Within Our Gates: Oscar Micheaux’s 1919 film, one of only three of his surviving features, was salvaged from a waterlogged print in Spain labelled La Negra. It’s the oldest surviving American feature film directed by a black director, and if there were more people there last Monday than the usual crowd at a silent film revival at the Charles (for Pandora’s Box in April, ballpark number, 12), it was because of Jordan Peele’s Nope. That movie came out in the summer of 2022 after a lot of hype, and left the zeitgeist as quick as it came, vanishing from discussion just like Peele’s previous feature, 2019’s Us, another overambitious and pretentious misfire after the stick of dynamite that was Get Out. That movie came out nearly eight years ago, and it’s still invoked constantly.
What I remember most from Nope is the focus on Oscar Micheaux. Within Our Gates was playing at the same time as the Megalopolis simulcast with Coppola and co., and some friends of mine were mystified that I’d give up free IMAX tickets to see a revival. But how often can you see silent movies in this city? Besides, I’ll see Megalopolis, and I’ll be happy to pay for a ticket even if it sucks—again, who knows the next time someone will spends hundreds of millions of dollars of their own money on what looks like an aggressively uncommercial fantasy epic?
Micheaux was a more explicitly political filmmaker than Coppola, at least going by what’s left of his work. Within Our Gates starts steady but heads deep into horrific lynchings and long, drawn out deaths, all only a hint of the real brutality that occurred during slavery. It’s a bracing film despite its rough condition. The only drag is that the most common score circulating right now sucks: DJ Spooky does an okay job for most of the movie, but a couple times he uses drum machines, completely destroying the atmosphere and breaking the spell; I don’t necessarily mind anachronistic silent film scoring, but these weren’t drums that were informed by the images. You could feel the air leave the room whenever they came on and relief when they left.
Nashville: The greatest and most advanced American film ever made. Robert Altman advanced the form further than any other American director. It’s sad and scary that our films haven’t caught up with Altman’s masterpiece, released 50 years ago next summer. The opening chapter of J. Hoberman’s Make My Day puts Nashville and Jaws against each other as two ends of the disaster film cycle inaugurated by Airport in 1970; where Jaws “imploded” genre, Nashville “exploded” it; Spielberg offered the ultimate entertainment, a new world in the face of post-Watergate malaise—Altman assessed the times straight on and came out with, surprise, a cynical and pessimistic film. (Hoberman is dead on when he identifies Murray Hamilton's Amity mayor as a character ripped right out of Nashville.) It isn’t “self-satisfied” like some of the critics Hoberman quotes—49 years later, it works just as it did for Kurt Vonnegut (“the best movie I’ve ever seen”) and the wife of E. L. Doctorow (beside herself in tears) and Pauline Kael, whose advance rave likely conferred the movie’s masterwork status more than anything else.
Altman is without peer in America, and even his acolytes are far more conventional, so much so that the resemblance is hard to even make out. Are Boogie Nights or Magnolia recognizably Altmanesque? I don’t think so—they’re both far more similar to Goodfellas. What distinguishes Altman is his sound design and, even more so, his roving cameras and their long lenses and slow, slow zooms. He’s the most purely cinematic of all the New Hollywood directors, a film artist working on the ledge of what’s possible and frequently failing. It’s not hard to understand how the same man Nashville and Quintet only four years apart—that’s life for a working artist.
Scanners: Only worth seeing for the infinitely screen-shotted head explosion that comes about 10 or 15 minutes into the movie. David Cronenberg’s 1981 film is, like most of his early work, full of deadly dull scenes of people talking to each other in techno gibberish in between wonderful set pieces full of veins bulging, eyes rolling, and blood squirting in mist onto previously impeccably white walls. Unfortunately, Scanners has nowhere to go after that guy’s head explodes, because, as Eli Roth put it, lead “Stephen Lack is lacking.” Jennifer O’Neill is fine, but she’s not a part of anything spectacular, and every time she’s in the frame, I was only reminded of her far superior 1977 collaboration with Lucio Fulci, The Psychic. That film, one of Fulci’s many masterpieces, far outpaces Cronenberg’s work, almost all of it, but at least Scanners ends with an extended body implosion by Lack, a fiery “scanning” of villain Michael Ironside as depicted on the poster. Having the end credits roll out on green computer text is nice too, but next to Cronenberg’s next film, Videodrome, Scanners is a snooze, albeit redeemed by a full crowd ready to appreciate both the fantastic effects and the ridiculously bad work of Lack.
“Why don’t you just… think it?”
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter and Instagram: @nickyotissmith