Sight & Sound

[rrenault]

I had the same question asked at lunch : Is it any good ?

But on the other hand, most people around me, who aren't particularly "cinephiles", find Vertigo and Citizen Kane to be awful bores.

I know this is just anecdotal evidence, but I have non-cinephile friends who've been able to appreciate Citizen Kane and even Tokyo Story. I have one friend who's not a cinephile but is a huge Japanophile whose knowledge of Japanese cinema I don't think extends much beyond Kurosawa and Miyazaki, at least in terms of how a cinephile traditionally conceives of "Japanese cinema". Anyhow, their response to Tokyo Story was the film is lovely but admittedly a little depressing.

[tenia]

Oh absolutely, that's my case too and even my parents who really struggle with this type of movies are at times able to say "yeah ok this was good".
What I just meant is that in some respects, for many people, Vertigo or Citizen Kane or Tokyo Story aren't much more accessible or more "fun" than Jeanne Dielman.

[Red Screamer]

One of my friends was converted into a cinephile, after a lifetime of not caring about movies, by the one-two punch of Vertigo and Jeanne Dielman. I’m not saying that’s likely for most, but it does happen.

[Guido]

This is also of course anecdotal, but my wife taught an intro to film course a few years ago in Boston, and included Jeanne Dielman in the syllabus. She was surprised — after some basic context-setting, naturally — at just how enthusiastically the vast majority of students responded to it. Gangbusters.

[knives]

I was thinking this a little bit, now that the conversation has turned to Akerman as accessible, is that while it may have once been a very challenging film what it’s doing is more normal for people.

It reminds me a bit of comments I’ve read about The Mitchells vs the Machines and Everything Everywhere where such films ten years ago would have been too much for audiences, but now they’re able to be widely enjoyed because the tricks on display in some fashion have become normal.

For Jeanne YouTube has probably helped a lot where ASMR viewing of a woman peeling potatoes for three hours is something people aren’t shocked by. Add in to that some very straightforward and accessible themes and the movie doesn’t seem like the challenge it once was.

[therewillbeblus]

Yeah ASMR will probably help popular audiences warm to Mulholland Dr. too

[knives]

I hadn’t thought of that, though I would think that would only be true of the last act.

[zedz]

I don't know about all that. Ulysses frustrates most of the expectations readers bring to a novel. Not the same ones, but in the same way. One reason the majority of readers quit Ulysses within the first three chapters is because the book violates what they have learned to expect from a novel and also from themselves as readers.

I’ve never read it so I can’t properly comment, but I was more trying to say that what might at least be expectedly unexpected in a best book might not hold the same for a movie. I’m clearly trying to engage in a more general conversation though and so that it’s going to jive with what is apparently uniquely specific about this novel. I kinda wanna read it now, though

This might seem perverse, but my recommendation for tackling Ulysses is not the slow, reflective (re-read, take time out etc.) approach you mentioned earlier, but to plough headlong through it (with perhaps a little background / context-setting reading beforehand). Revel in the style, make of the story what you can, but come out the other side so you can reread it and start seeing the synapses connect and fire. Any first reading is likely to be murky and disorienting, because it's one of those novels that needs to be uploaded before you can really start to appreciate its brilliance, so don't worry about it all making sense first time around.

Non-spoiler: the basic plot is actually very simple: it's everything else that layers on the complexity.

I don't think it's a work of art that's especially analogous to Jeanne Dielman. That film is more of a Proustian exercise, where you have to hold on moment by moment and make it to the end of each sentence / sequence without losing concentration, and then the next sentence / sequence builds on the previous one as the meaning of the work inexorably builds in your mind like a house of cards. They're precise, cumulative and linear works in a way that Ulysses is not.

[swo17]

Having recently finished Ulysses, I think I agree. I read the first third of it maybe with the assistance of guides, which were very informative but kept disrupting the flow and tripling the time it was taking to read. Best advice I received was to read it aloud (in a bad Irish accent) to better appreciate a lot of the wordplay. Just don't ask me what any of it means

[Mr Sausage]

I don't know about all that. Ulysses frustrates most of the expectations readers bring to a novel. Not the same ones, but in the same way. One reason the majority of readers quit Ulysses within the first three chapters is because the book violates what they have learned to expect from a novel and also from themselves as readers.

I’ve never read it so I can’t properly comment, but I was more trying to say that what might at least be expectedly unexpected in a best book might not hold the same for a movie. I’m clearly trying to engage in a more general conversation though and so that it’s going to jive with what is apparently uniquely specific about this novel. I kinda wanna read it now, though

This might seem perverse, but my recommendation for tackling Ulysses is not the slow, reflective (re-read, take time out etc.) approach you mentioned earlier, but to plough headlong through it (with perhaps a little background / context-setting reading beforehand). Revel in the style, make of the story what you can, but come out the other side so you can reread it and start seeing the synapses connect and fire. Any first reading is likely to be murky and disorienting, because it's one of those novels that needs to be uploaded before you can really start to appreciate its brilliance, so don't worry about it all making sense first time around.

Non-spoiler: the basic plot is actually very simple: it's everything else that layers on the complexity.

I don't think it's a work of art that's especially analogous to Jeanne Dielman. That film is more of a Proustian exercise, where you have to hold on moment by moment and make it to the end of each sentence / sequence without losing concentration, and then the next sentence / sequence builds on the previous one as the meaning of the work inexorably builds in your mind like a house of cards. They're precise, cumulative and linear works in a way that Ulysses is not.

Funnily, that’s exactly how I read it the first time. But I’ve noticed most people who don’t finish tend to do the same. So, dunno. Maybe it comes down to how comfortable you are with not understanding.

I wouldn’t make too much of my comparison to Jeanne Dielman. I wasn’t trying to claim it was especially Joycean or anything. Maybe more Robbe-Grillet in its intense, repetitive focus on seemingly meaningless domestic details?

[knives]

That’s also how I read it and fell in love.

[Soothsayer]

I don't know about all that. Ulysses frustrates most of the expectations readers bring to a novel. Not the same ones, but in the same way. One reason the majority of readers quit Ulysses within the first three chapters is because the book violates what they have learned to expect from a novel and also from themselves as readers.

I’ve never read it so I can’t properly comment, but I was more trying to say that what might at least be expectedly unexpected in a best book might not hold the same for a movie. I’m clearly trying to engage in a more general conversation though and so that it’s going to jive with what is apparently uniquely specific about this novel. I kinda wanna read it now, though

This might seem perverse, but my recommendation for tackling Ulysses is not the slow, reflective (re-read, take time out etc.) approach you mentioned earlier, but to plough headlong through it (with perhaps a little background / context-setting reading beforehand). Revel in the style, make of the story what you can, but come out the other side so you can reread it and start seeing the synapses connect and fire. Any first reading is likely to be murky and disorienting, because it's one of those novels that needs to be uploaded before you can really start to appreciate its brilliance, so don't worry about it all making sense first time around.

Non-spoiler: the basic plot is actually very simple: it's everything else that layers on the complexity.

I don't think it's a work of art that's especially analogous to Jeanne Dielman. That film is more of a Proustian exercise, where you have to hold on moment by moment and make it to the end of each sentence / sequence without losing concentration, and then the next sentence / sequence builds on the previous one as the meaning of the work inexorably builds in your mind like a house of cards. They're precise, cumulative and linear works in a way that Ulysses is not.

I’d make this same recommendation for Sergei Parajanov films. And luckily thanks to Jsteffe, can recommend an explainer afterwards.

[therewillbeblus]

I don't know about all that. Ulysses frustrates most of the expectations readers bring to a novel. Not the same ones, but in the same way. One reason the majority of readers quit Ulysses within the first three chapters is because the book violates what they have learned to expect from a novel and also from themselves as readers.

I’ve never read it so I can’t properly comment, but I was more trying to say that what might at least be expectedly unexpected in a best book might not hold the same for a movie. I’m clearly trying to engage in a more general conversation though and so that it’s going to jive with what is apparently uniquely specific about this novel. I kinda wanna read it now, though

This might seem perverse, but my recommendation for tackling Ulysses is not the slow, reflective (re-read, take time out etc.) approach you mentioned earlier, but to plough headlong through it (with perhaps a little background / context-setting reading beforehand).

My mention of that was just to point out that there's an internalized acceptability of elastic approaches in consuming literature that might not be the same for film, and that this flexibility in consumption styles may affect how comparable these two top works are as crowning examples of their mediums, since the engagement mores play a role in how the mediums are defined and how the best examples could (and perhaps should) be defined. It was rhetorical though, and not trying to be an argument against Mr Sausage's point.

I'm with you all- every time I put down a novel for any considerable length of time, it stays on the shelf and I start over again from the beginning when I do pick it up. I believe I mentioned this before in another thread, but in early sobriety when I was in part-time school and out of work, I was consuming books compulsively just to stay out of my head, and decided to tackle Gravity's Rainbow and Infinite Jest back-to-back; the former took about eight days and the latter ten or eleven (and the DFW read like a children's book next to Pynchon's brutally-alienating novel, where I understood about a third of it, especially with all the character names changing unprompted, etc., but still loved what I did catch- as well as the wonderfully 'felt' blend of high and low brow humor- so even when I didn't get a stretch of dense, intentionally-inaccessible 'action', the juxtaposition had a very accessible sensory effect). I never would've made it through either without that kind of ruthless commitment. The same goes for Underworld, Moby Dick, Mason & Dixon, to name a few. So yeah, after reading for a little while now and knowing my own habits completely divorced from Ulysses' specificity, I'm pretty sure I'd have zero chance at ever tackling this book if I didn't sit down and pledge my time to working through it quickly. It's cool when my compulsive habits pay off, as with La flor's cumulative effect best experienced as close to the start as possible, or Woodcutters' obsessive-compulsive subjectivity, where consuming it in the way the novel is written only adds to its effect. Not sure if Ulysses will work in such cathartic ways, but I look forward to finding out

[swo17]

It took me most of the year to pick away at it, but I did read the last sentence in one sitting!

[zedz]

It took me most of the year to pick away at it, but I did read the last sentence in one sitting!

The last part of that last sentence

Spoiler

was one of the readings at my wedding

Maybe that's equivalent to forcing somebody to watch Jeanne Dielman?

[swo17]

Spoiler

Depends how far back you go to define "last part" and how much sex stuff that leaves in

[zedz]

Spoiler

Depends how far back you go to define "last part" and how much sex stuff that leaves in

A fair bit

Spoiler

but not as much as in the steamy section of the Song of Solomon we chose as our other reading.

It was the last page or so: Gibraltar, donkeys, orgasmic proposal acceptance (or breakfast acquiescence, if you're that way inclined)

[DarkImbecile]

Variety tries to muscle in on the fun

[spectre]

Well, Sight & Sound are now well and truly vindicated in their decision to throw the gates open to new contributors, imo – this is a far duller and more predictable list. And while I understand some will argue that's how it should be (i.e. that critics' polls such as these should enshrine the long-agreed-upon "greats" of the artform rather than throwing up surprises), I feel like this top 100 is a pretty narrow and limited representation of cinema's history.

You have to scroll down to #48 to find a film directed by a woman, for instance, and it's the bloody Piano! (In fact, I counted just five films directed by women in the entire list.)

[jegharfangetmigenmyg]

It's and extremely dull list. And it's also a case in point of what an extremely anglicized list you get if you only count votes by English-speaking journos. At least from Variety. The list has, what, 70-80% English language films?

[tenia]

It's indeed very US white males centered, but the 2nd half of it is quite surprising, with stuff like Bridesmaid or Moulin Rouge or Pink Flamingos, all above Le samourai.

[DeprongMori]

The Variety list certainly is parochial. I believe that all but 22 of the 100 films are in English.

[Gregor Samsa]

Not the most subtle of swipes in their entry for #78:

Over three-plus hours, the film re-creates tasks that Akerman observed her mother practicing for years, though in this case they’re disrupted by Jeanne’s double life as a prostitute — a feminist twist that builds to a shattering climax. Maddening at times yet never less than mesmerizing, it’s the very best film of its kind. But hardly the best film of all time. 

[spectre]

Kind of makes you wonder if that was the entire point of the exercise: to give the S&S list the middle finger and reassert “traditional” cinema, or something. Hard to imagine some of those contributors (e.g. Kiang) participating in such a reactionary exercise, but it’s also difficult to see that dig at Jeanne Dielman as anything other than an attempt to put it (and Akerman) back in its place. Not a great look, to be honest.

[thirtyframesasecond]

I wish the BFI published more issues. The S&S 100 films special was immediately sold out. Can't buy an issue for love nor money.

The Variety list has a few pretty crappy films, lots of perfectly fine but 'a top 100 film?' choices, and some interesting international films in the bottom half, but the top half is basically just the 'canon'.