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Last Tuesday I went to Doc Films for back-to-back screenings of Dziga Vertov’s Enthusiasm (1930) and Olivier Assayas’s Clean (2004), two films with very little in common. It was the sort of double feature I’ve programmed countless times at home, skipping across great distances in film history because I can’t decide which area I want to study in depth. One benefit to binging on cinema in this fashion is that you’re less likely to confuse the movies in your head later on—which can happen to me when I watch several films in succession from the same filmmaker, nation, era, or genre. I had this problem, for instance, when the Gene Siskel Film Center hosted an excellent Mikio Naruse retrospective in early 2006. Since the director often returned to similar characters and themes, I found that, after watching a couple dozen of his movies in two months, I understood Naruse very well, but had trouble thinking about his films individually.
In his 1967 book Films and Feelings (one of the most imaginative works of film scholarship ever written), Raymond Durgnat writes, “There is a vast repertoire of vivid and valid symbols which spectators understand without thinking of them as poetry. Whether they are convincing or not often depends on the accompanying richness of detail.” He goes on to offer “a little dictionary of poetic motifs,” which includes such gems as:
- Maggie Cheung in Clean
