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Wonders of the Reel World
The Ten Best Films of 1997 By Jonathan Rosenbaum | |
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Do movies come from the tooth fairy? When you consider the way that they’re often treated in this culture—in particular, what films are made available and are therefore considered "important"—the working hypothesis
appears to be that movies magically appear and disappear. The general idea is that the designated tooth fairies of product flow—producers, directors, distributors, exhibitors, and critics—make things happen and the only thing viewers are suppos
ed to do is show up for the movie, rent the video, or decide to do neither. Most viewers understandably don’t want to be bothered with the machinations that determine which movies turn up and which don’t. To tell the truth, most critics don’t want to be bothered with these matters either. But sustaining such innocence may involve too high a price. Readers who complain that 1997 was a mediocre year for movies are probably counting only the multiplex entries, only one of which made it onto my ten-best list—though why anyone would eliminate everything else in a city like Chicag o remains a mystery, perhaps explainable by saturation advertising, mass-media complicity in making everything but multiplex movies look unimportant, and the supposed inconvenient locations of some theaters. Looking to me for movies worth renting on video entails setting fairly low horizons: not only because seeing most movies on video won’t do them justice but also because few of the ones that will show up on video are as good as my favorites, and few even c ome up to the level of my honorable mentions. But for the video-bound, let me give you a third-rate list right now so I can move on to more serious matters. In rough order of preference, here are my top 25, at least of those I can still remember: Mothe r, Lost Highway, Men in Black, Crash, Kiss or Kill, Telling Lies in America, Ulee’s Gold, Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Jackie Brown, Titanic, SubUrbia, She’s So Lovely, Rough Magic, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Amistad, Contact (for all its unevenness), Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, That Old Feeling,Out to Sea, Hoodlum, Liar Liar, Sta rship Troopers, Kull the Conqueror (a bad movie, true, but a glorious one), and Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. Some of these aren’t available on video yet, but they’re all bound to turn up eventually. And if you think my po lishing off this list so cursorily is a bit flippant—though I have to say I saw nearly half of these movies twice—think how I must feel about how cavalierly most of you missed seeing the majority of my own favorites even once. One woman who recently rang my office wanted to know if the fact that a film was reviewed in the Reader meant that it was available on video. Not surprisingly, she came across Reader reviews on the Internet: I suspect that it’s only within t he vast playpen of cyberspace that such confusion could take root. In this zone, history, causality, and agency are often only dimly defined: this same woman was under the impression that I was Dave Kehr, my predecessor at the Reader who departed a dozen years ago. I also periodically get E-mail queries about the availability on video of films I reviewed eight, nine, or ten years ago, which I generally don’t answer because the questioner’s guess is as good as mine. Video rental stores are the logic al places to ask instead. One reason I’m feeling disgruntled is that I’ve been trying to figure out some way of squaring my serious list of ten favorites with something resembling market availability, and the hard truth is that, for about half of them, I can’t. Every year it seems that the rules regulating such lists, for critics as well as readers, become a little more arcane and difficult. If one attends film festivals, or even sees films outside Chicago, then it stands to reason that any regionally based list can’t be drawn fro m all the films one has seen in a given year. And because Chicago moviegoers are often treated like second-class citizens when it comes to some features, which are released much earlier in New York and Los Angeles, Chicago-based ten-best lists can look so mewhat out-of-date in a national context. The Chicago Film Critics Association recently responded to this problem by changing its bylaws so that films shown to the press in 1997, even if they don’t open in Chicago until 1998, now qualify for the CFCA’s 19 97 awards. This change in the bylaws is one of the reasons I’m a reluctant member of the organization. Another, more basic reason is that I’m far from convinced that the collective wisdom of the CFCA is necessarily superior to the collective wisdom of the Chicago fi lmgoing public—the only consideration that might make the CFCA awards useful. After all, hundreds of ordinary viewers but few if any other local critics saw my two favorite films of the past year. Maybe those hundreds of people and I are wrong and th e multiplex mavens are right, but don’t count on the tooth fairies to bring out any of my favorites on video and settle the issue. The truth of the matter is that no one knows everything that’s going on in cinema at any particular moment, tooth fairies in cluded, and those who decide to pitch their tents in the multiplexes usually don’t care to know about any other films anyway. Some in the CFCA have argued that Chicago critics in the multiplex vein are made to look stupid by national release patterns, and the new bylaws are meant to counter that impression: one might call it a Tooth Fairy Initiative undertaken by the weaker toot h fairies (the critics) in deference to the stronger tooth fairies (the distributors and exhibitors), who refuse to budge, and in further deference to the public at large, who are expected to know nothing and have blind faith in the tooth fairies’ collect ive beneficence. (Close your eyes, make a wish, and when you open them, the movie will be available—unless it isn’t.) For me, these new bylaws convey to viewers the unfortunate suggestion of one-upmanship, since Chicago critics can now select the best 1997 films from a pool that includes movies ordinary filmgoers in Chicago couldn’t see in 1997—and in some cases sti ll can’t see. Even worse, this initiative plays directly into the hands of distributors, who hustle ad copy out of reviewers by screening some movies weeks or months in advance—furthering a process, I would argue, that makes everyone, ordinary viewer s and critics alike, look and feel stupid. I can sympathize with colleagues who don’t want to appear stupid to their readers, but I can’t see how covering for the biases of distributors and/or exhibitors—the tooth fairies who are, after all, responsi ble for this state of affairs—can also be interpreted as a better situation for viewers, educating them about what they should see and why. (Sometimes, I might add, this recalcitrance is a blessing in disguise; so far, for example, we’ve been spared Gummo, the worst film I saw anywhere in 1997.) End-of-the-year press shows and openings are problematic to begin with, tied as they are in many cases to eligibility for Oscars and critics’ prizes—which translate into advertising. Often predicated on big companies’ strong-arm capacity, such openin gs are intended to exploit the amnesia or ignorance of viewers, who might conclude that Amistad is a more profound depiction of slavery than last year’s Nightjohn or the 1975 Mandingo. (Given my antipathy to the skillful but gloating L.A. Confidential, which just swept the National Society of Film Critics and New York Critics Circle awards, I haven’t yet made time for a close second look, but it strikes me as a considerably less imaginative reworking of noir conventions than Lost Highway or Kiss or Kill.) For critics eager to get their names in ads, screenings far in advance of release are an irresistible temptation to forsake common sense and dive into the cascading hype. And from the looks of things, the new CFC A bylaws, far from seeking to alleviate this obnoxious situation, are designed mainly to facilitate it. All this helps to explain why, despite my admiration for Martin Scorsese’s Kundun and Robert Duvall’s The Apostle—and, to a much lesser extent, for Wag the Dog—I can’t with a clear conscience recommend them as three of the b est movies of 1997 just because I saw them last year. Similarly, I can’t include Abbas Kiarostami’s The Taste of Cherry—a film I like even more than these, which I saw last year in Cannes and at the New York Film Festival—because t he Music Box won’t get around to showing it until this spring. And I can’t include the sublime full-color 1995 restoration of Jacques Tati’s Jour de fete, playing for a limited run at the Music Box next week—technically a 1997 release because Miramax dumped it at New York’s Film Forum last fall. The restored Jour de fete, never before shown in the United States, isn’t even among the 21 "1997 Miramax releases" sent to critics, and has been dutifully ignored as a consequence. If this means that I’m considered a back number a year from now, when I select any or all of these four films for my next ten-best list, then I’m afraid it can’t be helped. Even if art isn’t eternal, I’d like to imagine it’s enduring. My two favorite films from last year—both of which showed two times apiece in 1997 to substantial crowds at the Film Center—are cases in point. The first, A Brighter Summer Day, was made in 1991 but was first shown here only last year. (I t’s come out on laser disc too, subtitled in English, and I’m told it can be ordered from the more specialized outlets.) The second, The House Is Black, was made in 1962 and is so scarce that no print exists in North America and no still from it ca n be found to illustrate this article—though neither fact has anything to do with the film’s merit or importance.
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1. A Brighter Summer Day. Yang, who was in town for the tail end of his retrospective, told me that the school in the film is the one he attended as a teenager and that most of the incidents really happened to him and his classmates. A statement about Yang’s generation that took h im four years to conceive, prepare, and shoot, A Brighter Summer Day is arguably the greatest of all Taiwanese films—surpassing even the works of a master like Hou Hsiao-hsien—because it gives a voice to a quotidian culture without a voic e of its own. Moreover, it’s a voice in which exquisitely composed sounds and decanted images work in tandem—a voice that conjures up a vivid night poetry lit by little oases of illumination that endures in the mind like few other film experiences. 2. The House is Black. Thanks to my work on the film, I had plenty of opportunity to experience the overwhelming poetry of Farrokhzad’s sounds and images—including the extraordinary sound of her voice and the no less remarkable configurations of her words in relation to he r sounds and images—even if I could only appreciate the power of her written poetry secondhand. But if the greatness of some films can be measured by how much they change one’s view of the world, few have altered mine as much as this precious work. Perhaps the most formative film I saw as a child was Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932): its view of deformity, which combines compassion and horror, has been definitive for most of my life. But The House Is Black, whose radical and poetic compass ion for lepers eschews any sense of horror or voyeurism or sentimentality, changed all that. Whether this vision is specifically Iranian is a question I’m not equipped to answer. It’s worth noting that when the film was made, its reception in Iran was far from unanimously positive; given its subject matter, I doubt it could comfortably enter the mainstream anywhere on earth. On the other hand,I suspect that part of my attraction to Iranian and Taiwanese films stems from their resistance to Western values, which implies they have a great deal to teach me. An Iranian friend who loves The House Is Black as much as I do told me that she didn’t much care for Yang’s Taipei Story because it reminded her too much of various Iranian films that inveig hed against westernization—which implies in turn that national characteristics are merely one of the many lenses we look through when we watch movies. With or without its Iranian character, The House Is Black remains the most successful fusion of cinema and poetry that I know. I suspect this is true less for formal reasons than because of Farrokhzad’s irreducible sureness in what she has to say. 3. Irma Vep. 4. The Ceremony. 5. 4 Little Girls and Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. As impressive as these two films are, if I were selecting the best documentary I saw all year, I’d have to pick Frederick Wiseman’s Chicago-made Public Housing—a more-than-three-hour dissection of what it’s like to live locally in a concentrat ion camp. Perhaps Wiseman’s finest feature to date, this remarkable achievement deserves to be seen on a big screen—as I saw it when serving on the New York Film Festival’s selection committee. But so far it’s been shown in Chicago only on public tel evision, which makes it ineligible for this list. A stark portrayal of what we do to some of our citizens, Public Housing is not as polemical or didactic as my brief description implies, but it furnishes us with enough material to rethink in a numb er of invaluable ways all the issues it raises. I hope its two recent TV airings won’t represent the sum of its local exposure. 6. La Promesse. 7. In the Company of Men. 8. The Sweet Hereafter. 9. As Good as it Gets.
10. Comrades, Almost a Love Story.
Before proceeding to my list of honorable also-rans, I’d like to cite two substantial and important films that were seriously damaged by insensitive recutting—William Gazecki and Dan Gifford’s documentary Waco: The Rules of Engagement and Chen Kaige’s Temptress Moon. In both cases this mutilation was carried out to appease the sort of dim-witted industry reviewers, in both trade papers and the mainstream press, whose sole motive seems to be telling dim-witted producers or distributors w hat they want to hear. Next in line are a number of important, accomplished films that went through town so quickly that if you blinked you missed them: Flora Gomes’s 1995 Po di sangui, a formally beautiful pageant from Guinea-Bissau that turned up at Columbia College in March; James Benning’s Four Corners, an experimental feature that showed twice in somebody’s loft last month; Edward Yang’s most recent feature, Mahjong, which turned up during his Film Center retrospective; three solid entries at the Chica go International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in November, Ira Sachs’s The Delta, Su Friedrich’s Hide and Seek, and William E. Jones’s Finished; Philippe Garrel’s piercing The Birth of Love (1993), which ran at Facets Multimed ia in June; two refugees from the Telluride film festival that surfaced at the Film Center in September, Nicholas Barker’s oddball documentary Unmade Beds and Alexander Sokurov’s painterly Mother and Son (the latter returning to the Music Bo x for a full run this February); and five worthy features shown only at the Chicago International Film Festival in October (though the last two will be returning): Tsai Ming-liang’s The River, Yim Ho’s Kitchen, the collectively made French-C anadian sketch film Cosmos, Manoel de Oliveira’s Voyage to the Beginning of the World (featuring the last performance of Marcello Mastroianni), and Richard Kwietniowski’s witty Love and Death on Long Island. (Susan Dryfoos’s delightfu l documentary The Line King: The Al Hirschfeld Story passed through town quickly at the Silver Images film festival in May, but you might have caught up with it later at the Village North.) Eleven additional movies strike me as being collectively superior to the 25 multiplex favorites given at the beginning of this survey. Again listed in order of preference, the honorable mentions are Olivier Assayas’s Cold Water, Sally Potter’s T he Tango Lesson, Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book, Raul Ruiz’s Three Lives and Only One Death, Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s A Moment of Innocence (which I prefer to his Gabbeh), Peter Duncan’s Children of the Revolution, Lar s von Trier’s Medea, Jonathan Nossiter’s Sunday, Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s Guantan-amera, Wim Wenders’s The End of Violence, and Benoit Jacquot’s A Single Girl. Last year was also a pretty good one for revivals. A beautiful restoration of Godard’s Contempt showed at the Music Box in September, and my favorite film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Martha (1973), which had never been shown in Chicago befo re, was a highlight of the exhaustive midyear Fassbinder retrospective at the Film Center and Facets Multimedia. Even better were the prerelease version of Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep, which showed at Facets in June, and the original version of Ca rl Dreyer’s last silent film, The Passion of Joan of Arc, shown at the Medinah Temple in February to the strains of Richard Einhorn’s Voices of Light, memorably performed by Anonymous 4, the Los Angeles Mozart Orchestra, and the Zephyr Choru s. But my annual F.W. Murnau award to the film that did the most to alter my sense of film history has to go to the restoration of Fritz Lang’s seminal M, which played at the Music Box in August. It harks back to a period when it was still possible to believe one could embrace and understand the complex interactions of a large city from top to bottom—a possibility now lost to us thanks to the vagaries of cyberspace and video—and no film in the history of movies does more with that belief tha n Lang’s masterpiece. |
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