It’s been a while since I last posted about a movie – I’ve still been watching, but sometimes the films are just too much fun to take the time to write about. I’m currently working through Hollywood movies, from screwball comedies to film noirs and westerns, filling in more gaps but this time Anglophone ones. But Christmas is a time for reflection, and I’ve been recently preoccupied by how many connections I’m seeing between these movies from my LIST. With this in mind, I’ve cobbled together four potential double bills that I think are interesting.

Starting with…

Night and Fog (1955) with Shoah (1985)

Opening with the light choices. Two different depictions of the Holocaust, one a short film made ten years after the liberation of German concentration camps, the latter an epic documentary made over eleven years but shown in 1985. Night and Fog is unflinching in its use of archive footage, switching between shots of the camps in the 1950s and footage of the camps during the war. Shoah also flits between different footage:  the scaffolding of the nine-hour documentary are interviews with survivors, witnesses and perpetrators of the Holocaust and their voices are played over roaming footage of the overgrown sites forty years after the events. In the latter film, no archive footage is used, the documentary relies entirely on the stark testimony and the emotions of the interviewees.

Footlight Parade (1933) with Red Psalm (1972)

Basically, I’m advocating pairing any Busby Berkeley and Miklós Jancsó film together, but Footlight Parade has the unbelievable ‘By a Waterfall’ segment, whilst Red Psalm is the climax of a series of movies that are increasingly abstract. I’m aware that Jancsó is a little obscure. He’s a Hungarian director who made obscurely political movies that used the Hungarian landscape as a kind of theatrical stage, so soldiers, horses, peasants, prisoners become dancers, all tightly choreographed in scenes where they sweep around each other, move in spirals and dance over the plains. Jancsó, in short, is like Berkeley opened up and given a feeling of liberation and spontaneity that paradoxically works alongside the controlled movement. The influence of the earlier director on the latter is clear.

The Saragossa Manuscript (1965) with Céline and Julie Go Boating  (1974)

Two shaggy dog stories that offer you an immersion into a wholly unique and distinctive universe, both sprawling and taking time to build their worlds, both feeling less like movies and more like mythic experiences. The Saragossa Manuscript has an Umberto Eco-ish postmodern structure derived from the source that gives it an unreliable and intangible atmosphere. Ostensibly taking the form of a gothic, picaresque mystery, it takes it’s time with the unravelling (and ravelling) of its narrative, resulting in something far deeper. Similarly, Céline and Julie Go Boating is more than simply a ghost or time travel comedy. Both films end up as meditations on the complexities and possibilities of storytelling.

Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979) with Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St Matthew (1964)

The Pythons were a cine-literate bunch. The Holy Grail picked up cues from sources as rangy as Eisenstein, Tarkovsky and Bergman, but the Life of Brian slots perfectly into a mould of Biblical realism virtually created by Pasolini (following in the earnest footsteps of Rosselini) with The Gospel According to St Matthew. It’s not just the look – there’s something about the modernity of the comedy; the refraction of the life of Christ through the lens of modern expectations. As with Pasolini’s realist masterpiece, there is something irreligious about Life of Brian that somehow becomes more profoundly religious than anything that came out of Hollywood.   

Honourable pairings:

Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967) paired with La La Land (2016) – the latter a pastiche of the former, each with their own colourful and catchy charms.

Mouchette (1967) paired with Vagabond (1985) paired with Rosetta (1999) – a trio of realist depictions of a disenfranchised girl. Always a focus on the tenacity and the struggle of life in poverty.

The General (1926) paired with Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) – both mechanical ‘there and back again’ movies with spectacular set-piece stunts.

Shoeshine (1946) paired with Jeux Interdits (1952) – similar meditations on the relationship between children in trying times, and the dangers that arise when play becomes blurred with a struggle for survival.