The Favorites - Band of Outsiders (#34)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Band of Outsiders (1964/France/dir. Jean-Luc Godard) appeared at #34 on my original list.

What it is • Two wannabe hoodlums, Franz (Sami Frey) and Arthur (Claude Brasseur) enlist an odd, naive young woman, Odile (Anna Karina), into an attempt to rob the bourgeois family she lives with. Romantic, deadpan, perpetually bemused, the trio spends most of the film lounging (and dancing) in cafes, bantering about movies and current events, and deciding who Odile is going to sleep with. As Pauline Kael noted, it comes as a shock when they actually endeavor to commit the crime, as if one type of movie has been dropped down in the middle of another. Godard based the film on the pulp novel Fool's Gold by the Californian crime/western writer Dolores Hitchens. Thus we have another quintessential example of the French New Wave's interest in fusing taut American genre fare with a more leisurely French sensibility; Godard's early work in particular was an exemplar of this tendency from Breathless onward. The influence boomeranged back to America again, impacting the auteurs of New Hollywood down to Quentin Tarantino, who named his production company "Band Apart" - a play on the French title - and many others (while reading into the subject for this review, I even stumbled across an article comparing the dance sequence to Audrey in the diner on Twin Peaks). For such an influential film, Band of Outsiders has a mixed legacy - some consider it very minor Godard (including biographer Richard Brody and perhaps even the director himself), while others mark it among their favorites. Obviously, I'm with the latter group.

Why I like it •

The Favorites - The Man With a Movie Camera (#35)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. The Man With the Movie Camera (1929/USSR/dir. Dizga Vertov) appeared at #35 on my original list.

What it is • Experimental filmmakers of the twenties had a penchant for "city-poems," documentaries that recorded the daily life of a city, either in short form or, in the case of Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, over the course of an entire feature. The Man With a Movie Camera follows this course with explosive results although - appropriately enough - it "cheats" a bit, using four cities (Kharkiv, Kiev, Moscow, and Odessa) despite implying that we are gazing at a single metropolis. This is in keeping with the spirit of Movie Camera, a defiantly anti-fiction film which is nonetheless lively with creativity. There are a few staged shots, but for the most part this creativity is expressed through manipulation of the image, an anti-"verite" vision of documentary cinema. This ferociously fast visual cascade was radical during the slower-paced silent era and remains startling today. Superimpositions, backwards-motion, kaleidoscopic montages, and buoyant dollies give the movie a sense of endless motion. "Without the Use of Intertitles...Without the Help of a Scenario...Without the Help of Theatre!" the first (and last) title card declares. Vertov, in his early thirties at the time, had already spent years experimenting with revolutionary newsreels and avant-garde shorts, overlapping the two categories and pushing the medium to (and past) its limits. This film was the culmination. If it seemed Vertov was kicking open a door, that door quickly closed: within a decade, severe Socialist Realism was the mandatory state style. Future generations, far afield, would have to pick up where the fiery young turk had left off and today The Man with a Movie Camera seems more relevant than ever. When it unexpectedly cracked the prestigious Sight & Sound top ten for the first time in 2012, David Thomson noted: "Dziga Vertov’s 1929 film is the single work in the new top ten that seems to understand that nervy mixture of interruption and unexpected association" of the online era.

Why I like it •

The Favorites - The Gold Rush (#36)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. The Gold Rush (1925/USA/dir. Charlie Chaplin) appeared at #36 on my original list.

What it is • A lone prospector (Charlie Chaplin) waddles up an icy Yukon path, a polar bear calmly following in his footsteps. The ambitious tramp will be stalked by many more troubles before the film ends: he is buried in snow, challenged to fights by burly rivals, nearly frozen in a little cabin, starved to the point of eating his own shoelaces like spaghetti, almost shot by his hungry, hallucinating compatriot Big Jim (Mack Swain) who envisions him as a giant chicken, trapped in a cabin that has been blown precariously onto the edge of a cliff during the night, and, perhaps worst of all, heartbroken by the mocking flirtations of dance hall girl Georgia (Georgia Hale). The little guy meets all these challenges with his usual pluck and imagination, and the film features some of Chaplin's most memorable gags: the aforementioned chicken and shoelaces, of course, but also the frantic balancing act required as the cabin nearly topples over that cliff, and, on a more delicate note, his bread-roll dance number (featured above). The usual mix of pathos and comedy applies, especially in the original, longer cut which Chaplin shortened seventeen years later. Though City Lights and Modern Times provide close competition (and are a bit more complex), this may be Chaplin's most beloved film - it was certainly one of the biggest hits of the silent era.

Why I like it •

The Favorites - Snow White (#37)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Snow White (1933/USA/ani. Roland Crandall) appeared at #37 on my original list.

What it is • Not the Snow White you were expecting to see here? True, Betty Boop's version of the Grimm tale isn't exactly identical to the Disney feature, but there really are quite a lot of similarities! Both display the Evil Queen's jealousy when she discovers that Betty, er, Snow White is the "fairest in the land" by honing in on her face, with its wide eyes and bulbous nose, as it morphs into a frying pan with two sizzling eggs. The two Snow Whites also depict our heroine's escape from execution in similar fashion: the queen's knights destroy their weapons before brawling with the tree stump on which they were going to chop off her head, punching and kicking the scowling block of wood as it wraps its roots around them like tentacles. Most memorable of all is the music these films share - hallmarks of Sing-A-Long Song videotapes cherished by millennial children, in which the bouncing ball struggles to keep up with Cab Calloway in clown/ghost drag, lamenting his dead lover while his head detaches and becomes a giant bottle of "boooooze."

On second thought, maybe these two films are pretty different. Packing one hell of a punch at seven minutes and seven seconds (one for each dwarf), the 1933 Snow White beat its more famous companion by four years. Produced by the Fleischer brothers, it was largely the work of animator Roland Crandall who, according to Wikipedia, was given free reign to create this stream-of-consciousness cartoon by his own hand (which took half a year). The result is remarkable, every frame stuffed with hilariously random invention.

Why I like it •

The Favorites - Scarface (#38)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Scarface (1983/USA/dir. Brian De Palma) appeared at #38 on my original list.

What it is • The only film on this list to remake another film on this list, Scarface updates the story of a ruthless Italian gangster in Prohibition Chicago for the 1980s, transforming Tony Camonte into the Cuban Mariel boatlift refugee Tony Montana and shifting locations to sun-struck, coke-fueled Miami. De Palma steps in for Howard Hawks, while Oliver Stone's screenplay adapts Ben Hecht's original. As might be expected based on that personnel switch, the violent, profanity-laden three-hour update trades economy for excess. In other ways, however, the films share a kindred spirit beyond their largely identical plot points and narrative arcs. Both embrace blunt dialogue and characterizations as quietly clever as they are superficially crude. Both center on larger-than-life performances from studious, serious actors embracing vulgarity and vitality as two sides of the same coin. Both embed their lowbrow pleasures in a sophisticated, imaginative visual style, rich with creative camera movements. The 1983 Scarface also has some distinctive qualities the earlier film lacks: a gorgeous, splashy color palette and an immediately evocative Giorgio Morodor electronic score. The film is gloriously trashy, but also wonderfully-executed and, most importantly, honest in its comprehension of Tony's ferocious desires and the world that flatters and frustrates him. That blimp may proclaim "The World is Yours!" but it will eventually reveal itself to be the Hindenburg.

Why I like it •

The Favorites - Hyperballad (#39)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Hyperballad (1996/France/dir. Michel Gondry) appeared at #39 on my original list.

What it is • Bjork appears as an immobile sculpture, eyes closed in sleep - except when they briefly open - a tribute to the one moment of movement in Chris Marker's La Jetee? Simultaneously, she floats above as a sort of hologram, singing her song "Hyperballad" as the camera pivots around her form(s). Finally, most iconically, a video game avatar Bjork sprouts from the death mask-like visage and runs across the screen, the camera following her through a pixelated city, with the simple shapes of mountain peaks dominating the background. Michel Gondry's music video for this mid-nineties single touches on many of his favorite themes and motifs: simple, pleasing forms; a childlike sense of whimsy; multimedia interactions; the stark contrast of city and country. However, it also corresponds to the song's lyrics. Bjork sings a joyous ode to contemplating (and experimenting with) dangerous extremities each morning, before appreciatively returning to the security of her mountaintop home and the companionship of her still-sleeping lover. And the visuals reflect the gentle whirls and whoops of the electronic soundscape, a synthetic sound that feels organic. I only learned tonight, while reviewing a video I must have watched at least a dozen times, that all of "Hyperballad" was shot on a single roll of film, each layer of imagery exposed over the same frames. There's an incredible sense of natural movement to the effect despite the laserlike precision necessary to pull it off.

Why I like it •

The Favorites - Daisies (#40)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Daisies (1966/Czechoslovakia/dir. Vera Chytilova) appeared at #40 on my original list.

What it is • Two girls named Marie (Ivana Karbanová and Jitka Cerhová) cavort across a surreal cinematic landscape. I'm not sure how else to describe the setting - these are not the types of locations that are supposed to reflect an offscreen reality (nor do the characters seem to have any "backstory"). The tanning shacks, nightclubs, train stations, farms, and - most memorably - dining halls we visit don't exist in relation to one another, any more than a Western saloon and Gothic castle stacked side-by-side on a Hollywood soundstage. The Maries are a couple Sherlock, Jr.'s, leaping from film to film - or perhaps channel-surfers who have decided to wreak havoc on their favorite dating, fashion, and culinary reality shows. But even these useful comparisons are reductive, "explaining" what requires only immersion. The film toots along like a manic cut of punk pop and the best analogy might be to a loose, spontaneous early Looney Tune. Chytilova proves herself the long-lost distaff Slavic live-action twin of Tex Avery but the Czechoslovakian censors weren't laughing. They were desperately trying to squash the blossoming Prague Spring (one thinks of the Blue Meanies stomping every flower in sight, though the arrival of Soviet tanks in a couple years would put an end to such whimsical fancies). The authorities did not take this "lark" lightly in 1966, banning the film and reprimanding the fiery director. And indeed there is an undercurrent of darkness to the party onscreen, a vigorous anger undergirding the actions of Daisies' carefree apple-pluckers.

Why I like it •

The Favorites - Through a Glass Darkly (#41)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Through a Glass Darkly (1961/Sweden/dir. Ingmar Bergman) appeared at #41 on my original list.

What it is • Four characters - Karin (Harriet Andersson), who has just been treated for schizophrenia, her novelist father David (Gunnar Bjornstrand), her husband Martin (Max von Sydow), and her naive little brother Minus (Lars Passgard) - holiday on an isolated island. Emerging from the twilit sea, their boisterous laughter flickers on the soundtrack. The water looks cold, the light in the sky is dimming, and there is a fierce beauty to this image of fragile camaraderie. The chill they flee in this opening shot will catch up to them over the approaching night and following day, effecting a full transformation from curious, nervous innocence to devastating, irrevocable knowledge: most notably for the quietest character, Minus. The first film in Bergman's "Silence of God" trilogy may, in its own way, be as iconic as The Seventh Seal. Its title, borrowed from Corinthians, has become a kind of shorthand for "serious art film" and its final twist is up there with the split faces of Persona or Death playing chess among classic Bergman images (though I'll admit when I first read about it as an over-imaginative kid, I thought they actually showed the damn spider sneaking out from behind the door, like in a monster movie...or like the oddly terrifying "god" marionette who pops out of a similar door in Bergman's much later Fanny and Alexander). The trailer for the film intones, through stodgy newspaper clippings (recommended by Bosley Crowther and the Academy Awards!) and somber, eat-your-vegetables narration, that this is A Very Serious Film for what Pauline Kael called "come dressed as the sick soul of Europe parties." But Through a Glass Darkly is as raw as it is austere. Buried in the severity of its reputation is the heartbreaking beauty of Sven Nykvist's gorgeous photography and Andersson's electric performance, a sensitive portrayal of madness. Although that's not quite correct...the film may be less about the direct experience of insanity than about the precarious nature of a moment's peace, the certainty that the drop is coming, and a vague euphoric thrill just before a precipitous descent.

Why I like it •

The Favorites - The Mother and the Whore (#42)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. The Mother and the Whore (1973/France/dir. Jean Eustache) appeared at #42 on my original list.

What it is • We meet Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Leaud), a young man in early seventies France, as he wakes up next to an unidentified woman and tiptoes out of the room without waking her up. Downstairs, he knocks on another door and asks a different woman if he can borrow her car. She agrees amiably, as if this happens all the time, and Alexandre is off to a cafe to browse for future conquests (including an ex-lover to whom he professes wounded, undying adoration; we - and ultimately she - see right through him). Alexandre doesn't appear to have a job. He lives with Marie (Bernadette Lafont), a shopkeeper who fulfills "the mother" role of the title (at times), taking care of him financially and willing to give him a tongue-lashing whenever he attempts to bullshit her. Early in the film, he meets Veronika (Francoise Lebrun), "the whore" of the title (again, ambivalently and more than a bit ironically). She is not literally a prostitute, and so the moniker (which she denies) is surprising in an age of supposed sexual liberation. She is a Polish emigre and hardworking nurse whose very casual promiscuity initially appears as frank and unapologetic as Alexandre's (and a good deal more honest). However, even more than the others, a deep pain reveals itself with time. These three characters intersect before Eustache's casual camera, in mostly unadorned rooms (Veronika's hospital grotto is one of the loneliest and most simply evocative I've seen in a movie) or bustling cafes (with the buzz of real-life conversation surrounding the actors). The film is almost entirely composed of their conversations, carried mostly by the mile-a-minute Alexandre. Its minimalistic content and lengthy form (close to four hours) suggest something perverse and uncinematic, yet The Mother and the Whore is utterly captivating, one of the most celebrated films of the seventies. It really has to be seen to be understood.

Why I like it •

The Favorites - Rosemary's Baby (#43)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Rosemary's Baby (1968/USA/dir. Roman Polanski) appeared at #43 on my original list.

What it is • Rosemary (Mia Farrow) and Guy Woodhouse (John Cassevetes) move into the Bramford (really the infamous Dakota), a grand old New York building. Rosemary, who lacks a profession or the sharp personality of those around her, is initially overshadowed by more colorful characters like her eccentric neighbors, Minnie (Ruth Gordon) and Roman Castevet (Sidney Blackmer). And yet the film is entirely centered around her point of view and as it progresses, our identification with her grows more and more intense. The central sequence in this development is one of the creepiest setpieces in horror history: Rosemary dreams/hallucinates/actually experiences a demonic ritual assault but wakes up the next day with only a foggy memory of what happened (therefore, the most important step of our identification with Rosemary occurs when we witness something that she herself is later unaware of). She begins to suspect her kooky neighbors and demure husband, a struggling actor, have wicked intentions for her unborn baby. The paranoia is palpable and the film is enveloped in a suffocating sense of suspense even though most viewers will have a pretty clear sense of what's going on (either going in or after the "dream"). That's because the tension results less from plot machinations than from Polanski's masterful sense of pace and atmosphere, and from the power of the central themes - a woman whose control over her life slips from her fingers, until she seems to be hemmed in from every corner - and Farrow's embodiment of these themes in her fragile form and quaking expression. Surprisingly, the film is often quite humorous, never more so than in its equal-parts terrifying/hilarious conclusion. Rosemary's Baby has a quintessentially fifties/sixties borderline-nihilist sick humor backed by a genuine sense of apocalyptic, barely-contained anxiety.

Why I like it •

The Favorites - Out 1 (#44)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Out 1 (1971/France/dir. Jacques Rivette & Suzanne Schiffman) appeared at #46 on my original list.

What it is • Two theatrical troupes rehearse - if that's the proper term for their loose, playful methodology (one bemused director, played by Michael Lonsdale, remarks that their production of Prometheus Unbound has forgotten all about Prometheus). A pretty shopkeeper (Bulle Ogier, whom critic J. Hoberman described as "delightfully cannabisized" or something to that effect) spends most of her time lounging with purposeful-looking layabouts who apparently have some vague idea about starting an underground newspaper. Two strange, charismatic outcasts (Jean-Pierre Leaud and Juliet Berto) enact cons - one by pretending he is a deaf-mute harmonicist, the other by flirting with men until their guard is down so she can steal their cash. These fragments circulate independently of one another - either amusingly or frustratingly depending on the viewer's mood - until they slowly, surely begin to coalesce. An actress (Hermine Karagheuz) passes a mysterious note to the young con man (an action she will later deny). The con woman steals letters from a bourgeois household which refer to murky, possibly dangerous liaisons. Connections are drawn to Honore de Balzac's History of the Thirteen, with its enigmatic conspirators drawing connections between disparate events, and Lewis Carrol's The Hunting of the Snark, a nonsense poem in which we strive for deeper meaning at our own peril. Is Out 1 a coded message whose non sequiturs and shaggy-dog storytelling conceal a fascinating secret (perhaps a metaphor for May '68, a meditation on dreams and reality, or a revelation of subconscious truths too uncanny to name)? Or is it a puzzle that purposefully doesn't add up, teasing and tricking us into creating links out of thin air, when the true pleasure is to be found in sitting back and letting the massive movie's sense of a playfully unfolding present wash over us? If both answers appeal to your sense of cinematic adventure, then this 13-hour opus (aired as a miniseries in the early seventies, and seldom screened since) may be for you.

Why I like it •

The Favorites - Chinatown (#45)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Chinatown (1974/USA/dir. Roman Polanski) appeared at #45 on my original list.

What it is • It opens with old-fashioned credits, title cards with a classical font over an abstract sepia-toned background. Though made in the seventies, the film immediately pulls us back to the forties, the era of film noir, or perhaps even further into the thirties, when Chinatown is set. Then the first shot reveals something we never could have seen in actual Golden Age Hollywood: fairly graphic black-and-white photos of an extramarital sexual tryst. Detective Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) carefully watches a cuckolded husband (Burt Young) flip through the sordid stills and immediately three important aims are achieved: we learn about Jake's dirty business, a relatively honest living in a crooked town; we meet a very minor character whose story purpose will pay off later; and we realize something important - this film will lure us in with nostalgia, but its outlook is clear-eyed and unsentimental. Like three of the last five films on the list, and like the film I am immersed in at the time of this writing (the not-so-unrelated O.J.: Made in America), Chinatown takes place in - and is very much about - Los Angeles. Screenwriter Robert Towne was eager to convey his view of William Mulholland's real-life water scheme via the fictionalized story of Noah Cross (John Huston), a charismatic, deeply corrupt businessman who may be involved in diverting water from farmland so that drought-affected L.A. will have to push outward to the Pacific. Some people stand to make a killing on real estate - even if a few other people have to be killed for getting in the way. As Gittes investigates, he falls in love with a mysterious, possibly dangerous young widow (Faye Dunaway) and discovers dark secrets both societal and personal.

Why I like it •