Reverse Shot. Take One.

Past Reverse Shot symposiums have focused on a single filmmaker, but with "Take One," editors Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert introduce a new "ongoing series of symposiums in which our writers will tackle the whole of a film through some fundamental piece of cinematic construction: an edit, musical cue, color, and so on." And they begin with: "Just one single shot - from any movie, whatever genre, whatever period." This opportunity comes once in a lifetime, yo. Taking it up:

• Andrew Tracy chooses a "virtuoso shot," one of many "grace notes," this one coming at a "crucial moment" in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.

• "How to marry words to these of all images? I've expended over 500 thus far just to recount the basic happenings contained within the bounds of the shot, but still so much is missing..." Reichert on a long one in Werckmeister Harmonies. Related: Damnation, writes Reichert, "isn't a bad place to start examining Hungary's most prominent filmmaker," who also happens to be "one of world cinema's most talented, visionary living filmmakers."

• "[S]hots don't belong to the Lynchian lexicon," argues Michael Joshua Rowin. "Sure, Lynch is a consummate pro and clearly knows how to compose shots and link them with dazzling visual expression, but the man thinks in and constructs Moments." Nonetheless, the shot: "Nothing special, really, a simple cutaway. It comes towards the end of Mulholland Drive..."

• When Fassbinder saw Sirk, writes Chris Wisniewski, he "saw, for the first time, the possibility of marrying his personal political project (in the tradition of the Brechtian epic theater) with an emotionally satisfying narrative. And it all coalesces, for me at least, in one single shot" - in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul.

• "[W]hat's doubtless and perhaps most striking about Fantasia is that it still stands utterly alone; like a genre unto itself, or perhaps, one that never really spawned the imitators it perhaps should have, Fantasia forever remains firmly rooted in its time, its ambition, its crossroads." Koresky goes for that last, "longest single shot in animation up to that point."

• Keith Uhlich opens up "an 83 frame, just under three-and-a-half second shot from Steven Spielberg's Munich."

• "Todd Haynes's Safe," writes Vicente Rodriguez-Ortega, "while breathing almost exclusive whiteness all the way through the narrative, fully addresses the racial problematic at the core of the compartmentalized layout of Los Angeles and its neighboring towns." He takes us up to a final close-up and explains how Haynes has built up to it for maximum impact.

• Adam Nayman: "I have cried and cried out at many films in my life, but I have never again made a sound like the one that escaped my lips during World of Glory."

• Kristi Mitsuda: "Though Reverse Shot's shared enrapturement with [Before Sunset] has seemingly been done to death, alas, not for me." And certainly not that glorious last shot.

• Brad Westcott on Taxi Driver: "From a high angle framing Betsy's desk, the camera drifts slowly to the right, following Travis's arm as it makes a somewhat baroque sweeping gesture across the desktop." The shot's arrested many; go here, scroll down and find Adam Rosadiuk's take.

• "Gerd Oswald, an otherwise unremarkable director... remarkably found transcendence with 1956's A Kiss Before Dying," writes James Crawford. "There's little, narratively speaking, to suggest a work of weight and nuance, and yet Oswald accomplishes it, crafting a visually complex film. It all begins with the film's second shot."

• Marianna Martin on Contempt: "That Goddamned lamp. It is the secret star of the film, and this shot proves it."

• Eric Kohn: "While much of his theatrical energy in The Front is mercilessly chopped up in unflattering close-ups and scenes where various higher-ups berate his vague affiliation with the disparaged political party of yore, the long take leading across Hecky's hotel room and following him to the window gave the actor proper spatial range to channel his character's resigned psyche into a few brief moments of ironic girth."

• "Though invariably praised for the intelligence of his writing, [John] Sayles is rarely singled out for visual flair," writes Jeannette Catsoulis. So she explains why she's chosen a five-second "rapid shot/countershot sequence" from Matewan.

• Never mind the shot, what an opening paragraph from Daniel Cockburn: "In 1998, Gus Van Sant made what is still (more or less) universally regarded as a misstep, the (more or less) shot-for-shot remake of Hitchcock's Psycho. It was, however, a necessary step, an expiatory act which, genuflecting before the sanctity of the shot, shredded the director's on-high communion with the film. It's this disavowal of authorship, this minimizing of originality's worth, which must be acknowledged if one is to accept certain elements of Van Sant's subsequent 'Death Trilogy': wholesale transplantation of sequence-shots from Béla Tarr's oeuvre into Gerry; re-appropriation of Alan Clarke's title, subject matter, and stylistic treatment in Elephant; and re-creation of iconic Kurt Cobain photographs in Last Days."

• "Satyajit Ray's 1960 film Devi is a humanist work, but its interest in what exactly we do when we look at someone or something almost fragments the emotion we feel in watching it," writes Nicolas Rapold. He chooses the first shot of Doyamoyee.

• "[T]he biggest reason for [Under Capricorn's] failure (then and today) is also its triumph - the use of takes that typically last from five to eight minutes." Dan Callahan on Hitchcock's "maligned" film.

• Tom J Carlisle: "The audience is conditioned to expect that although the detective hero will pay a great personal price, he will find this real and absolute truth, and, through this knowledge, justice, however cruel, will prevail. Chinatown seems to be heading in that direction, dutifully, until that last, terrible, beautiful shot, where everything quickly and finally unravels."

A series of "Reverse 'Shots'" is presented without comment before we move on to the next section: the interviews: Crawford with 13 (Tzameti) director Géla Babluani (see also Bilge Ebiri's for Nerve) and Nick Pinkerton with Robert Altman.

This late summer issue's "Shot/Reverse Shot" feature sees Crawford (pro) and Catsoulis (con) facing off over A Scanner Darkly.

Reviews of recent theatrical releases:

• Koresky: "Wisely, director / editor / cinematographer Matt Mahurin focuses much of his attention on the food in his laidback, downtown New York restaurant documentary I Like Killing Flies.... Unfortunately, Mahurin's aesthetic doesn't quite capture the hominess and local color that have obviously made Shopsin's an old standby for more than 32 years." Also: "One could quibble that gays finally having their own Scary Movie might be as dubious a distinction, as say, oh, the first gay western, but Another Gay Movie is so rabidly forthright in its splattering of orifice-indiscriminate man-juices that it reaches a level of almost cleansingly ribald sadism." More from Jürgen Fauth.

• Reichert: "If writers had spent as much time untangling the various strands of Lady in the Water that link it inextricably with Shyamalan's others film as they did snickering at the introduced vocabulary and story contrivances of his fantasy, response might have been a hair more measured." Also: "With John Lasseter and Joe Ranft's Cars, the ever-growing commercial imperatives required to feed the beast that is Pixar have overwhelmed any sense of responsibility towards their audience."

• Wisniewski on The Devil Wears Prada: "Streep takes this lopsided mess of a film and performs some kind of strange alchemy through which it becomes not just watchable but oddly poignant. When we talk about acting as an art, surely this is what we mean: the artist doesn't rise above the material; instead she sinks into it, transforming it not from above but from within." Also, A Lion in the House: "In the company of so powerful and graceful a work of human empathy, criticism itself hardly seems relevant."

• For Crawford, The Road to Guantánamo is "muckrake par excellence, bringing to light a saliently deplorable instance of military and political wrongdoing, and it treats the experience of those who've suffered injustice as something that should also be laid bare - represented, and not abstracted through reporting. Put another way, Winterbottom and Whitecross are canny enough to deploy the one-two punch of both showing and telling, making for a remarkable fact-fiction hybrid." Also: The Dardenne brothers' L'Enfant has been justly hailed as a brilliant work, but for gritty observational verisimilitude The Death of Mr Lazarescu outstrips it at every turn."

• For Leah Churner, Brothers of the Head "contains the singularly democratic balance of visual pleasure and pain one expects from a good horror film."

• Elbert Ventura: "Sad to say, Scoop is as limp, lazy, and inconsequential as any of Allen's trifles from the last dozen or so years. But then there are the laughs." More from Jonathan Rosenbaum in the Chicago Reader.

• Martin on Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest: "[T]he elements that made the first film so pleasurable are left awash and drowning in a sea of production value."

• Eric Kohn: "Superman Returns has a lot of the elements that make a Singer film work, and very few of the distractions that make a Ratner film awful.... And yet...."

• Danielle McCarthy on Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man: "The covers of Cohen's songs by the likes of [Rufus] Wainwright and [Nick] Cave are boring at best and nearly unwatchable at worst... But seriously, why isn't Leonard Cohen onstage himself, performing his own songs rather than these self-serving, insufferable egomaniacs?"

DVD reviews:

• Pinkerton: Cemetery Man's "at-long-last arrival on anamorphic widescreen DVD will be cause for celebration for fans of Italian horror cinema, but... it deserves the notice of moviegoers in general." Also, "to produce bracing emotion without having stacked the deck with screenwriter's tricks, without the aid of sentimental molestation, as Clean does, is an accomplishment that shouldn't be undervalued." And, I Wake Up Screaming: "The movie's awkward positioning at genre crossroads makes it feel like a hangover from mixing pink champagne and cheap bourbon." Plus: The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight.

• Andy Stark has fun comparing "The Equinox... A Journey Into the Supernatural (1967) and its longer re-vamp Equinox (1970; Criterion's release contains both cuts)," before getting walloped by all the extras.

• Deidra Garcia enjoys Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare, "which spends approximately 75 minutes as a low-budget, poorly-constructed horror movie involving demonic possession and bloodshed, only to about-face into some sort of testament to the powers of a Heavenly Good within the last ten minutes."

• Justin Stewart on Criterion's mammoth Complete Mr Arkadin: "Is it too much? I think not, since I share Peter Bogdanovich's stated optimism about the project's 'importance.'"

• Rapold: "Harlan County USA is primary and essential."

All the while, Nick Pinkerton has been covering Frank Borzage, Hollywood Romantic, the series at the Museum of the Moving Image running through August 20. For more, see Slant's special feature on the series as well.

Posted by dwhudson at August 6, 2006 8:55 AM