Favorite (four), part fifty-seven

Just like in my other fifty-six posts in this series, I want to take a second to single out the highlights of my recent film viewing.  Most of the films I have been glad to see but only very few have stayed with me.  This series is my filter for those and my hope is one or two will be good to you as well.

Noel Black's Skaterdater

One of the most powerful shorts I have ever seen.  It captures adolescence and Socal in the mid 60s and renders them as vivid as Lamorisse in The Red Balloon.

Frederick Wiseman's In Jackson Heights

Wiseman has so many strengths and areas of mastery.  What moved me the most in this work was his desire to dig deep into what it means to be an American today living in a diverse, melting-pot community.  Wiseman shows so many different colors, the positives and the negatives, the beauty and the ugliness, the promise and the despair.  He may very well be our most important cinematic artist, narrative or documentary, that we have ever had.  

Frederick Wiseman's Boxing Gym

Perhaps my favorite of all of the Wiseman films I have seen to date.  Wiseman is pure cinema, devoid of non-diegetic music and devoid of anything that feels put on, forced, unnatural or basking in cinematic artifice.  Aside from feeling so human and so real, what impressed me the most about this work were its rhythms.  You could close your eyes and be mesmerized for almost 120 minutes by the musical sounds of its voices, words and movements.

Jean Rouch's La punition
Rouch stays in the streets of Paris and poetically captures a day in the life of a young Parisian girl during her formative years.  Most interesting are the last five minutes as the film shifts tone and becomes an expressionistic solo.

My two most recent playlists

https://open.spotify.com/user/mynuitchezmaud/playlist/3CFnkJfsKefDbZbQ8XoHwz?si=paFTjMHfSbSofc9OEkcEWg

https://open.spotify.com/user/mynuitchezmaud/playlist/264esSQZGO4I98wHTRraeH?si=lQGS4UKfSvKcD7kTo7TglQ

Favorite (four), part fifty-six

Just like in my other fifty-five posts in this series, I want to take a second to single out the highlights of my recent film viewing.  Most of the films I have been glad to see but only very few have stayed with me.  This series is my filter for those and my hope is one or two will be good to you as well.

Jean Rouch's Moi, un noir

Probably the biggest influence I have ever seen on Godard's Breathless.  I have long known that Godard was a big fan of Rouch but this film blew my mind.  The cadence of Belmondo's voicemover and the frenzied rhythms of Godard's feature debut seem to have been lifted almost entirely from Moi, un noir.  It's a remarkable film for its nudity, its post-sync methods and the most pop culture references I have ever seen from a work that came out before 1960. 

D'Urville Martin's Dolemite

It has an edge and grit that pushes things further than any other blaxpoitation film I have seen to date.  It is so freewheeling and unpredictable.  You never know what is going to come out of Rudy Ray Moore's mouth or where the film is headed next.

Hong Sang-soo's List

Top shelf Hong that in thirty minutes has all that makes Hong special.  His lightness of touch, his feeling for the sea, his natural, loose performances, his meandering scenes of drinking and eating, and his jovial spirit.   

Edward Yang, Yi-Chang, I-Chen Ko and Te-Chen Tao's In Our Time
An anthology film often credited with jumpstarting the birth of the Taiwan New Wave.  The first three films, in particular impressed me.  They concern themselves with similar areas of life as the Nouvelle Vague before them - youth trying to find its place, the experience of first loves and the awe for and questioning of the world around them.  There is a poetry and a feel for beauty that makes these early films particularly remarkable.