2017 has been (another) year of political upheaval and personal wobbles. Life and work have meant that, towards the end of the year, I have stopped blogging once a day, but shifted to two or three times a week. Despite this, I continue to discover films that chime with me personally, emotionally and academically. Some of these have been a surprise to me. I never thought that the last Tarkovsky movie I’d watch, or the earliest and least regarded of Jacques Tati’s films, would turn out to be my favourites. Some, like ‘Dunkirk’ and ‘Blade Runner 2049’ worked for me because of the environment of my viewing: the former in an IMAX with my best friend who, painfully, I can’t see as much of, the second with a new set of friends and in the comfortable surroundings of an Exeter screen.

10 – ‘The Sacrifice’, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1986, is a Swedish apocalyptic movie and the last by the Russian director.  Erland Josephson plays Alexander, a journalist and intellectual who lives in a remote part of Sweden with his wife Adelaide, played by Susan Fleetwood, and his children. Whilst celebrating his birthday with friends, a dinner party is disturbed by the sound of jet fighters passing close overhead. Later, a news broadcast reports on a global catastrophe, presumably a nuclear conflict. This news sends the party goers on a spiral of depression, hysteria and madness. I found the film to be one of the more accessible of Tarkovsky’s films with a defined story and a manageable length, but this isn’t to say it’s the best. It lacks a little of the immersive richness of ‘Andrei Rublev’ and ‘Stalker’, but still nods towards the director’s obsessions with myth, nature, superstition and religion. The film is bookended by two long, unbroken shots: the opening shows the father and young son planting a tree as the camera slowly pans back and forth across the scene. The film ends (aside from one further scene returning to the tree) showing the family home dramatically ablaze as the characters race to and fro across the plain. These scenes seem to sum up the film, defining the narrative trajectory as being from birth (the planting of the tree) to death (the destruction of the wooden house) and from placidity and calm to chaos and horror. Contrasted with the famous candle carrying moment from ‘Nostalghia’, this final moment of Tarkovsky’s last film is frighteningly dramatic and apocalyptic.

9 – ‘Jour de fête’, directed by Jacques Tati in 1949, is a French comedy written, directed and starring the creator of Monsieur Hulot. In this, his directorial debut, Tati plays François, a postman in a small rural village in France. François is bumbling and easily distracted by drink and socialising with his fellow villagers. Inspired by the American troops stationed in the village, François decides to increase his efficiency, but his attempts to do so result in anarchy and mishaps. In the meantime, a carnival has arrived in the village square, and the outsiders cause friction amongst the village. The highlight of this film is an extended sequence showing Tati on a bicycle delivering post. François races through the country lanes losing his bike, having near misses with motor vehicles and releasing his letters in unusual ways. The inventiveness here rivals Buster Keaton’s ‘The General’, but Tati adds another layer beyond the set-piece stunts. The village in the film becomes almost another character, and certainly the inhabitants including an elderly woman who acts as a chorus to the narrative make the story and the atmosphere of the film much richer than it should be. There is a nostalgia in this film, perfectly pitched as an antidote for the recent occupation of France during the Second World War, but this nostalgia isn’t forced, it is relayed simply through the focus on village life and on the eccentric characters.

8 – ‘Blade Runner 2049’, directed by Denis Villeneuve in 2017, is an American dystopian science fiction thriller. A sequel to the 1982 movie ‘Blade Runner’, ‘Blade Runner 2049’ takes place thirty years later. A cop, played by Ryan Gosling, has the special responsibility of hunting down and killing androids but finds himself drawn into a mystery that revolves around the actions of the lead character in the earlier film. Harrison Ford reprises his role of Dekkard, the ‘blade runner’ from the first film, now retired and in hiding, but before he retreated from the world, he concealed a secret that has the potential of causing a war and rewriting the past of Gosling’s character. It’s a long, meditative film, taking it’s time to build up an atmosphere and to immerse the audience in the fantasy universe of the original film. The connections between the two movies are intricate: that same balance of the scale of the grim cityscapes and the small details: the origami animals of the first and the wooden carved horse of the latter film. This move has a different preoccupation, however, as it is told more from the android’s perspective. There is an interesting thesis to be written comparing this with the television reboot of ‘Westworld’, both concentrating on the nature of reality and how life is formed through memories and dreams. The film is a rich, dense and spectacular piece of work, futuristic, but somehow retro, taking inspiration, as the original did, from tangled 1940s noir crime thrillers such as ‘The Maltese Falcon’.

7 – ‘Vampyr’, directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer in 1932, is a German and French horror movie made by the notable Swedish director of ‘The Passion of Joan of Arc‘ four years earlier. The film follows a man called Allan Grey, who investigates strange goings in a small village. He uncovers an outbreak of vampirism involving the village doctor and, with the help of a servant, manages to destroy the source of the outbreak and liberate those involved. It’s almost a silent movie with, like Tod Browning’s ‘Dracula‘, short moments of spoken dialogue. Like Browning’s film ‘Vampyr’ draws on jarring imagery and simple, but effective, visual tricks. Dreyer takes is slightly further, however, by completely free-forming his sense of weirdness to extend it to the plot. It draws more on the early, experimental films of Luis Buñuel such as ‘Un Chien Andalou’ and ‘L’Age D’or”. The film is full of striking and genuinely unsettling imagery. Dreyer uses shadow and trick photography, but he doesn’t just use it superficially, the whole film feels like a complete package, more thought through than ‘Dracula‘ and less campy. The location filming and the style of the film, as with ‘The Passion of Joan of Arc‘ gives it a grounded feeling, so the shocks, when they come, are even more effective.

6 – ‘Dunkirk’, directed by Christopher Nolan in 2017, is a British and American war movie focusing on the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from mainland Europe in the summer of 1940. The film is divided into three narrative strands: the first takes place over a week and concerns the soldiers on the beach, the second takes place over a day and focuses on a small civilian boat travelling from Dorset to help the evacuation, the third takes place over an hour and takes place in the air, as two Spitfire pilots cross the channel to protect the boats and men. These three strands interview in a complex series of encounters and crises until they are finally united on the French coast. Despite the narrative complexity, ‘Dunkirk’ is an intense, streamlined movie. Nolan uses techniques of silent cinema to get across emotion and events with minimal dialogue, telling the story through action and spectacle. Nolan also uses the raw, documentary feel of ‘The Battle of Algiers’ to add texture to his movie. Hans Zimmer’s music plays almost constantly, atonally and anxious, underpinned by the repeated sound of a ticking clock. The whole film is designed to ratchet up the tension of the situation, to drive forward the three time periods, and to give the viewer a sense of the tension and apparent hopelessness of the situation. This is not to say the film lack intimacy however, the scenes on the civilian boat, featuring Mark Rylance at a veteran sailor, play out a particular story about sacrifice and the effects of war, whilst the soldiers on the beach are all intricately drawn, each with their own motivations and personalities. But it is a film in which the visual spectacle is key and is one of those that should really be seen in as big and loud a cinema as possible.

5 – ‘Summer with Monika’, directed by Ingmar Bergman in 1953, is a Swedish romantic drama starring Lars Ekborg and Harriet Andersson. Andersson plays Monika, a free-spirited teenager who meets and falls in love with Harry, played by Ekborg. Both are trapped in a soul-less existence – Monika with an abusive father, Harry in a meaningless job. One spring Monika leaves her family and persuades Harry to quit his job, steal a boat and travel down the river to the countryside. Once there the pair revel in the pastoral bliss, but then Monika becomes pregnant, a stranger burns their possessions and they run out of food. The pregnancy proves to be the making of Harry, however. Returning to the city, he takes responsibility, marries Monika and begins to forge a career to take care of the baby and his wife. Monika cannot her impetuous free-spiritedness though, and after an affair she abandons Harry and leaves him with their child. It’s a bittersweet movie. The scenes of escape are genuinely cathartic, especially when contrasted with the claustrophobic city scenes. There’s also a traditionally Bergman sense of the pagan throughout, with the focus on the elements and nature, placing the characters as a part of them rather than simply within them. As with Pasolini’s ‘The Gospel According to St Matthew’, I’m fairly sure I spotted a moment lifted by Robin Hardy for ‘The Wicker Man’. There is one moment in this film that really hit home: at a moment of crisis, Monika seems to break the forth wall and stares right down the camera as if asking the audience for their advice or opinion. It’s a moment as shocking as anything in Bergman’s own ‘Persona’ or Haneke’s ‘Funny Games’.

4 – ‘A Canterbury Tale’, directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger in 1944, is a British movie following three young people in Kent during the war. Sheila Sim plays Alison Smith, a Land Girl who meets two soldiers: an American, Bob Johnson, played by John Sweet, and an English Sergeant called Peter Gibbs, played by Dennis Price. They stay in a small town near Canterbury and become involved in a local mystery. A man has been attacking women at night by pouring glue into their hair. Together they solve the puzzle and travel on to the city. It’s a focussed movie with a deceptively small scale story. The film is packed with metaphor and indirect propaganda. The three characters working together, the American, the British and the woman on the Home Front are clearly representative of the alliance of armies and the importance of civilians in the war, but it is the movie’s focus on landscape, rural customs, history and mythology that makes this film so distinctive. It feels very much like a ‘state of the nation’ narrative, using the Kent countryside and inhabitants to remind the viewer what the country is their fighting for. Framing this is the idea of pilgrimage and Christian spiritualism drawn from Chaucer that further develops this combination of synchronic and diachronic psychogeography. Coupled with ‘The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp’ and ‘A Matter of Life and Death’, this movie is at the centre of a rounded and multi-dimensional cinematic reaction to the Second World War. Each time I approach a new Powell and Pressburger film I feel like it is my favourite, but I think taking these three as a trilogy means I don’t have to choose anymore.

3 – ‘The Valley of the Bees’, directed by František Vláčil in 1967, is a Czechoslovak historical drama set in the middle ages. Petr Cepek plays Ondrej, a Teutonic knight who is mentored by Armin, played by Jan Kacer. Ondrej choses to leave the order to return to his family home, where he marries his dead father’s widow. Armin pursues Ondrej across Eastern Europe, and when he discovers his former protégé has now married, he exacts a terrible retribution. The film is, in effect, an off-shoot of Vláčil’s longer epic ‘Marketa Lazarová’. Made in the same year, ‘Marketa Lazarová’ reportedly cost so much money that the director made ‘The Valley of the Bees’ with the same costumes in order to off-set the costs. The result is a shorter, more focused movie, one that makes up for a lack of Tarkovsky-like scale with a Bergman-like concentration on individual psychologies. I found ‘The Valley of the Bees’ to be easier to digest and more pacey than Vláčil’s other offering. The result of this is that whilst watching ‘Marketa Lazarová’, I was distracted from the style and cinematography by the sheer scale of the film, here I was able to see and savour the intricate framing and dynamic camera movements. The film is threaded with religious imagery, but unlike the somewhat ironic references of Bergman’s ‘The Seventh Seal’, here they are pure and clear, for example an early shot of the pair of knights lying in the sea, a reference to baptism, is repeated both visually and aurally throughout. It’s clear, clean, shocking and masterfully directed. Better than Bergman.

2 – ‘La La Land’, directed by Damien Chazelle in 2016, is an American romantic comedy musical starring Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone. Stone plays Mia, an aspiring actress who, over the course of a year, forms a relationship with Sebastian, played by Gosling, a Jazz pianist whose ambition is to open his own club. The movie dips in and out of fantasy as their affair plays out and the characters struggle to balance their romance with the burdens and opportunities of their dreams. It’s a far more nostalgic and softer-edged movie than Chazelle’s earlier ‘Whiplash’. The director draws on the rich cinematic heritage of musicals, most notably ‘Top Hat’, ‘An American in Paris’, ‘Singin’ in the Rain’, and, particularly, Jacques Demy’s ‘Les Demoiselles de Rochefort’. The style, tone and balance of fantasy and reality is very similar to Demy’s, which gives this movie a feeling of ‘pastness’. Much like the jazz motif that the film focuses on, this nostalgia is riffed upon and constantly updated with references to modern LA with in-jokes about Prius’s, baristas, strip clubs and challenging auditions. The plot follows the comfortingly simple path of a romantic comedy, but the film is deceptively simple and develops themes, similar to anyone who has watched Fellini’s movies (particularly ‘Amarcord‘), of nostalgia, celebrity, and regrets. The final sequence, in which Sebastian re-treads the events of the film through a grandstanding dance number, is the culmination of these themes. It’s a film that manages to use old fashioned techniques both tap into what made the classic musicals so great, but that also updates them, much like the jazz music that is referenced throughout. Beyond all this, the film is about the city of LA, a town built on the industry of creating fantasy. ‘La La Land’ was, for me, David Lynch’s ‘Mulholland Dr.’ with the corruption and darkness pushed to the back but still managing to relay the idea of a city that is half mythic artifice and half grimy reality, sometimes just a block apart.

1 – ‘The Flowers of St Francis’, directed by Roberto Rossellini in 1950, is an Italian historical drama charting incidents in the career of Francis of Assisi. The structure of the film is nine ‘chapters’, each telling a parable from the ministry of Francis, and the nine cumulatively building up to the moment the Franciscan monks head off individually to preach across Italy. Rossellini’s cast are mostly non-actors, with monks playing the roles of the Franciscans. There is an austerity throughout this film, but with this simplicity comes a profound feeling of sincerity and spirituality. There is no attempt to romanticise the actions of the monks, instead their actions and their compassion become the main focus. There is also a sense of childlike wonder in the way Rossellini presents his subjects, from their wide-eyed and innocent approach to the wider world, to the final method of deciding who will go where to preach – the monks spin round until they are dizzy and the direction they stagger in dictates which city they head towards. For all this simplicity, the film is tightly filmed and the cinematography is outstanding. The highlight of the film (a moment picked out by Martin Scorsese in his documentary of Italian cinema) is the encounter between Francis and a leper. The scene is shot on a silent field at night as the monk is travelling home, the leper comes out of the darkness with the only sound being his bell. It’s a small but intense moment of film that is unforgettable.

And honourable mentions for:

Lynne Ramsay’s 1999 drama ‘Ratcatcher’, Nanni Moretti’s 1993 comedy ‘Caro diario’, Sidney Lumet’s 1957 courtroom drama ’12 Angry Men’ and finally Taika Waititi comedy superhero masterpiece ‘Thor: Ragnarok’.