Dreaming in Wartime 1943 - 1946 • "32 Days of Movies" Day 7

The seventh chapter in "32 Days of Movies", an audiovisual tour through 366 films.
(2015 update: included Vimeo embed after the jump)

View "Chapter 7: Dreaming in Wartime"

Dreaming in Wartime

Today's chapter tells a definite story - we begin with a man in the air, determined to crash-land his bomber. It gets closer to the ground, closer, closer, and then... And then the strangeness begins, dreams and nightmares. A witch crashing into a burning pile of rubble. A lucid but depressive atheist wandering amidst crowd of candle-carrying Catholics. A cool, cool jazz band lounging in some never-never minimalist studio in the sky. See you on the sunny side of the street...

And the dreamers. Oh the dreamers - they're all over the place. Sleeping on the eve of a battle, watched over unbeknowst by their king. Chasing mirror-faced daemons in the cracked sunlight of a chillingly cloudless afternoon. Napping in the houses of murder victims and waking up to wonder if they're still dreaming. Climbing from beach to boardroom, or lying in a groggy state on dirt roads to be awakened by flashlights.

A dirty dozen

My 12 films: Some Came Running, God's Country, Paris Belongs to Us, Rosemary's Baby, Pandora's Box, Daisies, Scarface, Baby Face, Air Force, Yellow Submarine, Last of the Mohicans, Easy Rider

Do memes last more than a week? It's been eight days since Piper at Lazy Eye Theatre challenged bloggers to program 12 films at the New Beverly Cinema. Eight days in the blogosphere seems like an eternity but I'll go ahead and bite (not that anyone asked me to). The idea is to create a rep program of twelve films, in themed couplets (for example, Piper sticks High Fidelity with Punch Drunk Love as romantic comedies, and Song of the South with Coonskin as half-animated, racially controversial adaptations of Uncle Remus' tales). Some have chosen to give the entire program an overarching theme; hats off to them, but I found it hard enough deciding what to include and what to leave out.

My pairs are themed, but the overall program is not, save that they are all among my favorite films, ones I would love to share with an audience. I tried for diversity, and there are some classics, some more recent films (nothing from the past 15 years, though), all in different styles and genres. There are silents and talkies, black-and-white and color, animated and live-action, even documentary. Admittedly, all but three or four are American. And one persistent consistency proved impossible to overcome: fully half the films are from the 60s, my favorite cinematic decade. It's a testament to that era's richness that the list still feels diverse. Anyway, on to the explanations...