0 Pather Panchali (1955)

India, 119 minutes
Director: Satyajit Ray
Writers: Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Satyajit Ray
Photography: Subrata Mitra
Music: Ravi Shankar
Editor: Dulal Dutta
Cast: Kanu Bannerjee, Karuna Bannerjee, Uma Das Gupta, Subir Banerjee, Chunibala Devi, Runki Banerjee

Pather Panchali (translated as "song of the little road") is the first film in director and screenwriter Satyajit Ray's so-called "Apu trilogy." It is explicitly about poverty but that's not the reason it's low-budget—not intentionally. The unadorned footage often feels documentary in style if not purpose. Francois Truffaut reacted badly to it—though it also appears a distinct influence on The 400 Blows—reportedly saying he wasn't interested in seeing movies about "peasants eating with their hands." It is also Ray's first movie, widely honored around the world now (and making a long-term home in the top 100 films on the list of the greatest of all time at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?). But it was made on the fly, while Ray worked a day job in an advertising agency, interrupted as funds ran out.

In 1955, India was largely isolated from Western mainstreams of filmmaking (which still hasn't improved that much), and by the evidence Ray was nearly as isolated from more localized Indian Bollywood mainstreams too. In many ways, the strains bend so far away from one another they meet on the other side. Under the influence of Jean Renoir, whom Ray met, and Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves, Satyajit Ray and Pather Panchali actually preview a lot of the nascent preoccupations and energy of the French New Wave and the heroic era of art film. One key difference: while it may be lighthearted (surprisingly so surprisingly often), Pather Panchali is rarely just whimsical. The stakes are high for these people with mere cling holds on survival. It is shot on basic black and white film stock, the music by Ravi Shankar is used sparingly, and the attention remains raptly focused on the impoverished family at its center.



Apu (Subir Banerjee) is the family's second child and first boy, and he is the common thread in the larger trilogy (which also includes Aparajito and Apur Sansar). But I think Pather Panchali is more about the women in the family and specifically the adolescent daughter Durga (Uma Das Gupta). Across the space of this movie she is systematically socialized, her independent spirit continually broken down by the requirements and expectations of her as a girl soon to be a woman. The father (Kanu Bannerjee) is a good-natured scholar and writer who barely earns enough to keep his family in food and shelter—sometimes not even that, in which case they must borrow from their neighbors. He is also gone from the family home for weeks and months at a time, trying to earn money.

The mother (Karuna Bannerjee) is a proud woman who bears the brunt of the responsibility to keep a home and raise the children, a role she bears irritably, embittered by the financial straits in which she finds herself, and by the drudgery of the work. Durga knows that drudgery well enough to know it is the source of her mother's unhappiness. Durga knows instinctively to keep her distance from it, which only makes her mother more ill-natured when she must force Durga to the tasks expected of her. Some of this is the mother's character—her pride torments her at least as much as her poverty. But the realities are manifest. It is painful to see the mother so thoroughly broken and attempting to impose it on Durga, even as the necessity remains apparent.

In that regard it is remarkably a kind of proto-feminist statement without even trying very hard about it. An old woman also moves in the orbit of the family. Played by Chunibala Devi, a woman in her 80s, she's designated an "auntie" but frequently comes into conflict with the mother and moves on to live off of other households temporarily, an impoverished itinerant living inside a much harsher and narrower version of Blanche DuBois's kindness of strangers. The auntie and Durga share a connection, trace elements of an unbowed rebellious spirit, but the ravages on the old woman speak clearly to the fate of that particular little road.

I like Pather Panchali for the unflinching way it takes on the poverty, but even more for the way it refuses to give up on beauty. The outdoor scenes have a wonderful sense of the lines and textures of nature and how we live within them. A fearsome storm occurs at one point near the end. Like so much else here, it is filmed with a warm and quietly observant eye, resting for long stretches on the surface of a pond, or canopies of trees, or children seen running on paths from overhead. Ravi Shankar's music is lively and welcome when it comes, propelling the momentum at strategic points. The events of Pather Panchali haunt long after seeing it. The story's complexities reverberate. Each person in the family is on a path, at different stages. In many ways it's a film about Durga, and in many more affecting ways it's about the father, so infrequently in the frame at all, whose crisis of maturity toward the end is heartrending and unforgettable. Mortally wounded, the family finally picks up and moves on, in one of the most indelible sequences I know, from the great storm on.

Detail: Pather Panchali (1955)

0 The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, Italy / Spain / West Germany, 161 minutes
Director: Sergio Leone
Writers: Luciano Vincenzoni, Sergio Leone, Agenore Incrocci, Furio Scarpelli, Mickey Knox
Photography: Tonino Delli Colli
Music: Ennio Morricone
Editors: Eugene Alabiso, Nino Baragli
Cast: Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, Lee Van Cleef, Luigi Pistilli, Rada Rassimov, Antonio Casas

Eli Wallach's teeth are too good—and that goes for Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef too. Gleaming white and straight and lined up just the way modern-day dentists like them. At some point—I think usually around the time Tuco (aka "the Ugly," Wallach) has brought Blondie (aka "the Good," Eastwood) to a monastery to recover from a bad time in the desert—I notice how well tended those teeth are and I am taken temporarily out of the action. My last complaint. That's the niggling level of my criticism about The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which is otherwise practically flawless.

It is, as the mystifying phrase we like to use now has it, what it is, and makes no bones about it. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is a cartoon-level Western trafficking in existentialism, with extra fine shooting and a bone-simple story of revenge and greed animating the three principals, as the divertissement, cutting across history and causing it to fall away: the Civil War, the railroads, horses and guns and broad brim hats and brown liquor downed straight. All the familiar elements are here, but merely to serve as feeble context for these three gods striding through and defining the action, straight out of a deck of tarot cards—the two angels of heaven and hell, and the trickster fool with the sad, sad story.



Director and co-writer Sergio Leone worked out a style as dependent on visuals and music as on narrative and words. Not a word is heard in the first 10 minutes of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and indeed the first 30 are dedicated to elaborate, stylized introductions, each with a freeze frame emblazoned with the key signifier: "the Ugly," "the Good," "the Bad." He liked it so much, and it works so well, that he repeated it again at the end.

Leone takes his sweet time over and over again setting up the many epic confrontations that populate this movie. We see one person doing something, and then another person doing something else, and then yet another person wandering away from the scene, and eventually all things connect up. But it takes a long time getting there—the picture is nearly three hours. As explosive and quick as the climaxes are we finally start to realize it's not the point at all. They are repetitive and redundant, an unending random game of rock-paper-scissors. What matters, in true existential fashion, is the beauty of each moment and the ability to grasp and see each one as it goes by. That's why it's slow.

There is a cinematic line that passes through Lawrence of Arabia and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and on to Apocalypse Now and John Woo's Red Cliff, great sprawling epics plunged into history and unfamiliar landscape—unfamiliar to its characters, its makers, its audience. Leone's work has been labeled "spaghetti western" from the first because he is Italian and brings a penetrating sense of foreignness to these quintessentially American scenes. The classic high-noon drawdown on main street here for example has the additional element of being in a war zone, with shelling. The story takes place in the middle of the Civil War, often intersecting directly with it. At one point Blondie and Tuco become prisoners of war in a Union POW camp where Angel Eyes (aka "the Bad," Van Cleef) has somehow become a commanding officer.

There is also something very funny (funny ha ha, I mean) about the way the plot points line up. Blondie is "Good" only in the sense of being skilled, but he is also a blessed figure in a way, often escaping harm altogether where Tuco suffers enormously. Blondie is absurdly able to operate serendipitously, at one point for example finding a cannon ready to fire and aimed just where he needs it. All he has to do is drop his arm and rest the coal of his familiar cheroot on the fuse. There is a sense of a greater power behind him, as there also is with Angel Eyes, in whose case the source is obviously infernal. By process of elimination that leaves Blondie as "Good." All things balance.

In a year when European art film was reaching certain enduring high points Leone was relegated more to the back and side of that, though we see better now that he certainly belongs with Bergman, Bresson, Tarkovsky, and the others. But spawning an international superstar in Clint Eastwood, playing with fundamental American b-movie elements, and incidentally seeing a good deal of commercial success obscured that somewhat, at least until Quentin Tarantino came along a few decades later (since which the problem tends to run in the other direction).

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is a movie I return to frequently, not least because so many are willing to agree on it (as they never would for, say, Andrei Rublev), and it works even in fragments, which I know from running across it on TV. It's slow, but always engrossing—there is a fascinating intricacy to the parts, and there is something pleasingly geometric about the forces balanced against one another and how they play out. The end is represented by the lines of a triangle inside a circle. It has the capacity to surprise very much; I can still never quite get over the scene with the POW orchestra, haunted by "More feeling," one of the cruel guards barks at them at one point. It's funny and harrowing and unnerving as hell, and sweet and beautiful and haunting as well. The whole movie balances on the edge of a blade, for nearly three hours, and then pirouettes to an astonishing finale. It never gets old or stale.

Top 10 of 1966
1. Au hasard Balthazar
2. Persona
3. Andrei Rublev
4. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
5. What's Up, Tiger Lily?
6. Masculin feminin
7. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
8. Seconds
9. The Battle of Algiers
10. Blow-Up

Detail: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

0 Play Time (1967)

France / Italy, 124 minutes
Director: Jacques Tati
Writers: Art Buchwald, Jacques Lagrange, Jacques Tati
Photography: Jean Badal, Andreas Winding
Music: Francis Lemarque
Editor: Gerard Pollicand
Cast: Jacques Tati, Barbara Dennek, Jacqueline Lecomte, Henri Piccoli, Michel Francini, Georges Montant

With Play Time, we find yet another highly lauded movie from the big list at They Shoot Pictures Don't They? with yet another unfortunate air of failure (thinking also of Vertigo, Metropolis, The Magnificent Ambersons, etc.). Director and co-writer Jacques Tati bankrupted himself on the most expensive movie ever made in France to that point, and then it never came close to making back its money. It's not hard to see where it went. The picture is shot in 70 mm (which is how it should properly be seen, though I haven't managed it myself yet) and features giant complicated sets, so imposing that collectively they came to be known as "Tativille" during the shoot.

Full disclosure: The first time I saw Play Time it left me cold—I knew my TV screen was too small and blurry to really do it justice but it seemed so aimless and dry I couldn't imagine a big size rescuing it. But maybe this is a movie that should always get a second chance, because the next time, more recently, I was charmed, often floored, and even laughing aloud at some of the goings-on. Until that point I had classified it as a comedy that was humorous and light-hearted but not actually funny. Now I see it as almost mordant, so dim is its view of the modern condition (for lack of a better phrase), and often wickedly funny in that context.



Tati is one of a kind—and may even be fairly classified as an acquired taste—but his sources go directly to the film comedians  of silent pictures and early talkies. He continually throws up giant canvases and moves people and things across and around them, here using tourists in groups and buses and glass and square angles to erect his vision of a sterile modern world of skyscrapers, concrete, and suffocating urban geometry.

He had already established his own comic persona so well by then, in the figure of M. Hulot, that when he first appears—in the back half of a long shot from above (deep focus is often the mode in Play Time)—we recognize him instantly, his figure, his gait, his hat and pipe and coat. As it happens, by the time of Play Time Tati was tired of Hulot and thinking of retiring him, and so he plays much to the side of the action, swamped by the surging tides of modernity. At the same time, Tati decked out any number of other players in his hat and pipe and coat. The specter of M. Hulot thus becomes constant and a little nagging, which only fortifies the comic potential.

Part of the charm of this movie indeed is the vast distance it takes for its point of view, so remote as to be godlike. Most of the dialogue is incidental and as if overheard, an undertow of murmuring voices, merely a coequal counterpart to the constant hum of machines and drone of auto engines and traffic. Play Time drifts from an opening sequence at the Paris airport to scenes of a giant downtown office building, a trade show, apartment living at night, and finally climaxes in an extended scene in a nightclub—all told, brooding over a 24-hour period, morning to morning (with a luscious and pungent coda of mid-morning traffic wheeling slowly around roundabouts).

Hulot seen darting about at the sidelines is the one constant, along with a steady stream of small-scale sight gags and visual puns: a small room off a building lobby becomes an elevator, a ruined pedestal of a Roman / Greek pillar turns out to be a trash receptacle. Open and closed glass doorways and walls continually fool us and the people in the movie. Lamps and lights appear in strange places, often switched on and casting weird shadows. Nothing is exactly as it appears to be, except insofar as everything appears to be soulless.

Maybe this is obvious, but I take the title to mean something on the order of "goofing" or "riffing." Tati (who reminds me a little of James Stewart here, tall and shambling and amiable) enters a world he plainly derides as made up of equal parts drudgery and stupidity, and he plays. The deadening qualities of modernity are exaggerated—the apartment building offers its residents absurdly unprivate living, for example, with full-wall plate glass windows facing over the street. Seen from the street side by side and atop one another they are like television screens, and in each one there is a show going on (at one point involving all watching TV).

Behind all the sour view there is a good heart. Here's the tell. The movie is needlessly charming, charming for its own sake, with wonderfully warm music and humor, undercutting the general tone of disapproval. In one very funny sequence, a drugstore cafeteria in the middle of the night is lit by a buzzing green neon sign so bright everyone in there looks ill (it also looks in that moment like the famous green scene in Vertigo). Hulot vainly attempts in the sickly light to determine whether any of the food is actually edible, peering closely at it and smelling it, and finally decides he's not that hungry after all.

It's a very quiet movie but that is somewhat deceptive. The centerpiece is the long and elaborate scene in the chic new nightclub / restaurant, which builds up to a remarkable head of steam. It starts in early evening, as people are only beginning to filter in, works abundant gags over the fact that the place is newly designed and built and still has many flaws and problems, and eventually builds to a crashing crescendo as sections of the venue collapse entirely with the dance floor fully packed and people still waiting in line for a table. At one point the music performed at the club changes from '60s-era lounge to bop and the pace picks up accordingly. As the place itself falls apart the music has been reduced to drumming and a percussive discordant organ keyboard, but the dance floor is more packed than ever. "It's the same thing every night," says a bored patron as she leaves.

At about that point I realized how much I love Play Time. It's strange and wonderful, daffy and acerbic, a treat on practically every level of cinema: visual, sound, and, yes, even narrative, once you get the hang of what it's doing. I really hope I get to see it on the big screen one of these days.

Detail: Play Time (1967)

0 A Clockwork Orange (1971)

UK / USA, 136 minutes
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Writers: Stanley Kubrick, Anthony Burgess
Photography: John Alcott
Music: Ludwig van Beethoven
Editor: Bill Butler
Cast: Malcolm McDowell, Warren Clarke, James Marcus, Michael Tarn, Patrick Magee, Adrienne Corri, Michael Bates, Sheila Raynor, Philip Stone, Anthony Sharp, Carl Duering, Michael Gover, Aubrey Morris, David Prowse, Clive Francis

There's nothing subtle about A Clockwork Orange. Its famous violence is obvious and programmatic: assault, robbery, rape, murder, the usual. In fairness, the picture does a reasonably good job of anticipating how ongoing societal breakdowns play out. And the solutions to the violence, arguably the point of this near-future fantasy, are also obvious and programmatic (see title metaphor, which belongs to the author of the original novel, Anthony Burgess). In the end, in an example of classic Stanley Kubrick cynicism, it appears that attempting to solve problems only makes them worse, and in unimaginable ways. We are left to try to live with the consequences. I suspect all the heavy-handed, clonking points are as much as anything the reason why I loved it so much as a teen. I do appreciate better now the horrors of the violence in the first 15 minutes alone—"the old ultra-violence," as voiceover narrator and main dude Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell) insists on calling it. But I also still appreciate the energy, concision, and choreography that went into those early scenes, especially the gang fight, which is a case of pure infectious dynamics. And the Beethoven soundtrack only propels it.

In fact, much like the case with some Woody Allen movies, I now experience A Clockwork Orange at least partly as formative and already internalized, operating in a kind of twilight haze of nostalgia. Some of the language formations—the moronic "well well well well well well well" of one of the thugs, the use of "appy polly loggies" as a sarcastic way to apologize, "eggiwegs" and such for food, and Alex's occasional elaborately Shakespearian turns of phrase, such as "what didst thou in thy mind have?"—I still use, and am often surprised on revisits to this movie to find them waiting for me there. A Clockwork Orange is less than convincing in its ideas, bogged down in outdated Cold War gestures such as a youth slang pervaded by Russian (that was Burgess more than director / screenwriter Kubrick), or just simply smug about its ability to shock. But some of its individual elements nonetheless remain outstanding—a hallmark of Kubrick films, as we can see better all the time.



In A Clockwork Orange, the single most important element is the performance by Malcolm McDowell, which it's fair to call a tour de force. Scrape away the smirking façade of McDowell's Alex and you are left with only another smirking façade, a taunting, jeering face of cruelty and youth, impatient for what he wants and taking it as he will, laughing at the gyrations of a society claiming to believe in things like fair play. Interestingly, a good deal of what makes McDowell's performance so effective is how much punishment he takes—not just his character Alex, but McDowell himself, playing him. He is spat on, forced to strip naked, knocked about frequently, his eyes pried open with clamps—and a lot of times it looks like it hurts. In one scene his head is held underwater for a very long time—time it yourself. He plays a horrible person but no one can say he doesn't receive his come-uppance.

Another important element: Beethoven stands in as a rich, complex symbol of culture and privilege. I like it better than Wagner, because it doesn't have the overt linkages to Nazism, yet Beethoven and more broadly the romantic style of symphony are Germanic (and 19th-century) enough that there is some unmistakable overripe hint of its poisoning the action with pulpy decadence. If at first Alex's appreciation for "the lovely Ludwig van" seems like a cheap affectation, it comes to work very well, as the pervasive ubiquity of Beethoven resembles the youth culture Alex wallows in. Beethoven's image is on every wall Alex calls home, and during the crime for which he is ultimately sent to prison he is attacked with a bust of the composer (defending himself with a giant statue of a cock and balls). The Beethoven element reaches its climax when the music is used to deliberately torture Alex—in one indelible image, his torturers are gathered around a pool table while the music plays, one of them idly rolling a ball back and forth across the table.

It's all a bit strained in the idea area, as I said—these are all-too 20th-century views of paranoia, totalitarianism, and manipulation of human will via techniques derived from Pavlov, Skinner, etc., which felt remarkably stale even at the time, one reason I suspect Kubrick omitted even reference to the title, let alone explication. And the story goes approximately the only direction it can go. But Kubrick (well, Burgess) even salvages that with a mechanized action / reaction narrative structure, in which many of Alex's victims get their turns as victimizers, and Alex, as he himself mentions late in the film, suffers his own tortures of the damned.

Perhaps most interesting, and to its vast credit, A Clockwork Orange is virtually drained of hackneyed emotional connections. In most vengeance-driven narratives we tend to be manipulated to be on one side or the other, often finding ourselves willy-nilly taking great vicarious satisfaction in the violence (cf., for just one obvious example, the 24 franchise). Perhaps Kubrick's greatest achievement is to keep us fairly neutral. What Alex does is horrible. But what is done to him is equally horrible and there's very little satisfaction in it—much less so when the injustice is only compounded and it begins to occur to us that there may actually be no just resolution available here at all, let alone a satisfying one.

In that case, maybe it's better to laugh, and so the movie goes out perhaps the only way it could: on one last vision of violence, Alex's declaration, "I was cured, all right," and the death-rattle chuckle of Gene Kelly's version of "Singin' in the Rain" playing over the credits.

Top 10 of 1971
1. A Clockwork Orange
2. McCabe & Mrs. Miller
3. Walkabout
4. The French Connection
5. Carnal Knowledge
6. The Last Picture Show
7. Macbeth
8. Two Lane Blacktop
9. And Now for Something Completely Different
10. Duel

Detail: A Clockwork Orange (1971)

0 Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)

Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes, West Germany, 93 minutes
Director/writer: Werner Herzog
Photography: Thomas Mauch
Music: Popol Vuh
Editor: Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus
Cast: Klaus Kinski, Helena Rojo, Del Negro, Ruy Guerra, Peter Berling, Cecilia Rivera, Dan Ades, Edward Roland

Pretty much everything we have come to know and love about Werner Herzog's idiosyncratic approach to filmmaking is already present in his early masterpiece, Aguirre, the Wrath of God: a location fraught with peril, hardships for everyone involved, Klaus Kinski the impossible, otherworldly music from Popol Vuh, a dim and bleak view of human history, and a genius for working with what is available, including indigenous extras, a barrel of squirrel monkeys, and an idea for building a ship onto the top of a tree. The whole thing was shot using just one camera (which Herzog had stolen), and the majority of it is made up of one-take shots, which is understandable given the exigencies, but all the more remarkable for how sure and brilliantly visionary it is. Cinematographer Thomas Mauch deserves high praise, with Herzog (and Kinski), for making Aguirre unlike anything seen before or since.

By focusing on the 16th-century European mania for gold in the New World—notably the search for a legendary "El Dorado," which New World natives likely invented simply to placate the European explorers descending on them—Herzog found nearly an ideal vehicle for his ongoing meditations on human foolishness writ large. He never questioned how to go about it. Asked on the DVD commentary if he considered using studio soundstages, Herzog responds emphatically, "The story takes place in the Peruvian jungle. You have to go there. There's no alternative."



So to the Peruvian jungle we go, even more primitive in 1971 than it is now, hauling a cast and crew of some 450 across dangerous interior mountains, up treacherous rivers, and along trails where a person can sink to the hip in mud. It's obviously dangerous. All you have to do is look. They are playing parts in a movie, but they are evidently sweltering in the heat with pounds of conquistador armor on them, barely holding their feet on narrow trails, or stopped entirely by vegetation that gives way reluctantly and only with the prodding of determined hacking. Those water spots on the camera lens, as on one scene with rafts floating down the churning rapids of an isolated river, are not there for the effect. When it's only one take, and the main consideration is staying aboard the logs lashed together for the purpose, it just has to be enough that the players maintained their characters and costumes for the duration, never mind water on the camera lens.

That's how it worked. One morning on the shoot they woke to find that the river they were camped on had risen 15 feet overnight and taken their rafts. In response, Herzog incorporated that as a plot point into the movie and made scenes out of the necessity of rebuilding the rafts. As a travelogue alone it is amazing and often breathtaking, and incidentally breaks all kinds of moviemaking rules along the way. At the first encounter of the river, for example, thick brown water churning and rolling over the rocks and breaks of volatile rapids, the camera simply sits and looks for several minutes. The energy of the water, and its danger, are felt viscerally. It is hypnotic, hard to look away. In fact, it's so mesmerizing I never noticed how long the shot is until someone pointed it out.

But Aguirre, of course, goes far beyond travelogue, worming its way down to human fundamentals of hubris and greed with the neat allegory of these Spanish explorers, who are so overflowing with evil, even as they pay lip service to Church, State, and whatnot. They do it all for the greater glory, which is only the usual cover story. The monk who accompanies the party (and ostensibly provides the journal on which the story is based, though that's just something else Herzog made up for the sake of the picture) is actually the worst kind of craven moral relativist in the face of the enormity of Aguirre, who routinely does away with anyone in his way. A woman who is likely to be murdered comes to the monk for his help, but he only tells her, "You know, my child, for the good of our Lord, the Church was always on the side of the strong." ("That's how I see the role of the Church in Latin America," Herzog quickly adds on the DVD commentary.)

As a movie, Aguirre, the Wrath of God is practically insane. Out of the bleakness it takes sudden turns into mordant (and very funny) humor. Out of the evident privations we witness there is a real beauty in the ability of people—story characters, actors, and crew alike—to overcome their circumstances and prevail, however temporarily, however illusory. And, of course, Klaus Kinski practically puts this movie on his shoulders and carries it all the way home, with his bug-eyes, his strange rolling gait, and his constantly unnerving presence. "He was a pestilence every day during the shoot," Herzog says casually at one point, confirming the legendary story that he threatened to kill Kinski and then himself if Kinski followed through on a threat to leave the production. "I would have too," Herzog says, though he is also often filled with frank appreciation of Kinski's smallest gestures, such as the way he tosses away a monkey he has been talking to near the end.

Kinski as Aguirre is nothing short of magnificent in the many horrible power struggles that erupt on the journey, and in the way he is so single-minded about keeping them focused on the gold and the glory, manipulating, prodding, intimidating, tirelessly. The first time I saw Aguirre it somehow didn't make much impression, but every time since it has only thrilled me, and continued to do so. This is what gonzo filmmaking looks like.

Top 10 of 1972
1. Aguirre, the Wrath of God
2. The Godfather
3. Cabaret
4. Last Tango in Paris
5. The King of Marvin Gardens
6. The Getaway
7. Deliverance
8. Kansas City Bomber
9. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
10. The Candidate

Detail: Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)

0 Metropolis (1927)

Germany, 148 minutes
Director: Fritz Lang
Writers: Thea von Harbou, Fritz Lang
Photography: Karl Freund, Gunther Rittau, Walter Ruttmann
Music: Gottfried Huppertz
Cast: Brigitte Helm, Alfred Abel, Gustav Frohlich, Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Fritz Rasp

You don't have to look hard to find the science fiction film heirs of Metropolis—some of the biggest and best. The architecture of Blade Runner (not to mention a female robot under the control of an industrialist), all the underground scenes in The Matrix franchise, and the fundamental narrative orientation of Avatar, to mention three easy examples, still fall under the shadow of Metropolis. There's even a shot that looks like a scene from Jailhouse Rock. It's no coincidence they are decades out from Metropolis—the impact is that profound. In fact, Avatar, which followed by 82 years, makes a particularly good comparison—expensive, arguably bloated, with a stupid-simple message no one can disagree with, and otherwise a sumptuous, disconnected visual feast—an experience.

The key difference, of course, is the amount of control the filmmakers had over their final products. In the case of Metropolis, it turned out director Fritz Lang had almost none. Lang's original cut, which ran to some two and a half hours, was summarily chopped down to around two hours for American release. After the film bombed—it was one of the most expensive movies ever made to that point, with tens of thousands of extras and many elaborate costumes and special effects, but on release it made back only a fraction of its cost (in Weimar Germany, remember)—it went down the memory hole, incidentally setting the model for failure that Cleopatra, Heaven's Gate, and many others would later follow. No one was particularly interested in film preservation in 1927 and that is ultimately how, long story as short as possible, I have come to own versions that are 82 minutes, 115 minutes, and 148 minutes.



There are even more versions beyond that—it turns out, for one thing, that Lang was still tinkering with various takes and editing new versions before its failure caused everyone to run away from it. I'm not going to attempt parsing any of that. The long version is based on a 16-millimeter version of Lang's original cut (or one of them anyway) that was recovered in 2008 from an archive in Buenos Aires, and it's the one to see. Disco savant Giorgio Moroder's 1984 version, the shortest, with a soundtrack featuring '80s artists, is an interesting curiosity worth seeing in its own right. Anything within the vicinity of two hours is probably like the one I have—a hideous public domain print, rendered somewhat incoherent from random cuts and flaws.

Metropolis is well worth seeing—and on as big a screen as possible. I want to steer one and all away from any of those latter DVD products you see around. My 115-minute version made me think I must have been wrong about a movie I saw first in a film club in the '70s (probably result of the first modern-day attempts at rehabbing it in 1972). The story such as it is in Metropolis affords the movie many long dead spots (exacerbated for me back then not being used to silent cinema), but certain images such as the cityscapes (in screenshot above) were amazing and thrilling and felt intensely futuristic even though obviously antiquated too. The story is no better in the restored version, but at least it's more coherent, more obvious that Lang did know what he was doing. Even the most damaged portions, which are from the 16-millimeter film (some shots and one sequence could not be recovered, which means even this version is still incomplete), largely have more visual clarity and definition than on my public domain DVD.

I have to kind of orient myself the right way for Metropolis. Because it has been such an outsize influence on science fiction in cinema, I tend to want to approach it expecting lots of interesting ideas. Wrong. What it has are interesting images—it's teeming with them, and full of an infectious and insanely creative energy. It's packed with process shots, some of which were invented here, such as the Schufftan, which uses mirrors to project actors onto miniature sets. In many ways, yes, the story's themes are useful to informing the imagery. I particularly like the use of the biblical Tower of Babel story, blended with imagery based on Bruegel (the Elder), Dore, and other Babel images. Metropolis may or may not be just another example of what money looks like, but Lang and his designers obviously relished taking every opportunity to innovate in a German Expressionist spirit—with angled shots, scale and perspective, detailed models, a camera on a swing, animated insets, typefaces for the intertitles, costumes, and more. It never stops trying and that is its charm.

The typical view of Metropolis now is that it is less about the future and more about Weimar Germany, riding high at the time on an economic bubble like most of the Western world—with an underclass ever more inclined toward direct action. It's a picture heavy on message (to wit, "THE MEDIATOR BETWEEN BRAIN AND HANDS MUST BE THE HEART!"), bearing strains easily caricatured as Communism, Fascism, or both. Lang's wife Thea von Harbou wrote the screenplay and the original novel. She and Lang divorced in the early '30s after she joined the Nazi Party and he fled the country. It must say something that where we now have zombies as our stock science fiction figures it used to be robots. But this is a robot that winks and dances the hootchy-koo so I don't even know what to do with that.

For all its oddities, Metropolis remains undeniable, the more so as it has been nearly entirely reconstructed now, which among other things enables the brilliant score written for it by Gottfried Huppertz to fit again. That alone makes it worth seeing in its (nearly) full splendor, warts and all. Look, it's like this. What Jack Kirby is to comic book superhero art Metropolis is to science fiction film. Its impact is felt everywhere, still, practically as much as ever, and profoundly.

Detail: Metropolis (1927)

0 The Mother and the Whore (1973)

La maman et la putain, France, 210 minutes
Director/writer: Jean Eustache
Photography: Pierre Lhomme
Editors: Denise de Casabianca, Jean Eustache
Cast: Jean-Pierre Leaud, Francoise Lebrun, Bernadette Lafont, Isabelle Weingarten, Jacques Renard, Jean Eustache

For practically everyone involved in The Mother and the Whore, certainly director and writer Jean Eustache (who committed suicide in 1981), Paris May 1968 was obviously a critically formative time and place to be alive, aware, and active, whether politically motivated or otherwise. The events of that time are rarely referred to even passingly in this overlong movie of three and a half hours, but they shadow everything. Or something does—a sense of profound shared experience, even a devastating one, lies back of everything witnessed in this picture, which alternates blindly, like a beast, between public and private spheres, with a common mode of abject failure.

Is it important to share feelings about that time and place, or even to know and understand them? I don't think so. I saw The Mother and the Whore first in 1975, knowing very little of its background and sources, and it completely thrilled me. It appeared then like nothing so much as a very odd (and charming) epic of desultory chat and small-scale relationship hiccups, which is what it remains at its best. It only unfolds and opens from there. The more you know about the historical context the more appeal it has, perhaps, but it remains alluring and resolutely human, as in the good-humored way it keeps showing how profound the inconsequential points we make in conversation are. But the conversational points are not what's important. The connection is. And here we see, the modern condition, characters attempting again and again to connect, and failing.



So many things about The Mother and the Whore are paradoxical and counterintuitive, underscoring the profound inability of connection at its heart. Set in Paris in the early '70s, it is shot in a muddy black and white, its images often swamped and effaced by darkness, stark and almost forbidding. There is no music except when people play their records—yet these moments, when we see people turning specifically to music for pleasure and solace, are among its most powerful. The great bulk of the movie takes place either on a mattress on the floor in the apartment shared by two characters or in various café settings. Not very much happens at all, though people are continually talking and smoking and drinking and eating and talking some more.

The picture focuses on Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Leaud), a younger man kept by an older woman, Marie (Bernadette Lafont). Their relationship is more or less "open," a status accepted without question by one and all (vestiges of the era). It embeds like food lodged in the throat a certain level of mistrust and not unrelated manipulations in the relationship. At the beginning of the picture Alexandre is acting the part of a heartbreak victim (the role seems familiar to him), thrown over by Gilberte (Isabelle Weingarten), who aborts his baby and finds another man before the next semester starts. Alexandre spies Veronika (Francoise Lebrun) in a café and picks her up, beginning a pointless affair with her.

The Mother and the Whore is set at an interesting and very brief point in modern Western history, shortly after a good deal of the anti-imperialist energy of the '60s in Europe had dissipated but shortly before feminism had become a powerful social force. Thus, somewhat surprisingly (to me), Alexandre and his friends are easily recognizable as chauvinist pigs, making no apologies for it—indeed, making excuses for it, in terms of perceived threats to their naturally superior masculinity.

Alexandre is, in fact, a fatuous idiot, as shown in one scene early in Marie's apartment where she complains, as she is doing the dishes, that he never helps with the dishes. This leads him to a soliloquy on the rewards of honest labor such as doing dishes, connecting it with the authentic proletarian experience (meanwhile not budging an inch to help with the dishes). Marie is exasperated but as she listens to him go on finally has to laugh at him. His stupidity is unthreatening and charming to her, and he has won her over again, though without quite knowing how.

In many ways, the cast is the class of European art film at the time, starting with Leaud, already the staple by then of important films of the '60s by Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. At this point in his career—with appearances here and in Day for Night and Last Tango in Paris—Leaud had about entirely transformed himself into some iconic saint of art cinema, always the character who wants to go to the movies, who talks about movies constantly, who forever smokes cigarettes and compares events in life to scenes in movies. In the first hour of this picture he name-checks Jorge Luis Borges, Robert Bresson, F.W. Murnau, and Nicholas Ray. Playing opposite him, Bernadette Lafont is as gloweringly warm and beautiful as she has ever been. Francoise Lebrun is enigmatic and gnomic, her beautiful round face beaming out of a slightly stooped and figureless form wrapped in shawls or bedsheets.

At this point in the lives of the characters of The Mother and the Whore, especially Alexandre, sexual revolution is all they have left—political revolution did not work out. So the three of them—Alexandre, Marie, and Veronika, i.e., the mother and the whore—proceed, and so proceeds the movie, through predictable jealousies, declarations of love, envenomed spats, groping for the edges and the limits for definition. But the edges and the limits keep receding and there is no definition. So life. There is only the next conversation and the next café date and the next night and bed and lover. Eventually all three end up in bed together, none of them any happier for it and a good deal more miserable.

I'm acting like the plot is the point here and in some ways it is. The downward trajectory of the fantasist revolutions, moving from the public sphere of politics into the private one of sex, with the same results, is much the point, and the story illustrates it well. But the best and truest moments in the movie are when it's closest to human experience—showing men and women who want to be adored, want what's fair and right for all, want what's easiest. They reject the conventional but never forget its promises. They want to feel superior, secure, loved, free from anxiety. They want the things they can never have, except by luck or single-minded dedication to one that excludes all the other things they want too.

Top 20 of 1973
1. Scenes From a Marriage
2. The Mother and the Whore
3. Don't Look Now
4. Mean Streets
5. Badlands
6. Sisters
7. The Last Detail
8. The Wicker Man
9. Save the Tiger
10. The Exorcist
11. Day for Night
12. A Touch of Class
13. F for Fake
14. High Plains Drifter
15. O Lucky Man!
16. American Graffiti
17. The Long Goodbye
18. The Spirit of the Beehive
19. Serpico
20. Enter the Dragon

Detail: The Mother and the Whore (1973)

0 Modern Times (1936)

USA, 87 minutes
Director/writer/music: Charles Chaplin
Photography: Ira H. Morgan, Roland Totheroh
Editors: Charles Chaplin, Willard Nico
Cast: Charles Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Henry Bergman, Tiny Sandford, Chester Conklin

I will lay it out straight here, because I may as well and no sense wasting time. Modern Times is such a longstanding favorite for me, with so many personal attachment points, that honestly I have little judgment or perspective on it. I just love it, every bit of it. For me, no Chaplin picture looks better. It is quintessentially "modern" in a way analogous to how we are all now "post-modern"; its heroic conceptions of architecture, design, and labor management (about which it is rightly dubious) feel like an entirely different time now. Yet Chaplin's iron backbone sunny-side views, unafraid to touch the treacle, balance the stark and formal geometries with warmth and humanity. Among other things it is a feel-good movie after all.

It is "modern" in many different ways. The music, by Chaplin again, is often shrill, staccato, and angular. The picture opens on an extreme close-up of a clock face with a sweeping second hand. It is an old-fashioned clock face, with Roman numerals, but the close-up is so tight it effectively transforms time itself into an abstraction. Modern Times is also acutely aware of the strikes, unemployment, class conflicts, and labor unrest ripping into the fabric of the culture and economy at the time of its release, deep into the Depression. Explicit cocaine use is not only acknowledged but played as a joke, and a good one. Chaplin's mincing about, and his use of characters such as a prison inmate working on a needlepoint project, imply layers of hidden farcical sexuality. And when the vagabond couple is left alone in a department store overnight the first thing they do is go to the toys section and start playing. Or is that "post-modern" to treat the human condition and/or enterprise as one conducted essentially by immature children?



Full disclosures: I saw this the first time under unusual circumstances, 17 years old and at the tail end of some days spent taking "white cross" amphetamines and not sleeping—I was crashing actually, as I had taken the last of them the night before, and really tasting that painful withdrawal experience for one of the first times, made only worse of course by no sleep for days. An unimaginably miserable feeling if you don't know it. My Dad thought I looked "a little down in the dumps," as he said, and Modern Times would cheer me up. That was in 1972, when the movie was making the rounds on some kind of revival promotion.

I don't think he or I or anyone could have picked a better movie for me to see in that moment. I was amazed by everything I was seeing. I was most impressed, that first time (perhaps reflecting a teenage point of view), by all the ways it breaks rules. It was made in 1936 so it should have been a "talkie"—even I knew that—but it wasn't, except it wasn't exactly a silent movie either, because people were talking and there were sound effects everywhere and the music was often cued to the images. But mostly it was goofing and amazing stunts. I had never seen anything like it. I was charmed and amazed (as I have never been since) by the scenes where people are literally trapped in the gears of the machine, and I was charmed and amazed again (as I have always been since) by the scene where Chaplin's unnamed "little tramp" character roller-skates blindfolded. I just soaked in the music and bold images. Interestingly, I don't recall having a response to the cocaine scene. But I have never forgotten the experience of seeing Modern Times for the first time. It turned a very bad day into a very good one, to say the least, and probably set me up for a lifetime of appreciating Chaplin.

The next time I saw it, some 10 years later, I was married and it became a favorite of ours. We identified with the little tramp and his girlfriend (Paulette Goddard), aka "a Gamin," making their way in a harsh world. What they wanted seemed so understandable, and so did its being out of reach—a home to share breakfast in. They were willing to work for it! The indomitability of their spirit really inspired me. "Buck up. Never say die. We'll get along!"—those words, silly as they are (and of course i-r-o-n-i-c because eventually she and I broke up), actually came to mean a lot to me.

So how are you going to argue with things like that? You can't. The brainstem wants what the brainstem wants—what the brainstem already has. As it happens, however, I did lose track of Modern Times for some 10 or 15 years. I settled on City Lights as not just my favorite Chaplin but my single favorite movie of all time and I wrapped that around me like a blanket for a long time. At one point I had occasion to revisit The Gold Rush, seeing it for the first time in the apparently now standard rejigger that Chaplin gave it in the '40s, and did not like what I saw. I thought Modern Times might be a bad movie after all, or mediocre. But no, relieved when I finally got back to it to find it's still a very great movie, worth seeing by all at least once for sure.

More views on Modern Times in a video essay by Joel Bocko at the Wonders in the Dark blog (including a portion of voiceover narration from myself) can be found here.

Detail: Modern Times (1936)

0 Nashville (1975)

USA, 159 minutes
Director: Robert Altman
Writer: Joan Tewkesbury
Photography: Paul Lohmann
Music: Arlene Barnett, Jonnie Barnett, Karen Black, Ronee Blakley, Gary Busey, Keith Carradine, Juan Grizzle, Henry Gibson, Allan F. Nicholls, Dave Peel, Joe Raposo
Editors: Dennis M. Hill, Sidney Levin
Cast: Ronee Blakley, Lily Tomlin, Keith Carradine, Michael Murphy, Henry Gibson, Keenan Wynn, Geraldine Chaplin, Gwen Welles, Ned Beatty, Karen Black, David Hayward, Shelly Duvall, Jeff Goldblum, Thomas Hal Phillips, Barbara Harris, Richard Baskin, David Arkin, Barbara Baxley, Elliott Gould, Julie Christie, Howard K. Smith, Steve Earle

Nashville has always seemed to me much larger and more generous than its rather narrow view of country music—a movie with ambitions of the white whale and designs on America (and/or "America") itself. Which only makes sense given its timing, made in the immediate aftermath of Vietnam 'n' Watergate, a time when cynicism naturally felt like sincerity. Straight ahead, a host of chambers of commerce were looking to the 1976 American Bicentennial for balm and healing, but no one else was. Nashville is here to explain some of the reasons why.

As a self-conscious Bicentennial checkpoint for director Robert Altman (and writer Joan Tewkesbury, and members of the very large cast, who improvised much of their dialogue and in many cases wrote their own country songs to sing), it tilted decidedly toward one side of today's stark national divide. It's full of mocking derision for the South, smug movie stars making cameos, elitist to its core, with adultery, casual sex, drugs, corruption, and celebrity culture. It was long, it was different, it was Important (with its famous sound design use of overlapping dialogue). It was suitably decorated with Oscar nominations and suitably denied most of the wins. Pauline Kael wrote a review for The New Yorker that was nearly as famous as the movie. It was emblem, fleeting icon, and prize in its time of what we've come to call Blue America. But over the years since it has become something else, or easier to see it for what it is.



In fact, watching it recently in a double feature with Goodfellas, I was impressed by how gentle and good-hearted Nashville is at its most bedrock levels. It represents a sensibility that can still be shocked by political assassination or the humiliation of a deluded singer with no talent. Altman's background in television serves him well with a light touch, punctuating his burbling, unfolding stream of scenes (largely shot in sequence) with deft setups, foreshadowing, rhyming themes, and comic set pieces. It's a banquet, basically. His huge cast of some two-dozen-odd enable him to isolate and match and mix unique elements. So, for example, we have the unnamed "tricycle man" (Jeff Goldblum), a hipster doofus in a floppy hat tooling around on a wacky motorcycle, playing various magic tricks, almost purely a visual element.

But the movie is a musical as much as anything and I'm sorry to say the music has worn least well about Nashville. It usually has enough charm to not slow things down much but is often about willfully misunderstanding country music. So we never miss the point, there's even one scene with a throwaway act in the background warbling, "Well, if makin' love were margarine / Then she is the high-priced spread." Ba da boom. The contempt is constant but even worse is when Nashville ham-handedly salutes a few figures, such as Vassar Clements, with the condescending air they are rare gems in an appalling wasteland. That Blue America thing again, I guess.

Yet the one part of Nashville I never tire of is the Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakley) thread, which is deeply musical and also where Altman lucked into something his movie needed more of: someone who not only understood the music, but was and is a pretty good songwriter and performer in her own right. I love the scene of her public breakdown not least because the first two songs she is able to get through ("Tapedeck in His Tractor" and "Dues") are so great. For that matter, so is the breakdown. It is riveting and poignant. Blakley pulls it off tentatively but completely for an amazing scene start to finish.

Another important and nicely worked out scene is nearly as musical, with Keith Carradine's performance of "I'm Easy," playing Tom Frank the womanizer. It's skin-crawling time as the gentle '70s country-rock song unspools and at least three women in the audience have reason to believe it involves them personally. Frank is an interesting element in the mix, a sourpuss rock 'n' roll guy whose music is anything but sourpuss rock 'n' roll (think Jackson Browne), an empty vessel of a human being, soulless, pathological, reprehensible, occasionally pitiable. "I'm Easy" is the perfect song for him. (On the matter of soulless, Karen Black as Connie White is the female analogue here.)

Nashville is a kaleidoscope ride, with flaws and bumps but a reassuring force to the narrative stream, so dense with detail that much is to be gained from multiple viewings, and it goes down easy, always with a friendly hello and smile. I love the way Altman and Tewkesbury make places and rituals the focal nodes of their large-scale structure. First there are the scenes at the airport, where many characters are simply coming and going on their business with others who have gathered to greet Barbara Jean's arrival. That is followed by a massive freeway pile-up. On Saturday night all the characters go out. On Sunday morning they all go to church—which characters go to which churches makes it one of my favorite sequences in the whole thing. (Once again Blakley steals the show, in a hospital chapel, singing "He Walks With Me." Goose bumps!)

That's the way it goes, lurching about, herding its cast through their rituals, and building to one of those Altman endings of great disaster, in this case an assassination, which may or may not have something important to say but certainly feels climactic. The key lyrical theme is rolled out big: "You may say that I ain't free / But it don't bother me." In recent viewings the political element—the campaign of Hal Phillip Walker, a third-party "Replacement Party" candidate for president, conducted via ubiquitous van with loudspeakers droning things like, "When you pay more for an automobile than it cost Columbus to make his first voyage to America, that's politics"—has more and more taken center stage for me. The random stupidity and undertone of malevolence in these blandishments feel chillingly prescient, although they are often funny. "You ever ask a lawyer the time of day?" the voice intones, making the case for eliminating all lawyers from the U.S. Congress. "He told you how to make a watch, didn't he?"

And more, with Nashville there is always more: Keenan Wynn's face, the galling stupidity of Opal from the BBC, Sueleen Gay's zen-like lack of self-awareness, Frog in the background constantly, Michael Murphy's smarm, Shelley Duvall as L.A. Joan ("she's from California," the constant refrain), Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson), pompous buffoon, and Linnea (Lily Tomlin), perhaps the single most interesting character here of all, a gospel singer, a devoted mother, an adultress. And more. See it, see it again, and then see it again.

Which reminds me of the editing, and the earlier, longer versions, and the lost footage. I'd rather forget that, but on the bright side, I do think the editing is a high point in Nashville, sorting out the many characters, keeping them distinct, and making all their stories more or less coherent as it plows relentlessly on.

Top 10 of 1975
1. Nashville
2. Love and Death
3. Barry Lyndon
4. Picnic at Hanging Rock
5. Swept Away
6. Welfare
7. Dog Day Afternoon
8. Monty Python and the Holy Grail
9. The Passenger
10. The Mirror

Detail: Nashville (1975)

0 Contempt (1963)

Le mepris, France/Italy, 102 minutes
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Writers: Jean-Luc Godard, Alberto Moravia
Photography: Raoul Cotard
Music: Georges Delerue (Piero Piccioni, Italian/Spanish version)
Editors: Agnes Guillemot, Lila Lakshmanan
Cast: Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, Jack Palance, Fritz Lang, Giorgia Moll, Jean-Luc Godard

The first thing that always surprises me about Contempt is how beautiful it is. That's a natural enough result of setting much of it in the daylight of Rome and Capri, casting Brigitte Bardot, and shooting in color—magnificent color. In fact, according to the consensus view revealed at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, it's now considered director Jean-Luc Godard's best after Breathless. I know Contempt was the Godard that left me most impressed walking out of the theater after seeing it for the first time (in a '90s rerelease). But the more I look at it the more frozen in stasis it seems to become, immobilized, inert, dare I say impotent, like the classical statuary on which it loves to linger.

It's a lot less playful than most Godard I know from the '60s, for one thing. In fact, it's almost stately, pitched at a snail's-crawl pace with Georges Delerue's remarkable score swelling like ripened fruit, intruding at will across anything in our field of vision. More money seems to be involved with this project too. The early '60s was a heroic era of art film, remember, one of those periods when money materializes for all kinds of crazy things. Godard and producer Carlo Ponti were kicking around names like Kim Novak, Frank Sinatra, Sophia Loren, and Marcello Mastroianni before settling on Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli. Jack Palance plays a leering, smacking American movie producer. And really, any movie that's about making a movie and has the wherewithal to cast Fritz Lang as Fritz Lang definitely has something going for it.



As it turns out, Contempt has much in common with Godard's breakthrough Breathless, at least in their broad outlines. In the first third, a moral crime is committed. In the middle third, a man and a woman in a relationship pass daytime hours in an apartment in a city. And in the last third, destiny plays a hand. The centers of both films are those middle sections, but whereas in Breathless the couple is deepening their romantic connection, in Contempt the relationship is dying before our eyes. Ultimately, it's a movie about the end of a relationship, though in turn that is weighed down with so much allegorical whatsits that the film operates more effectively on a cerebral level, undercutting itself.

Specifics may help illustrate: Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli) is a crime novelist who has been brought in as a screenwriter to help salvage a movie project directed by Fritz Lang. The producer is an American named Jerry Prokosch (Jack Palance), a smarmy, power-mad buffoon who brought Javal in partly because he heard Javal has a beautiful wife. And he does—Camille (Brigitte Bardot). The incidents that transpire between the three of them (and a second woman, an interpreter) are ambiguous but provocative, there are no innocents in this drama, and practically overnight the relationship between Paul and Camille ruptures. In many ways Contempt is strongest when it simply watches as the couple probes for the fault lines between them, especially in the long apartment scene.

But the film is also so vividly full of a culture of moviemaking (among other things) that it wouldn't be too hard to construct different cases for what it is actually "about." The American producer Prokosch is a loathsome creature who crawled out of Hollywood. "I like gods. I like them very much," he says at one point, in a screening room looking at rushes. "I know exactly how they feel. Exactly." A few minutes later, after throwing a calculated fit by way of bringing on Javal over any objections Fritz Lang might have, Prokosch says, "When I hear the word 'culture' I bring out my checkbook," and proceeds to write a check on the backside of a girl who obligingly bends over for him. (To which an urbane Lang, wearing a monocle, responds by saying, "Years ago, the Italians said 'Revolver'"—which I think takes the reference at least one step too obvious.)

But now you see how quickly we are so far afield of a drama about a crumbling marriage. Contempt takes the scenic route figuratively, turning corners into ingenious little nod-and-wink sleight-of-hand cinema tricks, which distract. It's beautiful, the music is beautiful, and it's always clever. But I'm not sure it has much of a heart, especially for something about the end of a marriage. The levels of contempt in this film are obviously many, so perhaps that is another one—contempt for the institution of marriage.

As for Brigitte Bardot, she is objectified from the first, in long scenes that veer dangerously close to soft-core porn. Yes, that opening scene, for example, is a tender moment of intimacy between a husband and wife. But honestly? It sets off distracting Brigitte Bardot four-alarm fires in my head and I suspect the heads of many many others. Our being privy to it this way somehow changes and supercharges it, not to mention the monumental vanity—and the other monumental asset—on display in the exchange. Nor does it feel natural, especially with the red and blue filters cast randomly over it in cuts, at pains to further emphasize the artificiality. It's the first scene, and with all that perhaps easy to miss that already Camille is tired of Paul, an interesting subtlety. But why should it have to be lost? (I know, I know. Godard has his reasons.)

Indeed, Contempt is reasonably good at tracing the endings of a faltering relationship, which is what makes it so disappointing in a way that it is also juggling a hundred other tricks and stunts, often intriguing but contributing less. It's not that I always have to have my satisfying narrative thread—though perhaps I do, I certainly like things better when they are there, I must admit—but rather more like: If you're not really interested in a narrative thread, perhaps it's better not to include one at all, let alone one that appears to be serious? There are some shots here—such as a mask floating in a blue sky—that I would be happy to gape at for 90 minutes with or without any distracting "narrative context." It's that beautiful.

Detail: Contempt (1963)

0 Annie Hall (1977)

USA, 93 minutes
Director: Woody Allen
Writers: Woody Allen, Marshall Brickman
Photography: Gordon Willis
Music: Woody Allen's record collection
Editors: Wendy Greene Bricmont, Ralph Rosenblum
Cast: Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Tony Roberts, Carol Kane, Paul Simon, Shelley Duvall, Colleen Dewhurst, Christopher Walken, Russell Horton, Marshall McLuhan, Dick Cavett, Jeff Goldblum, Shelley Hack, Sigourney Weaver, Truman Capote

A lot of things that Woody Allen is good at—tormented narratives shattered by revision, pieces playing just so where they land, tender ruminations buoyed by comfort music and nostalgia and surprising jokes, and streaming patter of gags, to name three—arguably found their best homes in Annie Hall. The fine points of this very fine picture, the easiest and most obvious movie of the year I've had to pick yet and maybe ever, is a very long list as it also includes that indelible chemistry with Diane Keaton, that wonderful self-flattering feeling of grown-up sophistication in the cultural markers (from Groucho to Kierkegaard), that certain casting touch that goes down to the smallest roles, and being so funny generally. But you get the point. It is arguably both the best movie Woody Allen ever made and the best Woody Allen movie ever made, which are not necessarily the same thing.

So what to say? It's going on 40 years now and the template that Annie Hall established for romantic comedy has positively dominated since then, replacing the slightly shopworn screwball model, which had gotten to be a little stuffy or inane or both since its own heyday. Woody Allen brought more genuine emotional engagement to the enterprise and obviated the whole idea of matrimonial happy endings, replacing them with the much more expedient joys and frustrations of connection (or lack thereof), which in turn grounded and made it more appealing. Remember (spoiler alert), Annie Hall does not have a "happy ending." As Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) mentions in the first minutes of the picture, the breakup is already in the past. Yet it rarely leaves me anything less than happy, tickled, pleased as punch, or downright joyful. It has a very good energy, as the saying goes, from beginning to end.



There's always trading in trivia, courtesy IMDb. Diane Keaton was born Diane Hall, and went by "Annie," for example. You probably already knew that. The working title was Anhedonia, but Allen couldn't convince the producers to go along with it—that intrigues me both because the first two syllables mimic the ultimate title and because "anhedonia" is the last thing I would associate with anything to do with this particular movie. More: The first cut ran an additional 50 minutes. Marshall McLuhan was not Allen's first choice for the famous inspired cameo—he first approached Federico Fellini and Luis Bunuel. The winner of the Truman Capote lookalike contest is actually Truman Capote. The average shot length is 14.5 seconds. Danny Aiello and Brooke Shields both had parts that didn't make it into the final cut.

And more: Allen remains mostly disappointed with Annie Hall (also Hannah and Her Sisters, which tells me anyway what I need to know about how much credence to give this), telling interviewer Eric Eisenberg just last year, "The relationship between myself and Diane Keaton was all anyone cared about. That was not what I cared about.... In the end, I had to reduce the film to just me and Diane Keaton, and that relationship, so I was quite disappointed in that movie."

It was originally conceived as more of a murder mystery (perhaps accounting for much of that original extra 50 minutes). For whatever reasons, Allen dropped it but finally developed the thread for 1993's Manhattan Murder Mystery, which interestingly, by circumstance, involved working again with Diane Keaton, who stepped in after Mia Farrow pulled out during the welter of the tabloid scandal.

Now I want to say a few words about Diane Keaton here, because she really made that latter movie, it's one of the few sparkling points for me in Allen's filmography since 1980 and the last great movie he made. And a lot of that, it's plain to see there and certainly in Annie Hall, is how good Diane Keaton is and how good she makes Woody Allen on film. It's a chemistry they have, they just draw it out of one another. Love and Death is worth seeing for that alone—I think it's his best straight comedy. She is the star of Annie Hall and Annie Hall is the landmark movie's most interesting character by far. She not only nails a certain upper Midwest personality type, but more broadly a whole way of being alive and sensible in the '70s, which was not an easy decade to navigate. Oh and also plus, the camera loves her.

Pieces of Annie Hall have systematically been torn away and imitated and grown cliché, and then enjoyed revitalization themselves again—several times over now. Did you see Frances Ha yet? Did you see (500) Days of Summer? Did you see When Harry Met Sally...? It is also a tremendous technical achievement, in terms of editing and shot setups. I love, for example, those long static street scenes with the line of the street running from lower left to upper right, which start as voiceover conversations until finally, long minutes later, the characters emerge within the frame, walking down the street, approaching the camera, which then begins tracking back with them once they are in medium. I love the ruminating nostalgic passages too, remembering Brooklyn and his childhood and family. Allen is very good at this type of filmmaking, as he would demonstrate later in Radio Days, but here it is casually sprinkled in for effect, powered by an energy of discovery.

Ultimately, I think, that may be the single greatest pleasure of Annie Hall, which is saying something. It brims with the energy of discovery. Examples: Opening and closing on jokes that are stale yet canny and resonant. Opening on Alvy Singer addressing the camera directly. Putting the rememberers in frame with the memory, and then enabling them to interact, sometimes in sly, nuanced ways. Allen is comfortable, and bold, with theatrical "fourth wall" exercises, and he's pretty good as well in Annie Hall at turning that fourth wall edgewise for cinematic split-screens, which are scattered across the film, used in slightly different yet always perfectly apt ways. It's also a really beautiful bittersweet romantic story, poignant and touching, and very funny too. A great one, that's all.

Top 10 of 1977
I think the glories of the decade may be more in the past starting with 1977, though the year certainly has some very bright flashpoints in the first three (or four) on my list, which is not even to start on the problem of Star Wars. I ended up relegating Star Wars to the "didn't like so much" category even though it is the only Star Wars movie that I like at all, and actually sometimes have liked very much. Call it blessing with faint censure. It's just that kind of year. I don't see that many significant gaps but by the lower echelons of my top 10 we are into recent finds and sentimental favorites, and meanwhile I kind of like some of the movies in the "didn't like" list. Even I can see that Between the Lines is not really that good. That leads me to believe it's just a weak year. Your opinions?
1. Annie Hall
2. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
3. Saturday Night Fever
4. Suspiria
5. 3 Women
6. Looking for Mr. Goodbar
7. Slap Shot
8. Killer of Sheep
9. The Kentucky Fried Movie
10. Between the Lines

Didn't like so much: Fun With Dick and Jane; Julia; Martin; New York, New York; Star Wars

Gaps: The American Friend; The Duellists; The Goodbye Girl; Hitler: A Film From Germany; That Obscure Object of Desire

Detail: Annie Hall (1977)

0 Au hasard Balthazar (1966)

France/Sweden, 95 minutes
Director/writer: Robert Bresson
Photography: Ghislain Cloquet
Music: Jean Wiener, Franz Schubert
Editor: Raymond Lamy
Models: Balthazar, Anne Wiazemsky, Walter Green, François Lafarge, Jean-Claude Guilbert, Philippe Asselin, Pierre Klossowski, Nathalie Joyaut

I have a great fondness for Robert Bresson's donkey movie, which is typically enough fractured, allusive, and blunt, helped in great measure by a basic narrative element barely in Bresson's control, if it is in his control at all. Back in film appreciation classes, I was given to understand that the somewhat stultifying Diary of a Country Priest was Bresson's essential go-to masterpiece so it's interesting to me that Balthazar is now ranked highest among the canonizers at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, followed by Pickpocket (my other favorite Bresson), A Man Escaped, Mouchette, L'Argent, and then finally Country Priest at #196. Despite that apparent fall in favor by Country Priest, a total of six titles in that list's top 200 clearly signals a regard for Bresson that may be higher than ever.

The element barely under control, of course, is Balthazar, who is an enigma in the way of all animals we may come to know, a blank slate as such, one that as viewers (and/or caretakers) we may be quick to fill in. Bresson artfully matches his usual bent for ambiguity—as always, the intent appears to be to film the ineffable—with the manifest reality of the donkey, which I think is what makes this movie work so well. However abstracted anything around it might seem to become, it remains the story of a life from beginning to end, "Balthazar, told by random incident" (more or less the translation of the title).



Balthazar is enigmatic in other ways too. He appears to have no other name than the one he bore in the picture. He is not listed in the credits anywhere I can find (there are probably two of him anyway as he appears first as an adorable foal). In fact, there doesn't appear to be a lot of information about him. IMDb has an intriguing story about how the animal was not even trained when it was acquired for the film, and little was done to remedy that other than teaching him the trick he does in a circus scene. He is thus almost pure cipher, harried for probably weeks or more by the bewildering confusion of a camera crew. I can imagine an interesting Les Blank coulda woulda shoulda documentary to accompany this that would tell the real story of the real animal.

Full disclosure: I come at the picture from a certain point of view I am likely to project all over it. In fact, with this particular movie, projection tends to be even a little more evident than usual. It produces copious amounts of weeping in otherwise stone-faced men and women, and leaves the most passionate vaguely bored. It is simply a puzzle, and a bit of a pretentious one, to many others. I find myself alert to the treatment of the donkey, somehow acutely aware it never has any idea of being in a movie. There is one scene that seriously threatens to break the spell, when the film itself becomes as despicable as the thuggish character it is attempting to show. Yet on balance I was moved deeply by the life story told here, appreciating the natural power of the scenes, as conceived, and by their sequencing and setups and occasional explosions.

Though Balthazar begins the movie, and life, as the pet for children on a country farm, it is not long before his life as a beast of burden sets in. Less than 10 minutes along a title card briskly informs us, "YEARS GO BY." At which point all the narrative threads begin to distinguish themselves: the farm girl who loves Balthazar, Marie (Anne Wiazemsky, who is tenderly beautiful and a magnet for the camera), the juvenile delinquent, Jacques (Walter Green, wearing a black leather jacket in every scene), and the older generation of family and neighbors who ineptly (and sometimes a little inappropriately) attempt to meet their responsibilities and care for them.

It is filled with many human cruelties. One could complain that some are a bit elaborately fashionable (Marie's humiliation by Jacques in her home, late in the movie), but they nonetheless hit with force. One could also complain it assumes the gait of an allegory too easily. There's a certain specificity to Jacques's relationship with Marie and his life around the town, for example, but otherwise the black leather jacket and, later, a ubiquitous transistor radio playing obnoxious "rock 'n' roll" feel like rote symbolism. But this is a very spry film as assembled, moving rapidly about its characters and modes, perhaps stubbornly refusing to clarify its narrative points (perhaps not), but always going back again to its certainties.

Balthazar is ultimately the one certainty of this picture, even as he never quite fits into it any better than he does the lives of those around him. Bresson finds numerous ways to emphasize this over and over. Medium-close shots for a person, it turns out, produce extreme close-ups of a donkey. When Marie pets him and murmurs to him to comfort herself, we see her just fine in almost glamour shots but we see only one eye and the contours of part of Balthazar's head. But the eye does read as expressive, and his bulk fills the frame. He is imposing and omnipresent in this film, as intended.

At which point you either make your purchase or you don't, I suppose. So much depends on caring about the donkey—the counterpoint all through between braying (a disturbing noise when prolonged) and chilly Schubert, the lovely touches of sound effects, the humor (as in the titles pausing for a bray), and of course the final sequence. The last 10 or 15 minutes, with Jacques's last unforgivable act, and all the ways it plays out, is one of the great finishes to a movie. Au hasard Balthazar remains scrupulously within the bounds of what it sets for itself, and achieves a tremendously poignant note, simply by the nature of the shape and aspect of the animal we have become familiar with.

Detail: Au hasard Balthazar (1966)

0 Manhattan (1979)

USA, 96 minutes
Director: Woody Allen
Writers: Woody Allen, Marshall Brickman
Photography: Gordon Willis
Music: George Gershwin
Editor: Susan E. Morse
Cast: Woody Allen, Mariel Hemingway, Diane Keaton, Michael Murphy, Meryl Streep, Anne Byrne Hoffman, Bella Abzug, Wallace Shawn, Michael O'Donoghue

I was once pleased to call Manhattan my favorite movie, prized above all others, desert island selection (never mind how you play those), etc. By the early '90s and the time of the Woody Allen / Mia Farrow tabloid spectacle I was more interested in forgetting it. In the event of the movie question, I quietly started calling another movie my favorite—City Lights, which has distinctive affinities—and didn't even bother to look at Manhattan again for a very long time.

It's the Tracy character and narrative thread causing the problems, of course, with the awkward (and unmistakable) overtones of predatory sex. I don't actually believe Woody Allen is a pedophile, or anything other than a somewhat boorish and clueless person. I also don't think it's enough to say that his personal life doesn't matter, only the work does. That's a sensible approach and one that mostly works with, say, Roman Polanski. But looking at Manhattan again closely underscores how determinedly Woody Allen interjects himself, on a very personal basis, into the center of his pictures.



Start with the opening sequence, which has claims on a place as one of the greatest movie openings ever. The magnificent climax to George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" plays, and a montage of Gordon Willis's stunning black and white photography unfolds. I have a note to myself asking if this is Willis's greatest movie, and I mean it, though his credits elsewise are boggling (notably the whole Godfather franchise). Long shots of the New York skyline. Skyscrapers. Street scenes. Central Park. New York in winter. New York in spring. An unbelievable shot of Yankee Stadium with a passing train. And then fireworks. It is an amazing, brilliant tone poem, setting the mood perfectly for a love song to a city.

But just ahead of this beautiful mess sits Woody Allen (as Isaac) with his stammering patter and stand-up comic instincts, making cheap gags: "Chapter One. He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Behind his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat.... Oh, I love this.... New York was his town, and it always would be."

That's what struck me most. I was impressed all over again with the photography and music in Manhattan, and by other points as well, such as the complexities and mechanics of the story. It's a narrative worked out well, much better than Allen usually does. Diane Keaton (as Mary) is solid as a rock, as always (especially when working with Allen)—watch how good she is at phone calls. So is Mariel Hemingway (as Tracy)—and for that matter, the Tracy thread is not written to be particularly flattering to Allen. It actually comes with a good deal of sophistication and insight.

But the furshlugginer Woody Allen gags! They do not stop! Here he is early, discussing his own self-declared most profound question of courage: "That's a key question. I, of course, can't swim, so I never have to face it." Talking with his best friend: "When it comes to relationships with women, I'm the winner of the August Strindberg award." In a fight with an ex-wife (played by Meryl Streep in a delicious turn): "My analyst tried to warn me, but you were so beautiful I got another analyst." Running for shelter with Mary from a sudden storm: "Come on, it's an electrical storm! Do you want to end up in an ashtray?" Discussing Tracy with friends: "I'm 42 and she's 17. I'm older than her father. Can you believe that? I'm dating a girl wherein I can beat up her father." On the way home from a date with Mary: "You look so beautiful I can hardly keep my eye on the meter."

Yes, I understand this is like complaining that Alfred Hitchcock movies are too suspenseful. It was this constant stream of gags as much as anything that appealed to me about Woody Allen movies in the first place, and for a long time. But Manhattan always was something different—far more ambitious, and, indeed, capable of realizing its ambitions. It is an absolutely gorgeous film. There is the famous opening, and nearly as well known a scene in a darkened planetarium museum space with Isaac and Mary getting to know one another, with brilliant use of black space and lines of white to define features, such as Mary's profile. Even small throwaway scenes, such as apartment interiors, are staged and shot memorably.

The story is blithe and chattery but intricately conceived, with a perfect impossible situation at the center of it in the characters of Isaac and Tracy, a story that actually plays out beautifully across the arc of the movie, and doesn't ever really cheat. It is an impossible situation. Isaac knows it and always knows it. Tracy doesn't begin to glean it until the very end. It is likely doomed, but there is still hope. It's a resolution for me on the order of Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby, with practically every point in harmony and believable and tied up neat as a bow. That's remarkable for anyone, but especially for Woody Allen.

So one forgives the instinct for gags, perhaps feeling sad noticing again as they come and come and come. But what are you going to do? One of the problems with classic comedy films—this is equally true for me with City Lights now, by the way—is that the magic of the comedy and the laughs can become thin and less predictable, even as stronger elements survive unblemished. I could speculate about the execrable Interiors from just the year before, which was suffocatingly parched of humor, let alone gags. Perhaps Allen felt constrained to bring that element back in.

Or perhaps, almost certainly we know now, it's the only way Woody Allen knows to play anything. So that's how he plays Isaac. Honestly, can you think of anyone else who could have? None of my complaints means he didn't create a stone masterpiece in Manhattan. When all is said and done, and for all my painfully enumerated difficulties with Woody Allen, this remains one of my very favorite movies.

Top 10 of 1979
During my time in the desert vis a vis Manhattan I claimed Apocalypse Now as my favorite of the year, and it is indeed a worthy effort. I don't hesitate to recommend the longer Redux version, though I like to have a copy of the original around too. The first time I saw the Richard Pryor movie is the hardest I have ever laughed anywhere, I believe, and Alien rounds out a very strong first four. After that it's rock 'n' roll movies, plus Cronenberg and Tarkovsky. Final tally: stupendously excellent year (hovering under: The Marriage of Maria Braun, The China Syndrome, Being There, The Black Stallion, Nosferatu the Vampyre).
1. Manhattan
2. Apocalypse Now
3. Richard Pryor: Live in Concert
4. Alien
5. Hair
6. Quadrophenia
7. Rock 'n' Roll High School
8. Stalker
9. The Brood
10. Breaking Away

Didn't like so much: All That Jazz, Kramer vs. Kramer, Mad Max, Quintet, The Tin Drum

Gaps: Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens, Best Boy, Life of Brian, 1941, Real Life

Detail: Manhattan (1979)

0 The Mirror (1975)

Zerkalo, USSR, 108 minutes
Director: Andrei Tarkovksy
Writers: Aleksandr Misharin, Andrei Tarkovsky, Arseni Tarkovsky
Photography: Georgi Rerberg
Music: Eduard Artemev
Editor: Lyudmila Feiginova
Cast: Margarita Terekhova, Innokenti Smoktunovsky, Larisa Tarkovskaya, Oleg Yankovsky, Ignat Daniltsev, Anatoli Solonitsin, Alla Demidova, Arseni Tarkovsky

By all I can tell, The Mirror was shot and first released in the USSR (under heavy official sanction, which prevented it from entry into Cannes) and then made its way slowly across the world—the first screening in the U.S. was 1983, according to IMDb—approximately during the period when I was busy attending revival house and art film theater series, taking film appreciation classes, and thinking a lot about movies. Yet even the name was plain unfamiliar to me many years later when I ran across it in a list of Greatest Films You Must See or some such. I shoveled The Mirror on in to my Netflix queue, along with two more highly regarded Tarkovsky pictures I knew only dimly, Andrei Rublev and Ivan's Childhood.

In retrospect, I think I can see how Andrei Rublev could become for some what I found in, say, The Mother and the Whore or Berlin Alexanderplatz: a vast, bewildering, disorienting film unlike any other, certainly unlike anything before it, and profoundly formative somehow. By comparison, The Mirror is more chamber suite, moderated by the focused scope and intimacies of autobiography. No surprise, it requires patience, and probably some previously existing predisposition toward director/co-writer Andrei Tarkovsky's work. Few filmmakers seem to me as capable of exploiting the daunting levels of complexity the medium can accommodate. But the slipperiness of the narrative handholds are frustrating. Yet there it sits at #27 on the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?



Well, it's not hard to see whose film-critical star is on the rise. The Mirror made it to the top 30 up from #67 last year, while Andrei Rublev is up to #22 from #42, and Stalker is up to #54 from #117. Three films by one director in that top 50 is the kind of thing achieved by figures such as Federico Fellini, Alfred Hitchcock, and Orson Welles, and them not always, which speaks volumes to the burgeoning esteem for Tarkovsky.

The Mirror is a lush overheated swamp of a filmmaking laboratory. How many types of film stock are used here? There are scenes in black and white, sepia, and multiple color tones, plus generous portions of historical documentary and newsreel footage. In a page from Persona, deliberate bad filmmaking techniques—boom shadows in frame, chopped-up cuts, and distracting cue marks (those dots in the upper right corner that signal projectionists)—are used at will, elaborately insisting on reminders of the medium. It feels like there ought to be a schema, such as in the shifts between black and white and color, but looking carefully I'm damned if I can make one out. The dreamier, hallucinatory sequences are in both black and white and color. So are the explicit memories. So are the present-day scenes, which modulate into harrowing, convincing, and oddly riveting relationship dynamics. So are scenes that seem to be advancing a narrative, however anecdotally. If anything, the shifts between black and white and color are like rhythms of nature, pounding waves, vibration, shifting across the tonal planes of this movie.

It is dense—often the visuals and audio are telling us two separate things at once. It includes voiceover narration by Tarkovsky's father Arseni, reading his own poetry. The omnipresent center of this film is actually not easy to find. I take it as autobiographical because that's what I've read, and that's what makes the most sense as a frame, though it's very generalized. We experience it from a deeply internalized place, rarely seeing the evident author (son and husband) in the present day, only as if glimpsed in mirrors, though the stream of his thought and speech is a constant. In many ways, it is how we experience ourselves, a body only occasionally seen and a voice constantly heard.

As pure filmmaker, Tarkovsky is capable of amazing technical feats. The complexity of his setups, and how well suited they are to the mood of the story (such as it is), are what make this for me. Early on, for example, there is a long tracking shot that starts from the dark interior of a country house, watches two children hurry from the breakfast table to see a calamity, stops and lingers on a mirror that reflects the backs of the children and our first tiny glimpse of a barn on fire, and then tracks out of the house and into a long wide exterior from under the eaves of a porch. Tarkovsky is good with buildings engulfed in flames, as he also demonstrated in The Sacrifice. He is also very good with simple and elusive things others rarely think of, or use poorly, such as wind. He is remarkably good with wind. He is remarkably good.

There are many scenes and images of great power strewn across The Mirror. Margarita Terekhova delivers a bravura performance, playing both the mother and wife. The picture possesses flourishes of magic realism, a risky stock in trade, but managed well. That means levitation among other things. The mushroom cloud makes an appearance, which arguably belongs in the autobiography of anyone alive since 1945. The implicit comparisons and refractions of memory and mirrors effectively layer on more complexity. The placid sense of revery often surprises. Everything feels thought through somehow, even as the ends seem to elude one. As with a good short-story anthology, the sum is not necessarily greater than the parts. But the parts indeed can be very great.

Detail: The Mirror (1975)