a party

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2011: A Year in Cinema

Continuing the tradition, what follows is a list of films seen for the first time in 2011, or revisited and reconsidered, in rough order of preference. I also wrote some little things for year-end roundups at Vinyl Is Heavy and for the Mubi Notebook. I've got some other thoughts, but not sure they'll drift their way into print in the immediate... for now, let's just say these top 5 (and maybe 6) will be influencing me for a long, long time.

Adam's Rib (George Cukor, 1949)
Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, 2010)
The Color Wheel (Alex Ross Perry, 2011)
This Is Not a Film (Mojtaba Mirtahmasb & Jafar Panahi, 2010)
Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011)
Passeio com Johnny Guitar (João César Monteiro, 1996)
A King in New York (Charles Chaplin, 1957)
The Pinochet Case (Patricio Guzmán, 2001)
Bahrain: Shouting in the Dark (Al Jazeera documentary, 2011)
Eadward Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (Thom Andersen, 1974)
The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography (William E. Jones, 1998)
The Exiles (Kent Mackenzie, 1961)
The Princess Bride (Rob Reiner, 1987)
Ars Colonia (Raya Martin, 2011)
Big (Penny Marshall, 1988)
Salvador Allende (Patricio Guzmán, 2004)
Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog, 2010)
Dead Island: Official Announcement Trailer
Palestinian Chicken episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" (2011)
A Village Fading Away (Patricio Guzmán, 1995)
Film Socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard, 2010)
The Angel Wore Red (Nunnally Johnson, 1960)
Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thom Andersen, 2003)
The Firm (Sydney Pollack, 1993)
Mister Softee episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" (2011)
The King's Speech (Tom Hooper, 2010)
"Hang With Me" (Max Vitali, 2010)
Get Out of the Car (Thom Andersen, 2010)
Inside Job (Charles Ferguson, 2010)
History Lessons (Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, 1972)
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (Leonard Nimoy, 1986)
Sherlock Jr. (Buster Keaton, 1924)
To Have and Have Not (Howard Hawks, 1944)
The Day He Arrives (Hong Sang-soo, 2011)
The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr & Ágnes Hranitzky, 2011)
Broadcast News (James L. Brooks, 1987)
George Harrison: Living in the Material World (Martin Scorcese, 2011)
Tauw (Ousmane Sembene, 1970)
The Ace of Hearts (Wallace Worsley, 1921)
Bi-Sexual episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" (2011)
Car Periscope episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" (2011)
Almayer's Folly (Chantal Akerman, 2011)
Three on a Couch (Jerry Lewis, 1966)
Wavelength (Michael Snow, 1967)
The Loneliest Planet (Julia Loktev, 2011)
The Immortal Story (Orson Welles, 1968)
Bhopali (Max Carlson, 2011)
Goodbye, Michael episode of "The Office" (2011)
Bobby Fischer Against the World (Liz Garbus, 2011)
Cops (Edward F. Cline & Buster Keaton, 1922)
Cabs Are Here! episode of "Jersey Shore" (2011)
Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942)
Ministry of Fear (Fritz Lang, 1944)
The Trip [theatrical version] (Michael Winterbottom, 2010)
The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011)
The Scarecrow (Edward F. Cline & Buster Keaton, 1920)
The Aristocrat (Greg Croteau, 2010)
Unstoppable (Tony Scott, 2010)
Young Adult (Jason Reitman, 2011)
Dallas (Stuart Heisler, 1950)
The Tall Target (Anthony Mann, 1951)
The Wedding Night (King Vidor, 1935)
Super 8 (J.J. Abrams, 2011)
Cold Weather (Aaron Katz, 2010)
Notorious (George Tillman, Jr., 2009)
The Wolf Man (George Waggner, 1941)
The Paleface (Edward F. Cline & Buster Keaton, 1922)
The Devil is a Woman (Josef von Sternberg, 1935)
Union Depot (Alfred E. Green, 1932)
The Descendants (Alexander Payne, 2011)
British Agent (Michael Curtiz, 1934)
The 3 Rs (David Lynch, 2011)
Haiku (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2009)
Two & Two (Babak Anvari, 2010)
Raffles (George Fitzmaurice, 1930)
The White Meadows (Mohammad Rasoulof, 2009)
The Informant! (Steven Soderbergh, 2009)
The Professionals (Richard Brooks, 1966)
House Party (Reginald Hudlin, 1990)
Along the Great Divide (Raoul Walsh, 1951)
All Blossoms Again: Pedro Costa, Director (Aurélien Gerbault, 2006)
Knight Without Armor (Jacques Feyder, 1937)
Jumping (Osamu Tezuka, 1984)
Killed (William E. Jones, 2009)
Discrepancy (William E. Jones, 2008-2010)
Tiny Furniture (Lena Dunham, 2010)
Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps (Oliver Stone, 2010)
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (William Greaves, 1968)
Faust (Alexander Sokurov, 2011)
Fun on Mars (Sally Cruikshank, 1971)
Too Big to Fail (Curtis Hanson, 2011)
Cinema Verite (Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini, 2011)
Due Date (Todd Phillips, 2010)
Autumnal (Scott Nyerges, 2008)
Film Montages (for Peter Roehr) (William E. Jones, 2006)
Berlin Flash Frames (William E. Jones, 2010)
Punctured (William E. Jones, 2010)
Cop Out (Kevin Smith, 2010)

In loving memory

طارق الطيب محمد البوعزيزي‎
Mohamed Bouazizi
March 29, 1984 – January 4, 2011

ideology

"The unjust and oppressive, all those, in fact, who wrong others, are guilty, not only of the evil they do, but also of the perversion of mind they cause in those whom they offend." - I Promessi Sposi, Alessandro Manzoni

Pensée unique

Monti to Parliament: no alternative

"Saying you have no choice cuts off all options, absolves responsibility and is the dream killer." - Seth Godin

Satyagraha

“When righteousness
withers away
and evil
rules the land,
we come into being,
age after age,
and take physical shape,
and move,
a man among men,
for the protection of good,
thrusting back evil,
and setting virtue on her seat again.”
- Philip Glass #OWS

explosion, dissolution, dissociation, disintegration

“The dérive (with its flow of acts, its gestures, its strolls, its encounters) was to the totality exactly what psychoanalysis (in the best sense) is to language. Let yourself go with the flow of words, says the psychoanalyst. He listens, until the moment when he rejects or modifies (one could say detourns) a word, an expression or a definition. The dérive is certainly a technique, almost a therapeutic one. But just as analysis unaccompanied with anything else is almost always contraindicated, so continual dériving is dangerous to the extent that the individual, having gone too far (not without bases, but...) without defenses, is threatened with explosion, dissolution, dissociation, disintegration. And thence the relapse into what is termed ‘ordinary life,’ that is to say, in reality, into ‘petrified life.’ In this regard I now repudiate my Formulary’s propaganda for a continuous dérive. It could be continuous like the poker game in Las Vegas, but only for a certain period, limited to a weekend for some people, to a week as a good average; a month is really pushing it. In 1953-1954 we dérived for three or four months straight. That’s the extreme limit. It’s a miracle it didn’t kill us.”
- Ivan Chtcheglov, excerpt from a 1963 letter to Michèle Bernstein and Guy Debord

via

UC Davis / Four Perspectives

UC Davis Pepper Spray Incident, Four Perspectives by Andy Baio

UC Davis

more photos

additional info: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

professional relations

"People who have an official, professional relation to other men’s sufferings, for instance, judges, police officers, doctors—in course of time, through habit, grow so callous that they cannot, even if they wish it, take any but a formal attitude to their clients; in this respect they are not different from the peasant who slaughters sheep and calves in the back-yard, and does not notice the blood. With this formal, soulless attitude to human personality the judge needs but one thing—time—in order to deprive an innocent man of all rights of property, and to condemn him to penal servitude. Only the time spent on performing certain formalities for which the judge is paid his salary, and then—it is all over. Then you may look in vain for justice and protection in this dirty, wretched little town a hundred and fifty miles from a railway station! And, indeed, is it not absurd even to think of justice when every kind of violence is accepted by society as a rational and consistent necessity, and every act of mercy—for instance, a verdict of acquittal—calls forth a perfect outburst of dissatisfied and revengeful feeling?"

- Anton Chekhov, from “Ward No 6," as cited in Was King Hammurabi a Commie? by Charles Simic

the main issue is in front of you

a ding in the universe

"It's more fun to be a pirate than join the Navy."








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"No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new."

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"Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?"