The Matrix’s obsession with binaries of costume, group size, violence, sets and props seems to establish it as a rudimentary us-versus-them fantasy of anti-authoritarianism. But unsettling visual parallels linger between its ostensible heroes and villains, driving us to ask if the rebels might not be shackled to enacting a violence as fascistic as the system they are fighting.

The movie aligns us early to both Neo and Trinity by pitting them separately against similar groups of uniformed pursuers. Cornered respectively in a fleabag hotel and in a maze of sterile office cubicles, Trinity and Neo each find themselves approached by policemen and Agents, who enter these scenes sharing space in shots with at least one similarly uniformed colleague (be it police uniform or Agent’s Secret Service suit). Through this visual grouping and their uniforms’ associations with legal authority, the policemen and Agents lose much of their individuality, seeming to hail from a vast conspiratorial network further implied in the Agents’ earpieces. We thus identify with the outnumbered individual in these scenes as they attempt to escape their omnipresent foes and unappealing environs.

As if to confirm our suspicions, the Agents and rebels proceed to subject Neo’s body to dichotomous extremes of physical violence, with contrasting resources at their disposal. When Agent Smith’s deal with Neo falls through, Neo’s mouth magically seals upon a cutaway from the smirking Smith, suggesting the Agent’s gleeful, inexplicable power to silence Neo. His colleagues pinning Neo down, Smith then activates a metal capsule that grows into a spindly, leg-splaying metallic virus that clambers into Neo’s navel as he struggles. By contrast, the rebels’ equipment is relatively low-tech, and their violence harmless: the device Trinity uses to extract the virus is ramshackle and ungainly, and the interior of Morpheus’ ship looks like an industrial basement with old barber’s chairs. Furthermore, the weapons-free fight between Morpheus and Neo, involving parries and near-miss fists, is benignly instructional, while Neo’s failure to leap across buildings is met merely with a rippling asphalt trampoline upon first impact, even as the blunt second impact reiterates the stakes of failure against their enemies. We are thus conditioned to continue seeing the rebels as underdogs and enablers against the oppressive Matrix and its Agents.

However, multiple images within Neo and Trinity’s subsequent rescue of Morpheus invite a troubling comparison between the Agents and themselves. “Dodge this,” says Trinity before shooting an Agent in the head, adopting the very pose taken by a simulacrum of Agent Smith earlier in Neo’s training. Furthermore, their black vinyl couture and sunglasses, contrasting with the sack-like robes they wear outside the Matrix, seems to empower them by evoking the bourgeois connotations of the Agents’ own immaculate suits, thus linking them back to the system they oppose. Who then is the enemy, if the image of the fallen Agent resolving into the lifeless body of some anonymous guard is to be believed? Who is to be saved, if we should thrill to unwitting lobby guards gunned down in slow motion, their shocked responses at Neo’s armory to be laughed at, their newspapers (implying their lack of malice) ripping apart? If their uniforms are meant to designate them as disposable minions of the system, the guards’ close-ups recall those of the rebels’ who were earlier unplugged, raising questions of whether Morpheus’ rationalization that “these people are still part of that system” is enough justify their treatment, and what else might be at stake beyond the rebels-versus-Agents’ feud.

Indeed, by resorting to using their enemies’ weapons against them, The Matrix perhaps muddles its heroes’ call to emancipation. The movie’s central action set pieces, after all, are set within the Matrix or its simulation program, and the ample slow motion and 180-degree pivots around a frozen image of combat encourage our investment in these sequences, hence contradicting somewhat the rebels’ spurning of the traitor Cypher’s declaration of “I choose the Matrix.” Ultimately, too, after Neo manages to completely outpace Agent Smith’s attempts to fight him, he still resorts to diving into Agent Smith’s midriff, visually reciprocating Smith’s earlier penetrative use of the virus against him. The Matrix hence ends, not with an establishing shot on the freed world of Zion, but with Neo flying up and out of sight in the Matrix whose inhabitants he pledges to free. This, then, might spell the extent of his (and our) liberation from the “prison for your mind”: the ability to enact death, destruction and superhuman combat within its confines, and to celebrate this meager power.

If you want an auspicious start with Doc Films, which screens movies every night of the academic year at the University of Chicago, you wouldn’t find it with late-era Stan Brakhage. No offense to the master, but these apparently random film collages failed to make a case against the urgency of my reading assignments. I did make it through Murder Psalm, Brakhage’s 16-minute short that intercuts “found” clips of Mickey Mouse barraging down a city street, trotting warhorses in negative, a corpse being slit, a girl assaulted by the splash of a beach ball on a fountain, another girl driven to an epileptic fit by a flash of lightning, yet another girl staring at her unchanging reflection in the mirror—or is it, etc. There are interpretations to be made here about the multiplicity of violence, identity and horror, though such interpretations may find it harder to justify the interpolating frames of damaged nitrate (one wonders if they were part of the original). To be charitable, I’m clearly still unprepared for the avant-garde, and I’m not yet willing to cede all worth in the movies to the strength of their coherence and readability. But so it goes.

Nonetheless, I am now the proud owner of a Doc Films quarterly pass, which lets you into every. single. movie. that Doc is showing this quarter, a veritable list that includes (in screening order) Gilda, Pather Panchali, McCabe & Mrs Miller, Dr Strangelove, The Kids Are All Right,  The Birth of a Nation, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Intolerance, Back to the Future, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Winter’s Bone, Eyes Wide Shut and I Am Love. So I’m not at all shaken that I dropped down $30 earlier for a slip of paper into 16 minutes of disjointment; it’ll pay itself back. I’m more concerned about the two acquaintances I met earlier who paid $5 each for their regular admission tickets, then came over to ask me what tonight’s film was about. I had to suppress my mirth at their facial expressions when I mentioned the words “avant-garde director”. But, again, so it goes.

Perhaps it is inappropriate that G.W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box will be the last movie I watch before flying 18 hours to the University of Chicago, and into a new chapter of my life. After all, the movie depicts characters who can barely understand or avoid the impulses they chase, even though this inevitably leads them into situations ever more dire. Indeed, in the shot above, Lulu (Louise Brooks) thinks she’s just ensured that things will go back to the way they were. Spoiler alert: they will not.

But I would like to think that I have a better grasp on my future than Lulu does, and the movie also works as fitting emblem for some of my hopes and resolutions. Take this very shot: as she gets dressed for her stage debut, assistants decked out-of-focus around her, you might think the reasons for Lulu’s glee are entirely professional. In truth, she’s just netted a very personal triumph, but you wouldn’t know this if I hadn’t said it (unless you’ve watched the film, of course). Take it from me too, then, that this blog is going to get a lot more personal from now on, since its pegging to my ups and downs as a film-studying undergrad means that my relationship to the movies will advance beyond the occasional rental and formal critique.

Then again, I don’t mean to understate just how far my pre-college cinephilia extends, since I bought Bordwell and Thompson’s magisterial Film History: An Introduction for a bit of enjoyable reading more than two months ago. Thus I can’t see how Pandora’s Box is anything but appropriate for this moment: not only did Nathaniel R fortuitously delay its episode in his inspiring Hit Me with Your Best Shot series so it coincided nicely with my departure; not only does it belong to the silent era, an area of expertise for my university’s film studies department; it also fits into one of the biggest gaps in my movie knowledge that I’m already most eager to fill.

What follows, then, is a list of movies that I’m hoping to catch for the first time (or would like a proper new look at) while in college. They’re divided into the sections of Film History that I’ve read in which they turn up, and Pandora’s Box lies crossed out among them, giving you a glimpse of the kind of tweet-length response that follows when I’ve watched one of them. And of course I’m expecting this list to grow—not least because you might have some to recommend!

Invention and Early Years of the Cinema, 1880s–1904

• A Trip to the Moon (Méliès, ‘02)
• Life of an American Fireman (Porter, ‘03)
• The Great Train Robbery (Porter, ‘03)

International Expansion of the Cinema, 1905–1912

• Films of Max Linder (‘07–’17)
• The Revenge of a Kinematograph Cameraman [stop motion] (Starevicz, ‘12)

National Cinemas, Hollywood Classicism, and World War I, 1913–1919

• The Student of Prague [an Autorenfilm] (Rye, ‘13)
• Fantômas [French serial] (Feuillade, ‘13–’14)
• Cabiria [Italian epic] (Pastrone, ‘14)
• The Birth of a Nation (Griffith, ‘15): A quaint, laborious, vilely effective KKK propaganda piece
• Intolerance (Griffith, ‘16)
• The Keys to Happiness (Protazanov, ‘15)
• Father Sergius (Protazanov, ‘17)
• The Immigrant (Chaplin, ‘17)

France in the 1920s

• The Tenth Symphony (Gance, ‘18)

Germany in the 1920s

• The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (Wiene, ‘20)
• Nosferatu (Murnau, ‘22)
• Metropolis (Lang, ‘27)
• The Joyless Street (Pabst, ‘25)
• Pandora’s Box (Pabst, ‘29): Brooks radiates impulsiveness; script, staging and actors make you care for the equally doomed people in her orbit
• The White Hell of Pitz Palu (Pabst, ‘29)

Soviet Cinema in the 1920s

• Aelita (Protazanov, ‘24): Cockamamie mix of melodrama, sight gags, stagey set pieces, and Soviet Martian revolutions
• The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (Kuleshov, ‘24)
• The Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein, ‘25)
• Mother (Pudovkin, ‘26)
• The House on Trubnaia Square (Barnet, ‘28)
• Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov, ‘29)
• Fragment of an Empire (Ermler, ‘29)

Late Silent Era in Hollywood, 1920–1928

• The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Ingram, ‘21)
• Wings (Wellman, ‘27)
• Safety Last [starring H Lloyd] (Newmeyer and Taylor, ‘13)
• The Circus (Chaplin, ‘27)
• The General (Keaton and Bruckman, ‘27)
• Putting Pants on Philip [starring Laurel & Hardy] (Bruckman, ‘27)
• Sunrise (Murnau, ‘27)
• 7th Heaven (Borzage, ‘27)
• The Docks of New York (Von Sternberg, ‘28)

International Trends of the 1920s

• The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, ‘28)
• Vampyr (Dreyer, ‘32)
• Un Chien Andalou [Surrealism] (Buñuel, ‘28)
• The Fall of the House of Usher (Watson and Webber, ‘28)
• Nanook of the North (Flaherty, ‘28)

Introduction of Sound

• The Jazz Singer (Crosland, ‘27)
• Blackmail (Hitchcock, ‘29)
• M (Lang, ‘31)

Hollywood Studio System, 1930–1945

• All Quiet on the Western Front (Milestone, ‘30)
• Min and Bill (Hill, ‘30)
• Trouble in Paradise (Lubitsch, ‘32)
• Holiday (Cukor, ‘38): Fairest standoff of Freedom against Sensibility I’ve seen in Hollywood romantic idealism. Grant and Hepburn lovely, fragile
• The Shop Around the Corner (Lubitsch, ‘40): Unhurried, humane, equal parts bittersweet and warm. Masterful handling of a potentially treacly premise
• Citizen Kane (Welles, ‘41)
• The Lady Eve (Sturges, ‘41): Stanwyck’s masterclass in sensuality, intelligence, emotional clarity & comic wizardry. Deftly paced, if a bit boisterous
• The Magnificent Ambersons (Welles, ‘42)

Other Studio Systems

• Madam and Wife (Gosho, ‘31)
• Wife, Be Like a Rose! (Naruse, ‘35)
• Humanity and Paper Balloons (Yamanaka, ‘37)

Cinema and the State: the USSR, Germany and Italy, 1930–1945

• Chapayev [Socialist Realism] (Sergei and Vasiliev, ‘34)
• Triumph of the Will (Riefenstahl, ‘35)

France: Poetic Realism, the Popular Front and the Occupation, 1930–1945

• The Rules of the Game (Renoir, ‘39)
• La Vie est à Nous (Renoir et al, ‘36)

Leftist, Documentary and Experimental Cinemas, 1930–1945

• Kuhle Wampe [written by Brecht] (Dudow, ‘32)
• The Plow that Broke the Plains / The River (Lorentz, ‘36/’37)

American Cinema in the Postwar Era, 1945–1960

• The Best Years of Our Lives (Wyler, ‘46)
• Gilda (Vidor, ‘46): A draggy, curious noir on triangular obsession; only Hayworth earns and keeps her status as bearer/object of hatred and desire
• Letter from an Unknown Woman (Ophüls, ‘48)
• The Lady from Shanghai (Welles, ‘48)
• Adam’s Rib (Cukor, ‘49): A shocking, revealing play at Tracy/Hepburn’s relationship. Outraged, sex-minded, needy Hepburn a surprise
• Sunset Boulevard (Wilder, ‘50)
• The Searchers (Ford, ‘56)
• Touch of Evil (Welles, ‘58)
• Psycho (Hitchcock, ‘60)

Postwar European Cinema: Neorealism and its Context, 1945–1959

• The Bicycle Thief (De Sica, ‘48)

Postwar European Cinema: France, Scandinavia and Britain, 1945–1959

• Day of Wrath (Dreyer, ‘43)
• The Earrings of Madame De… (Ophüls, ‘53)

Postwar Cinema Beyond the West, 1945–1959

• Sanshô the Bailiff (Mizoguchi, ‘54)

Art Cinema and the Idea of Authorship

• Diary of a Country Priest (Bresson, ‘51)
• Pather Panchali (Ray, ‘55): Loose vignettes rooted in rhythm to the life of poor, rural Indian family. Charming, eye-opening, at times very sad
• Persona (Bergman, ‘66)
• Blow-Up (Antonioni, ‘66)
• Play Time (Tati, ‘67)

Hollywood’s Fall and Rise: 1960–1980

• 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, ‘68): Sublimely scored opera of primal visions, riveting sci-fi worldbuilding, boldly deliberate thriller. A triumph
• McCabe & Mrs Miller (Altman, ‘71): Hazily, expansively grounded in its small-town locale and western tropes. Beatty at his muffled best
• Back to the Future (Zemeckis, ‘85): A peak of 80s fantasy aesthetic. Joyfully contrived sets and scenarios, campy hindsight time-travel jokes galore
• The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Sharman, ‘75): Brilliantly deranged, yet oddly unmoving; this movie demands the big screen, and crowd call-and-response

… not understanding why Sally said the story of her life hadn’t started yet…

… because mine feels like it’s already begun.

Thirty-three years later, here I come!

“God save Illinois.”