Best Films of 2018

10. La Flor (Mariano Llinás)
Across three days at the New York Film Festival, nearly 15 hours of alternately infuriating and exhilarating art damage. 

9. Night Pulse (Damon Packard)  
Packard is a national treasure and his latest conniption fit takes on the Poppy Bush Interzone, particularly 1991. Characters include Dick Cheney, USA Up All Night host Rhonda Shear, Julia Roberts, Kim Fowley, Sade, Janet Jackson, William Friedkin, Geddy Lee, and "the drummer from Roxy Music." Subjects include the poppy fields of Afghanistan, the Illuminati, the death of the CD, multiplexes, the Los Angeles riots, and the DuPont Family (I think). The genre is the psychological thriller as told by unnaturally lit, Snapchat-cured dialogue spewers stuck in digital loops and endless chase scenes. The feel is paranoid, nerve-wracked, stuck. The message (or one at least): Even the Keepers of the Matrix are in a (the?) Matrix. 

8. 24 Frames (Abbas Kiarostami)
The Iranian master's final film. Or photograph. Or animated photograph. Or magic lantern show. Or screen saver. Or stereogram. Or...

7. Nightlife (Cyprien Gaillard)
Eternal thanks to the Gladstone Gallery for the United States premiere of Gaillard's 2015 eye-dazzling 3-D meditation on race, nature, and cross-pollination, all scored to a gut-wrenching sample of Alton Ellis' "Blackman's Word" repeating "I was born a loser." 

6. Wishing Well (Sylvia Schedelbauer)
My favorite film at the New York Film Festival brings cinema back to (one of) its origins in the novelty of motion pictures with still and moving images pulling at one another as they tumble down a vortex. It's such a generous vision that the title is as much a verb as a noun. 

5. Blindspotting (Carlos López Estrada) 
It plumbs deeper into the subjectivity of its black male principal character (Daveed Diggs, superb) than Sorry to Bother You, bursts with more ideas than BlacKkKlansman, and, like Baby Driver, is a de facto musical to boot! There are several corny moments but this ranks with Mikey and Nicky as one of the most pungent explorations of male friendship on film.

4. Dead Souls (Wang Bing) 
Grim, artless, displaying little confidence in film's ability to testify, Wang's 495-minute record of the forced starvation of "rightists" in late-1950s China stands as one of cinema's great testimonials.

3. Avatar - Flight of Passage (Walt Disney Imagineering, LEI,  Weta Digital) 
I had to be dragged kicking and bitching last summer to my first trip to Disney World in over 25 years. But this 4D flight simulation through Avatar's Valley of Mo'ara damn near justified the grotesque expenditure. It takes the irrational enlargement of cinema to a tumescence undreamt of in the surrealists' philosophy. Next attraction: Josef von Sternberg Land. 

2. Eniaios IV, Reel 2 (Gregory Markopoulos)
The Museum of the Moving Image unleashed one sliver of the Markopoulos' 80-hour monument, a 40-minute re-edit of his 1967 Bliss (shown below and also screened in the program) alternating flashes of light with black leader at unpredictable intervals and reorienting our concepts of previously self-evident truths of weight and, especially, height. As with so many avant-garde masterpieces, part of the immense pleasure lies in learning how to watch it.

1. The Films of Betzy Bromberg
Anthology Film Archives' retrospective introduced a filmmaker unknown to me whom I now rank among the greatest ever. I downed four punkish shorts from 1977-1981 and three recent feature-length films and all were astonishing. But a Darkness Swallowed (2006) is quite possibly the most gorgeous film I've ever seen. Confounding the ears as much as the eyes (and kicking off a major Creel Pone obsession immediately after), it begins with a brief meditation on two old photographs and then plumbs down into a universe of increasing abstraction. The lasting effect is one of wonder about the worlds lurking beneath our immediate perception.

Most overrated film of the year:  
You Were Never Really Here (Lynne Ramsay) 

Saw it in 70mm and never again need to see it in that format:  
2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

Two excellent films with awful endings:
Burning (Lee Chang-dong)
First Reformed (Paul Schrader)

Three fantastic explorations of space/de facto westerns:
Leave No Trace (Debra Granik)
Sollers Point (Matthew Porterfield)
Western (Valeska Grisebach) 

Two great films, one great director:
Let the Sunshine In (Claire Denis)
High Life (Claire Denis)

Better than even Mandy:
Mom and Dad (Brian Taylor)

Best Unearthing:
Assignment: Female (Raymond Phelan, 1966) in Anthology Film Archives' Beyond Cassavetes: Lost Legends Of The New York Film World (1945-70) series 

Other Highlights:
The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles) on 35mm at the New York Film Festival 
Show & Tell: Helga Fanderl at Anthology Film Archives
Nathaniel Dorsky's Arboretum Cycle at Anthology Film Archives 
Eighth Grade (Bo Burnham)
The Grand Bizarre (Jodie Mack)
Your Face (Tsai Ming-liang)

Best and Worst Films of 1999

Here's a list I found of the best and worst films of 1999. Beau Travail, Rosetta, and The Wind Will Carry Us wouldn't make their way to me until 2000. No clue why my fave Jarmusch (Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai) is missing. Kikujiro would probably top the list today. I still loathe the moralizing final third of Eyes Wide Shut but the rest hypnotizes (the grain! the performances! the dorky sex castle! Xmas!). * means I remember not a damn thing about it.

1. Crazy in Alabama (Antonio Banderas)
2. Lovers of the Arctic Circle (Julio Medem) - This is listed with This Is My Father (Paul Quinn) but all I remember about the latter is a cameo by John Cusack as a pilot. 
3. Amerikanos (Christos Dimas)
4. Fight Club (David Fincher)
5. Black Cat, White Cat (Emir Kurastica)
6. An Autumn Tale (Eric Rohmer)
7. The Iron Giant (Brad Bird)
8. Election (Alexander Payne)/Stir of Echoes (David Koepp)
9. eXistenZ (David Cronenberg)
10. My Parents Read Dreams I've Had About Them (Neil Goldberg)
 
Runners-up: 
Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (Jay Roach) 
Besieged (Bernardo Bertolucci) 
The Blair Witch Project (Eduard Sanchez, David Myrick)
Bowfinger (Frank Oz)*
Dick (Andrew Fleming)
Get Real (Simon Shore) - But I hate how the female best friend was shrugged off.
King of Masks (Wu Tianming)*
Limbo (John Sayles)*
Loss of Sexual Innocence (Mike Figgis)
Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson)
The Omega Code (Rob Marcarelli)
The Red Violin (François Girard)
Romance (Catherine Breillat)
Run Lola Run (Tom Tykwer)
The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan)
The Straight Story (David Lynch)
Summer of Sam (Spike Lee)Superstar (Bruce McCulloch)
The Talented Mr. Ripley (Anthony Minghella)  
The Winslow Boy (David Mamet)
 
Worst:
1. American Pie - I no longer recall why this was #1 but voilà!
2. The Phantom Menace
3. The Mod Squad - At a preview screening, there was a loud industrial scraping sound that made the film great for 90 seconds.
4. The Out-of-Towners
5. The Thirteenth Floor*
6. Detroit Rock City
7. An Ideal Husband
8. Jawbreaker
9. Mystery Men 
10. Mystery, Alaska - Directed by Jay Roach for what it's worth.
11. Happy, Texas - At the press screening, the reels were out of order. A fascinating experience of a terrible film. 
12. The Dinner Game*
13. Dogma
A film called Elvis Lives was listed in the Worst category. But I can find no such film released around the time. Maybe I saw him at Taco Bell.

Three Hearts for Julia (Richard Thorpe, 1943)

I watched Three Hearts for Julia only because IMDb claims that Joan Crawford was offered the lead role but turned it down. Not sure if that's true even though Crawford starred in Above Suspicion (my vote for her most underrated film) also directed by Thorpe and released the same year. But it makes sense since Melvyn Douglas has the lead role. The female lead (Ann Sothern) would have proven too back seat for Crawford.

The mostly negative IMDb reviews note the poverty of laughs in this screwball comedy. But even though screwball comedies feature more violence (as a result from having to live by the dictates of monogamous heterosexual romance, say) than yuks, this one is especially odd since the dictates of wartime propaganda abrade against the comedy. It would make a great double feature with Daisy Kenyon (Otto Preminger, 1947) in which Crawford oscillates between two men. Here, Sothern juggles three men and the atmosphere feels on its way to Daisy Kenyon's enervated milieu populated with characters pulling themselves in myriad directions only to arrive at a nerve-wracked nowhere.

Douglas plays a war correspondent who returns home to find that his wife, Sothern, a violinist in an all-woman orchestra, has filed for divorce due to his lengthy absences. She tries to be best friends with him and even enlists his help in choosing between two suitors after her favor. Sothern's blasé path toward monogamy gives off a distinctive Lubitschian fragrance. But to continue along that path would have given the MPPDA pre-Code jitters. Douglas wants and eventually gets her back via the help of conductor and Czech refugee Anton Ottoway (Felix Bressart).

The inevitable reunion pivots more on (wartime) musical logic rather than comedic exigencies, exemplifying Jane Feuer's notion, from her seminal book The Hollywood Musical, that the musical marshals the forces of American entertainment to bring a film to its resolution. Ottoway longs to do a solid for Uncle Sam. So he plans a USO concert of Americana instead of the Borodin, Wagner, and Rimsky-Korsakov of previous scenes (during which the women preposterously halt rehearsals with makeup applications and child rearing) and through various machinations, uses the event to bring the two principals together. The concert is a medley of warhorses like "Kingdom Coming" and "Home on the Range." Sothern has been playing somewhat listlessly until she sees Douglas in the wings at which point she launches into a near-lusty solo of "I've Been Workin' on the Railroad." But their reformation is made through the music - they never embrace! And given that WWII is raging, it's more important to form a community on the heels of the formation of a heterosexual couple. So as the orchestra moves into "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree," the audience of military men sing along suddenly. Ottoway turns to them(/us) and the sing along blends imperceptibly into "America the Beautiful" for the last shot before the closing credits. If it feels uneasy, just wait 'til Daisy Kenyon.

Look fast for Marie Windsor in the orchestra.

 

 

Empire (Andy Warhol et al., 1965)

Saturday, January 12 at 1 p.m., the Whitney Museum of American Art, in conjunction with their Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again exhibit, showed Warhol's silent Empire at 16fps making for a screening of eight hours and five minutes. It was one of the greatest cinematic experiences of my life. Below are some thoughts on the screening divided into three sections: the experience of the environment, the experience of the film, and the aftermath.

I. Without Me

I stayed for the entire film with two brief-as-possible potty breaks. It was impossible to determine how many people lasted from beginning to end (start to stop?) since many people filtered in and out of the extremely dark theatre. But I would wager that the core group of fellow intrepid travelers comprised about ten people, no more than fifteen. I brought several fig bars, two beef/pork sticks, and two coconut waters (thanks to Blake Gopnik's suggestion in a New York Times article detailing his experience seeing it at 18fps in 2014 at the James Fuentes Gallery). 

I was in procedural terror for days before the screening. It's preposterous to discuss authenticity in relation to Warhol but would there be any rules? Would it be a happening? Could I last? What if I fell asleep or, worse, snored?  I knew my buddy Whit Strub was going too. Do I sit by him? Could I last? 

I arrived around 12:45 and sat one seat away from Whit. We talked with the gentleman behind us for a bit. Whit later told me he was a retired Poli Sci professor who was spending his free time absorbing culture. He confessed that he would stay only until about 4pm and indeed, three hours into the film, he leaned in to us and whispered (paraphrasing), "Gentlemen, remember to tell Sparta of your heroism" before departing.

About an hour into the film, a group of twentysomethings entered. One gal took several pictures and maybe a video of the screen. Another who arrived a bit later (and whispered with a gal in the first group) sat in the row in front of us and was buried in her phone almost the entire time. I looked over and discovered that she was on Instagram (I believe) and I caught her typing the words "video [sic] of...minutes of the fucking...Building!"

It's difficult to police reception of a Warhol film especially one as environmental as Empire. But for better or worse, the Whitney set the conditions of reception as silence in the dark. No Velvets, no Woronov/Malanga wielding whips, no silver clouds. In those conditions, it would prove absurd to request reverent silence. And here, I wasn't initially annoyed by the cell phone intrusion. It could help pass the time if need be. But the Instagram harangue irked me. And when it was clear that this group was staying a while, I grew nervous about future interruptions and wanted to yell, "Do I go to your Avengers-ass movies and ruin those? No! So don't do it here!" or "Why are you even here?!?" Instead, Whit lost patience and seethed "Turn your cell phone off, please!" at cell phone gal who soon left.

I'm glad I didn't say what I wanted. During the first potty break, I ran into a guy staying for the duration too. Turns out he's a NYU professor teaching a JanTerm course called The Age of Warhol (!) (and author of the 33 1/3 on Marquee Moon I found out later!) and those were his students. He apologized for their behavior because he told them that Warhol screenings could be raucous events. I shrugged, we discussed reception for a bit, and then it was back to the Empire. 

Feeling emboldened, I later scolded the matriarch of a noisy family. She was already seated yet felt compelled to use her iPhone flashlight to look around the theatre. "You can turn that off," I curtly suggested and they remained in silence for a respectable five minutes. Hour six saw a lot of activity: a man looking at Warhol pictures on his phone who left in a huff after I asked him to turn it off; a family with two young children who stayed approximately one minute with a father who almost killed himself tripping up the stairs; a woman who opened the door and exclaimed in loud, hilarious New Yawkese "the Empire State Building!" The NYU professor got vigilant and went to the door several times to request silence before entering.

II. Within Me

On the morning of the screening, my procedural terror morphed into excitement. And now I have difficulty recreating that terror. For the most shocking aspect of the Empire experience is how easy it was to watch. With no perversity implied, I submit that it was much more difficult for me to sit through many feature-length art films, L'enfant secret (Philippe Garrel, 1979, 92 minutes), say, or most Godard, than Empire. This is because I entered what Douglas Crimp calls, in his book "Our Kind of Movie": The Films of Andy Warhol, Warhol's time. In an section on watching several Warhol films at the MoMA Film Study Center with Jonathan Flatley (author of the superb essay "Warhol Gives Good Face: Publicity and the Politics of Prosopopoeia" in Pop Out: Queer Warhol), Crimp notes, “Jonathan and I remarked to each other after our final day’s screenings that our sense of time had been utterly altered by the experience. On the simplest level, we had become completely relaxed about how much time was passing and not at all impatient at the films’ usually long-seeming duration. We felt at that moment as if we could go on watching Warhol films for days on end and continue to enjoy the experience thoroughly.” For me, this is a warm, cozy feeling I associate with Christmas as a child or hanging out with friends I no longer see like Pope and Jean-Guy in Montréal at the start of my grad student life. There were moments when the severity, if not the sadism, of the film blew me back. But overall, it felt like a gift, an extended stay at a day spa or a fuzzily defined sense of care washing over me. I came to it but it came to me. I was genuinely sad when I saw the increased scuzziness of the final reel heralding that the end was just seconds away.

For the first hour, the image is evenly lit so that you can make out the details in the Empire State Building and see downtown to the southwest. But then the floodlights go on (less noteworthy than reported since it occurs so early in the film) and the viewer is treated to an extremely high-contrast image of the lights which makes up the majority of the film. Much more shocking is that the floodlights go off and for the last 70 minutes, the film is complete darkness save for a few lights that form a vague Big Dipper pattern. No one entered during this time but it would have been fascinating to gauge the responses to staring at a "nothing" even more extreme than the Empire State Building's floodlights. 

The true star of Empire is the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower eleven blocks to the southeast, Eve to the Empire State Building's Margo Channing. The tower features a light at the top that in real time blinks off every fifteen minutes and then blinks the number at the top of each hour. Since Empire is shown at 16fps, however, these occur at approximately 20 minutes and 70 minutes respectively in screen time. The first time I looked at my phone (apart from the first potty break at around 4:15 p.m.) was 6:50 p.m. not out of boredom or impatience but to time the blinks. These blinks were the friendliest aspect of Empire, lending the film a built-in metronome and grounding the Empire State Building's floodlights in space and time. The tower light shone the brightest during the last 70 minutes, much brighter than the faint antenna light on top of the Empire State Building which blinked incessantly but was easy to lose in the darkness. 

This Google Maps shot shows the positions of the two monuments along with the Time-Life Building from where the film was shot on the 41st floor. 

A window several floors below the floodlights remained lit for several hours. You can barely see it if you click on the picture at the top. Later I noticed it was off. But I never saw the moment it was extinguished. I call this light Li'l Window Dude. 

For a few seconds, Warhol appears and, more clearly, Jonas Mekas (along with four panes) in a reflection in the window. They turned on a light to reload the film and three (four?) times they forgot to turn it off before filming. This reinforces two realities about Empire: 1. It is not one continuous shot which would have been impossible with film. There are slight variations in each reel. 2. The film was originally credited to both Warhol and John Palmer, star of Warhol's John and Ivy (1965) and also visible in the film. And the concept of filming the Empire State Building was Mekas' idea. So the question of authorship is vexed in typical Warholian fashion.

Against the ceaseless image of the Empire State Building, the flares, hairs, and air bubbles on the film become events which the Digital Noise Reduction of a Blu-ray would eliminate (along with remaining captive to the film's duration, the best reason to see Empire on celluloid in a theatre). These elements compete with the core image for your attention, most intensely for a stretch where a ghost of the film, sprockets and all, floats on top somewhat akin to the material skidding in Little Dog for Roger (Malcolm Le Grice, 1967).

Finally, there are the perceptual tricks the film plays on the viewer. During the first hour, you try to focus on one part of the building. But the grain of the film starts to mimic movement that is not actually happening, a swarm of locusts accumulating or perhaps a gas leak wafting by one area. Turn your head slightly to either side and a black rectangle follows, a canted image of the frame that has been imprinted on your retina for so long. Sometimes you couldn't get the floodlights to render depth; other times you couldn't find their two-dimensional pictoriality again. Did the building just jump out at me?

III. Us 

After the screening, Whit, the NYU prof (one of his students stayed for about three hours!), and I chatted and were soon joined by a clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia. He emailed us his notes (sample nuggets: "About an hour forty five in I quietly move to the leftmost seat in the front row so that the parallax distortion of the image mimics the view of the Empire out my kitchen window" and "I dream of having an Insomnia cookie") and we shared our experiences. Apparently, someone towards the front was crying and everyone but me heard soft chanting at one point. 

At dinner afterward, Whit asked me to what extent my mind wandered during the film. I surmised it would be impossible to watch every minute of it in rapt attention. Certainly, there were moments when I snapped into philosophical mode, trying to fashion some sort of connection to sexploitation films of the era. But there were many more where I coasted in and out of lucid dreaming or kept repeating the Migos and disco I was listening to on the ride down to the Whitney. And I still remain stunned by how easy it all was, more sybaritic and opulent than some sort of severe exercise. 

Whit also noted that the core audience read as white men almost entirely including the four professors in conference at the end. Not sure how to address this fact except to suggest that the Whitney should revive the 8-hour Park Lanes (Kevin Jerome Everson, 2015) which they screened in 2016. 

Empire will be showing again at the Whitney on Saturday, March 9, 2019 at 1 p.m.

Random Art from the Whitney Museum of American Art and Allouche Gallery