CONT'D: Talking Pictures | Page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 I'm not trying to say that they didn't used to do that, but look at a movie like Jaws. Verna Fields, who edited Jaws, is an absolute genius. It's just beat perfect--every single beat. But now, that's easier to do, every dummy can play with it until the rhythm works. And you can do all sorts of amazing things: dissolves and wipes and fancy computer effects. It costs a lot of money to transfer to film, but you can do an awful lot on video. In 1980 or 1981, Abel Gance's Napoleon was re-released with an orchestra conducted by Carmine Coppola. It's a silent movie that utilizes a lot of avant garde techniques to tell a huge, epic story. When I saw it, I was used to the stately, literal style of David Lean, and Napoleon was an epic told in a style that seemed almost nuts. A camera mounted on a pendulum; a snowball fight that seemed to explode out of the screen. The imagery was so furious. I watched that movie and thought, "When sound came in, something really was lost." Nobody has made movies with this sort of unfettered imagery since then. I'm not saying that the movies released this year were as wild as Napoleon, but there's so much more freedom to experiment. Just look at a movie like Three Kings. In those desert sequences in they're playing with the landscapes, they're using different film stocks, they're trying to do things on film that they can't do in any other medium. I see possibilities in movies this year that I haven't seen before. A bad year at the movies can make you think that it's all been used up--all the good ideas, all the good techniques, everything is recycled. Sometimes it's recycled well, sometimes it's recycled badly, but that's not true this year. The good films weren't imitating Spielberg, they were off on their own trip. There were a lot of directors on different trips this year. And a wide range of trips at that...my two favorite movies, Run Lola Run and The Straight Story are about as different as two movies could possibly be. Run Lola Run is like a video game that resets itself at the end and lets you play again. You can tell that the director is working within the context of sturm und drang German cinema, where one's destiny is pretty much set for whatever reason. Whatever happens is in the cards. And now here's this movie that plays with people's destinies - if she gets out the door a millisecond later, everything changes. The world view and the technique of the film connect and synergize each other. Page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5