The point of making arbitrary lists...

I'm a serial list-maker. There is an obsessive compulsive part of my personality that enjoys sorting things into groups and thrives when it comes to forming arbitrary lists, especially when it comes to film. In the last few weeks I have given a lot of thought to my own end of year list, which is now veering towards being a "top 30" due to the fact that I have seen just over 130 new films so far this year. But what, you might ask, is the point?

Can one good film ever be definitively said to be "better" than another? How do you go about comparing works as different as 'Pinocchio' and 'Citizen Kane' and 'The Apartment' and 'Jaws'? What possible use is there in making these sorts of lists? Aren't these lists just cheap and easy disposable articles in an age of lazy journalism?

I understand - and even slightly agree with - those academics like David Thompson who routinely ask those questions, yet I am ultimately still drawn to these lists. For one, I find them fun to compile. There is a simple joy I get from taking an otherwise abstract concept like "taste" and making it something tangible or even quantifiable. A second reason why I enjoy these sorts of lists is that they are great starting off points for discussion. On an annual basis I find myself discussing the results of Sight and Sound magazine's end of year critics' poll with friends. A list like that can also encourage you to seek a film out that you might have overlooked. For instance, off the most recent S&S poll I haven't yet seen 'Carlos' - a French-made biopic about "Carlos the Jackal" - and its inclusion on the list will almost certainly result in my seeking the film out.



Perhaps that is the most compelling reason for the existence of these lists. They can perhaps inspire others to seek things out that they may never have even heard of, or may even have dismissed out of hand. I avoided 'In Bruges' (above) on account of its incredibly naff poster and it wasn't until I saw the film popping up in a few "best film" lists in 2008 that I tracked down a copy on DVD and subsequently discovered that I loved it.

Sometimes these rankings don't hold up over time. A look in an old notebook drew my attention to the fact that I once felt 'Garden State' was one of the best films ever made. I don't even like that film anymore. Likewise, my end of year list will doubtless contradict my earlier list, made in July, of "the best of 2010 so far". I'm sure if I return to my final 2010 poll in twenty years I'll have grown fonder of a few films and perhaps developed a dislike of others. All any personal list like this can do is provide a snapshot of a moment in time.

Accepting for the sake of argument that these lists are relevant and interesting (if only to me), I need to decide on a format for my 2010 "best of". Last year's list didn't include 'Ponyo' and 'Micmacs' even though I loved them and saw them at last year's CineCity Film Festival. The logic behind this was that they hadn't been officially released in the UK at that point. But making that judgement poses a few problems to the list-maker further down the line. For starters, both those films might have placed highly on last year's list, whilst they were fresh in my memory, whereas now they feel "old" to me. There is a reason the prestige pictures come out in the run up to awards season and not a year before the Oscars are nominated.



There is also another less fickle reason why I might have done better to include those films in last year's list. If I restrict myself only to films released in the UK in 2010, doesn't that mean I can't include films that are unlikely to get a UK release at all? In Venice I saw several good Italian films that won't receive any sort of release over here and I think I will include at least one of them in my final poll at the end of this month. And what about re-releases? Should I consider 'Rashomon' and 'Breathless' and 'Five Easy Pieces' too? Probably not, or this could get messy.

Considering all of this, I will draw my "best of 2010" list from every new film I have seen this year. I won't consider re-issues, but I will consider 'Micmacs' and 'Ponyo' from last year and I will also likely award places to films scheduled for UK release next year, such as 'Black Swan'. Expect to see the top 30 up on this blog as we get closer to the new year.

'White Material' review: A handsomely made, but oddly unfulfilling post-colonial drama...

Claire Denis’ ‘White Material’ comes with many a high recommendation. It placed (joint) 6th in Sight and Sound magazine’s 2009 poll of critics and it was not the only Denis directed film on the list as ‘35 Shots of Rum’ (also released in France last year) was joint 2nd. Jonathan Romney wrote that having two films in the list served to “reassert her position as one of the most avidly followed auteurs in art cinema” and, in the pages of the same publication, Nick James has reserved even higher praise for Denis writing that “there’s no better film-maker working in the world right now.” Given all this praise it is hardly surprising that ‘White Material’ was heralded as the July issue’s Film of the Month. Elsewhere, Peter Bradshaw’s four star review of the film in The Guardian saw him label it her best since ‘Beau Travail’ and called Denis “a poet of mood and moment”.

This puts me in an awkward position as a reviewer - one I found myself in earlier this year with ‘A Prophet’ – in that I am left wondering whether I have the courage to be like the little boy in the story of the Emperor’s new clothes and declare publicly that I can’t see what they are talking about. ‘White Material’ (and to a lesser extent ’35 Shots of Rum’) is a movie I almost hesitate to criticise as I start to doubt whether I understood it at all. “What did I miss?” I ask. I’m sure it’s in there and I scratch my head whilst fighting against my heart in a vain attempt to locate what I am missing.



I start to try I identify what other critics may be seeing: Claire Denis makes films of undeniable beauty and yet they are also always gritty enough so as to escape being called glossy or shallow. They take no particular viewpoint or political stance (at least none that I can identify) and so they can be lauded as non-judgemental and held up as a sort of objective “truth”. They are slow and subtle works, at their finest capable of evoking great joy and sorrow and of being tense and even frightening whilst still being poignant and tender. But time and time again they leave me cold, unengaged and even a little bored.

Why should I be bored? ‘White Material’ is set in post-colonial Africa in the midst of a civil war. There is barbarity and intimidation throughout. There are scenes of graphic violence, which should be all the more shocking by their close resemblance to reality: Isabelle Huppert portrays a woman whose family coffee plantation is under threat in a changing political climate – one which will see her become the victim of a racially motivated attack not too dissimilar from the kind seen in Zimbabwe in recent years (as shown in the documentary ‘Mugabe and the White African’). There are also child soldiers, reminiscent of those in another recent feature: ‘Johnny Mad Dog’. The political relevance of this story and the potential for something more polemical about racism, colonialism and modern Africa are at the route of my frustration with ‘White Material’. It could say so much and yet seems proud to say nothing at all.



Making overtly political films is very much against current critical favour. To confirm this you only need to watch a few interviews with Kathryn Bigelow as she marched towards her 'Best Director' Oscar earlier this year for ‘The Hurt Locker’. In almost every one she declared proudly that the film was A-political and in no way a comment on rights and wrongs of the Iraq war itself. Ever since Michael Moore popularised left-wing political activism in the early part of the last decade (to some making it seem crass), it has been accepted that the best films are not ideological but simply observe an event impartially.

But one of the best articles from the Cahiers Du Cinema that I ever read at university (and to my shame I can not remember its author) discussed how film is always ideological and can not help but be so. In fact when a filmmaker claims that their work is not ideological, instead suggesting that it is a reflection of how the world actually is, what we see is “truth” as they see it: the “real” world artificially constructed by them and shown through their lens. This sort of filmmaking is somehow more insidious and, even, more dangerous. The people who admit they are making a point are at least flagging up that their film is an idea, whereas when Michael Bay makes a sexist, racist, neo-conservative 'Transformers' movie he can call it entertainment and dismiss any political readings of the movie altogether.

I am not for a moment suggesting every filmmaker needs to be Jean-Luc Godard. In fact on this very blog I have lauded several films in the past for their honesty or objectivity ('The Hurt Locker' among them). But to set a film in post-colonial Africa and say nothing about race or politics whilst you are there is not, for me at least, a fulfilling exercise. Perhaps this could be forgiven if Isabelle Huppert did not cut such an unsympathetic and slightly annoying figure as the protagonist. Nicolas Duvauchelle ('The Girl on the Train')is slightly better as her son who, after one encounter with child soldiers, shaves his head begins carrying a gun, clearly now insane. His unsettling presence suggests a threat which never materializes and he is decidedly underused, his motivations never investigated. Christophe ('Highlander') Lambert is the husband and father and is a solid if unspectacular performer, but again has little to do in a film which is content to follow Huppert around as she consistently ignores warnings from workers, family members and the army about the inevitable violence and disaster to come.



The full extent of her ignorance of the situation is apparent when she visits a pharmacy and comments that they have perhaps gone over the top with security, having an armed guard outside. They respond by saying that they fear it is not enough and later we see that they have been murdered in their shop. If the film creates anxiety it is at the realisation that you are following the only character who has no idea what is taking place, or at least a character who is deluding themselves in an attempt to cling to the past. Unlike the real-life Mike Campbell in 'Mugabe and the White African', Huppert does not come across as strong or brave: just stupid.

Her stupidity is not a compelling enough reason to watch what is happening or to care much about it. I can't help but feel that someone like Werner Herzog would have gotten more out of the extremes of this situation and the insanity of these characters and in doing so he would have said something about human absurdity. In Denis' hands I was left to appreciate the stunning photography and feel nothing, emotionally or intellectually. We are not shown the causes of the trouble which is taking place, instead we are just left to watch a piece of apathetic "oh dearism". And that is a tragedy. I am yet to be convinced that Denis is wearing any clothes.

'White Material' is out now in the UK and is showing at the Duke of York's Picturehouse until Thursday the 8th of July. It is rated '15' by the BBFC.

My top five Kurosawa films (you may not have seen)...

This year is Kurosawa's centenary (he posthumously turned 100 back in March). Sight and Sound magazine have celebrated with a really great series of Kurosawa features in their July issue. Really great is the fact that they have re-printed interviews with the man himself, which are amazing to read (at least if your a bit obsessive about his life and work as I am).

I have decided to follow their lead and post clips for a "Top Five Kurosawa Films You Haven't Seen". I was tempted just to do my own "top five" list, but that would be a bit boring as it would include films everyone knows about. The likes of 'Yojimbo', 'Seven Samurai', 'The Hidden Fortress', 'Rashomon', 'Ran' and 'Ikiru' have been excluded from my thinking for this list. Instead, here are five of his films that everyone should seek out if they have the time and the interest:

'High & Low' (1963)
Based on an Ed McBain crime novel, 'High & Low' stars Toshiro Mifune in one of his greatest performances. Here is a really crazy American trailer which tries to sell this slow and talky movie as if it's a piece of Hitchcock:

'Drunken Angel' (1948)
A really overlooked gem. Two years before 'Rashomon' made everyone take notice in Europe, Kurosawa made this amazing film which also marked Kurosawa's first collaboration with Mifune (who steals the show from the equally brilliant Takashi Shimura). A really good, grimy look at post-war Japan and as political as Kurosawa ever got. The final scenes are among the most intense I have ever seen.

'Red Beard' (1965)
This slow, three hour 19th century medical epic was Kurosawa's final film with Mifune. Never a more humanistic movie did Kurosawa make.

'I Live in Fear' (1955)
Again, stars Toshiro Mifune. This time playing a man twice his actual age. The story is great: it concerns a man who dreams of moving his family to Brazil to escape the impending atomic holocaust he fears is coming to Japan. The paranoia and the exasperation of Mifune's old man are priceless. The film also marks the last score by Fumio Hayasaka, as he died of tuberculosis shortly after completing the score. It also has some great alternative titles in the west: 'Record of a Living Being' and 'What the Birds Knew'. Kurosawa would return to this atom bomb paranoia with a short section in 1990's 'Dreams'. I can't find a video clip so here is that mournful score, stained with tragedy:


'Dreams' (1990)
Curiously the only Kurosawa film to be available to stream from X-Box Live, 'Dreams' was part produced by Steven Speilberg (in a similar manner to how Coppola and Lucas helped finance 'Kagemusha' in 1980) and has visual effects from ILM. The film is a series of shorts which represent Kurosawa's own dreams. I'm not going to lie: some of them are a bit rubbish and much of the dialogue is terrible. But the whole film is visually splendid. Below is the entire "Crows" chapter, which stars Martin Scorcese as Vincent Van Gogh. The way Kurosawa turns Van Gogh's paintings into live action is breathtaking.


Also, if you want to get into Kurosawa (or if you are a bit of a fan already) you could do worse than to read his own book Something Like an Autobiography (which tells Kurosawa's life story up to the making of 'Rashomon' in 1950) or Donald Richie's brilliant The Films of Akira Kurosawa. The Richie book is an essential: detailed academic essays on every single one of his films. What a great book!

Finally, if you're hungry for even more Kurosawa then check out a short post I did, back in May, on his films being remade. Also, look out (or listen out) for the next Splendor podcast, which will take the form of a Kurosawa love-in.

'Tony Manero': an interesting film...

Not only did Sight and Sound name the Chilean 'Tony Manero' as their 'Film of the Month' in the May issue of 2009, but at the year's end the Guardian's Xan Brooks named it his fifth favourite film of 2009, beating such films as 'Il Divo', 'The Hurt Locker' and 'Sleep Furiously'. Since then I have been quite eager to catch up with it (quite late, as it came out in Chile way back in 2008!), but had been put off by the extortionate price that 'World Cinema' DVDs go for on the highstreet. Well, earlier today I got round to seeing 'Tony Manero' thanks to the wonderful Film Four.

I haven’t seen any Chilean cinema before, so I have no frame of reference for where this fits in and how typical it is of the quality of Chilean movies (though I would speculate that this is far above the average in terms of production values). I know that ‘La Nana’ was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film award at this year’s Golden Globes (and that it won an acting prize at Sundance), but apart from that I’m in the dark. What I can say is that I was really quite impressed by what is a very accomplished film from director Pablo Larrain.

I have always been interested (and obviously appalled) by stories about the Pinochet regime that ruled Chile from 1973-1990. There have been several American movies which have looked at the subject (‘Missing’ starring Jack Lemmon immediately springs to mind), but it is obviously really interesting to see how a Chilean film look back of that era. ‘Tony Manero’ is set in the late-1970s and Pinochet’s rule of Chile is constantly present in the film. It is present literally in the form of direct references to the dictator, the imposed curfew, the killing of political dissidents and the police-state atmosphere that grips Santiago in the film. But more than that: Pinochet’s Chile is embodied in the story of the main character, Raul, who will stop at nothing to achieve his meagre goal of being the best John Travolta impersonator on a TV talent show (specifically as Tony Manero from ‘Saturday Night Fever’, as the projectionist at a cinema playing ‘Grease’ learns to his cost).

Raul is vile, violent and completely selfish, yet he is (somehow) seductive to women (despite his impotence), even when he is betraying their love and even destroying their lives. He is a totalitarian who lives by a strict doctrine: that of endlessly studying ‘Saturday Night Fever’ and learning Tony Manero’s every move. He will not entertain different ideas, as people attempt (unsuccessfully) to alter the dance choreography from the movie. In pursuit of these warped ideals he often turns to remorseless murder. But aside from these illusions to Pinochet, the film is also critical of American hegemony in South America, as Chileans avoids dealing with the troubles at hand in favour of watching television talent shows and aping American cultural icons. In this way the film can also be seem as a comment on modern Chile and it’s attitude to the West. Indeed this was Pablo Larrain’s intention as he said to Sight and Sound in that May ’09 issue: “Raul Peralta was one step ahead of his country, because his absurd yearning – to be ‘modern’ – is shared by all of Chile today.”

It is perhaps a gross understatement to call ‘Tony Manero’ an interesting film.

'Tony Manero' is rated '18' by the BBFC and is readily available on DVD and may play on Film Four again soon, as they tend to replay things.

Ozu monogatari: Mark Cousin's stares into the void

According to Kurosawa, Yasujirō Ozu made films of “dignified severity”. He meant it as a criticism. In terms of the films they gave us, the two men could hardly have been more different: you certainly couldn’t confuse the horse chase sequence in ‘The Hidden Fortress’ or the titular ‘Seven Samurai’ running through the tall grass to save the villagers (both conveying an urgency and a sense of speed) with the famous stillness found in Ozu’s work. The most famous examples of his work are slow, small-scale family dramas like ‘Early Spring’ and ‘Tokyo Story’ (though, as Tony Rayns points out in last month’s Sight and Sound, he made many other types of film in his long and prolific career at Shochiku).

Yet Ozu’s films are no less compelling than Kurosawa’s. They delight with their attention to detail. In Ozu’s films, pauses are emphasised, shots linger, often with the camera close to the ground or looking in at the “action” from another room. External shots of trains going by are a common occurrence and seem simply to mark the passing of time and require patience. They are formal, beautiful and poignant: emotional, yet never mawkish or sentimental. Ozu never had wife or family of his own, yet he told stories about families which speak a universal truth, such as when the well-meaning elderly couple of ‘Tokyo Story’ find themselves to be an unwelcome inconvenience when visiting their (now grown up) children, who have jobs to attend to and children of their own to raise. None of the people in these stories are wrong or bad: they just are.

I am writing about Ozu because there has been a lot of attention paid to his work recently. This has partly been due to the fact that this month sees a programme of Ozu films playing at the BFI Southbank (until February 27th) and partly because similarities between Ozu’s work and that of Hirokazu Kore-eda are being drawn in reviews of his new film ‘Still Walking’ (Sight & Sound’s Film of the Month for February). Noted film historian David Thomson has also seen fit to contribute a snobby and pompous article about Ozu versus ‘Avatar’ for the Guardian newspaper. But the piece that caught my attention was a tribute paid to the great man by Mark Cousins during BBC Radio 4’s Film Programme. During the programme, Cousins described not only his appreciation for Ozu, but also his experience visiting Ozu’s grave recently. He describes how the man he sees as the “centre of film history” is represented by a tombstone without a name or any dates, but simply the Chinese character “Mu” which he translates as “emptiness” or “the void”, but which can also be read as “the space between all things”. "Dignified severity" indeed.

Surrounded by tributes of alcohol (like Kurosawa, Ozu was a notorious alcoholic) this grave is somehow the ultimate monument to a man whose films faced the facts of human existence, however apparently bleak, without any need to sugar coat them. He didn’t even want to romanticise his own passing from this Earth. That takes a special kind of dedication to the “truth” so often talked about by artists. Yet Ozu was not a pretentious artist. He was a company man. He was loyal to one studio his whole life and made a great many films (from the silent-era onwards) as a hired gun. He was disciplined and demanding, a perfectionist, but not at the expense of his humility. And whilst his films are not sentimental, they are not without sentiment (‘Tokyo Story’, for one, is a real tear jerker). He was, for me, a real humanist with a deep understanding of, and affection for, life’s smaller moments. He is survived by his films and not by a piece of stone.

Apparently Mark Cousins visit to the grave was made as part of an upcoming documentary on Ozu’s life and work. I, for one, look forward to a closer look at this fascinating 20th century artist if and when it is released. I will keep an eye out.

'A Prophet' and racial tensions in recent French cinema

Yesterday I listened to a radio interview featuring the French director Jacques Audiard, whose prison drama 'A Prophet' was Sight & Sound magazines film of 2009 after topping their annual poll of international cinema critics, ahead of such films as 'The White Ribbon' and 'The Hurt Locker'. What struck me about this interview was Audiard’s response to questions about the films scenes of violence, as he stated that it was not so much the violent acts themselves that had shocked viewers in his native France, but that an Arab (Malik [left] as portrayed by Tahar Rahim) was committing them. It was this statement which has caused me to wonder whether there is a movement in modern French cinema, united by its depiction of racial tension in an ethnically diverse modern France.

Indeed other recent internationally successful French films portray a similar picture of France to 'A Prophet', whether it’s within the inner-city classroom depicted in Laurent Cantet’s 'The Class', or a middle-class, white Frenchman’s journey through a seedy Muslim criminal underworld in the thriller 'Anything For Her' or in the frequent depictions of racial abuse and violence seen in last year’s 'Mesrine' films. And whilst Jean-Pierre Jeunet‘s 'Amelie' was criticised upon release for doing to Paris what 'Notting Hill' had done to London in terms of racial representations, his latest whimsical fantasy comedy, 'Micmacs', depicts France as a place where socially marginalised misfits (amongst them a black Muslim) must do battle against nefarious arms dealers, who we learn via an amusing office desk photo reveal, are chums of Nicolas Sarkozy. If these films, when viewed together, form a picture of a modern ethnically diverse France which is divided along racial lines (as well as economic ones), then perhaps they have a point. You need only look back to Jean-Marie Le Pen’s surprise rise to prominence in 2002, as his Front National party (in many ways the French equivalent of the BNP) polled second in the Presidential election, or to the huge race riots of 2005, to see some recent historical evidence to support the version of France represented in these films.

Is this view of France a hallmark of modern French cinema? I must admit I am living in a vacuum with regards to French film en masse. The French film industry is responsible for a great many films which receive little or no international distribution, the content of which I cannot assess with any authority. Perhaps the films which tend to be exhibited outside of France are the ones which seem to offer some kind of commentary on modern France for outsiders.

So what of British film? Aside from the odd film like 1999’s 'East is East' or 2007’s 'Brick Lane', British cinema seems not to share French cinemas preoccupation with issues of racial difference. Is this because Britain is more tolerant than France? Or rather, is it because we are still more focussed on social class (as in the work of Andrea Arnold, for one example)? Or is this simply because we are not engaging with the issue? I’d be extremely interested to read any views you might have.
'A Prophet' is screening every day until Thursday the 28th of January at the Duke of Yorks Picturehouse in Brighton and is rated 18 by the BBFC.