The Third Man

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.

"If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend," E.M. Forster once wrote, "I hope I should have the guts to betray my country." Albert Camus, faced with the possibility of his mother being killed by terrorists in the struggle for Algerian independence, said, "If that is justice, I prefer my mother." The circumstances in The Third Man - British officer Callaway tries to get naive American author Holly Martins to sell out his criminal friend Harry Lime, for the sake of Anna, a Czechoslovakian refugee - seem far more lopsided in duty's direction. Humanitarianism, rather than questionable nationalism, is set up against friendly loyalty, while the victim of justice is not a mother blown up on a tram, but a sociopathic greedy child-poisoner. Yet in a way, this only deepens the dilemma: the characters have every reason to betray Harry Lime, but one of them almost doesn't and the other never would.

Taxi Driver

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.

The following was written in the fall of 1999, when I was 15 years old, just for the hell of it (not a school assignment). I'm including it because a) this title wasn't even originally scheduled in the series, but was added at the last minute, b) this series is in part about my personal relationship to these movies, and c) this film has a certain adolescent intensity (and I mean that in a good way), so it seemed appropriate to publish a review by the teenage me.

Directed by Martin Scorsese. Starring Robert DeNiro. Released in 1976. Also with Cybill Shepherd, Jodie Foster, Harvey Keitel, Peter Boyle, Albert Brooks, and Martin Scorsese. Written by Paul Schrader. Photographed by Michael Chapman. Produced by Michael and Julia Phillips. Themes - Alienation; Violence; Lust/reviewed on 9/11/99.

When I saw my first two Scorsese films, Mean Streets (1973) and Raging Bull (1980), I enjoyed them and was very impressed by Scorsese's directorial skills. But neither was satisfying. I don't mean satisfying in a way that makes [you] leave the theater or shut off the VCR with a smile on your face or even tears rolling down your face after a sentimental tearjerker ending. Sure, those experiences may mean you were satisfied. But for me, satisfaction means your emotions (deep emotions) have been triggered by the movie and this kind of satisfaction means you can finish the movie in an upset or depressed mood.

Now don't get me wrong. I consider Raging Bull to be one of the top films of the eighties, and Mean Streets thrills me because it propelled Scorsese to success and it's raw and often exciting. But this film, Taxi Driver, is one that grabs you and pulls you into the screen, as do few movies. The Godfathers (especially Part II) does this, as do Vertigo, Saving Private Ryan in some scenes, and the Star Wars films on a good day. What are the qualities that can do this? I've found that color film usually helps me to get pulled in. Truthful acting, not just line reading - in fact the less talking the better, helps too. Music can really get me involved. Finally, the direction must give me the key to unlock the movie's world.

The Seventh Seal

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.

In the Valhalla of cinematic images, alongside Orson Welles grinning through one doorway and John Wayne gripping his arm in another, next to Mickey Mouse conducting a symphony of waves or King Kong hanging from the Empire State Building, there must be a spot for a black-cowled, white-faced Death leaning over a chessboard opposite a stoic Crusader, against the backdrop of a stirring dawn over a stilled, glistening sea, contemplating his next move. When recommending first Bergmans for neophyte viewers, I always lean toward Wild Strawberries, since its lush atmosphere and modern story seem, on the surface, to make it the most accessible entry point into the auteur’s oeuvre. Perhaps if I were more honest with myself, I’d select The Seventh Seal, which was my first Bergman and made a great introduction to his work.

Seven Samurai

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.

The ethos of Seven Samurai – the values it stands for, or at least represents – is compellingly divided. On the one hand, there is a definite communitarian spirit: characters are scolded for striking out on their own, for seeking their self-advantage instead of playing a role that serves the group. Whether they are seeking cowardly self-protection or courageous glory, the message is the same: do not abandon your post, do not sacrifice your duties, for anything. Furthermore, the samurai themselves have little to gain from their actions; they are stoic and dutiful but, as Kambei says in the end, “We were defeated again. We didn’t win, the farmers did.”

Merry Christmas from Monika and Yoko ("32 Days of Movies")

When I wrapped "32 Days of Movies" in November, I knew that the project was not quite finished. Now it is.

I have added four entirely new film clips to the series, bringing the grand total up to 370. One is a movie I've owned for years but initially forgot. The others are recent acquisitions, including a December 20 DVD release which helps conclude the final chapter.

Click on any of the screen-caps below and you'll jump to the video page. Check out the appropriate timecode for the clip in question.

Enjoy...

This opens Chapter 10

This appears at 3:45 in Chapter 32

This appears at 4:25 in Chapter 25

This opens Chapter 2

I have also switched the clip for the following. And yes, I know it's spelled wrong (but I'll bet you didn't until I mentioned it...)

This appears at 3:35 in Chapter 20

Avant-Garde: WHAT'S IN A NAME?

We began avant-garde month by defying language - with silent films whose currency was visual, whose ideograms were images. Today we openly confront, pull apart, and reassemble language, on a kind of a cracked-looking-glass Sesame Street, numbers and words thrown in the air, land where they may, brought to you by the letter X - as in crossed-out, mysterious value, or X marks the spot. Two short entries are followed by a longer one (covering A Walk Through H, a fantastic film that seems to aptly round out all our themes). Bring your map, but don't expect it to help any.

The Searchers

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.

Usually when we say a film starts "in medias res" we mean that we're plopped right down in the midst of action, with the plot already begun. That's not the case in The Searchers, which follows a conventional story arc. Beginning with Ethan Edwards' arrival at his brother's homestead, the film waits the requisite ten or twenty minutes before introducing the "inciting incident" in screenwriting terms: a Comanche attack on Ethan's relatives, killing the parents and son, raping the older daughter, and kidnapping the little girl. Only after this does the central action of the story begin, with Ethan and his part-Indian stepnephew, Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter) trailing the Comanche war party for five years, hoping to either rescue little Debbie or put her out of her perceived misery, as her teenage years will bring a dreaded miscegenation. Then the movie follows an episodic course, cutting between accounts of Ethan's and Martin's hunt and the "homefront" where Laurie Jorgensen (Vera Miles) pines after Martin and considers her other options. So no, The Searchers doesn't start "in the middle of things" as that Latin phrase would have it and yet in a sense it does: a whole world, historical, social, psychological, stretches out before the film even begins and the movie itself almost seems like the tip of the iceberg floating on waters which conceal its vast depths but let us imagine what lies beneath.

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.

Discussing The Rules of the Game

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.

About nine years ago, I saw The Rules of the Game for the first time. It left me completely cold. It wasn't that I disliked it per se, it just did nothing for me. A few years later I saw it again, and it still didn't quite click. Frustrated, feeling that I was missing something but unable to get a grip on exactly what it was, I jumped to my keyboard and left a post on IMDb: "Is this film overrated?"

Fast forward two years, when I saw the film again and returned to update my response. In doing so, I noticed that my question had really struck a chord; five or six pages of very thoughtful responses, pro and con, had resulted from that initial inquiry. Tonight I watched the movie again, in preparation for this series. However, rather than write a conventional review of the film, I decided to re-post highlights from that IMDb thread, since such an interesting discussion emerged.

I am also including, as a postscript, a response written freshly for tonight. However, the bulk of the post belongs to my initial and concluding post, and selections from the replies in between. They make for great reading - feel free to leave your own thoughts on the film below. Thanks to all those participants back in the day. Keep in mind these are just a small sampling of a long and at times contentious conversation; I stuck with the meatiest posts here but a lot of the shorter ones had some great insights too.

Rear Window (& thoughts on Dial M for Murder)

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.

Rear Window is a dazzling film, because it's so many things: an entertaining narrative, an enjoyable hang-out film, a beautiful visual experience, a provocative concept, and a clever contraption. This is Hitchcock firing on all cylinders, finding a gimmick (as he loved to do) that opened opportunities rather than constricting options (which was not always the case). It's a movie that has been written about thousands of times, approached from many angles: as a metaphor for the characters' anxieties about marriage, as a clever exploration of voyeurism, and as a meta meditation on film-going (and channel-surfing, in this new age of television). That last aspect particularly interests me, and there's definitely something to it. As James Stewart's L.B. Jeffries looks out over his courtyard, each window is like a separate screen, offering different viewing options in various genres: comedy, romance, musical, and eventually the one that consumes his attention - murder mystery.

Rashomon

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.

Is Rashomon a parable of relativism? Not exactly (sorry if that sounds like a relativist statement!). After all, the events (or rather, the different versions of the same event) portrayed don’t differ merely in perspective or this or that detail, but in the entire thrust of the action. Even the most anti-objectivist, open-minded, postmodern, pluralist thinkers would not claim that multiple accounts of a physical encounter, which completely contradicted one another, could all be “true.” When I first saw Rashomon, it quickly became my favorite Kurosawa – because of the lush visual (and sonic) texture and the cleverness of the storytelling. But I was baffled by the claim it offered some kind of concrete critique of “reality” and the “truth.” The point seemed a bit trite – after all, a man was killed, somebody killed him, and the different versions were all incompatible with one another. It’s possible nobody is right, but it’s a cinch everyone isn’t. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said in a heated political debate, “You’re entitled to your own opinions, sir, but not to your own facts!”

Raging Bull, the Last of the Consensus Classics

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.

There is some irony in Raging Bull being called “the best American film of the 1980s.” Its placement in that decade is a mere accident of chronology – and critics calling it the best of those years are essentially saying what (little) they think of them. Peter Biskind, by naming his book on 70s American cinema Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, acknowledged an important fact: when Raging Bull came out in 1980, it was closing out, rather than ushering in, an era. To this day, it remains a kind of fault line in cinema history – before it come the acknowledged classics, after it a number of films up for grabs, many possible masterpieces or potential classics, with their adherents and detractors, but few with the kind of immediately obvious weight Raging Bull carries. It is the last of the "consensus classics," a generalization (even Citizen Kane has its critics) but a helpful one in determining the shape of critical and popular opinion, and thus a kind of cinematic historiography.

Among popular Hollywood touchstones there’s E.T., maybe Raiders of the Lost Ark. Lynch’s unique voice has been recognized in the cautious canonization of Blue Velvet and (to a lesser extent) Mulholland Drive - though the "Lynchian" seems to transcend a single film. Do the Right Thing has its advocates, while Goodfellas and (more controversially) Pulp Fiction were huge gamechangers as far as style goes, informing everything that came afterward. Schindler’s List is probably the only post-Raging Bull film to seem just as “unavoidable,” as unquestionably important to the conversation – although it has many major detractors in a way Raging Bull does not. In recent years, only the one-two punch of 2007 (No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood) seem to contend that same throne.

What happened? It would require many more posts to explain in detail why consensus becomes less clear after Raging Bull. But the phenomenon is real, not imagined, and it is not a matter of time passing before the dust settles on reputations – consider that from 1962 to 1982, recent films did not have trouble making the international Sight & Sound lists: indeed, Raging Bull cracked the top three “all-time greats” within a dozen years of its release (back in 1962, L'Avventura made an even quicker jump, #2 after two years). I think there have been plenty of great films since then, but my list differs substantially from everyone else’s, as do everyone else's from one another. A certain common ground has been lost (the advent of DVD and the internet will either reverse or hasten this stasis in canonization, perhaps both; the 2012 Sight & Sound list should be interesting). What interests me here is why Raging Bull does make the cut, and what that means.