C’era una volta il cinema 2
No cinema visits this week. After all, the films of Sergio Leone have something to do with death.
For a Few Dollars More (1965)
Armed with a bigger budget for the second Dollars film, Sergio Leone was able to achieve a fuller effect. One of the more subtle improvements over the first film is that Leone was able to employ extras to populate his offbeat recreations of Western towns (though it could be said that the lack of extras in A Fistful of Dollars (1964) only adds to the existentialism of it all). Leone was preoccupied with research and realism as a frontispiece to the scenes behind which the narrative can take place, which is very different to the Hollywood attitude. Christopher Frayling, in his recommended biography of Leone, recounts an incident in which a librarian at the Library of Congress in Washington was astonished by Leone’s requests for background research materials on the reality of life in the West that no American film director had asked to view in the 20 years the librarian had worked there. The end result is the intense weathering of the sets, the smoky atmosphere in the saloons, the cruddy costumes of the cast, detailed replica firearms, and Clint Eastwood’s unshaven face. Yet this realism serves only as a mask behind which the surrealism, carnival, satire and unreality of Leone’s approach can occur and an Italian mythos of the West is produced. Over time, this method has become dulled through its repetition by inferior talents, but in 1965 it was absolutely new.
Irréversible (2002)
Along with Mulholland Dr. (2001), The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (2001-03) and INLAND EMPIRE (2006), this film completes my quartet of the only bona fide cinema classics to have been produced in the 21st Century of cinema. So far. It’s over four years since I saw it at the cinema and knew I was in the presence of something special. What I’ve found is that doubts set in about the film only afterwards when you’re not in its presence: doubts as to how seriously Gaspar Noé intends any of this, doubts about the incessant references to rectums, buggery and vaginas, doubts about every aspect of the making of the film, in fact. But all of these doubts disappeared once I started to watch the film again. As a boring liberal, there’s nothing I find more boring than having my liberal prejudices reconfirmed by a filmmaker telling me something I already know. For example, I haven’t seen Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) because I already know George Bush is an idiot and I don’t need Michael Moore to remind me. With cinema, I want to see something I’ve never seen before, something to astonish me, upset me, offend me, take me completely out of myself into worlds I would want to visit myself or never want to visit, not to escape the old, but to experience the new. And Irréversible delivers all of this in spades.