The 1968 Mini-List

[Red Screamer]

Life changes put this decade project on the back burner for me, unfortunately. But since I enjoy following along with everyone else's thoughts in these threads, I figured it was about time I threw something on the fire from recent viewings.

Uptight (Jules Dassin) A paranoid noir set among feuding black activist groups in Cleveland. It's a blunter and angrier film than you’d expect from a Hollywood studio and when that's combined with an old-fashioned plot from The Informer and a strain of stylization unusual for the period, it becomes one of the more fascinating collisions between Old Hollywood and New Hollywood. Both Dassin’s direction and Boris Kaufman’s photography embrace artifice and aim for studio-era mise-en-scène, but they’re shooting on location and largely at night. On the other hand, the script and actors are aiming for the kind of gritty realism that would become all the rage in the 70s. This tension kind of drives the film and sometimes produces pretty great results, including a robbery scene, blocked precisely in close-ups and ambient sound, that resembles Bresson’s color films. It also has some less than great results, but I’ll take what I can get.

Je t’aime, je t’aime (Alain Resnais) Once you forgive Jacques Sternberg for not being half as good a writer as Duras or Robbe-Grillet and forgive the film, too, for dabbling in pulp without any of the urgency of Muriel, the extent of Resnais’ achievement here, in both craft and imagination, becomes clear. Whereas his first three features are about memory (among other things), this one basically uses memory as a jumping-off point for a daring experiment in film structure and associative film style. As a result, it’s one of the few narrative films that represents memories in a convincingly semi-random way. All of the noodling is anchored by a sturdy, fairly conventional story foundation, but Resnais & co. empty out that foundation and withhold most progress in the story to create all kinds of unusual effects in the margins of their narrative—a movie where a cut between scenes might give you more information than the scenes themselves.

Claude Rich’s protagonist is not a very interesting man, or at least everything that would normally make him an interesting film character is treated as secondary to his unexceptional, even dull, traits and troubles. It’s hinted at, but not at all important, that he’s a successful author, for instance. Actually, there are a lot of interesting details that are carefully included but kept on the film’s periphery, from Rich’s past to the sudden multiplication of love interests to the haunting, non sequitur shot of the woman on the bus (which wouldn’t have the impact it does if Resnais didn’t construct the whole film so meticulously). There’s some depressing honesty in the selection of moments from his last decade too—a good portion of them involve him being stressed at work! The main idea is to create a continual present-tense experience throughout all of the time jumping, while the film’s psychological and narrative progressions are created by the structure—rather than a chronological narrative—as edits create indirect links between movements of the actors or lines of dialogue, and as imagery, associations, and feelings—rather than incidents and subplots—accumulate, with a great, musical sense of gradual escalation. Re: this present tense strategy, it’s telling that in 1968, Resnais is refraining from using expressionistic or trippy images while making a science fiction film, giving us the clearest, most classical mise-en-scène of his career so far (with the exception of a handful of distorted camera angles and surreal elements that dip into dream imagery). From the beginning, I was sucked in by the film's mental amusement park ride, and at the end, I was surprised to find myself so moved by the journey: the extraordinary accumulation of ordinary moments in a ??? life.

Golden Swallow (Chang Cheh) is a solid sequel to King Hu’s list-worthy Come Drink With Me, with some great fight choreography-cinematography and a stunning precredits scene that uses POV shots from inside a prison cell to segment the ‘Scope frame into small rectangular tiles. But I couldn’t entirely get on its grandiose, somber wavelength and the love triangle setup both sidelines Cheng Pei-Pei’s titular character and undermines the film’s intended ferociousness. Points for creativity: one doubled motif in the film is young men cutting themselves in half to prove their honesty.

Stolen Kisses (François Truffaut) I’m not the biggest Truffaut fan in the first place, but, man, is he running on fumes in this one. The film is shooting for the laidback episodic structure of a classic slapstick comedy, but it never finds its rhythm and most of the setpieces fizzle out before they've really been developed. Some scenes come to life from Truffaut’s sudden bursts of lyricism or surprises in Léaud’s performance. Maybe my favorite example of the latter is Léaud standing in front of a mirror repeating the name “Antione Doinel” endlessly until it cycles from a frightening psychological exercise for the fictional character to an impressive acting exercise by Jean-Pierre Léaud to a sort of documentary raised-curtain on the film’s fictional mechanisms, with the name getting repeated to the point of it sounding like fake nonsense until it starts to seem like it’s a desperate attempt by an actor to make himself believe in the world of the film. Truffaut criticized Godard for how he exploited Léaud’s darker side in Masculin Féminin, but glimmers of that darker side here are some of the interesting moments in the film, though Truffaut still treats Léaud as too much of a kid to take them further.

A few years earlier, this duo nailed a portrait of a young boy’s embarrassing romantic fixation in Antoine et Colette, with much more pathos and detail—think of the atmosphere and weight given to his job at the record plant in that film compared to the random assortment of jobs we get here, for example. And that film expertly avoided flights of juvenile male wish fulfillment like the one that takes Stolen Kisses’ longest and best job sketch—the shoe store—off the rails. That section of the film also provides us with the film’s only genuinely funny performance, a very committed Michael Lonsdale as an unmistakably despicable shopowner who hires a private detective to investigate why people don’t like him. Unfortunately, another one of the detective’s clients is probably the film’s low point, a brutally unfunny nervous gay murderer stereotype whose anxious hands we get a few dozen shots of, in case we didn't get the joke. Actually, Truffaut shows little feeling for comedy here in general, with regular lapses into sloppy filmmaking—the awkward timing and visual vagueness of the hotel sketch were the first things that made me suspect he was phoning it in a bit. I don’t know if I’ll watch the other Doinel films considering the drastic drop in quality between the first two films and this one, especially since this has the reputation as the last good one in the series!

Summer (Marcel Hanoun) is an enjoyable exercise in editing and cinematography, moving between constraint and miniature explosions in a string of variations on its minimal elements—a woman alone in the countryside, in a house, in retreat from revolution, and maybe finding the seeds of a new revolution in her solitude and her self. But I didn’t find I had much to chew on content-wise once it was over (hence the “maybe”, I’m not sure the film really kept to the thread), and it certainly felt wispy next to a somewhat similar film like, I don’t know, Le gai savoir. I look forward to revisiting it though, especially since zedz praises the film specifically for its political-intellectual qualities in the Re:Voir thread, so I probably missed a few things.

[dustybooks]

Loved reading that take on Stolen Kisses, which I’m planning to finally see a second time for this project, but your analysis matches my memories. For what it’s worth I liked Bed and Board quite a bit more than the other color Doinel films when I went through the series, but it’s probably significant that I was in my early twenties and had been in exactly one long-term relationship at the time. Based on my memories, I’m a little worried how it will play for me when I finally see it again. I do love Truffaut, probably more than most forum members, but he may be the director in my personal canon with the most films I’m ambivalent about or outright dislike.

[DarkImbecile]

Swo, if it’s not too late, could you add Carlos Saura’s Stress-es tres-tres / Stress is Three? I think it’s still November somewhere…

Watched it on a whim just this evening and now think it’ll make my list; I’ll elaborate tomorrow.

[swo17]

Added and you can VOTE HERE UNTIL DEC 18

[DarkImbecile]

A couple more:

The Living Skeleton (Matsuno) — An odd, uneven genre quilt of atmospheric ghostliness and absurd twists, garish shocks, and lurid sex and violence. On the one hand, the shadowy scenes of dark haired women stalking victims seem like a stepping stone between the classic ghost stories of mid-century Japanese cinema and the tropes of modern J-horror. Bookending the film, though, are scenes from a pulpily violent crime thriller and a mad-scientist revenge film that aren't nearly as effective. Still, the monochrome cinematography is often eeriely effective, and some of the sound design and ghost ship effects have a certain Val Lewton charm to them that kept me solidly engaged until a wild plot twist involving a wig and a suit of armor marked a turn toward substantially less grounded territory.

Stress is Three / Stress-es tres-tres (Saura) — My first Saura and a more or less random choice from the Criterion Channel's 1968 offerings, this turned out to be a slow-burning study of a married couple and the husband's best friend and business partner traveling across Spain and simmering with sexual insecurity, bourgeois anxiety, and a generally ominous post-World War/mid-Vietnam War malaise. Saura litters his more effective Western European variation on a Knife in the Water scenario with portentous recurring imagery of pinned insects and religious iconography spotlighting violent martyrdom, while dialogue and news broadcasts emphasize overpopulation and dwindling, hoarded resources; the political position of these well-off people within Franco's Spain bubbles to the surface when the husband floats a decidedly fascistic solution to population growth, while his wife doesn't object except to wish that the deaths of millions wouldn't impact them personally. On a formal front, the extremely limited use of non-diegetic sound and distortions of the image make them highly effective when they are deployed, and otherwise Saura's images are crisp and clear. Reminiscent of Antonioni and the previously mentioned Polanski, this film's particular brand of unease, cultural specificity, and barely contained violence made it one of the most intriguing discoveries of the decade for me — the ambiguous but potentially chilling dialogue and falsely cheery musical note on which the film ends continues to turn over in my mind. Strongly recommended, will definitely make my list.

[therewillbeblus]

Teshigahara's Burnt Map.

All. The latter is one of my favorite films ever and will jockey with 2001 and Petulia for my top spot this year. Every frame is a compositional masterpiece, and it's one of the very best examples of its genre -- schlumpy private investigator searches for a missing man whom no one really seems to want to find.

I enjoyed this- an LB reviewer described it as a Japanese Blow Up, which sounds about right. but I actually felt a more interesting Antonioni reference later in the film- though I suppose anyone could glean it from the missing man at the center of the plot! As opposed to Branded to Kill, the restrained and intuitive aesthetic allows a more organic observance of a one-note noir protagonist's dissolution of self, as he gradually engages in a banal world that obfuscates not only the mystery but any semblance of meaning. Using noir trappings to get there is an interesting move, though ultimately this becomes a tone poem about the friction between our impotence to grasp substance in an environment of superficial, tangible material- things, images, information, language, people- all of which have connotations out of reach. At a certain point it becomes obvious that the narrative isn't venturing in a constructive direction (literally, nothing is being constructed so much as progressively deconstructed), so I'm not sure it amounts to much more than an experiential piece of existential scab-picking, but that's far from a dis and I appreciated it under those conditions.

In a sense, the sooner one can abandon the plot the better, so that you can sit back and enjoy moments like a wonderfully nightmarish set piece involving a getaway from a bonfire gang scene at night. The back half drags a bit as the plot continues without as many of these showstopping bits to keep it intriguing on a visceral pitch of urban-Heart of Darkness. The sound design remains a highlight, and can sometimes interrupt these tedious stretches with a bolt of vitality brewing beneath the flat-affected motions on the surface. But then... just when I thought I was in for an hour of humdrum vapid talking that would drown out into nothingness to eclipse the coda, the film utilizes the simmering anti-suspense we've now frustratingly acclimated to as a catapult to fascinating terrain, revealing that this trial was falling into a soft cyclical rhythm by design.

The hypnotic effect actually paid off for me before the final act's descent into psychological implosion, when our hero is on the phone with a key player(?) and their conversation reveals a simple yet enigmatic answer that's been dangled in front of the detective all along. Though, significantly, this time it's really emphasized as less of a What Happened and more of a Why- because what else can we do but try to escape? It reminded me of the "answer" to L'Avventura's 'mystery' in that what occurred hardly matters as much as the effect of unbearable existence that would propel any action to retreat into being, emitting that film's vibe more than just a similarity to its plot device. It's a wonderful scene, one that snuck up on me in being almost indistinguishable from the others, but sent a chill down my spine. I can hardly describe it, just as I can hardly describe why L'Avventura destroys me in all the best ways (tho' I've surely tried) Then things get more defined in their surrealism, and ends with urban vehicles literally segregating and overwhelming our lead from any discernible outlet. It's a fun and rewarding final stretch, with some appropriately philosophical drive-by interactions between the hero and the woman who hired him that just graze the exterior of Why before dissipating into the more interesting and obscure symbolic.

[FYI this pops up as The Man Without a Map in most places, for those looking to watch it for this project]

[DarkImbecile]

A few other first-time watches (I’ll probably try to get at least a handful more in before moving on to 1969):

The Immortal Story (Welles) — The brisk pleasures of Welles’ last* narrative feature — a nesting doll of reflections on story, performance, and imagination — are split between the concentric circles traced by the script and the master’s still-sharp eye for an intriguing angle and a surprising cut.

Welles and Moreau deliver with the gravity and skill one would expect, but the character and performance that most pulled me in was Roger Coggio’s matter-of-fact melancholy as Levinsky; something about his detached acceptance of his role in life and his central placement as the one hearing a song long forgotten in the rare shell in the final moments of the film makes him the enigma worth examining in an otherwise fairly straightforward fable.

Kuroneko (Shindō) — Unlike a couple of the other contemporaneous Japanese horror films I’ve watched recently, this one not only oozes atmosphere — the way the camera drifts eerily through the fog-drenched bamboo forest, even when inside a building, is particularly memorable — but also tragedy and erotic tension.

A beautiful, quiet score and several shots of shrouded women flying through darkness will stick with me, as will the wrenching opening, a near-silent feudal Japanese rendition of The Virgin Spring. Even I f some of the rest is less effective — the repetition of attacks on samurai, the slightly draggy resolution of the plot after the emotional climax of Gintoki’s second loss of Shige — I expect that my ability to focus on what Shindō does very right here may improve on future viewings.

The Producers (Brooks) — Zany, madcap comedy is tough for me to fully embrace under the best of circumstances, and when it comes in a package as specifically, obnoxiously capital-S Sixties as this, it’s really starting in a deep hole. 

I’ve seen staged performances of The Producers a couple of times and found them enjoyable enough, but my familiarity with the material also diluted any transgressive shock value it might have had for contemporary audiences enough that I was stuck unsuccessfully looking for laughs from Wilder’s anxiety-ridden accountant or Mostel’s amoral scoundrel. The performance of Springtime and especially its titular song remain amusing, but make up maybe five total minutes of screen time, leaving us with horny old ladies, Nazi playwrights, cringy gay stereotypes, and dancing Swedish secretaries for interminable, laugh-free stretches.

Comedy like this is so dependent on subjective, situational responses, and I can see how it could garner a lot of goodwill on first exposure to the material in a well-attended theater, but watching it alone on my couch after having seen more refined and crisp performances of the same material was simply deflating.

The Great Silence (Corbucci) — Prior to the final moments of the film, I was already happily surprised by Corbucci's commitment to foregrounding the economic, racial, and sexual politics of the narrative. What appeared to be the film's weaknesses to that point — most of them centered around the use of the half-buffoon, half-heroic sheriff — were more than offset by its virtues: the unique locations, typically stellar Morricone score, Kinski's creepily effeminate sociopathy. But I still expected

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a more or less standard resolution, with the outstanding question being whether the stoic Silence would survive killing Loco and his gang and freeing the unfairly persecuted poor, or martyr himself in the process.

But ending on a bleak, pitiless massacre of all of our heroes and the common people already exiled by the system they struggled to survive under is not only shocking and subversive for its own sake — it also recontextualizes the character traits that had been presented as virtuous and righteous up to that point. Silence's refusal to shoot first, Sheriff Burnett's commitment to liberal values and the legal system, the madam's warning shot, the persecuted civilians' willingness to trust in the charity of their community: all of these gestures toward fair play end up enabling amoral, self-interested villains in enriching themselves at the cost of all these peoples' lives. In this snowbound spaghetti western, Corbucci somehow crafted a nearly peerless contemporary document of the curdling of the decade's optimism and activism into a more brutal militancy in the face of reactionary cruelty.

Plenty of commendable stylistic or technical touches elevate this as well, perhaps foremost the elegant being the transition to and from a flashback through the flame of a candle. My understanding is that I've started with Corbucci's best film, but if his work here is at all reflective of his baseline capabilities as a technician, I'll make a point to seek out some of his other prominent titles.

The Confrontation (Jancsó) — There’s something uniquely mesmerizing about Jancsó’s long takes, even relative to other films employing similar techniques. Though I intellectually understand that they must be precisely choreographed, his drifting camera and the movement of the actors across and through the frame seem so unstructured and halting that it is unusually hard to accept that there isn’t actually continuous spontaneous action by these hundreds of people filling the space for 360 degrees around the sliver we’re able to see at any one moment. 

That sense of immersive continuity paired with the Hungarian’s fascination with power dynamics lend The Confrontation’s descent from idealistic sloganeering about democracy and intellectual exchange into violence and finger-pointing a genuinely unsettling inevitability, as if you’re watching a heavy weight attached to your ankle by a long chain slide down a hill. 

Even without detailing any of the specifics about the country’s early transition to Stalinist communism, the film sketches the core dynamics that often accompanied this period for the nations behind the post-war Iron Curtain: a political vanguard of true believers; the force of the police state; the church and other institutions of the old order; and the mass of uncommitted, uncertain people subject to the whims and exuberances of these forces old and new.

My favorite aspect of the heavy use of song and dance that make this very nearly a musical: the particular poignant beauty of the Hebrew song one of the seminary students (a camp survivor, it’s implied) teaches the young communists, and which one of the young women repeats near the end to the party leaders preparing to chastise the students for their over-exuberance. The contrast between the melancholy fragility of that song and all the more muscular, energetic marching songs and odes to a united proletariat the students belt out for the rest of the runtime is unmissable and unforgettable.

[Matt]

An incredible year for cinema, yet it wasn’t tough for me to pick my 25 and order them. Never thought I’d be making any kind of list where Bergman, Kubrick, and Pasolini mingle with Andy Milligan, Russ Meyer, and Doris Wishman, but it’s less a matter of stylistic differences than access to resources. Is Bergman basically Milligan with state funding? Kubrick just obsessed with different kinds of gigantic objects than Meyer?

Can’t think of many differences between PPP and Doris. One had a slightly better understanding of Marxism?

[therewillbeblus]

I didn't make time to revisit it for this project, but in submitting my list, I was reminded just how terrific Lucia is from this year. If anyone owns the WCP 3 box and hasn't seen it yet, please try to carve out some time. zedz was the OG fans I believe, and I recorded my thoughts here

[DarkImbecile]

An incredible year for cinema

Have to agree, to my surprise; I think I’ve added more new films that will make my decade list of any set of viewings so far, and this year will likely be better represented than any beside 1960

[swo17]

With all the great features this year, don't forget about the shorts!

Feuerlöscher E. A. Winterstein (Alexander Kluge)
Kluge's features at times take on some pretty heavy subject matter, but here he takes a break to literally play with toys

The Flat (Jan Švankmajer)
Zdeněk Liška scores the mad happenings of an apartment dweller


Rat Life and Diet in North America (Joyce Wieland)
Adorable story about cats and rats who may or may not be thinly veiled stand-ins for our political overlords

Pas de deux (Norman McLaren)

I know enough French to know this is wrong, but for the sake of this blurb I'm going to pretend this film's title refers to God's pause button, in other words, the way he is able to freeze frame every moment as he spies on, er, watches over us from above, but also sees every frame at the same time

La révolution n'est qu'un début. Continuons le combat (Pierre Clémenti)
My Clémenti set is on the way following a preview of this film, so no idea where it sits among the rest of his directorial efforts, but this feels very cool in a way that I don't believe had yet come in fashion

Oh (Stan Vanderbeek)

To what does the titular utterance refer? The ecstatic cries of a lover? A child's realization of a connection between two stimuli previously misunderstood? A parent's discovery of that child having freshly spread fingerpaints over all the walls in the house? Why can't it be all three?

Stairs (Stefan Schabenbeck)

Who doesn't like stairs? I could climb them FOREVER

The Eve of Ivan Kupala/St. John's Eve (Yuri Ilyenko)

This is not a short but, uh, its appeal being more visual than narrative aligns it more with these other films? Or was I just too lazy to do a whole separate post of features? I suppose the only way to find out is to watch

[therewillbeblus]

Both The Flat and La révolution n'est qu'un début. Continuons le combat made my list. I wrote up the Clémenti here

[ryannichols7]

I've done a garbage job sharing my thoughts in these threads the last few months - this is what a new job will do to you. I have been watching films constantly, and agree with the sentiments that this is the best year for cinema of the decade, probably even ahead of 1960, or at least they're tied!

Petulia (Lester) - a masterpiece, that totally deserves to be held in high regard alongside 2001 and Once Upon a Time in the West but of course Warner buried it after release. they truly had no idea how to market this thing and I kinda get it - it's rather amazing that such a deep film was produced by a major studio. dustybooks had told me after I enjoyed The Knack and Lester's Beatles films that he did bring that sensibility to drama and he was correct. this film is symbolic of the entire 1960s - it's bright, fun, flashy, but full of sadness, bleakness, and disparity as well. as the decade goes on (soon to end with Midnight Cowboy in my eyes) you can see the dying out of the various "new waves", final films by major directors (Ozu, Ford, etc), and an increasing bleakness overcoming these works. Petulia captures all of this, while using San Francisco as its looming backdrop. the movie is aware of both the Summer of Love and Vietnam War, acknowledges both, and refuses to do anything more with either. its a movie of the times that rejects making any grandiose statements for or against either major event. John Barry's score is an all time classic (the movie blew my mind from the first second, as I was finally able to place a Cinematic Orchestra sample after knowing the melody for well over a decade), deeply unforgiving and perfectly ominous. Julie Christie remains one of the best actresses of the decade, refusing to cut and paste her various performances across these great films, and who ever expected George C Scott in a role like this? this movie should be still talked about constantly to this day, I'm glad everyone on this board loves it from what I've seen.

Capricious Summer (Menzel) - beginning to think Menzel really isn't my guy despite my love for Czechoslovak cinema of the 1960s, which is funny considering Czechmate. but yeah, what we really needed was Stalker to be more like Cocoon apparently? with a horrible mistreatment of a female character that just kinda takes it? endless conversations about nothing significant, lots of complaining, and the director's seemingly usual unnecessary sexual tinges. please let Larks on a String be good, but I'm not holding my breath.

Shame (Bergman) - feels incredibly linked to the Czechoslovak New Wave in terms of its approach to war and its effects on everyday people. it's not an original concept to use war as a backdrop to relationship turmoil, but I think as usual Bergman creates a prime example. feels all the more perfect now with the shut in mentality of the modern age and the apathy generation. the final scene is maybe Bergman's best ending in any of his movies.

Teorema (Pasolini) - downright silly movie, I think the premise has something going on but ultimately the film ends up saying nothing. none of the resolutions felt earned at all. I enjoyed Mamma Roma and Gospel but think Pasolini's 70s movies are a bit much. I think we're already kinda getting there..

Mandabi (Sembene) - I really did not like Black Girl and didn't like this much better. sorry, I know they're historically important films and whatnot but they are paced horribly and feel about three times longer than they actually are. I support any film that mocks bureaucracy and corruption but there are better ways to do it than this.

Monterey Pop (Pennebaker) - had absolutely no idea this was an impressionist mood piece of a music documentary - I love Pennebaker's work and wasn't expecting Woodstock or anything but wow, does he ever capture the psychedelia perfectly? a near religious experience, basically every single artist here sounds incredible, and the ending is flawless, uproarious glory. turn it way up loud and watch it on the biggest screen you can. would make a gloriously chaotic double feature with Gimme Shelter - but in what order?

Hour of the Wolf (Bergman) - I had been instructed for years this was Bergman's horror film. in reality its no more terrifying than Persona or The Silence minus the really gross face/mask scene towards the end. there was a lot that surprisingly reminded me of 8 1/2 but I'll say the biggest surprise is just how fun this is. I often find Bergman's films to be funnier than most do (I'm one of those that reads The Seventh Seal as basically a straight comedy) but this one gets quite frankly silly in a good way. I loved it and would love to see it in a crowded theatre with a great audience.

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has any industrial artist made a drumbeat out of Von Sydow beating the kid to death? paging 90s Trent Reznor

Profound Desires of the Gods (Imamura) - what happened to Shohei? I haven't enjoyed any of his movies after Pigs and Battleships and these kinda only get worse. this movie presents ideas and screams them at you for three ugly hours. bloated, silly, and gross in many ways, I recommend Kaneto Shindo's far superior The Naked Island if you want a film about urban versus rural Japan that works. but many find this to be a masterpiece, so you don't have to listen to me.

Dragon's Return (Grecner) - that's what I'm talking about. goes against most Slovak cinema I've seen, which is often more leisurely compared to the Czech average. this is a remarkably intense, fiery film that never goes above a slight boil. it bubbles along the surface with its brooding nature but never delves into full on assault. a great companion to The Cremator in terms of pacing and atmosphere but I obviously think this one smartly stays away from the macabre and horror that Juraj Herz's film does. Grecner instead goes for a more fable-like approach, and I find the results oddly beautiful. you can see the influence of Stefan Uher (especially the rural scenes in The Sun in a Net) here, which Grecner acknowledged. it's a film about loneliness in a very peculiar way, and amongst all the crags and rockiness on Radovan Lukavský's face, there is a remarkable sadness behind those eyes, and I have felt personally really affected by the film. his performance is staggering and may be my single favorite acting performance of this year, with the closest competition being in...

Once Upon a Time in the West (Leone) - after middling revisits to the Dollars Trilogy (2>3>1, to keep it short) I expected to be blown away by this and truly cannot stress how incredible of an experience it was. this is a basically flawless film (one minor exception) and the apex of the western genre in my eyes. I always say my favorite westerns are the films that have such a good sense of setting and space, but this one goes even further by having a real sense of atmosphere throughout the entire runtime. Morricone's unbelievable score is certainly there but I feel the movie doesn't overly rely on it like Leone's previous films do, he makes it a point to really immerse us in the setting. and the story itself is just unbelievable, brought to life by the four incredible leads. I'm not sure Fonda, Cardinale, Bronson, or Robards were ever better than they were in this film, and Cardinale's performance is unprecedented in the genre. women are usually larger than life in westerns, or they're on the side. Jill is center stage and commands the film without overtaking it, and I find that astounding. Fonda is unbelievably convincing and I'm glad this was his favorite of his own films. I love Bronson and Robards - imagining some of the more ridiculous alternate castings I've read about in their roles just feels wrong. I will spoil the ends below but just know I love how ambiguous this film ultimately is. it's endlessly layered, mysterious, and phenomenal. a masterpiece by every concievable standard.

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Cheyenne didn't need to die, that just felt so unnecessarily tossed off. but it's made up for with the much discussed ending for Frank and Harmonica - holy wow was that incredible. and the final shot's sweep is just too perfect.

If... (Anderson) - I basically have to talk about this in a spoiler box, but to those who haven't seen it, just know I hated it. as for why...

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it's not that the ending, which has aged obviously very poorly, is problematic. I have no issue with that sort of thing. it's that its entirely unearned and is unbearably stupid to me. this is way too much of a slog with very little actually happening. prep school kids terrorize each other and the faculty (representing "authority" or whatever) are evil! novel idea, we've seen it before. so how on earth do we reach that ending? I get that it's supposed to represent an act of defiance or sticking it to the man or whatever, but what are we really doing here, truly. I could not stand this film

spoiler alert: I don't like Kes either so this means the two top rated films of the British New Wave in the BFI poll of the greatest British films of all time are on my bad list. my favorites would be Billy Liar, The Servant, The Knack, Seance on a Wet Afternoon, Victim, and Darling.

Madigan (Siegel) - I think this is a good representation of the production code ending and moving from your more noir-y crime/police procedural films into the more gritty ones we'd see in the 1970s (Siegel's own Dirty Harry and of course The French Connection). an absolute treat to see two of the best Hollywood actors ever, Richard Widmark and Henry Fonda, in the same film, but also just a joy to watch in general - it keeps its 72 hour timeline to a very quick pace. nothing revolutionary but a fun time.

Valley of the Bees (Vlacil) - a return to more straightforward narrative after Marketa, Vlacil stays in the middle ages for an actual angry, violent film. while Marketa and its frequent comparison Andrei Rublev certainly feature bloodshed, it has a lot more intent and frequency here. the crusades were known to be like this and Vlacil has no issue demonstrating this. its not without the director's usual poetic nature, particularly the ending. I think it's key to see Vlacil balance something more primal and more intense with his usual visual beauty. Marketa has its moments, but he bordered more on surrealism there. Bees has a more naturalistic wonder and I think it makes a really fascinating comparison.

Hell in the Pacific (Boorman) - my first film by Boorman brings larger than life icons Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune together on a remote island. cinema and war at its absolute barest, most essential elements. certainly something as masterful as you'd hope it would be. my Japanese is passable but I was still grateful Kino subtitled the dialogue from both actors in this (if you choose to turn it on), there's a lot more nuance here in what's said in this near-silent film than one would expect. what keeps it from being something greater:

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the ending. obviously the theatrical version is some ridiculous Easy Rider nonsense and completely doesn't fit at all, we know that. but the alternative ending is also pretty unsatisfying in my eyes. not to be that guy that needs a happy ending - I love ambiguous/unsatisfying ones, but this one is far too much. did we need the whole Life Magazine thing? couldn't these two sit on a beach drinking sake together and watching a sunrise, bookending the film? maybe I could go back in time and help Boorman make this a masterpiece..

I sat down to write up just a few of these and just kept going, I hope this makes up for my shortcomings in the previous threads!

Stolen Kisses (François Truffaut)

edit: I forgot this one as I've basically forgotten the film already, but I'll echo basically every word you said here. maddeningly insubstantial and utterly forgettable. at least Jules and Jim and The Soft Skin are memorably bad in my eyes! I didn't get to hit The Bride Wore Black yet but I know it has its fans, will try and fit it in before Sunday

[the preacher]

Ballot sent. Don't forget political correctness!

[alacal2]

Whistle and I'll Come to You

Originally a one-off drama for the BBC's Omnibus programme this has subsequently been included in the 'Ghost Stories For Christmas' series and has been one of the few television seasonal delights for me amongst the Yuletide dross of so-called Christmas specials. I've watched it regularly and it still scares the shit out of me. Great sound design and no CGI could best the original creation, it looks marvelous on the BFI's new boxset. Whilst Horden and Miller's creation may have seemed incredibly mannered (and annoying) by some I think it brilliantly conveys how he'd always been haunted and that the gibbering wreck he 'becomes' when finally confronting the ghost is merely the unnerving flipside of his perceived self.

[DarkImbecile]

VOTE HERE UNTIL DEC 18

Just out of curiosity, how many lists do we have for this year, swo?

[swo17]

11 so far

[domino harvey]

12 now! Thanks for the reminder

[knives]

Hope I’m not too late. Been so busy I didn’t even have time to rep some favorites like Project X and How to Save a Marriage and Ruin Your Life

[swo17]

You have today. Does that give you enough time?

[knives]

I just submitted a list, but don’t have the time to write up those two. At a wedding.

[swo17]

OK, but those two films weren't eligible because they weren't on my initial eligibility list and no one else had mentioned them. I've made them eligible now, if you care to revise your ballot

[ryannichols7]

as per tradition I'll be submitting a late night ballot. I've ignored Oshima the entire decade but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and watch Death by Hanging, which is...an interesting way to close down the month. my preferred choice had to be done last night instead, and...

Head (Rafelson) - even funnier than I remembered it, and now with the context of revisiting A Hard Day's Night and Help! I can only appreciate it more. many complain it runs too long and doesn't sustain it's energy through the runtime but I disagree - at 86 minutes it feels very precise with it's targeting. this and Targets are the only two films I've seen so far that actually take aim at the American counterculture at the time and lampoon it in an amusing way. Petulia serves to comment on 1960s America as well but obviously since that's not the focus of the movie, it doesn't sting like this one does. the juxtapositions are hilarious, the long scene in the desert involving coca-cola is absolutely hilarious (and when it circles back to the punchline, brilliant), and the music remains wonderfully particularly "Porpoise Song" which remains one of my favorite songs of the 60s. this film is an act of punk rock more than anything that would be conjured up in the next decade, and paved the way for similar "image destroying" stunts like U2's ZooTV tour and R.E.M. doing Monster. I'd probably like One Direction more if they had a sense of humor like this...

[knives]

I find Three Resurrected Drunkards significantly better than Death by Hanging.

[domino harvey]

It just barely made the cut for my list, but it did squeak in