The Auteurs

Each of the Notebook's writers were given the opportunity to submit two lists of their ten favorite films of 2008.  One is restricted to films receiving at least a week's theatrical run in the U.S., a limitation regretfully imposed only so that we may arrive at a final tally of the Notebook's overall favorites released this year.  The second list is optional, and opens up the field to anything seen in 2008, new or old, festival or regular release.  Each writer is also given space for words of explaination, rant, annotation, or anything else that occurs to them about their film viewing in 2008.

***

I've been scanning film critics' year-end lists for a bit now, and most seem to agree that 2008 was a mediocre year for movies. Which strikes me as utterly ridiculous - this seems one of the strongest years I can remember. I fell in some kind of love with 9, or 12, or 15 new films in 2008. In a few years, when these films have been revisited and lived with, I'm convinced that people will see this year as one full of magic. I count at least 8 near-masterpieces from 2008, and more than likely 9. At least 3 more achieve near-greatness. One of the things I look forward to most in 2009 is chance to revisit many of the films I first met in 2008. Here, with provisional rankings, are my top 10 films from 2008:

1. Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, 2008)
2. En la cuidad de Sylvia (In the City of Sylvia, José Luis Guerin, 2007)
3. Ne Touchez pas la hache (Don't Touch the Axe, Jacques Rivette, 2007)
4. Låt den rätte komma in (Let the Right One In, Tomas Alfredson, 2008)
5. Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (John Gianvito, 2007)
6. J'entends plus la guitare (I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar, Philippe Garrel, 1991)
7. Le Scaphandre et le papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Julian Schnabel, 2007)
8. 三峡好人 (Sānxiá hǎorén) (Still Life, Jia Zhang-Ke, 2006)
9. WALL-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008)
10. Cristóvão Colombo - O Enigma (Chrisopher Columbus, The Enigma, Manoel de Oliveira, 2007)


Ten films about love:
Aquinas considers love as wanting good for another being for the sake of that other being. But love can be longing. Love can push and pull and burn and finally extinguish itself for lack of oxygen. Love can be a tender, shared lonliness. Love can be hope for the future. Or watching your love object destroy herself. Or love is seeing the beautiful things for the first time - things seen but loved only in retrospect. Love is refusing to be pulled apart by the world. Love is saving each other for the sake of the future. Love is the pull of the past and a long-shared journey, embarked on together.

Ten films about the world:
The world grinds you down when you're in need of another chance. The world is full of people each beautiful in their own way. The world doesn't compromise with fate. The world tortures you - and sometimes needs to be tortured back. The world is full of wrongs and also battles for right. The world creates doubts but doesn't stop for us to sort them out. The world is so full of beautiful moments that we sometimes forget to see them. The world changes and things are lost. The world needs our faith to be restored to life. The world is a place for quests.

Ten films about death (and life):
Loss is permanent more often than it should be. We lose things and can't get them back. At the moment of irrevocable loss, our wounds turn to scars. But our scars can help others and ourselves to heal. Our heroes die but their struggle continues. Time moves forward and we leave our past behind. Our time is too short. And it may be too late to salvage it. But we can try. Together, and full of hope.

A year of hidden depths, whose truth* has yet to be fully uncovered.

* Truth, Being, Reality - in Sanskrit, these are all represented by a single word: Sat.

Hong Sang-soo's Woman on the Beach stands as my strong #11 on this list. Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York was certainly the most ambitious English-language film of the year even if it left me feeling a little colder than it should have. It's lovely, but too intellectual; I hope as Kaufman directs future films that he learns to connect his meta-filmic existential crises more directly with the sense of loss at their core. It's still wonderful enough to stand at a strong #12. I would love to have included Michael Kirk's 2008 epic 2-part Frontline series Bush's War [www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/bushswar/], which stands as one of the great historical documents of our times. I wasn't as impressed with James Benning's RR as some, but it does have a richness that would likely reward future viewings, and certainly deserves a spot in any discussion of cinema in 2008.  I regret that some films remain unseen contenders for this list (The Wrestler, A Christmas Tale, The Flight of the Red Balloon, The Last Mistress, Paranoid Park, Waltz With Bashir, Ballast, Reprise, The Secret of the Grain, Che, The Class, among others). In a year where I missed so many possibly-great films, I'm heartened that enough magic stood out to put a film like Still Life - which I thought in January couldn't possibly be equalled in the 11 ensuing months of cinema - as only my 8th favorite of 2008. The film of year, though, remains Nathaniel Dorsky's Sarabande, a film that understands the nature of beauty, images, and cinema like few films before it, a film about which I can barely offer words.

The ten best films I saw this year that are ineligible for above poll, in rough order of preference, were:

Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945)
Portrait d'une jeune fille de la fin des années 60 à Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1994)
Je vous salue Sarajevo (Jean-Luc Godard, 1993)
City Lights (Charles Chaplin, 1931)
Le Fond de l'Air est Rouge (Chris Marker, 1977/1993)
Céline et Julie vont en bateau (Jacques Rivette, 1974)
Andrei Rubylev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1969)
Sarabande (Nathaniel Dorsky, 2008)
La reprise du travail aux usines Wonder (Jacques Willemont, 1968)
Cocksucker Blues (Robert Frank, 1972)

I wish you all a lovely 2009, in the cinema and out.

Before Kurahara and his scriptwriter Nobuo Yamada laid the taiyozoku genre to rest with Black Sun, they made two “road” movies. Their models are clearly Western films, rather than Japanese novels. They are not, however, slavish imitations, and both give the director and the screenwriter a freer hand to experiment with different styles: the two films are also quite different from each other.

The first, Nikui anchikusho (1962), starring Ishihara Yujiro as Daisaku, is a Hollywood-style star vehicle. Ishihara had married Nikkatsu’s previous leading actress, Mie Kitahara, who then retired, so Asaoka Ruriko plays Daisaku’s girlfriend. The English title, I Hate But I Love, reveals the director’s intention to make a kiss-and-make-up romantic comedy, along the lines of Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve.

The formal model is actually Sturges’ Sullivan's Travels. Daisaku is a busy celebrity who tires of his narrow, overly regimented life: his domineering manager/girlfriend, played by Asaoka, seems to embody his frustrations. On an impulse, he answers an ad to deliver a jeep needed by a medical volunteer in a remote Kyushu village. His employers try to stop him, but then the PR people, led by Daisaku’s girlfriend, decide to run with Daisaku’s “humanism,” sending a bevy of reporters to follow the fleeing celebrity along the length of Japan: Honshu, the Inland Sea, and finally Kyushu.

The second, road segment of the movie offers a fascinating view of the early ‘60s Japanese countryside. Kurahara doesn’t quite measure up to Sturges’ comic panache here, but this is the part of the movie where Asaoka’s character develops. She follows Daisaku—after cheerfully helping herself to his sports car—along the increasingly dangerous roads. As her bossiness gives way to fear, Daisaku finally sees her vulnerability. This is what he needs: only when she is desperately holding onto him, her car hanging off of a cliff, does his love for her truly gel.

Above: I Hate But I Love (1962). Image courtesy of NIKKATSU Corporation. All rights reserved.

As they travel through the Japan of 1962, Kurahara exaggerates the road’s perils. As in his taiyozoku films—with the pam-pams, their fat, white Johns, and arrogant GIs—one senses that Kurahara is exorcising problems from the recent past—in this case, rural backwardness—rather than showing the precise present. Read More

The first four films from the Filmex’s Kurahara retrospective, all from the ‘50s, show that he was experimenting with different genres. Although this is partly because these movies are based on different novels by diverse authors, he is also evolving as a director, feeling around for the kind of story he can comfortably adapt into film.

It is important to remember that in the mind of the public, the films Nikkatsu churned out were associated with their stars, rather than directors. Kurahara’s first non-apprentice film (omitted in the retrospective) was I’m Waiting (Ore ga matteru ze!), starring the pair from Crazed Fruit, Ishihara and Kitahara, Nikkatsu’s “alpha couple.”

Previous retrospectives, (including the Nikkatsu Action Films retro Mark Schilling put together for Udine) have included a few Kurahara films, but this year’s Filmex offering shows that in his best films, Kurahara often used certain members of the second rank of Nikkatsu performers, and got very good performances from them.

Above: The Third Dead Angel (1959). Image courtesy of NIKKATSU Corporation. All rights reserved.

  Read More

Related Films

Crazed Fruit

Dir Kô Nakahira

1956 Japan

HEIRONYMOUS MERKIN

Can Heironymous Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness? (1969) Is the film that dares to ask the question, "Can Heironymous Merkin ever forget Mercy Humppe and find true happiness?" Since the title appears only at the end, it’s fair to say that the film poses the question rather than answering it.

Anthony Newley’s autobiographical vanity project could be described as justly forgotten, except that in all its awfulness and horribleness and shittiness, it’s tremendously entertaining, although that does depend on where you like your needle to lie on the pleasure/malaise scale. Newley is determined to give us a bad feeling.

Read More

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8 1/2

Dir Federico Fellini

1963 Italy

Annie Hall

Dir Woody Allen

1977 United States

Each of the Notebook's writers were given the opportunity to submit two lists of their ten favorite films of 2008.  One is restricted to films receiving at least a week's theatrical run in the U.S., a limitation regretfully imposed only so that we may arrive at a final tally of the Notebook's overall favorites released this year.  The second list is optional, and opens up the field to anything seen in 2008, new or old, festival or regular release.  Each writer is also given space for words of explaination, rant, annotation, or anything else that occurs to them about their film viewing in 2008.

***

Thank God for rules, and strict adherence to them. Wihout them, I wouldn't have been able to include at least three films on my 2008 top ten, and given what a largely uninspiring year 2008, my list would have been drier without them. My rule was that the film had to have a theatrical run of more than a day somewhere in the United States in order to qualify. This kept two films that many people put on their 2007 lists off of mine...and enabled me to include one film that didn't get too far from New York, but did at least play the required time there.

1) Ne Touchez pas la hache [U.S. release title: The Duchess of Langaise] (Rivette): Wit, irony (actual irony, not the weak tea of snark that so often passes for it these days), romantic obsession, tragedy—all at a level of intelligence and refinement rare in any art form today, not just film. And, in the just-film department: mise-en-scene like nobody's business. And gravely beautiful performances.

2) Une Vielle Maitresse [U.S. release title: The Last Mistress] (Breillat): Wit, irony, romantic obsession, mise-en-scene, enthusiastic blood-drinking.

3) Razzle Dazzle/The Lost World (Jacobs): When he says "world," he's not kidding—Jacobs' dissection and examination of a minute's worth of hundrer-and-five-year-old Edison footage is both a backward-looking and prophetic work of wizardry.

4) Romance of Astree and Celadon (Rohmer): Rohmer's final film has a simplicity that convinced its unwise detractors that it was merely simple. It is, rather, enchanting, droll, utterly sincere. A late masterwork perhaps on a par with Dreyer's Gertrud.

5)  Synecdoche, New York (Kaufman): As multi-layered in its way as the Desplechin film below, Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut is a mordantly funny howl that deplores solipsism while trying and failing to find truly viable alternatives to it.

6) A Christmas Tale (Desplechin): Exhilarating complexity. The work of a filmmaker in love with the freedom he allows himself.

7) Flight of fhe Red Balloon (Hsiao-hsien): More simplicity. I never thought I'd see a variant on, or homage to, the legendary children's film that wasn't cloying. This isn't cloying—it's smart, soulful, beautiful.

8) Gran Torino (Eastwood): More simplicity.

9) The Wrestler (Aronofsky): Deceptive simplicity.

10) Che (Soderbergh): Epic moviemaking without bloat. The excitement is in the precision.

Acquarello
The Notebook's First Annual Writers' Poll

David Cairns
The Forgotten: Homunculus, mon amour
The Forgotten: I Stab Sane
The Forgotten: Fire and Ice
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Fernando F. Croce
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Andrew Grant
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HarryTuttle
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Darren Hughes
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Daniel Kasman
Murnau's light: "City Girl" and the run through the wheat
Murnau's dark: "City Girl" and lantern light
Now in theaters: "In the City of Sylvia" (Guerín, Spain)
Video of the day
Now in theaters: "Wendy and Lucy" (Reichardt, USA)

Glenn Kenny
Zasu Pitt's Hands: The Preternatural Delicacy of Borzage's "Lazybones"
Tuesday Morning Foreign Region DVD Report: "Alice In The Cities" (Wenders, 1974)
Tuesday Morning Foreign Region DVD Report, Caveat Emptor Edition: "Zabriskie Point" (Antonioni, 1970)
Tuesday Morning Foreign Region DVD Report: "Verboten!" (Fuller, 1959)
Tuesday Morning Foreign Region DVD Report: "Twisted Nerve"
Tuesday Morning Foreign Region DVD Report: "Les Stances a Sophie" (Mizrahi, 1971)
The Notebook's First Annual Writers' Poll

Ryland Walker Knight
Samuel Fuller's "White Dog": Natural is not in it.
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Edwin Mak
When Change Meant Change: Revisiting 1930s Chinese Leftist Cinema
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Nick Palevsky
Koreyoshi Kurahara, Part I: "Black Sun" and the Sun Tribe

David Phelps
Oshima: Artists and Lovers, Take One (of Four)
Oshima: Theater of the Revolution, Take Two (of Four)
Oshima: Perspective Matters, Take Three (of Four)
Oshima: A World of Their Own (Chasing Shadows, Take Four of Four)
Or...

Vadim Rizov
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Dan Sallitt
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Andrew Tracy
Alexanderplatz, encore

Neil Young
PAGES FROM A COLD ISLAND: don't trust the stars
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Zachary Wigon
A completely false security: an interview with Kelly Reichardt
The Notebook's First Annual Writers' Poll

Each of the Notebook's writers were given the opportunity to submit two lists of their ten favorite films of 2008.  One is restricted to films receiving at least a week's theatrical run in the U.S., a limitation regretfully imposed only so that we may arrive at a final tally of the Notebook's overall favorites released this year.  The second list is optional, and opens up the field to anything seen in 2008, new or old, festival or regular release.  Each writer is also given space for words of explaination, rant, annotation, or anything else that occurs to them about their film viewing in 2008.

***

There is a gap between what critics like and what the lacklustre distribution circuit likes to show to the public. There is the year 2008 for auteur's premières and the year 2008 for the local audience. And the critics dance in between. Reviewing all year long official theatrical releases gives an inaccurate picture of the 2008 creation (not to mention Experimental cinema, documentaries and shorts). And yet, the consensual opinion of the profession is full of films that the public didn't get to see (because so few countries released them and sometimes in only one theatre/festival). How can you get a sizeable population to know the best films of the year, if they make such a fleeting appearance? There is just too much going on at one time, and we can't cancel all things at hands to rush for that one film before it is replaced by the next disposable commodity.

If the Film Criticism Crisis of 2008 taught us anything (new), this would have to be the inadequacy of audience's habits and critics' duty. Not a viable profession.

I used to watch most Zeitgeist movies just to know what everyone was writing about, to make my own opinion. I don't bother anymore.  It costs me. Commercial sensations are unfulfilled. Going to the movies, casual and numbing as watching TV, has lost its singularity. Filmmakers serve us fast-food movies : engineered recipe quickly produced, standard stories quickly forgotten. Rarely anticipated, too often disappointing. Mainstream cinema is so far behind. Even the Coen brothers, Tim Burton, Paul Thomas Anderson, Christopher Nolan who used to make original, creative films with commercial appeal, now accommodate a broader, smoother, duller mainstream taste with formulaic genre. Auteurs are not bothered to make their mark anymore. If they just want to fit in and make big bucks like everyone else, critics can't give them the attention they used to deserve.

The Dark Knight was tastefully spectacular and cleverly written, fair enough for a quality night at the movies, not to register on my 2008 scrolls. Two Lovers was sketchy and emotionally contrived. Burn After Reading was just lame (I only liked the final absurd dialogue at the CIA). There is not much of substance beneath such a professional polish. Capable people making commercial hits is a novelty, it might be a change for the mainstream press and a surprise for the general audience, but it's hardly an achievement in terms of cutting edge cinema. So many movies this year that I didn't even want to watch... But I have to admit, even though I live in Paris, some I have yet to watch here (La Mujer Sin Cabeza; Synecdoche, New York; and Three Monkeys, due in January). Nonetheless I shall provide here a list complying with the American release rules :

TOP10 - 2008 American Releases

1. Still Life (2006/Jia Zhang-ke/China)
2. The Man from London (2007/Béla Tarr/Hungary/France)
3. Woman On The Beach (2006/Hong Sang-soo/Korea)
4. 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days (2007/Cristian Mungiu/Romania)
5. Mukhsin (2006/Yasmin Ahmad/Malaysia)
6. Silent Light (2007/Carlos Reygadas/Mexico)
7. The Band's Visit (2007/Eran Kolirin/Israel) Début
8. Opera Jawa (2006/Nugroho/Indonesia)
9. Paraguayan Hammock (2006/Encima/Paraguay)
10. Hunger (2008/Steve McQueen/UK) Début

Who I'm exited about are auteurs of contemporary cinema thinking outside the box. I seek a thought-provoking perspective in tune with the paradoxical evolutions of social realities, not an escapist fantasy. I expect a renewed storytelling approach, not repetitive plot lines by numbers. I desire to see challenging ways to make cinema, taking more ambitious risks to reach ground breaking achievements. Do you experience such a thing at your local theatre? These meaningful auteurs are struggling to make their films and to get them seen. You need to walk the offbeat margin to find deserving contenders for a top10.
Even such an indispensable filmmaker as the gifted Béla Tarr resolved to make his last film ever in 2008 because of his unreconcilable disappointment with the system of production, the audience playing safe and the unjust society we live in! It's time to worry, to stop indulging blissful optimism and start being realistic about what happened to our screens. What is going on backstage in the office of decision makers who funnel the cinematic art through the conservative grinder of pervasive conventions?

My second list is more representative of the 2008 festival premières. I'll omit titles with a 2008 première in France already on my first list (Béla Tarr, Hong, Ahmad, McQueen).

My TOP10 2008 - Freestyle

1. Shirin (2008/Abbas Kiarostami/Iran)
2. Now Showing (2008/Raya Martin/Philippines)
3. Los Bastardos (2008/Amat Escalante/Mexico)
4. Death in the land of the Encantos (2007/Lav Diaz/Philippines)
5. Milky Way (2008/Fliegauf Benedek/Hungary)
6. Liverpool (2008/Lisandro Alonso/Argentina)
7. Night and Day (2008/Hong Sang-soo/Korea)
8. A Short Film About Indio Nacional (2007/Raya Martin/Philippines)
9. Le Silence de Lorna (2008/Dardenne Bros/Belgium)
10. La Vie Moderne (2008/Raymond Depardon/France)

50 years after the death of French critic André Bazin, I like to think that he would have been proud of how 2008 auteurs perpetuated his theory of "real time recording" extrapolated to a level he couldn't have imagined. The best cinema today, in my opinion, comes from the peripheral countries without the solid industry/marketing enjoyed in the USA or in France. They don't get popular success nor comfortable profits, so critics should at least give due recognition for the intrepid hard work entirely devoted to the progress of cinema history.

Lastly, I'd like to mention the most inspiring revival screenings I saw in 2008 : Seppuku (1962/Kobayashi/Japan), Coup d'Etat (1973/Yoshida/Japan) and Roy Anderssson's début feature, A Swedish Love Story (1977/Andersson/Sweden).

Each of the Notebook's writers were given the opportunity to submit two lists of their ten favorite films of 2008.  One is restricted to films receiving at least a week's theatrical run in the U.S., a limitation regretfully imposed only so that we may arrive at a final tally of the Notebook's overall favorites released this year.  The second list is optional, and opens up the field to anything seen in 2008, new or old, festival or regular release.  Each writer is also given space for words of explaination, rant, annotation, or anything else that occurs to them about their film viewing in 2008.

***

Distribution:

Hunger
Paranoid Park
Encounters at the End of the World
Wendy and Lucy
4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days
Reprise
My Winnipeg
Happy-Go-Lucky
Che
The Flight of the Red Balloon

Everything:

Hunger
Paranoid Park
Afterschool
Encounters at the End of the World
Wendy and Lucy
Sugar
4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days
Reprise
My Winnipeg
Happy-Go-Lucky

I was thinking about trying to do a write-up that would consist of my thoughts on 2008 as an enclosed entity for cinematic trends and movements, until I realized that such write-ups tend to feel a bit forced to me. 2008 was not that different from 2007, and 2009 will probably not be much different than 2008, in terms of the amount of good or bad films produced, the amount and types of trends we see emerging, et cetera. One thing I did find notable was that 2008 saw not one, but two extremely young filmmakers premiere their films at the Cannes Film Festival, an exciting sign that younger filmmakers are finding it easier to get their work out there. I am referring to Antonio Campos and Josh Safdie, whose The Pleasure of Being Robbed I found admirable in its ambition, and enjoyable, but not enough so to make my list. It has been all too difficult in the past for younger filmmakers to make feature films and be taken seriously; perhaps that is changing.

My abbreviated thoughts on the three best films I saw this year:

Hunger (Steve McQueen) is one of the best films I have ever seen. I saw it at NYFF, but it wasn’t until my second viewing that I grasped how fiercely political this film is. The film is extremely, uncompromisingly formal, and its stylistic audacity is such that one becomes bowled over by it; a second viewing is necessary for the full political implications of the work to sink in. To risk sounding platitudinal, this is a film about the giant idea of sacrificing one’s life for a cause greater than oneself. That kind of commitment is the core of serious political action, and unsurprisingly, it is commonly tackled in films, almost always from a sentimental angle. Hunger has barely any dialogue in it, save for the one-act play that is found in the middle of the film, and never comes close to the realm of sentimentality. It understands how the body is a political instrument in a manner that illuminates the deep, physical connection that political heroes have to their causes. The film’s protagonist compares himself to Jesus at one point. It may be a bit much, but as Woody Allen once said, you have to model yourself after somebody.

Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant) is the logical endpoint of Gus Van Sant’s four film journey that began in Bela Tarr land, and ended with his own, distinct style of cinema. This journey produced two films that are great (Gerry and Last Days), one that is transcendent (Paranoid Park), and one mediocre film, Elephant. Van Sant really delved into the formal tenets of cinema with this digression, and came out proving that his grasp on what is purely cinematic is as strong as that of any filmmaker working today. From 2002 to 2007, no American filmmaker was more important. Paranoid Park is an extremely formal film, but Van Sant’s more subtle decisions are equally as powerful as his more obvious ones, such as the usage of dreamy, gorgeous Super-8mm. No one can photograph a face like Van Sant does, and his extended close-ups of his protagonist are more aptly compared to portrait photography and painting than to other examples of work in the cinema.

Afterschool (Antonio Campos) is the first film I’ve seen that captures exactly what it felt like to be growing up amidst the technological / internet boom that has occurred in this country over the last ten years. There have been plenty of attempts to incorporate the idea of digital reality as mediator of social interaction into a film (LOL comes to mind), but nothing with the eerie authenticity of Campos’ work of hyper-reality. Campos’ depiction of teenage self-consciousness and alienation finds its perfect double in the self-interest and reclusive tendencies encouraged by the Internet. On a superficial level, it’s true that it is not a realistic depiction of the way teens behave; but as Picasso quipped, “art is the lie that reveals the truth.” Campos’ film is hyperbolic in order to accentuate the tiny changes that are taking place amongst young people today – tiny, but pregnant with importance.

This year’s TOKYO FILMEX featured a retrospective on Koreyoshi Kurahara, a director whose long-term international reputation may rest on his taiyozoku, or “sun tribe” films. He did these for Nikkatsu Studios in the ‘50s and ‘60s. This is not what he was best known for in Japan in the decades before his death in 2002, though: after he left Nikkatsu, he mostly made family films about animals, far-away places or both. The retrospective omits these, and features films about and for an angry and confused generation, growing up in the wake of Japan’s defeat and during the American occupation.

Black Sun was made in 1964, when the “sun tribe” genre of films was going into decline, and Nikkatsu was losing out to new styles of action and genre films introduced by other studios. The tale of a black GI, it may have been influenced by Nagisa Oshima’s The Catch, made a few years before. The two are very different movies, however. The Catch is about a black American soldier captured during WW II, in a remote Japanese village; Black Sun is about Gil, a GI on the lam from American MPs, hiding in the heart of modern Tokyo.

Above: Black Sun. Image courtesy of NIKKATSU Corporation. All rights reserved. Read More

Related Films

Crazed Fruit

Dir Kô Nakahira

1956 Japan

The presences of the exemplary Nouvelle Vague icons Bernadette Lafont and Bulle Ogier in the female lead roles notwithstanding, what cachet 1971's Les Stances a Sophie has accrued over the years is largely extra-cinematical. Its soundtrack, composed and performed by the legendary Art Ensemble of Chicago—then comprised of hornmen Joseph Bowie, bassist Malachi Flavors, drummer Don Moye, and singer Fontella Bass (previously of "Rescue Me" fame and at the time married to Bowie) was for many years a much sought-after item among contemporary jazz fans, and with excellent reason. Like many free-music pioneers, the Art Ensemble decamped to Paris in the late '60s, where there was both a larger and more welcoming audience for its work and at least one pioneering record label (BYG, cofounded by a group of French jazzbos that included future Celluioid Records founder Jean Karakos) throwing studio time at any number of adventurous artists. The Ensemble's work for this soundtrack finds them folding classical themes and contemporary soul stylings into its already effortlessly eclectic and daring musical bag. "Theme de Yoyo," with Bass declaiming a critique of the battle of the sexes that's a raw counterpoint to some of the more politely limned tensions playing out in the film at that point, is an ever-bracing piece that suggests all sorts of post-Brechtian possibilities for movie music—possibilities that really haven't been too thoroughly explored since. It's also pretty killer when listened to entirely on its own.

  Read More

Each of the Notebook's writers were given the opportunity to submit two lists of their ten favorite films of 2008.  One is restricted to films receiving at least a week's theatrical run in the U.S., a limitation regretfully imposed only so that we may arrive at a final tally of the Notebook's overall favorites released this year.  The second list is optional, and opens up the field to anything seen in 2008, new or old, festival or regular release.  Each writer is also given space for words of explaination, rant, annotation, or anything else that occurs to them about their film viewing in 2008.

***

I barely seem to have seen any new films this year -- I did vaguely "keep up" by seeing stuff on DVD from the year before, but most of my explorations have been archaeological in nature. While I might be able to cobble together a list of my ten best films from 2008, it might intersect rather closely with my ten worst, and would certainly intersect closely with everybody else's lists. But I can cheerfully supply a list of the things I saw during a year's blogging that made a deep enough impression on me that they back popped into my head when I thought back. I'm probably missing lots, but here are ten films which seemed to suggest different ways of making films or thinking about films. And we always need that.

The Last Flight (William Dieterle, 1931). Brilliant, strange, off-kilter tale of war fatigue and drink.

Seven Footprints to Satan (Benjamin Christensen, 1929). Viewed with illegible Italian intertitles, this stopped being a haunted-house comedy thriller and changed into the Lynchian descent into vaudevillian madness it always wanted to be.

Sebastian (David Green, 1968). Moving and quirky spy drama with beautiful performances and a reckless disregard for plot.

This Land is Mine! (Jean Renoir, 1943). Maybe my most emotional viewing experience of the year.

Kitty (Mitchell Leisen, 1945). Beautifully detailed period comedy-drama, cheerfully amoral and sophisticated.

Thunderbolt (Josef Von Sternberg, 1929). Another deeply weird early talkie, deserving of restoration/distribution at once. How different cinema could have been!

Bay of Angels (Jacques Demy, 1963). Absolutely thrilling.

Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, 2008). I didn’t see many new films, but this one could qualify for a top ten in just about any year.

Horrors of Malformed Men (Teruo Ishii, 1969). Seriously disturbed, ludicrous, vivid and basically bananas. Offensive too, probably, but so exhilaratingly off-the-wall it short-circuits good taste.

Bewitched (Arch Oboler, 1945). Oboler’s cute little psycho-thriller moves in strange ways and deploys sound in an inventive and unconventional fashion. It could still serve as godfather to a new kind of cinema. Read More

Related Films

Shanghai Express

Dir Josef von Sternberg

1932 United States

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

Dir Jacques Demy

1964 France

Each of the Notebook's writers were given the opportunity to submit two lists of their ten favorite films of 2008.  One is restricted to films receiving at least a week's theatrical run in the U.S., a limitation regretfully imposed only so that we may arrive at a final tally of the Notebook's overall favorites released this year.  The second list is optional, and opens up the field to anything seen in 2008, new or old, festival or regular release.  Each writer is also given space for words of explaination, rant, annotation, or anything else that occurs to them about their film viewing in 2008.

***

Favorite Distributed Films of 2008

01. La Question humaine / Heartbeat Detector (Nicolas Klotz)
02. Alexandra (Aleksandr Sokurov)
03. A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin)
04. Ne touchez pas le hache / The Duchess of Langeais (Jacques Rivette)
05. In the City of Sylvia (José Luis Guerin)
06. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu)
07. Love Songs (Christophe Honoré)
08. Before I Forget (Jacques Nolot)
09. Reprise (Joachim Trier)
10. A Girl Cut in Two (Claude Chabrol)

Favorite Films of 2008

01. La Question humaine / Heartbeat Detector (Nicolas Klotz, 2007)
02. 24 City (Jia Zhang-ke, 2008)
03. The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel, 2008)
04. A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin, 2008)
05. Ne touchez pas le hache / The Duchess of Langeais (Jacques Rivette, 2007)
06. Tokyo Sonata (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2008)
07. Love Songs (Christophe Honoré, 2007)
08. Before I Forget (Jacques Nolot, 2007)
09. The Feelings Factory (Jean-Marc Moutout, 2008)
10. The Sky Crawlers (Mamoru Oshii, 2008)

The retrospectives in 2008 were the highlight of the year for me: filling the gaps from the idiosyncratic cinemas of such diverse filmmakers as Jean Eustache, Manoel de Oliveira, Teuvo Tulio, and Nagisa Oshima, and discovering the richness of some national cinemas from the "other" Europe, such as Slovenia and Romania.

While the films that introduced me to Jean Eustache's cinema, The Mother and the Whore and Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes suggest a sardonic, roguish streak, his penchant for experimenting with disparate narrative structures and film genres into unexpected modes of storytelling (especially in Les Photos d'Alix and Une sale histoire) and observations of quotidian life (in Le Cochon and Numéro Zéro) also reinforce his place in the vanguard of contemporary French cinema now inhabited by similar genre cross-cutting, multi-mode filmmakers as Olivier Assayas and Arnaud Desplechin.

Manoel de Oliveira's later films tend towards the historical (A Talking Picture and The Fifth Empire), the personal (Oporto of My Childhood), or expositions on the ambiguity of reality and truth (Belle Toujours), but this year's retrospective - which included rare screenings of his earliest works, Douro, Faina Fluvial and Aniki-Bóbó, as well as his more epic, period stories of love and repression in the so called Tetralogy of Frustrated Love (The Past and the Present, Benilde or the Virgin Mary, Doomed Love, and Francisca) - shows that his varied approaches to filmmaking are not mutual exclusive, defined by a certain faithfulness to retain the integrity of the source material and, like Eustache, an interest in the nature of performance.

The four films in the Teuvo Tulio retrospective - The Song of the Scarlet Flower, In the Fields of Dreams, The Way You Wanted Me, and Cross of Love - serve as more of an introduction than an exhaustive survey of Tulio's films, and whether or not the selection can be extrapolated to his overall body of work remains unclear. What does surface in these films, though, is a concern for the station of women against an outmoded, rigid sense of honor and morality, a social commentary on the hypocrisy and exploitation implicit in class relations, and a redemption through the purity and sacrifice of an idealized love.

Nagisa Oshima has been a long-time personal favorite, and this year's sidebar retrospective at the New York Film Festival served as more of a prelude to the upcoming touring retrospective in Washington DC in the spring on 2009 than a full immersion into Oshima's razor-sharp social observations, catching only a handful of the rarer screenings like A Town of Love and Hope, Pleasures of the Flesh, and Three Resurrected Drunkards, along with the two films that I hadn't seen before, Diary of a Yunbogi Boy and Dear Summer Sister. There is a rawness to the presentation of both films - a series of still photographs in Diary of a Yunbogi Boy that resemble photo reportage, and a flat composition and jarring editing to Dear Summer Sister that mirror the aesthetics of vérité filmmaking - that hints at their underlying kinship within Oshima's cinema: bound by his recurring themes of conformity and monoethnic rejection of the other (whether in the treatment of Korean immigrants or the cultural isolation of Okinawan islanders) that shape Japanese postwar identity.

From a historical point of view, it was interesting to see how the Cold War-era national cinemas of Romania and Slovenia worked around the strictures of Soviet interference and cultural imperialism to forge their own means of self-expression. For Romanian filmmakers Malvina Ursianu (Return of the Banished) and Dan Pita (Orienteering), the corruption of power and its dysfunctional leadership serves as an allegory for Nicolae Ceauşescu's transformation from political maverick willing to stand up against the Soviet Union to increasingly isolated megalomaniac seeking to control all facets of society - including reproduction - in order to retain his grip on power.

For the post-Yugoslav nation of Slovenia, a similar cult of personality is found in the form of Josip Broz Tito, and the social ideal of a united Yugoslavia that collapsed with his death is reflected in the failed cultural revolution of the homegrown art movement, zenithism in Karpo Godina's Raft of the Medusa. Moreover, the question of Slovenia's identity (and its idealization) within the federation of disparate Yugoslav "identities" - as well as its strategic role as a gateway to "old" Europe - is also implicitly reflected in the nation's most beloved films, from Frantisek Cáp's Vesna, to France Stiglic's Valley of Peace (which features a memorable performance by American expatriate, John Kitzmiller), to Bostjan Hladnik's Dance in the Rain.

Each of the Notebook's writers were given the opportunity to submit two lists of their ten favorite films of 2008.  One is restricted to films receiving at least a week's theatrical run in the U.S., a limitation regretfully imposed only so that we may arrive at a final tally of the Notebook's overall favorites released this year.  The second list is optional, and opens up the field to anything seen in 2008, new or old, festival or regular release.  Each writer is also given space for words of explaination, rant, annotation, or anything else that occurs to them about their film viewing in 2008.

***

Top 10 New Movies, Calendar Year 2008:

1. A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin)

2. Gitmek: My Marlon And Brando (Huseyin Karabey)

3. Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh)

4. Of Time And The City (Terence Davies)

5. Tony Manero (Pablo Lorrain)

6. The Order Of Myths (Margaret Brown)

7. Vicky Christina Barcelona (Woody Allen)

8. Just Anybody (Jacques Doillon)

9. Tulpan (Sergey Dvortsevoy)

10. The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan)

2008 is, at press time, being pretty much universally acknowledged as a mediocre year for film; granted, there's always a substantial group of people to say this every year (except for 2007's equally universally acknowledged bonanza, which may explain why more people than usual are grumpy and cinematically hungover this time around). But the lousiness of the year was amplified by the endless firings of critics (and attendant, even more depressing and eventually tiresome speculations about what said firings meant) and the simultaneous erosion of even the most token American releases of significant world movies. Three of the movies on my list screened in some festival context in New York, then disappeared without any news of future distribution; one, In The City Of Sylvia, didn't have a distributor at all — just a one-week run courtesy of Anthology Film Archives — which didn't stop indieWIRE's polled critics from giving it 22 mentions for the #12 spot in the overall results. More than ever, people (mostly critics and industry types) with access to festivals and the ability to schedule their lives around rare screenings are disconnected from the vast majority of film-viewers — not just in what they're interested in watching, but in figuring how to get access to these films in the first place if interested. These trends have been ongoing for a while, but in 2008, more than ever, trying to keep up with worthwhile world film increasingly resembled the hunched-over position of a confirmed music geek: while i was scanning blogs for buzz and album downloads, friends in far-off locales were doing the same for film, reading up on Greencine then jumping over to hubs like karagarga to torrent themselves back into the discussion.

Faced with this dismal trifecta — a statistically kind of unavoidable slump year, the irritatingly over-discussed death of criticism as a paying occupation and a more fragmentary film culture than ever — good riddance to 2008. Still, there's perks: less time watching new movies means more time to watch rep cinema — and since, by all reliable accounts, 35mm rep programming is disappearing even faster than anyone could imagine, you should do as much of this as possible if you have the option. Everything these days seems to be a spangly new print: I guess this has something to do with studios overhauling their archives for DVD transfer, which means this may never happen again, but for the moment it's all fun and games. To prove my point, here's an alphabetical list of 10 terrific older movies I saw in pretty much pristine condition for the first time this year that are shamefully underknown and not available, as of right now, on Region 1 DVD:

Age Of Assassins (1967, Kihachi Okamoto) — I don't really do OMG JAPANESE WEBSANITY, but Age Of Assassins is crazy yet focused. Anchoring some kind of gibberish plot about a mental asylum training assassins for neo-Nazi hijinks is one of Tatsuya Nakadai's most virtuosic performances — from Jim Carrey goofball to suave secret agent man — and a nasty message about the hangover of imperial culture and fascist tendencies in '60s Japan. Okamoto's represented on Criterion with Sword Of Doom and other samurai films; this should be next.

Audition (1963, Milos Forman) — The only Forman film you could really call humanist in any way; with its emphasis on blurring documentary and re-enactment, though, it's arguably the groundwork for much of Forman's career (the sort-of real auditions in Taking Off, the Brechtian interaction of actors and the real participants in the events being restaged in his latter-day biopics). More glibly, it's the only documentary on Czech brass bands you'll ever need to see.

Bye Bye Braverman (1968, Sidney Lumet) — No one's ever really figured out how to film Philip Roth successfully, but this Lumet tour of late-60s New York and Jewish neurosis comes close. Featuring a Jew so humorless he decries converts as "Too much, too late."

Celine And Julie Go Boating (1974, Jacques Rivette) — Why the hell isn't this on R1 DVD? Seriously.

Dry Summer (1964, Metin Erksan) — Just restored and shown at MoMA's invaluable annual To Save and Project series, this is a ridiculously brutal Turkish melodrama (cited by Fatih Akin as a peak of Turkish cinema no less). In it a dog is shot and a chicken has its head cut off — for real and for keeps. Indelible if disturbing.

Emergency Kisses (1989, Philippe Garrel) — One of three Garrel films I saw revived in New York this year in impeccable condition (the othes: La Lit De La Vierge and I Don't Hear The Guitar Anymore), and my personal favorite. None are available on DVD (though it being Garrel that's not very surprising if we're being honest).

Garde A Vue (1981, Claude Miller) — Miller's generally written off as a middlebrow hack, but there's honor in this underrated curio, which is basically little more than excuse for Lino Ventura, Michel Serrault and Romy Schneider to take turns going at each other in lengthy exchanges. The plot and direction are unexceptional (and the ending misguided), but if that sounds like a good time to you, you're definitely the target audience. This is exactly the kind of low-key pleasure that belongs on DVD.

Naked Island (1960, Kaneto Shindo) — An elemental stunt: one year in the life of a family cultivating an impoverished island. No dialogue, just a hypnotic nascent version of arthouse minimalism.

Quadrille (1938, Sacha Guitry) — There's the barely masked leering and desire of '30s Lubitsch, and then there's this: barely filmed in any meaningful sense (the takes are beyond-Preminger-long, presumably to help the theatrical actors set their own pacing), with a climax that involves Guitry listening to his lover explain, with no verbal euphemisms, what exactly she did and who with. Bracing.

U.S. Go Home (1994, Claire Denis) — This is neck-and-neck with Nenette Et Boni for me as Denis' greatest film. It features Vincent Gallo actually acting as opposed to enacting his performance art project one more time. It's an hour long and the print is slightly bedraggled, but god bless MoMA for digging it up in the first place.

Related Films

Celine and Julie Go Boating

Dir Jacques Rivette

1974 France

A Christmas Tale

Dir Arnaud Desplechin &

2008 France

Happy-Go-Lucky

Dir Mike Leigh

2007 United Kingdom

Each of the Notebook's writers were given the opportunity to submit two lists of their ten favorite films of 2008.  One is restricted to films receiving at least a week's theatrical run in the U.S., a limitation regretfully imposed only so that we may arrive at a final tally of the Notebook's overall favorites released this year.  The second list is optional, and opens up the field to anything seen in 2008, new or old, festival or regular release.  Each writer is also given space for words of explaination, rant, annotation, or anything else that occurs to them about their film viewing in 2008.

***

The Sun Also Rises (Jiang Wen, China)
Hunger (Steve McQueen, UK)
Warlords (Peter Chan-Ho Sun, China/Hong Kong)
Che (Steven Soderburgh, Spain/France/USA)
Lust, Caution (Ang Lee, USA/China/Hong Kong/Taiwan)
Delta (Kornél Mundruczó, Hungary)
Sparrow (Johnnie To, Hong Kong)
Blind Mountain (Li Yang, China)
There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, USA)
24 City (Jia Zhangke, China)

Being based in London, I could offer only the second optional list, but it should still be concurrent enough. What strikes me in reviewing my selection is how many entries were touched by the moralistic – only the deliriously entertaining genre twister Sparrow and absurdist wonder that is The Sun Also Rises escape this category – offering one angle on looking back at this year’s film. Even films acclaimed for broaching sensitive issues placidly, belong to the moralistic – like Hunger and the Maze Prison question, 24 City and China’s modernising reforms, or Che and Marxist revolution. In that, what could be more successful an indication of moralism, than the consensus that each treated its topics fairly? The imperative of morality tales, like ideology, is not merely the justification of its corner but the conquering of “neutral ground.”

However, neutrality was by no means the most favoured approach. The heaviest global box-office hitter of the year (only narrowly missing this list) was a case in point. The Dark Knight made no bones about its didacticism. And due to a shared usage of larger-than-life “anti-hero” figures, it is tempting to link it to There Will Be Blood. Both titles reaffirmed populist moralism with such gusto, that it became almost Eisensteinian in zeal. But to separate the two, my preferred was the latter; on account of its consistency to its own moralist logic, even at the destruction of own its protagonists. It is the difference left between Day-Lewis’ character, who found himself mercilessly unredeemed despite volunteering to personalised humiliation; and the caped-crusader’s satisfying martyrdom after an ingenious narrative sleight-of-hand – that justifies the existence of a secret moral aristocracy no less.

Extending beyond the crises of Western liberal democratic thought, Warlords and Lust, Caution continued to entertain popular moral anxiety; and did so by demonstrating how ethical systems are interchangeable. Ang Lee’s blockbuster upheld, via an excursus on bodily intimacy, the moral authority of humanism; whereas Peter Chan’s dramatisation of a previously obscure incident in China’s late Qing dynasty history, appealed to a native Confucian system. And due to the virtual coincidence of Zhang Yimou’s Confucian-flavoured Olympic spectacles, the trials and tribulations of authoritarianism in Warlords gained an extra resonance. However, there proved to be moral vitality beneath these grand undertakings too; Blind Mountain being the latest reminder. Such is the potency of Li Yang’s social realism, that comparisons with veterans like Ken Loach do not seem like an overstatement; all the more remarkable since Li is yet to complete his “Blind trilogy” (Blind River is expected for 2009).

So far, each film mentioned anchors around humanism, but Delta stands as the anomaly – charting its moralist trajectory on a radically anti-humanist course. In a deceptively simple narrative – two siblings’ attempt at building a safe-house on uninhabited terrain, in a bid to escape their cruel social worlds – Kornél Mundruczó (and Yvette Biró as co-writer) forced human concerns to retreat where primordial nature advanced to the fore. And by doing so, they provided a thought-provoking meditation on morality’s own precariousness and ultimately arbitrary origin.

The inevitable question this line of thought leads to is: why did moralistic films present themselves again in such force? A reflex answer would be: because of the uncertainties arising from our world, and the actions of our rulers. But this response alone is inadequate in isolating who was responsible for making it such a force. In that, it becomes necessary to ask: is it simply worldly uncertainty that converts our filmmakers into compelling moralists; or is it our need for moral guidance that generates this fertile exploit? The answer to this will require further thought; just as 2008 was a year that left us pondering changes – some genuine others merely symbolic. We witnessed the final acts of the Bush (one last time go on...) and Blair era; the dawning of an unprecedented global economic menace; the return of direct action in Nepal, Greece and Thailand; an eastward tectonic shift in the balance of superpowers; and the herald of a new tentative American hopeful. It is no surprise then, that cinema showed many had lots on their minds.