Cinema Survey 18

Beetlejuice: Seeing this in the same theater that I saw the sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice last fall drove home how far Hollywood filmmaking has fallen in terms of craft and imagination. Forget the insane roll that Tim Burton was on from the mid-1980s through the 1990s, forget that he wrote or developed many of those films and many of them became iconic, if not classics; forget that he’s still working and only overlooked because of his admittedly hack work for Disney throughout the 2010s. There isn’t an American filmmaker under 40 as distinct as Burton, and I don’t even like the guy’s movies that much. Besides being well-lit and designed, Beetlejuice is a display of untrammeled creativity and imagination expressed near the highest levels of the medium. It ends with Winona Ryder floating in the air because it’s delirious with joy, and confident enough in its abandon to go up. Who else could do this today with as much grace?

Caliber 9: Fernando Di Leo’s 1972 poliziottesco opens with a group of gangsters beating the shit out of a man and his wife—the wife is punched in the face against a wall with only a pillow between her and Mario Adorf’s fist—and then blowing them up inside a cave, burying them alive. It’s a thrilling opening that quickly sinks to the most boring procedural bullshit imaginable. And confusing—everyone else in the theater had the wherewithal to gasp when Barbara Bouchet betrayed our hero; I was busy admiring all of the sets, clothes, and of course Bouchet. These Italian exploitation films are most interesting for the luxury catalogue aspect, and it probably helps that they’re so confusing, because while they often are boring when there isn’t a set piece happening, they’re almost always nice to look at. These movies are also ALWAYS well photographed, especially the gialli. Generally, the prettier the women, the better the photography, at least in the Italian grindhouse.

Lancelot du Lac: Robert Bresson made many other movies I prefer to this one—The Devil, Probably; L’argent; A Man Escaped; Au Hasard Balthazar—but, like John Ford, all of them are immaculately photographed, edited, and, especially in Bresson’s case, paired with equally compelling sound design and music. Ford’s favorite hymns run through the decades of his cinema, while Bresson uses his precious Nagra more like an experimental musician, collecting “samples” for each new film, creating new motifs and threads that evoke more and reach deeper than a typical symphonic or orchestral score would. Keep in mind these are sounds like crickets, hammering, foghorns, car horns, footsteps. It’s these sounds and their spare deployment that makes all of Bresson’s films so tense and sinister: however minimal, Bresson’s sonic montage is menacing and hostile in its indifference; if his films are more “realistic” because of this, they’re also examples of a heightened “everyday reality,” one where the city (or the forest in Lancelot’s case) is always singing, perfectly out of tune with itself.

—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter and Instagram: @nickyotissmith