An aside, or: canon formation

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For the sake of posterity, my list for the Sight & Sound poll (republished without errors):   

À nos amours (Maurice Pialat, 1983)
Dalla nube alla resistenza (Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, 1979)
Hours for Jerome I & II (Nathaniel Dorsky, 1980-82)
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975)
Kodomo no shiki (Hiroshi Shimizu, 1939)
La région centrale (Michael Snow, 1971)
Sátántangó (Béla Tarr, 1994)
Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (Wang Bing, 2003)
Toni (Jean Renoir, 1935)
La vallée close (Jean-Claude Rousseau, 1995)

It never occurred to me to worry about what the greatest films ever might be, so I picked a few that I like. As others have pointed out about the overall poll, it's nice to see Jeanne Dielman and Sátántangó entering the canon next to film studies fixtures such as Metropolis and Psycho, but the measure by which Vertigo is to be considered a more important film than, say, Hours for Jerome is still somewhat unfathomable to me. The filmmakers' lists have now been posted too (featuring some LS favourites: Keiller, Apichatpong, Raya M, Allan Sekula, and so on), as has this very good piece on Ozu by Thom Andersen.

Realism(s) #20

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Images from Sharon Lockhart's installation Anna Schwinger: Installation of Artifacts from Repolust Cave, Archaeology Museum, Schloss Eggenberg, Graz 2011 (2011). Can't find much about this work online, but it appears to be a continuation of the choreography of work and gesture in Lockhart's excellent Double Tide (2009), projected horizontally onto a table. Also just noticed, and worth reading: a 2009 conversation between Lockhart and James Benning, mostly about the Lunch Break project.

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I've been finding Blogger's incremental changes to formatting and its new interface exasperating, which depletes inspiration for putting things up here. So, some recent-ish articles of interest that I've been meaning to excerpt or link to: Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations [full pdf]; Chantal Akerman: The Pajama Interview; A Morals of Perception; What is the Rational Response? (h/t Patrick Keiller); Antigone & LONDON; Mysterious Object from Thailand; The Exigencies of Mystery; The After-Image & Forest Roads; an interview with Ben Rivers; The Politics of Getting a Life; US 80s-90s; Against Community; Owen Hatherley talks about his new book, which I enjoyed; Sicinski on TDKR; and, last and not least, R.I.P. Stephen Dwoskin & Chris Marker.

History Lesson(s) #11

decorative panel - Odilon Redon, 1902, distemper & glue on canvas

Illuminations #13

A Story of Floating Weeds - Yasujiro Ozu, 1934, 35mm

Illuminations #12

Untitled (Northern series) - Daido Moriyama, 1978

Illuminations #11

C.F.Plateaux-no.9 - Tatsuo Miyajima, 2007, LED/electric wire/IC

An aside, or: a note on cinephilia #2

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We must believe in the body, but as in the germ of life, the seed which splits open the paving-stones, which has been preserved and lives on in the holy shroud or the mummy's bandages, and which bears witness to life, in the world as it is. We need an ethic or faith, which makes fools laugh: it is not a need to believe in something else, but a need to believe in this world, of which fools are a part.

--Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Continuum, 2005), p.167.

At sea #10

Seascape with Distant Coast - JMW Turner, c. 1840 (unfinished), oil on canvas