As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty
Chungking Express
The Green Ray
Killer of Sheep
Annie Hall
Wanda
The Graduate
Inside Llewyn Davis
Stroszek
Drive My Car
On the Beach at Night Alone
The Souvenir
The Last Days of Disco
We're All Going to the World's Fair
Oddities/Films I Think More People Should Watch:
Personal Problems
Folies Meurtrieres
Local Legends
Center Jenny
Reflections of Evil
Wax, or The Discovery of Television Among Bees
I Was a Teenage Serial Killer
Mary Jane's Not a Virgin Anymore
Computer Chess
Love-Seat: A Portrait of Self
Deadbeat at Dawn
Rapture
Super 8 1/2
They Eat Scum
Liquid Sky
Muscle
a note on reviews
I've been writing reviews on Letterboxd for a couple of years now but it has the same problems as all the other social media sites so I'm gonna start posting some of my longer ones up on here. I don't use ratings, I just talk about the films. Sometimes I might also talk about music.
anti-clock
(1979)
jane arden & jack bond
Joseph Sapha (Jane Arden's son, Sebastian Saville.)
The Anti-Clock project takes Joseph Sapha though the shadows of his past to confront that mirror image of the self that condemns us all - a blind automaton whose words are simply the rationale of the defense attack system caught in the horrors of the past and the anxieties of the future. Does our hero have a chance of alienating the circuit which will suppress his longing for a higher synthesis? - IMDB
(For context, I've been on a big cyberpunk kick recently and I found this in a list of cyberpunk movies)
Anti-Clock is one of those experimental films that almost has a narrative so that you're constantly tantalised and/or frustrated by the possibility that it might all fall into place. If I had to describe the story then I would say that it's about a man who killed his abusive father as a child and then grew up to be a drug dealer and gambler watching his memories and dreams on TV under the guidance of some creepy psychiatrists. This either causes psychic abilities to develop or comes about because of them. There are also several threads about the different generations of women in his family and how they react to their respective awful circumstances.
Whether any of that is centrally important or not, it's difficult to say. Most of the film is made up of seemingly unconnected events playing out through warping TVs while a voice over talks about probability, causation, theosophy, feminism, identity, psychiatry, and other lighthearted topics like that (occasionally interrupted by the psychiatrists who argue with, cajole, and "guide" him.) It feels almost like Arden and Bond knew that weren't going to make many films so they agreed to cram everything they could into each second of this one.
On the right, one of the psychiatrists - named in the credits as Madame Luisa Aranovitch (Louise Temple.)
Did I actually enjoy it? That's also difficult to say. It's very ahead of it's time in the use of audio loops, eerie archive material, and deliberate glitches or faults in technology, but it's also a bit overly dense and the endless voiceover does open it up to accusations of pretentiousness. I can't quite make those accusations myself because the script seems genuinely interesting and clever but it's definitely not accessible.
An example of the warping effects used throughout the film.
All of this, plus the minimalistic lullaby-ish soundtrack, makes it seem like something that Adam Curtis would like. In fact, a good description of it would be: a feature-length version of those montage interludes in Adam Curtis documentaries, freed from the pressure to connect or make sense.
The most interesting parts of it are actually the parts about feminism, which have a kind of solidity and conviction that the rest of it maybe lacks. Whatever I eventually decide about this film, I'm definitely interested in Jane Arden's other stuff because of that.
