GIVEAWAY: Nicolas Ray's "We Can't Go Home Again"

[cdnchris]

Oscilloscope Laboratories presents WE CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN by legendary director Nicholas Ray's on Blu-ray and DVD this Tuesday, November 13th.

To celebrate the release of Ray's long-awaited final film, Oscilloscope is giving away 3 Blu-rays and 2 DVDs to Criterion Forum readers. For your chance to win, let us know in the thread below what your favorite "outlier" / "experimental" film by a "Hollywood" director or a director who's worked within the Hollywood system, and why. Please keep responses to five sentences max and one response per person.

Contest will end at 11:59 PM PST on November 19th, 2012. The winners will be chosen and announced on this thread shortly thereafter.

[knives]

I'm probably using the Sarris version of experimental a little too much here but Brewster McCloud is not only my favorite oddity of a Hollywood director, but one of my favorite films ever. It's in its inability to be a traditional comedy that I think works best with Doran William Cannon at his demented best (I was also considering mentioning the Cannon scripted Skidoo for much the same reasons). This bizarre nature could have been just used for self aware comedy, but Altman does his best in shaping a strong emotional tale of the conflicted nature that innocence can present. Cort's naivetee is painfully split between the villainous guardian working like a vile id and the loving ragdoll love portrayed by Shelley Duvall in her best performance. Altman may be an outskirts to begin with, but he never made something so brilliantly against the system before or after.

[Niale]

Im all about fighting the god damn system!
I like that movie "New York, New York".
Scorsese made the system fuck the system.
I like watching it because it's pretty like them hollywoods be,
but its got BITE too! If I ever did coke and watched the film, Im sure
I would like it a lot better. Anyways, bluray please.

[manicsounds]

"F For Fake" by Orson Welles. He plays so many games with the viewer that you'll either feel irritatingly angry or completely enthralled by the outcome.

[DunnDorr]

My favorite is F FOR FAKE by Orson Welles. Using forgery to do a documentary about forgery, Welles must've been the Banksy of his time by being an exceptional showman and magician.

[mfunk9786]

I'm fascinated to this day by the fact that Bubble exists and works as well as it does. It shouldn't have been so easy for Steven Soderbergh to go out to the midwest, cast a bunch of non-actors, and make a film that is more chilling and atmospheric than most of the work coming out of Hollywood. It isn't flashy in its experimental nature, as it's a stripped-down story about very common people, but it's one of film's more intriguing dirty secrets that this film turned out as well as it did considering the near total lack of conventional pedigree involved. The sort of ballsy, "Hey, why don't we do it this way and just see what happens?" stuff that only Soderbergh takes on.

[gcgiles1dollarbin]

King Vidor's Metaphor, in which Vidor films his encounter and conversation with the painter Andrew Wyeth, a project prompted by the latter's profession of love for Vidor's The Big Parade, clips from which occasionally appear in the film. I love films that grapple with the director's impact on others (another example might be F for Fake, cited above by manicsounds) during which the filmmaker is brought to earth and considered as an artist affecting others and being affected by both his viewers and his medium. It is so rare to see a studio system director break the auteur mystification and give some thought--through film--to his role as a filmmaker--stepping out, as it were. You could argue that a filmmaker cannot avoid doing this, however completely he ensconces himself within the omniscient, invisible position of visual storyteller, but I think embarking on a project in which the object is to unpack the reciprocal impact between viewer and artist is a radically humble and potentially revelatory gesture. Metaphor was made in the late '70s, I believe, and although some consider it unfinished, it is nonetheless a moving valedictory from one of the masters.

[Gregory]

From the early stage of De Palma's career, when almost anything seemed possible, Hi, Mom is a rare example of an American feature of this period that compellingly engages with some of the same matters as the European art cinema, but with the (self-)satirizing air of a put-on. De Niro's character (carried over from Greetings) is now a Vietnam veteran who seems uncertain of his role in life except as a spectator, his ambition to make voyeuristic "peep" films placing in front of funhouse mirrors not so much the themes of Rear Window (though they are in there) as the entire 1960s media culture.
The extraordinary "Be Black, Baby" set piece comes immediately from De Palma's 1968-69 turning-point: having been blown away by The Performance Group's experimental production Dionysus, De Palma filmed and presented it in split-screen to show the interaction between performer and spectator, and ultimately to "problematize" that distinction. In Hi, Mom, the experimental theater "performance" serves as a satire of liberal spectators' white guilt and yearning for awareness of what is "hip" in their consumption of media, as their passivity is taken away from them, at least briefly. The Wikipedia article on De Palma fumblingly asserts that the film "espouse[s] a Leftist revolutionary viewpoint," whereas I find it anti-dogmatic, raising questions and posing situations that are as layered and thought-provoking as they are bizarre and farcical.

[htshell]

I'm going to place my vote for Eggshells by Tobe Hooper. I just watched it this weekend and it was a revelation. There's definitely a primitive/brutish Texan attitude to it, but it's also reminiscent of the New American Cinema zeitgeist of the late 1960s. It makes me wonder if Hooper had access to any films by Gregory Markopolous or Jonas Mekas and was thus inspired to incorporate avant garde/experimental techniques into his very of-the-moment film.

[who is bobby dylan]

There are many "outlier" films by many, "Hollywood" filmmakers I could pick, from Orson Welles, to John Cassavetes, but if I had to nominate only one film, representing both what its director achieved within Hollywood and in recognition of the outsider status that director maintained despite that success, I would pick Sam Fuller's Park Row. Unlike Welles or Cassavetes, Fuller achieved financial if not critical success within Hollywood, while at the same time making films as personal and polemical as any outsider and when his films became too personal, he still found ways to make them outside of the mainstream; Park Row is my favorite example. I find it hard to get through some movies because I'm not sure why the filmmakers made them in the first place, but with Fuller this isn't a problem. Park Row is a film that can't wait to tell us its story and invite us into its world.

[Professor Wagstaff]

Maybe you can chalk this pick up as childhood nostalgia, but I've always had immense affection for John Huston's "Annie". In his five decades as a filmmaker, this marked Huston's only attempt to make a movie musical (and perhaps jarring to Huston's fans might be the generally optimistic attitude of the film despite the director being a cynical realist). Like the Daddy Warbucks character of the film, Huston similarly made an unexpected adoption as a younger man, taking in a Mexican orphan who helped on set during the making of "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" and raising him in America (a decision that helped end his marriage to Evelyn Keyes). There's something charming in imagining this direct-for-hire gig might have exposed an element of this gruff old man's sentimental side that he'd hidden from the public for decades.

[Lowry_Sam]

This is a tough question,I love "unfilmable" novels and they fit the bill rather nicely (Cronenberg's Naked Lunch, Hill's Slaughterhouse Five, Welles' The Trial, Richardson's The Loved One, Nichols' Catch-22), however I can't just pick one above the others, so instead I'll chose another type of experiment: Von Sternberg's The Devil Is A Woman, which for me is the first film to define the camp aesthetic. Everything about this film, including the title, is so over-the-top, there is no way to watch it & not conclude that Von Sternberg intended to do something other than to just churn out another dramatic vehicle for Dietrich: The wry one-liners, dresses more stunning than most historical epics, wardrobe changes for every scene and enough sexual innuendo to raise the ire of the Hays office. It's the inspiration for The Women, Carol Burnett & Charro skits, Divine, That Obscure Object of Desire, Lola Montes & so much more.

[Gregory]

The Devil Is a Woman was meant to be titled Caprice Espagnol. The studio ordered the change late in the game, hoping that something that sounded a bit racier would boost the film's box office. Sternberg definitely did not approve.

[SpiderBaby]

Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie. Hopper's implosion of film (....within a film, within another), it's influences in society, such as violence shown through cultural differences and wrapped in religious-like undertones. A movie that defined an era of Hollywood filmmaking, and one could say helped destroyed an era as well. Very hard for me to think of another film that I love and holds my interest long after viewing than this one does. A personal favorite.

[The Narrator Returns]

Got to go with Steven Soderbergh's Schizopolis. A movie whose sense of humor ranges from oddball ("Smell sign!") to completely nonsensical (got to love the musical trash can), it's amazing to think that just a few years later, Soderbergh would be a sought-after commercial director. Hell, Schizopolis practically made him that commercial director. After becoming disillusioned with filmmaking, Soderbergh reenergized himself with a gag-a-minute comedy where a good majority of the gags would only appeal to a select few (Craig J. Clark and I are some of them, and we both consider it Soderbergh's finest). I will be forever thankful for getting Soderbergh back on the right track, and in a manner that's absolutely hilarious.

[mizo]

William Friedkin's "Conversation with Fritz Lang" is my choice because, to me, it represents the ultimate expression of one director's admiration for another, or just one man's admiration for another. The camera is so rapt with attention, as is Friedkin, when Lang speaks that it creates a really hypnotic feeling within the viewer. I don't know the circumstances around its making, so I don't know if the use of rather poor black-and-white stock was a stylistic choice or a necessity, but to me it only adds to the effect, not to mention that this is the sort of atmosphere I will forever imagine Fritz Lang in (color simply doesn't suit the man). It truly says something about Friedkin that he has such respect for Lang that he allows the latter's answers, if they can even be so called, to be as fabricated as his whims dictate just to share them with the people who revere him and his work as much as Friedkin does. And the film certainly seems a bit unusual next to "The French Connection" and "The Exorcist."

[domino harvey]

No question, it's Nunnally Johnson's avant-garde nightmare, the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. I've written at-length about this Gregory Peck vehicle on the board here, but the short version is this is a bizarro prestige pic from the 50s that abuses the seminal source text in order to make insane the inane existence of the modern man set adrift within the Lonely Crowd of the era. How or why this bold masterpiece has failed to find modern favor is a mystery indeed

[HypnoHelioStaticStasis]

Considering a lot of his later work, it's understandable that Wayne Wang's reputation is slightly tarnished by the slick emptiness of "Anywhere But Here", "Maid in Manhattan" and the reprehensible "Last Holiday." However, a lot of people forget than Wang got his start with some absolutely terrific independent features, most notably Chan Is Missing, which starts out as a quasi-noir in the Jarmuschian vein (it must be said that this film was released before that term even had a chance to be coined) and ends up being a wonderful shaggy-dog exploration of Asian-American identity and gap between immigrants and their children. I had very low expectations going into this, but they were exceeded tenfold. It shows a young filmmaker willing to put himself out there, which makes Wang's subsequent forays into Hollywood all the more uninteresting. Despite wallowing in the for-hire scene for a while, its nice to see Wang has returned to his roots a bit, with the underseen and undervalued "A Thousand Years of Good Prayers." Much of this guy's early work deserves a bigger audience.

[rossen]

Gus Van Sant Death Trilogy, especially Gerry and its otherworldly Harris Savides cinematography.

[vertovfan]

I choose Martin Scorsese's early short The Big Shave. I love how sensuality gives way to horror at the end, making it both seductive and disturbing. It's a bold political metaphor (the self-inflicted bloodbath echoing the United States' self-destructive involvement in Vietnam) and the soothing crooner soundtrack complements the visuals perfectly.

[Forrest Taft]

Was going to pick Soderbergh's Schizopolis, but seeing as it's already taken, I'll go with John Boorman's Zardoz (other Boorman candidates would be The Heretic, or perhaps even Tiger's Tail). Such a strange and beautiful film. I'm not sure I fully understand it, but that doesn't really matter because Boorman has such a powerful visual sense and keeps throwing his ideas out there one after the other. Not the campy flick the trailer makes it look like. The montage at the end gets me every time.

[What A Disgrace]

My vote would have to go to one of my personal favorite films, William Wellman's Track of the Cat. The Dreyer-esque tone, the scaled-down use of color, the seemingly overcooked and burnt-out drama...none of those things or more are secrets to people who are, or know, admirers of the film, and they seem richer with each viewing. But the straw that breaks the camel's back, for me, is the simple fact that the film is a wintry chamber-piece. Like Mon Oncle Antoine, another personal favorite, the film will continue to have a personal resonance to me as I grow and reflect on the many winters I spent with my non-immediate family.

[Applesauce]

Like many others, I'm sure, I only had the chance to view Otto Preminger's 1968 debacle Skidoo a few years ago. I might have fallen delightfully asleep halfway through only to be woken by Carol Channing's gleeful rendition of Harry Nilsson's title song, but with Nilsson then singing the end credit sequence, those remaining forty winks will never be missed. Coming from one of the few Hollywood producer/directors to command the utmost respect while continually questioning and challenging authority, Skidoo was a marvelous surprise that placed Preminger, the seemingly ultra-serious director of The Man with the Golden Arm, Advise & Consent, and Anatomy of a Murder, in the thick of the sixties free love wave, tacitly endorsing the use of LSD, and hiring Groucho Marx to play "God"; history has, unfortunately, been less kind and regards Skidoo with derision. Well, thanks to Preminger, we had a laugh; or in the case of Jackie Gleason, an hysteric giggle fit.

[matrixschmatrix]

To me, the ultimate outsider masterpiece by a Hollywood mainstay is Laughton's Night of the Hunter. It's certainly an outside work, since Laughton never got to make another film, and to me it's sort of the movie that Citizen Kane is always reputed to be, something so astonishingly gorgeous that one can't believe a first timer made it while also being so casually disinterested in the norms of the system in which it was made that it somehow counts as a mistake to have made it. It's really in love with Hollywood history, too, reaching knowingly back to Griffith with the casting of Lillian Gish- but also transforming the character she represented from the ever fragile virgin, about to be raped, to a towering pillar of iconoclastic feminine strength, defending the little things against a hard world.

It's an outsider work in a more fundamental way, too, serving as a really vicious mockery of the conformist, patriarchal standards so many other works of the era fought to uphold. What other filmmaker- outside, perhaps, of Ray himself- would have had a film in which a character who represents the central view of the community both egg on a helpless mother towards a disastrous, sexless, murderous patriarch and cry slavering through the streets as she leads a party to lynch the man, once he's declared outside of society?

[JeffWang]

My favorite experimental film by a director who's worked within the Hollywood system would have to be Steven Soderberg's Che. Soderbergh subverts the narrative conventions of the historical biopic by leaving out traditional traits such as psychological motivation, conventional character and story arcs, and a climactic resolution that ties everything up neatly. Instead, Soderbergh is more interested in the process of Che and his guerillas, and the nitty gritty details of their guerilla tactics to overthrow the corrupt Cuban government. Che is not a traditional rise and fall of a hero figure; rather it is a narratively daring film that is more interested in exploring the tactical routines and day to day, sometimes mundane details of a historical movement, and less interested in exploring the life of a historical figure.