>> CineFix Host: Sometimes cinema wears down a rut and falls in it,
telling the same six stories over and over again, and
that's when it's about time to shake things up.
These are our top ten favorite rule-breaking films of all time.
>> [MUSIC]
>> CineFix Host: Kicking us off at number ten,
let's talk about how there are film rules in the first place.
It's not like there's a stern film teacher sending directors to the cinematic
principles office for talking out of turn, or film police arresting offending
filmmakers and sentencing them to community service shooting feature for
the Lifetime movie network.
No, we're talking about the kinds of rules that form a silent contract between
filmmakers and film watchers that maybe you can't read off like commandments, but
you damn well know when they've been broken.
And back in the golden age of Hollywood, when the precedent for much of film was
set, something we now call classic Hollywood cinema style emerged.
They were a practical set of rules, guidelines, and practices,
set out to ensure movies do what they do best.
Tell immersive stories.
And what early Hollywood filmmakers quickly realized was that the number one
way to keep people in their seats and buying popcorn was to make sure they
didn't realize it was all an illusion until the ride was over.
So for our first rule, we wanna honor films that said, [BLEEP] it, and
made damn well sure we all knew it was a film we were watching.
We're talking about breaking of the forth wall.
Think Annie Hall, and Spaceballs, and Horsefeathers, and JCVD,
and The Great Train Robbery, and Pierrot le Fou.
Spike Lee has a way with a very Brechtian direct camera address, which by the way is
a theater tern that references the exact distancing effect we're talking about.
But for our first pick,
we think that Dogville really broke realism down the best.
>> Dogville Narrator: This is the sad tale of the township of Dogville.
Most of the buildings were pretty wretched, more like shacks, frankly.
The house in which Tom lived was the best, though, and
in good times might almost have passed for presentable.
>> CineFix Host: Sure, it's not as much breaking the fourth wall as it is
demolishing all of them, but the effect is exactly the same.
It's a constant reminder to the audience that what they're looking at isn't real.
The film itself is inspired by Bertolt Brecht, the man the effect is named after.
But we think one of the most interesting things about distancing and
alienation is that it stops working.
After a long enough time, we buy into the story anyhow.
We forgive the lack of set, and ultimately forget it.
Sure, the walls have been broken down, but the effect is the opposite.
We let ourselves be sucked in anyway.
But pulling out a megaphone and screaming, hey,
audience, you're watching a movie, isn't the only way guaranteed to kill a buzz.
There's all kinds of smaller,
technical rules you can screw up to jolt the audience back into
rude awareness of that tween two rows over who will not stop texting.
One of the most important things you've gotta get right is the editing.
Don't let anything jump jarringly in the frame.
Only cut when motivated.
Always cut on action.
But these rules got broken, too, by Battleship Potemkin, the repeat cut and
October with the metaphorical cut.
And by Legitae's assembly of still images.
However, if there is one bad boy editing rule breaker to rule them all,
it's gotta be Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless.
>> Speaker 3: [FOREIGN] >> CineFix Host: That's right back,
when everyone was trying to make
you forget about editing and cuts and believe that movies were real,
Godard was chopping up his film and throwing them right in your face.
Bringing the very artifice of editing right to the forefront with the jump cut.
Critics called it visual jazz,
filmic Cubism, Michel's hyperactive point of view.
Collaborators have explained it as anarchy acting out against the establishment,
freedom with no concern for the norm, and an attempt to sabotage the film.
We're not sure what the truth is, or if it even matters,
because the jump cut made a hell of a splash.
In addition to editing rules, another nearly ubiquitous feature of
this classical Hollywood continuity style is a predictable placement of the camera.
Filmmakers like Mizoguchi and Agnes Varda have drifted away from typical camera
placement to beautiful effect in films like Ugetsu and Vagabond.
But the most important rule of all is called the 180 degree rule, and it's
a shooting guideline for a establishing a dependable screen geography.
If you keep the camera on one side of your scene,
you end up with a consistent left and right across all the shots.
And although this kind of screen continuity pervades almost every film you
could have seen in theaters for the past century,
Yasujiro Ozu tossed it out the window when he made Tokyo Story.
>> Speaker 4: [FOREIGN] >> CineFix Host: Composition
was everything to Mr.
Ozu, a man who never
once used a zoom.
Avoiding moving his camera at all costs and used one dissolve, ever.
So when it came to deciding between a coherent space and
a beautiful match cut, he chose the latter.
The man was notorious for replacing the famously predictable 180 degree rule
with his own disorienting 360 degree version.
In place of left, right geography, he substituted perfect graphic matches.
But it worked.
His patient storytelling and playful style are only an obstacle insomuch
as they are unfamiliar to the audience.
But, after ten minutes of acclimation, they're just as engrossing as
any generic shot shot-reverse shot dialog scene and then some.
At number seven,
we also wanna honor films that took the whole idea of representing reality,
filming the world and capturing its light, and said [BLEEP] it, let's blow it all up.
Think Cocteau's Orpheus, or 2001 Stargate or Throw Away Your Books.
Rally in the Streets.
Think Tarkovsky's mixture of film stock in Andrei Rublev,
Spielberg's selective color in Schindler's List,
and Wes Anderson's eclectic aspect ratios in The Grand Budapest Hotel.
However for
our number seven, we think there's none rule-breakier than Enter The Void.
>> [MUSIC]
>> CineFix Host: Part feature film, part cinematic DNP trip,
Enter the Void is the closest thing there is to a mainstream incarnation
of the strobe film, which was actually a real thing in avant garde cinema.
And, close your eyes epileptics, because they look like this.
And that's enough of that.
Enter The Void used lighting and camera and
visual effects in a way unlike anything ever before it.
The story is an out-of-body POV experience in more ways than one, and
an absolute visual revelation in terms of how to view the world,
which is why we have no problem including it on our list.
So what this all comes down to is expectation.
Rules are expectations, and breaking them isn't necessarily violating an inflexible
law of gravity, so much as it is throwing the audience a curveball
compared to how they've learned to interpret cinema.
One of the easiest ways to quickly get audiences on board with different sets of
film conventions is by bundling them up into convenient packages called genres.
When we set of specific genre signifiers,
we know the kind of language the film is about to start speaking.
So, we can pull out our mental phrasebooks and follow along.
But what happens when films break from their conventions?
When they specifically subvert the expectations they've gone
out of their way to establish.
These are films like Million Dollar Baby, Audition, and Life is Beautiful, Dead or
Alive, Sunshine, or.
Cabin in the Woods broke it down in meta fashion.
But for our number six we're
going with From Dusk till Dawn.
>> [SOUND] >> Speaker 5: What
the- >> [SOUND]
>> CineFix Host: Quick-talking
Tarantino-esque crime film, starring Tarantino and a fresh from TV Clooney,
>From Dusk till Dawn makes it just about halfway through without a single undead,
before quickly pivoting into the kind of balls out, actiony,
vampire shoot-em-up that's pure Rodriguez.
Does it work, depends on who you ask, and
whether they like surprise birthday parties or not.
But it definitely breaks the rule.
Definitely raises some awesome questions about expectations and genre freedom, and
finishes with a bang and a middle finger to tradition, in true b-movie fashion.
Shifting gears to the broader strokes of storytelling and
moving fully beyond the physical craft of filmmaking,
one of the most allegedly unassailable features of the story is the protagonist.
Stories are about people, according to Aristotle, common sense,
and your eighth-grade English teacher.
Or at least animals that act like people or
fish that behave in a slightly human manner.
But what about films that say screw that,
like Au Hasard Balthazar and its protagonist donkey.
Or Rubber's sociopathic tire.
Phone Booth and
Barry buck tradition by getting rid of everything but the protagonist.
And Russian Ark makes the history of an entire country its hero.
But we think our number five belongs to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, for
dramatically and shockingly changing courses midstream.
>> [SOUND]
[MUSIC]
>> Speaker 6: Aah!
>> CineFix Host: Hitchcock purposely set out to mislead his audience, and
then devastated like an old timey George R R Martin.
He used their expectations against them,
carefully cueing them to invest in Marion Crane as the hero of the film,
before stabbing them in the metaphorical heart.
Because while Psycho's twist is almost a cliche now.
At its time, it was almost unthinkable.
Making the effect all the better and
reinvigorating screen death with the kind of impact it deserved.
So filmmakers can fracture images, genres and heroes.
Is nothing sacred, how far can they go?
We all know how stories work, beginning, middle, end, one thing leads to the next,
a character wants something and we watch them try to get it.
Or do we? Film makers like Tarantino, Nolan,
and Kurosawa thought differently in films like Pulp Fiction, Memento, and Rashomon.
They swapped the order up, flipped it backwards, and ran the tape back.
The Sweet Hereafter went backwards before it was cool.
Run Lola Run revised itself three times.
Planet Terror chopped out a whole ten minutes for funsies, and
Intolerance told four stories at the same time.
But for the film we think that gave a middle finger to story structure best,
it's gotta go to Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad.
>> Speaker 7: [FOREIGN]
>> CineFix Host: Truth, fiction, time,
place, logic, and cause all fold in on themselves, creating an Escher-like
narrative structure that refuses to be linearized in any kind of story map.
It's a question with no answer, a film with no meaning,
as beautiful as it is enigmatic.
It is a story about a story.
A story a man is telling a woman that we may or may not believe.
Resnais claims that when he wrote the story, he didn't believe it.
But when he directed it, he did.
They loved, they didn't.
They knew each other, they never met.
She's dead, alive, does it matter?
The film marches onward with no clear meaning or truth.
Just a story unlike any other, yet like them all at the same time.
Okay, so we can chop and screw a plot like a 90s DJ,
what about throwing it out all together?
The cardinal sin of storytelling is to be boring, right?
Well, maybe not.
Clerks is just a few guys at a convenience store,
Gummo meanders through a strange world with no real sense of direction.
My Dinner with Andre is just a conversation.
Man with a Movie Camera is just images of a city.
The wold, and Cléo de 5 à 7 is two hours in the life of a young singer waiting for
medical test results.
But that's all still a little much for our number three,
which goes to great lengths to tell a story with as little action as possible.
In Jeanne Dielman's 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080, man,
that is a whole sentence worth of French.
So you know what, [BLEEP] it.
Let's just write it up there on the screen.
>> CineFix Host: The film is honest about life
in a way most others are not.
It does not select the fascinating, it does not focus on the important.
It does not trim the fat.
Director Chantal Akerman spares no detail.
Nothing is extraneous.
Peeling potatoes is as important as murder.
For over three hours, Jeanne Dielman meditates on the daily routine of a mother
as she cooks, cleans, engages in sex work, and repeats.
By foregoing the extravagant,
the mishandling of a single spoon is a major plot point and cause for attention.
It is an attempt at life un-distilled, and
it's a beautiful, tiny epic for its narrative sins.
But the envelope pushes further.
Sure we can throw out plot, but what about causality, what about coherence and logic?
Enter surrealists.
A world where 1 plus 1 equals blue.
Check out Vera Chytilová's Daisies, Lynch's Eraserhead or Inland Empire.
Villeneuve's Enemy or Lanthimos's the Lobster.
But if there's a clown king of the surrealist film tricksters,
it's gotta be Luis Bunuel.
And we could go with just about any of his work, but for our number two pick,
we'll give this slot to the most successful bizarro fest,
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.
>> [SOUND] >> Speaker 8: [FOREIGN]
>> [SOUND]
>> Speaker 9: [FOREIGN]
>> Speaker 10: [FOREIGN]
>> CineFix Host: True to its surreal
nature, it is not easy to summarize
The Discreet Charm of The Bourgeoise.
It is a story about wealthy French
diners repeatedly showing up for
meals they are unable to eat.
Instead, they find themselves evading the police, or sneaking off to have sex, or
imposed upon by the army, or in the dream sequence of a stage play.
They never stop searching for
a feast, constantly frustrated by illogical interruptions.
But they never question their reality either.
It is a bizarre story world where anything can happen, asking us all to interrogate
our own logical assumptions and those of the stories we consume daily.
The surrealists were definitely onto something by rejecting waking logic
in favor of the oneiric sort.
But they're not the only ones to do it.
In the same way we receive visual information as a child,
before words have meanings and concepts have rigid associations.
Visionary filmmakers have sought to breakdown the rule of ordered thought and
speak to us primally.
So for our number one slot, we wanna honor filmmakers that have set out to
break the greatest rules of all, those of the human mind.
Kubrick dabbled in this with 2001: A Space Odyssey,
Malick with Tree of Life, Fellini with 8 1/2 and Antonioni with L'Avventura.
But this slot belongs to none other than Andrei Tarkovsky,
whose every film could top this list, but we're going with our favorite, The Mirror.
>> [MUSIC]
[SOUND]
>> Young Boy: Papa.
>> CineFix Host: There's nothing like dissecting a non-verbal film
out loud to suck the life of it.
But they pay me by the words, so please forgive me for trying, and
trying and trying and trying.
>> [SOUND] >> CineFix Host: Thank you.
Tarkovsky was a genius to whom no rules could apply.
His films are poetry where others are prose.
His images speak, but not in words or symbols.
They did not attempt to convey to us logic or language or concrete plot.
But instead, thoughts, motions, memories in the abstract, before processing and
verbalization.
To use his words, he was a sculptor in time, and as pretentious as it may sound,
we believe it.
Which is why his masterpiece is our pick for
the best rule-breaking film of all time.
So what do you think?
Do you disagree with one of our picks?
Did we leave out one of your favorite cinematic mavericks?
Let us know in the comments below, and be sure to subscribe for
more CineFix movie lists.
>> [MUSIC]