My friends, it has been years since I have done a decent list post here, or anywhere else. But the time is at hand - partly inspired by Sight & Sound's once a decade poll, Sammy Juliano at Wonders in the Dark has organized a massive poll, top 100s from anyone interested. How can I miss such a thing? And even if these days any kind of post here is a rarity and exercise in nostalgia - here is it.
100 films. I have ranked them, but though I might defend the first dozen or so in this order, the rest are, at best, more like bunches of 8-10 at a time, and all pretty well arbitrary. But that's all right. It's more fun to agonize over whether Rashomon is better than Mouchette than it is to give up and list them alphabetically, even if it is mostly meaningless. So consider all of this in order. Here you go:
1.M - Lang 2.Rules of the Game - Renoir 3.It’s a Wonderful Life - Capra 4.Early Summer - Ozu 5.McCabe and Mrs Miller - Altman 6.The General - Keaton 7.The Maltese Falcon - Huston 8.Celine and Julie Go Boating - Rivette 9.Pierrot le Fou - Godard 10.Vertigo - Hitchcock 11.Duck Soup - McCarey
12.Seven Samurai - Kurosawa 13.The Pornographers - Imamura 14.City of Sadness - Hou 15.Late Spring - Ozu 16.Nosferatu - Murnau 17.Ivan the Terrible I&II - Eisenstein 18.His Girl Friday - Hawks 19.Ugetsu Monogatari - Mizogushi 20.Aguirre Wrath of God - Herzog 21.Playtime - Tati 22.Blue Velvet - Lynch 23.Out 1: Noli me Tangere - Rivette 24.Vivre sa Vie - Godard 25.Pather Panchali - Ray, S 26.Gospel According to St Matthew - Pasolini 27.Touch of Evil - Welles 28.Breathless - Godard 29.High and Low - Kurosawa 30.Nashville - Altman 31.Mr Smith Goes to Washington - Capra 32.Tokyo Story - Ozu 33.Rushmore - Anderson 34.Mystery of Kaspar Hauser - Herzog 35.I Was Born But… - Ozu 36.Inland Empire - Lynch 37.Insect Woman - Imamura 38.The Big Sleep - Hawks 39.Bride of Frankenstein - Whale 40.Citizen Kane - Welles 41.Rear Window - Hitchcock 42.Brighter Summer Day - Yang 43.Trouble in Paradise - Lubitsch 44.Fires on the Plain - Ichikawa 45.Night of the Hunter - Laughton 46.Alphaville - Godard 47.The Long Goodbye - Altman 48.Pigs and Battleships - Imamura 49.Dr Strangelove - Kubrick 50.Killing of a Chinese Bookie - Cassavetes 51.Yi Yi - Yang 52.Gold Rush - Chaplin 53.A Woman under the Influence - Cassavetes 54.Satantango - Tarr 55.Sweet Smell of Success - McKendrick 56.Late Chrysanthemums - Naruse 57.Intentions of Murder - Imamura 58.Imitation of Life - Sirk 59.When a Woman Ascends the Stairs - Naruse 60.Killer of Sheep - Burnett 61.The Searchers - Ford 62.Osaka Elegy - Mizoguchi 63.Blue Angel - Sternberg 64.Breaking the Waves - Von Trier 65.Rebel without a Cause - Ray, N 66.Fort Apache - Ford 67.The Man With the Movie Camera - Vertov 68.Sansho the Bailiff - Mizoguchi 69.Bringing up Baby - Hawks 70.The Third Man - Reed 71.Rashomon - Kurosawa 72.Mouchette - Bresson 73.Camera Buff - Kieslowski 74.Frankenstein - Whale 75.Touch of Zen - King Hu 76.Fallen Angels - Wong 77.Love me Tonight - Mamoulian 78.Some Like it Hot - Wilder 79.A Hard Day’s Night - Lester 80.400 Blows - Truffaut 81.Ordet - Dreyer 82.Mabuse the Gambler - Lang 83.Fitzcarraldo - Herzog 84.Top Hat - Sandrich 85.A Man Escaped - Bresson 86.Germany Year Zero - Rosselini 87.Sans Soleil - Marker 88.Metropolis - Lang 89.The Awful Truth - McCarey 90.Dead of Night - Multiple 91.A Man Vanishes - Imamura 92.Sun’s Burial - Oshima 93.Fargo - Coen Brothers 94.Make Way for Tomorrow - McCarey 95.The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On - Hara 96.Kings and Queen - Desplechin 97.Vengeance is Mine - Imamura 98.O Brother Where Art Thou - Coen Brothers 99.Testament of Dr. Mabuse - Lang 100.Los Angeles Plays itself - Anderson
This is very near and dear to my heart. For my money, Monty Python's Flying Circus is the best show ever on television.
What was it? A sketch comedy show, made by a group of writers and performers (and a doctor) from Cambridge and Oxford, plus an American animator, aired at the end of the 1960s and the early 70s on BBC; some of it was recorded in front of a studio audience, but this was augmented with material shot outside the studio, as well as animation. It ran 3 1/2 years, 45 episodes in total. After it ended, the troop continued to work, together and separately; they made a compilation film from reshot versions of some of their best sketches, a way to distribute the material in those pre-video tape days (and before the show went into syndication, in the US at least); a couple years later, they made an original film, a spoof of King Arthur tales (and Eisenstein), that became much more of a success. Somewhere in here, the show was picked up by PBS in the United States, and soon became a hit, which encouraged PBS to start picking up other British comedy shows. They also made records, right from the start, and went on to make more films, to perform live and so on, generating a fair amount of product. However these things were received when they were made, by the mid-70s they were part of the culture, and easy to find - on radio, syndication, by word of mouth. By the end of the decade, and into the 80s, Monty Python had sunk very deep roots in youth culture, here in the USA at least. For me and most of my pals, anyway: you walked around high school and college quoting them and stealing their jokes, you watched the reruns on PBS and you scrounged up the VHS of the Holy Grail and watched that, over and over and over, you wore it out, you bought the records and listened to them, you sang the songs (sit on my face and let my lips embrace you!), you learned the names of philosophers and cheeses and many, many synonyms for death, you heard of things like Watney's Red Barrel and Biggles and Algy that might not otherwise have jumped the pond, you made jokes about your idiom, you learned what litotes was, you picked up many excellent insults (sniveling little rat faced git), and years later, you saw Godard's Weekend and recognized half a dozen Monty Python bits. Well, I did.
That kind of adoration doesn't always hold up. Things get into the culture (some part of the culture, large, small, who cares), they become cults of a kind. And later? Some of them you outgrow; some stay the way they started out - shared jokes and references and the shared memories they can point to. These things can be fun, smart, perfectly good works of art or entertainment - but they never really go beyond that; their quality never quite surpasses the joy of sharing a fun secret with people. I've felt that way with, oh - watching Star Blazers with the physics majors back in college; or with a few films - Better off Dead or Reanimator and From Beyond or watching early Beavis and Butthead or South Park. But then there are things, things that start the same way, as a shared reference among your friends, that you look at later, or over time, and realize they are better than your love of them. They are just as good from a distance as up close. They are as intellectually stimulating as they are amusing. You realize, this thing is great. I've seen films make that move, for me, and in the culture - The Big Lebowski might be the best example, which went from being dismissed, to become a cult favorite, to being seen as something like a masterpiece. (That's my trajectory for the film, and not just mine I think.) Monty Python started at that cult favorite stage for me, but every time I come back to it, the deeper, smarter, more comprehensively brilliant it becomes.
It is the best. But what makes it the best? I think to answer that, we must go to the tape:
(Makes you wonder, by the way - I wonder where the Semi-final of Part 3 of Kierkegard's Journals, starring Richard Chamberlain, Peggy Mount and Billy Bremner would come in this poll?)
Let's start with the obvious - it is very funny, as funny as anything on TV. That is especially true of its peaks - The Piranha Brothers, the Dead Parrot Sketch, the Upper Class Twit of the Year, the Ministry of Silly Walks - any of those are as good as any 5 or 10 minutes of television anywhere. But it is also true that over 45 episodes, with half a dozen skits a show, and maybe another half dozen bits every week, it is hard to maintain the high points. There are bad skits, there are bad episodes - but not a lot, and "bad" is definitely relative. There is almost always something to hold on to - a turn of phrase, a visual gag, a half-serious idea - to make everything at least a bit interesting. And those peaks are very high peaks. Taken just as comedy; and it is remarkable what a range of comic styles it offered. Over-educated verbal play to be sure, but also plenty of physical comedy, plenty of satire - political, social, cultural, parody and other cultural references, plenty of low humor - bawdiness, toilet humor, it is irreverent, scatological, sometimes very nasty (cannibalism jokes abound), and often deliberately, and knowingly, offensive. Racial, ethnic, gender stereotypes abound, sometimes rather nasty ones. But part of what makes it so good is that all these comic modes get mixed up relentlessly - The Royal Philharmonic Goes to the Bathroom - and never seem to stand still. What exactly is being made fun of doesn't stay the same very long - usually because everything is being made fun of at once.
All that, I suppose, is what might make it the best comedy ever aired on television; there's more, and that's what makes it the best show. It's not just how funny Luigi Vercotte describing Doug Piranha's way with words is - it's that it is almost beautiful. The words themselves, in their best verbal sketches, are beautiful, as words, as performances. The way Palin lists off Doug's literary tropes; the way Cleese declares that parrot dead; the way Palin says of the space alien out to win Wimbledon, "he wasna so much a man as a blancmange!" - the images are absurd, and the words flow. And the ideas behind the jokes swerve and twist, shift registers, like the way the satire shifts from Dinsdale's ultraviolence to Doug's sarcasm, or the way the mostly verbal comedy of the Dead Parrot sketch turns into something bit different when Cleese walks into what is supposed to be different pet shop, to see the same guy behind the counter, the same cage on the floor. Along with everything else going on in the sketch, the show has just made a joke about generic props on TV - but here, Cleese's character notices, is startled by it - for him, the world is changing shape. Everything has shifted a bit further into surrealism, beyond the verbal absurdity, to a surreal world. Only to completely break the illusion, with Cleese stepping out of character and Chapman coming in to break it up before it gets any sillier. That fluidity is fundamental to the show , it;s always there. The comedy shifts registers, sketches break in the middle, turn into something else, characters in one walk off into another, the world changes around them. Most episodes maintain this kind of protean world - there can be a kind of continuity, but it's continuity of jokes, or words, or performers, who find the world swirling around them like they were Buster Keaton in the Playhouse, or agent Cooper at the end of Twin Peaks.
(Speaking of fluidity - look how that clip starts with comedy about language, shifts to satire about greedy doctors, then to film parody, and jokes about TV interviews, then a joke about adaptation - spinning always everywhere at once.)
There is always philosophy running just under the comedy in Monty Python's Flying Circus. It's there in the show's consistent deconstruction of comedy - explaining their jokes, dropping (or mocking) their punchlines, showing the process of writing the joke, or introducing the writer ("Eric wrote a sketch"), or making up a a whole sequence out of writing a joke (The Funniest Joke in the World.) Even more, though, it's in the linguistics of the show - the magnificent verbal comedy, and all the verbal play, the puns and anagrams, the love of names, titles, phrases, words, all the jokes about words, all the jokes about figures of speech (it's a pun! no, not a pun, what you do call it when it's the same backwards as forwards?), all the sketches that hinge on some kind of linguistic problem. TV presenters indicating pauses and punctuations with gestures; semaphore versions of Wuthering Heights; a talk show host making his speech first in a normal voice, then in a high pitched comic whine; policemen who can only hear you when you speak in a certain register; people who only speak the beginnings, middles or ends of words; people who multiply every number by 10; people who speak differently in alternating sentences - this list could go on a while. But it adds up - the use of language (use and abuse) is always there, thematically. It's funny - but it's informative, too - it is philosophy; some sketches come close to being as much concrete enactments of philosophical (or linguistic) problems as Dekalog is. (Though here the philosopher is more likely to be Wittgenstein.)
Let's take the poet McTeagle:
There's a good deal of fun being had here with the pretensions of modern art; there's a joke on the idea that calling something art makes it art. But then again - Ewan McTeagle's "poems" are not that far from being poetry after all. Note their economy, their rhythms, their directness: "If you could see your way to lending me sixpence. I could at least buy a newspaper. That's not much to ask anyone." The Pythons are poking fun at modern poetry, maybe at William Carlos Williams ("I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox..."), but they're doing it by writing lines that get most of what they need to have to be poetry. They almost sound right, even if the material is a joke. And the sketch is packed with jokes - making jokes about Scotsmen, mocking pretentious critics, and of course parodying a real historical figure, the poet William McGonagall. And that joke has some layers to it: McTeagle's joke poems are probably genuinely better poetry than McGonagall's was. (Especially if you like modern poetry.) But the joke shifts again - it might start by taking the piss (from McGonagall, maybe the likes of Williams, definitely the critics it is mocking), but it gets harder as you go to dismiss the idea behind it - if you say you are making art, that's art. Or maybe, the admiration in the sheer bloody mindedness it takes to persist for someone as bad as McGonagall. And there is no getting around the fact that, whatever these poems are as poetry, they are hilarious as comedy - and as verbal comedy. And that good verbal comedy is not far from being poetry itself. I offer as evidence:
A nod's as good as a wink to a blind bat!
It's the old stockbroker syndrome, the suburban fin de siecle ennui, angst, weltschmertz, call it what you will.
Oh, we use only the finest baby frogs, dew-picked and flown from Iraq, cleansed in the finest quality spring water, lightly killed, and sealed in a succulent, Swiss, quintuple-smooth, treble-milk chocolate envelope, and lovingly frosted with glucose.
Someone whose boots I would gladly lick clean until holes wore through my tongue, a man who is so totally and utterly wonderful, that I would rather be sealed in a pit of my own filth, than dare tread on the same stage with him. Ladies and gentlemen, the incomparably superior human being, Harry Fink!
He used... sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor, pathos, puns, parody, litotes and... satire. He was vicious.
I'll do what I like, because I'm six foot five and I eat punks like you for breakfast.
Oh, I've had such a morning in the High Court. I could stamp my little feet the way those QC's carry on.
Listen, I gotta fight the lion. That's what that guy Scott's all about. I know. I've studied him already.
Well there are three things we can do with your mother. We can burn her, bury her, or dump her.
Argument is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says.
I wandered lonely as a crab.
Look how serious I've gotten.
I love how the show flows, all those changing registers of comedy, its all-consuming appetite for culture - pop culture, high and low culture, anything, everything. I love its parodies, and how easily it switches from making fun of a pretentious TV talk show to Mummy references, to a ridiculous musical interlude, to chicken fighting archeologists. I can't make anything like a list of the cultural references in the show - but I can suggest the range. Art films (Pasolini, Godard, Visconte), Hollywood prestige films (Hitchcock, Peckinpaugh), Hollywood epics (David O Selzer! 20th Century Vole!), B movies (monster films and westerns and noir and spy pictures etc), even underground films (parodies of stag films and the like) - they hit everything. Usually in a way that is both very funny in itself, and makes you want to go watch a low budget Mummy picture, or something with Rock Tree and Doris Dog. They get the same range in literary references (the poet McGonagall to Shakespeare's Gay Boys in Bondage - wait: how many types of literature is that parodying at once?), art references, jokes about history, the law, politics, sports - anything. (Anything goes in, anything comes out - fish, bananas, old pyjamas, mutton, beef and trout.) (Thus mocking Cole Porter, World War II documentaries, censorship, and making a modestly serious anti-war statement.) (Etc.)
Finally, let me talk about the men who made this show. It's rather unique in being almost completely self-contained: the 6 principals wrote and performed it, supported by a very solid crew, including some excellent supporting actors. (Carol Cleveland and Connie Booth, the Fred Tomlinson singers, in particular.) The fact that they wrote and played all of it gives it a lot of the unity it has: its fascination with language, history, films, art, literature, its surreal, absurdist tone, all remain through the series, and come up immediately in the work the members of the troop did later. They have thrived afterwards - John Cleese maybe the most, as writer and performer - though Eric Idle and Michael Palin had long, interesting careers as actors, and Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam both turned to filmmaking. Gilliam's work on the show contains a lot of the things I've been harping on about - most of the imagery is found imagery, old magazines, cartoons, high and low art, as well as his own drawings, all of them combined to create worlds that are capable of anything. Nothing in fixed - everything can turn into anything. He's followed those ideas through his film career. Graham Chapman might have had the most disappointing post-Python career, struggling with alcoholism and never living up to his promise as an actor. He was good - maybe better out of the sketch comedy of the show - Arthur and Brian are almost well realized characters in the films. He didn't have Cleese's comic virtuosity, or Palin's versatility, or Idle's ability to find a Type he could embody. (No one does smarm better than Eric Idle: another word I learned from the Pythons, by the way.) He was always a fine part of the ensemble, but only really seemed to emerge as an individual performer in those later films - especially Life of Brian, where he excels.
In any case, the fact that the 6 of them made the show - wrote it and played most of it and maintained significant control of it, is surely how it stayed as good as it did. It gave it the unity it had - and it meant that it was easier for them to stop, when they started to run out of ideas.
So to finish this off - I am going to make two lists. First - my favorite sketches - then, my favorite episodes. Because it's not enough just to run yourself over in a car - you have to get through the course and shoot yourself, to become twit of the year! Best sketches:
1. Piranha brothers (Season 2, Episode 1)
2. Upperclass Twit of the year (1.12)
3. Dead parrot (1.8)
4. Science fiction sketch (Scotsmen and a Blancmange at Wimbledon) (1.7)
5. The Ministry of Silly Walks (2.1)
6. Election Night Special (the very silly party seems to have risen quite far since those days) (2.6)
7. The Argument clinic (3.3)
8. Scott of the Antarctic (2.10)
9. Archeology Today (2.8)
10. Lifeboat (How long is it? that's a rather personal question!) (2.13)
And episodes: the show tends to be thought of first through its skits rather than the episodes - but some of them are quite strong. There are a few with complete narratives (the Cycling Tour, in particular), and others where one or two sketches take up the whole show. Those, I admit, tend to be the ones near the top.
1. Dinsdale (2.1) - silly walks and the Piranha brothers, in the same show?
2. Spanish Inquisition (2.2) - Spanish inquisition and courtroom charades, as well as those semaphore classics
3. Man's crisis of identity in the latter half of the twentieth century (1.5) - confuse a cat, police raids, a nightmare job interview - this is the 5th episode of the show, and probably the first great episode. They started slowly, started to get up to speed around the 3rd and 4th episode (Idle's Nudge, Nudge sketch is in episode 3) - but this one is the one that really nails what the show can be.
4. You’re no fun anymore (1.7) - This one has the science fiction sketch, scotsmen, tennis and a blancmange.
5. Cycling Tour (3.8) - a complete narrative, in which Mr Pither attempts a tour of Devon and Cornwall - only to rescue Clodagh Rogers who turns into Trotsky, le revolutionaire, then Eartha Kitt....
6. Royal Episode 13 (2.13) - this has some fine linguistic games (men who only speak the beginning, middle or ends of words), historical jokes (13 reasons why Henry III was a bad king), and then the lifeboat and undertaker cannibalism sketches, just in time for the Queen to tune in...
7. Scott of the Antarctic (2.10) - “I played Mrs. Jesus Christ in a geological siscline!”
8. The Naked ant (1.12) - this one has Mr Hilter in Mineshead, the upperclass twits, etc.
9. Archeology Today (2.8) - has archeology today, of course, but also the judges, Mr. and Mrs. Git, hunting mosquitoes with a bazooka, and so on.
10. The Ant, an Introduction (1.9) - llamas, lumberjacks, hunting films, and a quiet evening at home ruined by unwanted guests - "what's brown and sounds like a bell?"... Though as it should be, the scatology gives way to a cheerful Christmas carol as the credits roll - "Ding Dong Merrily on High," obviously, after that bell joke...
Dekalog is a 10 part television series, made in Poland in 1988, directed by Krzystof Kieslowski, written by Kieslowski and Krzystof Piesiewicz, his frequent writing collaborator. Each episode in the series is dedicated to one of the Ten Commandments, though the links are often quite free. The series is, in practice, more like a film cycle than television series - each episode is self-contained, linked only in their relationships to the commandments, and the setting, a large apartment complex in Warsaw. (And the filmmakers and crew.) Kieslowski conceived of the films as 10 separate films. He did not conform to TV conventions: recurring characters in an ongoing story; the need to pace the stories to match the way TV is watched, in the home, with the phone ringing and tea boiling and so on. Indeed, since 1989, Dekalog has been treated more like a film, or group of films, than as television. This is understandable: the films were distributed theatrically outside Poland, and Kieslowski himself was an established filmmaker when they were made, and his subsequent works made him a major art house figure internationally in the 1990s. He is a filmmaker first, and so Dekalog is treated as part of his film career. This is probably even more the case for Dekalog than for other TV shows made by people established in the film industry. David Lynch and Twin Peaks comes to mind - a series made by an established film figure a year or so after Dekalog, that, however congruent with Lynch's career, is still seen primarily as a television show. Of course, Twin Peaks did play by the rules of television - a continuing series with characters and a through-plot and so on - which certainly helps explain the difference. But the fact remains, Dekalog's origins in television is seen as somewhat incidental to what it is.
I don't really mean to dispute that - Kieslowski’s own remarks and ideas about the show push criticism in that direction; I have certainly always thought of these films that way myself. But it is interesting to consider how they do relate to television, as an art form, as a social force, as technology. The strongest link to television, I think, is the way Dekalog is structured around the home, the family, the domestic space. Television is a domestic form of entertainment and art - it exists in the home, to be watched in the home; Dekalog is centered around the idea of home. Far more than other Kieslowski films, which are often about individuals making their way in the world, or at least about how people live in public, outside the home, Dekalog is almost entirely rooted in domestic spaces. When it leaves the domestic sphere, it either brings it in through other means (as the ways the domestic ethical problems of Episodes 2 and 8 are discussed in a class in Episode 8), or makes the loss of the home a felt absence in the story (Episode 5 can be seen this way.) The apartment complex where the series is set may seem to be just the device linking these stories - but in fact, those homes become central to the stories being told. The importance of children in the series, and the importance of relationships between parents and children, is an obvious theme - but these themes are themselves part of the series' emphasis on the home. Home as family, as social space; home as physical space, actual buildings and rooms; home as symbolic space - a place of safety, rest, protection. Almost everything in the series hits one of those themes.
Kieslowski and Piesiewicz present a complex vision of the domestic world, as well. Homes (as physical spaces as well as domestic spaces) are complicated - sheltering and protective, but also dangerous, often broken. They promise protection but don’t deliver, neither the physical space or the social one of families. Homes do not protect you from bombs - they do not protect you from being spied on - they do not protect you from being pulled out in the middle of the night on a wild goose chase - they do not protect you from being stolen by your relatives - they do not protect you from thieves. When they do offer protection, that protection is not guaranteed - you can be refused shelter. You can be banished from your home. And even when you seem to have a stable, safe home, there is no guarantee that what you have is what you think you have. Your wife's child may not be yours; the man you thought was your father may not be; you sister can be your mother. Someone could be listening in on the phone; and if you think going back to your mother's house will offer you protection, be careful - you never know who's hiding in the closet. Home promises stability but it is never there.
In many of the episodes, this instability is shown through a significant absence. So in Episode 1, the mother is out of the country; in Episode 2, the husband is in a coma; in 3, Ewa's husband is missing, so she pulls Janusz away from his family on Christmas eve; Episode 4 is structured around the dead mother; Episode 10, a dead father. Episode 9 has a more symbolic version of this - first, in the husband's very Freudian lack, that his wife tries to fill with a young lover; later, by shifting to the more abstract idea that they are missing a child, which they hope to fill by adopting. These absences create many of the stories - certainly 2, 3, 4, 9 and 10 work that way - the thing that is missing drives the plot. The story itself, of course, can go a couple different ways - it can end up destroying a home and family (as in 1), it can end up restoring a home and family (2, maybe 9, even 10, in a sense) - but for all of them, the status of the family, the home, is what is at stake in the story.
Other episodes approach it from different angles. The protagonists may have lost their homes, or at least their connections to others, as in Episodes 5 and 6; they may be expelled from the home (or expel themselves) as in Episode 7; they may be denied the shelter of a home as in Episode 8. Or home itself may disappear, as literally happens in the Doctor's backstory in Episode 2. It is interesting that Episodes 5 and 6, the most famous episodes, both expanded into feature films, feature protagonists who are the most isolated. The characters of 6 are all alone, separated from any family, and most companionship. Magda has lovers, but they are not very reliable or satisfying; the landlady's son is on the other side of the world, and though she sometimes treats Tomek as a surrogate son, she and he are both intensely solitary figures; Tomek has no family, and has even lost the closest thing he had to a friend. We usually see these three in their apartments, in their homes - but these are places that offer very little solace. Their living spaces give them no privacy, no protection - they all spy on each other, interfere with one another, often with very dire consequences. They all look for a connection - and you can almost imagine the three of them forming a kind of family of their own - but it doesn't come, and the connections they form are imaginary ones, existing only in the own heads.
Episode 5, and A Short Film About Killing, is even more extreme. (One of the harshest films ever made, frankly.) Of all the films in the cycle, it spends the least time in anyone's home - none, that I can think of. It all takes place in public. Despite the story occurring out in the streets, Jacek and his victim are almost perfectly alone in the film, living completely in their heads, hostile to everyone around them. Even in this episode, though, home operates as a structuring absence. The end of the film, with Jacek telling the attorney about his sister's death, reveals, probably, the reason why he is here, alone in the city. Having helped kill her in a drunken accident, he has lost his family and home. We have less information about the cab driver's isolation, but we see it played out. He treats his neighbors with contempt (leaving Andrej and pregnant Dorota in the cold, rather than giving them a ride); we get a hint at how his neighbors treat him, when someone drops a dirty rag on him. He lives in the apartment complex, but he rejects it - and it rejects him. Unlike the other characters who live there, we never see him at home - all we hear of his family are his pleas with Jacek that his death will leave his wife alone, and the possibility that the woman in a wheelchair in the courtroom scenes is his wife. The attorney, meanwhile, is only seen in either public places - school, the court, prison - or alone. We do, though, get a glimpse of his family life when a colleague congratulates him on his child. That is all.
The double edged significance of home, though, probably comes out the most starkly in Episodes 7 and 8. In 7, a girl in her early twenties kidnaps her 6 year old daughter, who has been raised as her sister. It's notable that this is almost the only episode in the series to show a complete, intact family (we get a glimpse at one in 3, though the poor father is pulled out in the middle of the night) - and because this is by far the most poisonous family in the series. Majka's parent's home may contain the entire family, but it is a family based on deception, on the exploitation of children - the younger Majka as much as her daughter Ania. Even here, though, Majka is driven as much by the desire to find a home as the desire to leave the one she is in - she takes Ania and seeks out the child's father, a teacher who seduced (to put it as kindly as possible) her when she was 16. She doesn't say so, quite, but she seems driven by the hope that she can find a new home, a real home, uniting her child with its true parents. It is a vain hope, even though Woytek seems to regret losing the same thing - and has turned to making teddy bears, as if in compensation for losing his child. They come together, sharing a space sharing a shot briefly - but they can't even look at one another, and their child is asleep, buried by teddy bears....
And it ends. He calls Majka's mother, she leaves - that is all. In the end, her mother finds her, takes Ania back, and Majka rides away alone on a train. She loses everything - her mother keeps the semblance of home, but it is one based on a lie, and it's hard not to see Majka's absence becoming the fissure that destroys that home in the end.
Episode 8, finally, is structured around the notion of home as shelter, and shelter denied - as well as raising the stakes, by setting that drama in the midst of the holocaust. It is also the most metafictional part of the series - discussing its own backstory in a class, along with the plot of Episode 2; containing direct comments on the apartment block, the idea of all the stories going on in that space. It brings the themes to the foreground: children in peril, what adults owe children, the notion of a home as a refuge, a chance to live - though also the possibility of betrayal. (The real backstory of the backstory - the false information that the family intended to shelter Elżbieta were collaborators - raises that image: home as false security.) Though this is not about a family in the present, or even really about homes in the present, these images permeate the film. The home Elżbieta is denied; the house where she met Zofia and her husband during the war, which they return to, and Zofia finds herself turned away; the tailor's home - which was denied its possibility of saving a child.
Episode 8 might also be seen as a model for the series as a whole. Zofia's class is a seminar about ethics - from what we see of it, it seems to operate by posing ethical dilemmas, that are then filled in by the class. That's not far from the structure of the whole Dekalog: take 10 situations suggested by the commandments and tell them as stories, rooted in lived human experience. That is what Kieslowski and Piesiewicz do - and indeed, the sense of lived experience elevate them. It is also important, I imagine, that episode 8 is also both explicitly based on an actual story from World War II, and brings politics and history explicitly into the series. Grounding these things in the lived experience of 2 specific women, yes - but also implicating them in the overall history of Poland in direct, inescapable ways.
All together, then, Dekalog is a magnificent piece of work, as film, as television, however you want to slice it. It is a very rich text, for its stories, for its ideas, and certainly as filmmaking. There are many ways to look at it - taking it as a meditation on the idea of home, family, on how they work as both shelter and menace is just one to look at it, though it's an important element. And one that links it more strongly to television - an art form made for the home, about home. It has to rank very high.
(Let me offer a quick recap of the episodes: it may help.)
1. Father and son live happily, though his wife is gone; they work work with computers, waiting for the pond to freeze; father and sister differ, one religious, one rational. The father calculates that the pond is frozen, then tests it – but the boy goes skating and disappears, leaving his father and aunt desolate.
2. A man is in a coma, his wife has had an affair and gotten pregnant - if the man lives, she needs to abort the child, but if he is going to die, she will keep the baby. She nags the man’s doctor to know if he is going to live or die. He refuses to answer, she insists - he finally tells her the man will die. The man of course lives,and is pleased to have a child, even if it is not his.
3. Christmas eve, a man’s former lover comes to his house, saying her husband is missing and asking for help finding him. He goes with her, and they search the city and replay the end of their affair. In the morning she admits her husband left her long ago - she just bet herself she could keep this man out all night, or she would kill herself.
4. A man and his daughter are happy together - but there is a letter from her mother that she finally can't resist reading. She looks at it, and may or may not open it - she makes up a fake version and reads it, saying she is not the man's child. She then makes a pass at him, but he resists. In the morning, she repents - they end up burning the original of the letter, except for a bit of it, which says the same thing she wrote in the forgery. (Assuming it was a forgery.)
5. Follows a young lawyer, a bitter taxi driver, and a young man, the lawyer through his exams, the young man looking for a cabbie to kill. He kills this one, a brutal, horrific murder. Then cut to the end of the trial, then the execution, with the lawyer trying to comfort the killer, and railing against the system.
6. A postal worker spies on a woman; when his stalking starts causing her problems, he confesses. Later they go out together, but she ends up humiliating him - she immediately repents, but not before he tries to kill himself.
7. A woman kidnaps a child who has been raised as her sister but is really her daughter. They are found, though and she leaves alone in the end.
8. A professor has a visitor in her class – a woman who tells a story about a jewish child who was refused by a Polish family who said they could not bear false witness, to claim she was Christian. It was the professor of course, and the woman who tells the story was the child – the professor had good reasons for her actions, but has hated herself since anyway. She takes comfort in the child’s survival.
9. A doctor is impotent - he half tells his wife to have an affair, but when he finds out that she did have an affair, he becomes wildly jealous. He also treats a girl who needs major surgery to be able to sing, professionally - she would rather not, but her family, and the doctor get her to do it. In the end, the man and wife are nearly reconciled, but the lover hangs around, leading to a near crisis.
10. Two brothers discover that their father was one of the country’s most important stamp collectors. They get tied up in a scam to trade a kidney for a crucial stamp, but this is a ruse to allow someone to rob their father's apartment and take all the stamps. In the end, after many trials, they forgive each other and bond over having picked up their father's bug for stamps.
(I'm sorry this is going to look like a homework assignment - but this is a show that feels a bit like a homework assignment, a textbook at least. That isn't a bad thing, of course - it's meant to be informative as well as moving and entertaining, and it is, all of those things.)
What is it?
A historical documentary about the American Civil War, broadcast on PBS in 1990, and a huge success. (Largest ever audience for PBS, apparently.) It made Ken Burns a household name, and elevated Shelby Foote, in particular, to new levels of fame. There are 9 episodes, about 10 hours altogether, with around two hours devoted to each year of the war, with an hour for the build up and an hour of aftermath. It is straightforward history, using primary sources (period photographs and texts by contemporaries) to provide the base for narration and commentary. It digs into the primary sources - Burns' method of showing photographs, panning and zooming around the photo, to pick out details, became iconic, and has entered the language (thanks to photo and video editing software). Texts are read, with similar attention and care, by actors, many well known (Jason Robards Jr., Sam Waterston, Morgan Freeman, etc). The show was very effective as well as popular, and for a while, seemed to be the definitive historical documentary. That, I am sorry to say, isn't quite the case anymore - I will return to that a little later.
How is it as History?
It is quite good. It is essentially an introductory overview of the Civil War; it would make a good textbook in a basic history class. It is, to start, actual history - primary sources and commentary; everything is rooted in those sources, and in analysis by people who root their work in primary sources. It's clear about what is sourced and what is not, and what the sources are, as clear as a television show is going to be. It is a good introduction to the war - it tells what happened, it explains it well, it covers a wide range of experiences of the war. That is important. It is not strictly military or political history: it works in the home front, the day to day lives of solders, technology (of war, medicine, communication, and so on), it covers the role and place of women in the war, it attends to the experiences, attitudes and actions of blacks - slaves, ex-slaves, and free blacks. It is quite good at conveying the lived experience of all these people, on both sides of the war. It is an introduction - if you want details on the technology of killing, or the state of medicine, or the political machinations north and south and overseas, or details about campaigns and battles and strategy and tactics, you will have to go elsewhere - though often, you can go directly to the writers and books being discussed. You can do worse than go to the sources the show presents - read Frederick Douglass or Abraham Lincoln or Mary Chestnut or Grant's Memoirs. And there is certainly an abundant literature dealing with the Civil War.
Still - it is a good introduction. The historical analysis tend to be conventional, reflecting the historical consensus - which is fine, for a survey. But that is where things start to become complicated. It isn't that the show gets the history wrong so much as that arguments about the history of the Civil War are indissociable from the history of the Civil War. More on that later, for sure; for now - let me say that the show came out at a time when the historiography of the Civil War was, itself, changing. You can see this in the emphasis on the social aspects of the war, the emphasis on the lived experiences of the participants - that wasn't new in 1990, but it had not been the consensus on how to do history for very long. And the interpretation of the war had also changed. Burns doesn't wriggle around the question of slavery - that was the cause of the war, and he says so. That is the consensus historical view of the war today, and was in 1990 - but it has not always been. The show's narration gives us the consensus - but leaves out the historiography, leaves out the dissent, and the history of dissent. This is a point I will definitely come back to.
How is it as a film?
What is it as a film? Archival materials, photos and texts, mainly, with added narration and commentary; the photos used both as background and as explicit illustrations of the elements of the story, and "animated," particularly by the famed Ken Burns Effect. The primary texts are themselves animated by being read by expressive voice actors. Over the photos and between the texts are narration and commentary, sometimes as voiceover, often by experts, usually shot in fairly neutral situations - sitting in their office, or front porch, or such - there is not much movement anywhere in the show. There is very little filmed material besides the talking experts - the 1860s were too early, of course, for contemporary film; there is some fascinating footage of veterans gatherings and parades, from much later. Burns also uses a few a few inserts of empty fields, cannons, battlefields and the like, but strictly as background - there aren't even modern shots of the battlefield and locations, that I remember. Few if any. Finally, there are a few recordings of survivors and the children of survivors speaking - these are often quite marvelous.
It is, then, a relatively sober and conservative style of documentary - though one well suited to the material. The Civil War was one of the first large events to be heavily photographed - it is right to use those photographs as the basis for the work. The war left a rich visual record - photographs, drawings, engravings, paintings - Burns uses them to all good effect. It was also fought by a very literate nation - so the collection of texts is also very rich. All kinds or texts, from all levels of society, are here: letters, diaries, memoirs, speeches, political and legal documents, newspaper accounts and editorials, everything, from all levels of society, all types of writers. Private soldiers and their families, officers, politicians, slaves, ex-slaves, free blacks, ministers and essayists, newspapermen, foreign observers, and writers from the barely literate to Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln. The scope and variety of texts is wonderful indeed. Finally, all of it is set against music - mostly contemporary with the war, but with some pieces written in the 19th century style ("Ashokan Farewell", notably). The music, too, is sometimes illustrative (all those ballads about the longing for home), but usually used to set the mood. Maybe sometimes too much for mood and not illustrative enough: you'd think they'd have managed to find some kind of recording of people singing "John Brown's Body" - hard to get more primary a source than that. All of this adds up, sometimes, to a style where the mood overpowers the content - sober, a bit folksy (sometimes more than a “bit” folksy), mournful, though with a celebratory undertone - look what we survived, look what we did, but look what it cost us. Sad but uplifting.
For a while, this style felt like the very model for the Serious Historical Documentary - though even in those days, it was sometimes more of a whipping boy than a model for other filmmakers. (Back in the 90s, I seem to recall a fair amount of this, from both sides.) It's seriousness, folksiness, nostalgia, could all be attacked by political or personal documentarians; and its sobriety, documentary purity, its lack of spectacle, could be attacked by filmmakers looking to liven up the genre. It has not had many imitators. Today, even serious educational documentaries - the kinds of things aired on American Experience, say - lean heavily on reenactments. This isn't an improvement, I fear. Reenactments are incredibly stupid for 20th century documentaries - how can a reenactment match the power of actual footage from WWI or WWII or Vietnam or Chicago 1968? But even 19th century history gains little from the newer styles. How is a show like PBS' The Abolitionists better for having actors pantomiming Garrison and Douglass than it would be if it just read their words and Ken Burnsed over their photographs? I admit that Burns' nostalgia can run a bit thick sometimes, but that is a fault of the tone and sometimes the content, not the devices - change the music (why not use Charles Ives, or the Band? vary it up, but also pull the story forward - show how current the Civil War has remained through the century and a half since it ended), change the narration, and you would have a very different work - but you would still have history. Drop the photos for guys in funny hats play-shooting guns, and you have - what? why not just make a feature film?
It's hard to think what reenactments add in any case. What stays with you from The Civil War are the photos and the letters, the power of the words written in middle of the war. The primary materials are extremely powerful - resenting them respectfully, with the full emotional power a fine actor can bring, is enough.
And what about its politics?
Politics: well - there's no avoiding politics. There is a line at the very end of the show, when the experts are considering the legacy of the war, who won, what it meant and all. Barbara Fields (who might be the real star of the show, in the end), cites William Faulkner, to the effect that "history is not 'was', it's 'is'" - and adds that the results of the Civil War are still up for grabs. The war has never been resolved. She was right then - she is right today. The Civil War is still in the news, and not just incidentally, but very close to the center of contemporary American politics. We are, as a country, still arguing about what the war meant, what it did - what it was, even - and how to talk about it. It has always been so - the shooting stopped, and the debates began (though the shooting didn't stop for long, and in some ways still hasn't), and they are still going on. (Sometimes, alas, so is the shooting.) The issues coming out of the Civil War are still up for grabs - are we a democracy? are we going to treat everyone in America as Americans? Who will run this country, and for whom?
The history of the war has always been tangled up with politics; political debates have always been tied to historical interpretations of the war. I said earlier that the show appeared at a time when the historiography of the Civil War was changing - at least, at a time when the historiographical changes were filtering into the mainstream. There was a time, as late as the 70s, maybe the 80s, when you could get through high school, maybe even college, and still think the war was fought over state's rights and tariffs, that slavery was a side issue, exaggerated after the fact by northerners looking to make themselves look better, that the whole affair was a terrible, inexplicable tragedy - an act of god, imposed on the country by some impersonal external force, like a terrible storm. That was an interpretation of the war that came from the south, after the war, especially after Reconstruction. It is partly a way to shift blame away from the former confederates - but also part of the political struggles after the war, to undo the results of the war. There is no way to separate Lost Cause history from the reinstatement of legal white supremacy in the south - it is all tied to the that.
One of Shelby Foote's most famous remarks is that the war changed the grammar of how the United States was referred to. Before the war, people said, the United States ARE; after the war, they said, the United States IS. It is an excellent point - but it leaves out a lot. It obscures the fact that one side of the war was fighting explicitly against that IS. But it also hides a more sinister meaning (which I don't think Foote intended) - the meaning Dixon and Griffith made explicit in The Clansman/Birth of a Nation. It is that the story of the post-war years was the story of forging a nation of whites against blacks. Civil war history after the war, especially southern history, was directed toward reconciling north and south, but at the expense of reestablishing and strengthening the difference between Black and White. The Lost Cause version of history downplays the role of slavery, erasing the confederates' own acknowledgment that slavery was the cause they were fighting for; downplays the role of freeing the slaves in the north. (How could it be? the north fought to preserve the union, emancipation wasn't part of the plan until 1863, and it was always controversial.) Making slavery secondary to the war also makes the post-war amendments (#13, 14, 15) secondary - they become technical changes to the constitution, not the radical reimagining of democracy they might be taken for. It stresses the heroism of the south, and the soldiers on all sides; stresses the shared suffering of the war; stresses the processes of reconciliation after the war. But it is always a reconciliation of north and south, blue and gray - Joseph Wheeler serving in the Spanish American war. And it's all too often, reconciliation of north and south at the expense of black and white.
This interpretation of the Civil War was something like orthodoxy for most of the 20th century. That began to change in the 1950s and 60s, though mainly among academics - it took a while for the new historical consensus to reach the mainstream. The Civil War reflects the new consensus - Burns and company leave no doubt that slavery was the cause of the war, and that the accomplishment of the war was abolishing slavery, making possible, at least, a new birth of freedom. If the show has a problem, it's in leaving out the historiography of the Civil War. Maybe that is beyond the scope of a TV series about the war - but it is important. It is easier to understand why it is important to acknowledge that slavery started the war when you know the history of why slavery isn't considered the cause. The confederates knew it was the cause - they said so - and Burns is sure to cite their articles of secession, the speeches by men like Alexander Stephens, that stated as clearly as you like that they were fighting to defend slavery. Leaving out an account of how that changed leaves room for misinterpretation of the show. The show has a melancholy, but celebratory tone, that contains many of the elements of the old Lost Cause history. The sense of war as an act of god - the celebration of the country's ability to come back together - many of the personalizing anecdotes Shelby Foote tells in the show. These things are good - the show does include southern voices and perspectives, apolitical voices, north and south - it should. And it's a reminder that there is plenty in the Lost Cause version of history that is not wrong - but it's also why I think it is crucial to explain the history of the debates. Without the historiography, you can't separate the lies of the Lost Cause (denying the role of slavery in the war, denying the role African Americans played in the war - denying, ultimately, the radical and - let's not mince words - completely admirable importance of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments) from what is true. (The human experience of the war in the south; the importance of reconciliation after the war and so on.)
In the end?
How does it end? I don't know how I should end. The war hasn't really ended - how can a show about it end, or an essay about the show about the war? "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past." Ken Burns ended - twice, right? With Barbara Fields invoking Faulkner's "history is is" - then with Foote talking about making the war the most important war ever, and reading an old soldier waxing nostalgic for the war, over footage of a 1938 reunion at Gettysburg. The juxtaposition is odd when you think about it - Fields expresses the view that the war was about what the country would be and that the fight is still going on; Foote, himself, and quoting Barry Bentson, confederate soldier, puts is squarely in the past, romanticizes it, dreams of reconciliation under the two flags. Foote's ending feels satisfying - sad, but celebratory, a story of a country breaking itself apart and bringing itself back together again, through terrible cataclysm - but it also feels false. Or - a reconciliation explicitly at the expense of the people the war was in fact, fought over (slaves, blacks), and at the expense of the result of the war, those post-war amendments. The show as a whole sometimes is still seen as being too devoted to Foote's version - tragedy and reconciliation, not revolution and (thwarted, but still powerful) liberation - though as history, it hews closer to Fields' views. Maybe this would have worked better if they had been willing to let her have the last word: reverse those last two clips - because old soldiers dreaming of reconciliation is something to value; but understanding that the war was the central event in American history, and still is, is more important. The past is not dead; it's not even past.
This is a busy week, but I want to get this out there - a new countdown has stared at Wonders in the Dark, devoted to the 80 Greatest TV shows of all time (as voted by participants and friends of the blog.) That will be going all summer. As aways, expect plenty of fine writing and a few arguments along the way. Check it out!
Well, I know today is a Friday, and I try to post musical things onFriday, but it is more important that I post anything on a Friday, and this has been going around, so why not? The New York Times posted their 25 best films of the 21st century - I have seen others getting on on the act - so here you go. we're almost through two whole decades of this century - shocking... all right.
1. Inland Empire
2. Yi Yi
3. Vanda's Room
4. Kingsand Queen
5. Colossal Youth
6. Los Angeles Plays Itself
7. O Brother Where Art Thou
8. Secret Sunshine
9. Moonrise Kingdom
11. The Master
12. There Will Be Blood
13. The Royal Tenenbaums
14. The Death of Mr Lazarescu
15. Toni Erdmann
16. L'Intrus
17. Mulholland Drive
18. Inside Llewyn Davis
19. Sympathy for Mr Vengeance
20. The Headless Woman
21. Memories of Murder
22. Syndromes and a Century
23. Carlos
24. The Act of Killing
25. Mysteries of Lisbon
Best intentions aside, I have not exactly been burning up the blogging wires this year... February has been a - interesting - month.... More on that later, I imagine. Now, though, since we seem to have arrived at the Academy Awards, this weekend, I shall endeavor to address the Oscars, so far as I am willing, which isn't very far. An excuse to hand out my own awards for various categories, really... and so - generally speaking, I'll look at the nominations, say who I think will win and who should (so far as I have opinions on those things), then offer my own slates. I'm not going through the whole list of awards - just the obvious ones. Off we go:
BEST PICTURE:
Arrival
Fences
Hacksaw Ridge
Hell or High Water
Hidden Figures
La La Land
Lion
Manchester by the Sea
Moonlight
I've seen 4 of them - Hell or High Water, La La Land, Manchester by the Sea, Moonlight; have wanted to see at least Hidden Figures and Fences, but my filmgoing habits have been abysmal. The others I can live without (not that I'll avoid them, but don't count on it). Of those four: La La Land was all right, but nothing special - wildly overhyped, since people talk about it as though it were an actual good film, a really good film. I don't understand that. Annoying characters, bland, hackneyed story, not real great music - and weird ideas. But this is not a review of it (though that is something I should have done - oh well), and really, I don't even hate it - just that I find that it's apotheosis has started to get under my skin, especially since it seems the favorite to win. Hell or High Water was a lively little heist picture, lots going for it, though the story was absurd - but for what it was and with that cast, it was quite a fine thing. Not worth considering one of the 10 best of the year. The other two, on the other hand, are certainly worthy. Of the two - I hope Moonlight wins, though I doubt it has much chance. But they are both fine films.
As for what I would have picked? 5? This might look different if I were trying to imagine an Oscar ballot - a ballot that represents what Film Is Today, maybe - 9 films? I'd leave Fences and Hidden Figures in, though I didn't see them; leave Moonlight and Manchester By the Sea; might begrudge Other People La La Land; definitely add Certain women, 20th Century Women, Silence - finish up with Loving. Right? as for my favorites? keeping to English fiction narrative films...
1. Paterson
2. Certain Women
3. Silence
4. 20th Century Women
5. Love and Friendship
ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE
Casey Affleck, Manchester by the Sea
Andrew Garfield, Hacksaw Ridge
Ryan Gosling, La La Land
Viggo Mortensen, Captain Fantastic
Denzel Washington, Fences
I have seen two of those - I would vote for Affleck, maybe in general - he is fantastic. Gosling? the character is so annoying, I couldn't vote for him for any reason. (He's like Llewyn Davis, if the Coen brothers thought Davis was right about everything - obnoxious self-destructive bully who steals his material from better people, and thinks he's doing them a favor. The Coens know he's a prick - they know he does it to himself - they understand that sympathy is not endorsement of bad people; they used to get trashed for despising all your characters, but I don't buy it - they made me sympathize with Roland Turner for god's sake! ... La La Land isn't in that universe.) Now, if Gosling got nominated for The Nice Guys - I'd like that. As for the rest? Garfield is nominated for the Mel Gibson thing instead of the Scorsese thing? oy. Maybe. The rest might well be deserving. Stil have to see Fences somewhere... As for me?
1. Adam Driver - Paterson
2. Affleck - Manchester by the Sea
3. Joel Edgerton - Loving
4. Ralph Fiennes - A Bigger Splash
5. Tom Hiddlestone - I Saw the Light
ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE
Isabelle Huppert, Elle
Ruth Negga, Loving
Natalie Portman, Jackie
Emma Stone, La La Land
Meryl Streep, Florence Foster Jenkins
I saw all but one of these. This was a miraculous year for actresses - everyone of them (that I saw) is deserving (Emma Stone's character is underwritten - boy did that film annoy me - but she's fine in it, does all that's humanly possible to save it), and they might not even make my top five. I'd vote for Huppert - I suspect Stone will win... Negga would be great too. My choices? from a very deep pool:
1. Huppert - Elle
2. Kate Beckinsale - Love & Friendship
3. Anette Bening - 20th Century Women
4. Ruth Negga - Loving
5. Sandra Huller - Toni Erdmann
ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
Mahershala Ali, Moonlight
Jeff Bridges, Hell or High Water
Lucas Hedges, Manchester by the Sea
Dev Patel, Lion
Michael Shannon, Nocturnal Animals
Saw three of these - approve completely of the nominations (Ali, Bridges, Hedges.) Another deep field, though that might be because trying to parse out who's lead and who's supporting is not as obvious as always - in Moonlight say - how do you choose among the 3 leads? Anyway: I hope Ali wins - he really is outstanding... Me?
1. Mahershala Ali - Moonlight
2. Tom Bennett - Love & Friendship
3. Alden Ehrenreich - Hail Caesar
4. Tadanobu Asano - Silence
5. Jeff Bridges - Hell or High Water
ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
Viola Davis, Fences
Naomie Harris, Moonlight
Nicole Kidman, Lion
Octavia Spencer, Hidden Figures
Michelle Williams, Manchester by the Sea
Saw only two of these - can't gainsay any of the choices, though. This is another category that seems very deep, but the depth is not really here. So - Harris or Williams would be fine choices, so might the others... I would have picked these 5:
1. Lily Gladstone - Certain Women
2. Greta Gerwig - 20th Century Women
3. Naomie Harris - Moonlight
4. Michelle Williams - Manchester by the Sea
5. Paulina Garcia - Little Men
From here on down, I'll be cherry picking categories, just to give the ones I have opinions on...
DIRECTING
Arrival
Hacksaw Ridge
La La Land
Manchester by the Sea
Moonlight
Saw three of these - no real complaints (except the usual stuff about La La Land), though only Moonlight does anything with the direction that adds to the film. Manchester is a writer's and actor's film - Lonergan does his work, to get the most from his script and his cast, but that's still where the work is. Jenkins adds a great deal with the way he films Moonlight. (Indeed, I found the script its weakest part - it's solid, but it's too on the nose sometimes - especially compared to the subtlety of the performances and direction.) Any chance he can win? I hope so - that would redeem a lot o0f things. Gonna be La La Land, though, isn't it? The poor bastard tries, but in the end, for Hollywood drama/spoofs, I didn't just prefer Hail Caesar - I preferred Cafe Society!
1. Jim Jarmusch - Paterson
2. Scorsese - Silence
3. Maren Ade - Toni Erdmann
4. Barry Jenkins - Moonlight
5. Kelly Reichhart - Certain Women
DOCUMENTARY (FEATURE)
Fire at Sea
I Am Not Your Negro
Life, Animated
O.J.: Made in America
13th
Only saw one of these, oddly - did see some decent documentaries, but the only great documentary I saw was I Am Not Your Negro. That is a stone cold masterpiece - though from what I hear, so is the OJ film. From the few I saw, my top 5 (which I ca't pretend competes with the actual pool):
1. I am Not Your Negro
2. Lo and Behold
3. Gimme Danger
4. Tickled
5. Where to Invade Next
CINEMATOGRAPHY
Arrival
La La Land
Lion
Moonlight
Silence
Saw three of them - they all look good, I can't fault La La Land there. I hope Silence wins, it has to win something - Scorsese's best in decades? though Moonlight is also very good. But me?
1. Paterson [a pattern might be emerging here]
2. Silence
3. Moonlight
4. The Handmaiden
5. Jackie
WRITING (ADAPTED SCREENPLAY)
Arrival
Fences
Hidden Figures
Lion
Moonlight
Saw just one of these. Like I said - I liked almost everything about Moonlight, but I did think the script was just adequate. So I can't say if it should win. I would nominate(with some caveats in case I'm mistaking adaptations from originals, somewhere):
1. Love & Friendship
2. Certain Women
3. Silence
4. Elle
5. The Handmaiden
WRITING (ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY)
Hell or High Water
La La Land
The Lobster
Manchester by the Sea
20th Century Women
The first category I have seen every single nominee in. Nice! 2 of those seem like obvious contenders - the others have enough going for them (except La La Land) that I have no complaints. Still...
1. 20th Century Women
2. Toni Erdmann
3. Paterson
4. Manchester By the Sea
5. The Nice Guys
FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
Land of Mine
A Man Called Ove
The Salesman
Tanna
Toni Erdmann
Managed 2 of these - having finally seen Toni Erdmann - it is the best film of the year. It should win this. Salesman might - it is a fine movie, though getting a bit old hat for Farhadi, who has always been something of stretch as a great filmmaker - solid, but not really a master... I didn't see as many foreign films as I would like, but I saw some good ones...
1. Toni Erdmann
2. Elle
3. Salesman
4. Things to Come
5. The Handmaiden
2016 in movies, a bit late, though not as bad as last year, and it does let me get some some films in that are taking a while to get to the theaters. I did not have a great year going to the movies - it's a trend that's been building, and one I suspect is going to get a lot worse next year (for reasons maybe to be discussed.) The last couple years have been underwhelming film years - not bad, exactly; there are plenty of enjoyable films, but not as many transcendent ones, it seems. And the transcendent experiences sometimes seem to come from some detail in the film, some resonance, more than from the quality of the film itself. Maybe. Looking at what I saw - there are some fine films on there: plenty of pleasure, all the way down the list - and a few moments that brought back all the joys of the movies. I think I enjoyed this year's bunch of films more than I thought I did...
Whether that's so or now, I have done a terrible job of writing about films. I haven't written a thing about new films in a couple years - not a word last year. (Barely anything the 2 years before that.) Not much about old films either - unless it's for someone else (thank god for Polls!) Anyway: let me try to make up for that, with a few lines about these films - at least the top 10. And so without further ado -
Released in 2016:
1. Paterson - Beautiful and enthralling, based on the wonders of the everyday world - William Carlos Williams its obvious guiding saint - rooted in the world, and the way the world filters into one man's mind. Full of imagery - twins, writers and artists, performances, lovers - doubles and puns and internal rhymes. With nods to other films - Nagase at the end (from Mystery Train), Method Man rapping, Gilman and Hayward talking on the bus about Gaetano Breschi, the anarchist weaver who shot the king of Italy.
2. Certain Women - sharp ensemble piece, three stories almost entwined. Things happen, though nothing too dramatic, and even if something dramatic does happen, it does so quietly, almost apologetically; full of silences and looks; people working; people thinking. Beautiful film with a stellar cast.
3. Silence - best Scorsese film in 2 decades. Intense and driven, and carried by superb performances by all concerned. (Tadanabo Asano's character - weak, constantly betraying, trampling the cross and informing, and constantly coming back, begging for absolution - might be the most interesting.) A very interesting historical film as well - giving voice to the Japanese, in a fascinating tangle - a film by Americans of a novel by a Japanese about Portuguese priests...
4. 20th Century Women - Handsome clever film about a middle aged single mother trying to raise her son - another film bursting with brilliant performances: Bening and Gerwig and Crudup and Faning and Zumann the kid - Bening at the center, but first among many greats.
5. Love and Friendship - Whit Stillman adapting Austen directly, early, obscure Austen - which he describes on the DVD as an Oscar Wilde play written by Jane Austen. Kate Beckinsale is front and center - one of Stillman's monsters, the kind of character Chris Eigenman used to play - completely self-absorbed and likable anyway, you can't turn away, she's so brazen at what she does, always both completely honest and completely false. With a very cool ending, everyone getting what they want - including Lady Susan, who appears to have landed in the middle of a perfectly successful threesome...
6. Loving - Story of the Lovings, whose marriage and lawsuit ended miscegenation laws in the United States. Seen through the couple's eyes, his and hers, with their complimentary virtues, their love. It is beautiful, quiet, building tension without anything really overt happening - the fear and their ability to live around the fear, the way Edgerton squirms around the sheriff, the way they fight back. Not that it's needed, but more proof that Jeff Nichols is one of the great contemporary directors.
7. The Witch - A man is banished from his New England town in the early 17th century. He takes his family into the woods and carves out a farm there alone - but things are not well. The baby disappears - secrets and lies are revealed through the family's misfortune, and they all start going mad. Accusations fly - who is the witch? is Black Phillip the devil? A cool, brooding little film, tight and gripping - family disfunction, religious lunacy, the dangers of the frontier, madness and hormones, all add up to disaster of biblical proportions.
8. Mountains May Depart - Story in three parts: 1999 - a worker and a rising capitalist chase the same girl, until she chooses the money; 2014- the son visits his mother, whose long since divorced the capitalist; 2025 - the son, in Australia, as alienated from his father as his mother, has an affair with an older woman (Sylvia Change, so thus believable)... Melodrama of sorts, a story of misery and loss, a death as the main emotional foundation, with failed love affairs and children who don't talk to their parents the content. Everyone suffers - the rich guy ends up a pathetic loser, collecting guns in Melbourne; the worker - probably dead; the girl alone with her dog - which comes off as rather a triumph, in this context.
9. Elle - tour de force for Isabelle Huppert, who plays a rich woman, owns a video game company, and is raped to open the film - but reacts with a kind of cool numbness that we soon realize is her natural state. The story works in the backstory - her father was a mass murderer, who dragged her into his crimes, making her infamous, creating her shell. She never quite comes out - never quite becomes clear to us - stays strange throughout, as is her way.
10. Moonlight - film in three parts about a black boy/man in Miami (and Atlanta) - Chiron/Little/Black. He's a quiet sensitive boy who runs a gauntlet of trouble for it - called faggot at 9, beaten for it as a teenager, and crusting it over in street hardness as an adult. Revolves around three scenes at the ocean - learning to swim with Juan, a drug dealer who becomes his friend; smoking a joint and experimenting with sex with a friend as a teenager; then talking to the same friend, now a cook, at his house by the ocean as adults. Beautifully shot, acted with grace by the whole cast - handsome, very moving film.
11. Our Little Sister
12. Midnight Special
13. Fireworks Wednesday
14. My Golden Days
15. Little Men
16. Lo and Behold
17. Hail Caesar
18. Things to Come
19. Too Late
20. Jackie
21. The Handmaiden
22. A Bigger Splash
23. Hunt for the Wilderpeople
24. Manchester By the Sea
25. Krisha
Made in 2016 - an interesting list, because most of the best films released were in fact new last year. Usually you get a lot of the best foreign films from the year before showing up sometime in the first 2-3 months of the new year. ast year didn't have as much of that - or I didn't see them...
1. Paterson
2. Certain Women
3. Silence
4. 20th Century Women
5. Love and Friendship
6. Loving
7. Elle
8. Moonlight
9. Midnight Special
10. Little Men
And the annual look back a year - 2015. What I posted at the beginning of 2016:
1. The Look of Silence
2. The Forbidden Room
3. The Assassin
4. Tangerine
5. The Wolfpack
6. Taxi
7. Youth
8. Carol
9. The Big Short
10. Diary of a Teenaged Girl
And how it looks now - not much changed to be honest:
1. The Look of Silence
2. The Forbidden Room
3. The Assassin
4. Tangerine
5. The Wolfpack
6. Taxi
7. The Witch
8. Mountains May Depart
9. Our Little Sister
10. Carol
Alphaville is the first Godard film I ever saw, way back in the mid-80s. I saw it on a double bill with Alexander Nevsky, if my memory is accurate after 30 odd years. I remember liking Nevsky, though finding it all a bit strange; but Alphaville was a revelation. I had ideas about what Godard was supposed to be like - he was supposed to be difficult, possibly blasphemous (this is back around the time of Hail Mary - which I think was the second Godard film I ever saw, and came a bit closer to what I had been led to expect.) Instead, I saw this astonishing science fiction noir...
It is a beautiful film, with its rich play of light and dark, its bodies in rest and motion in overlit antiseptic spaces and dingy dark hallways, its faces, its eyes, especially Anna Karina's face and eyes. It's an overpoweringly romantic film - I walked out enthralled by Eluard and the staging of his poetry, Anna Karina’s voice, the light and dark, hands and faces, the strange contrast between Karina and Eddie Constantine - that sequence is, by itself, one of the most romantic, achingly sensual, passages ever put on film. I had never seen anything like it then, and haven't seen much like it since. But what might have been even more surprising was how funny the film is. Full of jokes, full of wit, visual, verbal, jokes coming out of the material, the references, the performances, staging, the setting. (That machine that asks you to insert a coin, then gives you a thank you token.) It's always serious, but never takes itself seriously - a pretty universal trait in Godard’s films. They are funny - they are full of serious things, conversations, ideas, images - but they are packed with jokes, visual and verbal puns, in jokes, references and allusions that become comical in context. (And it gets even funnier when you start spotting the things Monty Python stole - it's tattooed on the back of their neck!) It was a fine introduction to Godard - it conditioned me to look for beauty, romanticism, sensuality and wit, as well as Deep Thoughts and Art. (Which it has; don't discount that.)
And even more - it worked quite well, when I saw it the first time, as straight up science fiction. It holds up as science fiction now, both as pop fiction and for its ideas. It's ideas are legit, it’s image of the future: artificial intelligence, technology and technocracy, its particular brand of dystopia - a cool vicious embrace of science and logic, a technocratic tyranny, power diffused and de-personalized, a cruel, violent regime uncluttered by charismatic monsters. Dr. Von Braun is a cold dead eyed technocratic sadist, surrounded by dull technicians who follow him around like nervous interns. The only villain with any personality is Alpha 60 itself, a thing of rhythmic flashing lights, slide shows, and a mechanical voice. People have become zombies in this world, responding automatically - "Yes, I'm fine, don't mention it" - to any conversation; clapping politely at executions - their responses as automated as machines. Against this comes Lemmy Caution violent cool in a trench coat, cigarettes, and 45 automatic, crashing through this world with passion, emotion and art. This might be Godard's most Romantic film, too - in the sense of Romanticism as the embrace of passion, art and beauty, emotion and disorder against logic, order, science. Lemmy comes bearing pop culture props and poetry and represents the artist very well. He represents Godard very well - this is his quintessential mixture - pop culture and high art, science fiction tropes (high and low science fiction), plus noir, plus comics, plus high art, Eluard and Celine, and Cinema, always cinema - and maybe some general semantics to boot. All of it is fed in, all of it is taken seriously, and all of it is material for jokes. Nothing is allowed to settle in Godard's films - and it's that settling, that insistence on control, predictability, order, that Godard (and Lemmy) object to under the rule of Alpha 60.
Though in fact even the computer is more complicated that that. It is commanding and charismatic, in its way - almost Romantic, in a strange sense. A Satanic figure, undone by the hero - but compelling in itself. Satanic in Mick Jagger's sense, which itself is a Romantic notion of the devil - Satanic like Lucifer, bringer of light, trying to take the place of god, to rule all creation - not a bad description of Alpha 60.
And yet it’s a very ordinary monster, that computer - represented by just what you see there - lights, wires, boxes; sometimes by fans, or a simple flashing light, and always by a disembodied, mechanical, voice. This is another extraordinary quality of Alphaville - it is a very convincing science fiction film made up entirely of things in the real, contemporary (1965), world. It is probably the epitome of the type of film I referred to writing about Face of Another, films that shoot the real world to look and feel like science fiction. Alphaville is shot on the streets of Paris, in the buildings of Paris - but the glass and steel Paris, the modern Paris, of lights and machines and clean, modernist design. It looks other-worldly.
Godard constructs a futuristic world from this. Streets and cars and most of the actual technology are all contemporary, though shot and combined to look alien. Godard treats the world as it is like a science fiction place: flying in from New York (6000 miles away), becomes intergalactic travel. Only the computers are not part of the everyday world - but they are perfectly normal contemporary (1965) machines. Rooms full of banks of processors, wires, with keyboards and switches and card slots and flashing lights. You don’t see a lot of computers from 1965 - though it's interesting to consider that the back rooms where the real computing lives aren't that commonly seen now. We see the desktops and laptops and screens, keyboards and mice, the phones and tablets and all the other things people use - everything that interfaces with humanity. But even now, we don’t see the back rooms, where the infrastructure lives. Even now, it seems a bit alien when you see it (in Werner Herzog’s new internet film, say) - and not much different from what it looked like in 1965. Routers and processors and disk arrays and wires haven’t changed that much.
Though Godard does imagine the interface with humanity, though this didn't exist so much in 1965. It's an odd mix of analog and digital - invisible technology, disembodied voices, pervasive surveillance, microwave ovens - all made of sound and light. He warps it out of the real world, combining things in strange ways, showing pieces of the world, showing a world of sound and light, reflections and window panes, that subtly distort the world. Inside and outside, up and down, intermingle - it's an odd, translucent world, up on the surface....
And when the chance comes to use cinema to transform the world, he’s ready:
And so it is. A beautiful film, funny, fairly exciting, as adventure yarn (at least containing action scenes, half joke and half real excitement), imagining a dystopic future and what might be done about it, arguing what we have to protect - art, love, words - without quite (quite) disavowing what we could get from technology. And at times, almost exploding from sheer passion, desire and loss. Alphaville, the Capital of Pain, indeed...
