Three weeks into the new decade, the flood of lists rounding up the last one seems to have abated, but I enjoyed Stale Popcorn’s countdown of the decade’s best film posters, whose #1 coincides with that of a similar list on The Auteurs last month. (They have an interesting interview with designer Akiko Stehrenberger here.) The same poster is one I’m starting to see crop up on the walls of assorted designer/cineaste locales — plainly a modern classic, even if the film is plainly not.
London Film Festival
With apologies to Pete Townshend, the kids are most certainly not alright.
Such is the message we seem to be gleaning from the cinema of 2009, as a vast range of unrelated titles – “Precious,” “Coraline,” “Dogtooth,” “Antichrist,” “Fish Tank,” even “An Education” – appear united in visiting the physical and/or psychological damage wrought upon children by either obliviously or maliciously neglectful parents, in some cases planting the seeds of trauma for further generations.
No film this year, however, addresses the matter with more thematic exactitude and near-scientific scrutiny than Michael Haneke’s grimly riveting “The White Ribbon,” a film which differs from the ones previously mentioned by taking an entire community, as opposed to a solitary family, as its allegorical subject. More expansive in its focus than any previous Haneke work, it nonetheless surprises with the intimacy of its gaze and the social responsibility of its treatise.
Eternally fascinated by human behaviour, yet never a director much associated with the humane – his trademark chilliness reaching new heights (or depths, if you prefer) with last year’s “Funny Games” remake, which treated its papery characters with even more diagrammatic dispassion than the 1997 original – Haneke finally marries these two approaches here, empathizing with its considerable ensemble of characters even as it dissects them.
I knew when I tapped out my “year in superlatives” post last week that something was bugging me about my Best Poster pick. I had forgotten something, I just knew it. And as much as I loved the “W.” one-sheet I picked, I don’t know, it didn’t feel right.
Then I was reading through this list of the year’s best posters and it clicked. Even though I despised Michael Haneke’s “Funny Games” remake with every fiber of my being, this was a brilliant piece of work.
So, correction appended.