1999/2004: 2010 Blu-ray:

directed by Stanley Donen
screenplay by Peter Stone
story by Peter Stone and Marc Behm

Criterion #57.

I wish I loved it. I do like it quite warmly. It’s a cheery, imperfect movie.

Here are movie stars. Movie stars are people so splendid that they can watch their own movies as they’re happening. Like us. Life is a movie and we fall in love while we’re watching ourselves in it. This is the essence of romance and feels very true. Romance is to be together in the dark while a movie starring you is going on.

The meaning of this movie, it seems to me, is in that scene, in the lines: “Do you realize you’ve had three names in the past two days? I don’t even know who I’m talking to anymore.” / “Well, the man’s the same even if the name isn’t.” Key to this exchange is that neither party is distressed; to the contrary, they are Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn on the boat in Charade, at the very pinnacle of ease and romance. The message is: who’s to say what it means to care, or not care, about the intricacies of this particular bauble of a plot, these particular identities… or, for that matter, identity in general? It doesn’t change the underlying ineffable reality of whatever it is that’s happening for “Regina” and “Brian,” or for Cary and Audrey, or for us watching, or even, perhaps, for the late Mr. Leach and the late Ms. Ruston. What is it that’s happening for them? Life, happiness, the unknown. Maybe a mystery story. Something.

Like I just said about Hitchcock in the previous entry: all film is essentially surreal. And since we recognize ourselves in film, perhaps all life is surreal too.

It’s nice for this to have come right on the tail of The 39 Steps. This is exactly the same charade, but with that extra layer of self-awareness added: where Robert Donat never tipped his hand more than to smile with preternatural aplomb, Audrey and Cary stop after nearly every scene to savor their pleasure at being alive and a part of this game. Charade is happy to be a movie, and is happy that we are happy that it is a movie. For all his playfulness, Hitchcock held to a kind of British propriety in not letting his characters openly admit, within the frame, that none of it mattered, that all of the intrigues were simply a form of joy. (But he finally, finally, eventually, got there, in the very last second of the very last thing he made.)

On the other hand, sometimes this movie feels like a thriller starring a tulip in a vase. (I don’t mean in a Magritte sense, though that does sound interesting. I just mean professional tulip Audrey Hepburn and Miss Hepburn’s Clothes By Givenchy.) At one point we cut to Audrey alone in her room, momentarily to hear Cary Grant at the door. She is lying on her bed perfectly poised with her pointy arms behind her head, in acutely stylish clothing, placidly staring. I’m not saying I object to watching this; nobody would object to watching this. I’m just saying it’s often not at all like watching a mystery, or a comedy for that matter. It’s like watching a tulip in a vase. Very pleasant!

The tulip meets a mahogany humidor. After an hour of mostly thrills and goofs, she quite seriously says “I think I love you” to Cary Grant. This is the moment in movies when my defenses usually snap up: “Seriously??” (Yes, I know, whatever that says about me. But whatever it says about me, I’m not alone in it.) But here it was okay. It was right that she loved him. The one thing we really believe about Audrey and Archie — or at least their avatars — is that they are both committed to this pleasurable bantering distance from any real troubles — not just as a performance of cool, but as a mode of encountering life. In each other, within the script, they find a fellow traveler through the cinematic darkness. So of course they love each other.

On movie terms, that feels like a very real kind of love. Such love doesn’t necessarily have to take the form of kissing, or getting married at the end, or really anything in particular. They seem to know that too. They don’t need anything from each other. That’s why I believed it.

More concrete link to the previous movie: the housekeeper finds a dead body, screams directly into the camera. Link to the movie prior to that: Audrey Hepburn and Juliette Binoche are very closely related types. Link to the movie prior to that: Hm. I guess that Walter Matthau was in JFK with Kevin Bacon and Kevin Bacon was in Apollo 13 with Apollo 13. Link to North By Northwest: all of it, obviously, plus Cary Grant talks to someone from the opposite end of the same bank of telephones. Link to To Catch a Thief: really, truly, all of it. And I note the inclusion of Princess Grace Commemorative stamps when the stamp dealer inventories the cheap packet he gave the boy. Seems intentional.

Did Hitchcock like Charade? Was he flattered or annoyed or indifferent or what? What did he have to say about it? Why isn’t this easy to find out?

My quibble with the movie is essentially that it is loose sometimes when it wants to be tight and vice versa. But that’s the price of charm; if you want to catch it in a bottle, the bottle needs to be various different sizes. Or a vase. The whole thing plays much better on second viewing, when it no longer has to work.

Also, the last act is rhythmically stronger than the rest, which is helpful to the overall impression — thanks to a considerable assist from Henry Mancini, who hits all the necessary nails squarely on the head for 15 minutes straight.

Here’s the main title, which accompanies the great Maurice Binder animated titles. I love credit sequences like these, not just because I love abstract animation anyway, which I do, but because I love the idea that this world of abstract imagery somehow is the movie, is somehow an approved translation into dream-terms of the very DNA of the live-action movie that follows. The idea that a movie can have a subconscious, and that it is right to begin inside it. I enjoyed many things in Charade but the single moment that most excited me may have been when those arrows first snaked onto the screen at the very beginning, to the sound of pure percussion pattern. This is a story, it says, but first and foremost it is a pattern. Cool. That already makes me feel good. Can’t you feel your “cares” begin to drop away with the recognition that underneath all the things of man and Hollywood are these arrows and colors and stripes and a steady beat?

One other thing about these credits. Charade, notoriously, happens to be in the public domain, and thus legal to distribute freely. How did this top-class studio release fall through that particular crack? This is how. Look close. The copyright notice lacks the word “copyright” or the (c) symbol. Even though it’s very clearly, obviously, intended as a copyright notice. Even though it announces the date of publication, explicitly reserves all rights and specifies their owner. Can you believe the law is really so vindictive as to immediately place this film in the public domain upon its first commercial exhibition with this faulty notice? Well, it’s not any more, but it used to be.

So thanks a lot, Maurice Binder and/or unidentified Universal employee(s), and thanks a lot, U.S. law prior to 1978. Anyway, be warned: don’t pay for any release of this movie other than the official Criterion edition. Don’t watch one for free, either, if you can help it; the quality is always much worse than it needs to be (this goes for the Netflix streaming version, too), whereas the Criterion Blu-ray looks great. To its credit, Criterion makes no mention at all of the public domain issue and simply treats the film as though it were fully owned by Universal, which is after all the only decent thing to do.

The commentary track by Stanley Donen and Peter Stone is very good. Charming, personable. The same warm good cheer of the movie can clearly be heard in their two personalities. Donen seems to genuinely believe that some listeners might never have seen the movie before, and is intent on not spoiling surprises for first-time viewers. Stone thinks this is absurd but plays along.

During the swinging revelry of the orange-passing game, the two reminisce that they shot this during the Cuban Missile Crisis and that everyone felt that they were doing something incredibly frivolous and pointless given that the world was about to end. To me, this knowledge only deepens the romance of the scene, and in fact of the whole movie.

The woman who does a take when George Kennedy is holding Cary Grant at gunpoint and tells her to wait for the next elevator is clearly a non-actor but still does a pretty funny take. It’s both amateurish and effective; I watched it several times. I often think “if I had to do this bit part, could I do it?” Probably not as well as she does.

1999: 2012:

directed by Alfred Hitchcock
after the novel by John Buchan (1915)
adaptation by Charles Bennett; continuity by Alma Reville; dialogue by Ian Hay

Criterion #56.

I love this genre.

Movies like this transform “story” and “character” and “theme” into something more like one of those crib toys with ten different doodads: a bell and a spinner and a twirler and a ball and a phone and a rubber button and so on. Do they form a whole? Absolutely they do. Just look: it’s a whole. What ties that whole together, you might ask. But what kind of a question is that? Just look! Humpty Dumpty and Jack and the Beanstalk, and the Tortoise and the Hare and others. Obviously it’s about fairy tales etcetera. What is the phone there for, then, you might ask. But what kind of a question is that? Just look!

I will pretty much always take a good Fisher Price Activity Center movie over a movie with a message.

A good one, I said. What does it take for one of these movies to be “good”? Well, it does have to form a whole. You can look at the Fisher Price picture yet again if you need to: it’s all framed and united and designed. That is the function served by “plot” in these movies, and it’s an important function. In lesser movies, the various doodads are just dumped out of a box at your feet: here’s your damn Christmas present. That’s insulting.

So plot does matter quite a bit. But all the same, a movie like this does not actually tell a story; it just puts us inside a bubble of story-ness and then rings the bells and spins the spinners, without breaking the bubble. One arbitrary thing must lead to the next inexorably, as though this particular arrangement of doodads were actually a single perfect and necessary thing, being gradually revealed. There’s an art to it, but it’s an abstract art. Or a mostly-abstract art — like dance, or graphic design.

Because The 39 Steps is old and black-and-white and mostly shot on stagy sets, its bubble is very pure and complete. I felt cocooned in and safe, like I was floating with Glinda. Or, more aptly, coasting through the countryside in a luxe sleeper car, lulled by the muffled clacking of the tracks.

Hitchcock’s genius was his unwavering commitment to the bubble, even as over the course of his career the bells and spinners got bigger and louder. He was able to teach everyone else what was really going on at the movies: something unreal, something loopy and spooky and sensory. His coups de theatre are celebrated not just for their effect but for their instructional value as proof-of-concept. It wasn’t just that seeing a man on Lincoln’s nose was gratifying; it was also that a pioneering demonstration had been made of how and in what spirit it can be gratifying for there to be a man on Lincoln’s nose. Surrealism isn’t just for Freud, and nonsense isn’t just for jokes.

This is all to say that there should be a 39 Steps-themed crib toy. You could easily reskin the standard one to have Richard Hannay and a policeman running through the highlands along the bottom instead of the Tortoise and the Hare. One of the spinners can rotate to gradually reveal a picture of a hand missing a pinky. Etc.

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Overheard at the laundromat just now. The very large woman who works there was folding clothes while watching TV. A customer stood next to her and watched with her for a minute.

Customer: What’s this?
Laundry lady: It’s Castle. You don’t watch Castle?? You’ve got to!
Customer: It’s about lawyers?
Laundry lady (delightedly correcting him): It’s a show!

She put it better than I did.

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I am generally skeptical about “deep readings” of bubble movies like this. It’s not that I think they’re completely illegitimate; it’s just that they’re not usually done very sensitively. There’s a “visual essay” on the disc, in which a film scholar notes that the final shot of the movie, with chorus girls in the background and Mr. Memory dying in the foreground, juxtaposes “eros, the life instinct,” with “the death drive.” My objection isn’t that this is false; my objection is that it’s a clumsy, worthless way of gesturing toward something true. A kid watching naively, who has no clue what “the death drive” means or what such an analysis could possibly be saying, is better attuned to what’s really happening in that shot than an educated adult who has instant access to all the irrelevant cultural baggage that comes with those terms. Such analysis dumps extraneous crap in front of the film, blocking your view in the name of elucidation. Here’s your damn Christmas present, college boy.

Deep reading an image or a plot is basically a game. The Fisher Price Activity Center juxtaposes eros and the death drive too, come to think of it. Ask not for whom the bell goes ding!

Deep reading the psychology from which a movie springs, and to which it appeals, is another thing.

The sex in this movie takes the form of Madeleine Carroll taking off her wet stockings while handcuffed to Robert Donat, so that his hand can’t help but be along for the ride, no matter how limp and blameless he tries to make it. Subsequently, they have no choice but to sleep next to each other in a four-poster hotel bed. The appeal of the handcuff gag is the same as the appeal of “Seven Minutes in Heaven” and various other teenage contrivances to have sex forced on oneself: it relieves one of the responsibility of owning up to anything. It appeals to the repressed, who dare not pursue their own desire but would love for some hilarious fantasy circumstance to impose it on them. This is the framework for sex in so many old movies, and while it’s convenient for film scholars to talk about such devices as a way of getting stuff past the censors, I see it more as a way of appealing to widespread inner immaturity. God help us if these two characters were actually to have the hots for each other and acknowledge it: how drab and potentially tasteless. But if a Rube Goldberg machine appears and when the ironing board tips over and pulls the cat’s tail and releases the balloon, it yanks his hand so that he can’t help but touch her butt: now that’s entertainment!

As a teenager this stuff always seemed intuitively charming to me. But that’s because I was a teenager. Now I feel a little embarrassed for Hitchcock, or perhaps for all of Britain, snickering excitedly in the dark, sleepover party whispers, about “Well, but what if you were handcuffed together and then she got her stockings wet and had to take them off? Then you’d have to touch her leg! Snort!”

Okay, okay: it was still amusing. I guess at my present age I still thoroughly enjoy being yanked around by my trepidations about being hunted by a murderous spy or jumping from a moving train or whatnot; less so my trepidations about girls, because they’re much diminished. But yes, I can still “get it.”

And yes, it’s more complicated than all that, because Robert Donat’s character is not in fact snickering red-facedly; he is genuinely comfortable with whatever absurdly titillating circumstances happen to be dumped in his lap by fate. The fact that what’s happening to him would thrill a schoolboy amuses him. But we, the audience, are the ones thrilling, so we’re sort of the butt of that joke, aren’t we? “You should be so lucky, audience… and I should be so lucky,” thinks Alfred Hitchcock as he asks the actress to show a little more of her thigh. Doesn’t he? If these movies are based on his fears, one of those fears is clearly being put at risk of being aroused by a girl who has the composure that he lacks. Luckily his heroes always miraculously make it through the fire with their composure intact, just like they miraculously survive jumps from moving trains etc.

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Music direction by Louis Levy, but as we learned back in The Lady Vanishes, that doesn’t mean he wrote it. The score is apparently actually by Jack Beaver, Charles Williams, and Hubert Bath. Which of the three was responsible for our selection? I don’t think anyone is alive who knows. I certainly don’t. Here’s the main title (opening with a fanfare for the British censor’s certificate: hooray, it was approved!). As with The Lady Vanishes, the main theme serves a clue-like function in the course of the movie. The way the main title is put together is extremely old-fashioned, typically operetta-like, but in my mind somehow that feels just right for this sort of movie. When the woodwinds and pizzicato cascade down toward the end (“PERIL!”), or when in the last few bars the fanfare resolves and then deresolves twice in a row a la Strauss (“HEROISM!”), I am completely charmed. If you close your eyes, you’ll feel like you could almost reach out and touch a mustache.

Beaver, Williams, and Bath sounds like a place to get nice candles.

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Stuff on the disc: this interview, which is very good; this mini-documentary, forgettable; 22 minutes of the original Truffaut/Hitchcock interview tapes, fine (Truffaut describes various doodads as tres beau); the “visual essay” mentioned earlier, okay but bland; this radio version, just what it sounds like; and a few nice original production drawings like these.

The commentary track, by one Marian Keane, comes from the original 1999 disc and is firmly in the “By Martians For Martians” deflavorized academic mode. Sample sentence, her take on a POV shot: “When the newspaper is handed over to Hannay, we are in an intensely subjective sequence, and when Hitchcock sustains a subjective sequence, he’s investigating film’s capacity to reveal human subjectivity.” Typical BMFM mushy tautological nothingness; the word “investigating” is a classic red flag. I only made it about halfway through the movie and then stopped it. There’s really no point in subjecting myself to such stuff.

The black-and-white image is appealingly soft and sugary. Even after restoration, it does still flicker a bit. The sound isn’t great and probably never will be. There’s no getting around it: this movie is old.

As usual, Criterion’s packaging does some heavy compensatory lifting. “Actually guys,” it tells us, “old is the opposite of sell-out and sheep. It means taste and it means cachet. Duh, everyone knows that.” Well, that sounds great! That must mean the original period artwork would make a really hip cover, right? Right?

1999: (out of print by 6/01)

directed by Philip Kaufman
screenplay by Jean-Claude Carriere and Philip Kaufman
after the novel by Milan Kundera (1984)

Criterion #55.

Art experience is social experience, and time spent watching a movie is time spent in the company of actors. I like actors. I guess in some way everybody does, or at least everybody likes famous people. But I mean that I like actors for their actorliness. I like these people who treat being sensitive like serious business. I like what they care about and try to be good at, and what kinds of expression seem possible in the space they create. Yes, it’s true that actors often have emotional problems and are difficult and believe crazy things. But, you know, everyone has emotional problems, and everyone is difficult, and everyone believes crazy things.

In this movie, in the scene where Juliette Binoche delightedly singsongs “You’re jealous! You’re jealous!” to Daniel Day-Lewis, I enjoyed being allowed to share a moment of intimacy in the lives of two fictional characters, but more than that, I enjoyed contemplating a moment of real artistic intimacy between two actors. Whatever is recognizable and true-to-life about this dance that she’s doing and the sheepish way he’s responding, they arrived at it together, in trust, with shared purpose. Actors working together call on a mutual expertise in feelings. I wish everyone always called on a mutual expertise in feelings, so I feel comforted seeing that such a degree of shared experience is at least possible. He knew what she was doing, and she knew what he was doing. They each knew what the other meant, about people, about life, and then they honored it by living it out in the flesh. For the camera.

Even when characters in movies are hurting each other, the actors are actually doing something very intimately collaborative. There is something touching about the idea that any interpersonal engagement, no matter how contentious, is a mutual act of moment-creation, of life-creation.

(Of course, none of this is necessarily the case. Sometimes actors hate their scene partners and just do their own thing. Sometimes directors hate their actors and treat them like puppets.)

The Unbearable Lightness of Being is about the personalities and interpersonal dynamics in a love triangle. I gather that the book may be about a lot of high philosophy on top of that. The movie is pretty much just that, but with warm actorly care and a mellow spirit. One is free to think philosophical thoughts.

There are plenty of dramatic developments but it doesn’t have a plot per se. It offers emotional tone above all — all art does, I suppose — and here that emotional tone is personable; person-like. Actor-like, in fact. Why are some people rewarding to be around? What does their company offer? That’s the objective here, it would seem. At least that’s what it accomplishes.

It does reach a strong cinematic-philosophical flourish at the end. Having spent the duration in this particular company, I found that I was all in.

The film is not perfectly and ideally flexible, human, old world. It is an American-eye view. Sometimes all the nudity and the politics felt slightly more “European” than European. The moments do not quite just melt and reform; in the cuts from scene to scene, I felt the rooms and situations being produced and directed into existence. The movie sometimes slinks around behind the actors’ backs as though it knows more than they do. That I doubted.

I wasn’t transported; I was always aware that this was a production, an ambition, not the thing itself. But it was a congenial ambition, and the actors in it were real people.

The editorial presence gets one thing so very right that all hints of American calculation are readily forgiven: the music, selected from the works of Janáček, who was committed to pure intensity of feeling more than nearly any other composer. Almost everything he wrote is emotional to the point of philosophy. The most important selections here are “The Madonna of Frydek” from The Overgrown Path and the third movement of the Fairy Tale for cello and piano. But my ripped selection, the only piece truly in the clear, has to be the end credits, which is from the fifth movement of Janáček’s Idyll for strings.

Maybe the movie steals much of its emotional timbre from the music, and the actors themselves, and everything but the script and actual content, but that’s fine; the important thing is that it works as a place, a person, a familial attitude. Saying that it is congenial is not meant to be faint praise. Congeniality is a welcome gift.

I would be remiss if I did not address the title.

Get a load of that title. It’s so satisfying to say, and it takes some deep thought to parse. It’s either a beautiful poem or rhythmic nonsense. Who’s to say? That’s a powerhouse title. One of the all-time most dynamic titles. Much better than Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí.

As a service to the reader, here is my report on the meaning of the title as parsed by the movie: “lightness” is the innocent spirit of moral freedom that allows our man Daniel to pursue extramarital sex without any sense of transgression. His wife recognizes the aliveness of this lightness, contrasted with her weighty wounded feelings — that such freedom is a pure state of being, and thus philosophically preferable to her neediness — but she cannot find it in herself to emulate it or bear it in him, because loneliness and jealousy are real too. So the subject of the title is one’s lover’s existential freedom, which is both beautiful and unacceptable.

This might very well be a gross simplification or distortion of Kundera’s intention. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the title means something quite different in the book. Nor would I be surprised if it means exactly this. Bottom line: I am unsurprised.

Tip for being funny, brought to you by a primitive part of my brain: say this title but change some of the words. The crucial words here are “unbearable,” “lightness,” and “being”; focus on those. If you say the title but change one those three words to a word that sounds like it but is somehow different from it, you’re sure to win admirers and have some fun in the process.

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All written before listening to the commentary (by the director, the co-writer, the editor (Walter Murch, offering some fascinating shop talk), and Lena Olin).

Watching this movie again with the intelligent, craft-oriented commentary, I can’t help but feel like now I’m seeing it all more clearly, “as it really is.” And it’s quite different from the movie I described above. “What was I saying?” I think. “Congenial? Person-like? American? No plot per se?” Not only are the voices not confirming these things, but even I can’t see them anymore.

But it’s all going to stand. That’s the movie I saw when I was alone, when I was me. The fact that my experience isn’t being described to me by the artists only goes to show that our respective roles are completely different. Watching a movie is a dream; making a movie can almost never be a dream.

Or perhaps a better way of looking at it is that this commentary reveals the very Americanness I meant: under the humanist flesh, this is a movie of bones. Other artists might well have made a soft commentary. This is a hard one. Smart; but smart can be a trap.

Case in point: Philip Kaufman tells us that he was inspired by the Czech attitude that sexual pleasure, being free and private and sensory, is not subject to politicization and thus that sex is “an act of resistance.”

I say: calling something “an act of resistance” is politicizing it. Some might say I miswatched the movie by seeing the sex as very much just sex, something to smile about, but I do not think I am miswatching life. And seeing things in movies is part of my life.

As with life, commentary does not actually improve understanding.

Remember the days before commentary tracks? Someone at Voyager/Criterion invented this gimmick and now we all buy into its value. But bonus features are aesthetic quicksand. Movie is a movie is a movie: if you gotta ask, you ain’t got it.

2000: 2009:

directed by Al Reinert
“Filmed on location by the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration.”

Criterion #54.

(Moon landing documentary, of sorts, made entirely of NASA archival film.)

“Make no mistake,” as our president would say: this is by far the most astounding and spectacular and terrifying and important footage ever shot. It has been transferred and enlarged and printed wonderfully; the picture is pristine and frequently beautiful. The work done by the filmmakers in sorting through the countless hours of previously unseen NASA footage, and then making these selections public at such high quality, is a great and important service.

And continue to make no mistake: You can’t watch this stuff without being awed and thrilled and frightened and inspired (not necessarily in that order). Yes, by now a lot of the basic images may have collapsed into cliche — familiarity has drained the standard “blue marble” photo of most of its power — but it hardly takes any variation, just a tilt or two of the lens, a slightly new angle not seen before, and suddenly one can’t help but be contemplating it afresh, for real. Good god, that’s everything, all of it, surrounded by nothing, and someone went and stood in the nothing to look back and photograph everything. It’s tremendously, nauseatingly real.

In the commentary track, astronaut Eugene Cernan (“Last man on the moon”) says:

I can remember standing on the surface of the moon in sunlight looking back at the Earth surrounded by the blackest black that you can conceive in your mind, a three-dimensional blackness without a beginning and without end: it’s not darkness, but blackness. And the Earth, with all its beauty and all its splendor, lives three-dimensionally within this blackness.

That’s not just theoretical. Like it or not, that unthinkable enormity (in all senses) is something that a man really stood and looked at and saw, and it was as real and ordinary as this tissue box on my desk. A real man, a person so real and ordinary that after returning to the everything from the nothing, he did something as banal as record a commentary track for Criterion. Seeing it — that three-dimensional blackness without beginning or end — in a photograph isn’t as intense as looking directly at it, thank god, but it remains mind-boggling: literally unthinkable. And here it is, the unthinkable, captured on film by a few humans who wore death-proof suits and carried cameras beyond the edge of the living world.

So make no mistake: I was glad to watch this.

Aaaaand… you can make mistakes now.

C’mon, Simone: let’s talk about my big “but.”

The unique and tremendous power of this footage is that it is real. So it is inescapably frustrating that the filmmakers have stitched it together with the customary white lies of film — and a few egregiously gray ones — and in so doing have needlessly diminished it.

There were six moon landings and 11 manned Apollo missions in all. The approach taken by the director is to edit together the best footage from all of them, to create a montage that gives the general cinematic impression of a single mission from start to finish. The rationale for this approach is presented in various ways and in various places in the Criterion package: it allowed the use of all the best footage in one movie, it emphasized the universality of the endeavor by treating all the individual astronauts as essentially interchangeable, it avoided the need for an excess of technical-historical detail that would only distract from the cinematic force of the images.

I find all that completely sympathetic. It is perfectly legitimate to edit non-fiction film with an eye for poetry rather than encyclopedic accuracy. And this material cries out for poetic treatment.

But manipulating documentary footage in this way demands certain scruples that these filmmakers do not have. Their film does more than just edit things together out of sequence. It tells unnecessary lies, repeatedly.

In the very first minutes there is a shot of a crew of astronauts (I think from Apollo 16) walking down a hallway in their suits, headed for the launchpad. The arm of a woman who stands just off-camera appears briefly, waving at them as they walk by. In the film we hear her voice, crystal clear, cheerfully saying “Y’all take care now!” like a waitress might say to anybody who went through the door. That’s an odd and amusing thing to say to astronauts headed for the moon, I thought; what a strange and wonderful detail from way back in 1972, recovered by these filmmakers for me to re-experience and savor in the present day. Then the big “but” hit me: But wait, I thought. The NASA film crew surely wasn’t carrying a boom mike down this hallway. This footage is probably silent. And come to think of it, that sure didn’t sound like sound from 1972. I think that was ADR. Someone in an editing room in 1989 made up those words and stuck that in there to give a sense of place.

Whoever did it was comfortable so doing because it’s the kind of thing that’s done all the time in editing rooms: “We need to lay on some intuitive sound to make this shot feel alive. Let’s put some foley footsteps in there and some crowd noise from outside the door. And I guess when you see the woman’s arm wave we need some sound to justify it or it will seem weirdly silent. I guess we’ll just put in a voice.”

Generally, that’s all well and good for just another day in post-production. But I’m watching this to be put in touch with the real moments of which the film is an artifact. Adding phony footstep sounds is already a little suspect, though I can see the argument to be made for its subliminal value; certainly as a claim about the past it is very mild. But adding phony dialogue is simply no good! That is a strong claim: a woman said this. When in fact she did not. Maybe.

Only a few shots later, the man who closes the elevator door on the gantry is clearly heard to quietly say “Godspeed, men” as he salutes the astronauts. But wait, no he didn’t! Not necessarily! Someone sneaked into this stash of truth and inserted some lies! Hey, I was watching that!

Admittedly there’s not a lot of that kind of ADR lying, but those two instances came very early on and got me off to a bad start. The sin committed more often is false crosscutting. The only flight director we’re shown at mission control is Gene Kranz (whom you know as “Ed Harris”), with all footage seemingly coming from the same day, and maybe the same hour. I can accept that the premise of the film is that we’re not worrying about details: he’s just “a flight director” in this poem of the moon landings. If it cuts to him directing during footage of the launch and then again during footage of the moon landing and he’s wearing the same tie, we just have to roll with it. And I think I can. But when they show someone on the moon making a joke, and then they cut to him laughing, that really irks me! Was that how he looked laughing at that joke, or not? Is this a real moment that was part of a remarkable historical event, resurrected decades later by the marvel of film technology? Or is this an editing room invention from 1989 that is no more significant to me than anything else concocted by film editors in 1989? Those are pretty different categories!

When a video image of the Earth as seen from lunar orbit is shown on the screen in mission control, then we cut to reaction shots of various mission control crew staff members looking awed or reflective. Are they really looking at that image of the Earth on the screen? Or is it just their reaction to something else, maybe on a different day, during a different mission, and it just happened to be what the editor thought their reaction to seeing the Earth on the screen “should feel like”? My impression was that we were getting some of both.

Sly montage technique (as seen regularly at the Academy Awards and elsewhere) in which different sources are mixed and matched to create rhyming couplets — Tom Hanks dials his phone and then black-and-white Joan Crawford answers her phone, etc. — is post-modern fun that is absolutely antithetical to documentary. Just because all this footage is from NASA and none of it is from It’s a Wonderful Life doesn’t mean that what’s going on here is any different. We see an astronaut step off the lander on to the lunar surface and hear Neil Armstrong saying his line about it being a “one small step for [a] man.” Then we hear another astronaut’s interview about how when he stepped on to the moon, he made a joke because nobody would care what the “second guy” said, and then see the same video feed continue as a second astronaut hops down from the lander. We hear him say: “That may have been a small one for Neil, but that’s a long one for me.” Wow, I thought, how amusing! Why has nobody ever told me that that’s what Buzz Aldrin said?

Because it’s NOT what Buzz Aldrin said. It’s what Pete Conrad said, many months later, during Apollo 12. The moment created in the film, in which one line follows the other in short succession during the same video feed, is like a conversation between Tom Hanks and Joan Crawford: they both take place in dreamy silver screen land, for the viewer’s pleasure. “That’s the wonderful magic of the movies! P.S. The moon landing itself was real, though, we swear.”

I can’t overstress that this matters. You can’t cut historical footage like it’s fiction without devaluing the fact that it’s real. I want to be allowed to muse on the astonishing reality of everything I see! That is, in fact, the only thing I want from a movie like this. What else are we here for?

Turning on my jaded, skeptical, TV-watching, mediocrity-parsing brain is really, really detrimental to my ability to experience awe. Detrimental to my outlook as a whole. Why couldn’t the filmmakers see that the greatest gift they could offer would be to refrain from asking that of me?

A running theme in my mind during the movie was that man’s comprehension of the reality into which he is venturing is simply insufficient. Great emphasis is given to showing the astronauts goofing around, doing flips in zero gravity, acting like monkeys. It’s meant to give homely, human charm to the proceedings. But to me it said: yup, these are monkeys. Monkeys somehow figured out how to do this, monkeys put themselves in a tiny can and went way, way beyond the edge of what they understand, into a three-dimensional blackness without beginning and without end.

We are shown a real photograph of THE ENTIRE EARTH, to contemplate its unthinkable everything-ness, over which one of the astronauts is heard musing in an interview: “The three things that I associated with Earth were people, and green trees, and fresh water.” This is so bizarrely small-minded and stupid — you associate three things with Earth? And yet against the backdrop of infinite space, which is to say the reality of the universe, that’s just who we are. Hopelessly provincial monkeys with some dumb shit to say.

One of the astronauts describes the moon as “2001 type stuff.” This is what one of the twelve human beings ever to stand on the actual moon has to say about it. I don’t hold it against him: that’s just what we as humans have got to work with. The real moon does look kind of like the moon as seen in that movie 2001, come to think of it.

I saw the Earth and thought about the future of the species. I thought about climate change and pollution and how it is and will remain unmanaged because even as mankind gets big, man remains small. I felt down.

But then I had a flash of relief: I’m only thinking this stuff because that’s the mindset of this movie. This movie is making me think about Man The Mediocre because it has deliberately turned the most amazing documentary footage imaginable into something marketably less than a documentary, something less threatening, less real, less complex. Like planetarium shows have done for decades, the filmmakers set out to reveal the spiritual behind the science and instead just made another middlebrow Hallmark card. Neither here nor there, neither fact nor poem, neither man nor monkey.

But make no mistake: the raw materials are truly stirring stuff, and they shine through. Between the moments of frustration and the moments of despondency, I was moved. You’ll just have to do some editing in your head as you watch, philosophically and otherwise. And that seems a shame, since the whole point of the movie was to do the editing for us.

The Criterion package is great. The movie looks great, the commentary with Gene Cernan (and director Al Reinert) is engaging and personal, the bonus features are nicely assembled. In a way, they supply the traditional documentary grounding that the movie lacks.

The music is by crossword puzzle stalwart Brian Eno. I assumed he would bring ambient awe and terror to outer space, but the music is all dipsy-doodle Museum of Science type stuff. The music as the lander descends sounds like either the pinnacle of human endeavor or a spooky carnival on Punky Brewster. Or possibly the hold music when Henry calls the spooky carnival to make reservations.

It turns out that that particular track (“Quixote”) is actually by Roger Eno, Brian’s brother (who has, unfairly, never been in a crossword puzzle). Herein, it seems, hangs sort of a tale, one not told by the Criterion disc. According to the Wikipedia page for Eno’s original soundtrack album, the film was first assembled in 1983 as a purely non-narrative montage to music, with no voice-over. To give it wider appeal, it was gradually reworked into the 1989 version seen today, in which process some of the music from Eno’s 1983 soundtrack was replaced by music from his 1988 album Music for Films III, which is actually sort of a collaborative album, containing tracks by several other musicians (such as Roger). Having given a quick skim listen through the original 1983 soundtrack, I feel like it offers something more spiritually cohesive than what’s heard in the finished film. I also feel like the purer, artsier 1983 version of the film might well have eased nearly all of my objections above. It sounds more like the conscientious poetry that this footage deserves.

The finished film offers no musical cues that aren’t at least partially obscured by voice-over. The two longest stretches come during the spooky carnival sequence and then the end credits. Since of those two, only the end credits is actually by Brian Eno, that’s what we’re going with. The track is called “An Ending (Ascent)” on the album and runs about twice as long; I’m giving you as much of it as could be extracted from the film without including any dialogue. End Credits.

To me this sounds like 6th grade science class. Someone wheeled in the TV on a cart so we could watch something lame.

Footnote: Apparently, that’s not what “dipsy-doodle” means. But it should be.

1999: 2007:

directed by Akira Kurosawa
screenplay by Ryuzo Kikushima, Hideo Oguni and Akira Kurosawa
based on the book 日々平安 (Peaceful Days) (1958) by Shugoro Yamamoto

Criterion #53. Sequel me!

椿三十郎 = Tsubaki Sanjūrō = “Thirty-Year-Old Camellia.” The international title is Sanjuro. So basically this movie is called Thirtysomething. (I have just checked whether there is a Japanese-language version of the Wikipedia page for Thirtysomething, to compare the titles. There is not.)

But why, really, is it called “Thirty-Year-Old Camellia”? Well, when our mysterious hero is asked his name in Yojimbo, he resorts to the old “at the Alamo in the basement” routine: he looks out the window, sees a mulberry field, and says his name is “Kuwabatake Sanjuro (= thirty-year-old mulberry-field)… though actually I’m nearly forty.” The sequel repeats the whole bit, except this time there are camellias out the window.

It’s all about the mythic force of the ritualistic running gag. “Bond. James Bond.” Aw yeeah, he said the thing he always says! Kickass! As the orphan in The Cider House Rules explains, when another orphan asks why Michael Caine always recites the same little benediction every night when he turns out the light: “He does it because we like it.” Just like James Bond! Just like getting tucked in at night! The difference between “kickass” and “snuggly-cozy” is only a very slender line of macho denial.

This is only the second movie about “Thirty-Year-Old. Thirty-Year-Old [Plant-Out-The-Window],” which might seem a little premature for selling snuggly-coziness, but that’s what Sanjuro is selling. And I think that’s why I liked it better than Yojimbo. Because I know this game and I know how to play along. Tuck, tuck me in!

This movie doesn’t just happen to be one of the sources of that iconic image of Toshiro Mifune as a samurai (you know, the famous image, the one from CULTURE AT LARGE); this movie is itself deliberately trading on that iconicity, amping it up to make sure we get what we came for and know that we got it. Look at him go! it says. Look, it’s really him! It’s really one of those movies, and it’s happening right now! You are watching a sequel! Unlike Yojimbo, this one never feels less than commercial.

Well, that’s great. I’m all for it. Let’s hurry up and get this genre all good and coded out so that I don’t have to think about it rationally anymore. Because that’s really what I hate about samurai movies, westerns, and superhero movies: the pretense to actual representational meaning. As if! Enough already! The more artificial the better. If I’m going to have to watch samurai, I want you to put them through a rock tumbler first and make them all shiny. Comic book here we come! Bring on the magic powers! Bring on the time travel!

You think I’m kidding, but we really get almost all the way there. Sanjuro ends with a ridiculous duel — and by ridiculous I mean ridiculously KICKASS! — and by ridiculously KICKASS! I mean ridiculous — in which the two guys have a face-to-face epic comic-book stare-off for a very long time without moving, and then suddenly in a flash they both move and Toshiro Mifune has already killed the other guy, with a single slice across the chest that produces a truly fantastical fountain of spewing blood, like a firehose, Monty Python-style. In the bonus documentary we learn that the absurd overkill of this effect was a technical mishap, but that Kurosawa just went with it.

In other words, snuggly-cozy comic-book dream ballet for all the kids out there. The kids who can handle it.

Yojimbo felt pretty awkward for a classic made by people. Sanjuro feels pretty graceful for junk made by the system. I’ll take graceful junk over awkward classics any day. In fact I’ll take graceful junk over most things. (Junk of course is relative. Obviously there are limits. But this is 1962 and there’s still plenty of breathing room.)

I know, my response to Yojimbo was just a response to my own false expectations. Probably I should have just enjoyed it as good junk. I wish I could come to every movie purified of all prior knowledge of it, but I can’t.

Plot: Toshiro Mifune and the nine dumb good guys. “Do I have to do everything around here?” “I’m getting sick of your blundering!” “Now see what you’ve done!”

The story is about two officials, one of whom is bad and the other of whom is good. These two officials are a chamberlain and a superintendent. I couldn’t have come up with more MacGuffiny titles if I had tried. I find this aspect of the movie deeply charming. To a true innocent, everything in every movie is a MacGuffin. The “real purpose” is always outside the frame; what we are shown is only and ever an interplay of ciphers. Having to consider whether to trust the chamberlain or the superintendent brought me back to a time in my life before definitions. The movie operates there. Nine dumb guys and a smart guy have to rescue a kidnapped chamberlain from a superintendent and his army. Surreality is never far away.

The same might be said of that staple of childhood cinema, Star Wars, in which 70% of the dialogue is blessedly abstract. In Sanjuro once again I felt like I was seeing the complete contents of George Lucas’s brain laid out for inventory.

As my attitude toward life has been improving, my completist masochism has inevitably waned. I watched the documentary for real, but the commentary… well, it’s playing in the next room. Right now, as I type this. I can totally hear it. Here, right now he’s saying “…and that will give us the transition to this splendid sequence of Mifune stalking toward Muroto’s gate…” See?

It’s the same guy as last time, so I feel pretty sure I know how much he has to offer me. Now he’s saying: “… So you could say that one side of Sanjuro’s deadly nature, here, is his facial hair…” And now: “… Kurosawa almost never does this kind of routine continuity editing…” You get the drift. I know I do.

I promise not to post this until he’s done talking.

Music is by Masaru Sato again, with some use of the theme from Yojimbo and some of the same instrumentation, but generally a more restrained and sober dramatic approach. (With a couple of exuberant transgressions.) The score is more effective, less entertaining than last time around. Here’s the main title, all groaning and clattering. I like it. Sure sounds like this one’s gonna be bleaker than Yojimbo, doesn’t it? Well, turns out it isn’t. But too much atmosphere never hurt a movie.

He finished.

1999: 2007:

directed by Akira Kurosawa
screenplay by Ryuzo Kikushima and Akira Kurosawa

On we go. Criterion #52. Here too begins my new healthier attitude.

用心棒 = Yōjinbō = The Bodyguard, which is a perfectly good English title. Yojimbo is not.

I don’t know who’s going around saying that I love samurai movies but it’s not true. I’ve said it before, but I guess Akira didn’t hear me, so I say it again: I just don’t get much out of this genre. I find the milieu almost completely unexciting. The instant I see a wet noir street, or a glowing sci-fi planet, or a crumbling Dracula’s castle, I get a good eager taste in my mouth. When I see topknots and kimonos and dust and sliding panel doors I taste nothing. Like a big old gulp of air. Who cares.

This one I basically liked. So that means this one’s pretty great, all things considered. But it’s a drag to have to consider all things. I mean, when have all things ever considered me?

This one’s pretty great but I still don’t like samurai movies. I wrote a longer more intellectual(-sounding) entry investigating the ins and outs of why, but it was beating around the bush. The bush is a black-and-white mulberry bush somewhere on a studio lot in Japan. And who really wants to watch a bush?

Isn’t it important that we leave room in our worldview for there to be things that are genuinely boring? And once that room is made, are not samurai movies clearly such things?

Remember how George H.W. Bush didn’t like broccoli?

Beth said she finds samurai movies pleasantly lulling. I guess I can manage to find most things from before around 1970 pleasantly lulling, in a pinch. Maybe this project qualifies as a pinch.

Kurosawa continues to strike me as being too stately to be punchy and too punchy to be stately. Dammit, how fast is my heart supposed to be beating? Maybe what’s going in is that I’m too uncentered a person to savor balance, but to me it doesn’t feel like balance; it feels like taste tug-o-war between a fish and a fowl.

The exposition in this movie seems to me completely fumbled, undramatic and confusing, and then the story structure is designed around longueurs and redundancies that let the air out. Toward the end, undeniably, there’s some really good pulpy stuff — a top-notch escape from a locked room, for example. But then why wasn’t it all like that? Why is so much of it like hammy theater? Who’s this for? Why don’t I know how to be, watching it?

I think the answer is: dignity, boredom, innocence, and fun are different cultural quantities in Japan, so the math works out differently. Witness karaoke.

But only slightly differently. Every aspect of this movie that worked for me also seemed very American. Call me a jerk if you will, but I think present-day film buffs tend to love Kurosawa because it’s the least adventurous way to like something foreign. It’s just Hollywood as done by a stodgy Japanese uncle. Focusing the mind to be able to disregard the stodge and see through to the intention seems to be a gratifying part of some people’s intellectual self-image. How else to explain these commentary tracks (this one being no exception), which worshipfully point out every composition and editorial choice, even when those choices are blatantly gawky and ineffective? It reminds me of the analyses of 12-tone music I had to read in college: y’all sure have lots to say about what makes it so great but you skipped the part where we investigated whether it is so great.

My response to this commentary track, as to many other commentary tracks (as to many other things I encountered in college besides 12-tone theory): 1) Analysis is not in itself worthwhile or significant, nor does it demonstrate that the thing analyzed is worthwhile or significant. Anything can be analyzed. 2) Mere description is not analysis.

I mean, the commentary is fine. It’s conscientious and scholar-dull as you’d imagine, and tries to make a sweeping historical reading, which is silly. The included documentary from Japanese TV is much like the one on High and Low. It’s good enough but the overarching Japanese low self-esteem makes it all strangely small. They manage to make ostensible pride seem pathetic. What’s the opposite of a humblebrag? Anyway, there sure is a lot of weird Japanese “ahhhhh”ing and hearty chuckling about unfunny things. The 80-year-old set designer is interviewed wearing a Guns N’ Roses T-shirt.

I can see that in its day this movie was pioneering and inventive, but that was 50 years ago. Like I said in dismissing Nanook of the North, there’s a difference between historical significance and greatness.

I’m still glad to have seen it.

I feel strong pressure to make a couple of nominally “objective” points to save face but you know, my face is fine.

(e.g.: that the samurai genre and Yojimbo in particular are often discussed as an analogue to the Western genre, but that in fact this functions more like a gangster movie than a Western, despite the ghost-town visuals. I noted in fact that the plot was rather similar to Miller’s Crossing, and then was vindicated to learn that both movies were documented as having been inspired by Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key. And the legacy of this movie’s particular innovations (A Fistful of Dollars aside) seems mostly to be in other genres, in things like Indiana Jones and Die Hard and Dirty Harry. Plus that severed arm that was in every Star Wars movie. And pretty everything else in Star Wars for that matter. George Lucas has been here.)

The music, by Masaru Sato, is delightful — which is not to say it’s not also incredibly heavy-handed and only intermittently effective. Touch of Evil seems like a clear point of reference, but here incorporating elements of traditional Japanese music which surely are to be read as ironic. It’s got “attitude.” The whole movie’s got “attitude.” Just listen: track 52, the main titles.

The trailer uses different music, straight noir sleaze that has no traditional or period element at all, most of it sort of a sardonic saxophone dirge, and it works much better than the real score. In fact, watching it made the whole movie sort of snap into focus in my mind: oh I see, the movie is slow because sleaze is slow. I wish I could watch the whole thing with that score.

You know, I might just have been cranky when I watched it. But consider that you too might be cranky when you watch it.

Oh boy, I wonder what’s next!

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According to the 2014 edition of the “1000 Greatest Films” list at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They?, which purports to be the aggregation of all other such lists, the Criterion films thus far fall as follows:

1. Grand Illusion: 39
2. Seven Samurai: 10
3. The Lady Vanishes: 573
4. Amarcord: 77
5. The 400 Blows: 23
6. Beauty and the Beast: 234
7. A Night to Remember: —
8. The Killer: 685
9. Hard Boiled: —
10. Walkabout: 408
11. The Seventh Seal: 70
12. This Is Spinal Tap: 348
13. The Silence of the Lambs: 537
14, 15, 16. The Samurai Trilogy: —
17. Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom: 186
18. The Naked Kiss: —
19. Shock Corridor: 570
20. Sid & Nancy: —
21. Dead Ringers: 488
22. Summertime: —
23. Robocop: — (2012 list: 764)
24. High and Low: 327
25. Alphaville: 391
26. The Long Good Friday: —
27. Flesh for Frankenstein: —
28. Blood for Dracula: —
29. Picnic at Hanging Rock: 515
30. M: 49
31. Great Expectations: 447
32. Oliver Twist: —
33. Nanook of the North: 246
34. Andrei Rublev: 25
35. Diabolique: 624
36. The Wages of Fear: 251
37. Time Bandits: —
38. Branded to Kill: 742
39. Tokyo Drifter: —
40. Armageddon: —
41. Henry V: 647
42. Fishing With John: — (N/A?)
43. Lord of the Flies: —
44. The Red Shoes: 154
45. Taste of Cherry: 410
46. The Most Dangerous Game: —
47. Insomnia: —
48. Black Orpheus: 667
49. Nights of Cabiria: 176
50. And the Ship Sails On: — (2011 list: 949)
51. Brazil: 225

Or, put the other way:

10 Seven Samurai
23 The 400 Blows
25 Andrei Rublev
39 Grand Illusion
49 M
70 The Seventh Seal
77 Amarcord
154 The Red Shoes
176 Nights of Cabiria
186 Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom
225 Brazil
234 Beauty and the Beast
251 The Wages of Fear
246 Nanook of the North
327 High and Low
344 This Is Spinal Tap
391 Alphaville
408 Walkabout
410 Taste of Cherry
447 Great Expectations
488 Dead Ringers
515 Picnic at Hanging Rock
537 The Silence of the Lambs
570 Shock Corridor
573 The Lady Vanishes
624 Diabolique
647 Henry V
667 Black Orpheus
685 The Killer
742 Branded to Kill

2012: 764 Robocop
2011: 949 And the Ship Sails On

None of

7. A Night to Remember
9. Hard Boiled
14, 15, 16. The Samurai Trilogy
18. The Naked Kiss
20. Sid & Nancy
22. Summertime
26. The Long Good Friday
27. Flesh for Frankenstein
28. Blood for Dracula
32. Oliver Twist
37. Time Bandits:
39. Tokyo Drifter
40. Armageddon
43. Lord of the Flies
46. The Most Dangerous Game
47. Insomnia
42. Fishing With John (N/A?)

is invited to the party.

---

By contrast, here is my personal critical ordering (as done just now with minimal deliberation):

5. The 400 Blows
34. Andrei Rublev
35. Diabolique
51. Brazil
12. This Is Spinal Tap
49. Nights of Cabiria
10. Walkabout
6. Beauty and the Beast
11. The Seventh Seal
42. Fishing With John
4. Amarcord
50. And the Ship Sails On
44. The Red Shoes
1. Grand Illusion
30. M
31. Great Expectations
26. The Long Good Friday
29. Picnic at Hanging Rock
48. Black Orpheus
3. The Lady Vanishes
45. Taste of Cherry
46. The Most Dangerous Game
24. High and Low
2. Seven Samurai
37. Time Bandits
22. Summertime
32. Oliver Twist
19. Shock Corridor
47. Insomnia
36. The Wages of Fear
20. Sid & Nancy
7. A Night to Remember
13. The Silence of the Lambs
39. Tokyo Drifter
9. Hard Boiled
18. The Naked Kiss
38. Branded to Kill
40. Armageddon
14, 15, 16. The Samurai Trilogy
21. Dead Ringers
41. Henry V
8. The Killer
28. Blood for Dracula
43. Lord of the Flies
33. Nanook of the North
23. Robocop
25. Alphaville
27. Flesh for Frankenstein

17. Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom N/A

Comparing this list to the ostensible critical consensus list above, we find that apparently by my estimation, the most overrated of these movies are Nanook of the North and Alphaville, and the most underrated are Diabolique and The Ship Sails On.

Sure.

---

But wait, there’s “more.” It remains to reveal why I have chosen to pause for these obsessive festivities at this particular point, after 51 films.

Indulge me this alternate trophy case.

And from the front, tiny:

Those are the original spines and covers of titles 1–51, as they appeared upon release, beginning March 31, 1998, and running through the fall of 1999. These comprise the entirety of the releases designed to Criterion’s first DVD cover template:

With #52 they introduced the second template, a considerable ensleekening of the same basic idea:

This lasted until 2006 and #341. #342 is the first title with the third template, the longest-lived and still in use today, courtesy of the all-powerful “Paula Scher of Pentagram”:

(If you’re wondering what number they’re up to now: #703 The Freshman was released on March 25.)

To obsess over this a little bit further — which is, after all, what they want us to do: Criterion does not release these exactly in “spine #” order. The numbering is apparently assigned early enough in the production process that delays can cause projects to fall out of order in the queue, sometimes far out of order. As it turns out, one of their longest-delayed titles was #1, Grand Illusion, which was put off for nearly two years because a better film source was located. It didn’t become available until November 1999, around the same time as #62. So its cover wasn’t actually designed until after the second template was already in effect. If you scroll back up you’ll see that it’s different from the rest.

You’ll also see that it has an all-around snazzier cover than most of the other first 51 releases. With the exception of the last of them, the very showy Brazil translucent slipcase 3-disc extravaganza, the packaging design of this first year’s releases does not yet seem to be the priority and hallmark that it has since become for Criterion. Certainly if you go back and look at the laserdiscs that they had been releasing since 1984, the cover designs are completely ordinary.

It seems as though the heavy design investment in the Brazil packaging marked the arrival of a new strategy, and that the sleeker branding of the new template that followed it is another manifestation of the same. To my surprise I can’t find the history of this epochal business decision documented online, despite its obvious geek appeal as a subject, but maybe I just haven’t searched hard enough. Anyway, Steve Jobs gets all these accolades for having made a fortune by betting on design above all; whoever steered Criterion to put its money into art direction was just as inspired, in a distinctly different sort of market. I mean, I don’t know the numbers. I just know that when you go to Barnes & Noble DVD department today, in the age of the digital download, “The Criterion Collection” gets its own aisle, on par with “Comedy” or “Children.” I think it’s the only brand in the entire store that gets treated like a genre unto itself. Design is why.

I have very deeply mixed — well-nigh tortured — feelings about design and its power, and Criterion is a perfect object for them to play on. But to dig into that now would be premature, because we haven’t yet gotten to that era of Criterion’s identity. The all-black spines and the frequently gawky covers seen above are the company in its adolescence, not yet a woman. So I guess I’ll save my sound and fury about design for our next pitstop, 20 years from now.

Suffice it to say, for now, that by the way I am delighting absurdly in ordering these rows of rectangles, and above all in investing myself in the numbered list (oh god yes the numbered list!), I am revealing the psychological opportunity that was essentially dropped in their lap, and that they were savvy enough to seize, but I am also revealing the roots of my ambivalence.

All old news, round these parts.

What remains at present is to address the fact that Criterion has complicated my perfect rows of rectangles by reissuing and redesigning their editions of many of these films, years later, but retaining the same spine numbers. Of the 51 titles above, only 13 are currently in print in the same editions/the same packaging. 14 of the others are simply out of print, generally because rights agreements expired. A full 23 of them were replaced by improved versions: completely new releases in new transfers with new features and new packaging, products of a much later period within the DVD age. Whenever possible I watched the newest and best version — the old ones are, in fact, frequently not of great quality, 1998 having been very early days for DVD. So of course I am going to have enumerate each of them.

To start with the dullest and most pointless: if you totaled up that breakdown in the previous paragraph, you noticed that there is 1 missing. That’s this guy, which mysteriously on later pressings had the second template replace the first on the cover, without anything else about the product changing (as far as I’m aware). Maybe for a minute they considered doing that for all of them, but then decided against it.

Next dullest: these here Samurai — remember them? — were gathered into a box set (good call; who’s going to want just part 2?) and got similar template upgrades in the process (plus they eliminated that Papyrus-y title font, of doubtful ethnic sensitivity. Another good call). The box is at right.

Now we move on to the four that were genuinely rereleased in better transfers in the era of the second template, 1999—2006. Since I didn’t start watching my way through these until 2008, I got to see the new and improved editions of each of these four. These new covers are all improvements (though the loss of the 50s title treatment on The 400 Blows is disappointing).

(People who are really up on their Criterion OCD will know that there is actually yet another 400 Blows design from this era, as part of the “Antoine Doinel” boxset (spine #185, containing #s 5, 186, 187, 188). But I consider that as merely a component of release #185, only numbered “5” for old time’s sake and never sold individually as such. I thus am not addressing it here. I realize that I may lose some subscribers over this but we have always been guided by principle here at Broomlet. Today’s decision continues that fine tradition. Broomlet proudly embraces the spirit of the 21st century, in which no-one is excluded. However nothing matters more to us than your opinion. We want to hear from you! Please fill out a survey on your way out and let us know if there’s anything we can do to improve your experience.)

When the era of Blu-ray came around and necessitated high-resolution issues of otherwise old products, these same four releases, having already been brought up to a higher standard both internally and externally, simply had to have their designs adapted to current template.

However you’ll see that in the case of Beauty and the Beast they did take the opportunity to rework it, using the same basic components for something tonally rather different. This then, I believe, is the single example in their catalog of a title with three different covers: a 90s, 00s, and 10s edition. It can be easy for me to forget how different those three decades have felt, but these Beauty and the Beast covers have it nicely mapped out for me. If I’d seen the 2013 cover back in 1998, I would have thought it looked lopsided and arid and completely uncool, some clueless Soviet stab at elegance. Sterility chic hadn’t yet been invented; I couldn’t yet conceive of the general public, or even the pretentious few, feeling aspiration or desire for bloodlessness, for an icily soothing stasis. Nowadays of course the Apple Store cleantopia is axiomatic, and tweaked or drained color is de rigueur for movies.

That is all a bad thing, right? It seems like a bad thing. But there is another part of me now that thinks the box looks pretty cool and would probably look especially cool next to many other boxes of the same dimensions.

Moving on.

(No wait, before I move on. To be more fair (to me in 1999), I wouldn’t really have thought this looked clueless and Soviet. I would have recognized the asymmetry and cold as notions of high-fashion intellectual-aesthetic stylishness revived from earlier in the 20th century. And I probably would have found that remarkably historically-aware and exciting, the way I felt about Rushmore in 1998: “Wow, the aesthetic vigor of decades past doesn’t have to be dead after all! We can do it all again if we like!” So it wasn’t that I couldn’t yet feel the aesthetic; I just couldn’t yet imagine that in only a decade, Rushmore would have brought about so complete a renovation of popular aesthetics that these same gestures would be rendered completely ahistorical, drained of their vigor, turned into mere anxiousness and compulsion.

Okay, NOW moving on.)

Brazil is now being sold in a single-disc edition (and Blu-Ray) with the third template on a cover that might look like it was completely redesigned. Actually, it’s the same illustration that was always on the first box of the set, once you took it out of the translucent blue slipcase. (Now that you know what to look for, you can sort of see him there, winging it, even in this tiny image.)

So here, at last, are the interesting ones, the nineteen (+one box) that were completely upgraded and redesigned after the Pentagram rebranding, at the (still ongoing) height of the company’s fixation on design.

On my screen the width can handle five at a time so I’m doing them five at a time. Hope this looks right for everyone else.

Of these five, I saw the new version only of Amarcord. A Night to Remember and Walkabout weren’t reissued until after I’d watched them, but I do regret not having taken the time to seek out the superior editions of Seven Samurai and The Lady Vanishes, neither of which looked too hot on the old editions that I watched. Those are the only cases where I watched an old version by negligence rather than necessity. But there’s no time to look back now; not when I still have 650 titles to go.

The Samurai Trilogy, you’ll be happy to hear, is now only sold as a set. I missed out on all of these reissues, unfortunately.

The two Samuel Fuller titles with the new Daniel Clowes covers I missed out on, too. The rest I got to see in their new versions. (Well, except I opted out of Salo. But it was the new version that I opted out of.)

All of these I watched recently enough to get to see the updated versions.

That’s it. You made it!

So here at the bottom I’d like to announce: going forward I’m going to include the cover in each of my Criterion posts. The covers are irrelevant to the films but very important to what’s going on here. Whether I like it or not.

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Update! on the occasion of preparing the post for #52–100.

It’s three horrible years later and naturally Criterion has seen fit to revisit a few titles from spines #1–51 in that time, meaning that the rundown of the cover designs is now less than exhaustive. Naturally I’m going to rectify that.

Soothing, isn’t it.

directed by Terry Gilliam
screenplay by Terry Gilliam, Tom Stoppard, and Charles McKeown

Criterion #51.

This is an old favorite that I’ve seen many times and endorse. I am mostly going to muse about the ending. Spoilers.

Gilliam says it’s a happy ending, which on the face of it is passive-aggressive sophistry. (“That’s right, if you felt as put-upon as I do, you’d think this is happy! Think of that! Just imagine how bad I must feel!”) On the other hand, he’s not wrong that Sam’s escape is legitimate on the movie’s terms. The movie’s two dreams — left (bureaucratic cog) and right (winged hero) — are equal and parallel. Forget the logistics of “Sam going to sleep and dreaming,” which the audience knows is just a mechanical device. Brazil is a diptych, a tapestry with two panels. The tension throughout is: how will these two dreams coexist? The ending is simply that Sam chooses the right and the camera chooses the left.

But cameras are privileged, in movies, so the slap-in-the-face punchline feels like a decisive vote for self-pity on Gilliam’s part, after 2 hours of a movie that sure seemed to be voting for exuberant creativity. His Munchhausen ends the same way… except then it doesn’t. Brazil really does end this way, but that’s not where its heart lives. Gilliam’s bitterness is always ambivalent, which can make it all the less sympathetic. If you know better, why don’t you know better? Underneath his giggling victim act, he’s actually an extrovert Romantic. He’s no shrinking Emily Dickinson, holed up with his notebooks and worry. Look at this big crazy movie! How can the guy who made this end by telling me that real life consists of being shackled and tortured in the 9th circle of hell? The answer is that he doesn’t really mean it, he’s just venting. Which is a frustrating place to end.

It’s the same as what I said about The Lord of the Flies — we can get a kick out of defeatism because we don’t actually believe it. It’s just spookhouse make-believe, Halloween. But Lord of the Flies is very single-mindedly Halloween, whereas Brazil taken as a whole is a full Mad Magazine’s worth of cranky glee, a wild grabbag. The final needle-jab of sarcasm is delightful as a single beat, but it isn’t necessarily the ending, and it’s claiming to be necessary. It’s supposed to be hard and angry and poignant. But couldn’t this all just as well have ended with the fold-in?

Maybe I’m giving the ending too much weight. But I’m not alone, since this is what Gilliam and the studio execs came to grief over. The bonus material relating to the fights with Universal fascinated me this time around, because I was shocked to find that the executives now sound pretty sympathetic to me. Wrong, but sympathetic. Underneath the battle of business is a battle of psychologies: Gilliam identifying fiercely with his ending of ghoulish self-pity, addicted to his own petty resentments; the executives unable to conceive of ghoulish self-pity as entertainment because their resentments are not petty: because for them this isn’t Halloween, it’s real. Brazil is a nightmare they cannot afford to have; it’s truly too close to home. For Gilliam it’s a nightmare he can afford to entertain, but that his bitterness refuses to allow anyone else to avoid. Both positions are defensive and nobody benefits from either of them. But Gilliam at least made a movie.

The 3rd disc of this 3-disc set is the outlandishly choppy “happy ending” studio edit. Gilliam’s movie of good faith hope that ends in bad faith defeatism is grotesquely forced to conform to Sid Sheinberg’s emotional outlook of unchallenged bad faith hope. This is the function of the standard Hollywood narrative: selling ourselves something we don’t actually believe deep down but are pleased to imagine that we believe because it seems to fit the bill. The real Brazil is something Gilliam really believes, topped off with something he is pleased to imagine he believes, perversely, because it’s such a downer.

But the good faith resolution — the real moral of the story — is, I think, there under the surface already. Sam’s escape would be a happy ending, if only the camera could be gotten to agree about its validity, or at least be agnostic. The studio’s request that Gilliam bring in clouds behind Sam in the final shot, which can be seen in the Universal version, is philosophically apt. But on the Criterion director’s cut, Gilliam reverted to the original shot: the credits roll over the torture chamber, unrelieved. Gilliam’s commentary track musings at this point exactly capture the knife-edge of his ambivalence. He seems to find himself saying, to his own surprise, that he thinks the clouds are great, that they are the correct ending… and then, apparently feeling self-conscious about contradicting his own choice, rationalizes by saying that he didn’t include them in this cut because one doesn’t need to see them: one feels what they signify even when they aren’t there. But in the very act of needing to talk this out, he seems to recognize that one doesn’t necessarily feel them. Only his ideal viewer will feel them.

Like all self-pity, his functions as a test: Are you the right kind of person? Will you be able to feel my real vulnerable emotion that I am expressing as its spiteful opposite? Can you tell that when I’m hopeless I’m actually hopeful? Gilliam doesn’t trust anyone who can’t tell. Except when he does.

Anyway, the passive-aggressive ending could very easily be purified if after the nasty reveal, we returned to Sam’s reality, with him triumphant and free. Why not?

The two dreams of the movie are one dream, to us. The movie tells us to embrace illusions and also to reject illusions. It loves fantasy and fears it. Is it good or bad to be lost in a hall of mirrors? Is it good or bad that life is an illusion? The correct dream answer is: both, always. In this respect, most of Brazil is right on the money: irreconcilably ambivalent. Like all the best movies, its narrative impulses eat each other and cancel out and meld and run wild, while its feelings roll ever onward. That’s art I can get inside. It’s only when this movie tries to get specific and say something that I resist it.

This was Criterion’s first really mega-super-deluxe-o set, with three discs, a fancy slipcase, a new director’s cut, and lots and lots of bonus stuff. It is, not coincidentally, also the very first DVD I ever bought. (I believe). At Tower Records in 1998. It marks the end of Criterion’s first phase of DVDs, design-wise, about which an entire tedious post to come — and thus it marks the end of my first phase of this project. I’ve watched 51 of these babies! Time to celebrate; stay tuned. It feels fitting that this last one is the one that’s been on my shelf, wherever I’ve lived, for the past 16 years.

Because the image on the old 1998 disc is “non-anamorphic” and Criterion’s later releases of the same set were much higher resolution, I figured I’d get the Blu-ray from Netflix to watch the main feature. But when it arrived it turned out not to be the Criterion edition but the Universal edition, with the original theatrical cut. So I watched that first, and then the director’s cut right after. No offense to Terry or to Criterion but the Universal version is a better movie. It’s tighter and flows better. The colors of the transfer are nicer, too, I think. But the Criterion bonus stuff is top-class. Nowadays they probably wouldn’t lean on “press forward to advance through these screens of text” quite so heavily, but for 1998 it’s excellent. Gilliam’s commentary is solid, the commentary on the crazy studio version is pretty astute, the two little documentaries are both good.

I particularly enjoy the relaxed video interview with the late Michael Kamen, the composer. This is a rewarding score that I admire. It’s thrillingly shameless — after all, how would restraint possibly serve this movie? It’s a big orchestra slopping all over the place and wrapping all the oversaturated fantasy in oversaturated musical fantasy to match. Much of the score is derived from squeezing the title song through Richard Strauss, but it’s really gloriously all over the map. Kamen is ready to savor every little thing, just like Gilliam, and it’s that willingness to really pursue self-amusement all the way to its limits that I find magnetic. I used to listen to this soundtrack album a lot in high school. It’s bizarrely put together and doesn’t make a lot of sense as a listening experience; yet at the same time, maybe for that reason, it is even more transporting than most soundtracks. It is another world, a weirdly two-dimensional one, on its own terms.

There is no real main title to speak of, and the end title is, of all things, a kind of nod to Black Orpheus, completely uncharacteristic of the rest of the score. So our selection is the signature cue, the one everyone remembers, the one you probably know as “Wall-E preview”: “The Office,” which Kamen says was inspired by Leroy Anderson’s “The Typewriter,” but obviously there’s a lot more going on here.

I don’t know if the marimba + electric guitar combo is original to Kamen or is lifted from some Esquivel arrangement or something, but it’s a stroke of orchestrational brilliance. More fundamentally, it is film-composerly brilliance to have recognized that in the vamp of “Brazil” was the potential to tease out this rising tide that would convey yearning and irony and hopelessness and inanity. The subtle poignancy of this cue encapsulates everything that Terry Gilliam is saying in the movie, and Kamen figured out how to say it efficiently and simply, all within the pre-existing song he was obligated to use. I spent many an hour as a teenager contemplating this cue and considering what it would feel like to have the aesthetic and emotional insight to realize that you could write this cue and it would work. That’s composing. I aspired to that and still do. Your track 51.

directed by Federico Fellini
story and screenplay by Federico Fellini and Tonino Guerro
opera texts by Andrea Zanzotto

Criterion #50. And the Ship Sails On.

You know he’s a big deal when this is one of his minor films.

Fellini’s late work seems to be generally thought of rather dimly, at least outside Italy. (“Late work” here means everything after Amarcord, which chronologically speaking is the entire second half of his career.) Several of the films seem to be completely unavailable on DVD. From my internet reading I don’t get the sense that there’s any very good critical reason for the neglect other than inertia of neglect.

It doesn’t surprise me that once things begin to be unfamous, reflexive skepticism would keep them that way. Like I said ages ago, “art” in the abstract tends to be assumed to be mediocre. If you just look at the list of an artist’s complete output — an artist you know nothing about — you may well feel some tickle of an inclination to think “how nice for him that he kept himself busy; a shame it’s all (probably) the same, all (probably) kind of blah.”

People tend to assume that their cultural exposure has been governed by an invisible hand of taste, and that if they haven’t heard of something, it’s probably not as good as the things they’ve heard of. This is the artgoer’s equivalent of “if you’re poor you must be lazy.” But it’s human nature. We ought to aspire to do better than to just run with it, though.

In E la nave va there are some aristocrats and artists on a luxurious ship. Various scenes play out. It all seems to be a dream. Everything is gently, sweetly unreal. One of the characters says he’s a journalist and seems to be our tour guide. There is an air of foreboding and also of quiet happiness. Eventually there is a sort of cataclysm and it ends.

That’s it!

There is some hint throughout, especially toward the end, that this is a socio-political Allegory of The Death of The 19th Century. That’s well and good, but it’s hardly a skeleton key to the movie; it’s just one of many layers on Fellini’s onion of subconsciousness. The feeling that this may all be some kind of metaphor or a critique is just another emotional thread in the dream fabric. (Critics who seize a movie like this by the allegory and then try to shake it into submission are just dreaming their own agitated sort of dream.) The archetypes of the 19th century and the looming significance of World War I are all crammed on this luxury liner together not as comments on a historical reality but simply as ingredients sloshing around in a certain part of the present-day imagination. At least of the imagination of a certain Italian filmmaker. And of mine too, because I too have seen A Night at the Opera.

I lay watching this in a very soft state of mind and found it thoroughly congenial. My only complaints would be that 1) it all ran a bit long, and 2) when the political material began to be more prominent toward the end I started to get the unfortunate impression that I was supposed to be watching more rationally and analytically. In retrospect I’m confident that impression was false, but I do think there’s something a little dramaturgically imbalanced in the second half. Though that’s also the nature of dreams. That was probably just a first-time thought that would not present itself on repeat viewings.

I will not recount the contents because it’s a movie to be mused over rather than worked out and explained. Here for flavor is one scene: everyone stands around in the kitchen and watches intently while the “deepest bass in the world” does his trick of singing a note so low that it makes a chicken fall asleep. It makes the narrator fall down unconscious too, but they quickly pick him up and he’s fine and in good spirits.

This is, I guess, “surrealism,” but the official “surrealists” sort of stole that term for the flavor of their dreams. That Salvador Dali stuff always feels a little off to the icky side, for me. Fellini’s dreams are more like mine. Like my good ones anyway.

Here’s a quote from the director, vindicating my approach toward this movie. I didn’t find this until afterward:

I would like to have billboards placed on the cinema doors with the following wording: “There is nothing more than what you’ll see.” Or: “Don’t make any efforts to see what is behind, or you’ll run the risk of not being able to see what is in front of you.”

It’s a show. It’s a poetic auteurist show, not one that follows a set recipe, but its freestyling will be more or less familiar from your subconscious, if you let it be.

Signor Fellini is a very great artist, I say, for being able to draw such well-modulated dreaminess out of the great messy world of production reality: set-building and actor-wrangling and crew-direction and blah and blah blah. It is rare that so elaborate a production is put to so ethereal an end, or at least rare that the ethereal note survives the physicality of the production. In the movie there is a stinking rhinoceros on board the ship, representing (perhaps) the fantastic in the real and the real in the fantastic. At the end our narrator rows away with it, planning to live off its milk.

The artifice is part of the texture of the film: everything looks intentionally fake, in a pleasantly disorienting way, and our attention is repeatedly called to the deep strangeness in the very fact that this dream is so physical and real and made out of people and stuff at work in a studio. At the very end he goes all out and pulls back to show the studio and the lights the mechanism rocking the fake deck and the camera and the crew and, his face hidden by the camera, himself. But even over this the dreamy music continues to play. Even if I was wrong to say it about Nights of Cabiria, I know I’m right here: the spirit is simply that movies are dreams, life is a dream, we’re all on the ship and the ship sails on.

The flavor is sort of like Terry Gilliam meets Proust.

Or maybe David Lynch. And there’s some Chaplin and Marx Brothers thrown in. Plus at times it feels like you’re watching a movie about the Titanic. And/or an opera.

Pina Bausch is in it, not dancing. Barbara Jefford is in it, whom I was able to place (before the movie ended!) as Molly Bloom from the Ulysses movie. Odd that I quoted her in the last entry. The main narrator guy is played by Freddie Jones, who is apparently the father of Toby Jones.

One of the characters has clearly been intentionally made to resemble this painting.

I went online to read stuff people said about this movie but anyone who has anything to say other than that it’s underrated and a lovely piece of art seems mostly wrong to me. And I don’t want anyone to take away the half-asleep magic sympathy I felt for this movie so I stopped reading. Once I’ve posted this I probably won’t be able to help myself but read some more, though. I would watch this again someday.

Several of the lead actors are English-speaking only and had to be dubbed into Italian. The dubbing is very loose throughout, which serves to increase the dreamy effect and wasn’t a problem for me. But apparently (according to scattered comments online) the so-called “English dub” of the movie, as shown back in 1984 in the UK and apparently later on cable a few times, included the original audio in the actors’ real voices, and those who have seen it consider it the preferred version of the film. Criterion does not include this and I’m not sure it’s available anywhere. Criterion doesn’t include much of anything. Interestingly, since this release, they haven’t ventured to extend their catalog to include any of the other “obscure” Fellini items, even though this seems like ripe territory for “rediscovery.” Certainly for “repackaging.”

(Speaking of Criterion and its releases: hey, this is the 50th that I’ve watched! I’m going to do a little pointless celebrating of my grand achievement here, but not until after the 51st, for a dumb reason that I’ll explain when I get there.)

The music was done by one Gianfranco Plenizio (Nino Rota died in 1979). It’s almost entirely arrangements of familiar classical music (and a couple of “folk” items that I assume are at least partially traditional). The showpieces are two opera scenes, at the beginning and end of the voyage, sung by everyone on board, with new lyrics (including the title) set to bits of Verdi. But I couldn’t choose those because there are interfering sound effects and also I’m trying to avoid songs. The end credits are just Signor Plenizio playing “Clair de lune” with some odd editing, but it’s his own simple and dreamy take on it, and gives the flavor of the movie. So even though it’s not original music — in the strictest sense there is essentially none in the movie — this is what we’re going with. Track 50.

directed by Federico Fellini
screenplay by Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli
additional dialogue by Pier Paolo Pasolini

Criterion #49. Nights of Cabiria.

This has all the hallmarks of “great film” status (“Great film” in the snooty international Cahiers du Film Studies sense, not the Academy Awards montage “Oh, Toto! Attaboy Clarence! I’m the king of the world! You’re a wizard, Harry!” sense):

1) auteurism, this being Fellini’s own script for a movie showcasing his wife, plus did I mention “Fellini”
2) intra-cinematic reference (to e.g. Charlie Chaplin)
3) meta-cinematic reference (a movie star and a magic show figure in Cabiria’s adventures)
4) opportunity to say “breaks the fourth wall”
5) black-and-white
6) not American
7) slow pace
8) centrist approach to satisfy partisans of naturalism (unglamorous people and places + an impression of unmanaged humanity) and romanticism (touches of magic realism + fabulist contrivances in the plotting)
9) already established as a “great film”
10) (is good)

I may sound cynical about this, but I’m not. I enjoyed the movie and wouldn’t want to strip it of its fame at all. I do sometimes want to strip halls of fame of their fame, though. And their halls.

Advocates of relatively marginalized art are usually too preoccupied by their marginalization to think straight. They want to do the public culture a service by trying to return good and worthwhile things to the light — as well they might, seeing as how much of what’s in the light at any given time is terrible. But they tend to go about it naively and ineffectually. They wish everyone else shared their tastes, but they don’t actually believe in manipulating people to bring that about — so they devote themselves to building shrines and halls of fame, and then polishing them brighter and brighter, rather than simply buying advertising space and insinuating themselves into people’s regular lives, which might actually do some good. Shrines and halls of fame are essentially defensive.

The people at The Criterion Collection, however — to their immense credit — actually do something quite genuinely constructive to rehabilitating great films with their Trojan Horse approach. They package! package! package! until their vacantly sexy product can attract the design-lust of the living, and then lo and behold some people are, they know not why, watching Nights of Cabiria again. Or, equally, something else. Obviously Trojan Horseplay places great responsibility on the curator. And thus by extension on the viewer. I could go on about Criterion and packaging and authenticity and my mixed feelings. Someday I will but it won’t be for a while.

Nights of Cabiria is about a good soul and whether she will be able to find kindness in the world. It is exactly a Charlie Chaplin movie, except that Chaplin was a very pure egomaniac and did not differentiate between the world being saved and the world learning to love him sufficiently. Fellini tries to work outside such illusions. Both this movie and nearly every Chaplin movie pose the same sentimental question: “Will this person be loved sufficiently?” But the philosophical extension of the question is different in the two cases. Chaplin egomaniacally implies that his film is asking “will the world ever be good and pure?” Fellini’s generalization is the more reasonable “will any person ever be loved sufficiently?” He is a less complete egomaniac and has at least some inkling that his audience is made up of individuals with their own problems.

This may sound dubiously psychoanalytic of me, but it’s explicitly what the second half of the movie is about. The pivot of the plot (such as it is) is that in a moment of spooky transcendence, Cabiria — outwardly already a lovable Little Tramp figure — is magically made to reveal her true purity and simplicity of soul in its complete nakedness. And after this moment of uncannily intense vulnerability, the audience is held in suspense about it for a very long time: has this been a good or a bad thing?

Well, to spoil the famous ending — I’m going to try not to be specific, but if you haven’t seen it you might want to do that rather than read this and the next paragraph — it is, of course, a mixed bag. The question left poignantly open at the end is how much the proportions of that mix matter.

The strength of art is to draw compelling philosophical equations where the rational mind would refuse them, and this is where the film earns its greatness, in my book. Fellini’s ultimate cinematic proposal is that there is a sense in which the proportions of pain and joy simply do not matter. There is kindness in life, and that is good; there is cruelty in life and that is bad. And he can put his finger on the bad side of the scale as heavily as he wants, and it is still in some sense balanced. In the art-sense of the film we feel the truth of this point of view, and the tears it draws are, I think, tears of recognition. Then the lights are immediately turned back on so that we can’t argue against any optimism but our own, because Fellini has already removed himself. This is a very sophisticated manipulation of the audience and a very generous one.

Incidentally: I want to be clear that my calling Chaplin a “very pure egomaniac” is not intended as a criticism. I think his movies (at least the famous Little Tramp ones — I haven’t seen any of the more transparently self-indulgent later ones) are wonderful as gifts to the ego in everyone, the part that says “I am pure, and all my problems arise from the world being impure.” As far as it goes, this is true and healthy and the movies let us experience the joy of that. The difficulty comes when we stop watching intuitively and emotionally, and start thinking critically about the man behind the curtain, as it were, the real guy wearing the fake moustache. Then we might realize that we aren’t so sure we like his self-aggrandizing manipulations. But that’s the fall from grace. In actuality we did like the manipulations. They are not harmful to us until we observe them.

A few minutes ago, I intended for this train of thought to stop at several further stations that I had in mind, but my mental slate just got wiped and one of those end-of-the-line barriers got set up. And something I’m learning is that straining to recall thoughts that have untimely vanished is about the most destructive thing I can do to my flow, so let’s just go on to the next thing.

(“Untimely” as adverb: some dictionaries say “archaic” but OED, and more surprisingly, Merriam-Webster, do not. Take that, readers.)

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During viewing I thought: “perhaps the title Nights of Cabiria is meant to suggest that the successive episodes are her different dreams, reflecting and embodying her various fears and hopes and ambivalences, as real dreams do.” In part I thought this because I wasn’t yet clear on what level of realism vs. clown-show I was seeing. Later on, when I had grown comfortable with the style of the movie, I no longer needed this conceit to get me through, but it still worked. And afterward it still does. Maybe it only does because all movies are like dreams, or all art is like dreams, or all life is like dreams. But maybe it specifically does because Fellini had that in mind at some level, though I can’t find that documented anywhere. Anyway I’m putting it out there.

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Nights of Cabiria seemed to me to be one of those works by male artists that says “women (my wife/girlfriend especially) and their souls and feelings are so wonderful and deep, which is to say that my eye for women and my awareness that they have souls and feelings is wonderful and deep, are you getting this, ladies? Check out my massive throbbing sensitivity to what you really are.” As Molly Bloom says: “yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is”. She says this because a man made her say it, in the course of his very flashy attempt to demonstrate that he could understand or feel what a woman is better than anyone.

This genre is of course generally associated with Woody Allen… but I personally think of Steve Martin as its most embarrassing practitioner, with screenplay after book after play showcasing his sensitive understanding of the real literature-worthy feelings of women who, y’know, happen to be his type. Am I the only person who thought of this as horribly transparently no more than the output of an ingrained denialist compulsion to convert idle sex fantasies about hot girls into “real” “consideration” of their “particular inner lives”? I mean, look at the damn cover! And of course Steve Martin played the “guy in the me-Steve-Martin role in this sex fantasy” in the movie. (I admit, I didn’t read it or see the movie. I did read one of his later books. As I recall it too had a hot girl with a lot of inner sadness in it.)

I’m not saying that the thought “hey, I’m objectifying that person, but I don’t want to be like that: let me try to think more fully and empathetically about them” can’t ever yield fruit. I’m also not saying that the thought “hey, I’m objectifying that person and I love what I’m seeing and I’m going to write it down as art” is problematic. But I do squirm at the bad faith of “I agree that objectifying someone is insufficient but don’t worry, this can’t possibly be objectification because it has feelings in it. Look where I say that ‘she sighed with loneliness when men would ogle her long, toned legs.’ Look where I say that ‘her tasteful miniskirt kept riding up uncomfortably over her girlish, too-skinny thighs!'” If we’re reading about people as people and not people as bodies, why the obsession with appearances?

Though Steve Martin has walked the walk, in that particular respect, by descending into some kind of sad facelift spiral, so what do I know.

I guess all I’m really saying is that “depth” can also be an object, “sincerity” can be a fashion, and “sensitivity” can be a ploy. I would never hurt you, girl. (Aw shit you’ve just been v=dQw4w9WgXcQ‎’ed!) And I get uncomfortable during “Girlfriends: so full of human depth!” movies because some part of me feels like I’m being very slowly v=dQw4w9WgXcQ‎’ed.

Related: I have always been very nervous about attempting to write fiction about fictional people — and not just the hot ones — because I fear that all my “imaginative empathy” will just sound like Steve Martin’s writing: like someone who desperately needs to believe that he is sensitive, far more than he actually is sensitive. What causes that effect? Overthinking, and if you’re asking about it, it’s already too late. Damn! Try again later.

ANYWAY, let’s go back to Woody Allen, who like I said is a more common point of reference for the “dig me digging my girlfriend” genre. Maybe I’ve just got Woody Allen on the brain because Nicholas Kristof recently ran this provocative piece asking everyone what their favorite Woody Allen movie is — it’s been a while but I think mine may still be Love and Death. Thanks, New York Times, this was fun! — but Nights of Cabiria seemed to me like the ideal “why my girlfriend is cool” movie Woody has been trying to make for years. When I saw Amarcord I also got a strong sense of the extent of Woody’s debt to Fellini. Confirmed: it is a large extent.

In Fellini’s defense on this count, if a defense is needed: what Giulietta Masina is doing here is real performance, not just a kind of relaxed self-exposure a la Diane Keaton in Annie Hall (which, to be clear, I like). But, as some pretentious clowning instructor (or for that matter Charlie Chaplin) might say: the essence of clowning is truth — real, if stylized, self-exposure — and of course what charms and endears us about Cabiria is her aura of humanity and spirit, not her specific “persona,” and that cannot be falsified out of whole cloth. (I know it is theoretically a big deal that this is a movie about a prostitute, but she’s only as much a prostitute as The Little Tramp is homeless, which is to say only slightly more than Donald Duck is a duck.) It is a movie meant to win Giulietta Masina awards for being lovably wonderful, as it did.

Again the train hits a barrier and wonders where it could possibly have been going. I swear it was somewhere else. But look at that beautiful expanse of uninhabited snow out there, with no tracks to be seen. Let’s get out of here.

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Nino Rota is really very very good at what he does. His thing might seem limited and repetitive — if you listen to a “Best of Nino Rota’s Movie Music” album you might well feel that you’re just listening to a single cohesive album — but is actually exquisitely nuanced. The Amarcord theme and the Notti di Cabiria theme may sound like very similarly catchy little sentimental tunes in basically the same popular style, but if they swapped movies they wouldn’t work at all. The poignancy of one is not the same as the poignancy of the other: it’s a slightly different station at a slightly different volume at a slightly different time of day. In both cases the whole meaning of the film depends on the music, and he manages to get it exactly right.

Having on a few occasions been in or near the trenches when such musical choices are being hammered out, I know that this aspect of dramatic composing, getting the meaning exactly exactly right, is the subtlest and most important. John Williams used to say in interviews that the hardest part was getting the little motives on which the whole score was based to be exactly what they needed to be as signifiers, and that in more than one instance he had to work through many tens of almost-identical variants of the same few notes, trying to sniff out the right one. (Having them go on to be megafamous was surely vindicating. I think in the confidence of old age he may no longer spend quite as long as he might.) Nino Rota clearly had a special knack where he could get the dimension of meaning just right, and then execute it with such nonchalance that it would sound genuinely effortless, like it might just be a pre-existing track. I don’t know if he had to work at it or if it just came to him.

At the very end of this film, when the orchestra emerges in full force to bring down the curtain, we can’t help but notice that the score has known exactly what it was doing all along and has earned the feeling we’re feeling. It’s a very smart score that turns what might otherwise seem like a small and erratic movie into something cohesive and strong and moving. Here are the main titles: Track 49. (The themes that are “popular” here later appear arranged as “classical”; the themes that are “classical” here later appear arranged as “popular”.)