CINEMASOPHY: A Dialogue of Eras — April Films

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Cinema, an inseparable part of our lives, entertains while persistently raising sharp and uncomfortable questions. A lot can be said about a person based on the films they watch and love. Over the past half-century, at least thousands of lists of great movies have emerged — films every curious individual should watch to discover something about themselves.

For the next 12 months, this column will feature «alternative» cinema — perhaps not the loudest, but certainly extraordinary and profound. Films that deserve to be watched. Watched and loved. These are 24 stories of love, hate, actions, violence, and death. Stories about everything that cinema truly embodies.

 

«49TH PARALLEL» (UK, 1941)

 

Directors: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger

Starring: Laurence Olivier, Raymond Massey, Leslie Howard

 

 

If Richard Linklater turns fictional characters into almost real people, then «The Archers» — the famous British duo Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger — transform a wartime propaganda film into a work of high art. In other words, they build a genre story on documentary material. The great fantasists of their time, a kind of 1940s blend of Wes Anderson and Tim Burton, influenced key American auteurs of the 1970s (Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg).

Powell and Pressburger made «49th Parallel» on commission from the Canadian Ministry of Information, which hoped for a piece of propaganda that would persuade the U.S. to join the war. And that’s exactly what they got — only in the form of a dark fairytale, or a parody of Agatha Christie’s «And Then There Were None», about six Nazi submariners lost in the vastness of Canada. The commissioners, it seems, didn’t interfere much with the artistic process and didn’t constrain the means of the two eccentric Brits.

This boyishly mischievous film opens with a dramatic zoom onto a map of North America and a voiceover presenting the border (the titular 49th parallel) between the U.S. and Canada as «the only undefended one in the world». Immersing the viewer in sweeping panoramas of forests, fields, lakes, and cities now under threat, the filmmakers quickly move into the plot’s inciting incident — a German submarine surfacing right off the Canadian coast, which the Nazi captain declares a legitimate target of Hitler.

Here, fiction collides with documentary. The submarine is suddenly attacked by aircraft and, fatally damaged, sinks rapidly, leaving behind six crew members sent ashore on a scouting mission by the captain.

The Nazis’ journey through Canada unfolds as a sequence of episodes structured like an inverted fairytale: while fairytales typically follow noble heroes crossing lands filled with evil creatures, in «49th Parallel», it’s embittered Nazis trudging through a land of endlessly kind and generous people.

To ensure potential box office appeal, the filmmakers placed a major star in each episode: small but memorable appearances include Laurence Olivier, Errol Flynn, and Leslie Howard.

The propaganda was crafted with sophistication: Emeric Pressburger (the one responsible for the scripts in The Archers duo) considered this film his personal duel with Goebbels. He contrasts Nazi ideology with democratic values and frames the adventures of a handful of Nazi villains as a romantic quest to overcome obstacles. The Germans in «49th Parallel» are portrayed as strong, cunning, resourceful, cynical, and brutal — but (as is customary in fairytales) they are ultimately defeated. Because wars are won by idealists who oppose violence with the power of the free spirit.

The propagandistic effect, however, was somewhat blunted: Pearl Harbor happened, and America entered the war before the film even hit the screens.

The real winner was the audience: retitled «The Invaders» and shortened by 18 minutes, «49th Parallel» instantly became the highest-grossing British film in the American market, earning an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

A masterpiece would not be a masterpiece if it didn’t survive the test of time and find echoes in the works of contemporary filmmakers. The most notable examples include Steven Spielberg’s comedy 1941 (1979) and Jonathan Mostow’s U-571 (2000).

 

 

«BOYHOOD» (USA, 2014)

 

Director: Richard Linklater

Starring: Ellar Coltrane, Lorelei Linklater, Ethan Hawke, Patricia Arquette, Elijah Smith

 

 

A quiet and tender masterpiece by the relatively little-known (in our region) director Richard Linklater, Boyhood turns the seemingly uneventful childhood of an ordinary Texas boy into a deeply resonant experience for millions of strangers. It’s also a great film about time — something Andrei Tarkovsky once tried to capture in action. Linklater succeeded.

Through the coming-of-age chronicle of young Mason (Ellar Coltrane), who lives with his divorced mother (Patricia Arquette), his sister (Lorelei Linklater), and sees his father (Ethan Hawke) on weekends, the film reveals how relentlessly time flies, sweeping away the present moment.

The film’s magic lies in its unique artistic experiment: Boyhood was filmed over the course of 12 years in separate dramatic episodes, using the same cast throughout. This allows us to witness Mason’s transformation from a smart, charming child into a thoughtful and determined young man. Running just under three hours, the film captivates immediately and permanently. It was awarded the Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlin International Film Festival, three Golden Globes, three BAFTA Awards, six Academy Award nominations, and one Oscar win.

The subtle, almost hidden transitions that precede each new stage of the main character’s growing up are astonishing.

Yet behind all this admiration lies a sense of unease, born from the realization that the actors have completely dissolved into their characters, giving themselves over entirely. Some grow up, others grow old, transforming from once-young, awkward parents into graying, heavyset adults whose lives turned out nothing like they once dreamed. Boyhood, if you will, is in part a tribute to these two fragments of a broken whole — portrayed with incredible nuance by two brilliant actors, Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette. We see Olivia and Mason Sr. (Hawke’s character) in different stages of their relationship; Olivia tries to replace her ex-husband, forever stuck at 19, and rebuild their «broken» family into something whole again. But time and again, she ends up making the same mistakes, choosing all the wrong men, against whom the ex’s charming immaturity stops seeming like such a flaw.

Flawed and awkward, often making mistakes, they still manage to parent: the growing Mason absorbs the best of them both, becoming a deeply grounded and whole individual.

To create this masterpiece about the fleeting nature of human existence — a film that shows how time slips away irretrievably, like a long silk scarf through one’s fingers — Richard Linklater conducted a kind of rehearsal: over 18 years, he filmed the evolving romance of Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in the trilogy that would later make him famous — Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), and Before Midnight (2013).

Those three films leave no less powerful an impression despite the long intervals between them. They also draw a direct line from Linklater to the great François Truffaut, who filmed the adventures of his Antoine Doinel in a similar fashion, beginning with the semi-autobiographical The 400 Blows (1959), where a typewriter theft lands the young hero in a juvenile detention center, and ending with Love on the Run (1979), in which the now adult Doinel, divorced, struggles through another — equally troubled — relationship.

It feels like we’ve seen this before: first maturing, then aging Al Pacino in The Godfather trilogy; children growing up in the Harry Potter saga. But before Linklater and Boyhood, we had never seen all of this unfold in such a short span of screen time — in a single film.

For twelve consecutive years, Linklater filmed what seemed like insignificant improvisations with a handful of actor friends — and his own daughter, to boot — and then, from this collection of small domestic details and casual sketches that quietly alter the lives and fates of the characters, he constructed a monumental, nearly three-hour statement: a true cinematic fresco, a compelling odyssey into the human interior like nothing before it.

The director skillfully avoids using explicit time markers to indicate that we’ve moved, for example, from 2002 to 2003 or from 2009 to 2010. Instead, he relies on details — fleeting conversations about the Iraq War, background songs, and campaign posters that Ethan Hawke’s character pastes up with his on-screen children. This becomes a film within the film, reflecting the major political events of that era.

Boyhood reproduces Mason’s emotional landscape with the jeweler’s precision, making his experiences our own — every breath, tear, or passing remark is refined with accidental images, involuntary gestures, and subtle nuances of tone and facial expression. All the things young Mason first merely observes, he later tries to capture with his own camera, attempting to hold onto these vanishing moments.

Unlike other coming-of-age stories, there’s no major trauma or small tragedy depicted here. Those things remain off-screen. What unfolds on screen is a mesmerizing everydayness — not a sequence of events, but rather the intervals between them. That is time, binding everything together; the core around which all the director’s reflections on childhood and parenthood are woven. Time, in Linklater’s vision, is a river along which scenes and characters drift, unaware they are each on individual journeys destined to meet the same end.

 

CINEMASOPHY: A Dialogue of Eras — March Films

 

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