The First Features List

[swo17]

I was going to do a double-bill with another masterpiece of the same name, Lucian Pintilie's absurdist gem from 1968, but I'd forgotten that Sunday at Six came first and it wasn't, after all, his first feature. Go see it anyway, it's amazing.

Sunday at Six is also great though

[therewillbeblus]

Nobody has mentioned In Bruges yet, which needs no defending, but elevates the possibilities of blending the diverse ends of the spectrum for dark comedy to its limits. Egregiously politically incorrect lines are not only permitted but perfect humor due to the actors’ (especially Farrell’s) delivery, and it’s an inverted surreal buddy-adventure movie to boot. The film also sets itself apart from the director’s other works by being so cohesively even while dealing with such uneven tones (though, to be fair, Seven Psychopaths is uneven by its self-reflexive design).

[zedz]

I was going to do a double-bill with another masterpiece of the same name, Lucian Pintilie's absurdist gem from 1968, but I'd forgotten that Sunday at Six came first and it wasn't, after all, his first feature. Go see it anyway, it's amazing.

Sunday at Six is also great though

I might try to squeeze that in as well, but i doubt it's strong enough for my personal list.

[zedz]

Nobody has mentioned In Bruges yet, which needs no defending, but elevates the possibilities of blending the diverse ends of the spectrum for dark comedy to its limits. Egregiously politically incorrect lines are not only permitted but perfect humor due to the actors’ (especially Farrell’s) delivery, and it’s an inverted surreal buddy-adventure movie to boot. The film also sets itself apart from the director’s other works by being so cohesively even while dealing with such uneven tones (though, to be fair, Seven Psychopaths is uneven by its self-reflexive design).

In Bruges was bad enough that I've avoided all McDonagh's subsequent films, so maybe it does need some defending!

[therewillbeblus]

I think it’s a film where you’re either going to appreciate what it’s doing or not- it’s not hiding some core part of itself for discovery on repeat viewings (I say all this because, as I’ve mentioned before, most of my current favorite films left either a poor, middling, or fine but not mindblowing impression on me upon first viewings). For me, its wild tonal balance makes no sense in conception- mostly because it mines the depths of fatal despair and our basic, awful, embarrassing senses of humor (well, maybe not all of us…) and meshes them together; but the end result just works like few dark comedies do. The ending is a bit silly, though that’s fine because the first two acts pull off something unexpected and extraordinary. Farrell’s offensive banter mixed with suicidality creates a complex character via extremes, which normally dilute one to a cartoon.

You’re wise to avoid his subsequent work though. I kinda liked Seven Psychopaths, but mostly just appreciated what it was trying to do as an interesting failure. Three Billboards is just a failure.

His brother John’s debut, The Guard, is much funnier and lighter than any of Martin’s work (though his follow up, Calvary, is darker than anything either have done!)

[Sloper]

In case anyone still has time to watch it before voting, I strongly recommend Jacques Audiard's 1994 debut, Regarde les hommes tomber (English title See How They Fall, which I think gets the tone wrong).

However you feel about his subsequent work - I'm generally a huge fan - this one is a delightfully strange, disturbing, and ultimately very moving anti-thriller about three men who get entangled in each other's blighted lives. The novel it's based on (Teri White's Triangle) is similarly great, in similarly surprising ways.

Sadly the film is only available in a lousy, non-anamorphic DVD, which now seems to be quite hard to come by at a reasonable price. This is surprising given the cachet of the director and cast (Jean-Louis Trintignant, Mathieu Kassovitz, Jean Yanne, Bulle Ogier).

[therewillbeblus]

Thanks for the suggestion, Sloper! Two libraries in the minuteman network of the greater Boston area have it, for those local (I just placed a hold on one of them, though my turnaround is quick and it’ll likely be back in circulation within a few days).

Funnily enough, my closest non-forum cinephile friend always claims Audiard as his favorite director ever, which coming from someone with such a diverse palette strikes me as bizarre. I think he’s solid overall, but clearly he’s operating on a wavelength of genius for some that I just don’t get (yet)!

[therewillbeblus]

I finally watched Yes: 9012Live (and have now officially seen all released Soderbergh-helmed works including shorts/TV eps) and it’s definitively mediocre practice for someone interested in cinematography -which is, after all, his primary passion. It’s certainly not a “first feature” though, just a guy filming a concert experimenting with form via safe, banal methods. Now that I’ve seen it, I’m more comfortable casting my vote for sex, lies, and videotape, a film I may write up if I have time to revisit before submissions but that I expect to fall in the Breathless camp of ascending the ranks on my list less for being the ‘best’ film that fits parameters as a secondary detail, and more because it’s such a powerful and important “first feature”

[John Cope]

Now that I’ve seen it, I’m more comfortable casting my vote for sex, lies, and videotape, a film I may write up if I have time to revisit before submissions but that I expect to fall in the Breathless camp of ascending the ranks on my list less for being the ‘best’ film that fits parameters as a secondary detail, and more because it’s such a powerful and important “first feature”

I'd be very interested if you wrote about sex, lies. It was one of my first favorite films (it was released when I was in my late teens) and still is among my favorites as well as remaining my favorite Soderbergh even after all these many years and so much other great and diverse work. It was a formative film for me too, however unwise that may have been, as it seemed to me at that age, and coming out of the rather banal 80's, to be remarkably mature and adult. It seemed, and still seems, like one of the rarest portraits of actual adulthood in American cinema, and especially of that period. Much of this, I continue to think, has to do with the absence of children to ground/orient these characters in more conventional directions, those which allow for less direct and explicit exploration of the specifics of adulthood and as an end unto itself.

[therewillbeblus]

Interesting! I seem to recall reading some insightful thoughts of yours (somewhere in the depths of the history of the forum) on the film, pertaining to details I wouldn't have focused my own skewed perceptions, but in order to stay on track and unbiased I'll give it a watch this weekend and post something in its dedicated thread without digging those up

[Mr Sausage]

Eighth Grade (Bo Burnham, 2018)

A triumph of realism and minute observation. The trouble with a movie like this is that it can either render the nature of digital life inaccurately, making it alienating and out of touch, or it can render it so obsessively that the movie becomes unrelateable to anyone but its subjects. Burnham takes care to balance the movie, so one sees the role digital media plays in otherwise relatable, widely experienced emotions. Empathy is the overriding technique. Plenty of awkward and absurd behaviours occupy the narrative, but they are rarely clinical observations or moments for judgement. They are the outward results of carefully traced emotional spaces. The relative plotlessness works in the movie's favour because it allows a portrait of emotional realities and how those realities affect or even generate behaviours and interactions in a variety of situations. We see how a person navigates identity in a space where identity is unsure, rather than seeing identity revealed within the pressures of a plot. The big moments of another movie, impending graduation and more adult interaction, are mostly dull and banal--life moments one simply encounters, ie. new objects around which preexisting anxieties also have to contend but which take on no larger importance within the characters' emotional lives. More affecting moments, like the intrusion of sex into once safe-seeming interactions, loom larger and become crisis moments less for what happens in them (relatively little) than for how they force Elsie to confront her emotions more directly and nakedly in situations where she prefers to hide them. One of the subtleties of the scene in the car (and the movie as a whole) is how it shows the small social trap created by the perception that one is easy going. The movie teases out how how fraught and complex 'easygoing' is as a social identity. Because of course Elsie isn't easygoing in the slightest, and she wishes to hide that behind a veneer of go-wth-the-flow unconcern while also receiving small social pressures keep it up by characters who praise this value without seeming to expect anything more. So Elsie feels that whatever social gains she makes are exclusively down to this while also never being able to properly engage socially. The movie's assuredness comes through in how it sees that scene in the car so precisely both in terms of what it means to the character and how small social pressures can effortlessly manipulate people into compromising situations. But it does so without needing to make some big thing out of it. The implications are enough; we can imagine other outcomes with other people without needing Elsie to experience them. The movie pitches itself at a particular level and holds to it. It's the kind of thing that's easy to overlook or underappreciate. But this might well be one of the very best movies about adolescent experience.

Also, how absurdly talented is Burnham at such a young age? An engaging and charismatic actor (Promising Young Woman) and a confident, able filmmaker on top of being an accomplished comic, and he's only just turned 30. Ridiculous.

[therewillbeblus]

Also, how absurdly talented is Burnham at such a young age? An engaging and charismatic actor (Promising Young Woman) and a confident, able filmmaker on top of being an accomplished comic, and he's only just turned 30. Ridiculous.

Not sure if you've seen his Netflix specials, but the transition he takes into the end of Make Happy is one of the most emotionally-impactful and creative confessions of one's own psychosocial internal states I've seen (and then, of course, Inside just emphasizes all of that to 11)

[Mr Sausage]

I watched Make Happy a few years ago. I don't really remember it, but I do remember the final song. It has the most ambivalent "thank you" I've ever heard at the end of a performance.

[therewillbeblus]

I watched it pretty obsessively after Inside and that "Thank you, I hope you're happy" is uttered with such authentic self-consciousness that it, for me, solidifies Burnham's earnestness in his breaks from theatre in each of his last two works

[Mr Sausage]

The Myth of the American Sleepover (David Robert Mitchell, 2011)

Here's a coming of age film that breaks away from nostalgia or time-period mythologizing by taking place in no time. At a given moment we could be in the 70s, 80s, 90s, or later. The film is familiar but carefully unplaceable. I'd love to watch it again and see if any of the strands stick more to one time period than the other. The strand with the twins felt quite 80s, the pixie girl and her friend felt rather 70s, the love-lorn wanderer 90s/2000s. But there is enough bleed over to frustrate this. It's something Mitchell would exploit just as well in It Follows, a movie I adore for many of the same reasons I loved this one. It's a sharp, uninsistent look at young people navigating sex and relationships and the horizon of adulthood, but without any dramatic pyrotechnics. It's a meditative, introspective film. It's nice to see adolescence examined without emotional volatility. Not because adolescents aren't volatile or that the situations in the movie don't lend themselves to that. But because so often such moments are quiet and internalized, resting between extremes. The film is permeated with a last day, transitional, go-with-the-flow atmosphere, where people seem just a bit more open and adventurous than otherwise. There isn't a wrong note struck here.

[therewillbeblus]

It’s a bit late, but I completely forgot to make a plug for Yvonne Rainer’s first feature, Lives of Performers, which is available on backchannels and (though I don’t have access myself and therefore can’t confirm) I believe senseabove mentioned most of her work is on Kanopy as well. It’s essentially a Godardian essay film through a feminist lens, orchestrating a Brechtian methodology applied to autobiographical disclosures, and using Rainer’s own ethos about dance to model the narrative form.

[John Cope]

The Myth of Fingerprints (Bart Freundlich, 1997)

Bart Freundlich's 1997 film The Myth of Fingerprints remains a perennial favorite of mine and deserves more treatment than it has received. Despite its Thanksgiving setting I wouldn't necessarily say it's recommended holiday viewing as it's tremendously sad and melancholic but is leavened somewhat by its delicately applied layer of well considered humor. Certainly I prefer this film to Jodie Foster's similarly themed Home for the Holidays in which the humor and pathos co-exist simultaneously but do not helpfully inform one another; rather the humor just bulwarks the characters' supposedly exposed vulnerabilities, re-inforces their already snide superiority.


Myth does not do that. Its actual narrative is disarmingly simple and its scenes of humor and pathos more or less alternate, though elements of each seep through the cracks of the other as the characters become more well defined to us. What is recounted here is yet another of those family dramas in which old wounds are forced to be resurrected around the collective holiday dining table. Confrontation and conflict of one sort or another is standard and in terms of overall familiarity this must have seemed like nothing new to critics and audiences; I can imagine no other explanation for the film's otherwise unconscionable neglect.


For Myth is actually deceptively radical in its contents and approach. Part of my own affection for it has to do with the fact that Freundlich displays such unassuming confidence in this, his debut feature. Voices are rarely raised (Roy Scheider's performance is virtually mute) and much is allowed to remain just out of range and unsaid; perhaps because what lies behind this family's dysfunction is what lies behind most, fundamentals of personality so deeply embedded and inextricably part of each individual's identity as to not provide the consoling prospect of any easy remedy. It is simply the reality one must live with somehow. Myth has great understanding of that and sympathy for it. Everything is small, in miniature even, and nothing is forced or overstated. Julianne Moore's character of Mia shares her father's social antipathy but is more vocal about it. She is the one character allowed subdued rages that occasionally boil over; but all is so deftly controlled here that there is never a false moment or misjudged emotion. Much of her story zeroes in on the displacement of feeling and inability to be vulnerable that she and Scheider both represent at different stages.


But it's really in the relationship between Noah Wyle's Warren and his father Hal, played by Scheider, that Freundlich finds his film's heart and meaning. The aversion toward communication on both their parts is self-evident but when we finally discover the cause for it Freundlich's grasp on why this relatively small incident is significant, why it carries such weight, is what impresses most. Because he doesn't psychoanalayze the situation, perhaps knowing he cannot or perhaps seeing it as pointless, but rather just allows it to exist unstated as a perfect representation for all that has gone wrong between the two; the deep disappointment of a frustratingly unassailable divide. The reason for this is accepted as too remote to be knowable and that harsh fact is the deepest disappointment of all as it prevents any attempt at reconciliation; the suggestion of reason's irrelevance is also quietly devastating. Wyle's passive character and his emotional fragility will seem risible to some but is in its own way a radical move, a character not designed to appease audience desires for identification and another indicator of Freundlich's serious intent. It is also, perhaps, explanation enough for the remove between father and son.


On another level, the aesthetic achievement is remarkable for being so similarly pitched, so subtle in its emphases. One cut comes to mind. Warren's reunion with his estranged girlfriend ends with a very distanced long shot of the two sitting together in silence in the midst of a clearing of ice. The source of their fracture has been traced to the actions of Warren's father but more specifically his remoteness, his inaccessibility. We cut to Scheider walking alone elsewhere carrying the family's Thanksgiving turkey and we get the implication of his isolation and its potentially self-enforced nature. Nothing else is made of it but that clarity serves to ground our own experience with the narrative itself.


I remember that when this picture came out (which is pretty much the last time anything has been said about it) it was derided for its bourgeoisie sympathies. But Freundlich never denies these are the particular problems of a certain kind of privilege, that they would not come into being otherwise. He does not apologize for that; does not treat his characters dismissively, their buried pain with any less care or view it as having any less legitimacy. It is this astute dedication to emotional honesty that earns our respect (and reminds me of the profound powers of observation in the fiction of Andre Dubus).


Freundlich has yet to make another film to rank with this one. But I take comfort from the certainty that he is capable of it.

[zedz]

My Childhood (Bill Douglas, 1972) - This is a rather astonishing debut, with a raw visual lyricism that evokes Dovzhenko more than any of Douglas' contemporaries. It just squeaks in over the 45 minute mark and it's a fully mature work, particularly in the use of a stripped-down soundtrack to really focus the attention on key elements. It probably won't make my list, however, as for me it's inextricably part of the trilogy (and not my favourite segment, which gets richer as it goes along).

Working slowly through candidates, and realizing that a brutal cull is looming, I've been recalibrating my personal criteria for "great first features." I've decide to focus on works that express a fully formed talent bursting onto the scene for the first time (even if that talent might be a slightly different one from whatever developed later, as with Angelopoulos). It can't just be a very good (or even great) film in a familiar style: I'm looking for something new - for cinema and for the filmmaker. So if somebody has made a load of great shorts and their first feature is more of the same, but longer, I'm going to be much less inclined to include it. Maybe this way I'll be able to wrangle all the possibilities down to something manageable.

Signs of Life (Werner Herzog, 1968) - And here's a great example of a filmmaker arriving fully formed. This is a Herzog film through and through, and it doesn't much resemble anything else. The creative team of his glory years is already mostly assembled (cinematographer Thomas Mauch, editor Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus, Herbert Prasch on sound). No Popol Vuh soundtrack, but there's Florian Fricke, in the film, playing Chopin, waiting for the call.

If it's not a crazy undertaking on the the level of Aguirre or Fitzcarraldo, it's still ridiculously ambitious to make, as your low-budget debut, a period film in a foreign country. It's a clear expression of the theme that informs almost all of Herzog's great works: the stranger in a strange land. And it's the first of many features in which the protagonist is driven mad by a landscape, and in which the landscape is the covert main character. The figure of Stroszek also anticipates Herzog's later protagonists, but he's really a Bruno S. that turns into a Klaus Kinski, so neither of those Herzog axioms could have embodied the character as effectively as Peter Brogle does.

It's a film that would stand up as a modern classic even if Herzog had never followed it up, which is another way of thinking about what I'm looking for with this list project.

[domino harvey]

Reminder that lists are due at week’s end!

[therewillbeblus]

Voices are rarely raised (Roy Scheider's performance is virtually mute) and much is allowed to remain just out of range and unsaid; perhaps because what lies behind this family's dysfunction is what lies behind most, fundamentals of personality so deeply embedded and inextricably part of each individual's identity as to not provide the consoling prospect of any easy remedy. It is simply the reality one must live with somehow. Myth has great understanding of that and sympathy for it. Everything is small, in miniature even, and nothing is forced or overstated. Julianne Moore's character of Mia shares her father's social antipathy but is more vocal about it. She is the one character allowed subdued rages that occasionally boil over; but all is so deftly controlled here that there is never a false moment or misjudged emotion. Much of her story zeroes in on the displacement of feeling and inability to be vulnerable that she and Scheider both represent at different stages.

But it's really in the relationship between Noah Wyle's Warren and his father Hal, played by Scheider, that Freundlich finds his film's heart and meaning. The aversion toward communication on both their parts is self-evident but when we finally discover the cause for it Freundlich's grasp on why this relatively small incident is significant, why it carries such weight, is what impresses most. Because he doesn't psychoanalayze the situation, perhaps knowing he cannot or perhaps seeing it as pointless, but rather just allows it to exist unstated as a perfect representation for all that has gone wrong between the two; the deep disappointment of a frustratingly unassailable divide. The reason for this is accepted as too remote to be knowable and that harsh fact is the deepest disappointment of all as it prevents any attempt at reconciliation; the suggestion of reason's irrelevance is also quietly devastating. Wyle's passive character and his emotional fragility will seem risible to some but is in its own way a radical move, a character not designed to appease audience desires for identification and another indicator of Freundlich's serious intent. It is also, perhaps, explanation enough for the remove between father and son.

I don't have a ton to add to to your already-stellar writeup of The Myth of Fingerprints, but I found myself most captivated by the subtly inserted "watch game" Hope Davis questions Roy Scheider about. Davis expresses confusion over why Scheider asks his kids what time it is even though he wears a watch, and he describes it as a "game" where nobody can wear watches but him and yet he expects them to tell the time when prompted. This is a ‘game,’ not in the traditional sense of playful equality, but one that allows Scheider to superficially pose as an orchestrator of interpersonal relations with his children. I believe the game is earnestly established by Scheider to try to connect with his kids, but he delusionally doesn’t understand that he’s keeping them at arm’s length through the power dynamics inherent in the game to remain superior and aloof, while pretending to be inviting a form of intimacy with those he cannot actually breach.

Scheider’s “remoteness” and “inaccessibility” has been passed down as a trait onto Wyle, like a disease, which is the true tragedy of the film: that accountability in the form of blame is fruitless and a fantasy born from fairy tales that we ignorantly hold onto as simplified truths, when in reality we become responsible for exhibiting the traits we’ve inherited. Our complicity in forming our own identity matters as much as our nurtured influences, because the end result is still ourselves as the vehicles of behavior engaging with the world. This is a source of shame projected both inwardly and outwardly but without a tidy solution for escape in either direction. Of course Julianne Moore's character uses sex in a similarly superficial manner to Scheider's "watch game," an act that holds the opposite weight of its intended connotation, and the real intimacy she experiences is based in very different relational content.

I remember that when this picture came out (which is pretty much the last time anything has been said about it) it was derided for its bourgeoisie sympathies. But Freundlich never denies these are the particular problems of a certain kind of privilege, that they would not come into being otherwise. He does not apologize for that; does not treat his characters dismissively, their buried pain with any less care or view it as having any less legitimacy. It is this astute dedication to emotional honesty that earns our respect (and reminds me of the profound powers of observation in the fiction of Andre Dubus).

This criticism always irks me because statistically these privileged demographics suffer certain mental health and sociological crises more than other populations do, specifically within the detailed dynamics represented here. To refuse to meet the material on its level would be to deny truth, and such a condescending attitude to Rich People Problems Matter Less is ironically operating against its own attempt to even the playing field with dominance, and embodying the very characteristics of this family- except they have the excuse of distributing these harmful actions based on their social context… perhaps we’re all more similar than the critics think?

Also, the final shot of this film is one of the most honest and depressing 'final shots' that I've ever seen- I think that's a big part of the reason this film has not been discussed much in populist circles. The lasting tone it leaves on its audience is one of helplessness, despite the growth accrued by others in the preceding shots!

[zedz]

Mujo (Jissoji Akio, 1970) - There are actually very few Japanese New wave directors whose first features were among their best work, possibly because many of them served an apprenticeship with the major studios before they were able to properly let loose. Jissoji followed a different path, however, starting out in television and transitioning to film towards the end of the new wave period, making his first feature for the (by them well-established) Art Theatre Guild, and therefore free of any significant commercial pressure.

What he comes up with is a dark Buddhist parable that's as visually discombobulating as anything by Yoshida, set to an incongruous, nerve-jangling harpsichord score. The amazing look of the film draws a little from Yoshida's eccentric framing, but definitely has plenty of fresh ideas all its own, like the tracking shots that operate independently of the characters or narrative, like chess moves in a game going on above our heads. Like the Herzog I wrote about the other day, this is a film that's as much about the spaces the characters occupy as it is about the characters themselves, and the visual schema of the film is heavily weighted towards exploring those spaces in original ways.

Every time I come back to this film it startles me anew, and there's more to get out of it. It's exactly the kind of unprecedented work I'm looking for on my list of best first features.

[swo17]

So, for the record, the following films are NOT eligible for this project:
Paris nous appartient - Rivette
Ivan's Childhood - Tarkovsky
A Swedish Love Story - Andersson
Traveller - Kiarostami
Spirit of the Beehive - Erice
Sherman's March - McElwee
Buffalo 66 - Gallo

For the record, I believe all the films that I've left quoted above should now be eligible under the revised rules, using the argument that any 40+ minute film that preceded it is a technicality, and that the listed film is the director's first film that runs at least 75-80 minutes. Of course, people are also welcome to vote for the first 40+ minute film, such as Kiarostami's The Experience (but you can't vote for both of them on the same list!)

Finally, a couple more contenders I don't believe have been mentioned yet in this thread:

Zvenigora (Aleksandr Dovzhenko, 1927)
The Reflecting Skin (Philip Ridley, 1990)

[zedz]

Paris nous appartient (Rivette, 1961) - When I first saw this film some twenty-five years ago, it felt startlingly modern, and it still does, perhaps even more so. A bunch of people getting their lives twisted by vaporous conspiracy theories? What could be more 2021 than that?

It's a great example of a first feature prefiguring an entire body of work: Rivette was still working through the ideas he was exploring here forty years later (e.g. vague conspiracies, collaborative endeavours falling apart and reconstituting, rehearsals, Paris as a Feuilladean playground, modern-day grailquests). But it's also one of his best films simply on its own terms. It's loose-limbed but breezy and involving. The whiff of conspiracy propels the film and notionally ties a lot of disparate scenes together, even as it's constantly evaporating - a nifty narrative trick that Rivette would utilise over and over again, with varying levels of success. And it's also got a fabulous modernist score that's ever-present and never quite a comfortable fit, which just adds to the paranoid edge.

[therewillbeblus]

Nice appreciation- I've long held the belief that this is Rivette's best work (and finally wrote some thoughts earlier this year), but it's also the artwork (outside of his own) that I think most resembles Pynchon's more disturbing philosophical implications about our helplessly subjective psychosocial relationship with objective space and occurrences, and how breaking from that is where real horror lies. It's an easy Top Five film for me this project, as well as a Top Ten for our current decades project.

[domino harvey]

Lists are due today/when I wake up tomorrow. I have received all of three so far. So, the upside is I may not have to tally anything