Annual Catch Up 2016

Because I never seem to get round to writing about these during the year...


7. L'Atalante

This was one of the films I hadn't even heard of before starting this list, and it was as high as no. 7! Shows how little I know about cinema, eh. It's another very old film, from 1934, so that raises the usual question: is it on the list purely because of how important it is in the history of cinema and how influential it has been to later artists, despite being somewhat dated in today's eyes? Or is it actually good on its own terms?

I'd hesitantly go with the latter. It's definitely very good and I would easily rank it higher than something like Rules of the Game, but I still find the position in the top 10 a little surprising. Put this at number 50 and I wouldn't quibble for a second, but I think top 10 films should be truly special and, for me, this isn't quite up there.

It's the story of a woman who marries a river boat captain. We don't see anything of the courtship, and it's not really clear why they're together since they don't seem especially in love. In fact, he's kind of a dick and at one point abandons her in Paris. There's a facade of reconciliation, but you know they will either end up divorced or miserable. So the central romance is not exactly very romantic, but there is a lot to love about this film. The supporting characters are great fun, and there are lots of little vignettes of French river-boat life that keep you absorbed throughout. Probably only one for the film buffs out there, but I liked it.


27. Ugetsu Monogatari

This movie is hard to explain. First of all it's a bit all over the place, can get a little abstract and doesn't always make much sense. The title, which translates loosely to Tales of Moonlight and Rain doesn't help much either. But secondly, and no less importantly, I don't want to spoil it for you because it's awesome. Go into it blind, like I did, and I think it'll be a lot more fun.

This is a real masterpiece of Japanese cinema and I'm glad to have had it recommended for me. It is kind of weird, and the plot takes you to places that you don't expect from the outset, but it never stops being interesting, it has a great cast of characters and it is immaculately put together. Hmm, now that I'm writing this I kind of want to watch it again...


37. The Bicycle Thief

This is really Bicycle Thieves, but the list-makers' inability to get titles right strikes again. It's the first of two Vittorio de Sica films I'm ticking off, and there are many similarities between the two. This one is the more action-packed, but that's not saying a lot. It's a gentle story about a working-class man who's delighted to get a job putting up posters, but devastated when his bicycle gets stolen and without which he won't be able to continue working. He hunts around 1940s Rome with his son trying to track it down. Does he literally find the thief? You'll have to watch it to find out.

So just do that - watch it. It's a classic that every film-lover should see. Brilliantly performed, unflashy direction and a lovely and honest story that actually provokes the odd thought. So stop watching that Big Bang Theory rerun and whack this on the telly.


57. The Lady Eve

58. The Palm Beach Story

This is a romantic and hilarious 1940s Preston Sturges screwball comedy, about a smart and devious woman trying to bag herself a slightly dopey millionaire. Of course, she finds love at the end. The dialogue sparkles like it rarely does these days, the performances are spot on and the direction is energetic and never loses pace. A brilliant comedy that's just perfect for a Sunday afternoon.

And yes, I just wrote one review to cover two films - I'm big on efficiency. They really are bizarrely similar and appear consecutively on this list. I think I preferred the #58 entry overall, but they're both pretty great.


62. Umberto D

The second de Sica film I watched this year - actually the second de Sica film I've watched in my whole life - this film is utterly lovely. It's a simple and sad story, about a proud elderly man trying to get by on his meagre pension in 1950s Rome. It's all very realistic and devastatingly honest about its subject and the collection of characters he meets. Carlo Battisti, a non-professional in his only film role, is amazingly believable as Umberto. His little dog Flike is the star of the film, though. Adorable and smart, there's a heartbreaking scene where, too proud to do it himself, the old man gets Flike to beg on the street for pocket change, but immediately regrets what he has done. If I wasn't emotionally dead inside it would bring a tear to the eye.

Watch this if you're in the mood for something quiet and understated - it's perfect.


112. 8½

This is the film that film-makers love more than audiences, but that's ok because there's more than enough to enjoy if you've never gone through the hell of directing your own feature. It's the story of a director working on a film, struggling with creative block and managing the various women in his life. He seems to be a bit of a hack, making some sort of rubbish sci-fi B-movie but still unable to come up with any good ideas. His counterpoint is Fellini himself, who never runs out of steam and pours all of his genius into this story. It's full of delicious little flourishes, bizarre flights of fancy and the highly watchable Marcello Mastroianni. Why did it take me so long to watch this?


112. Napoleon

I don't know why the list films I've decided to see at the cinema have been the longer ones. Les Enfants du Paradis was over three hours long, and amazingly this was more than twice as long if you include intermissions! I think it probably is too long, but not by much. You could definitely lose the sub-plot of the maid having a crush on the Napster. And while some of the political intrigues of the Terror give important context to the B-dog's rise, a lot of it could be streamlined. But I'm quibbling - there's a good four or more hours of riveting classic silent cinema here.

Surprisingly, it doesn't even cover much of Boney N's life, ending with the start of the Italian Campaigns, two decades before Waterloo. That's a little disappointing, but there's more than enough to enjoy, from the childhood snowball fight he commands with military precision, to the exciting and chaotic Siege of Toulons. Perhaps he is painted a little too perfectly, since you know that in the end he'll lose to Wellington and Nelson, but we'll forgive a French director from focusing on the French.

A magnificent and riveting watch. I'm very glad to have caught this at the cinema, too, since the ultra-wide 3:1 aspect ratio finale would look ridiculous on a TV screen. Highly recommended if you don't mind getting deep-vein thrombosis.


112. The Girl and Her Trust

An easy one to tick off the list, this is a 15 minute silent short directed by the granddaddy of early cinema: D.W. Griffiths. I'm not really sure why it's on here, really, but I suspect it's some boring reason like being ahead of its time and inventing some cinematic tropes that later became ubiquitous. For example, there's a fairly lengthy chase scene involving a steam train following a hand-car, and the camera tracks the action from the side. It looks terrible, since it was clearly done with a camera mounted on the back of a truck driving on a bumpy road, but for 1912 this was highly impressive. Maybe if it wasn't for this film, Keaton's The General wouldn't exist, but that doesn't mean that it's any good in today's money.


212. The Philadelphia Story

It was a little hard to believe that I'd never seen this before but it's one of those classics that had always passed me by. I'd seen High Society, the remake, and the countless other films that this has inspired, but never the original. Watching it, though, it did all feel very familiar and I knew from the first few minutes that I would be in safe hands. It's just one of those perfect films that does what it sets out to do so flawlessly that you can't really pick any faults with it. If you're in the mood for a romantic comedy with some bite, you can't go wrong with this one.


220. Last Year at Marienbad

This is a very weird and abstract film, about a man on holiday trying to convince a woman he meets that they actually had an affair the year before. She can't remember him, but maybe her memories are as fractured as the film's editing? Who can say. I don't always like this sort of thing, and prefer my surrealist cinema to have at least a smidgen of narrative structure. That's why Mulholland Drive and Eraserhead are much better than Inland Empire. But I actually rather enjoyed this film. For one, it's quite short and that's definitely a plus point for films that don't make any sense. It's beautifully photographed, so you can at least enjoy the visuals. And it has some nice moments. Not one that I'm going to recommend to many people, but I don't regret sitting through it.

5. The Man With A Movie Camera

I've been at this blog for five years, so it's pretty shameful that I still haven't finished the top 10. Let's try and rectify that this year...

The Man With A Movie Camera (which, as is this list's wont, is probably not its title) is described as an "experimental silent documentary with no story and no actors". Clearly, therefore, it'll fall into the "arthouse bullshit" category - those films that are 10% intriguing and 90% boring nonsense. Who the hell voted this all the way up to no. 5? Sheesh... Except that in this case that's not right at all - this is a masterpiece and everybody should see it.

As described, it doesn't really have a storyline, but you could say that it's the story of a day in the life of a Soviet city in 1929. People wake up, people ride in cars, people go to work, babies get born, beers get drunk, people go for mud baths, trains ride by. We also see people going to the cinema and watching a film. The film is called Man With A Movie Camera, which is a bit odd. We also regularly see a man with a movie camera, filming Man With A Movie Camera, and a woman in the editing room editing said film. Sometimes the film fractures and we see some stills, but that's just because she's taking a break.

Such self-reflexive fourth-wall breaking could be a bit annoying, but it's so seamlessly done that it functions more as a running gag than some sort of knowing comment on the nature of filmmaking. You smile at the director's cleverness rather than try to decipher his meaning. It's basically like the final fight scene in Blazing Saddles, which I doubt anybody has ever said before.

The film is super important for students of film history. As Wikipedia tells me, Vertov, the director, invents or develops a staggering array of film techniques: double exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, footage played backwards, stop motion animations. What a show off. But what's even more impressive is that even 87 years later, when all of these techniques have been done to death and watching a film with an average shot length of 2.3 seconds isn't such a shock to the system (fuck you, Michael Bay), it still feels fresh and new and exciting. I'm not saying it would make a lot at the box office, but if this was released today as a new 2016 film it would not look dated.

The editing is the true triumph here. The direction is very inventive in places, but really anyone can wander about a city and shoot random stuff, and then have another person shoot the person shooting the random stuff. The genius is Elizaveta Svilova, Vertov's wife, who had to compile all the footage and stitch it together into 68 minutes without once losing momentum and letting it get boring.

I should also note that I watched the version with a 2002 Michael Nyman score, which really enhances it. Silent films were never truly silent and - just like with any "talkie" - the music is a hugely important factor in how you perceive and enjoy the film.

I genuinely recommend this to anyone with a passing interest in cinema. You don't have to watch it all, although it's only an hour and I doubt you have anything better to do. Just watch ten minutes and get a feel for it - you might get swept along and watch it to the end. It's currently available on Youtube, although I have no idea how legal it is. Presumably the film is out of copyright, but the music won't be.