Cinema Discipula

Cinematic henchmen preying upon rural folk get their comeuppance by drowning in torrents of grain.

Vampyr (1932) and Witness (1985)

Cinema’s tattooed men of the sea.

L’Atalante (1934) and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)

Zero Dark Thirty

Relentless and demanding, like its protagonist, who strives and strives as all protagonists do, but discovers for herself in the end that the end can never really be the end, even if the credits are rolling. Fearlessly conventional, the film is a paean and critique both of the terrifying, possibly narrow-minded force of American intelligence and of the procedural film’s traditional hero. Director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal have turned the uncompromising ambivalence of neorealism onto the insular, secretive community of intelligence agents who shape and uncover the forces that threaten and safeguard American lives. With a darkened ballet, the rightfully lauded final act of the film encapsulates and concludes the ruthless thoroughness of the previous two hours. All of the films on this list are exceptionally acted, intricately written, beautifully shot, complexly scored and vividly strange in some way. None are so relevant or so committed to a communicable vision of the truth, in all its terror and splendor, as this film.

Lincoln

Plausible visions of greatness, particularly when it comes to portrayals of American politics, are so rare on the screen that they have become, perhaps rightfully, sacred. It is the religion and intelligence which Daniel Day-Lewis brings to his performances, and the historical rigor and theatrical eloquence which Tony Kushner brings to his scripts, and the visual inventiveness and narrative persistence which Steven Spielberg brings to his films that, together, have built this magisterial house of cards, a confluence of carefully pursued ambitions which have, for a precious moment, allowed us to brush past the faces and lives of the dead portrayed, Lincoln foremost and centrally placed among them. Greatness pursued and fleetingly achieved for the continued good of those to come, both the virtue and narrative theme of this rarely ham-handed but ultimately justified dramatization of history. Together with Zero Dark Thirty, this film may come to represent the turning of a new page in historical fiction.

The Master

Joaquin Phoenix as Freddie Quell and Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Lancaster Dodd are two volatile bodies in motion, spinning through the hesitant rise of Dodd’s pseudo-scientific religion, The Cause. The closer they come to each other, the more the sparks fly between their contact points; when Freddie and Lancaster share an unblinking confessional session of “Time Hole” work, it is a wonder the 70mm film doesn’t catch fire. Because their relationship is so irrational, the film is aimless and narratively lopsided—but without this organic disorganization, the primal pull of true romance which fuels the film would lack that very same spontaneity which occasionally pushes this doomed love affair onto truly original narrative ground. With Hoffman as his first mate and writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson as his navigator, Phoenix cum Columbus has landed—that nobody knows precisely what he’s reached hardly makes any difference.

Cosmopolis

Pulsating with life-taken-for-granted, the film-limo glides through Manhattan like a funeral barge drifting out to sea. Director David Cronenberg adapts from novelist Don DeLillo and to the twenty-first century, exploring the inevitability of irrationality not simply in humanity but in all things, an endorsement of chaos theory and a warning against hubris that reminds us all that we will never be in a position where such a warning should be anything but obvious. An interesting potential double feature with Lincoln, this film imagines the greatness of its central figure Eric Packer as an impossibility, a radioactive element made increasingly unstable when mixed with capitalist ambitions in the information age. Greed is good… for a while, but what is it that DeLillo has someone say that someone else has said (Chaplin, it seems): the logical extension of business is murder? This convincing film is the physics of that fable.

Holy Motors

Like watching a sporting event: aimless but compelling, a mix of extreme highs and pedestrian lulls with little in between. A series of vignettes, my favorite of which remains the beauty and beast retelling pictured above, both for its refreshing narrative consistency and for the pleasurable malevolence of the leprechaun-esque beast figure. Other highlights include the accordion-based intermission and an introductory dream sequence featuring the director Leos Carax himself, the former exceptional for the drive of its music and the latter for its hypnotically irrational imagery. The greatest virtue on first viewing comes from the abnormality of the work, a daring brought to life and held together by the unselfconsciously chameleonic star and lodestar, Denis Lavant. Would be higher on the list, perhaps, if I were less of a narrative Philistine still clinging to the pleasures and comforts of home. Well, as they say, tomorrow is another day.

The undying theme of unrequited love.

David Denby bewails the supposed death of movies, and, of course, the villainous “Hollywood” holds the bloody knife. Only once—not even in a sentence, in a clause—does Denby even slightly acknowledge the massive part critics have had to play in deciding what films get seen by whom, that film magazines and newspapers make an active decision to promote and sustain the culture of blockbusters.

It would be amusing if it weren’t so depressing that Denby, without a hint of irony, can condemn the abandonment of traditional traditional editing techniques at the same time that he promotes Terrence Malick and the action montages of Paul Greengrass as paragons of film aesthetics! The disintegration of the continuous, easily understood filmic space isn’t a sign of the apocalypse—it’s just a new stylistic trend (not that new, really), with new ways to express, and new things to teach us. The editors working today, many of whom learned their craft from the previous generation of editors Denby glorifies, aren’t stupid; they’re just trying something new.

Read this nonsense from Denby’s article:

“You could say, I suppose, that [Inception] is about different levels of representation, and then refine that observation and observe that the differences between fiction and reality, between subjective and objective, no longer exist—that what Nolan created is somehow analogous to our life in a postmodernist society in which the image and the real, the simulacrum and the original, have assumed, for many people, equal weight. (The literary and media theorist Fredric Jameson has made such a case for the movie.) You can say all of that, but you still haven’t established why such an academic-spectacular exercise is worth looking at as a work of narrative art, or why any of it matters emotionally.”

Look at the way Denby acknowledges the complex critical interests blockbuster films like Inception have inspired in academics and popular critics alike, and then in the next breath claims that none of this matters because he doesn’t get it. In other words, Denby argues, ‘Inception may be interesting to the stuffy postmodern academic, but what about the stuff that really matters? Like the stuff that I was interested in when I first encountered film theories decades ago?’ If this article were written by a college freshman, it might be interesting. In Denby’s hands, it’s infuriating. Why should we have to prove to Denby why a film is “worthy” of being looked at as a work of narrative art? To add insult to injury, Denby nostalgically recalls Bazin. But it was Bazin who was able to look past the High Art blinders of his contemporaries and see the virtues and aesthetic values of popular films. What Denby doesn’t seem to realize is: if he were writing about film in the 1950s, he would be exactly the type of critic Bazin would be reacting against.

Worst of all, Denby hypocritically bloats the scope of his article—he really spends the entire article discussing the action blockbuster, ignoring the rest of Hollywood’s output—in order to create an apocalyptic spectacle that will draw the most readers, playing into the same sensationalism he purports to rail against. His allusion to critics and studios past are a slipshod mockery of the rhetorical rigor and precision of the critics and filmmakers he invokes. Denby references a statement made by Bazin that sound films of the 1930s and 1940s reached a classical purity, as if Bazin believed this period to be a pinnacle in American film history (like Denby), but Denby completely ignores the fact that these introductory statements were part of a larger essay by Bazin written in the 1950s and about the fact that, despite the technical mastery of films like Jezebel and Stagecoach, the Neorealist films and American auteur masterpieces like Citizen Kane were actually superior. Denby whines about the fact that many film directors are coming out of music video production rather than an old-school studio hierarchy, but then praises David Fincher as a bastion of the dying art of filmmaking. He praises TV as a new site of brilliant characterization, and then paradoxically suggests in a baffling display of aesthetic conservatism that, for reasons undisclosed, truly nuanced characterization would just feel “awkward” on a TV show.

The more I hear aging critics proclaim that film is dead, the less bashful I get about proclaiming them fools. It’s not that great films are no longer there to be seen; it’s just that these proselytizers have gone blind.

Let me leave you with a quote from a calmer, more eloquent party, the ever-prescient Whitman:

I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

Or, in my words: movies are, and will be, fine.

It’s wonderful that Bong-Joon Ho selected Zodiac (2007) as one of his ten favorites, because the shared virtues between the film and his own Memories of Murder (2003) are manifold and fascinating, especially since this influential film for Bong-Joon Ho came out years after his own. Do you think Fincher thought of Bong-Joon Ho’s film while making Zodiac? Both films are about the obsessive, extensive, disheartening investigation of a serial killer who announces his murders in some way. Both cased involve a series of promising suspects who have to be turned aside because of purely circumstantial evidence. Both turn from violence to humor, from obsession to melancholy and back again. A great double-bill!

Additionally, Bong-Joon Ho’s selection of Fargo (1995) draws out further pleasant cross-cultural pollinations in cinema. Perhaps Detective Park Doo-man (Song Kang-ho) is a strange conflation of Marge Gunderson and Jerry Lundegaard, the simple hard-working detective, but one who bungles everything and puts on airs of competency?