The Dark Of The Matinee #1. 5 favorites.

We were talking with a good friend the other night about movies and it got us remembering some favorites of the art film variety. With tour just ending and the next one still a few weeks away, might be a good time for a movie marathon.

“Badlands” by Terrence Malick.
It’s total genius. The soundtrack, the natural light. Genius. And so simple a story, done 100 times before and since but somehow, never even as close.

the films of Claire Denis
Claire Denis is one of the best living directors. Her eye is amazing and the different types of stories she tells really wide. Actually, there is something in the languid pacing of her films that reminds me of Terrence Malick. They’re subtle and rich in texture while still managing to sometimes get into some really sensational subjects.

“Satantango” by Belá Tarr
Okay. it’s long. Really long. Really, really, really long. And I wouldn’t watch it at home because It would just be too much and slow and everything else would be far too distracting, but if you get a chance to see the Tarkovsky-esque 7.5 hour movie projected and disappear into the black and white world for a day, it’s well worth it. It’s more like looking at paintings than watching a movie. Long shots of people walking in the rain and slowly losing their minds in an impossibly bleak Hungarian landscape following the collapse of their collective farm at the end of soviet rule. So, yeah, if you like the art films, and the length isn’t too terrifying, look for it playing at museum or something somewhere.

“Dead Man” by Jim Jarmusch
Jim Jarmusch is obviously a hero of the underground and someone who just seems like he’d make a fantastic dinner guest. All his movies offer complex examinations of culture clashes but Dead Man always seemed a totally different beast. You can play Pynchon like games of spot the Blake reference and the singularity of narrative makes it feel more novelistic than his other films. One of my favorite things about it is the way it inverts the tradition of the Western by replacing the panoramic with tight and highly contrasted close-ups. In a sense, it looks more like contemporary portraits of the old west by photographers like Edward Curtis than it does a ‘Western’.

“Spirit Of The Beehive” by Victor Erice
One of our favorite beginnings to a film with children running through town shouting, “the movies are coming, the movies are coming” as a mobile projection van arrives to screen Frankenstein. This spanish film from the 70′s is all atmosphere and although very realistic still feels like a dream. It’s all about Anna Torrent. The movie follows the 6 year old actress as she tries to make sense of the world around her following the Spanish civil war. The scene when the two sisters whisper back and forth about Frankenstein… oh brother, it kills me.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 30th, 2010 at 06:15. It is filed under Dark Of The Matinee, Show & Tell. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.