belated June 2024 Patreon round-up: EXCLUSIVE - Conversation on The Boy and the Heron & Godzilla Minus One w/ Max Clark + TWIN PEAKS Character Series advance

Two Japanese World War II-era fantasy films from 2023 involving dangerous creatures crown my $5/month tier rewards for June - and they're covered in an unusual way. At this point I'm leaving podcasts for patron's picks every other month and Twin Peaks topics more sporadically than that, so I when I spoke about Hayao Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron and Takashi Yamazaki's Godzilla Minus One with my friend and previous guest Max Clark (who got me to see both of these films), I decided to edit and present our extensive, two-hour-plus discussion in text form. In addition to exploring how The Boy and the Heron both emerges and differs from previous Miyazaki films (in the past I've covered Spirited Away in prose and podcast), we learn how Studio Ghibli Park in Japan crystallizes the auteur's vision, tease out the film's most-likely-accidental but still intriguing reflections on AI, investigate how the fanciful story reflects the behind-the-scenes Ghibli personalities, and reflect on why the friendship between the characters Mahito and Himi is so affecting. For Godzilla Minus One, which I saw initially in its brief black-and-white cinematic presentation, we dig into the intricacies of the fluid creature design and compare this latest entry - and its monster - to Hideaki Anno's Shin Godzilla (which I've discussed alongside the original and Americanized fifties Gojira/Godzilla in capsule form before; elsewhere I recorded capsules on the 2014 Godzilla and the original King Kong vs. Godzilla). And we get into many other subjects in relation to both films, including Japan's experience in the war and postwar periods. For even more from Max and I, you can check out our podcast episode on Blade Runner 2049 several years ago.

And open to all patrons is an advance entry on another beloved Twin Peaks character, alongside a few quick updates on what else I have been or will be working on this summer...

What are the June rewards?

May 2024 Patreon round-up: EXCLUSIVE - Films in Focus podcast #3: The Zone of Interest + TWIN PEAKS Character Series advance

I hoped and suspected that The Zone of Interest would be the next film patrons picked for me to cover following its prominence at the Academy Awards in March, where it won much-deserved prizes for Best Sound and Best International Film, as well as the backlash to and praise for director Jonathan Glazer's acceptance speech drawn directly from the film's own themes. The title had appeared in an earlier poll, spurred by last year's podcast on Glazer's earlier Under the Skin; while I missed most of the press around it in 2023 I'd been anticipating this coverage for several months. Nonetheless, I wasn't really prepared for the power of this film, the purity of its aesthetic and especially the emotional devastation of its conclusion. Responding to a post about how the film "must most importantly be 'felt', rather than be 'understood'", I recently commented on Twitter that "The 'felt' and 'understood' were more intertwined than in most films I can think of. So much of its impact relies on what you know rather than see/hear yet it's so visceral. The power of the ending rests in an intellectual concept but [is] as emotional as any ending I've experienced." The Zone of Interest follows several months in the life of the Auschwitz commandant, told entirely on one side of the concentration camp wall - the side on which Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) live in their tidy, well-manicured villa. This episode discusses the film's aggressive, intricate soundtrack, surveillance-style shooting strategy, and differences from the novel Glazer very loosely used as inspiration; I also explore the history of the real Höss, the prisoner-written song "Sunbeam" featured in the film, connections to other famous Nazi- or genocide-themed works like Schindler's List, The Act of Killing, and Dr. Strangelove, what marks the time period as both distinct and resonant, and much more, in one of my longest reviews of a single film.

In addition to that $5/tier feature, for all patrons I've advanced another TWIN PEAKS Character Series entry, in this case one of the most complicated, fascinating characters of the third season (and, in some ways, before that too).

What are the May rewards?

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (The Unseen 2008)

"The Unseen" is a series in which I watch popular films for the first time (spoilers are discussed, including for Twin Peaks and Forrest Gump). The list, which moves backwards in time, is based on the highest-ranked film I've never seen each year on Letterboxd (as of April 2018). The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was #5 for 2008.

The Story: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." The famous conclusion of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby was literalized by the same author three years in the past (how appropriate) with his 1922 short story The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. And David Fincher's cinematic adaptation, based on a screenplay by Forrest Gump's Eric Roth (a connection hard to miss), literalizes this concept even further with actual floodwaters threatening the hospital deathbed of Daisy Fuller (Cate Blanchett) in 2005 New Orleans. As Hurricane Katrina bears down on the city where she spent much of her life, the eighty-two-year-old Daisy shares an anecdote, and then a diary/scrapbook, with her thirty-seven-year-old daughter Caroline (Julia Ormond). The anecdote relates the sad tale of Mr. Gateau (Elias Koteas), a clockmaker who was commissioned to create a grand timepiece for New Orleans' train station; grieving the recent loss of his son in World War I, Gateau's installation runs backwards, symbolically wishing for the return of those dead young men. The diary reveals that, around the same time - the night of Armistice Day to be exact - button manufacturer Thomas Button (Jason Flemyng) raced home through the jubilant end-of-war celebrations to find his wife (Joeanna Sayler) dying in childbirth. Horrified by the infant's appearance - the boy is a shriveled creature covered by wrinkles and wracked with arthritis, cataracts, and other ailments - Thomas flees his home with the baby in his arms, nearly tossing the child into the river before hiding him on the steps of a nursing home.

Adopted by caretaker Queenie (Taraji P. Henson) and dubbed Benjamin (eventually played by Brad Pitt whose features are fused with other actors' bodies early on), the child is not expected to live very long. Every day of existence seems a miracle, and all the more miraculous is his slow recovery from all those birth defects. Though small in stature, well into adolescence his face and body resemble the elderly residents surrounding him; he needs braces after finally standing from his wheelchair inside a revival tent (the preacher played by Lance P. Nichols collapses in death even as he summons Benjamin to rise). Drawn to the outside world but unable to travel far - physically because he's old and mentally because he's still a dependent child - Benjamin falls in love Daisy (Elle Fanning and Madisen Beaty before Blanchett steps in), a girl visiting her grandmother at the home. Just a few years younger than him in reality, they appear to be separated by an almost unbridgeable gap of generations. Eventually Benjamin becomes self-reliant enough to begin work on a tugboat, where the salty, tattooed Captain Mike Clark (Jared Harris) introduces the naive youngster to the pleasures of booze and women. Departing for a series of international engagement during the Great Depression, Benjamin - now looking like a seasoned but far more upright sixtysomething - meets the refined British expat Elizabeth Abbot (Tilda Swinton) while docked in the Soviet Union, already at war with Germany although the U.S. is not. The sailor and the diplomat's wife begin an affair with ends without explanation on the eve of Pearl Harbor; from there Benjamin joins his captain in a war effort where they serve mainly to assist bigger and sturdier cargo conveys and battleships.

After a relatively quiet period at sea, the tugboat battles a U-boat and Benjamin is one of few survivors. He returns to New Orleans looking middle-aged while his mother appears noticeably older. When he is reunited with Daisy, she is at the peak of youthful beauty and vivaciousness - a trained dancer, she lives in New York City and provides a stark contrast with Benjamin's reserved Southern gentleman demeanor. He declines her sexual overtures and then attempts to visit Manhattan and sweep her off his feet a few years later, by which time she has another lover. They remain emotionally too far apart to kindle their chemistry into something deeper and more fulfilling. Meanwhile, Benjamin's father reaches out to reconcile with him, explaining the young man's history for the first time and eventually passing the booming button business onto the younger Button when Thomas dies. Another decade, another phase of life for Benjamin, who is now spry enough to race his motorcycle from one romantic encounter to another while also encountering another missed connection with Daisy in the fifties. The handsome bachelor discovers that the talented performer's career has been cut short by a devastating car accident; when he shows up in Paris to visit, she rejects even his overtures of friendship. Only in the sixties, when they are both chronologically and physically around forty, do the couple finally come together. Traveling in style and living off the Button family earnings (they move in together only after Benjamin's non-Button mother passes away), they embrace the vitality of rock and roll and the sensuality of the era. A daughter - Caroline, it turns out - is born in the late sixties and Benjamin decides he must depart to wander the world and prepare for an old age in which he will transform into a child.

Benjamin and Daisy reunite one other time to make love, she now aged into her fifties (with a new husband to raise Caroline) and he a beautiful youth of twenty or so, before their final years together. A seeming adolescent whose confusion has more to do with senility than puberty, Benjamin returns to the nursing home and is looked after by his former lover now playing the role of mother; he dies in her arms as a fresh-faced infant just a couple years before her own end. Caroline is shocked to learn all of this history in her mother's final moments, just as it becomes clear that the hurricane is about to consume the city. Nearby, Gateau's ornate clock - recently replaced by an impersonal digital display - rests forgotten in a basement and drowns in the deluge.

The Context:

September 2023 Patreon round-up: EXCLUSIVE - More thoughts on "Barbenheimer" & Podcast Episode 100 Feedback + ADVANCE - TWIN PEAKS Character Series entry

With summer officially coming to an end, it was finally time to wrap up my "Barbenheimer" reflections which began with a public double review of Barbie and Oppenheimer in the week after their July 21 release. I announced back then, and am now delivering, a lengthy, in-depth follow-up essay exclusive to the $5/month tier with no plans to share it any further. If you enjoyed the first piece, you'll definitely want to check this one out; in twenty-one paragraphs and over six thousand words, I explore the recent films of both Christopher Nolan and Greta Gerwig and how they lead into their latest work, the political ramifications of Oppenheimer, why the meme/trend of combining the two movies took off, the millennial resonance of both but especially Barbie, and many other related subjects. Given the way it builds off what I've written about both Nolan and Gerwig for the full fifteen years of this site, and how it echoes a piece I wrote almost a decade ago (another dual review providing a springboard for cultural reflections), this essay feels like the perfect punctuation for this moment in my own online activity. I didn't think it would take this long for this sequel to be ready, but I'm quite pleased with the results and hope you consider them worth the wait.

Between my "Barbenheimer" analysis and the many podcasts previewed in August and still unreleased to other tiers or the public, this is a great time to make the jump to the top tier if you've ever considered joining. However, there are also rewards for $1/month patrons to enjoy, including the first taste since March of the main patron podcast's Episode 100 - in this case, a final round-up of listener feedback. And as always, I'm sharing a TWIN PEAKS Character Series entry (albeit one that I still need to revise a bit) at least a month ahead of schedule - in this case well in advance, since I probably won't resume the public series again until 2024.

Barbie & Oppenheimer

I've separated those titles for a reason - this is not exactly a study of the "Barbenheimer" phenomenon which weaves these two radically different films together at every turn. Instead, for the most part I'll be reviewing each film separately and without concern for the combination of their divergent material (aside from this intro and eventually, in a follow-up Patreon piece, some closing thoughts about what does potentially link these movies). At the same time, clearly I'm taking the bait here by writing a single piece to deal with both films. How could I not?! For fifteen years, my online work has been marked by an obsession with duality (even my most singular obsession, Twin Peaks, focuses on that theme). My very first blog post paired two DVDs spanning the history of cinema, and since then I've taken every opportunity to compare and contrast in prose, podcast, and video essay (including a "Side by Side" series devoted to that very theme). These switch between works with blatant connections (like the Sterling Hayden 1950s heist films The Asphalt Jungle and The Killing) - in order to tease out what makes them differ - and works that seemed fundamentally opposed (the anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion and the aforementioned surreal murder mystery Twin Peaks) - in order to tease out their rhyming sensibilities. A recently-concluded podcast covered dozens of different films with the hook of comparing them to Twin Peaks; as Kevin B. Lee once noted about my early video work, "interweaving" is a constant theme.

With all that in mind, I took immediate note of the bemusing, tongue-in-cheek "Barbenheimer" trend that overtook Twitter several months ago, following the announcement that Greta Gerwig's whimsical Mattel-sponsored toy movie Barbie would be released on the same day as Christopher Nolan's brooding period biopic Oppenheimer. The genesis of the meme is obvious at a glance - the movies form an almost too-perfect yin-yang in tone, aesthetic, creative development, and especially the gender of the protagonists and presumed audience. Cheeky vs. somber, bright vs. dark, commercial promotion vs. highminded literary adaptation, the ultimate chick flick vs. the distillation of filmbro chic. Alongside this fission, however, exists a sense of fundamental fusion. After all, if the films didn't have a certain consonance, the whole concept would fall flat. If Barbie dropped the same day as, say, Mission: Impossible 7, or Oppenheimer accompanied The Little Mermaid into theaters, there wouldn't be the same reaction. The most obvious parallel emerges in the titles themselves, one-word names of the central characters, lending themselves perfectly to a portmanteau. Both works are directed by distinctive auteur filmmakers working on a grand yet focused scale, making films that feel deeply personal even while addressing much bigger subjects. And those very subjects are both uniquely iconic. If the atomic bomb appears more consequential to human history than a plastic doll (despite what Gerwig's amusing 2001: A Space Odyssey opening tribute suggests), it's hard to argue against their equal ubiquity within pop culture. The Bomb and The Barbie have been wildly popular and deeply controversial, and the idea that they belong in the same conversation says much about the nature of postwar America, a legacy that lingers three quarters of a century later.

All of this was apparent at the outset, from posters and trailers, or even just knowing the basic concepts. Could this potentially long-winded joke ever have an adequate punchline, something which could convert it into a more profound meaning? I've avoided reading or listening to much else on the subject beyond those amusing memes (a follow-up exclusive to $5/month patrons will engage with critical commentary, among other matters). Nonetheless, I have peripherally picked up on some fatigue with the whole double feature conceit, implying a reversion to the idea that these two films are better viewed and discussed in isolation rather than forced concert. Even if that's the approach I'll mostly take here, it's worth noting that without the inspired pairing I wouldn't be reviewing these movies at all right now. I make it to few new releases, hardly ever on opening weekend, and have missed the more recent work of both directors (something I hope to rectify before that follow-up piece). I'm generally quite busy with online and offline work at the moment and it took some effort to catch this double feature last Saturday. The impetus of their complementary-yet-incompatible pairing made such an effort impossible to resist, so I'm thankful to the "Barbenheimer" booster rocket for that. For once I'm not catching up with a zeitgeist long after the fact - but are the movies themselves late to the party?

Captain America: The First Avenger (The Unseen 2011)

"The Unseen" is a series in which I watch popular films for the first time. The list, which moves backwards in time, is based on the highest-ranked film I've never seen each year on Letterboxd (as of April 2018). Captain America was #2 for 2011.

The Story: He's always an odd man out - initially as a scrawny Brooklyn kid who fails every Army physical and eventually as a fossil reawakened in a world he can't understand. But in between those two demoralizing positions, Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) gets to be exceptional in the best way possible. Chosen for a top secret World War II experiment due to his fighting spirit and unpretentious sense of virtue, Rogers is injected with a high-tech serum which expands his muscle mass and increases his endurance. The goal is to create a fierce fighting force of fellow supersoldiers; unfortunately, he remains an army of one when the leading scientist Dr. Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci) is killed, and the formula which transformed Rogers dies with him. Reduced to selling war bonds and touring the European theater in a tacky costume with the hokey name "Captain America," Rogers receives another opportunity for valor. He discovers that his childhood best friend Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) has been taken prisoner by the renegade German faction Hydra, led by the scientist Johann Schmidt (Hugo Weaving). Schmidt has received the same serum as Rogers and becomes his nemesis, especially after Rogers defies Colonel Phillips' (Tommy Lee Jones') orders to rescue Barnes.

With the encouragement of the smitten British officer Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) and the technical support of Howard Stark (Dominic Cooper), Rogers leads a band of misfit commandos on war raids, eventually climaxing with a battle against Schmidt over the Atlantic. Saving New York City from a devastating weapon (powered by the mysterious Tesseract that later shows up in The Avengers), Rogers is forced to crash land on an icy island where his body is discovered in 2011. He wakes up in a familiar forties hospital room...but it's a bit too familiar: he remembers the baseball game on the radio from several years before his disappearance. Breaking out of the false soundstage where he's being held, Rogers races into the modern Times Square and is confronted by Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), head of the S.H.I.E.L.D. agency that has been cultivating superheroes across the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Informed that he's been frozen and comatose for seven decades, Rogers is most morose about the final conversation he had with Peggy shortly before his fate was sealed. "I had a date," he sighs, a Rip Van Winkle dismayed rather than relieved to discover the passage of time.

The Context:

SEVEN AMERICAN GENERATIONS: zoomers, millennials, X, boomers, silent, greatest, and lost

An illustrated guide to the living American generations (excluding those born after 2013) and the unique periods of the past century they experienced at different ages

INTRODUCTION

Although intended as a useful reference going forward, I'm publishing this entry in the particular context of December 2019. Between the "ok boomer" meme, Xers fretting over their "forgotten middle child" status, questions about where the millennial generation actually begins, and uncertainty about what to call post-millennials, there's been a lot of talk about generations in the past few months. No wonder: the 2020 presidential campaign has sharpened divisions between different age groups, with majorities of boomers and millennials not only supporting different parties, but different candidates within the Democratic primary (ironically, the oldest candidate has overwhelming youth support while the youngest is disproportionately popular with an aging crowd). We're also reaching the end of a decade defined by millennials, while in the past few years an even younger tech-savvy, politically activated generation has begun to come of age.

Meanwhile, dramatic demographic changes hover on the horizon. By the end of the 2020s, the last of the lost generation will probably pass away; the entire greatest cohort will cross their century mark and the first silent will turn one hundred; the oldest boomers will hit eighty while the youngest boomers and oldest Xers become senior citizens; millennials will enter middle age as zoomers constitute the majority of young adults; and an even newer generation will emerge onto the scene (the oldest of them are already five, but most haven't been born yet so I'm leaving them out of this analysis). This is an especially dramatic turn for my own generation since the Age of the Thinkpiece has made the terms "millennial" and "young" synonymous - often negatively so. As I once joked, around 2032 a thirtysomething will write a "damn millennial kids are ruining ______" essay, only to be informed that they're actually younger than the youngest millennial. Indeed, by my own admittedly controversial calculations, the first millenial will turn forty in a few weeks; with all of this in mind, December 2019 seems like a good time to take stock, try to lock some of this down and ponder the phenomenon both visually and statistically. Please note, as the title suggests, I am focusing exclusively on a U.S. context especially when it comes to defining the different eras.

The following entry is the result of a year's worth of off-and-on pondering and about a week's worth of hunting and gathering images to illustrate these ideas - as well as a lifetime of being inordinately obsessed with eras, generations, and the process of aging, and how these stack up against each other in a kind of historical grid. I think it's mostly self-explanatory and don't want to further clog up this introduction, but if you're confused I offer an "explanation of process" at the end of this entry. This is not academic work for which I've been trained to follow certain procedures, it's purely the result of my own curiosity and speculation, so take it as you will! Hopefully it's as helpful and absorbing to peruse as it was to assemble.

Descriptions/credits for "Seven American Generations"

This entry lists all of the actors, events, and photographers (for the era collages, where available) in my "Seven American Generations" post. I didn't want to disrupt the flow of that piece but knew readers might be curious. Where there's an accompanying video, it's linked in the description. The above image, by the way, is of Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds with a space man (how prescient) on the opening day of Disneyland in 1955. It didn't fit with the collage I created but I'm glad I found a place for it somewhere.

Also, since there are no repetitions here and everything is full-size you can use this as an image gallery too (click an image to fill your screen).

If you stumbled across this post via a Google image search or another similarly blind route, you're probably confused...click below for context:

VISIT

SEVEN AMERICAN GENERATIONS:
ZOOMERS, MILLENNIALS, X, BOOMERS, SILENT, GREATEST, AND LOST

The Favorites - Casablanca (#57)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Casablanca (1942/USA/dir. Michael Curtiz) appeared at #57 on my original list.

What it is • Do I really need to tell you? The legend of Casablanca is well-established by now, although I also have to wonder if its star hasn't dimmed a little in recent years. Even for very young viewers in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, its zeitgeist seemed within reach - the World War II generation was still very much among us and this film belonged to our grandparents' generation; with constant TV and film references, black-and-white classic Hollywood felt a stone's throw away, culturally, even as it was a half-century or more in the past; and Casablanca was one of the most accessible titles at a time when classics were not so easy to see. Today, the youngest WWII veteran is eighty-nine, a teenager has grandparents who grew up with Saturday morning cartoons not Hollywood double features at the local movie palace, and most new releases reflect video-game or comic-book aesthetics rather than Old Hollywood. So, then, a quick explanation: Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) is an American in North Africa early in World War II, after France had fallen to the Nazis and before his own home country, neutral like him, had committed to the fight for freedom. Rick lived in Paris before the German invasion, romancing a young widow who, as it turns out, was not as widowed as they both thought she was. Now the lady Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) shows up at Rick's fashionable cafe/casino with husband Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), a member of the Resistance. Rick must decide between helping or punishing her old lover, honoring a worthy cause or maintaining his steadfast, above-it-all cynicism. Romantic heartbreak, but also commitment to political action, are the subjects of Casablanca.

Why I like it •

The Favorites - The Best Years of Our Lives (#64)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946/USA/dir. William Wyler) appeared at #64 on my original list.

What it is • The war is over...the big one, the one that galvanized the country and affected every life, at home or abroad. Of course it didn't have the same effect across the board. Some, like soldier Al Stephenson (Fredric March), sailor Homer Parrish (Harold Russell), and airman Fred Derry (Dana Andrews), experienced the battlefield for themselves and are returning with wounds psychic (in Fred's case) or physical (in Homer's - he is played by a real-life double amputee). Others, like Al's wife Milly (Myrna Loy) and daughter Peggy (Teresa Wright), experienced its shocks more indirectly, through the absence of their loved ones and more subtle social and economic changes on the homefront. And still others, like Al's banker boss Mr. Milton (Ray Collins) or the right-wing isolationist who gets in a fight with two of the veterans at a soda fountain, barely seem to have been affected by it at all except as an abstraction or an imposition. This diversity of experience is one of the brilliant qualities of The Best Years of Our Lives, which centers around the three veterans (attempting) to adjust to their old lives, only to discover that those lives don't exist anymore. It doesn't simply offer one prepackaged notion of how the war impacted America and the individuals in this story; it explores many different points of impact with rapt fascination. In telling this story, William Wyler's attention to detail and Gregg Toland's astonishing deep-focus camerawork create a world so textured that after nearly three hours we feel as if we live there ourselves.

Why I like it •

The Favorites - Schindler's List (#85)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Schindler's List (1993/USA/dir. Steven Spielberg) appeared at #85 on my original list.

What it is • Oskar Schindler arrives on the screen with an aura of glamor, charisma, and mystery, as superficially charming as he is morally bankrupt. All around him the Jews of Krakow - rich and poor, old and young, cynical and idealistic - are stripped of their property, huddled together in ghettos, herded into work camps, and executed on the whims of their German occupiers. Schindler's concern is to get his enamelware business going, taking advantage of the war (and the possibility of Jewish slave labor) to make a fortune which he can then spend on lavish parties and the best in consumer goods. It would be easy to set Schindler up as an instinctively despicable figure, but instead Spielberg and star Liam Neeson encourage us to enjoy his company, to see the world simultaneously through his eyes and through a wider lens which perceives the suffering he is oblivious to. This is a risky gambit (it would have been easier to focus the film through his eyes entirely OR to make a docudrama about the horrors of the Holocaust) but one that ultimately pays off as these two distant worlds come crashing together, and the awakened Oskar discovers the humanity of those around him, and of himself.

Why I like it •

The Last Stage

When Wanda Jakubowska entered the gates of the women's camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau as a political prisoner of the Nazis, she seized upon a goal that may have kept her alive in the months and years to come. Although she had joined the Polish Resistance early in World War II and been committed to the Left many years before that, this was not a political goal (at least not primarily). Jakubowska had also been a filmmaker for over a decade, founding the film group START and crafting experimental films throughout the thirties, climaxing with a feature film whose only print was destroyed during the German invasion of Poland in 1939. Inside the concentration camp, Jakubowska conceived the idea for her second feature even as she herself, not just her work, faced destruction. If and when the Nazis were defeated and Auschwitz was liberated, she would create a film about life in the camp. And so she did.

Generations Linked by Video: The iHistory WW2 Project & Interview with Jeffrey Worthington

 The iHistory WW2 Video Competition

"The iHistory WW2 video competition is proud to connect teenagers with WWII veterans, giving students the opportunity to hear first-hand accounts of history. The students will film an interview with a WWII veteran that will be submitted to the Library of Congress. Then the students will use editing resources provided on our website to make a mini-documentary which they will submit to the competition on YouTube." - from "About the iHistory WW2 Contest"

•

There's a moment near the start of The Century (a documentary miniseries from 1999) that I've always found magical. The program begins unexpectedly in small-town New Jersey around '96 or '97, peeking into the corners of the familiar present to notice unexpected hints of the past. While there are many revealing places (including a car garage that was once a stable, back when "horsepower" meant just that), the most powerful and poignant reminders are the people who inhabit these places. It's their voices that carry us into the past, a miraculous dissolve from a moonlit sky to archival footage of dancing soldiers and parading movie stars and moonwalking astronauts...never has history seemed so alive.

That's the power of human memory, and the power of modern technology to capture and deliver these memories to a new generation. And that is why I was so intrigued to find out about the iHistory World War 2 project, a contest (sponsored by the nonprofit Worthington Foundation) encouraging young students to record interviews with World War 2 veterans; students will then be given the opportunity to craft polished documentary projects. This idea perfectly captures ability modern media's ability to bring history to life. Furthermore the time is now, because the youngest WW2 vets are now in their late eighties, and they aren't getting any younger.

I heard about the contest via email; I receive many such notifications and usually can't follow up even with the interesting ones. Yet I was fascinated by this project - its historical relevance, its cross-generational connections, its ability to open up filmmaking for young people who many never have considered themselves filmmakers before - and so I scheduled an interview with Jeffrey Worthington, founder and CEO of the Worthington Foundation. At the appointed time, Jeffrey was dealing with an unforeseen emergency, but he was kind enough to respond to my questions anyway, and the results are below. For more information, you can visit the iHistory WW2 contest website. The full interview follows the jump.

They Were Expendable, A Canterbury Tale, & Hail the Conquering Hero

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.

Schindler's List and Munich

This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.

When Schindler's List was released in 1993, it was regarded as a breakthrough, a true turning point in Steven Spielberg's career when the wunderkind director finally became a "grown-up." In fact, the movie is very much a culmination of his previous films, more of a crescendo to his early period than a harbinger of his later work. It is a film of flourishes, grand gestures and set pieces, full of heroism and villainy with a larger-than-life backdrop and clearly delineated moral stakes. For this reason, this extremely popular and widely acclaimed movie had a fair number of detractors on its release. They focused on the sentimentality of certain moments (especially Schindler's tearful plea at the end of the movie) and the selectivity of its focus, choosing to dwell on the positive in such an overwhelmingly negative subject. Stanley Kubrick, a friend and posthumous collaborator of Spielberg, supposedly noted that Schindler's List was a story about success, but the Holocaust was all about failure, and J. Hoberman dismissed the movie with the rhetorical question, "Is it possible to make a feel-good movie about the ultimate feel-bad experience of the 20th century?"

These criticisms could be viewed as footnotes to the film's overwhelming success but they speak to a larger phenomenon, a deep-seated critical and intellectual antipathy toward Spielberg (along with an acknowledgement that he can't merely be dismissed, but must be debunked). They're also important because they remind us of that essential fact - that Schindler's List grows out of Spielberg's earlier body of work - and they are interesting because of what came later, especially Munich. Indeed, that film makes an interesting companion piece to the earlier one, in terms of subject matter, narrative approach, and stylistic inclinations. It comes from a period where Spielberg had overcome some of the critical hurdles that still faced him with Schindler's List, and when a truer break with the early films had been made. I would argue that the real turning point in Spielberg's filmography arrives not with Schindler's List, or The Color Purple, or Saving Private Ryan, any of his other self-consciously "adult" films dealing with real-world historical subjects, but with a science fiction film at the dawn of the new millennium. Beginning with AI Artificial Intelligence, Spielberg's work darkened - or rather the darkness that had always been there came to the forefront, coinciding with a breakdown in the strict discipline Spielberg films always enjoyed. Munich belongs to this new period of uncertainty and messiness; Schindler's List definitely does not although it contains hints of the darkness and maturity to come.

Casablanca

This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.

* Today I learned that a fellow blogger, who was an enthusiastic commenter on The Dancing Image, passed away. Ironically, his final post references Casablanca as does the name of his website (though I didn't realize it until now). I encourage you to visit Laszlo's at Lex, and I now dedicate this piece to Gerald Stewart. *

What are the fundamental things in life? A kiss? A sigh? So the Casablanca cult would have you believe - after all, we are told, the film is a romance first and foremost, a gauzy Hollywood myth full of larger-than-life themes, iconic close-ups of glamorous stars, and an exotic locale and wartime backdrop that serve to heighten the emotional tenor and raise the narrative stakes, though only window dressing for the main attraction: a love story to end all love stories. Everyone knows that the film was meant to be nothing special, just another Warners release, that it even shifted into B territory with Ronald Reagan considered for Rick. We've heard how, miraculously, the elements all clicked into place: ideal stars, a perfect supporting cast, the right writers and crew behind the camera, last-minute rewrites to ensure that the film ended on its memorable, ever-more romantic bittersweet note. Love lost is that much easier to savor.

I've felt this way about Casablanca before - watching the movie several years ago, the World War II trappings seemed almost surrealistically artificial. I think I had been watching later, more hard-hitting films on the war, so it felt bizarre to see these actors roaming around an elaborately decorated soundstage in sunny Los Angeles, pretending to be struggling in life or death with the Nazis who were half a world away. True, America had joined the war by this point, but this also served to make the heightened stakes of the films' German dominance and American neutrality seem safely past. No, Casablanca might be many things but a true reflection of the war and the wartime mentality, it was not - just a fun, exciting, romantic slice of Hollywood mythology, right? Wrong.

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.

Storm Clouds Gather 1940 - 1942 • "32 Days of Movies" Day 6

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

View "Chapter 6: Storm Clouds Gather"

Storm Clouds Gather

In a quiet European cafe, a couple bicker and, by bickering, flirt. It is charming, wistful...and more than a little poignant: argument as gradual romance rather than violent dispute. In another establishment, in another European country, this same couple (or so it seems) find themselves surrounded by a bloodthirsty crowd, hands raised high in stiff salute, singing lustily about their glorious leader. Upon reflection, that cafe scene becomes even more poignant, tragic even. War has come to Europe, and by extension, to Hollywood.

The Sunday Matinee: Miraculous Virgin

This is an entry in The Sunday Matinee series.

Miraculous Virgin, Czechoslovakia, 1967, dir. Stefan Uher, starring Jolanta Umecka, Ladislav Mrkvicka, Otakar Janda

Story: As bombs fall from the sky, a beautiful young woman wanders into the lives of several young artists and a melancholy middle-aged sculptor. They treat her as their muse. Yet before long, she is overwhelmed by their aggressive attention, and they are frustrated by her aloof resistance to their overtures.

An interesting element of the various European New Waves is their relationship with the recent past - namely World War II. I've often felt that the sixties were imbued with the displaced spirit of the forties, and that the cultural explosion and political upheaval of the era may have been impossible without the misery, death, and displacement of two decades before. This is not to say that the war played a huge role in cultural artifacts of the time; in some ways, the influence was indirect, in others displaced. In certain countries, for example the United States or Britain, the war was considered property of the older squares, and youthful revelers, rebels, or activists either satirized or ignored the earlier era's sensibility. Elsewhere, the war haunted the cinema without necessarily being foregrounded: in France, it popped up in the films of Alain Resnais (about ten years older than most of the other New Wavers); in Italy and Japan, a sense of collective guilt fed into the bitterness with which young filmmakers scorned the societies of the past. Whatever the country, New Wavers tended to be born around the same time period, from the late twenties to the mid-thirties (some a bit younger in Italy, some a bit older in Britain), making them teenagers at the time of the war. This meant that most did not serve as soldiers, and would only have experienced the turmoil of the time to the extent that war came to them.

Czechoslovakia, in some ways, was spared the most brutal aspects of the war. Unlike Britain, Poland, Germany, or Japan it was not subjected to substantial aerial bombardment, one reason that Prague still remains the glistening city of the past, architectural jewels from earlier centuries still dominating its skyline. Yet this was precisely because the Germans didn't need to bomb the Czechs - the country had already been handed over to Hitler by allies eager to appease, and Czechoslovakia was given the dubious honor of enduring Nazi occupation from months before World War II even began. Following the war, unlike the French, Italian, or British, the nation was not able to stumble towards a new sense of independence or democracy; it was occupied by the Soviets, democratic officials were killed, and a Stalinist dictatorship was installed within several years of the "victory." In some ways, for Czechoslovakia, the war never ended. No wonder then, that World War II features so prominently in the Czechoslovakian New Wave (and here it makes sense to use the country's full name, as Miraculous Virgin was directed by a Slovakian, not a Czech). Some of its most famous films - including the Oscar-winning Closely Watched Trains and The Shop on Main Street - take place during the war. The best of these (and the least well-known) is the phenomenal Miraculous Virgin - while the setting is ambiguous, the film is tormented by a sense of occupation, persecution, death, and collaboration. Its themes are universal, but the historical experience of this beleaguered nation is the context out of which Miraculous Virgin was born.

Inglourious Basterds

Inglourious Basterds' hook is clever, canny, and seemingly irresistible. A squadron of Jewish-American soldiers, led by a gentile backwoodsmen (is there any other kind?), drops behind enemy lines in 1944 Germany and sets about killing as many Nazis as possible.  While Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) leads his titular squadron on an Apache-inspired campaign of terror against the Germans, a quiet, beautiful young cinema owner endures the unwanted attention of a chipper Aryan sharpshooter. Unexpectedly, these overtures lead to a meeting with Goebbels, a tense dinner with the man who killed her family (he does not recognize her) and the opportunity to exact retribution on her kin's murderers. The climax sees the Basterds' official mission unknowingly collide with Shoshana's personal revenge plot, as a propaganda print and occupied theater goes up in flames, and the Fuhrer goes down in a flurry of bullets. Yes, the movie's hooky all right, but in the finished film the goofy high concept (Nazi-hunting Jewish guerrillas) is probably the least interesting element; one frequently wonders if Tarantino couldn't have made a better film by foregoing the cartoonish central device and withholding the residual hipster winking (dramatically toned down, but still a dominant element in the director's style).