'Deep, Genuine Moral Tones;' and Other Varieties of Twaddle

Rebecca Prime's fine essay, "Cloaked in Compromise: Jules Daissin's Naked City" (found in the endlessly fascinating 2007 anthology "Un-American" Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era) contains a survey of contemporaneous critical reactions in the American press to Rossellini's Rome:Open City (1945). Very rarely have so many specimen of very fine sounding nonsense been amassed in one place. We discover, thanks to the legendary New York Times critic Bosley Crowther (a popular bunching bag for both Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael, and a noted inferior to such contemporaries as Otis Ferguson, James Agee, and Manny Farber) that Rome: Open City demonstrated "hard simplicity and genuine passion" and not "the slickly manufactured sentiments of Hollywood's studio made pictures." One of Crowther's contemporaries, the not-so-legendary Lee Morris opined "People under the oppressor's heel aren't apt to say, 'I want to be entertained. I don't want anything serious. No ideas, now.' They begin to think straight about basic values. And so does their art." The absolute faith in the hard and fast binaries of the genuine and the manufactured, of moral seriousness and slick entertainment, rather astounds me. Not that such sentiments have disappeared completely from the critical commonplace (though I can't imagine anyone aside from a particularly guileless press agent making such broad and confident claims about any public's fondness for 'basic values'), but at least one would expect them to be expressed a little more apprehensively now. But I'm left pondering what the distance between their lofty sentiments, and mine (and maybe yours) means. The quotes above make me think about my particular distance from the sophisticated rubes who wrote them, but also the extent to which their sensibility might contain a kernel of grace worth preserving.

Pierre Bourdieu famously claimed that all tastes are in fact matters of distaste (though I find such ideas already loudly implicit in Kant's notion of "communities of taste," but I digress), but though the terms they use to articulate their standards repel me, I'm left wondering how much my actual positions and preferences differ from the naive, dated liberal humanists of the era. After all, though I keep words like "authenticity" and "sincerity" banned from my critical lexicon on the grounds they tend to be something worse than useless as critical concepts, I'm not totally lacking in sympathy for the aesthetic and ethical qualities those terms were meant to get at. And in the specific case of a movie like Rome: Open City, I share their admiration if not the grounds upon which it was based. My sense of distaste is for what the sensibilities of those critics threatened to exclude more than for the films they embraced.

Crowther contrasted Rome: Open City to "slickly manufactured sentiments of Hollywood's studio made pictures," which leads me to think about my own favorite Hollywood movie of 1945*: Edgar Ulmer's Detour, a poverty row film noir which is as stripped of the normal commercial comforts of Hollywood cinema as Rossellini's masterpiece. And surely, much of what I love about Detour has to do with its considerable distance from "slickly manufactured sentiments." I also admire the movie's "hard simplicity," which in this context means a gnarled grace, where the extreme poverty of means reduces the film to the purity of Ulmer's feverish mise-en-scene. As far as "genuine passion," I'm not sure if genuine ever enters into it, but what makes Ulmer's movies so fascinating is their go-for-broke quality, the complete emotional overdrive of every moment which you could call passion, or you could call hysteria.

Not that Crowther or his contemporaries noticed any qualitative similarities at the time. Part of the pleasure of Detour is its utter disreputability, the fact that it seems disengaged from anything like good taste or decent humanist values. But in its way, it has as much to say about its own moment in history as Open City does about the chaos of occupied Rome. Made by Edgar Ulmer, a Jewish emigre working in Hollywood, Detour evinces a feeling of profound dislocation, and a sense of fatalism which seems to speak to Ulmer's particular historical situation. The fact that the movie, made in the cheapest studio sets and backlots, takes place in hellhole motel rooms which look perfectly cast for their part, and expressionist night clubs which have a way of becoming untethered from any discernible physical reality, only seems befitting for the expression of a man cut loose from the fortunes and profound misfortunes of history.

Much of my admiration for Detour comes from the feeling that it doesn't simply want to entertain me (it wants to leave the viewer feeling throttled and confused), and is at heart as deeply serious as any historical nightmare one can imagine. In other words, I value the movie for many of the same middlebrow reasons Lee Morris valued Rome: Open City. Yet, no one in 1945 placed any value in Ulmer's movie, and if Bosley Crowther and Lee Morris ever bothered to see it (as it was a poverty row release, few if any critics at the major dailies would have screened the movie), they would have likely been outraged at the notion that it was in any way aesthetically comparable to Open City. So whatever surface sympathy between their critical standards and mine shatters upon contact with actual movies.

Rome: Open City continues to impress today because some of Rossellini's images bear the burden of history, capturing movement in ways that seem radically uncomposed and automatic. The famous scene of Anna Magnani chasing after a truck carrying her partisan boyfriend possesses the same unsettling texture of truth as, for instance, the famous photograph of a little boy in the Warsaw ghetto holding his hands up as Nazi troops move him about by gunpoint. (A connection once suggested by one of Godard's cine-essays.)

In contrast, every image in Detour connotes the overdetermination of Ulmer's intentions.

But though the texture of their images differ, both Ulmer and Rossellini worked out profound fabrications of history, specific responses to the contingencies of their moments.

In another piece Prime cites, Crowther wrote "feeling that pulses through [Open City] gives evidence that it was inspired by artists whose own emotions had been deeply and recently stirred" resulting in a movie possessing a "deep, genuine moral tone." It's unlikely that anything more than a paycheck stirred Edgar Ulmer to make Detour, and one thing that measures the difference between myself and Crowther is his insistence on overrating the importance of intentions. But also, I sense a linguistic chasm, so that what I think I mean when I use words like "moral," or "simplicity" or "passion" differs a great deal from what Crowther thought he meant. Ultimately, the reason Crowther's words strike me as so naive, even though I share a similar belief in a moral core to great films, is the difference of what that core amounts to (well, that, and Crowther had no sensitivity whatsoever to film form). Crowther, an old fashioned humanist of old fashioned liberal leanings, seemed to imagine art as a kind of smart, open minded Anglican minister, well spoken and dressed proper with just the right degree of indulgence in rumble tumble rhetoric and not a bit more. The out of control, more than a little ragged and mad soapbox evangelicalism of Detour naturally offended New York Times notions of human virtue, but such qualities keep Detour in close contact with reality as the rest of the 20th century came to define it, and thus continues to assert an urgent verisimilitude in the same spirit as the most powerful moments in Open City, while Crowther's writings read like the fatuous, well-intentioned anachronisms they always were.


*It should be noted, however, for accuracy's sake, that Crowther composed his review for Open City's US release in 1947.

About Jacques Brel and the Blue Umbrella: Some Fragmentary Thoughts on Carlos Reygadas' Silent Light

1. Jacques Brel

Nearly two thirds of the way through Carlos Reygadas's Silent Light (2007), footage from a 1967 Jacques Brel concert makes a surprise appearance, and it helps crystallize everything that works and doesn't work about Reygadas's enigmatic film. The lead character, Johan, and his mistress, Marianne, have just made love in an upstairs bedroom at a diner/motel. He left his kids in the diner on ground floor, and when he ventures down, they're initially nowhere to be found. He eventually finds them outside in the parking lot, sitting in the back of a van owned by a baseball cap wearing American, watching old Jacques Brel concert footage on the van's built-in media player. The scene has the air of a Surrealist juxtaposition. The situation of these characters - aside from the American, all members of a Mennonite community - finding themselves in a motel parking lot enjoying a Jacques Brel performance from 1967, seems strange, and the shift of feeling signaled by the appearance of Brel startles, though the characters all take obvious, relaxed pleasure in watching Brel perform "Les Bonbons '67."

Brel's style of performance, ostensive, melodramatic, simultaneously ridiculous and poignant, contrasts sharply with the dramatic register of the rest of movie. Both the performances and the rhythms of the film itself work inward, maintaining a muted approach that breaks through to something bigger and louder only occasionally. Brel represents the only significant contact the film makes with the world outside of the Mennonite community and its particular behavioral codes. In the context of the world Silent Light portrays, Brel violent display of emotion shocks and moves because it unleashes feelings that have remain pent up from the very first scene.

The moment comes after a love scene marked by its quiet reserve and singular lack of anything that might be considered ecstasy or excess. Yet, what touches me about the scene is the way Reygadas conveys the texture and tenderness of human flesh with an immediacy that quickly becomes uncomfortable. Reygadas accomplishes this discomfort by placing his camera in very close proximity to his actors. Here for instance, are two shots of the first embrace between Johan and Marianne:

The close-ups strike appear unusually tight in the context of the film, and the effect feels invasive. The sound mix adds to the feeling of intimacy, since it effectively registers the wetness of their kisses with an overwhelming textual immediacy. Reygadas composes the vast majority of the movie in long shot, meaning the cuts to these intimate close-ups achieve a force which feels almost violent. It was precisely the uncomfortable, fleshy immediacy of Reygadas's style which prevented me from watching his previous feature, Battle in Heaven, all the way through. I simply did not want to be in such intense physical contact with his performers in that movie. Here, both the characters and the actors are more appealing, and their intimacy more moving.

In the love scene which immediately precedes the Jacques Brel footage, the intimacy again proves startling. For instance, Raygadas's camera captures the gleam of saliva on Marianne's neck.


Reygadas has a habit of following intense moments such as this one with framing choices which seem archly formalistic. Sometimes the choices effectively achieve a rhyming balance between intimacy and distance which contributes to the movie's emotional texture. Other times, his choices strike me as rather empty. Here, for instance, is a pair of shots that come from the very last moment of the love scene and the very next image, a cut to the downstairs diner.

The choice of framing for the scene on the left jars in the context of the moment, since it shifts the characters to the extreme left of the frame, leaving a composition filled largely with negative space. The moment disengages from the intimate contact with the characters which had marked most of the sequence. The next cut (the still on the right) reveals a precise visual logic, since it rhymes rather neatly with the previous image, in that the only person in the shot occupies the (less) extreme right of the frame, leaving the left of the image to be filled by a kind of negative space. The distanced framing serves some narrative purpose in the shot on the right since it allows us to register the children's absence. Yet beyond that, the choices strike me as emptily formalistic. In Film as Film, V.F. Perkins emphasizes the notion that mise-en-scène should entail the enrichment of conception and feeling, and as someone who shares Perkins's disdain for such formalist audacities as the famed 'waking lion' scene from Eisenstein's Potemkin, I'm enormously sympathetic to Perkins's point of view. For all that I find interesting and admirable about Reygadas' film, I find too many scenes where Reygadas appears to embrace oddities of framing and staging for their own sake. The above sequence of images would make a useful illustration of a graphic match in Bordwell and Thompson's Film Art, but beyond that I'm not sure what function it serves.

In contrast, an apparently absurdist gesture like the inclusion of the Jacques Brel performance punctuates the scene with an outpouring of affect which feels absolutely necessary to the moment. We're at the end of a rendezvous between two illicit lovers, and the last shot we see of Johan and his children comes from a point of view shot belonging to Marianne, who looks on at the man she loves, and his children. Together, they share a beatific perfection from which she's pointedly excluded.


Following a long shot depicting Marianne's long, lonely walk away from the van and back towards the diner, Reygadas temporarily surrenders his movie to Jacques Brel. Brel's engagingly weird, spastic performance (he evokes images of Jerry Lewis) provides its own mise-en-scène, and such an open display of emotion, the practice of a performer who felt it was his ethical responsibility as an entertainer to provide a surplus of emotion to a needy audience, answers the emotional inertia of the world we've inhabited for the last hour. We're left with tight close-ups of Brel that echo Reygadas's fondness for alarming proximity to his performers, but whereas Reygadas's intimacy feels invasive, Brel was such a smart exhibitionist that his presence always feels invited.



2. The Blue Umbrella

Fifteen minutes or so after Jacques Brel makes his appearance, Johan and his wife, Esther, sit in Johan's car, riding down a highway during a torrential downpour. The atmosphere of the scene is tense. Esther knows about Johan's affair with Marianne, and the entire sequence depicts a woman existing in a profound state of estrangement not just from her husband, but from all the details of her existence. She tells Johan she feels ill, and asks him to pull over the side of the road. He complies, and she gets out into the pouring rain. After moving a few feet from the vehicle, Johan calls out to her, and she turns back to him. He hands out a blue umbrella to her, which she accepts before walking back away from the car.


The scene moves me due to its offhand humanity. It might not register at all if it weren't the case that among the problems which plague contemporary cinema is a kind of casual meanness that pops up in all sorts of contexts. Whether it's a random bystander saying "Some whore got raped" when Monica Bellucci gets placed in an ambulance in Irreversible or a character opining "We lost a really hot Milf" in response to a character's death in The Final Destination or the way everyone treats Rachel Harris' character in The Hangover, modern cinema suffers from a glut of characters pathologically committed to random acts of cruelty (and misogyny). The sour turn reflects a contraction of human possibility, where the natural instinct seems to be to respond to people as varieties of nuisances. The unremarkable grace of a man giving a woman an umbrella as she heads out into the pouring rain proves painfully compelling in this context.

Reygadas's framing works perfectly here, documenting the interaction between husband and wife from a distance that captures the fragile humanity of the moment without doing anything to underscore it or clumsily overemphasize its import. It's also one instance where the richness of the film's cinematography doesn't overwhelm the other elements in the film, and instead operates in complex concord with the other elements of the mise-en-scène. The scene soon proves compelling for another reason; Reygadas isn't yet finished with that umbrella.

Soon after the long shot in which Esther walks away from the car, we see a close-up of Esther hugging a tree and crying uncontrollably. After about minute, she collapses and falls to the ground. The movie cuts back to Johan, in the car, waiting on his wife. He eventually gets out to look for her. The camera follows closely behind, and we get a herky-jerky handheld following shot as he ventures into the rain. He eventually spots the key detail that allows him to locate his wife: the blue umbrella blowing away in the distance.


Ironically, given the camera's closeness to Johan, the camera records the umbrella's movements before Johan seems to detect it. Once he spots the umbrella, Johan swerves to the left and spots his wife lying crumbled at the foot of a tree, and rushes forward to her side. As he runs to his wife, the camera remains stuck at the spot it first caught the umbrella's movements, as if that crucial detail remains the most significant piece of information. We watch Johan in long shot as he cradles his wife's body, and lets out a cry that manages to be heard above the pounding of the rain. Reygadas' camera keeps a tactful distance.

Reygadas packs his images with ideas. The umbrella first pops up as a throwaway gesture, a shorthand way of getting at the concern felt by a husband for his wife even as their love collapses. A moments later, the action proves to have a follow-up, in that it's the tell-tale sign that enables the man to recover and mourn his wife's body. The actions possess a neat congruency, the sign of mercy dovetailing into another merciful (though devastating) moment. The umbrellas accrues a retrospective narrative weight thanks to the ways Reygadas uses it as connecting device in his mise-en-scène. It's the unobtrusive visual element upon everything turns.

Smart mise-en-scène is the art of making images think two or more thoughts simultaneously. One reason I love William Wyler's movies, for instance, is that I can look at virtually any given image from The Good Fairy, The Little Foxes, or The Best Years of Our Lives, and see Wyler working on three or four ideas at once. In contrast, most movies works one idea at a time, and do so relentlessly, achieving the numbing monotony of thought characteristic of advertising and political propaganda. Going back to the shot of Esther taking an umbrella from her husband, you can see Reygadas accomplishing three, maybe four, tasks - the shot demonstrates Johan's concern for his wife; it shows Esther's momentary sense of composure in turning back for the umbrella; it sets up the future use of the umbrella as a talisman of Esther's death; and it presents the overwhelming beauty of the natural landscape emphasized through Reygadas's decision to shoot the action in long shot.

My reservations about the movie, however, emanate from the last of Reygadas's preoccupations in that shot, since Reygadas's sense of rapture has a way of arresting the movie. He tries to use beauty as a way of getting at transcendence, and had his camera seemed more disinterested, content to simply record the world's slow unfolding, the obsession might have paid off. But the attention paid to beauty often feels overcomposed. The film's obvious antecedent is Carl Dreyer's Ordet, which makes a startling contrast given Dreyer's formal asceticism in that movie. I often have problems with the stylized performances that characterize most Dreyer movies (my favorite Dreyer is Day of Wrath because it's the only one where human behavior doesn't appear to conform to some cryptic geometry invented by the director), but his asceticism feels absolutely right in Ordet. Beauty can be a trap for a filmmaker, and it feels as if Reygadas falls into it.

In Silent Light, the scenes where Reygadas gives the movie over to depopulated landscape shots feel like an emptying out, in terms of ideas and feeling.Those shots can also feel aggravatingly mannered. For instance, shortly after the moment Johan recovers his wife's body, he carries her back to his car. As he falls to the ground with his wife cradled in his lap, a semi pulls over to the side of the road. Two men get out and go up to Johan to see what they can do to assist. Reygadas shoots the two men from a low angle, seemingly from Johan's point of view. As they move out of shot toward Johan, Reygadas keeps his camera still, and continues holding the shot of the semi-truck against the horizon for half a minute while we hear Johan and the two truckers out of frame.

I have nothing against depopulated shots like the one on the right. Ozu's "pillow shots," Antonioni's evocations of ennui, and Tarkovsky's sculpted portraits of time all serve particular ideas and conjure up concrete emotions in their moments. My problem with Reygadas's landscape shots is that they often seem disconnected from the texture of any given moment. Where the long shots that characterize so much of this particular sequence bespeak of a discretion which proves incredibly moving, the static camera and the use of offscreen space feels emptily formalistic, and disengages from the scene in a way that doesn't seem to contain any ideas at all.

The ideas Reygadas's landscape compositions do get across are largely second hand clichés of landscape painting.

Which isn't to say that his images aren't singularly lovely, as the above images ably attest, but they have the quality of ready-made compositions, with no feeling for the fortuitous or the compellingly clumsy that comes from a curious, investigative relationship with the natural world, like Renoir capturing the swirl of dust around Boudu's feet in Boudu Saved from Drowning. All these images bear the burden of thought and intention, and lose much of their potential for poetry as a consequence.

What fascinates me about the blue umbrella is how its quotidian complexity work in contrast to Reygadas's much vaunted landscape images . The uses Reydadas finds for that umbrella suggests an intelligence trying to work its way through the contingencies of a specific dramatic situation, using the discrete ephemera of the everyday as a way of making meaning and feeling manifest. In other words, the profound handiwork of any ordinary decent director.

The Fatal Glass of Milk

I watched William Wyler's These Three (1936) this morning and found myself admiring Wyler's staging even when having problems with the narrative. In particular, I loved a scene a third of the way through when Miriam Hopkins paints the legs of a table while recounting details of her childhood to Joel McCrea. Wyler frames Hopkins in a medium shot as she sits on the floor. McCrea is just offscreen to Hopkins's right. The shot offers us three details to pay attention to. Firstly, there's the most kinetic detail, Hopkins painting the table legs, the visceral action that keeps the scene from being just a moving photograph of a person talking. Secondly, Hopkins herself, as she talks to McCrea (whom she's in love with) about her childhood. And lastly, a glass of milk, just behind Hopkins's left shoulder, and tucked further back into the frame, very unobtrusive but still very much part of the composition. One assumes that Hopkins's monologue constitutes the most significant narrative element, but in fact it doesn't inform us of anything important, and as McCrea's character has fallen asleep out of frame (which we don't discover until cut after Hopkins finishes her monologue), it does nothing to move the relationship forward. In fact, it's the unobtrusive glass of milk which is the most important thing in the frame. When, a few cuts later, McCrea knocks the glass over, he sets the entire plot in motion. It reminds me of Hitchcock's famous desire to make a suspense movie entirely about objects, but I'd say Wyler beat him to the punch in 1936.

Rosenbaum and Agee

Let us now take a brief break from the bitter business of personal canon formation to praise this 1980 piece on an Agee documentary by Jonathan Rosenbaum. I've noted in the past that Rosenbaum has become too strident for my taste in recent years, at times sounding like a parody of himself, but this piece, about a negligible 1980 documentary on the great writer James Agee, shows Rosenbaum at the near-peak of his expressive powers. Check out the passage where he slides in his requisite jab at Republican Presidents: "[Carter] wasn't a bit like...Ronald Reagan leaking sincerity and integrity like a reptilian wallet in his old General Electric TV spots." Beyond the self-affirmatory proclamation of his liberal bona fides, the line gets across a great simile (the wallet a nasty-easy-smart evocation of liberal disgust at Republican avarice), and a funny piece of trivia. The language gives the swipe an afterlife beyond the peevish impulses of its moment, something I'm not confident can be said of Rosenbaum's recent writing. Smart prose pervades the piece, and it offers a particularly bracing engagement between a writer and his literary model. Read it as if your peace of mind depended upon it.

Getting Back in the Game

Every couple of months or so, I resolve to dedicate myself seriously to this blog. This resolution usually results in a small burst of activity for a week or two, followed by weeks or even months of inactivity. Partly as a result, I have no audience, no discernible reason for maintaining this blog aside from my own amusement - which as far as reasons for doing things go, ain't a bad one. So I think I'm resigning myself to the fact I have a haphazardly maintained blog kept mainly for some measure of self-amusement.
With my semester just wrapping up (with a generally terrific bunch of students) I want to try to get a couple posts in before I tackle the spring. As a way of easing back into blog writing, I thought I'd try my hands as this pretty wonderful quiz, courtesy of Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule. It's called "Professor Russell Johnson's 'My Ancestors Came Over on the Minnow' Thanksgiving/Christmas Movie Quiz.' It's so delightfully odd and esoteric that I feel compelled to respond.

1) Second-favorite Coen Brothers movie. Not a terribly interesting answer I'm afraid, but I got to go with No Country for Old Men, which comes in just behind Fargo in my list of favorite Coen Brother movies. A fairly conventional ranking, but then my opinion of the Coen oeuvre is fairly conventional. I like the Coen Bros. movies people usually like (my fondness for The Hudsucker Proxy being the only derivation from the norm ), and dislike the Coen Bros. movies people usually dislike (my lukewarm feelings for The Big Lebowski being the only derivation from that norm). I admire the kinds of things people usually admire about their movies - the formal precision, the pitch black wit, the knack for sharp characterization - and dislike the things people usually dislike about them - the icy sensibility, the way their wit can slide into snide satire, and the overly broad caricatures of regional types. Fargo is their warmest and most humane effort, while No Country has a clearer sense of aesthetic purpose, if only thanks to the source material. I value warmth more than purpose, thus No Country is a close second, and exists just a notch above Blood Simple in my Coen movie ranking.

2) Movie seen only on home format that you would pay to see on the biggest movie screen possible? (Question submitted by Peter Nellhaus)Tati's Playtime, since my feelings for it have always been those of reserved admiration rather than rapture, and if the claims of Rosenbaum and other admirers are to be believed, a 70mm screening could easily change that dynamic.

3) Japan or France? (Question submitted by Bob Westal)I assume this means which nation's cinema I value more, and I guess this might mean I flunk the quiz, because I can't answer that question. If I go with France, that means forswearing Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, and what might be my favorite film of all time, Yasujio Ozu's Late Spring. If I go with Japan, that means forswearing Renoir, Truffaut, and what might be my favorite film of all time, Godard's Vivre sa Vie.

4) Favorite moment/line from a western.Right now I'm going to say Henry Fonda leaning back in his rocking chair in My Darling Clementine, playing a balance game with a wooden beam.

5) Of all the arts the movies draw upon to become what they are, which is the most important, or the one you value most?Well, since it's my dissertation topic, I've got to say acting. I watch movies to see Myrna Loy walk across the room, and Cary Grant hold back hysterical laughter, and Ward Bond scowl at the universe and its many disappointments. It's precisely in the effects of performance that one can feel how slightly out of control the movies can be, a entropic force destabilizing everybody who comes into contact with it.

6) Most misunderstood movie of the 2000s (The Naughties?).Maybe Eastwood's Changeling, because I just saw it and like it a lot. The reception in the US was quite lukewarm, which just goes to show that many critics still aren't interested in looking at the images right in front of them. Sure, the script is too schematic, too redolent of the conventions of melodrama, but for the thousandth time, the plot's not the thing, the manner is, the level of feeling invested. On a shot by shot level, this is an effortlessly heartbreaking film, a movie that looks at the decay of love and hope with a eye that manages both objectivity and pity. Go back and watch those early scene between Jolie and her son. On first viewing, there's something tossed off about those moments, adding to the common mistaken impression that Eastwood is just a photographer of narrative poses. But look at those scenes in light of the ending, in light of everything we know is to come for those characters - what at first glance looks lackadaisical transforms into the crushingly tragic, and it a manner that feels blissfully tossed off rather than burdensomely telegraphed.

7) Name a filmmaker/actor/actress/film you once unashamedly loved who has fallen furthest in your esteem.When I was ten years old, my favorite movie was Edward Scissorhands. Now, as I near thirty, I can't find it in myself to give a damn that Tim Burton is making Alice in Wonderland.

8) Herbert Lom or Patrick Macnee?A decision that feels like a betrayal, but I have to go with Lom. Macnee can be an immensely enjoyable screen presence, a trapeze artist of an actor who glides in and out of moments with the greatest of ease. Lom is more of a tightrope walker, moving into the most conventional genre roles with a emotional commitment that finds him risking a fall into the abyss, leading you to catch your breath every few moments. For pleasure's sake, Macnee is a god, but for pity's fake, Lom is a man, and in contests of personality, I prefer men to gods.

9) Which is your least favorite David Lynch film (Submitted by Tony Dayoub)I suspect I might feel more sympathetic to it now, but there have been times when I've hated Wild at Heart. It plays like a parody of a Lynch film, and finds him more or less in a holding pattern after Blue Velvet. Twin Peaks, the show and movie, soon found him exploring thornier emotional material, and this now looks like a tossed off lark made by Lynch as a minor prank before the overwhelming richness of Peaks. Seen again in that light, I suspect it might yield more pleasures than it did on first viewing, although I expect to still be turned off by some of the nastiness of its images and tone.

10) Gordon Willis or Conrad Hall? (Submitted by Peet Gelderblom)Willis, easy. Hall prettified everything, his visual conceits too ready-made, and too ostentatious in their presentation. Willis risked obscurity to help us see more clearly.

11) Second favorite Don Siegel movie.A tough call between Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Escape from Alcatraz (both clear runners-up to my favorite Siegel movie, the extraordinary The Lineup). Escape from Alcatraz might be one of the few perfectly made film - not a second wasted, not a detail out of place - but I've got to go for Invasion of the Body Snatchers, whose imagery remains powerfully mythic.

12) Last movie you saw on DVD/Blu-ray? In theaters?DVD: Rushmore, which I screened this week for my class. In theaters: Inglorious Basterds.

13) Which DVD in your private collection screams hardest to be replaced by a Blu-ray? (Submitted by Peet Gelderblom) A blu-ray player, along with a HD TV set, remains one of those reputed necessities of modern living I lack, but when I get one, I suspect one of my first purchases will be a blu-ray edition of Blade Runner, whose catalog of New Wave rock imagery as a vision of the future makes it one of my favorite films to just stop and stare at (it almost entirely lacks any narrative urgency, leaving only the seductive void of Ridley Scott's grimy-sexy imagery).

14) Eddie Deezen or Christopher Mintz-Plasse?Looking up his filmography, I've seen surprisingly few Deezen films besides Grease. I've never been a fan of Grease, so Deezen has never made much an impression on me one way or another. Part of the disarming effectiveness of Superbad resulted from the warmth and awkward sweetness of many of the performances, Mintz-Plasse chief among them, so I must go with Mr. McLovin.

15)
Actor/actress who you feel automatically elevates whatever project they
are in, or whom you would watch in virtually anything.It's one of my life's projects to see every movie Boris Karlof was ever in, so I must go with him, although the same applies to Lugosi, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Vincent Pirce, and Lon Chaney Jr.

16) Fight Club -- yes or no?No. Or rather yes to some of the first third or so, but once the plot really kicks in gear, it loses much of the anarchic, anything-goes charm of the opening moments, and collapses under the weight of David Fincher's overly polished images.

17) Teresa Wright or Olivia De Havilland?De Havilland is a great actress, but I find Wright's performances in Shadow of a Doubt, Best Years of Our Lives and Pursued so absolutely note perfect that there are times when I consider her my favorite actress. De Havilland is always a pleasure, but Wright is frequently an obsession.

18) Favorite moment/line from a film noir.Mike Hammer quotes Christina Rossetti in the bachelor pad of the gods in Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me, Deadly.

19) Best (or worst) death scene involving an obvious dummy substituting for a human or any other unsuccessful special effect(s)—see the wonderful blog Destructible Man for inspiration.At times like these, a young man's fancy turns towards thoughts of the end of Lucio Fulci's Don't Torture the Duckling.

20) What's the least you've spent on a film and still regretted it? (Submitted by Lucas McNelly) Saw the Jimmy Fallon/Queen Latifah comedy Taxi for free at the campus theater, and found the whole affair so thoroughly dispiriting I walked out midway through, and felt down in the dumps for the next week.

21) Van Johnson or Van Heflin?
Both tend toward the bland side of things, but must go with Van Heflin for his ineffable portrait of a death of quiet desperation in Fred Zinnemann's Act of Violence.

22) Favorite Alan Rudolph film.Trouble in Mind, a 1985 is-it-sci-fi-is-it-noir-is-it-memorex? movie that seems to exist half a beat ahead of real life, and leaves you wondering minutes/days/years later, what the hell did I just watch?

23) Name a documentary that you believe more people should see.Alain Resnais' Night and Fog.

24) In deference to this quiz’s professor, name a favorite film which revolves around someone becoming stranded.Bunuel's marvelous version of Robinson Crusoe - the most deeply felt affirmation of surrealist principles ever made.

25)
Is there a moment when your knowledge of film, or lack thereof, caused you an unusual degree of embarrassment and/or humiliation? If so, please share.I apparently have no sense of shame when it comes to my knowledge of film, so I'll induce a qualifying incident forthwith by admitting I've never seen a single Visconti film.

26) Ann Sheridan or Geraldine Fitzgerald? (Submitted by Larry Aydlette)Fitzgerald never made much an impression on me, while in I Was a Male War Bride, Sheridan manages to keep her head while all around her are losing theirs, so her.

27)
Do you or any of your family members physically resemble movie actors
or other notable figures in the film world? If so, who?My students apparently think I look like Jonah Hill. These students, over whose destinies I have some measure of control, are brave and foolhardy souls.

28) Is there a movie you have purposely avoided seeing? If so, why?The remake of Funny Games, not just because I expected it to be unpleasant, but because I knew damn well there wouldn't be a single tonal or textural surprise in the whole thing.

29) Movie with the most palpable or otherwise effective wintry atmosphere or ambience.McCabe & Mrs. Miller, says the man who has lived in Florida his whole life, and understands the concept of "wintry atmosphere" largely as a fantastic urban legend.

30) Gerrit Graham or Jeffrey Jones?Graham, because I can't see Jeffrey Jones pulling off a convincing Mick Jagger impersonation.

31) The best cinematic antidote to a cultural stereotype (sexual, political, regional, whatever).The "Japanese tourists" at the end of David Mamet's The Spanish Prisoner.

32) Second favorite John Wayne movie.A rather boring answer admittedly, but Stagecoach. The Searchers, now and forever, comes first, but Stagecoach's kineticism, and Wayne's athletic poetry, remains one of the great affirmations of cinema as the art of pure movement.

33) Favorite movie car chase. Car chase scenes are actually a pet peeve of mine, so even some of the most highly vaunted ones annoy me. That said, one of the reasons I love the aforementioned The Lineup is the chase that climaxes the film proves not only tolerable, but inspired.

34) In the spirit of His Girl Friday, propose a gender-switched remake of a classic or not-so-classic film. (Submitted by Patrick Robbins)A remake of Black Narcissus about a group of monks slowly going nuts in India could be intriguing.

35) Barbara Rhoades or Barbara Feldon?My relative lack of familiarity with 70s TV schlock shows through here, since I don't know that I've seen anything with Barbara Rhoades. On the other hand, I loved Get Smart as child, and Agent 99 was surely one reason it proved a short term obsession for my pre-pubescent mind.

36) Favorite Andre De Toth movie. Riding Shotgun, a tidy Western lacking any pretension, and with an tactical openness that lets every moment breathe in the possibilities of the backlot.

37)
If you could take one filmmaker's entire body of work and erase it from
all time and memory, as if it had never happened, whose oeuvre would it
be? (Submitted by Tom Sutpen) Sounds like an awfully cruel fate to visit upon someone's life work, but upon reflection, the world would surely be enriched by the removal of The Wicker Man remake from existence, and I've never understood what people saw in the incompetent imitations of Jules Feiffer that constitute the rest of his oeuvre, so Neil LaBute is merely a second rate playwright rather than third rate filmmaker in my universe.

38) Name a film you actively hated when you first encountered it, only to see it again later in life and fall in love with it.I don't believe I've ever experienced a complete shift from hate to love. More likely, I move from deep admiration to passionate love, or mild enjoyment to strong enthusiasm. The closest I think I've come to experiencing the wide arc of reactions traced by the question is my reaction to David Lynch's Fire Walk with Me. On first viewing, I found the movie extremely frustrating, although I always loved individual scenes. On further viewings, however, the searing pain and sadness of the film seemed more manifest, and I've since come to see it as at least a near-great film.

39) Max Ophuls or Marcel Ophuls? (Submitted by Tom Sutpen)Not really a contest, is it? Yes, The Sorrow and the Pity is one of the greatest documentaries ever made. But The Reckless Moment is one of those movies composed of nothing but fleeting gestures - perfect, little, lovely gestures, any one of which can break your heart.

40)
In which club would you most want an active membership, the Delta Tau
Chi fraternity, the Cutters or the Warriors? And which member would you
most resemble, either physically or in personality? The Cutters. I've not seen Breaking Away in ages, but I'm thinking Cyril in terms of temperament, though I'm not a bike rider.

41) Your favorite movie cliché. Weird noises coming from closet. Must inspect. Carry rolling pin for protection. Slowly open closet door. Rolling pin ready to strike.Something jumps out. Narrowly avoid braining a black cat. Breathe sigh of relief. Oh, watch out - knife wielding serial killer stands right behind you. Shriek! Shriek! Shriek!

42) Vincente Minnelli or Stanley Donen? (Submitted by Bob Westal)Minnelli. Singin' in the Rain is great, obviously, but Donen made some real duds, like Kiss Them For Me, where his utter lack of commitment showed in every frame. Even very bad Minnelli is interesting, and Minnelli made more great movies than Donen - Meet Me in St. Louis, The Bandwagon, The Bad and the Beautiful, Tea and Sympathy, and The Bells are Ringing to Donen's Rain, On the Town, and It's Always Fair Weather.

43) Favorite Christmas-themed horror movie or sequence.Gremlins. A week later, a strange smell started started emanating from the chimney.

44) Favorite moment of self- or selfless sacrifice in a movie.The final scene of Ride the High Country.

45)
If you were the cinematic Spanish Inquisition, which movie cult (or
cult movie) would you decimate? (Submitted by Bob Westal)The Goonies cult. I hated it when I was five, I hate it now. Love the Cyndi Lauper song, though.

46) Caroline Munro or Veronica Carlson?Not really a choice sane man can make, but if forced, I'll go with Carlson, but only because Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed might be the greatest film to come out of Hammer Studios.

47) Favorite eye-patch wearing director. (Submitted by Patty Cozzalio)John Ford

48)
Favorite ambiguous movie ending. (Original somewhat ambiguous
submission---“Something about ambiguous movie endings!”-- by Jim
Emerson, who may have some inspiration of his own to offer you.)The Awful Truth. Not extremely ambiguous admittedly, but ends with a possibility presenting itself, a mere chance of something rather a consummation. Gets at the way the pleasure of love often lies in its clumsiness.

49) In giving thanks for the movies this year, what are you most thankful for?The fact that I obtained a copy of Jacques Rivette's L'amour fou.

50) George Kennedy or Alan North?
Kennedy, because he looks like he could be nobody in particular.