Good topic! Well, there are so many memorable moments, both from great and not-so-great films... many of these seem to focus on faces, it strikes me...
Branagh's Henry V giving a rousing speech before the battle of Agincourt... and the chant Non Nobis - with an incredibly long continuous tracking shot - after the victorious outcome for the English...
Jules' (Sam Jackson) cool lines at the conclusion of Pulp Fiction... (a film that fascinates me though I hate it for its authorial 'voice')...
Halloween: Michael (the slasher) emerging out of the shadows behind the Jamie Leigh Curtis character in the final act...
Andrei Rublev: the torturous killing of a priest by the Tartars... and the glorious finale of Rublev's fresco The Trinity in colour...
Billy Wilder's The Apartment: when the doctor from next door slaps Fran (Shirley MacLaine) in the face to resuscitate her after her suicide attempt.... a similar scene in James Cameron's The Abyss... (a mostly mediocre film, but with some great moments).... In the same film: when the Ed Harris character slowly plumets down to the bottom of the ocean, saying it's a one-way trip for him...
2001: for me the most intense and breathtaking moment is when Dave Bowman, floating in weightlessness, successively dismantles the computer, HAL, who starts singing a children's song... (with the entire chamber in red)...
Burt Lancaster flashing the greatest smile in the world at Gary Cooper in Vera Cruz...
Ivan the Terrible's mad stare out of the corners of his eyes during his truly terroristic speech in the coronation sequence of part 1...
The coffeeshop dialogue scene between Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro in Heat, their slightly ironic facial expressions...
Marco Ramius (Sean Connery) making his speech to his Soviet submarine crew in The Hunt for Red October: 'We will lay off their largest city and listen to their Rock'n'Roll, while we conduct missile drills...'
Paris, Texas: Nastassia Kinski in close-up slowly starting to cry in the nightclub booth scene when Travis (Harry Dean Stanton) tells her, with his back turned, the true story of his departure...
The Best Years of Our Lives: Homer's (Harold Russell's) expression of anguish and frustration at being made fun of by school kids because of his prosthetic hands, and smashing the window in response... numerous other moments in that film...
The LIfe of Emile Zola: the brutal defrocking of captain Dreyfus...
Sheriff Chance (John Wayne) giving Stumpy (Walter Brennan) a quick kiss on his bald head in Rio Bravo... In the same film: the Angie Dickinson POV shot of a momentarily feminized Wayne as he's standing in the doorframe, before crossing the room...
Seconds: Saul Bass' credit sequence of eyes in large close-up, the anamorphically distorted and distended facials... and in the same film, at the end: the Rock Hudson character, tied to a gurney, realizing what's ahead, and his muted screams, one of the most distressing and terrifying moments in all of cinema...
The brief double exposure of the skull and Norman Bates' face at the end of Psycho...
There are so many examples...
H
And so on and so on and so on....
Henry
there is so much very serious -- and important – stuff on this list that it serves [for me at least] some very useful purposes in keeping up with what different people in different places and with different agendas are doing
but i wonder if i might impose a thread of trivial pursuits on a sort and ask those who are inclined in this direction to share suggestions’ for what might be called iconic moments in cinema . . . there are moments in films we’ve seen that are [or are taken to be] so memorable that one merely has to mention them to elicit a universe of responses . . . i think off-hand of some bits of dialogue that almost everyone will recognize [“go ahead, make my day”; “i’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse”; “play it again sam”] – and while it’s interesting that it’s words rather than images that come to mind first that may be simply because it’s so much easier to quote words than to refer to and explain images . . . but there are also images: the sliced eye in chien andalou; the face of dreyer’s jeanne d’arc; nosferatu; the grinning skull in psycho
so, if you would enjoy a break from thinking about film as language, you might want to suggest your own candidates for this very rough list of iconic moments in cinema
mike
.
Dr. Henry M. Taylor
University of Zurich
Phone +41 (0)44 272 21 61
Mobile +41 (0)78 639 49 82
*
*
Film-Philosophy Email Discussion Salon.
After hitting 'reply' please always delete the text of the message you are replying to.
To leave, send the message: leave film-philosophy to: [log in to unmask]
For help email: [log in to unmask], not the salon.
**
