The Screengrab : chantal akerman

Screengrab Presents THE TOP TEN BEST FILMS EVER!!!! (Part Nine)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 15 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Paul Clark's Top Ten Best Movies Ever!

1. BELLE DE JOUR (1967)
2. 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968)
3. THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (1928)

The greatness of The Passion of Joan of Arc stems from the fact that director Carl Th. Dreyer knew what it was that made Joan’s story important- not that she believed that God had tasked her to save France, but that she was so steadfast in her faith that she thought it better do die than to deny it. Consequently, Dreyer’s version of Joan’s story has no battle sequences and no heavenly visions, merely a powerful retelling of Joan’s final days, her trial and execution. The world of this film is an unsparing- one might say godless- one, full of evil and underhanded men who are more than willing to sacrifice Joan for their own political gain. This serves to throw into sharp relief the power of Joan’s faith, by heightening the pain and suffering she endured up to the end for the God in whom she so resolutely believed. Falconetti’s performance, then as now, is a wonder, and it’s only fitting that she never appeared onscreen again- how could she have possibly lived up to it?

4. JEANNE DIELMAN (1975)

The sheer amount of focus that director Chantal Akerman and star Delphine Seyrig bring to this film is pretty breathtaking, showing us the everyday life of one woman over the course of 3 ½ hours. What’s more, Jeanne Dielman isn’t an especially noteworthy woman- she’s a single mother who turns the occasional trick to help pay the bills. But rather than lingering on Jeanne’s side job- which has no bearing on her life outside the confines of her bedroom- Akerman instead shows us the details of her everyday routine- preparing the meals, cleaning the flat, doing the shopping, and so on. Because of Akerman’s extensive use of real time, the film becomes about this routine, and consequently, when anything interrupts the routine, the film gains a surprising amount of impact, even from something as simple as Jeanne not getting her usual seat at the local café. As of now, Jeanne Dielman is unavailable in the United States in any home viewing format, so if the film ever makes it to your local rep house, you owe it to yourself to go.

5. ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1968)

6. ORPHEUS (1949)

“A legend is entitled to be beyond time and place,” states director Jean Cocteau in his introduction to Orpheus. This unique approach to the original myth allows Cocteau to re-imagine it as one of the kinkiest love-quadrangles the big screen has ever seen, involving the titular poet, his wife Eurydice, Death herself, and her chauffeur Heurtebise. The movie’s key performance is from Maria Casares, who is not the larger-than-life Death that most audiences would expect, but so life-sized and lonely in the role that the love entanglements are allowed to be as poignant as they are. One of the most memorable touches Cocteau brought to the film was his knack for making the real world surreal, not merely through editing and camera trickery (film run backwards for eerie effect, characters suddenly disappearing into thin air), but also through strange locations (a bombed-out building used as the realm of the dead) and surreal plot points (chiefly among them the car radio on which Orpheus listens to the bizarre "poetry"). Cocteau was a true multi-talented artist, and Orpheus is on top of everything else one of the great films about the uneasy mix between art and life, in which life and art intrude onto each other, but in the end, if the art is truly enduring then not even death- or Death- can take it from the world.

7. CITIZEN KANE (1941)

8. PLAYTIME (1967)

I don’t think that any viewer who is paying attention can possibly deny what a singular directorial achievement Playtime is. With this film, a box-office disaster on its initial release, Tati re-created modern-day Paris on his own terms as a sterile maze of boxy skyscrapers, plate-glass windows, and beeping gadgetry. But while other filmmakers might be tempted to turn this setting (built entirely from scratch for the film) into an urban nightmare, Tati- true to the film’s title- concentrates on the funny little eccentricities that sneak their way in. This approach is ideal, as it turns out, as Tati’s impossibly intricate mise-en-scène (his skill at engineering visual moments is even keener than Keaton’s) would run the risk of becoming stifling if it wasn’t done with such offhand charm. To describe any of the priceless moments in the film wouldn’t spoil them so much as it would sell them short, as Tati pulls them off so perfectly, yet so unassumingly. And in the midst of it all is Tati’s signature character Hulot, a bastion of old-fashioned provincialism, who would exist at odds with his hyper-modern surroundings but for his singular brand of good-natured aloofness, which translates surprisingly well to his new environment. Playtime is bravura filmmaking of the gentlest kind, a film that demands to be revisited- and seen on the biggest screen possible- innumerable times to be appreciated, and is a sheer delight on each and every viewing.

9. THE GENERAL (1926)

If I was forced to choose a favorite filmmaker, my first choice would almost certainly be Buster Keaton. But for me, an even tougher choice is which of his films to choose. For the purpose of this list, I decided to disqualify Keaton’s short films, which sadly eliminated such classics as One Week, Neighbors, and The Scarecrow. In the end, while part of me was tempted to choose Sherlock Jr. or Seven Chances, I kept coming back to The General, which is both the greatest Civil War movie ever made and one of the greatest comedies in cinema. Rather than filling the film with wacky, distracting supporting characters, much of The General is comprised of scenes with Keaton alone on the train, and these scenes feature some of the most ingeniously realized gags ever put on film- the most legendary being the one in which Keaton finds a railroad tie atop the tracks in front of the train, so he carefully climbs down onto the train's cowcatcher and uses another railroad tie to knock the first one off the tracks. Like so many of the film's great moments (which are plentiful) this gag is less about gut-busting hilarity than engineering- we marvel at the simple ingenuity of it, with the added charge that Keaton did even the most dangerous stunts himself. There’s also a nonchalance about the film that's refreshing, a charm that takes its cue from its star's unassuming demeanor, that allows even the most intricate gag or potentially deadly stunt to feel like a throwaway, as though instead of a show-stopping moment it's all just another annoyance to this character's routine. Which, of course, only makes it funnier.

10. GATES OF HEAVEN (1978)

Roger Ebert may sometimes be prone to going overboard with praise, but when he’s right, he’s right, and he’s 100% right about Gates of Heaven, a movie he’s been stumping for for more than three decades. Fans of Errol Morris know what I’m talking about, but for the rest of you- yes, it really is that good. Morris may use pet cemeteries as his starting point, but ultimately it's about the ways in which we deal with the death of those we love, and by extension with our own mortality. Morris has always been one of the most patient of documentarians, and one of the chief pleasures of Gates of Heaven is in the distinctive and colorful ways the various interviewees talk, from the bone-weary resignation of failed cemetery owner Floyd McClure to the regurgitated management philosophies of Philip Harberts to (especially) ornery old Florence Rasmussen. And as Morris interviews various owners of dead animals, they reflect on how important these pets were in their lives as a source of companionship and unconditional love- sure, these people sound a little crazy for projecting these feelings onto animals, but simply by presenting these people the film asks us how many people can offer the same kind of loyalty these pet owners felt from their pets? In the end, this film offers no small amount of plain-spoken philosophy, as when one pet owner states, "there's your pet, your pet's dead. But what happened to the thing that made it move?" No film I've seen is this profound about the ways in which people seek meaning not in art or centuries-old wisdom, but in the lives (and deaths) of others.

SPECIAL MENTION: DECALOGUE (1989)

This being a “best movies” list, it’s debatable whether Krzystzof Kieslowski’s The Decalogue really qualifies, since while it has played theatrically all over the world, it was originally intended as a ten-part miniseries for Polish television (call this “special mention” a compromise). What’s undeniable, however, is that this is one of the major works of the twentieth century. Decalogue was inspired by The Ten Commandments, but one of its great achievements is that it views the Commandments less as religious doctrine than key moral tenets that govern most modern-day societies. So rather than trafficking in pious, preachy parables, Kieslowski and co-writer Krzystzof Piesiewicz examine the ways in which people in the modern world struggle with these age-old decrees, not always successfully. In one of the episodes, a girl who has grown close to her widower father must decide how to deal with her feelings after she discovers that he isn't her biological father after all; in another, the unfaithful wife of a gravely ill man finds out that she is pregnant by her lover, and tells her husband's doctor that the unborn child's fate will be decided by whether or not he believes her husband will die. And in the series’ most beloved episode, a teenage voyeur falls in love with a woman he spies on, and decides to become part of her life. The way this film plays out defies all expectation, yet in retrospect the events seem almost inevitable. The Decalogue may or may not be an according-to-Hoyle movie, but I’m guessing that when the history of moving-image-thingies is written, The Decalogue will occupy a place of honor.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight & Ten

Contributor: Paul Clark

The Rep Report (March 7-14)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 23:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: An inspiration to late bloomers everywhere, the Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira (born in December, 1908) made his first film in 1938 and managed to make a dozen more pictures over the course of the next forty years, but he started to buckle down in 1979, when he made his breakthrough with Doomed Love. He's made more than thirty works since then, and has churned out a movie a year since 1990. "The Talking Pictures of Manoel de Oliveira" (March 7-30) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music is an ambitious retrospective salute to the remarkable career and little-seen work of this distinctive and filmmaker as he apprroaches his centennial.

BAM is also paying tribute this month to J. Hoberman, the brainy and idiosyncratic film writer, on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of his settling in at his regular perch at The Village Voice. Running from March 10 through April 3, the schedule begins with Eraserhead, the subject of Hoberman's first review for the Voice, and includes such "personal favorites" of the critic as King of Comedy, David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch, Ernie Gehr's Side/Walk/Shuffle, Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, and John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13. (Pleased as punch, the Voice has posted Hoberman's 1992 review of Naked Lunch, a stellar example of the kind of fireworks that Hoberman can set off even when writing about a movie that many sane people wouldn't watch again if blindfolded.)

Take Five: Belgium!

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Opening wide this weekend, Martin McDonagh's In Bruges stars Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson as a pair of exiled hitmen stuck in the Belgian city until it's safe for them to return home, and their sojourn is meant to be hellish in every sense of the word. Belgium has long been Europe's punchline — yes, even more so than Poland; its stolidly middle-class character and reputation as "where culture goes to nap" makes it the butt of many a joke. David Rees of Get Your War On calls the sixteenth-century seer Nostradamus "the last interesting Belgian", which insult is all the more cutting considering he was actually French; and in a memorable Monty Python sketch, game show contestants are challenged to come up with a derogatory term for Belgium, and one noteworthy entrant claims that he can't think of anything more derogatory than just "Belgian". But all kidding aside, if you actually were trapped in Bruges for a prolonged period of time, you could do a lot worse as a way to pass the time than to head for the local cinema. Belgium has, er, sprouted one of the more interesting independent film scenes in Europe recently, and as this short list of some of our favorite Belgian movies of recent years should illustrate, there's a lot more to Belgian filmmaking than just Jean-Claude Van Damme.

MAN BITES DOG (1992)

One of the first Belgian films to create a great deal of buzz outside of Europe, Man Bites Dog (the French title translates, creepily, to "It Happened in Your Neighborhood" or "He is Coming to Your House") is a postmodern twist on the serial killer narrative a good five to ten years before such things became trendy. Anticipating the self-aware American horror films of the 2000s, it follows a small documentary camera crew as they tag along with Ben (played with sinister charm by co-writer/director Benoit Poelvoorde), a disconcertingly media-savvy mass murderer. Crammed with supremely disturbing moments, shocking violence, and genuinely clever moments of humor, Man Bites Dog has held up quite well and is still better than most of the films it undoubtedly helped to inspire.

D'EST [FROM THE EAST] (1993)

One of the best things about Belgian cinema is the experimental filmmaker Chantal Akerman. Her complex, meditative, sometimes almost motionless films lull you into a nearly placid state so that you barely realize it when a moment of epiphany arises. D'Est, a far too little-seen documentary from 1993, is perhaps her greatest film: a deceptively simple series of images of people in Eastern Europe, many of them only a few years removed from the burdens of Soviet rule, are shown. The people take vacations, engage in sport and play, have long moments of leisure, and Akerman's brilliantly photographic sensibilities capture long stretches of beautiful simplicity over a period of almost two hours. The effect is not unlike watching a well-crafted painting slowly mutate into something entirely new and different.

LUMUMBA (2000)

Director Raoul Peck is a Haitian; the film takes place in Africa, and the production itself was a joint effort of Belgium, France, Germany, and Haiti. But almost all of the filming was done in Belgium, the majority of the financing came from there, and in a greater sense, the entire film is a legacy of Belgium's blood-soaked imperial past. The radical reformer Patrice Lumumba (brilliantly portrayed here by Eriq Ebouaney), prior to his assassination, was the ruler of the Congo, a huge country in central Africa that suffered more than most during its colonial period thanks to an incredibly brutal occupation and exploitation by Belgium's King Leopold. The film was an independent success, and a testament to the fact that some countries are more willing to examine their colonial legacies than others.

ANY WAY THE WIND BLOWS (2002)

If Tom Barman's sprawling 2002 film, based in and around the port city of Antwerp, isn't one of the best Belgian movies in recent history, it's at least one of the most ambitious, and definitely one of the oddest. Part travelogue, part documentary, part music video (and showcase for the director, who's also a well-known local pop star), and part bizarre remake/interpretation/'homage' to movies like Short Cuts, Magnolia and Pulp Fiction, Any Way the Wind Blows features a diverse group of French and Flemish citizens, all from different backgrounds and with widely different characters, who all wind up, through a rambunctious and chronoligically confusing narrative, at the same party on the same night. It functions almost like a collage of several more convincingly made films, but it's not without its charm.

THE ALZHEIMER CASE(2003)

When you first hear De Zaak Alzheimer described, you think it can't possibly be anything but a tasteless, awful disaster: it's about a pair of detectives attempting to track down and capture a mob hitman on his final assignment — final because he has an advanced case of Alzheimer's Disease. Amazingly enough, though, director Erik Van Looy manages to pull the thing off without recourse to depressingly tasteless jokes or maudlin sentimentality. Instead, he presents us with a surprisingly plausible plot, a tight, chilling narrative with plenty of suspense, and a nicely presented noir sensibility. An American remake of this movie (which played at festivals under the name The Memory of a Killer) is in the works, but if you can hunt down a DVD copy of the original, it's well worth checking out on its own merits.