Sight and Sound 2022 Round 2: 21-40

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.

"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?

― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, January 24, 2023

It's alright not to like everything.

― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, January 24, 2023

I agree completely. I think ilx rejects him to an extent because he's a super-straight man who makes a fetish out of straightness and masculinity, in a dated 50s/60s way.

A little like Bergman and Antonioni in some aspects, but more aggressive.

I like him though because, along with Bergman, he was an iconic filmmaker when I came of age and I think at the time their films resonated far beyond the milieu they placed them in, which seemed very new at that moment

while the S&S Critics' top 100 included two of his films and the S&S Directors' top 100 included three, he didn't enter into our ILX poll of the top 100 greatest films

Antonioni is similarly dated in a lot of his scripts but the camera movement is something else so there is something to come back to.

Don't get why there is a need to keep liking stuff just bcz you came of age and that hit the spot. Icons fall. I mean I love a lot of Takeshi Kitano's films but I wouldn't put him in a top 50.

Funnily enough I re-watched King of New York last night. Ferrara and Fellini could be a point of comparison in that 'men only' sense but there is just no comparison. Everyone is having such a ball doing it, nothing deep. It's like a very plastic compilation of all these moments in every gangster film put together side by side. Rather have that than this Fellini crap.

I'll look at Juliet of the Spirits though.

There's at least a couple of Kitano's movies that are personal faves and I was consider putting high on a list

I'd actually rate Fellini more than Bergman and Antonioni if we're judging these things solely from a gender studies perspective, in that he's more upfront and as such more illuminating. His movies are very explicitly about indulgence and he's not afraid to look ridiculous in his libido, as opposed to the more furrowed brow take of a Bergman or an Antonioni.

That's true about Nights of Cabiria and the extent to which he probes Marcello in La Dolce Vita (H haven't watched Juliet... in ages), but Bergman's theater-influenced hijinks are weirder to me.

Do not see that with Bergman, who gives far more space for women in his films!!

Fellini sounds a bit like Knausgaard or something xp

Sure Bergman gives women more screentime, but it's women as filtered through the psyche of a man from a certain era. Just as an example Isabella Rosselini recently gave an interview to Jesse Thorne where she talked about her mother and him clashing during Autumn Sonata because Ingmar just couldn't imagine a woman choosing a career and not feeling guilt over that.

By contrast with a lot of Fellini there's no pretension that we're getting a view into any psyche save his own. This certainly limits him in certain ways but as I said, it's very what you see is what you get.

Again this isn't meant as a take on the total value of these two directors, I don't need every artist to be a good feminist for me to enjoy their work, but I'm just talking within the confines of discursing straightness and masculinity, as per Dan's post.

Inevitably the roles of women will be filtered through Bergman as he writes the scripts. That's no different to any male director who does the same, like Fassbinder.

But it's not simply a case of more screen time is it? They have personalities and seem fully fleshed dramas, with all their faults. There is nothing comparable going on with Fellini. I can't imagine any actress clashing with Fellini over the psychology of the character on set.

What I'm suggesting is that Bergman's worldview is conservative. I mean obviously it is compared to Fassbinder, but in general the women being fully fleshed out characters doesn't clash in any way with the fetischization of certain norms - it actually kinda reinforces them, by acknowledging the conflicts therein and thus making the whole thing more believable.

I agree with you no actress would be in that situation with Fellini. Nor would any male actor, aside from the one playing his stand in.

You're both right, I think? While I've dinged Bergman here for titling a film Fanny and Alexander which cedes little space for Fanny, I can't think of a major director from the era, for example, writing speeches for Liv Ullmann's wife in Shame that lash against Max von Sydow's marginalizing of her domestic worries; or in limiting the husband's role in Autumn Sonata to observer, watching Ullmann and Ingrid B.'s drama (if I remember correctly Bergman doesn't even tell the film through the husband's POV).

I think of Buñuel, who once balked at being termed a feminist director because of Susana, Viridiana, Diary of a Chambermaid, and Belle de Jour; to a degree he was correct. But in at least a couple of those films he showed curiosity about a woman's role in domestic spaces dominated by men.

(sorry, long post)

Apropos of probably not this conversation, I did enjoy the explicit L'aaventura reference in S2 of The White Lotus.

I haven’t seen Juliet of the Spirits or Nights of Cabiria recently. La Strada seems like a transitional film for Fellini, where he is starting to define his style, with Giulietta Masina starring in a signature role, and with a completely savage performance by Anthony Quinn

What I like most about him though is the visual extravagance of mid-period films like La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2, and to some extent Amarcord. Whatever reservations I have about his world view and his detachment, there is no one else who approximates his visual aesthetic - depicting societal chaos, catholic superstition, wonder, nostalgia, carnality, altruism - all in an elegant and beautiful way in terms of concept, framing, cinematography.

The scores by Nino Rota were great too

playtime

Man, Night of the Hunter was so good.

What struck me most - and which I wasn't expecting - was just the eerie, hypnotic forward motion of it, the way it moves from tension to dreamy calm, and the recurring image of the stars overhead and the river below. So much of it is carried on the music and Mitchum’s singing, and the music and imagery flow together so perfectly. Absolutely crazy that this is Laughton's only directed film.