What I’m Seeing This Week: I’m happy to report that I am finally going to make it to the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival! The screening I’m targeting is the one of 7 Walks with Mark Brown at Cinemapolis on Sunday. I’m also hoping to catch Warfare there or at the Regal Ithaca Mall and Drop at the Regal.
Also in Theaters: Had I but world enough, and time, other FLEFF events I’d want to attend include the screenings at Cinemapolis of Sleep with Your Eyes Open tonight and The End of St. Petersburg (which includes live musical accompaniment by local legends Cloud Chamber Orchestra) on Saturday, and the live performance using 19th-century optical devices called “Elliott and Schlemowitz’s Magic Lantern Show” there on Sunday. My favorite new movie now playing Ithaca that I’ve already seen is The Woman in the Yard, a well-crafted chilling psychological horror film about my greatest fear as a parent which continues its run at the Regal, but maybe only for one more week (it’s down to one showing per day). I also enjoyed Black Bag, which closes at Cinemapolis tonight, and A Working Man, which continues its run at the Regal. Noteworthy special events include free screenings of last year’s Best International Feature Film Oscar winner I’m Still Here at Cornell Cinema on Monday and Matter of Mind: My Alzheimer’s at Cinemapolis on Wednesday and free “sensory-friendly” screenings of the PBS children’s television program Carl the Collector at the Tompkins County Public Library on Wednesday. Finally, your best bets for repertory fare are the 4k restorations of North by Northwest and my November “Drink & a Movie” selection The Searchers at Cornell Cinema tomorrow and Sunday respectively as part of their “VistaVision!” series.
Home Video: I’ve been meaning to check out Wooden Crosses on the Criterion Channel ever since Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell (RIP) referred to it as a “masterpiece unknown to most modern viewers” in their “The ten best films of … 1932” blog post a few years ago and I finally got around to it the other day. Here’s what I posted to Letterboxd after my second viewing:
As a committed pacifist war films aren’t my favorite genre. It is the shame of our species that we’re still fighting each other at this point in our development, and there isn’t much else to say about the matter. Wooden Crosses is largely exempt from this argument, though, because of when it was made and because it isn’t so much anti-WAR as it is anti-war PROPAGANDA. While it has elements that are maybe more appropriate to the silent era like a double exposed dual parade of living and dead soldiers, it’s very smart about sound and neither of its most crucial scenes would work as well or even at all without it. First Corporal Breval (Charles Vanel), far from leaving his comrades with lofty sentiments or pearls of wisdom as he expires instead instructs them to make sure everyone knows what a slut his wife is. Then Gilbert Demachy (Pierre Blanchar) is denied a hero’s death and succumbs to a gutshot wound after an entire day spent whimpering pathetically in no man’s land as he waits for nightfall and the promise of stretcher bearers who never arrive. The point is clear: there is nothing ennobling about their “sacrifice.” Their stories were simply cut short and wasted, leaving behind a lifetime of unfinished business. Wooden Crosses is also justly famous for the documentary-style combat footage that is the reason 20th Century-Fox studio head Darryl Zanuck bought the North American rights to it (so that the footage could be reused in The Road to Glory), the maddeningly incessant sound of artillery is again the reason this is *effective*. I would even go so far as to say that it compares well to some scenes from Band of Brothers, which is impressive considering it preceded that work by nearly 70 years.
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts can be found here. A running list of all of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.
The Prodigal Cinephile 