S&S 100 Films HTF Forum Challenge (1 Viewer)

[Lew Crippen]

Guys, is it too late (by about two or so years to join in? I took a look at the big list and thought that I’d see how many I’d seen in 2002. I gave my self no credit for ones that I’d seen when they first came out (e.g. Last Year at Marienbad) and then never seen again, or for films such as Dr. Strangelove that I know very well, and have seen recently, just not this year.

My total is a surprisingly small 52.

I removed the line that had both Godfathers (as they were already separate entries) and kept the three color trilogy as a single item (makes no difference, as I’ve not seen any this year).

 

[teapot2001]

Lew, the goal of this challenge is to have seen 100 movies on the 1992 list by December 31, 2002. I'll be starting a new thread for the 2002 list at the beginning of January, so you might as well join that.

~T

 

[Doug D]

d'oh! Well, I lose this challenge: I'm at 75, but there's no way I'm seeing 25 more of these between now and 12/31. Maybe I'll just start working on the 2002 list now and save myself some trouble ...

 

[teapot2001]

The new thread will be up in a week or two.

~T

 

[Jun-Dai Bates]

By the way, Pascal. We are fortunate in that Black God, White Devil happens to be one of Francis Ford's favorite films. Hopefully Zoetrope will get this released on dvd for us someday (maybe through Fantoma). It played at the San Francisco Int'l Film Festival about 5 years ago. Very interesting film (lucky me got to see it at the Castro).

As for Imitation of Life, I'm sad that people here don't seem to like it much. I consider it Sirk's greatest masterpiece. It probably helped that I saw it at the Castro, where people applauded the costume designer credit, and laughed at every histrionic moment, and wept as well (when the curtain closed and the lights came up, there were no less than 10 gentlemen weeping in the audience).

Imitation of Life doesn't quite have the visual flair of Written on the Wind, but it isn't far behind. Sirk's visual style--particularly his sweeping style and his use of color--is as sharp has his pacing and the performances that he gets out of his actors. No director (that I've seen) has ever walked so thin a line between camp, melodrama, and self-parody on the one side and real heartfelt drama on the other, and no film of his (that I've seen) walks it so much as this one.

Perhaps the film itself is somehow conscious of this dualism in Sirk's style, because the storyline itself is split in two: a campy, over-the-top emotional rollercoaster story about an actress that has to choose between her career and her daughter, and a genuine tragedy about a mother whose daughter would rather deny her than accept her race and the lower-classness that she associated with it. I would venture that no American director would have been capable of relating that second storyline as effectively as Sirk did. When Annie's daughter leaves Annie behind in the street, and tells Annie to pretend that she doesn't know her if they should meet in the street, it is a powerful moment; you want to laugh at the histrionics, but at the same time, if it doesn't move you, then maybe your heart isn't really beating.

Anyhow, much more could be said about the film (and has been said), but I really think that it is a masterpiece a whole level above the technical marvel of Written on the Wind and Sirk's other films. Apparently it was the last and most successful film of his career (are there any other directors that end with their most successful film, after a successful career?)--little wonder, it captures two of the most relevant issues of the time (race relations and inequality, and women with careers) in a film like no other. In fact, I can think of no film that bears much in the way of similarity to Imitation of Life, neither in Sirk's career nor in all the films I've seen.

 

[Jun-Dai Bates]

Also, just for the record, I made it to 65 films, 35 short of 100. Although 2 of those, Andrei Roublev and Sunset Boulevard, I watched after the New Year. I look forward to the next list. Hopefully I will have watched all the films before 2012 with or without the list to guide me.

 

[Pascal A]

I actually got to see Black God, White Devil during Christmas vacation, but was really too tired to watch any film, so by the time the revolutionary character (the white devil allusion) came along, I was already zoning out. My first impressions of it though is that it's very folkloric and surreal. I'll definitely give it another shot as part of Thi's 2002 S&S Challenge.

 

[teapot2001]

Give me about another week. I'm having problems with the format of the tables.
~T

 

[Dome Vongvises]

Just got back on Netflix. Will be checking out the Apu trilogy first thing.

 

[Brook K]

You're in the wrong thread Dome. This is the Challenge based on the 1992 list. The 2002 list thread is around here somewhere though I've seen around 10 S&S movies since my last post in it.
It's a trip reading some of my old posts. Like the one where I didn't like Imitation of Life or preferred Ossessione to La Terra Trema.

 

[Dome Vongvises]

Whoops!!!

 

[give-me-theater]

I made a list based on the poll. It lists the films with at least two votes from the critics and two votes from the directors. It is the ultimate list, I think. No randomness with just ONE critic or ONE director.
Intolerance (D. W. Griffith, 1916)
Greed (Erich von Stroheim, 1924)
The Gold Rush (Charlie Chaplin, 1925)
The Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)
The General (Clyde Bruckman and Buster Keaton, 1926)
Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927)
Napoléon (Abel Gance, 1927)
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (F. W. Murnau, 1927)
The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928)
Earth (Alexander Dovzhenko, 1930)
L'Age d'Or (Luis Buñuel, 1930)
City Lights (Charlie Chaplin, 1931)
King Kong (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933)
Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, 1933)
L'Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934)
Modern Times (Charlie Chaplin, 1936)
Grand Illusion (Jean Renoir, 1937)
The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939)
The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939)
Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939)
His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940)
Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942)
Ivan the Terrible, Part I (Sergei Eisenstein, 1944)
Children of Paradise (Marcel Carné, 1945)
Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945)
Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945)
Beauty and the Beast (Jean Cocteau, 1946)
My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946)
A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1946)
Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1948)
The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949)
Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950)
Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)
All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950)
Los Olvidados (Luis Buñuel, 1950)
Umberto D. (Vittorio De Sica, 1952)
Singin' in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1952)
Ikiru (Akira Kurosawa, 1952)
Ugetsu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953)
Él (Luis Buñuel, 1953)
Tokyo Story (Yasujirō Ozu, 1953)
Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)
On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954)
Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954)
Journey to Italy (Roberto Rossellini, 1954)
Ordet (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1955)
Floating Clouds (Mikio Naruse, 1955)
The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955)
Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray, 1955)
The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)
A Man Escaped (Robert Bresson, 1956)
The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)
Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, 1957)
Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)
Ivan the Terrible, Part II (Sergei Eisenstein, 1958)
Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958)
Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959)
Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959)
The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, 1959)
North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959)
Pickpocket (Robert Bresson, 1959)
La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960)
Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960)
L'Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960)
The Apartment (Billy Wilder, 1960)
Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
Viridiana (Luis Buñuel, 1961)
Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961)
Jules and Jim (François Truffaut, 1962)
Eclipse (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962)
Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962)
To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan, 1962)
8½ (Federico Fellini, 1963)
The Leopard (Luchino Visconti, 1963)
Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963)
Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1964)
Chimes at Midnight (Orson Welles, 1965)
Au Hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966)
The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)
Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)
Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966)
2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968)
The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969)
Satyricon (Federico Fellini, 1969)
The Conformist (Bernando Bertolucci, 1970)
A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971)
McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971)
The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)
Amarcord (Federico Fellini, 1973)
Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974)
The Godfather Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
The Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975)
Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975)
Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)
Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)
Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980)
Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)
Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Bergman, 1982)
L'Argent (Robert Bresson, 1983)
The Time to Live and the Time to Die (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Lao Jia-Hua, Yang Lai-Yin and Xu Xiao-Ming, 1986)
Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986)
A City of Sadness (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 1989)
The Decalogue (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1989)
Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990)
Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)