Shooting Down Pictures

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.

Screened Wednesday December 23 2009 on 35mm at the MoMA Study Center, New York NY

TSPDT rank #986    IMDb Wiki

A white man on a trade expedition in an exotic tropical locale abandons his greedy merchant colonial companions to shack up with a native girl. He learns her people’s ways and warns them of the encroaching enemy that threatens to wipe out their culture. All of this is presented in a groundbreaking cinematic format that will redefine the standard of motion pictures to come. Sound familiar?

This 1928 Tahitian excursion was the first MGM sound film (as well as the first to feature the famous MGM lion in the credit roll). Swap 3-D for sound innovation and you pretty much have a Tahitian template for Avatar.  Not saying that James Cameron knowingly ripped off the plot; it’s pretty much self-flagellating post-Colonialist drivel, the Eurocentric bullshit that even Terrence Malick isn’t immune to. But at least instead of James Horner muzak, we get William Axt and David Mendoza’s sub-equatorial symphonic jazz score (listening to it, you can practically see the palm trees swinging languidly in the breeze – trimmed with Art Deco tinsel):

This production was set to be Robert Flaherty’s first feature for a Hollywood studio, but (as notes following the break detail) his ethnographic philosophy and methods clashed with his professional crew, led by assistant director W.S. “One Take” Van Dyke (The Thin Man). Flaherty eventually left the shoot (later to return to the Polynesians with F.W. Murnau to shoot Tabu) and Van Dyke took over, completing the shoot in swift succession and delivering what in many ways is a quintessential Hollywood entertainment: exotic adventure, love, gunfights, technical innovation,  spectacle linked to pseudo-liberal social consciousness. Plus giant killer clams and a the unforgettable sight of a body washed ashore covered in horseshoe crabs.  The film also skirts the issue of language barrier that forced Cameron to invent a whole new language, as White and Tahitian silent dialogues are translated into the universal language of English subtitles. Only in the movies, indeed.

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Screened December 22 2009 on .avi downloaded from the Website that dare not speak its name in Brooklyn, NY

TSPDT Rank #955  IMDb Wiki (German)

Considered the pinnacle of ’30s Austrian cinema, Maskerade embodies much of the best of 30s European filmmaking, in which the camera dances to a distinctly musical rhythm of movements and countermovements. It sits comfortably among the ’30s films of Rene Clair, Max Ophuls and Jean Renoir, as well as Ernst Lubitsch’s work in Hollywood. Compared to most of those films, its topic may seem relatively fluffy: an artist creates a minor scandal by painting a masked nude suspected to be an aristocrat’s fiancee; when he names an innocent girl in an attempted cover-up, it leads to unexpected romantic entanglement. Willi Forst takes a well-worn continental costume milieu as a starting point, doing everything he can to breathe life into it. The camera darts with ease through ballroom scenes, connecting the eyelines of characters as they scope each other’s movements. He laces the film with clever tricks both visual (dialogues filmed in silhouette) and aural (a montage of citizens making animal sounds while reading the gossip pages). Driving everything is a buoyant soundtrack of 19th century waltzes and opera, whose lilting rhythms can be found in the film’s pacing even when the music subsides. The film itself feels like a symphony of varied movements: robust allegros, minuet-like montages, and a climactic rondo that brings everything to full circle. Overall, life is presented as an irresistible society ball, governed by status, gossip and decadent desire.

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Screened December 19 2009 on unsubbed Region 2 DVD with subtitle file in Brooklyn NY

TSPDT Rank #907 IMDb Wiki

There’s a strong suggestion of a great movie in Victor Erice’s second feature, made 10 years after his celebrated debut The Spirit of the Beehive. Erice’s breathtaking use of natural light demands comparison to Vermeer, while his ability to evoke a child’s wonder and terror at the mysteries of the world make him an art cinema antecedent to Spielberg.  But financing woes halted filming on this story of a girl’s attempt to solve the riddle of her enigmatic father. While Erice edited the footage to what he considers a finished film, it’s clearly lacking a satisfying final act (in which the daughter travels to the father’s hometown carrying clues to his past).

But the narrative is just as compromised by moments that stray from the child’s first-person perspective, Erice’s strong suit. Scenes where the father corresponds to an old flame diffuse the suspense, though they give the film clarity in its truncated form. A running voiceover narration by the girl as an adult reinforces a sense of pastness that further dilutes the primacy of the moments Erice offers us, a number of them visually stunning.

It’s strange that Erice would allow a voiceover to structure a film whose underlying thesis is the futility of words: the father’s anguished letters leading to no good outcome; his awkward conversations with his daughter and virtual non-communication with his wife. Instead, it’s objects, images and gestures that link the characters: an amulet, a drawing of a woman, a joyful communion dance, the incessant pounding of a cane on floorboard. These are also Erice’s best forms of communicating, and what ultimately links this film to his viewers.

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Screened December 4, 2009 on Warner Brothers DVD in Brooklyn NY

TSPDT rank #995 IMDbWiki

For this film I felt less interested in my own thoughts than in those of  two of my earliest friends in the world of online cinephilia.  Back when I was a regular on the IMDb Classic Film board, Lee Price (Lee-109) and Christianne Benedict (Chris-435) were among the most knowledgeable and engaging peers, especially on the subject of horror films.  In fact they were contributors to the anthology Horror 101.  (Some of you may also know Christianne from our wonderful video essay on The World According to Garp; and Lee was behind the 100 Directors of Animated Shorts). So I thought to call them up and ask them what they thought of this film. What follows is 25 minutes of awesomeness. You can listen to the .mp3 here or right-click to download. Here’s an index of topics for easy reference:

0:00 – Setting template of Hammer horror and post-’50s horror movies
6:24 – What do Hammer’s Dracula and James Bond have in common?
8:20 – What Christopher Lee brought to Dracula
11:35 – Sex, vmpires and Victorian women
14:15 – Bram Stoker’s paranoia
16:00 – Favorite Dracula films, and why no movie yet has gotten Dracula right
18:00 – What Hammer introduced to the Dracula myth and to the movies

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Screened December 13 2009 on NYFA VHS (courtesy of the NYU Library) in Brooklyn NY

TSPDT rank #910  IMDb

In the second installment of Mark Donskoi’s coming-of-age trilogy, based on Maxim Gorky’s childhood memoirs, teenage Maxim emerges from the ashes of his family’s destitution, as chronicled in The Childhood of Maxim Gorky. Searching for a trade to apply himself, Gorky is repeatedly sabotaged by petty folk entrenched in each establishment he enters. Whereas Childhood held a quietly romanticized view of the masses suffering under the petty tyranny of pre-Revolutionary feudalism, My Apprenticeship shows the underclass exploiting each other.

These films are saddled with a Socialist Realist agenda that threatens to reduce each scene to a civics parable, denying it of the pulsing lyricism of that other landmark childhood film trilogy, Satyajit Ray’s Apu films. But there’s a strong humanist countercurrent that takes the film beyond mere didacticism. At its best moments the film resists the easy Soviet stereotyping of characters into desirable and undesirable social types. The most memorable characters engage with Maxim over books and ruminations about their waylaid ambitions; paradoxically, it is in relaxed conversational stasis, not in reform or production, that this Marxist propaganda film envisions a state of human fulfillment. The way Donskoi deploys music to freeze time and saturate a moment with lyrical pathos anticipates what John Ford would start doing around the same period. The ultimate motif is that of the Volga River, upon which the film stages more than a few knockout moments of wordless beauty. Its gentle, constant flow evokes a grace that transcends the turmoils and conflicts, grand or small, inflicted by humans upon each other throughout time.

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Screened December 11 2009 on Columbia Tri-Star DVD in Brooklyn, NY

TSPDT Rank # 962 IMDb Wiki

Frank Capra abandoned the vibrant American melee upon which he built his reputation to issue this queasy utopian treatise dressed as an exotic adventure fantasy. Shangri-la makes for both a visually and dramatically banal paradise. Proto-Bob Ross matte landscapes and manufactured nature sets alternate with knockoff Frank Lloyd Wright architecture cluttered with curios. It could be fun in a camp/surreal way if Capra wasn’t so insistent that this Neverland was what Depression-era American needed, where fun times involve listening to Sam Jaffee’s wrinkled Lama make longwinded pseudo-Buddhist platitudes bemoaning man’s fate (I’ll take spitfire banter with Claudette Colbert or Jean Arthur anyday). Jane Wyatt is easy on the eyes and Ronald Colman, that paradigm of 30s benevolent colonialism, somehow bestows dignity on his environs through his benevolent colonialist gaze. Thomas Mitchell and Edward Everett Horton bring some down-to-earth Capra back to the proceedings by virtue of their charming petty-mindedness, casting the warm glow of genuine human behavior amidst the lofty artifice.

The restored version of Lost Horizon can be viewed online on Google Reader (see after the break)

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Screened December 7 2009 on Masters of Cinema Region 2 DVD (thanks Gina) in Brooklyn NY

TSPDT rank #994  IMDb Wiki

Douglas Sirk’s penultimate feature, and one of his most personal, brings his entire Hollywood career into stark relief.  This adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel of love in WWII Germany envisions a bombed-out wasteland that couldn’t be further removed from the Technicolor gloss of affluent America seen in his most famous films. There are no vibrant pastels or lush interiors decorated with fine upholstery or shiny bric a brac; here, whether inside or outside, it’s a seemingly monotonous ash gray or dirt brown. Whenever color arrives (usually a tree blossom or sprig of a leaf), it’s a miracle.

This seems to invert the formula established in other Sirk films, where the abundance of attractive surfaces amounts to overcompensation for dissatisfied lives lurking underneath. Here, it’s luxury that makes life worth living: the young lovers Ernst (John Gavin) and Elizabeth (Lilo Pulver) bluff their way into a fancy meal in an officer’s club, in a scene that defies gravity. What’s even more fascinating is how that famous Sirkian irony is turned on its ear. In films like All That Heaven Allows or Imitation or Life, Sirk lays ironic subtext into the dialogue or the mise-en-scene, such that it verges on mocking the characters’ myopic pursuits of happiness (while priming hipster camp laughter). Here the script is flipped: cynicism and irony wrought by wartime cruelty are the fashion, a way for soldiers and civilians alike to numb themselves from the inhumanity that engulfs them. It’s against this convention that the lovers fight, hanging on to a flickering sense of hope and earnestness (Gavin, a bit wooden, doesn’t quite carry it off, but Pulver more than compensates – it’s easy to see why Godard was smitten by her in his famous review of the film, as her doe-eyed litheness make her a prototype for Anna Karina).

What Sirk keeps consistent between this film and the American-set melodramas is his fixation with the fragility of what makes life worth living in a world of suffocating convention. Wealth and poverty prove to be equally dehumanizing.  What matters are the frail bonds between people, enabled by fleeting moments of fantasy fulfillment. This isn’t tied to any overt political or social agenda. Quite the opposite, there’s a startling, paradoxical acceptance of the status quo as a fundamentally inescapable condition: it’s ground that gives birth to its own acts of defiance – these moments of transcendent beauty – and it’s the ground that smothers them out.

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