Never in a trillion years ...

A Passion for Films

I recently finished reading Richard Roud's A Passion for Films: Henry Langlois and the Cinematheque Francaise and Jacques Richards' Henri Langlois: Phantom of the Cinematheque
is also on the my Netlfix queue. Although I'm not prepared to join the cult of Langlois, just yet, I am astonished by the sheer voluminousness of the Cinematheque's screening schedule. In the 1950s, the Cinematheque showed three films a night (at 6:30, 8:30 and 10:30) almost every night of the year. When the Cinematheque added a new auditorium at the Palais de Chaillot in 1963, Langlois found himself with two theaters to fill and rather than split the programming between them, he played three films a night in the Palais as well meaning Parisians had a choice of six revival films a day, over 1,000 films a year (give or take repeat screenings). It's a staggering figure, especially looking back from the age of the flat panel TV and high definition DVD when a traditional cinematheque is doing heroic work if it shows 1 film a night! As I become more intimately familiar myself with the logistics and economics of programming at a cinematheque, even in a center of movie culture like Los Angeles, Langlois' achievement becomes all the more remarkable. Those were, of course, different times.

The Cinematheque Francaise was the theatrical equivalent of a one man Netflix queue that could be viewed by an entire city. The sheer number of films that Langlois threw up on screen is made all the more impressive by the fact that more often than not, the schedule of films was announced each week and more often than not, the announced film was not the film that ended up being shown. These days, revival houses have to be careful to lock programs months in advance and start advertising them well before the first screening. It's the only way to ensure that at least a minimum number of people will remember to make the time to actually leave their homes to see this or that film -- whether it's old or new.

There are obviously a lot of reasons why this is so. Langlois ran the Cinematheque on a shoe string but as near as I can, he didn't have to worry much about paying rentals or licensing fees to copyright holders on the films in its collection. Roud doesn't get into the specifics of the arrangements that Langlois had with studios and collectors. So even if, as was mostly likely the case, a lot of the Cinematheque's films screened to small audiences, low turnout didn't have a huge impact on the Cinematheque's bottom line. These days, that would simply be impossible. Studios and archives simply won't release prints without paid licenses and/or rentals. Given the costs and challenges of distributing a lot of contemporary cinema in traditional theaters (so much for the megaplex boon to indie and foreign films!), some smaller distributors are starting to charge cash-strapped cinematheques much higher rentals to screen new works. As much as most cinematheques have struggled to set themselves apart from the marketplace, the marketplace has come calling nevertheless looking for its cut.

Of course, the main reason why Langlois could screen as many movies as he screened was because there was simply no other way for people to see them at the time. He had a guaranteed, even if small, audience for every film. This was true even after the advent of television, which remained a poor substitute for the theatrical experience for decades. I believe it still is, despite all the latest advances in home theater technology and the almost paralyzing accessibility of so much classic and international cinema available on DVD. The real problem is that the accessibility of films on DVD actually reduces the chances you are ever going to see it on the big screen, the way it was originally intended to be seen.

While we hardcore cinephiles might like to distance ourselves from the "vulgarities" of contemporary, mainstream culture, in taking an elitist stance, for instance, towards those who still prefer "full screen" DVD versions to "widescreen" presentations, the bottom line is that we have still opted for convenience over experience. I don't want to open an endless debate about what actually constitutes an "authentic experience" of a film, but it should go without saying that even the best home theater experience of Murnau's Sunrise is still only a shadow of the experience of seeing it on the big screen on, oh joy of joys, a nitrate print! I think programmers and cinematheques need to remind their audiences that whether they are coming to see an old or a new film, they are also coming to share an experience that is rapidly fading. And by that, I don't only mean seeing a film on the big screen, I mean seeing a film on the big screen with an audience that really gives a shit about movies, with an audience that less likely to pull out their iphone and start scrolling through their calendar items in the middle of a film, which recently happened near me at screenings of both Let There Be Blood There Will Be Blood [I don't know why I keep screwing this title up] and The Savages, arguably two of the best films of the year. It was encouraging to see that the latest Los Angeles programming institution, Cinefamily, made the act of actually going to a movie, central to its philosophy:

The Cinefamily’s goal is to foster a spirit of community and a sense of discovery, while reinvigorating the movie-going experience.

I hope anyone who attends an Archive screening at the Billy Wilder Theater comes away with the same feeling. Certainly, that's what we aim to do as well.

Before ending this rant, I should be clear that I'm still all for making masterpieces old and new available on deserved DVD editions. I would only add that we should also start calling again for these films to return to the big screen as well -- and then actually show up when they do!

A World Without Writers

Is this thing still on?

Anyone interested in trying to revive this thing? Yet again?

Exiled etc.

Rob may be our resident Johnny To expert here but I highly recommend Exiled which has been selected by Hong Kong to represent it as a foreign language film for the Oscars.

I don't think I've ever seen a more meticulously and expressively photographed action film. Each set piece seems begins like a tableau and then just blows apart into furious movement. It's beautiful stuff.

Which reminds me of something else i was going to blog about.

I saw four of the six films in the Redcat's Pedro Costa retrospective this weekend and was totally blown away. (For all you Foundas haters out there, I would direct you to his piece in the Weekly on Costa which I thought was a pretty good intro to his films.)

Anyway, during the Q&A after Colossal Youth (Juventude em marcha) an obvious film student asked Costa about his pacing and editing style which, with its long takes and fixed camera positions, reminded the student of painting. Oh man did that set Costa off. As soon as the kid said painting Costa cut him off: "No, no, no, these are not paintings, this is cinema, it isn't painting at all ..." And proceeded into a rant against critics who have consistently referenced painting in discussing his works. I guess the age old antagonism continues ...

Film ... Huh ... What is it Good For?

I came across a striking quote while reading about the line up for this year's Venice Film Festival.

Here's the news that colored the piece:

[Festival]Director Marco Mueller has assembled a Hollywood-heavy line up for this year's festival, which opens on Wednesday with "Atonement," the screen adaptation of Ian McEwan's acclaimed novel starring Keira Knightley.

Two competition films are about Iraq, part of a spate of movies on the topic due to hit theatres over the coming months.

Then we get a quote from Mueller:

"For me cinema is now the best answer to war," Mueller said in a recent interview with an Italian magazine.

Maybe I'm getting a little too cynical in my old age - I'd love to still believe in the transformative power of art - but who in their right mind could look around at the fucked up state of the world today and still suggest that cinema is the best answer to anything?

I get that a movie can open up a pathway to understanding different peoples and different cultures. I've actively sought out films about Islam and the Muslim world the last few years -- I recommend The Clay Bird and Time and Winds -- and I think I have a more complex, nuanced grasp on the issues of Islamic terrorism as a result. Just to pick one example. But it's more than a little naive to think that watching a couple of movies is going to change anything. Viewing without action is meaningless and the cinema, for all it's potent efficacy at conveying a political message or exposing corruption is a medium that encourages passivity in its patrons, is it not?

Just throwing out there to RDs resident cynics: Does anyone here agree that cinema is the best answer to war?

Dawn (Note: Spoilers for Sunshine)

Not to make a theme of bagging on the Weekly but Ella Taylor's review of Sunshine is a fairly good example of how bad the film criticism has become there, in my opinion. She either exaggerates some points for effect -- Cillian Murphy does not spend most of the film peering through one confining contraption or another, he spends about 20 minutes (out of 115) in a space suit; no golden-suited figure is dragged into the gravity of the sun, although one does become incinerated upon becoming exposed to its unadulterated rays -- or simply misunderstood others -- the sun's premature weakening has nothing to do with humans and little about the occasional bursts of violence could be considered sadistic. In short, her review seems rather lazy to me; she appreciated some of its surface but couldn't be bothered to think about its themes.

I would place the film in the company of Children of Men. Both films use apocalyptic events in the near future -- the sudden infertility of humanity; the sudden weakening of the sun's power -- as the springboards for meditations on the role of faith and hope in human existence. The crew of the Icarus II are all well aware that their mission may be pointless and it taxes them, popping up in petty fights. However, at some level they all accept that the potential to do good outweighs the risks or pointlessness; Capa's fractured monologue to his sister and nieces tells them that if they wake up one morning and the day seems even a bit brighter, the mission will have been worth it. This hopefulness also informs the crew's fateful decision to alter their course in an attempt to rendezvous with Icarus I -- Capa, the crew's physicist, reckons that two last chances are better than one, and illustrates his point with a computer model that refuses to calculate the likelihood that their mission will succeed.

The sun itself becomes the symbol of this hope and of an utter lack of hope -- or perhaps a different kind of hope, a fatalistic desire to leave the material world behind. Searle, the Icarus II's psychologist, begins the film by experiencing the sun as directly as he can, giving himself a very bad case of sunburn in the process. His experience is transcendental; he describes it as the sun overtaking one's body and soul. Capa describes what will happen upon the detonation of the Stellar Bomb they hope will jump start the fading sun as a "small Big Bang" -- the creation of a new star within the old one -- and adds that he is not at all frightened about what will happen. On the other hand, the villain of the film has experienced the same transcendental experience as Searle and has come to a different conclusion, one that would doom earth to death. For the villain, the sun doesn't infuse him, it remains outside of him and "speaks" to him as it poisons his body. Unable to embrace the hope that the sun represents, the villain aligns it with "God," an abstraction of life and death -- it becomes a symbol of a symbol, a perversion of its relationship with the humans and planets it nurtures. The showdown inside the Stellar Bomb between Capa, Cassie and the villain is a battle between the complete faith in science to renew the transcendental symbol (Capa), an agnosticism that both fears and believes in the future (Cassie) and a fatalistic religious attitude that assumes that natural disasters are the just deserts for sinful humanity (the villain).

The film's "lead," Robert Capa, shares a name with the famous World War II photographer. The connection might be a bit opaque, but one possible link would be the Capas as witnesses to pivotal battles in human history between more-or-less clearly defined good and evil. Just as the Allies committed what must be considered war crimes during WWII, the crew of the Icarus II sacrifice themselves and others for what is clearly a greater good. In this case, Cillian Murphy's famous blue eyes are the lens through which this epic moral struggle occurs.