I just got a press release informing me that there’s going to be an event at the Austin Film Festival tonight, featuring Glenn Gordon Caron, the creator of Moonlighting (for what it’s worth, he also directed the Warren Beatty/Annette Benning remake of An Affair to Remember, which makes him the last film director to work with Katherine Hepburn). Caron is scheduled to “present a hand picked episode from his acclaimed series Moonlighting as well as an episode from his unaired series Fling, starring Brooke Langton and Amy Sedaris.”

Moonlighting is one of my ultimate guilty pleasures, so if I was in Austin right now I would be genuinely excited to attend this event. But check out the image they put in the release to promote it:

That image is a pretty strong example of why, even though I’m totally a fan, I find watching Moonlighting today to be somewhat unsettling. Why do relics of the 80s like this somehow seem “older” than anything from the 70s?

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Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There is a postmortem–but of what, exactly? It opens with the examination of a corpse, played by Cate Blanchett; the press notes tell us we’re supposed to connect this image to Bob Dylan’s 1968 motorcycle accident, in which he almost died but didn’t, and after which he was allegedly never the same. So on some level, it’s a love letter to a dead man whose body is still with us-–although, at the press conference following the New York Film Festival screening of the film yesterday, Haynes kept referring to Dylan in the past tense, as though his own private Dylan was long gone and never to return–but it’s also a catalogue of various shards of the dead culture of the 1960s. It’s as vital as it sounds: like so many of Haynes’ films, it’s based on a provocative concept that plays in practice like a museum piece.

It’s a collage of personality impressions and visual styles. Grainy, fluttering black and white gives way to a bottle green landscape, spotted with the second best psychedelic lens flares of the NYFF thus far. The film’s hallucinatory logic seems at first to defy any kind of stricture, until the references start to stack up: visual quotations from Dylan album covers, The Beatles doing silent comedy, La Strada; actual, scripted quotations from at least two Godard films. Each of the six protagonists is a walking (though hardly living or breathing) quotation, a riff on a Dylan phase or personality thread. A young ruffian who uses poetry to deliver uncomfortable truths to The Man. A prepubescent compulsive liar. A misunderstood prophet who finds his true calling by turning to God. An aging cowboy in hiding, laying low in a town obsessed with Halloween. A bad actor who becomes a big star and neglects the woman he loves. A put-opon speed freak who uses pop music to deliver uncomfortable truths to The Man.

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We haven’t done an installment of The Micro Five in a couple of weeks, so let me give you a refresher: the basic idea is not to create a definitive (read: totally subjective) Top Five list, but to pick a super-specific topic and examine how five films handled it differently. You can read previous installments here, here, here and here.

This time out, we’re looking at musical numbers of the 80s. The Hollywood musical is thought in some quarters to have lost its way in the late 70s/early 80s (although recent reappraisals have been kinder to the era that produced curiosities like One From the Heart.) Still, the influence of MTV on all aspects of 80s culture (but especially youth culture) by the end of the decade led to an normalization of song and dance scenes (but especially dance scenes) in non-musicals. See my take on five numbers involving John Hughes, Spike Lee and Christopher Walken, after the jump.

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If you’re someone who takes note of advances in technology and reacts to them in some way, you’re most likely in one of two camps: the Nostalgia Camp or the Opportunity Camp. But it’s possible to have a foot in both camps, valuing the past and envisioning the future all at the same time. A somewhat recent revival of silent films with live performances is a good example.

John Brownlee of Wired recently wrote a post about this, “Filmmakers Seek Future in Past.” He says the silent film medium was pretty much killed about 80 years ago, with advances in sound recording. Now, Brownlee writes:

Prolific modern-day directors like Guy Maddin work largely in the medium of silent film to convey postmodern tales. Silent film festivals are held annually around the world: from San Francisco to Kansas, from Italy to Australia. The Chilean subways are plastered with thousands of still images, coming to life as contiguous strips of film as the trains rumble by. And numerous groups throughout the United States have been inspired to compose and perform live original scores to silent film.

Silent film has much to offer, creatively–it doesn’t have to be left in the Museum of How We Used to Make Movies. It’s true that although certain stories and messages are very difficult to communicate in a silent film, other material can be more fully and less-awkwardly communicated without sound, or at least without words. Adding a live score allows even more opportunities to communicate and convey emotion. (Check out the Alloy Orchestra, which some of the Spout team heard accompany Lonesome at Telluride last year.)

In all, I think the revival of silent films is an exciting development, especially for musicians and composers who have a whole slew of classics to pick from and play with. But will filmmakers get excited about potential new opportunities for them? And are the opportunities really new, or are they just exercises in nostalgia? Obviously, it can go in either direction, depending on the intentions and visions of the people behind the project. In terms of moving the medium forward, here’s an interesting prediction from Cherchi Usai, the director of Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive:

Curiously, it is in the ubiquitous digital advertising displays littering modern cities that Cherchi Usai sees the future of silent film, pointing to the Going Underground film festival, a weeklong event in January where silents from local filmmakers were shown in Berlin’s subways.

“Silent cinema is penetrating our lives in new, unpredictable ways,” says Cherchi Usai. “There is a paradigm shift. This is an evolution of the silent film experience into a completely different technology. And it could not have happened before.”