Le Quattro Volte, dir. Michaelangelo Frammartino (2011)

When A. O. Scott says that a film “reinvents the very act of perception,” you listen.

Michaelangelo Frammartino’s Le Quattro Volte (2011), is the most transfixing and profound narrative I have seen in years. The film structures itself around the four modes of transmigration (an ancient model of reincarnation); a soul wanders from man, to animal, to vegetable, to mineral. An old man trades his goats milk for dust swept up in a church in order to delay his death. Eventually he passes, and we follow his process of transmigration. For such a simple story (that has no dialogue whatsoever), it might seem odd to commend the writing, but any filmmaker that can weave a riveting story while forcing the viewer only to watch understands screenwriting in its truest form. The camera does all the talking.

The cinematography is disturbingly objective: think Robert Gardner without the narration. After the first cycle, you actually start to feel like a spirit, witnessing humanity as a species and people as animals. We scan around the old town up in the mountains; Andrea Locatelli’s camera is often perched on top of houses, hills, steeples. We’re not serenely floating as much as hovering, with a nagging feeling of menace; the next second we’re shocked by the most suffocatingly subjective camera–we are buried in the center of a pile of ash, sealed into a stone tomb or built into a wooden conflagration. In the final stage, we are released. We are smoke and ash. We sweep over the forest where his favorite tree was, we brush the field where his goats fed and we snake through his old mountain town.

What this film capitalizes on so successfully is the simple pleasure of watching. Much like the beginning of There Will Be Blood or Wall-E, it’s comforting when a director forces you to watch. It’s an act of confidence: “I know what I’m doing, just let me show you.” Its effect in Le Quattro Volte is that and more. There are only a few things in the film that place us in time; otherwise this story could have happened hundreds of years ago. In the terms of transmigration, it absolutely has. It’s happening all the time.

The ride’s over.

There went the decade, crawling to a slow halt in the station, and now we disembark.  This decade had its ups (college, technology) and downs (war, hurricanes)–and the world of film was no exception.  Filmmaking went in two directions:  Hollywood films ballooned year by year with increasing budgets and frames, culminating with this month’s Avatar, James Cameron’s all-digital $700 million 3D action romp; Independent Cinema moved into inventive territory with uploads to YouTube and low-fi meditations in Neo-neorealism after many Studio Independent Branches that funded indies (for a period, c. 2003-2007) realized that there was no real market where they believed one to be and abandoned the cause.  Still, large theater chains carried more independent films than ever before, and distribution for independent films was bigger than ever with the internet and VOD cable television bringing cinema to places it never could have travelled in the past.

We forget that in 1999, DVDs were seen as the luxury alternative to VHS tapes (as Blu-Ray is to DVD now) and the local video rental store was the general access point to the cinematic world.  But with this decade came the domination of the disc, and Netflix rose with it along the way.  No matter where you live, so long as you have access to the internet and a DVD player, you can watch nearly any film.  Think about that.

This decade was the era of the superhero.  Television rooted itself in its conception of reality, though gradually began to lose itself to the power of the immediacy of the internet.  Just as the remote control killed the traditional nightly television schedule, so did TiVO and iTunes murder watching television on any predetermined schedule at all.

Here’s the Company List for the top films of the Noughties. These films are listed in chronological order, since the task of attempting to quantify a rank for such a wide variety of films is next to impossible.

2000.  In The Mood For Love  –  (Dir. Wong Kar-Wai)

Perhaps the best love story of the decade (another arguable candidate would be 2008′s Wall-E).  Wong Kar-Wai’s meditation on unfulfilled love sizzles with Christopher Doyle’s unreal colors and cinematography.

2001.   Mulholland Dr.  –  (Dir. David Lynch)

To settle the debate once and for all:  no one, no one, actually knows the “plot” of the film.  David Lynch created a multilayered maze that helped launch Naomi Watts’ career.  Nothing else came close to matching the beautiful terror of a man standing behind a dumpster waiting for us.

2001.   The Royal Tenenbaums  –  (Dir. Wes Anderson)

“…I always wanted to be a Tenenbaum.” From the opening Prologue, set to an instrumental version of “Hey Jude” and a voiceover by Alec Baldwin, to the last slow-motion shot at the cemetery, perfectly synchronized to the serendipitous “Everyone” by Van Morrison, Wes Anderson crafted a great film and a good story made even better from an outstanding ensemble cast.  No one has thought of anamorphic lenses quite the same way ever since.

2002.   Y Tu Mamá También  –  (Dir. Alfonso Cuarón)

Cuarón’s free-form journey to a mythical, idyllic beach with long, flowing shots sits as a permanent cinematic hymn to the confusion of love, the pain of youth, and the hidden beauty of the world.  But–were it none of those things–it still would have made the list for Luisa’s slow dance towards the camera near the end.

2004.  Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind  –  (Dir. Michel Gondry)

Because breakups are hard and no one had known quite how to articulate a very old question:  if the end of the relationship is painful enough, would you prefer it never to have happened?  And because only Michel Gondry could irrigate the humanism buried deep within the complex script by Charlie Kaufman.

2005.  Caché  –  (Dir. Michael Haneke)

No other film perfectly encapsulated the Decade’s most prominent themes: a deep sense of uncertainty and the burgeoning digital universe of technology.  Haneke caught a lot of slack for the ending, but the mystery itself — who filmed us? — was the ideal metaphor for this period of time.

2007.  I’m Not There  –  (Dir. Todd Haynes)

I’m Not There represents an unmatched attempt at crafting a truly cinematic biography of a person:  fragmented, refractory, and incomplete.  Todd Haynes travelled down a clear salad bar of auteurs to choose from for inspiration — Fellini, Godard, and Sirk to name a few — in order to give every “glance” at Bob Dylan a new feeling.

2007.   There Will Be Blood  –  (Dir. P.T. Anderson)

The most poetic film of the decade was also the most potent indictment of the Bush-Era political mindset.  It’s not just one of the best because of Daniel-Day Lewis’ performance, which was easily one of the best of the decade, but because P.T. Anderson drew from a dark palette to give us an intense story using a deft economy of dialogue and exposition.

2008.  Wall-E  –  (Dir. Andrew Stanton)

In the opening ten minutes, Andrew Stanton was able to reduce storytelling to its oldest, and best, elements.  Though the entire film is nearly silent, it is easily one of the most emotional and engaging stories of the Decade.  It’s the perfect paradox:  the most artificially created film of the year was also the most human.

2009.  Ballast  –  (Dir. Lance Hammer)

Most people do the same double-take when they find out that the director of the film — a film propelled forward by an entirely African-American cast of non-actors giving intense, unsentimental performances — was white. Lance Hammer was able to reduce filmmaking to its guttural core by spending the better part of three years in the Mississippi delta casting the actors and workshopping the script with them.  Watching Ballast we’re given the clear harbinger of the next wave of filmmaking.