Thanks to what might be described as a cataclysmic montage of historical and fictional narratives, also known as a “surprise ending,” A Talking Picture enforces reflection as few films do. I can’t quite argue with critics who withheld the details of this conclusion, because a completely cold first viewing so effectively reproduces the hermeneutic experience of September 11th. The catastrophe that cuts short the film’s 80-odd minutes of conversation precisely relates that day’s shock of historical self-consciousness—the epiphany that what’s passed was prologue to a historical drama underway before most of us realized.

Accordingly, few films reward the return visit a DVD allows quite like A Talking Picture, which becomes something of a film à clef. Our pre-WTC state of ignorance seems preserved in the travelogue sequence with the professor and her daughter’s visitation of dead civilizations. They tour the ruins of bygone, stricken empires and review their legends, never with an inkling that their own fate is written on the crumbling walls. To a second-time viewer the dialogue and images come alive like a haunted forest with warnings and lessons, prophecies and farewells. The opening shot of crowds on shore waving goodbye to the camera, the tale of Pompeii as divine retribution: it’s now a world of grotesque signs and omens, like that little dog tied to a boat that drifts back and forth, pulling him closer to the edge each time. The anxious paranoia of a second look at A Talking Picture captures the moment after the attacks when we succumbed to furious retrospection, obsessive scanning of history, and desperate reverse engineering, all far too late.

My first experience seemed a little boring by contrast, as I had stupidly decided the pacing was some indulgent sequel to the wistful reflexivity of I’m Going Home. But that’s the genius behind de Oliveira’s dramatic structure, which, assiduously flat, sails blandly forward, past suspense, romance, etc., assembling elegant international celebrities who appear one by one to be safely seated at the captain’s table. The travelogue’s unflappable, monumental sense of time creates the conditions for the captain’s whispered announcement, which, like most awful news, seems some sloppy joke or misheard rumor. And as soon as de Oliveira has recast his entire film in a single flash, he ends it. And there we are. The artifice of the professor’s efficient lectures and interviews and the civilized (and civilizing) conversation come to embody that comforting, false sense of order, before everything became exciting for all the wrong reasons.
—NICOLAS RAPOLD