The Best of 2012

Here are some of my cinematic highlights of 2012, modified from comments posted at Dave Kehr's indispensable blog:

The Best New Films (alphabetical):

Almayer’s Folly (Chantal Akerman)
Barbara (Christian Petzold)
A Century of Birthing (Lav Diaz)
Holy Motors (Leos Carax)
In Another Country (Hong Sang-Soo)
In the Family (Patrick Wang)
Life without Principle (Johnnie To)
Like Someone in Love (Abbas Kiarostami)
The Master (P.T. Anderson)
Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson)
Neighboring Sounds (Kleber Mendonça Filho)
Night Across the Street (Raúl Ruiz)
A Simple Life (Ann Hui)
Tabu (Miguel Gomes)
Walker (Tsai Ming-Liang)

Runners-up: Las Acacias (Pablo Giorgelli), Bernie (Richard Linklater), The Cabin in the Woods (Drew Goddard), Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg), Damsels in Distress (Whit Stillman), Dark Horse (Todd Solondz), The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies), Elena (Andrei Zvyagintsev), Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Véréna Paravel), Magic Mike (Steven Soderbergh), Unforgivable (André Téchiné), You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet (Alain Resnais), Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow)

Repertory:   The year was bookended by two essential retrospectives, Robert Bresson at Film Forum in January and Pier Paolo Pasolini at MoMA. While I had seen all of these directors’ feature films previously, I was grateful for the chance to see so many of them again in that dying medium of 35mm.

I discovered the films of Keisuke Kinoshita thanks to a series at the Walter Reade. I’ve seen about ten of them thus far and am continuing to work my way through his many films available on Hulu Plus. I would single out two, PHOENIX and WEDDING RING, for their sublime performances by Kinuyo Tanaka. (The latter also featured two scenes of Toshiro Mifune in a bathing suit that, as they say, are worth the price of admission.)

The other major auteur discovery this year was Pierre Etaix, especially for LE GRAND AMOUR, YO YO and the brilliant vampire episode in AS LONG AS YOU’RE HEALTHY. Long unavailable, his films have been digitally restored and are currently making the rounds. Etaix's use of camera placement and sound for comic effect are comparable in some ways to Jacques Tati and Jerry Lewis, but there is also an undercurrent of melancholy running through the best of his films which is enhanced by his acting persona.

 

Other top repertory films first seen in 2012:

The Satin Slipper (Manoel de Oliveira)
La chouette aveugle (Raul Ruiz)
The Man Who Left His Will on Film (Nagisa Oshima) (RIP Oshima-san)
Hotel du Nord (Marcel Carné)
Coeur Fidèle (Jean Epstein)
Pièges (Robert Siodmak)
Malina, Dress Rehearsal, Eika Katappa and Willow Springs (Werner Schroeter)
Feu Mathias Pascal and Le Bonheur (Marcel L’Herbier)
Max et les ferrailleurs (Claude Sautet)
Moana (Robert Flaherty)
The Walls of Sana’a and The Paper Flower Sequence (Pier Paolo Pasolini)
San Diego Surf (Andy Warhol/Paul Morrissey)
Unfinished Business (Gregory LaCava)
The Loves of Pharaoh (Ernst Lubitsch)
Lumière d’été and Le ciel est à vous (Jean Grémillon)
Chung Kuo China (Michelangelo Antonioni)
A Short Film About the Indio Nacional and Autohystoria (Raya Martin)
Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? (Pedro Costa)

Finally, THE PERFUMED NIGHTMARE (Kidlat Tahimik): I actually first saw this many years ago, but Tahimik’s one-of-a-kind performance piece/Q&A after the screening, in which he discussed his “indie-genius” filmmaking philosophy, qualifies as the directorial appearance of the year.

Pier Paolo Pasolini

 The Gospel According to St. Matthew

Arabian Nights

 The Decameron

 Teorema

Before the year ends I want to acknowledge the invaluable complete retrospective of the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini at MoMA, which ends on Saturday, January 5. Besides the opportunity to see many of his films again in beautiful new prints, each film has been preceded by short archival interview material by Pasolini himself relating to that screening. Although I have seen all of the features previously, I had never seen 3 of the 4 location documentaries which were shown yesterday. The 12-minute The Walls of Sana'a, filmed in Yemen at the same time that Pasolini was making his penultimate film Arabian Nights, was especially beautiful and poetic.

Raya Martin

 A Short Film About the Indio Nacional

Now Showing

Independencia

Next Attraction

The Museum of the Moving Image is presenting an essential retrospective of the films of Raya Martin this weekend and next. Martin, only 28 years old but already one of the two greatest Filipino “new wave” filmmakers (along with Lav Diaz), is boldly experimental in style, alternating generally between historical films like A Short Film About the Indio Nacional and Independencia, focusing on the tragic colonial legacy of the Philippines and shot in glorious black and white 35mm, and contemporary subject matter in films like Next Attraction (his coming-out film as a gay man) and Now Showing, which focus on cinema and autobiography and are shot in color video. However, Raya Martin is a director who resists such simple classifications, freely mixing styles, genres and film stocks, blending narrative and experimental film, black and white and color, sound and silent film. His films incorporate the history and love of cinema into the history of the Philippines as well as variations of his own personal story. I have previously seen Independencia, Next Attraction and Buenas Noches, España (shown earlier this year at MOMI) and I’m truly looking forward to this opportunity to catch up on the rest of his films.

I believe I saw Raya Martin in the audience earlier this week at the Museum of Modern Art’s premiere screening of Andy Warhol’s outrageous comedy San Diego Surf, not at all surprising considering Martin's desire to explore cinema’s past and constantly push its boundaries.

Tabu

This glorious image, in luminescent black and white and Academy ratio, is from one of the few Main Slate films in this year's New York Film Festival to be projected in 35mm, Miguel Gomes's Tabu. This will be my last of 17 Main Slate films this year, and looks to be one of the best. The weekend also offers Leviathan and The Last Time I Saw Macao, two other highly-anticipated films. Of those that I have already seen, Abbas Kiarostami's Like Someone in Love and Leos Carax's Holy Motors stand above the rest.

NYFF 2012

 The Satin Slipper

Leviathan

The Last Time I Saw Macao

At last the full 2012 New York Film Festival 50th Anniversary schedule is posted online, and it is overflowing with great films in the Main Slate, Masterworks, Views from the Avant-Garde and this year's remarkable sidebar program, featuring 37 films from the great French TV series about filmmakers, Cineastes de Notre Temps. I laboriously went through the lineup today, prioritizing my choices in order to see as much as possible. I'm delighted that Manoel de Oliveira's 7-hour film The Satin Slipper will be shown early in the festival on Sunday, September 30 and does not conflict with any of my other selections. One critic tweeted that this may be the repertory event of the year, which it may well turn out to be. Oliveira's 1985 film directly follows three other masterpieces based on literary or theatrical works, Benilde, Doomed Love and Francisca, which he made from 1974 to 1981.

From the main slate I'm planning to see the following films:

Amour (Michael Haneke)

Araf - Somewhere In Between (Yeşim Ustaoğlu)
Barbara (Christian Petzold)
Bwakaw (Jun Robles Lana)
Here and There (Aquí y Allá) (Antonio Méndez Esparza)
Holy Motors (Leos Carax)
The Last Time I Saw Macao (João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata)
Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel)
Like Someone in Love (Abbas Kiarostami) and the HBO Directors Dialogue with Kiarostami
Memories Look at Me (Song Fang)
Night Across the Street (La noche de enfrente) (Raul Ruiz)
Our Children (Joachim Lafosse)
Something in the Air (Olivier Assayas)
Tabu (Miguel Gomes)
You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet (Vous n'avez encore rien vu) (Alain Resnais)

The Walker

In addition, Views from the Avant-Garde features Raul Ruiz's 1990 La chouette aveugle, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Mekong Hotel and short films by Tsai Ming-Liang (The Walker) and João Pedro Rodrigues (Morning of St. Anthony's Day).

Pursued

Tabu

Of the many Cineastes filmmaking documentaries, I will definitely see Chantal Akerman by Chantal Akerman and Pedro Costa's Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?, and try to fit in as many others as my schedule and sanity permit. In the Masterworks section, I plan to see again Max Ophuls's exquisite Liebelei and perhaps Raoul Walsh's Pursued. I will update this post in the next few weeks.

The Clock

Christian Marclay's 24-hour film/video/whatsit The Clock, now playing for 2 weeks at the Lincoln Center Atrium, is one of the most compulsively watchable films in recent memory. It can also be quite exhausting after a while, since there is little discernible narrative development other than the passage of time to keep one engaged over the long haul. But those clips are so skillfully edited, and there is such a wealth and variety of films and TV shows utilized, that a cinephile can get a constant adrenalin rush of recognition. The concept of showing a clock or watch with the exact time at least once every minute, matching the real time in which the shot is being screened, is a fascinating one. And the editing rhythm, which varies from fairly long clips to a rush of short shots, makes one continually aware of how time passes in "real" life and how important it is as a narrative element in so many films. After all, a film takes place over a certain length of time, so why not make a film that's about nothing but time?

The Clock uses straightforward editing of the visual elements of the clips, with no added dissolves or fadeouts, but it employs sound bridges and overlaps between different clips to suggest subtle or not-so-subtle connections. My favorite use of this device began with the familiar music from Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut which played for about 5 seconds before the clip actually started, and continued briefly after the clip until a character in the next clip lifted a phonograph needle from a record. The selections and juxtapositions are often quite funny. Marclay made the decision to show all the clips in the same aspect ratio, stretching Academy ratio films and squeezing Scope images. While some cinephiles might object to this distortion, it has the effect of presenting a more homogenous visual field even as it jumps between silent and sound films or black-and-white and color. While most of the clips are in English, there are a sizable number of foreign-language films, none of which contain subtitles.

In my first shift watching The Clock, from 12:23-2:45 pm last Saturday, I was pleased to see several Asian films in the mix, including Tokyo Story, What Time Is It There? and In the Mood for Love. During my second shift, last night from 7:19-8:43 pm, there was a particularly rich auteur period from about 8:30-8:40 that included clips from Resnais's Muriel, Kieslowski's A Short Film About Love and Lang's The Thousand Eyes of Doctor Mabuse. I hope to see more this weekend.

A Burning Hot Summer Weekend

Beware of a Holy Whore (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)

 A Burning Hot Summer (Philippe Garrel)

Moana (Robert Flaherty)

This past weekend began with a rare screening of R.W. Fassbinder's Beware of a Holy Whore. Besides its many behavioral and formal beauties, sardonic humor and painfully honest autobiographical representation of a tortured location shoot, it afforded me one last chance to see Werner Schroeter and his muse Magdalena Montezuma onscreen again following the great month-long Schroeter retrospective at MoMA. Fassbinder gives Montezuma a gorgeous last shot in a boat retreating from the film's turmoil after she's been thrown off the set by the tyrannical director, scored to an aria Schroeter himself might have chosen.

I don't have much to say about Philippe Garrel's A Burning Hot Summer except that it deals with love, death, politics and cinema in intriguing if not completely satisfying ways.

The great revelation of the weekend was Robert Flaherty's remarkable 1926 docudrama Moana, receiving a rare screening at Anthology with the new soundtrack created for it in 1981 by Flaherty's daughter Monica. This new soundtrack attempts to recreate authentic music, sound effects and dialogue to accompany the film's original silent images and succeeds remarkably well. Flaherty manages to place his camera to capture every detail of the island's natural beauty, the light playing on the trees and water, the work rituals and coming-of-age ceremonies, and the casual eroticism of this harmonious Samoan community. The film in many ways anticipates Murnau and Flaherty's 1931 masterpiece Tabu but is far less well known.

Bonus image:

Magdalena Montezuma (right) in Werner Schroeter's The Death of Maria Malibran