It is a Flemish tradition for children to write a “New Year’s letter” and to read it out loud to their parents and godparents on the first of January. As the tradition prescribes, the children solemnly declare their New Year’s resolutions before being handed their presents. For the first week of 2021, we’ve selected films that feature beautiful letters. Unlike the tradition though, the letters in these films are all love letters in their own right.
Juventude em marcha [Colossal Youth] (Pedro Costa, 2006)
“Every day, every minute, I learn beautiful new words for you and me alone – made to fit us both, like fine silk pyjamas,” Ventura recites in Juventude em marcha. When Pedro Costa made Casa de Lava in 1995, people from the Cape Verde Islands asked him to take letters with him to their loved ones who moved to Portugal in search for a better life. He became their postman of sorts, and these letters granted him a key to Fontainhas: the Lisbon neighbourhood where most Cape Verdeans lived and to which he would dedicate the greater part of his oeuvre to this day. The letter Ventura repeats as if he were rehearsing it, with small variations in each repetition, is composed as a montage, a collage of fragments from real letters by emigrants and the famous “Letter to Youki” by Robert Desnos, sent from the Buchenwald concentration camp. Juventude em marcha is available on The Criterion Channel.
The Shop Around the Corner (Ernst Lubitsch, 1940)
A man and a woman fall in love with each other. As much as this is the film, it is not. The man and woman we see on the screen can’t stand one another. Employees at a shop in Budapest, he is the top salesman and she is the new girl: they are rivalling colleagues. They both correspond with an anonymous other through letters on “cultural subjects”. Unaware that they are in fact writing to each other, they swiftly switch subject matter to the subject of love, “naturally on a very cultural level”. “What else can you do in a letter?” he asks himself. And so, they both fall in love with the author of the letters they receive. You can watch The Shop Around the Corner here.
Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thom Andersen, 2003)
“This is the city: Los Angeles, California. They make movies here. I live here. Sometimes I think that gives me the right to criticize the way movies depict my city.” Thom Andersen deals with his two loves – his hometown and the cinema – by looking at and listening to the moments where the two intersect. He writes a history of the city by taking a critical look at the way others have filmed it. Except for the voice-over, written by Andersen and narrated by Encke King, Los Angeles Plays Itself does not so much feature a beautiful letter as it is one itself. It is a love letter. Kanopy offers the film here.
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