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A Classic Film A Night For Two Weeks (Part 2)

4/3/2010

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YOU PROBABLY WANT TO READ PART ONE BELOW FIRST!

The first half of this disjointed essay covered the first half of my attempt to watch a film from a different country every night for as many nights as I could manage. I made it to thirteen and recounted the first seven in part 1. I made it from Sweden to Brazil in a week.


There is a point to this; I want to encourage people to watch and think about movies they might not normally approach. I plan to do this again. Starting over maybe or making it horror movies from different countries. Who knows? The permutations are endless. I know it is sometimes difficult, with renting by mail to get a new movie every night so maybe you can make up different rules. I do think having guidelines is important. Many nights I just didn’t want to watch a movie!  But I did, because I didn’t want to break my rules.

But, of course, I did break the rules a little with a couple of the movies we are about to chat about.

Yes, I cheated on the film, Mandabi (Senegal) but I have an excuse. This is the second film from the one African director everyone who knows anything about movies knows, Ousmane Sembène. I fudged my rules a little because Sub-Saharan Africa's first movie (made by an African) was likely Sembène's, Black Girl from 1966. I picked this 1968 film because it is, frankly,  a better movie.

 An out of work man gets a money order from his nephew in Paris with instructions on what to do with the money.  In a short, clever, scene Sembène illustrates that a street sweeper in Paris makes enough to support an extended family in Senegal. The money order is nothing but trouble, unleashing a hoard of desperate people, corrupt bureaucrats and angry relatives to put the man deeper in debt than before he received this largess.  It is like a Kafka story set in West Africa. I would also liken it to films like The Out of Towners (the Jack Lemon film not the remake) and After Hours. Everything that can go wrong does.

On film number nine I really wanted something Russian. You can only ignore Russia for SO long when it comes to film. I desperately wanted to avoid Eisenstein and settled on Ballad of a Soldier (USSR). I approached the film with trepidation. It was one I was not SURE if I had seen AND it was a Russian movie.


 Russian movies from the beginning of film to the end of Stalin are often technically brilliant and full of people praising the motherland. The motherland is great and all but I get a little sick of hearing about it. This movie has little of that (mostly in a short, ending voice over). It is beautifully shot and acted and is more a story about basic human decency than about war or Communism. A young signalman at the front, almost by accident, takes out two German tanks. When his commanding general wants to give him a commendation he asks, instead, for a chance to go see his mother on leave to fix her leaky roof. He has six days to get there and his trip is delayed by his inability to say no to the needs of other people. It is a wonderful film on every level.

Finding a suitable movie from Spain during my time frame isn’t the simplest of things. Civil War, Fascist terror and generalized repression intervened to make the country inhospitable to creative types (no matter what Dali may have said).Muerte de Ciclista (sounds better than Death of a Cyclist) (Spain) is directed by Juan Antonio Bardem (uncle of Javier Bardem), this film is beautiful. It looks fantastic, and not just because Lucia Bose is stunningly gorgeous.


You also, gradually, come to understand and, in some way, sympathize with each character in the film. How this is done is masterful considering we are talking about a movie that does not quite hit 90 minutes and has half a dozen main characters. They deftly steer around such thorny issues (for Franco's Spain) as the civil war. They talk about characters fighting in it, allude to how it ruined their lives but never mention which side they fought on. This no doubt left censors certain it was Franco's side while audience members could draw their own conclusions (if he was on the winning side would he be this disaffected?). I could go on and on. This is the best movie I have seen of this group of ten. Better even than Bridge on the River Kwai and Amachord! Javier should be proud of his uncle as this is easily one of the best films I have ever seen.

For Germany  I chose Die Brucke (The Bridge). There are a lot of good films before World War II  from the likes of Fritz Lang and G.W. Pabst but that would have been the easy route (and do not talk to my about that Nazi bitch Leni Riefenstahl. She should have ended up on a rope and her movies are propaganda films and nothing more. Sorry film professors and apologists).

The twenty years (or thereabout) following the war were lean years for the German film industry. I am sure there were some decent movies but not much more than that. It wasn't until the 60s that there was a renaissance in West German film making. One film does stand out--at least in critical acclaim-- and that this film, from 1959. It is a technically well done, well shot, decent looking, decently acted film about several high school students drafted into the German army at just about the end of the war. Unfortunately it is really an "our brave boys" film with the trappings of an anti-war film hung on it.

 I was rooting for all the main characters to die pretty fast in this one. It is just not a particularly convincing or moving film. I also question the "true story" part of it for a variety of reasons I will not get into. They also have American soldiers shouting silly things to the kids like "We don't fight kids". U.S. troops wiped out groups of Hitler Youth with some regularity and justifiably so; When someone is firing an anti-tank weapon at you, you do not check his ID. So The Bridge was a disappointment. Yet it may also be a precursor of the great things to come in the next decade so it is worth seeing and knowing for that alone.

I had never even heard of A Girl in Black (Greece). I watched an hour of this when I realized I was not in the mood and was probably not giving this sometimes beautifully shot film the chance it deserved (second time I cheated as I did not watch the whole movie). I resumed the next evening and was rewarded.


I figured out, in part, what is so off putting about this movie; it is really sad. It isn’t unrelentingly so but there is a melancholy that permeates the film. All the shots are just a LITTLE longer than is normal in commercial films (even of that time) and they linger on people in groups.  There is a long shot of a funeral procession, then there is a different long shot of the same funeral procession. It makes for a sort of languid pace but that is not really an insult to the film. It helps you feel l the characters emotions and also to get a feel for the beautiful surroundings. It is a slow film but it is worth sticking out with. There is truly beautiful cinematography throughout. People fond of Neorealist films (a camp you could include Muerte de Ciclista in too) will enjoy this despite its lack of UNRELENTING sadness.

Finally I arrived at the silent Danish classic, Vampyr. Carl Theodor Dreyer directed this fine film and the most perplexing thing about it is that no one has remade this exact vampire story. A man comes to an inn; we know and learn nothing about him in the movie. But we know the inn and its environs are infested with the minions of a vampire. One of these meets a death similar to one of the bad guys in the movie Witness (and I am not talking about Danny Glover).  It is a silent film with minimal titles, telling the story through expression and movement. One of the great things about silent films, in the hands of a capable director, is how they are almost ballet. The film is also moody and ethereal which always appeals to me.


I ran out of gas and didn’t get to Pather Panchali (India) and Women of the Port (Mexico).

The point of this is more than just a test of endurance. It is a way to find things out about films, to view films you haven’t seen for times or have never seen before. It does require research if you want to watch films “widely accepted as classics.”  But a little research isn’t a difficult thing. Make up your own rules and get to watching movies.




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Senegal To Copenhagen:Thirteen Classic Films In Thirteen Nights Part 1

3/16/2010

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The best way to learn about movies isn’t reading about them in a book. Of course books and guides help, they cannot be discounted but if you want to know Fellini you should probably watch La Dolce Vita. If you feel an uncontrollable urge to understand Woody Allen have a look at Hannah and Her Sisters or Manhattan. To know movies you have to watch movies. To this end I decided to watch a film, from a different country, every night,for as long as could manage to do it. I didn’t do any research, just watched the movies. Some of them I knew something about and some I had seen. Others were totally new.

In fact I  came up with the justifications after the fact. Really, I just started doing it. I was sick of Two and a Half Men and Family Guy reruns I suppose. I did set a couple of guidelines for this project:

- The film had to be a widely acknowledged classic.

-The film had to be from between the years 1930 and 1960

The dates were somewhat arbitrary but I refuse to call a film a "classic" within a decade of its release. Saturday Night Fever is not a classic, sorry it is not. Yet, everyone said it was in the 70s. Some people still do. They are wrong. If you do not believe me I suggest you watch it. Sure, some of the music holds up from a production standpoint if nothing else, but the movie, while not bad, is not a classic. The films I picked, I do not think there is a great deal of debate over, some I had seen before and some I had not.

I began in Sweden with Ingmar Bergman although I think I went with a less obvious title, rather than The Seventh Seal I chose Smiles on a Summer Night.

Who says Bergman films are depressing? If anything this one is kind of sweet. His early movies are all funny in some way and uplifting. I include The Seventh Seal in this statement; all those weary of life die and the young family escapes. The Knight who wants to do one meaningful thing to make up for the dubious sum total of his life is able to accomplish just that. But there I go, watching one movie and talking about another. Smiles on a Summer Night is a romantic comedy. The basic plot about a repressed son and a vaguely hedonistic and world-weary father could be transported into this century and star Kate Hudson. Some of today’s directors could likely even make THIS suck I suppose. Dad cheats on beautiful young wife with actress, son secretly loves his stepmom. And then they all go away for the weekend. Hell, this sounds French, not Swedish!  In the context of the run of the mill current romantic comedy this illustrates that such films need not be terrible.

The next film on the menu was French, Jean Vigo’s L'Atalante. Vigo died in his twenties and part of his mystique lies in that. His three efforts are elevated into the pantheon of “greatness”, in part because of his untimely demise. To under praise Vigo is to commit a heresy.  L’Atalante is a technically great movie both brilliantly shot and edited. It also functions in the same way silent films did. Not so far removed from a time when there was no sound (date) the actors use expression and motion as much as dialogue to move the plot.  In the film a woman marries a canal-boat captain and takes up life on his boat, along with his curmudgeonly mate. Tension ensues as their worlds collide and the boat, the “L’Atalante” moves slowly through France.


 It may be that the incompleteness of Vigo's catalog that leaves us with a feeling of his promise rather than simply what we see on the screen. This is his only full length movie.

Boy oh boy, I had forgotten about Amachord (Italy). Fellini made two of my personal favorite movies (La Dolce Vita and La Strada) and this one is as good as either. I write these are personal favorites because some quibble about Fellini’s best films and they  may have points to score on my choices!


Regardless, Fellini made great black and white films. He made dazzling color films.

This movie is a plot-less slice of life. It is made up of pieces of memory. He doesn't give commentary about Fascists in the film. They are, mostly, just normal small town people. He sees them with the eyes of someone growing up, someone not totally cognizant of the wider currents of what was happening around him. He gets into the minds of people from the past and made them his voice. I would be shocked if anyone who likes film at all didn't like this movie. It meanders, has no specific plot (as noted), some characters talk to the camera, others don’t and it is inconsistent. It is also a work of absolute, transcendent, brilliance.

If you like westerns, you like Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (Japan). I confess. I own Yojimbo and I forgot how much I like it until I watched it again. The box says it was remade as A Fistful of Dollars in fact it was remade as Sergio Leone's entire career and a good chunk of Clint Eastwood's early career as well. It is also a remake, and homage to, the American Western. 


One of the best elements of the film is how fight scenes take ten seconds. Modern day action movies make the mistake of drawing these out. If you want to show someone is a badass; demonstrate it visually.  It always bugs me how, in many Westerns, the "badass" always takes so long to dispatch the evil doers once they start fighting. Two warring clans live in a town and a lone, mysterious Samurai wanders in to upset the balance of power. It is perfect (and the DVD looks great).

The Bridge on the River Kwai (UK) is one of my favorite movies. I have practically memorized it so it was something of a cheat to include it here. Sure I had seen all the movies up to this point but I hadn’t seen them 20 times. I recall once acting out the last scene for a friend of mine who claimed to never have seen it.


"What have I done?" says Alex Guinness as he falls on the explosives

"Madness...MADNESS"....

Maybe the best of David Lean's movies and William Holden and Guinness are fantastic. There is a larger point about obsession and fate in here. The film is doom laden, people “escape” but they are drawn back into the path no matter what they do, no matter how they try to avoid it. I need another word for “brilliant.” How about Stupendous? How about I want to look like William Holden in this movie?

I asked for suggestions for American films. Casablanca was discussed but who hasn’t seen that 20 times? The suggestion, nonetheless, inspired me to watch Key Largo, a film I thought I had seen but I hadn’t (there is a possibility I totally forgot it of course). It is a hard movie not to like--like most John Huston films. I thought it was interesting because they actually seemed to take the time to know a little hurricane history. Getting facts straight was not a priority in that era (hell, when is it in movies?).

There is an interesting line where Mr. Templeton says of the Seminoles (and I paraphrase) "Even when we go to help these people we wind up harming them" which is a pretty interesting statement for the time. There are good guys and bad guys but the Seminoles pretty much get screwed by all of them.  I suppose that is a bit of reality. Although I also think Seminoles might know better than to hang out right by the ocean during a HURRICANE.

For the next film I, once again, picked a film I had never seen: Black Orpheus (Brazil). The film is a co-production so it is ALSO a French film but the setting, actors and ethos of the film is Brazilian. It is an outstanding film. It is always MOVING. It is like a two hour dance party and yet it is more than that. Ostensibly, it is the retelling of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, but set at Carnival. It is simply done and the characters are likeable and alive. But it is also tragic, like the mythology it is based on. The best thing about the film may be trying to think of anything else you have ever seen SIMILAR to it.


Part 2 soon.


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