The Best Thing I Watched This Weekend

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I watched a lot of high-quality films this weekend. I saw the slightly hard-to-find Godard film (Vivre sa vie) on a big screen. I finally got around to watching Jean Epstein's glorious surreal 1928 version of Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher which was just as bewitching as I'd always heard it was (I'll probably do a Picture Pages post for it sometime soon actually).

I watched most of Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (my DVD crapped out about 2/3rds of the way through which really really sucked; now I have to wait for a replacement) and all of his The Marriage of Maria Braun, which...well I've finally gotten onto a long-awaited and long overdue Fassbinder kick. I realized it was well past time. So besides Querelle - which thanks to the wonder of Brad Davis' sweet sweet ass I've seen several times - these films I've watched these past couple of weeks are all I've seen of Fassbinder's so far. So my experience is new and limited. But I'd kept hearing Maria Braun was considered his best. I've got to say, while I thought it was a wonderful film (and how much did Verhoeven's Black Book "borrow" from it? God!), I'm definitely on Team Ali: Fear Eats the Soul as of right now for his best film. Again, my experience is limited. But nothing in Braun packed the emotional wallop that Ali did.

Anyway. So I watched all those films, and then I also watched Hungarian director Bela Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies. It came up in the post Nat did on Movie Eclipses the other week and I found myself curious. I'd never even heard of it. And then the film started and... well it's opening scene made me cry. For awhile. Watch it.

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I'm not entirely sure what it is about that that haunts me so. I suppose a lot of it is that beautiful score (I actually paused the movie when this scene ended and went on an immediate quest to find an mp3 of it - it took some work to figure out the music's name but I eventually did and you can download it here if you like) but I was hooked from there. That is an astonishing, beautiful piece of cinema. The rest of the film had moments that neared this high but how odd for a film to peak in the opening scene, no? I'm not meaning to devalue the rest of the film here, it's really a lovely piece of work, but those first nine minutes or so are some of the greatest minutes I've ever seen put on film, period. When the camera pulls back and the lamp fills the top half of the frame, and János tells of the effect the darkness has on the world, and the drunk playing the sun folds in on himself... all of it gives me chills.

For extra credit: I had no idea beforehand what a very Hanna Schygulla sort of weekend it was gonna be either. She was in the both of the Fassbinder films and Werckmeister. I hadn't even known of her until late last year when I saw her in The Edge of Heaven, a performance I so loved in a film I so admired that she got her due in my end-of-year awards. And now she's everywhere! Teaches me to think I know anything, not having been familiar with her til now.
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