Ten Titles, Five Explanations

Eleven days ago, I was infected, as it were, by a viral social media questionnaire about ten movies that had an impact on me. Gauntlet so thrown, I was a good host and passed it off to nine other people. After all, if we’re just large, heavy vessels for the biotic stew in our vital organs — and following the metaphor, just semi-autonomous carriers for memes and automated word salad passing through the internet — then the choice wasn’t really up to me. The challenge would continue, or die out, regardless of my involvement. But I saw it as both a celebration of film and an interesting social experiment. For those who aren’t familiar, the rules of the game are simple:
1. Every day for the next ten days, post a still from a film that had an “impact” on you (most interestingly, this doesn’t imply a favorite movie or even movie you like, just “impact,” however you want to define it).
2. Tag someone who you’d also like to see complete the challenge (many people eschew this part, although I thought it was half of what made it interesting)
3. Don’t provide a title for the film, or any explanation as to why you chose the still, or what impact it had on you.
I saw two interesting dynamics at play here: one, the social media publicity/embarrassment angle: it seems there is a terminus point at which someone posts “too much” on social media, and something of an unspoken rule not to tag people at random — you have your Facebook friends, and then you have the (far smaller number of ) people you actually interact with via Facebook. Are there really 9 people whom you’d feel comfortable tagging in something like this? If not, will you actually keep going, or fold?
This is probably part of why Instagram stories are so ubiquitous: they allow you to both post and not post on social media. You are both keeping up your internet presence and not being a perceived “addict.” This challenge, however, basically seems to undermine these unwritten rules. It reads like a throwback, something you would’ve seen in Facebook’s mid period (say, 2008–2009), but clearly there’s still some kind of demand for it.
The second dynamic was the fact that you can’t post the poster for the film. You have to choose a still. And, I think crucially, people don’t always just go with the most iconic images from each particular film. They choose a particular moment, a set of characters, an action, which had an “impact” on them specifically. The still can function as a way into their perception of the movie — what image says best, in a word (or 1000, as it were) what the movie is. I found these two entries particularly fascinating:


Neither of these are particularly heroic, dynamic images. The framing is fairly tight on them given that they have to fit in four characters. In the first image, the Incredibles have just reunited, having managed to break Mr. Incredible out. In the second, the Millenium Falcon is being pulled into the Death Star. But notably, we don’t see Violet and Dash’s force-field-hamster-wheel moment, or the image of the tiny Karelian freighter being pulled into the superweapon the size of a (small) moon. We just see the people, their connections, their personal dynamics. I got the sense from this and other posts that my friend Sam sees movies as being about interrelatedness, push and pull between different personalities and character, and that he might not give quite as much consideration to things like political themes, intertextuality, or technical aspects like cinematography and sound design, in favor of the nuances of performance and dialogue. I think that’s great! I would say both of these films had an impact on me as well, but would never have chosen the same stills.
I also noticed strange interconnectedness between my own posts. My girlfriend pointed out halfway through that she thought the common theme of the stills was children: and it’s true, the first five stills I posted either featured children, or only portrayed children. I hadn’t considered this angle in the slightest.
What I had considered was what kinds of movies I wanted to portray: after all, there are dozens if not hundreds of movies I would say had an impact on me. Hell, Digimon: The Movie had an impact on me, at least at the time. But in writing down a lot of “favorite” movies, I noticed a lot of international titles, and so I decided to go all international and, more by coincidence than on purpose, all foreign-language. In total there are: 2 Japanese films, 2 Korean films, 2 German films, 1 Thai film, 1 Greek film, 1 Italian film, and 1 Swedish film. All of them had a strong impact at the time, and all have stuck with me in some capacity since then. Some are absolute favorites, others I haven’t seen more than once, but all were, in a (mostly) positive sense of the word, impactful. So, without further ado:
1. Noriko’s Dinner Table (dir. Sion Sono), 2005

The sequel/prequel/spinoff to Sono’s breakout hit Suicide Club, an intense, jarring, surreal, violent, conspiratorial tale which never transcends being the sum of its parts. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s an outstanding film, but it doesn’t have any kind of personal stakes to me. In a movie about the unpredictability and illogic of social movements and hive mentality, the individual is somewhat lost. Go figure.
Noriko’s Dinner Table flips this script entirely. It is all about the individual, or the breakdown thereof — the malleability of identity, the experience of being both inside and outside of a social movement — despite its far-reaching implications and being set before, during, and after another film, everything is hyper-focused on Noriko’s journey, and it only makes its political and social commentary stronger.
There’s some debate as to what kind of movie this is: drama, thriller, coming-of-age, horror? To my mind, there’s no doubt that it is a horror movie, and it does a disservice to the genre to imagine that it cannot contain these other elements. But I see where the confusion lies: horror is often confused with the aesthetics: the blood, the gore, the jumps, the ghosts, ghouls, demons, etc. No. Horror is a sensibility. It is a guiding philosophy which angles the film towards a certain experience. Noriko’s Dinner Table doesn’t have a single jump scare, sound sting, or conventionally “scary” moment in its 160 minute runtime. And it’s the scariest goddamn movie I’ve ever seen.
2. Grave of the Fireflies (dir. Isao Takahata), 1988

Studio Ghibli’s best film wasn’t written or directed by Hayao Miyazaki. No, that, and the greatest animated film of all time, comes from the other half of the famed anime studio’s brain-trust, Isao Takahata, probably best-known in the U.S. for his Oscar-nominated 2013 film The Tale of Princess Kaguya.
It’s hard to summon anything insightful to say about this film because its beauty and power don’t need to be teased out. It’s primal, not in a simple-minded, violent way, but its setting taps into our most basic instincts of survival, protection, family, and love. It brings the past to life, it evokes the magic and sorrow of the human experience through the wonder of animation — it’s the kind of film that reminds you why we as humans make movies in the first place. I guess that’s all I can really say — there are tears on my keyboard already.
3. A Tale of Two Sisters (dir. Kim Jee-woon), 2004

One in a long line of proud Korean films to be given a horrendous Western remake, Kim Jee-woon’s magnum opus is one of the darkest portrayals of family life that exists on-screen. We all know the contradictions between the ideology around parenthood, and the Disnified notion of family — we’re well aware that parents can beat, rape, and murder their children, that siblings can dedicate huge portions of their lives to screwing each other over and causing pain, etc. Usually, our response is the correct one: these are extreme cases which don’t fundamentally undermine the inherent social bonds created by living in a family, or render its institutional utility null and void.
But A Tale of Two Sisters asks whether those “perversions” aren’t always there. Where is family — what is family? It’s the primary locus of anxiety regarding nudity, sexuality, self-expression, expectations, career, and death. “What’s not to love?” How about, what’s there to like?
Not that this is a uniformly drab, miserable movie with no nuances or grace notes. It understands human beings’ natural pull towards some kind of guiding force, a yearning for structure. With every extreme that Su-Mi (the film’s protagonist) goes through, I don’t get the sense that the framing of any particular scene is judging her. The film allows you to make your own conclusions regarding how you feel about her — it just asks what you’d do if you were in the same position. I wasn’t very confident in my answer, or very comfortable with the implications. If that isn’t impactful, nothing is.
4. The White Ribbon (dir. Michael Haneke), 2009

I think that the plot, pacing, mood, and tone of The White Ribbon are all finely constructed — it’s a good movie that has a satisfying beginning, middle and end, aptly handling all of the social and political themes it takes on.
But to me, the genius of the film, and what makes it enduring, is the thoroughness with which it recreates a time and place, and the authenticity with which it portrays a lifestyle I had no familiarity with, yet felt right at home in. Other period films may do great research, beautifully recreate sets and costumes, get the accents and dialect just right — but none truly suspend my disbelief like this film. Or, more to the point, in a film like The Witch, I indeed willfully suspend my disbelief, that it’s not Anya Taylor-Joy I’m looking at but Thomasin.
In The White Ribbon, nothing nearly so conscious happens. It just seems as if there was really some East German village in the 1910s, and Michael Haneke just brought a camera, filmed them, and cut it all together. I don’t feel the artifice in this film at all. It’s a tremendous effort, and again, something that movies especially can evoke beautifully: the transportation to a time and place that you have never known, and the ability to make it feel second nature. I love reading history, and that can allow you to access truths about the past which can be tremendously enlightening and immediate. Movies can’t teach you the way history can, but that’s not what they do best: They don’t tell you facts about previous epochs —if done right, they are the facts themselves.
5. The Bicycle Thief (dir. Vittorio de Sica), 1948
I don’t really have the knowledge or vocabulary about Italian neorealism to say anything interesting about The Bicycle Thief. There’s quite a body of excellent literature regarding postwar films and working through the experience both from a military and civilian standpoint. I just think that, in addition to being an all-time great film, it’s got one of the all-time greatest film titles. It’s truly expressive of how people are reduced to roles and simple signifiers, how the blanket terms of “crime” and “criminal” are too broad to be meaningful in society, yet we rely on them so heavily to give us a sense or social and moral order. However much you might sympathize with Antonio and Bruno, think they’re decent people who are down on their luck, and understand Antonio’s actions as desperate and without malice, no-one else will. They are forever locked into a particular underclass of being. It’s the film that made me shiver when hearing the phrase “tough on crime” resurge. If anything, I think I have to thank it for that very reason.
The Other Five:
I would argue that pretty much anyone “should” watch the previous films, that they are “objectively” good insofar as filmmaking skill, critical acclaim, and general reputation go. The following, while I still find impactful and many of which I love, don’t necessarily hold the same status, with the probable exceptions of Thirst and The Lives of Others. As such, I’ll just list the titles, directors and show the posters. Also: with the exception of The Bicycle Thief (which somehow has like 6 credited writers in addition to de Sica), all of these films are by writer-directors. The following are as well, with the exception of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, written by Nikolaj Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg.
6. Shutter (dir. Banjong Pisanthanakun & Parkpoom Wongpoom), 2004

7. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (dir. Niels Arden Oplev), 2009

8. The Lives of Others (dir. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck), 2006

9. Iphigenia (dir. Michael Cacoyannis), 1977

10. Thirst (dir. Park Chan-wook), 2009
