5 Flicks to Get Cinematically Fit | FilmStack Challenge #3

Musing Outloud on How to Exercise Your Brain with Movies

As this monthly series is taking shape, I’ve had to adjust the name of it. First I titled it Ted Hope’s Challenge, because

Ted Hope

was the one who wrote the challenge. Then I called it the Hope for Film Challenge because it was bringing in a whole community of his readers. Now it’s squarely the FilmStack Challenge, which nomenclature others got to far ahead of me, and so I apologize for the branding confusion. It also makes more sense that way, as the challenger this month is

Sophie

of That Final Scene.

This month's challenge: What 5 movies would make an amazing "progressive workout" sequence for film newbies?

Or other ways to think about this:

What 5 movies would you use to turn someone into a film lover?

Design your perfect 5-movie introduction to cinema.

Personally, I had to tackle this as a sort of 4, possibly 5-dimensional chess game. There are several different approaches to the same challenge that I’m trying to fit together in one single, highly limited selection of films. Aspects I had in mind while creating this list:

• The list should feature films of increasing mental challenge from easiest to enjoy to most difficult to interpret.

• The list should be roughly chronological along the timeline of the advancement of cinema.

• Similarly the films on the list should open gateways to entire movements in cinema, and provide context of how movies have been approached over time.

• The list should include as many different possible “modes” of filmmaking (not just genre but structure, type, effect, production process, intended audience, whatever) as I can possibly fit into just five selections.

• The list should include as many different film industries as possible, which is another way of saying each film should be from a different country.

• The list should sell people on the concept and promise of cinema as an artform that can be appreciated in its own respect. Ideally, it should help people fall in love with movies.

• And obviously it’s gonna be some of my favorite movies that I really eagerly want you to see.

I think I did a pretty good job at binding these various considerations together.

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Sherlock Jr. (1924, US), dir. Buster Keaton

American cinema; Hollywood cinema; movies as entertainment; vaudeville and stage; silent film; special effects; cinema as dreams; populist cinema; the movie business; studio productions

I could have easily filled this challenge with silent films alone, because filmmakers had already developed and achieved everything cinema is capable of doing before they added synchronized sound to the mix.¹

Outside of some technological updates on how to do visual and special effects and a few structuralist experimental cinema, the artform is all here in Sherlock, Jr. All of it. Everything you can think of, from Christopher Nolan’s quick cross-cutting to Tom Cruise dangling from an airplane to telling a good ol’ fashioned yarn to making meta-commentary on good ol’ fashioned yarns, were all preceded by Buster Keaton in this one 45 minute long exaltation of the joy, dreams, promise, and magic of the moving image.

If you want to fall in love with cinema, Sherlock Jr. is the ideal movie to start with. It’s fun. It’s amazing. It’s not only technically impressive, you don’t have to know anything about how the effects were achieved to see how impressive they are. They speak for themselves.

You’ll laugh, you’ll fall in love, you’ll release a gasp of relief when that train misses him, you’ll cringe when he lands on his neck and be amazed he stood up and walked it off — despite having just broken it. There’s action, there’s comedy, there’s romance. There’s not a single second of this movie that isn’t dazzling.

It also establishes a thematic I see running throughout film history: where literature tells of the knight saving the princess, movies tell of the princess waking the knight up. This is, I assure you, why you love Star Wars and The Matrix. It all starts with Sherlock Jr, itself a reverse Sleeping Beauty.

Sherlock Jr. is the apotheosis of Hollywood cinema: a pure fusion of entertainment and art, craft and storytelling, performance and effects, technical and emotional devices. When we imagine people sitting in a movie theatre, wide-eyed, open-jawed, popcorn left forgotten on their laps, bathed in the silver light reflected from screen, we’re imagining the world that Buster Keaton encapsulated right here.

Also like much of the history of Hollywood cinema, it couldn’t exist without the sacrifice of the artist for the commercial interests of the producers. Keaton, a self-abusive alcoholic, never really made a lot of money during his career, as his producer Joseph M. Schenck wrote his contract with MGM without his input. This enabled Keaton to take ever bigger risks with the movies themselves, with only the reward of satisfaction. Eventually the damages he took from doing his own stunts combined with his alcoholism got him fired and divorced, and he spent the rest of his career as a comic performer.

I can’t think of a better pairing of movie and behind-the-scenes to describe the challenges artists face bringing you the entertainment that flickers across the screen. Sherlock Jr. is a synecdoche of cinema itself AND Hollywood as well.

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Herein I will add the only gatekeeping statement I will have in this entire essay: Sherlock Jr. is pure, undiluted cinematic joy, so if you didn’t like it or at least respect it, I’m at a loss at how to sell you on the art of cinema.

It’s possible that you may like some movies based on their subject or their entertainment value but aren’t really into film as an artform unto itself. This is okay — some people can like paintings but not care about painting, have favorite music but not really be interested in learning about it, or enjoy reading but don’t really dive into the depth and breadth of literature.

If, on the other hand, you’re still with me and was moved by Sherlock Jr, I’m certain you’ll stick with me to the end. This gatekeeping doesn’t carry forward; you don’t even have to like the following movies. But if you give them a chance, I can guarantee you’ll at least find something in them interesting and moving.²

Last chance to cancel my course. Ready to move on? Welcome, then:

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Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse : (1933, Germany) dir. Fritz Lang

German cinema; Expressionist cinema; film noir; horror cinema; cinema as nightmare; social issues and public anxiety; movies contending with history; cinema as an illusion; tricksters and frauds; propaganda; book adaptation; serialization; iconic cinema

There remains a joke on all visitors to cinemaworld: they spend half their time in a dark room, staring at an black screen.

Thus I was told by my film professor Nina Fonoroff. “Motion pictures” are created out of an illusion called the persistence of vision: flash enough pictures at a person fast enough, and their brain puts them together as one continuous, moving image. This does mean that in between the static images is no light at all. ~50% of a movie’s runtime, no light is shown from a projector.

For an artform made of light, cinema is uniquely adept at showing the darkness. This quality is no better informed than by looking at German Expressionism, the forebearer of films noir and horror.

If a movie is an illusion, cinema itself is hypnotism. In fact the concept of hypnotism and mind control runs as a third rail underneath the surface of images we see, provoking all sorts of periodic outrage and distress. People know how important the moving image is, which is why we pick our statespeople based on how they perform on television more than how well they can write their plans for leadership.

Now, there’s quite a lot of Expressionist films to choose from, particularly again from the silent era, but I chose this sound-era sequel because, again, I’m trying to cover a lot of territory here. Dr. Mabuse had already appeared before in the 1922 Lang film, Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler. That first movie features Dr. Mabuse more like The Penguin, a mob boss and gambler who runs a counterfeiting operation in the Berlin underground. “Der Spieler” in this case can mean both “The Gambler” but also “The Puppeteer,” and as a character stood to represent the fraudulence and immorality of Weimer-era Germany.

In 1933, however, Lang returned Dr. Mabuse to screen, and now his figure has become more monstrous and paranormal. No longer just a hypnotizer, Dr. Mabuse literally haunts the investigators and characters, seemingly controlling people from a distant cell while also capable of appearing in rooms as a phantasm. The realist bottom had dropped out as German culture seems to be seduced and driven mad by a dark spectre.

Huh, 1933 Germany? I wonder what Mr. Lang could possibly have had in mind.³

Lang would return again to Dr. Mabuse in 1960 with Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse (trans: “The 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse”), which turned out to be his final film; and Dr. Mabuse showed up again in about 13 other feature films, a television series, and other media. Originated as a series by author Norbert Jacques, Dr. Mabuse is an early film icon, or perhaps cinematic universe unto himself, shapeshifting and adjusting to match the social anxieties of the day.

He is, in a sense, always with us, always with his fingers in the underground or eyes behind the wall or presence beyond history’s grave, ready to rise again and drive the worst impulses of man towards crime, violence, and self-destruction, perhaps temporarily able to be held in cell or coffin, but whose influence is something more of a mind-controlling mechanism, a leader not only able to defraud people of their material valuables, but also their values.

Sound familiar? We get quite a lot of that these days. The Testament of Dr. Mabuse is that he is among us. Beware.

Cinema doesn’t solely operate to entertain and to incite our dreams; it can also be a nightmare reflecting our social issues and civil concerns. A medium is neither a window nor a mirror, but some amalgamation of both, which represents more purely the better it twists the world of appearances to uncover what’s underneath.

Welcome to the dark side of film. The part of the projector that casts only shadow.

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Stalker (1979, Soviet Russia), dir. Andrei Tarkovksy

Russian cinema; poetic cinema; philosophical cinema; film theory; surrealism; science fiction; contemplative cinema; movies as temporal artform; slow cinema; color vs. black & white as a choice; cinema as virtual reality; labyrinths; elemental cinema

It’s time to exercise your patience.

There’s an image of cinephiles like me, stodgy intellectual types that shush the person chewing popcorn and watch these long, slow, boring movies where people walk around aimlessly speaking cryptic dialog about philosophical notions. Well, this here is that movie: it’s so soporific, in fact, that even the characters all stop to take a nap midway through.

Joking aside, though, Stalker is mesmerizing, in a different sense than the dark magick of Dr. Mabuse.

Stalker is painting, music, and poetry. Tarkovsky was the son of a poet and a man of deeply-held faith, making the best movies he could under the surveillance of Soviet Russia, which he eventually had to leave. He survived their censorship, like many Soviet artists, via science fiction; and less you believe that this movie is just random and arbitrary for the purpose of sounding smart, he had to reshoot the entire thing when the first version of it burnt down in a factory fire. You don’t make a movie twice just to show off.

There’s a term that went out of fashion about a decade ago, “contemporary contemplative cinema” (CCC), which to a large degree exists because of the path filmmakers like Tarkovsky forged. In his case, he literally wrote the book about it. Tarkovsky approached film as a very purposeful, very necessary means of addressing everything he thought and believed about the world around him.

And, though that might not sell you on its surface, his movies are such a beguiling, surreal experience. In Stalker, characters navigate a maze without walls, relying solely on faith in the guide they suspect to be an idiot-savant, to find a room in The Zone that they’re not sure exists, and don’t know how it will help them.

This magical realist and very alien “Zone” is felt, not seen, as the movie switches from black and white to color and is placed in a blasted out former battleground where tanks and ammunition lay rotting in unmanaged grass. It’s an inverse The Wizard of Oz, where dour black and white reality is not replaced by glorious technicolor adventure, but by the shock of infrastructure rotten by rust, water, and mold.

So much for “go touch grass”: the grass here is dangerous. And you don’t know why! Is it a Chernobyl-like atomic radioactive fallout that caused the Zone? Some Soviet military experiment? Aliens? God himself?

Movies tell stories, but the best of them create the sort of stories where each individual viewer thinks they saw their own movie. Stalker, despite always having the same images in the same order and the same lines of dialog for everyone who watches it, and being interpretable both with a critical mind and acknowledgment to Tarkovsky’s own intentions and writings, is nevertheless a personally affective experience that gives you exactly what you bring into it: just, in fact, like the Zone.

Cinema is cerebral and brings you into the mind of its creators. None were better than Tarkovsky at fixing you in his own world, a world with rules you understand but are not, in fact, written down, much less ever dictated by the characters. The anti-Netflix cinema, where a character won’t even announce what they’re doing, you’ll never quite be able to pin down how you understand it just by watching it.⁴

It’s also important to bring up Tarkovsky as sort of a denier, an antithesis of the Soviet Montage line of film theory — which, by all means, I encourage you look into as part of your cultural exercise. Soviet Montage started as technical theory and lead eventually to propaganda films. Tarkovsky holds great animus against both the merely technical (the image must have its underlying philosophy) and propaganda (being himself a victim of it).

Here it is necessary to express that you can learn from artists without always agreeing with them: there’s important film theory to learn from the likes of Dziga Vertov and crew. There’s important film history to learn from Sculpting in Time. The point is that the possibilities are there, to craft worlds in your unique form of filmmaking, to expand cinema beyond the borders of quotidian narrative entertainment. Vertov-like, you can “make a brand new human” with your “mechanical eye,” or Tarkovsky-like, you can “sculpt time” to navigate “the Zone” of faith. Another way of saying this is you can make poetry of film by cutting fast or cutting slow.

The key significance of experiencing Stalker at this juncture, however, is to learn the rewards of patience. If you like Stalker, oh how many further riches the history of cinema provides you.

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Tetsuo: the Iron Man (1989, Japan) dir. Shinya Tsukamoto

Japanese cinema; punk cinema; underground cinema; animation; music video; technophobia; cult cinema; subversive cinema; experimental cinema; the cinema of resistance

Alright.

I’m enjoying imagining a person reading this essay, a genuinely curious person who has always wanted to “get into film” but hadn’t really known where to start, and by reading up to here has been on board, even watching along. That person perhaps really enjoyed Sherlock Jr, sort of enjoyed Dr. Mabuse but found it “kind of old,” they watched through Stalker and are like, “Yeah man, I see what you’re saying, but that was rough for me to get through,” and are starting to worry, “So are these movies just going to get longer and slower as we go along? Is the point that cinema becomes more difficult the more work it requires the audience to do?”

Well, welcome to your reprieve. Go ahead and splash some of this water over your face, let’s cool down a bit.

Psych! That water was full of arsenic and used condoms!

Welcome to the full-frontal 40 minute visual assault entitled Tetsuo: the Iron Man. You will go in feeling like a curious human being. You will come out with your brain shredded by junk metal.

Tetsuo: the Iron Man is fast. Tetsuo: the Iron Man is LOUD. Tetsuo: the Iron Man is unlike any other movie you’ve ever seen, unless you’ve already seen Tetsuo: the Iron Man.

The story, as much as it has one, involves a man waking up one morning to find he has a wire growing out of his cheek. From there his body progressively starts to turn into a pile of junk metal, which would be freaky enough, except that he’s pursued by a screeching, obsessed, and vengeful man made of rust through a broken and industrially poisoned Tokyo.

This all unfolds over pounding industrial music, jagged frame-by-frame stop-motion and timelapse photography, anime-style camera movements, and almost constant screaming from the actors. Welcome to Japan, which cinema arguably developed out of two modes of storytelling: Noh, the contemplative, structural, and minimalist filmmaking that tells the story of entire generations of family in a stirring of green tea; and in this case Kabuki, a form entailing exaggerated masks and wild dances.

But also welcome to underground cinema. The cinema of punks, anarchists, revolutionaries, and people not satisfied with the world they’re sold. Shinya Tsukomoto was driven to make Tetsuo: The Iron Man out of his fears and concerns about industrial pollution. The inciting incident, a car crash, came out of his own experience, which left him with a life-long hatred of cars. Using whatever money he could scrape together, his collective of artists and dancers, and a lot of lo-fi ingenuity, he cast a 40 minute performance that became a cult classic that still drives peoples to movie theatres just to say they’ve experienced it.

And emotional experience is the muscle you’re working here. This movie will make you feel many contrasting things at once. You’ll be disturbed, but you’ll like it. You’ll be horrified, but also laughing. You’ll want to vomit, and it’ll be exciting and glorious.

Many filmmakers have to contend with a moral quandary: film is wasteful, polluting, and expensive. It’s difficult to be a filmmaker and believe in things like solving climate change, providing for your collaborators and colleagues, and navigating the commercial requirements to come out the other side with something that can have impact. Some punks, like Tsukomoto, skip the history and the theory and run on pure id. If Dziga Vertov wanted film to make the new mechanical man, Tsukomoto unveiled that new man to be a person broken by machinery and leaking motor oil everywhere.

Cinema is poetic, thoughtful, and painterly. It can also be dirty, profane, and glitchy. You can write books theorizing how the motion picture expands new possibilities for meaning-seeking, or you can scream “FUCK YOUR RULES” and give your terrified hero a fatal industrial drill in place of his penis. Both are valid.

Welcome, my friends, to the cult. The film reel was developed by chemists and spun by illusionists: here the alchemists take over and summon demons.

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Catch your breath. All of the above has been different ways of teaching you how moving images have meaning.

Now it’s time to question them.

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Sans Soleil (1983 / Beyond Time, France / Beyond Geography) “dir.” “Chris Marker”

French cinema, New Wave cinema, documentary, video, postmodern cinema, travelogue, non-narrative, experimental film, post-ideological, essay film, metanarrative, movies as time travel

Hi, hello, welcome. Before you lies the Markerverse, a compelling if confusing place, multifaceted, and with many trick floors, some of which may even contain cerebral booby traps to trip your brain up. Watch your step, you’re in a maze of carnival mirrors made of journalistic, documentary, and travel footage. The world of appearances, it turns out, betrays you regardless of survival at both extremes.

Above I put “directed by” and “Chris Marker” in flying quotations because he didn’t direct this movie so much as assemble it, and Chris Marker is just one of his many pseudonyms, a character the artist plays moreso than a registered and identified citizen of France. He has had many forms (before his quotidian real-world death) and many appearances. In fact one of the great regrets of my life is that a former professor almost pulled off interviewing him in Second Life, but it didn’t work out. I was invited; I still want to be there.

Anyway, again this selection is trying to do a lot of work: not only to represent a higher (potentially highest) challenge of cinematic fitness, but to represent much of film history and modes of filmmaking not yet covered. In this case it’s worth bringing up the French New Wave explicitly to describe the ways Marker deviated from it, the same way Tarkovsky helps me introduce Soviet Montage by being the antithesis of it. And by the way, Marker and Tarkovsky were friends.

Marker was a multidisciplinary artist who was working in French filmmaking before the New Wave took hold but got carried along, to some degree, by that wave. His early work with superb structural stylist Alain Resnais sent him off on a documentary track where, by various names and guises, and in collaboration with various collectives but particularly SLON, Marker tried to create a new mode of moviemaking: without “auteurs”, contrary to the Right Bank New Wavers like Godard et al, with a focus on revolution and social impact.

It didn’t work out. Marker the multidisciplinary moved on and over the course of his life assembled a personal library of footage he made various film essays of, the most famous of which is Sans Soleil.

Sans Soleil itself is a movie that questions what its own images mean. After all vigor and activism of his more ideological youth, Marker looks back over his footage… his travels… his memories… and realizes his dominant concern is “the world of appearances.” He investigates himself and in so doing, investigates the underlying fragility of images themselves.

Now, this is no sophomore philosophy. This stuff has consequences. Sure, he travels around San Francisco chasing the ghost of Vertigo. Certainly, he questions how much he can really know of the people he’s filming when at a Japanese ritual. He looks at televisions, paintings, museums, zoos, stuffed animals, and faces with the same inquisitiveness. But he also acknowledges capturing footage of Luis Cabral decorating the selfsame Major who, a year later, would seize power in Guinea-Bissau. Behind all the images are their subversion: history’s frustrating tendency to refuse to comport to what even the most well-meaning advocates intend.

Sans Soleil is, in a word, layered. Chris Marker is a pseudonym but the story isn’t even told by him. It’s read by a woman’s voice, who is reading letters by a figure named Sandor Krasna, a world- and possibly time-traveller. The text of Sans Soleil say one thing while the footage says another. Underneath lies a sound design, sometimes synced and often not, rarely clear and often funneled as if echoing from the past, that brings its own additional signifiers. The three elements, voice, picture, and sound, weave together in an elaborate choreography that can take you down down infinite passages of history and memory.

This is non-narrative cinema. There is no beginning, middle, or end; it loops upon itself, Ouroboros. There’s no conflict in the sense of a driving of characters. There’s no climax whatsoever. There’s only the challenge of mapping it all out like the gnome in the magic maze of DragonLance, which shifts its shape underneath him as persists in measuring every angle, counting off every step.

I once decided to write a 12 page essay on Sans Soleil for a college assignment. I got to page 36 just trying to describe how its editing works, which was really just meant to be the introductory paragraph, before I called it a day and called it a structuralist essay.

I have also watched this movie more times than I can count.

I still don’t “get it.” Or rather, I don’t think it’s that hard to comprehend. I think just watching it, you’ll get it. Every line spoken, every shot and edit, are in and of themselves comprehensible and any given moment.

It’s grokking the thing that seems impossible. It’s a bin of signifiers that tips out to spill when you bend down to pick up another one. A Faberge egg that itself is a Matryoshka doll, all projected through a kaleidoscope. Every winding thought, contemplation, idea, musing, or poetic meditation Marker takes you through leads one from another quite sensibly, until at any given point you wake up and wonder how the living hell you got here from there. Weren’t we just looking at emus in the Ile de France? Why is everyone patting the Hachiko statue at Shibuya Crossing?

And underlying it the question too few cinephiles, and dangerously enough filmmakers, fail to ask themselves: what are we doing with the images we create? What responsibility do we have toward their consequences? And can there really be a Zone — yes that Zone again, that you visited two movies before — where images can be processed until they are nothing but themselves?

I brought you here to fall in love with film. Now you have to deal with the fallout.

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I will tell you this. If you followed me on this journey to this point, even striding defiantly pass the gate I erected despite plausibly not enjoying Sherlock Jr and yet still deciding to face what lied beyond, I will say that I have changed your mind.

Not, possibly, towards loving or appreciating cinema.

But your brain has been fundamentally altered watching these movies. They got into your neural cells and rewired them. There are certain things you’re going to see in movies you never saw before. Hell, there are certain things in the real world you’ll see you never saw before. And you’ll never be unable to unsee them.

Congratulations! You’ve been given the curse of the cinephile.

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Look. There’s only so much I can do with five movies. I could have done this same activity focusing exclusively on silent era alone; animations; American independent cinema; and what really hurts me inside is the short shrift given to experimental cinema. This list is very Westernized: even the two Easternmost countries are particularly Western from the frame of reference of the East; but even within the West, I didn’t even get into British social and Italian neo-realism! And I’m very mad at myself for not including a single film directed by a woman, but that’s one of film history’s particular sins, underrepresenting half the human population for its entire history.

I thought about having each segment end with a list of alternatives or continuations of that stage. But I’m so happy with how much territory I was able to cover with so few titles, I’m gonna own it as is. This is your list. If you want some like/as to branch off of, feel free to send me an e-mail.

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To read my previous film essays:

To watch some of my own movies:

Tip me through Venmo!:

1. And here of course is the necessary disclaimer that silent films often had synchronized sound in the form of scores and vocal performances, and also sometimes had color.

2. There may be some huge, deeply passionate cinephiles who love movies and think Sherlock Jr. is terrible, but I don’t know them and don’t want to meet them.

3. Just in the off-hand chance: Nazis, Lang was worried about the Nazis.

4. A very quick media literacy footnote here to point out that streaming services are more akin to television than cinema and the difference is that television grew out of radio and cinema grew out of literature and the stage. Or another way to see this difference is that radio and television are piped into your home as ambient, passive media; you have to actually attend, and thus attend to, movie screenings.