Thoughts on Night of the Hunter

The Night of the Hunter

I was a little disappointed with this film. Although I enjoyed its angular cinematography (apparently influenced by German expressionism, I read) and could recognize James Agee’s influence in its more writerly moments, the film came off a little heavy-handed and blatant. It reduced what could have been a sophisticated if unsettling story into a trite morality tale praising the innocence of children. Part of my disappointment may be due to the fact that any story involving preachers instantly triggers Flannery O’Connor, whose writing was never preachy but rather unpredictable, dark, and ambiguous. Here, everything is stark black and white - and any judgment is made for you. It’s heroes are totally good and its villains are completely bad. 

The best part of the film for me were two characters, Powell and Ms. Cooper. Powell is a memorable villain, a murderer who pretends to be a preacher so as to gain access to his victim’s homes and money. Ms. Cooper, the old lady who saves the children, is an admirable, modern woman and Christian who stands on her porch with a shotgun. She is able to see through Powell’s false christianity immediately. She also delivers the film’s moral. In contrast to Powell, she’s a true preacher - but how do we know? “By their fruits ye shall know them.” Ms. Cooper performs many generous acts - but the irony is that the film doesn’t ever ask its viewer to perform the difficult act of judging that the victims of Powell failed at.

One question that I’m still working out is the pattern of duplicitous characters in the movie. Since the screenplay was written by the brilliant James Agee, he is no doubt hinting at something here. I’m interested in two parts. First, where the young boy John confuses the Jesus-floating-down-the-river story with the Moses-floating-down-the-river story. John himself floated down the river to escape an attempt on his life. Also recall the story John begins to tell his sister Pearl in their bedroom about the “rich king in Africa” while standing proudly with his hands on his hips. So it appears that John plays some sort of “king of men” figure. He’s no doubt heroic and smart, but perhaps his best quality, according to the film, is that he is able to move on (children “abide and they endure,” in the film’s last line), being totally enthralled with a pocket watch he gets for Christmas. 

The other scene that interests me is how John reacts identically to Powell’s arrest as he does to his father’s arrest. I’m still puzzled as to this scene - is the idea simply that he is having a psychological flashback of the earlier traumatic event of watching his father’s arrest? For its overall simplicity and earnestness, Agee leaves his mark in a few ambiguities. 

Update: I just found an excellent review at http://notcoming.com/reviews/nightofthehunter .

Coincidentally, Black Book reblogged this excerpt from an essay that aptly describes Polanski’s subtle touch in Repulsion: redvelvetteacake: I have always been astonished at the ease with which Polanski could create the feeling of paranoia. There is no specific way to effectively represent paranoia on-screen. It is a very private and quiet emotion. It is not something that is usually shared with an audience. It is not achieved with startling or shocking moments. It is something that requires several subtle layers of detail and restraint. Repulsion may be the most perfect example.  One Scene: Repulsion by Ti West

Coincidentally, Black Book reblogged this excerpt from an essay that aptly describes Polanski’s subtle touch in Repulsion:

redvelvetteacake:

I have always been astonished at the ease with which Polanski could create the feeling of paranoia. There is no specific way to effectively represent paranoia on-screen. It is a very private and quiet emotion. It is not something that is usually shared with an audience. It is not achieved with startling or shocking moments. It is something that requires several subtle layers of detail and restraint. Repulsion may be the most perfect example. 

One Scene: Repulsion by Ti West

(via bbook)

Welcome to My Study

You’re always welcome to enjoy the things that I’ve found. Here are some things I’ve enjoyed lately:

After watching SO MANY stupid movies, I’ve decided to take control of my movie-watching again. I’m not trying to be a snob about it - I just don’t want to wake up one day and find myself at Ghost Rider II. Which apparently will be a real thing soon.

So I took to the internet. I once thought IMDB’s Top 250 Movies was a good place to start, but after seeing that Inception was listed as the 11th greatest movie ever made that list was out, needless to say. I found this spreadsheet of the 1000 Greatest Movies “as voted by 2,138 critics, filmmakers, reviewers, scholars and other likely film types” at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They.

So far, it hasn’t let me down.

No surprise, Citizen Kane, is number one. And one of my favorites, Vertigo, is number two. I’ve started with the Top 50.

Needless to say, in the last six weeks, I’ve watched some amazing films. Here are some thoughts on a few of them:

  • Seven Samurai: I thought it would be a little more sober in tone - I couldn’t understand why the samurais thought everything was so funny. Kikuchiyo was an interesting character. You want to write him off as a goof off, but you can’t. I need a film type to explain it to me. There were some great shots of the battle scenes through the fences, etc. that I thought were pretty cool and maybe even innovative for the period but I don’t know anything.
  • 2001: A Space Odyssey: Talk about not knowing anything - this movie made me feel dumb, but at the same type I could enjoy it visually. I was fascinated by the monolith. It was at once the least and most interesting object conceivable. A black slab. Plopped down in the middle of a movie. No further explanation. It could be argued that the monolith was pretentious or indulgent or whatever. I thought it was awesome. If I were in film school and had to write an essay on the movie, I’d mine the significance of space food. Why all the scenes of eating in space? 
  • L’Avventura: When I finished it, I thought, Meh, but then as time went on, it really stuck with me. It haunted me. It was so empty and subtle, but I keep going back to it. I’ve been recalling lines (“Why should we be here talking, arguing? Believe me Anna, words are becoming less and less necessary; they create misunderstandings.”) and scenes (knocking over the ink well, the smiling in the mirror). Something about it reminds me of a Maguerite Duras book - its subtle emotional intensity, perhaps, or its disjointed narrative. Visually, it was beautiful. 
  • Lives of Others: Loved it. I loved the visual pun - or perhaps more - where the stasi dude’s writing seemed to be more than mere recording, but almost like he was writing a play involving the characters he was spying on. The close ups of the typewriter striking the dialogue, his mapping out the apartment. The stasi was the silent director, controlling their lives. 
  • Other movies I’ve enjoyed: The Searchers, Assassination of Jesse James, Temple Grandin, Passion of Joan of Arc, Batman (Tim Burton’s). Kicking and Screaming was pretty good. 
35mm_scan_12 by Carl W. Heindl on Flickr.

35mm_scan_12 by Carl W. Heindl on Flickr.

Guillermo del Toro On The Future of Narrative

  • Wired: It sounds like you're talking about an entirely new form of storytelling.
  • del Toro: Think about the way oral tradition became written word—how what we know about Achilles was written many, many years after it made its way around the world with different names and different types of heroes. That can happen when you allow content to keep propagating itself through different kinds of platforms and engines—when you permit it to be retold with a promiscuous form of mythology. You see it when people create their own avatars in games and transfigure their game worlds.
  • Wired: How is that interactivity going to change Hollywood—and the way directors like you make movies?
  • del Toro: [Legendary B-movie producer] Samuel Arkoff once told me there are only 10 great stories. That's where the engine and promiscuity come in. Hollywood thinks art is like Latin in the Middle Ages—only a few should know it, only a few should speak it. I don't think so.
  • Wired: So how will the public story engine tell those same 10 stories differently?
  • del Toro: We are used to thinking of stories in a linear way—act one, act two, act three. We're still on the Aristotelian model. What the digital approach allows you to do is take a tangential and nonlinear model and use it to expand the world. For example: If you're following Leo Bloom from Ulysses on a certain day and he crosses a street, you can abandon him and follow someone else.
  • Wired: You're describing a model that's more like a videogame. Is the merger of movies and games the first step?
  • del Toro: Unfortunately, I've found in my videogame experience that the big companies are just as conservative as the studios. I was disappointed with the first Hellboy game. I'm very impressed with the sandbox of Grand Theft Auto. You can get lost in that world. But we're using it just to shoot people and run over old ladies. We could be doing so much more.
  • Wired: But these nonlinear, hybrid storytelling forms involve gaming tech, which could trap them in a geek ghetto. What's going to bring down that wall?
  • del Toro: Go back a couple of decades to the birth of the graphic novel—I think we can pinpoint the big bang to Will Eisner's A Contract With God. Today, we have very worthy people doing literary comics. I think the same thing will happen on the Internet-gaming side. In the next 10 years, there will be an earthshaking Citizen Kane of games.
  • (via: Wired)

Books that should not be movies. (via: HTML Giant: Blog Archive » God damn it: ‘The Road’ trailer)

From the looks of the trailer, The Road movie is going to be horrible. Looks like they took out all the ambiguity—which I thought was the most interesting part about the book. So why does this movie look more like Armageddon than anything McCarthy has written? Probably because the producer is trying to sell tickets. I guess the Coen brothers—and David Lynch—are the only directors who can sell ambiguity. I’m dreading the adaptation of Blood Meridian.

METROPOLIS! (via mrcookieface:butterflyeffects)

METROPOLIS! (via mrcookieface:butterflyeffects)

Where the Where the Wild Things Are trailer is: on Tumblr!

Where the Where the Wild Things Are trailer is: on Tumblr!

(via: nevver)

(via: nevver)

It’s a Wonderful Life is a terrifying, asphyxiating story about growing up and relinquishing your dreams, of seeing your father driven to the grave before his time, of living among bitter, small-minded people. It is a story of being trapped, of compromising, of watching others move ahead and away, of becoming so filled with rage that you verbally abuse your children, their teacher and your oppressively perfect wife. It is also a nightmare account of an endless home renovation.

Wendell Jamieson (NYTimes.com) brings the cynicism.

The subject is very serious,” Kaufman continues. “It’s ever-present and I think it’s obviously everybody’s life and everybody’s experience: Everybody deals with the continuum of getting older and death and the regret that comes with more and more life passing by….It’s a person’s life, and it takes it to the end, and all that comes with that. [Synecdoche, New York] doesn’t have a happy ending, but I don’t know if it has a sad ending, either. It’s a curious ending, and there are things to think about,and there are things that happen toward the end of the movie that are odd and, I think, raise questions. Questions about what it means to be an individual, or what it means to be old or what it means to lose yourself or find a connection or all those things that are part of a person’s life. You don’t necessarily have to come out of it feeling devastated It wasn’t my intention. I really had no intention at all.

Dollar, Steve. “Charlie Kaufman Adapts.” Paste Magazine. Nov 08.

The Frame is a commonplace book by Marshall.

Reach me at marshall[at]theframe.org.

Elsewhere: Links: