Black God White Devil

I saw Glauber Rocha's film Black God White Devil today. The film looks stunning, with black-and-white, almost solarised, photography. At the start, the camera is hand-held and moving frenetically, but later there are some lovely images of desert landscapes and ruined buildings. It's a very slow film, though, with the ritualised action punctuated by long pauses in which the characters simply stand around staring at each other. Most characters also have a knack for speaking with portentous pauses, which slows things down even more.

Rocha was the most influential director of Brazil's Cinema Novo movement in the 1960s, and this was his first internationally-famous film, but I think the earlier social realist Novo films are more important than the theatricality of Black God White Devil.

The Poseidon Adventure

I saw Ronald Neame's The Poseidon Adventure with Dech last night. This was the film that established the basic conventions of the Disaster genre, i.e. a group of A-list stars in peril. In this case, they're guests on a luxury liner which is capsized by a tidal wave.

I'd seen Shelley Winters in earlier films, especially Lolita, and I was surprised by how much weight she'd put on by 1972 (when The Poseidon Adventure was made). Even more surprising was what she was put through during the film - she appears caked in grime, she has to swim underwater, and she is constantly criticised for her weight. I've read previously that she was a very stroppy actress, so God knows how she was persuaded to do half of the things she does in Poseidon.

The part we liked the most was after Gene Hackman, the lead actor, has climbed the Christmas tree. Everyone was on the floor (actually the roof, as the ship was upside-down), and Hackman realised that if they propped up a large Christmas tree they could climb up it and reach a ledge that led to a potential exit. He convinced a small group to climb up, but most people wouldn't listen to him. He tried one last time to make them see sense, but they still ignored him. So he climbed up the tree himself, and, from the ledge, he paused to look down contemptibly at them. Then there was an explosion, and the scene below him suddenly looked like Sodom and Gomorrah in hell - a writhing mass of burning people. Hackman turned his back on them and went through a door to safety... and then he closed the door behind him!

It's one thing to turn his back on them, but closing the door on them as well seems a bit harsh. Hackman's character is a priest, after all. It's a very funny moment, though, and the film is worth seeing despite most of the acting (apart from Winters and Hackman) being a bit ropey. It also has Leslie Nielsen as a deadpan ship's captain at the start, so you think it's going to be a parody but in fact it isn't (not intentionally, anyway).

The Fifty Greatest Films Of All Time

The current issue of Vanity Fair has a feature listing The Fifty Greatest Films Of All Time. They don't explain who wrote the article, or who chose the fifty films, and the titles are listed alphabetically:

• All About Eve
  
• Amarcord
  
• Annie Hall
  
• Blow-Up
  
• Bonnie & Clyde
  
• Breathless
  
• Bringing Up Baby
  
• Casablanca
  
• Chinatown
  
• Citizen Kane
  
• The Conformist
  
• Die Hard
  
• Dirty Harry
  
• Double Indemnity
  
• Dumbo
  
• The General
  
• The Godfather
  
• The Godfather II
  
• Goldfinger
  
• The Gold Rush
  
• Gone With The Wind
  
• GoodFellas
  
• The Graduate
  
• Grand Illusion
  
• It Happened One Night
  
• It's A Gift
  
• Jaws
  
• Lawrence Of Arabia
  
• Mildred Pierce
  
• National Lampoon's Animal House
  
• North By Northwest
  
• Now Voyager
  
• Old School
  
• Paths Of Glory
  
• Psycho
  
• Red River
  
• Reds
  
• Rome: Open City
  
• The Rules Of The Game
  
• The Seven Samurai
  
• The Seventh Seal
  
• Singin' In The Rain
  
• Some Like It Hot
  
• Stagecoach
  
• Sullivan's Travels
  
• Sunset Blvd
  
• Toy Story
  
• Trouble In Paradise
  
• 2001: A Space Odyssey
  
• The Wild Bunch
  
• The Wizard Of Oz
  
• The Women

Film lists like this can broadly be divided into three types.

Classical Hollywood lists:
Golden Age films like Gone With The Wind and The Wizard Of Oz, selected by nostalgic film critics with rose-tinted glasses.

World cinema lists:
arthouse films like Pather Panchali and The Seven Samurai, which are selected by film directors simply because they always have been.

New Hollywood lists:
American cinema 1970s+, like Star Wars and The Godfather, which appear at the top of lists voted for by the public.

Of these main types, the Vanity Fair one is closest to the "Hollywood" list. It emphasises classic Hollywood films like Casablanca, Stagecoach, and The Wizard Of Oz. It also finds room for Animal House and Die Hard, though, which is almost criminal considering the films it leaves out (Apocalypse Now, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Blue Angel...). There are only eight foreign-language films, which is nowhere near enough.

Citizen Kane, The Rules Of The Game, and Battleship Potemkin are almost obligatory on lists like this - if a 'greatest films of all time' list doesn't include these, it can't really be a credible list. I think 2001: A Space Odyssey should also be obligatory, but then I would say that, wouldn't I?

Howard Hawks, Francis Coppola, Victor Fleming, Billy Wilder, Michael Curtiz, Jean Renoir, Alfred Hitchcock, and Stanley Kubrick are the only directors who appear twice in the list. I think, in addition, Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, and Orson Welles each deserve another entry.

Fritz Lang and Sergei Eisenstein, who deserve at least two entries each, don't appear here at all, because silent cinema is very under-represented. The only silent films included are the comedies The General and The Gold Rush. This is a shame, considering the many experimental silent films available to choose from. I know Vanity Fair is a glamour magazine not an academic journal, but Un Chien Andalou, Metropolis, Cabinet Of Dr Caligari, and Battleship Potemkin are far more important silent films than the two they chose.

There aren't precisely fifty films on this list - they admit that they (inexplicably) included Old School as an extra guilty pleasure, and (like many such lists) they treat The Godfather and The Godfather II as a single film. But even at fifty-three films it's far too short - there are too many masterpieces missing. That also applies to other 'fifty greatest' lists - they have a tendency to go for mainly English-language films with one token French New Wave film, one token Neo-Realism film, etc. Then again, lists of 500 or 1,000 are too long - they always include many films that really don't deserve to be there.

In a list of 1,000 you can't see the wood for the trees, and lists of fifty have too many obvious omissions. I think 100 or 200 is a more reasonable amount, which means the Vanity Fair list should be doubled or quadrupled.

Sight & Sound reply

Last month, I wrote to Sight & Sound about Kubrick's appearances in his own films. This month, Gene Phillips (author of Stanley Kubrick: A Film Odyssey and editor of Stanley Kubrick Interviews) has replied.

Hungappa article

A two-page article in the current issue of Hungappa, the student magazine of Charles Sturt University (Australia), has been compiled from text and images taken from my website. The article (The C Word) is credited to Rachel (no surname given), and includes my URL as a footnote.

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