Fantastic Metropolis

As for movies, I didn’t see much in the theatre, but at the end of 2003 I subscribed to Netflix, so I saw a wider range of films than I have in many years.

Just as I remember 2003 as the year I discovered Jan Svankmajer and Hayao Miyazaki, 2004 will be remembered as the year I discovered Guy Maddin. First, I saw Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary, which was so unlike anything I’d ever seen I had to find more. Next was The Saddest Music in the World, Maddin’s most recent film and my favorite of his that I’ve seen, a medley of hardboiled cardboard and wistful yearning and goofy horror and all the travails of a fairy tale gone dreadfully wrong. Of Maddin’s other films, I saw Triumph of the Ice Nymphs (Aubrey Beardsley does Mr. Rogers), Archangel (Sergei Eisenstein does Preston Sturges), and The Heart of the World, which may be my favorite Maddin movie, a six-minute silent film about love, death, and the center of the Earth.

It was a good year for DVDs, with some of my favorite films finding their way onto DVD for the first time. There was Short Cuts, Robert Altman’s channelling of Raymond Carver’s stories into L.A. ennui, coupled with plenty of extra features about the film, Carver, and Altman. It even comes with a book of the original stories.

Paris, Texas is an even better movie, and the fact that it is now available on DVD almost makes my life complete. Written by Sam Shepard and directed by Wim Wenders, Paris, Texas has some of the best acting ever put on film, and some of the most haunting, harrowing scenes. It is not a movie that clamors for your attention or plays your emotions like some Spielbergian epic of gotcha, but it is so respectful of the story it has to tell and the characters it portrays that by the end it is emotionally draining and artistically overwhelming—loneliness made manifest in landscape, life made vivid by the lies of art. The DVD includes a series of deleted scenes woven together, and it is a testament to the power of the film itself that even watching the deleted scenes is a powerful experience.

I’ll end where I began, though, with Chekhov, because a film of equal power and beauty to Paris, Texas also recently made its way to DVD, Unfinished Piece for Player Piano, a Russian film directed by Nikita Mikhalkov and loosely adapted from Chekhov’s first play, Platonov, as well as some of his stories. It’s one of the only films I’ve ever watched and then immediately watched again—and that was on a bad videotape rented in New York on a cold winter night in a basement apartment without much heat ten years ago. I’ve since seen the film many times, and each is a revelation. Watched once, the movie reveals little, because it is an ensemble story, and just keeping the characters straight is a challenge at first. It’s not the individual characters that matter, though—they are important in the way any individual instrument in a symphony is: inextricable, but the beauty comes from everything coalescing into a whole.

In his notebooks, Chekhov wrote, “I hope that in the next world I shall be able to look back upon this life and say, ‘Those were beautiful dreams…’” Amidst its disappointments and disasters, 2004 gave us some beautiful dreams.

Matthew Cheney has written reviews, essays, and interviews for Locus, English Journal, The SF Site, and The Internet Review of Science Fiction. He writes regularly about various topics at his weblog, The Mumpsimus.