Monthly Archives: May 2004

PAL speedup

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One of the many pleasures of owning an inexpensive multi-region DVD player is being able to purchase DVDs from around the world and watch them at home. (Well, I suppose an expensive multi-region player would do the trick as well.) But one of the problems that sometimes occurs with European DVDs (or North American DVDs sourced from European tapes) is that they have been recorded in the PAL video format, which runs at 25 frames per second instead of the film-standard 24 frames per second. If care isn’t taken, the film simply plays 4% more quickly on video.

My friend Trond S. Trondsen demonstrates why this is an ongoing problem for cinephiles and why image specialists with PhDs in Cosmic Geophysics write good technical analyses in his new article, PAL speedup–Case Study: A Man Escaped.

THX 1138 trailer

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I’ll admit that I’m torn by the trailer for the upcoming digitally-enhanced and restored version of George Lucas’ arty, dystopian exercize in style, THX 1138 (1971). On the one hand, the trailer is marvelously structured, and the film itself is such a radically incongruous debut for one of today’s most popular feel-good entertainers that it’s virtually a movie from an alternate universe. If the film had been a critical or financial success, who knows where it might have steered Lucas in subsequent years? As a true anomaly in the filmmaker’s oeuvre, it’s one of those fascinating, forgotten relics of film history.

On the other hand, although it has been years since I watched the film, I don’t recall it as being particularly good beyond its considerable visual and aural invention. Despite its bleak tone, it’s still a George Lucas picture, complete with one-dimensional characters, mechanical plotting, and style over substance. The trailer itself suggests a thematic dual critique of police states and modern capitalism, a please-them-all strategy predicated on equal ideological disdain. (And we won’t even go into Lucas’ own contributions to modern consumerism, which have simultaneously made him one of the richest persons in the world and his recent films into two-hour long toy commercials.)

Moreover, the trailer seems to illustrate several themes Susan Sontag referred to in her article cited in my previous blog, particularly the visual depiction of prison brutality and the sense of having one’s private life be made public. Although the film comes down negatively on both of these ideas, the trailer could be seen as playing into their taboo thrills. Lucas’ cultural timing for rereleasing this film may actually ensure a reprisal of its rejection 33 years ago.

Susan Sontag on Abu Ghraib

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Film critic, theorist, and writer Susan Sontag doing what Susan Sontag does best in the latest issue of New York Times Magazine, writing on the photographs from Abu Ghraib and what responses have said about deeper cultural and political truths:

Shock and awe were what our military promised the Iraqis. And shock and the awful are what these photographs announce to the world that the Americans have delivered: a pattern of criminal behavior in open contempt of international humanitarian conventions. Soldiers now pose, thumbs up, before the atrocities they commit, and send off the pictures to their buddies. Secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamor to be invited on a television show to reveal. What is illustrated by these photographs is as much the culture of shamelessness as the reigning admiration for unapologetic brutality.

Lancelot du Lac

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This essay is part of full review posted at http://www.robert-bresson.com. –Doug

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It’s perhaps a bit ironic that New Yorker Video is releasing DVDs of Robert Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac (1974) and A Man Escaped (1956) simultaneously–Lancelot was originally the film Bresson hoped to make after Diary of a Country Priest (1951). Inevitably, however, he couldn’t raise the proper funding; at one point he uncharacteristically considered casting professional actors Burt Lancaster and Natalie Wood in the film, though what kind of movie that would have resulted in is anybody’s guess. Suffice it to say that the version Bresson did eventually make is firmly rooted within his stylistic world of nonprofessional “models,” de-dramatized performances, and “cinematographic” style.

Lancelot was Bresson’s third film in color and many critics feel it is one of his strongest visual works. This is no doubt partly due to the contributions of cinematographer Pasqualino De Santis, who had worked with Luchino Visconti and would continue to lense Bresson’s final two films. Its careful chromatic scale of dark reds and browns and glowing torchlight on canvas tents lends the film warm tones that serve as counterpoint to its otherwise severe interpretation of the final days of King Arthur, whose Knights of the Round Table have returned from their Grail quest empty-handed and dispirited. As Kristin Thompson comments in her narrative analysis, The Sheen of Armour, the Winnies of Horses: Sparse Parametric Style in Lancelot du Lac (1988):

Bresson has simply eliminated most of the original events [in La Mort le Roi Artu] . . . while expanding a few elements greatly. Thus most of the first half of the film comes from one summary sentence in La Mort: “Now, though Lancelot had behaved chastely by the counsel of the holy man to whom he had confessed when he was in the quest for the Holy Grail, and though he had apparently renounced Queen Guenevere, as the tale has related before, as soon as he had come to court, not one month passed before he was smitten and inflamed as much as he had ever been at any time, so that he fell back into sin with the queen just as he had done earlier.” . . . The elimination or compression of events in an adaptation is common enough, of course. But Bresson eliminates or compresses some things only partially, leaving bits of puzzling information which seem to hint that we have missed something along the way.”

Tantalizing ellipsis may a typical Bressonian approach, but it does seems particularly pronounced in Lancelot, perhaps because Bresson assumed the legend of King Arthur was widely known. Bresson also elides much of the heroism, action, violence, and grandiose milieu of the traditional tale, fashioning an epic story as a restricted, modest film, with weary characters fighting to maintain their chivalric ideals despite the pressing desires of their hearts at the end of an age.

Bresson was always highly-attuned to the rhythm of his films and many commentators have stressed Lancelot‘s visual and aural patterns in particular, suggesting it was Bresson’s way of adapting the poetic source material. Lindley Hanlon’s detailed analysis of rhythm in Fragments: Bresson’s Film Style (1986) goes so far as to consider passages of the film’s dialogue through their parataxis (juxtaposition of phrases), dovetailing (shared words), and meter (spoken rhythm). As Hanlon explains, an element such as dovetailng, when used consistently, intensifies the film’s themes:

Throughout the film, conflicts between charaters hinge on these syntactic interchanges where a word such as faire or vous becomes the pivot of the discourse as it is played on, changed, rhymed, or denied. One could profitably make a list of the many verbs that tie together this discourse, almost always stated in a forceful, matter-of-fact declarative sentence, as a verb in the present tense, or as an infinitive. The narrative moves from verb to verb as these characters in search of a goal seek to resolve their conflicting inclinations. The dialogue is as much of a ritual battleground as the tournament. The words are lanced at each other in rapid succession.

Hanlon analyzes the meter within much of the film’s dialogue, identifying stressed syllables. And if one might question the validity of such an approach, it should be noted that Bresson explicitly wrote on the subject in Notes on the Cinematographer: “Model. Thrown into the physical action, his voice, starting from even syllables, takes on automatically the inflections and modulations proper to his true nature.” And later: “Nothing is durable but what is caught up in rhythms. Bend content to form and sense to rhythms.” This emphasis on rhythm propels Lancelot‘s visual and sound design to such an extent that the experience of watching the film can be virtually hypnotic.

Bresson also conceives of the overarching narrative in formal terms. While many of his specific ellipses serve to de-emphasize spectacle (several combat scenes occur offscreen, a jousting tournament is visually represented by the powerful legs of the combatants’ horses), Bresson begins and ends the film with startling violence. Suited knights stab and decapitate one another in a dark forest, producing torrents of blood; simultaneously, there is a sense of stylization to their movements in the throes of death, actions with unnatural pauses and stiff poses that lend the suited knights a mechanical, inhuman aura.

For much of the film, the knights wear their armor without helmets, clanging and rattling from scene to scene; occasionally, the knights wear their helmets and raise or lower their visors to deliver snatches of dialogue, like miniature dramatic curtains. Suited up for attack, however, they resemble robotic shells of glistening steel. In this way, they become living paradoxes of life and death, human and metal, illustrating Bresson’s dual obsession with spiritual and material worlds.

“Has God forsaken us?” a despondent Arthur asks in the early scenes of the film, noting the empty chairs of the Round Table. A sense of imminent doom pervades the film and serves as a creeping metaphysical antagonist. “We can forestall fate,” Lancelot suggests, “deflect the menace.” For damage control, Arthur orders his remaining knights to “perfect yourselves, remain united, forget your quarrels, cultivate friendship,” but tensions inevitably remain and allegiances shift in light of Mordred’s increasing hostility.

Besides Lancelot (Luc Simon), the knight whom Bresson highlights the most is Gauvain (Humbert Balsan). While Lancelot oscillates between his loyalty to Arthur and his love of GueniËvre (Laura Duke Condominas), Gauvain struggles to maintain his idealization of Lancelot and heroic knighthood in general. “[Mordred] is everything that you and I despise,” he tells Lancelot. “When he splashed you fording a river you said he offended your horse. How he cringed before you. I dislike weaklings. They should be hanged.” Gauvain is perpetually the first person to defend the honor of Lancelot and GueniËvre but his high ideals generate as much conflict as they remedy.

GueniËvre’s narcissism prevents her from completely accepting these ideals as well. Her exchanges with Lancelot continually elevate their love over the good of the community. When Lancelot asks for her humble consent to free him of his vows to her in order to atone for their love and restore the Round Table, GueniËvre replies, “No, I’ll save no one at that price . . . To think yourself responsible for everything is not humility.”

Bresson conveys a sense of encroaching metaphysical judgment through his evocation of nature. After searching the forest for Lancelot and, like the Grail search, finding nothing, the knights return to Arthur and proclaim, “The forest is a devil,” just before a thunder crash registers an unexpected rainstorm. As the knights scramble to secure their tents in the deluge, Bresson cuts to dark trees swaying in the shadowy downpour while a door handle rattles ominously. “Some force is manipulating us,” the knights intone, initiating a theme that will reappear in Bresson’s subsequent film, The Devil Probably (1977). If Lancelot‘s fantasy depiction of a changing world inhabited by deflated survivors with a penchant for self-destruction is an allegory for the modern age, The Devil Probably explicitly sets that vision in contemporary Paris.

“Poor Lancelot,” GueniËvre muses, “trying to stand his ground in a shrinking world.” But like Bresson’s concentrated adaptation, which runs less than 90 minutes, Lancelot’s world may be compressed but it retains nobility. The film is often characterized as a “despairing” film in Bresson’s late oeuvre, but in fact, it’s more of an elegiac lamentation (as opposed to a nostalgic or mythologized portrait), beautifully rendered in loving, rhythmic care.

A Man Escaped

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I’m finally getting caught up on my writing projects. The following essay is part of a full review of New Yorker Video’s new A Man Escaped DVD (to be released on May 25) posted at http://www.robert-bresson.com –Doug

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Robert Bresson’s 1956 masterpiece, A Man Escaped (Un condamnÈ ‡ mort s’est ÈchappÈ), is based on a book of the same name published the same year by AndrÈ Devigny, a Catholic French Resistance fighter in WWII. The book recounts Devigny’s true-life laborious escape attempt from the Gestapo’s Fort Montluc prison in occupied Lyon in 1943. While Bresson’s adaptation stays very close to the details of Devigny’s account–even filming in Montluc itself–Bresson accentuates the metaphysical aspects of the narrative, turning the story into a meditation on existential and spiritual themes rendered in precise, physical terms. This dual-visioned approach is made explicit from the start: Bresson adds a secondary title to his adaptation, The Wind Blows Where It Wills (Le vent souffle o˘ il veut), a biblical phrase found nowhere in Devigny’s book, emphasizing the serendipity of spiritual rebirth. This interplay between the physical and the spiritual generates a compelling paradox throughout the entire film, and it’s highlighted in a single passage from Devigny’s book:

“I had quite a lot on my side: an increasingly determined urge to escape, a plan already sketched out in broad outline and partially realized, the stupidity of the Germans, and a certain congenital predisposition to good luck on which I was always consciously drawn. There were two elements in this plan: mine and God’s. Where, I wondered, was the dividing-line set?

Alas, I could not tell; but I felt that heaven would only aid my grimly resolute struggle insofar as I threw every physical and moral reserve I possessed into the balance.”

But the film is far from a religious tract. When RenÈ Guyonnet of L’Express asked Bresson if one could find “extraordinary praise for the perseverance of faith” in the film, he replied, “This praise is not the subject, but follows from the subject.” When asked about the film’s sense of mysticism, he elaborated: “I do not believe that everything in a film is put there. You include some things without including them. What you call my ‘mysticism’ must derive from this. In Un CondamnÈ I tried to make the audience feel these extraordinary currents which existed in the German prisons during the Resistance, the presence of something or someone unseen; a hand that directs all.”

If Bresson seems to be editorializing his source material, he can be forgiven, as one of the few widely-known biographical details of his life is that he spent 16 months as a German prisoner-of-war himself, from March of 1940 to June of 1941. The intensity and realism of the film’s visual and aural detail surely owes a great deal to this experience.

In addition, the film’s tension between free will and determinism was a quintessential theme of postwar France exemplified by the existentialist writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Anouilh, and Albert Camus, who was a friend of Bresson’s. Questions of political occupation and personal responsibility, individual choice and fate were of paramount importance in a country processing its recent historical travails.

As Allen Thither writes in The Cinematic Muse: Critical Studies in the History of French Cinema (1979):

“It is, in fact, with a Kierkegaardian understanding of religious paradox that one must begin an interpretation of Un condamnÈ ‡ mort, for in one sense this is a film about an unmediated relationship between the particular and the absolute. The cultural context that grounds the narrative project is, in general terms, that system of existentialist religious values in which the oppositions of faith and despair, freedom and grace, or spirit and flesh establish a coherent semantic field.”

Bresson ingeniously conveys these philosophical themes through concrete and material means. In the opening scene of the film, Lieutenant Fontaine, the film’s protagonist (played by FranÁois Leterrier, a local philosophy student), is being transported to Montluc in the back of a car, seated beside two handcuffed prisoners. Bresson creates suspense as Fontaine eyes the road and fingers his door handle. Just when a tram passes before the car and it stops, Fontaine flings open his door and leaps to freedom. But Bresson’s camera, like the other prisoners, stares immutably ahead without panning with the action. Offscreen gunshots echo and figures are seen running outside the vehicle. The camera remains motionless. Within moments, Fontaine is apprehended and brought back to the car, restoring the frame’s composition, where he is handcuffed and cruelly beaten. In this first scene, Bresson establishes the tension between blind chance and inescapable fate.

A Man Escaped was the filmmaker’s first film with an entirely non-professional cast and it crystallized his mature aesthetic: a shallow depth of field in the compositions, automatic and barely-emotive performances, a heavy dependence on sound effects–particularly those occurring offscreen, isolated instances of music, brief dialogue, and elliptical editing that omits narrative detail in order to provoke mystery or avoid sensationalism.

The film is the second part of Bresson’s trilogy that relies heavily on narration (Diary of a Country Priest, A Man Escaped, and Pickpocket) and the first part of his trilogy that centers around themes of imprisonment (A Man Escaped, Pickpocket, and The Trial of Joan of Arc), although both of these elements appear in various guises throughout his oeuvre. And as AndrÈ Bazin described the complex relationship between the spoken word and image in Diary of a Country Priest (1950), “The most moving moments in the film are those in which the text and image are saying the same thing, each however in its own way. The sound never serves simply to fill out what we see . . . It is here at the edge [between sound and image] that the event reveals its true significance.” After Fontaine is brought to Montluc and beaten again for his escape attempt, he is later dumped in a dark cell. His blood-stained face pokes out from behind his jacket, thrown over him. He appears dead or at least unconscious, but then his narration begins: “I could feel I was being watched. I didn’t dare move.” And the viewer is reminded of Fontaine’s inner strength and craftiness.

The film famously restricts itself to Fontaine’s immediate space throughout. The sense of claustrophobia and lack of omniscient perspective submerges the viewer into Fontaine’s world. In a bare, concrete cell with nothing but a bed and a barred window that displays a portion of an empty courtyard, the viewer shares Fontaine’s joy at the smallest of discoveries–a pencil or a spoon or a box of clothes. Sound reveals a tremendous amount of information: where the prison is situated, what surrounds it, who is near or far, what they are doing. When Fontaine decides to engineer his escape, beginning by scraping his door with a chiseled spoon, it establishes the central visual motif for the film–Fontaine, specifically his hands, interacting with his material environment, forcing his situation, challenging fate by taking advantage of every vagary of chance.

In fact, Bresson’s treatment is much more focused in its perspective than Devigny’s, whose book offers several scenes set outside the prison and describes events immediately preceding and following his imprisonment. Much of the German terror in the book is personified by Montluc’s Head Warden, a beastly tyrant named Fr‰nkel, who was curiously an anti-Nazi himself, and would therefore oscillate between granting prisoners occasional freedoms (like packages from home) and beating them ruthlessly. (“No one could forget that squat, corpulent figure,” Devigny wrote, “that square head, those steel-rimmed glasses; much less his angry voice and continual oaths. I doubted if he had ever learned to talk; his only language consisted of curses and blows.”) In contrast, Bresson rarely shows the faces of Fontaine’s captors, who come and go merely with echoing footsteps and the rattle of keys, thrusting him about or sentencing him with ominous finality. (The anonymous SS officer who delivers Fontaine’s actual death sentence in the film is based on a mysterious figure in Devigny’s book named Colonel Barbier. Not until 1987 was Klaus Barbie identified, tried and convicted for crimes against humanity.)

The film’s structure progresses from despair to hope, isolation to community. Fontaine begins alone and slowly develops a network of relationships throughout the prison by tapping on the walls of his cell (the very means of separation become conduits of communication) or speaking from his window to Blanchet (Maurice Beerblock), his unseen neighbor in an adjacent cell who initially refuses to communicate. As Fontaine’s escape efforts gain legitimacy, however, Blanchet begins to believe in him. When one escapee fails but gives Fontaine important information for his own plans, Blanchet remarks that the prisoner “had to fail so you could succeed.” “It’s extraordinary,” Fontaine replies. “I’m not teaching you anything,” Blanchet retorts, and Fontaine nods, “Yes, you are…what’s extraordinary is that you just said it.”

AndrÈ Devigny died in February 1999 at the age of 82; by the end of the year, Bresson, too, will have passed away.

Chiseling and scraping, devising and communicating, Fontaine fights against his fate (the French title translates more accurately as One Condemned to Death Has Escaped) and restores hope in those around him. A perfectly realized and quietly burning film, Bresson’s fourth feature film is not only one of his greatest artistic achievements, but one of his most popular and accessible films as well. It’s an excellent entry point into the work of a master.

Ymdb.com

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The Internet is often characterized as being an ethereal jumble of opinion and interaction without consensus. And while this can be true–particularly in chat rooms or Usenet free-for-alls–I’ve enjoyed consistent interaction with people across the country and the globe over the past few years whose tastes in film are remarkably similar to my own, and who continue to suggest new films to discover with a genuine degree of certainty regarding shared cinematic values. Whether we all have similar tastes because we’ve spent so much time interacting online or whether we’ve spent so much time interacting online that our tastes have converged is anybody’s guess, but it’s encouraging to see universal acclaim for films like Carl Dreyer’s Ordet (1955)– a movie bypassed by the ’60s cinephilia “mainstream”–coming from today’s Internet cinephiles. In contrast to the idea that the Web is a hodgepodge of random opinion, I can attest to having experienced a genuine sense of community.

The Ymdb.com website has either been offline or difficult to access for the past few months, but it seems to be up and running again these days. It allows users to rank their Top 20 movies of all time, discuss the films with others, and as a bonus, tells you which user’s lists are closest to your own. In light of this, it invariably amuses me to see how many of the users most closely ranked to my list are people I already know out of the nearly 14,000 registered users at Ymdb.com, including Filmjourney discussion participants Acquarello and Jonathan Takagi, Masters of Cinema colleagues Nick Wrigley and Trond S. Trondsen, and friends like Darren Hughes and Melissa Hoftstetter. I warmly recommend jotting down the titles of the films on any of their pages and taking the list with you the next time you visit the video store.

In addition, Gary Tooze of DVDBeaver.com, whose Yahoogroups listerv has provided a wonderful forum for bringing many of us together, offers a <a href="collective list averaged from his forum’s participants. Unlike many other critical lists, it’s one I’m proud to be associated with.

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Updates have been slow at Filmjourney of late because I’ve got three essays to complete by the end of the week, two for robert-bresson.com and one for the liner notes of Eureka Video’s first release in their Masters of Cinema Series, Arnold Fanck’s The Holy Mountain (1926). The latter essay has necessitated a bit of research on my part…so if anyone has any bergfilme opinions they’d like to get off their chest, I’d be delighted to chat.

Bride of Frankenstein

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Mary Shelley’s 1818 Gothic novel, Frankenstein, is not only one of the finest works of literature in the English language, critiquing the dark limits of ambition at the height of Enlightenment positivity, it’s also considered to be the first science fiction novel. Its tale–a gruesome fiend cobbled together from dead bodies and cruelly abandoned by his father/creator to wander the night in search of cosmic acceptance and meaning–has reappeared in various forms throughout the years.

Director James Whale fashioned two classic horror films from the story, Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935), both of which have been out of print on DVD the last few years but have been reissued as an inexpensive box set with several of Universal’s sequels to boot. Aside from Edgar Ulmer’s exquisite The Black Cat (1934), Bride of Frankenstein is certainly my favorite of the era’s thrillers.

The Universal films, visually linked to German expressionism (and often made by German immigrants working in Hollywood), defined cinematic horror and set the stage for its hybrid, the science fiction/horror film. In her book Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (1987), Vivian Sobchack offers this helpful distinction between Monster films (more horror) and Creature films (more science fiction):

The horror film is primarily concerned with the individual in conflict with society or with some extension of himself, the science fiction film with society and its insinuations in conflict with each other or with some alien other. Therefore, the arena for conflict in the horror film is usually as small as a minute town tucked away in the Carpathians, an old castle, or an English village, while the arena for the science fiction film is most often the large city, the planet Earth itself. If one genre is as large as the human soul, the other is as large as the cosmos. . .

The Creatures of science fiction films seem to roam the Earth almost as if by accident. They may fall from outer space to threaten the planet, invade it, destroy it, or they are accidental by-products of “the Bomb.” In the horror film, however, the Monster seems less accidental; he seems to arise inevitably out of a personal Faustian obsession or the inherent animal nature of Man. . . Since the horror film emphasizes individual moral conflict, the Monster must be a significant and personalized antagonist. To make the moral struggle truly protean, both Man and Monster must be given equal weight and equal time. Thus, in the horror film, we are involved in personalized conflict and combat: Dracula vs. Dr. Van Helsing, Frankenstein vs. his Monster, Lawrence Talbot vs. his animal alter ego. . .

In the science fiction film, the Creature is less personalized, has less of an interior presence than does the Monster in the horror film. Usually we are given only form, physical attributes; the Creatures of science fiction distinctly lack a psyche. After the initial shock at the Creature’s appearance, our interest lies not in why the Creature will do what it does, but solely what it will do and how it will do it–in other words, its external activity. Our sympathy is never evoked by a science fiction Creature; it remains, always, a thing.

Conversely, in the horror film there is always something sympathetic about the Monster, something which gives us–however briefly–a sense of seeing the world through his eyes, from his point of view. He is not other than Man; he is the darker side of Man and therefore comprehensible.

The Frankenstein films certainly fall into the Monster category, and Whale is as adept at presenting their moral conflict as he is at creating a visually striking and atmospheric milieu. Between the two films, he made The Invisible Man (1933), which still impresses with its clever visual effects, Claude Rains’ aristocratic performance, and touches of macabre humor. But these elements achieve their perfect maturity in Bride of Frankenstein, with its painterly and dramatic lighting, beautiful dissolves and tracking shots, sophisticated effects, and unexpected eccentricities.

For much of the latter, Whale cast Una O’Connor (whom he used in The Invisible Man and would reuse in The Old Dark House), playing a feisty, histrionic old lady who makes assorted jabs and sarcastic barbs throughout the film. After a prologue, the movie opens at the flaming windmill that ended the first film. A gust of fire rises and O’Connor enthusiastically nods, “That’s his insides, caught at last! Insides is always the last to be consumed.” When the nonchalant village burgomaster finally arrives on the scene, he perversely tells everyone to go home and get a good night’s rest, to which O’Connor alone seems to protest. “Come now, we want no rioting,” the burgomaster replies.

But in addition to the humor, the film also taps into the deep melancholy and tragedy of Shelley’s tale, framing it within the context of Man’s unbridled obsessions. In some ways, Frankenstein is replaced by a new character, Pretorious, an ex-professor who enlists Frankenstein’s aid. (“Pretorious?” O’Connor mutters. “That’s not even a real name.”) Amazingly for the early-’30s, Pretorius suggests he has grown miniature people “from the source of life–I grew them like cultures,” foreshadowing today’s genetic experimentation. In fact, various scenes suggest inspirations for later echos in Blade Runner (1982), including a murder beneath the gaze of a perched owl and various lighting effects, and the latter film’s emphasis on the ethical failings of outsized genetic ambitions is thoroughly Frankensteinian in theme.

Bride of Frankenstein is a pop culture work, but one suffused with artistry and many layers of meaning that have made it a perennial favorite among cinephiles and film commentators. It’s a genre film not to be missed.

TCM videos

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I don’t have cable TV, so I was surprised to discover an impressive collection of original trailers and movie clips provided by Turner Classic Movies on their website. Check out the tracking shots in Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, Robert Wise blithely justifying his recutting of Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons (“people were laughing at the film”), Robert Mitchum pursuing the children in Night of the Hunter, the charming repartee in The Philadelphia Story, or a featurette on one of my supreme guilty pleasures, George Pal’s The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao, among scores of other clips. (Real Player, Windows Media)