1960s Discussion and Suggestion (Lists Project Vol. 2)

[Kirkinson]

Now that I've made my preliminary list (79 films - what am I to do?) I've chosen a few that didn't make it last time to throw into this thread in the hopes that others will take notice. I don't even know if all of these will end up on my final list, but I'll give them a chance here all the same.

Alice in Wonderland (Jonathan Miller) - Is this eligible? I'm not sure what the rules are regarding TV movies. In any case, it has become my favorite screen adaptation of this book (Carroll is my favorite writer). There's no hint of the obvious in the way the author's language is interpreted by the expert cast, no "playing down" to the kiddies, and the lack of any attempted whimsical costumes strips the fantasy down to a sort of bare absurdism.

April and Falling Leaves (Otar Iosseliani) - As stated above. Nothing would give me greater pleasure than an Iosseliani film on the list, and these are both very enjoyable. And like I said, they're both on the same DVD, so check them out!

Le Bonheur (Agnes Varda) - Apparently, a challenging and widely misunderstood film (flipping through some film theory and criticism books at my school's library I came across so many feminist attacks on this work that totally missed the point I quickly stopped being amused by how off-the-mark they were). Varda's critiques of love, jealousy, companionship and the ideal of the nuclear family are both compassionate and merciless.

The Cow (Dariush Mehrjui) - Powerful, even shocking (on an emotional level) with an extraordinary lead performance.

Le Gai savoir (Godard) - A crucial piece of Godard's oeuvre, an essential companion to Weekend, and a fascinating experience in its own right.

The Lion in Winter (Anthony Harvey) - Never have I had so much fun watching such a fucked-up family.

Macario (Roberto Gavaladon) - A great, macabre little fable from Mexico with some of my favorite bits of Figueroa photography.

Morgan! (Karel Reisz) - Not so sure about its particular significance except to the degree that I adore David Warner and this is still probably the greatest performance he ever put to film.

The Plea (Tengiz Abuladze) - Again, as stated above. I should add that the film is not befuddling necessarily because it is intentionally so obscure, but because it is so steeped in Georgian culture that it can be difficult to follow without some foreknowledge. I should also take this opportunity to say that if anyone watches Ruscico's DVD, make sure you select the Georgian mono track -- both because the dialog all comes from Georgian poetry and because the 5.1 mix adds sound effects that were intentionally unused in the film.

I have a list with me now of 49 films I'd like to see before I turn my list in. There's no way I'll get to them all, but I'd like to thank everyone for the suggestions they've added to this thread so far. They've been most helpful.

[Michael]

My solid 60s favorites:

8 1/2 - what more can I say about it? Here I've already smothered it to death with obessesive love.

The Birds - the most poetic of all Hitchcock films, yes including Vertigo. This flaps most vigorously with guts, surreal beauty and freshness. I used to think it lesser than Vertigo, Psycho and Rear Window.. not anymore. The Birds' women are far richer, more alive and complex.

Kill Baby Kill - tied with Lisa and the Devil and The Whip and the Body as my favorite Bava film. Simply a gorgeous, dreamy gothic horror film. A little boy playing a ghost girl, purple cobwebs, hell yeah! I really can't recommend you enough to explore Bava. Make sure to check out his debut film, his most famous film Black Sunday and you will be blown away by the intense beauty of his cinematography and set pieces. The Girl Who Knew Too Much, Blood and Black Lace and Danger: Diabolik are also magnificent.

Scorpio Rising - I still can't get over the fact it was made before I was born - more than 40 years ago! It looks like it could be made this morning! One of the most original, mind-boggling films ever made. NO excuse for it not making it to the final list now that the Fantoma DVD will be available in less than a month from today.

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? - as much as I love Psycho, I think Baby Jane has more punch and a more emotionally devastating effect. The same director's next hag horror effort Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte may be better directed and more fluid but I prefer Baby Jane's whiskey coarseness. The ending with Baby Jane waltzing on the blistering hot sand, I still find incredibly unsettling today. Bette Davis's forced smile through layers of crusty make ups in the bank scene, look into her eyes - so wounded and lost. Virtuoso acting and movie and everything.

Carnival of Souls - to think of something as brilliant, beautiful and poignant as this film could be made independently right out of the "nowhere" of America, it's quite stunning and special.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg - one of my favorite musicals along with Meet Me in St. Louis and Top Hat...wet alleys, smoky cafes, snowy melancholy.. can you resist the thought of having a menage trois with Catharine and Nino?

Gertrud - my favorite Dreyer by far. the heart of the film is a prune..slowly becoming a full juicy plum by the end.

And oh...

Lolita - I'm so wild about James Mason who I think is a very remarkable actor. The film is perfect. Funny and really so fucked up.

[zedz]

Recent Viewings:

Cheyenne Autumn

Its reputation as a 'problematic' film is richly deserved. Even leaving aside the incongruous Dodge City episode, which seems to be a stray reel from an entirely different picture interpolated simply to bloat the movie up to 'epic' length, the film is frequently clunky. Even Ford's good intentions are often misguided (was this 'smoothing the pillow of a dying race' stuff really that progressive in the 1960s? and what's wrong with Native American actors anyway?) - but then you get the Fort Robinson sequence in which the US treatment of Native Americans is framed in the film language of the Holocaust, a ballsy comparison in any day and age. I found much of the film's expository dialogue painfully lame, especially in contrast to Ford's visual eloquence - doubly apparent when shonky back-projection shots are interpolated near the end. In general, I thought the film would have worked much better as a silent (a stunning, Technicolor, widescreen silent!), as the visual storytelling throughout is on a much more sophisticated level than the script and performances. I'd replace Alex North's bombastic score as well, as it generally seemed an awkward fit with Ford's classicism.

Topaz

If I'm not mistaken, this is Hitchcock's longest film (and how!). The first time I saw this I thought it was depressingly mediocre, with one memorable image (the overhead shot of Juanita's death). Since then I've seen some other stinkers (Torn Curtain, anyone?) and read some spirited defences of Topaz, so I figured I should give it another chance. This time, the memorable shot was less impressive, but I could at least see that Hitch was trying some new things in the film. Unfortunately, I can do without Hitchcock's experiments with uncharismatic performances and absence of suspense, and a few interesting crane shots provide little compensation. The whole thing seemed to me more like a truncated TV mini-series than a worthwhile film (hey, we even get the chaste 'sex' scene between two of the leading ciphers), and the whole thing is so ugly, with garish TV lighting and slapdash back projection all over the place.

Oedipus Rex

A crucial Pasolini, laying the foundations for almost every important work that followed in its ethnographic / mythic mode (following on from The Gospel, but taking it into the brand-new territory he'd further explore with Medea and Pigsty) and starting to pick at the scab of Fascism he'd repick in Pigsty and dig into with rusty scissors in Salo. Citti offers probably his most mannered performance (and that's saying something), and he glowers at the centre of the film as one almightly Alienation Effect. I prefer the kind of stylization offered by Clementi or Callas in the corresponding positions of their films, and I find that the film loses momentum in its final third (Oedipus seems outrageously obtuse in failing to join the dots until absolutely everything has been spelt out to him, but then, Pasolini's Oedipus is quite pointedly an unthinking brute, incapable of outwitting the Sphinx, for example). So it's not my favourite Pasolini by some distance, but it's compulsive viewing, and Tartan offer a sublime transfer - their second Pasolini set is one of the releases of the year.

The Apartment

My 60s list is likely to have very few Hollywood products on it (everywhere else being so much more exciting), but here's a strong contender. Even with my recent heavy dosages of Japanese 60s cinema, this remains one of the great examples of widescreen B&W composition, and it contains some of Wilder's most subtle and intricate navigations of tone.

Cruel Story of Youth

I'm planning to make my way through Oshima's 60s work in chronological order for the first time, in order to trace one of the most extraordinary creative runs in cinema. It starts here, with a generic youth film, but already you can see the emergence of the director's thematic preoccupations (the equation of sex with serious danger, the melding of fiction and documentary in the AMPO protest footage, the interweaving of political and historical subtexts) and some of his technical ones as well. There's a superb long-held shot when Fujii visits Mako after her abortion, accompanied by a mostly off-screen conversation. It's not as elaborate as Night and Fog in Japan's plans-sequences, but it's looking ahead to them. Siimilarly, the couple's scam gives rise to the kind of cyclical structure he'd continue to explore for years - most all-encompassing in Three Resurrected Drunkards and The Man Who left His Will on Film, but in quote similar form to Cruel Story in the repeated rituals of Boy's con game, The Ceremony's ceremonies and The Realm of the Senses erotic crescendo. Ultimately, it's still a "youth film", but it's one that has a toughness I don't think any American example has ever approached. The hero is one of the most unsympathetic characters ever put in the centre of a film, his one faintly redeeming quality a kind of feral attachment to Mako. But since the only way he can express that attachment is through pimp / prostitute exploitation (as soon as they meet, their relationship starts to spirals downwards to that inevitable conclusion), it's hardly redeeming. It all ends badly of course, but just how badly is hard to believe, and Oshima spits a brutal, sarcastic Romeo / Juliet allusion in our face just before the end title.

[zedz]

Next Lot:

The Sun's Burial

I'd long had this pegged as a siamese twin to Cruel Story, and the two films have more in common with each other than with any other 60s Oshimas I've seen, but I'd underestimated just what a leap in ambition this film represented. It's a gangster film, but possibly the most squalid gangster film ever made. The main criminal activity we observe, for instance, is the buying and selling of blood. The film, as with Cruel Story, is punctuated by moments of extreme brutality and is ruthlessly unsentimental. Where Oshima is stretching himself is in his juggling of a vast cast (over twenty characters significant to the plot, by my reckoning) and multiple plot lines. This density is best expressed in several long-held shots in busy surroundings (e.g. the local bar) during which the camera tracks, pans and dollies around a relatively static tableau picking up on character and plot 'events'. Unfortunately, he doesn't really pull off the difficult challenge of mastering such an unruly narrative field (it's no Brighter Summer Day), and many of the characters never get beyond the status of stock figures. Nevertheless, the film builds to a hell of a climax. The implicit death of the title is manifold, and at the end it's as if we're observing not just the annihilation of the 'sun tribe' genre, but of youth, and even of Japan itself.

Love Is Colder than Death

Another gangster film, of a sort. This is such a bizarre movie, but it keeps growing on me. Fassbinder namechecks the New Wave (hey, we even see a waitress named Erika Rohmer eat lead!), and there's a direct line from Band of Outsiders through A Little Chaos to this film, but my current perspective is that Fassbinder's primitive style here is closest to Luc Moullet, with hearty chunks of Warhol and Straub thrown in.

Stylistically, it's so wrong it's right. A lot of the film consists of 'incomplete' compositions: seriously off-balance static frames that, in time, through the movement of characters, attain a fleeting balance. For example, the characters might be squeezed into the far left of the frame, with the right hand side a big white dead space. Ninety seconds into the shot, a character will move in to occupy the dead space and balance the composition. Often the 'completed' composition will represent only a brief section of a much longer shot, but the camera won't reframe to 'correct' the composition. These static, frontal shots are part of the film's extremely theatrical presentation (the outrageously fake violence is another crucial element), but one of the thiings I love about the film is how its style seems to evolve before your eyes. After half an hour or so, extremely diagrammatic camera movements start to appear (a long lateral track achieved by placing a camera in the back seat of a car - the Kiarostami shot; the long reverse dolly before advancing characters - the Bela Tarr shot); by the final third of the film, camera movement has become even more ambitious and expressive, including a quarter-turn around Lommel and Schygulla that's a tentative precursor to Fassbinder's signature encircling movement (see Whity, Ali and above all the delirious example in Martha). There's a virtuoso sequence - one of my favourite in all Fassbinder - in which the camera dollies in counterpoint to the characters as they shop(lift) in a supermarket, to the accompaniment of deranged Peer Raben muzak (an electronically fucked-up choral work). Raben lands on Planet Fassbinder fully formed, and many of Fasbinder's stock company are also already present and correct.

La Collectionneuse

Simply gorgeous. Nestor Almendros should take a bow, and so should Criterion for reproducing such delicacy so beautifully in their transfer. The film, with its emphasis on narration, seems much closer to several New Wave shorts of the period than to other features. In fact, it seems rather like a feature-length short film in its simplicity and directness. This is not a slight: the length of the film seems to arise from sustaining a mood rather than elaborating incident, and it does so expertly. At about the 70 minute mark, the anecdote started to feel over-extended to me, but the mood and visuals sustained my interest the short distance until the denouement. Has any other director made so many superb summer films?

Abhijan

Is this really the only 1960s Ray readily available? I've never seen this superb film hailed as one of his major works, but that just goes to show what we're missing. It's a fantastic film, utterly involving and beautifully paced, balancing detailed character and community stuff with moderate intrigue (it's not plot-driven, more neo-realist) and some brilliantly edited 'chase' sequences.

[Steven H]

zedz, I found most of his 60s output on netflix, but the DVD quality is poor (I plan on watching at least some of these soon). I also have a friend with The Zoo, and I've been wanting to see that one. So far Charulata is the best of that decade for him (that french disc looks BEAUTIFUL I'd love to get my hands on it), but I have yet to see the MoC disc.

I don't know if anyone's brought it up yet, but one of my favorite 60s films is Bertucelli's Ramparts of Clay, in fact, it will probably make it into my top ten. There's a pretty decent looking french disc of this, and I would definitely say you don't have to understand what's being said to find it engrossing. Meanwhile my free and alotted time are both dwindling with equal speed, so I don't think I'll be able to see as many interesting films before the lists are due. A few that I'm *really* looking forward to, and will definitely find the time for are Marker's Le Joli Mai, Garrel's The Virgin's Bed, Wajda's Everything For Sale, and maybe a Chabrol or Rohmer. Of course, it would take a mountain to move some of the stuff I have on there.

[starmanof51]

The Lion in Winter (Anthony Harvey) - Never have I had so much fun watching such a fucked-up family.

Kirkinson - I will absolutely ride shotgun with you on Lion in Winter. One of my half-dozen all time faves. I always tend to defend it on entertainment terms rather than aesthetic ones, but I'm prepared to throw it a high vote for this list.

[Subbuteo]

Here are a few of my possibles: La Rupture- recently reviewed on the new Arrow disc. Although this is my all out fave Chabrol, his entire oeuvre with Audran in this period is a monumental achievement worthy of direct comparison I feel with the Rossellini/Bergman pictures, or Sternberg and Dietrich.

David, also a favourite of mine but wasn't its release 1970?

[Subbuteo]

(Maybe this is simply totally hallucinatory old age...)

You and me both dear boy... I've trouble remembering my birth date!

[Lemmy Caution]

Abhijan

Is this really the only 1960s Ray readily available?

Charulata (1964) and Mahapurush (1965) are available on Dvd from Bollywood Films, with English and assorted European subtitles.
Unfortunately, I'm way behind in watching Indian films, and haven't gotten to them yet.
Maybe the 60's list-project-thang will act as a kick in the backside.
But I've got piles and piles to watch.

[Via_Chicago]

Charulata (1964)

Charulata just might be the best film that Ray ever made.

[zedz]

Thanks for the information about Charulata on DVD. Any recommendations for where these discs can be purchased? I'm assuming the quality is less than stellar, but would be glad to hear otherwise.

In the meantime, the sixties revival continues:

Black God, White Devil

I just love this film. Rocha takes what could have been Spaghetti Western material and transforms it into something cinematically unique. The nearest comparison I could make is to Pasolini's Gospel according to Matthew, but this film is simultaneously much more political, much more mystical and much earthier. There's a delicious tension between Rocha's almost classical treatment of some scenes (the confrontation with Sebastao in the chapel, the attack on the wedding party) and the rough intimacy of the handheld camerawork out on the sertao (some of the most magnificent use of landscape I can think of - Rocha's brief 'Holy Mountain' sequence is worth the entirety of Jodorowsky's filmography), just as there is between the narrating folksongs and the use of Villa-Lobos. Brilliant post-Godard use of jump-cuts as well. In the second half, when Corisco enters and Manoel becomes Satanas, things really get cracking, and the radical shifts in tone and pace from sequence to sequence and shot to shot are absolutely rivetting. When is Criterion (or anybody!) going to realise what we're missing?

Catfucker

I don't think any English-language distributor has ever bothered to translate the title of Fassbinder's second feature. Funny, that. This was the first early Fassbinder I saw, fifteen years ago at least and after having seen about a dozen or so post-Merchant examples of his work. Its austerity came as a real shock then, and it still packs a punch in that respect, even in comparison to Love Is Colder than Death. In many ways, it's considerably less recognisably "Fassbinderian" than that first film: fewer of his core stock company appear (or, conversely, there are more 'minor' or one-off Fassbinder players), Peer Raben's contributions are much less imposing and characteristic (basically some tinkly piano over the 'promenade' shots), and the film is much more stylistically constrained (and Love Is Colder than Death was pretty minimal!). The camera is always static and frontal, with the exception of the back-tracking 'promenade' shots. It's a great script, though, much more complex and pointed than that of the prior film, exploring three key ideas obsessively - money, sex and gossip - and building up, through a daisy chain of small fragmentary scenes, a withering portrait of a contemporary Germany that uses those three things to express its prejudice, delusion and self-loathing. I suppose the strength of the material accounts for the film's reputation as Fassbinder's first 'classic', though formally I find it much less interesting than that first film.

The Chase

Pre-Bonnie and Clyde Arthur Penn attempts a similar dissection of his own society, but he falls far short of Fassbinder. Nevertheless, this is a fascinating failure, in a kind of awkward holding pattern between Old Hollywood and New Hollywood. You've got very early work from the next generation of stars (Robert Redford - bland; Robert Duvall - OK but constrained; Jane Fonda - fleeting but surprisingly good) alongside mixed contributions from the then-current wave (Marlon Brando - fruity but fine; Angie Dickinson - flavourless; James Fox - cod-Texan and pretty awful, not just because of his accent) and a smattering of old troupers (an all but wasted Miriam Hopkins). The tale is an overegged potboiler about The Southern Problem that does at least build to an impressively unpleasant climax. There's a sense of trying to push boundaries, but the attempt is so mired within dated conventions that all the effort feels misdirected, and the desperate hipness makes the whole thing seem all the more antique.

[zedz]

Looking back over Marlon's career, was he ever anything other than Fruity? Another Penn performance - in Missouri Breaks - must be the ne plus ultra of Grande Dame ultra Queen. Poor bloody Nicholson!!

I've had this on my shelf for the longest time but have never watched it. Maybe I'm waiting for the right drinking game to present itself. Suggestions welcomed!

He even manages to choke the word "Bubba" (Redford's character) into a quadrathong every time he mumbles it. Despite which the movie is pretty gripping, although my Penn nominations for 60s would easily be Mickey One and Alice's Restaurant (whose elegiac funeral scene with Joni Mitchell still moves me to tears.)

I hadn't realised that Alice's Restaurant was 1969. That's long overdue a revisit.

[Scharphedin2]

This is one of my favourite threads in the forum, and I have enjoyed reading all the recommendations above. Regretfully, I have only just managed to really get into the swing of the ‘60s this week myself, and have a huge list of things I would like to view before the submission deadline. Here is a quick first round of a few of the films from the ‘60s that I did manage to view recently:

Kicking off an extended schedule of ‘60s films, I viewed Louis Malle's Zazie dans le metro, and it turned out to be an excellent way to enter this particular decade. I have seen quite a number of Malle's films over the years, and have come to expect sensitive and authentic portraits of people presented in dramatic contexts, so nothing prepared me for the stumbling-thumbling slapstick of this bright, colourful chase around Paris on the heels of a young girl, whose one desire is to ride the metro. If the tone and style of the film reminded me of something from the hand of Richard Lester, the expert handling of the girl (Malle always was good with children in his films), and the rather risque sexiness/sexuality of the film was very clearly Malle.

One of my most eagerly anticipated films over the past two years has been Franticek Vlacil's Markéta Lazarová. In the meantime a number of this director's other films have appeared on DVD, amongst them his first feature – The White Dove. If anything, this little film raised my anticipation of seeing the later masterpiece. It is a rather short feature, concerning the dove of the title, which at the film's beginning is released, along with hundreds of other doves, somewhere in Belgium. The dove is expected to arrive at the Baltic coast, and we see the people of a small seaside community anxiously awaiting its arrival. However, the dove loses its way over Czekoslovakia, and comes into the possession of an invalid boy and a painter/sculpturer. That is a very condensed description, and the focus of the film is of course not so much the dove itself, as the people (both on the Baltic coast and in the Czech apartment building in which the boy lives) that we are introduced to on its journey. Vlacil spins a nice little parable of human need and longing, but the thing that struck me most was the perfection of the images that he created for the film. The release of the pigeons early on in the film is a wonderful opening full of the sense of possibility, and the subsequent contrast between the cramped, prisonlike Czech residential complex, and the airy wide-open coastal sequences, really tell the whole story without much dialogue.

Interestingly, Andrei Tarkovsky (to whom Vlacil has been compared in some places) made his diploma film – The Violin and the Steamroller – in the same year that The White Dove was completed. And, like Vlacil's film, Tarkovsky's short feature is centered around the friendship of a young boy and a grown man. The boy plays the violin and is being bullied by his peers; the man operates a steamroller and is respected by his colleagues and looked up to by the children in the neighbourhood. Water literally runs through the entire film, and helps to establish the mood and depth of human experience that is the common element in all of Tarkovsky's films. There is a wonderful moment in the film, when the boy is accompanying the steamroll-driver on his lunch break; they are sitting inside a derelict building, with pools of rainwater covering most of the ground, and the man asks the boy to play his violin. I think the film director Tarkovsky that many of us admire was very much born in this scene.

Another true short film that I saw, and which made a strong impression on me was Kevin Brownlow's Millay at Steepletop. Aside from “First Figâ€

[tryavna]

Huston's Reflections in a Golden Eye is a fine example of a faltering director coming right back to form (in which he remains for the rest of his career)

Even counting Annie?

[zedz]

One of my most eagerly anticipated films over the past two years has been Franticek Vlacil's Markéta Lazarová.

You and me both. The prospect of it being as good as, let alone better than, Valley of the Bees would drag me across hot coals. Thanks for the White Dove tip. Was that a Facets release?

Interestingly, Andrei Tarkovsky (to whom Vlacil has been compared in some places) made his diploma film – The Violin and the Steamroller – in the same year that The White Dove was completed.

I'm not a big fan of Roadroller and Violin. As you note, it's worth seeing to trace the first appearances of some key motifs (water, the apple motif he develops in his first three films), but all in all it's rather callow, and would nowadays be just another minor brick in the wall of socialist realism had Tarkovsky not gone on to much greater things.

As for me, I took in a particularly bizarre double feature of Night and Fog in Japan and Umbrellas of Cherbourg that ended up working a treat. Radically different films, but both of them are supreme exercises in style.

Umbrellas of Cherbourg

I'd actually never seen this before, and it simultaneously fulfilled and undercut my expectations, primarily due to the unexpected complexity of Demy's treatment of his material. Primarily, it was an aesthetic delight. As with the Oshima, the director's sheer confidence drives you through the most unlikely content and delivery, and every eccentric choice is made to work cinematically. For instance, the insert referencing Lola is superfluous, comes out of nowhere, doesn't match anything else in the film, and would be lost on the vast majority of the audience who hadn't seen the earlier film, but it's delivered with such a commanding and seductive camera movement that it just adds to the mood of the film. Baie des anges remains my 60s Demy pick, however.

Night and Fog in Japan

Even more leaps and bounds for Oshima. In this film he tackles material as sprawling, and even more esoteric, than The Sun's Burial, but this time he brings the full weight of his intelligence to bear on it and synthesizes his first masterpiece through force of will. It's the first of his films to present its burden of ideas densely organised into a one-of-a-kind cinematic matrix (a la Death by Hanging and Diary of a Shinjuku Thief) that viewers can explore at their leisure. It's deeply political, but not polemic: a generation laid open on the autopsy table for our inspection, but we're the ones who have to conduct the inquest.

Personally, I'm less interested in the subject matter (the many faces of Japanese student radicalism in the 50s and 60s) than in how Oshima deals with it. As with his previous film, he's working with a massive cast of characters, but this time he's found a structure that allows them to find their place. There are about a dozen major characters, radiating out from the bride and groom (Nozawa and Reiko), through his former lover and colleagues (Misako, Nakayama, Toura, Sakamiki, the Professor) and her fellow AMPO protesters (Ota, Kawasaki and another guy, Kitami's friend, whose name eluded me) to the ghosts at the feast (his - Takao, and hers - Kitami). The interrelationships are complex, and only emerge gradually, but by the end it becomes clear that each of these characters represents a different, carefully calibrated attitude towards radicalism (e.g. uninvolved sympathy - the Professor; fiery commitment - Ota; sarcastic disillusionment - Toura; opportunistic dilettantism - Nakayama), and together they represent a dialectic (not an allegory) on the subject.

Quite apart from that is the piecemeal exploration of the buried backstory, or backstories, foremost among them the fate of Takao, revealed in fragmentary flashbacks, which brings us to the genius of Oshima's structure and style. The film basically takes place in real time, at the wedding reception of Nozawa and Reiko, but it's punctuated by a baroque pattern of nine flashbacks (some of which in turn take in multiple timeframes and settings) from the perspectives of various characters (in order: Toura, Ota, Toura, Toura, Misako, Misako, Nozawa, Kitami's friend, Takumi). Each of these flashbacks, though, represents shared experiences, so they're much less individualised than is normally the case, and some seem very much like 'group' memories (e.g. Misako's second flashback). At any rate, the flashbacks are anything but private, as they represent the sharing of information among the characters. The whole film comes to resemble a collective stream of consciousness, and Oshima brilliantly emphasises the hall-of-mirrors aspect of this continual retrospection by approaching the same events from multiple perspectives and adding in a second wedding party (Nakayama and Misako's) as one of the focal point of the flashbacks, thus providing a kind of trompe l'oeil (or trompe le memoire) effect.

But wait - there's more! Not only do we have an intensely creative story and structure, but an amazing style as well. The entire film consists of about 40 shots, the majority of them long, intricate tracking shots. There are a greater number (but only a handful) of conventional-length shots in the flashbacks, but even these can be striking, with flash-bulb freeze-frames or highly artificial lighting shifts. The two longest shots are both over ten minutes, in constant motion. The first one of these, about 17 minutes in, begins by following the characters as Ota reproaches Reiko over the fate of Kitami, panning and tracking around the room to frame and reframe characters or groups of characters. About halfway through, we settle on the drunk Toura, who hears music outside. The camera falls in behind him, then overtakes him to reveal the ghost of Takao on the threshold. Suddenly, there's a 180 degree whip-pan back inside, but now the entire reception has been plunged into darkness with only the faces of the characters implicated in the Takao story (Sakamiki, the Professor, Nozawa, Toura, Nakayama and Misako) spotlit. This tableau is held while Takao's eerie song plays out. Then the lights come on, revealing the rest of the wedding party, the camera dollies back in and returns to the fray (Ota's confrontation). At the tail end of the shot, after Takumi appears and takes things in yet another direction, the camera dollies out into the garden (and the night, and the fog) to transition through a hidden dissolve to another night, another fog, another garden and another flashback.

The use of sequence shots was not entirely an aesthetic decision, apparently, but an expedient one to get most of the film in the can and edited before Shochiku realised what Oshima what he was really doing. This speed does show in the execution of several shots, with shaky dolly work or awkward framings and reframings, but Oshima's tactic sort of worked - he got the film completed before the studio interfered - and sort of didn't - they pulled it from distribution after three days.

[Ishmael]

Thanks for the information about Charulata on DVD. Any recommendations for where these discs can be purchased? I'm assuming the quality is less than stellar, but would be glad to hear otherwise.

The DVDs of the Ray films are indeed less than stellar, but all are watchable except for Joi Baba Felunath. That has a most bizarre subtitling problem: during a silent sequence at the beginning of the film, a long sequence of subtitles come up on the screen. It turns out that they're actually subtitles for dialogue at the end of the movie, so they provide a handy spoiler for those who want to read the end of the film while watching it begin. At least the subtitles are repeated later at the appropriate place. There's also another scene where the subtitles proceed the dialogue by at least two minutes. I can't say that this ruined the movie for me, but it's definitely mighty weird. The quality of the picture and sound on these DVDs varies. None of the films have been restored, and there's a lot of print damage. There's also a fair amount of hiss on most of the audio tracks. In fact, they're marginally worse than Sony's Apu Trilogy. As rentals, though, they didn't bother me. At least I got to see them. Just don't expect anything better than VHS quality.

[zedz]

Two films that surprised me seeing them again after a very long time. Both of these made the first cut of my list last time around, but I was surprised to discover how selective my memory of each had been.

The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach

A beautiful, austere film biography in the second person. After my single viewing in the late 80s I had extremely vivid memories of the musical performances, which were perfectly reproduced on the DVD, even down to the details of composition and the speed and trajectory of the exquisitely blunt camera movements. I had only vague memories of the 'documentation' shots, and was surprised by how much of this material there was in the film, and I had completely forgotten the film's few 'dramatised' scenes. Still, the emotional effect was just as intense this time around. By holding conventional identification at arm's length and instead focussing on the banal everyday details of Bach's life (all those documents, all that jockeying for position) with the sublime music expressing all of the emotion, it's peculiarly moving, particularly in the tumultuous denouement. And seeing actual people actually playing actual music on actual instruments on screen remains one of the most incredible special effects - why should that make a film avant-garde? Fans of early Greenaway shorts should probably give this a try.

She and He

This made the lower reaches of my list last time around on the residual impression of its uncommonly vivid characters and relationships and the power of the climactic scene in which Naoko helps the ragpicker search for his dog. The style of the film I'd recalled to be standard 60s realism, but it's actually much spikier, very documentary-like. Having now seen Hani's masterpiece Inferno of First Love, I'm much more aware of how challenging a filmmaker Hani could be, and there's plenty of evidence of his interesting and subversive choices in this film. A passage like the children's turf war in which Naoko becomes embroiled verges on the disturbing surrealism of Emperor Tomato Ketchup, but it seems that this is one Hani film that Terayama did not have a hand in - though I stand to be corrected. And that search for the dog is a brilliant abstracted suspense sequence, a creepy orchestration of architecture and darkness that make Antonioni dance with Lynch.

What's most impressive about the film, though, is that it's one of the few films to tackle the gulf between the middle classes and the poor head on. Plenty of films depict poverty, some even without sentimentality, but very few (some Cinema Novo, Viridiana perhaps) explore the awkward interface between the haves and the have-nots, certainly not with the intensity and intelligence of this film. Sachiko Hidari carries the film with a perfectly pitched performance of a difficult role. Molly Shannon's compassion-addict in Year of the Dog is the only comparable modern role I can think of, but neither Hani nor Hidari play the role for laughs or pathos. Every relationship and emotion is scrunched-up and problematic: who's exploiting who? what does it mean that the ragpicker fails to live up to her / our expectations? The film does give in to easy satire in other areas, such as the relationship of the other residents to the indigent, and the advent of the driving range (but hey, even Ozu couldn't pass up the satirical implications of the Japanese golf obsession).

By the way, the imdb entry for this is somewhat bizarre, with the minor roles of the Laundry boy and walk-on Doctor tagged as the leads and no reference to the English title (so a search for "She and He" doesn't turn up this film). It looks like a lot of the English titles for films have recently been stripped out of imdb - The Party and the Guests is also unfindable by that or any related title, as are lots of Japanese 60s films (e.g. Death by Hanging and most other Oshimas)

[zedz]

Another Fasbinder fave for the 60s must be Whity - a cross genre Western Musical of withering bitchiness, wich predates the great Spelling soaps, plus Ron Randell as the paterfamilias. Sublime! Fassbinder and Raben's music doesn't get any wilder than this until Jeanne Moreau sings "Each Man Kills the Thing he Loves,, da-de-da" in Querelle.

According to imdb, Love Is Colder than Death and Katzelmacher are Fassbinder's only 1960s features (though Rio das Mortes has a 1969 date in a lot of other places). Given the speed with which he was churning them out and the often rudimentary releases they 'enjoyed' it's probably all quite muddy. But I'm with you on Whity - though I have no idea how I'm going to deal with the full weight of Fassbinder come the 1970s list!

Latest viewing was Irma la Douce, which was distressingly lame: painfully overextended and unfunny. No doubt very 'risque' in its day, it hasn't aged at all well. Rather than waste any more energy on it, I might as well just recycle my comment on The Chase: "There's a sense of trying to push boundaries, but the attempt is so mired within dated conventions that all the effort feels misdirected, and the desperate hipness makes the whole thing seem all the more antique."

[souvenir]

Latest viewing was Irma la Douce, which was distressingly lame: painfully overextended and unfunny. No doubt very 'risque' in its day, it hasn't aged at all well.

Agreed. Irma is Wilder's most disappointing film in my opinion, though, strangely enough, it was actually his highest grossing picture. Aside from The Apartment, I think One, Two, Three remains the most enjoyable thing Wilder did in the decade. Its antic zaniness rivals the best of the screwball comedies from the 30s and 40s.

[Cold Bishop]

I can't help but ask zedz, with Japanesenewwave.com gone, how do you keep viewing these films.

Honestly, the only deterrent keeping me from submitting a list is the large amount of movies that I feel from reading and word-of-mouth are essential to see before making any sort of opinion of the decade. With the sixties, these are mostly made up of Imamuras, Oshimas, Shinoda, Masumuras, Hanis, etc.

I really hate to turn this into something that should be better off in the "bootleg" thread, but while I'm trying to put together such a list, I can't help but feel very disheartened by the large amount of "must-see" movies that I know are out there, but I cant seem to track down.

[Scharphedin2]

Thanks for the White Dove tip. Was that a Facets release?

Yes, I viewed the Facets release, and although I am not about to blunder into recommending anything with Facets' name on it, I would say that this release is closer to the "best" of their efforts, than it is to their "worst."

I am happy to see that I will likely not be the only one to cast a vote for Billy Wilder in the ‘60s. To me, he belongs to that first group of directors that I became aware of as directors in my early teens, and the film that introduced me was a TV broadcast of The Apartment. Since then, I have seen almost all of Wilder's films, but The Apartment is still the one (aside from everything else it has going for it) that I can always come back to and experience all the basic pleasures of simply watching a fun and entertaining film. One, Two, Three is the obvious competitor from the decade, but I also think that The Fortune Cookie has its moments; in fact, it is completely outrageous – to me the seminal pairing of Lemmon and Matthau.

Some quick comments on a few ‘60s films that I have viewed recently:

Elia Kazan's Wild River. I think this is first a really gorgeous cinemascope film – in terms of the use of color and composition, it is very obviously the sibling of East of Eden. The story concerns an official of the American government, who is sent to the Tennessee Valley in the 1930s to lead the evacuation of an area that will be flooded as an effect of the erection of a dam. In the telling of his story, Kazan manages to touch on several of the important issues of his own day in relation to race, gender, and constitutional rights, without losing sight of the human story(-ies). The element that most viewers can usually agree on with Kazan's films is the quality of the performances, and there are some exceptional ones in this film as well – Montgomery Clift and Jo Van Fleet, of course, but Lee Remick touched me above all.

Samuel Fuller's Underworld, USA. The title says it all; Fuller tells an archetypal tale of revenge in a manner that feels as if you are in the ring with a prizefighter. The pace is brisk, and the cinematic language is blunt and kinetic. A man is beaten to death by four hoodlums in a back alley, and we see it all in silhouette on a wall. A gorgeous blonde teen hooker has been beaten by her pimp, and Fuller allows the audience to take in the bruises in long close-ups of her face. The drowning of a fat man is accomplished by pushing him under and standing on his shoulders. The film would fit in nicely with the gangster dramas and noirs of the ‘30s and ‘40s, the main difference being that Fuller's way of talking is much more direct.

Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring. Despite my Scandinavian origins, I have not been that attracted to Bergman in the past, but I was deeply impressed with this film. I liked the idea that Berman built his film on a folk ballad -- a short tale of a crime and its revenge set in medieval times. Several weeks later, the film is still vividly with me, particularly the moment close to the end, where Von Sydow wrenches a birch tree from the ground with his bare hands – the violence and almost arbitrary nature of this act, when we well know what the scene anticipates. The film is structured around two other scenes of harrowing and highly graphic violence, but to me it was this short moment that bore the very strongest emotional impact.

Ermanno Olmi's Il Posto. I am not sure what the correct term for Olmi's particular brand of “realistâ€

[tryavna]

One question I quickly throw out there in closing, as I need to finish my coffee and get going -- why, with this most romantic of peoples (the Italians), has the tradition of realism and documentarism been so particularly strong in the country's film history?

I suppose the short -- and simplistic -- answer is that it was by necessity (i.e., in response to the difficulties on immediate post-war conditions). Of course, I'd be kind of interested in hearing whether or not you think the realist/documentarist tradition continued much beyond the classic boundaries of the Neorealist period. Watching later Visconti, Fellini, etc., as well as Leone, Bava, etc., I've always gotten the impression that the Italians couldn't wait to get back into the studio so that they could re-embrace stylization.

This is a very genuine question from me. I just attended an interesting presentation on Neorealism yesterday, so I've been thinking about Italian directors quite a bit during the past 24 hours.

[Awesome Welles]

One question I quickly throw out there in closing, as I need to finish my coffee and get going -- why, with this most romantic of peoples (the Italians), has the tradition of realism and documentarism been so particularly strong in the country's film history? DeSica, Rossellini, Antonioni, Visconti, Olmi, Rosi, Scola, Amelio, to just list a few of the bigger names... all of them began their careers with films in the realist/documentary vein.

It seems like such an easy answer that maybe it isn't the answer at all, but perhaps this is due to the fact that all the directors grew up during the war and were assistant directors or directors themselves during the neo-realist period.

I always feel that a country's traditions, whether these be literary or originating from the stage inform their cinematic practices. Of course one also has to take into account what political changes have informed their artistic practices. Both World Wars provided (in Europe) impetus for not only propagandistic practices but also, in the case of Italy, a backlash on the promotion by the Italian goverment that Italy was in a strong position. The filmmakers sought to reveal the truth and expose (to use a Cuban phrase) a country of underdevelopment, where people were suffering. Perhaps this need to unveil a truth inscribed artistic practices in those young Italian filmmakers and this was thus carried forward, whereby many new and young filmmakers forgot, for a long time, what it was like to make films that were any different.

Italy of course has suffered at the hands of much corruption and filmmakers like Francesco Rosi have sought to tackle these issues. Rosi is, as those who have seen his films know, a great aesthete. His films are wonderfully stylised and in my opinion you really do get the best of both worlds. He provides a great bridge between neo-realism and the latter stylisations of Italian cinema. It may just be that, like the old phrase "if it isn't broken, don't fix it". The documentary/realist aesthetic may just be the best way to get a point across. Godard's agit-prop didn't work because no one saw it, whereas everyone saw neo-realism in the 40s, I can't comment on the 1960s as I have no idea of the cinema admissions.

[Scharphedin2]

I think that necessity is only part of the answer. Clearly DeSica, Rosselini, Visconti and other directors, who began their film careers right around the time of World War II and in the years immediately following made the films they did with the means at their dispossal, and also to a degree in response to the socio-economical conditions in Italy following the war. Even the early realist films and documentaries by Fellini and Antoinioni can be explained this way.

However, the thought struck me, because even with directors arriving on the scene later, I think there is the same pattern to an extent. To begin with Olmi and Rosi, these directors made their first films in 1953 and 1952 respectively; Olmi made more than a score of documentaries, before breaking into narrative films in the sixties, and Rosi's first handful of feature films were very rooted in the documentary tradition. With these two, one could say that they remained committed to social issues throughout their careers, and that they have retained elements of the realist-documentarist school in their work. Pietro Germi was of the same generation (although he began as a screenwriter already during the war), and as far as I know his earlier work is rooted in realism, but then later he moved on to make the better known comedic films.

Then we have directors like Bertolucci and Pasolini who do not make their debuts until the '60s, but then with films that are very influenced by neo-realism and documentary film styles. And, even bringing the argument up to date, I think the argument can be made that the early work of directors such as Amelio (Ladro di bambini and L'America) and Tornatorre (Nuovo Paradiso and Stanno Tutto Bene) also is quite rooted in the realist tradition.

I have not seen nearly enough Italian cinema to justify making any real statement on this. It just struck me as interesting that so many of the filmmakers I am familiar with out of Italy share this realist or documentarist strain in their early work. Needless to say Leone and Bava do not fit into this pattern, as Tryavna points out above.

I would be curious to read the thoughts of posters with a greater knowledge of Italian film than me.

[zedz]

I can't help but ask zedz, with Japanesenewwave.com gone, how do you keep viewing these films.

JNWC was the key. They pretty much covered Imamura during their brief existence. My Oshima viewing is thanks to the JNWC titles, the three Raro titles, and a couple of kind donations from a friend (a copy of Kino's OOP Violence at Noon VHS and an alarmingly shonky, but gratefully received, Three Resurrected Drunkards from who knows where). With the even more elusive Yoshida I've had to make do with similarly clandestine, or unsubbed, sources. Joen, which will definitely be making my 60s list, looks like a digitalisation of a dub of a VHS of a long-forgotten TV screening, for instance. You take what you can get. Has any other film movement as major as this been so poorly served by English-subtitled DVD?

Honestly, the only deterrent keeping me from submitting a list is the large amount of movies that I feel from reading and word-of-mouth are essential to see before making any sort of opinion of the decade. With the sixties, these are mostly made up of Imamuras, Oshimas, Shinoda, Masumuras, Hanis, etc.

Don't be deterred. The more you see the more gaps you'll perceive. When I saw She and He way back when, I was happy just to 'knock off' another New Wave director, but when I finally caught up with the blinding Inferno of First Love, I realised that I needed to track down all of his work. Even though Shinoda is probably the best-represented New Wave director, that just makes the missing titles that remain (e.g. Punishment Island) all the more frustrating.

Which brings me back to my Oshima viewing. I've had to negotiate a considerable gap between Night and Fog in Japan from 1960 and 1966's Violence at Noon. That includes a couple of important features and the entirety of Oshima's extensive TV documentary work. Given how important documentary was to the form and content of his fiction films, I'm probably missing out on some serious light-shedding there.

Violence at Noon
I've already commented on this recently, but I have to rave some more. The editing style of this film is simply astonishing, and in drastic contrast to the long tracking shots of Night and Fog in Japan (I think Desser counts several thousand shots for this film, as opposed to Night and Fog's 43). And it's an editing style that owes as little to classic Hollywood editing as it does to modish Godard jumpcuts. Typically, Oshima will cover a given scene from a multitude of angles and distances, and create chains of edits that view the same material from different positions. In contrast to the earlier film, the camera is almost always static (the few exceptions are tilts, until we get to the penultimate scene in which the two female leads meet in a train carriage, which is covered by a series of mysterious and extreme back and forth pans), but the effect is one of constant, dynamic motion. The dense montage creates a sense of deconstructed camera movement: a series of shots of the same character from different angles being a deconstructed circular track, for example; a series of shots of the same character from different distances (ending up on an extreme extreme closeup of their eye, say) a deconstructed zoom. The use of the soundtrack is also arresting and original. When Shino has her first flashback during Eisuke's initial attack, it's totally silent, but when we return to her present, the sound only gradually bleeds back in. The content of this film is utterly compelling, but it's the style that keeps me rivetted to the screen every second.

Death by Hanging
This is where Oshima's thorny, dense mature style really emerges. As noted above, this film is closely related to Three Resurrected Drunkards (which I think barely preceded it), but TRD is sort of the streamlined, Chuck Jones version. Death by Hanging is an encyclopedia in comparison, though it's a prankster's encyclopedia. At one level, Oshima's 'messages' come through loud and clear: the death penalty is an abomination, Japan's treatment of Koreans ditto. But he piles so many different intellectual layers onto the absurdist premise (R, a convicted murderer, is hanged but fails to die) that the film sprawls into more dimensions than it - or you - can contain. In the course of the film, Oshima teases out the metaphysical, moral, legal, psychological, political and historical implications (and there's probably more angles I've overlooked) of R's failure to die, while all the time being strikingly staged and blackly funny. The officials need to get R to acknowledge his guilt, and his R-ness, before they can re-execute him, and they attempt to do this by ever more elaborate re-enactments of his crimes - Oshima's favoured cyclical structure is again evident. In this film, Oshima returns to his long, fluid takes, but they're less flashy than those of Night and Fog in Japan, and in general the style is much more staid than Violence at Noon, maybe because the content is anything but. I have immense respect for this film, but seeing it again, I loved it less than other 60s Oshimas, so while Violence at Noon will be racing up my list, this one's probably staying put. I should also put in a word for the film's trailer, one of the best I've seen. It's more like an incredibly informative "director's introduction" to the film, specifying the material's historical basis and clarifying the filmmakers' intentions. The series of mug-shots of the film's cast and crew is wonderful.

The Shooting
When, oh when is somebody going to give this film a decent release? The recent Madman edition has mediocre print quality and is in the incorrect 1.33 ratio, but I've never seen this on the big screen or in its correct ratio on the small one. Nevertheless, this is currently the only non-experimental American film that's still in my top 50 (I've had to do some pretty drastic jettisoning - even films that were in my top 20 last time around have been pushed off). Although the compositions are painfully, obviously wrong on this DVD (even to the extent of both major characters in a given shot being off-screen at some points), it still looks fantastic. The pitiless landscape is perfectly captured, and Hellman's placement of his characters in it is as expressive as Walsh or Mann. Plus there's the appallingly nihilistic, almost Beckettian storyline, with fantastic use of ellipses to keep us on edge, and three exceptionally great performances, with Nicholson tagging along behind the mighty Oates and Millie Perkins' ultimate femme fatale. What I also noticed this time around was the wonderful attention Hellman pays to the horses, prefiguring, perhaps, the fetishism of Two-Lane Blacktop? It's one of the few westerns where they're more than just props or local colour, but living, cohabiting creatures.

Ride in the Whirlwind
I've always felt this was the lesser of the two films, and still do, but it's nevertheless a fantastic achievement. Again, it's minimal and existential - Beckett is still a valid reference point - and again, there's more than a passing nod to film noir. No femme fatale this time, but the kind of oppression by fate you see in so many of those films is present and correct: the clang of Lang rings out through the wilderness. For me, there's less happening on the allegorical level, and the situation lacks the mystery (and a little of the horror) of The Shooting. Plus, there's no Oates (Cameron Mitchell is fine, but no substitute, and Harry Dean leaves early) and Millie Perkins is much more constrained. Nevertheless, a great film.