Sunday, November 7, 2021

The Greatest Dissolve in Movie History?


Over at Jaime Weinman's fine website "Something Old, Nothing New," there's a discussion about the scarcity of dissolves in US movies post-1968. Weinman et al. seem a bit off the mark in terms of timing. (MTV and its all-encompassing 80s stupidity would eventually drive the last nail into that coffin). In the work of 70s American New Wave directors (Coppola, DePalma, Scorsese, Altman, Cimino, Penn, Malick, Robert Benton) there are frequent and sometimes astonishing uses of the effect. (Altman's Thieves Likes Us from '74 seems like one long emerald-toned dissolve.)

In fact, did the 1970s, in terms of thematic and emotional power, give us the greatest dissolve in movie history?

Michael Corleone has lost his father and eldest brother, and is now haunted by memories and images of an imagined past. He has moved his family out of its New York sanctuary to the open mountains of Nevada. His older sister hates and shuns him, because of the murder of her husband, ordered by Michael. He has renounced his older brother Fredo. And he blames his wife for the recent loss of their child.

Michael comes to his own mother, to ask what it's all about.