30 Best Films of the 2000s (Part Three)

Part Three of the 30 Best Films of the Decade:

1o. Goodbye, Dragon Inn – dir. Tsai Ming-liang (2003, Malaysia/China)

What then is the object of cinema in the new century? To recover the old gods of its genealogy; to rectify the new techniques with the arrogation of old histories. Here is a film about the act of film-watching, the act of viewing, of seeing, of reading the screen on which no thing, in truth, exists, has existed, or ever will exist. It is a film to be watched by ghosts, because it deals with the great spectre itself: the flickering light, the whir of the celluloid wheel, the crackle of the soundtrack. The ghosts of cinema, the ghosts of what film culture had been. Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a farewell to the cinema of yesterday, to the ‘classics’ (of which Tsai Ming-liang selects one of King Hu’s great works, Dragon Gate Inn, as the representative). The movie theater is the site of incongruous fraternities in the dark, where one can be simultaneously alone and near someone, together yet apart in a realm at once corporeal, at once metaphysical. The old Fu Ho theater will be closed, Dragon Gate Inn will be its last showing; yet the strangers who congregate appear to be concerned with something else, an unnamable desire that leads strangers to grope in the dark for throbbing life, for the warmth of foreign hands, for reflections of moving images on the oblique cornea. But life no longer exclusively exists outside the screen (indeed, a visiting Japanese tourist discovers to his terror that he is the only person in the theater); life is also on the screen: we see a crippled woman, the ticket-vendor, find some momentary peace from hobbling up and down the narrow corridors of the theater, transfixed by the moving image of a woman-warrior skillfully vanquishing numerous foes. We see her look through the portal of the theater at the portal of the Dragon Gate on-screen; we see ourselves watching her watch the screen. Ultimately we are reduced to contemplate whether we too are not dead, as we stare into the dead space of an empty theater that will (and at the time of our viewing it) no longer be there.

This is not strictly a postmodern film, it is an elegy that celebrates the passing of the spectacle into the permanence of a divergent consciousness: the awareness that film – its culture, its venues, and its republicans– is itself the object of film. A love story, almost out of dust and mildew, suddenly arises at the conclusion; in between the long takes, the sharp angles, and the presence of a crippled woman-in-love and the absence of her object-of-love, is a steamed rice bun, a rainy neon-lit night, and the flourishing song of nostalgia: “I remember under the moon, I remember before the flowers… So much of the past lingers in my heart… Year after year, I can’t let go, can’t let go… can’t let go…”

9. In Praise of Love – dir. Jean-Luc Godard (2001, France)

If the object of cinema in the new century was the cinematic expression itself – that is, the moving image removed from the classical (literary) mechanisms of narrative – then the new praxis would be a dialectics that accounted for the progress (or decline) which the motion picture industry had made in over a hundred years. Godard, that divisionary figure, has been chronicling the history of cinema since the inception of his career as director with Breathless. Godard’s whole mechanism has been dialectical; only rarely has the auteur been more concerned with the narrative of his films (or rather, with the mechanics of narrative) than with cinema’s historical placement alongside the classical art forms (sculpture, painting, literature) or with its valuation as business and commodity. Godard’s late career has veered almost totally into the latter preoccupation, while becoming increasingly adversarial about the monopoly Hollywood has made over the factors of cinema production and distribution. There would be an exit-plan for the director in the affordable shape of digital video. A new dialectic occurred to him (probably after being commissioned to make a short, Origins of the 21^st Century, to open the 2000 Cannes Film Festival) in which the old techniques would be synthesized with the new histories, and the old histories with the new techniques. Hence, one half of In Praise of Love is in a luscious classical black-and-white, reminiscent of the director’s earliest films, having for its subject the 21^st century scars of Paris’ underbelly, its unseen poverty and spiritual miasma; the other half, in vibrant color, depicts the pained search for the historical and spiritual origins of America and Europe, and for the translation of old mediums (literature, Simone Weil, the French Resistance, Catholicism) into the new landscape of digital media.

In Praise of Love has been obtusely criticized (with that peculiarly baseless indignation that Americans seem to have when they are lambasted by those whom it believes itself to have sustained) for being “anti-American”; but the film has little concern with the historical origins of America, or, for that matter, with the nature of history as such. The film is as critical of, and as burdened with, the failures of European historicism as it is of the amnesiac state of American cinema. Godard’s greatest apprehension is ontological: “When did the gaze collapse?” If the essence of cinema has been compromised by the blanketing of history with its commodification (if cinema can be, in one scene, both a Pickpocket and The Matrix; or if it could glibly fictionalize the realism of non-fiction, of real suffering, of actual poverty) then where will the gaze find itself gazing in the new era? The final scene sublimates the film over its previous bitterness, superimposing the spectacle of a sunset coloring the sea over the figure of the protagonist’s mind (Godard’s mind) thinking, pondering, dreaming: “I see a landscape new to me…” The question is asked: what is it which history can not erase, which cinema can still capture and the gaze still find even within the new technologies to come? Godard answers, Love.

8. Oasis – dir. Lee Chang-dong (2002, Korea)

Sometimes the transition that a novelist makes into becoming a filmmaker turns out to be a dreadful or self-indulgent affair. Sometimes it can be a glorious revolution. Lee Chang-dong, former Minister of Culture for the Republic of Korea, was also an acclaimed novelist who, after finding much success with his books, inexplicably turned to making films as his main practice. Perhaps he made the (right) choice because he discovered that film was, in truth, the “new novel” that writers like Julio Cortázar and Alain Robbe-Grillet had tried to devise on the page but would find better represented cinematically. Oasis, Lee Chang-dong’s most challenging film, is not an example of the new novel as film, nor is it a pinnacle of formalism or of the disruption of formalism, nor is it an aesthetic experimentation. It is, in terms of narrative, a straightforward film that ambles along a rather conventional story arc: Oasis is a romance. But it is a difficult, sometimes gut-churning romance to watch. It is, quite simply, the story of how an impossible love occurs between a mentally ill man and a woman with cerebral palsy. The risks the actors take are numerous; I don’t know of a more difficult, and resultantly, a more triumphant love story than this, this decade. Godard’s In Praise of Love was in search of Love in all its abstractions and sequences. Oasis, laying naked the illusion that love is based on good intentions (and not on dire need), is the story of love at its purest, at its ugliest, at its maddest. In Andre Breton’s phrase, it is Mad Love: “…the mind chooses to believe that the loved object is a unique being, whereas often [the] social conditions of life can destroy such an illusion.”

Every decade must have its great love story; if not in love with cinema, then in love with the absolutely unique, with the socially dysfunctional, with the clearly mad: “And it is there – right in the depths of the human crucible, in this paradoxical region where the fusion of two beings who have really chosen each other renders to all things the lost colors of the times of ancient suns, where however, loneliness rages also, in one of nature’s fantasies which, around the Alaskan craters, demands that under the ashes there remain snow – it is there that years ago I asked that we look for a new beauty, a beauty ‘envisaged exclusively to produce passion.’” The passion here is unconventional, and the beauty ridiculous, but the sentiments are such as will defy the lineaments of one’s cruelest prejudices.

7. Syndromes and a Century – dir. Apitchatpong Weerasethakul (2006, Thailand)

The old gods of cinema are the same gods who figure in our cultural mythologies. F.W. Murnau’s account of Faust is as consummately expressed, and as ancient, as Goethe’s. What if, in the statue of a nameless civic leader seated imperiously in front of a municipal building, we were to find the same visage and serenity of a Buddha? Syndromes and a Century is, on the surface, a dirge on the passing of natural order (of antiquity) into mechanical order (into futurity). The green fields and rice paddies of Thailand are to become the industrial scapes of a swiftly changing globalized village no longer “Thailand.” The statue of the Buddha may not be erased by the monument to a late politician, but the politician’s deification will certainly share the same space, and thus the same prestige, as that of a timeless spiritual reality. The open-window outdoor hospital in which the memories of one’s dead brother freely pass through in breezes and manifest in the enigmatic smile of a friendly monk, transforms into a white linoleum, white-wall, white-ceiling building in which human interaction is controlled and decided by degrees of separation, within areas of color-coded regulation and seat-assigned protocol.

Weerasethakul creates a dichotomy of the natural/traditional contra the mechanical/industrial, but the film’s majesty does not lie in the simplicity of the argument; instead, Weerasethakul does something unpredictable when he chooses to fuse the two contrasting orders and produce a resolution that impinges upon a philosophical objectivity utterly alien to us. We emerge from a vacuum of reminiscences dazed to find a 21^st century world both mechanical and organic. It is a vision of the world as strange and fearsome as it is oddly liberating and familiar. That the Buddha (that ‘oneness’ as such, in a statue or in the object-of-love) can coexist on the same plane as the Absurd and the pedestrian is the sum point of the experience. The space-age is already here, and we are living it.

6. Caché – dir. Michael Haneke (2005, Austria/France)

In the techno-age of terrorism, no film has so definitively captured the neurosis of the fear of the Other as starkly, as shockingly, as this one. Michael Haneke, whose work will continue to be analyzed in film school seminars for years to come, is to my mind the most persistently theoretical director working today. His films are expert theories of films. The viewer will nearly always find him/herself a voyeur complicit with the havoc, frustration, and brutality that characterize Haneke’s work. The play of desire is also the shutter of frustration. Caché may not be Michael Haneke’s best film, but it is, strangely, the film most seen by moviegoers who were not already Haneke followers. That was due to the cunning of its marketing: Caché was billed rather ingeniously as a “thriller,” and it utilized the international appeal of two of France’s best-known mainstream actors, Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche, to find a platform in art house theaters as well as in multiplexes. That Caché nonetheless turned out to be effective at masquerading as a thriller was a demonstration of Haneke’s mastery of genre expectations. Yet this is where many moviegoers and cineastes found themselves divided: while some, who perceived the hoodwink, objected to Haneke’s disguise, others were lured to reconsider the film’s true intentions. Caché is, superficially, about the hidden ‘guilt’ that a western European man feels about his relationship to an Arab man who, we learn, is his adopted brother.

In the broader sense, it is about the undisclosed sense of guilt that the westerner feels toward the colonised (hidden) orient; the ignorance that the westerner has of the Arab, of the oriental Other, is at bottom the source of an involved fabrication of terror. But the terror is imagined; indeed, it is hardly threatening in any literal sense. A stranger (we never officially learn who) sends tapes that invade the private space of a well-known talk show celebrity, Georges Laurent (played by Auteuil), and his family. The tapes are usually static shots of the outside of the Laurents’ home, or they are tracking shots that lead to places familiar to Georges. The stranger (let us call him/her, the Other) also leaves childish drawings depicting violent bloody acts. No crimes are committed, and no explicit acts of terror abound: but the atmosphere of terrorism – abstract, immaterial, uncertain – permeates the life of Georges Laurent. Inevitably he is driven to confront his past, which we are led to collect ‘clues’ from in recollections he has of the manor home he may (or may not) have grown up in. In fact, no discernible evidence is provided by Haneke to establish any situation in the film as a bold coldblooded fact; the lack of evidence is ultimately the proof that a youtube culture as devotedly ‘documentarian’ as ours has gone to great lengths in cultivating environments of revelation, subjection, and dread out of sync with the authentic history of the Other. Haneke’s point will become more relevant with time: despite its supposed objectivity, video footage is not the truth; it is the concealment of a fictional Other who we contrive to believe watches us.

5. Le fils / L’enfant– dir. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (2002, 2005, Belgium)

The Dardenne brothers have been responsible for popularizing a new type of cinema that would adapt a stripped-down neorealism for use by anyone anywhere in the world. If neorealism had once been of a specific national or political character, now it was converted into a technique of expression in line not only with the spirit of a quotidian profane life to be found anywhere in the world, but also in line with the direct motions of such a life. Taken thus, the Dardennes cannot be considered innovators in film technology, but they are certainly collectors of indisputable film truths; truths which are infinitely translatable across cultures and nations. They reveal the subject — in a manner enviable to the documentarian — at a proximity  equally disinterested and compassionate. Very literally, the Dardennes will shoot off the cuff, on the very shoulders of the subject, or in as close a proximity to the subject’s actions as to seem on the verge of toppling the protagonist over. It is at once 3^rd and 1^st person filmmaking; or more relevantly, it is the dubious art of the reality TV show rectified and taken to its credible apotheosis. We are that person, as we walk with her, watch her withheld or unhinged and entirely oblivious to the camera, in the viscerality of a life that would be discarded by others as unspectacular. The Dardennes have been making films since the 80s, but they might be better known in the cinema of their followers, in certain moments of Iñárritu ‘s Amores Perros or in the structure of Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler. The Dardennes are directors who might be incapable of producing a film that attempts anything larger or more extensive than the bald immediacy of the situations and characters they select to portray, but their art thrives precisely on this formulation of urgency. If they have a masterpiece this decade, it would certainly be L’enfant; but to not include Le fils as well would be to lose sight of what makes the Dardennes so peculiarly universal to our time: in the marriage of subject-matter to methodology, any subject they select will do. But what appears so easy and impromptu to make is the work of much contemplation and mechanical preparation; their inimitable hand-held technique is the best possible type of pseudo-spontaneous camera-writing around. The two films, L’enfant and Le fils, are twin documents of unexceptional lives made exceptional through an unconditional love for the unseen unspoken acts that irrevocably make us human.

4. Russian Ark – dir. Aleksandr Sokurov (2002, Russia)

On the mere basis of technical merit alone, Russian Ark is a monumental film that should make any credible best-of-decade list. I quote from the distributor’s description of the film: “Filmed in a single day with a cast of thousands, three live orchestras and an army of technicians, Russian Ark covers 300 years of Russian history in a single 96 minute tracking shot through 3 rooms of the world famous Hermitage Museum. Not only is Russian Ark the longest uninterrupted shot in film history, it is also the first feature film ever created in a single take.” But Russian Ark‘s significance has less to do with its place as a technical milestone in film history than with the relevancy of its statement to our time. It is, in a way, the photographic positive (the color-print copy) to the negative of Jean-Luc Godard’s In Praise of Love. Whereas Godard’s film intersects the three ‘texts’ of image, sound, and literature and disrupts its narrative by not only going backwards in time but also joining disparate objects of discussion (or peripheral objects) through an advanced convoluted editing, Sokurov’s film employs no editing (it is, after all, one long take) except in what occurs on the field of vision, on the panoply of history. Godard’s film is as cut-up as Sokurov’s is solid; but both are indelibly connected to the fate of cinema upholding the weight of hundreds and thousands of years of European art history. Sokurov is more positive than Godard: he is the unseen spectator (who is us as well) – the camera, or the cinematic function itself – as he/it progresses through the ‘ark’ of Russian history, through the history of art in essence: he is objective and bears no opinions (as the camera can bear no opinions). But the introduction of a nameless 19^th century French diplomat, about as over-educated a man as can be, brings the presence of scrutiny and opinion to the proceedings. This diplomat, whom the unseen spectator trenchantly dubs “the European” (for our purposes, a man with a particularly contentious French temperament quite like Godard’s), also laments the passing of history, while wittily praising or disparaging some of the works and artists housed in the Hermitage Museum.

Despite his immense learning (and suspicious facility with the Russian tongue), we gradually realize that “the European” does not quite understand what being Russian means, nor what thoughts and sentiments are native to the Russian mind; we thence witness the same treatment Godard made of the American mindset now reversed on the European mindset by an outside 3^rd man, the Russian/Eastern thinker. In this sense, Russian Ark is a very Russian film; but that is only the second layer beneath the fold of technical majesty that makes this film an essential experience. The third layer is the seed of the Ark’s concealed universality: it is a film about the confrontation of cinema with its historical antecedent, the work of visual art – the painting – the museum-piece. The Hermitage, archetype of the museum concept, is the movie theater of antiquity; the works housed in the Hermitage are the fragments of a total picture, are the ‘films’ that brought through a blossoming genealogy the fruition of the cinematic medium. Consequently, Russian Ark (like In Praise of Love, Goodbye Dragon Inn, and other films on this list) is about the necessity of situating cinema within the historical progression of art – specifically here, within the museum context – if only to remind the spectator that art has never lost its purpose (its punctum) of catalyzing the experience of life waking up.

3. In the Mood for Love – dir. Wong Kar-wai (2000, China)

Wong Kar-wai is a director more known for his indulgences than for his restraints. Coupled with Christopher Doyle‘s sumptuous color-cinematography, Wong’s idiosyncratic taste for hyperkinetic formality (an oxymoron that defines what is indefinable in Wong) sets the great Chinese director apart from his contemporaries, both national and international. Wong creates formality from the slightest details when he is at his most informal. He customarily likes to direct without a script, or with a script so bare that only the general plotline is described for the actors’ sake. He directs with a feeling for the plot and the characters, and so his flourishes, sometimes confounding, sometimes illuminating, are always inspired by an archly sensual divination. With this in mind, In the Mood for Love stands doubtlessly as the culmination of the ideas that were central to Wong in previous films and of the techniques which made him an auteur. Wong is a director of profound eroticism, and this film is fittingly his reinvention of the erotic. It is also a film whose eros is most strengthened by restraint and conjecture. No ostentatious blips in memory are indulged in, and no backward-forward-backward dance moves are overdone; the colors that saturate the scenes do not spill out in flashbacks across the screen, but are wrapped snugly around the thin porcelain body of Maggie Cheung, or contained in the streetlamp reflection that shines off Tony Leung‘s jet-spruced hair, or are delicately dissolved in the cigarette smoke that wafts upward around them as they ponder what nakedness must look like in a warm bluish rain. Here is a romance in which no kiss is traded or embrace luxuriantly indulged in. Maggie Cheung’s ethereal beauty, befitting the composure of the courtly ladies of yesteryear, grows the more she remains dressed; and she is dressed exquisitely in every scene. Tony Leung’s indomitable coolness, of the order of Humphrey Bogart at his most taciturn and refined, increases with each emotional outburst he fails to make (and which lesser men would be inclined to give in to); he never loses focus, never quits being indefatigably handsome in manner and vestiture. They are, as a couple on the brink of some fevered consummation, the epitome of love at its most abstract; for love may be more profound as a fiction than as a fait accompli. What is it they’re after in the fiction they create? It is not sex. It is what sex cannot substitute. Synchronicity.

The resolution that ends the film is also an uncharacteristic move by Wong, and one which rings true with other films in this list. The meditation on Angkor Wat, a temple as old as any living idea, strikes us as an instance of the unerotic; but its purpose is a difference in eros, apart from the sexual, and proximate to the passing of the history of the unrealized: “The past was what he could see, but not touch…” A commentary on the departure of a specific love — the characters’ — and a metacommentary on the permanence of the unseen (Angkor Wat, as the unseen object of cinema, defying the passage of history, of General de Gaulle, of Phnom Penh, etcetera), in which Tony Leung’s character (Chow Mo-wan) buries the secret of his heart, to outlast his own life. Their love had been unconsummated (hence, unseen, in the metaphysical sense), so Chow Mo-wan buries it in the most ancient of places as a permanent testament to a fading style (a style of love, of loving, as nostalgic as 1960s Hong Kong).

2. Songs from the Second Floor / You, the Living – dir Roy Andersson (2000, 2007, Sweden)

For whom finally does cinema call? For the dead who allow us to treasure life (despite our superstitions); and for the living who importune us to wake up. There are not many films like Songs from the Second Floor and You, the Living which gape at our collective silliness and absurd pathos with the same steely savage humor. Songs from the Second Floor announced the beginning of the century by bringing back to life the victims of the previous. The dead do not leave us, they stay as palpable as before; those we believe we’ve left behind, are made more prevalent in our despair to escape past mistakes. You, the Living – which cannot be considered without Songs in conjunction (both are to connect to a 3^rd film in a planned trilogy) – is a love letter to those who believe they are interminably stuck in lovelessness; it makes the case that love will blossom once we learn to value that we are still alive, that our so-called despair is but a willful blindness to the despair of others. Both films (the first inspired by a poem of Cesar Vallejo, and the second by a Roman Elegy of Goethe) are masterpieces of mise-en-scene and visual tablature in which the camera, reduced to immobility, surrenders itself to the spectacle of luminous tableaux vivants. Songs took Roy Andersson 4 years to make; You, the Living, 3 years. The two are an attack on the notion that we are happier because our lives are modern, ordered, and technological; yet when things fall apart (i.e. when a recession hits, a global economic depression, an irrational war abroad, etc.), we witness the citizens of a civilized society (very much our own) suddenly regress to rampant superstition, paganism, human sacrifice, and outright cruelty. The modern is not so distant from the past; they are joined together indissolubly, with the advance of generations and the persistence of human emotions. Likewise, Andersson’s films formulate a betrothal to the art practice of the past; the films are living pictures whose edits make no illusion of the fact that what is occurring is not really occurring: we are watching symbols of the modern psyche play out their meanings. Both form a poetic rebus that narrates the problems of our time; but most importantly, what sets Andersson’s films apart from others just as preoccupied with the end-of-days problem that the spiritual decline of modernity has caused, is that neither film ever loses sight of the humor that lies at the soul of spiritual suffering. For it is with laughter (so Andersson teaches us) that a child learns to adapt to a world in ruin.

1. Werckmeister Harmonies – dir. Bela Tarr (2000, Hungary)

Human wisdom will find its truth best expressed in the village parable. One parable has it that mankind is inextricably connected to the world, to its depths and heights, and to its revolutions in the great abyss. The cosmic order is not a science but a knowledge of one’s placement within it; a peasant’s knowledge as much as a poet’s inquiry. Andreas Werckmeister, an obscure German baroque composer, believed in the music of the spheres, and gave credence to the idea that the end result of music is divine, in praise of God and the order God has made. It is futile to expect a peasant or a layman to understand the principles of invertible counterpoint in music theory (as Werckmeister understood them), but it is virtuous to teach the peasant and the layman that the order which God has made and given us is primarily musical. That music is primarily bodily. That the body is primarily a vehicle of worship. Bela Tarr, a poet fatally concerned with the spiritual welfare of his country and of this world’s impending doom, has crafted a parable that all men and women should know: the parable of the dwarf and the whale. The dwarf who has fed the wrath of the destitute and the idle and the impressionable is he who foments the chaos that usurps man’s contemplation. Man, woman, and child are periodically sacrificed to chaos, and the 20^th century was such a century, no different from those in the past plagued by wars and invasions and diseased ideologies. The whale existed long before the dwarf, when the celestial spheres and the world were first created from the abyss. The whale is vast, monolithic, wondrous. But above all, it is silent, as still and silent as the waters that circle the globe and which had brought the whale’s impossibility to being. The midget, who speaks across cultures and languages, who shouts and raves and unsettles the existing order, if only out of boredom and contempt for complacency, yells over the beached corpse of the whale.

The whale is the symbol of an ancient harmony that existed before the chaos of human progress ever existed, and its symbol is as silent as it is ancient; the dwarf, as small as the germ of a false idea, is made larger, a symbol of symbols, through the noise of human language, and through the bluster of ideology. The dwarf, whose voice is gigantic and whose words are stored in pamphlets, is shielded from sight (in the film); only his shadow looms forth like a condemnation of man’s ignominy returning to haunt those who stayed apart from the world’s ruckus. But the whale is denuded of the mystery of depths it had once surged through; right before our eyes, its cryptic melancholic eye is forced to witness the waste man has made of the world. The monk who desired to keep apart from the world’s desolation learns that the world comes for you when you least desire it; it comes knocking, charging, storming at your door. The layman who sought to escape its madness is captured by the eye of technology (a hovering helicopter, waking us from the slumber of fables). The sight of suffering is enough to quell all rebellions, all madnesses, all the acts and days of wrath. The march of history is the march of discontented men through black-and-white streets at night, in ravenous search of weakness, under lamplight. The harmony of the world in harmony with the cosmos – the harmonies which Werckmeister had written of and devoted his career to – are hidden in the sacred saturnine eye of the whale. A tale as ancient as the cosmos, as modern as the jet plane.

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