Translated material
13 films 2013
It is possible that 2013 will remain in the history of cinema, as 1913-in the history of sociology. There were anomalously many interesting films, so there were no more rating lists at the end of the year not only ordinary, but also necessary. I note the gigantic work of Boris is ridiculous in the “session” and the zeal of editors of Cineticle magazine, who selflessly listed even “films of the year that failed to watch”. I admit, and I missed one film that would surely find myself in my rating - the "stray dogs" of Tsai Minlyan, so let it be invisibly present under the zero number.
1. "Stemple Pass" ( STEMPLE PASS ), James Benning
Pass Pass Pass in Montana. There was a hut of terrorist Theodore Kachinsky, who sent bombs to those who, in his opinion, contribute to technological progress and destroy nature. Unabber is serving a lifelong conclusion without the right to pardon, his hut is dismantled and, despite the protests of the owner, in 2008 became an exhibit of the exhibition dedicated to the centenary of the FBI. James Benning's interest in Unaberta Dav., the eco -terrorist was devoted to the installation of “ Two huts ” (the second hut belonged to Henry David Toro, also naturally, although not so uncompromising). The works of Unabobert were published only partially in the collection " Technological slavery ", but Benning managed to read the diary that was seized during the arrest and, together with other things of Kachinsky in 2011, was sold at auction. Excerpts from the manuscript, which the acquaintance of Benning acquired for $ 40,000, sounds in the film. Notes of the obsessed intellectual (if Kachinsky had not abandoned the work in Berkeley and did not hide in the hut, he would probably make a brilliant academic career) - an interesting document, as if written under the dictation of Prishvin and Chikatilo. Unabert fought against progress on the side of nature, but his diary begins with voluptuous descriptions of hunting and preparing dishes from game (for example, pregnant squirrels). Then - a chronicle of small sabotage (Kachinsky poured sugar in the gas tanks, smashed tourist cottages) and finally terrorist attacks. Three people died due to the fault of Unabobert and 23 were injured, and if he had implemented all his plans, there would be much more victims.
“Stample Pass” is connected with another Benning film -about the Russian art group “War”, the shares of which struck him so much that he decided to mount and comment on the videos found in the network for American spectators. Benning followed everything that happened around Pussy Riot, and when we met recently at the Vienna Film Festival, he first asked about the health of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, who then held a hunger strike. I think he could take a beautiful clip for some Pussy Riot song, in which almost nothing would move: real punks, as you know, have no need to move at all.
2. "Real" ( Gegenwart ), Thomas Hayze
The present, that is, "life". There are not so many living in the film of Thomas Hise, but their liveliness is impressive. This is a portrait of a shabby provincial crematorium. Everything works like German watches: they bring, take, drink coffee and joke. The stove breaks, and it is repairing an ominous look of skinhead. No sobbing widows, no ceremonies, only a production wrong side. "It must be life and good, / what do you understand in it, in a hurry / between the font and the morgue?" Crematorium workers will probably be burned in the same furnace.
After the "real" I decided to watch all the films of Thomas Haise and was not disappointed. I recommend “ happy (blacks) ” about a theater youth named Sven, who recites Lotreamon, but is forced to become a sailor, as well as the film “ My Brother ” about the aging East German hippies (agent of the Stasi and his victim), who settled in the famous French village of Bugarash, where a flying saucer is hiding in the mountain, so that we have been hiding in the mountain to take us to take us to take us to take us away Cosmos when a day of day comes.
3. "Until the madness will separate us" ( Feng AI ), Van Bin
Van Bin removed patients of a psychiatric clinic in Yunnan province. There are not so few documentary films about crazy houses (for example, “ every trifle ” of Nicolas Filiber), but, as a rule, they are devoted to some forms of art therapy. In the Yunnan crazy house, killers, complainants and authors of political petitions, violators of the law on family planning and just homely rowdy are sitting. No art therapy does not shine for them: they are simply stained with antipsychotics and stuffed with tablets to hold more calmly. In the West, such a movie is impossible: not a single director would allow you to shoot insane patients who are walking naked, defecate on the floor and copulate with each other. “So far, madness will not separate us” - generally outside this humanistic tradition. Van Bin removes his characters exactly animals in the zoo, and his ruthlessness makes the same strong impression as the harsh orders of the Chinese madhouse themselves. May the bowl pass us!
4. "Leviathan" ( leviathan ), dir. Lucien Kasten-Tylor, Verena Parawel
Leviathan is not only a film, but also an installation that last winter at the Berlin Film Festival was shown in an abandoned crematorium in the Vedding area. I lay there for three hours on the floor, watching a seagull fluttered on the ceiling of the columbaria (hello to Thomas Heze). Lyusienne Casten-Tylor and Verena Parawel were shot by Leviathan with a risk to life, having cameras as if a greedy gull is watching for fishing: under incredible corners, too close, very low, in the water-several small cameras were perished in the womb of the whale.
Leviathan has been worn on all festivals for the second year, and in November, all the works of the Harvard Laboratory of touch ethnography, despite the charlatan name, were shown in November. “Leviathan” is so far the most significant achievement of the laboratory, but it is worth noting their last film “Manakaman”. It was shot in Nepal, on a funicular, taking pilgrims to the temple of the Hindu goddess. Someone is silent, someone says, someone is taking the goddess flowers, someone chicken, and the sacrificial goats shine, anticipating their fate.
5. "It is hard to be a god" , Alexei German
"It is difficult to be a god" - the Russian "Leviathan". Rumata, an earthling who studied the terrible Arcanar in the Book of Strugatsky, was hidden on his forehead, fixing everything that was happening. In the film by Alexei Herman, this camera also looks at the medieval natives with a fish eye, and they swim in unbearable proximity to her (and to us). The main character is "hard to be a god" - dirt. The rain and slush were both in the "Lapshin" and in the "check on the roads", but now the smoked clay fills everything. A white towel immediately gets dirty, blood flows through the washed face, clean clothes are stained with slop. Large and small monsters are swarming in the mud: both the monks from the "Black Order" and their enemies, who, having received power, will begin to do the same, and "gray, opening the path to black." As in Khrustalev, the frames are filled with flickering, turning into an engraving with many small details: everything moves, rustles, new figures, new objects appear from everywhere. Such a movie, of course, can only be watched on the big screen, but I'm afraid there will be few opportunities. The gigantic picture is doomed to museum rental. This already became clear at the Roman premiere, when the Arkanar flock of gloomy Moscow men in the jackets, headed by Minister Medinsky, who for some reason, was welcomed in the hall, who for some reason was welcomed with applause. It is noteworthy that the most popular review (a billion reposts on Facebook) turned out to be notes of some nervous girl who did not like the movie so much that she went out in the middle of the session to smoke (!), And then she returned and changed anger for mercy. The film, which has prepared for 40 years (the first script was written in 1968), is not designed for the possibility of today's viewer: perhaps that is why Alexei German did not dare to finish his work.
6. "Appendix" ( Upstream Color ), Shane Carut
Unabber, the Hero of the Stamples Pass, read the book of Toro "Walden", and in the film of Shein Carrut, the Uldena copies are received by mail chosen and doomed. The mechanic Karut laid out his film, how the tools are laid out on the rug, and in time lifts either a shining wrench or a gray screwdriver. I like everything in "impurities", but the most numerous piglets are most of all, because it is in them that demons usually instill. Well, worms, of course: such, they say, lived under the skin of Maria Stuart in prison. This film itself looks like a worm - it crawls inside and from time to time anxiously declares itself. Alain Rob-Griye could make such a movie if he was born in Dallas among gvo people; Two main impurities of its plots are present - the stratification of time and sadism.
7. "Dance of reality" ( La Danza de la Realidad ), Alejandro Khodorovsky
I am proud that I managed to publish in Russian four books by Alehandro Khodorovsky, including the wonderful novel "Albina and Men-PSU." But this is only a small part of his works. Unfortunately, the “Dance of Reality” has not been translated, an autobiographical book, which has now become a film. When I met with Khodorovsky in the late 90s, he was passionate about another script-the sequel of the famous Mole. It was an expensive plan - Johnny Depp and Marilyn Manson should have turned into Abel and Cain, who decided to bury their mother next to his father on an island, destroyed by a nuclear explosion. The “dance of reality” is much more modest, and it is clear how the producer pacified the fantasies of Kodorovsky, convinced that if rabbits appear in the frame, then there should be ten thousand. Cripples, firefighters, people with dirty umbrellas in the "dance of reality" are probably fewer than Khodorovsky would like.
I traveled around Chile when shooting began, and the local television channel said that the great director returned from France to his homeland, to Tokopieli to remove his Amarkord. I did not reach Tokopilia, but I can imagine how regrettable this town looked in 1929, when Alehandro Khodorovsky was born in a family of emigrants from the Russian Empire. But reality is dancing, the meager shop of the Bolshevik's father turns into a temple, and he himself is a terrorist who goes to Santiago to exterminate the usurper. Khodorovsky advises his students in the courses of psychomagi to the first matters to understand the secrets of relations with parents, to break the chains that the family has shot down on you. The film "Holy Blood" and Khodorovsky’s books were dedicated to liberation from parental oppression, but now his own children have grown up, he has turned into a patriarch and in the final of "Reality Dance" goes to a lilac rooking in the kingdom of death. This farewell, there will be no film about the sons of the mole.
8. "Lightning" ( Foudre ), Manuel Morgen
"Lightning" is a film in four seasons. "Autumn" - about people struck by lightning: a fish, a cattle breeder, a cheese and the owner of the hotel tells about their experience the Thunderer Baalu, part -time Parisian DJ. “I got all the electricity that the France power plants produced in me,” the farmer is proud of. For everyone, this is the main existential experience, what you remember every day. The latter is confessed by a dancer, whom Lightning struck on the beach. Now her legs are paralyzed, but life has become better: after the disaster, she feels happy and is still dancing-in a wheelchair. The second season - "Winter" - is dedicated to a psychiatric clinic suffering from depression to patients. The father of melancholy appears - Saturn, psychiatrist William de Carwayio, who studies the healing methods of constructed lightning - electric shock. His ancestors are from Guinea-Bissau, where people fall into a trance and communicate with the gods during the vuduist dance: one of the attributes of the ceremony is miniature red stretchers decorated with fragments of mirrors. The ancient Roman doctor Galen recommended treating mental disorders, applying fish to the head - an electric slope, and we move to the "spring": to the ruins of Palmyra in Syria. Here lives an archaeologist-deregiste, looking for a mysterious Truffle Kama in the desert. It is believed that his mycelium is intertwined with the roots of a sand rose, and gives rise to lightning, sticking into the sand with a fiery phallus. The KAM Truffle has the properties of Aphrodisiac, and he is brought to the island of Sutra. The Kamasutra begins "Summer": the play by Marivo "Dispeut" (1744). The two orphans of Azor and Egla flow separately in complete isolation, not revealing them the secrets of love, and finally adjusts to them a meeting to determine who is a chaste - a man or a woman. Love at first sight - Coup de Foudre, a blow with lightning. Parted puppets copulate on the beach, and their history is commented by an astrophysicist, which concludes that black holes and depression are the same thing, and lightning and sperm are similar matters. Azor and Egle are overtaken by Saturn - melancholy, and all the characters are found at the disco that God Baal controls. Do I need to add that the dance in a wheelchair begins?
I was at the premiere of this extraordinary film in Rotterdam and immediately decided that it needs to be shown in Russia, the wind of Russian chaos was spinning in it. Thanks to Boris, it was ridiculous and Alexei Artamonov managed to do this, Manuel Morgen came to Moscow and Petersburg and met with the audience. Here is her wonderful interview about Baal, depression and poetry. It so happened that in Russian about the "lightning" was written much more than in other languages.
9. "Nymphomaniac" ( Nymphomaniac ), Lars von Trier
"Lightning" has not yet been released in French rental. Distributors are afraid (and quite reasonably, even the Rotterdam audience scattered) that 230 minutes is too much. "Nymphomaniac" - and it is even longer - the producers were reduced and cut in half. The full version (330 minutes) will be shown in February on Berlinal, the shorter came out on December 25, for the holiday, and this is a really perfect Christmas comedy about the miraculous salvation of the body and soul. Charlotte Hensbur, like Scheherazada, tells the wise Jew one after another story of his misadventures, and he string them on a musical line and fishing fishing line. The closest literary relative of Nymphomaniac is the hilly novel by Nabokov, "Hell", and the kinship is very commendable, but the striking resemblance to Peter Greenai's techniques puzzles and depresses. Greenway tragically lost dexterity after the first part of the "suitcases" and now removes something unbearable. Trier is younger and Bodrey, but some kind of fatigue in the “nympho” is felt, and, despite countless orgasms, the film is a little slower than it should: although, perhaps, this impression arises precisely because it is cut by commercial knives.
10. "Stranger on the lake" ( l'nconnu du lac ), Alain Girodi
I put the "stranger" immediately behind the "nympho" so that the two most obscene films of the year can hold hands. The magazine Cahiers du Cinéma put the "stranger" in first place in his ranking. True, on the second they have “abstract holidays”-a movie, in my opinion, is completely monstrous in every way, so the list looks pretty sorry. It is interesting what Trufffo would say if in 1968 in Kaya would glorify such a film about gays sitting by the lake, with a hardporn scene? Would I be indignant or approve? And Hodar? However, I have great doubts that the "stranger" is related to the dark alley of Gay Kino. Alain Girodi is remarkable in that the heroes of all his paintings live in a parallel world: it seems to be France, but it seems to be not quite, it seems to be modern, but it would be the Middle Ages with feudal lords and messengers, it seems to be homosexuality, but with some tortoise, well-fed old people. I really like the word "Crobant" - this is the name of the currency that is used in this parallel world. Now, when a gay revolution is walking around the world and carries with him, in addition to the torch of freedom, a pile of banalities (like the melodrama "Life of Adele"), it is very good that such independent things stuffed with wild tamps, such as "stranger by the lake", appear and receive recognition.
I’ll name another interesting film, which leads a gay discourse wounded by banalities to a fresh clearing: “What now? Remind me” Zhuakim Pintu. Boris ridiculously devoted an excellent article to this picture , to which I have nothing to add.
11. "Birmingham ornament II", Yuri Leiderman and Andrey Silvestrov
In the first film of this cycle, consisting of stories, cut into small episodes and mixed in arbitrary order, emigrants in the sundresses of the firing of the Russian cabbage in the Louvre, and horses on the pasture near Krasnoyarsk wore huge icons instead of riders. New characters arise in the second part: the Pechal man (aka prisoner) wanders with a hookah in Crete in 2184, Mandelstam, Gorodetsky and Klyuyev discuss Russian issues in Moscow in 1933, and young Yar-Kravchenko draws silently, the Finns in costumes vote in the forest and on the coast, the excellent samurai shouts an incomprehensible text about the revolution and Ekibastuz, and Mikhail Efremov brilliantly pronounces the monologue of the Odessa artist living in Berlin, and simultaneously writes the picture: the half -naked Putin caught a huge fish showing him the figure. Dadaism is alive and burst, as in 1918. Here (after the plot of Herman), a conversation with Yuri Leiderman, which I recorded after the premiere of the "Ornament" in Rome.
12. "For one second" (from One Second to the Next), Werner Herzog + " Medeas ), Andrea Pallaoro
This film was not noticed by film critics, although it was shot by the famous director, and almost three million people watched it. It is made by order of telephone companies and posted for free viewing:
This is about negligent drivers who send SMS while driving and after a second turn into killers. Stories told by Herzog will make even a man out of marble tremble. But behind edification is a different plan, also frightening in its own way. Hertzog has long been passionate about evil jokes of fate, watching them almost with enthusiasm. He recently shot a whole series of villains sentenced to death for terrible meaningless crimes. Indeed, the skeleton of the universe is exposed in such plots: some modest salesman sends a message to his friend that he will be at home soon, and this message kills a whole family. Why did the God of God stick into this man and those who rode to meet him?
It seems that the desire to constantly look into the abyss (his recent film about the killers, Into the Abyss ) somehow affected the Herzog itself. At the premiere of his series about suicide bombers on Berlinal a year ago, he was accompanied by harsh bodygags, as some governor of the Krasnoyarsk Territory. I never saw the director to come to the cinema with security. From whom they are protecting him-from psychopath stalkers or from himself?
Hertzog has been living in Los Angeles for many years, and another expert-EXPATE, the Italian Andrea Pallaoro, lives there. Like Herzog, he is obsessed with American crimes, more precisely, one of their variety, quite widespread by the killings of children of parents. Pallaoro studied newspaper reports on such atrocities and was looking for patterns. It is curious, for example, that some future deobuyers shortly before the crime began to complain about vision disorder. The problem with the eye also arises in the father of a large family in Mede. In a very beautiful, shot on a 35-mm film, which is rare at the present time, there is no accurate time, everything happens either 40 years ago, either 20 or yesterday in a heavy haze of drought, destroying the crops, ruining farmers and driving them crazy.
13. "The Messenger from the Shadows " , " Masque of Madness ), Norbert Pfafenbichler
Two new parts of the large project "Notes on the Cinema" by the Vienna artist Norbert Pfaffenbichler. In the "Messenger of the Shadows" he mounted dozens of fragments of surviving paintings in which Lon Cheney (1883-1930) played, including scenes from a wonderful "punishment", where Cheney portrayed a legless gangster. It turned out a whirlpool of demonic transformations, in which "a person with a thousand faces" becomes an old woman, then a Chinese, then the devil knows what. A completely new movie shot a hundred years ago. In the "mask of madness" the same operation is subjected to Boris Carloff. I must say that Norbert Pfufenbichler himself, born on time, could become a great actor of silent cinema: he has an amazing face, and if I were Murnau or Robert Vine, would immediately invite him to the main role.
Here you should recall the three wonderful archival film projects of 2013. Firstly, it is a digital restoration of Alfred Hitchcock's surviving dumb films, undertaken by the British film Institute. All nine restored paintings were first shown at a wonderful festival of archival cinema in Bologna. Secondly, it is a collection of experimental shortcashes of Kertis Harrington , sixteen-million beauty, as important as the much better well-known films of Kenneth Enger and Maya Deren. And it is certainly worth watching another film shot 40 years ago and arising this year from non -existence after a long restoration: " Cousin Jules " of Dominica Benishetti. This is a great story of a humble man living in a world, so well tailored that even death is not able to ruin the ideal mechanism of his being.
Finally, three links to ratings that I made in 2010 , 2011 and 2012 . There are so many films, and time jumps so agile that it seems that these lists have arisen not the day before yesterday, but in some kind of cave of forgotten dreams.
1. "Stemple Pass" ( STEMPLE PASS ), James Benning
Pass Pass Pass in Montana. There was a hut of terrorist Theodore Kachinsky, who sent bombs to those who, in his opinion, contribute to technological progress and destroy nature. Unabber is serving a lifelong conclusion without the right to pardon, his hut is dismantled and, despite the protests of the owner, in 2008 became an exhibit of the exhibition dedicated to the centenary of the FBI. James Benning's interest in Unaberta Dav., the eco -terrorist was devoted to the installation of “ Two huts ” (the second hut belonged to Henry David Toro, also naturally, although not so uncompromising). The works of Unabobert were published only partially in the collection " Technological slavery ", but Benning managed to read the diary that was seized during the arrest and, together with other things of Kachinsky in 2011, was sold at auction. Excerpts from the manuscript, which the acquaintance of Benning acquired for $ 40,000, sounds in the film. Notes of the obsessed intellectual (if Kachinsky had not abandoned the work in Berkeley and did not hide in the hut, he would probably make a brilliant academic career) - an interesting document, as if written under the dictation of Prishvin and Chikatilo. Unabert fought against progress on the side of nature, but his diary begins with voluptuous descriptions of hunting and preparing dishes from game (for example, pregnant squirrels). Then - a chronicle of small sabotage (Kachinsky poured sugar in the gas tanks, smashed tourist cottages) and finally terrorist attacks. Three people died due to the fault of Unabobert and 23 were injured, and if he had implemented all his plans, there would be much more victims.
Unabober's hut - in the lower right corner
James Benning shows the same landscape - only the seasons change. In the lower right corner of the screen is the part of the hut in which Unabobert lived. Two hours to look at the postcard - mountains, forest, hut roof - is not boring at all, you dive into the landscape and you remain to listen to the impassive story of the hermit about cunning crimes in the name of nature. In inaction, every detail becomes high. When smoke comes from the pipe, it seems that the cardinals who choose the Roman dad are hiding in the hut.“Stample Pass” is connected with another Benning film -about the Russian art group “War”, the shares of which struck him so much that he decided to mount and comment on the videos found in the network for American spectators. Benning followed everything that happened around Pussy Riot, and when we met recently at the Vienna Film Festival, he first asked about the health of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, who then held a hunger strike. I think he could take a beautiful clip for some Pussy Riot song, in which almost nothing would move: real punks, as you know, have no need to move at all.
2. "Real" ( Gegenwart ), Thomas Hayze
The present, that is, "life". There are not so many living in the film of Thomas Hise, but their liveliness is impressive. This is a portrait of a shabby provincial crematorium. Everything works like German watches: they bring, take, drink coffee and joke. The stove breaks, and it is repairing an ominous look of skinhead. No sobbing widows, no ceremonies, only a production wrong side. "It must be life and good, / what do you understand in it, in a hurry / between the font and the morgue?" Crematorium workers will probably be burned in the same furnace.
After the "real" I decided to watch all the films of Thomas Haise and was not disappointed. I recommend “ happy (blacks) ” about a theater youth named Sven, who recites Lotreamon, but is forced to become a sailor, as well as the film “ My Brother ” about the aging East German hippies (agent of the Stasi and his victim), who settled in the famous French village of Bugarash, where a flying saucer is hiding in the mountain, so that we have been hiding in the mountain to take us to take us to take us to take us away Cosmos when a day of day comes.
3. "Until the madness will separate us" ( Feng AI ), Van Bin
Van Bin removed patients of a psychiatric clinic in Yunnan province. There are not so few documentary films about crazy houses (for example, “ every trifle ” of Nicolas Filiber), but, as a rule, they are devoted to some forms of art therapy. In the Yunnan crazy house, killers, complainants and authors of political petitions, violators of the law on family planning and just homely rowdy are sitting. No art therapy does not shine for them: they are simply stained with antipsychotics and stuffed with tablets to hold more calmly. In the West, such a movie is impossible: not a single director would allow you to shoot insane patients who are walking naked, defecate on the floor and copulate with each other. “So far, madness will not separate us” - generally outside this humanistic tradition. Van Bin removes his characters exactly animals in the zoo, and his ruthlessness makes the same strong impression as the harsh orders of the Chinese madhouse themselves. May the bowl pass us!
One of the chambers in which the film was shot about Chinese madness
4. "Leviathan" ( leviathan ), dir. Lucien Kasten-Tylor, Verena Parawel
Leviathan is not only a film, but also an installation that last winter at the Berlin Film Festival was shown in an abandoned crematorium in the Vedding area. I lay there for three hours on the floor, watching a seagull fluttered on the ceiling of the columbaria (hello to Thomas Heze). Lyusienne Casten-Tylor and Verena Parawel were shot by Leviathan with a risk to life, having cameras as if a greedy gull is watching for fishing: under incredible corners, too close, very low, in the water-several small cameras were perished in the womb of the whale.
Leviathan has been worn on all festivals for the second year, and in November, all the works of the Harvard Laboratory of touch ethnography, despite the charlatan name, were shown in November. “Leviathan” is so far the most significant achievement of the laboratory, but it is worth noting their last film “Manakaman”. It was shot in Nepal, on a funicular, taking pilgrims to the temple of the Hindu goddess. Someone is silent, someone says, someone is taking the goddess flowers, someone chicken, and the sacrificial goats shine, anticipating their fate.
5. "It is hard to be a god" , Alexei German
"It is difficult to be a god" - the Russian "Leviathan". Rumata, an earthling who studied the terrible Arcanar in the Book of Strugatsky, was hidden on his forehead, fixing everything that was happening. In the film by Alexei Herman, this camera also looks at the medieval natives with a fish eye, and they swim in unbearable proximity to her (and to us). The main character is "hard to be a god" - dirt. The rain and slush were both in the "Lapshin" and in the "check on the roads", but now the smoked clay fills everything. A white towel immediately gets dirty, blood flows through the washed face, clean clothes are stained with slop. Large and small monsters are swarming in the mud: both the monks from the "Black Order" and their enemies, who, having received power, will begin to do the same, and "gray, opening the path to black." As in Khrustalev, the frames are filled with flickering, turning into an engraving with many small details: everything moves, rustles, new figures, new objects appear from everywhere. Such a movie, of course, can only be watched on the big screen, but I'm afraid there will be few opportunities. The gigantic picture is doomed to museum rental. This already became clear at the Roman premiere, when the Arkanar flock of gloomy Moscow men in the jackets, headed by Minister Medinsky, who for some reason, was welcomed in the hall, who for some reason was welcomed with applause. It is noteworthy that the most popular review (a billion reposts on Facebook) turned out to be notes of some nervous girl who did not like the movie so much that she went out in the middle of the session to smoke (!), And then she returned and changed anger for mercy. The film, which has prepared for 40 years (the first script was written in 1968), is not designed for the possibility of today's viewer: perhaps that is why Alexei German did not dare to finish his work.
6. "Appendix" ( Upstream Color ), Shane Carut
Unabber, the Hero of the Stamples Pass, read the book of Toro "Walden", and in the film of Shein Carrut, the Uldena copies are received by mail chosen and doomed. The mechanic Karut laid out his film, how the tools are laid out on the rug, and in time lifts either a shining wrench or a gray screwdriver. I like everything in "impurities", but the most numerous piglets are most of all, because it is in them that demons usually instill. Well, worms, of course: such, they say, lived under the skin of Maria Stuart in prison. This film itself looks like a worm - it crawls inside and from time to time anxiously declares itself. Alain Rob-Griye could make such a movie if he was born in Dallas among gvo people; Two main impurities of its plots are present - the stratification of time and sadism.
7. "Dance of reality" ( La Danza de la Realidad ), Alejandro Khodorovsky
I am proud that I managed to publish in Russian four books by Alehandro Khodorovsky, including the wonderful novel "Albina and Men-PSU." But this is only a small part of his works. Unfortunately, the “Dance of Reality” has not been translated, an autobiographical book, which has now become a film. When I met with Khodorovsky in the late 90s, he was passionate about another script-the sequel of the famous Mole. It was an expensive plan - Johnny Depp and Marilyn Manson should have turned into Abel and Cain, who decided to bury their mother next to his father on an island, destroyed by a nuclear explosion. The “dance of reality” is much more modest, and it is clear how the producer pacified the fantasies of Kodorovsky, convinced that if rabbits appear in the frame, then there should be ten thousand. Cripples, firefighters, people with dirty umbrellas in the "dance of reality" are probably fewer than Khodorovsky would like.
I traveled around Chile when shooting began, and the local television channel said that the great director returned from France to his homeland, to Tokopieli to remove his Amarkord. I did not reach Tokopilia, but I can imagine how regrettable this town looked in 1929, when Alehandro Khodorovsky was born in a family of emigrants from the Russian Empire. But reality is dancing, the meager shop of the Bolshevik's father turns into a temple, and he himself is a terrorist who goes to Santiago to exterminate the usurper. Khodorovsky advises his students in the courses of psychomagi to the first matters to understand the secrets of relations with parents, to break the chains that the family has shot down on you. The film "Holy Blood" and Khodorovsky’s books were dedicated to liberation from parental oppression, but now his own children have grown up, he has turned into a patriarch and in the final of "Reality Dance" goes to a lilac rooking in the kingdom of death. This farewell, there will be no film about the sons of the mole.
8. "Lightning" ( Foudre ), Manuel Morgen
"Lightning" is a film in four seasons. "Autumn" - about people struck by lightning: a fish, a cattle breeder, a cheese and the owner of the hotel tells about their experience the Thunderer Baalu, part -time Parisian DJ. “I got all the electricity that the France power plants produced in me,” the farmer is proud of. For everyone, this is the main existential experience, what you remember every day. The latter is confessed by a dancer, whom Lightning struck on the beach. Now her legs are paralyzed, but life has become better: after the disaster, she feels happy and is still dancing-in a wheelchair. The second season - "Winter" - is dedicated to a psychiatric clinic suffering from depression to patients. The father of melancholy appears - Saturn, psychiatrist William de Carwayio, who studies the healing methods of constructed lightning - electric shock. His ancestors are from Guinea-Bissau, where people fall into a trance and communicate with the gods during the vuduist dance: one of the attributes of the ceremony is miniature red stretchers decorated with fragments of mirrors. The ancient Roman doctor Galen recommended treating mental disorders, applying fish to the head - an electric slope, and we move to the "spring": to the ruins of Palmyra in Syria. Here lives an archaeologist-deregiste, looking for a mysterious Truffle Kama in the desert. It is believed that his mycelium is intertwined with the roots of a sand rose, and gives rise to lightning, sticking into the sand with a fiery phallus. The KAM Truffle has the properties of Aphrodisiac, and he is brought to the island of Sutra. The Kamasutra begins "Summer": the play by Marivo "Dispeut" (1744). The two orphans of Azor and Egla flow separately in complete isolation, not revealing them the secrets of love, and finally adjusts to them a meeting to determine who is a chaste - a man or a woman. Love at first sight - Coup de Foudre, a blow with lightning. Parted puppets copulate on the beach, and their history is commented by an astrophysicist, which concludes that black holes and depression are the same thing, and lightning and sperm are similar matters. Azor and Egle are overtaken by Saturn - melancholy, and all the characters are found at the disco that God Baal controls. Do I need to add that the dance in a wheelchair begins?
I was at the premiere of this extraordinary film in Rotterdam and immediately decided that it needs to be shown in Russia, the wind of Russian chaos was spinning in it. Thanks to Boris, it was ridiculous and Alexei Artamonov managed to do this, Manuel Morgen came to Moscow and Petersburg and met with the audience. Here is her wonderful interview about Baal, depression and poetry. It so happened that in Russian about the "lightning" was written much more than in other languages.
Foudre - Générique de Fin from Nicolas DeHorter on Vimeo .
9. "Nymphomaniac" ( Nymphomaniac ), Lars von Trier
"Lightning" has not yet been released in French rental. Distributors are afraid (and quite reasonably, even the Rotterdam audience scattered) that 230 minutes is too much. "Nymphomaniac" - and it is even longer - the producers were reduced and cut in half. The full version (330 minutes) will be shown in February on Berlinal, the shorter came out on December 25, for the holiday, and this is a really perfect Christmas comedy about the miraculous salvation of the body and soul. Charlotte Hensbur, like Scheherazada, tells the wise Jew one after another story of his misadventures, and he string them on a musical line and fishing fishing line. The closest literary relative of Nymphomaniac is the hilly novel by Nabokov, "Hell", and the kinship is very commendable, but the striking resemblance to Peter Greenai's techniques puzzles and depresses. Greenway tragically lost dexterity after the first part of the "suitcases" and now removes something unbearable. Trier is younger and Bodrey, but some kind of fatigue in the “nympho” is felt, and, despite countless orgasms, the film is a little slower than it should: although, perhaps, this impression arises precisely because it is cut by commercial knives.
10. "Stranger on the lake" ( l'nconnu du lac ), Alain Girodi
I put the "stranger" immediately behind the "nympho" so that the two most obscene films of the year can hold hands. The magazine Cahiers du Cinéma put the "stranger" in first place in his ranking. True, on the second they have “abstract holidays”-a movie, in my opinion, is completely monstrous in every way, so the list looks pretty sorry. It is interesting what Trufffo would say if in 1968 in Kaya would glorify such a film about gays sitting by the lake, with a hardporn scene? Would I be indignant or approve? And Hodar? However, I have great doubts that the "stranger" is related to the dark alley of Gay Kino. Alain Girodi is remarkable in that the heroes of all his paintings live in a parallel world: it seems to be France, but it seems to be not quite, it seems to be modern, but it would be the Middle Ages with feudal lords and messengers, it seems to be homosexuality, but with some tortoise, well-fed old people. I really like the word "Crobant" - this is the name of the currency that is used in this parallel world. Now, when a gay revolution is walking around the world and carries with him, in addition to the torch of freedom, a pile of banalities (like the melodrama "Life of Adele"), it is very good that such independent things stuffed with wild tamps, such as "stranger by the lake", appear and receive recognition.
I’ll name another interesting film, which leads a gay discourse wounded by banalities to a fresh clearing: “What now? Remind me” Zhuakim Pintu. Boris ridiculously devoted an excellent article to this picture , to which I have nothing to add.
11. "Birmingham ornament II", Yuri Leiderman and Andrey Silvestrov
In the first film of this cycle, consisting of stories, cut into small episodes and mixed in arbitrary order, emigrants in the sundresses of the firing of the Russian cabbage in the Louvre, and horses on the pasture near Krasnoyarsk wore huge icons instead of riders. New characters arise in the second part: the Pechal man (aka prisoner) wanders with a hookah in Crete in 2184, Mandelstam, Gorodetsky and Klyuyev discuss Russian issues in Moscow in 1933, and young Yar-Kravchenko draws silently, the Finns in costumes vote in the forest and on the coast, the excellent samurai shouts an incomprehensible text about the revolution and Ekibastuz, and Mikhail Efremov brilliantly pronounces the monologue of the Odessa artist living in Berlin, and simultaneously writes the picture: the half -naked Putin caught a huge fish showing him the figure. Dadaism is alive and burst, as in 1918. Here (after the plot of Herman), a conversation with Yuri Leiderman, which I recorded after the premiere of the "Ornament" in Rome.
12. "For one second" (from One Second to the Next), Werner Herzog + " Medeas ), Andrea Pallaoro
This film was not noticed by film critics, although it was shot by the famous director, and almost three million people watched it. It is made by order of telephone companies and posted for free viewing:
This is about negligent drivers who send SMS while driving and after a second turn into killers. Stories told by Herzog will make even a man out of marble tremble. But behind edification is a different plan, also frightening in its own way. Hertzog has long been passionate about evil jokes of fate, watching them almost with enthusiasm. He recently shot a whole series of villains sentenced to death for terrible meaningless crimes. Indeed, the skeleton of the universe is exposed in such plots: some modest salesman sends a message to his friend that he will be at home soon, and this message kills a whole family. Why did the God of God stick into this man and those who rode to meet him?
It seems that the desire to constantly look into the abyss (his recent film about the killers, Into the Abyss ) somehow affected the Herzog itself. At the premiere of his series about suicide bombers on Berlinal a year ago, he was accompanied by harsh bodygags, as some governor of the Krasnoyarsk Territory. I never saw the director to come to the cinema with security. From whom they are protecting him-from psychopath stalkers or from himself?
Hertzog has been living in Los Angeles for many years, and another expert-EXPATE, the Italian Andrea Pallaoro, lives there. Like Herzog, he is obsessed with American crimes, more precisely, one of their variety, quite widespread by the killings of children of parents. Pallaoro studied newspaper reports on such atrocities and was looking for patterns. It is curious, for example, that some future deobuyers shortly before the crime began to complain about vision disorder. The problem with the eye also arises in the father of a large family in Mede. In a very beautiful, shot on a 35-mm film, which is rare at the present time, there is no accurate time, everything happens either 40 years ago, either 20 or yesterday in a heavy haze of drought, destroying the crops, ruining farmers and driving them crazy.
13. "The Messenger from the Shadows " , " Masque of Madness ), Norbert Pfafenbichler
Two new parts of the large project "Notes on the Cinema" by the Vienna artist Norbert Pfaffenbichler. In the "Messenger of the Shadows" he mounted dozens of fragments of surviving paintings in which Lon Cheney (1883-1930) played, including scenes from a wonderful "punishment", where Cheney portrayed a legless gangster. It turned out a whirlpool of demonic transformations, in which "a person with a thousand faces" becomes an old woman, then a Chinese, then the devil knows what. A completely new movie shot a hundred years ago. In the "mask of madness" the same operation is subjected to Boris Carloff. I must say that Norbert Pfufenbichler himself, born on time, could become a great actor of silent cinema: he has an amazing face, and if I were Murnau or Robert Vine, would immediately invite him to the main role.
Here you should recall the three wonderful archival film projects of 2013. Firstly, it is a digital restoration of Alfred Hitchcock's surviving dumb films, undertaken by the British film Institute. All nine restored paintings were first shown at a wonderful festival of archival cinema in Bologna. Secondly, it is a collection of experimental shortcashes of Kertis Harrington , sixteen-million beauty, as important as the much better well-known films of Kenneth Enger and Maya Deren. And it is certainly worth watching another film shot 40 years ago and arising this year from non -existence after a long restoration: " Cousin Jules " of Dominica Benishetti. This is a great story of a humble man living in a world, so well tailored that even death is not able to ruin the ideal mechanism of his being.
Finally, three links to ratings that I made in 2010 , 2011 and 2012 . There are so many films, and time jumps so agile that it seems that these lists have arisen not the day before yesterday, but in some kind of cave of forgotten dreams.