Carole Bouquet and André Dussollier in Unforgivable.

2012’s best so far and Sarris remembered

This year, I want to do the Mid-Year Reckoning differently, as a tribute to film critic Andrew Sarris’ recent passing. It was Sarris, during my grad school years at Columbia, who wisely advised that the percentage of good movies has not changed from the old days; now that the output is larger, the significance of sifting out the trash is more important than ever. Sarris’ indispensable work The American Cinema, first published in 1968, used the Nouvelle Vague’s notion of auteurism (cinema authorship) to categorize all Hollywood film history up to that point.

Sarris’ commentary on over 200 directors was an awesome feat, combining scholarship with sharp perception. His extraordinary assessments should still structure anyone’s thinking about movies, American or global.

Because The American Cinema emerged from cinema’s first half-century, it preserves aesthetics and values (pillars from Griffith to Sternberg) that have been lost in the recent years of criticism’s decline, in which media and box-office presence is given importance over the individual visions that Sarris knew were what made cinema an art form. He articulated that belief with idiosyncratic precision that to this day—when both Hollywood and the critical “community” have lost self-respect—is still awesome to read.

Each summer, my mid-year assessment has been a way to keep track of the movie year’s deluge, which, given the dozen or more films that open every week, is more than can be reviewed. Perhaps the reckoning might this time benefit from following Sarris’ model, as a reminder of the standards a film-lover has every right to uphold.

I take great exception to the TV pundit whose memorial to Sarris cited that he “loved movies.” Sarris’ work was greater than any fanboy obsession—everybody “loves” movies, but Sarris turned his interest into teaching, study and personal expression, the things that make criticism valuable, an art in its own right.

With continued respect for Sarris, one of the two critics who have meant the most to me, professionally and personally, I repeat The American Cinema’s first nine top-tobottom categories, citing the work of individual directors. It could help to understand how 2012’s best films so far might ultimately rank in film history or, as Sarris crucially demonstrated, in a personal pantheon rigorous enough to share with the world.

Pantheon Directors
Unforgivable (André Téchiné)—a tumultuous view of private lives as society and society as family.
The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies)—examines the linkage of desire and despair to find the value of personal resurrection.

The Far Side of Paradise
Damsels in Distress (Whit Stillman)—the rare campus comedy genre visits private worlds that reflect the eccentricities we recognize deep down.
Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson)— compares the innocence of youth and maturity.
Dark Horse (Todd Solondz)—tragedy found in the comedy of hopes squandered by misguided fashions. The Skinny (Patrik-Ian Polk)—clarifies the blur of sex and friendship that gay life faces straight-on.
A Thousand Words (Brian Robbins)—a Hollywood satire so casually profound it scared off the industry and its fans.

Expressive Esoterica
Americano (Mathieu Demy)—an Oedipal odyssey that finds cultural heritage in family legacy.
Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor)—addresses action movie tropes to satirize the deficiencies of contemporary genre excess.
The Lady (Luc Besson)—eloquently acted political biopic, refined non-comic-book heroism.
The Flowers of War (Zhang Yimou)—common tragedy and possibility, rapturously envisioned.

Fringe Benefits
Detention (Joseph Kahn)—traces moral chaos throughout recent pop history. Chronicle (Jonathan Trank)—youth’s visionary search for meaning.
Wanderlust (David Wain)—audacious mockery of Occupy sentimentality and its outdated hippie heritage.
That’s My Boy (Sean Anders)—empathy, heredity and its discontents.

Joyful Noise (Todd Graff)—the anodyne effects of music and the movie musical.

Less Than Meets the Eye
Roadie (Michael Cuesta)—great performance by Ron Eldard.
The Kid with a Bike (Dardennes brothers)— modern neuroses given fairytale attention.
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (Timur Bekmambetov)—trash made uncommonly spectacular.

Lightly Likable: Being Flynn, Darling Companion, Man on a Ledge, Where Do We Go Now?

Strained Seriousness: The Turin Horse, Safe, Neil Young Journeys, Magic Mike

Make Way for the Clowns: Ted, The Dictator, Casa de mi Padre

Oddities, One-Shots and Newcomers: Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Gerhard Richter Painting, Locked Out, John Carter

To read more from City Arts click here.

Realistic historical proofs confirm Davies’ unique method of cinematic testimony. Combing through British archives assists Davies’ memory retrieval. Financed as an official history of Liverpool, Of Time and The City isn’t that any more than Gerry and the Pacemakers’ “Ferry Cross the Mersey” was. But like that 1960s British Invasion hit, it proves the spiritual reality of Liverpool through the sincerity of Davies’ recall. He narrates the film himself: “We love the place we hate; then hate the place we love. We leave the place we love; then spend a lifetime trying to regain it. Between loving and hating the real journey starts. Do you remember? Will you ever forget?” Through unabashedly theatrical cadence, Davies pours all his artistry into these images.

Because Davies’ style is both formal and idiosyncratic, you cannot distance yourself from his recollection. By presenting history in a personal manner, he stirs your own memories of youth, of home and of media. Like that magnificent Long Day Closes sequence of school-, church- and movie-going rituals unified by the pop song “Tammy,” Davies appraises shipyard, tenement and factory scenes; relating them to classical and pop music. It is the most extraordinary demonstration I know of the postmodern experience.

What’s postmodernism? If you’ve ever felt a pang of longing from home movies, family photos, old movies or songs, then the formal innovations in Of Time and The City will tell you. Davies’ breaks through the intimidating and alienating use of found footage by experimental directors like Bruce Conner or James Benning. That’s not a slam but a distinction. These images are more than materiel but totems brimming with unguarded emotion. Of Time and The City isn’t a high-minded anti-capitalist critique but a rich panoply of the historical and spiritual facts of industrial-age life. Quotations from Joyce (“As you are, we once were”) to Engels (“Removed from the sight of happier classes, poverty may struggle along as it can”) combine political awareness with passionate empathy. Davies cites DeKooning: “The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time.” Then replies, “The trouble with being rich is that it takes up everyone else’s.” He pinpoints the problem of hegemony.

Opening with an old-style movie palace as its sumptuous red curtains unveil a brilliant white screen, Davies establishes a familiar mode of dreamlike projection. His meticulous eye lives up to hushed expectation. Though he didn’t shoot this footage, each clip is handled like a personal memento, explicating England’s Free Cinema documentary tradition. Davies’ legato pace (nostalgic/analytical) confers emotional grandeur very similar to the recognition of psychic and sociological violence in Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep montages. Scenes of vast cheering soccer crowds and beaches loaded with sunbathers convey the phenomenon of desperate leisure. Women washing laundry, workers filing in and out of factory gates are awesome in themselves but overwhelming when Davies adds choice musical scoring (Ewan McColl’s “Dirty Old Town”) and his own acerbic observations (“We had hoped for paradise. We got the anus mundae”).

Selecting from other people’s images conveys the evanescence of memory. It’s amazing that the anonymous documentarians’ best instincts match Davies’ own. He achieves a fragile sense of loss, anxious to capture the exact significance of a passing moment. Memorializing quotidian life, he provides ironic grace: as when happily chanting schoolgirls are linked to a diva’s operatic finesse. It conveys Davies’ process of maturation and his class aspirations.

While sexual identity is a major theme (“caught between canon and the criminal law, I said good-bye to my girlhood”), spiritual longing is bigger. Of Time and The City uncannily parallels Guy Maddin’s charming, satirical gay-memoir film, My Winnipeg; but this more rigorous concept—sticking to actual documentary footage as in shots of a heterosexual couple kissing—achieves a greater sense of outsider’s regret and desire. These are the two most original, ingeniously written films of the past year, yet Davies doesn’t retreat into subculture like Maddin but reworks nostalgia for the universality of its tenderness and comedy.

Toward its conclusion, the documentary evidence of working-class stress inspires indignation, unleashing Davies’ harsh rejection of Catholicism and his disillusionment with “fossil monarchy.” But Davies connects intimate yearnings to his political and existential quandary to demonstrate the importance of movies and music as means of spiritual sustenance. One scene reveals how his repressed sexuality sought the formality and elegance of ballroom dancing. This explains his grave formalism as well as his fuddy-duddy disdain for rock ’n’ roll. The Beatles may have become synonymous with Liverpool but Davies dismisses John, Paul, George and Ringo as “Not so much a musical phenomenon but a firm of provincial solicitors.” Only an artist so passionately devoted to pop music can get away with that perversity. Davies redeems himself by including a Hollies war requiem and with an extraordinary montage where Peggy Lee’s “The Folks Who Live on The Hill” addresses Liverpool’s bitterest home truths.

Throughout his career Davies has referenced T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, and here he quotes it directly (“In my end is my beginning”). There’s been nothing this ravishingly highbrow since the compendium of literary quotes in Godard’s Nouvelle Vague. Yet it’s most effective when juxtaposed with the power of popular music and movies. Of Time and The City should inspire moviegoers to pursue full recognition of their cultural experience. Davies doesn’t detach art from life; he knows it’s the key to what makes us citizens and humans.
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Of Time and The City
Directed by Terence Davies
Running Time: 72 min.