jürgen fauth’s muckworld

Ah, lists! Like all fans, film aficionados are collectors, and every now and then, all collectors enjoy sifting through their stash to trot out their favorite baubles, arranged one way or another, to show them off to the world. Look! I’ve got three of the ultra-rare green kind, and oh, how that marbled one catches the sunlight just so! Toying with the objects of our affection in this way makes us feel happy and safe. In the world of movies, that’s what we call a list.

The movies we’ve seen (and can remember) are our stash and currency, and the best and shiniest of them will have to bear the scrutiny of any passers-by. As members of NYFCO, Marcy and I do this once a year, and recently, I’ve been asked, along with a number of bloggers and critics, to help put together a list of best films made in a language other than English before 2002. The list of nominations is out now at Edward Copeland’s site, and it’s a good one. You can go vote on your favorites, and a final tally will be published soon.

For the goal-oriented, that should be the end of the story, but I always find that democracy and criticism make an uneasy fit, and to me, the final result is somewhat beside the point. Instead, you might be happier taking a look at the individual ballots (or adding your own) here, at Jim Emerson’s site, at the House Next Door, or on your own damn blog. The fun is in the arranging of the marbles, the weighing of their comparative beauty, the debates over which ones have been overlooked or could be traded in for shinier ones. (It’s also a terrific way to fatten up your Netflix queue.) For the avid collector, the list is never an end in itself — it’s just a way to spend a little bit more time with some of our favorite things.

So here’s the snapshot of movies I considered worthy of inclusion according to this particular set of parameters on this particular day–culled from a much longer list of close contenders while LH 182, after three hours delay, finally began its initial descent on Berlin-Tegel, a fact I mention only because it may help explain the heavy Teutonic emphasis: I literally found myself in the Himmel über Berlin. Feel free to add your 25 favorites in the comments, and don’t forget to vote at Edward Copeland’s site. In alphabetical order:

8 1/2 Federico Fellini, 1963
Aguirre, The Wrath of God Werner Herzog, 1972
Akira Katsuhiro Otomo, 1988
Au Hasard Balthazar Robert Bresson, 1966
Band of Outsiders Jean-Luc Godard, 1964
Black Orpheus Marcel Camus, 1959
City of God Fernando Meirelles, 2002
Day for Night Francois Truffaut, 1973
M Fritz Lang, 1931
Nights of Cabiria Federico Fellini, 1957
Run Lola Run Tom Tykwer, 1998
Seven Samurai Akira Kurosawa, 1954
Solaris Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972
Spirited Away Hayao Miyazaki, 2001
Stolen Kisses Francois Truffaut, 1968
The Lovers on the Bridge Leos Carax, 1991
The Man Without a Past Aki Kaurismaki, 2002
The Rules of the Game Jean Renoir, 1939
The Seventh Seal Ingmar Bergman, 1957
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg Jacques Demy, 1964
The Wages of Fear Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953
Wings of Desire Wim Wenders, 1987
Y Tu Mama Tambien Alfonso Cuaron, 2001
Yojimbo Akira Kurosawa, 1961
Zur Sache, Schätzchen May Spils, 1968

When the director of Showgirls, Basic Instinct, and Robocop takes on a story that begins like The Diary of Anne Frank, you can bet your sweet ass that the heroine is going to shoot and screw her way out of trouble until she finally makes it to a kibbutz. Black Book, which did big business in Holland and arrives here with the cachet of an acclaimed foreign film about the Holocaust, would be plain-old kitsch if it didn’t cash in on the suffering of millions to get its low-brow action-adventure kicks. The word for this is Shoahxploitation.

How titillating is Black Book? At cliffhanger pace, Rachel (Carice van Houten) flees from her bombed-out hiding place, and Verhoeven runs down a comprehensive checklist of World War II tropes: endless narrow escapes through attics, trunks, and caskets, barges that get the Apocalypse Now treatment, resistance airdrops, backroom operations, midnight raids, botched kidnappings, prison breakouts, firing squads, and tense passport controls: “Papiere, bitte!” Oh no, we’re carrying secret microphones and suitcases stuffed with Jewish gold!

Plenty of machine-gun violence leads to gleeful close-ups of mass graves, and Verhoeven doesn’t skimp on the sex, either. When good men are imprisoned, it’s clear that somebody must sleep with the occupiers to free them. Graphic Jew-on-German action follows, and in one extended scene, our dedicated heroine colors her pubic hair to fool the Obersturmbannführer (Sebastian Koch). In turn, drunken fascist swine piss in front of their whores, and our heroine has to vomit a little. And you know if there’s a shitbucket, Verhoeven won’t be satisfied with a simple close-up: somebody has to dump it out over someone else, preferably a naked woman.

I can’t even begin to tell you how tired I am of movies where the murderous villains carry my father’s name, and the Nazis in Black Book are about as three-dimensional as the ones in Indiana Jones. With Starship Troopers, Verhoeven himself created a compelling satire of fascism. There is a entire tradition of very good and very necessary movies about the Holocaust and the Resistance, but is it asking too much that they grow more insightful rather than more graphic and exploitative? Black Book pretends to bring news about duplicity and treachery and the odd bedfellows that wartime makes, but it’s obvious that nothing gets Verhoeven as excited as the cold steel of a Nazi gun against hard Jewish nipples.

Zwartboek. Paul Verhoeven, 2006. *

• Here’s the trailer