Week 26/2024

EN

“One of the most intriguing things about The Vanishing is the film’s unusual structure, which builds suspense even while it seems to be telling us almost everything we want to know. The movie is a thriller based on a domestic tragedy – on a wife who inexplicably vanishes into thin air, and of her husband's three-year search for information about what happened to her. Almost from the beginning of the film, we know more than the husband does, and yet the more we know, the more we wonder and fear.more we wonder and fear.”

Roger Ebert1

“For uncertainty to play any role in suspense, it must be in terms of a condition on having a desire to know, i.e., one desire among many for which frustration gives rise to feelings of suspense. […] During our initial viewing of Spoorloos, we, just like the main character Rex, develop an overwhelming and perverse desire to know what happened to his girlfriend Saskia after she vanished from a heavily trafficked roadside gas station. Spoorloos, however, isn’t a whodunit; we as viewers are told quite early on in the film that Raymond abducted Saskia. Yet despite being so informed, we are little better off epistemically than Rex, who spends the three years following Saskia’s disappearance utterly consumed by his obsession to know what happened to her.”

Christy Mag Uidhir2

• 1Roger Ebert, “The Vanishing,” rogerebert.com, 25 January 1991.
• 2Christy Mag Uidhir, “An Eliminativist Theory of Suspense,” Philosophy and Literature 35 (2011), 121–133.

EN

“Chaplin's approach to Limelight was altogether exceptional. He first set it down in the form of a novel running to something like a hundred thousand words. This incorporated two lengthy ‘flashback’ digressions in which he related the biographies of his two main characters, the clown Calvero and the young dancer Terry Ambrose, before the beginning of the story. Much later Chaplin was to say that the idea for Limelight was suggested by his memory of the famous American comedian Frank Tinney, whom he had seen on stage when he first came to New York, at the height of Tinney's popularity. Some years later he saw him again and recognized with shock that ‘the comic Muse had left him’. This gave him the idea for a film which would examine the phenomenon of a man who had lost his spirit and assurance. In Limelight the case was age; Calvero grew old and introspective and acquired a feeling of dignity, and this divorced him from all intimacy with the audience.' Chaplin, in his sixties, must inevitably have taken a subjective view of this peril. Moreover, he was in process of witnessing, painfully, how fickle a mass public can be.”

David Robinson1

“If Limelight as a whole is Chaplin’s farewell, then that final vaudeville act is surely his farewell to slapstick. It is a perfect, hilarious gem; he teams up with Buster Keaton to do a piano-violin duet that runs into small problems like a smashed violin and an overstrung piano. His final exit – and then his last request to have his couch carried to the wings, so that he can watch Miss Bloom dance – is perhaps not so much sentimentality as an expression of his belief that if all things must end, then at least they should end gracefully.”

Roger Ebert2

• 1David Robinson, Chaplin: his life and art (London: McGraw-Hill, 1985), 550-551.
• 2Roger Ebert, “Limelight,” rogerebert.com, 19 April 1972.

EN

Audience member: In my opinion, the film - and the problem of foreign young people in general - is not about why they came 10 years ago, but about the fact that 4 million people - half of them young people - live here today. That's the first point. They are here, and that is why we have to ensure that their discrimination is reduced and that they are treated with dignity. The second point, which I find very good in the film, is that it allows these young people to have their say and that it makes clear the extent of the everyday scandal that is happening in Germany. That's where my question comes in: Why is he [a social worker] so polite with those responsible? That is a mystery to me. This social worker from Moabit, who knows what goes on in this prison, should be pressing charges, he should be doing more against these everyday beatings, from which the foreign youths in particular suffer […] Instead, he waffles on more or less theoretically. Why didn't you make this contradiction clear? 

Montazami-Dabui: The social worker was the only one you could talk to. He immediately said, "It really hurts me when I see the young people in the cell all day. They have no radio, no magazines, they just sit alone in the cell and only go out for half an hour every day.” And then I [asked] him if he was willing to give an interview. And when I got permission to film, there was always an officer watching. I shot 300 metres [of film]. I always thought that now he would come and say what was important. You can see that he wants to say something, but he still doesn't say anything. And then I said, okay, let's go now. When the camera was off, I told him, “but you told it differently before”. “Yes”, he said, “do you want to make me breadless?”

From a discussion at the Duisburger Filmwoche in 19781

• 1Filmwoche Duisburg, “Catalog”.