Jennifer Garner
Jennifer Garner
Jennifer Garner Alias
Pictures of Famous Actresses Jennifer Garner
Friday, July 30, 2010
Monday, July 26, 2010
The Milky Way (1969)
***½
Country: France-West Germany-Italy
Director: Luis Buñuel
The General, It Happened One Night, Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz, Sullivan's Travels, Detour, Easy Rider, Into the Wild—the road movie is one of the most enduring and versatile of film genres. Its literary roots stretch as far back as Homer's Odyssey and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. But surely one of the oddest, most unique, and most startling of all road movies is the great Luis Buñuel's surrealistic-religious version of that venerable genre, The Milky Way, from 1969.
In the film two hitchhiking tramps, Pierre and Jean (Peter and John, names clearly chosen for their Christian connotations), undertake one of the medieval pilgrimage routes from France to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, where the cathedral is said to contain the remains of St. James. As in most road movies, along the way they have colorful experiences and encounters with various people—but with some important differences that distinguish this from the typical road movie. For one thing, this is a Buñuel movie, so unpredictability and departure from strictly literal storytelling are to be expected. For another, because the individual episodes always involve religion in some way, they are linked thematically. And most curious of all, Pierre and Jean act sometimes as participants in the events of the film, sometimes more as observers who wander in and out of the episodes enacted around them, exactly the same as in dreams, where the dreamer's point of view can suddenly shift in just this way.
Each vignette in the movie serves as an anecdote of some kind about the Roman Catholic religion. Except for Pierre and Jean, everyone in the movie seems to be preoccupied with religion, endlessly pondering the polemics of Catholic dogma. But Pierre and Jean, who don't seem to be devout or even practicing Catholics, never discuss religion even though miracles constantly happen around them. Almost as soon as they set out they have an encounter with what appears to be Buñuel's bizarre personification of the trinity—an oracular man in a black cape accompanied by a dwarf and a white dove. Right after they comfort a child who bears the stigmata of Christ sitting alone by the side of the road, a chauffeured limousine pulls up and gives them a ride, almost, it seems, as a reward for their compassion. Later, when a passing Citroën speeds past them without stopping, Pierre mutters, "I hope he breaks his neck," and a moment later we hear screeching brakes and a crash. When they rush to the wrecked car, they find the angel of death sitting in the car waiting to show them that their prayer has been answered. Yet aside from causing understandable amazement, these miraculous incidents have little effect on them and never direct their thoughts or conversation towards any religious or spiritual topic.
As Pierre and Jean make their way to Santiago, scenes from their journey alternate with scenes from the past (including scenes of the Marquis de Sade and the Inquisition), their reveries about what they are experiencing, tangential scenes of the religious experiences of the people they encounter in which they play little or no part, and scenes from the life of Christ that offer some parallel to what is happening to them at the moment. Early in the film, for example, Pierre tells Jean that he wears a beard because his mother told him he looks better with it. This is immediately followed by a scene in which Christ prepares to shave his beard and the Virgin Mary tells him not to shave because he looks better with a beard. At the end of the film, just as the two vagabonds reach the outskirts of Santiago, they encounter a prostitute (Delphine Seyrig) who invites them into the woods for sex. The camera then pans away from the three, and we see Christ and his disciples walking through these same woods, where they encounter two blind men, whose sight Christ proceeds to restore in a weird parallel to the sexual encounter of our pilgrims.
Much of the film consists of people debating the theological enigmas of the Catholic church as though these were the most pressing of issues. Many of the most divisive historical controversies of Catholicism are included—free will versus predestination, the nature of the trinity, the nature of the Virgin Mary—quarrels which have spawned heresies, caused schisms, and resulted in excommunication, torture, and even death for those on the wrong side. Although the debates in the film generally end inconclusively, one—on the question of transubstantiation in the Eucharist, that is, how the body of Christ can be contained in the bread used in the communion service—is ingeniously resolved by an uneducated innkeeper. It's like this rabbit pâté I'm serving you, he tells his argumentative guests as Pierre and Jean observe from another table: the rabbit is in the pâté, yet it's still pâté. As in the other debates of this nature, the famously anticlerical Buñuel makes one of the most sacred doctrinal disputes of the Church seem utterly inane.
What I have described might sound rather like a narrative hodgepodge, with one episode following another haphazardly as the pilgrims proceed along their route, the progress of that journey about the only thing in the movie that could be called linear. But somehow it all manages to hold together, the film's coherence the result of its own crazy internal logic that fuses realism with mysticism, cogency with randomness. The images and the ideas don't fit together in any sort of conventionally logical way, but in the analogical way that dream images and events do. The film clearly shows Buñuel's thorough understanding of the psychological underpinnings of surrealism and absurdism and the exceptional skill with which he was able to translate those concepts into cinematic terms. I don't think any other filmmaker would have been able to take such an unlikely mélange and make it work so well—poking fun at what is basically a serious subject in such a bracingly comical way and with such bemused detachment—as Buñuel does in The Milky Way.
Country: France-West Germany-Italy
Director: Luis Buñuel
The General, It Happened One Night, Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz, Sullivan's Travels, Detour, Easy Rider, Into the Wild—the road movie is one of the most enduring and versatile of film genres. Its literary roots stretch as far back as Homer's Odyssey and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. But surely one of the oddest, most unique, and most startling of all road movies is the great Luis Buñuel's surrealistic-religious version of that venerable genre, The Milky Way, from 1969.
In the film two hitchhiking tramps, Pierre and Jean (Peter and John, names clearly chosen for their Christian connotations), undertake one of the medieval pilgrimage routes from France to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, where the cathedral is said to contain the remains of St. James. As in most road movies, along the way they have colorful experiences and encounters with various people—but with some important differences that distinguish this from the typical road movie. For one thing, this is a Buñuel movie, so unpredictability and departure from strictly literal storytelling are to be expected. For another, because the individual episodes always involve religion in some way, they are linked thematically. And most curious of all, Pierre and Jean act sometimes as participants in the events of the film, sometimes more as observers who wander in and out of the episodes enacted around them, exactly the same as in dreams, where the dreamer's point of view can suddenly shift in just this way.Each vignette in the movie serves as an anecdote of some kind about the Roman Catholic religion. Except for Pierre and Jean, everyone in the movie seems to be preoccupied with religion, endlessly pondering the polemics of Catholic dogma. But Pierre and Jean, who don't seem to be devout or even practicing Catholics, never discuss religion even though miracles constantly happen around them. Almost as soon as they set out they have an encounter with what appears to be Buñuel's bizarre personification of the trinity—an oracular man in a black cape accompanied by a dwarf and a white dove. Right after they comfort a child who bears the stigmata of Christ sitting alone by the side of the road, a chauffeured limousine pulls up and gives them a ride, almost, it seems, as a reward for their compassion. Later, when a passing Citroën speeds past them without stopping, Pierre mutters, "I hope he breaks his neck," and a moment later we hear screeching brakes and a crash. When they rush to the wrecked car, they find the angel of death sitting in the car waiting to show them that their prayer has been answered. Yet aside from causing understandable amazement, these miraculous incidents have little effect on them and never direct their thoughts or conversation towards any religious or spiritual topic.
As Pierre and Jean make their way to Santiago, scenes from their journey alternate with scenes from the past (including scenes of the Marquis de Sade and the Inquisition), their reveries about what they are experiencing, tangential scenes of the religious experiences of the people they encounter in which they play little or no part, and scenes from the life of Christ that offer some parallel to what is happening to them at the moment. Early in the film, for example, Pierre tells Jean that he wears a beard because his mother told him he looks better with it. This is immediately followed by a scene in which Christ prepares to shave his beard and the Virgin Mary tells him not to shave because he looks better with a beard. At the end of the film, just as the two vagabonds reach the outskirts of Santiago, they encounter a prostitute (Delphine Seyrig) who invites them into the woods for sex. The camera then pans away from the three, and we see Christ and his disciples walking through these same woods, where they encounter two blind men, whose sight Christ proceeds to restore in a weird parallel to the sexual encounter of our pilgrims.
Much of the film consists of people debating the theological enigmas of the Catholic church as though these were the most pressing of issues. Many of the most divisive historical controversies of Catholicism are included—free will versus predestination, the nature of the trinity, the nature of the Virgin Mary—quarrels which have spawned heresies, caused schisms, and resulted in excommunication, torture, and even death for those on the wrong side. Although the debates in the film generally end inconclusively, one—on the question of transubstantiation in the Eucharist, that is, how the body of Christ can be contained in the bread used in the communion service—is ingeniously resolved by an uneducated innkeeper. It's like this rabbit pâté I'm serving you, he tells his argumentative guests as Pierre and Jean observe from another table: the rabbit is in the pâté, yet it's still pâté. As in the other debates of this nature, the famously anticlerical Buñuel makes one of the most sacred doctrinal disputes of the Church seem utterly inane.
What I have described might sound rather like a narrative hodgepodge, with one episode following another haphazardly as the pilgrims proceed along their route, the progress of that journey about the only thing in the movie that could be called linear. But somehow it all manages to hold together, the film's coherence the result of its own crazy internal logic that fuses realism with mysticism, cogency with randomness. The images and the ideas don't fit together in any sort of conventionally logical way, but in the analogical way that dream images and events do. The film clearly shows Buñuel's thorough understanding of the psychological underpinnings of surrealism and absurdism and the exceptional skill with which he was able to translate those concepts into cinematic terms. I don't think any other filmmaker would have been able to take such an unlikely mélange and make it work so well—poking fun at what is basically a serious subject in such a bracingly comical way and with such bemused detachment—as Buñuel does in The Milky Way.
Monday, July 19, 2010
Reign of Terror (1949)
***
Country: US
Director: Anthony Mann
Anyone interested in the works of Anthony Mann, the subject of a recent three-week long retrospective festival at the Film Forum in New York, would be well advised to take a look at his unusual 1949 film Reign of Terror (also known as The Black Book). It was shown at the Film Forum on Bastille Day, July 14, and on the same day on the Turner Classic Movies channel, where I saw it.
Reign of Terror, which takes place in France in 1794, five years after the French Revolution, opens with the public condemnation and execution of Danton, engineered by Maximilien Robespierre (Richard Basehart). Immediately afterward, Robespierre finds that his secret black book, containing a "hit list" of the other rivals he intends to denounce and persuade the street mobs to condemn to the guillotine, has been stolen. Robespierre wants to be proclaimed absolute dictator of France in a few days' time, but he realizes that if his enemies make public the contents of his black book, this will never happen and he himself will almost certainly be condemned for his aspirations to power. To find the missing book, he sends for a judge from Strasbourg known for his harsh sentencing of enemies of the Revolution (500 condemned in one month alone). This "hanging judge" is assassinated, however, and his place taken by an impostor intent on exposing Robespierre's treachery, Charles D'Aubigny (Robert Cummings). The rest of the movie is essentially a thriller that details D'Aubigny's attempts, aided by his mistress Madelon (Arlene Dahl), to avoid detection and find the missing book.
Those familiar with the films noirs of Mann from the late 1940s and the Westerns he made in the 1950s, considered landmarks of their genres, will recognize elements of both in Reign of Terror. Made almost at the end of Mann's series of noirs and just before his first Western, it can in many ways be seen as a transition between the two. Themes found in Mann's versions of both those genres are also present in Reign of Terror—impersonation, underworld power struggles, loyalty and betrayal, order versus anarchy, the crushing of ordinary people by the lawless, interpersonal conflict that can erupt into what for its time must have been quite shocking physical violence. D'Aubigny might almost be an undercover agent in one of Mann's noirs, like Dennis O'Keefe's character in T-Men, and Robespierre the leader of a criminal gang the agent infiltrates. Similarly, he resembles one of the heroes portrayed by James Stewart in the Westerns, a man trying to bring a criminal to justice, as in The Naked Spur. The black book itself acts as the movie's "McGuffin," in the same way as the stolen loot O'Keefe seeks to retrieve in Raw Deal or the rifle James Stewart tries to track down in Mann's very first Western, Winchester '73.
The rather bland Cummings might seem a surprising choice to play the hero in a romantic intrigue, but he is actually good, playing the role straight, his voice pitched lower than usual, in a restrained performance quite different from the glib, almost camp persona of his 1950s television sitcoms. Basehart is even better as the notorious Robespierre. The highlight of his performance comes near the end of the film with his impassioned speech to the bloodthirsty mob after the contents of the black book are indeed revealed. When he tells the mob that to die for liberty would be a privilege, is he sincere or is it a clever ploy devised by a master strategist to win their sympathy and save his own life? The scene is especially intriguing coming soon after another scene in which he attempts to cajole a young boy into revealing the whereabouts of the black book with gentle, silver-tongued blandishments as cunning as those of the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Film noir stalwart Charles McGraw also makes a strong impression as Robespierre's uncouth, sadistic chief henchman. But the acting honors in the movie surely must go to Arnold Moss as Robespierre's ally/rival Fouché. He is by turns menacing, sarcastically flippant, and slyly calculating. One moment he seems trustworthy, the next moment entirely duplicitous.
Robert Cummings and Arnold Moss search for the black book
But the thing that will keep your eyes glued to the screen the whole time is the sheer visual panache of the film. Cinematographer John Alton and Mann made a formidable team in the three noirs they worked on together (four, if you include Mann's uncredited contribution to He Walked by Night, also with Basehart), but to my mind, visually Reign of Terror surpasses even the most impressive of those. The movie may technically be a historical thriller, but it is in many ways a film noir masquerading as a costume picture. The high-contrast lighting, camera placement and movement, dynamic composition, and depth of field all bear the clear stamp of film noir. At the same time, Mann's use of outdoor locations, uncommon in the generally set- and interior-bound early noirs, points ahead to his Westerns. Near the beginning of the movie is a striking landscape shot of a lone horse rider seen from a distance slowly moving horizontally across a gently arcing hill, the hill and tiny rider silhouetted against a cloudy sky just after sunset, a shot that wouldn't seem out of place in a Western. The film includes a thrilling action sequence that also prefigures Mann's Westerns, in which D'Aubigny escapes Robespierre by jumping through a glass window (which in a Western would most likely have been the window of a saloon). This is followed by an extended chase with D'Aubigny and Madelon in a wagon, pursued by mounted horsemen through the streets of Paris and then through the countryside, again a scene that might have come directly from a Western.
Receiving credit as producer is the great William Cameron Menzies, noted production designer (Gone With the Wind, For Whom the Bell Tolls) and occasional director (the 1936 version of H. G. Wells's futuristic Things to Come, the 1953 sci-fi classic Invaders from Mars). IMDb lists him as an uncredited art director on Reign of Terror. Even though he doesn't receive formal credit, his hand is evident throughout the film in its production design, and he should receive recognition at the very least as an indirect contributor to the film's strong visual appeal. The baroque bedchamber of D'Aubigny's mistress Madelon, the bakery containing Robespierre's headquarters, Robespierre's torture chamber in the basement of the bakery, his private quarters with their bookcase-lined walls that conceal a secret room—all these settings are tremendously atmospheric, far more so than their economical and rather minimal construction would lead one to expect.
Reign of Terror might fall short of greatness, but it does contain enough spectacular parts to make it a pleasure to watch. Connoisseurs of artistic mise en scène will find much to relish here, and because the film stands on the cusp between Mann's noir and Western periods, admirers of his work will find it indispensable to an appreciation of his development as a director.
Country: US
Director: Anthony Mann
Anyone interested in the works of Anthony Mann, the subject of a recent three-week long retrospective festival at the Film Forum in New York, would be well advised to take a look at his unusual 1949 film Reign of Terror (also known as The Black Book). It was shown at the Film Forum on Bastille Day, July 14, and on the same day on the Turner Classic Movies channel, where I saw it.Reign of Terror, which takes place in France in 1794, five years after the French Revolution, opens with the public condemnation and execution of Danton, engineered by Maximilien Robespierre (Richard Basehart). Immediately afterward, Robespierre finds that his secret black book, containing a "hit list" of the other rivals he intends to denounce and persuade the street mobs to condemn to the guillotine, has been stolen. Robespierre wants to be proclaimed absolute dictator of France in a few days' time, but he realizes that if his enemies make public the contents of his black book, this will never happen and he himself will almost certainly be condemned for his aspirations to power. To find the missing book, he sends for a judge from Strasbourg known for his harsh sentencing of enemies of the Revolution (500 condemned in one month alone). This "hanging judge" is assassinated, however, and his place taken by an impostor intent on exposing Robespierre's treachery, Charles D'Aubigny (Robert Cummings). The rest of the movie is essentially a thriller that details D'Aubigny's attempts, aided by his mistress Madelon (Arlene Dahl), to avoid detection and find the missing book.
Those familiar with the films noirs of Mann from the late 1940s and the Westerns he made in the 1950s, considered landmarks of their genres, will recognize elements of both in Reign of Terror. Made almost at the end of Mann's series of noirs and just before his first Western, it can in many ways be seen as a transition between the two. Themes found in Mann's versions of both those genres are also present in Reign of Terror—impersonation, underworld power struggles, loyalty and betrayal, order versus anarchy, the crushing of ordinary people by the lawless, interpersonal conflict that can erupt into what for its time must have been quite shocking physical violence. D'Aubigny might almost be an undercover agent in one of Mann's noirs, like Dennis O'Keefe's character in T-Men, and Robespierre the leader of a criminal gang the agent infiltrates. Similarly, he resembles one of the heroes portrayed by James Stewart in the Westerns, a man trying to bring a criminal to justice, as in The Naked Spur. The black book itself acts as the movie's "McGuffin," in the same way as the stolen loot O'Keefe seeks to retrieve in Raw Deal or the rifle James Stewart tries to track down in Mann's very first Western, Winchester '73.
The rather bland Cummings might seem a surprising choice to play the hero in a romantic intrigue, but he is actually good, playing the role straight, his voice pitched lower than usual, in a restrained performance quite different from the glib, almost camp persona of his 1950s television sitcoms. Basehart is even better as the notorious Robespierre. The highlight of his performance comes near the end of the film with his impassioned speech to the bloodthirsty mob after the contents of the black book are indeed revealed. When he tells the mob that to die for liberty would be a privilege, is he sincere or is it a clever ploy devised by a master strategist to win their sympathy and save his own life? The scene is especially intriguing coming soon after another scene in which he attempts to cajole a young boy into revealing the whereabouts of the black book with gentle, silver-tongued blandishments as cunning as those of the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Film noir stalwart Charles McGraw also makes a strong impression as Robespierre's uncouth, sadistic chief henchman. But the acting honors in the movie surely must go to Arnold Moss as Robespierre's ally/rival Fouché. He is by turns menacing, sarcastically flippant, and slyly calculating. One moment he seems trustworthy, the next moment entirely duplicitous.
Robert Cummings and Arnold Moss search for the black bookBut the thing that will keep your eyes glued to the screen the whole time is the sheer visual panache of the film. Cinematographer John Alton and Mann made a formidable team in the three noirs they worked on together (four, if you include Mann's uncredited contribution to He Walked by Night, also with Basehart), but to my mind, visually Reign of Terror surpasses even the most impressive of those. The movie may technically be a historical thriller, but it is in many ways a film noir masquerading as a costume picture. The high-contrast lighting, camera placement and movement, dynamic composition, and depth of field all bear the clear stamp of film noir. At the same time, Mann's use of outdoor locations, uncommon in the generally set- and interior-bound early noirs, points ahead to his Westerns. Near the beginning of the movie is a striking landscape shot of a lone horse rider seen from a distance slowly moving horizontally across a gently arcing hill, the hill and tiny rider silhouetted against a cloudy sky just after sunset, a shot that wouldn't seem out of place in a Western. The film includes a thrilling action sequence that also prefigures Mann's Westerns, in which D'Aubigny escapes Robespierre by jumping through a glass window (which in a Western would most likely have been the window of a saloon). This is followed by an extended chase with D'Aubigny and Madelon in a wagon, pursued by mounted horsemen through the streets of Paris and then through the countryside, again a scene that might have come directly from a Western.
Receiving credit as producer is the great William Cameron Menzies, noted production designer (Gone With the Wind, For Whom the Bell Tolls) and occasional director (the 1936 version of H. G. Wells's futuristic Things to Come, the 1953 sci-fi classic Invaders from Mars). IMDb lists him as an uncredited art director on Reign of Terror. Even though he doesn't receive formal credit, his hand is evident throughout the film in its production design, and he should receive recognition at the very least as an indirect contributor to the film's strong visual appeal. The baroque bedchamber of D'Aubigny's mistress Madelon, the bakery containing Robespierre's headquarters, Robespierre's torture chamber in the basement of the bakery, his private quarters with their bookcase-lined walls that conceal a secret room—all these settings are tremendously atmospheric, far more so than their economical and rather minimal construction would lead one to expect.
Reign of Terror might fall short of greatness, but it does contain enough spectacular parts to make it a pleasure to watch. Connoisseurs of artistic mise en scène will find much to relish here, and because the film stands on the cusp between Mann's noir and Western periods, admirers of his work will find it indispensable to an appreciation of his development as a director.
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Tommy Lee Jones in Famous Actors and Actresses
Tommy Lee Jones
Tommy Lee Jones
Tommy Lee Jones
Famous Actor Tommy Lee Jones
Monday, July 12, 2010
Le Corbeau (1943)
***½
Country: France
Director: Henri-Georges Clouzot
The French director Henri-Georges Clouzot (1907-1977), best known for two films he made in the mid-1950s—The Wages of Fear (1953), which won the Grand Prize at the 1953 Cannes Film Festival, and Les Diaboliques (1955)—is often referred to as "the French Hitchcock." In those two films, Clouzot's signature use of suspense acts not just as a means of achieving moments of heightened tension and excitement, but as a sustained mood that barely lets up until the movie's shocking conclusion. In his second full-length film, Le Corbeau (1943), the suspense, while just as effective, is derived more from the conventional "whodunit" approach of the classic mystery.
Based on a true incident that had happened years earlier, Le Corbeau concerns a rash of poison pen letters signed "Le Corbeau" (The Raven) that tear apart the fictional Saint-Robin, a small village in provincial France. At first the letters are aimed at a relative newcomer to the village, Dr. Germain (Pierre Fresnay), accusing him of performing abortions, which he denies. Soon others in the village start receiving vicious anonymous letters too, and not only do the accusations seem believable, but in some cases we know they are true. Clearly the writer of the letters not only knows a great deal about the secret lives of the villagers, but is also a cunning judge of character able to accuse people of things they might not actually have done but are only too capable of. The number of suspects is large, for nearly everyone in the village has a grievance against someone else. But who in the village is so filled with generalized malice that he or she would go to such extremes to destroy its social fabric?
In a 1974 series on the history of French film made for French television, Clouzot explained the importance of suspense in his movies by saying that suspense is the element that keeps the viewer watching "everything else." In Le Corbeau that "everything else" consists of quite a lot. For one thing, there is Clouzot's strong sense of visual theatrics (another trait he shares with Hitchcock), beginning with the shots of the village cemetery that open the film, suggesting that this is a dark place with many buried secrets. Although most of the letters are delivered by post, a couple of times they are publicly delivered in passages of great visual drama. One time this happens at the funeral of a man who has been driven to suicide by one of the letters, a funeral the entire village attends, when a letter accusing a female villager of being responsible for his death tumbles from a funeral wreath on the back of the horse-drawn hearse bearing his coffin to the cemetery. The entire village then becomes a frenzied, vengeful mob who chase her through the streets of the village to her home and nearly kill her. Another time, in the local cathedral where the priest is sermonizing about the evil of the letter-writer, the entire congregation looks up to the highest gallery and watches in stupefied fascination as another letter slowly flutters to the floor.
A key scene in the film occurs when Dr. Germain discusses the evil behind the letters with his friend Dr. Vorzet, a psychologist (and ironically the man with whose wife he is secretly having an affair). The scene is staged in a darkened room illuminated by one overhead light—a lamp with one naked bulb and a small shade that directs the light downward—hanging just above Germain and Vorzet. Vorzet tries to convince Germain that any of the villagers might be The Raven because good and evil co-exist in all people and it is impossible to suppress the evil in one's nature completely. He illustrates this by reaching up to start the overhead lamp swinging lamp back and forth, casting each man now in darkness, now in light. When Germain reacts skeptically to Vorzet's ideas, the psychologist asks him to reach up and stop the swinging light. When he does, he immediately burns his hand and instinctively withdraws it, while the lamp keeps on swinging, continuing to cast each man in an unstoppable alternation of light and shadow. The scene uses dialogue, staging, lighting and photography to focus the overriding theme of the movie—that in the right circumstances everyone is capable of evil, a theme that given what we now know of the ignoble actions of many ordinary French citizens during the Nazi occupation, must have had extra resonance at the time.
Mirroring Dr. Vorzet's cynical view of humanity, Clouzot's depiction of life in the small town is relentlessly caustic. Aside from Dr. Germain, who seems sincere although hardly without flaws (besides the affair with Madame Vorzet, he also gets a handicapped young woman pregnant after a one-night stand), nearly everyone else in the movie—no matter how sympathetic they seem at first—is corrupt in some way. These nasty small-town provincials are driven by the basest, most petty, most selfish of human impulses. Narrow-minded and suspicious of outsiders like Germain, they are also filled with envy, lust, and greed directed at one another. Above all, they are hypocrites who conceal their true natures while projecting their vilest urges and motives onto their fellow villagers. The greatest effect the letters have on the community is to lead its inhabitants to expose their true selves, an ugly and dismaying sight indeed.
Although Le Corbeau was a big hit in France when it was first released, it was not without controversy. Leftists and the Resistance denounced it not only because it was made by Continental Films, a German-controlled production company established during the Occupation by Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, but also because of the savage—and in their eyes unpatriotic—way it depicted life in provincial France. Likewise, the Nazis and the collaborationist Vichy government were displeased with the film because they felt it surreptitiously condemned the practice of denouncing those working for the Resistance, a practice the Nazis encouraged. Clouzot suffered reprisals from both groups of the film's detractors. Just days before the movie's release, Continental fired Clouzot, who had also been in charge of the studio's screenwriting division. After the war, he was accused of collaboration because of his association with Continental Films and banned from the French film industry for life. Later this was reduced to two years.
Le Corbeau is a very accomplished work and in its perversely bleak way quite enjoyable. Its unsparingly negative view of human nature, plainly the product of a filmmaker of a highly pessimistic temperament, and its expert manipulation of audience response through the precisely targeted use of suspenseful situations as the film works its way to its grim conclusion anticipate Clouzot's later and better-known masterpieces. It is well worth seeking out, especially for those interested in pre-New Wave French cinema or in the suspense genre.
For more about Continental Films and the French film industry during the Occupation, I recommend Bertrand Tavernier's excellent film Safe Conduct (2002), which details the experiences of two men working in the French film industry during this time.
Country: France
Director: Henri-Georges Clouzot
The French director Henri-Georges Clouzot (1907-1977), best known for two films he made in the mid-1950s—The Wages of Fear (1953), which won the Grand Prize at the 1953 Cannes Film Festival, and Les Diaboliques (1955)—is often referred to as "the French Hitchcock." In those two films, Clouzot's signature use of suspense acts not just as a means of achieving moments of heightened tension and excitement, but as a sustained mood that barely lets up until the movie's shocking conclusion. In his second full-length film, Le Corbeau (1943), the suspense, while just as effective, is derived more from the conventional "whodunit" approach of the classic mystery.
Based on a true incident that had happened years earlier, Le Corbeau concerns a rash of poison pen letters signed "Le Corbeau" (The Raven) that tear apart the fictional Saint-Robin, a small village in provincial France. At first the letters are aimed at a relative newcomer to the village, Dr. Germain (Pierre Fresnay), accusing him of performing abortions, which he denies. Soon others in the village start receiving vicious anonymous letters too, and not only do the accusations seem believable, but in some cases we know they are true. Clearly the writer of the letters not only knows a great deal about the secret lives of the villagers, but is also a cunning judge of character able to accuse people of things they might not actually have done but are only too capable of. The number of suspects is large, for nearly everyone in the village has a grievance against someone else. But who in the village is so filled with generalized malice that he or she would go to such extremes to destroy its social fabric?In a 1974 series on the history of French film made for French television, Clouzot explained the importance of suspense in his movies by saying that suspense is the element that keeps the viewer watching "everything else." In Le Corbeau that "everything else" consists of quite a lot. For one thing, there is Clouzot's strong sense of visual theatrics (another trait he shares with Hitchcock), beginning with the shots of the village cemetery that open the film, suggesting that this is a dark place with many buried secrets. Although most of the letters are delivered by post, a couple of times they are publicly delivered in passages of great visual drama. One time this happens at the funeral of a man who has been driven to suicide by one of the letters, a funeral the entire village attends, when a letter accusing a female villager of being responsible for his death tumbles from a funeral wreath on the back of the horse-drawn hearse bearing his coffin to the cemetery. The entire village then becomes a frenzied, vengeful mob who chase her through the streets of the village to her home and nearly kill her. Another time, in the local cathedral where the priest is sermonizing about the evil of the letter-writer, the entire congregation looks up to the highest gallery and watches in stupefied fascination as another letter slowly flutters to the floor.
A key scene in the film occurs when Dr. Germain discusses the evil behind the letters with his friend Dr. Vorzet, a psychologist (and ironically the man with whose wife he is secretly having an affair). The scene is staged in a darkened room illuminated by one overhead light—a lamp with one naked bulb and a small shade that directs the light downward—hanging just above Germain and Vorzet. Vorzet tries to convince Germain that any of the villagers might be The Raven because good and evil co-exist in all people and it is impossible to suppress the evil in one's nature completely. He illustrates this by reaching up to start the overhead lamp swinging lamp back and forth, casting each man now in darkness, now in light. When Germain reacts skeptically to Vorzet's ideas, the psychologist asks him to reach up and stop the swinging light. When he does, he immediately burns his hand and instinctively withdraws it, while the lamp keeps on swinging, continuing to cast each man in an unstoppable alternation of light and shadow. The scene uses dialogue, staging, lighting and photography to focus the overriding theme of the movie—that in the right circumstances everyone is capable of evil, a theme that given what we now know of the ignoble actions of many ordinary French citizens during the Nazi occupation, must have had extra resonance at the time.Mirroring Dr. Vorzet's cynical view of humanity, Clouzot's depiction of life in the small town is relentlessly caustic. Aside from Dr. Germain, who seems sincere although hardly without flaws (besides the affair with Madame Vorzet, he also gets a handicapped young woman pregnant after a one-night stand), nearly everyone else in the movie—no matter how sympathetic they seem at first—is corrupt in some way. These nasty small-town provincials are driven by the basest, most petty, most selfish of human impulses. Narrow-minded and suspicious of outsiders like Germain, they are also filled with envy, lust, and greed directed at one another. Above all, they are hypocrites who conceal their true natures while projecting their vilest urges and motives onto their fellow villagers. The greatest effect the letters have on the community is to lead its inhabitants to expose their true selves, an ugly and dismaying sight indeed.
Although Le Corbeau was a big hit in France when it was first released, it was not without controversy. Leftists and the Resistance denounced it not only because it was made by Continental Films, a German-controlled production company established during the Occupation by Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, but also because of the savage—and in their eyes unpatriotic—way it depicted life in provincial France. Likewise, the Nazis and the collaborationist Vichy government were displeased with the film because they felt it surreptitiously condemned the practice of denouncing those working for the Resistance, a practice the Nazis encouraged. Clouzot suffered reprisals from both groups of the film's detractors. Just days before the movie's release, Continental fired Clouzot, who had also been in charge of the studio's screenwriting division. After the war, he was accused of collaboration because of his association with Continental Films and banned from the French film industry for life. Later this was reduced to two years.
Le Corbeau is a very accomplished work and in its perversely bleak way quite enjoyable. Its unsparingly negative view of human nature, plainly the product of a filmmaker of a highly pessimistic temperament, and its expert manipulation of audience response through the precisely targeted use of suspenseful situations as the film works its way to its grim conclusion anticipate Clouzot's later and better-known masterpieces. It is well worth seeking out, especially for those interested in pre-New Wave French cinema or in the suspense genre.
For more about Continental Films and the French film industry during the Occupation, I recommend Bertrand Tavernier's excellent film Safe Conduct (2002), which details the experiences of two men working in the French film industry during this time.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
A Conversation with the Author
In early July 2010, after more than 100 posts, The Movie Projector observed its second anniversary. To mark the occasion, my good friend Alta Rigaud asked to interview me about the blog and the way I write it.
How did you start writing The Movie Projector?
Back in 2008 I started reading the blog Maximum Strength Mick by the San Francisco Chronicle movie reviewer Mick LaSalle. His blog was going strong then, and some of the questions he posed his readers were so intriguing that I started responding to them. I guess I had a lot of pent-up opinions about movies, because I found myself leaving very long comments on his blog. It seemed like once I started writing, I couldn't stop. When I found how easy it was to set up an account on Blogger at Google, I thought, "Why not put all this in your own blog, since you're doing all this writing anyway?"
Where do you watch the movies you write about?
I live in a rural area with only one movie theater. It's a bit of a drive to get there, and I don't really enjoy the experience of being in a theater audience anymore. So I watch my movies at home. Because of my preference for older films, I watch a lot on Turner Classic Movies. (I have satellite TV and a DVR.) Occasionally something I'm interested in will play on the Independent Film Channel, but not often. I used to watch AMC but because they now show commercials, don't always letterbox, and sometimes even edit the films they show, I avoid them unless it's something older that wasn't filmed in widescreen and isn't likely to be edited for content. I have a subscription to Netflix and watch a couple of movies a week from them. I also request movies from my local public library, which has a fantastic collection, especially of classics like those in the Criterion Collection. I get a couple of films a week from the library. I've only ever bought one DVD (Terrence Malick's Badlands because it wasn't available anywhere else) but otherwise never buy DVDs because I'm just too frugal (euphemism for cheap) to spend money on something I'll probably only watch once or at the most twice.
How do you choose your subjects?
I always write about a movie I've just seen, either for the first time or again after a number of years. You might say that certain movies ask me to write about them, so to speak. Sometimes I know while watching that I'm going to write about this film, if not, within a day or two at the most. I'll jot down thoughts while watching or shortly after and use those as a starting point. I don't try to cover the movies as thoroughly in an essay style as I used to. I found it was taking too much of my time and cutting especially into my reading time—I'm a compulsive reader (I like mysteries) as well as movie watcher. I've found that sticking to the review format tends to focus my thoughts and reduce the amount of time I spend on a post. One curious thing I've discovered is that I like to include a photo or two from the film in each post. I used to choose them after the post was finished, but now I like to do that soon after I start it. I've found that searching for the right images often acts as a sort of visual aid that either inspires me to keep on or moves me in a certain direction.
What do you look for when watching a movie?
For the total film experience, I look for a film that moves me on three different levels: emotionally, intellectually, and visually. The balance of these elements varies, and I find that extra strength in one or two of these areas can counter-balance a slight weakness in the other(s). But the really great movies, the ones I call masterpieces, have a strong effect on me in all areas—my heart, mind, and eye.
Do you have any principles that guide the way you write about movies?
I don't like the overly academic style of writing about film, the kind filled with jargon-laden abstractions. If I can't paraphrase what I've just read, then to me the writer hasn't really spoken to me, no matter how impressive the words sound. I try to avoid that kind of writing, although I know that my writing seems rather formal—even to myself—compared to some blogs I read. I admire a colloquial writing style in others, but it doesn't really come naturally to me. I do like to analyze, though. It's just in my nature. So when I watch a movie I ask myself how much I enjoyed it and then try to figure out why I responded to it the way I did and what in particular I liked or didn't like. I tend to write about movies I like, but occasionally I'll write about one that I didn't respond to so positively, usually because it's highly regarded and disappointed me. I find that doing that once in a while keeps my critical observations sharp. One quality I value in writing about movies is concision. The writers about film that I most admire, whether professional critics or amateur bloggers, have this. I try to get in, make my point, and move on without belaboring the idea or, as I read in some blogs, repeating it over and over in different variations. At the other extreme from the overly abstract way of writing about movies, I also try to avoid just recounting the plot of the movie at length. I try to summarize the plot in a paragraph or two. I've read some blogs that are just plot descriptions that go on and on and contain very little interpretation, and I find that approach dull. I'm especially fond of describing a particular scene and showing how it fits into the overall feeling or meaning of the movie. I enjoy doing that a lot.
How much research do you do for a post?
I make a point of relying on my own ideas and knowledge to write my posts. While I'm writing I do only factual research, mostly using IMDb and sometimes the TCM website or Wikipedia or reference books I have at home. I actually avoid reading any criticism of the film I'm writing about that I haven't previously read. The reason is that I want to present my own ideas, not repeat the ideas of others. After finishing, I may look for a brief quotation to support my ideas or to use as a lead-in. I must admit that I'm gratified when I find that a writer I admire saw the same things in a movie as I did, but I look upon my blog as a forum for my own ideas, not as a place to present things I've compiled from secondary sources. If I do refer to someone else's ideas, I make sure to give that person credit.
What's the hardest part of writing your posts?
I'm a perfectionist. I never just write and post. I tend to write a first draft (this is often done a couple of weeks before the post is published) and then make lots of revisions. Even after posting, I can't resist going in and tweaking a word or phrase here and there. I know the shelf life of any post is about until the next post appears, but I take writing seriously (I taught it for a number of years) and like to prolong the probably illusory notion that what I put into words will last.
Could you explain the RECENTLY VIEWED section of your blog?
After I'd been blogging a few months and was watching more films, towards the end of 2008, I started keeping a record of the movies I was watching and rating them in a notebook to keep them straight in my mind. I decided to add this section to the sidebar at the same time because I thought that knowing what movies I choose to watch and what I think of each one would tell the reader a lot about me, that is, about my likes and dislikes and my tastes and preferences. There was probably also the thought that it might inspire readers to watch some of these movies that I didn't write a post about. I know that I watch movies all the time because I was intrigued by what some other blogger wrote about them, or because reading about a certain movie reminded me I'd been meaning to watch it but never had and it was about time I got around to it.
I noticed that you also rate the movies in this section using a four-star rating system.
I decided to follow Leonard Maltin's four-star rating system because that's how I think of movie ratings. A lot of people prefer the five-star system, but for me that creates too many fine distinctions, and I have trouble enough making up my mind about anything. Having more choices would only complicate matters for me. I assign a star rating based mostly on how I respond to a particular film, but in my explanation of each rating I do acknowledge that some of my ratings reflect my own tastes and preferences, or that I think people with certain tastes or preferences would find a movie of greater interest than the general viewer. For instance, I gave Julie and Julia ***½, which was higher than most, because I'm such a Francophile as well as a foodie and a huge fan of Julia Child. Also because I was so relieved that Meryl Streep, whose performance looked almost like a caricature in the snippets used for publicity, not only got all the mannerisms right but also created a real three-dimensional character that was just beautiful to a Julia groupie like me who used to watch her original show on PBS. I'm basically a pretty easy rater except for the very highest **** rating, but then I don't spend time watching a movie unless I'm reasonably sure based on what I've read about it that it will appeal to me and is of an acceptable level of quality. I hardly ever start watching a movie then turn it off, even if I'm not having that great a time with it, so I guess I have a built-in risk aversion where films are concerned.
In the ABOUT MYSELF section, you say that your favorite films are the classics. Can you explain that statement?
About the middle of the 1980s I stopped going to the theater because I found the disrespectful attitude of many people in the audience too distracting, and by that time movies were available on VHS. Also it was getting rarer to see foreign language movies, which I've had a fondness for since taking film classes in college. I continued to read reviews of current releases and to follow the annual awards. By about 1990 I began to find that of all the movies released in a year, there were on average only two or three that really appealed to me, and then those didn't always turn out to be all that satisfying. (I'm talking mostly about American movies here.) It was participating in the best of the decade polls at Wonders in the Dark that really drove home the message that most contemporary movies aren't my cup of tea. I realized that my preference for classic films was genuine and not just a matter of being out of touch with what's out there. Only rarely do modern movies and directors, especially American ones, give me the kind of pleasure the classics do. Even the most highly praised ones often disappoint me.
Can you give an example of a well-received recent movie you found disappointing?
I just watched The Hurt Locker. Even though I'm not a big fan of combat movies, I thought it was a well-written character study of an almost pathologically obsessive personality who only feels fully alive in the midst of extreme risk, and Jeremy Renner gave a brilliant performance in the lead. But that shaking camera! Despite the movie's strengths, I had to force myself to watch it to the end and stop fuming about that camera. Hadn't the director ever heard of the Steadicam? Did she really think all that jarring was adding authenticity and tension to the movie? At a few points, when it seemed called for, this approach worked for me, but for the most part I found it intrusive and annoying, a constant reminder that somebody is trying to pull my strings and just won't let up. Couldn't she see in the rushes how much better the movie was in the few moments when the camera stopped shaking? Most of the movie obviously used planned camera set-ups, so to persist in that style was to me artificial in the extreme. To think that a movie whose main stylistic influences seemed to be The Blair Witch Project and Cops won the most prestigious critics' awards and an Oscar for directing just amazed me. I could only assume that the awards-givers responded to the timeliness of the subject and the perceived political stance of the movie (I couldn't tell there really was one beyond the generic idea that war is hell) more than to the actual experience of watching it. Anyway, that's why I prefer to catch up on the classics I've missed. There are still plenty of them out there, and I'm far more likely to enjoy them than most current features.
Do you subscribe to the auteur theory?
To a certain extent, yes, but mostly to predict the likelihood of my liking a film. I still prefer to judge movies on a case-by-case basis, although even that tends overall to support the auteur view of directors. A proven great director is clearly more likely to make a great movie than a mediocre director. Still, mediocre directors can occasionally hit the jackpot when all the elements fall into place, and great directors are still capable of making a stinker now and again. Terrence Malick has an unbroken record, but he's only made four movies. Fellini once observed that even the best directors tend to have a period of greatness that runs at most about ten years, and I think that was a very perceptive observation. And let's face it, moviemaking is much more of a collaborative process than the extreme auteurists are willing to grant. When I read a critic in The New Yorker call Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor a "masterwork" a few weeks ago, I couldn't believe it. That was a movie I could hardly watch with a straight face, it was so shoddily made, so outrageously exaggerated and unrestrained, and to read a professional critic take it so seriously was for me an illustration of auteurism gone mad.
Is there a particular director whose work you have problems with?
I have a love-hate relationship with John Ford. There's no question the man knew how to tell a story (although he might have moved the camera around a bit more—to me he's almost the anti-Ophuls), and he made a large number of masterpieces. But he also made a large number of movies that are a distinctly mixed bag, with elements of greatness dragged down by elements that are cringe-worthy. In particular, I find many of his movies compromised by over-sentimentality and cornball attempts at humor. A couple of years ago I saw The Searchers for the first time. I know a lot of people consider this his greatest film, but something about it made me reserve judgment. A few weeks ago I saw it again, and there it was—those things that seemed out of place in a movie with so much greatness. Ken Curtis, Vera Miles, and Jeffrey Hunter when he is younger were horribly embarrassing in the unsubtlety of their characterizations. And that scene in the fort of the madwomen who've been rescued after years of captivity by the Comanches. Just dreadful. And the ending that comes from out of the blue with no motivation or explanation. Howard Hawks did such a better job with this kind of ending in Red River. On the other hand, there's Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, The Grapes of Wrath, The Informer, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and some that I think just miss masterpiece status—They Were Expendable, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and Fort Apache. And even though I couldn't bring myself to give The Searchers a full **** rating, I still gave it ***½ for coming close.
Have you recently discovered any directors whose work you especially like?
I'd never seen a movie by the French director Bertrand Tavernier, although I knew of him, until a little more than a year ago. The first movie I saw by him, Coup de Torchon, was excellent, very dark and very funny at the same time. It's based on a novel by Jim Thompson. Then I saw A Sunday in the Country—a masterpiece—followed by Life and Nothing But, another masterpiece. He's especially good at evocative period settings, but he doesn't use that as a substitute for superb storytelling, characterization, and acting, or for creating an atmosphere that just emotionally pulls you in like a magnet. And he lets all these things work their magic without a lot of directorial intervention—what some call "invisible technique." I just saw It All Starts Today, a movie with a modern setting and a more contemporary semi-documentary style, and it was great too.
Who do you think is the greatest director of all time?
Of the dozen or so possibilities that come to mind, I would have to say, based on the number of masterpieces and near-masterpieces they directed and the overall consistency of their work, it's between Alfred Hitchcock and Ingmar Bergman. Hitchcock's more fun, but Bergman's deeper. I'd go with Bergman by a nose. My favorite Bergman film of all is Wild Strawberries. My favorite Hitchcock film is North by Northwest, which is also my favorite movie of all time.
What is the biggest thing you've gained from writing the blog?
It's inspired me to watch many more movies than ever before. I think of myself as a cinephile, yet I marvel at how many essential movies from my self-proclaimed period of interest, that is, 1930-1980, I have yet to catch up on. The blog is helping to give me the motivation to do this.
How did you start writing The Movie Projector?
Back in 2008 I started reading the blog Maximum Strength Mick by the San Francisco Chronicle movie reviewer Mick LaSalle. His blog was going strong then, and some of the questions he posed his readers were so intriguing that I started responding to them. I guess I had a lot of pent-up opinions about movies, because I found myself leaving very long comments on his blog. It seemed like once I started writing, I couldn't stop. When I found how easy it was to set up an account on Blogger at Google, I thought, "Why not put all this in your own blog, since you're doing all this writing anyway?"
Where do you watch the movies you write about?
I live in a rural area with only one movie theater. It's a bit of a drive to get there, and I don't really enjoy the experience of being in a theater audience anymore. So I watch my movies at home. Because of my preference for older films, I watch a lot on Turner Classic Movies. (I have satellite TV and a DVR.) Occasionally something I'm interested in will play on the Independent Film Channel, but not often. I used to watch AMC but because they now show commercials, don't always letterbox, and sometimes even edit the films they show, I avoid them unless it's something older that wasn't filmed in widescreen and isn't likely to be edited for content. I have a subscription to Netflix and watch a couple of movies a week from them. I also request movies from my local public library, which has a fantastic collection, especially of classics like those in the Criterion Collection. I get a couple of films a week from the library. I've only ever bought one DVD (Terrence Malick's Badlands because it wasn't available anywhere else) but otherwise never buy DVDs because I'm just too frugal (euphemism for cheap) to spend money on something I'll probably only watch once or at the most twice.
How do you choose your subjects?
I always write about a movie I've just seen, either for the first time or again after a number of years. You might say that certain movies ask me to write about them, so to speak. Sometimes I know while watching that I'm going to write about this film, if not, within a day or two at the most. I'll jot down thoughts while watching or shortly after and use those as a starting point. I don't try to cover the movies as thoroughly in an essay style as I used to. I found it was taking too much of my time and cutting especially into my reading time—I'm a compulsive reader (I like mysteries) as well as movie watcher. I've found that sticking to the review format tends to focus my thoughts and reduce the amount of time I spend on a post. One curious thing I've discovered is that I like to include a photo or two from the film in each post. I used to choose them after the post was finished, but now I like to do that soon after I start it. I've found that searching for the right images often acts as a sort of visual aid that either inspires me to keep on or moves me in a certain direction.
What do you look for when watching a movie?
For the total film experience, I look for a film that moves me on three different levels: emotionally, intellectually, and visually. The balance of these elements varies, and I find that extra strength in one or two of these areas can counter-balance a slight weakness in the other(s). But the really great movies, the ones I call masterpieces, have a strong effect on me in all areas—my heart, mind, and eye.
Do you have any principles that guide the way you write about movies?
I don't like the overly academic style of writing about film, the kind filled with jargon-laden abstractions. If I can't paraphrase what I've just read, then to me the writer hasn't really spoken to me, no matter how impressive the words sound. I try to avoid that kind of writing, although I know that my writing seems rather formal—even to myself—compared to some blogs I read. I admire a colloquial writing style in others, but it doesn't really come naturally to me. I do like to analyze, though. It's just in my nature. So when I watch a movie I ask myself how much I enjoyed it and then try to figure out why I responded to it the way I did and what in particular I liked or didn't like. I tend to write about movies I like, but occasionally I'll write about one that I didn't respond to so positively, usually because it's highly regarded and disappointed me. I find that doing that once in a while keeps my critical observations sharp. One quality I value in writing about movies is concision. The writers about film that I most admire, whether professional critics or amateur bloggers, have this. I try to get in, make my point, and move on without belaboring the idea or, as I read in some blogs, repeating it over and over in different variations. At the other extreme from the overly abstract way of writing about movies, I also try to avoid just recounting the plot of the movie at length. I try to summarize the plot in a paragraph or two. I've read some blogs that are just plot descriptions that go on and on and contain very little interpretation, and I find that approach dull. I'm especially fond of describing a particular scene and showing how it fits into the overall feeling or meaning of the movie. I enjoy doing that a lot.
How much research do you do for a post?
I make a point of relying on my own ideas and knowledge to write my posts. While I'm writing I do only factual research, mostly using IMDb and sometimes the TCM website or Wikipedia or reference books I have at home. I actually avoid reading any criticism of the film I'm writing about that I haven't previously read. The reason is that I want to present my own ideas, not repeat the ideas of others. After finishing, I may look for a brief quotation to support my ideas or to use as a lead-in. I must admit that I'm gratified when I find that a writer I admire saw the same things in a movie as I did, but I look upon my blog as a forum for my own ideas, not as a place to present things I've compiled from secondary sources. If I do refer to someone else's ideas, I make sure to give that person credit.
What's the hardest part of writing your posts?
I'm a perfectionist. I never just write and post. I tend to write a first draft (this is often done a couple of weeks before the post is published) and then make lots of revisions. Even after posting, I can't resist going in and tweaking a word or phrase here and there. I know the shelf life of any post is about until the next post appears, but I take writing seriously (I taught it for a number of years) and like to prolong the probably illusory notion that what I put into words will last.
Could you explain the RECENTLY VIEWED section of your blog?
After I'd been blogging a few months and was watching more films, towards the end of 2008, I started keeping a record of the movies I was watching and rating them in a notebook to keep them straight in my mind. I decided to add this section to the sidebar at the same time because I thought that knowing what movies I choose to watch and what I think of each one would tell the reader a lot about me, that is, about my likes and dislikes and my tastes and preferences. There was probably also the thought that it might inspire readers to watch some of these movies that I didn't write a post about. I know that I watch movies all the time because I was intrigued by what some other blogger wrote about them, or because reading about a certain movie reminded me I'd been meaning to watch it but never had and it was about time I got around to it.
I noticed that you also rate the movies in this section using a four-star rating system.
I decided to follow Leonard Maltin's four-star rating system because that's how I think of movie ratings. A lot of people prefer the five-star system, but for me that creates too many fine distinctions, and I have trouble enough making up my mind about anything. Having more choices would only complicate matters for me. I assign a star rating based mostly on how I respond to a particular film, but in my explanation of each rating I do acknowledge that some of my ratings reflect my own tastes and preferences, or that I think people with certain tastes or preferences would find a movie of greater interest than the general viewer. For instance, I gave Julie and Julia ***½, which was higher than most, because I'm such a Francophile as well as a foodie and a huge fan of Julia Child. Also because I was so relieved that Meryl Streep, whose performance looked almost like a caricature in the snippets used for publicity, not only got all the mannerisms right but also created a real three-dimensional character that was just beautiful to a Julia groupie like me who used to watch her original show on PBS. I'm basically a pretty easy rater except for the very highest **** rating, but then I don't spend time watching a movie unless I'm reasonably sure based on what I've read about it that it will appeal to me and is of an acceptable level of quality. I hardly ever start watching a movie then turn it off, even if I'm not having that great a time with it, so I guess I have a built-in risk aversion where films are concerned.
In the ABOUT MYSELF section, you say that your favorite films are the classics. Can you explain that statement?
About the middle of the 1980s I stopped going to the theater because I found the disrespectful attitude of many people in the audience too distracting, and by that time movies were available on VHS. Also it was getting rarer to see foreign language movies, which I've had a fondness for since taking film classes in college. I continued to read reviews of current releases and to follow the annual awards. By about 1990 I began to find that of all the movies released in a year, there were on average only two or three that really appealed to me, and then those didn't always turn out to be all that satisfying. (I'm talking mostly about American movies here.) It was participating in the best of the decade polls at Wonders in the Dark that really drove home the message that most contemporary movies aren't my cup of tea. I realized that my preference for classic films was genuine and not just a matter of being out of touch with what's out there. Only rarely do modern movies and directors, especially American ones, give me the kind of pleasure the classics do. Even the most highly praised ones often disappoint me.
Can you give an example of a well-received recent movie you found disappointing?
I just watched The Hurt Locker. Even though I'm not a big fan of combat movies, I thought it was a well-written character study of an almost pathologically obsessive personality who only feels fully alive in the midst of extreme risk, and Jeremy Renner gave a brilliant performance in the lead. But that shaking camera! Despite the movie's strengths, I had to force myself to watch it to the end and stop fuming about that camera. Hadn't the director ever heard of the Steadicam? Did she really think all that jarring was adding authenticity and tension to the movie? At a few points, when it seemed called for, this approach worked for me, but for the most part I found it intrusive and annoying, a constant reminder that somebody is trying to pull my strings and just won't let up. Couldn't she see in the rushes how much better the movie was in the few moments when the camera stopped shaking? Most of the movie obviously used planned camera set-ups, so to persist in that style was to me artificial in the extreme. To think that a movie whose main stylistic influences seemed to be The Blair Witch Project and Cops won the most prestigious critics' awards and an Oscar for directing just amazed me. I could only assume that the awards-givers responded to the timeliness of the subject and the perceived political stance of the movie (I couldn't tell there really was one beyond the generic idea that war is hell) more than to the actual experience of watching it. Anyway, that's why I prefer to catch up on the classics I've missed. There are still plenty of them out there, and I'm far more likely to enjoy them than most current features.
Do you subscribe to the auteur theory?
To a certain extent, yes, but mostly to predict the likelihood of my liking a film. I still prefer to judge movies on a case-by-case basis, although even that tends overall to support the auteur view of directors. A proven great director is clearly more likely to make a great movie than a mediocre director. Still, mediocre directors can occasionally hit the jackpot when all the elements fall into place, and great directors are still capable of making a stinker now and again. Terrence Malick has an unbroken record, but he's only made four movies. Fellini once observed that even the best directors tend to have a period of greatness that runs at most about ten years, and I think that was a very perceptive observation. And let's face it, moviemaking is much more of a collaborative process than the extreme auteurists are willing to grant. When I read a critic in The New Yorker call Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor a "masterwork" a few weeks ago, I couldn't believe it. That was a movie I could hardly watch with a straight face, it was so shoddily made, so outrageously exaggerated and unrestrained, and to read a professional critic take it so seriously was for me an illustration of auteurism gone mad.
Is there a particular director whose work you have problems with?
I have a love-hate relationship with John Ford. There's no question the man knew how to tell a story (although he might have moved the camera around a bit more—to me he's almost the anti-Ophuls), and he made a large number of masterpieces. But he also made a large number of movies that are a distinctly mixed bag, with elements of greatness dragged down by elements that are cringe-worthy. In particular, I find many of his movies compromised by over-sentimentality and cornball attempts at humor. A couple of years ago I saw The Searchers for the first time. I know a lot of people consider this his greatest film, but something about it made me reserve judgment. A few weeks ago I saw it again, and there it was—those things that seemed out of place in a movie with so much greatness. Ken Curtis, Vera Miles, and Jeffrey Hunter when he is younger were horribly embarrassing in the unsubtlety of their characterizations. And that scene in the fort of the madwomen who've been rescued after years of captivity by the Comanches. Just dreadful. And the ending that comes from out of the blue with no motivation or explanation. Howard Hawks did such a better job with this kind of ending in Red River. On the other hand, there's Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, The Grapes of Wrath, The Informer, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and some that I think just miss masterpiece status—They Were Expendable, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and Fort Apache. And even though I couldn't bring myself to give The Searchers a full **** rating, I still gave it ***½ for coming close.
Have you recently discovered any directors whose work you especially like?
I'd never seen a movie by the French director Bertrand Tavernier, although I knew of him, until a little more than a year ago. The first movie I saw by him, Coup de Torchon, was excellent, very dark and very funny at the same time. It's based on a novel by Jim Thompson. Then I saw A Sunday in the Country—a masterpiece—followed by Life and Nothing But, another masterpiece. He's especially good at evocative period settings, but he doesn't use that as a substitute for superb storytelling, characterization, and acting, or for creating an atmosphere that just emotionally pulls you in like a magnet. And he lets all these things work their magic without a lot of directorial intervention—what some call "invisible technique." I just saw It All Starts Today, a movie with a modern setting and a more contemporary semi-documentary style, and it was great too.
Who do you think is the greatest director of all time?
Of the dozen or so possibilities that come to mind, I would have to say, based on the number of masterpieces and near-masterpieces they directed and the overall consistency of their work, it's between Alfred Hitchcock and Ingmar Bergman. Hitchcock's more fun, but Bergman's deeper. I'd go with Bergman by a nose. My favorite Bergman film of all is Wild Strawberries. My favorite Hitchcock film is North by Northwest, which is also my favorite movie of all time.
What is the biggest thing you've gained from writing the blog?
It's inspired me to watch many more movies than ever before. I think of myself as a cinephile, yet I marvel at how many essential movies from my self-proclaimed period of interest, that is, 1930-1980, I have yet to catch up on. The blog is helping to give me the motivation to do this.
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