C’era una volta il cinema 1
One cinema visit this week, marked with a *. After all, the films of Sergio Leone have something to do with death.
A Fistful of Dollars (1964)
The rise of DVD and the success of American television has had an unfortunate side effect. When it comes to widescreen framing for the big screen, directors who’ve worked predominately in television, advertising or music videos simply do not have a clue. JJ Abrams, creator of Alias and Lost, was heavily criticised for his filming of Mission Impossible III (2006) as if it was just another TV show: too many closeups, too many cuts, not the faintest idea that his images would be projected on forty foot wide cinema screens. What a contrast it is to watch Sergio Leone at work, a man with an instinctive feel for composition and shot selection where not a frame is wasted. Leone wasn’t an intellectual or a political filmmaker (except after Leone started to believe his own press), he was an instinctual one, and the effects he achieved reach such a fine pitch of pure visual cinema that it is hard to remember that a lot of the imagery we’ve enjoyed over the last 40 years started here in this low-budget, second-string Italian western.
Eastern Promises (2007) *
In which the Cronenberg project has continued to infect the local multiplex after the success of A History of Violence (2005). There are similar narrative tricks at work in this new film, which a second viewing will highlight. I don’t know whether it’s a result of his Canadian upbringing, but there’s a chilliness of affect Cronenberg brings to his films that’s quite unique. They have an unrelenting quality, a suggestion of inevitability. Things could only turn out the way they turn out because there was no other way they could go. There was an amusing “ban this filth” non-story in The Sunday Times last week, in which quite clearly nobody outside the newspaper had any interest. The simple defence of the violence in this film is this – this is what violence really looks like: nasty, brutal and bloody; utterly unredeeming, utterly unstylised, utterly shocking. Criticising Cronenberg for an honest approach to violence is a dead end, and the so-called Arts Editor who wrote the piece should be sacked for lacking cultural awareness, intelligence, comprehension and film literacy.