The Screengrab : persona

Screengrab Presents THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES EVER!!!! (Part Eight)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 May 2009 23:30:00 GMT

Leonard Pierce's Top Ten Best Movies Ever!

1. CITIZEN KANE (1941)
2. PERSONA (1966)

Ingmar Bergman’s Persona opened so many cinematic doors for me, I feel like the film itself holds me in a sort of eternal debt. It’s an incredibly intense film, with some of the most powerful and difficult emotional moments I’ve ever seen on screen, but despite its often harrowing bleakness, it feels to me like a gift. Its performances are so titanic, and yet so subtle, they awakened me to what real acting, as opposed to mere performing, really meant; its philosophical and psychological depth is profound in a way that I thought impossible without descending into polemic; and its liberation from traditional narrative perfectly straddled the line between what had gone before and what was yet to come. Its emotional intensity, its quiet self-awareness, and its breathtaking erotic moments all supported a meditation on identity and reality that’s stunning in its power. Apparently, it changed things for Bergman, too – he spoke of it as being the first film where critical reception and commercial success were not at all under consideration when he made it. He sensed he was taking his work as far as it could go, and he was right: over forty years later, it’s still perched at the extreme of cinema, one of the most moving, most meaningful films I’ve ever seen, and more than anything else he ever made, justified his reputation as the medium’s most probing artist.

3. THE GODFATHER (1972)

4. DR. STRANGELOVE, OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964)

As I discussed in my entry about Dr. Strangelove this past Thanksgiving, when we listed the movies we were most thankful for, it does the world the eternal service of proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that the words “comedy” and “masterpiece” need not be mutually exclusive. Of course, there’s a reason that most comedies aren’t great films: focusing on good jokes usually means ignoring things like extremely skillful direction and design, and staffing your cast with comedians usually means sacrificing the possibility of great acting. None of that applies here: Stanley Kubrick is at the very top of his game, applying his masterful sense of pace and visual keenness to the proceedings, and he brings just the right mix of actors to this pitch-black story of nuclear paranoia. By anchoring the film with a stunning triple-role by Peter Sellers, then the funniest man alive, and then coaxing master-class comic performances out of non-comic actors like George C. Scott, he managed to create a movie that was as brilliant as it was brilliantly funny. And good grief, is it funny: Terry Southern, the century’s finest portrayer of inappropriate behavior in high places, had a field day, coughing up at least a half-dozen of the funniest scenes in movie history. If the phone call to the Soviet premier, the scenes between Sellers and Sterling Hayden, or Slim Pickens’ loopy speechifying don’t crack you up, maybe humor just isn’t your thing.

5. THE BIG SLEEP (1946)

Film noir is far and away my favorite genre of film, so it’s curious that the one I choose as part of my ten greatest movies of all time is arguably not of the genre at all. The stellar adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s first Phillip Marlowe novel has plenty of noir trappings, but its focus on the lawman rather than the criminal, its traditional mystery structure, and its optimistic outcome puts it far more in the vein of a standard detective story than a true film noir. But for all that, it still captures the look and feel of post-war crime dramas like nothing before or since, and its masterful evocation of Chandler’s L.A. is unparalleled – quite a feat considering most of it was shot on studio back lots. Its brilliance is unquestionably the result of the collaboration of four men at the peak of their creative powers: Chandler, who created the unforgettable source material; novelist William Faulkner, whose script captured Marlowe under glass and then gave him a jolt of dangerous sexual electricity; Humphrey Bogart, who is simply as good as he can be in a role that seemed written just for him (though it wasn’t, not even close); and director Howard Hawks, who applies his professional approach to make the impenetrable narrative walk a razor’s edge. But the contribution of three women to this masculine film should never be ignored: Lauren Bacall, young and sexy and confident as hell, playing Marlowe’s lover/foil; Martha Vickers, as Bacall’s sister, who accomplishes the astonishing feat of stealing the film out from under her; and co-writer Leigh Brackett, one of Hollywood’s unsung heroines, who kept Faulkner’s contributions from getting too excessive and tightened the script until it rang. Simply amazing.

6. WEEKEND (1962)

7. PSYCHO (1960)

It seems equally strange that I’d count as one of my favorites a movie that more or less buried the noir genre. By shifting the focus of the killer from a dangerous badman on a doomed but comprehensible mission to an unpredictable psychopath who couldn’t be reasoned with, let alone understood, Alfred Hitchcock set a precedent for movie villains that later proved to be a disaster; but in his hands, it was a triumph. It was a major departure for Hitchcock, but shifting the emphasis from suspense to shock proved to be surprisingly simple for someone of his talents. As in all great films, every element comes together: from Hitchcock’s incredibly taut direction to Bernard Herrmann’s shrieking score to Saul Bass’ memorable credits to terrific performances from Anthony Hopkins and Janet Leigh (in one of the motion picture industry’s all-time greatest fake-outs), the great things about the movie totally overwhelm the viewer and leave you with the unmistakable confidence that you’ve witnessed greatness. It’s been a running gag here for years that Psycho can more or less be placed on any list we happen to put together; that’s a testament not to how much we love the flick, but to how much greatness it contains.

8. RAGING BULL (1980)
9. THE SEARCHERS (1956)
10. THE CONFORMIST (1970)

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

Contributor: Leonard Pierce

The Screengrab Holiday Special: Movies We’re Thankful For (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 17:00:00 GMT

LEONARD PIERCE IS THANKFUL FOR:

BARTON FINK (1991)

It wouldn’t be the first time I found myself agreeing with the French, and it wouldn’t be the last. But when this richly layered film by the Coen Brothers swept the major awards at Cannes, it was, for me, a confirmation that what I had only previously suspected was indeed true: Joel and Ethan Coen were not just good directors, not just great directors, but the greatest living American filmmakers. Barton Fink, to this day, is not one of the Coens’ best-loved films; it tends to be very divisive, and while its greatness isn’t frequently in question, where it belongs in their filmography is hotly disputed. For me, even in the wake of later triumphs like Fargo, The Man Who Wasn’t There, and No Country for Old Men, it seems obvious that it’s one of their greatest movies, and likely their best altogether. For a movie that was apparently scratched out during the making of Miller’s Crossing to help the Coens overcome a bad case of writer’s block, it’s astonishingly deep and complex, a deft blend of satirical comedy, character-driven drama and existential horror that seems all along to be about one thing and ends up being very profoundly about another. Not even The Big Lebowski equals Barton Fink as an evocation of Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles, and its intricate, dreadful set design surpasses anything the Coens have ever done. And to top it all off, it’s one of the few cinematic evocations of the process of writing that isn’t an embarrassment. The day I saw Barton Fink is the day I finally realized that the greatness of Hollywood films wasn’t a thing of the past: it was something I was living through.

THE BIG SLEEP (1946)

One of the marks of a truly great film is that it seems you can never find enough things to say about it. Sitting down to write this, I wondered what I could mention about The Big Sleep that I hadn’t already talked about a hundred times; but now, I realize I could write a hundred pages about it and still not even begin to cover all the things worth discussing. Although everyone involved with this imperishable hardboiled detective yarn was at the top of their game, its greatness is largely the work of four geniuses at the absolute peak of their powers: the brilliant pulp novelist Raymond Chandler, who provided the source material about Philip Marlowe’s foray into pornography, blackmail and murder; the great novelist William Faulkner, who was brought on to write the unforgettable screenplay and who added his own raffish twists; the consummate professional, director Howard Hawks, who filmed one of the tightest movies of the era; and actor Humphrey Bogart, who cemented his role as perhaps the greatest leading man of all time with his utterly wonderful performance as Marlowe. Every single set piece in the film works perfectly; it’s a testament to how well the movie succeeds that whenever someone brings up the fact that the plot has a massive hole in it, it’s only to say that it doesn’t really matter one whit. The movie is drenched in L.A. atmosphere despite its back lot settings, and not a single performance is a dud: Bogart and lead actress Lauren Bacall got all the attention, but everyone, from the hired goons to the butler, shines during their moments on camera. Often identified as the father-film of the golden age of noir, I’d argue that The Big Sleep is lacking a few key elements of my favorite cinematic genre, but it does contain enough of them that it kick-started my interest in crime dramas; and maybe it’s a good thing that it’s not pure noir. If it was, it would have no competition.

DR. STRANGELOVE, OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964)

Dr. Strangelove did a lot for me. It was one of the first movies of my color-charged adolescence that taught me how to appreciate the virtues of filming in black and white. It was my first introduction to the work of the savagely funny Terry Southern, whose ultra-black absurdist humor, and whose underlying premise that people in high places were like as not entirely insane, would be a huge influence on my later life. It was my second encounter, after The Shining, with the great Stanley Kubrick, who I am still convinced is even more brilliant than he is generally given credit for, and that’s considerable. But most of all, what it did for me was to convince me of something that, up until then, I had not believed, and that even now, in my darker moments, I suspect might not be the case: it convinced me that a funny movie could also be a great movie. I had always had an affinity for comic writing, especially of the variety as poisonous and coal-black as that found in this Cold War apocalyptic comedy, but I was also learning to appreciate great art, and I so rarely found the two within shouting distance of one another that I started to despair. The truly great, I decided, and the truly funny, were incompatible, and I’d have to make a choice. Luckily, Dr. Strangelove came around and showed me how wrong I was. It is unquestionably a great film: brilliantly structured, astonishingly well-filmed, crammed full of great performances, and featuring a few set pieces (the first shots of the War Room, in particular, and the breathtaking hand-held shots of the invasion of Burpelson Air Force Base) that are undoubtedly the work of a great filmmaker. But it is also a paralyzingly funny movie, and the telephone conversation between Peter Sellers’ President Merkin Muffley and the unseen Soviet premier may be the most hilarious scene I’ve ever encountered.

PERSONA (1966)

Just before I saw Persona for the first time, I was starting to get worried about myself. My taste in movies ran decidedly towards rugged genre work, and there was something unsettlingly dude-ish about my attraction to films about murderers and lowlifes. And I didn’t quite understand what great acting really was; I tended to confuse character with acting, and I often mistook dynamic presence for talent, not realizing they are two substantially different things. What’s more, my attempts at appreciating Ingmar Bergman had been pretty thoroughly jobbed. Sitting in a small theatre in Phoenix in 1993, though, changed all those things. Persona, which today I count as one of the very tiny number of movies I’d contemplate if asked to name my all-time favorite films, was a quiet, sinuous film whose significant emotional power came entirely from within instead of being generated by external threats. Its acting was explosively great, and yet so subtle and calm as to be nearly invisible; it taught me the value of reaction, of contemplation, and of silence to great acting. It showed me what Bergman was truly trying to do, and allowed me to finally appreciate him for what he was; and, beyond that, it proved to me, in the same way Dr. Strangelove had proven that comedy and genius were not incompatible, that a movie could be deeply, intrinsically philosophical and not be pretentious, preachy or incomprehensible. Genre film never really relinquished its hold on me, and I later figured out how to look far enough below the surface that I could see depth when there had seemed only to be tension; but that’s a lesson I never would have learned if it weren’t for Persona.

WAVELENGTH (1967)

“Why do so many novelists still write as though the revolution that was Ulysses never happened,” asked the Scottish experimental writer B.S. Johnson, “and still rely on the crutch of storytelling?” It’s a question I’d learned to ask of literature, but until I lucked into a screening of Michael Snow’s daring structuralist masterpiece Wavelength in college, I had not yet learned to ask it of film. Every movie on my list, I included because I’m thankful that it introduced me to some new element of filmmaking that hugely enriched my life as a viewer. In the case of Wavelength, it’s simply stated: it taught me that there was such a thing as experimental film. That alone opened up huge new vistas for me, and led me to great filmmakers like Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, Chris Marker, and, especially, Stan Brakhage. Wavelength itself is quite a curiosity, even decades after its debut: a 45-minute tracking shot across a New York loft, accompanied by disjointed conversation, hints of a murder, an atonal whine, the final and unending terminal focus on a photo of the ocean. It straddles the border between narrative and non-narrative while opening up huge possibilities for visual poetry, the freeing of the camera from spatial limitations and traditional usages, and the nature of time in this most time-based medium. Prints of Wavelength are hard to come by, and often as not in terrible condition; it would be wonderful if America treated Snow (who filmed Wavelength here) as well as he’s regarded in his native Canada.

Click Here For More Thanks From Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark & Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Contributor: Leonard Pierce

The Rep Report (Dec 6 - 14)

Peter Smith — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 17:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Film Society of Lincoln Center's annual Spanish Cinema Now begins on December 7 and runs through the 27th. The schedule this year includes a special program devoted to the works of the late Pilar Miro, one of the rare women to make a filmmaking career for herself in the wake of Franco's death. Seven of her features will be shown, including her last movie, the 1996 version of Felix Lope de Vega's The Dog in the Manger.

BERKELEY: The Pacific Film Archives' Ingmar Bergman: Light and Shadow (December 6 - 20) gives admirers of the late director, whose death last summer was one of the supreme, sad film events of the year, to remember some of his proudest achievements (including Persona, The Seventh Seal, and Shame) in handsome prints on the big screen. The final selections, wisely, are The Magic Flute and Fanny and Alexander, either of which can serve as a timely rebuttal to the idea that Bergman has nothing to offer in the way of holiday festivity.

— Phil Nugent

The Rep Report (November 20 - December 6)

Peter Smith — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: For two days, the Brooklyn Academy of Music offers a smartly selected tribute to the late Ingmar Bergman. On November 20, Bibi Andersson will be on hand to introduce a film that boasts one of her most astonishing performances, the 1967 Persona; that will be followed by a too-rare screening of one of Bergman's greatest and most seldom-seen features, the richly textured anti-war lament Shame, introduced by the novelist Jonathan Lethem. On November 21, you can spend Thanksgiving Eve, appropriately enough, sinking deep into the epic family drama Fanny and Alexander.

BOSTON: From November 23 through December 6, the Brattle hosts Watching the Detectives, described as a chance "to fully explore the lighter or more colorful film that also feature some of the world's greatest detectives." I'm not sure what's so light about Klute, and "colorful" isn't the first word it brings to mind either, but part of the charm of the program is its random-mix quality. The first week is heavy on movies based on "classic" literary detectives, including double bills featuring William Powell as Nick Charles (The Thin Man) and as Philo Vance (The Kennel Murder Case) and Margaret Rutherford as Agatha Christie's Mrs. Marple (Murder She Says and Murder Most Foul), as well as Albert Finney as Hercule Poirot in Murder on the Orient Express and Alec Guinness as Father Brown in The Detective. There's also a rare chance to see a new 35 mm print of Stephen Frears' 1972 debut film, Gumshoe, starring Finney as an amateur sleuth with a midlife crisis and a Bogart fixation. And on December 3, celebrate David Lynch Day in Cambridge with Blue Velvet and the American broadcast version of the Twin Peaks pilot.

PORTLAND: The Clinton Street Theater's Fifth Annual Thanksgiving Kung Fu Marathon on November 22 offers twelve hours of martial arts flicks with all the trimmings for five dollars. Sounds like a public service to us.

— Phil Nugent