Three Images for the Day (10/15/13)

Ordet (Dreyer, Denmark, 1955)

Only Yesterday (Stahl, USA, 1933)

The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, Denmark, 1928)

Only Yesterday image courtesy Gina Telaroli.

NYFF Capsules

While I’ve been podcasting through much of NYFF, I did not have that much chance to talk about my two favorite works at the festival, and one of high merit. Capsules below:

Only Yesterday (John M. Stahl, USA, 1933)

Few will be able to question a dogmatic stance that John Stahl’s Only Yesterday is a towering masterpiece of the classical melodrama given its rarity (not even on VHS!), but be assured such a work is deserving of the praise. As soon as the film’s seemingly trivial depiction of Black Tuesday (but delightfully so—suicide never seemed so funny) begins to feel staid, Stahl suddenly shifts toward innocent love, bitter disappointment, and ultimately the value of life an unappreciated life. John Boles moves through his wife’s fancy dinner party, unable to answer any questions about the crisis until he locks himself in his office. With the gun loaded, he notices a private letter for him, leading him down memory lane to a young woman named Mary Lane (Margaret Sullivan) he met during the war and then abandoned, while she became the woman who does not forget (for reasons both emotional and physical). Movement seems to be the game that Stahl plays. Either the camera moves, or the characters move, often in opposition, passing just for a second. The narrative involves passing movements as well, these rare chances when diagonals of life can finally cross, but only for a moment, and one that may lack recognition (Stahl’s was the first adaptation of Letters from an Unknown Woman, but where Ophuls highlights physical tragedy, Stahl turns toward the metaphysical). A meet cute ends first as a comedy, secondly as a tragedy, and thirdly as something beyond us entirely, a navigation of emotional territory rarely felt in the American (or any) cinema. When the two lovers finally collide first via a slow exchange of silent close-ups and then finally via words, each phrase out of Boles’s mouth is an emotional dagger, cutting right into Sullivan’s heart. But her continued gaze and affectation is the core of the film—she is willing to let this man reveal his own hollowness, and unwilling to believe their night was not destiny. Sullivan comes from a theatrical background, but her close-ups stand in stark relief, a blank face also a canvas of tears held back. While it’s wrong to create pointless value judgements, Stahl does silent, black and white close-ups in a way that rival any devastation created by Douglas Sirk, sometimes letting the gaze of Sullivan carry all the pain in a way much riskier than a gambit by Sirk’s spilling of emotions. His work is toward a quiet reverence that always respects its protagonist, and never once falters toward anything of pity. She is a triumph of human testament to live despite (a word beyond her vocabulary). The ending of Only Yesterday, both in terms of narrative and the carefully constructed mise-en-scene of the final bedroom, brings to mind Dreyer’s Ordet. There is no literal transcendence for this melodrama, but there is instead an emotional one.