Device Notes

Early in The Man Who Stole the Sun , chemistry teacher Makoto Kido and his students are held hostage in their school bus by a highjacker.  He wants to use the hostages as a bargaining chip so he can speak to the emperor about his son.  We don't know why he wants this, but the highjacker is clearly anxious and at the end of his rope.  Kido, his students, and the highjacker remain together on the bus for hours, in a standoff with the police.   Detective Yamashita leads the effort to save them.  He doesn't hesitate put his own life on the line, and decides to get on the bus himself to negotiate with the highjacker.  He gets the highjacker outside, then grabs his gun.  Yamashita gets injured, but still fights, and eventually wrestles the gun away.  Snipers fire on the highjacker.  We see Yamashita in close-up, blood staining his collar, as he lifts the highjacker onto his shoulder and drags him into an ambulance.  Yamashita's an old-fas...

Iblard Time is a short film made by adding small animated touches to a series of paintings by Naohisa Inoue, a painter who worked briefly with Studio Ghibli, most notably in one of their best films, Whisper of the Heart .  The grass sways in the wind, the water ripples, a train or a person passes through wordlessly.  They add just a bit of depth and activity to Inoue's paintings, which depict Iblard, a surreal world of unique plant life, laws of physics, and buildings that merge with the natural environment. One of the bolder variations the film makes on Inoue's paintings is that a person will sometimes come into an image moving, then freeze in place, and the art style in which they're rendered will change.  They go from cartoon character to an element of the painting, with visible brushstrokes and an added flatness that comes from a reduction in distinction from their surroundings.  It abstracts what little activity we see, makes it look like an ever-present part of...

If you already know the ending of this film, the early scenes feel different.  Richard Barthelmess was 26 when this film released, and his character David is 18.  David wants nothing more than to be seen as a man, not a boy.  In light of all this, the way the beginning of the film depicts him as a child at play comes across as a punchline at his expense.  But when you anticipate the crisis he goes through in this film, they look more like elegies to lost innocence. Tol'able David is about David, his family, and the rural town where they live.  The neighboring household consists only of David's friend, Esther Hatburn, and her grandfather.  Three dangerous criminals arrive and invite themselves to stay at the Hatburns' home.  The criminals happen to be Hatburns as well, distant relatives, but their presence is tolerated out of fear rather than any familial obligation.  Their stay in town causes all kinds of misery. A couple little touches early on s...

The final few shots of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg compose one of the most moving scenes I've seen in a film.  All it shows us is a man, viewed from a distance, smiling as he sees his wife and son return from a short outing on a snowy but unremarkable night, and playing with his son in the snow for a bit.  Similarly effective scenes from other movies are longer, wordier, and closer to the action .   The scene takes place after the final encounter between Genevieve and Guy, the two central characters.  The film is divided into three chapters, first with Genevieve and Guy in love before he's drafted, then Genevieve's experience of his absence, then his experience after his return.  The entire film is sung, and not in lyrics or distinguishable songs.  Rather, most of the dialogue is ordinary talk given rhythm and melody.  Likewise, the film takes place mostly in ordinary settings, but elevated with lavish colors.   The most emotionally inte...

There are a few different positions I’ve seen people take on this film.  A common one is that it’s a picture of corrupt self-interest.  That’s if everyone is lying.  Another is that it shows that access to the truth is either inherently subjective, or that what anyone believes will be affected by what they want to believe.  That’s if everyone believes their own story.   Any viewer will explain it however they want to explain it, whether to say they lied out of self-interest, that they have distorted perspectives, or that truth itself doesn't exist.  Errol Morris complained about people assuming that there is no truth in the film, and about people comparing Rashomon to his documentary The Thin Blue Line .  This is quite understandable: The Thin Blue Line is about real people that experienced real suffering, one of whom was almost killed by the state.  The idea that there was no real truth in that case is simply offensive.   I...

Many of Isao Takahata's movies have it that when the characters are comfortable, yielding and curved lines dominate.  Angular geometry is emphasized where they're uncomfortable.  It's a simple trick whose effects become complicated depending on exactly what the nature of those places are, or when other elements come into play to affect the film's tone.  Or in Pom Poko , when the tanuki pass through different levels of realism and stylization, becoming cartoons composed of simple, round shapes at moments when they're happy but also vulnerable.  Only Yesterday is the film that addresses this most directly, and the one that has the most fun with it.  It's about Taeko, a 27-year-old office worker who decides to take a break and visit her distant relatives in the country.  The contours of the countryside in this film aren't quite as stylized as those of the more comfortable places in many of Takahata's other films, and the film acknowledges that whatever c...

Eisenstein is famous for intellectual montage, but that was only one of several modes of montage he conceived of.  In his writings he talks a great deal about exciting the audience, and the highly kinetic images spliced together in the montages of Battleship Potemkin and Alexander Nevsky reflect this goal.  He'll put images of crowds on the move next to rapidly undulating flames or boats racing along the surface of the water with their sails shaking in the wind.  When you've seen enough of Eisenstein's films, you can tell that he didn't use images of crowds just to intellectually connect them to other ideas, he found them beautiful and exciting.  He didn't have the anxiety many other filmmakers have about the mystery of other minds.  Tarkovsky was probably the best of the filmmakers who did, which would explain why he said he could not appreciate Eisenstein's work.  Eisenstein is interested in those rare moments where many people are of one mind, histor...