1. Mon Oncle Antoine (Claude Jutra, 1971): Canadian cinema and I aren’t getting along so well these days. This was admittedly a really well-made film, very 400 Blows for French Canada, and I can really see how something like this–about the hard life in an asbestos mining town in the pre-Quiet Revolution era–would have played so soon after the FLQ Crisis (it was shot before, released after). But honestly it was kind of dull: preteen boy loses innocence, sees dead body. Religion is presented ambivalently. Let’s all come of age! There’s definitely some interesting stuff in here — like that weird unmotivated zoom from the tavern to the church, or the naked lady in a coffin dream sequence — but it’s just not my scene. I think it’s the male coming-of-age story that I just generally don’t respond to very well.
  2. La Semana del Asesinos (aka Cannibal Man) (Eloy de la Iglesia, 1972): This, on the other hand, was fascinating. It’s a horror film designed for international distribution made when Franco was still in power, but it’s not really a traditional horror movie at all. There is a lot of killing, but it’s all from the perspective of the (really sad, economically oppressed) killer. He lives in this depressing little shack right next to a new highrise complex in Madrid, and works in a slaughterhouse, and then he like, tries to cover up the smell of the rotting bodies in his bedroom with air freshener and perfume. Anyway, there is lots of indications of repressed homoerotic desire and proletarian rage, so you know I was into it.
  3. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (Stanley Donen, 1954): You guys, this might be the most sexist movie ever made. I have searched high and low for irony embedded in the text, and unless you count a strenuous attention to rigid gender roles that borders on desperate, you really can’t find any. To wit: And yet. I love this movie more than words can say. Some people see this as reflective of the Eisenhower era and all its attendant gender baggage, but I have a problem with seeing old movies purely as “an historical record of the misogynist antecedency of modern patriarchal thought, a reference manual to the canonized idols, saints, and gods of 21st century oppression.” The problem is simply this: the movies reflected an ideology that the man (the military-industrial complex, whatever you want to call it) wanted people to buy, but I don’t think there’s any reason to think that everyone actually bought it. I’m sure 1950s viewers were as aware of the absurdity (if not the antiquarian contempt for ladies) of the plot of Seven Brides as you and I are, and if nothing else, the ridiculousness of the whole thing can’t really have reinforced anything. Plus the pleasures of that film are so caught up in non-story elements: it’s really still famous because of its choreography, not because of its deft psychological portrait of young manhood. The barn-dance scene is justly famous, and “Lonesome Polecat” is equally fabulous, in a much more restrained way. Part of what makes it so beautiful is that the dance work and the stunts are so clearly authentic, and there’s something fascinating watching it done in what’s such an otherwise goofy production.
  4. Viridiana (Luis Buñuel, 1961): This was also made in Franco’s Spain, but it pissed a hell of a lot more people off. The Vatican denounced it! Always a good sign. I don’t really know how to explain Viridiana: it’s about an almost-nun (she’s ready to take her vows, there’s probably a Catholic word for it, but I sure don’t know it) who goes to see her uncle and kind of eventually has to come to terms with the crap that is the outside world. It kind of presents her relgiosity as at least partly to do with a desire to keep the messiness of the world out, but it might be better understood as just implying that her isolationism gives her the high moral ground to look down on everyone else. I really loved the Last Supper scene with the motley beggars and then the lady’s vagina (not shown) as a camera.
  5. Spirit of the Beehive (Víctor Erice, 1973): You’ll notice a pattern: this is another subtly subversive Franco-era film, but this is an award-winning art film, not a schlocky horror movie that no one took seriously at the time. It’s absolutely gorgeous. I love how their house has these gorgeous honeycomb windows (like a beehive) and how big the space around them is. It’s a great example of how cinema doesn’t need to be political to be political. From Paul Julian Smith’s Criterion Essay:
The question of how political The Spirit of the Beehive is has been hotly debated since the film’s premiere, when leftist critics attacked its lack of overt commentary. Yet to equate Franco and Frankenstein as twin masters of horror is too crude. By focusing not on national conflict but on domestic distress, what one reviewer called “the war behind the window,” Erice gives a much more subtle and moving take on the historical trauma suffered by Spain in the twentieth century.

That trauma is signaled in coded references. The village may be a playground for heedless children, but its unpaved streets and ruinous buildings are scarred by conflict and deprivation. The father, Fernando, listens in secret to a shortwave radio (surely it is to the BBC, forbidden by the regime), while his wife, Teresa (Teresa Gimpera), writes letters to an absent loved one (an envelope is addressed to a Red Cross camp in France, where Spanish refugees were interned). The character known only as “the fugitive,” whom Ana visits in an abandoned barn, is presumably a member of the maquis, or anti-Francoist resistance. More generally, the insistent melancholia, approaching catatonia, of the household marks it out as one inhabited by members of the losing side in the war. As the innocent Ana leafs through the family photo album, we glimpse her father in a snapshot with Miguel de Unamuno, the famous intellectual who was a brave critic of Franco’s rebellion.