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I really loved both Reinette & Mirabelle and Detective -- which I found to be among the most "enjoyable" films of their repectivbe creators. I wonder why they are comparatively "obscure"?

As far as late period Godard goes, I don't think Detective is obscure at all. Certainly more people are aware of it than something like Germany Year 90 Nine Zero or JLG/JLG

I like Reinette and Mirabelle a lot, but at times it feels like a video for a high school French class--especially the first two stories, which on paper look a lot like language-learning scenarios (Meeting a new friend in the country! Ordering at a cafe!). This may be a particular issue for me, since I watched it on VHS and the videos that accompanied my high school french textbook in the late 90s were trapped in the same late 80s/early 90s fashion and color trends that Rohmer depicts here and in many of the Comedies and Proverbs. And the transitions in particular look like the amateurish video-editing techniques you often see in educational materials. Still, the film's structure ends up being pretty genius, as each subsequent episode develops new philosophical strands established in the previous episode, retroactively enriching the whole film. And the asshole waiter's kinda fun.

In lieu of a Rohmer run-down, what's everyone's favorite and least favorite Rohmer of the decade? The Green Ray and The Aviator's Wife are probably set to make my list, with Reinette and Mirabelle and Pauline at the Beach as Tier 2 maybes. A Good Marriage is my least favorite Rohmer of all I've seen so far. It feels like an awkward misstep in his transition between male and female protagonists, where the character's delusions aggravate all sympathy away. Delusions are central to Rohmer, but here there's a lack of the rationalization that makes those delusions compelling, which means it plays like proto-cringe comedy without the funny.

The worst confidante award goes to Fabrice Luchini in Full Moon in Paris, who seems to be hitting a bunch of the "gay best friend" tropes while still lusting after Pascale Ogier and constantly offering her blatantly self-serving advice. It's such a weird performance for a a character that's supposed to be a lothario that I'm not sure whether it was meant to be hilariously incongruous or just bad casting.

Shrew wrote:In lieu of a Rohmer run-down, what's everyone's favorite and least favorite Rohmer of the decade? The Green Ray and The Aviator's Wife are probably set to make my list.

I haven't sat down to finalize my list, but these are my two favorites of the decade as well: the Aviator's Wife is a definite yes, and the Green Ray is probable as well. I've seen most but not all of Rohmer's 80s work, so I don't want to point any fingers at "weakest," though I can't recall not at least enjoying all of them

I'm glad I'm not the only one to pick up gay best friend from him, though it seems I liked the film more than you if for nothing else than the structure. So far though it seems only The Green Ray and 4 Adventures will make my list though I've liked all I've seen so far. I was really hoping though that the Detective fans here could go more into that film since most of the praise on the board that I could find is of the broad, "I liked this," nature without really going into why it is especially good.

Detective is, as I have said elsewhere, my favorite 80s Godard and up there with Nouvelle Vague as the best of his later period works. I think it's good for apparently some of the reasons it troubles you: It's an outwardly impersonal (even for Godard) work for hire that Godard transforms into a picture that actively works against itself throughout the narrative (a dichotomy which is set up in the opening credits by the ACTORS and STARS distinction), finally culminating in what must be the most hilariously flippant solution ever to be found in a "mystery" film. It's maybe Godard's most subversive work of the later period, in that it has the hallmarks of being widely palatable and "mainstream", and yet his own struggle to reconcile the two halves of this movie he's making (and this was a decade for Godard to make fascinating reconciliations in his work-- see how King Lear eventually transforms away from Shakespeare and into yet another Jeanne d'Arc pic by the end) is all the more futile since the final product is markedly Godardian in every scene. Distinctions of vision or intent are and remain indistinguishable by the film's end, and all that's left is JLG.

knives (a few months ago) wrote:Yeah, I just finished Streets of Fire, which is pretty damn amazing, and the difference is pretty amazing in terms of storytelling, costume, and cinematography. It's pretty old school in a lot of ways, but the sight of Dafoe dressed for an S&M club bathing in neon light is just about the most amazingly '80s thing ever. It's almost more like a Hong Kong cartoon than any American picture I can think of excepting De Palma.

I just watched this too, and share your enthusiasm - not sure why it acquired such a low reputation, other than for being too odd a hybrid of genres (quasi-period action musical). Hill's tough-guy shtick is always slightly ridiculous (as others have mentioned, his characters can only seem to communicate by constantly insulting and threatening each other), but with the temporally ambiguous, vaguely fantastical framework here I think it really works. There are plenty of enjoyably strange moments, such as the doo wop quartet breaking into song shortly before their hijacked bus is stopped by the police, or Dafoe swinging a warhammer in the climactic show-down, or Rick Moranis generally as a swaggering bastard mirror version of Louis Tully. It may well sneak on to my list. (An interesting film to pair it with would be Kathryn Bigelow's debut The Loveless, another slice of 50s nostalgia in which Dafoe plays essentially the same bad boy biker, although the style of that one is rather more naturalistic and understated.)

Also rewatched:

Thames Film (William Raban, 1986)

This is a fascinating film, combining elements of the 'voice of god' documentary of the past (it has an authoritative-sounding voiceover by John Hurt, and incorporates footage from Basil Wright's 1951 Waters of Time, amongst others) with the topographical contemplation of such avant-gardists as Michael Snow or James Benning (alongside whose names Raban's, like most of the largely overlooked British school of experimental filmmakers, deserves to be better known). The tone is ghostly, even deathly, as floating footage of the Thames river is periodically intercut with details from Bruegel's Triumph of Death. What struck me this time is how closely Raban's film anticipates the more acclaimed 90s work of Patrick Keiller: both seem to have a love-hate relationship with the English industrial landscape and its history, and are haunted by the ghosts of empire. (For the curious, the BFI's now-decade-old Raban DVD can be obtained for under ten pounds on Amazon.)

domino harvey wrote:Detective is, as I have said elsewhere, my favorite 80s Godard and up there with Nouvelle Vague as the best of his later period works. I think it's good for apparently some of the reasons it troubles you: It's an outwardly impersonal (even for Godard) work for hire that Godard transforms into a picture that actively works against itself throughout the narrative (a dichotomy which is set up in the opening credits by the ACTORS and STARS distinction), finally culminating in what must be the most hilariously flippant solution ever to be found in a "mystery" film. It's maybe Godard's most subversive work of the later period, in that it has the hallmarks of being widely palatable and "mainstream", and yet his own struggle to reconcile the two halves of this movie he's making (and this was a decade for Godard to make fascinating reconciliations in his work-- see how King Lear eventually transforms away from Shakespeare and into yet another Jeanne d'Arc pic by the end) is all the more futile since the final product is markedly Godardian in every scene. Distinctions of vision or intent are and remain indistinguishable by the film's end, and all that's left is JLG.

Which is all entertaining to a degree, but it leaves me with a sense of is this all that there is to it? I'd say it's a good film, but it's self commentary lacks the urgency I get out of something like Notre Musique. It actually reminds me of a Ford I saw recently, When Willie Comes Marching Home, which similarly has an impressive meta conceit that I can't really appreciate beyond it being a good auteur joke.

A Better Tomorrow (John Woo) -- one of the most fun things for me in projects like these are watching the genre pics, whether it's film noir, 50s sci-fi, spaghetti westerns or wuxia. I think 80s Hong Kong actions films will be my genre of choice for this project. This had a noticeably smaller budget than the films that followed and looked a bit dated in parts, making it someone obvious that it was one of the forerunners of the genre, but it had the required amount of testosterone even if the themes of brotherhood were overbearing at times. The shoot out at the end was a bit flabby around the middle, but why complain. Bullets!

Yeelen (Souleymane Cisse) -- the landscapes and the colours in this movie were just incredible. I tend to prefer neo-realism over mysticism and folklore, but I enjoyed this a lot. The mystical elements weren't overbearing and while I probably couldn't understand the film on an allegorical level, the plot was intriguing enough to match the photography.

Taipei Story (Edward Yang) -- this was really disappointing. I'm sure many of you have seen the same poor print of this that I did with the cut off subtitles (and moments of white on white), but it was the presentation that bothered me most. Why is Yang and Hou's work so detached? I never really found someone like Antonioni's work to be detached, and I think I'm a fairly patient film viewer, but this was the most bottled up human drama I've seen in quite some time.

The Official Story (Luis Puenzo) -- very good film. Some have said it's manipulative, but without a deep understanding of the Argentinian politics at the time as a I casual viewer I thought it did a good job of mixing a political situation with the demands for a dramatic spine. And the lead actress Norma Aleandro gave a very personal and outstanding performance.

The Killer (John Woo) -- Again I can't complain. It was the testosterone kick I was looking for. I don't think the genre is as cool as spaghetti westerns, 70s yakuza films or other films of its ilk, but the films are enjoyable and easy to watch. The contradictions surrounding the killer wasn't the most original internal conflict in cinematic history, but it was all very heroic and the continued themes of friendship and brotherhood were handled a bit better.

Diva (Jean-Jacques Beineix) -- this continued the long tradition of French art house crime thrillers rather nicely. I'm not really sure that it got the bad guys down pat (at least it didn't appear that way in the beginning) and the subplot with the bohemian and his muse was a bit esoteric without the context of the novel, but I understand Jean-Jacques Beineix was playing with the crime genre while creating a certain type of melodic, colourful style, and I loved the way the opera/diva aspect was mixed seamlessly into the Hitchcock style thriller of a young man in the wrong place at the wrong time. Very entertaining.

Lola (Rainer Werner Fassbinder) -- again with the colours. This looked like Fassfinder was channeling Douglas Sirk at times. Really gorgeous. I enjoyed this immensely until the third act climax where I thought it fell apart slightly. It wasn't really the ending I was expecting, though in a way that made it interesting as it subverted the Hollywood ending in true Sirkian fashion. I still think The Marriage of Maria Braun is the best film in the trilogy, but there was good work in all three.

Rewatched Terence Davies's Trilogy, of which the second and third parts - Madonna and Child and Death and Transfiguration - are eligible. These are films that I have admired in the past (voting for Madonna last time round), and they are undeniably powerful, but on this viewing I was struck more than before by their often unpleasant oppressiveness. I'm sure Davies was faithfully documenting his own psychological universe, but it's one grounded in a maudlin and morbid Catholicism (however lapsed), reminiscent of the darker parts of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist, with added homosexual guilt. So while I still admire these films' artistic achievement, I no longer feel like voting for them; the toxic ideological framing gets in the way of enjoyment. (Bela Tarr can be similarly oppressive, but his vision is more secular.)

Viewing Log:

Bachelor Party (Neal Israel, 1984): Going into this, I thought that it was a Ron Howard film (I must have been thinking of Night Shift). No, instead this flaccid comedy comes to us from the same asshole that wrote the original Police Academy. Both films are on about the same level, trying to create an Animal House vibe with none of the charms or the laughs. Here Tom Hanks stars a school bus driving shlub who's about to marry rich girl Tawny Kitaen, leading to countless unfunny and tired ‘slobs vs. snobs’ jokes. His friends, including Adrian Zmed and Michael Dudikoff (who sadly doesn’t fight any ninjas here) set out to throw him the ultimate bachelor party, despite the fact that the women in their lives make them vow to not have any hookers there (as if this is something that most future brides have to make their fiancés foreswear?). Of course things quickly get out of hand with, yes, hookers and random partygoers that migrated to their hotel room, lured by the dulcet tones of the worst new wave music you’ll ever hear. What follows is rife with misogyny, transphobia, and racism. By all rights this should have ended Tom Hanks’s career since he comes off looking like a real jerk in it, but he somehow survived this travesty. The only feelings that I felt watching this were sadness over the passing of Wendie Jo Sperber and a desire to be doing anything else.

Une chambre en ville (Jacques Demy, 1982): In a city shut down by a tense labor strike, François (Richard Berry) and Edith (Dominique Sanda) leave their respective lovers to be together, setting in motion a series of events that will end in tragedy. Edith walks out on her middle aged electronics store owning husband Edmond (Michel Piccoli), while François abandons his pregnant girlfriend Margot (Danielle Darrieux) who is sadly perhaps the only person here who behaves rationally whatsoever. Being a Demy film, it should come as no surprise to learn that every line of dialogue is sung, and that every scene is crackling with the typical vitality that he provides. While the film definitely has it's high points, I can't give it a positive review. Edith is so unrelentingly ugly in every action that A) I couldn't believe that even a scoundrel like François could find anything to love in her, and B) every scene that she was in felt like an over the top self-parody. This was a truly frustrating experience.

Father (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1988): Eiji Bandô plays the eponymous father, the roguish Kikutaro who squanders his son's childhood with a series of get rich quick schemes that always end in trouble. Kikutaro isn't an inherently bad guy, but he's too preoccupied with his own scams to ever be much of a father to his son, which leads the youngster to bitterness and frustration, but also an undying love for his old man. This dramedy marked the end of Kinoshita's career, it's slightly better than the other films that occurred in his deep decline. No, that's not an endorsement.

Les sièges de l'Alcazar (Luc Moullet, 1989): This gem of a comedy centers on the exploits of Guy Moscardo (Olivier Maltinti), a mid 1950s critic for Cahiers du Cinéma who life seems to be defined by his love of the films of Vittorio Cottafavi (who I must admit having never heard of before viewing this), his hatred of Michelangelo Antonioni, and his lack of success with women. The film takes place almost exclusively in a French art house theater (come to think of it, are there any shots outside of it?) as Guy makes his way through a week long showing of Moscardo's films. During this time he develops a fixation on Jeanne (Elizabeth Moreau), a critic at a rival publication whose tastes are diametrically opposed to Guy's. His advances are met with cold indifference and mocking dismissal. Later when he finds a woman interested in him, he foolishly ignores her advances in favor of catching the ending of a Cottafavi flick. While there aren't exactly any jokes in here, Moullet does an outstanding job of setting the mood and letting the comedy (and drama) flow naturally out of it. It should be seen by all cinephiles, especially those who place art before life.

Paradise Not Yet Lost, or Oona's Third Year (Jonas Mekas, 1980): Mekas is a master of crafting what are essentially home movies into films that seem like an indispensable examination of the human condition. Here his camera is focused on Oona, his young daughter as they vacation in the US and meet family in Europe. I don't think that I can adequately describe the footage captured here other than calling it life itself.

Trouble in Mind (Alan Rudolph, 1985): Rudolph had a craptastic run in the 80s, and this turgid turd may well be the nadir of his decade. This aborted attempt at a neo-noir stars an eclectic cast (Kris Kristofferson, Lori Petty, Divine (out of drag, but still hamming it up), and Keith Carradine) as various small time crooks whose lives intersect. Kristofferson mumbles his dialogue in an indecipherable voice, the characters all act like morons, and nothing makes even the least bit of sense. The film wants to be what, say, The Grifters was a few years later. Instead it almost makes Tough Guys Don't Dance look good by comparison. Curse you, whoever recommended this shit to me!

The Vanishing (George Sluizer, 1988): I originally watched the first half of this back in the same year that Criterion released it on DVD ('00?). Unfortunately, my eBay copy came badly damaged and stopped playing halfway through. Now that I've seen the full film on Hulu, I find that I'm decidedly indifferent to it. Gene Bervoets plays Rex, a Belgian vacationing in France with his young wife Saskia (Johanna ter Steege), who mysteriously goes missing one day at a gas station. After becoming a media darling in the years that followed, Rex becomes the target of Raymond (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu), Saskia's killer. When the two finally meet it's an encounter unlike anything you've ever seen. Donnadieu is far and away the best thing in the film, absorbing every scene that he's in like a black hole swallowing light. Rex, by contrast, never feels fully realized or fleshed out, with Bervoets having little to do until the film's final act. If the whole film were as good as the final third, then it'd be a easy recommendation.

I have some hazy memories of there being a weird out-of-nowhere polemic in defence of the 3D trend that takes place at the end of Bachelor Party, in which the school bus crashes through the wall and screen of a cinema just as a cinephile is smugly complaining about the uselessness of the trend to his girlfriend, with of course the tiresome film nerd being wowed by the realistic special effects (including accidentally being punched full in the face) as the final fight scene then takes place on the main stage.

I’ve been meaning to post more as I’ve been doing a lot of watching in these final days of summer break, but never quite seem to get around to it. But I recently viewed all the full-length 80s films of Costa-Gavras and Marguerite Duras and thought I would write up some thoughts on them as I haven’t seen much discussion on either of these filmmakers in the thread so far. I apologize for the length.

Duras: Agatha- A series of still shots or slow pans of the inside of a house or shots of an ocean are overlaid with disembodied voices of a siblings carrying on a conversation about their childhood and their apparently incestuous relationship before it was “covered up” and they are married off. Duras’ mise-en-scene is almost entirely emptied of people, allowing her to play with the relationship between spaces and memory—the characters are remembering these locations from their past, but they are seeing them as they are in the present. I coincidentally watched this back to back with Straub and Hulliet’s Too Early, Too Late, which is also interested in a similar relationship between landscape and history. But whereas Hulliet and Straub are interested in a political memory of failed revolution, Duras turns inward into personal memory. When the characters do appear on screen (including the great Bulle Ogier, who was also in the best Rivette of the decade, Le Pont du Nord, that same year), Duras keeps the dialogue spoken off-screen, giving an even weirder, disembodied feel to the exchange. This disembodiment is heightened by the appearance of mirrors and a mise-en-abyme effect so that it is difficult to make out which Ogier is the real one. Like her 70s films such as India Song, the hypnotic pacing demands a great deal of patience, but I find the film immensely rewarding.

Her next feature, Il Dialogo Di Roma (1982), is similar, with a couple talking over footage of Rome. I found it to be less effective, although the only version of it that I could find was a TV rip that was fairly bad quality so that likely marred my experience. I found it difficult to suss out a relationship between the images of Rome and the conversation.

Her final film Les Enfants (1984) is quite good, though: a philosophical mediation of schooling, education, and coming of age, and family with the completely bizarre premise that the film’s seven year old children are played by adults. This is also commented on within the diegesis by their teachers and a news reporter, who each say something to the effect of them looking like they are forty. Our seven year old protagonist begins the narrative in a Bartleby moment and refuses to go to school. His explanation is either that he “doesn’t want to learn what he already knows” or he “doesn’t want to learn what he doesn’t already know”—different characters recount it differently and the film seems keen to play with the slippage between the two iterations. The film seems like an interesting mediation on the entrance of children into language and culture, or, if you like, the symbolic order. I’m not quite sure what to make of everything yet, but it was a great experience.

Costa-Gavras: Missing, I take it, doesn’t need a recommendation as its brilliance is well established. I will say that what I find most interesting about the film is not so much the Chilean coup material (see the great Battle of Chile for that), but its representation of the subjective transformation required for the Jack Lemon character to come to terms with the reality of U.S. foreign policy. The film seems to make the deeply pessimistic point that it takes the death their child for someone like him to even question their beliefs. This mediation is very apropos of the cultural moment of the 1980s, in which the left is coming to terms with the failed utopian projects of the preceding decade. Of course, Costa-Gavras is not defeatist- it is precisely by making such a film and recovering the historical trauma of 9/11/73 that Costa-Gavras hopes to begin such a subjective transformation in his audience.

Costa-Gavras’ final film of the decade, Music Box, is like a mirror image of Missing in that it deals with a young layer’s struggle to admit to herself that her father was a Nazi war criminal. Again, Costa-Gavras is interested in the radical subjective transformation that one must undergo (a sort of symbolic death of the self) in order to face the Real of political history. I thought Jessica Lange gave a deeply affecting performance in the role of the lawyer. A couple of plot points towards the end are a bit hokey, but I found the film to be rather powerful overall.

His other two 80s films, Hanna K and Betrayed, both have exactly the same problem: the use of a fairly uninteresting romance narrative to trigger the real political interest: the occupation of Palestine in Hanna and the rise of religious right-wing terrorists in the U.S. in Betrayed. Betrayed at least pays off the romance narrative better by intertwining it more with the political narrative, but the plot is fairly absurd: a female FBI agent goes undercover in the Midwest to investigate a right-wing group who kill a radio DJ and then she falls in love with a guy who ends up being one of the group’s leaders. Then, when she is with them while they murder an African American, her bosses ask her to stay undercover (including sleeping with him) while they plan their next move. Costa-Gavras’ point here is obviously to critique to FBI, but I find the representation of the female agent deeply problematic: who falls in love with a guy they are investigating as a potential terrorist? It smacks of sexist cliché that this well-educated agent would be more interested in a relationship with a man than doing her job. As a political thriller it works okay and the final thirty minutes are fairly tense, but I couldn’t get over the initial narrative device. Hanna plays it a bit differently, with the romance triangle (really a square, as there are three men in love with the film’s eponymous lawyer) allegorically representing the different political positions the viewer could take. This film is mostly notable for tackling the Palestinian occupation (which apparently got it in some trouble in the U.S.) and the political elements are well done by the great screenwriter Franco Solinas. The romance plots simply felt superfluous in what was otherwise a well done film.

Satori wrote:I’ve been meaning to post more as I’ve been doing a lot of watching in these final days of summer break, but never quite seem to get around to it. But I recently viewed all the full-length 80s films of Costa-Gavras and Marguerite Duras and thought I would write up some thoughts on them as I haven’t seen much discussion on either of these filmmakers in the thread so far. I apologize for the length.

Duras: Agatha- A series of still shots or slow pans of the inside of a house or shots of an ocean are overlaid with disembodied voices of a siblings carrying on a conversation about their childhood and their apparently incestuous relationship before it was “covered up” and they are married off. Duras’ mise-en-scene is almost entirely emptied of people, allowing her to play with the relationship between spaces and memory—the characters are remembering these locations from their past, but they are seeing them as they are in the present. I coincidentally watched this back to back with Straub and Hulliet’s Too Early, Too Late, which is also interested in a similar relationship between landscape and history. But whereas Hulliet and Straub are interested in a political memory of failed revolution, Duras turns inward into personal memory. When the characters do appear on screen (including the great Bulle Ogier, who was also in the best Rivette of the decade, Le Pont du Nord, that same year), Duras keeps the dialogue spoken off-screen, giving an even weirder, disembodied feel to the exchange. This disembodiment is heightened by the appearance of mirrors and a mise-en-abyme effect so that it is difficult to make out which Ogier is the real one. Like her 70s films such as India Song, the hypnotic pacing demands a great deal of patience, but I find the film immensely rewarding.

Her next feature, Il Dialogo Di Roma (1982), is similar, with a couple talking over footage of Rome. I found it to be less effective, although the only version of it that I could find was a TV rip that was fairly bad quality so that likely marred my experience. I found it difficult to suss out a relationship between the images of Rome and the conversation.

Her final film Les Enfants (1984) is quite good, though: a philosophical mediation of schooling, education, and coming of age, and family with the completely bizarre premise that the film’s seven year old children are played by adults. This is also commented on within the diegesis by their teachers and a news reporter, who each say something to the effect of them looking like they are forty. Our seven year old protagonist begins the narrative in a Bartleby moment and refuses to go to school. His explanation is either that he “doesn’t want to learn what he already knows” or he “doesn’t want to learn what he doesn’t already know”—different characters recount it differently and the film seems keen to play with the slippage between the two iterations. The film seems like an interesting mediation on the entrance of children into language and culture, or, if you like, the symbolic order. I’m not quite sure what to make of everything yet, but it was a great experience.

Of these, I've only seen Agatha, ou es lectures illimitees, which I only remember as haunting. The rest of it is too vague in my memory to be able to vote for it in good conscience. It's about time some reckless label issued a Duras collection.

I do have a couple of footnotes for Les Enfants. The 'adults as children' premise isn't completely bizarre. Exactly the same thing was done in the great Dennis Potter TV play Blue Remembered Hills in 1979. I highly recommend that film and might even have included it in my 70s top 50 last time. If not then, then the time before.

And Straub / Huillet shot a very short version of the same Duras story as En rachanant in 1982. As I recall, this was issued on a free DVD included with the late great Cinema publication. It might still be available from Amazon.fr, but it will also still be unsubbed!

And if not the Straub Huillet short is available in good versions subbed all across the Internet which unfortunately is the only way to see most of their work. It's an unofficial 51 spot for me.

I will definitely take a look at Blue Remembered Hills and En rachanant; thanks for the recommendations. I've been meaning to revisit Class Relations, Straub & Huillet's adaptation of Kafka's Amerika, soon, and so En rachanant will especially work great as a companion piece.

After seeing Agatha and Too Early, Too Late together, I've been really intrigued by the intersections between the films of Duras and Huillet and Straub, so the fact that H & S actually adapted a Duras story is fascinating. I'd love to know if Duras saw their film (and what she thought of it) before she made her version.

swo17 wrote:

bamwc2 wrote:I need a clarification on Amir Naderi's The Runner. imdb has it listed as 1990 even though it premiered in 1985 at the Nantes Three Continents Festival (also via imdb).

Well that's confusing! I've only seen something like that before when a release date has just recently been added for a film. So maybe that's the case here, and the issue will resolve itself in a few days?

It looks like this probably was the case, as IMDb now unambiguously categorizes this as an '80s film.

Some recommended '80s shorts--many of these will be making my list, and you could easily watch all of them in the time it takes to watch a couple of features. I eat shorts for breakfast, so if there are any other gems that I've missed, please let me know.

New York Portrait: Chapter II (Peter Hutton)
This is available on Oscilloscope's release of Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy, and it would be worth the price of admission alone. Stunning black and white shots of candid New York moments, some of which are filmed so as to take on an abstract quality, like a blimp floating between two buildings that look like sprockets on a film reel, or a flooded street where the water could easily be mistaken for molasses.

Bus Stop (Andrea Gomez)
When I tell you that this film was animated in watercolors, you'll probably be able to conjure up an idea of its looseness and loveliness, but there's a dark side here as well.

The Public Voice (Lejf Marcussen)
Have you ever wondered what's inside the molecules of paintings? More paintings! But weird ones, that their artists have deemed unfit for human viewing. Like, did you know that the Mona Lisa was originally envisioned as living in the hollow of a man's back, molding pottery out of the faces of houseguests?

Dimensions of Dialogue/Virile Games/Darkness Light Darkness (Jan Švankmajer)
And you thought Cronenberg had the market cornered on body horror. Also, I know I'm alone with this, but if we ever do a comedies list, Virile Games is making my top 10--every time someone around me starts talking about sports, my mind tunes them out and just starts playing back this film from memory. Every time. My favorite part isn't even the clay gore, but the graceful ballet of the fooseball-styled paper cutout athletes.

In a somewhat similar vein, the Quay brothers' Street of Crocodiles and Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies are also worth a look.

Pièce touchée (Martin Arnold)
Fairly disturbing found footage of a married couple that suffers from violent seizures. It can be heartbreaking to see the difficulty with which the husband performs even simple tasks like entering a doorway or trying to kiss his sweetheart.

Spacy/Thunder (Takashi Itō)
Discussed previously in this thread here. One of these was my spotlight title during the animation list, and the other is my spotlight now. You might say I'm a fan.

The Man Who Could Not See Far Enough/The Pressures of the Text (Peter Rose)

Not this guy, the other one.

Two films frustrated by the limitations of the medium. In the first, Rose tries to capture the grandeur of solar phenomena but can only overwhelm us with boxed images. Then he tries to convey the scale of the earth but can only do so from as high as he can climb. In the second, an erudite lecture (presented by Rose himself) on the meaning of language reaches its breaking point, devolving into gibberish and pornography.

Stories About a Man (Bogdan Dziworski)
(Note: The start and finish of that link are not actually part of the film, but were imposed by whatever TV station aired this once. There is, unfortunately, no better way to see the film.)

This was a spotlight title during the documentaries project. I found the film quite endearing at the time, though having since acquainted myself with several more of Dziworski's films, it's become more apparent what he's trying to achieve here, and that this is something of a high mark from his filmography. Nearly all of his films that I've seen prominently feature scenes of skiing, often filmed from immersive angles (here his work bears the mark of friends/sometimes collaborators Zbigniew Rybczyński* and Gerald Kargl, who together went for a similar aesthetic in Angst). The cinematography here is more subdued though, drawing your attention away from the camera and focusing it instead on the main character, who is fascinating enough to carry the film on his own. (What touches are added here tend to be surreal rather than flashy.) It's also been observed that the sound design in this film is unique, though it's clear to me now that this is simply Dziworski's bread and butter. For him, there practically are no sounds but Foley effects. Though his films are mostly documentaries, he distances them from reality in this way, creating alternate worlds where the presumably heavier gravity emphasizes different elements. It's a rich and distinctive body of work, experimenting with form nearly as much as Wiszniewski, and it's beyond me why PWA haven't devoted a volume to him yet.

*As an interesting sidenote, a film by the two of them called Wdech-wydech predates Fanny and Alexander and seems as though it could have been the source for the haunting piano motif used toward the end of that film.

Media (Zbigniew Rybczyński)
And speaking of Rybczyński and gravity, hopefully you can all spare a minute and a half for this effortless trifle that must have taken forever to make.

Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (Todd Haynes)
I recently took Gregory up on his suggestion here. Just to report back, Illegal Art is still offering the DVD, though so few people are ordering them these days that they aren't necessarily checking for new orders very often. The film on disc looks like the same bootleg in general circulation, with subpar picture quality and occasional audio drops or illegible subtitles. As for the film, well, perhaps anyone with enough Barbie dolls laying around could have made it, and probably any easy listening music will sound horrifying if you layer enough of such songs on top of one another. But none of that makes this film any less of a triumph.

Elephant (Alan Clarke)
Visions from a violent utopia, in which all are free to carry as they please, and victims range from politely objecting to obliging.

Witnesses (Marcel Łoziński)
One of the most striking elements of Shoah for me is how it serves as a witnessing tool, making the Holocaust more than just an abstract concept by simply handing the microphone over to its survivors so that they can tell their stories. Well, Witnesses does a very similar thing, only its witnesses are scarier, its target less distant (its focal event occurring during peacetime makes it harder to excuse as a war atrocity, getting at something rather unsettling about the human condition) and hey, it's even got "witness" right there in the title. QED. By all accounts, this should hardly register in the shadow of Shoah (it's substantially shorter, and even on the PWA DVD looks like a YouTube video) and yet there's something about the film that keeps me coming back to it.

swo17 wrote:Dimensions of Dialogue/Virile Games/Darkness Light Darkness (Jan Švankmajer)
And you thought Cronenberg had the market cornered on body horror. Also, I know I'm alone with this, but if we ever do a comedies list, Virile Games is making my top 10--every time someone around me starts talking about sports, my mind tunes them out and just starts playing back this film from memory. Every time. My favorite part isn't even the clay gore, but the graceful ballet of the fooseball-styled paper cutout athletes.

Those shorts are excellent, and I would also recommend The Fall of the House of Usher (1982), Down to the Cellar (1983) and especially The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope. Usher is a mesmerizing bit of tactile animation, which Svankmajer excels in, with no human representations at all (no puppets, paper cutouts, or even animated bodies, as we often see in his work). As the familiar Poe tale is read aloud, scenes of coffins and furniture moving about and threatening rock formations create an impressionistic interpretation of the story in gloomy black and white. Down to the Cellar plays like a precursor to Alice, with a little girl's venture to her apartment building's cellar becoming a nightmarish awakening to a threatening adult world. Pendulum does not feature as much animation as we generally expect from Svankmajer, instead giving us a truly horrifying, first-person experience of Medieval torture. This, for me, is one of Svankmajer's most moving pieces, creating a palpable sense of fear, hope, and ultimately despair.

swo17 wrote:I eat shorts for breakfast

I hope they're clean.

Obviously I endorse most of swo's films and need to see the rest. I've been wanting to see that 'Mona Lisa is actually just an extra in a Bosch painting' film again for 25 years!

Looking at Feego's follow-up post, I expect Svankmajer will fall victim to some radical vote splitting, as Darkness Light Darkness is my favourite short of his this decade. There's a good chance that this and Alice will both end up in my top ten, so I'm probably going to have to exclude any more of his films from my list to make room for all the other essentials.

I knew I was making a mistake in not highlighting every film Švankmajer made this decade!

Also, regarding The Public Voice, I recently contacted both the DFI and the film's production company, and there are no plans for a DVD of Marcussen's films any time soon. So that YouTube link is likely the best you're going to get for a while.

Rybczyński's 'New Book' featured very highly in my 70s list and 'Tango' will probably make my top fifty this time around. He also has numerous terrific music videos that could be included, though I've vowed not to include music videos.

Any Polish animated recommendations? We've got the Anthology of Polish experimental animation and there are some 80s shorts on here.

thirtyframesasecond wrote:He also has numerous terrific music videos that could be included, though I've vowed not to include music videos.

There's no reason you should do this--they're just as eligible as any other short film.

swo17 wrote:

thirtyframesasecond wrote:He also has numerous terrific music videos that could be included, though I've vowed not to include music videos.

There's no reason you should do this--they're just as eligible as any other short film.

Maybe I will then. 'Close to the Edit' (Art of Noise), 'Opportunities' (Pet Shop Boys), 'All The Things She Said' (Simple Minds) are all excellent Rybczyński music videos. He might've done 'P Machinery' by Propaganda now I think about it. And 'Imagine' too, even if I don't like the song.

Corbijn's video for David Sylvian's 'Red Guitar' would definitely be there too.

Now I really will have to think!

Good grief, the deadline is one month from today. I suppose people can start sending me lists whenever. Before doing so though, please take a moment to read back through the first post of the thread, particularly the eligibility section, some of which has changed since the project started.