The reason it took me so long to make this post, even though there aren't very many movies listed, is because I was studying for the bar exam. I hope the above picture reflects that.
Breaking News (2004)
It opens with a long take in which the camera flies from person to person, location to location, and event to event. The way it slowly, carefully shuffles through everything worth paying attention to creates a sense of the camera's physicality, that moving it around is a burden.
Most of the film isn't like that, though. Later on, the film becomes confined to an apartment building. It cuts between different floors that largely look the same. In stairwells, cops and criminals glare at each other through narrow gaps in the railings. At the same time, the cops are on a PR mission, selectively releasing footage of the chaos to the media, which we see in short vignettes. When the criminals catch on, they start to do the same. One could read social commentary into it, but what's really amazing about this film is the sheer size of its bag of tricks, and how well it picks out a different trick for every situation.
Center Stage (1991)
This film consists partly of a biopic of actress Ruan Lingyu and partly of documentary footage about the making of that biopic. The result is a film that reflects on its own speculative nature, though not in a way that undermines its dramatizations of the events in Ruan's life. Its biography is pieced together from incomplete sources of the truth, some of which are not entirely consistent with each other. But the fact is, all biographies are.
Simply articulating this point would be banal. But in Center Stage, there is also the partly fictionalized biopic itself. Irrespective of any merit it has as a source of factual information about Ruan's life, the performances, the expressionistic cinematography, and the piecing together of historical events creates something deeply moving. In the end, uncertainty about the truth is no reason to turn away.
Chameleon Street (1989)
This is one of the more unbelievable true stories put to film, considering what William Douglas Street managed to get away with. The film approaches this with an incredible sense of humor. When Street impersonates a doctor and illicitly performs a surgery, another doctor praises him for his "surgical savoir-faire," which is both one of the most bizarre and one of the funniest lines I've heard in a film. Street's narration shows not only how he's always one step ahead of everyone else, but just how silly his tactics are for staying there. His behavior is remarkable and often outrageous, but even as the film constantly surprises us, it makes him seem, somehow, perfectly natural in a world shaped by absurdities of stereotype and credentialism.
The Day I Became a Woman (2000)
Work, freedom, gender, and age are all connected in this film, which it illustrates in three segments, each focusing on a woman at a different stage of life. First, a young girl named Hava tries to play with her friend, who is stuck doing schoolwork behind iron bars. In the process, she meets a few other boys her age who are preparing to go to work. In the remarkable second segment, a woman named Ahoo participates in a cycling race while men on horses approach the road from either side, demanding she go home to her husband.
The second segment is where the film builds some vocabulary it uses later. The cycling race is on a road parallel to the ocean, and for almost the whole 25 minutes the segment lasts, Ahoo's bicycle never stops, and the camera doesn't sit still. Waves sometimes crash against the cliffs off one side of the road. Ahoo says little if anything: whenever the men accost her, she just keeps pedaling, and once they leave she cycles to the front of the race. By the end of the segment, the constant motion is almost physically exhausting. Armond White said this segment "could be a dream sequence," appearing basically real, but with small twists and exaggerations.
In the third segment, an elderly woman named Houra goes on a shopping spree to buy everything she wanted but never had earlier in her life. The film takes on a dreamlike quality once again, depicting a private, domestic space resting on sand, in the open air. It ends with an image of motion into the ocean, breaking from the second segment's strict adherence to motion parallel with the shore. But it's not without uncertainty. Hava returns for the final scene. With her appearance, we also have to reconsider what the first segment met, having seen the experiences of women older than her and the role of boys and men in their lives.
Memoria (2021)
In Memoria, when the film lingers on something for several minutes—the most extreme case being when one character takes a nap while another silently watches—it gives your mind time to wander. True to the film's title, your memories get a chance to enter the experience, if only briefly, and even if they may be only trivial. It's like how 4'33" seeks to let you listen to the noises in the space around you, but for the noise inside your own mind.
This plus the loose connection of events in the film and the mystery of what's happening make it a somewhat hazy experience. Near the beginning of the film, the cars in a vacant parking lot at night have their alarms set off by some unseen force. This moment passes quickly, and has no discernible connection to what happens before or after. It's easy to forget about it, given all the opportunities the film creates for mental noise to flow in. But later, when we hear another car alarm, we vaguely recall it. You wonder if things you witnessed earlier actually happened or if you just dreamed them. Tilda Swinton's character experiences something very similar.
The film knows that whether we remember them or not, we rest on a foundation of past events. But at the same time, it suggests that in modern life, it's hard to remember some things, either because they're too terrible or because there's simply too much there to account for. This dilemma is not resolved in the film, but it hints that if there is a future beyond it, it lies in the transmission of memories, rather than the introspection of individual minds. One of the best scenes in the film is one in which Swinton's character attempts to describe a strange, inexplicable, utterly unique experience to someone else, and they work out together a way to simulate it so they both can share it.
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