Queen Jeanne

Ten years ago, I was so interested in the release of Sight & Sound's new critics' poll on the greatest movies of all time, which comes out every ten years on the 2's, that I devoted three different posts to it, including the one where a friend and I both revealed our own ten votes, which you can find here. 

This time, I guess I've got more going on, as I considered not even mentioning it on my blog at all.

Then I thought, If I can't give at least a passing mention to something that occurs only once a decade, what kind of film blogger am I?

I considered updating the list linked above. I'm pretty sure 2001: A Space Odyssey, which topped the directors' poll this year, would make it on my personal list now. I've also soured a little bit on Rear Window since last time, though I need another viewing to see if my last viewing in 2015 just caught me on a bad night.

But even when you've been writing a film blog for nearly 14 years, it can be boring to write the same post twice, so I'm going to skip over that idea and instead register my shock at this year's new poll topper.

I had not even seen Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles when the last list was released. I rectified that in 2018, but only after sitting through its arduous and intentionally monotonous 201 minutes over the course of two nights. I considered myself better for having seen it but I cannot say I actually liked it in the traditional sense. In some respects it is one of the most uncinematic films I have ever seen. 

And now it has been voted by critics as only the fourth film ever to top the list.

The Bicycle Thief (still refusing the plural over here) was the first ever list-topper in 1952, before Citizen Kane launched a (justified) reign of terror that ran the next half century, until just before the 2012 list was released. Even when the list was separated into two lists in 1992, divided between critics and directors, neither group moved off of Kane until 2012, when both dropped it in favor of Vertigo (critics) and Tokyo Story (directors). 

I was incensed enough when my beloved Kane was overthrown by the overrated Vertigo, but this ... this is something else.

"Incensed" is not the right word this time. "Puzzled" is probably better.

On the one hand I applaud that Sight & Sound's attempt to diversify its voting body has yielded what would appear to be immediate results. It seems impossible not to draw a correlation between the invitation to more female critics, and the existence of more female critics in general, and the rapid ascension of a film that they obviously believe speaks to the essential experience of women. 

On the other hand, in a list designed as intentionally slow-moving, where one film was king for 50 years, should we really be seeing such a rapid ascension? Jeanne Dielman was a mere #36 in 2012, and the only event that occurred in the ten years since then to raise its profile was the suicide of its director, Chantal Akerman -- which could indeed be used as a lens to add intensity to the film's themes.

Then again this list is fundamentally an expression of passion inspired in its voters at the time of their vote, not some stodgy adherence to the status quo. One of the 2022 list's great surprises on the positive side is the #30 debut of Celine Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire, my #2 of 2019 that still makes me swoon any time I think about it. It may be that this film will never get any closer to #1, and probably that it should not, but the fact that it has this moment to commit to permanence its impact on critics is really terrific. And of course it's likely we have female critics to thank for this as well.

And it's not like they've cleared the deck of the old standard bearers. Vertigo is still #2, Citizen Kane is still #3. I hate to think of Kane as "only" the third best movie of all time, but Kane doesn't need Sight & Sound to continue delivering accolades to it. It is thoroughly and utterly chalk at this point.

I want to pause to acknowledge a slight grammatical deviation in the listing of the full title of Jeanne Dielman, now that the film is getting such attention. I'm seeing it listed primarily with an additional comma than the one I'd been using, as Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles rather than Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. (The poster above has yet a third punctuation, with only one comma after 23.) 

I'm going to keep the punctuation I've used over the years whenever I've mentioned it -- this used to be my go-to joke for a long and ungainly title, even before I saw it -- for a couple reasons. One is that having the 23 offset by commas makes it seem like it is Jeanne's age, which we know is not correct because the character has a grown son. Furthermore, its points would be considerably hollower if we were talking about a woman just five years out of high school -- the whole idea is that her life has settled into a drudgery of household chores and tricks with johns. Another reason is that Wikipedia, which I trust implicitly whether I should or not, continues to use the punctuation I've been using, though notably, IMDB uses the one I've been seeing passed around since the Sight & Sound list was revealed. It could be that IMDB scrambled to fix it up just within the last few days, I don't know.

In 2012 it seems like the top 250 vote getters were readily available to find, but this year's articles about the poll seem to focus on the top 100, so I'll make some isolated comments about those top 100 for the remainder of this piece.

#4 - Tokyo Story - This is my preferred example of how to make a slow-moving film that lulls us into a total understanding of its themes by the end. I wrote a long piece on this movie in college and I'm really due for another viewing.

#6 - 2001: A Space Odyssey - As mentioned, this topped the directors' poll and rightly so, as this film has shot up majorly in my estimation as a result of two viewings (one on the big screen in 70 mm) since the 2012 poll. This is now in my personal top 20 on Flickchart and I couldn't be happier to see all the voters continue to shower it with praise. (And yes, it makes sense that this would top the directors' poll as it is a very "directy" film, as I wrote to a friend yesterday.)

#7 - Beau Travail - Okay ladies, you need to calm down now. This is the highest ranked film I haven't seen, and it was another film directed by a woman, Claire Denis. In its way, the ascension of this film could be considered even more shocking than Jeanne Dielman, as it was only at #74 in 2012. Guess I will prioritize a viewing now.

#9 - Man With a Movie Camera - Another film I had not seen in 2012, this one truly earns its spot. I awarded this five stars on Letterboxd when I finally watched it in 2020. 

#14 - Cleo from 5 to 7 - This makes three female directors in the top 15, which really, is a good thing, whatever shock I may be registering. I had meant to watch this when I acquainted myself with the films of Agnes Varda a few years ago but for some reason couldn't find it. Second movie in the top 100 I haven't seen.

#16 - Meshes in the Afternoon - Female co-directed (Maya Deren). Third unseen.

#17 - Close Up - I had only just seen Abbas Kiarostami's film when the last list was revealed. Really deserving. 

#27 - Shoah - This movie is like nine hours long and it still breaks my notion of what a film is, so I still have not seen it. Fourth unseen.

#28 - Daisies - Another female director. Fifth unseen.

#31 - Mirror - Tarkovsky. Sixth unseen.

#43 - Killer of Sheep - Another film newly seen by me in the last decade. Wasn't quite this impressed with it but like that it's on the list.

#48 - Wanda - Directed by Barbara Loden, another woman. First film on this list whose title is not actually familiar to me at all. Seventh unseen. 

#52 - News from Home - Chantal Akerman's second film on the list. I wasn't aware of this, apparently, when I watched two movies by Akerman for my Audient Auteurs series in 2018, watching the similarly titled No Home Movie to go along with Jeanne Dielman. Eighth unseen. 

#52 - Fear Eats the Soul - I actually wanted to watch Rainer Werner Fassbinder films for the above-mentioned Audient Auteurs series, but I think there was an availability issue with his films. (Incidentally, I always heard this referred to as Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, but I guess Ali has gone away.) Ninth unseen. 

#54 - Sherlock Jr. - This was a first-time viewing for me in 2016, and I really wish it were in the top ten. 

#54 - Le Mepris (Contempt) - Godard. Tenth unseen. 

#59 - Sans Soleil + #60 - Daughters of the Dust - Two more movies that I've watched for the first time since last list. I wasn't using that list as an official watchlist but it looks like I did some good work in the past ten years.

#60 - Moonlight - Second film that could not have made a previous list. 

#66 - Touki Bouki - Eleventh unseen. 

#67 - The Gleaners and I - This is what I watched when I watched Varda films for Audient Auteurs and couldn't get my hands on Cleo. Another first-time viewing in the past ten. Really good film.

#67 - Andrei Rublev - Another Tarkovsky I haven't seen, though ten years ago I hadn't seen any, and now I've seen three, so I guess that's something. Twelfth unseen. 

#72 - My Neighbor Totoro - It seems hard to believe that in 2012 I had only seen one Miyazaka film, that being Spirited Away, and now I have seen all but his first and his most recent. Did I mention I've been doing good work in the past ten years? Totoro is my favorite.

#72 - Journey to Italy - Thirteenth unseen.

#72 - L'avventura - Another first-time watch in the past ten.

#75 - Imitation of Life and Sansho the Bailiff - Two more first-time watches since the 2012 list, though I really didn't like Sansho the Bailiff. 

#78 - A Brighter Summer Day, Satanango and Celine and Julie Go Boating - Fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth unseen. 

#78 - A Matter of Life and Death - I really need to stop listing the films I've watched for the first time in the past ten years. I get it, I've been a good doobie. This is one of my favorites of those.

#84 - Pierrot le Fou, Histoire du Cinema and Spirit of the Beehive - Seventeenth through nineteenth unseen.

#88 - Chungking Express - I can't tell you how many times I've tried to find this. I can't. Twentieth unseen. 

#90 - Parasite - That's two 2019 films to debut on this list, though I would have liked to see my #1 from that year higher.

#90 - Yi Yi - I have also tried to find this without success. Twenty-first unseen.

#97 - Get Out - Final film debuting in the top 100 that did not yet exist in 2012. It's interesting to note that the debuts are from two Black male directors, one Korean male director and one French female director. That's some good diversity right there.

#95 - Black Girl and Tropical Malady. And we end with a total of 23 unseen movies.

I'll have you know that I skipped mentioning five more films that I had seen since 2012 after vowing to stop that. I also missed a few earlier (sorry Battle of Algiers, I love you) but I'm not going to go back and correct that now. 

So having seen 77% of the top 100 is pretty good, certainly a lot better than I did last time. And now I've got a good list to work from for next time, though with the way this list tends to randomly unearth movies that aren't household names for cinephiles, I don't suspect I'll have any chance of hitting the full top 100 in 2032. 

Sounds like a long time from now, but I guess 2022 sounded like a long time from 2012. I'll be 59. Perish the thought.

I should probably give an additional shout out to the directors' list, which, as in 2012, seems like more a reflection of the films they actually like than the films they think they should like. In my 2012 post linked above, I said that the critics seemed to try to out-impress each other while the directors were more likely to geek out on a perceived peer that they admired, tending for (slightly) more mainstream fare. Many of the titles are of course the same, but a handful I'll shout out that I'm happy to see are Taste of Cherry, The Conformist, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Wild Strawberries, A Separation, The Seventh Seal, Jaws, Eraserhead, Don't Look Now and Dr. Strangelove. They only had room for two of the first-time eligible movies, Parasite and Moonlight. Minus points for including Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom on their list -- also an unfortunate first-time viewing in the past decade. Blecch. 

I guess once I got writing about Sight & Sound I had a fair amount to say after all.

See you back here in ten years.

The best and worst annoyingly long movie titles

You’d think that there would not be any good “annoyingly long movie titles.” The very name discounts the possibility of them being good.

But I think it’s possible for something to be annoyingly long and still good, or at least, still funny.

Today I hope to throw some words at the topic of annoyingly long movie titles, inspired by the upcoming release of Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn, which is decidedly an example of the latter. As in, the worst.

Come on, it’s just Birds of Prey, screw all that other noise. And most movie marquees around the country and the world will, indeed, be screwing all that other noise. You will not see the full title of this movie on any movie marquee in the world. But you will see it on every poster for the movie, albeit in significantly smaller type, which means some idiot in the marketing department at the studio is still trying to make And the Fantabulous Emancipation (breath) of One Harley Quinn happen.

But not every annoyingly long title is And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn. Maybe it’s only because I really liked the movie, naming it my #1 movie of 2014 and one of the top 25 of the last decade, but this new title reminds me most of Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), a title for which I developed a limited fondness. As they are both, broadly, superhero movies, I even feel like Harley Quinn (I’m not writing that damn thing out again) is borrowing inspiration from Birdman. Both also seem to have pretentious ambitions, which again, I accept because the movie really worked for me in Birdman’s case.

Of course, probably the best example of the annoyingly long movie title is the one that does so specifically for the purposes of humor. Well, you might argue that most annoyingly long movie titles are done for humor, as otherwise you’d just switch to something more palatable. But there are certainly degrees to which the humor does or does not work.

Take, for example, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Borat’s broken, some might say strangled, English was one of the biggest jokes about the character, so a title that is grammatically awkward, unduly worshipful of the man’s home country, and also gets at an obsession with America and its pop culture, is like killing three birds with one stone. I’ve made it a point of pride that I can roll off this title without any errors, when asked. (Because that particular scenario arrives just about every day.)

But long character-based titles don’t work just because it’s a somewhat beloved character. Sometimes they just try our patience. A couple years ago, the movie with the longest title on my whole movie list came out. It was called Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond – Featuring a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton. So Tony Clifton may not be beloved, but Jim Carrey and Andy Kaufman may both be, to varying degrees. But this title pretty much just made me smack my forehead. Suffice it to say that I definitely had to look up the correct wording just now.

The movie whose title is long just to make fun of the idea of long titles is also usually a bust. The first movie I’m discussing today that I haven’t seen is a prime example of that. That would be Don’t be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood. Now that I’ve written it out, I think the title is not trying to make fun of the idea of long titles so much as it is being silly by trying to literally string together about four different titles. At least it’s better than Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13^th. There’s one more of these titles that is like twice this length but I’m having trouble tracking it down.

My favorite purely innocent long title is The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain. I suppose there is something cheeky about this – they could have figured out a simpler title if they’d wanted to – but the title does do an admirable job of describing what the movie is about, as it is about a provincial debate in the Welsh countryside about whether a local elevated surface is better described as a hill or a mountain. For a while, this was my favorite movie title to bring up in joke circumstances, when I was looking for something awkward to encapsulate a small, idiosyncratic non-blockbuster.

Supplanting The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain as my go-to random long title was Jeanne Dielmann, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which is not an easy choice as I always have to look up the exact wording, but is fun anyway. As this is an arthouse film with a very serious demeanor, this title exists to capture the everyday humdrum quality of a person’s life by naming the movie after her street address, not to be whimsical in any way, shape or form.

It’s probably worth including a subsection in this post about earnest documentaries with long subtitles, like Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief or If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front or Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place, but I don’t know that their length is “annoying.” Or if it is, it’s only annoying because it sounds more like the name of a graduate thesis than a movie.

I’m sure I’m only scratching the surface of movies whose titles test our patience and don’t always reward us, but I can’t end this discussion without mentioning probably the actual best movie to be guilty of a thing like this, which is Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. If Stanley Kubrick did it, there has to be some merit there, right?

As for this new movie coming out, I think the main things that annoy me about the title are that it a) makes up a word, b) uses the word “one” as though pretending we don’t know who Harley Quinn is, and c) suggests that the movie is entirely about the fact that she has been “emancipated” from her relationship with the Joker, or at least so it would appear.

I think I’ve had enough references to the Joker for a couple years, thank you very much.

Audient Auteurs: Chantal Akerman

This is the final installment of my 2018 monthly series Audient Auteurs, in which I’ve been seeing two movies per month from a renowned director whose works had previously eluded me.

I spent a lot of this series not knowing who my next auteur would be and whether I would be able to track down any of his or her movies, but I’m ending it on a positive note. Not only am I finishing with one of the directors on my original list, but she also adds some diversity to the group, becoming my third woman of the 11 auteurs I’ve watched for this series.

That would be Chantal Akerman, the Belgian director whose life came to a tragic end when she committed suicide in 2015 at age 65. So I guess it’s only sort of ending the series on a positive note.

When I looked for Akerman earlier in the year, I swear I could not find any of her stuff available for streaming or rental. I guess I should say, I couldn’t find Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles anywhere, and didn’t look beyond that because I didn’t see any point in watching Akerman if I was not going to watch that. It may have been user error on the search or its availability may have actually changed over the course of the year, but when I took another look in November, voila, Jeanne Dielman was available for rental on iTunes. Not only that, but I could select my second film from a handful of others also available for rental.

I have a funny pre-existing relationship with Jeanne Dielman, which is that it has taken over the mantle of the title I go to when I am looking for a random obscure movie with a long and unwieldy title. In these situations I used to always use The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain, but Jeanne Dielman has eclipsed it in perceived humor value, probably because it’s in French and has all those commas. And as I did eventually see Englishman, I figured I was destined to one day catch Jeanne Dielman. That day ended up being December 4^th. And 5^th. But we’ll get into that in a moment.

First, a bit about Akerman. She was born in Brussels to a Holocaust survivor in 1950, and attended a Brussels film school at age 18. She claimed to have been inspired to become a filmmaker by Godard’s Pierrot le Fou, and you can see that Godard’s non-traditional approach to filmmaking has rubbed off on Akerman’s films. Stylistically, she’s known her for use of long takes and for her incorporation of feminist themes into her work, specifically the toxic intersection of femininity and domesticity. However, Akerman also rejected the labels critics tried to ascribe to her, be they “Jewish” or “feminist” or “lesbian,” and claimed to feel more of her identity stemmed from her relationship to her mother, with whom she was very close. She killed herself in October of 2015 after being hospitalized with depression.

Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)

This is not just a long title – it’s a long movie. I knew that going in. I can’t imagine getting much more bang for your rental dollar, on a per minute basis. The movie is three hours and 21 minutes long.

That wouldn’t be a surprise if it were some kind of war epic, but Jeanne Dielman is as far away from that as you can get in. In fact, it’s a portrait of three days in the life of a suburban Belgian mother who feeds and houses her young adult son. And it’s three days in which nothing much happens. Jeanne’s life is one dominated by chores – washing the dishes, preparing meals, doing the laundry, running errands around the neighborhood. Oh, and there’s also the occasional sex with a stranger. See, Jeanne supports herself and her son through prostitution.

That makes this movie sound exciting in some way, but it’s really not, and that’s by design. Dialogue is sparse, and usually pedestrian when it does occur. The interactions with the johns are mostly boring as well. This is meant to be a stultifying 200-minute document of the tediousness of this woman’s domestic life, and though something does happen in the final 15 minutes, I think it’s worth not spoiling for you what that thing is, or how effective it is as an outcome of what’s come before.

Any movie that goes on for more than three hours involves some kind of strategy for watching it, whether that’s splitting it up over the course of several viewings or engaging in some other task while you’re watching. I did both. In fact, I got this idea that the best way to watch Jeanne do chores was to do chores myself. So I did put away laundry. I did write Christmas cards. I did wash dishes. In fact, there was one brief moment when Jeanne and I were both cutting vegetables at the same time. It was sublime.

Watching this for three hours and 20 minutes is some kind of endurance test, but it does have its moments of reward. Although Jeanne’s interactions with her son are mostly banal, each night as he’s going to bed he plunges into some kind of thoughtful and in-depth analysis of a past event in their life, involving his father, or a dream he had. In a movie chock full of dialogue, a moment like this might not mean much, but in this movie it does make you sit up and take notice. Ditto a scene where Jeanne reads a letter from her sister. I thought the film’s most profound moment is when Jeanne is standing at her door after returning the baby she’s been babysitting to the mother. You can’t see the mother – you can only see Jeanne on her side of the door – but you can hear the mother’s disjointed comments on being at the butcher and trying to figure out what to order. When she gets to the front and hasn’t decided, because it’s not her comfort zone, she panics and orders the same thing the woman in front of her ordered. This little anecdote mirrors the desperation we are starting to realize that Jeanne also feels.

There are some interesting formal things Akerman is doing here as well. The camera is exclusively stationary as the film is composed entirely of long takes of mundane activities. One thing that’s interesting, though, is how many of the shots involve Jeanne walking into or out of a room and turning its lights on or off. It demonstrates the way Jeanne’s life can be compartmentalized into all these little “rooms,” these chores and tedious obligations, which get switched on and off ad infinitum until the end of time.

I ultimately came out positively on Jeanne Dielman, but I kind of feel like the same effect could have been accomplished in half the time, and it still would have felt quite long and tedious (in the useful ways Akerman is intending, I mean). There’s certainly something impressive about how the actress, Delphine Seyrig, goes through these tasks in a single take without botching them, and how her commitment to the project brings home the soul-killing nature of this woman’s existence. However, as can be the case with art films, you get the concept pretty early on, and it’s hard to compute exactly what quantity of it is really needed to achieve the goal. Why 201 minutes? Why not 401 minutes? Why not film three days in real time? Certainly, part of what makes Jeanne Dielman Jeanne Dielman is the torturous running time, and it wouldn’t feel like nearly the experiment it is at only 90 minutes. Even at 90 minutes, though, it would still be a distinct creation, and would have been possible for me to take down in a single sitting. And maybe consider watching a second time at some point in the future.

I actually watched Jeanne Dielman for even longer than I needed to. The resumption of one of my pauses during the 48-hour rental window brought me back to an earlier point in the running time without me initially realizing it. I watched footage I’d already seen for somewhere between 15 or 20 minutes before realizing I’d already watched it. I just thought the repetitive nature of it all was part of the point.

No Home Movie (2015)

Flash forward 40 years and Akerman is still interested in some of the same things, though this time, they relate to her own mother. No, her mom was not a prostitute -- I think we established earlier she was a Holocaust survivor. And though I suppose those two things are not mutually exclusive, let's give her the benefit of the doubt.

This is a documentary that consists largely of conversations between Akerman and her mother in the last months of her mother's life -- some in person, some over Skype. There's a lot of eating of meals in her mother's home, some chores, even some turning on and off of lights. It made me wonder if this also constituted the core text of Akerman's other films that I haven't seen.

It appears she may have finished filming but not finished editing before Natalia Akerman died. Akerman never states that her mother died -- that would not be very Akerman of her -- but the images she chooses to close the film create that impression. After two hours of footage mostly of her mother pottering around her Brussels house, her health steadily deteriorating, the final shots are of the house without her in them. These are not the movie's first lingering shots of the house -- lingering a bit too long, some might argue -- but they are the first in which the elder Akerman does not eventually wander into the shot. That's saying something without actually saying it.

The film has other footage that doesn't obviously relate to Natalia Akerman and her immediate environs/circle of acquaintances. There are a number of long takes of a camera looking out the windows of moving vehicles at barren landscapes and the like. This is travel footage but there is no overt explanation of its relationship to Akerman (who appears regularly in the film) and her mother. Some of them last for five or six minutes. In fact, the film's most profound shot is its opening shot, which shows a tree against such a landscape being buffeted about by violent winds. This too goes on for several minutes, and is sort of hypnotizing.

As with Jeanne Dielman, there are a number of profound moments, but a lot of material that strikes me as a bit indulgent. Comparing this to other documentaries or narrative features is a bit apples to oranges, as this is clearly a personal film about an extremely personal subject -- which is also why I feel very hesitant about criticizing it in any way. Never mind the fact that it was Akerman's last movie, as she killed herself the year after her mother died, which was the same year the film was released. Clearly her relationship with her mother was one of the things that had been sustaining her.

But it did beg the question, for me, of what questions she asked herself about which material would comprise this movie. Of the 40 hours she purportedly shot, how did she choose these particular 115 minutes? Quite a bit of it seems to be lacking in thematic import. It's tricky because neither do I want her to be on the nose, though there was never any risk of that with this filmmaker. I guess I just prefer a bit more rigor in terms of the choice of what to include and what not to include, and to have the reasons for each seem clearer to me. Put another way: Would this even have been worth making as a film had her mother not been dying? That's cold but it's a legitimate question on my part.

Part of me also wondered if she knew her mother was dying when she started making the film, although the fact that she was 86 at her death indicated it was in the relatively near future no matter the state of her health when filming began. There's never any prognosis, negative or otherwise, about Natalia's health mentioned in the film, though she asks if the physio is coming in an early scene, and as the movie goes on, she develops an alarming cough that does not portend good things. If the younger Akerman had just wanted to record her mother's stories, I suppose that's reason enough to make the movie, though I wonder if it then does belong more in the realm of the "home movie" it claims not to be. Maybe it's Akerman's mere status as a filmmaker that makes her mother's stories worth sharing with a larger audience. Maybe if we all had the capacity to do so, we'd tell our parents' stories too.

Okay! That brings Audient Auteurs to a close. Instead of recapping what I watched and which were my favorites, I'll give you my regrets: the auteurs who were on my list who never made it into the series, in all cases because I couldn't source their movies despite repeated checks throughout the year. They are:

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Hal Hartley

Jacques Rivette

Eric Rohmer

Lina Wertmuller

So the other seven names I gave you in my original post back in January did make it into the series, which I guess is pretty good. With Hartley I may not have looked hard enough, because I think his stuff is generally available, and I feel like I should be able to get my hands on some Eric Rohmer. Well, it's in the past now, so I won't worry about it.

A few others that I added to my list during the year but could never find:

Charles Burnett
Philippe Gurrel
The Shaw Brothers
Lav Diaz

Once the clock strikes 2019 I'll be back to tell you about my new monthly series for the new year. Thanks for reading!