INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE (1989)–Streaming
INDIANA JONES AND KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL (2008)–Streaming
All the talk about Indiana Jones in the other thread led me to revisit two of the movies last night. LAST CRUSADE has always been a favorite, and I remember how much I disliked CRYSTAL SKULL when I saw it upon its release. But time and quarantine can do funny things, so here goes.
I watched CRYSTAL SKULL first since it is a film that has drawn me back over the years, and each time I have liked it a little more than the previous viewing. This time the film came across more than ever as a cartoon (THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN is Spielberg’s next movie). The film is also full of the tropes and memento mori of the 1950’s. If Scorsese fills his films with references to earlier movies, Spielberg fills his with the detritus of pop culture–CATCH ME IF YOU CAN is an earlier example, while READY PLAYER ONE is his most extravagant and accomplished use of this approach.
Also, as much as Spielberg tried to recall his earlier aesthetic self, CS is clearly made in his late style. Janusz Kaminski does a good job of approximating Douglas Slocombe’s lighting, but Spielberg is a more accomplished director in 2008 and it shows. This growth, combined with advances in film technology, allows Spielberg to create a mobile mise en scene not possible (though sought) in the 1980’s. The movie is still a cartoon, but a more fluid one than its predecessors.
LAST CRUSADE remains the pleasure it always was, but it was made under a different aesthetic regime, and the difference between filmmaking then and filmmaking now is more apparent than ever. This change hit me strongly a while back when I stumbled onto a showing of THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK. I stayed with the film for a while, and after a few scenes, the thought popped into my head: “Well, that is the only section of that set they decided to build.” I will admit that such thoughts are rarer for me than other filmic considerations, but it crystalized something I had been thinking about regarding cinematic space.
Analyzing the use of space in films was something I came to late. I was initially more interested in performance, writing, and content than in use of space. But the more I wrote and read, the more issues of space came to the fore–especially in my work on Joseph L. Mankiewicz for whose mise en scene I wanted to make a strong argument (which I was able to do citing JLM’s creation of rhetorical space as opposed to the lyrical space of a filmmaker such as John Ford). Once I got on a space kick, filmmakers such as Preminger and Hawks, whom I already loved, became even more dear to me (and some like Billy Wilder fell a notch or two).
Technology allowed a shift from movement in frame/space (and the attendant use of offscreen space of which Mankiewicz was a master) to movement within space. If LAWRENCE OF ARABIA were made today, we would not wait for the camel to reach us, we would go and meet the camel (and then circle it in a drone shot). The 1980’s and 1990’s were the transition period, and by the millennium’s turn technology allowed mise en scene never imagined before (I remember watching HEREAFTER by Clint Eastwood and thinking how much he was moving the camera as compared with his older films). The LAST CRUSADE provides the pleasure of the older aesthetic even as it gives hints of what is to come.
Lastly, I found it interesting that LAST CRUSADE could end with the upholding of Christian dogma: when asked by his son what he found, Henry Jones replies “Illumination.” In CRYSTAL SKULL, the Christian God has been replaced by interdimensional beings (I know Spielberg was not pleased with the ending, but in many ways his work fostered and aided the changeover). Insight is now replaced by spectacle, and otherworldliness succeeds interiority.
