I arrive home (in the subtropical wet forests of northern NSW, Australia)
check my emails after only a day or two and there is this fascinating
deluge. Autobiography - including, in particular, many instances of the
(often fascinating, often very useful) autobiographical genre of the list. I
could not help but read through them when I should have been working (I do
ecological survey and restoration work). And there was also Simon
Critchley's essay on Malick's (one director on my list of favourites) the
Thin Red Line where he
decribes his most powerful memory of his first watching of this film - the
scene and sounds of making that hard climb up that big Kunai grass hill that
dominates a long section of the film. Mine too.  Outside my window right now
I can see blady grass growing (that is what it is called around here).

I have a particular philosophical interest in narrative, particularly in the
logic of narrative, the historical distinctions between history and fiction,
and the relation of these matters to narrative style and poetics. This
interest led to my writing a book on The Philosophy of Fiction. Although I
have always felt that word fiction has awkwardly anachronistic and
novelistic connotations in the cinema context, I suspect that this may be
because film is somehow even more fictive a medium than prose, more poetic
than poetry. I am now
writing a book on the history and poetics of nature, particularly on the
physical works of contemporary
Australian natureculture.

I should add that usually my least favourite narrative genres are biopics
and biography, and I liked Critchley's brief biographical remarks on
Malick's biography. Yet I share his curiousity, especially in the case of
those of you sitting around this table. I live in a remote area and it is
nice to have a conversation with you. I hope I am not too long-winded.

As for my films of 2002, well it is still 2001 here, and here is usually
somewhere in America. The distribution sees to that. I like nothing better
than getting out of all this
nature and spending two weeks in the dark dreamtime of the Sydney Film
Festival, but I cant always get away. If I listed my favourites I suspect it
would look like Adrian's Citizen Kane canon - although Kane and Vertigo
would not be on it. The Magnificent Ambersons would though. Although it runs
down the page, I offer the
following not as a list and not of favourites but as an edited  non-ordered
farrago (is that OK Richard?), quite specific to my fleeting subjectivity
just now, of half
forgotten films, films that I would like to see again, awards I would like
to
make, films that have taken up odd corners of my subjectivity, films that
have moved in and just stayed, a few things that I have loved in films, and
films of myth and legend.

2. Groucho singing Lydia in At the Circus (Best song and dance)
3. Cassavetes Minnie and Muskowitz (spelling?) Seen too long ago and the
film I want to see tonight.
4. Priscilla Queen of the Desert, the schmalzy anti-gay, misogynist film I
would most like to pull apart if I had the time to write a scathing essay.
5. Voice-over. As in Malick. And as in Truffaut, and many more (where its
sonority, pace, timbre etc somehow makes
me feel warm inside - as if the rapid pace of the narrative at these points
creates a kind of warmth). Or as sharp incisive commentary as in Barry
Lyndon (I enjoyed Roberts remarks on
this) or Age of Innocence.
6. Balthazars voice. And the end of Au Hazard Balthazar. We all cried here.
8. The King of Comedy. In which Taxi Driver meets Daffy Duck and Jerry Lewis
(The favourite filmmaker of my childhood).
9. Godard's Helas pour moi. A film to go to sleep to - in the good sense as
Raul Ruiz describes it in his Poetics of Cinema (one of my favourite cinema
books)
10. He Died With a Felafel in his Hand. The most disappointing film of the
most delightful comic novel (John Birmingham).
12. Looks and Smiles (seen too long ago) and Ken Loach, for being too often
pigeon-holed as a
socialist realist when he is really a fine maker of talk cinema (could even
be compared with the master, Rohmer).
13. I Know Where Im Going. (Powell and Pressburger.) and The Walls of
Malapaga. Unrelated except that they were both seen by accident, still come
back to me, and I wish I could remember them better and see them again.
15. John Huston's The Dead. My favourite literary adaptation.
20. The Wind Will Carry Us. Thank you to Dorner for the view from Iran and
the sense among Iranians that there is this problem of romantic projection
onto Iranian cinematic culture. I certainly did not know about this. There
is perhaps something similar in the romance of Aboriginal culture in
Australia. I suspect it is present in the reception of Rabbit Proof Fence,
and certainly Aboriginal people point it out in other areas.  The Wind Will
Carry Us strikes me as a film about modernity's  romance with traditional
culture. It could even be called a comedy about that romance.
27. The film, played entirely by a cast of animals that Bresson did not make
on Christ. It is like John Milton's epic poem on King Arthur. May these two
great unmade works of narrative art always stand in my mind as memorials to
all the films that, as far as I am concerned, might as well not have been
made. That is the films of Bela Tarr, Hou Hsiou Hsien, Tsai Ming-liang, and
many others that I hear of and worry when or if I will get to see them. I
gather every one has this anxiety, and that we all live in the bush
sometimes or in the backblocks of somewhere. I can usually get to see them
on the small screen eventually, after the conversation dies down. But its a
worry and its small.

For Shane, whose autobiography I most enjoyed, here is Wittgensteins Joke
from Simon Critchleys essay on Malick, in case anyone did not get it.

Wittgenstein asks a question, which sounds like the first line of a joke:
'How does one philosopher address another?' To which the unfunny and
perplexing riposte is: 'Take your time'.

Surely this is a joke.

Ross