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2004 Year in Review: Ten Things
MUBARAK ALI gets comfortably numb as he reviews ten classics seen – and loved – on DVD in 2004; DAVID LEVINSON scours the ten films that rocked his world.
Because my top ten of '04 is pretty much the same as that from the Auckland International Film Festival (with Before Sunset, Kill Bill Vol. 2, and Elephant all thrown in the mix), I've decided to pull something different this time round when I'll just mention ten great classics caught up with on DVD this year, that in a perfect world would have gotten some form of communal orgiastic celebration they all so richly deserve:
The Color of Pomegranates
Paradjanov, the gay Armenian artist and outcast filmmaker used to make films that force us to leave our universe and enter his, where we are assaulted with his highly eccentric cinema of abstract imagery, otherworldly folk music, and a wild, restless camera. In what is perhaps his most accessible work (of the five I've seen), he traces the life of Armenian poet, Sayat Nova, with his distinctive aesthetic embellishments (i.e., stripped of any discernible plot, dialogue or character development, and the presence of a skewed perspective – ostensibly reflecting the constantly drifting state of mind of its subject). We are left with impressions (such as what possibly inspires his art or that of his discovery of sexuality as a child, or spirituality as an adult) rather than concrete incidences as the film navigates its fragmented narrative of highly abstruse episodes that sketch the outline of a life that culminates in tragedy. One of the key films of sixties avant-garde cinema, this is a small universe away from realist/cinema verite films. (Sergei Paradjanov/1970)
The Falls
Greenaway's three-hour faux-documentary-slash-absurdist fantasy sets the highly idiosyncratic tone of much of his later work. Its subjects are the 92 people who have survived the mysterious Violent Unknown Event, only to end up with bizarre mutations, create new languages of their own and harbour a fanatical infatuation with birds and flying. The 'screenplay' has to be one of the most ingenious (or preposterous, depending on what your view on Greenaway is) conceptions ever: theories and mini-biographies are created around each of the available victims of the incident (some of them have been removed from the catalogue for various reasons, you see), one of whom hilariously cites the VUE as being an Alfred Hitchcock creation in an attempt to contend with the unexplained ending of The Birds! Recurring Greenaway motifs such as ornithology, numerology, demented humour, and a self-aware and artful obsession with symmetry and pattern are all astonishingly evident here, his first feature-length film, through which he's already (re)defining the role of the spectator. (Peter Greenaway/1980)
The Holy Mountain
Jodorowsky's follow-up to his classic acid-Western El Topo is a lot more esoteric, but it holds rich rewards for those willing to submit to the mystical experience. It bears elements of a plot, which involves the wanderings of a Christ-like figure across a bizarre, apocalyptic landscape of unrest and chaos. He ascends a mysterious portal where he meets The Alchemist (significantly played by Jodorowsky) who has assembled eight other people from different backgrounds – it turns out that he's planning to kill and supersede the nine immortal masters atop the Holy Mountain in order to achieve eternal life, and the film thereafter follows their path to the Mountain. (If all this sounds very anticipatory of Monty Python-esque daftness, it kinda is. Except, the humour here being seethed with acid and reformed from its own excrement – you'll see what I mean.) Because this is a Jodorowsky film, the intense surreal imagery of the film is best left undescribed, but it is utterly (and somewhat dangerously) disorienting, and is barely balanced by the absurdist humour that surfaces sporadically. The final self-reflexive scene recalls that of Persona or The Patsy, but here the inaccessibility of nirvana is likened to the illusion of Cinema. (Alejandro Jodorowsky/1973)
Man With A Movie Camera
This is probably the ultimate 'director' film – no other film fetishises or mythologises the camera (and unavoidably, it's product) as much as this experimental Soviet silent does. The exhilarating score by Michael Nyman elevates the frenetically juxtaposed montage – capturing an ordinary day in Russia – almost to the level of performance art (although the film is, I'm told, a formalist documentary). (Dziga Vertov/1929)
The Servant
While Performance remains the best male version of Persona ever made, this nasty little bugger bears some of the revered Swedish film's characteristics too, preceding it by three long years of European cinematic innovations. Disguised as a rejection of the British class system in its situation of role reversal between master (James Fox, who was also the victim of a dynamic power shift in Performance) and servant (devilishly played by Dirk Bogarde), there's always something more sinister lurking beneath the surface that has more to do with distorted gender and repressed sexuality (I'm not reading too much into it – there's a convex mirror in the living room fer God's sake, plus it stars Dirk Bogarde!). Nice b/w photography (the interior shots are especially disorienting), cool jazz score, neurotic women, swinging sixties-style orgies: this is easily the best of the three collaborations between Joseph Losey and playwright Harold Pinter. (Joseph Losey/1963)
Diary of a Country Priest
Another Bresson film I like, which has led me to reconsider my initial position on the French master; I've always been mixed on Bresson, not least because of the near-Brechtian distance at which his later films have always held me. An austerity is certainly evident in Diary, but not to such an extent that it becomes forbidding. Indeed, such a distancing mechanism is relevant in this case when the unwell priest who arrives in a hostile village, becomes increasingly isolated from those around him and is confronting his own demons, so to speak. In this manner he is similar to A Man Escaped's Fontaine, whose isolation in a jail cell culminates in an escape, and indeed to the brutalised animal, Balthazar, from the director's quintessential film. The priest eventually finds escape too, and it is a moving and humbling moment of spiritual release. (Robert Bresson/1951)
Pickup on South Street
Or Honour Among Thieves, Fuller-style, is all loopy about a top-secret microfilm that our pickpocket hero unknowingly obtains while pulling a 'job' on the film's unlikely femme fatale. Fuller's rough and distinctively frugal filmmaking is evident in this classy crime-drama-noir – which shares the stratosphere of fifties noir cinema with Kiss Me Deadly and The Big Heat – and you can almost taste the sleaze as it threatens to bubble to the surface (though not in the absolute uninhibited glory as in some of his later works). And the kiss that passes between Widmark and Peters is electrifying, as is Thelma Ritter's gritty, Oscar-nominated performance. (Samuel Fuller/1953)
The Ladies' Man
Jerry Lewis' is a universe that is forever embracing the artificiality of the medium (in this case generously showing us the edges of the huge doll-house set), a universe outlaying the illusory nature, hypocrisy and necessity of the Hollywood system, a universe that taps into his own dysfunctional psyche to express hidden fears and obsessions through Lewis-the-performer. The Ladies' Man is also a brilliant statement on the domestication of man by woman and contains some of the funniest sequences you'll ever see ('funny' being an entirely relative word in Lewis' dictionary). Lewis stars as Herbert Heebert, who, upon discovering that his sweetheart cheated on him on his graduation day, regresses into the I-hate-girls phase of pre-teen years. Next thing you know, he gets a job as a caretaker-cum-houseboy in the enormous boarding house (the aforementioned 'doll-house') occupied by dozens of young and beautiful aspiring actresses. The film's acute sense of gynophobia expresses itself in almost every subsequent encounter Herbert has with the ladies, but Lewis-the-director allows two important excursions that are brazenly male-centric: the famous hat scene (which not only underscores challenged masculinity, but also has to be one the funniest scenes, like, ever) and the highly complex sequence where the film's sense of space gives way to an endless chamber of male sexual frustrations (when Herbert enters the one room he's forbidden to). (Jerry Lewis/1961)
Andy Warhol's Trash
Along with the prior Flesh and the subsequent Heat (forming a loose trilogy that attempts to capture the sixties' perversions from the point of view of societal pariahs), Trash understandably constitutes an iconic film trilogy of American underground cinema, this side of Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, and Gregory Markopoulos. Joe Dallesandro stars as the impotent heroin-addict, suspended in a state of asexual bliss and perpetual disconnection, and the film thinly – and mostly hilariously – follows the attempts of many women (and men) to seduce him, and those of his live-in girlfriend to salvage him/them-as-a-couple (a great, celebrated performance by transvestite actress, Holly Woodlawn). If at-times-banal-but-mostly-beguiling longeurs of nothingness, improvisation, graphic full-frontal male and female nudity and near-exploitative/frank sexual encounters sound off-putting, then potential viewers should remain off-put. However, those brave enough to venture into the film will be rewarded with an unyielding canvas of transitory but chilling emotional truths. At the end, it's up to the viewer whether to take it seriously or not, but either way, it's essential viewing. (Also worth watching by Paul Morrissey is the flawed but highly enjoyable, Blood For Dracula, which is probably as poetic as B-movies get). (Paul Morrissey/1970)
Germany, Year Zero
While it was thrilling to witness the birth of an entire film movement in the first film of Rossellini's 'trilogy of war', it wasn't until here, the final film, when this new cinematic language took on a meaning – that of a constant state of wandering – that defines much of neorealism. The subject of the post-Nazi influence on a young German boy leading him to kill his ailing father, and then himself, may have been shocking then (it's still affecting now), but the one surprising element that haunts the film is its cold persistence in searching for meaning where it lamentably doesn't exist: the raison d'être of war. (Roberto Rossellini/1948)
—Mubarak Ali
Top five moments that Rocked My World (in no particular order):
» Tropical Malady
Fisting: on a scene-by-scene basis, its first half reigns as one of the most arresting pieces of cinema this year, a heady fusion of Thailand's morphing (pop)cultural landscape with a burgeoning gay romance. But if I had to pick just one, it would be the point at which Tong begins licking Keng's fist, turning day into night, like into love, and the film's universe into something so much more.
» Kill Bill, Vol. 2
Bride in a Coffin: makes for one of the most nimble negotiations of sound/space in recent memory.
» Twentynine Palms
Knife to the Chest: first time round, made me want to put my foot through the floor. Second time round, what had appeared to be whiny Euro-malaise suddenly became like an existential noose to the neck.
» Before Sunset
Nina Simone: where the eighty-minute battle fought between an entrenched past and untenable present comes not so much to as a standstill as it seems to evaporate entirely.
» Napoleon Dynamite
"I see you're drinking 1%. Is that 'cause you think you're fat? 'Cause you're not. You could be drinking whole if you wanted to."
Top five films that will never see the light (or is that dark?) of day in New Zealand outside of a festival context:
1. Twentynine Palms (Bruno Dumont)
2. Anatomy of Hell (Catherine Breillat)
3. Crimson Gold (Jafar Panahi)
4. Memories of Murder (Bong Joon-ho)
5. Cowards Bend the Knee (Guy Maddin)
—David Levinson
See also:
» The Editors' Year / Lists '04
» Ten Tele Things
Because my top ten of '04 is pretty much the same as that from the Auckland International Film Festival (with Before Sunset, Kill Bill Vol. 2, and Elephant all thrown in the mix), I've decided to pull something different this time round when I'll just mention ten great classics caught up with on DVD this year, that in a perfect world would have gotten some form of communal orgiastic celebration they all so richly deserve:
The Color of Pomegranates
Paradjanov, the gay Armenian artist and outcast filmmaker used to make films that force us to leave our universe and enter his, where we are assaulted with his highly eccentric cinema of abstract imagery, otherworldly folk music, and a wild, restless camera. In what is perhaps his most accessible work (of the five I've seen), he traces the life of Armenian poet, Sayat Nova, with his distinctive aesthetic embellishments (i.e., stripped of any discernible plot, dialogue or character development, and the presence of a skewed perspective – ostensibly reflecting the constantly drifting state of mind of its subject). We are left with impressions (such as what possibly inspires his art or that of his discovery of sexuality as a child, or spirituality as an adult) rather than concrete incidences as the film navigates its fragmented narrative of highly abstruse episodes that sketch the outline of a life that culminates in tragedy. One of the key films of sixties avant-garde cinema, this is a small universe away from realist/cinema verite films. (Sergei Paradjanov/1970)
The Falls
Greenaway's three-hour faux-documentary-slash-absurdist fantasy sets the highly idiosyncratic tone of much of his later work. Its subjects are the 92 people who have survived the mysterious Violent Unknown Event, only to end up with bizarre mutations, create new languages of their own and harbour a fanatical infatuation with birds and flying. The 'screenplay' has to be one of the most ingenious (or preposterous, depending on what your view on Greenaway is) conceptions ever: theories and mini-biographies are created around each of the available victims of the incident (some of them have been removed from the catalogue for various reasons, you see), one of whom hilariously cites the VUE as being an Alfred Hitchcock creation in an attempt to contend with the unexplained ending of The Birds! Recurring Greenaway motifs such as ornithology, numerology, demented humour, and a self-aware and artful obsession with symmetry and pattern are all astonishingly evident here, his first feature-length film, through which he's already (re)defining the role of the spectator. (Peter Greenaway/1980)
The Holy Mountain
Jodorowsky's follow-up to his classic acid-Western El Topo is a lot more esoteric, but it holds rich rewards for those willing to submit to the mystical experience. It bears elements of a plot, which involves the wanderings of a Christ-like figure across a bizarre, apocalyptic landscape of unrest and chaos. He ascends a mysterious portal where he meets The Alchemist (significantly played by Jodorowsky) who has assembled eight other people from different backgrounds – it turns out that he's planning to kill and supersede the nine immortal masters atop the Holy Mountain in order to achieve eternal life, and the film thereafter follows their path to the Mountain. (If all this sounds very anticipatory of Monty Python-esque daftness, it kinda is. Except, the humour here being seethed with acid and reformed from its own excrement – you'll see what I mean.) Because this is a Jodorowsky film, the intense surreal imagery of the film is best left undescribed, but it is utterly (and somewhat dangerously) disorienting, and is barely balanced by the absurdist humour that surfaces sporadically. The final self-reflexive scene recalls that of Persona or The Patsy, but here the inaccessibility of nirvana is likened to the illusion of Cinema. (Alejandro Jodorowsky/1973)
Man With A Movie Camera
This is probably the ultimate 'director' film – no other film fetishises or mythologises the camera (and unavoidably, it's product) as much as this experimental Soviet silent does. The exhilarating score by Michael Nyman elevates the frenetically juxtaposed montage – capturing an ordinary day in Russia – almost to the level of performance art (although the film is, I'm told, a formalist documentary). (Dziga Vertov/1929)
The Servant
While Performance remains the best male version of Persona ever made, this nasty little bugger bears some of the revered Swedish film's characteristics too, preceding it by three long years of European cinematic innovations. Disguised as a rejection of the British class system in its situation of role reversal between master (James Fox, who was also the victim of a dynamic power shift in Performance) and servant (devilishly played by Dirk Bogarde), there's always something more sinister lurking beneath the surface that has more to do with distorted gender and repressed sexuality (I'm not reading too much into it – there's a convex mirror in the living room fer God's sake, plus it stars Dirk Bogarde!). Nice b/w photography (the interior shots are especially disorienting), cool jazz score, neurotic women, swinging sixties-style orgies: this is easily the best of the three collaborations between Joseph Losey and playwright Harold Pinter. (Joseph Losey/1963)
Diary of a Country Priest
Another Bresson film I like, which has led me to reconsider my initial position on the French master; I've always been mixed on Bresson, not least because of the near-Brechtian distance at which his later films have always held me. An austerity is certainly evident in Diary, but not to such an extent that it becomes forbidding. Indeed, such a distancing mechanism is relevant in this case when the unwell priest who arrives in a hostile village, becomes increasingly isolated from those around him and is confronting his own demons, so to speak. In this manner he is similar to A Man Escaped's Fontaine, whose isolation in a jail cell culminates in an escape, and indeed to the brutalised animal, Balthazar, from the director's quintessential film. The priest eventually finds escape too, and it is a moving and humbling moment of spiritual release. (Robert Bresson/1951)
Pickup on South Street
Or Honour Among Thieves, Fuller-style, is all loopy about a top-secret microfilm that our pickpocket hero unknowingly obtains while pulling a 'job' on the film's unlikely femme fatale. Fuller's rough and distinctively frugal filmmaking is evident in this classy crime-drama-noir – which shares the stratosphere of fifties noir cinema with Kiss Me Deadly and The Big Heat – and you can almost taste the sleaze as it threatens to bubble to the surface (though not in the absolute uninhibited glory as in some of his later works). And the kiss that passes between Widmark and Peters is electrifying, as is Thelma Ritter's gritty, Oscar-nominated performance. (Samuel Fuller/1953)
The Ladies' Man
Jerry Lewis' is a universe that is forever embracing the artificiality of the medium (in this case generously showing us the edges of the huge doll-house set), a universe outlaying the illusory nature, hypocrisy and necessity of the Hollywood system, a universe that taps into his own dysfunctional psyche to express hidden fears and obsessions through Lewis-the-performer. The Ladies' Man is also a brilliant statement on the domestication of man by woman and contains some of the funniest sequences you'll ever see ('funny' being an entirely relative word in Lewis' dictionary). Lewis stars as Herbert Heebert, who, upon discovering that his sweetheart cheated on him on his graduation day, regresses into the I-hate-girls phase of pre-teen years. Next thing you know, he gets a job as a caretaker-cum-houseboy in the enormous boarding house (the aforementioned 'doll-house') occupied by dozens of young and beautiful aspiring actresses. The film's acute sense of gynophobia expresses itself in almost every subsequent encounter Herbert has with the ladies, but Lewis-the-director allows two important excursions that are brazenly male-centric: the famous hat scene (which not only underscores challenged masculinity, but also has to be one the funniest scenes, like, ever) and the highly complex sequence where the film's sense of space gives way to an endless chamber of male sexual frustrations (when Herbert enters the one room he's forbidden to). (Jerry Lewis/1961)
Andy Warhol's Trash
Along with the prior Flesh and the subsequent Heat (forming a loose trilogy that attempts to capture the sixties' perversions from the point of view of societal pariahs), Trash understandably constitutes an iconic film trilogy of American underground cinema, this side of Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, and Gregory Markopoulos. Joe Dallesandro stars as the impotent heroin-addict, suspended in a state of asexual bliss and perpetual disconnection, and the film thinly – and mostly hilariously – follows the attempts of many women (and men) to seduce him, and those of his live-in girlfriend to salvage him/them-as-a-couple (a great, celebrated performance by transvestite actress, Holly Woodlawn). If at-times-banal-but-mostly-beguiling longeurs of nothingness, improvisation, graphic full-frontal male and female nudity and near-exploitative/frank sexual encounters sound off-putting, then potential viewers should remain off-put. However, those brave enough to venture into the film will be rewarded with an unyielding canvas of transitory but chilling emotional truths. At the end, it's up to the viewer whether to take it seriously or not, but either way, it's essential viewing. (Also worth watching by Paul Morrissey is the flawed but highly enjoyable, Blood For Dracula, which is probably as poetic as B-movies get). (Paul Morrissey/1970)
Germany, Year Zero
While it was thrilling to witness the birth of an entire film movement in the first film of Rossellini's 'trilogy of war', it wasn't until here, the final film, when this new cinematic language took on a meaning – that of a constant state of wandering – that defines much of neorealism. The subject of the post-Nazi influence on a young German boy leading him to kill his ailing father, and then himself, may have been shocking then (it's still affecting now), but the one surprising element that haunts the film is its cold persistence in searching for meaning where it lamentably doesn't exist: the raison d'être of war. (Roberto Rossellini/1948)
—Mubarak Ali
Top five moments that Rocked My World (in no particular order):
» Tropical Malady
Fisting: on a scene-by-scene basis, its first half reigns as one of the most arresting pieces of cinema this year, a heady fusion of Thailand's morphing (pop)cultural landscape with a burgeoning gay romance. But if I had to pick just one, it would be the point at which Tong begins licking Keng's fist, turning day into night, like into love, and the film's universe into something so much more.
» Kill Bill, Vol. 2
Bride in a Coffin: makes for one of the most nimble negotiations of sound/space in recent memory.
» Twentynine Palms
Knife to the Chest: first time round, made me want to put my foot through the floor. Second time round, what had appeared to be whiny Euro-malaise suddenly became like an existential noose to the neck.
» Before Sunset
Nina Simone: where the eighty-minute battle fought between an entrenched past and untenable present comes not so much to as a standstill as it seems to evaporate entirely.
» Napoleon Dynamite
"I see you're drinking 1%. Is that 'cause you think you're fat? 'Cause you're not. You could be drinking whole if you wanted to."
Top five films that will never see the light (or is that dark?) of day in New Zealand outside of a festival context:
1. Twentynine Palms (Bruno Dumont)
2. Anatomy of Hell (Catherine Breillat)
3. Crimson Gold (Jafar Panahi)
4. Memories of Murder (Bong Joon-ho)
5. Cowards Bend the Knee (Guy Maddin)
—David Levinson
See also:
» The Editors' Year / Lists '04
» Ten Tele Things
