The First Features List

[jazzo]

Let’s not forget Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant.

And I’m right with therewillbeblus on Hot Rod.

[Never Cursed]

Two introductory experimental misfires from directors with polar opposite sensibilities and goals:

Mysterious Object at Noon (Apichatpong Weerasethakul): Completely antiseptic combination of documentary and acted narrative, intertwined through a sort of improv game: ordinary people interviewed in the documentary segments contribute a few sentences to a story, which is then acted out by performers in a narrative of increasing silly crypticism. The result is a great if unfortunate object lesson in the power of film to shape and constrict. The described additions to the story are all interesting in their own regard given the context of who is telling them (young kids add lots of ridiculous flourishes to their segment, a folk music group performs their segment with traditional instruments), but they (and the fictional segments) are all filmed and cut together in the same inert art-house style regardless of its appropriateness to the story being told. Obviously some of the more fanciful ideas proposed by the participants could not be realized, either at all or within the confines of the tiny production, but the amount of cop-outs taken by the director in terms of actually filming them are too much even for a meager film. Events as disparate as a war, a plane crash, killings, disappearances, and grand revelations are all rendered as static conversations in the same two or three locations, smoothed over into nothingness by a director suffering from inexperience, overcommitment to distancing techniques, or both. We end up with an anti-gestalt movie, one that is less than the sum of its (individually unimpressive) conceptual parts. Someone please tell me that Weerasethakul drifts from this general direction, as I at least want to give Uncle Boonmee a chance...

Lost In London (Woody Harrelson): Wild Birdman pisstake/nepotism project that follows writer/director/star Harrelson through a single night of escalating crisis sparked by the near-dissolution of his marriage. I doubt anyone reading this has heard about this movie or given it any thought since 2017, which, considering its cast and frankly insane production gimmick (it was shot in a single take crisscrossing the city center of London and broadcast real-time into theaters as a live event) is never a good sign. Seeing it now, removed from hype, confirms that it is a deeply flawed and bizarrely egotistical film, but also one of curious interest in its technical wizardry (which isn’t really a credit to the director in this instance) and in the depths of self-deprecation that Harrelson is willing to plumb. The script is pretty amateurish, full of unbearably cute first-draft darlings that a more experienced writer would have killed (and were I Harrelson, I would also have not railed on Wes Anderson for being too “precious” in such a work) but Harrelson, playing himself in a dramatization of a real altercation with police he had in 2002, indulges in a level of self-criticism that one rarely sees a modern celebrity cop to (unless of course they are backpedalling after being cancelled.) The dramatized version of Harrelson is a relentless, noxious, self-serving piece of shit, framed in such a way as to indicate that the real Harrelson is deeply embarrassed to have behaved like this and is airing it as a way of purging. It doesn’t go so far as, say, a Sam Levinson-esque piece of empathetic critical introspection, but these elements of the film are at least not a backhanded compliment on its director’s part. There’s still way too much affected banter that does seem insular or self-serving (which honestly makes it more interesting to me in how it captures a celebrity that is and is not self-aware), but I never stopped wanting the film to be better-written than it ultimately was. (It does admittedly have one scene, involving vomit, that is one of the more effective comedic surprises I’ve seen in some time).

[therewillbeblus]

The Mother and the Whore

If I'm going to plug for this masterwork to be considered Eustache's first feature, I may as well defend it. After posturing at nouvelle vague malaise, particularly in his first 'technically'-qualifying Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes, Eustache disgorged a deeply personal, epochal account of the life of a drifter who is ironically living in stagnancy. The antithesis of Linklater’s Before trilogy, as intimacy born from shared insight is replaced with ennui reinforced through fatalistic myopia. Léaud parrots a belief that there is no such thing as chance, and destines himself to corporeal purgatory as a non-participant because he’s afraid to engage with the world; and yet he’s curious and magnetized by the very stimuli he is repelled by, frightened of, and indifferent to. This is a film about the disease of disengagement pitted against the allure of engagement, with little chance for happy endings but plenty of amusing fleeting interludes to pass the time. So for privileged, socially-rebellious, self-destructively apathetic and inert -yet self-indulgently pretentious- intellectuals in modern western civilizations, it’s Life: The Movie.

And then Françoise Lebrun's speech happens in the final act, which serves as a confession from Eustache against the value of his own solipsism, a refraction away from his narrative and into unconditional concern for a voice ignored by society, including the film itself. What appears to be an argument for humanism transforms into another devastating illustration of emotional confusion. He doesn't know what to do with this uncomfortable empathy that leaves the orbit of his gravitational narcissism, or the tragedy of his powerlessness to forge a connection with the foreign experiences he cares for in these women or even himself, and so he channels his anguish in the only authentic way he can to demonstrate this painful fallibility: He has his whore demand release from her label, he has his mother cry alone with temporal attention signifying equal worth to the absent couple, and he has his stand-in scream.

The final scene is a complicated eruption that communicates a manic crisis of enhanced passion, but there's no catharsis in this surrender- only a realization of impotence to breach isolation, regurgitated into the void as the film abruptly ends. The abrasive finish is disconcerting after the meandering banality we've witnessed for so long, drama extinguished as soon as it's triggered, and we truly understand why these people have kept their guards up for three and a half hours, only it's been far longer than that. They are withered souls in youthful bodies, having lived their own personal eternities in perpetual alienation. This wasn't triggered by May '68 but it is a symptom of that cultural era, and there's no antidote in sight.

[zedz]

I love The Mother and the Whore, but it's really stretching it to consider it a debut feature. Eustache had made four important films between 40 minutes and an hour in length over the preceding ten years, and a 110 minute documentary (which I haven't seen) in 1971. Nice write-up, though!

My latest qualifying film is The Wolf House (2018), by Joaquin Cocina and Cristobal Leon, a pair of amazing Chilean animators whose work is lifesize and kind of installationesque, in that they transform actual spaces for the purposes of creating their animation, using a wide array of techniques. Their work is hard to describe, but harder to forget, and tends to be in the realm of sinister / magical psychodrama.

This film was purportedly created some time ago by a creepy German / Chilean bee-keeping cult, who have recently restored and disseminated it to persuade the public that they're not really creepy at all. (It doesn't work.) A young girl flees the cult with a couple of pigs, holes up in an abandoned house to evade the wolf prowling the woods, and finds that the world she creates for herself inside might be even more dangerous than the external threats. It's harder to sustain an uncanny mood over feature length, but the filmmakers' invention seldom flags, and this is a tour-de-force of painstakingly raw creativity.

I also rewatched Walkabout, which is still a great, great film. I'm even grudgingly accepting that my least favourite bits (the vignettes where we leave the protagonists and see what other white folk are up to in the outback) are thematically significant, if rather unsubtle, in providing talking-point counterexamples to the main narrative's treatment of sexuality, colonial exploitation and subsistence hunting.

[therewillbeblus]

I love The Mother and the Whore, but it's really stretching it to consider it a debut feature. Eustache had made four important films between 40 minutes and an hour in length over the preceding ten years, and a 110 minute documentary (which I haven't seen) in 1971.

I hear you, but they all feel like shorts to me, even if that is totally my own stretching of definition. I'm surprised that Les Mauvaises Fréquentations makes the cut on time, as nothing more takes place than in the early meandering amateur shorts of any nouvelle vague auteur. La Rosière de Pessac and Le Cochon are likewise banal docs that, aside from the former- which somewhat earns its length- seem like strange films to assign "feature" to- though I subjectively struggle at times with documentaries in general fitting the term unless they take on a narrative evolution that feels wholesome and organic (i.e. The Color of Fear, Exit Through the Gift Shop). I've only seen Odette Robert, which is the truncated available version of that doc, Numéro zéro, and it's an excellent fly-on-the-wall unveiling of Eustache's grandmother's history through prompted storytelling. Still, it doesn't feel like a "first feature," which I suppose The Mother and the Whore does because it takes the one-note elements of all of these works (narcissism and ennui, ritual and mechanical participation, and personal narrative of what's been lost, how we've been branded, and our powerlessness to escape the isolation of our experiences via memories or in real time) and morphs them all together into a multidimensional existential journey. I won't dispute running times, but none of those others feel like a feature- though the three-and-a-half-hour behemoth takes the single shades of each and makes a bold sculpture from all of them and much, much more.

[zedz]

I kind of agree that La Rosiere de Pessac is unremarkable when taken in isolation (though really fascinating in conjunction with its remake), but the banality of Le Cochon is definitely deliberate and strategic, and I think it's a truly great film.

Also, I can't agree with any "documentaries don't count" nonsense, as that wipes out the entire careers of some of the greatest filmmakers, and, for the purposes of this project, means that the Errol Morris film under consideration isn't Gates of Heaven - a truly remarkable, fully-formed debut feature - but The Dark Wind, which nobody talks about for good reason.

[zedz]

Oh, and Never Cursed: Weerasethakul's later films are nothing like Mysterious Object at Noon, which I've always considered an interesting, but failed, experiment. I like the idea, but in execution the results are far less interesting than I'd hope, with many of the participants either failing to fully engage with the exercise, or developing the story in a predictable, boring way. Any of the later features (except for The Adventure of Iron Pussy) will give you a better idea of what he's about and what he's capable of.

[therewillbeblus]

I kind of agree that La Rosiere de Pessac is unremarkable when taken in isolation (though really fascinating in conjunction with its remake), but the banality of Le Cochon is definitely deliberate and strategic, and I think it's a truly great film.

Also, I can't agree with any "documentaries don't count" nonsense, as that wipes out the entire careers of some of the greatest filmmakers, and, for the purposes of this project, means that the Errol Morris film under consideration isn't Gates of Heaven - a truly remarkable, fully-formed debut feature - but The Dark Wind, which nobody talks about for good reason.

Oh, I know that "docs don't count" is nonsense! But I'm trying to make (a very biased and individualized) distinction with documentary. Gates of Heaven -and the only doc that'll make my list, The Color of Fear, which is essentially a filmed focus group- feel like features because the scope of their vision are feature-length in texture. Something like Le Cochon, to me, may be intentionally banal but its insularity feels like a short-idea rather than the equally-physically insular The Color of Fear that expands upon its idea in waves that create ripples. If Sherman's March were eligible, it would easily make my list for similar reasons of conceptual density.

By the way, I'm totally aware that I'm defining features based on a 'feeling' that has no basis in objectivity. Films over a certain length may be technically features, and a film like Le Cochon may feel like a feature to someone else, but I'm trying to explain a feeling and it probably doesn't translate well when I set up abstract parameters. In the spirit of on-brand terminology/genre-bending, let's just all agree that Dutchman is both a horror movie and a feature and should be on everyone's list.

Speaking of insular films that speak volumes... Dutchman is a movie I've written about before, but lately have found myself ruminating on the many layers of social horror it elicits from me. The film triggers me on a very personal level, because Shirley Knight embodies the kind of dangerous qualities I seem to always magnetize towards, despite consciously recognizing, in romantic partners. The film makes me shamefully yet physiologically want her, and simultaneously fear her with its positioned objectivity. It’s not only social horror on a larger scale, encompassing broad notions of the unknowable nature of people, or the cessation of safety when we simply exist in public due to the presence of other people with different intentions and patterns of intrusive action, or the specifics of race relations.. but the film is also operating on a very idiosyncratic, deeper plane for the generalized insatiable male. Knight is the scariest masked horror movie monster ever, because she has no mask, because she’s real, and because she entrances parts of me that my mind knows disinhibits self-preservation, that which my psyche has no will to securely combat. The film reminds me that I am weak, powerless, and self-destructive, not only externally triggered by another but due to my own essence.

Knight's performance is one of the best ever, and the surreal filmmaking to match the play's strengths, and morph its tone in step with our and Freeman's experience, is what will catapult it to the upper tiers of my list (it's a list-worthy 60s film too *two birds, one stone*).

[zedz]

Dog Star Man (Stan Brakhage, 1964) - This is a masterpiece in the original sense of the word, a work wherein Brakhage deploys a broad range of his accomplished techniques to show us just what he can do. It's an encompassing work that fuses his most cosmic imagery with his most intimate. One of the things I like most in it is a rare quality that it shares with another amazing first feature, Jan Svankmajer's Alice, which is the way it manifests a child's eye view of the world. In Svankmajer's films, it's the way that children invest everyday objects with magical life in order to enact their narratives. That's how I used to play as a child, and I've never seen it better evoked than in that film.

In Dog Star Man, you see how children will imagine an ordinary task into a mythic quest. One man and his dog go to chop some wood, but in Brakhage's telling, it becomes a timeless epic, augured by solar flares, achieved against colossal odds, and upon which, like the red wheelbarrow glazed with rain water, so much depends. One of the miracles of the film is that Brakhage didn't lose a limb stumbling through all that snow with his axe!

Part One establishes this thesis, but I prefer the more concentrated and stylistically wilder subsequent parts, which almost seem like the character in part one hallucinating while he's out there.

Uski Roti (Mani Kaul, 1969) - The general idea of this film is so crystal clear - feckless and brutal men; victimized women - that in narrative terms it feels more straightforward than it really is. Kaul's apparently simple narrative is tricked out with devastating elisions, unsignalled leaps, more than a few sequences that seem to be projections of the protagonist, and disjunctive edits that might be reflections of a psychic break, or might just be stylistic effects.

What really resonates in this extremely confident first feature is Kaul's stark, emblematic mise-en-scene and sound. The soundtrack is post-synced and determinedly non-naturalistic: silence is the base-line and any additional sound effects are very deliberately orchestrated to serve narrative ends (such as increasing tension or evoking a mood) rather than ones of verisimilitude.

Kaul's second film, One Day Before the Rainy Season uses similar techniques but pushes them further, telling a more wide-ranging historical story largely from the confines of a small hut on a hill, with off-screen sound (a celebration, an approaching horseman, the rain) carrying a heavy narrative burden.

[swo17]

Great thoughts! Regarding my pedantic point earlier about Anticipation of the Night (1958, 42 min) disqualifying Dog Star Man (1962-4, 79 min), I think the latter is just barely feature-length, but clearly seems to fit the spirit of the new rules. However, by the same logic, I'm not sure if I can choose Zorns Lemma (1970, 60 min) over Hapax Legomena (1971-2, 197 min)

[zedz]

Great thoughts! Regarding my pedantic point earlier about Anticipation of the Night (1958, 42 min) disqualifying Dog Star Man (1962-4, 79 min), I think the latter is just barely feature-length, but clearly seems to fit the spirit of the new rules. However, by the same logic, I'm not sure if I can choose Zorns Lemma (1970, 60 min) over Hapax Legomena (1971-2, 197 min)

I thought the lowest running time bar had been officially lifted to 45 minutes, which would rule out Anticipation of the Night.

It also means that Mujo is eligible for Akio Jissoji!

Sixty minutes has always been feature length, anyway. No way that can be considered a short.

[swo17]

The new rule is that you can use your judgment to pick whatever you think constitutes a director's debut feature, so long as your choice is at least 40 minutes long and you only choose one film per director. So you could choose Anticipation of the Night, or you could argue that that's too short and choose Dog Star Man instead. It also means that, yes, you don't have to rule Mujo out on a technicality just because there was one film slightly over 40 minutes preceding it. You might say that 50 or 60 minutes is too short for one director, and just fine for another. Where different people have exercised different judgment, the "vote for it" rule will sort everything out.

To me, 60 minutes is a midlength feature which could be reasoned either way. Zorns Lemma could be the shortest film on my list if I decide to include it. But it probably helps its chances that it's one of my very favorite films. I'll have to think about it more

[therewillbeblus]

Zorns Lemma definitely feels like a feature to me, a hypnotic endless cycle of personalized signification. However, I also never considered Hapax Legomena as one feature when it consists of so many great episodes I always took as very separate parts of a larger "art project" vs. whole omnibus film or whatever. Either would make my list easy, so I'll happily collaborate on a discussion towards a judgment call to avoid orphaning.

[zedz]

If it helps, I'll be voting for Zorns Lemma!

[swo17]

OK, I was trying to look smart by drawing a comparison but I haven't even seen all of Hapax Legomena, and its multiple parts don't work the same way as Dog Star Man's. Feel free to permanently replace me with an image of grinding meat

[knives]

If it helps, I'll be voting for Zorns Lemma!

Seconded!

[therewillbeblus]

Those help me leave it on mine as well, though I definitely would have been surprised if Hapax Legomena was the preferred categorization of "feature"!

[Maltic]

Zero for Conduct is 42 on Letterboxd/tmdb and 44 on imdb, Wavelength is 43 and 45, respectively...

[therewillbeblus]

Either way they'd be eligible

[Maltic]

Oh right, then I guess Dog Star Man and Anticipation of the Night will split the Brakhage vote, cf. the Godfathers in some of the Sight & Sound polls.

[therewillbeblus]

I think part of the idea is that, if someone doesn’t want vote splitting to happen, they make a case why one film should qualify as the “first feature” over the other. It might still happen but defending one v the other in this discussion thread can help eliminate completely arbitrary placement.

[Maltic]

Sounds fair

[knives]

Is there an English subbed edition of Hark’s The Butterfly Murders around?

[Nw_jahrles]

To clarify cases where the director’s early work was co-directed with someone else before they went on to solo directing projects. Are these filmmakers totally ineligible or we have to choose their first solo effort. I’m thinking Mario Bava and Nic Roeg.

[swo17]

Bava is eligible for Black Sunday and Roeg for Walkabout