I looked back on the year and thought about single cinematic images that knocked me flat. Or produced an actual “wow.” Or somehow encompassed a film in a strange way. Many of them rushed back immediately. Others sprung to mind when I skimmed through my list of films seen. In accordance with my favorite movies of 2013, many of which are featured here, I was surprised by what I responded to most. I noticed some trends. Evidently, I’m drawn to sunsets, running water (preferably colored), and, rather unoriginally, red. I also kinda like trash. Some of these shots speak for themselves, while others require the images that come before them, or after them, sometimes successively, to achieve their respective impacts. Presented in no particular order, each has a backstory, save the last, which is summed up with a heartbreaking, note-perfect line. This is a very personal list, and I could’ve easily bumped the total to 50 or more. Don’t see your favorite shots in the roster? Share your thoughts (or, ya know, a link to a screengrab) in the comments.
Spring Breakers
Spring Breakers opens with brute satirical force, blasting the harsh sounds of Skrillex over hedonistic (and overtly misogynistic) shots of alcohol cascading down bare breasts. But it’s at its most biting when Harmony Korine opts to incorporate Britney Spears’s “Everytime” in this surreal, yet serene, music break that’s crosscut with vicious mayhem, and culminates with a shot that typifies the film as a trouble-in-paradise, neon-nightmare send-up.
The We and the I
When I recently spoke to Michel Gondry, we discussed my favorite image from his glorious The We and the I: a small RC bus that looks like it doubles as a boombox, and cruises through the Bronx during the film’s opening credits. It’s a small symbol of Gondry’s signature whimsy, yet the intimately straightforward The We and the I is aesthetically unlike any of his other work, which is why, as he confirmed, the bus is destroyed by the actual bus that carts the movie’s cast of high-schoolers home. Here, the shadow of the real bus looms, seconds before its tire crushes the little bus to bits.
12 Years a Slave
No, this isn’t a nighttime satellite view of a glowing island, or a shot of a fiery constellation. It’s the soon-to-be-gone remains of slave Solomon Northup’s (Chiwetel Ejiofor) distress letter, which he burns to avoid punishment in the finest image from 12 Years a Slave. Held until the last ember dies out and leaves the screen black, the shot exemplifies the great beauty and peril of Steve McQueen’s work, as we gather with awe that we’re watching Solomon’s hope turn to ash, but we only process it on an intellectual level.
Mother of George
This shot of the hands of Mother of George’s surprisingly powerful co-conspirators (heroine Adenike, played by Dani Gurira, and matriarch Ma Ayo, played by Bukky Ayaji) contains so much of what makes the film thematically and aesthetically transcendent. In the cool blue of breakout DP Bradford Young’s lensing, Ma Ayo passes newlywed and pressured heir-bearer Adenike some fertility beads, in hands that will come to symbolize a wealth of female agency, and amid the culture-defining fabrics that remain a wondrous visual constant.
Leviathan
In Leviathan, a peerless, terrifying snapshot of the commercial fishing industry, the boat that carries the crew (and is equipped with all manner of small cameras), is immediately established as a kind of creature, its bowels and inner-workings exposed as it cruises the high seas. As the hundreds of marine-life corpses start to pile up on the ship’s deck, you begin to realize that this is a horror show of slaughter, but it doesn’t truly hit you until the scraps and blood are gushing from the boat, in this shot. The ship, a beast itself, is merely expelling the waste of what it fiercely digested.
All Is Lost
In All Is Lost, things are bad from the get-go for Robert Redford’s nameless protagonist (no, I won’t be calling him “Our Man,” as credited), when he sees that his yacht has been critically struck by a lost shipping container. But things are far worse when a nasty tempest hits, rolling the boat repeatedly, often with Redford on deck. Here, in the film’s best gasp-inducer of a shot, you see a submerged Redford swimming up to his overturned vessel, and you know, intuitively, that he’s going to reach it just as it rights itself again, leaving him suddenly back on board what was just upended and underwater. The image is fleeting, yet grippingly visceral, and it somehow captures a merger of nature’s power and man’s free will.
Post Tenebras Lux
Spoiler alert: In Post Tenebras Lux, Carlos Reygadas’s personal and puzzling cabinet of curiosities, a man eventually pulls his own head off, an action that wildly underscores the film’s class tensions, not to mention its apparent core theme of the male capacity for violence (and subsequent guilt). From this lushly photographed film, a safer choice for “best shot” might have been from the dazzling opening scene, which, in Reygadas’s squared-off, 1:33 ratio, beautifully bisects earth and sky as a young girl toddles among animals. But this image is by far the most devastating, and even as its hyper-real horror lingers, the film’s beauty seeps in, with rain and color producing an oil-sheen effect, and the much-discussed fish-eye blur intensified by the climate. It’s a blunt illustration of the movie’s mix of elliptical splendor and shock-and-awe.
The Past
Asghar Farhadi’s The Past certainly lives up to its title, as virtually every event that transpires in this unraveling family mystery involves the unearthing of something shattering from days gone by. Ever the compassionate explorer of seemingly harmless, yet emotionally catastrophic, human error, Farhadi sets us up for his systematic removal of skeletons from closets with this early shot, wherein exes Marie (Bérénice Bejo) and Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) dart their heads back in a car after Marie appears to have hit something while backing up. The film then briskly cuts to the title card, as if “the past” were something Marie and Ahmad were literally facing.
Prince Avalanche
In Prince Avalanche, his thoughtful, perhaps purgatorial return to form, David Gordon Green is constantly filling the screen with primary colors, donning road workers Alvin (Paul Rudd) and Lance (Emile Hirsch) in blue suspenders to contrast against their red truck, and most of all, accentuating the yellow of the paint used to apply road lines. A searching tale of quotidian work amid a gray, yet strangely gorgeous, landscape, the movie confirms it’s a true work of art in this moment, when the paint bleeds its way into a babbling stream, and the merger of labor and land is visualized.
Gravity
Gravity’s best shot is also, without doubt, its most shamelessly on the nose, holding, for what feels like pretentious ages, on Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), who floats weightless as if in utero, her survival of the first act officially sparking a rebirth. And yet, who could possibly complain when the photography is this majestically beautiful? For all the innovative effects in this spiritually inclined, so-called “game-changer,” this is the moment that makes thank yourself for coughing up the full IMAX 3-D price.
Laurence Always
The high point of Xavier Dolan’s Laurence Anyways is the liberating, hyper-stylized coming-out of Fred (Suzanne Clement), who surprisingly dethrones the film’s title character as heroine. And yet, this brilliantly florid epic is still a love story above all, and never is Fred and Laurence’s (Melvil Poupaud) bond—not to mention Dolan’s voice—more apparent than in a spirited aside that sees them visit a small town, where colorful garments rain from the sky and there isn’t another soul to be seen. It’s their world; you’re just visiting it.
Byzantium
With Byzantium, Neil Jordan did more than reclaim the vampire flick from legions of YA fangirls; he reinvented the ways in which the undead could behave, and even come to be, on screen. In this tale of two centuries-old vampiresses (Saoirse Ronan and Gemma Arterton), vamps don’t have teeth for bloodletting, but retractable thumbnails, and to transform, there’s no biting, but rather a visit to an eerie, damned island, where one enters a cave human, and emerges immortal. The first time we see the environmental effect of this morphing, it’s gorgeous and haunting, with blackbirds swirling into the air and waterfalls running red with blood. Hell, the change is worth the indelible sight alone.
Passion
Take your pick of which noired-up, saturated, and questionably realistic office scene from Passion suits you best. Brian De Palma certainly doesn’t skimp on the blue-tinted, skewed-angle frames, cut to ribbons by venetian-blind shadows. This one, however, seems to hypnotically stretch the frame altogether, accentuating Isabelle’s (Noomi Rapace) already loopy mental state, as well as the growing schism between her and frenemy Christine (Rachel McAdams).
A Touch of Sin
Like the B-side of Post Tenebras Lux, which wows with violence amid the sublime, Jia Zhangke’s astonishing A Touch of Sin is a film defined by shots of brutal outbursts, yet most affecting in a moment that’s conversely tame. After tracing the tales of four Chinese commoners who struggle, often bloodily, to continue with daily life, Zhangke finally settles on one last image of a crowd, a small sampling of a population for whom the vignettes’ stars had been speaking throughout. Having put you through the wringer, Zhangke rewards you with something terribly bittersweet.
Her
There’s probably not much of a complex connotation to be applied to the jaw-dropping owl shot in Spike Jonze’s Her, short of the obvious message that lovelorn Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) is caught in the talons of loneliness, heartache, detachment, and familiar modern ennui. But by the time we arrive at this shot, in which Theodore, having roamed a metropolis, sits in front of a giant screen that sees a screech owl slowly grasp for its prey directly behind where Theodore’s settled, the emotional, social, and technological wonders of Her’s multi-tasking narrative have already dug their claws in. In short, you’re in genuine bliss long before this image leaves you awestruck. It’s the kind of shot you’re simply thankful a director had the generosity to include.
Museum Hours
Jem Cohen’s masterpiece Museum Hours contains a grand abundance of compositions that capture artworks on a wall—an ever-changing parade of stills made up of frames within the frame. Why, then, single out a shot of trash on the street? The beauty of Museum Hours lies in the benevolent heart of protagonist Johann (Bobby Sommer), who, like his art-museum colleagues, has a special affection for Bruegel, a painter who found magnificence in the everyday, and helped establish the art of landscapes with his depiction of everything from cattle to playing cards. Johann explains that he once found a frying pan in a Bruegel piece, and then began patiently searching for the egg in other works. He found that too, and as he explains the discovery, he also cites the discarded miscellany of the modern, outside world, while Cohen visually corresponds, first with this image. It’s a transcendent moment in which Johann, Bruegel, and Cohen all become one—appreciators of unlikely beauty, wherever it may be.
Shadow Dancer
A sort of Red Riding Hood with streaks of the Big Bad Wolf, stoic Colette (a stunning Andrea Riseborough) is always an uncertain presence in James Marsh’s undervalued Shadow Dancer, and fittingly, she’s usually outfitted in scarlet, a vibrant hue in an otherwise overcast milieu. The film sees Colette and her fellow IRA members get entangled with MI5, specifically an agent played by Clive Owen, and we’re never quite certain which side has the woman’s loyalty. Here, the alarming sight of her red coat is augmented by an adjacent, matching phone booth, where one of her cohorts catches her after she’s just hung up with Owen’s character. It’s a high point of tension in a film with its own built-in red flag.
Maniac
Like the cult film on which it’s based, Maniac has a nifty formal conceit: The audience POV is that of the titular killer (Elijah Wood), who’s almost only seen in mirrors, if seen at all. This makes it that much more unsettling when Franck Khalfoun finally, without warning, swings us out of the monster’s eye sockets and lets us see him at arm’s length, a sudden, judgmental distancing that’s surprisingly uncomfortable. Turns out it’s scarier to see the maniac in action, where there’s zero room for sympathy, than it is to live within his skin.
Only God Forgives
The fist is the key image of Nicolas Winding Refn’s intoxicating, divisive Only God Forgives, an ultra-arty saga about a despicable American crime family, whose only member with a conscience, Julian (Ryan Gosling), flees to Bangkok to run a fight club as a front for a drug ring. It’s only after Julian’s brother is killed, his satanic mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) flies in for an obscenity-laden visit, and his face is beaten to a bloody pulp that we learn the Freudian roots of what Julian was truly running from. In the end, his only release—spoiler alert—is the removal of the fists that, long ago, sealed his fate and now symbolize his vocation. Julian’s nemesis, Lt. Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), is only too happy to oblige.
Before Midnight
“Still there. Still there. Still there. Gone.”
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