As a 16 year old not-out-yet trans girl I had little reason to leave the confines of my bedroom. I wrote in journals about the pain I was experiencing in day to day life just by existing as a false version of myself, the gender dysphoria that seemed the permanently stagnate my every move, and the frustration of knowing that I had no real home to relax in either by body or through family. This intensely introspective period of my life saw my writing flourish at the expense of my mental health, but I figured out the type of person that I was supposed to be, and how I could go about accomplishing these goals of womanhood. I also saw my growth as a cinephile become a fixture of my everyday life. I wasn't going to school, but every day I found something new in cinema to give me reason to wake up in the morning. During all of that time though I could never find something that so resolutely affected me in the way that Chantal Akerman's movies did. The first movie of hers that I ever saw was Je, Tu, Il, Elle and I was struck by the first section where Chantal moves about her apartment writing about herself, and her ideas. This felt like what I was going through at the time. The interior space, the singular experience, the personal writing, the repetition. Chantal Akerman was filming something that felt like my life. I remember jotting down "I wish I could make movies like this" in my diary afterward. This experience kickstarted a love affair I had with her work that I've never had with any other filmmaker.

In the late 2000s there really wasn't filmmaking or television about transgender characters beyond ridiculing those people or having them play corpses. Finding relatable cinema has always been a game of looking for subtext or tonality that replicates personal feelings. My queerness is insular and deeply ingrained in my body. I like to shed my skin when I engage with art and feel reborn into someone that feels prouder of who I am. The lyrics of Donna Dresch and Kathleen Hanna were scribbled all over my walls in places my parents dare not look. My little secret of who I really was, and books by Alison Bechdel brought to me tears, because she was wrangling with anxiety over herself that was a constant feeling for me as well. Chantal Akerman did the same things for me, but in cinema. Her interior worlds felt like they lacked freedom. They were jails. Being closeted was nothing short of demoralizing so to see something so deeply personal reflected in her hallways, small rooms and spaces inhabited by women not made for this world felt like my space. Akerman's cinema was more of a home for me than anything I ever lived through up until last year, and her characters were versions of myself I could see existing.

It has always been baffling to me that Akerman's cinema has been described as detached, because I have the opposite experience with her work. I think back to that quote in Jeanne Dielman about her son not understanding, because he wasn't a woman, and I think this experience could hold true for why her cinema has never been accepted into a generalized canon as much as it should, because film criticism is a field inhabited mostly by men. Akerman has always laid herself out there for the world to see. She is a deeply personal filmmaker whose cinema has always represented her life in some way. The holocaust is a running theme in her work, as much as her relationship with her mother, queerness, art, and movement. She could never be pinned down to one specific type of movie so she's often worked in both narrative and documentary, experimental cinema, musicals, romance- and so much of it vital to her experiences.

Even recently I have found my relationship with Akerman's work expanding into new areas. I haven't seen my mother in 18 months, and our relationship is fractured to say the least, but she sends me letters. She talks about the experience of losing me, and wanting to see me again. She is sad that she hasn't seen me in as long as she has, but she knows I'm working towards living my life in a way that is representative of who I am. She always ends each letter hoping to hear back from me as soon as possible. She worries. I put on News From Home the other day in preparation for a piece on her now final film No Home Movie, and I was moved by the similarities between the way my mother and Chantal's mother reacted to each of us moving away. They're so very similar and it became apparent to me for the first time that maybe this is what a mother/daughter relationship feels like. It's complicated and messy, but there's a lot of love to be shared between us. I cried at that revelation. Akerman's movies have always felt symbiotic- like they come out of some place within her that I feel personally connected to even though I never had the chance of meeting her. The type of effect she had on my life is nothing short of profound, and it has to ring true for other women.

I woke up this morning to the news that she had passed, and from reports it was a suicide. I sobbed into the shoulder of the man who gave me a physical home over the woman whose cinema sheltered me in a cinematic one. I am gutted. I feel like part of my soul was removed when I heard this news. She felt like family. I miss her so much. 

 In an older review I posted this year for Takashi Miike's "Fudoh: The New Generation" I stated that if there is one unifying theme in Miike's work it is that violence begets violence. Nearly twenty years after Fudoh came out the man is still grappling with those same ideas in his most recent picture Yakuza Apocalypse. Miike has been making yakuza pictures his entire career, and they make up the greater amount of his early v-cinema contributions when he was a director for hire in his earliest days as a director. He's still a director for hire, but in a bigger Japanese blockbuster system. He's still making yakuza pictures in his own brand, and even with more restrictions on what he can and can't do with more money involved he's still raking the coals of puncturing violent cinema with both comedy and a mournful approach that tackles the subject head-on.

Deadly Outlaw: Rekka

In a recent interview with the A.V. Club Miike stated that he does not like violence. When Miike begins to assess the truth of his characters they become violent. Miike is not a cynical filmmaker for these preoccupations with violence, but an empathetic one. In Miike's first golden period he made a handful of films that would be known as the Dead or Alive Series as well as another masterpiece in Deadly Outlaw: Rekka. These are violent pictures, but Miike handles the theory of violence in an interesting way. For Miike violence is a tangled web his characters get lost in. They're products of their environment rather than essentially violent people. Yakuza Apocalypse follows in those footsteps, even if it's a much lesser achievement than that series of movies Miike put out in the early 2000s.



Yazuka Apocalypse begins as an analysis of masculinity and how that is intertwined with the nature of the Yakuza. There are specific examples of the absurdity of masculinity as gatekeeping: Drinking blood in front of your overlord, punching each other squarely in the face until another man falls, having your foot stomped and offering the other foot for the same punishment. It's all to prove oneself to some masculine superior in the yakuza- in this case, vampire lord Genyo Kamiura. For our lead character Kageyama the yakuza offers him a role he can fit into, and a fantasy of what he could become. It might even be like the movies, but that all unravels when he finds out his superior is a vampire, and turns him into one as well, making him the new central figure of masculine power. In a later scene Kagayama uses his powers on an otherwise emasculated child who weeps and sobs at not being strong enough, but then after Kageyama turns him into a vampire the child finds himself with his newfound strength. All of these ideas on what it means to be a man are taken to their logical extreme in the black comedy Ichi the Killer, but they are brought back here to round out some of Miike's ideas on the absurdity of the Yakuza.


The vampire mythos is also important to Miike's ideas on masculinity. Yakuza pictures have been done to death, but yakuza vampire pictures are a new layer on the genre. On paper it sounds absurd, but that's Miike. He takes the absurd and levels it in his ideas and his cinema. Vampirism sweeps through Japan when Kageyama begins to turn other people. It sweeps across this setting like wildfire, until finally our vampire lord can walk with an army behind him. When you place this scene beside an earlier scene where an elder discusses the dangers of spreading vampirism too much you get a clearer picture of what Miike is getting at by utilizing genre instead of playing his Yakuza picture straight. The spreading of vampirism is the spreading of the yakuza is the spreading of violence is the end of life, and a great criticism of violence in and of itself.


As dour as Miike can be sometimes he always has a sense of humour, and this is where many people have the wrongheaded idea that the man is simply "crazy". Miike simply doesn't play by rules. This places him closer to cinematic kin of Joe Dante than it does other filmmakers he is often compared to like Sion Sono. At the close of Deadly Outlaw: Rekka a man with long white hair says "Rock n' Roll" and that general idea comes back here when they unravel the mystery of defeating the Japanese folklore Kappa god with a piece of paper that says "Stay Foolish". Miike lets loose in the final third finally delving completely into the Vampire and Japanese Folklore of this genre cinema picture. There are Frogs performing wire-fu, grenades going off, mockery of Sergio Leone and a subtle homage to John Carpenter's They Live. He ignores all pretenses of ending his picture in the classical way he set up the first two acts. Yakuza Apocalypse isn't as interesting when it abandons a majority of it's ideas for something a little more altogether crowd pleasing and what North American audiences expect from Takashi Miike, but it is fun, jovial and loose in a way that recalls that Rock N' Roll man at the close of Rekka. Miike has put out better work this year (As the God's Will), but Yakuza Apocalypse is a wonderful addition to the dense filmography of an often misunderstood master.

Yakuza Apocalypse was recently added to Video on Demand.

"Saute Ma Ville is the mirror image of Jeanne Dielman"
-Chantal Akerman

In Jeanne Dielman there is a woman who lives her life through rituals. She cooks and cleans every single day. It's mechanical, perfectly shaped and fills her life with purpose. When there are slight breaks in those tasks the woman of that film begins to fracture. Jeanne Dielman shows a structure to live in. Saute Ma Ville seeks to destroy those structures.

Saute Ma Ville is a phoenix film. It is destroying the old guard to bring life to a new generation. In this case it is the women of the 1960s not wishing to live the types of lives their mothers, aunts and grandmothers were forced to endure. While Jeanne Dielman is a more radical statement by tapping into the mental state of women and delivering a portrait of time and procedure Saute Ma Ville is more like a blunt instrument. The title even infers a simple act of destruction: "Blow Up My Town". In that respect Chantal Akerman's first film feels similar to the energy and exuberance of Vera Chytilova's Daisies, but Akerman's technique is different and entirely her own, even if Daisies and Saute Ma Ville are sisters in arms.

Chantal Akerman was only 18 when she made this film, but her filmmaking is already developed. Her insistence on framing around tight spaces and entering into the mindset of specific characters is present, and she is adept at capturing poignant moments of singularity- a recurring theme throughout her entire career. The parallelism of her camera to her characters is one of her trademarks and in Saute Ma Ville it strengthens Akerman's chaotic turn as an implosion. Her camera is energetic which contrasts heavily with the work she would do in New York a few years later (the work her reputation as a difficult filmmaker is built upon), but the excess of movement calls for what she wants to convey. Her character is a blitzkrieg and can never stay still for more than a couple of seconds so the camera follows her. Her voice echoes over the images in a lilting, angelic humming that clashes with the violent nature of the acts she is committing to totems of femininity of the past. The brooms are broken, the lotion is everywhere and the soap is on the floor. Everything is out of place, because it must be to start anew, and Akerman's zipping camera work personifies her character with resolute confidence.

Chantal Akerman stars in this picture, and in her own words she's a Charlie Chaplin-esque kind of character whenever she is in her own movies, this one included. Akerman is jovial, singing, a smile forever attached to her face as she moves around the kitchen knocking anything in her path to the floor. This is a death dance, but instead of being somber it is celebratory, because the end of this prison is liberating for Chantal and speaks to a larger theme on the kitchen as a woman's place. In 1968 Saute Ma Ville could also easily be seen as an oncoming storm, a film that literally represents the dawning of second wave feminism. When Chantal writes in lotion on a mirror with her hands "IT'S ALL OVER" she doesn't mean her life, she means the past. When she finally kills herself on top of an oven in the final frames of the short she's destroying the idea that a kitchen is a woman's place while also damning the kitchen as a place of life lost for those women who toiled away in that confined space. The women Chantal watched growing up, and the women she'd make movies about for the rest of her career.
As a first statement Chantal Akerman came out of the gates swinging with a rough snapshot of feminist thought. She'd never accept those queer or feminist labels that are key to her work, but I believe she was absolutely aware of the type of cinema she was making. She wouldn't return to this type of work again until 1974 with Je, Tu, Il, Elle and her filmmaking acumen would evolve as she was introduced to experimental cinema, but as it stands Saute Ma Ville is an interesting first chapter for one of the great filmmakers and an introduction to everything Akerman would give the world.

Unlike her first film, Saute Ma Ville, there isn't a narrative in La Chambre, and Akerman has begun to twist away from conventional cinematic goals into something both entirely her own, and daringly experimental. In La Chambre, Akerman asks many questions and none of them have explicit answers, but the function of the movie is to get the viewer to think of how they view cinema as a narrative art-form and how we latch onto any tidbits of information that may move a story forward. Akerman has consistently been concerned with stillness in her movies, and how that plays into realism (look at the opening third of Je, Tu, Ill, Elle for example), and La Chambre's only progression is how this singular woman moves, otherwise objects are at rest. But Akerman is just as interested in those resting objects, and her camera makes a point to frame household items such as chairs, an oven, and a dishwasher with the same priority she frames herself. The framing is meticulous, but never boring, and the images never dull due to the function of the camera's constant movement. By placing the camera in a 360 degree pan she's asking audience members to observe how the objects change, even if they don't. The only changes to the objects are in the lighting, and it's only slight, but this is something we must view, because the camera demands their importance with the same centered framing as the subject (the woman). Something interesting happens after the first couple courses around the room though- the camera reverses course as if on audience instinct to move towards the woman. The curious thing about this is why that was needed and what Akerman is saying about narrative subjects. She's just as calm as the chair we've already seen twice. Her movement isn't any more fascinating than how the light reflects off of a wall, but the camera is pulled to her, because she moves. Each repetitive movement of the camera becomes tighter and tighter until the camera keeps the woman in frame for the better part of a minute, but she remains listless as she devours an apple. When the camera finally realizes there is nothing to see here the lens pulls away from her again and the movie ends. What was the subject? Is a subject even needed to produce cinema? These questions aren't definitely answered, but explored and beg to be analyzed by viewers.




La Chambre is just the beginning of Chantal Akerman questioning how cinema functions, and offers a glimpse into more of her instinctive techniques as a filmmaker. While, Saute Ma Ville, may have been an introduction to her feminist themes La Chambre offers more in the way of what we've come to know as Chantal Akerman's form. The attention to space and how movement effects image and narrative were brought to full light in Hotel Monterey, and in that way La Chambre sometimes feels like a test run for a fuller picture, but the attention to objects, rooms and the people within them would be of fascination to Chantal Akerman throughout her career all the way up through Almayer's Folly, where she finally sought freedom from interior spaces. The interior lives of women can be seen in her first two films as well, even if La Chambre rejects any traditional narrative filmmaking technique, and positions Akerman as a subject in her films. Akerman's resolute attention to portraying women came first through portraying herself. By questioning cinema and distancing her filmmaking from a popular narrative mode she gained a reputation as a difficult filmmaker, but she's inviting you into her worlds and into herself, even if whatever she's doing is simple, such is the case in La Chambre.

you can watch La Chambre on youtube here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AGakyb3eBU

In Chantal Akerman's previous short film La Chambreshe experimented with big ideas on the nature of cinema and what constitutes as narrative in spaces. She takes that idea to its logical endpoint in Hotel Monterey. Monterey is a film made up mostly of static observational shots on the people who reside in a run down hotel in New York City. Hotel Monterey is rigorous to say the least, but there are these pockets of narrative surrounding the residents and the all encompassing oppressive look of the hotel is very deliberate in creating a specific feeling of dread. In my previous review for Hotel MontereyI likened the film to a thesis on the idea of a home, and how hotels are inherently these soulless institutions, because they are rarely the home of anyone. They exist only to be a substitute of the warmth that comes from having a home so Akerman's filmmaking feels ghostly and cold. I still think that's very present in Hotel Monterey as my ideas on what hotels represent hasn't changed in the last year, but what has changed is my understanding of why exactly this film connects with me so deeply.

On a more basic level Hotel Monterey is simply about documentation, but the word simple never really conveys the maximal qualities of Chantal Akerman. This hotel is seemingly falling apart, the hallways look like they've been beaten down, white paint has turned yellow over the years, and rooms have garish furniture, but Akerman uses these tools to create a portrait. Her documentaries in this mode (Monterey, D'est, South) are in some way or another about the people who wander into her lens, but they are just as much about the rooms they occupy, and the images they end up creating in those rooms. One such image is that of a woman sitting in solitude with her back to the camera. It could be an image from any one of her movies, but this is the first time Chantal Akerman has used that picture. She is interested in how women, especially, occupy space over time. She brought this idea to perfection in Jeanne Dielman, but the women of Chantal Akerman's films could star in any of her movies with little changes in substitution. Chantal Akerman makes Chantal Akerman movies and her movies feel like something primal in my very soul.

There is one image (it is the first screencap in this post) that I had forgotten about, but upon seeing it again brought out an internal pang of loneliness inside of my body. The pregnant woman in clear view who shines in perfection through the grime of the hallway walls. The door and the angular framing position her as a focal point and bring an image of deep blues and whites to contrast with her humanity. She seems so very far away though, there is no close-up, Akerman would hardly ever move the camera in this film so this is the only image we get. The only glimpse of her narrative and her life is this hallway, and her body piercing the frame and so clearly it ruptured the entire film for me on an emotional level. This image came along on the recent news that scientists believe trans women may be able to get pregnant within the next five years. I latch onto that glimmer of hope, and see this idea of who I want to be, and what I want my future to look like and Akerman's cinema gives me an image of a pregnant woman within reach. Akerman's cinema has always felt as if it has evolved around my mental state whenever I decide to watch one of her films, and that one example has left me in a state of bittersweet devastation upon coming into contact.



However, there is a deep irony in that image of the pregnant woman as it contrasts so severely with the rest of the picture. While the pregnant woman represents a semblance of life or a future the majority of the images in Hotel Monterey show a barren existence. Akerman spends the majority of time on the emptiness. There's no sound, no life, just a bit of reflected light bouncing off the walls and showing these blank dead doors and the lack of a subject within. Even when people are front and centre to the camera, like in the elevator sequence at the beginning of the picture, they'll often move out of the way of the frame as to not get in the way of whatever it is Akerman was shooting. This assumption that whatever it is Akerman was filming was more interesting than that person is unsettling, because even when Akerman was pointing the camera into dead space the people of Hotel Monterey would resist the camera and the idea of becoming the subject of her movie. In that way the humans of this hotel more closely resemble ghosts slipping in and out of frame and hardly effecting it in one way or another. The only people in the film who remain corporeal are the pregnant woman, the woman in the chair and the singular man, who we know almost nothing about. His face is eerie, and in some ways he could also be a ghost.

When Akerman finally does move the camera it is after nearly forty minutes of immobility, but it's so slow and unsure of movement that it more closely resembles being sucked into the hotel itself at first. It is another simple camera movement, like the reverse of direction in La Chambre, that emphasizes her great attention to detail over time. When she shifted her mode of storytelling she began to more visibly move upward through the hotel rather than linger on the walls. It is in these final moments when she reaches the rooftops that she finally reaches New York City, the skyline is pearl, the city is just waking up, and the traffic is already building, it seems peaceful. It seems like at once an afterlife and a home. A new dawn brings light through the dreary hotel and maybe it's residents will call this city their home. For Chantal Akerman she found a hotel, her first of many.

"It seems so shallow"

"You are so self involved"

These two phrases pop up in Joanna Arnow's Bad at Dancing and i Hate Myself :), which begs the question is Joanna Arnow a self-indulgent filmmaker and is that a bad thing? Arnow is at the subject of each of her films, both behind the camera, and in front of it, and her lens functions as a way to release her own anxieties about herself out into the world. These could easily be called vanity projects, but Arnow isn't a filmmaker of minimal self-obsession. She is a self assured publisher of personal cinema that unleashes a torrent of inward complexity that marks her as a unique voice in a currently overstuffed cinematic climate.

Joanna Arnow's voice is singular. There are many screenwriters and directors who tread some of the same ground as Arnow, like Lena Dunham, and Greta Gerwig, and many of the one size fits all men of the mumblecore scene, but none of these voices are as difficult to pin down as Arnow.  Dunham, far too often goes for self inflicted humour that contains no long-lasting bite, and Gerwig is a sentimentalist at heart, but Arnow presents herself in a fashion that has no preconceived notions of whether or not she is pleasing. She just is. That alone is a maximizing quality that would lift even the most banal filmmakers, but Arnow is not banal. She is exciting, because she is unpredictable, uncomfortable, and unpolished in a very real way.

Her first feature, i Hate Myself :) is especially impressive as she asks herself the question "Is my relationship with my boyfriend healthy?". What is initially a portrait of her aggressive, oftentimes drunk, racist boyfriend becomes a portrait of herself, and her film works as therapy. Her editor (who does his job completely naked) asks her difficult questions about herself, and her relationship. He is a phallic therapist who doesn't mince words with Joanna. ("Do you like it when he degrades you? I think you do".) Joanna has no concrete answer for that question, and while it is obvious that her boyfriend James could very well spell trouble for Joanna she never quite lets go of her relationship. The audience at any point is likely screaming for her to run as far away as possible, but Arnow isn't asking for our approval. She just presents herself, lets us make up our minds, and then she chooses her own path regardless of what we may think, and that's bold. The final moments contrast in emotionally difficult ways that complicate her filmmaking, and leaves the viewer at a loss at how exactly one should feel. There is a level of fearlessness in that kind of craft, and while the documentary aspect of the film makes the ending inevitable, the fact that she never once softened her story only further proves her guile as a filmmaker.


In Bad at Dancing, Joanna Arnow is once again presenting herself, but this time she is fictionalized to a degree. She is essentially playing herself, as her mannerisms, speech patterns and behaviour mirror her real self in i Hate Myself :) . Bad at Dancing is a little difficult to watch at times, but the escalation of tension in her previous film is replaced with awkward humour set around the staging of her body in any given scene. The most significant of these jokes happens in the bedroom of her best friend and her boyfriend where she insists on interjecting herself in their most intimate sexual activities. Arnow never asks to participate in sex, but she wants to be close to them at all times. Her body is consistently framed a bit to the left or right of the centre of the frame and the subject of Arnow's images is more frequently the roommates that she is making uncomfortable. Even when her best friend begins to play a song on guitar to try and capture an older moment of sisterly bonding Joanna can't help but interject or cause the moment to stop. Her body, her voice, her actions are always fracturing the frame. She is terrified of losing her best friend, and that makes the situation humorous, because Joanna Arnow, the character, cannot help but get in her own way. Surely enough the film ends with her alone, touching herself as her friends go to have sex in another room. It is an image of deep introspection. Arnow's body, much like her anxieties and quirks are on display. No rules. She will use all of herself. She carries the same attitude in her direction. She is Tina Belcher with a movie camera willing to put every single aspect of her life into her work of personal cinema.

The Force Awakens could more appropriately be called A New Hope, but not just for the fact that the plot follows many of the same beats and narrative trajectory as the film everyone fell in love with from the seventies, but because The Force Awakens has granted a generation that grew up on the notoriously hated prequels the optimism to believe in Star Wars again. In many ways, The Force Awakens is merely an introduction, and an attempt at a palette cleanse by going back to the basics of what made the original trilogy beloved in the first place, and for the most part J.J. Abrams and company succeed. The Force Awakens isn't the only film to use familiar imagery and plotting of a previously beloved picture to kickstart a new franchise this year. 2015 has given us both good (Creed) and bad (Jurassic World) examples, and while The Force Awakens isn't as successful as Creed at recontextualizing a franchise around new characters of different genders and races it adequately introduces a more diverse Star Wars that feels fresh by opening up their universe a bit to extend beyond a faultless white male protagonist.

Ultimately these new characters makes this installment of Star Wars worthwhile, because they offer a new wrinkle on old ideas. Finn (Jon Boyega), Rey (Daisey Ridley) and Poe (Oscar Isaac) are introduced with such confidence that these characters already feel iconic and stand alongside the old guard (Solo, Leia, Chewbacca) admirably. Finn is a former stormtrooper who cannot abide by a fascist state, Rey is a farmgirl scrapping for parts to put enough food on her table to make it to the next day, and Poe is a fast talking ace fighter pilot. All three get a potentially iconic moment of introduction, Finn's Stormtrooper helmet covered in blood, Rey cave diving (the films only effective 3D moment) and Poe's confident back and forth with R2D2 replacement droid BB-8, but it is Finn's that introduces the newest idea to the franchise that links the prequels and original trilogy in a fascinating way. The blood on the helmet is such a simple, perfect image that it conveys the real sense of violence in this regime. Later on, it is mentioned that the stormtroopers are brainwashed children who have grown up to die for The First Order. This ties back into the Clones in film number two, and while I'm unsure if they ever intend on asking the philosophical questions of a Stormtrooper's innocence, and the nature of war it is something of far more depth than this film often presents. Woefully, this is as far as it goes so it almost renders that potentially loaded image as mute.

There is also Kylo Ren, at once both a stand in for Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader, and the trickiest role to pull off of the new characters. The riskiest bit of writing in The Force Awakens comes by the way of taking inspiration from the prequels and making Kylo Ren a figure who is being torn apart by a decision, much in the same way Anakin Skywalker was in Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. Ren mopes, he explodes at any little thing going wrong, and he is deeply insecure about his abilities. He talks to a Darth Vader helmet, and wishes he could be like the legend. It's all embarrassing, but Adam Driver flourishes in these complexities that on the surface could singlehandedly sink this revival. Driver is working on a level that no one else even touches. Isaac, Ridley and Boyega are all enthusiastic about being in Star Wars, and it shows through effervescent reading of the dialogue, and if Driver were to take the same path his performance would be hammy, but instead Driver comes off as complicated, which is something those other three characters lack at the moment.

J.J. Abrams has also never been better. His employment of crane and tracking shots throughout the aerial combat sequences is some of the finest in the series, and through all of this action he doesn't lose sight of the image. While my screening was compromised by the background neutralization of the image it was easily identifiable that Abrams was working with a concentrated effort to make this film beautiful. Some of his choices get lost once the plot has to be engaged, and the next film set-up, but credit where credit is due, there are a bevy of striking, emotional compositions throughout The Force Awakens most notably of which involve Rey flying a vehicle across the sandy plains of Jukka with the fallen imperial ship in the background, and a long shot of an embrace between two characters in mourning while the rest of the world celebrates. Both of these images contain depth and resonance, one being the other side of war, and another being the image of the film- a rebirth, a new dawn.

From time to time The Force Awakens falls under the weight of obligation by having to set up the next film. Too often plots are given simple resolutions and the more interesting aspects of this film are sidelined to tackle the singular goal of destroying the Nu-Death Star, complete with Triumph of the Will imagery in one of the films more cringe-worthy moments. Jogging to get to the next plot point never really gives anything the space to breathe in the final third, and the fact that all of our heroes except Poe are attached to a separate far more interesting plot makes the conclusion feel unbalanced. A lightsaber fight in the snow with our main hero and villain is going to be more interesting than the side quest 100% of the time. If there is also intention on giving layering to the stormtroopers as brainwashed innocents then the ra-ra victory of destroying them unequivocally means that this ending is not one of pure celebration. There simply has to be more dissection if that is going to be introduced, and to ignore that is to dishonour that original writing for Finn. Star Wars, was after all supposed to be in some effect a response to the Vietnam War as stated in the Making of Star Wars, and to render that idea in such an unexplored fashion makes me squeamish about the body count. Is this then just a war spectacle if we aren't even going to examine that idea? I'm willing to give it a pass for now since this is the first chapter of three, but that plot point lingers afterward much stronger than anything that gave a thrill. As Star Wars moves forward, it is in my deepest hopes that some of these flaws are cleared up. The hardest part is already out of the way, and that was to gain our trust, which I think The Force Awakens easily achieves.

The biggest change in my viewing habits from 2014 to 2015 was the centering of specific auteurs, which is much closer to the way my boyfriend watches movies than I choose to experience cinema. I usually take a sampler platter approach to the way I watch movies, but by living with someone who is far more organized than I my viewing habits altered slightly. As did his viewing habits, as my picking films on a whim attitude became the other side of our cinematic coin. We even kept a hat around this year with specific movies on slips of paper that we'd end up watching. We ended up scraping that hat when we started an Alfred Hitchcock project, which you'll see visible in this list. Cinema always remains interesting. The movies I watched this year had their strengths and weaknesses, and there are certain goals I did not keep (50-50 gender split, which ended up being close to 35/65), but cinema is always the highlight of my year. This top 50 represents the best and brightest of those viewings I had in 2015. At the top of the list is Robert Altman's "Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean" which has been on my mind more than any other film in the past twelve months. It even has Cher. The other 49 movies do not so that made the choice for #1 ultimately easy to land upon. Here's to hoping 2016 is as fruitful, and I'll finally hit that 50/50 gender gap in viewing. (As always new releases and rewatches are excluded from the list)

1. Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (Robert Altman, 1982)

2. Wheels on Meals (Sammo Hung, 1984)

3. Whisper of the Heart (Yoshifumi Kondo, 1995)

4. Police Story (Jackie Chan, 1985

5. The Day I Became a Woman (Marzieh Meshkini, 2000)

6. Hookers on Davie (Janis Cole & Holly Dale, 1984)

7. New York, New York (Martin Scorsese, 1977)

8. The Story of Marie and Julien (Jacques Rivette, 2003)

9. Faust (F.W. Murnau, 1926)

10. Green Snake (Hark Tsui, 1993)

11. Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946)

12. All About Eve (Joseph L. Makiewicz, 1950)

13. Angel's Egg (Mamoru Oshii, 1985)

14. Dyketactics (Barbara Hammer, 1974)

15. Barton Fink (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1991)

16. Dance, Girl Dance (Dorothy Arzner, 1940)

17. Peking Opera Blues (Hark Tsui, 1986)

18. Waitress (Adrienne Shelly, 2007)

19. Birds (Takashi Miike, 2000)

20. Limelight (Charlie Chaplin, 1952)

21. Leave Her to Heaven (John M. Stahl, 1945)

22. The Blade (Hark Tsui, 1995)

23. Challenge of the Masters (Lau Kar-leung, 1975)

24. A Better Tomorrow III: Love and Death in Saigon (Hark Tsui, 1989)

25. A Better Tomorrow (John Woo, 1986)

26. Needing You (Johnnie To, 2000)

27. Le Pont Du Nord (Jacques Rivette, 1981)

28. Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967)

29. Eight Diagram Pole Fighter (Lau Kar-Leung, 1984)

30. The Wrong Man (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956)

31. No Fear, No Die (Claire Denis, 1994)

32. Monsieur Verdoux (Charlie Chaplin, 1947)

33. Katie Tippel (Paul Verhoeven, 1975)

34. Dragon Inn (King Hu, 1967)

35. L'invitation Au Voyage (Germaine Dulac, 1927)

36. Sheer Madness (Margarethe Von Trotta, 1983)

37. Zebraman 2: Attack on Zebra City (Takashi Miike, 2009)

38. The Seventh Victim (Mark Robson, 1943)

39. I Was a Male War Bride (Howard Hawks, 1949)

40. My Brilliant Career (Gillian Armstrong, 1979)

41. Jour de Fete (Jacques Tati, 1949)

42. The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940)

43. Stagefright: Aquarius (Michele Soavi, 1987)

44. I'll Take You There (Adrienne Shelly, 1999)

45. Friends with Money (Nicole Holofcener, 2006)

46. Once Upon a Time in China I-III (Hark Tsui, 1991-1993)

47. Merry-Go-Round (Jacques Rivette, 1981)

48. About Elly (Asghar Farhadi, 2009)

49. Winchester '73 (Anthony Mann, 1950)

50. Romance (Catherine Breillat, 1999)

*Analysis of a scene is a feature on Curtsies and Hand Grenades where I take a look at specific scenes in movies and discuss them*


Jacques Rivette smartly evades the weight of Carl Th. Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc by never trying to emulate or tap into the same filmmaking techniques that bluntly created one of the most devastating portraits of personhood in all of Cinema. Dreyer focused on the weary, crumbling presence of Maria Falconetti's face in close-up, but Rivette's picture avoids those comparisons by never actually focusing on the trial or lingering on the tragedy. Instead, Rivette opts for a portrait of Joan as a person who was persecuted not only because she was considered an idolatress, but because she dared call into question the place of women in society by subverting her gender role and dabbling in masculine presentation.




Joan giddily darts a pair of scissors across her unkempt straw-like hair in order to please god and herself. She chooses a mirror of armour, a masculinizing of vanity. Her reflection reveals an evolving self. In order for Joan to go into battle she must adopt the roles of men. If she is going to be with the men she must be a man. Her first task is to remove the long hair that paints her as feminine. She mutters to another woman who works nearby that she must look like a boy, and in an attempt to make her haircut more appropriate the woman offers to even up her look. This early scene paints a portrait that continues throughout the rest of the film, and it is one of women helping Joan achieve her goals. Whether those women know that Joan is only merely doing these things because she sees messengers of god or they envision a woman breaking barriers of gendered norms is irrelevant. They help her regardless. The same woman who cuts her hair finds her a suit of armour made from hand-me-downs of smaller boys.






Jacques Rivette shoots his adaptation of Joan of Arc with documentary style realism. There are insertions of talking head shots to deliver the exposition of the narrative. These scenes are coupled with recreations of the events certain characters discussed moments previously, and the majority of the first act is Joan's acceptance of her task and the battles she wins for her country and for God. Along the way many men question the legitimacy of Joan's combat and military skill, often chalking any setbacks to her gender, and whenever she succeeds men say "I've never seen a woman do that before" or "You're pretty good for a woman", to paraphrase. These exchanges of soldiers finding their notions of gender challenged further establish a theme on Joan's breaking of binary ideas on what a woman can or cannot accomplish. Even a woman can die for her country, and her beliefs.

This particular version of Joan's story is split into two parts and while the first film is relatively triumphant the second part brings about the inevitable tragedy that is nestled inside of this story. The tranquil pace of the first picture begins to evolve in the final hours, as that same pacing mutates from peaceful to brutally anxious. Every viewer goes into the film knowing that Joan is a martyr, but Rivette alters this narrative slightly, and presents a wrinkle on Joan's doom that is far more powerful in day to day life than the religious persecution that colours Dreyer's masterpiece. In Rivette's film her martyrdom would be one of the illusion of choice for a woman who lives in an uncaring patriarchal environment.

Once Joan is captured by the English they begin a trial based around her idolatry, which Rivette only briefly engages, but the reasoning behind the trial is clearly the deep-seated misogyny behind the men who would be furious that a woman defeat them in a battle. If battle is not man's sport anymore then what does he have left to conquer? But it's more than that as well. There is a hatred in how easily Joan was able to try on a masculine identity, and worse how natural a fit it became on her body. The bible states in Deuteronomy that any man or woman who would wear the clothing that wasn't associated with their gender would be considered an abomination, a disgusting thing, a wicked creature. Joan came through God, but was challenging the very notions of his perceived word. There would be no evolving of ideas on a gender binary. There would only be fire to put out an idea.






That idea would spread in subtle ways. In one digression a mother is frustrated her daughter's hair is tangled. The girl doesn't want to straighten or comb her hair, and after spending a short amount of time with Joan she seems to have grasped towards that freedom Joan was exhibiting in her presentation, even if that just meant letting her hair become slightly messy. This one scene is the fissure in society caused by Joan's gendered rebellion, and in a cinematic context it is all the evidence one would need to know Joan was causing change in the ideas of the women around her. Maybe I didn't have to spend so much time on my appearance?



Joan took the dress under the condition that she would be sent back to a prison in her home country and if she would be given female prison guards to attend to her needs. That final detail is important, because Joan knew that women, in this telling of the story, would have her back. Throughout this film women have been helping her along the way, whether that be the woman who helped her find the armour or the girl she befriended before trial. They were Joan's true angels. When the prison guards rip her of her masculinity and force her back into the more traditional femininity that she was seen wearing in the first scenes of the film it spells her doom. As a prisoner she was left to the will of the men around her, because there would be no female prison guards. Only men who saw a vulnerable woman who they could have their way with on repeated occasions. They wrap her in chains. Her dress exposed. A metaphor for the place women held in society during Joan's period of life. The only way to push back the rapist prison guards was to dress like a man again after they loosened her shackles. It was the only protection she had against rape. And as soon as they saw she was dressing this way again the priests decided she had rebuked god, but they weren't acting in the law of god. They were acting in the law of man. The law of man that would say a woman should stay in her place and lest she get out of line she be put back where she belonged. For Joan that meant ash.

In the book of Genesis Adam and Eve live in the garden of Eden among many temptations that God has laid before them to test their faith. One such temptation is the "Tree of Knowledge" or the tree of life. The tree of knowledge is a metaphor for free will, and if anyone eats from the tree of knowledge they become "like god". Eve eats an apple from the tree after great temptation from Satan in the form of a snake and she is made into a scepter of fallen grace, because she dared question her rulers who "knew better" and convinced Adam to do the same. Eve is every woman who ever sought liberation, and like Eve the women who suffer and languish under strict patriarchal rule in Mustang also take of that apple.


Mustang begins as a breezy summer picture. The girls have ruffled sleeves on their blouses and smiles on their face as they cheer out "Let's walk, the weather's nice". The end of school begats horseplay in an inviting ocean as summer arrives and nothing could appear to be dangerous about this situation, but they made the mistake of having fun with boys. When word got out to their grandmother and uncle that they had been engaging in this activity it meant handcuffs, cages and control, because a woman who plays with boys eventually has sex, and in this small patriarchal community nothing could be more abominable.


Director Deniz Gamze Erguven does a good job of introducing visual confinement over her motion picture. The grandparents are from an older way of thinking where a girls chastity was tied into her value as a wife, and in their panic to preserve their granddaughters they slowly begin to build walls around them as they sell their five adopted children off to eligible bachelors. In the beginning of Mustang the camera has an elegance in frame that mirrored the young girls personalities, and when the walls go up the camera remains intuitive to their perspective but instead of the curiosity of the world inviting exploration the eye is dominated by mundane household activities and an introduction of rhythm and repetition in the girls lives, as every woman in their community has taught them this is their definitive role. There is no safe space in the home of this sisterhood either, and all five girls eventually start striving for their own spots in the house-jail to relax. The older siblings sunbathed through a crack in the exterior. The youngest girl literally plans an escape just to go to a soccer game, which coincidentally was attended by only women after rioting caused by male attendees ruined the national team's previous game. This notion of a safe space is in the visual language and finding a fracture inside of their of their home built upon an architectural chastity belt becomes paramount. As the walls become more densely layered with steel and spikes the house begins to resemble something between a castle and a prison- a blunt metaphor if there ever was one, but appropriate in its usage here- and the only truly safe space becomes the arms of the sisterhood. In many frames the camera lingers on their symbiotic relationship. The girls are a tangle of limbs, a web of skin providing support where there otherwise was none and it becomes a recurring visual motif as the web is untangled and their sisterhood altered as each girl one after the other, getting younger and younger is married off to a suitor.




"You'll learn to love your husband" but what if they never wanted one in the first place? The compulsory decision making of their uncle, and to a lesser extent their grandmother a representative of a larger cultural problem all around the world where views on women are archaic is driving force of the conflict. In a previous film I watched for the Female Filmmaker Project, The Day I Became a Woman, there is a long section of the film devoted to one woman who escapes her husband by disobeying him and competing in a bicycle race. In that movie the feminist text of the film is refashioned into an action picture through long tracking shots, overhead camera work and an attention to detail that makes the escape invigorating, terrifying and personal. Mustang goes for something similar in the latter half of the movie when the feminist text becomes genre by adapting the prison break trope. It's a relatively standard idea considering the already in place prison metaphor, but it works because of a smart decision to align the escape with the wedding of the second youngest child. There are legitimate stakes in what the two girls are trying to elude at this point as we've already seen the previous sisters suffer under sexual violence in their marriage or plan their own much more dire escape through attempted suicide. This is their last chance to make it to Istanbul. To find their own liberation. Erguven's choices as a director in these final moments are solid. The foliage and cages become peepholes and escaping the maze of steel is like a lesser version of the climax in The Shining. There is never a clear view of the Uncle as he trudges through the steel walls behind them, and the camera stays almost exclusively in the girls point of view which only makes the final moments more tense and worthy of its genre rhythm.


Mustang is a film whose text is woven into feminist theory as well as personal women's narratives, but it also functions as a folk tale. "The girl(s) who have been locked away in the tower" has been around literature and cinema for a very long time. In the older Disney animated pictures there would need to be a prince to whisk the innocent maiden off to safety, but those narratives were always reliant on good men earning a prize. It was a male hero's journey instead of a self actualized story about women. The metaphorical dragon in Mustang is an ingrained culture of men making decisions for women and having abject control over their respective bodies. But in Mustang there is no prince. The sisters have to be their own saviours, and while that seems to blur into the strong female character archetype that oftentimes reduces women in action pictures here it is an inborn strength through desperation, and not one achieved through violence. Mustang comes from a Turkish mindset first and foremost, but there are other similar narratives throughout cinema that prove dominance over women is bound to Earth in various forms of severity. Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides and Isao Takahata's The Tale of Princess Kaguya are two others on the same family tree as Mustang, and the list goes on and on all the way back through the history of cinema whether the director was Kenji Mizoguchi or Ida Lupino. Cinema is a mirror into reality, and one doesn't need to look far to see that often in movies women are struggling under the control of some force whether it be societal or personal just because we ate of an apple.

My Dad was not a good man. He ruled our house with a dedication to control that veered into threats that were both verbal and physical. I still have the emotional bruises that came with growing up with a man who came from a line of men who were taught to be respected was to be loved, and to be respected one had to be taught to obey through violence. Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) talks about regrets. She saw a little girl being drug along a store by the arm much too hard by a father, and how she couldn't do anything to stop it. The girl fell. Michelle said she knew girls like that because she was one. I was one too.

 My childhood was destroyed and turned into something that damaged me by a patriarchal societal upbringing that intersected with transphobic views that smothered my reality and my possibility to find myself in a haze of physical, psychological and emotional abuse from parents and others. I never had a childhood for these reasons, much less a girlhood, but I'm relearning that it's not too late to reconfigure and claim my own girlhood and define my childhood on my own terms.


My own sense of self had been muted for so long that my only outlet for expressing how I felt was through the vicarious nature of art, and specifically television, movies and music. Little tremors of power coursed through me in the images of Sailor Scouts because they stood up for themselves, which wasn't something I had the voice or know how to do against a father who routinely made sure I evaded all things feminine or face his wrath in the form of a beating. My father thought he was beating femininity out of me and masculinity into me, but what he was doing was completely eliminating my sense of self and setting me up for later bouts of depression, submissiveness and PTSD.

I recently viewed childhood favourite Labyrinth in a cinema, and while I was always struck by how much I saw myself in the lead character Sarah one scene had slipped out of my mind, but came flooding back in torrents during this viewing. I was already crying a good deal throughout, because fellow gender weirdo David Bowie had passed away recently (he'd mean something to me much later in life), but one line of dialogue made a memory come back to me that I had forgotten. The memory was that of a young version of myself re-enacting Labyrinth in my backyard saying "You have no power over me" over and over again. Those words are a deliberate statement of reclamation. I wish I had the strength to say those words to my father when I was that young, but I never began to put those words into sentences until almost twenty years later. "You have no power over me".

Fast-forward about ten years from that childhood memory and I'm listening to Bikini Kill, and finding a saviour in the words of Kathleen Hanna. I'm scribbling the words "Feels Blind" in bathroom stalls in the high-school I dreaded going to every day and on my bedroom wall as a kind of motto of my own sense of self. The bridge of the song features Kathleen singing her fucking lungs out, screaming the words "Women are well acquainted with thirst, How does it feel? It feels blind". The muted nature of my life in my teenage years was an endpoint that I thought at the time would end in suicide, but getting into Bikini Kill was like a curtain being pulled down, and I finally had a voice of my own to speak and scream that I wasn't satisfied. Kathleen's voice was like a flurry, a kick, a shot of confidence. Bikini Kill pulled me down a rabbit-hole that got me into feminism and queercore bands like Team Dresch along with other all girl rock bands like Sleater-Kinney.. The all-girl part was really important to me, because I didn't need a masculine voice to comfort me.. I needed reconciliation and support in knowing that I wouldn't be alone in feeling the way I did from another woman, and Kathleen was that person for the longest time. Today, I have "Feels Blind" tattooed on my wrist, because I wouldn't be alive without Bikini Kill.

When I finally moved away from my parents in the Summer of 2014 I told them I was going to Philadelphia to make movies. They knew I had contacts in Philadelphia who were making films of their own so I told them a lie to free myself. I went to Target after a 14 hour drive up the country (soundtracked by various Riot Grrrl acts) and bought some tops and jeans I could be comfortable in. I shed the oversized, masculine clothing on my body, and stepped into my own skin for the first time in my life. That was truly the first step in redefining my own girlhood, but I still lacked the language or the know how to get by on my own as a woman. I wasn't socialized to know these things. I was an on-looker with all my best girlfriends while growing up, but now it was my time to learn what I wanted to, and what kind of person I would be. I'd be carving out my own journey and figuring out my own sense of self.

I've been struggling for a very long time trying to reconcile why my childhood turned out the way that it did, but the short answer to the question is that it's the default considering how violent our society is towards transgender people. Today, I'm making a statement to free myself again from the burden of a broken childhood and the absence of my own girlhood while growing up. I am a girl, and I'm finding things out about myself every day. I'm turning into myself. I had a neglected girlhood, but I know it was present, because I could feel it, and I had a reckoning when I lived vicariously through other girls I looked up to in art. That my own girlhood was attempted to be stamped out by my own father's ideas of patriarchal upbringing doesn't matter anymore. I'm going to take the moments I can remember and cherish them, even if they were just in movies, and I'm going to hold onto them. They were the moments that eventually sculpted me into the woman I am today. My girlhood was observation. Looking into a window of a house I always wanted to enter. I'm finally here, and everything I ever wanted is now in practice. Everything I do makes me the woman that I am. That is my girlhood. That is my truth.

*IMDB World Premiere Dates*
Some of these lists are thin or incomplete.


2015

1. No Home Movie (Chantal Akerman)
2. Carol (Todd Haynes)
3. Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller)
4. Magic Mike XXL (Gregory Jacobs)
5. Blackhat (Michael Mann)
6. 88:88 (Isiah Medina)
7. Mistress America (Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig)
8. Creed (Ryan Coogler
9. The Assassin (Hsiao-Hsien Hou)
10. Hit 2 Pass (Kurt Walker)

2014

1. The Tale of Princess Kaguya (Isao Takahata)
2. Gone Girl (David Fincher)
3. Pompeii (Paul W.S. Anderson)
4. Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson)
5. Don't Go Breaking My Heart 2 (Johnnie To)
6. Goodbye to Language 3D (Jean-Luc Godard)
7. Listen Up Philip (Alex Ross Perry)
8. The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson)
9. As the Gods Will (Takashi Miike)
10. Lucy (Luc Besson)

2013

1. Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer)
2. Top of the Lake (Jane Campion)
3. The Immigrant (James Gray)
4. Bastards (Claire Denis)
5. Blind Detective (Johnnie To)
6. Drug War (Johnnie To)
7. White Reindeer (Zach Clark)
8. Inside Llewyn Davis (Coen Bros.)
9. The Wind Rises (Hayao Miyazaki)
10. The World's End (Edgar Wright)

2012

1. Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach)
2. Romancing in Thin Air (Johnnie To)
3. Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine)
4. Wolf Children (Mamoru Hosada)
5. Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg)
6. Resident Evil: Retribution (Paul W.S. Anderson)
7. The Unspeakable Act (Dan Sallitt)
8. Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson)
9. Ace Attorney (Takashi Miike)
10. The Lords of Salem (Rob Zombie)

2011

1.  Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan)
2. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (David Fincher)
3. Girl Walk//All Day (Jacob Krupnick)
4. The Skin I Live In (Pedro Almodovar)
5. Don't Go Breaking My Heart (Johnnie To)
6. A Separation (Asghar Farhadi)
7. Weekend (Andrew Haigh)
8. The Deep Blue Sea (Terrence Davies)
9. We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsay)
10. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick)

2010

1. Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese)
2. Attenberg (Athina Rachel Tsangari)
3. Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt)
4. Somewhere (Sofia Coppola)
5. Winter's Bone (Debra Granik)
6. Dogtooth (Giorgos Lanthimos)
7.  Resident Evil: Afterlife (Paul W.S. Anderson)
8. Zebraman 2: Attack on Zebra City (Takashi Miike)
9. The Social Network (David Fincher)
10. Uncle Boonme Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Joe)

2009

1. Bright Star (Jane Campion)
2. Halloween II: Director's Cut (Rob Zombie)
3. Alle Anderen (Maren Ade)
4. The House of the Devil (Ti West)
5. Whip It! (Drew Barrymoore)
6. Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson)
7. Two Lovers (James Gray)
8. Adventureland (Greg Mottola) 
9. Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold)
10. Drag Me to Hell (Sam Raimi)

2008

1. Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt)
2. Sparrow (Johnnie To)
3.  35 Rhums (Claire Denis)
4. Martyrs (Pascal Laugier)
5. Rachel Getting Married (Jonathan Demme)
6. Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh)
7. The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel)
8. Speed Racer (Lily and Lana Wachowski)
9. My Blueberry Nights (Wong Kar-Wai)
10. The Wrestler (Darren Aronofsky)

2007

1.  4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu)
2. Waitress (Adrienne Shelly)
3. Zodiac (David Fincher)
4. Inside (Julien Maury, Alexandre Bustillo)
5. Death Proof (Quentin Tarantino)
6. No Country for Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen)
7. I'm Not There (Todd Haynes)
8. Southland Tales (Richard Kelly)
9. We Own the Night (James Gray)
10. Water Lilies (Celine Sciamma)

2006

1.  Syndromes and a Century (Joe)
2. Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola)
3. Triad Election (Johnnie To)
4. Deja Vu (Tony Scott)
5. Inland Empire (David Lynch)
6. A Prairie Home Companion (Robert Altman)
7. Miami Vice (Michael Mann)
8. Friends with Money (Nicole Holofcener)
9. Exiled (Johnnie To)
10. Silent Hill (Christophe Gans)

2005

1.  Linda Linda Linda (Nobuhiro Yamashita)
2. Domino (Tony Scott)
3. Election (Johnnie To)
4. Three Times (Hsiao-Hsien Hou)
5. A History of Violence (David Cronenberg)
6. Match Point (Woody Allen)
7. Cigarette Burns (John Carpenter)
8. Dave Chappelle's Block Party (Michel Gondry)
9. Fever Pitch (The Farrely's)
10. Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee)

2004

1. Innocence (Lucille Hadzihalilovic)
2. Mysterious Skin (Gregg Araki)
3. Notre Musique (Jean-Luc Godard)
4. Collateral (Michael Mann)
5. Tomorrow We Move (Chantal Akerman)
6. Kill Bill Vol. 2 (Quentin Tarantino)
7. Before Sunset (Richard Linklater)
8. Man on Fire (Tony Scott)
9. Birth (Jonathan Glazer)
10. Bad Education (Pedro Almodovar)

2003

1. Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola)
2. The Story of Marie and Julien (Jacques Rivette)
3. Kill Bill Vol. 1 (Quentin Tarantino)
4. Running on Karma (Johnnie To)
5. Dogville (Lars von Trier)
6. Memories of Murder (Bong Joon-Ho)
7. Elephant (Gus Van Sant)
8. In the Cut (Jane Campion)
9. Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thom Anderson)
10. PTU (Johnnie To)

2002

1. Vendredi Soir (Claire Denis)
2. Funny Haha (Andrew Bujalski)
3. Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay)
4. Deadly Outlaw: Rekka (Takashi Miike)
5. Minority Report (Steven Spielberg)
6. Lilya 4-Ever (Lukas Moodysoon)
7. Punch Drunk Love (Paul Thomas Anderson)
8. May (Lucky McKee)
9. Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki)
10. Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes)

2001

1. Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch)
2. Fat Girl (Catherine Breillat)
3. The Happiness of the Katakuris (Takashi Miike)
4. Take Care of My Cat (Jeong Jae-eun)
5. Millennium Actress (Satoshi Kon)
6. Millennium Mambo (Hsiao-hsien Hou)
7. Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff)
8. Trouble Every Day (Claire Denis)
9. Kandahar (Mohsen Makhmalbaf)
10. Ghosts of Mars (John Carpenter)

2000

1. In the Mood For Love (Kar-Wai Wong)
2. Ginger Snaps (John Fawcett)
3. The Day I Became a Woman (Marzieh Meshkini)
4. DOA 2: Birds (Takashi Miike)
5. Yi Yi (Edward Yang)
6.  Almost Famous (Cameron Crowe)
7. American Psycho (Mary Harron)
8. Chicken Run (Peter Lord, Nick Park)
9. Suzhou River (Le You)
10. Needing You (Johnnie To)

1999

1. Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick)
2. Beau Travail (Claire Denis)
3. All About My Mother (Pedro Almodovar)
4. Rosetta (The Dardennes)
5. Audition (Takashi Miike)
6. The Matrix (Lily and Lana Wachowski) 
7. The Mission (Johnnie To)
8. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (Jim Jarmusch)
9.  Princess Mononoke (Hayao Miyazaki)
10. I'll Take You There (Adrienne Shelly)

1998

1. Histoire(s) du Cinema (Jean-Luc Godard) (the entire series upon completion in 1998)
2. Perfect Blue (Satoshi Kon)
3. Fucking Amal (Lukas Moodysson)
4. Buffalo '66 (Vincent Gallo)
5. The Big Lebowski (Joel and Ethan Coen)
6. The Last Days of Disco (Whit Stillman)
7. The Flowers of Shanghai (Hsiao-Hsien Hou)
8. Sombre (Phillipe Grandieux)
9. Rushmore (Wes Anderson)
10. Small Soldiers (Joe Dante)

1997

1. The End of Evangelion (Hideaki Anno)
2. Jackie Brown (Quentin Tarantino)
3. Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson)
4. Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion (David Mirkin)
5. The Sweet Hereafter (Atom Egoyan)
6. All Over Me (Alex Sichel)
7. Gummo (Harmony Korine)
8. Titanic (James Cameron)
9. Eve's Bayou (Kasi Lemmons)
10. Face/Off (John Woo)

1996

1. Breaking the Waves (Lars von Trier)
2. Bound (Lana and Lily Wachowski)
3. Crash (David Cronenberg)
4. Fargo (Joel and Ethan Coen)
5. Fudoh: The New Generation (Takashi Miike)
6. Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (Joe Berlinger & Bruce Sinofsky)
7. Nenette et Boni (Claire Denis)
8. Everyone Says I Love You (Woody Allen)
9. Sudden Manhattan (Adrienne Shelly)
10. I Shot Andy Warhol (Mary Harron)

1995

1. Clueless (Amy Heckerling)
2. Fallen Angels (Kar-Wai Wong)
3. The Bridges of Madison County (Clint Eastwood)
4. [SAFE] (Todd Haynes)
5. Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven)
6. Whisper of the Heart (Yoshifumi Kondo)
7.  The Blade (Hark Tsui)
8. Ballet (Frederick Wiseman)
9. Crimson Tide (Tony Scott)
10. The Addiction (Abel Ferrara)

1994

1. Jeanne la Pucelle (Jacques Rivette)
2. Hoop Dreams (Steve James)
3. Chungking Express (Kar-Wai Wong)
4. In the Mouth of Madness (John Carpenter)
5. Legend of Drunken Master (Kar-Lau Leung)
6. I Can't Sleep (Claire Denis)
7. Portrait of a Young Girl in Brussels at the End of the 60s (Chantal Akerman)
8. Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino)
9. Bullets Over Broadway (Woody Allen)
10. Nadja (Michael Almeryeda)

1993

1. The Piano (Jane Campion)
2. Green Snake (Hark Tsui)
3. Blue (Derek Jarman)
4. D'est (Chantal Akerman)
5. A Perfect World (Clint Eastwood)
6. Matinee (Joe Dante)
7. Je Vous Salue Sarajevo (Jean-Luc Godard)
8. Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis)
9. The Age of Innocence (Martin Scorsese)
10. I Was a Teenage Serial Killer (Sarah Jacobson) 

1992

1. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (David Lynch)
2. Orlando (Sally Potter)
3. The Long Day Closes (Terrence Davies)
4. Nitrate Kisses (Barbara Hammer)
5. Hard Boiled (John Woo)
6. Once Upon a Time in China II (Hark Tsui)
7. Husbands and Wives (Woody Allen)
8. Malcolm X (Spike Lee)
9. Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood)
10. Batman Returns (Tim Burton)

1991

1. The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme)
2. The Rapture (Michael Tolkin)
3. Point Break (Kathryn Bigelow)
4. Barton Fink (Joel and Ethan Coen)
5. The Double Life of Veronique (Krzysztof Kieślowski)
6.  Only Yesterday (Isao Takahata)
7. Beauty and the Beast (Gary Trousdale & Kirk Wise)
8. Begotten (E. Elias Merhige)
9. Once Upon a Time in China (Hark Tsui)
10. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (James Cameron)

1990

1. Paris is Burning (Jennie Livingston)
2. Gremlins 2: The New Batch (Joe Dante)
3. An Angel at my Table (Jane Campion)
4. Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven)
5. No Fear, No Die (Claire Denis)
6. Days of Being Wild (Wong Kar-Wai)
7. Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese)
8. The Nightwatchmen (Claire Denis)
9. Darkman (Sam Raimi)
10. Days of Thunder (Tony Scott)

1989

1. Kiki's Delivery Service (Hayao Miyazaki)
2. Gang of Four (Jacques Rivette)
3. Sweetie (Jane Campion)
4. Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee)
5. Crimes and Misdemeanors (Woody Allen)
6. The Killer (John Woo)
7. A Better Tomorrow III: Love and Death in Saigon (Hark Tsui)
8. The Little Mermaid (Ron Clements, John Musker)
9. Tetsuo: The Iron Man (Shinya Tsukamoto) 
10. Heathers (Michael Lehmann)

1988

1. My Neighbor Totoro (Hayao Miyazaki)
2. Die Hard (John McTiernan)
3. Grave of the Fireflies (Isao Takahata)
4. Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg)
5. Hairspray (John Waters)
6. Chocolat (Claire Denis)
7. The Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Scorsese)
8. Akira (Katsuhio Otomo)
9. The Accused (Jonathan Kaplan)
10. The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris)

1987

1. Broadcast News (James L. Brooks)
2. Sign O' The Times (Prince)
3. Prince of Darkness (John Carpenter)
4. Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (Todd Haynes)
5. RoboCop (Paul Verhoeven)
6. Two Friends (Jane Campion)
7. King Lear (Jean-Luc Godard)
8. Radio Days (Woody Allen)
9. Predator (Jon McTiernan)
10. Stagefright: Aquarius (Michele Soavi) 

1986

1. Big Trouble in Little China (John Carpenter)
2. Hannah and Her Sisters (Woody Allen)
3. The Green Ray (Eric Rohmer)
4. Working Girls (Lizzie Borden)
5. The Fly (David Cronenberg)
6. Peking Opera Blues (Hark Tsui)
7. Top Gun (Tony Scott)
8. Aliens (James Cameron)
9. Something Wild (Jonathan Demme)
10. Manhunter (Michael Mann)

1985

1. Police Story (Jackie Chan)
2. Angel's Egg (Mamoru Oshii)
3. Ran (Akira Kurosawa)
4. Day of the Dead (George A. Romero)
5. Vagabond (Agnes Varda)
6. After Hours (Martin Scorsese)
7. Hail Mary (Jean-Luc Godard)
8. Wuthering Heights (Jacques Rivette)
9. Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis)
10. Desperately Seeking Susan (Susan Siedelman) 

1984

1.  Wheels on Meals (Sammo Hung)
2. Purple Rain (Albert Magnoli)
3. Starman (John Carpenter) 
4. The Terminator (James Cameron)
5. Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders)
6. 8 Diagram Pole Fighter (Kar-Lau Leung)
7. A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven)
8. Mutable Fire (Bradley Eros)
9. A Girl's Own Story (Jane Campion)
10. Once Upon a Time in America (Sergio Leone)

1983

1.  Silkwood (Mike Nichols)
2. One Day Pina Asked (Chantal Akerman)
3. Videodrome (David Cronenberg)
4. Christine (John Carpenter)
5. Sheer Madness (Margarethe Von Trotta)
6. First Name: Carmen (Jean-Luc Godard)
7. Three Crowns of the Sailor (Raoul Ruiz)
8. Born in Flames (Lizzie Borden)
9. Sudden Impact (Clint Eastwood)
10. Possibly in Michigan (Cecelia Condit)

1982

1. The Thing (John Carpenter)
2. Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (Robert Altman)
3. Blade Runner (Ridley Scott)
4. Toute Une Nuit (Chantal Akerman)
5. Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Amy Heckerling)
6. White Dog (Samuel Fuller)
7. Tenebrae (Dario Argento)
8. Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Bergman)
9. Conan the Barbarian (John Milius)
10. The Wrath of Khan (Nicholas Meyer)

1981

1. Ms. 45 (Abel Ferrara)
2. Possession (Andrzej Zulawski)
3. They All Laughed (Peter Bogdanovich)
4. Escape From New York (John Carpenter)
5. The Evil Dead (Sam Raimi)
6. Le Pont Du Nord (Jacques Rivette)
7. The Great Muppet Caper (Jim Henson)
8. Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg)
9. Merry-Go-Round (Jacques Rivette)
10. The Road Warrior (George Miller)

1980

1. The Shining (Stanley Kubrick)
2. Stardust Memories (Woody Allen)
3. The Elephant Man (David Lynch)
4. Inferno (Dario Argento)
5. Cannibal Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato)
6. The Fog (John Carpenter)
7. Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese)
8. The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kirshner)
9. Carny (Robert Kaylor)
10. Coal Miner's Daughter (Michael Apted)

 1979

1. Alien (Ridley Scott)
2. Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky)
3. My Brilliant Career (Gillian Armstrong)
4. Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola)
5. The Castle of Cagliostro (Hayao Miyazaki)
6. Life of Brian (Terry Jones)
7. Nosferatu: Phantom Der Nacht (Werner Herzog)
8. The Brood (David Cronenberg)
9. The Muppet Movie (Jim Henson)
10. Manhattan (Woody Allen)

 1978

1. The Meetings of Anna (Chantal Akerman)
2. The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (Lau-Kar Leung)
3. Girlfriends (Claudia Weill)
4. Dawn of the Dead (George A. Romero)
5. Halloween (John Carpenter)
6. Alucarda (Juan Lopez Moctezuma)
7. Empire of Passion (Nagisa Oshima)
8. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Philip Kaufman)
9. Drunken Master (Yuen Woo-Ping)
10. An Unmarried Woman (Paul Mazursky)

 1977

1. News From Home (Chantal Akerman)
2. Suspiria (Dario Argento)
3. Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett)
4. Opening Night (John Cassavetes)
5. 3 Women (Robert Altman)
6. Hausu (Nobuhiko Obayashi)
7. Martin (George A. Romero)
8. Stroszek (Werner Herzog)
9. La Soufrie (Werner Herzog)
10. Cruel Passion (Chris Boger)

1976

1. Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese)
2. Noroit (Jacques Rivette)
3. A Real Young Girl (Catherine Breillat)
4. Harlan County, U.S.A. (Barbara Kopple)
5. Duelle (Jacques Rivette)
6. Assault on Precinct 13 (John Carpenter
7. Carrie (Brian De Palma)
8. Mikey and Nicky (Elaine May)
9. The Outlaw Josey Wales (Clint Eastwood)
10. Challenge of the Masters (Kar-Lau Leung)

 1975

1. Jeanne Dielman: 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman)
2. Nashville (Robert Altman)
3. Love and Death (Woody Allen)
4. Black Moon (Louis Malle)
5. Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir)
6. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman)
7. Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick)
8. The Stepford Wives (Bryan Forbes)
9. Katie Tippel (Paul Verhoeven)
10. Death Race 2,000 (Paul Bartel)

1974

1. Celine and Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette)
2.  Je, Tu, Il, Elle (Chantal Akerman)
3. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper)
4. A Woman Under the Influence (John Cassavetes)
5. Dyketactics (Barbara Hammer)
6. Female Trouble (John Waters)
7. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbender)
8. Edvard Munch (Peter Watkins)
9. The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola)
10. Black Christmas (Bob Clark)

1973

1. Lady Snowblood (Toshiya Fujita)
2. F For Fake (Orson Welles)
3. The Spirit of the Beehive (Victor Erice)
4. Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (D.A. Pennebaker)
5. The Exorcist (William Friedkin)
6. Don't Look Now (Nicholas Roeg)
7. Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese)
8. Coffy (Jack Hill)
9. High Plains Drifter (Clint Eastwood)
10. Badlands (Terrence Malick)

1972

1. Hotel Monterey (Chantal Akerman)
2. The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (Rainer Werner Fassbender)
3. Pink Flamingos (John Waters)
4. Across 110th Street (Barry Shear)
5. Cries and Whispers (Ingmar Bergman)
6. La Chambre (Chantal Akerman)
7. The Heartbreak Kid (Elaine May)
8. Aguirre: The Wrath of God (Werner Herzog)
9. Chloe in the Afternoon (Eric Rohmer)
10. The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola)

1971

1. A Touch of Zen (King Hu)
2. Wake in Fright (Ted Kotcheff)
3. McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman)
4. Out 1 (Jacques Rivette)
5. A New Leaf (Elaine May)
6. The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich)
7. Two Lane Blacktop (Monte Hellman)
8. A Bay of Blood (Mario Bava)
9. The Devils (Ken Russell)
10. The French Connection (William Friedkin)

1970

1. Wanda (Barbara Loden)
2. Gimme Shelter (Charlotte Zwerin, Albert and David Maysles)
3. Claire's Knee (Eric Rohmer)
4. Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (Jaromil Jires)
5. Witches Hammer (Otakar Vavra)
6. Girly (Freddie Francis)
7. The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (Dario Argento)
8. And God Said to Cain (Antonio Margheriti)
9. The Grandmother (David Lynch)
10. Two Mules for Sister Sarah (Don Siegel)

1969

1. Mad Love (Jacques Rivette)
2. The Fruit of the Paradise (Vera Chytilova)
3. Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (Nagisa Oshima)
4. Take and the Money and Run (Woody Allen)
5. Une Femme Douce (Robert Bresson)
6. Porcile (Pier Paolo Pasolini)
7. Topaz (Alfred Hitchcock)
8. Bambi Meets Godzilla (Marv Newland)
9. The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah)
10. Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger)

1968

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick)
2. Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski)
3. Death by Hanging (Nagisa Oshima)
4. High School (Frederick Wiseman)
5. The Great Silence (Sergio Corbucci)
6. The Immortal Story (Orson Welles)
7. Saute ma Ville (Chantal Akerman)
8. The Golden Swallow (Chang Cheh)
9. Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero)
10. Targets  (Peter Bogdanovich)

1967

1. The Young Girls of Rochefort (Jacques Demy)
2. Samurai Rebellion (Masaki Kobayashi)
3. Japanese Summer: Double Suicide (Nagisa Oshima)
4. Playtime (Jacques Tati)
5. Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn)
6. Titicut Follies (Frederick Wiseman)
7. A Countess from Hong Kong (Charlie Chaplin)
8. Death Rides a Horse (Giulio Petroni)
9. Don't Look Back (D.A. Pennebaker)
10. 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (Jean Luc Godard)

1966

1. Daisies (Vera Chytilova)
2. The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly (Sergio Leone)
3. Persona (Ingmar Bergman)
4. Black Girl (Ousmane Sembene)
5. Tokyo Drifter (Seijun Suzuki)
6. The Face of Another (Hiroshi Teshigahara)
7. The Nun (Jacques Rivette)
8. Come Drink With Me (King Hu)
9. Django (Sergio Corbucci)
10. The Trouble with Angels (Ida Lupino)

1965

1.  Le Bonheur (Agnes Varda)
2. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (Russ Meyer)
3. Chimes at Midnight (Orson Welles)
4. For a Few Dollars More (Sergio Leone)
5. Pierrot Le Fou (Jean-Luc Godard)
6. Repulsion (Roman Polanski)
7. Loves of a Blonde (Milos Forman)
8. Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard)
9. Pleasures of the Flesh (Nagisa Oshima)
10. N/A

1964

1. Marnie (Alfred Hitchcock)
2. Charulata (Satyajit Ray)
3. Kwaidan (Masaki Kobayashi)
4. The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Pier Paolo Pasolini)
5. Blood and Black Lace (Mario Bava) 
6. The Masque of the Red Death (Roger Corman)
7. Onibaba (Kaneto Shindo)
8. Nadja in Paris (Eric Rohmer)
9. A Fistful of Dollars (Sergio Leone)
10. At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul (Jose Mojica Marins)

1963

1. The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock)
2. The Haunting (Robert Wise)
3. The House is Black (Forugh Farrokhzad)
4. Charade (Stanley Donen)
5. Mothlight (Stan Brakhage)
6. 8 1/2 (Federico Fellini) 
7. Black Sabbath (Mario Bava)
8. Suzanne's Career (Eric Rohmer)
9. I Fidanzati (Ermanno Olmi)
10. The Silence (Ingmar Bergman)

1962

1. Harakiri (Masaki Kobayashi)
2. Cleo from 5 to 7 (Agnes Varda)
3. The Man who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford)
4. Vivre sa Vie (Jean-Luc Godard)
5. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (Robert Aldrich)
6. Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean)
7. The Exterminating Angel (Louis Bunuel)
8. The Trial (Orson Welles)
9. La Jatee (Chris Marker)
10. Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey)

1961

1. Through a Glass Darkly (Ingmar Bergman)
2. Something Wild (Jack Garfein)
3. Paris Belongs to Us (Jacques Rivette)
4. The Children's Hour (William Wyler)
5. The Pit and the Pendulum (Roger Corman)
6. Yojimbo (Akira Kurosawa)
7. Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais) 
8. A Woman is a Woman (Jean-Luc Godard)
9. The Innocents (Jack Clayton)
10.  Les Fiances du pont Mac Donald ou (Agnes Varda)

1960

1. Eyes without a Face (Georges Franju)
2. Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock)
3. L'aaventura (Michelangelo Antonioni)
4.  The Virgin Spring (Ingmar Bergman)
5. The Testament of Orpheus (Jean Cocteau)
6. The Apartment (Billy Wilder)
7. Peeping Tom (Michael Powell)
8. Black Sunday (Mario Bava)
9. Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard)
10. The Fall of the House of Usher (Roger Corman)

1959

1.  Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks)
2. Anatomy of a Murder (Otto Preminger)
3. Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan (Nobuo Nakagawa)
4. North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock)
5. Good Morning (Yasujiro Ozu)
6. Sleeping Beauty (Clyde Geronimi)
7. The Hound of the Baskervilles (Terrence Fisher)
8. House on Haunted Hill (William Castle)
9. The 400 Blows (Francois Truffaut)
10. Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais) 

1958

1. Touch of Evil (Orson Welles)
2. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock)
3. Bell, Book and Candle (Richard Quine)
4.  The Magician (Ingmar Bergman)
5. Horror of Dracula (Terrence Fisher)
6. Mon Oncle (Jacques Tati)
7. The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (Nathan Juran & Ray Harryhausen)
8. The Diary of a Pregnant Woman (Agnes Varda)
9. It! The Terror From Beyond Space (Edward L. Cahn)
10. The Fly (Kurt Neumann)

1957

1. Throne of Blood (Akira Kurosawa)
2. Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander MacKendrick)
3. Forty Guns (Samuel Fuller)
4. A King in New York (Charlie Chaplin)
5. 12 Angry Men (Sidney Lumet)
6. The Curse of Frankenstein (Terrence Fisher)
7. Paths of Glory (Stanley Kubrick)
8. Funny Face (Stanley Donen)
9. The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman)
10. Night of the Demon (Jacques Tourneur)

1956

1. Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk)
2. The Searchers (John Ford)
3. The Wrong Man (Alfred Hitchcock)
4. The Red Balloon (Albert Lamorisse)
5. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegal)
6. The Killing (Stanley Kubrick)
7. Baby Doll (Elia Kazan)
8. Deduce, you Say (Chuck Jones)
9. Forbidden Planet (Fred M. Wilcox)
10. The Man Who Knew Too Much (Alfred Hitchcock)

1955

1.  The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton)
2. Rififi (Jules Dassin)
3. Diabolique (Henri-Georges Clozout)
4. To Catch a Thief (Alfred Hitchcock)
5. Mr. Arkadin (Orson Welles)
6. Le-Pointe Courte (Agnes Varda)
7. Smiles of a Summer Night (Ingmar Bergman)
8. The Trouble with Harry (Alfred Hitchcock)
9. Killer's Kiss (Stanley Kubrick)
10. N/A 

 1954

1.  Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock)
2. Voyage to Italy (Roberto Rossellini) 
3. Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa)
4. Sansho the Baliff (Kenji Mizoguchi)
5. Godzilla (Ishiro Honda)
6. Dial M For Murder (Alfred Hitchcock)
7. On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan)
8. Sabrina (Billy Wilder)
9. Creature from the Black Lagoon (Jack Arnold)
10. N/A

1953

1. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks)
2. Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu)
3. Ugetsu (Kenji Mizoguchi)
4. White Mane (Albert Lamorisse)
5. The Bigamist (Ida Lupino)
6. Summer with Monika (Ingmar Bergman)
7. The Hitch-Hiker (Ida Lupino)
8. The Earrings of Madame De...(Max Ophuls)
9. Mr. Hulot's Holiday (Jacques Tati)
10. Roman Holiday (William Wyler)

1952

1. Singin' in the Rain (Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly)
2. Othello (Orson Welles
3. Limelight (Charlie Chaplin)
4. Trick or Treat (Jack Hannah)
5. Feed the Kitty (Chuck Jones)
6. Bend of the River (Anthony Mann)
7. Rabbit Seasoning (Chuck Jones)
8. N/A
9. N/A
10. N/A

1951

1. Hard, Fast & Beautiful (Ida Lupino)
2. The Tales of Hoffmann (Powell and Pressburger)
3. The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise)
4. Strangers on a Train (Alfred Hitchcock)
5. The Thing From Another World (Christian Nyby and Howard Hawks)
6. Ace in the Hole (Billy Wilder)
7. Alice in Wonderland (Various)
8. Mr. Hulot's Holiday (Jacques Tati)
9. Summer Interlude (Ingmar Bergman)
10. A Streetcat Named Desire (Elia Kazan)

1950

1. Orpheus (Jean Cocteau)
2. All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz)
3. Sunset Blvd. (Billy Wilder)
4. Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis)
5. Winchester '73 (Anthony Mann)
6. Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa)
7. Outrage (Ida Lupino)
8. Rio Grande (John Ford)
9. Girl with Hyacynths (Hasse Ekman)
10. N/A

1949

1. The Third Man (Carol Reed)
2. Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu)
3. Not Wanted (Ida Lupino)
4. I Was a Male War Bride (Howard Hawks)
5. Jour de Fete (Jacques Tati)
6. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (John Ford)
7. Under Capricorn (Alfred Hitchcock)
8. The Young Lovers (Ida Lupino)
9. N/A
10. N/A

1948

1. The Red Shoes (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger)
2. Red River (Howard Hawks)
3. Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophuls)
4. Women of the Night (Kenji Mizoguchi)
5. Macbeth (Orson Welles)
6. Key Largo (John Huston)
7. Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica)
8. Meditation on Violence (Maya Deren)
9. The Storm Within (Jean Cocteau)
10. Rope (Alfred Hitchcock)

1947

1. Black Narcissus (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger)
2. Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur)
3. Monsieur Verdoux (Charlie Chaplin)
4. The Lady From Shanghai (Orson Welles)
5. Nightmare Alley (Edmund Goulding)
6. N/A
7. N/A
8. N/A
9. N/A
10. N/A

1946

1. Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock)
2. Beauty and the Beast (Jean Cocteau)
3. The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks)
4. The Cat Concerto (William Hannah and Joseph Barbera)
5. It's a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra)
6. The Stranger (Orson Welles)
7.  N/A
8. N/A
9. N/A
10. N/A

1945

1. Brief Encounter (David Lean)
2. Leave her to Heaven (John M. Stahl)
3. Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock)
4. N/A
5. N/A
6. N/A
7. N/A
8. N/A
9. N/A
10. N/A

1944

1. Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincent Minnelli)
2. To Have and Have Not (Howard Hawks)
3. At Land (Maya Deren)
4. Laura (Otto Preminger)
5. Lifeboat (Alfred Hitchcock
6. The Curse of the Cat People (Robert Wise)
7. Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder)
8. Witch's Cradle (Maya Deren)
9. Bluebeard (Edgar G. Ulmer)
10. N/A

1943

1.  Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren)
2. I Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur)
3. Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock)
4. The Seventh Victim (Mark Robson)
5. Day of Wrath (Carl Th. Dreyer)
6. N/A
7. N/A
8. N/A
9. N/A
10. N/A

1942

1. The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles)
2. Cat People (Jacques Tourneur)
3. Casablanca (Michael Curtiz)
4. I Married a Witch (Rene Clair)
5. This Gun for Hire (Frank Tuttle)
6. Bambi (Various)
7. The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturgess)
8. Saboteur (Alfred Hitchcock)
9. N/A
10. N/A

1941

1. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles)
2. The Maltese Falcon (John Huston)
3. Suspicion (Alfred Hitchcock)
4. The Wolf-Man (George Waggner)
5. The Lady Eve (Preston Sturgess)
6. How Green Was My Valley (John Ford)
7. N/A
8. N/A
9. N/A
10. N/A

1940

1. Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock)
2. Dance, Girl, Dance (Dorothy Arzner)
3. His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks)
4. The Great Dictator (Charlie Chaplin)
5. The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor)
6. The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford)
7. Fantasia (Various)
8. N/A
9. N/A
10. N/A

1939

1. Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks)
2. The Wizard of Oz (Various)
3. Young Mr. Lincoln (John Ford)
4. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Frank Capra)
5. Stagecoach (John Ford)
6. The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir)
7. The Women (George Cukor)
8. N/A
9. N/A
10. N/A

1938

1.  Vivacious Lady (George Stevens)
2. The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock)
3. Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks)
4. N/A
5. N/A
6. N/A
7. N/A
8. N/A
9. N/A
10. N/A

1937

1. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (David Hand)
2. N/A
3. N/A
4. N/A
5. N/A
6. N/A
7. N/A
8. N/A
9. N/A
10. N/A

1936

1. Modern Times (Charlie Chaplin)
2. The Only Son (Yasujiro Ozu)
3. Dracula's Daughter (Lambert Hillyer)
4. Osaka Elegy (Kenji Mizoguchi)
5. Sisters of the Gion (Kenji Mizoguchi)
6. Swing Time (George Stevens)
7. N/A
8. N/A
9. N/A
10. N/A

1935

1. The Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale)
2. The 39 Steps (Alfred Hitchcock)
3. Top Hat (Mark Sandrich)
4. N/A
5. N/A
6. N/A
7. N/A
8. N/A
9. N/A
10. N/A

 1934

1. The Black Cat (Edgar G. Ulmer)
2. It Happened One Night (Frank Capra)
3. N/A
4. N/A
5. N/A
6. N/A
7. N/A
8. N/A
9. N/A
10. N/A

1933

1. The Gold Diggers of 1933 (Mervyn Leroy)
2. 42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon)
3. Duck Soup (Leo McCarey)
4. King Kong (Merian C. Cooper)
5. The Invisible Man (James Whale)
6. N/A
7. N/A
8. N/A
9. N/A
10. N/A

1932

1. Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch)
2. Vampyr (Carl Th. Dreyer)
3. That Old Dark House (James Whale)
4. Grand Hotel (Edmund Goulding)
5. The Mummy (Karl Freund)
6. N/A
7. N/A
8. N/A
9. N/A
10. N/A

1931

1. City Lights (Charlie Chaplin)
2. Madchen in Uniform (Leontine Sagan and Carl Froelich)
3. M. (Fritz Lang)
4. Frankenstein (James Whale)
5. Dracula (Tod Browning)
6. Tokyo Chorus (Yasujiro Ozu)
7. N/A
8. N/A
9. N/A
10. N/A

1930

1. Blood of a Poet (Jean Cocteau)
2. Monte Carlo (Ernst Lubitsch)
3. L'age Dor (Luis Bunuel)
4. The Divorcee (Robert Z. Leonard)
5. N/A
6. N/A
7. N/A
8. N/A
9. N/A
10. N/A

1929

1.  Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov)
2. Un Chien Andalou (Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dahli)
3. Blackmail (Alfred Hitchcock)
4. Rain (Joris Ivens and Mannus Franken)
5. Days of Youth (Yasujiro Ozu)
6. N/A
7. N/A
8. N/A
9. N/A
10. N/A

1928

1. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Th. Dreyer)
2. Steamboat Bill Jr. (Buster Keaton)
3. The Fall of the House of Usher (Jean Epstein)
4. N/A
5. N/A
6. N/A
7. N/A
8. N/A
9. N/A
10. N/A

1927

1. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (F.W. Murnau)
2. L'invitation au Voyage (Germaine Dulac)
3. The Lodger (Alfred Hitchcock)
4. The Cat and the Canary (Paul Leni)
5. N/A
6. N/A
7. N/A
8. N/A
9. N/A
10. N/A

1926

1. Faust (F.W. Murnau)
2. The General (Buster Keaton)
3. A Page of Madness (Teinosuke Kinugaza)
4. The Adventures of Prince Achmed (Lottie Reineger, Karl Coch)
5. N/A
6. N/A
7. N/A
8. N/A
9. N/A
10. N/A

1925

1. Battleship Potempkin (Sergei Eisenstein)
2. Strike! (Sergei Eisenstein)
3. The Gold Rush (Charlie Chaplin)
4. Seven Chances (Buster Keaton)
5. N/A
6. N/A
7. N/A
8. N/A
9. N/A
10. N/A

1924

1. Sherlock Jr. (Buster Keaton)
2. Ballet Mecanique (Fernand Ledger, Dudley Murphey)
3. N/A
4. N/A
5. N/A
6. N/A
7. N/A
8. N/A
9. N/A
10. N/A

1923

1. Safety Last! (Fred C. Newmayer, Sam Taylor)
2. A Woman of Paris (Charlie Chaplin)
3. N/A
4. N/A
5. N/A
6. N/A
7. N/A
8. N/A
9. N/A
10. N/A

1922

1. Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau)
2. Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (Benjamin Christensen)
3. N/A
4. N/A
5. N/A
6. N/A
7. N/A
8. N/A
9. N/A
10. N/A

1921

1. The Phantom Carriage (Victor Sjolstrom)
2. The Kid (Charlie Chaplin)
3. N/A
4. N/A
5. N/A
6. N/A
7. N/A
8. N/A
9. N/A
10. N/A

1920

1. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene)
2. Leaves out of the Book of Satan (Carl Th. Dreyer)
3. N/A
4. N/A
5. N/A
6. N/A
7. N/A
8. N/A
9. N/A
10. N/A 

*There are other films I have seen before 1920, but compiling a list of those seems unreasonable at the moment. They may be added later. Feel free to recommend movies (especially for weaker lists!)

Realiti and Run Away With Me open with introductions that clearly define the shape of the song and the music video to come. Realiti is like a city-made watercolour painting dripping with cerulean, tangerine, mauve, lemon, periwinkle and navy. The establishing shot of Grimes amidst the eastern architecture has an effervescent quality from the musician's starburst bangs and amethyst sunglasses down to the swirls and tails on the kimono pictured behind. This attention to colour creates texture of vibrancy which directly contrasts the chilly atmosphere of the song, but effectively embodies the soul of the music. Run Away With Me's video begins with something a little more sweeping and epic. The image of Carly Rae Jepsen twirling in a summer dress on a park bench has a forever quality that resembles attic memories and eternal love. It pairs perfectly with the epic horns and promises of tomorrow. Jepsen dares viewers to come with her as an outstretched male hand clasps her own and they're off.

After these rather different establishing moments that reveal the tone of their music videos Realiti and Run Away With Me intertwine and follow a similar path conveying an idea of freedom through movement. Both videos introduce a city, and a landmark where Jepsen and Grimes perform respectively.






The major difference between the two is that Jepsen is among people and Grimes is solitary, which speaks to the different moods created in the songs. Realiti is a song of internal recollection while Run Away With Me is an underneath the bleachers-star soaked sky-track of deeper love and possibility. Run Away With Me is a song of the present and Realiti is a song of the past. Jepsen grasps a hand. Grimes cradles herself.


Run Away With Me is strong at cultivating a mood of ample freedom and careless anarchy that's only possible when you're head over heels in love. Realiti is a little trickier, with an ever-present wistfulness and lyrics that more closely resemble Bjork's Hyperballad. Realiti is a composite of tour footage and quickly thrown together performance, but like Run Away With Me it's a sensory experience tied to the action of a memory. For Grimes it is an actual tour and for Rae Jepsen it's narrative.





Both women use their bodies through dance to further the texture of their music videos. Grimes' dancing is more solitary and keeps in tune with her song. She rocks her shoulders from side to side on an electronic beat, she glides her hips when the synths slither into position for the chorus and jumps when the chorus reaches its climax. The editing of the video is pristine in combining these shots into a cohesive full picture of various settings (Fountain, Forest, Cave, City, Boardwalk) that are united through the dancing created by this song.





The forward momentum created by the jostling camera, Grimes dancing and the window-shots of cities through cars in movement make the video feel like its a living, breathing organism, and the colours are amoeba-like and comforting, always resting in a present glow as if the lights never go off. It's Michael Mann-esque in its execution of the digital nightlife of the city as a place of pure beauty. In Realiti the city doesn't sleep, because the city is alive. It's as much of a statement for the architecture of cultures as it is a snapshot of tourism during Grimes tour of Asia.



Similar patterns arise in Run Away With Me, but because dance is a subjective outlet for expression Jepsen favours something more direct, running & spinning. In Frances Ha during one key moment of expression Frances runs to her then apartment accompanied by David Bowie's "Modern Love". It's an exhilarating moment cloaked in a loose bit of irony, but when Frances runs she spins, because her expression of happiness is to twirl. Jepsen does the same thing here, but without the irony.






Like in Realiti architecture is used to show the depth and beauty of the world, but in Run Away With Me the world is made small by falling in love. The structure of the song oozes longing and need over verses that come together in the falling stars and fireworks of a chorus that delivers a promise that the world can hold us and we can make that world ours. That the barriers could slip away and everything would be attainable in an act of self-declaration. "I'll Be Your Sinner in Secret. Run Away With Me".




The music video can be a cinematic mirror to the song. Realiti and Run Away With Me find the soul of the music in the images they present, and project a clear visual interpretation of what the song means and what the song conveys. These videos elaborate on texture, movement and emotion to amplify certain elements of music to connect with the viewer. When music and cinema intertwine there is an inherent magic in the symbiosis of the two artforms coming together to maximize into one whole. Too frequently music videos try to be cinema by way of narrative storytelling, but the strongest music videos find reality in the abstraction of images coming together to evoke a feeling instead of a story. Realiti and Run Away With Me are striking in their visual similarities, but tonal differences. They follow similar structures and image progressions, but because the songs have different focal points the music videos feel differently despite their sameness. They are sister films, and two examples of the possibility of the music video as an art form of image based reflection.

Confessions of a Female Badass is an ongoing column at Curtsies and Hand Grenades where I discuss women in genre cinema.


[TW: Discussions of Rape, Rape Revenge Movies and Rape Culture]

"What is it like to be a Woman?" 

Genre cinema frequently asks this question of viewers. In genre it is used as an empathizing technique to ask audiences to identify with a victim and her eventual conflict. By getting viewers to see themselves as the women of these movies filmmakers create a funnel that cycles into tension, horror, action and eventual catharsis through resolution, but what of female audience members? Women already know what it's like to be a woman. We know the feeling of being followed down a side walk for an uncomfortable amount of time. We understand the jeers of men who make comments about our bodies, because this isn't something we go to the cinema to feel, but it's something innate in our own experiences. Rape-revenge cinema takes this question to it's natural endpoint, and these films at their best emphatically strike back at cultural norms, but far too often they merely reinforce rape and the gendered power dynamics therein. When mixed with the sensationalism of exploitation cinema these movies can tread on shaky ground that sexualize the act of rape, which is a purely evil act in cinematic terms. Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion avoids many of these pitfalls through formal complexity and an understanding that rape is not something to be taken lightly, but instead a problem so paramount in female experiences that an angel of death had to be made for women scorned everywhere. A woman who existed as a blade in the hand of every woman who was ever been sexually taken advantage of by a man. That Woman was named Nami Matsushima (Meiko Kaji), and she was known as the Scorpion.




Scoprion is introduced barreling down a field of susuki grass with her friend Yuki (Yayoi Watanabe) as they try to escape the prison. The guards (all men) are hot on their trail with rifles in hand and attack dogs ready to maul. Scorpion and Yuki are thwarted, but in this opening scene Scorpion's revenge is foretold in her gaze. Meiko Kaji decided to act using only her face and play the role in near silence, a minimalist choice that would prove gravely important to the tone and feeling of director Shunya Ito's more extravagant set pieces. Kaji's face grounds every scene, and in close-up her eyes foretell death. There are two images that are created through dissolve in the opening minutes that speak to the films understanding of female P.O.V. in the rape-revenge film. These two images understand whose gaze is violent through objectification and whose gaze is just. In both images Scorpion is leering with determination of her goal of vengeance, but along with her gaze there is the image of nude women prisoners straddling over a bar, and in the other image the bloodshot eye of a lustful man. The first of these images is a rape metaphor. To complete the task of moving over the bar women have to spread their legs and glide over the object. The eye belongs to the man standing directly underneath these women watching them display their bodies as part of a punishment administered by the guards to assert control over their bodies. To control women you take possession of our bodies. This is the power dynamic of rape. Scorpion's gaze reflects a universal female point of view that ranges from the women in the world of the movie to the women who are merely watching the film. Scorpion is a biblical figure whose vengeance is not only for herself, but for women everywhere. She is a totem, and the movie makes this clear in these early images. Kaiji's glare is in some small way a statement that our bodies remain our own.





In a 2016 interview with Arrow Video Production Designer Tadayuki Kuwana he stated that he "wanted to create a sense of hell surrounding the prison. I took inspiration from prison camps in World War II for the look of the world surrounding and inhabiting the prison where Scorpion resides". Kuwana wanted to create depth by using higher ceilings so Scorpion would feel smaller in her surroundings, and this is used to great effect in the first scene following her capture. Scorpion has been locked away in what can only be described as an underground box where the earth bleeds onto her through constant precipitation. She has been hog tied and left there for an undisclosed amount of time, but she hasn't lost her sense of determination surrounding her vengeance. Her gaze is constant. Ito accompanies Scorpion by having the camera take her eye. When a fellow female prisoner (who has gained some level of privilege in the ranks by selling out other women) arrives to bring her supper the camera stays with Scorpion's point of view. Ito uses perspective to make us feel like we are in Scorpion's shoes. The camera looks up at the visitor and then a dutch angle is employed to convey our sense of confinement. Scorpion can't move to get a better view so the viewer doesn't either. The understanding that Scorpion is the lead character not just in title, but in form is key to the film's place as a movie about rape. When movies about rape as a catalyst for revenge stray from the perspective of the abused there is danger in the possible loss of that voice through the mundane trappings of the overworked genre. Films that do travel down that road become less about the consequences and damage of rape and more about violence begetting violence. Where the Scorpion films succeed is in the centralizing of Scorpion as a figure not through narrative, but with the camera as well. The adept image choices and camera movements place us inside Scorpion, and we travel with her rather than at a distance. The viewer is not merely watching, they are being at the same time. 









Scorpion's backstory finds her in prison due to the betrayal of a man. In the deep, comforting blues of an empty space Scorpion has sex with a man she had fallen in love with, and he asks her a favour. The depiction of sex here is in direct contrast with every other sexual encounter in the movie to give a clear view of what is rape and what isn't. In this earlier scene the camera moves in a dream-like manner of tilted framing and slow-motion with a focus on faces. Scorpion is unwrapped from a blanket to reveal her entire body to her lover and they make love passionately. Like earlier scenes this is shot from her perspective.  It was a defining moment in her life, but the man was only using her for his own means. In the first three Female Convict Scorpion movies men are monsters whose sole passions for women only go as far as their usage for their bodies or their skills. Scorpion agrees to do the favour. She infiltrates a den of Marijuana dealers and is subsequently raped. This scene is painful to watch, not in its realism, but in its intentions to break Scorpion. Shunya Ito and Tadayuki Kawana use theatrical techniques to inform the emotional complexity of the scene. Scorpion's rape is shot from the floor up through a mirror with a focus on her back and tilted, pained face. The faces of her rapists are also visible, contorted and monstrous, with no discernible human qualities. Like exaggerated Clowns with demonic expressions. The scene quickly fades to black and Scorpion's lover bursts through to arrest the Marijuana dealers for the drug charges as well as a rape charge, but not before he makes a deal with the leader of their drug ring nullifying everything. In a literal heel turn the set uses a revolving door to reveal his dirty deal, and Scorpion's face is one of utter heartbreak. These scenes are shot from the ground always keeping her face in frame and in focus. Her emotional response is key and Meiko Kaji's expressive face gives us all we need to know about how hurt she is, and how used up and damaged she felt. This is the moment where Scorpion truly sought after the justice that was owed her. She was used and cast aside after giving away her entire body to this man who had no use for her. She lays on her back and the flames of hell light up underneath her possessing her with the power to take back what was hers. Scorpion finds herself in jail after a failed assassination attempt hours later. 







Scorpion's prison guards are malevolent and spiteful towards her continued disruption of the status quo. They punish Scorpion with solitary confinement in the dank hell, but when she strikes back at her abusers she's met with more abuse. For Scorpion and the other women in the jailhouse the body isn't just confined, but lost. The second rape of our lead character occurs less than ten minutes after the flashback sequence of her original betrayal. Like the other scene Scorpion's point of view is taken into consideration. The camera lies on its back and stares into the eyes of prideful, powerful, evil men. Unlike the first scene this sequence lingers on the act of rape itself showing two gruesome images of penetration with a police baton. The second rape sequence is intended to be the fuel for the viewer's hatred as well as Scorpion's. She cracks for the first time in the face of her male oppressors and shows pain in her face, but she ultimately doesn't lose her gaze or her goal of slaughtering the men of the prison who have taken her life away. The camera finds the right balance of torture, horror, and surrealism with a final twirling image circling her head and finally resting on her eyes. This scene doesn't sugarcoat the act of rape or sexualize it, but reacts to the bluntness of the act with respect to the victim's body. Rape is not merely a plot-device in the Scorpion films, but an interrogation on the act and how it specifically relates to women, and the female body. Being a woman watching this film is to be in the trenches of your worst possible nightmares of oppression. Our bodies, spirits and souls expunged in the name of male satisfaction. As Scorpion fights back we live vicariously through her, her blade is ours, and so is her vengeance. Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion is a slow-release bomb towards blatantly criminal patriarchal figures who see women as nothing more than a body or a tool.



Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion complicates itself in its debt to a genre which rarely rose above the gutter. The film lies in the intersection of the rape-revenge horror film and women in prison exploitation pictures. Scorpion is without a doubt exploitation, but exploitation has the ability to get dirty and address problems high-brow films often neglect or soften in favor of a larger audience. Female Prisoner's greatest complications are when it must align itself to the genres that birthed the movie. For example in the shower scene the camera lingers for what is probably too long on the naked bodies of women, and there is a gratuitous sex scene between two women which isn't here for much more than titillation. The movie rounds these potentially bankrupt sequences out with a conscious attention to the potential of depth for any scene. The shower sequence is bookended with an actual summoning of a Kwaidan. It's a show-y sequence which doesn't play into the films attention to the Woman Scorned Narrative, but distracts from the bodies of Women in the shower. The lesbian scene is followed by the presentation of the double-standard of how sex between men and women is perceived when she is immediately called a slut and beaten down by the prison warden. All of these more difficult scenes of violence against women, both sexual and non-sexual, inform the language of the movie in direct fashion, and because Ito and company paid attention to how things are framed, edited and perceived they never stray from what's good and bad. The moral obligations of the Female Scorpion movies towards justified violence in the face of oppression stays true.




In what would be the the final punishment of the film Scorpion digs and digs until she drops. While she's digging the great hole in the Earth her fellow inmates are told to toss dirt in on her, and they slowly grow to hate Scorpion for their own forced punishment of digging. The plot element of women hating each other in the Scorpion film complicates the movie in an interesting way, because the nature of their hatred for one another comes from an ulterior source. The Women only begin to quarrel when scraps of privilege are dangled above their heads by men in positions of power. Some Women look out for each other at all costs, but others buy into the systems of power in the prison system to make their sentences easier.









The duality of this female conflict is in the presentation of Yuki and Scorpion who are ride or die gals. Yuki and Scorpion were introduced in the opening minutes trying to escape the prison together, and their bond stays strong throughout the movie. In the dig,dig,dig sequence she is hesitant to throw dirt on her friend until Scorpion acknowledges her and asks her to, because to rebel would mean her punishment and she doesn't want that for her friend. Ito captures their bond in slow-zoom close-ups and they relay all the information they need to through their faces. When the men try to torture Scorpion by reviving her to dig again once she's fallen Yuki attacks and sacrifices everything for her friend. She kills a prison guard and brings on a thunderstorm as the women riot. 







Yuki's ultimate sacrifice is captured with pure expressionism through set paintings. The sky is tinted orange with fury when the Women riot and shortly after she takes a bullet for Scorpion, the one woman who always looked out for her. After Yuki begins to drift away the sky begins to lose colour fading into a blue before a lightning bolt splits the sky signaling Yuki's end. The Women do a death dance of joy as they exact their revenge on the men who tortured them for years. The image of the prison Women shaking and screaming, chanting and loosing control of their bodies is powerful in it's pure unbridled nature. These are Women whose actions, emotions and feelings have been kept in check for god knows how long unleashing everything all at once. However, Scorpion's vengeance is beyond the prison and for her to find the man who ruined her life she'd need to get to the streets. She escapes among the flames of her inmate sisters as the establishment begins to fall. 









She is dressed for a funeral. Her long black hat shrouds her face and she drifts among the neon lights with ease. She glides like a spectre for the men who wronged her, and they each taste her steel. They lock their expressions in surprised anguish with their shock that a Woman would dare to fight back. Their final faces are created by a Woman who would not take injustice anymore and she extinguished their very lives. Scorpion's punishment is quick and breathless for all men, except one. She takes her time with the man who set her up and appears in an elevator stabbing him multiple times, but that wasn't enough, and as he strides out onto the rooftop, covered in blood she stabs him again and again until he's gone. She stares at him and watches him die. A close-up is used on Meiko Kaji's face and with her eyes she gives him the same contemptuous look she's carried throughout the entire film. 



When Rape-Revenge films are done well they can be a cathartic outlet for a population without much of an answer as to how to combat rape culture. They can be powerful in their depiction of overcoming a monster, and give those with lingering internal and external wounds a salve for a wound that society refuses to heal. Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion is the apex of the genre in its understanding of the seriousness of rape and the dynamics at play in how and why this act happens. Scorpion is the personification of our scorn, the anger in our hearts and the edge of our knife. She is an avenging reaper whose black wings flap and descend upon rapist men like an Angel of Death. Our Angel of Light.

Confessions of a Female Badass is an ongoing column at Curtsies and Hand Grenades where I discuss women in genre cinema.

 [TW: Discussions of Rape, Rape Revenge Movies and Rape Culture]

Exploitation cinema addresses difficult subject material with a directness not usually gifted to mainstream filmmaking. At its best these kinds of movies ask questions of viewers and unsettle their cultural ideas of sex, race, gender and class. Rape is not a stranger to cinema, but it is uncommon that this topic is handled with immediacy, concern and grace. Rape-revenge movies must have an understanding of the psyche of the abused, and facilitate this through camerawork and character depth. The person's (almost always a woman) fight for justice needs to be paramount, and their agency within the narrative has to be a concern. The Female Prisoner Scorpion movies don't always understand how to go about balancing their exploitation duties to pinku cinema, and rape-revenge to their righteous women's anger, but frequently they find a balance of expressiveness and strength at the centre with the help of Meiko Kaji (Scorpion). Kaji (Scorpion) is a performer whose eyes emote more than dialogue ever could and her stoicism, determination and weathered life experiences gift the Scorpion films a character who viewers can identify with and follow, even when scenes are hard to bear. It is in her eyes that the Scorpion films find their power as vengeance pictures, and in Jailhouse 41 Scorpion evolves into a figure whose acts of reprisal become mystical. What is only hinted at in Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion becomes gospel as Scorpion becomes the blade for all women.




Director Shunya Ito understands that this is Scorpion's movie and nearly always has her point of view in mind. In the first moments of Jailhouse 41 Scorpion is hog tied once again in the pits of the prison in what I described as "dank hell" in my first piece on these movies. Scorpion is seen dragging a spoon across the rock floors and refashioning it into a primitive knife. She does this knowing it might be her one way to escape or to strike back at the warden who captured her and sent her back to prison at the close of the first movie. In these scenes the camera is looking up, just as Scorpion would be and the image is of the Warden Goda (Fumio Watanabe) and his men standing above Scorpion. When it is announced that Scorpion would be taken outside along with the other women to meet a dignitary from the state who is coming to check up on the prison she is "cleaned" with a fire hose. Her face breaks in these moments and she shows vulnerability. The cracks in Scorpion's armor are important to make her a relatable figure instead of a superhero and amplify the anger audiences are supposed to feel with the cruelty of the warden and his men. Ito smartly frames the hose sequence no different than Scorpion's introduction and the lens is filled with splashes from the water. The camera takes the place of her body.


The effect of Scorpion's previous escape from prison has made her a legend in the eyes of the women alongside her. Tales of the revolt that came at the hands of her unwillingness to break in the face of the steepest of punishment have spread and they speak of her in hushed tones like a god waiting to be unleashed from her shackles and roam free again. She represents the possibility of being free and unburdened with the abuse they've suffered at the hands of the men who oversee them in jail. She is a perceived god of possibility and an arbiter of their future. Scorpion is a slippery figure who seems to find her way wriggling to freedom when given an inch of room to run, and the women inmates know this fact about their fellow incarcerated sister. When they see her emerge their faces are of shock, jubilation and excitement. Already Scorpion is becoming a leader among women, but there is one woman named Oba (Kayoko Shiraishi) who remains unimpressed with Scorpion. She carries a scowl on her face and contorts herself into broad theatrical expressions throughout the movie. A natural rival to both Kaiji and Scorpion.



After a failed murder attempt on the warden with the knife she carved during the opening credits Scorpion and the other women are sent to a biblical punishment of dragging rocks tied to their backs and in Scorpion's case carrying crosses. The blocking in the punishment sequences is always fascinating, because it carries the sense of space and the hierarchy of the inmates versus the guards. Notice in the first screencap the men are all standing high above the women with guns held high in standard police uniform. They're perfectly coiffed and untarnished by the dirt, dust and clay of the rock field. The women, in contrast are hunched off, caked in filth and below the men. The scorpion films use blocking to investigate hierarchy and these are most striking in large spaces. In the first film Scorpion is asked to dig a hole until she drops and like this scene with the rocks she is literally underneath the feet of her oppressors.

Scorpion's cross-carrying is no small coincidence either. Her presence as a saviour to the masses is well known and this alignment with Christ gives her iconography that is known worldwide. Scorpion, however, is not a martyr or a saint. She's a murderess with a justified hand. But even the punishment of Christ is not enough in the eyes of Chief Warden Goda. Goda insists that Scorpion must be broken, and a punishment not befitting of her will only turn Scorpion into an idol. Goda orders his men to publicly gang rape Scorpion in front of the other women.








Scorpion's gang rape is the most difficult scene to witness in the movie, but it gives fire to her later actions. It is made more cruel and vile, by Goda's decision to force the other women to watch Scorpion be publicly raped. One woman, who is unnamed, falls at the sight of this, because it's too much to bear. Ito treats the sequence for the horror that it is by never shying away from the vileness of the act. The woman who breaks is key to understanding how much of a struggle it is to watch scenes like this as a female viewer. It's a meta-decision that informs the women who view this film that Ito understands this is despicable to view, and it also works as a plot mechanism because it undoes Scorpion's hero status in the eyes of the women, because she is brought down to their level through the gang rape. Formally, the rape is shot similarly to rapes in the first film with a focus on Scorpion's face and the continued usage of the camera as a point of view tool. The rapists are never given control over the image and whenever they do appear in frame their faces are demonic, crushed under pantyhose and sniveling. They show no human characteristics. There is also never a clear frame of penetration in this scene, but in the sunglasses of the warden four figures are seen moving around Scorpion. The mind makes the scene far worse, because of the implied nature of the act. By suggesting the violence of the rape Ito sidesteps sexualizing it leaving it up to viewers to think about what's happening and question our ideas of what rape looks like and what rape is, which is a far more complex shot than bluntly showing the act of sexual violence. It is also a smart usage of the camera to artfully sidestep what is expected of the genre expectations of the film. At the close of the scene in slow zooms and cuts Scorpion locks eyes with the warden and as is her carrying card she marks him for utter vengeance. The act of extreme close-up gives Scorpion some level of agency in a scene where all agency is taken. Her eyes signal a foreshadowing that this scene will not go unpunished.





To fully break the girls spirit warden Goda tells two of his men to kill Scorpion while they're headed back to the prison, but she thwarts their attempts and Scorpion's rival Oba kills the second guard. Preceding their escape there is a difficult scene of the other women attacking Scorpion. With their faith in Scorpion's ability to lead them to safety they kick her repeatedly. The camera spins around their attacks quickly, blurring the image, and their screams and frustrations are heard. This isn't a direct attack on Scorpion, but an attack on their patriarchal situation. This is an assault of failed hope and dashed dreams, and Scorpion's relationship with these women is flawed from this assault. The Female Prisoner Scorpion films address infighting between women, but do so by framing it as a product of men stoking the flames of their relationships. Men have access to the power in these movies, and represent an abusive, evil, patriarchy and the women in these movies fight for what little amount of privilege is granted. The women are prone to hierarchy and judgment and when confined within a closed space such as a prison fighting is natural.

Before the women flee they make a scene of one of the guards who tried to kill Scorpion. They maul his body, disrobe him and with legs splayed they plant a giant plank of wood directly into his genitals. It's a graphic image, and perhaps the bloodiest in the series. It's an image of specific meaning due to the camera's lingering presence. It's lit in a way that makes it clear blood is gushing up from his wound and we see the full extent of his mangled body. In the Female Prisoner Scorpion films when women are raped the camera rejects the sexualization of the subject by never showing the full extent of the act of rape, but instead uses reaction shots and close-ups. Those scenes are made disturbing by the power of the actors faces, and that is a clear rejection of typical filmmaking techniques for rape that focus on the female body. This image of a defiled man is made powerful by contrast in the the destruction of his body in a physical, visible way. It's angry, violent, impure, but radical in context of the rape-revenge movie and in how Scorpion functions as a series of movies in this genre.


Unlike in the previous Scorpion film the surrounding characters of Scorpion are given a backstory. In Jailhouse 41 this is accomplished through a psychedelic fantasy sequence that utilizes traditional Japanese theatrical techniques and beautiful high-contrast colours. The seven escaped prisoners come upon an old woman in their journey and when they fall asleep later that night she narrates their story. Each woman has been sent to prison due to a crime associated with men. Some of the justification for these crimes hasn't aged as well, especially the one regarding jealousy, but all of these stories fall in line with the universe of Scorpion where men do women wrong. Oba gets the the densest of these revelations as she murdered her children when she caught her husband cheating and couldn't bear to know she brought something of his into the world. Oba's narrative is the most complicated, and her later actions make her evil in a way that requires a true test of empathy from Scorpion. She too has been wronged, but she has done some wrongdoing herself. For Scorpion to be an avenger of all women she has to be an avenger of a woman like Oba as well.









When the old woman eventually dies the next day she gives Scorpion a blade that endows her with mystical ability. Scorpion takes the blade and rakes it across her eyes in a fluid motion (Ito's homage to his own favourite director Luis Buñuel), and this image would be her rallying cry for movies to come. Scorpion's hair rises and she's lit in a flame scorched orange silhouette, but unlike the scene from the Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion this scene signals her mystical powers as a vengeful reaper of all women, and not merely a tool for her own vengeance. The balance of Scorpion's heroism and vulnerability tips over in this sequence. From this point forward Scorpion would be less of a Woman and more of a symbol. It's a bold choice for the complicated people she must fight for, and the reliance on her earlier vulnerability makes her a hero who deserves power. She is an underdog who has risen into a force.






The Female Prisoner Scorpion movies have a deft eye for critical evaluation of their audience. Being in the pinku genre Ito knows the audience who would go to this movie and casually inserts an image of an offended woman overhearing men discussing sex with women who had just escaped form prison. Her look of disgust is the moral heart of these movies. At their centre the Scorpion films pay notice to the women characters and how they interact with men. Not to let the men see her reaction she quickly reaches for a smile to diffuse any possible negative outcome, which is something women are trained to do in the company of unbecoming men when we grow up.

Oba is perhaps a character who exists as criticism of the women in the audience who view Scorpion as a hero. Oba is the likely scenario of how offended men would view Scorpion in the first place so her more brazenly evil tactics are a focus. Oba works as a counter-point to Scorpion's righteousness. She is more coarse and complicated in her hatred of not only men, but human beings. Oba strips women, steps on men and uses hostages as target practice in their lengthy escape. She's an individual who is beyond damaged and throws Scorpion to the police to save her own ass later in the movie. It is perfect that Oba and Scorpion would stand together in the end as Scorpion learns to have compassion for someone who hated her guts.








Scorpion's compassion for Oba is beautifully rendered in their final moments. Before Oba dies she relives the moment that sent her to prison. Her face is less severe and she carries a deep grief in her expression as she plunges a knife into her womb aborting her unborn fetus. In a striking image of abortion stigma a net is thrown over her and people prod her with sticks as she bleeds out. When Oba comes to Scorpion catches her and for a second Oba drops her defenses and rests in Scorpion's arms. Finally, she lets down her armor and breathes, because she knows her torment is nigh over. Scorpion stares at her and their eyes meet. Scorpion didn't have to catch Oba, but she did, and despite all of the vicious things Oba had done in the past she helped a woman in need. In her great empathy Scorpion carries Oba until she expires. She closes her eyes and lets her move onto the next world and Scorpion weeps. The message of unity among women crystallizes in this moment, because everyone has a backstory and moments that cause their own problems. It's our duty to try to understand why.





The blade from the old woman was always ours to share, and the blood of our peace washes us clean. Scorpion sprints in the final moments of Jailhouse 41 with an army of women behind her. Her evolution into feminist totem carries weight in this moment, because she isn't seen as a solitary figure reckoning with her own personal needs, but the needs of many. When the blade passes hands it's a symbol of not only our collective spirit towards a common goal, but that we cannot do this alone. It would take all of us. It's an empowering fruitful image to end a movie on and an undeniably feminist one in the context of the world this movie exists within.

When looking at the history of Brothel's on film there's a clear picture of perceived danger both within the house and for the men who enter.That history works like a shroud for most of these movies in creating an instinct within the tone through cinematic history and through cinematic language. The title, House of Little Death's, even suggests danger, but like Lizzie Borden's Working Girls that tonal history is mostly brushed off through the banality of sex work. Instead what is presented is sex work as a job of preparation both in presentation and mental fortitude.

In the opening scene a near static camera shows a woman named Victoria (Alexandra Maiorino) prepping herself for a night of work. She pulls at the lingerie and runs her skin through her fingers trying to make herself as presentable as possible for her (mostly) male customers. When interrupted by another woman the camera follows her and the rest of the women are seen doing the same. TaFoya focuses on these smaller internal moments of preparation to the film's benefit. It's a trick in the Chantal Akerman handbook to showcase time spent. These scenes don't have the length or the intention to truly reckon with Chantal, but they do give the audience a brief feeling of moments that are often too short or concise in other movies of this type. When TaFoya holds his camera on Victoria to show her using foundation, blush and mascara we ride with her through those tasks and it creates a sense of interiority that is beneficial to creating the closeness needed to ponder what actually goes into the job that makes it central to these women.

There is an acknowledgement that sex work is inherently theatrical in the cinematic language that is used throughout the movie as well. TaFoya even places an ode to Jacques Rivette's Out 1 later in the film. Rivette was a key figure in bringing the theater to the screen so this instance of letting the audience know Rivette influenced the work clearly defines House of Little Deaths as performative. This in turn ties back into the scenes where characters are putting on make-up and donning their sexiest clothing. It's all an act that comes with the job. The women are performing a role for the customer in an attempt to make herself and her experience desirable. The metatextual performances of the actors in the movie are observed and noted through the form, and that gives the movie another layer to process and admire.

A newcomer to the job (Cassie played by Michelle Siracusa) frequently asks the other women for help in her appearance and act. During one scene she asks one of her co-workers for outfit tips and their conversation immediately begins to break down into girl talk. "What do you like?""What do you like to wear?" and so on. It's a nice moment where the wall of the job comes down and they can just be, but it becomes more complex when thinking about the task of picking those clothes they're discussing, because they aren't necessarily dressing for themselves but others. Their need to both find themselves in their dress while also compromising for their job is their moment of artistic control over their work. There is a perceived uniform, but you can make it your own. They wear the clothes and the make-up, but it's done by their hand. That too ties into the process of theater and cinema and the question of ownership in art.

House of Little Deaths is less interesting when it becomes a movie that needs plot to reach a resolution. In the final third the leader of the Brothel, Nancy (Reina Guarini) reveals to the women of the house that she's pregnant and won't have an abortion. This piece of news is a shock to the other women who see Nancy's decision to bring the baby to term as a betrayal of sorts, because it puts their jobs at risk. This curveball of plot isn't in direct opposition to reality, but it does seem to rupture the film's sense of pacing, space and priority, because suddenly there's a goal in mind for the characters other than simply existing, doing a job and understanding how their roles work at the house. There was always some level of conflict among the women, as there is in all workplaces, due to clients and other potential job opportunities, but the fissuring of their relationship makes the final third feel heavier in a way and simplifies their relationship due to a final image that feels too easy and somewhat unearned. Virginia Woolf pondered the idea of romanticism through sisterhood and the relationships of women in her novel Mrs. Dalloway. She wrote that relationships between women are inherently romantic, and the final image of a group of women becoming entangled as one conveys that very same idea. It's an image that movies come back to rather frequently with the most recent example being from Mustang, but where House of Little Deaths fumbles is in the simplification of the image through reconciliation. It's an image that can only have one meaning, and that is acceptance of her pregnancy. It's a crowd pleasing note to cap off on in a movie that usually requires more of the audience, but even with missteps in the final act House of Little Deaths features a lot of engaged filmmaking and TaFoya is someone to keep an eye on.

You can support House of Little Deaths here by becoming a fan of the film.

Confessions of a Female Badass is an ongoing column at Curtsies and Hand Grenades where I discuss women in genre cinema.

 [TW: Discussions of Rape, Rape Revenge Movies, Incest and Rape Culture]

Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable would not be the implied conception of Themyscria at the close of Jailhouse 41. Instead of investing in the images of free women who are a collective force when brought together Best Stable opens with a metaphorical image that Scorpion (Meiko Kaji) would always carry her past and she'd continually be chased by the dogs of patriarchy. Over a brief sequence on a subway Scorpion is seen sitting alone before a group of police officers chase her out of the underground vehicle. One of those men is Detective Kondo (Mikio Narita), the man in charge of finding her. He manages to handcuff himself to the wanted criminal, but not before the subway doors are shut. This would leave Scorpion with just enough space to hack off his arm in a bloody heap. She runs through the station and the city with an arm trailing behind her. This image is in direct opposition to the image that closed Jailhouse 41. Scorpion is still running, but her pursuit towards freedom or safety is singular and she's still dragging with her the men who long to see her punished for her crimes of murder. There is no wish-fulfillment in the land of beasts and the rabid tone of fiery vengeance in the previous two films is replaced almost entirely by an all encompassing, rain soaked melancholy. It's an ironic choice to present the freedom of Scorpion as something ultimately doomed compared to the relative optimism in the predictability of her prison stay, but it's a masterstroke in giving director Shunya Ito's final Scorpion picture a heavy dose of reality and resets the stakes so that Scorpion has something to say beyond her vengeance. What Beast Stable marvelously accomplishes is setting up a secondary truth. We are not Scorpion, and some of us suffer regardless of some hope that we won't.




Yuki (Yayoi Watanabe) is the figure with which that idea of suffering with no reprisal is presented. Yuki is an inherently tragic character beautifully acted by Yayoi Watanabe in what would be one of her only performances on film. Yuki is introduced by way of incestual rape. One of Shunya Ito's greatest strengths as a director in this series has been his ability to clearly define the central figure of any given scene through blocking and camera work. This becomes especially important when you're trying to shoot sequences of rape where it is incredibly difficult to retain point of view and intention. The Female Scorpion films in the hands of Ito have consistently given us a window into the horror of the act while still grounding us with the person this is happening to, and frequently these acts are part of a larger picture and not framed as the whole reasoning for revenge. In the previous film Jailhouse 41 none of the women featured were in jail for instances of revenge against rapists except Scorpion. By giving them a larger backstory they are rounded out in ways that make for interesting characterization. Oba (Kayoko Shirashi) in particular is one of the greatest characters in these movies, because she isn't a saint, but you can see how she becomes who she is through both Scorpion's eyes and her own. In Beast Stable Yuki is a great character, but it is with the assertion that rape has always been a part of her existence and she bares the scars of something that was never her fault. Yuki's rape sequence is handled far differently than the other sequences in the Scorpion films; gone is the outlandish demonic faces of the abusers and the pained expression of a woman at their hands. Instead there is silence, darkness and a loss of expressiveness. There is no music to amplify the horror or frenzied camerawork to show struggle, but there is a calm acceptance of what is happening that is deafening in the blank face of Yuki. Ito shoots the scene with a few simple shots built around a couple of cuts to relay the language of the scene. There is an establishing shot of the landscape which looks like something out of Nagisa Oshima's The Sun's Burial and then an overhead shot of Yuki and her brother naked in a dark room. A close-up of Yuki's face is then employed and it's clear that she's dissociated from the actions going on in her bedroom.  These few shots are crisp, concise and introduce the audience to the central problem of incest for Yuki in a way that is not typical of exploitation's usual tool-chest of sleazy over-statements and gratuitous nudity.

I am struck by the way Yayoi Watanabe approaches the role of Yuki as an insular person and how the camera always understands her own space through distance and estrangement. Yuki is characterized by sunken shoulders, recoiling posture and keeping her head down at all times. All of these actions present a person who doesn't want to be touched, looked at or interacted with, and it is only considerate that the camera comply through medium and long shots. Even in the company of the city Yuki is framed in a way that presents her isolation by finding areas of quiet like an abandoned bridge, an alleyway or a graveyard. Through isolation Yuki can have some semblance of control over her body. She can shield herself from interactions, contact and conversation with other people and simply rest inside herself. She's a loner by circumstance and survival. She comes home to her rapist so to find her own peace she has to find a nothingness in architecture where her safety is attainable. It's reminiscent of what Sheryl Lee would do with body language so masterfully in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. In that movie Laura collapsed inside of her own hell, and Sheryl played the role like someone grasping for a hand on the edge of darkness. When she was touched she reacted like a bundle of exposed nerves jolting into a reactionary refusal of interaction. David Lynch presented much of this through her already severely damaged headspace due to her own dealings with incestual rape. A lot of Laura Palmer's eventual crumble is shown rather than implied differing her from Yuki's situation, but where they share similarities is in the process of untangling themselves from reality to find peace in a solitary space that could be their own. For Laura Palmer that had to be achieved through death, but in Yuki's case it is in the graveyard of her own mind, away, locked inside herself.








Yuki only finds Scorpion while strolling through the city trying to find a spot to hide her client and herself (Yuki's a sex worker, another similarity with Laura Palmer). Scorpion is trying to untangle herself from the arm she chopped off in the opening scene of the movie. At first glance it looks like she's gnawing at the arm until it relinquishes itself from the handcuffs, but she is merely dragging the cuffs across a headstone (a call back to her scraping knife in Jailhouse 41). Yuki is frightened by what she sees, but she and Scorpion have an understanding. They lock eyes and there is a cut to Scorpion free from the handcuffs sleeping at Yuki's house. During this scene Scorpion meets Yuki's rapist, and it turns out to be her brother who has brain damage from a working incident and cannot control his actions. This does not absolve him of his crimes, but Ito asks audiences to have empathy for the man in two images. One of which is achieved by placing the eye of the camera through his perspective when he attempts to rape Scorpion. This is the first time this has happened in these movies. The camera holds on his hands as they shake over Scorpion's sleeping body, and it is a horrifying image, but also one of unsureness and skepticism. It is almost as if part of him knows this is wrong, and due to the knowledge of his damaged brain, it becomes a tragic scene. Scorpion fights back and the scene moves between their point of view until she grabs a knife and cuts Yuki's brother. Before Scorpion can kill him Yuki walks in and she's infuriated that her brother attempted to rape her new friend. She punches him and screams "Don't I give you all the sex you could ask for? How could you?". There's a close-up of Scorpion's face after this line of dialogue and Meiko Kaji's acting here is noteworthy, because she lowers her guard and with her facial expressions she shifts the scene from anger to empathy, and her perspective is usually the one we follow. Yuki keeps her brother locked up in their house for fear that he may rape another woman. She carries a cross for the other women of this city she's protecting by metaphorically taking bullets for them by absorbing the sexual assault of her brother. The greatest test of Scorpion's ability as an avatar of Women everywhere (an idea presented in the second movie) is when she sees a woman like Yuki. Yuki obviously deserves to be free of her brother, but she is also the only person keeping him out of trouble and away from the streets. Yuki is a sacrificial lamb and Scorpion is a slaughterer, but when Scorpion sees the pain in Yuki's face as they lock eyes she understands that Yuki doesn't need revenge, she needs someone to understand, and as an audience we are supposed to as well.

This short scene is the most complex and daring in the entire Scorpion series because it asks us to understand the mindset of someone who is being raped by someone that they love. This scene is here to give Yuki more depth and place us even further into her world, a world she can barely control. It is here that the Scorpion series becomes more about Yuki than the iconic, titular character we've come to love. There is plenty of vengeance in the movie, but the emotional core of Beast Stable is in the face of a girl who can barely keep herself grounded on Earth. Yuki is a figure whose heart is pure, but has dealt with the most vile act and still comes out of it hoping for a brighter day. This is not to say that she doesn't have her moments where she wishes her brother was dead, and there is a scene where she begs for that to happen, but she never acts on that desire. It is something I can't possibly grasp, and it complicates Beast Stable because audiences are hardly asked to grapple with these questions. In the Jack Garfein film Something Wild (1961) a similar circumstance happens where after battling with post-traumatic stress disorder in the wake of being raped Mary Ann Robinson (Carroll Baker) returns to her rapist to live a life of domesticity. She is not persecuted for her actions in that film and Yuki isn't persecuted here, but instead these films ask tough questions about the mindset of Women who have dealt with sexual assault. They don't come up with any definitive answers on how to overcome the problem of having been raped, because there is no easy fix it for survivors of sexual abuse. These movies instead let these Women decide what to do next and how to move forward if moving forward is even possible. It's important that movies like Something Wild, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable remember the Women at the heart of their stories and never let the act of rape become something trivialized to a plot point or something secondary in these characters lives. When a movie is about rape it must wrangle with what this means and how this effects their characters in ways significant and minor. It cannot merely be background noise. In Female Prisoner Scorpion it is the catalyst for the suffering of Women everywhere. This movie understands it is about sexual power dynamics and the onus is unfairly on the Women to stop this action from happening which reflects the real world where we're told to watch how much we drink at parties, not to walk down the wrong street or make sure our skirt isn't too short.









The following day Yuki picks Scorpion up from her new job where she works as a seamstress, but something is amiss. Yuki greets Scorpion with a jubilant smile, but it almost instantly vanishes a second later, as if breaking her emotional consistency with happiness would undo her own sense of safety. She turns her back to Scorpion and there is a following close-up on the new friend's face that reads as concerned. The tranquility of their near silent friendship is broken up by the feeling that Yuki is about to unleash a torrent of emotions, and that she is at her breaking point. Ito holds his camera on the two as they move through the city always making sure that the blocking is keeping in key with Yuki's reluctance for intimacy and Scorpion's distant compassion. Yuki always follows Scorpion and not the other way around, and when they sit and watch the sunset over a train station with a soda in hand a scene of possible dialogue becomes a moment of reflection. Scorpion is almost begging Yuki to open up through her glances and gestures towards compatibility, but her new friend is uncomfortable. When the two later end up at Scorpion's apartment Yuki sits in the dark with her head down and she finally breaks the silence. "I'm not going home to my brother tonight. Let him starve for all I care", but Scorpion isn't buying her anger and tends to the groceries she just bought. Yuki then accelerates things and asks Scorpion to kill her brother, but bursts into tears seconds later. The final twist in the scene is that Yuki vomits after this reveal. She runs over to the sink to wash her mouth out before admitting that she's pregnant. Her voice is heightened by her emotional upheaval and her strength in her own stoicism is ruptured by a pregnancy she doesn't know how to process. A magical thing happens in the final frames of this scene. Scorpion gently rests her hand on Yuki's back and out of Scorpion's mouth she delicately says one word "Yuki". It's a gesture of pure intimacy that Yuki is not familiar with and we haven't seen in the movie up to this point. Shunya Ito is consistently aware of what he's doing with blocking and where his actors are in frame and in the case of Yuki she hasn't been touched by anyone except for her brother up until this point. In the earlier scene where Yuki saves her brother from Scorpion's blade there is an overhead shot of Yuki crouching beside her brother with a shadow splitting the image in half with Scorpion on the other side of the room. That image speaks multitudes of how her relationship to the world works. Yuki is essentially trapped by this unseeable barrier that makes her life one of near complete isolation. This is coupled in the fact that Yuki and Scorpion were always previously framed with space in mind on their walk back to her apartment. With this one single hand on Yuki's back Scorpion shatters a wall and realizes Yuki's potential to feel the touch of another human being again without it being rigid, painful and horrific.

Yuki is unfamiliar with that level of affection and sprints out of the apartment to get away from something she isn't yet ready to embrace. On her way out a box of matches falls out of her purse that are slung into Scorpion's chest by a man who crosses her off as she tries to catch up with Yuki. He's not a man of subtlety and he removes his ridiculous sunglasses and licks his lips at the mere sight of Scorpion. What is revealed later is that this man works as security for the prostitution ring that later harms Yuki when she starts to work in their territory without permission. He slings the matches into Scorpion's chest and walks away, but his body language and his intentions are clear in that he is using his power as a man to take possession and ownership of Scorpion's body with a sexual advance and the severity with which he threw the matches back at Scorpion. The matches become a consistent theme throughout this movie as a symbol of the relationship between Yuki and Scorpion. The first of these images comes moments later in Scorpion's apartment when she's flicking the matches one by one and this is edited together with a scene of Yuki putting on lipstick for her job. This split POV enhances their relationship and makes the film feel symbiotic between the two women. The most striking moment occurs when Scorpion flicks a match and through that brief lighting of the flame a tear is visibly running down her cheek. Her face is otherwise emotionless, but this one moment of emotional significance from Kaji speaks volumes for her ability to convey with gestures both minimal and maximal. In the Arrow Video set Shunya Ito consistently compared her to Clint Eastwood's The Man with No Name character from Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy, but she is much more complex than Eastwood's iconic gruffness and infinite cool. She is instead a towering figure of empathy, motherhood, and warmth funneled through a psychedelica that owes debts to Seijun Suzuki, Nagisa Oshima and an emotional wellspring that is closer to Maria Falconetti in her ability to convey a total facial performance



The previous two films in the Female Scorpion franchise had to deal with genre expectations that bridged the gap between genres such as horror, rape-revenge, women in prison and women on the run. These movies had a duty to cross off certain elements on a checklist in order to be made, and for the most part these movies succeed at taking these genre limitations and turning them into strengths. For Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable those expectations are gone in favour of a freedom that gave Shunya Ito and company the permission to run wild with what they wanted to portray to an extent. However, with the diminishing need for genre fulfillment there was a new one for sequel expectations that handcuffs Scorpion slightly. Ironically the thing that gets in the way of what Beast Stable wants to accomplish is the actual act of vengeance, which was the core of the previous two movies. The vengeance in Beast Stable is closer to a digression, but like the previous two films this obligation becomes a strength, because they didn't sleepwalk through this part of the filmmaking process or anything else. 

The vengeance that must be fulfilled in Beast Stable is tied together through a few coincidences that link the characters of Yuki, Scorpion and a third woman who isn't named. This final woman is introduced shortly after Scorpion's run in with the man in her apartment complex and like Yuki she is a sex worker and she is pregnant. She's hiding the pregnancy from her bosses, but eventually begins to show. Katsu (Reisen Lee) runs the show in this side of town controlling the sex work game and her many security officers find out about this woman's pregnancy and bring her to Katsu. Katsu is a figure of exaggeration with garish make-up closer to the styles of 70s drag queens and she lives with a flock of crows who hold no significance other than to paint her as an elaborate creature of strange taste. Around the same time the man who threatened Scorpion in the hotel dies, but not from her hand instead it's from another woman, but Scorpion is assumed to have killed the security officer. The men who work for Katsu capture Scorpion at the same time they are punishing this third woman. They see her pregnancy as a loss of finance and force her to have an abortion. Yuki plays into these narrative threads through her own interaction with Katsu which ended in torture for having worked in her area without permission, and with her own pregnancy.




These rather cumbersome plot coincidences are handled with some level of grace through expert filmmaking and two scenes which are elegant, extreme and emotionally thunderous. The first of which is the forced abortion which is cut parallel with Yuki's which was of her own free will. The forced abortion is one of total horror. It is a scene of annihilation. The room is sheathed in white with curtains, tables and walls all projecting this perceived cleanliness, but what is happening to this woman is anything but and her blood ruptures the paleness of the room. Her voice is like an alarm, heaving and moaning with guttural intonations that reckon with the complete sorrow of a motherhood lost. The sort of camerawork that was used in 701 and Jailhouse to convey rape is used as well, and it makes sense that these techniques that worked so well in those previous two movies would work well here, because both scenes are used to show someone taking something from another person. There's a close-up of her face that elicits such total pain it would be easy to miss that she grips a scalpel, but this too is in frame and leads into the single most powerful image in the whole of the Scorpion series.

In an interview with Arrow Video Shunya Ito stated that Luis Bunuel was one of his favourite directors and the recurring blade across the eyes image is an homage to Un Chien Andalou. In Jailhouse 41 Scorpion witnesses the death of an old woman who in her final moments gives Scorpion a knife. After she is given that weapon the old woman dies and is buried underneath the autumn leaves after a deep gust of wind and then vanishes. Upon seeing this Scorpion takes that blade and runs it across her eyes and in that moment she became mystical and endowed with an assumed power to complete her tasks of vengeance at all costs due to the spirits of Women scorned. Beast Stable uses this image too, but Scorpion's possession is given so much more weight due to what we've seen happen to the woman who gives her the scalpel. After her abortion the unnamed woman is brought back to Katsu's lair to die, but inches away from her is Scorpion being held captive for her assumed murder of one of their security guards. Scorpion notices the woman edging closer and closer so she dangles her arm out of the cage and they touch. Scorpion's gesture gives this dying woman a last moment of assurance that what she has experienced will not go unpunished. With that outstretched arm Scorpion unfurls finger by finger the scalpel she grasped when they took what would be her child. Scorpion's hands shake and she pulls the scalpel out of her hand. In an extreme close-up reminiscent of what Jonathan Demme would popularize years later in The Silence of the Lambs she takes that scalpel and drags it across her eyes. Meiko Kaji's eyes are the window to the soul of these movies and an audience surrogate. Her eyes are bleary, bloodshot and about to burst with tears for what she has seen. She slowly pulls the blade across and the tears start to roll out, and it is in the intensity of her stare and the sorrow of the previous scene that makes this moment of action have context the previous usage of this image did not. Here, Scorpion becomes a reaper in a way that doesn't ring as abstract or showy, but simply through the tools of cinema that have been apparent since the silent age, an image, a face and a reaction.








Yuki's own abortion runs in syncopation with the unknown woman's and gives an added dose of fuel to the revenge that Scorpion proceeds to unleash after she becomes possessed with the spirit of the dead mother. The idea of the inserted vengeance narrative inside of Beast Stable comes out of an analysis of how motherhood is perceived in the world in which they live. The narrative logs that form the bridge here are that rape can lead to unwanted pregnancy and how does abortion tie into this story? We never learn the unnamed Woman's backstory, but it is assumed she is happy with her pregnancy, unlike Yuki, and they represent the opposite spectrum of how pregnancy is presented. On one hand Yuki's fetus is the product of incest and she struggles with the notion of keeping or terminating the pregnancy, and she eventually decides to abort. The other woman is faced with the horror of not deciding what to do with her body, and her decision is made for her. This implies that Beast Stable is a pro-choice movie, and this perception is achieved through the simple parallel editing of how their abortions are performed.The Scorpion films ask these questions of what constitutes having a female body at its worst, and the growth in these movies is that this feeling has shifted slowly from an external idea of what femininity looks like to something internal and true due to the faces, body language and sheer presence of Meiko Kaji, Yayoi Watanabe and Kayoko Shiraishi.

Upon killing the men who forced the woman to have an abortion Scorpion says she's possessed with the spirit of the dead girl, and what was assumed to be implied regarding Scorpion's powers is confirmed, but her powers only give her so much, and she soon finds herself retreating from Detective Kondo and his men who want to see her die. Scorpion crawls into a sewer to hide, and what started in a damp hell would end there. In Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion she was sent to live in a dungeon of the prison where the floor was wet, cold and there was no light to creep through the darkness. In Beast Stable Yuki provides the light by dropping matches down the sewer and calling her name.


"Sasoriiiiiiiiii" 

To call Scorpion's name is to bring her to life, and the magic of watching the Female Prisoner Scorpion movies is in the belief that she'd appear. The idea of Scorpion is one of both justice and freedom that a woman isn't alone and her heart can sing even when hell surrounds her. Meiko Kaji brought Scorpion to life through her steely gaze and her empathetic trust in the fruitfulness of women through her cinematic actions, both violent and affectionate. She created a figure of light and darkness that could take up a sword for the damaged or offer a healing hand when necessary. Kaji sings the theme song that plays throughout these movies and the lyrics say "A Woman's life is her song" and my song is one of survival. Upon finishing Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable I came clean with a secret that I had harbored inside of me for a very long time. I sobbed on my husband's shoulder and told him that my father raped me on a semi-regular basis while I was growing up. The experience of actually vocalizing my history with sexual abuse was a moment of healing, because I could finally begin to understand that I did nothing wrong, and I didn't bring this on myself. Watching the Female Prisoner Scorpion movies has been a cathartic experience for my soul and having been open about my past I feel like I am able to move forward with my future. I saw something of myself in Yuki and I felt attached to her as she dropped matches down into the sewer calling her saviours name, and I knew that I had something of a saviour in Scorpion. The very idea of her was with me and even in knowing I'll always drag my past around, she has given me the strength to pick up the pieces of my own life in some small way.