Properly Screened

This was the first silent film I've seen and I wasn't sure what to expect (beside maybe boredom) but I was blown away. This is one of the most intense and deeply affecting pictures I've ever seen. Renée Falconetti plays the titular role in Carl Theodor Dreyer's retelling of the 15th-century trial and execution of Joan of Arc based on the actual court record. Taking place after her capture during the Hundred Years War, Joan faces an inquisition by French-Burgundy clergymen. Throughout the trial they try to get Joan to admit that she was not sent by God, but was being guided by the devil. They deceive her, blackmail her, and threaten to torture her before she signs the confession. Shortly after, she withdraws her confession realizing that she would rather die than betray God. As she is burned at the stake, a riot breaks out by distraught witnesses who claim she is a saint. This film is 81 minutes long and features almost 1,500 shots, which results in a dynamically paced f...

Another one of my favorite discoveries from this project, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) is a story about the unlikely love that develops between two lonely people and the society that refuses to accept their relationship. Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder , the film follows Emmi, a widowed cleaning woman in her sixties, and Ali, a Moroccan migrant worker more than twenty years her junior. Their meeting is almost accidental: Emmi takes refuge from the rain in a bar frequented by immigrant laborers, where Ali is jokingly dared to ask her to dance. What begins as a polite conversation gradually becomes something deeper. Both are isolated in different ways: Emmi by age and loneliness, Ali by xenophobia and his status as a Gastarbeiter (guest worker). In each other they find companionship and comfort. But their happiness is fragile. When they marry, their relationship becomes a scandal among neighbors, friends, and coworkers. Emmi’s own adult children disown her. People stare at them ...

This was my second time watching this film and I remained unmoved. It's often described as surreal neo-noir, an exploration of the dark side of suburban America, and I can see that: white picket fences, manicured lawns, but something rotten hiding just underneath. I just don't connect with it. What felt shocking or transgressive in 1986 has been escalated by decades of films since. I dunno.  But seeing it in a theater was a different experience than watching it at home. Without the option to fast-forward through the rape and abuse scenes, Frank was even more repulsive. I also noticed details I’d missed before, especially how alive the opening blue velvet curtains felt. They don’t just act as background for the title sequence text; they move as if they’re breathing. I was also grateful to see it on 35mm, and not a pristine print. The grit and texture suited the film, a reminder that celluloid is physical and imperfect. Maybe it’s because I’ve been revisiting a lot of Hitchcock l...

I hadn’t seen this film in almost thirty years, but it was one of the screenings I’d been looking forward to the most, mostly for sentimental reasons. I was introduced to it in high school video arts by Mr. Weesner, who used the crop-duster scene to teach us about Hitchcock’s obsession with storyboarding and visual control. I can still picture him pressing pause on the classroom VCR, pointing at the leading lines and emptiness around Cary Grant, explaining how none of it was accidental. That sequence was conceived almost entirely in advance, planned shot by shot. The suspense doesn’t come from dialogue or music but from the composition of each frame. Hitchcock uses vast negative space --- Cary Grant stranded in an empty, sunlit field --- to heighten tension, subverting expectations of danger lurking in shadows. Each visual beat escalates with architectural precision. When the Mount Rushmore finale hit, I realized I had completely forgotten that the movie ends with Thornhill and Eve d...

Since its release, this film has left audiences perplexed. Myself included. It’s often cited as the best film of the twenty-first century, a reputation that somehow coexists with the fact that most viewers don’t fully understand what the hell they just watched. Mulholland Drive (2001) is meant to be felt not understood. I saw this as part of 4-Star Theater's celebration of David Lynch's birthday with a friend who had never seen the film. I failed to warn her that this was a two-and-a-half hour fever dream. In hindsight, that omission was very Lynchian. Lynch was notoriously cagey about explaining his work, leaving viewers to interpret what the film was about. But the generally accepted reading of the plot is Diane Selwyn is an aspiring actress who comes to Los Angeles after winning a jitterbug contest and receiving an inheritance from her aunt. She falls in love with another actress, Camilla, who ultimately betrays her by sleeping with the director of the film they are working...

I've spent my movie watching career generally avoiding the Classic Westerns genre. The frontier masculinity is off putting. So are the racist depictions of Native Americans. And the treatment of women as symbols rather than subjects. This film has all three. In The Searchers (1956), John Wayne plays Ethan Edwards, a brooding Confederate veteran driven to hunt down the Comanche chief who killed his family and abducted his niece, Debbie, played by Natalie Wood.  This film is one of the most mysterious of the classic Westerns because of the degree that the audience is asked to read into the antihero's motivations. Does Ethan feel he is to blame for the death of his family? Is he on a quest to bring Debbie home because he's secretly her father? Does he mean to rescue her, or is he so outraged by the threat of miscegenation that he'd rather kill her? Is that why Debbie's adopted brother is so insistent in joining him, to guard against his fury? Maybe Ethan is meant to b...

I'm just going to tell you what Roger Ebert said of this film, which he rated four stars. So here is it, verbatim. The screenplay was adapted from a play of no great consequence; memoirs tell of scraps of dialogue jotted down and rushed over to the set. What must have helped is that the characters were firmly established in the minds of the writers, and they were characters so close to the screen personas of the actors that it was hard to write dialogue in the wrong tone.   Humphrey Bogart played strong heroic leads in his career, but he was usually better as the disappointed, wounded, resentful hero. Remember him in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” convinced the others were plotting to steal his gold. In “Casablanca,” he plays Rick Blaine, the hard-drinking American running a nightclub in Casablanca when Morocco was a crossroads for spies, traitors, Nazis and the French Resistance.   The opening scenes dance with comedy; the dialogue combines the cynical with the weary; wi...

I can't watch Alfred Hitchcock films without thinking about Mr. Weesner, my high school video teacher.  But to reduce him to that --- my high school video teacher --- is woefully inadequate. Weesner was a dear family friend and my mentor. Over the decades we must have talked about hundreds of films. And we watched at least a dozen in his home theatre. I was a cocky kid, but he somehow delighted in my hot takes. (Years after his death, I finally watched Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid , one of his favorites. "A sad, toxic depiction of male friendship," I would have told him. That would have made him laugh.) There is so much I want to say about the role he played in how I think about art --- how I think about myself --- but it all gives me a lump in my throat. After his death, I stopped seriously watching movies for years, unable to love or hate something without being overcome with the grief of never being able to talk to him about it.  But, boy did he love Hitchcock, ...