Comments

Just because I haven’t seen the entirety of all the films above — who has? — is no reason to assume they aren’t the greatest of all time. Essentialise to ten to render a bastard art ‘important’ or ‘great’ — the bottom line for intellectual consumption — and how could it be? At the point where movies no longer veil reality but plot it, what could be more important than the unimportant films of William Wellman and Ken Jacobs that take their marginality and bastardisation as a starting point? They offer a ground-level reimagining of those subjects/subjections of style, story, society, serving to command, and purifying the world into a single voice — a set of terms for reality that the camera has been able to affirm like no other medium. Westward the Women, Times Squared, Lancelot du Lac, The Love of the Actress Sumako, Khrustalyov My Car, The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, Tih Minh and The Loom stay stuck on the margins, and a canon only creates new standards. The purpose of this list is clearly promotion, but whether it’s promotion of one’s own alignment with camps of taste or of a few movies that could challenge these, might be open to debate. It could be that dumbness is the only dissolution to a dumb discourse, if only our generation can slough off the figures that made films ‘matter’ and make all this stuff matters of a conversation, the flipside of life, passed and traded among networks of a few friends with the luxury to care – films made among friends, love as a surplus value of a transmogrified, traded-in reality: real luxuries, when not immune from history. Only time can untell — stay tuned. Maybe, like these movies, notes for self in a public forum. Anyway, a crash course as a map of the terrain.