The Prisoner viewing diary concludes (including conversations) • the bulk & conclusion of The Favorites series • Fandor video essays continue (including The Passion of Anna K., The Colors of Daisies, and Meshes of Lynch) • teaser/intro for The Mirrors of Kane video series • Twin Peaks interviews: John Thorne, Scott Ryan • YouTube video series continue: "The 3 1/2 Minute Review" - "Side by Side" - "Cinepoem" - "Montage" • Twin Peaks podcasts including The Secret History (Obnoxious & Anonymous, Twin Peaks Unwrapped) plus podcasts on Evangelion & Star Wars • election/political commentary • Top of the Lake season 1 viewing diary
continuing Chapter 24: Paris, Portmeirion, and Other Planets (December 2015 - April 2016)
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JANUARY
Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable ensure termitic focus within the elephantine excess of one of Hollywood's most sumptuous productions
Re-publishing responses to many postwar Euro classics I was seeing for the first time in my early twenties
Number Six's greatest virtues - his intelligence and his stubbornness - work at cross-purposes in an escape attempt
Sergei Eisenstein's take on the historical epic (designed like a live-action cartoon) is at once resolutely theatrical and cinematic
My complicated feelings toward the third Star Wars prequel, boiled down into 210 seconds
An elaborate escape plan goes in...an interesting direction
"Get out of my way, Johnny, I'm gonna spit!" I love everything about this Hawks classic, even (maybe especially) the most blatant censor's intervention ever ("He's-a disgrace to my people!")
Questions about Lynch's six-week walkout from negotiations with Showtime the previous year, led by the Obnoxious and Anonymous podcast
The Language of Birds: Jacques Rivette's OUT 1 (my video essay collaboration w/ Covadonga G. Lahera)
As part of a longer collaborative series, we played around with footage from the epic experimental Out 1, creating and escalating an aesthetic dialogue
Six plus Six equals Twelve - which one is the double?
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Assembling highlights of my forum posts and online comments from the summer the Twin Peaks blu-ray came out
The iconic power of the Great White and the engaging chemistry of the human characters, straddling cinema's different qualities as early Steven Spielberg often does
Comparing/contrasting a couple heist films, whose similarities only emphasize their divergent outlooks
Taking on the tech elite who want to control education, a half-century ahead of schedule
The cinematic evocation of a medieval aesthetic and atmosphere
Concluding a couple months of Rivette-focused work with a tribute on the occasion of his death
FEBRUARY
My appearance on No Ship Network's podcast to discuss my work, my interests, and (of course) Twin Peaks with hosts Em and Steve
Spying on dreams to find out the big secret
Excavating the traditions, troubles, and eccentricities of a farm town in Indiana
Collage of spoken word, translated text, distorted cinema, and abstracted photography convey a powerful Arthur Rimbaud poem
You can't go home again - or can you? (Love this episode)
An experience to get lost inside, both dense and sparse, close-quartered and wide-open
Looking back at my 2006 questions and reactions from almost a decade later...the last chance I'd get since IMDB wiped its message board archives a few months later
The plot against Number Two is more complicated than it initially seems
Together, these films reflect not only the growth of the protagonist but also of Satyajit Ray
Non-narrated montage arranging clips from Karina's seven Godard features to follow a close structure and tell a kind of story
Joining several other commentators on a podcast to mark the anniversary of Cooper's arrival in Twin Peaks
Now this I was not expecting at all - is there any genre The Prisoner doesn't dip into? (They even go so far as to re-imagine the opening montage!)
Highlighting the recently-marginalized Honorary Academy Awards with two montages - "Spike Lee: Four Strategies" and "Gena Rowlands: Getting Closer" - cut to Miles Davis and John Coltrane in a live version of "So What"
A globetrotting adventure/romance/mystery filtered through a single room and window, anchoring itself down to express multiplicity
MARCH
A Leap Day check-in on the progress of an ambitious visual tribute
This Prisoner episode avoids a high concept - rare but solid
"The world in an hour and a half" according to Godard...Robert Bresson's spare film manages to tease a sprawling, communal narrative
Creating a narrated trailer for the clip series I arranged nearly five years earlier, explaining its purpose and highlighting its chapters
An unexpected face in the mirror
Fusing Old Hollywood's larger-than-life storytelling with postwar slice-of-life realism
Screenshots of the slow-burn buildups and dramatic reveals in Steven Spielberg's first four big creature features (best viewed by slowly scrolling through desktop mode on a computer screen)
Six and Two play mind games
Giving over-the-top visual form to what it feels like to to pull off the big show after intense preparation
One director uses different approaches/formats to bring her closer to another (recently deceased) director
Both fantasy and sci-fi, a fable with a very unique aesthetic
One of the wackier episodes, hated by some, loved by others
A guest appearance on a podcast to address the dreaded mid-season 2
Stray reflections on Twin Peaks, some quite lengthy, from the summer of 2014 - including reasons why there would never be a new series!
My biggest year of videos, with lots of diverse activity on Fandor, my own YouTube series, and some more random entries along the way
Vera Chytilova and Annabella Lwin bounce across the color spectrum in a rapid one-minute montage
As the end approaches, The Prisoner dips into a quasi-experimental theater approach
APRIL
Is Barry a Jack Torrance-like loser, does he have more self-awareness, or is he in fact a noble soul despite the narrator's insistence?
Considering both the theatrical cut and the Redux: the first may be more iconic but does the second have more depth?
Shots from Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon rhyme with shots from Lynch's films in startling, uncanny fashion
A final round-up of Twin Peaks comments from 2014, leading up to the announcement of The Return
Who's Number One? I watch The Prisoner finale for the first time...
Clone Wars yields a cave of forgotten nightmares
Despite the broad scope of this documentary series, the "personal view" is key to its success
At the time this was my thousandth post (although later I beefed up the archive with a number of pieces originally written for other sites back in 2009-2010)
My viewing diary complete, I chat with the fan who chose its viewing order
My last Favorites entry for several months packs ten mini-films into one epochal epic, a view of the ten commandments in the last years of Communist Poland
After a very busy summer, fall, and winter - and over a year of steady activity on the site - I needed a breather (and an excuse to use the Rover pic)
Chapter 25: Finishing the Favorites (May - November 2016)
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MAY
Just in time for the film's seventy-fifth anniversary, a teaser for my Mirrors of Kane video series (one chapter would follow, but the rest were put on the backburner for the near future...)
Kicking off the Kane series with a look at how people approach the film - and why it matters
JUNE
The creator of Wrapped in Plastic joins me for another conversation, this time to discuss his new book
JULY
Reaching the season 2 finale on this podcast after a yearlong journey
Swapping two very different soundscapes in an experimental video essay
Multiple guests take turns with various aspects of Fire Walk With Me for the Unwrapped podcast
Why "The Girl Who Was Death" is a great episode (and many other matters) - a great conversation with a big Prisoner fan
AUGUST
Bringing our discussion from print to audio, I join Bob's podcast to take a sweeping overview of the whole Evangelion series
Switching places, I guest-host the podcast for an episode
Talking to the director of a documentary about the Twin Peaks Festival (and finding how how he ranks Twin Peaks episodes)
Paying tribute to the great Allan Fish, whose work - and the community that sprung up around it - dominated so much of my online activity
SEPTEMBER
Comedy as imaginative as it is funny (and the Marshall McLuhan cameo anticipates Twitter celebrity tag-ins by several decades)
Thirty, forty, even fifty years after release, the film's zeitgeist still seemed within reach - but does it still?
Celebrating that eternally stirring climax with a 2016 review of a 1992 adaptation of a 1936 film based on an 1826 novel about a 1757 war
This casual epic conveys a magic embedded in the every day, waiting to be discovered (in my case, on a Sunday morning at an obscure festival)
A masterpiece (in its way, an anthology of loosely-linked sci-fi stories) whose very existence is as iconic and improbable as the monolith itself
If L'Avventura is haunted by a recent yet irretrievable past and La Notte captures the anxiety of a very present ennui, L'Eclisse - my favorite of Michelangelo Antonioni's trilogy - conveys the possibility of an open future
Part crime genre, part art film; part Cassavetes, part Bertolucci; defined by both handheld grittiness and camera dollies, Martin Scorsese's very personal film is drawn from many cinematic traditions
Geppeto's village, the intricate array of clocks and whirligigs in his shop (a tightly woven web of Silly Symphonies), the "Dark Disneyland" design of Pleasure Island...all depict Disney's talent for world-creation
Peter Greenaway's work is a dizzying tug of war between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, and this is a film that I could enjoy on mute OR with my eyes closed
Perfect evocation of noir's je ne sais quoi - thick with fog, wet streets, chiaroscuro, tightly packed deep frames, harsh lights hitting the lens, and a femme fatale embracing a detective as smoke curls in the air
Forget the Bomb, *this* is Slim Pickens' finest moment
The tragedy of a schoolgirl investigating her own trauma, considered in isolation from the larger mythology that spawned this film
Hilarious and brilliantly constructed, what initially seemed like a minor film in the Coens' vast oeuvre has possibly become their most beloved
Reeling the viewer into its murky waters through sheer narrative grace and clear-eyed formal discipline
Is Out 1 a coded message concealing a fascinating secret? Or a puzzle that purposefully doesn't add up?
An American genre film glazed in the avant-garde
While the characters tumble around their little corner of the universe, the film mournfully suggests a larger, more transcendent reality just passed by, like a cloud drifting lazily but irrevocably toward the horizon
Weaving the line between cold, weary apathy toward life and painful exposure to its strongest emotional eddies
Not content to cut between frames, the film cuts within them, creating dazzling collages in perpetual motion
A music video shot on a single roll of film, with each layer of imagery exposed over the same frames
The blimp that proclaims "The World is Yours!" turns out to be the Hindenburg
OCTOBER
Packs a hell of a punch at seven minutes and seven seconds - one for each dwarf
Though City Lights and Modern Times provide close competition, this may be Charlie Chaplin's most beloved film
"Dziga Vertov's 1929 film is the single work in the new [Sight & Sound] top ten that seems to understand that nervy mixture of interruption and unexpected association [of the online era]" - David Thomson in 2012
"He wondered if the world is becoming a dream, or if the dream is becoming the world"
Relocates the urban warfare of Prohibition thugs to the wilderness of the American West and shifts the sensibility from post-World War I fury to post-World War II introspection
Snapshot of a zeitgeist seemingly at its peak but in retrospect already beginning to slide
Winking at the silliness of the whole charade while wrapping us up inside an examples of how effective that charade can be
Tex Avery is so in tune with the pace of cinematic perception that he knows we can understand the most ludicrous conceit in a matter of seconds if presented the right way
Probably the earliest film on my list that I can remember being released in theaters although I was way too young to see it at the time - Home Alone was my Joe Pesci flick that year
Up in the villa overlooking the valley, as in an enchanted castle in a child's fable, an alienated young man decides to see what happens when he shakes the foundations of his frozen family's world
Embodying and subverting classical western forms, The Searchers draws on genre conventions that John Ford and John Wayne helped create while pointing toward the revisionist decades to come
A film project tracks a group of Brits from childhood to old age; each time I watch the series I can identify with a different chapter since I match up roughly with one of the installments every seven years
As in an earlier entry on this list, the standout scene involves slow death, overpowering music, and an achingly, even ominously still landscape
Caught between the common folk and the local elite, the family he's defending and the community opposing them, his own idealistic appeals to higher principles and his shrewd ability to employ emotional manipulation
In addition to the cleverness of its overall shape and its fearlessness in articulating its concerns, this wintry classic is very much an exercise in atmosphere
The film has plenty of empathy (which is not to say sympathy) to go around but its power is anchored in the subjectivity of the victim of violence, rather than identifying solely with her avenger
In many ways a small, focused film, whose looming presence in Hollywood history is owed to two factors - one positive, one definitely not
Seemingly patterned along the lines of L.A. ensemble pieces like Short Cuts and Grand Canyon, David Lynch's most celebrated work owes its sprawling structure to another source - and goes in a very different direction
A work whose massive impact eventually shifted away from cinema (once #1, it's no longer even in the top 500 hits of all time) and toward cable drama
Naive expectations raised only to be crushed by the disillusioning indifference or hostility of those - individuals, institutions, and social forces - more powerful or deceitful than our heroine
Star Wars fuses the spirit of backyard play with careful craftsmanship and the result is unlike anything before or since, despite many imitations
The intriguing, unsettling sensation of getting lost in your own home
Very British in sensibility and attitude, as crisp and curt as Carol Reed and writer Graham Greene could manage, but the two most important characters are American and this may be the greatest noir (a very American form)
The outsider who finds his own path to confident power by deciding his role is to defend society from other outsiders
Experimental to its core, mixing documentary, found footage, home movie, fictional re-enactment, autobiographical narration, and pure painting-in-motion visual setpiece
A snapshot and a painting at the same time - and of course, the music is fantastic
Within moments of our grandiose introduction to this larger-than-life character, a rapid-fire newsreel exalts, mocks, glosses, and punctures Kane from all angles
Bedford Falls is a fantastically impressive microcosm, a self-contained universe worthy of a decade-spanning soap opera, yet somehow contained within a single two-hour film - all as set-up for the famous final act
Not to ignore the film's searing, if implicit, critique of capitalism, imperialism, and representative government, but the heart of this Godfather is still more psychological than sociological
Something about Carl Theodor Dreyer's work connects on an electric level - however carefully the film was planned, it must have grown out of a core understanding rather than a cold-blooded blueprint
This documentary about the Rolling Stones' catastrophic Altamont concert offers the distinct sensation, almost unparalleled in American film history, of capturing a particular period in the exact moment of its apex, collapse, and transition
NOVEMBER
There's an intense precision to these hallucinatory stop-motion nightmares, as nonsensical as they seem, creating the impression that what we see is incredibly significant...even if we can't quite determine why
Soon after its release, The House is Black became a memorial not just for the leper colony documented onscreen but for the woman whose imagination and intelligence illuminate the film - it is twenty-two minutes, her only movie, and a masterpiece
Perpetually unsettling us with its combination of dollies and pans, startling us with its harsh, vivid sound design, and wrapping us in a carefully-realized world of sin, dread, and suffocating custom
I distinctly remember, on first view, dreading that the film would end when its primary narrative seemed to conclude despite the lingering mystery. And then...it kept going.
Lawrence of Arabia's greatness, cleverly constructed in the first part, is most fully realized in the uncertain, sprawling second part
Not a present-day documentary, and these "children of Marx and Coca-Cola" are not millennials, but this zeitgeist felt very relevant as I wrapped my Favorites series with #1 in autumn 2016
Burnett's multifaceted documentary explores various incarnations and interpretations of Turner
On the morning of the presidential election, I reflected briefly on my political evolution even as my engagement with current events had mostly vanished from the site (or rather, migrated to Twitter)
Tweeting the night of Trump's election
Analyzing one of the most mysterious objects of Fire Walk With Me for a new, recurring Twin Peaks podcast segment covering various topics
How Twin Peaks confronts incest in its characters' lives (and how this relates to real-life scenarios), explored in another podcast segment
The work of Frost on and off Twin Peaks, part of a special podcast episode on the show's co-creator
I join Bob for his final countdown podcast, for the film where it all began
With the third season still on the horizon, I talk Mark Frost's novel along with a podcast host who didn't care for it...
...and then I join in with another podcast to dig into the question of whether the book's "mistakes" are intentional
A video study of how Ousmane Sembene used his film's design to express its political outlook
Clips from Damien Chazelle's low-budget musical form my tribute to a New England city
DECEMBER
What might happen in season 3? I indulge in some guesswork with a podcast six months ahead of the premiere
Taking stock and sharing a political call-in as 2016 approaches its conclusion
An introduction and directory for my first-time viewing of the Jane Campion mystery series
Barely a few minutes in, Top of the Lake quickly establishes the evocative landscape, whose unusual architecture, open space, and vague sense of melancholy recall The Sweet Hereafter
What strikes me on my second visit to this bleak, dour town is just how funny it can be at surprising times
Robin's fascination with the Tui videotape is one of Top of the Lake's clearest nods to Twin Peaks, placing her closer to the likes of Dale Cooper than the "True Detectives" but with an extra twist of identification
The community is defined by the struggle between the powerful, maintaining a code of silence to preserve their power, and the victimized, keeping quiet to preserve something more valuable (and vulnerable) than power
As the series moves toward its climax, here's an hour marked by death and discovery
Characterized by sharp images, narrative twists and turns, and a growing sense of anxiety - something feels slightly off but the troubling storm on the horizon is moving too fast for us to escape
The season finale provides an effective conclusion with at least one moment of brilliantly realized dread
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