Shooting Down Pictures

*SPECIAL NOTE: Night Moves is playing Sunday 11/16 and Tuesday 11/18 as part of the Arthur Penn retrospective at Anthology Film Archives. Visit anthologyfilmarchives.org for more info

——————————-

screened June 23, 2008 on Warner DVD in Weehawken NJ

TSPDT rank #840 IMDb Wiki

Arthur Penn’s contribution to the mid-70s Hollywood revival of film noir reflects all of the bitter disillusionment and vertiginous, disempowering truth borne by the fallout of Watergate on American society. An unheroic, deeply flawed private eye Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman) tries to bring a missing girl to safety, only to be led down a rabbit hole that collapses upon him by the end.  Penn strikes a atmosphere of 70s coastal sun-baked laid backness hosting a legion of jive-talkers and hangers-on, and concealing a conspiracy both geometrically simple and shockingly unfathomable.  Through this wasteland walks Hackman, in what would be a career performance if he didn’t have so many others worthy of the term.  Feeding off a lively, colorful ensemble (including early performances by teenage Melanie Griffith and an unhinged James Woods) and blessed by Alan Sharp’s zinger-laden dialogue, Hackman toils with a latent sense of professionalism that eventually is consumed by pride into a self-destructive, onanistic reckoning with his own ineffectuality in a world that offers no safe harbor to his private anguish and confusion. Sharp’s intricate plotting unravels like a Rube Goldberg, with an ending that ties up loose ends so neatly that it resembles something of an oneiric projection of Moseby’s worst fears come true.

Want to go deeper? Do you dare???

Continue Reading »

screened September 9, 2008 on DivX in Brooklyn, NY

TSPDT rank #710 IMDb

The crowning achievement in the mercurial career of Soviet director Boris Barnet, this simple story of a love triangle between two shipwrecked sailors and the beach blonde darling of a fishing village exemplifies a kind of film that could only have been made at the dawn of the talkies, when cinema had to rediscover its vision at the same time that it discovered its voice.  Films that most ingeniously mounted this challenge – Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante, Luis Bunuel’s L’Age d’or, and both Frank Borzage’s and Yuan Muzhi’s versions of Street Angel, to name a few – were able to retain the luminescent purity of the silent era iconography and hitch it to pure simple stories of love and discovery, milked from an infant’s gaze and an adolescent’s emotions.  The tremulous and intermittent occurences of sound add a paradoxical wonder,  fearlessly inflicting violence on the silent image by thrusting it into a fragile new dimension.  The result is a cinema that remains vital and vigorous, perpetually new.   By the Bluest of Seas opens with a capsizing of a ship among relentlessly stormy seas that amounts to an audiovisual ablution for the viewer, eventually casting them on a blank, enchanted seaside full of possibility, where boisterous song, vaudevillian slapstick, romantic wistfulness and nonstop pining rule the day. It is a utopia of emotional freedom and spontaneously generating, momentary magic, a utopia that can only happen in the cinema.

Want to go deeper?

Continue Reading »

Screened July 12 2008 on DivX in Weehawken NJ

TSPDT rank #595 IMDb

Often cited as John Ford’s favorite film, this turn-of-the century period piece about folksy Judge Priest, the de facto patriarch of a sleepy Kentucky town, at first seems hopelessly dated with its unrepentant nostalgia for a Confederate society whose implicit bigotry enables a cavalcade of dubious stereotypes, not least of which is the embarrassing jigaboo schtick of African American cultural albatross Stepin Fetchit as Priest’s servant. But on formalist terms, this may very well be one of Ford’s most perfect achievements, in which he masterfully orchestrates the rites and rituals that govern a small community into a 90 minute cinematic circus. Each scene brims with Ford’s inimitably attentive playfulness with decorum, decoding and sometimes debunking the social assumptions guiding each character’s interactions, and the sheer beauty of how Ford films bodies moving through space in a civic ballet is a joy to behold.  Ford acknowledges and embraces the contradictions of humanism and prejudice governing class, gender and race relations, such as distinguishing one form of vigilantism (shooting a rapist businessman in the back instead of arresting him) as acceptable while another (lynching a helples black man) is strongly condemned).  Progress and tradition are locked in a perpetual duel over the life of this town, most vividly in the contrasting protocols of local Confederate and Union army veteran meetings and the scandalous funeral of a prostitute where Judge Priest, at risk of losing his job, takes a principled, proto-feminist stand under the guise of common decency. Tensions finally give way to a prolonged procession – bubbling with music and devoid of words – involving the various factions of the entire town.  Filled with collective joy and private sorrow, it strikes a mournal grace note that simultaneously commemorates and laments the man-made forms that maintain and constrict this microcosm of society. 

Want to go deeper? Continue Reading »

screened November 8 2008 on DivX in Weehawken, NJ

TSPDT rank #358 IMDb Wiki

The highest debut placement within last December’s update of the They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? list of 1000 greatest films was this corrosively black comedy by Luis Garcia Berlanga, the long-suffering subversive of Spain’s Franco regime. A young undertaker whose job leaves him unloved by the ladies takes interest in the equally forlorn daughter of a government executioner. A series of mild shocks to his humdrum existence nudge him into marriage, parenthood, the real estate rat race, and the eventual assumption of his father-in-law’s socially despised profession, a fate into which he is literally dragged kicking and screaming. Unrelenting in its laughing fixation on death and people’s discomfort with it, Berlanga’s masterpiece is as damning as Bertolucci’s The Conformist (TSPDT #65) in its view of life under fascism, where the complicity and compromise of everday citizens perpetuate a society’s alienation from the horrors it perpetrates.  This vision is brought forth not only with a razor sharp script by Berlanga and Rafael Azcona, but by Berlanga’s use of the frame: whether in cavernously deep wide shots or claustrophobic interiors, people frequently bump into each other, distracted in their petty self-interests, the affably hapless protagonist moreso than anyone. The film also tweaks contemporary auteurs Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, linking the bourgeois self-absorption of their milieu to an ignorance of working-class entrapment, a condition that Berlanga, with unsentimental starkness and wit, brings sharply into view.

Want to go deeper? Continue Reading »