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If I Had a Sight & Sound Film Ballot: Diego Costa’s Top 10 Films of All Time

It’s the warping, re-signifying logic of affect and memory that architected this list.

If I Had a Sight & Sound Film Ballot: Diego Costa's Top 10 Films of All Time
Photo: United Artists
Editor’s Note: In light of Sight & Sound’s film poll, which, every decade, queries critics and directors the world over before arriving at a communal Top 10 list, we polled our own writers, who didn’t partake in the project, but have bold, discerning, and provocative lists to share.

I can identify two elements common to the films that ended up on this list. They are either about feminine suffering and/or about the impossibility of language to ever quite translate feeling. The criteria which I came up with for this impossible, unfair, and incredibly fun assignment involved remembering the films that led me to think “This is one of the best films ever made” at the time I first saw them, and which, upon a re-screening, several years later, remained just as remarkable—perhaps for different reasons. Also part of the criteria was my (failed) attempt at not repeating directors, and making a conscious effort to go against a cinematic “affirmative action” that would try to represent different periods of time, countries, and genres. It’s also mind-boggling to notice how half of the list includes films made in the mid 1970s. But the list escapes traditional logic. It’s the warping, re-signifying logic of affect and memory that architected this list, which turns out to be nothing short of this cinephile’s symptom.


The Mirror

10. The Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975)

The occasional ringing of a pre-cordless telephone reminds us that this isn’t a painting. But, unlike Stalker, in The Mirror someone actually picks up the phone—only to say that “being silent for a while is good.” The politics of the nation is the ubiquitous presence that haunts the home, where former lovers go from discussing custody of their child to whether they have both become incomprehensibly bourgeois in a country without private property. “A book is a deed, not a paycheck,” he tells her. “What kind of relationship do you still want to have with your mother?” is what she’s wondering. The shot that gives title to the film is nothing short of stunning: A boy stares at his reflection as if realizing he just simply has to, despite everything, become a man.


Cries & Whispers

9. Cries & Whispers (Ingmar Bergman, 1972)

Here again, as the French say, “Les jeux sont faits”: The woman suffers the consequences from betting all her chips on the man, while his refusal to demand love from one single woman goes unpunished. Man remains unscathed, woman caught in her grieving repetitions. The woman is tender, the man makes her stare in the mirror so he can point out her imperfections (“Your fine broad, broad forehead now has four wrinkles above each brow”). In this scene, the repetition isn’t a Bardot-like fishing for bodily compliments, but a ruthless projection onto woman of the brutality of time (“Why do you sneer so often, Marie?”). This cinematic version of écriture feminine opens with a series of melancholy shots of ticking clocks and the back of public statues (languid female figures carrying the weight of a harp no less), followed by a withering Harriet Andersson writing on her diary, “It is early Morning…and I am in pain.” She’s in a room covered in blood-red walls, blood-red carpets, and blood-red furniture cushions. Never has the exteriorization of pain been so literal, and yet so delicate, so full of unspeakable mood as it does in Cries & Whispers.


Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams

8. Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams (Akira Kurosawa, 1990)

Because my mother was obsessed with feeding me a high-art diet from an early age, I got to see Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams at age 10. And I never forgot the mind-boggling line in the stunning third dream: “Snow is warm.” Twenty years later, as I re-watched the film, the subtitles told me something slightly different, “The ice is hot.” More prosaic, but still deliciously paradoxical. This dream, in which a group of men try to make their way across mountains of snow to the rhythm of their own panting, unsuccessfully, made me forever fascinated by the playfulness of language and the freeing possibilities of ambivalence. Kurosawa turns what’s usually a quite soporific activity, listening to someone else’s dream account, into a series of long ludic orgasms, a spectacle so synesthetic that makes Inception feel like a silly vulgarity, an insult to what the unconscious actually produces.


Almanac of Fall

7. Almanac of Fall (Béla Tarr, 1984)

Béla Tarr has made a career capturing the poetics of communist doom. His characters are either desperate to leave or miserable for having decided to stay. Almanac of Fall, which opens with a heart-wrenching Pushkin citation about the strangeness of the land and the treacherousness of the familiar, focuses on the love-hate (though mostly hate) relationship between a resilient mother and her irresponsible son, who’s as vicious in his fits of rage as he’s incessant in his demands—for money. The film includes an eerily quick rape against a refrigerator, an unlikely blowjob scene between elderly lovers, and a stunning worm’s-eye view shot of a domestic fight in which the camera sees through the kitchen’s concrete floor as if it were looking into an aquarium. This is the kind of film that gives us the frightening sense that the truly traumatizing events have already occurred, and that what we witness is just the aftershock of a history of violence so systemic it’s become the only possible mode of communication.

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A Film About a Woman Who…

6. A Film About a Woman Who… (Yvonne Rainer, 1974)

With a mesmerizing minimalism akin to Jørgen Leth’s The Perfect Human, Yvonne Rainer performs feminine insatisfaction through the biting simplicity of title cards, poetic narration, and long takes of silent modern dance movements in this experimental gem. Rainer’s ability to verbalize and render visible the eternal disconnect between lovers is eerie. In the end her love story, and ours, of course, look like nothing other than clichés. But Rainer turns the wounding inherent to the threat of losing love, which seems so unique for us and unintelligible for anyone other than our selves, into a shared text.


Cléo from 5 to 7

5. Cléo from 5 to 7 (Agnès Varda, 1962)

I’ve often thought of this tale of feminine uncertainty as a film about AIDS. Cleo is a kind of Madonna, who at some point was actually going to play Cleo in the American remake. She has everything: the blondness, the glamour, the svelte figure, the luxurious apartment, the silk robe, even a loyal assistant. There are only two things missing: the guarantee of her man’s love and of her body’s integrity (she is “sure” she has cancer). Cleo’s anxieties about getting her test results seem to echo more fundamental anxieties about the impossibility of guarantees in general when it comes to loving, or simply existing. Here men, too, are the aloof absent figures for whom women are pearls who live in a holiday state. “Your beauty is your health,” he tells her.


Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

4. Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975)

A perfectly coiffed woman alternates the repetition of domestic work and sex work with the dexterity of a factory worker in Chantal Akerman’s tour de force. Jeanne Dielman bathes, cooks, reads letters to her son at the dinner table, and sleeps with her clients while the food simmers without ever crinkling her cardigan. The home is the space where repetition is performed with such clockwork precision you would think there were actually no lacunae between each iteration. Akerman exposes the robotic and dehumanizing banality of “women’s work” as well as the way naturalized free labor erases the specificity of the task: Domestic work is sex work.


Ali: Fear Eats the Soul

3. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974)

The difference we have learned to recognize as the producer of desire gets divorced from the literality of the genitals in one of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s masterpieces, Ali: Fear Eats The Soul. A middle-aged white woman finds in linguistic, class, and racial difference the allure for getting close to a younger and foreign guest worker. Seduced by another kind of alterity, Emmi (Brigitte Mira) liberates herself from the condemning gaze of neighbors and family to live a love affair certainly outside scripted expectations. In this unlikely bond we find that there’s actually much more sameness than anything else in traditional modes of coupling, and that there’s a kind of revolutionary jouissance in making contact with otherness without previously accounting for what it may find.

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Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom

2. Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975)

It’s been said, to the point of triteness, that cinema is the stuff that dreams are made of. Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom couldn’t be more cinematic, then, as it tells the ID-centric Sadean tale of unleashed perversion without pathologizing or punishing the unconscious for what it simply wants: the most beautiful buttocks in the world, barking teenagers on a leash, and feces as dinner entrée in this case. Pier Paolo Pasolini expands the limits of cinema through the logic of unbridled hedonism of the film’s main characters. All sexuality is perverse, all relations of power are unbalanced, and disgust is never much more than a defense mechanism against some kind of primary attraction.


Scenes from a Marriage

1. Scenes from a Marriage (Ingmar Bergman, 1973)

What has always drawn me to Bergman is his ability to capture, with chilling nuance, feminine misery. Bergman doesn’t use this uncanny ability to understand what women want, but what makes them hurt. Instead of schadenfreude, Bergman forges an empathy that almost apologizes for being the culprit of women’s suffering—or, at the very least, for his impotence before it. Scenes from a Marriage points to the perverse impossibility of monogamy and also to its alternatives: that which becomes possible in the translation from scripted ideality to the lived human experience. The lovers never quite fuse, but never quite separate either. Though they seem closer to each other once the very fantasy of perfect unity cracks. They are entwined in a messy, at once tender and violent confusion that goes beyond anything language could ever contain.

Diego Semerene

Diego Semerene is an assistant professor of queer and transgender media at the University of Amsterdam.

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