NYT's 25 Best Movies of the 21st Century
Amongst the New York Times' 25 Best Movies of the 21st Century are :
- A Touch of Sin (Jia Zhangke)
- Silent Light (Reygadas)
- Three Times (HHH)
- Timbuktu (Sissako)
- Wendy and Lucy (Reichardt)
5 Contemplative films out of 25, that's 20% of the best of the century (so far).
Not bad for a mainstream journal that publishes Dan Kois (the bored philistine).
Comments
In either case, they could have done better with the more mainstream-friendly entries on the list. I'd have included Carol, The Master, The Skin I Live In, and The Piano Teacher to start with. Perhaps I'd throw in 35 Shots of Rum, and I'd try to represent Farhadi somehow as well, and also Kiyoshi Kurosawa. And maybe I'd controversially throw in something like Miami Vice. Anyhow, just my personal thoughts.
À toute!
Farhadi is also my idol, one of the best of the last decade or so.
But I don't know Dermikubuz, I'm intrigued.
I'm not aware of this problem, and I'm not following the box office stats closely to have an informed opinion. I'm not sure they are performing less than equivalent French-speaking art films or World art films... art films in general are not performing very well, even in France. The miracle of "l'exception culturelle" is that they are distributed at all, and outside Paris too. So the access to culture is preserved. Unlike in the USA where the screening in theaters is reserved to money-making movies.
So the institutions are giving money to protect the access to the theaters for every small films... and they can't spare this aid for "commercial movies". There is a commission that study the case of each contenders ("l'avance sur recette" http://www.cnc.fr/web/fr/resultats-2016 ), which lends money to films at the stage of screenwriting as an advance on the money they "might" make at the box office. Naturally, most films never pay back this advance. But they are really strict to make sure the money goes to the needy.
Assayas is a household name and can gather investors by himself by now. Although I wonder why his English-language film would not benefit from this aid. I'm also surprised that PTA, Haynes or Ramsay would be blacklisted because they are not blockbuster material... I have the feeling that France helps the American (or British) indie too but you're right, I see no English name on the link above. I see "Elle" by Verhoeven, in 2014, but maybe it's because it was in French.
If the government doesn't help them directly, at least there are private distributors who are willing to buy them and put them in theaters, which is rare in the USA (where nothing foreign is in theaters outside NYC and LA). Maybe they think that by the simple fact they are in English, the market of the USA is open to them to pay back their investments.
In France an art film that fares very well makes 400,000 spectators when they reach mainstream appeal (a blockbuster makes at least 2 millions spectators) so it's a niche market for indie films that is split between many world cinemas.
I didn't see "Sils Maria" was it in French-English? It had Stewart attached to it too.
There is a market in the USA for artfilms, with the college campuses, the eldery, the immigrants from around the world (second or third generation), and urban cinephiles... but it's a shame that the plethoric festival circuit (where filmmakers don't draw any money from screenings) has replaced, with the VOD at home, the local theaters (that are closing down one after the other).
Artfilms in France fare a little better than in the USA because there is a cinema culture here still (curiosity for world cinema and culture of theaters), but not enough to sustain a market without state aid of course.
A Separation is mainstream (it's just foreign), but Amour was a hard UFO to market. But there are good foreign mainstream movies, why do you think the USA is closed to them? Is it pure competition? Or is it that the audience is really faithful to domestic products?
At any rate, I think it's a complex situation, and the fact that Americans are just a bunch of philistines who don't care about art is really just one factor among many, even if it is one factor among many. But like you said, much of it comes down to the public subsidies for cultural dissemination you have in France that don't really exist in France. In any case, I don't have a problem with multiple co-existing distribution schemes for art films, so Ceylan's works getting released on blu-ray and made available on the itunes store in North America is still a heck of a lot better than nothing. I'm fine with theatrical distribution co-existing with blu-ray/digital. How else will someone in the boondocks of Iowa manage to access something like Horse Money. Even fifty years ago, I can't imagine a film like 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her was any more widely distributed in theaters than Winter Sleep was three years ago. In many ways, I think the DVD revolution was a saving grace for cinephilia, since it meant you didn't have to fly to Paris or New York to see a Bresson film. Surely, you'd acknowledge companies like Criterion, Eureka, Cinema Guild, and so forth provide a valuable service. In my opinion, the theatrical and home viewing experiences each have their pros and cons, and there are benefits, going both ways, you can extract from one that you can't from the other. I certainly agree with you that without the "exception culturelle" those Left Bank revival houses and all those corner bookshops would probably struggle to survive!
But I can't help but find it sad that big pictures can't be seen on the big screen anymore for most people. It's more an aesthetic matter, maybe an out-of-date question in today's digital age.
Although David Lynch says in his Cahiers interview that if you watch close enough your smartphone or tablet, the screen is as big as if you're seating at the back of a theater (with the headphones on of course).
What about Mubi and Fandor? I only tried Netflix for a month, the choice is mainly mainstream.
Jauja is like Amour, hard to sell because of its lack of dialogues. In spite of Viggo Mortensen. But they are all beautiful films for those who have the patience (Anatolia, Jauja, 35 shots). Maybe the critics aren't doing enough to sell them to their readers, maybe readers don't read critics anymore (and visit the tomatometer instead!)
I haven't seen Costa's Horse Money, how is it?
I actually haven't seen Horse Money either yet by the way. It's on my list. In any case, Netflix has a poor selection even if excellent picture quality. FilmStruck is the reverse as is Mubi, since the compression artefacts are often quite distracting. Compression artefacts aren't an issue if you rent a film on itunes though. All the Kino, Cinema Guild, Criterion, et al. material is available on itunes...if you have access to an American CB of course.
Haneke has perhaps penetrated a wider consciousness as did Kiarostami intermittently I suppose.
And if we talk about France, there was a series of exhibitions pairing up 2 (CCC) filmmakers together at Centre Pompidou in Paris, which is a cultural recognition, even if it's a museum therefore a clique of aficionados like you say. Mekas & Guerin, Alonso & Serra, Wang Bing & Rosales...
Béla Tarr did an exhibition in Amsterdam.
I don't think CCC has the potential mainstream appeal (narratively) that Modern Cinema had, so it will never break out in the wider cultural consciousness. But the fact they are adopted by festivals is already a big win, despite the bored critics who complain about that "mannerism".
Ceylan and Jia Zhangke (but also Kawase, Reygadas, Kore-eda, Dumont, Gus Van Sant, HHH, Kiarostami, Kaplanoglu...) have an accessible narrative style that a willing mainstream audience could "tolerate" if they tried in the right conditions.
But it's a little more difficult for the core CCC auteurs such as Tarr, Alonso, Bartas, Diaz, Tsai, Omirbaev, Andersson, Benning, Hutton, Dean, Fliegauf... they are mostly wordless and static which is not something the audience cope with easily unless they are art fans.
CCC is an art, it's not entertainment! so it's obvious they land in museums and festivals rather than at the multiplex.
It's been a few weeks. Anyhow, I just wanted to say a few things. I'm not entirely certain interest in 'film as art' has dwindled to the extent people suggest. Sometimes I just think second wave cinephiles, and this doesn't include you, are stuck so far up their own a** they're completely out of touch with the broader realm of "art and culture" within which the greatest films should ideally be getting appreciated. There are still tons of people out there interested in watching something "other than the typical Hollywood fare", even if an Alonso would only attract a tiny fraction of this population. Look at the number of imdb ratings films like The 400 Blows, Persona, Stalker, and most Haneke works have. Take a film like The Florida Project, for instance. It's by no means CCC, but it's not a middlebrow prestige picture either and it's certainly aesthetically engaging. Is it Dreyer or Bresson? Probably not, but that's not the point. But I guess I'm to some degree an anti-elitist at heart in the sense that Bresson and Antonioni films should ideally be perceived as "cool" things to "check out" the way we're primed to perceive King Crimson and/or Velvet Underground albums rather than as "Strombolian" works to aspire to in order to increase our cultural capital at cocktail parties. I think much of the obsession over categories like 'high art' is largely politically motivated and isn't always related to aesthetics. So perhaps the auteurist tendency to use the likes of Hawks, Lubitsch, or Ford as a club with which to beat down Bergman and Antonioni may be annoying but perhaps it was necessary if only to reinvigorate cultural discourse and resist the complacency of urban bourgeois museum goers. "Ah oui, j'ai vu l'expo de Kandinsky à Beaubourg l'autre jour. Ce n'était pas ma tasse de thé franchement, mais je suis content d'y avoir allé." "Oui, mais quand même il y a vraiment quelque chose qui te frappe dans ces toiles, tu sais...", and so on and so forth. I think you get the picture. I don't think 'reverse elitists' like Andrew Sarris were so much against art films as they were against the idea of 'serious culture' as a Sunday activity for bourgeois self-improvement.
Being a cinephile rather than a multiplex goer is an elitist practice because it's a niche, because titles are not readily accessible, because there is no advertisments, because they have less screens... But it doesn't have to be bourgeois! It's a cultural niche, not a social class warfare.
I think Hawks, Lubitsch, Ford, Bergman, Antonioni and Haneke are in the same bag of auteurism, at least today (long after the quarrels of cinéphile parishes), are they more open to a wider public? I don't know
I prefer the legacy of Sarris to Pauline Kael's ;)
I'm not into Hawks, Lubitsch or even Ford myself... I've seen The Searchers last month for the first time, and I wonder why it is so high on the Best Movie Of All Time list. It's beautifully shot, but it's very classical. I think modern cinema is much more interesting artistically, like Antonioni, Bergman...
I'm pro-Cahiers too. I was just jokingly putting the responsibility of their shoulders. I'm a fan of Bazin especially!
The Cahiers legacy is priceless.
But they started the tearing down the pedestal of artfilm masters to the benefit of genre masters.
I see no harm if the youngsters at least know of a Bergman, a Tarkovsky, a Kubrick (to me they are geniuses in cinema history), it's already hard homework compared to the king of mainstream cinema they were raised on today.
But I think Renoir is trendy too among artfilm lovers (thanks to Criterion)