Happy autumn! Today marked the fall equinox for the Northern hemisphere, and while the season can be a depressing one for mainstream moviegoers (at least until Thanksgiving ushers in the holiday blockbusters and Oscar-bait releases), it is otherwise a wonderful time of the year. Having grown up in New England, I’ve always had a great appreciation for the changing leaves, the brisk weather, the pumpkin and apple picking and the foodie holidays (as a rather chunky kid, I really only liked Halloween for the candy and Thanksgiving for the stuffing of my face). I even looked forward to going back to school every September.
But autumn can be a great season for cinephiles, too, despite the significant lack of worthwhile theatrical releases. For one thing, the colder weather, particularly the colder nights, keeps us indoors more often for DVD watching. For another thing, the season has lent itself nominally and spirtually to some great films by the likes of Ozu, Bergman and Rohmer, among others. Personally, I think movies set in the fall tend to look the most beautiful, although I recognize that part of my aesthetic appreciation comes with my general love for autumnal landscapes and activities.
To get myself in the mood, and share the spirit with fellow fans of the fall, I’ve found ten scenes that will help us to welcome the season:
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By all accounts, Douglas Sirk’s 1950s melodramas rocked Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s world when he first saw them in the early 70s. In “Imitation of Life: On The Films of Douglas Sirk,” a 1971 essay on Sirk included in the Criterion edition of Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, Fassbinder presages his own late-career turn towards films centered around female protagonists by marveling at Sirk’s unique way with women. “In Douglas Sirk movies the women think,” Fassbinder writes, as if this plain realization has knocked the wind out of him. “I haven’t noticed that with any other director. With any.” He also marvels at the Hollywood director’s ability to subvert dominant society via low art, sneaking radical critique into “films that people in Germany with his level of education would have smirked at.”
What Fassbinder must have seen that those academic stiffs would have missed, was that Sirk needed the smirk in order to mask what he was “really” up to. When Fassbinder reworked Heaven’s basic plot and ideas into his own Ali: Fear Eats the Soul 18 years later, he dispensed with the beard. Refusing to allow the audience the option of wallowing in redemptive fantasy and ignoring the subtext, he brought the tragedy up to the surface where it couldn’t be missed.
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