Out 1 Film Journal's Top 13 Films of 2013

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.

1. Leviathan 

(Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Veronica Paravel)

 

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)

11. Museum Hours 

(Jem Cohen)

 12. Viola 

(Matías Piñeiro)

13. Daredevils 

(Stephanie Barber)

BEST UNRELEASED FILM

 Hard To Be A God

(Aleksei German) 

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Museum Hours (Jem Cohen, 2013)

by James Hansen

A tender, intimate portrait of care and friendship, life and art, Jem Cohen’s Museum Hours may be best observed in the position of a wanderer. Anne (Mary Margaret O’Hara) makes an unexpected trip to Vienna to care for a dying family member. In Vienna, Johann (Bobby Summer), a museum guard, befriends Anna. He becomes her guide and they travel around a number of unique spaces – the hospital, the museum, and the city at large. Cohen’s fine directorial eye shows Anne and Johann as almost floating around the city. The beautifully rendered scenes softly flow from one to the next, as if they are leaves blowing in the wind or billiard balls gliding across a table.

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