Noah Lyons on the changing face of Cinematic truth/faith, circa 2013

Noah Lyons gave me a list of the best films of the year when I asked him too but he did so with the understanding that if he caught up with better films I'd allow him to update the list. So when we posted our favourites of the year, he endured a marathon watching bout and revised his list. Here are the awesome results. Noah's got one of my favourite brains currently at work, so enjoy!

-Scout

1. Act of Killing – Representing the trend of inevitability, boundary-pushing, and end-game aesthetics this year in film, this documentary/horror story makes us question the ethics of filmmaking and storytelling, the relationship between media and actions, and the power of self-deception. The final vomiting sequence is the most real, satisfying, and ghastly scene I saw all year. Is the film ethical? Yes, because it tosses aside status quo ethics to plunge into a world otherwise inaccessible by a camera – the evil soul.  

2. Night Across The Street – Take the best elements of Lynch, Fellini, and Jodorowsky, and you get this pitch-perfect surrealist adventure through the memories and brain of a dying man. Ruiz manages to capture the mood and style of Eugene Ionesco better than I have ever seen in a film; the non-sequitur logic, the inversion of spatial coordinates, the exploration of the liminal space between the screen and the body. I laughed and applauded more than anytime else all year. “Why do you come to the cinema, if you don’t even know anything about the film you’ve just seen?” asks Beethoven. The boy/us: “We came to have fun, not to learn anything.” The magic of the moving image again becomes joyous and miraculous. 

3. Leviathan – This is what I mean by an end-game aesthetic. As Scout has pointed out, there is really no way to make a documentary now that we have been witnessed a pure embodied POV that challenges our notions of documentation and the abilities/limitations of the camera. With no real plot or characters to speak of, Leviathan is pure visceral experience of slaughter and the sea, colored by rust and blood, free from the laws of gravity and photographic restraints. 

4.  You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet – Resnais’ Last Year at Marianbad changed everything I thought I knew about film; again, Resnais blows the mind with another challenge to the aesthetical ontology of the silver screen, and our relationship to it. Theatre, movies, remakes, adaptations, the dialogue backstage and onstage, all interweave into a funereal fugue which speaks to the ghosts of past loves and words. I am astonished by the envelope-pushing of 2013; just when I think there’s no space left to challenge and unravel the structure and ontology of film, I’m reminded by the great auteur that indeed, “you ain't seen nothing yet”. 

5. Spring Breakers / The Bling Ring – I will defend these two films to the death. I include them together because they are two sides to the same coin. Like a bloody car crash, I could not look away from these piercing cuts into the American teenage myth/dream of the modern era. Few have yet to truly examine these myths of celebrity and college escapism with a critical eye. Ironically, Korine, who usually has as his subject spheres of Americana that go unnoticed here looks at the most obvious representation of ‘Americana’, and blasts it with so much ironic satire that it somehow morphs into concern, rather than fatalism and absurdity. And it looks good. Sadly, it suffered from a terrible mismarketing campaign that turned off pretentious critics and high-minded individuals in lieu of attracting the very types the film is critiquing, who of course hated it. Same with The Bling Ring, which also examines a seemingly obvious slice of the American pie but manages to transcend the banality and strike terror into our hearts as we realize that this is not fantasy. There is a difference between reality and truth; these films are true. And what else more can we really say, now? These films had to happen, and did. 

6. Computer Chess – Refreshing and revitalizing, despite the fact that this is an aesthetic and cultural throw back to 1980. It caught me off-guard countless times with its brilliant genre twists and arid humor. The dramatic irony of knowing where technology will lead us in regards to dating and connectivity makes it all the more enjoyable and poignant. 

7. Vanishing Waves – Disclosure: one of the two films this year that made me cry. I admit I am a sucker for movies about the retrieval and/or destruction of memories; nevertheless, this romance (in the skin of sci-fi) strips away all conceit and plot contrivances to reveal what it looks like and how it feels when two hearts fall in love. The montage of the comatose woman and the doctor rolling naked in a Malick-lit wooden room is exactly that. The Antichrist-esque/Cronenbergian [the man himself wishes we'd say Cronenbergundian, ed.] image of nude limbs and flesh crawling in and out of each other manages to avoid horror/sci-fi shtick. Forget Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. 

8. The Past – If this was an American film, it would win the Oscar for best picture without a doubt. This is how drama is made, and a case study for any aspiring actors. There’s really not much more to really say; it’s tight and fully packed (as Lynch says of his singer/muse Chrysta Bell). I include this, and no other “perfect” films, on my list because it reaffirms the power of a story told well without the bells and whistles of star power and Hollywood. 

9. To The Wonder – I read somewhere that Malick is to light what Welles was to shadow; whoever said that is correct. While shadow is usually the optical and aesthetic frame and delineation of a form, for Malick light is the frame, the line, the ray, the alien force descending upon the earth. This film is also about silence, and the invisible currents (of toxic waste, bleeding hearts) that flow through our time here on this beautiful earth. 

10. Dormant Beauty – The other film that made me shed quite a few tears. Much could be said about Bellocchio’s excellent use of topical politics as a backdrop for his drama; however, I was more intrigued by the theme of faith that underscores the four plots. Faith in God, faith in The Resurrection, faith in the Revival of the comatose, faith in the Rebirth of love. Faith supports us, but it is also alienating. Should I abandon my faith in Jesus Christ and the miracle of the resurrection, for faith in the love of a stranger? The faith that my heart is still capable of feeling? Should the cross lie across my breasts or turned around, invisible, to lie on my backbone? Does God desire life or death, joy or pain? Despite all of these questions, I never questioned the foundation of my faith but the way in which I express it and when/if I recognize other faiths in other people. Connectivity and love require the faith that when they die, we will move on. Also, I could stare at Alba Rohrwacher’s face for aeons. 

11. A Field In England – A Shakespearian tragedy translated by Jodorowsky and performed by Samuel Beckett ghosts under the influence of mushrooms. This is the weirdest film I saw this year, and I loved every minute of it. When the alchemist begins gobbling mushrooms, my head truly felt like it was crackling and spewing lava. It is hard to “do weird” these days; this is how it’s done. 

12. Blue Jasmine – This slot also includes the likes of 12 Years a Slave, The Great Beauty, American Hustle, Her, Inside Llewyn Davis, etc. That is those films that are extremely well executed but offer nothing to the future of cinema. All of my ‘best’ or ‘favorite’ films would more accurately be described as the most important ones; importance is when a film closes, with a to-be-continued, the chapter on a movement or style or technical achievement or reveals the potential of future explorations. Or it begins blazing a new path. Blue Jasmine does not do any of these things. Woody, I’m tired. I’m tired of the same shit movie after movie. Woody, you are a perfect director. There is nothing wrong with this film and that’s why I hate it. Not only is it a carbon-copy of your other films, with new brilliant performances, it does not innovate or challenge or even have a hint of imagination. Woody, return to experimentation of form and genre, rather than creating perfect cinematic ice cream cones. 

Honorable Mentions: Fruitvale Station, Post Tenebras Lux, Upstream Color, Lords of Salem, We Are What We Are, Gravity, Side Effects

The Subject Was Death

The following is a contribution to David Cairns' Blogathon entitled The Late Show, looking at the final films of actors, directors or any other notable talents. Head on over to Shadowplay to catch up with the happenings and the many brilliant words being spilled over many odd and interesting works in the autumn of many lives. 

Raúl Ruiz spent his whole career making one indelible impression after another. Based on personal accounts I've read and the experience I have with his films, the overwhelming feeling I always got was that he was always just behind you in the cinema smiling at you while you watched what he was up to. You could turn back around, whether through charmed confusion or plain ardor and he'd be there to wink at you, then nod to indicate that you're about to see something better. Even if you don't like his films, how could you not admire him? His movies were always adventures, if perhaps not always naive or traditionally thrilling. Even the byzantine corridors of Mysteries of Lisbon had reveals and reversals that turned an ordinary passage into a grave, bold twist of fate. Sure it's classic literature, but it never forgot to occasionally act like an action-packed serial. 

Naturally he was gone before I had a real opportunity to engage with his body of work. Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful there's a whole canon I get to experience at my leisure but one never likes to view a body of work as an obituary. How could I watch Lines of Wellington and not wonder how it would have turned out if he'd lived to finish it? But the sadness passed as I began watching this missive from a man on his way into the next life. Valeria Sarmiento, Ruiz's great love in life (after the cinema) had stepped up and completed it in his absence and done an absolutely marvelous job. Her hand seemed guided lovingly by the man himself, though no one without great talent could have produced such a splendidly textured work. Perhaps the best way to think of Lines of Wellington is as a wake. Sadness fills the air but there is joy here, and everybody in the world stopped by to pay their respects. One is torn whether to judge it devoid of the departed first author's influence. What is the film if not a tribute to the way Ruiz's camera made us feel, a stunning approximation of his style? I found it a compelling trip down a riverbank with the dead on both sides. What can one do when surrounded by sadness so profound as this, sadness, a lack that has actually produced a film. Lines of Wellington is about surviving. Naturally it's all Sarmiento and the friends of Ruiz can be asked to do, but they've done so much more. I'm incredibly grateful for Wellington. 

Death is the ultimate producer isn't he? You can work to whatever deadline you think you have, craft your life the best you can, roll with the punches, deal with bumps in the road and uncooperative performers, work magic time and again, but the fucker always gets final cut, don't he? Who's ever really ready to let a legacy lie? Francis Ford Coppola has a marvelous zen attitude toward death, I find, but I think secretly he's as nervous as I am. He gave a whole series of interviews around the time of Tetro and Twixt where he talked about death, how he's come up with mechanisms, games, to take the weight out of the event; Take the wind out of death's sails. He would ride an elevator to the bottom floor of his building and in the dark passage between the first floor and the lobby would pretend he would be dead when he hit the bottom. Everything seemed ok in those moments. But now he's out raising money for another mob film. Death can fuck right off, it seems. Three films for no money with no pressure were enough to get all the demons out (they make a hell of a triple feature, they do. Watch them backwards, Twixt, Tetro and then Youth Without Youth and see if you aren't bawling by the finish) and now he's back on the horse. I just know I'm going to be having this conversation with the bastard all my life. There's no playing fair with death. Ruiz's passing strikes me as so marvelously sly because he left after completing what really ought to have been his last film. If I may read into the motivation of someone I will never meet, Lines of Wellington was one more film than Ruiz knew he was meant to make, so he passed it to his loved ones. Is this provable fact? Not at all. It's just the narrative I gave to myself to make his passing seem less cruel, and more a final twist in a narrative Ruiz had been writing since he started making art for kids like me to consume, analyze and fall for. 

I'll tell you the best approximation of grief I've ever encountered: In Bertrand Bonello's marvelously decadent wallow House of Pleasures (oh how I love that film) one of the denizens of a brothel succumbs to syphilis and the other girls are left to mourn her. Quite without warning we're in a dark room dancing with the girls to The Moody Blues' "Nights in White Satin." They're too broken up to speak, they can only sway and sink into each other for unvoiced support. One of them walks up the hall, not hearing the music, peering into the room. Darkness everywhere but for the candle lit bodies in a silken parlor filled with the most marvelous suffering you've ever seen. That is how one wants to mourn. We almost never get to. That is the sort of mourning Ruiz deserves. Sadness that compels one to dance. Perhaps fittingly, perhaps not, I saw Lines of Wellington before La Noche De Enfrente, Ruiz's final complete work as director, just after hearing about his death. Lines is a remarkable film, but it came with the nagging sensation that he wasn't really gone. The wake had been thrown too soon and like Don Juan or Tom Sawyer (or both) he was watching it from a safe distance, smiling just a little wider than he should at the tribute paid to him. He couldn't be gone. He had one more film coming out. 

Thus is the frustrating magic of release dates; they bring the dead back to life. We still have one more James Gandolfini performance to look forward to. What a horrible, bitter hope to give to us. Gone too soon. Everyone always gone too soon for my liking. Thanks to Film Comment, La Noche De Enfrente played New York's Lincoln Center and I got on the first train I could to go see it. The screening was patchily attended, to say the least. There can't have been more than fifteen people in the theatre. I settled in and so did this dreamy vision of life and art holding hands for a long walk down the beach of Ruiz's memory, consciousness, unconsciousness and desire. The first thing that really jumps out: the bit where Bluebeard the pirate talks with a young boy in front of a bluescreen beach. What's that about? Why the artificiality? There are no beaches in Chile? Aha! Forest for the trees. Rookie mistake. This is his version of the Byron Haskin technicolor fables that had invaded his childhood like pirates on a galley. Suddenly I was at a beautiful crossroad: the 24 year old in the theatre wanted to figure out the tricks being played, the 4 year old in the back of my head was intoxicated by the scenes of peculiar logic drifting into each other like rogue brushstrokes. I've been giving a lot of thought lately to what might have been the first film I remember seeing in a theatre. Best I've been able to narrow it down to were kid-friendly rep screenings of Treasure Island (Haskin, naturally) or 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea at the County Theatre in Doylestown, my home all these years. They still show those kid friendly matinees and the world's a better place for it. I remember being enchanted by tales of pirates, of being carried out to sea with a bunch of disreputable characters who you could never spend enough time with. Old Hollywood may have been built on lies but never let anyone tell you it wasn't magic. If I could retire to anywhere in time and space, it'd be to Hollywood in the 50s, because I could go anywhere in the world, do anything, be anywhere. The lies were exquisite back then. You could sink into them, like the girls in House of Pleasures, a similarly anachronistic voyage. Ruiz understands this. He doesn't try to lift us out of dreamland too often, but his last scenes are quite haunting without exerting too much effort. We are in the barrel of a gun for one brief scene after all. Doesn't get any more uncanny than that. 

Ruiz really did direct as if he were orchestrating your dreams. La Noche De Enfrente especially has a "Now you're here. Now you're here. Now this happens" sequencing that is truly the stuff of dreams. People walk from one room to the next, only to discover a whole new plot thread waiting to take them far away from the quiet retirement drink they were just having. Ultimately they shall have little consequence, but you'll wake up believing them. I was in the thick of all this when around the halfway point something drew me ever so slightly from the fantasia. Breathing. I had no memory of anyone coming and sitting behind me, but sure enough there was a low, wheezing sound, the unmistakable husky sound of a slightly sick older man breathing just behind me. For money I would have sworn there was no one there before the lights dimmed. The breathing continued right along with the film. I said nevermind and delighted in the things Ruiz was showing and telling me and it does feel like it's just to you, the viewer, independent of every other viewer. Dreams have that kind of intimacy. A thought strikes me, and I'm regressing to childhood in my seat so I entertain it. Could it be Ruiz seated behind me for one last screening? He seemed to be welcoming death with a joy-buzzer hidden in his palm all throughout the film, what with his conversing with historical figures and mixing his spiritual plains. Is it so far fetched that the man flew here to see his last work at a low-key venue, a small, sparsely attended theatre, someplace a throng won't recognize him. Tom Sawyer is sitting behind me, watching his own film, breathing down my neck. What a trick to play. What a damn good last laugh. It's so beautiful I want to believe it. I can't but I want to. I let the idea float away like pipe smoke to the carpeted ceilings and I settle back in, a little more invested than I was before. 

We want to believe the fairy tales, that we can be abducted by life-loving pirates and into high-seas adventures we'll never forget. The truth, that we could never live the lives of fictional characters, is too painful for us to cope with, which is why we've got movies, isn't it? To paint fantasy with lights and people and words and imagine for a moment we've lived something we haven't. One dream at a time, some good, some bad. The best films can do this to us, anyway. He had a bit of an ace up his sleeve in the form of a 6 hour runtime (!) but when I stopped watching Lav Diaz's Century of Birthing I felt I was still in the Philippines and it would take another round of dreams set somewhere else to wake me from that illusion. That is why we watch, isn't it? Am I being overly optimistic? Childish? Good. I'll never get to be these people, so I want to live their lives for a few hours at a time. I want to go off and live dangerously with the likes of His Majesty O'Keefe, Lord Jim, Robinson Crusoe, John Carter, Mick Travis, Bluebeard the Pirate or even Ruiz himself, lovable character that he is. Was? Is? But one has to grow up, so we get our doses in two hour films and pretend. Next best thing we can do is dream. So when the film ended, I stood up, gathered my things and walked out of the theatre as quickly as possible, taking care not to look behind me, never to know the identity of the man behind me, if indeed I hadn't dreamt him up. Sometimes we need the lie. Death taps his foot, looks at his watch, and waits for the ugly truth to show up. I like the truth, so long as it's given to me in a good film, but I'll take the lie any day. What's the point a dyin' if we don't know what we're gonna miss?