It's a shame I wasn't able to make it to that screening.

Thus far I haven't really been able to get into Tourneur--possibly
because I haven't seen anything of his on film. From your description,
however, it sounds as though _Nightfall_ could have been the one that
sold me. I hope I'll be able to catch up on it at the Siskel Center or
somewhere else in the near future. The ones I've seen on video are:
_Cat People_, _Out of the Past_, _I Walked With a Zombie_, and _Night of
the Demon_.

For some reason, your account of that bit of dialogue brought to mind
another bit of dialogue--one of my favorites in cinema--from Bresson's
_L'Argent_. It occurs just after Yvon receives news that his daughter
has passed away; while he is sobbing silently on the bed, one of his
cellmates says,"On craint la mort parce qu'on aime la vie/We fear death
because we love life."

Perhaps a comparison/contrast with Ozu will throw into relief one
feature of Bresson's style that intrigues me. One of Ozu's well-known
mannerisms--especially in the 50s and onwards--is almost never to move
the camera; but still to follow the action through editing (through he
does so in what Bordwell aptly calls "360-degree" space). The
combination of 360-degree space and matches on action often gives his
editing the feel of live television (I used to do a little live tv
editing with a video switcher--looking at different monitors, choosing
which angle to switch to when, etc.--Ozu brings it all back). The
position of the camera never seems intrusive; it never feels as though
the camera were there first and all the decor "mis en scene" around it
anew for each shot (as it does in e.g. Eistenstein, or Leisen, or
Borzage, or Minnelli, or Blier). Rather, the camera feels as though it
just "happened to be there" to see things take place in a world that is
unaware of its presence. Somehow in Ozu that combination of
mise-en-scene and editing has distancing effects, which is something you
wouldn't necessarily expect.

Take that recipe: 360-degree editing, matches on action, and straight-on
camera angles. Then make the following changes: a) keep the "window
rather than canvas" mise-en-scene, but make all camera angles oblique
(rather than looking straight down a hallway to its vanishing point, as
Ozu almost always does, place the camera so that you're no longer
looking the vanishing point "straight in the eye"; so that it's just
offscreen); b) follow the action with the sorts of camera moves we might
expect, but follow torsos rather than faces; hands rather than arms;
legs rather than bodies; and c) keep the blocking slow and unambiguous,
so that figures in the frame move "with the camera in mind," as though
they were in an instructional film trying to teach the viewer to do
something; as though they were executing a set of instructions. You'll
end up with some approximation of Bresson's style.

The scene which builds up to that extraordinary moment of dialogue is a
dizzying cascade of obliqueness in every conceivable form: oblique
camera movements, oblique camera angles, oblique figure movement,
oblique glances between characters, editing that follows the narrative
action--but only the bits of it that your eyes would drift toward when
you were daydreaming--dialogue that's half relevant to the moment and
half withdrawn into poetic reverie. We cut straight from someone
reading the letter to Yvon's cellmate as he picks it up from the floor,
so that we never see Yvon read it. Temporal obliqueness. The cellmate
gingerly returns the letter to its former position on the floor, so as
not to disturb Yvon. Gestural obliqueness. He utters the line of
dialogue. Semantic obliqueness. How exactly is what he said
intelligible as a response to the letter? It doesn't seem to be, in any
literal sense. Doesn't Yvon appear to be expressing grief rather than a
fear of death? Is it even about him? It has the grammatical form of a
maxim (and even the repetitive rhythm of a maxim, like something out of
De la Rochefoucauld); a generalization. And yet, it isn't as though
grief has nothing to do with the fear of death. It isn't as though
death and life have nothing to do with their situation. In fact, in
some way that isn't easy to explain, something about that line seems
more to the point than any direct statement about Yvon could have been.
To top it off, they then make a toast, which (in much the same way) ends
up being more "obliquely relevant" than any direct response could have
been.

It boggles the mind how much there is in that film to be unpacked.

-Matt