The Lists Project

[zedz]

I'm no expert on this, and I've certainly seen the component films referred to just as you mention, but I've also seen them in numerous places as "Hapax Legomena I: (nostalgia)," "Hapax Legomena II: Poetic Justice," etc. Granted, it could just be that a lot of different places are copying IMDb. But where did the longer names originate?

From being component parts of Hapax Legomena, obviously, but I've never seen Frampton refer to them by those awkward titles.

For what it's worth, I just reviewed the essay on Hapax Legomena in the Criterion set. It starts off with a Frampton quote calling this a "single work composed of detachable parts" (emphasis not mine) and then goes on to describe how it was screened in various ways, all together, individually, and as a work in progress. Given all of this, I think it makes sense to have it eligible both as a whole and individually for each of the component parts, as was suggested earlier.

I feel I need to give you fair warning that I will never concede that (nostalgia) is not a film, so we could just bat this back and forth forever.

I've never disputed that Frampton (and everybody else) considers these films as a body of work, with its own cute name. My argument has only ever been against not being allowed to consider the films individually, and I've already said that I have no problem with people who have seen the whole thing voting for it. But even if he'd called it a "single work composed of non-detachable parts" (which is what you'd really want him to say to support your original argument), his comments don't overrule the evidence of the films themselves.

It'd be exactly the same if some filmmaker made the most categorical statement imaginable about his or her works. Stop Press! This 2006 interview with Renny Harlin has just turned up! "Every film I have ever made, from the shortest ad to the most bloated blockbuster, is a single continuous work, borne of a single, continuous artistic inspiration, and under no circumstances should they be considered separately. I have only ever thought of them that way, and they should only ever be thought of that way by anybody. Personally, I don't even think of them by the individual titles producers and distributors have given them - I can't even remember most of those - but as 'Renny Harlin I', 'Renny Harlin II', 'Renny Harlin III' and so on. Henceforth, I request that every reference to the films conforms to this nomenclature. Please see the filmography provided." Whatever, Renny. Director's statements and intentions never overrule the evidence of the films themselves.

And if Harlin is too frivolous and unlikely a candidate, try David Lynch, or Abbas Kiarostami. Or how about James Benning talking about The California Trilogy in those exact same terms? I can just imagine swo turning up with his notebook and saying, "I'm sorry James, you can't say that."

JB: "Why the hell not?"
Swo: "Because you used the word 'trilogy' in the title of the work. If you'd just called it 'California', maybe."
JB: "Well I'll be goldarned and blasted. Okay, son, I'll call it 'California."
Swo: Eeee, you can't really do that either. Not after it's appeared on imdb and everything."
JB: "Okay, okay, I'll call up I Am TV and ask them to change it, I guess."
Swo: "But James. . . (narrows eyes) you and I will always know the truth about what you've done."

Larry David as Swo; James Benning played by Foghorn Leghorn.

[swo17]

I've never been anywhere near that composed in the presence of a celebrity.

(nostalgia) is most certainly a film, and you'll be able to vote for it that way. Hapax Legomena is also a film that you can vote for. Everybody wins.

[zedz]

I can't recall any instance where it's actually become an issue (i.e. any case of people specifically voting for different versions of a particular film), but you might want to formulate a consolidation rule that covers all such instances. The ones that spring to mind for me are Pedro Costa's multiple passes at the Tarrafal / Rabbit Hunters material and Where Lies Your Hidden Smile? / Cineastes de notre temps.

Lots of Rivette and Welles examples, and A Brighter Summer Day, of course. Technically, La belle noiseuse and Divertimento don't share a single frame of footage, but they could be included as well, unless somebody squeals.

Good suggestions, though there seems to me to be a distinction to be made between cases of this that share a root name in common (as is the case with both Out 1s) vs. two completely different names altogether. It's easy to say that "Touch of Evil" covers the whole cult of Touch of Evil, including the multiple versions that exist as well as perhaps the Platonic form of ToE that only exists in each of our minds. In contrast, it would seem a bit awkward to combine, say, Dog Star Man and The Art of Vision. Would I have to present this film in the results as "Dog Star Man/The Art of Vision"? Or does one title absorb the other, and if so, which one and why?

Yeah, this is going to be a bit of a hornet's nest, and you'll end up being beholden to the eccentricities of particular historical accidents and naming practices. Here are a few test cases that spring to mind which will make things awkward.

The different versions of Touch of Evil all have the same title; the different versions of Mr Arkadin don't, but I don't think the differences between the two cases are otherwise material.

Rivette retitled his B-Roll version of one of his films; Gondry didn't (and nor did Straub / Huillet). Otherwise, exactly the same creative situation with both (though not with Une visite au Louvre).

Pedro Costa tends to give every variant edit of a film a different title, though the differences between them might be less than between equivalent variant edits by other directors. The two films directed by Peter Strickland called Berberian Sound Studio are completely different from one another.

My suggestion is to have a blanket consolidation rule for all such films so that any vote for a 'subsidiary' version just counts as a vote for the overall entity - unless somebody wants to argue forcefully otherwise for an exception, which can be considered in the discussion thread (though we should bear in mind that all that will do is split votes and harm the case of a favoured film).

I'd say the presumption of consolidation should be reversed for experimental films, since so many of them are entirely predicated on doing new and interesting things with existing footage. Despite the shared footage, the form and function of The Art of Vision is a completely different animal from Dog Star Man, and it's a completely different artistic project. That should be the criteria for counting it as an independent film, not the vagaries of Brakhage's naming practices. If he'd simply called it Dog Star Man (Redux), it wouldn't have changed the nature of the project.

[swo17]

I think that makes sense. I'll try and come up with something.

[swo17]

One film just occurred to me that I wouldn't know what to do with under this "variant edit" rule: Shogun Assassin, a reedit of the first two Lone Wolf and Cub films. Maybe just count it as a separate film from the LWACs? I suppose it doesn't matter much if hardly anyone would ever vote for it.

Also, a couple of other gray areas for the '70s list:

1. The Yakuza Papers/Battles Without Honor and Humanity. It looks like we treated this as a single film during at least the 2005 project (where it made the top 100 that way). I don't see any discussion or placement of it during the last project. I can see a case being made either way as to whether this is one film or five. Maybe we apply sort of a "portmanteau rule" here (i.e. you can vote either for the whole or for individual episodes, but with every vote competing against each other)?

2. I haven't seen The Emigrants or The New Land yet (and know nothing about them), but there was some discussion during the 2005 project about them perhaps constituting a single two-part film. Is there any merit to this?

[zedz]

I agree that Shogun Assassin is likely to be a moot point, but at any rate it falls into a different decade from its source films, which will also help keep things tidy if it does crop up.

The Yakuza Papers situation seems a bit weird, since those films are pretty much the same kind of thing as the Lone Wolf and Cub series, or Planet of the Apes. Are you sure the 2005 votes weren't just for Battles itself? I would expect that to be the lightning rod for the series vote-wise anyway.

As for the Troells, I haven't seen them either, but I think those who voted for them last time round voted for them together.

[swo17]

The Yakuza Papers situation seems a bit weird, since those films are pretty much the same kind of thing as the Lone Wolf and Cub series, or Planet of the Apes. Are you sure the 2005 votes weren't just for Battles itself? I would expect that to be the lightning rod for the series vote-wise anyway.

See here and also straight from you.

None of these films are terribly fresh in my memory, but I seem to remember The Yakuza Papers being more novelistic whereas the Planet of the Apes and Lone Wolf and Cub series are more franchises/adventure-of-the-week type fare. A couple other points to consider:

1. The entirety of The Yakuza Papers had a single director, unlike those other two examples.
2. The first five films were called "Battles Without Honor and Humanity." There were then three subsequent films called "New Battles Without Honor and Humanity," as opposed to "Battles 6, 7, and 8."

To the extent that people might consider the five episodes of The Yakuza Papers to be of relatively consistent quality, if they were only allowed to vote for individual episodes, there would likely be a lot of arbitrary vote splitting with the film ending up kind of screwed in the final tally. If at least a couple people would prefer to be able to vote for the entire thing, I suppose I don't see the harm in it.

[knives]

I think the omnibus rules are the best to go by with the only exceptions being for those films (ala Les vampires) which are always talked about in reference as a single entity. Of course determining those cases will probably be terribly hard and where we can probably fall to the arbitrary nature of the IMDB rule like we do for years.

[zedz]

That wasn't my call, though, swo. It was back when Michael was running the project. I guess that's the kind of call that can be made as the votes come in, but it will be handy to have the ruling figured out beforehand in case anybody wants to vote for more than one of the films.

Once more, my preference is to keep things discrete. It didn't happen last time with the Fukusakus, as I recall, but there were distinct votes cast for different Female Convict Scorpion films, and the voters definitely wanted to single out the individual films in those cases. I remember this because I inadvertently combined votes at first, not realising they were for different films.

[swo17]

I think the omnibus rules are the best to go by with the only exceptions being for those films (ala Les vampires) which are always talked about in reference as a single entity. Of course determining those cases will probably be terribly hard and where we can probably fall to the arbitrary nature of the IMDB rule like we do for years.

IMDb is inconsistent in this regard though. For example, they treat Les Vampires as one film and Fantomas as a bunch of individual films.

That wasn't my call, though, swo. It was back when Michael was running the project. I guess that's the kind of call that can be made as the votes come in, but it will be handy to have the ruling figured out beforehand in case anybody wants to vote for more than one of the films.

I didn't mean to suggest that it was your call, just that you were confirming that that's how it was treated at the time.

I generally think that things should be kept discrete as well, but not to the detriment of something that would be best considered another way. Take something like Fantomas. Allowed to be considered as a whole, it placed 15th on our pre-'20s list. But if each episode had been considered separately, likely the only chance one of them would have had to fare well would be if there were some kind of consensus about which one should stand in for the whole series. So obviously, the common sense solution there was to allow it to be counted as a whole. I guess The Yakuza Papers isn't quite as clear cut of a case as Fantomas, but still, if a fair amount of its fans are going to be saying "I wish I could vote for the entire thing without having to take up five slots on my list," (as would appear to have been the case during at least the 2005 project) then the common sense solution would seem to be to allow them this option.

The simplest way I can think of to ferret out how people would prefer to vote on contentious titles like these (let's limit them to serial/multi-part films all by the same director) would be to call both the whole and all of the individual parts eligible. If Fantomas were eligible this way, and everyone preferred to vote for it as a whole rather than for any individual part, then the outcome would be the same as what we presently have. If some people voted for individual episodes instead, the whole would lose those votes, but it wouldn't have "deserved" them in the first place, since the voter had the option to vote for the whole and didn't take it.

The effect of this approach on individual lists is, I should think, non-controversial, i.e. each person would be given the opportunity to vote as they see fit. (Note: I don't mean that every voter would have free reign to make up all of their own rules. This "whole vs. individual parts" option would only be allowed for a select few titles that would be announced in the first post of the thread.) Meanwhile, the effect on the combined list is that potentially you have both the whole and the individual parts showing up in different positions. (Note that this is similar to how, say, both La ricotta and Ro.Go.Pa.G might show up on our final '60s list.) But then this means that if the whole of The Yakuza Papers "deserves" to be on our final list (by virtue of being repeatedly voted for that way), it will have its chance to.

NB: Like the other examples brought up previously, the Female Convict Scorpion films were also not all directed by the same person.

[knives]

I think the omnibus rules are the best to go by with the only exceptions being for those films (ala Les vampires) which are always talked about in reference as a single entity. Of course determining those cases will probably be terribly hard and where we can probably fall to the arbitrary nature of the IMDB rule like we do for years.

IMDb is inconsistent in this regard though. For example, they treat Les Vampires as one film and Fantomas as a bunch of individual films.

Hence my use of arbitrary which I feel any conclusion to this will be.

[swo17]

Sorry, I initially read you as saying that we should let IMDb decide whether something is one film vs. multiple films (based on whether IMDb has one or multiple pages set up?). If not that, how else were you suggesting that we define whether a film is "always talked about in reference as a single entity"?

[knives]

Oh, I just meant like in the case of Fantomas you could vote for one of the serials or the whole thing depending on preference, but with Les vampires you could only vote for the whole.

[zedz]

Oh, I just meant like in the case of Fantomas you could vote for one of the serials or the whole thing depending on preference, but with Les vampires you could only vote for the whole.

Now this does strike me as a ridiculous distinction. The vagaries of imdb listings have nothing to do with the production and exhibition circumstances of these films, and it seems absurd to have different voting rules for different Feuillade serials.

Doesn't the mini-series rule cover these anyway? I mean, that's the closest modern day equivalent, isn't it?

[swo17]

Well, the miniseries rule covers miniseries. I suppose it could also cover things that are kind of like miniseries, depending on how generous you are with the rule.

On a completely unrelated note, The Yakuza Papers is kind of like a miniseries.

[knives]

Oh, I just meant like in the case of Fantomas you could vote for one of the serials or the whole thing depending on preference, but with Les vampires you could only vote for the whole.

Now this does strike me as a ridiculous distinction. The vagaries of imdb listings have nothing to do with the production and exhibition circumstances of these films, and it seems absurd to have different voting rules for different Feuillade serials.

Doesn't the mini-series rule cover these anyway? I mean, that's the closest modern day equivalent, isn't it?

I agree its a ridiculous distinction and I've lost my original point for making it. Personally I prefer the route for the most options so while I don't see anyone in their right mind voting for part of a serial or miniseries I prefer being allowed to voting for distinct parts to a series or of a film or however it applies in a given situation. Yes this would mean being given the chance (as David Hare wanted to so long ago) to vote for the separate Ivans, but it would also give me the chance to vote for Out 1: Spectre which I have seen, but have not seen the long version which relates back to your original point that started this whole conversation.

[zedz]

Swo: Well, a serial is much more like a miniseries (one story, one production, finite number of episodes, staggered release) than a loosely related series of films featuring the same characters in different stories - which is much more like non-serial series television. Anyway, that's the television analogy I'd employ for The Yakuza Papers, which is structured more as a villain-of-the-week type affair.

Knives: Yes, I think the principle of not voting for films you haven't seen is a pretty important one, but it can be hard to avoid in the case of variants. The first time I placed A Brighter Summer Day at the top of my 90s list*, I'd only seen the shorter version, and up until the last iteration of the Silent / 20s list, everybody was voting (or not) for some kind of compromised Metropolis. You can rationalize it by giving the director the benefit of the doubt that you wouldn't like the complete version of the film any less than the version that you've seen. So if you vote for Out 1, you could consider it a vote of confidence that the original work is at least as good as what Rivette extracted for Spectre.

*The point being that, even in its truncated form, it was still better than any other film made that decade. Given that, I wasn't about to handicap it because I didn't know exactly how much better the integral version was.

[knives]

I guess for me the difference comes from Rivette's alternate treatment of the film and what I've heard about differences in the versions making it sound more like a case of Wake Up, Ron Burgundy rather than the examples you cite of films being truncated for reasons unrelated to artistic intent (though of course I could be wrong though I believe my overall point still stands).

[swo17]

Swo: Well, a serial is much more like a miniseries (one story, one production, finite number of episodes, staggered release) than a loosely related series of films featuring the same characters in different stories - which is much more like non-serial series television. Anyway, that's the television analogy I'd employ for The Yakuza Papers, which is structured more as a villain-of-the-week type affair.

I guess I can't really argue my point any further until rewatching it to refresh my memory, but I remember Yakuza Papers being distinctly more like a novelistic mini-series than a villain-of-the-week type affair.

Personally I prefer the route for the most options so while I don't see anyone in their right mind voting for part of a serial or miniseries I prefer being allowed to voting for distinct parts to a series or of a film or however it applies in a given situation.

I think I kind of agree with this. For example, in the case of Out 1, I think it makes sense to assume that votes that don't specify "Sceptre" are for the longer version, or just for Out 1 in general, but if someone is of the opinion that Sceptre is a decidedly better edit, I think that's an opinion that deserves to be counted. (Though if it were treated as a separate film, none of its votes would count toward Out 1 in general.) In knives' case, having only seen the shorter cut, he'd have to decide if he had a good enough feel from what he'd seen to want to contribute to the likely more popular vote for Out 1 in general, or if he'd want to vote solely for Sceptre.

In most cases, I'd expect people to vote the way that the current rules assume they should, but if we give more options as knives suggests, for any given case, this will either a) confirm that the current rules make sense and change virtually nothing in the results, or b) reveal a flaw in the current thinking and automatically correct for it.

[domino harvey]

Will we still be allowed to vote for films?

[swo17]

You can vote for whatever you want, you'll still end up with 40 orphans.

[Lemmy Caution]

I've yet to take part in one of these, but Documentaries is the one most likely to pique my interest - and also the one to which I can probably contribute the most, given the vast number I've watched over the last decade or so.

It looks like Documentaries are in the lead.
But I was recently trying to solicit recs for documentaries from the last decade or so in this thread,
if you want to get an early start on touting recent documentaries.

[matrixschmatrix]

Ok, anyone who's planning to vote, get it in- this is going to come down to the top two at 8pm tomorrow, unless Documentary manages to establish an outright majority by then.

[matrixschmatrix]

Uh oh, this is tricky- what do people think? Should we just go with Documentaries, or wait until there's a tiebreaker between War and Religious, or what?

[Gregory]

I hadn't gotten around to voting and just broke the tie.