Landscape Personified Cinematically.

This weekend is a cinematic glut in New York City. With the openings of "Lars and the Real Girl" - the blow up doll movie that dominated the Toronto Film Festival, "Control" - the black-and-white biopic about the leader of Joy Division, "Elizabeth: The Golden Age" - who can miss another stellar Kate Blanchett movie, Kenneth Branagh's remake of "Sleuth", and the New York narco-drama "We Own the Night", or any of the other dozen movies opening this week in the city.

But most importantly was the kick off of the annual NYASLA landscape film series on Friday night. This year the films were chosen for containing a landscape so consequential to the narrative it became it's own character. Landscape as character. Of course. It seems more than logical to me.



The line up is small but nice. I'm always happy to see both Godard and Kurosawa in a discussion regarding landscape, and usually just in general. I know nothing about "Gerry", and unfortunately I missed it due to an idiotic Friday evening Polshek deadline at work.

I have since taken the liberty of building my own list of films I would include in a must-watch film series for die hard landscape obsessives.

Here it is:

Yasujiro Ozu, "I Was Born, But...." (1932)
Robert Rossellini, "German Year Zero" (1947)
Nunnally Johnson, "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" (1956)
Walter Lang, "The King and I" (1956)
Orson Welles, "Touch of Evil" (1958)
Yasujiru Ozu, "Good Morning" (1959)
Francois Truffaut, "The 400 Blows" (1959)
Peter Brook, "Lord of the Flies" (1963)
Gillo Pontecorvo, "The Battle of Algiers" (1965)
Frank Perry, "The Swimmer" (1968)
Bryan Forbes, "The Stepford Wives" (1975)
Don Siegel, "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1978)
Tobe Hooper, "Poltergeist" (1982)
Luchino Visconti, "Death in Venice" (1985)
Hector Barbenco, "Pixote" (1985)
Cheech Marin, "Born in East L.A." (1987)
Kar Wai Wong, "Happy Together" (1987)
Abbas Kiarostami, "Where is the Friend's House" (1987)
Abbas Kiarostami, "Life and Nothing More....."(1991)
Mira Nair, "Mississippi Masala" (1991)
Mathieu Kassovitz, "La Haine" (1995)
Martin Scorsese, "Kundun" (1997)
John O'Hagan, "Wonderland" (1997)
Ang Lee, "The Ice Storm" (1997)
Daniel Friedman and Sharon Grimberg, "Miss India Georgia" (1997)
Alain Bertiner, "My Life in Pink" (1997)
Gary Ross, "Pleasantville" (1998)
Mira Nair, "Salaam Bombay" (1998)
Edward Yang, "A One and A Two" (2000)
David and Laurie Shapiro, "Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale" (2000)
Todd Haynes, "Far From Heaven" (2002)
Atom Egoyan, "Ararat" (2002)