Baby Snakes

THE FALLEN IDOL

Directed by Carroll Reed

At Film Forum Feb. 10-23

THE ISTER

Directed by David Barison and Daniel Ross

At Anthology Film Archives Feb. 10-16

The pre-jump-cut era of movies

The pre-jump-cut era of movies brought the world so many pleasures, a good number of which have largely vanished. Chief among these was a deep and meaningful sense of space. I don't just mean the assurance that when one character in a conversation addresses a remark screen left, his conversation-mate will reply while looking screen right, and that after a couple of hours spent inside a particular film, you will have such a strong sense of where everything was that you could go home and draw the locations. I'm referring to the notion of space-as-idea - i.e., the sense that the principal location isn't just a de facto stage where actors deliver their lines, but a philosophical and moral space as well ? a manifestation of the characters' desires, fears and conflicts; an emblem of the film's preoccupations and an arena in which those preoccupations get acted out. Lucky New Yorkers can go to Film Forum and see this notion illustrated in The Fallen Idol, a revival of Carroll Reed's 1948 feature based on Graham Greene's short story "The Basement Room." It's is not as immense, dazzling and propulsive as Reed's other great postwar collaboration with Reed, The Third Man, but the two films were made right on top of one another and share a number of striking surface qualities: sharp black-and-white photography that exaggerates architectural curves with extreme angles and very short lenses; a very Greene-ish fascination with honor and honesty, and the circumstances under which both get violated; and a palpable conviction that these characters aren't just actors wandering around fictional locales, but luminous beings whose lives imprint themselves on the space that surrounds them, and are likewise imprinted.

In Idol, that space is the French Embassy in London, where boy hero Phil (Bobby Henrey), the son of the French ambassadors, roams through a cavernous, elaborately wrought building that ultimately seems less a simple locale than a mirror of the kid's young, uncluttered, unfilled mind. As little Phil gets wrapped up in a potential scandal involving his family butler, Baines (Ralph Richardson), Baines' cold and shrewish wife (Sonia Dresdel) and the beautiful young French embassy worker (Michele Morgan) who Baines falsely describes to Bobby as his niece, the embassy's chambers and antechambers come to represent secrets, and the lies we tell to protect secrets. The embassy's black-and-white tile seems to represent the simple moral code (either a lie OR the truth) that most of the film's characters abandon. Its immense curving staircase is a vehicle by which characters morally rise or fall.

The sense of this particular space, the Embassy, representing Phil's malleable psyche is cemented in playful and striking setpieces, including a game of hide-and-seek, and a related moment where Baines, whose deception will later upend Phil's life, messes with the boy's head by flicking various lights and off. If the embassy is Phil's mind, the flickering lights are synapses firing; it seems both appropriate and funny that Baines would be the one controlling the switches. It's an astounding scene. As Phil reacts to the explosions of light and darkness, you're seeing his emotional evolution translated into an electrical event, one that's smaller than, but as thrilling as, the light show-as-intergalactic-conversation that climaxes Close Encounters of the Third Kind. (How much do you want to bet Spielberg got the idea for that sequence from Idol?)

Reed's grasp of image-as-characterization manifests itself in other, less grand bits of symbolism, from the opening montage of flowers (an Eden image, charming in its simplicity) to the inserts of Phillip's hands cradling his pet serpent. We realize, instinctively without crude verbal prompting, that Baines is a snake in the child's garden that is the embassy, and that the lie in which Baines ensnares Phillip is the boy's original sin. "Some lies are just kindness," Baines tells the boy, paving the way for a well-meaning but inept cover-up that will make an already awful situation even worse. Even little lies are baby snakes, Idol tells us, and we should not get too comfortable with them.

For a less spectacular but equally heady evening, check out The Ister, another limited-run feature that takes morality as its subject and explores it through a heady mix of word and image. The documentary's title refers to a series of lectures by Martin Heidegger on German poet Frederich Holderlin's "The Ister," which contemplates the Danube (the title is the river's Greek name), and simultaneously considers the influence of history on modern life and the notion that time is an artificial construct, just one of many methods by which humankind tries to control nature and deny mortality.

You might think a documentary couldn't deal with such weighty, abstract issues except by pointing the camera at a philosopher and letting him ramble, but you'd be wrong. There's plenty of talk in The Ister, which invites filmmaker Hans-Jurgen Syberberg (Our Hitler, sections of which quoted in The Ister) and philosophers Bernard Steigler, Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarth to talk about Heidigger in relation to Holderlin, Nazism, the Holocaust, the former Soviet Union, the assembly line, industrialized agriculture and related subjects.

But this is no talking head film; on the contrary, it's a meticulous but very visual work that permits its images to free-associate into patterns that connect with, but don't boringly illustrate, what its subjects are saying. You never feel as if you're being lectured to, but rather as if you're reading a thorough but comprehensible philosophy text, pausing to let your mind wander and make its own connections, then circling around to rejoin the movie's mainstream of thought, emphasis on "stream." Like Terrence Malick, who was profoundly influenced by Heidegger and built all four of his masterpieces around images of water, The Ister arranges its various chapters around a journey toward the source of the Danube; like Malick, Barison and Ross pause to drink in related bits of beauty as they travel, confident that nothing they show is ever tangential.

Every few minutes there's a juxtaposition that makes you grin or gasp. Stiegler unpacks and lights a cigarette and talks about how philosophy and literature have always defined literature in terms of breath, and suggests that the Holocaust, which turned industrial techniques to genocide, gave humankind "?a case of historical emphysema." The last phrase is spoken over a close-up of an ashtray filled with cigarette butts, confirming that the Holocaust was not a singular event, but the opening chord in a horrible, endless refrain, and an addiction as well. Later, The Ister recounts the story of Agnes Burnaeur, who was drowned in the Danube on charges of witchcraft to prevent her from marrying Prince Albert and mucking with the rules of dynastic succession. This story somehow flows gracefully into an interview with botanist Tobias Maier, who has devoted his life to documenting flora in cemeteries, which he describes as the only places left in German where vegetation is left to flourish undisturbed by humans. This movie is like Maier's obsession: a thicket of images and ideas growing wild among tombstones.