Red and Blue...

It was one of those rare days yesterday where I was home in the early afternoon and watched the documentary Spielberg on Spielberg in which Steven Spielberg spoke about the numerous films he's written and directed. It was whilst watching the clips that accompanied his dialogue that I began to think about particular film segments that had a great impact on me over the years. More recently it was the first and last five minutes of Lars von Trier's The Anti-Christ in which von Trier uses slow-motion and black and white footage to create the most poetic, beautiful and poignant account of pain and anguish. Slow motion was a technique also employed by Spielberg in the first fifteen minutes of Saving Private Ryan (1998) and it was deployed in such as way as to depict the disorientation, anguish and strange sense of time that occurs when the mind is paralysed by fear. Who can forget that amazing scene in Schindler's List (1993) a predominantly black and white film, when Schinder, on viewing the Krakow ghetto from a nearby hill notices a little girl in a red coat walking amidst the Nazi troops and terrified people; or the red glow that emanates from ET's (ET: The Extraterrestial, 1982) chest, which reveals that he is alive! The red glowing tip of ET's finger as he tells Elliott at the end of the film 'I'll be right here' and the scene between the two when they point a finger to their heart and mouth and say 'ouch'. Perhaps I always like films that create certain emotions. I am consistency drawn to Spielberg's direction of J. G. Ballard's novel Empire of the Sun (1987, but that maybe because, like Ballard, I was separated from my parents when I was young. I cry often in this film, but particularly at the end when Jamie is re-united with his parents and we realise that he is no longer a child. Many of Spielberg's films appear to deal with a loss of innocence, difference, trauma and spirituality. Spielberg said (in the documentary) that ET was his most spiritual film, but I find a similar kind of spiritualism in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). The one single scene that can induce a sense of great happiness in me is the one in Close Encounters in which thousands of Indian people are singing the five notes - B flat, C, A flat, (octave lower) A flat, E flat - the sounds used in the film for humans to make contact with the alien ship. I'm not talking here about amazing films, there are many of them, I'm attempting to flag moments that have made me forever different. David Lynch's films do that. I've returned over two dozen times to his film Blue Velvet (1986) and am fascinated by the confrontation scene between Frank (Dennis Hopper) and Kyle (Frank is breathing amyl nitrate, whilst a woman dances on the car). Frank and Kyle who appear early on as totally different individuals become like each other in this scene, not only by their desire for Dorothy, but because of their similar psychology. The Club Silencio scene in Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001) will always haunt me for the exquisite sounds that emanate from the mouth of the female singer (although even this is an illusion) as will the ''say fuck me' scene in Wild At Heart (Lynch, 1990). I could go on forever, recalling great moments in film history, but I'm going to stop this stream-of-conscious piece of writing, because amidst all this emphasis on emotion and the colors red and blue, I suddenly recalled the destruction of the Twin Towers, which changed us all and whilst I was watching the television reports that day the emphasis appeared to be on whether the stock market would open. Amidst all the trauma and destruction the emphasis was still on money!