I have a personal genre of films that I’m especially fond of: movies that are uninspiring throughout their duration but have some sort of fantastic payoff at the end. There are, of course, a myriad of ways the start of the film can be uninspiring. Some, like Antonioni’s Passenger, use narrative tedium as a foil against the narrative pleasure of the ending. Some, like Fuller’s House of Bamboo, don’t sustain the director’s style until the end. Some, like Demy’s Bay of Angels or Bava’s Kill, Baby, Kill! just have such wonderful stylistic flourishes at the end that the inconsistency of the preceding ninety minutes seems lackluster. What draws me to these is the way that they reward patience, a quality that’s central to cinephilia. Film is a medium that came of age as popular entertainment, but its expression as an art often requires distance, contemplation and, yes, displeasure. For those like me, who imbibe the cinephile’s masochism yet also love popcorn-munching absorption in a good cinematic story, these films give the carrot in addition to the stick.
Chantal Akerman’s films are the ultimate expression of the Last Five Minute film. Each, out of a stance of political-modernist avant-gardism, resists narrative pleasure until the very end. Each caps off with gestures of conflict and resolution that in any other film might be insignificant but in context take on the aura of brilliance. The Eighties, which is screening Monday at Harvard Film Archive, is a prime example of this. Without giving away too much of the payoff, I’ll just say the film is a deconstructive musical that exposes the construction of the film illusion, image and sound alike. Not for everyone, but the patient who can sit through it will find their reward.
Also, I’ll be sure to catch the rarely screened and hard to find early Alain Resnais shorts screening Tuesday at the archive. Already in these, you see the stylistic and thematic concerns (tracking shots + reflections on time) he’d develop in his feature films like Hiroshima Mon Amour.
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