The Greatest Films of All Time According to Some Toronto Cinephiles

David Davidson (Blogger: Toronto Film Review)

1. Indo-china: Opium den (Lumière Brothers)
2. The Lady from Shanghai & Double Indemnity
3. Les Enfants du Paradis & Les Anges du péché
4. Rear Window & Scarlet Street
5. Cheyenne Autumn & Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
6. Land of the Pharaohs & Hatari! & Red Line 7000
7. Rameau's Nephew by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen & The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach
8. 3 Women & Two-Lane Blacktop & The Swimmer
9. The Last House on the Left & Assault on Precinct 13 & Rampage & Blue Collar
10. Les Nuits de la pleine lune & Le viol d'une jeune fille douce  & J’entend plus la guitar
11. Tucker: The Man and His Dream  & Catch Me If You Can
12. Eyes Wide Shut
13. As Good as it Gets & J'ai pas sommeil
14. Promises Written in Water & Colossal Youth
15. Cosmopolis

*****

Arielle Gavin (Blogger: Dragonaut)

1. The Hole (Tsai Ming-Liang, 1998)
2. (nostalgia) (Hollis Frampton, 1971)
3. Blue (Derek Jarman, 1993)
4. Le beau mariage (Éric Rohmer, 1982)
5. Colossal Youth (Pedro Costa, 2006)
6. Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg, 2012)
7. Le diable probablement (Robert Bresson, 1977)
8. The Smiling Lieutenant (Ernst Lubitsch, 1931)
9. A nos amours (Maurice Pialat, 1983)
10. Ms.45 (Abel Ferrara, 1981)

*****

Kazik Radwanski (Filmmaker: Tower, Green Crayons)

1. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Dreyer, 1928)

2. A Woman Under the Influence (John Cassavetes, 1974)

3. Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949)

4. Mouchette (Robert Bresson, 1967)

5. Stroszek (Werner Herzog, 1977)

6. Vivre sa vie, The Mother and the Whore, À nos amours

7. Wanda, Killer of Sheep, Mikey and Nicky

8. Made in Britain, Meantime, Raining Stones

8. Beau travail, In Vanda’s Room, Where is the Friend’s Home?

10. A Married Couple, Pour la suite du monde, Goin' Down the Road

*****

Igor Drljaca (Filmmaker: Krivina, The Fuse: or How I Burned Simon Bolivar)

Here is a list of my favourites, though I might be forgetting a few. I refuse to rank them.

-       The Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975)

-       2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

-       Au Hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966)

-       Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)

-       Le fils (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, 2002)

-       Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami, 1990)

-       Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954)

-       The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris,1988)

-       A City of Sadness (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1989)

-       RoboCop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987)

-       Blissfully Yours (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2002)

-       Caché (Michael Haneke, 2005)

-       Modern Times (Charlie Chaplin, 1936)

-       Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley  Kubrick, 1964)

-       Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)

-       What Time Is It There? (Tsai Ming-liang, 2001)

-       Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)

-       The Decalogue (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1989)

-       In the Mood For Love (Wong Kar-Wai, 2000)

*****

Antoine Bourges (Filmmaker: East Hastings Pharmacy, Woman Waiting)

These are honestly the first ones that came to mind. They are in no particular order. I am probably forgetting 12 more that I'll regret not including, but I feel these ones all deserve top positions anyway.

-       Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949)

-       Vivre sa vie (Jean-Luc Godard, 1962)

-       Faces (John Cassavetes, 1968)

-       Gertrud (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1964)

-       2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

-       Wanda (Barbara Loden, 1970)

-       La maman et la putain (Jean Eustache, 1973)

-       Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975)

-       L'argent (Robert Bresson, 1983)

-       The Taking of Power by Louis XIV (Roberto Rossellini, 1966)

-       Le rayon vert (Éric Rohmer, 1986)

-       Liverpool (Lisandro Alonso, 2008)

*****

Simon Ennis (Filmmaker: Lunarcy!, You Might as Well Live)

Top Ten (in no particular order):

-       The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955)

-       That Obscure Object of Desire (Luis Buñuel, 1977)

-       Vernon, Florida (Errol Morris, 1981)

-       Lost Highway (also Blue Velvet / Eraserhead)

-       Double Indemnity or The Apartment

-       Two or Three Things I Know About Her / Weekend

-       The Shining (also Dr. Strangelove / 2001)

-       Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)

-       Welcome to the Dollhouse (Todd Solondz, 1995)

-       Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven, 1995)

Ten More (in no particular order):

-       Seul contre tous (Gaspar Noé, 1998)

-       Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947)

-       Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff, 2001)

-       Safe (Todd Haynes, 1995)

-       Repo Man (Alex Cox, 1984)

-       Manhattan (Woody Allen, 1979)

-       Fat Girl (Catherine Breillat, 2001)

-       Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Terry Gilliam & Terry Jones, 1975)

-       Top Hat (Mark Sandrich, 1935)

-       Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, 1933)

*****

Hugh Gibson (Producer: A Place Called Los Pereyra)

Here's my list in no particular order.

-       2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

-       Life and Nothing More… (Abbas Kiarostami, 1992)

-       Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975)

-       Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

-       Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978)

-       Muriel (Alain Resnais, 1963)

-       The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)

-       Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)

-       The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris,1988)

-       The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969)

Special mention: La jetée, The General, The Godfather II, Goodfellas, Tristana, The Mystery of Picasso, Unforgiven, Dimensions of Dialogue, A Moment of Innocence, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, M, The Manchurian Candidate, Contempt, Sherlock Jr., Fantasia, Crimson Gold, A Brighter Summer Day, Close Up, and many more....

*****

Lev Lewis (Composer: Amy George)

I won’t waste space distinguishing between “best” and “favourite”. The “best” lists always straddle the middle, and as valuable an artifact as the S&S list is as a collective group-think, in the end the personal compilation is usually more compelling. What I do want to stress is my still forming library of knowledge. It feels as if I’ve seen a fair share of the past 100 years of movies, but when tasked with making a statement of this sort, I realize how little of a dent I’ve actually made. With that said, this can stand as the ten best films I’ve seen at the ripe age of 21.

There are many apologies necessary. First to women, who go unrepresented here, even if seven of my choices identify a woman as their primary narrative focus. To the 1940’s, who despite yielding The Grapes of Wrath, The Letter, The Philadelphia Story, The Lady Eve, The Ox-Bow Incident, Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Laura, The Best Years of our Lives, Notorious, The Red Shoes, Bicycle Thieves & A Letter to Three Wives did not make the cut. To silents, who get one paltry mention. To the last 25 years of filmmaking. To Bergman and Bresson and Cassavetes and Chaplin and Cukor and Hitchcock and Hou and Kazan and Mizoguchi and Resnais and Wong and Woody. And to all the magnificent films I still have to experience. I’m looking forward to you.

1. Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978)

2. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928)

3. Woman in the Dunes (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964)

4. The Earrings of Madame De... (Max Ophüls, 1953)

5. Broadcast News (James L. Brooks, 1987)

6. Long Day’s Journey Into Night (Sidney Lumet, 1962)

7. Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray, 1955)

8. The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939)

9. New York, New York (Martin Scorsese, 1977)

10. Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959)

*****

Chris Kennedy (Programmer: The Free Screen, Early Monthly Segments. Filmmaker: Towards a Vanishing Point, Tamalpais) 

A very personal list. These are not the best by any objective standards, but they all spun me in different ways.

1. Flaming Creatures (Jack Smith, USA, 1963)

2. Out 1: noli me tangere (Jacques Rivette, France, 1971)

3. The Mysterious Object at Noon (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand, 2000)

4. The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (John Cassavettes, USA, 1976)

5. Le Fond de l'air est rouge (Grin Without a Cat) (Chris Marker, France, 1977)

6. Sátántangó (Bela Tarr, Hungary, 1994)

7. Life Dances On (Robert Frank, USA, 1980)

8. Les Maître Fous (Jean Rouch, France/Niger, 1955)

9. Nest of Tens (Miranda July, USA, 2000)

Tie:

10. The Hart of London (Jack Chambers, Canada, 1970)

10. A Burning Star (Kenji Onishi, Japan, 1995)

*****

Blake Williams (Filmmaker: Many a Swan, Coorow-Laptham Road)

1. Inland Empire (David Lynch, 2006)

2. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

3. Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2006)

4. Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967)

5. Nashville (Robert Atlman, 1975)

6. Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954)

7. Wavelength (Michael Snow, 1967)

8. Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944)

9. Punch-Drunk Love (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2002)

10. Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami, 1990)

*****

Marco Gualtieri

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

2. There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)

3. Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967)

4. Where is the Friend's Home? (Abbas Kiarostami, 1987)

5. Un condamné à mort s'est échappé (Robert Bresson, 1956)

6. Le Beau Serge (Claude Chabrol, 1958)

7. Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman, 2008)

8. Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975)

9. Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927)

10. Les parapluies de Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964)

*****

Ryan Krahn

1. Daughters of Darkness (Harry Kümel, 1971)

2. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) 

3. On the Silver Globe (Andrzej Żuławski, 1987)

4. Caché (Michael Haneke, 2005)

5. Choses Secrètes (Jean-Claude Brisseau, 2002)

6. Outer Space (Peter Tscherkassky, 1999)

7. Greed (Erich von Stroheim, 1924)

8. Bungalow (Ulrich Köhler, 2002)

9. Nuit de Chien (Werner Schroeter, 2008)

10. Class Relations (Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet, 1984)

11. Fascination (Jean Rollin, 1979)

12. The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982)

13. Dogville (Lars von Trier, 2003)

14. The Shooting (Monte Hellman, 1962)

15. A Man Escaped (Robert Bresson, 1956)

16. The Earrings of Madame de… (Max Ophüls, 1953)

17. Perceval le Gallois (Eric Rohmer, 1978)

18. Blind Beast (Yasuzo Masumura, 1969)

19. Grin Without a Cat (Chris Marker, 1977)

20. Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami, 1997)

*****

Adam Nayman (Film Critic: Cinema Scope, The Grid, The Globe and Mail)

1.     2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

2.     Beau travail (Claire Denis, 1998)

3.     A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang, 1991)

4.     Céline et Julie vont en bateau (Jacques Rivette, 1974)

5.     Don’t Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973)

6.     Duck Amuck (Chuck Jones, 1953) 

7.     La Règle du jeu (Jean Renoir, 1939)

8.     Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1982)

9.     Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)

10.  Viridiana (Luis Buñuel, 1961)

*****

John Semley (Film Critic: The A.V. Club, Cinema Scope)

1. 8 ½ (Federico Fellini, 1963)

2. Bigger Than Life (Nicolas Ray, 1956)

3. Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986)

4. Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch, 2001)

5. Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975)

6. Performance (Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, 1970)

7. Pickpocket (Robert Bresson, 1959)

8. Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)

9. The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)

10. The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969)

*****

Kiva Reardon (Film Critic: inMovies)

In making this list the first rule was it had to be a favourite. Not necessarily something I watch once a year (though many are), but films whose titles instantly conjure a memory, image, or even a tactile experience. That said, I naturally had the established canon in mind when cultivating this list: the French New Wave classic, the Technicolor masterpiece, the silent era favourite etc. But if these types of lists are meant to indicate the greatest contribution to cinema, here I am hoping to suggest we might recalibrate how we—because there is always a bias in any presumed collective—think about “contribution.”

1. Cléo de 5 à 7 (Agnès Varda, 1962)

Because Agnès Varda’s film captures and breaks down bourgeois malaise/idealism; but unlike any, say, Jean-Luc Godard film which has the same aim, she doesn’t merely use the female protagonist as a rhetorical device.

2. All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1955)

For the colour, the melodrama, and it’s influence on Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (which is my way of getting that film on my list).

3. Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999)

For creating a new form of war film and the way in which the Denis Lavant’s body becomes the skin of the film.

4. Attenberg (Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2010)

Because years from now we will look back on the New Greek Cinema and marvel at the films (this is the only forecasting I’ll engage in, I promise); for its conflation of the animal’s body and the human’s; and for the ingenious inserts, which speak louder than any dialogue.

5. 24 City (Jia Zhangke, 2008)

Because digital is not the death of cinema.

6. Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)

Because of the fear of the doppelganger and the latent lesbianism.

7. Les Amours de la Pieuvre (Jean Painlevé, 1965) 

Because when else do we stare into the soul of the mighty octopus and bask in its formless wonder?

8. King Kong (Merian C. Cooper &d Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933)

The best monster movie; sheer entertainment.

9. The Marriage of Maria Braun (R.W. Fassbinder, 1979)

Because there is no better role model than Maria Braun, or R.W. Fassbinder.

10. Orlando (Sally Potter, 1992)

Because it is a celebratory, wildly free feminist exegesis on lived experience and alternate histories.

*****

Nicholas Little

1. Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977)

2. The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939)

3. The Earrings of Madame de... (Max Ophüls, 1953)

4. Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)

5. Taxi Diver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)

6. North by Northwest (Alred Hitchcock, 1959)

7. La jetée (Chris Marker, 1962)

8. Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962)

9. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

10. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011)

Honorable mentions:

- Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)

- Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959)

- Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)

- Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969)

- King Kong (Merian C. Cooper &d Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933)

*****

Megan Widawski

1. Dazed and Confused (Richard Linklater, 1993)

2. Heathers (Michael Lehmann, 1988)

3. Clueless (Amy Heckerling, 1995)

4. Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (Peter Hewitt, 1991)

5. Rivers Edge (Tim Hunter, 1986)

6. Sixteen Candles (John Hughes, 1984)

7. Shopgirl (Anand Tucker, 2005)

8. The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)

9. West Side Story (Jerome Robbins & Robert Wise, 1961)

10. Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976)

Honorable mentions:

- Cinderella (Clyde Geronimi, 1950)

- The Lost Boys (Joel Schumacher, 1987)

- Jaws (Stephen Spielberg, 1975)

- Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939)

- The Sound of Music (Robert Wise, 1965)

- Sid and Nancy (Alex Cox, 1986)

*****

Sean Rogers

1. The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942)

These first six entries could be swapped out for any other film by their respective filmmakers. Ambersons remains Welles's roomiest film, his saddest. Poetic, its having been ruined.

2. Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks, 1939)

Featuring the most hermetic of Hawks's clans, and so, the most perfect. Tempted to say Red River, instead, if only to include a western on here.

3. Eloge de l'amour (Jean-Luc Godard, 2001)

The most recent title on this list eulogises not just love, but cinema, resistance, the 20th century, all those elements that Godard sees as interchangeable and abandoned.

4. Muriel (Alain Resnais, 1963)

Like Eloge, another film haunted by war, seized by war, fissured by war. Resnais's most tightly controlled film, aside from those devastating flourishes.

5. Vampyr (Carl Dreyer, 1932)

Film's nearest approximation of nightmare, that close cousin to the vaunted spirituality of Dreyer's other work. Plus, a good representative of the horror flick -- another favourite genre.

6. Lancelot du lac (Robert Bresson, 1974)

Bresson's cinema was never about transcendence so much as presence -- this is his most brute and physical film.

7. Flaming Creatures (Jack Smith, 1963)

Smith's gauzy orgy, however, provides the most tactile experience in movies. Tough to pick from among so many other major works in the avant garde, which too rarely get mentioned in exercises like this.

8. Bimbo's Initiation (Dave Fleischer, 1931)

Along with the Hawks and the Minnelli, this is one of the films on this list I've had the pleasure to teach, though always too briefly. As Jonathan Rosenbaum said of Guy Maddin's Heart of the World, the few dense minutes of this flailing, feverish short are "inexhaustible."

9. Sátántangó (Bela Tarr, 1994)

Carved from life's muck.

10. Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944)

Rich, unalloyed pleasure. Opulence without decadence -- Hollywood at its finest.

The requisite caveats:

a. Listed in the order I thought of them.

b. I'm aware of how American, French, and male these choices shook out. A quick, sneaky corrective might go: The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum, A City of Sadness, Close-Up, Jeanne Dielman..., Ceddo, Daisies, Ivan the Terrible I & II, Marketa Lazarova, M, and Go! Go! Go!.

c. I'm working under the assumption that it's become passé to include Vertigo...

 *****

Marc Saint-Cyr (Blogger: Subtitle Literate)

1. Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Bergman, 1982)

2. Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)

3. 8 ½ (Federico Fellini, 1963)

4. The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, 1959)

5. Yi Yi (Edward Yang, 2000)

6. The Ascent (Larisa Shepitko, 1976)

7. What Time is it There? (Tsai Ming-liang, 2001)

8. L’Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934)

9. The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939)

10. Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2006)

*****

Christopher Heron (Film Critic: The Seventh Art)

1. Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1983)

2. Early Summer (Yasujiro Ozu, 1951)

3. The Crime of Monsieur Lange (Jean Renoir, 1936)

4. Journal d'un curé de campagne (Robert Bresson, 1951)

5. Sansho the Baliff (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954)

6. Gertrud (Carl Dreyer, 1964)

7. Sátántangó (Bela Tarr,1994)

8. Hail Mary (Jean-Luc Godard, 1985)

9. Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975)

10. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1943)

11. Young Mr. Lincoln (John Ford, 1939)

12. The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub,1968)

13. Loulou (Maurice Pialat, 1980)

14. Alexander Nevsky (Sergei Eisenstein, 1938)

15. Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967)

16. Le Plaisir (Max Ophüls, 1952)

17. Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999)

18. The Falls (Peter Greenaway, 1980)

19. Chimes at Midnight (Orson Welles, 1965)

20. Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)

*****

David Balzer (Art Critic: Canadian Art. Writer: Contrivances)

Here's a pretty personal list of essentials, unranked and free of commentary:

- The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1943)

- L'avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960)

- Bunny Lake Is Missing (Otto Preminger, 1965)

- Yolanda and the Thief (Vincente Minnelli, 1945)

- Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954)

- Léon Morin, Prêtre (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1961)

- Lola Montès (Max Ophüls, 1955)

- Journey in Italy (Roberto Rossellini, 1954)

- Andrei Rublev (Andrey Tarkovsky, 1969)

- Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959)

*****

Daniel Gallay

1. Out 1: Spectre (Jacques Rivette, 1974)

2. The Far Shore (Joyce Wieland, 1976)

3. Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949)

4. L'Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934)

5. F for Fake (Orson Welles, 1973)

6. Lola Montès (Max Ophüls, 1955)

7. A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1946)

8. The Flowers of St. Francis (Roberto Rossellini, 1950)

9. Dishonored (Josef von Sternberg, 1931)

10. Los Olvidados (Luis Buñuel, 1950)

*****

Calum Marsh (Film Critic: Slant)

An alternative to my Slant Top Ten list, in the spirit of Rosenbaum, who picks a different top 10 for every Sight & Sound poll and doesn't let himself pick the same movies twice, I wanted to come with new picks which I also love.

- California Split (Robert Altman, 1974)

- Bitter Victory (Nicholas Ray, 1957)

- Rock Hudson's Home Movies (Mark Rappaport, 1992)

- The Devil, Probably (Robert Bresson, 1977)

- The Exiles (Kent MacKenzie, 1961)

- The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges, 1942)

- Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven, 1995)

- Distant Voices, Still Lives (Terence Davies, 1988)

- Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan, 2011)

- The Act Of Seeing With One's Own Eyes (Stan Brakhage, 1971)

*****

Tina Hassannia

1. Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami, 1990)

2. Céline et Julie vont en bateau (Jacques Rivette, 1974)

3. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (F. W. Murnau, 1927)

4. Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967)

5. Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966)

6. Love Streams (John Cassavetes, 1984)

7. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl T. Dreyer, 1928)

8. The Cow (Dariush Mehrjui, 1969)

9. 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)

10. The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, 1998)

*****

Samuel Adelarr (Blogger: Guntalk) 
In chronological order:

- Modern Times (Charlie Chaplin, 1936)

- My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946)

- Voyage to Italy (Roberto Rossellini, 1954)

- An Autumn Afternoon (Yasujiro Ozu, 1962)

- 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)

- Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967)

- Milestones (Robert Kramer, 1975)

- The Passenger (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1975)

- L'argent (Robert Bresson, 1983)

- Abraham's Valley (Manoel de Oliveira, 1993)

*****

Jovana Jankovic (Blogger: Toronto Film Society)

1. Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950)
2. 3 Women (Robert Altman, 1977)
3. Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997)
4. Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992)
5. Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)
6. Lili Marleen (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1981)
7. Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958)
8. La ley del deseo (Pedro Almodóvar, 1987)
9. Match Point (Woody Allen, 2005)
10. Barton Fink (Coen Bros., 1991)
11. Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974)
12. The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955)
13. The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, 1962)
14. La haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995)
15. Caché (Michael Haneke, 2005)
16. Der Blaue Engel (Josef von Sternberg, 1930)
17. The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
18. Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991)
19. In The Cut (Jane Campion, 2003)
20. Harlan County, USA (Barbara Kopple, 1977)

*****

Eastern Yoo (Clerk: Suspect Video)

1. Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975)

2. La Grande Illusion (Jean Renoir, 1937)

3. Andrei Rublev (Andrey Tarkovsky, 1969)

4. Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)

5. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980)

6. Cure (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1997)

7. Akira (Katsuhiro Ohtomo, 1988)

8. Ma nuit chez Maud (Éric Rohmer, 1969)

9. Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Bergman, 1982)

10. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)

*****

Moen Mohamed

My ten films will not be my Top Ten, but it is a selection of ten films that are among my favourites.  I make that distinction very clear because I don't believe in a single film or 10 films being the best of all time.  It is just a personal choice.  I have been lucky to have seen dozens and dozens of masterpieces in my life.  So, I think they all should be given that honour of appearing on any list I create.  I am just being kind and appreciative to the directors whose films mean so much to me.

In alphabetical order:

- The Burmese Harp (Kon Ichikawa, Japan, 1956)

- La Chambre Vertre (Francois Truffaut, France, 1978)

- Cronaca di un Amore (Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy, 1950)

- In a Year with Thirteen Moons (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Germany, 1978)

- Landscape in the Mist (Theo Angelopoulos, Greece, 1988)

- The Mad Fox (Tomu Uchida, Japan, 1962)

- Pakeezah (Kamal Amrohi, India, 1972)

- Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, Australia, 1975)

- Tokyo Twilight (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan, 1957)

- The Tree of Wooden Clogs (Ermanno Olmi, Italy, 1978)

*****

Ron Walther

1. Purple Noon (René Clément, 1960)
2. Mysterious Skin (Gregg Araki, 2004)
3. Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947)
4. Kiss me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955)
5. If… (Lindsay Anderson, 1968)
6. This Sporting Life (Lindsay Anderson, 1963)
7. The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970)
8. Love with a Proper Stranger (Robert Mulligan, 1963)
9. In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, 1950)
10. On Dangerous Ground (On Dangerous Gound, 1952)

*****

Scott Cowan

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

2. The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967)

3. Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949)

4. Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)

5. La Grande Illusion (Jean Renoir, 1937)

6. Les enfants du paradis (Marcel Carné, 1945)

7. On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954)

8. Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945)

9. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)

10. Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927)

*****

Thom Ernst (Host: Saturday Night at the Movies)

- The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)

- The Godfather: Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)

- Nashville (Robert Atlman, 1975)

- The Bicycle Thief (Vittorio De Sica, 1947)

- Crimes and Misdemeanors (Woody Allen, 1989)

             - The Miracle at Morgan's Creek (Preston Sturges, 1944)

- Cabaret (Bob Fosse, 1972)

- Paths of Glory (Stanley Kubrick, 1957)

- Magnolia (P.T. Anderson, 1999)

- La Strada (Federico Fellini)

*****

Ryan McNeil (Blogger: The Matinee)

-Modern Times  Charlie Chaplin, 1936)
- Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
- Rashomon  (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)
- Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
- Cabaret (Bob Fosse, 1972)
- The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)
- Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977)
- Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980)
- No Country For Old Men (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2007)

*****

Andrew Proczek

1. The Noriko Trilogy: Late Spring / Early Summer / Tokyo Story

2. Germany Year Zero (Roberto Rossellini, 1948)

3. Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946)

4. Au Hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966)

5. India Song (Marguerite Duras, 1975)

6. Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)

7. Le Plaisir (Max Ophüls, 1952)

8. Ordet (Carl T. Dreyer, 1955)

9. Nostalghia (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1983)

10. The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel, 2008)

*****

Thom Loree

1. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)

2. Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch, 2001)

3. Dead of Night (Ealing Studios, 1945)

4. The Thief of Bagdad (Ludwig Berger & Michael Powell, 1940)

5. The Docks of New York (Josef von Sternberg, 1928)

6. The Thing from Another World (Christian Nyby & Howard Hawks, 1951)

7. The Chase (Arthur Ripley, 1946)

8. Fires on the Plain (Kon Ichikawa, 1959)

9. He Who Gets Slapped (Victor Sjöström, 1924)

10. Flesh and Fantasy (Julien Duvivier, 1943)

The Edward G. Robinson episode.

*****

Simon Hue
In chronological order:

- It's a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946)

- Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, 1956)

- Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)

- Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959)

- Les demoiselles de Rochefort (Jacques Demy, 1967)

- The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969)

- The Purple Rose of Cairo (Woody Allen, 1985)

- The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, 1998)

- Yi Yi (Edward Yang, 2000)

- A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001)

*****

David Acacia

1. Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939)

2. All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950)

3. The Earrings of Madame de... (Max Ophüls, 1953)

4. Beauty and the Beast (Gary Trousdale & Kirk Wise, 1991)

5. Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch, 2001)

6. Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)

7. In a Year with Thirteen Moons (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1978)

8. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000)

9. Les enfants du paradis (Marcel Carné, 1945)

10. Cries and Whispers (Ingmar Bergman, 1972)

*****

Clint Enns (Filmmaker)

A Few of My Favorite Short Experimental Films and Videos of Recent Years (in no particular order):

1)    Evan Meaney – The Well of Representation (2011) The Well of Representation is arguably Meaney’s best work to date and was easily my favourite video at the 2012 Images Festival.
This video is the epilogue to The Ceibas Cycle, a 10 part series of videos made between 2007 and 2011 that investigates glitches and their connection to communication theory, the archive, ghosts, and our digital identities.  The Well of Representation combines all of these ideas into a hacked, 16-bit re-make of Hollis Frampton's Gloria! (1979).

2)    Scott Fitzpatrick – Places With Meaning (2012) and Up (2012)
Places With Meaning is the sequel to Wingdings Love Letter (2011) and celebrates the often misunderstood and critically under-appreciated font, Webdings.  These 16mm films were created by laser printing directly onto recycled film.
Up (2012) was created to be viewed with ChromaDepth glasses (Walter Forsberg's article about Lillian Schwartz and ChromaDepth can be found in Issue #3 of Incite and is available here. If you would like a pair of  ChromaDepth glasses, Incite Issue #3 comes with a pair and can be purchased here).  The piece can easily be read as a 3D spacial study through colour.

3)    Nicholas O'Brien - A Letter (to Chelsey Hoff) (2010)
A letter to artist Chelsey Hoff made on VHS for a secret santa exchange.  Check out Chelsey Hoff's videos here. 

4)    Zahid Jiwa - Five Towns: Video Asylum for Shut-Ins  (2010)
A tongue-in-cheek VHS homage to one of my favourite filmmakers James Benning.

5)    Sabrina Ratté - Station Balnéaire V.1 (2011)
The Almalfi Coast electronically manipulated to create a video that is spiritual, meditative, and soothing.  This video could be seen as an extension of Jane Wright's video landscapes.

6)    Mark Pellegrino – On Being Selfish (2011)
In the future we will all have our 15MBs of fame.  Enjoy it while it lasts Mark.

7)    David Domingo – Sound of the Sun (2011)
Remember those 16mm educational documentaries you were forced to watch as a child?  Don't you wish you were watching this instead? 

8)    Sean Dunne - American Juggalo (2011)
The decline of Western Civilization captured in one exploitative ethnographic documentary.  This film is destined to become a cult classic.

9)    Félix Lajeunesse, Paul Raphaël, and Zacharias Kunuk – Kobe (2012) 
I recently saw this video as part of the Home On Native Land exhibit at the Lightbox.  The video perfectly uses 3D technologies to capture the sparse landscape of the north and to present a portrait of contemporary Inuit culture by documenting a the life of a young Inuit boy.  The pacing of the video provides the viewer with time to reflect, a luxury that is missing in major cities.

10) Ji Yeon Lim (aka YALOO林) - Mountain for your mind (2012)
A video that re-imagines the landscape film in a digital era. 

What Issue Was It? (En Couverture at Nightswimming)

In the early eighties at the French film magazine Positif they ran a series entitled “le cinéma et nous,” which was initiated in a convivial spirit to get some of the magazines writers to answer two questions: What is the value for you of seeing a good movie? and, what exactly do you expect to take in from seeking out films, and seeing them at movie theaters? With one of the goals of this petit jeux to share with the reader what animates the individual writers and to better articulate the spirit of the magazine, Positif.

Well the writers jumped onto the challenge, usually with two- or three-pages-long responses, where they described with depth and breath what first turned them towards movies and how they feel about them at the time when they wrote the pieces. The questions are so fundamental, yet simple, that when one thinks of them, there is just so much that comes to mind, and the problem seems to be picking where exactly does one start. So to avoid banal repetition, with each new le cinéma et nous pieces the answers become all the more different, rendering the questions all the more complex.

The first le cinéma et nous was in March ’81 issue (N.240) and included contributions to it by Robert Benayoun, Emmanuel Carrère, and Paul-Louis Thirard. In their respective pieces Benayoun writes, “What do I expect from cinema? Not that this answer is exhaustive, but I want it to enlighten, for it to bring forth something new in myself. It's vital that its imagery be both stimulant and exalting.” Carrère writes, “I don’t know any better words to describe the cinema then those by Cocteau, who was amazed by its power to show, “death at work.” And Thirard writes, “The cinema brought forward my first political conscience. For many years, I saw no contradiction between my taste for engaged, militant films, [...] where eroticism and revolution were on the same plane.”

In the following le cinéma et nous in the May ’81 issue of Positif (N.242), Françoise Audé describes her youth at ciné-clubs, “Seeing a film at a film-club, was for me, the occasion of a nocturnal outing and an encounter with people. It was also now indistinguishable of a prolonged discussion where I started to feel the political tensions between the attendants. The cinema then is thus associated in my emotional memory to the euphoria of the Liberation – everything is possible – and to the idea of liberty and to the idea of engagement.” And Gérard Legrand on film-criticism, “Even though it's more ambitious when writing about cinema compared to other arts, I have never lost hope that it could enrich the mind, that it can be a beautiful criticism instead of only the sterile criticism of pointing out faults, like said François-René de Chateaubriand, and I would add how Jean Massin reclaimed it, the criticism should be that of a “embouchures” [mouth of a bay] over the criticism of “sources”[spring water].”

The next le cinéma et nous was in the June ’81 issue of Positif (N.243), where in it Alain Masson addresses the viewer's passivity while watching movies, “What do we go do at the cinema? First off, and essentially, nothing. When the guards of humanism blamed the movies of being lazy distractions, they were more on point then the zealots of modernity who blew wind about a “active spectator”." While for Petr Král, “The fever that I get from the images of a film are, in fact, less about a dramatic order then that of moral order.”

And in the last le cinéma et nous that I could find, December ’82 (N.262), for Alain Garsault from any film, "I expect what expected Joachim du Bellay from poetry: that it makes me feel: "angry, calm, happy, sad, love, disgusted, to admire, shocked, in short [that it] changes how I feel, twisting how I feel, like a good song"; forcing me to welcome it all in, I might add." And for Michel Sineux, “Like for many people of my generation, I had the chance to discover cinema in its temples – caves like unlike anything you’ve ever seen, between a rococo theater and a musical (Le Parisiana!) – and not in these multiplex, that are all over the place today and that are reducing the experience to a collective televisual spectacle.”

I haven't seen any more le cinéma et nous in the following issues, and I wonder how much longer the series lasted. But around this time a new feature also started at the magazine, which is “autour du cinema” that would eventually turn into “bloc-notes.” The first autour du cinema started in January 1982 (N.250), and two early ones that really stick out include: Michel Ciment wrote his first autour du cinema: 31 jours de Janvier in the March ’82 issue (N.252), where he would list his favorite films of the previous year, a tradition, that of putting forth his top ten films of the previous year in the January bloc-notes, that Ciment would continue onwards. While in the June ’83 issue of Positif (N.268), Robert Benayoun in autour du cinema: 30 jours d’avril, would really open up about having hemiplegia, which arose from a stroke, and the personal toll it had on him while still finding hope in the films of Resnais, Altman and Lewis.

This emphasis on the writers personal disclosure, and giving them space to do so, makes Positif unique amongst other film magazines. Their series, first off, le cinéma et nous, and then autour du cinema which would become bloc-notes gives their writer's a chance to break the fourth wall of a film review to discuss their other interest. While also for Positif this opening up of their space leads to the creation of new forms of film criticism.

The reason that I bring up le cinéma et nous is because of a new series organized at the French film-blog, Nightswimming, is doing something very similar. Edouard Sivière, who manages Nightswimming, started a series entitled En couverture de(s) Cahiers/Positif: Une couverture à soi, un numéro fétiche, where unlike in le cinéma et nous, where people discussed their cinephilia in relation to movies and movie-theaters, here the contributors are discussing their relationship with Cahiers du Cinéma and/or Positif, with one of its goals of being to explore the magazines with their own histories.

So far some of the highlights of the series include: Positif film-critic Fabien Baumann's Un pubis en vitrine, where he talks about a poster of a cover of Positif, that features a nude women from a still of Raul Ruiz's Klimt, that would go on their office window, and he was surprised by peoples response to it, “I don’t think an issue of Positif has ever had such an impact on such a varied public.” Phil Siné's contribution is of great interest as it discusses a readers response to Cahiers as it evolved and grew, and how Cahiers has a way to champion a certain kind of American mainstream cinema, and taking an anti-pedantry position: de Casino à Scream et de Martin Scorsese à Skeet Ulrich. While Oriane Sidre discusses the Septembre 2010 issue of Positif (n°595), Le visage de Yun Junghee, and that issues cover, Poetry by Lee Chang-Dong, and the magazine's championing of South-Korean cinema, as well as how the magazine looks today under Michel Ciment. More recently the contributions are becoming more complex, and esoteric with their references (which is a good thing) and in the most recent contribution by Pascal Manuel Heu, "Des Couverture et Trois Couleurs", he even gets reflexive about the whole En couverture series. This is film writing which is pushing the limits of what it can be - a fufillment of the Positif spirit of writing.

Honesty Competitions (Part 3) by Arielle Gavin

This is the first guest contribution by Arielle Gavin, it is the third chapter of her Criticism and Curatorial Practice prize-winning thesis "Honesty Competitions" (OCAD, 2012). You can find the introduction and the first chapter on Bas Jan Ader at her blog, Dragonaut. - D.D.

*****

Past, present, future

Irony maintains a strange connection to history, always inhabiting a tricky past-present. Its many meanings continuously build upon and erase each other, only to return again. Irony appears as a rhetorical device beginning with Plato, as a characteristic of dramatic theatre, as a core concept of German Romanticism, as the colloquial definition of “saying one thing and meaning another,” as proposed cultural dominant of postmodernism, and as sacrificial lamb of New Sincerity. Its methods sometimes involve knowingly digging up material from the past in order to say something about the present, its many reference points forever falling in and out of fashion. When we speak of irony today, we speak of it as cultural mood, as synonym for sarcasm and cynicism. Since the following chapter is centered around the early 2000’s – the site of a secondary rupture, of a “post-postmodern”¹ break - it seems customary to bring up the end of irony, and along with it the end of postmodernism.

Linda Hutcheon foreshadows these links with “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern,” (1998) an essay she begins with a personal anecdote. Hutcheon writes about completing the final manuscript of Irony's Edge (1995), one of the many texts she has written on the subject of irony. An hour after submitting the manuscript to her publisher, Hutcheon walked into a bookstore. The first thing she noticed there was a magazine whose headline read “The End of Irony? The Tragedy of the Post-Ironic Condition.” The feature article announced that irony had tired itself out, and that it was currently being replaced by “seven different types of nostalgia."² Hutcheon had spent the good part of a decade writing about postmodernism and what she saw as its defining feature - irony - but had not thought to write about nostalgia. Not only did she find irony more appealing, more "edgy," she did not think that irony had much to do with nostalgia anyway.³

Hutcheon's accidental encounter with this article prompted her to reflect on what it might mean to write about irony towards the end of the twentieth century. As a result, she tries to make sense of the unlikely marriage of irony and nostalgia, the latter being alternately indulged in and derided by postmodern culture. Like nostalgia, sincerity can unassumingly stage itself as “a mode of self-expression generally held to be nondiscursive, transparent, outside of ideology.”⁴ “Back in the day”-type rhetoric suggests that there was simply more sincerity to go around in the past, and that this reserve of sincerity has since been depleted. This thought process stands in opposition to the varied and “transideological” uses Hutcheon attributes to irony.⁵ That is to say, where nostalgia tends to idealize the past, irony tends to instrumentalize the past in order to critique it. Herein lies Hutcheon’s belief in the political applications of irony.

Hutcheon’s article made a few things clear to me. One, that as postmodernism drew to a close, irony (its defining feature, according to many) began to close in on itself. A strange culture war emerged on its grounds, one where the supposedly lost value of sincerity is selected as a radically conservative, oppositional tactic for combatting postmodern irony. Second, that the question of irony and its “end” is inextricably linked to the ends of both modernism and postmodernism. Third, that irony’s end had been announced prior to 2001, and that its end(s) will continue to be announced in the future. The very act of placing irony along a historical continuum is an exercise in “evading teleology” that requires one to shuttle between the past and the present.⁶ 

An irony of ends

The ends of both modernism and postmodernism can be traced to a single name: that of architect Minoru Yamasaki. Yamasaki designed the St. Louis Pruitt-Igoe housing complex, a monolith of modernist architecture. Modernism’s (thwarted, so the story goes) aspirations to utilitarianism, functionalism, and progress were embodied, caricatured, and incapacitated by the building’s imposing square structure. The complex's small apartments and large communal spaces - initially intended to be practical, economical - quickly became run-down. Less than twenty years after Pruitt-Igoe was erected, its buildings were largely abandoned and uninhabitable. On March 16, 1972, the first of the thirty-three buildings that made up Pruitt-Igoe was demolished. Architectural critic Charles Jencks famously announced this as the movement’s death knell, or “the day that Modern architecture died."⁷ While the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe did not bring modernism to its end (it was going to die anyway - of old age, of inefficacy, according to Jencks), it stood as a pretty clear indication of the way things were going. 

The pathos of Yamasaki’s failures as an architect extends to his other famous project; the buildings that made up the World Trade Center. Many interpreted the collapse of its towers on Septemeber 11th 2001 as the twin end of postmodernism and irony. The act of ironic interpretation suddenly seemed ineffective in the wake of unforeseen cultural trauma. In the weeks following the attacks, announcements of irony's death proliferated. It is true that a certain kind of irony - cynical, detached irony as cultural mood - had naturally gone out of style by the early 2000's. But this is only one kind of irony, so our conversation doesn't end there. To reject irony in favor of a simpler simplicity is no simple task. How is one to forget cultural irony when its aftermath is still strongly felt? Linda Hutcheon makes a good point by observing that our age “joins just about every other century in wanting to call itself the age of irony.”⁸ The very recurrence of that historical claim supports the claim held by some that irony is “inherent in signification, in its deferrals and in its negations,”⁹ that every age is ironic in one way or another. If anything can be agreed on regarding irony at the end of the twentieth century, it is that “irony had become an extremely charged clear by the time the towers fell code word masking a number of larger social, cultural and aesthetic divisions,”¹⁰ eventually dividing itself into our current conversation of irony and sincerity.

The etymology of the word ‘sincerity’ contains two meanings:

1) of one growth, unmixed

2) that which is not falsified.

Alison Young uses this definition as the jumping-off point for her essay “Documenting September 11th: Trauma and the (Im)possibility of Sincerity,” which discusses a contemporary “aporia of sincerity."¹¹ Through examining the methodology and outcome of The 9/11 Commission Report (2004), Young concludes that we must reconsider the question of sincerity. As sincerity shifts from affect to “media effect,” Young wonders whether texts can succeed in delivering the sincerity effects their authors seek.¹² Young is not questioning whether authors are sincere or insincere, but rather how works of literature or visual art might go about communicating sincere things. Hopefully it’s become clear that my intention in writing is not to claim particular artists for the camp of sincerity while banishing others to the land of irony. To vouch for an artist's sincerity would mean to know fully that artist’s intent, to be sure of the “congruence between avowal and actual feeling”¹³ Lionel Trilling gave as a formula for sincerity. Because our reading of sincerity is primarily one of effects, and since infinite (mis)readings of these effects can and do occur, a sincere attempt at expressing something can easily appear ironic.

It follows that my discussion will center on recent stylistic techniques used to represent sincerity. After the “death” of irony rose two strategies of the sincere within visual culture. The first takes the form of a codified aesthetic of sincerity within contemporary American cinema,¹⁴ the other a nostalgic-ironic appropriation of so-called amateur aesthetics in video art. The subject or document that is viewed as amateur generally has no conception of itself as being sincere, but nonetheless comes to signify this quality. 

Is there a sincere colour?

Around the time these things were happening, I was ten years old. I remember going to to see the film Zoolander with my family on the weekend of its release - September 28, 2011. We arrived at the theater early, and sat watching previews. One of the trailers made a distinct impression on me, not least because I thought it only made a distinct impression on certain kind of person. Though I never liked pink when I was younger, I found the faded Pepto Bismol that spelled THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS delightfully disgusting. Maybe I was a little proud of my newfound appreciation for strange shades of pink. These shades filled a montage of white, upper-middle class characters exhibiting vaguely anti-social behaviours. A man with a bright geometric pattern painted on his face sped towards the screen in a vintage car. A grandfather cheered on a dogfight with his grandchildren, surrounded by a cast of “ethnic” characters of non-specific ethnicities. A blonde girl stalked around her bedroom decorated with African masks. The scenes unfolded against the soundtrack of “Judy is a Punk” by the Ramones. Both the film and the song, which I had likely just heard for the first time (I was ten years old, after all), felt interesting in a new way. After all, my reading of the trailer had nothing to do with the contentious avant-gardes of punk music and reactionary sincerity. I saw The Royal Tenenbaums (dir. Wes Anderson, 2001) shortly after its December release, and subsequently tried to model myself after a young Margot Tenenbaum. I quickly took to walking around my middle school with the Ramones blasting from my headphones, though I was never very good at affecting Margot’s disinterest. At some point in my early teens, I fell out of love with Anderson’s films. I’m not entirely sure why – maybe I thought them insincere, maybe I was going through the teenage ritual of rejecting childhood things – but I think my total adoration-turned-total-disgust speaks to the inexplicably strong reactions Anderson’s films draw from audiences.

The most (in)sincere director

A friend wrote to me in a February 2012 email, “wes anderson is the most insincere director i can think of, because i think the naivete is false and a twee refusal to grow up is a gross and counterrevolutionary…super heteronormative as well.” I read the email and agreed with him, only to find myself in the middle of a heated bar conversation a few nights later. I brought up Wes Anderson, and before I could get a word in, an acquaintance declared Anderson to be a supremely sincere director. Not only was Wes Anderson sincere, he insisted, but he was sincere in a way that many people just didn’t understand.

In light of these two responses, Wes Anderson seems a particularly compelling subject of inquiry regarding the post-9/11 “aporia” of sincerity that is the focus of this chapter. Anderson’s 2001 film The Royal Tenenbaums is set in an anachronistic New York populated by whimsically decrepit buildings, for example a fictitious “375th Street YMCA.”¹⁵ With no Twin Towers in sight, one is almost allowed to believe that the film took place sometime before they were built, sometime before postmodernism and the brand of irony associated with it.

But The Royal Tenenbaums is bookended by a hyper-awareness of nostalgic stylization. The film begins with a neatly composed shot of a book being checked out of a library. A hand peeking out of a camel blazer stamps the card enclosed in the book’s cover, something I haven't experienced since childhood trips to the library. The book is then closed to reveal a quaint illustration of melting candlesticks, THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS spelled out in the pink Futura of the film’s trailer. In the following shot, the cover illustration reappears as a real-life set design, using the same mustard-green colour scheme and curtained backdrop. These mirrored images make unclear the starting point of stylization. Anderson could very well be flattening the personalities of his characters to fit a simplified storybook format. But Anderson works almost exclusively with stock characters, mainly drawn from white upper-middle class America. Or, to be more specific, the stock character of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Of course this "character" exists in the real world, but it has been sufficiently mythologized (see The Preppy Handbook, Ralph Lauren advertisements, the disaffected prep school students of J.D. Salinger novels, and so on). We can say that by framing The Royal Tenenbaums as fiction - its intertitles take the form of book pages, “scene” swapped for “chapter” - Anderson counters the argument that he is merely stylizing a referent firmly based in reality. An astute observer of aesthetes and an aesthete himself, the visual style of his films reads to me as the combined efforts of his own narcissism and the narcissism of his characters.

The characters in The Royal Tenenbaums largely understand themselves through representation. Some fashion their reality in writing, Margot with her plays and Raleigh, her husband, with his studies in anthropology. Some emotions are explained only through their bracketing, the story of Richie’s fall from tennis stardom succinctly told in television footage of his losing game and a tabloid cover that reads MELTDOWN. Etheline also styled her children, a “Family of Geniuses,” in prose. Like the rest of the film’s books-within-books, Family of Geniuses appears onscreen dog-eared and faded, a simulacrum of the book as intellectual fetish object. Family of Geniuses is not a real book, empty of content (asides from the story of the film that contains it), but nonetheless appears significant, handsomely weathered. Like the many unread books that make up an impressive library, the books written by the Tenenbaums are markers of lives dictated by the pressure to endlessly perform individual intelligence and precocity.

The Royal Tenenbaums and mise en abyme subjectivity

The Royal Tenenbaums is a portrait of a family and their now-grown children. All three were child prodigies - Margot a gifted playwright, Richie a star tennis player, and Chas an astute businessman (businessboy, perhaps) - who faded into obscurity with the onset of adulthood. The story picks up with a cast of characters obsessed with recapitulating the glory of their youth. They continue to wear their childhood clothes, as if the garments had magically grown in a gesture of solidarity. Like the closet of a cartoon character, Margot's wardrobe is filled with a dozen penny-loafers and a striped Lacoste dress in every colour. Richie continues to dress like Björn Borg, even in non-tennis situations. Chas replaces the business-wear of his childhood with a new daily uniform, but the repetition does not end there. Now a father, both Chas and his two sons wear red Adidas tracksuits at all times (save for a funeral, where the trio opts for black Adidas tracksuits). They also share the same curly brown hair, though this can be owed more to genetics than to intent. By projecting his self-caricature onto his own children, the cycle of repetition extends to an absurd degree.

This bittersweet navigation of identity fits with the tone of The Royal Tenenbaums, which film scholar James MacDowell describes as the composite of deadpan humour and melodramatic subject matter.¹⁶ In "Notes on Quirky" and subsequent essays, MacDowell argues that tone - not subject matter, not certain editing techniques, not uniform visual style - is the strongest indicator of the "quirky" film. Treating the quirky film more as a sensibility than as a genre, MacDowell explains that its tone is illustrative of a larger cultural condition, a structure of feeling characterized by its back-and-forth dialogue around irony and sincerity. I follow MacDowell's analysis by focusing on Anderson's films in an essay concerned precisely with this ironic-sinere structure of feeling. But before I delve into the topic of tone, I want to comment on a particular aspect of the quirky film. Central to The Royal Tenenbaums and other quirky films is a certain kind of character best encapsulated by Anderson's paradoxically self-conscious adult-children. I would offer the titular characters of Napoleon Dynamite (2004) and Juno (2007) as culturally significant and instantly recognizable examples of the "quirky" character. The aestheticized awkwardness of these characters can be located along a spectrum. At the one end is the character whose idiosyncrasies serve as fodder for cheap jokes, and at the other is the character whose idiosyncrasies are meant to endear the audience. On the first end, I think of the painful confession Napoleon Dynamite makes after presenting his crush with a hand-drawn portrait: "It took me like three hours to finish the shading on your upper lip." Even if Napoleon's misguided social interactions are endearing by proxy, they are generally treated with a kind of detached, jokey irony. MacDowell points out that the ostensibly cathartic/redemptive dance scene at the end of the film still mines from a "comedy of embarrassment."¹⁷ An earnest but uncoordinated (note, uncoordinated) Dynamite performs a solo dance routine to the applause of his classmates, but even his choice of song - the musically awkward blue-eyed soul of Jamiroquai's "Canned Heat" - is meant to be a kind of in-joke with the audience. 

Still comedic but more melodramatic, more openly sentimental, Juno treats its main character more kindly. She shrieks would-be, cutesy teenage slang ("Honest to blog!") into her novelty phone, which is shaped like a hamburger. These qualities are not framed ironically, though; they contribute to a vision of a benignly dorky teenage girl unexpectedly faced with the very adult responsibilities of having a child. Returning to MacDowell's diagnosis of the quirky film, Juno tones down deadpan humor in favour of emotional engagement. 

Also worth mentioning is the character-person of Michael Cera, who plays Juno's boyfriend in the film. Cera's first popular role was as George Michael Bluth on the sitcom Arrested Development. Cera was fifteen years old when the series debuted in 2003, a real-life awkward-looking teenage boy at the onset of puberty. Also an awkward teenage boy facing the onset of puberty, George Michael mumbles nervously through most social situations that take place on Arrested Development. One of the more notable situations is the crush he harbours on his cousin, a teenaged girl named Maeby (whose strange name serves as an endless source of puns, including the running joke of her questionable conception). Humour drawn from awkward-seeming characters and situations is a mainstay of quirky cultural output. Adam Kotsko explores this point in his 2010 book Awkwardness, partially explaining the phenomenon of awkwardness-based humour as a contemporary response to the issues of postmodernism, one of these issues being the much-treaded theme of irony as cultural dominant. Kotsko selects Woody Allen as the progenitor of this kind of humour, describing the ambivalently autobiographical leads of all Allen films as "the Woody Allen character."¹⁸ Woody Allen clearly bases this character (and its nebbishy charm) on his own idiosyncrasies and neuroses, fashioning many doppelgangers in the characters of Alvy Singer (Annie Hall, 1977), Isaac Williams (Manhattan, 1979), Mickey Sachs (Hannah and her Sisters, 1983), and others. The Woody Allen character does not necessarily need to be played by Allen himeself; Larry David (Kotsko devotes a whole chapter to David in Awkwardness) recently assumed this role in the Allen-directed Whatever Works (2009). Beyond this, the Woody Allen character has its own life as a cultural type, the character-person of Michael-Cera being a contemporary example. Since Arrested Development, Cera has continuously been cast in the role of the adorably awkward teenage boy. Perpetually virginal and sheepish, he still manages to impregnate his love interest in Juno. Subsequent roles in films like Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist (2008), Youth in Revolt (2010), and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (2010) see Cera shyly charming his way into the hearts of manic pixie dream girls, subtly reputing the common notion that confidence is sexy (see chart below). I imagine Cera was first cast in this type of role because he was, conveniently, an actual shy teenage boy. But Cera has been playing this role for a good part of the last decade. Yes, playing the role of himself, contrived as it sounds. This confusion of identity is compounded in Paper Heart (2009), the meta-documentary (I don't know how else to describe it) based on the unverifiable romantic relationship between Cera (who plays himself in the film) and Charlyne Yi, the film's screenwriter and lead actress.

What does it mean for a person to purposely act awkward, acting being by definition self-conscious and awkwardness being by definition unconscious? It leads to the impossibility - as with Allen and as with the Tenenbaums - of verifying whether the character of a film is necessarily the stylization of a referent firmly rooted in reality (in simpler terms, of the actor or actress who plays the character). Further, it makes any claims to authenticity near-impossible to confirm, resulting in a perpetual chicken-or-the-egg-type questioning of subjectivity. 

What, then, should one make of the Tenenbaums? Are they just a cast of lovably "quirky" characters? Are we supposed to interpret their antisocial behaviour as a fashion statement or a remote critique via inhabitation? In his article "If I Can Dream: The Everlasting Boyhoods of Wes Anderson," Mark Olsen writes that Anderson "does not view his characters from some distant Olympus of irony."²⁰ After all, how is Anderson to maintain emotional detachment from characters who stand as infinitely repeated versions of himself? The director's early films - Bottle Rocket (1996) and Rushmore (1999) - were filmed in his native Texas. As an adolescent, Anderson atteneded the preppy collegiate - seemingly lifted straight from a Salinger novel - used as the set of Rushmore. One can easily identify Rushmore's Max Fischer - serial overachiever and director of pretentious, cutesy middle school plays - or the dysfunctional geniuses of The Royal Tenenbaums as the director's gently self-mocking portraits. If we trace the caricature at work in The Royal Tenenbaums far back enough, we end up with Wes Anderson infinitely styling and projecting himself as the characters of his own (the) film.

Knowing naiveté

Art historian E.H. Gombrich writes, “The more you prefer the primitive, the less you can become primitive,"¹⁹ a statement that is taken up ambivalently in The Royal Tenenbaums. This paradox is best expressed in the film’s knowingly naïve visual style; its neatly composed shots look like childhood drawings traced by an adult, the final product retaining none of the original messiness. James MacDowell points to this in the “sweetly unsophisticated pink flag” that flies above the Tenenbaum home.²⁰ Anderson’s aesthetic can be easily described (and dismissed) as cloying. Unusual shades of pink pop up everywhere; the awning of a hotel, a rotary phone, the walls of an ice cream parlour, a woolen glove. The decidedly unrealistic proliferation of such details holds a mirror to the suspended naiveté of the film’s characters. MacDowell writes that the childhood artifacts that Margot, Chas, and Richie cling to remind us that they are no longer children. Richie sets up an anorak-yellow tent in the family’s living room, his too-tall body dwarfing the structure clearly intended for children. This visual gag frames the character’s longing for childhood instead of expecting us to indulge uncritically in it. The “wrongness” of these images rests not only in their resemblance to impossibly perfect children’s drawings, but in their ability to evidence the Tenenbaums’ problematic relationship to childhood. 

This unfaltering belief in the purity of childhood is not the only element of primitivism evident in The Royal Tenenbaums. The characters display a tendency to view other cultures as exotic or less advanced than their native American one. Margot bolsters her writing career with cultural tourism, the kind I imagine she thinks of as "zany anthropology." A brief montage shows Margot at the age of nineteen at a wedding on an unidentified West Indian island; flirting with lesbianism in Paris at twenty-one; then a few years later in New Guineau, groping a man in tribal dress (her in a pink bikini). Etheline works as an archaeologist, and Raleigh St. Clair as a neurologist who conducted field studies on a fictional tribe called the Kazawa Atoll. St. Clair's book on the subject, The Peculiar Neurodegenerative Inhabitants of the Kazawa Atoll, features a photograph of the author with one of his research subjects. The two men stand side-by-side, St. Clair in a bathing suit and the subject in a loincloth, headdress, and body paint. The photograph is shot in classic ethnographic style, straight-on and perfectly centered. The composition of the photograph is not unlike those of the shots that make up the film, their veneer of order and artistic control contradicting the unfinished emotional business (adult children, intentional naivete, an "aporia" of sincerity, and so on) taking place in the frame. 

Throughout the film, St. Clair studies the behavior of Dudley Heinsbergen, a boy inflicted with a peculiar form of autism. He calmly watches Dudley struggle to arrange a set of toy blocks in a particular formation, calmly taking notes on the boy's progress. He later reads the results and chuckles to himself “How interesting, how bizarre,” as if the boy were a mischievous pet or inhabitant of remote New Guineau. What is actually bizarre, I suppose, is that St. Clair does not make much of a distinction between the two. St. Clair takes Dudley everywhere he goes, the boy narrating in deadpan the details of their surroundings to no person in particular. Dudley favors a Jacques-Cousteau-plays-tennis outfit of corduroy shorts, yellow ringer t-shirt, and bucket hat with navy stripe, his nerd-chic style later cashed in on by films like Napoleon Dynamite. The unlikely fashion plate of Dudley Heinsbergen reflects a world where no person or thing is immune to being aestheticized.

“I always wanted to be a Tenenbaum”

Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make.²¹ - Pierre Bourdieu

In his essay for the Criterion Collection release of the film, Kent Jones points out that The Royal Tenenbaums – alongside other films directed by Anderson – centers on a character “from a little lower on the economic ladder.”22 This character is Eli Cash, the boy grew up in a simple apartment with his aunt. Cash lived across the street from the Tenenbaums and became a regular fixture at their home, an honorary member of the family also inflicted with their complex around creativity. Eli was not a child genius, but later tried his hand at writing. At the beginning of the film, we are introduced to the grown-up Eli at a reading for his newly-released novel. After reading, he takes a phone call from Margot, and anxiously implores of her “You think I’m especially not a genius?” Cast as his adoptive family’s foil, Eli illustrates just how strongly the concepts of taste, precociousness, and genius are linked to class. We are reminded of many kinds of work that factor into the designation of genius. 

Eli writes middlebrow fiction that is met with lukewarm critical reception and offhand remarks from those close to him. Having grown up in a lower-middle class household, the quality of Eli's work is never validated with the label of “genius” his wealthier counterparts already attained before adolescence. In fact, Eli’s books are only met with positive regard at the very end of the film. In the middle of a police questioning, the officer pauses to pay Eli a compliment; the officer, transparently portrayed in jus'folks-style, had read Eli's new novel and greatly enjoyed it. The officer even asks for an autograph, temporarily alleviating the embarrassing events leading up to the police questioning. 

The Royal Tenenbaums points to the cycle of legitimation that links class, taste, and cultural production. Eli's inability to be validated as an author of "highbrow" fiction reflects a kind of glass ceiling of class mobility; (lower) middle-class upbringing, middlebrow writing. Conversely, the Tenenbaums cannot escape the trappings of their own background. Their predetermined, premature success is crystallized forever in the figure of the adult-child. Like fallen rulers, the “royal” Tenenbaums are trapped by the privileged status they reached as children. They remain there indefinitely as dysfunctional apparitions of their former selves. I feel that the film is neither as explicitly political as my discussion of it, nor as apolitical or twee as it has been made out to be. Maybe I'm at fault for not picking a side, but it's the film's back and forth - between irony and sincerity, critique and indulgence, artifice and naturalism - that makes it so intriguing. 

The strongest point of Jones’ essay on The Royal Tenenbaums is in his identification of the film’s political  implicaions. Unfortunately, this point is a little lost on Jones, whose assertions of Anderson’s particular brand of sincerity read as self-congratulatory. Jones writes, “For someone like me, who connected directly with his sensibility from the first frame of Bottle Rocket, it's difficult to comprehend how anyone could not get the work of such an exquisite storyteller.”²³ Jones suggests that Anderson presents a secret kind of sincerity that only a special kind of person would understand. I do not know what to make of this “secret” sincerity; I have made it clear that the definition of sincerity is no simple task, but the idea that it can only be decoded by some kind of super-sensitive aesthete does not sit well with me. Despite pointing out the issues of class raised by Anderson, Jones only affirms these relations by designating sincerity as an esoteric taste category requiring specialized understanding. This category, which formed in reaction to the perceived ideological threat of postmodern irony, possessed a problematic ideology of its own. If postmodern irony was dismissive and mocking of the stupid, the unrefined, the "primitive," then the New Sincerity romanticizes the "primitive" in a way that is (often unbeknownst to itself) condescending. 

In the following installment, I will discuss the New Sincerity, a term that has risen to prominence in the last decade. As I understand it, the New Sincerity - like Anderson's films - concerns itself mostly with problems of the self, the double or performed self, the artistic process and artistic self-representation, a reactionary stance towards irony that favors a highly idealized vision of the sincere, and an arguably regressive engagement with primitivism. 

Arielle Gavin

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1I'm hesitant to use the word, but no single term has been agreed upon. Of the many terms put forth in the race to name the contemporary moment - off-modern, hypermodern, altermodern - the one that interests me most is the metamodern. I will discuss the concept of metamodernism in the next chapter. 

² Linda Hutcheon, “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern,” Methods for the Study of Literature as Cultural Memory (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopoi, 2000) 193.

3 Ibid. 195

⁴ Jane Taylor, “Torture, Truth, and the Arts,” The Rhetoric of Sincerity, Eds. Ernst van Alphen, Mieke Bal, and Carel Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009) 22.

⁵ Linda Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge (London: Routledge, 1994) 20.

⁶Linda Hutcheon, “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern,” Methods for the Study of Literature as Cultural Memory (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopoi, 2000) 195.

⁷Charles Jencks, “The Death of Modern Architecture,” The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002) 57

⁸Linda Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge (London: Routledge, 1994) 27.

⁹Ibid.

¹⁰Jeffrey Sconce, “Irony, Nihilism, and the new American ‘smart’ film,” Screen 43:4 Winter 2001: 353.

¹¹Alison Young, “Documenting September 11th: Trauma and the (Im)possibilty of Sincerity,” eds. The Rhetoric of Sincerity, Ernst van Alphen, Mieke Bal, and Carel Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009) 99.

¹²Ibid. 104

¹³Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972) 4.

¹⁴This aesthetic is best represented by what has been termed the "quirky" film.

¹⁵375th Street does not exist; The highest street number in New York City is 263.

¹⁶James MacDowell, “Wes Anderson, tone, and the quirky sensibility,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 10:1 March 2012: 8.

¹⁷Ibid. 11

¹⁸Adam Kotsko, Awkwardness:An Essay (0 Books:Winchester, 2010) 1.

¹⁹E.H. Gombrich, The Preference for the Primitive (New York:Phaidon, 2006) 297.

²⁰James MacDowell, “Notes on Quirky,” Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism I (2010) 5.

²¹ Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction : A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste,

Trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984) 6.

²²Kent Jones, “The Royal Tenenbaums,” Criterion Collection: Current Jul. 8 2002. www.criterion.com/current/posts/214-the-royal-tenenbaums

²³ Ibid.

Pop Quiz: Le fils

Pop Quiz 1

           A man marries a woman, they aren’t too well off, but that’s not important to the story, and they have a baby, a boy, who they love, a lot. One night, the boy, the couples son, he gets killed, he was in their families car and it gets broken into and he gets killed, it’s a tragedy, terrible, wouldn’t even wish this onto ones enemies, but life has to go on, right? The happily married couple, after the murder of their son, splits up, gets divorced, are no longer together, i.e. are no longer legally married, though he still misses her, or not exactly “her,” but his wife, and his son at that, and the life he had, which he longer has. And the man, who sees his ex-wife regularly, has found out that she is now with a new guy and pregnant again, with a new child that wont be his. Let’s say that the man X is a carpenter, you know the blue denim overall type, and at his job, one day he sees this sixteen-year-old kid, let’s call him Y, come in looking for a job, and he recognizes the boy from the trial for his sons murder. This boy Y at first gets a job in the wielding department of the factory, but then, for some complex reason the man X wants for some reason be closer to this “messed up” kid, well after what he’s done, he has to be messed up – right? So this blonde-haired boy who has just got out of a five-year prison term, and you can tell he’s probably living in a half-way house with a social-worker or a shitty one-room apartment with his mattress on the floor and stuff, and he’s so happy and feels lucky to have this job, and but like starts to appreciate X’s guidance and helpfulness, as this kid never knew his own father and apparently his mom’s boyfriend doesn’t allow him to see her, i.e. the boys mom. And X does help him out, not exactly because he wants to, but he’s caught in a few instances where he just kind-of has to help, like he’s asked where a certain street is and, really, if you know, how can you not direct him to the right street, or else you would be a total dick. And Y is impressed with X’s ability to precisely measure objects and distances, to the fucking centimeter, and they play around with this, the distance between Y and a car, the length of a piece of wood etc. Let’s return back to X and describe him more faithfully: X is a big man, he does sit-ups on his floor regularly, looks to be around 5’10 and weighs around 210 pounds, balding with short brown hair, thick lenses in his steel-rimmed glasses, with a constant pissed off look on his face, as if he’s keeping at bay an overwhelming anger (with the loss of the son, this is understandable), and when ever X is around Y this seems to be amplified. While Y is aloof, silent, also more introspective, but unlike X the reasons for Y w/r/t the introspection it seems like its more like that of a hurt puppy or that of a child who accidentally touched a cooking element, he’s gone through too much and is now weary, and its painful to hear Y describes playing foosball when he was locked up as a way “to forget my problems,” because its a perfectly child-like thing to do, but in a very un-childlike mise en scène. So X and Y work more and more together, and on one day they go on a suspiciously long drive to a lumber yard (so far they’ve only been working in the carpentering workshop), and on this drive X asks Y about the murder, and Y asks X if he would consider taking him in and being his guardian. Silence. They keep driving. They are now in the lumberyard, where everything seems to reach a climax w/r/t to their interpersonal relationship. As at the lumberyard, this expansive industrial space, with its steel walls and ceiling, full of stacks of lumber, stacked on one another, full of hiding spaces and shadows: X tells Y that he’s the father of the boy that he killed. An unbalanced moment, for Y as he has to both (a) think about all of the experiences he had with X and mentally revisit these experience – some of them have been pretty scary, e.g. X knocking him off a ladder, X throwing down large planks of wood at him – to see how this might change his perception of them and (b) run, get away from this deranged figure, um, because who would actually spend all of this time to get close to the person who killed your son, right, and what does he, X, want to do to him, anyways? After an extensive chase, which seems like its right out of French Connection II or something, the two of them are now outside on the dirt, X catches up with Y, is on top of him, choking him, X has his hands around his throat, Y isn’t breathing right, X’s grip is getting tighter, there is the look of a murderer in his eyes, shit, is he going to do it? Kill Y, the person who killed his son, who he’s been working with for these last few days, and who he now kind-of likes, what good would it actually do? There is no way X’s son is coming back, and what about, when X was chasing Y, and tells him that he doesn’t want to hurt him, and now he’s doing just that.

And then X stops, and throws his hands, his fists, on the ground.

They both sit up, beside each other, for a while, and breathe heavily, and then the man, X, walks away. He’s now back at his car, dirty, after all the rolling around in dirt, and he’s putting the last few pieces of lumber in his vehicle, and then the boy, Y, is there and after a brief moment of hesitation, the boy starts to help.

Q: (A) Is the man, X, a good father?

*****

For the answer to this question, and more concerning Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's film Le fils come to hear Adam Nayman discuss it at the next talk in the series What We Talk About at the Drake Underground later on this month.