Day Is Done

The images above are from Frank Borzage's lovely contribution (one of three he would make) to the "Screen Directors Playhouse" series, entitled Day Is Done (1955). As so often in Borzage, we are presented with a simple love story, played out over a hazy, perilous social backdrop. The backdrop in this case being the Korean War, and the love story being, atypically, not of the romantic male-female variety with which Borzage is so commonly associated, but rather the love of music that is shared by and binds together two male soldiers: a distant, dispirited sergeant (Rory Calhoun) and a green, eager-eyed private (Bobby Driscoll). The pair, each a musician before entering the war, find a bugle on the body of a slain Korean soldier while out on reconnaissance patrol one night, and as they each take turns with the instrument, eyes become glazed over, piercing time and flooding them with memories from what might as well have been a previous life, memories that literally melt onto the screen as the sergeant fondly recalls the crisp pride with which the job of the bugler was once carried out, and it becomes clear that the music produced from the bugle is providing for these men an intimate refuge no less than that of the apartment in Seventh Heaven or the hovel in Man's Castle. 

It would make sense to assume that the restrictions of the half hour television format would do no favors to a director who by this point was considered (barring Moonrise) long past his prime, but this is very much a deeply felt piece of Borzage, with his spare, compressed mise-en-scene, his commitment to foregrounding human drama at the expense of supplemental space translating pretty much untouched, as does, more surprisingly given the length, the air of unhurried leisure with which moments and events are normally allowed to play out in his worlds. Though in this world, alas, the reality of the situation does not ultimately give itself over to the transcendent; here a death is a death is a death, with grief finding expression only through a weary, impromptu performance of "Taps", both an act of solemn farewell and the solidification of another memory.

Niagara

There's something poignant about a movie that sees fit to acknowledge the death of its own aesthetic. Such is the case with Niagara, the frothy 1953 Technicolor noir not so much directed as assembled by Henry Hathaway. Assembled, literally, around an icon in the form of Marilyn-just-as-she-was-becoming-Marilyn; assembled in the sense that the chief stylistic preoccupations on display -- hot, lurid colors in movement and ever-furtive window slat shadows; a simultaneous rebuke and embrace of genre -- are barely allowed to exist without her presence. She is very much the engine for these elements, the sole expressive nexus that swirls them together, giving the film so much of its visual personality. And even if Marilyn wasn't much of an actress at this point, she still slinks around the dusky crevices of this world in her bright pinks and yellows (even shifting into pure shadow at times) with every bit the force and presence of the natural wonder that provides the backdrop, while the likes of the great Joseph Cotton and Jean Peters struggle to do a damn thing with their lots, and it's very difficult to say that the movie does not belong completely to her.

And so after the sheer ludicrousness of the script has guided Monroe's character to the top of a bell tower*, and after she's been murdered by her husband in said location, we are given the relatively loaded compositions shown at the top of this post: the aesthetic spirit of our film, now lifeless, bathed in the features that constantly surrounded her, except now given a decidedly mournful appearance. Giant slat shadows within a splayed container of light that may as well be an exaggerated coffin. An outfit one might wear to a funeral. Color in the form of a bright yellow kerchief, which Monroe had absurdly held onto and flailed throughout her final doomed chase. The kind of kerchief that one could clutch in their hand as they wave goodbye to a loved one. And that's what this moment is, a movie waving goodbye to itself. Sure, there's another act left to go, with Cotton and Peters perilously trapped aboard a gasless boat drifting towards the edge of the raging falls, but the movie's style as it had been established --- having already been given a proper farewell -- all but evaporates, giving way to dingy brownish earth tones and misty, bland blues and a general blah atmosphere of predetermined redemption. This stretch may have more "action" and "closure" than anything that preceded it, but it feels at best like a forced and prolonged coda, and at worst like something stripped from some other, far less interesting film. We have already been given the real climax, and it's easy to sense that the movie agrees.

*The matter of the bell tower, along with a handful of other shared cues, has led some to ponder the possibilities of Hitchcock drawing upon Niagara for inspiration while conceiving Vertigo. I don't see much there personally, but who knows. It is more than a tad interesting to think of Hitch's masterpiece and its boundless obsession as being, in some subconscious measure, a reaction to Niagara and the frank treatment given to the murder of its blonde femme fatale, its sober formal acknowledgement of the loss and of what it means.

(Updated) TAKE TWO: Tarkovsky Blu-ray Giveaway

The winner of the drawing was Brian B. from Massachusetts. Congrats, Brian! I've sent you an email to work out the shipping arrangements.

Let's try this again, and don't worry, no plethora of screencaps to plow through this time. I have one brand new, factory sealed copy of Andrei Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice on Blu-ray, released by Kino International, to give away to someone. If you would like a chance to win it, ALL YOU NEED TO DO is send me an email at tosh500@gmail.com. The subject line of your email should say TARKOVSKY and the email itself should contain your first and last name, as well as your state of residence. Only one entry per person please. I will accept entry emails for 48 hours. The cutoff will be 12:00 noon EST, Saturday, January 14. At that point I will have a random drawing to decide the winner, and will be in prompt contact with that person to arrange shipping details. I will update this post with the winner's name at that time. Once again, please enter only if you reside within the continental U.S., otherwise I will not be able to ship you the disc. Good luck!

The Sacrifice Blu-ray Giveaway / Screencap Contest (UPDATED)

(Updated 1/10/12: I've gone ahead and listed the actual movie title that the screencaps are from below. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to give away the blu-ray, because I didn't receive a single entry! I guess either twenty caps was a bit too unwieldy of a number, or maybe they weren't quite as easy as I thought many of them were. Probably both? Either way, I'll try and think of a different, better way to give the movie away.)

I was recently fortunate enough to come into possession of an extra copy of Andrei Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice on Blu-ray, released by Kino International. It's one of my very favorite movies, and Kino has done an excellent job with this release, and I would like to give it away on this blog to someone. It is brand new and factory sealed. Below, I have posted twenty anonymous screencaps from twenty different movies. To win, all you need to do is be the person who correctly identifies the most screencaps by the title of the movie. A few things:

1) Right now, I can unfortunately only afford to ship the disc to someone living in the continental U.S. So please only participate if this applies to you.

2) All entries should be sent to my email address: tosh500@gmail.com. Please do not post your picks in the comments section of this post. The subject line of your email should say CONTEST, and along with your twenty guesses in order (only the movie title is necessary), it should include your full name, as well as your state. Please do not send me your address. I will be in contact with the winner after they've been determined to work out shipping arrangements. Only one entry per person please!

3) The deadline to submit your picks by is 11:59 pm EST on Sunday, January 8th. I will post the winner, along with the correct answers to all 20 movies, sometime on Monday.

4) Be sure to include the tiebreaker with your picks. The tiebreaker is listed below the twentieth screenshot. If there are two or more who are tied for the highest number of correct guesses, this will be used to determine the winner.

Here are the twenty screencaps:

Screencap #1
(Strangers on a Train)

Screencap #2
(Dogville)

Screencap #3
(L'enfant)

Screencap #4
(Rebel Without a Cause)

Screencap #5
(Man with a Movie Camera)

Screencap #6
(Helas pour moi)

Screencap #7
(The Ox-Bow Incident)

Screencap #8
(The Yards)

Screencap #9
(Ivan's Childhood)

Screencap #10
(Intolerance)

Screencap #11
(Park Row)

Screencap #12
(Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind)

Screencap #13
(Minnie & Moskowitz)

Screencap #14
(Window Water Baby Moving)

Screencap #15
(Moonrise)

Screencap #16
(A.I. Artificial Intelligence)

Screencap #17
(Vengeance is Mine)

Screencap #18
(Traffic)

Screencap #19
(Ghost in the Shell)

Screencap #20
(Les bones femmes)

Tiebreaker question: I have used a random number generator to select a number between 1 and 1986 (the year Tarkovsky died). Guess this number. In the event that two or more people tie for the most correctly guessed screencaps, then the person who comes closest to guessing the random number will win.

If you have any additional questions or comments about the contest, or anything, you can feel free to either leave them in the comments, or send me an email. Good luck!

My End of the Year Summary

Last December I posted a Top 25 of 2010 list to round out the year and discuss my favorite new movies. I'm going to be doing something a little different this time around, for a couple of reasons: 1) I enjoyed in 2011 easily the most productive year of movie watching I've ever had (right around 500 total viewings) and 2) despite that quantity, only a small percentage represent new releases. Not to say that I saw no new movies at all, just not quite as many as I normally do (nevertheless I have tacked on my top 10 of the year at the bottom of the post). On the whole, it was for me a year of cinema defined more by digging into the past than swimming with the present, and so it would only make sense to create a wrap-up post focusing more on that experience.

I have organized the below as follows: there is the Movie of the Year, which was my single favorite older film discovery from 2011, followed by a couple of runners-up for that spot. Then there are two categories, The Masterpieces and The Gems, which are also comprised solely of titles I viewed for the first time in 2011. The Masterpieces (and I know some people, myself occasionally included, have a problem with how easily that label can be bandied about, but it gets the point across here) are the movies that were my highlights from the year, the ones that quite simply struck me the hardest, that occupied my thoughts and/or emotions the most, the movies I look forward to living with from here on out. The Gems are the movies that, while not quite "masterpiece" level, made a significant impression on me in one positive way or another, and I feel like giving them a shout out. Some of the Gems could be said to have minimal or dismal reputations, and many of them I came to with not much in the way of expectation, but all of them blindsided me by how much I liked them. I have also imposed on myself a rule of selecting only one film per director between all categories, and in a year where a large portion of my time was spent really sinking my teeth into the vast filmographies of more than a few directors, this can be seen as limiting in a sense, but it's the tack I've decided to take, if only to give this post a measure of economy. So just keep in mind that below when you run across a movie from the likes of, say, Ford, Walsh, Chabrol, Preminger, to name a few, the listed movie is the one I've chosen to put down, but it is also acting in a sense as a stand-in for a good handful of other great movies. Below the Masterpieces and Gems, I also have a few other random categories, where I do things like highlight a few of my favorite acting performances from all my first time viewings, list a few distinguished titles that didn't do as much for me as I'd hoped, and list a handful of my favorite pieces of film writing I discovered during the year.

When I originally set out to draft this post, I did so with the intention of writing a little something about each movie I selected, but as I went through my viewing logs and began assembling everything, it quickly became apparent that such an endeavor would be a much more exhaustive one than I had allotted time for, so I have to be content with simply listing everything sans comment. And in any case I'm not even sure that I could do justice to some of my experiences with these movies at this point in time. Maybe eventually. I guess that's what the blog here is for. Here it is:

Movie of the Year: The Sun Shines Bright (John Ford, 1953)

First runner-up: Through the Forest (Jean-Paul Civeyrac, 2005)

Second runner-up (tie): Night Moves (Arthur Penn, 1975)

 &

The Hired Hand (Peter Fonda, 1975)

 _________________________________________________________

The Masterpieces (37 total titles; in alphabetical order)

2/Duo (Nobuhiro Suwa, 1997); 4 Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle (Eric Rohmer, 1987); Afraid to Talk (Edward L. Cahn, 1932); Allures (Jordan Belson, 1961); Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (Martin Arnold, 1998); Anticipation of the Night (Stan Brakhage, 1958); Au bord du lac (Patrick Bokanowski, 1994); Betty (Claude Chabrol, 1992); The Big Trail (Raoul Walsh, 1930); Claire Dolan (Lodge Kerrigan, 1998); Cracking Up (Jerry Lewis, 1983); The Dangerous Thread of Things (Eros) (Michelangelo Antonioni, 2004); Deep In the Woods (Lionel Deplanque, 2000); Eccentricities of a Blonde-haired Girl (Manoel de Oliveira, 2009); Experiment Perilous (Jacques Tourneur, 1944); Four Nights of a Dreamer (Robert Bresson, 1971); Gamer (Neveldine/Taylor, 2009); Gertrud (Carl Th. Dreyer, 1964); He Who Gets Slapped (Victor Sjostrom, 1924); Hell's Hinges (William S, Hart, 1916); The Hills Have Eyes (Alexandre Aja, 2006); I Was Born, But...(Yasujiro Ozu, 1932); India: Matri Bhumi (Roberto Rossellini, 1959); The Last Laugh (F.W. Murnau, 1924); Lazybones (Frank Borzage, 1925); Le Plaisir (Max Ophuls, 1952); The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942); Monsieur Verdoux (Charles Chaplin, 1947); The Moon Is Blue (Otto Preminger, 1953); Ne Change Rien (Pedro Costa, 2009); New Rose Hotel (Abel Ferrara, 1998); Not Reconciled (Straub-Huillet, 1965); Queen of Diamonds (Nina Menkes, 1991); The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (Budd Boetticher, 1960); The Set-Up (Robert Wise, 1949); These Are the Damned (Joseph Losey, 1963); Winchester '73 (Anthony Mann, 1950)

The Gems (24 total titles; in alphabetical order) 

The 51 File (Michel Deville, 1978); The Beast of the City (Charles Brabin, 1932); Carnal Knowledge (Mike Nichols, 1971); Downstairs (Monta Bell, 1932); Ghosts (Christian Petzold, 2005); Gold of the Seven Saints (Gordon Douglas, 1961); Hotel (Jessica Hausner, 2004); Housekeeping (Bill Forsyth, 1987); I Can See You (Graham Reznick, 2008); Just Before Dawn (Jeff Lieberman, 1981); The Letter (Jean de Limur, 1929); Little Murders (Alan Arkin, 1971); Moonfleet (Fritz Lang, 1955); Nightmare Alley (Edmund Goulding, 1947); Noon Wine (Sam Peckinpah, 1966); Office Killer (Cindy Sherman, 1997); Payday (Daryl Duke, 1973); Quiet Please: Murder (John Larkin, 1942); Scream of Fear (Seth Holt, 1961); Sharky's Machine (Burt Reynolds, 1981); Some Call It Loving (James B. Harris, 1973);

Symptoms (Jose Ramon Larraz, 1974); Thirteen Women (George Archainbaud, 1932); Whistle and I'll Come to You (Jonathan Miller, 1968)

____________________________________________________  

Performance of the Year (female) - Jeanne Eagles in The Letter (1929)

runners-up: Marie Trintignant in Betty (1992), Angela Pleasence in Symptoms (1974), Katrin Cartlidge in Claire Dolan (1998), Makiko Watanabe in 2/Duo (1997)

Performance of the Year (male) - Lon Chaney in He Who Gets Slapped (1924)
runners-up: Jerry Lewis in Cracking Up (1983), Jimmy Stewart in The Naked Spur (1953), Stacy Keach in Fat City (1972), Emil Jannings in The Last Laugh (1924)

Performance of the Year (animal) - Raimu the monkey in India: Matri Bhumi (1959)

Director I spent the most time with in 2011 - John Ford (48 movies, 61 viewings)

Movies with lofty reputations that I didn't connect with - The Butcher (Claude Chabrol), Werckmeister Harmonies (Bela Tarr), The 39 Steps (Alfred Hitchcock), Battle Royale (Kinji Fukasaku), Accident (Joseph Losey)

Movie I previously disliked that I came to love this year - Crash (David Cronenberg, 1996) 

Movie I previously loved that lost a little something for me this year - Carlito's Way (Brian De Palma, 1993)

Original score I could not stop listening to - The Hired Hand (Bruce Langhorne)

Favorite film writing/criticism discoveries of the year, both new and old:
- The Doddering Relics of a Lost Cause by Jonathan Rosenbaum
- Craig Keller on Cindy Sherman's Office Killer
- Depression, Melancholia, and Me: Lars von Trier's Politics of Displeasure by Trevor Link
- Phil Coldiron on Sleepwalk and House of Tolerance
- Crisis, Creation, Compulsion - Dave Kehr on Raoul Walsh
- The Essential - Jacques Rivette on Preminger's The Moon Is Blue
- A Closed Door That Leaves Us Guessing - transcript of a Pedro Costa lecture
- The Searchers - Dismantled by Ross Gibson
- The Conversations: Terrence Malick pt. 1 and pt. 2 by Ed Howard and Jason Bellamy
- Think But This... David Phelps on Rivette's 36 vues du Pic-St Loup (from Girish Shambu and Adrian Martin's LOLA issue 1 )
- Zach Campbell's Counter Canon: A Viewing List
- Film Socialisme Annotated translated by David Phelps
- The Magnificent Ambersons: What's Past is Prologue by Jim Emerson
- Steven Shaviro on Neveldine/Taylor's Gamer
- "The Tree of Life": Great Events and Ordinary People by Adrian Martin
- The Dynamics of the Image, or Civeyrac Matters by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
- Poor, Old, Hollywood - Andy Rector on Losey's The Lawless
- Vertigo Variations by B. Kite and Alexander Points-Zollo - pt. 1 / pt.2 / pt. 3
- Perspective Reperceived: Brakhage's Anticipation of the Night by Ken Kelman (not online; found in The Essential Cinema: Essays on the films in the collection of Anthology Film Archives, Volume One)
- Experiment Perilous by Chris Fujiwara (not online; chapter in the book Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall)
- The Sun Shines Bright by Tag Gallagher (chapter in the book John Ford: The Man and His Films, which can be downloaded here)

_______________________________________________________

I'm not going to bother listing all of the 2011 releases I still need to catch up with; suffice it to say that there are a boatload, and hopefully it will be sooner rather than later before I get the opportunity to see them all. Out of everything in front of me, I'm most looking forward to A Dangerous Method, Margaret, House of Tolerance and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. As it stands now, here is, in roughly preferential order, my ten favorites:

Top 10 of the Year

1) Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt)
2) The Tree of Life (Terence Malick)
3) You Are Here (Daniel Cockburn)
4) Melancholia (Lars von Trier)
5) Contagion (Steven Soderbergh)
6) The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (David Fincher)
7) Nostalgia for the Light (Patricio Guzman)
8) Road to Nowhere (Monte Hellman)
9) El Sicario: Room 164 (Gianfranco Rosi)
10) The Skin I Live In (Pedro Almodovar)

___________________________________________________________

I'd love to hear about any of your favorite film discoveries from the year, newer and/or older. Please feel free to post them in the comments. Happy New Year!