March Madness: A Summary of Films Watched This Month

Looking over the entries in my film diary for the month of March, they seemed even more varied than usual. I try to watch things from a variety of time periods, countries, and genres, but this month’s list had some truly unique films that I’d love to write about more in the future. Here’s the rundown of everything I watched this past month.

Source: Film Comment

I started this month off with Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror. The Russian production company Mosfilm uploaded the full movie to their Youtube channel where it remains free of charge and with optional English subtitles. There was literally no reason why I should not watch it.

Though sometimes described as a “plotless” film, there is a story in Mirror, even if it doesn’t follow all of the traditional story beats exactly: a middle-aged writer is divorcing his wife and will likely lose his adolescent son in the process. This brings back daydreams and memories of his own childhood, spent with his single mother whose husband abandoned her and the children.

Like many of Tarkovsky’s films, Mirror is fixated on the ideas of time and memory: memory not merely as a piece of information stored away but as an active, living force in the world. The characters of Mirror are not simply haunted by memory, they are shaped and moved by it as well. The past is present with them. We see this in the structure of the film, in the way that it collapses all places and times into one. The narrative jumps back and forth between the past, the present, and the dreams of multiple characters, without a clear sense of continuity. The same actors play more than one character, blurring the lines between one time period and another even further. Tarkovsky encourages his viewers to think of these events and these people as one and the same thing, even if in the world of the story they took place decades apart. I find this manipulation of time and memory fascinating and hope to do more digging on it in the future.

Source: Vox

Next after that was an old favorite, the 1944 version of Gaslight. Starring Charles Boyer as the crazed jewel thief husband and Ingrid Bergman in her first of two Oscar-winning roles, this film is the gold standard in bloodless horror. Boyer’s merciless control over his wife and her desperate attempts to cling to her sanity are chilling even if, like me, you’ve seen it about forty or fifty times.