Sight and Sound 2022 Round 8: 161-180

Curious to see how Leone vs. Leone shakes out, though I'd assume TGTBTU wins out

Top 5:

Black Narcissus (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger; 1947)
The Exterminating Angel (Luis Buñuel; 1962)
Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais; 1961)
The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles; 1942)
Where is the Friend’s House? (Abbas Kiarostami; 1987)

I'd like to give Almodóvar recognition, and his most popular film to date was also his best film to date.

I'd like to give Memories of Underdevelopment recognition, but I regret I haven't watched it yet

(And Bad Education is the better mid-period Almodovar film, to my eyes)

3 that i love and wouldn't choose between: Narcissus, Exterminating Angel, St Matthew
3 just a whisper below them in my heart: TGTBaTU, Marienbad, Orlando

(And Bad Education is the better mid-period Almodovar film, to my eyes)

― fair but so uncool beliefs here (Eric H.),

A matter of opinion.

Also, I was careful to say "to date" as I also think BE is a wee bit better realized.

It's about time the piano realized it has not written the concerto

Just realized there's actually three director splits happening here, with Buñuel and Resnais also.

Charulata or Exterminating Angel or Marienbad. Just ahead of Red Desert and Black Narcissus

Ambersons definitely--I don't even mind the bastardized ending (and don't know how it was supposed to end.

George Amberson Minafer went on a bloody revenge murder spree after he got his comeuppance.

Agnes Moorhead became bio-fused with the hot water heater

The strawberry shortcake got tired of being eaten by George, so it ate him instead.

Rosebud was the sled

my favorite films in this round are all from 1961-1964

1. Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais; 1961)
2. Red Desert (Michelangelo Antonioni; 1964)
3. The Exterminating Angel (Luis Buñuel; 1962)
4. The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Pier Pasolini; 1964)
5. Charulata (Satyajit Ray; 1964)

Last Year at Marienbad is a weird, stylized, transgressive movie. I remember being mesmerized by the posters for it that depicted an otherworldly sculpted landscape when I a kid. When I was older I asked my best friend’s father who I respected and who had seen it what it was about, and he got this look in his eye like it was an experience that he couldn’t really ever explain

I’ve only seen one of these, but I happened to really dig it when I saw it in a revival house some months back.

Fellini it is

The Resnais films split my Resnais vote, leaving Narcissus in the top spot.

Amarcord (Federico Fellini; 1973)
Black Narcissus (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger; 1947)
Charulata (Satyajit Ray; 1964)
Un chien andalou (Luis Buñuel; 1929)
A City of Sadness (Hou Hsiao-hsien; 1989)
The Exterminating Angel (Luis Buñuel; 1962)
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone; 1966)
The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Pier Paolo Pasolini; 1964)
Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais; 1959)
Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais; 1961)
Memories of Underdevelopment (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea; 1968)
Red Desert (Michelangelo Antonioni; 1964)
Where is the Friend’s House? (Abbas Kiarostami; 1987)

All great films its between Bunuel (Exterminating Angel) & Pasolini. But I wish I could vote for them all.

God, fucking Amarcord

Chien Andalou is amazing of course but somewhere down the line i absorbed Breton's disdain for Dali, plus L'Age d'Or is the real achievement from Buñuel's infant phase

Charulata is a really lovely film, can't think of many others where all 3 sides of a "love triangle" are treated as sympathetically

otm

My finalists:

All About My Mother (Pedro Almodóvar; 1999)
Black Narcissus (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger; 1947)
Charulata (Satyajit Ray; 1964)
A City of Sadness (Hou Hsiao-hsien; 1989)
The Exterminating Angel (Luis Buñuel; 1962)
Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls; 1948)
The Magnificent Ambersons

Voting Where is the Friend’s House because Alfred didn’t have it on his list

I've that this is on the poll:

Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (Wang Bing; 2002)

Went for:

Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais; 1959)

It's the beginning for serious films. It's bad this is so low in the poll. Very bad.

It's plenty serious; when I was younger I laughed at how serious it was. I understand its importance but later Resnais brought off this kind of novelistic approach to filmmaking with more finesse.

Eric, Where is the Friend’s House?'s the only one of the trilogy I haven't watched.

Pauline Kael mocked it pretty severely iirc. There was a time when I would also steer clear of it because of its pretensions, until I learned to embrace such pretension when done correctly.
(xp)

She was (mostly) correct about HMA, but I've far less patience for her mockery of movies that offend her notions of American bad taste or something.

See also Camille Paglia’s echoing of that sentiment. “Come and dress as the sick soul of Europe” indeed.


I never tire of this song that references it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZJWWrKewpE

This is one of the best batches. The pinnacle of movies as “entertainment” (TGTBTU) and as “art” (Hou, Resnais, Bunuel, others) and perfectly indicative of how blurred those distinctions are.

If Kael is mocking HMA she's wrong. It's a really great film.

otm

I believe the sick soul of Europe essay is more about La Notte (she liked L'Aventura tho) and La Dolce Vita but it's been a while since I've read it.

Don't think there's a contest between TGTB&TU and Once Upon A Time honestly, as a Leone fanboy I do like the latter a lot but it's full of weird lapses in taste (Yesterday!!) and it's his worst ever treatment of women.

Magnificent Ambersons is pretty great yeah but I can understand wanting Welles to be less dominant in lists like these and I'd rather this one drop off than Citizen Kane or above all F For Fake. Likewise Black Narcissus super great but there's better Archers.

Think I might vote Letter From An Unknown Woman, which is understandably enough flying under the radar here but it's a devastating work.

yeah, I'm surprised more posters haven't mentioned it.

you're otm about Kael and La Notte.

Yeah Letter is fantastic

Better Archers maybe Red Shoes and Blimp, maybe maybe A Canterbury Tale, but i could totally make a case that BN is their best

Right now I'd vote Charulata. But I need to see Exterminating Angel, Letter from an Unknown Woman, Where is the Friend's Home, and Gospel According to St. Matthew before I vote.

My top 5 would be Black Narcissus, The Exterminating Angel, TGTBTU, Red Desert and Where Is the Friend's House? Will probably vote for Kiarostami.

TGTBATU is one of the best-paced three hours movies you'll ever see, it's a pretty leisurely told story but it moves along so swiftly and before you know it they've crossed the river and are entering the cemetery. The civil war stuff is weaved into it so beautifully and movingly, too.

Voted for Black Narcissus tho, its power sneaks up on you.

I know I’m too hard on Movies For Guys Who Like Movies™, but TGTBTU is genuinely pretty great

it's a classic™. But actually, it really is great!

One of the few good man films.

The stuff w Tuco's brother gets to me, and that moment w Blondie when they hit the road again after. Tuco lying about how it went down between them and Blondie passing him the cigar to share it. Leone got a lot of unexpected emotion out of that story and those characters.

so here for classic emo action movies

this one is really tough tbh but i'm going to have to go with my favorite almodovar

I first watched Red Desert in college, and saw it again recently. It is about a woman’s existential worries and her succumbing to an undefined malaise in a dreamlike version of a 1960s industrial society. It is set to a very strange electronic score. In retrospect it feels futuristic. It has colorized scenes that still seem unique

“Michelangelo Antonioni’s first film in color, from 1964, is his most mysterious and awe-inspiring work….Vitti’s mask-like look of blank dread is the vanishing point for the polluted landscape of roaring machines; the metallic river, the riotous tangle of tubes and pipes, the yellow poison gas and orange flames that spout from smokestacks, and the smoldering fields of debris” - Richard Brody

Eric, I thought your description of the narrative details of Last Year at Marienbad was perfect

“A woman simply known as A (Delphine Seyrig) somnambulistically rebuffs, reconsiders, and recoils from the romantic intimations of a man called X (Giorgio Albertazzi) as the two navigate the rococo hallways and gardens of a resort chateau. While M, A’s maybe husband, grifts equally zombified socialites in the salon, X tries to convince A she promised last year (… in Marienbad … my edit) she would run away with him when they met again this year. He struggles to remember the specifics of their brief encounter, but the more he successfully jogs her lagging memory, the closer both come to facing an unspeakable, repulsive realization.

… By the movie’s end, you’re not even sure whether the main characters know each other, whether they exist in the same era as their surroundings, or even if they’re alive at all. Beyond Seyrig’s fashionable sarcophagus of haute couture Chanel and the movie’s self-referential games and rituals, Resnais’s film is a stark, elegant horror film about the dread we spend our whole lives trying to put off contemplating until next year.”

Seen all but four of these, and they're all at least good except for Amarcord (which I hated) and Symbiopsychotaxiplasm which is an interesting experiment with barely adequate execution.

I'm pretty sure I wrote an essay comparing Black Narcissus and Red Desertin school, and I'll vote for the latter, but I know that City of Sadness was great, even if I can't remember a single detail.

Every Resnais film is impressive, only ones that I love are Muriel, maybe Love Unto Death.

If I feel like some Duras or Robbe-Grillet, I'd prefer to watch their own films rather than these.

Not a sentiment you hear every day

The key sentiment was "If I feel...", I'm only occasionally in that mood.

red desert and exterminating angel are my favorite movies from their respective directors. hard to choose between the two

exterminating angel is like a twilight zone episode (complimentary)

^otm

Wow! Anyone who hasn't seen the Kiarostami should try to asap! It's amazing!

I'm watching it tonight.

The Exterminating Angel will probably get my vote. Red Desert will definitely earn a laff (I adore L'Avventura and L'Eclisse but when Antonioni goes sour for me I can't stop being amused).

"exterminating angel is like a twilight zone episode (complimentary)"

lol, that is completely correct

I always think of the rich rotter laughing as they conclude that the damage done to the window was by "a passing Jew." That's perfect to describe this milieu.

I'd like to give Memories of Underdevelopment recognition, but I regret I haven't watched it yet

― fair but so uncool beliefs here (Eric H.), Friday, May 12, 2023

Watch it.

It’s good

More than for its Godard-indebted tricks, the film was useful for showing what Cuba looked like in that interzone just before and just after Castro declared himself a Communist.

OTM

Didn't realize I'd given this one such a long lead

The fix is in.