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Manly Footwear: This is the first of several movies on the list that I have seen so many times, and is such a part of the motion picture ecosystem, I worried I would not be able to see it clearly. And I was right, it is all but impossible to separate all the other times I’ve seen the rivers of blood gush out from the elevators from this viewing, or to muffle the echoes of every line of dialog before they are spoken. So, I paid attention to the way shots were framed, pacing, editing, the better to appreciate The Shining as a work of art. And, as a work of film-making art, I noticed how much of the film looks like a series of paintings in a gallery: static, rectangular shots of large, beautiful spaces with one or two figures doing something small. Even the tracking shots of the boy on his tricycle have a graceful, old master kind of feel to them. Had I thought of it, I would have done better to watch The Shining with the sound down, and just look at all the beautiful, creepy stuff going on in every scene, because the story, and much of the dialog,…
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Manly Footwear: We went to see Amanda Palmer perform in Toronto the weekend that we watched this film, and I wondered if some of the points she made—about the absence of female songwriting icons in the 1980s, for example—would be part of the way I viewed A Woman Under the Influence now, since I have already seen it 6 or 7 times during last 15 years. Would I find it misogynistic, given the attention #metoo has focused on the male directorial gaze? Or exploitative of the mentally ill? Or simply self-indulgent, given Palmer’s ability to reinvent self-indulgent art as profound cabaret? Thankfully, Palmer’s performance was transcendent, and I was glad to have had access to her vision because she reminded me that equity is always the goal, that the more various and inclusive the voices making up the chorus of our vision, the better chance we have to be astonished, and that, after 7 or 8 viewings, A Woman Under The Influence still astonishes me. I love the idea that Cassavetes did not consider Gena Rowlands’ character “crazy,” for example. Accepting that Mabel and Nickie were just two people smothered by their gender roles is interesting and difficult to do, because they are…
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Manly Footwear: my complaint about Blowup’s main character being an asshole and thus ruining the movie watching experience for me might need a bit of refining, since I love Aguirre, the Wrath of God, and the main character is an insane, murderous colonizer who soothes himself with visions of the incestuous empire he will found with his daughter. But Klaus Kinski’s Aguirre is not an asshole, he is evil, and evil is fascinating, whereas assholism is dull, not the least because assholes have neither the creativity nor the will to go all the way to the dark side. If Kinski’s Aguirre found a corpse in the park, as Thomas the photographer does in Blowup, he’d probably strip it naked and set it on fire so he could roast a lemur. That Kinski overacts almost goes without saying: he never stands up straight once during the film, swaggering around like his spine had a pivot joint at its base, preventing his shoulders from ever coming full center, and he does so, for most of the movie, on a raft drifting down river. Even when he sits and broods, which he does a lot, he manages to overdo it, but it just makes sense, with regards…
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Manly Footwear: This was the first film on our list that I have seen multiple times, and I can’t say quite why, since I have never sought it out until now. Directed by Michael Antonioni in 1966, Blowup features a parade of 60’s mod cons, stylish camera work, a darting narrative that MacGuffins everything in its path, and Vanessa Redgrave, but I just don’t particularly like it, probably because the main character–who dominates every scene–is a complete asshole. Certainly, I’ve found reason to watch, again and again, other movies about terrible people (Raging Bull, off the top of my head, is #24 on our list), so what about Thomas, the fashion photographer, is so off-putting? I understand that in part the movie is meant as a commentary on a shallow world inhabited by shallow people, and that such a world is, more and more, coming to define even our private lives. And I get to see Jeff Beck smash a guitar, and I actually dig the idea that there is a body, and murder, and oh well, forget about it–as Roger Ebert wrote, Blowup is “a hypnotic conjuring act, in which a character is awakened briefly from a deep sleep…
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Manly: Chris Marker built this movie from other films, and from his own 16mm clips taken on travels to Japan and Guinea-Bisseau, as well as some from Iceland, San Francisco, Cape Verde, Ireland, and France. A voice-over, letters from an imaginary traveler named Sandor Kressna (read by Alexandra Stewart), weaves in and out and around the various clips, helping hold the whole assemblage together. And, none of the preceding description does any justice to the astonishing grace with which it drifts from here to there, from flat film stock to violently manipulated imagery, from one culture to another. It brought to mind the writing of WG Sebald, in the themes of memory and loss that his work shares with this film, but also in the meandering style that only reveals its tightly controlled structure in retrospect, and also the Japanese essay form zuihutsu (随筆), which is similarly fragmented and wandering at first blush, but which reveals a wealth of connections the longer one contemplates the different sections. History throws its empty bottles out the window, the narrator says at one point, and true to a film about memory and the nature of time, Sans Soleil dips and weaves narratively, but…
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