More Foreign Film Voting Angst

Actually, more might not be the right word - I don't think my previous posts on the subject are all that anxious. This time, though, I promise angst! I haven't done any real bitching about it - now that I've voted (waiting for that big screen show of Pierrot le Fou - important for positioning purposes, as I haven't seen it in a while, and my favorite Godard film didn't make the cut), I am going to whine a bit.

1) What made the list that had no business being there? First - there are quite a few recent films that, while good, seem well below the threshold for a list of the 123 or so best foreign language films ever: Amores Perros? nice film - not great; City of God? Y Tu Mama Tambien? I'm not convinced by any of them, though I don't exactly disapprove. Another, similar category, might be good films by important directors - that are nowhere near the best. I probably shouldn't complain about the Kieslowski films that were nominated - preferring his Polish films to his French ones is probably a minority opinion - but I think it's justified. Similarly - Almodovar made the list a couple times, but for the wrong films - why not Law of Desire? Women on the Verge of Nervous Breakdown? even Matador?

On the other hand - how does Run Lola Run keep turning up on these lists? It's okay, but really - especially when you look at some of the kinds of films that didn't make the list (specifically, Hong Kong, Japanese and Korean action films) - what is this rather dull retread doing here? Come on people! have you all forgotten The Killer? And then we get to the Embarrassments: Amalie? people still watch that? Even worse - Delicatessen probably has a case for being on the list - so not only is this a bad film, it's the wrong film! And finally, there's Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon - oh dear. That needs its own entry.

2) I am not happy with the quality of Chinese films nominated. Yi Yi is deserving, Wong Kar-wei is deserving (though I think he deserved it more for Fallen Angels or Happy Together than for In the Mood for Love or Chungking Express) - but filling out the rest with two of Zhang Yimou's silly soap operas and a fake Wuxia film - God, that annoys me. I know - I could have voted differently - I have been hating myself since I hit send on the first nominating ballot for not voting for, at least, A Touch of Zen - and since seeing some of the films that did get votes, I can hate myself for not voting for Come Drink With Me, as well, plus Jackie Chan (Project A II) or John Woo (either the Killer or Bullet in the Head) or Tsui Hark (Peking Opera Blues and/or Once Upon a Time in China). For that matter, I hate myself for not voting for Platform or The River - or for Beijing Bastards, if lost causes are worth anything. Though of course by now I'm up to a 10-15 or so films I'm hating myself for not voting for (including Fallen Angels and Happy Together and The One Armed Swordsman and Swordsman II if I were honest) - and I haven't even mentioned Hou Hsiao Hsien, since I did vote for him - but did I end up splitting votes there? If I'd voted for Flowers of Shanghai, would that have gotten it on the list? oh, the guilt.

Anyway - for all the complaining, there is a kind of point here: it is - that the world has moved on. I suspect that 10 years ago, you could have gotten a couple John Woo films on a list like this, if not Hou or Yang. Hong Kong action seems to have disappeared - oddly, not quite replaced by Korean and Japanese genre films, though they get more attention these days. I have noted in the past how strange it is that Park Chan-wook films, say, don't sell out; I noticed it a couple weeks ago, at a double feature of Election/Triad Election - there was a decent crowd, but 10 years ago, every showing would have been mobbed. It's odd, and kind of disappointing.

3) This is not a complaint so much as an observation about the changes in film culture. There was a lot of gnashing of teeth around the time Bergman and Antonioni died about the Death of Film (at least art films) - you could find some evidence in this survey. What does it say about film culture today that a poll like this could exclude films from the last five years? and get almost no complaints? I don't necessarily disagree with the decision - but try to imagine how something like that would have gone over in 1967 or 1962 - when films 2-3 years old were scoring high on these kinds of polls... I get the impression that in the 60s (and possibly in the 70s as well) even jaded cynics would have admitted the chance that the next film they saw could be the Greatest Film Ever Made. Reflected in the voting - L'Aventura landing on the 1962 Sight and Sound top 10, say.

Do people feel that way now? I don't think this exactly means that good to great films are no longer being made - but I think it means that the culture of film watching, if not film making, has changed - there is no sense of a collective effort to change the art form (or the world.) In a way, I think I can relate this to my own conviction that canons should be organized more around genres and types and categories like nationality, than around individual films. I think the perceived value and importance of an individual film is driven as much by the context - by the expectations about the art form as a whole - as by the film itself. Watching those Johnny To films a couple weeks ago, enjoyable as they were, did not give me the thrill seeing a new John Woo or Ringo Lam film would have in the 90s - or (speaking of Johnny To and associates) that Too Many Ways to Be Number 1 or Expect the Unexpected gave me. (If I'd known that was the last gasp...) Are the new films as good as the older ones? better? worse? I don't know - it isn't quite important. It's that being part of a movement, part of an expectation of seeing something new and exciting, gives films extra power.

Though - to end this post - I still walk away from films actively wondering if I just saw the best film ever. Syndromes and a Century felt a bit like that - probably the only time this year. Last year it happened twice - the Death of Mr. Lazarescu and Inland Empire - which might be... and so on. But even there - my curiosity about the growing interest in Rumanian and Thai films gives those films an extra kick. And even the Lynch film gets a little push from the existence of films like Zodiac, which are also reinventing the technology of filmmaking...