Film, the measure of all things

Another important difference between the two films is that Amen. has so many facts to impart that its only concern when it comes to style and form appears to be what will allow the audience to absorb this information, whereas Irreversible is so formally and stylistically aggressive that this aspect overpowers what it has to say, which isn’t much.

Whatever one decides, it becomes a rationalization either for Noe’s violence or for our willingness to tolerate it. If Irreversible has any value it lies in our pondering which form of rationalization we’re engaging in.

Noe’s film is more fashionable — and getting much more media attention — than Amen. on both sides of the Atlantic because of its “edginess,” but that doesn’t necessarily mean we can learn more from it. I would argue that its status as a fashion statement discourages us from learning much from it. The envelope it pushes is new only in the degree of its ugly explicitness, not in the broaching of new subject matter.

Amen. shows us nothing of the atrocities it deals with, but it still has a lot to say. This makes it the precise reverse of Irreversible, which ultimately speaks about nothing but shows us everything.

Ben Barenholtz kept Eraserhead playing in theaters at midnight for week after week and month after month before the film finally found its audience, thereby launching the career of David Lynch. There were only twenty-­five people in the theater on opening night in New York’s Cinema Village in 1977, twenty-­four the second night, but Barenholtz persisted and kept the film running for almost a year. A year later, Barenholtz opened it again in New York at the Waverly, where it more than doubled its first run — playing ninety-nine weekends through mid-­September 1981, a run that ended only when the theater closed to build a second screen. According to Lynch himself, there was never a single point when the film simply “took off”: “It was a very gradual incline.” But it proved that persistence of this kind — which is possible only in independent theaters, at least according to the way most chains are run — can eventually reap spectacular dividends, especially when it comes to creating and developing new markets.