Director's Final Films

what's wrong with it? obviously it's 90 minutes of orson welles vanity, but flipped around it's 90 minutes of being a guest at the greatest after-dinner speech ever recorded

plus it engages with the idea of the fictional narrative with loose-limbed & mischievous delight, which I enjoy. it's intelligent and sparky, the very opposite of complacent

it's not terrible but it is at best an amusing trifle. Just because a master made it doesn't make something a masterpiece.

WELL I THINK IT IS

wonder who my fellow Bunuel voters were :D

4 votes for Gertrud is surprising. I always associate it with the most difficult of difficult cinema but maybe that's due more to the circumstances in which I watched it (like 13 years ago on a really blurry VHS).

yeah, i share yr surprise - on two separate viewings it struck me as a rather stagey, ponderous chamber piece, far less compelling than Day of Wrath or Ordet. some wonderful camera movements, mind.

what's wrong with it?

Nothing's particularly WRONG with it except Orson Welles made at least ten better films.

All of which would've also placed highly in this poll had they been his final film (which as someone pointed out upthread, F4F isn't actually either, but whatev).

but Gertrud MIGHT be Dreyer's best film.

I voted for Gertrud, and it's not my favorite Dreyer, but it's just my favorite of these films, of which I haven't seen everyone. I'm not really a fan of final films, it seems. My second place was Cluny Brown, I think.

Gertrud is fantastic. That would have been my vote. Saw it for the first time maybe two years ago and it never registered to me as super difficult. Talky, stagey, yes, but always engaging.

Count me in the "shrug" category for F for Fake.

ok who voted Querelle

Each man votes the thing he loves.

Sorry, but whenever I watch Gertrud all I can think about is the diseased liver transplant in The Kingdom.

Baard Owe is awesome.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3US46U6-fc

Shoot, wanted that to embed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3US46U6-fc

are those windows intentionally kubrickian or is that just a bad transfer?

It's intentional.

Man, forgot how beautiful and ghostly the lighting could be in this. Need a rescreen soon.

Watched some "Making of" extra and he talked about how difficult it was to talk slow enough for Dreyer, iirc.

yeah i'd like to watch it again in ideal viewing circumstances.

i regret that my prime cinephile days were 2000-2002 before most of this stuff was on DVD.

feeling that

Well, to be honest the biggest difference is something else. The ability to read about this weird indonesian director, check up on him on the internets, and a couple hours later watch one of his films on my HDTV. That is insane.

yeah i feel like i was on the tail end of the era of certain films being elusive or even apocryphal.

think that out of all the films ever made, there's still a relatively small proportion of them available to view, and there are plenty of movies, some of them quite urgent and key, that have never had a home viewing issue of any kind. but obv there's more than enough to be getting on with right now

are those windows intentionally kubrickian

My friend calls late Kubrick style "glare."

haha. i love my blu ray but i yearn to see EWS on film again. thought it was one of the most beautiful movies ever when i first saw it.

Baffled by that. I thought EWS was unbearably ugly, all those cold primary colors clashing with each other.

I'm with ryan.

i may be alone in that sentiment! (xp: or not!) i do like primary colors. (loved this about JLG late 60s films too). EWS is certainly "garish" in its color scheme but it just seems so information-dense to me. love how the colors seems to insist on some kind of symbolism that remains elusive. anyway, im a sucker for kubrick's hermetic late style.

I like JLG-colors as well, but they are considerably lighter and warmer than in EWS. I think of the red billiard table under the green lamp, and it's just ugly to me.

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_llcoh95nzM1qisxvio1_1280.jpg?.jpg

Ugh

that scene is so fucking great.

Three Colors: Kubrick

Kubrick didn't live long enough to see EWS released in cinemas and - in the UK at least - he was, unsurprisingly, pretty exacting about the way his movies were projected. I saw EWS the day it opened in UK cinemas and was massively disappointed by the quality of the print - the colours were very washed out, the image quite grainy. The DVD/Blu-ray corrects this to some extent, but I do think that if Kubrick had lived a little longer the film would've looked better on the big screen.

the graininess and washed out colors are part of what make the intensity of the color scheme work, imo.

i am one of the disgusting animals that voted for f for fake fyi

meh, horrorfans I give a pass to, what can ya do

Reductum ad Morbsurdum

haha to both of you

same principle when one finds one's copy edited by someone who writes a long thoughtful review of the new Cher album

Was almost going to poll this before realizing I already had.

it still bugs me that f for fake won despite not being welles's actual last film!

(even tho i like it)

Love Streams also not technically Cassavetes' final film.

How did Imitation of Life not run away with this?!

I was wondering that too.

I think that was because the top three vote-getters are all better films than it.

Tbf it’s been a while since I’ve seen Imitation of Life, so maybe it’s time for a rewatch.

Of the eighteen I've seen, I'd have voted for The Sacrifice. My notes indicate that I saw The Ascent in the theatre, and I have absolutely no memory of it. Weakest is probably Lola Montes, a big fancy cake that spins and spins in front of the camera.
I have a pet theory that if Tarkovsky had lived to make another film, it might well have been terrible. He was keeping such a careful balance of mysticism and absurdity, and I can't imagine him pushing forward from this film without that equilibrium collapsing. But who knows whether it would have been made back in the USSR or in the West, and how that might have affected the production and the reception of it.
Most notable final film that's not on the list is The Turin Horse, which I regard less as a movie than a preview of dying.

That Tarr is still alive just underlines that.