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.

Year: 1953 Director: Yasujiro Ozu

After Citizen Kane and Vertigo Tokyo Story is the fourth greatest film of all time, according to the 2022 Sight and Sound poll. It was third in 2012, and fifth in 2002. The plot is simplicity itself: an aged mother and father (68 is seen as a venerable age) from western Japan visit their grown up children in Tokyo for the first time. Neighbourhood doctor Koichi and beauty salon owner Shigi both regard the parents visit as an interruption to their busy lives with their own children and jobs. Noriko, the widowed wife of another son posted missing in WW2, is far more selfless with time and trouble. An effort to pack the parents off to a seaside resort in the guise of treating them is a complete failure, and the parents are practically hurried out the door back home.

The first half of the film sets out an entry point as a generational comedy, but the story pivots on two parallel scenes resulting from the parents return from the resort. The father hooks up with some former colleagues, and they get steaming drunk in a geisha bar, proclaiming their disappointment with their offspring. Their » Continue Reading.

Year: 1915 Director: Claire Denis

Beau Travail is like Jeane Dielemann another recent film to leap up the Sight and Sound survey. In 2012 it was a lowly 79. In 2022 it’s number seven and second in my odyssey through the 2022 poll. I did say I was not watching these strictly in order, next up will be In the Mood for Love (no 5). Nobody surely needs another review of Vertigo (2) Citizen Kane (3) or Space Odyssey (7). It’s a tight 90 minutes and doesn’t waste a second.

The story is loosely derived from Melville’s Billy Budd (as the Britten Opera, which appears in the soundtrack, is too). In place of the ship our closed institution is the barracks of an elite French troop of foreign legion troops based in Djibouti. The time of the film is not specified, but as Djibouti became independent from France in 1977 I am guessing sometime in the early seventies.

Sargeant Galoup has decades of exemplary military service, and rules his troop like the perennial drill sergeant figure by being the most masculine, hardest, fittest man amongst them. His bond to the captain is challenged by the arrival of new recruit Sentain » Continue Reading.

Year: 1975 Director: Chantel Akerman

If only there was a musical equivalent to the Sight and Sound once in a decade poll of the world’s greatest films. Imagine 1,639 music critics, academics, curators and archivists from across the world submitting a top-ten poll. If nothing else it creates a list against which all others can be measured. No chance.Sigh.

So, anyway onto the Sight and Sound greatest films of all time list. The 2022 list delivered a thunderbolt by proclaiming Chantel Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman 23, Rue Du Commerce, Bruxelles number one. Vertigo, the top one last time, falls to two and Citizen Kane is at three. Surely no-one needs a write-up of either of these but Jeanne Dielman I hear you say. What on earth is that. Take this as the start of an impromptu series working its down the films on the list newer to me, and probably to you too. So no 2001 (no 6) or The Godfather (12) but absolutely yes to Beau Travail (no 7). Can’t promise they will all be in strictly rank order as some are as short as 14 mins, others weigh in at over three hours.

We have a brand new » Continue Reading.