Film Movements and what to watch next
June 26, 2016 5:04 PM Subscribe
I’ve just watched about 7 Italian neorealist films from Criterion and I have a 2 part question.
1: Do you know of a really good list of film movements with examples?
2. After the neorealist, what movement should I dig in to new?
French New Wave would be the Cinema 101 answer, I think.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:14 PM on June 26, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by Thorzdad at 6:14 PM on June 26, 2016 [2 favorites]
There's nothing quite like Italian neo-realism.
For vaguely similar-ish things, the Criterion 50's-era B&W classics by Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Andrei Tarkovsky, Robert Bresson, etc, might have the same attention to detail and emotional resonance.
Béla Tarr has made recent films in a serious old fashioned style.
posted by ovvl at 7:21 PM on June 26, 2016
For vaguely similar-ish things, the Criterion 50's-era B&W classics by Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Andrei Tarkovsky, Robert Bresson, etc, might have the same attention to detail and emotional resonance.
Béla Tarr has made recent films in a serious old fashioned style.
posted by ovvl at 7:21 PM on June 26, 2016
Dogme 95. They even had their own manifesto!
posted by Ursula Hitler at 12:29 AM on June 27, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by Ursula Hitler at 12:29 AM on June 27, 2016 [1 favorite]
Also, I'm assuming you've Googled "list of film movements." The first page brings up some interesting results.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 12:31 AM on June 27, 2016
posted by Ursula Hitler at 12:31 AM on June 27, 2016
Chinese Fifth Generation. Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, Tian Zhuangzhuang etc - 80s & early 90s.
Some highlights for me... Horse Thief, Life on a String, Farewell My Concubine, Yellow Earth, Raise the Red Lantern... but there are loads more. Follow up with Hou Hsiao-Hsien (City of Sadness, A Time to Live & A Time to Die) if you like those.
posted by rd45 at 5:55 AM on June 27, 2016 [1 favorite]
Some highlights for me... Horse Thief, Life on a String, Farewell My Concubine, Yellow Earth, Raise the Red Lantern... but there are loads more. Follow up with Hou Hsiao-Hsien (City of Sadness, A Time to Live & A Time to Die) if you like those.
posted by rd45 at 5:55 AM on June 27, 2016 [1 favorite]
I'd say go for Iranian New Wave; Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf in particular are among the greatest directors of my lifetime, and the whole genre will give you the same kind of hit as Italian neorealism.
posted by languagehat at 6:52 AM on June 27, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by languagehat at 6:52 AM on June 27, 2016 [1 favorite]
Best answer: I may be conflating styles, periods and movements somewhat here, but here's a straitlaced game plan to chew through a lot of canonical Western film history pretty quickly: Assuming you really enjoyed the neorealist stuff, I might suggest staying back in the old black-and-white years and having a look at German expressionism (Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu, Metropolis, M). That will not only expose you to some silent film aesthetics but also give you a grounding in the cinematographic techniques that led to the horror styles of the 1930s and 1940s (including the Universal monster movies) as well as to film noir in the 1940s and 1950s, which will cover some of the more exciting stuff that was going on in the U.S. during that period. When you get a taste for film noir, that might be a good time to head on over to the French New Wave to see how Godard and company synthesized American genre film tropes into new filmmaking styles in the 1960s. That would feed you into the New Hollywood movement that Rhizome mentions above, when Hollywood filmmakers assimilated some of the lessons learned from the French and got really daring in the late 1960s and 1970s. New German Cinema, covering the 1970s and a lot of the 1980s, might be interesting if you think Werner Herzog is a colorful character and want to know more about his origin story. I'm not sure how many of the key non-Herzog works from that era are readily available, though, aside from Fassbinder and Wenders.
Outside the Western tradition, there are the Chinese and Iranian movements mentioned above as well as the influential-on-Hollywood Hong Kong New Wave of the 1980s and 1990s that gave us Tsui Hark, John Woo and Wong Kar-wai. And if you want to stick with Criterion titles, Criterion's coverage of the Japanese New Wave (Oshima, Imamura, Suzuki, Teshigahara) of the late 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s is exceptionally strong.
It really comes down to what floats your boat. There are plenty of immersion points to choose from, and this stuff can get really granular — there's a Romanian New Wave, there's a New Nigerian Cinema, a New Queer Cinema movement that dates to the early 1990s, etc. I don't know where to find a comprehensive list; that Wikipedia page has some that I've never heard of but is missing others (New German Cinema).
posted by Mothlight at 7:50 AM on June 27, 2016 [4 favorites]
Outside the Western tradition, there are the Chinese and Iranian movements mentioned above as well as the influential-on-Hollywood Hong Kong New Wave of the 1980s and 1990s that gave us Tsui Hark, John Woo and Wong Kar-wai. And if you want to stick with Criterion titles, Criterion's coverage of the Japanese New Wave (Oshima, Imamura, Suzuki, Teshigahara) of the late 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s is exceptionally strong.
It really comes down to what floats your boat. There are plenty of immersion points to choose from, and this stuff can get really granular — there's a Romanian New Wave, there's a New Nigerian Cinema, a New Queer Cinema movement that dates to the early 1990s, etc. I don't know where to find a comprehensive list; that Wikipedia page has some that I've never heard of but is missing others (New German Cinema).
posted by Mothlight at 7:50 AM on June 27, 2016 [4 favorites]
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Wikipedia has a pretty extensive list of movements.
posted by rhizome at 5:37 PM on June 26, 2016