Tytti Rantanen

Comments

India Song

I saw India Song when I was 19 years old, it was my first encounter with Marguerite Duras, and the film and her way of writing and filmmaking has haunted me ever since.

Out 1

This would be my "desert island film".

Lola

The greatest use of the otherwise overused Beethoven's 7th of all time.

The Night of the Hunter

I am positive Shelley Winters was cast as Charlotte Haze in Kubrick's Lolita due to her heartbreaking performance in The Night of the Hunter.

L'Atalante

In lieu of a traditional wedding reception, we hosted a screening of L'Atalante. It is a perfect film to start matrimonial life.

A Cock and Bull Story

This is maybe the greatest attempt of an adaptation, especially when it is about a novel (Tristram Shandy) that should be impossible to translate into film.

Possibly in Michigan

I did not find this via TikTok, but I am happy many teenagers did. Violence and perfume!

The Watermelon Woman

I cherish films that offer witty commentary on film history. As an artists' moving image distributor, I also felt seen when Cheryl visits an independent feminist archive run with very scarce resources.

Melancholia

During the geopolitically tragic spring 2022, I found weird comfort in thinking about the ending of Melancholia and picturing a small hut where I could solve cryptic crosswords if everything just ended.

Jane B. par Agnes V.

Although Varda is lauded for the self-reflexive, intro-retrospective, autobiographical essay films she made during the 2000s until her death, this portrait with Jane Birkin feels particularly accurate and sharp in questioning what kind of mirror the cinematographical apparatus is. A thoughtful and playful film on female image, ageing, and friendship.

Further remarks

It would have been easy to make either a top three (Duras-Rivette-Demy) or top twenty: with ten films one starts to balance haplessly between one's darlings, guilty pleasures, and inevitable political questions that were maybe not as clear and demanding in 2012 as they are now. Anyway, I chose ten films that have somehow stayed with me, some of them for almost 20 years (India Song), some of them only since this spring and summer (Watermelon Woman, Jane B. par Agnès V.). These are examples of the films I want to spend time with. I am aware of unfortunate omissions in my selection: all films in my top ten are either European or American; most of them French; none of them from my native Finland (I do recommend Niskanen's Eight Deadly Shots); none of them from the past ten years; there could and should be more short films; etc. We have to keep watching more films, old and new, from near and far.

"All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are 'sides', and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot. As people mature they cease to believe in sides or in Headmasters or in highly ornamental pots."

(Virginia Woolf - A Room of One's Own, 1929)