With the list reaching its deadline, I feel I should atleast write about a few films. While most of these which will follow in the next few days could wait until the Defend Your Darlings thread, I feel I should atleast stick it out for a few in the hopes to change a few minds in the last second.
Two from my top 10
Come and See (Elem Klimov, 1985) Available from Kino R1
Easily my #1 pick, Elem Klimov’s film explodes the old Truffaut adage about the impossibility of making an anti-war film. Of all the films on the subject of war, I still have to say this is the most successful and my favorite (although that word seems obscene to describe a movie this horrifying). Klimov’s film dives headfirst into the carnage, but unlike, lets say,
Saving Private Ryan (a film which this influenced) this film successfully presents war as a terrifying nightmare completely devoid of any glorification or excitement; a swirling, poetic fever dream which, I imagine, goes the limit as to how effective a narrative film can get in portraying the incomprehensible horror of war. It influenced Malick’s
Thin Red Line also, and while its grimmer and more brutal than anything I could imagine him ever doing, one can see the affinity the film holds for Malick. The film is less a narrative than a succession of hallucinatory visions. After it, what you remember most are these short moments of savage poetry. A green field beautifully lit up by orange flares. The momentary deafness in the protagonist when a bomb drops nearby (directly cribbed, less effectively, by Spielberg). The tracking steadicam shots following the makeshift soldiers desperately searching for food. The German soldiers emerging from the fog like ghosts. The sweltering, agonizing journey through a crowded swamp filled with lamenting survivors (referencing
Marketa Lazerová?) leading to a charred corpse.
Despite all the visceral carnage, the most memorably terrifying image from the film is the look of sheer terror on Aleksei Kravchenko’s face at the end of the film. This decade probably produced the two greatest performance from child actors I have ever seen: this film and Hector Barbenco’s
Pixote. Crafting the film as a coming-of-age story, Kravchenko’s face, like Fernando Ramos da Silva in that film, seems to complete an impossible task: it seems to grow older, more world weary and numb, until the end where the realities of the event which has passed are devastingly impressed on their faces in a manner which seems impossible, short of actually experiencing the events yourself. That Klimov supposedly went Herzogian and had the actor hypnotized really can’t be blamed. It seems unbelievable to ask for such an performance from any child that age naturally.
The film’s only fault is that it veers near propaganda near the end with a somewhat one-dimensional portrait of the German soldiers. But this is expected: the film was commissioned as a propaganda film to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Russia’s victory. That Klimov manages to get away with such an uncompromising, unheroic vision that he does is remarkable enough, and can only be attributed to the Glasnost. Even then, he manages to portray the soldiers as naturally as possible, and there’s hint of madness in them which seems less “evil” than traumatic. There casualties of the insanity of war also. Any hint of the one-dimensional is quickly washed away by the films ending – an almost non-narrative-film-within-a-film – which posits the the atrocities of WWII and Nazism not as the result of inherently evil monsters, but of human beings potentially not unlike the victims. It’s a simple thought, but one which often gets lost when people, and especially films, try to comprehend the incomprehensible of the War and try to reimagine Nazism as a singular phenomenon. This film ultimately does away with all nationalism, and presents the war as the horror story it must be to all soldiers and civilians alike.
Les Destins de Manoel (Raoul Ruiz, 1985) Known subbed bootleg exists
I imagine I'll be this film's sole vote, which is a shame, but unavoidable considering the only way the film could be harder to see was if it was lost. I find it near impossible to try to write about this film. It seems like a work impossible to grasp in its totality after multiple viewings, let alone when you’ve only seen it once on a bootleg tape long ago (and even then, only the three part French version as opposed to the four part Portuguese). But from that one viewing, despite all the confusion and incomprehensibility, I can say it is definitely a masterpiece-of-masterpieces, and if it were ever released in its full form (by Criterion, lets say), I’d like to believe it would cause a sensation.
While
Three Crowns of a Sailor and
City of Pirates have both gotten some love in this thread – and both are great films which will make my 50 – I can’t help but feel that those two films (as well, I imagine, the still unseen-by-me adaptation of
Treasure Island, although it may very well have been released after; you can never tell with Ruiz) feel like warm-ups for this monumental work. There’s descriptions of the film both on
IMDB and
rouge.com.au for those who want to know what its about. The best description I can give is that it’s a fairy-tale… not just a fairy tale, but
THE fairy tale captured on film. It’s a labyrinthe phantasmagoria of dreams, fantasies, alternate realities, magical occurrences, shifting identities, colliding genres, narratives-within-narratives etc. etc. etc. A free-form web of images which could be rendered nonsensical if not for the master’s deft hand. It’s also a epic work (despite its 16mm low budget beginnings) which bears the influences and borrows freely from the works of Lewis Carroll, Robert Lewis Stevenson, H.G. Wells, the Brothers Grimm, Jorge-Luis Borges, Jacques Rivette, Luis Buñuel, Orson Welles,
Sunset Boulevard and much, much more. I know a bootleg of a lone Australian broadcast is out there, and Google Video leads me to believe it may exist online in some form. It doesn’t help that the film is known under various titles, and I believe the bootleg is broadcast under
Manoel dans l’île des merveilles/Manoel on the Island of Marvels (or perhaps
Wonders). If anyone here more adept at tracking bootlegs down can find it, I sure hope you share. This is a lost film whose obscurity should be punishable by law.
More to come...
swo17 wrote:OK, I've checked my usual channels, and nothing. Any suggestions where to find this?
Hmm... I didn't have problems finding subtitles when I looked for it, but alas, I can't find anything now either. Only the unsubbed Chinese release. Makes me wish I kept them. I know they're out there, and they may have originated at KG, although I can't guarantee that.
