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I thought it might be interesting if we had a place, like the Dynamic Top Tens of..., only instead of listing our top tens or however many films people wish to list we would instead have a place where we could talk about our revelations of 2008, films that we have been meaning to get round to, that surprised us etc. Instead of just talking about those films in their relevant threads it might be interesting to talk about them here - a place where people might visit occasionally, a place where people can read about a wide variety of films which they might not have read about in their relevant threads. I know I missed a whole bunch of stuff in the Lionsgate thread as I thought it wasn't relevant to me (as all Lionsgate stuff would appear via Optimum in the UK. I was wrong). I thought about this late last year and I would have chosen Celine and Julie Go Boating and O, Lucky Man! as my revelations but I think it would be nice if this were a very spontaneous thread where people could write a few lines about something they thought was... well whatever you feel. It'd be nice to read recommendations about films we might not ordinarily consider or revisit perhaps.

So far my 'revelations' have been:

1. David Holzman's Diary (Jim McBride, 1967)
After researching avant-garde documentaries in the Avant-Garde, Experimental & Non-narrative films thread this film was recommended. At first I was a little confused because what I had been told and what I had expected it to be contradicted with later reports of what the film was actually doing - having a very conscious representation of itself as fictional when it purports to be real in a mockumentary (I hate that word) kind of way, instead of leaving the whole thing very ambiguous - which is what I expected it to be.

So I finally watched the film (which I rented and subsequently bought - a fantastic disc from Second Run). The film begins and it smacked me in the face - wow L.M. Kit Carson is simply amazing, the whole feeling of the film is brilliant. Brilliantly scripted, acted, shot, there is a fantastic movement about the whole film, the way David moves within the frame, the way the camera moves. But it isn't a flowing movement which becomes hynoptic, rather it is a movement which is contradictory of itself, the way real life is. The film is a real critique of the two documentary movements of the time - Cinema Verité in the US and Direct Cinema in France, though I see it more a critique of Verité than anything else, after all the person making the interaction in the film is David himself rather than a director and subject as it was with Rouch. McBride makes a really obvious, staged critique of the verité movement by having a friend of David's give a long explanation about the capture of reality and how once the camera is turned on it ceases to be reality - this is shot in a long take that is actually quite breathtaking and testament to the acting, though as mentioned I think this is intentionally performed to be perceived as staged - just another one of those grey areas of 'truth' in the documentary. The film does not only focus on documentary but also evokes those moments in cinema of introspection - evoking Peeping Tom and Rear Window that questions voyeurism as an analogy of the cinema. The film is also an amazing time capsule with concerns of the Vietnam war in the background and the whole independent cinema movement. I loved it.

2.

My biggest revelation thus far has been MANDINGO, which I saw as part of Film Comment Selects and which completely blew my mind - it's got the immersive, horrifying otherworldliness of great sci-fi and the scope and ambition of a Great Masterpiece. Easily one of the most troubling experiences I've had with a movie, but also one of the most enthralling.

Good idea, quite apart from the fact that this thread might also be useful for reminding us of all the non-CC-discs that came out in 2008 when it comes to the end votes.

Greatest revelation so far: "The Phantom Carriage" AND "The Image Makers". Both films I found totally captivating, and the way how the Bergman film illuminates Sjöström's is particularly exciting. One of the few TV productions that I find does work despite its 'non-cinematic' look. The play on which it is based might be seen as someone's attempt to re-create the typical Bergman spirit (and probably that's one of the reasons why Bergman jumped for it, the Sjöström connection notwithstanding), but Bergman's direction and the acting is as captivating as ever. I think I like this one better than "After the rehearsal" of which it reminds me a lot.

This is a great idea for a thread. The Travelling Players is my greatest discovery so far this year (already raved about in the 70s list thread), but Ford's Pilgrimage was also a revelation, not least for the light it sheds on so many other Ford films.

I finally saw Nostalghia, and despite thinking that it is my least favorite Tarkovsky film, I can't stop thinking about it (and I watched it 3 months ago!).

Although I must mention that Tarkovsky is my favorite filmmaker, and that my least favorite of his work I still prize more highly than that of most other filmmakers.

I'm trying to grapple with what it all means (with regards to Nostalghia). I don't generally have this hard a time deciphering Tarkovsky's films (even Mirror, I find, is fairly straight forward), but this one just left me dumbfounded (what's with that bird sequence?). I am baffled by the ending, and I'm still trying to figure out what it means (and no review/article/theory I've yet read or heard really satisfies my own curiosity).

I am always intrigued when opinions are strongly divided on whether a new release is "Criterion worthy". Two relatively recent examples of this are "Metropolitan" (Stillman), and "Kicking and Screaming" (Baumbach).
Turns out I love them both, even though I would never attempt to make a case that they are among the most important films in the collection.

Even if these are not your choices for little gems, they provide good examples of the kind of noteworthy films that are strong enough to argue about, obscure enough to risk being forgotten, and intelligent enough to cause me to blind buy them, simply because of that big "C" on the cover.

I first read / heard about Sergei Parajanov back in the late 90s in an intro to film course taught by a favorite English professor of mine. Our text included David A. Cook's A History of Narrative Film, which I still refer to constantly and find to be a fantastic overview of world cinema. Cook was rapturous about Parajanov, spending several pages discussing Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors in detail in his Soviet Union section. A later part of the book discussed The Color of Pomegranates and offered several film stills. Cook's admiration for the two films frustrated me over the years, as I had difficulty viewing either work in any format. When the Los Angeles County Museum of Art presented a week-long program on Parajanov's works, I decided to make the trip up to LA to watch Shadows and Pomegranates on the big screen. And ten years of anticipation still unprepared me for the new form of cinematic language used by Parajanov. Cook had stressed that Shadows "violates every narrative code and representational system known to the cinema," adding that perhaps even that was an understatement, as the film "seems intent upon deconstructing the very process of representation itself". And despite my preparation, the film was still dizzying and wonderfully complex. Some in the audience seemed thrown for a loop - I heard nervous giggles in the rather bravura opening sequence where, without warning, the point of view shifts from ground level to the peak of a rapidly tumbling tree. I almost had to grab the edge of my seat, the shot was so unexpected and astonishing. The whirling of the camera, the use of fish-eye lenses, the tapestry-like setpieces and, perhaps most important (and certainly so in Pomegranates), the unique and haunting use of sound - too much to cram into one or even several paragraphs. It was overwhelming. And yet despite the tour-de-force aspect of Shadows, Parajanov always maintained a strong link to the emotional nature of his characters. How many filmmakers can lay claim to achieving such a tenuous balance - wowing the crowd with acts of technical daring while reaching rather profound insights into national myth and culture?

I'm not sure if a film I've read about and anticipated for nearly a decade can be fairly labeled a "revelation". But I'm pretty certain that no amount of preparation for films like Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors or The Color of Pomegranates can prevent a first time viewer from being stunned. Don't know how many others here hadn't seen these films until the showing and simultaneous Kino release, and I'm aware there's a thread for the specific dvd releases of the titles, but couldn't pass up sharing the details of what was clearly a revelatory theater moment for me (and, judging from the conversations and reactions of those around me at LACMA, many others, some of whom are members of this board).

I am truly jealous that you got to see those on the big screen.

Shadows is one of my 'revelations' for 2008, and from the moment I saw that blood flow over the camera lens in the opening (much like the egg dripping down the lens on Los Olvidados) I was hooked.

miless wrote:I finally saw Nostalghia, and despite thinking that it is my least favorite Tarkovsky film, I can't stop thinking about it (and I watched it 3 months ago!). . .
I am baffled by the ending, and I'm still trying to figure out what it means (and no review/article/theory I've yet read or heard really satisfies my own curiosity).

It's been a long time since I've seen it (the only Tarkovsky I've never seen in 35mm), but if you're talking about the final shot, I read it as Gorchakov's post-death vision that represents the final reconciliation of his spatial dislocation - a superimposition of Russian and Italian landscapes in the form of the dacha located within the ruins of a cathedral. That kind of psychological reconciliation of opposites is also crucial to the ending of Mirror, where Alexey manages to mentally untangle the images of his mother and wife (and locate them in the same landscape), and the melding / merging of opposites figures at the conclusion of many of his films (Earth / Solaris, doing a very similar superimposed landscape trick; Sound and Silence in Rublyov and The Sacrifice, which also deals with Annihilation / Rebirth).

That reconciliation of Italy and Russia is, of course, prefigured in the title of the film (which renders Russian pronunciation in Italian orthography), which is pointedly not the correct 'Nostalgia'.

It's a film I took a while to love (it's always hard to get over mimes in any context), but I now find it far more satisfying than the earnest Bergman pastiche of The Sacrifice, and it features the purest version of his crowning 'miracle' in the long candle shot which also might be the purest illustration of his conception of film as 'sculpted time' - the nature of the shot authenticates the miracle, and it would have a completely different meaning if it were conveyed in a different way.

Finally I managed to see the work of Quebecois film maker Gilles Groulx -- the most experimental of the "direct cinema" group back in the 60s and 70s. The NFB released a box set several years ago -- but it was unsubbed and quite expensive. Finally, the price dropped to the level of the more recent NFB sets devoted to Quebecois masters. Still unsubbed, but at least I can finally _see_ them.

That reconciliation of Italy and Russia is, of course, prefigured in the title of the film (which renders Russian pronunciation in Italian orthography), which is pointedly not the correct 'Nostalgia'.

For me, Nostalghia is Tarkovsky's best film, but it certainly does take some time to fully grasp what he's doing. What makes the ending even weirder and, to my mind, more profound, is the fact that this reconciliation between the "West" (Italy) and the imagined "East" (Russia) is explicitly filtered through the whole history of German Romanticism through the iconographic fusion of two very important paintings by Caspar David Friedrich (Eldena Ruin and Hutten's Grave) in that final shot. The literature on the film isn't as rich as one would like, but the best article, by a long ways, is by P. Adams Sitney and it was included in an anthology put out by MoMA back in 2003 called "The Hidden God: Film and Faith." Sitney's essay on Vertigo in the same book is equally good and it also includes the complete text of Nathaniel Dorsky's "Devotional Cinema," so the book is well worth tracking down.

Ahm... not wanting to interfere with your discussion (all great points on "Nostalghia"), but I see a problem coming up with this thread, and that is that interesting discussions of a film get in here which would probably better deserve their own thread for easy reference at later points. I mean nobody looking for a discussion of "Nostalghia" in a year or so is likely to find this one (okay, there's the search function, but you know what I mean).

So, should we perhaps use this thread for brief recommendations or statements, and if there's a greater need to discuss a particular film, go over to the individual threads (or create one)?

My two revelations of 2008 so far couldn't be further apart: Vlacil's 'Marketa Lazarova', and Todd Field's 'Little Children'.

'Marketa' is simply stunning, as most people here probably know already. Virtually every single frame could be hung on a wall and ogled at for years. I watched it with a friend and our jaws couldn't stop dropping.

'Little Children' had me smiling straight from the off, for no reason I can explain other than the film just felt right. It unashamedly plays up its literary origins with a book-ish voice-over narration that comes and goes, but even that works. Dialogue, performance, emotion, photography - none of it flags or ever descends into genre-satisfying convention or parody. Not a film you need think about too much; just an intelligent, entertaining, enjoyable, grown-up movie.

foliagecop wrote:'Marketa' is simply stunning, as most people here probably know already. Virtually every single frame could be hung on a wall and ogled at for years. I watched it with a friend and our jaws couldn't stop dropping.

I caught it in late 2007, but I entirely agree with you. And The Round-Up had a similar impact on me a fortnight or so ago - even though Miklós Jancsó was far more of a known quantity to me than FrantiÅ¡ek Vláčil.

I'd also like to echo all the comments made about seeing Shadows of our Forgotten Ancestors for the first time - I caught it in Paris in the late 1980s, and saw it for no better reason than that Paradjanov had long been a name I felt I should check out, it was a big-screen revival of a newly-restored print, and I liked the title (which translated as The Horses of Fire). That was pretty much all the preparation I had, and so you can probably imagine my reaction - broadly along the lines of "oh my God, where did this come from?"

One of my greatest revelations (in essence just a film I have seen this year which surpasses anything else) is Visconti's 'The Leopard'. I should admit that my knowledge of Visconti and Italian cinema outside of Pasolini and Antonioni is pretty sparse. I haven't even seen too many of Fellini's films even.

'The Leopard' though is one of the greatest films I have seen in a long time. Epic film making now comes to mean huge budgets and running times rather than the scale or the magnitude of a film, but this really is 'epic', charting the decline of an aristocratic family during the period of Italian unification in the 1860s. With unification came the rise of a new social order; the bourgeoisie rendering the upper classes increasingly irrelevant. Don Fabrizio (Burt Lancaster) cuts a resigned figure though dignified with it, whereas his nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon) of the younger generation at least seems able to adapt with the times, marrying the daughter (Claudia Cardinale) of a wealthy merchant/politician. Visconti's own conflict between his aristocratic upbringing and his Marxism allows him to handle the material in an even handed and sympathetic way. And then there are the set pieces; the roaming camera around the estate at the start, the battle between the redshirts and loyalists, and the 45 minute ballroom sequence. Absolutely superb.

Did Visconti ever match this?

Come to think of it, my big 2008 revelation has been the work of Andrzej Munk. Until late last year, I'd only seen his incomplete final film Passenger courtesy of Second Run's cropped version, but when I discovered that all his other features and the bulk of his documentaries were available courtesy of Polart and PWA, I watched the lot in close to chronological order.

You'd never guess in a million years that the strident Stalinist propaganda of Destination Nowa Huta! was made by the same man who by the end of the same decade was gleefully poking fun at Polish notions of duty, heroism and national pride, but Munk's career is as much a microcosm of a rapidly-changing decade as the output of one individual (I noticed the same names popping up again and again in the credits, and that he retained most of his crew even when he switched to features).

The real tragedy is that Munk died as he was only just beginning to spread his wings - the documentaries are fascinating viewing in the light of what came later, but hardly any show the sardonic, sarcastic personality that's unmistakable in Eroica and Bad Luck. (Roman Polanski was an assistant director on the latter, and in many ways he's Munk's natural heir). In many ways, he's the yin to Andrzej Wajda's yang - they both started in features at about the same time (Munk was slightly older) and tended to explore similar subjects, but Munk's mockingly subversive takes on World War II couldn't be more different from Wajda's more sombre, serious analyses. His death at just 39 was clearly a major blow to Polish cinema, and Passenger makes it virtually impossible to predict how he'd have developed.

Anyway, the DVDs of the pre-Passenger work are all entirely acceptable - I reviewed PWA's documentary set in here, and the first of Polart's three DVDs (Man on the Tracks) here. I've since watched the other two and hope to upload similar pieces shortly.

This is Cinerama.

This has been the biggest revelation this year. I saw it on the only Cinerama screen in Europe and even though the print wasn't that great, the sheer ballsiness of the process and results, blew me away. It just reminded me why I love films so much and of the superiority of the cinema and group experience. Honestly, I've been scanning the listings for all the local cinemas (with no success) because I can't bring myself to watch films as I usually do!

It's obvious why the process had such a short lifespan but thank God there are enthusiasts out there to revive it. I've never seen celluloid look so good (at least in the parts where the print wasn't bad), it was more real than reality. I genuinely didn't realise films had the potential to look so hyper-real. But why would I? I was brought up on video, or a half decent 35mm print.

I saw "Last Year at Marienbad" during its initial run at Film Forum earlier this year and despite not being all that in love with it when I first saw it years ago (on VHS), I was blown away by it this time around. The print was beautiful, and I just felt that I "got it" (as much as one can "get" the movie) in a way that escaped me when I was a 20 year old snob. I recalled it being slow, but left the theatre this time around marveling at how propulsive it seemed, how it rarely seemed to "stop". I'm seeing it again next week when it plays a return engagement at FF (and maybe in a double feature with "Contempt").

Several recent reviewings of rarities come to mind. Rowland V.Lee's tragically overlooked anti-war silent Barbed Wire from 1927, Frank Borzage's Little Man What Now? from 1934, Mario Peixoto's Limite from 1931, Souleymane Cissé's Yeelen and King Hu's Come Drink With Me. Sadly, all bar the last two are not on DVD, I can only hope they eventually will be.

I have to second Marketa Lazarová.

Maybe tied with Ménilmontant, which I tracked down thanks to the ravings at this forum.

I've been recently discovering some of those classic MGM musicals from the late 40s/early 50s. I don't know why I ignored these films all the time before, especially because I always liked jazzy crooning and dancing, but so it goes...

Anyway, while there was hardly any true let-down among these films for me yet (though I can't understand why people tend to rate "Meet me in St. Louis" and "Easter Parade" that high), the real mind-blowing stand-out one was Minnelli's "The Band Wagon". Apart from unbelievably great music all around, that final Astaire ballet is a knock-out performance. I never thought the man could be that COOL. Not even Michael Powell could have directed that one better. And if that wasn't enough, there's one thing that's even better: Astaire and Cyd Charisse "Dancing in the Dark". I must have played that single sequence at least seven or eight times in the last two months or so for pure enjoyment. The epitome of effortless style and romance. Really makes me want to put a shine on my shoes.