May 17: In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914 -- Edward Curtis)

★★★

Years before Robert Flaherty followed Nanook for his year in Northeast Canada, Edward Curtis blended some Northwest Kwakwaka'wakw tales into a melodramatic story that let him showcase the vanishing culture of this people.  In the Land of the Head Hunters has a predictably clichéd story, but the visuals make the film worthwhile.  Curtis uses actual Kwakwaka'wakw actors, and he brings into the film an outstanding number of ethnographic elements.  We see decorated Kwakwaka'wakw lodges, totems, big canoes, and costumes like that of the wolf-dancer.  Even the story feels like it has authentic elements with the extraordinary brutality of Yaklus as he murders people he happens on.  There’s much to appreciate in this film.

Unfortunately, the restoration of this film had to proceed from terribly flawed sources, and the compromises imposed on the restorers limit its cinematic pleasure.  Big sections of the movie were apparently missing, so the action stops frequently as we linger on a frozen frame that replaces the missing footage.  This technique is a reasonable compromise, but there are so many instances of the action freezing that the film at times feels like a slideshow rather than a movie. 

It’s a pity that there aren’t better elements to restore this film from.  The parts that are intact show us that Head Hunters could be a far richer cinematic experience, though even in its present condition, it still has much to offer as a document of the unique, fading Kwakwaka'wakw culture.

May 16: The Epic of Everest (1924 -- Cpt. John Noel)

★★★★

This is an engaging documentary about the failed 1924 British expedition to climb Mt. Everest.  The leaders of the expedition, George Mallory and Andrew Irvine among them, apparently weren’t thrilled with Cpt. Noel’s tagging along to film, but that left Noel to bring his own subjectivity to bear on this movie.  And his is a refreshing take that is neither a hagiography of valiant leaders nor a hyped thrill like we see on cable TV.  Noel’s interest here is the beauty that surrounds the climbers and the almost mystic doom that follows the expedition.

Long before David Lean filled his camera frame with a desert and let a distant line of camels cross it, Noel’s steady lens gazed at tiny lines of men and yaks as they trudged across the Tibetan plateau or struggled up an ice-caked cliff.  And these are only a few images of the beauty Noel finds on the expedition.  We also see landscapes with square Tibetan village structures that cling to topography and close-ups of the rugged inhabitants dressed traditionally.  Glacial columns create fantasy landscapes, too, and all the while, Everest looms in the background with a plume of snow blowing off its peak.  And we watch darkness creep over this extraordinary landscape several times.  Epic of Everest tells us that the expedition is cold, hard, and menacing, but what resonates is the beauty of the endeavor that it shows us.

Noel also imparts a mystical doom to his telling, just as an Anglo-Saxon chronicler might in one of his epics.  Everest is a mighty, unconquered force of nature, and we see a Tibetan priest foretell the expedition’s failure.  We also learn that as Chomolungma, the Mother Goddess of the Earth, Everest is protected by mythic, howling dogs, and that one of its glaciers, for all its beauty, is the place that fairies and giants dance.  All these would threaten those who seek to conquer the mountain.  At one point, an intertitle makes doom even more explicit when it tells us that the next image of the 22-year-old Irving is that of a man who would soon be dead.  Hence the dread as we see Mallory and Irving set out on their last attempt at summiting and later watch Noel Odell he lays out blankets on a high ridge as a signal that the two have vanished.  The fatalism that Noel evokes here hearkens back to that of early storytellers like the Beowulf poet.

Even with this originality, Noel’s portrayal doesn’t manage to transcend the worldview of his time.  We learn the name of only one of the 500 porters, but the film mentions the names of every one the Europeans; we linger on the deaths of Mallory and Irving, but we never learn anything of the two porters who freeze to death in a base camp.  There is also a smugness in the film’s attitude towards the Tibetans and an attitude of conquest towards nature.  But the beauty and spirit that inform this film lift it past the limits of its worldview and make it a movie that we can readily respond to today.

April 6: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016 -- Zack Snyder)

★★★

April 2: 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016 -- Dan Trachtenberg)

★★★

10 Cloverfield Lane is a predictable genre movie but for the fact that it fuses two genres that
we never see together.  It starts as an effective psychological thriller that stays locked in the perspective of the kidnapped Michelle.  This perspective limits what we know, and it leaves us guessing about the nature of her kidnapper, Howard.  Through Michelle, we see his menace and learn things about him that cause us to doubt his sanity and motivation; at the same time, we learn things about him that surprisingly turn out to be true.  Dan Trachtenberg’s direction maintains this perspective, and in doing so, builds and sustains suspense, while John Goodman’s effective performance sells that character, never giving away more than Michelle could pick up.  The horror mounts as Michelle tries to resist Howard.

After the gory standoff between kidnapper and victim that is part of this genre, 10 Cloverfield Lane becomes Spielberg’s War of the Worlds and makes several typical genre gestures there, too.  Michelle sees aliens from a distance and is also threatened up close when she’s in hiding. She finally she heads off to help in the battle against the invaders.  It’s familiar stuff from this type of sci-fi.

The originality in 10 Cloverfield Lane comes from its fusing the psychological killer thriller with the sci fi alien invasion genre, but Trachtenberg doesn’t bring much else to this project.  He hews so closely to the genre conventions that we ultimately have little investment in the characters or the outcome since we know the genre games and their rules.  The film has a clever idea (what if there really ARE Martians?) that it explores effectively, but it takes no risks in either of the genres it uses.  In keeping so close to convention, it doesn’t engage or move us, and it brings no particularly new insights to viewers.

March 22: The Witch (2015 -- Robert Eggers)

★★★★

March 21: The Revenant (2015 -- Alejandro Iñárritu)

★★★★★

January 12: The Book Thief (2013 -- Brian Percival)

★★★★