Jake's Picks

Spotlight: Shadows of Forgotten Film

City Girl, Eros + Massacre, Hi, Mom!, Wise Blood, The Pope of Greenwich Village, An Angel at My Table, A Moment of Innocence, The Intruder, Shirin, Phantoms of Nabua

Drawing up a list of underseen classics in this day and age might as well be an attempt to list the greatest films of all time. Even someone not wishing to be obscure could befuddle audiences with the selection of a neglected Orson Welles film (Chimes at Midnight, his hidden masterpiece, speeds to the mind), much less a piece of foreign cinema that rarely, if ever, reaches English-speaking shores. I myself can make no claim to being versed in the buried treasures of world cinema; cinephilia to a 21-year-old already feels like an enormous game of catch-up, with entire regions of world cinema yet to be explored. What follows is a list of films not lost to time but never really given a fair shake, either through shoddy distribution or general indifference. Not all are landmark films, but each has something to offer the curious viewer.

City Girl | F.W. Murnau | 1930 | 722 votes
F.W. Murnau’s penultimate film is a pastoral yet realistic feature that deepens the rural/urban contrast of his previous film, the masterpiece Sunrise, by peeling back the negative side of the countryside in addition to the city. Farmhands leer at Kate, the titular city girl brought back home by a lovestruck worker, as much as factory chaps in the lunch counters. Yet Murnau also uses his film as one last paean to the silent film, which he himself perfected with Sunrise just in time to see it die. His poetic shots of rolling waves of wheat would reverberate all the way down to Terrence Malick, the director who would pick up Murnau’s dropped baton decades later to bring poetry back to Hollywood.

Eros + Massacre | Yoshishige Yoshida | 1969 | 200 votes
The final card of Jean-Luc Godard’s Week End infamously intoned “End of Cinema,” but Yoshida’s Eros + Massacre outdoes him with a hanging by 16mm film. As dialectical as the most complex Godard film, Eros + Massacre also incorporates Rivette’s use of theatricality and process to uncover emotional truth and Resnais’ slippery, recursive memory. Numerous filmmakers around the world have tried to make sense of the ’60s, but better than anyone, Yoshida linked the personal and political motivations of revolution until sexual freedom and political upheaval are one and the same. This is a portrait of idealism, hypocrisy, despair and fury, all packaged in one of the most daring deconstructions of film grammar ever created. One of the great unsung masterpieces.

Hi, Mom! | Brian De Palma | 1970 | 1,962 votes
The masterpiece of Brian De Palma’s early, experimental features, Hi, Mom! represents the apotheosis of his incorporation of Godard’s Brechtian influences into his own trashy satire, tearing down ’60s culture with as much force as Godard did with Weekend. Its justifiably lauded “Be Black, Baby” segment is perhaps the director’s finest exercise in deliberate audience punishment, putting his diegetic crowd through such torture the pain extends to those of us at home or in the theater, only for the punchline to shatter every barrier between a film’s diegesis, the director’s knowledge and the audience’s awareness. By the end, De Palma tears down not only the complacent bourgeois masses but the naïve, violent radicals who protest the senseless destruction in Vietnam by creating that same meaningless chaos at home. By the time the film ends with De Niro waving at the camera shouting the titular statement, everything’s been reverted and inverted to the point that one must laugh to fight back the madness.

Wise Blood | John Huston | 1979 | 1,708 votes
John Huston is the only director who could consistently get away with making great, or at least solid and fascinating, movies out of great literature, always capturing the author’s voice but finding the cinema in every tome. Huston makes his most delirious feature to bring Flannery O’Connor’s demented prose to life, casting his workman-like direction in surreal tones without changing much of anything, only suggesting that something is always amiss around Hazel Motes and his upstart Church Without Christ. Though not as much an aesthetic embodiment of O’Connor’s style and moralism as, say, the indirect references in most of the Coen brothers’ work, Huston’s adaption nevertheless works as a brilliantly deadpan shaggy dog joke with a gruesome climax, just like Flannery used to make.

The Pope of Greenwich Village | Stuart Rosenberg | 1984 | 3,279 votes
Not an altogether great film, The Pope of Greenwich Village is nevertheless noteworthy for containing the greatest performances of two of the most brilliant but turbulent actors to come of age in the ’80s. Mickey Rourke and Eric Roberts play their roles as if they’re remaking Mean Streets, Roberts even less controllable than De Niro’s Johnny Boy and Rourke pouring all his quiet, heartbreaking grace into holding back the monster that would later tear him apart in the ’90s. The film makes moralistic neo-noir of Scorsese, but the two leads, along with Darryl Hannah, prevent any simplification by exploring uncharted pockets of the same space, the darkest areas even Keitel and De Niro didn’t plunge into. One of the finest acting showcases of the ’80s.

An Angel at My Table | Jane Campion | 1990 | 2,746 votes
Campion’s first biopic set the stage for her subsequent great films, The Piano and Bright Star, but she never equaled this triptych of the life of New Zealand author Janet Frame. Compared to her brazenly stylistic shorts and debut feature, An Angel at My Table, is remarkably straightforward and downbeat. However, the director clearly brought her skill with fractured, dysfunctional caricatures to her serious consideration of a genuinely dysfunctional, isolated human being. Everything about the film is immaculate (down to the casting across ages, which is seamless you’d swear they just filmed the movie over decades as the original child grew up), yet the film lacks the stuffy “prestige picture” trappings thanks to Campion’s gentle touches, the same touches that would enliven her other two, more famous, biographies.

A Moment of Innocence | Mohsen Makhmalbaf | 1996 | 735 votes
Mohsen Makhmalbaf attempts to come to terms with the assault on a loyalist police officer that put him in jail during the revolution in Iran by bringing that same man in two decades later to tell his side of the story with the director, casting the younger version of himself. Up there with the headiest of Iranian cinema, A Moment of Innocence is also one of the most emotionally complex and resonant, its metafictional games further exploring ideas of perception, political and personal memory, the possibility of changing the past and the hopes of reconciliation. Its final image is so searing it breaks the bonds of cinematic capacity until you believe the cinema can alter history itself.

The Intruder | Claire Denis | 2004 | 767 votes
Claire Denis’ magnum opus finds the poetry in philosophy, using a heart transplant to explore the metaphor of foreign bodies both internal and external, elliptically tugging at the character of her dour, mildly sinister protagonist while building man into a Ship of Theseus. The aesthetic itself matches this allegory (as well as the style of post-impressionism), always revealing parts and contours but never the whole until everything comes together. Denis’ minimalism has always focused on the intangible and emotional, but L’Intrus is her finest, most abstract yet inexplicably tangible work to date.

Shirin | Abbas Kiarostami | 2008 | 542 votes
In what may be Abbas Kiarostami’s last feature in Iran for the foreseeable future, the world’s greatest living director made a tongue-in-cheek “return” to traditional cinema after years experimenting with video, only to put the joke on his critics (and even friends) by framing that return by essentially staging a movie from the front of a movie theater room looking into the crowd. But if this was a jab at those begging him to get back to cinema, it proves that even Kiarostami’s real-life wit contains the same humanistic searching as his diegetic comedy. Surveying the faces of women as they watch a film about a classical Persian romance myth, the director educes notions on gender roles in life and art, the power of cinema and, with a cameo appearance by a Juliette Binoche too covered up to be recognizable among the host of Persian actresses, a humanism that moves outside native Iran toward the international future Kiarostami was already planning. For a film based around a simple gimmick, Shirin is one of the most beautiful and provoking films of the previous decade.

Phantoms of Nabua | Apichatpong Weerasethakul | 2009 | 75 votes
Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 11-minute Phantoms of Nabua is as vital to understanding his subsequent feature masterpiece Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives as that film’s narrative antecedent, A Letter to Uncle Boonmee. Phantoms unlocks the elegiac yet progressive view of the death of traditional cinema and the role film plays in relation to reality. A group of teenagers kicks around a blazing soccer ball, eventually setting fire to a projection screen displaying a film of the village in which the people are playing, dissipating its capture of the past into the present when the light continues to project into smoke and air. Like the explosive finale of Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, this climax serves as a sort of funeral pyre for cinema, but Joe tacitly poses philosophical questions on the future that show an almost Emersonian thread of connection, between past, present and future as well as fiction and reality. It’s all connected, and Joe burns a hole in the artifice to find the circulatory system beneath. An essential short.