By Bob Clark
We’re taking a break from anime this Saturday, or at least I am insofar as it pertains to writing this column. On the day that this piece is running, I’ll be sitting in Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center to catch a morning screening of the Hayao Miyazaki classic Laputa: Castle in the Sky on the occasion of its 25th anniversary. I’d had a chance earlier this week to see a screening in honor of the 10th anniversary of the Ghibli master’s most celebrated work, Spirited Away, but I was already spending too much time and money on other attractions in this, the 49th annual New York Film Festival, to spare any more change for an already rather popular film, especially considering that it very well might make rounds in theaters again after G-Kids picked the director’s films up for distribution. I’ve been going to the Film Festival regularly for over ten years now, and thankfully the system of securing tickets has gotten more and more reliable over the years, allowing parishioners of the church of cinema more than ample opportunity to sit in on some of the most anticipated film events of the year. Years ago I wasn’t able to score seats for stuff like Dancer in the Dark, Mulholland Drive or Dogville, but over the years I’ve made up for the difference attending showings of Manderlay, Inland Empire and Antichrist, not to mention discovering unanticipated gems every now and again. This year I’ve seen four features already before tomorrow’s Laputa screening, and though it hasn’t been my favorite assortment of works over the course of a decade, it’s certainly been one of the most varied and interesting, to say nothing of the heaps of stuff I passed up, a combination of old classics, new fare and rarities you don’t get much of a chance to see anywhere else. In that sense, the range of works I’ve seen this year probably best represents the whole of the NYFF experience better than anything else I’ve sat in on over the years.
To start with, there’s William Wyler’s Ben Hur, screened here in a digital restoration to mark the (two years belated) 50th anniversary of the film’s premier. Much has been made of how this film took home a record-setting slew of 11 Oscars, the likes of which not even the overrated likes of James Cameron’s Titanic or Peter Jackson’s The Return of the King could best, and as such, there’s always something of a temptation to write a work off when there’s that much universal acclaim and admiration tossed in its direction. Not to mention the fact of the movie’s overbearing religious plot (this is A Tale of Christ, after all, I suppose in the same way that Ivanhoe is a tale of Robin Hood), which makes it all rather terribly difficult to take seriously for a skeptic who’s already a lapsed Catholic, and by now is something of a lapsed Tarot reader as well (though that would probably change if I could find where I lost that damn Rider-Waite deck). There’s all sorts of reasons to walk into Ben Hur with a kind of modern cynicism that makes one immune to all the dated mannerisms, aesthetically and dramatically, when watching it on television. It has an arch, dramatic stiffness at times that doesn’t translate well to the small-screen, even when broadcast in widescreen format, which gives you all the details of the picture but crunches them down so small you don’t feel as though you’re looking through a letterbox as much as peering at a postage stamp.
Spread out on the big screen, however, all that changes. The picture comes alive and swallows you whole in ways that can’t be approximated on the most expensive of home-viewing set ups. All those fetishistically crafted sets that can appear like diorama miniatures on television breathe more fully when projected larger than life, letting you see the expressive tendencies in the subdued range of colors and set-design throughout, the kind of direction that would lead to Ridley Scott’s world-building spectacles. All those overlong takes take on a more generous dimension sitting in the theater, daunted by the sheer scale and majesty of the film’s recreation of ancient Rome at the height of its colonial powers, and gives added weight to the subject of Imperial rule and the question of how to deal with it from the perspective of the conquered. It’s a question that is put expressly into dramatic form as Charlton Heston’s heroic Jewish prince suffers betrayal at the hands of his boyhood friend, turned Roman occupier, and survives the slavery of the galleys and the do-or-die races of the Circus Maximus to win freedom and justice for his family. These are the stakes and scopes that the epic form were meant for, and this is by far the way these epics were meant to be seen, at a scale that for two or three hours at a time positively dwarfs anything else in your field of experience.
And of course, all of this comes to a head in the one-of-a-kind chariot race, which in the hands of Wyler and second-unit action master Andrew Marton is easily one of the most impressive set-pieces ever to grace the silver screen, the kind of no-holds-barred combination of scope, choreography and editing that is a testament to the consummate skills of everyone involved, and the likes of which one rarely sees nowadays even in the best of action cinema through pure in-camera filmmaking. I’ve often considered what films I would choose if I ever returned to my action-scene series, and along with Michael Mann’s Heat and Tom Tykwer’s The International, this is easily one of the candidates I would spend more time writing about than anything else. But it’s also a sequence that, like anything else from the film, one can only really appreciate on its fullest terms when seeing on the big screen– yes, watching at home in letterbox format it’s easy to appreciate the swoop and speed, the intricacy of the pacing and whatnot, but only when the chariots are riding as large as a locomotive, barreling and crashing straight at you does the sequence really come to life. It even injects a degree of shell-shocked life to the latter portions of the film, where all the Christian undercurrents assert themselves for a very solemn, anticlimactic conclusion. Seeing this film was something of a strange instinct for me, one I wasn’t sure would be worth the while, but even now, knowing full well I won’t be able to recapture its magic on the small screen, the experience was well worth being able to rediscover one of those rare feats of cinematic popularity– the move so overrated it’s become underrated.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, we have perhaps one of the most underexposed films ever made, especially by a filmmaker from around the same generational pool of directors as Wyler. Nicholas Ray is famous for his works as a studio-system auteur, where he was able to bend the rules of the game just enough to inject a subversive, anti-establishment element into genre thoroughbred fare like In a Lonely Place and Johnny Guitar, or weave new contributions to the tapestry of cinema history in stuff like the iconic Rebel Without a Cause or the positively anti-social melodrama Bigger Than Life. He even managed to stage his own over-the-top spin on the Biblical epic-mania with The King of Kings, which I had planned to view immediately after Ben Hur in preparation for the next film I had on my schedule, Ray’s underground piece, seldom seen since its screening at Cannes in 1973, We Can’t Go Home Again. Conceived as a project between himself and his students at SUNY Binghamton, the film mounts itself as a massive experiment in cinematic aesthetics and traditional narrative, existing somewhere between a straightforward documentary and fictional portrayal of Ray himself and his students as they attempt to make their film while wrestling with their own various anxieties in the post-60’s American malaise.
In a sense, one can see this both as the ultimate Ray film, and as the ultimate repudiation of them as well, as it eschews all of the studio formulaic professionalism that his most celebrated works maintain, opting for a far less regulated, far less censoring approach, juggling all manner of raw material, disciplines, and presentation. Gone, for the most part, is the open-frame approach that Ray used for his films both in 1.33 and 2.35, looking wide throughout each shot to add an element of architectural finesse to his framings both of physical structures and between people isolated together, as well. Instead, Ray spends most of the film’s running time projecting several images together in rounds of split-screen compositions and superimpositions mixed with aggressively colored video distortions paired with electronic-synthesized music tracks. Though much of the multi-screened footage consists of atmospheric stuff that doesn’t need to be paid strictest attention– a lot of protest-march and police-brutality that almost look like hippie stock footage, or sped-up city montages that almost resemble the hyperspace sequence of Star Wars mixed with the star-gate stuff of 2001— oftentimes we’re presented with colliding narrative strands that can’t easily be reconciled. Being an experiment, it wouldn’t be fair to ignore the fact that not all of its gambits pay off, and that at times the film rather sits in a static lull, from all its hyperactive kinetic activity. It’s so busy trying to move in all directions at once, it can’t help but remain absolutely still.
And yet, for all its flaws (which Ray might’ve sought to correct given more time, as he’d spent the better part of his remaining years constantly re-editing the film) it stands as one of the most impressive works of avant-garde reinvention from a stalwart figure of the studio era (one might wish to put Welle’s long whispered final film into that category, if it ever sees the light of day). All of the subject matters that Ray had to disguise in his more conventional films are free of the pretense of gestalt here, resulting in a marvelous work of cinematic stream-of-consciousness that always remains intriguing, even when it isn’t entirely focused. Perhaps the most important ingredient to the work is Ray’s winning presence himself, at turns playing wise mentor to his troubled students and the fool as his unconventional methods slowly start to unravel over the course of the film. Ray makes canny use of the iconography from his own films throughout, sporting a red windbreaker that looks like it could’ve been lifted from James Dean’s trailer, and harkening back to Johnny Guitair as he fumbles about trying to hang himself in a barn (“I made ten goddamn Westerns, and I can’t even tie a noose!”). It might be the most eloquent end both to a Ray film and his career in general that, after railing against all forms of authority in the form of policemen, cowboys and parents of all sizes, he is unwilling to spare even himself of his own distrust.
That same mood of self-respecting self-loathing can be found in spades throughout the latest offering from David Cronenberg, A Dangerous Method, a film that easily wins back my confidence in the director from the stale efforts of his more mainstream collaborations with Viggo Mortensen– A History of Violence and Eastern Promises feel like the kinds of movies a struggling auteur would make in order to gain the kind of freedom and flexibility in the studio system that Cronenberg himself already won years ago with far more impressive Hollywood collaborations like The Fly. But if those more aggressively geared works of pulpy action-noir was the stuff that allowed him to attract sufficient talent and funding to his adaptation of Christopher Hampton’s play The Talking Cure, about the tense war of wills and emotions between Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, then it was well worth it. Coasting on a trio of respected and recognizable stars to play the founding fathers of psychoanalysis and a kind of patient-zero for their efforts who becomes an object of contention between them (though thankfully not in the ways that the painfully overwrought romantic trailers might make you believe), Cronenberg conjures one of the most impressive films he’s made in years, perhaps the most accomplished since his take on Ballard’s Crash back in the 90’s.
Part of what helps is that we have an anchor story that fits in a little easier with the director’s oeuvre of the erotic– the relationship shared between Michael Fassbender’s Jung and Keira Knightley’s Sabina Spielrein feels at times like an echo of the passive-aggressive affairs of the body and mind that are prevalent in works like Naked Lunch and M. Butterfly, especially where they concern fictionalized versions of real-life personages. To be sure, much of the matter of A Dangerous Method‘s drama feels somewhat lightweight at times, as though in 90 odd minutes Cronenberg and Hampton feel forced to spread their subjects a little thin in order to fit all of them in. We only understand the matter of Jung and Freud’s relationship and rivalry in the broadest of strokes, none of which are embellished in any significant depth. There’s lip-service to Jung’s growing fascination and experiments with the supernatural, Freud’s stubborn predilection towards interpreting all of psychic distress as caused by social-sexal conditions, and the matter of religion in Europe of the turn of last century, especially as it regards Jung’s tumultuous relationship with Spielrein, a Jewish girl who begins as the doctor’s patient and by turns becomes his lover, his enemy, his protege and lover again.
In the hands of any other director, this would all amount to a handsome work of period recreation and bodice-ripping romance, with perhaps an ample amount of melodramatic handwringing towards the end, especially as all three characters find themselves heading towards their own kinds of doom (Freud’s death of cancer, Spielrein’s death at the Nazi’s, Jung’s descent into madness, prior to his triumphant return to the world stage). Through Cronenberg, however, this hill of beans flourishes into something like a state of the union address on the matter of man’s existential crises through the subject of both the body and soul themselves. Through a canny use of Kubrickian composition and Wellesian deep-focus tricks throughout (that look as though they’re achieved by the same digital means as the long-shots of Jeremy Irons as the Mantle twins in Dead Ringers, turning each character into one another’s doppelganger), Cronenberg builds a psychic space throughout the film that extends beyond the reach of the physical. His treatment of locations, especially early on during Spielrein’s treatment at the clinic, reach back to the pastoral feel of the director’s early works even as the more ornate architectural elements carry a hint of Marienbad, especially as the film drives itself towards more psychologically roundabout ways. In a very real sense, this story of Jung and Freud, with their bantering about the substance of the relationship between the Ego and Id or their odd experiments made in the hopes of penetrating the most guarded psychic material of the mind especially when it comes to sexual repressions and the connection between the libido and the death instinct, represents no less a work of science-fiction than any of Cronenberg’s other works, and through the twin pillars of psychoanalysis, the director might just be revealing more of the inner workings of his fascinations than ever before, especially when it comes to the subject of transformation. In his hands, Fassbender’s Jung becomes a strange cousin to tortured souls like Brundlefly, fused not at the bio-molecular level with a household instinct but joined at the mind with loved ones he cannot help but push away, leaving him alone to face his coming apocalyptic dreams and visions. In A Dangerous Method, we have gone beyond “The New Flesh”, into a territory of new minds. Where Cronenberg will take this in his coming Don DeLillo adaptation is uncertain, but it’s sure to be an interesting ride.
Where Cronenberg’s latest film is a kind of subtle science-fiction (that is, quite literally, a fictionalized work about a matter of scientific study), Lars von Trier’s latest effort stands as one of the most profoundly exact uses of the genre’s potential, though it takes its time in getting there. And even when we do reach the high-concept promise of its early moments, I’m fairly certain that it would be a mistake of genuinely galactic proportions to read Melancholia as a literal story about the end of the world as resulting from a collision between the Earth and a newly discovered planet “hiding behind the sun”. Much, if not most, of the scientific premise at work here is laughable– there are all manner of objects flying out in space that could cause an extinction-level event upon making contact with out little pale blue dot, but it’s rather hard to take the idea of an entire planet blindsiding us and orbiting into our path without so much as a satellite spotting it over the years. Even small details fail to ring true, like a troubled mother having to perform multiple search-engine inquiries before finding information on the planet’s route, or even the name given to the planet itself (though granted, we have more or less run out of appropriate Greco-Roman names to grant our astrological bodies, especially those that wish to murder us en masse). It all unfolds less like a taut, real-life drama about the consequences of discovering you’re living on a planet’s borrowed time, and more like the vivid dreams of a chronic depressive so unhappy in her life upon this world that she finds herself reaching out beyond the stars to draw down a planet to crush her, and everything she knows to smithereens.
And that, of course, is more or less what we find ourselves watching over the course of this film. Introduced through a series of super slow-motion tableaux that look as though Annie Liebovitz stepped in as second-unit director, Kirsten Dunst delivers a smoldering performance as Justine, a young woman so wrapped up in the fog of her own clinical depression that she’s barely able to muster up enough enthusiasm to go through the charade of a wedding, flip the bird to her advertising executive boss or even lift her leg into a bathtub. Charlotte Gainsbourg (that rare return actress to a Lars von Trier project) tries to settle her nerves down as a sympathetic sister struggling with the implications following the news of the kamikaze planet’s trajectory with Earth in her own family, doing her best to shield her son from the worst and suffering the optimistic nay-saying of her astronomer husband (Kiefer Sutherland, not quite out of character yet from Jack Bauer, another level of fantasy to toy with). Though we start out with a charming ensemble sequence during the wedding (including an aggressively cynical Charlotte Rampling in a pale, blue spiral dress so much like the doomsday planet one almost imagines you might find her name somewhere in the credits of the special effects for delivering a motion-capture performance as Melancholia itself), the longest stretches of the film, especially those that deal with the incoming heavenly body, are a mere four-character affair, as though the end of the world were reduced to an off-Broadway one act.
Here, we see the director’s increasingly theatrical sensibilities coming to the forefront, as the single location allows for some of his most poignant panoramic displays, especially when reduced to sights as simple as watching the planetary harbinger of doom alight the sky at night as a second moon. There’s a naturalism at work here every bit as tangible as the Brechtian sensibilities of Dogville and its sister sequel were imaginary, with its pantomime minimalism. There, Von Trier made the sight of nothing but chalk outlines standing between a frail township and their ruthless secrets something harrowing, and here he makes the simple vision of an extra cosmic satelite hanging in our sky no less so. The elegance of the visuals here are matched by the fascinatingly grounded series of events with which he puts together the planet’s approach, with side-effects of its close passage with the Earth building up until the inevitable becomes unavoidable. It’s the intimate moments with which he renders so much of this that make up for the sometimes baffling dream logic of it all, and lends it a realism that’s purposefully lacking in the story itself. As the family watches the planet approach through telescopes and makeshift devices, there’s a quaint inviting quality to it, as though Armageddon had become a mere celestial event to be witnessed during backyard astronomy. Little wonder that a poor little rich girl with a country-club house full of art books and an arrogant astro-scientist as an in-law might daydream about the end of the world in this way, as though it were an emotional pain-gate therapy, like Hugh Laurie’s Dr. House breaking the bones in his hand to distract himself from the pain in his leg while detoxing from Vicodin. We used to look up at the sky and feel our problems on Earth grown small and petty in the face of that overwhelming awe. Once you overcome that, however, the same can be true of terror– whether it’s an asteroid, a comet or even an entire planet, anything large enough to end all life on an entire world barreling towards ours makes all our issues dwindle by comparison. It may not be the most optimistic take on the apocalypse in science-fiction (those final moments between Shinji and Asuka on the bonewhite shoreline of a blood-red sea in End of Evangelion— like all kids, they have no idea how lucky they are) but imaginary or not, the fact that the end of things can motivate a splintered psyche and a fractured family towards a kind of reconciliation is enough of a catharsis to feel a pittance of hope.
And tomorrow, there’s Castle in the Sky, my favorite of Miyazaki’s movies, and one that I’m sure I’ll eventually catch up to for some Saturday Anime column, but not today. After all, if there’s anything I’ve learned from this year’s festival, it’s that the best of films can only be bettered by experiencing on the big screen, and that perhaps in fact one can’t really claim to have experienced one at all unless having seen it in the way it was meant to be. There’s something terribly reductive, isn’t there, about viewing any movie on a television or computer screen, no matter how expedient it is? With so many classics one has little choice but to accept the pragmatic trap of home viewing, and even if one is able to catch a glimpse of great works in their true theatrical environment, you’re making a sacrifice of sorts, paying a little extra to watch a film that you can just as easily pay almost the same amount to own a copy of at home. Yet I know how much a difference seeing a movie you love in the theater, on a screen as wide as the eyes can dart, can make on your opinion of it. That’s why it’s often so painful to admit that very few of the films I can count as personal favorites are ones that I’ve been able to actually see on the silver screen, in lieu of home viewings– the Star Wars episodes and Evangelion Rebuilds, sure, and American Psycho perhaps, but most of the movies I rank highly are ones that I’ve either only seen on VHS and DVD, or at the very best were introduced to in that fashion. Sometimes we get lucky and get to re-experience a movie we’ve seen before in diminished form anew on the big screen, and how it moves and impresses us can change immensely. I was always a fan of Lang’s Metropolis, but watching it projected on the biggest screens Film Forum can afford, the experience was amplified, deepened and altogether validated. Seeing the final cut of Blade Runner at the Ziegfeld during its anniversary run a few years ago and just a few months back at the Jacob Burns Film Center 24 hour movie marathon, I felt touched and transported in ways that you can’t match even when watching the blu ray on the biggest of high-definition sets. Hell, if Ben Hur could be improved not merely by a new restoration but by being shown up on the big screen, I can only imagine how well Castle in the Sky can fare. Great films deserve to be seen on the big screen, after all– it’s the closest thing they have to home.
Its great to hear more great reviews for A Dangerous Method. Its one I plan to see in November when it premiers in Virginia as part of the Virginia Film Festival. While I have to disagree about your assessment of is last two features (both of which I thought to be very strong works from a director whom I believe hasn’t made a bad film since the late 70s) , I’ll admit they weren’t a powerful as the film that came before them, Spider. With that feature it felt like Cronenberg really was moving totally beyond the flesh and working to create a truly psychological film. After reading your review, I believe that A Dangerous Method might follow the same route. I’m very excited to see it.
I must say I’m also intrigued by your review of Ray’s film. I already think highly of the filmmaker (In a Lonely Place may be my favorite American film of the 50s after Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo), and would love to see how he tackles an avant-garde film.
“Spider” is a movie I plan to revisit in the wake of this new one. So much has been made of the agonies and ecstasies of the flesh in Cronenberg’s cinema, it’s refreshing to see him tackle the purely psychological, or at least for him to confront it more directly, as the mind is always bound up with the body, whether it likes it or not. A random thought– this might be the closest he’s come to addressing the mysteties of the pyche since his psychic thrillers in the 70’s, and the link is a profound one.
Bob—-
This post is truly a towering achievement. As you kept it under wraps I can only say how utterly delighted I was to see this fantastic post upon first viewing this morning. As I stated before I envy you for seeing BEN-HUR in this new and restored print, as it’s one of my favorite films of all-time. Even the arrival this past week of the stunning blue ray box set can’t mute my disappointment at not having attended the Festival screening. But you have gone above and beyond as this marvelous post attests to, and reading here about Nick Ray and Cronenberg and tomorrow’s planned Miyazaki is thrilling. And I can’t agree with you more on the need to see these on the big screen whenever possible. I’m sure you’ll have more to say about WE CAN’T GET HOME AGAIN and some others here, but as is this is an enthralling report. Love those interlocking caps too!
I will making my own first appearances at the New York Film Festival today and tomorrow with SUN IN THE LAST DAY OF THE SHOGUNATE this afternoon at 2:30 P.M. (Kawashima; 1957) and then tomorrow, SUZAKI PARADISE RED LIGHT DISTRICT at 1:00 P.M., both key features of the Nikatsu series.
Again, Bob, this is one of your most passionate pieces ever, and a terrific public service to all movie fans!
Holy shit, if it were planned I don’t think you could have come up with a lineup of 4 films I would have been more excited to see – too bad I was not in the city this past week, as I probably would have accompanied you to each and every one of these (had I been able to acquire tickets).
Ben-Hur was one of my favorite movies as a kid (on horribly stretched – not even cropped but stretched so everyone looked like Elasticman – VHS) and as I told you recently, seeing it unfold itself to proper proportions in relation to a fullscreen movie, even within the confines of a small streaming video, was eyeopening and I’d love to have that experience replicated 10000X over on the big screen. I always enjoyed the story and the spectacle, but over the years came to regard it more as a guilty pleasure – your praise makes me wonder if perhaps that’s wrong and I should accept it as genuinely a strong film, not just on the power of nostalgia and personal tastes but on its own terms.
I actually think the ending is quite good, much more more logical & better than the silent ending, which I think was also in the books. In that, Judah gathers a huge army on the outskirts of Jerusalem and then calls them off when he’s moved by Jesus’ crucifixion. Now THAT’S anticlimactic – but the humble mechanics of the ’59 version I think offer a poignant, humanist conclusion to an at-times larger-than-life tale.
I admire Nick Ray greatly (especially the early b&w stuff) and am obsessed with works that deal with the 60s zeitgeist, so I really hope Ray’s film makes its way to DVD soon (I think it’s “saved” on Netflix but God knows what that ever means). You lucky bastard.
I’m not the world’s biggest Cronenberg fan, but I’m greatly fascinated by Jung and this is one of those films I would want to see on subject alone, even if its director was a nobody. That it’s a compelling auteur as well is icing on the cake.
As for Melancholia, von Trier is that rare director who will get my ass in a theater seat these days, no questions asked. I love the idea of this movie and can’t wait to see it.
Great stuff, all-around. Every new entry I was like “Can this lineup get any better?” And then it did.
As for smallscreen vs. big, like I said in the other thread, I’m ambivalent about this. True, some of my best, most visceral viewing experiences were in a theater – the opening of Antichrist comes to mind, along with retro screenings of Day of Wrath, the 3 Star Wars films in a row at the Wang Center when I was 9, and the first 30 minutes of Saving Private Ryan – but then again others have been in the intimacy of a TV or computer screen (Fire Walk With Me comes to mind), and probably better for that. It’s hard for me to say.
Growing up, the ritual of going to the theater, smelling the popcorn, gazing at posters for coming attractions, making sure to arrive early for the trailers and stay sitting with my father through the entire credits, all of this was very important to me. And the darkness of the theater, the company of others, the sense of collective anticipation and experience – all were vital to making the movies seem not just like a hobby, but a vocation. But at a certain point I drew away from this – high ticket prices, closing of the more down-home multiplexes in favor of the grotesque overpriced impersonal one in the area I grew up, the ubiquity of DVD, and especially diminishing returns from the new releases themselves…all contributed to my disillusionment with this vital tentpole of the cinematic temple. Perhaps I’ll return to the fold someday but for now I’m content to stick with home viewing and classics for the most part.
Nonetheles, I look forward to Weekend this Monday, the perfect way to say goodbye to the NYC screening experience, which was definitely a vital part of my cinephilia for so many years.
On the theatrical experience– granted, I’m not about to start heading into the theater to see movies I can watch any time on DVD at the drop of a hat. “Citizen Kane” is already a great movie no matter how you watch it, impressive as hell. I’d love to check it out on the big screen, and given that Film Forum will be showing it soon I might, but let’s face it, the money issue is no laughing matter. Granted, there’s plenty of movies I’ve seen time and again on DVD that I’ll jump at the bit for to see in the theater– tomorrow we’ll be seeing “Week-End”, and there’s no real logical reason to do that, besides the fact that I’ve more or less decided to see any Godard film I can on the big-screen when I get a chance to. And obviously, you know I’ll be lining up to see “The Phantom Menace” in 3D early next year (although I was introduced to that one in the theater, so it’s kind of a cinematic boomerang experience, rather than seeing it on the big screen for the first time). There is something genuinely different about the theatrical experience, both in the communal aspect (we take for granted just how much audiences respond to movies in person, and oftentimes I wonder if my reactions are somewhat dulled to that sort of thing after years of mostly seeing great movies all alone on the television) and in the sensory one, which is really the more important thing. Films are made to be seen in the theater, quite literally, and you lose something by transitioning it to the smaller, reductive screen. It’s as different from reading a book in hardcover or even paperback to looking at it on a damn iPad.I’d even venture to say it’s close to the difference between seeing a play in the theater, and merely seeing a video of the production. There’s plenty of movies I’ve only seen on TV that frankly I don’t like much, and I wonder if my opinion would change seeing them in their natural habitat, so to speak.
Oh, Bob ‘Weekend’ looks so much more apocalyptic on the big screen; I think you’ll be blown away.
I’m sure. So far I’ve been introduced to four Godard films on the big screen: “Made in USA”, “2 or 3 Things I Know About Her”, “Every Man For Himself” and “Film Socialisme”. “Week-End” is one I’m already familiar with, and already like, but the experience can only improve.
I do find that theatrical screenings can be a bit more hit-and-miss for me. Like if I’m not in the right mood (or if the “set” isn’t right) it’s harder for me to fall under the spell in a cinema than on TV. I know that’s counterintuitive but I think it’s because of all the buildup – the stakes, in terms of cost and effort and atmosphere, seem higher and this gives one more anxiety about “enjoying” the movie and thus if one gets off on the wrong foot it’s harder to get back on it. At least I’ve found this to be true occasionally. Oddly enough, other than our last group excursion to go see Band of Outsiders, Godard has usually worked better on TV than big screen for me, though I’m very much looking forward to Weekend tomorrow. 2 or 3 Things didn’t click (though I doubt it would have on DVD either) and La Chinoise, one of my favorite Godards, fall a little bit flat for me when I saw it theatrically, partly because the audience didn’t seem to be going along with it.
But I suppose because the stakes are higher, though you run a bigger risk for failure, the terms of success are larger too. I can’t believe when mentioning my best theatrical experiences above, I neglected Out 1, which is probably my #1. That had both ecstacies and disappointments, and because it was so damn extended, it could accomodate both experiences. Thus it’s not only probably my best screening, but the most archetypal.
One of my most memorable was Au Hasard Balthazar in 2003 – I’d waited 5 years to see it, reading about it in a book and eagerly anticipating, looking it up everywhere I could but unable to find a copy (I even ordered a VHS which turned out to be PAL and thus didn’t play in my machine). Catching it at Film Forum I remember being nervous after all the buildup, and then I felt such a keen sense of disappointment leaving the theater – it wasn’t the film I had expected or built up in my head over so many years and there was no denying the letdown. It slowly won me over on revisits when it came to Criterion, and now I’d consider it one of my favorite films and I think that disappointing screening actually played its part in helping it get there.
I’ve certainly felt an anticlimax on some films seen in the theater that I grow to appreciate more at home, but I think those are mostly due to them being my first experience with a movie in general rather than due to the hype of the theatrical experience (that theory does interest me as a Prequel fan, though I’m one of those people who got them from the first screenings). “2 or 3 Things” in particular struck me as rather alienating when I first saw it at Film Forum, and I was later able to get into its rythms on DVD (particularly watching it without the subtitles on), but I’ve had that experience with so many Godard films already by that point. If anything, I think that having that theatrical experience at first can form a great foundation for one’s appreciation, the bedrock by which you can judge and remember the larger scope of a picture while watching it at home. I’d rather relive my initial theatrical experience while watching the DVD than go to see a movie I already know in the theater and essentially just recycle the TV experience projected onto a larger format.
Bob, you prick, this is magnificent stuff!
I couldn’t agree more about watching films on the big screen; ‘Lawrence of Arabia,’ Gance’s ‘Napoleon,’ Eisenstein, Kubrick just aren’t the same on a TV screen, no matter how big or how high-definition.
And ‘Laputa’! Right after I re-read ‘Gulliver’s Travels.’
That Ray sounds veeerrry interesting and, like you, I can’t wait to see what Cronenberg does with ‘Cosmopolis’.
Great writing!
I’m off to enjoy the great weather here in NYC. Quickly before I depart, I just want to say that your mentions of A Dangerous Method and Melancholia have made me even more excited than ever. Superb writing as always Bob… and I’m in such a good sunny mood, I’ll let the Cronenberg AHOV and EP verbal assault slide.
Nice take on “Melancholia”, Bob, I feel the same in every sense of it, or maybe I misread and you found some faults in it (I found some as well in its first half), but still is pretty much a beautiful and splendid film with great acting. Good luck with the rest of the festival Bob!
I don’t really find fault with it really (except the overbearing score, which plays as though the last record player on earth broke playing Wagner), but I do think it’s easier to take the film if you take it as a depressive girl’s dreaming about the end of the world than literally so. Otherwise, it just seems a little silly, perhaps even moreso than LvT’s usual stuff. Granted, he’s always had a sentimental side, but in his recent films it feels like we’ve been getting the cynical side of that. It makes one long for the sight of bells tolling in the sky rather than a matricidal planet bearing down for mother earth.
Great report, Bob. Your exuberant encounter with the issue of body as related to psychology, in new and old films, highlights a special task for art and for thought. I would have been happier hearing of Cronenberg moving in on the clash between Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr; but the way you’ve introduced the basic tension in A Dangerous Method compels me to see it. Nice point about the cognitive dash elicited by Ben Hur, to kick off your excellent essay.
Cronenberg tackling Freud and Jung feels overdue in one sense, but it’s also just as easily a surprise. His last two movies felt like a mainstream put-on, for me, an attempt to win the approval of masses and studios he’d already gotten the support of with milder compromises in the past that yielded more powerful results. “Spider”, I think, is the movie that definitely pushed him into a different, less physical, more psychological direction, and perhaps now it’s easier to see what he was attracted to in those two Viggo movies, even if in the end I feel they’re little more than mere exercises in a genre more critics are likely to be impressed by than body-horror and sci-fi. “A Dangerous Method” feels more like the movie he was reaching towards after “Spider”, and a film that has far more in common with his classical sensibilities and genuine interest in the tug and pull between the repression of the mind and the outlet of the body.