When Movies Mattered: Reviews from a Transformative Decade

making the chaos of the world work for you; it means dropping a fixed, static identity-which is always your most vulnerable point-and finding the freedom to adopt a series of superficial, provisional ones, all of which become incorporated into an ever-growing you.

But in the movies-and surely this is part of Godard's point-to change forms is to address audiences.

Cassavetes's commitment to his two principal characters is complete: his camera never once abandons them-never goes behind their backs to offer an editorial judgment-and we must experience the events of the film as they experience them, as integral blocks of time.

The subtitles, which make the most muffled speeches comprehensible, are an interference, though the raggedness of the sound makes Pialat's point: this isn't rhetorical dialogue, addressed to the audience to make dramatic and character points, but speech considered as a sound effect, part of the natural content of the image.

The film opens a Pandora's box of forbidden pleasures, linking a marginally acceptable guilty fantasy-running wild in a department store-to a much darker and more sinister one, that of having a license to kill.

Death, violence, and moral corruption aren't just slapstick props in these films, but agonizingly real presences, and their comedy isn't a release from horror but a confrontation with it.

It's never easy to pinpoint the exact moment when Fuller's imagery rises from the ridiculous to the sublime.

He has gained his art, but he has lost his life.

Eijanaika