Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954)

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Alejandro Amenábar's Open Your Eyes (1997)

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Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run (1998)

When most people talk about films and time loops, they refer to time loops as “a la Groundhog Day.” In Groundhog Day and many other films like it, time loops are a way for normal people to try everything again. Ultimately, time loops are seen as a sort of bad karma. But in tonight’s film, Run Lola Run, time loops are a chance for Lola (played by Franka Potente) to try things again in an attempt to save her boyfriend, Manni (Moritz Bleibtreau).

In Run Lola Run, both written and directed by Tom Tykwer, it appears that nobody is aware that they are in a time loop at all, unlike Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day who is completely aware of his repeating, so much so that he manipulates his experience to set up certain events, learn to play piano, and win the heart of a woman he’s smitten with. The plot of Run Lola Run rotates around Lola’s need for a large sum of money to save her Manni’s life. He owes a lot of money to a crime boss who will kill him if he doesn’t deliver. Lola chooses to try to steal money from the bank where her father works, then deliver the money to Manni, who’s trying to get the money himself by robbing a grocery story. Tykwer repeats the sequence three times. Each time Lola goes to the bank, she learns the same things. If she were aware that she had tried this before, she would have not gone back each time. However, notice that in the first sequence, Manni shows Lola how to load a gun. In the second sequence, she knows how to use a gun already.

So, a major theme in this film is the concept of chaos. The chaos theory states that small things that people do can (and often do) result in major changes. Notice that the only real difference between the three sequences is how Lola responds to the man on the stairwell during the animation sequence. Each response causes a slight change in timing, and therefore a totally different outcome. Also, each time Lola passes people on the street, a different future is shown for those people, though there are seemingly no differences within the context of the film.

One final theme in the film is futility. Lola seems to make quite a few decisions in each loop that result in the outcome. But did she ever decide how the sequence would end? Was there any great planning on her part? Or is fate simply in the hands of the man with the dog? Is Lola simply running around like a ball on a track, encountering whatever obstacles she will? Nobody, perhaps not even Tykwer himself, can know.

Noah Shavit-Lonstein
SPA Film Club

Terence Young's Wait Until Dark (1967)

We haven’t shown a lot of suspense thrillers during the last five years of Film Club screenings. Part of the reason is that Film Club exists to present great movies you haven’t had the opportunity to see previously. But people tend to be skeptical or reticent or just plain foot-draggy about committing to something they’re unfamiliar with. This explains why Hollywood spends so much money on promotion (sometimes a third of the entire production budget); they want to acquaint you with the product so you won’t be intimidated by it even if that means spending millions on product tie-ins at McDonald’s. Hey, if you’ve played with the toy, the movie must be great.

Film Club doesn’t have millions of dollars. We barely get Blue Sheet announcements done on time. The consequence of that is that we end up asking you to come to see movies on faith rather than a (false) sense that you know what you’re going to be seeing. And often you don’t (although if you’re reading this, you did – thank you.) We’ve learned that some genres are easier sells than others – romance, action, animation, anything with Johnny Depp. Others are more difficult, and one of those is the suspense thriller.

When we elect to show a suspense thriller that’s older, two issues pop up. First, there’s the unfamiliarity with an “older” film. If you’ll allow us a soap box moment, let us just say that it’s sad how controlled Americans are by PR, advertising, and the productization of important things like art, politics, and even religion. Everything is packaged for us. Open the New York Times Book Review and 15 books will be reviewed, the same 15 books you’ll find reviewed in other literary journals, the same 15 books you’ll see ads for in literary media. Some of those books are very good, but 25 years ago some of the books reviewed and celebrated during any given week were also good, but have been forgotten. Why? Not because they turned out later not to be good, but because the marketing machine has moved on. Old doesn’t sell; new sells. And now you buy Twilight and Jim Butcher novels instead of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Anne Rice novels. Those are old. No one is talking about them. And even if you did pick the old ones they might not feel the same as the newer ones.

That’s the second problem with the suspense thriller genre, the genre itself has evolved and when we look back we don’t see stories told in a familiar (there’s that word again) way, the way we’re used to. Watch Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931) some time. See if you don’t laugh when Bela Lugosi slinks out of the shadows and raises his hands up, claw-like, like he’s about to play an awesome chord on an invisible piano. You can almost hear a million parodies getting ready to say “bluh, buh-luh, buh-luh; I vant to drink your bluhd!” Were people really scared by that in 1931? They certainly aren’t now.

Now we want realism. And we want blood (just like Dracula). And we want dismemberment. It shocks us to think that in John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), the film that started the modern slasher genre, the hockey-masked Michael Myers terrorizes and murders all those high school kids, and there isn’t a drop of blood in the movie. Carpenter was going for psychological horror.

The same is true of Henri-Georges Cluzot’s Diabolique (1955), a terrific French film about a boarding school head-mistress who murders her adulterous husband and hides his body in the murky school swimming pool, only to find it missing when the pool is drained the following spring. Psychological horror.

And the same is true of Wait Until Dark (1967), tonight’s film about a blind woman (Audrey Hepburn) terrorized by three thugs who think a doll stuffed with heroin is hidden in her apartment. Although it’s directed by Terrence Young (who previously directed three of the first four James Bond films), this is Hitchcockian suspense. Does that genre still thrill? Are we still fitted with the buttons it pushes?

In the week leading up to this screening, every adult who noted that we’re showing Wait Until Dark has stopped to comment on what a great film it is, especially one scene in particular. The students we’ve chatted with, who don’t know it, are skeptical. Maybe they’re a little afraid. Because, really, the unknown is often scary. We’re more comfortable with the familiar. Maybe we should take more risks. After all, it’s only a movie.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954)

Screened with:
Chuck Jones' "Feed the Kitty" (1952)
Mark Har's "My New Life" (2003)

Consider the thriller. The world can be a terrifying place, yet most of us feel an inexplicable and irresistible pull to sit in a dark movie theater and watch a film that terrifies us. Whether it’s watching Mike Myers (not that Mike Myers) stalk a nubile Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween or gelatinous acid ooze from an alien’s interior mouth just before it attacks in the Alien films or a shadowy government conspiracy threaten heroic FBI agents in "The X-Files," we love to be scared.

In those examples the protagonists face overt, vicious monsters. (Yes, Your Humble Commentator just compared secretive, unaccountable government cabals to serial killers and blood thirsty aliens.) Alfred Hitchcock, on the other hand, dealt in a more subtle form of suspense, the thrill of watching ordinary people mistakenly get caught up in a life-threatening situation. In Rear Window (1954), Jimmy Stewart is “Jeff” Jeffries, an action photographer cooped up in his apartment with a broken leg. When he’s not fending off the marital advances of his girlfriend Lisa (played by Grace Kelly), he spends his time staring out his back window at the residents of the various apartments across the courtyard. And in one of the apartments, a man’s wife suddenly disappears. Jeff suspects foul play. Or is it all a product of his over-active imagination?

Say what you will about the suspense in this film, there’s a lot going on in addition to a few cheap thrills. Hitchcock, for instance, seductively doles out the minor melodramas of Jeff’s neighbors in a way that turns us into voyeurs as much as it does Jeff. It is just like Hitch to suggest impishly that the act of going to a movie is a form of voyeurism, especially if that film includes any form of intimacy. Think about that the next time you laugh when Peter Seller’s character Chance in Being There says “I like to watch.” Don’t we all?

Another form of fear we indulge in for entertainment is the urban legend. And while that may evoke images of sitting around the campfire, telling the one about the escaped one-armed psychopath and the hook hanging off the car door handle or the one about your friend who knows someone who went to a bar, passed out and woke up without a liver, local filmmaker Mark Har has put a little urban legend up on the big screen with his short "My New Life." Coincidentally, Har’s 15-minute film, which was shot in the Twin Cities area, has the feel of an episode of … "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" or perhaps "Tales from the Crypt." In the end, we here at Blake Classic Films are happy to give you the opportunity to gratify that funny little penchant you have for artificially encouraged fear. No doubt it’s a welcome relief from the real life fear of taking your AP exams.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser