The Favorites - The Passion of Joan of Arc (#8)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928/France/dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer) appeared at #8 on my original list.

What it is • Joan of Arc lived from 1412 to 1431, dying when she was still a teenager; her legendary accomplishments - turning back a British invasion of France, following the voices she heard in her head - were achieved nearly six centuries ago. In over a hundred years of cinema, there have been dozens of adaptations of her life (Wikipedia counts forty - including Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure!). Nine countries have participated (all Western except for Japan - which aired a French opera). Acclaimed directors, including Georges Méliès, Cecil B. DeMille, Victor Fleming, Roberto Rossellini, Otto Preminger, Robert Bresson, Paul Verhoeven, Werner Herzog, Jacques Rivette, and Luc Besson, have offered their interpretations. Geraldine Ferrar, Michèle Morgan, Jean Seberg, Hedy Lamarr, Julie Harris, Geneviève Bujold, Janet Suzman, Sandrine Bonnaire, and Leelee Sobieski have all played Joan - Ingrid Bergman even played her twice, once for her husband (joining a tradition stretching from Méliès' wife Jeanne d'Alcy,  to Besson's wife Milla Jovovich, though d'Alcy didn't marry Melies for another thirty years and Jovovich divorced Besson between the film's production and release). With such a storied history - and I haven't even mentioned the excellent La Marveilleuse Vie de Jeanne d'Arc, which followed the film being reviewed by barely a year - you'd think there would be some difficulty in determining the Joan of Arc masterpiece. But there isn't. The Passion of Joan of Arc routinely appears near the very top of all-time great lists, Carl Theodor Dreyer is widely considered the greatest filmmaker to tackle the topic, and Falconetti is praised as the most superb Joan. That's an understatement, actually; many would rank her performance as the greatest in the entire history of cinema. The Passion of Joan of Arc, which focuses exclusively on the trial and execution of Joan, has a tumultuous history. It was controversial when it was shot - territorial French critics despised the idea of a Dane reproducing their saint - and it was frequently banned and censored. Multiple, corrupted versions existed for decades until the original cut was discovered in the early eighties in, of all places, a Norwegian mental institution. Rather differently from Dreyer's sound films, Passion (considered by many the apex of silent cinema) consists almost entirely of close-ups of actor's faces, a riveting, hypnotic symphony of actors' expressions exemplifying the art of intercutting reaction shots.

Why I like it •

The Favorites - The Godfather Part II (#9)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. The Godfather Part II (1974/USA/dir. Francis Ford Coppola) appeared at #9 on my original list.

What it is • Several years have passed since the events of The Godfather (depending on your source, as few as three or as many as seven). Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) has moved the family business out west, and the effect is slightly chilling. In the original film, the Mafia already operated on a grandiose political level detached from its reputation for sleazy street crime. Now Michael is fully enmeshed with the political and corporate world of postwar America, and his geographical relocation exacerbates his distance from the old world (as does his visit to Cuba, sitting side by side with the heads of "legitimate" financial powerhouses, further blurring the lines between the Mafia and Big Business). Yet even as we watch the mobsters advance into modernity, we leap back in time to explore their roots: the film actually begins in Sicily, with a young Vito Corleone (Oreste Baldini). As in late fifties America, turn-of-the-century Sicily makes no real distinction between the wealth and power of criminals and politicians: when local kingpin Don Francesco (Giuseppe Sillato) condemns Vito to death for his father's betrayal, there is no greater authority to condemn him, and Vito must flee for his life. In New York of a hundred years ago (where the boy grows up to be portrayed by Robert De Niro), crime is the only available path for the underdog immigrant, the only way he knows he can protect his family. The irony, of course, is that in the present day Michael follows the path his father set forth and it leads not to the preservation, but to the destruction, of his family. Michael's wife Kay (Diane Keaton) is estranged, his son Anthony (James Gounaris) is threatened, and his brother Fredo (John Cazale)...well, poor Fredo. The Godfather Part II portrays the chilling logic of power, its ability to destroy even that which it has been unleashed to protect. If The Godfather suggests a graceful acceptance of this reasoning, Part II bravely follows it through to its bitter end. There aren't many sequels among my Favorites - even when obvious opportunities present themselves (like one of the later Star Wars films) I have a tendency to favor the original over the works following in its footsteps. Unsurprisingly, The Godfather Part II is the film to buck this trend. It's the only sequel to win Best Picture or to place on many Greatest-of-All-Time lists, and amazingly it does so not as an improvement on a first chapter that didn't really have its act together but rather as the extension of one of the most popular, beloved, and acclaimed classics of all time. On my own list, The Godfather appeared in the top twenty, yet here Part II is even higher. And I'm certainly not alone in that preference, no matter how slight, over its iconic predecessor.

Why I like it •

The Favorites - It's a Wonderful Life (#10)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. It's a Wonderful Life (1946/USA/dir. Frank Capra) appeared at #10 on my original list.

What it is • You may know this one: George Bailey (James Stewart) dreams of escaping his small town in upstate New York. Family crises, business troubles, and true love (however he might try to resist it) foil his plans for college, world travel, and a grand career. Threatened with financial catastrophe and public humiliation on Christmas Eve just after World War II, George contemplates suicide but an angel named Clarence (Henry Travers), who has been told George's life story in a series of "flashbacks," intervenes to show him what life in Bedford Falls would be like if he'd never been born, teaching him to be thankful for what he has and proud of what he's accomplished. Well...my Favorites list has hopefully been a healthy mix of under-the-radar recommendations and familiar classics. Few are more familiar than It's a Wonderful Life, certainly as celebrated a movie as Gone With the Wind or The Wizard of Oz though its trajectory is closer to the latter than the former - forgotten for years before television gave it second life. In fact, more than almost any other film in the history of Hollywood, It's a Wonderful Life has become synonymous with a particular ritual - and not just any ritual, but one of the most important in American culture. This has become the Christmas movie since PBS began airing it as holiday counter-programming in the seventies. In the process, attention settled on the "see what life is like if you'd never been born" high concept and especially the exuberant setpiece closing the movie with a joyous bang, all "Auld Lang Syne" and bells ringing on Christmas trees. It goes so well with eggnog and heapings of Christmas dinner crowding the coffee table in front of the TV, carols competing for attention from nearby stereos, and relatives gathered together in a living room, their chatter overwhelming the dialogue onscreen. Perhaps because of this taken-for-granted familiarity, or the fact that the Greatest Generation who experienced its timeline is now in its nineties, or simply because the black-and-white studio style can no longer claim the universality it once held, It's a Wonderful Life's dominance has become more precarious in recent years. More purely light-hearted fare like A Christmas Story (also set in the forties, but shot in color in the eighties) have threatened its perch, as have hundreds of other Christmas films aired on hundreds of other channels (and thousands available on platforms like Netflix) - long gone are the days when families had to select from only a few options for holiday party TV. I think it would be a pity if It's a Wonderful Life did slide back into quasi-obscurity, a favorite among cineastes but unappreciated by the wider public. It's much more than just a feel-good Christmas movie, but that status allows it to slip a deeper perspective and more ambitious approach into a diet of December fluff.

Why I like it •

The Favorites - Citizen Kane (#11)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Citizen Kane (1941/USA/dir. Orson Welles) appeared at #11 on my original list.

What it is • The great man is dead, and he died alone (well, sort of...). But this isn't an ancient legend, and we can't be fooled into believing this titan was universally revered and respected. It's 1941, the age of mass media, an age that Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles) himself helped create - as we're reminded more than once. And so, within moments of our grandiose introduction to this larger-than-life character, a rapid-fire newsreel exalts, mocks, glosses, and punctures Kane from all angles. He is an awe-inspiring tycoon and a ludicrous public figure; he is a powerful man of the world and an isolated loner in his private castle; he's a communist and a fascist! The rest of the film both follows and subverts this pattern in more subtle fashion. After that info-battering, a throughline is needed, and it arrives in the hunt for the meaning of "Rosebud," Kane's dying words. A roving reporter (William Alland) interviews a series of figures who knew Kane, each from a different perspective depending on their relationship to him, where he was in his own life when they knew him, and the quirks of their own personalities. The film itself reflects this diversity in almost subliminal ways, shaping its style around the voices of these narrators while reflecting the different eras they inhabit. Citizen Kane is one of the all-time great biographies in any medium, one of the few biopics to transcend the problems that afflict that genre. Shaping an entire lifetime into a two-hour feature isn't easy, but Kane turns those challenges into virtues. It works both as an anthology of interrelated short stories and as a sprawling but cohesive novel. Of course, Citizen Kane is frequently praised as the greatest film of all time due to technique more than narrative: its incredible visual invention and ambition (we all know the litany: the trick shots, the visible ceilings, the deep focus, the long takes, the creative montages, etc etc) amplify the plot, themes, and characters, but also transcend them. At twenty-five, straight from his groundbreaking work in radio and theater, Welles was given the most unusual deal of Hollywood's Golden Age, using it to make a film that both extends and radically re-configures the tools of that particular trade. There's a million things I haven't mentioned here (most notably three words: William Randolph Hearst), and I couldn't even scratch the surface of most in a short capsule piece. Fortunately, there's plenty of other writing on Kane, including some by myself that has been linked below. Besides...

Why I like it •

The Favorites - Jammin' the Blues (#12)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Jammin' the Blues (1944/USA/dir. Gjon Mili) appeared at #12 on my original list.

What it is • The opening credits roll over an abstract shape - two circles, one inside the other. Then the shape tips up, revealing itself as the top of a hat, worn by Lester Young. Slowly he lifts his saxophone to his lips and begins to play, and the whole ten-minute short films reels out effortlessly from that point. Well, not effortlessly exactly. The musicians are in top form, both on the soundtrack filled back to front with three of their songs - "Midnight Symphony" (introduced by a narrator in the only lines of spoken word), "On the Sunny Side of the Street" (the only song with lyrics, sung by Marie Bryant), and the title track (accompanied by an unadorned, infectious dance from Bryant and Archie Savage). They are also working hard in front of the camera, but in a different way: precisely miming to their previous recording in the fashion of MTV music videos that would emerge thirty to forty years later. And behind the scenes, director Gjon Mili - an innovative LIFE photographer - carefully arranges lighting effects and camera movements with director of photography Robert Burks, while setting up the perfectly-timed cut-ins and cutaways for editor Everett Dodd (brilliantly, the movie will sometimes jump to a musician who isn't playing at the moment, as when Young calmly lights a cigarette and watches Bryant perform). All of this hard work feels effortless because it flows so naturally and because everyone seems to be having a good time. I think of the film as being massively underrated (it is), even writing for a caption in my #WatchlistScreenCaps series a few years ago, "The greatest fucking musical of all time, and no one knows it!" (of course when I tweeted this someone enthusiastically identified it right away). In fact, it was selected by the National Film Registery and nominated for Best Short the year it came out. Still, it deserves to be even more widely recognized not just as a notable example of its form but a small, perfectly-crafted masterpiece that can stand with the much longer musical narratives of that time or any other. However you categorize it, Jammin' the Blues sizzles.

Why I like it •

The Favorites - The Mirror (#13)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. The Mirror (1975/USSR/dir. Andrei Tarkovsky) appeared at #13 on my original list.

What it is • Everything is in luminous black and white, as if the images had been etched in a glowing stone. Awakened by a distant whistle, a child (Filip Yankovsky) slides out of bed and walks toward a large doorway. A split-second before the cut, something white floats through the frame, a garment caught in a gusty breeze even though we're inside. Then we are watching a stern man (Oleg Yankovsky) step out of view, revealing the woman (Margarita Terekhova) whose head he has just soaked. Her hair hangs down in an uncanny fashion that suggests her hair is her face (an effect recalled in the Japanese horror film The Ring and its American remake). We float back as she dangles her wet locks back and forth in slow motion; parts of the ceiling collapse in wet chunks, splashing onto the watery surface of the floor while a flame shoots up out of a stove in the background, an act of lonely defiance amidst the indoor torrent. The woman passes across our sight, parting her hair to reveal a strikingly beautiful face which locks eyes with us for a moment - although in fact this is her reflection, caught in several mirrors clustered around each other. We continue to slide away until all is dark.  •  The scene is set in color, defined by the greenery of the surrounding grass and trees, the brown wood of the log cabin, and the golden-orangish glow cast through the cabin's window. These colors are faded yet somehow still vibrant, exuding a warmth which is soothing, but not quite comforting. The boy and the woman, his mother Maria, huddle outside this cabin and introduce themselves as strangers from Moscow who have been relocated to the countryside. Shivering in the drippy weather, Maria's polite conversation implicitly asks for an invitation inside, but the woman of the cabin (Larisa Tarkovskaya), exuding a quiet defiance, is not particularly forthcoming. The child watches, lips locked and eyes scowling, soaking up the tension without necessarily being able to articulate why it exists. Turning near the window, outlined in the low light's glow, her hair tied in a kerchief so tight it resembles a skull cap, the hostess looks for all the world like a figure out of Vermeer. If the previously described sequence clearly spoke in the silent, subconscious language of dreams this moment plays out as an authentic fragment of reality, poetically pregnant but not revealing its secrets. The significance is locked away beneath the functionality of the gestures and speech.  •  Between these two marks, a boy (the same actor but a different character) wanders through an empty house. An offscreen chorus builds to an ominous crescendo as a frosty smudge on glass evaporates, and then all is quiet again except for a ringing phone. The boy answers it and speaks to his father (the grown version of the boy we saw in the other sequence), who tells him that when he was his age, during the war, he was in love with a redhead. And then we are back in time, looking at this bundled-up girl as she tramps through the snow. The following series of events, photographed in the pale white, blue, and brown of a Russian winter, could almost stand as a self-contained short film - an instructor (Ignat Danitsev) tries to impress firm but not too harsh discipline on a group of very young adolescents, including the stubborn orphan Asafiev (whose actor I can't find). Asafiev resists his orders and nearly destroys them all with a grenade that fortunately turns out to be a dummy (thinking it's live, the instructor leaps on top of it, ready to sacrifice himself for the hapless child warriors). Then we are suddenly viewing old, scratchy newsreel images of soldiers dragging supplies through icy tundra, thick mud, and rippling waterways. Loud splashes and sighs fill the soundtrack, clearly added afterwards to the pre-existing footage, a present erupting from the past.  •  I chose all three of these sequences at random, by jumping back and forth across a YouTube video of The Mirror in its entirety. Like fragments half-remembered from a dream, they can hint at hidden treasures. I can't hope to approximate "what it is" in a mere paragraph, however long, so it seemed right to dip inside the film and explore certain moments up close before pulling back to explain why they add up to something so memorable.

Why I like it •

The Favorites - Taxi Driver (#14)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Taxi Driver (1976/USA/dir. Martin Scorsese) appeared at #14 on my original list.

What it is • It is the mid-seventies. That's important, although the film has never ceased to be relevant; if anything, it may be even more pertinent today as the protagonist's profile fits a number of young, lone wolf killers in recent years. Nonetheless, Taxi Driver arises from a specific era, in which New York was rough, dirty, and dangerous in the eyes of outsiders and residents alike. Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) is also a Vietnam veteran, a fact barely referenced in the film - he mentions serving in the Marines during a job interview, and later we see a NLF flag hanging on his wall - yet always hovering on the brink of its consciousness. Post-Watergate cynicism (perhaps also not so out-of-date in 2016) saturates the film's view of politicians and the society they run - it goes without saying that Travis' first target, a Presidential candidate, speaks only in superficial platitudes. The role of the women in the film is also informed by this particular moment, when feminism both rose out of and challenged the counterculture: both Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) and Iris (Jodie Foster) seem independent and sexually liberated on the surface, but they are constricted by the aggressive men around them, for whom liberation means entitlement. Iris in particular provides a sensitive portrait of how exploitation and abuse could hover under the guise of freedom: only thirteen, she is pimped by the long-haired, sweet-talking hustler Scout (Harvey Keitel), whom she met at a commune. The movie also exists at the uneasy intersection of sixties rebellion and eighties conformity: Travis is an outcast who, despising other outcasts, desperately wants to "cleanse" his city of its "filth." His phobias are explicitly racially coded, in one of the film's boldest, most pertinent moves - this is an expert portrait of a very particular form of alienation and anxiety, in which an outsider clings desperately to one of the few qualities that makes him an insider: his whiteness (not for nothing was this film modeled after The Searchers). And of course this is a film that could only really thrive in its specific era, a bleak, alienating movie funded by a major studio and turning quite a profit at the box office (albeit small potatoes when compared to the blockbusters that started rolling out a year later). It's funny - working through the qualities that make Taxi Driver such a seventies film, I'm only reminded why it still resonates. Just as Travis' violent purge calms things down until they - inevitably - will simmer to the surface once again, so the topical qualities of Taxi Driver "disappeared" under the glossy superficialities of the eighties, nineties, and zeroes but never really disappeared at all...and now they stare back at us from the mirror with the added charge of forty repressed years.

Why I like it •

The Favorites - The Third Man (#15)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. The Third Man (1949/UK/dir. Carol Reed) appeared at #15 on my original list.

What it is • "I never knew the Vienna before the war," a cheerful narrator informs us, shortly before disappearing from the film altogether. It's that kind of movie. The music - starting even before this fast-paced opening montage, with the image of a zither playing under the credits - is defiantly incongrous with the shadowy streets onscreen and the murky intrigues of the story (quite a bit more on that in a moment). Our hero, Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) isn't much of a hero at all, an American abroad in a land whose pernicious complications he doesn't understand; the film itself seems to hold him in contempt even as it accepts him as our guide. The flashy title character, Harry Lime, is dead when the film begins and Orson Welles' much-celebrated role in the movie is little more than a cameo in terms of screentime (though boy do those handful of minutes pack a punch). The Third Man is very British in sensibility and attitude, as crisp and curt as Reed and writer Graham Greene could manage, but the two most important characters are American, and this may be the greatest noir, a very American form. Francois Truffaut once grumbled that British cinema was a contradiction in terms but The Third Man is as visually rich as any Hollywood feature with several of the most striking images in cinema history. My favorite is the final shot, as a figure approaches from the horizon, flanked by two symmetrical rows of trees, while leaves flitter down from the sky at random. Moving on a narrative level, striking as pure pictorialism, this single take also evokes the flavor of the entire movie, mixing meticulous order (the trees) with spontaneous energy (the leaves), leavening its air of inevitable fate (the long walk) with bracing dashes of ironic surprise (the unbroken stride, straight past the camera, leaving Holly to smoke his cigarette in bittersweet resignation).

Why I like it •

The Favorites - Meshes of the Afternoon (#16)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Meshes of the Afternoon (1943/USA/dir. Maya Deren & Alexander Hammid) appeared at #16 on my original list.

What it is • A woman (Deren) wanders alone through her Los Angeles home and rests in a chair. There, it would seem, she dreams an encounter with an eerie cloaked figure carrying a flower, whose face is a shard of smooth glass: a mirror in which no reflection can be glimpsed. Within this dream, time folds over itself. She is the woman in the window looking down at herself as she passes up the winding path. She is floating up to the ceiling, toppling fluidly down stairs, cascading through window curtains, as if her own house is a space station in which the standard experience of gravity no longer applies. She is still sleeping in the chair, vulnerable to a knife attack from her own goggle-eyed double. Upon near-death a man (Hammid) awakes her, but this encounter too has an unreal tinge. The film ends with a fourth layer of experience, a macabre final image, but is this any more - or less - real than everything else we've seen? This avant-garde masterpiece repeatedly suggests that every clue is a double-edged dagger, most literally when the key which the woman pulls from her mouth transforms into a knife in her open palm. Meshes of the Afternoon teases us with the temptation to make sense of what we see, while refusing to provide any digestible order to reassemble its gorgeous puzzle pieces. The film was creator/director/star Deren's cinematic breakthrough, a collaboration with her husband, the talented cinematographer Hammid, which also contributed to their personal and professional breakup. Deren's later films, for which she receives sole directorial credit, are perhaps more purely obscure and enigmatic; on another day, I could place them above Meshes and in any just analysis At Land and probably Rituals of Transfigured Time would be on equal footing. What uniquely intrigues about Meshes is its existence at the cross-section of narrative and pure experiment, and its touch of Hollywood glamor, reflected in a looking-glass at once more disorienting and far more lucid than the straightforward products of the dream factory.

Why I like it •

The Favorites - Star Wars (#17)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Star Wars (1977/USA/dir. George Lucas) appeared at #17 on my original list.

What it is • Every touchstone of pop mythology has been thrown into the pot and brought to a boil: a poetic/kitschy opening ("A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..."), spaceships rumbling overhead, lasers blasting against a starfield, a trek through the desert, an isolated farm, a princess, robots, aliens, a bar crowded with outlandish characters, a black-masked/cowled supervillain, a shrewd old mentor, a wisecracking outlaw, a republic transformed into a ruthless empire, aerial dogfights, shootouts, sword fights, a sneaky rescue operation, heroes disguised as villains, a daring swing across a chasm, a descent into a monster-haunted pit, a fearsome weapon, a noble ragtag resistance, a mystical religious code. The pleasure of Star Wars derives from two sources: the delightful eclecticism with which it gathers together its diverse inspirations, and the awesome clarity and precision with which these disparate elements are coalesced into a unified whole. Star Wars fuses the spirit of backyard play with careful craftsmanship and the result is unlike anything before or since - despite how often its accomplishment has been imitated (most recently by a new Star Wars film, shorne of its creator but still in the thrall of his creation). The story? Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) lives on the spot "furthest from the bright center of the universe," the desert planet Tatooine, but the war between the Empire and the Rebellion comes to him in the form of two droids, C-3PO (Anthony Daniels) and R2-D2 (Kenny Baker) who arrive with a secret message from Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) for the nearby mysterious recluse Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness). Escaping his home in the Millennium Falcon, piloted by Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew), Luke will attempt to rescue Leia from the Death Star, while Obi-Wan must face his former pupil turned dark lord, Darth Vader (David Prowse, voice by James Earl Jones). But you probably already knew that. The context? That you certainly know: Lucas, fresh from the popular rock'n'roll nostalgia of American Graffiti and the dystopian sci-fi nightmare of THX-1138, wrote an ambitious, nearly incomprehensible story outline and dedicated himself to realizing its sprawling vision with a makeshift special effects operation and a troubled British production tepidly supported by Twentieth Century Fox. Nothing much was expected (except perhaps a dangerous flop) before the film debuted in 1977 and changed movie history forever, following the lead of The Exorcist and Jaws by cementing box-office blockbusters as Hollywood's mainstay - and identifying the blockbuster with fantastical content, an action-oriented tempo, and a very youthful audience. The legacy? Beyond that broader impact, the film spawned a vast universe of narrative spin-offs, playful merchandise, and three phases of film franchises. First, the two sequels (1980 and 1983) continued this film's story, deepening and darkening until it became an Oedipal struggle between father and son. Second, the three prequels (1999 to 2005), further darkened and expanded the universe while revolutionizing digital effects; this trilogy alienated many fans of the original series from Lucas until the filmmaker was a pariah within the community he himself had invented. Third, an open-ended series of films (2015 to, well, as long as Disney can make money), probably one a year, will continue the story but also expand around its margins with stories taking place in between existing films, focusing on tangents and side characters until no one narrative can define Star Wars anymore. The world of Star Wars has escaped the bounds of its creator, its original audience, the cultural moment that gave it birth, and the very first film phenomenon that initially seemed like a sui generis standalone marvel, not the kickoff of something much bigger. That Star Wars - not Episode IV: A New Hope but simply "Star Wars" - can become obscured by its own legacy, but that's the Star Wars I am here to celebrate. Part Pop Art, part pulp fiction, very much an auteurist project, Star Wars remains startlingly original if you can see through the haze: the home movie as big-screen epic.

Why I like it •

The Favorites - Nights of Cabiria (#18)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Nights of Cabiria (1957/Italy/dir. Federico Fellini) appeared at #18 on my original list.

What it is • Cabiria (Giuletta Masina) is caught between two worlds, though it's clear where she ultimately belongs: she is a prostitute, living amongst the poor in a modest home. In an increasingly prosperous Rome this makes her an outcast, able to interact with wealth through her clients but unable to command it herself. She does own her little house, however, and is able to save up her money, aspiring toward marriage and middle-class comfort. Ironically, these aspirations will harm her more than any limitations: the film opens when a lover nearly drowns her to steal a purse and later a crowd at a magic show will laugh mockingly when, hypnotized, she guilelessly reveals her hopes and dreams. Throughout the movie, naive expectations will be raised only to be crushed by the disillusioning indifference or hostility of those - individuals, institutions, and social forces - more powerful or deceitful than she is. Just like its protagonist, Nights of Cabiria has an interesting place in Fellini's oeuvre, hovering between the lingering neorealism of his early works and the flamboyant flowering of his later, colorful dreamscapes. This in-between status is something Cabiria shares with La Strada, probably Fellini's most celebrated collaboration with his wife Masina, but Cabiria feels just a bit closer to his later works thanks to its setting. We are a dozen years out from the wartime rubble and the capital of Italy is already becoming a glamorous hotspot...for those who can afford the glamor. Cabiria captures a fifties Rome which Fellini made internationally iconic in his next film, La Dolce Vita. There is an interesting relationship between these two movies: Cabiria, warm and earthy, suffering but full of heart; Dolce Vita, a bit more cerebral, living the "sweet life" but searching for a soul. Both follow a character's episodic ups and downs through Roman days and nights, but one film features a plucky, downtrodden female prostitute and the other stars an aloof, handsome male journalist. There's even a scene in which a suave man makes love to an old flame instead of the woman he picked up on the street - but in La Dolce Vita this scene is told from the john's point of view, whereas in Nights of Cabiria it is told from the streetwalker's. The endings also seem to reflect one another: Cabiria, heartbroken but still spiritually alive, tears and a smile together on her face as she is surrounded by a sea of humanity; Marcello, cheerfully lost as he cannot hear "the call of the angel" from across a shallow stream on a beach.

Why I like it •

The Favorites - The Godfather (#19)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. The Godfather (1972/USA/dir. Francis Ford Coppola) appeared at #19 on my original list.

What it is • This grand epic, which uses the Mafia as its subject but takes as a model the mythical tales of kings and warriors, begins with the recitation of a sordid crime - the savage beating of a woman by two young men out for a joyride. This showcase for Marlon Brando and Al Pacino (among others) fades up not on their faces but on the unfamiliar expression of theater actor Salvatore Corsitto, born before World War I in Sicily, playing Bonasera the undertaker. This family drama, in which the clan is the most important unit and "Italian" (or really "Sicilian") is the only nationality that matters, begins Bonasera's monologue with the solemn sentence, "I believe in America." Despite its legend, The Godfather is full of surprises right off the bat. Perhaps equally surprising for those who have soaked up its influence from a distance, through the cultural osmosis of cartoons and parodies and casual impressions of Brando's raspy delivery (spoilers ahead if you're one of those people), "the godfather" himself, Vito Corleone, isn't really the main character. The narrative largely belongs to Vito's son Michael, who starts the film as a uniformed Marine hero, the family outsider, and eventually ascends to become the title character himself (literally as well as figuratively: the climactic christening cross-cuts between his ritualistic renunciation of Satan and embrace of brutal violence to solidify his reign over rival families). How many people are left to be surprised by The Godfather? Obviously young potential viewers come of age all the time, but are they interested? This was, in a sense, the crowning achievement of New Hollywood, a marriage of Hollywood glamor and raw violence which could still seem shocking in 1972. It brought together the maverick of the Fifties - Brando, encased in jowly make-up with a dental fixture obscuring his speech - with the new mavericks of the Seventies, behind and in front of the camera, a passing of the torch just as important as the one occurring onscreen. But nearly forty-five years after it became the highest-grossing film of all time, it no longer even cracks the top 500 worldwide box-office hits - it's been nudged out by the action-oriented, adolescent-marketed blockbusters (including several spawned by Coppola's protegee George Lucas) that began dominating the box office just a few years later. Does the film still speak to audiences of the present? Anecdotally, I think it does. It still seems to enthrall viewers, young and old, who come across it in frequent TV airings, home video releases, or digital rentals. The story is well-told, the world is immersive, and most of all the characters are fascinating. If theatrical features no longer seem to follow its form, television most certainly does: The Sopranos, itself godfather of a generation of cable dramas, is impossible to imagine without this film's obvious influence on subject and, more subtly, on form. And most other prestige dramas of the twenty-first century follow the template of a stately style brought to bear on family drama, masculine assertion, and corruption of the individual. Born as a pulp bestseller fifty years ago (author Mario Puzo had resisted writing about Italian gangsters for decades but finally "sold out" in desperation), troubled in production (Coppola didn't want to do it and was nearly fired, along with Pacino, early on), The Godfather has achieved a cultural impact that no one could have predicted.

Why I like it •