Andrea Virginás

Comments

La Règle du jeu

A still fascinating example of what András Kovács Bálint names "closed situation narratives". Rules of the Game easily depicts a complex social panorama while combining strong documentary sequences with utterly theatrical, and artificially filmic moments.

The Third Man

The best example, in my opinion, of a European co-production that uses the various national elements (from Vienna as a location to Italian Alida Valli as the mysterious woman and post-Citizen Kane, Europeanized Orson Welles, or a British director and a Hungarian-born producer) to their full and best effect. Thrilling throughout, with a fine play between a chief focalizer character and omniscient film narration, never losing its rhythm or pace of moving forward while sinking back in time.

ELTÁVOZOTT NAP

A feature debut of the director, The Girl remains a fresh experience, capturing female emancipation within its Eastern European milieu. The film succeeds in conveying the force and liberating experience of such a journey, but also the extreme loneliness it entails - and it does so through deeply impactful visual and auditive compositions.

Some Like It Hot

The prototype of comedy, touching upon the most sensible dividing lines in society: class and gender. Even its blindness to race is telling, a blind spot of mainstream cultural representation to this day. And it simply does not age, or it ages gracefully.

Stalker

The film that showed us the inner plains of our minds, while remaining true and faithful to a natural and material reality so defined it rings a bell to anyone living within the confines of a European geography. And even beyond that. Its post-apocalyptic accuracy does not lose its edge, either, and unfortunately.

Memento

A film that changed linear film narration for ever, while maintaining the consistency of characters and the depth of emotional involvement possibilities throughout.

Mulholland Dr.

The yardstick, at least for me, for what fictional film diegesis can do, when it is not a rigid concept, but a living, pulsating and forever changing, sensous world.

Toni Erdmann

An elegant intercultural "remake", a hybrid of Berlin School, Romanian New Wave and New Female Cinema (a term I invented for the sake of this poll). Innovative in its character-building and acting (methods), Toni Erdmann is also the most accurately realistic depiction of post-communist capitalism - as a process and as a state - that I am aware of.

Le Procès

The film that for me stands as the monument of the two world wars, presenting the wounds on the social fabric and within the "European" psyche (which, of course, may be located geographically anywhere) that shall never heal.

Clouds of Sils Maria

A masterpiece of metareflexive cinema, and an icily precise depiction of the analogue-to-digital change in our culture - while masterfully acted, spectacularly filmed, and funny to the point of no return.