50 greatest films & videos of the 2000's

frame enlargements from Robert Breer's What Goes Up

Here is my favorite 50 films made between 2000-2010.

One film per film-maker. In a very arbitrary order of preference:

1. What Goes Up (2003) - Robert Breer
2. Three Times (2005) - Hou Hsiao-hsien
3. The God of Day Had Gone Down Upon Him (2000) - Stan Brakhage
4. Un Lac (2009) - Philippe Grandrieux
5. As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000) - Jonas Mekas
6. Poetry and Truth (2003) - Peter Kubelka
7. Glider (2001) - Ernie Gehr
8. Corpus Callosum (2002) - Michael Snow
9. Miami Vice (2006) - Michael Mann
10. Worldly Desires (2005) - Apichatpong Weerasethakul
11. 'R Xmas (2001) - Abel Ferrara
12. Yi Yi (2000) - Edward Yang
13. Chats perchés (2004) - Chris Marker
14. Ten Videos: 3 (2006) - Kyle Canterbury
15. Le silence de Lorna (2008) - Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne
16. Va savoir (2001) - Jacques Rivette
17. The Decay of Fiction (2002) - Pat O'Neill
18. The Legend of Nile (2009) - Eytan Ipeker
19. L'arrotino (2001) - Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub
20. Two Lovers (2008) - James Gray
21. Sobibór, 14 octobre 1943, 16 heures (2001) - Claude Lanzmann
22. Kedma (2002) - Amos Gitai
23. A Talking Picture (2003) - Manoel de Oliveira
24. Süt (2008) - Semih Kaplanoğlu
25. İklimler (2006) - Nuri Bilge Ceylan
26. Le Temps Qui Reste (2005) - François Ozon
27. Still Life (2006) - Jia Zhang Ke
28. Zodiac (2007) - David Fincher
29. 30 Days of Night (2007) - David Slade
30. Grizzly Man (2005) - Werner Herzog
31. Ohio Postcard (2009) - Ekrem Serdar
32. The Host (2006) - Bong Joon-ho
33. Lachrymae (2000) - Brian Frye
34. Eureka (2000) - Shinji Aoyama
35. Breaking News (2004) - Johnnie To
36. Vicdan (2008) - Erden Kıral
37. Où gît votre sourire enfoui? (2001) - Pedro Costa
38. Songs from the Second Floor (2000) - Roy Andersson
39. EVO (2002) - Oliver Hockenhull
40. La fille coupée en deux (2007) - Claude Chabrol
41. Ten (2002) - Abbas Kiarostami
42. The New World (2005) - Terrence Malick
43. The Edge of Love (2008) - John Maybury
44. Engulfment (3) (2009) - Adam Rokhsar
45. Russian Ark (2002) - Alexander Sokurov
46. I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (2006) - Tsai Ming-liang
47. La frontière de l'aube (2008) - Philippe Garrel
48. Tatil Kitabı (2008) - Seyfi Teoman
49. Buffalo Postcard (for Ekrem) (2009) - Can Eskinazi
50. Orchard (2004) - Julie Murray

Sidney Peterson's "The Potted Psalm" (1947)

To interpret The Potted Psalm is beyond my capacity. I'll just try to react to it.

In Visionary Film, P. Adams Sitney uses the title of this specific film as the title of a whole chapter. And there is a quote by Sidney Peterson over there:

"The connections may or may not be rational. In an intentionally realistic work the question of rationality is not a consideration. What is being stated has its roots in myth and strives through the chaos of the commonplace data toward the kind of inconstant allegory which is the only substitute for myth in a world too lacking in such symbolic formulations. And the statement itself is at least as important as what is being stated."

Vertical pans, rhythmic movements, fetishes, but more importantly, freedom, the liberty to see what happens... A film that grows organically, without any rational connections, always human... Using a phrase from Peterson's Mr. Frenhofer and the Minotaur: "Something that is perfectly natural, but beyond anatomy".

I don't have the book at hand but in Film at wit's end: eight avant-garde filmmakers, Stan Brakhage has detailed comments about the film, and Peterson's art in general.

As Fred Camper writes: "The truly silent cinema of avant-gardists requires no accompaniment—silence deepens the viewer's imaginative involvement."

And one of my favorite quotes on art, by Sidney Peterson:

"These images are meant to play not on our rational senses, but on the infinite universe of ambiguity within us."

In my opinion, the title itself describes Peterson's definition of film as art: Great films are sacred songs that have, unlike ancient songs, a definite form, but they are also like plants, capable of growing in time. According to Merriam-Webster: "Potted" also means "drunk" in slang. I don't if the word was used in this sense at the time, but if it was, then "Potted Psalm" might also mean a sacred but possibly irrational, debauched song. I think all of these interpretations, and others I can't think of, can be true at the same time.

about waysofseeing.org

I've added an About page to waysofseeing.org.

It talks briefly about who I am, about this website, and about the name "ways of seeing".

I was strongly influenced by John Berger's famous book Ways of Seeing when I was a kid but when I was naming this website I didn't want to specifically refer to Berger's book. The phrase at the time meant, and still means something closer to the way Fred Camper uses it in his writings.

Here are some examples from Fred's website:

Permutations 4: The Tower, All Views 13 (2008), by Fred Camper

About his own art:

"I am trying to use multiple images to suggest a traveler's journey of discovery. Cinema is one of several influences, in the many ways that a cut between two different angles of the same scene can open up, or close down, the space, or that camera movement can reshape an entire locale. In film or on paper, images can construct a visual architecture, new ways of seeing space and objects. Presenting an object or locale through multiple images is also a way of undercutting any single view, creating, for the viewer, a voyage through different levels of awareness. Multiple views can also suggest, by extrapolation, an infinitely large number of different ways of seeing an object."

About Gerhard Richter:

"If we learn only one lesson from the last century, it's that artists are constantly redefining what art is, and that each redefinition requires new criteria, new ways of seeing — indeed, that's often the point of the redefinitions."

About Stan Brakhage:

"Part of Brakhage's goal is to enrich viewers' seeing of things in the ordinary world, to help each viewer uncover unique and imaginative ways of seeing."

About Roberto Rossellini:

"There are some zooms in pre-1967 Rossellinis -- there's even one or two in "Generale Della Rovere" -- but starting with "La Prise du Pouvoir par Louis XIV," Rossellini used the zoom pretty continuously. At one point he even had a remote control device built so that he could zoom without looking through the camera, during shooting. The zoom is constantly reframing, going to wider or closer views, and his use of it I think is crucial to the style and ideas of the films: it places every moment of them, every image, at a potential transition point between two or more perspectives, suggesting that at any instant there are other, and in a sense always "wider," possible ways of seeing the situation. Rossellini's late films tend to center around "pivot points" in history, such as the beginning of the Renaissance in "The Age of the Medici," which is consistent with his way of seeing, in which whatever is happening is always on the brink of some momentous change."

My definition of the phrase changes with every new artwork I encounter, which is exactly the point...

Nicole Brenez & Adrian Martin on Stan Brakhage

This is a great article on Stan Brakhage by Nicole Brenez and Adrian Martin. It appeared in Rouge on June 2003.




Brenez and Martin argue that "Brakhage’s films propose a tutoring of the eye, a rapturous attentiveness to the tiniest visual fluctuations and effects."

Somewhere in the article, they quote Brakhage himself:

"This eye is a jelly, and it’s quivering continually, with our heartbeat, with our walking, with our breathing, with anything that happens, any movement we make. And what I did was to make an articulate dance with that possibility, with this lens."

The image is from Cat's Cradle.

Otto Preminger's "Bunny Lake is Missing" (1965)

This is the opening of Preminger's Bunny Lake is Missing. In the first 1 min 53 seconds there are only two cuts. Yet, the camera moves, reacts and reveals... Very much like the film's story slowly revealing itself. In Preminger, the truth is something to be discovered by "an adventure of perception" (using Stan Brakhage's words).

The first shot is 22, the second 38, and the third 53 seconds.

Stan Brakhage's "The Dante Quartet" (1987)

The Dante Quartet (1987), painted over photographed imagery, is one of Brakhage's lushest works: in the "Purgation" segment, colors and images collide with and grind against each other, and in "Existence Is Song," contrasting colors, moonscapes, and volcanoes burst forth like an acre of flowers blooming.

- Fred Camper (in a capsule review he calls Stan Brakhage "a master of subjective vision.")