Pulling a Spellbound

Went to see The Red Turtle today. When did that movie officially come out, like a year ago?, but it's just come out today in theaters around these parts. I can't remember the last time I cried during a movie- it used to happen all the time, but I guess it hasn't happened in a while; my last confirmed cry was during Storks; though I can feasibly see myself having cried during the Lego Batman movie, I can't really recall one way or the other. (I cry sometimes during really emotional movie trailers; it barely happened during the trailer to, I think Born in China, before the film.) But The Red Turtle- it's beautiful, and gorgeous, and almost entirely without dialogue, and fabulous, in the sense that it's like a fable of some sort, because there's exactly one plot element (probably symbolic??) that's not really explainable through any known science.

Matthew Whoolery, who teaches psychology classes (including cultural psychology) here, was there with his family, I saw at the end as they got up and passed where I was sitting (when it ended, everyone sat there in silence for a bit, not getting up for a minute or so even though it was just credits playing.) Did you like it, he asks a younger daughter, and she says she loved it, and I think to myself no young human daughter would say such a thing, but that's at the same time as I recognize the voice of the man passing by me and everything makes sense, the question is answered as it is asked- Matthew Whoolery and his family watch a bunch of slow-paced non-American international cinema, all the time, so it makes sense that this film would be appreciated by them.

Which brings me to my post's point, and a revelation of a little that happened yesterday as well. Matthew Whoolery was the one who introduced the movie for International Cinema Night yesterday evening- the film was Theeb, which was a nominee for best foreign-language picture, last year I think. It was amazing. It's an amazing film. But, as he pointed out in the after-film discussion, maybe he's preaching to the choir of saying it- those who turn up for International Cinema night in the first place, and then those who stick around for the discussion afterward, would be the ones inclined or pre-inclined to be willing to appreciate something like it. And not everyone is, or would be.

Theeb has almost no non-diegetic music in it. The Red Turtle has even sparser dialogue. Western audiences, American ones at least and especially, are conditioned to want to have wall-to-wall, eventhood, event-ness, in their movies; something's always got to be happening, and if there's not that a lot of people get bored and/or confused. But his 6-year-old daughter, in watching Theeb as he tells us and The Red Turtle as I see firsthand, is able to appreciate a film where that doesn't happen. It didn't even occur to me, meanwhile, that boring movies could be boring.

There are certain things we expect out of cinema just by default; it's almost unthinkable that a film could go without non-diegetic music except for maybe during the credits- but we've got, No Country for Old Men, Cloverfield. Theeb has a little bit of music, but without your hand being held by the music, having it tell you how to feel, you don't know how to feel, and that makes these films so much more suspenseful.

I can't think of many examples of films where the dialogue is inconsequential or background noise or nonexistent- a few, but no mainstream live-action American ones. The Red Turtle. The Triplets of Belleville, maybe other Sylvain Chomet films but I'm not sure. Boy and the World. The sparseness of dialogue here makes these films into, parables or something. Fables, was a word previously used, that's a good one.

Color is another thing that we expect from movies- I was thinking about Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound during the discussion on the use of music in film. Film won an Oscar for its score, but that's not why I was thinking about it- the film's in black-and-white but there's like two frames of red spliced into the film at the climax. It's not unusual for a black-and-white movie to have its frames tinted for emotional effect or to indicate time-of-day- a night shot would be tinted blue, an indoor shot would be tinted yellow, that kind of thing. So it's not too unprecedented to have color splash out of nowhere in a black-and-white flick. But it is shocking.

I think about that a lot, some. Now that we have the technology, and we can have the music and the talking and the color in the movie, we expect it- but if we don't pull back these things, go without them for some or all of the movie, it's impossible to recreate a Spellbound. Not that we generally even remember that movie out of all of Hitchcock's oeuvre, but whatever.

So I made it to International Cinema Night, that's what happened at 7:00 pm. I'm honestly not trying to be mysterious about yesterday, nobody's probably even that curious. But that's what happened at 7:00.