Reel Adventures 13 - Recommendations

For each Reel Adventures at R.W. Norton Art Gallery in addition to the highlighted movie I provide a few other recommendations. Here are the recommendations from our 13th Reel Adventures.

Reel Adventures 13 - Trivia Questions

Here are the trivia questions from Reel Adventures 13 at R.W. Norton Art Gallery:

ROUND 1
• What does Pirovitch do the first time Matuschek says, “All I want is your honest opinion.”?
• What book is Klara using for their first meeting?
• Who replaces Pepi?
• What does Klara ask Kralik to do to prove he’s not bow legged?
• What word is not in the vocabulary of Matuschek & Co?

ROUND 2
• What is the first phone call Pepi makes at Matuschek once he becomes a clerk?
• What are the two items Matuschek gives Kralik upon termination?
• What does Klara say what one might call her trouble?
• What does Pepi tell the new errand boy when he looks at his bonus?
• What does Pirovitch say he’ll do to pay for Dr. Hegedus?

ROUND 3
• What Klara tells the woman shopper Matuschek & Co designed the box for?
• How many employees does Matuschek say he employs?
• Who does Pepi tell Mrs. Matuschek he is when she calls on the phone?
• What does Kralik say upon learning that Klara is reading Tolstoy? “I didn’t know you went in for ____________ _____________.”
• What does Pirovitch tell Kralik how you know if someone is truly a friend?

BONUS
• Who was Margaret Sullavan’s first husband?
• Warren Beatty once starred in a film with the exact title of one of Lubitsch’s most famous films. What was it?
• Name five components of Rudy’s Christmas Eve meal (must be exactly as mentioned in the film).

Reel Adventures 13 - Talk

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

https://drive.google.com/.../1alrL9ouTGosq60DXaL2.../view...

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."

Reel Adventures 12 - Recommendations

For each Reel Adventures at R.W. Norton Art Gallery in addition to the highlighted movie I provide a few other recommendations. Here are the recommendations from our 12th Reel Adventures.

Reel Adventures 12 - Trivia Questions

Here are the trivia questions from Reel Adventures 12 at R.W. Norton Art Gallery:

ROUND 1
• What is the last thing Lecter gives Clarice?
• What city was Catherine Martin kidnapped in?
• What is the first thing Starling says when she sees the cadaver?
• What tool does Clarice use to raise the storage facility door?
• What does Lecter have instead of a view?

ROUND 2
• Who does Clarice “see” in the coffin at the funeral parlor?
• What are Lecter’s final words to Senator Martin?
• When Crawford first describes the assignment to Starling, he says it’s not a job really it’s an __________ __________?
• I tell you things, you tell me things or?
• What got Starling killed during training?

ROUND 3
• How does Jame lure Clarice into his house?
• What does Lecter tell Clarice that she loves most?
• When Clarice visits Lecter at night what does he send to her through the tray?
• What food magazine is in Lecter’s cell in Memphis?
• What does Lecter respond when Starling says it’s the sort of thing Miggs would say?

BONUS
• What crooner responds to Lecter’s escape?
• This FBI director gave Demme his first shot at making a feature?
• I mentioned three ways film can demonstrate that it could do something no other art form could do. What are the three ways?

Reel Adventures 12 - Talk

What a special evening at R.W. Norton Art Gallery for Reel Adventures 12!

Here's the talk I gave and I'll share the questions we asked tomorrow. Between Round 1 and Round 2 I first showed this video:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gEsASjxJJT0JaYyCGD2R-OKHCEq6nFSx/view

And then between Round 2 and Round 3 I gave this talk:

The famous French filmmaker Robert Bresson once said that a film is born three times: first in the script, then in the shoot, and finally in the edit.

As you can tell from the clips we watched before the break, today we’re focusing on film’s final birth – the edit.

Crosscutting is a unique film term that means jumping back and forth between two locations to achieve a certain effect - excitement, tension, or in the famous scene we saw from The Silence of the Lambs, deliberate misdirection. You also heard the editor of The Silence of the Lambs, Craig McKay, talk about parallel editing which is simply a form of crosscutting.

What’s interesting is that these now-famous sequences – the baptism scene in The Godfather or the FBI raid in The Silence of the Lambs – do not exist in this form in their original novels. They were not simply adapted from the page. They were created by cinema. And to me that fact points us to a much larger idea.

At nearly every Reel Adventures I’ve talked about film as an artform – about the belief that cinema, when practiced at the highest level, deserves to stand alongside painting, music, and literature. That a great film can be as meaningful as a Van Gogh painting, a Beethoven symphony, or a Tolstoy novel.

Early defenders of film as art argued that cinema had to prove two things in order to earn that status.

First, it had to establish who the artist was. Unlike a painting or a novel, film is intensely collaborative. So critics and filmmakers began to argue that the director functions as the film’s primary creative voice – the guiding intelligence shaping all the elements into a coherent whole.

Second – and this is the more difficult hurdle – film had to demonstrate that it could do something no other art form could do.

One of those uniquely cinematic qualities is montage: the idea that meaning is not confined to a single image, but is created through the relationship between images. Editing allows film to generate ideas, emotions, and even moral judgments that do not exist in any individual shot. For those of you who attended Reel Adventures Rear Window, this is exactly what Alfred Hitchcock explains so clearly in his famous demonstration.

(VIDEO of Hitchcock I showed):

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eYm8gMK5dzIb9cBqrk7IuCQbUgwHmL4p/view

Another early concept was kino-eye – the belief that the camera is not just a recording device, but a new way of seeing. Through lenses, angles, slow motion, and time manipulation, film can reveal aspects of reality the human eye alone cannot perceive.

 
And then there is crosscutting. Crosscutting allows film to place two separate actions in conversation with one another. As you heard Mario Puzo, the author of The Godfather, point out this technique – this ability to tell two stories at once and create meaning from their collision – is something the novel simply can’t replicate in the same way.

So where does that leave us?

Film is undeniably a hybrid art. It borrows composition and light from painting, performance and blocking from theater, and narrative structure and dialogue from literature. But it is not merely a combination of those forms. It is something new.

Cinema possesses expressive tools that belong to it alone – montage, kino-eye, and crosscutting – the ability to create meaning through juxtaposition and rhythm. And it is in the edit, that final birth of a film, where these tools fully come to life.

If an art form must demonstrate unique capabilities in order to claim its place, then film more than meets that challenge. And the scenes we’ve looked at today don’t just entertain us – they quietly prove the case.

My Top Films Seen in 2025

Since 2009, I have put out a fairly detailed list of my favorite films, new and old, that I saw during the year.

Here is the short summary of what most knocked me out in 2025:

Pedro Pinho's I Only Rest in the Storm

Oliver Laxe's Sirat

Johan Grimonprez's Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat

Sergio Leone's Duck, You Sucker!

Shinji Somai's Moving

Eric Rohmer's The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque

Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value