Most comprehensive list of films shot in Egypt during its silent era, 1896-1932

Derived from disparate secondary sources, especially Ali Abu Sahdi's Proceedings of Egyptian Cinema in the Twentieth Century وقائع السينما المصرية في القرن العشرين

This spreadsheet is accessible publicly and may be copied. I hope that it may draw attention to an all but forgotten era of vital cinematic activity, the era of silent cinema in Egypt.

The Deranged New Iconoclasts--ISIS in the Age of Digital Reproduction

Having attended elementary and secondary public schools in Saudi Arabia until the age of fourteen, I became keenly aware of the Wahhabi[1] repudiation of realistic pictographic representation of life—animal and particularly human life—though not plant life. I could not have foretold the attention that “animation” in such discrepant forms as pre-Islamic Assyrian statues and polished internet ISIS propaganda videos would attract a quarter of a century later.

To be sure, the Saudi government permitted depiction of animal and human life forms on state television, in the press, and in third party publications produced in the country or imported. Censorship was enforced strictly, so that broadcast programs were edited to remove whatever provoked in the minimum the conservative sensibility of the autocratic, theocratic government. Aside from the provocation of varied content, a stricter interpretation of Islamic doctrine than that imposed by the government had it that depiction of animal and particularly human life was forbidden outright. Such a view was pervasive enough that I have found drawings I made in early elementary school wherein a line crosses the necks of animals and humans, certainly in response to a teacher’s request, to undercut a presumed intent in drawing to depict realistically.  Years later, classmates and I would be admonished by religious teachers that watching TV was forbidden, regardless of content, because it depicted lifeforms.

By the time I had left Saudi, I was confused about the religious acceptability of depiction, because I had noticed the variety of opinions and interpretations regarding. What seemed contradictory was that more realistic depictions were considered more flagrant, so that sculpting humans was more egregious from a religious practice standpoint than two-dimensional depiction, while representation by hand, such as in painting or drawing, was considered more flagrant than “mechanical” depiction such as by camera. In recent years, we have witnessed the modern era’s most extreme advocate for Islam not merely condone video depiction, but practice it instrumentally, for propaganda, including the depiction of ISIS members destroying iconographic sculptures that the group considers idolatrous.

ISIS could indeed be described as the New Iconoclasts, who similar to the original Byzantine Iconoclasts referred to by Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation, would appear to practice an uncompromising form of rejection of representation of not only divinity but of god’s creation. In fact, reprimands I heard in Saudi school in my youth, drawn from the Saudi government’s adopted ideology of Wahhabi Islam, which borrows much from the scholarship of 11^th century theologian Ibn Taymiyyah, as does the ideology of ISIS[2], sounds near identical to the description of the sentiments expressed by Christians across broad territories, critical of devotional depiction in images, prior to the Byzantine Iconoclasm against cultish devotional practices in the 8^th century.[3]

As is told in the Qur’an, the Prophet Muhammad ordered that the idols in the vicinity of the Ka’ba be destroyed upon his conquest of his hometown of Mecca with his followers, in 630 CE. ISIS is continuing this tradition a millennium and a half later[4], so as to seem far more outmoded than the Prophet and his followers had been, though I suspect that Jean Baudrillard has suggested the motivation behind iconoclasm in both instances:

But what becomes of the divinity when it reveals itself in icons, when it is multiplied in simulacra? Does it remain the supreme authority, simply incarnated in images as a visible theology? Or is it volatilized into simulacra which alone deploy their pomp and power of fascination - the visible machinery of icons being substituted for the pure and intelligible Idea of God? This is precisely what was feared by the Iconoclasts, whose millennial quarrel is still with us today. Their rage to destroy images rose precisely because they sensed this omnipotence of simulacra, this facility they have of erasing God from the consciousnesses of people, and the overwhelming, destructive truth which they suggest: that ultimately there has never been any God; that only simulacra exist; indeed that God himself has only ever been his own simulacrum. Had they been able to believe that images only occulted or masked the Platonic idea of God, there would have been no reason to destroy them. One can live with the idea of a distorted truth. But their metaphysical despair came from the idea that the images concealed nothing at all, and that in fact they were not images, such as the original model would have made them, but actually perfect simulacra forever radiant with their own fascination. But this death of the divine referential has to be exorcised at all cost.[5]

ISIS has demolished the remains of the 2,000 year-old city of Hatra, in fact, including structures not depicting any life form, having already assaulted the 3000 year-old remains of the city of Nemrud and a museum of antiquity in Mosul, the largest city currently under ISIS’s control[6]. All the while, ISIS had deployed video, arguably more lifelike than an antique statute in that it depicts movement and sound, whose style and content had been greatly informed by narrative Hollywood action films.[7] As such, ISIS has determined to assault creative works of indigenous origin, which have negligible influence on current ideological lives of people in the area, as it borrows a foreign art form and coopts creative works imported from an entity which it opposes vehemently—the United States. How could such an approach stand as congruous with the group’s doctrine, which has been central to its recruitment practices?[8]

The explanation, I reckon, is twofold and is contained in Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Firstly, sculpture, such as of pre-Islamic civilizations of the Middle East, and painting, such as that which I undertook in art class in my childhood, involve the hand in creation of the work—throughout. Whereas photography involves the manipulation of apparatuses that perform the work on behalf of the hand, arguably a comparatively indirect practice of “creation.” As Benjamin famously qualified, “For the first time in the process of pictorial reproduction, photography freed the hand of the most important artistic functions which henceforth devolved only upon the eye looking into a lens.”[9] Secondly, photography in all of its forms, differs from painting, sculpture and other pre-industrial pictographic art forms in that photographic images reproduced and re-disseminated ad infinitum lack what ruins evidently possess, what Benjamin describes as the “aura” of non-reproducible arts works.[10]

What will ISIS make of virtual reality technologies—looming as they are, if one were to follow the announcements and maneuvers by the likes of Google and Facebook[11]—and their holographic accruement, one might ask? I predict that ISIS would adopt them, because of their potential utility in persuasion, a practical concern of the group, and because of the technology’s “indirect” creation, as far as its human users are concerned—an apparent, though arguably false, removal of such creation from human agency. Indeed, we may not look forward to ISIS continuing to adopt new media technologies in an effort to assert its governmentality upon not only the people under its territorial control, but Muslims far and wide.

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[1] Wahhabism (المذهب الوهابي) was not a commonly purveyed term describing the particular brand of Islamic theology in the Saudi Arabia of the 80s, from my experience. Rather, the theology was presented as the correct interpretation of Islam with hardly a qualification.

[2] Ideological links between Wahhabism and Ibn Taymiyyah, as well as between ISIS and Ibn Taymiyyah are well established. See ”You Can't Understand ISIS If You Don't Know the History of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia,” by Alastair Cook, a quarter-century operative of MI6 and Middle East political writer, a background that would have me distrust him, were it not for the perspicacity of his work. June 29, 2014. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alastair-crooke/isis-wahhabism-saudi-arabia_b_5717157.html> and “The other side of Ibn Taymiyya – on the occasion of the political ascent of Salafis and Islamists,” by Abdel Hakim Ajhar of al-Quds al-Arabi. December 14, 2011. < http://arabist.net/blog/2011/12/20/in-translation-will-the-real-ibn-taymiyya-please-stand-up.html>

[3] “In the age before iconoclasm, therefore, certain basic positions had been staked out by both the attackers and the defenders of images. The former said that God was a purely spiritual being who could not be depicted. Depictions, in any event, were made of vile matter which was unsuited to the divine essence and also encouraged the worship of material creation. Creation itself, moreover, was God’s work alone. People should not, in creating images, presume to share in God’s work. Images were idols, or so very much like them as to make no difference. Finally, God revealed himself in words, not in pictures.” Thomas F. X. Noble. Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians. University of Pennsylvania Press. Philadelphia. 2009. 27

[4] As is the Saudi government of ruins dating back to the dawn of Islam—see “The Destruction of Mecca.” Ziauddin Sardar. New York Times. Sep 30, 2014. < http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/01/opinion/the-destruction-of-mecca.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0>

[5] Simulacra and Simulation (originally published in French in 1981). The University of Michigan Press. Ann Arbor. 1994. 169

[6] See “Iraq Says Islamic State Militants Raze Ancient Hatra City.” Ahmed Rasheed and Isabel Coles. Mar 7, 2015. < http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/07/us-mideast-crisis-iraq-hatra-idUSKBN0M30GR20150307>

[7] See “Islamic State and Its Increasingly Sophisticated Cinema of Terror.” Jeffrey Fleishman. Los Angeles Times. Feb 26, 2015. < http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-ca-isis-video-horror-20150301-story.html#page=1>

[8] See “The Secret World of ISIS Training Camps—Ruled by Sacred Texts and the Sword.” Hassan Hassan. The Observer. Jan 24, 2015. < http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/25/inside-isis-training-camps>

[9] The renowned remark is found under “I”

[10] ISIS videos may lack taste in the extreme, but that does not preclude their artistry. See Benjamin under “III”

[11] See “Google’s Android to Take on Facebook in Virtual Reality.” Rolfe Winkler. Wall Street Journal. Mar 6, 2015. < http://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-android-to-take-on-facebook-in-virtual-reality-1425684553>

“Seeing” Rodney King’s Arrest through Barthes’ Three Meanings

Reading William Mitchell’s classic digital imaging work The Reconfigured Eye, I had not expected to find mention of Rodney King, the single paragraph that it was[i], though I had decided twenty pages earlier to link the operative chapter, “How to Do Things with Pictures” to a disquisition on the Rodney King arrest video. It has not been quite a quarter of a century since King’s fateful arrest on March 3^rd, 1991, but then I’ve never been into jubilees.

At the point of referring to the Rodney King arrest video, already Mitchell had cited Barthes’s notion of the press photograph in dialogue within a context, a linguistic one, with at least a title or caption[ii]. I find it likely that Barthes would have thought the same of press motion pictures, analog video for example, such as the edited, broadly TV-broadcast recording of the Rodney King arrest captured by hobbyist photographer George Holliday.

Mitchell himself uses parlance that evokes the legal procedure when discussing photography’s deployment of “larger signifying structures to report the significant facts (or ‘facts’) about states of affairs that are claimed to have existed and events that are claimed to have taken place, and how such reports are used to convince, to create belief, and to command assent.”[iii] Mitchell then goes on to write, “A piece of evidence is a fact with significance in some context, a fact that has been pressed into service, used to support some claim or argument. It serves to tell us about something in the past… Photographs then present facts but are frequently used as evidence.”[iv]

Which leads me back to Barthes, who despite writing about photography throughout his accomplished career, including in his final work Camera Lucida (1980), wrote on film in a single instance of which I know and even then referring only to a film’s stills and not to any “motion” photography: stills from Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in his 1970 essay The Third Meaning. In this essay, Barthes lays out three levels of semiotic interpretation, tiers of sense making according to functionality: “communication,” “signification” and “signifiance.”[v] I wish to explore these three tiers in the hermeneutic experience of viewing the video of the motorist’s arrest, particularly within the courtroom, in a manner that applies The Third Meaning’s mode of analysis to the motion, instead of to the still, photograph.

Barthes’ first discussed level—or perhaps range is a better description—his first range of interpretation is the one he addresses only in passing in his noted essay, that of “communication.” Here is the interpretation concerned with transference of information. The experience of drawing information from viewing of the video recording of King’s arrest. Information was communicated to viewers in two distinct realms: the public realm, mitigated by press and broadcast (the internet would not have figured in public opinion then), and the realm of the courtroom, which subsumed the goings-on of the public realm since the video had been shown on national TV and discussions about it had taken place for months before the trial had begun.

The video of nine minutes and twenty seconds in total[vi] had its first thirteen seconds truncated, including the video’s first three seconds which depicted King rushing at one of the four arresting officers. The video was not consumed in its entirety by most  American viewers who saw a minute or two of it (I included, at the time), because news broadcasters opted to broadcast the most graphic segments of it, at a length of sixty-eight seconds. The jury, on the other hand, saw those same 68 seconds, but were persuaded to reconsider the pervasive account of brutal arrest by the 13 seconds noted, excised by the local TV station KTLA to whom photographer Holliday had conveyed his video, because seconds 4-13 were blurry.[vii] In court, expert witness Sargent Charles Duke going through the video frame by frame managed to convince the jury--of ten whites, a Hispanic and an Asian--that Officer Koon was justified in each blow he had administered to King. The jury acquitted the officers of ten of the eleven charges and was hung on the eleventh, concerning only one of the four indicted officers--Powell.

Sergeant Charles Duke, witness for the defense

Barthers’ second range is that of “signification” of what he explains as the “obvious meaning,” the decided and directed symbolism of the image. To mind comes the race and gender of the person undergoing arrest. “Driving while black,” King is dressed in clothes that do not connote “work,” unlike the officers, who are dressed in the regalia of government—of the authorities.

Then there were captions. After all, hardly any words could be made out of the video’s soundtrack, recorded from an apartment’s balcony nearby by an amateur photographer, as a helicopter hovered above the arrest scene. Instead, Sargent Duke narrated the action by explaining the developments as they progressed, one frame at a time. Duke did not describe what he saw on screen, but interpreted for the jury the actions of Officer Koon, based on his own occupational expertise.[viii]

What observers and analysts have missed about the conduct of the trial, however, is precisely Barthes’ third range of meaning—“signifiance.” Barthes describes this as the image’s obtuse meaning: “Indifferent to moral or aesthetic categories (the trivial, the futile, the false, the pastiche), it is on the side of the carnival.”[ix] Here Barthes refers to the disguised or the undeliberately revealing, the truth in the absurd. Several witnesses representing law enforcement testified in the case, all referred to by their occupational title despite wearing civilian clothes, including three of the defendants, two of whom engaged in a narration or explanation of the action in the 81-seconnd segment of Holliday’s video.

Theodore Briseño, one of the four defendant officers

The TV used was a large CRT set, perhaps even 40 inches in size, but it was of a concave screen variety and placed at a distance of at least several meters from the jury. Moreover, particular components of each frame were pointed to by what may be called a baton, that used by the police as well as a different a pointer of a baton, such as the sort that could be used in a classroom.

Sergeant Stacey Koon, another of the four defendants

Terry White, African American prosecutor in King’s case described the jury polemically: “They were people who believe there is this 'thin blue line' separating law-abiding citizens from the jungle--the criminal element.”[x] During the trial, the judge had permitted the inclusion into evidence of a remark made by Laurence Powell, one of the officers on trial, transmitted from his squad car, earlier on the day of King’s arrest, in which he had likened domestic trouble among blacks to the film Gorillas in the Mist[xi]. A gorilla in the jungle is not likely to wield a baton, but a police officer could wield one with authority, regardless of its shape or intent of use.

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[i] Mitchell, William. The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-photographic Era. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994. 212

[ii] Ibid. 191

[iii] Ibid

[iv] Ibid. 192

[v] Barthes, Roland. "The Third Meaning: Reasearch Notes on Some Eisenstien Stills." Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. 52-54.

[vi] The disagreement about the length of the video is curious: The ascribed length is eight minutes in a Los Angeles Times article. ("The Other Beating." Los Angeles Times 19 February 2006. http://articles.latimes.com/2006/feb/19/magazine/tm-holiday8.) Only that five years later, the same publication described the video as nine minutes long. (Rubin, Joel, Andrew Blankstein and Scott Gold. "Twenty years after the beating of Rodney King, the LAPD is a changed operation." Los Angeles Times 3 March 2011. http://articles.latimes.com/2011/mar/03/local/la-me-king-video-20110301), as did by Time, following year. (Gray, Madison. "Rodney King, Whose Police Beating Led to Los Angeles Riots, Dies at 47." Time 17 June 2012. http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/06/17/rodney-king-whose-brutal-police-beating-sparked-the-deadliest-riot-in-u-s-history-dies-at-47/). These errors are intriguing since a (near) exact length was reported much earlier, in 1993, in The Philadelphia Inquirer (Clark, Robin. "Life After Taping The King Beating Hasn't Always Been Easy He Has Been Hounded By The Media, Cursed By Strangers. His Wife Returned To Argentina." The Philedelphia Inquirer 19 April 1993. http://articles.philly.com/1993-04-18/news/25983219_1_george-holliday-police-officers-king-video) much closer to the length I have clocked in watching a version recorder from a camera pointing to a TV playback of the video, as posted on YouTube (Weinstein, Henry. "After the Riots: The Search for Answers." Los Angeles Times 8 May 1992. http://articles.latimes.com/1992-05-08/news/mn-1894_1_king-case), and the duration (9 min 20 sec) noted by the most extensive work on the King affair by Lou Cannon in Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD.

[vii] Cannon, Lou. Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD. Boulder: Westview Press, 1999. 23

[viii] "Expert Testifies Officers' Beating Of Motorist Complied With Policy." New York Times 20 March 1993. http://www.nytimes.com/1993/03/20/us/expert-testifies-officers-beating-of-motorist-complied-with-policy.html

[ix] Barthes, Roland. "The Third Meaning: Reasearch Notes on Some Eisenstien Stills." Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. 55.

[x] Weinstein, Henry. "After the Riots: The Search for Answers." Los Angeles TImes 8 May 1992. http://articles.latimes.com/1992-05-08/news/mn-1894_1_king-case

[xi] "Judge Says Remarks on 'Gorillas' May Be Cited in Trial on Beating." New York Times 12 June 1991. http://www.nytimes.com/1991/06/12/us/judge-says-remarks-on-gorillas-may-be-cited-in-trial-on-beating.html

Non-linear Narrative Films--A Historical Analysis

“But I suppose film is distinctive because of its nature, of its being able to cut through time with editing.”—Oliver Stone

Ever since storytelling became the standard practice of movies has the depiction of time been instrumental. It is perhaps not a coincidence that Méliès stumbled upon the praxis of stop motion as early as 1896, a mere year after the first public film screening in history. Economic and narrative imperatives would have brought about such a development, by which the camera is stopped at the end of a shot before being rolled again once the next shot is set up for, sooner than later. Since humans experience time as moving forward (even when Time is cyclical, as it is in a number of cultural traditions), stories mostly replicate this, though not always.

Movies have hardly ever represented the passage of time realistically. A ninety minute film often tells a story spanning years. Representative moments significant to the plot are depicted, while ensuring that audiences acknowledge intermitting time through clues ranging from wardrobe changes to aging the characters using makeup to printing dates on frames ushering scenes. Yet, even when time is leapt across, most films have done so in a forward direction.

The cinema arrived along with a variety of technologies that, along with drastic sociopolitical changes, ushered the era of modernism. Modernist philosophy concerned itself with how humans responded to such changes, including in the phenomenology of time. Thomas Mann would make this central to his magnum opus The Magic Mountain (1924). Marcel Proust slowed time down to a trickle in In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927). Virginia Woolf and James Joyce isolated time in the moment. In the US, William Falkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) would deploy the same stream of consciousness yarn in its first of four parts, before confounding the reader by moving the story a generation earlier in the second part then returning it to the present for the remainder of the novel.

Such literary experimentation was not lost on filmmakers of the 1920s, two of whom would make a deliberate and uncommon filmic representation of time a dramatic instrument in and of itself—both Soviet. Sergei Eisenstein’s exceedingly influential Battleship Potemkin (1925), especially in its famed “Odessa steps” sequence, stretched out the duration of events overtly, so as to heighten the emotional charge relating, including a particular emotion that would figure in much of the tempering with linearity in future cinema—suspense. Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) aimed to overthrow narrative filmmaking, in part by sabotaging the linearity inherent to cinematic depiction—through editing.

Soviet cinema did visit America—Eisenstein did personally—but 1930s Hollywood was not the time for formal experimentation in the medium of film, rather a time to ride out the Great Depression, while negotiating the cost of incorporating sound into film recording and exhibition. Moreover, the Hollywood studios by the ‘30s had minted aligned formulae to producing films that would insure profitability, formulae which did not welcome narrative presentations that would challenge audience understanding. Thus, it is not surprising that it took a filmmaker with a vision to challenge the conventions of cinematic storytelling and a contractual agreement to permit him to get away with it; the film was Citizen Kane (1941). Orson Well’s masterpiece opens with the protagonist’s passing then recounts it in two ways—first through a newsreel of Kane’s life that is watched by journalists in the film. Second through the depiction of remembrances of Kane by people who had been closest to him, remembrances told by these characters to one of the journalists who had watched the earlier newsreel. Citizen Kane’s storytelling methodology suggests to the audience that no story is told through an omniscient eye, because no such eye exists. Instead the stories of our lives are told through what others know of us, in patches drawn from different times. If the story is important enough it is edited by media people—just like movies themselves! The remembrances do conveniently recall Kane’s life chronologically, though convenient is not a description that befits Citizen Kane nor many of the films that have deliberately, even defiantly, presented human time in ways uncommon to our experience of life or of the movies.

Whereas the remembrances of Kane were assumed to be more-or-less truthful, the veracity of recollection would be questioned in a later film—Rashomon (1950). Witnesses tell divergent accounts of a violent crime that has occurred, including one witness who testifies to court as a ghost—accounts modulated to self-serve. Rashomon questions the veracity of memory, because of our impulse to protect ourselves, even our legacies (the ghost). So influential was this Japanese classic that an English language term has borrowed it—the rashomon effect refers to a condition whereby an incident is recalled in conflicting ways by different people. Nevertheless, it would take more than philosophical utility to convince Hollywood studios to greenlight scripts that challenged the default depiction of time as moving forward, permitting for the occasional leap backward in flashback, often made obvious to viewers by cutting to it using a dissolve. It would take a movement.

The French New Wave exploded on the world cinema scene in the late fifties and had a profound, enduring effect on it, even on hitherto trenchant Hollywood cinema. The best known of the French New Wave filmmakers was Jean-Luc Godard, whose Breathless (1960) deployed a time fracturing editing technique (introduced in Man with a Movie Camera) called the jump-cut. The jump-cut had the effect of deliberately privileging those moments when our consciousness resurfaces, before submerging while we carry out the perfunctory and the quotidian.

It was Godard’s contemporary, however, Alain Resnais whose works suggest his standing as the first great filmmaker whose foremost cinematic interest was the dissection of time—thematically and formally. Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) takes semi-autobiographical material rendering it a conventional, albeit miscegenational, melodrama before disintegrating into a stream of blotted memories of discord and hurt, but also of amour. Resnais’s follow-up Last Year at Marienbad (1961) recast melodrama as an abstraction in which memory is only slightly more suspect than consciousness, a consciousness coinciding baroque opulence, shadowless trees, and ephemerality.

By the late 1960s, Hollywood studios faced two realities: diminished profits over the course of the decade and the emergence of a culture of defiance and rejection of societal strictures and subjugation, particularly among the youth, a target market considered the most valuable throughout much of the industry’s history. With a relaxing of restrictions on how stories should be told arrived the opportunity to deploy non-linear narrative. Two films that did so were Two for the Road (1967) and Point Blank of the same year. Two for the Road intercut scenes drawn from multiple road trips that the lead couple make to continental Europe over the span of over a decade, so as to serve a glossy, charismatic and intimate observation of a romantic relationship’s verisimilitudes, meanwhile generating suspense in unpredictable temporal movements, not only in looking forward. The film well represents two tropes common to such non-linear cinematic storytelling: They generate suspense inductively, instead of deductively, in that the audience is prodded to consider “I wonder what might have caused this?” instead of “I wonder what is to happen next?” Secondly, non-linear storytelling is often deployed reflexively, so that characters may assess how their lives have led them to where they currently are. Point Blank rendered its flashback scenes not only hazy, but also suspect by way of inconsistent semiotic clues, though no less suspect than the “present” in the picture, which itself is depicted as uncanny. Whereas Marienbad married incongruous narration and action, Point Blank does so for dialogue and sound effects.

The Godfather Part II (1974) broke new ground in serving as sequel and prequel at once. Boldly, the central character of Vito Corleone, performed by Marlon Brando, who dies in the first Godfather, is resurrected in the second as a younger man whom moves to New York from Sicily, as performed by Robert De Niro. The Godfather Part II intercuts scenes of the younger Vito with scenes that follow chronologically from where the first film had left off.

In 1980, Wood Allen delivered his commercially unsuccessful Stardust Memories, inspired by the Bergman masterpiece Wild Strawberries (1957) in that it deploys prolonged memory sequences to reflect upon its protagonist’s career and life. While Betrayal (1983) was probably the first film whose narrative moves counter-chronologically throughout its scenes. Though this method would be redeployed in Memento (2000) not as successfully—Whereas Memento uses the counter-chronological approach to engender inductive suspense, it does so in augmentation to a rather humdrum genre plot, so that the audience is asked to piece the puzzle backwards. Betrayal, on the other hand, having exposed its audience to the dissolution of the intimacy in a love triangle, mines significant episodes of their earlier lives, so that the audience can trace the cracks back to their fissures—to haunting effect.

Not only did two films in the early 90s make use of non-linear storytelling, they have earned their renown to it in good part. Groundhog Day (1993) had its protagonist relive the same day—helplessly reliving it, while learning about then trying to improve himself. Pulp Fiction (1994) not only deploys flashbacks, but at one point has its lead character killed, before resurrecting him by featuring him in scenes to follow that had taken place before he had met his demise.

A number of films in recent years have deployed non-linear storytelling. The boldest of these and most gimmicky is The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), which tries to locate poignancy in the ridiculous condition of its eponymous character whereby he begins his life aged then gets younger, ending it as a …, while all around him pass through our world normally. The financial and critical success of this film, which takes itself entirely seriously, is indicative of the gullibility of even professional observers to a finely packaged, handsomely rendered melodrama that foregrounds its nonconformity.

This year alone, a handful of films have skewed linear storytelling. Perhaps audiences at this point in the medium’s history are familiar enough with such an approach that their potential confusion is not the prohibitive concern that it was once. Perhaps filmmakers could take advantage of such a methodological allowance to render what has always matter about movies, that they tell their stories effectively and memorably.

Note: At least two renowned films thaat instrumentally employ non-linearity have come to mind since writing this essay--D. W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916) and John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). Certainly, many more have slipped my mind or had never entered it!

Night of the Hunter (1955): A Blemished Gem

In the history of American cinema, rare films, perhaps no more than several, stand as inimitable singular works. Movies like Intolerance, 2001 Space Odyssey, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit qualify, as does Night of the Hunter. These movies boast not only a technical audacity, but also an admixture of quality source material and a marriage of talents whose synergy accounts for something that could not have been predicted, and as such could not have been planned for.

Released in 1955, Night of the Hunter was the directorial debut of venerated actor Charles Laughton, a movie vocational shift far less common in the days of classical Hollywood than it is today. Laughton's choice for lead also registered as unpredictable, since the film's sole star Robert Mitchum went against his cool, sleepy-eyed type in his portrayal therein. The movie's unsettling subject matter and grotesque milieu sealed the film's fate. It would flop commercially, denying Laughton a second directorial opportunity. Today, it is broadly acknowledged as a patent classic.

Night of the Hunter is quintessentially a Southern Gothic horror film, based on the 1953 novel of the same name, which had drawn from the actual case of a serial killer by the name of Harry Powers, who in 1932 was convicted of multiple murders of women and their children, women whose money he had been after and to whom he had connected through so called "lonely hearts" newspaper ads. The lead villain in the filmic adaptation does much of the same.

Harry Powell, played with reflexive, pungent menace by Robert Mitchum, is a psychopathic, sexually frustrated, false preacher who speaks to God about his plans to assail women in the name of the lord, so as to strip the world of their temptation. Harry understates in his one-sided chats with God his interest in these wicked women’s money. Thus, when early in the picture Harry is jailed for a month for stealing a car, with Ben Harper, a man sentenced to death for having murdered and robbed a bank, he decides to visit Ben's would-be widow and two children upon his release, since Harry’s cellmate had refused to cough up the location of the loot before being executed.
Robert Mitchum as Harry Powell, notoriously brandishing "LOVE" and "HATE" on the knuckles of either handOnly that the secret has not died with Ben, as we have earlier seen him entrust the money to his tween boy John, as well as the caretaking of John's preschool sister Pearl, before being arrested in his children's presence. Thus, when we later see Harry through John’s eyes, after his release, in the ice cream parlor where John’s mother has been compelled to work, we can smell the blood before it has been shed.

Shelley Winters as Willa Harper in a most chilling post mortem shot

Harry ingratiates himself to everybody in the town, it seems, what with his charged scripture inspired proclamations and pontifications, except for John, who appears reticent toward the preacher at first then suspectful once Harry asks John about the money. Harry marries John and Pearl’s mother Willa (performed hauntingly by Shelley Winters), whom he spellbinds with fire and brimstone, before murdering her, once he realizes that she is of no use to him. All the while, Harry admonishes then, upon realizing that the children know of the money’s location, terrorizes them into divulging its location.

Only fate and John’s ingenuity intervene to temporarily protect the children as they escape their hometown, by taking a boat downriver. Temporary, as John notes, upon seeing and hearing Harry in their pursuit, in the horizon, ambling on his horse and singing his hymnal refrain as wont throughout the picture. Having been forsaken by every adult in their hometown--including trusted Uncle Birdie, who had promised John protection--an adult finally intervenes on the children's behalf, a farmer named Rachel (silent film star Lilian Gish), who lives downriver and who shelters John and Pearl (as she is doing already for three other children) from the sinister forces that have arisen during the Great Depression as she does from Harry once the preacher finally catches up to them.

At their best, Southern Gothic works embed their depravity in depravation, not through facile causality, but in illustrating the immorality that coincides indignity, an indignity born out of poverty. It is no coincidence, therefore, that genre exemplifiers written by O’Conner and Faulkner, as with Night of the Hunter, are set against the socioeconomic milieu of the Great Depression. Yet, Hunter aims for more, by framing itself as a theological morality tale—literally, since the film opens and closes with scenes in which Rachel looks into the camera as if telling the film’s cautionary tale. Rachel and John embody Hunter’s championing of behavior, not merely dogma, which rises above self-centeredness, into the realm of clemency and empathy.

Stylistically, the film seems most influenced by German expressionistic techniques (which the American noir subgenre absorbed), as evidenced by vivid chiaroscuro and constrained, distorted interiors. Hunter even deploys the iris shot, ubiquitous in 1920s cinema, but near-extinct by the 50s, evidently in homage to the silent era. One scene magnificently weds all such influence, the one in which Harry ritualistically murders Willa in their attic bedroom. The gloomy lighting within the room shaped like a Gothic church steeple (whose design originally meant to evoke passage to heaven), as Harry “exposes” himself by brandishing his knife, his substitute penis, in the direction of the room’s peak, looks as if inspired directly by the German expressionistic classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), also about a serial murderer.

Expressionstic production design and lighting harken to German cinema of the 1920sIf Hunter is to be faulted for anything, it is for its over-richness within the constraint of a 92-minute movie, not surprising considering the abundant talents of the film’s principals: eminent critic and author James Agee as screenwriter, distinctive cinematographer Stanley Cortez, thespian prodigy turned director Laughton, and a superb cast. There are themes that are insufficiently explored: Is the second king about whom John asks Rachel Jesus or himself? What of the apples? John’s consuming them would make him into Adam, not Jesus. A few narrative strands are also unfulfilled: What of the prison warden’s family, abandoned after evoking a redolent comparison to the Harpers? What of the lynch mob at the end, which barley appears on screen before its being dispensed with? We may rightly suspect that footage relating had eventuated on the cutting room’s floor.

Nevertheless, as Pauline Kael once remarked, “Great movies are rarely perfect movies” and Night of the Hunter is an unforgettable, blemished gem.