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<\/p>\nDB here:<\/p>\n
By now most people accept the idea that 1939 was a kind of Golden Year of cinema. You know, Rules of the Game<\/em>, Stagecoach<\/em>, Wizard of Oz<\/em>, that movie about the Civil War, etc. TCM has even made a movie<\/a> about 1939. On this site Kristin and I have talked about earlier wonder years, like 1913 and 1917. So in planning this year\u2019s Bruges week-long Zomerfilmcollege (aka Cinephile Summer Camp<\/a>), Stef Franck and I discussed building my lectures around a single year. I proposed 1941, but he countered with 1960.<\/p>\n 1960 was a logical choice in providing spread for the whole program. At Bruges we intertwine several threads of lectures and screenings, and this year we had silent films (The Cat and the Canary<\/em>, The Wind<\/em>), Hollywood\u2019s cinema of emigration (Florey, Siodmak, Ophuls, etc.), and contemporary Korean film. All in 35mm, of course. So picking 1960 filled in another area.<\/p>\n As so often happens, a contingent choice came to seem a necessary one. By the time I opened my mouth to introduce The Bad Sleep Well<\/em>, I had convinced myself that 1960 was another watershed year. Consider these releases:<\/p>\n Rocco and His Brothers<\/em> (Visconti), La Dolce Vita<\/em> (Fellini), L\u2019Avventura<\/em> (Antonioni),\u00a0Le Testament d\u2019Orph\u00e9e<\/em> (Cocteau), Plein Soleil<\/em> (Clement), \u00c0 bout de souffle<\/em> (Godard), Les Bonnes femmes<\/em> (Chabrol), La Verit\u00e9<\/em> (Clouzot), The Bridge<\/em> (Wicki), Wild Strawberries<\/em> (Bergman), The Devil\u2019s Eye<\/em> (Bergman), Lady with the Little Dog<\/em> (Heifetz), The Letter that Wasn\u2019t Sent<\/em> (Kalatozov), The Steamroller and the Violin<\/em> (Tarkovsky short), The Teutonic Knights<\/em> (Alexander Ford), Innocent Sorcerors<\/em> (Wajda), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning<\/em> (Reisz), Tunes of Glory <\/em>(Neame), Sergeant Rutledge<\/em> (John Ford), Psycho<\/em> (Hitchcock), Spartacus<\/em> (Kubrick), Elmer Gantry<\/em> (Brooks), 101 Dalmatians<\/em> (Disney\/ Reitherman), The Magnificent Seven<\/em> (Sturges), Exodus<\/em> (Preminger), Home from the Hill<\/em> (Minnelli), Comanche Station<\/em> (Boetticher), Verboten!<\/em> (Fuller), The Bellboy<\/em> (Lewis), The Young One<\/em> (Bu\u00f1uel), TheYoung Ones <\/em>(Alcoriza), The Shadow of the Caudillo<\/em> (Bracho), <\/span>Devi<\/em> (Ray), The Cloud-Capped Star<\/em> (Ghatak), This Country Where the Ganges Flows<\/em> (Karmakar), <\/span>Red Detachment of Women<\/em> (Xie Jin), The Back Door<\/em> (Li Han-hsiang), Enchanting Shadow<\/em> (Li Han-hsiang), The Wild, Wild Rose<\/em> (Wang Tian-lin), Desperado Outpost<\/em> (Okamoto), Spring Dreams<\/em> (Kinoshita), When a Woman Ascends the Stairs<\/em> (Naruse), Daughter, Wives, and Mother<\/em> (Naruse), Cruel Story of Youth<\/em> (Oshima), The Sun\u2019s Burial<\/em> (Oshima), Night and Fog in Japan<\/em> (Oshima), The Island<\/em> (Shindo), Pigs and Battleships<\/em> (Imamura), Sleep of the Beast<\/em> (Suzuki), and\u00a0Fighting Delinquents<\/em> (Suzuki).<\/p>\n We didn\u2019t show any of them.<\/p>\n Several factors constrained our choices, including the availability of good prints with Dutch subtitles, or at least English ones. We also didn’t want to run too many official classics. And we fudged a little for pedagogy’s sake. We had to include a Godard, but instead of\u00a0\u00c0 bout de souffle<\/em>, we picked Le Petit soldat<\/em>\u2014made in 1960 but not released until 1963. The World of Apu<\/em> was released in 1959 in India, though it made its world impact in the following year. Lola<\/em> was finished in 1960 but released in early 1961. A dodge, but I wanted a Nouvelle Vague counterpoint to Godard, and it fit well with the Ophuls thread, and\u2014well, it\u2019s Demy. In any case, we wound up with a list of outstanding movies.<\/p>\n All in all, quite a week. My sessions ran from 9:00 AM to 12:30 or 1:00 PM, with the film embedded. After lunch, there were more talks and screenings, usually winding up at about 1:00 AM. Other speakers included\u00a0Kevin Brownlow, <\/strong>Tom Paulus, Steven Jacobs, Muriel Andrin, Egbert Barten, <\/strong>and Christophe Verbiest<\/strong> (linking his talks on contemporary Korean film to the absolutely nuts 1960 Kim Ki-yong melodrama The Maid<\/em>). The locals’ lectures were in Dutch, but these worthies are fluent in English, so sharing meals with them allowed me to catch up with their ideas.<\/p>\n Pegging a batch of movies to a single year can seem gimmicky, so I treated the films as exemplifying different trends, many of which started before 1960 and have continued since. I concentrated on trends within world film culture, though in several cases those were tied to still broader social and political developments. Above all, the 1960 frame allowed me to do the sort of comparative work I enjoy.<\/p>\n \n Generations<\/strong><\/p>\n My first grouping was \u201cTwilight of the Masters.\u201d This allowed me to develop the idea that, remarkably, people who had started making films in the 1910s and 1920s were still active in the 1960s\u2014and often making films that recalled their youthful efforts. Renoir revisited La Grande illusion<\/em> in The Elusive Corporal<\/em>, and Dreyer returned to his origins in tableau cinema<\/a> through the staging of Gertrud<\/em>.<\/p>\n In this connection, Fritz Lang\u2019s 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse<\/em>, his final movie, revisits his Mabuse cycle in the way his previous films for Artur Brauner revise the \u201csensation-films\u201d he wrote for Joe May (especially\u00a0The Indian Tomb<\/em>). Drawing on some ideas in my online essay, \u201cThe Hook,\u201d we studied Lang\u2019s crisp transitions between scenes. From this angle, 1000 Eyes<\/em> is a sort of encyclopedia of ways you can connect scenes (visual link, auditory link, association of ideas, etc.). The transitions whip up a breathless pace and steer past some plot holes, and sometimes they generate a level of mistrust, implying story possibilities that don\u2019t turn out to be valid.<\/p>\n Testament<\/em>\u2019s motif of eyes and vision became expanded to television surveillance in 1000 Eyes<\/em>. There might even be an oblique connection between the Hotel Luxor\u2019s panopticon and the rise of television ownership in Europe at the period. Here, as ever, cinema doesn\u2019t have good things to say about TV.<\/p>\n Twilight of another, not quite so old master: Late Autumn<\/em> by Ozu. I reviewed some features of Ozu\u2019s style and then analyzed the film as a multiple-character drama. Ozu and his collaborator Noda Kogo split up the plot in order to present different characters\u2019 attitudes to the central situation: the question of a daughter\u2019s marriage. The plot ingeniously withholds information about the attitude of Akiko, the mother, by deleting certain scenes that would clarify it. Here too, the old master recalls earlier films by having characters discuss their college flirtations, which invoke scenes from Days of Youth<\/em> and Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth?<\/em><\/p>\n Both Billy Wilder and Akira Kurosawa furnished me with a second generational cohort. I know, probably nobody in his right mind would see common features between these two directors. But desperation can fuel audacity. Both emerged during the late 1930s, began directing in the 1940s, and enjoyed a string of great successes in the 1950s; but both fell on harder times in the 1960s. Both became accusatory living legends, haunting local industries that had kept them from working.<\/p>\n Leading up to The Apartment<\/em>, I considered Wilder\u2019s contribution to two trends. First, the industry had hit the doldrums. In Europe television and new leisure lifestyles were not yet the threat they would become, but in America, the industry needed to pull its audience away from the TV set and the barbecue. Wilder proved skilful in using Hollywood\u2019s turn to sex as the basis for his cynical comedies. The Lubitsch touch, a worldly appreciation of the oblique approach to matters of sex, was replaced by something harsher. In Wilder’s world, there are mostly sharks and shnooks, those who take and those who are taken.<\/p>\n Second, I situated Wilder as a leading figure in the emergence of the writer-turned-director in the 1940s (Sturges, Huston, Brooks, Fuller, Mankiewicz, etc.). This encouraged me to probe his dramaturgy, and so we analyzed the taut structure of The Apartment<\/em>\u2019s plot. It has rightly been recognized as a model screenplay, making us sympathize with a careerist covering up his bosses’ infidelities, all the while whetting our interest by shifting the range of knowledge away from the protagonist at key moments. It also displays a nice interweaving of motifs that function both dramatically and metaphorically (especially Miss Kubelik\u2019s hand mirror). Of course at the end I had to run a clip showing the influence of The Apartment<\/em> on the opening of Jerry Maguire<\/em>.<\/p>\n By the mid-1960s, however, Wilder was pushing his luck, especially with Kiss Me Stupid<\/em>. In The Apartment<\/em> he wanted to make \u201ca movie about fucking,\u201d and he predicted that some day people would do the deed onscreen. But having glimpsed the promised land of the 1970s, he was unable to enter. Despite some worthy efforts, notably The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes<\/em>, he haunted Hollywood as a major director who had outlived his moment.<\/p>\n \n Human, all too human<\/strong><\/p>\n Kurosawa\u2019s international fame came largely through the growth of the film festival as a prime institution of international movie culture. This situation let me sketch in the importance of festivals in bringing directors like him to world recognition. (By the way, Richard Porton has just brought out an informative collection<\/a> of thoughts on film festivals.)\u00a0With The Bad Sleep Well<\/em>, I was able to talk a bit about something that is often forgotten\u2014Kurosawa\u2019s efforts in social, even political cinema. From Sugata Sanshiro<\/em>, a tribute to Japanese martial arts, and\u00a0The Most Beautiful<\/em>, the loveliest movie you\u2019ll ever see about girls making lenses for gunsights, up through Occupation projects like No Regrets for Our Youth<\/em> and Scandal<\/em>, Kurosawa engaged with political subject matter. Ikiru<\/em> and I Live in Fear<\/em> made this side of his work even more salient in the 1950s.<\/p>\n The Bad Sleep Well<\/em>\u2019s attack on corporate corruption sits well with this tendency. It considers the \u201ciron triangle\u201d of Japanese politics, the collusion of bureaucrats, politicians, and private industry\u2014particularly the building industry, whose livelihood depends on bids for government projects. Still,\u00a0it\u2019s hard to believe that while Kurosawa made the film, and while Ozu made the serene\u00a0Late Autumn<\/em>, students were fighting police in the streets over the US-Japan security treaty. That turmoil surfaced in Oshima Nagisa\u2019s demanding and formally daring\u00a0Night and Fog in Japan<\/em>.<\/p>\n The movie is shot with Kurosawa\u2019s usual muscularity, including virtuoso compositions in what he called, following Toland, \u201cpan-focus.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The film’s twists also seemed to me worth examining. The protagonist is a minor presence in the first scenes, and his reticence in the beginning is mirrored in the finale, when he simply vanishes and his pal has to tell us what happened to him. Such a daring structure, reminiscent of the abrupt midway break in Ikiru<\/em>, gives the film an almost Brechtian discomfiture, as well as highlighting the secondary characters\u2019 rather perverse reaction to the hero\u2019s fate.<\/p>\n Kurosawa was widely called a \u201chumanist\u201d director, and this concept sheds light on what we might call the \u201cinternational film ideology\u201d pervading festivals in the 1950s. In various areas of social and philosophical thought, a notion of humanism emerged out of disillusionment with the \u201cage of ideology\u201d that had engulfed the world in war. Several thinkers declared that the age of religious dogma and social collectivism, either Nazi or Communist, was over. Now what mattered were the features that drew people of all societies together, and the prospect of enlightened social action based on those commonalities\u2014tolerance, respect, and a belief that people ultimately took individual responsibility for their communities. Catholics, Communists, and people of all stripes scrambled to call themselves humanists. As Dwight Macdonald, former Trotskyite, put it, \u201cThe root is man.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n Film festivals embraced this universalism, pointing to the great films of Italy\u2019s Neorealist trend as proof of cross-cultural communication. Although these films often scored specifically Italian political points, they could also be seen as human documents speaking to audiences anywhere. Who could not empathize with Ricci and his son in Bicycle Thieves<\/em> (named at the 1958 Expo as the third-greatest film ever made)?<\/p>\n The turn to humanism helps answer a puzzling question: Why Satyajit Ray? Virtually no Europeans had ever seen a film from India. What enabled a director from this country to achieve worldwide renown? And why not other Indian directors of his era, such as Raj Kapoor, Guru Dutt, Mrinal Sen, and Ritwik Ghatak? All of these had to wait many years for discovery by European tastemakers.<\/p>\n For one thing, Ray was highly westernized himself. He was a child of the Bengali Renaissance, a virtuoso in many fields (he composed music, drew with facility, wrote detective stories and children\u2019s books), and an admirer of European cinema. A stint assisting Jean Renoir exposed him to one of the greatest of Western filmmakers. A viewing of The Bicycle Thieves<\/em> determined him to make films. He was skeptical of imitating Hollywood, which had been a prime inspiration for Hindu cinema. He criticized Bollywood\u2019s reliance on schematic romance and musical numbers. If any Indian director was to make the move to the festival circuit, it would be him. (You can argue that other non-European filmmakers who made it into the fold were the most \u201cwestern\u201d\u2014Kurosawa, Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, etc.).<\/p>\n Just as important, Ray\u2019s stories suited the humanist program. Whereas Ghatak and Sen made politically charged films, Ray concentrated on the individual. In The World of A<\/em>pu<\/em>, social conditions are shown, but as a background to the development of personality and psychological tensions. At the film’s start, students are holding a street march demanding political rights, but they are offscreen, a backdrop to Apu\u2019s meeting with his old professor as he gets his letter of recommendation. What follows is a drama of artistic failure, blossoming love, and a young man\u2019s confused growth to maturity and responsibility.<\/p>\n It’s a simple story, rendered lyrical through constantly developing imagery: Apu stretched out prone, the famous grimy window curtain, and a cluster of visual motifs I hadn’t noticed on previous viewing. Ray’s concise direction links the torn curtain in Apu’s room to the famous (Langian?) transition from a movie screen to a carriage window, the cluster unified by associating Apurna with male children. Thanks to Andrew Robinson’s book on Ray, we know that in the carriage scene she is already thinking of the son she will bear.<\/p>\n It\u2019s easy to romanticize this handsome, happy-go-lucky hero. I think the College participants thought I was a little hard on Apu, since I treated him as far from the \u201cconscientious and diligent\u201d young man his professor wrote of. Surely his idealistic-novelist persona is sympathetic. But if he is to grow as the film suggests, he must have failings, and Ray shows them to us\u2014dreamy indolence, self-centeredness, even poutiness. The film is a character study, a sort of Bildungsroman<\/em> tracing how Apu learns his place in his world. Our discussion after this film was particularly rich, with one participant suggesting that in accepting his son he isn\u2019t abandoning his art entirely, but giving it human significance: He promises to tell Kajal stories.<\/p>\n Ray came to directing in middle age, a somewhat rare option<\/a>.\u00a0So too did Gillo Pontecorvo, but the latter made many fewer films. Although\u00a0Kap\u00f2<\/em>, isn\u2019t as strong a movie as our other entries, it did allow us to talk a bit about coproduction, about European cinema’s relation to World War II, and about what came to be known as the morality of technique.<\/p>\n European coproductions are another fundamental part of the 1960 landscape, and they illustrate how economic considerations penetrate artistic choices. (Why are American and Italian actors in the \u201cGerman\u201d film 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse<\/em>? Why do we find Anouk Aim\u00e9e in 8 \u00bd<\/em> and Jeanne Moreau in La Notte<\/em>? Follow the money.) For the Italian production Kap\u00f2<\/em>, the primary roles are taken by an American (Susan Strasberg, playing the heroine Edith) and two French actors\u2014the concentration camp translator played by Emmanuelle Riva and the heroic Soviet soldier played by Laurent Terzieff. The film was shot in Yugoslavia.<\/p>\n The story centers on a young Jewish girl who, in order to survive Nazi internment, passes herself off as a Gentile and becomes a camp commandant, whipping other prisoners into line. Other Italian films of the period, notably Rossellini\u2019s Generale Della Rovere<\/em>, were dealing with issues of conscience during the war, but Kap\u00f2<\/em> was apparently the first fictional feature in Western Europe to confront the Holocaust since Alessandrini\u2019s Wandering Jew<\/em> of 1947. In 1960, Adolf Eichmann had been captured by the Mossod and stood trial the following year, and after Kap\u00f2<\/em> came a few other films addressing the camps, notably Wajda\u2019s Samson<\/em> (1961) and Lumet\u2019s The Pawnbroker<\/em> (1965). So the film had a strong contemporary resonance; after its US release, it would be nominated for an Oscar.<\/p>\n <\/a>One reason Stef and I picked Kap\u00f2<\/em> was the controversy around Jacques Rivette\u2019s accusation<\/a> in Cahiers du cin\u00e9ma<\/em> that for a particular tracking shot Pontecorvo deserved \u201cthe most profound contempt.\u201d The film, as Rivette indicates, is\u00a0dominated by an already compromised conception of realism: grimed faces, make-up that hollows cheeks, somewhat ragged clothes, moderately shabby bunks.\u00a0The shot shows the body of Theresa hurled against the electrified barbed wire, with the camera coasting slowly toward it. Her silhouette is almost classically composed, with the hands artfully pivoted and standing out against the sky. For Rivette this pictorial conceit is virtually obscene.<\/p>\n It seems to me that Rivette’s essay sought in part to reply to those who thought that Cahiers\u2019<\/em> policy amounted to pure formalism. In calling for an ethics of technique, Rivette argues that artistic choices which might seem to be in the service of correct\u00a0politics can betray a deeper immorality: using a historical cataclysm as an occasion for a safe realism and self-congratulatory flourishes. Similar complaints could be lodged against Kramer\u2019s Judgment at Nuremberg<\/em> and Stone\u2019s World Trade Center<\/em>. And because for the Cahiers<\/em> team artistic cinema was an expression of a creator\u2019s vision, the morally maladroit traveling shot brands the director as a man of bad faith.<\/p>\n Rivette isn’t saying that film artists shouldn\u2019t try to represent historical trauma. He simply argues that other paths could be taken. For instance, Resnais\u2019 Night and Fog<\/em> and Hiroshima mon amour<\/em> acknowledge that some events cannot be encompassed by normal understanding, and the form of each film enacts an effort<\/em> to understand, not a fixed conclusion. What we see in Night and Fog<\/em> is \u201ca lucid consciousness, somewhat impersonal, that is unable to accept or understand or admit this phenomenon.\u201d For Rivette, Pontecorvo seems convinced that romantic love and self-sacrifice can overcome Nazism, albeit with some help from the Red Army. He tries to explain, even prettify, an event that cannot be understood within the usual humanistic categories.<\/p>\n \n New Wave, still new<\/strong><\/p>\n Lola<\/em>.<\/p>\n Godard\u2019s Le Petit soldat<\/em> is far more preoccupied with uncertainties, even confusions, than Kap\u00f2<\/em> is. 1960 saw an extraordinary number of former colonies, especially in Africa, gain independence, and during that year the Algerian war of resistance was spreading to Europe. Godard\u2019s central character Bruno is working with the OAS vigilantes dedicated to killing Algerian terrorists, but when he meets the lovely Veronica Dreyer he decides to leave politics behind and flee with her to Brazil. Perhaps \u201cdecides\u201d is the wrong word, since his actions are impulsive: he abruptly shies away from committing a political assassination, and he abruptly abandons his colleagues. But he\u2019s captured by FLN terrorists and, in the film\u2019s most famous sequences, tortured. At the end, he commits the assassination, not knowing that Veronica, herself in league with the Algerians, has been captured by his pals and killed. But his final voice-over is almost a shrug, and his act of murder takes on the flavor of an existentialist acte gratuite<\/em>.<\/p>\n Le Petit soldat<\/em> doesn\u2019t offer heroic figures, as Kap\u00f2<\/em> does in Theresa and the Soviet soldier. Nor does it allow us to sympathize much with the egotistical, capricious Bruno. The texture is more disjunctive, littered with the usual digressions and citations. Since the film was shot in Geneva, there\u2019s a persistent motif of Swissness, with citations of Paul Klee. A sneaky one I never noticed before: the seduction game Bruno plays is modeled on the three fundamental shapes in the Bauhaus basic course, which Klee taught.<\/p>\n Having experimented with discontinuous imagery in \u00c0 bout de souffle<\/em>, Godard in his second feature turns his attention to the soundtrack, creating one of the most minimalist ones I know. If Bresson whittles down his soundtrack to a spare but recognizable realism, Le Petit soldat<\/em> goes a step further, scrubbing out nearly every noise until we\u2019re almost watching a silent film. Traffic scenes lack traffic noises, with only a car horn or a bit of dialogue breaking in. One passage on a train could almost be a sound loop.<\/p>\n The strategy of suppressed sound is carried to a paroxysm in the torture scenes, with the clink of handcuffs and the soft tapping of typewriter keys highlighted and bits of music played spasmodically\u2026but no sounds of pain. Only during the rushed and almost throwaway climax, is something like a plausible city ambience heard. In a dichotomy that will be familiar throughout Godard\u2019s work, there\u2019s a split between image (Bruno is a photographer, and in the early part of the film he takes snapshots of Veronica in her apartment) and sound (the political factions rely on telephones and tape recorders, and the OAS thugs trick their way into Veronica\u2019s apartment through sound recording).<\/p>\n In all, Le Petit soldat<\/em> isn\u2019t exactly fun but it\u2019s exhilarating in its bursts and unexpected frictions. Next time somebody tells me that Godard\u2019s technical innovations have all become commonplace, I\u2019ll point to this film of 1960, which would be daring and demanding if released tomorrow.<\/p>\n Fun, albeit grave, is what Lola<\/em> is all about. It takes formal artifice far beyond realism, creating a sort of non-musical musical. (It has one number, and even that is a sketchy rehearsal.) As geometrical as a minuet, its plot plays out in a hall of mirrors, where characters share names, pasts, and sentiments. The sailor Frankie and the wandering Michel, both in love with Lola, are blonde giants. Lola is actually named C\u00e9cile, and the little girl of the same name seems in some ways an early version of her, while C\u00e9cile\u2019s mother has a dash of Lola in her past.<\/p>\n Roland starts out as the protagonist, but as he warms and cools and warms to Lola, the story momentum shifts to others. There\u2019s Lola of course, and young C\u00e9cile who strikes up a friendship with Frankie, and C\u00e9cile\u2019s mother who yearns a bit for Roland, and Michel, who left Nantes years ago and has lived in another movie, specifically, Mark Robson\u2019s Return to Paradise<\/em> (1952). Here the structure of the plot unfolds the network of relationships among people, linked mostly by casual encounters across a few days. The last section accordingly consists of a series of farewells, as if the story can end only by breaking ties of affection.<\/p>\n \n In surveying these films, I was struck by how much most of them owed to the growth of postwar institutions of film culture, and how strong those institutions remain. Coproductions and subsidies were feeding a massive buildup of European cinema. Contrary to what you might expect, as attendance cratered from the late 1950s onward, the number of European films produced went up. The EU countries still overproduce, releasing nearly 1200 theatrical features in 2008.<\/p>\n Film festivals were promoting not only universal humanism; they were also packaging films under rubrics of authorship or the New XXX Cinema and the Young ZZZ Cinema. 1940s Neorealism, aka \u201cNew Realism in Italian Cinema,\u201d seems to have been, once more, the prototype. Festivals must make discoveries and emphasize novelties. At the same period film schools taught professional standards, and film archives showed classics and gave postwar filmmakers a more secure sense of the medium\u2019s history. Lang, Ozu, and Wilder weren\u2019t dependent on such institutions, but younger filmmakers were. And still are.<\/p>\n 1960 is an arbitrary data point, but it\u00a0stands out as an extraordinary year for quality. In addition,\u00a0picking it as a benchmark allowed me to think about some important trends of the period. What probably didn\u2019t show through my lumbering PowerPoints, with their charts, diagrams, and frame enlargements, was how much I learned from my Bruges stay. One of the deep satisfactions of teaching is remembering, no matter how confidently you declare your claims, how much more there is to know. Of things cinematic there is no end.<\/p>\n \n We also asked participants to read Serge Daney\u2019s essay, \u201cThe Tracking Shot in\u00a0Kap\u00f2<\/em>.\u201d Daney’s elaborate exercise in autobiography, irony, and moral reflection could not be plumbed in the time at my disposal, there or here. But it did help me understand Rivette’s argument. In preparing my lectures, I also owed a debt to some excellent books, notably Tom Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity<\/a><\/em>; Andrew Robinson, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye<\/a><\/em>; Carlo Celli, Gillo Pontecorvo: From Resistance to Terrorism<\/a><\/em>; and Richard Brody, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard<\/a><\/em>. As ever, the invaluable documentation provided by the print editions of Screen Digest<\/a><\/em> over the years enabled me to compile my tables of attendance, releases, and the like.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>Running alongside my titles were horror films and thrillers from the same year, including Peeping Tom<\/em>, Black Sunday, The Leech Woman<\/em>, and Corman’s\u00a0House of Usher<\/em>. William Castle\u2019s 13 Ghosts<\/em> was shown with reconstructed versions of the original two-color Ghost Viewers. (Look through red if you believe in ghosts, blue if you don’t.) Imagine the shot above through a red filter. The creature, pink on the print, turns satanically crimson\u2014confirmation that ghosts exist, although they look less like Casper and more like those Red Devil candies you ate in theatres as a kid. In a prologue, available here<\/a>, Mr. Castle explains it all.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>This frame of reference can be seen in Steichen\u2019s 1955 photo exhibition, circulated around the world in a best-selling book, called The Family of Man<\/em>, as well as in the 1958 Brussels Expo, the first major world\u2019s fair since the war. There films like For a More Human World<\/a><\/em> (frame right) presented technology, science, education, and cooperation as teaming up to improve the lives of people in all nations.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n <\/a><\/a><\/p>\n