Shooting Down Pictures

Screened November 29 on YouTube (thanks to Gina Telaroli for the tip) in Brooklyn NY

TSPDT Rank #975  IMDb

In a way it makes sense that Chantal Akerman’s 1982 masterpiece is (for the moment) available on YouTube, because it resembles a fan video compilation of dramatic scenes from the movies, stitched together in one ecstatic montage.  Instead of ripping them from her DVD collection, she’s reshot them in her own beloved Brussels. By my count we’re looking at 55 dramatic encounters, embraces and separations involving 75 nameless characters, usually in couples, lasting anywhere from 30 seconds to five minutes, arranged in loose chronology from anticipatory dusk to weary dawn. It’s a puzzle-form film that practically begs to be re-watched and broken down by geeks to find patterns and beguiling inconsistencies – like when a woman checks into a hotel in one scene only to be seen running into the same hotel a few scenes later. Many characters resemble each other in appearance and dress (women in blue dresses, men in white shirts) such that they all bleed into each other – only upon close observation does one realize that only a few characters reappear, and mostly near the end.

This convergence of the universal and the specific is but one of the film’s several paradoxes. With it’s actors’ balletic movements, rushing up and down streets and stairwells, pushing and pulling their partners in bars and bedrooms, it’s a musical, except  without music (save the recurring clacking of heels, as irresistible as fate). It depicts a city teeming with human life, energy, lustful passions, yet nearly every figure seems touched with lonely desperation even in their moments of consummation.  Or the way the characters move and speak like automatons following pre-programmed behaviors to express their most selfish desires. Love and lust, so exciting in an isolated moment, so banal in the context of human history, a script that essentially has never changed.

For me, this dialogue between love in the movies and in real life is the film’s most beguiling paradox. These fleeting scenes of romantic union and dissolution somehow embody both the larger-than-life drama of movie climaxes (and cliches) and the quotidian pleasure of everyday people-watching. Because these sublime encounters are devoid of the larger narrative granted to movie characters, they become as anonymous as people embracing on the street. The thrill of the movies aren’t just on screen, they’re everywhere around us, if we have the eyes to see them. This movie grants us that gift.

PART ONE OF TEN:

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Screened November 28, 2009 on Artisan Entertainment/ Republic Pictures VHS borrowed from the New York Public Library

TSPDT rank #978 IMDb Wiki

Leo McCarey’s sequel to Going My Way ruled the 1945 holiday season, outgrossing every film up to that time save Gone With the Wind.  Mixing gentle convent comedy, spiritual melodrama, and hints of romance between its megastar leads Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman, it was primed to be The All-Time Christmas classic movie. It’s a Wonderful Life has since taken that title, while Bells has receded into pop culture obscurity, considered too square for contemporary tastes. Time Magazine’s Richard Corliss even denounced it as the worst Christmas movie ever, for what he saw as the film’s sanctimonious tone and shamelessly manipulative plot twists.

And yet there are those who consider it one of McCarey’s finest among a body of work that boasts an unparalleled handling of both interpersonal ethics and the blossoming of romantic feelings. The two themes are more deeply interwoven here than perhaps any of his other films: Crosby’s priest and Bergman’s nun develop complex feelings as they shepherd their students, regarding each other with jealousy that shifts imperceptibly into admiration, and possibly more.  McCarey’s achievements are  especially exquisite given that a) he’s dealing with taboo feelings between a priest and a nun with the utmost below-the-surface delicacy; b) he had to mold emotional subtext into Crosby’s monotonously smug countenance.

The film ambles at an incredibly relaxed pace, resting comfortably in its spaces almost to the point of stasis. I haven’t come across any comparisons between postwar McCarey (An Affair to Remember) and Carl Dreyer (Ordet; Gertrud), but the two seem to have much in common in terms of how they allow complex feelings to unfold over gentle, drawn out dialogues in flat interiors, where space collapses and it’s just people in communion, breathing the same air. Likewise, this is a film that invites you to breathe with it. It benefits greatly from having one of the most open actors in film history embodying its philosophy onscreen. Bergman’s like a child in this film, her presence so organic and unmannered, eyes watching, reacting to lines of dialogue as if hearing them for the first time. The sequence where she teaches a student to defend himself while simultaneously figuring it out herself with a boxing manual is one of the most joyously playful pieces of acting on celluloid. It’s her attentiveness and conviction, not just to who her character is, but to the moment she inhabits – a moment handled like a divine gift in which she can learn, love and grow – that combines the best of what Bergman and McCarey stood for.

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