Bakjwi (Thirst) (Chan-wook Park, South Korea, 2009)

This is a vampire story set in the Far East. A tale full of sound and fury. It concerns a Roman Catholic monk, who takes part in a medical trial that has to do with a dangerous infectious disease. At a given moment he is given a blood transfusion. The blood is vampire's blood. This affects him physically (he gets super human powers, as long as he drinks blood) and mentally (he gives in to the joys of sex). However, he does not kill to get blood. Then he commits the mistake of sharing his own blood with the woman he has fallen in love with and she turns into the archetypical vampire who is prepared to kill to get the blood she needs. This is both their undoing. It is a fast paced story that does not bore the spectator for a second. As acknowledged in the credits quite a few plot elements come from Emile Zola´s novel Thérèse Raquin (1867).

Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, USA; 1945)

I watched Spellbound years ago in a cinema. I've watched it again this week on dvd. What struck me was that the dvd version begins with an Overture and ends with Exit Music. What you see is a picture of a tree in autumn and the words Overture/Exit Music, respectively, in the same font as the credits. What you hear is the film music of Spellbound. The odd thing is that these two items take ages before you see the credits. I got the idea there was something wrong with the dvd. I'm just wondering whether Hitch himself added the music or somebody else thought this a good idea. I saw the cinema version about sixty years ago and I can't for the life of me remember anything about this musical preface and postscript. When I saw the film again this week I found that it is still pretty good, better than, say, Suspicion (Hitchcock, 1940).

Suspicion (Alfred Hitchcock, USA, 1941)

I have an Italian dvd of Suspicion. You can watch the film  in B/W or in a coloured version, made  for Turner. The latter  is really  something: the colours seem to scream at you, they jostle for your attention: „ Look at me, look at me, my Name is Red. Do you like me?“.  They are so loud that  you forget to pay attention to the story. It  is quite an experience.

Det sjunde inseglet (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden, 1957)

In 1955 Bergman had tried to get The seventh seal funded by Svensk Filmindustri, but nobody was interested. When Bergman was nominated for the Palme d'Or for his Smiles of a Summer Night in 1956 things changed. Bergman borrowed money to travel to Cannes and asked the then chairman of SF to fund The seventh seal.

This time Bergman got a limited budget and not really enough days to shoot the film. This shows. One example: the lit window of the building next to the film studio is visible when soldiers are taking a girl to the place of execution (the story is set during the crusades) and there are quite a few errors in the continuity.
However, these shortcomings don't matter.

The seventh seal is a wonderful film. The story deals with a knight who returns from the Crusades and his servant. They have been away for ten years. The Black Death is raging in Sweden and Death has come for the knight. The knight persuades Death to play a game of chess with him. The Knight knows he will lose but the game buys him some extra time to do a good deed. Death agrees. After the horrors of war the knight is wrestling with the question whether there is a God. His servant is past that stage. He denies the existence of a higher power. They are a contrast to a couple in a troupe of travelling actors who are cheerful christians.
The story tells the gripping tale of the couple and the knight with his servant who are travelling towards the knight's castle. On the way they meet villagers who are in varying degrees terrified by the coming of the Black Death.  There is an impressive scene in which the main characters meet a group of flagellantes who whip themselves to allay the wrath of God who sent the plague because of the sins the people committed.
Later there is a wonderful scene in which the group are having a meal of strawberries and milk. The atmosphere is serene and happy.
They discuss faith. The knight says:

                Faith is a torment, did you know that? It is
like loving someone who is out there in the
darkness but never appears, no matter how
loudly you call.

He is now very close to the moment when he is going to lose the chess match. But he says:

                I shall remember this moment. The silence, the
twilight, the bowls of strawberries and milk,
your faces in the evening light. Mikael
sleeping, Jof with his lyre. I'll try to
remember what we have talked about. I'll carry
this memory between my hands as carefully as
if it were a bowl filled to the brim with fresh
milk.

Die Austernprinzessin, Ernst Lubitsch, Duitsland 1917

I don't find it easy to watch films in the context of their time or their place in the history of filmmaking in a particular country. What I want is emotion, to be grabbed by the scruff of the neck and carried along. The ultimate "suspension of disbelief", so to speak. Besides that, I find it fascinating to read clever texts about films or directors or movements etc. But these texts, although they may help me see things I had not noticed before, only rarely change the emotional impact the film had on me in the first place. To give an example: I have read that Dziga Vertov was doing something completely new when he put his camera somewhere in a street in Russia and recorded what was happening in front of the lens. I can appreciate that intellectually, find it most interesting, but when I watch a KinoPravda film like "Man with a Movie Camera", I am not riveted to the screen during the film. I can see a lot of the techniques the film uses, but, frankly, the film doesn't do anything for me emotionally. "Die Austernprinzessin" is also a case in point. It's an early film by Lubitsch who went on to make fast moving comedies in the U.S.A. later. "Die Austernprinzessin" must have been a very funny film when it was first released in 1919. But I carry my own history of film watching. And that influences my response. Having said that, there are scenes that still work well for me: the outbreak of the foxtrot epidemic is still funny. So are the oystertycoon's daughter's words when her father has promised her a prince for a husband. I wasn't bored during the 60 minutes that the film lasted, but I feel that the passage of time has not been kind to a film like this and that I cannot relate to the general atmosphere of the film which Lubitsch no doubt intended. This is, in the case of "Die Austernprinzessin", due to the emphatic acting. I feel that the degree of histrionic expression in silent films varies from film to film, or director to director. In my experience the silent films of Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd have aged more gracefully. Could it be that there are more close ups in Lubitsch´ film and actors/directors like Lubitsch regarded making films too much like making theatre? The close ups are, frankly, embarrassing. They spoil the speed of the action.