The Screengrab : gates of heaven

Screengrab Presents THE TOP TEN BEST FILMS EVER!!!! (Part Nine)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 15 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Paul Clark's Top Ten Best Movies Ever!

1. BELLE DE JOUR (1967)
2. 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968)
3. THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (1928)

The greatness of The Passion of Joan of Arc stems from the fact that director Carl Th. Dreyer knew what it was that made Joan’s story important- not that she believed that God had tasked her to save France, but that she was so steadfast in her faith that she thought it better do die than to deny it. Consequently, Dreyer’s version of Joan’s story has no battle sequences and no heavenly visions, merely a powerful retelling of Joan’s final days, her trial and execution. The world of this film is an unsparing- one might say godless- one, full of evil and underhanded men who are more than willing to sacrifice Joan for their own political gain. This serves to throw into sharp relief the power of Joan’s faith, by heightening the pain and suffering she endured up to the end for the God in whom she so resolutely believed. Falconetti’s performance, then as now, is a wonder, and it’s only fitting that she never appeared onscreen again- how could she have possibly lived up to it?

4. JEANNE DIELMAN (1975)

The sheer amount of focus that director Chantal Akerman and star Delphine Seyrig bring to this film is pretty breathtaking, showing us the everyday life of one woman over the course of 3 ½ hours. What’s more, Jeanne Dielman isn’t an especially noteworthy woman- she’s a single mother who turns the occasional trick to help pay the bills. But rather than lingering on Jeanne’s side job- which has no bearing on her life outside the confines of her bedroom- Akerman instead shows us the details of her everyday routine- preparing the meals, cleaning the flat, doing the shopping, and so on. Because of Akerman’s extensive use of real time, the film becomes about this routine, and consequently, when anything interrupts the routine, the film gains a surprising amount of impact, even from something as simple as Jeanne not getting her usual seat at the local café. As of now, Jeanne Dielman is unavailable in the United States in any home viewing format, so if the film ever makes it to your local rep house, you owe it to yourself to go.

5. ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1968)

6. ORPHEUS (1949)

“A legend is entitled to be beyond time and place,” states director Jean Cocteau in his introduction to Orpheus. This unique approach to the original myth allows Cocteau to re-imagine it as one of the kinkiest love-quadrangles the big screen has ever seen, involving the titular poet, his wife Eurydice, Death herself, and her chauffeur Heurtebise. The movie’s key performance is from Maria Casares, who is not the larger-than-life Death that most audiences would expect, but so life-sized and lonely in the role that the love entanglements are allowed to be as poignant as they are. One of the most memorable touches Cocteau brought to the film was his knack for making the real world surreal, not merely through editing and camera trickery (film run backwards for eerie effect, characters suddenly disappearing into thin air), but also through strange locations (a bombed-out building used as the realm of the dead) and surreal plot points (chiefly among them the car radio on which Orpheus listens to the bizarre "poetry"). Cocteau was a true multi-talented artist, and Orpheus is on top of everything else one of the great films about the uneasy mix between art and life, in which life and art intrude onto each other, but in the end, if the art is truly enduring then not even death- or Death- can take it from the world.

7. CITIZEN KANE (1941)

8. PLAYTIME (1967)

I don’t think that any viewer who is paying attention can possibly deny what a singular directorial achievement Playtime is. With this film, a box-office disaster on its initial release, Tati re-created modern-day Paris on his own terms as a sterile maze of boxy skyscrapers, plate-glass windows, and beeping gadgetry. But while other filmmakers might be tempted to turn this setting (built entirely from scratch for the film) into an urban nightmare, Tati- true to the film’s title- concentrates on the funny little eccentricities that sneak their way in. This approach is ideal, as it turns out, as Tati’s impossibly intricate mise-en-scène (his skill at engineering visual moments is even keener than Keaton’s) would run the risk of becoming stifling if it wasn’t done with such offhand charm. To describe any of the priceless moments in the film wouldn’t spoil them so much as it would sell them short, as Tati pulls them off so perfectly, yet so unassumingly. And in the midst of it all is Tati’s signature character Hulot, a bastion of old-fashioned provincialism, who would exist at odds with his hyper-modern surroundings but for his singular brand of good-natured aloofness, which translates surprisingly well to his new environment. Playtime is bravura filmmaking of the gentlest kind, a film that demands to be revisited- and seen on the biggest screen possible- innumerable times to be appreciated, and is a sheer delight on each and every viewing.

9. THE GENERAL (1926)

If I was forced to choose a favorite filmmaker, my first choice would almost certainly be Buster Keaton. But for me, an even tougher choice is which of his films to choose. For the purpose of this list, I decided to disqualify Keaton’s short films, which sadly eliminated such classics as One Week, Neighbors, and The Scarecrow. In the end, while part of me was tempted to choose Sherlock Jr. or Seven Chances, I kept coming back to The General, which is both the greatest Civil War movie ever made and one of the greatest comedies in cinema. Rather than filling the film with wacky, distracting supporting characters, much of The General is comprised of scenes with Keaton alone on the train, and these scenes feature some of the most ingeniously realized gags ever put on film- the most legendary being the one in which Keaton finds a railroad tie atop the tracks in front of the train, so he carefully climbs down onto the train's cowcatcher and uses another railroad tie to knock the first one off the tracks. Like so many of the film's great moments (which are plentiful) this gag is less about gut-busting hilarity than engineering- we marvel at the simple ingenuity of it, with the added charge that Keaton did even the most dangerous stunts himself. There’s also a nonchalance about the film that's refreshing, a charm that takes its cue from its star's unassuming demeanor, that allows even the most intricate gag or potentially deadly stunt to feel like a throwaway, as though instead of a show-stopping moment it's all just another annoyance to this character's routine. Which, of course, only makes it funnier.

10. GATES OF HEAVEN (1978)

Roger Ebert may sometimes be prone to going overboard with praise, but when he’s right, he’s right, and he’s 100% right about Gates of Heaven, a movie he’s been stumping for for more than three decades. Fans of Errol Morris know what I’m talking about, but for the rest of you- yes, it really is that good. Morris may use pet cemeteries as his starting point, but ultimately it's about the ways in which we deal with the death of those we love, and by extension with our own mortality. Morris has always been one of the most patient of documentarians, and one of the chief pleasures of Gates of Heaven is in the distinctive and colorful ways the various interviewees talk, from the bone-weary resignation of failed cemetery owner Floyd McClure to the regurgitated management philosophies of Philip Harberts to (especially) ornery old Florence Rasmussen. And as Morris interviews various owners of dead animals, they reflect on how important these pets were in their lives as a source of companionship and unconditional love- sure, these people sound a little crazy for projecting these feelings onto animals, but simply by presenting these people the film asks us how many people can offer the same kind of loyalty these pet owners felt from their pets? In the end, this film offers no small amount of plain-spoken philosophy, as when one pet owner states, "there's your pet, your pet's dead. But what happened to the thing that made it move?" No film I've seen is this profound about the ways in which people seek meaning not in art or centuries-old wisdom, but in the lives (and deaths) of others.

SPECIAL MENTION: DECALOGUE (1989)

This being a “best movies” list, it’s debatable whether Krzystzof Kieslowski’s The Decalogue really qualifies, since while it has played theatrically all over the world, it was originally intended as a ten-part miniseries for Polish television (call this “special mention” a compromise). What’s undeniable, however, is that this is one of the major works of the twentieth century. Decalogue was inspired by The Ten Commandments, but one of its great achievements is that it views the Commandments less as religious doctrine than key moral tenets that govern most modern-day societies. So rather than trafficking in pious, preachy parables, Kieslowski and co-writer Krzystzof Piesiewicz examine the ways in which people in the modern world struggle with these age-old decrees, not always successfully. In one of the episodes, a girl who has grown close to her widower father must decide how to deal with her feelings after she discovers that he isn't her biological father after all; in another, the unfaithful wife of a gravely ill man finds out that she is pregnant by her lover, and tells her husband's doctor that the unborn child's fate will be decided by whether or not he believes her husband will die. And in the series’ most beloved episode, a teenage voyeur falls in love with a woman he spies on, and decides to become part of her life. The way this film plays out defies all expectation, yet in retrospect the events seem almost inevitable. The Decalogue may or may not be an according-to-Hoyle movie, but I’m guessing that when the history of moving-image-thingies is written, The Decalogue will occupy a place of honor.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight & Ten

Contributor: Paul Clark

Screengrab Review: Standard Operating Procedure

Peter Smith — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 18:45:00 GMT

By Mike D'Angelo

In one sense, Standard Operating Procedure is anything but. Errol Morris has few rivals among documentary filmmakers, but he isn't renowned for tackling hot-button issues torn from yesterday's headlines; most of the folks who've sat down before his patented Interrotron camera have been either fascinating eccentrics (Gates of Heaven; Fast, Cheap & out of Control) or aging provocateurs willing to discuss controversies from decades past (Mr. Death, The Fog of War). For all its lurid notoriety, Abu Ghraib seems almost too ordinary a subject for someone as outlandishly gifted as Morris, and while he's done his usual formally sophisticated and journalistically thorough job, S.O.P. is the first movie he's ever made that gives off a faint but unmistakable whiff of déjà vu.

You know the players; you know the photos. Morris has secured interviews with five of the seven MPs who were indicted, including media scapegoat Lynndie England, and coaxed from them a disarmingly candid assessment of their behavior. Anybody who's read Philip Zimbardo's excellent The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil will be familiar with the film's unstated thesis, which blames the persecution and degradation at Abu Ghraib not on the moral lapse of a few "bad apples" but on a poisonous atmosphere created and condoned by those much higher up the military food chain. Still, words on a page can't provide the odd amalgam of shame and defiance that permeates these interviews, nor the dispassionate intimacy of the Interrotron itself.

What gets short shrift, surprisingly, are the photographs themselves. Some have been critical of Morris' decision to commission flashy animated sequences from graphics whiz Kyle Cooper, finding the juxtaposition of the sordid and the high-tech to be somehow unseemly. Those people should chill. But what I really wanted from S.O.P. — especially given the terrific essays Morris has been writing on the nature of photography for the New York Times — was an in-depth exploration of the bizarre disjunction between what the disgraced MPs (persuasively) claim they were feeling and their demeanor in the pictures. Sabrina Harman, for example, wrote letters to her lover at the time that powerfully recount her disgust at what was going on — so why do we see her grinning like a lunatic and giving a big party-hearty thumbs-up beside an Iraqi corpse? Morris asks the question, but he doesn't really delve, being too busy indicting the U.S. military as a whole. Thing is, we don't need Errol Morris to do that. We rely on him to look past the patently obvious.

Gravedigging with Werner Herzog and Errol Morris

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 18:30:00 GMT

The 2008 Film Issue of The Believer features the transcript of a conversation between filmmakers Werner Herzog and Errol Morris, which took place at Brandeis University last fall. As you know if you've seen Les Blank's short film Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, Herzog played a significant role in getting Morris's career started by betting the budding documentarian that he would indeed consume his footwear if Morris ever completed his first film Gates of Heaven. Herzog survived the meal and their friendship survived the bet.

Even before the shoe-eating incident, Herzog and Morris got up to some odd adventures together. "When Werner and I first met each other, we took a trip to visit this serial killer [Edmund Emil Kemper III] in prison in Northern California," says Morris. If you're not familiar with Kemper's resume, suffice it to say he got started torturing animals and killing his grandparents, moved on to murdering female hitchhikers, and ended his storied career by bludgeoning his mother to death with a hammer, using her head for a dartboard and raping her headless corpse. "Kemper was, in a way, a very sensitive person," says Herzog. "When you looked at his hands, like the hands of a violin player, in a way. I remember he looked like an elephant with a Mozart soul."

Herzog and Morris later had a falling out over another serial killer, the notorious Ed Gein. As Herzog explains, "Errol wanted to know more about the grave robberies, because Ed Gein had not only murdered people. He also excavated freshly buried corpses at the cemetery. And I do remember: he dug up graves in a pretty perfect circle. And in the very center of this circle was the grave of his mother. And Errol kept wondering, did he excavate his mother and use her flesh and skin for some sculptures in things at his home?... So the only way to find out is, I proposed, let's go to Plainfield, grab a shovel, and dig at night."

It turns out that Morris had some qualms about this plan; you can read the rest of this fascinating story here.