interests which I fear won't cross-pollinate enough. I dunno, maybe someone has a book on this subject they could recommend. I'm stumped!

September 1, 2012 3:04 PM 

Joel Bocko said...

(continued; final section, I promise!)

I do suspect that people are more likely to check out a new movie than randomly read about one they've seen (speaking of very casual moviegoers here). In that sense, having original content on a blog otherwise devoted to celebration of other films could lead readers down the rabbit hole. In this sense, filmmaking and film analysis could serve as dual engines, powering one another: with the initial analysis reeling in the already cine-enthusiastic, who will then spread the word when the original material appears, thus leading curious web-surfters to the site, and leading in the long-run to their exploring what the filmmaker thinks of other films. It's certainly an approach I've considered and ultimately hope to pursue in one form or another.

Finally, there's the matter of direct connection between cinephiles and the casually curious. Face-to-face encounters are still the most effective way to sell anything; you'll get a higher volume the more indirect your approach, but with a much lower success rate. Even in this virtual age, the best bet for actually flipping someone into a film enthusiast is to discuss with them, person-to-person, your excitement about the medium, let them feel it and respond to it, and giving them opportunities to see what makes you tick.

This needn't be limited to friends & family (who, truth be told, are probably the least likely to respond to your exhortations) - one idea I had recently was to set up a free discussion group week to week, if I could find the space. The online listing/advertisement would be geared towards those who are not dyed-in-the-wool cinephiles but merely curious about the medium. The hook would be a video series I created last year, with 8-minute chapters each containing about a dozen 30-40 second clips from DVDs I own. The streaming quality is hit-and-miss but I also have discs with the same content - I thought it would be interesting to screen a chapter at the end of each session, and then take a vote on what people wanted to see next time, based on the sample taste they'd gotten it. Obviously this same approach could be taken using pictures, or even simply describing the different films but I think the element of choice (within parameters) could be a key attraction for this type of film.

It's just an idea, and something I haven't even begun to explore yet, but I'm sure there are thousands of such ideas out there; all that needs to be done is to put them in place.

Ultimately then, Jason, while we may be on the same page in many regards I think my emphasis is a bit different than yours. Yes, naturally advocating or evangelizing for cinema is important but I think what may be even more important is a very conscious, planned approach to change the way movies are viewed and discussed in this country. I don't know that we can do more than chip away at the problem, but sometimes one little chip can expose a serious gusher. Let's hope so because we need it; it's been a remarkably dry season.

New to The Dancing Image? An old friend? Either way, there are probably a lot of posts or features you haven't seen yet. If you're like me, you're always discovering new blogs and saying to yourself: "Wow, this site has an extensive backlog. Some of this stuff looks great. I'll have to go back and check it out sometime!" And then of course, we never do.

Well, this is my invitation to break that trend! Visit (or re-visit) these two central pages and you can navigate easily and entertainingly through all this site has to offer. You can also just enjoy these pages without following any links; they are both directories and features in themselves:



Year by year, from the silent era to the present, I've linked every single film discussed in original essays or through quotations from other critics, illustrated with screen-caps or sampled in appetizing clips. This is the best route for those who have a particular favorite era in movie history, or who, like me, just love surveying the whole crazy chronology, from silent slapstick to the glamorous Golden Age, from sexy black-and-white to dazzling Technicolor, from the raw "cinema verite" of the Sixties to the computer-generated universe of today. It's all there, with plenty of pictures to illustrate the incredible journey. Power up the flux capacitor.



This one's ALL pictures, for those who think a visual medium deserves a visual approach. Generally alphabetized by title of the film (or sometimes painting or actor, if it's a promotional still), each image doubles as a link. You'll be led back to the post originally featuring any image you click on. This is a great way to let your eye guide your mind and imagination. (Fair warning: there's a bit of NSFW stuff in the form of some very mild nudity and generally cartoonish carnage.) If your browser is slow, the Picture Gallery may take a little while to load - but it's worth the wait, I promise!


And of course you can always visit Top Posts for my highlights from four years of blogging, The Directory for a straight-up list of all the reviews I've written, or, my personal favorite, the Video Gallery for a guided audiovisual tour through the movies - with uninterrupted 30 to 60-second clips from my DVD collection as your guide. I hope if you find things you like along the way, you'll let me know. I always enjoy hearing back from readers, especially on older stuff.

As for the new...

With summer ending and my priorities shifting, I'm hoping to hunker down soon and create lots of fresh content for this site. That means short essays (and occasionally long ones, though this summer's marathon essays were mostly exceptions to the approach I want to take!). But it also means, hopefully, pictures, multimedia posts, video essays, interviews with young independent filmmakers and perhaps even a short film or two of my own within the next year. The more ambitious projects, of course, hinge on finally getting a computer again (I've been working off library monitors, friends' PCs, and my iPhone for a while now). I want to create at least a hundred or so fresh posts before returning which shouldn't take long if they're short, so wish me luck.

And in the mean time, enjoy exploring The Dancing Image!

Short thoughts on: The Honeymoon Killers • Forbidden Games • Tout Va Bien & Masculin Feminin • Moby Dick • Robert Bresson • Yasujiro Ozu and Early Spring • My Dinner with Andre • Stanley Kauffmann • Sweet Movie

As I prepare a batch of fresh posts for the fall (a dozen new reviews are already written, with dozens more on the way), here are some more oldies but goodies. These sporadic notes and musings were originally comments on IMDb. Many of these thoughts led to longer conversations, and you can click on the date to see the original thread. Some of the responses are pretty interesting; in fact under the final fragment, on the extremely controversial Yugoslavian film Sweet Movie, I actually included some samples of the ensuing discussion (most of which I didn't see until now). And if you've viewed the film in question, I'd be really interested in your own opinion on the matter.

(See here for Pt. I and Pt. II of this archival project.)



On whether "The Honeymoon Killers" (1970) should have stuck to the facts about its homicidal protagonists (spoilers):

The same thing occurred to me. I was not familiar with the story before watching the movie, but afterwards I read an essay on the actual history (included with the Criterion DVD). Apparently Fernandez was into voodoo, believing he had supernatural seductive powers, and Beck was raped as a child and suffered psychotic episodes. As you point out, they both had families too.

In an interview, the writer/director admits he fabricated negative qualities for the victims. Making one a daffy, cheap old lady and another a streotypical America First booster type, is basically pandering to the Leftist social criticism of the time. While the characters are somewhat humorous the trick is cheap & trite, even slanderous.

Actually, I thought the movie was interesting on its own terms, and obviously the author has to choose very carefully what he does and doesn't include. In its own way, the film's story is very focused and including all those fascinating biographical details would have diluted some of its power (although complexity adds its own power). And I give credit where credit's due...the murders are not at all romanticized, and our sympathy is entirely with the victims of the brutal violence (unless you're Marguerite Duras, apparently).

But I do think the broad characterizations of the victims distracts from the films status as a kind of anti-Bonnie & Clyde and plays into the hands of those who would see it as a wacky, countercultural love story (see one of the posters) or some kind of political statement, as if the drowning of a small child was a really hip way to stick it to the bourgeoisie.

Read the full discussion here.



On the abandoned first and last scene of "Forbidden Games" (1952):

I watched the alternate opening and ending on the Criterion DVD. The children appear, dressed in old-fashioned garb in an idyllic location, opening up a book to read the "story" which is the film. In the end, the girl is crying and the boy pretends to read a happy ending which isn't actually there. I thought this actually heightened the tragedy of the film. Ironically, the framing device, with its stereotypical images of childhood and nature, appears more removed from reality than the "imaginary" story the children are reading. This somehow throws the dark complexities of the film proper into relief, and made it even more harrowing to me. Like waking up from a dark dream, and telling yourself it was only a nightmare when part of you knows it touched on a deeper, more troubling truth...

Did anyone else see this and agree/disagree?

Read this interesting response.



On "Tout va bien" (1972) vs. "Masculin Feminin" (1966):

This is the only post-'68 film I've seen by Godard (not including Letter to Jane which was included on this DVD). Masculin Feminin is my favorite Godard too, but it's hard to compare it to Tout va Bien. Masculin Feminin takes a documentary, cinema-verite approach towards its fictional characters, treating them as if they were real people, interrogating them to discover their opinions and feelings. Tout va Bien continues this Godard tradition BUT it also highlights the falsity of its fiction in a way that Masculin Feminin does not -- by staging scenes so that their "phoniness" is immediately apparent and we are not tricked into thinking what we're seeing is real. It's a Brechtian technique which Godard had become very fond of as he became more political (I think Masculin Feminin was on the very early end of his eventually Maoist political awakening). To me, the greatest flaw of the film was how unconvincing the workers were; one can try to pass this off as Brechtian but ultimately that seems like a cop-out to cover up Godard's lack of identification with the proleteriat. He's obviously much more comfortable with the bourgeois intellectual character played by Yves Montand, and the M/F-like scene in which he answers unheard questions (presumably from Godard) is one of the more successful in the film. Basically, Tout va Bien's successes, in my opinion, lie where all of Godard's successes do, in his ability to twist the usual forms of cinematic presentation in a way which shocks the viewer. His strength is visceral and when he lapses into didacticism, that strength can be depleted. Masculin Feminin is definitely the better film because it's investigative; at 36 Godard still believed in the ability of the camera to discover some sort of truth. Whether or not that's a realistic belief, it does make for more rewarding movies.



On how to make a movie of "Moby Dick":

The film would have to be made by a thoughtful, meditative director, someone like Terence Malick, except less placid and with a more temperamental, tumultuous style. If Peter Jackson got anywhere near this project, it would be roughly equivalent to the Antichrist rewriting the Gospels...

I disagree with the poster who said the only way to approach this novel in film format is to distill the melodramatic elements...I think the metaphysical content (which is what the book has largely been celebrated for) could be conveyed in a more experimental fashion, the memorable words being translated into images, sequences, sounds...of course, to present the whale and the wide-ranging spectacle, major funding would have to be supplied.

A big-budget avant-garde film...I guess I'm daydreaming again...



On my mixed feelings about the cult of Robert Bresson:

I'll throw my lot in with the others on this board -- Bresson's sense of humor (if he has one) seldom comes across and indeed, his persona and directing voice often come off as arrogant.

I read a quote recently saying that there were very few directors no one could ever label "pretentious", Mizoguchi and Bresson being two (was Ozu the other? I can't recall). I can't concur with that statement. Au Hasard Balthazar fascinates me (I waited years to see it, and when I did was disappointed, but it's grown on me since) and A Man Escaped and Pickpocket work really well as spare narratives. But there's something sinister about the way Mouchette is treated -- held up to abuse and ridicule until her sacrifice is supposed to cleanse us, the viewer, who up to then have been voyeurs, rather than participants, in her suffering.

And the cult around him annoys me - the whiff of self-satisfaction, the coldness in his austerity, and the way his followers get away with making statements like J. Hoberman's "If you don't get Bresson, you don't get cinema." Again, I'm not trying to dismiss him altogether -- he's a great, unique filmmaker and I like much of his work. But I think the films needs to be subjected to more intelligent and nuanced criticism than they are at the moment.



On whether or not Yasujiro Ozu is a "transcendentalist" (spoilers for "Early Spring"):

I am writing this immediately after viewing Early Spring for the first time. This movie was, to me, one of Ozu's most mundane - and I don't mean that as a put-down. Up to now I've seen A Story of Floating Weeds, Late Spring, Tokyo Story, Tokyo Twilight, and Floating Weeds, all of which were quiet films dealing with relatively simple things, yet all seem larger than life compared to Early Spring. True, there is the adultery and the death of a friend, but more so than any other Ozu film I've seen (and admittedly there's still the vast majority left) it is about the slow, steady stream of daily life, the office, the marriage, the responsibilities, the disillusionment, the weariness.

Which leads me to my question: is it fair to call Ozu's cinema "transcendental" as Schrader and other critics do? To me, it is not at all about transcendence but resignation and stoicism in the face of life's withering disappointments and trials. Yes, there is a lyricism to his films and catharsis here and there but compared to most other movies, I really don't think "transcendental" is the proper tag.

Anyone else agree/disagree?

(By the way, I agree with the comment on the main page which mentions "Sopranos" - I've been re-watching it since the series finale and it's amazing to what extent the Mafia aspect exists just to sex up a show that's as much about doing the laundry and taking out the garbage as it is about killing people).

Read the full discussion here.



Confronted by dozens of posts on "My Dinner with Andre" (1981) asserting that the title character's stories were "boring," I disagreed:

Crazy perhaps, self-indulgent certainly (as he himself says halfway through the dinner) but certainly not boring! The character reminded me of people I've known who come off somewhat flaky, but are redeemed by their sincerity. Andre didn't do all these "live" theatrical events for the sake of being different or original but in pursuit of some spiritual truth. Wally is certainly far more secular, if that's the right word (and I think it is) than Andre but I'm not sure his reactions in the first half are entirely embarrassed and uncomfortable. I think he's a bit fascinated too - actually, I think he's ambivalent. Some of his comments, questions, and reactions early on strike me as honestly compassionate towards and interested in his friend, with others do seem cold and calculated to insulate himself from this crazy person. Actually, the most subversive moments in the movie were when the characters would say something about really committing to their lives, recognizing the humanity of really living, and then the waiter would come up to take their plates and they would awkwardly ignore him. I agree that the staging, shot structure, and editing are superb and that Louis Malle's direction is subtle but great.

I liked Waking Life but I also agree that there's more value to having real characters offer these questions and insights, which come out of their own life experiences, rather than creating human mouthpieces to spew philosophical thoughts which supposedly spring up out of a vacuum, devoid of any context.

Read an interesting response here.


This one's not me, it's a quote I found from the New York Times review of "My Dinner with Andre" (1981):

Vincent Canby wrote:

At times ''My Dinner with Andre'' suggests a reunion of Christopher Robin (Mr. Gregory) and Winnie-the-Pooh (Mr. Shawn) 30 years after each has left the nursery to pursue separate careers in the theater. Mr. Gregory, older, originally more practical, has sought truth in ways that must strike a lot of us, including Mr. Shawn, as crazily if wonderfully self-indulgent.

Mr. Shawn's Pooh, however, is just what you might think Pooh would grow up to be - still filled with wonder and curiosity about mundane things, capable of finding joy in daily tasks of utmost banality, thinking that a trip to the top of Everest to find oneself is somewhat expensive when he, Pooh, is convinced he might find himself quite as easily in the cigar store next door. Wally, like Pooh, is also candid enough to say at one point, with polite exasperation, ''I really don't know what you're talking about.''



On Stanley Kauffmann:

How many living critics can start a recent column with this phrase?

"On the morning of August 24, 1927, a few weeks before I started high school"...?

P.S. And five years after I wrote this, he's still going strong...



On the scene in Dusan Makavejev's "Sweet Movie" in which a woman strips down and fondles young boys:

Honest question about the striptease...

If the little boys had been little girls and the female seductress a male, how would you and other audiences react to the scene? What does this say about us, the filmmakers, and the scene itself?

here are some of the responses I received:

MovieInYourFace: "I totally agree. If that were the case I would say this movie would still not be released and banned in even more areas.

I think it was a pretty f'd up scene anyway... and not because I'm bourgoise - or whatever this movie labels those offended as - it's because it's done simply for the cause of offending."

mianda72: "Well they weren't and I'm not sure it would be any more or less incendiary if they were. The scene itself isn't about sexuality, it's about corruption. That scene (along with Ms. Canada's REBIRTH from the suitcase on the Champs Elysee) is one of the central metaphors of the film, that is to say how subversive ideologues (communists) prey on the idealism and naivete of the youth. The scene crosses the line of provocation into antagonism that's for sure.(as I'm sure was Makavejev's intent)"

potatochip007: "All of you are projecting your own fears and insecurities onto this one scene instead of looking at this movie as a whole. You are being uptight, and just now reading all of your comments generally weirded me out about our society.

While this is just a meaningless message board on a website that few read anyway, I just want anyone who might be reading this who feels differently and are outraged from the poorly expressed opinions here, you are not alone.

Throwing around terms like "molested" and "harmful", that's the real harm.

All of you, seriously?? Seriously. You weren't even there. And this is what you're getting from this movie here? This is what you are concentrating on, what you are taking away?

Ugh, I give up."

TheManInOil: "Who cares what it's "about"? Nothing justifies a woman getting naked with kids, caressing them suggestively, opening their pants, shoving her naked crotch in their faces and saying "You can *beep* me if you're lucky." Nothing."

Read the full discussion, including more comments here.

I've just finished one of the best essays on film I've ever read. It's called "Has Hollywood Murdered the Movies?" and it's by David Denby in The New Republic. Denby's essay is about the effect that over-digitalization and informal formalism have on movies: how the narrative art has been pruned to the point of poisoning the tree, how a concern with fleeting impression over deep-seated effect has destroyed the relationship between the spectator and the spectacle. In six pages, Denby effectively conveys things I've been feeling and saying for years. I don't necessarily agree with all of Denby's examples (some of the films he sees as exceptional I think are endemic, and vice-versa) but his overall point seems irrefutable. Movies are no longer made, marketed, or (especially) received the way they used to be, not in an evolutionary sense (these goalposts are always shifting) but fundamentally. This passage in particular had me shouting "Yes!" aloud as if I was watching the Patriots score a touchdown:

"The glory of modernism was that it yoked together candor and spiritual yearning with radical experiments in form. But in making such changes, filmmakers were hardly abandoning the audience. Reassurance may have ended, but emotion did not. The many alterations in the old stable syntax still honored the contract with us. The ignorant, suffering, morally vacant Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull was as great a protagonist as Julie Marsden. The morose Nashville was as trenchant a group portrait and national snapshot as the hopeful Stagecoach. However elliptical or harsh or astringent, emotion in modernist movies was a strong presence, not an absence." (emphasis added)

What an elegant and perceptive way of contrasting the formal revolution of the fifties, sixties, and seventies with that of today. Elsewhere, at times, Denby falls into the trap against which he cautions in his opening: "Nostalgia is history altered through sentiment. What’s necessary for survival is not nostalgia, but defiance." Denby is a brilliant diagnoser but suggesting viable solutions is not so much his strong suit, whatever his best wishes. That's okay; we need more defiant voices right now, more people who, as Denby puts it, "are made crazy by the way the business structure of movies is now constricting the art of movies." What's so astonishing is that so few people seem to be concerned about this; as Denby says later:

"These observations annoy many people, including some of the smartest people I know, particularly men in their late forties and younger, who have grown up with pop culture dominated by the conglomerates and don’t know anything else. They don’t disagree, exactly, but they find all of this tiresome and beside the point. They accept the movies as a kind of environment, a constant stream. There are just movies, you see, movies always and forever, and of course many of them will be uninspiring, and always have been. Critics, chalking the score on the blackboard, think of large-scale American movie-making as a system in which a few talented people, in order to make something good, struggle against discouragement or seduction; but for my young media-hip friends, this view is pure melodrama. They see the movies not as a moral and aesthetic battleground, but as a media game that can be played either shrewdly or stupidly. There is no serious difference for them between making a piece of clanging, overwrought, mock-nihilistic digital roughhouse for $200 million and a personal independent film for $2 million. They are not looking for art, and they do not want to be associated with commercial failure; it irritates them in some way; it makes them feel like losers. If I say that the huge budgets and profits are mucking up movie aesthetics, changing the audience, burning away other movies, they look at me with a slight smile and say something like this: “There’s a market for this stuff. People are going. Their needs are being satisfied. If they didn’t like these movies, they wouldn’t go.”"

Denby argues, on the contrary, that "The audience goes because the movies are there, not because anyone necessarily loves them." I tend to agree, and agree as well that to the extent audiences, at least younger audiences, do seek out this form of entertainment, it's more a matter of conditioning than inherent predilection. Lately I've had conversations with people only eight or ten years younger than me, but there's already a sensible generation gap in the way they view movies: when I argued for originality, for a cinema that created new characters and stories and experiences instead of endlessly rehashing the same material they seemed perplexed - they went to movies precisely to see the familiar "rebooted" with new technology but the same old connections. The sense of adventure, at least beyond the adventure of ever-slicker fantasy worlds, has gone out of cinema, and with it, I think, a sense of emotional investment, a feeling that movies were somehow important and exciting.

No doubt not everyone always felt this way. Yet sixty years ago, even thirty or forty years ago - hell, I'd argue even ten years ago - movies were a bigger part of the national psyche, part of the way we engaged with the world around us whether (as Denby has it) we were younger kids being dragged to "adult" movies, half-understanding what we were seeing and intrigued by what we didn't understand, or adults who had to see the latest topic of conversation so we'd know what to talk about at the party. Movies were important. Important no matter what type of person you were, or where in society you came from, and the more obscure films basked in the reflected glory of the more iconic examples: thus even the most challenging avant-garde experiments felt like brothers under the skin to the blockbuster titans. Everything was cinema.

I've written about this before, from a more personal angle (exactly a year ago, in an essay called "The Big Picture") and I've also alluded to many of these arguments - the way digital cinema has thrown the relationship between illusion and reality out of whack, the decline of movies as they are colonized by younger art forms (comics and video games), the possibility that audiences - in an age of increasing interaction (with media) and atomization (from one another) are losing their orientation toward cinema and engaging more with more long-form, episodic, open-ended formats like a TV series. Denby doesn't touch on all these points in his essay; it's a frustrated cri de coeur but sometimes I feel like he might be missing some connections. It would probably take a full-length book or at least a much longer essay to really nail the how and especially the why of cinematic decline.

Most of all, Denby doesn't really seem sure where to go from this crisis. At essay's end, after pinpointing numerous causes and outcomes of "a new and awful way to put a picture together", he has only this to offer as a shred of hope:

"So are American movies finished, a cultural irrelevance? Despite almost everything, I don’t think the game is up, not by any means. There are talented directors who manage to keep working either within the system or just on the edges of it. Some of the independent films that have succeeded, against the odds, in gaining funding and at least minimal traction in the theaters, are obvious signs of hope. Terence Malick is alive and working hard. Digital is still in its infancy, and if it moves into the hands of people who have a more imaginative and delicate sense of spectacle, it could bloom in any one of a dozen ways. The micro-budget movies now made on the streets or in living rooms might also take off if they give up on sub-Cassavetes ideas of improvisation, and accept the necessity of a script. There is enough talent sloshing around in the troubled vessel of American movies to keep the art form alive." 

This is rather thin gruel after working up our appetite, but at the risk of sounding ageist part of the issue might just be that Denby is in his fifties or sixties. His proposals are essentially returns to a past, yet he himself, in one of the essay's most provocative and essential passages, notes that past forms were not inevitable but in large part accidental; that the train has not derailed from its one truth path but taken another route, one it could have taken from the get-go but for historical and cultural circumstances of the early twentieth century:

"A long time ago, at a university far away, I taught film, and I did what many teachers have no doubt done before and since: I tried to develop film aesthetics for the students as a historical progression toward narrative. ...  But I now think there was something merely convenient in teaching that way. The implication of my lesson plan was that the medium had by degrees come to a realization of itself, discovering in those early years—say, 1895 to 1915—its own true nature embedded within its technology: the leafy oak of narrative lodged within the acorn of celluloid. It is a teleological view, and it is probably false. In truth, there is nothing inherent in the process of exposing strips of film to light sixteen or eighteen times a second (later twenty-four times) that demanded the telling of a story. ... It is likely ... that narrative emerged less from the inherent nature of film than from the influence of older forms—novels and short stories and plays. ...  If creating fictions is not encoded in the DNA of film, then what is happening now has a kind of grisly logic to it."

With this in mind, I doubt what will "keep the art form alive" is a strengthening of the weak elements that right now preserve the flickering flame. I think those embers are dying and fanning the ashes will not ignite a new conflagration; what is needed now is an entirely new spark. This will, unfortunately, entail a sharp turn from the dying elements which added so much to the meaning and romance of film in its early years: the communal experience, the texture of celluloid. The new cinema will be broadcast through the internet and viewed on computer screens; it will be fashioned with cheaper and more flexible tools, less prohibitive in cost, less restrictive in ability. Many movie-lovers want to revive the lush and glamorous means used to weave a spell. But these means have always been in the hands of those with money and power, the gatekeepers to the system, and they will not relinquish their money or power any time soon. Creators and critics need to get it into their heads that the essence of cinema, its soul so to speak, lies not in the trappings of Hollywood but in what is conveyed amongst those trappings, or what was once conveyed.

Since the Hollywood gatekeepers will never let us in, better to fashion our own world outside the gates, just as those within (or their ancestors) did once upon a time. If you can bring down costs, simplifying the input, you can multiply the output. The film industry essentially arose from scratch. Why not repeat the experiment, and delight in the fresh and unexpected results?

Movie content is a story that grips you, a character you care about, but also a throwaway gesture that delights you, a fleeting expression on a face that moves you, a color or location or change of light or piece of scenery you find thrilling for some unexplainable reason. Movie style is how a shot contains its elements, how editing creates the exquisite ecstasy of frisson, how the actors' or camera's movement opens up a new world with each footstep or turn of the dolly wheel. Celluloid was sensitive and added many qualities of its own while the experience of viewing with a big audience amplified and extended the experience; no doubt we are losing something as these qualities disappear, but in lightening its load cinema will also become more fleet-footed, more flexible in its ability to reach viewers and reflect new aspects of their reality - and their imagination.

Perhaps because I am young enough (twenty-eight, and disillusioned with contemporary cinematic trends for about half my lifetime) I can understand this better than someone in his sixties or seventies. Then again, on the same day, on the same website, David Thomson, no spring chicken, published a companion piece that points in the right direction. At first, more than halfway through his essay, "American Movies are Not Dead, They're Dying" I thought Thomson was merely indulging in his recent penchant for dismissing both the cinema and the cinephiles who adore it with a reckless passion he once shared: "older cinephiles stay at home nursing their Criterion securities. They have never had it so good, or so misleading. ... don’t worry: new movies will be released on any Pad you have, streaming, screaming, and available for interruptions of all sorts."

However, as it turns out the operative description in his dismissal is "older," not "cinephile." Thomson goes onto praise the inclusion of The Man with the Movie Camera in the recent Sight & Sound top 10, an inclusion he attributes to the younger viewers. Observing that "Dziga Vertov’s 1929 film is the single work in the new top ten that seems to understand that nervy mixture of interruption and unexpected association," Thomson goes on to praise viral mashups recontextualizing Lindsay Lohan and Scarface. Ultimately he is observing a similar phenomenon to Denby - a cinema stripped of the need for (conventional) narrative and returning to its frenetic pioneer roots; only Thomson detects the silver lining. This suggests that perhaps the problem with the new mainstream cinema may not be the new ingredients but the old - not that contemporary blockbusters are fragmented, unmoored, and driven more by speed than gravity, but that they are all this while still clinging to old cliches. The worst of both worlds, so to speak: narrative accouterments without the soul of emotional involvement, formal fireworks without the full freedom Vertov's experiments allowed. Ultimately Thomson fudges on his enthusiasm for the young, and ends on a pessimistic note but his uncertain hopefulness is more significant. He can't see how the jokey You Tube videos might evolve into something more ambitious and rewarding, but I can.

For older viewers, the decline of emotional involvement and the ascent of video (both in the recording and viewing sense) are inextricably tied. But when I fell in love with movies, I could move with ease between the home living room and the neighborhood multiplex; I was as fascinated by the Hi-8 images my father recorded in home movies as by the massive 35mm prints projected in a dark room. Therefore I know that new technology and home viewing are not the end of cinema but one more development. Likewise I intuit that as narrative continues to develop, and as movies continue to explore avenues that are not primarily, essentially, or even minimally, narrative - they can still retain, indeed strengthen and evolve, an emotional relationship to the the audience.

Just as the past glory and the present misery of the movies were not inevitable, neither is the future. We must make it ourselves.





Here are some more great passages from Denby's essay, to whet your appetite until you're convinced to read the whole thing:

"When I speak of moviegoers, I mean people who get out of the house and into a theater as often as they can; or people with kids, who back up rare trips to the movies with lots of recent DVDs and films ordered on demand. I do not mean the cinephiles, the solitary and obsessed, who have given up on movie houses and on movies as our national theater (as Pauline Kael called it) and plant themselves at home in front of flat screens and computers, where they look at old films or small new films from the four corners of the globe, blogging and exchanging disks with their friends. They are extraordinary, some of them, and their blogs and websites generate an exfoliating mass of knowledge and opinion, a thickening density of inquiries and claims, outraged and dulcet tweets. Yet it is unlikely that they can do much to build a theatrical audience for the movies they love." 

"The Iron Man movies have been shaped around the temperament of their self-deprecating star, Robert Downey, Jr., an actor who manages to convey, in the midst of a $200-million super-production, a private sense of amusement. By slightly distancing himself from the material, this charming rake offers the grown-up audience a sense of complicity, which saves it from self-contempt. Like so many big digital movies, the Iron Man films engage in a daringly flirtatious give-and-take with their own inconsequence: the disproportion between the size of the productions, with their huge sets and digital battles, and the puniness of any meaning that can possibly be extracted from them, may, for the audience, be part of the frivolous pleasure of seeing them."

"Many big films (not just the ones based on Marvel Comics) are now soaked in what can only be called corporate irony, a mad discrepancy between size and significance.
Most of the great directors of the past—Griffith, Chaplin, Murnau, Renoir, Lang, Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock, Welles, Rossellini, De Sica, Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, Bergman, the young Coppola, Scorsese, and Altman, and many others—did not imagine that they were making films for a tiny audience, and they did not imagine they were making “art” movies, even though they worked with a high degree of conscious artistry. (The truculent John Ford would have glared at you with his unpatched eye if you used the word “art” in his presence.) They thought that they were making films for everyone, or at least everyone with spirit, which is a lot of people. But over the past twenty-five years, if you step back and look at the American movie scene, you see the mass-culture juggernauts, increasingly triumphs of heavy-duty digital craft, tempered by self-mockery and filling up every available corner of public space; and the tiny, morally inquiring “relationship” movies, making their modest way to a limited audience. The ironic cinema, and the earnest cinema; the mall cinema, and the art house cinema."

"The intentional shift in large-scale movie production away from adults is a sad betrayal and a minor catastrophe. Among other things, it has killed a lot of the culture of the movies. By culture, I do not mean film festivals, film magazines, and cinephile Internet sites and bloggers, all of which are flourishing. I mean that blessedly saturated mental state of moviegoing, both solitary and social, half dreamy, half critical, maybe amused, but also sometimes awed, that fuels a living art form. Moviegoing is both a private and a sociable affair—a strangers-at-barbecues, cocktail-party affair, the common coin of everyday discourse. In the fall season there may be a number of good things to see, and so, for adult audiences, the habit may flicker to life again. If you have seen one of the five interesting movies currently playing, then you need to see the other four so you can join the dinner-party conversation. If there is only one, as there is most of the year, you may skip it without feeling you are missing much."

"Constant and incoherent movement; rushed editing strategies; feeble characterization; pastiche and hapless collage—these are the elements of conglomerate aesthetics. There is something more than lousy film-making in such a collection of attention-getting swindles.

Again and again I have the sense that film-makers are purposely trying to distance the audience from the material—to prevent moviegoers from feeling anything but sensory excitement, to thwart any kind of significance in the movie." 

"People who know how these movies are made told me that the film-makers could not have held those shots any longer, because audiences would have noticed that they were digital fakes. That point (if true) should tell you that something is seriously wrong. If you cannot sustain shots at the dramatic crux of your movie, why make violent spectacle at all? It turns out that fake-looking digital film-making can actually disable spectacle when it is supposed to be set in the real world. Increasingly, the solution has been to create more and more digitized cities, houses, castles, planets. Big films have lost touch with the photographed physical reality that provided so much greater enchantment than fantasy. 

In the scriptorium, an unspoken vow was repeated daily: audiences need to get emotionally involved in a story in order to enjoy themselves. The idea is so obvious that it seems absurd to spell it out. Yet in recent years this assumption, and everything that follows from it, have begun to weaken and even to disappear."

"It is shocking to be reminded of some of the things that are now slipping away: that whatever is introduced in a tale has to mean something, and that one thing should inevitably lead to another; that events are foreshadowed and then echoed, and that tension rises steadily through a series of minor climaxes to a final, grand climax; that music should be created not just as an enforcer of mood but as the outward sign of an emotional or narrative logic; that characterization should be consistent; that a character’s destiny is supposed to have some moral and spiritual meaning—the wicked punished, the virtuous rewarded or at least sanctified. It was a fictional world of total accountability.
Space could be analyzed and broken into close-ups and reaction shots and the like, but then it had to be re-unified in a way that brought the experience together in a viewer’s head—so that, in Jezebel, one felt physically what Bette Davis suffered as scandalized couples backed away from her in the ballroom. If the audience didn’t experience that emotion, the movie wouldn’t have cast its spell."

"This seems like plain common sense. Who could possibly argue with it? Yet spatial integrity is just about gone from big movies. What Wyler and his editors did—matching body movement from one shot to the next—is rarely attempted now. Hardly anyone thinks it important. The most common method of editing in big movies now is to lay one furiously active shot on top of another, and often with only a general relation in space or body movement between the two. The continuous whirl of movement distracts us from noticing the uncertain or slovenly fit between shots. The camera moves, the actors move: in Moulin Rouge, the camera swings wildly over masses of men in the nightclub, Nicole Kidman flings herself around her boudoir like a rag doll. The digital fight at the end of The Avengers takes place in a completely artificial environment, a vacuum in which gravity has been abandoned; continuity is not even an issue. If the constant buffoonishness of action in all sorts of big movies leaves one both over-stimulated and unsatisfied—cheated without knowing why—then part of the reason is that the terrain hasn’t been sewn together. You have been deprived of that loving inner possession of the movie that causes you to play it over and over in your head."

It don't rain but it pours. All summer, I've taken my sweet time in updating this blog, yet in the past four days, I've put up four posts, all (I think) worth reading. This is the second post in three hours but time was of the essence, and not just because the subject is a Criterion flash sale (good till tomorrow morning) - or rather the video Criterion is using to promote said sale.

The video, a delightful and enticing montage featuring brief clips of every single DVD in the Criterion Collection, bears more than a passing resemblence in construction and spirit to a video I posted last fall though it's probably just a coincidence (I am hardly the first to employ the "in ... seconds/minutes" concept, though most seem to focus on a single film). See 'em both here for yourself:






The primary differences that strike me are that (in music, and probably in speed too) mine is a bit harder-edged and that Jonathan Keough's is probably a bit more nuanced - though sometimes the timing seems random, certain clips seem to punctuate the breaks in the music nicely and to extend a few frames beyond the others, though maybe it's just my imagination. My own video was essentially an afterthought to a much larger video series, posted for the benefit of friends and I didn't expect it to receive the attention it did (although Keough got way more views, way faster!) - my clips are all exactly the same length (four frames, if memory serves) and except for the starting point, the cuts were not timed to the music. The result is a much rougher video, for better or worse.

In one regard at least, I would heartily encourage Keough to consciously imitate me: a few days after posting "60 Years in Cinema (in 40 Seconds)" I posted a follow-up which consisted of still frames from each film, held for two seconds, with a title superimposed, a kind of code-cracking key for the blink-and-you-miss-it speed montage. I would love to know where some of Keough's images come from, and given the size of the Criterion Collection, it could take years to find out. Get to it, Jonathan!


Oh and, despite the fact that I've pre-empted myself, do check out those earlier posts - especially the one from Saturday.

Only when I return to this opus, perhaps several times, will I offer a full-length review. Even to compose a capsule after a single viewing seems a cheat; there's so much to soak up and sink in. Watching the Histoire(s) in an ice-cold room above a garage, as I prepared a cross-country trip, this flickering film was like a fire to warm myself by. Although in French the title has a double-meaning, "story" and "history," perhaps "dream" is the best description. In Godard's impressionistic vision, images from a century of cinema bleed into one another while he offers cryptic and evocative observations on the soundtrack, offering music, sound effects, and titles in conversation with the fragments of cinephilia swirling around us. One can scale any number of intellectual peaks in response (Jonathan Rosenbaum has an epic appreciation of the film on his website, illustrated by at least a dozen stirring screen-caps, including the one featured above); but one can also dive down deep into the subjective swirl of what one is seeing. That's Godard; cerebral sure, but what a sensualist!



Speaking of cinematic sensualists, few can top Terence Davies in that department. Linking his lushly-produced, impressionistic, autobiographical narrative with aural and visual quotations from popular movies and music of the fifties, Davies creates a poetic visual memoir, partly about what happened to him as a boy, but even more about how it felt. Set in the grubby world of the Liverpool slums but stylized with painterly love and care to evoke a feeling of nostalgia, the film depicts what Davies calls an interlude between the death of his tyrannical father and the sufferings of adolescence, a brief time when he was relatively free from anxiety and able to enjoy life both actively and contemplatively. In the latter category, we have long, beautiful shots of the light subtly dappling a carpet through a window and finally (in the closing moments, scored to the title track) the moon appearing and disappearing behind a cloud. To see this on a big screen with Davies in attendance was a treat, as was his discussion afterwards, in which he memorably and euphorically quoted lyrics from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and practically hugged himself with joy.



In a rush to view a dozen or so classics on You Tube that I hadn't found elsewhere, this was one of the highlights. Luminously photographed, with mesmeric performances by Hertha Thiele (as luminous schoolgirl Manuela von Meinhardis) and Dorothea Wieck (as compassionate teacher Frauleine von Bernburg). Though the lesbian theme was more pronounced in the book and play, the film is quite forthright about Manuela's "crush" on von Bernburg, and the film has a palpable overheated quality which goes while with the controlled and inventive Pabstlike direction of Froelich (working hand-in-hand with Sagan, the director of the play). Crackling with that energy that could be found in the better early talkies, and with an ominous air of menace in its authoritarianism vs. compassion story (since within two years Hitler would be taking power), the movie holds up today as a moving melodrama. Thiele and Wieck easily evoke girlish passion and a young woman's uncertain authority, respectively, although ironically they were born the same year.



Also viewed on You Tube, and also crackling with the the energy of early talkies (although this is of the spitfire American variety rather than intense German vintage), Me and My Gal has humorous routines, a charmingly roguish performance by Spencer Tracy as a flatfoot cop trying to woo a waitress, and a shaggy-dog story involving gangsters and prison breaks as well as romance. Most importantly however, it has Joan Bennett, whose wisecracking, sexy-as-hell allure holds the picture together like wadded-up gum, maybe the same gum she loudly snaps from scene to scene. Depicting how-far-are-we-gonna-go necking in all its pre-Code glory, this couple's a far cry from the cheerfully domesticated husband and wife a reunited Tracy and Bennett portrayed in Father of the Bride (1950). These two young lovers have the Depression-era metropolis as their playground and backdrop; meanwhile ever-inventive director Walsh makes creative use of the new sound technology to give them both voiceovers  during their makeout sessions. Some films are carried by style, some are carried by story, some are carried by stars. Bennett's a hell of a gal, and as a result this is a hell of a picture.



And now for something completely different. With every new film I see by him, my opinion of Lars von Trier grows. I haven't seen Manderlay yet, but The Five Obstructions, Dogville, Antichrist, and now Melancholia paint a picture of the one Western auteur (that I've seen, anyway) able to successfully bridge between postmodern irony, which seems (perhaps incorrectly) inevitable in European art at this stage, and a sensibility of deep feeling and meaning. Following in Antichrist's footsteps, Melancholia negotiates between the gritty texture of a Dogme, neo-neorealist aesthetic and the epic grandeur of a new high-end digital formalism - and it also balances between the tropes of genre (in this case, sci-fi and disaster vs. Antichrist's relationship to shock-horror) and the demands of self-consciously personal art. Finally, both films move beyond modernity to evoke an almost medieval sense of artistic allegory. Melancholia's conceit is wonderful in its zany way, absurd as science, but deeply evocative as myth: a new planet has been discovered "hiding behind the sun" and as it approaches the earth, mankind is doomed. Kirsten Dunst is a bride who leaves her groom before their honeymoon, in one of the most astonishing and effective wedding sequences to open a film since The Godfather or The Deer Hunter; she welcomes the  apocalypse with open arms. Charlotte Gainsbourg, the agent of destruction in Antichrist, here represents the last whisper of humanity that doesn't want to go down without a fight. Neither does von Trier, mixing resignation with defiance in a film that, while not quite as powerful as Antichrist, remains one of the most fascinating features from last year.



A cult classic as much for its corny but warm-hearted sincerity as for its awesome Hawaiian surf footage, this played at a retro screening in Santa Monica this past summer, and the enthusiasm of the audience was palpable. I myself was coming off a rough week, and this was the perfect movie to return a smile to my face. North Shore, a disappointment in theaters which developed a following on HBO and VHS tape, is one of those movies that gets passed on behind friends, its lines quoted and moments referenced as inside-joke talismans with goofy glee. This is especially true when it comes to Turtle (John Philbin), the ultimate 80s surfer dude who shyly shapes master longboarder Chandler's (Gregory Harrison's) boards and watches resentfully as naive outsider ("a Barney" as Turtle calls him) wins Chandler's trust. Rick is the ultimate fish-out-of-water or, in this case, landlubber-in-water - as he previous surfing experience was in Arizona (yes, you read that right). North Shore features cameos by famous surfers like Gerry Lopez and Laird Hamilton (who apparently still gets crap from strangers confusing him with the egotistical asshole he plays onscreen), a winsome love interest in Nia Peeples (who appeared with five other members of cast and crew after the screening, and is still as gorgeous as back in the day), and an ending that manages to disarmingly mix feel-good triumph with its no-competition ethos. My favorite moment in the whole film, however, arrives about halfway through when a photographer is chatting with the hero and somewhere in the background a random boogie-boarder rushes into a breaking wave and then screams as he goes flying through the air. My friends and I used to rewind the tape and watch this blink-and-you-miss-it background action over and over, laughing aloud on each occasion. Good times.



This second Bing-Bob road movie is at once charmingly dated, with its pop culture references and World War II setting, and shockingly ahead-of-its-time (in the censor-provoking suggestiveness, its Frat Pack bonhomie, and especially its meta-self-referentiality, shared by some other Golden Age comedies like Hellzapoppin or the Marx Brothers movies, but typically assumed to be a feature of our postmodern age). Road to Morocco is recommended viewing for any younger movie buffs (including this one) who typically would've associated Hope with the "square", Establishment-endorsing figure of the sixties and seventies; here his moon-faced visage bursts with anarchic impatience, self-ridicule, and endless, hilarious lust. Crosby is fun with his smooth, suave, laid-back vibe but it's Hope's show to steal, and he does so vigorously with some of the funniest double-takes I've ever seen (one, following Bing's question "What's that bulge in your pocket?" is so fleeting I almost wonder if it's intentional; but on first viewing I laughed instantaneously and uproariously).



Touted in its rollout as a comeback for Stone (the Wall Street sequel did fairly well, but both it and W. received mixed reviews at best), apparently Savages was drowned out by the rebooted Spider-Man. I still haven't seen that one, and am in no rush to do, but I enjoyed Savages quite a bit. The tale of two drug dealers, hippie Ben (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and hardcore war veteran Chon (Taylor Kitsch), who want to turn the tables on a cartel that has kidnapped their mutual lover O (Blake Lively), Savages sometimes suffers from some cringeworthy dialogue ("he didn't have orgasms, he had wargasms") but the filmmaking is generally sharp and the narrative entertaining. Obviously Stone was attracted by the good old Platoon duality of Ben and Chon, and he's clearly charmed enough by Lively's allure to devote a superfluous black-and-white glamour montage to her, but it's the supporting performances by older actors that make the film most effective. Salma Hayak, smoking at forty-six, feasts on her incredulous mamma-bear kingpin role, while John Travolta makes the most of a few scenes as a balding, overweight, DEA agent with his corrupt hand in the till (midlife paunch aside, some of that old Saturday Night Fever swagger is apparent as he saunters down the boardwalk with his younger cohorts). Best of all is Benicio del Toro (does he ever go wrong?) who gets to flip his Traffic cop part on its head by embodying a ruthless, grungy enforcer. There's a twisty ending and a number of topical reference points (from Iraq vet Chon's penchant for setting IEDs to the inevitable drug war commentary; nearly thirty years after Scarface Stone's point remains) but at heart Savages is a slick and enjoyable thriller.




Three relatively light entries and then...this. The alphabet and the cinema make strange bedfellows and for years Shoah has sat uncomfortably along other movies: is it primarily a work of art? A testament? A provocation? All of the above? Claude Lanzmann's legendary 10-hour documentary of the Holocaust, has always unsettled and discomforted those who see art, entertainment, and information as interlocking and inseparable elements of cinema; Pauline Kael, whose touchstone for movies - including great movies - was "pleasure" angrily rejected Shoah and particularly the cult surrounding it, spurring major controversy in critical circles. I found Shoah on You Tube, divided into fifty-nine 9-minute segments, and watched an hour each night. The only time I've ever really cried watching movie was the interview in the barbershop. It was not very cathartic; Lanzmann allows no such easy outs. Shoah is as much about memory as anything else: there is no stock footage and certainly no recreations, only mournful faces recalling their suffering and empty landscapes haunted by the evil events that occurred there decades ago, but within collective memory. Like Histoire(s), this a film that will get the full treatment from me on another occasion, because I couldn't do it justice now, in a paragraph or two nine months after I watched it. But for now I'll note that, while it no longer seems to be available on You Tube, you can watch it on Netflix. I strongly suggest that you do.



Here is a documentary that emphatically does seek to weave art, entertainment, and information into one ambitious, messy, unique package. It's been criticized in some quarters as too idiosyncratic but I found it thoroughly invigorating, particularly in the first and last third of the movie (the middle passage, covering the well-trod ground of mid-century cinema, gets a bit lost in the anecdotal and familiar). A BBC miniseries based on Cousins' innovative and highly readable book, this journey is narrated by Cousin in his lilting Irish brogue and is pointedly revisionist - proudly pointing to a pluralist, multivocalist vision of cinema rather than a Grand Narrative focusing on a few magical moments in the medium. This is where the series will be most illuminating for Western viewers: it opens up a world of forgotten pioneers and latter-day Third World expression which not only highlights overlooked areas on the cinematic maps but recontextualizes and refreshes some of the most famous movies of all time: this is a film unafraid to pair the Bollywood musical-cop-romance classic Sholay, which few Brits or Americans will have heard of, with a little movie called Star Wars as two populist entertainments that revolutionized cinema in the seventies. And indeed, while casting a skeptical eye on the "bauble" of Hollywood (Cousins' analogies and frameworks here are simply ingenious; he doesn't just discard an old narrative, he has the courage to invent a new one, and it's the strategy and structure which make this film more than just a collection of observations), Cousins eagerly celebrates the highbrow and the low, the conventional and the inventive (though his emphasis is on the latter, in all its manifestations), the celebrated and the overlooked. To me, the best film of 2011.



A charming idea, and one that leads me to wonder how many other filmmakers could inspire an entire movie devoted to paying homage to their themes, subject, and style. Certainly Alfred Hitchcock (Mel Brooks usually parodied broad genres, but he devoted an entire film, High Anxiety, to riffing on this one director). Definitely Walt Disney, although at a certain point that legacy becomes bigger than one man. Beyond that, there are dozens, maybe hundreds of directors who could be pastiched in recognizable fashion, but wider audiences probably would not catch on. Where Super 8 missteps, and fundamentally fails, is in confusing two distinct groups of Spielberg entertainments: the pure popcorn thrill rides, full of cartoonish human carnage, and the sentimental heart-tuggers, with their quieter momentum and sincere humanism. Jonathan Rosenbaum has long highlighted a misanthropic vein beneath Spielberg's supposedly warm-hearted image, but in fact this applies primarily to the first group of films (Jurassic Park and The Lost World, the Indiana Jones films - particularly Temple of Doom). But Super 8 expects us to abruptly shift gears from watching an alien monster munching on innocent townspeople to sympathizing with it as it makes contact with the little boy and reveals it just wants to "go home." This only serves to highlight the cruelty and undermine the emotion - at the end of the day, Spielberg maintains an uneasy balance between showman and artist (unlike, say, Hitchcock, he seems to veer between the two extremes rather than combine them in a single package). The wider audiences along with the director's detractors, and apparently Super 8, is primarily aware of the showman and, in paying Spielberg tribute (with Spielberg's own participation, which adds an interesting twist), Abrams and Super 8 actually do him a bit of a disservice.



Widely touted as a long-awaited return to form for Disney (for sixteen years after The Lion King, the House That Walt Built suffered in comparison to its owned-but-not operated innovator Pixar and the Dream Works Shrek series), Tangled was at once a welcome re-engagement with classic fairy tales (Rapunzel finally joining the Disney princess family) and an embrace of new technology (this was the first Disney film to be rendered entirely in 3D CGI). The title and subject matter were illuminating. Disney's success has always been predicated on two elements: one, the appeal of its stories and characters, and two, the quality of the animation (sometimes criticized as too generic and smooth-edged, but unquestionably sweeping and inventive at its best). Tangled is very Disneyesque in the first aspect, but insufficiently so in the second. I was surprised and charmed to see that the characters were as likable and imaginatively created as those from the vault - the tradition of distinctive character animation continues at the studio. On the other hand, the animation itself, despite the luster of the three-dimensional style, had a surprisingly flat and generic feel. There are some exceptions - certainly the boatroad through the floating candles is impressive - but the forests onscreen don't breathe with the depth of Bambi or the stylization of Sleeping Beauty; the setting have a kind of generic solidity that misses the cluttered charm of Pinocchio or the dazzling grandeur of Beauty and the Beast. Apparently, this format is Disney's new direction, but it remains to be seen if they can recapture the transportive visual worlds of their classic films as the last remnants of cel animation shrivel up and waste away like the witch at the end of Tangled.



More wryly amusing than laugh-out-loud funny, this HBO collaboration between Altman and Doonesbury cartoonist Gary Trudeau starts in archly satirical mode but as it moves through the campaign season (its episodes unveiled in tandem with the actual Democratic primary schedule) we start to become more and more sincerely sympathetic with the honorable if somewhat disengaged Jack Tanner, and more and more invested in his quixotic and fictional campaign. Besides, how satirical can one get when society seems to already be satirizing itself? The 1988 campaign, particularly the general election (before which Tanner ends, on an ambivalent note) was when the hypertrivial method of campaign coverage - and campaigning itself - truly began in earnest; uninspired by eventual candidates Bush and Dukakis, the media would instead focus on pointless hot-button issues like flag burning, or misleading voter scare-tactics like the Willy Horton ad. In contrast to all of this, Tanner is a decent guy with a real concern for people, yet there is something a bit vapid about his persona. We hear little about specific policy and when his campaign videographer (hilariously played, in one of the series' few outright broad turns, by Matt Malloy) captures him an in impassioned, offguard moment, the campaign offers a new tagline: "For real" - yet all we've actually heard him do is offer some general thoughts on leadership and name his favorite Beatle. Confronting Tanner with the reality of 1988 America (most memorably when he and his staff visit the Detroit ghetto, and the project strays as far from comedy as it will ever get, culminating with Tanner's discovery of a dead child), Altman and Trudeau both demonstrate the politician's willingness to go outside the boundaries of mind-numbing Beltway mentality and express doubts about whether Tanner, or indeed any politician, can truly grapple with these programs, especially through the current system. Ultimately, Tanner '88 is less about answers than observation, weaving its way between reality and fiction until we're no longer sure which is which, if we ever were.



This tremendously entertaining and thought-provoking miniseries begins in a museum, or apparently a museum, as any art show might. Our host, seventies long hair overflowing, a loose-fitting funky shirt hanging off his shoulders and arms, contemplates Botticelli's Venus and Mars, its fame rather familiar, the conventional museum setting perhaps numbing us to the painting's original power, especially as we're further distanced by the filter applied by the camera and the TV (or in my case, computer) screen that we're watching this on. And then Berger, without turning to acknowledge the camera, reaches forward and cuts into the painting on the wall, carving Venus' face from the larger context and creating an isolated fragment in much the same way modern mechanical reproduction does (more than ever in the age of the internet). The unexpected gesture is shocking, subversive, provocative, and very funny. Before watching this series on You Tube (where you can find it in its entirety, in full color unlike some earlier available copies), I read the book and while fascinated by Berger's ideas the presentation seemed incomplete (fragments of text and tiny black-and-white reproductions failing to evoke as full a picture as the TV series) and I was skeptical about Berger's larger points and aims.

Watching the series, however, it all makes sense: Berger is questioning not only how the new media context changes our perceptions of art, but how the very legacy of art appreciation is tainted to begin with extra-aesthetic concerns disguised or "mystified" as aesthetic - most controversially, he compares oil paintings with slick modern advertisements and contends that their purpose and approach are fundamentally similar. All in all (and if you have all day, or several) Ways of Seeing makes a fantastic double feature with Kenneth Clark's equally individualistic yet pointedly more traditional Civilisation, demonstrating both the appeal and pertinence of a more mythic approach and the satisfaction taken when taking it all down a peg, as Berger does in his side-by-side comparisons, his discussions with women of their presentation in classical art, his meta-observations not just about paintings but the medium he himself is using to present his case. Appropriate for a show which questions the conventional academic reading of artistic nudity, Berger's fundamental cry is that of the little boy in Hans Christian Anderson: "The emperor has no clothes!" But his project is not only negative, but positive - a celebration of works whose vitality transcends or at least reinvents culture and context. At its core, Ways of Seeing wants to remove or at least recognize as many obstacles as possible, so that we can see more clearly, with our own eyes, instead of seeing merely what others want us to see. Whether or not you agree with his point, it's a series that must be seen and grappled with - I've included part 1 of the first episode below along with the other You Tube clips.



I've included this for completist purposes, as it's the only Wind in the Willows adaptation I haven't discussed on this website (see my Willows series for the rest). A video adaptation of the Children's Theater of Mineapolis production (the above picture is from the show, not the movie), with the masked characters taken out into the fields and forests of the countryside, this version is most noted for featuring Julee Cruise, later the chanteuse in "Twin Peaks," in a bit part. Looking at that picture, I suspect that originally the play featured the storytelling characters narrating the actions of the actors in animal costume, who probably performed in pantomime, and this strikes me as a better approach than the one the video takes (we see the actors in heavy costumes and masks covorting outside with labored, exaggerated gestures and an obnoxious and grating voiceover). All in all, I finished the tape, which I found in a video store going out of business - again for completist purposes - but I certainly wouldn't recommend it. This is how my Willows viewings ended, not with a bang but a whimper.

From now on, I will post steadily - usually Monday, Wednesday, and Friday - so you can expect a consistent output from this blog. I'm not talking short-term, I'm talking long-term, at least a year if not more. I'm already building up a substantial backlog.

This begins in the coming month with three reviews a week. After writing these pieces, I accidentally discovered that they neatly fell into four groups, and so each week has a theme: teenage struggles, forties films, movies about Africa, and fantasy entertainment from the eighties. A discussion of two idiosyncratic Spalding Gray works, which (appropriately enough) didn't fit in with any of the themed weeks, will wind things up, along with (maybe, maybe not) a horror film for Halloween. All of these reviews will be relatively short and focused - a new approach I want to take in my written work. But that's just the beginning.


On November 1 (my birthday) I will post my first narrated video essay - a practice I hope to continue at least once a month, and make a central feature of this blog from now on. The following week, I will kick off a schedule which will hold for at least a year.

Mondays are dedicated to random posts, alternating between reviews, video essays, interviews with young low-budget filmmakers (my inbox has been accumulating their emails for years, and I plan to make use of them soon), and various other odds and ends.

Wednesday's for a series called "The Favorites" which will explore, in a structured, economical, and reader-friendly fashion, the 100 favorite films I listed at the end of last year: it will take a countdown structure and answer a few straightforward questions, boiling my thoughts on each film down to the essentials.

And Friday will be devoted to several series of personal interest: first an episode guide to the anime show "Neon Genesis Evangelion" (including addended conversations with blogger Bob Clark, who introduced me to the series). When that finishes, perhaps a year-by-year exploration of popular American movies, examining how style shifted and evolved over time, including everything from tone and characterization to lighting and editing, using hit movies (not necessarily the best, but the representative) as touchstones. I think this could be really, really fascinating and illuminating.

Eventually, maybe in a year or more, I want to offer up, at an even faster pace, a brief look at every single film I own on DVD and VHS, filling in the gaps in my own directory and creating a massive line-up featuring screen-caps and links to reviews for every movie in my collection. I also have other ideas for individual pieces (a "Dark Side of Oz" piece, exploring the moody history and associations of the iconic classic) and extended series (a multipronged approach to, say, a few hundred carefully chosen movies - encompassing handcut trailers with pop music, deep formal analyses using video and image, prose meditations on the film's mood, and a gallery of screen-caps from each title - it would take years to prepare, so no promises). But for now, just know that there will always be something brewing in my online home, and the table will not be empty for the foreseeable future.

So starting on Monday, The Dancing Image will become reliably and consistently prolific, economical, and colorful (full of images - I'll be able to screen-cap again soon!!! - and varied in both the types of movies I approach, and how I approach them). If you've dropped in occasionally in the past, an approach no doubt fed by the sporadic ebb and flow of my own posting and infrequent engagement with the larger blogosphere, now's the time to feel confident visiting more often.

I am not only taking this route for its own sake. It also serves a larger purpose, which I might as well announce up front: to build a reliable audience and platform for my own work as a filmmaker. After years of trying to get myself going, I am writing and developing several projects and I hope that in the coming months and years, The Dancing Image will facilitate the premiere of interesting online movies - short films and eventually serialized features by yours truly.

So that's the plan. After four years of building the blog, going in different directions, taking breaks, and fluctuating in my engagement with the larger blogosphere, I now plan to start making full use of it. I hope you will too, and that you'll enjoy visiting The Dancing Image as much as I'm enjoying creating it.

Well, I've always had a weakness for announcing everything officially - from seasonal updates to series kickoffs to online makeovers. Hopefully pontification and prognostication will shortly make way for demonstration. Actions do speak louder than words, after all.

Rosetta is about 30 now.

When the Dardenne brothers released their second feature in 1999, their title character (Emilie Dequenne) was a teenager saddled with more responsibility and less comprehension than many of her peers - at once an adult (more so than her own mother) and a child, prone to temper tantrums and exasperated confusion as she's asked to play by rules she doesn't even understand. In the end, it appears Rosetta may not even make it to 30, and the raw immediacy of the Dardennes' style and pace (both the character and the viewpoint - trying to keep up - never stop moving, as if they're playing a sort of neorealist video game) make such questions seem irrelevant while you're watching.



Yet afterwards you wonder. Not only Rosetta's age but the world situation and film aesthetics have changed over time - the latter in large part because of this film and others by its filmmakers. The story, simply following Rosetta's desperate search for a job in an often indifferent but sometimes sympathetic Belgian city, was actually criticized by some intellectuals in '99. Why would this impoverished individual actually seek employment instead of defiantly ridiculing or ignoring the capitalist system and its values? Where was her rebellious instinct? Others conveniently reinterpreted the material to celebrate Rosetta's get-ahead mentality, making her a kind of icon of the no-bullshit underclass, but this reading doesn't quite work either because the person she most hurts in her driven quest is Riquet (Fabrizio Rongione), the young man who tries hardest to help her.

Today, the bohemian what-me-work? attitude of the 90s seems utterly out-of-touch. One has to be gainfully employed in the first place to fret over the "alienation effect" of work. Hence, Rosetta seems more relevant than ever and so do its themes - the complexity of "fairness" and "honesty" in a dog-eat-dog world (spoiler: Rosetta tattle-tales on her would-be friend, who is cheating his boss, and she gets his job: scrupulous integrity or selfish gamesmanship?). Rosetta alternately seems ruthless (the above scenario, and also a sequence where she almost drowns the same character) and naive (as she grows upset when being terminated, having foolishly assumed that working hard is all you need to do).

Likewise I found her at times infuriating - her treatment of Riquet is utterly callous and certainly unloyal - and at others admirable, depending upon the situation in which she applied her fairly consistent values. If Rosetta is still with us, I hope she learned how to treat other people honorably. Yet I also hope she maintained her own strong-willed code of ethics, at least to apply to herself; our world needs a sense of honor, no matter how quixotic.

Perhaps even more fascinating than the way our world changes is how the eyes that perceive it change too. Take, for example, the teen movie. It's been exactly thirty years since Fast Times at Ridgemont High hit multiplexes. Culturally a lot has changed, even to the point of coming full circle: the 80s fashion sense (brand new but fully blown in '82) went way out-of-fashion and then rather remarkably came back, albeit cloaked in irony and nostalgia. Meanwhile, those pixelated arcade games in the Sherman Oaks Galleria (itself a fallen victim of history's merciless march) have morphed into slick computer graphics that are close to convincingly emulating the very flesh-and-blood of the bored high-schoolers who play them. Meanwhile, those original teenagers, of course, are now well into middle age with kids the same age as they were in this movie.



But of course some things don't change - or haven't yet. Take the butterflies-in-stomach interplay between cute girl and geeky guy (we still don't see much of the reverse in movies, do we?). Or the yawning gap between authority figures who know the nature of the world (Mr. Hand, the sardonic lecturer, portrayed by "My Favorite Martian"'s Ray Walston) and indifferent kids who just want to have a good time (Spiccoli, played by Sean Penn in a star-making performance). These types and themes have been with us, by rough estimate, ever since one Mesopotamian knocked up another or the first Egyptian student skipped lessons to nibble on a pleasure-inducing leaf.

More narrowly too, teenage culture - which did not exist in its present fashion much before the dawn of rock 'n' roll - has actually remained fairly consistent in its outlines since the summer of '82. Sure, the tools of communication have transformed, with iPhones replacing those old red clunkers with the tangled cords. This is less true of what is actually communicated: initially nervous, eventually bold hints of sex and drugs, a sense of belonging to a mass tribe connected by scholastic rituals and pop culture touchstones, the uncertainty of whether one belongs to the world of childhood and adulthood.

The teen movie itself, however, the way this experience is communicated on movie and TV screens, has changed. The tropes are no longer as fresh as they were when Fast Times helped invent them, and nowhere near as raw. True, Cameron Crowe's screenplay is often broadly comic, yet director Amy Heckerling brings the truth to the surface of potentially cliched situations. She (and to be fair, Crowe's story) foregrounds the characters' work and school lives rather than just treating adolescence as a liber-teen party. Meanwhile, sex is demystified as "Surf Nazi" graffiti hovers over Stacy's (Jennifer Jason Leigh's) orgasmless deflowering, and later a hot-and-heavy sex drive doesn't make it much past kickoff.

And while today's teen movies make feints toward rebellion but seldom let controversy impede on commercialism, Fast Times has character grappling with abortion, gleefully fellating bananas (more shocking for Phoebe Cates' childlike matter-of-factness than all the violated apple pies in the world), and uttering profanities still juicily provocative because the teens seem to know they're barely getting away with it - back then, there was no PG-13 compromise between family-oriented PG and the big R.

Most importantly, Fast Times at Ridgemont High lacks 21st century slickness. Scenes kind of bump along until they're over, the movie lacks the TV-commercial artificial polish of contemporary mainstream comedy, and Leigh's performance in particular has moments of emotional honesty that still cut. It also doesn't hurt that many of the characters - the girls, at least - look like they could plausibly be in high school instead of getting ready for their tenth reunion.

Fast Times is, don't get me wrong, a whole lot of fun, full of comedy, sex, and yes, even melodrama. But it tempers these with a spontaneity in character, a poignancy in situation, and a refreshing looseness and openness in the style. Thirty years ago, Jeff Spiccoli - with his entertaining but off-center frivolity - was one character in one hit teen movie. Today, one gets the sense he's writing, directing, and dominating all of them.

In the film The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, Francis Doyle (Emile Hirsch) and Tim Sullivan (Kieran Culkin) stumble across a dying dog. The two middle-schoolers are stoned, returning from a visit to the drug dealer, from whom they've also purchased some animal tranquilizer (part of an elaborate plot to steal a cougar from a wildlife center). They hope to set it loose at their parochial school, an idea that seems as outlandishly cartoonish as anything in the comic books they illustrate in their spare time.

This other animal encounter, however, is all too real. Confronted by the suffering canine, Francis (the thoughtful protagonist in thrall to Tim's badass/smartass persona) seems both shocked and helpless. Lying by the side of the highway, guts spilling out onto the grass, the whimpering beast is obviously suffering, but what can be done? Tim, usually ready with a sarcastic quip, takes the matter into his own hands - literally - as he tries to carry the dog to safety. Moments later, it dies in his arms.

A similar incident occurs in the book upon which the movie is based, yet with a different outcome. The novel was composed by 31-year-old Chris Fuhrman on his deathbed; about a third of the way through, there's a flashback in which Francis recalls finding a dog on the outskirts of a shabby black neighborhood. Tim shouts angrily about the neighborhood's indifference, getting into a racially-charged argument with one black teenager and then, as in the movie, he tries to help the dog. But he does so by brutally killing it, putting it out of a misery he's certain the entire world shares.

This difference highlights the contrast between book and movie, for better and worse. The book is sharper and edgier than the film - more cutting in its characterizations of adult authority, and focused heavily on racial tension, a topic which is completely excised from the finished film. On the other hand, the movie is more complex and ambiguous in its approach: the subjectivity of literary narration is displaced into animated comic-book sequences inventively woven into the live action, and producer Jodie Foster is cast as the head nun whose severity is tempered by a certain sensitivity.

Foster's ambivalence about unsympathetic characters works for the nun, a composite of several characters in the book, and more compelling than any of them; however, this hesitation is less effective when it comes to Tim, who is still cocky and nihilistic in Culkin's hands, but loses some of his bilious hard edge. This desire to soften also frustrated animator Todd McFarlane, who was hired to do the animated sequences; even in the DVD's self-congratulatory special features, he complains that he wanted the cartoons to be grislier and more sexual, reflecting the dark, tough-minded sensibilities of teenage boys.

Ultimately, the book works better for me - it's less watered down. The director Peter Care occasionally flat sense of dramatic development and a lack of rawness in the film's aesthetic both worked to undermine some of the story's important moments, at least for me. I also got the sense, watching those special features, that there were a few too many cooks in the kitchen; a lot of interesting ideas aren't quite woven together. That was my impression, anyway; I know people who adore this movie. For me it was more of an intriguing concept than a fully-realized work. That said, what The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys attempts onscreen interests me: in losing the often vital bitter nastiness of Fuhrman's authorial voice, it gains a more well-rounded view of human nature.

The best moment in the movie arrives when Francis sleeps over at his troubled girlfriend Margie Flynn's (Jena Malone's) house. He wakes up in the middle of the night to witness a melancholy female ghost stare at him from across the bed, calmly cross the room, and then disappear in the musty attic air. Chilling and subtle, the scene articulates the spirit of death which shadows both book and movie, balancing Tim's bleak view of a cruel and meaningless universe with Francis' sense of a life haunted by ghosts of memory - memories of fateful mistakes, memories of intense pleasures, and memories of the melancholy moments in between.

Obviously such ghosts haunted Fuhrman as he penned his one and only book, and its "fearful symmetry" (the dog scene is not the only one to involve animals and death) echoes the William Blake poem to which it pays tribute.

There's an intriguing irony to the story with which Sullivan's Travels delivers its anti-message message. First, that story: Sullivan's Travels follows John L. Sullivan (no, not that one - this one's a director played by Joel McCrea), who wants to shoot O Brother, Where Art Thou (no not that o- never mind), a serious drama focused on war, fascism, and the Great Depression. He wants to capture the times, speak to the messes, deliver a message - but yes, he placates the worried moguls who try to deter him, "with a little sex."



The larger film's sex appeal arrives courtesy Veronica Lake, who's never been better - like the movie itself, she gets to both glam it up by a Hollywood poolside and slum with the Forgotten Men, while accompanying our hero in his hobo-impersonating research. Preston Sturges, one of the most inventive writer-directors of the World War II years, overtly mocks Sullivan's earnest entreaties; it's amusing to see the privileged, pretentious Hollywood hack flee an industry that thousands (including Lake's nameless Girl) are trying to break into. Ironically, due to hitchhiking, carjacking, and hay fever, Sullivan always winds up back in the lap of luxury he desperately decries, with the luscious Lake along to lick his wounds.

The film's wisest words are delivered by Sullivan's butler (Robert Grieg) who intones: "You see, sir, rich people and theorists - who are usually rich people - think of poverty in the negative, as the lack of riches - as disease might be called the lack of health. But it isn't, sir. Poverty is not the lack of anything, but a positive plague, virulent in itself, contagious as cholera, with filth, criminality, vice and despair as only a few of its symptoms. It is to be stayed away from, even for purposes of study. It is to be shunned."

Sturges' gut, apparently endorsing this sentiment, doesn't prevent him from following in Sullivan's footsteps, eventually depicting the impoverished with solemn photography, moody musical cues, and a montage which mostly breaks from the preceding zany tone. When Sullivan is robbed, injured, and imprisoned the film ceases to be very comedic at all, instead embracing the grim pallor of I Was a Fugitive From a Chain Gang, albeit with occasional comic relief.

And then it's on to the film's famed conclusion, in which the grimy prisoners gather in a sympathetic black church (a welcome reprieve from the wince-inducing "colored chef" routine earlier in the film). There the beleaguered convicts savor a Mickey Mouse cartoon and roar with laughter. Immensely relieved and incredulously disbelieving, Sullivan asks one of his captors, "Am I laughing?" Following an ingenious ploy to engineer his release (as his own murderer), Sullivan declares he's through with seriousness, that what the huddled masses really need is laughter and entertainment.

It's a very clever conclusion, but also something of a cop-out, especially considering what came before. In a sense, Sturges gets to have his cake and eat it too - both ridiculing and implicitly endorsing the idea of an entertaining Hollywood picture focused on the social depths and desperation. With, of course, a little sex.

Watching three films from 1944-45 back to back to back I was struck by World War II cinema's variety of flavors. Hail the Conquering Hero, an all-American Preston Sturges comedy, takes place far from the battlefield, on the homefront where all eyes are on a war which remains somehow elusive, even imaginary. They Were Expendable, on the other hand, is mired in the muck of war; it's one of John Ford's most Hawksian films, the male camaraderie (even featuring a "one of the guys" tough gal, played by Donna Reed) mostly untouched by sentimentality or mythologizing. Meanwhile, Powell and Pressburger, that eccentrically flamboyant yet surprisingly un-escapist duo, negotiate between these two spheres. A Canterbury Tale is set on a "home front" which is also at times a battlefield, a British countryside fundamentally transformed by modern warfare, with its troop transports, blackouts, and women at work. Together, the three films convey a fascinating triptych view of how movies presented the war while it was still unfolding.


Hail the Conquering Hero sings a cockeyed duet with Sturges' earlier Sullivan's Travels: in that film, a wealthy filmmaker desperately tries to experience Depression-era poverty, yet circumstances keep returning him to comfortable Hollywood. Hail's impossibly named Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith (Eddie Bracken) is an ex-Marine, discharged due to hay fever; while millions of young men worry they'll die by Japanese hands, Woody frets over missing Guadalcanal and losing his opportunity to follow in dead Dad's footsteps. A troop of sympathetic Marines concoct an elaborate lie whereby Wilson will return home a war hero and, against Woodrow's wishes, the whole town ends up feting this "triumphant" veteran. Sturges savors the ironic premise while also sardonically yet lovingly painting a portrait of out-of-touch small town America, concerned and fascinated by the war but without a clue of its reality.

Apparently, while directing They Were Expendable, John Ford treated John Wayne like a real-life Woodrow Truesmith, constantly mocking and correcting him for not "getting it right" due to inexperience (Wayne got a deferment and never served, whereas Ford himself was in the Naval Reserves, and shot propaganda films in the heat of combat). Star Robert Mongomery, D.P. Joseph August, and writer Frank Read were all either reservists or veterans, and the story - following the plight of a PT crew as the Japanese approach the Philippines - is saturated in stoic attitude and realistic texture. It has its longueurs - if that's the right word - but they are gripping longueurs, capturing both the nervous downtime and the chaotic action of warfare. The attack sequences still cary a verve and sense of realism, while the location work, conducing in Florida, nonetheless captures the pungeant texture of Bataan.

A Canterbury Tale is also shot on location, far from the sweat of the Phillipines, yet just as close to a (different) enemy. The movie fascinates because it captures a sense of civilian society at war. There are three soldiers onscreen, yet the most memorable characters are Alison Smith (Sheila Sim), a hearty farm worker whose lover was lost in the Mideast, and Thomas Colpepper, JP (Eric Portman), an enigmatic official and local history buff who just may be the "glue-man," a mysterious midnight marauder pouring glue in girls' hair to keep them indoors. When the true culprit and motive are unveiled, there's less logic than whimsy in true Powell and Pressburger fashion. However, this conclusion also concerns itself with what this changing world will ultimately produce. If Hail anticipates and speculates on the war from afar, and Expendable experiences it up close, then Canterbury already starts to move beyond it, recognizing how this total war brings people together and pulls them apart, how it can create a new future while reawakening the past and how, unlike poor Woody, ultimately we are all soldiers on history's battlefield.

Leslie Halliwell was an inveterate curmudgeon, but he certainly had a sense of humor. A great many - perhaps a majority - of the entries in his 1981 collection "Halliwell's Hundred" are comedies. The British programmer and film critic, who was quite pointed in his dismissal of virtually everything that followed the 1950s, cherished memories of afternoons spent in the local cinemas or at student theaters or even in a cozy den at home (or, for that matter, a barely-sheltering hotel room, surrounded by a hostile American city just out his window). In these spots he would reel in the dreamlike atmosphere and lighter-than-air concoctions of Hollywood or British classics.

Classic comedies were, in a sense, perfect for his purposes: escapist without succumbing to sentimentality, subtly subversive yet essentially safe, entertainment with intelligence which was neither glum nor superficially glamorous. Halliwell had a soft spot for ramshackle constructions barely held together by the slick mechanics and studio system of the Golden Age film industry: he's at pains to emphasize that his book is not canonical, but rather a warm favorites list (if that; some go beyond even guilty pleasures and are classified as fascinating failures). They are cherished memories of a movie past. The enthusiasm shows in the writer's loving language - this volume is stuffed with plot summaries (spoilers everywhere), a potentially hit-and-miss methodology but Halliwell is skilled at evoking a film through quotations and descriptions.

It was through this approach that I was turned onto Hellzapoppin, a rollicking burlesque sampled heavily by Halliwell's celebratory prose. Perhaps too heavily; when I finally found the film on You Tube I hardly laughed at all - in this case, Halliwell hadn't just spoiled the plot (which he astutely notes is impossible to describe, and besides what would be the point in trying?), but the gags! The only moment that made me laugh as hard onscreen as on page occurred when Hugh Hubert wears a frightening mask which fails to scare fellow audience members. Shrugging, the defeated would-be prankster sits back in his chair and removes the mask. The lady sitting next to him turns, stares at his real-life bulbous mug...and screams hysterically. Dumb, but hilariously timed.

Tell me what you think - the film is on You Tube (the wretched quality of the print, especially since so many gags are visual as well as verbal, probably helped decrease the ticklishness of my funny bone). Since I've mostly refrained from giving away the jokes or the film's general approach, does the film make you laugh? Who's to blame for my lack of mirth: Halliwell or Hellzapoppin or You Tube or me?

Taken together, these two 2006 films - with almost the exact same title and similarly themed stories - make an illuminating double feature. Amazing Grace is a big-budget historical drama, directed by veteran filmmaker Michael Apted. Crackling with atmosphere and lively performance, this biopic follows William Wilberforce (Ioan Gruffudd), the British MP who finally convinces Parliament to abolish the slave trade following a 15-year crusade. One of his inspirations is the ex-slave trader-turned-penitential pastor John Newton (Albert Finney), composer of the famous verse "Amazing Grace" which captured both his shame and his religious conversion.

The Amazing Grace is Nigeria's first film shot on 35mm and despite some scenic photography and quality performances, it's generally as unpolished as Amazing Grace is slick. The Nigerian film focuses on an earlier period in the life of John Newton (Nick Moran), as he captains a slave ship to West Africa, suffers a crisis of conscience, and falls in love (Pocahontas-style) with native Ansa (Mbong Ogungide). The narrative is heavily fictionalized, and one of its more absurd conceits is that Newton lifted the melody for "Amazing Grace" from a tribal song, when in fact the melody was imposed on Newton's verse in 1835, long after he died; it was derived from a very un-African tune called "New Britain."


Yet if the detail is historically false it does point to a larger purpose: director and co-writer Jeta Amata clearly wants to present the awakening of European conscience as a collaboration between Africans and Europeans, rather than a wholly white achievement. In this, even more than style or story focus, the film differs from Apted's Amazing Grace which, without apology, presents the forces of African liberation (excepting only one minor character who dies before the goal is attained) as almost entirely white-skinned and well-off. Since slaves and even ex-slaves were largely (and rather obviously) disenfranchised at the time, there's no doubt some historical accuracy in play - although one has to wonder why Olaudah Equiano, that aforementioned exception, plays such a tiny role onscreen compared to the other abolitionists.

The film succeeds quite well on its own terms - Amazing Grace is dramatic, moving, often witty, and captivating in its depiction of a society in transformation. Yet taken as some sort of grand statement on abolition, something does seem to be missing, and it doesn't help that virtually every mainstream film dealing with slavery or civil rights focalizes the action through a sympathetic white protagonist (even when doing so requires reinventing history, as with Mississippi Burning or last year's The Help). I found Amazing Grace fascinating politically - it goes out of its way to stress Wilberforce's parallels with contemporary left-wingers (he's not only a bleeding-heart when it comes to human rights and government activism, he's also youthfully unkempt and a lover and protector of animals too). Yet the screenplay by Steven Knight also makes certain to emphasize Wilberforce's rejection of Thomas Clarkson's (Rufus Sewell's) Jacobin rhetoric, which is presented as prima facie objectionable rather than as something Wilberforce considers before rejecting.

Amazing Grace's philosophy is emphatically liberal rather than radical, celebrating reform over revolution and suggesting that activism is or should be fun. Not without doubts, of course: Wilberforce scolds future wife Barbara Spooner (Romola Garai) for talking about the anti-slavery campaign as if it's a lark; after all, politics is more about painful social change than personal style, right? Yet ultimately Spooner's spontaneity and gaiety reinvigorate Wilberforce's campaign. In a speech at the end of the movie, Lord Charles Fox (portrayed with delightful panache by Michael Gambon) claims that, while Napoleon may be considered a "great man," he must go to bed at night haunted by memories of the wars he has caused; meanwhile Wilberforce can finally sleep soundly, having achieved a truly noble aim. A movie devoted to a physically and emotionally grueling fight to end a massive institution shouldn't be accused of making it look easy, yet in the end Wilberforce does get to see the pot at the end of the rainbow.

As spectacle, Amazing Grace is very entertaining (I can't agree with critics who found it boring or undramatic) yet as human drama it's ultimately The Amazing Grace which is more compelling. In Amata's film, the European characters are all a shaded mix of good and bad, with ruthless slave-driver Oliver (Scott Cleverdon) alternately playing bad cop to Newton's more conscience-afflicted captain and providing common sense alternatives to Newton's hypocritical and racist rationalizations. Meanwhile, the African characters (including Ansa and Etim, played by Fred Amata) are painted in more noble colors, yet they are also shown to be human - there's a village leader who almost kills Newton and Ansa and a slave-trader whose motivation mixes greed and survival.

The romantic spark between Newton and Ansa is also surprisingly effective, in large part due to Obdungide's winning and luminous screen presence, although their dialogue sometimes stretches credulity (and could captured and confused slaves really pick up on English so quickly?) - as does the convuluted passage in which Newton and Ansa, for reasons that remain unclear, convince a number of Africans that the slavers just want to take them along on a kind of work-exchange program. Yet if The Amazing Grace wants to correct a skewed historical perception (of African slaves who remain objects of pity, no less objects for that), it is less interested in using facts to do so, and more intrigued by the possibilities of what Oliver Stone once called "the countermyth." Myths and countermyths both can carry the sting of truth and in The Amazing Grace this truth can be seen in the humanity of both slaves and captors, set at odds by historical circumstances yet still fundamentally the same creature under differently-hued skin.

This truth can also be found in the disturbing shade of trouble and tragedy hovering over Newton even after the film closes, all the way into his appearance in Apted's Amazing Grace as an old man still tormented by the voices of his previous victims. To me this feels more honest than the notion of laying one's head down to rest after a job well-done, even if Newton's famous lyrics suggest otherwise.

Commonly observed and commonly occurring, the cinematic tendency to depict black Africa through white eyes persists into the twenty-first century. Lord of War (2005) explicitly embodies the discrepancy between First World power and Third World experience, while Blood Diamond (2006) attempts to balance between three perspectives - the exploited, the middle ground exploiter/exploited, and the outside observer trying to help the exploited without having quite so much at stake.


Djimon Honsou is Solomon Vandy, the fisherman whose village is burnt down; while his son Dia (Kagiso Kuyperr) is brainwashed by a charismatic warlord (David Harewood) to be a ruthless child soldier, Solomon himself becomes a slave, mining diamonds for the same man. Leonardo DiCaprio is Danny Archer, a Rhodesian smuggler cynically out to get his own, and assuming everyone else is doing the same. Jennifer Connelly is Maddy Bowen, the guilty-liberal American reporter who wants to win the Pulitzer, help out suffering Africans, and sleep with Archer, not necessarily in that order.

Honsou is sturdy, and Connelly does what she can with a rather cliched role, but it's DiCaprio who gets the richest character, and he runs with it. He also offers an interesting key to the film's uncertain perspective - sympathizing with Africans, yet seemingly identifying with Westeners; as a white African, Archer can negotiate between the control of Europeans, Americans, and former African colonial overlords and the suffering of native (at least by birth) Africans in a land of war and brutality. This is especially clear in the ending, in which Solomon is restored to his son, Maddy gets her story (along with a broken heart), and Archer (whom we think of only by his last name, like a hotshot spy or  something) plays the martyr, dying alone on a hill, under fire, a sacrificial lamb because he lacks either Solomon's rooted goodness or Maddy's essentially innocent outsider status.

Archer's in-between identity is highlighted by his farewell phone call to Maddy - she's at a posh street site somewhere in upscale Northern Europe, while Archer is sweating it out in the jungle. He can't escape his fate, yet he can communicate with the other world; this very intermediary status enabled him to assist Solomon in the first place. This a rather fascinating and enticing conceit the more you think about it, and not at all uncommon of the more sophisticated and satisfying Hollywood movies which appeal both to an audience's desire for mobility, savvy, and at least some sense of power along with its need for a rooted sense of suffering and survival, so that the character's "cool" cache seems earned. In this case, it allows the film to span an inside and outside perspective on exotic Africa.

Lord of War, meanwhile, fully and (at least initially) unapologetically embraces a Western view of the 90s conflict in Sierra Leone and Liberia (and by implication, later conflicts as well). Yuri Orlov (Nicolas Cage) is a conscienceless arms dealer, a Ukranian emigre from Brooklyn who narrates his own story, a classic rise-and-fall opus in which Orlov wines and dines dictators, plays cat-and-mouse with Interpol on the open seas, and marries a supermodel who sees, hears, and speaks no evil (at least not initially). The film has been described (and decried) as Blow with guns instead of drugs, and so it is but I'm a sucker for this form of narrative and was engaged throughout. What's odd about Lord of War is that usually rise-and-fall movies depict criminals whose only victims are either fellow players or customers who (presumably) should no better - obviously a lot of drugs wound up in inner cities, but watching Blow you'd think they were delivered exclusively to homes with swimming pools. In these films, the antihero's fall is due more to hubris than true villainy, and it's our barely guilty pleasure to root for the antihero throughout.

Lord of War initially feeds into this dynamic, through both director Andrew Niccol's fast-paced, wildly stylized direction and Ethan Hawke's unsympathetically smug self-righteousness as the Interpol agent tracking Orlov. When Orlov empties a jumbo jet in a matter of minutes, just barely skirting Valentine's seizure of his goods, we're primed to applaud his chutzpah. But it's much harder to avoid the body count of guns than of drugs, and so Niccol is confronted by a challenge: how to shift gears from Orlov's badass hijinks to recognition of the brutal exploitation he's been involved with?

Niccol solves this dilemma by offering a twist on the rise and fall timeline: when Valentine finally captures Orlov, the gun-runner correctly predicts that a highly-ranked U.S. official will soon arrive to ask for his release. As a supplier to U.S. clients, Orlov is too valuable to American foreign policy - so as his career continues to soar, Orlov's only punishment arrives in the form of personal loss; otherwise crime does pay in Lord of War's sober conclusion. This interesting attempt to pivot is not fully effective because the change in tone never really pulls the rug out from under the film's earlier viewpoint. We could rewind the film and not see it any differently; the slick pyrotechnics would still play as fun rather than suddenly, horrifyingly all-too-real.

For a true grounds' eye view of what global tornadoes have been wrought by narcissistic butterflies like Orlov, one must ultimately look elsewhere - perhaps to films created by Africans themselves.

After watching La Vie de Boheme (1992) I thought of Aki Kaurismaki as a postmodern director, and I don't typically think of postmodernists as crafting earnest message movies. Yet that's essentially the mission of Le Havre (2011): to tell a simple story expressing concern for the plight of illegal immigrants in France. Marcel Marx (Andre Williams), a cranky old bohemian, takes in a young African refugee, Idrissa (Blondin Miguel) and gruffly arranges his escape from France, with the professional but not inhuman investigator Manet (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) on their heels. This entertaining and humanist narrative hopes not only to tell a story, but also to activate the viewer's sympathy in a way than abstract pamphlet could not. To call as quiet, artful, and minor-key a film as Le Havre "propaganda" would seem heavy-handed, but the film wears its values on its sleeve by making the political explicitly personal. Given my casual impression of Kaurismaki, a hipster before the term was unfashionable, this direction surprised me.

I haven't seen most of the Finnish filmmakers' oeuvre, but this previous winter, while seeking rare movies on You Tube, I stumbled across La Vie de Boheme and was completely enchanted. I've never read the French novel nor viewed the infamous opera, but I have seen Rent, the wildly popular modern update of La Boheme, on Broadway. I also caught the silent King Vidor version (starring Lillian Gish) on TCM a few years back and perhaps most importantly, just weeks before viewing Kaurismaki's take I'd read Bohemia: The Protoculture Then and Now, an out-of-print book by Richard Miller, found in a used bookstore in western Massachusetts in late 2011. I've a great fondness for obscure and idiosyncratic historical surveys and this one did not disappoint, offering a sweeping and opinionated study of the Bohemian ideal, from its inception in Restoration France to its countercultural hippie present (at the time of writing, mid-seventies I believe).

Given the vast history of an already self-conscious phenomenon, how could Kaurismaki hope to capture the freshness of his film's source, Scenes de la Vie Boheme, by Henri Murger - the 1851 novel which popularized the idea of bohemianism and thus inadvertently led to the tropes of bohemian life becoming secondhand cliches? Kaurismaki's remarkable answer is to not even bother making the ideal seem fresh, nor to succumb (entirely) to nostalgia by making the film a period piece. Instead he highlights both the discrepancy and universality of an old-school bohemian lifestyle in the modern world. Cleverly setting his tale in the 1990s, with modern cars and clothing, Kaurismaki does not update the essentials of the story: the characters still live in unheated grottoes and die of TB in picaresque 19th century fashion (even if the hospital rooms are up-to-date). Most importantly, the deadpan characters skirt late 20th century irony, so the presentation is at once charmingly naive and whimsically clever.

Which brings us back to Le Havre; if La Vie de Boheme appears postmodern, that's because its pastiche of past and present has little purpose beyond its own (and our own) bemusement, and yet within this apparent lack of concern for historical authenticity is a kind of cool focus on emotional authenticity. For all the awareness of its own eccentricity, the film and its dramatic events seem no less sincere. Likewise Le Havre features quirky characters, a self-consciously stylized reality and a deadpan performance style, yet it lacks any winking guile. As it turns out, this self-aware quirky environment is actually the perfect environment for a low-key humanism, as if the self-conscious yet earnest bohemians of Murger's day had come full-circle. They've passed through a moment in which irony expressed indifference, to the other side where eccentricity doesn't necessarily entail alienation.

Though I wish we'd gotten to know the child refugee a bit better (Le Havre shares with most of the other films discussed this week a tendency to make African agony an opportunity for European/American redemption), Le Havre does not present itself as universal. Indeed it fixes itself squarely within its little territory and proudly cultivates this modest arena. Recently, I've been discussing the difference between big and small films, major- and minor-key, and bemoaning the fact that European cinema in particular seems to trend way too much toward the latter qualities (and to be clear, a film can be "big" in ways beyond obvious scale - I'd argue that the minimalist La Vie de Boheme is not quite "small" due to the originality of its approach to a perennial historical/cultural theme).

True enough, yet this is not to complain about small films in and of themselves: a healthy cinema should always be stuffed with films in which you can enfold yourself, with a handful of characters and environs in whose atmosphere you're content to while away the hours. Le Havre, despite touching on larger themes, is just such a film. It even gets away with (spoiler alert) reversing the melancholy ending of La Vie de Boheme, allowing Marcel's wife a miraculous medical recovery, a warmhearted gesture which only a small film, unburdened by thematic necessities or tragic obligations, could get away with. Kaurismaki has a tangible sense of place and moment, slightly chilly yet surprisingly beckoning, a grimace cloaking its heart - much like the expressionless yet compassionate police agent who will never display his humanism overtly; ultimately it is this very inexpression that saves the day. Sometimes saying nothing says it all.

What is it about 80s fantasies, particularly animated fantasies, that fascinates me well into 21st-century adulthood? There's an aspect of nostalgia to be sure. I was born in 1983 and these movies reflect not just the era that shaped my early consciousnesses but also a form the world must take for everyone at that age: at three or four years old, reality itself seems mysterious, fantastical, dark - all that will later become familiar glows with the dangerous allure of magic. If this is nostalgia, it's an edgier, more unsettling nostalgia than is sold to us on TV commercials, a nostalgia rooted in the recognition that childhood is not merely a time of carefree happiness, but also of deep-rooted fear and disoriented confusion. At any rate, I didn't see The Secret of NIMH or The Last Unicorn, two offbeat animated films from 1982, until about a month ago - so any nostalgic chord they struck was generalized and indirect.
No matter when one was born, something objectively historical and cultural was at work in the 80s, a golden age for cinematic fantasy, particularly dark fantasy (and both The Secret of NIMH and The Last Unicorn, despite their seemingly cuddly heroines, are dark, melancholy films - but then fairy tales were always among the most disturbing and unsettling works of literature). Perhaps the cult of fantasy was shaped by fallout from a drug culture that had only crept into the mainstream about fifteen years before, or maybe it resulted from a longing and anxiety fostered by the collapse of social conventions (both widespread countercultural experiences were, to a certain extent, driven underground by the conservative reaction of the immediate present).

For whatever reason, 80s fantasy culture carries an often palpable expectation of identification as if its creators (and their audiences) weren't just safely touring a faraway place, but experiencing a full-fledged vision of a world more real than our own. Often condemned as "escapism," fantasies and other mythological genres can actually reveal more about an era than its documentary works, since they tend to correspond to the zeitgeist's inner, rather than outer, life. By leading us into dreamlike yet vivid worlds, fantasy films reflect the pain and disorientation engendered by reality but displaced deep into the subconscious.

That said, the universe of Secret of NIMH is not entirely otherworldly. Based on Robert O'Brien's book Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, Don Bluth's debut feature (released just two years after the talented animator stormed out of Disney, dragging a loyal entourage behind him) intriguingly fuses sci-fi with fantasy; its walking, talking mice and rats aren't just magical creatures, they're the result of scientific testing. The "NIMH" of the title is actually a top-secret government acronym and our renamed heroine Mrs. Brisby's dead husband was a heroic mouse who led the escape from the chemical-testing laboratory. Hiding out in the fields near a farm, he taught the other rodents how to think and control their surroundings (and, presumably, to speak English and wear clothes).

This plot is often confusing; perhaps Bluth bit off more than he could chew (I could've done without Dom DeLuise's comic relief but I guess the kiddies needed a breather between the doom and gloom; speaking of the voice cast John Carradine as a daimonic owl provides a special treat). Nonetheless I found the alternation between the magical, mystical, almost medieval underground world of the murine secret society and the identifiably contemporary, domesticated farm (as well as the modern, scientific urban lab) pleasingly provocative and disorienting. Most of all, NIMH is significant for its splendid animation: this is a visually rich tapestry hand-drawn with loving care in a fashion few would attempt today (one of the reasons Bluth departed Disney was his feeling that it had already given up on this approach).

The Last Unicorn, a Rankin-Bass production, certainly not as lush as NIMH, still bursts with imaginative imagery; its sleek, stylized backgrounds and incorporation of medieval artwork reminded me of Secret of the Kells (2009). However, Unicorn's central appeal lies in its story and characters. In the 80s, Rankin-Bass had a way with poignant, evocative animated features - their 1987 adaptation of Wind in the Willows is one of the cartoons I treasure most. The company also attracted fantastic voice casts. Just as I can't read Grahame's book without conjuring Jose Ferrar's richly authoritative Badger or especially Roddy McDowell's wistfully otherwordly Rat, if I ever pick up Peter Beagle's novel The Last Unicorn I'll doubtless hear this cast (Jeff Bridges, Angela Lansbury, Christopher Lee) in my head. Especially Mia Farrow, perfectly cast as the fragile and curious, childlike yet wise title character.

As with Willows, the film depicts a sad loss of innocence (more starkly than Willows with its melancholy repressions), a yearning feeling of loneliness and restlessness, and a series of contentious yet committed friendships. Like NIMH, Unicorn's world is haunting, at times even nightmarish, with its cackling crones, depressed decrepit kings, and ferocious raging bull, trailing a crimson cloud of fire wherever it stampedes (one of Unicorn's most bizarre and bizarrely appealing tangents suggests narwhals surfing the sea are in fact mutated unicorns, deformed and submerged by the bull's black magic). Even the film's "happy ending" is bittersweet at best.

Too often we forget that so-called "children's entertainment" contains a greater measure of wisdom, a deeper understanding of mortality and loss, than many supposedly adult films. When we're grown-up we can kid ourselves that life consists solely of the small patch we see before us, with its grounded, practical, even predictable concerns. When you're new to the world, such a narrow (and misleading) focus isn't possible, and movies like these help us to remember the state of confusion and beauty which call to us still from across the years.