paratext

Cinefamily’s doing a retrospective of one of the most mind-blowing living filmmakers, Hungarian director Bela Tarr (including the insane, 7.5 hour Satantango and his latest and last film Turin Horse). Here’s my blurb for his dreamlike masterpiece, Werkmeister Harmonies.

A masterpiece of bone-chillingly stark beauty, Béla Tarr’s breakthrough film about chaos descending onto a small Hungarian village is an intellectual and visual juggernaut of near-unmatched power. Through unforgettable imagery that intertwines hope and despair as inseparably as the black and white of the film’s bleakly stunning compositions, Tarr melds all the unalterable monumentality of the cosmos with the small rhythms of our human routines and intrigues. A bar full of haggard drunkards beautifully recreates the dance-like rotations of the solar system — and the stuffed corpse of a whale interrupts the bustling life of the village square with the inescapability of decay, both physical and societal. Throughout it all, Tarr’s trademark long shots (the film is comprised of a mere 35 long-takes), along with his solemnly gliding camera, transform the screen into the equivalent of an oversize hourglass that both mourns and celebrates the unavoidable progress of time, and our place in it. Ultra-rare 35mm print!

http://www.cinefamily.org/films/the-films-of-bela-tarr/#werckmeister-harmonies-49-730pm

La Femme Publique. 3/16 at Cinefamily. This movie has the best naked dance scenes ever put to film. 

A rare film about filmmaking that’s fleshy as it is brainy, La Femme Publique is an eloquently effed love letter to cinema that could have only been created by a director for whom romance is synonymous with delirium. A physically stunning Valérie Kaprisky stars as an aspiring actress whose efforts in a wild film adaptation of Dostoevsky keep her (barely) sane amongst the literal grind of nude photography dancing(!). Long drawn to the cinematic concept of doubles, Zulawski casts one for himself here, in the guise of the expat director (an intense Francis Huster) who shares Zulawski’s own obsession for extracting extreme, unorthodox performances from the cast. As Huster directs Kaprisky both on and off the set (and into his bedroom), his production remains one of cinema’s most self-reflexive and most aggressive films-within-a-film, viscerally exploding the boundaries between performance and life, and between director and directed. An essential companion piece to The Important Thing is to Love, this is required viewing for anyone looking for insight into the creative mind of one of the 20th century’s most inventive auteurs.

This is seriously the best year-end film list that has ever been made, and I’m so excited about it. It’s sort of a tally of 18 writers’ votes, but I feel like this year I helped shape the list in major ways beyond just watching shit and voting. 

Over a year of scouring festivals, wading through DVD screeners for hidden gems, ruining my back and ass in The Cinefamily’s seats. Bugging all the other writers to watch all my top picks after I uploaded them to a streaming site. Telling people over and over again that Drive wasn’t actually all that great. Writing reviews for 7 out of these 25.

Anyway, enough about me. These films are amazing (Drive excepted), and representative of the ridiculous range of innovative, infinitely-watchable stuff that is being made that sadly, most of us never get to see. One of the films was shot in my hometown, and stars a girl I saw at parties and coffee shops back in high school. One of the films, William Never Married, was never even released at all (but you can stream it here: http://indieflix.com/film/william-never-married-33085/). 

OK, I’m going to go piss myself in excitement.  

http://www.tinymixtapes.com/features/2011-favorite-25-films-2011