The Art House Strikes Back

Over the past week, I’ve enjoyed a little “staycation” (that is, a vacation where you don’t actually go anywhere) from my job at the Rainbow Factory. I decided to take advantage of this by catching up on my movie watching. To my surprise and delight, Hulu Plus offers a ton of Criterion films commercial-free and unedited.

                For those of you unfamiliar, the Criterion Collection is a video label that specializes in art-house foreign films, as well as American films with a unique vision or voice, films like Rashomon, Wild Strawberries, 8 ½ and Harold and Maude. These DVDs/Blu-Rays tend to be higher in price, difficult to find in brick and mortar stores and (lately) even hard to get to on Netflix.  Thus, finding a lot of them right at my fingertips, available to watch whenever I want (for a low monthly fee of $7.99) was a godsend.

                Oh, and they have TV shows to, if you’re into that sort of thing.

                So, what did I watch?

                I watched: The Phantom Carriage, The Seventh Seal, Orpheus, Good Morning, The Naked Kiss, The Rules of the Game, The Battle of Algiers, L’Atalante, Mon Oncle, Zero de Conduite, The Exterminating Angel as well as the documentaries The Love Goddess, Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope, Direct Your Own Damn Movie! and Poultry in Motion.

                (On Netflix, I watched Persona, Arsenic and Old Lace, Wet Hot American Summer and Sabrina. On DVD I watched The Saphead, Midnight in Paris, Brazil and The Sweet Smell of Success. As well as a wonderful double feature: Citizen Kane followed by Plan 9 from Outer Space.)

                Why am I telling you all this? Why am I gloating about the fact that I spent the last week and a half on my ass, doing nothing productive?

                Because I feel like what I did is the cinematic equivalent of going to Lourdes.

                I went out and re-discovered cinema, I reminded myself why I love this stuff so much, why movies captivate me, why I have decided to dedicate my life to studying them, and teaching others about them. I feel cleansed. I feel refreshed.

                Sure, I could have gone to the beach, gotten a sunburn, sand in uncomfortable places and spent a lot of money I didn’t have, but that’s just not my cup of tea.

                Let me tell you about some of the things I discovered.

                First, Jean Vigo, a French filmmaker, who sadly died at the young age of 29 from tuberculosis. He only completed one feature-length film: L’Atalante, which is a beautiful and touching film, but that wasn’t the one that amazed me, the one that amazed me was his previous film, Zero de Conduite, with a running time of only 45 minutes, Vigo shows us a strict school for boys and how while the boys can be little hellions and get into all kinds of mischief, their teachers aren’t much better. Full of surrealistic touches (the headmaster is a midget with a bead down to his waist, dummies fill the stands at a rally), the film is poetic and charming an anti-authority film that rallies not only against the oppressive teachers and headmasters, but against cinema itself, a film that dares to go its own way. The real surprise for me was discovering that the film was released in 1933 (the same year as King Kong, Duck Soup and The Invisible Man), but if you had asked me while I was watching it, I would have sworn that it was from the 1960’s, and that Vigo must have been a contemporary of Truffaut and Goddard. Zero de Conduite was truly ahead of its time (the fact that it was banned until 1945 should tell you something).

                Next, I will commit cinematic blasphemy. The Rules of the Game.

                I didn’t dig it.

                Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fine film, one that is well directed, well acted, well written, but…well, it just left me a little cold. Perhaps it is because I’ve seen so many drawing room comedies, where the rich gather at a hunting lodge and hop in and out of one another’s arms. Perhaps it’s the film’s historical significance that I’m not appreciating. Who knows? Maybe one day I’ll look back on these words, smack myself in the forehead and go, “What was I thinking? How could I not appreciate that movie?”

                Wouldn’t be the first time.

                (Actually, Brazil was a film that I had a hard time getting into previously, but one that I thoroughly enjoyed once I actually sat down and watched it this past week.)

                But this doubt speaks more to my own neurosis, that fear that I have, the one that says that when I don’t appreciate something, the defect is in me, not in whatever it is I’m viewing. The Rules of the Game is widely considered one of the greatest films ever made and here I am, rather bored with it. Is it because I’m an overweight, undereducated American who wouldn’t know true art if it slapped me in the face? Or is it simply a subjective choice? As my old screenwriting professor used to say, “That’s why they make chocolate and vanilla.”

                Anyone who knows me knows that I enjoy sharing my love of movies with others, exposing them to films that they have never seen, but that I think they would enjoy. (My batting average on this is fairly high). My wife, Sarah, and I decided to do the mother of all double features (we enjoy doing this sometimes, making tacos and watching The Evil Dead Trilogy or Alien and Aliens) in Citizen Kane and Plan 9 from Outer Space.

                Citizen Kane, considered by many to be the greatest (or at least one of the greatest) motion pictures ever made. The photography, the mise-en-scene, the lighting, the acting, the script, everything firing on all cylinders and creating a remarkable motion picture, one that can be (and has been) studied one frame at a time.

                Plan 9 from Outer Space, considered by many to be the worst (or at least one of the worst) motion pictures ever made. The cardboard sets, the obvious Astroturf in the cemetery, the piles of stock footage that doesn’t match what Ed Wood filmed, Bela Lugosi’s double who resembles the Lugosi as much as I do, everything misfiring and creating a hodgepodge mess one that can be (and has been) laughed at and ridiculed time and time again.

                I was asked if the wife and I experienced mental whiplash from such a double feature.

                So, that was my week, the great (The Battle of Algiers, Orpheus, The Seventh Seal), the awful, (Plan 9 from Outer Space), and everything in between (Wet Hot American Summer, The Saphead, The Naked Kiss).

                As I said before, I feel refreshed, rejuvenated and one with the cosmos.