by ·Comments Off on The Round-Up (1965, Miklós Jancsó)

Emory played this for us on 35mm, introduced by poet and politician Gyula Kodolányi who watched it in Hungary during its opening run… and this is the night after I saw a perfect print of The Age of Innocence introduced by Salman Rushdie. If their film screenings are about to stop, as has been rumored, at least they’re going out on top.

Scary movie. First 90ish minutes I’m wondering “where are they going with this”, then it all comes together in the last five. Set in the 1860’s but meant to illustrate and refer to interrogation techniques of the 1960’s (surprised he got away with it). Stark black-and-white, artfully composed in widescreen, with long-ish shots (nothing over a couple minutes), set at a prison out on the plains and a few surrounding buildings.

A hundred or more prisoners are being held together, a few in solitary covered with hoods and the rest in a large courtyard, but the guards don’t know whether they’ve captured the rebel leader and which of the prisoners are his horsemen. Threat of execution turns one prisonder, a pointy-hatted murderer, into a not-so-covert inside agent for the jailers. Guards capture a local woman and torture her to death in view of the prisoners, provoking suicides. Ultimately the jailers succeed through some twisty psych tricks into getting two elder rebel soldiers to identify themselves. A competition is staged, and the winner gets to select a troop of men to leave prison and join him. It’s announced that the rebel leader has been granted amnesty, and the new troops all cheer. The guards, now having identified the rebels, descend upon them with hoods…

Bright Lights:

In the concise (20-minute) but revealing interview included by Second Run with The Round-Up, Jancsó pauses to explain the larger context intended by these films, that is, how they were meant to universalize human cruelty beyond apparent, coded references to the then recent 1956 Soviet action. Speaking carefully and succinctly, Jancsó offers two themes: “the humiliation by the powerful” and “the defenselessness of the people.”

by ·Comments Off on The Age of Innocence (1993, Martin Scorsese)

Not gonna say too much except that I was hella impressed by this movie. It’s the sort of high-society period piece I usually stay away from, but with balls-out film technique and beautiful cinematography.

Swell, stringy music by Elmer Bernstein (Sweet Smell of Success, every 80’s comedy, Far From Heaven). Beautiful opening titles by Saul Bass. Shot by Michael Ballhaus (The Departed, Quiz Show, tons of Fassbinder) and edited by Powell’s widow. Production designer worked with Fellini and Pasolini, costumer (who won the film’s only oscar) worked with Ruiz, Gilliam, Leone and Fellini, and the set decorator worked on RoboCop 3 and The Lathe of Heaven.

Glad to see macaws and peacocks. Noticed a Samuel Morse painting that I’ve seen at the High. Spent a whole scene staring at the actors’ clothes and the surrounding paintings, thinking about the color combinations. Distracting but very brief cameo by Scorsese as a wedding photographer. Playful transitions, irises, fades to color, rear projection and some super matte work.

The story, okay I might not have given it my full attention because of the colors and the irises, but fully modern man Daniel Day-Lewis is paired with innocent traditional girl Winona Ryder, but then he falls for fiery scandalous Michelle Pfeiffer instead. Eventually DDL is so widely suspected of having an affair with Pfeiffer that he may as well have – but never did. Lots of unspoken thoughts going on, DDL/Ryder’s marriage in the 20-years-later epilogue seems like the Crane Wife, like society would fly apart if they ever spoke what’s on their minds. All the actors very good – I thought Pfeiffer stood out, but the academy preferred Ryder. Great to see Geraldine Chaplin, looking good a decade after Love on the Ground, though she had very little to say or do. Richard Grant played as much of a villain as the film had, a sideways-smiling scandal-slinger, and Jonathan Pryce showed up towards the end as a Frenchman (dunno why, with all the opulence on display, Scorsese couldn’t afford an actual Frenchman).

Appropriate to watch this right after the Michael Powell movies, given Scorsese’s love for Powell’s films. I wouldn’t have guessed the fight scenes in Raging Bull were influenced by The Red Shoes ballet before I heard it in the DVD commentary. Also appropriate to watch this soon after Orlando and soon before The Piano, a sort of 1993 oscar-campaign review.

2020 Edit: watched again on Criterion Channel, noticed two separate things that might’ve been stolen by A Very Long Engagement, and wondered if the narration is from the novel. Wicked line: “but what if all her calm, her niceness, were just a negation – a curtain dropped in front of an emptiness?”

by ·Comments Off on Alexander Nevsky (1938, Sergei Eisenstein)

This will sound awfully disrespectful, but you’d think the renowned master of montage Eisenstein, he who reinvented movie editing, could pick up the pace a little. This movie drags. Each shot has a wonderful composition, and each shot is held for a second or two too long. And to be more disrespectful still, I beg to differ with E. Von Mueller calling Prokofiev’s score the best in history. But maybe he’s kicking back at home with an LP of the full orchestral arrangement, not the weak bits on the film itself (Criterion essay on the director/composer collaboration calls the soundtrack on the film “like a chamber ensemble recorded over a telephone”). I’ve still got to hear the re-recorded score sometime. And I intended to… but after the movie and the DVD commentary, I didn’t feel like going through it a third time.

The bloodless battle on the ice wasn’t exactly choreographed by Sammo Hung… buncha overarmored guys clumsily smacking into each other with weapons. But I’ve made fun of the acclaimed classic film enough now. Composition-wise it is beyond reproach… some of the most amazing-looking shots of the 30’s. A beautiful movie and a swell piece of anti-German propaganda (which is why it was celebrated, then banned, then celebrated).

How you know the Germans are Bad Men: they toss naked babies into fire:
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Russia is under Mongol rule, but this is mostly ignored. Nevsky kicked the asses of the Swedes or some other country previously, so he’s called on to protect Russia from the invading Germans, who have already conquered one major town and killed everyone in it, including babies. Meanwhile in another town, two tough guys are competing for the only pretty girl. She says she’ll marry whichever fights the most bravely. So off they go with Nevsky, the town armorer (who dies from being too generous, giving away his best armor and saving the leftovers for himself) and a hot warrior woman. Battle on the ice lasts some 30 minutes. Crowd scenes outdo most of your Braveheart / Lord of the Rings epic battles with lovely, artistic shots of actual masses of people (outdone later in Ivan The Terrible), but close-ups of battle are a little lame. After, one guy is dying, other guy generously tosses the pretty girl at him and goes after the hot warrior chick. The glory of Russia is restored (well, they’re still under Mongol rule) and Nevsky goes back to his humble fishing life, after issuing a stern warning to the Germans which is screamed across the screen in giant bold text!

Mr. Nevsky:
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by ·Comments Off on The Lady (1992, Dariush Mehrjui)

This film was banned by Iranian authorities for no declared reason, then released six years later, uncut, again for no reason. Also no reason why, a decade later, its director came to Emory to present it in person followed by a confrontational Q&A. Screening was packed – must’ve been every Iranian-Atlantan in that building at once.

Banoo (Miriam, “The Lady”) is left by her international-businessman husband (who has been having an affair abroad with a younger woman), frightened to be in the huge house by herself. Meanwhile, her neighbor the groundskeeper and his pregnant, sick, bitchy wife, are kicked out of their shack and she invites them to move in. They invite other family members, including a friendly young woman with babies, and one of their fathers, Khan Salar, a good cook but a habitual liar and thief. The maid quits and the poor family takes over the rich house (a la Viridiana). Banoo is pleased with her new family, and they have a lovely feast of a dinner one night, the peak of happiness in the movie.

After that, it’s all downhill, mostly because Khan Salar starts stealing everything in the house and selling it with his crooked partner, while Banoo retreats upstairs into a daze and stops eating or talking to anyone. She’s friends with a doctor, who says he always wanted to marry her, but she acts strangely cold towards him in the second half and never tries to get his non-medical help. Finally the husband comes home, pays off everybody to leave permanently, and tries to fix up his wife.

Also watched 30-minute Dear Cousin Is Lost from a 2000 compilation film (involving M. Makhmalbaf), which the director claims is his favorite work because it’s more freeform, with a more experimental narrative than his others. A movie is being filmed, but the director is fretting over the shot of an actor on a high tower at the beach, yelling for him not to allow the despair of the sunset to reflect in his eyes. Actor, meanwhile, spaces out on his long-lost girl who disappeared into the sea. She reappears as a ghost, wanders around with him while the movie crew wonders why their actor has just died up on the tower. As paramedics are rising to bring his body down, he returns, wakes up. I don’t think the director gets his shot, though. Oh, and there’s dream-logic stuff about stealing electronic equipment and getting in fights.

Director got upset at people who think the characters in the movie represent all of Iran, who suggest the lead female character wasn’t strong & independent enough, and who ask what he thinks of other Iranian filmmakers, but still managed not to come off as cranky. I enjoyed the interview and the movies.

Ezzatolah Entezami (played old guy Khan Salar) starred in M. Makhmalbaf’s Once Upon a Time, Cinema the same year, and Mehrjui’s debut feature The Cow in 1969. Guy who played the doctor is better known as a cinematographer – shot Offside, The Wind Will Carry Us, Salaam Cinema, and the short we just watched. Banoo herself only in a few other movies, including Mehrjui’s earlier Hamoun. Screening was dedicated to Khosro Shakibai, an actor who played the lead(?) in the short and the husband in The Lady, who died in July of this year.

by ·Comments Off on My Man Godfrey (1936, Gregory La Cava)

On a drunken socialite scavenger hunt, Irene picks up “forgotten man” Godfrey at the dump. He asks her for a job, and she hires him as the family butler. A shave and a new suit later, he shows up at the house, gets shown around by the maid Molly, introduced to dizzy & spacy Irene, mean & nasty sister Cornelia, their eccentric mother, frustrated father, and an artist named Carlo who just hangs around. Irene and Molly are hot for Godfrey, Cornelia wants to get rid of him, and he seems too smart to be a regular bum.

But aha, Godfrey is a Harvard business man who gave away all his money to live free, and after regaining his self-respect by being a good butler, he takes the jewels that Cornelia tries to plant to get him arrested, pawns ’em, makes a fortune on some stock deals, bails out the broke father (after dad hurls Carlo through a window), then gets Cornelia back her necklace. Godfrey opens a happenin’ joint called The Dump, hires his old dump buddies, Irene follows him to his office and marries him by force.

Plot description doesn’t sound amazing, but it’s a screwball comedy… the fun is in watching smooth pencil-mustached Godfrey (post-Thin Man William Powell) deal with daffy Irene (post-Twentieth Century Carole Lombard) and Cornelia (pre-Stage Door Gail Patrick), surrounded by the unflappable mom (post-Gay Divorcee Alice Brady), furious dad (big, frog-voiced Eugene Pallette, pre-Lady Eve), sadsack Molly (pre-You Only Live Once Jean Dixon), easily-spooked Carlo (pre-You Can’t Take It With You Mischa Auer) and their boring harvard friend Tommy Gray (John Ford regular Alan Mowbray) who doesn’t actually add to the fun, he’s just around as a plot contrivance. Other than Gray, everyone here is wonderful and the writing is super. The whole harvard-dump thing struck me a little wrong, but it’s a depression-era cheer-up madcap comedy so I let it go. Would happily watch this again. Katy liked it too but complained that it wasn’t one of the greatest comedies of all time, because she can’t just walk away happy from a movie for some reason.

Former cartoonist La Cava’s 160th movie, if IMDB is to be believed, and the co-writer worked on three Marx Brothers movies. I looked for Frank Tashlin-esque cartoony bits but couldn’t find any. Movie got acting nominations in all four categories, plus directing and writing at the oscars, but won nothing. Within a decade, Lombard and Brady were dead and Patrick, Pallette and Dixon were retired. Didn’t seem like a cast that was on the way out the door. Movie was remade in the 50’s with David Niven, June Allyson and Eva “Green Acres” Gabor.

M. Kennedy at Bright Lights: “Repeatedly, La Cava and company serve up the rich as silly, frivolous, childlike, and trivial, while the poor are strong, dignified, generous, and compassionate. Miraculously, he gives us these elemental distinctions without the torpor of penny-ante philosophizing or the goo of Capraesque speechifying.”

December 2022: Watched again – Katy is mad about the ending but agrees that the rest is good.

by ·Comments Off on A Story of Floating Weeds (1934, Yasujiro Ozu)

My first mid-30’s silent film. Chaplin’s Modern Times doesn’t count, and the Russian Happiness was two years earlier. Japan still had union narrators in theaters, so their cinema stayed silent longer than most.

Traveling actor Kihachi brings his troupe to the town where his ex-girl and illegitimate son live. K. has made himself scarce, sending money whenever he can, so the boy (Shinkichi, now 20) could grow up without the burden of a no-good father, and whenever Kihachi’s in town he stays with the mother and sees the boy.

Kihachi’s current woman in the troupe suspects something is up, finds out the story through bribery and sets up younger girl Otoki to go after the boss’s son. The two fall in love, and Kihachi tries to break it up, leading to the revelation that he is Shinkichi’s father. Meanwhile, constant rain means the troupe can’t perform, and finally they’re out of work long enough to have to sell off their stuff and break up. After an emotional climax, the young lovers stay behind, and Kihachi and his girl make up at the train station, heading off to form a new troupe.

Great movie, slow-building, ends up as emotional and true-feeling as the other Ozus I’ve seen. I ought to watch at least one per year. They are refreshing. Kihachi somehow stays sympathetic even though he hits everyone in the movie at some point. That’s just how he communicates, I suppose. Definitely different kinds of families here than in Tokyo Story or Equinox Flower.

This was something like Ozu’s thirtieth movie, and it’s said to be the beginning of his mature style. It’s an uncredited remake of Hollywood’s oscar-winning part-talkie The Barker from 1928, which was also remade twice in Hollywood (with Clara Bow in ’33 and Betty Grable in ’45).

Half these actors had been in Ozu’s Passing Fancy the year before. The kid had later roles in Kon Ichikawa and Seijun Suzuki movies, and his father appeared in Ozu’s own 1959 color remake Floating Weeds. Maybe Katy will watch that with me next year – Masters of Cinema’s N. Wrigley calls it the most beautiful Ozu film.

by ·Comments Off on Avant-Garde Feminist Shorts

I passed up seeing The Scarlet Empress in 35mm for this, but it was probably worth it [later note after having finally watched The Scarlet Empress: nope].

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943, Maya Deren)
One of the great poetic movies of the 40’s. Love when she’s climbing the stairs, bouncing off the walls as the camera twists from side to side. Love the multiple Mayas sitting at a table in the same shot (technically impressive, too). Love the movement, the plot (avant-filmmakers take note: an actual plot), the look, that iconic shot of Maya at the window.

Fuses (1967, Carolee Schneemann)
Fairly rapidly-edited shots of director having sex with James Tenney, with other scratched and weathered colored filmstrips superimposed over it. The editing and content are exciting for about ten minutes, but the movie is twenty minutes long, and silent. Girl in front of me tried reading from the reflected light of Tenney’s alarmingly red-tinted penis on the classroom wall, then texted people for a while. I sat wondering why there were so many shots of her cat staring out the window. Maybe it was supposed to be boring, and that was the point. Worth watching on pristine 16mm, glad I saw it, just saying it felt long. Schneemann has few film credits, but they’re in collaboration with Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono and Stan Brakhage. The Brakhage influence can plainly be seen here, and the film process work makes for some wonderful images. This was apparently a reaction to the objectification of women in movies, with Window Water Baby Moving named as an example. The director: “I wanted to see if the experience of what I saw would have any correspondence to what I felt – the intimacy of the lovemaking… And I wanted to put into that materiality of film the energies of the body, so that the film itself dissolves and recombines and is transparent and dense – as one feels during lovemaking.” Won a special jury prize at Cannes.

Reassemblage (1982, Trinh T. Minh-ha)
Black with ambient sound. Then shots of a rural scene in Senegal with silence. More shots with narration. More shots with ambient sound. More narration. Eventually, more black. The sound is rarely commenting directly on the visuals, and even the ambient sound rarely seems to line up. Shots of bare-breasted African women, daily chores, kids (two albinos!), youth playing in the river, and so on, with comments about ethnography. The commentary might make sense written down, but as we heard it, all scattered and edited (the sound editing was pretty poor), it seemed to circle around some points without managing to make any. Got nothing against the film, was fine to hang out in Senegal for a while. L. Thielan: “By disjunctive editing and a probing narration this ‘documentary’ strikingly counterpoints the authoritative stance typical of the National Geographic approach.”

Reassemblage:
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First Comes Love (1991, Su Friedrich)
Pop music by the Beatles, James Brown, Willie Nelson and more, but someone please get this woman a cross-fader – it’s all so abruptly edited. The songs sometimes work really well with the images, though. Image is of four wedding ceremonies, astoundingly woven together into an ethnographic study of heterosexual marriage ceremony, interrupted by a text crawl of all the countries in which homosexual marriage is prohibited (every country but Denmark). Bell & Zryd: “This simple strategy, which contrasts the lush life of heterosexual ritual with the stark legal and constitutional realities of gay and lesbian relationships, reframes the anthropological text with political rigor.” Rigor isn’t something I look for in a movie, but avant-critics love to proclaim it. What rigor! Anyway, would like very much to see more of her work.

Girlpower (1992, Sadie Benning)
I hear the intro feedback of a Sonic Youth song and all is right in the world. Even though this movie (the shortest of the bunch, I expect) is a half-res crap-quality videotape, the music and narration are clear. About the narration – sounds like either a petulant girl or a woman in performance-art mode… an impressionistic video diary of disaffected youth, comfortable with herself but not with society. Aha, Benning was 30 at the time. Lotta shots of the television. Punk film, but with nicer sound editing than the Friedrich, weird. Short, enjoyed it. Ooh, she’s James Benning’s daughter.

by ·1 Comment

Great presentation of a not-so-great movie. Nobody ever called episode six of Red Heroine the best-ever silent martial-arts serial from China, but today it is the only surviving silent martial-arts serial from China, and therefore an important fragment of popular film history. The Devil’s Music Ensemble are touring it around the country, providing much better music than it deserves. Not that it’s a particularly bad movie, it’s just a standard piece of fluff to which nobody would give a second thought if it didn’t have to stand alone to represent an entire lost genre of Chinese film. So the D.M.E. is to be highly praised for their work and for enhancing our knowledge of film history, but the movie itself, well, it is what it is.

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What it is: a 90-minute self-contained revenge drama, the prequel to the prequel to the prequel to Kill Bill. Army invades, girl’s grandmother is killed and girl is kidnapped to become the general’s wife, but before that can happen, crazy-bearded White Monkey kicks the general’s ass and rescues her. Three years later the same thing is happening (minus the dead grandmother) to a new girl, a friend of the old girl’s “brothercousin” (so sayeth the awesome intertitles). Old girl reappears flying through the air (to great applause from the packed Emory crowd) as Red Heroine. She kicks the ass of the general and his hilarious bucktoothed assistant/bodyguard, and rescues the girl whom she suggests should marry her brothercousin. There’s minimal action, all shot wide, and no definite references to the other episodes of the series (maybe White Monkey was in them?).

IMDB’s details are muddled on this film and director, so this is from Kung Fu Cinema Dot Com:

Director Wen Yimin, who can also be seen in a supporting role as a young scholar in RED HEROINE, was a Manchurian who was born in Beijing in 1890. His work for the Youlian studio, which included helming the HEROIC SONS AND DAUGHTERS series (1927-1931) and at least two of the RED HEROINE films (1929-1930), established him as one of China’s first genre directors. In 1934, he moved to the Unique studio, an early venture by the Shaw brothers, who would go on to dominate the Hong Kong film industry decades later. In 1936, Wen co-directed a film, MADAME LAI, with future mogul Shaw Run-me. Wen permanently moved to Hong Kong after the war, where he sometimes worked under the Cantonese version of his name, Man Yat-man.

He is frequently credited as an assistant director to the prolific leftist filmmaker Zhu Shilin. Another frequent collaborator was director Ren Yizhi, daughter of Shanghai pioneer Ren Pengnian. He continued to appear in supporting roles in a number of mid-century dramas and action/adventure films. In 1965, he moved to Taiwan, and worked as an actor there until his retirement. He died in 1978.

by ·Comments Off on three by Hollis Frampton and Kenneth Anger (1964-70)

Wonderful 16mm screening at Emory, but not well-received by the students and regulars who came to be entertained. Silly students and regulars, it is not a university’s job to entertain you!

Scorpio Rising – 1964, Kenneth Anger
Couldn’t remember if I’d seen this before, but of course I have… opening credits bedazzled onto a motorcycle jacket were immediately familiar. Despite the nazi imagery and comparisons between bikers headed for a gay orgy and Jesus and his disciples, I heard no complaints. I think people enjoyed the juxtapositions (well-prepared presenter Andy warned us about ’em in advance) and grooved on the hot 60’s rock radio score (kept hearing “oh I love this song” from behind me).

Lemon – 1969, Hollis Frampton
Lovely film, second time I’ve seen it. Should be shown every year. Only comment overheard: “I don’t know about the second movie. Just a lemon.” Mostly people were quiet about this one. I choose to believe that they were awed into silence, contemplating its light play and imagining possible deeper meanings, and not quietly wondering what they needed to pick up at the grocery store. A movie can feel much longer or shorter than it is. Lemon is supposed to be seven or eight minutes long, but I say it feels like four, five tops.

Zorns Lemma – 1970, Hollis Frampton
(no apostrophe, in tribute to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake)
Okay, this one feels its length… its exact length, measured second by second.
1) Black screen, voice reads us some children’s poetry, each line beginning with a successive letter of the Roman alphabet (so I=J and U=V) to make 24.
2) The meat of the piece, 24 seconds, one letter per section. First section we see each letter once. Then a word beginning with each letter. Then again (different shots, different words). Again. Again, but X has been replaced by a shaking, roaring fire. Again, with the fire. Again. Again. Again, but Z has been replaced by the ocean, flat horizon, a wave rolling out to sea. Again with the fire and the ocean. Again. 24 letters at 24 frames per second (though it’s 25 seconds if you consider that each alphabet section is followed by a second of black, a shout-out to our PAL-locked buds in Europe who see everything on video a little faster than we do). And on until, some 40 minutes later, each letter has been replaced (C was the last to go). No audio except the groaning and laughter of my fellow filmgoers.
3) Sound and Vision together! A visual cooling-down after part two, two people and their dog walk across a snowy field from bottom of the screen to top as six alternating female voices on the soundtrack read us some philosophical writings about light – at precisely one word per second.
4) The audience members (those who hadn’t walked out) were horrified!

D. Sallitt liked it:

The bizarre experience of taking a test during a movie was completely distracting, so that I absorbed the materiality and the narrativity of the alphabet images only indirectly, during brief rest periods. Somehow this strengthened my investment in the images: I don’t think I would have found the “letter H” guy’s walk around the corner very interesting in itself, but that corner took on mythic spatial qualities for me.

Hahaha, I know what he means about the corner. Of the little movies that replace each letter, seen in one-second increments, some stay pretty much the same (the fire, the tide) and some progress as time passes (someone peels and eats a tangerine, this guy walks towards a corner). Everyone breathes a little sigh of relief when, finally after a half hour, the man disappears around the corner in a one-second bit toward the end. Next bit is just the corner. Next one the man comes back around the corner! Must be considered one of the biggest twist endings in non-narrative avant-garde cinema.

excerpts from S. MacDonald:

Even a partial understanding of Frampton’s films requires a rudimentary sense of the history of mathematics, science, and technology and of the literary and fine arts. … Nowhere is Frampton’s assumption that his viewers can be expected to be informed, or to inform themselves, more obvious than in Zorns Lemma, the challenging film that established Frampton as a major contributor to alternative cinema. Zorns Lemma combines several areas of intellectual and esthetic interest Frampton had explored in his early photographic work and in his early films. His fascination with mathematics, and in particular with set theory … is the source of the title Zorns Lemma. Mathematician Max Zorn’s “lemma,” the eleventh axiom of set theory, proposes that, given a set of sets, there is a further set composed of a representative item from each set. Zorns Lemma doesn’t exactly demonstrate Zorn’s lemma, but Frampton’s allusion to the “existential axiom” is appropriate, given his use of a set of sets to structure the film. Frampton’s longtime interest in languages and literature is equally evident in Zorns Lemma. …

The tripartite structure of Zorns Lemma can be understood in various ways, at least two of them roughly suggestive of early film history. The progression from darkness, to individual onesecond units of imagery, to long, continuous shots. … If the second section of Zorns Lemma is Muybridgian – not only in its general use of the serial, but because the one-second bits of the replacement images “analyze” continuous activities or motions in a manner analogous to Muybridge’s motion studies – the final section is Lumieresque.

As set after set of alphabetized words and their environments is experienced, it is difficult not to develop a sense of Frampton’s experience making the film. The film’s collection of hundreds of environmental words suggests that the film was a labor of love, and an index of the filmmaker’s extended travels around lower Manhattan, looking for, finding, and recording the words.

For most viewers the experience of “learning” the correspondences is fatiguing – especially since the process of watching sixty shots a minute for more than forty-seven minutes is grueling by itself – but the laborious process has been willingly (if somewhat grudgingly) accepted. The experience of learning the correspondences is the central analogy of the second section. It replicates the experience of learning that set of terms and rules necessary for the exploration of any intellectual field.

In a philosophic sense, Grosseteste’s treatise [spoken during the third segment] is an attempt to understand the entirety of the perceivable world as an emblem of the spiritual. And, on the literal level, what Grosseteste describes in the eleventh century is demonstrated by the twentieth-century film image: For a filmmaker, after all, light is the “first bodily form,” which, literally, draws out “matter along with itself into a mass as great as the fabric of the world.”