Auteurist Trap: 2020 - 40 Favorites

As it was for many people, all the most memorable film cultural events of the year happened for me at home. I only managed to catch a handful of films on the big screen in 2020 before the theatres began closing, and haven’t been back as of this writing. Turning entirely to the internet/streaming and physical media wasn’t all bad. One of the year's most exciting developments concerning older films occurred in April, when a rough copy of Bill Gunn’s eerie and unpredictable 1970 feature Stop! escaped into the grey market. For me, it lived up to all the years of intense curiosity. Let’s hope that the music clearance issues that have kept it in the vault can be resolved one day.

And taken collectively, I didn’t seen anything more compelling in 2020, old or new, than the series of films that comprise the streaming version of Nellie Killian’s essential Metrograph program Tell Me: Women Filmmakers, Women’s Stories series for The Criterion Channel. It offers portraits of women, told by female filmmakers in a variety of styles. There are features you may know, like Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie or you might recognize the name Joyce Chopra because she made Smooth Talk. Some of films are intimate documentary portraits, like Yudie, Joyce At 34 or Betty Tells Her Story. Others are political agitprop shorts like Janie’s Janie, Inside Women Inside and It Happens To Us. Some are more experimental, like Soft Fiction or Clotheslines. A lot of them are under an hour long, though you do get some buried treasures that are feature length, like Shakedown, Leila Weinraub’s documentary portrait of a black lesbian strip club. If you have the means to stream films via the Criterion Channel and this sounds like something you’d be interested in, I’d strongly recommend giving it a look as most of the series is still available now.

I could probably write an entire essay just on physical media in 2020, but let’s just say that it continues to be a golden age for the cult/classic/niche genre collector types, with lavish box sets devoted to everyone from Bruce Lee to Agnes Varda to Al Adamson to Alejandro Jodorowsky. Even the latest repackaging of the Friday The 13th franchise found new carrots to dangle, like the uncensored murder scenes from Friday The 13th Part 2. I was excited to see Umberto Lenzi’s early giallo thrillers with actress Carroll Baker finally emerge in the sort of box set I used to daydream about with friends, while weirdly neglected cult favorites like Diary Of A Mad Housewife, I Start Counting and Massacre At Central High that had been MIA during the heyday of DVD received the long overdue special edition Blu-Ray treatment. It remans physically and financially impossible to keep up with everything.

There were pros and cons to most of the theatrical film world transitioning to online. Virtual Cinema services allowed watchers to support theatres of their choice while streaming films that would likely only played in a handful of cities. This became oddly democratizing, since arthouse releases, which would invariably cost more time and money for small town viewers like myself, became just as easy to see on the first day as a Hollywood blockbuster. Even the festivals I follow, like New York Film Festival and Fantastic Fest, became more affordable and inclusive experiences for audiences unable to travel to New York and Austin, respectively. Though as I feared, the excitement, the community feeling, the “event” of it all...was completely absent as I streamed festival films in my kitchen. Niche art films became somehow even more private. A slow cinema experience like Tsai Ming-liang’s Days didn’t fully connect with me in this context, and I find myself wondering to what degree many of these films were suffering from being experienced this way. Would past NYFF favorites of mine like Jauja and Cemetery Of Splendor have done anything for me if I caught them on a laptop?

One genre that makes the transition from theatres to home viewing better than most are the sort of niche special interest documentary features that seldom make for great art, but often offer immediate pleasures if you have more than a passing interest in the subject. I have a weakness for pop music documentaries, so I was grateful for the opportunity to learn more about Swans (Where Does a Body End?), Frank Zappa (Zappa), The Go-Gos (The Go-Go's), The Band (Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band), The Ventures (Stars On Guitars), The Beastie Boys (Beastie Boys Story), The Bee Gees (How Can You Mend A Broken Heart?), Dolly Parton (Here I Am), Rock Against Racism (White Riot) and the East Bay thrash metal scene (Murder In The Front Row) while trapped at home. I probably learned more from Peter Medak’s moving account of his miserable experience making Ghost In The Noonday Sun (The Ghost Of Peter Sellers) than I did from Francesco Zippel’s hagiography on William Friedkin (Friedkin Uncut), but I loved both equally. Cinematic love letters to the culture surrounding NYC Arts retailers I've shopped at (Other Music, The Booksellers) didn’t make me feel as old as the docs dedicated to theme parks (Class Action Park) and children’s television (The Orange Years) of my youth. David Gregory's feature on horror anthologies (Tales From The Uncanny) made me smile for most of its running time. And somebody really needs to program a double feature of J.R. "Bob" Dobbs and the Church of the SubGenius and Neil Edwards’ 2015 effort, Sympathy For The Devil: The True Story of The Process Church of the Final Judgment, one day.

This doesn’t fall under the label of cinema, but since I mentioned music documentaries, I’ll remember the year as one where I turned to the internet to replace the experience of live music, or even of sharing music recordings with others. And beyond the above mentioned music docs, my 2020 was full of friendly Instagram Live Verzuz battles (RZA/DJ Premiere and Jill Scott/ Erykah Badu being my favorites), Questlove's multi-day Prince #QuestosWreckaStow IG live DJ sets, Bill McClintock’s clever musical mashups and hours of YouTube music reaction videos.

I ran out of time before I could catch up with Radium Girls, Fucking With Nobody, Eurovision Song Contest: The Fire Saga, The Whaler Boy, To All The Boys, Family Romance, 1BRE, Big Time Adolescence, Blood Quantum, End Of Sentence, AK vs AK, We Are Little Zombies, Feels Good Man, Blood On Her Name, A White White Day, Blow The Man Down, Rewind, Residue, A Secret Love, Lost Girls, The Trip To Greece, Bad Education, Selah And The Spades, Bull, The Half Of It, Lucky Grandma, The Old Guard, The Queen Of Black Magic, The 40 Year Old Version, The Old Man Movie, The Devil All The Time, His House, The Prom, Violation, Kindred, Console Wars, Yello Cat, Ghost Tropic, Tenet, Emma or Ema, among other movies. For all I know, they may all be better than what I wound up seeing.

2019 festival titles The Vast Of Night, Koko-Di Koko-Da, Wasp Network, Swallow, Sibyl, Saint Maud (which came out in many countries this year, but presumably arrives in the U.S. next year) were all on last year’s list, and Yourself And Yours was on my 2016 list, or I might have included them this one.

As in 2019, I'm only relatively certain that I managed to keep most of the names straight in a year with Sometimes Always Never and Never Rarely Sometimes Only, Zombi Child and We Are Little Zombies, The Wolf House, Wolfwalkers and The Wolf Of Snow Hollow, Come Play and Come To Daddy. I could catch Saint Frances while waiting for Saint Maud to finally open. I had zero trouble discerning Lucky Grandma from The War With Grandpa. We had two good single mother thrillers, I’m Your Woman and A Good Woman Is Hard To Find. Did you want to see Monster Hunter or Hunter Hunter, Nomad or Nomadland, Ema or Emma? Fortunately, Bad Education, Limbo, The Nest, Disclosure and Midnight In Paris will never be the source of any confusion.

I can usually only tell on the second or third viewing if something feels great. But I didn’t have time to rewatch most of these, nor many films I enjoyed that I didn’t put on the list, like Dick Johnson Is Dead, Sometimes Always Never, Nomad: In The Footsteps Of Bruce Chatwin, I’m Your Woman, She Dies Tomorrow, Days, Nomadland, David Byrne’s American Utopia, The Outpost, Spree, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, The Swerve, Martin Eden, Siberia, Let Them All Talk, On The Rocks and The Human Voice. If I had to rank my favorite films of 2020 in numerical order, Lovers Rock and Tommaso would be at the top.