written and directed by John Woo

Yes, this is Criterion Collection #8.

Okay, I’m going to get this right.

Obviously, the English title is The Killer. But that’s not literal. This is the Chinese title as it appears in the film (see above):

喋血雙雄

This film was made and set in Hong Kong, so the language is Cantonese (rather than Mandarin) and the characters are “traditional” (rather than “simplified”). Wikipedia tells us that the “pinyin” romanization of the title is “Dié xuè shuāng xióng” but that’s inappropriate for Hong Kong Cantonese, which apparently calls for the “jyutping” system: “Dip hyut soeng hung.” (Actually, the full jyutping rendering includes numbers indicating the pitched “tone” of each word: “dip6 hyut3 soeng1 hung4.”)

喋 = “dip” = flow/chatter
血 = “hyut” = blood
(喋血 = bloodshed/bloodbath)
雙 = “soeng” = pair
雄 = “hung” = male/hero

The internet tells us that this adds up to “Bloodshed of Two Heroes,” though there are also votes for “Two Men Covered in Spattering Blood” and “A Pair of Blood Spattering Heroes.”

I myself would venture something like “The Bloodbath Duo,”* which is lame but at least sounds vaguely like the English title of a movie. Unlike “Two Men Covered in Spattering Blood.” Though if it wasn’t the result of clumsy translation, that would actually be a fantastic and charismatic title; similarly, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind sounds like a confused Chinese import if you have reason to hear it that way.

Now thoughts:

You can say that these slow-mo gun battles are joyful choreography rather than real, vicious gore, and in a sense that’s very true. This is a movie made by and for those who have fetishized movie violence to the point that it has lost most of its intrinsic, mimetic meaning. But I can’t wrap my enthusiasm around that. Numbing fetishization does not free us from meanings, it just diminishes our ability to master them. As non-schlock artists know, stylization is not the same as dehumanization. Dehumanization, in fact, is the cheapest, most insensitive form of stylization.

We are aware, watching this movie, of both its complete indebtedness to, and non-participation in, American culture. It is neither a well-formed American action movie, nor is it a direct imitation of one. Its relation to American film seems to be one of fascination at a distance; the considerable cultural distance at which Hong Kong lies. Individualism, a keystone concept in all American movies, is here emulated, but seems to have been understood only as an aesthetic, a fantasy, rather than as a genuinely felt philosophy or a personal reality. The movie is all about the epic, soulful charisma of the eponymous Killer, but it’s really only about the idea of epic, soulful charisma; the character has no true personal identity at all.

I was aware of the missing human element as a gap – not just in the character but also at the level of showmanship. Where is the “I,” in this movie, either making it or in it? At a subconscious level, I felt this gap as a sense of repression. Here’s where my thoughts begin to take on a naive and potentially racist quality; brace yourselves. The void at the heart of this movie reminded me of my recent experience with Seven Samurai, and suggested a line of thought about East Asian cultures generally; take it or leave it. In these movies, cultures that have not truly embraced the idea of the individual are at play with that idea, because they’ve been told it’s the stuff dreams are made of. But either their dreams are repressed to a greater degree than we know, or these aren’t their actual dreams at all.

The dialogues about the self, in The Killer, are like imitative poems written by enthusiastic aliens. “He looks determined without being ruthless. There’s something heroic about him. He doesn’t look like a killer. He comes across so calm… acts like he has a dream… eyes full of passion,” murmurs the cop to the sketch artist, apparently entranced by the apparently mysterious apparent personality of The Killer, while the synths dig deep into that minor tonic chord looking for love. Is that really the flavor of life, for anyone? It only relates to life via elements misunderstood from other movies.

It’s like Jack Skellington making Christmas. The movie is passionately enamored of the things that it doesn’t comprehend, because they are so fantastically unlikely. What’s this? A man with a dream? Eyes full of passion? How marvelous!

I’ll say it: I find East Asian mindsets very hard to crack and I think it’s because they are genuinely different in how they perceive the self. I still recall my amazement upon seeing Japanese WWII propaganda cartoons wherein the Japanese enthusiastically portrayed THEMSELVES as a ravening horde of identical creatures, led by an individual who served only as a representation of the national spirit. That psychological culture has obviously weakened but it seems to live on in many ways; it has not been truly supplanted by the Western idea of the individual.

In the present movie, viewers are not supposed to identify with The Killer, or his associate, or the cop – they are only supposed to recognize them from other movies. It seems not to be appropriate to identify with characters. Perhaps this is felt as a kind of intense propriety – the inner sensations of an individual are seen as bodily functions that ought not leak out. In theory, this would seem to be contradicted by movies where individuals fight and love and cry, but watching the movie you sense that there is no contradiction at all. These are not individuals, they are MOVIE CHARACTERS, large and fascinating and not like us.

To me, East Asian celebrities seem arbitrary somehow, like they don’t really have their heart in it. Japanese television etc. seems bewilderingly wacky to us because its priorities are so different. I suspect it has gotten so absurd because is not the content of culture but the fact of culture that is important to that audience. The real purpose of such culture is to disseminate the comforting, proud knowledge that one is a member of a society that is full of celebrities and noise and products and bullshit. The people on Japanese TV don’t seem like real people because obviously they’re not and, says Japan, why should they be? The whole notion of “real people” is beside the point – it’s beside any point. It goes without saying that real people are an embarrassing subject – the one truly, painfully shameful subject – and thankfully have no direct role in culture.

We see in Japan (yes yes, I know the movie is from Hong Kong; like I said, this is all irresponsible and racist) a culture of people learning how to be individuals from movies instead of from humans. They are the offspring of the West’s dreams, which the West can hardly recognize. There should be a version of the velveteen rabbit scenario where a kid wishes for his toy to be alive but when it comes to life it has a personality and mind totally and disturbingly alien, the way a toy’s really would be. Is there a story like that?

When I was in college, Isaac Stern came to speak and take questions at some event or other, and was audience-asked why there are now so many classical musicians of East Asian descent. He answered by saying that a century ago there were many Jewish classical musicians – because, he thought, the culture of classical music presented itself to Jews as a way “out of the ghetto” – and that he thought something similar was in effect for East Asians and Asian-Americans today; that classical music offered them a way out of the “cultural ghetto” of their ossified thousand-year-old traditional cultures. This answer immediately created a stir in the audience and provoked several indignant responses. I’m told that later in his visit, Isaac Stern was unambiguously unpleasant to several Asian musicians, so perhaps there was more in the air at that moment than I knew. But I wasn’t sure then how offensive that answer was, and I seem to be disseminating a variant of it now. Phenomena like the undeniable affinity of contemporary Asian cultures for classical music would seem to justify some kind of generalizations of this sort – the question is getting the generalizations right, and I doubt that I have since I’m pretty much just making it all up. But I believe there is, at least, some grain of truth in this: that Asian cultures have a distinctly different impression of the self from ours, descended from their historically different impression of the self, and perpetuate it subtly, through small behavioral cues that are not quickly subsumed by general assimilation, internationally or as immigrants; which accordingly creates a slightly different relationship to work, to the external world as a whole, and at least partially accounts for large cultural phenomena like the absurdity of Japanese TV and Hong Kong action movies, or the widespread East Asian enthusiasm for classical music.

Maybe even that’s offensive too but at this point I’m not sure why it would be. Offended parties, by all means please show up in the comments and set me straight.

Anyway, for all that I’m saying they don’t know from “the self” over there in East Asia, I’m surely there is in fact plenty of contemporary Chinese (and Japanese, and Korean, etc.) literature and film that is articulate and sincere and astute about it, and might open a window for me, but I haven’t gotten there yet. A glance down the list suggests that I might not get there through Criterion, either. Right now I’m just watching this silly shoot-em-up movie.

Film-buff multiculturalists are generally either nerds (who feel reassured and comforted by fetishistic, enthusiastic-alien abstract manipulation of social reality) or scholars (who are occupationally prone toward evaluating things in the abstract rather than feeling them – and thus tend toward the same lack of direct engagement) and so it is not a surprise to me that twisted-mirror fetish-variants of Hollywood fare are the Asian cinema most enthusiastically imported to the US. I don’t really have any sense of what “high,” “literary” “intellectual” culture from the East looks like.

Also, in this movie, when he takes the girl to the hospital, the sign says “Scared Heart Hospital.” Those crazy Chinese!

So, I didn’t really talk about this movie at all. Probably the most offensive thing about all the presumption above, in fact, is that it takes The Killer as its starting point. But stay tuned because the next selection is another John Woo bullet-fest starring Chow Yun-Fat and I stay much more on topic in that entry.

This Criterion disc is long out of print and rare, and though I did manage to find a rip of the movie itself, I couldn’t get my hands on the disc as a whole, so I didn’t get to experience the commentary or anything else. Hence no image of the disc menu above.

Music here is by Lowell Lo, a Hong Kong composer/actor who apparently owns a synthesizer almost as good as mine. No official soundtrack release. Here’s the main title; cue it up, release the doves, and look like you have a dream.

Apologies, again, that I dared think these things. I deleted the ugliest stuff. Open minds and open hearts, people! Not scared hearts! Let’s talk.

* I’ve now (later) found several sites that suggest “Bloodshed Brothers,” which is pretty good.

directed by Roy Ward Baker
screenplay by Eric Ambler
based on the book by Walter Lord (1955)

Criterion Collection #7.

Not a film of any grand distinction, but gripping and effective all the same. The real life events are rich and upsetting, and all the film has to do is stay out of the way, which it does. The direction and acting are “restrained” and straightforward in the British style, but the resulting blandness here happens to be an asset – unintentionally, I suspect. The theme is man vs. death; we watch as the black water rises slowly, knowing that all these people are doomed, yet they irrepressibly go on being silly humans, chattering about propriety and nobility and inconvenience and on and on. So long as they can cling to their little ideas, they do. And so does the movie itself, seeming like a nice dull British movie about nice dull British people – which made the sense of impending horror that much more accessible to me. The audience instinct to shout “don’t go in there!” here manifests itself as “Don’t be the type of mild-mannered people who are in mild-mannered movies like this! You’re entirely unprepared for the elemental forces that are about to kill you!” That happens also to be the essence of our fascination with the story of the Titanic, I think, so this movie works out to be quite involving.

Part of me subconsciously was holding out hope that the passengers would be saved. When I caught myself feeling it, I was amused and surprised at myself, but there was no denying the feeling. I guess part of that is human nature, faced with any tragic story, whether or not it’s historically true. But I think here it particularly had to do with the blandness of the filmmaking. Since the movie never seemed to have an emotional agenda for me, it always seemed possible that the story and I might get to sneak away intact. James Cameron’s Titanic, by contrast, is so heavy on its agenda of epic-ness – the soundtrack always reminding us that “you are watching a grand tragedy!” – that it is impossible to hold out hope that anything other than a grand tragedy will happen. That movie was praised (by Roger Ebert, at least) for opening with a quick rundown of the historical course of events, to map out the story structure. But there is a huge difference between knowing externally to the film that the ship will sink, and knowing it within the film itself. Cameron (and Ebert, and everyone else) might have thought that starting a movie about the Titanic by telling us that it sank was just telling us what we already know, but it’s different to be told that your movie self knows it, too.

When we watch a movie we are always role-playing; the phrase “suspension of disbelief” hardly covers it. We are playing a game of make-believe at the movie’s request, constructing a make-believe self who knows only what the movie tells us to know. Of course, we always know more than that, but that’s exactly why we need the puppet self – so that we can negotiate between “we don’t know who the killer is, yet,” and “it’s so totally obvious who the killer is” and hold on to them simultaneously. Most movies are a series of implicit cues to the audience that map out what the “ideal audience member” is thinking. To interpret and follow these cues requires a certain amount of “theory of mind,” but there’s nothing sophisticated about it – generally even dumb people are very good at it. In fact, for many people, it seems like the false mind created on cue is actually nimbler than the real mind behind it. People who laugh heartily at clearly-cued but objectively unfunny jokes are demonstrating not their primitive sense of humor but rather their fine attunement to expectations. Their actual minds hardly enter into it, because they’re not called for. To take an example from the recent news – the people at political rallies who shout out scary stuff with fervor are not, I don’t think, actually expressing their true selves; they are just playing the part that the rally implicitly cues them to play. That may seem inherently ignorant but it’s not – it’s just like going to the movies, and it’s something we all do. But during a movie, all those fake minds are confined to chairs in the dark – bodies are shut down, as in sleep, to prevent us from flailing when we move in a dream – whereas during a political rally, they’re loose in the world and still capable of doing things. And those puppet minds are not to be trusted. That’s what’s scary.

Perhaps the defining distinction of the “art film” is that it attempts to address itself to the real mind and not the puppet. No cues, no agenda, nobody that you’re “supposed to be.” Would-be high-minded people are, after all, the only ones who complain about Hollywood movies being “manipulative.” As I said above, I certainly see the danger of the false self, and can sympathize with the desire to get away from cheap “manipulation.” But we must accept that role-playing is inevitable, with any work of art. An artist has to realize that his audience exists in the future, very possibly after his own death, and that they know things he doesn’t know. To engage with him they may well have to un-know things, and the only way to un-know is to begin afresh with a puppet self, a new mind. The movie that refuses to help its audience build a new mind may think it is abstaining from cheapness and condescension but it is generally just being stubborn and leaving the audience out in the cold. The strength of mind to watch as more than just the puppet is the individual’s responsibility, not the movie’s. From this point of view, refusing to give your audience cues is actually more condescending than manipulating the hell out of them, because it is based on the assumption that they need to be protected from manipulation, that they are too weak in the face of your art. Hollywood movies now, I think, lay on the manipulation as thick as possible because they trust that the audience has built up a substantial immunity to it. I guess in the earlier days of cinema, the audience probably was weaker, in that respect, because they weren’t as practiced. So perhaps there was in fact more of a need for the reserve and lyricism of Jean Renoir, or whoever, in order to leave the audience’s mind whole and able to engage. And perhaps our cultural sea legs are the reason why those sorts of movies aren’t really made anymore. We can all think perfectly straight after four drinks, so no matter how sophisticated a conversation you want to have, there’s no need to skimp on the booze.

That’s a passing thought and I don’t know if I buy it.

Anyway, that was all a digression. My original point was that A Night to Remember is far more emotionally effective than Titanic in regard to the central tragedy because it never tells the puppet about what is going to happen; it leaves that up to your real mind, which allows for a poignant dissonance. In Titanic, even the puppet knows all; the only thing reserved for actual emotional tension is the fate of the fictional romance-novel couple who have been Colorformed on to the historical backdrop.

Hm. Not sure that “puppet mind” stuff will make any sense to anyone but I move on.

The commentary, by two Titanic experts/obsessives (Don Lynch and Ken Marschall, who would go on to advise on Titanic) goes like this: “See those chairs? Those are exactly like the chairs on the Titanic, they really did a fabulous job with that. And see that railing?” etc. Other bonus materials make clear that producer William MacQuitty lavished a remarkable amount of attention on that sort of thing, for the time, so I’m sure he’d be gratified by their remarks. Walter Lord, the author of the original book, is seen too, and comes off as exactly the sort of person who might think that “A Night to Remember” would be an exciting title. I know I read the book in 8th grade but I can’t recall a thing about it; the title and the man behind it give me a hint as to why not. But I think I saw this movie then, too, and didn’t remember it either. I am not as stymied by superficial dullness as I was in 8th grade, I am proud to say.

Music, by William Alwyn, is perfectly decent and appropriate in the standard mold; nothing too assertive. Whenever “angst and struggle” music suddenly flies in to accompany the onboard chaos, it seems a little cheap for a second, and then you adjust. This is, after all, a movie. For track 7 of your album, I offer the Main Titles. Unfortunately, sound effects (of the ship launching) mar the first 30 seconds, but there were no completely unobstructed cues in the whole movie and this was the obvious choice, so you’ll have to live with it. Believe it or not, there are two separate recent rerecordings of this unremarkable main title, both of them, I believe, reconstructed by ear, the original score materials from most British films having been thoughtlessly incinerated. One is rather bad and the other is rather good.

This “watching the Criterion Collection in order” whim seemed doomed at first because it’s so stupid and endless, but I’ve been truly surprised at how much pleasure it’s given me so far. As playlists go, it’s got quality, unfamiliarity, and variety going for it. Scoring cultural literacy points is a bonus built in to many, if not all, of the selections. Overall, it seems more promising to me than my Netflix queue – and I made my Netflix queue, so that’s saying something. So, for the time being, I’m planning to keep it up. My policy solution for undesirable films is that I am perfectly entitled to skip any movie that I think will seriously nauseate me. I do not believe in “ordeals.” Tedium, with the right attitude, evaporates, but disgust is biological. I have my health to think of!

Incidentally, this is the second entry in a row on this site where I’ve opined that “blandness” is an asset to a piece of art. I’m not sure what that says about my current mindset. Something, though.

written and directed by Jean Cocteau
based on the story by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont

Criterion Collection #6.

The writing of this entry has been oddly fraught. I have begun and abandoned two versions already. I know, I know: who cares. Indeed.

The first miscarriage was the result of writing immediately after my first viewing, before I had gone back for the commentaries. Reactions change after you watch something several times. The second miscarriage was a bizarre experiment in writing by dictation + transcription. My spoken train of thought was fairly compelling, I thought, but only when it hit the page did it become clear to me how ridiculously unbounded it was, and how impervious to distillation. When I write, I struggle against not just my graceless verbosity, but also my tendency to think by disjunct leaps. The challenge of articulating my thoughts on a given subject but not on others feels something like peg-solitaire. It’s hard not to strand those pegs!

So let’s get right to it, as condensed as possible. I enjoyed this movie but held reservations. Those reservations were at the fore in my initial response; by the time I had watched the movie thrice more, for the commentaries and the opera (see below), I had become accustomed to those reservations and so was better able to enjoy the movie for what it is, rather than dwell on what it isn’t.

First, my reservations, enumerated:

1. The best moments outclass the average by an unflattering margin. The eerie, atmospheric fantasy sequences are wonderful, which only points up how the other scenes can be rather precious and are frequently dull.

2. Cocteau has many moments of fine inspiration, but he is not a natural filmmaker; his relationship to the medium is abstract rather than intuitive, and as a result there are many moments where rhythm and emphasis are subtly mishandled. A lot of goodwill and momentum ends up falling through those cracks.

3. Also symptomatic of Cocteau’s abstracted approach to the art is his naïve affection for blatant stagecraft and raw film tricks (hidden cuts and dissolves, mirrors, slow and reversed motion, etc.) I find these techniques delightful, but it must be acknowledged that they distance the audience from the story, because they expose and embrace artifice. And with this in mind, Cocteau’s prefatory injunction to the audience that we try to approach the tale like a child who “really believes” seems disingenuous – and/or condescending, to children, audiences, and fairy tales.

4. From Cocteau’s onscreen presence and affected handwriting (and the star under his signature), to his dreamy boyfriend in the role of godlike magician, sensitive lover, shirtless rogue, and flamboyantly caped lion, to the film’s undisguised and utter disinterest in Beauty, the ostensible lead character: there is an unpleasant Siegfried-and-Roy air of unchecked homosexual ego underpinning the whole thing. Yeah, I said it.

There’s no room for self-regard in the telling of fairy tales. “Fairy tales and the very sensitive artists who love them” is another story. This story, I believe.

Those are the gripes – or enough of them for here, anyway.

The praise is:

1. The scenes of the unearthly and fantastic are lovely, strong, and memorable. There are several images in this movie of high enough quality to justify all the rest. The strange Doré/Méliès/Dalí ambiance of the Beast’s castle is as distinctive and evocative a psychological space as any in a movie.

2. The photography is beautiful, bolstered by the lighting and costumes.

3. The trick shots and magic are all, as I said, delightful, both quaint and uncanny. I especially liked the moment when Beauty teleports back home and emerges through a hole in space.

4. Once you have accepted that the movie will never be quite as Edgar Allan Poe, quite as fevered as you would like, it begins to feel rather cozy. I imagine that to those who grew up with this movie (are there such people?), it could seem like a very warm and inviting place to return.

Music by Georges Auric lays it on a little thick at times but has some fine episodes, especially in the scenes where Beauty is exploring the castle in silence and the score carries us. Auric’s allusions to Ravel were perfectly tasteful but nonetheless inspired me to speculate about the superior score Ravel himself would have written, since this movie would have been exactly his sort of thing. (He did in fact write a little piece about la belle et la bête).

Here’s the Main Title, track 6 for your album. Auric has gone pretty blandly Hollywood here and it’s not the best piece in the score. I was tempted to select an excerpt from elsewhere, but I’d like to try to stick to standalone music – overtures, exit music, intermissions, etc. – and there were no cues that could be played completely without sound effects anyway.

There is a very attractive rerecording of the complete score that makes a much better case for Auric than the original. But for you I’m sticking with the straight-from-the-film version; the crackly mix and blunt performance is part of the movie’s personality.

Incidentally, of the five previous movies: La grande illusion has no soundtrack available (well, someone is selling a CD of the audio ripped straight from the film, but that doesn’t count); Shichinin no samurai was recently released but is already hard to come by; The original recording of The Lady Vanishes has, unsurprisingly, never been released, but oddly enough, someone recently concocted a full arrangement of the tune in piano concerto style, so that this album could claim to feature music from the movie, and you can still get that track on various Hitchcock compilations; Amarcord has been released and is fairly beloved; a few cues at least from Les quatre cents coup have been released, but don’t seem to be available now. As for La Belle et la Bête, the rerecording is your only choice, and you wouldn’t want the original anyway.

This all brings me to the last thing I must address. For the occasion I am resurrecting some text from the original cranky draft of this entry:

On this DVD is something bizarre: an alternate audio track containing an opera that Philip Glass composed in 1994 to be performed in sync with the film. What he has created is, in theory, fascinating: a full-length film opera paced like a non-opera. The project of composing a continuous work to supplant the entire original audio of an existing film is itself intriguing. This stuff is truly right up my alley. But Philip Glass, I finally feel emboldened to say, is terrible, and this opera is horrendous. I am tempted to put “opera” in quotes. It felt more like opera day on Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. For each scene, an accompaniment is laid down, built on – get this, Glass fans – a regular pulse, and then every single line of dialogue is plopped down on it wherever it happens to fall, to sync up with the mouths. He makes a token effort, at best, to relate the sung melodies to the looping harmonies, and the “click” tempi in which this business is worked out seem to have been chosen with no great sensitivity to the content of the scenes. The vocal lines end up being 100% melodically and rhythmically asinine, just outbursts of comically rushed-sounding garbage that seem as if they were auto-set by a poorly-programmed computer. His approach reduces the movie to scene-long blocks of unified affect, a technique that might play as atmospheric power in Mr. Glass’s other projects, but here just feels like obstinacy and laziness. Composing 90 minutes of opera/film score is a pretty hefty task – but not if you mostly ignore the film, reduce the text-setting to a purely mechanical process, and just play inane vamps to cover the time. Then it’s pretty easy, isn’t it. And – and this is really the most infuriating thing about it – even if we accept that Mr. Glass’s personal brand requires and excuses all of the above, even if we sigh and try to embrace the idea that 90 minutes of inane vamping is a sophisticated artistic response to this film – even then – we are still left with the fact that these are for the most part ugly, awkward vamps, badly orchestrated for chintzy synthesizers. They do not “feel” like the movie or the story or fantasy or mystery or anything good. They feel like peepee.

Ugh. Nonetheless an interesting project, and the disgust that I felt while watching it was accordingly interesting disgust, for me. So thanks, Philip.

But seriously: this guy is artistic fraud par excellence. Just because music has aesthetic value doesn’t mean the value necessarily originates in the talent or intellect of a composer. A single sustained chord has aesthetic value, and so does a room with a good paint job. Philip Glass is like the guy at the paint store; his paint is reliable enough, and is useful for certain rooms. But it’s as if Sherwin Williams let his fame go to his head and started producing vast sample chips for display at MOMA. “This sample chip, a gray-green entitled ‘November Mist,’ is a meditation on the inner life of genius, and is designed to replace the visual in Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête.” Seriously, that’s what this was like.

Finally, the commentaries: were the best yet. There are two – Arthur Knight and Sir Christopher Frayling – and they go in rather different directions and complement each other nicely. Both are intelligent and relaxed.

I had planned to talk about the original story of Beauty and the Beast itself, about the odd changes that were made by Cocteau, and about the debt owed by the Disney version to this film and the ways that Disney’s version actually improves on the plotting. But now I just want this to be over.

And lo!

directed by François Truffaut
story by François Truffaut
adapted by François Truffaut and Marcel Moussy
dialogue by Marcel Moussy

i.e. The 400 Blows.

Quite wonderful and definitely my favorite Criterion Collection pick so far. This being number five and all previous disclaimers regarding the longevity of this project continuing to apply. Coming up very soon on their list are various roadblocks – a whole slew of discs that are out of print and thus extremely hard to come by in the Criterion edition (there are always illegal ways, online, but do I really want to go there? not particularly), and, more distressing still, movies that I really REALLY don’t want to subject myself to. So I’ll either be dropping the whole thing cold or coming up with convoluted policies to rationalize the ones I skip.

“Quite wonderful and definitely my favorite Criterion Collection pick so far,” I said. As the guy says in that book about books you haven’t read*: we have all kinds of impressions of works we haven’t actually experienced, because just knowing they exist means sorting them and fitting them into our picture of the wider culture. In my picture of the wider culture, I have a chunk of property carved out for “European art movies” where I can toss all sorts of titles I haven’t yet seen. Having given them a category and seen a couple, I assign some basic prejudices to them. I articulated some of those prejudices here: “slower pace, less artifice, more interest in the human, more room for the lyrical and the profound, more ambiguity, greater resonance.” But the more basic prejudice is the one that can’t be articulated, that being my overall sense of what that all adds up to: what a European art movie “is like” and, more pointedly, what it “is worth to me.”

Because while I can nod at each of the attributes in that list I just copied from my entry of two years ago: yes, yes, they are all true of The 400 Blows – I also feel that what they signify as a whole is not true of The 400 Blows. Having thrown its title on the “arthouse” pile in my brain, I felt while watching that though I had categorized it correctly by all objective standards, I had gotten it wrong subjectively.

I’m not about to come out here and say that I have never been touched or moved or impressed by an arthouse movie – but this one moved me at a more basic level. It actually reminded me of life, and elicited emotions directly. Most of the time, arthouse movies seem to me to be specifically and intentionally rejecting the rhythms of commercial filmmaking. I think of them as having a rubato drift – all inflection, no drive – which is, in its way, just as artificial and arbitrary a tendency as anything out of Hollywood. But this was nothing like that: it actually worked. Somewhere in the bonus features Truffaut is seen saying that he thinks rhythm is the most important and most difficult aspect of filmmaking. Amen. His attention to it shows and means a lot. He says that his New Wave intentions were not to invent a new style of film but simply to correct mistakes he found in other films, to make films more true to life, and I believe him.

It’s also possible that I’ve just grown up a bit; I notice that I am more comfortable playing music at slower tempi, recently, which seems temperamentally relevant.

I’m going to be a bit bolder, from now on, about calling out rhythms that aren’t working. During slow famous movies I always tell myself that the deliberate pace is a kind of poetry and that I need to try to savor and enjoy it. But just now, watching the first few minutes of the next Criterion Collection movie – look it up if you want to know – there was a shot where some people were leaving the scene, and we stayed with the shot until they had all left. Only then did it cut away. After a point, the “meaning” of the shot had lapsed and it became only a mechanical matter of waiting for them to finish their motion. In that sense of waiting I recognized the feeling that I am constantly suppressing during art movies: “this moment means nothing and I don’t need it to process what came before, so I have nothing to think about; speed it up.” I am not an unthoughtful person! If a movie gives me absolutely nothing to think about for two seconds during a movie, dammit, I’m going to be honest and say: those are two mishandled seconds. Art movies get away with mishandled seconds at the beginnings and ends of shots all the time.

Not so here. He is in tune with the pulse of every scene, and, inconspicuously, of the whole movie. The ending is, I am not alone in saying, the most beautiful thing about The 400 Blows. It harnesses a carefully controlled accumulation of pressure that you the viewer have not even noticed until it is released. Commentary in the booklet seemed to be saying that the ending is positive, a hope and a relief, but I didn’t feel it that way at all. We spend the whole movie building a sense of pain that this child is not loved, and when the catharsis finally comes he is still entirely alone and unloved; only the rhythms have changed. The great sadness of that can only be accomplished through craft, and it was pulled off perfectly. I found myself shocked into crying, which is very high and rare praise from my skull, especially seeing as I was neither alone nor sleepy, when I tend to be more susceptible to tear-jerking.

The fantastic score is a major contributor to the impact of the movie. One of the most effective I’ve heard in a long time. During the movie I assumed it was by the ubiquitous Georges Delerue, but no – it’s by a guy named Jean Constantin who hardly did anything else in film. Which seems a shame, because this is really effective stuff. Here’s the Main Title, which is essentially identical to the Finale. I think it was the pizzicato solo violin that got me to tear up – a really brilliant, perfect choice.

Having seen this, it now becomes much clearer to me that Wes Anderson and his ilk are doing candied impressions of this material and style. Even the score was more or less copped for Rushmore. But this was relentlessly sincere, whereas Wes Anderson’s personal demons are not at issue in his movies in any obvious way – more like he’s made (Truffaut’s?) personal demons into fetish objects and papered his walls with those.

This made an interesting follow-up to Amarcord, since they both seemed to serve a similar memory-function for their respective filmmakers, but approached from two diametrically opposed perspectives. Beth asked me which was better. Apples and oranges, clearly. But I am personally much more of an apple than an orange, and I had a deeper experience with this one. Truffaut, in a sense, was the braver artist in that he truly reentered his emotional past, whereas Fellini seemed to want a solution that would allow him to use his past without having to inhabit it. Watching The 400 Blows was like hearing a plea directly from that boy in the film. The 27-year-old Truffaut, seen in a television interview, seems truly to be the character we’ve just seen, aged only a few more years. When the filmmaker puts himself into a carnival spinner with the protagonist and whirls them around at the speed of film, the implication seems pretty clear.

The performance by Jean-Pierre Léaud must be the best acting by a child ever committed to film, yes? Even more remarkable when you learn that all the audio was recorded later. The best feature on the disc is the audition footage of Léaud, instantly revealing himself to be perfect.

Oh yeah, the disc. Two commentaries: one from the original laserdisc, by a scholar type, Brian Stonehill. He’s well-organized and overall fairly reasonable, but the analysis isn’t particularly thoughtful or convincing. Actors reading from Truffaut’s letters and transcripts of various interviews are slipped into the mix; the whole thing feels planned and scripted enough that it ought to be better. The second commentary is a more recent interview with Truffaut’s lifelong friend Robert Lachenay, who corresponds to the friend character seen in the movie. There is overlap with the first commentary, but the personal touch is meaningful, if a bit depressing: Lachenay sighs distractedly throughout and is clearly trying not to dwell on the fact that his friend is dead, at least not while the tape is running.

* Which, ha ha, I haven’t exactly read.

directed by Federico Fellini
written by Federico Fellini and Tonino Guerra

Yes, Criterion Collection #4.

A very sweet nostalgia piece. No plot, just a sequence of memories that create a feeling. I don’t think there’s more going on here than that, but that’s plenty. Someone in one of the documentary features on the second disc says that Fellini went through life collecting impressions and then building movies out of them. His impressions are sufficiently rich, and his moviemaking is sufficiently witty, that we need no more. There’s ample food for thought – or for, at least, aesthetic delectation – here.

I spent some time musing on the distinction between thought and delectation, actually, while listening to the commentary – I don’t feel I’ve really watched a Criterion Collection disc, you may have noticed, until I take in the bonus features – which is by two film professors, Peter Brunette and Frank Burke. Their discussion takes a completely “interpretive” tack, organized around a vague thesis that the film is actually a sad comment on the stunted, adolescent nature of all human interaction in this small town and in Italy as a whole during fascism. For example, whenever a woman’s derriere is the center of the camera’s attention – which is frequently – they comment on how seeing women as a collection of body parts, rather than as whole people, is a symptom of the lack of real human connection in the world that the movie portrays. They almost never talk about memory, or nostalgia, or what teenage experiences mean to adults looking back on them, or how, to adolescents, everything becomes imbued with the mystery and intrigue of sex. They don’t have a language for saying these things in any depth, so they end up saying quickly that scenes are “just wonderful” and then, after an awkward pause, fill their mouths with other business: academic sideshows. The guy on the left is worse about it than the guy on the right. I forget which was which.

I used to have absolutely no patience for that kind of analysis. This time I felt more sympathetic to it. It is not illegitimate to point out that the movie has very few deep human connections portrayed in it. But neither does Star Wars. The question is, what does it mean, if anything? The implication, when a film scholar says such a thing, is that it is part of the intended message of the filmmaker. However, these guys seem to know that’s not the case – at one point one of them says that Fellini would probably be infuriated by their commentary, because he didn’t like people claiming that there were “meanings” in his work – but the justification, as usual, is that even if the meanings are there only due to the filmmaker’s subconscious, or as a byproduct of his circumstances, they are still part of the work for the audience. There was a time when my response to that was “Oh really? So what you’re saying is that there’s no framework in which you, Mr. Professor, can ever be demonstrably ‘wrong’? Well isn’t that convenient!” Now my response is “Yes, that’s interesting, what you’re saying, but only in proportion to how much it is a part of my experience of this movie.” Guys like this are given a bucket of delicious fresh water and immediately start panning for gold, holding up the grains proudly. Yeah, you’re right, Mr. Brita, that stuff’s in there, but don’t you think Fellini probably wanted us to drink the water?

Again, this goes back to the wine-tasting concept. Sooner or later you get done with saying “yum, wine,” and start talking about everything but “yum, wine,” because you wore that out. The commentary was sympathetic to me this time because I could tell that these guys really liked this movie, but they blew out their “yum” a long time ago. It’s okay to go there, but it brings new responsibilities. Graduating to that next level means raising the stakes – you’re now responsible for both levels at once. I had to wonder whether these guys had, along the way, inadvertently lost sight of the first level and actually forgotten that this movie is not, in fact, a sad comment on stunted human interactions – it’s a sweet, comic, nostalgic memoir.

Another attitude toward criticism, which I am also amenable to, is that critics point out the non-obvious in order to make it available to others, who might then wish to incorporate it into their future experiences. The grains of gold are being pointed out so that we, the audience, have the option of consciously choosing to savor them, thereby (supposedly) enriching our experiences. In this philosophy, criticism is a service, not a conversation. The reader of such criticism is expected not to commune with the critic, or compare notes, but rather to consider his offerings as educational, a Sherpa’s suggestions of what paths to take next. But given the choice, I will always prefer being stimulated to deeper understand and identify my natural experience of a thing than be stimulated to have a new and unrelated experience. The essence of art is the experience of it, and the nature of that experience is uniquely specific to each person. And at the same time, most people can be expected to make the same basic choices – i.e. when given the bucket, to drink the water.

Though I think I am speaking for everyone, I speak at least for myself when I say that the bottom line is: I find delectation a much more essential vein of aesthetic experience than any socio-political or psychoanalytic thoughts could ever be. If a critic offers up a dessert menu of new interpretations, saying, “you might not have noticed, but this movie could actually be seen as being a critique of traditional conceptions of masculinity,” I am almost always going to say, “why would I want to do that?” The only case where I might order what’s on that menu is if I don’t feel full yet. But in this case I most certainly did.

And having watched the bonus features – some very nice, well-chosen interviews etc. – I feel sure that Sig. Fellini did too. Unlike the commentary, this material enriched and confirmed the experience I was actually having – of being dipped into a man’s deep, mixed, sacred feelings about his memories and about his hometown. I didn’t always know what everything meant, exactly, but I never doubted that everything meant something true and personal to him, and that was generally rich enough. I don’t think the ambiguity was really the point, but it wasn’t a problem either; he judged his work very sensitively.

I had never seen a Fellini movie before. The strength of personality behind everything is obvious; it was immediately clear to me why he has such an enormous reputation. The film was not shy about being DIRECTED. Films can work many ways, and sometimes the director is hardly central to the experience, but this one entirely presented itself as the work of an “auteur.” I have the sense that the art-house tradition is disproportionately built around such films because art loves a celebrity, because we’re still wading through these old ideas about geniuses. Because pretension gravitates toward personalities, basically. But that’s not in any way a knock against movies that are built on personalities. I really enjoyed this.

I was immediately struck, strongly, by how blatantly, directly, and repeatedly Woody Allen has ripped off Fellini, in style, technique, attitude, everything. And that’s just from this one movie. After a while I got over it.

Cinematography was very pretty. In this case I did get to watch the later, improved Criterion release, and I’m glad, because the beautiful colors and the fine image quality was a big part of the experience for me. Yes, even on the iPod screen. Also, this edition has a very fine, nicely-judged illustration on the package, which always pleases me.

Music by Nino Rota is absolutely vital to the mood, and thus the movie as a whole, and very charming. I kept mis-hearing the main tune as a hybrid of “Stay Awake” from Mary Poppins and “Big Stuff” from Bernstein’s ballet “Fancy Free.” But eventually it came into its own. Here it is for your Criterion Collection soundtrack album, straight ahead, as the Main Title.

directed by Alfred Hitchcock
screenplay by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder
after the novel The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White (1936)

This was Criterion #3. Again, this is only a series if it wants to be.

This was perfectly enjoyable. I don’t think there’s much more here than meets the eye. The Criterion Collection is always sort of implying that there’s more to their movies than meets the eye, but it’s a hard case to make with this particular piece. The commentary here bears that out: the guy (Bruce Eder) fills the time by telling us about the history of trains, the prior and subsequent careers of every member of the cast, etc. etc. And for all that, his few real points – about the brilliance of Hitchcock’s work, naturally – seem merely like clumsy overstatements of the obvious. The commentary plays like a grudging, insincere essay assignment about Johnny Tremain.

That’s insulting, so I feel compelled to say: doing commentary for a film that you are not actually associated with is a losing proposition. Always. You may be a professional film writer or scholar or whatever, but in my living room – or on my iPod as the case may be – you’re just another voice, so you’d better be saying something genuinely interesting, and that’s setting the bar much higher than in most magazines or lecture halls. Without the power to grade or quiz us, and without the dignity and mystery of being laid out on a page of print, standard-issue arts commentary reveals itself as pretty thin stuff. Hitchcock handles the clues like a magician handles cards? Buddy, when I talk about movies with my friends, we say more interesting stuff than that.

Readers of the “Disney canon” entries on this site may disagree.

Anyway, my point is that it’s really no reflection on Bruce Eder that his commentary wasn’t worth my time.

More about commentary tracks: watching a movie while you hear someone talk only makes sense if the person is truly talking about what’s on screen. Otherwise the movie is just a distraction from the lecture, or worse, an arbitrary predetermined length for the lecture, almost always too long for anyone’s good. If you are talking about what’s on screen, you need to be truly adding to it rather than just riding along with it, and to do that, you have to have access to external information corresponding to every moment in the film. The only people who have such information are people involved with the making of the film. Exceptionally well-prepared researchers might be able to pull it off if they have volumes and volumes of material. But even directors usually can’t stay interesting through the entire duration of a movie. So beware.

Criterion’s got it tough since they’re committed to bringing out important films from decades ago and also to having commentary. So far we’ve had three movies by “classic” dead directors. I imagine that Criterion manages to wrangle higher-quality commentary when the creative team is still alive. We’ll see. OR WILL WE?

Do I really have to talk about the movie? In this movie a Lady Vanishes and then eventually [spoiler warning] she Reappears. I’m not telling where she is. You’ll know right away. It takes a remarkably long time to get going – the commentary informs me that this is, in fact, a brilliant stroke – and Hitchcock still doesn’t totally have his comedy and thriller pockets sorted out yet – as in, “now where did I put that next sequence?” [pat pat] – but it’s all good-natured and lively and cozy, and I have no real complaints. Whatever power it may once have had to grab you by the collar or make you laugh out loud has faded or been superceded, but I don’t think a movie like this will ever stop being pleasant company. I’m not sure that can be said of Flightplan, the trailer for which gave away the best detail in The Lady Vanishes. Thanks a lot, Flightplan.

I recognize now that The Last Express – it’s a computer game, okay? – was quite directly inspired by this movie. I guess so too was Madame Tutli-Putli, which I saw earlier this year but didn’t write about. I’m just letting things leap to mind – obviously, there are hundreds of “intrigue on a train” pieces that could all be tied in just as easily. Though, hm, I just checked and Murder on the Orient Express was written four years before this came out, so it’s not fair to say that every train mystery necessarily stems from here. I guess I’d have to read Orient Express to see whether the “feel” of this movie has influenced every other such movie, or whether that “feel” just goes with the territory. Or both?

This time, soundtrack club, I’m giving you the complete score – well, all the non-diegetic music anyway. The credits imply that the music is by Louis Levy (1894-1957), but don’t be fooled! It’s really by Charles Williams (1893-1978).

It’s your classic bookend score: Brief main title in the requisite pompous style, immediately followed by a curtain-raiser cue that sets the scene. Then, at the end of the movie, a “finale” flourish, immediately followed by a variant on the opening for the end credits. The whole movie in 3 minutes!

Not to give it away… but in this movie, the main title music is the MacGuffin. I think this may be the only movie ever made where that’s the case. Yes?

Enough already – here’s the track.

As you can see above, I am once again watching the old Criterion version from the library, despite the existence of a newer, snazzier reissue. Better picture and sound would have been appreciated, honestly. Glad to know they’re out there now.

I didn’t talk about the actors or the script or anything. Oh well.

directed by Akira Kurosawa
written by Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, and Hideo Oguni

Criterion Collection #2. As I said last time, I’m not pledging to continue doing this at any length. But who knows.

It’s Seven Samurai, by the way.

This is lots of fun. It took me 2 1/2 of the 3 hours of this movie before I knew it, but eventually it just sank in that I was having fun. The exaggerated, on-the-nose quality ultimately was a kind of sweetness; the imitation-Hollywood quality ultimately gave way to a genuine Hollywood-style pleasure.

But that’s what this is; not something bigger or greater than that. Somehow, somewhere, some aspect of the hype on this movie is out of whack. The Criterion commentary points it up: “Look: a tight close-up. Now watch as he falls back into a perfect composition with deep focus.” Blah blah blah. Naming the technical choices doesn’t make them remarkable. All movies, even terrible ones, demonstrate hard work and a lot of choices. To me this played like standard fare, but a little duller and broader, with undue yelping and whimpering, and a lot of space to reflect on nothing much happening. By the end I was able to find all of that more or less endearing, or at least ignorable, but I certainly never felt that the piece had risen anywhere near the level of great art. I remain unsure whether this slowness and broadness are somehow construed by others as artistic distinction, or whether those people have another way entirely of parsing the movie. But, really, this is a samurai movie about saving a village. It’s got some fun stuff in it. To claim much more than that already starts to seem like geek talk.

And boy does that commentary guy keep claiming more. His idolatry for Toshiro Mifune is absurd, especially considering that while he’s calling him something like “the greatest actor of all time at the absolute top of his game in one of his greatest roles,” the man in question is strutting around like a chicken, pulling ridiculous faces, and shouting, shouting, shouting. I don’t doubt he was a fine actor, and in context there’s nothing wrong with his over-the-top performance – but proportion, people!

I’ll grant the movie this: it’s right on the edge of contemporary standard practice, and that’s inevitably a very difficult region to judge properly, because it has enough of the present in it to soothe you into passivity, but enough of the past in it to require perspective. It’s a compliment to this movie’s later influence that I had to guard against watching it as a weak version of contemporary style. Lots of touches that George Lucas and friends would later rip off; my personal history with these things is the reverse of actual history and I tried hard to remember that this was the source and deserved the credit. I.e. yes, I acknowledge and admire that this is the first movie where we see a team assembled from individuals introduced one at a time. I admire it and it’s interesting, too. If this movie had been no fun at all, it would still have been historically interesting. But I’m just a little wary of the calculation that “historically interesting” + “fun” = “one of cinema’s great masterpieces.” Are we really sure about that?

I don’t know – did I miss the boat on this one? I just read what I wrote and it sounds sort of cranky. But look again at my thesis statement: “This is lots of fun.” That ain’t cranky!

I watched Criterion’s original release of the movie, from the library. Recently they reissued it in a multi-disc version that replaces this, with a much better image and all kinds of other stuff. But this was just fine for me; unless someone tells me otherwise, I’m done here.

The commentary was, for those of you counting, by a guy – an “expert” – named Michael Jeck. He somehow manages to make nerdish reverence sound pompous and self-satisfied, in a way that really brought me back to college lectures. Oh yeah, so that’s why I never felt comfortable in class. You forget these things, forget what they sound like and how they make you feel. I appreciated the memory jog. Sincerely, I did.

Click HERE for the second track in your Criterion Collection soundtrack album: the intermission music – a mini-suite of sorts, entr’acte style – from the soundtrack by Fumio Hayasaka (1914-1955). The score was much like the movie: a superficially Japan-ified imitation of Hollywood standard practice, somewhat gawky and broad, but ultimately appealing on its own terms.

directed by Jean Renoir
written by Jean Renoir and Charles Spaak

I won’t lie to you. I watched this because it is Criterion Collection #1. That’s not a promise or a project; it just is what it is, and if I watch Criterion Collection #2 sometime soon, that too will just be what it is. As are all things in this world.

This movie goes by “Grand Illusion” in English, which is stupid. One of the special features on the disc points out that this is stupid, and then says that all the same, tradition is tradition. It should be “The Great Illusion” – not only because that’s a better translation, but because it’s named after this book.

Is this one of the greatest films of all time? In a way I want to stay true to my underwhelmption, yea even in the face of the cultural consensus; in another way I want to nurture and privilege the part of me that was affected by it.

I watched it a second time with the commentary track – an “audio essay” by a film historian (Peter Cowie) – and hearing that slight curatorial analysis clarified the problem. The problem is that film by its nature is a medium of contraption within contraption; movies that try to come at humanity open and whole, without artifice, always feel relatively flaccid. The filmmaker, by becoming a filmmaker, has chosen a path of trickery; if he then decides he wants nothing to do with trickery, he denies film its natural impulses. And yet I recognize that this openness, this distaste for artifice, is surely an honorable thing in a human being and in an artist. It’s just the refusal to concede to the idiomatic demands of the medium that is distracting.

Perhaps they weren’t yet idiomatic in 1937. Perhaps today Jean Renoir would gladly concede to the conventional demands that I perceive as inherent to the medium; he just didn’t feel them at the time because they hadn’t yet crystallized as standards.

But whether it was an intentionally “alternative” language and rhythm, or just turned out to be a side-branch in the evolution of mainstream “standard practice,” there’s no question to me that this movie (and others like it) operates at odds with current expectations about tension, flow, and structure. Those divergences are not themselves meant to be interesting; they simply are.

The film wants us (and the commentary corroborates these impressions of mine) to reflect on the resonances of various themes as they are embodied in images and events. That might sound like it’s true of all film, but it’s not; most commercial film is fundamentally narrative in structure and drive. “Meaning” bolsters the narrative, not the other way around. At most, they go hand in hand as equals. This movie smells like it’s going to be a hand-in-hand sort of movie, but really the narrative is just a servant of the meaning, and a somewhat neglected servant at that.

Essentially, the technique is painterly – film as a moving painting. Secondarily the technique is theatrical – film as a series of performances. Both of these aspects of this film are wonderfully and warmly done. But there is something essentially filmic about, say, Citizen Kane that is here somehow mishandled. Intentionally? The camera and the, er, montage, are so unflappably calm and thoughtful that we feel held at an observing distance from any tension in the story. “Please muse on this; but we wouldn’t dare trick you into getting worked up about it.” When a character is suddenly in danger, the camera gently glides around within the same shot to show us how things play out. When significant events pass off screen, we fade out and fade back in on the new state of affairs with a calm that would seem almost deadpan… if the movie had anything but warmth in its soul, which it doesn’t. The calm is simply reserve and someone’s idea of taste. When the incidental score kicks in, just as opera-pumped as any Hollywood score of the era, it seems entirely wrong about what kind of experience we’re having. “Please!” we want to say, “that music isn’t how life really is! No need to be so dramatic. Just be quiet – I’m watching a prisoner of war try to escape.”

But neither is the action “how life really is.” It’s, as I said, painterly, and theatrical. The calmer arts.

Does that stuff count for or against La Grande Illusion in the game of “greatest films ever made”? I don’t know what to think. For a first-time modern viewer, at least, it counts against, because it disorients. It also counts against if the game has to do with taking full and masterful technical advantage of the medium; that’s a progress-related game where the winner is more likely to be relatively recent. People who make pronouncements about the “greatest ever made” usually want the spread to be ahistorical, or if anything, skewed toward the past. So the criterion* is usually profundity, or ambition, or something like that.

As for profundity, I’m not sure this movie was particularly more profound than any number of other heartfelt works about war. I had reservations about the content as well as the technique. If the purpose was to show that war and prejudice are futile – a great illusion, as it were – it seems odd that most of the movie portrays war being conducted with astounding civility. The heart of the movie is in the idea that man does not actually want to be inhuman to his fellow man, and that it is tragic when he is forced into this posture by the imposition of war. I think. But to really make this case, it should have offered us someone who seemed to believe in war, and then showed that in his essential nature he did not. Or someone who seemed to be cruel but at heart was actually humane. Instead we see only the good in people, caught in the grips of absurd events and circumstances imposed from without. The philosophy of the movie seems to be encapsulated at the end – looking at an expanse of snow and wondering where the border with Switzerland is, the characters observe that the border is imaginary, that nature certainly doesn’t care about the difference. The point being: so too with the divisions between men that create war, and so too with war itself. But is that really so? Then, we must ask, where does war come from? Where is the error that creates the illusion? The movie is not interested in the error, only in asserting the truth of the matter; but by spending all his time showing people’s innate respect for one another (with a few remarkably mild exceptions) Renoir leaves us on our own to decide whether or not his philosophy is actually true in our real world, where people are frequently quite inhumane.

It’s a vision rather than an argument and a poem rather than a story. Does that make this higher, better art? I say not necessarily. Do that make it more pretentious, more effete? I say, with greater effort, but ultimately with conviction: not necessarily. It simply is the way this particular movie happens to be.

On both viewings, I found myself feeling quite moved by the sentimental aspects of the last 20 minutes of the movie. Somehow the domestic scale suits the “painterly” technique better. It’s easier for me to find the emotion in a bowl on a table when nobody’s life is at stake. Perhaps the skill that film technique has learned in the intervening years is adrenaline management.

Jean Gabin has effortless movie star charisma and does an excellent job. Stroheim is memorable and satisfying to watch – but is it just me or does he have an obvious American accent in all three languages? Fresnay does fine but his coldness is pretty complete. The commentator talked about the unseen emotion that must be under the surface. Yeah, maybe that’s the point, but it’s not on screen – just in your mind, and your term paper.

Here’s the main title, by Joseph Kosma (composer of “Autumn Leaves”).

* Not sure what the Collection’s eponymous Criterion actually is. Not sure there is one. Their website variously says that the films are “important,” “greatest,” “treasures,” “finest,” “defining moments,” and “Armageddon.”