1960s List Discussion and Suggestions (Lists Project Vol. 3)

[Cold Bishop]

Japanese Belly Button is the only film available through the usual nefarious sources, no doubt owing to being an ATG film. No subs, alas.

Toru Murakawa's remake of The Beast Must Die (entitled The Beast to Die) is available with subs and is an impressive film, a highlight of the rather weak Japanese Eighties, with Matsuda going full Daniel Day-Lewis in his performance. Nonetheless, it doesn't dampen my interest in tracking down the original, which seems to be too important a film to simply vanish from the face of the earth.

[knives]

That's unfortunate and best of luck in that search.

[zedz]

Since we're speaking Japanese:

The Cage (Shuji Terayama, 1964) – The Experimental Image World of Shuji Terayama (Daguerreo) – This dream-like film is something of a throwback to older forms of experimental cinema: the stalking subjectivity of amateur psychodramas; the full-frontal symbolism of rehashed surrealism (to wit: people carrying clocks around like they've wandered in from Two Men and a Wardrobe or an early Bergman dream sequence). There are plenty of films from the era that fall flat on their faces toting the same baggage, but what makes this one work is Terayama’s instinct for the unsettling image – something that will blossom and spoil in the more transgressive films of the 1970s – and the hypnotic quasi-Amon Duul soundtrack (which may or may not be original).

And hey, it's on YouTube.

[zedz]

After an exhausting day at work, I felt the need to relax with a sure-fire masterpiece, so I rewatched Inferno of First Love, since I needed to figure out just where in my top ten it would end up.

It's a great film that never fails to unnerve me. Hani starts out in the realist mode he'd previously mastered in She and He, and for the first stretch it looks like we're in for a closely observed study of the awkwardness of adolescent sexuality, as Shun and Nanami meet for sex (which never really happens) in a seedy hotel room. Then the characters start talking about their pasts and Hani dives into impressionistic subjectivity. He pulls out all the stops with odd angles, point-of-view camera work, elliptical editing, freeze frames, disjunctive soundtracking and odd masking. And from that point on, even though the film always returns to a solid base of urban realism, Hani's formal invention never flags, giving cinematic expression to the characters' subconscious drives. This is most explicit in the scene where Shun undergoes hypnotherapy and is asked to imagine a movie screen on which he projects his feelings and memories. Hani shoots this as if the therapist's mechanism were literal, so when the latter start to hit too close to home, Shun's stepmother rushes up to the screen to try and block the unacceptable imagery, which, naturally, gets plastered all over her.

The revelations made in that sequence run throughout the film, and are completely creepy, though not as creepy as those made in a matching sequence later in the film which represents

Spoiler

Shun's masturbation fantasy.

I was seriously considering this film for my Horror movie list, but ruled it out on generic grounds. Still, the images in that latter sequence, presumably generated at the behest of the film's scriptwriter, Shuji 'Emperor Tomato Ketchup' Terayama, are far more rattling, particularly in context, than almost anything I've seen in an actual horror movie.

The film plays brilliantly with our sympathies, positing both protagonists as lost souls while also tweaking our suspicions about their complicity. Early in the film, emotionally arrested Shun befriends a young girl in a cemetery and is branded and hounded as a child molester. Of course, this can't possibly be the case, because Shun is the hero, but the more we discover about his seriously fucked-up background and confused state of mind, the more real this possibility becomes, and even though the film dallies with a number of different plot threads, that open question remains the yawning horror at the centre of the film, and it causes us to repeatedly play back what we did and didn't see at the outset.

All of the men in the film are sexually immature or twisted in some profound way, and this is expressed in the way they seek out sexual relationships with grotesquely unequal power relationships. Shun's stepfather is the most grotesque and explicit instance; Nanami's schoolmate's the most comic and pathetic - he makes an embarrassing short film confessing his love for a girl who barely knows he exists.

Nanami has her own sexual and relationship troubles, of course (she's tied up with these screwy guys, after all), but her struggle for sexual self-possession at least seems vaguely winnable, and vaguely reasonable, but the final scenes of the film make clear that this is a world defined and controlled by sexually screwed-up men, and the chances of a good outcome for Nanami are severely circumscribed. She's also the person who reminds us overtly just how screwed up this world is, by pointing out that it's illegal in Japan for her to show us her pubic hair - in a film which includes images that might well be illegal everywhere else.

It's a very troubling film, and the resolution Hani offers is not much resolution at all, and even less consolation. Compromised and problematic as he was, Shun may have been Nanami's best chance at happiness - it would, at least, have been a relationship in which she wielded some power, and in which there was the potential for mutual healing and growth. The immediate alternative is pretty grim.

Watching the film again, it still seems a dead cert for my top ten, but it may be clustering with a couple of related works. Oshima's kids-struggling-with-sex Diary of a Shinjuku Thief is the obvious counterpoint, but Yoshida's incredible The Affair demands attention too. Two films in which women return to a site of sexual depravity and find instead a ballet school sounds like more than a coincidence to me!

I expect this will be another list in which my 'top ten' ends up including twenty or thirty films.

[matrixschmatrix]

Has something happened to the usual back channels? Is there a new place for all the cool kids now?

[knives]

What ever do you mean?

[matrixschmatrix]

I was trying to find Ordinary Fascism and I can't load the website- dunno if it's the site itself or on my end.

[knives]

Your end, works fine for me.

[zedz]

Well, this should be fun.

My normal process for compiling a list is going back to the list I submitted for the previous round, shuffling rankings according to how I feel at the time, and inserting all the films I've (re)discovered since the last go-round.

On the weekend I was trying to figure out which old favourites I needed to rewatch so that I could give them the appropriate ranking. I didn't have my previous list at hand, so I decided to just list, off the top of my head, only those films which I strongly wanted to include in my top 20 (fully expecting these to run to 30 or more titles). I ended up with 66 titles, and haven't even consulted my old list to find out what obvious films I've missed.

So I'm going to end up with quite a different list this time around, and old standbys like Psycho that I couldn't have imagined not including won't even get a look-in.

Still, I have got a nice, mouth-watering pile of re-watches stacked up.

[knives]

Yeah, I can't imagine what to do the next three months since my mental list is already running seventy. I'm almost hoping I don't get to some things just so that I have a good excuse for not listing them.

[swo17]

Yes, I fear I won't even have room for any films I like, only soul-crushing behemoths beside which I can do nothing but tremble with deference.

In other news, I had thought that the New Yorker DVD of Peter Watkins' The War Game and Culloden was long OOP (a couple weeks ago a copy would have cost you at least $50) but that no longer seems to be the case. There are now plenty of new copies for sale on Amazon (including direct from Amazon) in the $10-20 range. Both of these films are very much worth a look.

[knives]

I suppose this is irrelevant to a degree, but are those and a few other New Yorker reappearances new pressings or just found old stock? New Yorker's website is obscure on this point.

[swo17]

FWIW, I already bought a copy and it says it was manufactured in 2006. I suppose it's possible that some surplus stock was found and that once these copies are gone it will be OOP again.

[knives]

In that case people should really be running to those Watkins.

[zedz]

Three Criterion titles to add to the experimental recommendations:

Mothlight (Stan Brakhage, 1963) – By Brakhage (Criterion) – There are lots of films available on Criterion’s astounding BluRays that I could highlight, and it’s actually Dog Star Man that will be placing highest on my personal list, but I’ve singled this one out because it’s the only available 60s Brakhage film that I’ve actually seen on film, where its trademark fluttering immersion is even more powerful. This is one of those films where the filmmaker didn’t just make a highly original film, but he actually managed to find a brand new way to make films, pushing Man Ray’s photograms or Len Lye’s cameraless scratching into a third dimension by actually affixing bits of insects to the celluloid, so that what we’re watching is more like the filmic shadow of a really unusual piece of sculpture. It’s a conceptual leap in filmmaking that’s crunchy and provocative, but the thing with Brakhage is that he can make that kind of concept formally compelling and artistically sophisticated. Thus Mothlight actually works almost onomatopoeically, evoking the look, feel and sound of scrabbling insects while also speculating a kind of moth consciousness, all furious shadows and tantalizing, celestial / infernal light.

Until I rewatched it, I was holding this film in my head as a shining example of “not animation,” since the randomness of the process worked against the creation of the illusion of continuity between frames (which for me is the sine qua non of animation). But damned if Brakhage isn’t doing quite a bit of frame-to-frame animation amongst the inspired, shuffling randomness, deploying, for example, long blades of grass lengthways to create a second or two of coherent, undulating motion. Brakhage is a brilliant inventor, which is why I was giving this film the nod, but he’s also a brilliant craftsman, capable of calibrating subtle filmic effects in the midst of such raging elemental chaos.

Surface Tension (Hollis Frampton, 1968) – A Hollis Frampton Odyssey (Criterion) – The real action on Criterion’s Frampton cornucopia begins in the 70s, as far as I’m concerned, but the early films are great too, and this is the best of the bunch. The film breaks down into three sections, each one of which presents a different variation on viewer anxiety, predicated on text / image disjunction. The first section shows us, in accelerated motion, a guy timing himself speaking, but all we hear is the nagging ringing of a telephone (the signature song of anxiety); the second section, a pixillated dash through the city, is accompanied by untranslated German narration on an unrelated topic; the third section, an extreme close-up of a fish in a tank in the tide, is overlaid with fragmented text. I adore that final section. What we see is seemingly straightforwardly simple, and seems to go together at a semantic level (fish + ocean), but the mechanics of what we’re actually looking at is complex and confusing (the fish is swimming above the waves; is this a regular fish tank planted in the beach? If so, what are the dimensions of that tank? Is there a mirror involved in some way?) But our processing of this complex visual information is continually frustrated / distracted by our need to understand the message that is stuttering out a word or two at a time in the overlaid text. Frampton is a master of making us self-conscious about the way we process and construct information, and this film is a superb statement of intent in that regard.

A Day with the Boys (Clu Gulager, 1969) – George Washington (Criterion) – A good example of the porousness of the narrative / experimental divide. This is ostensibly a narrative film, made by a major studio, and although in this case the narrative is delivered in a manner that so privileges formal experimentation that it easily qualifies as an experimental film, there’s no particular reason why this slight story couldn’t have been delivered in a quite straightforward way. Indeed, the narrative is probably the least interesting thing about the film (though it still annoys me that I forgot to include it in my Horror list).

What this film is really about is luxuriating in texture and technique. The storyline as such doesn’t even really start until the halfway point, and even then its primary contribution is to motivate a marvellous shift of tone. Gulager is basically throwing everything he can think of at the film to make it visually memorable, gorgeous and mysterious (and if you’re going to do that, Laszlo Kovacs is the man you want behind the camera). So this is something of a technical show pony: exaggerated grain, multiple superimpositions, freeze frames, long lens compression, extreme slow motion, solarizing, rack focus. With so much going on visually, it probably helps that the narrative is so sparse.

[zedz]

A little bit of massaging of my rebooted 60s list has generated a pretty rock solid top ten which will be very hard to shake. To my slight surprise, Czechoslovakia comes out on top, with three films in there, followed by two from the USSR and one apiece from Austria, Brazil, France, Iran and Japan

[Dylan]

So, I know a lot of people here loved Peyton Place, but has anybody caught up with its sequel Return to Peyton Place (1961)? It's pretty good. What I really liked about this is the whole small town girl goes to NYC and has an affair that mixes love & art production. The stuff with Tuesday Weld or Brett Halsey bringing Luciana Paluzzi home to bitch queen Mary Astor isn't as effective*. The big problem here is that there are more legitimately big-dramatic plots running through this than the first one and two hours isn't long enough to play all of them out without dropping most of them like a stone in the water - I believe it should've focused on the NYC plot. The film also suffers from having a lower budget that doesn't bring the old cast back (although Diana Varsi left Hollywood), but it's good to have Franz Waxman back on board (I thought his music was the best part about the first film - and here the theme has had lyrics written for it & sung by Rosemary Clooney over the titles). That said, I do like this film, though it really is something very different from the earlier one.

*the Luciana Paluzzi plot is basically Fred Zinnemann's film Teresa: man takes Italian bride home only to have her spat upon by the family, with the husband in turn beginning to doubt her, and the bride suffering from alienation.

[zedz]

More experimental recommendations, this time doing double duty for the animation project:

A Quiet Week in the House (Jan Svankmajer, 1969) – Jan Svankmajer: The Complete Short Films (BFI) – My love for this film, like the film itself, is completely irrational. It’s one of Svankmajer’s most original (despite loving references back to Cocteau) and accomplished works.

It starts out in the peculiar live-action / canned-sound vein of The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film, with a comically bizarre mission that involves the invasion of a house. This live action material is in faux-documentary mode that’s so faux it topples over into extreme stylization. Svankmajer’s greatness as an animator often obscures the fact that he’s one of cinema’s most gifted and precise editors, and this part of the film is filled with abrupt inserts and deliberately chunky cuts marked by a flash of clear leader. The rhythm is everything. Even though we’re watching a ritual of voyeurism, with the same sequence of actions repeated many times, the inflection is slightly, delightfully different each time.

It’s already something of a masterpiece (how about those tiny details, like the ring of an alarm clock as a graphic flurry of numbers?), but every time our bureaucratic stand-in peeps into one of the locked rooms, we slip into another dimension of ineffable, sublime strangeness. The quivering, dissolving, metamorphic animation in these sequences, unfolding in perfect silence, is some of the most sensuous, visceral and eerie I’ve ever seen.

Stairs (Stefan Schabenbeck, 1968) – Anthology of Polish Animated Film (PWA / NiNA) – Spectacular widescreen, black and white Claymation. A generically human figure wanders into a landscape of staircases that becomes increasingly complex as he progresses. The film is exquisitely crafted, with stark chiaroscuro that makes the landscape ever more oppressive and abstract, and the final shot (the one that plays over the closing credits) is utterly stunning.

Labyrinth (1961) – Anthology of Polish Animated Film (PWA / NiNA) – Lenica tackles an ambitious allegory (all a bit vague, like most decent allegories) with pre-Gilliam Victorian cut-outs. There are lots of images of imprisonment and frustrated escape, but lots of bizarre Carrollian anthropomorphism as well (a walrus in a top hat, a crocodile in a shawl). What I love about this work is the density of it. All of the source material Lenica is using has its own baggage of associations (the kind of associations Gilliam would use for irony and comical counterpoint), which jostle with the needs of the immediate narrative and its political implications.

Allures (Jordan Belson, 1961) – Jordan Belson: 5 Essential Films (CVM) – In this film, Belson is Fischinger’s sci-fi stepson (though the Whitneys have also been paddling in the gene pool), employing dazzling colour and rigorous geometry to evoke cosmic / subatomic vistas. It’s a constant stream of amazing imagery, created through optical manipulation and animation, but all of a piece and perfectly controlled.

[Gregory]

That's an eloquent write-up on Mothlight, zedz. I haven't decided which Brakhage films should definitely be on my list, though I'm with you on Dog Star Man, and I still believe 23rd Psalm Branch is a key Brakhage work, an impressive exploration of frightening perceptions and momentous realities (the latter being atypical for Brakhage). I love Mothlight and what it does, but I think of it as a lovely little trifle in his oeuvre—a famous and iconic work that is probably referenced a little more than its share relative to some other films that were among his major breakthroughs. Maybe that's changed a bit since Criterion released Vol. 2; I don't know. Mothlight has over a thousand votes on IMDb while 23rd Psalm has under a hundred. I think many of the major works of Brakhage's career are still greatly underappreciated among viewers of his work. (And I'm not implying that you overvalue Mothlight or any such thing!)
23rd Psalm Branch is still, to me, an utterly unique film that is so much more than its capsule description of a "meditation on war" etc. It is that, to some degree, though a man living with his family in a log cabin in the mountains could not really access or know war itself. (A BAM/PFA program billed the film as a critique of the Vietnam War, but I don't think it's about that per se, and I don't believe Brakhage presumed to make something about Vietnam itself, of which he knew little.)
So he insightfully created an epic about images of violence (WWII-era newsreels about war, more recent TV "coverage," etc.), and tried to reproduce his memories of experiencing those images. It's about Brakhage's and our own consciousness of events that are not accessible to us yet affect us directly because of the broader and deeper import of what's taking place. "I can't go on." Then the second part becomes about the film itself: Brakhage's struggle to understand the sources of his need to make the film, an episodic sort of "home movie" approach that strays as far as possible from the calculated mass-media images of war. It's personal and inward-looking, not so much political and historical as so many creative ruminations on great conflicts try to be, most ultimately saying little.

[zedz]

At the moment, I only have room on my list for Dog Star Man, which is a convenient film because it's so encompassing, but I will definitely be rewatching all the 60s Brakhages on Criterion's sets before submitting my final selection.

Today's experimental selection:

Die Parallelstrasse (Ferdinand Khittl, 1962) – Die Parallelstrasse (Edition Filmmuseum) – The first feature film of the New German Cinema, and though the early films of Kluge and Herzog followed its lead of subverting documentary and cross-breeding it with fiction, it remains to this day a film like no other, so a parallel universe - or strasse, of you like - in which this film set the tone for that movement is almost literally unimaginable. (You could imagine, for example, the young, exciting Peter Greenaway or the mature Chris Marker making a film with a similar premise, but they would surely be completely different in tone and effect).

I wrote at length about this film when I first saw it (in the Edition Filmmuseum thread), so I’ll be briefish here. The film begins at the end, and then starts again, but it never really begins or ends (even though the final shot is about as final as shots get), since what we’re watching is a ritual that can never be completed. Five men are tasked with organising hundreds of documents (which we see as short films) pertaining to a man’s life. If they fail to complete their task within an allotted span (three days), they die. The five poor saps we follow seem completely flummoxed by the job, and who wouldn’t be, given the peculiarly random assortment of vaguely sci-fi documentary fragments we’re shown (the first document, for instance, accomplishes in five minutes what The Curious Case of Benjamin Button couldn’t manage in five hours). Their interlocutor offers helpful advice that doesn’t seem especially helpful. In fact, he rather seems to relish their discombobulation.

I see the film as an allegory for all our lives. We’re all tasked with the challenge of making holistic sense of the incongruous scraps of knowledge and experience we accumulate. It’s a lifelong chore that can never be completed, and time is always running out, but engaging with that challenge is what gives shape to our lives.

Spoiler

However incompetent or efficient any given group of sorters might be, I wouldn’t be surprised if in every cycle there were always only two documents remaining when the final bell rings, or if the last film shown to the poor saps was always those empty shots of the desert, overlaid with human screams and the whispered word “triumph.”

[zedz]

Wargames (Donald Richie, 1962) – A Donald Richie Film Anthology (Image Forum) – Seemed the right time to post this experimental recommendation. Richie turns out to be a reasonably accomplished filmmaker, employing stark compositions (some kids, a goat, a featureless beach) with a powerful editing tension between extreme close ups and extreme long shots. The film plays out like a minimalist Lord of the Flies and has a wonderfully insidious soundtrack that, apart from a few scraps of music, consists of the constant roar of waves, which gradually gets augmented by a more ominous electronic howl.

[knives]

This will probably be chopped out by the end of things, but due to its resilience in my mind I'd feel horrible not to mention Paul Dickson's Stone to Steel which can be found on the big BFI short doc set. It's topic is fairly basic and apolitical which allows for Dickson to just focus in on the editing turning this into a musical more than a replication of fact. The machinery dances with wild light while the few humans present are almost props inversing the normal experience.

[zedz]

There are so many great documentaries on those various BFI sets that I've sort of just shut them all out (but I must admit your post sent me scurrying off to check when The Shovel was made - a number 50 film if ever there was one - fortunately, it was 1953).

Two masterpieces that immediately spring to mind and should be on everybody's must-see list are John Krish's I Think They Call Him John and Geoffrey Jones' Snow.

[knives]

I nearly forgot Snow. Dear lord that would have been embarrassing. As much as I would like otherwise I think I'll leave Krish off for now.

[zedz]

I know what you mean. I haven't got room for either of those incredible films at the moment. Hell, I haven't even got room for The Exterminating Angel.