The 1984 Mini-List

[swo17]

ELIGIBLE TITLES FOR 1984

VOTE THROUGH JUNE 30

Please post in this thread if you think anything needs to change about the list of eligible titles.

[yoshimori]

Thanks, kind sir.

1984 films I'll vote for that are missing from the list (and from snapshot):

Oguri, Kayako no tameni
Bellocchio, Enrico IV
Zulawski, La femme publique

For everyone: I'll also especially recommend folks add to their "to view" lists Morita Yoshimitsu's Tokimeki ni shisu [Death in the Throes of Ecstasy]. Iwai Shunji (All About Lily Chou-chou, Love Letter) says he wore out his VHS tape of this, his favorite movie, back in the day.

I'd also recommend, as a delightfully fun diversion, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. My college roommate's uncle wrote both it and (surprisingly) New York, New York.

[domino harvey]

Please add La Diagonale du fou, the Michel Piccoli playing chess thriller that includes at one point a mystical guru face-off so outrageous that of course it was based on a real thing that actually happened!

Also two Jessica Lange movies are missing: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Rip Torn giving an incredible Big Daddy as only he can; and Country, where hers was one of three (!) Best Actress nominees for farmers this year. And also MIA is Racing With the Moon, with what is surely Elizabeth McGovern's most adorable perf

[domino harvey]

And it's listed but of course everyone should see the singular the Annunciation, wherein the history of mankind is enacted wholly by children. More thoughts on the film here

[swo17]

I've added all of yoshimori and domino's suggestions, thanks!

[domino harvey]

Can you also please add Les ripoux (and its sequel Ripoux contre ripoux for 1990) (and Racing with the Moon still doesn't show up for me)

[swo17]

Racing with the Moon still doesn't show up for me

Sorry, missed that, should be there now

[domino harvey]

[martin]

La Pirate (Jacques Doillon)
I learned about this film probably much more than a decade ago when someone - possibly David Ehrenstein - was praising it on this very forum. It could have been in a gay-themed thread but I’m not sure about that. I’ve searched for the post with no luck though.

First of all, it’s a very complicated film, riddled and hard to fully grasp in one viewing. It’s not a very realistic or naturalistic film and the characters show big emotions, often changing from one extreme to the other within the same scene. And there are some theatricals, for instance in how a knife is used as a prop. The interviewer on one of the Blu-ray supplements likens La pirate to an opera which makes some sense. But the small cast (basically five characters played by Jane Birkin, Maruschka Detmers, Philippe Léotard, Andrew Birkin, Laure Marsac) all play their heart out. It was a riveting viewing and I enjoyed it. The most mercurial character is the child – played by Laure Marsac who was probably 13 at the time. She won a newcomer César for her performnce, by the way. She’s an instigator, stirs things up and drives the events forward, somehow reminding me of Shakespeare’s Puck.

Huge spoilerShow

There’s something unearthly about the Laure Marsac character. Is she an angel, a fairy, the devil, God or simply a concept or an idea? One character notices how she never seems to sleep. She drives a car, smokes, carries a gun and shoots two of the main leads (the Jane and Andrew Birkin characters) in the dramatic finale.

[knives]

A few recommendations for additions all of which I’m seriously considering voting for.

Paul Newman is seriously in consideration for greatest director of all time in my opinion and his Harry and Son is a prime example. It’s a pair with Sometimes a Great Notion as it deals with a new youth that Newman’s patriarch can’t figure out and whose attempt to do so only hurts his loved ones. It exchanges Kelsey’s poetry with an observational style allowing for an emotional sort of storytelling.

Makk’s Lily in Love won’t be mistaken as his absolute best work, but I find it a fun return to the style of Lubitsch and Stefan Zweig.

The Snowdrop Festival is one of Menzel’s best hangout movies as it just floats around this bizarre little village.

Ken Burns’ early film on the shaker religious sect is his most fascinating early documentary to me because of the dynamic themes that he is forced to engage with which he usually shied from during these years.

[swo17]

All added, thanks!

[therewillbeblus]

Can anyone direct me to a publication where David Bordwell gushes about Choose Me? I know he ranks it amongst his favorites, and I've read some passive reasons embedded in other essays online, but wondering if he ever devoted a longer essay to it. I'm revisiting the film and hoping to grow a greater appreciation for it

[John Cope]

Can anyone direct me to a publication where David Bordwell gushes about Choose Me? I know he ranks it amongst his favorites, and I've read some passive reasons embedded in other essays online, but wondering if he ever devoted a longer essay to it. I'm revisiting the film and hoping to grow a greater appreciation for it

I can't help you with that but I can share a re-post from a series of my own reflections on Rudolph's work:

Choose Me is a perfect gem of a film and one ripe for reappraisal and rediscovery. For me, as a die hard Alan Rudolph fan, this one was always the first in a triumvirate of great films he made in the 80's (the other two being Trouble in Mind and The Moderns, further elaborations of his distinctive style). It's romantic comedy but filtered through his lens, his very particular High Style (though that would get much higher still in the years to come). But it's also a relatable, honest and true human drama of often surprisingly bracing depths. This is Rudolph's great and singular contribution. For as much as he spins the aesthetic and style of his mentor Robert Altman (sometimes in very clear ways) he also develops it along his own track, emphasizing or prioritizing some features more than Altman did or would have, getting into a specialized space of exploration and reflection where the truth of reality and artifice merge.

This is a superb introduction to his technique. And in part that's because it acts as an almost perfect distillation of his themes and ideas, interests and compulsions, stylistic or otherwise. They are all here and accounted for, featuring to a prominent extent, overt but still somehow subtle, determining the form and direction of the film. The film traffics in the meaning of both artifice and style as heightened hyper-reality and within its design it manages to include many complicating elements. The Keith Carradine character, for instance, is described or labeled by a therapist, significantly a figure of authority, as a pathological liar and yet we never know him to lie, we never observe that and indeed all of his most overwrought seeming imaginings turn out to be "real". And this of course reflects on film itself, this one or any other, as a stage for or fabric of "lies" and aesthetic form made up of illusory elements, of simulacra. But this crucially is seen by Rudolph as no lie at all really, no lack of reality but rather an extension or enhancement of it, a revelation of a deeper reality, that which art always promises even as it is also a fiction of a sort, reducible only to that designation for those thus inclined to dismiss it.

In Rudolph's world, his presentation of the world, there is great, aching sincerity in artifice, sometimes only capable of being expressed through the illusion of artifice, even while more recognizable realist notions of raw emotion are also present. The forthrightness of the dialogue, often very funny but also just as often bluntly revealing, carries its own form of that sincerity. Meanwhile the inter-relationship between lies and truth continues in such details as the characters' very names as they are not always their "real" names but another construct, another artifice, serving some other purpose. And, in the midst of all this, is the explicit art of paintings and posters which comment on the action, sometimes clearly and sometimes in more nuanced ways.

The details are where Rudolph always shines, He never leaves anything unattended and that's especially clear in his characteristically expressive background players or even just simply extras that stand out and leave an impression. Here he rejects the idea that such figures should not be present as they are only a distraction. He fills out his world with such "distractions" and his consistent employment of such figures not only disregards the supposedly sage advice of extras not drawing attention to themselves but revels in the idea of that attention drawing. This can range from just populating his frames with couples kissing (a very characteristic Rudolph trope) reinforcing the romantic atmosphere, to unique takes on what might otherwise be just generic characters, such as the mechanic at the bus depot who petitions Carradine for help or the girl at the counter who barely tolerates either of them. Beyond that, there are characters such as John Larroquette's barman, quietly in love with Warren's character as she is quietly in love with others (the brief glimpse of confident conquest on his face as he leaves her house one morning is vintage fine detail Rudolph). But this isn't just about giving these actors "business"; rather it's about how their business suggests a world beyond the frame of the one we get in the movie, a larger and more expansive reality.

As many times as I have seen this over the years I still marvel at Rudolph's ability to draw all these disparate wide ranging tones together into an inextricable web, all elements complementing and enhancing the others. How can he have the broad comic farce character moments and the emotionally bare, deeply felt, all too resonantly real ones? I think it's because he tends to them all the same and really does see them as points along the same spectrum of expressivity. As such they radiate as organic, of-a-piece, whole. And they convince too even when I'm sure there are many who would take issue with, if not outright scorn, his structuring around the contrivance of so many coincidental encounters (in L.A.? No way!). But he pulls this off because he isn't trying to convince us they are anything else. It's just more of the same scaffolding of artifice, resonant as believable in its own way for what it gets at and allows us access to as with any contrivance of fiction or art, its own kind of realism.

The performances are great throughout. Carradine and Warren are terrific together (and makes me long for the reunion that could have been in Rudolph's own Ray Meets Helen). Warren is lovelorn and wary, Carradine is a mercurial enough presence to convince us of his catalytic effects upon others (a less grandiose version of Stamp in Teorema perhaps), and Bujold's character becomes more fully human through opening herself to both sincere feeling and artifice (the moment in which she magically appears behind Warren for just a couple of seconds is a glorious indicator of how Rudolph uses style with intuitive sensitivity). The script is a carefully crafted model of its kind and should be studied (I say that a lot but only when I really believe it). And the film has a perfect final shot which, while vacillating in feeling, encompasses an entire emotional range beautifully and with a grace stroke of a touch. Choose Me can best be summarized in an excerpt from one of the essays on poetry which the Carradine character has written: "...an exciting poem, passionate, witty enthralling. And its anxious, touching human drama is once again...a phenomenon of style."