Sight & Sound

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dekadetia
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Re: Sight & Sound

#901 Post by dekadetia » Fri Mar 17, 2023 9:54 am

MichaelB wrote:
Fri Mar 17, 2023 8:51 am
This notion that people should carry on mulishly voting for the same familiar "canonical" titles just because they've been invited to join the group is bizarre to me - surely the whole point of the exercise was to broaden its frame of reference?
Precisely -- and even if the voting base hadn't expanded, the level of access in 2022 was so much greater than it was even ten years ago. These kind of arguments neglect to acknowledge just how much canonization is a function of availability.

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MichaelB
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Re: Sight & Sound

#902 Post by MichaelB » Fri Mar 17, 2023 11:30 am

Oh, absolutely. Take Jeanne Dielman itself, for instance - I've been aware of its reputation for decades, but opportunities to actually see it have been sporadic in the extreme until surprisingly recently.

Ditto Daisies, which I first caught on BBC2 circa 1990 thanks to its reputation preceding it, but I don't think I had the chance to see it even once between then and whenever Second Run brought out their original DVD.

And I can confirm on the basis of six years' first-hand experience that neither of them played the London rep circuit in the first half of the 1990s at least, and most likely over a considerably longer period - Jeanne Dielman's length would have militated against it.

But both films are now readily available.

(And mention of Daisies reminds me of a friend complaining about "too many spoilers" in Peter Hames' exhaustive plot descriptions in his book The Czechoslovak New Wave - but there was a reason for this: when the first edition was published in the mid-1980s, most of these films were pretty much impossible to see, and a pretty hefty proportion of them had never been given English-friendly distribution. Hames was acutely aware of this, hence him consciously trying to create verbal substitutes for watching the films, as futile as that exercise might seem with a film like Daisies! I first saw about a dozen or so of these films at the turn of the 1990s thanks to a combination of a BBC2 and NFT season, but I didn't get a chance to explore them properly, especially the less fêted titles, for at least another fifteen years.)

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Ashirg
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Re: Sight & Sound

#903 Post by Ashirg » Fri Mar 17, 2023 1:20 pm

A little known filmmaker, Lucia Seles, also voted for two of her own films.

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Lighthouse
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Re: Sight & Sound

#904 Post by Lighthouse » Fri Mar 17, 2023 2:05 pm

MichaelB wrote:
Fri Mar 17, 2023 8:51 am
This notion that people should carry on mulishly voting for the same familiar "canonical" titles just because they've been invited to join the group is bizarre to me -
That notion is is bizarre to me too.

The canon, which reflects no truth, but just a consensus of opinions, should and must change over the decades. I criticised it always as disappointingly "conservative" for containing much too much very old films from before 1960.

It should change, but not for the wrong reasons.
A case in point: neither of my 2012 or 2002 lists included any American films - unless you count Once Upon a Time in the West as quasi-American - and I know for a fact that this wasn't for any pre-calculated polemical reason; it's just that when I enumerated the films that meant the most to me personally, they tended to hail from my own side of the Atlantic. For whatever reason, they speak to me on a more fundamental level,
And that's how it should be done imo, naming only those which one loves the most. And no compromises like "one film per director" or "it must feature a silent film" or it must this or it must that, just the personal favourites.
It would be better if S&S did not ask for the "greatest film", but for the favourites.

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senseabove
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Re: Sight & Sound

#905 Post by senseabove » Fri Mar 17, 2023 2:58 pm

You're presuming that one cannot do both, and implying that any secondary parameter for selecting 10 titles nullifies someone's votes for and love of the films, i.e. that one cannot think Jeanne Dielmann truly is among the greatest films, and that 2001 truly is among the greatest films, and make a legitimate choice to include the former over the latter. The very prospect of limiting one's selection to ten (or 15, or 100!) inevitably requires some form of winnowing; if a critic truly could only name 10 (or 15, or 100!) contenders for their personal greatest films list, my reaction would be that they don't have the breadth of experience to justify being asked in the first place, and a list that is only obvious canon classics is just a notch below that. (Hell, I'd say if picking 10 and only 10 for any given decade of the past century were a cakewalk, they probably don't deserve to be asked.) But it is entirely possible for someone to both select 10 films they truly think are among the greatest and recognize that doing so is both a personal and a political choice. I'm sure many of the critics who voted for Jeanne Dielman and not 2001 or Vertigo still think the latter are great films, possibly among the greatest films, but recognize that they are plenty popular enough that selecting them reveals nothing interesting about their taste, the films themselves, or the broad history of film.

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colinr0380
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Re: Sight & Sound

#906 Post by colinr0380 » Fri Mar 17, 2023 3:25 pm

MichaelB wrote:
Fri Mar 17, 2023 11:30 am
(And mention of Daisies reminds me of a friend complaining about "too many spoilers" in Peter Hames' exhaustive plot descriptions in his book The Czechoslovak New Wave - but there was a reason for this: when the first edition was published in the mid-1980s, most of these films were pretty much impossible to see, and a pretty hefty proportion of them had never been given English-friendly distribution. Hames was acutely aware of this, hence him consciously trying to create verbal substitutes for watching the films, as futile as that exercise might seem with a film like Daisies! I first saw about a dozen or so of these films at the turn of the 1990s thanks to a combination of a BBC2 and NFT season, but I didn't get a chance to explore them properly, especially the less fêted titles, for at least another fifteen years.)
This is a tangent from the main topic of the Sight & Sound list but that is also what made the Pete Tombs Mondo Macabro book so eye-opening and precious to me when first reading it in the late 1990s - all of those films that realistically at the time I would never have the possibility of seeing (either because they would not get released on video, or turn up on television) meant that the in depth synopsis of various films was very much appreciated as the next best thing to actually getting to see them myself. I also think back to that passage in Martin Scorsese's Personal Journey Through American Cinema film where he talks about seeing the reproduced stills in film books and making up his own idea of the film from just those images and from that remove. As someone who spent most of my teenage years poring over the reviews in the 1994 edition of the Radio Times Film and Video guide by Derek Winnert rather than actually watching films, I have always really liked that different experience of reading about a film secondhand compared to seeing them firsthand. Its not a substitute but you are seeing something as filtered through the eyes and opinions of another, even just in an 'objective' synopsis, and that can be a valuable, enjoyable and entertaining experience in itself.

There can be a fine line between a pure synopsis and a review (which is why I appreciated Sight & Sound handily illustrating both in their review section... at least until recent years, when the synopses got dropped. Which I think was a mistake, for the purpose of a synopsis working as a written historical record for future readers, but I digress), but I do feel that the best critics have to describe the contents of the work before they can begin to talk about it in more detail, because you cannot take for granted that your reader will be coming to it with that pre-existing knowledge. I do also feel that if someone is reading a book about films (or watching that Scorsese film) then you have to expect a certain amount of 'spoilers' as a given, since otherwise what is the point of reading about films in the first place? And if a film is of any worth at all it can still have its entire 'plot' described and it will still be worth tracking down and seeing for yourself. Reading the detailed plot synopses of something like Witch With Flying Head or Organ in the Mondo Macabro book made me more interested in seeing them rather than less, simply because I could not believe half of the plot details that were being related were actually true, and was left wondering just how they could have pulled it off visually!

(Of course that was in my just months pre-getting onto the internet 1998 days where books were all I had to wildly extrapolate from, and fantasise about, when nowadays I could just Google a trailer and see the slightly shonky visual effects in all of their gory glory!)
Last edited by colinr0380 on Fri Mar 17, 2023 3:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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hearthesilence
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Re: Sight & Sound

#907 Post by hearthesilence » Fri Mar 17, 2023 3:50 pm

MichaelB wrote:
Fri Mar 17, 2023 11:30 am
Oh, absolutely. Take Jeanne Dielman itself, for instance - I've been aware of its reputation for decades, but opportunities to actually see it have been sporadic in the extreme until surprisingly recently.

Ditto Daisies, which I first caught on BBC2 circa 1990 thanks to its reputation preceding it, but I don't think I had the chance to see it even once between then and whenever Second Run brought out their original DVD.

And I can confirm on the basis of six years' first-hand experience that neither of them played the London rep circuit in the first half of the 1990s at least, and most likely over a considerably longer period - Jeanne Dielman's length would have militated against it.

But both films are now readily available.
I've posted before on the impact restorations and revivals have had on the poll's top ten alone (ex: Vertigo, L'Atalante, Sunrise, all launched into the top ten due to similar revivals that following long periods of unavailability), but the quality and quantity of what's been either re-evaluated or rescued in the past 15 years is extremely remarkable. I first took notice when Killer of Sheep was finally made legally available after 30 years, which was a year after Army of Shadows was finally given a proper U.S. release. Then someone found most of the remaining long-lost footage for Metropolis. Out 1 and the full-length version of A Brighter Summer Day were actually restored and made available. In the meantime, I remember watching Daisies and discovering Agnès Varda (a screening presented by Dana Stevens) in 2009, just as they began their ascent - they had already been recognized as great, but undeservedly in the margins. (As some pointed out, even major books on French cinema in the '60s would barely mention Varda.) And personal favorites of mine, Claire Denis and Terence Davies, miraculously seem to be enjoying the height of their careers, with Denis becoming a household name and Davies writing and directing film after film. Back in 2009, I had to talk up Beau Travail knowing that no one I knew was able to rent it, and I wasn't sure if Davies would ever get to make a scripted film again.

Robin Davies
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Re: Sight & Sound

#908 Post by Robin Davies » Sat Mar 18, 2023 9:58 am

colinr0380 wrote:
Fri Mar 17, 2023 3:25 pm
This is a tangent from the main topic of the Sight & Sound list but that is also what made the Pete Tombs Mondo Macabro book so eye-opening and precious to me when first reading it in the late 1990s - all of those films that realistically at the time I would never have the possibility of seeing (either because they would not get released on video, or turn up on television) meant that the in depth synopsis of various films was very much appreciated as the next best thing to actually getting to see them myself. I also think back to that passage in Martin Scorsese's Personal Journey Through American Cinema film where he talks about seeing the reproduced stills in film books and making up his own idea of the film from just those images and from that remove. As someone who spent most of my teenage years poring over the reviews in the 1994 edition of the Radio Times Film and Video guide by Derek Winnert rather than actually watching films, I have always really liked that different experience of reading about a film secondhand compared to seeing them firsthand. Its not a substitute but you are seeing something as filtered through the eyes and opinions of another, even just in an 'objective' synopsis, and that can be a valuable, enjoyable and entertaining experience in itself.

There can be a fine line between a pure synopsis and a review (which is why I appreciated Sight & Sound handily illustrating both in their review section... at least until recent years, when the synopses got dropped. Which I think was a mistake, for the purpose of a synopsis working as a written historical record for future readers, but I digress), but I do feel that the best critics have to describe the contents of the work before they can begin to talk about it in more detail, because you cannot take for granted that your reader will be coming to it with that pre-existing knowledge. I do also feel that if someone is reading a book about films (or watching that Scorsese film) then you have to expect a certain amount of 'spoilers' as a given, since otherwise what is the point of reading about films in the first place? And if a film is of any worth at all it can still have its entire 'plot' described and it will still be worth tracking down and seeing for yourself. Reading the detailed plot synopses of something like Witch With Flying Head or Organ in the Mondo Macabro book made me more interested in seeing them rather than less, simply because I could not believe half of the plot details that were being related were actually true, and was left wondering just how they could have pulled it off visually!

(Of course that was in my just months pre-getting onto the internet 1998 days where books were all I had to wildly extrapolate from, and fantasise about, when nowadays I could just Google a trailer and see the slightly shonky visual effects in all of their gory glory!)
The trouble is the real film can sometimes fail to live up to the imaginary film which is conjured up by stills and critical praise. Vampyr has the most stunning set of stills of any movie so when I finally got to see it I was slightly disappointed. It took several subsequent viewings to really appreciate it. Likewise, Polanski’s Repulsion couldn’t quite live up to Ivan Butler’s lavish praise in his book Horror in the Cinema.

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Lighthouse
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Re: Sight & Sound

#909 Post by Lighthouse » Mon Mar 20, 2023 1:16 pm

exidor wrote:
Fri Mar 17, 2023 6:23 am
Lighthouse wrote:
Fri Mar 17, 2023 5:06 am
If Benning really thinks that his films are the best, then his list is okay, otherwise he is only a "fun" voter. Same for all those list which vote only or mostly for films by women. etc
What about those who vote only or mostly for films by men?
Nothing, I fear ...

How much films so far were made by women?
2% ?
1% ?
Maybe even less than 1%. I'm pretty sure less than 1% before 2000.

It is a sad fact, but it is a fact that until today most film were made by men, it is only recently that more and more women enter the director's chair. And that's good, and that will increase. Also now much more women work as critics than in the last century. And this will change the view on cinema too.

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Black Hat
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Re: Sight & Sound

#910 Post by Black Hat » Fri Mar 31, 2023 4:37 pm

hearthesilence wrote:
Fri Mar 17, 2023 3:50 pm
Back in 2009, I had to talk up Beau Travail knowing that no one I knew was able to rent it, and I wasn't sure if Davies would ever get to make a scripted film again.
The trajectory of Beau Travail going from an underseen excellent film to an overseen overrated film fascinates me, is its popularity because of Barry Jenkins? I'm sorry to say that how popular Denis has become with a certain kind of person, the smug type, has really turned me off her work. It doesn't help that she hasn't made a good film in years either.

pistolwink
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Re: Sight & Sound

#911 Post by pistolwink » Sat Apr 01, 2023 1:34 am

Huh? Beau travail was greeted as an instant classic in 1999–2000.

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Matt
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Sight & Sound

#912 Post by Matt » Sat Apr 01, 2023 8:26 pm

“Underseen” still applies, at least in the US, thanks to New Yorker Films’ typically rotten distribution, typically rotten DVD, and abrupt closure in 2009. I think most of the younger (~under 40) “Film Twitter” critics are likely to have seen it only upon the recent restoration.

rrenault
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Re: Sight & Sound

#913 Post by rrenault » Tue Apr 04, 2023 11:11 pm

Black Hat wrote:
Fri Mar 31, 2023 4:37 pm
hearthesilence wrote:
Fri Mar 17, 2023 3:50 pm
Back in 2009, I had to talk up Beau Travail knowing that no one I knew was able to rent it, and I wasn't sure if Davies would ever get to make a scripted film again.
The trajectory of Beau Travail going from an underseen excellent film to an overseen overrated film fascinates me, is its popularity because of Barry Jenkins? I'm sorry to say that how popular Denis has become with a certain kind of person, the smug type, has really turned me off her work. It doesn't help that she hasn't made a good film in years either.
Hmm…I’m not sure I’d call Beau Travail overseen. It still only has about 12,000 IMDb ratings. The typical acclaimed Antonioni or Ozu film has more, and I don’t see anyone judging those films by their audience or calling them “overseen” in quite the same way you are with Denis. I don’t see why Beau Travail performing well in the poll needs to be a turnoff in and of itself when we’re not holding the world cinema dinosaurs, Ozu and Antonioni included, to that same standard. Does Godard not have his share of “smug” Film Twitter fans too?

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Re: Sight & Sound

#914 Post by Noiretirc » Fri Apr 07, 2023 9:58 pm

Confession: I never knew anything (ie I didn't know it existed!) about Beau Travail until this poll.

(By all means, make fun of me now.)

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colinr0380
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Re: Sight & Sound

#915 Post by colinr0380 » Sat Apr 08, 2023 6:58 am

Now 1988's Chocolat, that's an obscure Claire Denis film! And is interesting to see paired together with White Material.

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Matt
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Sight & Sound

#916 Post by Matt » Sat Apr 08, 2023 1:18 pm

Ironically, in the US I would say Chocolat might be one of Denis’ least obscure films as it was the only film of hers distributed on home video by a major studio (MGM, in their “World Films” line, alongside films like Fanny and Alexander and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown). You can still buy it on VHS from Amazon!

Of course, this was at least as of 20 years ago, which in terms of this S+S list might as well be 70 years ago in terms of current cachet and availability. And if we’re going by the dubious metric of IMDb ratings, which have an inherent recency bias, it has less than a third of Beau Travail’s.

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zedz
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Re: Sight & Sound

#917 Post by zedz » Sat Apr 08, 2023 6:37 pm

Yes, I’d say that, before Beau Travail, Chocolat was Denis’s only film that wasn’t obscure.

S’en fout la mort and US Go Home are her great “obscure” features.

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hearthesilence
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Re: Sight & Sound

#918 Post by hearthesilence » Sat Apr 08, 2023 7:07 pm

zedz wrote:
Sat Apr 08, 2023 6:37 pm
Yes, I’d say that, before Beau Travail, Chocolat was Denis’s only film that wasn’t obscure.

S’en fout la mort and US Go Home are her great “obscure” features.
I'll agree with this. I actually have a vague recollection of Chocolat being shown in one of the French classes at my hometown school several years in a row.

I think it may have fallen out of circulation for a while in the U.S. but now that it's been restored in 4K (and just finished a run at Lincoln Center), it'll be everywhere soon enough.

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MichaelB
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Re: Sight & Sound

#919 Post by MichaelB » Sun Apr 09, 2023 1:29 pm

zedz wrote:
Sat Apr 08, 2023 6:37 pm
Yes, I’d say that, before Beau Travail, Chocolat was Denis’s only film that wasn’t obscure.

S’en fout la mort and US Go Home are her great “obscure” features.
I worked for the UK distributor of Chocolat shortly after its UK release, so it wasn't the least bit obscure to me. In fact, if I remember rightly, Chocolat was one of the titles that put them on the indie distribution map in the first place.

But the same distributor opted not to pick up S'en fout la mort because of the near-certainty that it would be cut to comply with the 1937 Cinematograph Films (Animals) Act, which takes no account of artistic merit when assessing the legality or otherwise of shots of animal cruelty carried out specifically for the film.

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Re: Sight & Sound

#920 Post by colinr0380 » Sun Apr 09, 2023 2:27 pm

I stand corrected then! :wink:

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exidor
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Re: Sight & Sound

#921 Post by exidor » Fri Apr 14, 2023 3:16 am

Does anyone know if they've given up doing the annual indexes now? 2022's hasn't materialised yet as far as I can tell. It'll be a shame if they have because that's pretty much the only way to navigate the digital archive.

kubelkind
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Re: Sight & Sound

#922 Post by kubelkind » Fri Apr 14, 2023 8:47 am

the same distributor opted not to pick up S'en fout la mort because of the near-certainty that it would be cut to comply with the 1937 Cinematograph Films (Animals) Act, which takes no account of artistic merit when assessing the legality or otherwise of shots of animal cruelty carried out specifically for the film.

I recall reading somewhere (maybe IMDb) a set report that suggests the cockfights were staged to some extent, i.e the birds separated before they could actually hurt each other. This seems to tally with the evidence onscreen (the shots of the fights are very brief), though I'm not sure how the scenes involving dead or injured birds would be explained. It'll be interesting to see what happens when someone tries to get the new restoration of this (one of Denis' very best, for me) shown in the UK.

Not to get involved in a pissing contest, but Man No Run is clearly Denis' most "obscure" feature, and I like it a lot, but then I love Les Têtes Brulées. Who in their right mind wouldn't love this! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oESRtPbnaAw

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GaryC
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Re: Sight & Sound

#923 Post by GaryC » Sat Apr 15, 2023 5:13 am

kubelkind wrote:
Fri Apr 14, 2023 8:47 am
the same distributor opted not to pick up S'en fout la mort because of the near-certainty that it would be cut to comply with the 1937 Cinematograph Films (Animals) Act, which takes no account of artistic merit when assessing the legality or otherwise of shots of animal cruelty carried out specifically for the film.

I recall reading somewhere (maybe IMDb) a set report that suggests the cockfights were staged to some extent, i.e the birds separated before they could actually hurt each other. This seems to tally with the evidence onscreen (the shots of the fights are very brief), though I'm not sure how the scenes involving dead or injured birds would be explained. It'll be interesting to see what happens when someone tries to get the new restoration of this (one of Denis' very best, for me) shown in the UK.
I saw the film at the London Film Festival (with English earphone translation rather than subtitles) and from memory there's a prominent credit saying that no animals were harmed in production, with the cocks fitted with plastic spurs rather than steel ones. That said, the cocks are still fighting each other so I wonder if that will still fall foul of the Animals Act, as that covers "goading to fury" as well as killings or injuries. Given that a distributor will have to pay the BBFC to classify the film even if it is cut or rejected, I'm wondering if anyone in the UK will go near it.

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Sight & Sound

#924 Post by MichaelB » Sat Apr 15, 2023 5:39 am

The reason why it wasn’t picked up for theatrical distribution was definitely the Animals Act - I know there was a lot of umming and aahing because the company I worked for very much wanted to acquire it, but they clearly agreed with your interpretation. They may also have taken informal advice from the BBFC over it - it was over three decades ago so I can’t remember.

That and Celia were the films that taught me first-hand about why UK distributors need to be thoroughly familiar with the Animals Act - Celia wasn’t cut, but the BBFC did flag up the scene when a rabbit is branded with a red-hot poker, and the Australian producers had to confirm that it was a case of real rabbit and fake poker in the medium shot and fake rabbit and real poker in the close-up. Happily, the evidence of the film itself matched that description, so they let it through - and I remember them saying how relieved they were that they didn’t have to cut it, because they appreciated that it was a pivotally important scene. But the Animals Act doesn’t recognise context or artistic merit, which is why it’s such a pain to have to deal with.

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Aunt Peg
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Re: Sight & Sound

#925 Post by Aunt Peg » Sat Apr 15, 2023 11:13 am

Bad Boy Bubby is another film that had censorship issues in the UK on it's initial release which are outlined in the book Bad Boy Bubby Controversies published in 2013 or 2014. The film never had any issues in Australia and most films featuring animal cruelty don't.

Some festivals give warnings (like the Melbourne Film Festival) but others (like the Sydney Film Festival) don't. I was beyond horrified when I saw Hukkle (2002). No warning in the program about animal cruelty which included a very graphic scene of a cat being poisoned to death. I had no idea that the film contained that content and when watching that scene I was at first unsure what was happening to the cat only to realise once the scene was well under way. I felt like throwing up.

I admit that had I known in advance I still would have seen the film given its prestige but as least I would have been prepared and could have closed my eyes and covered my ears.

I note that Hukkle received a UK release but was understandably cut. It never turned up in Australia beyond festival screenings and I really doubt any cuts would have been made had been submitted for classification.

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