Some Came Running

"Original Gangsters" at the Brooklyn Public Library

Starting tomorrow evening, at the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, I'll be hosting a six-week series of screenings called "Original Gangsters" with which I attempt to encapsulate the history of the gangster film with a mere six films. A futile effort but hopefully an entertaining and not unilluminating one. The first on the docket is The Beast of the City, a template of sorts and NOT a Vitaphone production, interestingly enough. The films are displayed via DVD, because that's how it's done in this venue. I'll introduce and lead a discussion afterwards. Check it out if you're around; more info is here. 

It was 50 years ago today

 

In England, the Beatles make their debut television appearance, on the Sid-Bernstein-founded Granada TV, a northwest-servicing commercial television franchise. They perform the songs "Some Other Guy" and "Love Me Do."

 

 

In Osaka, Japan, American modernist composer John Cage gives a concert at Mido-Kaikan, for which he is joined by artist Yoko Ono for the piece 26'55.988" for 2 Pianists & a String Player. Ono served as Cage's interpreter for much of the artist's 1962 tour of Japan, and participated in several other performances, including the one pictured above, featuring Cage, David Tudor and Toshiro Mayuzumi. 

"To Save And Project" and Raoul Walsh's "Wild Girl" (1932)

Joan Bennett and moppets, Wild Girl, image courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art

I experienced a really lovely privilege yesterday: to attend the screening of a rare, restored Raoul Walsh picture from 1932 called Wild Girl. It's one of many treasures screening in this year's "To Save And Project", New York's Museum Of Modern Art's film preservation festival. The slate this year is co-programmed by the great critic J. Hoberman and the spectrum of material is gratifyingly wide, ranging from pre-code Hollywood pictures such as this one and the Clara Bow talkie Call Her Savage to Peter Brooks' seminal quasi-doc London time capsule Tell Me Lies to the latest expansion of Once Upon A Time In America to anarchist films of the Spanish Civil War.

As to Wild Girl, it's an odd delight. A near-immediate predecessor to the better-known Walsh picture For Me And My Gal (which coincidentally played on TCM last night), it stars a gorgeous and delicate (and blonde!) Joan Bennett, who would subsequently play opposite Spencer Tracy in Gal. She's paired against silent hunk and future My Little Margie dad Charles Farrell, who, his work in pictures for both Borzage and Murnau notwithstanding, is a rather limited performer. "He's kind of got this proto-Joel McCrea thing going," I idly observed in conversation after the screening; "Make sure you emphasize 'proto' there," a friend responded. Based on a play that was in turn based on a Bret Harte story and was put to film in the '20s, Wild Girl's story is a hoary pocket Western in which local child-of-nature-vixen/virgin Salomy Jen (Bennett) is competed over by a semi-noble gambler (Ralph Bellamy with a waxed moustache), a plain lout (too-weird-looking-for-movies [by Carlos Clarens' estimation] Irving Pichel) and an outright slimy fake-pious politico (Morgan Wallace), and eventually swept off her feet by a vengeful-but-sweet stranger played by Farrell. There are a few other plot threads in this very brisk 80-minute picture, including the sad tale of a poverty-stricken dad by the name of Red Pete, and the movie has an ever-bouncing momentum that keeps it entertaining. While not exactly what you'd call a Great semi-lost picture, its biggest points of interest are visual: the movie is framed as being told from a photo album, and the opening has each of the main characters introducing him or her self from the frame of a large turning page, e.g., "I'm Salomy Jen, and I like trees better than men. Because trees are straight..." And subsequent scene transitions are done with the page-turning effect where a wipe might have been. An interesting optical. The peculiar mountain town Salomy and her dad live in is set and shot in California's Sequoia National Park, and there's some staggering footage of Salomy Jen and her mammy running around the giant trees and scaring bear cubs. The forest setting gives a weird lyrical fairy-tale feel to some scenes, particularly those such as the one pictured above, with Jen and the bevy of kids poor Red Pete is so worried about feeding. Then there's Bennett's nude pond swim (nude swimming is pretty big in pre-code pictures, see also Borzage's The River and DeMille's Sign Of The Cross...I'm feeling a trend piece here, if I can find a time machine), and the great Eugene Pallette's imitation of various horse-mouth noises, a routine the movie pretty much stops dead for. For a non-Great film, that's a lot of value, and if any of it sounds attractive to you I doubt you'll be disappointed if you go and see the picture on the 11th or 18th of this month. 

"I knew Raoul Walsh, knew him well," Pierre Rissient remarked in a conversation with a few other invitees after the screening. Rissient, the great French cinephile and programmer, is in town presenting a great sidebar at this year's New York Film Festival, "Men Of Cinema: Pierre Rissient And The Cinema MacMahon." This screening was scheduled at Rissient's behest, and I thank Gabe Klinger, whose working this event for MOMA, for including me in the invites for it. (It was also wonderful to meet Mr. K., with whom I've had several on-line exchanges, some slightly fur-flying, in person, finally.) "Walsh told me that when he was a boy, he witnessed an acual lynching, and it was something he remembered when making this film." Wild Girl's lynching scene is noteworthy indeed; it's the only sequence of the film executed in a series of quick cuts, and it's startlingly effective. Before Wild Girl we also saw, at Rissient's request, an Irving Lerner/Joseph Strick short in the Museum's collection, Muscle Beach, a 1948 tone-poem with proto-Beat rambling folk-song accompaniment, set at the title locale. Rissient, now in his seventies, still clearly lives for the excavation and experience of the cinematic tokens, the tendrils of which form a kind of secret history of the larger culture in all its implications (one particular point of interest in Muscle Beach, for Rissient, is that its music was by Earl Robinson, also the composer of "The House I Live In" and a Hollywood blacklist victim). And that, my friends, is MY kind of cinephilia. 

(It should go without saying, of course, that everybody at this hoity-toity event was wearing a bow-tie, and as each of us entered, humming Mozart, we were handed a long pin and asked to stick it into a voodoo doll of Josh Joss Whedon. It was a peaceful event for the most part except for a brief incident in which Andrew O'Hehir stormed into the projection room with a DVD box set of Season Six of Psych, screaming, "You're doing it WRONG!" and had to be forcibly restrained. And since we're on the subject, alas, I ought to point out that the estimable Vadim Rizov is making sense here. )

...he was an English guy...

If you're of the opinion that they don't make 'em like they used to, you are absolutely correct. If you're peeved that it's more and more difficult to see the ones they used to make on a big screen, that's absolutely correct too. So I would suggest you carve out some time and put your money where your complaints are this coming Thursday, October 4, when David Lean's still-remarkable, relentlessly thrilling 1962 picture Lawrence of Arabia plays in a 4K digital restoration for one showing only (at 7 p.m.) in theaters across the country, including one near you, I would expect. You can find out more at the Fathom Events website here. I can't imagine it'll be anything less than thrilling. I saw a prior restoration of the movie at the Ziegfeld some years back and it was one of my favorite moviegoing experiences ever. So don't wait for the upcoming Blu-ray; see it big, if you can. The presentation will also feature some nice extras, including introductions from Omar Sharif and Martin Scorsese. 

Oh dear

My old friend Tim Sheridan thinks it would be fun to run a newspaper. No, he thinks it would be fun to do a panel at the 2013 South By Southwest Festival. And he apparently thinks it would be fun if I appeared on this panel. You can help make this "fun" idea a reality by "liking" it in South By Southwest's "Panelpicker" feature. So go, and do, and be, and see you in Austin next spring? That would be weird...

Three films by Dan Sallitt

I hope I'll be indulged if I hew to a journalistic convention that, for reasons that remain obscure to me, has fallen into disfavor in recent years, and begin by making a disclosure. The writer and filmmaker Dan Sallitt and I are friendly acquaintances. We run in a couple of the same social circles and hence see each other at parties as well as at some screenings. We have "done" karaoke together, once. 

That said, we're not "close." There's quite a bit I don't know about him. Until recently, for instance, I was unaware that he's also a musician, and plays in a band, which information I found moderately irritating, as I had been hoping to "corner" the "market" in film-critic-types-who-also-have-bands. While I admire Sallitt's writing on film, we differ in taste more than a bit, and I frankly find myself exasperated by certain of his critical enthusiasms. 

Sallitt has made three feature films since the late '90s; his latest, The Unspeakable Act, plays in New York as part of BAM's CinemaFest on Sunday, June 24. I think it's an absolutely remarkable film, one of the best of the year so far, and if you're around, you should definitely see it. I'm hoping it gets wider distribution, because, not to be crass or anything, I think it more than establishes Dan's bonafides in terms of deseving a wider audience, funding for more films, and all that sort of thing. If you're already familiar with Dan's films, or even if you aren't, this lengthy "conversation" at MUBI is worth reading; and below are some of my observations on Dan's work so far. 

Made in 1998, Sallitt's first feature, Honeymoon, is clearly the work of a real film artist, albeit one who is testing his fully-formed voice against his technical facility. Let me talk about its strengths first. The movie tells an unusual New York story; Michael and Mimi (Dylan McCormack and Edith Meeks, seen above) longtime friends who toil in mid-level positions in publishing, are best friends who impulsively decide to marry without, not to be crude or anything, having established whether they can get it up for each other. One of Sallitt's immediately visible strengths as a writer and director of actors is his ability to comprehensively portray an actual social type (one that was more plentiful in 1998 New York than it is in 2012, admittedly): what I used to refer to as the Too-Brilliant-Copy-Editor, e.g., the genuinely gifted and genuinely sensitive and aesthetically attuned soul that never breaks through what you might want to call a glass ceiling for reasons that are entirely their own and are not unrelated to a certain social awkwardness. This social sect is the only one, I believe that could contain non-religiously committed individuals who would marry without even getting a sense of what their sex life could be.

The resultant spectacle of two painfully smart people tormenting themselves and each other in the most civilized way possible has its farcical aspects, naturally, but Sallitt doesn't caricature his characters, and many of the scenes operate on a low-frequency but definitely palpable level of emotional pain and physical mortification that's incredibly absorbing even while largely cringe-inducing. There’s a knife-edge on which the performances teeter between naturalistic and weirdly clumsy, and at times this actually messes with the suspension of disbelief you might need to fully invest in the action. That said, the two leads are remarkable, particularly Meeks, a woman who's not necessarily conventionally attractive and yet is able to exude, in performance, a demanding, even querulous sexuality that's seemingly at odds with her intellect and politesse and preferred mode of living. 

Sallitt's shooting and editing style here is surface-plain but, as with one of his cinematic heroes Eric Rohmer, deceptively canny, but total control occasionally eludes him; now and again in a shot you get the feeling of the performers having a too-acute awareness of the camera, holding themselves back so as not to get too close to it, and so on. None of this finally compromises the film's cumulative power, which it accrues by continuously threatening to send one of its characters into a Pialat-style rage blowout but...well, I don't want to spoil it for you. You can acquire the movie for viewing in various formats/platforms at Dan's home page. 

Dan's second film, All The Ships At Sea, made in 2004, displays more directorial assurance from its very first, still shot. It also displays Sallitt's admirable powers of compression perhaps to a fault, as 64 minutes is a pretty unusual length for a feature film. This is a fully-realized work though, once again featuring the extraordinary Meeks in a lead role. She plays a woman recently escaped, or expelled, from a religious cult, and the attempt of her Catholic theologian sister (Strawn Bovee, in the still above), to reconnect with her, and help her put her life back together. 

In a sense this picture harks back to Rohmer's 1969 My Night At Maud's, a feature-length chat about religious philosophy disguised as a sex comedy. Although Ships has neither the sex nor (for the most part) the comedy (there is a fair amount of mordant humor, as when a character you don't expect this kind of language from says "Ohio, Iowa, what the fuck's the difference?"). "We believe that a lot of the spiritual turmoil in the world is happening for a reason," Meeks' Virginia tries to explain to her sister Evelyn. Eventually we come to understand that at issue here is not belief or difference of belief or lack thereof of any of the above but plain and horrific disconnection, exemplified in the simple-as-death confidence Virginia confides to Evelyn about a childhood treehouse: "No one knew about it. I built it myself." Nevertheless, Sallitt gets a lot of implied spookiness out of the shadow of the cult that hovers over Virginia. I believe it is a testimony to Dan's equanimity as a person that he has not even considered, as far as I know, taking a polo mallet to the kneecaps of the makers of Martha Marcy May Marlene.

 Still courtesy of BAMcinemaFest/Static Prods.

The Unspeakable Act is a fully realized—sure, I'll say it—masterwork, an emotionally wrenching character study that puts its uncomfortable truths forward without recourse to conventional psychology. That is, the powerful attraction super-precocious teen Jackie (Tallie Medel) feels for her older brother, the equally brilliant but possibly more well-adjusted and socially accomplished Matthew, doesn't "make sense," yet makes total sense in the context Sallitt creates for it. And once again, that context has its roots in an actual (or is it "probably actual"?) social milieu, the shabby-genteel bohemian Brooklyn that's been priced out of the Heights and whose diaspora, such as it is, extends to the likes of Ditmas Park, where the film was shot. 

Using a variety of dislocation techniques (some of which are discussed at length in Sallitt's talk with Keller), the movie brings us uncomfortably into Jackie's world, and her bedrock obsession, to the point that, fifteen minutes in, when Jackie admits "I've never slept with anyone," the sigh of relief from the viewer is apt to be seismically palpable. Once what's at stake is laid on the table, Sallitt deploys his characters in what I can only describe as alchemical chess moves. Particularly upside-the-head-smacking is how we're shown the way that the amiable and ostensibly sane Matthew actually gets off on the attentions of Jackie. When a therapist enters the picture (she is played, beautifully, by Caroline Luft, who, I should disclose, is a friend of myself and my wife's, albeit one we don't see as often as we would like; in fact, I did not recognize her on my first viewing of the film), that character gets to play not-quite-irresistable force to Jackie's seemingly immovable object. Rarely does cinema treat us to the spectacle of a person inflicting what can only be called metaphysical damage to him or her self (despite its topic, the last thing Sallitt is making here is a "social problem" picture). One of the wonders of Tallie Medel's performance, besides the way she uses her slightly-sexually-ambiguous physicality, is how she documents that damage as vividly as if she were actually physically cutting into herself, even as Jackie the character believes she's giving nothing away that she doesn't want to. 

The movie is dedicated to Rohmer, but it is entirely a Dan Sallitt work. I hope his next film comes sooner than six to eight years from now.

Not in the stars

Busby Berkeley's immortal 1943 The Gang's All Here comes to New York's Film Forum in a really lovely new 35mm restoration starting April 20. You should totally go see it. It's an absolutely staggering piece of work, filled with amazing imagery (of which the above "ordinary" shot is but one example), and contains what's probably my favorite single shot in all of Hollywood cinema, the incredibly graceful crane shot starting with the view of a nude statue in the Greek style and ending with Benny Goodman finishing a verse of "Paducah." The restoration, I repeat, is a honey, and its existence suggests a future Blu-ray, a very devoutly-to-be-wished condition for a film that was once so difficult to see in ANY kind of format. But it's a fun picture to see with a crowd, in a real celluloid projection, so do catch it this way if you can.

I was thinking about writing at length about it, despite having done so a couple of years back for what was once The Auteur's Notebook. My good friend Keith Uhlich actually linked to that piece from his Twitter feed today, which compelled me to have a look at it, and I was happy to see that what I wanted to say this time, I had already said then, and not too badly at that, if I say so myself. So here is THAT piece. I'm glad that age has not withered nor custom staled my receptivity to Alice Faye's sometimes melancholy allure. 

"Disco" mystic and the Dunham variation

I was lucky enough to get into a screening of Whit Stillman's 1998 The Last Days Of Disco at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this evening, and even though I have the very nice Criterion DVD it was a real gas to see it on a big screen and with a live and appreciative audience. What a fucking spectacularly good film it is. The dialogue is so fantastic, really right up there as far as I'm concerned with the classic stuff like Hecht and MacArthur and of course Sturges but filtered through something both more literary-classical but also literary-postmodern. People compare Stillman to Tarantino on account of the cultural references, but listening to the debate on Lady and the Tramp this time around—as great a comic set piece as anything in post-'70s American cinema, and you don't even really need to know the Disney film to "get" it—I was oddly reminded of Pynchon, at least in terms of the way the argumentation is framed. There are a couple of narrative leaps I still don't quite grok—Matt Keeslar's Josh suddenly wearing that harlequin costume, for instance—but overall, just great, up to and including the dance fantasia finale.

The movie is part of a series programmed by the multi-hyphenate Lena Dunham, whose HBO series Girls is debuting on a date that lives in inf...well, it's April 15, which falls on a Sunday this year. Anyway, her series is called "Hey Girlfriend" and features films she admires/was influenced by, and after this screening of Disco Dunham led a Q&A with Stillman and actor Chris Eigeman, who's appeared in three of Stillman's four films. Dunham led off by saying one reason she loved Disco was its portrayal of a "great female friendship," a description that made Stillman raise at least one eyebrow. The film's central relationship is between Chloe Sevigny's Alice and Kate Beckinsale's Charlotte. Charlotte's, as it happens, is one of the most hilarious archetypal underminers in the history of fiction, so blatant in her manipulations that the joke becomes (in my mind at least) how much Charlotte only thinks she's being something like passive-aggressive. Sweet and inexperienced Alice falls for Charlotte's nonsense with a credulity that would make her an utter dupe in a less nuanced film, and this credulity leads to such classic lines as "I think Uncle Scrooge...is sexy." But on reflection, it seems that the fact that Dunham takes the relationship in the film as a friendship is not unrelated to what makes Dunham interesting as a filmmaker. There's been a lot of ink spilled about Girls lately, the most confounding piece to my mind being Frank Bruni's  "O tempora! O mores!" New York Times thumbsucker about these kids today with the meaningless sex. And I've written about how certain aspects of Tiny Furniture made this 52-year-old guy glad to be out of the demographic by which his gender is judged by Jezebel and such. (Incidentally, while I stand by all of the points I made in that piece, I allow right now that my overall tone might have been a little too studiedly acerbic. Or a lot too studiedly acerbic.) What I didn't get into as much is how Furniture depicted intra-female relations as head-spinningly alternating between abrasion and affection, competition and solidarity, and so on. Very few of the films I've seen by male filmmakers of Dunham's generation have any such concerns, but then again very few films at all have such concerns, or at least they don't articulate them in the way that, say, a film such as Disco, or, for that matter, Claudia Weill's Girlfriends, which also showed in Dunham's series, do. I mean, Girlfriends and Disco take VERY different formal approaches to that articulation, but they both share a similar sharpness and frankness (for all the artifice of Stillman's film, it also has a very definite adamance—and accent, if you will—on being about something real). As does Mike Leigh's great Career Girls, also part of the series and showing this coming Sunday. What I'm saying finally is that my main interest in Girls is in seeing where Dunham takes THAT theme. So I look forward to it. 

In the interest of what they used to call full disclosure I'll tell you that a friend who was part of the event introduced me to Dunham after the Q&A and we had a very pleasant chat and I found her completely engaging and gracious. 

Guerman studies

It's an exceptional week in New York to explore the works of distinctive, uncategorizable filmmakers; the Brooklyn Academy of Music is hosting an exhaustive retrospective of Andrzej Zulawski (very much looking forward to seeing his mudmen-on-the-moon epic On The Silver Globe on Saturday!) while today the Film Society of Lincoln Center kicks off its brief look at the films of Russian director Aleksei German, or Guerman (for this post I'm gonna stick with the latter spelling) in a series called "War and Remembrance." The look is brief because there's no other choice: over the course of an over forty-year career, Guerman has completed only six films, and the first of those was a co-directing effort, 1967's The Seventh Companion, which he made with Grigori Aronov. 

Guerman's first solo picture was 1971's Trial On The Road, which shows for the first time today at 6:15 p.m. Among other things, it once again proves the adage that I made up just now, which is that nobody makes a World War II film like a Russian. The movie begins with a stark depiction of Germans dousing a pit full of potatoes with kerosene, because that'll show those pesky partisans. It then features some narration from a young boy who we won't hear from again for the rest of the film, detailing back-in-the-day privation. And then it's trudge, trudge, trudge through densely packed snow, each footfall beautifully recorded, and being out of cigarettes, and deserted villages and stray gunshots and sudden views of a deadly platoon of goddamn Germans coming over a snow-white horizon to kill you all. Only the Russian World War II film gets this atmosphere so palpably, and if Trial doesn't reach the heights of pathos of Ivan's Childhood or the height of horror of Come And See, it takes a more than honorable place in the tension-and-tactics subcategory of war movie (a favorite of mine in this line is of course Mann's Men In War, and yeah, Trial would make a good double feature with it); from the atmosphere and anecdotes a very definite story emerges, in which a Red Army turncoat tries to make good with the partisans to whom he's surrendered. As much as the movie condemns war in a relatively conventional what-a-waste fashion, there is a certain exploitable heroism inherent in the protagonist's final sacrifice, and the up-and-at-'em, never-rest determination showed by the partisan's oft-besieged leader, played by Rolan Bykov, seen in the still above with Anatoly Solonitsin, a frequent Tarkovsky player here portraying a tightly-wound subordinate) seems a quality sure to please Soviet apparatchiks. Not so much, apparently; as Anton Dolin recounts in his excellent piece on Guerman in the current issue of Film Comment (in which he wryly asks, "how many other geniuses have managed to displease the Soviet censors, the post-Soviet commercial system, and the connoisseurs of Cannes?"), the movie was "denied release and nearly destroyed," and "finally screened in the Gorbachev era."

Possibly the most crucial of Guerman's films is the one he most recently completed (he's been working on his next picture, an adaptation of a sci-fi novel by the Strugatsky brothers, who also wrote the source material for Tarkovsky's Stalker, for decades), 1998's Khrustalyov, My Car!, which lives up to the oft-bruited idea of a fever-dream of a movie almost too well. A delirium of camera movement in which the lens takes in the exquisitely hoarded details of its settings with an addict's eagerness, it takes an extremely oblique narrative approach to a scenario inspired by the "Doctor's plot" affair in Soviet Russia directly prior to the death of Stalin, depicting in nightmarish detail the humiliation of its lead character, a rather magisterial physician. It makes no allowances for what the viewer may or may not know about the historical facts surrounding the story and of course that's not really the point: the point is the immersion, its awfulness, the specks of extremely mordant humor to be gleaned from it, all that. "Its characters aren't properly identified, its politics not elucidated, its geography vague," New York Times reviewer Stephen Holden complained when the picture played at the New York Film Festival. YES, EXACTLY. Nothing against Stephen, who's a smart fellow and a sharp writer, but relative to the ostensible institutional expectations of something such as The New York Times, yes, Khrustalyov, My Car! could be said to spit in the face of those expectations...although its resignation to its Otherness is such that spitting in the face may be too strong an action-image. It would be a perverse mistake to assert that Khrustalyov's greatness is acheived solely by way of its aesthetic querulousness, but its querulousness is certainly a part of its greatness. You hear rather too often of movies that take you down a rabbit hole, but this REALLY is one of those pictures. Put it this way: if you go check it out on my recommendation, I think you'll either want to hug me or break my nose upon leaving the theater. No middle ground. 

"Tarkovsky Interruptus"

It was heartening to see this event at the New School's Tishman Hall played to an overflow crowd. I mean, yeah, it did feature a literary intellectual superstar hosting a panel of other well-known, well-respected writers and artists, and yeah, it was free, but still, the whole thing was attached to a screening of a nearly three-hour Russian movie that is referred to in certain smarty-pants corners as a "cultural vegetable." And while the argument has been made that the very notion of screening this film, Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 Stalker, in the piecemeal way specified by the program, with hinterstitial discussion, constituted an act of contempt for if not outright sacrilege against the movie, this overflow crowd paid the film a great deal of respect I think, responding with obvious receptivity. 

Whatever one thinks of the writer Dyer and his book Zona, on Tarkovsky's film, it would take a churl indeed, after seeing him in person, to deny that he makes a great host. Casual but not fake-ebulliant or smug, he kicked off asking the audience how many in the film were first-time viewers, and how many had seen it before, and was both slightly nonplussed and more than a little chuffed to see the division was practically 50/50, ideal conditions for such an experiment. The experiment itself was the idea, apparently, of writer and New School prof Lawrence Wechsler, who introduced Dyer. It figured, I thought; this writer on aesthetic convergences has a knack for making seeming kockamamie ideas come to life (and making them work) and is one of the relative handful of souls with the pull to get the likes of Walter Murch to show up in the service of a seemingly kockamamie idea. 

Murch made some astute comments, but if you'd brought along a bottle of Jack Daniel's and played a drinking game with yourself that required you to take a swig every time he brought up his frequent collaborator Francis Ford Coppola, you definitely would be passed out before part two of the film started. Francine Prose mostly brought her novelist's passion to her observations, and made some pertinent remarks about icon painting (her Tarkovsky gateway drug was Andrei Rublev, which she recounted seeing every night for a week the first time 'round) and its relation to Tarkovsky's imagery. Philip Lopate spoke eloquently on the long-take aesthetic and how it "doesn't guide you the way quick editing and music does," which quasi-paradoxically led me to ponder just how much music there actually IS in Stalker (a LOT). Some of the most interesting comments came from Michael Benson, a polymath who worked with Malick on the cosmology sequences for Tree of Life and whose experience living in the U.S.S.R. in the '80s gave him some really spectacular insights. Speaking of the early scene in which Professor restricts Writer from going back in the bar, Benson noted that the word Professor uses, "nilsya," literally means "it is not allowed," and had a very particular resonance in Soviet society. Murch then compared the trolley sequence to an 1897 Billy Bitzer film Haverstraw Tunnel, and cited a review of the film from the New York Mail Express that said "[t]he way in which the unseen energy swallows up space and flings itself into the distances is as mysterious and impressive as an allegory."  Moments such as these really brought the proceedings to life, and made the kockamamieness of the idea somewhat less so. 

It wasn't perfect. Yes, the film was screened from the subpar domestic DVD (Dyer assured the crowd that every effort had been apparently made to find a print, and these efforts had failed) and you could see the damn interlacing; I'm pretty sure the wrong sound mix was played back. When Lopate described the ways in which he is resistant to Tarkovsky (Philip is a neighbor and friend and after the event proper I had an amiable chat in which we reflected that neither of us should be surprised that he chafes at Tarkovsky's evangelical side), this emboldened Slate's Dana Stevens, whose contributions up to this point had been inoffensive enough to be ignorable/forgettable, to chime in about the "weak writing" in the film. I don't think I said "Oh, shut up" loud enough to be heard. I do have SOME manners, you know. (Okay, I didn't even really say that. My hostility towards Stevens—or, more to the point, everything I believe Stevens stands for—notwithstanding, the "problem" is not with the "writing" per se but with its content, the earnest philosophizing, which can get, in keeping with Tarkovsky's evangelical side, a little strident; but which, as Dyer points out rather well, is offset by cinematic nodes of deep ambiguity. A fallback position for superficial quasi-urbane critics such as Stevens is to pin-prick obvious dialogue and conclude that it constitutes what the film if "saying." Feh.)

And believe it or not, even in the subpar projection, and with all the interruptions, the film still maintained a power that is simultaneously spellbinding and deeply disruptive. Makes me MUCH hungrier to see it in a more pristine form and presentation though.