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As the Hitchcock 9 proves, even a director as storied and studied as Alfred Hitchcock can have films still virtually unseen by a wider audience. Seeing a “new” work by a legendary director—the Northwest Chicago Film Society‘s recent screening of the long-lost John Ford film Upstream, for example—is an exciting prospect. People often erroneously assume that film history is set in stone, that we’ve learned all there is to learn and seen all there is to see. Not only is that untrue on a pandemic level—recent retrospectives of Werner Schroeter and Aleksei German show there’s always more to learn about cinema’s past—but on a personal level, one can always discover new films or, in some cases, rediscover films one’s already seen. My top five this week is dedicated to films I was forced to reevaluate after multiple viewings revealed aspects I’d previously missed. You can catch them after the jump.
- Déjà Vu (Tony Scott, 2006, USA) Really, I could put any of Scott’s films here, as it wasn’t a particular film that led me back to his work so much as the realization that he’d been steadily making some of the most radically stylized mainstream movies of his era. Déjà Vu, with its metaphysical accents and impressionistic formal design, seems a prime choice, but films like Unstoppable and Domino are also worthy because of the way they contextualize Scott’s entire filmography.
