1960s Discussion and Suggestion (Lists Project Vol. 2)
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- Joined: Fri Dec 15, 2006 10:44 am
1960s Discussion and Suggestion (Lists Project Vol. 2)
Since nobody else is taking the initiative, I thought I'd open the discussion on the 1960s Film List. I have not yet done a full list of 50 films, but here are some favorites I'm practically determined to include:
1960: Peeping Tom, When A Woman Ascends the Stairs, Shoot the Piano Player, Breathless, Eyes Without a Face
1961: A Woman Is A Woman, Last Year at Marienbad
1962: The Manchurian Candidate, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Jules and Jim, Ride the High Country
1963: Shock Corridor, Les Carabiniers, Contempt
1964: A Hard Day's Night
1965: Repulsion
1966: Andrei Rublev, Report (Bruce Conner), Seconds
1967: La Chinoise, Playtime, Wavelength
1968: Petulia, The Alphabet (David Lynch), Night of the Living Dead, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Part One
1969: Mister Freedom (William Klein), Funeral Procession of Roses (Toshio Matsumoto), Medium Cool
Anybody have any additional suggestions for viewing? The 1960s is such a wide-open decade when you consider that you have the collapse of the Hollywood studio system, the death of the Production Code, and the beginnings of the displacement of Japan & Western Europe's hegemony over the art film. Given the range of choices available, does anybody have any recommendations for the following genres?
Japanese New Wave
Czech New Wave
Brazilian New Wave
Other assorted New Waves
Italian giallos
Spaghetti westerns
Other European variations on the spaghetti western (paella western etc.)
"Grindhouse" films (construed broadly)
Martial arts, Japanese samurai films, King Hu, Shaw Brothers etc. etc.
Japanese "pinku eiga,"
Japanese "chambara" ghost stories
Any other Japanese horror
Any recommendations of the variety "If you like X, then you'll just love Y"?
1960: Peeping Tom, When A Woman Ascends the Stairs, Shoot the Piano Player, Breathless, Eyes Without a Face
1961: A Woman Is A Woman, Last Year at Marienbad
1962: The Manchurian Candidate, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Jules and Jim, Ride the High Country
1963: Shock Corridor, Les Carabiniers, Contempt
1964: A Hard Day's Night
1965: Repulsion
1966: Andrei Rublev, Report (Bruce Conner), Seconds
1967: La Chinoise, Playtime, Wavelength
1968: Petulia, The Alphabet (David Lynch), Night of the Living Dead, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Part One
1969: Mister Freedom (William Klein), Funeral Procession of Roses (Toshio Matsumoto), Medium Cool
Anybody have any additional suggestions for viewing? The 1960s is such a wide-open decade when you consider that you have the collapse of the Hollywood studio system, the death of the Production Code, and the beginnings of the displacement of Japan & Western Europe's hegemony over the art film. Given the range of choices available, does anybody have any recommendations for the following genres?
Japanese New Wave
Czech New Wave
Brazilian New Wave
Other assorted New Waves
Italian giallos
Spaghetti westerns
Other European variations on the spaghetti western (paella western etc.)
"Grindhouse" films (construed broadly)
Martial arts, Japanese samurai films, King Hu, Shaw Brothers etc. etc.
Japanese "pinku eiga,"
Japanese "chambara" ghost stories
Any other Japanese horror
Any recommendations of the variety "If you like X, then you'll just love Y"?
- toiletduck!
- Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 5:43 pm
- Location: The 'Go
- Contact:
So are short films still eligible for the main lists as well? I've been long awaiting the 60s list to campaign for one of the most hopeless causes of the project: Barbara Rubin's 1963 short Christmas on Earth. Coming from Warhol's Factory, this half-hour double-projection film is an experience bordering on conceptual art: it is accompanied by a radio turned on and allowed to play and the projectionist randomly passing different colored gels in front of the projector, all while showing Rubin's friends in sexually explicit (and body-painted) situations.
I don't know where you're going to manage to find a way to see this if you haven't already, but keep your eyes peeled. Mind-altering stuffs.
-Toilet Dcuk
I don't know where you're going to manage to find a way to see this if you haven't already, but keep your eyes peeled. Mind-altering stuffs.
-Toilet Dcuk
- zedz
- Joined: Sun Nov 07, 2004 7:24 pm
Shorts are still eligible as ever.
Re: recommendations for Jon, a lot of these areas that I'm interested in are woefully underrepresented on decent DVDs, but some titles are suggested below:
Japanese New Wave
The short-lived JNWC bootleg line released more essential New Wave films with English subtitles than every other label combined. Seek those out if possible - no appreciation of Japanese cinema is complete without Oshima's 65-71 run, or Insect Woman through Profound Desire Imamura. Earlier Oshimas are available from Raro in passable editions, but I don't know if Violence at Noon has English subs, and Cruel Story of Youth and The Sun's Burial, great as they are, are before he really gets cracking as an iconoclast. Night and Fog in Japan is a crucial film, however.
Double Suicide is essential, and the other available Shinodas (Assassination, Pale Flower and Samurai Spy) are great, but more in the line of ultra-stylish, bold genre films a la Suzuki and Masumura than 'pure' New Wave. There's the new Criterion Teshigahara set, Funeral Parade of Roses from MoC, and I can't think of much else (unless you include Shindo and Suzuki, but I think that's problematic).
Czech New Wave
There's quite a bit available, if you're prepared to tackle the depths of the Facets catalogue, but still several key omissions (no Schorm or Jakubisko, no Larks on a String).
I'm much fonder of the Formans among the four Criterion titles, and your next port of call should be Second Run, with a range of greats, specifically The Party and the Guests (one of the greatest films of the decade, in my opinion), The Cremator, Intimate Lighting and The Ear. From Facets, The Joke, The Valley of the Bees and The Fifth Horseman Is Fear are great films, in not too awful editions. Daisies is essential viewing, but I don't know how bad the available edition is. And don't forget the gorgeous new Svankmajer set from BFI.
Brazilian New Wave
Barren Lives is available in R1, but otherwise you'll need to go for the two Rochas (Black God, White Devil and Earth Entranced) released with English subs (in beautiful editions) in Brazil. As far as I know, that's it.
Other assorted New Waves
Jansco is finally coming onstream via Second Run and Clavis (France): one of the most original stylists in cinema history, and everything released so far is essential viewing. Makk's Love (from Second Run) is an amazing film, but it's 1970s.
Japanese "chambara" ghost stories
Any other Japanese horror
Speaking generally about Japanese genre films, Suzuki is hard to avoid, but check out Masumura as well (four titles on Fantoma). Red Angel is particularly amazing, one of the most uncompromising anti-war films ever made. Shindo's Kuroneko (on MoC) has a brilliant, eerie first half.
Re: recommendations for Jon, a lot of these areas that I'm interested in are woefully underrepresented on decent DVDs, but some titles are suggested below:
Japanese New Wave
The short-lived JNWC bootleg line released more essential New Wave films with English subtitles than every other label combined. Seek those out if possible - no appreciation of Japanese cinema is complete without Oshima's 65-71 run, or Insect Woman through Profound Desire Imamura. Earlier Oshimas are available from Raro in passable editions, but I don't know if Violence at Noon has English subs, and Cruel Story of Youth and The Sun's Burial, great as they are, are before he really gets cracking as an iconoclast. Night and Fog in Japan is a crucial film, however.
Double Suicide is essential, and the other available Shinodas (Assassination, Pale Flower and Samurai Spy) are great, but more in the line of ultra-stylish, bold genre films a la Suzuki and Masumura than 'pure' New Wave. There's the new Criterion Teshigahara set, Funeral Parade of Roses from MoC, and I can't think of much else (unless you include Shindo and Suzuki, but I think that's problematic).
Czech New Wave
There's quite a bit available, if you're prepared to tackle the depths of the Facets catalogue, but still several key omissions (no Schorm or Jakubisko, no Larks on a String).
I'm much fonder of the Formans among the four Criterion titles, and your next port of call should be Second Run, with a range of greats, specifically The Party and the Guests (one of the greatest films of the decade, in my opinion), The Cremator, Intimate Lighting and The Ear. From Facets, The Joke, The Valley of the Bees and The Fifth Horseman Is Fear are great films, in not too awful editions. Daisies is essential viewing, but I don't know how bad the available edition is. And don't forget the gorgeous new Svankmajer set from BFI.
Brazilian New Wave
Barren Lives is available in R1, but otherwise you'll need to go for the two Rochas (Black God, White Devil and Earth Entranced) released with English subs (in beautiful editions) in Brazil. As far as I know, that's it.
Other assorted New Waves
Jansco is finally coming onstream via Second Run and Clavis (France): one of the most original stylists in cinema history, and everything released so far is essential viewing. Makk's Love (from Second Run) is an amazing film, but it's 1970s.
Japanese "chambara" ghost stories
Any other Japanese horror
Speaking generally about Japanese genre films, Suzuki is hard to avoid, but check out Masumura as well (four titles on Fantoma). Red Angel is particularly amazing, one of the most uncompromising anti-war films ever made. Shindo's Kuroneko (on MoC) has a brilliant, eerie first half.
- Scharphedin2
- Joined: Fri May 19, 2006 7:37 am
- Location: Denmark/Sweden
I am again going to attempt to view films year by year. In addition to the titles you have already suggested for 1960 (all of which I second), here are a few titles that I would add for consideration:jonp72 wrote:1960: Peeping Tom, When A Woman Ascends the Stairs, Shoot the Piano Player, Breathless, Eyes Without a Face
The Italian triumvirate of Rocco & His Brothers (Visconti), L'Avventura (Antonioni) and La Dolce Vita (Fellini)
A couple of American films -- Billy Wilder's The Apartment, Mankiewicz's Suddenly Last Summer and Hitchcock's Psycho
Jacques Becker's Le Trou
Karel Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
And, Kurosawa's The Bad Sleep Well
- zedz
- Joined: Sun Nov 07, 2004 7:24 pm
I don't know how I'm going to tackle the 60s. My tactic so far for revisiting lists has been to keep a running list of "To Add" films and then add them in and reshuffle. First time around, I found the 60s list particularly difficult, and I ended up with about 100 titles in the running. Since then, I've seen / remembered / rediscovered 34 additional films which "have to be" in my top 50, so I'm going to have to be particularly ruthless or willful this time around.
- Gropius
- Joined: Thu Jun 29, 2006 5:47 pm
I share the consensus opinion that the 60s is the greatest decade so far in cinema's short history (some might say the 20s - never heard the case for 30s/40s/50s).zedz wrote:I don't know how I'm going to tackle the 60s.
Also the first decade for which I feel competent to join the List Project game, since at this chronological point one can stop feeling guilty about the insufficient breadth of 'classic Hollywood' in one's viewing history.
- zedz
- Joined: Sun Nov 07, 2004 7:24 pm
I was going to leave this until I'd seen some more key films, but it's the perfect illustration of both the richness of the decade and my own selection dilemma.Gropius wrote:I share the consensus opinion that the 60s is the greatest decade so far in cinema's short history (some might say the 20s - never heard the case for 30s/40s/50s).zedz wrote:I don't know how I'm going to tackle the 60s.
Here's a Top 50 list I could very happily live with, compiled solely of Japanese films. (And I stress that I'm by no means an expert on 60s Japanese cinema - there are vast tracts of reputedly great films which I've never seen).
Diary of a Shinjuku Thief
Inferno of First Love
Death by Hanging
The Profound Desire of the Gods
A Man Vanishes
Double Suicide
Tokyo Olympiad
An Autumn Afternoon
Red Angel
The Face of Another
Boy
High and Low
A Story Written with Water
Harakiri
Intentions of Murder
Story of a Prostitute
She and He
Kwaidan
When a Woman Ascends the Stairs
Woman of the Dunes
Funeral Parade of Roses
Insect Woman
Kuroneko
Night and Fog in Japan
Samurai Spy
The Naked Island
An Actor's Revenge
Branded to Kill
Sanjuro
The Sword of Doom
The End of Summer
Assassination
The Cage
Samurai Rebellion
Yojimbo
Pale Flower
Onibaba
Tokyo Drifter
Pitfall
Blind Beast
Ecstasis
The Sun's Burial
Tattooed Life
For the Damaged Right Eye
Fighting Elegy
Cruel Story of Youth
The Pornographers
Red Beard
Pigs and Battleships
Death by Hanging trailer
Japanese cinema in the sixties is the classic example of all your chickens coming home to roost. Directors who started out in the silent era (Ozu, Naruse) are still creating masterpieces (and there are Naruse riches I've yet to see from the decade), the post-war generation (Kurosawa, Ichikawa, Kobayashi) are still in their prime, plus there are the incredible riches of the New Wave and lots of vibrant genre filmmaking.
- Lemmy Caution
- Joined: Wed Mar 29, 2006 3:26 am
- Location: East of Shanghai
Just getting a start thinking about a 60's film list. Based on a quick impression, here's a baker's dozen that didn't make it on to the previous (2005) version of the 60's list:
Two Women (1961)
The Shop on Main Street (1966)
Harakiri (1964)
Darling (1965)
Mama Roma (1962)
Mother Joan of the Angels (1961)
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)
Cape Fear (1962)
The Cremator (1968)
Shock Corridor (1963)
Seduced & Abandoned (Germi, 1964)
The Finger Man (1962)
Diary of a Chambermaid (1964)
Two Women (1961)
The Shop on Main Street (1966)
Harakiri (1964)
Darling (1965)
Mama Roma (1962)
Mother Joan of the Angels (1961)
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)
Cape Fear (1962)
The Cremator (1968)
Shock Corridor (1963)
Seduced & Abandoned (Germi, 1964)
The Finger Man (1962)
Diary of a Chambermaid (1964)
- Saarijas
- Joined: Sun Sep 03, 2006 3:03 pm
- Location: CT
- Contact:
-
- Joined: Mon Dec 13, 2004 8:04 pm
I actually think the challenge on this list is to find the American gems, because this was a mighty decade for film everywhere but Hollywood, it seems. Yes, there are Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch, The Apartment and a few more staples, but it is not so easy to find American films that can really compete with even the Euro titles, to say nothing of Asia and other parts. I'm having a terrible time figuring out how to rank these seven near the top of my list: Andrei Rublev, 8 1/2, The Battle of Algiers, Once Upon a Time in the West, La Dolce Vita, Persona, L'avventura. Even a great American indie like Faces doesn't quite make it into that group for me.
- zedz
- Joined: Sun Nov 07, 2004 7:24 pm
I've been half-heartedly assaulting the magic mountain that is Japanese cinema in the 1960s (while also trying to mop up a whole lot of shorts), and here's what I've seen lately.
Fugitive from the Past – Uchida Tomu. This is the first Uchida I've seen, and it's a doozy. It's not New Wave, but it dips freely into the avant garde style manual when it needs to (with some impressive solarized flashbacks and personal crises, for instance). Otherwise, it's a magnificent long-form policier (three compelling hours) that treats its subject and subjects with a now-rare seriousness (the recent film it most reminded me of was Memories of Murder) while still finding space for eccentric, indelible scenes (a seemingly random encounter with a mountain witch, the de facto heroine going into a romantic rapture with the mangled thumbnail of the titular fugitive). It's a great reminder that at a time of radical filmmaking ferment, Japanese genre filmmaking was also at its height.
The Affair – Yoshida Yoshishige. I have always depended upon the kindness of strangers, at least when it comes to seeing the work of this visionary filmmaker. Yoshida is one of the most distinctive visual stylists ever to descend upon cinema, and each of the films of his I've seen is a stately procession of stunning, unexpected compositions that make you realise how drastically underutilised the potential of the film frame is in 99% of films. Projectionists must have dreaded his films in the dim dark past when they were actually shown in theatres, as any individual shot is likely to look compositionally ‘wrong' in isolation, and even now, overscanning TVs could wipe out major characters just like that. The Affair, from 1967, could have been a relatively conventional melodrama (troubled housewife is tempted to give her cheating husband a taste of his own medicine) were it not for its arresting delivery. In a series of Lynchian interludes, the heroine ventures to a remote beach house in the middle fo the night, where terrible things happen; elsewhere, she replays the bizarre death of her mother as a series of brutal variations in her mind (breathtaking use of a depth-flattening long lens and disjunctive cuts in these sequences). Like so many Japanese New Wave films, the radical style is no mere window-dressing, but the means by which the director drills down into the complex, interlocking subtexts of the material where the real action lies (in this case, memory, identity, sexual autonomy).
Double Suicide – Shinoda Masahiro. I popped this on briefly to show a friend some stunning images, but couldn't take my eyes off it. Directors like Yoshida and Imamura made brilliant use of the Cinemascope frame, but the Japanese New Wave also found entirely new ways to explore Academy ratio. I'm commented on Akio's Mujo in the past, and Teshigahara is also notable, but this masterpiece might be the best of them all. Shinoda crams his frames with patterns and textures, creating almost tactile images. Just a great film, and by some mad stroke of luck it's actually available!
Eros Plus Massacre – Yoshida Yoshishige. Or, Yoshida cubed. In this film he takes his idiosyncratic visual sense to outrageous extremes: one shot could be half a face, in extreme close-up, on the far left edge of the screen; the next, two faces, cut off at the neck by the bottom of the frame on the lower right, with the top four fifths of the screen devoted to empty headroom. The film makes better use of dead space than any I've ever seen. The film's narrative is as disorienting as its imagery (a contemporary story about revolutionary filmmakers races alongside the historical story of interrelated anarchist and feminist cells in 1910s Japan, culminating in multiple alternative climaxes – linear is definitely not the word: you probably need to go into several extra dimensions if you want a metaphor for the shape of this film) and it has an awe-inspiring intellectual density of theme and content. Like the best of Oshima's films (Death by Hanging or The Man Who Left His Will on Film are relevant reference points), Eros Plus Massacre piles interrelated ideas onto one another in a way that makes for meaningful and satisfying connections but without distilling anything to a simplistic thesis (it's not so much Idea A + Idea B + Idea C = Message D, more like Idea A x Idea B x Idea C x Idea D x Idea E = a unique, multi-dimensional cinematic object that evokes Complex F, which you can fruitfully ponder for weeks and years to come). These films also tend to deal with historical content in a much more dynamic and intelligent way than other cinema. In almost every historical film, history is a mere, more or less photogenic, backdrop for the characters' stories (Jansco is an honourable exception from the same period), but in many New Wave films, history is provocative, contested, malleable and urgent. Films like this and the late 60s Oshimas are provocative in the best senses of the word: they're works you can't passively consume.
Violence at Noon – Oshima Nagisa. From Oshima's mid-sixties period (how many other directors of the era were so productive and creatively volatile that they ran through four or more phases in a single decade?), post-TV and pre-ATG. In this film, he's still nominally working within genre constraints (as opposed to the genre- and fourth-wall-busting works of '68 and beyond), and as such, the film probably offers much more readily accessible evidence of his genius than something as far removed from normal frames of reference as Diary of a Shinjuku Thief. It's one of the great serial killer films, and Oshima's brilliance lies in fragmenting the tale into unexpected flashbacks, visions, blurting radio broadcasts, and still-photo ‘documentary' sequences evoking multiple viewpoints while surreptitiously realigning the story to focus on the relationship between the two women closest to the killer (the ubiquitous Kei Sato), Shino, his one-time lover and two-time victim, and Matsuko, his wife. As with so many Japanese New Wave films, it's continually visually arresting (extreme close-ups, extreme long-shots, radical decentring, drifting camera, sun-bleached flashbacks) and has great music (by Hikaru Hayashi, who contributed so much to Oshima's 60s work, but is probably best known now for his work with Shindo – Naked Island, Onibaba, Kuroneko).
Three Resurrected Drunkards – Oshima Nagisa. Common sense would tell you that this is a one-of-a-kind film, but its main structural conceit has since been borrowed by Groundhog Day and, to an extent, Syndromes and a Century. Three Japanese kids go swimming, find their clothes replaced by Korean uniforms, and spend the rest of the first half of the film persecuted by both the Japanese (because they're mistaken for stowaway Koreans) and the stowaway Koreans (who want to kill them and thus fake their own deaths). Oshima liked to pick the scab of Japan's ‘problematic' relationship with Korea (Death by Hanging plays arcane variations on this film's identity politics), but that's only one of the thematic plates Oshima keeps spinning in this deceptively comic film. At the halfway point of the film, the three characters end up back where they started (on the beach, competing to recreate the famous photo of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting an enemy in the head) and the film begins again, shot for shot. Gradually, the repeated narrative diverges from its model, primarily because, second time around, the three characters know what to expect and can avoid it. It's smart and funny, but step by step gets odder and more intriguing, as two of the characters gradually lose their sense of (Japanese) identity and internalize their ascribed (Korean) roles. It's a mind-bending comic variation on many of the themes explored with more weight in Oshima's preceding Death by Hanging (identity, social role-playing, racism, memory, culpability).
Fugitive from the Past – Uchida Tomu. This is the first Uchida I've seen, and it's a doozy. It's not New Wave, but it dips freely into the avant garde style manual when it needs to (with some impressive solarized flashbacks and personal crises, for instance). Otherwise, it's a magnificent long-form policier (three compelling hours) that treats its subject and subjects with a now-rare seriousness (the recent film it most reminded me of was Memories of Murder) while still finding space for eccentric, indelible scenes (a seemingly random encounter with a mountain witch, the de facto heroine going into a romantic rapture with the mangled thumbnail of the titular fugitive). It's a great reminder that at a time of radical filmmaking ferment, Japanese genre filmmaking was also at its height.
The Affair – Yoshida Yoshishige. I have always depended upon the kindness of strangers, at least when it comes to seeing the work of this visionary filmmaker. Yoshida is one of the most distinctive visual stylists ever to descend upon cinema, and each of the films of his I've seen is a stately procession of stunning, unexpected compositions that make you realise how drastically underutilised the potential of the film frame is in 99% of films. Projectionists must have dreaded his films in the dim dark past when they were actually shown in theatres, as any individual shot is likely to look compositionally ‘wrong' in isolation, and even now, overscanning TVs could wipe out major characters just like that. The Affair, from 1967, could have been a relatively conventional melodrama (troubled housewife is tempted to give her cheating husband a taste of his own medicine) were it not for its arresting delivery. In a series of Lynchian interludes, the heroine ventures to a remote beach house in the middle fo the night, where terrible things happen; elsewhere, she replays the bizarre death of her mother as a series of brutal variations in her mind (breathtaking use of a depth-flattening long lens and disjunctive cuts in these sequences). Like so many Japanese New Wave films, the radical style is no mere window-dressing, but the means by which the director drills down into the complex, interlocking subtexts of the material where the real action lies (in this case, memory, identity, sexual autonomy).
Double Suicide – Shinoda Masahiro. I popped this on briefly to show a friend some stunning images, but couldn't take my eyes off it. Directors like Yoshida and Imamura made brilliant use of the Cinemascope frame, but the Japanese New Wave also found entirely new ways to explore Academy ratio. I'm commented on Akio's Mujo in the past, and Teshigahara is also notable, but this masterpiece might be the best of them all. Shinoda crams his frames with patterns and textures, creating almost tactile images. Just a great film, and by some mad stroke of luck it's actually available!
Eros Plus Massacre – Yoshida Yoshishige. Or, Yoshida cubed. In this film he takes his idiosyncratic visual sense to outrageous extremes: one shot could be half a face, in extreme close-up, on the far left edge of the screen; the next, two faces, cut off at the neck by the bottom of the frame on the lower right, with the top four fifths of the screen devoted to empty headroom. The film makes better use of dead space than any I've ever seen. The film's narrative is as disorienting as its imagery (a contemporary story about revolutionary filmmakers races alongside the historical story of interrelated anarchist and feminist cells in 1910s Japan, culminating in multiple alternative climaxes – linear is definitely not the word: you probably need to go into several extra dimensions if you want a metaphor for the shape of this film) and it has an awe-inspiring intellectual density of theme and content. Like the best of Oshima's films (Death by Hanging or The Man Who Left His Will on Film are relevant reference points), Eros Plus Massacre piles interrelated ideas onto one another in a way that makes for meaningful and satisfying connections but without distilling anything to a simplistic thesis (it's not so much Idea A + Idea B + Idea C = Message D, more like Idea A x Idea B x Idea C x Idea D x Idea E = a unique, multi-dimensional cinematic object that evokes Complex F, which you can fruitfully ponder for weeks and years to come). These films also tend to deal with historical content in a much more dynamic and intelligent way than other cinema. In almost every historical film, history is a mere, more or less photogenic, backdrop for the characters' stories (Jansco is an honourable exception from the same period), but in many New Wave films, history is provocative, contested, malleable and urgent. Films like this and the late 60s Oshimas are provocative in the best senses of the word: they're works you can't passively consume.
Violence at Noon – Oshima Nagisa. From Oshima's mid-sixties period (how many other directors of the era were so productive and creatively volatile that they ran through four or more phases in a single decade?), post-TV and pre-ATG. In this film, he's still nominally working within genre constraints (as opposed to the genre- and fourth-wall-busting works of '68 and beyond), and as such, the film probably offers much more readily accessible evidence of his genius than something as far removed from normal frames of reference as Diary of a Shinjuku Thief. It's one of the great serial killer films, and Oshima's brilliance lies in fragmenting the tale into unexpected flashbacks, visions, blurting radio broadcasts, and still-photo ‘documentary' sequences evoking multiple viewpoints while surreptitiously realigning the story to focus on the relationship between the two women closest to the killer (the ubiquitous Kei Sato), Shino, his one-time lover and two-time victim, and Matsuko, his wife. As with so many Japanese New Wave films, it's continually visually arresting (extreme close-ups, extreme long-shots, radical decentring, drifting camera, sun-bleached flashbacks) and has great music (by Hikaru Hayashi, who contributed so much to Oshima's 60s work, but is probably best known now for his work with Shindo – Naked Island, Onibaba, Kuroneko).
Three Resurrected Drunkards – Oshima Nagisa. Common sense would tell you that this is a one-of-a-kind film, but its main structural conceit has since been borrowed by Groundhog Day and, to an extent, Syndromes and a Century. Three Japanese kids go swimming, find their clothes replaced by Korean uniforms, and spend the rest of the first half of the film persecuted by both the Japanese (because they're mistaken for stowaway Koreans) and the stowaway Koreans (who want to kill them and thus fake their own deaths). Oshima liked to pick the scab of Japan's ‘problematic' relationship with Korea (Death by Hanging plays arcane variations on this film's identity politics), but that's only one of the thematic plates Oshima keeps spinning in this deceptively comic film. At the halfway point of the film, the three characters end up back where they started (on the beach, competing to recreate the famous photo of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting an enemy in the head) and the film begins again, shot for shot. Gradually, the repeated narrative diverges from its model, primarily because, second time around, the three characters know what to expect and can avoid it. It's smart and funny, but step by step gets odder and more intriguing, as two of the characters gradually lose their sense of (Japanese) identity and internalize their ascribed (Korean) roles. It's a mind-bending comic variation on many of the themes explored with more weight in Oshima's preceding Death by Hanging (identity, social role-playing, racism, memory, culpability).
- Steven H
- Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 3:30 pm
- Location: NC
Great write-ups on some of my "top ten" films from the 60s (at least one of them vying for my no. 1 spot... gawsh I wonder which?) Your esteem for Eros Plus Massacre is very encouraging. I think that Bertolucci, Resnais, and maybe a few Czech new wavers (I know that at least SecondRun's disc of Party and The Guests is a *must see* for those interested in this list) were as cerebral and challenging as the Nuberu Bagu group.
Other than Tarkovsky, Paradjanov, and Kozintsev, are there any other Russian 60s works worth pursuing? I've heard something of Mikhalkov-Konchalovski (collaborated with Tarkovsky a bit), but don't know if any of his 60s stuff is available (or worth searching out.)
Other than Tarkovsky, Paradjanov, and Kozintsev, are there any other Russian 60s works worth pursuing? I've heard something of Mikhalkov-Konchalovski (collaborated with Tarkovsky a bit), but don't know if any of his 60s stuff is available (or worth searching out.)
- zedz
- Joined: Sun Nov 07, 2004 7:24 pm
I'm not on the Bertolucci bus, but agree that Party and the Guests is unmissable.Steven H wrote:I think that Bertolucci, Resnais, and maybe a few Czech new wavers (I know that at least SecondRun's disc of Party and The Guests is a *must see* for those interested in this list) were as cerebral and challenging as the Nuberu Bagu group.
Konchalovsky is a good director, but in my patchy experience not in the same league. Asya's Happiness (1966) is a decent film, but on the level of other 'suppressed' films of the period (I think this one was suppressed, anyway) like The Commissar (also well worth tracking down, but it's nowhere near my list). Iosseliani's early films are very much in the spirit of his later works, so if you've liked any of his films, check them out. Personally, even though he's extremely stylistically consistent, I find that I like some of his films much more than others, for no obvious reason, so I can't really make reliable recommendations here.Other than Tarkovsky, Paradjanov, and Kozintsev, are there any other Russian 60s works worth pursuing? I've heard something of Mikhalkov-Konchalovski (collaborated with Tarkovsky a bit), but don't know if any of his 60s stuff is available (or worth searching out.)
I can, however, recommend wholeheartedly Kira Muratova's Brief Encounters. She's the greatest non-Tarkovsky, non-Paradzhanov Russian director of that era (and this one) and her first feature is superb. Much more naturalistic than her recent work (which isn't saying much), but with a wonderfully intricate flashback structure and a superb central performance by her good self. One of the few 60s films that's truly attentive to the nuances of women's lives, and, like virtually all decent Russian films of the 1960s, it was locked up in a cupboard for decades.
- denti alligator
- Joined: Wed Nov 03, 2004 9:36 pm
- Location: "born in heaven, raised in hell"
- Dylan
- Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 9:28 pm
The 1960's are absolutely my favorite decade for cinema, and I'm really looking forward to contributing to this list.
1960's discoveries I've made this year I would recommend:
Le Feu Follet by Louis Malle is probably the greatest film I've watched for the first time this year (so far): a flawlessly executed portrait of loneliness and existential conflict, peerless in its sense of devastation, both quiet and loud.
Another film I really loved and can't get out of my mind is Peter Yates' 1969 New York character drama John & Mary, starring Dustin Hoffman and Mia Farrow at their very peak...this is a story I found to be sensitive and compassionate, visually lustrous and perfectly composed, with a meditative atmosphere and intelligent dialogue. And in terms of imagery, writing and sophistication it struck me as a million miles ahead of most American dramas we get these days. And after looking over reviews, I think it's VASTLY underrated, as well.
Although not quite great, I found both Frank Perry's Last Summer and William Wyler's The Collector to be absolutely fascinating, both with magnificent acting, shocking conclusions, good-looking photography and clear, powerful central metaphors.
Some rarely discussed 1960's favorites of mine I recommend:
When the Cat Comes (Voltech Jasny)
Two for the Seesaw (Robert Wise)
The Soft Skin (Francois Truffaut)
King of Hearts (Philippe de Broca)
A Patch of Blue (Guy Green) (this in particular is a truly magnificent film, with one of the greatest scores ever written)
One of my five favorite films of all-time that far too few have seen that I naturally will urge everybody here to check out: Seconds (John Frankenheimer)
With that said, I have recently compiled my updated top 50 of the 1960's (which hadn't been updated since my submission to our previous 60's list), but I imagine (and hope) it will be revised many times over the course of my newly re-ignited but inevitably never-ending pursuit of the films of this era.
Here is, categorized, some of what I will consider tackling over the next two months:
prolific 60's directors
Joseph Losey (Secret Ceremony, Eva, The Servent)
post-Mockingbird Robert Mulligan (Inside Daisy Clover, etc.)
Jacques Demy (Bay of Angels, Model Shop, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg)
Sidney Lumet (Long Day's Journey Into Night, The Appointment, Vu du point, etc.)
later Elia Kazan (America America, The Arrangement, Splendor in the Grass)
Arthur Penn (Mickey One, etc.)
Jacques Rivette (Paris Belongs to Us, etc.)
Italian films
Senilita (Mauro Bolognini)
Gli Indifferenti (Francesco Maselli)
Il Bell Antonio (Mauro Bolognini)
Girl with the Suitcase (Valerio Zurlini)
The Harem (Marco Ferreri)
La Cagna (Marco Ferreri)
Violent Life (Brunello Rondi and Paolo Heusch)
La Visita (Antonio Pietrangeli)
Classics
Faces (John Cassavetes)
Red Desert (Michelangelo Antonioni)
Zabriskie Point (Michelangelo Antonioni)
La Collectionnuse (Eric Rohmer)
Cul de sac (Roman Polanski)
I Love You, Alice B. Toklas!
The Train (John Frankenheimer)
A Married Woman (Jean-Luc Godard)
If… (Lindsay Anderson)
Billy Liar (John Schlesinger)
Faster Pussycat, Kill Kill! (Russ Meyer)
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
Rare/little-known American Dramas
The Happy Ending (Richard Brooks)
The Sterile Cuckoo (Alan J. Pakula)
The Fox (Mark Rydell)
That Cold Day in the Park (Robert Altman)
1960's discoveries I've made this year I would recommend:
Le Feu Follet by Louis Malle is probably the greatest film I've watched for the first time this year (so far): a flawlessly executed portrait of loneliness and existential conflict, peerless in its sense of devastation, both quiet and loud.
Another film I really loved and can't get out of my mind is Peter Yates' 1969 New York character drama John & Mary, starring Dustin Hoffman and Mia Farrow at their very peak...this is a story I found to be sensitive and compassionate, visually lustrous and perfectly composed, with a meditative atmosphere and intelligent dialogue. And in terms of imagery, writing and sophistication it struck me as a million miles ahead of most American dramas we get these days. And after looking over reviews, I think it's VASTLY underrated, as well.
Although not quite great, I found both Frank Perry's Last Summer and William Wyler's The Collector to be absolutely fascinating, both with magnificent acting, shocking conclusions, good-looking photography and clear, powerful central metaphors.
Some rarely discussed 1960's favorites of mine I recommend:
When the Cat Comes (Voltech Jasny)
Two for the Seesaw (Robert Wise)
The Soft Skin (Francois Truffaut)
King of Hearts (Philippe de Broca)
A Patch of Blue (Guy Green) (this in particular is a truly magnificent film, with one of the greatest scores ever written)
One of my five favorite films of all-time that far too few have seen that I naturally will urge everybody here to check out: Seconds (John Frankenheimer)
With that said, I have recently compiled my updated top 50 of the 1960's (which hadn't been updated since my submission to our previous 60's list), but I imagine (and hope) it will be revised many times over the course of my newly re-ignited but inevitably never-ending pursuit of the films of this era.
Here is, categorized, some of what I will consider tackling over the next two months:
prolific 60's directors
Joseph Losey (Secret Ceremony, Eva, The Servent)
post-Mockingbird Robert Mulligan (Inside Daisy Clover, etc.)
Jacques Demy (Bay of Angels, Model Shop, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg)
Sidney Lumet (Long Day's Journey Into Night, The Appointment, Vu du point, etc.)
later Elia Kazan (America America, The Arrangement, Splendor in the Grass)
Arthur Penn (Mickey One, etc.)
Jacques Rivette (Paris Belongs to Us, etc.)
Italian films
Senilita (Mauro Bolognini)
Gli Indifferenti (Francesco Maselli)
Il Bell Antonio (Mauro Bolognini)
Girl with the Suitcase (Valerio Zurlini)
The Harem (Marco Ferreri)
La Cagna (Marco Ferreri)
Violent Life (Brunello Rondi and Paolo Heusch)
La Visita (Antonio Pietrangeli)
Classics
Faces (John Cassavetes)
Red Desert (Michelangelo Antonioni)
Zabriskie Point (Michelangelo Antonioni)
La Collectionnuse (Eric Rohmer)
Cul de sac (Roman Polanski)
I Love You, Alice B. Toklas!
The Train (John Frankenheimer)
A Married Woman (Jean-Luc Godard)
If… (Lindsay Anderson)
Billy Liar (John Schlesinger)
Faster Pussycat, Kill Kill! (Russ Meyer)
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
Rare/little-known American Dramas
The Happy Ending (Richard Brooks)
The Sterile Cuckoo (Alan J. Pakula)
The Fox (Mark Rydell)
That Cold Day in the Park (Robert Altman)
Last edited by Dylan on Sat Oct 20, 2007 1:12 am, edited 1 time in total.
- Kirkinson
- Joined: Wed Dec 15, 2004 5:34 am
- Location: Portland, OR
Tengiz Abuladze's The Plea. A dense, difficult work that viewers probably won't understand without proper context, but which I think can still be admired in the midst of befuddlement. And predictably I'll second zedz's mention of Iosseliani's early work, though I think the recommendation is fairly easy: only two of his 60's films are on R1, April and Falling Leaves, and they're both on the same DVD, so people should check those out. And if you have easy access to it, his excellent short documentary Tudzhi (La Fonte) is a special feature on the French R2 of Monday Morning.Steven H wrote:Other than Tarkovsky, Paradjanov, and Kozintsev, are there any other Russian 60s works worth pursuing?
EDIT: Jesus, I forgot about I Am Cuba. That is a must-see for the 60's as far as I'm concerned. Completely and utterly delirious.
- Steven H
- Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 3:30 pm
- Location: NC
I wasn't until I saw Partner. Maybe its my affinity for Dostoyevsky's bizarre short story and self-referential films, but I loved every second of this; however I wasn't impressed with anything else of his 60s output, and actually despised his short film in Love and Anger.zedz wrote:I'm not on the Bertolucci bus, but agree that Party and the Guests is unmissable.
As for Party and the Guests, I'm in love with it. I first read about it in Cook's History of Narrative Film tome, and out of all the films mentioned, it's what really stood out in my memory (that same book is where I became heavily interested in Japanese new wave film.) Thank God for SecondRun (Bikey, I really want a nice DVD of Kadar and Klos's Adrift, which I think is their best film.)
I'll gladly go looking for Kira Muratova's Brief Encounters, Tengiz Abuladze's The Plea, and Iosseliani's April and Falling Leaves (thanks Kirkinson, and I agree with you on Soy Cuba, though I had forgotten that was a Russian film because of the language difference.)
That's ridiculous. It was released in 1969, and if anyone is curious, I actually have the month and specific date at home in the ATG Vienniese Catalog (a fantastic resource for the period). Well, it will definitely head my list for the 70s (which was going to be Oshima's The Ceremony...), but just for the record-1969. edit: I was wrong, it's 1970 *quietly backs out of room*denti alligator wrote:According to imdb Eros Plus Massacre is 1970.
I also hope that everyone involved has had a chance to see Forugh Farrokhzad's The House is Black (both for the 60s and the short films). Also, just in case, I have to mention Paradjanov's Sayat Nova and Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (though the lack of an R1 or R2 UK DVD of the latter cannot bode well for it's placement, where the hell is Criterion on this?) Of course, you can always buy the excellent Films Sans Frontieres version.
Last edited by Steven H on Mon Dec 10, 2007 10:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.
- Gropius
- Joined: Thu Jun 29, 2006 5:47 pm
Nice commentaries. Unfortunately, like most people here presumably, I have little prospect of seeing any of those before the list deadline (the absence of Oshima on DVD is frustrating). I expect mine will be predictably Eurocentric.zedz wrote:I've been half-heartedly assaulting the magic mountain that is Japanese cinema in the 1960s (while also trying to mop up a whole lot of shorts), and here's what I've seen lately.
- pauling
- Joined: Thu Jun 02, 2005 3:04 pm
- Location: St. Paul, MN
- Person
- Joined: Sat May 19, 2007 3:00 pm
1960: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, The Mask of Satan (Mario Bava)
1961: The Day the Earth Caught Fire, The Innocents
1962: Billy Budd, A Kind of Loving, The L-Shaped Room, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
1963: Billy Liar, The Caretaker, The Damned, The Servant, The Victors, The Damned, This Sporting Life, The Three Faces of Fear (Mario Bava)
1964: Becket, King & Country, The Pumpkin Eater, Seance on a Wet Afternoon, Blood and Black Lace, Gamlet (Russian Hamlet)
1965: Bunny Lake Is Missing, The Collector, The Hill, The Ipcress File, Repulsion, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Loved One, The Flight of the Phoenix, The Saragossa Manuscript
1966: The Wrong Box, The Naked Prey, The Trap, A Man for All Seasons, Seconds, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Sult
1967: The Graduate, In Cold Blood, Point Blank, Bedazzled, Belle de jour, Le Samouraï
1968: The Lion in Winter, Once Upon a Time in the West, The Great Silence, Rosemary's Baby, Targets, War and Peace (1964-67), If....
1969: Army in the Shadows, The Witch's Hammer, The Milky Way, The Bedsitting Room
1961: The Day the Earth Caught Fire, The Innocents
1962: Billy Budd, A Kind of Loving, The L-Shaped Room, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
1963: Billy Liar, The Caretaker, The Damned, The Servant, The Victors, The Damned, This Sporting Life, The Three Faces of Fear (Mario Bava)
1964: Becket, King & Country, The Pumpkin Eater, Seance on a Wet Afternoon, Blood and Black Lace, Gamlet (Russian Hamlet)
1965: Bunny Lake Is Missing, The Collector, The Hill, The Ipcress File, Repulsion, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Loved One, The Flight of the Phoenix, The Saragossa Manuscript
1966: The Wrong Box, The Naked Prey, The Trap, A Man for All Seasons, Seconds, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Sult
1967: The Graduate, In Cold Blood, Point Blank, Bedazzled, Belle de jour, Le Samouraï
1968: The Lion in Winter, Once Upon a Time in the West, The Great Silence, Rosemary's Baby, Targets, War and Peace (1964-67), If....
1969: Army in the Shadows, The Witch's Hammer, The Milky Way, The Bedsitting Room
- tryavna
- Joined: Wed Mar 30, 2005 4:38 pm
- Location: North Carolina
Although Bondarchuk doesn't really belong beside those other directors as a director, his massive War and Peace certainly does. Its scope, assurance, and utilization of virtually every film technique known to man at the time of its making sets it apart from all other cinematic epics.Steven H wrote:Other than Tarkovsky, Paradjanov, and Kozintsev, are there any other Russian 60s works worth pursuing?
Kalatozov does deserve to rank among the three you mentioned, if only for I Am Cuba, as Kirkinson already pointed out. (Of course, he only made one other movie during the decade: the interesting but inessential The Red Tent.)
- zedz
- Joined: Sun Nov 07, 2004 7:24 pm
Nice to know she'll be reaching the threshold of both lists, unless one or other of us is struck down by lightning in the meantime. It's a stunning film that puts her up there with Charles Laughton in the exclusive pantheon of one-time-only directors.Steven H wrote: I also hope that everyone involved has had a chance to see Forugh Farrokhzad's The House is Black (both for the 60s and the short films).
- Awesome Welles
- Joined: Fri Apr 27, 2007 6:02 am
- Location: London
- zedz
- Joined: Sun Nov 07, 2004 7:24 pm
The inherited rules are that trilogies have to be counted as separate films, but two part films (e.g. Ivan 1 & 2) can be voted on as a single entity, so you can only vote for Part 3 this time around (if memory serves - I think Parts 1 & 2 are both 1959?)FSimeoni wrote:How is Kobayashi's Human Condition trilogy to be treated? It began in 1959 and ended in 1961 according to IMDB. I would feel like I was voting for the entire trilogy (which I see as essentially one film) by including the third part in my list.
A lot of people seem to select one film to represent their vote for an entire trilogy. Few people voted for more than one part of the Apu Trilogy for the 50s list, for example, though I doubt that everyone who did so felt that one of the films so overwhelmingly outshone the others.
I've already decided on My Ain Folk to represent the Bill Douglas Trilogy come the 70s, and Death and Transfiguration for Terence Davies (another decade-straddling example), for example.