Media reviews/film commentary/interviews

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From The Atlantic Magazine (online):













https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... lm/595309/

[Lencho of the Apes]

A lovely essay on Ulmer:

http://www.screeningthepast.com/2014/12 ... r-g-ulmer/

[Lencho of the Apes]

Dept. Of State propaganda films made by woman puppeteer Mary Chase:

https://unwritten-record.blogs.archives ... a-message/

[rischka]

https://theoutline.com/post/8412/the-ir ... i=waoofcx2

a good review of the irishman.

Scorsese’s opus shows us the superficiality of anti-Boomer politics and the tragic limitations of the supposed Golden Age...


Scorsese’s best movies are all in some way about the political economy of the country and the lives of the white ethnic working and lower-middle class in the second half of the 20th century. Taxi Driver (1976) is the story of an alienated working-class man; Goodfellas (1991), to paraphrase the character Karen Hill, is about blue collar guys who decided to cut some corners to get their piece of the American dream; The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) is about lower class parvenus scrambling to get rich, and the Teamsters’ pension fund hovers in the background of Casino (1995), as a source of capital for the mob-run Las Vegas casinos, which brings us to The Irishman.

[arkheia]

Recent article on Vulture on the under-recognized actor Juano Hernández. I wish it went into more detail analyzing his roles and performances but as a primer on his background, it's well worth the read.


https://www.vulture.com/2020/01/juano-h ... egend.html

(I recommend reading on an incognito tab if you get stuck at the paywall)

[pabs]

This is one of my favourite films, and I wonder whether a re-watch will make me downgrade it. I saw it once about 10 years ago.















From: https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sig ... 4XMy90-LNo

[MrCarmady]

Chungking is super re-watchable, I would be surprised if your opinion of it were to change dramatically. Great interview. I can't believe I haven't seen Days of Being Wild yet, I've loved his work for years.

[greennui]

WKW used to be my fav director but my taste has changed so much in recent years that I wonder if I would like his films as much If I watched them today. A friend asked me about his films the other day and I couldn't recommend them with the same conviction as I've done before.

[pabs]

Recent article on Vulture on the under-recognized actor Juano Hernández. I wish it went into more detail analyzing his roles and performances but as a primer on his background, it's well worth the read.

https://www.vulture.com/2020/01/juano-h ... egend.html

(I recommend reading on an incognito tab if you get stuck at the paywall)

His performance in Intruder in the Dust, in which he plays Lucas Beauchamp, a black farmer accused of murdering a white man, is his best work because of this quality.

Thanks. I'll try to get that film and maybe a few of his others.

[liquidnature]

WKW used to be my fav director but my taste has changed so much in recent years that I wonder if I would like his films as much If I watched them today. A friend asked me about his films the other day and I couldn't recommend them with the same conviction as I've done before.

Agreed. WKW's were some of the first 'independent' (or whatever) films I watched and loved, so I have no idea how I would feel about them now, 10 years later.

[Holymanm]

So... when is someone going to pick him for the director poll already?

[FLABREZU]

ok ill pick him

[pabs]

from: https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/arc ... ew/614017/

[Brotherdeacon]

https://www.diagonalthoughts.com/?p=1423

About the “insane horizon” of cinema

By Philippe Grandrieux

“A segment has been cut out of the back of his head. The sun, and the whole world with it, peep in. It makes him nervous, it distracts him from his work, and moreover it irritates him that just he should be the one debarred from the spectacle.”
Kafka, January 9th 1920.

The future of cinema is to be free and great and strong, to transmit some of that “windy chaos” that we tend to protect ourselves from, as if we desperately wanted to believe that the world is ordered, reasonable, possible, when it’s exactly the opposite: chaotic, delirious, untenable, driven by the unstoppable force of desire. Beyond will and morality, the world is what we desire, absolutely. Terribly. And cinema should be considered commensurate with this excessive horizon. Its projected desire impressed upon the film strip. That is what filming is, to make possible the movement from the self to the others and from the others to oneself. That is what light is, precisely that, the movement of the desire reflected from the face that stands quietly in front of me, and it looks at me, and I feel invigorated by its breathtaking beauty, its unchangeable otherness. That is cinema, to film that presence, the being-there of things, to film trees and mountains and the sky and the mighty flow of the river. That is what it is to be an actor, to be able to carry the weight of reality, its gushing, hallucinating vibration, to embody it (very few succeed), and in the time of a shot, the space of a take, to become sky, mountain, river and the stormy mass of the ocean. And then cinema is immense. We are won over and forget ourselves and we forget what we carry, and what we don’t know, what we can’t know, although it fascinates us and brings us to life, to a life that is lived, and so it unfolds. This rhythm, this way of framing, of lighting the body, of interrupting the take, it comes, it’s there, and cinema closely touches its essence, a sensorial experience of the world, whose destiny is to transmit through sensations, the only means which are its own, to convey a fraction of the passing world, the sensitive world, soon dissipated, lost, carried away by time, a part of time, and that feeling of “inevitable solidarity” may resound in each one of us. It is a far cry from the narrative labour to which most filmmakers submit to, without resistance. Far from psychology, from categories that have been abused by morals. No, the future of cinema is its childhood, its brilliance, its brutality, the world that begins again, it’s an image that is larger than life, in front of which we placed ourselves one day, this vibrating, silent image, for the “infans” is the one who doesn’t speak, who stands aside from social conventions, in front of the chaos, outside of language, of sense, without distance, suddenly captured by colour, and it’s the big red flowers and the field and the woods, and it’s the river and the water that is too cold and their hands rubbing their back, warming their small bodies, and it’s the breath against one’s neck and the wet soil under one’s feet. That’s infancy, to be entirely swept away by sensation, overwhelmed by one’s emotions, subjected to the almightiness of one’s affections. And that is cinema, its future, that time silenced of images, that heroic time, poetic, that time of childhood, where we can all be transported to by the sole force of desire through the body and its stories. And eyes wide open in the dark, and it scares us so much, so much, but also we laugh we cry, and it has held us, breathless, in front of this big face with sealed eyes and with the heart knocking against our chest, we have run along the way, and we have cried out from the dunes : “Johannes…”, and we have waited, and hoped, so much, and against the wind, and against the great cloudy sky, shouted again, with him, with the father, “Johannes…Johannes…” and for a moment we have become, without knowing how, that father looking for his child, his lost son, and then that trampled grass and then the entire moor. That is cinema. Its destiny, its future, is to stand, unfailingly, before the world, to its eternal return, facing the high noon, to the sacred “yes” of the child.

In the beginning, movement analysis. Chronophotography. Horse, birds, man, woman. It runs, it jumps, it flies and it starts again.

And immediately, the pornographic use, for cinema is the industry of the bodies. Our great-grandmothers suck and are humped in the kitchen. The smell of soup and fuck, that is the smell of the century of the locomotive and the unconscious. Men are muscular and have moustaches, they pose for our great painters, they pose with a hard-on for the camera. An assembly of bodies, mise en scène, a litany of sequences, the script of cinema was de Sadean from the beginning. In the meanwhile, Degas brushed bodies, women in the bath, with their backs curved, with their fleshy bottoms in the dark shadow of the greasy ink, available bodies, the flabby bodies of whores, legs wide open, pot-bellied, the exhausted bodies of the brothels, of the dark rooms. Degas worked on the black-coated zinc plates with his hands. With his fingertips, with his palm, he stamps, tears, scratches, removes the dark night. He brings in the light.

His eyes suffer, he touches the image. He photographs absolutely. Tiny, astonished dancers fluttering in the footlights, with long brushed hair, an opaque mass flowing along their backs, crouching women with painted faces, legs in the air, gaping sex, sprawled bodies, rigid bottoms, inscribed by Degas in the thick glue, in the mischief of the ink, the truth of his time. He’s in the room, in the dark. He’s fabricating, blindly and slowly, cinema. And he invents it just as de Sade did before him. He shows us the way: cinema is made (above all) with the hands, with the skin, with the entire body, by fatigue, by breath, by the pulsations of the blood, the rhythm of the heart, by the muscles. Body and sensation, that is the machine, its absolute power, its obsession. That is its becoming. Invented bodies, comical, grotesque, obscene, the improbable bodies of the stars and the monsters, and light, its palpitation, and the beating of shots, and in us, fear, joy, hope, sadness, the obscure deployment of human passions.

What do we seek, since the first traces of hands were impressed in rock, the long, hallucinated perambulation of men across time, what do we try to reach so feverishly, with such obstinacy and suffering, through representation, through images, if not to open the body’s night, its opaque mass, the flesh with which we think – and present it to the light, to our faces, the enigma of our lives. Bodies and thoughts, bodies and sensations, those are the same profound arrangements of cinema. In 1927 Antonin Artaud writes Witchcraft and the Cinema, a seminal and visionary text. “To use cinema to tell stories, exterior actions, is to deny its best resources, to go against its absolute object. I think the cinema is made primarily to express matters of the mind, the inner consciousness, not by a succession of images so much as by something more imponderable which restores them to us with their direct matter, with no interpositions or representations”.

Artaud is delirious. Surely, but not only. What is this imponderable thing? What would the nature of cinema be if it rendered images directly, without interruptions, without representations? Artaud the magician called for the transmutation of cinema, it must be of another substance in order to express the matters of thought, the interior conscience. Such is the insane horizon of cinema, improbable, the secret that haunts it. Such is the energy that animates it, that pushes it forward. One must close the gap between oneself, one’s body, and the source of sensation. Cinema desires a wrapped body, taken by the instinctive material. All projection devices (large screen, 360°, glasses, stereo, Dolby surround, headphones…) increasingly place us inside the cave, at the centre of illusion, in what is already our reality, a cyberspace. Without a doubt, our body will soon be directly connected to the film. A hybrid device of technology and flesh – science-fiction imagines it and science produces it. A cinema in the “folds”, inscribed within the body, in direct contact with the organs, a nanocinema, molecular, contagious, indispensable, will be the next step. But what Artaud foresees is even more insane, more unheard of. Cinema is no longer only “a psychic cinema… a subcutaneous injection of morphine… The cinema is an amazing stimulant (which) acts directly on the grey matter of the brain”, it demands henceforth another body.

In 1947, precisely, the world gets back on its feet, stunned. Artaud launches his programme: the body must now “by placing it again, for the last time, on the autopsy table, remake his anatomy”. Sperm, Americans, synthetic products. His paranoia is fully operational. Vision, inspiration. That is his pace. That’s what he’s made of. He throws out sentences. He whispers, screams, smashes. Under the pressure of his breath, Artaud dictates the order of things, he draws the bodies of tomorrow, he announces the reign of “synthetic products ad nauseam”. The time has come for the actual fabrication of bodies. The voice is hoarse, acute, in overdrive, accelerated. It announces our future. Man will finally accomplish the endeavours demanded by de Sade. He will confront his definitive materiality, absolutely, without deviation. Fabricated, machined, modifiable, transformed into a commodity, he will be a “living currency” (Pierre Klossowski). The exact opposite of virtuality. Bodies will be the simulacrum through which we will experience and experiment the power of our desire, its “voluptuous emotion”. Will fiction be embodied, carnal, made of blood and muscles? Is this the “imponderable thing” which Artaud dreams of, through which we will access our interior conscience without interruptions, without representation, is this the transubstantiation of images in a body? Of course this is an hallucination, but beyond the improbability of such a development, Artaud’s delirium and Klossowski’s fable seem to sketch the destiny of cinema, of this cinema that I love, the one that connects us to the most archaic forces, to what’s more inherent and instinctive in each one of us, inextricably weaving image and body, the very stuff of our affective relationship to the world, by placing us under the threatof the astonishing emergence of what can neither be seen nor heard.

Originally published as ‘Sur l’horizon insensé du cinéma’, Cahiers du cinéma hors série: Le siècle du cinema (November 2000). Thanks to Stéphane Delorme.
Translated by Maria Palacios Cruz.

Philippe Grandrieux is one of the “Artists in Focus” on the Courtisane Festival 2012

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(Many of these documentaries are available to watch free online.)


Sixty-two Films That Shaped the Art of Documentary Filmmaking

The idea of what a documentary is has shifted according to what has—and hasn’t—been possible during the past hundred years. But the artistic preoccupations of their creators have not changed radically in that time.

By Richard Brody

The New Yorker, October 14, 2020

Since the pandemic hit and social life became severely constrained, I’ve been obsessing even more than usual about documentaries. Their very essence is to provide virtual connections to people in far-off times and places—and to experiences that would otherwise remain unshared, even among people close by. Craving such virtual connections, I’ve been watching far more documentaries than I usually do—especially given the dearth of new releases—and more of them than I can squeeze into the regular round of reviews.

This has been no sharp break but only an intensification of the last few years of my movie-watching, which have offered a plethora of rediscoveries (thanks to the ardent connoisseurship of repertory programmers) and have given a new urgency to my viewing of documentaries (thanks to changes in the field). Nonfiction filmmaking has been undergoing an aesthetic revolution over the past decade or so, one that parallels the major change in fiction filmmaking, namely, a shift toward personalization. The main expression and key movement in that change is mumblecore, which has exerted a wide-ranging influence through its luminaries, its aesthetic, and its ideas. Mumblecore’s documentary counterpart is creative nonfiction, an idea that’s rooted in the filmmaker’s presence, be it physical or virtual, and in the conspicuous display of process.

The artistic preoccupations of the new generation of documentary filmmakers don’t break with those of earlier generations; rather, they have their roots in decades-old films, in which the same ideas and practices sometimes turn up in forms—embodying the filmmakers’ relationship to their subjects—that seem daringly original even now. The most artistically advanced documentaries are those in which the participants are engaging conspicuously with the filmmakers; in their most radical forms, they show the influences, inspirations, or perturbations that the people onscreen experience from the filmmakers’ presence. Which is another way of saying that, although documentaries follow real people, their crucial material and subject is nonetheless performance.

Throughout its history, the very idea of documentary filmmaking has shifted according to what was—and was not—possible at any given time, owing to the nature of movie equipment. Because cameras in the silent-film era were cumbersome, it was hard for filmmakers to be present at events as they unfolded, which is why much early documentary filmmaking involves reënactment, or what might now be called docudrama. Many of the earlier films on my list, such as “The Forgotten Frontier” and “Farrebique,” fall into this category: they show events replayed by the very people who had experienced them in real life. The arrival of synch sound did not instantly revolutionize documentaries, as it did fiction films, because early sound-recording equipment was extremely difficult to bring on location and because filmmakers were slow to make significant use of it in the studio. Instead, the first great revolution in documentaries came only in 1960, after lightweight synch-sound equipment was developed, to go with lightweight cameras. The result was cinéma vérité, or direct cinema, as exemplified by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s “Chronicle of a Summer” and Robert Drew’s “Primary.” Yet this revolution quickly led to a paradox. On the one hand, it allowed filmmakers to thrust themselves into the action, evoking a sense of involvement, of being implicated, and fostering a far more intensely personal mode of documentary filmmaking. On the other hand, the power of lightweight synch-sound equipment and the relative ease of its use fostered a countervailing type of cinema, one that, in ostensibly observing and recording events objectively, rendered filmmakers even less visible and audible than before—the so-called fly-on-the-wall approach to documentary filmmaking.

That soon became the new convention, even the new orthodoxy, but it coincided with a revolution in subject matter and perspective—the liberations of the sixties—that had its own dramatic effect on the art form. The first great period of documentary filmmaking ran from 1960 to about 1980, when, relying on new equipment, filmmakers responded to—and advanced—social progress by fusing the personal and the political in their art (as in “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm” and “Joyce at 34”). New video technology helped: it enabled filmmakers to record for longer periods without interruption and with even smaller crews.

When lightweight digital video—on cameras and cell phones—became available, it sparked the recent and ongoing second revolution in documentary filmmaking, making the camera a virtual extension of the filmmaker’s body and integrating filmmaking with daily and private life. The outpouring of astoundingly creative and personal documentaries in recent years is the result of those technical advances and of a renewed and deepened sense of the inseparability of the political and the personal, the breaking down of the barriers between the public and private realms. Documentary filmmakers are creating new forms that pursue political progress through (and even despite) the morass of new media. Note that this list does not distinguish between short and feature films, either on artistic or practical grounds. Shorts have been a major source of cinematic ideas outside the mainstream, and they have also been relatively accessible to many great filmmakers—notably, women and Black directors—who, having been kept out of even the art-house mainstream, have struggled to find the resources to make features.

The presence of documentary filmmakers in their films isn’t itself an aesthetic idea; neither is the prominence of interviews. (There are some famous films that rely on both which I haven’t included on this list; there has also been a trend in recent decades toward personality-based documentaries, which exploit leading aesthetic currents rather than advancing or deepening them.) There’s no empirical criterion to define a movie’s artistic dimension, which is, instead, a matter of composition, style, experience, and of imaginative confrontation with the times. There’s no aesthetic pleasure, obviously, in contemplating horrors such as the Holocaust, racism, poverty, or cruelty, in the private or public sphere. Beauty is found, rather, in the acts of determination, engagement, and revelation, which, in turn, serve as a mode of transmission. The forms and styles with which filmmakers embody experience and ideas lock into a viewer’s receptors, effecting not merely a transfer of information but an emotional, even an unconscious, transformation of the viewer—and, so, of the future.

“Salt for Svanetia”
(1930, Mikhail Kalatozov)

It’s about the most ordinary of subjects—table salt—but what it depicts is at the very limits of the representable. The villagers of Svanetia, an isolated mountainous region in then-Soviet Georgia, are dying from lack of salt, and Kalatozov shows their agonies in terrifying detail, before Soviet workers arrive to build the roads that will open the region to shipments (including of salt) from other parts of the country. The film is a work of overt political propaganda, yet Kalatozov gives the impression of filming in a state of horror and shock.

“The Forgotten Frontier”
(1931, Marvin Breckinridge)

The only film directed by Marvin Breckinridge, a.k.a. Mary Marvin Breckinridge, is an early work of extraordinary documentary portraiture—and adventure. It consists of a series of dramatic reconstructions, filmed on location in rural Kentucky, involving the Frontier Nursing Service, which was founded by Breckinridge’s cousin, also named Mary. The documentary shows Mary’s cousin and other actual nurses as they bring medical care to remote areas of Appalachia. Along with tense and poignant medical and familial dramas, the director evokes her own self-aware participation in the story by way of her cousin’s ceremonious public interactions.

“Enthusiasm”
(1930, Dziga Vertov)

Vertov’s first sound film is a story of Soviet industrialization that overcomes the hostility of—or, rather, lays waste to—organized religion. It’s a story of forced enlightenment that takes as its very premise the rise of mass media, by way of radio. Vertov’s use of sound is as ecstatic as his cinematography: contrapuntal, impressionistic. The film’s sense of form is as thrilling and hectic as the revolutionary ardor that motivates it.

“The City”
(1939, Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke)

A film of advocacy on behalf of planned communities, based on the work of the urbanist Catherine Bauer, this documentary expresses philosophy and social analysis with a passion that’s embodied in the content and editing of its images and in its ardently declaimed commentary. Its historical reënactments and newsreel footage give rise to a wall-to-wall monologue that looks ahead to latter-day essay-films.

“Let There Be Light”
(1946, John Huston)

While working with the U.S. Army Signal Corps during the Second World War, Huston films veterans at a Long Island mental hospital who endured mental trauma as a result of combat in that war. The inclusion of doctors’ extended and engaged interviews with patients gives voice to stifled memories of the war’s horrors, away from official celebrations of victory. (In all likelihood, that is why the Army banned the film until 1981.)

“Farrebique”
(1946, Georges Rouquier)

This is a documentary that’s centered on the power of language, whether in legal wranglings or in the transmission of family history from grandparents to grandchildren. Filming at his own family’s farm in the South of France, Rouquier recruits his relatives to play roles closely resembling their real lives, reconstructing their activities and conflicts over the course of a year.

“Strange Victory”
(1948, Leo Hurwitz)

A documentary as first-person essay from Hurwitz (who soon after was blacklisted under McCarthyite inquisitions), this film looks closely and furiously at a bitter paradox: Black veterans return from fighting against Nazism in the Second World War only to face Jim Crow laws and unchallenged racism at home.

“Night and Fog”
(1955, Alain Resnais)

Made at a mere ten years’ remove from the Second World War—as official France was ignoring the Holocaust and the deportations of Jews from France—Resnais’s short documentary fuses present-tense scenes of the vestiges of Auschwitz and Majdanek and archival images, evoking the Holocaust, and the politics that led to it, in terms of the struggle to recover stifled memories and presenting the clarity of memory as essential to political progress.

“Chronicle of a Summer”
(1960, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin)

The founding work of cinéma vérité (the term was invented by Morin to describe the film), this film is also a crucial work of reflexive cinema, showing the filmmakers preparing to approach people in the streets of Paris and ask them whether they’re happy, and proceed to their on-camera and interview-centered investigations of French colonialism, the Algerian War, and the Nazi Occupation—along with their own self-critical depictions of watching, showing, and discussing their work.

“Integration Report 1”
(1960, Madeline Anderson)

Anderson was among the first Black female documentary filmmakers, and here she presents American racial conflicts, in both North and South, with a jolting sense of immediacy, and conveys the newly liberated discourse of civil-rights advocates—along with the performative concern-trolling of white counter-protesters.

“The Children Were Watching”
(1961, Robert Drew)

Robert Drew, whose film “Primary,” from 1960, launched the documentary form of direct cinema in the United States, here immersively films the effort to desegregate public schools in New Orleans, encompassing both the violent opposition of white residents and the experiences of Black families who are the targets of violence.

“Belarmino”
(1964, Fernando Lopes)

Lopes’s film is a collaborative docu-drama, in which the aging Portuguese boxer Belarmino Fragoso plays himself, as his career is ending. Belarmino speaks at length in interview scenes that are as revelatory—of himself and his times—as his reënactments of his daily routine, which Lopes films with a keen eye to Belarmino’s many modes of self-conscious self-presentation.

“Take This Hammer”
(1964, Richard O. Moore)

Moore, who was white, films James Baldwin on a tour of San Francisco’s predominantly Black neighborhoods that’s led by the community activist Orville Luster. While recording Baldwin’s illuminating discussions with Luster, Moore also observes Baldwin as a virtual reporter, interviewing Black residents of the city and eliciting comment from voices rarely heard in American cinema.

“Love Meetings”
(1964, Pier Paolo Pasolini)

Pasolini brings intimate experiences into public light in this documentary, in which Italians talk on-camera about sex, freely, candidly, comedically, confrontationally. In recording their commentary, Pasolini manages to reveal the private prejudices behind rigid societal exclusions and oppressions.

“A Time for Burning”
(1966, William Jersey)

The New York-based filmmaker William Jersey, who’d been raised in a fundamentalist Christian family and was still practicing at the time, was hired by the Evangelical Lutheran Church to make a film about racial tension within their ranks. The remarkable film he made follows parishioners of an all-white church in Omaha as they come into conflict over their minister’s plans for voluntary outreach to Black congregations. Jersey elicits extraordinary candor from the film’s white participants, and also meets members of the city’s Black community who speak openly to him of the deep-rooted bigotry that they endure—and of Jersey’s own inevitable participation in it.

“Portrait of Jason”
(1967, Shirley Clarke)

Filmed in a single night in Clarke’s rooms in the Chelsea Hotel, this film consists entirely of an on-camera interview of her friend Jason Holliday, a gay Black man and a self-described hustler. Pinpointing the agonizing pressures of history in the self-revealing and self-flaying confessions of a single soul, Clarke, one of America’s most original independent filmmakers, seems to invent a new genre of personal filmmaking—a cinematic address in the second person singular.

“The Lenny Bruce Performance Film”
(1967, John Magnuson)

The point was simply being there; the camera rolls and Bruce performs, in what turned out to be his penultimate public appearance, from 1965. Amid the hilarity, the profundity, and the audacity, hypocrisies and orthodoxies shatter. The film’s minimal, spartan approach provides a better cinematic showcase for onstage performance than succeeding generations’ more elaborate presentations have ever done.

“The Queen”
(1968, Frank Simon)

More than two decades before “Paris Is Burning,” Simon went behind the scenes of a drag pageant in New York. The film features extraordinarily candid and intimate discussions among gay men—at a time when homosexual behavior and drag itself were illegal—along with scenes of drag queens’ physical transformations that break the boundaries between performance and private life.

“Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One”
(1968, William Greaves)

William Greaves’s multilayered metafiction—based on a scripted scene of a couple in crisis—is a documentary about the very nature of fictional films, and the authority of a director trying to make them. Greaves films himself, his actors, and his crew at work in Central Park, interacting with one another and with whomever happens to be there, and also includes the crew’s own critique of his methods and even his character.

“Original Cast Album: Company”
(1970, D. A. Pennebaker)

In this documentary of the making of a studio recording, Pennebaker captures performances of a historic greatness (especially by Elaine Stritch), filming with a sensitive synergy in long and probing takes that shiver with his own excitement and sense of collaborative energy..

“Numéro Zéro”
(1971, Jean Eustache)

Eustache’s film consists almost entirely of an extended interview with his grandmother Odette Robert. He elicits her intimate horror stories, which seem to fuse with the modern history of France as well as with the substance of his far more celebrated fiction films (such as “The Mother and the Whore”) and with his own sense of identity.

“Growing Up Female”
(1971, Julia Reichert and Jim Klein)

Through a series of interviews with a multigenerational and multiethnic group of women living near her home town, in Ohio, Reichert explores the gender-centered pressures tacit in her environment and reveals the indoctrinations that she and other women experience from media controlled mainly by men. Though the film runs only forty-nine minutes long, it encompasses a vast historical scope.

“Joyce at 34”
(1972, Joyce Chopra and Claudia Weill)

Another pioneer of first-person filmmaking, Chopra begins by documenting the birth of her daughter and goes on to examine the connection between her work as a filmmaker and her family life—and also, through interviews with her own mother, a retired schoolteacher, confronts and contextualizes her own efforts at balancing work and home.

“Marjoe”
(1972, Sarah Kernochan and Howard Smith)

In this film, which won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature before disappearing from circulation (it was restored and reissued in 2005), Marjoe Gortner, who had been a child-star preacher, returns to the pulpit as an adult for a farewell tour, which he uses to repudiate the world of organized religion. His riveting stage persona fills the screen with the ecstasy and the skepticism of the age of rock; he collaborates with the filmmakers to reveal the tricks of his trade and, in on-camera discussions, discloses the painful story of his exploitation.

“F for Fake”
(1973, Orson Welles)

Taking off from investigations of an art forger and a literary fraudster, Welles’s wide-ranging, richly ironic, and loftily speculative personal-essay film puts the very distinctions between documentary and fiction, and between first-person declaration and journalistic exploration, under kaleidoscopic scrutiny.

“El Sopar”
(1974, Pere Portabella)

The very existence of this movie—a clandestine gathering of former political prisoners of the Franco regime, filmed while it was still in power—is a miracle, and Portabella, a director of highly stylized dramas, finds simple forms that give physical presence to the reports from the depths of political horror.

“Welfare”
(1975, Frederick Wiseman)

Frederick Wiseman, the great documentarian of bureaucracy in action, here also spotlights the contrast between dispassionate functionaries and the anguish of their put-upon and desperate supplicants. It’s a film about the gap between the letter and the spirit of the law—and about the modes of behavior, or performance, that result.

“Grey Gardens”
(1976, Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Ellen Hovde, and Muffie Meyer)

The implicit performances of documentary subjects are at the center of all of the Maysles brothers’ major films, but never more emphatically than in this one. Their view of the chaotic decline of the two Edith Beales, mother and daughter—and the desperately antic theatre of shattered dreams that they present—is inseparable from the Maysles’ own tensely compassionate implication in their subjects’ lives.

“Not a Pretty Picture”
(1976, Martha Coolidge)

Coolidge’s effort to dramatize her experience of being raped, when she was a teen-ager, is the anguished and profound core of this documentary, in which she collaborates with an actress who was also a victim of rape and considers the implications, even the very possibility, of dramatizing such an experience.

“The Battle of Chile”
(1975-79, Patricio Guzmán)

Guzman’s documentary in three parts, filmed in 1972 and 1973, anticipated, with a sense of prophetic foreboding, the violent opposition to the government of Chile’s President Salvador Allende. Guzman filmed the end times of the regime, under rightist and American pressure, from within.

“A Grin Without a Cat”
(1977, Chris Marker)

This three-hour documentary is a vast intellectual history, putting the momentous events of 1968, in France and elsewhere, under Marker’s political microscope. (Spoiler alert: he instead locates the era’s key political events in 1967.) Aided by furious archival explorations and his expansively trenchant voice-over analysis, Marker filters a period of global upheaval through his editing table.

“Word Is Out”
(1977, Mariposa Film Group)

Considered the first documentary about gay people by openly gay people, this film features twenty-six individuals talking about their lives, at length, in detail, and with a complicit candor. In revealing their lifelong oppressions, they enact a liberation of their own voices and of society over all.

“The Police Tapes”
(1977, Alan and Susan Raymond)

Taking advantage of a relatively new technology, portable video equipment, the Raymonds embed with police officers at work in the South Bronx, which at the time had the city’s highest crime rate. They film the officers making rounds—at night—and talk with the visionary borough commander, Tony Bouza, whose progressive philosophy of policing embraces drastic social change.

“Poto and Cabengo”
(1979, Jean-Pierre Gorin)

Learning of a pair of San Diego twin girls who spoke a private language, the French director Jean-Pierre Gorin (who had moved to California) visited them and their family; his explorations of their linguistic issues revealed the family’s distinctive emotional world and cultural dynamic, while also evoking crucial aspects of American life over all—and Gorin’s own place in it.

“With Babies and Banners”
(1979, Lorraine Gray)

The documentary that should have been made in the nineteen-thirties, about women who played crucial roles in strikes at General Motors factories in 1936-37, was instead made in the nineteen-seventies; as directed by Gray (and produced by Gray, Lyn Goldfarb, and Anne Bohlen), it virtually revives those events by connecting interviews with the women, forty years after the fact, to an astounding selection of archival footage.

“Fannie’s Film”
(1982, Fronza Woods)

Fronza Woods’s short documentary brings to the screen a figure who was, at the time, virtually invisible in American movies: a sixty-five-year-old Black custodial worker. Blending interviews and observation, and using a soundtrack of Fannie telling her life story, Woods—an overlooked figure in American independent filmmaking, who has never had the opportunity to make a feature film—leaps ahead of documentary conventions, and reveals Fannie’s domestic and professional stories to be tales of epic heroism.

“Shoah”
(1985, Claude Lanzmann)

There is a before and an after: the agonizing twelve-year experience that went into the making of the nine-hour film, in which Lanzmann interviews survivors of the Holocaust, former concentration-camp guards, people who lived near the death camps, and historians—is clear onscreen, and the incommensurable events that the film details with an unprecedented, horrific specificity are evoked with a power beyond representation, thanks to Lanzmann’s arduously developed artistry.

“The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On”
(1987, Kazuo Hara)

As a soldier in the Japanese Army during the Second World War, Kenzo Okuzaki survived a virtually suicidal mission. Years later, after years of violent opposition to the regime, he travels throughout Japan to confront his former officers, and Hara collaborates with him to film these furious, even violent confrontations. The result is a clear-eyed record of a country’s ongoing, official indifference.

“Lightning Over Braddock”
(1988, Tony Buba)

After making several documentaries about his home town of Braddock, Pennsylvania, Buba filmed his own efforts to make a fictional film there, starring one of his former documentary subjects. What he ended up filming is a multilayered account of his failure to make it, one that unfolds the town’s local and large-scale political conflicts and a grimly comical account of his own life.

“Rock Hudson’s Home Movies”
(1992, Mark Rappaport)

In one of the most original of all essay-films, Rappaport brilliantly and empathetically connects Rock Hudson’s private life as a gay man and his public one as a movie star. A keen-eyed, clip-centered film, it is as much about the actor’s performances as about the act of movie viewing.

“Thank You and Good Night”
(1991, Jan Oxenberg)

Oxenberg seems to burst beyond the boundaries of the genre in this film about her grandmother, who was terminally ill at the time (and who died in the course of the filming). Using fantasy sequences, dioramas, a faux quiz show, and other imaginative devices, Oxenberg delves deep into family history, and into the cosmic mysteries of death. (The film should have launched her career; instead it was the last feature film she has directed to date.)

“The Devil Never Sleeps”
(1994, Lourdes Portillo)

Portillo revisits her home town of Chihuahua, Mexico, to investigate the unexplained death of her uncle, a local politician. She discovers her family's story to be a lurid melodrama of conflicting interests and political corruption, and she films it—and her childhood memories—with a labyrinthine style to match.

“A Plate of Sardines”
(1997, Omar Amiralay)

In this short film, Amiralay, a Syrian filmmaker (and one of the main interview subjects in Lawrence Wright’s piece in The New Yorker, from 2006, on Syrian cinema) considers Israel and the Nakba from the perspective of his childhood memories and family lore (including the titular dish), and considers the Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights and the destruction of the city of Quneitra from the perspective of moviemaking and moviegoing.

“Histoire(s) du Cinéma”
(1988-99, Jean-Luc Godard)

No filmmaker has identified so closely with the history of cinema than Godard, and no filmmaker has looked as deeply into it. This eight-part series, totalling four hours and made in the course of more than a decade, makes use of clips in a manner—involving his own hands-on video effects—no less daring or imaginative or exquisite than his creation of dramatic images. Nearly every other filmmaker’s approach to archival images seems bland and timid by comparison.

“Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property”
(2003, Charles Burnett)

One of the great fiction filmmakers, Burnett here deploys his dramatic artistry along with a historian’s ardor and a journalist’s probing interviews. The film is a work of cinematic historiography, examining how Turner’s life, and the rebellion he led, have been depicted and deformed over time. Burnett dramatizes historical events through a multiplicity of performances, and offers a glimpse at his own effort to film them.

“Fengming: A Chinese Memoir”
(2007, Wang Bing)

This clandestinely made three-hour film, featuring extended takes running up to an hour, is composed almost entirely of an in-depth interview of a woman who, with her late husband, was a victim of China’s political repression in the nineteen-fifties and sixties. It’s an exemplary work of the embodiment of history in language and the recovery of history in real time.

“The Beaches of Agnès”
(2008, Agnès Varda)

This great cinematic autobiography fuses memory and imagination in scenes that expose the artistry and the lifetime of experience that went into making them. Of all of Varda’s freely imaginative documentaries, it’s the one in which she was at her most personal, her most confessional, her most intimate, and her most inventive.

“Phyllis and Harold”
(2010, Cindy Kleine)

A virtual novel of a personal documentary, in which Kleine tells the story of her parents’ apparently happy marriage, and her own discovery of her mother’s extraordinary lifetime of secrets—of which Kleine remains, throughout the film, the uneasy guardian.

“The Missing Picture”
(2011, Rithy Panh)

Panh, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge regime, relies on small figurines and archival footage, as well as new interviews and his recollections, to evoke its depravities and his own family’s sufferings.

“This Is Not a Film”
(2011, Jafar Panahi)

Under house arrest, facing imprisonment, and banned from filmmaking, the Iranian director Jafar Panahi nonetheless made a film without, strictly speaking, doing so—using a planted camera and a cell phone to record his own life in isolation and to act out one of his own unfilmed scripts with a vital urgency that surpasses acting.

“Actress”
(2014, Robert Greene)

Greene, the crucial theoretician-in-action of the recent wave of self-implicating and self-questioning documentaries, here films his neighbor—the actress Brandy Burre (best known for her role on “The Wire”)—and finds her private life to be a grand and poignant melodrama.

“Field Niggas”
(2015, Khalik Allah)

Allah, filming and recording sound by himself, brings new energy to the observational documentary in this movie presenting his encounters with people he meets on 125th Street. With stylistic ingenuity and clarity of purpose, he reveals the practical pressures that they confront as well as the monumental intimacy of their lives.

“No Home Movie”
(2015, Chantal Akerman)

The solitude implicit in Akerman’s do-it-yourself filmmaking is also a story of family. Here she turns the camera on her relationship with her aging mother—their emotional closeness and physical distance—her own virtual exile from home as a result of her international career, and her experience of an existential solitude of tragic, horrific power.

“Coma”
(2016, Sara Fattahi)

Living in Damascus with her mother and grandmother when the city was under siege from the Syrian regime, Fattahi reveals family history and political anguish with a cinematographic eye and bold juxtapositions that seem wrenched physically from the catastrophe and subjectively from deep within.

“Rat Film”
(2016, Theo Anthony)

Starting from his own smartphone video recording of a rat in a garbage pail, the Baltimore-based filmmaker travels through town to probe the city’s ongoing problem of rodent infestation and finds, through passionate research and engaging interviews, long-hidden historical outrages appearing before his eyes.

“The Two Faces of a Bamiléké Woman”
(2016, Rosine Mbakam)

Mbakam’s film takes a classic premise—the return-home story—and expands it by way of extraordinary compositional skill and a keen sense of the connections between personal and societal events. Born in Cameroon and living in Belgium, she returns to her homeland to visit her mother and other relatives and, during her travels and discussions, discovers the forms of independence that Cameroonian women have asserted in the face of a patriarchal culture.

“Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?”
(2017, Travis Wilkerson)

A film that exemplifies the inseparability of the personal and the political, Wilkerson’s documentary investigates a racist killing perpetrated by one of his own ancestors in Alabama, in 1946. In looking into the crime, Wilkerson uncovers the area’s grim history, its legacy of civil-rights activism, its current-day political pathologies, and their inextricable connection to his family life today.

“Shirkers”
(2018, Sandi Tan)

Tan’s extraordinary act of personal and cinematic reclamation—or resurrection—is centered on footage recovered from a lost feature film that she and friends had made as teen-agers in Singapore, in 1992. Her elaborate detective work reveals vast currents of hidden history and fulfills a journey of self-liberation—plus, the original film she made or what she’s able to recover, proves to be a hidden masterwork.

“Infinite Football”
(2018, Corneliu Porumboiu)

The Romanian director, whose wry fictional films are centered on language and epistemology, turns the camera on his own extended discussions with a longtime acquaintance, a low-level bureaucrat with idiosyncratic ideas about the rules of soccer. With no effects or voice-over or archival footage, and focussing mainly on the low-stakes practicalities of boundary lines and offside definitions, Porumboiu reveals his subject to be a secret utopian visionary.

“One Child Nation”
(2019, Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang)

Wang, who was born in China and lives in the United States, returns to the village in Jiangxi province where she grew up and examines China’s former one-child policy from the perspective of her own family and neighbors. The result is an investigative film told from a intimate perspective, as Wang recounts her own childhood, discovers the stifled anguish of horror stories within her community (including ones that she lived through unawares), and exposes an international web of corruption that profited from compulsorily abandoned children.

“My First Film”
(2019, Zia Anger)

Anger’s first feature film, “Gray,” which she worked on from 2010 to 2012, was never released; this is her record of its making and shelving, along with the story of her life as it was altered by that protracted process. Anger delivers this story as a performance that she has given in a variety of theatre venues, projecting the screen of her laptop computer onto the movie screen as she manipulates images in real time, along with her live spoken commentary. Despite the spontaneity and singularity of those events, the result is a virtual movie (that only awaits recording and distribution).

“Dick Johnson Is Dead”
(2020, Kirsten Johnson)

Johnson, a cinematographer whose previous film, “Cameraperson,” was a different kind of cinematic self-portrait, here focusses on her changing relationship with her father. He is facing dementia and can no longer live alone, so she invites him to move in with her and documents their time together. In imaginative fantasy sequences (and depictions of her own filming of them), she also confronts, with gruesome good humor and a metaphysical twist, the eventuality of his death. It’s a documentary about the transformation of family life and love through the filming of it.

[Roscoe]

And there's this, where we are now obliged to wonder what exactly Keanu has on A.O. Scott:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/202 ... anu-reeves

4

Keanu Reeves
By A. O. SCOTT

Maybe you’re surprised to find Keanu Reeves so high on this list. But ask yourself: have you ever been disappointed when he showed up in a movie? Can you name one film that has not been improved by his presence? We’re talking about Ted Logan here. About Neo. John Wick. Diane Keaton’s also-ran love interest in “Something’s Gotta Give” (2003). Ali Wong’s also-ran love interest — a guy named Keanu Reeves! — in “Always Be My Maybe” (2019). Surely there is not another movie star who exhibits so much range while remaining so irreducibly and inscrutably himself.

Can you name one film that has not been improved by his presence?

But he has been curiously easy to underestimate. Like so much else in the ’90s, the appreciation of Keanu Reeves in the first phases of his career was hedged with irony. It was too easy to make fun of the blank, earnest confusion that defined his characters in “Point Break,” “The Devil’s Advocate” and the “Matrix” movies, to project their blankness onto him, to suppose that his still waters ran shallow.

He was always in on the joke, though. And never entirely joking. In middle age, he has risen to a new level of achievement, a zone where artlessness and self-consciousness converge. He’s one of our most credible action heroes, and also one of our most resourceful and inventive character actors. He has weathered beautifully, becoming at once sadder and more playful without losing the otherworldly innocence that was there from the start.

Is the melancholy, uxorious, dog-loving assassin in the “John Wick” movies a genre put-on, a paycheck gig, a midlife action workout? Probably. Of course. With (let’s say) Gerard Butler in the title role they would be slick, nasty throwaways. What Reeves does is give the franchise more gravity than it deserves, more humor than it needs, and the soul that it otherwise comprehensively lacks.

One of the delights of movie-watching in the past decade has been encountering him in unexpected guises. As some kind of post-apocalyptic cult leader known as the Dream in “The Bad Batch,” Ana Lily Amirpour’s 2017 crusty dystopian fantasia. As the chalk to Winona Ryder’s cheese in Victor Levin’s abrasive anti-rom-com “Destination Wedding” (2018). As the voice of a cat named Keanu in “Keanu” (2016).

There is more to the man than the sum of these parts, which are puzzles and koans, chapters in a perpetually updated manual in meta-modern movie stardom as a way of being. He’s not a perfectionist. He’s perfection itself. We were told a long time ago, and now maybe we can finally believe it: he’s the One.

[Holymanm]

movies made in 2020 have shaped the art of documentary making forever?

[pabs]

Twenty-first century noir


The term film noir may have come to refer to a body of US films made between 1941 and 1958, but it also conjures up a potent blend of cinematic style and dark material that still inspires directors around the world, among them the most formidable names in Hollywood and in arthouse cinema: Nolan, Lynch, Campion, Mann, Ceylan…

The 15 films below – updated from the 12 we presented in our February 2013 issue – represent an attempt to gauge the essence of noir in the 21st century – a genre that allows filmmakers to push the envelope of narrative construction, while also addressing the themes that haunt us, from memory loss to compulsive violence to transgressive sexuality.

Nick James, Sight and Sound, 27 November 2020



In the last two decades, film directors as significant as Christopher Nolan, David Lynch, Michael Mann, Jane Campion, Jacques Audiard, Lynn Ramsay and David Fincher have all made knowing, vivid use of the palette of moods that make up film noir. Yet before I started to look (at first, back in 2013) into noir’s survival as a tendency in 21st-century cinema, I would have said that its influence had waned.

Once an indelible genre, it seemed to have become merely a set of gestures the be applied to hybrid thrillers. The sourly romantic blend of fatalism, desire, danger, fantasy and mistrust that sparked off my own cinephilia when I spent much of the 1980s tracking down as many noirs of the 1940s and 50s as possible, seemed to have become only a passing thrill.

Certainly, the careworn figure of the hardboiled detective who “down these mean streets… must go”, as Raymond Chandler put it, went out of fashion as soon as Hollywood was obliged to pursue more fluid modern concepts of the masculine. Hollywood narratives in the noughties – key exceptions like Bond and Batman aside – preferred to offset the centrality of the existential loner, preferring buddy partnerships or the shared sparkle of ensemble power-play.

Audiences didn’t feel the need so much to identify with one lead character. In the globalised market, the moviegoing experience offered customers multiple viewpoints, a greater sense of community. Perhaps, also, it was decided that movies shouldn’t try to compete in existential terms with the online games industry, where each individual gamer (or shooter) is truly responsible for their body count or blood trail, an inhabiting of character films can’t yet rival.

Hollywood had, in any case, become commercially allergic to medium-budgets. The many dark-themed, transgressive thrillers that used to fall into into this modestly profitable cache lost their source of funding. And of course, with big screens and digital technology allowing television to be much more cinematic, great television series, from The Sopranos to Breaking Bad to The Bridge to Babylon Berlin, borrowed much of film noir’s seamy allure.

So the suspicion lingered that in cinema only the vestiges of noir remained, its hose laddered, its raincoat discarded in favour of the arthouse anorak – that it had become merely one of the set patterns of the postmodern grab-bag of popular thematics.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. Looking back with the blinkers off, noir has remained a constant source of fresh visions. I’m arguing that the 15 films below are as much a fragmentary guide to the concerns of our times as the original noirs were to those of wartime and post-war America.

Of course, seven or eight decades after the first acknowledged films noirs appeared, a filmmaker can’t use such an approach to crime themes without a revivifying angle. But that’s what’s so startling about the films below (and others I mention in passing): they are hybrid forms bursting with fresh perspectives. Which means that few, if any, of my examples are pure in the sense of the original canon, but then few of those originals contained all that noir allows.

Nitpicking of noir definition arose as soon as French critic Nino Frank first used the term ‘black film’ in 1946, borrowing from the série noire novels, and thereby mystifying the people who made those films, who thought they were making inexpensive moody thrillers.

Even after the classic period was established, critically, as having lasted from John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941) to Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958), it was still sometimes hard to figure out when a gangster film or a police procedural or a heist movie or a psychological thriller stopped being just what was written on the film cans and could be toe-tagged as bona fide film noir. For, as Paul Schrader has it, “film noir is not a genre… It is not defined… by conventions of setting and conflict, but rather by the most subtle qualities of tone and mood.” I’d cavil that those qualities were not always so subtle, but Schrader is otherwise dead-on.

Step outside that canon – most of which is listed in Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward’s Film Noir: An Encyclopaedic Reference to the American Style – and noir is wide-open to category disputes. A new problem arrived with the first major spate of self-conscious, post-definition noir films, such as Alan J. Pakula’s Klute (1971), Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973), Peter Yates’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), Dick Richards’s Farewell, My Lovely (1975) and Arthur Penn’s Night Moves (1975).

How do you draw a line between sincere tribute and kitsch parody in a form that has flaunted its pulpy, gaudy ‘low’ culture allegiances from the get-go? Thereafter, the handy tag ‘neo-noir’ separated the originals of 1941-58 from the endless numbers of films inspired by them. Yet, as the Wikipedia list of neo-noirs will confirm, that term is so indiscriminate as to be virtually useless, even as it demonstrates noir’s discreet pre-eminence.

Combing through likely titles for this round-up, I could have made claims for at least 50 noirish films made since 2000. To hone my selection criteria, I went for films whose use of noir moods seemed either formally inventive or apt about a contemporary anxiety.

I also looked for new uses of the usual elements: hardboiled literary sources; tough, morally ambiguous protagonists; first-person (possibly unreliable) voiceover narration; flashbacks and dream sequences; subjective camera viewpoints; subversions of classical narrative; melancholic saxophones and strings; a femme fatale or two; elements of expressionist lighting; a grainy dystopian angle on urban life. As might have been expected, with such a disparate set of signifiers, inherent contradictions soon bubbled like boiling tar.

As everyone knows, in routine hands, these noir stylistics are clichés. Filmmakers today must use them with caution. And there are other constraints. The theoretical writings that helped make watching noir so delectable in the 1980s also made filmmakers more knowing in their depiction of the archetypal characters, which sometimes makes them too self-conscious. Some of noir’s darkest imaginings have been co-opted by the serial-killer genre – which may be why films like Brick, Tell No One, and Widows find the night a less compelling metaphorical arena.

Yet in the 15 films below, noir retains much of its original capability to act as a conduit and pressure-relief valve for the contradictions and hypocrisies of the day. That so many of the lead characters experience their sense of self being fragmented, merged, replaced or destroyed is a common noir trope, but 21st-century examples take that dissolution much further (which may itself indicate that contemporary mistrust of the loner). The portrayal of fragile, shifting personalities and identities in Memento, Mulholland Dr., In the Cut and A History of Violence parallels anxieties about the way we create and manage our personas through social media.

Screen violence used as an aesthetic as well as a dramatic tool is a familiar trope, but in the pulp extravagance of Sin City and the macho indulgences of Drive the conflict between violence-as-outrage and violence-as-pleasure is tested to an unnerving, degree. Despite the three noirs with female protagonists here (In the Cut, Mulholland Dr and Widows) women tend to be more readily shaped for the fatale stereotype than they were in the 1970s ‘neo-noirs’ – a problem that missing examples like Baise-moi (2000) or Miss Bala (2011) wouldn’t have solved.

Smaller concerns – such as the creative convergence of film and television compellingly evidenced in Mulholland Dr. and Red Riding, or the way that films like Collateral use the new digital cameras to better capture how we see the city at night, or the sense given by Sin City that all cinema may be heading towards animation – provide further evidence of noir’s shape-shifting.

If the documentary aspects of noir have largely been left to the likes of The Wire and the Scandi-noir TV series, the feeling remains that at the extremes of the category, a high-school noir spoof like Brick can engage our attention to a real-life setting almost as well as a terrifying, poetic look into institutional child murder like Red Riding. Finally (and this was one of the aspects that intrigued me most when I set out) noir has again become a strong, if oblique, influence on international art cinema – as it once was on Godard, Melville, Fassbinder and Bertolucci, to name but four. As we shall see in the entries on Three Monkeys, and Long Day’s Journey Into Night, some of the most decisive films in international art cinema made in the last dozen years can be said to owe noir a debt.

I can’t claim that this collection is in any way definitive. One of the pleasures of noir is that everyone is loyal to their own transgressive feeling for it. Strong cases can be made for many missing films – even a completely different 15. I’ve found no place, for instance, for class-mobility semi-noirs such as Match Point (2005) or Andre Zvyagintsev’s Elena (2011).

But what I hope my selection establishes is that 21st-century noir is more than just the outer circle of the blast pattern of a cultural explosion that happened a lifetime ago.
The fact that there’s only one pastiche period piece here (The Black Dahlia) shows that noir has shrugged off its corny Bogart-in-a-raincoat image.

If we had to choose new poster boys and girls for noir, the habitual criminals would be Mark Ruffalo (see In the Cut) and Scarlett Johansson (The Black Dahlia, Match Point). But if you’re seeking the contemporary equivalent of Bogart’s cool, then for better or worse Ryan Gosling – a man who down these mean street must drive – has it. He’s not so much out of the past as in a less lonely place.

1. Memento Christopher Nolan, 2000

Loss of self

Noirs favour haunted memory and the dream-state, so it’s no surprise that so many begin with the protagonist in bed. When Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) is woken by a phone call, the traditional noir circumstance of the lone male explaining himself in voiceover begins, except that Shelby can’t do that because he suffers from anterograde amnesia, the inability to form new memories – a dilemma of some contemporary resonance.

The burgeoning prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease means that memory loss – a common noir event – is now a universal dread, and part of Memento’s fascination comes from watching how Shelby copes with his lack of knowledge or understanding in an action context.

While we sympathise with his vulnerability and essential isolation, the tone of the film isn’t sombre or mournful – it’s outgoing, almost jaunty. Shelby is a vigorous, fidgety person. It’s noticeable that everywhere the sunshine seems too bright, as if director Christopher Nolan is making light the opposite of enlightenment.

Shelby gears himself up for each new day by rehearsing certain drills, like a child refining his persona for school. He has a system of where to put things and how to interpret the instructions he’s left for himself the day before. This activity sometimes feels like a critique of the dependent way we run our lives via electronic media. He will only talk to people face to face, because he needs to look into their eyes to see if they’re telling the truth. He takes polaroids and tattoos the most important messages on his own body, a corporeal authentic stance that also feels very noughties (text on the body being a major recent preoccupation of Western artists). But we buy Nolan’s whole outlandish conceit, I would argue, because the noir crime-film conventions ease us into his dilemma.

As soon as Shelby finds a gun strapped to his leg and we understand there’s a revenge motive – someone killed his wife – we’re comfortable enough to cope with the film’s significant challenge: that the story unfolds in a dual but contrary manner, with colour sequences that succeed each other by going backwards in time, and black-and-white sequences that go forward.

Nolan has shown a consistent interest in identities threatened by noir-ish situations (in Insomnia, 2002, The Dark Knight, 2008 for instance), and having a narrative fold back on its storyline is, of course, a key noir trait; but reverse chronology is a more extreme strategy.

It’s curious that several films with a similar structure were made around the same fin de siècle time – Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter (1997), Lee Changdong’s Peppermint Candy (1999), Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible (2002), François Ozon’s 5x2 (2004) and a subplot of Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004).

Only one of those is particularly noir-ish: Irreversible, with its notoriously graphic underpass rape of Alex (Monica Bellucci), which is shot and lit much like a noir, with Bellucci dressed as if she were a femme fatalle.

What makes Memento significant in the canon is that it’s all about the dissolution of the central personality; what makes it radical is that this dissolution happened before we meet him. So we watch the piecing back together of a man who is a ghost to himself, who remains innocent of the memory of his doings, even as we learn who he is through what he’s done – in a way that he, despite being the first-person narrator, can never know. In that sense, it couldn’t be more dazzlingly postmodern.

2. Mulholland Dr. David Lynch, 2001

In every dream a nightmare

The most impressive parts of David Lynch’s career have been dedicated to extending the more unnerving effects of the noir palette on viewers’ psyches, but Mulholland Dr. is probably his most potent variation on noir themes – specifically, here, the career terror lurking beneath Hollywood’s bright facade. Like Memento it centres on memory loss, but there’s an excess of recall and imaginings here that’s almost the opposite of the repetition and reductiveness of Nolan’s film.

After the pure fun of a montaged jitterbug opening sequence, we see an image that couldn’t be more intensely noir: a shiny black limo crawling through the darkness of Mulholland Drive, high above Los Angeles, its red tail lights like eyes peering from the stygian gloom. The unnamed glamorous woman (Laura Elena Harring) in the back seat looks every inch a classic femme fatale, but she’s in danger. “What are you doing? We don’t stop here,” she asks as the driver and his partner turn with guns in their hands. Then a carful of joyriding teens collides with them and our heroine is the only survivor (car-crash survival is a Lynchian mini-theme). Now she’s suffering from amnesia as she staggers downhill (crossing Sunset Boulevard en route).

Her psyche, however, is not the one the film is most interested in. It’s the mind of Betty Elms (Naomi Watts), the ingenue actress whose apartment our amnesiac slips into, that we’re invited to slip into. When Betty asks the stranger for her name, she calls herself Rita after Rita Hayworth (she’s just seen a poster of Gilda on the wall).

As a particular kind of femme fatale, ‘Rita’ is meant to be unfathomable, but Betty, taking on the investigator role, forces the pace on trying to find out her identity. Since she’s a button-bright goody-two-shoes, this is perhaps the most prominent inversion in the film of noir typology.

It allows Lynch to pair Rita’s classic vamp and Betty’s cross between Doris Day and a Hitchcockian ice queen in a lesbian tryst that distracts us from the notional goal but offers motivation for the film’s extraordinary coda, when the upbeat Betty ‘becomes’ the bitter Diane Selwyn and ‘Rita’, famous actress Camilla. The relationship between them now mirrors the likes of All About Eve and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? – their transformations cued by the opening of a mysterious blue box.

Few noir films can match Lynch’s ability to make a seemingly super-ordinary environment seethe with uncanny dread. Since we know that the film was constructed out of the vestiges of a pilot for a TV series that never happened, with the coda drawn from some extra scenes added a year later, we accept the undeveloped nuances that put full comprehension beyond reach.

The same applies to the ambiguity around identity, which can be read several ways. You can argue, for instance, that Betty/Diane more or less behaves like a male protagonist, thereby undermining in turn the disruption of thriller norms the film seems to achieve – but then the identity-merging and swapping that occurs puts quicksand under that view too.

In the sense that you’re never altogether sure if you’re watching a dream or not, Mulholland Dr has some affinity with Scorsese’s near-noir Shutter Island (2009) – though the presentation of the latter film, inevitably, is more uptight.

3. In the Cut Jane Campion, 2003

Sex and the city

This sexual take on noir comes from combined female voices – those of author Susanna Moore and director Jane Campion. Moore’s ‘erotic mystery thriller’, published in 1996, shocked many by having its protagonist Frannie – a college professor teaching writing to ghetto kids – butchered at the end by the serial killer. Campion’s film, made in collaboration with Moore, goes for a more redemptive ending, but otherwise explores the erotic allure of danger for Frannie (Meg Ryan) with alacrity.

The professor hangs out in rough places so she can pick up ghetto speak for a book she’s publishing. When visiting a dodgy bar with a student, she accidentally witnesses a woman with long blue fingernails giving a man a blow job; his face is in shadow, but she notices a number and a playing-card tattooed on his wrist. She comes home to find a man lurking on the staircase of her apartment building, who turns out to be Detective Malloy (Mark Ruffalo), investigating the death of a woman who, we discover, had long blue fingernails.

Signalled as emotionally distant – at least in comparison with her more instinctive and vulnerable flatmate Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) – Frannie is also physically fragile and socially clumsy. Meg Ryan – playing against her romcom persona – gives her a New York edge of quirky curiosity, like a less kooky Woody Allen heroine, but it’s also intriguing to imagine what the film might have been like had Frannie, as originally intended, been played by producer Nicole Kidman. (She backed out, saying she couldn’t commit to something this emotional while in the throes of divorcing Tom Cruise.)

Not that Frannie holds back in the raunchy sex scenes in which she seems to lose herself with the very able Malloy. Even after he ignores her, suddenly, when his cop partner shows up, and she’s mugged on the street because she had to walk home alone in the rain, Frannie remains drawn to a policeman she half-suspects may be involved in the murder.

Class differences simmer along with the sexual tension. Malloy’s interest in Frannie could be casual curiosity about a more upscale person than himself, but it could equally be sinister. Ruffalo handles the ambiguity superbly, his behaviour by turns touchy, sensitive and highly observant. (Also in Collateral, Shutter Island and Zodiac, Ruffalo is clearly the go-to actor for 21st-century near-noir.)

This curious, intelligent woman’s yen for a potentially dangerous man cuts to the heart of noir’s often queasy appeal. The city’s underbelly as a dark playground for desire is explored more exorbitantly here even than in Mulholland Dr., but the film is also curious about the lighter side of single women in New York.

In the Cut adopts the point of view of people who too often find themselves alone in their apartment, bemoaning their inability to make contact with the world – the internet-dating generation’s predicament. Some of the chatter between Frannie and Pauline about sex and clothes seems like a mild satire of Sex and the City – then at the height of its television fame. But it’s the way that Campion, in scene after scene, juxtaposes powerful female desire with vulnerability that makes In the Cut a unique noir.

4. Collateral Michael Mann, 2004

The electronic night

Mann’s gun-for-hire drama is really about competence and social justice, but the way it changed the game for noir has more to do with its technical advances. Collateral was probably the first noir-ish film to fully employ the digital RED camera, which captures the electronic urban night in a way that’s closer to how our eyes adapt to see it than anything real film could achieve.

The film is mostly set in a taxi, an environment that allows us to view nocturnal downtown LA in its gleaming, yellowed corporate glory – roaming coyotes and all. Max (Jamie Foxx), an African-American who has dreams of building his own limo company, is the driver. An easeful figure, he couldn’t be less like the obvious noir taxi prototype of Travis Bickle.

The film starts calmly, with a nicely judged flirtation scene between Max and Annie (Jada Pinkett Smith), a lawyer who’s out of his league, but charmed by his honesty and ambition. After she gets out the next customer is Vincent (Tom Cruise), a white assassin with a schedule of potential witness murders that promises mayhem.

Like his fellow directors Nolan and Lynch, Mann has revisited noir like an addict. If his magisterial heist epic Heat (1995) seemed a hyper-charged summary of all his favourite dramatic situations from the myriad TV cop shows he’d worked on, as well as his TV film The Jericho Mile (1979) and the features Thief (1981) and Manhunter (1986), Collateral takes certain of those elements and plays them quietly, like mutterings in the corner of your mind.

Vincent, a Nietzschean figure, rides Max’s benign, good-guy worldview as hard as he does his cab (which gets wrecked in stages). The killer espouses a carpe diem life, and recapitulates the essence of Orson Welles’s “would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving” speech from The Third Man by asking whether Max’s life was changed one bit by the slaughter in Rwanda (and, of course, he’s saying that to a black man).

Vincent is the characteristic Mann warrior: the guy living at the extreme who has to hold on to his angst (he dresses like a yuppie, but was, we learn, raised by the state); he even has the same name as Al Pacino’s thief-taker in Heat. However dominant he is in the dialogue exchanges, Vincent is not the soul of the film. Yet Max, who is, cannot achieve his apotheosis without taking on some of Vincent’s attitude.

In one of the best scenes, Max must pretend to be the assassin in order to get information from the gangster who’s sponsoring the killings. He’s doing very badly at it, but then takes off his glasses and repeats one of Vincent’s laconic catch-phrases in an ice-cool manner. (This transference of personality is like a miniature of what happens in A History of Violence.) To be a success in the Collateral world, you need to become a reluctant killer against the grain of your conscience – a classic noir twist.

5. Brick Rian Johnson, 2005

High school confidential

Thanks to Brick we don’t have to imagine what it would be like to merge a John Hughes high-school movie with a low-budget noir. Of all the films included here, this one cleaves closest as a narrative to the early-1940s models.

Even the youth of the actors is less of a divergence than it might appear: Joseph Gordon-Levitt was 24 when he played Brendan, a soft-looking student type who, in the opening scene, is contemplating the corpse of his ex-girlfriend Emily (Emilie de Ravin), which lies in a storm-drain outlet. This made the actor about five years younger than, say, Robert Mitchum and Alan Ladd were when they first put on a raincoat. His female co-stars de Ravin and Nora Zehetner (who plays the femme fatale Laura) were also 24, and thus older by two years than Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep.

Brendan is not as soft as he looks. Writer-director Rian Johnson’s script – heavily influenced by Dashiell Hammett, who invented hardboiled detective fiction with his Continental Op stories – seems at first to give his hero the moralising knight-errant persona and sparkling wise-guy patter of Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. “I’ve got all five senses and I slept last night. That gives me the edge over all of you,” he tells a gaggle of would-be-threatening stoners. An early strategy sees him win a knockdown fight with a football jock, but soon he’s getting beaten up all the time, the way a private detective should be.

A flashback from the opening death scene to “two days previously” allows us to follow Brendan as he unravels the sordid tale of Emily, who wanted to be on the inside of the hooked-up narcotics set rather than “eat with” a loner like him. Eventually we find that Brendan is no knight after all – he ratted out his own dealing partner to the school because he’d lured Emily away.

If you go with it, the conceit of high-school kids speaking and behaving as if they were in Red Harvest works wonderfully. It also leads to some great gag scenes, such as when drug overlord ‘The Pin’ (Lukas Haas) tells the thoroughly beat-up Brendan, lying in his basement, that they should return to the real world; we next find them sitting in the kitchen being given milk and cookies by the overlord’s doting mother. Another fine moment sees Brendan come on like the DA as he bullies the vice-principal, forcing him to make a mutual back-scratching deal.

Noir is easy to spoof, but it’s hard to do it well. Brick is brilliant at it and not as blatant as Shane Black’s elegantly airy Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005). But don’t be fooled by the high-school setting into thinking Brick is cutesy. It remains true to drug-scene violence and the heartbreak that makes Brendan both a tough guy against type and a highly intelligent provocateur of mayhem. One nice twist is that his intelligence-gathering techie partner is called Brain, and may not actually exist outside Brendan’s head, which means he’s been talking to himself even more than the average tough guy.

6. Sin City Robert Rodriguez & Frank Miller, 2005

The valve wide open

Sin City brought noir back close to its pulp-magazine origins, using green-screen CGI technology to exactly recreate the exquisitely etched, near-monochrome ink-splash world of comic-book legend Frank Miller’s Sin City stories, four of them, all set in Basin City, a seething dystopian hellhole.

The actors (Bruce Willis et al) are shot and lit by Rodriguez to merge seamlessly into animated panels from Miller’s pages. For anyone who’s ever been a comic-book fan, it’s an exhilarating experience – one that’s much truer to the Pop Art quality of, say, the Marvel or DC superhero comics of the 1960s than any ‘realistic’ Marvel adaptation.

There’s apt usage of Miller’s trademark white-out-of-black effects: white blood, the rectangles of sticking plaster on the rock-like head of doomed thug Marv (Mickey Rourke), the figure of Dwight (Clive Owen) falling as a flat white shape against black tar. Similarly enjoyable are the privileged small details – eyes, a bed, a dress – picked out in colour.

Transparently immersed in a graphic-novel vice world, Sin City pushes its levels of violence – and show nearly all women as lissome, semi-clothed or naked S&M vamps – to a degree you’d never get away with in a realistic-looking movie. The film is a relentless hymn to bloodlust, with a sidebar sentimental concern for romantic promises.

At the scene of the massacre of bad guys at the end of the fourth story ‘The Big Fat Kill’, wanted murderer Dwight – who has engineered the doom of gangsters trying to take over the prostitute-run Old Town – describes his machine-gun toting former lover thus: “The Valkyrie at my side is shouting and laughing with the pure hateful bloodthirsty joy of the slaughter… and so am I.”

Marv, the implacable super-tough hunk of ‘The Hard Goodbye’ section, extols the pleasures of torture. It’s comical – in the gallows sense – to see how blatantly Rodriguez takes noir’s position as a site of repressed and undirected desires and opens up the valve.

As with A History of Violence, there’s a mock-epic quality to the way graphic-novel voiceover description and speech-bubble dialogue is written that grants further distance from any plausible real world, allowing greater licence. Sin City is fantasy fiction that caters blatantly to the urges of young males, cashing in, too, on many adults’ enduring fondness for past pleasures.

7. A History of Violence David Cronenberg, 2005

Gun control

Although it mimics the 1947 classic Out of the Past in its premise of a mild-mannered, seemingly innocent small-town guy whose former life of crime reclaims him, A History of Violence only confirms its noir predilection in the last section, when Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) returns to Philadelphia, his native territory, to finally erase his former criminal identity as crazy Joey Cusack. Up until then it’s as much a family drama about a man who becomes a local hero when he foils an armed robbery at his diner by killing the two perpetrators, only to find that press photos attract the attentions of gangsters from back East.

Folksy touches in Cronenberg’s film remind one of the soap-opera elements in Twin Peaks; and like Sin City, the dialogue (no voiceover here) has its roots in a graphic novel (by John Wagner and Vince Locke), from which screenwriter Josh Olson’s script was adapted.

The film has some of the portentousness of Sam Mendes’s 2002 gangster-noir graphic-novel adaptation Road to Perdition (a film stylistically that sits about halfway between this and Sin City). Cronenberg’s focus, however, is on Tom Stall’s Janus personality, and in what the irruption of violence into ‘ordinary’ life does to his lawyer wife Edie (Maria Bello), teenage son Jack (Ashton Holmes) and young daughter Sarah (Heidi Hayes).

There’s a fascinating contrast of role-playing between a pre-revelation sex scene with Tom in which Edie dresses up as a teenage cheerleader to liven up their wedding anniversary, and a more primal post-violence coitus on the stairs of their ‘little house on the prairie’.

The moment when Edie realises who she’s been married to for so long is typical of the dialogue and the dilemma:

Tom: “What do you think you heard?” Edie: “It’s not what I heard… It’s what I saw. I saw Joey. I saw you turn into Joey right before my eyes. I saw a killer, the one Fogarty warned me about. You did kill men back in Philly, didn’t you? Did you do it for money? Or did you do it because you enjoyed it?” Tom: “Joey did, both. I didn’t. Tom Stall didn’t.”
The final scene, when Tom returns to this once-placid home in Millbrook, Indiana, shows that the re-emergence of his violent self is regarded precisely as if he’d had an adulterous affair, and he’s offered the same sort of forgiveness (much as returning kidnap victim Nicholas Brody constantly was in the series Homeland).

A History of Violence can be read as a film about gun control. Here is the Midwestern citizen, who’s fine as long you treat him decent, but will defend his own to the death. So the Stall family’s shotgun refers to the one in so many US homes – and to the history that put it on the wall rack or in the gun cabinet.

8. Tell No One (‘Ne le dis à personne’) Guillaume Canet, 2006

Sunshine noir

Canet’s French adaptation of US writer Harlan Coben’s urgent thriller is perhaps the most difficult of my selections to justify. For such a dark-themed narrative – it has paedophilia, bent cops, sadistic assassins, street gangs and corrupt politicians – Tell No One seems to go out of its way to be sunny and provincial. Though half of the film was shot in Paris, even its urban scenes are mostly spacious and leafy.

The hospital where conscientious paediatrician Dr Alex Beck (François Cluzet) works is in Clignancourt, at the northern tip of Paris. It seems a bubble of calm professionalism – except when the thug-like Bruno (Gilles Lellouche) turns up with his haemophiliac son and won’t let anyone but Alex touch him. Alex has a big fluffy Briard dog, and his sister Anne is a show jumper. His family come from the Yvelines region, near the Rambouillet forest. They couldn’t be more bourgeois or more French.

Tell No One begins in that forest, eight years before the main action. After an outdoor family dinner, Alex and his wife Margot (Marie-Josée Croze) take their annual swim in a lake just as the sun is going down. As it grows dark, Margot swims away from the raft where she and Alex have been having a small tiff. He admires her body as she gets out of the water and stands on the jetty. A moment later he hears her scream, swims for the shore and – as he’s climbing the ladder – gets knocked out and falls back into the water. When he comes round, he finds Margot has been murdered.

A jump forward to the present takes us to what screenwriter’s call ‘the inciting incident’, when Beck gets an email with a video clip that shows Margot is still alive – just as the police discover two new male bodies at the lake. Soon Alex is the main suspect in several murders. So Tell No is a classic wrong-man thriller, right?

No, not in my book. Apparently, when he rang Coben, director Guillaume Canet was persuasive about how he would adapt the film. When a planned Hollywood version collapsed, Coben (who appears briefly in the film) offered it to Canet, because, he said, unlike the Hollywood execs, the director understood it was a love story first and a thriller second.

Though the romance in Coben’s novel is pretty cheesy, transferring it to France at least makes Beck’s undying passion for a seemingly dead woman seem part of a tradition of amour fou. Given that it’s a story of redeemed love, rather than the usual doomed affair, the sunniness of the mise en scène makes sense; but the desperation with which Alex clings to his romantic illusions while bluffing a banlieue thug suggests that he could find his own history of violence.

Tell No One is also here to represent the renaissance of the Europe-set thriller. Its soul was reborn with John Frankenheimer’s Ronin (1998), setting the tonal template for Doug Liman’s The Bourne Identity (2002).

Of course Frankenheimer and Liman are US directors, but they rekindled a taste for the muted-palette, existential Euro-thriller that has produced such treats as Niels Arden Oplev’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009 – so ably remade in the US by David Fincher), Götz Spielmann’s Revanche (2008) and Alberto Rodriguez’s Marshland (2014).

The remarkable career of Jacques Audiard is also a factor. His Hitchcock tribute Read My Lips (2001), The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005) – a brilliant remake of James Toback’s Fingers (1977) – his prison movie A Prophet (2009) and his Tamil Tiger immigrant’s survival tale Dheepan (2015) all feed off noir atmospherics. Tell No One, however, is a different proposition: a noir drenched in sunshine.

9. The Black Dahlia Brian De Palma, 2005

Old school

If there’s one pulp author of recent times who remained true to the darker impulses of noir it’s James Ellroy. Two of the ‘LA Quartet’ of reputation-making novels published between 1987 and 1992 – The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential and White Jazz – have been made into features: illustriously with Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential (1997), and elegantly with De Palma’s The Black Dahlia, in a work of similar scale and ambition, yet with more of a yen for the 1940s and 50s wardrobe.

The film centres on a love triangle between two police partners, Dwight ‘Bucky’ Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) and Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart) – former boxers who bonded after a staged-for-their-bosses rematch – and Blanchard’s girlfriend Katherine ‘Kay’ Lake (Scarlett Johansson), whom he stole from a sadistic racketeer he saw imprisoned.

When Blanchard engineers a transfer for him and Bleichert to a special team investigating the brutal torture and death of young wannabe actress Elisabeth ‘Betty’ Short – soon known to the press as ‘The Black Dahlia’ – Bleichert starts to worry about him. “He’s all bent out of shape on this dead girl,” he tells Kay. Sweet in his brow-furrowing, Hartnett is perfect for these observant early scenes, but lacks the gravitas to handle the shifts in tone to come. The story only gets more baroque and perverse, building up to a truly hard-to-credit convoluted climax.

This is the only 1940s-50s period piece included here, and in terms of old-school Hollywood glamour, few can do better (with a half-reasonable budget) than De Palma. Despite its extremely dark story, The Black Dahlia keeps a light tone most of the time, and avoids spoofery, creating a grandiose, grit-free kind of pastiche with gorgeous melancholic orchestral interludes.

If De Palma’s lushness at times seems an odd equivalent to the clipped, staccato urgency of Ellroy’s prose, it does sweeten the pill of the Black Dahlia’s revolting destiny. (Ellroy’s best book, the autobiographical My Dark Places, in which he pays for the real-life 1958 murder of his mother to be reinvestigated and reveals his own dangerous obsession with the real-life Dahlia case, has never been adapted for film.)

What made such an operatic cop drama refreshing to see in 2006, despite the overly relaxed performances of its cast, was its contrast to the cultural talking-point of the day: television’s Baltimore-based The Wire (2002-8). Most cop dramas since have cleaved closer to social realism.

Ellroy’s novels reveal the deep longstanding corruption that’s part of the LAPD’s heritage. Other dramas were quick to exploit the late-1990s Rampart Division scandal that revealed the depth of that cess pit. TV’s The Shield (2002-8), running in parallel to The Wire, showed LAPD cops operating without restraint (much like the Yorkshire police of David Peace’s Red Riding novels).

Ellroy and writer-director Oren Moverman subsequently zoned in on the same material for Rampart (2011); David Ayer’s End of Watch (2012) is more respectful of front-line cops (if not their colleagues). But films about the LAPD can’t seem to dodge the stink in the way that, say, James Gray’s We Own the Night (2007) romanticises the NYPD with its Cimino-like love of milieu and the crowd scene – or how David Fincher makes a workaday, diligent public servant out of San Francisco’s Inspector Dave Toschi (Ruffalo again) in his superb serial-killer procedural movie Zodiac (2007).

10. Three Monkeys (‘Uç Maymun’) Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2008

Rolling thunder

Best known as a director of superb international festival art cinema, Ceylan has never been shy of borrowing moves from genre cinema. In particular he uses the shock reveal of ghost stories. You can see it when the lead character falls asleep and imagines being suffocated by sand on the beach in Climates (2006), and again with the ghostly appearance of the central family’s young son – who was drowned before the film begins – at moments when family honour is compromised.

Three Monkeys, though, is wholeheartedly a noir. It begins, like the early scene in Mulholland Dr, with a rear shot of a car driving at night – here through a thunderstorm. The driver is Servet (Ercan Kesal), a relatively wealthy businessman trying to move into politics, who’s having trouble staying awake.

He kills a pedestrian by accident and flees when a second car comes, knowing they got his licence-plate number. Being arrested will destroy his political career, so he calls his driver Eyüp (Yavuz Bingöl), and persuades him to take the rap in exchange for his continued salary and a lump sum when he gets out of prison.

Eyüp’s family are relatively poor, living literally on the wrong side of the railway tracks. Hacer (Hatice Aslan), Eyüp’s attractive wife, dotes on their feckless teenage son Ismail (Ahmet Rifat Sungar).

When Ismail fails his college exams, he asks Hacer to persuade Servet to lend him the money for a car, so he can work as a school driver. Though she gets the money, Servet makes a pass at her and soon they’re having an affair. Ismail discovers this, but doesn’t confirm his father’s sharp suspicions. When Eyüp gets out, the film moves broodingly, inexorably towards murder.

The cinematography is high-contrast, textured with rough skin, inky shadows and bruised purple skies. The plot follows a fatalistic downward spiral that’s like a shadow version of A History of Violence, in that all the family collude not to acknowledge the transgressions they’ve committed. There’s barely anything approaching an action scene. Everything is concentrated on Chekhovian interactions between people, all shrouded close by a very Turkish sense of noir.

Three Monkeys stands here as the most obvious example of the regular use of the noir palette by international auteurs. (Sharunas Bartas’s 2010 Eastern Drift – a realist tale of the downfall of a petty thug – would have worked equally well.)

A list of 21st century noir-influenced arthouse films would also include Robert Guédiguian’s La ville est tranquille (2000), Fabián Bielinsky’s Nine Queens (2000), Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible, Michael Haneke’s Hidden (2004), Béla Tarr’s The Man from London (2007), the Dardenne brothers’ The Silence of Lorna (2008), Paul Verhoeven’s Elle (2016) and many others.

11. Red Riding: The Year of Our Lord 1974 Julian Jarrold, 2009

Brit punk noir

Nothing like Red Riding had ever come out of British film or television before, although you can find fragments of novelist David Peace’s poetic approach to an underworked period of British crime history in all sorts of punkish cultural artefacts: music, song lyrics, posters. Peace’s incandescent Blake-as-a-tabloid-writer style in his novels 1974, 1977, 1980 and 1983 is unique in its combination of words-as-bullets, indelible imagery and zealous fury at Yorkshire police corruption and violence.

Tony Grisoni’s vivid scripts for the trilogy (which missed out 1977, to keep costs down for commissioners FilmFour) were written to be shot as films – which is how they were first experienced in the US – but were seen by most people in Britain on Channel 4. This cross-platform fluid identity – one that affects several noir works here – does not diminish how cinematic these works are, or how much they raised the game for both kinds of crime drama in the UK.

I’ve chosen the opener of the trilogy to represent the whole because it is the most straightforwardly noir-ish in plot and tone. In 1974, a pre-teen schoolgirl, Claire Kemplay, goes missing, and cocky young Yorkshire Post reporter Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield), back from an unsuccessful sojourn down south, thinks the police are ignoring links between several cases. When his colleague Barry Gannon (Anthony Flanagan) warns him that “there are death squads in every city”, Eddie dismisses him as paranoid.

After Kemplay’s body has been found – she’s been tortured and raped, and has swan’s wings stitched into her back – Eddie is sidelined by his editor, and the police swoop on a Roma site that happens to have been earmarked for development by local developer John Dawson (Sean Bean). But Eddie can’t keep his nose out, and when Gannon is found dead, he presses a connection between Dawson and Paula Garland (Rebecca Hall), one of the mothers grieving for a murdered daughter, to the point where the police work him over and warn him off. It all leads to a classic confrontation that’s as Yorkshire as batter mix yet as cinematic as anything else in this article.

When 1974 was about to be transmitted, I praised its “crisp, energised bleakness”, adding that “it looks like a dream collision of early Wim Wenders and prime Mike Hodges” and writing about Brit noir’s “air of fatal misery” – a tradition that loops back to Roeg and Cammell’s Performance (1970), Hodges’s Get Carter (1971) and Sidney Lumet’s The Offence (1972). I stand by that appraisal.

The later films in the trilogy play out in the shadow of the real-life Yorkshire Ripper case and go further into fascist levels of police activity and collusion with paedophiles – all of which has an even darker ring after so much has come out about the Yorkshire Police-related cases of Jimmy Savile and the Hillsborough disaster.

Crime films of all sorts have boomed in the UK in recent years, a run that probably started with the comedy geezer gangsterism of Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998). Several films stand out from that ruck, including Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast (2000), Shane Meadows’s Dead Man’s Shoes (2004), Paul Andrew Williams’s London to Brighton (2006), Ben Wheatley’s Down Terrace (2009) and Kill List (2011), Noel Clarke’s London Crime Trilogy (2006-2016) and Sally El Hosaini’s My Brother the Devil (2012) – you can add your own examples.

But what makes Red Riding so tantalising is that its aesthetic ambition made it possible to imagine a British television series to rival The Wire or Denmark’s phenomenal noir whodunnit The Killing. Possible, that is, if you could find the money and TV-company confidence to back such outlandish talents as were brought together for the trilogy. Sadly, that ain’t gonna happen.

12. Drive Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011

Ultra-violence

Refn’s Copenhagen-set Pusher trilogy, made between 1996 and 2005, established the director as a purveyor of highly realistic and violent drug-gang films soaked by a noctural drizzle of constant fear and tension – and laced with the bleakest strain of black humour.

Two English-language films made quickly in Britain, the prison psychobiography Bronson (2008) and the Viking saga Valhalla Rising (2009), got him the attention of movie star Ryan Gosling, which is how he got to make this adaptation of James Sallis’s neo-noir page burner.

I’ve avoided the term neo-noir for most of this article, but use it here to distinguish what it conjures in my own head. Rather than denoting anything too down-at-heel, neo-noirs usually are in love with gleaming surfaces, mirrored skyscrapers and the like: William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), Kathryn Bigelow’s Blue Steel (1989) and Michael Mann’s Heat (1995) are buffed and waxed in this way.

Drive is also – for the first half of its 100 minutes at least – a tribute to the mythic street epic noirs Walter Hill made in that run from The Driver (1978), through The Warriors (1979) and 48hrs (1982) to Streets of Fire (1984).

Ryan Gosling plays the ‘Driver’ – exactly what Ryan O’Neal’s character is called in Hill’s movie of the same name (which itself was inspired by Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï): a young man of few words and a dazzling stare who works as a movie stuntman and sometime getaway driver.

The film begins with this nicely definitive line of patter: “You give me the time and the place, I give you a five-minute window. Anything happens in that five minutes and I’m yours. No matter what. Anything happens a minute either side of that and you’re on your own.”

Its opening sequence is pure, exquisite noir tribute, with an LA night at least as evocative and exciting as that in Collateral, and the driver’s ordinary-looking but souped-up Chevvy playing vanishing games with police choppers and black-and-whites.

Sadly, Refn’s film then settles into a gawky love triangle that unfeasibly casts the classily elfin Carey Mulligan as the wife of a serious felon doing time. All the excitement of a film ostensibly about fast cars is allowed to fizzle out through that unlikely bit of casting.

Refn either isn’t interested in what cars can do, or he didn’t have the budget to find out. He prefers his figures to stand perfectly still, framed staring in awe at whatever’s just happened, as if in a trance. And in any Refn film: sooner or later there’ll be moments of extreme violence.

Sure enough, in a lift scene, the cool, good-looking, neatly dressed Driver shows how nasty he can be. A smooch with Mulligan precedes the Driver stamping and crunching an assassin’s face to pulp – a scene as hard to watch as the brutality meted out by Casey Affleck’s Lou Ford to Jessica Alba’s Joyce Lakeland in The Killer Inside Me (2010), although maybe not quite as full on as the revolting skull-crunching performed by Vince Vaughan’s character in S. Craig Zahler’s Brawl in Cell Block 99 (2017).

The opprobrium Michael Winterbottom’s film attracted seemed to miss Refn altogether, perhaps because nobody expects anything else from him. Thus Drive for me looks like the real thing, but has no power under the bonnet. I include it here because, for ten glorious opening minutes, it captures the mythic quality of Hill’s best films. And I’m glad that’s still grabbable.

13. You Were Never Really Here Lynne Ramsay, 2017

PTSD

My last two choices are marked depictions of mental dissolution or abandon that portray the lives of their protagonists as continuous noir. Lynn Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here, adapted from Jonathan Ames’s crystalline pulp novella, centres on a violent man suffering from a severe form of PTSD that has him zone out for seconds at a time, afflicted by images of past trauma.

Joe (Joaquin Phoenix) is an ex-serviceman living a kind of civilian black ops untraceable life as a private heavy specialising in rescuing kids from rings of paedophiles. His method with the captors involves the brutal use of hammers, images from which, in a film that favours close-ups of objects, Ramsay’s camera steps away. They’re shown at a distance, for instance, on CCTV cameras. There’s no glorying in blood just photographic chill, and that recoil from horror, for me, makes them all the more powerful than the close-up splatter of S. Craig Zahler or Tarantino.

Noir here is gorgeous gleaming city lights flashing by shot from taxis and hire cars, piss-yellow interior corridors, long shots of near-empty buildings with a single implacable figure moving through them, a fragmentary dicing of things that catch Joe’s haunted attention.

Phoenix, sporting a shaggy beard and a wary, impassive mien, sculpted his body into that of a shambling multi-scarred muscle man with a gut, whose memory taunts him not with the absence suffered by Memento’s Leonard Shelby but with jagged flashbacks that leave him frozen and enervated in the moment.

Anonymity protects his fragile existence, but secrecy is compromised when, on entering the house he shares with his mother (whose abuse by his father is the source of his own trauma) a kid who works at the supermarket where he picks up his work messages sees him.

When his next job – ostensibly rescuing a politician’s daughter – goes wrong, that moment of being spotted leads to a classic noir bind: Joe, having lost everything that matters to him attempts a suicide by drowning that becomes a rebirth. We assume then that vengeance is on his mind and there’s a young innocent to save but what unfolds purposefully undermines the man’s-gotta-do element of fatalist biblical justice.

Throughout, the film, through Joe’s eyes, freezes on close-ups of random human faces, as if the camera is looking for evidence of trauma in every passer-by. As befits an age when therapy and protection of the vulnerable are prime concerns, You Were Never Really Here is more interested in revealing the causes of crime and the damage inflicted than in crime itself, the psychological fore and aftermath of events that noir, with its flashbacks and its anxious scanning for what’s coming, is uniquely capable of accommodating but rarely embraces.

14. Widows Steve McQueen, 2018

Black and white

Several Black American directors seized the opportunity to use elements of noir in the 1990s: Carl Franklin with One False Move (1992) and Devil in a Blue Dress (1995); John Singleton with Boyz n the Hood (1991), Mario Van Peebles New Jack City (1991) and Bill Duke Deep Cover (1992).

Infamously, that surge of fresh Black talent was neither nurtured nor encouraged by Hollywood and one consequence is that Black American directors seem less interested in a genre that confines them to portraying criminals types. But in Widows, British director Steve McQueen, working with American crime fiction novelist Gillian Flynn as co-screenwriter, successfully turns that problem inside out, using multiple perspectives to expose the political structure of graft and intimidation that cements criminality into the fabric of American politics.

With its brief intimate first shot, the film makes an immediate statement of the contrasting skin tones of Viola Davis and Liam Neeson as they kiss in bed of white sheets in an apartment of white walls. Yet what’s most striking about Widows is not the difference but the moral near-equivalence of its venal participants.

The film is drawn from the 1980s British television series of the same name, whose basic conceit has not been changed. A team of male bank robbers gets killed while on a job. Under pressure to replace the money lost, their widows resolve to mount a heist themselves using chief robber Harry Rawlings’s detailed playbook.

But if the difference between good and bad here is just shades of economic necessity, that’s not to say the blatant distinction between a race kept down since slavery and one that presumes the continuance of its privilege of power isn’t present. It inflects every spoken word.

Of all the Neo-noirs here Widows is the film which best offers that greater sense of community I mentioned earlier. Partly this comes from our protagonists being women forced to band together against their better judgement and partly it’s to do with the admittedly rickety subplot: the election for Alderman in a South Side Chicago district that pits a corrupt white continuity candidate Jack Mulligan (Colin Farrow) against an equally corrupt Black hopeful Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry).

Veronica (Davis), ostensible widow to Rawlings (Neeson), is immediately threatened by Manning whose campaign money it was that was stolen. She recruits two others, Linda (Michelle Rodriguez), a Latino, and Alice (Elisabeth Debicki), of Polish origin – the fourth Widow, Amanda (Carrie Coon), is excused because she has a recently born baby.

The urgent sense conveyed of their desperate vulnerability to an imminent fate is what makes Widows most noirish.

As well as handling his first crime film with the directness of a Don Seigel, McQueen is also adroit at the shorthand of nodding to existing crime films. The casting of Neeson as Harry Rawlings, the homme fatale, makes use of his implacable persona from the Taken films, and his character has echoes of Gillian Flynn’s most famous creation, Amy, the disappeared wife in Gone Girl (2014).

In Neo-noir terms, setting a heist movie in Chicago puts the film in Michael Mann territory and there are a few echos of Heat, not least a brief coffee shop encounter between Davis and Coon, two hard women talking tough less sentimentally than De Niro and Pacino.

15. Long Day’s Journey into Night Bi Gan, 2018

In the mood for reverie

At Cannes in 2004, so powerfully did Wong Kar-wai’s 2046 inhabit my mind that I wandered the back streets of that tourist town feeling that everything I saw was an extension of that film as I walked in a kind of trance of echoed moments and memories.

The only filmic equivalent I’ve ever had of that rich post-screening experience was watching Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2018), a labyrinthine, noir-inspired dream-logic film that would be easy to dismiss as all style – especially as you’re given 3D glasses and told to use them only at the moment the protagonist puts his on. I’ve chosen it here for its radical reworking of noir language but it also stands for the phenomenal influence of Wong Kar-wai.

No one has done more to revive and update the glamour and allure of noir cinematography and settings than Wong and his collaborator designer/editor William Chang, although this century they’ve mostly used them in gorgeous melancholy romantic dramas such as In the Mood For Love (2000), 2046 (2004) and My Blueberry Nights (2007). Wong is just one – the crucial one – of the many influences acknowledged happily by Bi Gan; prominent among the others are Resnais, Tarkovsky, Lynch and Apichatpong.

Long Day’s Journey Into Night is unquestionably a noir but it has no coherent narrative plot line. What it seeks to do and succeeds in achieving in two parts (like Mulholland Dr.) is an evocation of the pull of fractured memory followed by an immersion in a nocturnal dream state.

“Anytime I saw her I knew I was in a dream again,” says protagonist Luo Hongwu (Huang Jue), a former casino manager, referring to Wan Qiwen (Tang Wei), a femme who proved fatale in the past when her gangster ex-boyfriend killed her lover, Luo’s friend Wildcat (Lee Hong-Chi).

Luo himself questions whether his memories of his own affair with her, in which she’s always wearing a green dress, are real or not. He’s thinking about death because he’s just returned home to Kaili (Bi Gan’s home town in the sub-tropical Guizhon region of South West China) for his father’s funeral and about Wan Qiwen because he’s hoping to find her there.

This first pre-3D part of the film revels in the insubstantial, in slippages of time and identity, in half-heard mutterings, and flashes of recognition. The second part begins when Luo, with time to kill, enters a cinema and puts on his 3D glasses. Thereafter, in one continuous 50-minute take, via scooter and zip wire, we descend first to a pool hall managed by a woman who might be Wan Qiwen, then on downwards via levitation to a village karaoke contest where trouble is brewing.

At nearly every moment of this dazzlingly choreographed shot one is beguiled by some detail or wowed by the ever-morphing spectacle. Long Day’s Journey Into Night is at the absolute forefront of rethinking how cinema works, and it shows how the reconfigured language of noir can successfully describe states of consciousness never realised before on screen.

[Joks Trois]

Nolan is not happy about Warner's streaming plans for 2021.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ ... -bros-plan

[thoxans]

always a joy to behold egotistical hollywood narcissists wallowing in self-important temper tantrums

the good news is now i can ignore nolan's movies on not just the big screen, but the small screen as well!

[pabs]

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/arc ... 20/617351/

[flip]

am i the only one who thought da 5 bloods was terrible

[greennui]

https://twitter.com/Slant_Magazine/stat ... 7211166720

[rischka]

interesting stuff on this list ^ many i never heard about but the #1 film will soon wend it's way to a folder near you (haven't watched it yet)

[Holymanm]

"democratization [sic] of cinema" = voting in the rene clair poll

(i've only seen one of his movies, so unfortunately i can't participate in democracy)

[pabs]

That Slant list is really, really interesting! Thanks greennui.

It bears posting out in full, so here it is:

50. On the Rocks (Sofia Coppola)
49. She Dies Tomorrow (Amy Seimetz)
48. Heimat Is a Space in Time (Thomas Heise)
47. Boys State (Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss)
46. Red, White and Blue (Steve McQueen)
45. The 40-Year-Old Version (Radha Blank)
44. I Was at Home, But… (Angela Schanelec)
43. The Assistant (Kitty Green)
42. The Invisible Man (Leigh Whannell)
41. Pahokee (Patrick Bresnan and Ivete Lucas)
40. I’m Thinking of Ending Things (Charlie Kaufman)
39. Shirley (Josephine Decker)
38. Donbass (Sergei Loznitsa)
37. Ham on Rye (Tyler Taormina)
36. Da 5 Bloods (Spike Lee)
35. Joan of Arc (Bruno Dumont)
34. The Painter and the Thief (Benjamin Ree)
33. The Vast of Night (Andrew Patterson)
32. Possessor (Brandon Cronenberg)
31. Another Round (Thomas Vinterberg)
30. Liberté (Albert Serra)
29. Nomadland (Chloé Zhao)
28. This Is Not a Movie (Yung Chang)
27. The Twentieth Century (Matthew Rankin)
26. Ghost Tropic (Bas Devos)
25. The Wolf House (Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña)
24. Welcome to Chechnya (David France)
23. Sorry We Missed You (Ken Loach)
22. The Whistlers (Corneliu Porumboiu)
21. Tesla (Michael Almereyda)
20. Zombi Child (Bertrand Bonello)
19. Yourself and Yours (Hong Sang-soo)
18. Tommaso (Abel Ferrara)
17. Collective (Alexander Nanau)
16. Never Rarely Sometimes Always (Eliza Hittman)
15. Bacurau (Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles)
14. The Wild Goose Lake (Diao Yinan)
13. Space Dogs (Elsa Kremer and Levin Peter)
12. American Utopia (Spike Lee)
11. Martin Eden (Pietro Marcello)
10. The Cordillera of Dreams (Patricio Guzmán)
9. Fourteen (Dan Sallitt)
8. Time (Garrett Bradley)
7. Lovers Rock (Steve McQueen)
6. To the Ends of the Earth (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
5. Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa)
4. The Grand Bizarre (Jodie Mack)
3. First Cow (Kelly Reichardt)
2. City Hall (Frederick Wiseman)
1. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (Bill and Turner Ross)


And here’s the webpage, with potted reviews of each film:

https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/the- ... s-of-2020/

[Monsieur Arkadin]

am i the only one who thought da 5 bloods was terrible

I thought it was a mess. Too interesting for me to call terrible, but way too uneven for me to think of as a net "good".
I thought the scene with Hanoi Hannah (or whatever her name was) speaking directly to the black G.I.s was absolutely fantastic. But the first battle scene was so awkwardly staged and generic I couldn't tell if it was meant to be thrilling, or ironic, or what.

[Joks Trois]

^^Agree with all that. It wasn't good, but it was more interesting than Spike's last 4 or 5 films. He really messed up the battle scenes though which is odd considering that they were quite well done in Miracle of St.Anna.

[greennui]

I don't know much about Slant Magazine but it seems like everytime I come cross an interesting film article or top list it's always from Slant.