This isn’t A Moment In The Sun. I got a hankering to sculpt a dog guy this week instead. It’s just been that kind of week off, frankly. I’m about ready to just start making the Pointy character anyway just so the project still has some semblance of momentum.

This week I watched a ton of movies. Let’s talk about Martin Scorsese’s list again.

Represented are: the Italians (mainly represented by neorealism); the French (including beaucoup de French New Wave); the Germans (represented by both German expressionism and New German Cinema) and the Japanese. (People have of course made criticisms: no Ingmar Bergman, no Fellini, no Russian/USSR work such as Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, or anything by Andrei Tarkovsky. It’s a solid primer, but it’s not the full story.)

There’s 39 movies in total. I’ve watched 32 of them so far. Has it actually been worth it?

The answer is yes of course it has, these films were recommended for a damn good reason. I’ve gone “off-list” a few times to watch other work by directors whose work has really made an impression, too.

Kurosawa’s historical black and white movies – Rashomon, Yojimbo, The Hidden Fortress and Throne of Blood – are all worth checking out too. If like me Nosferatu is the only Murnau movie you’ve ever seen, then you need to see the beautiful Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans now. I enjoyed Jean Cocteau’s Beauty And The Beast (on the list) but the same director’s Orpheus (not on the list) I liked even better. (I also like Mr Cocteau’s famous Twins.)

I now have a broader sense of what’s out there and what it’s about, but I’ve gravitated towards some stuff more than others. As historically important and interesting as Godard’s French New Wave movies are, I’m not into them as entertainment. On the other hand, Ozu’s Tokyo Story was an instant favourite.

So it’s been a mind-broadening exercise. Enjoying other people’s work is an important support activity for creativity – I have to know what I like, and I’ll typically find it realised fully in the work of other people long before I have the skill to competently make it for myself. And it’s also important to sometimes explore places that aren’t immediately obvious – I never know what I’ll turn up or learn about myself. For instance, if you’d told me Tokyo Story’s synopsis, I probably wouldn’t have been interested – but it’s now one of my favourite movies of all time. I’d love to make something one day that moves people as much as Tokyo Story or Sunrise moved me. It would be an honour.

After cranking through no less than 25 films in the last two weeks along with a few days on Architecture Academy, I’m decidedly fed up with watching movies and I’m in a mood to make stuff again. 🙂

These are my notes on the movies I’ve seen so far. Format is Title (director) – notes. Some of these movies likely deserve a second viewing too – I’m sure I have something less boorish to say about Ugetsu Monogatari.

Japanese movies:

• Seven Samurai (Kurosawa) – essential, long but never boring, just awesome
• Sansho the Bailiff (Mizoguchi) – a melancholy story about wretches, but v good with its long shots
• Tokyo Story (Ozu) – incredible. go-to piece for engaging characters and unhurried storytelling and avoiding the soap opera feel
• Ugetsu Monogatari (Mizoguchi) – a bit slow but maybe wasn’t in the mood for it
• Ikiru (Kurosawa) – poor old Kenji. a very wise movie about being old and infirm, and a superb one too.
• High and Low (Kurosawa) – great police procedural, consistently interesting and beautifully visually composed
• Death by Hanging (Oshima) – haven’t watched yet

The French movies:

• Napoleon (Gance) – awesome and super-ambitious for its time, didn’t get it watch it all because of stupid glitches
• Beauty and the Beast (Cocteau) – great! dreamlike in a good way, the bit with pecky swans was also hilarious
• Children of Paradise (Carné) – awesome mime work but lots of talky human relationship stuff and clunxposition, too much of a soap opera
• The Grand Illusion (Renoir) – Great. Good fun. Loving Renoir as a director. The films are lively and humane.
• The Rules Of The Game (Renoir) – Octave is awesome. Hunting scene is perfectly horrifying. Also a total kicker of an ending.
• The 400 Blows (Truffaut) – didn’t really “get” this one, a good portrait though
• Shoot the Piano Player (Truffaut) – likeable enough, wandered a bit.. prefer Truffaut to Godard but.. i dunno
• Band of Outsiders (Godard) – inventive but kind of distractingly restless, guess i don’t get Godard
• Breathless (Godard) – Rewatched. Talky, cool, the jumpcutting works, protag is a bloody idle reprobate tho.
• Weekend (Godard) – Someone had a bug up their arse. Apocalyptic and pissed off but a bit verbose and lectureish.
• Le Boucher (Chabrol) – A taut psycho thriller.

French movies I watched that aren’t on the list:

• Orpheus (Cocteau) – a strange and magical urban fantasy, like Gilliam without lavish production design (and better for it!)
• Au Hasard Balthazar (Bresson) – so melancholy. well done, sort of dreamlike. poor donkey though. 🙁
• The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Bunuel) – literally dreamlike and wonderful
• The Exterminating Angel (Bunuel) – (ok technically this was made in Mexico by a Spanish guy but it’s another Bunuel) awesomely uncanny bourgeois surreal “social horror”, dark and funny and uneasy and wonderful

Ze Germans:

• Dr Mabuse, the Gambler (Lang) – long (four and a half hours long in fact) but bloody awesome, very watchable
• Metropolis (Lang) – a classic, bit long though
• Nosferatu (Murnau) – creepy as hell and great
• Aguirre, Wrath of God (Herzog) – defs picks up once they’re all on the raft, amazing no-safety-net filmmaking + use of music/moving paintings
• The American Friend (Wenders) – not a fan, slow burning neo-noir; many scenes end too suddenly..
• Ali: Fear Eats The Soul (Fassbinder) – hell yes. a beautiful melodrama. great video essay about Fassbinder + Sirk + melodrama included as DVD extra.
• The Merchant of Four Seasons (Fassbinder) – again melodramatic but great, bit of bourgeois-hating never hurt anyone 🙂
• The Marriage of Maria Braun (Fassbinder) – not in the mood, too full of movies. ok.. i guess.. i dunno.. ?
• Kings of the Road (Wenders) – unwatched
• The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (Herzog) – unwatched

Ze Germans, not on the list:

• Sunrise: A song of two humans (Murnau) – WAHH. THE FEELS. Silent cinema at its most emotional and purely visual. (ok technically this was made in the USA by a German director)

The Italians:

• Rome, Open City (Rossellini) – again a very strong sense of time and place, wasn’t really in the mood again
• La Terra Trema (Visconti) – long, pride-fuelled tragedy. avoids being melodramatic by grounding itself in realism. a hard watch
• The Bicycle Thieves (de Sica) – potters along through Rome, very strong sense of time and place, and then WHAM! that bloody ending..
• Rocco and His Brothers (Visconti) – Epic. Sad. Stool tragedy. But surprisingly watchable and not that depressing.
• Umberto D (de Sica) – melancholy as hell and quietly gutpunchy but still solid, isolation and poverty and hopelessness and old age.
• L’Avventura (Antonioni) – Dull and plodding. Generally tedious characters. Beautiful lensing + sound though, locations were superbly chosen.
• Blow-Up (Antonioni) – interesting, the driftiness of Antonioni’s stuff is interesting but somewhat soporific
• Big Deal on Madonna Street (Monicelli) – haven’t watched yet
• The Easy Life (Risi) – haven’t watched yet
• Before the Revolution (Bertolucci) – haven’t watched yet
• Paisan (Rossellini) – haven’t watched yet

The Italians, extra time:

• 8 ½ (Fellini) – SARAGHINA!! fun, the fantastic asides are great
• Fellini Satyricon (Fellini) – holy shit. visually amazing but it’s a lot to take in.