The 1964 Mini-List

[Rayon Vert]

I'm surprised Bande à Part is so high on many people's lists. It's one of the few 60s Godard films where I don't see much there, like he regressed and stopped moving from that constant forward-edging where he was at that point. But maybe I was influenced by RIchard Brody's appreciation of it when I first saw it!

[bottlesofsmoke]

Thanks again swo, great work as always!

I also didn't vote for Dr. Strangelove, if I was going to vote for a Peter Sellers comedy from this year, it would have been A Shot in the Dark, which just missed my list... but I do think the "War Room" line is funny!

1. Il deserto rosso
2. Lilith
3. Yearning
4. Woman in the Dunes
5. The Killers
6. Soy Cuba
7. Diamonds of the Night
8. Three Outlaw Samurai
9. Les Parapluies de Cherbourg
10. Band a part
11. Le Tigre aime la chair fraîche
12. Gertrud
13. Charulata
14. The Fifth Horseman is Fear
15. The Masque of the Red Death
16. Man's Favorite Sport?
17. Swastika
18. Seance on a Wet Afternoon
19. Kiss Me Stupid
20. The Naked Kiss
21. Sex and the Single Girl
22. Bedtime Story
23. Le journal d'une femme de chambre
24. Children of the Damned
25. Seven Days in May

[therewillbeblus]

I'm surprised Bande à Part is so high on many people's lists. It's one of the few 60s Godard films where I don't see much there, like he regressed and stopped moving from that constant forward-edging where he was at that point. But maybe I was influenced by RIchard Brody's appreciation of it when I first saw it!

I feel like it's often cited as one of it not his most accessible early film. I have friends who generally don't like Godard much but who love this one, and Godard enthusiasts also tend to like it. My enthusiasm has dwindled a bit on repeat viewings, but I still adore the film. While I can understand how you could view its oeuvre-placement in a critical way, there's something to be said for taking a break from relentless heavy material to have some leisurely fun before going back into the depths of complexity- forever

[Rayon Vert]

Good point. It comes after the (superficiall) mainstream Le Mépris, yet it feels a lot more conventional than that predecessor. It's a bit like Breathless all over again, but a little duller. I should give it a rewatch at some point.

[Maltic]

Bande a part is The World as Will and Representation, the other work is The Critique of Pure Reason.

[Mr Sheldrake]

Charulata (Satyajit Ray)
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick)
Il magnifico cornuto (Antonio Pietrangeli)
Pale Flower (Masahiro Shinoda)
Kwaidan (Masaki Kobayashi)
Sedotta e abbandonata (Pietro Germi)
Onibaba (Kaneto Shindō)
My Fair Lady (George Cukor)
The Pumpkin Eater (Jack Clayton)
Assassination (Masahiro Shinoda)

[Rayon Vert]

Bande a part is The World as Will and Representation, the other work is The Critique of Pure Reason.

Ah, makes sense!

Wait, didn't the Schopenhauer come after the Kant?

[Maltic]

Indeed, and a story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.

[ryannichols7]

I never posted my list, absolutely banner year. bold = new for this project, starred were new for 60s project initial vote, double starred revisited for this month.

15 the TAMI show
14 shadows of forgotten ancestors
13 red desert
12 gate of flesh
11 kwaidan
10 manji
09 seance on a wet afternoon
08 a hard day’s night**
07 charulata
06 onibaba*
05 the gospel according to st matthew
04 dr strangelove**
03 diamonds of the night* (and **)
02 and the fifth horseman is fear
01 pale flower

I think the only ones I didn't write up were as follows:

Manji (Masumura): still searching for my Masumura masterpiece, but I think this came really close (this and his debut Kisses are my favorites thus far, though I really want to revisit Giants and Toys). it is wild to see Ayako Wakao and Kyoko Kishida in the roles that they're in and I could tell going in that this would be another Kaneto Shindo script (much like Irezumi), because the work seems a little more suited for him. it suffers from the problem some other Masumura works do (namely Black Test Car) with too much dialogue and borders on too much melodrama, but I found it pretty biting and exciting overall, with wonderful photography like I'm used to with the director. I do wish it went a little further, but it's far too much fun to feel too let down by, and is probably the trashiest of a film I've enjoyed in awhile - everyone here is a total disaster. now I need to see The Handmaiden (I never did), because this really did play out like every description of that film that I know of. I think a really good companion to Irezumi thanks to the exploration of woman's relations as men see them. this film, relating moreso to woman-woman and how men see them, and that film how men perceive women. anyway, Arrow needs to release this.

The TAMI Show (Binder): largely awesome and incredibly prophetic, though you can feel the Beatles-shaped hole here (filled by A Hard Day's Night almost perfectly), this is basically the 1960s version of Stop Making Sense where the performance is so much the spectacle and choreography, as opposed to just being a band onstage playing music (Pet Shop Boys: Performance is my 1990s selection, but I'm lost on what the 70s equivalent is). from Jan and Dean's onward song onward I was pretty excited, also sensing a bit of the cinematic flair Richard Lester exhibited in AHDN. kicking off with Chuck Berry I figured we'd be bang on, but unfortunately Gerry and the Pacemakers are shoved in there rather disapprovingly. but that's the only real lowlight, it's bang on from there, and the advantage over the Beatles' film is that everything is recorded live. I'd never seen footage this early of the Miracles or the Supremes, and both are in absolutely stellar form here. The Beach Boys are a huge treat to see in their fully original lineup, as dustybooks noted this is basically as rare as it gets, and I'm glad my first viewing of this film was with them intact. Lesley Gore and Marvin Gaye are the really slept on performances here, both have so much charisma and handle the audience beautifully. James Brown's performance is as notorious and earth shaking as advertised, my only comment is that I don't feel it should overshadow the rest of this great film. and the Stones, wow - as a disciple of theirs it's a real treat to see footage before they were even at the point of playing their own songs. Binder was insane with his prophecies - Smokey Robinson, Diana Ross, and the Stones (minus Brian Jones, of course, and now ditto Charlie Watts) are still keeping the energy of this film alive to this day. my #1 dream inclusion aside from the Beatles would've been Buddy Holly, who would've fit right in with this film and been a great time, but it's nearly as perfect as it is, one of those "lightning in a bottle" moments I can't believe got captured as well as it did.

to 1965!

[therewillbeblus]

Caught up with Cash Flagg's gonzo low-budget horror flick The Thrill Killers after seeing Glenn Kenny log it with five stars on LB. His high-ranking obscure favs occasionally leave me scratching my head, but this one was a blast. A band of mental patients escape from the local asylum and go on a murderous rampage in suburbia, which includes plenty of nifty decapitations. Sounds like a million other movies from the 60s, but where this kind of programmer might normally fail by being shot straight (and probably veer into propaganda rather than exploitation fare), Steckler opts for relentlessly-novel detours of punk-rock guerrilla filmmaking techniques bordering on experimentalism. This tactic reflexively uproots us from the secure, banal world of these suburbanites and shakes us around to the rhythm of the schizophrenic minds of their threatening assailants, deranging the normalcy of the schema into abnormality through elastic liberation of grounding conventions.

Speaking of, the villains may not be fleshed out, but their erratic personalities are distinct from each other, lopping on an additional layer of horror as a victim encounters one with consequential unpredictability in response, unsettling both subject and viewer alike. Typically a sole killer will behave within a predictability the audience is let in on, or all killers will prey in a similar, simpleminded pattern if in a gang, or if not, they'll be detailed characters so we 'know' them enough to understand why they behave individually. But these different men approach their prey according to an unexplained internal logic that each actors clearly understands but the film doesn't let us in on- only making the encounters more disturbing as drive-by assaults (plus, well, they all route toward the same murderous explosions). There's one early scene featuring a strobe light effect in arrhythmic sync with arbitrarily alternating camera angles observing the murder and aftermath with such profound and perverse intrusion that recalled Lynch's Inland Empire (the frames also jarringly sway between complete surrogate subjectivity -of both perpetrator and victim!- to aloof static objectivity of trivial, cold inspections; it's like a nauseating ride I never want to get off of), and also a midpoint home invasion that's bursting with rich liberal wielding of form to create something simultaneously enthralling and terrifying, going on forever as it keeps inventing exciting ways to capture a hackneyed setpiece. This kind of film has no business being this awesome.

[therewillbeblus]

Just caught up with Tobe Hooper's early short film, The Heisters, a madcap surreal silent chamber piece, that plants Three Keatonesque Musketeer Stooges into a Bava-inspired production design, with setpieces concocted by Frank Tashlin doing his best Raul Ruiz impression. This is essentially a live action Loony Tunes skit, but it's one that demonstrates real visual wit and technical prowess, as well as the audacious commitment to vision that Hooper would retain for the remainder of his career. He's wearing his influences on his sleeve, but he makes them very much his own brand in the acuity and attention given to ideas canvased in his images.

[TechnicolorAcid]

I think more than any film, Walking the Streets of Moscow reminds me most of Moscow's answer to Rozier's Adieu Philippine. Both tales of young adults that are essentially comprised of small vignettes tied around the thinnest of plots, equally in love with its locations as with its characters and both very eager to remind you of the presence of time. Before the Mosfilm credit even appears, Walking the Streets of Moscow starts with the sounds of loud, chiming clocks and from there it reminds you repeatedly about the limited amount of time that our young writer lead has before he has to leave Moscow with clocks a constant symbol and the character of Sasha's various references to him needing an extension before he enters the Navy a consistent reminder to us of how the film will end. But while I'm making it sound like it's a tragedy, don't be mistaken because this is an extremely warm film, I mentioned the film's love of its locations but I really do emphasis that this is just a extended love letter to Moscow, every character in it gets treated with a sense of genuine understanding and/or pure warmth, there's a small moment that I think really defines the whole movie where our tour guide Kolya's grandmother points at a picture of her sons, begins lamenting their deaths in the war and then earnestly begins telling a story about how they'd all give down their clothes to their brothers when they didn't need it anymore, and it's such a genuinely beautiful, honest moment that doesn't really have any place to be there but still brings me to tears everytime. The film is just filled with all of these small little moments that build this vibrant, lived in treasure trove of a city and I could ramble on all day about these moments or it's bits of delightful comedy or in its depiction of community and bonding or it's relation to Daneliya's other films but I just want everyone reading to CHECK THIS ONE OUT, it's only an hour and 16 minutes and is without a doubt one of the best films to come out of the Soviet Union and its lack of an American home video release (or honestly the fact that nobody voted for it in the mini-list, seriously what the fuck) feels like a cinephile crime of the highest order. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!