Beginning the new year after
finishing information about the last month of the last year. A new title for
the blog. "Region Incognito", while being kept, eventually came off
as pretentious for me in hindsight even if it was a pun on DVD region coding.
The new one feels more interesting. Melancholic yet suggesting one digging
deeply into materials that have even been left rotting. And it has truth in it
as I've now had to handle decay 9.5mm film, a situation that rarely happens
outside of archival work. There's going to be an attempt to make this blog more
interesting, in response to my thoughts on the last post, and they'll be
appearing over time.
This was going to be a short
list. Maybe thirty films since I saw a lot. Fifty. I'm someone who does keep
notes on what he watches - list making is an obsession and incredibly useful
for keeping track of good films when your memory tuned to remembering movies occasionally
fails. I started compiling the list and realised the mountain I had in front of
me. I cannot complain about this being a bad year, because so many films, even
minor ones, were good or of interest. With this in mind, split up for
practicality, I'll make this alphabetical, ignoring films that would qualify
for a Best of 2013 in cinema list aside from a couple of exceptions, and as per
my usual way argue there's no difference between cinema, television and shorts.
It'll be a list of films and other motion image work I saw for the first time,
or had a reconsideration of. For this part, we'll start with two none alphabetical
entries, and the letter "A". It's a shame I never grew up with Sesame
Street because I could have written in references to its obsession with letters
for humour...
 |
| *Corpus
Callosum (Michael Snow, 2002)
My
only regret with films like this, and directors like Michael Snow, is that once you finally become interested in them,
their work cannot be found in conventional ways. The notion of cinema as meant
to be seen in a cinema, or an art installation,
becomes an elitist straight jacket that suffocates the potential influence
films like this could have. Purity of how the film is seen paradoxically goes
against the desire to make an avant garde film meant to question it in
structure and tone. The film itself, playful, downright crude, shows that
slapstick comedy and experimental structuralism actually make great bedfellows.
Snow is able to revisit his young
self, what he started off as, in a screening of an early film within this one
decades later, while yet having a sex fantasy gag earlier on. The only figures
onscreen who are human, in control, and are not puppets the director can
literally distort are children in a classroom who control the camera instead in
their segment. For a full review from the blog archive, a link is here.
|
 |
| 8MM/The
Number 23 (Joel Schumacher, 1999/2007) Two films that'll raise eyebrows in being mentioned. 8MM is very lurid and sordid. It's difficult to defend The Number 23 because its tone and premise are completely shaky. But I admire Joel Schumacher. Even in the least dignified of positions - a ridiculous number conspiracy based thriller, toy makers breathing down his neck on Batman & Robin (1997) - he is always interesting in how he makes his films. Look, lighting, visuals, even if it's kitsch or grotesque. Its inherently cinematic even in the poorest of taste. There's something compelling with the content with the films I've seen too, these ones particularly. A serious attempt at a thriller based on snuff movies that, while complete exploitation, is sincere enough to work, and a peculiar mystery work that, while complete hogwash, is entertaining and fascinating for all the pieces stuck together in it. At least with these films it means neither Nicolas Cage or Jim Carrey are mugging for the camera, trying to act, whether you think they're doing good performances or not. A link to a review of 8MM can be found here. |
 |
Akio
Jissoji
(This Transient Life (1970), Poem (1972),
Marquis de Sade’s
Prosperities of Vice (1988), Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis (1988))
One
of the most visually distinct directors I've discovered this year; only Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis feels out
of place in the quartet, slow, trying to cram in clearly a far larger source in
too short of a run time that is already long, and what feels like a mainstream
blockbuster in an eighties Japanese multiplex, but on a rewatch, its
entertaining for its visual flourishes and imagination. The rest are films
where every moment, every camera movement, and every detail is unique, the
camera moving in ways rarely seen in other movies, and a visual structure where
even watching Poem without subtitles
was still a compelling experience for what is onscreen. And yet Jissoji is not just empty visuals. Deep,
philosophical examinations, dissections on religion, views on transgressive
sexuality, and two completely different types of film (Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis and Prosperities of Vice) set around late twenties Japan and exploring
the mood of the time period, whether the ghosts of the past or the near future
of World War II. You cannot find most of the director's work in the West at all
- I even want his Ultraman work
available, and it's all thanks to users on MUBI.com
for letting people know of talented directors like him. A mini-review of This Transient Life can be found here.
|
 |
| Ali:
Fear Eats the Soul/The Marriage of Maria Braun (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974-9) Two works of rich melodrama, emotional depth rarely seen in this sort of cinema from what I've usually seen, and visually subtle for full effect. Enough said. |
 |
| Apollo
18 (Gonzalo López-Gallego, 2011) Sometimes you have to wonder why some films were tarred and feathered. This is flawed, but for the found footage genre, this is more and away more imaginative and interesting than a mediocre work like Paranormal Activity (2007) which mistakes the genre for amateur. The origin of the subgenre, The Blair Witch Project (1999), was just as good for how the technology used in its world to record the events effected the reality seen to the viewers who would find the footage. It's not just the fact that this truly makes outer space an isolating place you cannot escape from, but the mixing of different cameras that film the events show how fractured the world has become as technology drastically evolved, and forces the viewer to feel even more stuck with the characters. I also admit - Spoiler warning - the idea of killer space rocks was ridiculous enough to get me interested in the film - Spoiler Ended. A review for it can be found here, in a series on "bad cinema" it didn't deserve to be in, and I may never attempt again after the low quality of some of the work ebbed my enthusiasm quickly. |
 |
| Ashes
and Diamonds (Andrzej Wajda, 1958) Zbigniew Cybulski, camera facing up, under a sky full of exploding fireworks. An entire turmoil of World War II encapsulated by a display that is violent and hiding the sound of lingering scars that would persist. |
 |
Attack on a Bakery (Naoto
Yamakawa, 1982)
Never
has the debate on which baked good to get had such philosophical implications.
|
 |
| Aurora
(Cristi Puiu, 2010) Where boredom in cinema has virtue, the three hours leaving me in fascinated stupor, watching it on the floor facing up at a huge projection screen, wondering what the drive of the protagonist was when he goes about with a disturbed plan. That he's still obsessed with minor things like claiming CDs between the acts he commits, obsessed with getting his daughter out from school, and that the banality of the whole work, like the director's previous film The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005), was not to pointlessly capture a false version of reality, but to show reality properly in how alarmingly human beings can act while acting like they normally do. A reason is explained at the end, to answer why events happened, that makes complete sense and doesn't at the same time. It stops being a film then but the sickest joke you could ever hear. |
 |
| Avenge but one of my two eyes
(Avi Mograbi, 2005) Near this film's conclusion, it's no longer a subjective documentary, from the director's own kino eye as his humanity has had enough and he starts screaming at the soldiers, his fellow Israelis, about their lack of humanity. Its instead seeing the anxieties and despairs of a person be made visible to you fully. What felt like an average documentary, not connecting together for any real depth, becomes a truly deep film with a final half that puts everything into place. The meaning of the title, the moral complications, the pain, all. |
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Images, in order of appearance, from the following sources:
http://deeperintomovies.net/journal/image10/corpuscallosum6.jpg
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSxLp232PJ_JWRHmXcqlKU0CZX0patzrB1tKwoV56o3X15s7uWR_JHAnLoQwpd7sWKvCyjdJAetrB7ELSm9oRWHkAO9m9sYji6LHrp2kjSr5BQcjXk8d41CrlCWZbZASeLuuDfDndH_rQ/s320/8MM+2.jpg
http://garysundt.files.wordpress.com/2008/03/number23pic7.jpg
http://somewordsandplaces.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/mujo-03.jpg
http://andrewsidea.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/vlcsnap-4082935.png
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_khYoWIBgmBI/TKIK-SPioEI/AAAAAAAACq8/I39cPEtxxE0/s1600/marriage3.jpg
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/sites/default/files/2011/10/apollo1802_a_l.jpg
http://31.media.tumblr.com/06b74d6cfacaa67ecb7c7698669bce03/tumblr_mtbnfgDsUT1qzxhlpo1_500.png
http://i50.photobucket.com/albums/f327/Roebling77/Film%20Stills/The%20Bakery%20Attack/vlcsnap-00634.png
http://www.frontrowreviews.co.uk/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/av-festival-aurora.jpg
http://pan.lapanacee.org/sites/pan.lapanacee.org/files/styles/adaptative/adaptive-image/public/mograbi.jpg?itok=l-r2kgQu
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