I'm re-reading Truffaut's The Films in My Life and it has made me wonder, what are the films that have made an impression in my life? I'm not talking about "favorite" or "best," those would be something else. No, these are films that changed the way I thought or saw in some way. Some of them are great, some of them aren't so great.
This is by no means a comprehensive list, just the first several that came to mind. I'd be interested in knowing what you think of this list, and I welcome everyone to comment with lists of their own, and not just of film, but of plays, performances, books, musical compositions, paintings, or any combination of those. It's a blog, after all.
Invaders from Mars (1953, not the remake): Martians land on Earth and take over the bodies of good ol' red-blooded Americans, leaving them cold, unemotional, and with little marks on the backs of their necks. This film's thesis, how well do we really know the people we know?, set my seven-year-old mind reeling to such a degree that when the movie ended I went and surreptitiously looked at my father's neck for that mark. That probably says something about my relationship with my father, but still, pretty powerful stuff.
An American in Paris, Singing in the Rain, On the Town, Anchors Aweigh: I didn't care for musicals as a pre-adolescent, but for some reason I was obsessed with Gene Kelly. I think he made the musical "safe" for me. Unlike his chief rival, Fred Astaire, Kelly was athletic, his muscles ripped, and his dance numbers were often more like gymnastic routines; i.e., more like sport, i.e., "manly," and less like dance, i.e., "girly." Later, I would discover that Kelly's mission was to show that dancing was like sport and suitable for manly, he-men. He succeeded with me at least, and in the process introduced me to Gershwin, Bernstein, Comden and Green. Good work, Gene. Also, we have the same birthday.
La Luna: Jill Clayburgh plays a recently widowed opera singer touring Italy with her son, a teenage heroin addict. She decides to assuage her grief and cure his habit by indulging in an incestuous affair with the boy. I remember watching this film with my older brother and being curious about these people. Suddenly, the small New Jersey towns I had grown up in seemed provincial; the world was filled with all sorts of people, from opera divas to teenage junkies, people who didn't act the way the people in my family did. I wasn't intimidated by this sudden expansion; I thought it was a wonderful thing. And the scene where Clayburgh's son repeatedly jabs a fork into his mainlining arm will never leave me.
Slasher films from the late 70s and early 80s: I decided to lump them all together, not because no one film stands out, but because when I was a teenager these films introduced me to the idea of movie-going as a communal experience. As a child, I occasionally went to drive-ins with my family or the Summit theater in Union City with friends, but it wasn't until I was 17 and able to drive that going to films became a ritual. And I was lucky (or unlucky) enough to be of driving age during the Golden Age of Slasher films. Each week I'd go to a movie theater to see a film that was seemingly tailor-made for me and my friends who wanted nothing more than to go to a movie where the human body was mutilated. Afterwards we'd go to a nearby diner and discuss the film over cheeseburger deluxes. True, the conversations were not on the level of a cineaste's ("When he plunged the spear through the couple that were doing it! That was f-in' cool!"), but still, we were engaged with the films and discussing images. It was an exciting time.
Simple Men: Here was a film, a small, quirky, intelligent, stylized film that seemed like something I would have made, from the color pallet to starting and ending the film with the same line of dialogue, "Don't move," which in the context of the scenes mean very different things. Yep, that's something I would have done, would still do. More importantly, this film seemed like something I could have done. A good script, a few actors, a few locations, some American Playhouse money, and boom! you've made a true independent film! I saw this film again recently and it seems dated in only a couple of ways, but it held up overall and managed to move and inspire me, and not in a nostalgic way. The impromptu dance scene to Sonic Youth's "Kool Thing" that falls out of the sky and into this movie still kicks ass.
Thin Red Line: I saw this at Zeigfeld on that giant screen with that big sound system. Director Terrence Malick and cinematographer John Toll had taken their time and made me care about the characters and this idyllic part of the Pacific; I sank into the languorous rhythm of the film. And then everything got blown apart in the first battle scene and I wept like I never had in a movie theater. Later, the camera surveys a post-battle battlefield and we linger on a Japanese soldier, his body covered in sand, his face partially exposed, the light in his eyes dimming. He has only a few breaths of life left. A voice wafts over the image: "Are you righteous? Kind? Does your confidence lie in this? Are you loved by all? Know that I was, too. Do you imagine your suffering will be any less because you loved goodness and truth? " Do you imagine your suffering will be any less because you loved goodness and truth... I was devastated.
Tokyo Story: I'm so grateful I didn't know about Yasujiro Ozu when I was 21, because I would have been turned off so completely as to not give him a second chance. His films are not for the speedy metabolisms of people in their twenties, he is a filmmaker for adults over 35, people who have seen or are beginning to see their parents age, people with a sense of mortality. I think Roger Ebert said when he finished watching an Ozu film he felt refreshed and cleansed, the complete opposite of the adrenaline rush he felt after seeing an American action film. Who am I to argue with a Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic and co-screenwriter of Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens. Watching Tokyo Story I realized that a film can be meditative and still engaging. Tokyo Story also reminds me that a lot less really can say a lot more, that a simple family drama is as important a story as any other, that certain themes truly are universal. This film also started me down a road of Nipponphilia that I'm still gleefully traveling on.
What works of art made you who you are?
