Some decade! It has frankly been bananas. Ten years of war, apocalyptic terrorism(s), madness, global conspiratorial aggregations, the collapse of deregulated markets, black people in the white house, the viral spread of digitality in all of its forms, and the continued outboarding of our brains in our ongoing evolutionary transformation into a particularly complicated type of ant or something. Virtuality increasingly predominates. The cinema, as per, has been right there to clinically catalogue the symptomatologies, serve as test-case host for the microbial agents, and to begin to construct a complex multi-dimensional cartography of our brave new morphological world, setting out to discover its limits and contours, its gradations and plateaus, its depths and its peaks. We have certainly lived through interesting times in these ten years, a propos the supposedly Chinese curse the origins of which have never been established, but which came into popular usage in the 1930s, a decade no less hellishly interesting than the in-some-ways-similar one we have just endured w/ its economic disaster and endgame competition of global extremisms (a fact which may portend a very dark road ahead indeed). For someone like myself who prides himself on his dark sense of humor and fondness for disaster, it has become irreducibly apparent that I am right where I ought to be in the space-time continuum. Part of what has been most appealing to me in these past ten years in how the digital world has precipitated a growing formal grammatical complexity and sophistication in the image culture. I can think of no better example of this complexity and sophistication than that gradually built up by the amazing and globally very popular
Bourne franchise, three films spanning the years 2002-2007. No films better exemplify how popular cinematographic practices have so stridently surpassed previous understanding of the medium’s capabilities than this increasingly sophisticated post-global triptych. A further indication of how extraordinary a decade of cinema this has been is that
The Bourne Ultimatum fails, despite its not insignificant virtues, to quite make my list of the best twenty films of the decade. Nor, somehow, does
Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle (’03), the film that to my mind still best demonstrates how these newly sophisticated cinematographic tools are used to make even the most brazen of consumerist entertainments – owing so much to the kinetic virtuosity of music videos and the nimble, spatiotemporal sculpting first perfected in the sly Marxist parable
The Matrix (’99) – absolutely fucking mind-melting. It is clear that cinema itself is at a serious impasse, and that the world of new media is still in the early stages of asserting its dominance over how we make sense of ourselves and our world – how we are entertained, informed, and inspired. Films like
Avatar continue to mollify the masses whilst maintaining the primacy of cinematographic spectacle, tied as it is to a public experience in a theatrical setting, in a world that will continue to change, along w/ its image culture, very fast indeed.
A little preliminary explanation as to the nature of the following list of twenty films is in order before it is laid out. First and foremost, there is no objective set of aesthetic, formal, sociopolitical, or historical criteria that informs the choice or these individual films or the order in which they are presented. (I do notice that the vast majority of the films come from the first half of the decade which may have something to do w/ the amount of time I have had the opportunity to live w/ them). The list only exists in order to help me orient myself, because it gives me pleasure – it is, in fact, a taxonomy of pleasures tied to a particular period of time, as such it is a consideration of pleasures that could not have been had at any other time. It is important to me that the films I choose do in one way or another seem
particularly important by virtue of both when they were introduced into the world and when they became known experientially by me. It is also important for my
enjoyment that the list not be bogged down by too many films by a small handful of filmmakers. If I were to consider more than one film by any filmmaker, I fear that the top five films would all be by Claire Denis which, though absolutely just, would be no goddamn fun at all. It is for this reason – that of my own personal pleasure – that this list of films contains only one film by any given director. Finally, as usual, there are a great many films that could just as easily replace some on the list. It is hard not to include a brief list of runners up. It is almost impossible to come to terms w/ the fact that we have just lived through a decade that includes twenty films that I deemed superior to:
Comédie de l'innocence (Raoul Ruiz, 2000),
Saenghwalui balgyeon / Turning Gate (Sang-soo Hong, 2002),
Um Filme Falado / A Talking Picture (Manoel de Oliveira, 2003),
Salinui chueok / Memories of Murder (Bong Joon-ho, 2003),
Birth (Jonathan Glazer 2004),
The New World (Terrence Malick, 2005),
Les amants réguliers (Philippe Garrel, 2005),
Solntse / The Sun (Aleksandr Sokurov, 2005),
Period Piece (Giuseppe Andrews, 2006),
...a bude hur / It’s Gonna Get Worse (Petr Nikolaev, 2007). And those are just the first ten that came immediately to mind. These lists change over time, anyway. Maybe eventually I can make a top twenty list of my top twenty lists of the 00s. Until then …
20. Forty Shades of Blue (2005)
Halfway through the decade the film to beat as state of the nation address on American masculinity was
Forty Shades of Blue, a film paradoxically dominated almost entirely by the performance of an actress, and I’m pretty sure no other film ever quite did. It also overtakes Jarmusch’s
Mystery Train (’89) as the best film ever about Memphis. Telling the story of Alan James (Rip Torn at his doddering, explosive, drunken bestial best), a legendary music producer entering into old age and grieving his youth, taking it all out on his young Muscovite trophy wife and mother-to-his-three-year-old-son Laura, played in possibly the greatest performance by an actress this decade (who wasn’t Isabelle Huppert or Jeanne Balibar) by Dina Korzun. When Alan’s troubled adult son returns into the fold and develops feelings for Laura, we watch as these insecure, secretly needy men fall over themselves to entrap her in their confusion, desire, and need to be accredited as men, while Laura retains a total strength and self-composed insouciance, struggling w/ her own feelings but also well aware that she needs desperately to hold on to this life in which she now finds herself, subsumed within a cocoon of wealth and status that can be taken away from her at any moment. This is not the sort of maudlin “adult” relationship material trucked in by American workhorses like Sydney Pollock and Robert Benton, but more the touching and radically decentered poetics of family relations that one finds in the greatest films of John Cassavetes and Maurice Pialat. And the steely Memphis blues of the lighting are gorgeous. This was only the second film DOP Julian Whatley shot (and he has, criminally, only shot one since). He sets up shots for director Ira Sachs here that remind you of the kinds of shots Mark Li Ping-bin would set up for a Wong Kar-wai or a Hou Hsiao-hsien, providing sleek finish to a film heavy in naturalism.
19. Miami Vice (2006)
Michael Mann’s total reinvention of the 80s television cop opera that, w/ its combination of white suits, puffy hair, and ejaculatory gunfights, established him as a major player after his terrifically accomplished but underperforming debut feature
Thief (’81), is simply put the best looking digitally shot film that I have yet seen. It is a gorgeous, textural film, that fetishizes everything within its visual field, featuring by far the sexiest shower love scene ever committed to celluloid (which the digital had to be blown up on to for theatrical screening). The narrative and the characters are so streamlined to meet the basic needs of this no-beating-around-the-bush built-to-ride policier, that the flaws of Mann’s other films are nowhere to be found here. There is nothing extraneous forced upon the sleek and compact chassis of this baby. It plays more like a stoned tone poem than an action film, and would probably be the best film made this decade to watch on opium (which would be an ironic thing to do whilst watching a film about vice squad heroics in the first place), if not for the fact that the film is already opium enough. Sorry Karl Marx. I like it.
18. Process (2004)
Speaking of tone poems,
Process is a motherfucker of one! Of all the films that I have seen only once,
Process is the one that I most wish to see again. Somebody must put this excruciating suicide masterpiece on DVD. It is a must see for anybody who has suffered through recurrent periods of obsessive suicidal ideation. Shot is twenty-nine single long takes of Béatrice Dalle (perhaps my deep-down-in-the-dank-darkness-of-myself favorite living actress), as she is led through the titular process which culminates in her taking her own life onscreen. Before this we witness her onstage theatrical meltdown, a lengthy bout of threeway sex w/ two actors from whom two very realistic performances have been, ahem, excited, the revelation of scars from an offscreen mastectomy, a snack of shattered glass, and the lengthy packing up in boxes of a very substantial collection of books. It is a hypnotic, glassy, and powerful ordeal scored by John Cale and featuring songs by Smog and others, as well as lots of intertitle text and quotations from Don DeLillo etc. Everything about this film is sinister and unapologetically cruel. Guillaume Depardieu, playing the ex-lover of the glamorous suicide-to-be, limps around in his final performance before the amputation of his leg. I have been unable to track down either of the subsequent films that American art critic turned cinematic provocateur C.S. Leigh has made. I can think of nothing more singularly maddening. My ex and I loved this film so much we spent years trying to track down a copy on eBay to no avail. Talking to her recently, I discovered that she still hasn’t given up, though none of her leads have turned out as of yet. It’s that kind of film. You can’t put the fucking thing to bed.
17. Death Proof (2007)
Tarantino once called
Jackie Brown something along the lines of his hanging out w/ people movie.
Death Proof fits that same bill only more so, surpassing
Jackie, his previous high water mark. It is his masterpiece. The list of things he is borrowing from, as usual, is longer than a Fritz Lang anaconda, but rest assured you’ll catch up w/ his childhood love of
Dukes of Hazard. Just the lap dance scene alone (playfully excised as it was from the shortened
Grindhouse version) references
Blue Velvet, Almodovar and his protégé de la Iglesia, Tarantino’s buddy Rodriguez … and he’s paying so many props to seemingly unrelated contemporary Richard Linklatter in the Austin section … or what about all the references to the films of Jack Hill merged w/
Smokey and the Bandit? Opening w/ Jack Nietsche and the foot/ass fetish is the least of it (though it sure demonstrates that yr in good perverted hands like a motherfucker). This movie is a total feminist masterpiece and if you don’t notice that the first time than I recommend that you rescreen
Death Proof and pay special attention as the amazing Zoe Bell returns the too-cool-for-Burt-Reynolds-school gaze right as power polarities are putting our portrait-of-a-serial-killer not-so-cartoony-as-we-might-at-first-think antagonist right in the goddamn crux of his own swarthy castratedness, poring Red Rose bourbon on his wounds and weeping … then she grabs a heavy pipe and leaps on a Dodge Challenger like it were a John Ford stallion. The editing is the most brilliant freaked out digikink madness since Miike’s
Dead or Alive. I would marry any one of up these bitches AND FAST. And good to see
Film Comment on the rack at a Tennessee gulp ‘n’ go! And his best soundtrack yet! More fun than any of us deserve!
16. Ne touchez pas la hache / The Duchess of Langeais (2007)
Though Jacques Rivette, the king of really long French new wave films w/ impeccable mise-en-scène, is indeed adapting Balzac’s
The Duchess of Langeais w/ his measured 2007 masterpiece, his French title,
Ne touchez pas la hache (which was the title Balzac originally chose) is way better, and the film definitely should have been released in North America as
Don’t Touch the Axe. It really is the perfect title for this quietly nasty story of two lovers trying to keep the upper hand over one another, salubriously maneuvering to force the other to make the fatal gesture, keeping everything at the level of a sinister seductive game of intelligence, subversive wit, and intertwining stratagems of ridiculous unspoken complexity, for fear of exposing themselves to courtly humiliation or romantic hurt. Rivette has long proven to be cinema’s greatest adapter of 19th century literary masterpieces, and
Ne touchez pas la hache is one of his greatest such adaptations. Jeanne Balibar brings smirky brio to her turn as the manipulative, coy and by-turns-obnoxious duchess, while Guillaume Depardieu is bullish and brash as the in-over-his-head but no-less-malicious Napoleonic military hero freshly returned from darkest Africa to something equally menacing in the chambers of a
lady. Something which by turns perplexes, excites, and enrages him. The way their bodies inhabit these extraordinary spaces in their dance of love/hate was no doubt aided by the fact that the actors reportedly despised one another. That it is ultimately the duchess upon whom the axe falls is indeed surprising. As is her resultant reinvention as a barefoot Carmelite nun. Sexy and vicious stuff.
15. Hayabusa / Dog Days Dream (2006)
Perhaps the great underscreened debut feature of the last twenty years,
Hayabusa remains so below the radar that it doesn’t even have an entry on the Internet Movie Database. It is the greatest slacker love comedy of all time. A young Japanese couple lose their dignity and pathetic sources of income (he basically collects garbage until he suddenly doesn’t) during a brutal heat wave, and decide to barricade themselves inside the wreckage. This is simply one of the best Japanese comedies of all time. We open w/ a shot of her brushing his teeth whilst he lies in bed. Long takes have been a major characteristic of the finest art films of this decade, but it is rare to see them so well deployed in a straight-out comedy (let alone a debut feature), but
Hayabusa may well be the film that rocked those motherfuckers better than any other. Good Lord! As a statement about post-Marx hopelessness and the lives of young people w/ no room to move, this movie is an instrument of comic cosmic war (channeling W.C. Fields, Jacques Tati, Jerry Lewis, and the Godard of
Soigne ta droite), begging for an understanding of how hard late market consumer capitalism is on the young, sexy, and terminally lazy. There is no way that most of the films winning festival awards these last couple years even deserve to sit at the same table as this masterpiece nobody saw. Number two of the decade on the list of films that I would give large quantities of plasma to see a second time.
14. Izo (2004)
If cinema is the seventh art then Takashi Miike is presumably on to about the ninth or tenth by now. Just when you think he can’t go any further (than
Gozu? Come on!), he takes his game into even more decentered territories with the space-time continuum disrupting
Izo, his furthest-out-there alien intervention yet. Telling the story of a time-traveling Christ-figure without the forgiveness part, Miike’s elaborate reworking of epistemology in TV miniseries
MPD Psycho gets transferred into purely metaphysical territory, the whole while inventing a new Brechtean street theater approach.
Izo is a wonder of digital montage and countercultural archive/database fever. This is the first Miike manga-mash for Chomsky readers and black-kerchief-wearing anarchists. It is his first film for readers of pre or post-kitsch SF. It is many things if not most. At its center is a hero for right now; a warrior at war with all life on earth, with all history as it folds before power’s pen; with all institutions and systems (including laws of astrophysics and molecular biology). Izo is “grudge” as demonic possession, as post-individuated, as post-temporal. The grudge is of us, we are of it. The manifold is open like the universal wound, our struggle akin to the struggle of sperm in search of fertilization (did he get that shit from some educational film?), a fiery yawning of the firmament, and we are always swallowed back up by our ecstatic activity, our accursed share. History is a fire science of revenge. Izo is our wrath and rapier, the eternal return of a fall, skipping down across phonograph grooves of the real. Every name in history is I, said Nietzsche. And the time is always right now, answers the cybercipher. Izo is above us and below, his deathblow conjoins two gravities within a single field of movement. This is the new smoke and mirrors folks.
13. Dying at Grace (2003)
Allan King is a Canadian national treasure. As a Canadian, I cherish the documentary tradition on which my national cinema is founded. It is the only national cinema in the world whose two greatest filmmakers, Michel Brault and Allan King, are primarily known for documentaries. King invented a form of fly-on-the-wall documentary that he calls “actuality drama,” and each of his films has been about other people who represent or act out concerns that are dominating his own life (such as marriage in his unbelievably awesome
A Married Couple (1969), which I recently saw again as part of a Canadian cinema retrospective in Calgary – it just gets better). With
Dying at Grace, King has made an incomparably powerful film out of his own concerns about mortality. Filmed over the course of one winter in the palliative care ward at Toronto's Grace Hospital,
Dying at Grace unflinchingly shows us the last days of five terminal patients, up to and including their final breaths. More than anything else the film confirms how exhausting death is both for those who go through it and those (sometimes, sadly, only the hospital staff) who wait by their side. And finally how peaceful, even transcendent, the letting go.
12. Ten (2002)
Ten conversations involving an Iranian woman driving a car and her various sundry passengers. Fewer camera setups than that. Is Kiarostami not now officially the bus driver of our cinema? the man at the helm, astride the wielding of our gazebox? Well it’s certainly starting to look that way, Bub, and you had better get on board if you want to catch the current of our digital world and its new networks and veins of video truth! What Louis and Auguste Lumière started, the Iranian resistance continues, standing in refusal instead of mere awe. An oppositional poetics confronting the hegemony of silence, the absence of light met with unburied luminosity, vision wrested from the shroud. The truth does not need complications, polyrhythmic abundances, false provisions, when it itself is victory. Not when the liberated senses are the world’s common field. Not when the locally-global stand no longer needs mediation. Kiarostami has won our World War III. Not that that will slow down the bloody losers! This is our infatada against the forces of silence, the presencing absences of any empire whatever! This is our cinema unbridled, under the radar, and it matters very much!
11. Qian xi man po / Millennium Mambo (2001)
Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien, arguably the greatest filmmaker of the nineties, continues to go strong, having even branched out to make gorgeous and lived-in films in Japan and France. His druggy and opulent
Qian xi man po, shot in his homeland and expertly capturing, encased in amber, the Taipei of an ecstasy high, was perhaps better than any other film this decade at capturing the look and feel of the lives young people lived in it. A film absolutely alive w/ electric nightlife color, sensuous decadence and sumptuous decor, focusing most of its energy on the camera-worship of Hong Kong starlet Shu Qi , playing a woman ever in-between looking back on the contemporary action (a solemn love triangle involving a DJ boyfriend and a Hou-type criminal ne’er-do-well) from the not-to-distant future (2011 to be precise). Hou structures the achronological narrative, framed by our heroine’s unreliable narration, as is his wont, around gatherings over food and drink which Mark Li Ping-bin’s roving camera eats up like its in on the feasting, w/ most of the nominal action played out offscreen.
Qian xi man po captures our post-global era flawlessly, traversing its nightclubs and tiny apartments w/ effortless grace, as though it were exploring a strangely familiar planet full of both bluesy ennui and exultant beauty. As good looking a film w/ as pretty a cast of characters as you will ever see. It’s a minor work, but gloriously so. One which crystallizes a place and time like no other.
10. DemonLover (2002)
When William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, and Jules Furthman were adapting Raymond Chandler’s
The Big Sleep to the big screen, one of them famously asked Chandler to clarify a few plot points. It turned out that he had no idea who had committed one of the murders in his own labyrinthine novel. One imagines that if confronted to provide the same type of narratological overview of
DemonLover writer-director Olivier Assayas would be forced to offer up a similar shrugging of shoulders. His international cyber-espionage thriller (on steroids) about slimy corporate malfeasance in and around the hardcore manga market, is so intricate and opaquely plotted that the viewer is left as confused to its goings on as the average citizen is to the behind-the-scenes machinations of real post-global affairs. Part of the film’s radicality is that the most nefarious agents of subterfuge and domination are its hyper-intelligent and self-sufficient women. Vanguard technologies remain at the forefront of this forward-looking masterpiece in a way that makes it read like the abject unconscious to the
Bourne franchise’s ego.
DemonLover will be written about at great length in one hundred years, like Conrad’s
The Secret Agent was in the last years of the 20th century. This is pure epochal cinema, summing up how we do business and summing up how everything we do is “just business,” while at the same time entering uncharted structural and formal waters that feel eerily familiar because this is a director in full control of his craft even if chaos is, after all, his canvas. People have trouble understanding what is happening in this film…this is not there fault! I have trouble understanding what is happening in this film. The characters have trouble understanding what is happening in this film! Something is being encapsulated here, on both sides of the fourth wall, and you feel it queasily in yr diaphragm; not unlike watching yr TV and seeing two simulacra skyscrapers crumbling into the concrete.
DemonLover makes for a one hell of a conspiracy-confusion double-bill w/ Assayas’s subsequent companion film,
Boarding Gate (’07).
9. Cowards Bend the Knee (2003)
Although we could not possibly have seen it coming at the time, Winnipeg countermythologist Guy Maddin’s
Cowards Bend the Knee (originally made as a gallery instillation to be viewed through peepholes, suggesting the sordid nature of the material) would turn out to be the first and greatest film in a masterful sui generis trilogy (at least a trilogy, maybe more are forthcoming … one can only hope), continued through
Brand Upon the Brain! (’06) and
My Winnipeg (’07), in which he has constructed a temporally unstuck autobiography, no longer simply imaging-into-existence an alternative history to Canadian national cinema but one for himself as well. Nobody, amazingly enough, has ever done anything quite like this. The conceit is pure genius: make a completely honest film about what a prick you are, how you made your first girlfriend have an abortion and immediately grew cold and withholding towards her, blaming her for everything, and then killed your hockey coach father by being such a huge disappointment to him, but make this film strange and dreamlike and situate it in an era before you were even born … but use your real name. Fill it w/ horrific abject fetal abattoirs hidden within beauty parlors, acts of Oedipal anguish, hands w/ their own berserk autonomy, and an aesthetic that brings to mind flashbulb-lit photos of the hockey stars of yore. This movie reads my soul like brail. I can still hear my own father screaming “skate, skate, BEND YOUR KNEES” at me during hockey practice as a kid. This film almost feels like my own private fever dream (replace Winnipeg with Calgary and off you go). Points also for bringing the film in at approximately one hour. Maddin’s shorts are like premature ejaculations and his features are likely to drag. This cine-novella is the greatest thing since legalized abortion.
8. Rokugatsu no hebi / A Snake of June (2002)
Finally, the greatest film about mediated sexuality in the digital age! Somebody had to do it! Shinya Tsukamoto (who had a hell of a comeback decade in general) is our man, much as he was at the end of the 80s when he made
Tetsuo, the Iron Man (’89). Set your cell phone on vibrate and submit to
Rokugatsu no hebi, wise elder Tuskamoto’s schizosexual manifesto on the liberation and consequent bracing-back-up that proper desire needs if it’s going to breathe. Control, in the sense required of it for psychosexual enjoyment, must feed from chaos and such chaos must find its chaosmos (on-and-off control-like phenomenon). The biomechanical nightmare cartoon carnality of
Testuo has given way to a biomechanical nightmare social realism, of a kind, though it is still hyper-cyber-stylized in that way – that smog and blue concrete manner, in an industrial jazz inferno (it was shot in black and white then tinted blue) – that only Master Tuskamoto Shinya can swing it. Asuka Kurosawa’s Rinko, a help-line outreach worker, becomes lost in a sadomasochistic web of virtual contact, mediated biosocial control, and cell phone self-endangerment tactics, with the viewer admiring the hardwiring and the director/sadist attending to the release of current. This film is like a machine: a sex chair – the kind used to unkink all blocked flows so that full orgasmic root potential can be breached – which can also be used to torture or kill; the best kind of machine, in short: one with mobile parts and counterparts. Tsukamoto is the gleeful sadist at the controls as the maniacal interloper in the film and analogically as its director. One of the best, most radical films of the last twenty years,
A Snake of June, with its devo science of desire, works like a computer virus. Infect yourself. Get off.
7. Sud pralad / Tropical Malady (2004)
The greatest new discovery of the decade was probably the New York-educated, queer Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul (‘Joe’ to his friends), whose films continually push forward notions of what cinema is and what it is capable of doing.
Sud pralad is one of the most beautiful love stories ever put on screen. Broken into two halves, employing a brokeback structure (a structuralist term which has nothing to do w/ gay cowboys eating pudding) that are often utilized by his films (
Sang sattawat / Syndromes and a Century (’06) would use the same approach to strikingly different effect). In the first half, we witness the blossoming of love between confident soldier Keng and shy farm boy Tong. Their growing attraction and intimacy brings w/ it a heightened awareness of the fullness of life, as small gestures increasingly contain worlds. In the second half, a feverish fairy tale suddenly breaks out as the soldier now pursues the object of his affections, now a shape-shifting something-or-other, in a moving primitivist parable (full of tigers in trees, mysterious cattle, and a philosophical baboon) that may bespeak the impossibility, the obscure slipperiness, of queer desire in a culture as stultifyingly conservative as Thailand’s (where Joe’s movies are routinely banned).
Sud pralad is an incredible, adventurous formal triumph that ceaselessly discovers new and engaging ways of seeing. It is also tremendously haptic. You can almost touch it. The humidity is palpable.
6. Inland Empire (2006)
“A woman in trouble,” quoth the poster for David Lynch’s greatest movie, shot as it was by the consummate stylist on customer-grade video. And the poster ain’t fuckin’ kidding! Lynch, in his voluble and volatile, sui generis style, has come dangerously close to finding a new form with this video extrapolation of his late-period fugue technique trapped in a twisted web of female psychic collapse. Though just another Möbius strip, it is certainly his greatest achievement, formal or aesthetic, since
Eraserhead first emerged from the AFI horse stables.
Inland Empire (apparently occasioning experiences of real life synaesthesia in some viewers) was well served by being distributed in the Roger Corman / Barnum & Bailey style, causing it to resemble a (post-global) nightmare slowly sneaking down into our towns from
upstairs. An absolute triumph of form in the William H. Gass sense of the word: a thing synthesized by proxy through the most systematic yet precarious set of disciplines, like a monstrous, Rabelaisian house of cards being built along with its own corresponding physics.
5. La commune (Paris, 1871) (2000)
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Peter Watkins is one of the great artists of the last half century and one of the last remaining Marxists of high cultural standing w/ anything like a commercial audience in mind. The sprawling
La commune, running at approximately six hours in its complete form, was his greatest film since 1974’s
Edvard Munch. Using a coterie of nonprofessional actors w/ whom he collaborated carefully, forcing them to share in the research and development as he always does, Watkins restages the famous events of the Paris Commune and its violent suppression by the French republican and Prussian forces of Bismarck in the late 19th century, all in a minimally decorated derelict factory, covering it w/ an anachronistic documentary crew and fabricating hilarious news footage, complete w/ coolly "objective" talking heads. By the end he is even talking to his actors as themselves, reflecting upon the events that they have been reenacting. The mordantly clever device of modern news casters and documentarians participating in historical events to which such access was obviously never available, a device he began using w/
Culloden in 1964, allows for a critique of how history has been and is currently being constructed differently-but-the-same, and how acts of resistance and microcultures which practice such resistance become surreptitiously reintegrated and assimilated by dominant mechanisms of power and historical sense-making. The whole exercise serves to celebrate the universality of movements for emancipation and the fleeting pleasures of order usurped at the ecstatic and violent behest of workers, artists, and intellectuals. Powerful and inspiring stuff, Watkins continues to invent new methods for critically framing history, at once beautiful to look at and endlessly conceptually rich.
4. Bu san / Goodbye Dragon Inn (2003)
Perhaps the cinema’s most quietly profound love letter to itself as an artform, Tsai Ming-liang's
Bu san nonetheless suggests that cinema may well be entering the century of its own death, something Godard has been proclaiming for a long time and which is also implicit to his own decades-in-the-making
Histoire(s) du cinema project. There is something tremendously punk rock about the minimalist and quiet
Bu san, in that its depiction of an empty, or rather emptying, movie house, which is screening Honk Kong action kingpin King Hu’s kung fu classic
Dragon Inn, is presumably meant to be partially soundtracked by the walkouts that it itself is guaranteed to provoke from any but the most stalwart of audiences. The movie house in the heart of Taipei, about to shut down for good, is a haunted, gutted realm of the dead. The few who remain are there to worship. Such is the film’s own intended audience. The sounds of ghosts reverberate through its dark, mysterious recesses. There is no film in the world that presents a comparably implacable realm of screen shadows, as the kinetic action plays out in and around and at odd angles to expertly constructed long takes this formally intractable masterpiece of understated grace delivers, dedicated as it is to commemorating the magic-lantern artform that brought us the exultant sculpting of light.
Bu san is one for the believers. A postmodern conceit that plays as the highest of high modernism.
3. En la ciudad de Sylvia (2007)
En la ciudad de Sylvia is, quite simply, one of the most sad, funny, moving, and exquisitely constructed works of art that I have ever seen committed to celluloid. On the surface it is merely a film about a beautiful and strange young man, habitually sketching the amorphous charcoal shrouds of women (or a woman that is manifested in each – in his notebook he writes “elle” under one sketch only to promptly add an s) who stalks a strange and beautiful woman he believes to be Sylvia, a chick he met at the conservatory café six years previous, through the meandering streets of Strasbourg (a city in which my first love lived for some time when I most missed her). One is reminded, of course, of Jimmy Stewart’s Scottie trailing Kim Novak’s human question mark through
Vertigo’s psychosexually spiraling San Francisco only that in
Sylvia the desperation so awkwardly worn on this young man’s face and suffused through his every move demonstrates in a way that I have never seen before what Pasolini once called in a poem “proof of love” – and not just love for Sylvia but for all Sylvias as for the pumping of blood through your own body like a tympani drum as you lie in bed dead sober, more powerful than any drug. This is a film about ridiculous desire and its tremendous gravity, and it encapsulates this like no other work of art I know. It reminds me very much of the three films to have most palpably done this to me so completely before:
Au hazard Balthazar;
The Devil, Probably;
L’Argent. The Bresson film that
Sylvia most invokes, though, is
Four Nights of a Dreamer, Bresson’s only romance (no matter what Paul Schrader thinks the end of
Pickpocket means). This is clearly done intentionally, as director José Luis Guerín has gone out of his way to tell this dreamer’s story in three chapters: “First Night”; “Second Night”; “Third Night.” Amazingly enough, I would take these three nights over Bresson’s four any day. The greatest film ever about we desiring-machine monads, trapped magisterially in our eyes and ears, pumping pure life into the veins of our collective civic self. A miracle of a thing.
2. La captive (2000)
Another film, like
En la ciudad de Sylvia, whose formal elegance, impressionistic visual power, and piercing, deliberate cutting invoke both Bresson and Hitchcock, the two most deliberate filmmakers I can think of, Chantal Akerman’s
La captive is the film whose DVD I have most persistently returned to over the last couple years like a favorite record one routinely puts on to hang out w/. While not her most important film, or even her best, it is most certainly my favorite. A truly hilarious and touching feminist-surrealist riff on Proust’s
La prisonnière, the fifth volume of
A la recherche du temps perdu, the film just as readily evokes the patriarchal anxieties of Maupassant’s short story “La femme de Paul,” (transmuted to an era in which the man proper is no longer needed for procreation) w/ its feminine object of desire being taken in by the Sapphic delights of lesbianism driving the hero to drown himself. Simon (played by the hilariously befuddled Stanislas Merhar as a big handsome soft-eyed baby) is so terrified that his lover Ariane (softly querulous, slyly deflective Sylvie Testud, here approaching goddess stature) will end up making out with one of her girlfriends when he isn’t looking that he effectively turns them both prisoners of his desire, the whole while being unable to contain her unrestrained lifeforce, which threatens his masculine pride and his sanity both. The story is like late Buñuel, only better, and it fully demonstrates what Julia Kristeva calls “feminine genius,” a genius in part characterized by the following consideration: “to live means to live for the other, including, and above all, when this is impossible and traumatizing.” Such is the plight of Ariane. And the gift of Akerman. What a supreme gift.
1. Trouble Every Day (2001)
I already said that if I did not put specific limitations around this list Claire Denis would have seriously dominated the top five. Aside from having the greatest film noir title ever, her
Trouble Every Day is both my favorite horror film ever and the only film of the past decade that is guaranteed to be on my list of the twenty greatest films of all time. It deserves to take on an absolutely iconic position in our culture. It is the horrifying and intoxicating story of two individuals, played by Vincent Gallo and Béatrice Dalle (!), infected by some contagion released in the wilds of Africa by some sort of never-clarified meddling, causing their mutual sex drives to take a swing for the sublimely monstrous. Denis, more than any other living filmmaker, thinks in cinematographic terms. Nothing has to be translated from the language of literature, theater, or anything else. It is pure cinema-thinking-itself. If you have ever loved somebody so much you wanted to eat them,
Trouble Every Day may be for you. Don’t say I didn’t warn you, though. It has taken me over like the contagion that takes over its perfectly cast actors. Everything is perfect, from the obligatory music by the Tindersticks, the photography by the always magnificent Agnès Godard, the bizarre and glorious performances, to the post-colonial critique and wildly out-there violence that nobody saw coming from Denis in a million years. It is simply everything I could want from a movie. Then again, I am not a well person.
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