Pretend you have a ballot for the 2012 edition of Sight & Sound's top 10 movies of all time list

c and j vs c on t

nevermind old joke

I admittedly prefer "visionary" filmmaking on that order to be so far gone that it doesn't give off any evidence of knowing it can be any other way. Antonioni c. L'eclisse gives me that impression.

Antonioni even at his best is one step too close to SCTV for me

So, awesome?

Andrea Martin > Monica Vitti

Zabriskie Point = Farm Film Report

yeah antonioni seems like one of the most overrated filmmakers, even though i appreciate almost everything he's done to some degree or other (however that does NOT include beyond the clouds, yeesh)

there is so much that is wonderful about his "alienation trilogy" or whatever but to some extent i think they're not so much about emptiness as just kind of empty.

his first feature, chronicle of a love affair, is a stone masterpiece, and i can't deny l'avventura or the passenger either.

reeeal good! xp

I generally don't have a problem with masters striving to make masterpieces. Trying to argue that either Godfather is top-10 when Coppola can't figure out what to do with Diane Keaton, that's a problem.

i love manny farber's quote, "Unlike Klee, who stayed small and thus almost evaded affectation, Antonioni's aspiration is to pin the viewer to the wall and slug him with wet towels of artiness and significance."

i'd make an exception to my "rule" for playtime, which is definitely a postwar art film striving to be a masterpiece, but does so lightly and pretty much achieves everything it sets out to do--which has little to do with "significance."

I'm not sure I can really get on board with an aesthetics of smallness and lightness. Seems unduly limited. What's wrong with "significance"?

In any case I see Antonioni et al as heir to a certain strand of 19th century novel. Like the whole "novel of ideas" thing. Melville, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. And fwiw I find the "visionary" approach far freer than the evasion of "significance."

that farber quote is kind of symptomatic of why he's a brilliant writer but often frustrating as a critic -- he's holding antonioni to an insane standard. it's like when he complains that 'taxi driver' is unrealistic because de niro's cab never runs out of gas.

i dunno, his quote is a pretty accurate description of much of red desert

i'm not really offering an aesthetic program, just stating my preferences when the chips are down. that's what the thread is about no?

Yes of course. Didn't mean to give impression I was calling you out! (I actually really find your preferences in this regard really challenging and interesting so maybe just pushing back a little.)

And I guess this kernel of a debate is interesting to me because it touches on how we think about something like "modernism" in movies.

i was looking through some of the 2002 ballots and this one probably comes closest to my taste:

Peter von Bagh
director of Il cinema ritrovato festival
Finland
Top Ten

The Wedding March (von Stroheim)
Okraina (Barnet)
Make Way for Tomorrow (McCarey)
A Canterbury Tale (Powell, Pressburger)
Late Spring (Ozu)
Rio Grande (Ford)
Édouard et Caroline (Becker)
Bigger Than Life (N. Ray)
Man of the West (A. Mann)
And Life Goes On... (Kiarostami)

the japanese know where it's at too:

Li Cheuk-To
Chairman of the Hong Kong Critics Guild
Hong Kong
Top Ten

Au hasard Balthazar (Bresson)
Floating Clouds (Naruse)
The General (Keaton)
Mirror (Tarkovsky)
Pather Panchali (S. Ray)
The Puppetmaster (Hou)
Spring in a Small Town (Fei)
Tabu (Murnau)
Two or Three Things I Know about Her (Godard)
Vertigo (Hitchcock)

Yomota Inuhiko
Meiji Gakuin University
Japan
Top Ten

Kaagaz ke phool (Dutt)
The Story of the Late Chrysanthemums (Mizoguchi)
A Touch of Zen (Hu)
L'Age d'or (Buñuel)
Le Vent d'est (Godard)
Accattone (Pasolini)
Vampyr (Dreyer)
Napoléon (Gance)
Il deserto rosso (Antonioni)
Au hasard Balthazar (Bresson)

L'Age d'Or (Bunuel, 1930)
M (Lang, 1931)
Kikujiro (Kitano, 1999)
The Maltese Falcon (Huston, 1941)
Mishima (Schrader, 1985)
A Canterbury Tale (Powell & Pressburger, 1944)
Days and Nights in the Forest (Ray, 1970)
Zero de Conduite (Vigo, 1933)
For a Few Dollars More (Leone, 1965)
The Man Who Knew Too Much (Hitchcock, 1934)

I don't know if I expect Joel David's list to ever be topped.

Salò (Pasolini)
Manila by Night; City after Dark (Bernal)
Khalnayak (Ghai)
The Opening of Misty Beethoven (Metzger)
Hour of the Furnaces (Solanas)
La Règle du jeu (Renoir)
God Told Me To (Cohen)
La Région centrale (Snow)
Olympiad Berlin 1936 (Riefenstahl)
The Devil in Miss Jones (Damiano)

And fwiw I find the "visionary" approach far freer than the evasion of "significance."

Yeah, one of the major reasons I've never been able to get with the deification of screwball ethos.

how is screwball (which you sometimes broaden to mean "wacky comedy," but let's lay that aside) inherently less significant than horror? Both offer a vision of human trials that aim to reveal character.

to argue that either Godfather is top-10 when Coppola can't figure out what to do with Diane Keaton, that's a problem.

We've argued this before...My problem with Keaton is more the woodenness of her performance (sometimes she's okay) than Coppola not knowing what to do with her. But to me, there are supporting performances just as wooden in The Searchers and Vertigo.

Both offer a vision of human trials that aim to reveal character.

Horror offers a representation of a universal human emotion, one which is easily transmuted over to experiences (i.e. mechanized dehumanization) not necessarily closely related to the thing being represented (i.e. chainsaw massacres). Wacky comedy reveals people trying to make people laugh, which is fine, but usually it's better when my friends do it to me.

I see way more of my life in comedy. And invariably find comedy in the best horror too.

(I guess I won't quote Michael O'Donoghue's "Making people laugh is the lowest form of comedy" again. Oops! Jerry Lewis's best films don't make me laugh that much.)

Agreed, I like Jerry Lewis movies because they are basically horror movies.

I wonder whether Criterion reissues of his later films have made L'Avventura less an obvious choice for inclusion. These days I'd rank L'Eclisse over it.

^^^ me, on all days

In any case I see Antonioni et al as heir to a certain strand of 19th century novel. Like the whole "novel of ideas" thing. Melville, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. And fwiw I find the "visionary" approach far freer than the evasion of "significance."

Kael cited Woolf, Mann, Joyce, and James in her review ("In any case I see Antonioni et al as heir to a certain strand of 19th century novel. Like the whole "novel of ideas" thing. Melville, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. And fwiw I find the "visionary" approach far freer than the evasion of "'significance.'")

Wacky comedy reveals people trying to make people laugh

almost never, if you're talking about the people on the screen.

I'm always surprised when I remember Kael actually liked L'avventura.

Wacky comedy reveals people trying to make people laugh, which is fine, but usually it's better when my friends do it to me.

You're too short for that gesture.

I'm also too pale for Miami, but I still look forward to having a face-to-face with you in which we trade nothing but AAE lines. Some snowy night, in front of the fire.

Killer to killer!

Very effective. But why take it out on me?

this whole "which genre is more profound" is a pretty stupid exercise.

Everybody has pretty stupid exercises, except some people.

pretty stupid exercise vs reverse massage

remove bookmark

One good bookmark removal and you'll be rid of that Miss Caswell forever.

Back to the Copacabana.

no way are there any wooden performances in 'vertigo'!

if jerry lewis counts as horror, surely 'bringing up baby' does.

It's not like the Tom Helmore villain in Vertigo is supposed to evoke (or display) passionate feelings, he's just an enigma / agent of chaos.

Yeah, the spectacle of Cary Grant leaping gay is sort of a horrorshow.

it's 'night of the living dead' with hepburn starring as the zombies

Kael cited Woolf, Mann, Joyce, and James in her review ("In any case I see Antonioni et al as heir to a certain strand of 19th century novel. Like the whole "novel of ideas" thing. Melville, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. And fwiw I find the "visionary" approach far freer than the evasion of "'significance.'")

The films are visually incredibly exciting but the narratives are often so lacking (not in a bad way -- always feel they are giving way to more important things), and what they have to say about anything so thin that I can't quite see this comparison coming off.

Well, she meant that the film approaches on visual terms the "heft" of what the modernists attempted.

Yes and for my part i think the comparison holds in the sense of that those novels were kind of an arena for entertaining philosophical ideas.