Women Directors List Discussion + Suggestions

[bottled spider]

That reminds me of another Canadian feature I don't think has been mentioned yet, Patricia Rozema's I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, which was quite a big deal in the little indie fishpond of 1987 (and I see was later voted one of the ten best Canadian films of all time). It's quirky and charming, and must have sold a lot of copies of Delibes' Lakme.

I saw this in the theatres when it came out, I think. I vaguely remember or misremember finding it precious and overly whimsical. But a glance through a couple reviews suggest it's better than my recollection. I won't be able to fit it in before the deadline, but maybe I'll check it out later, along with several more candidates I never got too.

Love Serenade (Barret, 1996) will be my "quirky independent" entry. Two sisters who live together in the small town of Sunray compete for a "celebrity" radio DJ who's moved in next door. I first saw it on television a while ago, and revisited it just for fun, not expecting it to be list worthy. It's kind of a silly film, and yet seeing it again, I was very much taken with its concrete details -- the décor of the various interiors, the clothing, the small town streets. Lots of little things to notice. And the two leads are very good. So what the hell, it went on the list.

[swo17]

Don't check the Passages thread, zedz

[zedz]

Don't check the Passages thread, zedz

Ah well, but what a career. I guess it's somebody else's turn to be the greatest living filmmaker. One more review to go (I haven't got a copy of her last film, Eternal Homecoming), for what might just be her best film.

[zedz]

I have finally (or penultimately) wrestled my list into the least dissatisfying form I can, ending up with ninety films on the big list. The films are so strong that numbers 26 through 50 and 51 through 75 really read more like parallel universe top 25s, so here are those parallel universe lists. All these films, of course, are excellent.

26. Beau Travail (Denis, 1999)
27. Certain Women (Reichardt, 2016)
28. Nana (Massadian, 2011)
29. India Song (Duras, 1975)
30. Brief Encounters (Muratova, 1968)
31. Cleo from 5 to 7 (Varda, 1962)
32. Apotheosis (Lennon / Ono, 1970)
33. Daughters of the Dust (Dash, 1992)
34. At Land (Deren, 1946)
35. The Hitch-Hiker (Lupino, 1953)
36. An Old Mistress (Breillat, 2007)
37. Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go (Longinotto, 2007)
38. Asparagus (Pitt, 1978)
39. Two Friends (Campion, 1986)
40. Take Care of My Cat (Jeong, 2001)
41. L’Age des possibles (Ferran, 1995)
42. Visages, Villages (Varda /JR , 2017)
43. Daisies (Chytilova, 1966)
44. Lights (Menken, 1967)
45. Vagabond (Varda, 1985)
46. Sweetness (Davies, 1992)
47. Forever (Honigmann, 2005)
48. Journey to the Sun (Ustaoglu, 1999)
49. Dorian Gray as Represented in the Popular Press (Ottinger, 1984)
50. US Go Home (Denis, 1994)

If somebody travelled back in time to the beginning of this project and told me that this was the list I ended up submitting, I would have 100% believed them. All of these are films I assumed would be in my top 25 when I started my rewatches.

Many of the films in the next batch are in the same category, though a number of second-tier films by favourite directors would have given this away as an also-rans list to slightly younger me.

51. A Girl’s Own Story (Campion, 1986)
52. The Holy Girl (Martel, 2004)
53. Ydessa, the Bears & etc. (Varda, 2004)
54. A and B in Ontario (Wieland / Frampton, 1984)
55. Archipelago (Hogg, 2010)
56. Light Music (Rhodes, 1975)
57. The Order of Myths (Brown, 2008)
58. Fuses (Schneeman, 1967)
59. Ulysse (Varda, 1983)
60. Mana Waka (Mita, 1990)
61. Wendy and Lucy (Reichardt, 2008)
62. 35 Rhums (Denis, 2008)
63. Bluebeard (Breillat, 2009)
64. Sisters in Law (Ayisi / Longinotto, 2005)
65. Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 60s in Brussells (Akerman, 1994)
66. Trouble Every Day (Denis, 2001)
67. The Tango Lesson (Potter, 1997)
68. Hey! You Wild Geese (Bobrova, 1991)
69. My Name Is Oona (Nelson, 2011)
70. Meek’s Cutoff (Reichardt, 2010)
71. The Tuner (Muratova, 2004)
72. Fly (Ono, 1970)
73. Jacquot de Nantes (Varda, 1991)
74. War Stories Our Mothers Never Told Us (Preston, 1995)
75. The Reunion (Odell, 2013)

[the preacher]

My 25 runners-up would be:
Brødre (2004)
Café Paradis (1950)
Coup de foudre (1983)
Dance, Girl, Dance (1940)
Das blaue Licht (1932)
Die Fremde (2010)
Døden er et kjærtegn (1949)
Dong fu ren (1968)
Dzhamilya (1969)
Europa Europa (1990)
Frozen River (2008)
Kamienne niebo (1959)
Koibumi (1953)
La guerre est déclarée (2011)
Le bonheur (1965)
Macu, la mujer del policía (1987)
Nirgendwo in Afrika (2001)
Nu ren si shi (1995)
Ostatni etap (1948)
Outrage (1950)
Rue cases nègres (1983)
Salaam Bombay! (1988)
Terra Sonâmbula (2007)
The Japanese Wife (2010)
Tri topolya na Plyushchikhe (1968)

[zedz]

One last round-up:


Melody for a Street Organ (Muratova, 2009) - A masterpiece, and quite different from her other masterpieces. In this film, she takes the dimensional fluidity of the first section of Two in One and integrates it smoothly into the whole film. The camera can swoop down on its protagonists from a great height, or soar up to describe their physical context (and isolation). This strikes me as Muratova's most Felliniesque film. I'm decidedly not a Fellini fan, but this film takes the aspects of his style I find most interesting (the grandiose artificiality and physicality of the sets), subtracts the narcissism (though Muratova does indulge in a delightful call-out to the plot of Second-Class Citizens and displays a big poster for Two in One), and applies that style to a compelling, focussed - if picaresque - narrative.


It's interesting that it took Muratova this long to direct her analysis of societal malaise towards the treatment of children. In her previous child-focussed films, they were either the symptoms of social rot (The Girl and Death) or witnesses / bystanders rather than victims (Among Grey Stones). In this film, her critique is entirely predicated on the way that adults are too venal, callous, suspicious or self-absorbed to recognize and address the need of Alyona and Nikita, two half-orphans who have fled the prospect of separation to try and find their fathers in the big city. They drift through dozens of scenarios and situations at the train station, on the streets, in private apartments, and in a large store, being casually victimized all the way. It's a Christmas tale, with all the pretty lights, gluttony and goofy antics just putting the kids' plight in starker relief.


Most of Muratova's regular players put in brief appearances, but her stylization of performance and dramaturgy is dialed down in favour of visual elegance and richness and direct empathy for the two leads. It's the entire situation that is grotesque, not the specific individuals they encounter, who are by and large not malicious - which somehow makes everything much much worse. Some great effects, as when a fairy godmother arrives at the eleventh hour - by palanquin! - and ascends into the sky in a thoroughly banal way, or when a replay of events on a security camera reveals a completely different version of a scene we'd already watched live, with the weird sense that it's the security camera footage which is biased and subjective.

The ending of the film is rather audacious:

SpoilerShow

It's not just downbeat, but brutally narratively frustrating. The siblings become separated when Alyona is caught by supermarket security and Nikita, who is on the brink of being rescued by the fairy godmother, is shuffled off into the snow due to staff indifference. While wandering around, he comes within a staircase of the father he's been searching for, but that's a rather conventional irony that's almost beside the point. What really jars is that the separation is final: the film doesn't return to Alyona to resolve her story, and instead follows Nikita as he finally finds shelter in a flat undergoing renovation, curls up on a bed and falls asleep. After Christmas, workmen enter the flat and discover him, and the film ends as they freeze in a parody of the Adoration of the Magi, surrounding a baby Jesus who has frozen to death.

The film is a major achievement from start to finish, exhibiting a mature, individual style that's quite different from the mature, individual style of Brief Encounters, or the mature, individual style of Long Farewells, or The Asthenic Syndrome, or the range of styles in Three Stories. It ended up as my highest placed of her works. Now who is going to make this wonderful film available on an English friendly BluRay?

I also found time to watch a couple of favourites to help rank them:

The House Is Black (Farrokhzad, 1963) - Sober look at the inhabitants of a leper colony. This is ostensibly a public service film (as would be so many later Iranian masterpieces), but it's so much more, not least a humanist and aesthetic manifesto. The startling images are juxtaposed with spiritual verses on the soundtrack, and presented through an energised, contrapuntal editing style. Farrokhzad's gaze is so intent that the initial shock of what we are seeing is steadily worn away, leaving a residue of empathy, curiosity and admiration. At the end of the film, when a door closes on this world, we are the ones being shut out.

Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go (Longinotto, 2007) - I found this on YouTube, and liked it just as much as the first time I saw it. It's a very intense film, looking at extremely troubled, and often violent, children at a special school. As you'd expect, it's often harrowing, but there are patches of mild relief, and Longinotto's trademark empathy gives everybody a voice, even those parents we know have behaved monstrously in the past. I ended up not ranking it in my top 25, as I expected, because seeing it again I realised that it was very much equivalent to a lot of Longinotto's other films in terms of quality, so singling it out as the representative of her body of work seemed extremely arbitrary. Another, perhaps silly, meta-niggle was that it's one of her only films that doesn't have a clear feminist angle, which made it seem even more inappropriate as a representative work. But it's a fine documentary that I highly recommend.

[domino harvey]

Lists are due by the time I wake up tomorrow (~8AM EST). No more edits to already submitted lists

[movielocke]

got my list in, but I didn't get nearly as far through my filmstruck queue as I thought I would. :-/

[domino harvey]

Voting closed, results eventually

[Kirkinson]

I'm excited to see how it turns out. I've been dealing with a pinched nerve lately that gets aggravated if I sit down, so that really hindered both watching films AND writing about them towards the end, and as a result I didn't get to use the extra week's extension as much as I had hoped. That said, the last several posts in this thread have made me feel better about not having gotten through as much of my watchlist as I wanted, because they make it abundantly clear that I never would have gotten to a point where I felt satisfied with how many films I had managed to watch, that even if I got through everything I had originally planned, there would still be innumerable great films out there I hadn't considered yet. I'm sure this feeling is familiar to people who participate in these lists all the time, but since this is the first one I've done in 7 or 8 years, I needed that reminder.

Even so, I did manage to see two more films new to me that I thought were so overwhelmingly great they ended up in my top 25: Sara Driver's You Are Not I, and Kira Muratova's Chekhovian Motifs, which is definitely my favorite of the four Muratova films I've seen at this point, and makes it all the more curious to me that I just didn't connect with The Asthenic Syndrome (which I will obviously have to rewatch at some point). I loved pretty much everything about it — grating at times, certainly, and relentless, but also laugh-out-loud hysterical and with an unexpectedly poignant ending.

The last film I squeezed in before the deadline was A New Leaf, which I enjoyed but still didn't really connect with all that much, and still creeped me out in ways that seemed to disconnect me from what the film was trying to do. I feel like I have to conclude that maybe I just don't "get" Elaine May, because as with The Heartbreak Kid, I have very little actual criticism to make of the film itself, just a subjective personal reaction that I need to sort out.

[domino harvey]

THE WOMEN DIRECTORS LIST PROJECT

01 Beau travail (Claire Denis 1999) 9 (2)
02 Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman 1975) 8 (2)
03 Daisies (Věra Chytilová 1966) 7 (2)
04 Wuthering Heights (Andrea Arnold 2011) 5
05 Cléo de 5 à 7 (Agnes Varda 1962) 6
06 the House is Black (Forough Farrokhzad 1962) 4
06 35 Rhums (Claire Denis 2008) 5
08 Le bonheur (Agnes Varda 1965) 5 (1)
09 Vagabond (Agnes Varda 1985) 6
09 Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt 2008) 6

11 the Piano (Jane Campion 1993) 5
12 Portrait of Jason (Shirley Clarke 1967) 4 (1)
13 Old Joy (Kelly Reichardt 2006) 5
14 the Ascent (Larissa Sheptiko 1977) 4
15 Clueless (Amy Heckerling 1995) 4
16 An Angel at My Table (Jane Campion 1990) 4
17 the Heartbreak Kid (Elaine May 1972) 3
17 Wanda (Barbara Loden 1970) 3
19 Harlan County USA (Barbara Kopple 1976) 4
20 Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt 2016) 4

21 the Asthenic Syndrome (Kira Muratova 1990) 4 (1)
22 La Ciénaga (Lucrecia Martel 2001) 3
22 Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (Agnes Varda 2000) 3
24 Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola 2003)
25 Bright Star (Jane Campion 2009) 2
25 Je tu il elle (Chantal Akerman 1977) 4
25 Me and You and Everyone We Know (Miranda July 2005) 3
25 Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay 2002) 2 (1)
25 Ratcatcher (Lynne Ramsay 1999) 2 (1)
30 L’intrus (Claire Denis 2004) 2

30 Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade 2016)
32 Sink or Swim (Su Friedrich 1990) 3 (1)
33 Madchen in Uniform (Leontine Sagan 1931) 2
34 Orlando (Sally Potter 1992) 4
35 Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren 1943) 3
36 Melody for a Street Organ (Kira Muratova 2009) 2
37 Riddles of the Sphinx (Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen 1977) 3
38 the Girls (Mai Zetterling 1968) 2
38 India Song (Marguerite Duras 1975) 2
38 Ritual in Transfigured Time (Maya Deren 1946) 2

41 Mikey and Nicky (Elaine May 1976) 3
41 News from Home (Chantal Akerman 1977) 2 (1)
41 Paris is Burning (Jennie Livingston 1990) 3
44 Olympia (Leni Riefenstahl, 1936) 2
45 L’annulaire (Diane Bertrand 2005) 2 (1)
45 Nenette et Boni (Claire Denis 1996) 2
45 Portrait of a Lady (Jane Campion 1996) 2
48 Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold 2009) 2
48 Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Véréna Paravel 2012) 2
50 Friday Night (Claire Denis 2002) 2
50 You Are Not I (Sally Driver 1981) 3

KEY Number of ballots film appeared on out of sixteen total submissions (number of ballots with film ranked Number One)


ALSO RANS
Gas Food Lodging, the Hitch-Hiker, Titus, White Material, Innocence, the Virgin Suicides, I Can’t Sleep, Tomboy, Les rendez-vous d’Anna, Desert Hearts, the Savages, Smooth Talk, Meek’s Cutoff, Somewhere, the Slumber Party Massacre, US Go Home, American Psycho, the Hurt Locker, the To Do List, the Arbor, My Name is Oona, Working Girls (1931), Two Friends


ORPHANS
A League of Their Own, A New Leaf, A Visit to the Louvre, Agnes Browne, American Honey, American Splendor, Anatomy of Hell, the Anniversary Party, Antoine, Archipelago, Artemisia, At Land, Attenburg

Baby ryazanskie, Bachelorette, Bella Martha, Bend it Like Beckham, Beyond the Lights, Big, Bittere Ernte, Blue Steel, Bluebeard, Bouquets, Boys Don’t Cry, Brave

Chamisso’s Shadow, Chekhovian Motifs, Chou tin dik tong wah, Christopher Strong, Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, Citizenfour, the Corporation, Crazy, Crossing Delancey

D’est, Dance Girl Dance, Daughters of the Dust, De Cierta Manera, the Decline of Western Civilization, the Decline of Western Civilization Part II, Desperately Seeking Susan, Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed, Dorian Grey in the Mirror of the Yellow Press

Efter brylluppet, the Eighties, the Enchanted Desna, Eve’s Bayou, Everyone Else, Exhibition

Faithless, Fan shan, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Fat Girl, the Fits, Flores de otro mundo, Forma, Fresh Kill, From the Clouds to the Resistance, Frozen River, Fruit of Paradise, the Future

Girls Always Happy, Go Fish, Grace of My Heart

Heart of a Dog (1), Home for the Holidays

I Shot Andy Warhol, In My Skin, In That Country, Italiensk for begyndere

Jean Gentil, Jesus Camp, Jesus’ Son, Johanna D’arc of Mongolia, Julie and Julia

Karnal, Kiesza - Hideaway, Kindless Villain

L’Avenir, L’invitation au Voyage, La Maternelle, La Nina Santa, La pointe Courte, La Coquille et le Clergyman, La Souriante Madame Beudet, Lady Chatterley (2006), Ladybird, Laggies, the Last Mistress, Le Camion, Les salauds, Lights, Little Women (Armstrong), Long Farewells, Losing Ground, Love Serenade, Loving Couples, Luna cautiva serpiente roja bandeja de plata

Magdalena Viraga, Manakamana, Marianne and Julianne, Marie Antoinette, Mi Vida Loca, Moe no suzaku, Monsoon Wedding, Mr and Mrs Iver (1), Mur Murs, the Murderer in Four acts, Mutations, My American Cousin (1985), My Twentieth Century

Nathalie Granger, Near Dark, Nezabyvayemoye, Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy, Night Moves, the Night Porter, Now Eat My Script

O Ébrio, Observando el cielo, Odds and Ends, Organ, Oscar and Lucinda, the Other Side of the Underneath, Outrage

Para que no me olvides, Powers of Ten, the Prince of Tides, Reassemblage, Red Shift

Rosa Luxemburg, Rules of the Road

Sambizanga, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, Sharasoiyu, Sheer Madness, Shin Sung-il is Lost, Shinjuku Boys, Sister, My Sister, Sleepwalk, the Street, Sukkar banat, Summer 1993, Sweetie, Synchromy No. 2

Talentime, Tau ban no hoi, Terminal Island, the 13th, Three Stories, Tomka and His Friends, Touchy Feely, True to Life, Tsuki wa noborinu

Une nuit sur le mont chauve

Visages, villages

Walking and Talking, Washington Square, Wasp, Water, the Watermelon Woman, Wayne’s World, We Need to Talk About Kevin, Wei chao, Welcome II the Terrordome, Well, Come On, Smile, Where Are My Children?, Wings, Winter’s Bone, Wonder Woman

Y aura-t-il de la neige à Noël?, You Were Never Really Here

Zero Dark Thirty

[bottled spider]

Thanks Domino. That was a lot of fun. The main thing I got out of this was finding out that I like Jane Campion way more than I thought I did. And being introduced to a number of movies I'd either never heard of, or heard of but mistakenly thought weren't my cup of tea.

[Werewolf by Night]

Yowtch. Call me Mr. Bumble cuz I got so many orphans.

But, as always, the best part is having a list of films I need to catch up with. Thanks to everyone who participated and to domino for tallying.

[swo17]

This is a great list, thanks domino! I feel like I should've voted for some Elaine May and more Muratova, though I don't know where I would have fit them.

[domino harvey]

My Top 10 + Orphans

01 L’annulaire
02 the Heartbreak Kid
03 Me and You and Everyone We Know
04 the Girls
05 Bachelorette
06 Wuthering Heights
07 Portrait of Jason
08 A New Leaf
09 Laggies
10 Smooth Talk

11 Seeking a Friend for the End of the World
13 Touchy Feely
14 Winter’s Bone
16 Julie and Julia
17 the Prince of Tides
25 Kiesza - Hideaway

Wuthering Heights has to be the Cinderella Story of the list-- did anyone expect it in the Top 5? And folks, it was only a few points away from topping Daisies...

I've seen a shameful 32/51 from the list, but I have at least seen 18/20 of the Top 20!

[yoshimori]

Yes. Thanks, moderator and recommenders.

47/50 seen here (though a few of those I barely remember). But probably because most of the directors are kind of "usual suspects". I had the "cinderella" pick, Wuthering Heights -- which I've heard Arnold herself say is her least favorite of her works and which, for me is her best -- at number 4.

What the heck -- following domino's lead:

My Top 10 + Orphans

01 Morvern Callar
02 Beau travail
03 Shin Sung-il is Lost
04 Wuthering Heights
05 Ratcatcher
06 Talentime
07 "Observando el cielo"
08 Fish Tank
09 "Kindless Villain"
10 Fan shan [Crossing the Mountain]

11 Forma
12 Antoine
13 Attenberg
16 Sharasojyu
17 We Need to Talk about Kevin
19 Wei chao [When the Bough Breaks]
20 Girls Always Happy
21 Marlina - the Murderer in Four Acts
22 Moe no suzaku [surprised mr kerpan didn't have this one too]
23 "Luna cautiva serpiente roja bandeja de plata" ["Enchanted Moon Red Snake Silver Tray"]
25 Y aura-t-il de la neige à Noël? [Will It Snow for Christmas?]

So 60% orphans!

[zedz]

Thanks domino. I’ll have to comment later because I’m out and about (and Tapatalk cuts off everything except the end of the orphans)

[Michael Kerpan]

Alas, I enjoy reading and participating in discussions for these lists more than I enjoy MAKING (long) lists (which I almost never do anymore). My apologies to Naomi Kawase (and yoshimori).

[colinr0380]

I steered a bit into focusing more on putting a few orphans on the list this time around, and since there were only 25 spots I tried to go for a one film per director rule, and luckily it looked as if I supported films that otherwise would not have been mentioned - my Catherine Breillat vote went to Anatomy of Hell for example (though I vacillated between that and Abuse of Weakness for a while!) I just love that Anatomy of Hell is a sex-voyeurism/gothic-ghostly romance/chamber piece film! And I also voted for Liv Ullmann's Faithless (I just love that it is a sex-voyeurism/ghostly romance/chamber piece film!). Any of Kathryn Bigelow's films could have placed, but I particularly love the unorthodox relationship in Blue Steel and the way that it tackles the female cop's home life as deftly as the thriller elements. I went for Jodie Foster's Home For The Holidays rather than Little Man Tate to balance out some of the weightier films on the list. Then Artemisia is a great 'portrait of artistic struggle with the added complication of being a woman' film, and the other historical film slot went in a more political direction with Margarethe von Trotta's film of the life of Rosa Luxemburg. I wrote a bit about The Night Porter in its dedicated thread, and Sister, My Sister in another thread. I also wanted to throw in a couple of defining lesbian dramas of the 1990s: Go Fish, and the sci-fi tinged, environmentalist Fresh Kill. For more female-driven sci-fi there is also Welcome II The Terrordome.

And of course I wanted to squeeze a horror film in there, so in my wild card 25th slot I put in Organ, directed by Kei Fujiwara (best known as an actress in Shinya Tsukamoto's Tetsuo: The Iron Man film), which sort of shows that not just men can make ultra-gory low budget organ-trafficking horror pictures!

[yoshimori]

> I enjoy reading and participating in discussions for these lists more than I enjoy MAKING (long) lists

I applaud your restraint!

[Michael Kerpan]

> I enjoy reading and participating in discussions for these lists more than I enjoy MAKING (long) lists

I applaud your restraint!

Hah -- not "restraint" but a mix of laziness and weariness....

[domino harvey]

Little Man Tate

As someone who was a kid in gifted and talented programs when this came out, it's ridiculous how many times I was shown this film at the time, both in school and out. I haven't had the nerve to see it as an adult, but it's so weird that so many adults wanted to show this to us when the world depicted in the film was far, far from any we were experiencing in day-to-day life!

[Kirkinson]

Many thanks to domino for compiling and to everyone for the discussion. I've only seen 34/51 from the final list, and more frustratingly, 9 of the films I haven't seen were on the watchlist I had set for myself for this project, but I didn't get to them. I'm also shocked and delighted that Wuthering Heights placed so high — someone should send this to Andrea Arnold! I also think it's her best film by a mile, and I like her others a lot, so it kind of hurts that she seems to consider it a mistake.


My Top 10 + Orphans

01 News from Home
02 Leviathan
03 The House Is Black
04 Wuthering Heights
05 Daisies
06 Le Bonheur
07 Marianne and Juliane (Margarethe von Trotta, 1981)
08 Je, Tu, Il, Elle
09 Vagabond
10 Red Shift (Gunvor Nelson, 1984)

13 Now Eat My Script (Mounira Al Solh, 2014)
14 Sheer Madness (Margarethe von Trotta, 1983)
19 Chekhovian Motifs (Kira Muratova, 2002)
22 Loving Couples (Mai Zetterling, 1964)
23 Well, Come On, Smile (Leida Laius & Arvo Iho, 1985)

I saw My Name is Oona, Red Shift and Time Being all at the same screening many years ago with Gunvor Nelson in attendance before I had ever heard of her before, and while I thought all three were amazing, it was Red Shift that left the strongest and most lasting impression on me. But seeing My Name is Oona in the Also Rans makes me wonder if I should have made a more strategic choice and possibly given Nelson a place on the list!

Most of my other orphans were expected, but I am *shocked* that I evidently gave Chekhovian Motifs its only vote. When Zedz posted his 26-75 and it wasn't there, I assumed it had to be in his top 25!

[zedz]

Well, my list seems to be perfectly split: twelve made the list, twelve were orphans, and one was an also ran (virtual failed high-five to the other person who voted for I Can't Sleep).

I'm actually surprised so many of the films I voted for (all of my top seven, too) made the final list, since it was clear from the diversity of discussion in the thread that this would be a low-consensus list project (which is good!). Looks like domino was lucky to get enough for the final fifty, given the paucity of also-rans and the proliferation of orphans.

I think this is the first time in any list project that I've actually written up every film I've voted for, so I can present this without further comment (successful applicants are in bold):

1. Sink or Swim (Friedrich, 1990)
2. L’Intrus (Denis, 2004)
3. Ritual in Transfigured Time (Deren, 1946)
4. The House Is Black (Farrokhzad, 1963)
5. Nenette et Boni (Denis, 1996)
6. Melody for a Street Organ (Muratova, 2009)
7. Jeanne Dielman (Akerman, 1975)
8. Long Farewells (Muratova, 1971)
9. In That Country (Bobrova, 1998)
10. Nathalie Granger (Duras, 1972)
11. I Can’t Sleep (Denis, 1994) - ALSO RAN
12. Exhibition (Hogg, 2013)
13. Three Stories (Muratova, 1997)
14. Friday Night (Denis, 2002)
15. Old Joy (Reichardt, 2006)
16. Chamisso’s Shadow (Ottinger, 2016)
17. Riddles of the Sphinx (Mulvey / Wollen, 1977)
18. Rules of the Road (Friedrich, 1993)
19. Le Bonheur (Varda, 1965)
20. The Asthenic Syndrome (Muratova, 1990)
21. Crazy (Honigmann, 1999)
22. Je Tu Il Elle (Akerman, 1974)
23. Summer 1993 (Carla Simon, 2017)
24. My Twentieth Century (Enyedi, 1989)
25. Le Camion (Duras, 1977)

The six films in the top fifty I haven't seen are:
Clueless, The Heartbreak Kid, Wanda, Madchen in Uniform, Mikey and Nicky, You Are Not I

Wanda and Madchen in Uniform are on my longterm to-watch list, waiting for definitive, or at least decent, versions. I saw A New Leaf and enjoyed it well enough, but it didn't make me desperate to see any more Elaine May (and I find Ishtar barely amusing and formally dull). Definitely keen to see Sara Driver's work after the discussion in this thread, but that DVD set seems to be OOP now.

[zedz]

That reminds me of another Canadian feature I don't think has been mentioned yet, Patricia Rozema's I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, which was quite a big deal in the little indie fishpond of 1987 (and I see was later voted one of the ten best Canadian films of all time). It's quirky and charming, and must have sold a lot of copies of Delibes' Lakme.

I saw this in the theatres when it came out, I think. I vaguely remember or misremember finding it precious and overly whimsical.

That was my take on it as well. But it had a lot of fans, so I thought I should mention it.