Shooting Down Pictures

Screened February 22 2010 on New Yorker DVD on a flight from Prague to New York

TSPDT rank #819 IMDb Wiki

Although this blog project covers only the films I haven’t previously seen on the TSPDT 1000, when I saw that The Times of Harvey Milk was back on the list after last January’s update, I just had to make room to write about it.  The film constitutes one of my formative film-related memories, though the memory had nothing to do with watching the film. It was March 1985; I was 10 years old. The Oscars were airing on TV – this was the first time I’d ever watched them. I don’t remember much about that year’s telecast other than that for the Costume Design award they brought an elephant onto the stage to accessorize the costume models from A Passage to India, and that an Asian guy had won Best Supporting Actor. I also remember that when they announced that the winner for Best Documentary was The Times of Harvey Milk, I started jumping up and down and ran to the living room to tell my parents. I’m not sure why I did this. Somehow I knew about The Times of Harvey Milk, and somehow it was a big deal to me that it had won.

It might have been that the film had gotten a lot of coverage on the local news in San Francisco, since it was about recent events that took place in the city. So I might have equated the film’s Oscar moment to something like when the 49ers won the Super Bowl just two months before. I wouldn’t actually see the film until two years later, during our family’s free home trial of HBO, but by that point Harvey Milk was already firmly imprinted in my mental mosaic of San Francisco, thanks in part to the film’s Oscar being touted by the news as a win for the city. Even after watching the film at age 12, I have to confess that I still didn’t know what “gay” really meant, other than some vague sense of men being in love with men, a concept that both repulsed and fascinated my parents (I remember long conversations about Boy George), and that my classmates would tease each other with homophobic epithets with such frequency, and with such perverse relish, that “fag” or “gaylord” became inverted into terms of endearment almost devoid of any denotative meaning (see Deadwood’s liberal application of the word “cocksucker” as a point of comparison).

I bring up these somewhat embarrassing recollections for several reasons. First, to show what significance The Times of Harvey Milk had for me as a Bay Area native, even without having seen the film. Second, to illustrate what a quasi-schizophrenic jumble of attitudes one can have towards sexuality growing up in an SF immigrant suburb, exposed to Asian homophobia, AIDS scares, (mostly) progressive teachers and media and a prestigious Oscar-winning documentary. In a sense, as a child I was the perfect audience for The Times of Harvey Milk, because the film is the cinematic equivalent of that teacher many of us might have had in grade school or junior high: the one with the uncommonly centered demeanor and reassuring smile, who seemed to have a handle on the world in a way we aspired to attain someday.

It’s really ironic then, that one of the documentary’s “subplots” involves the defeat of Proposition 6, which would have made it illegal for gays to teach in public schools. The defeat of Prop 6 was a milestone for gay rights in the U.S. and one of the highlights of Harvey Milk’s brief political career.  In a way, the film confirms the fears of the conservatives who wanted to pass Prop 6, and who dreaded the influence that pro-gay pedagogues would have on their children.  But the profoundness of that influence is less in the gay lifestyle itself than in the rhetoric used to present it, something that The Times of Harvey Milk makes vividly clear.

On the one hand, the film’s presentation of Milk invokes a classic American archetype: an entrepreneurial idealogue determined to make a difference in the world and for the better.  Through a series of biographical episodes and first-person anecdotes by historical witnesses, Harvey Milk is painted as an irrepressible optimist who runs for citywide office three times before finally succeeding, and who speaks with both fearlessness and flair on behalf of his constituents as well as his own principles. He’s ultimately painted as a tragic Shakespearean figure, felled by a jealous, self-destructive right wing Iago with an almost too-symbolic name: Dan White. I remember seeing the film as a kid and my mind making a laserbeam connection with gays as another persecuted minority, another underdog to be championed against The Man.

On the other hand, the film doesn’t cater to a sense of niche interest, but adopts an expansive embrace of a cross section of society. Take the film’s casting, a veritable rainbow coalition of voices; it’s the filmic embodiment of the State of the Union addresses that Bill Clinton mastered, touching on every demographic needed to score points across the board.  Among the many talking heads speaking fondly of Milk, there’s an Asian man to signify approval from racial minorities (yeah, I guess all of them):

Then there’s Tom Ammiano, future successor to Milk as City Supervisor.  He’s an extension of Milk’s off-the-cuff persona, flamboyant to the extent that he almost serves a quasi-minstrel role as comic relief.  But the levity serves as setup for two sequences: when Ammiano talks about the impact that Prop 6 would have on him, a schoolteacher at the time, potentially costing him his job; and a when he talks about the impact that Milk’s death had on him, the perils of his life come into sharp relief.

There’s also a TV reporter who prominently covered much of Milk’s tenure for the news – here she gives her off-camera impressions of Milk. What this does is foster a sense of community and candor behind the professional veneer; that despite the roles we play in society, we ultimately relate to each other as humans. It’s a small touch but it makes a difference and it really reveals the humanist spirit of the film.

But the real lynchpin as far as connecting the story to a “mainstream” audience is a labor leader who more or less admits his homophobia, but gradually and begrudgingly comes to respect Milk for his determined advocacy on behalf of the issues they shared.

It’s worth considering how much the film is a reflection, even an homage, of Milk’s personality. Like Milk, the film uses humor and empathy, along with a sense of the dramatic to shape and tone its message. Also note how well lit these interviews are, with a consciously consistent effect of sunniness, achieved even in the choice of wardrobe.  It’s subtle, not overtly staged, but effectively warm and upbeat, seeing its subjects in the best possible light – was this the way Milk himself saw people?

In their commentary for the New Yorker DVD, director Rob Epstein and editor Deborah Hoffman discuss how they decided to retell the events of Harvey Milk and SF Mayor George Moscone’s murders multiple times, first with raw footage, then with a chorus of voices alternately relating events and expressing emotional reactions. This is meant to mirror the natural waves of reaction experienced in times of trauma. This is another example of the canniness of the film, engaging the viewer on a deep level of empathy. It’s so brilliant that I almost find it unsettling that all my buttons are getting pushed the right way.  It’s almost disenfranchising; I mean, how can you not like this movie or disagree with its message?

In sum, this is as much a polemical documentary of its time as Triumph of the Will was for the 1930s – though rather than persuade you with grandiose spectacles of fascist supermen, it’s a more dialogic approach, informed by the rhetorical techniques of college seminars and group counseling sessions.  It’s open, embracing and incredibly potent, appealing to both reason and sentiment. While watching it at age twelve I came away with an appreciation of Milk and the gay rights movement, this time I stand in awe of the power of a masterfully constructed cinematic narrative to imbue people with a new outlook, its force a million times more powerful than the gun that took Harvey Milk’s life.

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Screened February 3 2010 on YouTube in Brooklyn, NY

TSPDT rank #784  IMDb Wiki

Be sure to also check out Ritwik Ghatak: An Online Primer

After watching the rigorously choreographed long-take mastery of Berlanga’s Placido, my encounter with Ritwik Ghatak was a jolt. His splintered account of family dissolution in Bengal following the 1947 Partition feels perpetually jostled, mirroring its characters sense of displacement and desperation to resettle themselves both physically and emotionally.

Discombobulation is apparent from the first scene: displaced villagers from the Bangladeshi side of the partition have tried to carve a colony for themselves on the outskirts of Calcutta, to the chagrin of the locals. Even among the migrants there are factions of locality and caste as a way to prioritize resettlement; as one landlord asserts: “If we can’t keep the differences, then what are we left with?”

Skip ahead to 3:30 in the following clip:

WATCH SUBARNAREKHA, PART 1:

Note how the sequence begins with a sense of patriotism and resolve: Haraprasad the teacher initiates a new school for the colony children.

It cuts from this composition that conveys a ceremonial sense of a community planting itself (note the flagpole squarely in the frame) to this more intimate shot giving a variation of the same idea, a child, hand planted on the adult.

But then there’s an abrupt cut to a completely different space (is it the same village?) where a low-caste woman pleads a landlord to take her and her son.

After a quick refusal the film explodes into chaos: her son suddenly runs offscreen and people begin to scatter in all directions across the frame. A man grabs the woman and the camera sweeps leftward as he drags her to a truck ready to deport all the low-caste migrants from the village.

The camera finishes its leftward sweep by craning upward to look down at the truck; the gesture is simple but combined with the onscreen activity, it conveys a sense of epic tragedy.

Then the shot cuts back to the earlier shot of the teachers sitting planted, as if they were spectators to their own village’s ethnic purging. Ghatak has established two visual spaces within the village and only now is he suturing them together, one fragmented space watching the other. It undermines the rosy words of peace and harmony uttered by the teacher, and establishes a theme of narrative, spatial and tonal fragmentation that continues throughout the film.

Another example: Ishwar, one of the villaged teachers, depressed over his lowly status as a migrant, runs into a college classmate, now a wealthy businessman and who offers him a job. Note how the angle on Ishwar shifts dramatically across the reverse shot at the moment he is offered the position:

The film is rife with angular shots expressing weird geometries; you would assume that Ghatak was co-opting his French New Wave contemporaries, but really it traces back to his love of Eisenstein and Soviet Constructivism.

A less propitious, but more striking example comes later, when Ishwar tells his sister Sita that she’s been betrothed against her will. Skip to 0:30 in this clip and see what Ghatak does with cutting variations of essentially the same shot of Sita to convey her sense of alarm (see Omar Ahmed’s comparison with how Scorsese uses the technique, after the break):

Again, the film is filled with these irruptions: one of the film’s happiest sequences, of two children frolicking through an abandoned airstrip, is abruptly ended when one of them is called away. The other child plays on her own; the music resumes the mood that the two of them had established until WHAMMO!

The film’s only real moments of sustained tonal clarity come in the songs sung by the adult Sita, which amount to arias in this historical opera. But even these songs can have a disruptive effect on the narrative. One of her most beautiful and mournful songs comes right after Ishwar has been awarded a promotion; he searches for her to share the news, finding her along the desolate banks of the river (1:50 in the following clip):

If anything, the protracted mood of this scene establishes the feeling of loss and longing that underlies the entire film.

Since I brought up the elements of the musical genre that Ghatak incorporates, I should also mention how unabashedly Ghatak embraces melodrama as well as Greek tragedy. The film is a roiling mix of genres as well as moods. And on a subtextual level, it’s more densely packed than I can manage to unravel in this post, connecting Oedipus, Hindu mythology, Marxist theory and the tragedy of Indian history in such a way that only a cosmopolitan scholar, artist and activist such as Ghatak could manage.  And yet, despite boiling all these elements into a raging stew that reflects the tumult of the world around him, he can also offer images of breathtaking simplicity, conveying all of his hope and sadness:

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Screened January 30 2010 on .avi downloaded from the website that dare not speak its name in Brooklyn, NY

TSPDT rank #763  IMDb Wiki

As with my previous entry on Douce, the only print of this film that I could access has no subtitles. My original plan was to enlist a Spanish-speaking friend to watch it with me and offer live translation. But having watched the film, I wouldn’t wish to force anyone to help me through the muy rapido Spanish dialogue. Just listening to it recalls the breathless banter of 30s screwball.

The online synopses I could find (most of them posted after the break) offer only cursory summaries of the plot, leaving much of what transpired onscreen lost to me. So much the better to appreciate the film’s cinematic qualities.  As I mentioned, the film’s spitfire dialogue recalls the comedies of Capra and Hawks; some associate the film’s Christmas setting and main plot (a guy desperately trying to save his livelihood after the bank calls in his loan) to Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. Others connect the film’s subplot about the rich townspeople’s bogus, self-serving acts of charity towards poor people during Christmas with that other great Spanish film of 1961, Bunuel’s Viridiana. But the film’s satirical depiction of people engaged in a manic farce while hosting out-of-town visitors had me thinking of another great comedy of the same year, Billy Wilder’s One, Two, Three.

Watching the film, despite feeling that the film moved at a brisk clip thanks to the speedy dialogue, I began to notice how long the takes were, with many shots lasting over a minute or more. I went back from the beginning and counted no less than 25 shots, each lasting one-to-three minutes long, which altogether account for over a third of the film’s 80 minute running time (title credit sequence not counted). There are roughly an additional 17 shots lasting 30-59 seconds. Overall, there are a total of 158 shots in 80 minutes, averaging 30 seconds a shot.

Why does Berlanga rely so much on long takes? On the practical side, it’s simpler, faster and more economical to set up a single master take than to do multiple camera set-ups for a given scene. But Berlanga is no slouch. Just watch this one-take scene. Clocking in at almost 3 minutes, it’s one of the longest shots in the film. Try to figure out how many actors are in the scene, and how many camera positions he’s able to achieve in one take:

By my count I have a dozen characters, and about half a dozen unique looks at this one room. Berlanga is very resourceful, relying on what I think is a single dolly track to roll the camera up and down the room , rotating the camera horizontally so that it captures a total of about 120 degrees of the room over the course of the scene.  But perhaps what’s most impressive is his staging of actors in several different configurations so that there’s an exceptionally dynamic sense of dramatic movement as well as shifting social dynamics from start to finish. Masterful use of foreground and background, not to mention lateral movement, to emphasize contrasts between divisions of people within a single room.

Believe it or not, this scene is preceded by a one-shot scene lasting 80 seconds, and followed by another one-shot scene lasting three and a half minutes. This dynamically staged long-take technique pretty much dominates the middle stretch of the film, where in one scene after another, people are thrown into different, contentious combinations, their fortunes and emotional states apparently in constant flux.

But Berlanga is no one-trick/ long-take pony. In other scenes, he’ll incorporate flash cutaways lasting just a second or two. There are a couple of sequences that use this technique liberally: the arrival of the charity benefactors at the town’s train station; and a charity auction where a man appears to be pressured to bid for something he doesn’t want to save face. Interestingly, both of these scenes amount to public ceremonies, as if to suggest that they elicit heightened states of excitement and anxiety.

Berlanga’s filmmaking was already quite deft 10 years earlier when he made Bienvenido, Mister Marshall!, employing freeze frames, fast motion and other comic editing tricks at a level on par with Preston Sturges. But his handling of dialogue scenes catered more to conventional Hollywood decoupage techniques. Compare what goes on in the above clip from Placido with how the following stills, captured from one scene in Bienvenido Mister Marshall!, cuts from master shot to individual close ups before returning to the master:

As another point of comparison to Berlanga’s shooting and in-camera editing technique, I pulled up Wilder’s aforementioned One, Two Three and played through the first half of the film, as well as the famous extended climactic sequence whose energy and incredible use of interior spaces to move action along is worthy of comparison to those in Placido. Scanning through about 80 minutes of footage, only once did I find a shot that lasted more than one minute. Here’s a representative capture from that sequence:

Even though the pacing is manic, the space isn’t nearly as compressed as the interiors in Placido. This film is set in large modern office spaces whose expanse suits a wide Scope frame.  Some of the energy is conveyed from a host of characters rushing in and out of Cagney’s office with their crises of the moment, with Cagney riding the eye of the storm.  For the most part the The film employs an arsenal of shots at different lengths (wide/ medium / close-up), tracking shots, shot/ reverse-shot dialogues, woven seamlessly and coherently even as it conveys the chaos at hand.

Interestingly, despite an ensemble of over a dozen characters interacting with Cagney over the course of this sustained climactic act, there are hardly ever more than two or three characters engaged with him at a given moment, which allows for Wilder to parse the manic activity he’s concocted into a coherent stream. Compare this to the above shot in Placido, where a dozen characters appear in one shot and alternate in their interactions, no one of them dominating the proceedings.

Wilder’s approach creates a more adversarial feeling between characters, setting up clear oppositional dynamics, mostly between James Cagney’s blow-hard Coke executive and everyone around him, with whom he dispatches one at a time. Berlanga’s technique of shooting dialogue scenes emphasizes more of a holistic social environment. Even as people contend with each other inside the frame, the camera acts as a needle to weave them together into a tapestry of comic dysfunction.

Interestingly, Berlanga’s film El Verdugo, made two years after Placido, employs a widescreen camera approaching the Scope compositions of One, Two, Three. While Berlanga largely retains the use of long takes often exceeding a minute, instead of compressed compositions of people, he more frequently exploits the wide screen to emphasize distances between people, especially with the main characters, who are undertakers, and thus relatively ostracized within society:

Thinking further on my account of Berlanga’s work in Placido, I’m now curious to compare his approach to ensemble scene-making to that of perhaps the most famous American ensemblist, Robert Altman. I don’t seem to have a DVD of Nashville or Short Cuts on me (!), but I would wager that even Altman doesn’t let his shots go as long or involve as sophisticated blocking as you see with Berlanga. Altman, a TV director, relied on multi-camera setups that he could use to cut from shot to shot, always looking for a shot to materialize (as in a sports event) rather than constructing it through blocking and framing.

Speaking of sports, I was playing with this sports analogy: that Wilder shoots dialogue like a lightweight boxer, dancing quickly across the canvas of his wide shots before settling into a series of shot/reverse shot flurries; while Berlanga is more akin to a heavyweight, lumbering steadily across the canvas, pushing you around the ring. Not sure how well this holds up, but it gives me an excuse to put up this clip:

Finally, I would like to say that I think enough of this film after one impaired viewing that I’d like to see it again with subtitles. I’m hoping someone might come through and offer timed fansubs. In fact, I’m willing to offer $140 US (which translates to about 100 Euros) to the first person who can provide timed fansubs for this film.

To take part in the Shooting Down Pictures Fansub Challenge, all you need is a copy of the movie Placido, which you can find via torrent, and a PayPal account for me to send the money if you’re the first one done. If you’re interested but don’t know how to access the movie via torrent, send me an email or DM me on Twitter (at alsolikelife) to let me know you’re interested, and I’ll hook you up. Offer good only until February 28, so better get cracking!

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Screened January 27 2010 on DVR downloaded from the website that dare not speak its name in Brooklyn NY

TSPDT rank #839  IMDb

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the one film on the TSPDT 1000 that I hadn’t been able to locate in any form was this one, which had just been re-introduced to the list after the January update. Not long after that update, with the help of a couple of wonderful people from the French archival cinema community, I was able to track down a 35mm print of the film with the rights held by Gaumont. Unfortunately, Gaumont quoted me a ridiculous fee of several hundred Euros to rent the print, which made it pretty much impossible for me to access it. However, fortuitously at the same time, someone posted a DVR rip of the film, presumably from European television broadcast, to a site that will here remain unidentified. So I had my chance at last to watch this strangely inaccessible classic of French cinema.

The one catch was that the rip was unsubtitled, which presented me with the dilemma of whether I should proceed with watching, esp. given that reviews of the film mention the elegant script by Pierre Bost and Jean Aurenche. Fortunately, Marilyn Ferdinand provides a solid enough account of the plot on her site that I was encouraged to take the leap. All the same, I must acknowledge that my understanding of the film is by no means satisfactory. I can only hope that my opting to treat this as an experiment in watching a film without a grasping its dialogue might offer alternative insights focused more intently on its cinematic properties.

I should also mention that watching the film in this manner reminded me of many times as a child when I’d watch American comedy films and TV shows with my mother, and I’d laugh along with the punch lines only to turn to see my mom bearing an uncomprehending smile, aware that there was something to laugh about but not quite knowing what was funny. I think there were at least a couple of instances where I’d play the asshole and ask her if she got the joke. In some ways I was as confused as she was – ashamed at the wedge between us, irrationally resentful to her for making me feel alienated in my joy even as with the TV laugh track to egg me on. I dedicate this entry to her, that we may unshamefully derive our own pleasures from what we don’t fully understand. Continue Reading »

Screened December  17 2009 on .avi format downloaded from the website that dare not speak its name in Brooklyn NY

TSPDT Rank # 938 IMDb Wiki

This post is dedicated to Matthew Dessem, proprietor of The Criterion Contraption. I’m going to co-opt his lengthy, conversational approach to writing up films, to savor this film as well as the remaining entries of my own project…

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Screened Wednesday December 23 2009 on 35mm at the MoMA Study Center, New York NY

TSPDT rank #986    IMDb Wiki

A white man on a trade expedition in an exotic tropical locale abandons his greedy merchant colonial companions to shack up with a native girl. He learns her people’s ways and warns them of the encroaching enemy that threatens to wipe out their culture. All of this is presented in a groundbreaking cinematic format that will redefine the standard of motion pictures to come. Sound familiar?

This 1928 Tahitian excursion was the first MGM sound film (as well as the first to feature the famous MGM lion in the credit roll). Swap 3-D for sound innovation and you pretty much have a Tahitian template for Avatar.  Not saying that James Cameron knowingly ripped off the plot; it’s pretty much self-flagellating post-Colonialist drivel, the Eurocentric bullshit that even Terrence Malick isn’t immune to. But at least instead of James Horner muzak, we get William Axt and David Mendoza’s sub-equatorial symphonic jazz score (listening to it, you can practically see the palm trees swinging languidly in the breeze – trimmed with Art Deco tinsel):

This production was set to be Robert Flaherty’s first feature for a Hollywood studio, but (as notes following the break detail) his ethnographic philosophy and methods clashed with his professional crew, led by assistant director W.S. “One Take” Van Dyke (The Thin Man). Flaherty eventually left the shoot (later to return to the Polynesians with F.W. Murnau to shoot Tabu) and Van Dyke took over, completing the shoot in swift succession and delivering what in many ways is a quintessential Hollywood entertainment: exotic adventure, love, gunfights, technical innovation,  spectacle linked to pseudo-liberal social consciousness. Plus giant killer clams and a the unforgettable sight of a body washed ashore covered in horseshoe crabs.  The film also skirts the issue of language barrier that forced Cameron to invent a whole new language, as White and Tahitian silent dialogues are translated into the universal language of English subtitles. Only in the movies, indeed.

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Screened December 22 2009 on .avi downloaded from the Website that dare not speak its name in Brooklyn, NY

TSPDT Rank #955  IMDb Wiki (German)

Considered the pinnacle of ’30s Austrian cinema, Maskerade embodies much of the best of 30s European filmmaking, in which the camera dances to a distinctly musical rhythm of movements and countermovements. It sits comfortably among the ’30s films of Rene Clair, Max Ophuls and Jean Renoir, as well as Ernst Lubitsch’s work in Hollywood. Compared to most of those films, its topic may seem relatively fluffy: an artist creates a minor scandal by painting a masked nude suspected to be an aristocrat’s fiancee; when he names an innocent girl in an attempted cover-up, it leads to unexpected romantic entanglement. Willi Forst takes a well-worn continental costume milieu as a starting point, doing everything he can to breathe life into it. The camera darts with ease through ballroom scenes, connecting the eyelines of characters as they scope each other’s movements. He laces the film with clever tricks both visual (dialogues filmed in silhouette) and aural (a montage of citizens making animal sounds while reading the gossip pages). Driving everything is a buoyant soundtrack of 19th century waltzes and opera, whose lilting rhythms can be found in the film’s pacing even when the music subsides. The film itself feels like a symphony of varied movements: robust allegros, minuet-like montages, and a climactic rondo that brings everything to full circle. Overall, life is presented as an irresistible society ball, governed by status, gossip and decadent desire.

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Screened December 19 2009 on unsubbed Region 2 DVD with subtitle file in Brooklyn NY

TSPDT Rank #907 IMDb Wiki

There’s a strong suggestion of a great movie in Victor Erice’s second feature, made 10 years after his celebrated debut The Spirit of the Beehive. Erice’s breathtaking use of natural light demands comparison to Vermeer, while his ability to evoke a child’s wonder and terror at the mysteries of the world make him an art cinema antecedent to Spielberg.  But financing woes halted filming on this story of a girl’s attempt to solve the riddle of her enigmatic father. While Erice edited the footage to what he considers a finished film, it’s clearly lacking a satisfying final act (in which the daughter travels to the father’s hometown carrying clues to his past).

But the narrative is just as compromised by moments that stray from the child’s first-person perspective, Erice’s strong suit. Scenes where the father corresponds to an old flame diffuse the suspense, though they give the film clarity in its truncated form. A running voiceover narration by the girl as an adult reinforces a sense of pastness that further dilutes the primacy of the moments Erice offers us, a number of them visually stunning.

It’s strange that Erice would allow a voiceover to structure a film whose underlying thesis is the futility of words: the father’s anguished letters leading to no good outcome; his awkward conversations with his daughter and virtual non-communication with his wife. Instead, it’s objects, images and gestures that link the characters: an amulet, a drawing of a woman, a joyful communion dance, the incessant pounding of a cane on floorboard. These are also Erice’s best forms of communicating, and what ultimately links this film to his viewers.

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Screened December 4, 2009 on Warner Brothers DVD in Brooklyn NY

TSPDT rank #995 IMDbWiki

For this film I felt less interested in my own thoughts than in those of  two of my earliest friends in the world of online cinephilia.  Back when I was a regular on the IMDb Classic Film board, Lee Price (Lee-109) and Christianne Benedict (Chris-435) were among the most knowledgeable and engaging peers, especially on the subject of horror films.  In fact they were contributors to the anthology Horror 101.  (Some of you may also know Christianne from our wonderful video essay on The World According to Garp; and Lee was behind the 100 Directors of Animated Shorts). So I thought to call them up and ask them what they thought of this film. What follows is 25 minutes of awesomeness. You can listen to the .mp3 here or right-click to download. Here’s an index of topics for easy reference:

0:00 – Setting template of Hammer horror and post-’50s horror movies
6:24 – What do Hammer’s Dracula and James Bond have in common?
8:20 – What Christopher Lee brought to Dracula
11:35 – Sex, vmpires and Victorian women
14:15 – Bram Stoker’s paranoia
16:00 – Favorite Dracula films, and why no movie yet has gotten Dracula right
18:00 – What Hammer introduced to the Dracula myth and to the movies

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Screened December 13 2009 on NYFA VHS (courtesy of the NYU Library) in Brooklyn NY

TSPDT rank #910  IMDb

In the second installment of Mark Donskoi’s coming-of-age trilogy, based on Maxim Gorky’s childhood memoirs, teenage Maxim emerges from the ashes of his family’s destitution, as chronicled in The Childhood of Maxim Gorky. Searching for a trade to apply himself, Gorky is repeatedly sabotaged by petty folk entrenched in each establishment he enters. Whereas Childhood held a quietly romanticized view of the masses suffering under the petty tyranny of pre-Revolutionary feudalism, My Apprenticeship shows the underclass exploiting each other.

These films are saddled with a Socialist Realist agenda that threatens to reduce each scene to a civics parable, denying it of the pulsing lyricism of that other landmark childhood film trilogy, Satyajit Ray’s Apu films. But there’s a strong humanist countercurrent that takes the film beyond mere didacticism. At its best moments the film resists the easy Soviet stereotyping of characters into desirable and undesirable social types. The most memorable characters engage with Maxim over books and ruminations about their waylaid ambitions; paradoxically, it is in relaxed conversational stasis, not in reform or production, that this Marxist propaganda film envisions a state of human fulfillment. The way Donskoi deploys music to freeze time and saturate a moment with lyrical pathos anticipates what John Ford would start doing around the same period. The ultimate motif is that of the Volga River, upon which the film stages more than a few knockout moments of wordless beauty. Its gentle, constant flow evokes a grace that transcends the turmoils and conflicts, grand or small, inflicted by humans upon each other throughout time.

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