MARTIN: Yes.
ROGER: -- and about their souls, their guilt, their anguish. And here these people are at arms length. I loved the film too, because once again though its kind of like a dream. The narrator comes down from above and thinks about this material, rather than really being up to his neck in it.
MARTIN: Well, it takes you to a place in time. It takes you to a place You begin to think about you know, what are we as human beings, what are these soldiers doing on this primeval island?
ROGER: Do you think that audiences are open-minded when they see a film that doesn't play just like a standard TV movie?
MARTIN: No, I'm worried that they're not at this point. That's what worries me.
ROGER: Yeah. I worry about that, too.
MARTIN: I'm very worried. That's why I think "The Thin Red Line" is so important. You could come in the middle of it, you can watch it. It's almost like an endless picture. It has no beginning and no end. People say, "Well, sometimes I can't tell whose voiceover it is." It doesn't matter. It's everybody's voiceover.
Segment IV
MARTIN: Now I'm cheating a bit with my choice for the Number 1 film in the '90s, because it was actually made in '86. But it didn't really become widely known in the United States until the early '90s, which is when I saw it for the first time. It's called "Horse Thief," and it was made in Tibet by the mainland Chinese director Tian Zhuangzhuang. The story of the film is as simple and elemental as the lives of the people it depicts: a man is ostracized from his tribe for stealing horses, his living conditions become so severe that his son dies, he repents and is accepted back into the fold, and he's forced to steal horses again to keep his second child alive.
CLIP
MARTIN: Now, I have a great interest in anthropology, and Tian takes you inside a culture that, initially, felt as distant to me as the surface of the moon. And because he stays so simple and so specific, the point of view becomes universal. This is what life is all about: struggling to keep your family alive. "Horse Thief" was a real inspiration to me. It's that rare thing: a genuinely transcendental film.
ROGER: This movie is like an Italian neo-realist film. It made me think of "The Bicycle Thief," although it's more despairing even than "The Bicycle Thief." It's about people who are hungry and who are cold. He's walking around in the snow barefoot at one time. And his choice is be a horse thief or be dead you know, be a horse thief or my child starves and he's already lost one child.
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