A tempest of Murnau, Borzage, and Griffith with its own achingly sensual, mist-shrouded, potently translucent vision of city life and the mystique of human desire, Josef von Sternberg’s The Docks of New York is one of the pinnacles of American silent drama in the year of its acme. Which was, coincidentally, the year of its sputtering death throes, almost as if the pre-sound era was firing on all cylinders to stave off the phantom of sound, to preserve the crystalline purity of the visual medium and acclimatize viewers to the potency of the screen itself, and, above all, to throw itself the most divine combination going-away party and sarcophagus it could muster from its own hands. If so, Victor Sjöström’s The Wind might be the mortal specter of tenuous life, the skeleton in the casket, and Murnau’s Sunrise could be the grand, angelic denouement, the swooping saving grace to send the silents off to Asgard or some other heavenly resting place after being tempted by fate. I think it fitting that The Docks of New York would only ever take pride of place at silent cinema’s funeral as the drunken after-party, with the blissful ignorance of acceptance slurring around a fear of the future that is still waiting in the wings. Continue reading
Golden Age Oldies: The Docks of New York
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Temptation begs to flatten G.W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box by giving it a moralizing voice or treating it as a statute on character worth, in doing so succumbing to the bourgeois decree to dress up the film in airs that Pabst, and certainly main character Lulu, have no earthly use for. Played by Louise Brooks in a phenomenal tantrum of a performance at the heart of what is inherently a melodramatic sideshow of a film, Lulu is a man-killer and an earthquake but also an embodiment of the implacable drive to not only persist but discover oneself at the heart of the human condition. In a world that is a playground and a hot-house of self-discovery and self-preservation, our earthen notions of morality don’t really apply. 
Slinky and unruly by the standards of its time, Rouben Mamoulian’s Applause – a stepping stone onto a proficiently very good if seldom great path as a cross-pollinating genre director – opens with its camera not only on the move but on the war path to prove the director’s ambition. Even the intro’s deceptively near-silent implementation of sound in the far off distance intimates that this is not a complacent motion picture by 1929’s standards. The roving camera more or less an ingrained tool by 1929, it was nonetheless not yet a known quantity, and sound was never as vigorously applied before as it would be in this feature. This knowledge in tow, Applause is a film that obviously shows Mamoulian, in his debut feature, was ready to go to bat with the future of film in his hands. 
Legend has it that Luis Buñuel chased partner in crime Salvador Dali off set once the painter – on sabbatical to help discover the possibility of the relatively new medium of film – had done his dirty work helping the madman director renegade against The Powers That Be with the screenplay for L’Age d’Or. Verification of the tall tale or not, the exuberance of the overstatement is appreciated in a film with a ramshackle, manic, antic enough demeanor and a will to treat subtlety as a devout enemy at the gates of its own hyperbolic, spasmodic mind. The story may be a fabrication, but the spirit of it rings true in the gloriously impulsive film the two men produced, a work that files a restraining order against the idea of restraint itself. 
Central Intelligence is, I am told, a movie about two buddies, one domesticated and the other an epidemic, where one is just maybe an insane rogue agent. Let us look at a much better such film that is mostly forgotten today (and, I must admit, one that is cartoonishly better at evoking the off-kilter is-he-or-isn’t-he-crazy tension that the 2016 half-heartedly, impersonally wishes to suggest).
Mel Brooks turned a gloriously-still-kicking 90 years old this week, and as a happy birthday I’m sure he’ll never read, a review of his debut feature length film. 
House cleaning with a review from many months ago I never got around to publishing. It’s the films ten-year anniversary as the best blockbuster from 2006, and what with the blockbusters this year falling down left and right with no idea what on earth they’re doing, the time seems right. 
Southern Comfort
Bug
Visually garrulous and verbally unobtrusive, Ivan’s Childhood is perhaps the platonic ideal of the director-is-born image, a fully-formed debut for the ages. A film riddled with the ideas that would eventually molt into Tarkovsky’s future six feature films, a diminutive career (seven including this film) by any standards, Ivan’s Childhood lays the groundwork for Tarkovsky’s unmooring of the cinematic consciousness into realms both indescribably beautiful and thoughtfully revelatory. Then again, “eventually” doesn’t do justice to Ivan’s impossible grandeur and fractured intimacy; on its own terms, had the greatest director of the last fifty years not pursued a career in film at all and absconded from sight leaving only this singular mark of his trespass on our earthly realm, he would still be one of the definitive directors of the second half of the twentieth century. 
The Long Take 