Category Archives: Movies

THE STORYTELLER'S VOICE

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D.
W. Griffith was a product of the stage, an actor and a failed
playwright. But he was also a product of the Biograph years, where he
honed his craft as a filmmaker in short self-contained stories, which
often have an anecdotal quality. In his feature work Griffith frequently used stageplays written by others as source material — he never mastered this formal discipline in stories
he wrote by himself . . . but this is a crucial failing only if you think
movies need to be tightly-plotted narratives with an overall structure
which the individual scenes all serve and to which they are subordinated.


This
ideal became the Hollywood norm, but Griffith was at his best when he
didn't follow and didn't need to follow it — which is why his later
films, when he was trying to fit in to the standardized studio style,
are so inferior to his earlier work.


The
Birth Of A Nation is a rambling, disjointed film narratively — more
like a collection of tales than a unified story in its own right — and is least satisfying when it narrows its focus in its final episodes
to the melodramatic mechanics of its theatrical source. Only the pure
cinematic beauty and power of the Clan ride redeems it from this
reductive derailment of its epic expansiveness.

Intolerance
of course takes this narrative expansiveness to wild extremes, but even
Griffith's great small films, like Broken Blossoms and True Heart
Susie, have an anecdotal quality. There may be a heart-stopping final
action climax or melodramatic denouement, but the films as a whole
don't build towards it with the kind of precision and economy and
momentum we have come to expect from popular movies since the onset of
the studio era.


This
is a criticism one could also level at Huckleberry Finn, which lies
somewhere between the delightful, rambling yarn-spinning of Life On
the Mississippi and the tauter formula fiction of Tom Sawyer. It is
a criticism one could level at The Odyssey, too — and the Bible. All
of these works use narrative formulas, with a more or less developed
overall structure, but proceed episodically, like a series of related
tales told by the fire over the course of many evenings.


One
can see why the studios resisted this sort of storytelling in movies.
It's too hard to predict in advance how movies made this way are going
to turn out — they depend too much on the instincts and the genius of
the storyteller and they lend themselves too much to improvisation.
Griffith's style of anecdotal epic was still fresh in the mind when one
of his truest disciples, Eric Von Stroheim, tried to emulate it in
darker tones in Greed. From his perspective, the experiment of Greed probably didn't look that outrageous — Griffith's method had,
after all, led to astonishing success both critically and commercially. Greed was longer and grimmer, but followed the same loose-knit narrative
strategy.


Thalberg,
a corporate functionary with taste, but a corporate functionary first
and last, really had to destroy the film — not just as a warning to
profligate directors but as a signal that the days of Griffith's method
were over. Enter Rupert Julian and the era of the sensibly-made,
pre-visualizable film. That era produced its own kind of treasures, but
I think one of the reasons we are attracted to the silent era is
because it was the last time the ancient voice of the storyteller could
be heard it all its eccentric, iconoclastic, unclassifiable glory.

Its
echoes took a long time to die out. It was last heard clearly, I think,
in The Godfather, Part II, with its parallel storylines that
reflected each other elliptically and suggestively rather than
according to some formal narrative dialectic. It's a messy film, on one
level, but unified by the passion and conviction of the storyteller's
voice — and the same is true of Griffith's messy masterpieces.

VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA

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Vicky Cristina Barcelona is a trivial, shallow film about trivial, shallow characters, played by extremely capable and fascinating actors.  It's basically a goof on François Truffaut's Jules et Jim, an updating and transposition of its wry, deadpan ironies about self-involved Bohemians, or would-be Bohemians.  But Truffaut's film is both more exuberant, with a young man's high passions, and more mature, in its uneasy sense that a price will have to be paid for the feckless adventuring of unmoored hearts.

Woody Allen borrows Truffaut's humor and attitude but uses them solely for diversion — and Vicky Cristina Barcelona is diverting enough, with amusing situations and dialogue.  There's nothing at stake in the film, however, or in the lives of its characters, except the gratification of passing moods.  The two artists in the film, whom Allen might possibly see as positive characters, in fact produce generic “modern art”, abstractions as devoid of meaning as their lives.

One of the title characters is interested in Gaudi, and Gaudi's work is featured in the movie from time to time, but filmed in such a way that its architectural forms are unreadable.  Barcelona, itself one of the title characters, is never evoked with any precision or enthusiasm — the film has no real sense of place or atmosphere, or no more than one could get from a tourist brochure.

We are left with the pleasure of watching some very fine actors go through their paces.  Javier Bardem reveals a deft sense of comic timing — he seems to realize that the character he's playing is an idiot, even if you're never quite sure Allen does.

The three female characters are all portrayed as immature, weak and neurotic — they have none of the self-possessed willfulness of Jeanne Moreau's Catherine in Jules et Jim, her sense of joyful romantic nihilism.  Scarlett Johansson and Penélope Cruz are always intriguing to watch on screen but the real bravura performance here is by Rebecca Hall, who was so wonderful in The Prestige.  She's just as wonderful in this film, in an entirely different role and performing with an entirely convincing American accent.

She has none of the glamor or obvious sex appeal of Johansson or Cruz, but she rivets attention by the truth of her performance, and her subtle erotic awakening is far more vexing than the overt sensuality of her co-stars.  Allen seems to recognize this, which makes it all the more infuriating that Hall's character has no development.  None of the characters do.  They have “experiences” which leave them all essentially unchanged.

I suppose this can be read as Woody Allen's philosophical view of life — as an exercise in marking time — but it's profoundly superficial and profoundly undramatic.  The bleak future that Hall's Vicky walks off into at the film's end seems like a punishment Allen is inflicting on the actress herself, for suggesting, through her art, that the experience of living might add up to more than Allen can bring himself to admit.

GERTRUDE STEIN ON SCREENWRITING

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You have to remember in writing film stories that it is not like
writing for the theater — the film audience is not an audience that is
awake, it is an audience that is dreaming.

                                      [This is Stein quoting advice from screenwriter Jacques Viot (Le Jour Se Lève)]

The portrait of Stein is by Picasso.

MANNY FARBER

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I was sorry to hear recently about the death of painter and critic Manny Farber.  I love Farber's paintings but must confess to having decidedly mixed feelings about his film criticism, for which he's generally better known.  He strikes me as someone who had acute intuitions about movies but was never able to find a critical language capable of explicating them.  He came up with wonderful terms like “negative space” but their meanings shifted so mercurially that you could never be sure exactly what he wanted them to convey.  I defy anyone to come up with a definition for “negative space” which applies to all the contexts in which Farber used it.

Farber also lapsed frequently into language so obtuse that no meaning of any kind can be teased out of it.  I don't think this was the result of pretension, or lack of intelligence — I think it was the result of frustrated passion.  He knew something extraordinary was happening in the film or scene he was discussing, he knew there was no conventional critical language with which it could be described, so he just riffed, out beyond the limits of rational communication, and hoped to get the sense of what he felt across.

This sort of approach can work — but so can simply shouting, “Hey, look at this!”  Farber's writing about film is an odd mixture of sublime insights, many opinions eccentric for their time which subsequent generations of critics have vindicated, and bouts of incoherent shouting.  Threading your way through the maze can be exhausting.

Farber's admirers will tell you that his incoherent passages are attempts to produce abstract literary equivalents of the non-verbal effects found in movies — which is academic nonsense of a far more objectionable type than Farber's.  His approach to movies was simply emotional and impressionistic, rather than analytical.  It's instructive to note that when Farber did try to describe images precisely he sometimes misremembered what he had “seen”.

It must be said, though, that Farber really cared about movies, and responded deeply and honestly to them, which is nine tenths of what good criticism is all about — but for some reason he felt the need to supply, or try to supply, that last tenth, an intellectual comprehension of cinematic means, which he lacked.  That makes him, for me, more frustrating, less enjoyable to read than other critics, like Kael and Agee, who tended to write within their limitations, which were very similar to Farber's.

With his passing, I rejoice in the paintings (like the one at the head of this post, a tribute to Budd Boetticher) which he left behind.  I believe they will long outlive his writings about film.

LARRY MCMURTRY ON COMIC BOOK MOVIES

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An industry that seems to have concluded that its best hope is to
dramatize the comic-strip literature of an earlier and more vigorous
era is one whose fevers have finally destroyed its nerve. With rare
exceptions the pictures coming out of Hollywood today are the last
resorts of the gutless.

              — Larry McMurtry, foreward to Film Flam: Essays on Hollywood (Simon and Schuster)

This quote is from 1987.

[With thanks to More Than Meets the Mogwai]

VICTORIAN SENTIMENTALITY AND THE CINEMA

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The popular audience of the 20th Century never lost its appetite for the straightforward, heartfelt sentimentality of the Victorian era.  This was so much the case that all art forms which eschewed such sentimentality — painting, sculpture, concert music, opera, poetry and, for the most part, fiction — ceased to be popular arts at all.  Serious new works in all these forms were addressed to smaller and smaller elites.

20th-Century intellectuals, especially those associated with the academy, rejected frank sentimentality as a kind of outdated perversion, as something as unhealthy in its way as the supposed repression of sexuality in the Victorian era.  To be labeled a sentimental artist was as incompatible with intellectual prestige as being labeled a prude.

In the arts where “serious” intellectuals and the academy had no particular authority, such as movies and popular music, frank sentimentality continued on its merry way, commercial success with large audiences being considered sufficient compensation for intellectual disrepute.

When highbrow intellectual critics began to take movies seriously, they naturally tended to favor those films which relied least on sentimentality, or which rejected it to one degree or another.  This has resulted in a canon which reflects a skewed picture of popular movies.

It's all very silly, of course, and will someday be seen as one of the charming but lunatic quirks of 20th-Century intellectual fashion.  Meanwhile, however, it's interesting to imagine how the field of 20th-Century popular movies will look to future generations, who will have moved on to some other form of cultural myopia.

It may be, for example, that True Heart Susie will one day be considered as fine a film as Pandora's Box.  That Meet Me In St. Louis will be considered as fine a film as The Magnificent Ambersons.  That The Ghost and Mrs. Muir will be considered as fine a film as Vertigo.  That Titanic will be considered as fine as film as The Godfather, Part II.  There may even come a day when the Hollywood musical will be considered as cool as film noir.

The good news is that you don't need to wait for this shift in cultural prejudices to work itself out.  You can go right ahead and appreciate great films of frank sentiment for the masterpieces they are.  You can enjoy them emotionally and intellectually to your heart's content.  The 20th Century is over, after all — and good riddance to it!

FORCE OF EVIL

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This
extraordinary film is, generically, a late-cycle crime melodrama, but
it's quirky and original enough to transcend the genre pretty
thoroughly.  John Garfield plays a crooked Wall Street lawyer who
crosses the line between representing organized crime figures and
collaborating with them.  Like the great Warner Brothers gangsters
of the 30s, he's a tough guy on the make who chooses a life of crime,
but he thinks it's going to be “respectable”, white-collar crime — until he's dragged
into the violence and thuggery that underpins the rackets he believes he
can manipulate.

This distinguishes him from the gangsters of the 30s, gives him a kind
of innocence, though it's innocence of a curious sort.  He and a number of
the film's characters make a distinction in their minds between
“honest”, harmless criminality, mere corruption, and the “evil”
criminality of men who resort to violence.  This takes us very
close to the territory of the true film noir, where all of society has lost its moral bearings, where the lines between right and wrong have been hopelessly obscured.

Abraham Polonsky, who directed and co-wrote the film, is not quite venturing into that territory, however.  His outlook is more political — less concerned with moral bewilderment and confusion than with the wholesale structural corruption
of American society. 
The lines between good and bad are ultimately very clear in Polonsky's universe,
and he posits off-screen forces that are gathering to fight the
corruption of the system, forces which Garfield's character will eventually decide to join.

The protagonist of a true film noir
never has this route out of his predicament.  His plight has more to do with
existential uncertainty than with political or social problems in
need of practical reform.  At the same time, though, Force Of Evil is
suffused with the atmosphere of a true noir,
since the forces of good are never personified dramatically — the
crusading special prosecutor Garfield finally turns to never appears on
screen.

Force Of Evil points the way to Coppola's Godfather films, which, like this one, are in the gangster tradition but with a crucial twist — they concentrate not on the
battle between good guys and bad guys but on the creeping moral decay of the bad
guys, seen from their point of view.

We don't revel in the
transgressive behavior of Garfield's character, or of Michael Corleone
in the Godfather films, as we
reveled in the transgressive behavior of Cagney's bad guys, in
confident expectation that they will be brought to justice in the end.  Garfield's character in Force Of Evil,
like Michael Corleone, is punished by forces within himself and close
to home.  Far from going down in a blaze of outlaw glory, he rots
from the inside, slowly.  Polonsky offers Garfield's character a
way out, through social action and personal reform — Coppola, less
political, less didactic, less optimistic perhaps about American society, offers Michael Corleone nothing.

SLEAZOID

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Over on Illusion Travels By Streetcar, Tom Sutpen has posted a poetic tribute to the book Sleazoid Express, which summons back the long-gone days of pre-Disney 42nd Street in Manhattan, when former legit theaters which had become grind movie houses showed exploitation films to the hustlers and grifters who called that part of town home.

As it happens, I was just watching an interview with Michael Eisner about Disney's decision to refurbish the New Amsterdam Theater on 42nd street, which had fallen below even grind-house standards.  Its grand interior, which once housed the Ziegfeld Follies, was open to the elements and home only to birds.  Eisner describes telling Rudolph Giuliani, then the mayor of New York, of his fears that family audiences might not feel comfortable visiting that part of town, with its grind houses, sex shops and massage parlors.  “They will be gone,” said Giuliani.

“They can't just 'be gone',” Eisner said.  “I mean, you've got the ACLU, free speech.”  “Look in my eyes,” Giuliani said, and repeated, “they will be gone.”

By the time The Lion King opened in the beautifully restored New Amsterdam, they were gone.  Sleazoid Express is about what was swept away to make room for Simba and company.

Sutpen suggests why we should remember this lost world, which is why we should remember all the “unexamined” aspects of our culture — because they often provide greater insight into who we really are than cultural manifestations which have the full support of city police departments.

Back in 1908, when 42nd Street was an upscale theatrical Mecca, nickelodeons, the grind houses of their day, were showing the first films of D. W. Griffith.  In sleazy dives on the shabbier side streets you could hear “Negro music”, the precursor to jazz.  In other words, there was a time when the two great art forms of the 20th Century were part of America's marginal culture, its unexamined culture.

Whatever the exploitation films of the Sixties and Seventies represented, it was important, and it isn't gone.  By the same token, as Sutpen notes, the Times Square Renaissance, which turned a scary part of town into a family-safe part of town, also began a process by which Manhattan has been transformed into a mall-like environment for tourists, losing its urban juice and spirit.  What began as a rebirth in Times Square inaugurated a kind of lingering death for one of the world's great cities.

Culture, too, has its own circle of life.

LUCILLE BREMER IN LA PAZ

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She gained movie immortality in her first film, playing Rose Smith, Judy Garland's older sister, in Meet Me In St. Louis.  The next year she danced with Fred Astaire in Yolanda and the Thief, and when that film proved to be a flop, her career took a precipitous downward turn.

She danced with Astaire again in the movie musical revue Ziegfeld Follies, adorned the cover of Life magazine in 1946 and had a supporting role in Till the Clouds Roll By the same year, but MGM gave up on her after that, loaning her out to poverty-row studios for parts in negligible films.

She threw in the towel soon afterward, married the son of a former President of Mexico and went to live with him in La Paz, Baja California, until their divorce in 1963.

Bremer had been a Rockette and a Broadway chorus girl before moving to Los Angeles.  She was spotted by Arthur Freed dancing in a show at the Versailles nightclub, given a screen test and almost immediately cast in Meet Me In St. Louis, which Freed produced.  She is often referred to as a “protégée” of Freed, and one of Judy Garland's biographers says she was sleeping with him, which might account for her meteoric rise at MGM.  I hate to think of her sleeping with Freed, a married man, while they were making Meet Me In St. Louis, that heartfelt paean to family values, but Hollywood is Hollywood.

I don't know what accounted for her meteoric fall.  She was a good actress and a talented dancer, but I wouldn't say she had star quality, and in Till the Clouds Roll By she sometimes looks haggard, worn out at 29.  Of course Garland was burnt out at an even younger age — MGM had that effect on some people.

It's a strange and sad tale, except for the part about La Paz, one of my favorite places on earth.  I like to think of Rose Smith strolling along the malecón there, of an evening, enjoying the breeze off the Mar de Cortes, far from the intrigues of Culver City.

[Image above © 2007 Harry Rossi]

THE BIG TRAIL

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In the whole history of cinema there is no greater feast for the eye than Raoul Walsh's The Big Trail, from 1930.  It cost something approaching $100 million in today's dollars — though in truth it probably couldn't be made today, without CGI, for less than $300 million — and Walsh put all of the budget on screen, creating an epic vision of a wagon train's journey from the banks of the Mississippi to the Pacific coast.  It was shot in a standard 35mm format and in a 65mm wide-screen version, which has recently become available on DVD for the first time.

Because so few theaters were willing or able to refit to show the 65mm version, and because the film was not a hit, Hollywood abandoned the wide-screen format until the 1950s, when it was taken up again in response to the threat from television.  So The Big Trail remained a costly experiment gone awry — but it hardly plays as an experimental work today.  Walsh's composition for the wide screen is as elegant and accomplished as any in the later history of the format — it bears favorable comparison with the best wide-screen work of John Ford or David Lean.

As a film shot almost entirely on location, it also bears comparison with Greed and Ford's The Iron Horse for its pictorial realism, which is downright breathtaking.

That's the good news.  The bad news is that the script for this early talkie is marred by stilted dialogue delivered in a stilted style by almost all the actors, including John Wayne in his first starring role.  The location sound is extremely impressive for a film from 1930, but not impressive enough to hold its own with the stunning visuals.

I can say without hesitation, however, that if The Big Trail had been a silent film, it would today be ranked among the greatest movies ever made.  If you can look past its limitations as a talkie, you can see the masterpiece it might have been — the masterpiece that on one level it certainly is.

Ford, who discovered Wayne, is said to have held a grudge against him for making his starring debut in another director's film.  I suspect, however, that this was in part displaced resentment against Walsh for creating such magnificent images of the American West, which rivaled and sometimes surpassed those Ford had created in his own silent Westerns.  It is perhaps no accident that Ford abandoned Westerns entirely during most of the 1930s, returning to the form only in 1939, with Stagecoach . . . and I'm tempted to suggest that Ford spent the rest of his career as a maker of Westerns trying (successfully) to live up to the visual poetry of Walsh's The Big Trail.

FRAMES

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This is the seventh in a series of essays in honor of André Bazin . . .

In an article on film and painting, André Bazin argues that the frame around a painting has the purpose of cutting it off from the real world, establishing the limits of a conceptual field necessary to analyzing the painting in its own terms . . . while the frame around a cinematic image is not a boundary marker but merely a masking device, blocking out an infinite expanse of space which we are meant to imagine as existing outside the mask.

This doesn't seem quite right to me.  There are certain kinds of painting which evoke the world with an optical integrity, an über-photographic reality, which make it not only possible but desirable to imagine a universe beyond their frames.  Much Victorian academic painting has this nature — it was a quality of painting which modernism rejected but which still had its virtues.  Some “classical” painters used this quality — Vermeer, for example.  The conceptual universe of Vermeer's paintings does not end at the edges of his frames.

And the frame of a cinematic image is often much more than a mask — a device for focusing attention.  It sets the boundaries for creating a drama of space, exactly as the proscenium arch does in classical ballet.  The distance or nearness of two dancers in a ballet only has dramatic meaning in relation to the space defined by the proscenium arch.  In ballet, the frame of this arch doesn't just demarcate an arena of theatrical illusion — distancing it from the real world inhabited by the spectator — it has a functional role in defining the expressive terms of the dance.

It's true that in photographed cinema, as opposed to animation, say, we can readily imagine a world beyond the frame with the same ontology as the actual objects photographed within the frame, but there is a counter impulse to discount this peripheral world in order to read the space within the frame as a theatrical arena whose dramatic content only makes sense within that frame.

Take the scene in The Searchers, for example, when Debbie appears in the far distance on top of a ridge behind Nathan and slowly moves towards and into the foreground space they occupy.  This becomes a visceral objective correlative to Nathan's dawning acceptance of Debbie as an individual human being, not just a symbol of his sense of disenfranchisement as a man, an object for the vengeance he wants to visit on life.

The shot is an image of a real place in a real moment of time, but we cannot imagine the world beyond its frame, we cannot imagine the space as seen from Debbie's perspective, for example, and still experience the full meaning of the shot.  The frame here acts as a frame does with most paintings — it creates a conceptual field distinct from the world beyond its borders, and only within that conceptual field does the shot “work”.

Bazin's formula is just too simple.  In the paintings Alma-Tadema did of the ancient world, we feel that the frame is indeed just a mask — a window onto a whole lost world beyond its frame which we delight in imagining.  And conversely, when we are swept into the space of a great animated cartoon, it's hardly necessary to seriously imagine a whole cartoon universe beyond its frame.

We can imagine such a universe beyond the cartoon frame, just as we can, with much less effort, imagine a world beyond the ridge Debbie appears on, but it's the way the frame limits such images, takes them out of the larger world, that makes their meaning in purely cinematic terms possible.

Here again, I think it's Bazin's location of cinema's power in photographed reality, rather than in the drama of space, that leads him to a deficient theoretical proposition.

THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL

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The Bad and the Beautiful is sometimes called a film noir but it's nothing of the sort — it's a romantic soap opera whose stylistic “darkness” is purely aesthetic and whose thematic “darkness” derives from simple perversity.  A true film noir presents the image of a morally chaotic universe, a universe in which moral choices are either unclear or existentially useless — The Bad and the Beautiful glamorizes evil and asks us to love it.

The Bad and the Beautiful is the only film ever made about Hollywood which manages to capture its peculiar culture of perversity.  Hollywood, in the classic studio era, was not about money.   Given the fact that the major studios had a virtual monopoly over film distribution, money was a given.  Movies were a rigged game.  It wasn't about power, either — power was also a given, a consequence of all that money.  And it wasn't about sex — money and power guaranteed sex, not only for the beautiful people who paraded their wares in front of a camera but for the nerdy little businessmen who organized the parade.

The coin of the realm in Hollywood was brutality and betrayal .  The ability to hurt other people, especially one's friends and allies, with impunity was the one entitlement that signified genuine status in Hollywood.  It was the only behavior that had a lasting and enduring glamor there.



The Bad and the Beautiful is about (and also part and parcel of) the sentimental myth created in Hollywood to lend a romantic flavor to the puerile exercise of brutality and betrayal — by insisting that it was all for art, for the good of the picture, for the good of the public.  This  myth was meant to disguise the fact that brutality and betrayal had an erotic charge in Hollywood, that it constituted a kind of moral pornography — that it existed for its own sake.

In a world of total material and sensual satiation, moral perversity was the only thing still capable of delivering a charge.  It was the sort of charge that attaches to a child killing an insect or a small animal, to high school kids tormenting an outsider into suicidal despair, to the enslavement and torture and destruction of helpless people by governments.

Simone Weil wrote, “Brutality,
violence, and inhumanity have an immense prestige that schoolbooks hide
from children, that grown men do not admit, but that everyone bows
before.”  This insight is the key to Hollywood's culture, and to The Bad and the Beautiful.  For The Bad and the Beautiful is not about money, not about power, not about sex — not even about filmmaking or Hollywood per se.  Its emotional climaxes, its juice, come from moments of lurid, glamorized, unrepentant brutality and betrayal.

One might say the same for most of Greek drama, of course, and much of Shakespeare.  The difference is that The Bad and the Beautiful calls down no retribution from Olympus, from the inexorable workings of fate.  In Sophocles as in Shakespeare, the frisson of moral perversity is part of the entertainment, but there is a price to be paid.  In the perpetual adolescence of Hollywood, so brilliantly evoked in The Bad and the Beautiful, no price is exacted — except a kind of emptiness, that money and power and celebrity and Oscars can't fill up.  There is that kind of emptiness at the heart of The Bad and the Beautiful, but it's not acknowledged.  The film is a perfect paradigm of true spiritual despair — a despair that is unaware of itself.

ILLUSION TRAVELS BY STREETCAR

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The web log If Charlie Parker Was A Gunslinger is a new thing under the sun — a kind of journal of visual culture composed almost entirely of images, with minimal comment.  I think of mardecortesbaja as primarily a journal of visual culture, though the commentary has an equal place with the images.  But at Charlie Parker it's mostly the images that talk — to us and, perhaps more importantly, to each other.  The result is a sort of subliminal conversation that too much interpretation would drown out.

Tom Sutpen, one of the guiding lights at Charlie Parker, has just started a different kind of web log, Illusion Travels By Streetcar, devoted to his writing about film.  In the first post, he produces this evocation of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, which he jotted down on a legal pad for some writing project he can no longer remember:

Metropolis,
that occult skyscraper of vision piled atop ever more crazed vision; of
fairy tale narrative and futuristic nightmare; of half-buried eroticism
and a mystic symbology lifted, with all the weightless ease of an empty
bottle, from the Old Testament; all in service to a vaguely Socialist
fever dream its director, Fritz Lang, had no real interest in. That
tattered Metropolis, in all of its deranged willfulness and splendor, will almost certainly never be seen in its entirety again.

It's a lovely piece of writing and a fine summary of the film but its last line has taken on a new resonance with the news, only recently reported and now spreading through the Internet like wildfire, that a complete print of Metropolis has been discovered, in a film archive in Buenos Aires.  It's a 16mm preservation copy of a battered 35mm original, but it's all there — the film as Lang originally made it, before it got cut down by its American distributor — the only known copy of the complete film in existence.  (The image above is a frame-grab from the print.)

This is exciting in itself and also for the wild hopes it arouses that other lost footage might someday still be found — a copy of Von Stroheim's four-hour cut of Greed, for example, or the footage RKO cut from The Magnificent Ambersons.

But enough dreaming.  Check out Sutpen's new blog — I suspect it's going to be essential reading for movie fans.

MEXICO

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Check out “Mexico”, not the James Taylor song of the same name, but a somewhat obscure Elvis track from Fun In Acapulco.  Thanks to Tony D'Ambra of the invaluable films noir web site for reminding me of it, in a post about The Big Steal, a prime example of fiesta noir — a film that starts out noir but goes goofy when it gets south of the border.

Elvis's “Mexico” is a slight bit of material but Elvis makes it fun — and manages to remind me how much I miss Baja California and La Paz.

Elvis sings the song in the movie — it can also be found on the soundtrack album and on the two-disc set Command Performances which collects most of the songs from the Elvis movies not included on the various Masters box sets.

COHERENT SPACES, SEDUCTIVE SPACES

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The sixth in a series of essays in honor of André Bazin.

Movies
achieve their highest aesthetic enchantment and greatest power to move
us emotionally by creating the illusion of spaces on the other side of
the screen which we can inhabit imaginatively.  It's not the fact
that moving pictures move that moves us, it's the fact that movement is one of the chief ways that spatial illusions are created.

The coherence of the spatial illusion is crucial, not just in
individual shots but in the combination of shots through editing. 
Single photographic images have a kind of built-in spatial coherence,
though they can be lit and composed in ways that counteract this
inherent quality — flattening the image, for example, so that we have
a hard time evaluating the depth of the space recorded.  But even
images with spatial depth all shot in a single location can be combined
in such a way as to confuse us about the totality of the space they are
meant to suggest.

Almost any competent director can create the basic illusion of a
coherent space.  The simplest way to do this is to follow
what has come to be the standard “studio style” — to start each scene
in a particular location with a master shot showing the overall space
of the scene and then cut in to closer shots of people or objects
within that scene, whose place in the spatial scheme has already been
established.  There are endless variations of this method. 
One can open a scene on a close-up of an object or an actor and then cut to a master
shot, but the master shot always serves as the ground of the illusion,
the point of orientation, even if that orientation is delayed.

We would find it very difficult to imaginatively inhabit a scene whose
spatial coherence was impossible or difficult to read — even if we
could construct it intellectually in our minds based on disparate
visual cues.

But the illusion of spatial coherence is merely the bottom line for
imaginative participation in a cinematic shot or scene.  The
greatest, most pleasing and most powerful films create spatial
illusions that seduce us into the imaginary spaces of the work — which
invite or viscerally compel us into the spatial illusion.

This is where the art of cinema begins, and all great directors have
known how to seduce us in this way.  They seem to have come into
possession of this knowledge by instinct, almost to have been born with
it.  It doesn't, in other words, seem to be a knowledge that can
be taught, except perhaps by example.  We have no language for
analyzing this knowledge systematically.

But there is a system to such seduction.  It can be used in
complex and subtle ways to manipulate our emotional involvement in and
reaction to the narrative elements of a film.  Allowing us to
enter the illusory space on screen at our own pace, as with a
deep-focus shot in which the choreography of the actors emphasizes the
space slowly and subtly, creates a different emotional effect than
hurtling us into an illusory space by a rapid movement of the camera,
one mounted on the top of a speeding train, for example.  A master
shot looking down on the scene has different effect than a master shot
looking straight-on.  A master shot which tracks in on a detail or
a character has a different effect than isolating the element with a
cut, and a master shot in which an element moves towards the camera
into a close-up has a different effect again.

Such variations of effect have been part of the crude methods of cinema
from the beginning, and account for the omnipresence of the chase as a
climactic device.  Even if it has no logical raison d'etre,
a chase is almost always cathartic — by creating the illusion of rapid
movement through space the chase reaffirms and satisfies our attraction
to the basic
method and charm of cinema.  It creates emotional involvement with
the characters, the pursuer and the pursued, quite beyond any conscious
involvement arising from the dramatic narrative.  When Orson
Welles said that every great film was a chase he was acknowledging this
fundamental principal.

But when such visceral involvement is manipulated in complex ways in the service of
dramatic narrative, of character exposition, cinema rises to the level
of great art, an art founded in the creation of coherent and seductive
spatial illusions.