American Movie Critics: An Anthology from the Silents Until Now. Edited by Phillip Lopate. New York: Library of America, 2006. [Amazon]

A fascinating book. Wonderful for updating your Netflix list, and also for getting a sense of America’s love affair with the movies from the start.

Some quotes:

“The rhythm of the play is marked by unnatural rapidity. As the words are absent which, in the drama as in life, fill the gaps between the actions, the gestures and deeds themselves can follow one another much more quickly. Happenings which would fill an hour on stage can fill hardly more than twenty minutes on the screen. This heightens the feeling of vitality in the spectator. He feels as if he were passing through life with a sharper accent which stirs his personal energies.” – Hugo Munsterberg (b. 1863)

“First of all, reality (today anyway) is largely the invention of journalism and is based on the formulas of the neat, transmissible word-summary of action past. Visual media simply convert this formula into sight terms. In both fiction and so-called fact media, or a fusion of them, the same banal process always takes place: the technicians invent a plausible simulacrum of what is supposed to happen or have happened in life. A newsreel or documentary film is supposed (a) to represent accomplished fact or (b) typical and/or current and continuous fact. Each is an item, more or less edited, detached from the whole continuum of reality yet presumed to stand for reality-reality in an ontological sense, the “world,” and so on.” – Parker Tyler (b. 1904)

“The Astaire-Rogers dance films were romances, or rather, chapters in a single epic romance…. in those years dancing was transformed into a vehicle of serious emotion between a man and a woman. It never happened in movies again.” – Arlene Croce (b. 1934)

“…audiences who have been forced to wade through the thick middle-class padding of more expensively made movies to get to the action enjoy the nose-thumbing at “good taste” of cheap movies that stick to the raw materials. At some basic level, they like the pictures to be cheaply done, they enjoy the crudeness; it’s a breather, a vacation from proper behavior and good taste and required responses.” – Pauline Kael (b. 1919)

“People like me who champion pornography on the grounds that it is life-enhancing are constantly being told that it isn’t truly life-enhancing, because it is only a travesty of the real thing. The difficulty with that argument is knowing what the real thing is. Whenever I ask for a definition, my interlocutor begins to sputter; precisely as “everyone” knows that blue movies are boring, “everyone” knows what the real thing is. But I don’t. Or I do and I don’t. I live bathed in a continuous erotic glow, and I recognize pornography as among the thousand blessed things that heighten this glow. Like sunlight, like water, like the smell and taste of skin, it helps make me happy. I foresee that with every passing year it will become increasingly precious to me: a vade mecum when the adventure of old age begins.” – Brendan Gill (b. 1914)

“Film is stillness in motion. There is no such thing as a moving picture. All pictures are still pictures. The illusion of movement in film comes from passing a succession of perfectly frozen images before a lens so rapidly, with a convenient eyeblink between them, that we are deceived into thinking that stillness is action. Take the film out of the projector and look at any one frame – as you now must, if you wish to see it at all – and you will see what Keaton may have seen all his life: rigidity at the heart of things, rigidity as the very condition of apparent activity. Keaton may have taken his esthetic – even his attitude toward life – from the knowledge he derived every time he finished a strip of celluloid. What was printed on the celluloid was immobile, silent as the tomb, an extract and an abstract from the void. It was also, at the same time, part of a continuum, and when the continuum was seen whole – miracle of miracles that this should be possible – what had been indisputably dead leapt to unreal, yet mysteriously persuasive, life. Now Zero moves, has being, joins the tangible – without ceasing to be Zero. Whether he arrived at his identity consciously or not, Keaton became what film is.” Walter Kerr (b. 1913)

Films recommended by selected critics, not yet on Netflix:

Edgar Allan Poe (1909)
Man’s Genesis (1912)
Greed (1924)
Moana of the South Seas (1926)
Hog Wild (1930)
The Fatal Glass of Beer (1933)
The Devil Is a Woman (1935)
Ceiling Zero (1936)
Elephant Boy (1937)
God’s Stepchildren (1938)
Youth Runs Wild (1944)
Counter-Attack (1945)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945)
Saratoga Trunk (1945)
Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948)
Intruder in the Dust (1949)
The Tall Target (1951)
Banditi a Milano (1968)
High School (1968)
The Coming Thing (1970)
Law and Order (1969)
Hospital (1970)
The Gland Hotel (1975)
Welfare (1975)
Meat (1976)
Cheek to Cheek (1986)

Kawa no soko kara konnichi wa / Sawako Decides
Ishii Yuya, Japan
2009, 112 min

Cast: Mitsushima Hikari (Sawako), Endo Masashi (Kenichi), Aihara Kira (Kayoko), Shiga Kotaro (Sawakos Vater Tadao), Iwamatsu Ryo (Nobuo).

To be screened at Japan Cuts Festival of Contemporary Japanese Cinema (July 1 – 16, 2010)

After five years, five jobs, and five boyfriends, Sawako (Mitsushima Hikari) still has not fully arrived in Tokyo. Her favorite phrases are “can’t be helped” and “working class is why.”

Kenichi (Endo Masashi), a toy designer at the toy company, has determined to live an “eco lifestyle.” Sawako spends evenings with him and his daughter Kayoko (Ahira Kira), while he clumsily knits a sweater vest, baby blue like his own, intended for Sawako. Instead of a good-night kiss at her door, Kenichi asks Sawako for her empty cans to recycle.

In Sawako Decides (literal translation of the Japanese title is “Hello From the River Bed”), we learn the power of a “lower-middling woman” – chu no ge no on-na.

Yuya may have hit on the trope of the decade with his observation that “the image of small shellfish squirming in the riverbed also contains a hopeless gravity that was a perfect fit.” He says his influences are musical even more than cinematic, and I believe him; Sawako Decides is wonderfully paced. And Mitsushima Hikari is an expressive, physically precise comic genius.

Double Tide
Sharon Lockhart, USA/Austria
2009, 99 min

For two weeks each year in South Bristol, Maine, low tide occurs twice within daylight hours—once at dawn and once at dusk. From the perspective of her stationary camera, filmmaker Sharon Lockhart documents the progress of a solitary clammer (Jen Casad) in these magic hours as she hauls her heavy skid out into the shallow cove and makes her way across the mudflat.

The clammer works for 45 minutes in the fog of dawn. Slowly, sunlight touches the landscape. Colors and features emerge, a Japanese landscape painting come to life. These are momentous events.

No words or music accompany the clammer at her centuries-old, physically demanding, solitary work. The intermittent buzz of an insect, the slap of boots in mud, a sharp sucking pop as she pulls clams from their nests, the dull thunk as they land in her bucket, a distant foghorn.

The screens breaks to black, then the 45-minute cycle repeats in the late afternoon, twilight sun, blue sky. A completely different picture – somehow the clammer seems much bigger, her world smaller.

Once she finds something that hurts – says “Oh!” and pulls back her hand. She tires, her hand seems to cramp. A cough. Nearby children’s voices as she finishes her work, washing heavy buckets of clams as darkness falls.

Double Tide is Lockhart’s fourth film about work (after (Nō, Lunch Break and Exit).

Update: US Release – Nov 12, 2010