By Matt Zoller Seitz
This is the second in a series of countdown essays on the most important directors of the 2000s, written for Salon.com.
Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in "Stagecoach," and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in "The Third Man." -- Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (1961)The poignancy of that quote comes from the implication that the novel’s hero, Binx Bolling, is so alienated from his existence that films feel more real to him than life. But certain filmmakers -- I call them sensualists -- go Walker Percy one better. Through boldly expressive shots, cuts, sound cues and music, they suggest that we experience movies as moments because we experience life that way, too.
Michael Mann, Terrence Malick, David Lynch, Wong Kar-wai and Hou Hsiao-hsien -- the decade’s great sensualist filmmakers -- accept this proposition as a given. Read a cable channel's one-paragraph schedule-grid summary of Mann’s Ali, Collateral, Miami Vice and Public Enemies; Malick’s The New World (all three versions, each of which is a different and equally valid film); Wong’s In the Mood for Love, 2046, "The Hand" (a segment of the omnibus Eros) and My Blueberry Nights; Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire, or Hou’s Three Times and Millennium Mambo, and you would never guess that the films’ directors had anything in common.But they share a defining trait: a lyrical gift for showing life in the moment, for capturing experience as it happens and as we remember it.
To read the rest of the article, click here.
Posts
13 comments:
This series has been wonderful so far; this one in particular makes me want to go back and rewatch everything mentioned in it.
Minor nitpick: I think you mistakenly attributed the "tiny couple" scene to INLAND EMPIRE instead of Mulholland Dr. Unless there's a tiny couple in INLAND EMPIRE that I missed, which considering the multitudes it contains could very well be the case (I'm sure somewhere in there is definitive proof for string theory).
Good catch -- I'll see if I can get that fixed tomorrow.
Fantastic. I told an ex-girlfriend that Malick and Mann (Malick, especially) are poets of humanity's loss of itself, but I think she found that a little indeterminate. I watched Ali recently and was astonished that something so contrary to biopic pieties had ever been allowed to be made.
Adam and JF: Thanks so much. It appears the readers of Salon beg to differ!
Matt, the readers of Salon, or, to be fair, its commenters, are pretty useless and predictable, even as bad comment sections go. If I were you, I wouldn't waste electrons reading them.
Hi Matt, I thought your article was fantastic, especially since so many of the films you mentioned are my favorites of the past long while (although I think Denis deserves mention, being the kind of sensualist you described). I didn't comment at Salon because I thought the folks over there were being unnecessarily hostile, but I was wondering what you thought about what they were saying. I mean, it's pretty bizarre to so violently criticize a director for being perversely voyeuristic when cinema is voyeuristic in such fundamental ways.
I'm pretty sure every film-related article at Salon gets those people. It's like there's a portion of their readership that can't entertain an idea that's foreign to them that isn't supported solely by examples from things they personally like without getting angry at the writer and bemoaning the state of modern film criticism.
Oh, don't worry, I'm not bugged by any of it. I used to get the same kind of mail when I wrote for the Star-Ledger. I'm writing buff-ish pieces for a pretty obsessive kind of reader and I don't expect everyone, or anyone, to like or agree with it, or even find it interesting. It is a little funny, though, how readers fixate on a particular idea and won't let go of it -- Lynch being not sensual because some of his imagery is deliberately ugly and frightening, for instance, or Bay not belonging on a list of important directors because the reader doesn't like him. (I don't either, but I still think he's important.)
Onward. Next installment compares Robert Zemeckis and Wes Anderson and asks what they have in common.
I'm not sure whether he's going to pop up somewhere else on this list, but I think Apichatpong Weerasethakul would have fit right in here with his stunning contributions Tropical Malady and Syndromes and a Century.
Scorsese used to be a sensualist, but he's sort of lost it. I still vividly recall the scene in "Goodfellas" where Paulie slices garlic with a razor blade.
I debated about whether or not to include Scorsese, but he hasn't been too sensual this decade. Formally busy and conceptually ambitious, but not too sensual. Except perhaps for some of the Christ imagery in "The Aviator" and a few moments in "Gangs of New York."
A great article indeed ! , i think Hou at other films were less sensual than observational (master shot school ) especially Cafe Lumiere ,
regarding other examples :i also can think of Silent Light and Claire Denis work in general.......
Great series so far, Matt, and since I love the other four directors so much but have never been much of a Lynch fan, you've inspired me to give Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire a try (I've never seen either - I know, the shame...)
I think Olivier Assayas and even Steven Soderbergh (in parts of Solaris and Che, particularly) could also be regarded as sensualists. But then they both vary their styles and approaches a lot.
Looking forward to the rest of the series.
Post a Comment