Nicolas Winding Refn has a powerful feel for tone and a good pictorial eye. I appreciate the way he tries to use elements of form and style to provide more evocative experiences - e.g., the way he intimates eyeline matches and shot-reverse shots in non-contiguous spaces. He's a guy with a sharp and insistent sense of how he wants to get a story across through formal elements that aren't totally conventionalized, and it doesn't all amount to serving the narrative so much as it does creating and sustaining a tonal structure. Indirectly or directly he owes a clear debt to the 1980s axis of Cimino-Mann-Friedkin, as well as the rise of Tarantinoism in the following decade. It's the fascination with (slightly) older media forms - title card fonts, killer throwaway shots, just the right ambient music - that aligns him with Tarantino in my mind. It's as if he studied, valiantly, the entire back catalog of sleek and not-so-sleek genre product in the video store circa 1996.

Like James Wan with The Conjuring, Winding Refn's approach in Only God Forgives is deeply satisfying on some level because it's a pop/genre film that trusts its audience to have an aesthetic experience that doesn't boil down to breathless A-to-B-to-C narration, pompously confused political "THEMES (!!!)," and quirky sarcasm. (The Nolan-Whedon death grip on mass-market genre cinema is 100% stultifying, in my view. I'd rather just sit and watch American Ninja II a dozen times in a row, frankly.) Nevertheless, this doesn't mean that Wan or NWR just get a free pass. I also think these two directors share a sense of unfulfilled potential. Their work, even when good, often feels shallow.

Now it's worth pausing for a second to parse out what that might mean. In many cases, people use the word "shallow" (or a synonym) to refer to a lack or failure of three-dimensional characterization or overt thematization. But if these elements are missing, I'm not bothered by their absence per se. This isn't the precise meaning of "shallowness" that concerns me. A lot of great cinema, and art in general, features characters who lack depth and are deliberately not drawn to suggest interiority or believable motivation. I fully and absolutely believe that work that limns the superficial can in fact be great and, well, "deep." To varying degrees, I feel about The Conjuring and Only God Forgives, like Drive, Bronson, Pusher, Saw, even Insidious (which I adore), that these don't trust their instincts enough. They follow their focus enough to create beautiful, stylized, lovingly textured objects but really only seem to have a self-belief in their own effects and not always in what these effects might achieve as full-blown works of art ... even if "low" art ... even if self-conscious pastiche high-low art.

(Valhalla Rising, by the way, I pretty much exempt from these criticisms. For me it's a minor masterpiece and by far NWR's best work that I've seen, one that achieves depth through its evocative play with surfaces and unknowns. Contra dominant tendencies, it doesn't try to explain everything.)

Of course this ignores other important facets of the work. Plenty to be said about Only God Forgives as a weird kind of orientalist text. These are other things worth addressing ...

World for Ransom (Robert Aldrich, 1954)

The Girl from Nowhere (Jean-Claude Brisseau, 2012)

I haven't watched this yet; it's just a placeholder and a heads-up.

Regarding 12 Years a Slave, I have mixed feelings. I do think it is a very viscerally powerful film, and in some sense the historical trauma of American slavery can always use further cinematic exploration given the relative dearth of films that make this a central topic. (Playing to "white liberal guilt" can sometimes be a dreadful thing. In cases where it prompts people to try to think - really - about the lives of those in situations much more dire and dangerous than their own, however, then please, bring on the guilt.) That said, I also think that Steve McQueen is actually a fairly conventional prestige filmmaker. (I have only also seen Hunger; not Shame.) It's not unheard of for art world people to come into cinema and actually have a more or less pedestrian approach the medium. Perhaps "pedestrian" is harsh. McQueen actually strikes me as a pretty good conventional filmmaker. I'd rather there were more Oscarbait films like Hunger or 12 Years a Slave than some of the treacly junk that have invaded multiplexes in recent holiday seasons.

But while I'm sympathetic, in many ways, to denunciations of 12 Years a Slave as a form of (very respectable) torture porn, I still wonder ... why is it that the prism of pornography has become the only way we ever read images and narratives that depict blood and broken skin anymore? Jonathan Rosenbaum has recently posed a question:

What 12 Years a Slave, The Act of Killing, Bastards, and A Touch of Sin(the latter, for me, the best of a dubious lot) all seem to be proposing, in different ways, is that the shocks and jolts of exploitation filmmaking are the most expressive tools we have in order to arrive at the truth about the world we live in. But what is this truth, finally, but that venerable chestnut, “It’s only a movie”? 

I'm not entirely unsympathetic to Rosenbaum's question. And while I only really like two of the four movies he mentions above, I probably like all of them as individual films more than he does. What I wonder, however, is why it has also come to be that any "explicit" or "graphic" content now comes to stand in as the route of exploitation? This strikes me as akin to saying that any film that employs nonlinear narrative structure or a few jump cuts is automatically taking the art cinema route to narration, and from there assuming that there is a monolithic opinion to be had about (all) art cinema and (the entirety of) its effects on narration.

I don't want to dismiss the very real connections that exist between exploitation film and other, more respectable genres and modes of production. In general these things need to be parsed out even more explicitly. But all the same. Could there be a different vocabulary for us to use to discuss films that might push the limits of violence, sex, and sordid behavior and yet not be "exploitative"? On some level, otherwise, I feel like this threatens to be an unsophisticated blanket condemnation of the films' audience.

Norman Z. McLeod and W.C. Fields.

ETA for a year's end blog post - Saturday, January 4. That's the day after The Great Beauty opens here in Chicago at the Music Box, and I'm hoping to see it on Friday or Saturday and that will be my chosen cut-off for the films that might make Ye Olde Top Ten List, and those that will have to wait to be seen later. This year I've actually seen more commercial movies than I have in many previous calendar years. So I'm going to pretend like I'm 20 years old again and make a real life, honest-to-god top ten list to commemorate 2013 In Film. Of course lists like these are often a little bit silly and useless, but (a) I'll be including comments on most of the films, not just listing them straight-up, and (b) if I can get people interested in seeing or re-evaluating even just one title, then it's worthwhile. Plus, "YOLO" (as Fritz Lang would say).

(No guarantees that it will consist of exactly ten films, strictly speaking. Still working that part out. I think overall it was a solid year for feature-length cinema.)

In 2014, bloggish activities might include more content related to novels I read, and hopefully a little bit more focus on a few areas of cinema where my viewing and writing have lately grown too slack: African films, particularly from sub-Saharan nations; Scandinavian and Eastern European films; and more experimental work in film, video, multimedia.

Ida Lupino. Not yet sure which film she was making here.

In the past twelve months I caught a respectable number of new releases. However, I didn't see too many new documentaries, and virtually no recent experimental work. This is a real shame, as these areas could more readily use exposure than a lot of the mainstream and arthouse hits I discuss below. Also I wish that I had delved a little deeper into the No Budge stuff. I'm sure I missed a few gems. So, while I saw more new titles this year than usual, what I focused on tended towards the narrative feature film a little more than usual, too. In that respect, my list and my comments about the year are themelves probably more boring and predictable than they would sometimes otherwise be.

I don't mean to wring my hands excessively. It's just that I know the soporific effect of the same 12-15 titles that crop up on list after list at year's end. And my contribution, frankly, isn't so far from upper-middlebrow/highbrow consensus.

In any event I'll try to do better on all counts in 2014.

ACCURSED SHARE / FILM MAUDIT OF THE YEAR











Although Spring Breakers is a solid runner-up in this category, I really want to highlight Only God Forgives, which has stuck with me and remained more resonant than Korine's film. Overall I'm highly ambivalent. Through its imagery, its soundscape and lush score by Cliff Martinez, its sense of pace and flow, its cohesive range of acting styles emulating dreams of old viewings of 1980s action movies seen late at night, its beautifully jagged editing principles that tweak continuity and contiguity in ways the old Noël Burch might have appreciated - through all these things, Only God Forgives is a stunning achievement. If everything here were on the same level, this would easily be one of the very best films of the year. But it also doesn't seem to direct these elements into very productive or interesting directions; it caves in on itself. I worry that rather than building into some kind of fascinating portrait it all becomes an echo chamber of movie-movie referentiality, and that this referentiality serves as an excuse for half-baked and trite representational strategies with regard to ethnicity, nation, sexuality, etc. Things are "dark" and "mysterious" for reasons unclear, except that we know these things are cool. Nicolas Winding Refn is - like Spielberg, Shayamalan, Tarantino, or Wan - a filmmaker with incredible talent and vision who also seems prone to making some bad or timid choices. Perhaps it's down to taste; perhaps he doesn't trust his audience or himself. I'm not sure I've arrived at an explanation for that yet. The fact that this has appeared prominently in so many worst-of-the-year lists (often, weirdly, right in the #2 slot) might even speak to the ways in which it is effective. I'm on board with criticisms of the film for its ideological-representational inanities. As for those who foreground instead how its acting is bad or its plot is messy ... well, they can stick to their award-winning titles for their own pleasure and we'll all be happier for it.

A few lines for films that I wanted to love, but didn't - yet hope to love in the future. Maybe. I have to admit to varying degrees of disappointment in Bullet in the Head (Walter Hill), The Canyons (Paul Schrader), The East (Zal Batmanglij), Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel), Passion (Brian De Palma), and To the Wonder (Terrence Malick).

ASTERISKS











There is also the issue of films made this year by friends, acquaintances, collaborators, etc. - many of whom I've had a beer with, at least, and a couple of these projects I even contributed some very modest funds. These are works that do not need special pleading and can stand on their own considerable merits. But for two reasons I'm cordoning them off in their own honorable mention category here. One, I tend not to want to "meet the band" and for that reason I have a hard time feeling like art by people I know, especially in real life and before they ever made these works, is indistinguishable from art by people I don't know at all or have met only in passing. Two, this gives me a chance to free up more slots in my top ten list. Since this isn't a ballot for any poll, I feel no urge then to advocate for these works in that particular way. BUT! You should not hesitate for one second to see, if you haven't, Gabe Klinger's Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater(delicate nuances here about what propels people to make art); Dan Sallitt's The Unspeakable Act (which brings distinctive acting styles, not mere retreads of what we see elsewhere in independent cinema, under an assured overarching aesthetic; the climactic scene struck me with the force of the kind of revelation you see every once in a while in Ozu); Ignatiy Vishnevetsky's Ellie Lumme (its Chicago is deeply colorful and beautiful); Craig Keller's Fait Accompli: Episode 1: Caused(another very beautiful work to look at and seep into); and Gina Telaroli's Traveling Light, which has some traces of the 1970s structural film but - I'll say as an Amtrak veteran in years past, myself - has a very embodied and yet defamiliarized effect which I found warmer than the term "structural" might connote. I would feel guilty about leaving some of these off of an actual list but for the fact that I don't think anyone considers me a critic, technically, anyway. So it's not as though you could add me to the chorus of "over 50 critics top ten lists!"

For 2014 and beyond: Please keep an eye out for my friendRamon PeBenito, who has been working on small projects as well and starting to branch out into short films, series, and who knows what else. 

HONORABLE MENTIONS












Some more honorable mentions, many of which I'd be happy to have round out a top ten list in a year where I didn't see or like as much as this one: At Berkeley (Frederick Wiseman, 2013: the great American documentarian of institutions is himself an institution of the best kind; thanks to a kind soul who hooked me up for this one), Berberian Sound Studio(Peter Strickland, 2012: would make a fascinating double bill with Pontypool), Drug War (Johnnie To, 2012: captivating, and on another day, might have snuck onto the top ten list; I prefer it to his recent Blind Detective), In Another Country (Hong Sang-soo, 2012: "minor" but in a very pleasant way), It's All So Quiet (Nanouk Leopold, 2013), Kid-Thing (David Zellner, 2012: the spirit of Tootie Smith is kind of alive and well), Like Someone in Love (Abbas Kiarostami, 2012: in need of a revisit to be honest - I watched it in a tired and distracted state), Night Across the Street (Raul Ruiz, 2012), Nightfall (James Benning, 2012: lovely climax), Perfect Thoughts (Doron Max Hagay, 2013), Something in the Air (Olivier Assayas, 2012: played me like an instrument), Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley, 2013: gentle, minor in a good way), Walker (Tsai Ming-liang, 2012: patience), You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet (Alain Resnais, 2012: metametametameta).

FAVORITES

This is a top eleven list because I had composed a tentative top ten, and was just waiting to see a few more movies this week before publishing everything. The film I designated beforehand as my 'cut-off' movie ended up blowing me away, but instead of letting good ol' Jia fall off, I decided simply to expand the list. Plus that's how Olaf Möller does a lot of his end-of-year mentions, in honor of eleven players on a soccer team. So that's good enough for me. I saw the majority of these, but not all, in theatrical release this year ...











11. A Touch of Sin (Jia Zhang Ke, China, 2013) Any one of the stories here could have sustained an entire feature on its own; put the four incidents together and you have an image of a society straining itself outwards to the breaking point. Growth and opportunity have their dark flipsides, this approach is a bit schematic but nevertheless feels full of flesh and blood, desperation, and cathartic, terrifying acts of violence.












10. The Girl from Nowhere (Jean-Claude Brisseau, France, 2012) How things have changed, and yet how much has remained the same, in the decade since the sumptuous extravagances of Secret Things. With Brisseau, well, 21st century Brisseau in particular, I always start out his work with the creeping suspicion that this will be a Dirty Old Man's apologia for himself, but the films always expand in surprising and enriching ways. Of course, having seen some of his earlier work from the 1980s and 1990s as well, I realize that this is not the case - the spiritual and stylistic dimensions of the work ground him a different lineage altogether. This austerely beautiful, gently charming film work requires a few more repeat viewings - it feels like a novella that goes by breezily and, upon reaching the end, the realization hits that all the deepest and most important threads seemed invisible.












9. Sun Don't Shine (Amy Seimetz, USA, 2012) Glistening skin on slightly overcast skies suggests oppressive heat and angst. I love the way everything about the tangled emotional history the two leads have is never fully explained but instead left for one's imagination to fill in. Macabre Southern dread meets aimless white twentysomething aimlessness. It's beautiful and uncomfortable at the same time. You can infer a whole lifetime behind Kate Lyn Shiel's sad-scared-determined eyes here; for me she's captivating in the way that many people find Greta Gerwig captivating. Seimetz (also an actress; one of the leads in Upstream Color) is one to watch.










8. Neighboring Sounds (Kleber Mendonça Filho, Brazil, 2012) Local-historical palimpsest at its finest. One of the best depictions of a community as a "living" thing, in real spaces, with generations and cause and effect, in recent memory. Dread is pervasive but not necessarily oppressive here. Aaron Cutler put it in a succinct way when he noted a little while back, "A society based on class division also runs on class-based suspicion."Neighboring Sounds also reminded me a little of Scorsese, in parts, and in that sense I'd rank it favorably in comparison not only to this year's American Hustle, but also the popular Brazilian film City of God.












7. Museum Hours (Jem Cohen, USA/Austria, 2012) A simple approach to a refreshing category of human interaction, the incidental friendship. For years I've longed to come across more movies that told stories like these. Cassavetes and many microbudget filmmakers mine this terrority but there is something in the pristine way this chance encounter is handled that I can't forget or overlook. What happens when circumstances prompt two people who don't really know each other to share intimacies for an indeterminate amount of time? Here painting and sculpture become reflective media, conversational media, as much as artworks in themselves. A really lovely movie.











6.Student (Darezhan Omirbayev, Kazakhstan, 2012) Omirbayev is always interesting; Student may even be his strongest film. I'd say there were a few minor missteps in the timing and editing that moved too eagerly for wry laughs and rhetorical jabs, but in the bigger scheme these were negligible. Student is an absorbing, clear, slow-burn kind of movie, wearing its status as Crime and Punishment adaptation lightly yet in no way shortchanging the gravitas of the material. That's part of its power: it achieves qualities that rarely go together. It's leisurely paced but taut; narratively oblique and elliptical yet expansive in its novelistic sense of world; even its highly overt thematization of capitalism-as-social-battleground is leavened by the contexts in which it's always brought up (e.g., a classroom lecture, or a nature program on TV). Finally, for some understated cinephilia points, the movie includes some wind in the trees, hands on prison bars in close-up, and a mistreated donkey. What more can one ask for?














5. Computer Chess (Andrew Bujalski, USA, 2013) Some of my affection for this film comes directly from its enthusiastic remarkable pastiche job in recreating a particular (if hazy) era, not simply in its production design but even many of its acting rhythms and of course its video aeshetic. But I also appreciated its contentment to simply let the gradual weirdness of its world, and its dive into surreality, be. This doesn't mean that the "weird for the sake of weird" card always works. It's all about what effects & affects can be achieved by the interplay of formal, stylistic, and performative elements: does it produce intriguing thoughts or feelings, for instance, and can we spot interesting patterns or structures in the way these reactions mount up? If so, then perhaps the messy work is doing something that is not messy. Like many films on this list, and especially the films that are listed after this slot, Computer Chess provided me with these hit-the-nail-on-the-head vivid moments for emotions that I can't quite name with single words - like the coy flirtatiousness of prolonged adolescence, or the knife's edge between wanting to believe and enjoying one's skepticism when making (or imagining) some strange discovery alone before one's computer screen.









4. Upstream Color (Shane Carruth, USA, 2013) One of the year's big surprises. (I liked Primer quite a bit, but the pessimist in me expected Carruth to go in a very different direction - that of Aronofsky or Nolan.) Instead we have this impressionistic Malickian vibe applied to causally motivated narrative-logistical construction. And it's all shot very prettily. But I really responded to the way Carruth and his fellow actors convey these affective registers that seemed to arrive in a very immediate and practical way. In other words I kept feeling delighted and curious about such things as, What would it feel like to rebuild one's life financially after such a fugue state? If suggestible hypnosis became a larger social crisis, would bank tellers (for example) have to undergo training to spot warning signs? What are the relations between different parts of the food chain and the symbolic role we might ascribe to one in exchange for the other? And so on. That's one of the great things about Carruth's engineer's approach to narrative and logistics - there's all this left-brain stuff about airtight explanations and structure, but he's also a terrific filmmaker of possibilities.











3. Bastards (Claire Denis, France, 2013) In many ways it feels very much like an utterly typical Denis film, including some familiar faces, and in that sense there's always the threat of hermeticism and calcification. The more we learn about the facts of what has transpired, story-wise, the deeper, darker, weirder, and more dangerous and alluring this world (our world) seems. We've already been trapped long before we realize it; that's part of what maturation entails. Rather than a loss of virginal innocence, which is how a couple characters in the film may see certain other characters, this is a patient and world-weary reminder that innocence never existed in the first place - though violence does exist in many forms. I'm inclined to think of it as Denis' most hopeless work, which is not to say it is without any levity or beauty.













2. The Great Beauty (Paolo Sorrentino, Italy/France, 2013) The last film I saw before putting this list into the atmosphere. I had hoped I'd like it, but I hadn't expected to be moved quite like this. The top two films here were, for me, the masterpieces of 2013 (that I've seen). Given that stature, it's a little hard for me to digest it all and fashion any kind of insightful commentary mere hours after walking out of the theater. I only know that it struck me very deeply. I am reminded of what Bellour said in his contributions to the "Movie Mutations" letters, about civilization as something greater than cinema, something that (as in Oliveira) could produce culture. Speaking only for myself (but optimistic that others might have similar sentiments), a lot of my youthful cinephilia, and approach to art in general, involved various kinds of revolt against the Idea and all its schematic, oppressive inorganicism, and different ways of appreciating the sensual, the particular, the termitish. Of course art can never and should never escape from these concrete elements. That is part of what makes it art. But it's not always enough; I no longer believe in something like "pure" cinema, or a "purely" graphic or formal or sensuous perspective (it may exist but only as a feature on the reception end, not as an ontological basis for the medium). Only in the last few years am I slowly orbiting back into the realm of ideas, synthesizing them and allowing that synthesis to be a stronger part of my reaction to artworks and my theories about art. Thank the gods for the Italians, who seemed to have never abandoned this commitment to aesthetic and cultural tradition and the Idea, even as they've produced so much great and experimental work. This is a roundabout way of saying that The Great Beauty, during its two and a half hours, not only delighted and entertained me, and presented a very intriguing aesthetic, but forced me to grapple with it, and in the process interfaced with the way I think about the world and cinema's relation to it.














1. Before Midnight (Richard Linklater, USA, 2013) And so draws to a close, perhaps, a really remarkable triptych. These films are noteworthy not only for how they present an image-in-motion of Jesse and Celine, but how they also, relatedly, reflect upon concerns of filmmaking and current affairs. What is life in the society of the spectacle? That's a counterintuitive question to ask about the Before trilogy, maybe, but a crucial one. Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight all act as snapshots from particular places within that society, not just thematically but as modes of expression: the romanticism of an indie culture just budding into the mainstream in 1995, the restless post-9/11 digital-digitized malaise of 2004, and now in 2013 the classicist sketch imbuing this new installment with a profound and loving conceptual violence toward its precursors. This is not a film enamored of romance. It does not implicitly and nostalgically attempt to recreate the magic, as most films about romantic love (even most of the great ones) might. It is one of the great anti- or non-romantic films, in fact. It is, however, very much about love. There is something clear, cold, bracing, and strong here; I think it may take most of us quite some time to catch up to it. Emerson's famous quote about genius ("we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty") pertains to my own experience. I see my own non-genius reimagined in stunning form. I can't pretend there is anything impersonal about my love for this movie or its predecessors. The Befores have a special and a-critical relationship to my own life, showing some of the ways my path might direct, and expressing with clarity thoughts and feelings I've only begun to feel. In a strong year full of terrific cinema and quasi-cinema, for me, still nothing else really can touch it. (Late addendum: The Great Beauty is wonderful too, of course.)

Some people hated this movie (e.g. Richard Brody). Others seemed to rejoice in pronouncing it something less than a masterpiece. I'm unfazed. Many (though not all) of the criticisms of this film or its predecessors seem to reroute themselves into expressions of distaste for the two main characters. On one level I can understand this. Younger Jesse and Celine are painfully earnest; they're on the nose because they look like kids who like to read and talk about ideas but are merely smart, rather than brilliant. They conform to a very particular image of moderate noncomformity. And (god forbid) it is thus possible for audiences to walk into a Before movie and identify completely and unproblematically with the characters on-screen. As for older Jesse and Celine; are they not simply following - and therefore (god forbid again) endorsing a particular hackneyed and privileged path as a romantic couple who approach middle age as just a bickering married couple? For people smarter than all this portraiture, who aren't duped because they recognize what Jesse and Celine are (i.e. slightly superficial bourgeois bon vivants), well, this is simply unacceptable, isn't it? But I have a theory about this. When your criticism of a work of fiction hews toward personal criticism of characters as though they were real people who need to be corrected, you're no longer working on the movie. It's still working on you. A similar comment could be applied to Frances Ha, which I personally neither loved nor hated, but which certainly divided opinion on comparable grounds. On that film, Vadim Rizov has written very cogently about what I think is the same basic issue.

LATE TO THE PARTY











Here's a decidedly non-exhaustive list of some great recent stuff I've caught up with in 2013: Target (Aleksandr Zeldovich, 2011), The Wise Kids (Stephen Cone, 2011), Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2012), Accident (Cheang Pou-soi, 2009), Seven Blind Women Filmmakers (Mohammad Shirvani, 2008), Pontypool (Bruce McDonald, 2008), Love Crime (Alain Corneau, 2010), Medicine for Melancholy (Barry Jenkins, 2008), Life Without Principle (Johnnie To, 2011), The Turin Horse(Tarr/Hranitzsky, 2011), and Whore's Glory (Michael Glawogger, 2011). Actually, come to think of it, a lot of these were courtesy of Netflix streaming. Maybe that says something about my priorities or my laziness. I saw Corneau's film mainly in anticipation of De Palma's Passion, but it was the French original and its clean, cold vision of libidinized corporate marauding that actually moved and surprised me. Plus, McAdams and Rapace are both fine, but the duo of Kristin Scott Thomas and Ludivine Sagnier trumps them hands down, all day, every day.

MISSED CONNECTIONS

There were still plenty of films I didn't see, or haven't yet had the chance to see. I thought about listing in more detail what else I did and did not catch, but why waste the space? If you're curious about whether I saw something or why your favorite isn't on the list (or why your least favorite is), all you've gotta do is ask. I'm also greatly looking forward to films from the festival circuit of the past year or two that will be released in some adequate fashion this year.

GOLDEN OLDIES













First I'd like to mention a trio of great films seen by me on the big screen for the first time in 2013: Raoul Walsh's delirious melange Wild Girl (1932, on 35mm at the Block), which is about as good and as free as cinema gets, and is matched only by similarly beautiful Pre-Code works by Walsh; History Is Made at Night (Borzage, 1937, again 35mm at the Block), which I'd never gotten around to seeing despite its great reputation, and which instantly shot up to a special pantheon of romantic classics (and that climactic horn...); and finally Antoine et Antoinette(Jacques Becker, 1947, DCP at the Siskel Center): a movie that is really lively.

Next up, three more films I saw at home. All of these were titles that fell through the cracks and which I very well could have (and should have) seen before: Christopher Strong (Dorothy Arzner, 1933), Far from Vietnam (Chris Marker, et al., 1967), and Guys and Dolls (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1955). For that last one, no, I don't care very much that Brando can't sing and you'll never in a million years convince me the film isn't great just because of that fact. Vocal talent is obviously an important consideration in a musical but sometimes you just have to open yourself up to what else is also happening.

Third, a trio of great revisitation experiences. Party Girl (Nicholas Ray, 1958)on DVD was a better image than the television broadcast I taped for myself back circa 2000, which was roughly the last time I saw the film. (Though I've seen a number of Rays on the big screen, this is still not one of them.) The reunion was overpowering; this might even be the Nick Ray film I love most right now. I could watch it again right now. I also caught at the Siskel Center two loopy, evocative, dry-humored, and powerful French films that seemed even stronger the second time around: Le Pont du Nord (Rivette, 1981) and Trouble Every Day (Denis, 2001).

Moving on, I feel compelled to highlight my favorite new-to-me cinematic person this year - Spanish experimental filmmaker José Val del Omar (1904-1982), whose works absolutely floored me. This fellow's imagination, the energy and his eye for beauty, supply an alternative thread of modernism that looks something like other threads of avant-garde work, but also a bit askew. What a great, great, great filmmaker. I'm glad that the recent recovery of his works has enabled a new generation of amazed onlookers like myself to experience this stuff. (Runner-up personage discovery - the husband and wife team of Andrew L. and Virginia Stone. I may have seen a film or two before this past year, but 2013 was when I became aware of them as a very interesting-seeming duo. Andrew Sarris lists them [well, him] as "lightly likable" but I think there's enough personality in the few little things I saw to designate them "subjects for further research" in my own book.) In 2014 I'll have to attend, finally, to Jonathan Rosenbaum-favorite Peter Thompson ...

I would be remiss if I didn't also tip the hat to such great new-to-me films as Die Parallelstrasse (Ferdinand Khittl, 1961), Dynamite (Cecil B. DeMille, 1929), Targets (Peter Bogdanovich, 968), California Split (Robert Altman, 1974), Der Reise (Michael Klier, 1983 - thanks to Patrick Friel for programming this, twice), Un flic (J-P Melville, 1972, though I think I might have seen this one before), Happiness (Aleksandr Medvedkin, 1934, ditto), Torre Bela (Thomas Harlan, 1975), My Heart Is That Eternal Rose (Patrick Tam, 1989), La Primera Carga al Machete (Manuel Octavio Gomez, 1969), The Prisoner of Shark Island (John Ford, 1936), and Charade (Stanley Donen, 1963).

Here is Ben Sachs on Fritz Lang's Western Union (1941).

"The movie is something of a Social Network for the 1860s, depicting mass communication as the dominant force of the zeitgeist. Indeed, the characters are so obsessed with establishing the first coast-to-coast telegraph line that they often forget the Civil War’s going on. The telegraph also influences the way characters relate to each other. In a clever motif, a group operators “speak” to each other in Morse code as a way of passing along secrets. And in one scene, Randolph Scott’s character scares a group of Indians into respecting the will of Western Union by shocking them with a live cable—an image of technology’s triumph over man and nature.

"The plot of Western Union is organized like a lattice of conflicting interests and desires—or, to continue the metaphor, like a hub where different cables intersect. Every narrative conflict is triangulated. The western expansion of the telegraph faces violent opposition from both Native American tribes, who don’t want anyone trespassing on their land, and from Confederate soldiers, who want to sabotage any tool that might help the Union Army. (In one nifty development, Scott discovers that a group of Indian saboteurs are actually Confederates in disguise—it feels like something out of a novel by Lang admirer Thomas Pynchon.)

...

"This narrative structure recalls the interlocking conspiracies of Lang’s Spiders (1919) and Spies (1928). What’s interesting is how Lang uses the structure—a crucial innovation of Modernist fiction—to meditate on historical fact. The film reaches some characteristically cynical conclusions, none more damning than its final shot."

Chiedo asilo / Seeking Asylum (Marco Ferreri, 1979) I figured I'd remedy my general lack of knowledge of a fairly important late 20th century Italian filmmaker, Ferreri. So begins a series of, I'd say, five or six posts that will feature screenshots and some very basic words of response to the work. Now, I've had Seeking Asylum on my to-see list ever since somebody mentioned it in a Senses of Cinema all-time top ten; I can't remember who it was, but I do recall something about the hells of late capitalism. I think I can see this person's point. Roberto Benigni plays a kindergarten teacher who runs into some obstacles for his unorthodoxy. Education is a matter of reckoning with the world rather than the memorization of facts, etc., etc. It's a loose film, more about vignettes and quirky characters, but kind of beautiful and colorful in a way it needn't be. The painted window at the end of the hallway (visible in three screenshots above) is a gorgeous recurring visual feature.

Il seme dell'uomo / The Seed of Man (Marco Ferreri, 1969) Its stark color palette is interesting, and there are some ways in which the 'post-apocalypse,' such as it is here, haven't quite been imagined as we see it here. Anne Wiazemsky is, as usual, a very compelling screen presence but overall the project feels as though some of the air has been let out of it.

Diario di un vizio / Diary of a Maniac (Marco Ferreri, 1993) This one feels like some of Brisseau's latter-day works initially threaten they'll devolve into. Well - to be fair - that's a harsher characterization of this movie than it deserves. It's actually pretty interesting, this image of a "vizio," which I think translates in Italian not simply to maniac but to pervert. At any rate, I'm not particularly invested in the tones despite being able to acknowledge the interest. I like the sense of anarchic dirtiness that's turning into a recurrent theme here with Ferreri (but really one doesn't even need to have seen any of his work to expect this), but at this point my pleasure is very detached,almost purely cerebral. Please note that the image of the nude woman on the bed, above, is in mid-dissolve to a close-up of Jerry Calà's face, his intent stare, which is a constant feature of the movie.

L'Udienza (Marco Ferreri, 1972) Maybe my least favorite in this run - which isn't to say it's a bad film. But still not one that I love. As a movie working in this subdued satirical register, focusing on Roman Catholic religious bureaucracy, it reminded me a bit of Bellocchio's My Mother's Smile (which I saw well over a decade ago, so don't recall well). Impressions of a few motifs after seeing these films in fairly quick succession: a lot of close-ups and extreme close-ups of his male protagonists' faces (which are generally not bland faces); he also loves to feature beautiful women as supporting characters who are maybe a bit coquettish, difficult, or "teases."

El Cochecito (Marco Ferreri, 1960) This one, of course, is a great little movie. I love things like this, rambling comic worlds or communities that are offbeat without straining to be too quirky. Unforced quirk, I suppose. It puts me in mind of certain Ford films, and certain British comedies (like maybe The Happiest Days of Your Life or Genevieve) ... cloistered little worlds that might be happy and charming but might also be dark, venal, petty, etc.

La grande bouffe (Marco Ferreri, 1973) If Tinto Brass fixated on the derriere, and Russ Meyer attended to the bust, then Ferreri might have been one of cinema's major tits-and-ass filmmaker. (I think I've seen La grande bouffe, long ago, but I can't be sure; it's one of those movies that one can almost feel has been viewed without ever watching it, like 8 1/2 or The Passion of Joan of Arc.) It courts excess openly; its theme is the excessive consumption of sensuous pleasuresby a group of four bourgeois men. As such, the contemporary need for filmmakers to take a detached and very explicitly outlined moral stance on their subject matter, as well as the kind of pleasure available, is not accommodated here. The film indicts or at least makes ugly the very pleasures it explores and, yes, also takes part in, much like The Wolf of Wall Street (and the recent moralistic controversy that film has incited). This doesn't mean that works like these are beyond criticism. But it does speak to a particular mode of exploring pleasure that I, at least, think of as Catholic (though not exclusively so). More puritanical forms of cultural "reading," however, will allow zero patience and tolerance for such methods.

In addition to Ferreri, recently I have been focusing on Aleksei German,having only seen Khrustalyov, My Car! before. I missed the opportunity to see his work on the big screen when it came to Chicago in 2012, I've had to settle for digital files. But the effect remains stunning. These films are just massively great.

(I still have yet to see My Friend Ivan Lapshin and, of course, I eagerly await Hard to Be a God.)

To give just one tiny, fractional glimpse of what kind of lively formal play pops up in the films, look below at these two shots from Check-up on the Roads (1971). The first, taken roughly from the vantage point of the men in motorcycle and sidecar, is composed as a serene shot. Here's this visitor on a calm horizon; visibility seems "high."


But the quasi-reverse shot is not from the vantage point of the walker, but rather of a pair of men from sniper range further back. We can't spot them from the first angle, nor does it even look like they have a place to hide. They are "invisible." What's fascinating to me is how the reverse angle, aside from conveying important narrative information, is also compositionally very different from the first. The view bears downward; nestled between two mounds or snow banks, the snipers both form a triangle, flanking the walker and the motorcyclists. There are woods in the background (no horizon). Slow on either side obscures invisibility. Threat is invisible (if imminent) in the first shot; the pictorial vision of the second shot is like tunnel vision, allowing us to see nothing else but this threat.


Then there are touches like the one below, where an active gun has fallen into the snow and its hot barrel steams violently. Literally, these are only tiny details, but imagine a huge number of them imbuing every frame and moment and scene of these films with such texture and richness. Each Aleksei German film I've seen has been (1) funny, (2) deeply nostalgic and yet, I think, also aware of the complications of such nostalgia, (3) profound - not in a way that can be mocked or brushed aside, but actually profound because merely even perceiving the gravity of the issues requires that one let up a little on the superegotism of snark, (4) ramshackle like an old Army vehicle [or rather gives the calculated appearance of being ramshackle; this isn't lazily "demonstrative" production design but a lively and holistic approach to mise-en-scene, blocking, and cinematography], (5) beautiful to listen to, and (6) unpredictable.

I am a media scholar by training, and I spend much of my time as both an historian and a theorist of different forms of moving image media. This blog is not, in fact, much of a record of my professional or academicpursuits at all. Nevertheless, as some root level both my cinephilic and blogging impulses as well as my scholarly ones are very much the same, because I am interested in questions about the ontology and the significance of different forms of images and different forms of audiovisuality. So I think a lot about what distinctions are to be made between, say, a film and television program. Or film in general versus television in general. Truth be told, by my reckoning, most "handy" distinctions between film and video, or between film and television, start to wither under philosophical scrutiny. This is not to say that there are no distinctions. It is only to say that the professed meaning, extent, or nature of these distinctions seem to be prone to exaggeration, or in some way, less than logically airtight. Many of the common dichotomies don't really hold up ...

Audience or no audience. One can see a film where one is the only one in the theater, and one can project a DVD or show something on a TV screen to a large audience.

Big screen or small screen. If I recall correctly, Jean-Luc Godard once famously said that one looks up at the cinema, and down at the television. Strictly speaking, this isn't true. There are cinemas with stadium seating where one can look down at the screen, and there are countless ways in which television can be hoisted up above the viewer. This is simply an example of extrapolating certain conventional viewing practices onto the ontologies of media themselves - and thus, on a philosophical level, simply wrong. In any event, if you throw a celluloid film image onto the wall in a small screening space, it may indeed be smaller than a television today.

Celluloid or not. If you have a good-quality film print of a work, and it is in the "original" exhibition gauge, and you have a way of showing it without inordinate breaks between reels, then great. I don't think anyone would dispute that this is close to ideal. Almost nobody has this capacity though. Also, prints are often damaged or edited, and it is in their chemistry to decay. Let me ask a loaded question. If you had to choose between a 69" HDTV home screening of a Blu-Ray of Il deserto rosso or a very pink 16mm (or even 35mm) print of the same film at a dank, smelly theater with a few noisy patrons in attendance, would you really choose the latter? Every time? I think not. In fact I want to say that I remember even Fred Camper (one of the great and noble defenders of celluloid) indicated he wouldn't necessarily go for film over video in conditions like those. (Could be wrong here, though.) It's not that the I discount the importance of celluloid as a technology and medium distinct from video formats; in fact when I've taught college students I've sometimes tried to emphasize to this digital generation that this difference exists at all. There are some qualities of film that, due to the photochemical emulsion and its projection onto the wall, simply won't translate or translate fully to digital forms. At the same time, I am unconvinced by any placement of the total ontology of the art of cinema in the materiality of celluloid. For one thing, I've yet to come across any accounts of such an ontology - i.e., cinema that is reduced what is truly filmic and not simply "moving images" - that don't still operationalize metaphors from other, more desirable, less "invasive" art forms, like painting ...

The Major and the Minor (Billy Wilder, 1942)