In my essay on Jia Zhang-ke’s Ash Is Purest White that appears in the current issue of the Reader, I asserted that “one of the more compelling things about the film [which takes place over 17 years] is how you can never predict when Jia will flash forward in time. It’s one of those movies . . . in which time exists as an autonomous force.” Writing that line made me think about other movies that cover long stretches of time in such an idiosyncratic fashion, movies that subvert the conventions cemented by too many routine biopics.
The Long Gray Line John Ford’s first film in ‘Scope also happens to be one of his major neglected works of the 50s—a biopic of epic proportions (138 minutes) about West Point athletic instructor Marty Maher (Tyrone Power), who was a mess-hall waiter before joining the army but returned to West Point to become a much-beloved teacher—an example of the sort of “victory in defeat” or at least equivocal heroism that comprises much of Ford’s oeuvre. Adapted by Edward Hope from Maher’s autobiography, Bringing Up the Brass: My 55 Years at West Point, the film is rich with nostalgia, family feeling, and sentimentality. It’s given density by a superb supporting cast (including Maureen O’Hara at her most luminous, Donald Crisp, Ward Bond, and Harry Carey Jr.) and a kind of mysticism that, as in How Green Was My Valley, makes the past seem even more alive than the present. Clearly not for every taste, but a work that vibrates with tenderness and emotion (1955). —Jonathan Rosenbaum
Eden Taking place over 21 years, this 2014 French drama by Mia Hansen-Løve covers the rise and fall of garage, a house music subgenre that reached the height of its popularity in the late 1990s, yet the film never feels like an epic or even a period piece. As in the writer-director’s Goodbye First Love (2011), an exhilarating sense of the present moment overwhelms all; the time is always now. Again the theme is lost innocence: the hero, modeled after Hansen-Løve’s brother and coscreenwriter Sven, gives up a promising academic career to become a DJ and grows moderately famous, but the high he gets from making music gives way to decadence and ultimately despair. The camerawork is so fluid and the settings so brimming with detail that one feels washed away by the film, recognizing the hero’s decline only when he does—that is, too late. —Ben Sachs v
