I am not quite sure where I would hang my hat on this one, but I like hearing other people kick it around. So, all thanks to the Guardian, which decided it would make a nice periodical feature. Among others, they have had:

Bertolucci talk about La Règle du jeu: It was shot in 1938, just before the second world war. There is a scene where a group of people, gathered together for a long weekend at a villa near Alsace, go hunting. They start killing these birds and rabbits, and it becomes like a massacre. You cannot avoid thinking this was some kind of prophecy, about the massacre that would soon sweep over Europe.

Renoir is like a junction between the France of impressionism (the France of his father, Auguste Renoir) and the France of the 20th century. Sometimes it’s as if he were making films about characters from his father’s paintings. But what is really extraordinary about Renoir, particularly in La Règle, is that he loves all his characters. He loves the goodies and baddies, the ones who make terrible mistakes. He loves the ones who are on screen for just two minutes. This is something I have always tried to do. When I made my first film, at 21, I hadn’t seen La Règle again. But it was always in the back of my head. Later, when I made an Italian epic called Novecento (released in the UK as 1900), I was filming a wedding scene, a long sequence, and I was feeling very influenced by Renoir. So at the end of it, Bob De Niro says: “It’s late, it’s going to rain soon, let’s go back inside the house all together.” There are the words from the end of La Règle.

Linklater talking about Some Came Running: Have I taken things from it for my films? I wish! They don’t make ‘em like that any more. I would love to, but I don’t think people would buy that kind of 50s melodrama. There are sequences that are intimate, one-room scenes, but then there are beautiful crescendos, like the one at the end – he can deliver that too. Minnelli’s sensibilities were perfect for it – the sensitivity and the bravado. It hits all the notes.

Shelton talking about Hunger: The film reminded me of a book that I read a couple of decades ago called Sculpting in Time by the great Russian film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky. In the book, he talks about how sad he is that when cinema was born it adopted the model of theatre for its form. He thought that cinema had more kinship with poetry and called it the most truthful of art forms.

Loach talking about The Bicycle Thieves (both of them…): But The Bicycle Thieves was the one that did it for me first. The story is just of a man and his son, looking for work on a bicycle and what the consequences are for their family. It only tells the story of this one family and doesn’t go beyond, but in doing that it tells you everything you want to know. I love this idea of telling a story in microcosm; if you get the story right and the characters right, the film will say everything about the wider picture without having to generalise. Of course, that’s how I rationalised it later. At the time, I just thought: wow.

All in all, this is a great little series that I hope they continue to work on. I like how it tackles the implicit question about the difference between our favorite films, and those films we would rank if asked to make a list of the 10 or 20 best films. If asked to write up an installment for this feature, what would I talk about? Probably Mad Max. No, maybe… Beau travail. Oh wait, 2001!

See how tough this gets?

“Although human beings are incapable of talking about themselves with total honesty, it is much harder to avoid the truth when you pretend to be other people.”

- Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998)

Were he still alive, Akira Kurosawa would have celebrated his 100th birthday today.

Kurosawa never forgot that audiences went to the cinema to be entertained. However, Kurosawa’s films were not mere entertainments. Even in such lengthy works as his 3-hour masterpiece, Ran, the tension and narrative urgency persist until the haunting finish. As a viewer, we laugh at the clownishness of the samurai wannabe Kikuchiyo in The Seven Samurai, yet we cannot fail to be moved as we learn of this character’s tragic history.

The formative event in his own childhood occurred when, in the immediate aftermath of the devastating Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, his older brother dragged him around Tokyo and forced him to gaze upon massive scenes of death and conflagration. As young Akira attempted to turn away from the carnage, his brother sternly told him, “If you shut your eyes to a frightening sight, you end up being frightened. If you look at everything straight on, there is nothing to be afraid of.” These words became a lifelong motto for Kurosawa, as he pushed himself and his audiences to stare directly at human wrongs and tragedies, whether war, poverty, child abuse, or class discrimination.

Nonetheless, Kurosawa succeeded (most of the time, anyway) in representing moral dilemmas to his audience, rather than preaching about them. In viewing his films, I feel moved to become a better person.

Hearing the venerable Dr. Niide of ‘Red Beard’ tell his young trainee Yasumoto, “There is always some story of great misfortune behind illness,” challenges me to see my patients as fellow human sufferers instead of viewing them as a set of abnormal labs or a dysfunctional organ system. Watching Kurosawa hilariously skewer modern Japanese bureaucracy in Ikiru served as a personal antidote during my years as a government employee, urging me to aid, not obstruct, those in need of my department’s assistance.

A spiritual and psychological honesty permeates Kurosawa’s films. While feeling inspired by his hopeful exhortations towards social transformation in his postwar films Drunken Angel and Stray Dog, there are also other times when the pessimism and even despair of his films of the 1970’s and 1980’s resonate in my soul. However, I then find relief when the elderly characters in his final three films live serenely and with an Ericksonian ego integrity in the face of poverty and loss, perhaps best exemplified by Kane, the survivor of Nagasaki in Rhapsody in August.

I would be remiss if I did not also make mention of the visual qualities of Kurosawa’s work. In his editing, scenes of action, and his use of telephoto lenses to create an impressive depth of field, he was a pioneer. When he finally arrived late to the usage of color film in 1970, he employed it with an unforgettable vividness: the disturbing garishness of Dodeskaden and the deathly hues of Kagemusha immediately come to mind.

My heart sinks when I watch the final scene of his final film, 1993’s Madadayo. The lead character, an elderly professor, dreams of himself as a child playing hide-and-seek in a hayfield at sunset, calling out to his playmates that he still has not hidden. “Ma-da-dayo” (“No, not yet”), he sings. I, too, wish to call out – not yet, Kurosawa-san, you still have beautiful films to make.

Ed. note: Andrew also contributed several capsule reviews on Kurosawa films to the Arts & Faith Top 100 Films list. From his take on Dersu Uzala: “The product of several months of on-location filming with an all-Soviet cast in Siberia, Kurosawa effectively uses his trademark long range lenses in Dersu Uzala to reveal wide natural tableaus in which the human figures are often silhouetted miniatures in massive landscapes. Kurosawa always excelled in depicting violent turns of weather, and here we see windswept plains that can quickly claim lives with their brutal chill. And although Dersu is only his second color film, he masterfully captures deep-red sunsets coloring broad fields of ice, ominous moonlit nights, summery forests, and ice-clogged rivers. With such immense vistas, violent movement, and intense color, it may be argued that Nature is actually the main character in this film.”

Perhaps the rationale for omitting such films as Ushpizin, Munich, or Defiance (while including The Unborn or Go For Zucker, for example) is simply that he’d already written about them. Maybe “Another 25 More-Or-Less Jewish Movies” would have been more apt a title. But I’m picking nits: it’s a fun list, and I’ll provide links to his other pieces at the bottom of the article.

1. Fiddler on the Roof (Norman Jewison, 1971)
“With each musical number, another integral and eternal aspect of Judaism is pondered, explored, and expressed with passionate flourishes. With Matchmaker, the so-called shidduch crisis comes to mind. To Life evokes our most elemental prayer in this world; to recognize that every organic instant is a nes and cause for celebration. But likely the most memorable tune and performance from the entire nearly three hour epic is Israeli actor Chaim Topol as Tevye’s rendition of If I Were a Rich Man. No single song encapsulates the wild tempest of the Jewish experience better. Not many compositions can at the same time convey a deep longing for God, a saintly faith-based approach, a melancholy sort of optimism, and a turgid existential philosophy, all while being essentially about a pitiable monetary necessity. ”

2. Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993)
“Some might argue that Schindler’s List is not a Jewish film. It is technically about a heroic gentile who risked much to save Jews, and secondarily about a demonic regime that slaughtered our people unreservedly and without conscience. There are Jews in the movie, most prominently a tactful accountant played soulfully by Ben Kingsley, but Jews mainly function as referents for either gracious saving or heartless destruction.”

3. Waltz With Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008)
“Besides the phenomenal artistic and narrative achievement of Folman’s movie, the outlying issue the film raises is one often heard and discussed. Can Israel fight its wars, exist as a confident and secure nation, while at the same time maintaining a “Jewish” code of morality. Are Israelis ever permitted to acknowledge guilt or shame over their actions without either compromising the integrity of the nation or risk being dubbed apologists? Which is the lesser evil? Can the men and women killing and dying for the country and muddling through war after war emerge sane after all they are required to see and do? Can we indeed grant them the solace of confession? Can a country without an inch to give ever apologize?”

4. The Frisco Kid (Robert Aldrich, 1979)
“The Frisco Kid has the feel of an artist’s charmingly naive youthful indiscretion. One would think that the cinephile fantasy pairing of Gene Wilder and Harrison Ford as unlikely traveling companions in the old west, where the former plays Avram Belinski, a Polish Rabbi, and the latter, Tommy Lillard, a bank robbing bandit, would be possible only as a fortunate quirk, a providential misstep in the early, unsteady careers of both. . . . The almost impossible to believe truth is that The Frisco Kid hit theaters in 1979. Gene Wilder had already been a household name from such classic comedy gems as Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, and Silver Streak. . . . The entire civilized world recognized Mr. Ford as laser for hire rake Han Solo. . . . Robert Aldrich was a sixty year old professional veteran filmmaker credited with directing over thirty films including The Dirty Dozen, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, and The Longest Yard.”

“I mention all this . . . so that when anyone watches or re-watches this joyful little movie in wonder, they can adequately marvel at the uncommon innocence and unselfconscious humility of it. . . . One would guess that since the movie is so thematically off the grid and clearly close to someone’s heart, that the men behind it would be Jews seeking to express a fondness for their heritage. Not the case. Aldrich, nor writers Michael Elias and Frank Shaw are members of the tribe.”

5. A Stranger Among Us (Sidney Lumet, 1992)
“An interesting story revolving around the shocking murder of a young chasid who works in New York’s Diamond District. The investigation is conducted by Detective Emily Eden, a troubled soul in need of substance. . . . Without clichéd protests or patronizingly comedic montages, she winds up undercover as a chasid and living with the Rebbe’s family. . . . Though the crime’s resolution is excitingly handled and surprising enough, such temporal trifles pale in comparison to the mysteries A Stranger Among Us seeks to explore. Like the mystery of a tremendously warm, divinely invigorating Shabbos, or the mystery of our devotion to God who we do not see over human beings who may be right in front us.”

6. Homicide (David Mamet, 1991)
“If you read Mamet’s The Wicked Son (2006), his stream of consciousness rant about anti-Semitism, Jewish destiny, and our eccentric God, you would know that Mamet, not easily discernable as a Jew based on his work (unlike, say, Woody Allen or Neil Simon), is quite smitten with his Judaism. Despite a professional choice to write mainly about other topics, Judaism consumes him. So much so and with such passion and zealousness that it appears in his personal life he constantly walks the line between crusader and madman. . . . Watching the film is truly like experiencing the ebbs and flows of Mamet’s raging inner storm. Sometimes his pulp, clever writing takes over, sometimes his Jewish compulsions win the day. The effect is jarringly uneven. We are asked to believe a range of premises just before they are discounted by a drastic, unsubstantiated turn of events.”

7. Brighton Beach Memoirs (Gene Saks, 1986)
“One preeminent Jewish dilemma raised by Mr. Simon is that of assimilation. While the Jerome’s are by no means religious (though Mrs. Jerome encourages her husband to go to shul and pray when the flurry of tribulations arrive), there is certainly an overarching message of ‘We are better off keeping to ourselves.’ Simon does somewhat present a counterargument, but the well established law, as was undoubtedly impressed upon him, remains.”

8. Yentl (Barbra Streisand, 1983)
“Barbra Streisand, as writer, director, producer, vocalist, star, and all around supernatural force behind the adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story about a young independent Jewish woman who poses as a male yeshiva student to fully realize her love of Talmud, deserves all the credit and all the blame for the charming yet disturbing, courageous yet shallow, poignant yet somehow uninvolving film experience that is Yentl.”

9. A Serious Man (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2009)
“A Serious Man not only acutely conveys an abundance of data about cultural and religious Judaism, it undoubtedly will be a very different audience experience for Jews and then for everyone else. Different to a point which makes it difficult to comprehend how a non-Jewish viewer would relate to the material. It’s like trying to surmise how a non-Jew would react to a steaming bowl of chulent.”

10. The Prince of Egypt (Brenda Chapman, Steve Hickner, Simon Wells, 1998)
“If DreamWorks were more confident and less wary of Disney’s shadow, The Prince of Egypt would undoubtedly have been a better movie. When trying to be something it is not, the film wanders aimlessly like Hebrews through the desert. But it is those thrilling instances of purity (“Rameses! Let my people GO!”) which shine on, haunt, and remain with us after the closing credits. As Jews, we are inclined to constantly seek out inspiration in order to keep our faith through this Diaspora, and The Prince of Egypt, missteps and all, is a more than valid resource. Next Passover/Easter, when The Ten Commandments is solemnly aired to mark the season, avoid it like the plague and make The Prince of Egypt a bold new tradition.”

11. Once Upon A Time In America (Sergio Leone, 1984)
“We get De Niro, James Woods, William Forsythe, and other mean looking gentile actors portraying characters with the names like David Aaronson, Max Bercovicz, Phil Stein, and Patsy Goldberg. These soulless Yids are then put through the motions of mob movie standards, with their polished, respectable façades barely hiding the bloody chaos of political corruption and precarious tooth and nail survival. But is that it? Is there no greater comment in relation to what Jews bring to the organized crime table? So they hang out in a restaurant where stars of David decorate the glass windows and they avoid attending services to burn and pillage the neighborhood. Are such atmospheric details (or indicators) the final word on Judaism for Leone and his movie (which was based on the novel The Hoods by Jewish gangster Harry Goldberg)? The answer is yes and no.”

12. Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)
“When the elderly orthodox couple in front of me on the ticket line for Quentin Tarantino’s latest was asked what movie they were interested in seeing, I experienced a moment of depraved glee. The man – white shirt, black pants, white beard, big black velvet yarmulke, placid face straight off a Rebbi card – was compelled to answer the box office attendant, “Two for Inglourious Basterds, please.” Hence the first hint that Tarantino’s so called “Jewish Revenge Fantasy” had awakened something extraordinary in a people. Yes, the theatre filled up with a diverse crowd, plenty of young folks simply looking for a wicked starburst of entertainment, but there was also a remarkably unconventional Jewish presence. Groups of older, possibly European immigrants who surely passed on Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. Modern orthodox couples with their teenage and adolescent children who likely did not organize similar family outings to Kill Bill Volumes I and II. It was evident that Inglourious Basterds had achieved religio-cultural requirement status among many Jews, like Schindler’s List did when it came out in 1993. Jews were being drawn to it like moths to a flame.”

“It seems from the buzz emanating from Jewish enclaves that Basterds has been unofficially deemed an important film (“Did you see it yet?”), whether as an educational endeavor (exemplified by the chaperoning of children way too young for the content), a potential source of pride, a necessary cathartic release, or quite possibly just another one of our many chukim. And it accomplished all this, I contend, with audiences never fully realizing what the film was essentially supposed to be about or the filmmaker’s intention.”

“Whether art can transform into something it was not originally meant to be based on the beholder’s perspective leads us to the obvious follow-up question: Does Inglourious Basterds live up to a people’s widely varying and arguably irrational expectations? Is it the fulfillment of a holy commandment that some are hoping for it to be?”

13. Operation Thunderbolt (”Mivtsa Yonatan” Menahem Golan, 1987)
“If not for some minor (but moving) Judaic references and the fact that the events depicted actually occurred, Operation Thunderbolt would have been considered just another example of the many similar low budget action flicks produced in that distinct era. It would never have received an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film or, more importantly, evolved into the Jewish summer camp/ fast day staple which it has become (along with its red blooded 1977 American version, Raid on Entebbe).So why all the reverence for Thunderbolt by camp activity coordinators everywhere?… It really boils down to two of those moving Jewish moments mentioned earlier. There is the extended utterly soul collapsing look that a Holocaust survivor passenger delivers to the German terrorists as they call out his name and urge him to follow his fellow Jews into a separate room. Clearly reminiscent of the selection process by Nazis in the concentration camps…and yet the survivor stares, steams, eyes bloodshot and pained, and he marches on in compliance. The scene speaks volumes about the mentality of the oppressed Jew. The other moment is quite simply framed, but it really amounts to everything. It sums up the movie, the history and miracle of the nation of Israel, Jewish resurgence in the 20th century, the invisible hand of God, and all matters in between. . . .”

14. Life Is Beautiful (Roberto Benigni, 1997)
“Life is Beautiful is often described as a fable because in actuality, the mysterious providential strokes of fate which Guido enjoys tend to fall on the wrong side of possible. It is also incredibly light hearted (in a most seductively amusing way) despite the severe material. The manner in which Guido’s fortune is manifest, in both the labor camp and prior thereto, is certainly the stuff of quasi-fantasy. If there are breaks to be caught even in the face of imminent destruction, Guido seems to have been gifted a magical net. Call the film a fable if you will, but the result of Guido’s faith and wild efforts are of no consequence to me. Whether his desperate attempts to shield his son from even a fraction of the pain and anguish surrounding them succeed is utterly irrelevant to the grandeur of this once in a decade masterpiece. The message of Life is Beautiful cannot be limited by its level of credibility. As parents, Benigni exclaims, we must try and try and keep on trying until that final breath is rudely demanded from our bodies. That is the only viable option for the sake of our precious children. So after seeing Life is Beautiful, I ask myself that same old question: What will I do?”

15. Go For Zucker (Dani Levy, 2004)
One sure giveaway that Dani Levy’s Go For Zucker was made with some orthodox chefs in the kitchen is that during a scene depicting Shabbos morning services, the chazan and congregation abstain from using God’s name when reciting the Shema (instead they go with “Hashem,” a permitted alternative). There is well-informed talk of mincha and ma’ariv, milcheig and fleishig, a merrily sung bircas hamazon, and plenty about sitting shivah. Luckily, as someone with a yeshiva education, I’m familiar with these terms so an elucidation of the specifics was not needed, but Go For Zucker – an inexact translation of the actual German title (Alles auf Zucker!) – seemingly requires of the audience an experiential familiarity with modern German sociology, and as someone with a yeshiva education, I was lost. Clearly, the film which essentially swept Germany’s most prestigious film awards in 2005 has more depth than I am able to give it credit for. Germans take their art seriously and Go For Zucker, without the proper insight and intelligence, comes off as a scattershot, rather trying comedy, and not a particularly funny one at that.
“What the movie actually shows is a repulsive orthodox family replete with fat, piggish, money obsessed wife, attractive, strange, slutty daughter, reclusive, socially retarded son, and obstinate, hot-headed father. Jackie must contend with this motley crew while attempting to avoid shivah and play in a high stakes billiards tournament. His go-to (and always side-splitting) routine to get out of the three aggravating Shs (Shul, Shivah, and Shabbos) is to fake a heart attack. If this film’s intention was to bravely provide showcase for Jews to return to mainstream German entertainment, I’d say it missed the mark. Better to assume it rather reminded the good Aryans why they desired to be rid of us in the first place. Goebbels would have found the depiction of Jews in Go For Zucker promising.”

16. God Is Great, I’m Not (Pascale Bailly, 2001)

“Michele approaches her religious education (and eventual conversion classes) with such enthusiasm, passion, and curiosity, that it actually allows orthodox Judaism to appear an attractive alternative for the young and trendy. Writer Alain Tasma provides very insightful dialogue for Michele to chew over as she competently charges through the process. . . . She is on a mission. She’s got the soul of a fanatic. And like all fanatics, unfortunately, the infatuation with an of-the-moment ideal or cause is merely a reflection of whichever influence was transmitted and received most recently. Michele is God is Great’s focal character and she is sprightly, lovely, and sympathetic, but we can’t learn anything essential from her, so we must move on to Francois. . . .”

17. The Unborn (David S. Goyer, 2009)
“Why is The Unborn an essential Jewish film considering how oddly vague it is in terms of actual Judaism (Casey, though technically Jewish, deals with her situation as if an outsider)? The answer is that The Unborn marks a defining moment in modern Jewish history. With The Unborn, apparently, it officially has become kosher for movies to commercially exploit the extermination and torture of six million Jews.”

18. A Price Above Rubies (Boaz Yakin, 1998)
“A Price Above Rubies is as much about harshly judging a woman for intolerably giving up on her family and religion as it is about admiring her for avoiding tragedy and choosing life. My estimate is that Yakin (fiendishly) roots for the latter reaction, though he provides convincing evidence to support both.”
“Yakin makes sure that we have bearded, payesed, black hat wearing, Torah learning, Shabbos celebrating devils so that his audience can go home sniping, “See, those orthodox Jews aren’t such good people after all!” Which is a fair conclusion because the premise is correct, but Yakin’s argument is presented with such blind rage and fury that his little film goes from sensitive and perceptive to sensational and scandal-mongering very quickly.”

19. The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, 1927)
“The Jazz Singer may well have resulted when a bunch of fat cat Jewish moguls stuck their necks out about eighty years ago and declared, ‘Momma, Poppa, remember all the stuff that you taught us was important about where we come from – our life and the length of our days and all that pious stuff Zadie, the Rebbi’s shamesh, did for the poor – well, we may act like we forgot all about it (and we’ll most assuredly forget about it during the after party), but we just gambled our reputations on making this movie to let you know, and to let our people know for all time, that deep down we didn’t forget.’ I think The Jazz Singer is a shallow attempt by a powerful group of straying Jews to clear their consciences.”

20. The Governess (Sandra Goldbacher, 1998)
“There are achingly beautiful symbols of traditional Judaism in the film. Whether it be Rosina’s lighting of Yom Tov candles and the spare Seder she conducts in the dimness of her room with joyful memories of her aunts attempting to eat eggs dipped in salt water dancing through her head. Or her lingering after the Cavendish’s leave church so she can utter a lonely, bitterly sincere Shema (as the film begins in a lavishly ornate synagogue with the Shema being read). Or, most hauntingly, as the girl, so far from home, so confused by her Gentile surroundings and the feelings raging inside her, wraps herself in her father’s tallis as if a comfort blanket and rocks on her bed whimpering prayers to her father’s God. ”

21. Pi (Darren Aronofsky, 1998)
“The most shockingly insightful Jewish bit built into the film comes when Max is dragged before a Rebbi who claims the two share the same last name. We are awakened to the fact that Max is a descendent of priests and that maybe, just maybe, he is not simply a raving lunatic, but a chosen one, given a divine message. Maybe math is God’s language and if we can break the code we can comprehend Him and His universe.”

22. The Chosen (Jeremy Kagan, 1981)

“The plot is tough to swallow and the filmmaking style seems straight out of 1970’s porn, but The Chosen is actually about Judaism. That takes guts. Special interest Jewish films are a dime a dozen but take away the ones that deal with Israel, the Holocaust, and what are deemed to be Jewish themes (cranky, old people in Florida, neurotic, rich people in New York), we are left with very little. The Chosen is a rarity of immense proportions. It shouldered its way into the popular consciousness, perhaps with a few concessions and a straining dramatic license, but nonetheless it remains a thoughtful, provocative engagement of legitimate issues relating to Judaism, the ancient, ever evolving religion. Potok took something typically kept for Shabbos table banter and made it into art, made it into a public challenge. Somewhat exploitative, but courageous nonetheless. For that alone, The Chosen deserves to survive and be forced upon our children for many generations to come.”

23. The Merchant of Venice (Michael Radford, 2004)
“With all the concentrated faithfulness to Mr. Shakespeare, the film naturally retains its chief ambiguity and the reason for its eternal appeal and fascination amongst the sons and daughters of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. As long as The Merchant of Venice is read or performed, its audience will ponder the question: Is Shylock the Jew a villain to be reviled or a tragic figure to be pitied (or perhaps even a pugnacious scrapper to be admired)? . . . Good old Bill Shakespeare has certainly left us a legacy.”

24. Europa Europa (Agnieszka Holland, 1990)
“Now we have the genre called the Holocaust movie and it too has a formula. Nazi rise to power in 1930’s Europe, restrictions on Jews, ghettos, concentration camps, mass deaths and mass suffering, greed, hate, martyrdom, sacrifice, and last but not least…survival. Someone always survives. The story always centers on some form of Jewish humanity overcoming devastating odds to emerge from the ashes whole. With all the Holocaust movies released, not a single one dares to end things with the ultimate finality of all consuming death as the torture porn flicks produce with assembly line confidence. This despite the Holocaust being in essence entirely about racking up body counts and piling up corpses.”

25. Exodus (Otto Preminger, 1960)
“The screenplay for Otto Preminger’s 1960 film about the labor pains and eventual muddled birth of the State of Israel was adapted from the epic 1958 novel written by Leon Uris. The name of the film, and many will tell you the story itself, was adapted from the work of a mysterious, but ultimately purposeful God of many names.”

Courage in Doubt and Defiance
Holocaust Denial in Adam Resurrected and The Reader
The Band’s Visit

Praying With Lior
Ushpizin
Jewish Classics: The Believer
Munich

Everything Is Illuminated
The Passion of the Christ
The Goyish Problem: Hiding and Seeking & Decryptage
The Statement

The Hebrew Hammer
The Pianist

They’re adorable, sure.

But do we have to stop there?

Within the last week, I’ve seen a full-length feature film about newborn babies (appropriately called Babies) – and a full-length feature film about the pets who survived Hurricane Katrina (MINE).

Remarkably, the three-plus hours involved did not turn me into a raving cynic. Instead of immersing me in stifling cuteness, both films were surprisingly thought-provoking, well-crafted, and worth recommending.

The one-two punch of these films left me thinking about how rarely I see a movie in which babies and critters aren’t exploited for their cuteness. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t mean to equate human infants and pets. I only mean to point out that we tend to give both character categories the same insultingly narrow treatment.

I’m hard-pressed to think of films in which infants or toddlers are treated as much more than a joke or an inconvenience. I’m not asking for them be to portrayed as sophisticated personalities; that’d be a stretch. But in the real world, babies demand respect. Why aren’t they given more respect at the movies?

Can you think of a film in which a toddler was taken seriously? Half-seriously?

In the same way, I’m having a hard time thinking of movies in which cats and dogs are treated as much more than comic relief. They’re a dash of “cuteness” to entertain the audience, usually. They’re onscreen so that they can adorably cover their eyes with a paw whenever human characters do something embarrassing. They’re shown escaping disaster, so audiences will cheer. Or, as in most animated films, they’re really representing human behavior, rather than causing us to think about the experiences of animals.

Thank God for MINE, a documentary that takes dogs seriously. The movie isn’t without its sentimental flourishes, but it treats God’s creatures as individuals deserving of respect and compassion. They’re shown to have tremendous influence in the lives of their caretakers. Here’s the trailer for MINE at FilmMovement.com. (The movie opens at the Pickford theater in Bellingham, Washington for a short run this week, and it’s available to subscribers of Film Movement.) Check it out if you get the chance, even if you aren’t a pet owner.

I’ll be reviewing both of the aforementioned movies soon. But before I do, I’m asking for your help:

Can you think of examples in which babies or pets are included for reasons other than cheap laughs?

Can we come up with enough titles to appease the angry hordes of disgruntled toddlers and insulted puppies who may be, even now, plotting their revenge?

Helena Bonham Carter in Alice in Wonderland

Maybe Tim Burton and I just don’t get along.

I have a deep, deep love of the darkly comic, which might explain why my favorite childhood books included Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (and its Great Glass Elevator sequel), Sideways Stories from Wayside School, the Mary Poppins series, and, yes, Alice In Wonderland (along with Through the Looking Glass).

Tim Burton likes to take my favorite tales and turn them into movies. Every time I’m hopeful; every time I come away feeling underwhelmed. I had the highest of hopes for Sweeney Todd – I even braved the hordes of NYU musical theater undergrads and went to a midnight screening. But after having seen the stage production, the film was decidedly . . . lackluster.

Still, I hope, and so I recently found myself sitting on the edge of my theater seat, wearing goofy glasses, ready for Alice in Wonderland. I devoured Carroll’s weird classic over and over as a child. (I have a distinct and bizarre memory of reading about the Jabberwocky while walking through the local warehouse club’s frozen-foods section with my mom. I don’t know why.) And the posters and trailer looked awesome. This, I thought, is the ideal Burton tale – full of color, full of wonder, full of weird. I haven’t seen all the cinematic adaptations of the book, but  I remember two: a very old one, and then, of course, the cheery Disney-fied version. This looked better. This looked weirder. This looked fantastical.

108 minutes later, I left the theater scratching my head. What just happened? Why was I . . . bored?

The film’s concept is wonderfully innovative: Alice, now a young lady, inadvertently returns to Wonder/Underland after a long absence. She’s expected, though, because she’s been slated to destroy the Jabberwock. The Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) in the meantime has been ruling the land, having ousted her sister, the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) from the throne.

Alice runs into the usual suspects, including the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp), and the story continues on from there. It’s visually quite stunning, and quite imaginative in its character realization.

And yet, halfway through, I felt bored. I knew what was going to happen before it happened. The whole thing seemed mapped out ahead of time – which felt, oddly, not in keeping with the actual spirit of the film. I felt cheated, as if the visuals were supposed to wow me so that I wouldn’t notice that the story was a bit anemic. I don’t want to be checking my watch in the middle of a movie to see how much is left.

I don’t really have an explanation. I don’t insist on grand, sweeping stories in my films (after all, one of my favorite films is Into Great Silence). But I was sorely disappointed, and I suspect I can’t be the only one. And in fact, this is the same beef I had with Avatar: I felt as if the visual was overemphasized to the severe detriment of the story. Many of my friends were fine with it; perhaps I just have more problems with it.

This is taking on a greater concern to me as I see the myriad of films being released in 3-D or being converted to 3-D this year. What’s going on? Can we have good stories in 3-D films that aren’t made by Pixar? And where are those filmmakers?

Several of the most important filmmakers in the world today are from Iran. And that’s remarkable, considering the Iranian government’s dislike for art that shows the rest of the world the truth about the totalitarianism and suffering there.

When protesters took to the streets, some of those filmmakers were courageous in their shows of support.

Last month, Michael Leary posted a link here at Filmwell that led readers to an article from the film issue of The Believer. That article, “Watching Shrek in Iran,” included some surprising Iranian perspective on the career of their world-famous director Abbas Kiarostami, who has been in Italy making a movie with Juliette Binoche. Apparently, Kiarostami isn’t as popular in his own country as he is abroad. Iranians seem to prefer filmmakers who stay home and focus on Iran.

But those who do focus on the truth of life in Iran take serious risks.

That could not be more obvious than it is today, with this dismaying update on the condition of the imprisoned Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, who made The Circle and Offsides.

I confess, I did not even know that the director had been imprisoned (just a day after Leary’s post on Kiarostami). But as I traced news stories from today’s updates to the original news of Panahi’s arrest, I was dismayed.

Panahi’s films have been rare, persuasive, troubling glimpses of oppression in Iran. As he told Anthony Kaufman (indieWire), “I am a socially committed filmmaker, and I cannot be indifferent to what is happening around me.”

He was arrested on March 1, 2010, and taken to prison.

Abbas Kiarostami has come forward with an open letter that calls for Panahi’s release.

On Friday, The New York Times reported that he was still in jail, and that things were looking no better.

Saturday’s report from the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran had more details, saying that Panahi’s wife was concerned about her husband’s health:

Taherah Saeedi, the wife of film director Jafar Panahi, who was arrested on 2 March 2010, has published a report about her husband’s condition in solitary confinement that has rendered him immobile and under emotional stress. She stated that in the past, her husband has twice experienced severe spasms in his chest for which he was taken to the emergency room. The attending physician diagnosed his condition to be psychological and said that if it continued he could suffer a heart attack.

IFC has further commentary on the situation here.

There’s a certain sickening inevitability to the news that Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi has been arrested, confined and in danger of a heart attack. He’d been flirting with danger for a long time — first with a series of films uniformly banned in Iran, then by wearing the long green scarf signifying solidarity with the protesters at festivals. By effectively becoming the international cinematic voice of the opposition, something like this seemed only a matter of time in coming.

But it’s still incredibly disturbing.

Say a prayer for Mr. Panahi and for his family, and for all of those imprisoned truth-tellers that he represents.

Watch his movies, and share them. You should especially see The Circle. They are excellent films, urgent and brave. And as we can see now, they are costly.

Hearing the news that The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane is being adapted for the screen by screenwriter Jeff Stockwell, I’m concerned.

The magic of Kate DiCamillo’s remarkable children’s book is that its central character is inanimate, and never speaks. Edward is a doll. A thinking doll, but a doll that does not come to life like the toys in Toy Story, or like the stuffed bear in the department store in the famous children’s book Corduroy. And yet, Edward Tulane is a book of powerful emotion, suspense, and beauty. Could it ever work as a film?

With Plastic Bag, director Ramin Bahrani and narrator Werner Herzog have convinced me that it can work. Although this 18-minute short is a work of tongue-in-cheek genius and wicked humor, it’s also rather affecting in spite of itself.

I once said that I would have liked American Beauty if it had been all about the plastic bag.

Well, here it is: 18 minutes of “too good to be true.”

This has me reflecting on the “inanimate objects” that have taken on personality through the mystery of movies.

The volleyball in Cast Away.

The monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Do you have a favorite big-screen inanimate object, one that takes on a mysterious presence over the course of the film?

I like to think of the list as a sort of back door to faith, your own private entrance to the houses of the holy. The Hidden God contains an essay by Nathaniel Dorksy on “Devotional Cinema,” in which he addresses the moments “not where religion is the subject of a film, but where film is the spirit or experience of religion.” He talks about a transcendent “alchemy” that happens in good film, in films that “lay the ground for devotion.” The list ostensibly contains these sorts of films. It is a monument to a history of people speaking a different language about eternal concepts, testing this new grammar of light, texture, and rhythm as it contacts the contours of faith and reality. The list honors artists in tune with the human condition, putting human faces on high-concept theological realities. And most of these films do more than simply describe these realities; they rehearse them, reproduce them, and enable us to inhabit them. These films are catalysts, mirrors, and antidotes. Simply put, the list is a guide to spaces of insight and reflection that exist off the beaten track of tried and true spiritual practices.

This was back when it was referred to as the “100 Most Spiritually Significant Films.” I really liked these annual lists despite the dozen or so movies that seemed to appear repeatedly with little regard for my annoyance. But even a cursory spin through the current list, the 2010 Arts and Faith Top 100, indicates that times have changed. It has shed films like American Beauty, Changing Lanes, Dogma, Fight Club, The Matrix, Signs, Sixth Sense, or The Truman Show, and along with these a lot of its initial popular appeal. And then it has picked up many of the truly great films from this last decade, like Heartbeat Detector, Summer Hours, Syndromes and A Century, and In Praise of Love. Somehow even Brakhage and Deren found their way onto the list.

And in the midst of all these changes, I think the loose descriptor “spirituality” has become an even more abstract point of common ground for this wide range of films. This is not the fault of the over 40 voters involved this time, the list of films nominated, or even the voting process. I actually don’t think it is even a problem. What do Playtime, Meshes of the Afternoon, and Beau travail have in common? Not much other than the fact that they are on this list. I find this new sense of indeterminacy really compelling. It reflects the work the diverse community that developed the list has put into talking about international cinema since its inception.

In a talk delivered at a 2003 event, visionary INTERFILM president Hans Werner Dannowski remarked: “…the vivid crossing of borders between film and theology may save the film from the banality of cinema and festival business, and it may also save the church from the deep sleep of the habitual and the always known.” There is a lot of border crossing going on this list, culturally, ideologically, and formally. Brakhage’s wash of colors, perhaps along with the Punch Drunk Love interludes, responds to the clinical claustrophobia of The Passion of the Joan of Arc. The last scene of Beau travail provides an interesting formal counterpoint to the end of Ordet or Stroszek. The gentle comedy of Ozu’s reflection on modernization in Early Summer becomes a discussion partner with Heartbeat Detector’s more sinister take on the modern industrial complex.

This list is a work in progress, and next year may see it shifting towards a more eclectic or even mainstream taste index. Does my above 2005 description still apply? Yes. But I think it does now in a way that embodies the increasing border-crossing agility with which many have learned to talk about theology or spirituality and cinema in the same sentence.

Please visit the Arts and Faith Top 100 list. (Thanks to Image Journal.)

Jeffrey Overstreet has written a handy Q and A.

I didn’t like James Gray’s film The Lovers very much. But someday soon I’m going to love it.

You have one or two of those movies, haven’t you? The movies you frowned about afterward, but two years later you were watching them for the fifth time, your enthusiasm growing?

It’s my first experience with a James Gray film, and from what I’ve read about his previous works (Little Odessa, The Yards, We Own the Night), I was expecting something moody with decent performances.

What I didn’t expect was a film that would trap me in the middle of several difficult questions.

In case you haven’t discovered it yet:

The film follows Leonard (Joaquin Phoenix), a lost soul still living with his parents (Isabella Rossellini and Moni Moshonov). He’s jumpy, twitchy, and he mumbles like… well, like Joaquin Phoenix in recent public appearances. Even though he looks to be in his mid to late 30s, he behaves there as if he’s a moody, bashful eighteen-year-old suffering from an excess of parental monitoring and concern.

In time we learn that Leonard is bipolar. And worse, he’s tried suicide more than once, traumatized by the breakup with his fiancee. But in spite of these explanations, it’s hard not to wonder if his hovering parents might not be largely responsible for his anxieties. (I even wondered, throughout the film, if we were being told the straight story about what happened with Leonard’s ex-fiance.) Whatever the case, his recovery from the crisis is a process of mothering and medication.

Leonard’s father, a Jewish immigrant and a longtime Coney Island dry-cleaner, is kind but distracted by his business. Leonard’s mother is so dutifully concerned that one comes to suspect she either shares Leonard’s feelings of imprisonment or she’s hiding beneath layers of formality for some reason that will be revealed. They keep Leonard under rigorous, but not unloving, surveillance.

For Leonard to find himself caught up in not one but two rushed romances seems unlikely. What young woman wouldn’t be thoroughly spooked by his shiftiness? He looks more like a potential stalker than boyfriend material. (But far be it from me to say it couldn’t happen. I’ve seen women I admire fall hard for some of the most reckless and unstable men I’ve ever met — and suffer the consequences.) Anyway, Leonard gains the trust and admiration of both the level-headed and sweet Sandra (the radiant Vinessa Shaw) and she who will be known as “The Accident Waiting to Happen and Probably Repeatedly” — a drug-addicted flirt named Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow).

Of course, Leonard’s parents want him to fall in love and marry Sandra. She’s part of a family like theirs, after all. And what is more, this can only help their desire to see the two dry-cleaning businesses merge. And why not? She’s lovely, sexy, and clearly ready to climb all over Leonard (much to my bewilderment).

Leonard is willing to play along, as if a part of his brain gets that this is sensible, and the other part gets that Sandra is smokin’ hot.

But the same part of his brain that is clearly hot for Sandra is even hotter for Michelle. Michelle’s more exciting. And she exists outside the formidable walls of Leonard’s controlled existence. But she’s also in trouble. Having made her happiness dependent on the affections of a manipulative married man (Elias Koteas), she’s an emotional wreck, and strung out on drugs to boot.

So, there’s the setup.

Leonard is drawn to Sandra, against a backdrop that emphasizes history, tradition, and family.

Watching the film, I was frustrated to see adult characters behaving like such foolish teens. But I was also confounded that they would be drawn to each other in the first place. I couldn’t decide, was this just poor casting? The actors are good — no, they’re great — but this seems like a story for much younger characters. Or were they cast for the deliberate purpose of creating such discomfort?

Whatever the case, such a scenario can only end a few ways. Leonard ends up with Option A, or Option B, or neither, or he kills himself, or Options A and B fall in love and things take a perverse dive.

But the ending of Two Lovers, as unimaginative as it seemed at first, has been stuck in my head for days. And I can’t decide whether its presence in the back of my mind is welcome or not.

I found the story unpleasant, unlikely, and often very annoying. But the cinematography and the performances were so darkly fascinating that I kept watching.

And now, I can’t stop thinking about Leonard: about how I’ve actually come to care about what happens to him; how I want him to survive; to be free, living an authentic life of preferences and pursuits; but also to to remain under supervision; to be guided into wise choices so that he won’t mess himself up again. I want him to know passion, but also to grow old with a faithful wife and a loving, supportive family. I want him to have a good job in his future. But I also want him to live with zeal and courage, breaking free from the life his parents have so rigorously designed and predetermined for him.

What is best for Leonard?

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a character who is quite the same kind of aggravating and endearing as Leonard. Phoenix is brilliant here. He makes the dumbest lines seem real. He never overplays a moment. He makes Leonard scary, sad, and ultimately sympathetic, somebody we hope will break free even as we hope he stays under close observation.

And this is it. This is why I know I will come to love this movie. It does what the very best art does:

It wraps itself around a question. It gives us many entry points into the story, and leaving us in sufficient doubt about the conclusion. That way, viewers will arrive at myriad opinions and interpretations. They’ll have many different desired outcomes, many different concerns for the characters, many different predictions about what might happen next.

And yet, rather than just being merely enigmatic and confounding, Two Lovers expresses something that is true about all of us. Even if we look at these broken creatures with alarm or disgust, face it: We experience the tension between the desire to live a life of authentic passion and the desire to avoid catastrophic mistakes. We want to make choices with wild abandon, but we want to be restricted just enough that we will be rescued from the consequences of our weaker moments.

I sympathize with Leonard’s longings, but fear what will take place if he shuts out everything else and pursues them. It’s a fractured world, and any choice, any outcome will be imperfect and leave him wondering “What if?” But which outcome would be worse? Brief, reckless, and liberating bliss — leading, almost inevitably to disaster? Or enduring but difficult love and responsibility, in union with a woman of forgiveness and grace, surrounded by support?

But no, it doesn’t feel right to take from Two Lovers some abstract lesson that is universal. What I love best is that Gray and his co-scripter Richard Menello have given everything, and every character, such particularity. It is not about Everyman, but this man: This sometimes slovenly, sometimes boyishly playful man.

And it’s not about two “kinds of women”, but these women. Gray has not made Sandra homely; he has allowed Vinessa Shaw to make her genuinely alluring, warm, and wonderful. To choose her would not be to surrender sensuality and idiosyncracy. But in most directors’ hands, Sandra would have been painfully plain.

Nor is Michelle a goddess. She applies makeup with a trowel before going out on the town to behave like a spoiled college girl. She’s maddeningly fickle, capable of terrifying gullibility, and almost irreversibly damaged by addiction, sure to fail in anything she sets out to do. But thanks to Gwyneth Paltrow’s remarkably subtle work (Why isn’t she given great roles more often?) there is just enough grace left in Michelle, just enough potential for recovery, that we dare to hope she’ll escape the traps she’s set for herself.

Leonard and Michelle, on top of the world, where it is very cold, and it's a long, long way down to earth.

It also helps that the film’s locations and cinematography amplify the murkiness of Leonard’s quandaries. The walls of his Brighton Beach surroundings are claustrophobia-inducing. When he looks out his window it’s as though another part of the building is about to fall down on him. And there, far above, is mercurial Michelle all Rapunzel-like in the window, doing the “I’ll show you my true feelings for you by opening my shirt” thing — a move that made sense when it was the confused teen in American Beauty, but just seems like another immature display from the Mess That Is Michelle. She leaves Leonard as awestruck as a teen with a dangerous crush. His obsession make it seem entirely possible that he might cut all of his lifelines in a hopeless attempt to save her.

And as contrived as the climactic moments seemed when I saw Two Lovers the first time, I must admit I gasped when the head-slappingly obvious image of a solitary glove on the edge of the tide played onscreen. It wasn’t because it was a brilliant idea (it was Visual Poetry 101), but because the shot itself was fantastic.

This is a perplexing film. But I’d much rather have one of those than a dozen well-made films that wrap things up neatly, deliver their conclusions, and leave me stammering the next day as I strive to answer the question, “What did I see last night?” The script wouldn’t have given me much hope for anything interesting. It’s all the complications that fill those silences and burdened glances between the lines. And it’s the wave of relief I felt at the outcome; and then that second, unexpected wave of dread that quickly followed as I guessed what would probably come next; and then, the wave that came after that, which made me think, Well, isn’t that better than the alternative? And the next wave… and the next….

I’d better stop. I’m falling for Two Lovers even now. And I’m not yet sure if embracing this film is a wise and responsible decision or a mad and reckless crush  that I’ll eventually get over.

I suddenly feel like Leonard.

The number of film critics who have indelibly shaped my understanding of the cinema is relatively small, perhaps a half dozen, maybe a dozen at the most. Susan Sontag is chief among them, although I’ve never thought of her as a critic per se. During a youth spent at academic institutions in Berkeley, Chicago, Cambridge (MA), Oxford, Paris, and New York, she was trained as a philosopher and thought and wrote like one. And like a philosopher, Sontag had a precise intellectual agenda. As David Denby wrote in an astute summation of Sontag’s love of the movies, she had absorbed the ideology of the 1960s intellectuals who wrote for Partisan Review and then attacked their view of modernist art, partly because they had undervalued European experimental film, a medium which they hardly considered worthy of attention.

In challenging them, Sontag achieved much. She expanded artistic taste for a generation of readers and moviegoers, particularly those living in New York; she brought attention to an array of relatively neglected artists (many of whom are now widely respected); and she revised the very purpose of film criticism. For someone like me, born in the generation after Sontag’s, it is the latter achievement that perhaps matters most. Sontag’s writing on film was only a small part of her writing on the arts, and on the surface it can seem fairly clinical. Her expansive essays on directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, Ingmar Bergman, and Robert Bresson engaged their films by exploring a variety of related intellectual issues, including questions of form, the relationship between literary texts, the internal mechanics of narrative, the integral ties between structure and content. And in these essays, she often indulged in esoteric aphorisms, calling Godard a “deliberate destroyer of cinema” or concluding that in some of Alain Resnais’ films “the memory of an unrecapturable feeling becomes the subject of feeling.” These statements only made complete sense, only cohered, within the larger intellectual context of the essays that contained them.

Yet for all of its earnestness and rigorous formalism, Sontag’s criticism was always emotive and humanistic. She was interested in a director’s technique and in a film’s formal properties only insofar as they led to a deeper, more immediate delivery of the experience of the cinema, as if film criticism were the artistic equivalent of impact boosting. Understanding what Bresson or Bergman were doing with a film’s form produces a higher aesthetic and visceral experience, one that is unimpeded and truer, and in the process the viewer can be psychologically and emotionally transformed. Consider how Sontag ended her 1964 essay on Bresson: “the power of Bresson’s [films] lies in the fact that his purity and fastidiousness are not just an assertion about the resources of the cinema … they are at the same time an idea about life … about the most serious ways of being human.” Or, as Denby put it:

Sontag spent her life trying to grasp modernity, both as a specific series of developments in the arts and as the quintessence of experience in the violent and demoralizing twentieth century. Film was the new art of the century, and the greatest contemporary directors, going past mere representation and narrative, reformulated its language, expanding consciousness and emotion in the bargain. In 1968, in a long piece on Godard in Partisan Review, Sontag wrote that the director’s “approach to established rules of film technique like the unobtrusive cut, consistency of point of view, and clear cut story line is comparable to Schoenberg’s repudiation of the tonal language prevailing in music around 1910.” Film, then, was the last great wave of modernism. Or at least a certain kind of film, in which form became experimental and philosophically resonant: the movies of Resnais and not Bunuel, Bresson but not Dreyer, Godard but not Truffaut, Bergman’s “Persona” but not Bergman’s “Smiles of a Summer Night.” In such works, film amounted to nothing less than the making of new forms and the making of souls.

Sontag championed specific types of films because they illuminated both the artistic potential of the cinema and the nature of human experience. Her film criticism proceeded by a similar process of illumination. Her 1966 essay on the science fiction films of the 1950s, “The Imagination of Disaster,” is like much of her work. There she was, as usual, using aphorisms to enumerate all the qualities of a specific type of film. “Science-fiction films are not about science,” she argued. “They are about disaster.” Or: “the science fiction film is concerned with the aesthetics of destruction.” Or: “science fiction films are one of the purest forms of spectacle.” These assertions are just sign-posts to a specific destination: not science fiction films but what these films reveal about modern experience, particularly about the nearly unbearable anxiety resulting from the dehumanizing traumas of the twentieth century, the memory of mass destruction caused by two world wars, the constant threat of nuclear annihilation , and the “threat not only of individual death, which is certain, but of something almost insupportable psychologically — collective incineration and extinction which could come at any time, virtually without warning.” The real meaning of these films is this:

the imagery of disaster in science fiction is above all the emblem of an inadequate response. I don’t mean to bear down on the films for this. They themselves are only a sampling, stripped of sophistication, of the inadequacy of most people’s responses to the unassimilable terrors that infect their consciousness. The interest of the films, aside from their considerable amount of cinematic charm, consists in this intersection between a naive and largely debased commercial art product and the most profound dilemmas of the contemporary situation.

This brilliant interpretation comes towards the end of the essay, like a bang. Science fiction films reveal human limitations in coping with the extremes of experience; they also reveal a desire to “neutralize” or “beautify” terror and anxiety about the world, even if this is not necessarily beneficial (”they inculcate a strange apathy”, she wrote, “concerning the process of radiation, contamination, and destruction that I for one find haunting and depressing”). Sontag didn’t merely illuminate how science fiction films are constructed; she revealed why they exist and why we need them.

The force of these kinds of interpretations makes Sontag’s criticism compelling, perhaps even necessary in its own right. Sontag’s emphasis, in much of her writing on film, on the formal achievements of experimental filmmakers helped expand the canon to include different directors and films while also placing film on the level of the other arts. But her arguing, bravely, for the transformative, redemptive, or illuminating power of film refashioned criticism itself into something that could enhance the direct experience of the cinema while, in the most revolutionary manner, it could also permanently, and wonderfully, alter our sensibilities.

_____
Sources:
David Denby, “The Moviegoer: Susan Sontag’s Life in Film,” The New Yorker (Sept. 12, 2005).
Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Anchor Books, 1990).
Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will (New York: Anchor Books, 1991).