
Necrology. 1970. USA. Directed by Standish Lawder. 11 min.
“A mordant, extended sight gag, Necrology is a mystery beginning to end. It’s best viewed cold; please resist online explanations of Lawder’s cinematic time/space puzzle until the last credit has rolled” (Amy Taubin).
Pickup on South Street. 1953. USA. Written and directed by Samuel Fuller. With Jean Peters, Thelma Ritter, Richard Widmark. DCP. 80 min.
“When I turned 14, I was allowed to both ride the subway and go to movie matinees on my own. From the jolting first image of a train speeding through the darkness and then the abrupt cut to Jean Peters’s face inside a brightly lit, crowded car, her hand gripping the swaying strap above her head, Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street emblemized this newfound freedom and the dangers ahead. It’s a very sexy film, not simply because of the slap/kiss heat between Jean Peters’s sort-of bad girl and Richard Widmark’s agile-fingered cannon, but because Fuller’s charged-up camera moves and crossfades ensure the adrenaline rush. I didn’t yet understand anything about film language and how it could turn a pulp narrative into a masterpiece, but I could feel every shot change in my solar plexus. On the screen was a secret New York more thrilling than anything I encountered in my daily life, and Pickup on South Street was the key to it. Later I learned that the subway cars, stations, and tunnels were a set, fabricated on the Twentieth Century Fox lot to Fuller’s specifications, and that the entire film, save for a few seconds here and there, was shot in Los Angeles. No matter, it remains for me the consummate vision of the real New York of my adolescence and my dreams” (Amy Taubin).