Sight and Sound 2022 Round 2: 21-40

Portrait of a Lady on Fire was very good; not so much I would have thought it would make #30 in an all-time-list, but better than a number of the other 19 listed here. Never seen a Sciamma film before. I liked the cleanness of the images, and the way the pacing never lagged even though there was plenty of time for introspection and observation. Interesting parallel with Late Spring: both feature bridegrooms who never appear onscreen.
Also, kudos to the director for resisting what for me would have been an irresistible temptation to use a sad-girl ukulele version of "I'm On Fire" over the end credits.

If you liked Portrait, watch Girlhood, which I prefer.

i think M

Jean Vigo is one of those directors I always have to remind myself wasn't, apparently, gay even though I think his filmography is incredibly gay

omar does a great job of describing part of Night Of The Hunter but w/o getting into spoilers I think it's also important to point out how all that menace gets turned on its head in the film's climax, a tonal shift that totally bewildered me the first time I saw the film, rarely seen in classic Hollywood (unless it's by accident) but totally of a kind with a lot of arthouse cinema to come, Lynch of course a prime example. So that's also part of why I think it's on here, it's just totally sui generis for its time and place imo.

That being said I'm voting Playtime.

outside the top 40 - Barry Lyndon, Wanda, Fear Eats the Soul, News From Home, Le Mépris, Sans Soleil, La dolce vita, Daughters of the Dust, L’avventura, Sunset Blvd., A Brighter Summer Day, Blue Velvet, The Leopard, Madame de… etc. - are all amazing films, and some of them surpass the films on this list

― Dan S, Sunday, 22 January 2023 bookmarkflaglink

La Dolce Vita is wack.

Fellini (sorry) is wack

That's right

It's time for a backlash to the Fellini backlash (Nights of Cabiria is great, I like stuff in several others)

Nights of Cabiria was hard work. all that shouting

I Vitelloni's his best, but I have time for Nights of Cabiria and The White Sheik. The early '60s party movies, despite amusing and poignant bits, are like road shows that don't know when to quit.

Cabiria, White Sheik, Vitelloni, Variety Lights all much funnier than Some Like It Hot

Madness (I do like Cabiria)

From what I remember I like it ok but no idea why any Fellini is considered to be anything much worth beyond the odd re-screen.

It's funny, I don't give a shit about Fellini except for 8 1/2 (and La Dolce Vita to a limited extent).

I wish I liked Mirror more than I do...I keep trying.

Love a good angry walkout

When Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali debuted at the 1955 Cannes Film Festival, no less a personage than Francois Truffaut stomped out early, declaiming, "I don't want to see a movie about peasants eating with their hands."

What a dickhead.

And, it's worth saying, a really mediocre filmmaker, debut feature aside

Shoot the Piano Player is great.

And, though I'm not as big on it personally, I think most people would say the same of Jules and Jim.

I would be curious to know exactly what the original statement was - seems like it could have been distorted over the years (I see slightly different versions in different articles, some without the "eating with their hands" part). Anyway, apparently he changed his mind on second viewing.

When Francois Truffaut then a film critic first viewed “Pather Panchali” (Song of The Road) he severely criticised it. He found the film too slow and initially meaningless. After viewing it a second time he was compelled to change his decision and applauded the cinematic efforts of debutant director Satyajit Ray.

Rewatching Pather Panchali last night, I thought of The 400 Blows more than once, so it's an odd little dustup.

S&S poll only went for 400 blows in the top 100 didn't it? If so, good.

I'd rather Pialat's debut was in its place.

The 400 Blows is an excellent thing to show in a film class. I still feel strongly about it and The Story of Adele H.

I think Truffaut produced L'enfance nue, no? (I can't check now)

Rewatching Pather Panchali last night, I thought of The 400 Blows more than once, so it's an odd little dustup.
― jmm

That came up on this thread:

The Day Is Done, Take Me Across: The Satyajit Ray Thread

It's clear he didn't get the movie when he saw it but the wording of the Truffaut quote strikes me as likely apocryphal. It actually sounds like something Godard or one of those guys would put out there.

It’s never been refuted, has it?

La Dolce Vita and all of Fellini's films are awesome imo, but it's not surprising that ilx rejects him. Mirror is great too, as well as The 400 Blows (and all of the films in the Antoine Doinel series) and Jules and Jim

All of Fellini?

most of Fellini, except for the later films

I've only watched the first two of Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy - Pather Panchali and Aparajito, both of which are amazing. Haven't seen Apur Sansar (The World of Apu) yet, or The Music Room

Watching Pather Panchali and The World of Apu during the 2015 revival was one of my Transcendent Film Experiences.

I liked Days and Nights in the Forest better than any of the Apu films, maybe just because it had a lighter touch. The only other Ray I've seen is The Home and the World, I find him good without feeling too compelled to see any particular title.

I liked Ray's Charulata and The Big City. I need to see more.

Maybe Satyricon represented the end of Fellini's genius in making films. It is outré and garish, like Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain, but like that film it is fascinating in retropect

Pather Panchali strikes me as the best of the trilogy, if only because Durga and the old aunt are such wonderful characters. And the story is more centered on forests, fields and nature scenes, and so the photography is just amazingly beautiful.

I thought I might include The Passion of Joan of Arc in my top 25 in the ilx poll but didn't, there were too many films that superseded it for me, but it is still an all-time great film

Other great Ray films not yet mentioned: Devi, The Hero, The Coward. Charulata and The Music Room are incredible. Days and Nights in the Forest might be his Renoir movie.

"La Dolce Vita and all of Fellini's films are awesome imo, but it's not surprising that ilx rejects him."

Why would ilx reject him?

It's alright not to like everything.

Aparajito is my fav of the Apu trilogy for pretty much the opposite reasons jmm cites for prefering Pather - I was much more taken with the portrait of an urban India, in contact and conflict with the West, and the protagonist drunkenly bragging he'll be as big as Shakespeare and Jane Austen. Pather is magnificent but the India it showed me was much more familiar from colonial portraits - which is not to say it's somehow fake or fetischized, it's real of course. To be fair I was also a drunken youth with outsized ambitions when I saw the trilogy though.

The Big City was probably my favourite new-to-me watch of last year; a film that gives every character their due.

The absence of any other Indian cinema, whether arthouse or commercial, in the top100 shows that despite all the whining it could still stand to improve its representation in many areas.

Why would ilx reject him?

I think Fellini has been very unfashionable in most film critic/enthusiast circles for a while. Kinda bound to happen when you personify the normie idea of what an "art film" looks like.

City Lights (Chaplin, 1931)

That final scene is cinema, to me.

xp: I don't know about that. La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2, especially, will have fans. The more films I watched the less I thought about Fellini.

1 Playtime
2 Passion of joan of arc
3 M
4 Taxi Driver
5 Some like it hot

I did not like 8 1/2 but I saw it when I was a teenager. Couldn't finish Claude Lanzman's Shoah Diary.

Juliet of the Spirits is the underrated Fellini, which I predict the future will bear out.

His two best imo are La Dolce Vita and Nights of Cabiria.

Shoah is incredible and I would have watched more hours of it.

No love for The White Sheik?

Oh wait, I see some upthread.

xxp
Lanzmann's The Last of the Unjust is essential as well. I thought it was his final movie but that was Shoah: Four Sisters which I haven't seen yet.

I'm not trying to rank the Lanzmann holocaust docs but I think Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 p.m. is a masterpiece, it's so powerful because it covers resistance and resistance that was successful. And it acknowledges that incidents like this where Jews managed to organise successfully to murder high ranking Nazis and escape certain extermination was an extreme rarity in the nought point nought nought nought recurring % range.