Art for Art’s Sake — Looking at the Ten Best Films of 2017

by Duane Porter

Art is art regardless of where you find it, in an art gallery or in the street, in a theater or on television. Art does not have to be didactic, edifying, decorative, or entertaining. As Marcel Duchamp demonstrated over a century ago, it doesn’t have to be anything at all. Embracing this uncertainty, it’s possible to think of art as research, inquiry into the unknown and perhaps the unknowable. It is also possible to think of looking at art as research. Looking can be an end in itself and a means to an end. Looking thus becomes a dynamic synthesis of perception and consciousness. Being aware of perception and conscious of consciousness, transcending the day-to-day habit of only seeing what we expect to see, an encounter with art can be an encounter with illumination. Illumination, an emergent property of the act of looking, serves self-knowledge enabling one to construct a more comprehensive worldview and with it, a more meaningful life.

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1. Twin Peaks: The Return directed by David Lynch

FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) is careening through the space-time continuum. A vertiginous freefall as depicted in Scotty’s nightmare in Vertigo (1958). Cooper’s face blurred and shaken fills the screen accompanied by a violent whooshing sound. The light from a myriad of stars streaks through the void. A roiling cloud forms amid violet-colored vapors. Cooper passes through and lands in a heap on the balcony of a massive metal structure rising out of a purple-tinted sea. Hearing the sound of the waves, feeling lost and confused, he stands and looks out over this never-ending otherworldly ocean. Looking around, there is a window he is able to enter. The inside vibrates with a dense electronic hum broken by random glitches, zszczch! A woman with no eyes (Nae Yuuki) wearing a red velvet dress is sitting on a couch in front of a fireplace. She turns toward him and nods. The room reverberates strangely as if time is stuttering, zszczch, zszczch! Everything seems to be moving forward and backward at the same time. He reaches out and takes the hand of the woman, he hears music and looks around the room. He asks, “Where is this? Where are we?” She pulls him down beside her, running her hands up his sleeves, she begins to feel his face. She tries to speak but is unable to form words. He is startled by a loud banging. She shushes him, putting a finger to her lips. The banging continues, the walls shake. She becomes frantic. The banging is deafening. She leads him away through a door to a small room with a ladder. They go up the ladder, pass through a trap door, and step onto the top of a metal box floating in space, stars twinkling all around them. He sees a bell-shaped structure there equipped with pressure guages and a lever. The banging continues. The woman tries to tell Cooper something but he is unable to understand her. Sidling close to the edge, she reaches for the lever and pulls it down. Electricity crackles and runs through her body. She is shaken and thrown into space. Cooper reaches for her but can only watch helplessly as she disappears. The banging has stopped. He goes back inside. Another woman (Phoebe Augustine) in a red dress sits before the fire. He begins to move toward the woman, she turns her head to look at him and then checks her watch. A lamp switches on next to an electric panel set in the wall. Moving closer to the panel he feels an electrical force field and hesitates. The woman tells him, “When you get there you will already be there.” The banging begins again. The woman says, “You’d better hurry, my mother’s coming.” The electric panel has a large outlet at it’s center. As Cooper moves closer, he appears to dematerialize and is drawn into the outlet, all except for his shoes which fall to the floor.

July 16, 1945, White Sands, New Mexico, 5:29 AM (MWT) a countdown begins, 10, 9 . . .3, 2, 1. The discordant strains of Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1960) accompany a blindingly bright flash of light that obliterates the landscape. An ominous cloud shaped like a mushroom grows up from the desert floor. Great clouds of dust and debris ride the radiating shock-wave. The shrieking screaming of the Threnody builds as inside the growing mushroom swirling vapors of black and white intertwine. Fiery flashes give way to chaotic particles dancing in darkness. The Threnody becomes a droning as the particles begin to swarm like a plague of locusts. Momentarily resuming their dance, the particles increase to a frantic infinitude of bright dots and streaks resembling a film by Brakhage. As the Threnody reaches a crescendo billowing whorls of fire coalesce into explosians of color, red, green, blue, violet and yellow. Then, out of black and white clouds, appears a convenience store with two gas pumps out front. In the darkness, a steamy vapor rises amid sputtering dimensional glitches of static and bright flashes of light inside the store. A group of men converge in front of the store and seem to be pacing about in random patterns as the static and bright flashes continue. They gather inside as the flashes of light intensify and the store and the ground it sits on begin to disruptively shake. All grows dark and a calmness descends. A figure (Erica Eynon) in the darkness spews from its mouth a stream of foam and bubbles looking much like a latex sculpture by Eva Hesse. From within this gooey fecund mass a black bubble comes to the surface containing BOB (Frank Silva), the embodiment of evil let loose in the world by the deeds of men. The Threnody bursts forth again as a conflagration of fire and dark energy erupts with fiery explosions. From the heart of this inferno comes forth a golden seed, closer and closer, until it fills the entire screen. On the strains of the Threnody, a vision of hurtling through the space-time continuum recalls the stargate sequence in Kubrick’s 2001 (1968), coming again to a vast purple sea, the sound of wind and waves all around, a modernist castle, like something out of the films of Fritz Lang, rests atop a towering pinnacle of rock. Inside, a woman named Dido (Joy Nash) sits listening to a gramophone. A very tall gaunt-looking man (Carel Struycken) slowly climbs a carpeted stairway and enters into a large auditorium that contains a movie screen but no seats. On the screen, he is shown the events that led up to the birth of BOB. With an expression of disquiet on his face, he floats toward the ceiling. Dido comes into the room and watches in wonder as a stream of golden particles issue from the top of his head forming a cloud out of which a golden orb floats down into Dido’s reaching hands. Looking into the orb, she sees the angelic face of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), she kisses it and sends it out into the world.

It’s nightfall as Agent Cooper and Carrie Page (Sheryl Lee) pull out of Odessa. The headlights probing into the darkness illuminate the white lines of the lost highway. Two lights appear in the rear window and seem to hover there. Sensing dread, Carrie turns her head and looks back. The lights continue to hover there. After a few long minutes, Carrie looks back again, anxiety showing in her face. Cooper glances in the rearview mirror but keeps his attention on the road ahead. Carrie looks back a third time and asks, “Is someone following us?” Cooper looks in the rearview mirror again but says nothing. Time passes slowly until, at last, the lights overtake them and a car passes and moves on ahead. Carrie, breathing a sigh of relief, leans back in her seat and closes her eyes. On and on they drive, the white lines flashing by in the dark induce a sense of interdimensional uncertainty. Crossing a bridge, they pull into Twin Peaks. It is late at night, everything is closed and no one is out on the street. Driving through town, Cooper looks over at Carrie and asks, “Do you recognize anything?” He parks across the street in front of the Palmer house and shuts off the engine. “Do you recognize that house?” She says, “no.” He takes her by the hand and leads her up to the front door. He asks for Sarah Palmer but the people living in the house know no one by that name. Cooper and Carrie walk slowly toward their car. Stopping in the middle of the street, they both turn around and look back at the house. Cooper, looking for a clue and straining to understand asks himself, “What year is this?” Carrie looks up at the house again, recognition gradually seeping into her consciousness, she faintly hears someone call out, “Laura!” Suddenly she is overcome by a shattering hysteria, erupting in shrieking anguish. The lights on the street glitch and splutter, zszczch! zszczch! and all goes dark.

A memory of something I once heard long ago comes into my head, “. . . the feeling of something half remembered . . . the face in the misty light, footsteps that you hear down the hall, the laugh that floats on a summer night . . . that was Laura but she’s only a dream.”

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David Lynch is in his studio working on a painting, the paint is thickly textured on the canvas. The image is dark, almost black. Putting his brush aside, he sits back in his chair, lights a cigarette, a cloud of smoke gathering above his head, and he looks at the painting. There is a suggestion of a figure in the darkness, blurry and indistinct, an organic body inhabiting a physical space, reminiscent of the distressed bodies in the paintings of Francis Bacon. Looking at the painting he begins to wonder what it might be like if the wind were blowing through it. Dreamlike the images on the canvas begin to move swaying to and fro reflecting the uncertainty of the physical world. Attempting to grasp an image rising from perceptions passing through the nervous system into consciousness, he picks up the brush and begins moving the paint, his gestural brushstrokes leave tracks on the thick impasto surface, pressing harder he uses his fingers to manipulate the textures and spaces, openly experimenting to see what happens, where it will go. Lynch explains, “The more you throw black into a colour, the more dreamy it gets. . . Black is depth. It’s like a little egress; you can go into it, and because it keeps on continuing to be dark, the mind kicks in, and a lot of things that are going on in there become manifest. And you start seeing what you’re afraid of. You start seeing what you love, and it becomes like a dream.” In the years since Inland Empire (2006), his paintings have admitted more color and light while continuing to look into a resolute darkness. His art is one of philosophical and personal inquiry using language, light, motion, sound, and texture to explore the ungraspable nature of reality. For years, he has practiced a systematic meditation seeking a sort of hyperconsciousness, working toward a connection with the universal consciousness of ultimate reality. In his view, it is for this that we exist.

During the late 1960s David Lynch was an art student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in Philadelphia. It was here, David Lynch: the Unified Field, 2014, the first major U.S. exhibition of his artworks was held. An extensive retrospective selection of paintings, assemblage, photography, and graphic works, as well as the multi-media Six Men Getting Sick (1967). Also included were several of his early short films that were made in Philadelphia. Less than two miles away from the Academy, in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés: 1. La chute d’eau, 2. Le gaz d’éclairage (1946-66) can be found. In a half-lit alcove there is a door made of ancient darkened rough-hewn wood set into an arched brick border, many visitors pass it by with only a cursory glance, but behind the door is a room-size diorama, a scene of pastoral eroticism rendered with a disturbingly provocative naturalism, a hole in a brick wall reveals the life-size figure of a nude woman lying on a bed of twigs holding in her upraised arm a gas lamp that illuminates a scenic landscape containing a running waterfall. Stepping up close to the door and pressing one’s eyes to a pair of peepholes, the disconcerted viewer has become the voyeur. The Philadelphia Museum holds the largest collection of Duchamp’s work to be found anywhere and the spirit of Dada and Surrealism pervades the cultural atmosphere of the city. Even though David Lynch claims to not have been much of a museum goer, he was much affected by the time he spent in Philadelphia. Twin Peaks: The Return can be seen as an extension of his greater body of work referencing the early films, The Grandmother (1970) and Eraserhead (1977), many of the paintings and drawings such as Woman with Screaming Head (1968), So This is Love (1992), and Pete Goes to His Girlfriend’s House (2009), as well as the feature films Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Dr. (2001). If the value of art, and I believe it is, is to alter consciousness, to allow us to see the world differently than we saw it before, then David Lynch is indeed one of the major artists of our time.

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2. On the Beach at Night Alone directed by Hong Sangsoo

Younghee (Kim Minhee) visiting her friend, Jeeyoung (Seo Younghwa), in Hamburg, sits on the living room sofa amusing herself with a small electric keyboard on her lap. Clear soft light from a window brightens a bouquet of purple flowers standing in a jar on a low table at her feet. Going out, Younghee and Jeeyoung walk under an overpass as a train goes by overhead. Looking up, a large leafless tree is silhouetted against the overcast sky. Walking side by side with hands in coatpockets through the green expanse of the city park, they pass others, a boy on a bicycle, a woman with a stroller, someone has a large black dog. A man in a dark coat and knit cap stops them to ask the time, they look at each other and don’t answer, he goes on. Across the park stands the Hamburg Planetarium with its domed rooftop symmetrically framed by a grove of trees to each side. Jeeyoung walks by with Younghee a few steps behind her, figures passing through the frame. Approaching a small footbridge with slightly arched mossy wood railings, Jeeyoung proceeds directly across but Younghee hesitates. She stops, Jeeyoung looks back at her but continues on across, stopping to look back again from the other side. As Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major fills the air, Younghee falls to her knees and bows down, her head nearly touching the ground. Jeeyoung stands and waits, turns away and looks at the ground. A few moments pass, Younghee rises and walks across the bridge.

After dinner at the home of Jeeyoung’s Hamburg friends (Mark Peranson and Bettina Steinbrügge), Younghee is taken to see the Elbe river, Hamburg’s connection to the sea. They follow a path through the trees to a sandy beach. Walking along, Jeeyoung looks back noticing Younghee is not with them. Younghee has stopped to draw a picture in the sand, a face, the face of a man. Jeeyoung squats down beside her and they talk a while about their experiences with men. “Do whatever you want,” Younghee offers, “before you die, do everything.” Jeeyoung says, “I don’t know, I’m old now.” “So don’t waste your time,” Younghee counters. She stands and walks toward the river, turns and says, “It’s cold.” Jeeyoung goes to tell her friends it’s time to go. Younghee walks along the beach alone as Schubert’s quintet once again rises on the air. When Jeeyoung turns to look back, Younghee has disappeared. Looking further, she sees Younghee being carried away over the shoulder of a man in a dark coat and knit cap. . . In darkness, the Schubert continues as Younghee sits in a theater watching a movie. The movie ends and the houselights come up. She is alone among the many empty seats. She blinks her eyes and reaches for a cup on the floor, drinks and takes a deep breath. Lost in thought, questioning her sense of perception, perhaps everything is illusion and nothing is real. She stands, grabs her pack and walks out the door into the sunlight of the the coastal city of Gangneung in South Korea.

After a long emotional night with friends, eating, drinking, and talking about life, love, and happiness, in the late afternoon Younghee goes to the beach alone. Bundled in a heavy coat and wearing gloves she lies down on her side, her head on her arm facing the waves. Contemplating her place in the universe and the flow of time, she becomes aware of her breathing being in concert with the lapping of the waves and slowly drifts into sleep. A man’s voice commands her to wake up. He asks if she’s alright. She had been lying there so long that he had become alarmed. She says she is fine, she has been dreaming. She stands up, thanks him, and bows. Reassured he goes on his way. She brushes the sand from her coat, turns and begins walking. It is late and the shadows are long. In her solitude the beauty of the light is a miracle. Sensing elusive connections, she is seeking solace in the movement of the air. As she walks along the beach alone, we hear Schubert’s string quintet one last time. In spite of intermittent uncertainty, everything is grace.

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3. Song to Song directed by Terrence Malick

In a green space near a swimming pool, Faye (Rooney Mara) is playing with a little girl, sharing her wonder, pointing with her finger at a disappearing butterfly.
“I wanted experience.”
A boom camera swings overhead. Among a crowd at an afternoon concert, Faye looks up at the performer’s image on a huge video screen.
“I told myself, any experience is better than no experience.”
Wandering outside the venue, her wrist covered with festival wristbands, she stops to watch through a gap in the fence. Under blue lights, she is waiting outside the restrooms. Under red lights, she is watching the band and sipping a drink, a straw to her lips, looking at everything.
“I wanted to live . . . sing my song.”
Wind rustles through some nearby trees and a flock of birds fly by in the gathering dusk.

She shows apartments, she walks dogs, taking BV (Ryan Gosling) along. They play and flirt, in an improvisational performance, and fall in love, touching, seeking, looking. Living in that ecstatic space between desire and fulfillment.
“I thought we could just roll and tumble.”
“Live from song to song, kiss to kiss.”

“Be ready to suffer. Don’t be afraid.” Faye is standing with Patti Smith on a patio looking over a green parklike lawn, the scattering sunlight coming through the leaves of the great sprawling trees. “I saw my husband. I saw this boy across the room. And I loved . . . I just loved him the first moment I saw him. And we had a life. And it was beautiful, and it was difficult. And I thought I would be with him the rest of my life. But he died.” Faye reaches out and touches a ring that Patti wears on a slender chain around her neck.

Across the street is a little gray-colored house under a big leafy tree. A car goes by and Faye, her face very close, turns her head and looks away. A high-rise apartment building and a crane tower loom high above her. She looks around, another car goes by. Near tears, she lowers her eyes and swallows, then closes them until she hears another car go by. Looking up, she squints at the light and turns abruptly to cross the street.

Through experience and imagination, her identity and sense of being emerges. Seeking something real, trying to grasp the nature of things, newly aware of the complexity of the phenomenal world, she is looking at everything, trying to see what is there, and the world is full of things, an infinite richness of things to be looked at. With her eyes open, she’s venturing into the unknown, looking at the moments, seeing a little more today than she saw yesterday. Feeling almost free of gravity, without friction, weightless.

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4. Phantom Thread directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

When I look at Louise de Broglie, Comtesse d’ Haussonville, the exquisite portrait painted by the Frenchman Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres in 1845, once I get past the limpid gaze of her pale blue eyes I am most struck by the alchemy of light on fabric. The way the light falls on the rustling folds of her pale blue satin dress is rendered with an unmatched mastery. The chromatic phenomena accompanying these light reflections seemingly produces an infinite array of shades of blue. The illusion you might be able to feel the smoothness and delicate texture is almost complete. There is a fascinating attention to detail here. The blue of her eyes and dress is matched by the tiny stones of her ring and bracelet and echoed in the mantle drapery she leans against as well as in the color of the walls. Her yellow wrap has been dropped on a chair, her opera glasses and calling cards deposited on the mantle, and in her hair a deep red ribbon provides the perfect accent to her enigmatic coolness. It is in the nature of aesthetics that the pleasure of looking is an integral part of being human.

Unlike Louise who was a countess, Alma (Vicky Krieps) waited tables in a small seaside village until one day she waited on a fussy man with a big appetite. First he takes her out to dinner, then he brings her back to his atelier in the attic space of his country house. She takes off her dress and steps onto a box, standing in her slip. He puts her in a toile, a muslin mock-up, and carefully fastening hooks and pinning pleats he makes it fit. She stands there smiling amusedly. He brings out some color swatches and tossing a green one aside he puts them one at a time upon her shoulders. He decides against the blue leaving two shades of violet. Choosing the darker one, he asks if she likes it. She does. He pins it to the toile and says, “I’d like to take your measurements. Is that all right?” She nods and he removes the toile. She is standing once again in her slip when his sister, Cyril (Lesley Manville), comes into the room. Handing Cyril a notebook, he says, “My old so-and-so, would you mind?” He steps towards Alma and, asking Cyril if she’s ready, begins. Putting the measuring tape around her, he calls out, “Thirty-two.” Cyril writes it down in the notebook. He continues, “thirty, thirty-one, thirty-five and a half.” Measuring for the bodice, he makes the comment, “You have no breasts.” Frowning, flustered, she says. “Yes, I know, I’m sorry.” He says, “No, no, you’re perfect. It’s my job to give you some,” then he added, “if I choose to.” For you see, Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) is an artist, a couturier, a dressmaker and he wants to make Alma a satin dress.

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5. The Florida Project directed by Sean Baker

Six-year-old Moonee (Brooklynn Prince) lives in the Magic Castle, a run-down motel in the shadow of Orlando’s Disney World, with her fiercely irresponsible mother, Halley (Bria Vinaite). Barely more than a child herself, Halley always seems to make ends meet one way or another. The Magic Castle’s lavender walls provide a backdrop for the everyday adventures of Moonee and her friends, Scooty (Christopher Rivera) and Jancey (Valeria Cotto). Bobby (Willem Dafoe), the motel manager, patient and caring, keeps an eye out for anything that might harm them. Given the transforming grace of childhood spontaneity even the repetition of banal routine is full of possibility. The magic of this film is in the relentless authenticity it finds in paying attention to the unnoticed small moments, something as commonplace as crossing a street can have a quiet exultation.

On one of their expeditions into the countryside adjacent to the motel, Moonee and Jancey are huddled under a huge tree trying to get out of the rain. “Moonee, why’d you take me on this adventure?” But soon the rain stops and Moonee, taking Jancey by the hand, leads her out from under the tree and through the surrounding greenness of tall grasses and vegetation. Closely they move in shimmering anticipation. Looking down and stepping carefully, Moonee says, “Whoo! Careful of the pooey.” In front of them, a small herd of cows and calves are mooing and milling about in a wide open pasture bordered by a row of trees in the distance. They stand there looking at the cattle and Moonee says, “See, I took you on a safari.” Jancey makes a mooing sound. Moonee smiles and moos at Jancey. Jancey laughs and, “moo-oo,” they moo together.

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6. Detroit directed by Kathryn Bigelow

As a general rule I’m not that interested in movies that are about something. In this case, Detroit is certainly about something but it’s how it’s about something that interests me. The rioting and looting in the street and the overbearing show of force by the police and the military are depicted with an intense hyperrealism. Presenting its material in an almost experimental fashion, elliptic and allusive, the first hour creates an atmosphere of unrest, providing a context for what follows. What might be described as a docudrama, at about the halfway mark, makes an abrupt descent into horror genre territory. On the night of 25 July 1967 the Detroit police turned the Algiers Motel for a few very long hours into a house of horrors, killing three young black men and beating, terrorizing, and humiliating the remaining tenants including two 18 year-old white women visiting from Ohio. This long scene that takes place in the dingy corridor of the motel annex possesses a gripping claustrophobia and a visceral nausea-inducing terror rivaling The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) or The Blair Witch Project (1999).

When we stop to consider what is happening in America today, it’s discouraging to realize how little things have changed in fifty years. Lawmakers, predictably making things worse, are working hard to make it legal for everyone to carry a gun. At the same time, the police are legally killing people everyday, disproportionately targeting people of color, out of fear that they might be carrying a gun. In our time of growing economic inequality, hate and fear proliferate, exacerbated by opportunistic leaders hoping to profit off the pain and suffering of others. It is the endemic racism in our society that is the real American horror story.

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7. Let the Sunshine In directed by Claire Denis

She sits in a club with several friends vaguely bored and losing interest in the conversation. A stranger in a leather jacket, standing off to the side, catches her eye. She is aware he is looking her over, the music begins, she rises and moves out onto the dancefloor.
At last my love has come along.
Swaying with a sinuous undulation, she rolls her head from side to side, closing her eyes.
My lonely days are over,
He drops his jacket in one of the booths and following comes up close behind her.
And life is like a song.
Showing just the suggestion of a smile, she turns her head towards him and they begin rhythmically swaying together. He puts his hand on her shoulder and she turns to face him.
I found a thrill to press my cheek to,
She holds him close and with her face pressed close to his she gently kisses his cheek.
A thrill that I have never known.
She pulls away and with dazzled eyes locked they dance around each other.
You smiled and then the spell was cast.
He pulls her close again putting an arm around her and burying his face against her neck.
And here we are in heaven,
Putting her arm around him, she passes her hand across his forehead.
For you are mine at last.
They begin swinging to the last strains of the song. Pulling her close, he sweeps her off her feet. With both of her arms tightly around his neck, she is laughing as they whirl around and around. Her face is radiantly happy as with a kiss of her hand he returns her to her seat.

Isabelle (Juliette Binoche) is looking for love, wishing and hoping to find a relationship she can be happy with. As a woman of a certain age there is a richness to her beauty, a subtlety of expression in the curve of her smile and an alluring provocation in her lithe silhouette. As each emotional adventure (Xavier Beauvois, Nicolas Duvauchelle, Laurent Grevill, Bruno Podalydès, Alex Descas) gets added to her series of brief encounters with an anguish verging on farce, she has another shifting fragment to put into her cabinet of disappointments. Hopelessly hoping, smiling a lover’s smile and weeping a lover’s tears, “pourquoi, pourquoi,” why is it so difficult to speak of love? Even the exotic interlude with the stranger (Paul Blain) on the dancefloor ends up like all the others, ultimately not fulfilling her expectations. Only love is a reason to live and how much longer can she wrestle with the wages of desire. Each new encounter is like a bewildering relapse. In despair, she visits a psychic, a fortune teller (Gérard Depardieu), a charlatan who self-servingly tells her what she wants to hear. So again she is filled with giddy anticipation still unknowing she must make her own truth.

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8. Lover for a Day directed by Philippe Garrel

Art has always used images of the face and the body to explore the nature of existence. The naturalistic representation of the countenance to express universal human properties such as harmony, energy, ecstasy, humility, and pathos is an age-old obsession. Thus, the study of form, proportion, design, and order is a means to deeper truth. A consuming realism, drawing near the mysterious echo of particularity, quickens the rhythm of our breathing and the beating of our heart. The shape of a neck, the rising of an arm, the expression of a hand, the vital tension of pure presence is an intersection with truth.

On the dancefloor, Ariane (Louise Chevillotte) and Jeanne (Esther Garrel), having found partners, are swaying to the rhythm of the music. Ariane, her head gently on a supporting shoulder, closes her eyes, her hair pulled up, the glancing light intimately illuminates the strands of hair at the back of her neck and softly rakes across the lobe of her ear. At the end of an extended arm, performing a pirouette, throwing her head back, her face to the light, her profile is strikingly etched against the surrounding darkness. She gracefully whirls around and is caught by waiting arms that lift her high in the air and then lower her softly to the floor where she twirls away into the arms of another and then back again. Jeanne, her hands attending to her partner with casual intimacy, smiling at the whispers in her ear, turning her head to whisper back, several strands of hair hanging across her face, light delineating her eloquent fingers and lissome arms, she moves around the floor, every contingent gesture contributing to a sublime minimalism.

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9. Columbus directed by Koganada

Columbus, Indiana is home to an unusual concentration of modernist architecture, featuring designs by Eliel and Eero Saarinen, I.M. Pei, Robert A.M. Stern, Deborah Berke, and others. Casey (Haley Lu Richardson), taking a break from her work at the Cleo Rogers Memorial Library, is standing smoking in a brick-lined plaza between the library and Eliel Saarinen’s First Christian Church, built in 1942 and considered one of the first modernist churches in America, a huge glass-fronted geometric structure with an asymmetrically placed cross. On one side of the church is a large tree and on the other is a tower extending into the sky. Close to where Casey stands, rising out of the brick-paved circle, a sculpture forms organic shapes in the air and gracefully looping over, returns back into the bricks. She lifts her head, looks at the church and exhales smoke into the air saying to herself, “Notice how the cross and the doors and the clock are all off-center. This design is asymmetrical yet still remains balanced.” She is what might be called an architecture enthusiast attending to the form of things, ever conscious of an aesthetic everydayness.

In the evening she drives to the Irwin Union Bank, a relatively modest design by Deborah Berke, parks and gets out of her car. She shuts the door and as the camera stays in the backseat looking between the headrests and through the windshield, she sits on the hood and looks at the horizontal row of rectangular glass panels lit from inside, she finds something “weirdly comforting” about being here. The camera cuts to her face gazing longingly upward. Cut again to the glowing rectangles running the length of the frame. Now cut again and she’s sitting in a bed of flowers wearing different clothes, rows of lights receding behind her, eyes closed, immersed in philosophical contemplation. Nearby, a car passes, she wipes her eyes and looks around, finding meaning amid the sound of distant traffic.

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10. mother! directed by Darren Aronofsky

In celebration of the successful publication (the first printing having sold out) of a long-awaited new work by the Poet (Javier Bardem), his wife, his muse, and soon to be mother of his child (Jennifer Lawrence) has spent the day prepairing an intimate candle-lit dinner just for the two of them. While bringing the food to the table she is startled by a man at the kitchen window. Rushing through the dining room, she sees her husband out on the front porch greeting a group of people. She is alarmed but he is obviously pleased and flattered that they have come a long way just to see him. She walks back into the house sensing that her plans for the evening have been ruined. Walking in circles, heavily pregnant, dressed in her evening gown, she is baffled and confused by the growing clamoring crowd. Soon, everywhere she turns, there are strangers in the house. It seems an impromptu book-signing has been arranged by his publisher (Kristen Wiig) arriving now with the second printing and turning to the soon to be mother, “There she is, the inspiration … and look at you, you’re about to pop!” More and more people come, the invasive trangression of souveneir seekers taking things, breaking things is more than she can tolerate. She calls emergency, “they’re stealing everything!” But the Poet, overcome by such ardent adulation, says to her, “They’re just things, they can be replaced.” Hundreds have come seeking to be blessed by the words of the Poet, but many of the dissonant horde are subsumed into an indifferent chaos. She is incredulous at the sight of her home being ransacked. Someone tears woodwork from the wall, others cart off the baby crib, others are plainly trashing the place, bashing holes in the wall, tearing out the fixtures. With an uncertain distortion of time and space, police arrive forcing their way through with clubs and pepper spray. There are gunshots and people screaming. People are being locked into makeshift wire cages. Police in riot gear confront protesters burning things in the middle of the floor. Revolutionaries gather in the vestibule chanting slogans with their fists in the air while in another room prisoners with bags over their heads are being executed by the publisher. A bomb goes off blowing a hole in the wall filling the air with dust and debris. Soldiers, breaking out windows, rush into the darkened house. The mother, feeling the baby coming, is consumed by panic. A soldier trying to help her, calling for a medic, is struck down by random machine gunfire. Gasping in horror, surging with a vibrating frenzy, she crawls over the dead bodies that litter the dirty floor. Emerging out of the enveloping cataclysm, the Poet has found her and is leading her to safety, besieged by refugees demanding his attention, with help from his zealots he gets her up the bombed-out stairway. He breaks open the sealed door to his study and carries her inside blocking the door behind them. Screaming in agony, she gives birth. As the mother and the Poet rejoice over their newborn, the world grows ominously quiet as the huddled masses gather outside the door awaiting the holy sacrament.

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Runners-up – limited to ten and listed in alphabetical order:

BPM (Beats per Minute) directed by Robin Campillo
The Beguiled directed by Sofia Coppola
Faces Places directed by Agnès Varda and JR
Good Time directed by Benny and Josh Safdie
Happy End directed by Michael Haneke
Ingrid Goes West directed by Matt Spicer
Lady Bird directed by Greta Gerwig
The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) directed by Noah Baumbach
Sleep Has Her House directed by Scott Barley
Wonder Wheel directed by Woody Allen

And lastly the films I haven’t been able to see yet:
Ismael’s Ghosts (Arnaud Desplechin)
A Gentle Creature (Sergey Loznitsa)
Zama (Lucrecia Martel)
Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc (Bruno Dumont)
The Day After (Hong Sangsoo)
You Were Never Really Here (Lynne Ramsay)
Western (Valeska Grisebach)