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Opening Shots: ‘Altered States’

Jim Emerson

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“Altered States” opens with the image of a fluorescent, egglike shape surrounded by darkness. It is a window. From below, in comes a floating human figure (William Hurt as Prof. Eddie Jessup), who appears to be immersed in liquid. Surrounded as he is by the dark oval frame of the window, he resembles an embryo inside a mother’s womb. The camera slowly tracks back to reveal that Jessup is inside a horizontal tank in an empty room. As it tracks back even further, the viewer detects the edges of a second window, rectangular this time. In front of that window sits a bearded scientist in a laboratorium, who carefully monitors the room with the tank holding Eddie Jessup.

In the film, science tries to discover the essence of the Self by use of altered states of consciousness. The opening shot prepares the audience for this very process by taking the viewer through different layers/windows of counsciousness: from the symbolic birth of the Self, via self-awareness, to self-examination; from subjectivity to objectivity. The soundtrack amplifies this trajectory, going from bubbly water effects and steady breathing through an oxygen mask, to the buzz of lab equipment and clicking of buttons.

Peter Gelderblom

founder / contributing editor

www.24LiesASecond.com

JE: Beautifully done, Peter! I love the use of sound in this shot, too: From the very first moments you have this feeling of being immersed in an individual’s interior consciousness — which is where the drama of the movie really plays out.

#CNNFail: The revolution is being Tweeted and Facebooked

Jim Emerson

Saturday afternoon. Conservative/libertarian columnist, comic, blogger and self-proclaimed geek Robert A. George tweets and posts on Facebook: “Cripes! Iran is falling apart and even CNN Int’l is showing a packaged piece on a water-skiing squirrel!! #tcot #iranelection.”

This is the world we live in. BBC had some real breaking news from Iran, which reportedly caused the Ahmadinejad regime to kick some of its reporters out of the country, block its satellite feeds, and otherwise hamper its coverage. But most of the real news was coming directly from the cell phones and laptops of Iranian citizens who found ways to circumvent Ahmadinejad’s attempts to block access to unprocessed, “unofficial” information, especially on the Internet and sites like YouTube.

On Twitter, where #CNNFail and #Iranelection were top topics, tweets relayed options for bypassing government censorship:

PLEASE RT Functioning Iran proxies 218.128.112.18:8080 218.206.94.132:808 218.253.65.99:808 219.50.16.70:8080 #iranelection

good Web proxy!: http://orcade.ncad.fr/poxy-0.5b2/ #iranelection

CNet reported:

Even as Twitter became the best source for rapid-fire news developments from the front lines of the riots in Tehran, a growing number of users of the microblogging service were incredulous at the near total lack of coverage of the story on CNN, a network that cut its teeth with on-the-spot reporting from the Middle East.

For most of Saturday, CNN.com had no stories about the massive protests on behalf of Mir Hossein Mousavi, who was reported by the Iranian government to have lost to the sitting president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The widespread street clashes–nearly unheard of in the tightly controlled Iran–reflected popular belief that the election had been rigged, a sentiment that was even echoed, to some extent, by the U.S. government Saturday.

On Facebook and Twitter, many Iranians — and supporters worldwide — changed their profile pictures to the image above in solidarity. In an international gesture of protest, people were encouraged to wear green — color of candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi’s opposition party, which claims to have actually won the election — on Monday.

UPDATES: Marc Armbinder offers advice on how we should always approach news, whether from newspapers, radio, network television, websites, blogs or Twitter: “Follow The Developments In Iran Like A CIA Analyst.”

Armbinder again: “The Revolution Will Be Twittered”:

Why hasn’t Mousavi been arrested or killed? Iran’s regime is thuggish, but I don’t think it wants to risk further alienating Europe or China. And I surmise that because the Iranian government knows that the opposition — maybe we should call them the silent majority? — has ways of communicating and organizing outside of their control. Mousavi would become an instant martyr. Twitter, Facebook, blogs — and the mainstream media — are all colluding to keep hope alive for the Iranian people.

Tweeted (and Re-Tweeted) news flashes and “official news” from Fars News late early Monday (PST) below. Compare and contrast:

Borat: For Make Milgram Experiment

Jim Emerson

Your typical Cannes bathing beauties.

Borat (Sacha Baron Cohen, currently appearing as Jean Girard in “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby”) has a movie coming out in November with a title as good as “Ricky Bobby.” It’s called “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” and people who have seen it are raving about how subersively smart and revealingly funny it is.

Cohen and his characters (particularly hip-hop dimwit Ali G) are huge in Great Britain, and Naomi Alderman has an analysis of what makes Borat run in the UK Guardian:

Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest film is due for release in November, but the storm of protest has started early. Already the film, in which Borat, a fictional Kazakh reporter, spits out food given to him by Jews on the ground it may be poisoned, and refuses to fly “in case the Jews repeat their attacks of 9/11”, has been called “disgraceful” and “disgusting”.

I first encountered the character of Borat in a clip from his HBO TV show which has circulated widely on the internet. Baron Cohen, as Borat, stands in front of an audience at a redneck bar in Arizona and announces that he will sing “a song from my country”. He then sings, “In my country there is problem, and that problem is the Jew. They take everybody money and they never give it back.” The chorus is particularly catchy: “Throw the Jew down the well (so my country can be free).” [Clip and lyrics here.]

I am a Jew. I’ve written about my community in a way that is critical but none the less, I hope, affectionate. I love the Jewish community with all its flaws and insecurities. And I think that Borat’s song may be the funniest thing I have ever seen in my life. It is funny because it is ridiculous, because it parodies the most stupid kinds of anti-semitism, because the viewer is in on the joke. And, like the best humour, it is funny because it is viscerally, nauseatingly terrifying. It contains images every bit as unsettling as Leni Riefenstahl’s “The Triumph of the Will.” It is funny because it is true….

The reason it is unsettling to hear Borat sing “Throw the Jew down the well” is because of the reaction of those listening. Some sit in mute astonishment and horror. But some join in. Some sing along, smile and stamp their feet. One woman even – unprompted, mind you – puts her fingers to her forehead to make horns when he sings, “You must take [the Jew] by his horns.” Borat is unsettling not because his opinions are outlandish but because he reveals how many ordinary people share them….

Borat is shocking because we cannot help but imagine ourselves in the place of his hapless victims and because we understand – though not, perhaps, consciously – that we might have acted precisely as they did. We too might have remained silent when Borat suggested “hanging” homosexuals, or nodded politedly at the suggestion that a Humvee is suitable for “running over Gypsies.” Not because we fear for our lives if we disagree but, perhaps, to avoid embarrassment. Borat is funny because he is shocking, and he is shocking because he reveals the truth.

After watching the clip, I’m not so sure that at least some of the people in the crowd weren’t in on the joke — particularly the lady who makes the horns, because she seems aware she’s on camera and has evidently decided to play along. Complete “Throw the Jew Down the Well” lyrics after jump…

Griffin Mill and ‘The Return of the Player’

Jim Emerson

He’s baaaaack. And he’s miserable.

Michael Tolkin, who wrote the novel and screenplay on which Robert Altman’s “The Player” was based, has published a sequel in which studio executive Griffin Mill, now 52, is trying to get out of Hollywood. Tolkin has this to say about the state of movies, in a New York Times interview:

“The movies haven’t been very good the last three or four years, they really haven’t,��? he said. “Everybody knows that. At least that, maybe more. And what they were will never return.��?

The source of all this creative- industrial- complex angst is the death of what he both eulogizes and parodies: the classic journey-of-the-hero story structure, analyzed by Joseph Campbell in the 1940’s, popularized a generation ago by George Lucas through “Star Wars,��? spouted and shorthanded by studio executives ever since, and all but trampled to death, Mr. Tolkin said, by nearly every subsequent action movie and thriller that Hollywood has turned out.

Or as Griffin puts it: “Physics cracked the atom, biology cracked the genome and Hollywood cracked the story.��?

What he’s talking about, of course, is the ubiquity of screenwriting guru Robert McKee’s story structure techniques, satirized in “Adaptation.” with Brian Cox playing McKee.

László Kovács: In Memory

Jim Emerson

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László Kovács (May 14, 1933 – July 22, 2007)

Kovács emigrated to the United States with his lifelong friend Vilmos Zsigmond, who became another great Hungarian-American cinematographer.

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For me, perhaps the most indelible image in Kovács’ work is the last shot of “Five Easy Pieces” (Bob Rafelson, 1970), a long stationary take of a gray, rainy stretch of Pacific Northwest highway, stuck in the muddy pavement outside an isolated gas station. The only camera movement is a slight pan. All the loneliness, frustration and alienation of the whole movie culminates (in a diminuendo, if that’s possible) in this damp, atmospheric image.

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Other notable Kovács films include:

“Psych-Out” (Richard Rush, 1968)

“Targets” (Peter Bogdanovich, 1968)

“Easy Rider” (Dennis Hopper, 1969)

“That Cold Day in the Park” (Robert Altman, 1969)

“Getting Straight” (Rush, 1970)

“Alex in Wonderland” (Paul Mazursky, 1970)

“The Last Movie” (Hopper, 1971)

“What’s Up, Doc?” (Bogdanovich, 1972)

“The King of Marvin Gardens” (Bob Rafelson, 1972)

“Paper Moon” (Bogdanovich, 1973)

“Shampoo” (Hal Ashby, 1975)

“Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (Steven Spielberg, 1977 — additional photography)

“New York, New York” (Martin Scorsese, 1977)

“The Last Waltz” (Scorsese, 1978 — additional photography)

“Ghostbusters” (Ivan Reitman, 1984)

“Mask” (Bogdanovich, 1985)

“Say Anything…” (Cameron Crowe, 1989)

“Radio Flyer” (Richard Donner, 1992)

“My Best Friend’s Wedding” (P.J. Hogan, 1997)

Prof. Irwin Corey’s Foremostly Authoritative Spring Break Movie Quiz

Jim Emerson

View image The Professor is IN!

“Kiss today goodbye, and point me t’ward tomorrow….” Yes, Dennis at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule has published his latest irresistible quiz: Prof. Irwin Corey’s Foremostly Authoritative Spring Break Movie Quiz.

So you may as well just click on that link and kiss today goodbye. (Actually, you can probably do it in a half-hour or so, but what would be the fun of rushing?) Don’t forget, can’t regret what you do for love, eh?

Yeah, yeah, oh yeah…

Jim Emerson

I remember seeing this on “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” (my favorite show for a while). I saw so much I broke my mind. And then, many years later…

The Rise and Rise of the Celebritocracy

Jim Emerson

Alec Baldwin, the Cable News Celebrities’ Menace to Society.

From a 2003 interview with Toby Young, celeb interviewer, memoirist and author of “How to Lose Friends and Alienate People”:

“I have this idea for a dystopian satire. It’s set in the immediate future, and it’s going to be about the moment when ordinary Americans turn on the celebrity class. There’s going to be a sort of French Revolutionary-style bloodbath where A-list celebrities are strung up from lampposts and lynched on street corners. The storming-the-Bastille moment is going to be when the looky-loos outside the 2023 Academy Awards kind of break through into the Kodak Theater and start lynching A-list movie stars on live TV.” (Only 15 minutes ’til the first VF Oscar party reference, I note.)

“And it sets off a chain reaction across the United States,” he continues, leaning in, conspiratorially. “And there’s a scarlet pimpernel figure, who’s kind of a second rate English talent agent based in Los Angeles, and in the pre-revolutionary era, he couldn’t get anyone to return his calls. But in the post-revolutionary era, he figures out a way to get celebrities to safety. And the way he does that is, the only country where celebrities are still safe is Britain, because they’re such craven starfuckers that the revolution doesn’t actually affect them. And the way he smuggle celebrities out of Los Angeles is by disguising them as flight attendants on Virgin Atlantic. They occasionally get spotted. They get rumbles in mid-air and tossed off the plane. I need to come up with the right word to describe this celebrity apocalypse. If I can come up with the right word, I’ll be in business. My father wrote a similar book in the 1950s called ‘The Rise of the Meritocracy,’ which is about a bloody revolution in which a kind of meritocratic overclass overcame and coined the term ‘meritocracy.’ I want to coin a similar word to describe a society in which celebrities are the kind of governing class.”

Don’t we already live in a celebritocracy? Not in the sense that the National Inquirer and the Star and People and Vanity Fair and cable news continue to inflate the importance of celebrities (including wannabes from the media like Anna Wintour or Graydon Carter or A– C——). That kind of thing has been going on for a long time.

What I’m fascinated by is the insistence by some of the media entertainers (from Sean Hannity to Wolf Blitzer) that the lives and political views of celebrities really are as important as those of elected officials! It’s just amazing. Quote from a reader at Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish blog:

… [T]he actor Alec Baldwin was on a radio show in NYC a short time ago when conservative radio hosts Sean Hannity and Marc Levin called in to hurl insults against him. During the course of the 7-minute battle, Levin, out of nowhere, suddenly seeks to mock Baldwin as “Brokeback Alec.”

Which, when you think of it, makes no sense. You can love or hate Alec Baldwin. But to hurl the epithet “Brokeback Alec” at him – at an actor who was married to, and had children with Kim Basinger, who has had any number of relationships with any number of starlets — to call him “Brokeback Alec” is as nutty, as counterintuitive and just plain silly, as to hurl that [“faggot”] epithet against Edwards!

[Sullivan responds]: Mark Levin anti-gay? I listened to the exchange. Levin called Baldwin a “butt-boy” as well as “Brokeback Alec.”

This is hilarious! Well, OK, pathetic. But it reveals the priorities and reasoning abilities of lightweights like Hannity and Levin when they feel they have to call in to a talk show to hurl nonsensical names at an actor. (BTW, “30 Rock” is really funny most of the time. It’s a TV sitcom. Starring Alec Baldwin. I hope Hannity and Levin will call in to randomly question Jim Belushi’s sexuality the next time he does promotion for “According to Jim.” Then they can go on Ellen DeGeneres’s show and accuse her of having a hankering for man-flesh!)

What Hannity and Levin and other celebritalkers don’t get is that they themselves are just celebrities, famous for being on TV or radio. (And, I suspect, some acting talent.) If Toby Young’s “revolution” ever comes about, they’ll be the first ones to go — not because they’re “A-list” (they’re certainly not), but because, like Paris Hillton or Zsa Zsa Gabor, they’re famous just for being famous. They’re at the bottom rung of celebrity along with reality TV personalities (maybe above William Hung but below Rob and Amber), yet their entire careers depend on them pretending to be serious ideologues. (Except for Rush Limbaugh, who admits to just being an “entertainer” who makes stuff up in character that he’s not stupid enough to actually believe himself. Is that worse?)

Opening Shots: ‘Punch-Drunk Love’

Jim Emerson

Three eloquent and distinctly personal appreciations of the opening of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Punch-Drunk Love”:

From Nareg Torosian, ScreenPlay:

The opening shot of one of my favorite films of recent years, Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Punch-Drunk Love” (2002). As described on the DVD’s back cover, the focal point of the movie is Barry Egan, “a socially impaired owner of a small novelty business, who…is unlikely to find love unless it finds him.” On the surface, nothing much happens during the handheld shot that begins the movie, but for this first minute and a half, Anderson is able to set up three crucial elements for the rest of the film:

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1. Barry’s loneliness. The set is about as sparse as can be – one desk and one chair in the corner of a large, unadorned, warehouse-like room. No one else will enter the frame, and other than the voice on the other end of the telephone, no other sound can be heard. (A metallic ping that breaks the silence will attract Barry’s attention and cause him to leave, thus creating a bridge to the film’s next shot. Jon Brion’s lush, atmospheric score/soundscape will not come to play for several minutes.) Anderson shoots the sequence in a long shot, and the resulting amount of empty, indifferent space conveys the character’s sense of isolation and emotional distance; this composition is mirrored later when Barry calls the phone sex service in his apartment and when he calls Lena from a pay phone in Hawaii. Even the first spoken line (“Yes, I’m still on hold”) subtly hints at his feeling of emotional repression and arrested development.

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2. Barry’s phone etiquette. In the opening dialogue, Barry politely and rationally explains a loophole in one of Healthy Choice’s promotional campaigns to one of the company’s phone representatives. This is one of many phone conversations he will have during the course of the film, and it will become clear that he is a man who (initially) seems more confident and can express himself more clearly over the phone than in person.

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3. The film’s color scheme. Color is very important in this movie, and the shade of blue on the warehouse wall and on the suit Barry wears will be closely identified with him throughout the film. It is not until Lena’s appearance that a vibrant red will make its way into Anderson’s palette, literally and figuratively signaling a change in Barry’s monotonous existence.

On Not Getting the Joke, Part Twenty-Seven Thousand Four Hundred Eighty-Two

Jim Emerson

While humor is a matter of personal taste, it’s also a matter of misdirection (like magic), of absurd juxtapositions that violate expectations… and taboos. Perhaps you remember the image of one state politician’s head pasted onto the body of another’s baby — and the latter’s preposterous (and disingenuously exploitive) allegation that it was actually making fun of her child, rather than the politico who was portrayed as a baby. No one has been able to explain how ridiculing a baby could have been intended as funny, or as satire — but, then, you’d have to be awfully thick to honestly believe that was the intent in the first place.

So, here’s another strange one: In his new stand-up show, “Science,” Ricky Gervais (best-known co-creator and star of BBC’s “The Office” one of the great comic achievements of Modern Man) made a joke about regretting drinking and driving. You may or may not think it’s funny, but here’s the gist, according to Gervais:

“The Sopranos”: Eighty-Sixed

Jim Emerson

“In the midst of death, we are in life, heh? … Life goes on…”

— Paulie Walnuts, Episode 86

Meantime life outside goes on all around you.

— Bob Dylan, “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”

Some will win, some will lose

Some were born to sing the blues

Oh, the movie never ends

It goes on and on and on and on

— Journey, “Don’t Stop Believin'”

Have another onion ring. Pop the first DVD of Season One into the player and press “play.” “The Sopranos” is… I’m not going to say “over.” Think of it as complete at last, a perfect whole. It’s finished but it’s not over. Life goes on.

It’s not uncommon for a long-running show to get self-reflexive in its final episode: “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “St. Elsewhere,” “Newhart,” “Seinfeld,” “Six Feet Under,” to give a few famous examples. And no show has ever displayed more awareness of itself as a show than “The Sopranos.” Not even “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show,” the sitcom about being a sitcom. “The Sopranos” has always been a serial mob movie about being a serial mob movie in a culture where everybody’s seen a lot of mob movies (and remakes of mob movies) and even low-level Jersey mobsters imagine themselves acting like the mobsters in the movies. And in its last seconds (which made my heart leap and had me laughing and crying at the same time), “The Sopranos” accomplished what I hoped it would, as I wrote earlier: “… I want [series creator David] Chase to come up with something I didn’t anticipate, but which feels right for “The Sopranos.” He’s done it before. But now I’m afraid in a different way: I really, really want the ending to live up to the show.”

Opening Shots: ‘The Wire’

Jim Emerson

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This summer a friend is introducing me to the HBO series, “The Wire,” beginning with the first season on DVD. Sunday nights, we eat a big ol’ fresh-grilled meal (like steak, ribs, kabobs, pork loin, salmon, scallops wrapped in prosciutto, asparagus or broccoli sauteed in olive oil, garlic and crushed red peppers)… I’m sorry, what was I saying? I kept hearing from friends that “The Wire” was something great, as good as (some say even better than) “The Sopranos” or “Deadwood.” Well, we’re only three episodes in (we also watch a “Freaks and Geeks” — all new to me — after each episode), but I’m hooked.

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“The Wire” is about Baltimore police (homicide and narcotics) and their investigation and surveillance (hence the title) of a city-wide drug operation run by one Avon Barksdale, a shadowy figure said to be based on a real Baltimore dealer. All threads seem to lead back to Barksdale, but the cops don’t even have a photograph of the guy.

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The first image of the first episode of the first season is a close up of blood on the pavement. It lasts only a few seconds, but the camera slowly moves up the trail of blood toward its source, the body of a drug-related homicide victim. The liquid catches the flashing lights of police cars and seems to illuminate with electrical sparks like… wires. Only the middle-ground of the shot is in focus — where it comes from and where it leads are still blurry. We don’t know it yet, but the whole season has been set up for us.

Is it time for best movies of the decade already?

Jim Emerson

Yes it is, I’m afraid. Or almost. Good grief, I know, it’s not even Thanksgiving yet and they’ve already got the festive “Best Of” decorations up in the stores! And I know lots of critics who’ve been told by their editors to start working on their big ’00s lists — so, reluctantly, I’ve begun to ponder mine, as well. I haven’t even taken a first stab at it but I can tell you this: It will probably not resemble the Top 100 list published a few days ago in the Times of London. Oh, sure, I can conceive of putting together some kind of list that includes “Crash” (#98), “Bowling for Columbine” (#77), “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” (#28), “Slumdog Millionaire” (#6) and the like — but such a ranking would not be comprised of movies that I hold in high esteem. (Have any of the decades’ movies plummeted in reputation more dramatically than “Columbine” and “Crash”?)

If you want to page through the Times’ list, you can go ahead and start here. It’s not all so bad. Meanwhile, here are the top 20 — with links to things I’ve written about some of the titles:

How we all became Richard Nixon

Jim Emerson

Here’s Adam Curtis’s six-and-a-half-minute documentary segment on how, over the last 50 (75?) years or so, we have become a culture of increasingly paranoid weirdos. (Satirical, too.) It reminded me of “The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear” (2004), the essential documentary about the politics that led up to 9/11, and how they continued afterwards. And then I realized why: They’re both Adam Curtis films! From the intro to “Power of Nightmares”:

Stages of a Cinephile

Jim Emerson

View image Defining moments — in movies, and in a movie-lover’s life.

A comment by Anonymous at Girish’s on the stages in the life of a cinephile contains more truth than I’d like to admit:

1. Ages 6-13/ marvel at the lights, learn about adult life, eat sugar/Disney, Spielberg, John Hughes

2. Ages 14-19/ age of discovery, excitement and inspiration/ Rear Window, Bicycle Thief, early Godard

3. Ages 20-26/ O.C.D. attempt to see everything by every major director/ Dreyer, Ozu, late Godard

4. Ages 27-33/ burn out period, start seeing films rarely and complain about how bad movies have gotten, sell your old videos/ Straub, Snow, Dziga Vertov Group

5. Ages 34-41/ burn out continues, fall asleep in one two many Sokurov films, stop watching art films and start watching blockbusters again, become a faux-populist and develop inane arguments about movies you’ve never seen

6. Ages 42-45/ watch only Reality TV and Internet porn, get drunk alone, send mass emails linking to Armond White reviews

7. Ages 46- /after therapy and anti-depressants repeat steps 3-6.

In my case, stage 1 began at age 3 (at a drive-in with, yes, Disney’s 1961 “101 Dalmatians”). Stage 3 lasted until about age 37, and stages 4 and 5 were condensed, though I’m not sure I ever became a neo-populist, since I never disliked popular movies just because they were popular. (No comment about stage 6.) My real “crisis of faith” in movies was from about 1998 – 2003.

BTW, the book “Defining Moments in Movies,” edited by Chris Fujiwara, that inspired this comment is delicious and nutritious cinemaniacal brain candy. Once you start tasting, you’ll just want more and more. As Fujiwara explains in his introduction, the 800-page, still-studded nibble-book (organized by decade, 1890 – 2000+) “is designed to highlight film scenes, or events in the history of cinema, that the [62] contributors (who include film critics, film historians, writers in other fields, and academics) regard as profound, essential, illuminating, or significant…” — “a network of visions and preoccupations, an anthology of cinephilic passions, a casual encyclopedia of cinematic events.” In fact, Fujiwara’s intro is a worthy “moment” itself.