An Invention without a Future: Essays on Cinema

Four Years as a Critic: 2007–2010

305 Writing about what one regards as the best pictures of the year is a much easier job than reviewing movies on a regular basis, if only because it’s always more pleasant to praise or defend films than to attack or dismiss them. Nevertheless, anyone who proposes a list of best pictures in a given year is confronted with two practical problems. The first is that no critic, not even one who makes a living by reviewing for the daily press, can possibly see everything. The second has to do with the dating of films. Old productions are found and made available on DVD, new films are given different release dates in different countries, and some films go direct to video stores, while others open in select U.S. cities at the end of December or the beginning of January. Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others appeared on several ten-best lists of 2007 in the United States, but by my reckoning the first of these was originally exhibited in the 1970s and the second had a U.S. screening in 2006. By the same token, Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, which also appeared on some 2007 lists, didn’t open officially in the United States until 2008.To put reasonable limits on the choices I made for my “Films of the Year” in Film Quarterly, I tried to restrict myself to feature -length pictures of any date that, as far as I could determine, had their first U.S. big-screen showing, not counting film festivals, during the year in question (in once case I included a TV series, Mad Men, first broadcast in that year). What follows are six of the pictures I discussed during the years in question, followed by my lists of the best films of each year. Even if you disagree with the rankings, these lists give evidence of the continuing importance and considerable achievement of cinema in the twenty-first century. Four Years as a Critic 2007–2010 306 / In Defense of Criticism 2007: colossal youth The most impressive film I saw in 2007 was the 2006 Portuguese/French/ Swiss production of Pedro Costa’s Colossal Youth (Juventude em Marcha, properly translated as “Youth on the March”), which played at a dozen or so museum or art-cinema venues across the United States. This is the third in a trilogy of films Costa has made among the poorest slum dwellers of the Fontainhas area in Lisbon, most of whom are immigrants from the rocky, volcanic Cape Verde Islands, a former Portuguese colony established to serve the African slave trade. In 1994, Costa traveled to Cape Verde to make an excellent wide-screen fiction film, Down to Earth (Casa de Lava, or “House of Lava”), and upon returning he brought gifts to people in Fontainhas from their relatives who had worked in the film. Soon he began shooting in the Lisbon favelas, using the residents as actors in a series of improvised “stories” derived from their own experience. His first effort, Bones (Ossos, 1997), concerns a desperately poor teenaged couple and their baby; the second, In Vanda’s Room (No Quarto da Vanda, 2000), takes place almost entirely within a tiny room where Vanda Duarte, a drug addict who appeared in Bones, snorts crack cocaine, shoots heroin, and talks with friends. Colossal Youth also features Vanda, now clean and taking statesupplied methadone, but the focus has shifted to a black man named Ventura, who also appeared briefly in Bones. At the point when the film begins, Fontainhas has been virtually demolished by city planners and its inhabitants are being moved to a public housing project in Amador on the outskirts of the city.Ventura’s wife, fed up with the life he has given her, brandishes a knife and throws him out of their slum dwelling. The seventy-five-year-old Ventura, a tall, slender, haunted figure in a dark suit and a white shirt, wanders about like a lost soul, dreading the clean, well-lighted, but empty rooms the city has assigned him, passing the time by visiting friends and various “children.” (He has a damaged memory and so many possible offspring from his history of falling drunkenly into strange beds that neither he nor we can be sure if any of the people he visits are actually his relations; he seems never to have been a legal...