Shooting Down Pictures

Screened Thursday, December 18 2008 on YouTube

TSPDT rank #919 IMDb Wiki

A fascinating war wages in a German girls’ boarding school at the cusp of the Nazi era: not just between the hormonally-charged girls and their authoritarian teachers and schoolmistresses, but between the lively, chaotic movements and warm, supple textures of the girls striving against the film’s encompassing form: coldly cavernous hallways, a camera obsessed with pinning subjects against its precise angles, and the lockstep rhythm of academic ritual.  The film’s first act, where an emotionally unstable girl (Hertha Thiele) is matriculated into the institution, is dominated by a sense of enclosure within militaristic protocols, but gradually gives way to pockets of idleness and intimacy among the girls, who seek gratification for a variety of impulses in an even greater variety of ways: pin-up photos of movie stars, love notes from other girls, officially sanctioned bullying, and perceived favoritism from the headmistress. Played by Dorothea Wieck, the headmistress embodies the contradictions of this institution: her mannish shoulders and gait convey a domineering authority that the girls seek pleasure by satisfying, encouraged by her soft, flirtatious gaze suggesting a warm, maternal presence underneath. Her character knows the rules of discipline, and she knows how to bend them to her own advantage, most memorably in a perverse sequence where she bestows good night kisses on the faces of a roomful of grateful girls. The film’s once-controversial status as anti-authoritarian, proto-feminist and ultimately pro-lesbian is by now a non-starter; more troubling is the glaring subtext of pedophilia that remains largely unaddressed. All the same, this is a landmark work, blessed by a stylistic rigor that serves its subject matter perfectly.

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Now posted to Spout Blog

Please check them out and discuss there or here.

And to close out the countdown, here are five other videos that didn’t make the top 10, but are still worth your while.

I’m happy to report that the countdown of the Top 10 Music Videos of 2008 is moving to Spout Blog where the final five videos will be disclosed later this week. I’ll post the link here when it’s up.

Bill over at They Shoot Pictures Don’t They? has been gathering more top ten lists from passionate film lovers throughout this year and applying them to the master list. He informs me that a new December 2008 update to the 1000 Greatest Films is due any day.

Upon seeing last December’s updated list, I made an open complaint about how little representation of experimental and third world cinema there was, as well as films directed by women. One of my goals for the year was to seek and collect more lists that represented these perspectives.  I wasn’t quite able to fulfill this aim, but I did get a few good ones, which I have forwarded to Bill. If I have a moment I will post them here as well.

Bill also invited me to submit my own updated list. I haven’t put one together in a while, and I’m not really one to do this sort of thing anymore – I’ve just seen too many movies at this point to know better than to attempt a list of bests or favorites. However it’s only fair that I do what I’ve asked several respected colleagues to do. So here’s a list that I think best represents the films I most cherish at this particular moment, with their directors in parentheses:

Awaara (Raj Kapoor)
Bamako (Abderrahmane Sissako)
Breakaway (Bruce Conner)
City of Sadness (Hou Hsiao Hsien)
Close-up (Abbas Kiarostami)
Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee)
Earth (Aleksandr Dovzhenko)
The House is Black (Forough Farrokhzad)
I Was Born, But (Yasujiro Ozu)
Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk)
Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett)
L’Argent (Robert Bresson)
L’Eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni)
L’Intrus (Claire Denis)
Les Vampires (Louis Feuillade)
Love and Duty (Bu Wangcang)
Love Streams (John Cassavetes)
The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein (John Gianvito)
Menilmontant (Dmitri Kirsanoff)
Moolaade (Ousmane Sembene)
Ordet (Carl Dreyer)
Outer Space (Peter Tscherkassky)
Platform (Jia Zhangke)
Playtime (Jacques Tati)
Rose Hobart (Joseph Cornell)
Shanghai Express (Josef von Sternberg)
Street Angel (Yuan Muzhi)
Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese)
The Third Man (Carol Reed)
A Touch of Zen (King Hu)

Taken March 9, 2008. Filming of interview with Manoel de Oliveira for the New Yorker DVD of Belle Toujours.

Beyoncé – “Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It).” Directed by Jake Nava

With 15 million views and counting on YouTube (and that’s just for the officially uploaded version), Beyonce’s video is a bona fide sensation that speaks for itself. Beyonce is hot, the doppleganger wing dancers are hot, but the sexiest thing about this video is the camerawork and lighting design, combining to create what can be termed “music video-as-sculpture.”  Maybe only a cinephile can find the clip’s whip-zooms (1:07!) and sudden shifts to blinding white more arousing than Beyonce slapping her own ass.  On the other hand, it’s hard to think of a video that better celebrates (rather than cheaply exploits) the beauty of the female form in motion (the invisible stair steps at 2:22 hasn’t failed after multiple viewings to blow my mind for suggesting further unexpected dimensions of contouring choreography). With the emphatic shoulder shrugs and stop sign stiffarms, it’s feminine but fierce, part mating dance, part martial arts.

Apparently this 21st century video dance craze isn’t wholly original, but inspired at least in part by a Bob Fosse routine documented in this video of a performance on the Ed Sullivan Show featuring the irrepressibly limber Gwen Verdon:

Seeing this, one could be even more impressed by the Beyonce video for referencing dance history, but somehow for me it stole some of the feeling of originality from the piece.  Not sure how one discerns between homage and plagiarism (and this has fomented quite a debate on YouTube) but if anything it reinforces the feeling that the lighting and camerawork is what’s truly unique about the video. I’m also left wanting to do a mashup of the two for comparative purposes. Too late, someone’s beaten me to it:

M83, “Graveyard Girl.” Directed by Mathew Frost

In the concept-and-spectacle-driven world of music video, once in a while you have to stand up for old-fashioned narrative, especially when it’s done right.  The most accomplished demonstration of linear storytelling in a music video came courtesy of French shoegaze band M83 and director Mathew Frost.

in his unparalleled appraisal of the videos of M83, Brandon Soderberg astutely describes the video as a dreamily anachronistic vision of a high school situated somewhere between the cigarette-wielding 1980s teens of John Hughes movies and the cell phone infested campuses of the present.  The grainy, Maysles-style handheld documentary shots lend vintage authenticity to this concocted microcosm, while the tightness of most of the shots suggest the claustrophobic worldview of the protagonist.

The heroine is the cutest social misfit this side of Ally Sheedy, enhanced with Molly Ringwald’s hair.  She haunts the campus like a goth ghost in a black hoodie, losing herself in sketch sessions at the local pet cemetery – where she meets the dreamboat campus jock in a moment of quintessentially cute vulnerability, tending to his dead dog’s grave. From there the video takes us on a vivid journey, both narratively and emotionally, through a quick succession of shots, none lasting longer than 5 seconds.  It’s clean, efficient and yet breathtakingly evocative, using an economy and purity of gesture and image worthy of Bresson.  Details like the girl’s writing “Would you?? NEVER” in her notebook, or photo of the boy and his dog prominently placed on her dresser are tossed off like throwaways, but brim with wondrous suggestion over this girl’s rampant inner life. Bless the wonders of YouTube to allow viewers to dwell on these lyrical flashes with instant rewind.

The video is not without its shortcomings – I could do without the goofy vision of dog heaven midway through, because it literalizes the imaginative depths of this girl that had otherwise been suggested through the swift, subtle details of her real existence. And the ending is such an out of left field Hollywood dream come true that I’m more inclined to view it as her imagination spilling onto the screen, thus rhyming with the dog heaven sequence – certainly a more interesting reading than believing that this guy would run after her; he hardly knows her! Still, what precedes this climax is a stunning display of music video storytelling, brisk, precise, poetic.

Equal if not greater attention has been paid to M83’s other video from this year, the Eva Husson-helmed “Kim and Jessie,” a delightfully choreographed teen dance video suggesting sexual initiation on wheels. If only it didn’t owe so much to dance routines from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video and The Big Lebowski… but it’s a surreal joy to watch all the same.

Screened December 2 2008 on Warner Brothers DVD on flight to Washington, DC

TSPDT rank #998  IMDb Wiki

Heralded in its day for its audacious envisioning of an American social landscape ravaged by dysfunctional sexuality – featuring an aspiring single mother who impregnates herself upon a dying soldier’s genitalia; a transsexual [gasp!]; and a feminist society who protest violent rape by cutting their own tongues off – John Irving’s 1978 picaresque now reads like a hysterical (in both senses of the word) male vision of the burgeoning feminist movement. Not much is different in George Roy Hill’s 1982 movie version, except that the absurdist imagery no longer drifts along the cooing flow of Irving’s prose, but rattles and jerks from one set piece to another.  What’s missing is a strong characterization of the title character, played by Robin Williams, who scrambles from scene to scene like a quarterback shaken out of his pocket, never finding a consistent behavioral core from which to regard the shenanigans. Glenn Close and John Lithgow deserved their Oscar nominations for breathing dimension and empathy to a couple of kooky types the film otherwise regards with mocking abjection.  For its reactionary middle-of-the-road advocacy of American normalcy under the threatening spectre of liberal progress, it’s a worthy precursor to Forrest Gump [TSPDT #577]. Of the films I’ve seen in the past two years for this project, this is the film for whose placement on the 1000 Greatest Films I have the most reservations.

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Amanda Palmer, “Oasis.”  Directed by Michael Pope

Boston-based Amanda Palmer of the self-described “Brechtian punk cabaret” act The Dresden Dolls launched an ambitious multimedia project around her solo debut Who Killed Amanda Palmer, including an upcoming photo book with text by Neil Gaiman and a series of videos for six of the album’s twelve tracks, all directed by Michael Pope.  Ironically, the best video from the album thus far is not part of the series, and concerns “Oasis,” what Pitchfork reviewer Joshua Klein deems the weakest track on the album: a “blithe, bubblegum, mostly obnoxious… rape and abortion ditty– ha!– that gives irony a bad name.” Klein’s opinion is no doubt informed by the song’s tonal incongruity with what is otherwise a pensive, introverted concept album. Judged on its own, “Oasis” is a refreshingly frank account of a young woman’s nonchalant dealings with unwanted pregnancy, backstabbing friendships and music idolatry, a brash affirmation and wry tweak of teen feminist self-determination.

Cheekily dedicated to Sarah Palin, the video is a literal re-enactment of the events described in the song, designed with a willful garishness that fits the music’s flippant, anything goes tone.  The zippy pans, zooms and cuts almost disguise the fact that the video’s multiple scenes and locations are all shot in the same room.  Cluttered with props and people, the carnivalesque proceedings feature several outrageous moments: the thumbs-up gesture as the rapist doggystyles Amanda; the fist-bump between molested Melissa and the abortion clinic nurses; Amanda high-fiving the abortion doctor; and Melissa’s final expression of disbelief.

One may understandably balk at watching what might be the campiest video on rape and abortion around. All the same, it does its part to enhance the song’s unique attributes in voicing a girl’s bodily horrors and superficial thrills with an irrepressibly adolescent pluck.  It looks especially good compared to the “official” Who Killed Amanda Palmer videos, which amplify their song’s brooding qualities to the point of ponderousness.  In this case, two minutes of just cutting loose and having fun provides longer lasting pleasure than half an hour of strained seriousness.

screened  Wednesday October 29 2008 on Flicker Alley DVD in Weehawken, NJ

TSPDT rank # IMDb Wiki

Abel Gance was celebrated by his countrymen as France’s answer to D.W. Griffith; one quality the two directors abundantly share is ego.  Griffith’s imprint of every intertitle with his monograph can barely compete with the opening shot of La roue, in which the stony visage of its director looms over footage of speeding railway tracks, rendering him more of a captain of industry than a cinematic visionary. Such bombast may account for the initial seven-plus hour length of this magnum opus, in which Gance uses the Oedipal melodrama between a railway conductor, his son and his step-daughter to illustrate the cycle of life, from destructive desire to transformative love.  Even in its present 4 plus hour cut, it can be an uneven slog at times, as Gance lingers on moments until they creak with significance. But there’s no denying his all-embracing ambition in bringing as many forms of cinema as he can conceive: from grimy working class realism to cliffhanger action to costumed fantasia interludes to moments of avant garde abstraction. On a shot by shot basis, there are few films that seem as visually diverse, certainly not from this period.

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