8. The Gap (November - December 2024)
Roughly November 8th to mid-December, 2024
I started writing what would become this entry the morning of the 2024 election in the U.S., on the heels of revisiting Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny; a handy and unsentimental guide to dealing with the threat of fascism published within a wave of largely opportunistic “resistance” literature that became an industry unto itself after the 2016 election. All of Snyder's lessons pulled from twentieth century history are evergreen, and while eyes will gravitate towards notes on how to deal with paramilitaries, there's a lot about preserving curiosity and interest as a form of not just defiance in the face of authoritarianism but as a means of preserving our shared humanity. Practicing corporeal politics, learning from peers in other countries, breaking down social barriers — knowing that your brain is a muscle and actually exercising that muscle is not just what makes one a threat to a tyrant but it's also what makes your life interesting and worthwhile. It's why the need for artists is eternal, recession-proof — I think back to the times in my life, often as a teenager, where the credits rolled on a film made by filmmakers who died before I was born; who were of different ethnicities or sexualities or class structures and yet the fruits of their labor taught me something about myself or helped clarify my own values; values that are still in my bones today.
It was two years ago, in a more depressive moment of my life marred by a continued struggle to outrun unemployment and inability to meaningfully “break in” to the industry I'm still very much on the outside of, that I decided to upend my own perception of what my favorite films were — on the surface, those two things may seem disconnected, but film, the most sacred thing in my life and the driving force behind nearly every meaningful decision in my adult life, was starting to become associated with a sense of unfulfillment or even failure. I thought about making a list of 100 favorite films, but to “free” myself from the regular answers I'd given for favorite movies for years at parties or on social media to where they rolled off the tongue (or my keyboard) with much thought at all. I just asked myself: which films give you goosebumps at the mere mention of their titles?
Nearly two years later, I've been excited to revisit this exercise — partially because I've had some discoveries and rediscoveries that I'd like to see contextualized alongside movies that have meant a lot to me for longer, but also because it worked, and I've had to think about what “it” was in this situation beyond a renewed sense of energy. I think what I'm realizing was that it just wasn't about me feeling like getting back to work; it wasn't just that these movies gave me the juice to put my foot to the gas and get my hands dirty and figure out how to scramble my life and resources to make these films exist regardless of whether anyone in the elusive cabal that is “the industry” gives a shit or not. It's that these films make me want to be the most engaged person I can be; not just with my own work but with the world at large; the desire to travel or cook or engage with culture or social or civic engagement or civil disobedience is nurtured and even electrified by these movies that make me want the most out of everything life has to offer. I think that's where the connection to this idea of tyranny lies; or the desire to “live” within these favorite films — these movies allow me to be the most active participant in life that I can be; and being an active participant in your life and society is the greatest impediment to any authoritarian aspirations that may be lurking around the corner.
Much of this journaling was fueled by what I saw as existential, philosophical threats — a few weeks before a cancer diagnosis which posed a much more physical threat and then maybe doubled the existential panic for good measure. But on the other side of my surgery and the positive prognosis, the desire to be an active participant was reaching new heights that I didn't even know were possible, even as someone who made a conscious effort to live an engaged life in the world. I assumed these words would all need a rewrite, restructuring, recontextualizing, but they don't — maybe just a thesaurus for more adjectives, or better yet, maybe I just need to drink from the well of the very movies I'm writing about. Maybe that “hydration” will protect me in moments where, like when staring down the barrel of the diagnosis, the blanket of cinema falls short.
From Nikos Papatakis’ The Shepherds of Calamity, also known as Thanos & Despina — one of the most exciting first encounters of the year.
Before I posted this, I boldfaced the titles I saw for the first time this year, which doesn’t account for titles like The Exiles or The Night Porter that I revisited in 2024 and only made greater, more personal impressions this year. Nine titles — two from the great Palestinian filmmaker Michel Khleifi who likely would have never been on my radar if not for the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Like many, I've taken my eye off the ball from the war crimes towards the Palestinian people, and I could only feasibly play the cancer card for the last two months of the year, so that's no excuse. Like many, I've become desensitized to the news, numb to images of human carnage. Like many, knowing there was nothing I could do to reroute my tax dollars away from genocide, helplessness became a backwards form of closure.
But one of the key elements of Amber Massie-Blomfield's thesis in her great book Acts of Resistance, which I'll paraphrase, is while art won't stop the bombs from falling, art will assert the humanity of both its creators and its audience when oppressive forces are trying to strip that humanity away. Khleifi's cinema is unfortunately timeless in its depiction of a society under siege, yet the work is also timeless in its often humorous and colorful renderings of sex and romance and familial politics. We can all see ourselves in these characters, validating their humanity as well as our own. It is unspeakably tragic that these films will outlive so many Palestinians whose lives were cut short in the most horrific of ways, but the permanence of cinema means that Wedding in Galilee and Tale of the Three Jewels will have the opportunity to outlive us all, including Benjamin Netanyahu.
Many of these filmmakers have little in common with Khleifi or one another; some are people who have done or said things I don't agree with and wouldn’t even want to meet. What they share in common is that the world is better off for what they chose to share with us. To borrow some of Timothy Snyder's verbiage, they thought of their own way of speaking, even if only to convey the thing they thought everyone was saying. I don't know this for a fact, but I think this binds Michel Khleifi to someone like Fritz Lang working in the Weimar Republic; both bound to an 80 year old Ousmane Sembène making a film about female solidarity in Senegal at the end of his career, and all three of them are tied to what filmmakers like Alice Rohrwacher and Bertrand Bonello and Rebecca Zlotowski and Mohammad Rasoulof are doing today; filmmakers who we get to follow in real-time. One year ago I would have been surprised and disappointed to think Transmission wouldn't yet exist, surprised and afraid to learn I had cancer, but I would have been equally surprised and amazed to know that I’d be present in the Grand Théâtre Lumière at Cannes when Mohammad Rasoulof, on the heels of fleeing his home country of Iran, held up photos of his two lead actors on the red carpet at the world premiere of his film The Seed of the Sacred Fig.
Michel Khleifi’s Wedding in Galilee & Mohammad Rasoulof debuting The Seed of the Sacred Fig, from my phone
These are the people who make up a shared history of cinema that, over 125 years, teaches us about our collective humanity; about the mistakes we've made and the mistakes we'll make again as a larger culture but also the minute details that make up our day-to-day life that we see in filmmakers who lived maybe a century before we did, and yet we find our commonality in their work. Collectivism = defiance, and even if many of the members of this collective have been dead for half a century, their way of speaking lives on through those who engage their work, like conduits — and there's pride in being a conduit for those who have come before you and made you the person who you are through osmosis. This kind of spiritual collectivism that is film history — that I'm sure is shared with music, literature, painting — will serve us in a world where free and open information are not enough for people to accept our realities, but this is where the idea of ALL art being inherently political comes into play. To quote Massie-Blomfield again: "A gap exists between our intellectual grasp of what we face, and its real meaning for ourselves, for the people, creatures and places we love. The gap is where we must make art.”
I don't want anyone to mistake this list for some kind of objective canon, because even though I've spent god knows what percentage of my life watching movies, I have blind spots. Only a tenth of these films are directed by women, and I would imagine a similar percentage are from Asia and Africa combined. This list speed-runs through the first half of the 20th century and a personal taste only becomes evident in the second half. There is only one silent film, and it's among the most famous. And the absence of filmmakers like Kubrick or Ozu or Tarkovsky is not for a lack of reverence, I promise. But these movies elicit a specific type of reaction; an electricity that touches every facet of my life; an “activating”, so to speak, and I've limited it to those titles — titles that, for me, occupy the proverbial gap.
…but “limited” is probably a poor choice of words there, because I didn't limit it to 100 this time. Life is too short for arbitrary goalposts on what excites us, so the goalposts have widened.
