Rosenbaum's 31 best movies of 1994
Two key items that certainly would have qualified, The Blue Kite and Bitter Moon, are missing only because I placed them on last year’s list, by virtue of their appearances at the Chicago International Film Festival.
1. Sátántangó. Bela Tarr’s riveting sarcastic comedy about self-interest and self-deception was the surest sign all year that personal filmmaking is alive and well, at least as long as some personal filmmakers are sufficiently gifted and original — as well as persistent enough to go the limit with their projects. In this case, Tarr spent 120 shooting days in ten separate parts of Hungary over two years to make a movie so concentrated, single-minded, and clear-headed that it puts most of Hollywood to shame. Tarkovsky is one of Tarr’s acknowledged influences, this film’s despiritualized landscapes, its exciting and singular narrative structure, its uncanny capacity to deal cogently with a couple of characters in isolation over long periods, and its gallows humor are worlds apart from the films of the late Russian director. So is its literary source, a 1985 novel by Laszlo Krasznahorkai (who collaborated with Tarr on the script); it still hasn’t been translated, but if it ever is, it’s the first Hungarian novel I’ll want to read. The film played here only once, at the film festival, with Tarr in attendance, and it says something about the involvement of the audience (most of whom stayed the film’s duration) that the subsequent question-and-answer session lasted about an hour.
2. The Second Heimat. All 13 features in Edgar Reitz’s 1992 German epic about youth, love, and art in the 60s played twice at the Film Center last spring — once over a four-day marathon and a second time over a succession of Thursdays and Sundays — and to follow it either way meant entering into a mesmerizing narrative contract with Reitz that was almost as involving as reading Proust. Not quite as innovative as Satantango (or “Three Colors” or even That’s Entertainment! III), Reitz’s multifaceted chronicle of a generation summed up the best of 60s filmmaking while offering a thoughtful and searching critique of what that filmmaking — and that generation — accomplished and failed to accomplish. Most of the leading characters are classical musicians and filmmakers, and one central part of the film’s pleasure is the musical performances (the work of Nikos Mamangakis, who composed the score, deserves an essay in its own right). Another is Reitz’s handling of extended party scenes, which grow in resonance as one becomes progressively more acquainted with his large and unforgettable cast of characters. Even the film’s absences and ellipses played a crucial role: I’m still trying to figure out why Reinhard commits suicide and why Renate, unlike the other major figures, isn’t accorded a full feature of her own; both of them remain indelibly lodged in my memory.
3. That’s Entertainment! III. This is a delight that effectively came out of nowhere. The two MGM compilations of musical clips that preceded it — three if one counts That’s Dancing! – were routine exercises in self-congratulation dosed with hypocritical piety; for this one the studio not only opened its treasure chest of unseen and unused numbers but offered us a bracing and intelligent critique of studio decision making. The two writers-directors-editors-producers, Bud Friedgen and Michael J. Sheridan, worked as editors on the previous films, which must have afforded them ample opportunity to think about how they could improve on the work of their predecessors, even while adhering to the same basic format of having former MGM stars introduce the clips. One improvement was allowing Lena Horne to expound on the racist policies that curtailed her work at the studio; another was the use of editing and split-screen devices to show us separate versions of the same number side by side or back-to-back, explaining in some cases how the wrong version got picked, or in others how the best version got put together. In addition to a few familiar items, one gets to see excluded footage from Singin’ in the Rain, The Band Wagon, Cabin in the Sky, The Harvey Girls, Easter Parade, the otherwise unseeable Annie Get Your Gun, and even a neglected gem like I Love Melvin. You also get to hear a snatch of the heartbreaking rendition of “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” Ava Gardner recorded for Show Boat, which the studio inexplicably chose to dub with another singer’s voice. A fascinating history lesson, this shares some of the limitations of other such compilations, but the overall sharpness of the selections made it for me the most pleasurable Hollywood release of the year. It’s already out on video, and though it inevitably loses part of its impact on the small screen, most of the original wide-screen ratios have been preserved.
4. Blue, White, and Red (“Three Colors“). I preferred Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blue to his White and his Red to his Blue when they came out individually. But given the rare achievement of his trilogy as a whole, it would be churlish to include only one or two parts on my list, especially because they work better together than they do separately. Like Pulp Fiction (see below), these films were handled by Miramax, the most sophisticated marketers of independent movies around — as well as the most active in recutting and/ or retitling. Kieslowski’s trilogy and Pulp Fiction are two cases where their interference was minimal; in the case of something like The Advocate, which they both retitled and substantially recut, I refuse to consider eligible for my list — even though I enjoyed it — because I haven’t seen the original.
5. Fly High Run Far. Ever since I caught this briskly paced and gorgeously filmed period epic a little over three years ago in Taipei, I’ve regarded it as the best Korean movie I know. It looked every bit as impressive as I remembered when it turned up at the Film Center in July. Directed by the most famous, most popular, and probably the most prolific Korean director, Im Kwon-taek, who has made over 80 films, and beautifully shot in seasonal colors, it covers the four decades in the late 19th century when the radically humanist and egalitarian religious sect known as Kae Byok flourished. I found both its pageantry and its leading character — Hae-Wol, the sect’s charismatic leader — deeply moving and its sense of economy exemplary.
6. Little Women. I’ve never read Lousia May Alcott’s 1869 novel, nor do I recall ever seeing the previous screen adaptations directed by George Cukor (1933), Mervyn LeRoy (1949) or David Lowell Rich (1978, for TV). But unlike almost every other example of mainstream, English-language fiction filmmaking that I saw last year, this film was one I could enjoy and admire without feeling I had to make excuses or apologies. Its impeccable craft (including its wonderful cast) is a virtue I’ve come to expect from the Australian writer-director Gillian Armstrong, but her lovely sense of period tied to a fresh and intelligent grasp of the American past is something a good deal rarer nowadays. (The only other commercial movie that showed this sort of flair was also made by a non-American — Alan Parker’s uneven but underrated The Road to Wellville.) If fans of Pulp Fiction (or The Age of Innocence, for that matter), scoff at Little Women‘s genteel subject matter, that’s only because the sentimentality of girls’ pictures has less prestige at the moment than that of boys’ pictures. (For the sentimentality of men’s pictures, see #8 and #9 and for the sentimentality of a women’s picture, see I Like It Like That, listed under #10.) In any case, this movie, surprisingly tough-minded about its characters and what they want, isn’t fairly labeled as a girls’ movie; it also deserves to be seen by grown-ups.
7. Calendar. Atom Egoyan’s most satisfying movie to date is also the only recent movie I’ve seen about tribalism that deserves to be described as such. Using some of his familiar loop strategies, whereby the same material gets compulsively replayed, Egoyan tells a story about a marriage that disintegrates during a trip from North America to Armenia, where an assimilated Canadian-Armenian photographer (Egoyan himself), while shooting a dozen rural churches for a calendar, becomes insanely jealous when his diasporan Armenian wife (Egoyan’s real-life wife Arsinee Khanjian) converses with their guide in Armenian. The film alternates between this painful situation, captured in video and photographic records, and subsequent scenes back in Toronto,where the husband attempts to converse with various other women in English only to find each of these conversations interrupted by the woman making a telephone call and talking to someone else in a foreign language (with the photographer’s finished calendar hanging in the background). Much of this plays as grim comedy, and if the rigorous formalism of Egoyan’s method strikes some viewers as formulaic and overextended–even at 75 minutes–for me it represented an energizing, illuminating, and challenging breakthrough out of the more insulated concerns of Egoyan’s other recent features. For once he has connected his obsessions about sex and media with the ethnic conflicts raging in the world outside, and the advances this leads to in his work are considerable.
8. Highway Patrolman. What ever happened to the anarchic and resourceful Alex Cox, the English-born, American-trained independent who made Repo Man, Sid & Nancy, and Walker? He moved to Mexico and started a second career with this terrific 1992 Spanish-language portrait of a Mexican highway patrolman (Roberto Sosa) that was far and away the best and most believable cop movie to show in Chicago last year. (Its possible competitor, Charles Burnett’s The Glass Shield, is still being back held from release and may not even surface in its brilliant original form.) Working in a virtuoso long-take style (the whole movie has only 187 cuts), Cox mixes comedy with tragedy and social critique with straight-ahead action. Meanwhile, making the most of Mexican landscapes and a talented cast, this movie refuses to either idolize or demonize its three-dimensional hero, much less the morally complex world he moves through. It took two years for this gem to reach Chicago; let’s hope we won’t have to wait too much longer to see Cox’s masterful baroque, black-and-white adaptation of Jorge Luis Borges’s “Death and the Compass,” made in Mexico for the BBC around the same time.
9. The Last Bolshevik. The only video on my list apart from Godard’s Only Cinema (see below), Chris Marker’s moving personal essay about his late friend and mentor Alexander Medvedkin was in many respects also a guarded self-portrait of Marker himself, trying to bear witness to his own communist dreams and what he, Medvedkin, and history itself made — or didn’t make — of them. It got me interested in the Medyedkins (mainly undocumented) career, and it prompted a good many second thoughts about the leftist idealism of this century, which too many people have been all too eager to sweep under the carpet. A couple of leftist friends complained that Marker’s melancholy ruminations were too self-serving and not really probing enough, but for me they started off chains of thought and investigation that are still going on. I suppose a lot depends on whether you regard this movie as a moratorium or a starting point. For me, it was the latter.
10. Just to prove what a good year for movies the last one was, let me propose a 20-way tie here between Leos Carax’s Bad Blood, Bill Forsyth’s Being Human, Nanni Moretti’s Caro Diario, Wong Kar-wei’s Chunking Express, Tim Burton’s Ed Wood, Rose Troche’s Go Fish, Ousmane Sembene’s Guelwaar, Steve James, Frederick Marx, and Peter Gilbert’s Hoop Dreams, Darnell Martin’s I Like It Like That, Nicolas Philibert’s In the Land of the Deaf, Bigas Luna’s Jamon Jamon, Hai Ninh’s The Little Girl of Hanoi (made and released in Vietnam in 1974, but arriving here 20 years later), David Mamet’s Oleanna, Frank Perry’s On the Bridge (a persuasive and upbeat account of his struggle with cancer), Only Cinema (part three of Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinema), Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, Ken Loach’s Raining Stones, Cyril Collard’s Savage Nights, Tran Anh Hung’s The Scent of Green Papaya, and Peter Bogdanovich’s The Thing Called Love (which didn’t make it to most other American cities, but played here thanks to the efforts of the Music Box). I wouldn’t call any of these movies perfect, but they were all awfully good in one way or another, and they’ve all certainly stayed with me.
