December is when all the best of the year lists come out. I particularly look forward to Film Comment’s list considering they poll a number of film critics so it’s more a consensus opinion than one man’s looney tune tastes. Then comes award season, where studios unveil their Oscar hopefuls and countless statues are handed out that most people don’t give a shit about, leading up to that big overblown and instantly debated Academy ceremony, which I’ll certainly have my own annual tradition of predicting the winners then complaining about the winners in that order.
Another tradition that I mentioned here last year is They Shoot Pictures Don’t They and their top 1000 film list. Other than a December update and a few random and sporadic ones earlier, they’ve pretty much unveiled a new list every January. Seeing how this was the year with the fewest new lists discovered, there was also the smallest number of new entries on the list.
Perhaps the biggest reason for this is the fact that a monumental change in the film cannon is set to take place in 2012. The once a decade Sight and Sound poll of the greatest films of all time is going to be updated this year. This top ten list has been pretty much the definitive source as to the greatest films of all time pretty much since it’s first incarnation in 1952. I’m very curious to see what changes if any are made to the list and will be blogging about it in the future. Since TSPDT bases a large portion of their list on the individual Sight and Sound polls, I expect the top 1000 to look quite different come 2013.
As was the case last year however there were two films I needed to add to the top of my to watch pile after the most recent update. Once again Stan Brakhage’s The Art of Vision continued it’s downward trajectory falling down to 871 (819 the year before, 800 the year before that). The shortened version, which is far better known is Dog Star Man which was near the bottom of this list. The 248 minute version has remained elusive and was not included in two separate Brakhage retrospectives at Doc Films or on either Criterion Collection DVD set. In other words, fuck that movie it’s impossible to find.
I still cross my fingers that it’ll drop off the list entirely so I can stop worrying about it, but on to the new additions that I had to see. First up was Ken Jacobs Star Spangled to Death. Like the Brakhage film this is damn hard/impossible to find and is exceptionally long. I first heard of it in the Village Voice Film Guide a few years ago and have been looking for it ever since. Asking my more offbeat sources about it, keeping my eyes and ears peeled for special screenings, or just praying for a DVD release has led to nothing since. I was able to find the first three parts of it on Google Videos, but part three was missing the sound for the second half so well as of now I’d say I can’t quite cross this off my list. You could make the argument I got the basic gist of the epic down, but that’s like saying I’ve seen Art of Vision because I’ve seen Dog Star Man, it’s just not the same.
The other film added to the list was also well over the three hour mark, but at least it’s available and it reminds me of one of the films I had to watch last year, Peter Watkin’s film Edvard Munch. That’s right that great director who never gets mentioned had yet another new entry this year. After discovering him (through the same VV film guide as the Jacobs film) I decided to proceed through his filmography slowly. This meant well I hadn’t seen Munch or last year’s new entry La Commune (Paris 1871) before being included on the list. Keep in mind that when this list gets updated I pretty much drop everything and make it my top priority to see everything I can. So I guess one Peter Watkins film a year is a slow enough pace to watch his films, or is it?
Edvard Munch was a painter in case you didn’t know, and he painted The Scream, you’ve all seen it you would recognize it instantly and that’s the biggest thing you need to know about him. It falls into one of two categories of Watkins films. On the one hand are documentaries that are more like re-enactments. He doesn’t make biopics in any traditional sense, but shoots them like a first person cinema verite documentary, but using actors and something of a structured script. He’s known for allowing his mostly non-professional actors to improvise a great deal of their dialogue to keep the documentary feel and this fits very well into that. The Battle of Culloden and La Commune also fit into this category of re-enacted docudrama.
His second category is fictionalized docudrama. This might sound similar and it is because stylistically you can’t tell the difference. Where the two styles differ is that half of his films are telling of a historical event or person, whereas the other half are completely made up stories filmed like a documentary. War Game was his earliest and possibly best known of these, although Punishment Park (the first film of his I saw) fits into this category very well. After watching Edvard Munch I decided I might as well watch another Watkins film that I had lying around, which was his follow up, 1977’s Evening Land. It’s fitting because this fits into the second category making today’s Watkins sampling an even split.
Like some of his films a good deal of time, and sometimes even some research on your own part are required to find out just whether or not the film is a work of pure fiction. I was damn near convinced Punishment Park was a real documentary the first time I watched it, after all how as I to know that was Watkins signature trademark? Evening Land is like all of his films I’ve seen damn good. Is it as good as some of his others, perhaps not but you’re comparing great films to masterpieces here. The more of his work I see the more I’m convinced he’s one of the greatest directors of all time, and consequently the most ignored historically.
I’m going to attempt to explain why someone so damn amazing can be so little discussed. Peter Watkins films suffer from two standpoints. One, they are hard to categorize. Due to the documentary nature of his films he is often lumped into the same category as documentary filmmakers (the unwanted nerdy step children of fiction filmmakers). Even the greatest documentary filmmakers have a hard time being mentioned in the same sentence as directors like Ford, Hitchcock, Hawks, Kazan, or Welles. Sometimes they only get mentioned if that particular great director made some documentaries, like Resnais, Godard, Herzog, or Scorsese, but even then those documentaries are largely left out of the discussion of their major work.
On the flip side documentary filmmakers exclude Watkins because he isn’t a real documentary director. Sure he employs the technique, but he clearly stages works of fiction, and who has the audacity to film a documentary about a Norwegian painter hiring actors and staging it with first person interviews representing people who died decades ago? You can imagine the outrage for people who complain that Michael Moore fabricates things in his films.
So you have Watkins neglected by the regular directors and shunned by the documentarians, ok so what the public should still recognize his hard to categorize body of work. Well that’s the thing, the public was unable to see his films for quite a substantial amount of time. The War Game was banned for years, and Edvard Munch’s distribution was suppressed for many years. It wasn’t until the latter half of the 2000’s that his films finally were released on DVD, restored, with bonus features and in many cases available for the first time in any format. What followed was something of a wave of recognition for Watkins, coupled with the US release of La Commune in 2003.
In other words people are still figuring out what an amazing filmmaker Peter Watkins is. There are still a few of his films I haven’t watched yet, and some are definitely on the epic side of things. Resen (The Journey) is 873 minutes and The Freethinker is 276 minutes, so needless to say those will take some time to get through. The good news is however is that Culloden, The War Game, Privilege, Punishment Park, Edvard Munch, La Commune (Paris 1871) are all available on DVD and are exceptionally good films. So for you Netflix users out there, give some consideration to Watkins.
Also for those interested in seeing the TSPDT full list, you can view it here
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