What is the meaning of a ten best list? For me, at any rate, it means a list of movies with the highest possible mystery quotient–the movies that fascinate me the most because they still have secrets to withhold. And the best litmus test that I know for determining this quality is repeat viewings. If a movie that knocked me out seems less mysterious after a return visit–as was the case with Broadcast News, Cross My Heart, and Orphans–then it doesn’t belong on the list. Conversely, if I haven’t been able to see the film twice, but something about it persuades me that a second look would keep its mysteries alive, then I’m more likely to include it.
It is always expedient to assume otherwise, yet the fact remains that even most “experts” are mainly limited to the titles that the marketplace nudges in their direction, while other worthy films remain in protracted or perpetual limbo. If I were to list all the best features I’ve seen over the past year or so, without any marketplace considerations, I would probably have to include Jean-Luc Godard’s King Lear (which I saw at the Toronto Festival of Festivals, but which hasn’t yet opened anywhere), Mark Daniels’s The Influence of Strangers (an independent New York feature that hasn’t even made it into any festivals that I know of, much less acquired a distributor), and David Sobelman’s Runaways: 24 Hours on the Street (a Canadian TV documentary that hasn’t been exported).
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Although I’ve been slower to pick up on this than some of my colleagues, there’s no question that part of the big news about recent world cinema is the vitality of Eastern filmmaking, much of which contains a sense of discovery that has all but vanished from the West. It should be pointed out, however, that Tian Zhuangzhuang’s masterpiece from the People’s Republic of China, about a Tibetan Buddhist peasant ostracized from his community, is by no means typical. As English critic Tony Rayns has remarked, it belongs more with “non-Chinese films that have explored the space between the sacred and profane” by Tarkovsky, Herzog, Paradjanov, and Bresson, than with the other innovative “fifth generation” films to have emerged from the Xi’an Film Studio.
Mammame
Melo
Ishtar
The prime advantage of nonnarrative cinema is that it allows one to think, in contradistinction to the conveyor-belt strategies of story telling, which usually permit thoughts to emerge–if at all–only after the films are over. Consequently, although this Benning feature is his first to contain actors–Rhonda Bell and Elian Sacker, who powerfully re-create portions of the court testimonies of Bernadette Protti and Ed Gein, two deranged killers–the principal character is really the spectator’s own mind, confronting these actors and the settings where the crimes took place, and contemplating the relationship between them. The absence of psychologizing, as in Jon Jost’s thematically similar and equally haunting Last Chants for a Slow Dance (1977), liberates the imagination in relation to Benning’s beautifully composed images, and this respect for the viewer’s intelligence pays off in highly charged dividends.
