Soon after I start­ed dri­ving, back in high school, I got a mobile phone capa­ble of SMS mes­sag­ing. As with any tech­nol­o­gy not yet wide­spread, it then seemed more nov­el­ty than con­ve­nience; I hard­ly knew any­body else with a cell­phone, much less with one capa­ble of receiv­ing my mes­sages. But in the inter­ven­ing dozen years, every­one start­ed tex­ting, and the prac­tice turned from odd­i­ty into near-neces­si­ty, no mat­ter the time, no mat­ter the place.

Now, hav­ing tak­en for grant­ed the abil­i­ty to instant­ly send short mes­sages across the city, coun­try, or world to one anoth­er, soci­ety has, inevitably, begun to focus on the asso­ci­at­ed dan­gers of tex­ting. But few of us have thought quite as hard about them as has Wern­er Her­zog, direc­tor of Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Fitz­car­ral­do, Cave of For­got­ten Dreams, and now a doc­u­men­tary against tex­ting while dri­ving. But don’t peo­ple already know the dan­gers? Haven’t pub­lic ser­vice announce­ments cau­tioned them not to do it, and stiff, fee-threat­en­ing laws gone on the books across Amer­i­ca?

Judg­ing by the sud­den pop­u­lar­i­ty of Her­zog’s new 35-minute film From One Sec­ond to the Next, spon­sored by cell ser­vice provider AT&T, a Ger­man New Wave lumi­nary’s words car­ry more weight. “I’m not a par­tic­i­pant of tex­ting and dri­ving — or tex­ting at all,” many have already quot­ed him as say­ing, “but I see there’s some­thing going on in civ­i­liza­tion which is com­ing with great vehe­mence at us.” Despite not hav­ing dri­ven reg­u­lar­ly since high school, I do on my rare occa­sions at the wheel feel that strange­ly strong temp­ta­tion to text in motion. Hav­ing watched Her­zog’s unblink­ing take on the real-life con­se­quences of doing so — unpayably high med­ical bills at best, paral­y­sis and death at worst — I don’t see myself giv­ing in next time. Whether or not it sim­i­lar­ly effects the stu­dents of the 40,000 schools in which it will screen, it marks a vast improve­ment upon all the murky, heavy-hand­ed cau­tion­ary videos I remem­ber from my own dri­ver’s ed days. Per­haps what Her­zog did for Bad Lieu­tenant, he should now do for that class­room clas­sic Red Asphalt.

You can find From One Sec­ond to the Next in our col­lec­tion of 550 Free Movies Online.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Por­trait Wern­er Her­zog: The Director’s Auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal Short Film from 1986

An Evening with Wern­er Her­zog

Errol Mor­ris and Wern­er Her­zog in Con­ver­sa­tion

Wern­er Her­zog Has a Beef With Chick­ens

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

If you’ve tak­en a film stud­ies course, you’ve almost cer­tain­ly seen the work of Georges Méliès. His 1902 short A Trip to the Moon, at the top, which some cin­e­ma schol­ars cite as the pic­ture where spe­cial effects as we know them began, has a par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant place in cin­e­ma his­to­ry. Nobody who watch­es that four­teen-minute pro­duc­tion ever for­gets the image of the moon’s con­ster­na­tion after the pro­tag­o­nists’ space­craft crash­es into it. And the rest of the movie, if nar­ra­tive­ly shaky, still has an impres­sive visu­al pow­er. If any­body had both suf­fi­cient imag­i­na­tion and suf­fi­cient know-how to com­mit such a voy­age to that cut­ting-edge medi­um known as motion film over a cen­tu­ry ago, the the­ater own­er and sea­soned illu­sion­ist Méliès did. Charged by the cin­e­mat­ic pio­neer­ing of his coun­try­men the Lumière broth­ers, he began doing it in 1896, and con­tin­ued until 1913, which makes A Trip to the Moon a mid-career high­light.

A mid-career high­light, that is, along­side 1904’s The Impos­si­ble Voy­age (just above), which con­tin­ues in the same vein of Jules Verne-style fan­tas­ti­cal sci­ence fic­tion. This time, in fact, Méliès took not just the sen­si­bil­i­ty from Verne but, in part, a sto­ry, draw­ing inspi­ra­tion from Verne’s play Jour­ney Through the Impos­si­ble about a young Dan­ish baron tempt­ed to trav­el to far-off lands, plan­ets, and real­i­ties. He wrote into this sequel, of sorts, a nat­ur­al des­ti­na­tion: the sun. MUBI.com’s “pub­lic domain greats” page offers a list of these and oth­er Méliès films avail­able free to watch online, the likes of which inspired Mar­tin Scors­ese to adapt Bri­an Selznick­’s Méliès-cen­tric nov­el The Inven­tion of Hugo Cabret into Hugo, a film visu­al­ly inven­tive by the ear­ly 21st cen­tu­ry’s stan­dards just as A Voy­age to the Moon excelled by the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry’s. Those films cur­rent­ly avail­able include:

• A Trip to the Moon (1902)
• The Infer­nal Caul­dron (1903)
• The Impos­si­ble Voy­age (1904)
• The Liv­ing Play­ing Cards (1905)
• The Hilar­i­ous Posters (1906)
• The Dev­il­ish Ten­ant (1909)

They will all be added to our col­lec­tion of 550 Free Movies Online.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Pow­er of Silent Movies, with The Artist Direc­tor Michel Haz­anavi­cius

The Birth of Film: 11 Firsts in Cin­e­ma

The Ear­ly Days of Ani­ma­tion Pre­served in UCLA’s Video Archive

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Lau­rence Olivi­er as Vito Cor­leone? Dustin Hoff­man as Michael? Those are two of the intrigu­ing options direc­tor Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la was appar­ent­ly mulling over when he jot­ted down these notes while prepar­ing to make his clas­sic 1972 film The God­fa­ther.

The cast­ing of The God­fa­ther was a noto­ri­ous­ly con­tentious affair. Exec­u­tives at Para­mount Pic­tures thought Mar­lon Bran­do — Cop­po­la’s first choice to play Mafia “God­fa­ther” Vito — was too dif­fi­cult to work with. They thought Al Paci­no was too short to play his son Michael.

“The war over cast­ing the fam­i­ly Cor­leone was more volatile than the war the Cor­leone fam­i­ly fought on screen,” writes for­mer Para­mount head of pro­duc­tion Robert Evans in his mem­oir, The Kid Stays in the Pic­ture. At one point the stu­dio want­ed Dan­ny Thomas to play Vito and War­ren Beat­ty to play Michael. A long list of lead­ing Hol­ly­wood actors were con­sid­ered for the role of Michael, includ­ing Robert Red­ford, Ryan O’Neal and Jack Nichol­son.

Cop­po­la even­tu­al­ly set­tled on Paci­no as the cere­bral Michael and the lit­tle-known Carmine Cari­di as Michael’s tough-guy old­er broth­er, Son­ny. Evans told the direc­tor he could have one but not both. In a pas­sage from the book, quot­ed in Mark Seal’s 2009 Van­i­ty Fair piece, “The God­fa­ther Wars,” Evans describes a tense meet­ing with Cop­po­la:

“You’ve got Paci­no on one con­di­tion, Fran­cis.”

“What’s that?”

“Jim­my Caan plays Son­ny.”

“Carmine Caridi’s signed. He’s right for the role. Any­way, Caan’s a Jew. He’s not Ital­ian.”

“Yeah, but he’s not six five, he’s five ten. This aint Mutt and Jeff. This kid Paci­no’s five five, and that’s in heels.”

“I’m not using Caan.”

“I’m not using Paci­no.”

Slam went the door. Ten min­utes lat­er, the door opened. “You win.”

For more on the cast­ing of The God­fa­ther, includ­ing excerpts from screen tests and remem­brances from Cop­po­la and oth­ers, see our ear­li­er post “A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Cast­ing of The God­fa­ther with Cop­po­la, De Niro & Caan.”

via A.V. Club

Image by Col­in Swan, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

We’ve looked this week at the favorite movies select­ed by such respect­ed film­mak­ers as Stan­ley Kubrick and Mar­tin Scors­ese. Today we round out this trio of emi­nent direc­tors with the great­est films of all time accord­ing to Woody Allen, vot­ing in the almighty Sight and Sound poll. The direc­tor of Annie Hall, Crimes and Mis­de­meanors, and Mid­night in Paris select­ed, in no par­tic­u­lar order, the fol­low­ing:

• The 400 Blows (François Truf­faut, 1959)
• 8½ (Fed­eri­co Felli­ni, 1963)
• Amar­cord (Fed­eri­co Felli­ni, 1972)
• The Bicy­cle Thieves (Vit­to­rio de Sica, 1948)
• Cit­i­zen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
• The Dis­creet Charm of the Bour­geoisie (Luis Buñuel, 1972)
• Grand Illu­sion (Jean Renoir, 1937)
• Paths of Glo­ry (Stan­ley Kubrick, 1957)
• Rashomon (Aki­ra Kuro­sawa, 1950)
• The Sev­enth Seal (Ing­mar Bergman, 1957)

It comes as no shock that Ing­mar Bergman makes the list, giv­en Allen’s well-doc­u­ment­ed and open­ly admit­ted enthu­si­asm for (and, in cas­es like Inte­ri­ors, direct imi­ta­tion of) the man who made The Sev­enth Seal. If that vote rep­re­sents Allen’s con­tem­pla­tive, moral­ly seri­ous side, then the vote for Luis Buñuel’s endur­ing­ly fun­ny sur­re­al­ist farce The Dis­creet Charm of the Bour­geoisie rep­re­sents his well-known predilec­tion for humor, often class-based, which occa­sion­al­ly melts into silli­ness.

Like Scors­ese, Allen includes Kubrick, though for his ear­ly Paths of Glo­ry rather than the more wide­ly-seen 2001. Like both Scors­ese and Kubrick, he picks a Felli­ni — two, in fact — and all three of their lists illus­trate that it would take a con­trar­i­an film­go­er indeed to deny Orson Welles’ Cit­i­zen Kane a vote. Kubrick, you’ll recall, also had great praise for Vit­to­rio de Sica and François Truf­faut, and their ear­ly pic­tures show up among Allen’s selec­tions. Take Kubrick, Scors­ese, and Allen’s lists togeth­er, and you have a few prin­ci­ples to guide your view­ing: con­cen­trate on the mid­cen­tu­ry mas­ters. Cit­i­zen Kane real­ly does mer­it all those acco­lades. And above all, make sure you watch your Felli­ni. But which films did Felli­ni love?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mar­tin Scors­ese Reveals His 12 Favorite Movies (and Writes a New Essay on Film Preser­va­tion)

Stan­ley Kubrick’s List of Top 10 Films (The First and Only List He Ever Cre­at­ed)

How Woody Allen Dis­cov­ered Ing­mar Bergman, and How You Can Too

Woody Allen Answers 12 Uncon­ven­tion­al Ques­tions He Has Nev­er Been Asked Before

Meetin’ WA: Jean-Luc Godard Meets Woody Allen

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.