Tags: Vatican Film List: Art
Everyone knows that
Citizen Kane — celebrating its 70th anniversary with this week’s 3-disc Blu-ray debut — enjoys a bulletproof reputation as The Greatest Movie Ever Made … What isn’t so generally known is that the film’s prominent place in so many film classes — and for that matter, the fact that there
are film classes in the first place — has a lot to do with the work of a revolutionary Catholic film critic and theorist, André Bazin, whose critical theories were shaped by the same tradition of Christian personalist philosophy that informed the writings of Pope John Paul II.
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(Newly available on Blu-ray/DVD) Rather than a static motion picture,
Fantasia was originally conceived as a repertoire, a selection of presentations that over time could be augmented by new pieces while old ones were retired, like an orchestra rotating its concert lineup … Ten years ago, amid the wreckage at the end of the 1990s Disney Renaissance, the Disney studio marked
Fantasia’s 60th anniversary with
Fantasia 2000, a film intended to honor in a way the original repertory conception of
Fantasia.
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The pope’s remarks were both forward looking, speaking to the potential of cinema to become “a more and more positive factor in the development of individuals and a stimulus for the conscience of society as a whole,” and also historically minded, speaking positively of the praiseworthy contributions of “many worthwhile productions during the first hundred years of [the cinema’s] existence.”
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A- |
**** |
+0|
Teens & Up
It is an extraordinary artifact from another culture, a mythology as remarkable and as alien as the
Epic of Gilgamesh or the Icelandic
Eddas. For students of silent film, this is one of those indispensable landmarks you must see before you die.
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B- |
*** |
+0|
Adults
As yet, I have found no illumination in critical accolades and
explanations. No critical account of La Strada I have read
has struck me as compelling or illuminating. Pauline Kael
famously wrote that the three main characters represent the
flesh, the spirit, and the mind. But the same could be said for
virtually any trinity of characters, from Lancelot, Arthur, and
Guinevere to Kirk, Spock and McCoy to Mr. Toad, Mole, and Rat,
and what light this paradigm sheds on this particular story is
unclear to me. Alan Stone calls it "a parable about Italy under
fascism and the possibility of Christian Salvation," but I can’t
see that it has anything interesting to say about this either, or
that it says it in an interesting way.
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B |
***½ |
-2|
Adults
Though more of a Fellini skeptic than not myself, I can’t go
along with the common opinion that Fellini’s early
neorealist-inflected works, culminating in
La Strada, are his best, and that the
later, increasingly surreal cinema of the gaudy and fantastical
represented by
8½; is self-indulgently trivial by
comparison.
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B+ |
***½ |
+0|
Adults
For Yank audiences who may be unfamiliar with the historical
context, Jeff Shannon of Amazon.com calls the film "an Italian
equivalent to Gone With the Wind," a rough-and-ready
in-a-nutshell classification that is not without merit. Both
films are elegiac wartime epics lamenting the passing of an
elegant and aristocratic way of life; both are based on popular
novels; both deal with elevated soap-opera-like
goings-on.
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A+ |
**** |
+2|
Teens & Up
Perhaps the single most remarkable thing about Grand
Illusion, Jean Renoir’s classic pre-WWII WWI masterpiece, is
that it practices rather than preaches its rigorous humanism,
regarding every character with sympathy and nuance. German or
French, noble or common, Gentile or Jew, man or woman — all are
simply human in this semi-comic tale of civilized warfare at the
end of the age of nobility. Characters on both sides of these
divides display various forms of prejudice, from antisemitism to
class-based snobbery, but none is reviled or scorned.
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A |
**** |
+2|
Teens & Up
Surreal, sprawling, and operatic, drawing on
biblical and medieval Christian imagery as well as H. G. Wells’s
The Time Machine, Fritz Lang’s deeply influential pulp
allegory
Metropolis colonized a new realm of the
imagination that has shaped subsequent science fiction from
Flash Gordon to
Star Wars, from "The Jetsons" to
Blade Runner.
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A |
**** |
+1-1|
Teens & Up
2001: A Space Odyssey doesn’t just
depict a quantum leap forward in human consciousness — it
practically requires such a leap, on an individual scale, from
the viewer. Like the hominid in the first act who looks at a bone
and suddenly sees what no hominid has ever seen before, one must
watch
2001 in a different way from other films.
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A |
**** |
+0|
Teens & Up
Stagecoach is not the greatest Western of all time, but has been called the first great Western, and played a key role in the status of the Western as the quintessential American genre.
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A- |
***½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
Much of the comedy comes from reversal of stereotypes, with
the mild-mannered, middle-class Holland aspiring to the role of
criminal mastermind, and Holland’s elderly landlady (Edie Martin)
knowledgeably conversing with bemused bobbies in street slang
learned from dime-store crime fiction. And while the
caper-gone-wrong comedy genre has been done to death in recent
decades,
The Lavender Hill Mob avoids most of what became
the clichés of the genre.
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A+ |
**** |
+2|
Teens & Up
While working on
Citizen Kane, Welles joked that "If
they ever let me do a second picture, I’m lucky." He was only
half right. He was lucky enough to make many additional pictures,
some of them masterpieces in their own right. But the luckiest he
ever got, which is more than lucky enough, was getting to make
Citizen Kane itself. That unprecedented level of control
and magical synergy was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity — and,
to his immortal credit, Welles made the most of it. He made
Citizen Kane.
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A |
***½ |
+2|
Kids & Up
Thus, while
Little Women is far from hostile to its
male characters, it has a positive feminine character and defines
its protagonists not by relationships with men but by moral
choices, experiences, and relationships with one another, their
mother, and their community. Part comedy of manners, part
morality tale, it’s more interested in its heroines "conquering
themselves" than in a man conquering their hearts.
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A- |
***½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
Though diminished by decades of pop-horror incarnations, the vampire remains uniquely evocative of both dread and fascination, horror and seductiveness. Monsters from werewolves to Freddy Krueger may frighten, but neither victims nor audience are drawn to them. By contrast, the vampire suggests the horror of evil working on our disordered passions.
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A |
**** |
+1-1|
Kids & Up*
Silent films were already old-fashioned and out of vogue in 1936 when Charlie Chaplin completed his last silent feature film,
Modern Times, almost ten years after the sound revolution began with
The Jazz Singer. A silent film consciously made for the sound era,
Modern Times is a comic masterpiece that remains approachable today even for movie lovers raised on computer imaging and surround sound.
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A+ |
**** |
+2|
Kids & Up
The Wizard of Oz is one of a very few
shared experiences that unite Americans as a culture, transcending barriers of age, locale, politics, religion, and so on. We all see it when we are young, and it leaves an indelible mark on our imaginations. We can hardly imagine not knowing it. It ranks among our earliest and most defining experiences of wonder and of fear, of fairy-tale joys and terrors, of the lure of the exotic and the comfort of home.
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A+ |
**** |
+1|
Kids & Up
If
Fantasia failed to spark a hoped-for entertainment
revolution, its achievement is all the more starkly singular. A
joyous experiment in pure animation, an ambitious work of
imaginative power, a showcase of cutting-edge technique, and a
celebration of great music, it is without precedent and without
rival. I’ve watched it far too many times to count, and I have
yet to begin tiring of it.
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