Last month while finishing a list of my 1,000 favorite films for a forthcoming collection, I was shocked to discover I’d forgotten to include Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog. If I’d been working on the list a few days later, when I attended a press show of the soon to be rereleased The Battle of Algiers (1965), which I hadn’t seen in decades, I probably would have included that as well. In my 20s I thought the film was important for its radicalism; today I find it impressive for its evenhandedness. Some films continue deepening long after we first see them, partly because shifting contexts enlarge our understanding of them, partly because our perceptions are altered by those of other viewers: over the past couple of months a few people have persuaded me that I underestimated Clint Eastwood’s capacity to criticize his own characters in Mystic River (though that didn’t plant the film on my ten-best list). Some movies are diminished by time or by comparison. I’m a big fan of Guy Maddin’s Dracula: Pages From a Virgin’s Diary and Cowards Bend the Knee, but neither one made my list because I like his The Saddest Music in the World (which hasn’t shown here yet) even better.
There doesn’t seem to be any limit to what promotions departments will try or any evidence that they care whether they succeed. Dreamworks hawked Peter Ho-Sun Chan’s 1999 The Love Letter by sending anonymous love letters to critics. Each appeared to be written on an old-fashioned typewriter with a faded ribbon, and I’m ashamed to confess that I was fooled into thinking it was a real letter until I saw the same letter on-screen. I’m sure Dreamworks’ publicity department wouldn’t have cared that I was furious at being manipulated, especially because I wound up liking the film anyway.
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If my job consisted of seeing only films like The Cat in the Hat, 21 Grams, and The Love Letter I would, in effect, be working for the studios, and my ten-best list would be something like the Oscars–basically high-priced items and a few independents thrown in for appearances. Relatively few American film “journalists” are paid directly by the studios, in the form of junkets and free airfare, hotel rooms, and meals in exchange for carefully monitored promo pieces (which are then delivered to us as “news” by reputable as well as disreputable publications). But traditionally nearly all critics have been sent end-of-the-year bonuses in the form of “screeners”–videos or DVDs of ten-best-list contenders that arrive in the mail in November and December. Some of us have regarded these perks as status symbols; some see them as closer to tips than payoffs, a demonstration of the industry’s respect for us as honest shills, as members of a hardworking community of publicists. But a few months ago the MPAA outlawed screeners for the press, arguing that they contributed to piracy. Small studios successfully challenged the decision in court, saying it discriminated against them because they depend on screeners to make their films better known. The MPAA’s decision had set off a frenetic debate among film critics, who fired off e-mail protests, held meetings, and circulated petitions; some of them seemed to be waking from a protracted reverie, as if they’d never quite recognized the studios’ contempt for them. While studios seem to be spending more and more on promotional gimmicks, they seem less and less interested in imparting basic information about the films to reviewers. It may only be a matter of time before they start charging critics for detailed production information, just as they already charge audiences for some of their promotional posters and T-shirts.
Let me start with a tie. The best 2003 movies about the radical disparity in the world between rich and poor, powerful and powerless, are Spike Lee’s 25th Hour and Jafar Panahi’s Crimson Gold. Lee’s film, adapted by David Benioff from his own novel, opened here last January; it concerns how a former Manhattan drug dealer spends his last 24 hours before beginning a seven-year prison term. Panahi’s story–proposed and written by Abbas Kiarostami, who was inspired by a newspaper story–is almost equally compressed and circumscribed; it follows a middle-aged pizza deliveryman in Tehran, a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war, who eventually holds up a jewelry store and shoots both the owner and himself. The film premiered at the Chicago International Film Festival in October and is likely to open here commercially later this year.
In the Mirror of Maya Deren. I’m not sure why it took an Austrian filmmaker, Marta Kudlacek, to give us a definitive portrait of the mother and primary muse of American experimental film. But this documentary feature is superior even to substantial American books about Deren (1917-’61) in telling us who she was and what she was like. Kudlacek judiciously selected from Deren’s films and audio recordings and from the testimony of those who knew and worked with her to make one of this year’s key documentaries. It was given a dozen screenings at the Gene Siskel Film Center last fall yet–like The Same River Twice and Joy of Madness, found farther down this list–never made it to New York.
I was also moved by the film’s treatment of war as something that ultimately brutalizes everyone, ignoring such issues as slavery and even the results of the only major battle we see. Some critics have argued that ignoring such things is a questionable choice, but I would counter that it’s easy to take all sorts of positions about just wars and noble causes when one isn’t fighting in them (something the current Bush administration excels at). I was also impressed by the film’s highly romantic effort to approximate certain literary effects: stretching time with a courtly patience that recalls medieval romances (the hero’s long journey home suggests some of the adventures of Lancelot, down to the witchlike crone who tends his wounds); examining rascality, avarice, and cruelty in a way that recalls Huckleberry Finn; and even developing characters as Gone With the Wind does but with more thought and nuance.
- Two independent heartbreakers about working-class youths: David Gordon Green’s lyrical All the Real Girls, set in a North Carolina mill town, and Ken Loach’s tragic Sweet Sixteen, set in a seaside town in western Scotland. (They opened here about a month apart in February and March and are both out on DVD.) The two main characters in Green’s film are somewhat older and less hopeless than the title hero of Loach’s film, who keeps trying to be a good person and keeps discovering that his world won’t allow it.
