I mostly agree with your picks, though i’d substitute Sisters of the Gion or Chikamatsu Monogatari for Tales of the Taira Clan. Trying to pick my top five Mizoguchis, though, is like picking my five favorite fingers. I saw Life of Oharu for the first time in high school (20 + years ago) on a crappy videotape and have been in love ever since…
The Long Long Trailer/Weekend
Celine and Julie Go Boating/Jeanne Diehlmann (with an intermission, naturally)
Rules of the Game/Nashville
Mouchette/Out of the Blue
Salo/Pink Flamingos (guess the connection?)
Vertigo/Letter from an Unknown Woman
i was feeling depressed one night and rented Safe and In a Year of 13 Moons. unless you are curious about what it feels like to be suicidal, I would not recommend doing this.
I didn’t see anyone mention Russell Metty, who worked with Sirk on all his big films, and lensed Touch of Evil as well. I would also add Lee Garmes ( Shanghai Express), Stanley Cortez (Magnificent Ambersons and Night of the Hunter), Sergei Urusevsky (The Cranes are Flying, The Letter Never Sent and I Am Cuba) and Edward Tisse, Eisenstein’s guy.
nino rota for fellini, especially Amarcord and 8 1/2.
Delerue’s score for Contempt.
Duke Ellington’s score for Anatomy of a Murder.
and everything Bernard Herrman did
I don’t think anyone has yet mentioned Out of the Blue (Dennis Hopper) — really great movie starring a post Days of Heaven Linda Manz. Masumara’s Blind Beast is definitely worth a look: it’s been released on dvd by Fantomas. And has anyone else ever seen Wicked Woman, a grade C film noir from the mid-50’s with Beverly Michaels?
there’s a very grim Ozu movie about a woman struggling to survive in post war japan called A Hen in the Wind — one case in which a literal translation (as i’m assuming it to be) takes away from the seriousness of the enterprise. (the movie is more like Germany Year Zero than Chicken Run.)
Madame De
Devil is a Woman
Gertrud
Marnie
The River
Tabu
everything by Mizoguchi
L’Eclisse
Cries and Whispers
Ivan the Terrible, both parts
Othello (the Welles version, especially the pre-credit sequence)
Jeanne Diehlmann
Oskar Fischinger’s shorts
Barry Lyndon
Written on the Wind
Night of the Hunter… and so many more
Kim Novak in Vertigo
the cynical sister in Sisters of the Gion
Bette Davis in Beyond the Forest (i grew up in a small town — i know just how she feels!)
Bruno in Strangers on a Train
Susan Kohner in Imitation of Life
Marlene Dietrich’s character in Devil is a Woman
Joan Bennett in The Reckless Moment
Claude Rains in Notorious
Peter Lorre in M
i got Dario Argento (about whom i have absolutely no opinion) and Elia Kazan who i think is pretty cool, despite the whole naming names deal. But, filmmakers aside, i also share a b-day with Elizabeth I!
according to dietrich’s daughter’s book, josef von sternberg painted. i wouldn’t be surprised if Murnau was an painter too. oh, and Mizoguchi (no surprise) studied painting.
As with just about everyone else, i love this movie and cry every single time Jean Gabin leaves in the end. however, i don’t think will it change any racists’ and patriots’ minds (though it would be great if any movie could do that!). renoir himself is quoted somewhere as remarking that he was so proud of himself for making this powerful anti-war film that got so much attention and how it might change people’s minds about the futility of war… then 2 years later, hitler invaded poland.
None of the Bergman/Rossellini movies have ever been released in this country on dvd. Likewise India, which is one of the best ever put on film. As people mentioned already, one of the von sternberg/dietrich movies is still unreleased (Shanghai Express). and i find it criminal that many of the early renoirs are unavailable.
Sirk’s There’s Always Tomorrow and All I Desire
Ray’s Bigger than Life, The Lusty Men and Johnny Guitar
a whole bunch of king vidor movies, especially Beyond the Forest
Rivette’s Out 1 and L’Amour Fou
I’m a pasolini fan so i think salo is pretty important too… but it’s not a movie you would want to re-visit. if you want the much more enjoyable anti-thesis of salo, watch his Arabian Nights.
One of my favorite poems by one of my favorite poets:
The Fish
by Elizabeh Bishop
I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of its mouth.
He didn’t fight.
He hadn’t fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
— the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly —
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
— It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
— if you could call it a lip —
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels — until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.
this thread is totally cool! after working intensely for 10 hours, it’s great to come home to poetry. here’s one of my favorites from Marianne Moore:
Peter
Strong and slippery, built for the midnight grass-party confronted by four cats,
he sleeps his time away — the detached first claw on his foreleg which corresponds
to the thumb, retracted to its tip; the small tuft of fronds
or katydid legs above each eye, still numbering the units in each group;
the shadbones regularly set about his mouth, to droop or rise
in unison like the porcupine’s quills — motionless. He lets himself be flat
tened out by gravity, as it were a piece of seaweed tamed and weakened by
exposure to the sun; compelled when extended, to lie
stationary. Sleep is the result of his delusion that one must do as
well as one can for oneself; sleep — epitome of what is to
him as to the average person, the end of life. Demonstrate on him how
the lady caught the dangerous southern snake, placing a forked stick on either
side of its innocuous neck; one need not try to stir
him up; his prune shaped head and alligator eyes are not a party to the
joke. Lifted and handled, he may be dangled like an eel or set
up on the forearm like a mouse; his eyes bisected by pupils of a pin’s
width, are flickeringly exhibited, then covered up. May be? I should say,
might have been; when he has been got the better of in a
dream — as in a fight with nature or with cats — we all know it. Profound sleep is
not with him, a fixed illusion. Springing about with froglike ac
curacy, emitting jerky cries when taken in the hand, he is himself
again; to sit caged by the rungs of a domestic chair would be unprofit
able — human. What is the good of hypocrisy? It
is permissible to choose one’s employment, to abandon the wire nail, the
roly-poly, when it shows signs of being no longer a pleas
ure, to score the adjacent magazine with a double line of strokes. He can
talk, but insolently says nothing. What of it? When one is frank, one’s very
presence is a compliment. It is clear that he can see
the virtue of naturalness, that he is one of those who do not regard
the published fact as a surrender. As for the disposition
invariably to affront, an animal with claws wants to have to use
them; that eel-like extension of trunk into tail is not an accident. To
leap, to lengthen out, divide the air — to purloin, to pursue.
to tell the hen: fly over the fence, go in the wrong way — in your perturba
tion — this is life; to do less would be nothing but dishonesty.
I first saw this about 20 years ago in a revival house in nyc. they used to show it fairly often at the Thalia Soho (for anyone who was in new york in the 80’s). you can get a copy of it from england if you have an all region player. i love it — it’s one of my favorite godards. it makes absolutely no sense in terms of plot, character, etc. — in fact, less so than every other godard in his pre-maoist phase — but it’s gorgeous to watch and he plays with color and sound like a jazz musician riffing on film noir themes.
Top 5 (or rating) Mizoguchi about 3 years ago
I mostly agree with your picks, though i’d substitute Sisters of the Gion or Chikamatsu Monogatari for Tales of the Taira Clan. Trying to pick my top five Mizoguchis, though, is like picking my five favorite fingers. I saw Life of Oharu for the first time in high school (20 + years ago) on a crappy videotape and have been in love ever since…
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What's the most annoying film music you've had to endure? about 3 years ago
oh, god, Titanic — that song goes on and on and on…
i HATED the music for A Beautiful Mind (hated the movie, too) which was (as my partner put it) “treacly”.
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GOOD DOUBLE BILLS about 3 years ago
The Long Long Trailer/Weekend
Celine and Julie Go Boating/Jeanne Diehlmann (with an intermission, naturally)
Rules of the Game/Nashville
Mouchette/Out of the Blue
Salo/Pink Flamingos (guess the connection?)
Vertigo/Letter from an Unknown Woman
i was feeling depressed one night and rented Safe and In a Year of 13 Moons. unless you are curious about what it feels like to be suicidal, I would not recommend doing this.
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GOOD DOUBLE BILLS about 3 years ago
Cobra Woman/Duck Soup — that’s genius!
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Best Movie Villain about 3 years ago
how about Welles in Touch of Evil?
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Spirits of The Dead about 3 years ago
the Vadim is insufferable, the Malle is entertaining, the Fellini is pure genius — some of the best work he’s done.
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Which film, according to you, better represents the art of Cinema? about 3 years ago
If I had to convince an unbeliever that cinema was an art, I’d pick Touch of Evil.
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The Great Cinematographers about 3 years ago
I didn’t see anyone mention Russell Metty, who worked with Sirk on all his big films, and lensed Touch of Evil as well. I would also add Lee Garmes ( Shanghai Express), Stanley Cortez (Magnificent Ambersons and Night of the Hunter), Sergei Urusevsky (The Cranes are Flying, The Letter Never Sent and I Am Cuba) and Edward Tisse, Eisenstein’s guy.
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Most Traumatic or Dramatic Film Endings about 3 years ago
Some of the most affecting endings for me:
Imitation of Life
Vertigo
Germany Year Zero
Jeanne Diehlmann
but my favorite ending to a movie has to be the climax of Duel in the Sun.
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FAVORITE VAMPIRE FILMS about 3 years ago
Vampyr is my particular favorite, but Daughters of Darkness is great too — Delphine Seyrig is the most glamourous vampire ever.
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3 Favourite Movies From 5 Favourite Directors about 3 years ago
Bresson:
A Man Escaped
Au Hasard Balthazar
L’Argent
Dreyer:
Gertrud
Ordet
Passion of Joan of Arc
Rossellini:
Stromboli
Voyage in Italy
India
Antonioni:
L’Eclisse
The Passenger
Le Amiche
Kiarostami:
Close-Up
The Wind Will Carry Us
Five
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The Most beautiful scores in cinema about 3 years ago
nino rota for fellini, especially Amarcord and 8 1/2.
Delerue’s score for Contempt.
Duke Ellington’s score for Anatomy of a Murder.
and everything Bernard Herrman did
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Obscure recommendations about 3 years ago
I don’t think anyone has yet mentioned Out of the Blue (Dennis Hopper) — really great movie starring a post Days of Heaven Linda Manz. Masumara’s Blind Beast is definitely worth a look: it’s been released on dvd by Fantomas. And has anyone else ever seen Wicked Woman, a grade C film noir from the mid-50’s with Beverly Michaels?
Go to Comment
Mistransalted titles about 3 years ago
there’s a very grim Ozu movie about a woman struggling to survive in post war japan called A Hen in the Wind — one case in which a literal translation (as i’m assuming it to be) takes away from the seriousness of the enterprise. (the movie is more like Germany Year Zero than Chicken Run.)
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The Most beautiful scores in cinema about 3 years ago
ditto In the Mood for Love
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The most beautiful films? about 3 years ago
Madame De
Devil is a Woman
Gertrud
Marnie
The River
Tabu
everything by Mizoguchi
L’Eclisse
Cries and Whispers
Ivan the Terrible, both parts
Othello (the Welles version, especially the pre-credit sequence)
Jeanne Diehlmann
Oskar Fischinger’s shorts
Barry Lyndon
Written on the Wind
Night of the Hunter… and so many more
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Obscure recommendations about 3 years ago
The Ascent is really great. also try shepitko’s Wings in the same box set.
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CHARACTERS WHO MAKE ME LOVE THEM IN SPITE OF THEIR DEEP HUMAN FLAWS about 3 years ago
Kim Novak in Vertigo
the cynical sister in Sisters of the Gion
Bette Davis in Beyond the Forest (i grew up in a small town — i know just how she feels!)
Bruno in Strangers on a Train
Susan Kohner in Imitation of Life
Marlene Dietrich’s character in Devil is a Woman
Joan Bennett in The Reckless Moment
Claude Rains in Notorious
Peter Lorre in M
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WHO IS / WAS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL FILM ACTRESS EVER? about 3 years ago
Delphine Seyrig in everything
Dietrich in Von Sternberg
Ingrid Bergman in Stromboli
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TOP TEN OF NEO-REALISM about 3 years ago
Paisan
Germany Year Zero
L’Amore
Stromboli
Flowers of St. Francis
Europa ’51
Voyage in Italy
Umberto D
Bicycle Thieves
Shoeshine
it’s really hard to go beyond rossellini and de sica in this category.
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Your birthday director(s) about 3 years ago
i got Dario Argento (about whom i have absolutely no opinion) and Elia Kazan who i think is pretty cool, despite the whole naming names deal. But, filmmakers aside, i also share a b-day with Elizabeth I!
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Filmmakers that Paint-ed about 3 years ago
according to dietrich’s daughter’s book, josef von sternberg painted. i wouldn’t be surprised if Murnau was an painter too. oh, and Mizoguchi (no surprise) studied painting.
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Any Thoughts on Grand Illusion? about 3 years ago
As with just about everyone else, i love this movie and cry every single time Jean Gabin leaves in the end. however, i don’t think will it change any racists’ and patriots’ minds (though it would be great if any movie could do that!). renoir himself is quoted somewhere as remarking that he was so proud of himself for making this powerful anti-war film that got so much attention and how it might change people’s minds about the futility of war… then 2 years later, hitler invaded poland.
Go to Comment
Classic movies you can't get on d.v.d. about 3 years ago
None of the Bergman/Rossellini movies have ever been released in this country on dvd. Likewise India, which is one of the best ever put on film. As people mentioned already, one of the von sternberg/dietrich movies is still unreleased (Shanghai Express). and i find it criminal that many of the early renoirs are unavailable.
Sirk’s There’s Always Tomorrow and All I Desire
Ray’s Bigger than Life, The Lusty Men and Johnny Guitar
a whole bunch of king vidor movies, especially Beyond the Forest
Rivette’s Out 1 and L’Amour Fou
god, there’s still so much out there!
Go to Comment
One of the best films ever! about 3 years ago
I’m a pasolini fan so i think salo is pretty important too… but it’s not a movie you would want to re-visit. if you want the much more enjoyable anti-thesis of salo, watch his Arabian Nights.
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Salo/ Last House on the Left (original)? about 3 years ago
There’s a great defense of Last House on the Left by Robin Wood in “Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan”.
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Our Favourite Poems- for a site anthology about 3 years ago
One of my favorite poems by one of my favorite poets:
The Fish
by Elizabeh Bishop
I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of its mouth.
He didn’t fight.
He hadn’t fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
— the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly —
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
— It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
— if you could call it a lip —
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels — until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.
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Movies That Should Be In the Criterion Collection about 3 years ago
jeanne diehlmann
celine and julie go boating
all of oshima’s 60’s work, especially Boy
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Our Favourite Poems- for a site anthology about 3 years ago
this thread is totally cool! after working intensely for 10 hours, it’s great to come home to poetry. here’s one of my favorites from Marianne Moore:
Peter
Strong and slippery, built for the midnight grass-party confronted by four cats,he sleeps his time away — the detached first claw on his foreleg which corresponds
to the thumb, retracted to its tip; the small tuft of fronds
or katydid legs above each eye, still numbering the units in each group;
the shadbones regularly set about his mouth, to droop or rise
in unison like the porcupine’s quills — motionless. He lets himself be flat
tened out by gravity, as it were a piece of seaweed tamed and weakened by
exposure to the sun; compelled when extended, to lie
stationary. Sleep is the result of his delusion that one must do as
well as one can for oneself; sleep — epitome of what is to
him as to the average person, the end of life. Demonstrate on him how
the lady caught the dangerous southern snake, placing a forked stick on either
side of its innocuous neck; one need not try to stir
him up; his prune shaped head and alligator eyes are not a party to the
joke. Lifted and handled, he may be dangled like an eel or set
up on the forearm like a mouse; his eyes bisected by pupils of a pin’s
width, are flickeringly exhibited, then covered up. May be? I should say,
might have been; when he has been got the better of in a
dream — as in a fight with nature or with cats — we all know it. Profound sleep is
not with him, a fixed illusion. Springing about with froglike ac
curacy, emitting jerky cries when taken in the hand, he is himself
again; to sit caged by the rungs of a domestic chair would be unprofit
able — human. What is the good of hypocrisy? It
is permissible to choose one’s employment, to abandon the wire nail, the
roly-poly, when it shows signs of being no longer a pleas
ure, to score the adjacent magazine with a double line of strokes. He can
talk, but insolently says nothing. What of it? When one is frank, one’s very
presence is a compliment. It is clear that he can see
the virtue of naturalness, that he is one of those who do not regard
the published fact as a surrender. As for the disposition
invariably to affront, an animal with claws wants to have to use
them; that eel-like extension of trunk into tail is not an accident. To
leap, to lengthen out, divide the air — to purloin, to pursue.
to tell the hen: fly over the fence, go in the wrong way — in your perturba
tion — this is life; to do less would be nothing but dishonesty.
Go to Comment
Made in the USA about 3 years ago
I first saw this about 20 years ago in a revival house in nyc. they used to show it fairly often at the Thalia Soho (for anyone who was in new york in the 80’s). you can get a copy of it from england if you have an all region player. i love it — it’s one of my favorite godards. it makes absolutely no sense in terms of plot, character, etc. — in fact, less so than every other godard in his pre-maoist phase — but it’s gorgeous to watch and he plays with color and sound like a jazz musician riffing on film noir themes.
Go to Comment