Re: Dynamic Top Tens of 2012
Posted: Mon Aug 06, 2012 10:46 pm
Based on what I’ve seen from Cannes, Berlin, Sundance and elsewhere, this is not likely to be a great year for cinema. Lots of very good films that aren’t up to the level of their directors’ previous best, or interesting flawed works, but the first-rank masterpieces seem to be thin on the ground. By this time of year, I’ve normally seen twenty or more films that ought to be in my top ten, and I’m trying to find devious ways to defy mathematics. This year, I’ve got nine, and the tenth feels like it should be on the supplementary list. Fingers crossed for a whole lot of surprises to come. There are certainly a few Venice titles I’m looking forward to.
Ten Best
SPECIAL CASE: Raumlichtkunst (Fischinger) - Maybe the best new film I saw this year is in some ways over 80 years old. This speculative reconstruction of one of Fischinger's multi-screen film performances from 1926 would be a stunning achievement in any decade, a tsunami of abstract kinesthesia. Even if it's only an approximation of what he was doing at that time, it confirms that he was 30, 40, 50 years ahead of it.
Holy Motors (Carax) – As the prologue announces in no uncertain terms, this is Leos Carax’s Dream of Cinema, and it’s a dream about death and transformation, about the existential implications of acting, and about the pure joy of great filmmaking. It’s also really funny, has some lovely dogs in it and a couple of great musical numbers. If you want tight plotting and detailed character drama on top of all that, you really have no idea where this film is coming from.
Vivan las Antipodas! (Kossakovsky) – More pure cinema delight. Is this the first time that some smart producer has thrown serious Baraka-level money at an actually great documentary filmmaker? Kossakovsky’s previous films have been extremely intimate and low-key (Svyato, about a little girl becoming aware of her own reflection for the first time, is about as intimate as documentary can get), and he manages to preserve that easy, human level of interaction even in a globe-trotting spectacle like this. He’s particularly fine in delineating the relationship between humans and animals. This is a film that really understands scale, and understands that any environment is an environment of wonder if you know how to look at it the right way.
Tabu (Gomes) – One of those films where you know from the outset that you’re in the hands of a master filmmaker and can sit back and see where you get taken. Like Holy Motors, this is a film that is reflexively about cinema (more than half the film owes a debt to silent film, and the opening nods to The Asthenic Syndrome) without being overly derivative.
Nana (Massadian) – A beautifully realized first film, focussed entirely on the experience of a 4 year old girl left mostly to her own devices on a farm. Yes, it’s as cute and as scary as that suggests.
Just the Wind (Fliegauf) – This following-people-in-extreme-close-up thing is possibly the biggest art-house cliché of the new century, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t instances like this when it’s exactly the right aesthetic choice for the material, and all the film’s tense meandering lays the groundwork for an explosive finale.
In Another Country (Hong) – This seems to have been dismissed as minor Hong (like almost every other recent Hong), but I think it’s one of his best, even if it is very much business as usual. (And anyway, who wouldn’t want to see another half dozen ‘business as usual’ Eric Rohmer films, for example?) It’s actually one of his most straightforward and straightforwardly entertaining films, since it sets up a clear framing device to account for the sly narrative tricks that ensue, but that also helps make Hong’s entire creative project a little more transparent. After all, don’t all our lives resemble a Hong film to a large extent, with the same situations, relationships and bits of dialogue recurring in an infinite number of possible variations? It’s the situational context and our own personal history that inflects these commonplaces with individual meaning. I’m delighted to report that Huppert gets Hong, and this particular script, completely, and seems to have a great time playing three variations on a Korean woman’s limited understanding of what a French woman in Korea might be like. She’s not searching for deep character moments but is fully invested in the narrative play.
Moonrise Kingdom (Anderson) – Speaking of pure delight. . .
River Rites (Ben Russell) – Family play in a river, backwards, becomes a bizarre ritualistic performance, punctuated with thumping electronica.
Slow Action (Ben Rivers) – A masterpiece of ethnographic forgery: an essay film exploring the cultures of four imaginary islands, all putative utopias, all eerily post-apocalyptic.
In the Fog (Loznitsa) – This film sort of encapsulates the year for me. It’s a great film, flawlessly made, but it’s a giant step down from the audacity of My Joy. Still, it’s not fair to downgrade such a fine film simply because Loznitsa’s previous one was one of the best of the century to date.
And Also:
A perdre la raison / Our Children (Lafosse) – Extemely tense and bleak domestic drama, with an incredible performance from Emilie Dequenne (even better here than in Rosetta.)
Barbara (Petzold) – The best Petzold film I’ve seen so far. Impeccable filmmaking.
Photographic Memory (McElwee) – Another instalment in his ongoing autobiography, one which brings us into the present and takes us way back into the past, in order to ruminate on the hazards of personal and technological memory.
The Lifeguard (Alberdi) – An extremely low-key semi-documentary character study that builds to an unexpectedly complex emotional climax.
Margaret (Lonergan) – You all know this is a great film already, right?
Faust (Sokhurov) – The more heavily narrative Sokhurov’s films are, the less I tend to like them, but this film has so many amazing visual and atmospheric sequences that I love it anyway.
This Is Not a Film (Panahi) – I actually didn’t love this as much as I hoped, but it’s charming and profound and all those good things.
Crazy Horse (Wiseman) – Doesn’t get into the institutional culture as deeply as you’d hope from Wiseman (and at any rate not a patch on the wonderful Boxing Gym), but well worth it for the superb pop-art musical numbers. Quite probably Wiseman’s most visually spectacular film.
For the Record:
Amour (Haneke) didn’t do it for me. Beautifully made and beautifully acted, but it struck me as cynical and glib (a bit like The Piano Teacher in this respect). A much better deathbed film, in my opinion, was Stopped on Track (Dresen), which seemed to me to have greater honesty and more to say, even if its ultimate message is the hardly consoling “the death of a loved one is absolutely horrible, but it doesn’t have to be terrifying.”
(Oh, and for the benefit of those who like to get all tied up in statistical knots, I've taken the radical approach of compiling my list of the best new films I've seen in 2012 from the new films I've seen in 2012. i.e. if I see it in 2012, and it's a new film, it's eligible, even if was first screened for seven Kazakh goatherds in a DCP-equipped yurt in November 2010.)
Ten Best
SPECIAL CASE: Raumlichtkunst (Fischinger) - Maybe the best new film I saw this year is in some ways over 80 years old. This speculative reconstruction of one of Fischinger's multi-screen film performances from 1926 would be a stunning achievement in any decade, a tsunami of abstract kinesthesia. Even if it's only an approximation of what he was doing at that time, it confirms that he was 30, 40, 50 years ahead of it.
Holy Motors (Carax) – As the prologue announces in no uncertain terms, this is Leos Carax’s Dream of Cinema, and it’s a dream about death and transformation, about the existential implications of acting, and about the pure joy of great filmmaking. It’s also really funny, has some lovely dogs in it and a couple of great musical numbers. If you want tight plotting and detailed character drama on top of all that, you really have no idea where this film is coming from.
Vivan las Antipodas! (Kossakovsky) – More pure cinema delight. Is this the first time that some smart producer has thrown serious Baraka-level money at an actually great documentary filmmaker? Kossakovsky’s previous films have been extremely intimate and low-key (Svyato, about a little girl becoming aware of her own reflection for the first time, is about as intimate as documentary can get), and he manages to preserve that easy, human level of interaction even in a globe-trotting spectacle like this. He’s particularly fine in delineating the relationship between humans and animals. This is a film that really understands scale, and understands that any environment is an environment of wonder if you know how to look at it the right way.
Tabu (Gomes) – One of those films where you know from the outset that you’re in the hands of a master filmmaker and can sit back and see where you get taken. Like Holy Motors, this is a film that is reflexively about cinema (more than half the film owes a debt to silent film, and the opening nods to The Asthenic Syndrome) without being overly derivative.
Nana (Massadian) – A beautifully realized first film, focussed entirely on the experience of a 4 year old girl left mostly to her own devices on a farm. Yes, it’s as cute and as scary as that suggests.
Just the Wind (Fliegauf) – This following-people-in-extreme-close-up thing is possibly the biggest art-house cliché of the new century, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t instances like this when it’s exactly the right aesthetic choice for the material, and all the film’s tense meandering lays the groundwork for an explosive finale.
In Another Country (Hong) – This seems to have been dismissed as minor Hong (like almost every other recent Hong), but I think it’s one of his best, even if it is very much business as usual. (And anyway, who wouldn’t want to see another half dozen ‘business as usual’ Eric Rohmer films, for example?) It’s actually one of his most straightforward and straightforwardly entertaining films, since it sets up a clear framing device to account for the sly narrative tricks that ensue, but that also helps make Hong’s entire creative project a little more transparent. After all, don’t all our lives resemble a Hong film to a large extent, with the same situations, relationships and bits of dialogue recurring in an infinite number of possible variations? It’s the situational context and our own personal history that inflects these commonplaces with individual meaning. I’m delighted to report that Huppert gets Hong, and this particular script, completely, and seems to have a great time playing three variations on a Korean woman’s limited understanding of what a French woman in Korea might be like. She’s not searching for deep character moments but is fully invested in the narrative play.
Moonrise Kingdom (Anderson) – Speaking of pure delight. . .
River Rites (Ben Russell) – Family play in a river, backwards, becomes a bizarre ritualistic performance, punctuated with thumping electronica.
Slow Action (Ben Rivers) – A masterpiece of ethnographic forgery: an essay film exploring the cultures of four imaginary islands, all putative utopias, all eerily post-apocalyptic.
In the Fog (Loznitsa) – This film sort of encapsulates the year for me. It’s a great film, flawlessly made, but it’s a giant step down from the audacity of My Joy. Still, it’s not fair to downgrade such a fine film simply because Loznitsa’s previous one was one of the best of the century to date.
And Also:
A perdre la raison / Our Children (Lafosse) – Extemely tense and bleak domestic drama, with an incredible performance from Emilie Dequenne (even better here than in Rosetta.)
Barbara (Petzold) – The best Petzold film I’ve seen so far. Impeccable filmmaking.
Photographic Memory (McElwee) – Another instalment in his ongoing autobiography, one which brings us into the present and takes us way back into the past, in order to ruminate on the hazards of personal and technological memory.
The Lifeguard (Alberdi) – An extremely low-key semi-documentary character study that builds to an unexpectedly complex emotional climax.
Margaret (Lonergan) – You all know this is a great film already, right?
Faust (Sokhurov) – The more heavily narrative Sokhurov’s films are, the less I tend to like them, but this film has so many amazing visual and atmospheric sequences that I love it anyway.
This Is Not a Film (Panahi) – I actually didn’t love this as much as I hoped, but it’s charming and profound and all those good things.
Crazy Horse (Wiseman) – Doesn’t get into the institutional culture as deeply as you’d hope from Wiseman (and at any rate not a patch on the wonderful Boxing Gym), but well worth it for the superb pop-art musical numbers. Quite probably Wiseman’s most visually spectacular film.
For the Record:
Amour (Haneke) didn’t do it for me. Beautifully made and beautifully acted, but it struck me as cynical and glib (a bit like The Piano Teacher in this respect). A much better deathbed film, in my opinion, was Stopped on Track (Dresen), which seemed to me to have greater honesty and more to say, even if its ultimate message is the hardly consoling “the death of a loved one is absolutely horrible, but it doesn’t have to be terrifying.”
(Oh, and for the benefit of those who like to get all tied up in statistical knots, I've taken the radical approach of compiling my list of the best new films I've seen in 2012 from the new films I've seen in 2012. i.e. if I see it in 2012, and it's a new film, it's eligible, even if was first screened for seven Kazakh goatherds in a DCP-equipped yurt in November 2010.)