Hello filmmakers… If you are interested in having your work considered for the 2010 Sarasota Film Festival (April 9-18, 2010), today is our regular deadline. We hope you’ll consider allowing us to review your film. Our late deadline is January 30, 2010, but if you’re interested in submitting now, we’re eager to take a look.
You can submit via our Withoutabox application here.
As we prepare for Sundance and continue to work on plans for the 2010 Sarasota Film Festival, I wanted to take a moment to point you toward the ballot I put in with indieWIRE for the Annual Critics Survey 2009. As I always say, this blog is about championing films I love, not about any pretense to formal criticism (you can rest easy, blog haters, I have no intentions of “rating” in your world…), but it is always an honor to be asked to particpate in the indieWIRE Poll. Here is my list of favorites, each item linked to my own memory of each film, be it writing, a preview, a photo, whatever.
I am planning on writing from Sundance if I can get WiFi in the freezing cold tent in the parking lot at the Holiday Village (which will replace the comfort of the Yarrow Hotel Lobby as the Press and Industry waiting area); I’ll do my best to get capsules written every day. In the meantime, a last look back at 2009. My ballot below:
I love Eric Rohmer’s films. Yes, even The Lady and The Duke and its aristocratic distrust of the common man. Rohmer always stood apart from the Nouvelle Vague for me, more of a problematic cousin to the emotional honesty of Truffaut or the intellectual cool of Godard than a part of their fraternity. His movies are, for me, one of the only exceptions to the old rule of “show don’t tell”, primarily because of the dissonance between what his characters say and what is really going on in their hearts. Rohmer’s films are the literal definition of irony without ever feeling ironic, and it was his gift to understand what people mean when they say what they say. Veiled intentions, hurt feelings; Rohmer is always aware of his character’s true emotions, even when they aren’t. It is this awareness, always passed along to the audience through beautiful, long takes that allow his actors to undermine the text of the dialogue and create the text of the film, that define Rohmer’s cinema.
In recent years, primarily thanks to Criterion’s re-relelase of Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales in a beautiful deluxe edition DVD boxset, Rohmer’s early films, lovely movies all, have been rediscovered and much was made of his important role in shaping the current state of international cinema. I’m happy he lived to read those notices and, knowing what words meant to him as an artist, I hope he enjoyed the praise. Now that he is gone, I do feel that a certain type of filmmaking may have gone with him; a cinema that eschews the gadgetry and technical tricks of the trade in favor of people, their behaviors and their struggle with their feelings. Like I said, I love his movies. I will miss his work and was hoping for another film from him soon. Alas.
The Opening Sequence of Eric Rohmer’s La Collectionneuse
This post concludes The Back Row Manifesto’s Incredibly Personal, Completely Subjective List of the Best Films of The Decade (2000-2009). The introduction to the list can be found here.
I know. I’ve surprised no one. C’est la vie…
Let me start this tale the way I always start this tale, because the formative experience is the one that provides a key to the final meaning:
“Transformation is a powerful thing. The first time I ever saw a film by Arnaud Desplechin was one of the cinematic moments that changed my life. Close your eyes with me. Imagine that feeling of walking into a movie theater unaware and walking out a new person. It’s 1996, I’m 25 years old and living on poverty wages in Washington, D.C. spending my days in an exhausting government job and my nights hopping from one movie theater to the next. My favorite of the bunch, The Biograph, had closed and been replaced by a CVS pharmacy. All that remained, aside from the relatively mainstream fare, was the snobby Kennedy Center and The Key Theater on Wisconsin Avenue, one block north of M Street (it is now a Banana Republic, a fact which makes it hard for me to walk though the doors of that particular chain store.) The theater was well kept, and I slid in, dripping wet from the rain on the streets, grabbed a seat near the back and watched what has become one of the cornerstone films of my life; Arnaud Desplechin’s My Sex Life…or How I Got Into An Argument.
There are moments you never forget at the movies, and I can remember almost every detail of that night; the smell of the space (popcorn and expensive perfume), the shape of the head of the person in front of me, the texture of the floor beneath my feet, the lumpy contours of the cushion in my seat. The epic scope of the film, the honest exploration of real and complicated feelings, those messy interactions of people my own age; it was literally transformative. Mathieu Amalric’s performance as Paul Dedalus, so flawed, selfish, egotistical, manipulative, and so very alive, resonated with me in a powerful way, but so too did Emanuelle Devos as the heartbroken Esther and Jeanne Balibar as the manipulative Valérie. Every character in the film feels like a part of me. The jilted lover, the lothario, the confused student, the rival—all of them share something of me, and the impression they made on me in my mid-20’s was profound. The cast in the film has gone on to become the face of contemporary French cinema, and seeing them perform in other films feels like spending time with old friends whom I miss dearly.”
I wrote those paragraphs in September of 2004 at the Toronto Film Festival after a screening of Desplechin’s Kings and Queen In the five years since, Desplechin has released two more movies that have rocked me to my core; his intensely personal documentary L’Aimee and the brilliant A Christmas Tale. Kings and Queen was preceded in the decade by two more brilliant films, the incredibly misunderstood and under appreciated Esther Kahn and criminally unreleased Léo: Playing In The Company Of Men. Taken as a whole, this body of work will remain for me the seminal work of this decade, the most important, pleasurable, meaningful movies I saw in the past ten years.
Arnaud Desplechin’s Kings and Queen
I feel as though I have grown up with Desplechin and I feel such a deep connection between his filmmaking and my own experience of life, of the world and of the movies that I often find it impossible to convey the depth of my appreciation for his work; every film, hell, every frame feels like it was made just for me, a glimpse inside of my own passions and a deeply layered exploration of the ghosts and hidden worlds that exist just beyond my grasp.
Know this: Desplechin’s films are all haunted by the specters of his imagination, but they are also dense, deeply spiritual texts that carry incredible layers of meaning. I was privileged to meet Desplechin a few times this decade, twice for interviews, and I always tried to get him on the record about the way he executes this density; each time, he parried my inquiries. The closest I ever got to getting a confession was this exchange from May, 2005:
BRM: During your recent retrospective at BAM, audiences had a chance to see all of your films together, and for me, it was illuminating because one notices right away that the films begin to almost talk to one another, to rhyme, on many levels. As a another way of talking about Nora and Ismaël’s story in Kings & Queen, I’d like to talk to you about your earlier films, because in many ways Kings & Queen feels like a continuation and culmination of the groundwork established in your other films.
So, in your films, there is a sense of haunting, of spirits, ghosts, and corpses arriving to change the meanings of character’s lives. The examples are numerous: The head, called le fantóme, in La Sentinelle, the return of Esther’s menstrual cycle in My Sex Life…, the dead monkey that helps free Paul in the same film, the dead in Léo, and of course Nora’s ‘ghosts’ in Kings & Queen. Can you discuss the role that these ghosts play for you? How do you wish them to be understood?
AD: Each time I’m starting to work on a film, even if I love to settle the plot in the real world, I start to think about the plot as a fairy tale, or a dream, or a nightmare… As if it was the best way to tell the truth about characters or narration, instead of realism. When I wrote my first movie, La Vie des Morts, I thought, here you have this girl, coming back to her parent’s house, because her cousin just committed suicide. The cousin is between life and death, a bullet in his head, and all they have to do is wait. Then, this girl, Pascale, (like a holy lamb) notices she starts to be strangely nauseous; her womb starts to ache, her period is delayed. She can’t understand what’s happening; she has no reason to be pregnant. So, what’s happening? At the end of the movie, she wakes up; during the night she had a weird miscarriage. And her father is telling to Pascale his cousin died at the very same moment. So, during the movie, she was pregnant with the death of her cousin. And she’s the one in the family who will have to free her cousin from death agony, through this black magic delivery. It seemed to me that such a plot, being pregnant with someone’s death, would express in an obscure and obvious way what mourning is about. Then, perhaps, all theses ghosts are spoors, cinematic appearances of the past in the middle of the present.
Arnaud Desplechin
That, for me, is the true greatness of Desplechin’s work, that he has found a way, film by film, to create a layering of time (“the past in the middle of the present”) through not only the experiences of his characters, or in the thematic “rhyming” across his films, but in his audiences as well. Sitting through one of his movies, you can’t help but feel overwhelmed by the familiarity of it all, a sense that, while it is all so surprising and new, it feels intensely logical and connected to everything you love about the movies. When we spoke in late 2008 about his latest film A Christmas Tale, I went back to him about how this process might work: BRM: Let’s talk about the use of signs in your films. Watching your movies, it seems that one should begin looking at these films like you might look at paintings, with coded signs embedded in them. Can you discuss your use of signs? What would you like the audience to take from these?
AD: I do not want to trick the audience. The idea of these things, these signs, is not meant to be a surprise; yes, it is there, but it is not meant as a trick. What I mean is: for sure, meanings and signs appear on a screen. But it’s not my will. My job, as a director, is just to give to all those strange meanings a nice shape, a nice form and a good pace.
My feeling is that, as soon as reality is screened, it starts to mean. It’s not the director who’s doing that, it’s the cinema itself. A simple corridor transforms itself into a threat, or a refuge, or a path, a birth, a death, an evocation of 2001: A Space Odyssey, whatever; a white napkin transforms itself into a gloomy sheet (Shaft Returns), the bed sheet transforms itself into a cinema screen (Notting Hill), and the blanket of It Happened One Night becomes a wall between Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert.
I couldn’t call them “signs”, because, as a spectator, I don’t feel compelled to interpret them. Or worse, to give the “right interpretation”?! No, it just happens when reality starts to shine, to glow. My job as a director is just to notice these odd rhymes that happened all the time, and to use them in the storytelling. Yes, the grave of Joseph that you can see in the graveyard in Roubaix was inspired by Waldo (Emerson)‘s grave in Concord. But I hope no one in the audience will notice it. It just helps me to draw a nice mythical grave, to draw a dream that you can inhabit.
BRM: You are putting so much into each frame, we’ve only just discussed one minute of the movie…
AD: But this is not all meant to be for the audience to be aware of! This is just my job of being a good pupil and making sure it is there.
BRM: How should the audience see these things? Is this why audiences come away from your films feeling their depth but, as is often the case, being unable to articulate why the film they experienced feels so rich?
AD: My goal is not to have the audience search for all of this. I want them to be entertained, to be dazzled. This is what I mean by being a good pupil. These images, these sounds; they come out of the screen in waves. Each level of the image, all of the (images) in (a single shot), the sound; they come out off the screen on many different levels and directly to the audience. I want them to come away from it like the movie has dazzled them.
Well, consider me dazzled, then.
Arnaud Desplechin’s Esther Kahn
Desplechin’s attraction to mythological symbols and classical narratives, the way he weaves serious themes into hilarious situations and vice-versa, and the way he integrates his actors’ performances into his films, be it through editing or the work he gives them to do in the story itself; every element of the filmmaking process is under his spell. But Desplechin is right; more important than the way in which these films utilize an arsenal of ideas and techniques is their effect on the hearts of the audience. And while I am constantly tempted to tear the films apart in order to see how they work, I also find myself constantly getting lost in their beauty and efficiency as movies, as entertainments.
Of the five films he made in the 2000’s, I consider three of them (Esther Kahn, Kings And Queen and A Christmas Tale) to be among the finest films of all time. And while so many people have been deprived of the opportunity to see Léo: Playing In The Company Of Men (no English language DVD is available), I consider that film to be a sort of Rosetta Stone of Desplechin’s work in the decade; orphans, symbolic patricide, suicide, the sins of the parent being visited upon the child, the classical structure of a great tragedy, the mythological texture of the film—so many of his thematic concerns are rooted in the film. And yet, it remains woefully undistributed in the USA (despite a Region 2 French language DVD being available).
Arnaud Desplechin’s Léo: Playing In The Company Of Men
While movies come and movies go and we track their relative success in terms of the numbers of tickets they sell (always enamored with business, this country of ours), we often tend to look past the true value of art; the impact it has on helping its audience re-imagine the form, to re-examine how we see the world through the lens of a creative re-ordering of things. And while Desplechin’s films fly relatively under the public radar in this country, it seems to me that his cinema is the best expression of our time, looking forward and back, material, sensual and intellectual, encompassing a unique space between myth and reality that feels both heightened and completely tangible. I can think of no movies I would rather watch, again and again; they constantly find new ways to surprise and move me.
Anyone who has read this blog over the years knows of my love for Desplechin’s work, and while I have loved so many films over the course of the past ten years, no work has meant more to me than his. This process, this ordering of films, has never been about list making or rules or following a format, but has always been a way for me to organize my passion for movies into its own story, a way of remembering a fixed period of time spent watching the work of artists that I love. I have no greater affection in the world of cinema than I do for the films of Arnaud Desplechin; they are my comfort, my hope, my secret, a series of stories that speak to me, to my generation, to my time being alive. These films are my cinema and as such, I consider them the most important movies of the decade.
My unconscionable exclusions of films and filmmakers that I love who ended up outside of the list but who have burrowed deep into my heart:
Hou Hsiao Hsien , Terrence Malick, Tsai Ming-Liang (especially The Wayward Cloud * swoon *), Wes Anderson, Matthew Barney, Lucrecia Martel, Kelly Reichardt, Martin Scorsese, Jacques Rivette, Oliver Assayas, Jean Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Agnés Varda, Edward Yang and Philippe Garrel, almost all of whom were excluded because honestly, my favorite films of theirs were not made in this decade. Does that mean that their films of the “aughts” were not among the top films of the decade? No. This list is subjective, topical, a list of people and experiences, not a qualitative be-all and end-all. No list can encapsulate the cinematic joys I have experienced these past ten years… Take it for what it is, a priority ordering of pleasures…
Actors of the Decade: Mathieu Amalric and Lee Kang-sheng Actresses of The Decade: Isabelle Huppert and Emmanuelle Devos Cinematographer of the Decade: Agnes Godard Composer of The Decade: Johnny Greenwood Editor of the Decade: Dana Bunescu Unconscionably Unreleased Film Of The Decade:Secret Sunshine by Lee Chang-dong
The Back Row Manifesto’s Incredibly Personal, Completely Subjective List of the Best Films of The Decade (2000-2009) will be unveiled over the course of the month of December (and now on into January). Think of it as a sort of misguided advent calendar without the little chocolate surprises. Either way, thanks for reading and please check back every day over the next few days for the full list. The introduction to the list can be found here.
Remember your first trip to the movies? I do. In November of 1973, right around my third birthday, my dad took me to see my first movie, Walt Disney’s Robin Hood. I loved it (still do, despite the fact that now, in my old age, Pinocchio and Dumbo are probably my favorite Disney films) and the experience of seeing an animated, family feature was formative for me, as it has been for generations of film lovers before and since. Times may have changed, but the movies still provide that sense of wonder, still retain their place as America’s great escape; progress may have changed the movies, but the collective act of seeing a movie on the big screen remains a vital, formative cultural experience for most of the nation. And in the 2000’s, no filmmaker, no actor, no studio, no one, nothing, nothing has been more influential on the lives of young moviegoers than the films created by Pixar Animation Studios.
Brad Bird’s The Incredibles
Originally a division of George Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) called The Lucasfilm Computer Graphics Project, 1986 saw Lucas sell this company to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs (who had recently departed Apple) for $5 million. Jobs, who invested another $5 million of capital into the company, changed the name to Pixar and, banking on Pixar as a computer company, with the signature Pixar Image Computer being able to render high resolution images for medical and government functions, began efforts to sell as many machines as possible. But while the hardware business was a flop, it was an employee, John Lasseter, who began making animated shorts on the system to showcase the computer’s unique abilities…
John Lasseter’s 1984 Short Film The Adventures Of André and Wally B, produced at the Lucasfilm Computer Graphics Project, which would later become Pixar
As the animation department caught on in the world of advertising, Pixar began expanding upon a long-term partnership with Disney, who made a $26 million deal with the fledgling company to create animated films. The first project was Toy Story, which went on to be a global phenomenon and in 2006, after a long contentious relationship built upon billions of dollars of Pixar success, Steve Jobs sold Pixar to Disney for $7.4 billion in Disney stock. John Lasseter assumed his rightful place as Chief Creative Officer of Pixar and Disney, and Pixar was able to retain its autonomy as a separate entity under the agreement, which preserved Pixar’s corporate identity and culture in Emeryville, CA. Nice work if you can get it.
I am placing Pixar in the number two slot of my Best of The Decade list not because they created a great film here or there, or because the studio’s commitment to quality proved consistently excellent in a community like Hollywood (which is traditionally scrambling behind the curve of their audience’s tastes and interests), or because of the revolutionary process of animation that Pixar developed, re-shaping animated film for our lifetime. No. Instead, I think it is important to recognize that Pixar created four, that’s right, four, animated masterpieces in ten years, a staggering accomplishment when you consider that these four films also grossed a collective $2,483,000,000 in world wide box office and were directed by three different Directors (Brad Bird having directed two of them). For all of the agonizing I do about Hollywood and the business of movies and the studio system and the shitty storytelling and the pandering and the corporate middle men working their damnedest to find the lowest common denominator, it is also important to always be intellectually honest and tell the truth, So, here goes; When we look back at the 2000’s, The Incredibles, WALL*E, Ratatouille and Up will be eternally remembered as four of the greatest movies of this decade. And rightly so.
Brad Bird’s Ratatouille
Pixar’s commitment to storytelling, developing great stories first and making them into gorgeous works of animated art, places them head and shoulders above the overwhelming majority of American films of the past decade; these are ambitious spectacles that never pander to the baser instincts of the audience and that always value a humanistic appreciation of the outsider, of the wide variety of differences in experience, passion and ability. Forced to choose between a film like WALL*E or the adventures of a farting ogre and his minstrel donkey, I know upon which side of the fence I sit.
The other minor miracle of these particular Pixar films is that they are not sequels or franchises, not based on comic book characters or children’s toys, are not musicals and are generally not designed primarily as delivery systems for ancillary businesses and licensing; a Ratatouille Happy Meal was never in the cards (although The Incredibles did just fine with the products, I’m sure). While other Pixar films were cash cows for the new cross-platform business of children’s films (Cars and the Toy Story franchise spring to mind immediately), these four films had a special quality, a purpose as cinema and as film first, that allowed the movies and the characters to instill meaning through their narratives instead of being primarily a delivery system for chicken nuggets and action figures. And while it may seem faint praise to congratulate a series of films that made 2.5 billion in box office for not being overtly commercial, it is the credibility of each film as a film that, underlined by that box office number, reveals the true brilliance of Pixar’s vision; great, worthwhile, artfully made movies can bring in audiences and simultaneously transcend the universe of shit that surrounds them.
Andrew Stanton’s WALL*E
Not that the Pixar oeuvre is without its controversies. While much was made of a film like The Incredibles endorsing the conservative value of exceptionalism, of the powerful individual utilizing his powers to the best of his ability, it was clear that cultural critics were missing the point of all Pixar films; everyone is exceptional. Who watches a film like The Incredibles and relates to the actions of the villain, Syndrome? Obviously, millions of people saw something of themselves in the story of an exceptional family, which is why the studio’s unique ability to make audiences not only invest deeply in their stories but feel deeply and passionately about their characters’ dreams and desires is the key to the success of their films. And while most films of this genre play down to the kiddies while keeping the adults interested with pop culture winks and humorless clichés, Pixar’s films, and especially WALL*E and Up, create an ageless narrative on the screen, one that addresses, at a very primal level, the experience of wonder and being alive.
Pete Docter and Bob Peterson’s Up
These are big ideas for animated films, but don’t be fooled; the intent and purpose of these movies is to create classic cinema that will endure long after the pop culture references fade into obscurity, after the celebrity voices are no longer recognizable and long after the technology of the movies changes forever. The idea of making great films for children and families is an inspiration to someone like me, someone who wants to see important cinema flourish across future generations, who wants his own son to be able to discriminate between a great film and a cheap amusement. Maybe a film like WALL*E will offer my son a gateway into the films of Chaplin and Kubrick? Or maybe, the pleasure of Pixar’s films will simply inspire him to love the experience of watching movies with his opinionated, long-winded dad. I can’t predict the fate of anyone, but I do believe that in The Incredibles, WALL*E, Ratatouille and Up, there is hope for popular entertainment, for the development of a discerning audience. Nothing would mean more to me than to see Pixar continue to bring these beautiful films into the world. We’re living in a golden age for animated storytelling in this country, and Pixar is leading the way. We should sit back, content, and enjoy every frame of it.
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