Do the Right Thing
Kurosawa’s Stray Dog takes place during a Tokyo midsummer heat wave and you can really feel it!
Strange, thought I posted a reply here. Seems to have vanished into the night…
Watching Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tokyo Fist at the cinema first time I was impressed by the overwhelming feeling of heat in the opening scenes. Reflecting off the white apartment blocks onto the poor chap below. The sense of disorientation, the rotting corpse…
Unfortunately it’s never really worked for me in any small-screen version I’ve seen. Maybe heat just doesn’t work on DVD. Maybe you just need a really big screen. I dunno.
night at the golden eagle could make anyone sweat.
Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Pitfall
REAR WINDOW
The Shining. When you listen to Wendy Carlos’ score during the final hedge maze scene, it sounds like your spine is freezing. Oooh, chilling! I love that movie!
Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Cool Hand Luke. “Gettin’ some water here, boss!”
Several parts of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly for sure. Especially when Clint is dragged out in the desert.
I just watched Do the Right Thing for the first time yesterday, and it definitely conveys temperature really well. Everyone’s pretty sweaty, but beyond that everyone acts like they would if it were really hot. Plus people get angrier when its hot. Superkal beat me to it, though.
I felt the heat when I watched Do The Right Thing, and I felt the cold when I watched The Thing. Both do a masterful job of conveying the temp.
Heat:
Lawrence of Arabia (Lean)
Giant (Stevens)
I Live In Fear (Kurosawa)
Tokyo Story (Ozu)
The Bridge on the River Kwai (Lean)
Dry Summer (Erksan)
The Night of the Iguana (Huston)
The Wages of Fear (Clouzot)
Purple Noon (Clément)
The Passenger (Antonioni)
Zabriskie Point (Antonioni)
The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly (Leone)
Cold:
Dersu Uzala (Kurosawa)
The Ascent (Shepitko)
Time Stood Still (Olmi)
Into the Wild (Penn)
Vagabond (Varda)
Picnic at Hanging Rock has that dreamy, squinty, summertime haze to it, which turns into a nauseous swelter pretty fast, i.e. when the girls start shedding their clothes and passing out on the rocks. I thought that scene portrayed sickening, oppressive natural heat very well.
“Body Heat”
Heat amplifies desire.
Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear
Don’t kill me, but I saw The Day After Tomorrow when I was 10, and ended up wrapped in several hundred blankets
@Supercal: LOL.
How about Some Like it Hot? Got ‘hot’ right in the title.
Argh, septuple post. You’ll have to excuse me. I guess that’s what happens when you “lag out” at 3AM.
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HEAT
Kurosawa’s Drunken Angel
Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes
COLD
Bergman’s Winter Light
Carpenter’s The Thing
cold:
the ice storm.
doctor zhivago.
hot:
dune
kikujurio
I think of two immediately:
Do the Right Thing (which is mentioned above) — red walls and filters used to create the hot atmosphere.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich — ice blue filter to convey the 50 degrees below zero temperature of a Siberian labor camp. I happened to see this film in an overly air-conditioned theater so the cold effect was enhanced.
Falling Down
Bug
Touch of Evil
Sugar Cane Alley
Gerry
The Year of Living Dangerously
When it comes to the depiction of tropical climate, you begin to see that filmmakers treating themes of colonialism and imperialism have done it most directly & effectively (and by extension that point also covers many a space-colonizing kind of sci-fi film): Lean; Denis; Joffé; Beresford; Weir; Annaud; Pontecorvo; Boorman; Herzog…Coppola of course in Apocalypse Now…
Terrestrial cold = dystopia, human hardscrabble struggle, siege: Altman’s Quintet; The Thing, of course; Alexander Nevsky; Ice Station Zebra, etc…
Easily ‘A Streetcar Named Desire.’ The t-shirt drenched with sweat on Brando, the claustophobic setting, that music, the placement of the lighting (from above for a glaring look). It was wintertime when I watched it and it felt like it was 90 degrees outside.
david lincoln brooks
What are some films, in your experience, which very well manage to convey a sense of temperature…?
Is there a picture which definitely makes you feel great heat? Is there a film which makes you very cold just by looking at it?
Conversely, there are times when I get no temperature cues from a movie; I’m watching JULES ET JIM tonight, and never do I get a good sense of just how warm or cool is the France we’re looking at… To my eye, it could be anything from 55degF…..to 80degF……… rather cool to rather warm… and yet the vegetation—- and the clothes the characters wear—— do not give me clues as to what the temperature must be.
Your thoughts?