Wednesday, November 15, 2006

The 'Potemkin' moment

I've just started reading Are You Talking to Me by John Walsh. I've hardly read more than the introduction and already I know it's the book I should have written, the book I would have written, if I could. It's a serious book about the movies, written by a fan. I thoroughly recommend it.

And it leads me to another criterion for the inclusion of a film on a list, which I have called 'The Potemkin moment'.

By this I mean the moment when you see a film, any film, and comprehend for the first time the visceral power of the movie art form and its limitless possibilities. Suddenly you know that it can be more than an entertainment, something to be ashamed of liking. Maybe the film is not in itself outstanding, maybe it has many faults overall, but it has elements that you know can be harnessed to greatness.

'Potemkin' must have had this effect on many in the 20s and probably still does to new viewers. I would have chosen Abel Gance's Napoleon from that period, a silent film with epic sweep and technically daring. Birth of a Nation was a revelation to the world in its day, as was Citizen Kane 25 years later.

In conversation the following have been put forward as personal choices: 2001; The Shining; The Good, the Bad and the Ugly; Psycho; Seven Samurai. I suppose it's inevitable that people will choose big, brassy films. You have to be pretty sophisticated to choose a Japanese study in ageing as the film that made the first big impact upon you.

Walsh speaks of seeing, at the age of eight, Lawrence of Arabia, Mutiny on the Bounty, Casablanca and The Longest Day. Martin Scorsese, in his TV documentary series, remembers the garish colours of Duel in the Sun and The Ten Commandments.

As a boy myself I was impressed by Kane, The Third Man, The Magnificent Seven and The Guns of Navarone, respectively for performance and narrative structure, crazily-angled photography, character delineation and sheer exciting story-telling.

But, as anyone who knows me will have guessed, the film that turned my flirtatious toying with the cinema into true, deep, passionate love was The Wild Bunch.

It opens with movement. Even the music seems to start halfway through a bar. The frame freezes on Bill Holden's grim face as he says, 'If the move, kill 'em' and the credit appears, 'Directed by Sam Peckinpah', to the sound of a long, low chord.

The chord underscores the amateurish marching band playing 'Shall we gather' tightening the tension before an orgy of violence breaks out, the like of which I had never seen before, and which I did not realise would be outdone two hours later.

I was struck by the death fall of one man, in slow motion and intercut with other bursts of action, as two children watch fascinated.

I liked the radical concept of villains as heroes, of the original sin in children, the existential aceptance of a meaningless world. It is brutally honest and honestly brutal.

Every line is quotable and has entered my everyday speech. The music is perfect. The acting the best the cast ever turned in. Peckinpah himself was never as good again.

The Searchers is the one Western which appears on 'respectable' lists. It is indeed a great film, and with Once upon a Time in the West, one of the three which 99% of Western fans would take to their desert island. The third is The Wild Bunch. Perhaps it is still too strong and too illiberal for our bleeding-heart critics.

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