All right, we spent past few weeks covering our favorite cinematic
recreations, adaptations, remake, sequels, prequels and franchises.
So now it's time to see what's new.
Things born of and by the cinema, these are our picks for
the five most original films of all time.
(Sound) After we decide we're looking for
stories made new just for the screen, the first question we're confronted with is,
what makes a film more original than another?
And our first thought is it might just be the most cinematically innovative film we
can find.
So interpreting it that way, we started looking at firsts.
From the early efforts of Come Along Do and As Seen Through a Telescope and
The Jazz Singer, to the edgy adolescent years of Battleship Potemkin and
Breathless.
To the recent technological maturity of Star Wars, and Toy Story and Gravity.
These films introduced us to never before seen cinematic techniques,
like a painter using a new color for the first time.
However, if innovation is our benchmark, then the most original film would be,
of course, the original film.
Which just so happens to be the Roundhay Garden Scene.
And that's it, that's the whole scene, captured at a mind boggling 12 frames per
second for just under 3 seconds in Leeds, England.
This right here,
was cinema crowning from Louis Le Prince's technological womb in October 1888.
Of course, when you look into any evolution,
there is seldom a Clear Adam and Eve to point at.
10 years prior, Edward Muibridge shot this, but it took 12 cameras arranged in
a line shooting onto glass plates, copied onto a rotating disk he called
a zoapractiscope, as opposed to Le Prince's single device onto film strips
which were shown via projection that far more resembles what we call cinema.
It doesn't quite have the production value of the latest Avengers, but
this right here, what you're watching, is a window into a world of 150 years ago.
When the world's first movie camera cranked the life and
began this whole art form that we love so much.
(Sound) Of course,
picking the earliest relic we can find doesn't exactly answer the question we set
out to answer in a way that does justice to that special feeling of originality
we feel when we watch a Charlie Kaufmann film.
And it certainly doesn't populate your watch list with cinema's most interesting
offerings.
So maybe the most original has less to do with innovation and
more to do with uniqueness.
Telling a story so unlike what anyone else has ever done, or
is doing, or maybe even ever will, and if we look here,
we start to find films that immediately smack of a sense of originality.
The surrealist desert fantasy of The Holy Mountain.
The Hollywood identity nightmare of Mulholland Drive, and
the uppercrust absurdism of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.
The anthropomorphized, sociopathic tire of Rubber.
The black void invasion of Under the Skin.
The bizarre Japanese, I don't even know what that is, of Funky Forest.
And, of course, the existential fever dream of Synecdoche, New York.
They tell tales the likes of which we never even dreamed.
But the one film that outdoes
our dreams most has to go to Holy Motors.
(Music)
It is difficult to find words with which to describe Holy Motors that
capture all of its madness without reducing it in the process.
It's about an actor, in a sense,
keeping appointments to play roles, but there is no camera except for our own.
Some of the roles are funny,
some of them are sad, many of them suggest a sense of growing old.
The actor plays a rich business man, and a beggar woman, and
an impulsive sewer troll, and half a dozen other roles.
Sometimes, he is hurt, experiences tragedy, but other times,
there seems to be no sense or consequence at all.
And yet, put together, it works.
It comes together to form an entirely unexpected experience
that is nevertheless delightful.
Hailed by some as reinvigorating cinema and decried by others for
wasting our time, Holy Motors is an energetic ode to the magic of filmmaking.
And pretending, and being, and truly unlike anything else we've ever seen.
(Sound) Now, if you subscribe to the,
there's only 39 or 7 or 3 or 1 stories and we're just constantly retelling
them theory, which we don't, because it's semantic nonsense, but if you do,
maybe most original comes from how that story is told, not just what it is.
So in terms of familiar stories that are uniquely told,
we start to think of films like Dogville that does it without sets, or Memento,
which tells it backwards and forwards.
And in films like Jerry that tells it without words.
Mr. Nobody that does it in split timeline, or The Lobster, and Play Time, and
Songs from the Second Floor that do it with delightfully unique tones.
Of Birdman and
Russian Ark that tell it in a painterly stroke of a singular camera move.
Or the Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus with the fantastic trick camera work of
a grown up George Melies.
However, if there's a film that tells its story in a way we've never seen before,
our money is on one of Gaspar Noe's.
Could have been Love, could have been Irreversible, but
not when it's got to be our favorite of his, Enter the Void.
(Noise) >> I have a gun.
I have a gun.
I'm going to shoot.
(Inaudible) >> If you don't leave, I'll shoot.
What do you want me to do?
(Noise)
>> The story of Enter the Void is almost too simple.
A young American drug dealer in Tokyo is shot by police and
he has a vision of his entire life before and after his death.
But take that simple story and then reshuffle it into a fascinatingly complex
series of flashback and flash forwards that meld seamlessly into one another
with a third person omniscient camera that wanders through space and time.
And neon flashing hallucinatory mindscapes,
like the disembodied spirit body of the protagonist unstuck
from the normal strictures of human experience in a predeath fever dream and
you wind up with a whole lot more than just a simple story.
And the light, and sound, and visual effects, and
camera work with which Gaspar Noe renders this experience, are utterly fresh.
His lens moves with a virtuoso freeness that is nonetheless
painstakingly designed.
And for all his hard work, he has created a new vision of the cinematic experience
as simultaneously psychological, personal, and
visually stunning in a way we have never before quite experienced.
(Sound) So
uniqueness is feeling pretty good as a way to pick original films, but
there's one more criterion worth exploring and that's medium specific.
Medium specificity is a fancy schmancy art criticism
term based on the theory that each individual artistic medium,
from sculpture to painting to cinema, has its own unique properties and features.
And an artwork's medium is more specific if it is working in a piece in a way that
only it can.
So a sculpture can be more sculptural.
A painting can be more painterly, and
a film can be more cinematic, as opposed to literary, or theatrical,
or photographic, if it makes the most use medium's unique features.
This would be unadaptable cinema, a story that is inextricably linked with the way
it's told, a movie that couldn't be novelized or
painted without losing some or most or all of its je ne sais quoi.
So what is cinema's special sauce?
Is it capturing reality as it is or does that belong, too, to photography?
Is it movement?
Or is that shared with dance?
Is it the cut or the juxtaposition also found in and collage?
Is it perhaps just how it organizes experience in time?
Or is that too much like music?
We're not quite sure what the answer is, but we know that whatever it may be,
we catch glimpses of it in medium specific films like
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Being John Malkovich,
The Tree of Life, The Act of Killing, Paprika, The Mirror,
8 1/2, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Waking Life.
And for our fourth pick, The Five Obstructions.
(Foreign)
>> The Five Obstructions is a film about film a documentary about narrative.
A behind the scenes feature about a relationship as much as the filmmaker.
Lars von Trier of Dogville, Antichrist,
Nymphomaniac fame pulls his mentor out of retirement and
gives him a series of five challenges with which to remake a short film of his.
Each one more difficult and purposely confounding than the last, but
the result is something very special, a love letter to cinema.
It is a film by and of film, capturing the constructed with the candid.
Showing us both the heavily mediated work of Leth
with the incidental documentary of von Trier.
It ties its subject to its method,
examining itself as it examines the work of both men.
Using the medium of film to look at the medium of film and the men who make it.
Examining it through the lens of the technical, the ethical, and
the personal and authorial, to a truly original effect.
(Sound) Of course, perhaps,
narrative is the wrong place to look.
Maybe story telling itself is uniquely literary,
sharing too much with other medium.
Maybe the fact that most films are telling stories means that the most unique film
doesn't tell a story at all.
So, finally, we turn to the avant garde and the experimental.
Films and films makers that have been pushing the medium well beyond
the cohesive limits we find in the multiplex.
Beginning with the cinema graphical experimentation of Entr'acte,
Anemic Cinema, Ballet Mecanique, and The Man with the Movie Camera.
Continuing forwards into Un Chien Andalou and Meshes of the Afternoon.
On words into the truly bizarre of the strobe films, of color fields and
of empty, still rooms.
And finally,
edging into the accessible mainstream with Qatsi and Kronos trilogies.
The avant garde spans centuries, and the globes and
every which way possible you could stretch the median we call cinema.
However, for our top slot, we think one of the most interesting and
original works of the avant garde is Stan Brakhage's Dog Star Man.
Stan Brakhage is an avant garde cinema god.
He's done everything from hand scratches film frames to plaster them with moth
bits, stretching the medium of film as celluloid miles beyond anything
you've probably seen anywhere else.
And Dog Star Man is generally regarded as his masterpiece.
It combines dreamlike visuals that make Enter the Void look like a sitcom,
with recurring imagery, with a gentle semi narrative with the author himself.
For the first 30 minutes, the prelude is pretty much just this.
A constructed dream or
the creation of the universe vaguely predictive of Malik's Tree of Life.
After which we move into the narrative.
The story of Brackets trying to climb a mountain with his dog.
But while there is a linear sense to the story if you look for
it, the filmmaking shreds reality into a million pieces.
Mining cinema for hundreds of techniques you could hardly imagine.
It is impossible to begin to list all the different ways he uses editing and
camera work, and chemical post processing, and found footage, and in camera effects.
Each one fascinating on their own, but utterly chemical in combination.
It may slide in with Roundhay Garden Scene as one of the less enjoyably watchable of
the bunch, but it is impossible to see Dog Star Man and call it anything but deeply
original, which is why it's our pick one of the most original films of all time.
(Music)
So what do you think?
Disagree with any of our pics?
Did we leave out any of your favorite original films?
Let us know in the comments below and be sure to subscribe for
more Cinefex movie lists.