"alle anderen"

"What is a family? What is a couple? What is domestication? What is to live with another person, to domesticate another person, to have another person living in one's house or to create a home with another person? It has to do with that violence of adaptation, of "training" which is not limited to animals.. I do the other what one in the cattery with the sphinx. I try to create people who can live with me."
(Avital Ronell, Life Extreme)

20 Best Films of 2009 Poll

I sent my contribution to Film Comment's Readers' Poll a while ago. I thought, I should post them here, too. Being said, there are a number of 2009 titles I recently caught up that would have easily sneaked into this list. This can be read more as films seen in 2009 either by theatrical release or festival screenings. In 2009, I was able to attend most of the festivals and screenings throughout Toronto and Montreal therefore majority of these films included in the list have either been caught in one of these cities' film festivals or at one of the screening venues with the exception of Uprise and Iki Dil Bir Bavul which were caught up only in digital copies.

Melancholia (Lav Diaz, 2008)
Tony Manero (Pablo Larrain, 2008)
A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2009)
Trash Humpers (Harmony Korine, 2009)
Shirin (Abbas Kiarostami, 2008)
A Serious Man (Ethan&Joel Coen, 2009)
Film ist: A Girl& A Gun (Gustave Deutsch, 2009)
The Sound of Insects: Record of a Mummy (Peter Liechti, 2008)
To Die Like a Man (João Pedro Rodrigues, 2009)
Ne Change Rien (Pedro Costa, 2009)
Hadewijch (Bruno Dumont, 2009)
Left Handed (Laurence Thrush, 2009)
Double Take (Johan Grimonopez, 2009)
No one Knows About Persian Cats (Bahman Ghobadi, 2009)
Atashkar (Mohsen Amiryoussefi, 2009)
Uprise (Sandro Aguilar, 2008)
Un Prophete (Jacques Audiard, 2009)
On the Way to School (Orhan Eskikoy&Ozgur Dogan, 2009)
White Lightnin’ (Dominic Murphy, 2009)
Clone Returns Home (Kanji Nakajima, 2009)
Historias extraordinarias (Mariano Llinás, 2008)
Dogtooth (Giorgos Lanthimos, 2009)

Farber on Jeanne Dielman

When this movie's going right, it makes the spectator aware not only of repetitiousness but of the actual duration of a commonplace act. What's wonderful is that we are made to feel the length of time it takes to filter through in coffee-making, the length of time a sponge bath consumes, the number of spoonfuls it takes to eat soup, the number of steps from the kitchen stove to dining-room table, how many floors it takes elevator to move Jeanne from her flat to the ground. (Farber on Film: The Complete Writings of Manny Farber, p. 767)