The Return of David Hudson

Andrei Zviyagintsev's The Return

David Hudson, formerly of GreenCine Daily and then the short-lived IFC Daily, returns with the third incarnation of his invaluable roundup of links to the world of internet cinephilia, now called The Auteurs Daily. http://www.theauteurs.com/notebook/posts?author_id=55 David's posts can be found at The Auteurs Notebook, but he is now sharing a page with several other contributors. He is also launching a Twitter feed as a companion to this new enterprise, to which I quote David Ehrenstein's comment, "Tweets are for birds." Others may find that particular innovation more valuable than I do. Anyway, the return of David Hudson after a well-deserved month's vacation is great news to everyone in the online cinephile community.

Jonathan Rosenbaum's Alternate 100

Bulle Ogier in L'Amour Fou

Jonathan Rosenbaum, probably the best film critic working in America today, has reprinted a 1998 article in the Notes section of his blog in which he proposes an alternate list of the 100 greatest American movies, a provocative response to the American Film Institute's list that came out around the same time. http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?cat=9 It's a fascinating list, informed by a wide-ranging knowledge of what the American film canon should look like, in opposition to the AFI's lackluster list. He admits that there are "25 titles on the AFI list that I probably would have included on my own if I hadn’t wanted to create an all-new list for polemical purposes." The Magnificent Ambersons and Sunrise rank at the top of my own 10-best list but amazingly are absent from the AFI's list. I've seen 92 of Rosenbaum's Alternate 100, most of them multiple times. The 8 I have yet to see mostly fall in the avant-garde or experimental category and are therefore harder to come by, but I plan to catch Jonas Mekas's Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania at Anthology Film Archives soon. However, even a masterpiece like John Cassavetes's Love Streams and several other of these titles remain unreleased on Region 1 DVD.

I won't waste space posting the AFI list, but I'd like to present Rosenbaum's Alternate 100 both for my own easy reference and as a challenge to conventional wisdom.

Ace in the Hole/The Big Carnival (1951)
An Affair to Remember (1957)
Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
Avanti! (1972)
The Barefoot Contessa (1954)
Bigger Than Life (1956)
The Big Sky (1952)
The Black Cat (1934)
Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
Broken Blossoms (1919)
Cat People (1942)
Christmas in July (1940)
Confessions of an Opium Eater (1962)
The Crowd (1928)
Dead Man (1995)
The Docks of New York (1928)
Do the Right Thing (1989)
Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (1974)
11 x 14 (1976)
Eraserhead (1978)
Foolish Wives (1922)
Force of Evil (1948)
Freaks (1932)
The General (1927)
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)
Gilda (1946)
The Great Garrick (1937)
Greed (1925)
Hallelujah, I’m a Bum (1933)
The Heartbreak Kid (1972)
Housekeeping (1987)
The Hustler (1961)
Intolerance (1916)
Johnny Guitar (1954)
Judge Priest (1934)
Killer of Sheep (1978)
The Killing (1956)
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976)
Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
The Ladies’ Man (1961)
The Lady From Shanghai (1948)
Last Chants for a Slow Dance (1977)
Laughter (1930)
Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948)
Lonesome (1929)
Love Me Tonight (1932)
Love Streams (1984)
The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
Make Way for Tomorrow (1937)
Man’s Castle (1933)
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)
Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
Mikey and Nicky (1976)
Monsieur Verdoux (1947)
My Son John (1952)
The Naked Spur (1953)
Nanook of the North (1922)
The Night of the Hunter (1955)
The Nutty Professor (1963)
The Palm Beach Story (1942)
Panic in the Streets (1950)
Park Row (1952)
The Phenix City Story (1955)
Point Blank (1967)
Real Life (1979)
Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1971)
Rio Bravo (1959)
Scarface (1932)
The Scarlet Empress (1934)
Scarlet Street (1945)
Scenes From Under Childhood (1967)
The Scenic Route (1978)
The Seventh Victim (1943)
Shadows (1960)
Sherlock Jr. (1924)
The Shooting (1967)
The Shop Around the Corner (1940)
The Sound of Fury/Try and Get Me! (1950)
Stars in My Crown (1950)
The Steel Helmet (1951)
Stranger Than Paradise (1984)
The Strawberry Blonde (1941)
Sunrise (1927)
Sylvia Scarlett (1935)
The Tarnished Angels (1958)
That’s Entertainment! III (1994)
This Land Is Mine (1943)
Thunderbolt (1929)
Tom Tom the Piper’s Son (1969)
To Sleep With Anger (1990)
Track of the Cat (1954)
Trouble in Paradise (1932)
Vinyl (1965)
Wanda (1971)
While the City Sleeps (1956)
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957)
Woodstock (1970)
The Wrong Man (1957)
Zabriskie Point (1970)

UPDATE 7/28: Today in the Notes section of his blog Rosenbaum reprints a short item about the recent popularity of retrospectives of so-called "difficult" directors like Bresson, Tarkovsky and Rivette. He mentions a 2006 screening of Rivette's 4-hour L'Amour Fou at the Museum of the Moving Image that I was lucky enough to attend, at which he led a discussion of the film. There is an eager audience out there. I think the continued success of revivals in general depends on a combination of support from traditional media (New York Times, Village Voice) and the online community. The huge turnout for the Nicholas Ray series is a case in point.

Bigger than Life/In a Lonely Place

According to Jean-Luc Godard, le cinéma, c'est Nicholas Ray. Look at these images from two of Ray's masterpieces, Bigger than Life and In a Lonely Place. Notice how the framing of Bogart dominates Gloria Grahame anxiously standing in a doorway, with noir shadows adding the appropriate atmosphere of foreboding. Of course this is hardly a typical film noir, but an intensely romantic, autobiographical exmination of a relationship torn apart by Bogart's violent nature at war with his love for Grahame, never better as the would-be redemptive figure who can't save this tortured screenwriter from his own self-destruction. The shamelessly sentimental lines spoken by both Bogart and Grahame rank among my favorite dialogue in any Hollywood film: "I was born when she kissed me, I died when she left me, I lived a few weeks while she loved me."

Five years later Ray, now exercising his mastery of the Cinemascope frame, goes all out in depicting the psychosis of James Mason's suburban American dad terrorizing his son with the help of towering shadows, askew angles, broken mirrors and the like. Jonathan Rosenbaum has said, "It's hard to think of another Hollywood picture with more to say about the sheer awfulness of 'normal' American family life during the 50s." It's also hard to think of a better embodiment of the 50s zeitgeist in American cinema than Nicholas Ray, whose retrospective runs at Film Forum through August 6.

Top Ten Lists

Even though I'm embarrassed by some of my naive wording in the brief descriptions, I'm posting a link to my 2004 Ten Best List from Senses of Cinema, the Australian online film journal. I would change the rankings around a bit, probably substitute Sansho the Bailiff for Ugetsu, etc., but I stand by all my choices today. I'd also like to make room for a few great films I've re-seen in the past year or so, namely Leo McCarey's Make Way for Tomorrow, Jacques Rivette's Celine and Julie Go Boating, and Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman...

http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/top_tens/archive04.html#gerow

And perhaps I'll post a list soon of my favorite films since 1990, focusing particularly on the Iranian, Latin American and Asian renaissance represented by Abbas Kiarostami, Lucrecia Martel, Carlos Reygadas, Lisandro Alonso, Julian Hernandez, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Tsai Ming-Liang, Jia Zhang-Ke, Edward Yang, Wong Kar-Wai, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Hong Sang-Soo and Lee Chang-Dong.

Welcome to the Eclipse

Lupe Vélez in Lady of the Pavements

This is my first post on my first blog, so please be indulgent as I stumble my way into the film blogging community. I don't really know what direction this experiment will take, but I know it will be a highly subjective account of my relationship to film (and music, literature and the other arts as well). My emphasis will not be on serious, scholarly film criticism or analysis since I feel that countless others are doing that much better than I possibly could. Instead I plan to discuss some of my favorite films as they relate to my personal experience as a 54-year-0ld gay New Yorker living in 2009. As I learn to navigate this new medium, I hope to incorporate more photos, video clips and links.

A word about the name of this site. As I tried to think of a catchy name I suddenly thought of Antonioni's masterpiece, L'Eclisse. Aside from the fact that this film, and its stars, are so beautiful to look at, it symbolizes for me the possibilities of film to combine narrative and formal elements in new and astonishing ways. The final 7 minutes, in which the two main characters disappear as their everyday environment takes on new and menacing forms, remains for me one of the most haunting sequences in cinema. The titular eclipse also brings to mind the magic moment when the lights go down before the start of a film, and the gradual eclipsing of film altogether in the 21st century in favor of digital video. Godard in Histoire(s) du Cinéma saw the approaching end of the 20th century as the fin du cinéma, and in many ways he's been proven right, but I hold out the hope that, at least in my lifetime, there will still be places to see celluloid projected on a silver screen. Long live the Walter Reade Theater, MoMA, BAM Cinematek, Film Forum, the Museum of the Moving Image, the New York Film Festival, and in my sister city by the bay, the glorious Castro, the Roxie and PFA.

I just want to acknowledge a few people for inspiring me to start this blog. My friend Dan in the San Francisco Bay Area first put the idea in my head when he started a blog last year. Then I recently made the acquaintance of blogger Michael Guillén, host of the wonderful site The Evening Class, when I visited San Francisco for the Silent Film Festival. Michael, or Maya, strongly encouraged me to write more so I'm giving it a shot. Last but certainly not least, many thanks to my cinephile friend and companion Juan, who inspires me to think and talk about films and life from a new perspective every day.