Ten Films - Part 1

This post originally started as a feature I planned to write for my college magazine. As I’ve graduated now, I imagine this will be the last time I regurgitate and reform a piece of writing that was intended for the pages of Fusion magazine first.

There was no specific reason that this wasn’t published – I asked my editor if it would be possible for me to write a brief article that broached the ‘films to see before you die’ subject. I decided to settle for ten, because it’s a round number that could fit into the space available. Any more and it would have just been a list with a sentence each for description. Right from the very start I planned it to reflect my own personal tastes, and to be open about that – the same rule applies here.

I part wrote it, but never finished it in time for my second-to-last issue (I’d been given two pages, spread over two editions) and I forgot about it in time for my final issue, due to exams and such.

Ten films is, actually, far too insignificant to cover the history of cinema. It couldn’t cover a decade, and, in a lot of cases, couldn’t cover a full year.  

But any more and it’s a mammoth task that I don’t have the energy or interest to properly devote myself to. If you do want this kind of list, you can’t do any worse than the annual ‘1001 Films To See Before You Die’ tome, which introduced me to countless great films I likely would never have heard of otherwise. Similarly, Mark Cousins’ The Story of Film is similarly expansive and, if you wish, can be treated as a reading list.

The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)

A classic example of the minimalist, religious power that Carl Theodor Dreyer’s film channelled, The Passion of Joan of Arc is simply a beautiful film. It was Dreyer’s last silent film, one which was adapted straight from actual records of Joan of Arc’s trial. There would likely have been a temptation to make a film on this subject a huge, D.W. Griffiths-style melodrama, but Dreyer went in the complete opposite direction – much of the film is shot in extreme close-up, the screen framing Renee Falconetti’s face as she is interrogated by demonic court – who are also shot close up to emphasis their inhumanity and leering cruelty. Mark Cousins recognises these shots as what began to differentiate cinema from theatre – cinema allowed actors to move closer to the audience, or further away. Like the films of Sergei Eisenstein, The Passion of Joan of Arc helped to define cinema as a unique, special entity.

Falconetti, at the instruction of Dreyer, wore no make-up – it is as if it was removed to let the full emotion of her terrific performance get to the camera, and to further his quest for complete minimalism. The walls of the sets were painted pink to remove any glare that could be caught by the camera. Dreyer, recognising the one-off performance of Falconetti, was content to allow her to loom over the film, instantly becoming its defining characteristic. Even though it is shot in such a refined way, Dreyer still finds space for small acts of symbolism. Falconetti is frequently shown with pale light around her head, like a halo. The religious Dreyer would reprise this lighting in his later films, such as the austere Ordet.

In many ways, The Passion... is a ‘difficult’ film. Watching silent films from the 21^st century, when we are so used to dialogue, means that it can often be difficult to follow the exact nature of the plot in silent films. The Passion... is no exception – the title cards, which do carry text, are sparse compared to the amount of talking that the actors actually do on screen, leading to a sense that something is missing.* And the intensity of the close-ups can be wearing. But the austere beauty of Dreyer's vision always shines through.

 

L'Atalante - 1934

I'm a huge fan of Jean Vigo. He died of tuberculosis at the age of 29, leaving less than three hours worth of films - three shorts and L'Atalante, his only feature. But all are injected with his anarchic style, all attempting a mixture of social realism and surrealism (a trait picked up by Lindsay Anderson, hugely inspired by Vigo's work). I struggled to pick between L'Atalante, and the film that Vigo made just before it, Zero for Conduct (of which Anderson's classic If..., which nearly made it on to this list itself, is largely derived from) but in the end went for L'Atalante.

Jean and Juliette are that old cinema stapled - young lovers chasing excitement, with life bound to come between them. While Jean is a sea-faring adventurer, Juliette dreams of living a Parisian life of glamour. They get married, and inhabit Jean's barge L'Atalante with Pere Jules, a drunken madman who lives in a nest of nick-nacks he's collected from his years at sea.

 

Vigo was able to draw on the irrevent style of his earlier short A propos de Nice, as well as mixing it, in a fantastic scene near the end of the film, with Eisenstein's montage methods. But whereas Eisenstein used this method to convey the horror of the Odessa steps, Vigo uses it to express the longing of the separated lovers. L'Atalante sees Vigo channelling a romantic tale which was being told before the Lumiere brothers ever thought of stringing photographs together, and subverting it with the various styles and ideologies that cinema had offered up ever since. Bunuel and Dali's Un Chien Andalou played as big a influence as any of the romantic dramas which served it plot-wise.

Vigo's tragically young death, which left a cinematography shorter than any one Transformers film, does not, as you may expect, hang over L'Atalante, even though he had died just a few months before it had finished shooting. It almost seems to run on the energy of the love of Jean and Juliette, bounding with enthusiaism, not just for idealistic young love, but for what cinema can do, and what it can achieve, and what, most importantly, it can make people feel.

 

A bout de souffle (Breathless) (1959)

It was two Frenchmen who invented cinema, and it was two Frenchmen who, in the late fifties, helped to revolutionise it once again. Jean-Luc Godard and Raoul Coutard dragged cinema, kicking and screaming, from the studios and onto the Champs Elysees.

Coutard, a photographer like the Lumiere brothers before him, filmed scenes on a handheld camera, allowing them to effectively shoot while on the run. Jean-Paul Belmondo's chain-smoking, unbelieveably cool car thief Michel Poiccard, is himself on the run from police after shooting dead an officer. As he races about the streets of Paris, the film races after him. The film, like Poiccard, stands still for barely a second (barely, meaning that it does allow time for a Godard Standard - a long, bedroom set conversion between the leading man and woman). The film was shot without permission giving the cast a feeling of tension and excitement, which transfers onto the screen.

What A bout be souffle is most remembered for is breaking the 'rules' of cinema. Before, films were shot as if there was a line behind the camera, where the film stopped and the audience began. Shots didn't cross this line. Godard decided against this rule, and many others. Like Orson Welles with Citizen Kane (arguably the last Western-made film before Breathless which had the same revoltionary impact on film), Godard was accused of being a hack who had no idea what he was doing (he still gets that, actually). But, like many of his French New Wave contemporaries, he was a writer for Cahiers du Cinema, and knew exactly what he was doing (Welles, in a bid to prove that he had indeed learnt the rules of the trade before ignoring them, made The Stranger, his most 'Hollywood' film, and his only financially successful one).  

It is fitting that Godard won the Prix Jean Vigo award for A bout de souffle, (an award given in homage to Vigo to reward a French director who displays an independent spirit in their film making) because it simiarly uses a standard plotline, revolutionising around it. Godard borrowed a lot from old Film Noirs (Humphery Bogart gets a number of references throughout), while Vigo, as we have seen, made a romantic film. Both managed to use the basics of classic cinema to change it further - both fit perfectly into the ever-changing, ever-evolving styles of film.

 

The Red Desert (1965)

Earlier this year The Guardian, and no doubt a decent number of film blogs and magazine, ran articles focussing on the fact that Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman died on the same day, and that Bergman was incorrectly sitting on the throne of European Art-House Film King. It should have been Antonioni, they argued. It should be. Bergman called Antonioni 'boring', and he sometimes was - but so, sometimes, was Bergman. Bergman's films sometimes feel as if they have become stereotypical European Art-House works (probably due to their ubiqitous nature in parodies), and Antonioni offers more to explore in his films.

Like Carl Theydor Dreyer, Bergman was heavily interested in religion, and the human spirit in these conditions. His films were dark, but overall humanity came out more positive than negative, even if we struggled at times. Antonioni's attitude to the human race is largely negative - he rarely, if ever, portrayed his protaganists as likeable, or even tolerable. Often they had a disinterest in life - they suffered from ennui, and they couldn't even care about that.

Like L'Avventura before it, and Blow-Up after it, The Red Desert fails to really find a plot, despite presenting the audience with a mystery. In L'Avventura it's a disapperance, in Blow-Up, a murder, and in The Red Desert it is the nature of Monica Vitti's depression. She wanders around an industrialised landscape somewhere in Italy - it is bleak, and the bleakness is emphsised by Antonioni's use of colour - or, more specifically, his lack of it.

 

Much of the landscapes which Vittis haunts - and haunt her, as the film goes on - are filled with flat greys, greens, blacks and blues, with an occasional burst of technicolour in the background. It is reminiscent of Fritz Lang's M, which, despite being at the forefront of the sound revolution, showed restraint in it's use of dialogue and natural noises, where others overloaded. This was Antonioni's first colour film, and the effects are the same - the restraint places more emphasis on what the colours/sounds actually are, rather than just that fact that they are there. 

The Red Desert is not only a key work in Antonioni's filmography, but perhaps the best use of colour in film history (for me, the only thing that comes close to beating it is Bertolucci's The Conformist.  

 

La Haine (1994)

La Haine works better under it's English translation title - Hate. La Haine is a neo-realism drama without the humanity. It follows three 'banlieue' kids the day after a riot in a Parisian suburb. A friend of theirs - although it's suggested they barely knew him - his been hospitalised by the police, leading, as it does regularly, to the tension between poverty-aflicted youths and the police force finally giving out to violence. Vinz, the most unhinged, cop-hating of the three, has stolen a police gun, and is threatening to use it. Hubert and Said follow him around the city, picking through the chaos that lies in a run down housing estate both after a riot and in general.

 

It may be hugely stylised, by La Haine is a hugely powerful film - it doesn't lose any of the social impact that a film would if Quentin Tarintino would, for example. The three boys come from three distinct social background - Vinz is Jewish, Hubert Afro-French, and Said Maghrebian (it's never revealed his specific country of origin, but this does leave it open to suggestions that he's part of an Algerian immigrant family, which further expands the dynamic between the three, and their role in society). At one point they meet with a group of Le Pen supporting Neo-Nazis; at another they argue with a camera crew looking for a story about the violence the night before; in between, they clash with the police at various points. Throughout, director Mathieu Kassovitz's attempts to explore contemporary France could not be clearer.

La Haine succeeds because it articulates the anger - the hate - which rules the everyday life of thousands of people like Vinz, Hubert and Said. It does so with fantastic flair - one stand-out scene, from a film full of them, features a DJ playing a remix of 'Fuck Da Police' and Edith Piaf's 'Non, je ne regrette rien'. It has to be seen to be believed.

  

Part two will be out at some point during the week, I hope. Let me know how much you disagree with these choices below.

*Earlier this year I volunteered a silent film festival in Bo’ness, where, among films like Safety First and I Was Born But..., I was lucky enough to catch 'The Lost Art of The Film Explainer'. It was once of the best experiences I have ever had at the cinema. Accompanied by a two-person, multi-instrumental backing band, ‘The Film Explainer’ Andy Cannon showcased a forgotten art-form – during the silent film era, many of the people who attended the cinema couldn't read, or films were shabbily put together so that, even if you could read the title cards, they were difficult to follow. So film theaters began to hire people who would read out the intertitles of the film, as well as just generally narrate it. 

          Often they were just the manager of the cinema who lazily read off the screen, but many other people made a living from it. They were especially popular in Japan, where cinemas would advertise films based on what Film Explainer was going to be narrating. They did it in all manner of styles - political, comedic, serious. They were so popular that when 'talkies' were introduced in Japan many cinemas turned down the sound so that they could keep their Film Explainers.    

          Andy Cannon's style was lovely - the films he choose were forgotten, and largely crap, and he made fun of them, but in an affectionate way, in a way that you can tell he genuninely loves film, silent film especially. There's more information here: http://www.reelscotland.com/the-lost-art-of-the-film-explainer-19-august-filmhouse-edinburgh/ and I cannot urge you enough to go see it if you get a chance.