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Favourite Film Things 2002 - Part 3 compiled by Fiona A. Villella
The Entries
On Two Films from 2002
by Mark Peranson Year 2002: the attack of the clones. This year in movies, everything seemed to be replicated, duplicated, adapted – from literature, nonfiction, comic books, Saturday morning cartoons, the New Wave, the Land of Geekdom, and sometimes, not just according to the Raelians, real life. Continuing a long-germinating trend, originality continued to reach another new nadir in American film, with the laboratory known as Hollywood continuing to eat its own tail. With the recent discovery of the vast riches to be found in the shudders of Japanese horror and the wackiness of South Korean misfit comedies – currently being bought by rapacious Yankees spin doctors to shelve and remake – we should prepare ourselves for more second-hand goods in A-level packaging. To wit, the usual array of I Spy's aside, this year saw six remakes of honest-to-goodness films of all shapes and sizes playing at the same time for one week: see, The Ring, The Truth About Charlie, Red Dragon, Solaris, Swept Away … okay, I cheated, that last one only played for one week. Still, with all the adaptation came the anxiety of adaptation. (See the collected works of Charles Kaufman, which I support, but am tired of talking about already.) Although Tsai Ming-liang continues with his daring circular project of endlessly remaking the same movie (only 395 blows left!), the old auteuristic project of telling the same story over and over seems to be heading to the point of no return. While Mike Leigh spinned his wheels, De Palma continued… well, you know. Talk to Her finds another one of the year's baffling sensations, the obvious horndogs on the road Y tu mamá también, being crossed with the TBS staple Weekend at Bernie's. Antown Fisher – Oprah meets Dr. Phil. But context is everything. Give P.T. Anderson an Adam Sandler film, and watch critics who normally haven't the time of day for Sandler's usual shenanigans fall into line. The year's greatest critical hit, Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven, is also a remake, of sorts. Although Douglas Sirk may have died while in self-imposed exile in Lugano in 1987, 2002 will go down as the year when the reinterpretation and revival of his once-dismissed Hollywood melodramas crosses over from academics to full-blown filmic practice. Intimations of Sirk have been present in films from Fassbinder to Scorsese to Almodóvar – this is the type of Sirkian suffusion present in François Ozon's genetics experiment gone horribly wrong, 8 Women. (And is it just me or does Talk to Her just demand to be remade by Cameron Crowe starring Tom and Penelope?) Still, no director, ever, has been as pastiche-dedicated as Haynes, the former Brown semiotics major. Was film not one part inspiration, one part perspiration, one part acting, Sirk's estate could easily demand a co-director credit. Rather than simply splicing together All That Heaven Allows (Sirk, 1955) and Fear Eats the Soul (Fassbinder, 1973), Haynes uses Sirk's cinematic syntax and Julianne Moore's sublime face to write a supremely strange balancing act: Haynes on Sirk would be completely unimaginable without a close reading of Sirk on Sirk, but a film whose artificiality is the very key to its emotional depth. It seems to me that one can't resolve one's feelings to Far From Heaven without dealing with this artificiality (many are replacing it with a more value-laden term, “irony”), and artificiality that Haynes sees as indicative of not just “film” itself (as he has often said in interviews), but this very culture. I wasn't alive in the '50s, neither was Haynes, and nor were many of the revisionist critics intent on defending the '50s – and the nuclear family, á la Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can – and shoving Sirk back into the academic closet. The most curious (and, possibly, unquantifiable) thing about Far From Heaven is how it manages to be contemporary: the frisson caused by a well-placed cuss word? More than the people who were alive when Sirk was churning them out, Jackass-generation critics – a collectively cynical-by-nurture bunch – perhaps might be the ones who are on Haynes' wavelength, though the cynical comments about the film are coming from the conservative elders (one local critic pushing 50, and prodding homophobia: “I can't imagine the audience for this. Gay film geeks?”). True, we're cynical – we can't stomach the tearjerking feelgood sentimentality of a film like Antwon Fisher – but years of conditioning have mutated our reactions, leading to a place where emotions are not all that separate from intellect. Artificial melodramatists, whether Haynes or PTA, are cut from the same jib, realizing the anguish inherent in the fact that in the DVD age everything seems to be replicated, duplicated, and adapted. Abetting the Sirkian wave is the Criterion Collection's release of dazzling remastered (“as good as new!”) DVDs of All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind (Sirk, 1956) (with essays by Laura Mulvey, natch). These are the real treasures for us cineastes who were not alive in the '50s, the greatest decade for American sound and colour – Russell Metty's Technicolor – cinema. Haynes' recreation of '50s cinema is, to allude to one of Sirk's subversive contemporaries Nick Ray – perhaps next in line for revival – bigger than life: it's a factor of impeccable set decoration and to-die-for costumes, detached camera angles and colours; on the last two counts, Haynes is abetted by Ed Lachman's cinematography; I have no idea how anyone can say this film does not look good. Lachman, co-director with Larry Clark of the film maudit Ken Park (which languishes without a North American distributor), is deserving of artist-of-the-year accolades. And as for Ozon? If Sirk was still alive he'd surely sue for defamation of character. (Note to America: Sirk's best film may be in black and white. Are Haynes and Quaid up for a CinemaScope revival of The Tarnished Angels [Sirk, 1957]?) Is there any doubt that Manoel de Oliveira is the greatest living filmmaker? We should clone him before it's too late.
Even though he takes great pleasure in historical reconstruction, Scorsese, like Haynes, is ultimately just as concerned with the present as the past, and is deeply cynical about it – he has to be, to make a movie-movie like this one, littered with thieving politicians, bloodthirsty gang members whose modern-day counterparts are well-dissected in Nick Broomfield's Biggie and Tupac. A film made on the cusp of the last presidential election, Gangs makes politics into theatre – indeed, into a bona fide combat sport. The final coup de grace is how it reminds us of a stone cold fact that the rest of Hollywood seems to have erased with the ease of the stroke of a computer key: “The ballots don't matter, it's the counters. So keep counting!” Closing rant: Some critics have pointed out ideological issues with Gangs of New York, but the true ideological con job of the year – and also the true pompous, bloated, “hellish horror of failed ambition,” to quote another colleague on Gangs – is Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Most film critics are predisposed to like this kind of crap, indeed, revere it, because they read Tolkien under the covers while they were kids: I say anyone who has picked up a copy of The Hobbit should recuse themselves from any public comment on this catastrophic bore. Though horrific in its own right, The Attack of the Clones was a more enjoyable film – I'll take Yoda's nimble light-sabering over the Strom Thurmond lookalike Gollum's schizophrenic babble any day. War films are by their nature delicate enterprises, and many others, including most recently Salman Rushdie, have pointed out how irresponsible is it in this climate of saber-rattling to present one where good and evil are so clearly demarcated? One in which the faceless hoards of ultimate evil – there's even a suicide bomber in their evil midst! – are fending off by our motley crew of racially mixed, unquestionably pure heroes, who engage in a running tally of how many lowdown dirty Orcs they've felled with a mighty video-game swoop? (Oh, not to mention that the film is indeterminable, ridiculous – 45 minutes of talking trees!), and, ultimately, pointless – the hobbits start out two miles or so from The Two Towers, and end up 20 miles in the opposite direction. The audience for this – clearly repressed gay film geeks. Remind me again why this film was made? Oh yeah, 26 million dollars on opening day. 20 from 2002:
Adaptation (Spike Jonze, US) Mark Peranson is editor/publisher of CinémaScope and a programmer at the Vancouver International Film Festival. © Mark Peranson, January 2003 back to list of contributors
2002 Film Favourites
by Alberto Pezzotta
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (Park Chan-wook, 2002) Most useless, overrated, gross movie of 2002: Magdalene (Peter Mullan). If you want to see a daring movie about catholic religion, see Bellocchio's L'ora di religione. Fascist movie of the year: Irréversible by Gaspar Noé. Alberto Pezzotta writes for Corriere della sera and (too) many Italian film magazines. He has written books on Hong Kong Cinema, Mario Bava, Taxi Driver, and Abel Ferrara. He is based in Milan, Italy. © Alberto Pezzotta, January 2003 back to list of contributors
2002 Film Favourites
by Jit Phokaew (in preferential order)
Die Blume der Hausfrau (Dominik Wessely, 1999) The Tale of the Floating World (Alain Escalle, 2001) Innocence (Paul Cox, 2000) No Place to Go (Oskar Roehler, 2000) Nine Good Teeth (Alex Halpern, 2002) Days of Grace (Jaakko Pyhala, 1998) Queen of the Damned (Michael Rymer, 2002) And Then (Yoshimitsu Morita, 1985) Buenos Aires, meine Geschicte (German Kral, 1998) Cache (Carolyn Coal, 1998)
Favourite video/TV viewing: Jit Phokaew is a Bangkok-based cinephile. © Jit Phokaew, December 2002 back to list of contributors
2002 Favourites
by Mike Plante (Foreword disclaimer: Unless you saw every single film shown in any single theatre, art gallery, film festival, microcinema and basement, a top ten list is only personal and timely.)
Favourite films:
Favourite shorts:
Favourite underground videos (in no particular order): Mike Plante is editor and publisher of Cinemad magazine, programmer at the CineVegas International Film Festival and short film coordinator at the Sundance Film Festival. © Mike Plante, January 2003 back to list of contributors
Best of 2002
by Jared Rapfogel Though I loved Far from Heaven, Russian Ark, Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, and Talk to Her as much as the next cinephile, here are a few comments on some of the lesser noted films of 2002: Domestic Violence (Frederick Wiseman, 2001): Another great Wiseman documentary and, after Belfast, Maine (1999), proof that he is at the height of his powers. This is one of his most affirmative films, an investigation of domestic violence but from the perspective of a progressive shelter, and therefore emphasizing the process of rehabilitation and empowerment. Wiseman's great strength is his broad-minded even-handedness – by beginning and ending the film with almost unbearable glimpses of abuse, he makes sure we don't get lulled into a false sense of optimism, but he chooses primarily to approach his subject by portraying the excruciatingly difficult but not impossible task of taking control of one's life. Love and Diane (Jennifer Dworkin, 2002): A portrait of a poor, beleaguered Brooklyn family and the inadequate social services system that acts more to bar than to help them in their attempts to stay together. Dworkin's film is Wisemanesque in its refusal to make 'black and white' a situation that is nothing but shades of grey, however, it's a more expressive, impressionistic film than Wiseman generally allows himself, and thanks to the several years Dworkin spent with the family, a more intimate one. It's most Wiseman-like quality, though, is the feeling of relief and thankfulness it inspires for having captured a part of American experience that is so often ignored or glossed over. Esther Kahn (Arnaud Desplechin, 2000): A brilliant, mysterious film that was inexplicably dismissed by many critics. It's that rare creature – a period piece that feels almost magically transporting and authentic, but also cinematically exhilarating and innovative. Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay, 2002): Above all a perplexing film, one you begin to make sense of only after it's at least halfway over. The feeling you have while watching it, the sense of mystery as to its tone, its attitude towards its central character, and its ultimate direction, is one regrettably few movies give us these days. A movie that needs to be seen twice, once to experience it, once to try to begin to make sense of it (I've only seen it once so far).. Le Fils (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2002: Maybe the best movie of the year, and certainly one of the most emotionally and intellectually satisfying, it's a film of heartbreaking delicacy and directness, in which every gesture and every camera movement feels profoundly purposeful. A moral film in the best, most challenging, most substantive sense of the term.
La Commune (Paris 1871) (Peter Watkins, 2001): At once a riveting, heavily researched historical drama, a document of a highly theatrical communal acting exercise, a gleefully anachronistic assault on the media (the central conceit of the movie is that the events are being covered by two opposing television stations – one state-owned, the other revolutionary), and a frank investigation of its participants' political views. Surely the richest, boldest, and most politically engaged cinematic experience of recent years. Loin (André Téchiné, 2001): Largely dismissed on the festival circuit and almost unseen in America, Téchiné's latest Loin is not at all a weak effort. Shot on DV, it's a typically intense, focused drama, filmed in Techine's characteristically muscular, rhythmically disorienting style. Set in Morocco and concentrating on a French truck driver and his relationship with a young Moroccan man desperate to emigrate to France, it's small-scaled and unspectacular, but emotionally perceptive, moving, and honest as ever. Taurus (Alexander Sokurov, 2001): Another film that has been unfairly maligned at the festivals and virtually unscreened in the US, Taurus is the second in what will reportedly be Sokurov's trilogy of films on 20th century leaders. Here the subject is Lenin, and like Moloch (1999), which portrayed a short period in the life of Hitler, Sokurov limits himself to the final days before Lenin's death, his mind and body already well on the road to dissolution. Like Moloch, Taurus is a strange animal, a mysterious, poetic work that has little apparent interest in its subject's extraordinary life, treating him simply as a dying human being. A study in moods, Taurus is an exploration into the passage from life to death rather than a character study – that the particular human animal happens to be Lenin serves essentially to ground these meditations, to act in counterpoint to the universality of the film's themes. Lenin's importance in life serves only to emphasize the insignificance of such things in the face of the disintegration of a human being. Barren Illusion (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1999): Another remarkable Kiyoshi Kurosawa film, perhaps the strangest, least accessible of them, certainly the most non-narrative. Almost an experimental film.
Revived or newly encountered in 2002:
Retrospectives: Jared Rapfogel is a regular contributor to both Senses of Cinema and Cinema Scope. © Jared Rapfogel, January 2003 back to list of contributors
Favourite Films 2002
by Girish Shambu In no particular order:
Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes, USA)/Gosford Park (Robert Altman, USA)
Vendredi Soir (Claire Denis, France)/Trouble Every Day (Claire Denis)
Unknown Pleasures (Jia Zhang-ke, China)/Blissfully Yours (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand)
The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, USA)/Punch-Drunk Love (PT Anderson, USA)
Ten (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran)/Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay, UK)
The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke, Austria)/The Son (Jean-Luc & Pierre Dardenne, Belgium)
The Fast Runner (Zacharias Kunuk, Canada)/Russian Ark (Alexander Sokurov, Russia)
Shadow Kill (Adoor Gopalakrishnan, India)/Waiting For Happiness (Abderrehmane Sissako, Mali)
Femme Fatale (Brian De Palma, USA)/Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, USA)
These two stunning Spanish-language films are as distinct as they are affecting and exhilarating. The Almodóvar is a lyric poem, and the Cuarón is a rollicking road movie that packs an unexpected significance which it wears with admirable ease. As for Talk To Her, it is Almodóvar's best film yet—and the black-and-white silent film about a shrinking lover that he folds into its narrative is hands down the most sublime moment at the movies this year.
Lovely & Amazing (Nicole Holofcener, USA)/Secretary (Steve Shainberg, USA)
Highest Pleasure Quotient: Girish Shambu is on the faculty at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York. © Girish Shambu, January 2003 back to list of contributors
© Jason Sound, December 2002 back to list of contributors
© Megan Spencer, December 2002 back to list of contributors
2002 Favourites
by Mark Spratt Viewing:
[Released in Melbourne]
+ Best Restoration/Rediscovery:
Next Best:
Absolute Worst:
Overrated/Disappointments:
[P.S. Declaration – I'm the distributor of Swing and The Conversation.]
Reading: Mark Spratt has a long working background in exhibition, cinema management, programming and freelance reviewing. The director of Potential Films, he has now been a distributor for over 10 years. © Mark Spratt, January 2003 back to list of contributors
Ten Best of 2002
by David Sterritt and Mikita Brottman
Ten best films (in alphabetical order):
Ten best films without a US release in 2002:
© David Sterritt and Mikita Brottman, December 2002 back to list of contributors
In preferential order:
Brad Stevens is the author of forthcoming books on Abel Ferrara and Monte Hellman. © Brad Stevens, January 2003 back to list of contributors
2002: A Reflection
by Christos Tsiolkas Given the vagaries of distribution and exhibition, I've decided that any attempt at a list of best films I saw in 2002 should be limited to the films that I saw during that year, rather than by year of production or by official release in Australia. It can take years for films to make their way down here, and conversely, it can sometimes take a while for me to get to a film. But I can't begin any retrospective glance at the last year without acknowledging three films which I saw in 2001 but which were only officially released in Australia in 2002: they are Agnès Varda's The Gleaners and I; Bolado, Goldberg and Shapiro's Promises; and Jafar Panahi's The Circle.
The Circle is further evidence that if there is any hope to be had from contemporary narrative cinema, it is coming from humanist realism (whether from Iran, Belgium or Scotland). This is filmmaking, which is brave, rigorously committed to aesthetic and intellectual exploration, and which is, I believe, truly feminist. That's 2001. The best film I saw this year was probably Claude Chabrol's Le Beau Serge, which was made in 1959. I caught it on video. I have to confess to an ignorance of Chabrol's work. I've always assumed that he has been making Hitchcock derived thrillers from the beginning of his career. I certainly didn't expect this exquisite, sad exploration of friendship, loss, and rural life. It's made me hungry to see more of his films. Gosford Park (2001) I saw twice in the same week, once at the multiplex in the northern suburbs and then at an art-house cinema in the inner city. I can attest that Robert Altman's exhilarating and moving exploration of class is loved by both the proles downstairs and the bourgies upstairs. I'm tempted to say, forget film school, just watch Gosford Park. Or watch it, then Renoir's The Rules of the Game (1939), then watch it again. Gosford Park is a film shimmering with the love of what cinema can do – performances, editing, cinematography, art direction, sound, music, all of it was terrific. And you could feel that from the beginning, you could see it on the actors' faces. Lynch gave us another of 2002's best delights. From the opening scene of Mulholland Drive (2001) to the very end I was riveted; nothing would have budged me from my seat. I think Lynch is up there with the greatest of Surrealists. The audition scene and sequence in the Silencia nightclub were cinema's finest moments in 2002. It's a great film about the contradictions of the “Hollywood dream”, a Sunset Boulevard for the new century. Over the last decade I have been consistently impressed and challenged by Michael Haneke's work. The Piano Teacher (2001) was the year's most disturbing film, a powerful examination of a woman's masochism but one in which the psychosexual politics were connected to an investigation of the stratification of bourgeois culture. It featured the best performance of the year, by Isabelle Huppert. In daring to suggest that elite art production may not necessarily be worth the social and individual cost, it was probably the year's most despairing film. At the Melbourne International Film Festival I saw four films which have yet to receive an Australian release but I thought were fantastic. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's The Son (2002) was a tough and meticulously structured story about work and about reconciliation. It made me realise how few films have dealt at all well with the physicality and reality of working lives. I'd be hard pressed to say whether it or the Dardennes' Rosetta (1999) is the better film. Tsai Ming-liang's What Time is it There? (2001) was magical, as was Damien Odoul's Deep Breath (2000), both managing to conjure refreshing and idiosyncratically individual perspectives on, respectively, urban and rural life. The Palestinian film, Divine Intervention (2002), by Elia Suleiman was the most audacious and inventive film I saw all year. It was hard and funny and tragic. And unashamedly accusatory and political. All these films deserve a release. No, make that they demand a release. The best Australian film of the year was A Wedding in Ramallah (2002) by Sherine Salama. Her previous documentary about a Yugoslavian family's migration to Australia, Australia Has No Winter, was impressive. The new film, also about migration, its process and its cost, is even better. None of the Australian features I saw this year come close to matching it. Two other films that have stayed with me over the year are Spirited Away (2001) and Time Out (2001). The former, directed by anime wizard Hayao Miyazaki, is a superbly imaginative film, which literally does to an audience what its title promises: it spirits you away for two wonderful hours. Time Out was a sobering film by Laurent Cantet and built on the strengths of his earlier film, Human Resources (2000). In daring to suggest that work enslaves us rather than liberating us, it was also a bleakly radical film (and very different to recent English socialist realist films in which unemployment rather than work itself is the problem). Time Out featured the year's best performance by a male actor, by Aurélien Recoing. For my money, Cantet and Robin Campillo's script takes joint honour for best screenplay of the year, alongside Elia Suleiman's script for Divine Intervention. Other joys in 2002? Edward Yang's Yi Yi (2000), which finally made it to Australian screens. Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Kandahar (2001) was rough and uneven, but some of it was terrific, and all of it – given the inevitability of the bloody oil merchants and their lackeys sending us off to war – essential. Equally rough but equally special was Jia Zhang-ke Unknown Pleasures (2002), which had a unique look and a pacing: his is a China I've never seen on the screen before. I put my hand up as a fan of Wes Anderson's The Royal Tennenbaums (2001) and I'll put up my hand as a fan of Gwyneth Paltrow after seeing her in that film. She was very good. Also released this year and under-rated were Larry Clark's Bully (2001) and James Toback's Black and White (2000). Toback's film is all-over the place but the better work, and a hard, fascinating examination of white folks' obsession with black culture. Clark's film looked surprisingly ordinary but the writing and performances were fine. Of course, in 2002, there was The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), and just at year's end, The Two Towers (2002). Peter Jackson and his colleagues have re-invested the fantasy blockbuster with energy and imagination. George Lucas should be making a pilgrimage to them on his hands and knees. The most riotous time I had in the cinema this year was at The Lord of the Rings, and they are the best films to take drugs to. Bring on Boxing Day 2003. Ghost World (2001) was my year's biggest disappointment. I seemed alone of all my friends in not admiring Terry Zwigoff's film. I liked much of its imagery of suburbia but I thought the human life execrable. Zwigoff seems unaware that little girls grow up into those harridan women he obviously can't stand. And he wastes Terri Garr in a throwaway nothing of a scene. That's unforgivable. Panic Room (David Fincher, 2002) was another disappointment. I was not expecting much, just wanting to be thrilled and looking forward to watching Jodi Foster and Forrest Whittaker. I wasn't thrilled, except for the credits, and Foster was good in a shallow role. But the great Forrest Whittaker was wasted. Panic Room probably had the year's most derivative and silly script. I walked out of A Beautiful Mind (Ron Howard, 2001) because it started boring the Hell out of me. I assume it has a happy ending. I also walked out of Waking Life (2001). I think I've now walked out of every film Richard Linklater has made. I am certainly not interested in his whiny LA-slacker-philosophical speculations. The film was just plain stupid. As was the Australian film The Tracker (Rolf de Heer, 2002). It has received glowing reviews but I don't think I am a misanthrope in not liking it. There were moments of power in it but overall it failed to do justice to its subject and the final half-hour is particularly terrible, like bad amateur theatre. We needed to see real blood, if even once. I saw Godard's In Praise of Love (2001) again in 2002. It is his best work in years, poetic and harsh all at the same time. It shows up the hollowness of a Waking Life, the mediocrity of so much cinema. As yet, the film has not had a release in Australia. For all the good in 2002, that fact depresses the Hell out of me. Christos Tsiolkas is the author of The Devil's Playground (Sydney: Currency Press, 2002), and the novels Loaded (filmed as Head On) and The Jesus Man. He has also collaborated with Sasha Soldatow on Jump Cuts: An Autobiography, and has worked as a writer in theatre and film. His passions are movies, books, politics and Wayne van der Stelt. © Christos Tsiolkas, January 2003 back to list of contributors
Once again, I have seen too few new releases this past year for my comments to have any general validity (I'm still waiting for Russian Ark, for example); but the best new film I've seen was definitely Godard's Éloge de l'amour (2001). More time and viewings will be needed to begin to unravel its many intricacies; but even on early acquaintance one is grateful for its density of form and argument and for its sheer beauty. The bulk of the film is shot in an austere but rich black and white, resembling the formality of Bresson; but the end, shot in digital video, overcomes the traditional limitations of its format with luxuriantly intensified colors, a breathtaking contrast with and release from what precedes it. As for the film's content, one may briefly say that this seems one of Godard's most sustained meditations on memory and history, in which prevailing bleakness and mordant critiques of Hollywood's colonization of the past (Steven Spielberg is the target of special scorn) can not wholly erase a sense of hope—an attention to immanent grace, a tonic appetite for complexity. I should also mention the best revival of 2002: the restored edition of Lang's Metropolis (1927), which clarified both images and structure admirably and was a remarkably intense and thought-provoking experience, whatever its ideological confusions. Among older films that I first saw last year, standouts would include Rivette's magnificent fantasia on paranoia Paris nous appartient (1960) (which quotes Metropolis, incidentally) and Griffith's Isn't Life Wonderful (1924) and Sally of the Sawdust (1925), at San Diego's Museum of Photographic Arts—these last two starring Griffith's most underrated star, the extraordinarily intelligent Carol Dempster, proving herself as adept at comic exuberance as at heartbreaking innocence and patience. Erik Ulman is a composer and writer currently teaching music at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. © Erik Ulman, January 2003 back to list of contributors
2002 In Review
by Fiona A. Villella Not only is there something to be said for the whole list-making exercise, the very notion of assuming that a year is significantly distinct in meaning from others is equally suspect as is the whole idea of duration as a measurable, quantifiable unit. Regardless, the practice of taking stock of time just passed is no doubt a good thing. For me, a whole group of films can be favourites; it's difficult to order one above the other when each one is different and unique in their own way. And furthermore, what is the definition of 'favourite': is it the revelation gained from a film overall or a specific moment in a film, a moment unlike any other that can totally enrapture, and do so over and over again? Is it judged according to a film's aesthetic accomplishment, political leaning, originality, obscurity, or a combination of these? Ultimately, one presumes, every list or reflection is specific not only in terms of the time and place from which it derives but of course the 'sense and sensibility' of that individual. To quit the jiving and start the listing, below is my 2002 selection, remembering that (a) the year of release as 2002 is not a criterion for eligibility, (b) it is culled from an entire viewing spectrum (new release, film societies, home-video, film festivals etc) and (c) I certainly didn't manage to see all that I intended to this year (as is always the case).
Où gît votre sourire enfoui? (Pedro Costa, France, 2000) Ouvrières du monde (Working women of the world, Marie-France Collard, Belgium, 2000) (documentary) Phantom Lady (Robert Siodmak, 1944) Peggy and Fred in Hell (Leslie Thornton, US, 1985-2001) The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, 2001) Sauvage Innocence (Wild Innocence, Philippe Garrel, France, 2001) Sicilia! (Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, France/Italy, 1999) Silence…on tourne (Silence…We're Rolling, Youssef Chahine, France, 2001) T-Shirt Travels (Shantha Bloemen, US/Zambia, 2001) (documentary) The Universal Clock: the Resistance of Peter Watkins (Geoff Bowie, Canada, 2001) (documentary) Unknown Pleasures (Jia Zhang-ke, 2002) Vou para casa (I'm Going Home, Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal/France, 2001) Waking Life (Richard Linklater, US, 2001) What Time is it There? (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan/France, 2001) The Woman in the Window (Fritz Lang, 1944) Fiona A. Villella is General Editor and Manager of Senses of Cinema. © Fiona A. Villella, January 2003 back to list of contributors
2002 Favourites
by Wim Wenders
Favourite Films: But the re-issues of some of John Cassavetes' films in Europe towered above everything else, especially Woman under the Influence (1974). WOW! To see that film again was the absolute highlight for me.
Favourite Film Criticism: Other than that, I found the continuing return of documentaries to the big screen one of the great positive developments of 2002. And the irresistible rise of digital cinema which will guarantee the survival of independent filmmaking for years to come ... Wim Wenders is an internationally esteemed film director. His latest film is The Soul of Man (2002). © Wim Wenders, January 2003 back to list of contributors
2002 Favourites
by Jake Wilson Top ten new features (in preferential order):
Worst (from least to most unbearable):
5. Panic Room (David Fincher, 2002) Rather than nominate my favourite film books or articles for the year, I'd like to recommend two eccentric and stimulating Web critics: Darragh O'Donoghue, whose reviews are available here and here on the Internet Movie Database, and at the Amazon website; and the indispensable Ray Davis, whose Bellona Times blog features regular commentary on movies and on every other subject under the sun. Jake Wilson is a Melbourne-based writer. © Jake Wilson, January 2003 back to list of contributors
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