Best of 2008: Chris Stults, Assistant Film/Video Curator

In making this list of best films and videos that I saw in 2008, I’ve restricted myself to new films that played in Columbus during the past calendar year. In years past I’ve had people remark that they haven’t heard of most of the films in my list, so this year I’ve included information about when and where each of the films screened in town. The films below are listed in a rough order of preference, although all are “list-worthy.”

In Memoriam, Mark LaPore (Phil Solomon)

An encounter with the digital sublime, this suite of videos transforms footage from the Grand Theft Auto videogame series into a true ghost world haunted by memories of loved ones, cinema, and beauty. More anima than anime, these videos introduce the soul into the new media landscape. [Screened at the Wexner Center on 10/01/08.]

Rachel Getting Married (Jonathan Demme)

Amidst the lacerating family drama, the great humanist of the American cinema, Jonathan Demme, generously exceeds the recommended daily intake of grace notes. Rachel also reconfirms Demme as one of the nimblest of genre directors, showing a Hawksian capacity to inject a personal take on traditional forms and to masterfully shift tones on a dime-turn. [Screened at Landmark Gateway from 10/31/08-11/20/08; Drexel Theater from 11/24/08-12/11/08; AMC Lennox from 11/14/08-12/04/08]

Victory Over the Sun (Michael Robinson)

Punctuated by psychotronic animated interludes, an anthemic “November Rain” wails on the remains of past Worlds Fairs overtaken by nature. Michael Robinson has absorbed the traditions of modernism and his work often makes direct reference to touchstones of the movement (as the title indicates, Victory Over the Sun is a Futurist playground/graveyard) alongside more contemporary pop culture reference points. But he deals with modernism in a truly historical sense. Those days are gone. Long gone. Stronger, more eternal forces often bubble up from beneath the surface to reveal what was there all along (and may be all that we have left now). It’s possible to bring about the feelings and majesty that modernism brought forth, but it’s just nostalgia animating the corpse—like the ants in Ingmar Bergman’s snakeskin. There is no beauty without despair. [Screened at the Wexner Center on 04/02/08]

Still Life (Jia Zhang-ke)

The Village Voice’s J. Hoberman has said that Jia Zhang-ke, “the pre-eminent cine-chronicler of contemporary China, could well be the most contemporary narrative filmmaker on earth.” But beyond the “most contemporary” filmmakers today, Still Life also proves that Jia is one of the finest. The film is Jia’s most accomplished to date as he masterfully shows the effects and psychological costs of China’s relentless conversion to capitalism and “progress.” Using the Three Gorges Dam project (which is flooding entire villages and historically important regions out of existence) as a backdrop, Jia combines landscape and narrative in ways that are only rivaled by Antonioni at his peak. Still Life came in at #7 on IndieWire’s poll, clearly marking it as one of the most notable filmic achievements of the year so, as I discussed here,  it is especially troubling that its Columbus screenings passed without notice from the local media. [Screened at the Wexner Center on 3/21/08 and 3/22/08]

My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin)

Maddin’s latest plays feels like a Canuck addendum to Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities.” Neither Marco Polo nor Borges could have imagined such a delirious and fabulous city symphony! [Screened at the Wexner Center on 08/15/08 and 8/16/08]

Light Is Waiting (Michael Robinson)

Michael Robinson explodes TV’s “Full House” into an ecstatic mandala that splits and Olsen twin’s zygote into two to produce an Olsen-Stamos starchild to rule us all. Bob Saget sends out a distress signal from the rabbit hole of the boob tube and leads us on a tour of hell (aka the family-oriented sitcom) which Robinson transforms into assaultive formal and sonic ecstasies and horrors. There is no despair without beauty. [Exhibited in The Box at the Wexner Center from 03/01/08 to 3/30/08 and screening at the Wexner Center on 04/02/08]

Observando el cielo (Jeanne Liotta)

A stellar 19 minutes of celestial signs and wonders, Jeanne Liotta’s observations of the heavens takes footage from seven years of skyspotting in aid of capturing the cosmic possibilities of your own neighborhood. By remaining sensitive to the unique properties of 16mm film, Liotta upends clichés of time-lapse photography to create something both serene and jarring (accompanied by a pitch-perfect soundtrack by Peggy Ahwesh). Even though there is nary a human on view in front of the camera, this a film that is full of life… from this world and beyond. [Screened at the Wexner Center on 02/26/08 and 10/28/08]

The Duchess of Langeais (Jacques Rivette)

Jacques Rivette is often regarded as one of the most demanding filmmakers to come out of the French New Wave but this crowd-pleaser offers more evidence that he is also one of the most playful. Instead of playing with genre as he often does, The Duchess of Langeais sees him fooling around with ideas about adaptations. At the outset, the film appears to be as faithful of an adaptation of Balzac’s novella as possible. But somewhere along the line the film becomes unmistakably Rivette and it becomes clear that Rivette is interested in exploring the things that cinema can accomplish more easily than literature (and, relatedly, what things are easier for literature to accomplish). The film is also notable for providing the tragic and gifted Guillaume Depardieu with what could be his defining performance before his unexpected death this past October. [Screened at the Wexner Center on 06/20/08 and 06/21/08]

Black and White Trypps Number Three (Ben Russell)

The prolific Ben Russell produces a beautiful, simple film that starts off as a portrait film of an audience at a concert by the noise rock band Lightning Bolt. As audience members thrash in and out of view lit solely by a single spotlight, the effect is somewhere in between Caravaggio’s tenebrism and an anthropologist shining a flashlight under a rock. But after a song by Lightning Bolt (“Captain Caveman”), the music switches to a “third ear” drone soundtrack by Joseph Griggs and the audience moves in slow motion – more of a writhing than a mosh pit. The trance state in which the filmed audience exists spills out into the audience as viewer and viewed becomes a communally hermetic apostolate. Russell connects this very contemporary caste into a lineage that extends back to Dante and beyond. It’s the viewers call whether it’s Inferno, Purgatorio, or Paradiso. [Screened at the Wexner Center on 02/26/08 and 05/08/08 – Ben Russell visits the Wexner Center to present a program of films on 03/04/09]

Before I Forget (Jacques Nolot)

An austere, unflinching, and unsentimental portrait of an aging ex-gigolo, Before I Forget is the third film in French actor/director Jacques Nolot’s trilogy about what Variety called “the pragmatic side of gay life.” The film deals with all of the quotidian processes of life. Nolot putters around his apartment at night as his body decays. The meaning of life is bound up in the way that monetary transactions are handled. Sex is a chore, but one that must constantly be attended to. A portrait of the artist as an old man dressed as an old woman. [Screened at the Wexner Center on 03/30/2008]

Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (John Gianvito)

A quiet, inspiring work. John Gianvito conducts a séance with the activists and leaders who strove to create a more just and egalitarian America and channels their spirit in a rousing call to arms to continue their legacy. A rare documentary that inspires you to learn and read and act. As Michael Sicinski wrote in Cinema Scope, “at a time when most attempts at political cinema result in the equivalent of hastily Xeroxed leaflets, Gianvito has produced a document, one that we will no doubt be examining for years to come.” [Screened at the Wexner Center on 10/23/08]

Singing Biscotts (Luther Price)

For the films that he has been making in his Biscotts/Biscuits series, the Boston-based filmmaker Luther Price found an abandoned batch of 13 aged prints of the same documentary (it looks to be a documentary on a southern nursing home from the 1960’s or 70’s). Price then splices sections of nearly identical footage (artfully arranged) together to create near-loops that never quite repeat and never quite progress. Other films in this series use this technique to terrifying and heartbreaking effect, but Singing Biscotts is like a brief moment of glory and yearning frozen in amber as a gospel choir exhales a rondo of fermatas. [Screened at the Wexner Center on 02/26/08]

And ten to grow on (listed in alphabetical order):

Alexandra (Alexander Sokurov)

Burn After Reading (Joel and Ethan Coen)

Colossal Youth (Pedro Costa)

“EMPIRE” (Phil Solomon)

How to Conduct a Love Affair (David Gatten)

Presto (Doug Sweetland)

Right (Scott Stark)

Savage Grace (Tom Kalin)

The Silence Before Bach (Pere Portebella)

Woman on the Beach (Hong Sang-soo)

And the one the got away: Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s exquisite Flight of the Red Balloon would surely factor highly on my list if it had played in Columbus as it had in nearly every other reasonably sized city in the country. (I caught the film during its Dayton run.) We tried numerous times to book the film for screenings at the Wexner Center but another local theater was promising to give the film a longer engagement than we could provide. This obviously never happened and as a result Columbus missed out on a theatrical screening of the film that placed at the top of IndieWire’s poll of 105 film critics from around the country.