I am highlighting this montage of 30-45 second film clips, originally published as part of my "32 Days of Movies" video series in October 2011, for the Anniversary Archive series. Comments, sharing, bookmarks, and recommendations are welcome on the original piece, also linked after the intro.
In case you missed it, yesterday's entry featured film clips from 1943 to 1946. Also this week Press Play interviewed me & featured my video essay "directed by De Palma".
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Thirty-second chapter in "32 Days of Movies", an audiovisual tour through 366 films
Falling into the Future
Today we end quietly, mournfully, and, I think, beautifully. Many of these clips deserve that adjective - there is a sinuous grace to the films in this chapter, a kind of painterly impression as if figures and backgrounds on a canvas were being animated. As if, in a way, we had returned to the very roots of cinema, yet with a memory of where we'd been. This is less death than a kind of anti-birth, which makes the final clip deeply appropriate. It might help here to explain that my storytelling sensibility trends neither optimistic nor flatly pessimistic, but rather toward the tragic. Tragic conclusions are at once sad and deeply transcendent - not a happy ending, but still a glorious one. This certainly describes the last two clips, over which I played a single soundtrack - the music derives from the second film but works equally well with the first. Together they form a kind of swan song, and so this chapter's final moments can stand with the 40s dream chapter and the lightning montage ending the 60s episode as one of the most unified and telling moments in the video series.