Eclipse 1972: L’età di Cosimo de Medici

To celebrate Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles winning the 2022 #1 spot for Longest Film Title Ever, I’m finally watching this thing, which is four and a half hours long.

Unless I ditch it, of course.

Ah:

The Age of the Medici, originally released in Italy as L’età di Cosimo de Medici (The Age of Cosimo de Medici), is a 1973 3-part TV series about the Renaissance in Florence, directed by Roberto Rossellini. The series was shot in English in the hope of securing a North American release, which it failed to achieve, and was later dubbed into Italian and shown on state television.

That explains the extremely bad looping. But fortunately the DVDs has the English soundtrack, too, which is less loopey. I mean, the English version is also filmed as a silent film with the dialogue added later (as Italians were wont to do), but the lips track vaguely more to what they’re saying in English.

This is pretty dire.

Half the scenes are like this — they’ve got a camera on a tripod, but they zoom and pan a lot. It looks painfully amateurish.

And the dialogue is just people spouting factoids at each other. Is this a TV series designed to punish unruly school children? And teach them facts about Firenze at the same time?

The costumes are nice.

But OK, I have absolutely no interest in this — it may well turn out to be an awesome masterpiece, but I’ll never find out.

The Age of the Medici. Roberto Rossellini. 1972.

This blog post is part of the Eclipse series.

The 2022 Sight & Sound Directors’ Poll

A couple years ago, I watched all the movies on the Sight & Sound Directors’ Poll. Now there’s a new one out (they do this once a decade), so I thought it might be interesting to see what’s changed.

Most people write about the Critics’ Poll, because critics are the ones writing about films, naturally. But directors are more interesting — I don’t mean that the directors’ list is better than the critics’ list, but I think it’s more interesting to see what directors list as inspirations than what critics think are significant films.

(Sight & Sound expanded the number of people voting in the critics’ poll a lot this year, and I was worried that that was going to result in the list degrading towards something as puke-inducing as the imdb top 250 list — but my worries turned out to be mostly unfounded.)

Of course, Jeanne Dielman 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles won the critics’ poll, which I think is fun. It’s a great movie, but I don’t think anybody expected that to actually win, and I’m looking forward to a decade of Film Bros moaning on Twitter after they’ve attempted to watch it.

The directors’ poll is less changeable in some ways — 2001: A Space Odyssey inched out Tokyo Story for the first place. I’d expected to see Citizen Kane slide way down, but it remains at number two. Jeanne Dielman is the big newcomer on this poll, too, making an entry at number four.

Overall, about a third of the list has changed, which sounds like a lot. But only a single movie over #29 is new, and no movies that were top #29 have been removed. So it’s not like there’s been a radical change — almost all the additions/removals have been from the lower two thirds of the list.

Let’s look at the details. Here’s a list of all the new films on the 2022 poll, and we’ll continue bloviating after the list.

#4	1975	Jeanne Dielman 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles	⚄	Chantal Akerman
#29	1989	Do the Right Thing		Spike Lee
#41	1985	Vagabond	⚄	Agnès Varda
#46	1963	Dr. Strangelove		Stanley Kubrick
#53	1961	La notte		Michelangelo Antonioni
#53	1992	The Piano		Jane Campion
#53	1962	Cléo from 5 to 7	⚅	Agnès Varda
#53	1972	Eraserhead	⚅	David Lynch
#62	1949	Late Spring		Yasujirō Ozu
#62	1943	Meshes of the Afternoon		Maya Deren, Alexander Hackenschmied
#62	2001	La ciénaga		Lucrecia Martel
#62	1994	Sátántangó		Béla Tarr
#62	2004	Tropical Malady		Apichatpong Weerasethakul
#72	1952	Ikiru		Ikuru Kurosawa
#72	1974	The Conversation		Francis Ford Coppola
#72	2011	A Separation		Asghar Farhadi
#72	1987	Where is the Friend’s House?		Abbas Kiarostami
#72	1973	Touki Bouki	⚄	Djibril Diop Mambéty
#72	1991	A Brighter Summer Day		Edward Yang
#72	1976	News from Home	⚅	Chantal Akerman
#72	1973	The Spirit of the Beehive		Víctor Erice
#72	1976	The Ascent	⚃	Larissa Shepitko
#72	1948	The Red Shoes	⚃	Powell & Pressburger
#93	2004	Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind	⚄	Michel Gondry
#93	2016	Moonlight		Barry Jenkins
#93	1968	The Colour of Pomegranates	⚄	Sergei Paradjanov
#93	2019	Parasite	⚃	Bong Joon-Ho
#93	1997	Taste of Cherry		Abbas Kiarostami
#93	1970	Wanda		Barbara Loden
#93	1999	Yi Yi		Edward Yang
#93	1957	Throne of Blood		Akira Kurosawa

Of the 31 new films, I’ve only seen 13, so I have to get watching, I guess.

The most striking thing about the list is, of course, how many women directors are included. In the 2012 list, there was only a single film — Claire Denis’ Beau Travail. This list adds nine more, which gives us a… 10% share instead of a 1% share. *gasp* Conservatives are gonna be raging on twitter! Or Gab! But I repeat myself.

There’s a lot of films from Iran, and a couple from Taiwan. And finally a movie from Africa (and it’s great).

All the films I’ve seen that have been added are great — except Parasite, which is merely good. The most surprising addition to me is News From Home by Chantal Akerman. It’s brilliant, but it’s a documentary (sort of), and more experimental than films usually are on lists like this.

The 2012 list had four films by John Cassavetes, which is probably more a reflection of the age class of the directors voting than anything else. Not that there’s anything wrong with Cassavetes, but c’mon. The new Cassavetes is Abbas Kiarostami, who now have three films in the list. And again, I think it reflects a decade passing, and people making films now grew up with 80s/90s films instead of 70s films.

It’s no surprise that a bunch of films from the 80s (and newer have been added): About a third of the new movies fall into that category. What’s more surprising are some of the older films that pop up here. Like The Colour of Pomegranates from 1968? Sure, it’s a great movie, but why now? (Perhaps because it fell off of the critics’ poll.) Dr. Strangelove is more understandable — the only mystery is why it wasn’t on the 2012 list. But why La notte (1961) from Antonioni when two of his other movies leave the list? And why is The Conversation (1974) by Coppola popping up now?

Anyway, I’m looking forward to watching the twenty new movies I haven’t seen yet.

But let’s look at the films that have been removed from the list, too:

#30	1964	Il Vangelo secondo Matteo	⚅	Pier Paolo Pasolini
#30	1973	Amarcord	⚂	Federico Fellini
#44	1968	Hour of the Wolf	⚃	Ingmar Bergman
#44	1960	The Apartment	⚂	Billy Wilder
#48	1954	Rear Window	⚅	Alfred Hitchcock
#48	1962	L’eclisse	⚅	Michelangelo Antonioni
#48	1975	One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest	⚄	Milos Forman
#59	1937	La grande illusion	⚄	Jean Renoir
#59	1966	The Good, the Bad and the Ugly	⚄	Sergio Leone
#59	1972	Aguirre, Wrath of God	⚅	Werner Herzog
#59	1964	Gertrud	⚅	Carl Theodor Dreyer
#59	1966	Blow Up	⚄	Michelangelo Antonioni
#67	1954	Journey to Italy	⚅	Roberto Rosselini
#67	1962	Vivre sa vie	⚅	Jean-Luc Godard
#67	1973	Badlands	⚄	Terrence Malick
#67	1953	Ugetsu Monogatari	⚂	Kenji Mizoguchi
#75	1950	Los Olvidados	⚄	Luis Buñuel
#75	1969	The Wild Bunch	⚂	Sam Peckinpah
#75	1970	Husbands	⚀	John Cassavetes
#75	1980	The Shining	⚄	Stanley Kubrick
#75	1971	A Clockwork Orange	⚂	Stanley Kubrick
#75	2007	There Will Be Blood	⚂	Paul Thomas Anderson
#75	1926	The General	⚃	Buster Keaton
#75	1931	M	⚃	Fritz Lang
#91	1967	Le Samouraï	⚃	Jean-Pierre Melville
#91	1961	L’Année dernière à Marienbad	⚅	Alain Resnais
#91	1964	Soy Cuba	⚅	Mikhail Kalatozov
#91	1976	The Killing of a Chinese Bookie	⚂	John Cassavetes
#91	1933	Zéro de Conduite	⚃	Jean Vigo
#91	1978	The Deer Hunter	⚂	Michael Cimino
#91	1925	The Gold Rush	⚄	Charlie Chaplin
#91	1977	Opening Night	⚅	John Cassavetes
#91	1929	Un chien andalou	⚄	Luis Buñuel

There’s 33 movies gone, but what’s gone? And did good stuff go missing?

To take the last question first — yes, of course. But I’m pleased to see a bunch of stuff that I didn’t much like go: Ugetsu Monogatari, Amarcord, The Apartment, The Wild Bunch, There Will Be Blood, The Deer Hunter… none of those movies had any business being on the list in the first place.

The most striking thing about the list, though, is just the time period. If we by “the 70s” mean “68 to 81” (which one does, of course), 11 of the 33 (which my calculator informs me is “one third”) are from the 70s. I think that’s a natural development, because the 70s were extremely over-represented in the 2012 list — my guess is that the 2012 directors had grown up on those movies, so they included them a bit excessively.

The biggest loser/winner is John Cassavetes, who had four movies in the 2012 list, and one a single one in the 2022 list. However, his A Woman Under The Influence has gone from #59 to #29, so I think that may point to people deciding to focus on a single Cassavetes movie, and that’s a good choice. (It’s fantastic.)

Another understandable correction is that Hour of the Wolf by Ingmar Bergman is gone from the list. It’s not even on my 30 Best Ingmar Bergman Films list, so it was a weird thing to include.

As part of the 70s Massacre, two Kubrick films have gone missing: The Shining and A Clockwork Orange — but I don’t think either is very surprising. I am surprised that Barry Lyndon is still hanging on in there, because it sucks. And I’m pleased to see that Dr. Strangelove has been added instead.

Things I’m surprised to see gone: Rear Window (Hitchcock), L’eclisse (Antonioni) and Last Year in Marienbad (Resnais). And I’m sad to see Gertrud (Dreyer) gone, but I’m not surprised at all.

Overall, I think the new list better than the old one. Several of my favourite films have been added (Jeanne Dielman, Cléo from 5 to 7, Eraserhead, Vagabond, News From Home) and several of my least favourite films have been removed.

I do doubt that Jeanne Dielman will still be #1 in the 2032 Critics’ poll. It’s a great film, but I think the reason it landed at #1 is because Sight & Sound does unranked voting, so I think a whole bunch of people had it on their lists without thinking really wanting it to be #1. (I’d have included it on my list, too, if anybody asked. BUT THEY DIDN”T! *sob*) Having it in the top ten, like the Directors’ Poll does is perfect, though.

I’d like to see the 2032 list include India Song and Liquid Sky (heh heh).

This is pretty interesting: “All the movies from the Critic’s List to miss the Director’s List (Left) and all the movies from the Director’s List to miss the Critic’s List (Right)”:

I think… the critics’ list has more non-essentials than the directors’ list. But it’s pretty even.

That’s a good insult!

November Music

Music I’ve bought in November.

Comics Nitez

Oops! I had a cold, and as is often the case when I’m Suffering So Much From A Light Sneeze, my sleeping patterns got all fucked up. So I thought I had it fixed now — but then I woke up midnight and couldn’t go back to sleep again. Grr.

But I might as well use this night to read some comics, because I got a 20kg shipment yesterday.

Last Comics Daze I bitched and moaned about how the Desert Island Mystery Box was a bit on the… not very obscure side. And another one arrived yesterday, so let’s start with that.

Boris: Japanese Heavy Rock Hits Live (25th Anniversary Show)

01:32: Burning the Midnight Oil by Daniel Shepard (Desert Island)

What are the odds!

This is a book of illustrations, mostly. It reprints a bunch of zines on newsprint…

I don’t quite get the iconography, but it certainly seems persistent and consistent.

01:42: King Terry Garo Covers

So… this is apparently just what it says on the tin? A collection of King Terry covers for Garo?

Well, OK, fine by me — it’s good stuff, but it feels a bit… weird?

I wish somebody would just inherit a lot of money and start translating Garo to English in full. It seems like more than half of the collections of Japanese comics that are published in English now pilfer Garo anyway, and it’s be more interesting to read the comics in their original context instead.

But anthologies don’t sell, so…

01:54: Environments for controlling people: Best Practices by Deb Sokolow (Desert Island)

This is a very handy manual for constructing optimal architecture.

Very practical.

Boris: Japanese Heavy Rock Hits Live (25th Anniversary Show)

02:02: Smoke Signal 39 by James Jean (Desert Island)

Is everything this time around published by Desert Island? The Garo book didn’t say one way or another, as far as I could tell…

I like these broadsheet-sized thingies… I’ve only got a smattering of Smoke Signals, and the format seems to encourage illustration over comics?

And this is another collection of illustrations, which makes three of the four books in this mystery box. But it’s very pretty.

So that brings us to the end of the mystery box. It was a lot more mysterious than the previous box, which I really like, so I think I’ll keep my subscription going.

02:10: Breakfast #1-2 (Kobayashi Books)

This is a tabloid-size anthology published in Mexico, if I read the indicia correctly? I don’t speak Spanish, but I think I managed to make that out…

There’s one longer sequence, but the rest of the books are one pagers only. Which is OK, but some of the bits make me wonder whether they’re excerpts from longer works, like the thing to the right.

It’s mostly illustrations, again, but perhaps one quarter of the pieces are comics.

Wow, that’s a nice poster in the middle of the book.

Anyway, these are good reads. There’s a handful of pieces in Spanish, but the rest are either wordless or in English.

02:21: Six Hundred and Seventy-Six Apparitions of Killoffer (Typocrat)

Wow. This was published almost two decades ago, but I haven’t stumbled upon a copy, although I’ve read good stuff about the book. I got this copy from Domino.

This is absolutely totally amazing. It’s a comics reading experience like no other. It’s got an insane flow going on, and the story even makes sense — branching off new Killoffers on every bad impulse.

Fantastic.

They Hate Change: Finally: New

02:42: The Joy of Quitting by Keiler Roberts (Drawn & Quarterly)

Cool. I’ve been a fan of Roberts since the first minis, and this is a hefty book. I’m guessing that this is gonna be less a collection of vignettes (as usual) and more a single narrative?

Oops. It’s the opposite what I thought it would be — it’s a collection of older work. And I think I’ve got all of those books? Except possibly Rat Time? Well, I’ll read it anyway…

Roberts’ early work was all one-page amusing almost-not-even-an-anecdote stuff, and read so well in those smaller books. And I’m enjoying re-reading them here now, and I know that the stories are going to get more substantial (and longer) as time passes, but I think I’d be slightly discouraged if I was reading this for the first time — the thought of 250 one-pagers like this is exhausting.

But I mean, it’s all funny (and sometimes scary), and the storytelling is on point.

Ernest Hood: Back to the Woodlands

There’s certainly a cumulative effect to reading these strips, but I have to say I preferred reading them in the original (smaller) books. I’m totally exhausted now.

Xiu Xiu: Lucretia My Reflection

04:29: Career Shop Lifter by Gabrielle Bell (Uncivilized Books)

I’ve read most (all?) of these before on the Patreon, but reading them collected is always a treat. And there’s a signed postcard? Fancy! The signature looks so handsome that it doesn’t look real. Which reminds me:

I picked up this Rachel Cusk book in a bookstore a couple months back, and it turned out to be signed.

Now that’s a real signature.

Anyway, this is lovely as usual. The strips are set in a coffee shop, and she’s drawing the other people there. And we also get the finished drawings.

It’s a fun and interesting book.

Hyd: CLEARING

05:14: West 2 by John Grund (Uncivilized Books)

This is like real science fiction — which is a rare thing in comics these days. (Lots and lots of fantasy and sci-fi, though.)

I especially like how hushed this book is, and how things aren’t really explained. It feels like a well-realised world.

I’m waiting impatiently for more — it feels like it’s going to be a long story?

Black Cab: Superhereos (Shan remixes)

05:36: Fish out of Water by Phoebe Mol (Fieldmouse Press)

Ah, right, I think I kickstartererd that Fieldmouse Press thing? So I got four book from them yesterday…

I really enjoy the artwork here.

I have no idea what the book is about, but it’s cool anyway.

Sacred Paws: Strike A Match

05:41: Now and Other Dreams by Daryl Seitchik (Fieldmouse Press)

I guess all these stories are dreams? It’s a challenging genre, because it’s hard to convey what makes a dream matter when retelling the dream.

I’m not sure Seitchik is quite successful at doing that — most of these pieces don’t feel like real dreams — but it’s an enjoyable read nevertheless.

OK, I think it’s time for a nap. If I nap for three hours and get up at nine, then I can stay up until 23 and my sleeping pattern will be totally fixed. Yah! It’s a plan.

Rival Consoles: Now Is

10:23: Good Person Trouble by Noëlle Kröger (Fieldmouse Press)

I’m awake! I’m awake!

The storytelling here is unlike anything. It’s got such an oblique flow, but everything is still crystal clear.

Even perhaps a bit too clear, because what’s apparently meant to be a big reveal is obvious from the start. Still, the artwork is so charming, and it has great emotional impact. Really good stuff.

Johan Berthling: Björnhorn

10:59: Magic Nation #1 by Ellen O’Grady (Fieldmouse Press)

Again, this is really special — it’s about being a kid and really paying attention to stuff. It’s dreamy and engrossing. Fabulous.

I do wish they’d bound this book in a different way, though — the spine is so tight that I’m fighting the book all the time just to be able read it.

Various: Mute Tonal Evidence 2022

11:17: Notes from a Sickbed by Tessa Brunton (Graphic Universe)

This is a structurally unresolved book. It starts off with a bunch of introductions, and then a section that’s told in a very choppy way.

The main bulk of the book is great — I’ve never seen anybody explain how living with ME is like in such a vivid fashion. It not only clarifies a lot that I’ve been wondering about, but it’s also a gripping, moving story.

And then it… stops. Endings like that can be very powerful (73% of short stories in Paris Review use this strategy), but here it felt a bit unfulfilling? I mean, in one way it worked well, but I just wanted more — more resolution perhaps, or something.

So I’m kinda ambivalent. The main bulk of the book is really, really good, but…

Björk: Fossora

12:18: Who Will Make the Pancakes by Megan Kelso (Fantagraphics)

Ooh, new Kelso book…

This is super dense. Kelso packs so much into these pages, but it works.

Can: Live Cuxhaven 1976

But there’s five stories in here, and every one uses a different narrative strategy. It’s a satisfying read.

Sudan Archives: Natural Brown Prom Queen

13:56: Below Ambition by Simon Hanselmann (Fantagraphics)

This one is focused on detailing a band’s excruciating drunken performances.

It seems to go on forever and ever with pages like this.

But then it shifts and gets all moving and stuff.

And there’s some bits in here that are really funny.

Oh, and a flexi! Let’s put that on… Hey, kinda nice. Twinkly.

OK, I’m comicsed out and I have to run some errands… but that was a nice bunch of comics.

Art Comics Finder

Some years back, I wondered if anybody would step up and maintain, like, a site that lists comics shops worth visiting (when on vacation) and web sites worth visiting when shopping for interesting comics.

That never happened.

So now I’m just gonna start keeping this blog post updated with links and stuff. The first links are just off the top of my head, so I’ll be adding stuff as we go along…

Shops

These are shops that I’ve been at (or heard good things about) and have interesting small press stuff.

New York: Desert Island

Chicago: Quimby’s

Oslo: Tronsmo

Amsterdam: Lambiek

San Francisco: Comix Experience

Pittsburg: Copacetic

London: Gosh

Canberra: Impact Comics

Barcelona: Fatbottom

Toronto: The Beguiling Books & Art

Cambridge:

Paris: Album BD

Paris: Aaapoum Bapoum

(This list does not at all attempt to list all comics shops I’ve visited, just the ones with small press/art comics stuff. Google is great at listing mainstream comics stores, but sucks at saying which ones are worth visiting for this kind of stuff.)