It's hard to look back with any enthusiasm at a decade where the most fondly remembered movies are John Hughes teen comedies. And, truly, the recent all-consuming revivals of the Star Wars parade balloons only serve to remind us that the cinema had been dead for at least six years by 1983. That year's films only made it official.
1983 saw, on the one hand, the release of successful entertainments that proved how thoroughly the seventh art had degenerated into a mechanical purveyor of spectacle for kiddies (Return of the Jedi) and self-congratulation for yuppies (The Big Chill). On the other hand, there were films that mourned the classic cinema (Sans Soleil, Cracking Up), reinvented it in a funhouse mirror (the films of Raoul Ruiz), or acknowledged—with attitudes ranging from wariness to complacency—the arrival of a new regime of image and sound (The King of Comedy, Videodrome, First Name: Carmen, The Right Stuff, Rumble Fish).
From now on, film would feed on film. It would exist in a world apart, defined and driven by technology. Are we even talking about the cinema anymore when we're discussing the shallow, computer-generated images of Return of the Jedi? What links the filmmakers' obsessions with video screens to the mental breakdowns of their main characters in many of 1983's best films?
The two best films of 1983 were farewells. L'Argent is Robert Bresson's last film; and Nostalghia, the second-to-last for Andrei Tarkovsky, feels like it should be his last. Bresson and Tarkovsky sharply criticize the modern world and speak of the need to conserve spiritual values, but all the films represented here point to a crisis in human experience, a revulsion from the horror of daily life, and a crumbling mental landscape.
The top ten
1. L'Argent (Money; Robert Bresson, France)
The last work by the director of Diary of a Country Priest and Pickpocket is even leaner and more streamlined than those uniquely pared-down films. L'Argent presents modern Paris as a blue and grey world so harsh that the souls of all its inhabitants are permanently frozen. Using a Tolstoy story as his source material, Bresson relentlessly shows how a counterfeit 500-franc note completely ruins the life of a young oil-delivery man (Christian Patey). Rejecting every cinematic technique normally associated with innocent-man-driven-to-crime stories, Bresson cruelly-but-calmly pursues his subject: spiritual annihilation through our own complicity in crime, false accusations, and murder. Every frame, every single one, is dedicated to this pursuit, but on the level of normal filmmaking no explanantions are given, not even one. The frightening austerity of L'Argent turns other movies into insults.
2. Nostalghia (Nostalgia; Andrei Tarkovsky, Italy/USSR)
A Russian poet (Oleg Yankovsky) comes to Italy to research the life of a Russian composer who lived in Italy in the 17th century. Something's wrong with our hero, but the film deliberately makes it hard to tell what. His beautiful Italian translator (Domiziana Giordano) gives signs of being ready, given the slightest encouragement, to throw herself at him, but he's more interested in Domenico (Erland Josephson), a reputed madman who kept his wife and son locked up with him in his house for seven years. Tarkovsky invented a cinema directed purely toward thought, memory, and desire. Nostalghia is the director's major humanistic statement, an indictment of contemporary nihilism; it's also a brilliant essay on the futility of travel, a sardonic attack on the optimism of "communication," a fantastically slow and intense visual epic in which the camera constantly makes discoveries of light and texture.
3. The King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese, USA)
Robert De Niro is basement comic Rupert Pupkin, whose dreams of stardom eventually lead him to kidnap his idol, famed comedian and late-night talk-show host Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis). Scorsese's analysis of the culture of celebrity is brilliant, exciting, and hilarious, and deep down it's as chilling and mournful as Taxi Driver. De Niro's pathetic-loser-as-tyrannical-egomaniac is riveting; Lewis's bristling, understated portrayal of a prisoner of fame has an authority and complexity that imply a lifetime of crowd-pleasing isolation. Both of them are frequently upstaged by Sandra Bernhard, making her incredible film debut as De Niro's deranged associate.
4. The Three Crowns of the Sailor (Les trois couronnes du matelot; Raoul Ruiz, France)
The astoundingly prolific Chilean exile Ruiz has invented his own B-movie subculture, a world of voyages, languages, and phantoms. This is the cinema of pure pleasure. The Three Crowns of the Sailor is built around the situation of a sailor recounting his extraordinary adventures to a student. It quickly becomes clear that Ruiz has made the quintessential film about the seduction of voyages and the fascination of stories and signs. Ruiz sees the film frame as a hothouse of ravishing visual ideas: cigarettes, drinking glasses, party decorations, and body parts are stuck into the foregrounds of shots while something happens in the background; colored filters and a range of optical devices break up the flow of images. Ruiz also multiplies literary devices: first-person narration, indirect reporting, stories within stories, repetition, baroque turns of phrase. Behind everything, the same fatal enigmas: money, sex, and the desire for film itself.
5. Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (Furyo; Nagisa Oshima, Japan/UK)
In Java in 1942, a new prisoner (David Bowie) becomes an object of obsession for the commandant (Ryuichi Sakamoto) of a Japanese POW camp. A moving and, despite much painful brutality, hauntingly beautiful and mysterious film. The film explores the interaction between East and West in a subtle, complex way, posing unexpected questions and refusing easy answers. The actors are all excellent, including Tom Conti in the pivotal role of an intellectual British officer and "Beat" Takeshi Kitano as a childlike sergeant; Sakamoto also composed the magnificent synthesizer score.
6. Sans Soleil (Sunless; Chris Marker, France)
This documentary-essay film from the director of La Jetée is about the power of images—how they dissolve, recombine, and lodge themselves in memory. Marker travels from Iceland to Japan, from Guinea-Bissau to San Francisco and outer space, while a woman, a friend of the filmmaker, relates passages from his letters on the soundtrack. Sans Soleil is an attempt to represent the collective dream; a vast slide-show of world-memory; an advertisement for heightened consciousness. It's a refusal of non-personhood through editing. That the film is ultimately hopeful (unlike, for instance, Koyaanisqatsi, another 1983 film with superficial similarities to this one that is actually its opposite) is a startling cause for delight in the modern world.
7. Videodrome (David Cronenberg, Canada)
James Woods plays Max Renn, the questionable head of a scummy cable-access TV station, who will program anything, no matter how violent or sickening, if he thinks it will get a rise out of the public and ensure viewers. He stumbles across a show called "Videodrome," a pirated broadcast that's either from Malayasia or Pittsburgh. In his words, the program "has no plot, no characters, just torture and murder. I think it's the next big thing." This creeped-out film of philosophy and flesh, shot in colors from the inside of a stomach, explores the idea that TV is now a physical part of the brain. At least that's the thesis put forth by Brian O'Blivion (Jack Creley), a McLuhanite academic who exists only on videotape and runs a noble social experiment called The Cathode Ray Mission, a homeless shelter where bums are forced to watch game shows, the surgery channel, and French art films in exchange for food. The excellent ensemble cast, including Deborah Harry as a talk-radio host who specializes in terror-psychology, proves that, in this film at least, Cronenberg is as adept at casting as he is photographing viscera.
8. Cracking Up (Smorgasbord; Jerry Lewis, USA)
A series of sketches, mostly about Jerry trying to commit suicide, linked by his visits to a shrink (Herb Edelman). In one, for instance, he tries to shoot himself in the back of the head while watching TV. Lewis's stylistic convictions aren't abandoned in Cracking Up. The inventive approach to sound, the bold colors and compositions, the plotlessness, the big band score, the maladjusted physicality are all held over from the Sixties, and seem perfectly, beautifully, out of place in a film from the Eighties. New elements emerge, too: more space than usual is given to other performers, like Zane Buzby as a droning waitress; Jerry adopts the Members Only jackets of the middle-aged man of the period; the mental chaos is more painful. Despite the movie's severe psychological difficulty, there's a tortured dignity beneath all the embarrassment. Questions remain, though: with all his newfound success and respectability in the Nineties, why isn't Jerry directing again? And, Zane Buzby, where are you?
9. City of Pirates (La ville des pirates; Raoul Ruiz, France)
If Max Ernst had directed a horror film, it might resemble this. A curious feature of City of Pirates is that it doesn't take place in a city, but rather in deserted old mansions on a barren Portuguese coast. Maybe the city is the film itself: a sprawling circuit of interweaving stories and colliding objects, in which characters lose their individuality and undergo inexplicable upheavals and changes. Image and language totally overrun the world of the film like swarms of insects: we hear news reports, conversations, romantic novels, and automatic writing; the camera goes just about everywhere—at one point there's a shot purportedly taken from inside a man's mouth. The characters have the air of survivors of the end of the world. Obsessed with horror, the film is strangely devoid of violence. Over the course of the film, the plot—something to do with a mysterious boy and his effect on a young woman—progresses from the not-quite-graspable to the nonexistent. The film is about the slow dissolution by which this happens and how the viewer gives up to it.
10. First Name: Carmen (Prénom Carmen; Jean-Luc Godard, France)
Jean-Luc Godard is. . . Cracking Up! In First Name: Carmen, loosely based on the Mérimée novel that inspired the opera, Godard plays a twisted version of himself, a director ensconced in a sanitarium. He's had a breakdown after being "kicked out of the movie business." When asked by his beautiful niece Carmen (Maruschka Detmers) if he'll go back to making movies, he answers, "We should close our eyes, not open them." She then enlists his services in an armed robbery scheme that involves pretending to shoot a movie he's going to direct. Godard's later pictures are all films within films, works of despair in which his investigations of female sexuality are almost too much to take. A huge feeling of loss and failure permeates everything: the obsessive shots of beaches and water, the aphorisms Godard mutters, the musicians hired to play Beethoven's late string quartets at the robbery.
Honorable mention
1. Pauline at the Beach (Pauline à la plage; Eric Rohmer, France)
A slight-but-swift Rohmer film about how, from the perspective of a teenage girl, adult relationships just seem like a tremendous pain. Pauline (Amanda Langlet) arrives at a beach house with her grown-up cousin Marion (Arielle Dombasle), and soon they're swept into complicated entanglements defined by misunderstandings, dubious morality, and hurt feelings. The film presents summer flings as quick and confusing, and phony because they won't treat love with thoughtfulness or respect. People in Rohmer films always seem at their best cooped up in the city during the other three seasons. That sense of being at a loss during those times in the summer set aside for vacation, which Rohmer has depicted with paradoxical buoyancy and rigor whenever he's turned his eye to them, is examined and dispensed with here like in a good short story.
2. A nos amours (To Our Loves; Maurice Pialat, France)
Fifteen-year-old Suzanne's home life turns into a psychodrama after she, her mother, and her older brother are abandoned by her father; meanwhile, she goes through a series of relationships with young men, dimly aware that she's not finding what she's looking for. Much of the interest of the film comes from our not knowing whether its gradual darkening of tone is due to some internal dynamic of the characters' relationships, or to the screenplay's strategy of progressively showing them in different aspects. Thanks mainly to the buoyancy of Sandrine Bonnaire as Suzanne, and to the weight the film gives her relationship with her father (played by director Pialat), To Our Loves never becomes downbeat even when it's at its most abrasive.
3. The Right Stuff (Philip Kaufman, USA)
This large-scale Americana piece, covering the glory period of the U.S. space program, gets off to a good start. The first section, set in and around a California-desert Air Force base in the late forties and early fifties, is cleverly photographed, is dominated by Sam Shepard's Gary Cooper-like taciturn nobility as test pilot Chuck Yeager, and correctly uses the always-welcome character actor Royal Dano as a dour preacher. After the space program starts and a new cast of characters is set up, the film is still entertaining but largely pat. Experimental filmmaker Jordan Belson supplied optical effects that intermittently knock the film into the orbit of abstract science-fiction and suggest the awesome importance of its subject better than the rest of the film does. Apart from some flashes of doubt and regret and the tritely handled conflict between scientists and astronauts, everybody is upbeat and gung-ho most of the time in this movie. From a film made during the darkest depths of the Reagan nightmare, such insistent congratulation is disturbing.
4. The Makioka Sisters (Sasameyuki; Kon Ichikawa, Japan)
An elegant melodrama from Kon Ichikawa, the director of a varied (but always highly polished) group of films including the cannibal antiwar drama Fires on the Plain (1959) and the crazy transvestite An Actor's Revenge (1963). Set in Osaka in 1938, this sumptuous color film is clearly the work of someone who's been making and thinking about films for a long time. The Makioka Sisters deals with four upper-class daughters of a deceased shipping magnate who are settling for middle-class husbands. It's as deeply concerned with the way a certain class realizes itself through its possessions and decor as any film by Visconti or Scorsese.
Most wanted
1. The Secret Child (L'enfant secret; Philippe Garrel, France)
Philippe Garrel has an obscure reputation among English-speaking Velvet Underground fans as some guy who directed some strange-sounding films with Nico in the early '70s. His recent The Birth of Love was a lacerating, bleak, complex message from a distinctive and fully formed cinematic world. Garrel's The Secret Child, unreleased in the U.S., is considered by some to be a beautiful film. It apparently deals with the relationship between a drug addict and a former mental patient.
2. That Day, on the Beach (Haitan de yitian; Edward Yang Dechang, Taiwan)
When it comes to Chinese cinema, the Taiwanese New Wave has been lost somewhere between the craze for Hong Kong genre cinema as defined by John Woo (The Killer) and the arthouse popularity of Fifth Generation filmmakers from the People's Republic like Zhang Yimou (Raise the Red Lantern). Edward Yang's films sound like intriguing, formally daring, and melancholy looks into the lives of Taiwanese youth, but, like the films of his compatriot Hou Hsiao-hsien, they're largely rumors here.
3. My Brother's Wedding (Charles Burnett, USA)
Burnett is probably best known for his 1990 film To Sleep with Anger, with Danny Glover. A film he made in 1977, Killer of Sheep, is included by the Library of Congress in the National Film Registry. My Brother's Wedding, a portrait of a lawyer and his unambitious brother, is evidently an emotionally complex drama about African-American family relations. It's not on tape and never revived. Burnett recently did a miniseries for Oprah Winfrey where her name appears in the title. His last theatrical feature, 1995's The Glass Shield, was Miramaxified and opened to little notice. The current status of Burnett's films and career says a lot about filmmaking in America today.
4. Bérénice (Raoul Ruiz, France)
Raoul Ruiz noticed that although Racine is considered the French Shakespeare, Shakespeare movies are made all the time, but Racine movies practically never. So Ruiz decided to tackle this play, perhaps the most mathematically perfect of Racine's jewel-like, glowing tragedies. Suddenly bewildered as to how to approach it, Ruiz hit on the idea of having the actors appear mostly as silhouettes ("Chinese shadows"). The result is probably a fascinating piece of baroque cinema.
Overrated
1. Return of the Jedi (Richard Marquand, USA)
Despite Yoda's repressive advice to the contrary, we'll have to give in to our anger and go over to the dark side on this brain-dead entry in the Star Wars series. Return of the Jedi presents acting at its lowest level. The whole movie's nothing more than a collection of reaction shots to inflatable pool toys. Not to spoil the ending, but Darth Vader turns out to be Humpty Dumpty, and The Emperor is the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come. That's part of the film's self-conscious appeal to the eternal myths of World Religions. This may be the only movie ever made that would be improved by product placement. Lawrence Kasdan, the director of The Big Chill, co-wrote ROTJ with George Lucas, but this film wasn't written; it wasn't even directed. It was baked in a tree by Ewoks.
2. The Big Chill (Lawrence Kasdan, USA)
A sitcom about aging yuppies where the only character it's possible to identify with wisely committed suicide before the movie began. Classic-rock stations could stay in business by just playing the soundtrack to this movie all day. A big-name ensemble cast (William Hurt, Glenn Close, Kevin Kline, Jeff Goldblum, etc.) bounds through a color scheme that mercilessly explores that netherworld where pink and khaki meet to become taupe. When Jobeth Williams sits down at a church organ to play "You Can't Always Get What You Want" at a funeral, hope briefly flashes that the film will at least maintain this level of good humor, but it doesn't.
3. Terms of Endearment (James L. Brooks, USA)
An emotional rollercoaster ride at the artistic level of a one-dollar sympathy card, Oscar-machine Brooks's melodrama only succeeds in making you squirmy and uncomfortable. The film's plot is too episodic to build to any catharsis (although seeing cancer-stricken Debra Winger say goodbye to her kids puts you to the test), and the characters remain one-dimensional and disconnected. The ever-impressive Shirley MacLaine's talents are wasted, and Jack Nicholson, as a former astronaut, appears to be auditioning for his role in Wolf. People with domineering mothers might enjoy Terms of Endearment because it shamelessly indulges the "What if I died? How would you feel then?" fantasy. Strangely, the film ends with Nicholson describing his method of swimming to Winger's son as "just a little stroke I picked up out in space." This was the best moment in the film. Why isn't it one of those famous Nicholson lines?
4. The Year of Living Dangerously (Peter Weir, Australia)
Mel Gibson is a Sydney journalist on assignment in Indonesia in 1965. Although it succeeds in conveying that at that time, many Indonesians were poor, some were pissed off, and the government wasn't very nice, the film is concerned above all with Gibson's soap opera with British embassy staffer Sigourney Weaver. Unless you're as in love with Gibson and Weaver as Weir's camera is, you'll probably find it difficult to make it to the limply directed scenes of martial law that are supposed to qualify this as a "riveting political thriller."
5. Rumble Fish (Francis Ford Coppola, USA)
Matt Dillon and Mickey Rourke overplay and underplay, respectively, as "Rusty James" and his older brother, "The Motorcycle Boy," in this study of disaffected urban youth. It may mean something to you that Dillon and Rourke are in their prime. Otherwise, the film is mainly notable for black-and-white cinematography that gives every static shot the icy look of a fashion ad and every action scene the studied frenzy of a music video.
6. Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (Suk san sun suk san geen hap; Tsui Hark, Hong Kong)
In this fantasy set in medieval China, a small band of idealists is thrown together to search for two swords that will rid the world of evil spirits. The breakthrough film for Tsui Hark, Zu is considered a landmark in Hong Kong cinema, mainly because it upped the ante re glitzy special effects (Tsui brought in technicians from Hollywood to train his crew). It's a painful, dull film, visually skillful but infantile in its story-telling and tiresome in its insistence on constantly dazzling the eye.
Check out more from Club Havana's Secret History of Cinema:
Introduction;
1939;
1946;
1953;
1968;
1976; and
1994
Chris Fujiwara and A. S. Hamrah are Club Havana Productions.
A version of this article originally appeared in the Media Zone of the Web site Tripod.
