2002: Bruised Looks and Hidden Smiles By Adrian Martin Adrian Martin is a film critic for The Age (Melbourne, Australia)), and the author of Once Upon a Time in America (BFI, 1998) and Phantasms (Penguin, 1994). His current projects include books on Terrence Malick, Brian De Palma, the Mad Max series and the anthology Movie Mutations (co-edited with Jonathan Rosenbaum). He is a Doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Art and Design, Monash University.

Où git votre sourire enfoui?

Where lies your hidden smile? Pedro Costa's Où git votre sourire enfoui?, the director's preferred feature-length version of an episode of the French TV series Filmmakers of Our Time, was the best film I saw in 2002 (like many on this list, at the Rotterdam Film Festival). A documentary on the stern filmmakers Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet editing a version of Sicilia!, it gives a remarkable insight into the dynamics of an extraordinary couple who fuse art and life, and the intricate materialities of their filmmaking practice. It has a perfect beginning, a perfect ending, and is one of the only films that actually carves out its own, crystalline style from the currently faddish possibilities of 'digital cinema'.

The real Douglas Sirk. This year, it seemed like every second art film released in Australia was pitched as a tribute to Sirk - from Tears of the Black Tiger and Forever Mine (belatedly appearing on video) to 8 Femmes and Satin Rouge, by way, of course, of the overt homage rendered by Todd Haynes' somewhat overrated Far From Heaven. But it was a little-known, black-and-white film by Sirk that came my way which really astonished me: All I Desire (1953). In the fluidity and dramatic condensation of this masterpiece, I found the real Sirk: not the supposed Brechtian ironist, but a filmmaker deeply attuned to the yearnings and sufferings of social victims and victimisers alike. And the perfect director for that greatest of Hollywood actresses, Barbara Stanwyck. Two other vintage films, seen for the first time, filled me with delight: Josef von Sternberg's The Saga of Anatahan (1953) and Fritz Lang's Man Hunt (1941); and a more contemporary classic seen as if for the first time: Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop (1971).

No sexual relation. Michael Haneke's work has improved out of sight with his last two films. The Piano Teacher is a severe, lucid, devastating portrait of a man and woman fated never to connect on the plane of everyday, mundane, sexual desire: she's a grand, high art lady who flies in the face of her culture's prescriptions, he's a silly boy who turns aggressive when his teacher contradicts his misty fantasies of her. Therefore, the ultimate Lacanian film about the non-reciprocity of the sexes. But also an extraordinary essay on high culture itself: the profound alienation and perversity its 'training' virtually demands of its subjects, alongside the utopian sublimity it nonetheless embodies (in Schubert's music). Haneke's no-frills style has never been sharper in its analytical dissections. And will I ever be able to rid myself of that second-last shot of Isabelle Huppert (in the performance of the year), front-on to the camera, plunging that knife into her chest?

Friday's child. There is no filmmaker whose career I follow more intensely than that of Philippe Garrel, still virtually unknown outside of parts of Europe. His Sauvage innocence, viewed three times at Rotterdam, was the most 'plastic', sensual movie I could ever have dreamt up in my besotted fandom. An unusually comic and self-examining film for Garrel, it recreates his autobiographical obsessions and phantasms with new vigour. And it invents at least two of his greatest scenes: the tearing moment of the letter, written, and then read, which severs the relationship between director (writer-guru Mehdi Belhaj Kacem) and actress (Julia Faure, Kacem's real-life partner); and the soulful image-and-sound choreography of the Amsterdam dance, set to Them's "Friday's Child". Which brings us to -

Let the music play. Cinema would be a much poorer medium without, on all levels, the energies of song and dance. This year, inspired 'musical mutations' sprang out everywhere, sometimes in the least likely of places: in Monsoon Wedding, Mira Nair's only good film to date; in the otherwise routine The Guru, with its authentic Bollywood pastiches; in the numbers by Latifa in Youssef Chahine's Silence … on tourne; in the splendid Once More … With Feeling episode of Buffy on TV, instant proof of Joss Whedon's promise as a director; in Swing, the latest wave in Tony Gatlif's unending river of film; in the marvellous opening sequence, Indian music video intercut with looming suburban banality, of Ghost World; in the merry, liberated dance of Goldie Hawn and Susan Sarandon in The Banger Sisters; in the spookily beautiful, nocturnal performance of two women singing opera across balconies in Akerman's La Captive; in the "Technical Foul" number of Adam Sandler's Eight Crazy Nights (no one else is going to mention this film, so I'll do the honours); in Miike Takashi's crazy, amateur romp The Happiness of the Katakuris; and - for me the most sustained and blissful instance - in François Ozon's 8 Femmes, a brilliantly stylised extension of Resnais' indelible musical artifice in Same Old Song. There are movies that produce remarkable 'gestures' in what they show and how they show it: here, everything leads to the moment of Danielle Darrieux singing "There is No Happy Love", and the presentation of all eight women to camera, hands joined …

The avant-garde will kick your ass. Undoubtedly the greatest 20th century artist from the Australia-New Zealand axis ever to storm the art capitals of the world was Len Lye. An eye-opening retrospective exhibition at Monash University in Melbourne showcased his work in sculpture, photography and film; especially memorable was his quasi-narrative vignette of love and the British mail system, N or NW (1937), amazingly ahead of its time. Other avant-garde highlights of the year included Peter Tscherkassky's dazzling Dream Work, the final instalment of his 'Cinemascope Trilogy', taking found footage appropriation into new realms of ecstatic intensity; and Stephen Dwoskin's overwhelming video Intoxicated by My Illness, which figures in its multiple superimpositions the cross-overs between near-death pain and unimaginable pleasure. And a special mention for Nicole Brenez's ongoing 'Court-circuit' series on French TV devoted to masterpieces of avant-garde cinema, the best possible blend of pedagogy and cinephilia.

The long view. Jia Zhangke's Platform appeared on Australian TV over two midnights, unceremoniously chopped into a mini-series. But not even that treatment could rob this great film of its cumulative, haunting quality, its breathtakingly incidental handling of plot information and temporal structure, its distant-yet-close sense of towns, landscapes, communities, and glimpsed personal relations, especially refracted through the everyday prism of acts of musical singing, miming and dancing.

The torment is worth it. Pollock is a triumph for every member of its cast and especially for director Ed Harris - whose place is assured in cinema history already by this one film - and co-writer Barbara Turner, an extraordinary talent. The film has much in common with her project Georgia (1995): the same complex, psychological difficulties between people (artists, critics, patrons, nurturers) lingered over; the same problems of interdependence, crippled self-esteem, and neuroses fatally attached to artistic creativity. Anyone who dismisses this movie as the same old schtick about 'the tormented Romantic artist-genius' doesn't know much about the life of art (what it really takes to bring art forth), and on this plane Pollock joins La belle noiseuse (1991). Which reminds me of -

Triumph of love. The films of older artists are often in search of a precious lightness - and they are routinely dismissed or misunderstood when they achieve it. This has happened to Resnais, to Bertolucci (and to his wife, Clare Peploe, who made the year's most underrated film, the exhilarating Triumph of Love), and now to Jacques Rivette, with Va savoir. In a determinedly old-fashioned way, this film is about the magic of mise en scène at its most classical: the dance of bodies around the four walls (and floor and gables and passageways and roof) of a set, according to a sinuous choreography of attraction and repulsion, masque and revelation, flight and seduction. Hail the wide angle, deep focus lens!

Poetics of the archive. It was a fantastic year for rich, intimate, painstakingly researched documentaries about filmmakers: Martina Kudlácek's In the Mirror of Maya Deren, Sergio Machado's At the Edge of the Earth (about Mario Peixoto, maker of the experimental classic Limite [1931]), and most piercingly Paola Igliori's American Magus, about the polymath collector-filmmaker-collagist-theorist Harry Smith. The strange tale of Smith's secret, performance-art 'marriage' to a woman whom he made dress as a bride and then kiss all the beggars on a street - a woman he then referred to until death as his wife, although they spent no more time together - haunts me still.

Return to Eden. It was marred only by the limit of its auteur's acting ability, but Nanni Moretti's The Son's Room is still a beautiful portrait of what it takes to overcome depressive grief and slowly return to the earthly paradise of normal life. In two twilight works, Oporto of my Childhood and I'm Going Home, Manoel de Oliveira ventures even more profoundly into a strange, giddy, evanescent state between the sheer lightness of truly advanced old age and the dark, terrifying oblivion of impending mortality: he conjures, in this realm, the human as doll or automaton or mere projected image, as ephemeral sensation, intellection, illumination. Can any master make us so aware as de Oliveira of the precious duration of each shot, each fragment of life?

The Dogme has its day. Lone Scherfig's Italian for Beginners was a real surprise for me, partly because I am so immune by now to the charms of the Dogme school. But this, nudging just above Amos Kollek's Fast Food Fast Women, was the finest romantic comedy made anywhere in years: a superb interweaving of the repressed manners of daily life with romantic dreams and fragile human connections. Every detail had its place in the thematic schema, and every character was a gem. And neither Scherfig nor Kollek, for all their droll observation of frailties, were about to give up on the utopia of magical second chances and 'another green world'.

Bruised youth. From its opening fusion of dance music to speedy urban landscapes and languorous, loping teens, I knew that Larry Clark's Bully was the great, underrated movie of the year. Forget the sociology of it, the murder, the malaise, the amorality, the headlines … Clark is a 'termite artist' par excellence, who makes his films in the fine grain, not the broad strokes. And what he captures is the mystery of behaviour among young people whose burning, naked, spaced-out beauty is contradicted by their bruises, their 'tribal' behaviour, their too-fluid, borderless selves. Has any director used the cliché of the 'vignette freeze', with the characters' subsequent destinies appended as text, so powerfully, poignantly and subversively? Subsequently, Clark wasn't able to do much with the telemovie Teenage Caveman beyond those gory body-splitting effects (heck, the whole job took him less than three weeks to shoot); but Ken Park awaits …

A genre's backbone. More than ever, horror cinema is divided between the thoughtless (Ghost Ship) and the thoughtful - with Guillermo Del Toro taking pride of place in the latter category with The Devil's Backbone. In comparison to his slick, American assignment Blade 2, well-mounted but brought to life only in marginal, throwaway grace-notes, this film is a total 'symphony of horror' in a grand tradition, mixing Grand Guignol with philosophical reflection, and a fine sense of moral payback governing the relations between the living and the dead. And with the best final line since Eyes Wide Shut.

National duty. As for my own country's cinema, it produced three good feature films - Rolf de Heer's The Tracker, a boldly stylised 'outback Western' melodrama of race relations; Phillip Noyce's all-stops-out Rabbit-Proof Fence; and the delicate mood-piece by Michael Petroni, Till Human Voices Wake Us - and one exceptional experimental short, James Clayden's The Ghost Paintings 2, the work of an artist who has patiently chiselled out his style in the underground over twenty five years.

The new whodunit. 8 Femmes, Bogdanovich's The Cat's Meow and, above all, Robert Altman's magisterial Gosford Park partake of a new sub-genre: the artful whodunit set in a bygone era, that plays the Agatha Christie-style mystery element for camp, uses it as a scaffold on which to hang historic speculation, and/or unravels the social relations of an ensemble.

Visual pleasure and non-narrative cinema. Seijun Suzuki's delirious Pistol Opera: "As always, the result is curious", ran his note to the Rotterdam crowd. I will never fully understand this bizarre film (will anyone?), but I was absolutely mesmerised by its spectacle. Next best thing: Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark.

Globalisation fails. Sven Taddicken's My Brother the Vampire: in a just world, this outrageous, spirited comedy (the funniest contemporary film since the Korean Barking Dogs Never Bite) about disability and incest would be a smash hit in multiplexes everywhere. Alas, it can only be in most places an 'art movie', unless it suffers the fate of an American remake and ends up like Vanilla Sky or The Ring, the most horrifyingly useless films I saw this year.

… and the kitchen sink. Two subtle, finely wrought examples of British realism tend to drop off the radar at this platitudinous end of the year: Ken Loach's The Navigators, with its sly turn into political noir in the final movement; and Paul Greengrass' Bloody Sunday, deeply moving and involving in its grasp of the on-the-ground complexity of a political 'event'.

Reading notes. Best film books of the year: the ultimate work of 'close analysis' that still manages to run everywhere at once, A Long Hard Look at Psycho (British Film Institute) by Raymond Durgnat, who died in May; Jean-Baptiste Thoret's Dario Argento: Magicien de la peur (Cahiers du cinéma), a sophisticated, groundbreaking study of a still ghettoised director by a critic who embodies the new intellectual and activist vitality in French cinema culture; Peter Wollen's essay collection Paris Hollywood (Verso), particularly its opening "Alphabet of Cinema"; Barrett Hodsdon's angry and relentless Straight Roads and Crossed Lines: The Quest for Film Culture in Australia? (Bernt Porridge), the kind of exposé that every country, at some sclerotic moment, sorely needs; Studying Contemporary American Film: A Guide to Movie Analysis (Arnold) by Thomas Elsaesser and Warren Buckland, a pedagogical text which is also a brilliant, synthesising contribution to film theory and methodology. Worst film book of the year: David Thomson's disgraceful The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (Knopf). Magazine highlights - dossiers rule: the Max Ophuls dossier in CineAction no. 59, September 2002, eds. Florence Jacobowitz & Richard Lippe; the Larry Clark dossier in Balthazar no. 5, Spring 2002, eds. Cyril Béghin, Sophie Charlin, Stéphane Delorme & Mathias Lavin; the "Cine Argentino" dossier in De Filmkrant, September 2002, ed. Belinda van de Graaf, on-line version at www.filmkrant.nl/av/org/filmkran/home.html; and the mammoth latest issue (no. 7) of Otrocampo, in three languages, devoted to (hi)stories of film criticism, ed. Victoria Ciaffone, <www.otrocampo.com/7/index.html>. Essays: Robin Wood on The Piano Teacher, CineAction no. 59 - and Ken Mogg's reflections upon Wood in the 'Editor's Day' column of The MacGuffin website; "For Wanda" by Bérénice Reynaud, Senses of Cinema no. 22, September-October 2002; Jonathan Rosenbaum on Dovzhenko in the Chicago Reader; Shelly Kraicer's "Stephen Chiau: A Guide for the Perplexed" in Cinema Scope no. 10, March 2002.

Stolen moments. The shock ending of Jeepers Creepers. Feet on a red carpet, on and on, in and out, as the camera relentlessly tracks, in Argento's Sleepless. Joey Lauren Adams in James Toback's Harvard Man. Almighty destruction of the 'iron horse' in Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron. Mojo Jojo and his infernal legion in The Powerpuff Girls Movie. "I'm taking a swim in Lake Me" (Full Frontal). Sean Penn fluffing a line during the voice-over narration of Dogtown and Z-Boys. Passionate kissing in the street after Joseph Fiennes beats the stuffing out a passing mugger in Killing Me Softly. Mounting, ludicrous histrionics as the clock ticks and a child's life waits in the balance in John Q. A strange phantasm about Clint Eastwood's literally heartfelt compassion towards several, underprivileged, non-white races in Blood Work.

Quote of the year. Budding filmmaker Dawson to Amy, film critic for The Boston Weekly, on TV's Dawson's Creek:

Dawson: In your review of Almost Famous, you said it was the kind of film that reminds us why we still go to movies … It gave me chills.

Amy: Yeah, me too when I wrote it.

                                                                 © FILM JOURNAL 2002