The 20 Best Films of 2011 (Part One)

Part One of Hydra Magazine's 20 Best Films of 2011.

— By | December 27, 2011

2011 was a fertile year for festival films, especially for well-established and world-renowned auteurs, a few of whom happened to produce some of their most vital work. Some interesting parallels arose: ruminations on the origin(s) of life contrasted with visions of an apocalyptic nature. The end of the world turned out to be an occasion to reflect back on its beginning. Other films were almost wholly involved in the different valences of the surface, either as an apparition of speed and tactility, or as an asylum from the immanent and consternating depths of the past. As usual, there are a number of films that won’t appear on our list simply because they were unavailable or were not released in time. But we are confident that we have selected among the very best; in fact, there were so many films that we loved, we had to expand the list to 20 entries (from last year’s 10). So, without further ado, here is the first part of Hydra Magazine’s Top 20 Best Films of 2011 (for Part Two, click here):

 

20. 13 Assassins — dir. Takashi Miike (Japan)
In a summer made dreadful by a horde of subpar actioners and fatuous spectacles, Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins was something of a godsend. Miike has pulled off nothing less than an old school classic, one that proudly dares to insert itself in the worn-out samurai genre. Though 13 Assassins is a remake of a 1963 film of the same name (which was itself yet another exercise in jidaigeki themes that were in heavy circulation during the period), the inevitable comparisons to Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai are unavoidable. But Miike’s film stands separately, in homage to its obvious paternity, and its deference is shown, ironically, in the unfettered outbursts of ultra-violence that so distinctly mark a Miike film. A born iconoclast, Miike sticks to what he knows: brutality, ultra-violence, human cruelty. Cartoonish cruelty, indeed, the kind of cruelty that would characterize a comic book villain at his most parodic. The plot line is cold, simplistic, reducible to black-and-white binaries: something akin to the logic of a 12-year-old boy playing with his action figurines and constructing a highly ornate battle sequence in which the highest possible body count piles up.

Reduced to its fundamental parts (a preternaturally sadistic prince abuses and terrorizes his subjects at his every whim, so a group of 13 samurai are secretly gathered in a conspiracy to kill/stop him at any cost), the plot goes no farther than “good guys go after the bad guy” — but this is precisely the reason why 13 Assassins works so well: it wastes no time to get to the meat of the action, of which the centerpiece is the 40+ minute final battle scene in which the 13 samurai take on an army of 130 soldiers. Part of the pleasure of the film is in discovering how the 13 manage to level their odds: where Seven Samurai quite famously developed engaging storylines by involving the villagers in the operation of the makeshift battle fortress they construct alongside their samurai protectors, Miike and his screenwriters, perhaps sensing their inability to recreate such a highly inimitable plot structure, choose to forgo too much exposition and dive right into the visual surprise of trick-shot battle tactics (but this is probably more due to the inherent design of Kaneo Ikegami’s original screenplay). A young boy’s fever dream undoubtedly, but one whose execution puts to shame the current stock of action and superhero films that are being made with three times the budget in Hollywood now (that said, there was probably no better pure summer action film than this one in 2011).

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19. The Strange Case of Angelica – dir. Manoel de Oliveira (Portugal)
Manoel de Oliveira, as has been abundantly remarked upon, is still making films at the tender age of 103. Not only has he managed to continue working steadily since directing his first film in 1927, he has been producing films at a rapid pace. The Strange Case of Angelica, following quickly on the heels of its companion piece, Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl (2009), only confirms the suspicion that Oliveira won’t be quitting anytime soon. Angelica is filled with a literary allusiveness that saturates its many frames and interiors. Beginning with a quotation from Antero de Quental and propelled by the verse of José Régio, the film covers a wide expanse of literary-historical landscape: it feels both antique and contemporary at the same time, like a 19th century short story furnished with the techno-aesthetic novelties of the early 20th. Angelica centers itself around the reanimating wonders of photographic art, but its fable concerns itself with the encroachment of the cinematic on a chimerical world divided into a series of rooms, frames, and landscapes. Interiors in Oliveira’s film seem to denote an artificiality made resplendent only through controlled light and photography, balanced on the other hand by the naturalistic landscapes of plein air scenery (most notably in several passages when the photographer, a young man named Issac [played by Ricardo Trepa], shoots pictures of day laborers singing and working on a hillside farm). If some feel that the film’s peculiar pacing carries an artificial dryness bordering on the unreal and the corny, I would answer that its strangeness relies precisely on this dryness and artificiality which Oliveira meticulously builds up frame by frame — Angelica‘s atmosphere of muted washed-out colors, anachronistic knick-knacks, and old portraiture only makes necessary the odd Méliès-style special effects that suddenly, but tastefully, lift the two dream lovers into the ether of early cinema.
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18. Cave of Forgotten Dreams – dir. Werner Herzog (Germany/France/USA/UK/Canada)
What still strikes me about Herzog’s film is not so much his stunning use of 3D film techniques for a documentary on our recent discovery of, as far as we know, the earliest works of art created by human beings some 30,000 years ago;  what I’m ultimately still grappling with is rather his skill as an essayist, the ideas he explores throughout the film on the very nature of what it means to be a human being. Perhaps what marks our species off from the Neanderthals, as well as other animal beings and plant life, Herzog ruminates, is our ability to imagine, to invoke the spiritual, to produce symbolic meanings whose sensations evoke why life is worth living for us. Cross out our linguistic capacity, or our brain size, or even our DNA code, although these features of homo sapiens might be necessary for homo spiritualis, the animal guided by the ghost of the world spirit. 

Yet, in a brilliant stroke of Herzogian ambiguities, all these speculations are problematized by the cyclic movement of a deeper and richer penetration into the cave paintings themselves–of ash-drawn deer, tigers, bulls, red human hand prints, and even human-bulls, hybrids–all represented in movement, flux, the ceaseless flow of composition and decomposition within the chaotic pulse of the natural world. Perhaps the difference which marks human beings off from other species consists in our oscillation between our ability to represent fixed, simple identities, and our opposing ability to dissolve ourselves into the tumultuous flow–into the oneness of the natural world in which we live. Herzog expertly demonstrates that the medium of film is precisely the kind of art that can work through these tensions underwriting the vital dance of appearance and disappearance. And he pulls off an extraordinary piece of work in turning his reflections from the origins of human art to the medium in which it finds a horizon, and destination, today, all situated against the shadow of a nuclear facility just down the river from the cave of forgotten dreams. 
– Michael Krimper
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17. Melancholia — dir. Lars von Trier (Denmark/Sweden/France/Germany/Italy)
Apocalypse and story can be a bad mix: personal struggle when viewed against glacial, universal time will always be laughably insignificant. In Melancholia, nothing matters, the characters are annoying, and in the end, everyone dies. Why bother spending the money or effort to watch such a film? And yet Melancholia is moving, memorable, and perhaps the best film yet from Lars von Trier. It isn’t that his philosophies have changed—the extreme nihilistic streak is still very much present—but in giving up, he has managed to insert a note of empathy–or resignation–into the score. That small shift is what makes this film worth watching. The film’s prologue is a gorgeous tribute to Bruegel, Millais, and Wagner, and is worth watching on its own. The film following is divided into two sections, “Justine” and “Claire”, the two sisters played by Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg, respectively. It’s difficult to ignore the intonations of the Marquis de Sade when we hear the name Justine, as it is difficult not to associate the name Claire with light. The sections can as accurately be called “Death” and “Life”. The Justine section is obvious enough with its absurd, over-the-top, dysfunctional wedding. Humanity so far has only succeeded in doing two things well: performing empty rituals and being horrendously cruel to one another. The world in this section is certainly very much worth destroying.

In contrast, the Claire section is impressively subtle and affective. Gainsbourg does an excellent job bringing real pathos to her performance. Though we are meant to be critical of Claire, who wants only to sit on the terrace with a nice glass of wine and what’s left of her family—(and they will have a little Beethoven playing in the background as they go!)—her sincerity, as empty as it is, is itself moving. As is the care she takes in selecting the perfect piece of chocolate for Justine, the person least likely to care, and the arrangement of the flowers by her bedside, and her futile attempts to take her young son somewhere, anywhere, as the world ends. She loads him into the golf cart and drives—fast—towards what? It doesn’t matter, but she needs to feel as if there’s a point to the driving. As she scurries around like an insect about to drown in a deluge, Justine looks on with digust. Now it is Justine who is the villain, not the planet careening through space to destroy our own. And through this, the ending offers a splinter of comfort. Justine, the ultimate nihilist, nevertheless offers something that is the closest thing to a revaluation of ritual that we will get out of von Trier. We will go on building our magic caves.

– Anelise Chen

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16. Miss Bala – dir. Gerardo Naranjo (Mexico)
In his brief essay “Society of Control” Gilles Deleuze takes off on a Foucauldian platform and describes the control mechanisms that are in the process of replacing the older “disciplinary societies” of regulation; now instead of “vast enclosures of space” that govern and restrict the autonomy of each individual through the passage of assorted laws and institutions, a system of “limitless postponements” regulates the masses by converting them into transportable banks of information and monetary flow: “The old monetary mole is the animal of the space of enclosure, but the serpent is that of the societies of control. We have passed from one animal to the other, from the mole to the serpent, in the system under which we live, but also in our manner of living and in our relations with others. The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network. Everywhere surfing has already replaced the older sports.” Gerardo Naranjo’s Miss Bala manages to produce a semblance of one of Deleuze’s societies of control: the circular and horrific “open enclosure” known as the drug trafficking network of contemporary Mexico. Naranjo may be accused of aestheticizing too much what is fundamentally an ugly, irresolvable cancer in current Mexican society — the film offers the kind of kinetic pleasures usually attained in the fictional realm of the action film, an artificial world whose victims and villains are casuistic irrealities. But Naranjo (arguably) manages to skirt the line of fictional exploitation and nonfictional pathos by focusing on the intoxicating kinetic energy which moves the film deliriously along (Naranjo, in this respect, undoubtedly owes a great deal to Alfonso Cuarón’s work in Children of Men [2006]).

Miss Bala sends up a scathing critique not merely of the political corruption that has infiltrated both sides of the US/Mexico border zone, but most importantly of the patriarchal control mechanisms that force the heroine (an aspiring beauty queen who quite unfortunately gets caught up within the vicious power flow of the meta-structures that support and protect Mexico’s insatiable drug cartels) to move against her will from one space of enclosure to another. Her tormentor, the cartel man-of-all-trades Lino Valdez (played with icy relish by Noe Hernandez), is Deleuze’s monetary serpent, an indefatigable, “undulatory” anti-hero kept in power by a nominal yet complicit system of law. The irony of course is that the heroine, Laura Guerrero (played by Stephanie Sigman), gets to have what she most desires: she is crowned a beauty queen exactly because she has willingly bought into the social control mechanisms that restrict and reduce women down to trophies to be won. It is by permeating every level of social enclosure, especially within the realm of aesthetic valuation, that “corruption…gains a new power.”

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15. Drive — dir. Nicolas Winding Refn (USA)
Not much prepares you for the sudden eruption of violence in Drive. And we’re not talking just any violence, but the enormous explosion of heads powered by heavy ass shotguns–blood splattered on windows, walls, clothes, and starry-eyed faces–all the destructive terror handled by shady characters looming outside of a stale Los Angeles suburban motel. Probably somewhere deep in the valley. If you witnessed this marvelously horrific twist of events in a theater like mine, then some audience shudders corresponded to the nihil unbounded event; others laughed with the abrupt realization that–oh shit–the fun was about to begin.

Before the violent turning point, the anonymous “driver” or “kid” played brilliantly by Ryan Gosling suffers through at least half an hour of emotional awakening, stirred from the solipsistic confines of his shiny, enclosed vehicle, to the outwards overflowing of love for his too cute neighbor, Irene (Carey Mulligan), and his growing affection for her young son. I’ve already followed this propulsive narrative in terms of the stunningly beautiful synth-pop soundtrack, which sonically provokes  the cosmic expansion of the driver’s emotional sphere from an enclosed world of solipsism, but something is left to be said of director Nicolas Winding Refn’s play with themes of the human and machine, mechanical labor and violence, love and war. After all, the driver is a mechanic by day, a stunt devil during the fringes of his workday, and an amazingly expert get-away driver mercenary in the dark hours of the neon-lit night. His dawning love interest doesn’t so much pull him away from mechanical labor as transform his nuanced precision into even more incredible feats, expressed in what could count as heroic or even superhuman acts of violence, on the level of wars waged in epic romance, against those who threaten what’s gathered into his emotional sphere or resonance. But back to the soundtrack, you can now listen to two hours worth of Johnny Jewel’s unused tunes for an “imaginary film.”

– Michael Krimper
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14. Certified Copy — dir. Abbas Kiarostami (Iran/Italy/France)
Certified Copy blossoms like an inside joke whose effect on the viewer is to make her smile out of pleasure rather than frown in puzzlement. It also feels like the kind of film that Abbas Kiarostami had always wanted to make, not merely out of the desire to theorize what Europe, and what the West as a whole, had secretly meant to him, but also what it would be like to work across various languages, though always within the cosmopolitan, infinite language of translation. A film as much about copies and originals as it is about the risks and pleasures of living in a constant state of translation. Juliette Binoche delivers in all respects another portrait of Goethe’s version of the “Eternal Feminine”: “All of the transient, / Is parable, only: / The insufficient, / Here, grows into reality: / The indescribable, / Here, is done: / Woman, eternal, beckons us on” (final lines of Goethe’s Faust, Part II). But Kiarostami is no immature idealist (and neither, of course, was Goethe), and the exuberance of Binoche (her character, but herself too) is as much defined by the determined circumstances of her francophone culture as she is by the accidental/fateful circumstances of her sudden relationship to the art professor James Miller (played gamely by William Shimmel). Their spontaneous love begins in a game of charades, but it finishes in the conversion of a fabricated past into a realism that can no longer be regarded as counterfeit; uniting them together, of course, is Tuscany, both as a consubstantial repository of a formidable history of art and as the locus in which the two pretend lovers find grooves to cling to and a fresh soil to grow from.

Kiarostami’s skill in writing a role for Binoche so purely in her own voice demonstrates something of the pan-universality of his vision. The final image of the art professor gazing in disbelief at himself in the mirror, as he contemplates the strange and fortuitous authenticity which his situation has undertaken (is this really happening? why am I here?), while church bells play in a Tuscan background colored by the warm light of sunset, punctuates the essential Kiarostami technique of building up a film from the retrospective angle of its ending: one feels that the ending had been written first, before the scenario shaped itself into a discourse on the nature of the “copy”, authentic and inauthentic. One reviewer has astutely observed that Kiarostami’s thesis that European culture is itself a simulation, a copy, of the Antique, as opposed to being anything “original” or unique, testifies to the director’s outsider privilege of being an Iranian: Kiarostami’s insight into European society enjoys a perspective equal to that of a dispassionate man viewing a mysterious young woman suddenly vanish out of sight as she walks into a grove of olive trees spread out in a valley below.

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13. Le quattro volte — dir. Michelangelo Frammartino (Italy/Germany/Switzerland)
In the region of Calabria, Italy, there is a small township (comune) by the name of Serra San Bruno, famed for its Carthusian monastery and for an old form of charcoal production that uses the scarazzo, a half-dome built of heavy wood in which logs are burned and smoked slowly over a long period. Le quattro volte is not about charcoal per se but it is, in a deeply metaphoric sense, about the processes of carbonization that occur on the micro level of observation. As the title indicates, there are four different temporalities in the film, four processes or seasonal turns, that occur on a simultaneous plane: an old goatherder every night consumes church ash, in the belief that it will guard him from disease and death. A young kid is born to his flock (by this time the goatherder had died in his bed, having lost the packet of church ash and along with it the belief that it would preserve his health), and the kid shortly after becomes accidentally lost in the fields, left to perish (one is led to imagine) under the eaves of a large stately tree. The tree is afterwards cut down and made into the centerpiece of a seasonal festival in Serra San Bruno; when the festival ends, the ceremonial tree is brought down and cut up into logs that will soon become charcoal under the vigilant eyes and hands of the carbonai di Calabria. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust” would be, quite glibbly, the central message of Michelangelo Frammartino’s small and quiet fable, but the cyclical nature of his meditation on carbonization — the reduction of solid organic matter into the finer element of ash — also enjoins us to consider the hidden spectacles at play in the life of organisms. Le quattro volte, it could be said, acts as a Buddhist parable (an old goatherder, a young kid goat, a tall tree, and charcoal all enjoy an analogic relationship to the slow burn of time), but I am principally reminded of a drawn-out (and admittedly less artful) version of Artavazd Peleshian’s great epic short, The Seasons (1975). In both works, it is Time which features as the central protagonist, and its multitude of eyes gaze back at us through the different seasons of the flesh.
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12. Le Havre — dir. Aki Kaurismaki (Finland/France/Germany)
Aki Kaurismaki’s latest film reminds me a little of Manoel de Oliveira’s The Strange Case of Angelica: both seem to take place in a period which is neither the present nor the past but a strange mixture of both. Kaurismaki’s Le Havre might as well be Marcel Carné’s Port of Shadows (1938): it isn’t so much a place as it is a state of mind, a liminal zone that masquerades as an eternal port city in the vast country of cinema; a place where star-crossed romance and tragic endings happen as frequently as random, inexplicable acts of kindness. Some ships from the remote past come in to dock, others from the political present take off toward other, safer latitudes. It is no coincidence that the lead character, Marcel Marx (played by André Wilms), carries the same first name as Carné — Kaurismaki intends for every nuance of his finely crafted work to signal a homage to both Carné the director and to one of his great masterpieces, Le quai des brumes, also set in Le Havre, France. Wilms channels the face of an older, less hardened, but no less resilient Jean Gabin. But instead of relying on pure homage and imitation, Kaurismaki makes the decisive gesture of charging his retro-tale with contemporary problems and political background: the high romantic world inherited from Carné and Jacques Prévert is suddenly introduced to the realism of contemporary issues, in this case, the rights of and rampant discrimination against undocumented African and non-European immigrants living and working in Europe. Kaurismaki is no proselytizer of course, and he condenses his staging to the elements of true poetic-realist dramaturgy: unpretentious style always trumps overstuffed grandstanding. If it hadn’t been obvious before that the Finnish master is the rightful heir of the Carné/Prévert lineage, then Le Havre will put those doubts to rest.
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11. Shame — dir. Steve McQueen (UK)
If we are to look back at Steve McQueen’s past work (and speculate freely on his upcoming project), it would appear that the British helmer is deliberately building up a trilogy of the Human Body. His early short Bear (1993) features two naked men (including McQueen himself) grimacing at and sparring with each other; Hunger (2008) reflects on the brutality of Maze prison in Northern Ireland and the withering effects of a hunger strike on the body of IRA member Bobby Sands; Shame (2011), McQueen’s second feature-length work, is a study of the physical and spiritual effects of sexual addiction on the body/mind of Brandon Sullivan (played by McQueen’s trusty lead actor, Michael Fassbender). On the surface, Shame plays out like a cautionary tale about the cardinal sin of lust; but as it has been pointed out elsewhere, Shame is less a moral tale about sexual addiction than an aesthetic exercise in exploring how space and isolation affect and pervert the human body when it is systematically removed from (meaningful, substantial) human contact. Space is everywhere in Shame: Brandon is often navigating different levels of enclosure, and his only way out of the geometrical prison of McQueen’s sleek, lurid New York City is often through sexual (mis)adventure: simulated human contact, especially of the heightened sexual kind, becomes a quasi-spiritual necessity for a man who has learned to over-depend on screen culture (computer screens, but also high-rise window screens, apartment windows, office spaces, etc.).

Much like Kubrick’s masterful Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Shame has been grossly misunderstood: surface is everything because depth is lacking (or has become intolerable, fearsome), and urban space remains a constricted and evasive subjectivity for a man who has grown used to a self-imposed prison (a striking parallel to Hunger is notable here). Both films, Kubrick’s and McQueen’s, take place largely at night, in a New York City that seems to be lit from within like a permanent red light district, and both share the same thematic qualities: sexual longing often ties into a conflicted (and Freudian) past, one which may never be revealed except through a descent into the infernal machine of memory. Part of Shame’s highly skilled orchestration (particularly in handling such a difficult, unglamorous subject) lies in how McQueen circumvents the paucity of his scenario through a rapturous attention to discrete angles and hypertextured details. Things and faces are always going out of focus because faces have become things, and things have attained faces, orifices, vocal cords.

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Go to PART TWO

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