It’s that time of year again. How to decide what’s “best” out of the six-hundred-plus movies I watched in 2020? It’s an impossible task, so here’s a fairly random selection of things which may not be best, but certainly appealed to me and stuck in my memory.
Two new releases from the Criterion Collection showcase very different approaches to filmmaking. Robert Bresson’s Mouchette (1967) and William Greaves’ Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Two Takes (1968/2005), although both made during the turbulent late ’60s, display radically different styles and attitudes towards exploring authenticity in the cinematic representation of reality.
Minor Euro-horror gets the deluxe treatment in several releases from Blue Underground, Grindhouse Films and Severin; three features by Dutch director Dick Maas – De Lift (1983), Amsterdamned (1988) and Down (2001) – and three from Lucio Fulci – Cat in the Brain (1990), Aenigma (1987) and Demonia (1990) – along with Simone Scafidi’s Fulci for Fake (2019), an illuminating documentary about Fulci.
Pete Schuermann’s The Creep Behind the Camera (2014) is an odd hybrid, begun as a documentary and incorporating interview clips, but mostly a dramatization of the story of Art Nelson aka Vic Savage, a talentless sociopath who dreamed of being a movie director but was sunk by a lack of talent and his own increasingly violent sociopathy. Synapse’s Blu-ray includes along with the feature, a wealth of extras including a 2K scan of Nelson’s no-budget monster movie The Creeping Terror (1964).
In D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus’ Town Bloody Hall (1979), the raggedness of the film – shot on the fly in 16mm – perfectly captures the chaos of the event it documents, a fractious panel held in New York on April 30, 1971, in which four feminists were pitted against Normal Mailer, who had just published The Prisoner of Sex, his problematic response to the feminist movement. Criterion gives the scrappy film a 4K restoration and loads the disk with fascinating contextual supplements.
Twenty-seven years ago this week, I shot my short film The Adventures of Stella Starr of the Galaxy Rangers in the 23rd Century, Chapter 7: Falling Starr! at the Winnipeg Film Group with a bunch of dedicated friends and co-workers. What was I thinking!
Social isolation and “working from home” mean a lot of time for movie-watching … and the volume far outstrips my ability to say anything substantive about many of the films I do watch: so here I mostly just acknowledge what I’ve been viewing in the past 4-6 weeks. Part four of four.
Ashley Thorpe’s Borley Rectory (2017) is an eccentric, hand-crafted “animated documentary” about the notorious “most haunted house in England”, using a small cast shot against green screen who are embedded in richly layered images reconstructed from old photographs. Calling up memories of silent film and spirit photography, Borley Rectory is a uniquely immersive spectral experience.
“Folk horror” is one of those categories which is hard to define – but you know it when you see it, like film noir.Two very different features and two dubious documentaries seem to fit the category – Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973), Erik Blomberg’s The White Reindeer (1953), Malcolm Leigh’s Legend of the Witches (1970) and Derek Ford’s Secret Rites (1971) – all available in excellent Blu-ray editions.
The usual year-end round-up – not necessarily the best movies or disks, but some of the ones I most enjoyed, from high art to entertaining trash. The sheer range of what’s available should lay to rest any lingering rumours about the demise of physical media.