Shooting Down Pictures

One advantage of making a video essay on a film that very few people have seen (and therefore very few are likely to watch this essay) is that I can make it as personal as I want it to be.

screened Wednesday December 19 2007 on Kino DVD in South San Francisco, CA

TSPDT rank #931 IMDb

Brazilian Suzana Amaral’s impressive debut feature (made when she was 52, having enrolled at NYU Film School after raising nine children) is a stark portrait of Macabéa, a young office typist surviving in the slums of Sao Paolo. At first Macabéa’s ignorance and nose-picking lack of social graces test the audience’s sympathies, seemingly as gratuitous as a Farrelly Brothers gross-out. But it’s a tough kind of empathy Amaral is striving for, not flinching from the piss-pot details of Macabéa’s life while teetering on the brink of dunking the audience’s faces in it. Making great use of the expressive deadpan of unglamorous lead actress Marcelia Cartaxo, Amaral is able to convey a rich interior landscape of thought and desire in her protagonist with even the most unadorned camerawork (unassuming even during a couple of fantasy sequences). Amaral also exudes Macabéa’s stream of consciousness through a dense soundtrack of radio programs spewing useless trivia (which Macabéa later regurgitates to her chauvinistic loser boyfriend) and an electronic score whose chintzy tinniness seems oddly suitable to the heroine’s aesthetic disposition. Blessed with a densely descriptive novel by Clarice Lispector as its source text, the script and art direction impart volumes of incidental information about life as an urban Brazilian girl working barely above the poverty line. But extending beyond social realist reportage, the dreamy sequences where Macabéa rides the subway (the scent of men’s exposed armpits inciting dreams of love) or dances with a bedsheet on her head as a bride in waiting, complement the sordid mundane existence that surrounds these lyrical oases.

Cited for the 1000 Greatest Films by the following lists:

Anneke Smelik,  Sight & Sound (2002)
B. Ruby Rich,  Sight & Sound (1992)
Lourdes Portillo, Sight & Sound (1992)

Continue Reading »

Thanks cold bacon for this most improbable find that you literally stumbled upon.

Click image to read better…

“Reading his reviews makes me wish I had a bigger brain.” – overheard at a house party circa 2002
I feel bad that we planned milkshake night the same evening that J.Ho is getting feted at the MoMI, esp. as I haven’t yet seen Day Night Day Night.

Wish I had a collection of his reviews handy so I could pick a favorite — but you can’t do much better than the two that are in this book, especially “The Film Critic of Tomorrow, Today” (once you’ve read the Arnheim piece it riffs on).

Filmbrain posted it on his blog so I might as well post it on mine. 5:40 screening of the best American film of 2007, There Will Be Blood at BAM. We’re organizing a posse to see it and hang out afterwards at a nearby establishment in a collective attempt to make sense of what we just saw (especially the ending, which I’m still grappling with).

If you’re interested in joining us, buy your tickets here and shoot me a line.

see what you think of this

Last week in San Francisco my fellow Golden State Warriors fans Jonathan Marlow (formerly of GreenCine) and Hannah Eaves (Link TV) were swapping top ten lists. When I came back I tapped Cindi for hers. So here you are with four lists (the first two can also be found on the SF360 site):

Hannah Eaves

1. “Hotel Chevalier”
2. “No Country for Old Men”
3. Zellner Bros vs Duplass Bros Smackdown Program (at SXSW)
4. “You, the Living”
5. “Hannah Takes the Stairs”
6. “Radiant City”
7. “Persepolis”
8. “My Winnipeg”
9. “Manufactured Landscapes”
10. “Sicko”

Jonathan Marlow

The pesky criteria: Must’ve screened theatrically somewhere in the U.S. for the first time during 2007. This eliminates the honorable (and long overdue) resurrection of “Killer of Sheep” (Milestone deserves their own separate recognition for this significant achievement and the “I Am Cuba” set). Must be fiction, although some documentaries are clearly their own form of fiction. Documentaries deserve their own list, I wager. It also goes without saying that I would have to actually see the film, which rules out a few — “There Will Be Blood” or “Youth Without Youth,” for instance, might’ve made the list if I’d seen them. Then again, maybe they wouldn’t.

Any list, of course, is a perennial victim of the list-maker’s own peculiar tastes. I have no great fondness for coming-of-age stories or bio-pics, which strikes “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” and “Control” (both otherwise largely exceptional movies, although the former could stand to be about 45 minutes shorter). Much as I liked nearly every aspect of “Juno” (the script and performances, primarily), it still feels a bit too lightweight for the list. If I’d limited it to “films made in North America,” it’d certainly appear.

With these caveats and without further delay, a list (which breaks its primary rule with the first and second slots):

1. “You, the Living”
Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson’s long-awaited follow-up to “Songs from the Second Floor.” The fact that “Du levande” still lacks a U.S. distributor is merely another indication of the pathetic state of film distribution these days.

2. “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days”
The latest highlight from Romania is an abortion drama in the shape of a suspense film from first-time director Cristian Mungiu. On paper, it shouldn’t work. On the screen, it’s nearly two hours of satisfactory dread.

3. “No Country for Old Men”
Everyone says it’s the best movie from the brothers Coen in years. I won’t disagree with them (and I’d encourage those same folks to see their Cannes-commissioned “World Cinema” short from “Chacun son cinema,” a “companion piece” of a sort). Let’s hope that John Hillcoat does right by “The Road.”

4. “Brand Upon the Brain!”
With its road-show live performances, arguably the “movie event” of the year. Arguably the only “movie event” this year, though. Nonetheless, a delirious fantasy of familial discontent.

5. “Silent Light”
For the opening and closing sequences alone it would definitely appear somewhere among these ten. For everything that comes between those two moments, it falls in the middle of the list.

6. “Syndromes and a Century”
Of the several admirable New Crowned Hope films, this one appeared on my list of 20 features lacking distribution last year. “Sang sattawat,” essentially two-films-in-one, finally made its way to a few theatres in 2007 and deserves mentioning again here. Best short film of 2008? Weerasethakul’s “The Anthem.”

7. “Zodiac”
A mature work of remarkable restraint from a director not generally known for such qualities. The title would have you believe that it dwells on the identity of the killer but, much more interestingly, the film finds its narrative center in the finer details of obsession.

8. “Exiled”
For anyone thinking that they don’t make Hong Kong movies like they used to, Fong juk proves that certain directors — Johnny To, in particular — still have what it takes to rivet an audience. Of course, there are also missteps like “Triangle”…

9. “Atonement”
I suspect that the magnificent moments of this story originate in the book which, admittedly, I have not read. In other words, I fear that I’m reacting more to the structure of the novel and less to the accomplishments of the film. Even still, it earns a place here. To see where these same themes can go dreadfully wrong, observe Silk (also with Ms. Knightley).

10. “Private Fears in Public Places”
Ayckbourn and Resnais, together again! I have a weakness for both and, while this isn’t my favourite of their collaborations, it is still pretty damn charming in almost every way.

There you have it. How about fifteen more from the documentary side of the aisle?

1. “My Winnipeg”
2. “Forever”
3. “Radiant City”
4. “King Corn”
5. “Frank & Cindy”
6. “Manufactured Landscapes”
7. “Helvetica”
8. “Joy Division”
9. “The King of Kong”
10. “Maurice Pialat: Love Exists”
11. “About a Son”
12. “Protagonist”
13. “My Enemy’s Enemy”
14. “In the Shadow of the Moon”
15. “Encounters at the End of the World”

(and, since I’ve already praised it in the past, an honorable mention for “Darkon” — it received a well-deserved theatrical release earlier this year — while a few others, such as “Into Great Silence” and “Black Sun,” would otherwise hit this list if I hadn’t seen them the previous year…)

Cindi
(Cindi informed me that her list is not yet finished, so I’ve unpublished it until further notice)

Kevin
(Like Cindi’s list, my list includes anything newly released or unreleased that I saw for the first time in ‘07)

I was juggling several criteria trying to compare dozens of films with each other, before I settled upon a very simple rule of thumb: which ten films did I most wish I had made myself?

1. “Killer of Sheep” – who cares about whether it’s really eligible – this is one of my all time favorite films.
2. “Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days”
3. “There Will Be Blood”
4. “Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind”
5. “Colossal Youth”
6. “Eat, For This Is My Body”
7. “Quiet City”
8. “Ratatouille”
9. “Knocked Up” (I offer this rather sheepishly, as there were some more sensitive and even films about sexual relationships, especially two by women – “The Last Mistress” and “Lady Chatterley” – but I would give a lot to make people laugh like this film did.
10. a three-way tie between “Flight of the Red Balloon,” “Still Life” and “Useless”

Taking a cursory look at the revised list, I noticed a number of trends, many of which are listed below.

The most significant shift I detected was an uptick in silent era films, mostly from Weimar Germany. As Bill noted in his own introductory remarks, he received a large number of ballots from Europe, so it is unsurprising that the list would emphasize a greater number of European films.

This has me wondering about how demographics (national, ethnic, gender) impact the results of this poll. Personally, I’ve long been frustrated with the dominance of American and European participation in these polls, which naturally result in American and European dominance of these lists. We can all recognize that the United States and Europe have long dominated the medium throughout the 20th century. But when 889 of the top 1000 films are from those two regions, and the remaining 111 are from Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, you kind of have to wonder if the perspective of the list is a little skewed. It may not be merely that the U.S. and Europe simply make the best films, but that we’ve been pooling a predominantly American and European base of experts on what they think constitutes the best of cinema. I’ve long wondered if there needs to be a greater effort to reach out to cinephiles of different cultural orientations to get as much of their perspectives accounted for as possible.

Along these lines, I am thinking of embarking on a list collection campaign which will reach out to filmmakers, critics and academics from underrepresented areas around the world. The aim is to solicit a large number of ballots from those who share my concern for a truly global cinema that reflects the full range of humanity and the full possibility of cinematic expression. Hopefully by the time the next version of the list rolls out, we will have an ample representation of globally informed cinephiles to see what kind of impact they might have on the list as it now stands. This is certainly something worth anticipating.

In the meantime, here are some breakdowns of the current list:

By decade:

Decade: titles gained – titles lost

pre-1930: 17-4 (all 1920s except for one from 1890s)
1930s: 13-9
1940s: 10-7
1950s: 16-17
1960s: 29-20
1970s: 19-28
1980s: 21-26
1990s: 10-26
2000s: 4-2

A sampling of countries:

Country: titles gained-lost

Brazil: 3-1
China: 2-0
Czechoslovakia: 0- 4
Germany: 12-1(mostly Weimar)
Italy: 5-8
Japan: 5-8
Mexico: 2-0
Poland: 3-1
Spain: 6-2
UK: 8-12
US: 69-63
USSR: 4-0

By director

John Ford was the big gainer in this version of the list, with four new titles, making him the director with the most films in the TSP 1000 with 18. If I’m not mistaken the previous leader was Jean-Luc Godard with 16 (now 14).

Behind Ford, the following directors gained three titles each:
Paul Thomas Anderson
Luis Garcia Berlanga
Bernardo Bertolucci
Fritz Lang
Paul Schrader
Billy Wilder

The following directors each lost two titles in the revision:

Mel Brooks
Jean Luc Godard (gained 1 lost 3)
Mile Leigh
Barry Levinson
David Lynch
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Steven Spielberg (gained 1 lost 3)
Oliver Stone
Zhang Yimou

Enough with stats, let’s hear some opinions. Here are what I think are the most deserving and undeserving inclusions and exclusions from the new revised list. What do you think? Take a look at the ins and outs and let me know in the comments.

INCLUSIONS

Most deserving:

Army of Shadows (Melville, Jean-Pierre; 1969; France-Italy) •669
Arrivée d’un train à la Ciotat, L’ (Lumière, August & Louis Lumière; 1895; France) •825
Ballad of Narayama (Imamura, Shohei; 1983; US) •949
Chloe in the Afternoon (Rohmer, Eric; 1972; France) •943
Hallelujah! (Vidor, King; 1929; US) •558
Lady with the Little Dog, The (Kheifits, Iosif; 1959; Russia) •994
Shanghai Express (von Sternberg, Josef; 1932; US) •809
Simon of the Desert (Buñuel, Luis; 1965; Mexico) •872
Wanda (Loden, Barbara; 1970; US) •718
When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (Naruse, Mikio; 1960; Japan) •739

Most undeserving:

American Gigolo (Schrader, Paul; 1980; US) •873
Moulin Rouge! (Luhrmann, Baz; 2001; US-Australia) •973
New York, New York (Scorsese, Martin; 1977; US) •835
Night Porter, The (Cavani, Liliana; 1973; Italy) •992
Party, The (Edwards, Blake; 1968; US) •671
Royal Tenenbaums, The (Anderson, Wes; 2001; US) •962
Ryan’s Daughter (Lean, David; 1970; UK) •915
Talk to Her (Almodóvar, Pedro; 2002; Spain) •907
Unbearable Lightness of Being, The (Kaufman, Philip; 1988; US) •944
Wings of Eagles, The (Ford, John; 1957; US) •894

EXCLUSIONS

Most deserving:

Bad Lieutenant (Ferrara, Abel; 1992; US)
Europa/Zentropa (von Trier, Lars; 1991; Denmark)
Fortune, The (Nichols, Mike; 1974; US)
Jurassic Park (Spielberg, Steven; 1993; US)
Matrix, The (Wachowski, Andy & Larry Wachowski; 1999; US-Australia)
Nightmare on Elm Street, A (Craven, Wes; 1984; US)
Thing, The [1982] (Carpenter, John; 1982; US)
Trainspotting (Boyle, Danny; 1995; UK)
Vanishing, The/Spoorloos (Sluizer, George; 1988; Netherlands-France)
Wicker Man, The (Hardy, Robin; 1973; UK)

Most undeserving:

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Spielberg, Steven; 2001; US)
Enfance nue, L’/Naked Childhood (Pialat, Maurice; 1968; France)
Floating Weeds/Ukigusa (Ozu, Yasujiro; 1959; Japan)
Hail Mary/Je Vous salue, Marie (Godard, Jean-Luc; 1985; France-Switzerland)
Hawks and the Sparrows, The (Pasolini, Pier Paolo; 1966; Italy)
King Size Canary (Avery, Tex; 1947; US)
Menilmontant (Kirsanoff, Dimitri; 1926; France)
Quadrophenia (Roddam, Franc; 1979; UK)
Still (Gehr, Ernie; 1969; US)
To Sleep with Anger (Burnett, Charles; 1990; US)

Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward the lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain…  It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.

- Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus”

Almost exactly a year ago, I began the blog Shooting Down Pictures, primarily to chronicle a short-term project to view every film on the list of the 1000 greatest films of all time, as compiled by Bill Georgaris on his website, They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They?  Having finished watching 900 of the films on the list, I decided to savor the final 100 by blogging extensively about each entry as I viewed them.  Eventually this desire to be both thoughtful and thorough in experiencing each title evolved into the video essays I regularly produce for the blog, a form of film criticism/filmmaking that I’ve especially enjoyed.  By the end of 2007, I managed to watch over 40 films of the final 100, on pace to finish the project by early 2009 (later than my original goal but still not bad considering the amount of work I’ve put into each entry).

Around mid-December I noticed that Bill had announced on the TSP site that a new revision of the list would be rolling out by the end of December, with 139 replacements in the titles.  Influenced by 284 newly acquired lists, it constituted the biggest revision of the list in quite some time.  Needless to say, it has left a significant impact on my own project.

When I got my first look at the list, I was in the middle of preparing video essays for what was at the time #939 and #940 on my list of completed titles, My Brilliant Career and Hail Mary.  To my chagrin, neither title was included on the new list. In fact,  of the 40 TSP films that I’ve seen this year, 13 are no longer on the list.  And overall, the 940 films I have seen from the previous version of the list have been reduced to 901 in the new revision.  Just like that, I’m back to where I was a year ago!

In a way, it’s a blessing, as I now get to watch more films for my project.  But I should also admit to some discouragement, which is understandable given that on paper I am only one film closer to my goal than I was a year ago.  (However, it is entirely possible for a future update of the TSP 1000 to include more films that I had already seen – indeed, this was the case with the previous two updates to the list).  To be honest, I am more daunted by the practical matter of what to do with the films I’ve seen, numbered as they are on the left-hand menu.  Should I renumber them to reflect their current position in my project (for example, #899 – Wild at Heart, would now be #875, and #937 – Il Posto would now be #901)?  Should I leave them the way they are to reflect a historical record – if so then how do I distinguish between 2007’s #901 (Land of Silence and Darkness) and 2008’s #901 (Il Posto?).  I’m calling on all my library, information sciences and other genius friends for help on this.

Ultimately, I come to a state of reflection not unlike the one described in the Camus passage quoted above on the tragically immortal Sisyphus, condemned as he is to forever push a boulder up a hill, only to see it roll back to the bottom.  I think such a condition applies not only to my particular project at this moment in its history, but to any similar completist undertaking.  The plight of Sisyphus speaks to those living in the information age, overpopulated as it is with those who attempt to classify and consume the top 1000, 100, or even the top 10 of any medium of human experience.  However helpful such efforts can be to consolidate our understanding of cinema, art, or life in general, the wonders of the world will always prove to be innumerable.  Realizing this should provoke me and my fellow list-makers and list-chasers to put down their papers and spreadsheets and reflect on what these mad pursuits are good for in the first place.

I have long struggled between two states of mind: the objective-driven achiever vs. the reflective observer.  I would be the last to deny the sense of pleasure I get as I check through each title of the TSP 1000, drawing ever closer to the goal of completion.  But there have been moments in my life where after watching 3 or even 5 movies a day, I would feel empty or even nauseous, caught up in a mentality of compulsive consumption. (And as I look at the state of the world, our mass media culture and our increasingly polluted environment, I recognize this state of thoughtless consumption as an activity whose effects are poisonous to healthy living on multiple levels: physical, spiritual, environmental).  This is why I wanted the final 100 films in my project to be not a heedless dash for the finish line, but an occasion for exploration, reflection and discovery. In other words, to experience the best kind of movie watching I can manage.  These are, after all, the best films of all time.

This is why I’ve taken a lot of pleasure and even personal growth in the video essays I’ve produced for many of the films.  With each new one I’ve tried to push myself a little further to see what I could do with the medium, relying less on conventional approaches towards film criticism or commentary, and experimenting with different forms, voices and perspectives.  The essays will continue to be an essential feature of the Shooting Down Pictures project, and I will be actively seeking collaborators to help me further expand their range and depth.

So for now, we have another version of the top 1000 films of all time.  But whether you’ve seen 900 of these films or just 9, I think the same rule applies: it’s not about how many films you’ve seen, but how much you’ve gotten out of seeing them.  This is the same point made by Camus in the final lines of his remarks on Sisyphus, our tragic mascot:

“Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.”

Just think of cinema as the stone we shall push upward all of our lives, and take heart.

A moment of silence for the films celebrated in 2007 at Shooting Down Pictures that are no longer on the TSP 1000:

Dames (Enright, Ray; 1934; US)  video essay
Evil Dead II (Raimi, Sam; 1987; US) video essay
Hail Mary/Je Vous salue, Marie (Godard, Jean-Luc; 1985; France-Switzerland)
Haine, La/Hate (Kassovitz, Mathieu; 1995; France)  video essay
Heiress, The (Wyler, William; 1949; US)  video essay
Hold Me While I’m Naked (Kuchar, George; 1966; US) video
Inferno [1980] (Argento, Dario; 1980; Italy)  video essay
Lovers, The/Les Amants (Malle, Louis; 1958; France)
My Brilliant Career (Armstrong, Gillian; 1979; Australia)
Official Story, The (Puenzo, Luis; 1985; Argentina)
Quadrophenia (Roddam, Franc; 1979; UK)
Still (Gehr, Ernie; 1969; US)

Unfaithfully Yours [1948] (Sturges, Preston; 1948; US) video essay
Vanishing, The/Spoorloos (Sluizer, George; 1988; Netherlands-France) video essay