Films seen in January

TOP TIER



Battle in Heaven
Class Relations
Elsewhere
Essential Killing
Film socialisme
House of Tolerance
Lightning Over Water
Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors

SECOND TIER

Ball of Fire
Erotikon
Kill List
Night Moves
Shame
The Grapes of Wrath
Tigrero: A Film That Was Never Made

THIRD TIER



Carnage
Embodiment of Evil
Hugo
Little Shop of Horrors
Monster Dog
The Artist
The Fly
The Ward
Young Frankenstein

TRASH

My Week with Marilyn
Young Adult

Class Relations (Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, 1984)

Empty spaces in Straub and Huillet's Class Relations:

Preference is definitely given to spaces over characters. People enter and empty spaces and leave them again, the emphasis always on the place. Dave McDougall points out (here) that "Straub is as averse to 'protagonists' as to individual conceptions of history." This reliance on spaces clearly de-emphasizes the notion of a protagonist.