Pandora's Box (1929)

This post is part of the Film Preservation Blogathon, a wonderful project that has already yielded a great number of fascinating and passionate articles on film preservation from some of the web's best film bloggers. The Blogathon is being headed by The Self-Styled Siren and Ferdy on Films, and the master list of contributed articles can be found on both sites. This week-long endeavor is in support of the National Film Preservation Foundation, a nonprofit organization devoted to a very important cause, and I highly encourage everyone to offer a donation here. As they put it:

The National Film Preservation Foundation is the independent, nonprofit organization created by the U.S. Congress to help save America’s film heritage. They work directly with archives to rescue endangered films that will not survive without public support.

The NFPF will give away 4 DVD sets as thank-you gifts to blogathon donors chosen in a random drawing: Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900-1934 and Treasures IV: American Avant Garde Film, 1947-1986.

Considering this blog is strictly film reviews, I probably shouldn't spend too much time getting anecdotal about film preservation and engaging in hero worship about someone who had no creative ties to the film in question, but screw it. Film preservation is too important a cause to rush through, and without the work of James Card and like-minded film archivists, I would not be able to write about G.W. Pabst's 1929 silent masterpiece starring Louise Brooks today.

When I mentioned “like-minded film archivists” above, it was mainly in reference to Henri Langlois, whose Cinémathèque Française was tirelessly devoted to film preservation and whose screening of Louise Brooks films in the 1950s helped spark renewed interest in her career in France. A lot has been written about Langlois, especially in terms of his relation to French New Wave filmmakers, and he certainly deserves the many gushings of praise that have been placed alongside his name, but he'll have to settle for a simple hat tip here as I shift my attention to James Card, the first curator of the George Eastman House's film collection, one of Langlois' contemporaries and a personal hero of mine.

Valentine's Day Double Feature: Wings of Desire (1987) and City of Angels (1998)

As a child, I had a strong belief in guardian angels. This became especially prominent after one night when I thought I saw a ghost sitting next to my bed. The description I gave to my parents vaguely aligned with that of my dad's brother, Stephen, who died at the age of eight. My dad floated two possibilities about the sighting: (1) I was having a dream and thought it was real, or (2) Stephen was watching over me. I believe the former now, but the latter gave me great comfort. This childhood belief and sense of comfort reemerged while watching Wim Wenders' West German celestial romance Wings of Desire. While my response to the film was immensely personal, the film's highly revered place in the cinematic canon affirms that it's a pretty universally engrossing and thought-provoking experience.

The film's greatest strength is its patience. It is a romance, but it takes its time before introducing the love story and only revisits it sporadically throughout, with the two central lovers sharing very little screentime together. It is a color film eventually, but apart from a few brief snatches of color, the first hour and a half are shot in gorgeous black and white by veteran cinematographer Henri Alekan. All the necessary information about how angels interact with the human world and vice versa is revealed, but it is always revealed organically, never with rushed exposition. While much of the action revolves around angel Damiel (played by Bruno Ganz, probably best known for his turn as Hitler in Downfall and the great many YouTube clips the performance spawned), the central role of the film belongs to West Berlin, as Wenders lets the camera float freely around the city, capturing its diverse inhabitants in the midst of their daily lives. One bit of information revealed early on is that these peoples' thoughts can be heard by angels nearby, and the angels may offer a comforting hand on their shoulder. Wenders revels in this connection between and angels and humans, devoting many scenes, including this bravura sequence in a library, to simply capturing it in passing. The film also intermittently follows Peter Falk playing himself during a film shoot in Berlin and the sideplot pays off tremendously in a touching and hilarious scene.