All of the posts this week are my contributions to the For the Love of Film: the Film Preservation Blogathon that is being put on by the Self-Styled Siren and Ferdy on Films in effort to raise money for the National Film Preservation Foundation.  As film lovers, we should all be aware of how delicate film is and how much of it has been lost due to improper preservation.  Luckily for all of us, there are individuals who have made careers out of restoring and archiving movies so that we are able to enjoy them, and so will future generations.  To donate to the National Film Preservation Foundation, please click HERE.

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The first time I was properly introduced to the work of the man I often claim as my favorite film director was through a screening of the 1957 film Nights of Cabiria in a film history class in college.  I was immediately struck by Giulietta Masina who plays the main character, Cabiria (in real life she was Felini’s wife and they made a stellar team).  The film tells the story of a prostitute looking for love in all the wrong places; she is mistreated and abused by men she falls in love with, but she still keeps her chin up.  Director Federico Fellini modeled Cabiria after Charlie Chaplin’s famous derelict, and the film itself was inspired by Chaplin’s City Lights.  It is easy to see the comparisons.  Like Chaplin, Masina was expert at emoting with her face.  Like Chaplin’s endearing Tramp, we don’t want anything bad to happen to Cabiria because she is such a kind soul trapped by circumstance, a shining light of kindness in a cruel world.  It is heartbreaking to see Cabiria being treated so horribly by men in this film, and yet her positive attitude during times of trouble (read: the entire film) is very inspiring.

In a wonderfully insightful essay about the film, Fellini wrote:

“The subject of loneliness and the observation of the isolated person has always interested me. Even as a child, I couldn’t help but notice those who didn’t fit in for one reason or another—myself included. In life, and for my films, I have always been interested in the out-of-step. Curiously, it’s usually those who are either too smart or those who are too stupid who are left out. The difference is, the smart ones often isolate themselves, while the less intelligent ones are usually isolated by the others. In Nights of Cabiria, I explore the pride of one of those who has been excluded.”

Nights of Cabiria is a perfect example of Italian Neo-Realism, a movement that sprang up after WWII and showed the darker side of life after Fascism and the plight of many impoverished Italians.  Though other films of the time period showed bereavement in a more literal sense (Vittorio DeSica’s Bicycle Thieves and Umberto D, Rosselini’s Rome Open City, Fellini’s La Strada also starring Masina), Cabiria is perhaps more tragic in that we know our heroine is somehow doomed, and yet she keeps fighting, keeps smiling, keeps dancing (“Mamboooo!”), and keeps living, despite the weight of the world being on her small shoulders.  There is a beautiful scene when Cabiria is in a theatre in Rome and is called upon stage to be hypnotized.  She stands in a spotlight with her eyes closed and a small smile on her face, shrouded in her own fantasies.  It is a wonderful example of showing her isolation through images.

My favorite part of the film has got to be the ending, in fact, it’s my favorite ending of any film that I’ve ever seen.  It’s inconclusive, and we’re not really offered much closure, but Fellini’s trick of bringing Cabiria out of her diegetic world and into the world of the spectator is brilliant and through this we are offered a mixed feeling of hope (especially with the amazing music by Nino Rota in the final scene) and dread.  I think posting a clip of the end of the film here is okay.  Though it makes more sense in the context of the entire movie, it’s a beautiful scene in itself and speaks volumes of Fellini and Masina’s brilliance.  Observe:

“Cabiria is a victim, and any of us can be a victim at one time or another. Cabiria is, however, more of a victim personality than most. Yet even so, there is also the survivor in her. This film doesn’t have a resolution in the sense that there is a final scene in which the story reaches a conclusion so definitive that you no longer have to worry about Cabiria. I myself have worried about her fate ever since.”

Me too, Mr. Fellini.  Me too.

All of the posts this week are my contributions to the For the Love of Film: the Film Preservation Blogathon that is being put on by the Self-Styled Siren and Ferdy on Films in effort to raise money for the National Film Preservation Foundation.  As film lovers, we should all be aware of how delicate film is and how much of it has been lost due to improper preservation.  Luckily for all of us, there are individuals who have made careers out of restoring and archiving movies so that we are able to enjoy them, and so will future generations.  To donate to the National Film Preservation Foundation, please click HERE.

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I always joke that if I could marry a movie, I’d marry David Lean’s 1945 quintessential British classic Brief Encounter.  Of course, that’s silly, but I say it because in my mind Brief Encounter is about as close to perfection as a film can get.  My friend Amanda recommended it a couple years ago and I’ve been hooked ever since.

Based on the 1936 play Still Life by Noel Coward, Brief Encounter is the story of an ordinary man and an ordinary woman who happily go about their ordinary lives (he is a doctor, she a housewife) until a chance meeting in the cafe at Milford Junction rail station shatters their senses of normalcy and sets in motion a forbidden love affair.  What sets Brief Encounter apart from other films with similar story lines (and there are many) is that it’s a perfect marriage of acting, directing, and screenwriting.  It also offers great commentary on the rigid morals of the British middle class shortly after WWII.  The lovers are deeply enamoured with one another, and their mid-day trips to the cinema, stolen kisses in railway tunnels, and a trip to the countryside, offer an exciting relief from the monotony of their private lives at home.  They are unable to consummate their love, however, out of a deeply rooted sense of guilt.  Alec and Laura, the latter especially, must make do with fantasies.  We see her on the train to Ketchworth dreaming about a perfect world with Alec: on a cruise, in Paris at the opera, and other romantic interludes.  We know as much as Laura does that her relationship with Alec must stay in the world of the fantastic.

Some of the best dialogue in the film comes out of Laura’s sense of guilt.  One of my favorite passages in any film is this one:

“This can’t last. This misery can’t last. I must remember that and try to control myself. Nothing lasts really. Neither happiness nor despair. Not even life lasts very long. There’ll come a time in the future when I shan’t mind about this anymore, when I can look back and say quite peacefully and cheerfully how silly I was. No, no, I don’t want that time to come ever. I want to remember every minute, always, always to the end of my days.”

To me, this is great writing.  Richard Dyer, film historian and professor at King’s College in London, did a book about Brief Encounter for the BFI in which he suggests that the two lovers’ moral struggle and oppression may have been linked to Noel Coward’s personal experience as a (closeted) gay man living in a time when homosexuality was illegal and forbidden.  From what Ive read and seen, I’m not sure how closeted Noel Coward actually was; he seemed quite open and it was much easier for gay men to be free about their sexuality when engaged in the theatre.  Either way, the screenwriting in Brief Encounter is the best.  It’s sharp, intelligent, and never falls into a pot of sap like so many romantic films today tend to do (I’m looking at you, Nicholas Sparks movies).

Of course, Brief Encounter would not be the British equivalent of Casablanca (as some people refer to it) without Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard.  What I love about these two actors is that they weren’t at all glamorous, they were ordinary looking like you and me, and I think this made the story all the more believable.  Celia Johnson gives an especially powerful performance.  She had the most expressive and soulful eyes.  When Laura is at home with her husband and she is having an inner dialogue, wanting to tell him about her new doctor friend Alec, she says, “But, oh, Fred, I’ve been so foolish. I’ve fallen in love. I’m an ordinary woman. I didn’t think such violent things could happen to ordinary people.”   Can you imagine any other “conventionally beautiful” British star at the time uttering these lines in this film?  I don’t think I’d believe it if I saw it.  I’ve always thought of Ingrid Bergman as an unconventional beauty.  She was very natural, and I see Celia Johnson in the same way.

Brief Encounter is really the film that gave me an appreciation for David Lean.  I vastly prefer his earlier films to his later epics, and would take Blithe Spirit or Great Expectations of Doctor Zhivago any day.  Please don’t stone me for saying so.

If you have yet to see Brief Encounter, please do yourself a favor and remedy that situation.  You’re looking at a film that landed second on the BFI’s list of greatest British movies ever made, but it’s definitely first in my heart.  It is essential 1940s England.  And train station romances are simply the best.

Oh, shame on me I forgot to mention, the soundtrack is Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto #2.  This really is a movie after my own heart.

All of the posts this week are my contributions to the For the Love of Film: the Film Preservation Blogathon that is being put on by the Self-Styled Siren and Ferdy on Films in effort to raise money for the National Film Preservation Foundation.  As film lovers, we should all be aware of how delicate film is and how much of it has been lost due to improper preservation.  Luckily for all of us, there are individuals who have made careers out of restoring and archiving movies so that we are able to enjoy them, and so will future generations.  To donate to the National Film Preservation Foundation, please click HERE.

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Terrence Malick’s 1978 film Days of Heaven is a visual masterpiece. In fact, I’ll go as far as to say it’s one of the most visually stunning films I’ve ever seen. The story is quite simple on the surface: a young couple on the run in 1916, along with the boy’s younger sister, hitch a ride on a train to the Texas panhandle and work as seasonal harvesters on a young man’s farm. A love triangle forms between the boy Bill, girl Abbey, and the farmer (played by Sam Shepard) that ultimately leads to tragedy. All of the performances in this film are top notch (even Richard Gere, who usually isn’t one of my favorites), but I think Linda Manz totally steals the show. The story is, after all, told in a through her naive eyes, which gives the film a sort of fractured feeling. Manz has such a beautiful, haunted quality on screen.

The photography is really central in Days of Heaven. Malick and cinematographer Nestor Almendros (who won an Oscar for his camera work) wanted to pay homage to silent cinema and have images take precedence in the story. They also wanted to use as much natural lighting as possible to make it look more authentic. Alberta, Canada was chosen as the location for filming because of its breathtaking scenery (as seen in other films such as Legends of the Fall), and Malick and Almendros paid special attention to the use of color, which, in Criterion’s restored version is absolutely breathtaking. Everything in this film feels authentic to its period setting, including the farmer’s mansion, which evokes scenes from George Stevens’ Giant, and was built with full interior and exteriors by art director Jack Fisk. The opening credits even use authentic period photography, including famous photos by Lewis Hine. And let’s not forget Ennio Morricone’s haunting score, one of the most beautiful of any film. Malick’s vision was to be “a drop of water on a pond, that moment of perfection.”

To put it plainly, Days of Heaven is a work of art. From the sweeping shots of thunder clouds and vivid sunsets, to a plague of locusts, to an isolated mansion in the snow, every image in this film is like a painting. I think Malick certainly achieved a moment of perfection with Days of Heaven, or about as close as one can get to perfection on film. It is a period piece, an avant garde film, an epic. It is simply mesmerizing in so many ways.

In the Criterion essay about the film, historian Adrian Martin describes his thoughts after seeing Days of Heaven in the theatre:

I vividly remember the experience of sitting in a large, state-of-the-art theater in 1978, encountering this work, which seemed like the shotgun marriage of a Hollywood epic (in 70 mm!) with an avant-garde poem. Wordless (but never soundless) scenes flared up and were snatched away before the mind could fully grasp their plot import; what we could see did not always seem matched to what we could hear. Yes, there was another “couple on the run”—Richard Gere and Brooke Adams as the lovers Bill and Abby, he fleeing a murder he inadvertently committed working in a Chicago steel mill, she pretending to be his sister during the wheat harvest season in the Texas panhandle near the turn of the twentieth century—but this time, the filmmaker’s gaze upon them was not simply distant or ironic but positively cosmic. And there was so much more going on around these two characters, beyond even the dramatic triangle they formed with the melancholic figure of the dying farmer (Sam Shepard)—now the landscape truly moved from background to foreground, and the work that went on in it, the changes that the seasons wreaked upon it, the daily miracles of shifting natural light or the punctual catastrophes of fire or locust plague that took place . . . all this mattered as much, if not more, than the strictly human element of the film.

Above all, the radical strangeness and newness of Days of Heaven was signaled to its first viewers by its most fragmented, inconclusive, “decentered” feature: the voice-over narration of young Linda Manz as Linda, Bill’s actual sister, who is along for the ride, often disengaged from the main action but always hovering somewhere near. It might have seemed, at first twang, like a reprise of Spacek’s “naive” viewpoint from Badlands, but Manz’s thought-track goes far beyond a literary conceit. It flits in and out of the tale unpredictably, sometimes knowing nothing and at other times everything, veering from banalities about the weather to profundities about human existence. Sometimes even her sentences go unfinished, hang in midair. In this voice we hear language itself in the process of struggling toward sense, meaning, insight—just as, elsewhere, we see the diverse elements of nature swirling together to perpetually make and unmake what we think of as a landscape, and human figures finding and losing themselves, over and over, as they desperately try to cement their individual identities or “characters.”

In 2007 it was chosen to be preserved by the National Film Registry and Library of Congress for its achievement in being “culturally, historically, and aesthetically important.” Presently, Criterion is preparing to release it on Blu-ray, and I think if any film deserves such a treatment, it’s this one. This is a film I would have loved the opportunity to see on the big screen.

I can’t recommend this film enough.  If you haven’t seen it, do yourself the favor of adding it to your netflix queue.   I’m also sorry if this write-up is incoherent, like a lot of film critics, I have a hard time describing Days of Heaven because it’s that amazing.

All of the posts this week are my contributions to the For the Love of Film: the Film Preservation Blogathon that is being put on by the Self-Styled Siren and Ferdy on Films in effort to raise money for the National Film Preservation Foundation.  As film lovers, we should all be aware of how delicate film is and how much of it has been lost due to improper preservation.  Luckily for all of us, there are individuals who have made careers out of restoring and archiving movies so that we are able to enjoy them, and so will future generations.  To donate to the National Film Preservation Foundation, please click HERE.

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When it comes to film preservation, no distribution company beats the efforts of the Criterion Collection.  Together with Janus Films, Criterion has restored and released a line-up of foreign and art-house films so unprecedented, it nearly boggles the mind.  Granted, Criterion has signed contracts with a few studios to release some pretty questionable films (Armageddon?  Seriously?  Get out of here, Michael Bay!) but I can overlook that because the library is so chalk full of artistic and cinematic merit that it prevents the sore thumbs from sticking out.  I always know a Criterion film will be high quality.

Criterion’s mission (taken from their website):

Since 1984, the Criterion Collection, a continuing series of important classic and contemporary films, has been dedicated to gathering the greatest films from around the world and publishing them in editions that offer the highest technical quality and award-winning, original supplements. Over the years, as we moved from laserdisc to DVD, Blu-ray disc, and online streaming, we’ve seen a lot of things change, but one thing has remained constant: our commitment to publishing the defining moments of cinema for a wider and wider audience. The foundation of the collection is the work of such masters of cinema as Renoir, Godard, Kurosawa, Cocteau, Fellini, Bergman, Tarkovsky, Hitchcock, Fuller, Lean, Kubrick, Lang, Sturges, Dreyer, Eisenstein, Ozu, Sirk, Buñuel, Powell and Pressburger. Each film is presented uncut, in its original aspect ratio, as its maker intended it to be seen. Every time we start work on a film, we track down the best available film elements in the world, use state-of-the-art telecine equipment and a select few colorists capable of meeting our rigorous standards, then take time during the film-to-video digital transfer to create the most pristine possible image and sound. Whenever possible, we work with directors and cinematographers to ensure that the look of our releases does justice to their intentions. Our supplements enable viewers to appreciate Criterion films in context, through audio commentaries by filmmakers and scholars, restored director’s cuts, deleted scenes, documentaries, shooting scripts, early shorts, and storyboards. To date, more than 150 filmmakers have made our library of Director Approved DVDs, Blu-ray discs, and laserdiscs the most significant archive of contemporary filmmaking available to the home viewer.

The first Criterion dvd that I ever got for my personal collection was Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious, starring Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant (unfortunately this film has since been discontinued, along with another of my favorite Hitchcock films, Rebecca).  Later, as a film student in college, nearly every foreign film that was screened in class was a Criterion dvd.  Through Criterion, I was introduced to films such as Tokyo Story, Les Cuatre Cents Coups, Cleo from 5 to 7, Nights of Cabiria, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Ugetsu, and M, among others; all films that I could never find at Blockbuster.  I was hooked.  Imagine my delight when I discovered that DVD Planet in Huntington Beach had the entire Criterion Collection in stock!

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