Tonight's post is two of my favorite top ten lists: one from Catherine Breillat and one from Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte. I love reading about people's favorite things, especially when they involve music or film. I love the way Catherine writes about her choices- so strict, definitive, and she doesn't waste a single letter. Her latest film, Barbe Bleue, is based on the fairytale Bluebeard by Charles Perrault and is scheduled for release sometime this year.
Rodarte's descriptions are of course a lot like their clothing: gothic, romantic, and ethereal with echoes of childhood, femininity, and nature. Their new collection for Target is in stores now.
Catherine Breillat's Top 10 for the 2002 Sight & Sound Poll
1. AI NO CORRIDA
First, because I wouldn't otherwise have been able to make Romance. It made me understand that an image is not pornographic in itself, it's the way we look at it that renders it pornographic. More generally, I'd say that the image doesn't exist in itself, but is deciphered through our emotions. It is the means through which film-makers translate their ideas. This is why I make personal films, because in the end it's my signature on the film, even though others contribute to its making.
2. SAWDUST AND TINSEL
Because it's the first film I saw, and it contains all cinema. The combination of beauty and ugliness is at once fascinating and embarrassing. This ambiguity of opposites provides the poetry of the next three films.
3. BABY DOLL
4. LOST HIGHWAY
5. VERTIGO
6. SALÒ
Because it's essential it exists and it's terrible to watch.
7. L'AVVENTURA
For Antonioni's inexpicable modernity.
8. ORDET
Because even though I saw it 40 years ago, I know I must see it again and that Dreyer is perhaps the greatest.
9. LANCELOT DU LAC
There must be one Bresson.
10. TEN
Perfect Kiarostami, because there's no more image, no more mise en scène, just a camera and intelligence, and pure thought.
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Rodarte's Top 10 for the Criterion Collection
1. BEAUTY AND THE BEAST
Beauty and the Beast serves as a metaphor for the artistic process, exploring the creative through mythology and the arc of the fairy tale. One must travel to dark and mysterious places in order to be saved. Diamond tears, spilled for those brief and elusive moments in life, offer a glimpse of universal clarity. This movie, in its own way, displays a sense of perfection... but it is fleeting, as if seen in a rearview mirror. Ultimately, it is an instruction manual on how to fall in love with another, with oneself, and with true beauty. Cocteau never suggests that all fairy tales end happily ever after, and maybe it is better this way.
2. IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE
Epic. Wagnerian. A love story told in vibrant colors, sound, chinoiseries, wallpaper, and sheets of rain.
3. HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR
Hiroshima Mon Amour has possibly the best opening of any film, ever. History unfolds in a dreamlike narrative; love and passion intersect with violence, beauty, and the foreign. The notion of romantic love is blinding, intoxicating, horrifying, and breathtaking... like the afterglow of a nuclear holocaust.
4. FANNY & ALEXANDER
Bergman’s intended swan song offers amazing insight into the vision of one of the world’s greatest auteurs. Fanny and Alexander is a meditation on art, beauty, religion, and family. Personal history is both truth and fairy tale; it unfolds like a dream or a Swedish summer night where darkness never comes. In the end, Bergman asserts that one’s past has the power to both save and destroy. This idea is profoundly hopeful, and yet terribly devastating.
5. PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK
The first time I watched this film, I felt truly alone and isolated. The juxtaposition of European society and civility with the untamed landscape results in vast and expansive mystery. There is a desperation that comes from watching this film. Of course, this could only end in one way: the cannibalism of Victorian sensibilities.
6. JULES & JIM
I love the moment in French cinema this film captures: the height of the French new wave, when Truffaut honestly believed he could lead a revolution against the bourgeois establishment with a camera and impeccable taste. It is funny, however, that any truly brilliant piece of political artistry eventually becomes seen as established taste. No matter how you view the film, as a feat of aestheticism or a revolution of sorts, it is incredibly stunning and thought provoking.
7. THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS
This is one of our all-time favorite films. The Silence of the Lambs is a truly brilliant and uniquely American horror film. It exists as a fragile spiderweb: at the heart of this web a strange and delicate truth remains trapped, always with the hope of escape... The intimacy that develops and exists between the characters can be destroyed at any moment, and that is the true terror that propels the action. Ultimately, these fragile relationships are used to explore the most perverted aspects of the American dream: excess, greed, and violence.
8. METROPOLITAN
This film makes me glad that we are from Northern California, raised by two dreamers, but secretly jealous that we’re not Rockefellers or Vanderbilts. Sometimes we can’t tell if we love these characters or despise them... you know, sort of like your old stuffed animals.
9. AMARCORD
This movie is almost a complete inversion of Louis Malle’s Au Revoir Les Enfants, where the horrors of Vichy France are made all the more terrible juxtaposed to the innocence and ideal of youth. Here, you have the violence of Mussolini and terror of Fascist Italy completely erased by the antics of a bunch of horny teenagers. This film is visually gorgeous; the scene where the peacock flies in the snow always stays in mind. What makes this film so interesting is the notion that idealized beauty is not enough—visual beauty is grounded by the humanity and sometimes fallibility of the characters.
Eric Rohmer is one of our all-time favorite directors. All of the Six Moral Tales contained in the box set are brilliant. La Collectionneuse is our favorite. It is sparse and dreamlike. Every second moves languidly; every detail revealed with warmth... Time unfolds in this film just like summer.
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