April

Los Angeles Plays Itself [rewatch]
During the Q&A, Andersen mentioned a certain dissatisfaction with the original form of Los Angeles Plays Itself in 2003—in comparison to the decade-later remastering that replaced many clips with HD counterparts—feeling that it didn’t quite correspond to his desire to make a “real movie.” This statement felt consonant with something which I had only truly grasped when watching the film for the first time theatrically: there’s actually less constant narration than I remembered, with a good deal of the film clips playing out unabated. The film’s (simplified) aim is to critique and challenge the Hollywood machine and its pillaging of a beautiful, weird city, and the magpie-like assortment of sources holds up a mirror to the flaws. But Andersen has at the very least some affection and admiration for spectacle, and showing all these clips in full yet shorn of context, especially in a space where they would have been originally seen, magnifies all aspects: the crassness and inaccuracy, but also the attention to behavior and action, the immaculate craft (or lack thereof), the underlying politics. Additionally, by placing this range of works alongside each other (even/especially The French Connection, The Rookie, and a few Hitchcock films as a direct contrast) and the shock of Stratman’s grainy, pointedly unglamorous location footage, the viewer’s ability to distinguish between highbrow and lowbrow, artistic and commercial is largely subsumed into something almost hypnotic. Andersen uses the spectacle as both Trojan Horse and an end unto itself, just one of countless, brilliant contradictions laced throughout.

Leviathan [rewatch]
It’s easy to construe Leviathan as a case of man against nature, but there’s a certain irony in how (considering their centrality in most of the film’s publicity material) the seagulls aren’t generally considered largely separate from the marine life. In effect, they form a third part of the food triangle in the film, swarming the bloody mess strewn from the hulking fishing vessels, a quasi-parasitic relationship that skirts the line between natural and unnatural more fitfully than the most common interactions (man and fish). If the film’s interest can be broadly said to be work and its detritus, the latter part of the equation is both exterior and interior: the carnage of dead and dying sea creatures is juxtaposed with dirtied and weathered human bodies. In both the film’s most mordant and telling gesture, the workers can’t even escape the fishing life even in what little downtime they have, watching Deadliest Catch while slowly drifting to sleep. Is it because they seek identification, to see even dire circumstances? What Castaing-Taylor and Paravel provide is something else, something more awful and wondrous entirely.

January

In the Mood for Love [rewatch]
While it serves different purposes in different films, Wong’s voiceover has always been central as another layer in his characters’ and cinema’s means of expression. But while there are numerous phone conversations that hang over the film’s images, In the Mood for Love only contains two lines of true voiceover. They both come from Cheung, immediately after she and Leung realize they both know the secret that initially unites, then ultimately divides them: “I thought I was the only one that knew,” then “I wonder how it started,” both laid over a distant, hazy shot of the two of them walking away together.

Wong then cuts to black, then to what appears to be an innocent conversation, then an alarming upsetting of propriety, then a tentative and tortured reenactment. If cinema can be said to embody mindsets, to flesh out characters, then this may be among the greatest of examples: the decision to go down this path is not made on screen, but it is embodied in that brief strip of black leader, that ambiguous space between thought and action, made in an instant that haunts and grows in the mind.

Lincoln [rewatch]
Ten years and the nakedly obvious upheaval therein may have actually improved the fundamental politics of this, at least from my perspective. In the Obama era, Lincoln’s steadfast commitment to his principles could be seen as timely, a friendly reminder from an icon to continue the good work. Now, it’s the actual machinations that resonate; in a way it has matured, or perhaps its outlook has curdled, like some of the greatest historical films; it has come to take on the politics of its time, which is as much a testament to the unchanging undercurrents of America as it is to the total inhabitation from all here.

February

Who’s Stopping Us
There’s a scene in here that feels almost like a lo-fi version of the go-fast boat to Cuba in Miami Vice, two characters acting on an urge to kayak briefly across to Portugal. Though they have to return sooner rather than later, that spirit of freedom within certain limits feels so resonant with the experience of teenagehood, of all these characters moving in and out of focus as Trueba’s style shifts in response. Talking heads, voiceover, extensive hangout scenes, all of them feel integrated yet disruptive, a steady stream of insights and bullshitting that doesn’t aim to necessarily take any of the events (fiction or non-fiction) at face value. It is about the experience, the cross-section of life and vitality that gets at so much more.

Tree of Knowledge
The key moment early on (among many) is the journey of the dissected fox, first seen in long shot as the children, quiet and respectful for once, gather around the table in a circle. Gore is liberally shown but never gleefully, and the emphasis remains on the children, who have a certain awe at seeing this mini-spectacle. Two of the boys then take it, attempt to scare girls with it — only succeeding with the outcast Mona — then take it home to attempt to recreate the experience themselves. If Tree of Knowledge is as much a film about education as it is about the cruelty of children, this moment demonstrates it most clearly: a startlingly visceral punctum that breaches the bawdiness of its society that leads them to want to imitate their future selves. Unfortunately, some futures are more grown-up than others, and therein lies the essential, awful problem.

March

The Gospel According to St. Matthew
Everything comes forth from Pasolini’s early decision to convey the Sermon on the Mount in a seemingly endless series of forward tracking shots, framing Jesus the Anointed in front of a boundless and blank sky. It gets to the heart of what makes the New Testament such an oddly difficult collection of books to adapt to a different medium, even the nigh-universally known gospel. Pasolini’s great genius was to lean into that almost anecdotal quality, the procession of incident and teaching that the Book of Matthew provides, in doing so emphasizing the inherent integrity and value of each moment. The words spoken in each sentence of the Sermon function both in tandem and separately, and by placing them in formal conversation, by having them spoken directly to the viewer, their power is interpreted and conveyed with a stark impact.

Spirited Away [rewatch]
It’s a piercing testament to Miyazaki’s genius here that, for all the earned sentimentalism that flows throughout this, the film ends with Chihiro’s perspective of the tunnel receding into the distance. No view of her newfound friends, or her potential life partner, or even the mysterious gods is possible in the ultimate dichotomy between these worlds. As much as she was able to bring a great vitality to the bath house, there are forces greater than magic or love ruling over these realms, and so she must return to the living, and the sensations of the other side must remain a memory, just like the river that saved and nurtured her so long ago. It’s too far in both time and space, and that’s the way it must be.

Pom Poko
The interlude with the foxes, already comfortably assimilated into modern Japanese society, helps clarify and differentiate the plight and journey of the raccoons. It’s said early in the film that their nature doesn’t allow them to have the same focus as the foxes, too prone to sloth to be as convincingly for as long. While that may be true, that’s also exactly what allows them to produce such grand and beautiful feats: their community, their ability to feed off of each other’s energy to bolster each other. In their final decision to join Tokyo, it is still with that same compassion, a splitting up to keep as many alive as possible, an invisible community of bodies built up with each celebration, each humorous yet poignant transformation.

April

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
I’m sure others have discussed the Céline and Julie Go Boating parallels/potential homage by Rivette, but it’s fascinating how Lorelei and Dorothy’s own pantomime relies on a relative interchangeability that Céline and Julie decidedly lack. Despite their differing viewpoints on the attractiveness of a man, they both share an unabashed openness about said views, and consequently are able to inhabit each other, whether in intelligence or lunacy, shrewdness or naivetie. Like so much of the film, the illusion is as alluring as the reality, and the space created to inhabit it is as immaculate and wondrous as they come.

June

Flowers of Shanghai
I’ve never heard Shanghainese at such length before, and while I’m sure this film would be every bit as great in Mandarin or even Cantonese — it kind of sounds like Leung is dubbed when he isn’t speaking Cantonese, his voice is a little higher — it adds so much to the film. I have little knowledge of the mechanics of Shanghainese, but it sounds like it is either toneless or has tones that are much less pronounced than in other dialects. This creates a much more even-toned sound quality, an aural texture every bit as hypnotic as those repeated music cues, those tracking shots, those different yet similar narratives of decline and possibility.

July

Ruggles of Red Gap
One of the best things about this is how each musical moment holds at least two meanings at the same time depending on perspective: a dance becomes a first expression of autonomy, a new chance at love, an irritating defiance; a drum session becomes an almost childlike wonder, a bemused courtship, a momentary setback alleived by money. What McCarey accomplishes so well is being able to do justice to all of them, to find the beauty and opportunities that this paradise offers.

December

Yi Yi [rewatch]
This has never not been among the heights of cinema for me, but something that always puzzled me before this viewing was the focus on the father, sister, and brother, with the mother whisked unceremoniously away for most of the film. But apart from the absence it creates, the room allowed for all members of the family to flirt with the unknown (even the mother, trying out overt spirituality), it also removes the closest familial connection to the grandmother. Everyone else is at a slight remove from the old, comatose woman they express their thoughts to, whether by blood or by a generation gap; even the uncle has to overcome the grandmother’s apprehensiveness. If Yi Yi is the most incisive of films about family, it’s also crucial that the family is forced into unconventional circumstances for so long, that the final reunion is as bittersweet as possible, with chances for new life lost and the passing of a loved one. But they are together in the end, still fundamentally themselves, and that’s what matters.

February

PTU
The apartment raid, with the slow staggered ascent of Yam and his team with manually flickering flashlights, is at once one of the great summits of To’s ethos and its antithesis, with all that elegiac cool in service of a pointless raid that terrorizes a few women. Such is the greatness of PTU, a film that totally embodies everything masterful and terrifying about To’s filmmaking, where the wanton police brutality combined with the assuredness of the filmmaking could be repugnant if it weren’t for the interfering elements: a child riding a bike, an unexpected stabbing, an invitation to mahjong. Truth is subjective, bound to be written by the forces in charge, and it doesn’t matter who gets caught in the crossfire.

November

Shanghai Express
It’s so crucial here that none of von Sternberg’s characters fundamentally change, perhaps not even Dietrich. Despite their harrowing journey, they are either too enmeshed in China (Wong and her quiet patriotism) or too set apart from it by their foreign mindsets to be truly shaken. What matters here, and what von Sternberg so vividly conveys in his structure, which treats the entire upheaval of a vicious power struggle, is how events shed new lights on preexisting perspectives. Carmichael, previously the butt of most every joke, emerges as a guiding light, a conduit towards a deeper understanding. And it is with a great, unexpected tenderness that Dietrich rises to receive it, while keeping her luminescence intact.

The Souvenir: Part II
Aside from its clear purpose as an elaboration of an artist’s vision liberated from the strictures of a threadbare film school student’s budget and limited sets, the climax’s imagined short film acts as a synecdoche for Hogg’s larger vision. The Souvenir: Part II itself cycles through styles, throwing in privileged moment after moment, with the metafilm conceit helping the viewer to cast a different glance on each successive shot: is this Julie’s film? Garance’s? Patrick’s? Of course, it’s all Hogg’s film in the end, but there’s a productive tension of reality and unreality, most evident in Julie’s amusing but honestly painful attempts at communicating messy interior life to well-meaning but confused actors. In general, there’s a fitting sense of instability and tentativeness, thrown into further relief by the greater time spent with Julie’s mother and her own modest burgeoning artistic practice. And the very ending acts as a strange hall of mirrors, both an entrapment and a liberation, a closing of a chapter.

Round Midnight
I keep coming back to the moments where Gordon talks about his reeds. He seems to be playing on a single reed at a time, specifically requesting a Rico 3. I don’t know what the reed market was like in 1959; now reeds come in boxes of five (for tenors) and aren’t all that expensive. Moreover, Ricos are the starter reeds, the ones that come gratuit with your new horn. I play Vandoren Java 2 1/2s, designed specifically for jazz; I wonder if Gordon opting for the stronger reed helped with the richness of his sound, which regains its former luster over the course of the film. That Round Midnight can carry and sustain that detail only goes to show the key role experience should play when it comes to the creation of art.

December

Benedetta
As a Christian, I’m naturally inclined to believe in the validity of Benedetta’s visions, but I was surprised the degree to which the film — and Verhoeven — seem to agree, or at least in the conviction of her beliefs. Many have rightly commented on the general primacy of power relations over the lesbian copulations that were supposed to be the backbone, and it’s important to situate that within how it relates to the central dilemma of faith: the belief in something that can’t be directly experienced. Numerous characters, even Rampling’s daughter, invoke this, twisting it for their own ends, and while the film can be said to be a critique of the Catholic Church, a central core of faith remains intact. The two characters who most fervently express a desire for faith, Benedetta and the Reverend Mother, maintain it to the end, and as such remains unchallenged in that realm, even by the forces of lust for sex or power. What they end up doing with that desire is where interpretation lies, and where purity is corrupted.

January

Like Someone in Love
There aren’t many imposed time limits in either this or in the context of Kiarostami’s sadly curtailed career, but throughout there’s the sense of the director and his characters running out of time. The need to complete a sordid assignment, to replace a drive belt, to translate a few lines: none of these are given specific deadlines, but the characters nevertheless rush forward trying to get them over with. In their midst is Takashi, who has nothing but time: time to drive around, to light candles, to move across his apartment. Their collision is between the old and the new, the societal and the interior, and the results are unbearably poignant.

March

High and Low
In essence, High and Low really is building entirely to the scene in the GI bar. Though there are numerous scenes of interaction with the lower depths and sequences with large groups of people, this is the first time that the viewer is truly presented with the masses that Gondo and the police have been insulated from. Of course, there is a great deal of narrative import that occurs, but even more important is the clash between texture — loud music, rapidly moving bodies — and the intruders: the groups of “disguised” police officers and the dark glasses-wearing kidnapper. Both implicitly stick out, and it is their in-between status that snaps Kurosawa’s concerns into place: high and low are impossible to bridge, but there’s a great deal of room in the pits in between.

April

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon [rewatch]
While I fundamentally agree with Sean that the ending of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon doesn’t especially make sense, it carries a thematic resonance that squares with a lot of the film’s more direct import. Like with perhaps the film it most tries to emulate, A Touch of Zen, one of the greatest of all wuxias, the fundamental aim is self-betterment in favor of transcendence. For the warriors at the end of their prime, it’s to discover love while fighting the desire for revenge; for the desert bandit, it’s to recapture the one treasure that he had to let go of; for the poisonous thief, it’s to try to learn the art that she could never even begin to master. Jiaolong is caught between all of these places, and indeed wants on some level to achieve them all simultaneously. Accordingly, she is able to access these differing experiences and worlds, shifting in class stature and appearance; it’s surely no coincidence that she’s the only character to have substantially differing attire, and there’s a direct citation of the many wuxias where women disguised themselves as men just by wearing their hair up. Zhang’s all-time performance echoes this too, shifting between wide-eyed excitement, sullen discontentment, and hungry attraction in a way that still communicates the very core of her being. Crucially, she’s the youngest: she says that she’s “just playing” a number of times, and there’s a refreshing unseriousness and untestedness to her character that allows her to shift between these roles, to explore without getting stuck in her ordained place like the rest. (The near-mythic import that all of the other main actors, even Chang Chen, carry in comparison to Zhang’s still-ascendant star can’t be underestimated either.)

So while the essential nature of the ending, taking all of the stories and wishes spread throughout into account, may not necessarily work, if there’s one person who could both exist in the real world and among the clouds, floating forever, it’d be Jiaolong.

August

Dirty Ho
Both Wang and Ho face two fights that test different aspects of their kung fu abilities before they come together for the finale, and while Wang’s, cloaked in niceties and explicitly designed to be as dazzling as possible, deservedly get all the love, Ho’s feel equally vital to Lau’s framework. Whether it’s the “cripples” or the imagined con artists, he fights a succession of enemies, each with a different ability that in turn forces the untrained Ho to adopt a complementary kung fu style, often complete with otherwise unseen weapons, makeshift or not. That these are with more obviously “different,” even dangerously stereotypical foes who then reveal themselves to be phonies, speaks to the unbridgeable divide between Wang and Ho, separated as they are by class and wealth. Yet they share a sense of purpose, a talent for disguises, and a drive for fighting perfection, and even if it’s only for the span of a film, it’s more than enough to unite them.

September

Days
Even more than most of Tsai’s films, Days is in effect all about the body and its interaction with the surrounding environments, and while Lee Kang-sheng is deservedly getting much of the attention, it’s just as important to recognize exactly what Anong Houngheuangsy is doing here. It’s tempting to liken him to Lee in youth, and indeed at certain moments they appear quite similar even in the present day. But his situation, and thus the way he carries himself, is completely different. He lacks a Miao Tien or a Lu Yi-ching to surround him, cook for him, and govern the way he lives, and thus even when he appears more innocent, less prone to the acting out or pseudo-prankster behavior that Hsiao-kang indulged in, he has a responsibility to himself to uphold. His existence is thus one of a certain discipline, something that Kang never had and, as a result of his infirmity, can never have. It would be too much to suggest that Anong is some alternate vision, a way of life that Kang could have had, but Tsai’s renewed fascination, his fetishistic interest in the way this young, well-built man moves about his affairs, has its longing resonances that go well beyond the second half’s unity and separation. May we be able to continue watching alongside them.

October

Beginning
Seems to fully inhabit the material and the supernatural, which isn’t to say that the two continually coexist at all moments within this. Moreover, religion here is less the constant, forbidding presence that one would expect for a film all about the subjugation and degradation of women, and more a force that can be siloed off, that can be ignored for a time in one’s own solitude. For what Dea has internalized is an intensely focused, and just plain intense, approach to compartmentalization as evoked by composition. The innovation is less in the actual frames themselves, which tend closer to a de rigeur arthouse style (albeit even more beautifully executed than normal), and more in the context created around them, where a potent cocktail of quotidian and nightmarish tones and narrative throughlines is evoked at all times, even when the film focuses on a much different aspect of Yana’s life. By design, Beginning is a slippery film in multiple senses, where a brief respite in the woods can turn into something far more worrisome just by the elongation of the same shot, and where a pivotal location revisited ten minutes later can radically recontextualize an innocuous activity. Perhaps what’s strongest about this film is its deft balance of clear thematics with a certain inscrutability: ultimately motivations matter less in the face of such a distinct mood, which never lets up and only grows more thorny, more piercing.