The new issue of Cineaste is out and it’s expanded with a “Film and History Supplement.”

I haven’t had time to read the articles in depth, but a brief skimming looks promising:

ïA 2-page spread on Salt of the Earth (we’re somewhere around its 50th anniversary), which actually mentions the recent Los Angeles screening I blogged about a few months ago. (Incidentally, a settlement has been agreed upon, and it’s nice to see the same old faces at my local grocery stores again.)

ïDecent reviews of some recent personal favs (My Architect, The Return, Bus 174)

ïRobert Brent Toplin on “Cinematic History: An Anatomy of the Genre,” which includes these truisms: “Cinematic History Simplifies Historical Evidence and Excludes Many Details,” “Cinematic History Simplifies Plots by Featuring Only a Few Representative Characters,” “Cinematic History Offers Partisan Views of the Past, Clearly Identifying Heroes and Villians,” etc.

ïThe Cineaste Editors’ Choices for Favorite/Worst Historical Films, given that “history via film is not just a matter of fidelity to authentic period detail and factual accuracy, but to mood, manners, gestalt, zeitgeist, feelings.” (Tom Doherty)

Ten Favorite Historical Films
1. The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1965)
2. The Leopard (Luchino Visconti, 1963)
3. Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966)
4. Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1955)
5. The Rise of Louis XIV (Roberto Rossellini, 1966)
6. The Battle of Chile (Patricio Guzman, 1975-79)
7. Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962)
8. The Sorrow and the Pity (Marcel Ophuls, 1970)
9. JFK (Oliver Stone, 1991)
10. Salvatore Giuliano (Francesco Rosi, 1962)

Ten Worst Historical Films
1. The Birth of the Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915)
2. Mission to Moscow (Michael Curtiz, 1943)
3. Mississippi Burning (Alan Parker, 1988)
4. The Green Berets (John Wayne, 1968)
5. Revolution (Hugh Hudson, 1985)
6. North Star (Lewis Milestone, 1943)
7. The Alamo (John Wayne, 1960)
8. They Died With Their Boots On (Raoul Walsh, 1941)
9. Braveheart (Mel Gibson, 1995)
10. Forrest Gump (Robert Zemekis, 1994)

(And it’s interesting to note that JFK is a runner-up in the Worst category as well.)

As sometimes occurs, I had just purchased the relatively new Region 2 Japanese DVD set of Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausica‰ of the Valley of the Wind (1984) a few days before Disney announced it will release the film for Region 1 along with My Neighbor Totoro (1988) and Porco Rosso (1992) on August 31st.

But after watching the DVD, I have no complaints. If nothing else, it doesn’t have John Lasseter breathlessly offering spoilers for the film you’ve already purchased and are simply trying to watch, as do all the previous Miyazaki DVDs released by Disney. (One can only hope Pixar’s recent break from Disney will spare viewers from this annoying practice in the future.)

The Japanese DVD is a 2-disc affair jammed with extras, unfortunately only the film itself has English subtitles.

I’ve been excited to revisit Nausica‰ as it was the first Miyazaki film I saw (circa mid-’90s) and I remembered it as being extraordinary, even though it was the first feature film Miyazaki directed (based on a manga comic book he published). It has never been available in this country, although a severely edited VHS version was distributed by Anchor Bay entitled Warriors of the Wind.

My first impression upon watching the DVD was how beautifully-drawn and colored the film is. Miyazaki’s imagination is already running at full tilt, and desolate wastelands, lush woodlands, fertile valleys, and underground forests are all rendered with a great deal of epic sweep and detail. The other striking feature of the film is how truly archetypical it proved to be for Miyazaki’s subsequent career. The protagonist is a strong-willed, young, shojo girl, and the film’s ecological concerns, formation of conflicting social groups, and definitions of conflict along the lines of self-interest rather than categories of Good and Evil prefigure such films as Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986), Princess Mononoke (1997) (a film heavily indebted to Nausica‰), and Spirited Away (2001). Into this familiar yet environmentally-distinct milieu, Miyazaki firmly establishes his penchant for exhilarating flying scenes, air ship battles, mysterious and diverse animal life, and apocalyptic themes.

Like Yasujiro Ozu, Miyazaki has always enjoyed great popular success in his native homeland but has been relegated to poorly-promoted “specialized” or “foreign” categories of distribution in the States. (Until Spirited Away, that is.) And like Ozu, Miyazaki has maintained his own standards of storytelling and thematic obsessions despite this popularity. In her 2000 book Anime: from Akira to Princess Mononoke, Susan J. Napier suggests Miyazaki is by far the most ideologically-focused of anime filmmakers, revealing the falsehood that popular audiences shy away from entertainment with ideas:

What is Miyazaki’s vision? It is one that incorporates an ethical (some critics would say moralistic) agenda that is expressed not only in terms of narrative and characters but also through his extraordinary animation. More than any other animator dealt with in this book, Miyazaki has the potential for didacticism. However, the exceptional beauty of his imagery creates an “Other” world of immense appeal that transcends a specific agenda, and softens the more didactic elements of his vision. This vision is not only of “what is lost,” as [Miyazaki has said], but also, perhaps most importantly, of what could be.

Nausica‰ is a fully-realized and lovely fantasy that would serve as a perfect introduction or addition to anyone’s appreciation of Miyazaki’s oeuvre. My Neighbor Totoro is in many ways its equal, though its setting is more intimate and modest. I’ve yet to see Porco Rosso.

I enjoy the discussions at filmjourney as much as I do writing my blog entries, and we’re fortunate to enjoy the participation of Strictly Film School‘s Acquarello, who pops in from time to time. In one thread regarding current French cinema, for example, Acquarello writes about Michael Haneke’s Time of the Wolf (2003):

“It’s a tough film to sit through because there are no truly sympathetic characters…What I do like in the film is that Haneke doesn’t present convenient “innocents” in the film for the audience to gravitate to; there is a flaw and a culpability to each one of them.”

This really intrigues me given my very lackluster reaction to seeing the Hong Kong film Blind Shaft (2003) last night. It’s basically 90 minutes of the highly amoral antics of two antiheros followed by two minutes of their comeuppance, with a “convenient innocent” thrown in to anchor the audience’s empathy. I just found myself wondering, what’s the point of all this? (I also don’t understand the claims that the film criticizes the Chinese government, because all of the anti-communist rhetoric in the fim is propagated by social undesirables while the convenient innocent is a straight-laced, hard-working proletarian.)

After the screening, I was excited to learn that an upcoming James Wong Howe retrospective in L.A. will include one of my favorite Hollywood films, Sweet Smell of Success (1957), which, I suddenly realized with some degree of consternation, is also a movie about two corruptable opportunists who receive their comeuppance resulting from a convenient innocent or two. Why would I hate the one film and love the other?

Part of the answer is that Sweet Smell of Success has one of the wittiest and acerbic screenplays ever written, but that suggests I’m merely prone to accept a film’s basic thrust so long as it’s done in a charming manner.

Additionally, the opportunists in Sweet Smell of Success are arguably less depraved than the opportunists of Blind Shaft–the latter are murderers from the first scene on. But I hesitate to order moral compromises into some sort of ultimate hierarchy; these offenses are tolerable and these offenses are not. I’d like to think all people are human and compromise is compromise.

I appreciate moral ambiguity in art and a desire to show people as multi-faceted and complex rather than absolutely good or absolutely evil. Films that establish empathy toward flawed characters (or critical distance from endearing ones) often earn my respect, but I find that there is definitely some sort of line I draw that determines whether or not the film works for me. I find Sweet Smell of Success an acidic but important statement on media corruption and personal integrity, and Blind Shaft a simplistic and heavy-handed narrative idea with moral placards instead of characters.

This blog entry isn’t directly film related, so allow me a rare indulgence.

For several years now, I’ve been fortunate to count Karen Neudorf and her Canadian cohorts who publish Beyond magazine among my dearest friends. Although their first issue was printed in 1995, like all of us, Beyond‘s creative efforts led them to re-evaluate their vision. After a few years of reasonable success, they decided to a) expand the magazine’s focus, b) drop all of its advertising, and c) become non-profit.

In between that time and now, a few years have gone by while Karen has fund-raised and applied for grants, fine-tuned her vision, collected the work of writers and artists, and lived on bread and water.

So I’m very proud to announce the first issue of the new improved Beyond has finally been released. I believe in independent publishing and in artists who want to communicate without kowtowing to advertisers. But they need subscribers to make this work. ($30/year for 4 issues.)

I can’t guarantee you’ll like the magazine, but I can guarantee these things:

ïIt’s a labor of love by smart people hoping to make the world a better place.

ïIt’s strikingly designed by Janine Vangool, whose work was recently featured in the journal, Communication Arts.

ïIt’s well-written and eclectic, with such articles as an interview with musician Jane Siberry, a commentary on the life of painter and writer Emily Carr, reprinted pieces by Isak Dinesen and Douglas Coupland, and an introduction to contemporary cinephilia by yours truly, among many quotes, humorous bits, and music and reading recommendations.

I find the magazine enjoyable and inspiring reading and I encourage you to check it out.

After a few mis-starts last week, I finally managed to attend one of the key screening dates of the Chantal Akerman retrospective currently playing in Los Angeles. Luckily, it was a documentary marathon, so not only was I able to check out the lovely new REDCAT theatre in downtown L.A., I also managed to see four Akerman films: her landmark News From Home and her “documentary trilogy” comprised of D’Est (From the East), South, and From the Other Side. Although Akerman is merely in her fifties, she has in fact produced around 40 films in a wide variety of modes (documentary, personal essay, drama, romantic comedy, even a musical) and in a variety of formats and venues. I’ve only just begun my appreciation of her work, but this small taste has gotten me excited about the rest of her oeuvre.

The series has been co-curated by CalArts’ BÈrÈnice Reynaud, who aided Akerman on the production of From the Other Side and introduced each of the REDCAT screenings. Akerman was born in Belgium but she is the daughter of Jewish Holocaust survivors from Poland. Reynaud suggested that much of Akerman’s cinema is implicitly concerned with the plight of Jews in the diaspora, and can be read in the many trains, cars, faces, and places that appear throughout her work.

Akerman is known for her stylistic rigor and minimalist aesthetic (she recently named Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket as “the film of my life”) and the following documentaries offer some of the most potent arguments for the beauty, freedom, and complexity such an approach can achieve.

News From Home (1976)

Reynaud told us there is only one print available of this film in North America (luckily it’s also on video), and it is currently missing. So she apologized profusely about the faded, scratched UK print we watched, although I didn’t find it very distracting.

Akerman’s film is a collection of footage (shot by cinematographer Babette Mangolte, a filmmaker in her own right) of New York City in the mid-’70s involving tracking shots and static, formal compositions. The duration of each shot is extended, many of them are several minutes in length as they simply record the comings and goings of the city’s inhabitants and the sights and sounds of one of the world’s largest metropolises. There are shots of the city streets, a steady stream of cars coming and going, children playing baseball; there are shots of the subway beneath the streets, trains arriving and departing, lovers embracing, businesspeople going home, teenagers chewing gum. There are long takes within the subway cars themselves, the perpetual starting and stopping supplying a steady rhythm dictating arrivals and departures in the daily routines of thousands of lives.

But what transforms the film into something more than just a carefully-observed time capsule is its juxtaposition of voice over: Akerman herself reads letters from home written by her mother that tell of family concerns and practical details. They express parental love and support with constant reminders to write more often. Akerman layers this narration over the images of the city at regular intervals, allowing pauses for reflection. At times, the city’s sounds become dominant; at other times, the narration is foregrounded. Sometimes the narration and ambient noise fluidly merge into an ambiguous juxtaposition, passing cars muffle the ongoing news from home. What emerges is a profoundly personal meditation on the complexities of place–it’s not just New York City, but Akerman’s New York City, a home away from home, personal and remote, familiar yet foreign. And to see the film is to share her world and recognize our own within it.

D’Est (From the East) (1993)

The screening notes claim this film was shot in 16mm and I’m still trying to convince myself that it’s true. Traveling throughout Eastern Europe shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but in unspecified locations, Akerman records the people and architecture and sounds she comes across, lovingly lingering over them in gloriously elongated tracking movements or classically-framed stationary shots, producing images stunning in their spontaneous color and formal beauty. She favors late afternoons and winter evenings as her camera glides past endless lines of Europeans (this film focuses more on individuals than the city structures of News From Home) and captures their lives enshrouded in deep colors and atmospheric shadows. In one shot, the camera records a long line of pedestrians standing next to the street. As fresh snowfall accumulates around those waiting and watching (and reacting in various ways to Akerman’s camera, sometimes never seeing it, sometimes seeing it and ignoring it, sometimes offering a spontaneous performance), the sense of time and social expectancy is worthy of a BÈla Tarr movie.

Given its time frame, Akerman captures a people in a specific political transition attempting to bridge the past, present, and future. Again, the detached, somewhat objective stylistic approach invites the viewer not only to engage the portrait of real people in real locations, but to recognize in their mysterious personas and enigmatic contexts a universal expectation toward life, home, and an unspecified future. It’s the ultimate “people watching” experience on film, one that’s flooded with human nuance and cultural detail.

South (1999)

Akerman wanted to create a film about the beauty of the American South, but after arriving on location in Jasper, Texas, a brutal, racist murder occured that changed her focus. A black man, James Byrd, Jr., was beaten by three white men and chained to their truck–he was then dragged for three miles down a back road to a black cemetary, where his remains were deposited.

Unlike the preceding films, Akerman incorporates interviews in South, partly because it addresses an event and requires necessary exposition. Several people comment on the murder and race relations in general in and around Jasper, including several elderly black residents, the town sheriff, and a journalist; all agree that although things are better than they used to be previous to the Civil Rights movement, tensions remain vividly entrenched.

In many ways, the film is a meditation on violent crime as much as it is racial violence in specific, and as such, Akerman includes two of the films most emotional sequences, one is a significant portion of a black church memorial service that is rich in culturally-specific mourning rituals, and the other is the final shot of the film: a continuous view driving along the entire three-mile long stretch of the road Byrd was executed on. The camera is mounted on the back of a slow-moving vehicle and it points backward, a stylistic device that recurs throughout Akerman’s films, ensuring that the visual journey is one of continual discovery rather than simple clarification of what lies ahead. Each foot of the pavement reveals new terrain previously nonexistent to the viewer and serves as a potent reminder that the past must never be forgotten.

From the Other Side (2002)

I attended the University of Arizona in Tucson and lived there for several years and I currently live in Southern California, so I have long been familiar with tensions on the US/Mexico border to some degree, although any time I have crossed it I have been unceremoniously waved through without so much as being asked to stop my vehicle; many of my friends and I have always assumed this was simply because we were white. Despite all the rhetoric you may have heard about North American “free trade” and the “opening of borders,” the US/Mexico border is one of the most heavily militarized zones in the world: US marines, night scopes, motion sensors, guard towers, an 18-foot concrete barricade, and a fleet of military helicopters constantly patrol the area. In spite of this, many Central and South American workers attempt to cross into the US in search of higher wages each year, many of whom get lost, starve, or freeze to death, or drown in the flash floods that frequently occur in the parched desert.

Akerman once again offers a reflection on people and landscape, home and happiness by depicting the border and its inhabitants through her arsenal of stylistic tactics–formal compositions and extended tracking shots–along with interviews and another first: sporadic, nondiegetic music. The title is appropriately enigmatic: the “other side” could equally apply to those on either side of the border and thus merely defines people according to their “otherness.” The film, however, reveals the participants as human beings caught in a world of technology and commercialization that separates people rather than brings them together.

A US official in Douglas, Arizona admits that one increasing problem in the region is uncontrolled civilian law enforcement, and although Akerman avoids the sort of mocking showmanship someone like Michael Moore might have accommodated, one of the most chilling scenes in the film is her interview of US residents who practically brag about their ability to shoot immigrants they happen to come across. Voicing concerns about the “diseases” immigrants bring and US-trained 9/11 terrorists, one middle class US couple asserts their right to shoot anyone trespassing on their property, especially if the immigrant possesses “a stick or a knife.” Further, the ‘No Trespassing’ signs are warning enough, “and they don’t have to be in Spanish, either,” the husband explains, “I live in America.”

The film is the latest in a long line of extraordinary documentaries by Akerman that explore just what it means to live somewhere.

ïYesterday’s edition of the Los Angeles Times offers a belated but pleasant article on the “year of the documentary,” and although it seems to have just discovered films like Bowling for Columbine, Spellbound, My Architect, and The Fog of War, this is one dead horse that deserves a beating:

Once relegated to public broadcasting, cable channels or independent film festivals, the genre is increasingly viewed as popular entertainment worthy of big-screen play. Though many documentaries still face an uphill battle, Hollywood’s perpetual stepchildren are finally getting seated at the grown-ups’ table. They’re making money. They’re easier to finance and market. And they are increasingly feeding an adult appetite in a movie world that is more often aimed at teenagers.

ïSpeaking of documentaries, I was able to see four great ones this weekend by Chantal Akerman–expect a summary tomorrow.

ïRobert Davis offers some intriguing commentary from the San Francisco International Asian-American Film Festival. (And I hope he’s gearing up for SFIFF next, as I may just bump into him at a screening or two.)

ïAnd speaking of Asian-American films, Robot Stories (2002) premiered in L.A. this weekend, and it’s a solid independent film in the science fiction genre which includes many strong performances and creative support by members of the Korean-American community. Although two high-profile Hollywood films are being released this summer dealing with artificial life (I Robot and the remake of The Stepford Wives), both of these films will have to work overtime to beat Robot Stories‘ sensitive, thoughtful, and poignant statements on the subject.

Just a fun note here. One of my favorite movies of all time is Carl Dreyer’s Ordet (1955), based on a 1925 play written by Kaj Munk (1898-1944), a Danish playwright/pastor who was executed by the Nazis. Although the Criterion Collection’s release of Dreyer’s film on VHS and DVD has given it greater visibility on these shores, the original play itself remains elusive.

New Yorkers, however, will get the chance to see the play performed at the Theatre 315 (315 W 47th St.) in the Handcart Ensemble’s new production, running March 13 through April 3. The play’s notes claim it has been “translated by RP Keigwin & adapted by J. Scott Reynolds,” so how close it will be to the source material is unclear, but it sounds like a wonderful way to spend an evening in any case.

If any readers see the play, let us know your thoughts…

Incredibly sad news today…Spalding Gray’s death has been confirmed.

I had the plaeasure of seeing Gray when he visited my university a few years ago. He delivered one of his monologues in the school’s rundown theatre and was every bit as lively and eccentric and human as films like Swimming to Cambodia (1987) or Monster in a Box (1992) would lead you to believe. On the way to his talk, a friend of mine spotted him strolling to the theatre, and ran up beside him: “Are you Spalding Gray? Mind if I join you?” “Sure,” he replied, “As long as you can keep up–I’m late.”

He’ll be missed.

One of the biggest names in the history of documentary filmmaking was John Grierson (1898-1972), a Scotsman who championed film as mass communication with a high potential for social education. Grierson founded two major national organizations for film production: the Empire Marketing Board film unit in Britain in 1930 (later called the General Post Office film unit) and the National Film Board of Canada in 1939. Both of these organizations went on to produce landmark documentaries and short films for many years.

One of the filmmakers Grierson invited to join the NFB was a fellow Scotsman, Norman McLaren (1914-1987). McLaren had been an art student who had made his first film at the age of 19; Grierson had initially hired him for the GPO, where he specialized in creating animation. At the NFB, McLaren eventually formed an entire animation studio that produced some of the most acclaimed experimental works of the following decades.

Thankfully, Milestone Films has recently released a restored collection of 14 McLaren short films in a handsome 2-disc DVD set that includes the feature-length documentary Creative Process: Norman McLaren (1990) as well as an informative 100-page booklet that contains a thematic breakdown of the documentary, additional quotes, and technical notes for each of McLaren’s works. He utilized a wide range of techniques, including traditional cel and paper animation, cutouts, object animation, pixillation, and even “cameraless” works drawn directly on film. (And like the Criterion Collection’s release of Stan Brakhage’s work, the DVD medium offers a particularly useful opportunity for frame-by-frame analysis of these films.) Although a more comprehensive DVD set of McLaren’s career is reportedly being released soon in Japan, this North American release provides an excellent introduction to his work. The Milestone set (which can be ordered directly from them) has also been released in the UK by the British Film Institute.

Watching the collection is a tremendously varied and engaging experience, from the abstract and playful color antics and jazz score of Boogie-Doodle (1940) to the “live-action” story of a man attempting to sit in a reluctant chair in A Chairy Tale (1957) to McLaren’s “line” films (1960-’62) composed of moving lines that oscillate back-and-forth across the screen in rhythmic patterns.

In the documentary, McLaren comes across as a soft-spoken and reflective artist, dedicated to spending weeks in his studio exploring new graphical directions and effects. He was highly influenced by music and dance and his musings are sprinkled with cinematic references, like these two:

In any art movement, the art has to move into a new phase–a filmmaker has a desire to make a film that is not like a previous film. Film is changing, and it can’t help but keep changing. I don’t know whether it ever comes back to the same thing; it does return to the spirit of a previous period in some way, but it’s different, it’s new. Take a film of Jacques Tati like Mon Oncle which has something quite new–for me, unique–in it. So people will come along and do new things and sometimes return to the spirit of an earlier age. The process of art evolving is always one which has fascinated me. (1970)

I like black and white films. I don’t exactly know why–probably because there is a stylization which is removed from actual life, unlike a color film. Unless it’s done superbly, as in the Japanese film Gate of Hell, color can be a very distracting element. (1971)

Although McLaren’s career was much more experimental than Grierson’s, he maintained a dialectic between social responsibility and self-absorption. His film with his most direct social content, Neighbors (1952), won an Academy Award for its parable-like depiction of two men fighting to the death over a flower that appears directly on the border between their two properties. In 1954, he wrote, “The good moral work of art should have all the qualities that a good amoral work of art should have, such as formal unity, balance, contrast, and a sensitivity to the material out of which it is made. But it has, in addition, an even more precious quality–a consciousness of the human intelligence, the human spirit and that man is a social creature.”

“Ron Coleman tries to calm his shaken son, Trey, after a screening of
‘The Passion of the Christ’ in Killeen, Texas, on Wednesday.”
(AP/Steve Traynor)

Although one of my ongoing interests in film is how spirituality is communicated through such a literal art form, I’ve been doing my best to avoid The Passion of the Christ, due in large part to the unrelenting gruesomness of its approach as universally relayed by critics both for and against the film. I simply value the power of the imagination and filmmakers who know how to use it. (In his published screenplay for his never-completed Jesus film, Carl Theodor Dreyer purposefully depicts Jesus’ most intense suffering offscreen: Jesus’ moans and prayers are heard while the camera remains on the faces of his sleeping disciples in the Garden of Gesthemane, and Dreyer stipulates that the pounding of the nails should be heard but never directly visualized.)

In fact, I’ve chosen to avoid Gibson’s film entirely, especially as one of his supposed inspirations, Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), with its abrupt construction and lingering faces (not to mention its depiction of Jesus’ life), continues to stimulate and move me to reflection.

Wondering how to communicate my thinking on this issue without affording even greater media attention to Gibson’s film than it has already received, I was pleased to come across the following comments by Chicago Reader critic Fred Camper on his wonderful a_film_by listserv that I’ve had the pleasure of browsing the past few weeks. Camper’s point of reference is the documentary Shoah, but as he implies, the distinction between seen and unseen violence can easily be applied to fiction as well. (Emphasis mine.)

I think the film Shoah constitutes a pretty eloquent argument against ever using footage of concentration camps and corpses, or so I try to argue [here]. By constructing a nine-and-a-half hour documentary about something that’s never shown,
Lanzmann represents the true meaning of the Shoah not as bodies (which really don’t have much to do with the living people that once inhabited them) but as an absence.

It seems to me an almost immutable principle of cinema that the viewer tends to identify, in a positive sense, with the things seen–rooting for the bad guy being the common phenomenon. So while Resnais’ corpse footage [in Night and Fog] certainly causes revulsion at the inhumanity of it all, at the same time the viewer of corpses is put in the position of the Nazi murderers who created them and who are their only true owners. The film was certainly appropriate for a time when people wanted to forget all this, and his montage serves as an intrusive reminder, but the power of intrusive Shoah footage is I think more profoundly evoked in the great Nuremberg movie-watching scene in Sam Fuller’s Verboten, in the cutting between the images and the boy’s face, which represents as only Fuller can, a clash of consciousness, the way violence represents an impingement on identity.

A classic example of “rooting for the bad guy” occurs in Alfred Hitchock’s Psycho (1960). When the protagonist is murdered halfway through the film, Norman Bates rushes in, cleans up the mess, stuffs the victim’s body in the trunk of her car, and attempts to sink the vehicle in a nearby bog. And when her car suddenly pauses in its slow descent into oblivion, the audience can often be heard emitting a gasp of suspense–the car must sink! The ability of the cinema to prescribe a point-of-view simply through its depiction (another way of speaking of “desensitization”) is too formidable not to approach with fear and trembling.