GREAT SCENES
Titanic (James Cameron, 1997) 

As reality sets in on the RMS Titanic, the string orchestra plays “Nearer, My God, to Thee” — at least according to a handful of eyewitnesses and four films based on the disaster. The most recent of these, Cameron’s blockbuster romance, returns in 3D this weekend to mark the 100th anniversary of the ocean liner’s maiden voyage.

Did it really happen? Does it really matter? For a brief moment, anyway, Cameron captures the spirit of cinema’s pioneering populists, D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille.

GREAT SCENES
The Searchers (John Ford, 1956) 

Shot 1: Ethan Edwards arrives on horseback with Debbie.

A man will search his heart and soul

Shot 2: For a simple man like Mose Harper, happiness comes in the form of a rocking chair.

Go searchin’ way out there

Shot 3: Ethan returns Debbie to her relatives. He stands on the porch and looks on wistfully.

His peace of mind he knows he’ll find 

The camera pulls back, revealing the visual motif of the framed doorway — the impenetrable barrier between danger and refuge, loneliness and fulfillment — one last time. 

But where, O Lord 
Lord where?

Enter Martin Pawley and Laurie Jorgensen, exuberant young lovers reunited at last. As they step inside the doorway, Ethan turns and walks off into the distance.

Ride away
Ride away
Ride away 

In a stroke of visual and aural poetry, Ford closes the door on one of the most haunted figures in American cinema.

GREAT SCENES
Mr. Edison at Work in His Chemical Laboratory (William Heise/James White, 1897)

Born today — February 11: American inventor Thomas Alva Edison, whose 1,093 credited patents include the kinetoscope, the first fully functional motion picture camera.

By 1893, construction was complete on the world first film production studio, the Black Maria in West Orange, New Jersey. Here, cinematographers captured Edison at work in a mock staging of his actual chemical laboratory.

For Edison, who often employed ruthless tactics to advance his inventions — including bribing a theater owner in London for a copy of Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon, then showing the film in New York City without compensating Méliès — the arrival of sound in motion pictures “spoiled everything.” In an interview with Reader’s Digest in March 1930, he cited D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation as his favorite film.

GREAT SCENES
A Better Tomorrow / 英雄本色 (John Woo, 1986)

In a spirited homage to Johnny Boy’s entrance in Mean Streets, Mark Gor (Chow Yun-fat) sashays his way into a restaurant before a shootout.

With A Better Tomorrow, Woo ignited the “heroic bloodshed” genre of Hong Kong action cinema, combining operatic montage sequences, charismatic criminals as protagonists and recurring themes of redemption and chivalry.

GREAT SCENES
Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949) 

“That’s the order of human life and history: to expect such immediate happiness is a mistake. Happiness isn’t something you wait around for. It’s something you create yourself. Happiness comes only through effort.”

—

Born today — 12 December: Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu (小津 安二郎), who, despite never marrying, captured gentle, profound portraits of families through the lens of marriage, death and generational differences in postwar Japan.

After a protracted battle with cancer, Ozu passed away in his hometown of Tokyo on his birthday in 1963. He was 60.

Ozu’s signature style — static visual compositions and austere, contemplative frames — has gone on to influence a generation of contemporary filmmakers, among them Jia Zhangke, Mike Leigh, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang and Wim Wenders, who once called Ozu his “only master.”