tg

can you nominate your own film?

well, i’d say yes with one proviso. the objective here is not to just name obscure&great films but to build recommendations for others to see. so i’d say if your film is available to the watching public, why not?

tg

My nominees are…

The Spirit of the Beehive by Victor Erice
This is a great film about a child’s imagination, a family, and Frankenstein’s monster set in Spain after the Spanish Civil War. You can see the best acting by a child of all time in this film.

A Summer at Grandpa’s by Hou Hsiao-Hsien
This is probably the first film by Hou Hsiao-Hsien I saw. It is just a simple story involving a boy and his little sister spending a Summer vacation, but it is wonderful. Hou Hsiao-Hsien also made other great and possibly better known films, but I nominate this one here.

The Double Life of Veronique by Kieslowski
I’m also not sure if Kieslowski is obscure enough, but this is a little more obscure than the Three Colors. This and Red are my favorite Kieslowski films.

Chungking Express by Wong Kar-Wai
A cool film with an original style from Hong Kong.

Matewan (directed by John Sayles). This is a movie about a mining strike in West Virginia in the 1930′s. But it doesn’t come off as a dry thesis about Labor history. In fact it plays like a spaghetti western, with Sayle’s favorite actor David Strathairn in the Clint Eastwood role. Sayles has made a lot of good movies.

Stranger Than Paradise (Jim Jarmusch). I always think of this one as the best punk rock movie, even though it doesn’t have any any punk rock in it (unless you count Screamin Jay Hawkins as punk). It’s the attitude. Mystery Train and Ghost Dog are really good, too.

The Woman in the Window(Fritz Lang). Lang made a lot of nifty B movies after he came to America. This one has a twist at the end which ruins it for some people. You should just ignore the last 5 minutes of the movie.

The Music of Chance(Philip Haas). A movie about a couple of guys who lose a poker game and who then find themselve in servitude to the winners. It’s from a novel by Paul Auster, and it’s the kind of parable that can seem pretentious unless you are in the right mood. It worked for me.

Salesman(The Maysle Brothers). This is a documentary made in the 1960′s about some door-to-door bible salesmen. It will convince you that even if the physics thing doesn’t work out, it’s still definitely a better career choice than door-to-door bible selling.

Here I describe my all-time favorite: the movie _Blue_ (and the corresponding music by Zbigniew Preisner). (1993)

This movie begins with a tragedy, and, on the surface, it is about a woman, Julie (played by Juliette Binoche), learning to accept and grow out of the largest losses that one can possibly have. When she loses her husband and daughter in a terrible car accident, for all of its tragedy and drama, this is a luxurious situation: she is completely free. Financially, she is provided for, and she has no responsibilities. But how far is she really free? What does ‘liberty’ mean? Can one truly live a different life? Can one erase the past? How far are we free from feelings? Is love a ‘prison’? Or is it freedom? In Blue, the main character faces a prison that she creates by both her emotions and memory, and works her way out of that prison with the help of music. She learns that she actually can’t free herself entirely from everything that’s been.

Blue is also a movie about music. Musical notes often appear on the screen, about the writing of music, about working on music. When Julie tries to erase the past, the past comes back to her in the music. The musician who scored this movie wrote the music for many other Kieslowski’s films, and in some sense, Kieslowski’s films and Preisner’s music are inseparable. Kieslowski knew the ‘atmosphere’ that he wanted to create, and Preisner, as the movie was being filmed, created the music to bring out more of the atmosphere. One composer cited in the movie: “Van der Budenmajer” is a fictitious Dutch composer that is Zbigniew Preisner’s joke, because the music is really his. Preisner took all of his old works, cited a birth and death for Van der Budenmajer, and catalogued them with catalogue numbers used for recordings.

All three of the Kieslowski trilogy: _Red_, _White_, _Blue_ (blue: liberty, white: equality, red: fraternity) are about people who have some sort of intuition or sensibility, who have “gut feelings. Maybe that’s why I like these films alot. Kieslowski was (he died in 1997) a master at portraying the ‘human condition’, in very subtle, and yet very moving ways.

And for the foreign-film crowd, Fitzcarraldro is one of Werner Herzog’s best obscure movies… though Diva is my fav….

I find Liquid Sky to be screamingly funny. Sometimes I like the techno-scored accompaniment, sometimes not so much. A good one to watch at home, so you can choose how much sound you want.

To round things off I’ll finish by listing 10 films (by 5 different directors) you’re unlikely to have seen, even if you regularly visit the independent cinema in the “alternative lifestyle” district of your favourite city:

Woman in the Dunes (1964) and Antonio Gaudi (1984) directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara.

Tokyo Story (1953) and Floating Weeds (1959) directed by Yasujiro Ozu.

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964) and The Color of Pomegranates (1968) directed by Sergei Paradjanov.

The Street of Crocodiles (1986) and Institute Benjamenta (1994) directed by Stephen and Timothy Quay.

And here’s a couple for the kids … I mean young adults … Funny Ha Ha (2003) and Mutual Appreciation (2005) directed by Andrew Bujalski.

Also the 1968 Jean Luc Godard films within a film SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL is about as obscure a music video there is, and yet is captivating and informative, not just about the actual construction of a classic piece of rock-n-roll music, but also of the nightmare that was at the edges of social conflict in the US.