Mary Wiles

Comments

Céline and Julie Go Boating

Cléo from 5 to 7

Les VAMPIRES

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

India Song

Daughters of the Dust

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

Orphée

Shoah

Man with a Movie Camera

Further remarks

Daunted by the prospect of selecting the ten 'greatest' films in the history of cinema, I am opting instead to name those ten films that resonate with my own personal history. I paid close attention to women as creators, as actors, and as subjects. It was for this reason that I decided upon Céline and Julie Go Boating as emblematic of the Rivette oeuvre; likewise, I chose Cléo from 5 to 7 from the Agnès Varda corpus. Certainly, Céline and Julie offers the most exuberant, haunting expression of female friendship in the history of the cinema; whereas Varda’s Cléo allows us to envision one woman’s destiny as uniquely her own.

I chose to include Louis Feuillade’s serial film, Les Vampires, in which the mischief and magic of Rivette’s elusive heroines are anticipated in the inimitable Irma Vep, the most radical representative of silent cinema’s female characters. The imbricated network through which Irma Vep moves in Les Vampires seems counter to the hollow, minimalist space that Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman inhabits, yet these heroines occupy a comparable place of importance in film history. Jeanne Dielman can best be understood as an aesthetic incursion that tears away everything that preceded it to propose a feminist écriture that eviscerates our illusions.

I felt compelled to include India Song where Delphine Seyrig appears as the mesmeric woman, Anne-Marie Stretter, a bewitching, phantasmic presence around which the Durassian universe of music, movement and dance revolves. The only American director to appear in my list, Julie Dash is an exceptional storyteller, a black woman recording and retelling history in her sublime Daughters of the Dust, a film that locates power in the interweaving of women characters’ voices and in so doing, posits a new genesis derived from the polyrhythmic aesthetic of the African diaspora.

I have chosen to include Jacques Demy’s Umbrellas of Cherbourg, a reinvention of the Hollywood musical that with an uncannily prescient sense of timing exposes the betrayal and hypocrisy that issue from one young woman’s unplanned pregnancy. The Algerian War is the historical and political vanishing point against which Demy stages this bittersweet love story that ends in irrevocable loss.

From those works that form Jean Cocteau’s celebrated Orphic trilogy, I have chosen the palimpsestic chef-d’oeuvre, Orphée, for its promotion of poetic contemplation and experimentation in autoportraiture that anticipates what is today regarded as queer cinema.

I have chosen Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, a film that stands alone in the history of cinema in its refusal to represent the unrepresentable. I continue to marvel at Dziga Vertov’s Man with A Movie Camera’s dazzling formal beauty that is matched by its irrepressible political force.