2015 Muriels Hall of Fame Postmortem: A Letter From the Management

Hey everybody. Now that we’ve finished with this year’s inductions, I thought I’d chime in with some thoughts of my own, outside of my capacity of Muriels administrator, on the films we’ve honored so far. In the three years we’ve been doing this, we’ve inducted a good mix of movies, ranging from the 1920s to the 1960s and encompassing damn near every major genre world cinema has had to offer. We have thusfar honored films from eleven nations spanning three continents, with countries ranging from Mexico to India to Denmark. Heck, we’ve even included a female director, which considering how limited opportunities were for women filmmakers throughout the world fifty-plus years ago is pretty good for us.

In short, our goal has always been to cast a wide net, and we’ve done a pretty decent job of that so far. Now let’s keep it up.

If you look at the films we’ve inducted to date, we’ve inducted many of the obvious canonical classics (at least, those that have been eligible). I hope that this will compel us to embrace some less obvious choices in the future alongside the as-yet-unrecognized classics. There are a number of important (or at least interest) national cinemas we have yet to recognize. To cite one example, the sixties were a prime time for cinema in Eastern Europe, particularly in Poland and Czechoslovakia. It’s hard to imagine recognizing the greatness of film during this period without honoring important filmmakers like Andrzej Wajda, Milos Forman, and a young tyro named Roman Polanski- to say nothing of seminal works like THE SARAGOSSA MANUSCRIPT and CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS, all of which will become eligible in the next few years.

Granted, availability can be a factor when it comes to some national cinemas. Good luck trying to get your hands on key titles from Brazil’s Cinema Novo movement or pretty much anything from Africa from the period (though BLACK GIRL, now streaming on Netflix, becomes eligible as of the ’16 Muriels). Still, there’s plenty of good stuff out there if you know where to look. Quite a few golden age Chinese titles can be found on Fandor (though, sadly, not THE GODDESS), and Indian popular cinema is pretty well-represented on DVD if you have a Netflix account. Because while I realize we’ve already inducted an Indian film, their national cinema tradition is so strong that there’s plenty of room for more Indian films in the Hall of Fame.

Additionally, despite the relatively low number of eligible female-directed titles, there are several worthy films from female filmmakers to join Agnes Varda in the Hall of Fame. The most obvious example would be Maya Deren’s MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON, a major example of avant-garde cinema that has appeared on the final Hall of Fame ballot more than once. Another title I included on my initial ballot thisyear is Furough Farrokhzad’s lovely THE HOUSE IS BLACK, which would also allow us to recognize a key work of Iranian cinema, which would become so formidable in later decades. Then there are other female-directed greats like DAISIES, WANDA, A NEW LEAF, and particularly JEANNE DIELMAN, which will all become eligible within the next ten years.

That’s not to say we should discount the established classics altogether. After all, there are plenty of old favorites still to be inducted (Godard, anybody?). But if you’re like me, you probably came of age as a filmgoer at a time when most college courses and critical texts concentrated primarily on the USA, Western Europe, Russia and Japan, and though there are plenty of good films to honor from those regions, perhaps it’s time the Muriels Hall of Fame starts thinking more globally the films it honors. After all, cinema has long been an international medium, and it’s only right that we reflect that reality as well.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2015: Acknowledgements and Final Results List

Thanks to everyone who’s been following the Muriels Hall of Fame this year. In particular, I would like to thank all who participated in this year’s voting and contributed write-ups in conjunction with the announcements. This year’s voters were:

Josh Bell

Andrew Bemis

Christianne Benedict

Scott W. Black

Danny Bowes

Donald G. Carder

Kevin Cecil

Paul Clark

Dennis Cozzalio

Philip Dyess-Nugent

Jim Emerson

James Frazier

Luke Gorham

Jaime Grijalba

Glenn Heath Jr.

Sam Juliano

Peter Labuza

Adam Lemke

Michael Lieberman

Craig D. Lindsey

Matt Lynch

Sam C. Mac

Jeff McMahon

Patrick Miller

Matt Noller

Cole Roulain

Andreas Stoehr

Scott von Doviak

Clayton Walter

Patrick Williamson

George Wu

In addition, here is a tally of the final results of voting:

+ = 2015 Muriels HOF Inductees

9 votes:

+ City Lights (1931, Chaplin)

+ Trouble in Paradise (1932, Lubitsch)

+ Singin’ in the Rain (1952, Kelly/Donen)

+ The Searchers (1956, Ford)

8 votes:

+ Duck soup (1933, McCarey)

+ The Red Shoes (1948, Powell/Pressburger)

+ Touch of Evil (1958, Welles)

7 votes:

+ L’Atalante (1934, Vigo)

+ Bride of Frankenstein (1935, Whale)

+ His Girl Friday (1940, Hawks)

+ Sunset Blvd. (1950, Wilder)

+ Duck Amuck (1953, Jones)

+ Pather Panchali (1955, S. Ray)

+ Rio Bravo (1959, Hawks)

+ Cleo From 5 to 7 (1962, Varda)

+ The Exterminating Angel (1962, Buñuel)

6 votes:

The General (1927, Keaton/Bruckman)

Only Angels Have Wings (1939, Hawks)

All That Heaven Allows (1955, Sirk)

Wild Strawberries (1957, Bergman)

Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959, Resnais)

Breathless (1960, Godard)

Last Year at Marienbad (1962, Resnais)

5 votes:

Bringing Up Baby (1938, Hawks)

The Maltese Falcon (1941, Huston)

Children of Paradise (1945, Carné)

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946, Capra)

A Star Is Born (1954, Cukor)

Sweet Smell of Success (1957, Mackendrick)

Contempt (1963, Godard)

Woman in the Dunes (1964, Teshigahara)

4 votes:

Nosferatu (1922, Murnau)

Seven Chances (1925, Keaton)

I Was Born, But… (1932, Ozu)

Grand Illusion (1937, Renoir)

The Magnificent Ambersons (1942, Welles)

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948, Huston)

M. Hulot’s Holiday (1953, Tati)

Nights of Cabiria (1957, Fellini)

Paths of Glory (1957, Kubrick)

La Dolce Vita (1960, Fellini)

3 votes:

Freaks (1932, Browning)

Modern Times (1936, Chaplin)

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937, Hand)

Stagecoach (1939, Ford)

The Wizard of Oz (1939, Fleming)

Beauty and the Beast (1939, Cocteau)

Daisy Kenyon (1947, Preminger)

Letter From An Unknown Woman (1948, Ophuls)

Late Spring (1949, Ozu)

Orpheus (1949, Cocteau)

The Diary of a Country Priest (1950, Bresson)

Ordet (1955, Dreyer)

The Killing (1956, Kubrick)

L’Avventura (1960, Antonioni)

2 votes:

The Grapes of Wrath (1940, Ford)

Monsieur Verdoux (1947, Chaplin)

Bicycle Thieves (1948, De Sica)

All About Eve (1950, Mankiewicz)

Rashomon (1950, Kurosawa)

The Steel Helmet (1951, Fuller)

On the Waterfront (1954, Kazan)

The Red Balloon (1955, Lamorisse)

Jules and Jim (1961, Truffaut)

Lolita (1962, Kubrick)

1 vote:

Awaara (1951, Kapoor)

The Court Jester (1955, Panama/Frank)

A Face in the Crowd (1957, Kazan)

See everyone after the New Year for the 2015 Muriel Awards!

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2015: Cleo From 5 to 7 (1962, Agnes Varda)

"The great Agnes Varda's roots as a photojournalist and documentarian allow her to layer this story into a backdrop of quotidian beauty. Cleo's journey through the streets of Paris is a stream of jump cuts and micro-vignettes: faces outside a cafe, street performers, a simple cab ride, with the occasional intrusion of the news from the Algerian front or of some local politics. The outside world penetrating our own insular one, shocking Cleo, and us, into empathy." ~ Matt Lynch

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2015: The Exterminating Angel (1962, Luis Bunuel)

"Hilarious, bizarre, and with an air of almost ethereal grace, The Exterminating Angel remains a one-of-kind experience in the history of cinema. A more than worthy addition to this year's Hall of Fame inductees, it embodies an anarchist spirit sorely underrepresented in the pantheon of World Cinema." ~ Adam Lemke

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2015: Rio Bravo (1959, Howard Hawks)

"This is what made Hawks unique to cinema. You could label it as realism or classicism or whatever you like, but Hawks understood that rhythm was the most important element of cinema... Plot and character are everything to Hawks, but it’s rarely emphasized in the way other Hollywood films often do." ~ Peter Labuza

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2015: Touch of Evil (1958, Orson Welles)

"I now live in a cinephile world in which the 1998 version is the only version that people watch today and is considered a masterpiece of noir and one of the highest achievements in Orson Welles’s career, ranked alongside his first two films. And while some out there might say that their favorite Welles picture is one of his post-Hollywood works, to me Welles never made a more quintessentially American film than this one about the border between the United States and Mexico. It is legendary and at the same time a final eulogy for film noir, a sign of the changing times." ~ Jaime Grijalba

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2015: The Searchers (1956, John Ford)

"My favorite piece on the film is Jonathan Lethem's essay 'Defending The Searchers,' where the author wrestles from a very personal perspective about the impact the film has had on him and his impulse to defend it against those who find it offensive or simply boring and dated, even as his own relationship to the movie changes and grows more complex over repeated viewings. It's a movie that has similarly nested in the minds of countless filmmakers who have clearly been inspired, for better or worse by Ford and John Wayne's depiction of a tortured, obsessed 'hero.'" ~ Andrew Bemis

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2015: Pather Panchali (1955, Satyajit Ray)

"There’s something about Pather Panchali that transcends Neo-Realism. Ray was a first-time director working with a first-time cinematographer and you can sometimes catch them groping their way through film grammar and arriving at their own imagining of what cinema is. That something is uniquely their own." ~ Christianne Benedict

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2015: Duck Amuck (1953, Chuck Jones)

"By treating the very elements of moviemaking as a joke, Jones does what Orson Welles could do straight: make the viewer aware of the mechanics of his art in a way that makes creativity look like fun, the kind of fun that the viewer might want to get in on. Duck Amuck, like Citizen Kane, is the kind of movie that makes people want to make movies." ~ Phil Dyess-Nugent

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2015: Singin' in the Rain (1952, Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen)

"On the commentary track for A Clockwork Orange Malcolm McDowell explains that they chose to use the song 'Singin’ in the Rain' in Kubrick’s sadistic satire because they wanted to clearly express the sociopathic joy Alex felt and, 'Gene Kelly stomping on that street, in that water, rain coming down, the umbrella and dancing - that is euphoria! That is the happiest a human has ever been.' Of course he isn’t speaking about Gene Kelly, who was reportedly sick with an 103° temperature during the filming of the sequence. McDowell is speaking about Don Lockwood. Watching him so deeply in love that he jumps in puddles like a child and sings that he’s 'happy again,' makes audiences feel like we are truly watching the happiest human that has ever been,and that feeling is infectious." ~ Kevin Cecil

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2015: Sunset Boulevard (1950, Billy Wilder)

"As self-aware and jaded as Sunset Boulevard is about the movie business, it's also a celebration of cinematic grandeur, both the operatic silent films that made Norma a star and the dialogue-driven contemporary films that Joe (and Wilder himself) carefully craft. Norma famously laments that in her era, the stars 'had faces,' and Swanson's face is easily the movie's top attraction, her expressive eyebrows doing more acting than some performers manage with their entire bodies." ~ Josh Bell

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2015: The Red Shoes (1948, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger)

“Standing between the two halves [of the film] is the segment that assures the film’s standing as an all-time classic of the cinema, the 'Dance of The Red Shoes.' Being at once stylistically opposite to the rest of the film’s mostly down-to-earth dramatics and a reflection of what makes the rest of the film so great, the dance is truly enchanting, bringing ballet to life on the screen in way that emphasizes the artistic equality of the dance as it relates to the music, but does so on almost every cinematic level. From Jack Cardiff's stunning and perfectly lit Technicolor photography to the expressionistic set design and costuming, all levels of the film collaborate in the vivid act of storytelling that transcends language." ~ Patrick Miller

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2015: His Girl Friday (1940, Howard Hawks)

"God help the poor uninitiated soul who, in turning on Turner Classic Movies and encountering Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday (1940) for the first time, knows not enough about this dizzying reshuffle of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s The Front Page to at least take a few deep breaths before jumping in. It’s hard to imagine a faster, more breathless and whip-quick movie, from any genre, that all at once feels so fleet, dense and confident, without betraying even the slightest whiff of desperation, as this one." ~ Dennis Cozzalio

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2015: Bride of Frankenstein (1935, James Whale)

"Bride of Frankenstein might have been the first ever sequel to follow a masterpiece that actually improved upon its predecessor. James Whale's second Frankenstein film is very much the same type of creature feature as the first, with striking design work and a campy plot providing plenty of chills and thrills. But it's also a lot more, one of the first science fiction movies to demonstrate that movies don't need to be about people in order to explore what makes us human." ~ James Frazier

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2015: L'Atalante (1934, Jean Vigo)

"Jean Vigo was 28 when he started filming L'Atalante, and, by most accounts, was fully aware that his time on this earth was almost over. With this film he gave us a deeply humane insight into the ways in which we learn to communicate not only with words, but with pictures that can pierce the heart, and enlighten the soul. ~ Donald G. Carder

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2015: Duck Soup (1933, Leo McCarey)

"Together the Marx Brothers made 13 features, ranging from classics like Monkey Business to shrugs like The Big Store. What is it that separates Duck Soup from their other films and elevates it into the comedy pantheon?" ~ Jeff McMahon

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2015: Trouble in Paradise (1932, Ernst Lubitsch)

"It’s not every day an old, black-and-white comedy from the 1930s gets me all aroused. But that’s what happens every time I watch Trouble in Paradise, one of the funniest – and sexiest – farces I’ve encountered in my movie-viewing lifetime." ~ Craig D. Lindsey

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2015: City Lights (1931, Charlie Chaplin)

"[City Lights] encompasses everything we dream about when we go to the movies. Yes, the... final shot is one I would quickly identify as the most iconic of all-time, the one above all that moves us to the core of our being. What elevates it even further is the extraordinary lyrical and swelling score that Chaplin wrote himself for the film." ~ Sam Juliano

Click here for the full essay.

Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2015: Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964, Stanley Kubrick)

"The comic elements of Strangelove walk a tightrope above a bottomless abyss, as reinforced by its production design and cinematography. From the expressionistic 'war room'/cathedral, to the dials and switches of a B-52 bomber, to the military base where a deranged general attempts to bypass protocol and invoke world war, the film portrays an admittedly heightened reality, but undeniably a recognizable one." ~ Patrick Williamson

Click here for the full essay.