USA, 3 min
Directed by: Bruce Baillie
I can't say that the prospect of a 3-minute leftwards pan was appealing to me, but I actually found All My Life (1966) quite relaxing. A filmmaker should never underestimate the power of a well-chosen soundtrack, and Ella Fitzgerald's "All My Life" works perfectly, evoking a simpler time and place. I don't see any reason why a backyard fence, examined from right-to-left, should be nostalgic in any way, but it is. The camera follows along the length of the fence, sometimes tilting upwards to take into account the bushes, and ends the film by rising up into the sky, passing a telephone wire and losing itself in the emptiness of the blue overhead. Aside from the camera movements, there's no action and no story. Just a fence, that music, and the memory of a childhood you'd forgotten.Many of the avant-garde films of the 1960s have a tendency to be unintelligible, and often very grating. All My Life doesn't really have an obvious point to it, but, whatever it's doing, it seems to make a lot of sense. Maybe the length of fence represents a man's life (the film's title seems to support this idea). The missing pickets represent our mistakes in life. The continual leftwards-panning of the camera is inspired by the idea that, though we move leisurely through our lifetimes, we are nonetheless constantly moving forward, never able to turn around and correct the mistakes of our past, having always to suffer the consequences of our errors. At the end of our fences, of course, we go to Heaven, completely removed from the life we'd lived before. It's a novel interpretation, perhaps, but I like it.
7/10
My first film from Rainer Werner Fassbinder is a nine-minute short, one of the director's earliest efforts. The film follows three youths, caught up in the rebellious counter-culture of the 1960s, who decide to supplement their meagre incomes (selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door) by orchestrating a home robbery. The three aspiring criminals – played by Christoph Roser, Marite Greiselis and Fassbinder himself – bust into the home of a frightened woman (Greta Rehfeld) and demand her money. The characters, particularly Fassbinder's Franz, do plenty of over-the-top posturing, no doubt in homage to the James Cagney style of acting that dominated gangster movies of the 1930s and 1940s (the film even references this sub-genre of Hollywood filmmaking, musing that "I'd like to see a gangster movie that ends well, for once"). The scene of a home invasion surprisingly called to mind A Clockwork Orange (1971), though I don't know how likely it is that Stanley Kubrick received inspiration from the amateur work of an emerging German director.
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