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The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920) – I saw this last year during summer school in my dormitory, having heard references to it in numerous books and articles, and was later aware of its influence on Rob Zombie’s music video for “Living Dead Girl,” which is a very detail-oriented homage to
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The film was still effective when I initially watched it, but one law of nature that seems to be becoming truer and truer is that movies really are better on a big screen, in the dark, with a good sound system to surround you without pummeling you (the case could be argued against this for other movies, but that’s an article for another time). In this light, it’s astounding to think that some people actually willingly watch movies on iPods (I echo my sentiments with David Lynch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKiIroiCvZ0).
But anyway,
Caligari was of course much more effective in our class screening room. As much of a cliché as it may be, this is how movies were meant to be seen, and that’s why I yearn to see so many older movies on a big screen, and why going to the theater and NOT waiting for the DVD is so important.
Caligari works better in a theater because it’s creepier (the perfectly complementary modern score will make you jump at least once) and, in a way, while watching it with others, it’s more hallucinatory in the sense of “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” The only thing that could possibly make the experience eerier would be to see it late at night, when it’s either close to or past your bedtime. But not too late—you’d have to get back to bed to have enough time to have Dr. Caligari and Cesare visit your dreams.
Speaking of Cesare…Have you ever seen another metahuman antagonist quite like him? The term--after listening to Dr. Hendricks and another student describe him--“balletic zombie” came to mind, even though he’s not undead—he’s just been asleep for most of his life. In a way, he’s almost like a cross between the western conception of a vampire, and of course, Frankenstein’s monster: he acts gracefully under his master’s instruction, but when he sees a woman—a creature he’s never seen before in his life, who literally slept through puberty—he’s completely and utterly inept. In this light, Conrad Veidt, the man who played Cesare, is in such marked contrast with Max Schreck as Count Orlok or any of Lon Chaney’s memorable character creations. Plus I love the fact that he’s in
Casablanca…I’d definitely like to see how that transition occurred.
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Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939) – This one’s a little tricky for me to talk about; I watched the movie the entire time, I never nodded off, and I feel that I followed the story and its characters well enough, but my mind came and went from my head. Not from boredom, but from preoccupation, because the film is quite good (so good that some of the DVD’s special features consist of a professor commenting over certain scenes and shots, who’d spent years studying this film alone; he called Renoir’s multi-faceted, theatrical universe an “’and’ world” rather than a “’neither/or’ world”). I was just distracted. I definitely did not hate the film like the original audience who wanted to burn their movie theaters down upon the movie’s initial release, shortly before World War II broke out.
The movie reminds me somewhat of Ingmar Bergman’s
Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), what with both films’ tangled romantic webs, and Bergman’s film in turn is vaguely reminiscent of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but the first two comparisons are rather unfair.
Rules of the Game takes place in pre-World War II France, and is much more concerned with how we conduct ourselves in social circles rather than, say, the social circles themselves. It seems to say that although people are supposed to conduct themselves differently under different circumstances, the different conducts are much more similar than they appear. The famous “Hunt” sequence, for example, where various rabbits and pheasants are driven out to be shot and caught, seems to foreshadow the boisterous, rowdy behavior that will take place during the party in the movie’s 2nd half, as well as the fatal finale for one of the lead characters (on a technical/visceral level, “The Hunt” is very well-done and made me wonder how they made it look like the animals were dying—if in fact they were fake animals—and how they got that last rabbit’s amazing physical, bodily shudder as it breathes its last breath; although the two scenes are very far apart, “The Hunt” took me back to when Daniel Day-Lewis shoots the elk at the opening of Michael Mann’s
The Last of the Mohicans). I hate to spoil it for anyone, but the character in question who dies at the end is labeled by one of the other characters as a martyr, and as discussed in our class, Renoir seems to imply that these social “rules” can potentially kill those who try to stray from or ignore them outright.
Speaking of Renoir, he plays “Octave” in the film and winds up with a surprisingly meaty role for himself. Personally speaking, I often have conflicting feelings when it comes to directors acting in their own films. Cameos are great, I always love looking for those; everyone knows of Hitchcock’s cameos in his films by now, and Oliver Stone’s death as an army major in
Platoon makes me laugh just thinking about it (telling that to my dad, he called me sick—and he may be right—but I insisted to him that it was Stone’s acting that I thought was so funny). Some people find him annoying, but from what I’ve seen so far, I’ve enjoyed watching Woody Allen in his films, as well as Ben Stiller in
Zoolander and
Tropic Thunder, both of which he directed. My friend Matthew introduced me to filmmaker Jaques Tati through the movie
Parade, who to me was a logical step in this direction because he was a performer before he started directing, and furthermore,
Parade was about…performers (now I really want to see
Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot).
However, one director whom I was obsessed with for a time—M. Night Shyamalan—took The Director’s Cameo and started to go a little too far with it. It was all innocent enough at the beginning what with his small cameos as a doctor in
The Sixth Sense and a potential criminal in
Unbreakable; they were quick and painless appearances, and furthermore it was fun for me to be a dork and point out to others “that’s the guy who made this movie.” Then came
Signs, a movie that, while it’s my favorite Shyamalan movie and I feel it’s the best of his movies I’ve seen so far, is still marred by plot holes and one small detail: Shyamalan cast himself as a supporting character. Not as a “bit” character, not as an extra who merely walks by the camera or even does something coolly amusing in the background, but as a character who has a major impact on the plot and the main characters. Ignoring the fact that for a moment that I know who M. Night Shyamalan is and what he looks like, the fact of the matter is that he’s just not a very good actor. He says he wants to act more—which is fine, I mean we all have our hobbies—and he wants to create more opportunities for Indian and foreign actors—admirable, I feel—but
Signs would’ve benefited more from him casting another actor, any actor, someone whose sole job is acting. People may point the finger at Francis Ford Coppola for casting his daughter Sofia as Mary Corleone in
The Godfather Part III—and for the record, I do think he should’ve gone out and found another actress, and I wish that the originally-cast Winona Ryder hadn’t fallen terribly ill, as her presence probably would’ve aided the film at least a little bit—but at least Coppola wouldn’t have cast himself as Don Altobello if anything had happened to Eli Wallach (at least I think he wouldn’t have…). It’s a glaring blunder in
Signs because there comes a pivotal scene when Mel Gibson’s character confronts Shyamalan’s character, and from Gibson’s end, the characters should obviously be experiencing an emotionally-charged moment with boiling tensions dictated by a past history, but judging from Shyamalan’s character’s blank wall reaction, the characters may as well be talking about the new Lowe’s that opened in town at 6 in the morning. His cameo in
The Village wasn’t as bad, but it still came off as self-indulgent. I haven’t yet seen
Lady In the Water or the horribly-titled
The Happening, and I don’t think that he makes an appearance in the latter, but his part in the former sounds even worse as he plays—according to what I’ve heard—a writer whose work will be significant to Earth in the future. Shyamalan has a strong visual sense and interesting ideas, but it sounds like he needs to negotiate with his ego in order to take his movies back to a level of fine quality where they used to be.
Anyway, all of that said, I thought Renoir performed very well, and fit right in with the rest of the narrative.
