The Muriels Hall of Fame: Sunrise (1927, F.W. Murnau)

"I always think of F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans with a fair degree of melancholy. It’s one of the glories of the cinema, sure. But it’s also a kind elegy for silent films as they were about to be swept into the dustbin of history. Silent film had developed to a high degree of visual sophistication by the time Sunrise appeared and that sophistication is imprinted on every single frame of the film. Unfortunately, Sunrise appeared a month after The Jazz Singer. It was obsolete on arrival, arguably the last fireworks display of the era. The camera that Murnau had liberated from its moorings on the floor of the studio was remounted there as film had to learn everything over again to accommodate sound.

"At first glance, Sunrise is a simple, almost a simplistic movie. Femme fatale from the city convinces farmer to murder his wife and run off with her. Farmer can’t go through with it, but wife runs off. He pursues her. A long night of the soul follows. This is an artifact that clings to America’s self-image--already profoundly obsolete in 1927--as an agrarian nation. The country is wholesome in this film’s worldview. The city, a carnival of temptation. Frankly, it’s kind of corny. It’s an awful story. But then, it’s not really interested in story. It’s interested in images. The image is king here, and this is a tour de force in putting images on screen. The cascade of images, sometimes multiple images on the same screen, is intoxicating. The subtitle, 'A Song of Two Humans,' betrays the film’s intent not as narrative, but as poetry. The movie frame is a line, scenes are stanzas. As such, each frame is loaded with meaning. For all that, it’s such a living, breathing film that it takes time out for comedy here and there, and for suspense. It never leaves the frame without something to watch. Or someone.

"The technical bona fides in Sunrise are daunting. Everything in the movie was built to order. Both the city and the country were stages. The camera was suspended by cables a la those cameras that record sporting events these days. It could move anywhere. This was Murnau’s ultimate free camera, the resulting movie, the apotheosis of his “unchained cinema.” This became the house style at Fox in the brief moment before sound made all of this impossible, and you can see echoes of it reverberate through cinema in films as diverse as The Wizard of Oz (which strikes me as being very similar to Sunrise) and Citizen Kane (which is very different).

"Sunrise is one of the films for which Janet Gaynor won the first Academy Award for Best Actress. The first Oscar was given for a body of work rather than a single performance, but Gaynor’s performance here is of a piece with the two other films for which she won. Sunrise pairs with both Seventh Heaven and Street Angel for a formidable double or even triple feature. All of them are suffused with a delirious romanticism of a kind that vanishes from talking films, even once they relearned most of what they forgot from the silents. And all of them are devoted to the poetry of the image over the ruthlessness of narrative. The movies lost more than they gained from sound, at least in terms of the poetics of cinema. There’s not another film like Sunrise anywhere afterward. It’s one of the most beautiful things on this green Earth."

~ Christianne Benedict

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The Muriels Hall of Fame: Sansho the Bailiff (1954, Kenji Mizoguchi)

"More than any other Mizoguchi film, Sansho the Bailiff is entitled to be described as 'Shakespearean.' Its themes are universal, it’s characters embrace all walks of life and morality. The film’s central theme may well be how civilization and morality can emerge out of barbarism. Hence this noble story of redemption, and of good arising from evil, is tuned into cinematic art, abetted by the highest level of black and white cinematography, acting and writing. The mother is played by the legendary Kinuyo Tanaka, one of the greatest of Japanese actresses. As Mizoguchi was a passionate advocate of feminism, evidenced in many of his films, he surely had Tanaka evoke the strongest feminine vulnerability through literally every pore. The adult Zushio is played by Yoshiaki Hanayagi and his sister Anju by Kyoko Kagawa, who appeared in the other Japanese masterpiece of the same period, Ozu’s Tokyo Story.

"The cinematographer is Kazuo Miyagawa, who also shot Kurosawa’s Rashomon, among others. The scenes of nature, and especially the ones of trees and water evoke the texture of classic paintings, and Mizoguchi’s famous use of the long-shot and extended take insures that the camera keeps a respectful distance from the action, a distancing effect which mutes acute emotion. Hence, the viewer is inclined to be more contemplative. The use of close-ups, limited in this film, would force an emotional reaction. The fact that Mizoguchi still negotiated such a response is testament to the power of the story. Contemporary Far East directors like Edward Yang and Hsaio-Hsien have effected the same cinematic style, and similarly it’s been successful.

"Unlike his great contemporary Ozu, however, Mizoguchi’s camera frequently moves to accommodate the action, as in that electrifying final sequence. In Gilbert Adair’s book Flickers, the author makes claim that Sansho Dayu 'is one of those films for whose sake the cinema exists – just as it perhaps exists for the sake of it’s own last scene.' The camera tracks Zushio, in exceeding long shot, as he walks along the beach from the elder sea-weed gatherer, to the place he now believes his mother to be living in destitution. After the tearful reunion the camera retreats, without Zushio, to rest upon the seaweed-gatherer again. Thus, it can be assumed that while a few experience life-altering events, business as usual is transpiring around the rest of the world."

~ Sam Juliano

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The Muriels Hall of Fame: La Jetée (1962, Chris Marker)

Note: In an attempt to recognize great short films (since they can't win the 50th Anniversary Award at this point in time), I decided to institute a special rule whereby the highest-polling short film (meaning under 40 minutes) would be inducted alongside the top-ranked features, provided it cracked the top 25 overall. Here was this year's selection.

"La Jetée visualizes the original looper, an unnamed tragic emissary of time moving through forgotten memories to help save the world. What he discovers is potential life reborn and certain death, frozen images 'oozing like confessionals' representing versions of the past, present, and future intertwined by fate. His visual scars produce the opportunity for hope, but in rebelling against trauma one simply creates more of the same. The subconscious state teases individuality and freedom, even if there are personal moments of joy to be found within the deception."

"Visually, Chris Marker's film is an astoundingly frank depiction of how trauma defines itself by imagery, and how it can transcend the laws of science and logic. Each image carries a specific weight and resonance, and when one begins moving it's something akin to a revolution. In the end, La Jetée is one of the great cinematic tragedies in that it captures all the world's cries and whispers through one man's ultimate sacrifice."

~ Glenn Heath

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The Muriels Hall of Fame: M (1931, Fritz Lang)

"Whenever a non-cinephile friend declares that they don’t like 'old movies'— which usually means those made before 1960, in black-and-white, although the year continually seems to be moving forward as American culture increasingly fetishizes the 'new'— I tell them to watch Fritz Lang’s M, and they inevitably return to me with a rave. I suspect that this is because, over 80 years since its initial German release in 1931, the film still feels stylistically and socially relevant.

"Analyses of M usually position it one of the key German Expressionist films, which is certainly true, although doing so has the unfortunate effect of minimizing the film’s individual contributions to cinema down the line, all the way up to today. I choose to more generally view it as a foundational film in both the horror and crime genres—yet still superior to most all its successors—and the foundational film in the ever-popular sub-genre that intertwines the two, the serial killer procedural.

"Perhaps the film’s most significant contribution to Horror is the way Lang manipulates sound to ride the nerves of the audience. M was Lang’s first talkie, but dialogue is not the most important part of it until the very end, during Peter Lorre’s infamous monologue. Instead, the most striking sonic elements throughout are the recurrent whistle of Lorre’s focal child killer, Hans Beckert—a spine-chilling rendition of Grieg’s 'In the Hall of the Mountain King' that smartly factors into the plot later on—and sudden stretches of silence, the absence of sound proving to be as vital an effect as the presence of sound.

"But M is only a horror film to the extent that it seeks to instill in the viewer the same sense of dread that the city of Berlin feels with a loose killer roaming in its midst. Once instilled, M becomes more of a crime film, with Lang pioneering the now-standard method of cross-cutting between cops and criminals. I say criminals, plural, because Beckert isn’t the only one the film focuses on; underworld bosses also play a significant role in the story, as they organize their own hunt for Beckert, tired of the police raiding their establishments looking for the fugitive.

"Through Beckert’s stranglehold over every part of the city—the cops, the criminal underground, and the public at large—Lang develops much of M’s rich social commentary. The film is in part a mediation on how a society can project all its problems onto a single individual (or, as would happen just a few years later in the Germany that Lang fled, an ethnic group). Unlike the film’s stylistic achievements, it’s unfortunate that this facet of the film is still relevant today—when the media, which only plays a small role in M, fosters such a societal tendency to no end—though this relevance is what allows the film to retain all its power for modern audiences.

"Then there’s Lorre’s epic final speech — a triumph of acting and a harrowingly intimate exploration of another important social issue, that of how a civilized society should handle people who do evil things. Individual viewers will answer this question differently, based on their unique ideological perspective. The film takes a position of its own, but Lang doesn’t lay it on thick. Instead, the brilliance of M’s concluding moments rests in the fact that, in order to earn our position, we must confront the reality that despite his horrible crimes, Beckert is still a human being — perhaps the most terrifying and complex element of a masterpiece that’s full of them."

~ Danny Baldwin

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The Muriels Hall of Fame: Rear Window (1954, Alfred Hitchcock)

Yes, I know. Another Hitchcock movie. But think of it this way - these would all have gotten in sooner rather than later, so consider this a clearing of the decks so we can get all the most popular Hitch titles out of the way and concentrate on other directors next year. Unless there are other Notorious fans out there, then never mind.

"Alfred Hitchcock's pre-beatnik era West Village, seen through the eyes of the temporarily incapacitated, apartment-bound Jeffries (Jimmy Stewart), is reduced to little more than a few converted tenement apartment buildings, a narrow, busy street (Bleecker?) in the distance, with a sumptuous ambient soundtrack, a mixture of the most distant and near city sounds. Community as tableau has rarely been so crystalized as in Rear Window, accomplished largely by, as many have written about, how the film functions as a metaphor for the role of the less passive moviegoer or media consumer: how we observe, process and conclude.

"Jonathan Rosenbaum's point in his review of Rear Window, that Jeffries channel surfs between his various courtyard neighbors, is an apt one, especially if one follows the trajectory of media since the film's release in 1954. The internet is perhaps the most apt medium to compare the viewing habits of Jeffries' to: the outside world as an aquarium, sometimes interactive, but always open to one's obsessive, investigative tendencies. Most remarkable, however, is that Hitchcock presents all of Jeffries' conclusions as objective facts, allowing the film to function as a supremely disturbing thriller, nearly removing psychology altogether. It that device especially that defines how, suggested as much in the film, interactivity between medias and 'real life' allows one their own truths. One's microcosmic world, a courtyard neighborhood here, is a dollhouse kept at a (mostly) safe distance."

~ Michael Lieberman

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The Muriels Hall of Fame: The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928, Carl Theodor Dreyer)

"One key to understanding the depths of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s achievement in The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) is the realization that Dreyer doesn’t really have a set idea as to whether Joan, the peasant girl who led the French army to important victories in the Hundred Years’ War only to be burned at the stake by church officials for being a heretic, actually communed with God as she claims. That’s perhaps why Dreyer, at the beginning of his film, takes pains to emphasize that everything that he’s about to present to us is taken from the trial transcripts; on the dramatic level, he’s basically presenting us the facts of the case, in his belief that, by doing so, this will strip away the layers of sanctimonious religiosity and reveal the human beings underneath. 

"But Dreyer isn’t just interested in the procedural elements (certainly not in the way Robert Bresson was when he tackled the same material in his 1962 film The Trial of Joan of Arc). Joan may or may not have been touched by God— the whole trial basically hinges on that question, after all— but how else to describe the cumulative transcendent effect of Dreyer’s luminous close-ups, his starry-eyed low-angle shots, his images of flying birds, and so on, as anything other than divinely inspired? Throughout, Dreyer uncannily manages that tricky feat of diving right inside Joan’s internal anguish while also standing outside of it; at times, that 1.33:1 frame feels like a prison in and of itself. 

"Dreyer’s poetic images, however, might not have made quite the same impact without a great Joan leading the way—and in Renée Maria Falconetti, Dreyer found a performer of astonishing transparency who brings us right inside Joan’s thoughts and feelings moment-by-moment: her rapture at speaking about her relationship with God, her initial fear at the prospect of being burned at the stake, her weariness as the trial drags on. The end result of Falconetti’s burning conviction and Dreyer’s expressionistic visual style is a film that, more than any other film I can recall, illustrates not only the power of this one woman’s religious conviction, but the transcendental power of cinema to illuminate human experience." 

~ Kenji Fujishima 

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The Muriels Hall of Fame: Casablanca (1942, Michael Curtiz)

Today we begin announcing the winners of the recent Hall of Fame balloting, which will be inducted alongside the "grandfathered" honorees we inducted this past week. The eleven films that were inducted in the voting process will be announced in alphabetical order.

“Tell people you love movies, and they'll often immediately ask you that impossible question: ‘so what's your favorite movie?’ You can stammer and equivocate all you like, but in the end, they just want to hear one title. That title, for me, is almost always Casablanca.

“I know that it can be dismissed as an obvious choice, or worse: a dull one. Casablanca doesn't play any major role in the history of cinema. It didn't introduce any new techniques or signify a breakthrough of some kind. It's not by some fancy auteur – though I would argue that Curtiz is generally underrated as a director.

“What it is, however, is a movie full of pure pleasure, not necessarily my absolute favorite at any time but a film I can watch over and over and enjoy every single time. It may not have been revolutionary, but it was expertly crafted in one of the most successful movie factories that ever existed. And then, due to some unmeasurable, impossible to replicate movie magic, every single element came together perfectly. The actors are all perfect for their parts. Every line (except maybe for the one about cannon fire) lands. And the ending is one of the most memorable ones ever put on film.

“Yes, Casablanca is corny. But as one of its screen writers, Julius Epstein, remarked: ‘When corn works, there's nothing better.’ Corn has never worked better than it did in Casablanca.”

~ Hedwig van Driel

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