FICTION:
Most of these films perfectly capture the deep malaise of the contemporaneous moment: the systematic failure of neoliberalism; the idiocy of mass media and the pathology of celebrity cults (Matteo Garrone's Reality and Brandon Cronenberg's Antiviral - perhaps the most ballardian film of the year); the compulsion to perform in a shallow, frivolous culture (Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty); the implosion of affect in the early 21c (Jem Cohen's Museum Hours, Richard Linklater's Before Midnight, Carlos Reygadas' Post Tenebrae Lux, and Spike Jonze's Her, the unofficial remake of Marco Ferreri's I Love You, 1986); urban anxiety, alienation, anomie, social breakdowns, wealth inequality, and the slow death of the American Dream (Alexander Payne's Nebraska, Ruben Ostlund's Play, Alexandre Moors' Blue Caprice and Kleber Mendonça Filho's Neighboring Sounds). The most daring films of the year examined the ontological impasse of the human condition per se: Julian Posler's The Wall, Ulrich Seidl's Paradise: Love, and the Coen's Inside Llewyn Davis. The protagonists are literally or metaphorically stuck in a cul-del-sac. They are desperately looking for an exit plan, but they have no options. There is no exit. These characters are living dead. When all is lost, the only thing left to do is to laugh at the absurdity of the contingent: luckily, Sebastian Silva and Quentin Dupiex provided some relief.
Most overrated films of the year: David O. Russell's American Hustle and Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity.
Best soundtrack of the year: Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty
STATS (TOP 40)
Continents represented:
North America: 18
Europe (inc. Switzerland and the UK): 15
South America: 6
Other: 2
Countries represented:
United States of America: 15 (Scorsese 4, Jem Cohen, 6; Joel Coen, 9; Richard Linklater, 10; Spike Jonze, 13; Alexander Payne, 14; Noha Baumbach, 17, Alexandre Moors, 18 Andrew Bujalski, 24; Antonio Campos, 25; Terrence Malick, 33; Shane Carruth, 34; Lucy Mulloy, 36; Ben Dickinson, 37; Megan Griffiths, 41; Yaron Zilberman, 42)
Austria: 3 (Julian Pölsler, 1; Ulrich Seidl, 3 & 19)
France: 3 (Quentin Dupieux, 15; François Ozon, 23; Romain Gavras, 32)
Chile: 3 (Sebastian Silva, 16 & 20; Pablo Larrain, 31)
Mexico: 2 (Carlos Reygadas, 12; Everardo Gout, 35)
Italy: 2 (Paolo Sorrentino, 2; Matteo Garrone, 7)
Denmark: 2 (Nicolas Winding Refn, 22; Thomas Vinterberg, 30)
United Kingdom: 2 (Peter Strickland, 26; Ben Wheatley, 28)
Canada: 2 (Brandon Cronenberg, 8; Xavier Dolan, 27)
Germany: 1 (Baran bo Odar, 27)
Sweden: 1 (Ruben Östlund, 5)
Brazil: 1 (Kleber Mendonça Filho, 10)
Switzerland: 1 (Ursula Meier, 38)
Philippines: 1 (Ron Morles, 39)
Lebanon: 1 (Ziad Doueiri, 43)
NON-FICTION
It was hard to top The Act of Killing, my favorite doc of 2012 and the highlight of last year's Telluride Film Festival, but Far From Vietnam (Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, Claude Lelouch, Agnès Varda,William Klein, Joris Ivens) is as powerful, maddening, and revealing as Joshua Oppenheimer's masterpiece. Originally produced in 1967 and finally re-released this year, Far From Vietnam is as incendiary as ever. Especially William Klein's segment.
Frederick Wiseman's monumental 4-hour portrait of University of California, Berkeley - which I saw in perhaps the last truly independent movie theater of San Francisco, the Roxie - gets the second place. Some commentators have naively accused Wiseman of presenting a top-down view of (an already highly bureaucratized enterprise otherwise known as) UC Berkeley. According to this interpretation, Wiseman ignored or misrepresented the point of view of the students. But that's exactly the point: The students' perspective does not matter at all. When the Chancellor of the school Professor Robert Birgeneau comments that "Back in my days, students' protests were real - I even got fired from my job at Bell Labs for one day! - kids these days are just protesting for the sake of protesting" - I am paraphrasing here, but not really - he is simply reiterating that academic institutions can tolerate the performance of dissent insofar as it does not bring any possibility of altering the status quo. My favorite part, however, is the opening sequence, a long class debate about wealth inequality in the United States. "Why should I give a damn about the implosion of the [white] American middle-class? Why should I be concerned about your new problems? I represent a race that has been exploited for centuries... Why should I care about the new white poverty?," asks an African American student. Predictably, none of her peers - mostly white - could come up with a valid answer.
British cultural critic and filmmaker Ben Lewis did an excellent job in exposing Google's hypocrisy on its attempt to "democratize" (!) access to world culture by scanning and digitizing millions of books without any permission from the legitimate publishers. Google and the World Brain was predictably hated by the local techies, Tesla-drivers, and Google buses riders. Sophie Fiennes' sequel to The Pervert's Guide to Cinema is predictably entertaining. Zizek's deconstruction of the Kinder Surprise chocolate egg is priceless. I wrote about Room 237 for Rolling Stone magazines a while ago (in Italian). The gist: Rodney Ascher's doc is not that interesting or well made per se, but the very fact that wild interpretations of The Shining exist (and persist) is a huge success. Dismissing these elaborate exegeses as mere conspiracy theories completely misses the point: like cats, cinephilia has none lives and obsessive compulsive viewing is one of them.
I really liked The Institute, which describes an alternate reality game (ARG) that took place in San Francisco in 2011, a weird mix of Scientology, high-tech utopian marketing, and the Dharma Initiative. Among other things, The Institute perfectly illustrates the current level of alienation and desperation in the Bay Area, and above all the willingness to believe in pretty much anything that promises the precariat an illusion of agency and autonomy. It also shows how easily smart, clever, young individuals can be psychologically manipulated with smoke and mirrors, cheap tricks, and self-help slogans. A scary, sometimes terrifying experiment in social engineering. Apropos of playful deceptions and gamified narratives, Matthew Cooke's How to Make Money Selling Drugs is the documentary equivalent of Grand Theft Auto. Finally, Zachary Heinzerling's expose of the Shin Bet, the Israeli secret service agency is particularly relevant in an age of pervasive surveillance, NSA style. The Gatekeepers should be watched alongside Ziad Doueiri's The Attack.
LINK: MUBI FICTION/NON-FICTION
RELATED: 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005