In talking about the recent film
Magic Magic, Caitlin said
in her blog a few days ago that it, "treads that same liminal space
between civilization and the forest primeval, between sanity and lunacy" as
movies like Lars von Trier's Antichrist, Joseph L.
Mankiewicz's Suddenly, Last Summer and Peter Weir's
Picnic at Hanging Rock. I suggested to Caitlin that she make
a list of "Top Ten Films that Tread the Liminal Space Between Civilisation
and the Forest Primeval, Between Sanity and Lunacy". Naturally, I
immediately started thinking about what I'd put in such a list myself.
Thinking about what this particular
conceptual dividing line meant to me in relation to the movies Caitlin
mentioned--and mind you I haven't seen Antichrist or
Magic Magic--it seemed to me to imply a film that showed
modern human civilisation to be painfully absurd or meaningless for
juxtaposition to nature, or a depiction of nature overwhelming or infecting mental
processes in a delicate framework of culture considered civilised by the
characters in the film. This is actually a fairly broad definition. I wrote
down a very long list of movies, most of them great movies, then I narrowed it
a great deal by refining my definition to something more instinctual.
So here we go.
Top Ten Films that Tread the
Liminal Space Between Civilisation and the Forest
Primeval, Between Sanity and Lunacy
10. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
A relevant quote from my
review:
Familiar aspects of the self are a
catalyst for a chain of dream logic terrors . . . The self, both physical and
mental; an unexamined every day intimacy with flesh and blood is teased out
into a cunning, gleefully beautiful and grotesque nightmare.
9.
Onibaba
Stories of war are good candidates for this
list because they often take place in hostile, unfamiliar, natural settings
where the characters are painfully forced to abandon culturally instilled
values for things more basic and animalistic. In Onibaba,
two peasant women take to murder and plunder and soon their lives become even
less civilised than that. The strangeness of their brutality is represented by
a hole in the ground where they dump the bodies of their victims. From my
review:
[T]he film uses elements of myth
to tell a very effective, very raw story of regular people adapting to a
beastly reality. A reality where old moral perspectives become brutal,
arbitrary traps.
8. Picnic at Hanging
Rock
One of the films Caitlin mentioned, it's a simple
story that crushes its characters with its simplicity--in the Australian
wilderness, a small group of girls completely disappears and there's no
explanation. Beautiful and ominous footage of the enormous and strange rocks in
the area seem to suggest something that can never be put into words, a truth in
nature that exists outside the bounds of the structured reality of the Victorian
characters who find their efforts utterly and heartbreakingly feeble.
7.
L'Avventura
In a premise similar to that of
Picnic at Hanging Rock, L'Avventura
features characters dealing with the unexplained disappearance of their friend,
Anna, on a small island. Like Picnic at Hanging Rock,
beautiful shots of the natural rock formations providing no answers seem to be
the environment's peculiar way of rebuffing the most basic needs and desires of
human beings. As the film progresses, the characters begin to seem as though
the values of their society have taken on a frighteningly insubstantial
quality. From my
review:
As the friends struggle between
deciding what the flighty and selfish Anna might have done, or what terrible
accident may have befallen her, the land and the sea shown in the shots dwarf
everything partly because of this tortured confusion. The natural and silent
beauty emphasises the small, insubstantial society and the elusiveness not just
of Anna but of Anna's personality.
6. Apocalypse
Now
As I said with Onibaba,
war makes a natural context for a madness exacerbated or produced by a natural
environment, seemingly triggering something in the characters more deeply real
than everything they've ever been taught.
5. Aguirre, the Wrath of
God
A lot of Werner Herzog movies could go on
this list but this one seemed most fitting as the desires for conquest and rule
that arise in Kinski's character are in their basic structure patterned after
his contemporary culture. But it's the alien and oppressively natural
environment of South American jungle that sharpens his ideas to a point sharper
than anything society would condone.
4. Neco z
Alenky
Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland would belong on this list but Jan Svankmajer's 1988
adaptation belongs even more than the source material would. Svankmajer's use
of animal corpses and his more sadistic, wolf-like Alice take the film to a much more bestial,
less satirical place. From my
review:
This is a pretty gruesome Alice--maybe not as much
as American McGee's but this one makes more of an impression for its better
constructed character. Instead of the trite story in McGee's take about
childhood trauma, Neco z Alenky knows that kids are quite
cruel enough already.
3. Black
Narcissus
The vows of a group of nuns are tested just
by the heady environment of a monastery and former pleasure palace in the Himalayas. They're horrified to find their deep
convictions are insubstantial compared to the mountains, memories of lost love,
and lust.
2. Through a Glass
Darkly
The breakdown of boundaries and meaning in
a family begins with the onset of schizophrenia in the daughter. Her
perspective on God as a sort of monster hidden in the upstairs wallpaper has
about it a terrible insight.
1. 2001: A Space
Odyssey
This is the film that probably best suits
the criteria, beginning as it does with humankind's significantly more bestial
ancestors and portraying evolution of the intellect as sort of alien madness of
incalculable scope.
Here are a few more titles in no particular
I think could have been included on a longer list:
Prometheus
Ponyo
End of Evangelion
The Descent
Tideland
And here are some very good films that I
didn't think would fit as a whole but which have one or two aspects I think are
dead on:
Videodrome
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
The Night of the Hunter
La Notte
Viridiana
Spirit of the Beehive
Oldboy
Stray Dog
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