The 1963 Mini-List

[bottlesofsmoke]

Thanks swo!

01. Le Mépris
02. La baie des anges
03. Charade
04. Muriel
05. La Jetee
06. The Nutty Professor
07. Shock Corridor
08. Judex
09. Winter Light
10. Black Peter
11. The Birds
12. The Servant
13. A cause, a cause d'une femme
14. The Man from the Diner's Club
15. A Woman's Life
16. Hud
17. La ragazza che sapeva troppo
18. L'Appartement des filles
19. Irma La Douce
20. La visita
21. X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes
22. The Great Escape
23. Who's Minding the Store?

Great year for movies, especially on the top end. Any of the top four could easily have been tops. I’m happy with Winter Light winning too. Still so many to see… Billy Liar is the only one in the top 20 I haven’t seen, it was next up in my queue so I’ll still watch it soon.

[Toland's Mitchell]

I've seen 21 of the top 22, with Mothlight being the odd one out. Never heard of it, I'll have to look into it. My top 4, in order, were High and Low, Winter Light, 8½, and The Big City, which I feel are the four standouts of the year that would make my decade list. Other movies I had (not in this order) were Hud, Bay of Angels, Muriel, The Silence, Charade, From Russia with Love (orphan), Contempt, Billy Liar, La Visita, Le Feu follet, and a few others I don't remember off the top of my head. I didn't forget about The Birds, though. It's an enjoyable movie, but I don't find it among Hitchcock's best, and intentionally left it off my list. I see who the other member was who had Le Feu follet, curious who else had La Visita? Anyway, as always great lists everyone and thank you swo for everything!

[alacal2]

For the record.
1. 81/2
2.Le Mepris
3. The Birds
4. The Servant
5. Le Mani Sulla Citta
6. I Fidanzati
7. The Big City
8. La Jetee
9.Judex
10. Shock Corridor
11. This Sporting Life
12. A Woman's Life
13. La Baie Des Anges
14. Winter Light
15.Ikarie XB 1
16. Current
17. Il Gattapardo
18. Audition
19. Irma La Douce
20. Hud
21. The Small World of Sammy Lee
22. Lord of The Flies.

Skewed by lack of opportunity to view a lot of North American titles.

Good to see my views on Billy Liar vindicated by the board!

[Mr Sheldrake]

01. The Birds
02. La Visita
03. The Big City
04. The Executioner
05. The Caretaker
06. Contempt
07. High and Low
08. The Leopard
09. The Organizer
10. The Servant

[Maltic]

01 The Whip and the Body
02 Contempt
03 Youth of the Beast
04 The Nutty Professor
05 X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes
06 Mothlight
07 La Jetee
08 Muriel
09 The Love Eterne
10 The Leopard

[ryannichols7]

really really good year. *-revisited/watched for 60s project, **-revisted for this project, bold watched for this project

21 mothlight**
20 la jetee**
19 shock corridor
18 black report*
17 an actor’s revenge*
16 youth of the beast
15 visitors from the icy mountain
14 bay of angels
13 something different
12 charade
11 i fidanzati
10 black peter*
09 muriel, or the time of return
08 billy liar
07 the silence*
06 the great escape**
05 8½*
04 contempt*
03 winter light*
02 the big city*
01 high and low*

Winter Light is an awesome and phenomenal #1 for this forum. its my favorite of Bergman's films honestly, and would be #1 in any year that didn't also feature Ray and Kurosawa's best movies...

24 Alone Across the Pacific (Kon Ichikawa) - I suspected this would be an also-ran due to Ichikawa’s more famous and acclaimed film from this year

I would've killed to have voted for this, as I surely would've (I've enjoyed every Ichikawa I've seen, including my #1 of the decade upcoming in 1965), but it was bascially impossible for me to locate a copy of. the long OOP Masters of Cinema disc is available for something like $100 on eBay at the moment...

[Matt]

I looked up the going rate for the MoC release just after posting it and realized that its scarcity would probably ensure that it would be orphaned.

[TMDaines]

Second month in a row, just for my own housekeeping, I would have voted for:

#1) Le Mépris (Jean-Luc Godard - France)
#2) La jetée (Chris Marker - France)
#3) 8½ (Federico Fellini - Italy)
#4) Mahanagar (Satyajit Ray - India)
#5) Tengoku to jigoku (Akira Kurosawa - Japan)
#6) Boxer a smrť (Peter Solan - Czechoslovakia)
#7) Charade (Stanley Donen - United States)
#8) The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock - United States)
#9) Le mani sulla città (Francesco Rosi - Italy)
#10) Il gattopardo (Luchino Visconti - Italy)
#11) I fidanzati (Ermanno Olmi - Italy)
#12) I compagni (Mario Monicelli - Italy)
#13) Es muß ein Stück von Hitler sein (Walter Krüttner - Germany)
#14) L'ape regina (Marco Ferreri - Italy)
#15) Winter Light (Ingmar Bergman - Sweden)
#16) Irma La Douce (Billy Wilder - United States)
#17) Tom Jones (Tony Richardson - United Kingdom)
#18) RoGoPaG (Various - Italy)
#19) Machorka-Muff (Jean-Marie Straub; Danièle Huillet - Germany)
#20) The Great Escape (John Sturges - United States)

[dustybooks]

My belated log for the last couple of weeks of this project.

An Actor's Revenge (Ichikawa): Our own ryannichols7 lent me this and the next title. This was my first time seeing an Ichikawa feature. It's ravishing to look at and I found its intense exploration of the traditions of acting in Japan more effective than its actual revenge narrative. Kazuo Hasegawa was striking to watch but I may need a second viewing to fully appreciate the nuances of the story here.

The Big City (Ray): This on the other hand could not be more the definition of what I look for in films and what I love about them. More urban and modernist and humorous than Pather Panchali but just as moving, it is for all its cultural specificity a universal chronicle of a typical working class scenario -- just trying to get the rent paid, basically -- while also capturing so beautifully the sense of identity and purpose and even worldliness that can come from finding a life outside the home. The confidence that gradually dawns upon Madhabi Mukherjee during the course of the film is a joy to behold, and I think a lesser story would have the wedge it starts to drive between her and her generally loving family as the focus of the climax.

SpoilerShow

Instead, Arati's gaining of self-assurance actually contributes to her loss of the very job that brought it to her, but this too permits that beautiful scene in which her husband recognizes his own need to move beyond traditionalism and toward the mutual respect that must background any marriage, which is captured here as winningly as in any modern film I can think of.

The Cool World (Clarke): First of all, why is this so difficult to track down? I bookmarked an illegitimate link from my usual source but it disappeared so I ended up finding a VHS rip on a porn site! This is a micro-budget story cast with amateurs, showing an underprivileged fifteen year-old in NYC who's desperate to secure a handgun in order to reassert his gang's prominence in the neighborhood. The cast of characters includes junkies, wandering losers, sad strung-out femmes fatales and pseudo-gangsters, and the film is less dated than it would be otherwise because it resists imposing a moral standing on all this. It has a classic drive-by-cinema feeling that in practice reminded me more of film noir than of something like Shadows, which is the most obvious reference point.

Muriel (Resnais): I like Resnais' films but find them taxing -- as much as I love Last Year at Marienbad, each time I see it I do feel very ready for it to end once an hour or so passes, which is probably more a flaw in my own patience than anything. I had a similar experience with this insofar as I appreciated everything -- the aesthetics, the colors, the fragmented dialogue, the vague but familiar characterizations -- but found it all rather exhausting after a time. Given its reputation and my admiration for his other work, it's most likely just a "not yet" for me.

Shock Corridor (Fuller): I've gone through Fuller's major works mostly chronologically and this is the first time I've been less than enamored, although of course you can't mistake it by any means for pure exploitation cinema -- it's much too thoughtful and artful and probing for that -- and I suppose my major problem was the disconnect between the seriousness of the themes it ends up exploring, like racism and mental illness, plus the intrigue of the story itself (it's a nifty premise!) with the outrageousness of the performances which felt pitched to a different kind of movie altogether.

Black Peter (Forman): The movie this most readily called up for me was Welcome to the Dollhouse -- that combination of adorable recognition of ruthless second-hand embarrassment that come from an arduous recreation of adolescent foibles. It's so different from the films that made Forman a mainstream Hollywood director years later but it has a lot of perceptive charm about it.

Bay of Angels (Demy): With the admission that I am decades overdue on revisiting Umbrellas of Cherbourg, of Demy's films I've seen this is by far the most successful and engrossing. It's the first depiction of a gambling problem I've seen in which I felt I completely understood the addiction, the draw and the pull of it. As good as Jeanne Moreau is I keep mentally circling back to Claude Mann's performance, such a haunting example of "negative acting."

Scorpio Rising (Anger): I watched this just barely knowing what to expect and got quite a visceral thrill out of it: it's a spectacular burst of youthful, irresponsible energy with a glorious soundtrack. And thanks to its focus on the erotic and innate pleasures of the flesh, it feels no less vital for being tied -- rivetingly -- to its period. And Anger does more with color than most big-time directors whose films I watched from this year.

Blonde Cobra (Jacobs): This is a provocation, a rather harrowing portrayal of what looks to be a breakdown -- with audiovisual aids -- by underground queer icon Jack Smith, who rants and raves and mugs for over half an hour. Not here to deny the major status this attained in the circles of experimental New York filmmaking but I found it tiresome and more than a little grating to actually watch.

If it wasn't clear already, I really really thank swo and the board in general for keeping this year-by-year thing going. I'm getting such a kick out of it.

[swo17]

The Cool World (Clarke): First of all, why is this so difficult to track down?

This review of Milestone's Project Shirley covers all I think is known about this situation:

The largest item missing from Project Shirley is her relentlessly naturalistic narrative feature The Cool World, about life and death on the unforgiving Harlem streets. Clarke regarded racism as the most insidious and outrageous of all American ills, and this intense, indelible film was clearly a profoundly personal project for her. It was made under the auspices of Frederick Wiseman's production company, and for reasons that remain obscure the deservedly celebrated Fred has never released it in a video or digital format. Hence its absence from this collection, and I trust that Milestone will strive to include it at some future time.

[therewillbeblus]

dustybooks, I don't like Blonde Cobra either, but Jacobs has some strong work this decade and I hope you'll keep going in spite of such a beloved film of his not working for you. I'm apparently the only one who loves his Mekas film enough to vote for it(?!), maybe that'll appeal to you more as well

[therewillbeblus]

Unearthly Stranger (John Krish)
I don't believe Krish made that many fiction films, but it seemed to come about as naturally to him as anything else. This is a little bit like Invasion of the Body Snatchers but more complicated in that there ends up being much less of a binary distinction between a person and their "pod self." Some great shots and camera angles, and also of interest for its cast, including a rare early film role for Philip Stone, who you certainly know from his Kubrick films

This can look and move well for a concept fundamentally stodgy and silly (it's from the screenwriter of The Brain that Wouldn't Die and Al Adamson's Blood of Dracula's Castle) and dreamed up on the cheap, and Newell has a lot of fun playing against the supposed seriousness of the scientists. What I found most amusing is that the paranoia is less existential or based on political intrigue (though birthed in the shadow of the Profumo scandal, so perhaps that's there) than openly misogynist and how the film struggles with and laughs at that: The best scene takes place by a schoolyard made to be both intensely creepy and sympathetically sad; and it's never less than obvious that these serious and powerful men are reckless and incompetent.

Finally caught up with this and was bowled over by its eclectic ambitions, which are bifurcated a bit like an alien trapped in a human body - the emotional impulses eroding the more sterile ones! The first act approaches the material in a stripped-down chamber piece, with boldly-committed academic discussions on scientific merits and workplace politics informing paranoid dread.. but then the film becomes increasingly more infused with psycho-paranoia style into chaotic emotional dysregulation, shattering its intellectualized interests from the outset (and this amplifies quite heavily in the finale, my god! If swo played gifs of the camera's methodology in chronological order, you'd never guess this was the same film by the end). I loved how the cold war themes were almost immediately discarded (mentions of the "Iron Curtain" are spliced in occasionally without affect), in favor of other, more pronounced psychosocial ideas. I'm not convinced this was an intended allegory, but I thought it was a fascinating depiction of the 'rose-colored glasses' delusion, most common when one cannot bring themself to see the flaws, particularly deceitful behavior, in their romantic partner. Part of why this reading felt especially rich is that the partner-in-question had a more complex experience with their secrets than a traditionally reductive diagnosis would permit. The film and its characters hold the deceit alongside authentic affection, which destroys the false binary conclusion most people/films (from this period or otherwise) arrive at: That "because [person] did behavior X, it must mean they feel/are concrete emotion/personality Y." But since there's no middle, grey option either can conceive of in their cognitive vocabulary, it leaves them both fated in ways you'd expect.

This movie tries to do it all, on both polar extremes of its various spectrums, and its success rate is impressive. Hopefully another label releases this on blu-ray now that Network is gone