Wonders in the Dark

by Sam Juliano

I am over the moon to post a preliminary look at the dazzling cover and spine art for my upcoming book, Allan Fish: Wonders in the Dark, A Memoir of Friendship, my fifth soon-to-be-published work, after four novels. The back text is currently in a garbled foreign-language font, serving as a placeholder until the actual text is furnished. My talented graphic designer, Daniel Velle, has performed magnificently. The 120,000-130,000-word book is currently on track to be published on August 29th and will include a photo section. I will post the final cover tweak in mid-August.

We’re hoping to see Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey over the coming weekend.

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by Sam Juliano

Lucille and I were back at New Jersey’s Broadway-level Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn for their highly acclaimed production of West Side Story, which was every bit as terrific as the reviews promised.

Part 2 of our live theater Father’s Day weekend was a well-reviewed production of the timeless Tony Award-winning musical “My Fair Lady” at the Music Mountain Theatre in Lambertsville, N.J., along the Pennsylvania border. The show was a delight.

On Sunday night (Father’s Day), we will be seeing the film “Leviticus” at a local theater.

I continue to work overtime to complete my tribute book on Allan Fish, due out near the end of August.

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by Sam Juliano

I want to thank all the writers for their creativity over the past several days in the service of the Tenth Annual Allan Fish Online Film Festival. It was quite a venture, and I’ll be talking about it in the upcoming tribute book, Allan Fish: Wonders in the Dark, A Memoir of Friendship, due to publish on August 29th.

Lucille and I were thrilled to finally meet Caldecott medalist and Chicago native Matthew Cordell, who made a dazzling presentation on his new picture book, “102,” on Sunday afternoon at Books of Wonder in Manhattan. Several of Cordell’s previous books were glowingly reviewed in my Caldecott Medal Contender series at Wonders in the Dark. Cordell is personable, humble, and just an all-around terrific guy.

On Saturday night, Lucille, the three boys, and I saw Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day, a transcendent, emotionally shattering, and heart-stopping film that pushes very close to the highest 5-star rating. Continue Reading »

by Sam Juliano

In September of 2003, Allan Fish sat down at a keyboard. He was thirty years old and was living in the Lake District home where he was raised and spent most of his life. He was not, by his own account, planning to write a book. Rather, as he explained to me by email, he wanted to conduct an experiment to see whether he could put in print what he called his “musing and ramblings on the moving image.” He went on to explain that the project was “equal parts therapy and self-examination.” He wasn’t sure how feasible it was since he didn’t expect anyone to ever read it. Something pushed him forward, perhaps because he knew he possessed an enviable, economical writing style and an encyclopedic memory. What he did not own at that time was self-confidence, an extension of his cynical worldview. Still, because he was never someone who required external validation, he developed a writing regimen that limited the time he spent on a single review and the length of each review. Not long after he started, he expanded his horizons to emulate the Halliwell Film Guide, a publication he greatly admired and that will be discussed at length in another chapter of this memoir.

What he ultimately produced over the next decade was titled The Cinematic Pantheon: The Greatest Works of the Screen.

I have the introduction to this staggering work on my PC screen, from the single-disc file Allan sent me months before he passed. It says more about Allan Fish in a few pages than most people manage to convey about themselves in a lifetime of conversation. He began by situating his own life within the precise cultural moment in which he began. The final part of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings Trilogy was still in production, and Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation was only just appearing at Telluride and Venice. Chloe Moretz was only six years old, and YouTube was still two years from launching. He gave the coordinates of the moment with the control of a navigator so that you understand not just when but where he was when he began; what the world looked like from inside it; what was available and what was not; and what the landscape of serious film culture looked like before the decade that followed would change it in a way neither he nor anyone else could have confidently predicted.

Then Allan moved on to explain the book’s purpose.

At the outset, he dispelled any notion that it was, at its core, a critical or academic work, though the irony of that statement is evident to anyone reading its probing eloquence. He argued that academic works, with the dry affection of a person who has read many of them and noted their limitations, don’t give the writer much leeway to be passionate. Rather, he said, they require the writer to examine, as a pathologist would during a post-mortem. They can’t digress or go off on a tangent, and the structure must have a beginning, middle, and an end in that order. Allan has zero interest in discipline and all the interest possible in passion, in digression, and finally in the tangent that turned out to be the most direct way to the truth. By writing in a more personal style, he asserted, it allows my passion to hopefully shine through.

And it shone through like a wild river breaking its banks, proving that a winding torrent cuts a deeper canyon than any straight canal. From the first page to the last, across more than two thousand entries covering cinema and television from practically every country on earth with even the tiniest legacy, Allan redefined comprehensiveness as he worked overtime to ensure that no country, no region, and no sponsor of the seventh art should be shortchanged. Continue Reading »

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by Lee Price

Lists and the People Who Make Them

In 2006, I embarked on a mission to create the grandest movie list of them all. With help from my friends at the IMDb Classic Film Board, I set out to create a 2,000-movie list of the most essential movies of all time, borrowing the first 1,000 from the annually updated Greatest Films list at the “They Should Pictures, Don’t They?” (TSPDT) website and then adding 1,000 additional films to create the 2,000-movie list. Now, I thought, that would be a list to end all lists!

At the time, I assumed no one would be crazy enough to attempt building a larger list of essential films. I was wrong, though. There was someone crazier than me out there, someone way more ambitious, someone truly more visionary. On June 14, 2014, Wonders in the Dark published “The Most Important 5,000 Screen Works of All Time – A Chronology” by Allan Fish.

As a list maker myself, I am in awe of Allan’s work. His 5,000-film mega list is a landmark achievement. May it never be lost in the ever-swirling, murky depths of the internet. As a fellow list maker, it’s time for me to publicly pay my respects.

Technically, our lists were radically different. My “Doubling the Canon” list was a compilation built from the ratings contributed by approximately 100 regular participants on the IMDb Classic Film Board, a now-defunct but once very active community of cinephiles. It took me around 22 months to gestate the first edition of my elephantine list. Instead of overwhelming the regulars on the IMDb board with a massive poll covering a century of film, I divided the process into a series of votes, proceeding decade by decade. First, I requested titles to be considered, and then I asked participants to rate each movie on a 0-6 scale (from “Under no circumstances should this be in the canon” to “this MUST be in the canon”). One decade at a time, I compiled lists of recommended films (allowing no duplicates with the TSPDT list), requested votes on films seen, tallied the votes, and divided each film’s total by the number of votes. You enter it on the spreadsheet and snip the list at the 1,000th film, and you’ve got yourself a very big list. For the final step, I combined our 1,000 choices with the TSPDT list to form our “Doubling the Canon” list of the 2,000 greatest films of all time.

I worked within a community to build the “Doubling the Canon” list. This is not how Allan worked. His chronological list is a categorized (unranked) top 5,000 list, only different from a personal top 10 in sheer quantity. His list is a top 10 x 500. It is a personal statement. It is a work of list-making art.

In his introduction to his 5,000-film list, Allan wrote: “Each year I hope to update it, but if the fates ordain otherwise, as that’s still in the balance, then Sam (Juliano) will have to, at least with additions if not exclusions.” As we know, fate did intervene. Allan never returned to update the list. Sam has wisely decided not to update the list. As I recently wrote to Sam, “(That list is) a snapshot, incredibly valuable just as it is, both a personal statement and a snapshot of a moment in time.”

It is important to note that Allan’s 5,000-movie list does not exist in a vacuum. Sam and Allan launched the Wonders in the Dark blog on September 8, 2008; forty days later, October 18 to be exact, Alan announced his first Wonders in the Dark-based exercise in list-making. It all started with his review of the Will Hay comedy Oh Mr. Porter! (1937), which he designated #25 on a new list series of the top 25 films of the 1930s. From this point, Allan published a rapid-fire series of write-ups on each of his 25 selections, with the reviews drawn from a massive book he was writing on film masterpieces. Starting with the 1930s and then proceeding by decade (with one important detour for films prior to 1930), Alan continued to churn out these ranked reviews of great movies through July 2010, finishing with a total of 500 reviews of the “best” movies from the beginning of film through 2009. Continue Reading »

by Tony D’Ambra

This is a revision of a post at my Another Cinema Blog from 2014 – shifting the impressionistic framing to a more cinematic appreciation of Vigo’s cinema.  A 4K restoration of L’Atalante was released last December, and can be viewed on-line at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AMHltueLug.

A young bride in her white wedding dress stands on the prow of a river barge, ethereal against the craft’s dark outline. From the stern, a man emerges and, embracing her from behind, pulls her down to the deck. After a short struggle, she breaks free and leaves the frame: a lyrical portrait of innocence broken by the reality of physical union.

A contradiction at the heart of Vigo’s cinema. Tenderness disrupted. Romantic feeling shadowed by desire. Innocence overcome by lust.

Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante occupies a liminal place within French poetic realism, associated in the 1930s with directors like Marcel Carné, Jean Renoir, and writers such as Jacques Prévert, who explored the social textures of ordinary lives using a poetic lens to render mood and feeling through visual elements such as chiaroscuro, with a tendency to fatalism.

Carné’s films are often beautifully designed but emotionally trapped and often feel sealed by fate. Vigo’s film, by contrast, feels alive with accident and improvisation. Vigo’s cinematic vision is unique to the extent that he uses fantasy and enigmatic juxtapositions, which have a radical strangeness. Bodies stumble, cats invade beds, lovers sulk, objects break, gestures misfire. This tendency is less restrained and seen more clearly in his second feature, Zéro de conduit (1933), an anarchic tale of rebellious schoolboys.

Vigo, when he made L’Atalante, was consumptive, and must have had a keen awareness of the slender hold he had on life. The film was to be his third and last film, and his enduring cinematic legacy. Towards the end of filming he directed from a stretcher. He died before the film’s release and Gaumont lacking the courage to present Vigo’s vision with the freedom his work demanded, butchered it by removing 20 minutes from the final cut and replacing the score. It was only in the 1990s that Vigo’s unfettered vision saw the light of day with a full restoration. Continue Reading »