As a moviegoer who was privileged to see a good many films, both new and old, in a number of contexts, places, and formats in 1989, I can’t say it was a bad year for me at all. I saw two incontestably great films at the Rotterdam film festival (Jacques Rivette’s Out 1: Noli me tangere and Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan’s A Story of the Wind), and several uncommonly good ones both there and at the festivals in Berlin, Toronto, and Chicago. (Istvan Darday and Gyorgyu Szalai’s The Documentator and Jane Campion’s Sweetie–the latter due to be released in the U.S. early this year–are particular standouts.) Thanks to the increasing availability of older films on video, I was able to catch up with certain major works that I’d missed and see many others that I already cherished.
In the list below, I’ve excluded contenders that showed at the Chicago Film Festival in 1989 and are scheduled to open commercially in 1990, such as Maurizio Nichetti’s The Icicle Thief and Michael Moore’s Roger and Me. Alas, Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Decalogue still lacks a U.S. distributor, and given all the obstacles to acquiring one–the unwieldiness of a ten-part work, a reportedly recalcitrant agent in charge of the North American rights, the displeasure exhibited by the New York Times toward the Decalogue segment A Short Film About Killing, the difficulty of imagining a Kieslowski segment on Entertainment Tonight–we unfortunately can’t count on it turning up in the foreseeable future.
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To the best of my knowledge, this is the only film released in the U.S. in 1989 other than The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (see below) that has a reasonable chance of being considered a great work ten years from now. It is the only one that rethinks the cinema from the ground up, starting from scratch–perhaps because it also happens to be the only one that appears to have been made solely out of personal necessity. Grounded in family memories, Terence Davies’s achronological account of life in Liverpool in the 40s and 50s, structured more on feelings than ideas, relies mainly on portraiture and collectively experienced songs for its power.
I suspect it was largely the relative absence of plot–plot being the ne plus ultra of commercial filmmaking–that deprived this movie of most of the audience it could and should have had. At the same time, however, this absence gives a wholeness and intensity to every moment that is virtually impossible to achieve in narrative filmmaking, which tends to sacrifice such expressive possibilities for the sake of conventional continuity. And despite the fact that violence and emotional pain form part of this intensity–leading some viewers to confuse this part with the whole and conclude that the film is a “downer”–the pleasure and sheer empowerment offered by the songs and collective gatherings are certainly no less prominent or vibrant. I can honestly say that no movie this year gave me more happiness.
- The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
In contrast to the stacked decks that generally accompany most Hollywood “problem” pictures, which typically divvy up the antagonists in racial conflicts into separate piles labeled “us” and “them,” Do the Right Thing discovers a way of addressing a varied audience in such a way that no single viewpoint provides a skeleton key for comprehending the action in all its implications. The motto of Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, “Everyone has his reasons,” applies here not only to the separate perspectives of the pizzeria owner (Danny Aiello), his delivery boy (Lee), his two sons (Richard Edson, John Turturro), three alienated malcontents (Giancarlo Esposito, Bill Nunn, Roger Guenveur Smith), two elderly outsiders (Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis), and three comic kibitzers (Robin Harris, Frankie Faison, Paul Benjamin), among others, but also to the separate legacies of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X that are evoked at the movie’s end. Theoretical pluralism has often played a substantial role in American movies, but genuine pluralism pushed so far that it actively determines narrative structure is a rarity, and Lee’s comedy-drama provides a bracing model for how this can be done.
The only documentary in this list is a 58-minute portrait of the New York painter Leon Golub by the Chicago-based Kartemquin collective, directed by Jerry Blumenthal and Gordon Quinn. In the past, Kartemquin has mainly concentrated on grass-roots political struggles; profiling here a political painter, they come up with an exemplary approach to the vexing problem of how to present artists and artists’ works on film. In place of art critics and other “experts,” we get ordinary viewers and Golub himself commenting on the work and its meanings. Instead of treating the moment when a painting is completed with hushed reverence by isolating it as a “finished” work in an artist’s studio, the film moves directly from its creation to its social reception, without missing a beat. And because Golub himself is an unusually articulate and self-aware commentator on his own work, the film’s step-by-step chronicle of the execution and impact of one of his paintings offers a model of purposeful exposition.
