Year: 2023 Director: Jonathan Glazer

When I went to see Schindler’s List in the nineties the couple next to me had brought popcorn and cokes, perhaps looking no further than the Spielberg name. Their refreshments remained untouched throughout the film. This I have always thought summed up the issues around Holocaust cinema very succintly.

I have to admit I thought at first I would not go and see Zone of Interest. Glazer can stand in for Spielberg: an auteur making his Holocaust movie on first take seems to lead more in the direction of Life Is Beautiful or The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (both unwatched by me) than Shoah. Have we not had enough Holocaust films. There’s even a whole new genre of fiction ‘inspired by true stories’ such as The Tatooist of Auschwitz, The Tailor of Dachau concentration camp’ and so on.

And yet. Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism are on the rise. As it slips from living memory works of art that tell these stories will become more important, otherwise other stories contesting the magnitude, purpose or basic facts of the Holocaust will be unchallenged. However, if you enter this arena as a film-maker then the bar » Continue Reading.

Year: 1990 Director: Abbas Kiarostami

The seventeenth greatest film of all time, according to critics in the 2022 Sight and Sound poll, is not an easy film to see. Not on any streaming service (including the BFI Player) currently. The Criterion Collection edition is helpfully embedded on the wikipedia page for the film, so we watched that.

The con artist is an enduring film trope – what’s more natural to act out than a scene in which one person (at least) is already acting (‘lying for money’). From The Night of the Hunter, Hustle and The Grifters to Bowfinger (a film which bizarrely can be seen as kin to this masterpiece) film has been fascinated by er the grifter and the con artist.

Kiarastami’s starting point is a real story. A poor man struggling to feed his family, Hossain Sabzian, is sitting next to a well-dressed woman on a bus when she notices his book, a screenplay written by a famous Iranian film director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Quick as a flash he says he is Makhmalbaf and soon has an invitation to visit the woman’s family. Over the next few days he insinuates himself into her household, under the pretext of » Continue Reading.

Year: 1956 Director: John Ford

New Year – so rather than tackle anything new it’s another film from the Sight and Sound 2022 critics poll of the best films of all time. If Meshes of the Afternoon, a 15 min black and white silent short, was one of the most obscure then the film one spot above it in 15th place, The Searchers, is one of the most familiar. John Ford’s 1956 Western stands in that period where the genre was in transition, from the straightforward studio films with its reliable cast of heroes and villains to the cynical and nihilistic spaghetti westerns of the sixties.

John Wayne made a career playing the cowboy hero, and provides a magnetic central focus as an ex-confederate soldier who returns to the home of his brother. The opening action sees the menfolk lured away from the house by Native Americans, enabling another Comanche raiding party to loot, kill and most significantly kidnap Wayne’s two young nieces. Wayne and the adopted brother of the family Martin spend the entire rest of the film looking for these missing girls.

No need to rehash the plot further but instead talk about what Ford does in » Continue Reading.

Year: 1943 Director: Maya Deren

If there’s a prize for least-seen film on the Sight and Sound 2022 poll then number 14 I am sure would be in with a shout. Meshes of the Afternoon is a 14-minute black and white silent film from 1943, made by avant-garde US/Ukrainian film-maker Maya Deren. Deren plays the protagonist, a young woman who returns home and sees a mysterious hooded figure. She falls asleep in a chair and in a series of dream-like replays of her return home a number of actions are repeated: she sees a mysterious hooded figure with a mirrored face. She opens the door with a key, and later on the key reappears from her mouth. She goes up a flight of stairs and lifts the needle from a record playing on a portable phonograph. There are telephones around the house off the hook and bread and a knife. Later on a doppelganger of her appears, and a man who she attempts to injure. In the final scenes she appears again in the chair now dead. If David Lynch had never made films perhaps this film would not have the current prominence it has, though clearly a film that » Continue Reading.

Year: 1962 Director: Agnes Varda

Cleo from 5 to 7 is number 14 on the 2022 Sight and Sound Poll, another big climber from 207 in 2012. Another female directed film, after Jeanne Dielman at 1 and Beau Travail at 7. It’s (almost) a real-time film, following French pop singer Cleo around Paris from 5pm to 6:30pm as she awaits the results of a medical test.

And what a breeze this film is. Florence, Cleo is her stage name, is first seen at a tarot reading, where the predicted results of her test are not seen by the cards as good. She meets her maid (a fabulous channeling of Lynn from Alan Partridge energy) in a cafe and goes hat shopping. This first third is fabulous flaneuring – streets, cafes, taxi rides, shops, pavements all crammed full of interest. Director Varda was a cinematographer and each shot is immaculately framed, despite a loose and dynamic feel to the camework.

The energy drops in a long scene at her bijou flat – who wouldn’t want a swing and a coterie of kittens in their living room? – as firstly her older lover and then her Rogers and Hammerstein drop by » Continue Reading.

Year: 1929 Director: Dziga Vertov

Numbers one to eight on the Sight and Sound 2022 poll are – diverse in time, language and theme – broadly feature films. Scripts, actors, costumes and sets telling a story. Number nine is a different beast altogether – a hour-long documentary film chronicling urban life in twenties Soviet Union – AKA The Man With a Movie Camera, directed by Dziga Vertov in 1929. Arising out of techniques developed in his earlier ‘kino-pravda’ newsreels in the twenties, Vertov’s hour-long silent film sought to create a completely new film language without any reference to other art-forms like literature, theatre or painting.

The structure of MWAMC is fairly straightforward: there’s a very ‘meta’ opening in which we the audience in the cinema see the audience assemble in the cinema, the band tune up, the projectionist fire up the projector and so on. Sadly no DVD version in which we assemble on the sofa, Pringles and beer to hand, while someone feeds the disc in and tries to sync up the sound bar.

Then the film itself follows the rhythm of a day in the life of a Soviet city – compiled from shots in Mosow, Kiev » Continue Reading.

Year: 2001 Director: David Lynch

There’s been a slight hiatus in assembling the watching party, but last night we sat down to enjoy the eighth best film ever made – which according to the Sight and Sound 2022 poll is Mulholland Drive (or Dr). It’s place as the apex of the Lynch canon appears now unquestioned, above Blue Velvet and er Dune. All the more mysterious that this was his last film that in any way could be called a mainstream feature film. Inland Empire, his next, was shot on digital film and independently distributed.

The basic structure of Mulholland Dr. is straightforward: after a car crash a nameless young woman wanders through LA in shock, eventually ending up at new-actress-in-town Betty’s flat. Staring at a poster the amnesiac calls herself Rita and the two women investigate the circumstances behind her crash. In a parallel plot, maverick film director Adam is trying to prevent a mysterious gang taking control of his current movie, including insisting that an unknown actress called Camilla Rhodes play the lead.

As ‘Rita’ and Betty follow the trail, there are a host of familiar Lynch tropes, including the small man who spoke backwards in Twin Peaks » Continue Reading.