Most of us have definite ideas on what constitutes a "perfect" movie, and it gets personal very quickly. Great movies are worth fighting over, after all, and the more passionate the debate, the better.
My own ever-changing list of personal bests includes films as wildly different from one another as Disney's Pinocchio, Luis Bunuel's cosmic comedy-noir Viridiana, and George Romero's brilliant meditation on zombie consumer culture, Dawn of the Dead. High art, low art, no art at all — for me, pretty much anything goes. My only requirement is that the movie amaze me.
The bad news is not really news at all: We're not seeing many truly amazing films in our movie theaters these days. The good news is that DVDs have taken up the slack, with more and more of everybody's all-time favorite films showing up every day in the form of new, digitally remastered discs, often with oodles of tantalizing extras.
What follows are short takes on a couple of lost and found treasures recently released on DVD, both of which completely floored me. I'm usually hesitant to use words like "masterpiece," but these films are about as close to that elusive description as I can imagine. I'm sure that at least one of my choices will generate an irate e-mail or two, but that's exactly as it should be.
At the top of my rather short list is The Decalogue, a remarkable, 10-hour miniseries Krzysztof Kieslowski directed for Polish television in the late '80s. The film is made up of 10 stories, each set in a nondescript housing complex in Warsaw, and each supposedly illustrating one of the Ten Commandments. These illustrations are at best loose, though, even more elusive than Kieslowski's referencing, in Blue, White and Red, of the concepts of liberty, equality and fraternity symbolized by the colors of the French flag.
The film is made up of intimate, intensely personal dramas, small in scale but enormous in their spiritual and ethical implications. In the first story, a man fears that his son has died as the indirect result of placing too much faith in the predictions of a computer. In another episode, a lonely voyeur suddenly finds he's become the plaything of the mystery woman he's been obsessively spying on. In one tale, Kieslowski simply peeks inside the window of one of those drab apartments and dares us to guess the relationships that exist between the people inside.
In perhaps the best and most famous episode (later expanded into the feature-length A Short Film About Killing), a young bumpkin commits a senseless murder, and is then in turn murdered by the state. There's a terrible symmetry at work here — even the methods of murder (strangulation) are similar — but, as with the other Decalogue tales, there is no obvious moral to be gleaned, no lesson to be learned. Kieslowski is always more interested in raising questions than in instructing, and these open-ended, elaborately textured dramas all but demand endless hours of conversation.
The film's stories are sometimes fragile, moody and lyrical, sometimes raw and edgy, but always enormously resonant and inexplicably moving. Kieslowski delineates his characters and their environments with compassion, precision and elegance, mapping out spiraling human landscapes that inevitably touch on the possibilities of community, solitude, longing and, above all, love.
Facets Video is billing its DVD release of The Decalogue as "The Film Event of the Century." I'm not willing to go quite that far (at least not before laying eyes on the long-rumored restoration of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls), but it is a cause for celebration.
Kieslowski's masterpiece (there, I've said it) is spread over three discs on Facets' new set, with a remastered picture that appears somewhat smoother and less grainy than the film's previous, no-frills DVD incarnation, now long out of print. Extras aren't as bountiful as we might have liked on the new edition, but they shed some interesting light on the material. Disc one features a fact-heavy introduction by Roger Ebert, while disc three offers three wonderful documentaries on Kieslowski, including a lengthy look at the director going head-to-head with the international press, a brief but illuminating interview with Kieslowski, and a montage of talking heads offering tribute to the late filmmaker. A handsomely designed booklet rounds out this extraordinary package.
At the other end of the pop culture spectrum, we have Fritz Lang's science-fiction fever dream Metropolis, an eye-popping pulp yang to The Decalogue's austere, ethereal yin. If you've only seen one silent film, chances are it's Metropolis. But — at the risk of perpetuating clichés — until you've seen Kino-on-Video's new 2-DVD edition of Metropolis, you haven't seen the film at all.
Despite its legendary status, time has not been kind to Metropolis. The film itself is marvelous, but you'd hardly know it from the fuzzy, washed-out public domain videotapes and bargain basement DVDs that have been the only way to see Lang's epic. Adding insult to injury, over an hour of crucial footage has gone missing since the movie's premiere in 1927, resulting in butchered versions that often barely made sense.
All that changed in the late '90s, when a group of film archivists based in Munich embarked on an ambitious, five-year project to restore Metropolis to its former glory. Film elements were rediscovered, restoring Metropolis to a respectable 124 minutes, and the movie was digitally cleaned and tweaked to gleaming, razor-sharp intensity. It is this gorgeous, nearly blemish-free restoration that graces Kino-on-Video's DVD edition, along with a luscious Dolby 5.1 mix of Gottfried Huppertz's original orchestral score.
The film lives up to its rep in spades. Lang's deliriously visual telling of a utopian future where class struggle simmers just below the surface, and science squares off against mysticism still stands as a sort of ur-saga for the shape of sci-fi to come. The film's conflicts are epic and eternal in a way that both Wagner and Hegel might appreciate, while the special effects, sets and German Expressionism-influenced imagery look as striking today as they surely did 75 years ago.
The DVD is crammed with extras, the most impressive being restorationist Enno Patalas' exhaustively researched, 43-minute doc on the film's fascinating history and production. Patalas fares less well on his stilted, overly theatrical commentary track, but that's compensated for by such first-rate supplements as production stills, architectural sketches, poster art and an eight-page booklet with extensive information on the film's restoration.
Seventy-five years on, Metropolis remains one of the greatest and most influential films of its kind. It's a must-see, and, beyond question, the definitive Kino-on-Video DVD is the way to do that. Accept no substitutes.
Lance Goldenberg can be reached at lgoldenb@ tampabay.rr.com or 813-248-8888, ext. 157.
This article appears in Sep 4-10, 2003.