A Year in Film

Looking back on 2008, I realize that the majority of my film viewing took place at home, with films on DVD. Due to certain circumstances, I made few trips to local theaters and was unable to attend the Los Angeles Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival, which offered new films by directors whose work I admire, including Claire Denis, Arnaud Desplechin, Lisandro Alonso, Jia Zhang-ke, Olivier Assayas, and, above all, Lucrecia Martel, my favorite contemporary filmmaker. I am now at the mercy of distributors. But any and all disappointments in 2008 were softened greatly by the number of excellent movies I discovered on DVD this past year, none of them more exciting or more impressive than Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert, which appeared, like a beacon, in October in a remastered edition on region 2 DVD from the British Film Institute. Antonioni's preceding major films (L'Avventura, La notte, and L'Eclisse) had a pivotal, transformative role in my cinematic education a handful of years ago, and Red Desert, even after an initial recent viewing, has had no less of an influence. The DVD's appearance therefore carried genuine personal resonance; but in addition to whatever effects it's had on my viewing experience (and I'd say they've been immense in certain respects), I also think the film is one of the great exponents of modernist art and the culmination of Antonioni's work in the early 60s.

I say that in part because, while Red Desert continues the earlier films' themes of alienation and of a society transitioning from an older to a newer, more unstable one, it is more localized and cohesive. The manufactured beauty of Italy's post-war boom contrasts starkly with the emotional dislocation of one woman (Monica Vitti's Guiliana), as opposed to several people; she, alone, cannot adapt to the industrial and environmental changes around her. Antonioni continued using landscape and architecture as the imposing visual expressions of existential trauma, but in Red Desert he added a new element, namely, color, which he muted, used in solid swaths, altered, or enhanced to represent both Italy's social and economic transitions and Giuliana's inner state (and, in the process, he gave his entire mise-en-scène a remarkable similarity with the mid-century color-field painters, such as Mark Rothko, whose work he admired). In addition, Antonioni altered his visual style by using telephoto lenses to compress foreground and background, to flatten his shots and make certain sequences appear two-dimensional or out-of-focus. All of these techniques resulted in something even more abstract, even more dependent on visual interpretation, than the films that preceded it. Perhaps the most significant evolution lies in Antonioni's suggestion that Giuliana, unlike her alienated counterparts in L'Avventura, La notte, and L'Eclisse, has gradually learned to adapt to her existential isolation, as evinced by a comment she makes to her son about birds that have learned to fly around the poisonous yellow gases billowing out of factory smokestacks, and by a look in her eyes that suggests she is thinking something through, figuring something out, about her dilemma. I don't think Antonioni offers any substantive answers about modern existence in this film (he was more of an observer, anyway), though he does seem to conclude his loose "tetralogy" of modern alienation on a note of hope. Red Desert is a glorious film, and my favorite of 2008 by a fairly wide margin.

But such a declaration does not mean that other notable releases, particularly the extended 172-minute cut of Terence Malick's The New World, are in any sense deficient. The New World is the only film that I've ever been able to count among my personal favorites two years in a row, and this is because Malick's lengthy cut, released on DVD in October, essentially remakes the film anew. His rearranging of scenery and dialogue and his inclusion of inter-titles and, especially, of new sequences, montages, and interior monologues allow the narrative to flow more fluidly and to cohere better than it had in previous versions, thereby enhancing both the inherently tragic nature of his story (if "story" is even the right word) and the film's momentum towards its beautiful final act. The extended cut of The New World offers a cumulative, immersive experience, unlike few I've found in cinema, although there are three films in particular that I saw in 2008 that come fairly close. The first is Hiroshi Teshigahara's Woman in the Dunes, which is a singular achievement purely on a visual level; the complex patterns of close-ups of shapes in the sand, umbrella spikes, wood slats, flowing water, insects, and human faces and bodies contribute to the film's abstract, radical style, adding a sense of wonder to the film's puzzling but stark metaphors of human work and existence.The second is Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror, which I am still working to understand fully, although the immersive experience of watching it left me with strong memories of some of the most enigmatic images I've ever seen, from the slow tracking shot just after the title sequence, as Natalya (Margarita Terekhova) sits on a wood fence, to the long shot that closes the film, as the camera backs away, through the woods, while watching a mother and child from a distance.

The third is Arnaud Desplechin's Kings and Queen. At first, the film seems to be largely an extended, skillful, almost exuberant, catalog of various cinematic and dramatic methods: jump cuts, long takes, chapter segmentations, multiple points of view, a rejection of establishing shots; the use of dream sequences, flashbacks, historical footage, melodrama, fast zooms, split screens, and ellipses. But lurking amidst all that is a fairly powerful human story that weaves together threads of marriage and motherhood, friendship and family, past and present. The film's cumulative impact arrives in a revelation so viscerally disturbing that I almost stopped the DVD and considered not continuing with the film; but the decision to stay with it through the end allowed me to appreciate both the film and Desplechin's gifts as a director that much more.

Finally, if I could sum up my year in film in 2008, I suppose variety characterized it more than anything else. Of the theatrical releases that I did see, I enjoyed most Wernor Herzog's documentary about life in Antarctica, Encounters at the End of the World, and Wong Kar-wai's colorful treatment of momentary connection, My Blueberry Nights. In the past year, I also discovered or revisited intelligent genre and mixed-genre films (Mad Max, The Road Warrior, Sunshine, and Redbelt), encountered moving character studies (Wings), caught powerful supernatural thrillers (The Orphanage, The Innocents), watched narratively inventive films (The Lovers), and delighted in the wit and the social commentary found in certain Hollywood classics (Sullivan's Travels in particular). Here, then, are my personal favorites among all the films I saw in 2008, most of which were made in previous years but which I discovered for the first time (Red Desert being foremost, followed by fifteen others in alphabetical order):

Red Desert (Il deserto rosso; Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964; released on R2 DVD, 2008)

Days of Heaven (Terence Malick, 1978)
Encounters at the End of the World (Werner Herzog, 2007; U.S. theatrical release, 2008)
The Fire Within (Le Feu follet; Louis Malle, 1963)
Kings and Queen (Rois et reine; Arnaud Desplechin, 2004)
The Lovers (Les amants; Louis Malle, 1958)
Mirror (Zerkalo; Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975)
My Blueberry Nights (Wong Kar-Wai, 2007; U.S. theatrical release, 2008)
The New World: Extended Cut (Terence Malick, 2005; extended cut, 2008)
The Orphanage (El Orfanato; Juan Antonio Bayona, 2007)
Redbelt (David Mamet, 2008)
Sullivan's Travels (Preston Sturges, 1941)
Sunshine (Danny Boyle, 2007)
The Unfaithful Wife (La femme infidele; Claude Chabrol, 1969)
Wings (Krylya; Larissa Shepitko, 1966)
Woman in the Dunes (Suna no onna; Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964)

Some notable films I revisited on DVD (in alphabetical order):
Blade Runner: The Final Cut (Ridley Scott, 1982)
The Cranes Are Flying (Letyat zhuravli; Mikhail Kalatozov, 1957)
Mad Max (George Miller, 1979)
Million Dollar Baby (Clint Eastwood, 2004)
Morocco (Josef von Sternberg, 1930)
The Road Warrior (George Miller, 1981)

Comments

[Bob Turnbull]

Hi Michael! Happy New Year to you...

Nice list. I'm still woefully under-educated on Antonioni (I've only seen L'Eclisse). I need to rectify that this year...Chabrol too - I've only seen a single film of his.

My Blueberry Nights and Flight Of The Red Balloon are two titles I'd like to get under my belt in the next month or so. I wasn't initially eager to see either, but now that I'm reading more tempered reviews, I'm getting excited to see both.

I plowed through 6 or 7 Malle films last year and loved them all (well, I liked "Vanya On 42nd Street"). I still need to see The Fire Within though. His documentaries are pretty damn interesting too.

Glad to see someone else enjoyed Sunshine. I keep hearing how great the first 2/3 was, but how awful the last 1/3 was. It certainly didn't go where I expected it to, but I was fine with it. The Orphanage not so much...I saw it at TIFF 2007 and was underwhelmed - lovely in many ways, but I didn't think it earned its jump scares. I need to see it again though - so many people seem to like it (Maya was an early booster of it as well). The ending didn't sit well with me when I saw it (how she gives up life in the "real" world while her husband stays behind - I get annoyed at the distinction between mother/father roles), but maybe I read it wrong...I can do that sometimes...B-)

As beautiful as Woman In The Dunes is, I actually prefer Pitfall. I felt everything came together for that one...

Take care,

[Michael]

Bob, it's great to hear from you, and happy new year to you as well. Thanks for your comments. I initially had mixed feelings about My Blueberry Nights but overall I think it's a good, "smaller" film for Wong, with a very effective emotional "pulse" running through it. The Flight of the Red Balloon made a number of best-of lists, but I really felt mixed about that one when I saw it at TIFF in '07, although I think my response partly had to do with where I was sitting in the theater (well off to the side). Malle's great, and I'm thankful that Criterion released two of his 50s films on DVD. Like you, I was just fine with the last 1/3 of "Sunshine" -- I felt it was in keeping with some of the larger mysteries of the story and, given that the film's a mixed-genre exercise, I didn't mind at all the transition to a more "horror"-like narrative. Plus, the film's loaded with interesting scientific ideas (I got almost as much of a kick listening to a professional physicist's commentary on the DVD as I did watching the film itself.)

I can understand your response to The Orphanage. It's a film that can inspire real devotion or, with other viewers, a decidedly mixed response. I found it to be fairly crafty, but most of all I was really moved by it, so much that a while back I did not one, but three, blog posts about it (one, two, three). I was a little surprised that I ended up liking it so much, to be entirely honest.

I haven't seen Pit Fall, but I think I'll head over to Netflix and put it in my queue to rent. Thanks for the tip.