Fellini’s Casanova [1976, Federico Fellini] (5.0)

An occasional visual stunner that mostly permeates in my memory as an interminably obnoxious act of sadism toward the audience. Not in the torture porn sense of sadism, but in the kind such as approximating a fascinating film but with enough of an err toward crap that it causes a unique sort of spasm in the cerebral cortex. Casting Donald Sutherland was a true masterstroke, as he embodies everything that is right and wrong with this film in just one of his sweaty pelvic trusts.
 
 
Shampoo [1975, Hal Ashby] (7.3)

Will need to re-watch, but about an hour in I realized that I was in a bit of a subtle trance state, just watching these people do not much other than each other. Then came the euphoria of the election night parties, and that strobe light, and it was the most banal kind of bliss I’ve experienced in some time. The ending is affecting, but felt a tad too calculated.
 
 
Minnie and Moskowitz [1971, John Cassavetes] (6.3)

Cassavetes’ way of allowing scenes to ramble looooong past what any studio director would be allowed, or allow himself, is married to a funky kind of ellipsis in the first half that nearly left my mouth agape. I spent the first half hour trying to detect whether the projectionist had mixed reels (and I’m still not convinced that they weren’t out of order; the opening credits get cut short and then resume about 15 minutes later – anyone? intentional?) and finally succumbed to the ride. These people are insane, under the influence if you will, and I had so much pleasure watching their tirades linger on the screen before getting cut off, sometimes mid-sentence, only to return an hour later (maybe), that I didn’t really notice that they’re actually pretty thinly sketched. The second half gets considerably more straight forward as we focus on Minnie and Moskowitz – I guess this was to be expected – and I realized that I was probably supposed to care for these people a lot more than I actually did.
 
 
From Here to Eternity [1953, Fred Zinnemann] (6.1)

Perhaps it didn’t know what to do with itself tonally, but I thought that was one of the more compelling things about it. Why was a romance triangle built with Deborah Kerr if she is going to almost completely disappear in the film’s second half? Why shift from an endearing and selfless act of revenge in an alley into a full scale Pearl Harbor war picture? Who cares? It made the hammy elements of each detour at least formally tolerable.

   

I Confess [1953, Alfred Hitchcock] (6.2)

Would fit nicely into an essay on Hitchcock’s fluidity of guilt, not to mention his Catholic upbringing – this being the most overt confrontation with it.  It’s almost certainly his most literally spiritual film, but it slides toward the back of the pack in terms of visceral spirituality.  Predictable and questionably directed, it nonetheless presents a compelling moral dilemma that gets surprisingly tense in its latter stages.  I was hoping for the ‘The End’ to appear as Father Logan exited the courthouse after hearing his verdict, but was instead provided a citation for Kinski’s Aguirre performance.

 

Too Late Blues [1961, John Cassavetes] (6.0)

A film about spontaneity as much as it is about pride, chauvinism, and selling out, which is perhaps obvious in reference to a Cassavetes film, but I think this is both the first film of his to really incorporate it as an essential element (at least, I didn’t think Shadows was really concerned with it), as well as the most ambivalent toward it. Every key moment for protagonist John ‘Ghost’ Wakefield happens at a moment that seems to spring from nowhere, signalling actions that go against his believed-established morals and ideals – his treatment of Jess during the bar brawl carrying the most consequences.  His commitment to jazz and making more populist career moves is the conflict that ultimately wipes him out, prompting the loss of his girl, his friends, and his music. Much better for me in retrospect, so I’ll probably like it much more next time.

 

Mikey and Nicky [1976, Elaine May] (5.9)

The shot-reverse-shot patterns really irritated me, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was watching a hack doing her best Cassavetes impression, going so far as to cover it up by casting the man himself for the lead.  I don’t like to put too much stock in gendered voices, but this film was trying really hard to not come off as feminine.  The climax is brutal and unforgettable, but the evolution up to that moment – an intimate relationship between two males – needed someone who’d lived such experiences to tell them with any amount of breadth.

 

The Dirty Dozen [1967, Robert Aldrich] (3.9)

I was afraid that a film about twelve prisoners deployed on a confidential and urgent mission would play out like this.  Aside from the absurdity of the premise, you’ve got your token nutcase, screwball, and wise one, plus some fillers since it’s too difficult to make that many memorable characters without trying too hard. Ends in a loud, vulgar finale that holds up worse now than it probably did a few years ago now that Inglourious Basterds showed essentially the same thing, but with more grandeur, catharsis, and fun.

 
Pyaasa [1957, Guru Dutt] (Inc.)

‘Inc.’ because the promised screening format was 35mm, and what they were actually showing was a digital projection of what looked like a VHS bootleg (now that I look up screen captures to see how close in quality what they screened is to internet versions – and the quality is quite comparable – I’m also noticing that their aspect ratio (it was shown at 4:3) may have been off (the online version looks something like 1.66:1)). The bad quality isn’t the problem itself, but more that I was too enraged for the first half of the film to focus on anything else. I hate to carp on technical displays for a film of this stature (though, the only time I’ve ever written anything about perhaps my favorite film ever, Play Time, was to complain about how the Harvard Film Archive projected it from the Criterion DVD instead of a film print), it really prevented me from connecting with the film. This is based on expectations, of course, as I’m pretty sure that if I’d sat down in my living room to watch the same crappy version, I wouldn’t have been fuming, and therefore probably would have been fine as usual. What I did get, though, is that this film has beautiful music (looking for the soundtrack now), and it is beautifully photographed (from what I could gather), and that I’m not sure if Vijay’s transformation into a didactic Christ-figure, turning the end of the film into a sermon, will ever sit well with me. Here’s to a better screening scenario next time.

 
 

 
A Child is Waiting [1963, John Cassavetes] (5.5)

Similar to David Lynch with The Elephant Man, Cassavetes briefly went Hollywood early in his career for a very ‘un-him’ tearjerker, both coincidentally centered around life-crippling disabilities. This would really make a good companion to The Miracle Worker, as they are both about a woman’s struggles to discipline a disabled child, only in the Penn film the disability is physical, where for Cassavetes’ it is mental. The cognition required to properly integrate into society, and to abide its rules, is inherent in our DNA, and I was anticipating how the script would approach the little hiccup that lead to all of the subjects in this case being ill-equipped for such integration. The resolution, apparently, is to get frustrated and give up, which is significantly less compelling than watching Annie Sullivan whip Helen Keller around a room for reels at a time. Cassavetes’ talent for actors comes through in the Thanksgiving ‘play’, as the Down Syndrome-afflicted kids give believably stilted line deliveries that had prior-to-then been naturalistic, which I’d assumed was a given since they probably weren’t completely aware that they were even acting. Plenty of lush B&W photography to glaze over the excessively cloying bits (i.e. most of it), but I’m pretty sure that this was really just a vehicle to build to a gratuitous scene of Judy Garland tearfully singing ‘See the Snow Fly’ at a piano to/with a chorus of out-of-tune children.

Pretty slack, unfortunately. Excluding the longest end credits in recent memory, this barely cracks the 50-minute mark, and it’s essentially just your everyday Winnie the Pooh story drawn out to (barely) feature length. The post modern text play is fun, but bogs further into the educational moralizing typical of the Pooh franchise, tacking on an elementary lesson in semantics. I’m all for kids getting served some life lessons with their entertainment, but I felt too old for this material. Also, since I did grow up on the short episodes (my dad would either wake me up at 7am to watch them, or set the VCR to record them for me), I found the variances in the voices, however slight, and despite not having seen any Pooh material in two decades, more than unsettling – Eeyore especially. Not to mention that I never really understood until now that Winnie the Pooh is actually a complete moron – gluttony at its worst, until he makes the ‘choice’ to return Eeyore’s tail instead of eating some honey, although he could have very easily done both at the same time.

Life is too short to not waste time doing this. This should be regular for a while, starting now, but retroactive to a few days ago, when I started posting them on Google+, where I’ll continue to post them, too. Here are those:

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Rosemary’s Baby [1968, Roman Polanski] (8.4) – I somehow managed not only to avoid this for 25 years, but also to isolate myself from it enough to believe that it was some sort of The Exorcist competitor for gore and shock value, when it’s really a way more elegant study of paranoia that keeps the darkest matter offscreen. I was hoping that the reality of Rosemary’s fears would remain ambiguous (as a movie-watcher, of course I think her neighbors and doctors could possibly end up as satanic witches given their behavior, but that they actually are moves everything into the supernatural, distinguishing a bit of the severity of Rosemary’s condition – she wasn’t crazy after all, but actually quite justified). A lot of Lynch-isms in here, too (the Castevets have to be the source for the grandparents in Mulholland Dr. that lead to Betty/Diane’s ultimate fate; the final scene in the secret room evoked Blue Velvet‘s climax in Dorothy’s apartment; not to mention the ominous train noises).
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I Don’t Want to Be a Man [1918, Ernst Lubitsch] (5.6) – damn is Ossi an irritating brat. I like the way, over time, the gender politics becoming increasingly fickle – going from offensive and belittling representations of female daintiness (Ossi ‘doesn’t want to be a man’ because, well gee, smokin’ cigars, drinkin’ champagne, and gettin’ yer toes stepped on are tough work!) to her empowering, if still short-sighted triumphs over her ambiguously gay guardian (aside: were hetero males in early-twentieth century Germany really that touchy-feely? I mean, they could hardly keep their mouths off each other). Points for being such a prescient representation of drag, even if it’s all never as funny as it tries to be.
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Il Posto [1961, Ermanno Olmi] (8.7) – a few days ago I made a blanket statement against pretty much all of Italian cinema – excepting Antonioni, of course – but I clearly forgot about the neo-realists, somehow. The push-and-pull of ecstatic human emotions and the de-humanizing machine that is the workforce are balanced with a style that is somehow true to the ‘realist’ label but still expressive and occasionally abstract. Antonietta is one of the most alluring banal female characters I’ve seen; every moment she’s not on the screen in the second half of the film, I miss her.

“For Flaherty, what is important about Nanook hunting a seal is his relationship with the animal, the real extent of his wait. The length of the hunt is the very substance of the image, its true subject. In the film, this episode is thus composed in only one shot. Can anyone deny that it is much more moving as a result than montage of attractions would have been?”¹
– André Bazin

As cinema continues to finalize its transition from a medium composed of celluloid grain into one composed of digital pixels, it is important to take a closer look at some differences between these two means of producing a moving image. As D.N. Rodowick notes in a chronological outline of this transition, cinema has been under the influence of digital technology since digital image processing and synthesis was introduced in the 1980s², though this development merely allowed for special effects work to be done on films shot on celluloid. The real game-changing shift comes not only with post-production digital editing advancements, but also with the advent and ubiquity of digital capturing devices. ‘Films’ are being shot on hour-long digital tapes or with cameras rigged up to hard drives rather than 11-minute-capacity reels housing a thousand feet of celluloid. But for digital filmmaking to take possession of its “area of competence,” as Greenberg would say, it must determine and utilize that which is exclusive to itself as a medium.³ Of all that is unique to this new medium of cinema, I cannot see a more significant trait than its drastically extended allowance in shot length.

Additionally, if one wishes to look at just how varied our perception of the cinematic image is by this development, one would find a strong model in the genre of ‘structural’ filmmaking. P. Adams Sitney, who first named and outlined the characteristics of the genre, defines this avant-garde niche as one “wherein the shape of the whole film is predetermined and simplified, and it is that shape that is the primal impression of the film.”⁴ With a film that is about shape, and the deconstruction and minimizing of that shape, the work acts as an exposé of the formal paradigms that construct the narrative cinema. Michael Snow’s canonical structural film Wavelength is practically the example of this commentary. In “Toward Snow,” Annette Michelson’s seminal piece on Wavelength, she outlines the film’s deconstruction of narrative form. She writes, “The film is the projection of a grand reduction; its ‘plot’ is the tracing of spatiotemporal données, its ‘action’ the movement of the camera as the movement of consciousness.”⁵ She then adds, “Voiding the film of the metaphoric proclivity of montage, Snow created a grand metaphor for narrative form.” Given that he has taken on digital recording methods with some of his recent moving image work, there is not a more appropriate artist than Michael Snow to look at the shifts in perception that have been born from digital filmmaking’s extended long takes.

Snow’s 2002 video piece Solar Breath (Northern Caryatids) is a worthy candidate for this examination, both for its formal make-up (it is a single, static shot that lasts for 62 minutes), and for its primary subject (a pair of windows), which has a striking resemblance to the aesthetics of Wavelength. Throughout Solar Breath’s running time, the drapes hanging on the viewer’s side of the windows dangle, whip, and react to the wind that flows in and out of the space through one of the windows that has been left open. Though this window is open, there is still a screen that stops the drape from exiting the space. The drape, therefore, smacks lazily against the screen as the wind attempts to suck the undulating fabric out of our space and into the outdoors. On a small number of occasions, the drape will blow forward far enough to give the viewer a glimpse of the outside, where a solar panel sits on a table in the lawn, soaking in the sun, generating the energy that is potentially allowing the video camera to operate and record that which we are seeing. While all of this takes place – seemingly in real time without any breaks in the action – non-diegetic sound of someone eating fills the soundtrack.

That Solar Breath is a single shot of a set of windows steers it directly into dialogue with Wavelength (never mind that they were both made by Michael Snow). While Solar Breath genuinely has the appearance of being a single shot, Wavelength is very much a different story. In his original statement written for the release of the film, Snow purports Wavelength to be “a continuous zoom which takes 45 minutes to go from its widest field to its smallest and final field,”⁶ even though the material nature of celluloid, as well as the jumpy visual appearance, reveals this to not be the case. Michelson skimps around this claim, hazily mentioning the disruptions in the zoom in her description of it, saying that it is “by no means absolutely steady, but proceeding in a slight visible stammer.”(“Toward Snow,” 174) Shot with various stocks of 16mm film – some expired, some current – the film is very much a collection of reels. Not that it is any big secret that Wavelength was not actually done in a single take (the film goes from day to night and back to day in the course of 45 minutes). The reality of the matter is that Wavelength, a film made in 1967, couldn’t have been done in a single, 45-minute take even if Snow had wanted to; no reels of film, neither in 1967 nor now, support shots that are even half that length. The illusion that what we are seeing is continuous is an intuitive connection between our awareness of the limitations of the medium, and our detection of the intentions of the filmmaker to overcome these limitations.

Pier Paolo Pasolini, who coincidentally published his article “Observations on the Long Take” in the same year of Wavelength’s premiere, likens the long take to that of our own present perception:

“Reality seen and heard as it happens is always in the present tense. The long take, the schematic and primordial element of cinema, is thus in the present tense. Cinema therefore ‘reproduces the present’.”⁷

If the lingering shot is the present of a particular, subjective observer, it remains a reproduction of the present until it is finished, whereby it becomes the past, allowing for interpretation. Pasolini’s theory develops to posit that a shot’s meaning can only be given value once it is finished; like with human life, the possibilities of relations and meanings and developments is endless, “chaotic,” until it is over. This reveals Wavelength to be an anomaly of sorts. When its shots end, they are each followed by a brand new shot that begins in almost exactly the same place, with almost exactly the same perspective of exactly the same room as when the previous shot ended. While Pasolini sees montage as the construction of an objective viewpoint – the selection of the best of every possible subjective perspective to present objectivity devoid of the present – Wavelength exists as a montage that retains its subjectivity and its illusion of the present.

Bazin’s opinion on long takes differs from Pasolini’s in that it promotes long takes in order to retain the objectivity, rather than the subjectivity, ingrained in the single, unedited shot. He speaks of three different types of editing, and “All three have a common feature, which is the very definition of editing and montage: they create meaning which is not objectively contained in the images and which derives solely from placing these images in relation to one another.”(“Evolution of Film Language,” 88-89) In Bazin’s essay “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,”⁸ he details how a photograph, captured on emulsion, presents the photographed subject in the present. The photo is objective proof of the subject’s existence. Similarly, a motion picture film presents the change of the subject objectively. This change in the subjects exists as it was captured, regardless of image distortion. The objectivity of this change is interrupted, though, with montage, which introduces the subjectivity of the editor, inviting interpretation and meaning that was not invoked in the original shot. Going back to Bazin’s thoughts on Nanook’s hunt, the duration of his wait is presented in its actual temporal form; the wait that we experience in watching the hunt is identical to the duration that Nanook experienced at the original moment of filming. It is, thus, made present again in the viewer. Any cuts or edits in this shot would extinguish its validity as an objective document of the duration of Nanook’s wait.

There are comparable problems with this theory, again, when it is matched up with Wavelength. Because the shape of the structural film is the subject of the work, it is the zoom that should be considered the subject of Snow’s film (as opposed to the walls of the loft, any of the human performers, or the photograph of the waves). Going by Bazin’s ideas, then, the film is a document of the change of the zoom, and the duration of that change. The duration of the camera zoom at the heart of the film is fixed at 45 minutes once the starting point (the back of the loft), end point (the photograph), and the zoom speed are determined, all of which is set in the first moments of the first reel. The camera’s projected zoom is intermittently broken up by cuts, but, again, each shot progresses in the same direction at the same speed. Repeating one of Michelson’s key thoughts, “[Wavelength’s] ‘action’ is the movement of the camera as the movement of consciousness,”(“Toward Snow,” 175) the film presents only one consciousness. The fact that the zoom is broken up into many parts is inconsequential to the duration because all of the shots are intra-subjective, giving the illusion of a continuous trek. Wavelength successfully functions as a document of the duration of a 45-minute zoom through a loft because of this approximate continuity among its successive shots. The objective duration of the zoom would be the same as one shot as it is as several.

That Wavelength represents a single journey despite being composed of several shots is a result of the viewer’s intuition of the mode (celluloid) in which it was captured. This is a cognitively formulated suspension of disbelief, but as Rodowick details, it is also an inevitable awareness that is inherent in, and shapes the way that we perceive, every creative medium:

“A medium, then, is nothing more nor less than a set of potentialities from which creative acts may unfold. These potentialities, the powers of the medium as it were, are conditioned by multiple elements or components that can be material, instrumental, and/or formal. Moreover, these elements may vary, individually and in combination with one another, such that a medium may be defined without a presumption that any integral identity or an essence unites these elements into a whole or resolves them into a unique substance.”⁹

Thus, in McLuhan-ist fashion, the potential of the recording medium is a very important factor in its interpretation, in large part because we know what something can and cannot do, and therefore are more open to compensations. This is why the emergence of a medium such as video provokes new grounds for the perception of the extended long take. With video, several-hours-long shots are possible.

A sample of some of the structural filmmakers who have taken the plunge into digital capturing methods, other than Michael Snow, includes Ernie Gehr, Jonas Mekas, and, most recently, James Benning with his 2009 film Ruhr. Benning makes for an interesting model at this point, because a majority of his films are founded on durational concerns that he explores in long, static shots. Ruhr is Benning’s first ‘film’ not captured or exhibited on celluloid in thirty-two years of filmmaking, and contains the longest shot of his career, coming in at 60 minutes. Mark Peranson described this shot in his review of the film in the Winter 2010 issue of Cinema Scope magazine¹⁰:

“Relieved of the necessity of changing camera rolls, Benning goes all out with a mesmerizing shot of a coke-processing tower in Schwelgern, where every ten minutes water pours down onto the base and creates a billowing pillar of steam leaking through the steel-latticed structure and into the atmosphere; the tower looks that it is on fire. As it repeats, surrounded by clouds it itself creates, the image takes on a psychedelic quality, with each billowing blossoming into differing colours, a function of both the material being processed as well as the changing quality of light.”

As a continuous documentation of the repeating cycles of the steam from the tower, and of the daylight’s shift into the darker tones of the evening, this kind of shot is unique to the technology of video capturing. No form of celluloid could present the entire duration of this event.

A peculiar anecdote in the same review reveals another facet of video, and at the same time calls into question its indexicality. Near the end of his description of Ruhr’s concluding shot, Peranson reports, “the shot grew dark faster than time allows – Benning condensed 90 minutes to 60, in effect speeding up the sunset”(“Ruhr,” 57) (*Note – According to an interview with Benning, the shot was actually narrowed down to 60 minutes from a 120- minute shot¹¹). In this off-hand factoid, the credibility of the documentary value of the shot virtually vanishes. The shot, which is perceived to be a particular duration in the film, is revealed to have been twice as long in the original captured moment. First of all, it is important to note that there are two methods in which Benning could have eliminated that hour of running time. Either he sped up the video to play at 200% its captured speed, or he cut out a chunk from somewhere in the middle, and joined the remaining fragments through very slow dissolves and color correction. In the aforementioned interview with Benning, he reveals the latter method to have indeed been the case, but it is the potentiality of both options that questions and complicates the ways that we perceive video and its indexical value for duration and change.

To capture, and then playback, a document of a subject’s change in a manner which can be deemed to be indexical, there is a responsibility placed on the coordination of frame rates in the production and post-production development of the shot. In the analogical medium of celluloid, options for deviating from this coordination have always been slim, and have only gotten more strictly defined since the end of the silent era. Presently, 16mm and 35mm films are almost universally shot at 24 frames per second; with super 8mm, one has the added option of 18 frames per second, and the silent era saw a range of complicated frames rates, some of which, such as 17 frames per second, are awkward prime numbers that are practically incompatible with any of today’s projectors. While many of these frame rates were used for slow motion or fast motion techniques, the options for projecting a film at a frame rate that is different from that which it was captured, while still retaining an illusion of being ‘real-life’ speed, are nil (anything less than a 10% speed change will be imperceptible to most eyes). Even so, a film projected at a faster or slower frame rate than which it was shot is still, materially, unaltered.

Video, on the other hand, has a wide and complicated array of potential digital speed alterations. In editing suites such as Avid and Final Cut Pro, video can be sped up or slowed down by as little as .01%. Changes in video speeds will result in one of two distortions in the frame counts: in progressive video, frames will intermittently be dropped so that the final running time corresponds to the calculated manipulation, and in interlaced video, two frames will weave themselves together in order to compensate for the lost or gained time. In Europe, where the PAL video standard calls for frame rates of 25 frames per second instead of 24, films are telecined with a 4% speed-up to compensate for the difference, yielding very slight, though imperceptible fast-forward in practically every video available in the continent. The reality of this type of speed-up, though, originates in the post-production process: a film shot on either celluloid or video is subject to this manner of durational manipulation.

In contrast, the potentiality of the technique of ‘seamless splicing’ (i.e. Benning’s method of halving the duration of his shot of the coke tower) is rooted in the moment of capture. In the Fall 2009 issue of Cinema Scope¹², Benning recalls the circumstances for another shot used in Ruhr in which seamless splicing was also used:

“I began filming…in a wooded area adjacent to the Düsseldorf International Airport. There was no wind. It was absolutely still, not one leaf was moving. The high definition captured every tiny twig…I found the frame and pushed the start button filling two SxS cards with one take – a 114-minute shot. During that time 40 planes landed. The frame remained absolutely still, no registration movement, no dancing grain…I wasn’t sure this stillness would be acceptable, but then a plane passed through the frame providing momentary movement. Ten seconds later a wind vortex produced by the passing plane sang though the frame and disturbed one loose branch hanging from a nearby tree… When the next plane landed it started all over again…When I looked at the footage on my computer that night I realized I had recorded an action that would have been impossible to capture on film.”

In the film, this shot lasts roughly seventeen minutes, in which 4 of the 40 captured planes are seen landing. Just like in the coke tower scene, any jumps in time that Benning added in post-production are imperceptible. What we see in the film dictates that there are approximately 4 minutes between the landing of the first plane and the landing of the second; however, it is anyone’s guess as to how much time actually passed between the original landings of these two planes, or even if there were other planes that landed in between them. What we are aware of while watching this shot, though, is the potentiality that Benning recorded a large stretch of uninterrupted footage, and is presenting the viewer with his most ideal representation of this event.

This boundless, uninterrupted palette of moments likens the editing process to the more subjective, ‘hands-on’ artistic medium of painting. Rodowick quotes Thomas Elsaesser’s “Beyond Distance”, in which Elsaesser writes, “…the digital image should be regarded as an expressive, rather than reproductive medium, with both the software and the ‘effects’ it produces bearing the imprint and signature of the creator”. Rodowick adds, “The image becomes not only more painterly but also more imaginative.¹³” This is such a monumental quality for video to have, not only because it validates its place among more traditional fine art media, but because it gives it an edge against celluloid as a tool for artists’ and filmmakers’ creative and subjective freedom. When a shot is captured on celluloid, the potentiality of missed moments – via reel changes – comes into play. Therefore, because there are moments in the entire duration of the captured event that are ineligible for inclusion in the final presentation, the viewer cannot be confident that the filmmaker was allowed to curate the duration down to his most desired selection. This is akin to denying a painter access to certain viewing angles of his model, or the use of particular, appropriate brushes.

Michael Snow’s Solar Breath, thus, both suffers and reaps rewards from video capture’s potentialities. As a presentation of a long, continuous shot of wind playing and fighting with the window drapes, the indexicality of the duration of this event is dubious from the moment it is clear that it was captured in video. We see three or four instances in which the drapes blow forward to reveal the outdoors, but the intervals in which these, or any change, occur is shrouded in doubt and cannot be assumed to be an accurate representation of the real duration (this, of course, disregards situations in which an artist may explicitly state his faithfulness to the captured material in the editing process, which itself is a rare circumstance that cannot be read into the long-term interpretation or perception of the work).

On the other hand, Solar Breath’s capture method instills a subjectivity and creative freedom into the work via this same slight-of-hand potentiality. Like Benning’s hour-long coke tower shot, or his fifteen minutes of overhead planes and rustling twigs, Snow’s film is viewed with the possibility that the bit that we are seeing is only a fragment of the entire capture. Solar Breath isn’t randomly 62 minutes long; it is that length because Snow didn’t want it to be any longer or shorter. The piece presents the moments from the original shoot that Snow deemed to be worthwhile; the distance between the first and the second glimpses into the outdoors is what it is because Snow didn’t feel the need to shorten it (or even lengthen it). The potential for greater authorial control in the duration grants what is seen more weight as an expression of Snow’s tastes and intuitive sense of temporal composition. It is not just the work of nature, but a collaboration between Snow and nature.

Recalling Bazin’s ideas on the ontology of the photographed image, he likened it to a mummification of the model, and he saw film as the mummification of change in the model. Furthermore, these media were proof that the model and its changes existed, unaffected by the image’s distortions in focus, discoloration, or incorrect aspect ratios. As Bruce Elder explained in his dissection of Michael Snow’s film Presents,¹⁴ an image is not indexical when there is distortion, and this is detailed in the opening minutes of Presents when the squished image of a naked woman becomes completely unrecognizable as a representation of a human being. Likewise, then, any distortion of time in a moving image should be seen to diminish the image’s indexicality of the model’s change. This is the most liberating feature of video as a documentary medium. In the takeover of photography in the first few decades of the twentieth century, Bazin purported that “Photography is thus manifestly the most important event in the history of the visual arts. Both deliverance and fulfillment, it enabled Western painting to rid itself once and for all of its obsession with realism and to rediscover its aesthetic autonomy.”(“Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 10) Likewise, video’s inability to objectively present a durational event allows the medium to jump right into its own autonomy: the unquestionable faith that the image and its duration represent the artist’s uncensored intuitive vision.

Citations

1. André Bazin, “The Evolution of Film Language,” What is Cinema? Caboose,
   Montreal, QC, 2009: pg. 91.
2. D. N. Rodowick, “The Incredible Shrinking Medium,” The Virtual Life of Film.
   Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 2007: pg. 7.
3. Clement Greenberg, “Modernism,” Clement Greenberg – The Collected Essays and
   Criticism: Volume 4 – Modernism with a Vengeance (1957-1969), The University
   of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL and London, UK, 1993: pg. 86.
4. P. Adams Sitney, “Structural Film,” Film Culture, no. 47 (Summer, 1969), pg. 327.
5. Annette Michelson, “Toward Snow: Part 1,” Artforum, 5:10 (June, 1967), pp. 175-76.
6. Michael Snow, “A Statement on Wavelength for the Experimental Film Festival of
   Knokke-le-Zoute,” Film Culture, no. 46, (Autumn, 1967), pg. 1.
7. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Observations on the Long Take,” October, Vol. 13 (Summer,
   1980), pp. 4-6.
8. André Bazin, “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” What is Cinema? Caboose,
   Montreal, QC, 2009: pg. 3-10.
9. D. N. Rodowick, “An Ethics of Time,” The Virtual Life of Film. Harvard University
   Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 2007: pg. 85.
10. Mark Peranson, “Ruhr,” Cinema Scope, Issue 41 (Winter, 2010), pg. 57.
11. James Benning, Interview with Michael Guillen, “Darkest Americana & Elsewhere:
    Ruhr: A Few Questions For James Benning,” Twitchfilm, March 2, 2010,
    link.
12. James Benning, “Knit & Purl,” Cinema Scope, Issue 40 (Fall, 2009), pg. 39.
13. D. N. Rodowick, “Paradoxes of Perceptual Realism,” The Virtual Life of Film.
    Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 2007: pg. 106.
14. Bruce Elder, “On the Concepts of Presence and Absence in Michael Snow’s
    Presents,” in Wees, William C. and Michael Dorland, eds. Words and Moving
    Images. Mediatexte, Montreal, QC, 1984: pp. 34-51.

I’ve linked respective titles to my reviews hosted over at Ioncinema.
The comments are also being tweeted (@Astrostic)

Masterpieces
–
 
 
Best
Melancholia (Lars von Trier) – You don’t need controversy to make a great film, and this one is stellar. This film is not about an apocalypse, but rejecting preciousness to achieve real happiness; it was such a good idea to screen it after The Tree of Life, since this is essentially an antidote for that film’s gloss.
House of Tolerance (Bertrand Bonello) – This got me closer to tears than any other film in the festival; stunningly beautiful, more later.
 
 
Other Standouts
Martha Marcy May Marlene (Sean Durkin) – There are just so many ideas swimming around in it; it’s still shapeshifting in my head, maybe some of the cult stuff is a tad overblown, but still.
Drive (Nicholas Winding Refn) – Beautiful filmmaking da da da a bit shallow da da da doesn’t matter still amazing da da da what everyone else says da da da…
Elena (Andrey Zvyagintsev) – Why wasn’t this in Competition?! Slow-building, meandering, poignant, and a worthwhile progression of Zvyagintsev’s style, in my opinion.
The Day He Arrives (Hong Sang-soo) – One of the more emotionally resonant films I’ve seen from Hong; no structural gimmicks, just sweet coincidences. (‘Coincidences’ in film’s language not mine) ‘Logical paths created from chaos’ is kind of a pet theme of mine – it just makes most things better. Then again, that theme is present in many of Hong’s films I’ve seen, so maybe it’s just more ‘same old same old’. Whatever, it’s really good. (5 days later: Okay, I already thought this was great, but hearing that it has a Groundhog Day structure is news to me; my opinion of it will almost certainly be going up next time)
 
 
Quite Good
This is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi) – Had this continued on as a Brechtian makeshift construction of Panahi’s rejected screenplay, I think it would’ve been a masterpiece. As is, it’s still potent; had to chuckle at seeing a DVD of Rodrigo Cortés’ Buried on Panahi’s shelf. I don’t think that was staged.
Play (Ruben Östlund) – Sententious, yet pleasingly provocative & brilliantly directed film about class, manipulation, and theft; perhaps just a bit too Code Unknown.
The Prize (Paula Markovitch) – Incredibly strong debut; palpable tension watching a second grader try desperately to lead a normal life within her mom’s protective lies.
The Silver Cliff (Karim Aïnouz) – I guess it’s a Martel kind of day! Replace killing the dog in Headless Woman with getting dumped out-of-the-blue and you’ve got another bewildered woman, aimlessly trolling a life that used to be familiar; haunting, and some beautiful light texture.
The Kid With A Bike (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne) – Loved where it was going until he meets Wex; proceedings typically Dardenne; that’s never bad, but also not as exciting anymore.
Porfirio (Alejandro Landes) – Of the recent brigade of sparse, realist South American films, this one excels as a charismatic portrait of a man – and nation’s – immobility. Also, if you must have post-film didactic text, have your protagonist sing it aloud, as his film does.
Outside Satan (Bruno Dumont) – Dumont is back in the mode of his first two features; austerity is often grueling, but it does pick up significantly once its point finally emerges in the second half. Also, it includes his best sex scene by a mile; the girl came out of her mouth! (not really, but kind of, actually)
Goodbye (Mohammad Rasoulof) – Resonates quite at bit due to current events that are its raison d’être, but I was too drowsy to say if it stands on its own (‘Stands on its own’, meaning, if it is as breathtaking with the politics unknown or forgotten, as exceptional filmmaking. This is likely). Anyway, this was my first Rasoulof film; hope to see more (past and future).
This Must Be the Place (Paolo Sorrentino) – Color me surprised, but this was not only watchable, but constantly amusing, absurd, and funny; Penn is ridiculous. It made me want to watch Stop Making Sense again; the Talking Heads music video-esque bit here is as good as any individual moment in the Demme doc. (Actually, I take back that comment, as I just remembered four Stop Making Sense scenes that beat it. Still good, though) I’m still surprised that Penn didn’t annoy the living shit out of me; it might be an ‘up is down’ case.
>Hard Labor (Juliana Rojas & Marco Dutra) – I almost fell asleep in the 1st half, but then the audaciously strange 2nd half left me wide-eyed, heart racing, covered in goosebumps. I can’t say I ‘got it,’ though. Maybe it’s some kind of critique of lower class labor conditions, but that kind of goes out the window when ‘it’ appears.
 
 
Good
The Skin I Live In (Pedro Almodóvar) – Auto-pilot Pedro that had all of the ideas I thought it would from reading its short synopsis: good ones, but no risks.
My Little Princess (Eva Ionesco) – Eva Ionesco should have played the mother’s role, and that’s the only time Ionesco is preferred to Huppert, ever. It’s Ionesco’s autobiography of her childhood, posing in her mother’s erotic photos; lush and conventional, with some sharp dialogue.
Heat Wave (Jean-Jacques Jauffret) – Well, the subtitles cut out at about 70% of the way through and never came back on; However, if anyone can tell me what the mother’s diagnosis is, I think I could form a reaction. What I do know, though, is that it is a perfectly 50-50 genetic hybrid between the Dardenne’s concerns and Amores Perros, as raised by Adrienn Pal.
Mushrooms (Vimukthi Jayasundara) – Jayasundara evokes Antonioni and Jia’s alien urban landscapes with beautiful photography and eerie moods, mixed in with bizarre forest mystics pulled from Weerasethakul. I’ll need another look to sort through extreme narrative ellipses that led to a detached viewing experience, but in general I was hypnotized.
Dreileben: Beats Being Dead (Christian Petzold) – All of these were mostly enjoyable, but feel like three minor films tied together schematically. This one felt like a TV movie, but I thought the same about Jerichow. It’s the one where I most actively cared about what was happening.
The Island (Kamen Kalev) – one of the worst films I’ve seen this year…until the awesome final 45 minutes that came completely out of nowhere. Imagine you’re watching something rancid… say you’re an hour into Who Can Kill A Child?, when all-of-a-sudden, an hour in, it turns into the first half of Network. I’d written off Kalev for good, and now feel a need to see it again, in case the first half miraculously works somehow. It seems like part of the movie may be intentionally self-destructive ala Adaptation, only it idiotically put the bad part at the beginning.
Dreileben: One Minute of Darkness (Christoph Hochhäusler) – Half of this was very good, but it was intercut with a side plot that I couldn’t engage with, and had a kind of horror element that felt forced.
Sleeping Beauty (Julia Leigh) – What the hell is this movie about? I don’t know, but I sure enjoyed watching it not tell me; many scenes are quite haunting.
Poliss (Maïwenn) – Extremely well-made police drama, riveting for the entire length, though it seemed more like a TV pilot than a focused film; the love scenes drag a bit.
Habemus Papam (Nanni Moretti) – Great when realist comedy shows Vatican as the absurd ritual that it is, but not-so-great when it’s just plain silly. Stirring ending.
Miss Bala (Gerardo Naranjo) – Shifts from a ho-hum drug trade drama into a stylish, unconventional drug trade drama, yet still remains a drug trade drama.
Sauna On Moon (Zou Peng) – Yesterday was ‘Jia’ day, after Jayasundara evoked Still Life, Peng makes sexed-up Platform/The World amalgam that only works in spurts; but when it does, it dazzles (much like Jia).
Corpo Celeste (Alice Rohrwacher) – Nice enough little realist coming-of-age-and-religion movie; kinda slight, though; it frequently reminded me of Martel’s Holy Girl.
Dreileben: Don’t Follow Me (Dominik Graf) – Probably the most detached of the trilogy from the escapee plot, and had the most auteurist sensibility, but I couldn’t care less about the central dramatic element.
The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick) – An approximate quote from the film: “if you are too good, you won’t succeed.” That about sums it up. Precious and universal to the point of saying nil, it’s basically National Geographic with scrapings of a plot. Ellipses give needed abstraction, but not nearly enough. Obviously, Tree of Life will be proclaimed by many to be this generation’s 2001; the difference: Kubrick choked me up with a robot, where Malick left me cold with a human family. Worth noting that this is the first of Malick’s films that I don’t think is great.
Michael (Markus Schleinzer) – I’m not sure it does much with its premise beyond building up layers of irony, but it’s entirely watchable, which itself is a tad unsettling.
 
 
‘Okay’
Breathing (Karl Markovics) – The protagonist of this movie kind of looks like me; I’m struggling to say anything else. In…and out…
Tatsumi (Eric Khoo) – I’ve no interest or knowledge in gekiga, manga, anime, etc. This seemed to be a decent enough treatment of the material, but it’s formally tired, and never impressive.
Iris in Bloom (Valérie Mréjen & Bertrand Schefer) – Generic French, intellectual coming-of-ager, in which a teen and an older photographer muse about love & art. It’s ‘not for me.’
Restless (Gus Van Sant) – A death trilogy add-on, as made for to appeal strictly to teens; sweet-natured, but ultimately inoffensive and minor.
Once Upon A Time In Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan) – I’ve only seen this and Three Monkeys, so I’m by no means familiar with Ceylan. I see his appeal, but I haven’t been able to enjoy him yet. If/when I do, I have a feeling I’ll come back to Anatolia and see it as something truly special. Everything looks amazing, and the rigorous way that every scene is drawn out (especially the night search) is exciting in theory. However, it was a bad film to see at 10pm of a five-film day; I think the narrative and drama are neglected, and it felt pretentious at the time. There is no reason why this couldn’t have been a gripping film and a beautiful, contemplative one. The story is quite solid, just hidden in murk. [Update Sept. 2011: nevermind everything I said. I saw this again while actually being awake and it is a near-masterpiece]
Oslo, August 31st (Joachim Trier) – Less stylized than Reprise, but also extracts the non-depressive bits; I don’t care about depressed druggies relapsing.
Sleeping Sickness (Ulrich Köhler) – Resists any (needed) dramatic element for elliptical themes that intrigue only sporadically; basically, it’s Claire Denis sans a soul.
Unforgivable (André Téchiné) – Overlong; one trifle after another, and pretty much all of its charms are in the middle third; the outcome for the little dog: unforgivable.
Guilty of Romance (Sion Sono) – Sono says his film reflects the way he sees women, with “fascination and fear.” He forgot to add “sluts” & “garbage.” He sure can make a movie, though. If he ever makes something not trying to provoke the ire of an entire gender (or two), I might love it.
The Slut (Hagar Ben Asher) – Acted and shot well enough, but it goes exactly where you’d expect it to, & takes 0 risks getting there (aside from nudity).
The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius) – People seemed to love this somehow; it’s a pretty by-numbers treatment of the idea; watch Singin’ in the Rain instead. My rating (4.3) maybe should to be a tad lower, but I’ve got to give a shout-out to the aspect ratio.
The Fairy (Fiona Gordon, Dominique Abel, & Bruno Romy) – Funny only when it’s not trying to be (almost never), but it’s much more often chuckleless inventive; These guys don’t need to make more films…they’re all the same schtick.
The Giants (Bouli Lanners) – They awarded this the Directors’ Fortnight top prize for (quoting from memory) “exposing the evils that face the world today.” ‘Evil’ being weed, an abusive, retarded older brother, & Down syndrome.
Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen) – Art history 101 that’s explicitly exploring the familiar idea that we can only love an unfamiliar past; the acting is repellent.
Beloved (Christophe Honoré) – So the Closing film is just as good as the Opening one; this has one of most absurd threesomes ever, even considering pornos.
 
 
Difficult to Defend
Volcano (Rúnar Rúnarsson)
We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsay) – This is just an arthouse Problem Child; hopefully it will get parents to talk to their kids about the danger of having stupid parents.
Code Blue (Urszula Antoniak) – If you live alone, like minimal interior design, and have no friends, you must also be socially retarded and sexually perverted.
The Silence of Joan (Philippe Ramos) – Given how often this story has been done in cinema, why was this made? Oh, so Amalric can cameo as a priest.
Magic Trip (Alex Gibney & Alison Ellwood)
 
 
Plain Jane Bad
The Other Side of Sleep (Rebecca Daly) – Pseudo-contemplative, utterly disposable hackery that stole two hours from my side of sleep.
On the Plank (Leïla Kilani) – How a movie about girls swindling iPhones could be this impossible to understand makes me think it may be avant-garde gold. While watching it though, I contemplated the missed opportunity in making Arirang the closing night film instead of Beloved. Too bad.
Footnote (Joseph Cedar) – Oh for god’s sake. I’ll avoid the obvious titular joke and just mention that I really hate Jean-Pierre Jeunet.
Pater (Alain Cavalier) – Esoteric beyond repair; Cavalier’s narcissism is mediocre.
 
 
Awful
The Hunter (Bakur Bakuradze) – This movie can go ahead and die. Tedious, austere, and shapeless – all for the sake of being an ‘art’ film.
The Source (Radu Miheileanu) – Life is filled with simple pleasures, and one of them is knowing that I will never have to see this movie ever again.
Arirang (Kim Ki-duk)– Maybe this can be defended in some esoteric Buddhist way or something, but this is a DVD extra feature I would turn off after 5 minutes.

This alarmingly uncirculated restoration released by Filmoteca Española (it’s been around for at least 18 months) presents a markedly different version of this classic than what I came to know on youtube (and got to see once projected from celluloid, in a state that I can only fuzzily remember to be not-so-unlike the BFI/Transflux versions on youtube). The film as shown here plays in ‘actual time’, slowing down the hyper, 16 minutes cut to a more deliberately paced 21+ minutes. The image is less contrast-blown than any version I have seen, not to mention that it is no longer heavily cropped. The score, too, is different, dropping the now iconic tango back-and-forth with Wagner, with just a straight run through the Wagner. This message precedes the film on the DVD:

And here is the restored version, in its entirety (*note, this version begins with 2 minutes of silence)

(*Also note, the DVD of this restoration also got the OAR slightly wrong, squishing it to 1.37:1 instead of 1.33:1; I corrected this when I ripped it, so the version below is the first time this film has been on the internet in the correct OAR (to my knowledge)):

and the more commonly known version:

*Click on the ‘Lists & Logs’ tab to see lists from previous years.

This is list will be updated each time I see a film that had its world premiere in 2011 that is better than at least one of the films already on the list.

1. Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan)
2. House of Tolerance (Bertrand Bonello)
3. Melancholia (Lars von Trier)
4. Once Upon A Time In Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
5. Crazy Horse (Frederick Wiseman)
6. The Future (Miranda July)
7. small roads (James Benning)
8. Moneyball (Bennett Miller)
9. Buenas noches, España (Raya Martin)
10. The Pettifogger (Lewis Klahr)

 

My Top 10 Discoveries During 2011 (applies to films made before the 21st century)

1. Il Posto (1961, Ermanno Olmi)
2. The Idiots (1998, Lars von Trier)
3. The Wages of Fear (1953, Henri-Georges Clouzot)
4. Rosemary’s Baby (1968, Roman Polanski)
5. Dial M for Murder (1954, Alfred Hitchcock)
6. Diabolique (1955, Henri-Georges Clouzot)
7. Network (1976, Sidney Lumet)
8. The Miracle Worker (1962, Arthur Penn)
9. Exotica (1994, Atom Egoyan)
10. Broadcast News (1987, James L. Brooks)

 

Other 2011 films I’ve seen

• A Separation (Asghar Farhadi) – 7.4
• Martha Marcy May Marlene (Sean Durkin) – 7.4
• SEEKING THE MONKEY KING (Ken Jacobs) – 7.3
• The Pettifogger (Lewis Klahr)
• The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies) – 7.3
• The Wise Kids (Stephen Cone) – 7.2
• The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick) – 7.1
• The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr) – 7.1
• Elena (Andrey Zvyagintsev) – 7.1
• Take Shelter (Jeff Nichols) – 7.0
• Goodbye First Love (Mia Hansen-Løve) – 7.0
• This is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi & Mojtaba Mirtahmasb) – 6.9
• Drive (Nicholas Winding Refn) – 6.9
• Play (Ruben Östlund) – 6.9
• Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai (Takashi Miike) – 6.8
• The Prize (Paula Markovitch) – 6.8
• Damsels in Distress (Whit Stillman) – 6.7
• 4:44 Last Day On Earth (Abel Ferrara) – 6.7
• Gerhard Richter Painting (Corinna Belz) – 6.7
• Mildred Pierce (Todd Haynes) – 6.7
• Low Life (Nicolas Klotz & Elisabeth Perceval) – 6.6
• The Loneliest Planet (Julia Loktev) – 6.6
• The Silver Cliff (Karim Aïnouz) – 6.6
• The Unstable Object (Daniel Eisenberg) – 6.6
• Into the Abyss (Werner Herzog) – 6.6
• The Day He Arrives (Hong Sang-soo) – 6.5
• The Kid With A Bike (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne) – 6.5
• Final Destination 5 (Steven Quale) – 6.5
• Policeman (Nadav Lapid) – 6.5
• A Burning Hot Summer (Philippe Garrel) – 6.5
• Whore’s Glory (Michael Glawogger) – 6.5
• Slow Action (Ben Rivers) – 6.5
• Alps (Yorgos Lanthimos) – 6.4
• Hugo (Martin Scorsese) – 6.4
• Porfirio (Alejandro Landes) – 6.4
• It’s the Earth Not the Moon (Gonçalo Tocha) – 6.4
• A Mysterious World (Rodrigo Moreno) – 6.4
• Century of Birthing (Lav Diaz) – 6.3
• Almayer’s Folly (Chantal Akerman) – 6.3
• Outside Satan (Bruno Dumont) – 6.3
• Position Among the Stars (Leonard Retel Helmrich) – 6.3
• Summer of Giacomo (Alessandro Comodin) – 6.2
• People Mountain People Sea (Cai Shangjun) – 6.2
• Good Bye (Mohammad Rasoulof) – 6.2
• Amy George (Yonah Lewis & Calvin Thomas) – 6.2
• This Must Be the Place (Paolo Sorrentino) – 6.1
• Keyhole (Guy Maddin) – 6.1
• Abendland (Nikolaus Geyrhalter) – 6.1
• Green (Sophia Takal) – 6.1
• Terri (Azazel Jacobs) – 6.1
• Twenty Cigarettes (James Benning) – 6.1
• Paranormal Activity 3 (Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman) – 6.0
• Killer Joe (William Friedkin) – 6.0
• Bernie (Richard Linklater) – 6.0
• The Cat Vanishes (Carlos Sorin) – 6.0
• Hard Labor (Juliana Rojas & Marco Dutra) – 6.0
• Bobby Fischer Against the World (Liz Garbus) – 6.0
• The Color Wheel (Alex Ross Perry) – 5.9
• A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg) – 5.9
• Weekend (Andrew Haigh) – 5.9
• Project Nim (James Marsh) – 5.9
• The Skin I Live In (Pedro Almodóvar) – 5.9
• Alms for a Blind Horse (Gurvinder Singh) – 5.9
• Mark Lewis: Nowhere Land (Reinhard Wulf) – 5.9
• My Little Princess (Eva Ionesco) – 5.9
• Heat Wave (Jean-Jacques Jauffret) – ~5.9
• Haywire (Steven Soderbergh) – 5.8
• Back to Stay (Milagros Mumenthaler) – 5.8
• Mushrooms (Vimukthi Jayasundara) – 5.8
• Pariah (Dee Rees) – 5.8
• Land of Oblivion (Michale Boganim) – 5.8
• Kumaré (Vikram Gandhi) – 5.8
• Hell and Back Again (Danfung Dennis) – 5.8
• Dreileben: Beats Being Dead (Christian Petzold) – 5.7
• The Silence of Pelešjan (Pietro Marcello) – 5.7
• Wetlands (Guy Édoin) – 5.7
• Tomboy (Céline Sciamma) – 5.7
• Life Without Principle (Johnnie To) – 5.7
• Cut (Amir Naderi) – 5.7
• Pina (Wim Wenders) – 5.7
• The Island (Kamen Kalev) – 5.7
• Dreileben: One Minute of Darkness (Christoph Hochhäusler) – 5.6
• The River Used to Be a Man (Jan Zabeil) – 5.6
• The Ides of March (George Clooney) – 5.6
• Snowtown (Justin Kurzel) – 5.6
• Found Memories (Julia Murat) – 5.6
• Scream 4 (Wes Craven) – 5.6
• Hot Coffee (Susan Saladoff) – 5.6
• The Bengali Detective (Philip Cox) – 5.6
• Sleeping Beauty (Julia Leigh) – 5.5
• Contagion (Steven Soderbergh) – 5.5
• Goon (Michael Dowse) – 5.5
• Jiro Dreams of Sushi (David Gelb) – 5.5
• Harvest (Benjamin Cantu) – 5.5
• Beauty Day (Jay Cheel) – 5.5
• Poliss (Maïwenn) – 5.4
• Attack the Block (Joe Cornish) – 5.4
• Girl Walk // All Day (Jacob Krupnick) – 5.4
• Nana (Valérie Massadian) – 5.4
• Old Dog (Pema Tseden) – 5.4
• Bridesmaids (Paul Feig) – 5.4
• The Strawberry Tree (Simone Rapisarda Casanova) – 5.3
• Familiar Ground (Stéphane Lafleur) – 5.3
• We Have a Pope (Nanni Moretti) – 5.3
• Young Adult (Jason Reitman) – 5.3
• The Forgiveness of Blood (Joshua Marston) – 5.3
• Dragonslayer (Tristan Patterson) – 5.3
• Miss Bala (Gerardo Naranjo) – 5.2
• There Is No Sexual Rapport (Raphaël Siboni) – 5.2
• Lena (Christophe Van Rompaey) – 5.2
• Super 8 (J.J. Abrams) – 5.2
• Sauna On Moon (Zou Peng) – 5.2
• Two Years at Sea (Ben Rivers) – 5.1
• Winnie the Pooh (Stephen J. Anderson & Don Hall) – 5.1
• Jane Eyre (Cary Fukunaga) – 5.1
• Corpo Celeste (Alice Rohrwacher) – 5.1
• Dreileben: Don’t Follow Me (Dominik Graf) – 5.1
• The Interrupters (Steve James) – 5.1
• Blood of My Blood [Extended Cut] (João Canijo) – 5.1
• The Observers (Jacqueline Goss) – 5.1
• Faust (Alexander Sokurov) – 5.0
• Le Havre (Aki Kaurismäki) – 5.0
• The Mill and the Cross (Lech Majewski) – 5.0
• Target (Alexander Zeldovich) – 5.0
• Memories of a Morning (José Luis Guerín) – 5.0
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (David Yates) – 5.0
• Nuit #1 (Anne Émond) – 5.0
• Michael (Markus Schleinzer) – 5.0
• Café de Flore (Jean-Marc Vallée) – 5.0
• Brian May’s Brief History of 3D (Julian Kemp) – 5.0
• Monsieur Lazhar (Philippe Falardeau) – 5.0
• The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (David Fincher) – 4.9
• The Minister (Pierre Schöller) – 4.9
• Declaration of War (Valérie Donzelli) – 4.9
• Breathing (Karl Markovics) – 4.9
• Your Sister’s Sister (Lynn Shelton) – 4.9
• Sleepless Night (Frédéric Jardin) – 4.9
• Don’t Expect Too Much (Susan Ray) – 4.9
• Fightville (Petra Epperlein & Michael Tucker) – 4.9
• Fable of the Fish (Adolfo Borinaga Alix Jr.) – 4.9
• The Innkeepers (Ti West) – 4.8
• Tatsumi (Eric Khoo) – 4.8
• Take This Waltz (Sarah Polley) – 4.8
• Kill List (Ben Wheatley) – 4.8
• Iris in Bloom (Valérie Mréjen & Bertrand Schefer) – 4.8
• Upending (OpenEndedGroup) – 4.8
• Restless (Gus Van Sant) – 4.8
• Oslo, August 31st (Joachim Trier) – 4.7
• Sleeping Sickness (Ulrich Köhler) – 4.7
• The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye (Marie Losier) – 4.7
• Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Tomas Alfredson) – 4.7
• In the Family (Patrick Wang) – 4.7
• Beauty (Oliver Hermanus) – 4.7
• Buck (Cindy Meehl) – 4.7
• Samsara (Ron Fricke) – 4.6
• Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (Brad Bird) – 4.6
• Planet of Snail (Seung-jun Yi) – 4.6
• Papirosen (Gastón Solnicki) – 4.6
• Twixt (Francis Ford Coppola) – 4.6
• Unforgivable (André Téchiné) – 4.6
• Generation P (Victor Ginzburg) – 4.6
• We Were Here (David Weissman & Bill Weber) – 4.6
• ¡Vivan las Antipodas! (Victor Kossakovsky) – 4.5
• Shame (Steve McQueen) – 4.5
• The Grey (Joe Carnahan) – 4.5
• Hobo with a Shotgun (Jason Eisener) – 4.5
• Guilty of Romance (Sion Sono) – 4.5
• Headhunters (Morten Tyldum) – 4.5
• Rango (Gore Verbinski) – 4.5
• Lung Neaw Visits His Neighbours (Rirkrit Tiravanija) – 4.4
• Carré blanc (Jean-Baptiste Leonetti) – 4.4
• Five Broken Cameras (Emad Burnat & Guy Davidi) – 4.4
• The Slut (Hagar Ben Asher) – 4.4
• POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold (Morgan Spurlock) – 4.4
• The Cardboard Village (Ermanno Olmi) – 4.3
• The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius) – 4.3
• The Fairy (Fiona Gordon, Dominique Abel, & Bruno Romy) – 4.3
• All Divided Selves (Luke Fowler) – 4.2
• Fatherland (Nicolás Prividera) – 4.2
• The Giants (Bouli Lanners) – 4.2
• Bonsái (Cristián Jiménez) – 4.2
• 388 Arletta Ave. (Randall Cole) – 4.1
• Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop (Rodman Flender) – 4.1
• The Descendants (Alexander Payne) – 4.1
• Twilight Portrait (Angelina Nikonova) – 4.0
• Dark Horse (Todd Solondz) – 4.0
• It May Be That Beauty Has Strengthened Our Resolve: Masao Adachi (Philippe Grandrieux) – 4.0
• Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen) – 4.0
• Carnage (Roman Polanski) – 4.0
• Beloved (Christophe Honoré) – 4.0
• Empire of Evil (George Kuchar) – 4.0
• Crazy, Stupid, Love. (Glenn Ficarra & John Requa) – 3.9
• The Other Side of Sleep (Rebecca Daly) – 3.9
• The Ambassador (Mads Brügger) – 3.9
• Volcano (Rúnar Rúnarsson) – 3.8
• Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Rupert Wyatt) – 3.8
• Young Pines (Ute Aurand) – 3.8
• Starbuck (Ken Scott) – 3.8
• We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsay) – 3.7
• Think of Me (Bryan Wizemann) – 3.7
• Chicken with Plums (Marjane Satrapi & Vincent Paronnaud) – 3.6
• Las Acacias (Pablo Giorgelli) – 3.5
• Code Blue (Urszula Antoniak) – 3.5
• Like Crazy (Drake Doremus) – 3.5
• The Student (Santiago Mitre) – 3.4
• From Up on Poppy Hill (Goro Miyazaki) – 3.4
• The Silence of Joan (Philippe Ramos) – 3.4
• Thomas Ruff (Ralph Goertz) – 3.2
• To the Devil (Claire Denis) – 3.2
• Magic Trip (Alex Gibney & Alison Ellwood) – 3.1
• Wuthering Heights (Andrea Arnold) – 3.0
• Dust. A Sculptor’s Journey (Jeanne Pope) – 2.8
• On the Plank (Leïla Kilani) – 2.7
• Footnote (Joseph Cedar) – 2.7
• Love and Bruises (Lou Ye) – 2.6
• The National Parks Project (omnibus) – 2.5
• The Law in These Parts (Ra’anan Alexandrowicz) – 2.3
• Pater (Alain Cavalier) – 2.1
• The Hunter (Bakur Bakuradze) – 1.9
• The Source (Radu Miheileanu) – 1.8
• Doppelgänger Paul (Kris Elgstrand & Dylan Akio Smith) – 1.6
• Arirang (Kim Ki-duk) – 1.5