Author Topic: ET v. Sight and Sound's 100 Greatest Films of All Time  (Read 50760 times)

Sam the Cinema Snob

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Re: ET v. Sight and Sound's 100 Greatest Films of All Time
« Reply #430 on: July 15, 2020, 05:57:32 PM »
I second that. Meant to mention that in my first post.

Junior

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Re: ET v. Sight and Sound's 100 Greatest Films of All Time
« Reply #431 on: July 15, 2020, 05:59:13 PM »
Zero for Conduit is good too. His Criterion collection is good stuff.
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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 #432 on: July 16, 2020, 02:01:53 AM »
Zero for Conduit is on the Criterion Channel, too. Put it on my 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 #433 on: July 16, 2020, 02:05:17 AM »
Battleship Potemkin
SERGEI EISENSTEIN, 1925
1 STAR OUT OF 5

Watching this film made me feel like I was back in my Introduction to Film class I elected to take my first year of university. It has absolutely everything you’d expect from a film in such as class: undeniable historical significance, influential techniques, and it’s still pretty watchable. It’s also a work of political propaganda on behalf of a nascent Soviet ruling class that seeks to continue or perhaps complete its indoctrination over its people, perhaps the worst possible end for a film. Its placement in the film canon is somewhat bewildering and depressing to me.

My initial impression was a little different, because I find the “Rise up and kill your masters” message fairly rousing. When the men on the Potemkin overthrow the autocratic ruling order of their ship, provoked by an order given by the captain to the armed guard to kill the people who objected to eating spoiled meat for their dinners, they inspire other members of the proletariat in the town of Odessa and other battleships to join their mission. The message is clear: Long live the Revolution! Some of the more fascinating imagery regards Christianity, with the men on the Potemkin killing their material masters as well as a frazzled Christlike figure who preaches to them the value of the old order.

The real value to the cinematic tradition is in the wonderfully composed shots and innovative editing techniques on display. The “appearance” of the large procession at the funeral of the proletariat martyr from the battleship, Vakulinchuk, is quite striking. The most incendiary visuals involve the wanton killing of civilians by soldiers representative of the former ruling class, to which the Potemkin responds by targeting the opera house the government forces are using as a base. This is just speculation, but perhaps the opera house is also a representation of the values of the monarchy and aristocracy that is to be overthrown. I digress, the quick cuts, use of montage, well choreographed scenes of fighting and rebellion using such a large number of cast members and extras, and the focus on the many faces that make up the singular face of the people (The People, I’m sure) make it an alluring experience that is also apparent as an important piece to the evolution of cinema. But again, to what ends?

This is another film from the canon that I put in the “I get it, but don’t like it” category. Film as propaganda is an issue into which I’ll be inquiring for perhaps my whole life. There’s a gray area with a lot of political films that can be considered as propaganda to some extent, and while documentaries and films on important political issues will continuously be vital to democratic societies, that’s not what Battleship Potemkin is. If anything, it’s a pre-Orwell Orewellian piece made to sow allegiance to the Revolution and its nascent government, and isn’t much more complex than that. You can argue that in terms of form it’s one of the best and most important films ever, but admiring something simply based on form is not something I engage in or value. So, I came, I saw, and now I’m leaving.

For what it’s worth, the silent film most prominently featured in my university film course was The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which is way more complex and fun to dissect and discuss than Battleship Potemkin.
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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 #434 on: July 16, 2020, 06:44:44 AM »
8 1/2
FEDERICO FELLINI, 1963
5 STARS OUT OF 5

While 8 1/2 is a passionate work meant to be embraced and loved, above all I respect it for the director taking the best shot he can at the most difficult subject to honestly portray: himself, one’s self. So much of it confounded me, so much of it blew my mind, but the only thing even somewhat solid that I can get out of it is the interrogation of the self we see. There are no fast and hard conclusions you can come to, only that he went big on this exploration, and the ones who still get to benefit from it decades after his passing are us.

The opening sequence is about as good as it gets, the director, as played by Marcelo Mastroianni, who is otherworldly as the Fellini’s avatar called Guido Anselmi, attempts to escape from a car filling with its own exhaust, in a traffic jam that has gone frozen with everyone staring in his direction. The doors are locked, the windows won’t work, oh god, oh god. I think I stopped breathing at least once during the escape, an escape which I think is emblematic of the fine margins it took for Fellini to bring this masterwork to fruition. Like Guido making it out just before he passed out and succumbed to the gasses created by his own vehicle, it’s as if Fellini is telling us that got 8 1/2 out there before it did him in.

As every subsequent scene unfolds, I’d tell you to take a mental image of every person as they come and go, because you’ll likely be seeing them again as characters or as themselves, a distinction that is at least partially useless. We’re seeing a film, but also seeing the film that we are seeing being made. The more obvious meta elements, such as discussing the script with a producer, parts with agents, or event doing test screenings, transition to those less so, such as portrayals of Anselm’s love affairs or flashbacks to his childhood, which are nevertheless part of the movie that he’s trying to make, as if it were all part of a dream, but the dream is the movie, because that’s kind of what movies are. The only thing that he can’t make happen, or at least never sees to completion, is the spaceship, but then, you could argue that the film itself transports you from your own universe into the universe of Fellini’s own consciousness. There’s the sci-fi that’s pronounced but never apparent. Well, that and there’s mind-reading.

Who, then, is Guido Anselmi/Federic Fellini? It’s so easy to get caught up in the film that’s being made in front of your eyes that you might forget who exactly we’re examining. Answers vary, with varying degrees of accuracy. A Catholic in conflict. A man with massive woman issues, for which he’s deeply insecure. A tortured artist who doesn’t know how the next project will come off. An arrogant artist who expects people to bend to his will. A passionate artist who wants to make interesting and important things, and who especially doesn’t want to tell another bunch of lies, though he feels tied to that very fate. A tired man, maybe kind of pitiful, but then who isn’t? Life - and creation, or so we’re led to believe here - will do that to you. But he persists to the very close, the marching quintet. There’s something admirable about the whole thing, in putting yourself out there, shooting for the fences. And it still romanticizes the filmmaker and the process, but I don’t mind that, and find it preferable to a more cynical and hopeless path. If you don’t find your own projects important, then what’s the point?

Similar to La Dolce Vita, this is a film that takes no scene for granted and is constructed by a master who knows how to pull off the impossible. We find ourselves in repeated scenery, but in different contexts, at the turn of the camera we may be in his boyhood home next (or again), and the grounds for the spaceship turns from a place of great expectations to a place of resignation and renewal. Like magic, everything Anselm says seems to occur, even if not exactly as he says or may envision. 8 1/2 is also, I’d say, impossible to grasp within a single viewing. It gives you both the opportunity to immerse yourself within it, but also demands quite a bit of attention to its details, cinematography, ensemble cast and all the various roles, and the way time flows in the dream. But then, that all probably boils down to having nothing new to say about this monster of a film. All is as it should be.
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Teproc

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Re: ET v. Sight and Sound's 100 Greatest Films of All Time
« Reply #435 on: July 16, 2020, 07:00:41 AM »
Thought you would hate that one as being self-involved, navel-gazing and possibly misogynistic. Glad to have been wrong, I found it fascinating and I particularly love the ending. Life is a carnival circus!

I share your concerns re: Potemkin, but I definitely look at films aesthetically first, and Potemkin had enough to offer on that front for me to generally enjoy it.
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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 #436 on: July 16, 2020, 08:28:39 AM »
Battleship Potemkin

So, I came, I saw, and now I’m leaving.


:) I did particularly like this bit of the review.
« Last Edit: July 16, 2020, 08:30:37 AM by Dave the Necrobumper »

MartinTeller

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Re: ET v. Sight and Sound's 100 Greatest Films of All Time
« Reply #437 on: July 16, 2020, 08:29:00 AM »
8 1/2 is one of those that gets better every time I see it. Looking forward to the next viewing.

The fact is there are Soviet propaganda films that are far more entertaining than Potemkin. The Man with a Movie Camera, Strike, Mother and I Am Cuba are all top-notch.

Eric/E.T.

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Re: ET v. Sight and Sound's 100 Greatest Films of All Time
« Reply #438 on: July 16, 2020, 04:48:09 PM »
Dave the Necrobumper - lol  :)

Thought you would hate that one as being self-involved, navel-gazing and possibly misogynistic. Glad to have been wrong, I found it fascinating and I particularly love the ending. Life is a carnival circus!

I share your concerns re: Potemkin, but I definitely look at films aesthetically first, and Potemkin had enough to offer on that front for me to generally enjoy it.

I saw it as him admitting his misogyny and rather skewering it in places. I also think on this issue at times he comes across a little muddled and confused, which is a reflection of his difficulty dealing with the issue and his insecurities.

I read your review on this on Letterboxd. I see the aesthetic argument for sure, I just can't enjoy it solely based on aesthetics. I think the look of the film, the various editing techniques and transitions kept me going (as well as some of the horrors), but in the end I think it was so straight forward and lacking in complexity that I couldn't get beyond the problems.

8 1/2 is one of those that gets better every time I see it. Looking forward to the next viewing.

The fact is there are Soviet propaganda films that are far more entertaining than Potemkin. The Man with a Movie Camera, Strike, Mother and I Am Cuba are all top-notch.

This is interesting, I did not know The Man with a Movie Camera was Soviet propaganda. I'm looking forward to that one, though it kind of makes me nervous now. I'll go into it with an open mind, though. Strange to me that two Soviet propaganda pieces would be so high up this list.
« Last Edit: July 16, 2020, 04:51:55 PM by etdoesgood »
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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 #439 on: July 17, 2020, 06:02:23 AM »
The Passion of Joan of Arc
CARL THEODOR DREYER, 1928
3 STARS OUT OF 5

Dreyer is considered an expert at staging his scenes, a master of mise-en-scene, but with Ordet to a greater extent and Gertrud to a lesser, I found his stripped-down, minimalist sets to be excessively puritanical. With Ordet, the exceedingly obvious set-up and climax to the story were so in-line with the staging, 30-45 minutes in I felt like I could turn it off and write it up. The Passion of Joan of Arc is somewhat different, and I also think it’s a lot more adventurous, taking us almost completely out of the human world and into some nether region for one of the most famous trials, at least as far as charges and outcomes are concerned, in human history. Now, perhaps that big concrete courtroom looks precisely like the location where she was tried, the point is the featureless, white space makes a striking backdrop for all that is not, and the action can be focused directly on Joan and her accusers. Camera movement is slight and graceful, small pans or tracking-like shots showing the white men deciding her fate whispering their observations in a line, every scoff and show of exasperation used against them to show their hate and prejudice against this symbol of the French cause.

The torture chamber design is meticulous and horrifying. You can’t help but appreciate how, err, medieval, the whole set-up is. Yet, perhaps the most striking imagery comes outside, where Joan comes first and admits her “sins”, then returning after she retracts her confession to be burned at the stake. There is a good bit of intercutting as we get a close-up of Joan at her most desperate before cutting to a shot (vision) of a field of white flowers, then back. There are many such instances, well-timed and unsensational, where Dreyer’s editing is crucial to the meaning-making of the film beyond the large number of close-ups we get. It’s what takes the film to the next level and prevents it from going the monotonous paths of Gertrud and Ordet.

Yet, of course my writing on film centers around the experience of one, me, and while so much is written about Renee Jean Falconetti’s wonderful performance as Joan of Arc, there are only so many prolonged tearful close-ups one can take. That very element creates a situation where this saint-maker of a film gets a little too obvious and heavy-handed. The whole courtroom scene is labored in that fashion, ten tears, eleven close-ups, and twelve scoffs too many. Way too much of a good thing. While again, I appreciate the staging and Dreyer is able to give us the essence of the trial without being able to have the characters actually speak, quite a feat, it becomes dry well before it’s over. Where I think Falconetti really gets to shine is when the shots and filmmaking become more varied, and we can get a medium-shot of her holding the cross or a shot taken from a lower angle where the camera holds a gaze of her and the stake together, just shots that, while still sparse, hold a little more visual information and inevitably make the production far richer.

To an extent, as I’m this far into the Sight & Sound 100 (92 down, 8 to go!), the immensity of the task seems almost absurd. You could justify giving everything on this list 5 stars because they are such distinct works considered masterpieces by film scholars and high-minded critics around the world. Honestly, I have asked myself, Who am I to even be rating these films? They are unquestioned masterpieces of cinema. I’m usually on the side of so-called elitism and preciousness, but then if we, the enthusiasts, the megafans, the CINEPHILES, never weigh in in at least the smallest ways, which can spread, or not, who knows, but if we don’t try than no one is ever going to rethink this thing, and we’re going to be stuck with what the rather detached world of academia, as well as the decidedly homogeneous class of “Top Critics”, tell us*. As well, there is already way, way, way, way, way too much consensus on what makes a film “good”, at least within the world of American film criticism. I’d rather give everything 1 star and declare The Beach Bum the only film that has ever mattered/will ever matter before I do that. Anyway, I didn’t intend this aside originally for The Passion of Joan of Arc reaction, but I think it’s likely that I feel like with this film more than any other so far that I’m staring down one of the most sacred of cows, one of the films most entrenched in the canon, and thought, Yeah, it’s good, but goddamnit it has been surpassed by more than just eight other films, two of which were actually made in the same time period anyway. Maybe it’s heresy, but give me like several hundred films I’ve already seen over this and probably thousands more to come. You’re good, Joan, but there was no heavy metal!

I have more ideas about canonization and being a mere David staring down the Goliaths of the canon coming post-marathon.

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*I don’t hate the intelligentsia whatsoever, they have an outsized opportunity to study and consider works in their fields and should know more. I've even considered getting my Ph.D., or Ed.D. as it would be, and joining the world of academia in my particular field. Yet their opinions also seem to fossilize, so we have three films from the 1920s, despite all the advancements in technology and technique, in the top ten films of all-time according to one extremely reputable poll. As far as I know, this isn’t a poll of the most influential films of all time, or the greatest building blocks of cinema, but the outright best films of all time. While this continues to be an amazing and, I would argue, essential experience for someone who wants to go further in their knowledge of cinema, canonization is a tricky thing and you can certainly argue the Sight & Sound poll needs a little shock to the system, yes, to honor the past, but also look to the present and future a bit.
« Last Edit: July 17, 2020, 07:06:37 AM by etdoesgood »
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