misc.

1. If you watch the English version of Chris Marker's Sans Soleil (1983) several times, you will begin to believe that if thought itself had a voice it would be Alexandra Stewart's.

2. The ending of Claire Denis's Beau Travail (1999) makes a fairly convincing case that the cinema was invented for the redemption of horrible music.

3. Title for an academic study of Hong Sang-soo: "Towards a Metaphysics of Soju."

4. The problem with Christopher Nolan is he makes movies as if he has never farted.

5. Bresson in black & white is sublime. Bresson in color is really scary.

6. One might be tempted to call the second half of Birth of a Nation (1915) cinema's Original Sin, but I think it came twelve years earlier, with Edison's on-camera electrocution of Topsy the elephant. All we should require of a movie is that it not make us ask "Topsy died for THIS?"

7. Chaplin's "Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot" is a lovely formulation, though I guess he never saw a Mizoguchi movie, where life just gets more tragic in long-shot.

8. Funny how the death of cinema happened just as those who announced it reached an age where one's own death begins to feel like less of an abstraction.

9. The next New Wave is going to be a series of neo-realist superhero movies shot by teenagers with stolen Handycams on the streets of Ciudad Juarez.

10. After we take care of world hunger and economic inequality, our next priority as a species should be to project Hideko Takamine's face onto the moon.

Fading flowers in her hair / She's suffering from wear and tear / She lies in waterfalls of dreams / And never questions what it means

         Olivier Assayas returns to his formative years for the second time with Something in the Air (2012, better French title: Apres Mai). What distinguishes it from his first go-round with the era, Cold Water (1994, maybe his best movie), is first a more direct countenancing of the political situation in France in the aftermath of May '68, kept mainly implicit in the strained relationships between the generations in Water, and second a diffusion of focus. The main thread is the evolution of the Assayas surrogate Gilles (Clément Métayer, a dead ringer for Ziggy from The Wire if there ever was one) from high school radical to politically disengaged artist, but the movie roams promiscuously into the lives of various other characters in Gilles's orbit, and Gilles's own path takes a few detours. If Water is akin to a tightly constructed short story or novella, Air is more like a discursive memoir, and indeed Assayas has also written a memoir of sorts about this period in his life, A Post-May Adolescence. This has led some to complain that Air's second half is too scattered, but the scatter is what Assayas is going for. The movie is very much about how the collective dream of revolution went to pieces and left many of its young proponents chasing individualized dreams of self-actualization. A more legit complaint you could lodge is that Gilles as Metayer plays him is a little too recessive and inward for the movie's own good. Assayas's best films tend to pivot on a great performance, from Maggie Cheung in Irma Vep (1996) to Edgar Ramirez in Carlos (2010) to Virginie Ledoyen in Water; Métayer is just kind of there. But Assayas's ability to pull his viewer into an entirely plausible world, through a combination of dead-on detail, masterful orchestration of space and movement, and brilliant soundtrack cues, is undiminished, nor is his intellect.  He's clear-eyed about the failures of his characters, the naivety and arrogance underlying the Marxist rhetoric they routinely spout, yet gazes on them with great tenderness, and in the coda, set to Kevin Ayers's "Decadence," imparts to them a kind of grace.

besties ('67-'87)

         Pretty much the same deal as '88-'12, in terms of rules/intentions. A few fallow years, but '67, '68, '71, '74, '83, and possibly '84 are among the best years for cinema in the 20th century. '67-'74 is the single most fascinating period in cinema, for me, in that right as Godard peaks and recedes into Mao the impact of his innovations begins to be felt all over the world, with many exciting experiments in self-reflexive and political filmmaking coming out of the US, Britain, Japan, and elsewhere at an astonishingly rapid clip. We also have the flowering of the New Hollywood, which inherits some of the energy of the various New Waves and broadens the range of tones and subject matter available to mainstream movies. What follows this period in the US is, from one perspective, an increasingly precipitous descent into pervasive corporatized spectacle, which descent we seem to have reached a terminal phase of. But for someone like myself whose imagination was colonized as a child by said spectacles, '80s Hollywood at its best remains a richly evocative pop dreamscape.

1967

1. Week End (Jean-Luc Godard)

2. Playtime (Jacques Tati)

3. Wavelength (Michael Snow)

4. David Holzman’s Diary (Jim McBride)

5. La Chinoise (Jean-Luc Godard)

6. Mouchette (Robert Bresson)
7. Titicut Follies (Frederick Wiseman)

8. Belle de jour (Luis Bunuel)
9. 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (Jean-Luc Godard)

10. Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn)

11. Don’t Look Back (D.A. Pennebaker)
12. La Revelateur (Philippe Garrel)

13. Japanese Summer: Double Suicide (Nagisa Oshima)

14. Point Blank (John Boorman)

15. La Collectionneuse (Eric Rohmer)

1968

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick)

2. Faces (John Cassavetes)

3. Death By Hanging (Nagisa Oshima)
4. Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (William Greaves)

5. High School (Frederick Wiseman)

6. L’Amour Fou (Jacques Rivette)

7. Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero)

8. Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone)

9. L’Enfance Nue (Maurice Pialat)

10. Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski)

11. Je T’aime, Je T’aime (Alain Resnais)

12. Hour of the Furnaces: Part I (Octavio Getino, Fernando Solanas)

13. Performance (Donald Cammell and Nicholas Roeg)

14. Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (Nagisa Oshima)
15. Joy of Learning (Jean-Luc Godard)

1969

1. Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky)

2. My Night at Maud's (Eric Rohmer)
3. Boy (Nagisa Oshima)
4. Eros Plus Massacre (Yoshishige Yoshida)
5. The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah)

6. My Girlfriend’s Wedding (Jim McBride)

7. Katzelmacher (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
8. Law and Order (Frederick Wiseman)

9. Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger)
10. Dillinger is Dead (Marco Ferreri)

1970
1. Deep End (Jerzy Skolimowski)

2. Hi, Mom! (Brian De Palma)
3. Claire's Knee (Eric Rohmer)

4. Gimme Shelter (Albert and David Maysles)
5. Zabriskie Point (Michelangelo Antonioni)

6. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (Russ Meyer)

7. Husbands (John Cassavetes)

8. The Man Who Left His Will on Film (Nagisa Oshima)
9. Even Dwarfs Started Small (Werner Herzog)

10. The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci)

1971

1. Out 1: Noli Me Tangere (Jacques Rivette)

2. McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman)

3. Punishment Park (Peter Watkins)

4. W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism (Dusan Makavejev)

5. Beware of a Holy Whore (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)

6. Critical Mass (Hollis Frampton)

7. A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick)

8. The French Connection (William Friedkin)

9. The Ceremony (Nagisa Oshima)

10. Macbeth (Roman Polanski)

11. And Now for Something Completely Different (Ian MacNaughton, Terry Gilliam)

12. Whity (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)

13. Walkabout (Nicholas Roeg)

14. The Last Movie (Dennis Hopper)

1972

1. Pink Flamingos (John Waters)

2. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Luis Bunuel)

3. We Won’t Grow Old Together (Maurice Pialat)

4. Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky)
5. Love in the Afternoon (Eric Rohmer)

6. The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)

7. Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog)

8. The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola)

9. Tout va Bien (Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin)

10. Winter Soldier (Winterfilm Collective)

1973

1. The Mother and the Whore (Jean Eustache)

2. The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman)

3. Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese)

4. Badlands (Terrence Malick)

5. Don’t Look Now (Nicholas Roeg)

6. The Last Detail (Hal Ashby)

7. The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy)

8. The Exorcist (William Friedkin)

9. The Holy Mountain (Alejandro Jodorowsky)

10. Amarcord (Federico Fellini)

1974

1.  A Woman Under the Influence (John Cassavetes)

2.  Celine and Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette)

3.  Chinatown (Roman Polanski)

4.  Edvard Munch (Peter Watkins)

5.  Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)

6.  The Godfather Part II (Francis Ford Coppola)

7.  F for Fake (Orson Welles)

8.  Out 1: Spectre (Jacques Rivette)

9.  Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (Sam Peckinpah)

10.  Lancelot Du Lac (Robert Bresson)

11. The Phantom of Liberty (Luis Bunuel)

12.  The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola)

13.  The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper)

14.  Female Trouble (John Waters)

15.  Sweet Movie (Dusan Makavejev)

1975

1. The Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky)

2. Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman)

3. Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick)

4. The Passenger (Michelangelo Antonioni)

5. Grey Gardens (Albert and David Maysles)

6. That Most Important Thing: Love (Andrzej Zulawski)

7. Numero Deux (Jean-Luc Godard)

8. Love and Death (Woody Allen)

9. The Devil’s Cleavage (George Kuchar)

10. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones)

1976

1. Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese)

2. The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (John Cassavetes)

3. All the President’s Men  (Alan J. Pakula)
4. Mikey and Nicky (Elaine May)

4. The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicholas Roeg)

5. Anatomy of a Relationship (Luc Moullet)
6. Noroit (Jacques Rivette)

7. The Tenant (Roman Polanski)

8. A Real Young Girl (Catherine Breillat)

9. Carrie (Brian De Palma)

10. Ici et Ailleurs (Jean-Luc Godard, Anne-Marie Mieville, Jean-Pierre Gorin)

11. In the Realm of the Senses (Nagisa Oshima)

12. Duelle (Jacques Rivette)

13. The Omen (Richard Donner)

14. Up! (Russ Meyer)

1977

1. Eraserhead (David Lynch)

2. The Devil, Probably (Robert Bresson)

3. That Obscure Object of Desire (Luis Bunuel)

4. Martin (George A. Romero)

5. Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett)

6. Annie Hall (Woody Allen)

7. Suspiria (Dario Argento)

8. Opening Night (John Cassavetes)

9. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg)

10. A Grin Without a Cat (Chris Marker)

1978

1. Dawn of the Dead (George A. Romero)

2. Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick)

3. In a Year With 13 Moons (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)

4. Halloween (John Carpenter)

5. Empire of Passion (Nagisa Oshima)

6. Fingers (James Toback)

7. The Fury (Brian De Palma)
8. The Game of Death (Robert Clouse, Sammo Hung Kam-Bo, Bruce Lee)

9. National Lampoon’s Animal House (John Landis)

10. The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino)

1979

1. Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky)

2. Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola)

3. Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (Raul Ruiz)

4. Manhattan (Woody Allen)

5. The Third Generation (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)

6. Alien (Ridley Scott)

7. The Brood (David Cronenberg)

8. Being There (Hal Ashby)

9. Life of Brian (Terry Jones)

10. Escape from Alcatraz (Don Siegel)

1980

1. Berlin Alexanderplatz (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)

2. The Shining (Stanley Kubrick)

3. Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese)

4. Every Man for Himself (Jean-Luc Godard)

5. Bad Timing (Nicholas Roeg)

6. Kagemusha (Akira Kurosawa)

7. The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner)
8. Loulou (Maurice Pialat)

9. Dressed to Kill (Brian De Palma)

10. Airplane! (Jim Abrahams, Jerry Zucker, David Zucker)

1981

1. Possession (Andrzej Zulawski)
2. The Aviator's Wife (Eric Rohmer)

3. Blow Out (Brian De Palma)

4. Le Pont du Nord (Jacques Rivette)
5. Modern Romance (Albert Brooks)

6. Ms. 45 (Abel Ferrara)
7. An American Werewolf in London (John Landis)

8. Escape From New York (John Carpenter)
8. The Howling (Joe Dante)

10. The Entity (Sidney J. Furie)

1982

1. L’Enfant Secret (Philippe Garrel)

2. Blade Runner (Ridley Scott)

3. Passion (Jean-Luc Godard)

4. Burden of Dreams (Les Blank)

5. Expectation (Edward Yang)

6. The Thing (John Carpenter)
7. A Good Marriage (Eric Rohmer)

8. On Top of the Whale (Raul Ruiz)

9. Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper)

10. Fast Times At Ridgemont High (Amy Heckerling)

1983

1. L’Argent (Robert Bresson)

2. Sans Soleil (Chris Marker)

3. Videodrome (David Cronenberg)

4. A Nos Amours (Maurice Pialat)

5. The King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese)

6. First Name: Carmen (Jean-Luc Godard)

7. Three Crowns of the Sailor (Raul Ruiz)

8. The Family Game (Yoshimitsu Morita)

9. City of Pirates (Raul Ruiz)

10. Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (Terry Jones)

11. Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (Nagisa Oshima)

12. Zelig (Woody Allen)

13. Nostalghia (Andrei Tarkovsky)

14. Cracking Up (Jerry Lewis)

15. Breathless (Jim McBride)

1984

1. Love Streams (John Cassavetes)

2. Once Upon A Time in America (Sergio Leone)

3. Stop Making Sense (Jonathan Demme)

4. Repo Man (Alex Cox)

5. Barres (Luc Moullet)

6. Stranger Than Paradise (Jim Jarmusch)

7. The Terminator (James Cameron)

8. Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders)

9. Gremlins (Joe Dante)
10. Full Moon in Paris (Eric Rohmer)

11. Blood Simple (Joel and Ethan Coen)

12. 1984 (Michael Radford)

13. Top Secret! (Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker)

14. Amadeus (Milos Forman)

15. Body Double (Brian De Palma)

1985

1.  Brazil (Terry Gilliam)

2.  After Hours (Martin Scorsese)

3. Come and See (Elem Klimov)

4.  Day of the Dead (George A. Romero)

5.  Ran (Akira Kurosawa)
6. Lost in America (Albert Brooks)

7.  Trouble in Mind (Alan Rudolph)

8.  My Beautiful Laundrette (Stephen Frears)

9.  Hail Mary (Jean-Luc Godard)

10.   Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (Paul Schrader)

1986

1.  Blue Velvet (David Lynch)
2. The Green Ray (Eric Rohmer)

3.  The Terrorizers (Edward Yang)

4.   Mauvais Sang (Leos Carax)

5.   The Singing Detective (Jon Amiel)

6.  Aliens (James Cameron)

7.   Something Wild (Jonathan Demme)

8.   Down By Law (Jim Jarmusch)

9.  Manhunter (Michael Mann)

10.  The Sacrifice (Andrei Tarkovsky)

1987

1.  Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick)

2.  King Lear (Jean-Luc Godard)

3.  Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (Todd Haynes)

4.  Near Dark (Kathryn Bigelow)

5.  Robocop (Paul Verhoeven)
6. My Girlfriend's Boyfriend (Eric Rohmer)

7.  On the Silver Globe (Andrzej Zulawski)

8. Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn (Sam Raimi)

9.  The Untouchables (Brian De Palma)

10.  Predator (John McTiernan)