by James Hansen
While not quite on purpose, this list reflects the desire for unique images, assemblages, and experiences outside the confines of traditional narrative, character, and story; further, it illustrates a wide range of artists who expand, complicate, and question this inclination across fiction and documentary, narrative and experimental. These films epitomize a consistently paradoxical, often historical negotiation with images, the process of their construction, and their external (and cultural) mobility. Operating through what Blanchot calls "the happy chance of unconcern," these artists have made solitary, striking, slippery, wonderful works that I won't soon forget.
2. Computer Chess
(Andrew Bujalski)
3. Let Us Persevere In What We Have Resolved Before We Forget
(Ben Russell)
4. Spring Breakers
(Harmony Korine)
5. Life Is An Opinion (Fire A Fact)
(Karen Yasinsky)
6. Post Tenebras Lux
(Carlos Reygadas)
7. Let Your Light Shine
(Jodie Mack)
8. Frances Ha
(Noah Baumbach)
9. Beyond The Hills
(Cristian Mungiu)
10. The Lords of Salem
(Rob Zombie)
12. Viola
(Matías Piñeiro)
BEST UNRELEASED FILM
Hard To Be A God
(Aleksei German)