Last December I posted a
Top 25 of 2010
list to round out the year and discuss my favorite new movies. I'm
going to be doing something a little different this time around, for a
couple of reasons: 1) I enjoyed in 2011 easily the most productive year
of movie watching I've ever had (right around 500 total viewings) and 2)
despite that quantity, only a small percentage represent new releases.
Not to say that I saw no new movies at all, just not quite as many as I normally do (nevertheless I have tacked on my top 10 of the year at the bottom of the post). On the whole, it was for
me a year of cinema defined more by digging into the past than swimming
with the present, and so it would only make sense to create a wrap-up
post focusing more on that experience.
I have organized the below as follows: there is the Movie of the Year,
which was my single favorite older film discovery from 2011, followed by
a couple of runners-up for that spot. Then there are two categories,
The Masterpieces and The Gems, which are also comprised solely of titles
I viewed for the first time in 2011. The Masterpieces (and I know some
people, myself occasionally included, have a problem with how easily
that label can be bandied about, but it gets the point across here) are
the movies that were my highlights from the year, the ones that quite
simply struck me the hardest, that occupied my thoughts and/or emotions
the most, the movies I look forward to living with from here on out.
The Gems are the movies that, while not quite "masterpiece" level, made a
significant impression on me in one positive way or another, and I feel
like giving them a shout out. Some of the Gems could be said to have
minimal or dismal reputations, and many of them I came to with not much
in the way of expectation, but all of them blindsided me by how much I
liked them. I have also imposed on myself a rule of selecting only one
film per director between all categories, and in a year where a large
portion of my time was spent really sinking my teeth into the vast
filmographies of more than a few directors, this can be seen as limiting
in a sense, but it's the tack I've decided to take, if only to give
this post a measure of economy. So just keep in mind that below when you
run across a movie from the likes of, say, Ford, Walsh,
Chabrol, Preminger, to name a few, the listed movie is the one I've
chosen to put down, but it is also acting in a sense as a stand-in for a
good handful of other great movies. Below the Masterpieces and Gems, I
also have a few other random categories, where I do things like
highlight a few of my favorite acting performances from all my first
time viewings, list a few distinguished titles that didn't do as much
for me as I'd hoped, and list a handful of my favorite pieces of film
writing I discovered during the year.
When I originally set out to draft this post, I did so with the
intention of writing a little something about each movie I selected, but
as I went through my viewing logs and began assembling everything, it
quickly became apparent that such an endeavor would be a much more
exhaustive one than I had allotted time for, so I have to be content
with simply listing everything sans comment. And in any case I'm not
even sure that I could do justice to some of my experiences with these
movies at this point in time. Maybe eventually. I guess that's what the blog here
is for. Here it is:
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| Movie of the Year: The Sun Shines Bright (John Ford, 1953) |
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| First runner-up: Through the Forest (Jean-Paul Civeyrac, 2005) |
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| Second runner-up (tie): Night Moves (Arthur Penn, 1975) |
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| The Hired Hand (Peter Fonda, 1975) |
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The Masterpieces (37 total titles; in alphabetical order)
2/Duo (Nobuhiro Suwa, 1997); 4 Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle (Eric Rohmer, 1987); Afraid to Talk (Edward L. Cahn, 1932); Allures (Jordan Belson, 1961); Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (Martin Arnold, 1998); Anticipation of the Night (Stan Brakhage, 1958); Au bord du lac (Patrick Bokanowski, 1994); Betty (Claude Chabrol, 1992); The Big Trail (Raoul Walsh, 1930); Claire Dolan (Lodge Kerrigan, 1998); Cracking Up (Jerry Lewis, 1983); The Dangerous Thread of Things (Eros) (Michelangelo Antonioni, 2004); Deep In the Woods (Lionel Deplanque, 2000); Eccentricities of a Blonde-haired Girl (Manoel de Oliveira, 2009); Experiment Perilous (Jacques Tourneur, 1944); Four Nights of a Dreamer (Robert Bresson, 1971); Gamer (Neveldine/Taylor, 2009); Gertrud (Carl Th. Dreyer, 1964); He Who Gets Slapped (Victor Sjostrom, 1924); Hell's Hinges (William S, Hart, 1916); The Hills Have Eyes (Alexandre Aja, 2006); I Was Born, But...(Yasujiro Ozu, 1932); India: Matri Bhumi (Roberto Rossellini, 1959); The Last Laugh (F.W. Murnau, 1924); Lazybones (Frank Borzage, 1925); Le Plaisir (Max Ophuls, 1952); The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942); Monsieur Verdoux (Charles Chaplin, 1947); The Moon Is Blue (Otto Preminger, 1953); Ne Change Rien (Pedro Costa, 2009); New Rose Hotel (Abel Ferrara, 1998); Not Reconciled (Straub-Huillet, 1965); Queen of Diamonds (Nina Menkes, 1991); The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (Budd Boetticher, 1960); The Set-Up (Robert Wise, 1949); These Are the Damned (Joseph Losey, 1963); Winchester '73 (Anthony Mann, 1950)
The Gems (24 total titles; in alphabetical order)
The 51 File (Michel Deville, 1978); The Beast of the City (Charles Brabin, 1932); Carnal Knowledge (Mike Nichols, 1971); Downstairs (Monta Bell, 1932); Ghosts (Christian Petzold, 2005); Gold of the Seven Saints (Gordon Douglas, 1961); Hotel (Jessica Hausner, 2004); Housekeeping (Bill Forsyth, 1987); I Can See You (Graham Reznick, 2008); Just Before Dawn (Jeff Lieberman, 1981); The Letter (Jean de Limur, 1929); Little Murders (Alan Arkin, 1971); Moonfleet (Fritz Lang, 1955); Nightmare Alley (Edmund Goulding, 1947); Noon Wine (Sam Peckinpah, 1966); Office Killer (Cindy Sherman, 1997); Payday (Daryl Duke, 1973); Quiet Please: Murder (John Larkin, 1942); Scream of Fear (Seth Holt, 1961); Sharky's Machine (Burt Reynolds, 1981); Some Call It Loving (James B. Harris, 1973);
Symptoms (Jose Ramon Larraz, 1974);
Thirteen Women (George Archainbaud, 1932);
Whistle and I'll Come to You (Jonathan Miller, 1968)
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Performance of the Year (female) - Jeanne Eagles in The Letter (1929)
runners-up: Marie Trintignant in
Betty (1992), Angela Pleasence in
Symptoms (1974), Katrin Cartlidge in
Claire Dolan (1998), Makiko Watanabe in
2/Duo (1997)
Performance of the Year (male) - Lon Chaney in
He Who Gets Slapped (1924)
runners-up: Jerry Lewis in
Cracking Up (1983), Jimmy Stewart in
The Naked Spur (1953), Stacy Keach in
Fat City (1972), Emil Jannings in
The Last Laugh (1924)
Performance of the Year (animal) - Raimu the monkey in
India: Matri Bhumi (1959)
Director I spent the most time with in 2011 - John Ford (48 movies, 61 viewings)
Movies with lofty reputations that I didn't connect with - The Butcher (Claude Chabrol),
Werckmeister Harmonies (Bela Tarr),
The 39 Steps (Alfred Hitchcock),
Battle Royale (Kinji Fukasaku),
Accident (Joseph Losey)
Movie I previously disliked that I came to love this year -
Crash (David Cronenberg, 1996)
Movie I previously loved that lost a little something for me this year - Carlito's Way (Brian De Palma, 1993)
Original score I could not stop listening to -
The Hired Hand (Bruce Langhorne)
Favorite film writing/criticism discoveries of the year, both new and old:
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The Doddering Relics of a Lost Cause by Jonathan Rosenbaum
- Craig Keller on Cindy Sherman's
Office Killer
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Depression, Melancholia, and Me: Lars von Trier's Politics of Displeasure by Trevor Link
- Phil Coldiron on
Sleepwalk and
House of Tolerance
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Crisis, Creation, Compulsion - Dave Kehr on Raoul Walsh
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The Essential - Jacques Rivette on Preminger's
The Moon Is Blue
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A Closed Door That Leaves Us Guessing - transcript of a Pedro Costa lecture
-
The Searchers - Dismantled by Ross Gibson
- The Conversations: Terrence Malick
pt. 1 and
pt. 2 by Ed Howard and Jason Bellamy
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Think But This... David Phelps on Rivette's
36 vues du Pic-St Loup (from
Girish Shambu and Adrian Martin's
LOLA issue 1 )
- Zach Campbell's
Counter Canon: A Viewing List
-
Film Socialisme Annotated translated by David Phelps
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The Magnificent Ambersons: What's Past is Prologue by Jim Emerson
- Steven Shaviro on
Neveldine/Taylor's Gamer
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"The Tree of Life": Great Events and Ordinary People by Adrian Martin
-
The Dynamics of the Image, or Civeyrac Matters by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
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Poor, Old, Hollywood - Andy Rector on Losey's
The Lawless
- Vertigo Variations by B. Kite and Alexander Points-Zollo -
pt. 1 /
pt.2 /
pt. 3
- Perspective Reperceived: Brakhage's
Anticipation of the Night by Ken Kelman (not online; found in
The Essential Cinema: Essays on the films in the collection of Anthology Film Archives, Volume One)
- Experiment Perilous
by Chris Fujiwara (not online; chapter in the book
Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall)
- The Sun Shines Bright by Tag Gallagher (chapter in the book
John Ford: The Man and His Films, which can be
downloaded here)
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I'm not going to bother listing all of the 2011 releases I still need to
catch up with; suffice it to say that there are a boatload, and
hopefully it will be sooner rather than later before I get the
opportunity to see them all. Out of everything in front of me, I'm most
looking forward to
A Dangerous Method,
Margaret,
House of Tolerance and
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. As it stands now, here is, in roughly preferential order, my ten favorites:
Top 10 of the Year
1)
Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt)
2)
The Tree of Life (Terence Malick)
3)
You Are Here (Daniel Cockburn)
4)
Melancholia (Lars von Trier)
5)
Contagion (Steven Soderbergh)
6)
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (David Fincher)
7)
Nostalgia for the Light (Patricio Guzman)
8)
Road to Nowhere (Monte Hellman)
9)
El Sicario: Room 164 (Gianfranco Rosi)
10)
The Skin I Live In (Pedro Almodovar)
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I'd love to hear about any of your favorite film discoveries from the year, newer and/or older. Please feel free to post them in the comments. Happy New Year!
