Keep it light.

by Ryland Walker Knight

After I submitted that essay on Bright Star, Ekkehard asked me to give him three things that marked my year—and they needn't be strictly cinematic. But, as this year was marked by all kinds of junk and dumps (as much as true highlights) and plenty of fear and trembling and loathing to go along with flight and dance and cheer (life felt like a real Søren leveling at times), I chose to not bore this blog world with me. Thus, I kept my miniature missive to maximum light, kept it pithy and kept it to cinema. You can read my list (and so many others!) in German by clicking here. Or you can read the English I sent to EK below:

1. Any time you get to see Playtime in 70mm is a highlight. This time, it was an unofficial introduction to my stint in New York early in 2009. I saw it at the Walter Reade Theatre with Keith Uhlich, Matt Zoller Seitz and Glenn Kenny. Then we ate yummy Italian food in Park Slope.

2. The DREYER at BAM series was an education this spring. Very happy to have met those films in that setting, that is the cinematheque over the home, and to have written something about each screening.

3. Jumping back into the PFA swing of things with an Alain Resnais series was just plain fun, from the Marienbad beginning all the way through—forwards and backwards, of course—to the end, which was a film from that often-cloudy, always-jumpy second phase in the 60s, fittingly calling an end in its title: La guerre est finie.

Alain à la recherche #6: Mélo

by Ryland Walker Knight

[The Resnais series playing at the PFA this November and December is part of a broader, traveling retrospective with a concurrent run in Chicago at the Gene Siskel Film Center and a proposed stop at the newly renovated Museum of the Moving Image in early 2010.]

Now the shots, like true heartbreak, feel as though they will last forever. The film never drags, so to speak, but it sure is a drag: if it weren't so sad, it would be hilarious, a true and pitch-perfect parody of The Mélodrama, all its cogs of coincidence front-loaded and all its machinations timed, factory-like, to precise ends. People unravel, not their stories. And yet, people can never tell their own stories: words weigh too much. (Look at this blog!) So Alain makes the word weigh a ton, and his endless master shots foreground how these lummox-light fools talk around each other and never with one another. The most direct form of communication is a somersault, a joke. Not even music can tell a story like a body can, though a sonata may prove a haven or a gauze. And time can fly, as ever, in the fade from one scene to another: whole lives can be rearranged, and are, by, simply, the movie calling curtains on one of its idiots. Lit and timed like Gertrud—with spotlights highlighting the artifice but duration making the people deliberate material—this chic, art deco world—all of it tiles and squares and boxes, all of its lines of style—is one big columbarium. Every stage feels a coffin, the whole thing bound by rigors of time one block of misdirection and perjured, masking tape'd crate at a time.

April showers: a grab bag of links and hints, plus a question.

by Ryland Walker Knight

Wow, this is counterintuitive. But it's a treat nonetheless since the film has no Region 1 DVD. I went ahead and embedded the film here but you should definitely watch it full screen, and loud. It deserves to be seen just like its title declares (asks?) it to be. That way, the outsized colors that feed this melodrama will pack more punch and, we hope, shock you into a powerful feeling. I saw the film last summer before my Telluride trip (see the bottom and the comment thread of this post) and it kick-started a Nick Ray fascination that has only grown since (a recent example). In fact, I've had my favorite of his films, On Dangerous Ground, at home from Netflix for a little too long now. I sure would like to write something coherent about it, but that will probably have to wait since I'm on the hook for a long-form piece about James Gray for a certain publication to be named later. In any case, watch James Mason shiver and rant his way through an illness and addiction whose consequences hit home in more ways than one. New media, baby. It'll take over your life. Get it?

And, a reminder: my last Dreyer Diary shall hit The Notebook shortly, I'm told, and the link will appear in the link dump post below. While I'm here: March was rough stuff for a variety of reasons but the Dreyer films were a fine project to keep my brain active. I'm happy I met the films on the big screen (as with this Ray above, and On Dangerous Ground) since each is meant to be felt with the eyes (as a portal to the heart). For what it's worth: Ordet was/is my favorite. I'd like to write about it again, and better, some day. It has a lot to give. And, to reiterate what I tweeted @ Brian, all that nonsense comparing Silent Light to Ordet misses the fact that, plot point be damned, Reygadas' project is much more about tactility whereas Dreyer's project is about reorientation. You can find the perfect example of this shifting of perspective begin at the 3:55 mark in the clip below. (It occurs to me that I should say this comes a little late in the film, and that I should issue a spoiler warning for those concerned with such things.)
video unavailable; maybe again, some day, in a different form
What's really cool about On Dangerous Ground is that it's about both! I might say that those two films, along with some Hitchcock and Buñuel, are my favorites of the 1950s. I know it's a rich decade, as every one is, and that I cannot compare with some cinephiles' viewing history, but, are there any takers? Or, what's your favorite Nick Ray picture? And, for that matter, which Dreyer?

—Do we still have readers out there in the sphere? Can I provoke a response? To echo our stooly mope above: hit me.

DREYER at BAM. Links + Words.

by Ryland Walker Knight

Last year, my spring-time cinematheque education plunged me into Pedro Costa. This time, it's Carl Theodor Dreyer. This seems apt. Costa's work brings us past cinema, per se, into a digital world of filmmaking that, though not as radically (to say as abrasively) avant as somebody like Lynch (who I focused on two springs ago), forces one to rethink what images can do in these new forms available. What's intriguing to me about Carl Th. Dreyer's career, beyond the obvious stature his name has grown to, is how it bridges the sound divide, which will be another interesting way to think against Lynch and Costa, who both do so much with such simple sound effects (and affects). These are all things I'm going to pay attention to as tonight's screening of La passion de Jeanne d'arc (Friday, March 13th, 2009) starts the month-long DREYER at BAM series that spans the Danish filmmaker's career from his silent start to his full-arsenal endpoint. I plan on seeing as many as possible (which means all but two) and writing up each for The Auteurs Notebook. David Phelps got things started as only he could and if you click this link, you'll see all the posts under the "Dreyer" category over there, where my little missives will begin to appear (next week? tomorrow?). Additionally: I'll post a list of links to these pieces here so don't forget to check this space as we, ahem, march through the month. If I find other online readings, I'll go ahead and throw them into the mix here, too.

• First worthy posts outside our little circle about this specific retro: Jonathan Rosenbaum and Michael Joshua Rowin.
  
• Back in September I saw Jeanne for the first time. Words + Images.
  
• Dreyer Diary #1: Joan
  
• Part of the reason this series is such a thing for me at this juncture is precisely because I get to see these films projected on an impressive screen. But for those without this opportunity, due either to funding or to location, you can find a number of the films on DVD. Or, if you're really desperate (or just plain curious), there are youtubers like this dude who have uploaded the whole of Day of Wrath in pieces and made a playlist for our internet viewing convenience.
  
• Dreyer Diary #2: Wrath
  
• I skipped Monday and Tuesday's films, The President and Michael, because of friendly (and not so friendly) adventures out in the world. This doesn't seem too large a loss since, at the least, I did see Michael last summer at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival (more here at home). Chances are I would have appreciated it more at this point in my education but I still remember its apt sadness, its "plangent blocks of hurt," as I wrote then. Also, it's all about seeing, which is dope. In any case, I'll be seeing Ordet later this evening with a diary entry to follow as early as Friday afternoon if I come home ready to pump out some words.
  
• Dreyer Diary #3: Ordet
  
• Since relaunching their new website, The Criterion Collection has posted close to all of the essays included in their lovely releases in blog form. This, of course, means that a number of the essays included in the Dreyer Box Set are all available for our reading pleasure; ditto Joan and Vampyr. Thus: Dreyer himself on Joan; Jonathan Rosenbaum on Day of Wrath; Chris Fujiwara on Ordet; Philip Lopate on Gertrud; Kim Newman and Mark Le Fanu on Vampyr. There's also something of an overview piece by Armond White titled, simply, "Carl Th. Dreyer." I will writing more about these essays (and this set) as entry points for those unable to attend this (or any other cinematheque) retrospective/s for another outlet. Link coming soon!
  
• Dreyer Diary #4: Glomdale
  
• "Chain of Dreams: Carl Th. Dreyer," by Tag Gallagher at Senses of Cinema
  
• André Bazin on The Passion of Joan of Arc
  
• Dreyer Diary #5: Master of the House
  
• My buddy Darren Hughes, of Long Pauses, is a big Dreyer fan. I sat behind him last summer when I saw Michael and our conversation afterwards helped me to get with the picture a little better. In the past he wrote posts on Day of Wrath and Ordet that I recommend reading.
  
• Dreyer Diary #6: Gertrud
  
• My friend Kevin B Lee worked with Jonathan Rosenbaum on a video essay comparing Gertrud to John Ford's The Sun Shines Bright (which I have not seen). It's in two parts. Part One focuses more on the Ford picture while Part Two focuses more on the Dreyer; however, there is overlap. And, yes, it pays dividends to watch them together, and in order, to let the argument JR makes in his commentary build. More of which can be read here.
  
• Dreyer Diary #7: Love One Another + Vampyr
  
• Dan Callahan at The House Next Door on this current retrospective and its opportunity to see the earlier, silent stuff.
  
• Andy Rector posts "FEROCIOUS" by Jean-Marie Straub at his joint. It's all about our man at hand and his distaste for the bourgeois world, as translated by Rosenbaum.
  
• I wrote a little something for SpoutBlog about this series which you can read by clicking here.
  
• Fellow VINYL head Steve Boone on Day of Wrath: Church of Cinema.
  

[Pic 1: Day of Wrath / Pic 2: Gertrud / Pic 3: The man, tongue out]

Cutting into the world: La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc tears and tears, bleeds.

by Ryland Walker Knight

Dreyer cuts space apart to the point that it isn't even something to talk about. La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc has no need for spatial (or, for that matter, temporal) terms. Of course we're given the unity of the single day, and the stations of the cross, as it were, but every image in the film is expression; there's no real interest in representation. "The close-up is the face." It's a film of faces big and small and brimming and dead and burnt and crying and alive and inanimate. Hooks jutting across a frame are a face of terror and pain; the stake aflame with a cross behind, a face lifting us out of the world; the sacrament raised in prayer, a face of dignity; Jeanne's torn blanket a metonymic version of her, an echo of her arm's pump. It's as pure a film, as purely affective a film, as I have ever seen. But its grammar is miles from what PTA's been developing. In fact, not that this is fair or equivalent, his grammar seems much more akin to something like what Tony Scott habitually falls just short of despite his best efforts. It helps to have something to say, but, and I mean this, those last three Tony Scott movies, tied as they are to plot, deliver a lot of goods in purely formal registers; it reaches an apogee in Deja Vu's little room, and then loses itself, but pretty much the whole of Domino is fascinating, lively, expressive filmmaking. And Dreyer edits fast. (Much more interesting, though, than Tony over there.) In ten seconds you can see a baby suckling, Jeanne clutching a crucifix, the baby pull away from the tit, a man without a face pull away the cross from Jeanne's clutches, and the baby returning to the milk. A tidy circuit of give and take. It's phenomenal, really. I can't believe it's taken me so long to find my way to this master of cinema. Also, a hilarious footnote here: what a political film!


[We need reasons to believe in this world, even as we rend it open. Find more by clicking here.]