One of the funnier remarks in Variety late last year came from a Universal Pictures executive who noted that because of the special nature of Schindler’s List his company wasn’t really promoting the picture, but simply informing people it was out. I’d wager that if the other movies on my ten-best list had been given the same amount of “nonpromotion”–one of those modest multimillion-dollar campaigns–you would have heard nearly as much about them.
Case in point: Some of my colleagues appear to be trying to convince themselves and their readers that Schindler’s List has something new to tell us about the Holocaust, but I would argue that the film’s achievement is in simply reminding us of things we’ve forgotten. Spielberg’s filmmaking strengths are essentially conservative, and just as his use of black and white revives the cinema of the past, his view of Eastern Europe half a century ago is at best a powerful paraphrase of elements in Holocaust literature. (In no way can it be deemed any sort of advance on Simone Weil or Hannah Arendt, much less an equivalent, but if you want to be heard in the mass market you may have to claim such nonsense.)
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As far as unpretentious Hollywood entertainment is concerned, it was a mediocre year. The fact that so many people enjoyed Jurassic Park, Sleepless in Seattle, and The Fugitive, as if they were fresh rather than warmed-over genre romps, made me conclude that they were lucky to have seen fewer movies this year than I did. (I suspect this is an experience that generally separates professional reviewers from most other moviegoers, with quantity changing quality, altering tastes and preferences.) But as far as foreign pictures are concerned the year wasn’t at all bad, especially if you include the offerings of alternative venues like the Film Center, the Chicago International Film Festival, and Facets Multimedia. And the number of worthy American independent works was also respectably high–at least if you include videos and add Chicago Filmmakers to the list of alternative venues.
A tie between two Chantal Akerman films, as different from each other as two movies by the same filmmaker can be: Night and Day and From the East. The first, which showed at the Music Box last spring and is scheduled to return as a weekend midnight attraction at the Village, is Akerman at her most commercial and accessible. Alas, this still isn’t accessible enough for some people, though for me it’s the closest she’s come, after a couple tries, to capturing the lyricism and emotions of a musical. A tale of young lovers in Paris that qualifies in some ways as her Jules and Jim, the film beautifully captures the sensual feeling of summer nights in Paris.
Another tie, between the two best experimental works I saw all year, both of them videos: Bill Viola’s The Passing and the first two parts of Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinema. The first, a beautiful black-and-white video made in 1991, is a highly pleasurable meditation on encounters between settings in the American southwest and images and rhythms relating to dreams and sleep; it premiered at Chicago Filmmakers in late June. Godard’s multilayered meditation on cinema and the 20th century as perceived through each other, which showed at the Film Center in July, is rather more abstruse, though no less rewarding after repeated viewings; it qualifies fies as Godard’s Finnegans Wake, full of babbled profundities and obscure poetic fusions that can be taken straight or endlessly decoded.
Preface (Italy), a stunning half-hour short by Michelangelo Antonioni. Made in 1965 for a nevercompleted sketch feature, and, to the best of my knowledge, unseen in Chicago prior to the Film Center’s indispensable Antonioni retrospective, it registers like a fragrant summary of the director’s work at its most poetically mysterious.
