Anthony Banua-Simon’s Top10

Innocence Unprotected is built from fragments of a film made by the Yugoslav gymnast Dragoljub Aleksić during the German occupation of Belgrade. Aleksić’s movie is a seemingly straightforward melodrama in which he stars as a mythological figure and plays on his glamorous real-life reputation as someone who performed a lot of death-defying stunts in public. Released during the occupation, it was never shown again until Dušan Makavejev rediscovered it and decided to make it the basis of his own film, using the same title. Makavejev samples the original while adding different elements—including newsreel footage and scenes of Aleksić and the other actors in the present day—to create a new commentary that runs parallel to the source material.

What I love about Makavejev’s film is that it respects the original movie and the larger-than-life character Aleksić portrays in it, but it uses this cinematic construct to explore a darker political reality. I first saw Makavejev’s Innocence Unprotected at Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn, at a time when I was still thinking through how I wanted to make my own documentary Cane Fire, which uses a wide array of archival sources to examine colonial displacement and labor exploitation on the Hawaiian island of Kaua‘i.

The lost film that my project centers on—Lois Weber’s 1934 Cane Fire—is similar to Aleksić’s movie in that it was the first sound film made in the place it depicts. And both films are melodramas that were seen as subversive in their times. I learned a lot from studying how Makavejev approached his historical material.

Agnès Varda is the best to ever do it and has been written about extensively (insert Criterion essays here), so I’m not going to feign at making any new insights. But I would like to pass along my sense that the kids are alright, based on how well my undergraduate editing students take to both of these films, particularly The Gleaners and I. In resistance to the market’s move toward observational docudramas that push an idea of “realism” while imposing arbitrary technological standards, I strive to champion films that do not conform to these trends, which are often infinitely more profound than the films that do. Varda fully utilized the advantage of being able to have meandering yet intimate conversations with a mini-DV camcorder while still demonstrating her continued curiosity and poetic expression in whatever genre or technical format she was working in. A sophomore student recently shared with me a project he made with an SD camcorder similar to the one Varda uses. He shot with that camera because it best fit the story he wanted to tell. The curse of our infinite drive for higher and higher definition has finally been lifted!

“Winnipeg . . . Winnipeg. Snowy, sleepwalking Winnipeg.” Those lines are forever in my head, because I was working as a ticket taker at the IFC Center while it was playing there, and the trailer was constantly on a loop on the lobby TV. I was so excited to watch the movie that I came to work on its opening day—my day off—at a 10 a.m. screening.

I’m so mesmerized by the atmosphere that the film maintains, and it’s only after rewatching it recently that I was reminded how subdued its pacing is. It’s comforting, like when my grandparents would take me to go see travelogues at our local community center when I was a kid. The travelogues were usually just someone telling us about their vacation (while using a slide projector and employing a bit more research than the average tourist would), but I was so immersed in them that now I remember them as elaborately staged films. I even remember music playing along with the slides—was there music?

I bought My Winnipeg when it first came out on DVD, but it got lost at a Brooklyn post office. Maybe I’ll get the Criterion edition!

“What is this thing? Oh, it’s a movie. So, who’s moving whom?”

I love the idea of staging a narrative in a chaotic public atmosphere and letting the setting blend into the planned script. I’ve been working with this similar device in an upcoming project. Obviously, William Greaves’s film is more than that; it’s also about the film crew taking control and speaking actively about what it’s making. This is why I prefer making documentaries; you set out with an initial idea, but your subjects or social actors are encouraged to challenge your thesis and ultimately shape the result into something better.

I’ve seen this film so many times that I’m at risk of taking the whole experiment for granted and not appreciating what a bold idea it was for Greaves to take on. Sometimes I’m more distracted by how grating some of the dudes in that room can be while filming themselves dissecting Greaves’s direction behind closed doors. Another timely and politically relevant Greaves film that deserves a Criterion edition is Nationtime.

This is not my favorite Cassavetes, but it’s the one I’ve been thinking about the most lately, especially with regard to a project I’m working on about a PR agent in 1939 Waikiki (more about this in #6). It’s a film about male ego pushed to its absolute mortal limit.

I appreciate that the two different edits of this movie are available in the Criterion box set. I still prefer the original 1976 cut. It plays like other Cassavetes films of that era while almost begrudgingly following a loose crime-thriller plot. It takes unexpected diversions from the plot, and these moments of rupture are ultimately what make it so compelling.

The 1978 recut streamlines the genre plot points a bit more and holds back the pathetic moments that the protagonist, Cosmo, endures right at the beginning of the original. Cosmo almost gets away with being a rascal who’s good at his hustle, instead of being one who is utterly delusional from the start. Despite the differences in these two edits, they both end with Mr. Sophistication delivering a sincere monologue, only to have it undercut by a cheap gag. That character is the perfect Cassavetes cipher.

I’m drawn to films that take place in one building. I keep a running list, and I’m always accepting recommendations. As I mentioned above, I’m working on a project about the theoretical life of a Matson PR agent holed up in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Waikiki in 1939. Matson is currently a shipping company, but it was also part of the earliest cruise lines and hotel ventures in Hawai‘i. Just picture the main character of my film pretending to swim over 8 mm film rushes of the Matson cruise ship Lurline in the manner of Michel Piccoli’s character in Dillinger Is Dead. Beyond mimicking Dillinger, I want to explore the same themes of containment and alienation being mediated through various pop-culture signifiers. Stay tuned!

I love earnest documentary essays in which the filmmaker reflects not just on what they’re witnessing in front of them but also on the conversations and research they did in the process of making the movie. (This theme links to my next selection.) In Routine Pleasures, we get to watch director Jean-Pierre Gorin’s long talks with artist and critic Manny Farber as Gorin contemplates American landscapes, both in Farber’s paintings and in the miniature train models operated by a group of enthusiasts. I like how the film wraps around itself at points, like when Farber warns Gorin about being nostalgic right as Gorin is filming the model-train hobbyists as if they’re in a Hollywood film from the 1930s.

Gorin evokes the spirit of the film’s title by going at his own pace while taking in his new American environment as a French expat. A good lesson for all of us trying to stick with a long-term project: we have to be content with each stage existing as its own thing and enjoy the process. That being said, Farber and even the train hobbyists do eventually get a bit impatient and start to wonder when Gorin is going to finish this film.

Like Routine Pleasures, this is a film about the process of making a film. It works as a romantic-comedy parafiction while also contemplating our associations with the past, what we want it to say, and how all of that is influenced by our own positionality and power.

I love the hyper-specific comedic side characters that Cheryl Dunye inserts: the cultural critic who repeatedly refers to her Italian American heritage when claiming that Black scholars have their interpretation of “mammy” stereotypes all wrong; the archivist who gives Cheryl a tour of the volunteer-run collective that receives funds from something called the Hysteria Foundation.

Spending your waking hours outside of your day job obsessing over a lost film from the thirties and having it somehow lead to a romance? I want to believe!

It’s a shame that the film Barbara Kopple made after Harlan County USA—American Dream, about a failed union campaign at a meatpacking plant—isn’t available on Criterion, because together the two of them really do illustrate the meme construction “how it started / how it’s going” when applied to the subject of union organizing in this country. As with Varda’s work, I’m not going to waste time taking this celebrated film head-on. What I’ll say is that I show the first ten minutes to freshman and sophomore editing students just to illustrate how you can capture a constant hum of energy and momentum even with relatively simple ingredients. The film observes an intensifying strike while also giving us individual portraits of the miners and historical context wherever relevant, and it just flows seamlessly.

Acknowledging every person or group’s diversity while finding parallels in their struggles is an active way of illustrating solidarity through film editing and it’s hard to find a stronger example.

“I’d love a bite of your sandwich.”