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Best Films of 2002 (alphabetically by
director, selected from films which had their first Chicago screening in 2002)
Top 5 features:
-
Time Out [L'Emploi du temps] - Laurent Cantet
- Scratch - Doug Pray
- *Corpus Callosum - Michael Snow
- Russian Ark - Alexander Sokurov
- What Time Is It There? - Tsai Ming-liang
Next 5 features:
- In Praise of Love - Jean-Luc Godard
- Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys - Michael Haneke
- The Fast Runner (Atanarjuat) - Zacharias Kunuk
- Sobibor, Oct. 14, 1943, 4 P.M. - Claude Lanzmann
- Hukkle - György Pálfi
Special Mention (& perhaps the best of all films seen in
'02):
- (...) Reels 1-4
- Stan Brakhage
Top 5 shorts:
- Inferno - Paul Kosoulides
- Reaper, Sheeper, Treasure Seeker - Dave Lieber
- Correcto! Incorrecto! - Matt Rodriguez
- Plain English - John Standiford
- In Order Not To Be Here - Deborah Stratman
Other Wonders in 2002:
- Stan Brakhage screenings in April, especially (...) Reels 1-4
& Anticipation of the Night
- Michelangelo Antonioni's Eclipse (AMMI, NYC) & L'Avventura
(DVD)
-
Alexander Dovzhenko retrospective (Film Center) esp. Earth
- Kon Ichikawa retrospective (Film Center) esp. An Actor's Revenge
- Andrzej Munk retrospective (Walter Reade Theater, NYC)
esp. Passenger
- Béla Tarr's Sátántangó (Facets)
- Harold Lloyd on the rise in Safety Last (Gateway
Theater)
- 70mm print of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (Music Box)
- The Young Girls of Rochefort - Jacques Demy (Music Box)
- Lonesome - Pál Fejös (Doc Films)
- Hans Richter's Rhythmus 21 & Ghosts Before Breakfast [Vormittagsspuk]
(Film Center)
- Jon Jost's digital video Muri Romani (Film Center)
- The Sleepy Time Gal - Christopher Munch (Facets)
- reading Victor Grauer's Montage,
Realism and the Act of Vision
- Jeanne Dielman - Chantal Akerman (Block Museum)
- Block Cinema's programming in general; in particular, Godard's Histoire(s)
du cinéma (at least parts of it -- see below)
- Ticket of No Return - Ulrike Ottinger (Doc Films)
- the triptych at the end of Abel Gance's Napoleon (CATV), and his
short Au Secours! (DVD)
-
Same Player Shoots Again (short) - Wim Wenders (Facets)
-
Daniel Day Lewis in Gangs of New York
- the new print of Singin' in the Rain @ Music Box
-
news that 2003 will see the release of Criterion's 2-DVD set of Stan Brakhage
films
Things that made me groan at the cinema in 2002:
- the computer glitch that wiped out most of the films listed in September's
Doings
- going to see Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country
at the LaSalle Theater, discovering it was a 16mm pan-and-scan print, walking out
- the video projectors at the Chicago Underground Film
Festival (Landmark Century Centre), which either squished, cropped, or
otherwise seriously fucked up the image
- Block Cinema failing to get parts 5 & 6, or subtitled
copies of parts 7 & 8, of Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma (*but
see above)
- Spike Jonze's Adaptation
- increasing frustration with filmmakers/critics who fail to
utilize/appreciate the vast potential of film, and treat movies as the
equivalent of, or a convenient alternative to, reading screenplays or
watching theater