Editor’s Note #1 – Three Lists

The All-Time Edition

In late 2022, a few film lists were released. The most visible was Sight and Sound’s once-a-decade poll, now topped by Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Compared to the films which have topped the previous lists (Citizen Kane, Vertigo), it is a radical proposal. But we will return to this later. It seems like a good time to take stock of what exactly we want out of lists. It’s true, a list will not save you, it will not save films. Even if we concede these points (and many others), there are still practical functions for a list. There are many things which lists can tell us. Such as, what is at the center of cinephile culture?

Two lists from Argentina. The first is Encuesta de Cine Argentino, a survey conducted by three different film magazines and blogs – La vida util, Taipei and La Tierra Quema – to find the best Argentine films of all time. La vida util is a print magazine, but far away from the monthly schedule (and BFI’s institutional support) of Sight and Sound. The latter two are online blogs. Taipei seems to have, on the whole, a more literary approach (they are publishing an upcoming book on mumblecore). And La Tierra Quema bills itself as film criticism from a social perspective. All of them are run more on enthusiasm than resources. This was an attempt by cinephiles to continue the tradition of previous institutional polls (the last poll was conducted in 2000). And, after the results were announced and publicized in the Mar Del Plata International Film Festival, a series of screenings were organized in Buenos Aires of many of the films in the top 100 (Fernando Martín Peña, a key figure in the Argentine film scene, a researcher and film preservationist, also organizes screenings of films that were not in the top 100, full of even more rarities). The second list from Argentina we will discuss later.

Here is one potential function of a list. If the institutions are not addressing certain issues, then it falls to cinephiles to address them. The #1 film, Lucrecia Martel’s La Cienaga, had not even been released when the last list was compiled, a key film from the New Argentine Cinema. Martel’s cinema, controlled, ephemeral, overflowing with meaning and associations (political and otherwise) with every sound, every edit, is hard to deny. Three other films from the turn of the millennium (Pizza, Birra, Fasa; Silvia Prieto; Nine Queens) were found in the top ten, which mirror the results of the Sight and Sound list as well. According to the survey’s editorial, many of those who responded to the survey advised that their choices might have been different if Argentina had its own national cinemateque. The list and the subsequent screenings then become part of a polemical argument toward the creation of an Argentine cinemateque – “We believe that the absence of state policies that protect our national heritage, the poor conditions in which an immensity of copies survive (in the cases in which they still exist), the difficult or non-existent access to many films and the advantage of the most recent cinema in terms of exhibition material conditions, have ended up affecting the result.” If films aren’t available to be seen, how can they possibly be selected on such a list? So, the creators of the survey provide links to many of the films (Youtube, Amazon Prime, Mubi, etc.) in the best quality they can possibly find. And they set up film screenings. This is not exactly helpful for the English-speaking cinephile world, but it’s nonetheless inspiring. Here is an opportunity for direct action.

Another potential function for a list. Here is a list films you’ve never heard of! Filmmakers unknown to English-speaking cinephiles pop up over and over again. Adolfo Aristarain is behind the #3 film, Tiempo de Revancha, and he has other films on the list. Rodolfo Kuhn, Manuel Romero, Albertina Carri, Israel Caetano – it’s exciting! If you are a participant in the survey, then perhaps you view the list as an act of canon formation – here is your chance to rewrite film history for the better. If you are an outside observer, then perhaps a list is just an opportunity to write down more films to watch later. Is it possible to be more of an active participant? To not reduce a list to a series of titles, to make it meaningful beyond this… Let us return to this question.

One of the possible readings of the Encuesta de Cine Argentino is that it allows to see the impact of accessibility on how a nation’s cinephiles understand their own cinema, their own history. The list and the editorial response to the list makes clear the issues to address going forward. The list makes explicit what remains at the margins, what remains inaccessible. Each list has a structural absence which gives meaning to the selection. And if there are gaps, films which fall through the cracks, then a list provides a great starting place – we’ve agreed on a canon, now let us go further.

Two lists, two female filmmakers at the top spot – a list tells us many things about what is at the center of our film culture.

This brings us to Sight and Sound. Jeanne Dielman is the newest greatest film of all time. This is undoubtedly a radical choice compared to the previous title-holders, Citizen Kane and Vertigo. Akerman’s film is not for the casual viewer. It demands attention for its 200-minute running time so the viewer is able to detect and, more importantly, feel, the weight of the cracks in the routine that the film has painstakingly set up. Perhaps there are better Akerman films (my favorite is 2002’s From the Other Side, an impassioned attempt to map the physical and emotional journeys of immigrants coming into the United States through its Southern border, and the bizarre landscape which will greet them when they get there), but there’s probably none that’s more essential, more of a statement. After Jeanne Dielman, perhaps there was no more need for such a monumental gesture, and Akerman’s work splintered off in many different directions over the next 40 years, exploring literary adaptation, documentary, auto-fiction and more. Critic Alexandre Moussa recently wrote that Jeanne Dielman is “one of the rare objects capable of reconciling two enemy sisters: cinephile criticism, in the French tradition, and Anglo-Saxon cultural criticism, sensitive to the issues of representation.” It would be a futile exercise to try and guess which films belong to which tradition, but this split is but one possible reading of the various priorities available to the participants when casting their votes.

For the last 20 years, Sight and Sound have made a concerted effort to expand the voter base for the poll. In 2012, there were 800 voters. In 2022, over 1600. The first possible reading of the poll is that there is undoubtedly a concerted effort to include more female filmmakers on the list, and more filmmakers of color. My first thought was that this was due to the new influx of voters – a younger generation of critics wanted to leave an imprint on the list by including the films of their generation. But this assumption was somewhat incorrect, as we will discuss a little later. Like the Encuesta de Cine Argentino, we have 3 films from the last 25 years in the top 10, a shocking upheaval of the canon. Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love, Claire Denis’ Beau Travail and David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. are the great new classics.

And then there’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire by Celine Sciamma at #30, released in 2019. Is it too early to anoint a film like this in the top 100? What about Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight (#60)? Or Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite (#90)? Jordan Peele’s Get Out (#95)? Is it truly the  age of these films? Or is it the specific films that cause an issue? Yes, perhaps it’s a little shocking to so readily welcome a film released just three years ago into a top 10 list submitted for such an august and lasting publication. Seen from a historical perspective, Eric Rohmer included Hitchcock’s Vertigo in his 1962 ballot. It’s not unprecedented.

But these films are not Vertigo… Sciamma’s academicism seems like a beneficiary of an attempt to vote for more female filmmakers, but clearly the film and filmmaker has hit a chord (an even newer film, Petite Maman, broke into the top 250). Moonlight is a touching film, but it reads as a failed attempt to assume the narrative/formal strategies of Jenkins’ heroes, such as Claire Denis. Parasite and Get Out are interesting cases. Both are blunt instruments, quite inventive and funny. But they are indicative of the age when many films come pre-equipped with their own readings, films that come with their own annotations. Parasite is a closed-off film, a mathematical formula which struggles to imagine a path beyond its own violence, its own closed-circuit design. Get Out now seems like a warning shot; just last year Jordan Peele released a better film in Nope, more ambitious, more formally inventive, more beautiful. Perhaps we can designate these films as part of a cinema du discourse. These films are of the moment. They tackle questions of racism, feminism, capitalism and more. I understand entirely why perhaps in an age where questions of identity are paramount that these films would resonate with voters. This is not to diminish the films, but perhaps suggest that the filmmakers have tapped into something which is in the air, in the culture. Personally speaking, there’s no film from the last 5 years I would consider to quite crack a potential list. To put my cards on the table, the closest films would be Takahisa Zeze’s Threads – Our Tapestry of Love, and Mani Ratnam’s Kaatru Veliyidai, two romantic melodramas that absolutely destroy me. These are two films which feel very far away from these discourses. In melodrama, both filmmakers are allowed to get lost a bit, for meanings to get confused, to allow themselves the blessing of irrationality and ridiculousness, all while still striving for the shamelessness of the emotional release! But, they still feel pretty new. Perhaps in 2032.

When faced with a ballot, many voters saw this as a chance to include many new films into the canon, to place them at the center of film culture. Films which were not on our radars in the past have resurfaced due restorations and retrospectives. Filmmakers like Med Hondo, Sara Gomez, and Sarah Maldoror are undoubtedly benefitting from a greater awareness of their work, and their films being accessible (even if those channels are sometimes not exactly legal). Many other female filmmakers have also received a boost – Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, multiple Agnes Varda films in the top 100, The Watermelon Woman. It seems clear that many of the voters saw this poll as an opportunity to reshape the canon. Which is good. The canon is there to be dismantled, ignored, returned to… Howard Hawks was shut out of the top 100, but four of his films popped up from 101 to 130. Maybe the new voters in 2032 will have a different set of priorities. Each voter’s ballot is an extension of their priorities. Who are we to judge?

My original assumption about the new makeup of this list is not really supported by the data, however. After reviewing this tool and using it to filter the votes of only the participants who voted in both the 2012 and 2022 poll (433 voters in total), the picture becomes clearer. These set of voters, by themselves, would also put Jeanne Dielman at #1. These same set of voters would also put Beau Travail in the top 10. Portrait of a Lady on Fire would also be slightly higher in the results. Parasite, Moonlight and Get Out all still make it. A few films are shuffled here and there, but the overall thrust is the same. It is not just a phenomenon of the brand new voters causing these changes, but rather the legacy critics taking it upon themselves to also vote for these films. If we look at the top 250 of the 2022 poll, not a single film directed by a woman went down in the rankings – they only went up, or placed for the first time. The question then becomes: is this a permanent change? It is unlikely that Sight and Sound will consider another expansion of the voter pool considering how much work went into preparing this one (the posting of the results and ballots were both pushed back at least once). And 1,600 does seem like a good enough number to take a sampling of the cinephile world. But we have to return to the institutional nature of the poll. The magazine’s UK bias can be seen in the grotesque over-representation of UK voters, which somewhat doom the enterprise. And there is a failure to look too much beyond the English-speaking world. The Sight and Sound poll is, if nothing else, an opportunity to reach out beyond the English-speaking world and see what they have to say. It should do better. If a list is an opportunity to put forward an idea about what should be at the center of film culture, then it seems clear that Sight and Sound sees the English-speaking world as the center of that conversation.

It’s easy to be proactive if you’re invited to the Sight and Sound poll – the question of the type of cinephilia you want to fight for is less theoretical if you have a ballot and a chance to vote on the canon! But what about those of us who watch from the sidelines? What do we do with the results of this list? We return to the question from earlier. Simply as cinephiles, how do we remain active in this process?

Part of the impetus for starting Lucky Star, and by extension part of the reason why this column exists, is to have an opportunity to stage an intervention into issues in cinephile culture, and hopefully try to reorient cinephile energy in productive ways. When compared to those Argentine cinephiles who are starting their own film journals, working on translations, starting their own programming initiatives, I wonder why we waste so much time dunking on things like Dear Evan Hansen, for example. Surely there are better things to do.

As it relates to Sight and Sound, here is an opportunity to start a dialogue with these filmmakers, and with film history. Perhaps there are articles to be written about the paths these films took to their place in the canon, or to explore those filmmakers we don’t know much about (I must confess Med Hondo is not someone I know much about, though West Indies sounds fascinating!). If the idea of Sciamma in the top 100 is offensive to you, then perhaps it is time to propose a counter-canon, like Jonathan Rosenbaum did for those old AFI lists. But more than anything else, it should lead to more writing, more analysis, more critical thought. That is how cinephiles can engage with this admittedly flawed list.

But these are polls taken at least once a decade, and the questions posed by such polls are always with us – what is at the center of our film culture, and what remains on the margins…

The Year-End Edition

We started with Argentina, and we will finish with Argentina. The previous lists took the long view of film history – pick the ten best films in all of cinema history! But at year’s end we are inundated with lists which care only to sum up the previous year in film, a much more modest scope. On the final day of 2022, another list from Argentina was released, Roger Koza’s La Internacional Cinéfila, found on his blog Con los Ojos Abiertos. This is a list of the year’s best releases as voted on by those Koza himself invites. Those invited are friends and colleagues, fellow travelers of the festival circuit, programmers, critics and a few filmmakers. As such, the results follow suit – Pacifiction by Albert Serra topped the list. Most of the films belong to the festival ecosystem, with few deviations. It is a good list, an interesting list, specially if you have an interest in Argentine film and want to know what is going on in this scene. And it gives us a good starting point to discuss what makes it on these year-end lists and what doesn’t – what do we value?

A somewhat uncharitable reading of this list would be that it reflects the somewhat homogeneous taste of the film critics and programmers invited. The participants belong to the festival ecosystem, they’re watching the same movies, going to the same festivals, and, most crucially, ignoring what has not already been pre-approved. Koza in his introductory note traces the path of the top 10 films selected – Pacifiction at the Cannes competition, Dry Ground Burning at the Forum in Berlin, Trenque Lauquen in Orizzonti at Venice –  and we note that only Licorice Pizza and Nope did not premiere at a film festival. Of course, these are American auteur projects, positioned for awards season and box office success, which does not necessarily require a festival launch. Only one entry mentioned S.S. Rajamouli’s RRR, for example, and none mentioned Mani Ratnam’s Ponniyin Selvan: Part I. The Rajamouli broke through with North American audiences (it won an Oscar!), but seems to have been somewhat ignored by this group. It could be said that a filmmaker like Rajamouli, a filmmaker who relies on the spectacle of the big screen, who puts his imagination and resources to conjuring up fantastical images, does not really need the acclaim of critics. But this would deny him his artistry, his idiosyncrasy. Would it have helped if it had been launched at a festival? Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Gangubai Kathiawadi premiered at Berlin, but not in competition, which seems like a dutiful acknowledgement of the Hindi commercial cinema, trying to cling somewhat to its glamour but refusing its artistry (and Bhansali is a fascinating figure). To switch countries for a second, would a filmmaker like Akiko Ohku, who is not part of the festival world, find a home in a list like this? Essentially, La Internacional Cinéfila posits the festival world (and by extension, the festival film) as the center of its universe.

Let’s take as an example a film which made my top ten last year, Park Hyun-jin’s Love and Leashes. This is a Korean adaptation of a webtoon, dumped somewhat on Netflix, notable because it features Seohyun, a member of K-pop group Girls’ Generation. It arrives unsuspected to our screens, no reputation, no festival laurels or critical raves to help us decipher it. It’s a fascinating film: a romantic comedy that focuses on an S&M relationship, how its rules are negotiated, how the universe of the couple is imagined. But because this is a Netflix production, the edges of such a relationship are somewhat sanded down, its surfaces are nondescript, the world remains a suggestion… and it is through this “tamping down” that the film achieves its effects. The film lives in that tension, between the sleek Netflix surfaces of its world, and the conflicted eroticism of the imaginary. Seohyun’s gaze, fully embodying the contradictions of the film, always projects the intelligence of the actress, even in the most ridiculous of situations. The film is like an involuntary moan, both guttural and proper, escaping from its host…

No, this film was not mentioned in La Internacional Cinéfila. It probably wasn’t listed in any respectable lists. If we look toward our greatest critics to help us find the best films and make sense of them, this lack of engagement with the popular forms of cinema, whether it be 80’s or 90’s Hong Kong cinema (currently experiencing a renaissance of availability by boutique DVD companies), the current Indian cinema, or seemingly disposable items like Love & Leashes and My Boyfriend’s Meds (covered elsewhere on Lucky Star), is a serious oversight in our cinephile culture. There are people who are never going to like or see the value in a Farah Khan movie, for example, but seeing the same movies over and over again in a list like this simply reinforces the homogenous nature of the enterprise. If you only look at what plays in festivals, the end result seems predetermined, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Perhaps this is not an argument that is fair to Koza and La Internacional Cinéfila, as distribution in Argentina (and the rest of the world) is not the same as the United States. Indian cinema lives on US screens, but it does so secretly, without promotions, reviews, etc. In his editorials and open letters for the past years, Koza has written that from the very first list, over a decade ago, he has tried to “avoid the inevitable homogenization that comes with consensus.” He also acknowledges that it is a doomed mission, as it is “impossible to bring together all the visions of contemporary cinema.” But it becomes impossible to escape the homogenous rhetoric of contemporary cinema, as he puts it, if everyone is treating as their starting point, “the great film festivals, such as the Berlinale and Cannes, as well as Venice, Locarno and San Sebastian” which “will provide the annual discussion with a set of 550 films that seem to delimit the signs with which one can discuss what contemporary cinema is.” A colleague asked me why I would single out La Internacional Cinéfila and not Senses of Cinema, for example. The reason is simple: Senses of Cinema (or at least its World Poll) does not seem to me an outgrowth of a specific person’s sensibility and philosophy when it comes to cinema in the way that Koza’s list does (the closest equivalent in North American cinephilia is perhaps the Cinema Scope top ten, which is voted on exclusively by those who wrote for the magazine during the prior year). Reading the yearly roundup of La Internacional Cinéfila feels like catching up with a friend who has been on travels all over the world, letting us know what’s happening in the world of festivals. You can call it a question of temperament, but I’m always looking elsewhere, at the margins, at what is missing. The problem is always those films that don’t make it to festivals. How do we know about them if not for critics who are on the prowl, searching and digging?

Roger Koza names his editorial for the list, The Varieties of the Cinephilic Experience, but perhaps because I find myself very far away from this world of festivals, the list reflects just one type of Cinephilic Experience. And yet… It is a useful one. Here’s another potential function for a list. It can be a window into a specific niche and subculture. The programmers and critics in Roger Koza’s orbit may live mostly in that festival ecosystem, but this can be interesting. Personally I have no interest in Albert Serra’s work (Koza’s description of Serra’s working method, shooting tons of footage using three cameras, and then figuring it out in the edit, seems to me not very exciting, but I will withhold judgment for now), but where else would we find as many citations of these films by Lucia Seles, something called the Tennis Trilogy, films that premiered at BAFICI, comedies that are completely unknown and inaccessible? More films to see…

I end this inaugural editor’s note column by returning to an article posted on Reverse Shot, their Two Cents of 2022. In this article, there is a section called the Offenses of 2022, where the writers take certain films to task. One of the entries highlights S.S. Rajamouli’s RRR. The writer, Bedatri Choudhury, takes the film to task for its nationalist propaganda, rewriting of history, ideology, etc. (this is not an argument to rehash in this space, see Caravan’s take on this). She writes that “my problem with RRR is not that people claim it’s the best Indian film in decades – it’s not, but people are entitled to their opinions – but that so many of its international viewers are watching it shorn from context.” Additionally, she write that “the mammoth success of RRR has proven, once again, that the best Indians (for Western cinephiles) are the head-bobbing, dancing ones.” I don’t want to take the writer to task for this because they can feel however they want about RRR. The issue is writing this for a publication that has published a single full-length review of an Indian film in the last 5 years (All that Breathes). In 2015, Reverse Shot posted a feature on the New York retrospective of Mani Ratnam’s terrorism trilogy, but when Ponniyin Selvan is released, there is no review of it. The problem here is that there’s no alternative vision of cinema put forward – how are cinephiles supposed to go beyond RRR if outlets are not writing about those films? If it does not come pre-approved with a competition slot at a festival, then Indian cinema remains invisible. Olaf Moller once wrote that India “remains a film culture apart.” I would posit that this is because film critics and programmers (and Indian distributors) treat it as such. A healthy first step would be stop programming these type of films in the ghetto of the out-of-competition slots, like the Berlinale did with Zoya Akhtar’s Gully Boy, or Soi Cheang’s Limbo to move away from India, and include them in the competition proper. Critics, taking their marching orders from festivals (and their editors), would be forced to deal with such films, normalizing them within a festival context, and from there perhaps a greater awareness among cinephiles. Perhaps they will even find themselves mentioned in La Internacional Cinéfila.

La Internacional Cinéfila is but one path forward when making your way through contemporary films, one star in the constellation of cinema. And each list is but a new attempt to put forth a vision of cinema. An imperfect exercise, like all of them, but a worthy one. One that prides itself on its multicultural perspective, its alternative view of cinema. Edition by edition, Koza’s extended cinephile hive grows and grows, bringing more voices, more thought, more theory, more criticism.  If there’s a lesson to take away from this list is that we don’t have to wait 10 years to put forth our arguments – to ask ourselves, what is at the center of our cinephile culture? Perhaps simply to fight for a cinephilia where Seohyun vehicles are not ignored… Each year we renew our vows.