Screen Machine

26 Comments

• 
  Brad Nguyen
  27/01/11 - 7:14 PM
  

  We should make it a rule that a movie starring Jesse Eisenberg must feature in the #1 slot every year.

• 
  Bertolt Brecht
  27/01/11 - 7:38 PM
  

  I’m impressed by the titles you kids managed to list, while ignoring most of the mediocrity of the year – thank god for the lack of Inception.

  My favourites are the Rivette, Polanski and Kiarostami.

• 
  Brad Nguyen
  27/01/11 - 7:48 PM
  

  I think Adrian will appreciate being referred to as a kid.

• 
  Bertolt Brecht
  27/01/11 - 8:42 PM
  

  No condescension intended – I am 112-years-old, it must be noted. If you’d like, you can edit my above post and surrogate “kids” with “guys” – I’d hate to seem disingenuous. And I somehow missed the placement of Uncle Boonmee on the initial glance, but that was the film I liked most.

• 
  Conall Cash
  28/01/11 - 9:20 AM
  

  maybe Zombieland 2 will be the #1 film for 2011

• 
  Surbhi Goel
  28/01/11 - 5:36 PM
  

  It is a very good film list – avoids cliche and more representative of the World Cinema.

• 
  Brad Nguyen
  28/01/11 - 7:59 PM
  

  Thanks Surbhi! I’d call it charmingly schizophrenic. (Plus there’s at least one film on the list that I detest…)

• 
  Zora
  29/01/11 - 12:16 AM
  

  I secretly despise Jessie Eisenberg. He’s everything that’s wrong with glamour-nerds. He was great in Social Network, but that’s barely a compliment.

• 
  Zora
  29/01/11 - 12:17 AM
  

  Jesse I mean! I know he’s a boy.

• 
  Brad Nguyen
  02/02/11 - 2:09 PM
  

  But what’s great about Jesse Eisenberg is that he is actually convincing as a nerd (or as a neurotic)! Compare him to Michael Cera or the Flight of the Conchords guys who are obviously just cool, pop-culture savvy, popular guys playing at being nerds.

• 
  Jake Wilson
  02/02/11 - 8:11 PM
  

  Isn’t pop culture savvy meant to be a leading nerd characteristic? One could argue all the same that Cera doesn’t always/usually play nerds — Pauly Bleeker in Juno is an athlete, Scott Pilgrim is a hipster who has no trouble attracting girls. He and Eisenberg haven’t much in common, though they rank equally highly in my book.

• 
  Jessie
  03/02/11 - 10:14 AM
  

  Spoken like a couple of nerds.

• 
  Maggie
  04/02/11 - 12:00 PM
  

  Hey, I just realised this list is looking a little Triple J Hottest 100 with only the one lone female director. I know this is more reflective of the film industry being male dominated that any discrimination on our part, but it’s interesting right? I’m a bit bored with the reverence of the male auteur director. Will more lady directors step up goddammit!

• 
  jessie
  04/02/11 - 1:13 PM
  

  Winter’s Bone also directed by a chick. But yes, apart from that, a total sausage fest.

• 
  jessie
  04/02/11 - 1:14 PM
  

  whoops, I got confused, yes she is the only director- I had brad’s white material review in my head (which should’ve made it to this list too, IMO)

• 
  Brad Nguyen
  05/02/11 - 6:10 PM
  

  It’s an interesting question, Maggie. But I think it’s ultimately not so productive to merely count the women and men who made the list and act as if that tells us something about the films themselves. Rather, we could ask questions such as: Can we discern a “male” aesthetic? Should we necessarily define all the films above as male films? What – of the films above – remains feminine? What – of films made even by women – remains masculine?

  I agree that the film industry still suffers from gender imbalance, and that this is reflected somewhat in this list, but ultimately the question is an aesthetic one. If we had numerical equality of men and women in the industry, but the industry remained committed to peddling the same capitalist fantasies, the same politics of domination, that would remain a concern I think.

• 
  jessie
  07/02/11 - 8:22 AM
  

  I would argue that there have never been enough women at the top of the industry to know whether it would make a difference or not.
  As such, positive discrimination is still relevant (lordy, after all this time, still!).
  As such, I think reducing it to whether a film seems “masculine” or “feminine” kind of misses the point. It’s like saying, oh, we don’t really need women, cos men can be feminine too.
  Representation, access, self-definition all need to be continually built towards, or we continue to slide backwards.

• 
  Brad Nguyen
  07/02/11 - 6:28 PM
  

  “It’s like saying, oh, we don’t really need women, cos men can be feminine too.”

  That’s a pretty willful misreading of my comment, really. My point is that fighting a patriarchal system means more than just fixing numbers. It entails a critique of the whole structure of power. This is why, for example, someone like Judith Butler argues that queer politics is inseparable from the fight for equality on other terms such as race.

  Do you really think that women such as Margaret Thatcher and Sarah Palin have really disrupted patriarchy? In any case, we are not in the business of praising mediocre films merely because they are directed by women. We are in the business of taking films seriously on their own terms regardless of gender.

• 
  sam c
  07/02/11 - 7:17 PM
  

  I thought there were a lot of great female directed films last year that I expected to show up in the top lists more – Walking and Talking, Fish Tank, The Runaways, The Kids are Alright etc

• 
  Brad Nguyen
  07/02/11 - 8:01 PM
  

  It’s possible I would have put White Material on my list if only I had seen it last year!

• 
  Jessie
  07/02/11 - 10:34 PM
  

  Well, I would argue that we have never gotten to a point in politics or film where we could definitively know what an alternative to the patriarchal system might be- which is why numbers still matter. There is so much resistance to it though- even as you are talking about the importance of a critique of the patriarchal system on multiple fronts- you are being simultaneously (intuitively) defensive of the canonical system perpetuated by this very blog. Is there anything more patriarchal than the systemic ranking (reducing)of arbitrary things, categorising and organising them in this way?

• 
  Maggie
  08/02/11 - 1:55 PM
  

  (Oops, a bit late to this discussion) Brad – it’s a stretch to say that counting to one is an act of counting the gender imbalance in this list. I understand that lists such as this can only reflect the output of the industry, so it does seem that women are still not taken seriously as auteur filmmakers and don’t ‘head’ as many films as men do. (Note: the Auteur is, in the modernist sense, a singularly inspired, creative genius of the male persuasion – which is clearly what we predominantly value in this list). I know there’s no point whinging about gender imbalances, because I think the only choice female filmmakers have is to fight harder to step up to the role of auteur, despite the obstacles of industry. But film critics have a role in helping to widen the focus – we should actively keep an eye out for women filmmakers (as we would anyone with a challenging perspective) and – as you say Brad – consider the aesthetic value of their work more often. And I’m talking about the value of ‘real’ cinemaah that questions power structures (which we’ll always have plenty of) not capitalist fantasies (which we’ll probably always have far too much of). But until there are more films by talented women with which to compare to the abundance made by talented males, it’s hard to make such distinctions as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ film.

• 
  Brad Nguyen
  08/02/11 - 6:09 PM
  

  Jessie – I don’t understand this claim that somehow this site has a hypocritical male chauvinist leaning because we came up with an end-of-year list. You accuse the site of perpetuating a canonical system without perhaps having even read the article you are commenting on. As per the intro: “We hope that the pieces we’ve written on each of the twenty films that appear here are of greater use and interest to readers than the mock-suspense of learning what finishes in which position.” In addition, Conall is full of negative things to say about our number one film. We also published the individual lists to show the breadth of taste amongst our writers. If anything, our list is an anti-canon, designed to provoke discussion rather than solidify taste. (I think what has also been lost in this conversation is that I never said that the lack of women represented in this list was not problematic. That my encouragement to take a feminist critique of cinema to a deeper level than merely noting the sex of a director resulted in reactionary accusations of misogyny is a little disappointing to be quite honest.)

  Maggie – Again, I agree with you. The disparity between the number of men and women on this list is troubling. But from the same token, I don’t think I could accuse a single person amongst our contributors of not taking females seriously as auteurs. But, yes, a site like Screen Machine should be championing women filmmakers. And I would argue that we do just that, especially when judged by our general content, as opposed to this one specific article. (A note about feminine/masculine film: I don’t think it’s particularly desirable to look at films by women in order to try to discern a unifying aesthetic. I think this would be truly reductive. When I use the term “feminine” I use it not as literally referring to the style of films by female directors but as an aesthetic category that positions itself in opposition to the dominant ideological/aesthetic mode. Under such an analysis, films by female directors will have to stand the same scrutiny as those by male directors. For are not females and males – and everyone in-between – equally able to be subversive or conservative?)

• 
  jessie
  09/02/11 - 8:48 AM
  

  Reading back over these comments, it is really hard to see who has over-reacted to what first, but I feel we have misread each other. I don’t think you are a misogynist. I do think you are extremely sensitive & defensive about any perceived criticism of this blog. However, I will also acknowledge a certain amount of willful misreading of your arguments. I think it’s safe to say we are both pretty argumentative people, and both like to have the final word- and will turn ourselves inside out to have that final word, even if it means contradicting ourselves or putting forward arguments we have little faith in (which is a hard thing for me to admit, and maybe not something you will even own, but I suspect is true for you too). I think it’s probably better if we leave this debate here, before we bore the shit out of anyone still reading this, including ourselves.

• 
  Dr Benway
  07/07/11 - 4:34 PM
  

  Scot Pilgrim Vs The World at 14… Just curious why Kick Ass wasn’t there instead. Kick Ass was wittier, the fight scenes were better Hit Girl would destroy Scott Pilgrim any day of the week, by this I mean she was a more convincing fighter choreographically (is this a real word?) speaking. These are scientific facts not merely subjective observations…

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