On Film

Sitting in a theater is still worthwhile

Two brothers take desperate measures to try to save their endangered sheep in the Icelandic black comedy Rams.
Two brothers take desperate measures to try to save their endangered sheep in the Icelandic black comedy Rams.

There is a sense that we're losing touch with a lot of our traditional forms of interaction. A lot of the things that used to pull people out into the streets to mill around with strangers have been replaced by things we do in our homes, alone or with people we see every day. Absent a professional obligation, I don't go out to the movie theater much in the evenings anymore. That's kind of a shame, but there are too many options at my fingertips -- in addition to cable TV and Netflix there's a library of DVDs I'll never work my way through.

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Ingrid Thulin and Victor Sjostrom star in Ingmar Bergman’s uplifting classic Wild Strawberries.

On weekend afternoons when the sun's blazing, we still like to roll down the hill and catch a movie -- and it doesn't really matter much what we see. We've sat uncritically through Finding Dory, The Secret Life of Pets and The Infiltrator in recent weeks. I enjoyed them all, but I'm happy not to write about them in any sort of depth. I saw them the way most people see movies, with fairly low expectations. If I was watching them at home I might not have sat through any of these movies until the end. I might have decided that some other diversion would make better use of my time. But there's something about making the commitment, making a journey (however brief), standing in line and sitting in the midst of similarly committed strangers that makes the moviegoing experience richer than watching the same entertainment product at home.

When you ask people what they want from the movies, one of the answers that comes back most frequently is escape. They want to be -- for a couple of hours -- delivered from their workaday worries. They want, for a while, to live a different life in a different world through a surrogate. Maybe some of them want the opportunity to disengage and bask in bright colors and loud noises, but I don't think that's usually the case. For most people, the movies are another way of learning about the world. In a very real way, movies teach us how to live, how to carry ourselves. And they can teach us about how others live as well. The best movies are like literature. We benefit from consuming them, they allow us access to the experiences, memories and perceptions of others. For a little while we become a floating eye in someone else's imagination.

For four weeks I've had the chance -- thanks to Lifequest of Arkansas and Matt Smith and the good folks at Riverdale 10 -- to present a film series of sorts in an ideal setting. On Thursday mornings I've been screening and leading discussions about some of my favorite films to a class of 77 retired folks. It's a group with high expectations and a good deal of patience. Over the past couple of years I've tried to balance the films I've shown them. I want the movies to be entertaining and challenging -- qualities some people find mutually exclusive.

This year the slate was comprised of Grimur Hakonarson's Rams (2015), an Icelandic meditation on family and livestock and the lengths some of us might go to try to continue what we've come to consider "our way of life." It's what I describe as black comedy, though some members of the group didn't find much funny with it beyond its flat depictions of rural Iceland. Shot on location in a remote valley by a director with a background in nonfiction filmmaking, Rams feels like a documentary, albeit one with unprecedented access to the private moments of its subjects. (Serendipitously, a few days before I screened it for the group, my wife, Karen, ran across French documentarian Magali Pettier's 2015 film Addicted to Sheep when she was screening potential films for October's Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival. She recommended they program that film, which validated my sense of Rams as a highly realistic work.)

Anyway, Rams is available on DVD. And looking at those frozen, treeless Icelandic steppes is a good way to spend a couple of Arkansas summer hours.

But Rams was a replacement for the film I'd been planning to show -- Laurie Anderson's documentary Heart of a Dog, which got a bit of attention last year but never made it to Arkansas theaters. And though it's available for download now, it hasn't made it to DVD. Maybe next summer.

The second week I screened Mine, a 2009 documentary by San Francisco filmmaker Geralyn Pezanoski about pets that were separated from their owners in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, and the owners' subsequent efforts to get them back. It's an initially heartbreaking, ultimately uplifting movie that's about how we treat our animals and how we treat each other. I'd planned it as a companion piece to Heart of a Dog, but it worked fine as a stand-alone, drawing out lots of discussion about the nature of ownership and whether the special bonds we develop with our pets deserve some kind of legal notice.

Then, I showed them Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson's Anomalisa because it was probably the highest profile film that didn't get a theatrical release in Arkansas last year. It is an R-rated puppet show, the story of a man trapped in his own skin, his own life. I could make a case that it's a not-so-covert rewriting of Jean Paul-Sartre's No Exit, the 1944 existentialist French play that introduced us to the phrase L'enfer, c'est les autres (hell is other people).

Maybe that's not the way to describe it. How about I say it's the story of a depressive motivational speaker who spends a troubled night in a high-end Cincinnati hotel, probably committing what some people would characterize as a date rape. Intrigued now?

I showed it to what one of my students later reminded me was a kind of "church group." And they loved it.

Yesterday I rewarded them with Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries (1957), the sort of rich, humane film that reminds of just how great -- how artful and affecting -- cinema can be.

But it would have been different -- not bad, but different -- to have shown these movies on a TV screen. It's good to see them on the wall, in the company of others. I've already begun thinking about next summer's program.

Email:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

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MovieStyle on 07/29/2016

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