The Magnificent Ambersons November 5, 2010

Screens again Nov. 6 @ 7pm

1942, U.S. Welles’ portrait of a midwestern town’s transformation amidst the onslaught of the industrial age “uses the full weight [of the director’s] Gothic style” to transform Booth Tarkington’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel into a “dark, almost nervous film” (James Naremore). As time inexerorably passes, the aristocratic Ambersons remain stuck in a decaying past while Eugene Morgan (Cotten) invents the automobile and finds fortune. Eugene’s frustrated love for Isabel Amberson (Costello) is mirrored in the next generation when his daughter Lucy (Baxter) meets Isabel’s bratty son George at the grand Amberson ball. The scene, recognized as the high point of the film for its complex blocking and fluid tracking shots, is quoted in Godard’s Une histoire seule; Godard cuts rapidly between the young couple and an image of the Lumière brothers, uniting the futures of the young protagonists and the cinema in doom and comeuppance.

Followed by
Histoire(s) du cinéma: Une histoire seule
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard France 1989. French with English subtitles
Une histoire seule, the second part of Godard’s magisterial video essay Histoire(s) du cinéma, opens with the strains of Bernard Hermann’s Psycho score and dedications to John Cassavetes and Glauber Rocha. Questioning his own place “in all this light, all this darkness,” Godard intones that when cinema was first projected, people saw that the world was there. That world seems comprised of two great stories, of sex and death. But there is also the story of cinema, which Godard traces here from its birth (Reynaud, Demeny, Muybridge, Janssen, Cros, Edison) as his ever expanding and dizzyingly diverse compendium of audio-visual references and montage ponder cinema’s power as entertainment, escapism, reproducer of reality, industry of masks, story-teller, receiver and giver, memory.