Reel Adventures 13 at
R.W. Norton Art Gallery was special!
Here's the talk I gave between between Round 1 and Round 2 of Trivia. Then I brought up John Pickens to talk about elegance and style with someone who has spent his lifetime thinking about these ideas professionally.
"Good evening everyone.
Let's start tonight with a couple of definitions.
The word elegance comes from the Latin word eligere (eh-LEE-jeh-ray), which means "to choose" or "to select."
That's interesting because when we hear the word elegance, we often think of luxury, expense, or ornamentation. But its origins point us somewhere else entirely.
Elegance begins with choice.
An elegant solution in mathematics, architecture, writing, fashion, or film is often one that achieves a great deal while using very little.
How about style?
Style can perhaps best be defined as taste made visible.
Or maybe even better, values expressed through choices.
The clothes we wear, the homes we build, the cities we create, the books we write, the films we make — all of them reveal what we value through the choices we make and the choices we leave behind.
Tonight our focus is on The Shop Around the Corner, directed by Ernst Lubitsch.
Few filmmakers in Hollywood history became so identified with a particular way of making movies that critics and filmmakers eventually gave it a name.
In Lubitsch's case, they called it: "The Lubitsch Touch."
Tonight I want to spend a few minutes giving you all a sense of Ernst Lubitsch and this famous Lubitsch Touch.
Then later this evening, after our next round of trivia, I want to invite John Pickens up and spend some time talking about elegance and style with someone who has spent a lifetime thinking about those ideas professionally.
So let's start with Lubitsch.
Ernst Lubitsch was born in Berlin in 1892, the son of a tailor.
He began his career as an actor in Germany before becoming one of the great directors of both European and American cinema.
But what made Lubitsch special wasn't simply that he made successful movies.
It was that he seemed to possess a completely unique sensibility.
His films were witty without being cynical.
Romantic without being sentimental.
Sophisticated without being elitist.
And elegant in a way that was so distinctive that filmmakers and critics eventually gave it a name: "The Lubitsch Touch."
So what exactly was this Lubitsch Touch?
Part of it was trust.
Lubitsch trusted his audience.
He preferred suggestion to explanation.
Implication to exposition.
He understood that audiences enjoy participating in a story rather than simply being told one.
Part of it was economy.
Remember our definition of elegance.
Elegance begins with choice.
Lubitsch had an extraordinary ability to remove the unnecessary and leave only what mattered most.
An expression instead of a speech.
A closed door instead of a scene.
A glance instead of an explanation.
He often achieved more by showing us less.
And perhaps most importantly, Lubitsch understood grace.
Not grace in the religious sense.
Grace in the way people speak to one another.
The way they disagree.
The way they apologize.
The way they flirt.
The way they move through the world.
His films believed these things mattered.
So before we continue, I wanted to show you a short clip from the late filmmaker and historian Peter Bogdanovich, who I think does as good a job as anyone of explaining why Ernst Lubitsch remains such an important figure in the history of cinema.
CLIP
I love the phrase “The Lubitsch Touch.”
Because ultimately I don’t think it refers simply to a filmmaking technique.
I think it points to a way of seeing the world.
Lubitsch believed elegance mattered.
He believed style mattered.
He believed grace mattered.
Not wealth.
Not status.
Not luxury.
Grace.
The grace of conversation.
The grace of restraint.
The grace of treating other people with dignity.
What’s remarkable about The Shop Around the Corner is that Lubitsch locates these virtues not among aristocrats or millionaires, but among ordinary shop employees.
His film suggests that elegance is not something we buy.
It’s something we practice.
And I suspect that’s a good place to pause before our next round of trivia."
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