The epigraph from Tragic Sense of Life comes from the version translated by J. E. Crawford Flitch.
Metropolis. This German Expressionist film from 1927 carries a fuller narrative in its restored edition. The infatuation of Freder (Gustav Fröhlich) with Maria (Brigitte Helm) leads him into the catacombs of the plant with the workers; this is fleshed out more in the restored edition. His quest for Maria fuels his new quest to save the workers from their drudgery, and, in the process, coming into his own as a man, stepping out of the shadow of his autocratic father. The night I saw this in Ann Arbor, MI, the line was literally wrapped around the block; the movie started thirty minutes late to accommodate the crowd; you don’t want people filing in late during a silent film. There was a live organist in a tuxedo, and the audience was completely rapt, reading intertitle cards and listening to queues from the organist. It made the moviegoing experience a live event, a performance.
Stranger Than Paradise. That Jim Jarmusch is from my hometown of Akron, OH, always amused me; I not only understand from where his quirky style emanates, but I also respect the permission he allows himself for it to thrive. Though this wasn’t my favorite film of his—Down by Law, Mystery Train, Ghost Dog, Broken Flowers, still favorites—but I do love what this film adds up to. The dramatic irony is that these characters are on a quest, whether they realize it or not. This is realism, though; most people are unwittingly on a quest, but we so often dismiss it as fate. This film presents a voyeur’s view of this journey.
Last Year at Marienbad. Every time I see this film, I get something new out of it. This alone makes it one of my favorites. That every frame of it is composed with the keen eye of a still photographer only makes it more seductive. Games of chance, reverie, innuendo, infidelity, and the magnetism of attraction all factor in prominently in its composition. If one thinks the man who approaches this woman asking if she remembers sleeping with him last year—at this same soirée, in this same château—is inappropriate, one need only watch a bit longer to question whether he’s the predator or the prey. Like a good poem, we only need to raise the question and think about its implications. Who needs an answer?
The Red Shoes. Though it’s true that obsession can be fatal, it’s also true that to fight for something or someone you love may make life worth living. Maybe that’s the moral to this story: When Vicky (Moira Shearer) begins her dance, it’s clear that she’s in love with the life she’s dancing; that is to say, for Vicky, life is dancing. And when Lermontov (Anton Walbrook) and later Julian (Marius Goring) see Vicky, we know what each man loves in this world. And we also begin a story that transcends the original fairy tale of Hans Christian Andersen. It becomes a fairy tale, albeit a grim one, for adults.
Nosferatu. Shadows have never been used to greater effect than in this film. The possibility of what Orlok/Nosferatu—Dracula, really, but Murnau didn’t secure the rights to Bram Stoker’s novel, so he changed the name—could do with the embodiment of what lay behind the shadows always felt scarier than watching his gore play out. I think there’s a bit of the antihero in us all, and there’s always an antidote to allow that part to go unchecked. Here, Orlok gets so enthralled with the beauty (and the blood) of Ellen that he drinks from her vein into the sunrise, which, of course, kills the vampire. He chooses his demise by choosing to give himself over to his desire. And if you have to choose a way to go . . .
Un Chien Andalou. I won’t pretend to understand this film, Salvador Dalí, or Luis Buñuel, but I do understand how it makes me feel when I see it: that the mysteries of life and love are cyclical. Whether birth or death or love, everything takes time to be revealed.
Killer of Sheep. Being in the struggle of life is often more compelling than having it all figured out. Watching the adult characters in this film try at life is almost as beautiful as watching the children in the film play. You realize that the adults struggling were once these kids, and their ability to play as children is what keeps their spirits buoyed as adults.
The Mack. Most people see this as just another blaxploitation film with a pimp, but I think Max Julian brings a lot to this anemically written role. What strikes me about this film, though, are the scenes in which Goldie (Max Julian), the pimp protagonist, has conversations with and about his mama (Juanita Moore, of Imitation of Life fame). Ultimately, the entire plot hinges upon this relationship; every decision he finally makes emanates from the danger he puts his mother in. He, ultimately, must stop sacrificing the safety of the women he “employs,” too. It’s not until he starts seeing women as something other than pawns in a game that he begins to change his life.
Pather Panchali. Watching a child grow up is compelling enough, but watching a child grow up while overcoming insurmountable odds just makes you want to embrace all children. This is particularly the case once you see the aftermath of losing one child and the gift of having another child survive. Pather Panchali is part of a neorealist trilogy, The Apu Trilogy, which poses the question of what are the skills you need when you leave your father’s house. But this is no prodigal son. Apu, from childhood to manhood, shows how it’s done.
M. Peter Lorre has a face that calls for sympathy, even on a good day. In this film, even playing child murderer Hans Beckert, the sympathy comes as he tries to control himself. Later, he tries to escape vigilante justice from other criminals in Berlin. At one point when captured, he says, “Who knows what it’s like to be me?” Although I have no idea, thankfully, what this urge feels like in a murderer, we all have subjective realities we live and try to defend.
Rififi. Whenever anyone talks about this film, they always reference the thirty-minute heist scene that has no dialogue; it’s men at work on a highly skilled job. But what surprises me is how badly these guys behave. The misogyny is high; the lifestyle is fast and reckless. By the end, we see that this behavior may be rewarded all too often, but bad boys sometimes get their comeuppance.
The Great Train Robbery. When this film first played in theaters in 1903—the first Western, all of twelve minutes long—the scene in which Bronco Billy points his gun directly at the camera and shoots made audience members scream and duck under their seats. It’s not only hard to imagine a new art form in the twenty-first century, but it’s also hard to imagine any art form having the immediate influence on the public that film had at the turn of the twentieth century.
The Brother from Another Planet. You can look like the people in a new community, you might even be accepted by them, but you always know you’re not from their world. The Brother (Joe Morton) is an escaped slave from another planet, he lands in Harlem, NY, and, though he looks like everyone around him, he also doesn’t quite fit in. After a while, though, the community around him—and the brother from another planet, himself—realizes that they have a common experience (and enemy) in their universe of oppression.
The Homesteader. Oscar Micheaux’s life story is greater than the plot of most films. An autodidact to the core, he went from working as a Pullman porter to tilling land as a homesteader in South Dakota, to writing novels and selling them door-to-door, to making films. Did I mention that this is a black man in the 1910s? There’s no extant copy of The Homesteader; it’s an adaptation of Micheaux’s roman à clef by the same name. But of what we know, like most artists, his life informed his art. He was obsessed with racial uplift, fighting injustice, Booker T. Washington, and financial security. The Leo (Frank) v. (State) Mary Phagan trial was another obsession. During this trial, for the first time, black “witnesses” were used to convict an ostensibly white (Jewish) defendant. Local blacks were threatened by white men emboldened by the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan: they either testified that this Jewish man killed this young white woman, or these men, calling themselves the Knights of Mary Phagan, would burn them out of their homes or do worse to their families. Micheaux saw their testimony as selling out. In many of his films, the subplot is of a “race traitor” informing whites of the plans of blacks. The race traitor always gets his comeuppance in a Micheaux film, though. When Leo Frank’s body was brought back to New York—he was from Brooklyn, but he moved south to manage a pencil factory in Milledgeville, GA—the New York Times reported that a “Negro sophisticate” was in Penn Station with the crowd to memorialize Frank. They had no name for this well-dressed African American man in the crowd, we have no copy of The Homesteader, and I thought what if that was Micheaux in the crowd that day. It’s pretty unlikely that it was, but it’s pretty clear he was with Frank in spirit. So, I thought, why not bring them together here.
Do the Right Thing. The story takes place over the course of one day in Brooklyn, but all the characters have history; this is just the day that all of the history comes to a head. Spike Lee—and, while I’m at it, John Sayles—doesn’t get enough credit for putting characters in dialogue, honestly, across racial and cultural lines. These characters say what everyone on the street is thinking. This movie renders what would happen if our thought clouds were burst in mixed company.
Run Lola Run. Who hasn’t performed stupid acts for love? Lola (Franka Potente) tries to help her boyfriend, Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu), out of a jam. Manni loses and now needs to replace $100,000 that belongs to a drug lord; he has twenty minutes to find the money. Lola tries and tries and tries, repeating her series of efforts as if caught in the movie Groundhog Day. That they keep trying makes this worth watching again and again and again.
I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing. Unrequited love never looked sweeter than in this film. Polly (Sheila McCarthy) is well meaning but a bit hapless and socially awkward. She has mostly worked as a temp because she just can’t seem to get the hang of anything. Yet, she seems to have some facility with photography. She falls for a woman much more sophisticated than she: Gabrielle (Paule Baillargeon), who curates a gallery at which Polly finally lands a job. Gabrielle is not only out of Polly’s league, but she’s also involved with another sophisticated woman. Is it possible for someone like Polly to ever win a Gabrielle? Who cares? We just want to see Polly give it a try, and she goes for it.
Black Girl. Diouana (Mbissine Thérèse Diop) is one of those characters you fall in love with as soon as they enter the story. Diop is one of those actors you want to stare at for a couple of hours, easy. So this is an equation for emotional investment—if not unbridled infatuation, at least—woven into the writing and casting. Sembène takes it further by framing Diop beautifully in every scene, whether close-ups in cramped interiors or long tracking shots outside. The story of how the dignified Diouana is tricked into moving from Dakar to Antibes to work as an au pair, only to find later that the young white French couple really wanted her to work as a live-in maid, is already a tragedy of spirit, which we witness for most of the film. The surprising yet logical ending of this film restores agency in our hero.
American Gigolo. When I saw this movie in the theater as a teenager, I knew I was watching something that I’d never forget. At the time, however, I had no idea why I wouldn’t forget it. Looking at it now, I think Richard Gere’s Julian was the first male hero I saw on film who was truly vulnerable while maintaining style, tenacity, and swagger. He was a real man with a real problem. That is to say, neither Steve McQueen nor Clint Eastwood could have played this role with the sincerity Gere brings to this male sex worker, who looks for love in all the wrong places.
Blazing Saddles. It would be easy to call Mel Brooks a genius based on his comedic writing alone, but it would also be a disservice to his level of craft. This film, like many of Brooks’s films, delves into social politics like no other American filmmaker, whether that filmmaker is primarily dramatic or comedic in approach. This film—like Brooks’s version of To Be or Not to Be, which he wrote, produced, and acted in, and which, in my opinion, holds up better over time than Ernst Lubitsch’s original—not only handles the politics of race in the midseventies, but it also tackles the politics of sexual orientation. These are two tough subjects for people to talk about; that he is able to make us think about them and to laugh through the thinking is, well, genius.
Westworld. This is a story about what goes wrong when we get to live out our fantasies without a “safe word.” Set in an amusement park for adults that replicates the Old West—and ancient Rome, and the Renaissance—something goes wrong with the lifelike robots in the brothel and the saloon. The sex workers say no and the gunslingers shoot back. Once the robot workers have agency, the consequences are as grave as they would be in the real world. As fun as it sounds to live out our fantasies with impunity, it’s also fun to watch as they get reined in and as those among us who resist tempering get their comeuppance.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. This German Expressionist film has one of the first twist endings in film. Dr. Caligari and his faithful somnabulist, Cesare, are accused of a series of murders in a German mountain community. At the end, we find out that our narrator, Francis, is really a delusional mental patient; his delusion is that the head of the asylum, Dr. Caligari, and another patient, Cesare, are the serial killers. Once Francis’s delusion is revealed to Caligari, he realizes that he can now cure Francis. I saw this one in a theater with a live organist; I remember feeling a bit dazed, like Francis, or a bit like the sleepwalker. But I couldn’t stop thinking that understanding what we’re deluding ourselves about is half the battle. So, in this way, I was fully awake.
Ikiru. After thirty years of service in a government job and after learning he has stomach cancer and a few months to live, Kanji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura) chooses to do one meaningful deed before he dies: he completes the paperwork to build a playground in a poor neighborhood, where a cesspool is making life harder for the citizens. It’s sad to think of a bureaucrat giving his entire life to work—no vacations, no sick days—and no play, but it’s something transcendent to think of this worker choosing to do one meaningful thing before he dies. This is more than most people can say about their jobs or their lives, but it’s beautiful when those who are most underestimated find meaning in both, even if just for a few months.
The Red Balloon. The metaphor of the red balloon is so perfectly elegant that even a child can understand it. Lamorisse wisely cast his son Pascal in the lead role, as a boy named Pascal who finds a red balloon; the balloon soon takes on the personality of a secret friend. Pascal believes the balloon embodies a will, soon the other kids recognize what Pascal has in this new friend, and their jealousies get the best of them. Pascal, emboldened by the power of belief, rises above them—literally and figuratively. If you can’t relate to this story, I feel sorry for you.
One Week. When life looks good for you—when you have money, you have love, you have a home—someone is always going to be jealous. And sometimes they will even try to ruin your good time. Buster Keaton’s character is not discouraged by the small act of jealousy that turns his world upside down in this story. In fact, he’s unflappable as he keeps forging ahead against the forces against him. How can anyone resist cheering him on?
Oldboy. There’s a surprise in every scene of this film. In fact, I think this is the case for every film I’ve seen by Park Chan-Wook. Nonetheless, there’s also the familiarity of the human condition. In this film, the big mystery is what did the protagonist, Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik), do to his high school friend, Woo-jin (Yu Ji-tae), who has set out to get revenge in the most elaborate and sadistic way imaginable. No, it’s really unimaginable, but the suspension of disbelief is too strong to resist; the equation of the acting, writing, and direction of this film makes everything possible.