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Author Topic: ET v. Sight and Sound's 100 Greatest Films of All Time  (Read 50793 times)

Sandy

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Re: ET v. Sight and Sound's 100 Greatest Films of All Time
« Reply #390 on: July 06, 2020, 12:08:22 PM »


I'm happy you enjoyed the movie, etdoesgood.  :)

Eric/E.T.

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Re: ET v. Sight and Sound's 100 Greatest Films of All Time
« Reply #391 on: July 07, 2020, 05:42:08 AM »
Sandy - Score! THE classic musical! I should've expected a Sandy celebration, but surprises are better.

P.S. one of the reasons why I'm so find of Fanny and Alexander is because I've actually written my Master's thesis on its antifascist elements. So not only is it detached from MAGA vibes via literal distance, it can be read as being pretty explicitly anti-Trump, and, I argue, seems to be making the case for storytelling as a tool with which to counter fascist control. You can download a copy here, though I'm also trying to polish it up a bit for publication in a film journal of some kind: https://preserve.lehigh.edu/etd/2844/


Soooooo - we're pretty much aligned on Singin' in the Rain and the era that created the MAGA myth.

I read the abstract and introduction to your thesis. I'd rather print the rest before I read it, I don't much care for long form reading on the screen, but both the film, director, and subject interest me quite a bit. I did not know Bergman was, for a time, a Nazi sympathizer. That is disturbing, and the idea that he's using the dictatorial bishop to take down an old, very large skeleton is interesting. I mentioned that film somewhat offhand in the review, and still get some insight. As if I needed to make more offhanded remarks to get me in more trouble.

On a quite personal level, I'm wondering how you go from Lehigh to that...other school.  ;D :P Sorry I was raised in Michigan on sports and brainwashed with anti-OSU propaganda, which really didn't help when I lived and graduated high school in Ohio! You probably don't even care, lol.
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Eric/E.T.

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Re: ET v. Sight and Sound's 100 Greatest Films of All Time
« Reply #392 on: July 07, 2020, 06:01:04 AM »
The Mirror
ANDREI TARKOVSKY, 1975
4.5 STARS OUT OF 5

Is it fair to rate a film higher simple because, if you were a movie director, it’d be the film on the Sight & Sound 100 that you’d most likely (with the requisite talent) make? That’s a bit of what I’m doing here, though maybe not so much. Even in my own little way, with the little poems or story outlines I write, I love making things that don’t announce their meaning plainly or cleanly, but dare a person to interpret, or even more, to dream, and maybe even to be a little bothered or agitated. That’s how I experienced The Mirror, one of the best works of avant garde, impressionistic, and transcendental cinema I’ve yet seen.

The images that make up The Mirror are among the most spectacular one can behold. The camera does a slow ballet with the scenery, some of the circular motion where the camera goes around completely or circles back, exhibiting the unexpected or transporting you to totally different times, creates this wonderful juxtaposition between the concrete and abstract, in the most general terms. You can see where a scene like when Joel confronts Dr. Mierzwiak in his memories in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and he pops up twice on the stage, where Jim Carey was literally running between the two areas of the stage where the camera turns, comes from. Another design element that works beautifully is the archival footage from WWII, among other things. Considering how this film revolves around prewar, war, and postwar periods, and feels as unreal as those clips are starkly real, the footage creates a wonderful contrast to the visual and spoken poetry. I’d likely have to watch a commentary track to understand how everything I’m seeing in The Mirror was brought to fruition, but the effect is dizzying and hypnotic, conflicting and transcendental, the latter being a word with which I don’t always hold positive associations.

I honestly have been looking up synopses and explanations for what literally happens on the screen during The Mirror, but what’s the point of regurgitating that? Do a Google Search. However, this is a film that appears to be about Tarkovsky exorcising demons from his personal life and political situation vis a vis Russia before, during, and after WWII and other conflicts. There’s something quite Oedipal about the same woman playing his mother and the mother of his child, while his mother at older age is played by his actual mother as his avatar in the film, Aleksei, closes in on death in middle adulthood. Feelings of wonder engendered by the fantastic imagery are also accompanied by various difficult moods such as shame, frustration, and defeat. The voice overs consist a lot of Aleksei reciting poems as an adult, and at times emphasize the negation of death and embrace a sense of eternal life. There are many allusions to Christianity and the Christian god, but it isn’t so specific that I, an atheist, can’t something grand from it as well. The eternal isn’t just about literal eternal life to me, but about taking moments and expanding them and living in them until time itself is essentially eradicated. (A dream of mine that I’d certainly put into my film.) Since none of us have experienced the eternal or can possibly know for a 100% certainty what happens after death (though I’m over 99% sure it is much like what existence is like before you exist, which is pure nothing and probably nothing to be afraid of), to me an atheist’s vision of the eternal is as real as the believer’s. At the same time one must acknowledge the role theism plays in Tarkovsky, his art, and specifically The Mirror. It’s what helps him reach the higher level of the transcendent, and probably allows him to conceive of such a mad work of art as The Mirror is.

There’s probably a whole field of scholarship to be had just in analyzing The Mirror, and I’m guessing there is someone on this planet who is considered the ne plus ultra of Tarkovsky Studies. But as a dude who has seen three Tarkovsky films - Stalker, Andrei Rublev, and now The Mirror - this is the one with which I’m most taken. It’s inscrutable, yet Aleksei, his history, beliefs, and hang-ups, are there for you to empathize with. Then, for the fans of great cinematography embedded with stirring images that sit in your mind well after turning the screen off, this hits some tremendous and fascinating highs, which I don’t even care to spoil or discuss. It’s a work of surprises, contradictions, melancholy, and care, and by the end it’s hard to even remember that it starts with a woman smoking a cigarette on a fence, then making small talk with an irritating passerby. I suppose all dreams and dreamworks have to start somewhere.
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Dave the Necrobumper

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Re: ET v. Sight and Sound's 100 Greatest Films of All Time
« Reply #393 on: July 07, 2020, 06:56:58 AM »
Is Solaris on the watch list. I will be interested to read your view on it.

Teproc

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Re: ET v. Sight and Sound's 100 Greatest Films of All Time
« Reply #394 on: July 07, 2020, 08:04:20 AM »
Interesting that you responded to this more than Stalker. I saw Mirror earlier this year and was quite taken with it, but its abstractness left me a bit more removed from the mystery of it all than with Tarkovsky's more straightforwardly narrative efforts.
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Eric/E.T.

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Re: ET v. Sight and Sound's 100 Greatest Films of All Time
« Reply #395 on: July 07, 2020, 08:36:27 AM »
Is Solaris on the watch list. I will be interested to read your view on it.

It's not on this list, but it's a movie I definitely want to see, if only because I really liked the Soderbergh version and understand Tarkovsky's is super different. I also read part of the book, and it was way different in tone from the Soderbergh version. So...that's one for down the road, but I'd like to get it in sometime this year.

Interesting that you responded to this more than Stalker. I saw Mirror earlier this year and was quite taken with it, but its abstractness left me a bit more removed from the mystery of it all than with Tarkovsky's more straightforwardly narrative efforts.

The big question is, is it Mirror or The Mirror? The Criterion Channel calls it "The Mirror", and that's where I saw it, so that's what I called it, but BFI calls it "Mirror". Or maybe that's not the big question.

I expected to like Stalker more than I did, tbh. I also think that the actual spoken poetry (which includes a lot of philosophy) here made more sense in the context of what I was seeing, and the allegory + science fiction conceit of Stalker with the three-way discussions on matters of science and faith did not blend as well as I might have hoped.
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MartinTeller

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Re: ET v. Sight and Sound's 100 Greatest Films of All Time
« Reply #396 on: July 07, 2020, 08:43:12 AM »
I would recommend Nostalghia as another Tarkovsky would might love.

Eric/E.T.

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Re: ET v. Sight and Sound's 100 Greatest Films of All Time
« Reply #397 on: July 08, 2020, 01:23:51 AM »
I would recommend Nostalghia as another Tarkovsky would might love.

Added to the list!
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Eric/E.T.

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Re: ET v. Sight and Sound's 100 Greatest Films of All Time
« Reply #398 on: July 08, 2020, 01:39:59 AM »
Persona
INGMAR BERGMAN, 1966
5 STARS OUT OF 5

From one inscrutable masterpiece in Tarkovsky’s The Mirror (yesterday) to another in Bergman’s Persona (today), plus recent viewings of massive films by Antonioni, Godard, and Coppola, and goodness this Sight & Sound 100 marathon is really starting to batter me (in the best way). After watching Persona, I checked out a piece of an interview with Bergman, where he primarily talks about religion and, to paraphrase his POV, the liberation that came with becoming a nonbeliever, thus not having to live for another world. It’s an interesting contrast with The Mirror and Tarkovsky’s Christian perspective, especially as they both found their voices in what could be considered their biggest masterpieces (certainly the most lauded by the voters in this poll) through contemplation on life, death, and religion, which eventually led them to unconventional, avant garde avenues of expression. That is as far as I’m willing to take the comparisons, because any further might have you believe that I understand exactly what all of the images in each film mean, and I do not, but they are both on a larger list of films that I want to see with the commentary tracks to get a better perspective.

I actually think I understand The Mirror better than Persona, if that gives any insight to my POV. However, one major theme of the film I find alluring is the concept of objective v. subjective reality, and the result when they become confused. Now, I’m a monist and a materialist, so I don’t propose there is something abstract called the mind - it is a physical thing that resides in the brain, likely the outer cortex working in conjunction with a particular region of the brain stem, then of course in conjunction with many different parts of the brain that control our senses, etc.,  which gives us these magnificent perceptions - but there is still a difference in how we perceive reality and the objective truth of the world around us, which is much less interesting, if necessary to know. In Persona, Alma, the nurse attending a patient who is an actress that has stopped talking, has her perception of herself altered to the point where she (as I see it) begins to plays the role of Elisabet, however skeptically. Initially, Alma seems to be the "decent" person and Elisabet the "troubled"; however, revelations, back-stabs, and absolutely scathing words and actions ensue that show them as incredibly complicated and flawed, and then go far in exhibiting the fragility of human psychology, whether you believe in dualism or not. If there is any sort of final takeaway to be had, it’s that psychological stability sits on a razor’s edge. Bergman is experimenting with what happens when its state of equilibrium, or something close to such a state, is nudged one way or the other. Of the four Bergmans I’ve taken in thus far, each have approached psychology and attempted to decode the subconscious or unconscious, but it’s not a mere component of Persona rather than it is Persona, and his approach toward the subject may be confounding, but it is even more engrossing and profound than it is difficult.

The fragility of human consciousness in Persona connects with Bergman’s concept of liberation in living our best now in lieu of an afterlife, because it exhibits how fragile our sense of self and the world truly is. If we were more acutely aware of the fragility, we might consider more carefully how we spend our time on this planet. Every moment may appear a gift, while the end may not be anything to be so scared of; Bergman’s words in the aforementioned featurette actually soothed me about what’s to come after life, as he discusses the loss of consciousness as a type of relief from the troubles of the world, whether in sleep or in death. In light of such weighty considerations, Persona truly proposes nothing definite, but beyond being a fantastic, mind-bending work of cinema with incredible cinematography (the shadows, the fog, the blurs), it is also strangely life-affirming in that we are complex, flawed, and difficult beings, and none of us are beyond breaking down. Thus, live.

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In my Mirror write-up, I said of all the films on the S&S, that's the one I'd be most likely to make (with the requisite talent). Now I think it's probably Persona.
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Eric/E.T.

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Re: ET v. Sight and Sound's 100 Greatest Films of All Time
« Reply #399 on: July 09, 2020, 04:50:54 AM »
Seven Samurai
Akira Kurosawa, 1954
5 STARS OUT OF 5

A rewatch in reasonably close proximity to my first viewing on March 17th, just as all the Covid-19 quarantine was going into place. It was one of the easiest five star ratings I’ve ever given then, and nothing makes me feel any differently this time around.

I appreciate the build-up and pacing of this film, from the lengthy time the peasants spent in the village trying to win samurais over to their cause to protect their farmland and village, to the time spent watching the crew grow and build camaraderie. In a way, there is a lot before intermission that suggests there’s a little hang-out film within this larger film about the honor and frailties within a group of often-mythologized people. Some are seriously just there to get fed or because all they’re good for is chopping wood. Others come out of a sense of honor. And one, Kikuchiyo, played by the always enigmatic Toshiro Mifune, really just seems to be around for kicks. I also have a great deal of love for the performance Takashi Shimura puts in as the de facto leader, Kambei Shimada. He’s what you expect out of a wise and just samurai who puts others before himself and doesn’t fear his own demise. On a personal level, I enjoy watching these types of figures and hear their lessons on life and death because it’s so different from the way I see things, and they are so confident about the way they feel. That type of impulse, the motives, are what intrigue me and really get my respect.

If you’re waiting for the battle for the big payoff, you get it. The several day’s worth of cat and mouse, with platoons of villagers defending themselves from the bandits, who wish to steal everything they’ve got, with their bamboo spears, getting their vengeance; it’s barbarism, but everyone is a player in the game. Just simple icons such as the flag made for the village and the samurais plus the check sheet Kambei uses to figure out how many enemies are left, it makes you feel like you’re engaged in watching an ancient sport and your cheering for the underdogs who, if they lose, lose everything, their children, their food, their homes, likely their lives or they may as well become enslaved. Of course, the "honorable" samurai did just go burn the bandits' lodges with people still in them. This will make you question the fabric of the samurai, or if it's just a make they put on when need be. With all that seriousness philosophically or on the battle field, you have Mifune out there with some of the finest in comedic relief you can see, as well as some of the more heroic acts of the final encounter with the bandits.

Getting closer and closer to 70, Seven Samurai is still an epic adventure that I didn’t mind taking twice this year already. It’s quite a daring thing to spend the first half with so little action, so much character and team building, before they even get to the village and get initiate their plans to protect and defend the peasants. The last image of the three samurai and four large graves was poignant, as were Kambei’s words on how this was not their (the samurais’) win but that of the peasants. It may seem a bit like he’s downplaying what’s he’s accomplished, but his character consistently upholds what you’d think of as traditional samurai values, and I can’t help but be taken in by them. Beautiful film to watch, great action sequences, great set design to come up with all these traps and tricks the two sides would be using to their advantage or disadvantage. Above all, a fantastic ensemble cast with a couple guys standing above the rest, but everyone in the unit had something special to offer, as did some of the village people who we got to know. All there is to do now is get to the next Kurosawa!

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Lots of 4.5's and 5's now! I guess that's to be expected hitting up a list like this and getting to the top twenty. This one was just a shoe-in; when I saw it in March, I had it as a five-star film probably halfway through.
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