Just when you thought there was nothing left for talking heads to say about movies, here’s a first-rate visit with many of the best cinematographers in the business–John Bailey, Vilmos Zsigmond, Laszlo Kovacs, Conrad Hall, the late Nestor Almendros, Gordon Willis, Haskell Wexler, Vittorio Storaro, and Sven Nykvist, among others–talking with rare insight and perception about their craft (and discussing some of their predecessors, such as Billy Bitzer and Gregg Toland). The filmmakers, Arnold Glassman, Todd McCarthy, and Stuart Samuels, are smart enough not only to listen to what these artists have to say, but to come up with the best clips from the best prints available to illustrate their comments. It’s a pity they’ve basically restricted their inquiry to the U.S. industry, though that’s not surprising considering that the American Film Institute, which coproduced the movie, pretty much limits its efforts to preserving and promoting local mogul interests, unlike its counterparts elsewhere in the world. (The many non-American cinematographers are also shown discussing almost exclusively their American work.) But the uncommon virtue of this 1992 documentary is that it teaches us a great deal about things we think we already know. Why, for instance, was the lighting so low in the Godfather films? Read more
This presentation of the Museum of Modern Art’s elaborate reconstruction of D.W. Griffith’s 1916 masterpiece–a reconstruction similar to the one done by the UCLA Film Archives on Cukor’s A Star Is Born in employing single-frame images where consecutive footage no longer survives–is a major film event. Described by Pauline Kael as “perhaps the greatest movie ever made and the greatest folly in movie history,” the film cuts between four stories linked by images of Lillian Gish and a quote from Whitman (“Out of the cradle, endlessly rocking…”: “The Nazarene” starring Bessie Love; “The Medieval Story,” involving the 1572 Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre of the Huguenots; “The Fall of Babylon,” featuring Constance Talmadge, Elmo Lincoln, Seena Owen, Tully Marshall, and eye-popping sets; and “The Mother and the Law,” an exciting contemporary story starring Mae Marsh and Robert Harron. Probably the most influential of all silent films after The Birth of a Nation, the film launched ideas about associative editing that have been essential to the cinema ever since, from Soviet montage classics to recent American experimental films; and for the sheer generating of suspense through crosscutting and action the film’s climax hasn’t been surpassed in 77 years. It runs four hours and ten minutes, including intermission, and will be shown with an original score by Joseph Carl Breil, performed by members of the University Symphony Orchestra and conducted by the Library of Congress’s Gillian Anderson. Read more
