TEN BEST FILMS OF THE 1970s

This Sunday morning, I find the following films to be the ten best of the 1970s, which I am giving in order of preference, beginning with my most favorite:

1. THE PASSENGER (Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy, France, Spain, 1975). Written by Mark Peploe, Peter Wollen and the director, Antonioni’s The Passenger, a baleful, delicately mournful mystery, tests assumptions about identity, responsibility, authority. Antonioni also prods our perception to the full—for instance, by setting critical action just beyond the camera’s range so that we must listen carefully to hear what is going on.
     David Locke, a fatigued, jaded journalist, starts anew by exchanging identities with a corpse in a North African hotel. Maintaining professional distance, seeing detail but always missing the larger picture, Locke has held himself aloof from the revolutionary upheavals he has been covering, discounting their relevance to his own life. Now his new identity places him dead-center in the opportunistic, politically non-committed world of gunrunning.
     The Passenger critiques the assumption that the only connections the West can have to the Third World are colonialist, insisting instead on a shared humanity that links all people’s fates. As reporter, Locke stresses the eye (“Tell me what you see now . . .”); as artist, Antonioni stresses the soul.
     Antonioni’s penultimate shot resolves his material. (To be precise, it’s a gyroscopically “smoothed” meshing of shots whose outcome gives the appearance of a single slow camera movement.) From inside to out, through a close-barred window in a Spanish hotel, the (seemingly) steadily moving camera draws connections among disparate humans, including Locke, and elements of geographic and political space—indoors, outdoors, indoors again (now using a doorway instead of a window)—before the camera returns to Locke, dead, in his room. Failing to perceive all the connectedness that the camera has just elegantly drawn, Locke has taken a circular stroll into the arms of his own defeatism, uncovering the death lurking beneath the mask/metaphor of the original identity-exchange in Africa: for us, a cautionary experience.

2. CHRIST STOPPED AT EBOLI (Francesco Rosi, Italy, 1979). Among the twentieth century’s greatest works, Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (1945) is Carlo Levi’s account of his forced exile in Gagliano, an impoverished southern Italian village in Luciana province, after his arrest for antifascist activities—Levi was a Jewish socialist—in 1934. Levi wrote this account in the form of a novel, bringing into concert his use of the past tense and the spontaneity of stream-of-consciousness. With its clarity of detail, suffused poetically by melancholy, the book is glorious. So is Francesco Rosi’s deeply moving film of it, in its 228-minute version available in North America, on VHS, from Canada’s Lear Media. The 145-minute DVD version is less satisfying.
     Somber, mysterious, Rosi’s film mines the nostalgic properties of memory. We go back in time, guided by an elderly Levi’s haunted memory. This will be a secular man’s last testament. His memory will become our own.
     The strangeness of the village customs; because of his medical training, Levi’s acceptance by the villagers; his witnessing of petty politics; the mistreatment of the alcoholic village priest with a past: the film provides a vast, rich canvas of humanity. The title refers to the villagers’ sense of isolation and wretchedness, which they explain by the fact that Christ never visited their village, stopping short of it.
     Rosi captures the sense of a pause in one’s life, with its opportunity to observe and learn. This “pause” is two-fold: the temporary derailment of Levi’s political activism; forty years hence, Levi’s facing natural death. This is a reflective and humanistic film. Everyone whom Levi has met, including the peasants of Gagliano, has become a part of him. This helps explains why he never returned to the village.
     Gian Maria Volontè, as Levi, gives the performance of a lifetime.

3. AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD (Werner Herzog, West Germany, Peru, Mexico, 1972). Herzog’s Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes is the highest attainment of the New German Cinema, a Leftist movement, begun in the sixties and reaching fruition in the seventies, which disdained any sweeping under the rug of Germany’s role in the Second World War or possible German cultural predisposition to fascism. Like Ford’s The Searchers (1956), Aguirre is about a madman, not as a case study, but as a revelation of cultural presumption, cultural insanity. It takes on Western “civilization.”
     Based on the Spanish quest for El Dorado, this richly colored work—the cinematographer is Thomas Maunch—follows a conquistador who imposes his will on a splinter group of Pizarro’s army in Peru, in a mad effort to re-create the world in his own image: shorn of rationalization, the colonialist impulse. The film begins and ends loftily, in both instances with an extreme long shot suggesting an implacable God’s-eye view of human endeavor: first, in the beginning, ordered, united, intoxicated by dreams of glory, questers on a steep mountain of aspiration; at the last, amidst taunting monkeys, deprived even of his daughter, the one soul capable of calming his paroxysms, only the conquistador left alive, on a raft in the Amazon River. Herzog, a bit mad himself, committed those making the film—himself, cast, crew—to a daunting experience paralleling the one that the film depicts, perhaps hoping, like his protagonist, to validate both his own existence and the existence of God. He achieves, if not enlightenment, suasive fear and trembling, especially from the contribution of his “best fiend,” lead actor Klaus Kinski, whose ferocious, nearly intolerably moving performance gives the conquistador the massive emotions of Goya’s Saturno.

4. THE AGE OF COSIMO DE MEDICI (Roberto Rossellini, Italy, 1973). Rossellini’s three-part examination of Florentine society and culture in the fifteenth century begins with a banking family. Aligned with merchants and the explosion of European trade, the Medicis embody a new pursuit of wealth and power. In its style, this 4-hour film is heir to Rossellini’s sober, immaculate Rise of Louis XIV (1966), which inaugurated his series of minimalist present-tense histories treating figures such as Socrates and Pascal. According to critic John Wyver, the world that Rossellini reveals in his Medici film “is both patently artificial and startlingly real.” Stately formalism and documentary roughness balance each other, creating a secular vision in which the religious, more primitive world of Francesco, giullare di Dio (1950) still hangs lightly about, a ray of residual simplicity in a new world of immense complication.
     Leon Battista Alberti, philosopher, painter, sculptor, musician and architect, embodies the humanistic impulse that is also integral to this world. “What use is beauty?” a merchant asks as he peruses art. Art reflects humanity. Masaccio’s painting of Jesus gives scientific attention to human anatomy at the expense of a more traditional, “spiritual” approach. Its linear approach applies principles of mathematics. Art, then, incorporates a range of knowledge and attainments—including the financial, with the couple who paid Masaccio to paint the portrait themselves appearing in the piece!
     We see Masaccio’s painting as it is discussed from various perspectives. Indeed, this amazing film contains many conversations on a wide range of matters, including the Florentine tax code. It is especially steeped in architecture and certain organizing ideas: freedom; “the city” as being based on families; the marriage of art and science, which have in common “the progress of mankind.” Alberti is referring to architecture, but, surely, Rossellini also has cinema in mind.

5. THE PHARMACY (Joris Ivens, Marceline Loridan, France, China, 1972-75). In the years just before Mao’s death and the arrest of the Gang of Four, which signaled the end of the Cultural Revolution in China, Joris Ivens and wife Marceline Loridan took their cameras into Pharmacy No. 3 in Shanghai, which in addition to dispensing drugs manages an outreach program of medical services (after attending to peasants, pharmacists work in the fields alongside them), an extension of the pharmacy’s in-house medical care center.
     The employees have developed five rules for themselves: to show the same concern for both steady customers and transients, for those who buy and those who simply want information, and for those who buy a lot and those who buy a little; to be equally attentive to customers no matter how busy the pharmacy or whether it is day or night. Their goal is to wholeheartedly serve the public.
     There is a fascinating discussion of the competing motives of profit and service; at a weekly employee meeting, one of the participants reconfirms, “We should be concerned [above all else] with people’s needs.” This has nothing to do with dictate (“The customer is always right”) and everything to do with what the workers themselves feel should be motivating them.
     La pharmacie Nº 3: Shanghai keeps widening, eventually integrating the employees and patrons into the bustling life of the port city. The opening shot at dawn evokes a Turner painting; the closing one, a long-shot of Shanghai citizens under umbrellas in the rain, Ivens’s Regen (1929), to “de-exoticize” the Chinese.
     This documentary is more relaxed and fluent than other brilliant documentaries by Holland’s Ivens; the difference may be Loridan, born Rosenberg, a teenaged survivor of a Nazi death camp. There are no tirades against capitalism, only a warm embrace of Chinese humanity.

6. HARVEST 3,000 YEARS (Haile Gerima, Ethiopia, 1975). “The father grew maize. His son sowed bullets. That black bull will charge if sufficiently provoked.”
     Mirt Sost Shi Amit is a Brechtian parable about class division and revolt. Based in the U.S., Haile Gerima returned to his native Ethiopia to shoot this massive, staggering reflection on Ethiopia amidst the collapse of Haile Selassie’s uncaring regime prior to the military takeover.
     Tenants work in various capacities on a farm riddled with echoes of feudal colonialism. Mostly silent, the film is punctuated by distancing naturalistic sounds: mooing cows, squawking chickens, dripping water—this last, a sign of something ominous steadily growing. Work is treated neutrally; it isn’t sanctified, in the silent Soviet manner, or identified with oppression. Rather, it is the landlord, equipped with an absolute sense of entitlement, and the social structure he represents that attach oppressed lives to the farm laborers. Indolent (he even has to be shoed by a servant to be ready for church), the landlord berates the shoeless farmers for indolence—a charge that images of their field and other labor piercingly refute. However, this rural situation is metaphorical for all Ethiopia, including urban Ethiopia: “The rich live in high buildings while we, who have worked hard, live in graves.” Someone also says that an Ethiopian without money in a bank in Addis Ababa is out of luck, nowhere.
     Political conversations, both veiled and blatant, dot the film. More dramatic are instances of that earlier drip-drip coming to an accumulated point of satiation. One is ironic: the cowherder dying in a flooded-over stream trying to retrieve a cow after the landlord has promised death if she loses any of the cattle. Another: the landlord’s own lethal pummeling, to which conditioned peasants respond as if he were one of their own.

7. KHAK-E SAR BEH MORH (Marva Nabili, Iran, 1977). Marva Nabili’s The Sealed Soil revolves around 18-year-old Rooy-Bekheir, beautifully played by Flora Shabavis. The rest of the cast consists of actual inhabitants of a small Iranian village. By her age, her mother had borne four children, but Rooy-Bekheir has declined all matches arranged for her. She cannot explain her reluctance to marry. That would take a voice in a place where women unroll a rug so men can sit and decide things—although social upheaval is contriving to undermine even their authority. Rooy-Bekheir is given to tarrying in the woods, deep in thought. One day, shown from the back, she is alone there, seated in silence except for luminous rain. She undresses from the waist up and breathes deeply, her shoulders delicately inflecting as she steals a liberated moment. Soon after, she hysterically kills a chicken. Someone is summoned to exorcise her “demons.” The rituals may have worked, for at film’s end Rooy-Bekheir seems resigned to marry.
     We watch sewing, meal preparations—daily routines. Outside the family’s primitive home, squawking chickens and unseen wild birds both interrupt and underscore the quiet. All the shots are static, many with Rooy-Bekheir either walking towards or away from the camera—sometimes alongside a road outside the village, generating incongruous images of the traditionally clad girl and a few motor vehicles in the same frames. The cumulative result of the fixed camera set-ups is an exquisite stillness ironically also denoting, for Rooy-Bekheir, a straightjacketing existence.
     The Sealed Soil suggests a more meditative version of Jean-Louis Bertucelli’s powerful Ramparts of Clay (1968). Like that film, Nabili’s ran into political trouble. Once Islamic fundamentalists came to power, the film’s rough cut had to be smuggled out of Iran. The remaining work was done in the United States.

8. CARTESIO (Roberto Rossellini, Italy, 1974). Ironically, seventeenth-century mathematician and philosopher René Descartes had to be coaxed into publishing, and no sooner had he done so than he was in political trouble. He took his time in order to allow for the greatest measure of reflection before committing himself to his convictions; but, in reality, the times weren’t ready for him no matter how much time he took.
     One of Roberto Rossellini’s present-tense histories, Cartesio, which is phenomenal, brings its in-the-momentness to an open-ended point by leaving its subject in the middle of things. Descartes, beautifully played by Ugo Cardea, describes himself as a pilgrim journeying through his own thoughts; the film becomes torrentially moving once we realize that Descartes also is journeying from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. He insists on clear, honest thought in a world plagued by religious dogma—for which Rossellini devises the most gripping metaphor: as Descartes walks a street, conversing with a friend, those collecting victims of the plague in wheelbarrows are also going about their business.
     Descartes contested the falseness of knowledge, the conforming of science to inherited prejudices, including those of faith. For him, Rossellini implies, “original sin” is whatever one has been taught that constructs a barrier between oneself and the truth. Descartes devises a list of twenty-one rules for the mind’s right use, one of which requires a methodical approach to testing hypotheses, observations and evidence that circumvents bias, prejudice. He is quintessentially his own man. Descartes is “attracted to mathematics,” he explains, solely for the “metaphysical truths” that can be accessed through its study.
     Rossellini’s frames are elegantly restrained yet bursting with human activity. One series of shots confines people to the lower half of a room, with vast blank walls above them: interiors suggesting humanity’s place in the cosmos!

9. MEXICO: THE FROZEN REVOLUTION (Raymundo Gleyzer, Argentina, 1971). Raymundo Gleyzer’s pulsating, deeply moving México, la revolución congelada is a brilliant documentary about the “stillborn” 1910 Revolution that failed to bring economic and social justice to Mexico, but, rather, maintained the desperate poverty and hunger of the country’s indigenous peasants. Gleyzer, 34, was kidnapped and murdered by Argentina’s ruling military five years after this film. (His films are usually about Argentina.) Gleyzer won for it a special prize at Locarno for Third World production.
     The film combines historical documentation, consisting of voiceover and old photographs and newsreel footage in sepia or black and white, as well as footage from the Tlatelolco Massacre in Mexico City during the 1968 Summer Olympics, which claimed 400 lives, many of them students, and freshly shot material in color. The latter includes material from the 1970 presidential campaign—at least I think at least some of it is fresh—and interviews with rural peasants, for instance, Mayans.
     The materials are dazzlingly assembled; the result, trenchant. Gleyzer explores the reasons for the Revolution’s failure, its departure from socialist principles, its co-option by reactionary forces, including middle-class business, and so forth, and the effect of all this on the lives of actual people. At the outset of the Revolution, 1% of Mexicans owned 97% of Mexico’s land; nominal ownership expanded to about 50%, wherein persisting feudalism kept crops that these “owners” raised, on the land that they worked, nearly entirely out of their hands and their children’s mouths, prompting their further victimization by usurious lenders. All this also entailed the collaboration of Mexico’s exploitational neighbor to the north.
     The nobility of starving Mayans is apparent in their faces, their willingness to work, their love of family—and their great ancestral stone carvings, which this peerless film also encompasses.

10. DISTANT THUNDER (Satyajit Ray, India, 1973). The “forgotten holocaust”: the Bengal Famine (1943-44), engineered by British prime minister Winston Churchill—Britain ruled India at the time—and abetted by Hindu trader-profiteers, that exacted the lives of 3.5 million Bengalis to help keep World War II British soldiers clothed and fed. The price of rice soared beyond the means of rural people to feed themselves and their families; British imports to India were slashed as exports from India increased. Satyajit Ray’s tremendous Ashani Sanket commemorates the tragedy.
     Gangacharan Chakravarti (Soumitra Chatterjee, superbly charting a selfish soul’s gradual shame, humbling, enlarged humanity) has moved with wife Ananga to Natungaon in Bengal and, a Brahmin, has taken charge of the rural village because of his higher caste and education. He becomes priest, doctor, teacher, and opportunist, extracting payments when he and Ananga are already much better off than their neighbors. Meanwhile, the rice shortage takes hold, eventually reducing residents to privation and the sway of their basest instincts. It is another front of the war. (The Famine accounted for 90% of British fatalities in the Second World War.)
     The film’s phenomenal opening: Grass; sky; trees—pristine Nature, suffused with melancholy. The closeup of a hand in the river: Ananga, bathing. A formation of war planes flies overhead, its drone drowning out the chirps of birds. The planes “look like a flock of cranes.” The intrusion of war; the illusion of war’s distance and normality.
     A leper or, possibly, burn victim offers Chutki rice in exchange for sex. She chooses life.
     The first village corpse—an untouchable. In closeup, Gangacharan’s hand holds her wrist, to check her pulse.
     That celebrated closing shot: an old man and his seven dependants approaching the Chakravartis, to be taken in; the camera pulls back, revealing all the starving Bengalis they represent.

AIR MAIL (John Ford, 1932)

Written by Frank Wead and directed both beautifully and efficiently by John Ford, Air Mail revolves around the dangers to air-mail pilots flying out from a tiny snow-blown airport around Christmastime and the clash of personalities between straight-laced Mike Miller (Ralph Bellamy), who runs the airport, and pilot Duke Talbot (Pat O’Brien), who is a braggart and is morally loose. Mike’s doctor has warned him not to fly due to his failing eyesight, but traditionally Mike takes up a flight after one of his pilots crashes. Mike thus takes to the snow-dizzy air after Dizzy Wilkins crashes and dies. Having run off with Dizzy’s sexy widow, Duke is unavailable for the job, and another alternative turns out to be someone hiding behind a false identity: a notorious pilot who bailed out of a plane that was about to crash, leaving all the passengers to their mortal fate. This man begs for the chance to redeem himself, but this isn’t Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks, 1939), where such a pilot seizes the opportunity to reclaim his soul. Mike risks his own safety rather than participate in any scheme driven by someone’s personal agenda. When a crash deposits him on an “inaccessible” mountain-top, Mike rejects efforts to rescue him, which he feels will inevitably cost his rescuer’s life, and courageously accepts his fate. However, when he learns of the predicament, Duke takes off to rescue Mike nonetheless—not because he likes, much less loves, Mike, which he doesn’t, but simply because he believes he is capable of landing a plane and rescuing Mike, and therefore there is no reason not to. To do this, he cleanly breaks away from the Wilkins widow as we ponder the virtue in his detachment versus the something-else in Mike’s tiresome, stubborn “nobility.” But for an improbable happy ending, Duke would have heroically saved Mike’s life at the cost of his own.
     One of the casualties of Mike’s mail flight is his commitment to play Santa Claus for children on Christmas Eve. When the snow settles, responsible Mike is less than responsible—and, please note, doesn’t get the mail through.

THE DEER HUNTER (Michael Cimino, 1978)

The 1970s constituted U.S. cinema’s most dismal decade, and its Oscar-winning best pictures composed a series of trash (Patton, Rocky, etc.)—with two exceptions: the mediocre Godfather-sequel (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974) and Michael Cimino’s rock-solid The Deer Hunter, a study of war’s impact on three buddies from a Pennsylvania steel town who enlist to fight in Vietnam. It is a film of rituals: one’s wedding the weekend before all three young men leave; war; the funeral of one of the three.
     The central metaphor, powerful, is provided by the Russian roulette that (fictionally) the Vietcong forces on prisoners, coldly gambling on the outcome; all this perfectly encapsulates war’s fearsomeness and random killing, but also, ironically, war’s addictive nature. Nick (Christopher Walken, best supporting actor Oscar) remains behind in Vietnam, rather than go home, to keep playing the “game,” sending home anonymously his earnings.
     There are two other affecting passages. In one, home from combat, Michael can no longer shoot deer; a sign of Cimino’s coarseness is that Michael’s whispered aloud “Okay” is followed by Michael’s shouting out to Nature, “Okay!” After Nick is buried, the mourners group-sing “God Bless America!” finding a poignant place where sentimental patriotism and dry, unsentimental plea intersect.
     Robert De Niro is superb as Michael, whose sexual ambiguity adds immeasurably to the film’s capacity to observe reality quietly and intriguingly—and at a distance. Does Michael refrain from pursuing girls because he is in love with Linda, who is off-limits as friend Nick’s girl?—or is he so caring toward Linda because he secretly loves Nick? Meryl Streep, by the way, is lovely as Linda; as in Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979), Streep had not yet cultivated those distracting, self-serving mannerisms that would mark her transformation from dedicated actress to star.

TEN BEST FILMS OF THE 1980s

This morning, I have ranked the following films as the ten best of the 1980s, beginning with the very best one and proceeding in descending order of preference:

1. THE CONSTANT FACTOR (Krzysztof Zanussi, Poland, 1980). For whatever reason(s), Krzysztof Zanussi has participated in obscuring his artistic signature by doggedly trying to make films that are different from one another. Constans is perhaps his most personal film.
     Witold is beset with difficulties. He is his dying mother’s caregiver; at work his idealism collides with the inwardness, rigidness and corruption of an entrenched bureaucracy that mounts a plot against him; and he longs to scale the Himalayas, as his father died doing. Witold’s life appears bleak at the crossroads of his own character and things beyond his control. Finally, he withdraws from the world and becomes a window washer—a grotesque parody of mountain-climbing. The son will never become his father. The integrity to which he aspires must forever elude him.
     Witold places his faith in mathematics, believing it can explain his apparent bad luck, and the film’s precise, almost mathematical style is suited to this faith and Witold’s perception of the world. Something human, though, is ever poised to drop into or out of such a view of reality. As a result, Witold unwittingly contributes to a tragic outcome. Constans is breathtaking in its irony.
     Zanussi, a former student of physics and philosophy, has fashioned a rigorously intellectual work about self-determination and other-determination. Constans elegantly locates a man’s emotional life in a complex social and political environment. It demonstrates the struggle for survival by an individual whose resilience and intelligence would seem to offer more hope and better prospects. Of all great films, this may be the bleakest, not least of all for its portrait of daily existence in a joyless, programmatic Communist state. Throughout, its cold colors appear on the edge of colorlessness.
     Zanussi has made an uncompromising film about an uncompromising man. The implied self-criticism is devastating.

2. HORSE THIEF (Tian Zhuangzhuang, China, 1986). In the tradition of Robert J. Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922), Tian Zhuangzhuang’s fictional, objectively toned Dao ma zei, nonprofessionally cast, documents an ends-of-the-world existence, in Tibet, amidst an incarnation of Nature that is as fierce as it is gorgeous to behold so long as one doesn’t live in it and have to cope with it. The prevailing silence, especially in terms of the sparseness of dialogue, is correlative to the primitive existence of the film’s protagonist, Norbu (Tseshang Rigzin, wonderful). His is an elemental life—and an awesome odyssey. Norbu is devout; despite this, due to his harsh existence, he steals from his Buddhist temple and, as a result, when he is caught, he, his wife, Dolma, and their son, Tashi, are banished from their clan. Stripped of communal protection, they are at the mercy of the elements. Tashi dies. Another son is born, steeling Norbu’s determination to ensure the newborn’s protection, no matter what this may take.
     Here is the masterpiece of the Fifth Generation Movement in Chinese cinema—a portrait of such human hardship and impossible life choices as to unsettle viewers’ complacency and expand their sympathies. Tian has created an ordeal of enlightenment, a celebration of unearthly beauty—his astonishing color cinematographers are Zhao Fei and Yong Hou—that is perpetually disrupted by assaults on the human condition from within and without. His Horse Thief is also a piercing meditation on social organization, on the family unit within the larger group. We are moved to ponder issues of social responsibility in either direction, between family and community, divorced from the prism of ideological prejudice. Horse Thief is heartrendingly humane, as also would be, in a more conventional narrative mode, Tian’s epic of China’s Cultural Revolution, The Blue Kite (1993).

3. LONG LIVE THE LADY! (Ermanno Olmi, Italy, 1987). Written and directed by Ermanno Olmi, Lunga vita alla signora is Italy’s most brilliant film comedy. The “lady” in question, decrepit though still holding on, represents capitalism and wealth. She is her own guest of honor at an elaborate formal dinner/business celebration. Closed-circuit television sets are rolled down the in-between path of the U-shaped dining table to broadcast record high profits.
     Her Ladyship wears a veil because, if ever breathed on directly or exposed to too much light, she would disintegrate. She doesn’t attend the opera, because culture might kill her, but she espies distant dinner guests through opera glasses from underneath her veil. Infantile, her Ladyship drinks wine through a straw.
     Yet she is not the protagonist of Olmi’s intricately edited, combustibly funny satire. Boys and girls from a cooking school who have been brought in to serve the wine and dinner are the focus. (Cooked by the lady’s own chef and staff, the unusual meal begins with frogs and reaches a climax with an unidentifiable sea-beast—those familiar with Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita, 1959, will savor the joke—whose skeleton, when it is ceremoniously carted away, is picked-clean and bone-dry.) A flashback-insert shows the working-class youths’ instruction and preparation: Don’t turn around suddenly. Don’t look bored, etc. A flashback is inserted inside the flashback, showing one of the boys being similarly instructed years ago in church: “Beware of impure thoughts!” Libenzio’s “career path” has been this: church; school; job. This path of obedience reflects the patriarchal structure that capitalism now dictates more essentially than the Church.
     Poignantly, Libenzio and his truck-driver father steal a private moment outside the mansion. After dinner, a guest tries to impress the waiter sexually, but, come dawn, Libenzio flees the maze of Her Ladyship’s domain.

4. MORTU NEGA (Flora Gomes, Guinea-Bissau, 1988). Drought has dried the village’s wells. Guinea-Bissau’s war of independence from Portugal has been won and those guerrillas to whom death has been denied have returned home. Fractious, selfish interests war against the unity for which ethnic groups strive. A woman who secured her free allotment of oil before the commodity ran out is selling it in portions. Her rationalization for exploiting others, “I am doing it for my children,” is punctured by the sight of children—the new nation’s future—celebrating en masse, first, war’s end and, finally, the end of the drought.
     Underwritten by the Guinea-Bissau government, Flora Gomes’s Death Denied is an epic, that is, an expression of the aspirations of a people. The first part, which follows a contingent of guerrillas who have just been resupplied with artillery, is a great, gripping mini-film about war. Instantly the guerrillas are humanized as Diminga participates in the struggle in hopes of reuniting with her husband, Sako, whom she hasn’t seen in years. Almost as soon as they do (most tenderly, most movingly) reunite, an aerial attack wounds Sako, who orders Diminga back to their village, out of greater harm’s way. When Sako himself returns after war’s end, his health is most vulnerable, it turns out, from an earlier war injury, in his foot, that has reopened and become painfully infected. It refers to many things: historical pride, hence, vulnerability; the loss of his children that war exacted (delicately, brilliantly, Gomes mentions this loss only in reference to Diminga); his disillusionment on the heels of victory.
     Collapsing time, Gomes includes a song in which Diminga has passed into legend even as she tends to Sako’s needs. The future will commemorate her past; in the meantime, Diminga lives in the present.
     And the struggle continues.

5. THE HOME AND THE WORLD (Satyajit Ray, India, 1984). From a novel by Rabindranath Tagore, Ghare-Baire is Satyajit Ray’s most majestic and splendiferous film. The protagonist is Bimala Choudhury, who recalls her marriage in the early twentieth century. Nikhilesh, her spouse, a wealthy Bengali landowner and merchant, encourages her education and departure from traditional Hindu ways. Bimala eventually has an affair with an old college friend of his, Sandip Mukherjee (Soumitra Chatterjee, brilliant), a leader of the incendiary nationalist movement Swadeshi, whose first female member she becomes. Nikhilesh opposes Sandip’s politics, which he foretells will further divide Hindus and Muslims in a region that the ruling British have partitioned in order to short-circuit an alliance between the two groups. Sandip’s call for a boycott of British imports, Nikhilesh contends, will further impoverish Muslim merchants who are already struggling to survive. When his local agitation falls flat, Sandip organizes and unleashes a terrorist response.
     This is no facile Reds (1981), Doctor Zhivago (1965) or Gone with the Wind (1939), where history supplies a sweeping backdrop for soap opera. Ray, instead, creates a rich tapestry in which British imperialism, Indian nationalism, the Choudhurys’ marriage, Bimala’s tentative moves toward a liberated modernism, and her extramarital affair are tightly interwoven, generating a complex vision of a society in upheaval. Bimala is portrayed as existing uncertainly between two worlds, while the two men in her life, political opponents, are each certain of themselves but only in partial possession of the truth. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to see the political views of others apart from the prism of your own views? Ray’s final masterpiece enables us to take in a myriad of sociopolitical shades and inflections in a complex, combustible situation. Moreover, it concludes with a devastating shot telescoping a devastated life.

6. ARIEL (Aki Kaurismäki, Finland, 1988). A brilliant tragicomedy of the discontinuous lives of the working poor, Ariel is the second part of Aki Kaurismäki’s “proletarian trilogy.” Taisto Kasurinen’s unhappy lot in life, we are given to understand, was set prior to the film’s action and will continue beyond its completion. At the outset, the closing of a coal mine deprives him and his father of their jobs; the latter gives Taisto the keys to his convertible and announces his intention of committing suicide. Taisto doesn’t believe he will do this, even after he brandishes a gun, for the simple reason that he has not already done this in a perpetually hard, unfair life. But we hear the offscreen shot and see Taisto looking down at his father’s body, which remains out of camera range. What we see reflects what Taisto sees, because we see him and his fate reflects his father’s.
     Taisto, on the road, is beaten and robbed. He becomes a day laborer and sleeps at night in a mission flophouse. Nights are as black as oil. He meets Irmeli Pihlaja, who gives up her job monitoring illegal parking ticketing cars in exchange for dinner, and has sex with him. “I hated [my ex-husband] from the start.” Taisto: “That’s unusual.” Irmeli: “That’s what you think.” The two, along with Irmeli’s self-sufficient young son, become a family. Irmeli takes a factory job cutting meat.
     But the law puts Taisto in prison after he runs across one of the men who robbed him and he tries taking back some of his money. With Irmeli’s help, he escapes, and the three plan on fleeing aboard the Mexico-bound Ariel under a mockingly gorgeous, dusky blue sky. We hear “Over the Rainbow” sung in Finnish and recall Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ill-fated schooner, Ariel.
     Poignant. Devastating.

7. A TIME TO LIVE, A TIME TO DIE (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan, 1985). The second part of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Coming-of-Age trilogy is based on Hou’s own childhood. Tong nien wang shi begins with Hou’s voiceover recalling that his father relocated from Mei County, Kwangtung Province, in mainland China to Taiwan shortly after his birth, with him and the rest of the family following a year after. Hou, in effect, knew only the new country; his difficult adjustment, therefore, was to his family, whose difficulty adjusting to Taiwan exceeded his—although, because of his connection to them, he also experienced an acute sense of loss of homeland.
     Tong nien wang shi comprises incidents—recollections, to which Hou has added imagination, especially regarding his mother, who is seen explaining things to the family that goes beyond what she must have said at the time. One infers from this Hou’s greatest need for reconciliation with the memory of the woman who spunkily spanked him and kept the family together. However, it is Grandma whose wanderings keep her searching for Mekong Bridge and the way home. Eventually Grandma returns to the mainland.
     We know the name of Hou’s father from her cries at hospital at his death. Fen-ming! A laterally moving shot records the children’s faces of grief. Ah-hsiao, or Ah-ha, as his peers teasingly put it, is bathing in an adjacent room when he hears his mother’s piercing lament.
     We watch the boy and other children at play and getting into more serious trouble. It is the portrait of a great artist as not yet a young man.
     Tong nien wang shi is a gently melancholy work, full of a sense of lost cultural moorings that Hou now can grasp as an adult. The film is his brilliant attempt to fill in the blanks of his aching heart.

8. EPIDEMIC (Lars von Trier, Denmark, 1988). Save Vampyr (1931), by another Dane, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Lars von Trier’s Epidemic may be the greatest horror film ever made. It is certainly one of the most playful and visually fetching horror films.
     It’s pseudo-cinéma-vérité—a film-within-a-film the boundaries of whose Chinese boxes bend and blur. A film director named Lars (endearingly played by Lars von Trier himself) and his scenarist, Niels (played by Trier’s actual co-scenarist, Niels Vørsel), dream up a medical horror movie, in the dream of which Dr. Mesmer (Trier again), an epidemiologist, battles a disease that in fact he unwittingly spreads. Both films are in black and white; but the objective framing film is shot in 16mm, while the interior dream of a film is shot in luxuriant 35mm. The phenomenal cinematography is by Henning Bendtsen, who photographed Dreyer’s Ordet (1954).
     The dream is a nightmare of reality; talk of “mass graves” invokes specters of two world wars, the Holocaust, and the threat of annihilation imposed on us all by the examples of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Indeed, the framing film, in which the plague ultimately erupts with the assistance of hypnosis, seems to be catching up with the interior film.
     Irrepressibly funny and absolutely terrifying, Epidemic locates individual imagination in the grip of shared political realities. We cannot get away from our worst dreams, our worst imaginings, because they are real and because the paranoid U.S. is ever poised to drop at a whim another stupendous bomb. Art, our principal defense, only returns us to reality. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark because something is rotten elsewhere in the world. Europe exists in a colossal shadow.
     This is the second entry in Trier’s “European trilogy” begun with The Element of Crime (1984).

9. THE DEAD (John Huston, Ireland, U.S., 1987). Some literary works are untranslatable into cinema, and The Dead, from James Joyce’s 1914 collection Dubliners, is probably one of them. However, Irish-American John Huston long had nurtured the dream of turning the most beautiful short story in the English language into a film. He was in his eighties and working from an oxygen tent when he did this, from son Tony’s script, and the result is overwhelmingly moving. The Dead was Huston’s last completed film.
     With its bristling life, irresistible humor, sharp observation, and glow of melancholy, The Dead is Huston’s most deeply felt and beautifully composed film. One problem, though, did intercede. Joyce’s story unfolds through an omniscient narrator, some of whose gravest reflections are, now, unsuitably given over to Gabriel, the protagonist. Otherwise, though, the film is bliss. With guests dancing lightly around their persistent awareness of “the last end,” the film gives us afresh Joyce’s buoyant, captivating comedy of life written in his twenties to acknowledge “all the living and the dead.” Approaching his own end, his legendary sourness gone, Huston transforms this young man’s piece into a serene contemplation of a universal mystery whose depth of secrets only now he is on the verge of discovering. This hauntingly lit and gloriously acted film—Donal McCann, Anjelica Huston (Huston’s daughter) and Donal Donnelly are the Gabriel, Gretta and Freddy of our dreams—bears the sense of a gracious last testament freely given.
     Huston’s is one of the most substantial careers in American cinema, and some films of his that once seemed failures or overly commercial, such as Key Largo (1948) and The Misfits (1961), are of greater interest today.

10. IMAGES OF THE WORLD AND THE INSCRIPTION OF WAR (Harun Farocki, West Germany, 1989). The objective nature of photographic images is probed in this brilliant West German documentary by Harun Farocki. Such images, Farocki’s cinematic essay suggests, bear the subjectivity of the political uses to which they are put at one end and the subjectivities of human reception and perception at the other. Indeed, something else predates either of these mediations: manipulations of reality that generate those appearances which images then proceed to memorialize. In wartime, factories producing necessary equipment, for instance, are camouflaged to fool aerial reconaissance into generating photographs in which the factories appear to be ordinary residences.
     Such photographs were inadvertently taken of Auschwitz during the last world war. This was April 1944, when Allied reconaissance was searching instead for factories, chemical plants, etc., that is, bombing targets in order to fell the Nazi war effort. The aerial photographs were ignored as revealing nothing relevant; only in the mid-1970s, when they were discovered in CIA files and scrutinized from the vantage of considerable knowledge of the death camps, were they correctly deciphered. Farocki compares this “outside,” “objective” view with an “inside,” personal view aiming at objectivity: drawings of Auschwitz by Jewish prisoner Alfred Kantor. The photographs are also compared to Nazi photographs of Auschwitz.
     We may fetishize the photograph—and, more generally, technology. Farocki mockingly prefaces the Auschwitz material with the case of Albrecht Meydenbauer, a nineteenth-century architect who, in order to safely deduce measurements of a church, relied on still photographs from which a scale model presumably could be constructed.
     Farocki’s associative method may seem at times to want coherence, but his stunning Images is tightly constructed without appearing to be—a strategy to avoid imposing on the viewer just the sort of quantifiable “truth” the film seeks to penetrate.

Filmmaker and new father Blake Eckard has sent me his own list of the ten best films of the 1980s—and his includes two titles that narrowly missed my own list. Here is Blake’s list as I received it:

THE SHINING (1980, Stanley Kubrick)
PRINCE OF THE CITY (1981, Sidney Lumet)
WHITE DOG (1982, Samuel Fuller)
L’ARGENT (1983, Robert Bresson)
LAST NIGHT AT THE ALAMO (1984, Eagle Pennell)
COME AND SEE (1985, Elem Klimov)
BLUE VELVET (1986, David Lynch)
PLATOON (1986, Oliver Stone)
BELL DIAMOND (1986, Jon Jost)
THE THIN BLUE LINE (1988, Errol Morris)

A SONG OF INNOCENCE (Antoine Santana, 2005)

Six years after Marco Bellocchio’s La balia (The Nanny, 1999) comes another period study of class centering on a hired wet-nurse: writer-director Antoine Santana’s La ravisseuse, which for some peculiar reason has been given the title A Song of Innocence in the States. In their different ways, the impoverished illiterate, Angèle-Marie, and her mistress, Charlotte, both 18, are under the patriarchal thumb of Charlotte’s upwardly mobile, career-minded spouse, Julien, a painfully straight yippie transported back in time to 1877. The girls bond, and in a just universe both would flee with the baby; but, as it happens, only one of them does this. Taking a cue from propriety, Charlotte, who had even dined with Angèle-Marie in Julien’s absence, thus dangerously blurring class boundaries, snaps at the servant-girl, “Lower your eyes when I speak to you!” and therefore seals her own fate. Not even her offer of daily milk to Julien, who has secretly coveted her breasts, can save Angèle-Marie her job; and news of her own baby’s death from cholera—an occupational hazard, from one disease or another—helps spur her final desperate act.
     Santana is a moderately interesting artist but not an especially compelling one. Of the three main characters, Charlotte perhaps proves the most complex; marriage to Julien has raised her a bit, as her father, bled dry by the convent education he provided her, could not also provide Julien with a dowry, and we see her slipping back and forth between her wet-nurse’s and her husband’s rooms and influences. However, the most arresting performance comes from Anémone as Léonce, the older cook whose day-long drinking spoils Julien’s la-dee-da dinner, and who dislikes Angèle-Marie for suggesting incendiary potential that she (Léonce), with a similar history, has long since suppressed in herself.