White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949)

The usual route for Walsh is to slow the development by increasing specificity. It is very cunning: by the time his gangster comes apart, is shot down, or shoots his way through an ambush, Waslh has slyly doubled and tripled every move that the gangster makes in terms of height, texture, path, angle, and sound. Cagney’s psychotic break in the penitentiary dining hall involves a messy noisy tantrum after he hears his beloved Ma has been gunned down. Every move Cagney makes has been counterpointed and varied. His incredible frenzy literally swimming through cutlery and china down the length of a table has been twice anticipated with a slow camera dolly down the table and back, picking out each diner who gets splashed and shocked by Cagney’s tantrum crawl across the table. Cagney’s running battle through a half-dozen guards spaced at crucial spots around the hall has been anticipated by a quiet over-the-hall long shot as the prisoners file in and angle off into the various aisles. The battle itself is a frenzy improvised with perfect Cagney instincts: characteristically it is a mesh of variations on pace and height ending with Cagney being carried by the guards down the aisles and out the hall, above their heads like a frantically struggling fish on a tray.

Manny Farber, “Raoul Walsh,” in Farber on Film (Library of America, 2009), 702-03.

Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, 2002)

How did I miss what a dense and knotty picture this is? So I have the good people over at Reverse Shot (seriously why aren’t you reading their amazing Spielberg series) to thank for that. The film in its repeating motifs: eyes, mirrors, shifting perspectives, images doubling and overlaying each other call to mind DePalma making a futuristic Hitchcock wrong man picture. On repeated viewings the film’s metatextual concerns surface as Spielberg’s usual concerns (the reunification of the family) fade into the background.  So if A.I. is Spielberg’s most thematically audacious film, Minority Report is his most formally audacious. With A.I. Spielberg was interrogating his themes, whereas here he interrogates his method.

Filled with elaborate sequences, from a director who knows his way around elaborate, Report transcends the merely byzantine by crafting these sequences with a wit and playfulness that belies the film’s essential darkness, while simultaneously expressing a complex understanding of the nature of film, and moreover an understanding of how we construct reality through vision.  Moreover how images within cinema are constructed to create understanding. So while it the connection between the way John Anderton analyses, chooses, and discards images generated from the pre-cogs is represents how a film is edited, the entire films is constantly addressing seeing and crafting images. Most especially in the films greatest sequence, wherein Anderton and Agatha escape through the mall by directing their movements based on where the police are going to be. The scene perfectly encapsulates the way in which editing and camera placement determine the interplay of the objective and subjective views. Yet the camera is always subjective, even though it is essentially an objective recording device. It is through the editing of images that meaning is derived. What one is left with is the picture’s profound ambivalence about the nature of this process. So that while Spielberg in the opening of the film demonstrates how this process can illuminate truth, he spends the remainder of the film, undermining his initial hypothesis. Nowhere is this more readily apparent than in Agatha’s desperate inquiry “Is this now?”

A Matter Of Life and Death & Black Narcissus (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1946, 1947)

Britain’s masters of above board perversity produce two dissimilar yet singularly representative works. In the former, David Niven’s very David Niveny pilot fights to remain on Technicolor earth than the black and white afterlife when he survives a bomber crash. In the latter, a bunch of nuns are sent into an erotic/nostalgic reverie in their new exotic environment and by the sight of David Farrar’s shorts. Both films seemed filled with formal contradictions to accompany their narrative ones, the depiction of Life and Death’s aforementioned afterlife, Narcissus’s cold hothouse, whereas most stories of eroticism are enacted in claustrophobic interiors, this one’s is positively agoraphobic, despite being shot entirely on studio sets. Kathleen Byron’s Sister Ruth becoming more beautiful the more nutso she gets (although that could just be me). What sticks in the minds eye the strongest in the films are the moments of sheer beauty, a beauty borne out of neuroses (which is perhaps what links Scorsese so closely, explicitly and implicitly, to their pictures). Images as broad as the vastness of the Himalayas or as intimate as small town projected through a camera obscura, or as heartbreakingly unsentimental as Niven dictating a telegram to his family knowing that he’s certainly going to die. The irony of course is that he doesn’t but falls in love. It is not the auratic impressiveness of Wagner or Malick, but an interior vision depicted on the screen in otherworldly Technicolor. Driven by a veddy English brand of neuroticism their films are at once immediate and distant. Like I said, contradictory. The Archers give credence to the idea that films are the embodiment our collective dreamscape.

Liebelei (Max Ophüls 1933)

I saw this picture at the historic Portage Theater (in need of saving), in a perfectly fine 16mm print with rather eccentric subtitles. All in all it was an experience of viewing the past through a concatenation of filters. In 2012 watching a print of a film that I would guess was struck in the 70s of a film from 1933 of an 1895 play by Arthur Schnitzler. What makes this particularly unique is that every moment stands it seems at the brink of an entirely new epoch, historically and cinematically:

1895 End of the 19^th century, the publication of the Freud and Breur’s Studies on Hysteria, and the birth of the cinematograph.

1933 The rise of fascism, with Hitler’s ascendance to power. Since they were Jews, Schnitzler and Ophüls’s names were removed from the credits, So this a film that was neither written nor directed and instead appeared on the screen from nowhere. I would also note that this is around when sound cinema reached maturity.

2012 Digital age, death of film/cinema as a mechanical medium, as well as the mechanism itself?

The effect is one of seeing ghosts. The sense we are watching the shadows of the dead reanimated. Which is both true and untrue, the mechanistic/chemical medium so tied an external reality (the players, the sets, etc.). But it’s not re-presenting reality, they aren’t moving on the screen. It just looks like that. Who you gonna believe? Me, or your lying eyes? Still though I can’t shake the feeling that I was seeing a dream of the 20^th century that is about to become a nightmare. All this begs the question; what the fuck am I talking about? I don’t know. Film has aura.

The Raid: Redemption (Gareth Evans, 2011)

A work of anti-humanist cinema of space and movement made all the more exhilarating for its lack of irony or bloat vis-a-vis the essence of its technique. Art expressed through the collision of mechanized men cut and choreographed to within an inch of its life. The argument has been made that the film resembles a video game, point being that it lacks significant character development and the plot is thin; which are both true, but miss the point. Proof that, by and large, critics are still tied to Aristotelian (by way of Robert McKee bullshit) concept of dramatic construction, and dramatic construction-period as the cinema’s only appropriate mode. You can’t just make a picture where a bunch of guys kick the shit out of each other. However, I would posit that you can make a picture where a bunch of guys kick the shit out of each other artfully. And artfully they do. So while the camera may be shaky and the cutting may be fast; this is not the chaos cinema that everybody won’t shut up about. It takes skill, craft, and yes art to shoot these things right. All of which Evans has in abundance. An intuitive formalist, he knows that this picture doesn’t need anything more, so outside of a few half-hearted stabs at feeding the audience some pathos, he just lets the premise play out without gussying it up. And play out it does. Like an adrenaline shot to the gonads. Who could ask for anything more!