Shooting Down Pictures

Screened February 22 2010 on New Yorker DVD on a flight from Prague to New York

TSPDT rank #819 IMDb Wiki

Although this blog project covers only the films I haven’t previously seen on the TSPDT 1000, when I saw that The Times of Harvey Milk was back on the list after last January’s update, I just had to make room to write about it.  The film constitutes one of my formative film-related memories, though the memory had nothing to do with watching the film. It was March 1985; I was 10 years old. The Oscars were airing on TV – this was the first time I’d ever watched them. I don’t remember much about that year’s telecast other than that for the Costume Design award they brought an elephant onto the stage to accessorize the costume models from A Passage to India, and that an Asian guy had won Best Supporting Actor. I also remember that when they announced that the winner for Best Documentary was The Times of Harvey Milk, I started jumping up and down and ran to the living room to tell my parents. I’m not sure why I did this. Somehow I knew about The Times of Harvey Milk, and somehow it was a big deal to me that it had won.

It might have been that the film had gotten a lot of coverage on the local news in San Francisco, since it was about recent events that took place in the city. So I might have equated the film’s Oscar moment to something like when the 49ers won the Super Bowl just two months before. I wouldn’t actually see the film until two years later, during our family’s free home trial of HBO, but by that point Harvey Milk was already firmly imprinted in my mental mosaic of San Francisco, thanks in part to the film’s Oscar being touted by the news as a win for the city. Even after watching the film at age 12, I have to confess that I still didn’t know what “gay” really meant, other than some vague sense of men being in love with men, a concept that both repulsed and fascinated my parents (I remember long conversations about Boy George), and that my classmates would tease each other with homophobic epithets with such frequency, and with such perverse relish, that “fag” or “gaylord” became inverted into terms of endearment almost devoid of any denotative meaning (see Deadwood’s liberal application of the word “cocksucker” as a point of comparison).

I bring up these somewhat embarrassing recollections for several reasons. First, to show what significance The Times of Harvey Milk had for me as a Bay Area native, even without having seen the film. Second, to illustrate what a quasi-schizophrenic jumble of attitudes one can have towards sexuality growing up in an SF immigrant suburb, exposed to Asian homophobia, AIDS scares, (mostly) progressive teachers and media and a prestigious Oscar-winning documentary. In a sense, as a child I was the perfect audience for The Times of Harvey Milk, because the film is the cinematic equivalent of that teacher many of us might have had in grade school or junior high: the one with the uncommonly centered demeanor and reassuring smile, who seemed to have a handle on the world in a way we aspired to attain someday.

It’s really ironic then, that one of the documentary’s “subplots” involves the defeat of Proposition 6, which would have made it illegal for gays to teach in public schools. The defeat of Prop 6 was a milestone for gay rights in the U.S. and one of the highlights of Harvey Milk’s brief political career.  In a way, the film confirms the fears of the conservatives who wanted to pass Prop 6, and who dreaded the influence that pro-gay pedagogues would have on their children.  But the profoundness of that influence is less in the gay lifestyle itself than in the rhetoric used to present it, something that The Times of Harvey Milk makes vividly clear.

On the one hand, the film’s presentation of Milk invokes a classic American archetype: an entrepreneurial idealogue determined to make a difference in the world and for the better.  Through a series of biographical episodes and first-person anecdotes by historical witnesses, Harvey Milk is painted as an irrepressible optimist who runs for citywide office three times before finally succeeding, and who speaks with both fearlessness and flair on behalf of his constituents as well as his own principles. He’s ultimately painted as a tragic Shakespearean figure, felled by a jealous, self-destructive right wing Iago with an almost too-symbolic name: Dan White. I remember seeing the film as a kid and my mind making a laserbeam connection with gays as another persecuted minority, another underdog to be championed against The Man.

On the other hand, the film doesn’t cater to a sense of niche interest, but adopts an expansive embrace of a cross section of society. Take the film’s casting, a veritable rainbow coalition of voices; it’s the filmic embodiment of the State of the Union addresses that Bill Clinton mastered, touching on every demographic needed to score points across the board.  Among the many talking heads speaking fondly of Milk, there’s an Asian man to signify approval from racial minorities (yeah, I guess all of them):

Then there’s Tom Ammiano, future successor to Milk as City Supervisor.  He’s an extension of Milk’s off-the-cuff persona, flamboyant to the extent that he almost serves a quasi-minstrel role as comic relief.  But the levity serves as setup for two sequences: when Ammiano talks about the impact that Prop 6 would have on him, a schoolteacher at the time, potentially costing him his job; and a when he talks about the impact that Milk’s death had on him, the perils of his life come into sharp relief.

There’s also a TV reporter who prominently covered much of Milk’s tenure for the news – here she gives her off-camera impressions of Milk. What this does is foster a sense of community and candor behind the professional veneer; that despite the roles we play in society, we ultimately relate to each other as humans. It’s a small touch but it makes a difference and it really reveals the humanist spirit of the film.

But the real lynchpin as far as connecting the story to a “mainstream” audience is a labor leader who more or less admits his homophobia, but gradually and begrudgingly comes to respect Milk for his determined advocacy on behalf of the issues they shared.

It’s worth considering how much the film is a reflection, even an homage, of Milk’s personality. Like Milk, the film uses humor and empathy, along with a sense of the dramatic to shape and tone its message. Also note how well lit these interviews are, with a consciously consistent effect of sunniness, achieved even in the choice of wardrobe.  It’s subtle, not overtly staged, but effectively warm and upbeat, seeing its subjects in the best possible light – was this the way Milk himself saw people?

In their commentary for the New Yorker DVD, director Rob Epstein and editor Deborah Hoffman discuss how they decided to retell the events of Harvey Milk and SF Mayor George Moscone’s murders multiple times, first with raw footage, then with a chorus of voices alternately relating events and expressing emotional reactions. This is meant to mirror the natural waves of reaction experienced in times of trauma. This is another example of the canniness of the film, engaging the viewer on a deep level of empathy. It’s so brilliant that I almost find it unsettling that all my buttons are getting pushed the right way.  It’s almost disenfranchising; I mean, how can you not like this movie or disagree with its message?

In sum, this is as much a polemical documentary of its time as Triumph of the Will was for the 1930s – though rather than persuade you with grandiose spectacles of fascist supermen, it’s a more dialogic approach, informed by the rhetorical techniques of college seminars and group counseling sessions.  It’s open, embracing and incredibly potent, appealing to both reason and sentiment. While watching it at age twelve I came away with an appreciation of Milk and the gay rights movement, this time I stand in awe of the power of a masterfully constructed cinematic narrative to imbue people with a new outlook, its force a million times more powerful than the gun that took Harvey Milk’s life.

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Screened February 8, 2010 on veoh (see embedded video after the break)

TSPDT #992  IMDb Wiki

First off, I want to encourage everyone in New York City to take advantage of an opportunity that I will sorely miss: an in-person appearance (alternative link to event) by  Yuriy Norshteyn. This legendary 68-year old Russian animator rarely comes to the US; he may very well be traveling to raise funds for his first feature film The Overcoat, which he has been working on for nearly 30 years. In any case, please go in my place, as I will be on a flight to Berlin as he makes his appearance at the SVA Theater:

Monday, February 15: School of Visual Arts Theater (333 W. 23rd Street, between 8th/9th Ave.) This event is billed only as a Q&A so be aware that there may not be a screening. No price is indicated so I’m also assuming it’s free.

To be honest, I am a recent convert to Norstein, like, as of this week. He has been touted on this site before, as one of the 100 Most Important Directors of Animated Shorts, as voted on by my colleagues at IMDb. Still, when Tale of Tales appeared for the first time on the TSPDT 1000 upon its most recent update, I had never heard of the film, despite it being voted the greatest animated film of all time at polls conducted by two animation film festivals.

So I won’t pretend to be an expert on this film when I’ve been acquainted with its filmmaker for all of a week, and when there is already a book length study by animation scholar Claire Kitson available, which I will seek out. I will only say that I’ve seen this half-hour masterpiece four times in four days, and it feels like it’s stayed with me for four years. It’s as if Norshteyn sat with these images all his life, drawing them with such lucidity and palpable depth of feeling, that they make even the untold hours of ingenuity and laborious craft behind Pixar films feel relatively disposable. It summons a concept of the fermented image: a vision that has stayed with a person for as long as they’ve been breathing, and perhaps beyond that, like the wolf that lurks throughout the film, a folkloric figure as old as Russian blood.

It’s a vision that nurtures, like the suckling breast that satiates the infant who sees the wolf just as its eyes pull into sleep.

The whole film seems to be a drunken/lucid suckling of images, images that have nourished a lifetime of sublime melancholy and wonder, reflected in so much of what’s on screen. And the way each image is rendered with a delicacy verging on dissolution conveys a yearning for that same image, as fragile as the decaying memorabilia of one’s childhood:

or one’s memory rendered through a ghostly gauze – such as these tangoing couples about to be severed by the War raging around them…

Another recurring motif feels slightly more contemporary (with sharper lines, brighter hues and more fashionable clothing), involving an apple-loving boy who fancies himself feeding crows in the tree boughs as his parents loiter on a bench below:

The film cycles through these visuals in such a way that the repetition invokes instant affection and nostalgia, as with films by Duras or Wong Kar-wai. The wolf figures as the protagonist, the only one who seems to traverse from one zone of memory to another, often by crossing through forests that at times give the only acknowledgment of late 20th century modernity:

But his experiences of the hopscotching bull, the dancing phantoms, even the snowbound family, are all mediated by some sort of illuminated threshold: an entrancing fire on the hearth, or light raptruously emanating from a doorway or from a manuscript, as if these visions are liminal states into which he is lulled repeatedly. But it still doesn’t account for other images that seem to inhabit an interzone apart from the more sharply defined worlds, an eden blanketed in Tarkovskian dampness and mist:

And all these visuals still don’t account for images that I didn’t capture because they only make sense in motion: soldiers marching into a swallowing blackness; windows boarded up without hands or hammers; a pile of wood suddenly combusting; a tablecloth that seems to billow under the breezes of history. Or the sounds: a record skipping as men disappear from their lovers’ embrace; the wolf blowing on his hands as he tries to handle a hot potato. And the lullaby that begins the film and tips the film’s hand as a lullaby to all of us, whisking us to a world of beauty whose liquid lucidity can only exist in sleep, except when an artist is somehow able to extract these moments from a lifetime of dreaming. Again, it would be a privilege to meet such a person.

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Screened February 3 2010 on YouTube in Brooklyn, NY

TSPDT rank #784  IMDb Wiki

Be sure to also check out Ritwik Ghatak: An Online Primer

After watching the rigorously choreographed long-take mastery of Berlanga’s Placido, my encounter with Ritwik Ghatak was a jolt. His splintered account of family dissolution in Bengal following the 1947 Partition feels perpetually jostled, mirroring its characters sense of displacement and desperation to resettle themselves both physically and emotionally.

Discombobulation is apparent from the first scene: displaced villagers from the Bangladeshi side of the partition have tried to carve a colony for themselves on the outskirts of Calcutta, to the chagrin of the locals. Even among the migrants there are factions of locality and caste as a way to prioritize resettlement; as one landlord asserts: “If we can’t keep the differences, then what are we left with?”

Skip ahead to 3:30 in the following clip:

WATCH SUBARNAREKHA, PART 1:

Note how the sequence begins with a sense of patriotism and resolve: Haraprasad the teacher initiates a new school for the colony children.

It cuts from this composition that conveys a ceremonial sense of a community planting itself (note the flagpole squarely in the frame) to this more intimate shot giving a variation of the same idea, a child, hand planted on the adult.

But then there’s an abrupt cut to a completely different space (is it the same village?) where a low-caste woman pleads a landlord to take her and her son.

After a quick refusal the film explodes into chaos: her son suddenly runs offscreen and people begin to scatter in all directions across the frame. A man grabs the woman and the camera sweeps leftward as he drags her to a truck ready to deport all the low-caste migrants from the village.

The camera finishes its leftward sweep by craning upward to look down at the truck; the gesture is simple but combined with the onscreen activity, it conveys a sense of epic tragedy.

Then the shot cuts back to the earlier shot of the teachers sitting planted, as if they were spectators to their own village’s ethnic purging. Ghatak has established two visual spaces within the village and only now is he suturing them together, one fragmented space watching the other. It undermines the rosy words of peace and harmony uttered by the teacher, and establishes a theme of narrative, spatial and tonal fragmentation that continues throughout the film.

Another example: Ishwar, one of the villaged teachers, depressed over his lowly status as a migrant, runs into a college classmate, now a wealthy businessman and who offers him a job. Note how the angle on Ishwar shifts dramatically across the reverse shot at the moment he is offered the position:

The film is rife with angular shots expressing weird geometries; you would assume that Ghatak was co-opting his French New Wave contemporaries, but really it traces back to his love of Eisenstein and Soviet Constructivism.

A less propitious, but more striking example comes later, when Ishwar tells his sister Sita that she’s been betrothed against her will. Skip to 0:30 in this clip and see what Ghatak does with cutting variations of essentially the same shot of Sita to convey her sense of alarm (see Omar Ahmed’s comparison with how Scorsese uses the technique, after the break):

Again, the film is filled with these irruptions: one of the film’s happiest sequences, of two children frolicking through an abandoned airstrip, is abruptly ended when one of them is called away. The other child plays on her own; the music resumes the mood that the two of them had established until WHAMMO!

The film’s only real moments of sustained tonal clarity come in the songs sung by the adult Sita, which amount to arias in this historical opera. But even these songs can have a disruptive effect on the narrative. One of her most beautiful and mournful songs comes right after Ishwar has been awarded a promotion; he searches for her to share the news, finding her along the desolate banks of the river (1:50 in the following clip):

If anything, the protracted mood of this scene establishes the feeling of loss and longing that underlies the entire film.

Since I brought up the elements of the musical genre that Ghatak incorporates, I should also mention how unabashedly Ghatak embraces melodrama as well as Greek tragedy. The film is a roiling mix of genres as well as moods. And on a subtextual level, it’s more densely packed than I can manage to unravel in this post, connecting Oedipus, Hindu mythology, Marxist theory and the tragedy of Indian history in such a way that only a cosmopolitan scholar, artist and activist such as Ghatak could manage.  And yet, despite boiling all these elements into a raging stew that reflects the tumult of the world around him, he can also offer images of breathtaking simplicity, conveying all of his hope and sadness:

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You might have been a bit more indulgent towards us if you only knew how many fences we have to cross to make a film. […] Filmmakers like us will be gratified if people just accept the fact that we are fenced in. […] You are a fence yourselves, the most ominous, perhaps.

- Ghatak, quoted by Megan Carrigy, Senses of Cinema Great Directors Biography

(More words from Ghatak at the bottom of this entry)

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Part of THE COLLOQUIUM FOR UNPOPULAR CULTURE: THE SPEED OF YOUR HAIR (A series on love)

“You eat,” Luke said, “at the speed of your hair.”

“What does that mean?” said Nicole.

It took an effort of will not to say, “It means I want to spend the rest of my life with you.  I want to be with you when you are old, when your hair is grey…”  What he actually said was: “I don’t know.  It just seems true.”  His plate was empty.  He watched her eat, looked at her hair.  He is in love with me, Nicole said to herself.  She looked up again.  Their eyes met.  It felt as if they were kissing.  Luke poured another glass of wine for himself.

“Gulp,” she said, touching his hand.  “Gulp.”

LOVE STREAMS (dir. John Cassavetes, 1984)

WHEN: 7pm, Tuesday 9 February 2010
WHERE: Room 471, 20 Cooper Square (Bowery and East 5th)
ALL WELCOME.  Refreshments – stiff, copious – provided.

“Making a film has been compared, by many good directors, to a love affair.  What hasn’t been said is that this film, the recipient of the love, is the victim of an organized orgy.” (Cassavetes)

LOVE STREAMS is John Cassavetes’s last film.  He made it as he was dying of cirrhosis of the liver.  Critically disavowed, yanked off screens after just a few weeks, only briefly available on video in the States, it’s the story of the close relationship between Robert, a feckless lush (played by Cassavetes) who’s “writing a book on night life”, and Sarah (Cassavetes’s real-life wife Gena Rowlands), who describes herself as a “very happy person”.  Both are alive, lonely, lost.  Both, in their different ways, are quietly howling with grief.  Then comes the goat.

John Cassavetes’s films, Jim Jarmusch has written, are about “love, about trust and mistrust, about isolation, joy, sadness, ecstasy and stupidity”.  For that reason, their stylistic distinctiveness, and for their fierce and galvanic independence, they’ve long been touchstones for equally fierce, equally galvanic directors such as Claire Denis, Olivier Assayas and Pedro Almodovar.  LOVE STREAMS, in its rawness and desperation, its wild-eyed confrontation with human isolation and need, is hard to watch and equally hard to look away from.

LOVE STREAMS will be presented by Kevin B. Lee, a critic, filmmaker, and programming executive for dGenerate Films, a digital distribution channel for Chinese independent films. He contributes to ‘Time Out New York’, ‘Cineaste’, ‘The Moving Image Source’, and his blog Shooting Down Pictures, among other publications.

Screened January 27 2010 on DVR downloaded from the website that dare not speak its name in Brooklyn NY

TSPDT rank #839  IMDb

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the one film on the TSPDT 1000 that I hadn’t been able to locate in any form was this one, which had just been re-introduced to the list after the January update. Not long after that update, with the help of a couple of wonderful people from the French archival cinema community, I was able to track down a 35mm print of the film with the rights held by Gaumont. Unfortunately, Gaumont quoted me a ridiculous fee of several hundred Euros to rent the print, which made it pretty much impossible for me to access it. However, fortuitously at the same time, someone posted a DVR rip of the film, presumably from European television broadcast, to a site that will here remain unidentified. So I had my chance at last to watch this strangely inaccessible classic of French cinema.

The one catch was that the rip was unsubtitled, which presented me with the dilemma of whether I should proceed with watching, esp. given that reviews of the film mention the elegant script by Pierre Bost and Jean Aurenche. Fortunately, Marilyn Ferdinand provides a solid enough account of the plot on her site that I was encouraged to take the leap. All the same, I must acknowledge that my understanding of the film is by no means satisfactory. I can only hope that my opting to treat this as an experiment in watching a film without a grasping its dialogue might offer alternative insights focused more intently on its cinematic properties.

I should also mention that watching the film in this manner reminded me of many times as a child when I’d watch American comedy films and TV shows with my mother, and I’d laugh along with the punch lines only to turn to see my mom bearing an uncomprehending smile, aware that there was something to laugh about but not quite knowing what was funny. I think there were at least a couple of instances where I’d play the asshole and ask her if she got the joke. In some ways I was as confused as she was – ashamed at the wedge between us, irrationally resentful to her for making me feel alienated in my joy even as with the TV laugh track to egg me on. I dedicate this entry to her, that we may unshamefully derive our own pleasures from what we don’t fully understand. Continue Reading »

Screened January 19 2010 on BFI DVD rip downloaded from the website that dare not speak its name in Los Angeles, CA

TSPDT Rank #984  IMDb Wiki

“A film without actors” reads the subtitle of this title card. You have to think about what a concept like that meant back in 1930 Germany, why it would be perceived as a selling point instead of a drawback. A desire to get away from the excesses of Weimar Expressionism (Caligari, Metropolis, Murnau) whose overt theatricality and expensively staged, light-and-shadow spectacle were perceived as out of touch with the reality of Germany. All the better for a band of up-and-coming German filmmakers to make a distinguishing statement for themselves. Ulmer, Zimmerman, Siodmark, Wilder, Schüfftan (whose pioneering work in special effects seems antithetical to the spirit of this particular production): no one at the time could have imagined what a dream team of legendary talent this would prove to be. (My deranged mind summons this as a contemporary hip-hop equivalent)

Wilder’s silent dialogue screenplay doesn’t give much indication of the verbal brilliance that would grace his future scripts; but the story, basically chronicling how two guys pick up and dump a couple of girls on a weekend tryst, does give a whiff of his trademark cynicism. The story, such as it is, was based on “reportage” by Robert Siodmark (I can see it now; Siodmark telling Wilder, “I know this guy…”)

In the opening montage that introduces the main characters, Schüfftan’s way of framing people flirts with the Soviet propaganda style, shooting ordinary working folk in a statuesque, heroic manner, like cab driver Erwin Splettstsser:

But when he gets around to the Erwin’s friend Wolfgang von Waltershausen, an “officer, farmer, antique dealer, gigolo, wine trader…” the staging and lighting is less flattering:

One also might wonder if the multiple job labels appended to Wolfgang signify him as a Berlin Everyman, in that there’s a shadiness in men of all stations, which makes them less inconographic and more complicated – and thus more real – than their Soviet onscreen counterparts.

When we get to Erwin’s galpal Annie, an unemployed model who lounges all day in their apartment, we are back in the realm of G.W. Pabst/Louise Brooks decadence, though made less sensationalistic and more quotidian – she’s less the symbol of Weimar moral depravation as just a girl killing time picking her fingernails, waiting for a job but too lazy/depressed to go and find it.

The plot kicks off at a bus stop with Christl, introduced as a real life movie extra – her casting as a lead here may be a conscious inversion of the pecking order of actors. Wolfgang picks her up and makes a date in this shot, shot in a telephoto on a bustling street with real pedestrians and presumably a real police officer who doesn’t know he’s being filmed.

It’s a verite technique that (permits be damned) continues to this day, so long as the desire for street realism persists. The first time I was ever conscious of it was when Siskel and Ebert pointed it out in their review of Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies:

For an outstanding present-day example of this technique, check out Bradley Rust Gray’s The Exploding Girl, which will be released this spring in the US. (The film’s street cinematography is highly influenced by Hou Hsiao Hsien’s use of the technique in Cafe Lumiere).

This is just one of several strategies used by the film to infuse its wisp of a narrative with a real-time, real-world immediacy and texture. Aside from cinematography, there’s also montages of street shots that break in between scenes involving the main characters, as if to say, this story is just one plucked from the many people and experiences happening now. The montages also provide invaluable incidental details on Berlin circa 1930: how people got around (trolleys, cars), how streets looked:

But again, realism in narrative cinema isn’t just a matter of shooting everyday streets and scenarios and leaving it up to whatever happens to pass in front of the camera, at least as far as this film is concerned. There’s a distinct craft on display. All the technical resourcefulness and attentive eyes that blessed German filmmaking of this period is now trained not on outsized spectacle or melodrama but on capturing, staging and conveying an unmistakable impression of the real, and making it feel effortless and incidental. This paradoxical effort truly comes through in the scene where Edwin comes back home to find Annie lounging. Their mutual sense of malaise slowly simmers through a series of mundane actions that erupt into a shared tirade. Count how many shots are used in this sequence, moving deftly across the room, moving ever tighter, as if the walls were closing in as surely as that incessant dripping of the faucet:

At last, to get at each other’s goat, they tear down a wall’s worth of matinee idol lobby cards (actresses for him; actors for her), an arresting image and yet another dig at the wall of conventional moviemaking that this film attempts to undermine – as if all these fantasy images were symptomatic of the self-oppression and alienation from reality that may be plaguing this couple (and really, how far have we come?). But before they can really have it out, Wolfgang waltzes in and the buddies pick up a game of cards, leaving Annie looking on helplessly. We get one devastating close-up before the camera recedes from this tomb-like chamber of discord.

The next day Wolfgang and Erwin meet up with Christl and her friend Brigitte, a salesgirl, for a jaunt to Nikolassee, a grand park and recreation area on the outskirts of Berlin. In this extended passage the film is a world away from the tightly rendered naturalism of Erwin’s apartment, and indulges in a series of bold ventures in alternative narrative cinema. To set things up there’s a titillating sequence where the youngsters awkwardly undress, hiding in the rushes along a river.

Later on they picnic in a nearby spot, engaging in some jocularity leading to Erwin getting playfully spanked. This triggers a jarring jump to a scene of schoolboys spanking each other. Is it a cutaway to some other part of Berlin where this is happening? Is it a flashback to Erwin’s school days?

This leads to an idyllic passage that roams the park landscape ripe with families picnicking with naked babies frolicking on the sunny grass – the film seems to be moving intuitively through a series of moods and associations of gaiety and youthful innocence…

But as the sun-drenched visuals continue, a sense of afternoon languor starts to creep in: the shots move back to the city, baking in the midday heat. Adults slump on park benches or slouch over windowsills. The montage comes to a rest back in the apartment of Annie, finding her sleeping:

And then leaps back to the park, where we find our party similarly resting in the sun. At least Erwin is behaving himself so far from his girl’s sight, though that leaves Wolfgang to casually lay his paws on both girls at once:

Another vaguely associative cut, jumping back to the city and the shot of a mannequin in lingerie basking in the harsh shadows of late afternoon – seductive yet strangely deathly in its inertness. The death theme creeps in further as the montage shifts to shots of a gravesite:

Which then matches graphically with the windows of an apartment building:

and then the montage shifts to a scene where a beach photographer takes souvenir photos, which are incorporated in the montage. The internal logic of the sequence seems to be a desire to overcome a creeping sense of death and languidness that threatens to extinguish all this life…

Immortalized by the camera:

… or in a moment of sexual fantasy. A moment unlike any other before in cinema – clearly no love involved, at least on the male side, so for the viewer there’s no pretense of romantic idealism attached to the moment.

It’s just the pure erotic charge of a moment, where woman’s common sense (I know this guy just wants to bone me, and yet…) puts up an initial resistence…

And yet… the intense sensation of touch, the warm breath of his nostrils under her palm, the sweat and pulse of sexual excitement. The moment where a girl and The Cinema both discover the feeling of sex…

… all in this shot…

And so, a film ostensibly about capturing the lives of everyday people funnels into a full-circle depiction of their desire to escape the everyday, if only for a moment…

Jump forward nearly 80 years – the push-pull explosive exertion of this moment hasn’t been forgotten, at least not by Jean-Luc Godard. Witness his trailer for the 2008 Viennale:

And see also the films of this guy to see how the spirit of People on Sunday lives on… Everyday people, enraptured in everyday fantasy.

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Screened December  17 2009 on .avi format downloaded from the website that dare not speak its name in Brooklyn NY

TSPDT Rank # 938 IMDb Wiki

This post is dedicated to Matthew Dessem, proprietor of The Criterion Contraption. I’m going to co-opt his lengthy, conversational approach to writing up films, to savor this film as well as the remaining entries of my own project…

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Since my last entry had some less-than-flattering commentary on the TSP1000 list, here’s a post that highlights some of the best movies I saw last year, all thanks to the TSP1000 . You can click on the respective titles to see what I wrote about each. Unfortunately it seems that each one is on a slippery slope due to the new update, and a few have dropped out of the list entirely.

I’m also surprised and delighted by the number of comments that last entry received, and to know that others are using the TSP1000. So what films from the list have you seen in the past year that you enjoyed most? You can scan through the list to jog your memory if needed. In the meantime, here were my favorites:

Under the Bridges (1945, Helmut Kautner) (was #829, now #889)
Limite (1931, Mario Peixoto) (was #683, now #732)
Moonrise (1948, Frank Borzage) (no longer in the top 1000)
Toute une nuit (1989, Chantal Akerman) (was #975, now #977)
Bienvenido, Mister Marshall (1953, Luis Garcia Berlanga) (was #915, now #955)
Lucifer Rising (1972, Kenneth Anger) (no longer in the top 1000) Video  Essay
Tout va bien (Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin) (was #948, now #975)
The Ladies’ Man (1961, Jerry Lewis) (no longer in the top 1000)
Starship Troopers (1997, Paul Verhoeven) (was #974, now #898)
The Lusty Men (1952, Nicholas Ray)  (was #740, now #760) Video Essay

First off, I want to commend Bill Georgaris on another monumental round of collecting, compiling and computating in delivering the latest update to the 1000 Greatest Films on They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? The January 2010 edition incorporates 216 more films than the previous update of December 2008, resulting in the replacement of 68 films in the list of 1000. The good news for me is that the update only sets me back four spots in my quest to see  all 1000 films. My countdown will resume with Alexander Kluge’s Yesterday Girl at #993 instead of #997.

I’m expecting the Shooting Down Pictures project to finally conclude in the weeks to come – though I’ll be taking time to savor the remaining films as best as I can, at least as much as Matthew Dessem appears to in his entries on the Criterion Collection catalog. (Many thanks to him for giving me a mention in his profile by Roger Ebert.)

There is one film in the “left to see” column that has proven incredibly difficult to obtain, and that film is Douce / Love Story by Claude Autant-Lara. I can’t find a video copy of this film anywhere, and as of now it’s looking like I will have to spend a few hundred Euros to rent the film from France and then rent out a theater to screen it. If anyone out there knows of a way to access this film without considerable financial cost, please don’t hesitate to contact me at alsolikelife at gmail dot com.

I feel that I should follow up on last year’s version of this “state of the project” post (which itself was a rehash of issues I raised the year before), in which I offered a mild complaint that the list has consistently shown a lack of regard for world cinema (unless your idea of world cinema is Europe or Hollywood movies set in Middle Earth), as well as experimental films and films by women. Maybe I’m betraying my own biases towards films I consider underrepresented, but on the other hand there seem to be no shortage of supporters of the mainstream. The latest version of the list grimly bears this out.  I don’t so much mind that Jaws is now part of the top 100 films, even if it bumps off Bunuel’s L’Age d’Or, a Surrealist equivalent of a cinematic shark attack on the unsuspecting viewer. I have more of an issue with the entire Lord of the Rings Trilogy being shoehorned in by however many fanboy lists taken from any number of popcorn geek sites.

The numbers offer further discouragement. The number of films from North America and Europe keep climbing, from 900 to 905. At least the number of films by women went up one notch – the list traded Jane Campion’s Angel at My Table for Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark and Agnes Varda’s The Gleaners and I, bringing that total to 17. The experimental field dropped to 18 films (Mothlight and Dog Star Man replaced Flaming Creatures, Scenes from Under Childhood and Lucifer Rising).

Last year I tried to make my move to buck this trend by calling out to world cinema and experimental film scholars to contribute their lists. Unfortunately, my calls were met with typical responses of “I don’t do lists” and “how much does it matter anyway?” At the start of last year I considered the TSPDT 1000 a cultural landmark, something that people, especially young aspiring cinephiles, would turn to for guidance in their exploration of movies, and thus it was vital to make sure that the list represented a diversity of cinema. But after hearing so many film experts whose opinion I respect give a collective shrug to the project, I’m all but burned out on the idea of canons and their importance.

I do thank those individuals who sent lists my way, which I duly forwarded to Bill for inclusion. I would like to give a special thanks to one particular person, Nitish Pahwa, who took my call to action more to heart than just about anyone. He went to the trouble of transcribing an issue of Outlook magazine in which 25 Indian film directors were polled to pick their favorite Indian films of all time, the results of which were compiled. (Since this list doesn’t exist anywhere online to my knowledge, I plan to post it sometime soon.) I considered this a major find, given that India continues to make more movies per year than any other country, and yet they receive very little exposure to a world audience. I dutifully forwarded the results to Bill, as well as the findings of a similar poll of South Asian cinema organized by the BFI some years ago. To my chagrin, neither of these polls were figured into the current update.

In an email, Bill had told me that he could only count top ten lists for all films, and not those only focused on national cinemas. But if you look at the PDF Companion to the current 1000 films, which lists every source cited in the compilations, you’ll see numerous lists from the American Film Institute (AFI) that celebrate only American films: “America’s 100 Most Thrilling”; “America’s 10 Greatest Films in 10 Classic Genres”. There are countless genre-specific lists as well that focus only on sci-fi, horror, comedy, even “Spiritually Significant Films.”

If these topical lists can be considered, then why can’t a list on Indian or African or Asian cinema? Especially if it’s the only way for Indian film experts to be counted, given that these Indian specific lists are the only instance of their input on the subject? Otherwise, if you look at who voted for the Indian films, they’re almost exclusively European or American critics. Really then, what is this list but an echo-chamber exercise touting whatever films a Euro-centric pool of “experts” happen to see? Maybe this would explain why several Satyajit Ray films remain on the list, while Mother India, arguably the most revered film among Indians, dropped out of the updated list of 1000 – despite being mentioned repeatedly in the lists I collected to give to Bill.

I really hope that Bill reconsiders his position on the lists I submitted him, because for me they embody a crucial underpinning to the cultural significance this list has to offer: to what extent it can truly claim to offer the “greatest” in “all” of cinema,  according to a truly representative selection of film “experts.” As someone who has followed this list for years,  and has been one of its most ardent supporters, it pains me to raise these questions. But I wish to make the stakes clear: nothing less than ensuring the credibility and value of this list.