Do the Continental

I have a book review in the new (May) issue of Sight and Sound — Christine Leteux’s magisterial study of Continental Films, the German company that dominated French cinema during the occupation. So THAT’S why I was looking at those Maigret films, huh? It all makes sense.

The Sunday Intertitle: That Happy, Sexy, Sax-Playing Prince

I’ve accepted the new Sight & Sound top twenty as a welcome nudge to see some films I’ve neglected. But, happily, I had just watched IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE so I feel I’m catching up. Since most of my BA1 students at Edinburgh College of Art are Chinese, I thought I should include some Chinese film and I was way behind in my Wong Kar-Wei viewing. Of course, it turned out this was the one film in my season most of them had seen, even though it was made before they were born, I think.

And it has intertitles! Already at the beginning I was thinking I might make use of the first caption, but since it’s right at the front end of the movie it’s not really inter-anything. But then the film ends with a trip to Cambodia and a flurry of titles.

It’s a film I’ll need to see more than once. WKW’s endings often seem a little mysterious — those I’ve seen, anyway — and this one is particularly evocative, tying together the historical past, and a country that was almost eradicated in Year Zero, still in this story’s future, with a romance that’s been tragically sundered by time and circumstances.

And I was absurdly pleased to recognize the name of Prince Sihanouk, “that happy, sexy, sax-playing prince,” from Spalding Gray and Jonathan Demme’s SWIMMING TO CAMBODIA.

Now I just need to watch JEANNE DIELMAN and properly revisit BEAU TRAVAIL to get my cinephile badge back.

Listing (badly)

To be clear — the following is not my list of screenings for the coming semester. It’s my submission for the Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll.

1. He Who Gets Slapped
   Year: 1924
   Director(s): Victor Sjostrom
   Comment: My favourite film. It’s not like anything else. Lon Chaney manipulates the audience’s emotions by making shapes with his body, within the shapes Sjostrom makes with his camera. A melodrama in which nothing is really credible but everything is incredibly compelling. The film that draws the line between the laugh of the clown and the snarl of the lion.
2. The General
   Year: 1926
   Director(s): Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman
   Comment: Ten films is such a small number that maybe all the entries do need to be perfect. Formally speaking, this one is: every shot is an essential component. Keaton makes the camera’s observation part of the joke. Each shot says, in a perfect deadpan, “Here we are now. And now this is happening. And so…” Plus you have a cinematic icon as star, a magnificent comedian, an incredible daredevil, working on the biggest canvas he ever got.
3. Citizen Kane
   Year: 1941
   Director(s): Orson Welles
   Comment: What, I’m going to leave this off, so I can look more like a wild individualist? A brilliant cinematic mind jumps into the medium, determined to see what he can make it do. Tackle everything in a fresh way, from story to performance to camera to design, special effects, sound, editing. It may not actually invent anything but it packs in a ton of radical creativity and unconventionality. The filmmaker conveys his joy at all the tricks he comes up with, which makes the film supremely likeable to me, which it doesn’t get enough credit for.
4. A Matter of Life and Death
   Year: 1946
   Director(s): Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
   Comment: The Archers had to have a place on my list, and in truth it could be any of five or six films, but this one marries its experimentation to a story both real AND fantastical, enabling them to stretch themselves in every direction. I love their use of Technicolor and I have, I admit, a mysterious sentimental attraction to stories of WWII. And I have a deep sympathy for Powell’s rejection of realism: as he said, it doesn’t really exist in the cinema. It’s all an illusion. And we know it. Romantic, funny, epic, the film’s breadth of vision puts everything Britain’s made in the past 50 years to shame.
5. Eight and a Half
   Year: 1963
   Director(s): Federico Fellini
   Comment: There’s the sheer invention; the joy of looking through such a pair of magical eyes; Fellini’s roving camera; his carnivalesque world; Nino Rota’s galumphing score. I don’t know how many more times I can bear to see this one: the last time I was continually on the verge of tears over its beauty. And I don’t get that with other beautiful films. The love of cinema seems to speak directly to me, but to add an acerbic quality, Fellini is quite harsh on himself, via his stand-in Mastroianni.
6. The Knack… and How to Get It
   Year: 1965
   Director(s): Richard Lester
   Comment: The inventiveness and playfulness of the French New Wave is ported over to a grey London autumn and blended with native surrealism. Screenwriter Charles Wood explodes Ann Jellicoe’s play and, with director Lester, assembles a dazzling mosaic from the pieces. All the choices are surprising, and somehow coherent. And it’s all quite strange: John Barry’s jazz score and David Watkin’s beautiful photography combine with the oddball text to create a feeling that’s a bit mysterious, even while it’s mainly all just bursting with youthful exuberance.
7. 2001: A Space Odyssey
   Year: 1968
   Director(s): Stanley Kubrick
   Comment: “If he could get rid of the human element, he could make the perfect film,” joked Malcolm McDowell. But here he almost does. By acting, arrogantly, as if nobody had ever made a really good science fiction film, Kubrick solves all the problems methodically but also pushes the genre into epic, mythic, spiritual terrain that even the best sf literature rarely touched upon. Stately, bold, astonishingly beautiful. The great rationalist suddenly blasts us off into a psychedelic experience which doesn’t yield fully to reason. It’s not even certain if the film is optimistic or despairing (yet colourful).
8. Playtime
   Year: 1968
   Director(s): Jacques Tati
   Comment: Having become a national or international institution, Tati blew his career to pieces with a colossal folly, a two-hour-plus widescreen film about the purgatory of modern urban life, eventually transformed into a playground by the human imagination. With his character of Hulot reduced to one figure among dozens, spread across a vast screen, and with anything resembling a conventional gag or slapstick ruthlessly expunged. Only comedy that astonishes, laughs you can’t explain, comic abstractions, are allowed here. Jokes about things looking like other things, sounding funny, taking too long, not being audible, not being understood. The scale is dazzling, insane. The world received it with a puzzled frown. If you’re on the right wavelength, you’ll instead be almost embarrassed at receiving such a lavish gift.
9. The Conformist
   Year: 1970
   Director(s): Bernardo Bertolucci
   Comment: Bertolucci had recently cowritten a spaghetti western, Once Upon a Time in the West (another obvious contender for this list). Similarly, here we have a cruel and cynical tale delivered in a lush romantic style. Delerue’s music and Storaro’s photography create an astonishing sweep. The political intent gives the film a sense of passion, even though Bertolucci is quite harsh about his characters. In Trintignant, he has the perfect star for this style, giving a performance that’s elegant, sardonic, sometimes robotic, sometimes a little crazed. I think all my choices have something in common, a sense of filmmakers breaking through all the conventions, asking “Why can’t it be like this instead?”
10. My Neighbour Totorro
    Year: 1988
    Director(s): Hayao Miyazaki
    Comment: Miyazaki’s films add to the traditional dynamism of the anime form a welcome and surprising poetry. He pays attention to things cartoons usually ignore. A major setpiece here is two little girls waiting for a bus, one of them almost falling asleep. The filmmaker is in tune with childhood because his ambitions are usually simple but profound. Here, he wanted to show city kids what life in the country is like. His version of that is quite idiosyncratic, with the little dust bunny creatures, the cat-bus, and the titular nature spirit, a huge cat-owl thing, utterly benign but a little alarming and obviously very powerful. Very little is explained, which seems like a good lesson for children to absorb: there are mysteries.

Your further remarks

This was difficult! I will wake up screaming as it occurs to me the thing I forgot to put in. Even now I’m dismayed at what I felt compelled to knowingly exclude. No Chaplin, Marx Bros, pre-codes, horror films, musicals, westerns… is this even a list at all?