1960s List Discussion and Suggestions (Lists Project Vol. 3)

[Wu.Qinghua]

I agree it's most likely due to the sheer amount of great 60s films, so the introductory question's a bit rhetorical. But it's a great movie nevertheless. And guess what! I've never seen Xala (I'll have to do this asap - and I'll vote for Gutierrez Alea, too).

[thirtyframesasecond]

I think this list, more than any other, is going to be foreign language dominated for me. In my provisional list, it was something like single figure American/English films. There's just so much going on elsewhere in the world, new cinemas emerging that are hard to ignore.

One area that's not mentioned much is East Germany. I saw Kurt Maetzig's 1965 film "The Rabbit is Me" this weekend, made during the brief thaw when Krushchev was in power in Moscow. It was quickly banned for its pessimism, exposing the corruption of the state in the arrest of a young man and the blacklisting of his sister from university.

[zedz]

My top East German pick - though it probably won't reach my top fifty - is Traces of the Stones. Seems to be in print in R1. The stills make it look like a Kaurismaki film -- Leningrad Cowboys Go Construction - but it's actually a surprisingly nuanced social realist film that deals with Party influence with considerable ambivalence. Hence its suppression for several decades.

[swo17]

Let's talk deadline. We're only about two months away from the originally scheduled one, but I've only managed to see about half of what I was hoping to fit in during the entire project (and not for lack of trying). Is anyone else in a similar position? How would everyone feel about adding another two months, putting the deadline at May 19th?

[domino harvey]

It's not a real List Project list until the delays factor in! So, sure

[knives]

Let's talk deadline. We're only about two months away from the originally scheduled one, but I've only managed to see about half of what I was hoping to fit in during the entire project (and not for lack of trying). Is anyone else in a similar position? How would everyone feel about adding another two months, putting the deadline at May 19th?

I still need to see about two thousand films so I wouldn't mind (well a minimum of a hundred anyway).

[Dansu Dansu Dansu]

Let's talk deadline. We're only about two months away from the originally scheduled one, but I've only managed to see about half of what I was hoping to fit in during the entire project (and not for lack of trying). Is anyone else in a similar position? How would everyone feel about adding another two months, putting the deadline at May 19th?

That would be a relief. My ranked list (over a hundred strong -- not bad for me) is still dwarfed by my watch/revisit list.

[swo17]

OK, I'm calling that a quorum. Deadline pushed back to May 19th.

[Tommaso]

Fine with me, too. Although I already ask for a similar extension for the 70s list, which is the period where my personal cinematic 'terra incognita' really sets in (whereas I already have the hardest time since the 30s list trying to decide which of the many marvellous films from the 60s I have to exclude from my list...)

This one, for example:

Black Girl aka La noire de ... (Ousmane Sembene, France, Senegal 1966)

How come this beautiful film didn't make the Top100 last time? It's not only the first African film to win international recognition but also an exemplary 60s take on migration and racism telling the story of an African woman taking up a job as maid in, as far as I remember, Marseilles and featuring beautiful compositions as well as a marvellous sound track. The Kino DVD might be seriously flawed due to rendering a short color passage b/w, but this shouldn't prevent you from checking the film out (if you hadn't done that already). Spotlighted.

Thanks for the recommendation. The French disc is similarly flawed, as it's entirely in b&w, too. The film seems originally to have been 15 min. longer and was shortened before release because it was apparently easier to get distribution for it as a 'short' film of 56 min. The colour sequences seem to have been excised completely, or what remained of them rendered in b&w for the release print (as far as I understand from my limited knowledge of French; there's an explanation of this in the on-screen text extras of the French disc).

It's certainly an interesting film, but very much of its time. Even though the story is apparently based on a real incident, I can't help finding the politics of the film a little bit too obvious and the depiction of the French couple a little bit too clichéd. What Sembene may or may not have regarded as 'racism' might perhaps equally be seen as an outcome of class differences. I'm not sure whether a French girl from the lower classes would have been treated any differently at the time than this young girl from Dakar. However, it's indeed a powerful performance by the female lead, and as a film it's quite impressive, too (though I'm not a fan of voice-overs, on which this film relies very heavily; simply too didactic for my taste).

The French disc also has Sembene's first short film, Borom Sarret, as an extra. I found this quite interesting: a study of one day in the life of a horsecart-driver in Dakar. Curiously, when the camera films the people in the streets from the horse cart I couldn't help being reminded of the very early 'city life' films by the likes of Mitchell & Kenyon. Made 60 years later than the films of those pioneers of cinema, the reaction of the people to the camera is very similar and shows how much of a novelty filmmaking must have been at Dakar at the time.

[domino harvey]

Nine months should be the default standard now that people treat these lists as viewing exercises and not mere compiling jaunts (which wasn't always the case)

[Gregory]

La Noire de... is an example of politically engaged cinema, arguably coming out of a similar aesthetic movement as Battle of Algiers and other films that grappled with colonialism at that time, so to say that it was too openly political as a criticism per se seems difficult to understand, given the aesthetic intent behind the film from the beginning, which I believe was polemical but also something more than that.

To say that events like those depicted in the film could be explained purely in class terms seems impossible to fathom, given how large the legacy of racism and colonialism looms for those in the diaspora. In concrete terms, a lower-class French woman would have had legal rights and recourse that were not available to someone like the maid in this film.
The very title of it (not the English rendition), particularly the ellipsis, seems to comment on the way that the main character represents some kind of exoticized Africanness to the French, while, to them, it is unknown or unimportant what real, specific place she comes from. Race and colonialism figure heavily in the film's final sequences and in the symbolism of masks throughout.
Yet I think that Sembene would have agreed about the importance of class and social hierarchies. In fact, one of the things powerfully demonstrated later in his Xala is how political relationships and oppression do not simply boil down to race.

The heavy reliance on voiceover probably has to do with the film lacking the technical requirements to make a proper feature-length film: specifically the way that post-synchronization was used. I feel that it's a great film for what it is, but some allowances must be made for it being the first feature film to come out of sub-Saharan Africa. An incredibly powerful effort that falters a bit on many of the technical grounds due to the conditions in which it was produced.

[Tommaso]

La Noire de... is an example of politically engaged cinema, arguably coming out of a similar aesthetic movement as Battle of Algiers and other films that grappled with colonialism at that time, so to say that it was too openly political as a criticism per se seems difficult to understand, given the aesthetic intent behind the film from the beginning, which I believe was polemical but also something more than that.

My problem is not that it is too openly political, but that it is not differentiated enough. The comparison to Battle of Algiers makes this very clear IMHO. In that film, even the French colonel (or whatever his rank is) is shown not as a simple sadist, but as someone who does things the way he does because of the system he's in and because of the limited ways his ideals/background/culture allow him to act. Both sides are represented convincingly, even though the sympathies very clearly lie with the Algerian people. In places, the 'mistress' in La Noire de... or the behaviour of one of the guests who wants to kiss the Dakar girl because he "has never kissed a black woman before" border on caricature instead.

I agree about the difference in legal rights between a French country girl and this African woman, of course, but this doesn't necessarily mean they would have been treated much differently.

The very title of it (not the English rendition), particularly the ellipsis, seems to comment on the way that the main character represents some kind of exoticized Africanness to the French, while, to them, it is unknown or unimportant what real, specific place she comes from. Race and colonialism figure heavily in the film's final sequences and in the symbolism of masks throughout.

Indeed, and these sequences are very powerful but again in my view a bit too 'obvious'. The French husband being 'pursued' by the boy wearing that symbol of Africa... this works in its way, but is far less complex than anything in "Algiers".

I don't want to diminish the film's importance in any way, especially in its function of giving the Senegal its own cinematic voice. Perhaps one can call it a 'protest' film not entirely dissimilar to some of the class-conscious leftist films in the 20s in the Soviet Union or the Weimar Republic which also didn't care too much about presenting the 'enemy' fairly?

The heavy reliance on voiceover probably has to do with the film lacking the technical requirements to make a proper feature-length film: specifically the way that post-synchronization was used.

Not sure about that. Sembene didn't care too much about the voice of the street singer in Borrom Sarret being totally out-of-sync, and neither did I. This kind of voice-over seems rather a device to make sure that the film's message couldn't be misunderstood (for instance as just a personal psychological problem of the main character). The voice-over device was annoyingly over-used in many German films made directly after WW II, for instance, and I suspect for similar reasons.

[TMDaines]

I'm trying to participate in this - more in the sense of watching than writing (at the moment, in any case), because I thought it would help me work through my keyvip - but you could give me two years and I know it would never be enough time. Can I ask you guys how many films you roughly seen in your life and how many from the 60s you've seen? My number will be pathetically small considering I only got into cinema three and a bit years ago, and perhaps only seriously in the last two years. I'm just curious more than anything.

[domino harvey]

I'm trying to participate in this - more in the sense of watching than writing (at the moment, in any case), because I thought it would help me work through my keyvip - but you could give me two years and I know it would never be enough time. Can I ask you guys how many films you roughly seen in your life and how many from the 60s you've seen? My number will be pathetically small considering I only got into cinema three and a bit years, and perhaps only seriously in the last two years. I'm just curious more than anything.

No earthly way for me to figure that out, but I did peruse the previous 60s List Top 100s earlier today and realized I've seen all but thirty (combined total) of the films that made the cut the last two times, which surprised/delighted me. But they are pretty canon-heavy, so I guess it's not too shocking. Still, gave me a nice new To Watch pile, as though I needed such a thing!

[Tommaso]

I'm trying to participate in this - more in the sense of watching than writing (at the moment, in any case), because I thought it would help me work through my keyvip - but you could give me two years and I know it would never be enough time.

True, of course. But I don't have the feeling that I need to watch each and every film that is mentioned here or on previous lists, but rather that I want to get a feeling for the period and its diverse movements as a whole, and of course to fill in the gaps of those films everyone talks about which I haven't watched yet nevertheless.

In some cases I simply 'know' (gut feeling) that some things are not for me: Godard is an example. I've seen five or six films from him, and I simply don't feel the need to check out those I haven't because the impression so far is simply that his films don't do much for me. But then on the other hand there is someone like Yoshida whom I've only really discovered with this listmaking and whose works I really find impressive and feel the need to delve deeper in, even though - given how crowded my list is already - I'm not even sure whether any of his films will finally make it onto my list.

[matrixschmatrix]

Yeah, I've submitted three lists so far, and I don't think there's been a final list where I've seen more than 60 or 70 of the winners- but you watch as much as you can, and at some point what you choose to watch reflects your taste almost as much as how you react to what you actually manage to see, I think. It's always been as much about the discussion and the orphans and so forth as the actual list, at any rate.

[zedz]

And you're never going to have all the great films of any period under your belt. There are 1960s masterpieces that none of us have seen yet. Part of the fun of these projects is seeing how tastes change and how successfully or not new discoveries / eccentric enthusiasms fare in the final count.

Maybe the next time the 60s list comes round, your own personal list will be entirely composed of films you hadn't even seen this time around. That's a good thing, and it's certainly no reason to put off submitting a list until an imagined time of perfect enlightenment that will never actually come.

That said, and as noted in other contexts, if you're so fresh that you can barely come up with a list of 50 films from the decade that you actually like, it might be best to sit this round out, but I doubt that's the case for an enthusiast like TMDaines.

[matrixschmatrix]

I also think 6-9 months is more than enough time to get a sufficient number of movies under your belt to have a solid 50 film list, even if you're starting from nil. I think with the 30s list, there were maybe four or five on my final list I had seen before the project started- but if you see enough to make a list where everything on it is a movie you can stand behind, I think that's a valid list.

I also seriously always feel way behind everyone else on viewership (I think we had a similar discussion for the 50s project, where I found out I watched maybe a quarter of the movies some of the other people did) so I might be making excuses for myself, but to my way of thinking anyone who's seriously engaged with the material is a good addition.

[terabin]

OK, I'm calling that a quorum. Deadline pushed back to May 19th.

Sounds great. I'm much more likely to participate with the extra two months.

Can I ask you guys how many films you roughly seen in your life and how many from the 60s you've seen?

Most people on the forum I would guess will have seen thousands if not tens of thousands of films, but your mileage will vary. I don't think that's the point. Do you have 50 films from the decade that you can speak to - that you would be willing to defend - at this very moment? From my perspective, that's the requirement for participation. I easily have a couple hundred films from the decade that I've seen and liked, but what films have you seen that stick in your memory and have made an impact such that you would be willing to go to bat for them? That's why folks that have seen hundreds of films from the decade still scramble to make this deadline: how much do I really like this film I haven't seen in 10 years? What do I have to say about it? And: let's watch the outliers and eccentric choices that other forum members are excited about from the decade and speak well of in discussion. Curiosity in other people's pandas; a Sad Panda (personal favorite) turned into an also-ran because of a well-written post, a fellow forum member having a thrilling viewing experience as a result, and the film included in that fellow forum member's list, all of which wouldn't have happened without the plug. That's the excitement here in participating in these lists!

[TMDaines]

Oh, I fully agree. I don't plan on submitting a list unless I have fifty films that I can really define as "great" or very close to it (and I try not to use that term lightly). Any potential list I submit will probably have a specific flavour, if only because I focus on collecting and watching German, Italian and now Ukrainian cinema - and that doesn't mean I am biased towards films from a particular country - but I guess many of us have specific genre or national cinema interests, which are naturally reflected in our greatest films lists, simply because that is what we watch the most of. I just want to see most of the canonical great too and I'm not sure whether I'd feel comfortable submitting a list, if I weren't to have seen films like Au hasard Balthazar, Harakiri and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, i.e. stuff that is indisputably part of the canon. Outside of that, my viewing will obviously tend towards the far less well known German, Italian and Ukrainian films.

[zedz]

A bunch of highly recommended experimental films released by the excellent French label Re:Voir -

One (Yoko Ono, 1966) – Flux Film Anthology (Re:Voir) – I wish more of Ono’s films were available. Given her cultural prominence (for better or worse), you’d think she’d be a strong candidate for a By Brakhage-style release. Her sublime collaboration with John Lennon, Apotheosis, will make my 70s list, but you’ll have to track it down illicitly. This miniature is one of Fluxus’ super-slow one-shot films, and it’s gorgeously seductive: a match being lit, shot at 2000 fps with a scientific camera. David Lynch: “I wish I’d thought of that!”; Yoko Ono: “You will, David, you will.”

Smoking (Joe Jones, 1966) – Flux Film Anthology (Re:Voir) – Possibly the most beautiful of the extreme slow motion films shot with that scientific camera one night in 1966. A face is wreathed in cigarette smoke which shifts at glacier pace over the course of several minutes. Yoko Ono’s ultra-slow films (see above) are breathtaking enough, but even she singled this one out as a favourite.

The Song of Italy (1967) – Jonas Mekas (Potemkine / Re:Voir / Agnes B.) – Of course, the big Mekas film of the 60s, and the one I’ll probably be including in my personal top 50, is the compendious Walden, but that’s an unwieldy container of multitudes (that’s correspondingly hard to talk about). This, the longest and strongest of Mekas’ ‘Travel Songs’, gives a wonderfully concentrated taste of what he’s about. Sometimes his entire body of work seems like it could have derived from Fischinger’s Walking from Munich to Berlin, but this is the film that seems closest to that possible model: a non-stop flurry of diaristic activities and impressions, the time-compressed essence of a complex experience.

The Flicker (Tony Conrad, 1966) – Dreaminimalist (Re:Voir) – A landmark materialist film that works very well on Re:Voir’s DVD. After a comically drawn-out ‘WARNING’ screen and quirky titles, we’re presented with a stark white screen, which Conrad interrupts in increasingly frenetic ways over the course of half an hour. It’s a simple binary film, like Kubelka’s (very different in effect) Arnulf Rainer (which you’ll never get to watch on DVD), but what you ‘see’ in the subliminal patterns of black and white frames is much more than what is objectively there on the screen. This seems to be a very direct parallel with Conrad’s work with harmonics. You go to a Conrad concert to hear the notes that nobody’s playing, but which are nevertheless oppressively present, swarming around you, filling the hall. While watching this film, at times it felt like I was watching the visual equivalent: a swarm of static frantically filling the surface of the screen. At other times, I was watching complicated shapes slowly morphing deep within the screen. And sometimes I experienced a sort of horizontal vertigo, like I was falling across the room into the screen. And then, when a stray piece of print damage mars a single frame, it magically hangs there in the air for several impossible seconds. All in all, an utterly simple, utterly amazing film. And the whole point is that your mileage will vary, since most of the film is in your head.

My Name Is Oona (Gunvor Nelson, 1969) – Departures (Re:Voir) – Nelson’s previous film Schmeerguntz, a landmark feminist film in which found footage and magazine cut-outs of glamour girls are starkly juxtaposed with images of a pregnant woman cleaning, exercising, vomiting, wiping her baby’s arse, is probably the main event, but its transgressions and techniques seem much more like a time capsule piece to me than does this lyrical, eerie, invigorating portrait of the artist’s daughter. Multiple exposures of high-contrast, sun-dappled youth, often layered with abstracted nature imagery make for a giddy, tactile visual experience, and it’s all accompanied by a hypnotically processed soundtrack, along the lines of Steve Reich’s ground-breaking “It’s Gonna Rain.” Reich actually gets namechecked at the end of the film, and imdb hands him a composer credit, but the composer on other of Nelson’s films (and, uh, an Ewoks TV series from the 80s), Pat Gleeson, is similarly thanked, so I’d take that with a grain of salt without additional verification.

Le Revelateur (Philippe Garrel, 1968) – Le Revelateur (Re:Voir) – This extended allegorical whatsit (mother, father and child enact various archetypal scenes) could have been excruciating, but even at such a young age, Garrel is so assured a filmmaker that the entire film is hypnotic and immediate. The stark black-and-white mise-en-scene is continually arresting, and every time the camera moves it becomes positively electrifying. Le lit de la vierge presents a more elaborate and specific version of the same basic idea (with the Christian references dialled up), but at the expense of some of this film’s intensity. The silence certainly helps in this regard, as it doubly rivets your attention to the unfolding tableaux.

Fun and Games for Everyone (Serge Bard, 1968) – Fun and Games for Everyone (Re:Voir) – The graphic intensity of this quasi-documentary, which eliminates shades of grey in the manner of the Olivier Musset canvases all the beautiful people are gathered to celebrate, transforms a Warholian event into a Warholian artwork in which its participants are simultaneously flattened and elevated into pop art.

[Yojimbo]

One great thing about the 1960s list is that we won't have so many arguments, as we did for the 'Horror' list, as to what constitutes a 1960s film.
Looking forward to this one; when I was compiling a 'Top 1,000' a few years back I was more than pleasantly surprised by what a great year for cinema the decade had been

[Yojimbo]

My top East German pick - though it probably won't reach my top fifty - is Traces of the Stones. Seems to be in print in R1. The stills make it look like a Kaurismaki film -- Leningrad Cowboys Go Construction - but it's actually a surprisingly nuanced social realist film that deals with Party influence with considerable ambivalence. Hence its suppression for several decades.

Looks like a cross between 'The Wild Bunch' and 'Even Dwarves Started Small'

[Gregory]

The Flicker is amazing. I had my doubts about whether it would work on a DVD, but it did, at least for me, sitting close to a large screen. I was "seeing" strange things, but still not really making them out, wherever my eyes traveled on the screen. I've read up on it here and there to try and understand how such simple patterns of alternating darkness and light could produce hallucinated imagery, but it was tough for me to fathom all of the perceptual psychology and the phenomena of vision and consciousness that Conrad was tapping into, so it seems largely like sorcery to me.
Here's the clearest description of it that I've read:

Normal sound projection is at 24 fps. Below about 4 fps, the only real effect is of the light switching on and off. But in the range from 6 to 18 fps, more or less, strange things occur. The Flicker moves gradually from 24 fps to 4 fps and then back out of the flicker range again. The first notable effect is usually a whirling and shattered array of intangible and diffused color patterns, probably a retinal after-image type of effect. Vision extends into the peripheral areas and actual images may be hallucinated. Then a hypnotic state commences, and the images become more intense. Fixing the eyes on one point is helpful or necessary in eliciting the fullest effects. The brain itself is directly involved in all of this; it is not coincidental that one of the principal brain-wave frequencies, the so-called alpha-rhythm, lies in the 8 to 16 cycles per second range. Hence the central nervous system itself must here be considered as a kind of sensory mechanism, though its role is not explicitly understood.

From there, what Conrad has to say is harder for me to follow.

As a side note, there is a photograph I love of an audience reaction to The Flicker. It shows a few old biddies crammed into seats in a crowded theater, surrounded by the types you'd more likely expect to see at such a screening. They're dressed conservatively and wearing old-fashioned hats, and they have their eyes directed away from the screen and their fingers plugged firmly in their ears.

[Wu.Qinghua]

My top East German pick - though it probably won't reach my top fifty - is Traces of the Stones. Seems to be in print in R1. The stills make it look like a Kaurismaki film -- Leningrad Cowboys Go Construction - but it's actually a surprisingly nuanced social realist film that deals with Party influence with considerable ambivalence. Hence its suppression for several decades.

Looks like a cross between 'The Wild Bunch' and 'Even Dwarves Started Small'

If you want to watch only one 60s feature film which has been produced in the GDR then you should definitely watch Traces of Stones. It might be Beyer's masterpiece and it's surely been a disaster that it got shelved in 1966. It's actually in the lead position on my list at the moment ...

And if you'd also like to watch an East German documentary, then by all means go for Heynowski and Scheumann's Der lachende Mann aka Laughing Man (maybe you can find it with English subs on youtube). I doubt you will regret watching their notorious camouflage interview with a West German soldier sipping Pernod while talking about fighting "against communism" in the Congo.