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Persona completely floored me too. Inexplicably, a first viewing for me and is currently top of my list. It gets bonus points for Bergman's claim he would rather watch Thunderball than any Antonioni film!

alacal2 wrote: Wed Oct 12, 2022 9:24 am Persona completely floored me too. Inexplicably, a first viewing for me and is currently top of my list. It gets bonus points for Bergman's claim he would rather watch Thunderball than any Antonioni film!

I haven't gotten to write out my "catch up" post yet but Persona, a long time favorite, still floored me this goaround and cemented it's spot as my #1. I went through all the extras on the Criterion again and it's absolutely one of their best editions for a Bergman film, if not outright the best (the packaging tips it above The Seventh Seal I'd say, well worth owning even if you have the boxset). all the interviews on there with him are fantastic, especially that one cause he also essentially says he wouldn't want to watch his own films either. a modest genius. Peter Cowie putting on a masterclass as usual too

I'll write my post up late which means I won't be able to sell anyone on anything in time - if I can champion one film it's Coach to Vienna which I thought was a masterpiece. I'll try and expand on why before the poll closes!

A year later, and I still don't feel qualified to speak any more than this about Persona

therewillbeblus wrote: Fri Dec 03, 2021 8:00 amPersona is The Art Film, evoking a surreal mass of confusion and discovery utilizing everything from spatial and temporal manipulations to identity diffusion and even aggressive diagnostics on relational patterns to sell its enigmatic tonal energy. It’s an easy list-qualifier that perhaps one day I’ll expand upon, but to thoroughly tackle its monstrous content begging for interpretive emotional purging, I’d need about as much energy as this movie has- so I will humbly pass and submit to its aura of magic left as such.

While it would surely top the list of 'greatest' films of '66, I can't help but put at least two, and likely four films above it, simply because they've evoked such profound feelings from me more recently than Persona has. Of course, that's with the asterisk that I've seen all of them multiple times since my last viewing of Persona!

Alfie

Still got a mountain of stuff to watch but wanted to give a shout-out to this which will feature in my list. What could have so easily been dismissed as a 'Cockney Geezer' caper is a perceptive study not only of toxic masculinity but male loneliness.The use of 'direct to camera' speech surprisingly helps to establish an intimate bond between actor and viewer rather than a series of 'nudge-nudge' anecdotes. Most of this is down to Caine's acting and his superb sense of comic timing. The film's power is further strengthened by most of the female performances and, in particular, those of Julia Foster and Vivien Merchant. An unexpected treat.

swo17 wrote: Sun Oct 02, 2022 6:16 am VOTE HERE UNTIL OCTOBER 16

3 more days!

Ugg, the holidays have made it impossible to vote.

Do you need more time?

Yeah, if it’s not a problem an extension till Friday would help.

I'll go ahead and push the deadline back a week to the 23rd then

Sweet

do you still project the 67 deadline for 20 November? just curious. I think I'll have cleared up 66 by then and may get a head start.

this is good because my writeups (maybe today, if not tomorrow) hopefully will persuade some viewers to see Coach to Vienna

I'm not pushing back any future deadlines. This just gives people more flexibility. (Myself, I'm mostly through my 1967 watchlist at this point.) And your write-up will be wasted on me as I'm already voting for it

I thought these were a few last-minute watches until I just saw now we have another week.

Black Girl - The first ever feature film from Senegal (at least that's what online sources say). While it's nice to see a story from a culture that had never been represented in cinema before, this film felt rudimentary. The sound and cinematic qualities are average at best. It's barely an hour , and yet it felt like a long sit, as if the filmmakers weren't sure what to do with their story and lead character other than repeat the same melodramatic narrative beats, and symbolic imagery. The theme of the Black Girl was clearly to demonstrate how the shackles of colonialism were not completely removed when Senegal became an independent country. It's an important point to get across, but it was made by the 20 minute mark, without much expansion for the remainder of the run-time. I still gave Black Girl an average rating for its significance but I can't say I liked the film, nor eager to revisit it.

The Battle of Algiers - I was expecting a film like Battleship Potemkin or Soy Cuba, a film meant to praise revolution. Sure there was a little bit of that in Algiers, however the film took the time to tell its story from both perspectives, exploring moral dichotomies on both sides. It made for a compelling watch, rich with suspense and historical insight (albeit with biases).

Arabesque - Stanley Donen's successor to Charade was more or less follows the same formula. Two big stars of the era in an espionage rom-com thriller. The film's strengths are in the chemistry between Peck and Loren, and the action sequences. However, the story is a little underdeveloped and convoluted, thus never fully materialized. This film is leaving the Criterion Channel at the end of the month.

I'll watch more films this week in that case.

Just also bear in mind that there are still only two weeks left to suggest additions to the list of eligible titles for 1967, and I'll be starting the 1968 thread at that time as well

A handful of the dozen or so rewatches and new viewings I've been able to get to:

Closely Watched Trains (Menzel) — Kind of miraculous that this blends teen sex comedy, workplace humor, incisive political satire, and suspenseful espionage as successfully as it does. Václav Neckár’s lead performance as Miloš is wonderfully awkward, just a cringing scarecrow of nerves and anxiety navigating a confusing world of women, bombs, and office politics.

The element I felt was a little undercooked on first viewing was Miloš’ sudden transition from sex-obsessed neurotic to confident rebel willing to risk his life at a moment’s notice; the implication that getting laid made it possible for him to attempt acts of heroism seemed a little out of place with the tone of the rest of the film. This time, however, it felt more like Menzel making another joke about sexual anxiety: it’s literally easier for a young man to dangle over a Nazi war train, facing death with a live bomb in his hands, than it is to have a conversation with a girl he likes about sex — an extension of his earlier willingness to kill himself over minor sexual dysfunction.

It’s also impossible in the autumn of 2022 to see Vlastimil Brodsky’s Nazi stooge confidently explain the strategic genius behind the Wermacht’s retreats from every front and not think of the Russian military’s euphemistic explanations for each in a series of recurring defeats in Ukraine.

Daises (Chytilová) — Despite several remarkable sequences of gorgeous visual and auditory chaos — burning paper streamers in their apartment, too much fun with scissors — the first two-thirds of Věra Chytilová’s Daisies was a little too repetitive and occasionally obnoxious for me to fully endorse it; the girls felt too limited in their doll-like caricatures, and whatever socio-political commentary was being offered seemed too thin to justify all this cacophony.

The long final stretch in the hotel banquet room, however, is viscerally unsettling in a way previous gestures at anarchic behavior never achieve — and then the cleanup sequence after they renounce their bad behavior and insistence on their happiness with being well-behaved, hardworking women is more cutting commentary than anything else in the film.

Always good to finish strong, especially for a short burst of color, mayhem, and irreverence like this.

Au hasard Balthazar (Bresson) — It isn't going to sound like it, but I do moderately appreciate this movie — it has some beautiful images and ideas worth engaging with! The following is more my attempt to understand the substantial gap between my reaction and the "one of the greatest of all-time" consensus around this film:

I can buy into "the holiness of suffering" narratives under the right circumstances, especially if there's an element of selflessness or sacrifice built into that dynamic, or at the very least a compelling take on the source of that suffering; A Hidden Life comes to mind as a recent example that really hit me. Balthazar, though, has long been my least favorite of the Bressons I've seen, and this viewing did nothing to change my mind; I seemingly cannot achieve the level of investment in these characters (human or otherwise) necessary to achieve the emotional catharsis (or just straight depression) this film is notorious for delivering.

This may be a blockage of mine, but I very rarely find attempts at wringing pathos out of animals very convincing, and when the stupid cruelty of Balthazar and Marie's various exploiters and tormentors only rarely feels any more human than the titular protagonist, I have an even harder time connecting to the film. The greedy miller is far and away the most interesting of the people around our largely passive heroes who abuse them, because he at least has some sort of philosophy, largely selfish and cruel though it might be.

I'm not sure if there's a version of this that would've fully worked for me, but if there was I think it would be centered more around investigating the contrasts between a servant animal like Balthazar and the human he's most tied to, rather than their similarities. I'll probably revisit this again in another couple of decades and see if I can get there.

swo17 wrote: Thu Sep 01, 2022 5:14 am VOTE HERE UNTIL OCTOBER 23

Last day to vote!

I'll just throw in one last plug for The Flicker, which has a hypnotic, meditative quality that calms me prior to transitions or stressful events. If you don't like Mondays, and own one of the recent discs with it included as an extra but haven't watched yet, throw it on in a dark room with your phone on silent tonight and behold the entrancing qualities of the godfather of flicker films! For something so structurally mechanical, it never plays the same way twice

I'm with you on this one blus, except that watching The Flicker made me feel more nauseous than any illness I've ever had in my life, and afterwards I was profoundly disoriented for at least an hour, near catatonic to the point of being unable to drive. So while the film was an amazing, rollercoaster-like experience, it wasn't for me a particularly de-stressing one. It's almost like I can hear the incredibly tactile soundtrack still rattling in my ears...

Ha, well to be fair, it evokes all kinds of heightened sensations for me too, but the cumulative trance and its after-effects feel like a cleansing. Whether that occurs immediately or with some time and space depends on the viewing

The 1966 List



##. Film (Director) points/votes(top 5 placements, aka likely votes in decade list)/highest ranking

01. Persona (Ingmar Bergman) 444/21(12)/1(x5)
02. Andrei Rublyov (Andrei Tarkovsky) 361/19(10)/1(x4)
03. Au hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson) 278/15(6)/1(x3)
04. Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (Sergio Leone) 250/13(8)/1
05. Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni) 225/12(4)/2
06. Masculin féminin (Jean-Luc Godard) 214/11(5)/1(x2)
07. La battaglia di Algeri (Gillo Pontecorvo) 202/12(5)/2(x2)
08. The Round-Up (Miklós Jancsó) 162/9(4)/3(x3)
09. Seconds (John Frankenheimer) 159/11(2)/3
10. Chimes at Midnight (Orson Welles) 158/10(2)/5(x2)
11. Daisies (Věra Chytilová) 150/9(2)/1
12. Le Deuxième Souffle (Jean-Pierre Melville) 148/9(3)/4(x2)
13. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Mike Nichols) 144/8(4)/3
14. A Report on the Party and Guests (Jan Němec) 131/9(1)/1
15. Closely Watched Trains (Jiří Menzel) 124/7(2)/2
16. War and Peace (Sergei Bondarchuk) 119/7(3)/2
17. Breakaway (Bruce Conner) 117/6(4)/1(x2)
(tie) Come Drink with Me (King Hu) 117/8(1)/2
19. La Prise de pouvoir par Louis XIV (Roberto Rossellini) 103/8(2)/4
20. Operazione paura (Mario Bava) 99/6(1)/3
21. The Hero (Satyajit Ray) 92/5(1)/5
22. Fighting Elegy (Seijun Suzuki) 89/6(1)/2
23. The Face of Another (Hiroshi Teshigahara) 85/8(1)/3
24. The Shooting (Monte Hellman) 79/6(2)/3
25. Uccellacci e uccellini (Pier Paolo Pasolini) 71/6(1)/2
26. Bariera (Jerzy Skolimowski) 69/3(3)/2
(tie) Cul-de-sac (Roman Polański) 69/4(1)/4
(tie) Red Angel (Yasuzō Masumura) 69/5(1)/1
29. La Religieuse (Jacques Rivette) 65/4/6
(tie) A Big Hand for the Little Lady (Fielder Cook) 65/4/7
(tie) Violence at Noon (Nagisa Ōshima) 65/5(1)/5
32. Coach to Vienna (Karel Kachyňa) 64/5(1)/4
33. Fahrenheit 451 (François Truffaut) 62/5(1)/2
34. Tokyo Drifter (Seijun Suzuki) 56/4(1)/4
(tie) Brigitte et Brigitte (Luc Moullet) 56/4/6
36. La noire de... (Ousmane Sembène) 52/5/6
37. Chelsea Girls (Andy Warhol) 49/3(1)/5
38. La muerte de un burócrata (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea) 48/2(2)/1
39. The Flicker (Tony Conrad) 47/2(2)/2
40. Faraon (Jerzy Kawalerowicz) 46/5/7
41. Dutchman (Anthony Harvey) 44/2(2)/3
42. Here Is Your Life (Jan Troell) 43/2(1)/2
43. Spur der Steine (Frank Beyer) 42/2(1)/4
44. Wings (Larisa Shepitko) 41/3(1)/4
(tie) Lord Love a Duck (George Axelrod) 41/5/11
46. The Pornographers (Shōhei Imamura) 40/4/6
47. Torn Curtain (Alfred Hitchcock) 39/4/10
(tie) Made in U.S.A (Jean-Luc Godard) 39/4/12
49. Tant qu'on a la santé (Pierre Étaix) 38/2/6
50. The Professionals (Richard Brooks) 36/2/6
(tie) La resa dei conti (Sergio Sollima) 36/2/7

ALSO-RANS

7 Women (John Ford) 33/2(1)/4
Cathy Come Home (Ken Loach) 33/2/6
La caza (Carlos Saura) 32/2/7
Irezumi (Yasuzō Masumura) 32/3/12
The Sword of Doom (Kihachi Okamoto) 31/2(1)/1
Batman (Leslie Martinson) 31/2(1)/4
Abschied von gestern (Alexander Kluge) 31/3(1)/5
Le Père Noël a les yeux bleus (Jean Eustache) 31/3/11
Patriotism (Yukio Mishima) 30/3/9
Kyiv Frescoes (Sergei Parajanov) 30/3/10

Un homme et une femme (Claude Lelouch) 29/2(1)/3
Elsa la rose (Agnès Varda) 28/3/6
Django (Sergio Corbucci) 27/2(1)/4
The Chase (Arthur Penn) 27/3/8
Der junge Törless (Volker Schlöndorff) 24/3/9
Word Movie (Paul Sharits) 24/2/13
Castro Street (Bruce Baillie) 24/2/14(x2)
It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (Bill Melendez) 24/3/16
The Deadly Affair (Sidney Lumet) 23/2/12

The Plague of the Zombies (John Gilling) 22/2/13
Night Games (Mai Zetterling) 22/3/16
Process Red (Hollis Frampton) 18/2/9
Rasputin: The Mad Monk (Don Sharp) 18/2/11
Alvarez Kelly (Edward Dmytryk) 18/3/16
Sunday at Six (Lucian Pintilie) 17/2/12
Tung (Bruce Baillie) 15/2/14
Trans-Europ-Express (Alain Robbe-Grillet) 13/3/19
Three on a Couch (Jerry Lewis) 6/2/23(x2)
The Family Way (Roy Boulting) 4/2/23

ORPHANS

Film (Director) highest ranking

Aleph (Wallace Berman) 22
Alfie (Lewis Gilbert) 10
An American Dream (Robert Gist) 24
And So It Is (Jorge Sanjinés) 21
Arabesque (Stanley Donen) 23
The Bible: In the Beginning... (John Huston) 5
Blindfold (Philip Dunne) 13
Cash Calls Hell (Hideo Gosha) 15
Daimajin (Kimiyoshi Yasuda) 19
Emotion (Nobuhiko Ōbayashi) 23
es (Ulrich Schamoni) 7
Fantastic Voyage (Richard Fleischer) 14
The Fortune Cookie (Billy Wilder) 10
Gambit (Ronald Neame) 12
Genji monogatari (Kon Ichikawa) 19
Georgy Girl (Silvio Narizzano) 11
The Ghost and Mr. Chicken (Alan Rafkin) 6
La guerre est finie (Alain Resnais) 15
Hand Film (Yvonne Rainer) 25
Hare Krishna (Jonas Mekas) 7
Harper (Jack Smight) 10
Hold Me While I'm Naked (George Kuchar) 8
How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (Chuck Jones) 13
How to Steal a Million (William Wyler) 13
Incompreso (Luigi Comencini) 2
Lights (Marie Menken) 10
La Ligne de démarcation (Claude Chabrol) 14
A Man for All Seasons (Fred Zinnemann) 8
The Man in the Frame (Fyodor Khitruk) 12
Ming Green (Gregory Markopoulos) 13
The Miraculous Virgin (Štefan Uher) 9
The Office (Krzysztof Kieślowski) 18
One Million Years B.C. (Don Chaffey) 12
Passages from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (Mary Ellen Bute) 20
Piece Mandala/End War (Paul Sharits) 10
El precio de un hombre (Eugenio Martín) 18
The Quiller Memorandum (Michael Anderson) 1
Report from Millbrook (Jonas Mekas) 9
The Reptile (John Gilling) 9
Ride in the Whirlwind (Monte Hellman) 7
Le Roi de cœur (Philippe de Broca) 15
Samurai Wolf (Hideo Gosha) 19
Schmeerguntz (Gunvor Nelson) 24
The Secret of the Urn (Hideo Gosha) 23
Silence Has No Wings (Kazuo Kuroki) 14
Sky West and Crooked (John Mills) 18
Smoking (Joe Jones) 12
El sonido de la muerte (José Antonio Nieves Conde) 17
The Stranger Within a Woman (Mikio Naruse) 20
10 Feet (George Maciunas) 21
Tendre voyou (Jean Becker) 21
They're a Weird Mob (Michael Powell) 22
This Property Is Condemned (Sydney Pollack) 17
Tiempo de morir (Arturo Ripstein) 19
What's Up, Tiger Lily? (Woody Allen) 15
You're a Big Boy Now (Francis Ford Coppola) 14
YUL 871 (Jacques Godbout) 19

23 lists submitted

Thanks swo. Also: Arghhh, I forgot to vote for Bariera because I didn’t add it to my working list before submitting!

If you tell me honest and truthfully where you would have placed it on your list before seeing the results, I can reflect that

It would have been number 3 for me, but if my math is right I don’t think even that moves the needle that much in the overall list, so no need to reconfigure everything. It was my mistake!

Well it was a simple fix, and it moved it up 12 spots. More importantly, it now shows up as having 3 top 5 placements, which can only be said of these films:

01. Persona (Ingmar Bergman) 422/20(11)/1(x5)
02. Andrei Rublyov (Andrei Tarkovsky) 362/19(10)/1(x4)
03. Au hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson) 278/15(6)/1(x3)
04. Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (Sergio Leone) 250/13(8)/1
05. Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni) 225/12(4)/2
06. Masculin féminin (Jean-Luc Godard) 214/11(5)/1(x2)
07. La battaglia di Algeri (Gillo Pontecorvo) 203/12(5)/2(x2)
08. The Round-Up (Miklós Jancsó) 162/9(4)/3(x3)
12. Le Deuxième Souffle (Jean-Pierre Melville) 149/9(3)/4(x3)
13. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Mike Nichols) 144/8(4)/3
16. War and Peace (Sergei Bondarchuk) 119/7(3)/2
18. Breakaway (Bruce Conner) 117/6(4)/1(x2)
27. Bariera (Jerzy Skolimowski) 69/3(3)/2