On
Narrative Motion
All film lovers believe moving imagery is
vital to telling a cinematic story. Certain film lovers find this an
understatement: moving images are
stories. But even if an argument ensued between both kinds of believers outside
a theater, they would at least agree that some images are better than others.
They would agree on a general hierarchy in terms of where the best moving
images can be found. They would be having a discussion about the narrative of
motion.
A man raises a hand to his face, sneezes
and recovers. Two men awkwardly talk in an apartment; one takes out a knife and
slits his throat, spraying blood everywhere. The main similarity between these
two shots is that they are stories, in the primal sense; they contain beginnings,
middles and ends. A buildup to some eruption of the nasal cavity is at work—the
sneeze erupts—the man recovers. An awkward confrontation ensues between two
men—a knife appears—will the other man be stabbed? --No; a bloody suicide—the
other man walks back and forth, stunned, no words. The man sneezing is a
self-contained narrative; the confrontation-throat-slitting is a piece of a
larger narrative film. But the point, of course, is not how they may be
contextualized; it is how they keep our eyes on the screen. These images do it
because they are violent, sudden, perplexing and odd.
Those are not the only reasons our eyes stay with them.
Those are not the only reasons our eyes stay with them.
Moving imagery has some clear advantages over older
artistic practices. It is physical in nature and imparts gut reactions to the
viewer in a faster and more direct way than, say, a book. One can see moving
imagery playing to the gut if they watch the throat-slitting image, from
Michael Haneke’s Cache (2005). When
the reclusive Algerian character Majid removes the knife, in a static shot, the
first thought is that he will stab Georges, his wealthy French visitor. But he
turns the blade on himself, and the entire audience jumps in their seats. The
shot continues for several minutes, showing a stunned Georges pace around the
apartment. This is what motion in cinema can do to people by way of sudden
change in its visual-- and narrative-- momentum, in this case played in front of a still
camera. This does not mean that all good motion is violent; it means that all
directors must be magicians who work primarily with motion and stillness. In
other words, they work with physicality, and that physicality turns to
giddiness, shock and revulsion in the course of seconds. The combination of the
still and the moving is how the moving image tells a story. It is, logically,
what we are watching, and it better be exciting or else our eyes won’t stick
around.
At the same time a moving image,
literally, is just a bunch of photographs. It doesn’t move at all. Anybody who
has run a strip of film through their hands has seen clearly that they are holding
a strip of photographs, each one a variation on the prior photograph for ten,
twenty, thirty feet. In the early film of the man sneezing—known as Fred Ott’s Sneeze (1894)--A man stands
with his hand raised to his face. He is still standing with his hand to his
face in the next picture. And the next one, and the next one. The only
difference is that the hand is at a slightly higher elevation from picture to
picture, until the end of the end of the series, when the man has at last touched his face.
What the spectator looks at are not real pictures, but frames. Twenty-four of
these frames will run through a projector each second, to create what looks
like real speed.
This is how the filmstrip reveals the photography of moving imagery: frozen, redundant pictures. When still photography came about in the late 1830’s, it was more like painting. Because the subjects had to stay still for lengthy periods of time while the camera lens captured their features, there is no way photographers could have imagined how their technology would be appropriated in less than one-hundred years. But painting became photography and photography became moving pictures, and this entire process culminated at a lightning-paced historical speed. Although filmmakers ultimately discovered that there were stories within this motion, they remained engineers of redundant photographs.
This is how the filmstrip reveals the photography of moving imagery: frozen, redundant pictures. When still photography came about in the late 1830’s, it was more like painting. Because the subjects had to stay still for lengthy periods of time while the camera lens captured their features, there is no way photographers could have imagined how their technology would be appropriated in less than one-hundred years. But painting became photography and photography became moving pictures, and this entire process culminated at a lightning-paced historical speed. Although filmmakers ultimately discovered that there were stories within this motion, they remained engineers of redundant photographs.
When we watch either Cache or Fred Ott’s Sneeze, it is like watching a reality unfold
before our eyes. Not our reality;
some other reality that mimics how our reality unfolds in day-to-day life, but weirder, faster and shocked by a jolt of mystery. Individual shots
appear to happen in a real-time frame when in fact they do not. Some shots are
in slow-motion, others are in fast motion; a shot of someone walking out a door
might be cut in two and spliced in to different parts of the narrative; an
entire shot might be repeated, maybe more than once. The rhythmic ability of the moving
image is to play with time in ways both subtle and violent. This is why the good cinematic story
manipulates time consistently, to the point of excitement. It means that
traditional moving imagery—no matter what film or era it appears in—must utilize
redundant, false motion to make the narratives of individual shots interesting. Are we tricked when we watch films? We have. But if it looks like
interesting motion, nobody cares.
The belief that moving imagery must be
physical in its look, photographically rhythmic in its construction and must
hold its own as a story is the foundation behind what we might call
conservative film-love. Nevertheless, one remaining detail is important. There is
a specific format for presenting moving imagery. That presentation is on the
big screen. Some film lovers see a movie in theaters twice a week or more;
others see them in theaters once or twice a month. No matter: theaters—what
looked like the fixed mode of presentation of film for many decades—are in
trouble.
Everybody knows a book is written in words
and read from cover to cover. A painting is painted in oil-based liquids that
conform to different colors on an easel and placed on a wall in a gallery. A
play is memorized by actors and a director, rehearsed, and performed live on a
stage before an audience. A dance is performed on a wide stage before an
audience, with musical accompaniment and specific footwear for the dancers.
These art forms reached their modes of presentation after centuries of trial
and error. Literature only got there after a long time of oral recitations
around bonfires and symbols on tablets. Painting only got there after being dabbed
on cave walls and etched on the windows of churches. Dance, we might presume,
started with a person finding it fun and elegant to spastically move in
patterns, as others found that they felt the same. Now we have the fixed
modes of presentation for each of theses arts.
The big screen was film’s mode of
presentation up until the 1980’s. This mode found its commercial heyday in the
early 1930s, when ticket prices were around $0.60, the Great Depression was in
full swing, and theater attendance was booming in the United States (1).
An estimated 65% of the U.S population went to see movies regularly (2).
It was hard for a terrible economy to ruin film going. If anything, the wish to
escape a crumbing economy enabled film going. Plenty of pictures were bankable;
pictures like King Kong (1933), or Gone with the Wind (1937), or Frank Capra’s
films. No other art form offered viable competition. At this point, films were still
the premier escapist art form, but at the same time, the moving image was
losing some of its self-contained mystery. Audiences no longer merely asked
that the filmed image got itself across the screen. They asked for talking and
noises to distract them. Many of the great directors of the 20s, and their
films, were quickly neglected in favor of popular talk-fest extravaganzas. Yet
on a practical level, moving imagery still got the job done quicker and more
plainly than a sentence or a paintbrush ever could. The poet and film critic
Vachel Lindsay noted that the ideal state of a film was to “work like the
express elevators in the metropolitan tower. (3)” Films were fast,
always have been. Fleshing them out on a big screen gave their speed the
correct amount of space.
Then the 40s happened, and a war came, and films became about anxiety and pride. Then the 50s, and films became about domesticity, social ills, and technical innovation. Then the 60s, and postmodernism exploded in the lights of all projectors, self-referencing, pushing envelopes and, for the first time, hinting at the idea of a "death" of cinema. The 70s, the 80s, the 90s: viewers began neglecting the pleasures of motion. They wanted grand concepts, grand designs, and grand executions. Monsters on and off the screen.
Then the 40s happened, and a war came, and films became about anxiety and pride. Then the 50s, and films became about domesticity, social ills, and technical innovation. Then the 60s, and postmodernism exploded in the lights of all projectors, self-referencing, pushing envelopes and, for the first time, hinting at the idea of a "death" of cinema. The 70s, the 80s, the 90s: viewers began neglecting the pleasures of motion. They wanted grand concepts, grand designs, and grand executions. Monsters on and off the screen.
It is the year 2011,
the economy is at another low period, and films are at another low period. This
time, it is not merely because nobody has any money and there is so much
technical gadgetry available. It is also because theater attendance is at a
16-year low and tickets are pricier than ever (4). The question could
be, why are viewers not escaping in to film? Or, why are the would-be classics
so unseen? The more appropriate question is: what have moving images looked
like in the past 10-15 years?
They look like this: A penguin
talking to Edward Norton in a frozen cave, in an MTV-style zip of a flashback
evidently conveying the protagonist’s boredom and isolation. Leonardo DiCaprio
on a falling elevator that careens through a brown-tinged, decrepit-building of
his subconscious. Frodo reaching out to Gandalf, who falls fast in to a massive
fiery pit of CGI. A slow-motion close-up of Frodo’s face as he screams “No!”
These images are corrupted. But not because they are unimpressive. As any
honest person would admit, Peter Jackson, Christopher Nolan, David Fincher and
every screenwriter and technician who worked on The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-2003), Inception (2010) and Fight
Club (1999) worked hard on these shots. Still, we don’t feel it when DiCaprio
smashes in to the final stop of his mopey dream-state; we don’t get any base
thrill out of seeing it. We get a superficial thrill, and the permission to
think about how cool the artificial imagery looks. We don’t see sense any world
beyond the confines of the screen when Norton starts talking to that
metaphorical penguin; only an exact, preordained world within the screen. The
imagery of these films is too artificially unreal and bottom-line driven to
convey anything beyond the latest effects. Fans of such films might argue that that’s the point. You have to get what
the director is saying by choosing to frame the shot this way. You have to understand that a
slow-motion expression of brute dismay by a hobbit is the most available way to
tell an audience they are watching a pivotal scene.
But this is the postmodern route: everything makes a point about something else, and its all tied in to the sense of self. Whether or not people get any of this, the
point is that modern imagery reveals its hand. True moving imagery does not
reveal its fakery. Its fakery should open up a life beyond the director’s
intentions and interests. It has a life beyond precise framing and camera
angles and it most definitely has a life beyond special effects. Nobody
expected Majid to slit his throat and nobody knows what to do about all that
blood. Everybody expected the CGI of The
Lord of the Rings. Everybody gets the grand-design metaphors of Fight Club and Inception because their images are crafted to make sure you get it. Not confident about the power of original motion driven by storytelling, these
films pad a life-like look on to an absurd illusion (the falling elevator in Inception), rather than an up-front
expression of believable illusion, or they comfort themselves with a
superficial expression we’ve all seen before (The Lord of the Rings), or obvious thematic profundity (Fight Club). They present us with either
dismal clichés, such as Frodo’s cry, or super-ironic postures, such as Norton’s
penguin. General audiences tend to forgive the trendiness, the cynicism, the lack of
suggestion and illusion, and the clunky, non-physical motion of these films. It
seems the production values, the attractiveness of the actors and the gee-whiz
factors of the film’s concepts are enough.
 |
| (Frodo decrying the state of cinema) |
Overall, the big screen continues to fail
in economic terms, yet at the same time, people enjoy watching concept-driven blockbusters
on the big screen. So the modern blockbuster comes to us as a mixed blessing:
it helps to keep the big screen going while degrading serious moving imagery. Inception, Fight Club and The Lord of the Rings trilogy have been
trumpeted as major cinematic achievements; Fight
Club from an artistic perspective, Inception
and The Lord of the Rings from
artistic and commercial perspectives. The true irony behind Inception and The Lord of the Rings is that both were major box-office draws. There
have been other major box-office draws in recent years; The Dark Knight (2008),
Avatar (2009), the Harry Potter
films (2001-2011). But the essentially uninspired motion of all of these films,
the over-patterned intentions and statements and pandering to what clichés the
audience will accept, suggests that audiences no longer go to theaters to have
their minds tickled by illusion. They go to admire superficial spectacle, or to
see their preconceptions of what X film should look like fulfilled.
It is in this way that so many modern
films miss out on the narrative of motion. A man in a falling elevator is its
own story. This tiny moving image narrative—chained to other tiny narratives--
must develop its story through graceful movement. It need not be an arcane
metaphor, a wow-moment or an over-planned money shot. If the narrative of the
image takes us to another interesting narrative within a different image, the
metaphors and the wows should come naturally. But the fact is, a film such as Inception is the new escapism. It is
part of a web of escapism in to either half-baked cynicism (Fight Club) or concepts that aim to look
so bluntly cool, they can be viewed on any screen. Becoming immersed in a world
where we are all hooked on dreaming half our lives because of warring
corporations is itself a sort of illusion, but not a cinematic illusion. It is
a series of skillfully executed flashes; it may come across just as well on
iPhones and computer screens. What looks up-to-date, has a target audience and
the right intentions has replaced beautifully fake narrative moving imagery,
and its natural, expansive format of the big screen.
Clearly, there are many layers to a
moving image. Several of these layers (redundancy and photography) must remain
hidden, several others (motion, stories) must burst from the screen. The
problem lies in conveying why, exactly, some moving images look better than
others. To explain why a moving image doesn’t work is easy, but to explain why
it does work is to stammer. The best way to put it is that the true cinematic
moving image has no message, no target audience, no director’s commentary, no audience
knowledge of how it was done, no overabundance of effects or editing, no interference
from the director’s intellect or the camera’s nosiness. Only occasionally might
the lens filter, the zoom lens and split screen effects get at the truth and
mystery of motion. In most cases, to preserve the photography of moving
imagery, and to tell the story clearly, the wise filmmaker concentrates only on
movement within the frame. In a sense, the cinematic moving image is a naïve
piece of art and the director a simpleton artist; they are oblivious to grand
concepts and popular cynicism. The director only cares about
the story; the image only cares about its own workings. To relieve the
audiences’ apathy towards the big screen, these are the primary demands our
moving image artists must follow.
But to see the truest, most photographic
example of movement within a frame, it is best to go back before cinema existed.
Let us rewind so that the wound in Majid’s throat heals and his knife is put
away; Edward Norton and the penguin look at each other and leave their ironic
cave; cinema history runs backward until the Depression never happened and sound
is absent; Fred Ott jerks his head down in a motion that looks like laughter. After
some rewinding through darkness, we will see a photograph of a soldier in the
Civil War lying dead in a ditch. The picture is called “The Home of the Rebel
Sharpshooter, Gettysburg.”* Let’s put this picture in to motion: A soldier lies
dead in a ditch. Insects begin to crawl over him. The branches of the trees
hanging overhead rustle in the wind.
Were this a moving image, it would open up possibilities for entire
worlds and dimensions both out of the control of the director and within his
reach. The insects could lead us to another dead body, or to a
battle still being waged on the other side of the soldier. It could still look
“new,” it could be followed by an entirely different motion-narrative, it could
be long or it could be short. With the right touch, it could be part of a
smash-hit movie that resuscitates the big screen, again. Where tradition is
concerned, it must get back to the simplest, most honorable of demands; it must
get across the screen, gracefully.
I'd like to acknowledge:
(1), (2): The
Decline in Average Weekly Cinema Attendance: 1930-2000; Pautz, Michelle,
Issues in Political Economy, 2002.
(3) The Photoplay of Action, Lindsay, Vachel, from The Art of the Moving Picture, New York,
MacMillan, 1915.
(4) http://money.cnn.com/2011/12/29/news/economy/movie_ticket_sales/index.htm
* Photograph by Alexander Gardner, 1863
Domestic Mesh
3 Backyards, as a film, is unafraid of
everything the modern American independent film avoids. Such fearlessness does
not make it un-American; on the contrary, writer-director Eric Mendelsohn’s film is soothingly,
casually American. It is a heartfelt cinematic document of that peculiar region
known as the suburbs, so often ironically portrayed in American film. Here,
it is treated as a character, and therein lies the cinematic hope in Mendelsohn's film. Other filmmakers wish to show us the “dark side” of
suburbia, or where it fails morally. Mendelsohn is a more thoughtful, tender
filmmaker. Like all of us who have waded through suburbia, Mendelsohn knows
that there are no sides; suburbia is not a cube. It is a ball; Blue Velvet’s sadism is on the same
block as Edward Hopper’s upper-crusty melancholy. It spins around in cycles.
The first defiant act of 3 Backyards is to resist hard cuts.
Dissolves and fades link these leafy streets. The greenery of a sycamore tree
is absorbed by the light blue of the bay; the genteel boats that line the
harbor are, on one level, the genteel guards of the streets where few cars move
and children occasionally play. These feelings—of absorption, transference, middle-class
quietness and mystery—are inflected by the dissolves and fades that populate
the film. This approach to editing is the film’s most fearless technique; it
would be revolutionary if it did not recall certain Japanese films, like those
of Yasujiro Ozu. But Ozu, in his best-known work, was going for imagery that
contemplated class and intimacy. Mendelsohn is going for imagery that suggest
the mystery and nostalgia of ordinary lives. The film is actually designed on
the idea of linkage. So was Magnolia
or Synecdoche, New York. But those
films were post-modern to their cores; 3
Backyards is built like a wistful fable. Like all fables it has moral
components to each of its three stories. These are the primary narrative links;
the cross-dissolves are the visual links. The morals blend together just as the
leaves blend with the sun.
The first story of the film follows a man, John (Elias Koteas), who sits with his wife (Kathryn Erbe) in their kitchen at 3:30 in the morning. John is a businessman, as we can glean from his tuxedo and suitcase. He is leaving for an early morning flight and the expression that practically slides off his face tells us that this is just one of too many flights. He packs, faces his wife once more as he stands in the doorway, and brushes her off as she attempts to talk to him. He drives out to the airport in the deadbeat middle of Long Island—the place John Cheever skips in his stories—and finds that his flight has been canceled. Wandering around town, missing home but not wanting to go back, he finds his way to a diner where a young black woman from Qatar (Danai Gurira enters and asks about a job. This is how John’s story unfolds. As with the other two stories, it reaches its mysterious central image in this character; a very dark skinned female in bright clothing that looks almost like a pastiche. It is this central image that leads to John’s real adventure, and to his moral reconsideration.
The second story
follows a little girl, Christina (Rachel Resheff), who is playing with a golden
necklace in her parent’s dresser when her Mother calls to her about her school
bus, which has just arrived. Christina runs downstairs, but the bus has just
left, leaving her to walk to school herself. (A shot of her stopping in the
middle of the road, dropping her backpack, and loudly muttering “crap,” is a somehow painfully accurate depiction of childhood). Christina runs down the
streets and takes a shortcut through the woods that open in to a field of tall reeds.
Electrical wires run overhead. She stops when she runs in to a poodle, whom we glimpsed earlier on a missing dog sign, standing in the woods, his leash latched on
to a nail on a tree-branch. Christina sets the dog free only to wander in to
the yard of a man in his shed, masturbating under hanging dog collars. The cog
collars are the central image of this scene; their shape suggests the other central object, the golden necklace. Christina calls to the man, and so begins her day of moral
observation.
In the third story,
Peggy (Edie Falco), at work on one of her watercolors, hears a knock on her
door. She comes face to face with a famous actress with a home next door to
hers, who occasionally drops by the town. Peggy is flummoxed when the
nameless woman, played by Embeth Davidtz, asks Peggy to drive her to the ferry.
Peggy readily agrees and, immediately after the actress leaves, calls her
neighbor to gossip. We have not seen the actress yet. We have only seen her outline
reflected in a mirror. Peggy mentions to her neighbor that it looked like the
actress had been crying. We see the actress standing by the water on her yard,
her arms folded, her back to us. The central image of her profile—especially
her back profile, as it looks against the sky and the bay—is the important part
in the two women’s long journey to Port Jefferson. When the actress climbs in
to Peggy’s car, it is the start of Peggy’s moral test.
Eric Mendelsohn said
in an interview with IndieWire that he understood the film as a nature
documentary about the people of this town. Considering this conceit, all the
odd blocking and the recurring montages click. Of course, that must be the
reason we see a dissolve from a caterpillar inching through the grass to a girl
racing down a suburban street. That must be the reason the camera returns to
the sun shining in such a colorful halo, and why there is a pronounced lack of in the sky above this town. Like a nature documentary, 3
Backyards is not concerned with backstory. We don’t find out why, exactly,
John and his wife have a troubled marriage just as we never find out why frogs feel comfortable on lily pads. We don’t find out that Peggy has a husband until
the very end of the film. The film is only
concerned with action and effect. It is interested in the way John clutches two
fifty-dollar bills as his black business shoes clack on the pavement, and it is
concerned with what makes Peggy shrug in exasperation.
But these similarities aside, there must be something Mendelsohn isn’t telling us. A nature documentary implies an observation of a routine day in the life of a given creature. The protagonists of 3 Backyards each go through a day of gradual disruption in their routines. They each encounter a person outside of their normal understandings; a depressed actress, a naïve immigrant, a disturbed kidnapper of dogs. That the main characters never find out where their antagonists came from, who they are, or what ails them, is what lends the film its mystery. Because the film deals with people in unnatural, if believable, circumstances, it feels like a nature-mystery. Who knows what days in a middle-class ecosystem might turn up? What compassionate things can people possibly do other than watch one another?
But these similarities aside, there must be something Mendelsohn isn’t telling us. A nature documentary implies an observation of a routine day in the life of a given creature. The protagonists of 3 Backyards each go through a day of gradual disruption in their routines. They each encounter a person outside of their normal understandings; a depressed actress, a naïve immigrant, a disturbed kidnapper of dogs. That the main characters never find out where their antagonists came from, who they are, or what ails them, is what lends the film its mystery. Because the film deals with people in unnatural, if believable, circumstances, it feels like a nature-mystery. Who knows what days in a middle-class ecosystem might turn up? What compassionate things can people possibly do other than watch one another?
This question leads back to the moral content of the film. At the close of the section with John, he feels grateful for those he is responsible for, because he could not be responsible for a distant abstraction. At the close of Peggy’s section, she watches a lonely woman wander on to a ferry, and realizes that her own stasis and creative energy is more spontaneous and alive than a the stilted creativity of a wealthy star. At the close of the Christina section, she races through a field under power lines, twirling her Mother’s golden locket under the early evening sun, because her Mother needs a present and loneliness needs its space.
Mendelsohn has crafted American moving imagery for the advancement of impressionism and daily morality. But the most impressive aspect of 3 Backyards is, once more, its fearlessness. It will never receive mass accolades, a Criterion Collection release, a 25th anniversary release, because it is too modestly original. Its best hope is to influence, and to still look fearless twenty years on, when sensationalism and topicality have devoured cinema entirely. Mendelsohn’s cinema should continue to be as brave as the character of Christina. Near the end of her story, she runs down the field and recedes from the frame, and the cicadas hum as they always do at pivotal moments. It is distinguishable here because perhaps it is not, in the modern, topical sense, a pivotal moment. How many girls run through fields under power lines in any suburban day, no shocking statistic will ever show. Hopefully many.
2/22/13
Motion Studies: Silence from here on out
Mainstream cinema
approached art for a few minutes of screen time in 1996. This was in the
otherwise routine action film Mission:
Impossible. At a time when most grownups felt they were on an escalator to
the top floor of the American Dream, Tom Cruise was lowered in to the actual
subconscious of the American brain: the CIA headquarters. At a time when the
nation felt loose and secure, Ethan Hunt was strapped in tight as he stared
down at insecure flooring.
The plan he is
carrying out in the scene is basic in theory and straightforward in its
orientation: one man lies in the shaft above the ceiling, lowering Ethan Hunt
through a vent placed squarely in the ceiling’s center. “Silence from here on
out,” Ethan instructs, and the film obeys him. Ethan wears a chest-tight black
t-shirt. The room is blank; hush-white. Ethan is attached by the black rope to
the pulley system manned by his partner above. He drops swiftly in the motion
of a large, silent bird. He cannot and will not touch the floor; otherwise,
alarms would alert all of the CIA. A computer sits on a cubicle directly under
him.
Cut to Ving
Rhames, watching on two monitors from his perch in the getaway truck, as he
radios the command to stop. Ethan is suspended.
From outside the
room, CIA agent William Daniloe is making his entrance.
Positioned above
Ethan, as if dangling from a higher point on the rope, we watch the whiteness
of the room simmer down to a slick, dark grey. It is just light enough to contrast
with Ethan’s shirt. Mr. Daniloe enters, taps a few keys and becomes violently
sick in the trashcan beside the cubicle. He runs out of the room, trashcan in
hand.
From below Ethan,
the room turns white again and he is lowered further. So far, everything is
going according to plan.
That we have
before us the ideal cinematic usage of orientation—suspense orientation—is obvious. Fortunately, the scene achieves
something at a higher level. While the film is in color, this particular scene
is as solid a case as any for black and white moving imagery. The whiteness of
the room, the blackness of Ethan’s attire, and the black rope are the dramatic
adversaries, fighting each other with stealthy glares. The neutral, but vital
object, is the computer; also black. The one wedge in Ethan’s goal of accessing
that computer is the CIA agent. Except that two more wedges appear. These
wedges are neither black nor white. They feel gray, but in fact they are
colorless. A rat hobbles in to the shaft where Ethan’s partner is struggling to
hold on to the rope. He drops Ethan abruptly, halting his fall inches from the
floor. The second wedge takes the form of a bead of sweat that runs down Ethan’s
face. It drops and Ethan extends his hand, letting it splash on his palm. They do
not stop the clashing black and white. They simply distinguish the scene from a
black and white suspense sequence; they earn the scene its color, but only
just.
At last, Ethan
glides up to the keyboard. In a few close-ups, he logs on to the computer, taps
a few keys, and accesses a top-secret folder. It is 1996. People are being
lowered. Spaces are getting insecure.
Crap what should I call this Section
Numerous obituaries have poured in for Roger Ebert in the past two weeks. Well, he did die of cancer. And he was a formidable critic, whose career spanned more than forty years, and who at one point turned film criticism in to a pop art form. This is why we must conclude this brief obituary with the obligatory words, R.I.P Roger Ebert. As an afterthought, we can all watch this video:
But this obituary isn't over. Because believe it or not, about 155,000 people die every day, and just several days ago, one of them happened to be the documentary filmmaker Les Blank. Les Blank made many out-of-the-way films about out-of-the-way subjects--a New Orleans Zydeco artist, gap-toothed women, garlic--but he will probably be best known as the man who filmed Werner Herzog looking pissed off in a jungle. In Blank's film Burden of Dreams (1982), which covers the making of Herzog's Fitcarraldo, we are able to see the German director stand against a palm tree, insult the birds, the heat, rant about death and the jungle and finally proclaim that he loves the place, but against his better judgement. A couple scenes later, we are with Herzog on a motorboat. Blank asks him what he will do after Fitzcarraldo is done. Herzog looks over his shoulder chuckles and says; "I should stop making films. Instead, I should go to a lunatic asylum." These are amongst the more histrionic moments we can see of the most histrionic of great (living) filmmakers, and Blank was the guy behind the camera. He was 77 and died in Berkely, California.
Killers or Children
In a year of gun violence, political snark, and
proclamations of new and urgent crises, films came tumbling through,
haphazardly and, mostly, un-interestingly. Most of 2012s acclaimed films seemed
to respond to the year's events by making their subjects leadership, death
and pity: just look at the Oscar nominations. To this critic’s mind, it was
only two films—films that seemingly had nothing to do with this
grandiloquence—that came quietly and early, left in much the same way, and had
a more profound resonance than perhaps any other film of the year. These films were The
Dardennes Brother’s The Kid with a Bike
and Ben Wheatley’s Kill List. If one
looks at these two films closely, one might even see how they reflect on violence,
politics, death and pity more profoundly than the year’s louder and prouder
cinema. They do it through their stories about bad guys and outcasts: the
killer and the child.
 |
| (The Kid with a Bike/2011) |
The Dardenne Brothers achievements in The Kid with a Bike should be weighed in
direct proportion to what they ignore. The Dardennes will have none of the prissiness
of American Independent film; they don’t care about reflecting the correct
political or social agenda and they refuse to pull their visual style from the
gigabytes of highbrow T.V soap opera and perfectly lit digital dreariness. What
they do oblige the viewer with are athletic, sparse handheld shots of the
belligerence of children—especially a disturbed, self-centered child like their
protagonist—and straightforward dollies of their kid on his bike, either
persevering through a coastal dusk in Belgium to the strings of Beethoven’s
Piano Concerto #5, or biking on a sunny path with his adopted Mother, finally
on smooth ground. The Dardennes will have none of foreign cinema’s droning
long-take apathy, exemplified most dishonestly in 2012 by Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. All The
Dardennes care about are shots that show exactly as much as necessary and last
exactly as long as they must. Such technique cleanses their patient shots of
a boy sleeping, the woman and the boy embracing in a car, and the boy lying
unconscious on a forest canopy, of all sentimentality and
chest-puffing. "Patient" takes is really the only term for what these Belgian
masters do with the camera; they deliberately avoid the snottiness of the “long
take.” Their camera only frames the characters so that the truth of an image
might be revealed.
Ultimately, The
Dardennes love their smudge-faced protagonist, and ultimately their film
becomes a story of forgiveness, transcendence and possibly a religious
allegory. The kid of the title is taken in by a guardian angel, literally gets forsaken
by his father, is tempted by a devil in disguise, redeems himself, gets
attacked and figuratively reincarnated. It’s a ploy the Dardennes handle
lightly, but suggestively. What is more important is that they did in their
film what a master cynic like Nuri Bilge Ceylan could never handle; they
transcended their story with direct, spare, interesting moving imagery.
 |
| (The Kid with a Bike/2011) |
The Dardennes kicked
off the trend of films about children. Other films in 2012, such as Moonrise Kingdom, Beasts of the Southern Wild and Looper
made children their central focus. The inner lives of children, their
worries, fears and desires suddenly became a top-dramatic priority; and these
were all films for adults. On the
basis of writer-director Behn Zeitlin’s debut, this theme didn’t fare as
disastrously as some disgruntled critics (and filmmakers) have made it look. Beasts of the Southern Wild looks like
an attempt to approximate the films of Sergei Paradjanov in American cinema. It
has a wildness in color, camerawork, music and acting that American filmmakers
are afraid to attempt. In making a film about an impoverished (mostly) black
community in the wake of a terrible storm, Zeitlin made the wise choice of not
even mentioning hurricane Katrina or the politics surrounding it. Zeitlin
de-politicized a tragic situation and thereby broadened it. Even still, I fear
that his control of mood is not perfected. The film shifts between folk
art joyousness and sentimental pandering; it often comes off as more awkward
than eccentric. Its heroin is sometimes turned in to an icon, which seems an
odd, possibly inappropriate use of a six-year old. Zeitlin wants to get inside
the impressionistic psyche of a child; The Dardennes want to observe the choices
and movements of a child. Does it really matter that the simpler ambition was
better executed?
Another filmmaker
who observed the choices and movements of a child was Rian Johnson, the
writer and director of Looper. As a
film, Looper failed to transcend the
time-travel science fiction film chiefly because it became too entangled in the
supposedly mind-bending mechanics of time travel. It’s a shame, because the middle
section of the film is a genuinely interesting cinematic story. The film made
use of the setting of a farmhouse and expansive cornfields; an inventively
pulpy location, and an original one. Within this location, a plot about Joe (Joseph
Gordon-Levitt) traveling back in time to rescue the residents of the farm--
Sarah (Emily Blunt), and her young son, Cid (Pierce Gagnon), who possesses
dangerous telekinetic powers—rumbles out of the confused first thirty minutes. Cid
is most likely the future man known as The Rainmaker, who will become the evil
mob ruler of the future world Joe hails from.
Joe is a hired assassin who must protect Sarah and Joe from
those who would rather the rainmaker never existed.
 |
| (Looper/2012) |
Out of this plot emerges an eventual stunning
image. Cid, walking downstairs in to his living room, sees a man in a suit
pointing a gun at his Mother. He screams at the top of his lungs. All the
furniture in the house, and the man with the gun, are lifted in to the air and
suspended like traitorous puppets. Consider the implications of such an image. We’re
watching a child’s tantrum and an indicator of domestic violence rolled in to a
fantasy concept. Indeed, this is what the best fantastic filmmaking can and
should do. It should take common expressions and actual problems to help us
believe the futuristic, the alternate, and the improbable. For these few moments, Looper placed itself among the best Sci-Fi. Doing so with a child
at the center was a continuation of The Dardennes contention that children are
angry, and that they will do whatever they can to escape their special torment.
This is the tragic view of children in cinema. But when the furniture dropped
and the kid stopped screaming, the fun and the anger were over. Over, that is,
in Looper, which was an enjoyable
collection of scene-craft for its remaining running time, but could not bring
itself to further the actions of its superpower-endowed child. He is
fantastically angry; then what?
Though not as critically lavished as Beasts of the Southern Wild, or as
woah-dude-what-a-mindfuck as Looper, The
Kid with a Bike stands tall above each of those films.
This must have something to do with how The Dardennes made their film
accessible to the emotions and interests of both children and adults. Their
film asks the adult viewer to look at a child protagonist in the immersive
sense, without forgetting about what it is to be an adult. The adult must be
with the kid as he plays videogames on a couch with his questionable older
friend. The adult’s child-brain senses the exhilaration in playing a violent
video game, but their adult-brain knows the friend is bad news. The child
viewer (there aren’t many, but there should be), on the other hand, is not
asked to understand any concepts or emotions outside of his or her range of
experience. Still, he or she is asked to glimpse what the world of adults is like. What
The Dardennes straightforward, borderline sentimentality entails is that they
portray the human experience as an extension of the child protagonist. I
appreciated all the children of 2012 in their own way, but Zeitlin and Rian Johnson
only know of these things called children, which they think they look cool
onscreen. The Children of 2012 only have their true advocates in The
Dardennes.
 |
| (Kill List/2011) |
On the other side of the narrative of 2012 were the killers. Disgrtuntled, hateful, metaphorical, the killing tendency was seemingly everywhere in cinema as in life. It found its best expression in Kill List. In Kill List, the British director Ben
Wheatley effectively crafted a lurid fairy tale for our age, which combines the
hitman film with the horror film, albeit a type of horror film specific to
British cinema of the 70s. The story follows a down-on-his luck hitman, Jay (Neil
Maskell), possibly suffering a bout of depression as a result of some wretched
event he was party to in Kiev. He and his Swedish wife (the actress’s name,
Myanna Burning, evokes the mood of the film so well, it’s chilling) invite
Jay’s hitman friend Gal (Michael Smiley) and his mysterious girlfriend Fiona
(Emma Fryer) over for dinner one night. Things go embarrassingly wrong; Jay
becomes furious with his wife and overturns a table; the couple proceeds to
yell at one another while their guests sit and fidget. Fiona walks in to the
living room, where she takes a mirror off the wall, pencils a strange
symbol on the back and replaces the frame. Later on that night, Gal helps calm
his friend by telling him about a particular hit-job that both of them can take
on and will bring them a good bounty of money. Jay accepts the job, and the
dual catalysts for everything that follows are set.
The almost mundane
spooky story elements of the film are primed in these first fifteen minutes.
Except in Wheatley’s hands, they go from mundane to exciting, to shocking, to
utterly terrifying. The film moves through its cinematic influences easily and
unpredictably. Aside from the ominous music and urban-folktale feel, the first
quarter of the film hints at the kitchen-sink drama, one that might have been
shot by Ken Loach; it features washed out colors and one early, quirky scene, involving Jay coming home from the grocery store with
bags full of only bottles of wine. In these early scenes, the film wants us to
accept a hitman as an average working citizen. It’s a strange conceit, but it
becomes effective as soon as the film morphs in to a chilly action-adventure
movie, with a road-trip scenario wrapped around the demented goings on.
 |
| (Kill List/2011) |
The further genre
transformations do not come at the expense of authenticity in
characterization. Jay is forlorn and distant; Gal is a tough guy optimist. Jay
and Gal are tried-and-true buddies; when Jay picks up Gal to meet with their new
employer, Gal appears crestfallen, having been dumped by Fiona without
explanation. Jay consols him, but his mind is too far elsewhere to really do
anything for his friend. Later, as they meet with their boss in a shady hotel
room (by this point, the cinematography is all grays and steely shadows), their stern, gray haired employer stabs Jay
in the hand, to ensure that their contract is signed in blood; Gal
comes to his friend’s aid by pulling out a gun. Jay tells his
friend it’s all right, and this is the first sign in the film that we may be
dealing with an unreliable protagonist. Despite their old-friends banter while
driving or waiting for a victim to show up, Jay seems to know something, at
least vaguely, to which his partner and the viewer are oblivious. More signs of
the unrevealed nature of their mission turn up as they begin their killings.
Each victim not only seems to be expecting them, but smiles and thanks Jay
(it’s done by him each time) as he shoots them. Lurid pornography and a file on
Jay’s time in Kiev turn up at one victim’s home. Jay becomes increasingly
violent and aggressive in his killing methods. In a sign that the final genre setting
of the film is being realized—the horror film—Jay looks out the window and sees
Fiona standing on the other side of the highway. Her black hair blows in the
wind as she waves at him in a motion we only experience in bad dreams.
 |
| (Kill List/2011) |
Despite its
criticisms by devotees of horror movies, the last quarter of the film is too
spellbinding, nightmarish, and thrilling to go in to. Wheatley and his
co-writer, Amy Jump, may quit paying attention to plausibility by the end of
their twisted fable, but they earned the right. It is somehow fitting that
the characters speak in accents difficult for American viewers to understand;
sorry to inform us, but this film is set somewhere less glamorous and more
apocalyptic than London. It is fitting when Jay’s wife speaks in distress to a
relative on the phone, in her native language. We don’t see any translation, we
just see a series of domestic clips of Jay playing with his young son; somehow,
they emit tragedy. It is fitting, too, that our protagonist lives in a modest
suburban house rather than a conveniently crummy apartment or an isolated
mansion.
Each of these
narrative decisions—not to ignore the stylistic decisions, like the unnerving
hand-held camera—help to demonstrate what is essential about movie genres. What
we need in movie genres are sporadic bursts of twisty sensation, not ongoing, predictable
sensation. What we need in the current genre film (maybe not fifty years ago),
are characters who we might actually observe walking past us on the street, not
movie archetypes. What we have always needed in genre films is a constant
anticipation of what happens next, and what does happen next frequently
involves violence. Kill List is
broken in to chapters named after the two men’s victims; The Priest, The Librarian,
The MP and The Hunchback. If the violence that keeps escalating is almost too
violent—one scene involving a hammer is the litmus test—then this, too, is
fitting, because Wheatley’s film is about
violence. The violence inherent in men, the violence inherent in conspiracy and
threat, and the violence inherent in a dysfunctional society. If Kill
List somehow foreshadows the nihilistic riots that would engulf England
shortly before its release, or reflects the rise of nationalist parties in that
same country, Wheatley is too busy crafting a thrilling story of genres and
doom to bother with it much. The film is re-watchable for its manipulation of
chills. If, after watching it, you are walking in the woods and hear
music in the distance, do not feign indifference.
 |
| (Kill List/2011) |
Just as The Kid with a Bike found grace in
children, Kill List found thrilling
vitality in killers. I saw two other films that made killers their heroes: The Dark Knight Rises and Killing Them Softly. These films
attracted (or were pre-ordained with) far more hype than Kill List. But they fell apart due to their bloated-ness, their
pomposity, and their narrative incoherence. There was also the menacing flaw of
morality: while in Kill List, Jay was
a hero in the sense of being the far-gone protagonist, in Killing Them Softly, the brutal protagonist was an annoying
intellectual’s mouthpiece, while in The
Dark Knight Rises, the killer was, in the baldest sense, a hero.
 |
| (The Dark Knight Rises/2012) |
Christopher
Nolan’s epic of shallow darkness and chic seriousness was the worst film of his
trilogy, but that isn’t saying much. For a visually uninspired and humorless set
of movies in general, The Dark Knight
Rises added to the mix that cardinal sin of recent American films: thematic
opportunism. “Greed,” “The 99%,” “Revolution,” and “The Rich,” were every
journalist’s catchphrases for the past year. The Dark Knight Rises latched on to such trendy populism in its
portrayal of the evil, but radical, Bain and its hero, Bruce Wayne, who
ultimately defeats Bain but learns a lesson about being charitable in the
meantime. It is nonsensical enough to make a film where the hero is a
billionaire who wears a cape and a suit. It is a shady decision to attempt
solidarity with left-wing politics within this conceit. Even worse, it is bad
craftsmanship to carry this theme through the film at the expense of anything
making sense. Batman, in a useless state of captivity, does not even appear
onscreen for much of the film; Anne Hathaway, supposedly some kind of feminist
Catwoman, never stops acting like her character in Rachel Getting Married after a bad
relapse; nobody can understand Bain. The film was ultimately impossible to
follow, boring to look at and far too pleased with itself.
 |
| (Killing Them Softly/2012) |
Similar criticisms
can be made of Andrew Dominik’s Killing
Them Softly, a piece of technically skillful filmmaking and bad artistry.
Its incorporation of the 2008 financial meltdown in to a plot about gangsters
and stolen money may have been less sound-bite-ish than Dark Knight Rises, but it created a clunky allegory and an
obnoxious, holier-than-thou cynicism. Part of it was a cowardly dislike of people. Dominik’s contempt for all people makes The
Coen Brothers look like Christian missionaries. The only character who solicits
our interest, Brad Pitt’s Cogan, is a tired variation on the intellectual
killer. I would much rather spend time with the tubby, unstable Jay from Kill List than with an unsuccessful
archetype. But Dominik thinks that character archetypes are just fine, so long as they help him scold the audience.
The best part about Killing Them Softly was the opening credit sequence: Obama's inauguration speech runs over a shot of a ravaged man emerging from a building in to a junkyard; the three words of the film's title flash on to the screen in unforgiving white-on-black blocks. When the man emerges fully, he looks disappointed that that this, of all places, is where he ended up. An out-of-focus American flag limps against the sky. It is the only effective political image of the entire film; the remainder of the film is a jaded amalgamation of predictably ironic popular music and stylized scenes that are frankly offensive in their confident disrespect of everything within the frame. A scene in which Ray Liotta, sitting in his SUV unaware that a bullet is speeding towards him, is impressive only in the sense that exploitative action movies are impressive. The slow-motion shattering of glass, the bullet entering the head, the blood exploding from the other side. It is a stylized way of killing an artificial construct; to Dominik, that construct is any viewer who dares believe in following a film with their own eyes and not with the director's hand. Or it might be a larger killing; a killing of anybody who enjoys life even remotely. Who is killing who here? The director, or the hitmen in his film? Which killers got away with more in 2012? Artists or real-life maniacs?
The best part about Killing Them Softly was the opening credit sequence: Obama's inauguration speech runs over a shot of a ravaged man emerging from a building in to a junkyard; the three words of the film's title flash on to the screen in unforgiving white-on-black blocks. When the man emerges fully, he looks disappointed that that this, of all places, is where he ended up. An out-of-focus American flag limps against the sky. It is the only effective political image of the entire film; the remainder of the film is a jaded amalgamation of predictably ironic popular music and stylized scenes that are frankly offensive in their confident disrespect of everything within the frame. A scene in which Ray Liotta, sitting in his SUV unaware that a bullet is speeding towards him, is impressive only in the sense that exploitative action movies are impressive. The slow-motion shattering of glass, the bullet entering the head, the blood exploding from the other side. It is a stylized way of killing an artificial construct; to Dominik, that construct is any viewer who dares believe in following a film with their own eyes and not with the director's hand. Or it might be a larger killing; a killing of anybody who enjoys life even remotely. Who is killing who here? The director, or the hitmen in his film? Which killers got away with more in 2012? Artists or real-life maniacs?
Of course, the
failure of popular genre films to deliver the goods in 2012, and of films about
children to stop preaching about the child, does not mean all the other movies
were useless. Miguel Gomes’ Tabu was
an outstanding piece of work, which barely anybody saw. Zero Dark Thirty was a stylistically intoxicating piece of historical
reportage, even if it was overlong and partly deflated by the end. But the fact
remains that the finest films I saw this year were about a scrawny, wayward kid
and a depressed hitman. Two neglected people in this world; neglected not, of
course, in that we don’t recognize their existence, but in the fact that their stories
are of seemingly little consequence.
In 2012, filmmakers wanted allegorical realism, mostly of a political nature. But only The Dardennes and Ben Wheatley achieved any potential allegory. Audiences wanted action and whimsy, which is what most audiences want most of the time. The difference is that this time, killers and children were more important. Children rode bikes, got stabbed, performed telekinesis, led ragtag groups out of the swamps. The killers mainly killed people, but they got their own reasons and (attempted) humanity this time. Why these previously neglected groups, normally regulated to children’s films, bad horror movies and gangster or action flicks? Why did only two films get it completely right? If filmmakers are to practice more often with these subjects, then the killers and children may inherit cinema, at least for a short while. The latter will, unquestionably, inherit the world. The former, hopefully, will not.
In 2012, filmmakers wanted allegorical realism, mostly of a political nature. But only The Dardennes and Ben Wheatley achieved any potential allegory. Audiences wanted action and whimsy, which is what most audiences want most of the time. The difference is that this time, killers and children were more important. Children rode bikes, got stabbed, performed telekinesis, led ragtag groups out of the swamps. The killers mainly killed people, but they got their own reasons and (attempted) humanity this time. Why these previously neglected groups, normally regulated to children’s films, bad horror movies and gangster or action flicks? Why did only two films get it completely right? If filmmakers are to practice more often with these subjects, then the killers and children may inherit cinema, at least for a short while. The latter will, unquestionably, inherit the world. The former, hopefully, will not.
Motion Study: The Cool Sidle
 |
| (Reservoir Dogs/1992) |
It’s such a common movement: that
swift jolt the camera makes as a key scene reaches its apotheosis. As one
character approaches death, blurts out a confession, consummates tenderness
with another character—all of which a blood soaked Tim Roth does with Harvey
Keitel at the end of Reservoir Dogs—the
camera starts acting responsibly. It must listen up and play it cool. So it
doesn’t simply dolly; it sidles up next to both men—Roth, on the ramp of the
floor in the anonymous warehouse, Keitel holding his hand as he presses a gun
to Roth’s temple-- and ends on Keitel in center frame. This cool sidle of the
camera is effective, but only until this point, because at this point the most
jarring aspect of the image reveals itself. Keitel’s grief-stricken face gives
way to the blur of the background. The focus was, loudly, on Keitel’s features,
yet now the out-of-focus background looms, making itself hard to ignore. When
we hear the cops burst in, yell at Keitel, and shoot him, it becomes that rare
instant when the background bleeds in to the foreground. As soon as the shots
are fired, we intuit that Keitel will soon be out of the picture, and only the
background will remain. It is a nihilistic, ugly, and maybe inappropriate end
to an appealing technique, and to the film itself. That washed-out background
is the point of this psychopathic dolly: this charming, sleek motion that was
all about carnage and death.
Motion Study: The Lady and the Tramp
 |
| (Happy Go Lucky/2008) |
The
most distinguished scene in Happy Go
Lucky is the scene with the homeless man on the field full of metal pillars
at night. Curiously, part of the reason this scene is exemplary is because
there is no indication of what the metal pillars are there for. Do they hold
elevated train tracks? Are they industrial junk left in England’s neglected
urban wilderness? There is no answer when they stretch so firmly out of frame. It is the
director’s gesture that says, “you will never know these pillars.”
The
director, Mike Leigh, may not understand their significance either. Yet in to
this vague signifier walks Poppy (Sally Hawkins), a bright woman dressed in
bohemian blue, looking like a lost flower. She comes across a homeless man,
sitting against one of the pillars. He blends in to the background; she blares
out of it. The location is so much more barren, so much more consciously grim
than the locals we have seen in the previous hour of the film. The rhythm of
the shots, by necessity, goes from wide (the pillars and their vagueness) to
close-up (the radiant lady, the grungy tramp) and back and forth. But as the
characters come together, as Poppy scooches up beside the tramp and tries
talking to him—he is mostly rambling—the shots get closer, and an intimacy
develops between two people on utterly separate wavelengths. It is here that
the cinematographer Dick Pope reveals the art of cinematography; that is, he
blends compositions together. Because there is a certain light to the scene,
distinguishable only now, that pushes these people in to the elements—the
metal, the night—so that they are lost. For Poppy, the loss is temporary. For the tramp, the loss is forever. For the
pillars, the loss makes no difference.
Of Interest
[In this section, I get lazy and refer to the news of others on the Internet and elsewhere, content to let other writers do the work for me.]
There is something patently absurd about The Sundance Film Festival. It might be its flagrant parading of celebrities mugging for cameras in Robert Redford's backyard if not some graphic-designed to death movie house, promoting their new "Indie" movie. It might also be because all that is ever mentioned about the impact films made at the festival has something to do with whether or not a distributor picked it up, and what the early critical response (as if that means a damn) happens to be. It may also be that most of the films have their niche audiences and marketing schemes written in permanent marker and people still fall for it. It could be all three. And since it probably is, the patent absurdity of The Sundance Film Festival is more than "something." Needless to say, this critic is immediately suspicious of the film that Indiewire made its subject below. But see for yourself.
http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/sundance-interview-joseph-gordon-levitt-julianne-moore-tony-danza-talk-porn-sex-don-jons-addiction-20130123?page=1#blogPostHeaderPanel
David Thomson, that esteemed English film critic, author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, who has made the United States his home for some time, published a new book late last year called, rather sincerely, The Big Screen: The Story of Movies. The mammoth size of the book--covering, as the title promises, the history of film from Edison to digital and 3-D, is something I have not gotten around to reading in full yet. But of the excerpts I have read, I particularly recommend chapter 3. His tentative following of Siegfried Kracauer's theories of German cinema is interesting, but it is his writing style-- a blend of personal recollection and historical detail-- that is, as usual, the most enjoyable. That said, I have a fairly belligerent disagreement with him on his criticisms of Metropolis. Read the excerpt on Amazon.com, or get a physical copy and read chapter three. It's about sixteen pages. C'mon, you can do it.
http://www.amazon.com/Big-Screen-Story-Movies/dp/0374191891/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1359050662&sr=1-1&keywords=the+story+of+movies
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