>> CineFix Host: Sometimes cinema
wears down a rut and falls in it, telling the same six stories over and
over again, and that's when it's about
time to shake things up. These are our top ten favorite
rule-breaking films of all time. >> [MUSIC] >> CineFix Host: Kicking
us off at number ten, let's talk about how there
are film rules in the first place. It's not like there's a stern film teacher
sending directors to the cinematic principles office for talking out of turn,
or film police arresting offending filmmakers and sentencing them to
community service shooting feature for the Lifetime movie network. No, we're talking about the kinds of
rules that form a silent contract between filmmakers and film watchers that maybe
you can't read off like commandments, but you damn well know when
they've been broken. And back in the golden age of Hollywood,
when the precedent for much of film was set, something we now call classic
Hollywood cinema style emerged. They were a practical set of rules,
guidelines, and practices, set out to ensure movies
do what they do best. Tell immersive stories. And what early Hollywood filmmakers
quickly realized was that the number one way to keep people in their seats and
buying popcorn was to make sure they didn't realize it was all
an illusion until the ride was over. So for our first rule, we wanna honor
films that said, [BLEEP] it, and made damn well sure we all knew
it was a film we were watching. We're talking about
breaking of the forth wall. Think Annie Hall, and Spaceballs,
and Horsefeathers, and JCVD, and The Great Train Robbery,
and Pierrot le Fou. Spike Lee has a way with a very Brechtian
direct camera address, which by the way is a theater tern that references the exact
distancing effect we're talking about. But for our first pick, we think that Dogville really
broke realism down the best. >> Dogville Narrator: This is the sad
tale of the township of Dogville. Most of the buildings were pretty
wretched, more like shacks, frankly. The house in which Tom lived was the best,
though, and in good times might almost have passed for
presentable. >> CineFix Host: Sure, it's not as
much breaking the fourth wall as it is demolishing all of them, but
the effect is exactly the same. It's a constant reminder to the audience
that what they're looking at isn't real. The film itself is inspired by Bertolt
Brecht, the man the effect is named after. But we think one of the most
interesting things about distancing and alienation is that it stops working. After a long enough time,
we buy into the story anyhow. We forgive the lack of set,
and ultimately forget it. Sure, the walls have been broken down,
but the effect is the opposite. We let ourselves be sucked in anyway. But pulling out a megaphone and
screaming, hey, audience, you're watching a movie, isn't
the only way guaranteed to kill a buzz. There's all kinds of smaller, technical rules you can screw up
to jolt the audience back into rude awareness of that tween two
rows over who will not stop texting. One of the most important things
you've gotta get right is the editing. Don't let anything jump
jarringly in the frame. Only cut when motivated. Always cut on action. But these rules got broken, too,
by Battleship Potemkin, the repeat cut and October with the metaphorical cut. And by Legitae's assembly of still images. However, if there is one bad boy
editing rule breaker to rule them all, it's gotta be
Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless. >> Speaker 3: [FOREIGN]
>> CineFix Host: That's right back, when everyone was trying to make you forget about editing and cuts and
believe that movies were real, Godard was chopping up his film and
throwing them right in your face. Bringing the very artifice of editing
right to the forefront with the jump cut. Critics called it visual jazz, filmic Cubism,
Michel's hyperactive point of view. Collaborators have explained it as anarchy
acting out against the establishment, freedom with no concern for the norm,
and an attempt to sabotage the film. We're not sure what the truth is,
or if it even matters, because the jump cut
made a hell of a splash. In addition to editing rules,
another nearly ubiquitous feature of this classical Hollywood continuity style
is a predictable placement of the camera. Filmmakers like Mizoguchi and Agnes Varda
have drifted away from typical camera placement to beautiful effect in
films like Ugetsu and Vagabond. But the most important rule of all is
called the 180 degree rule, and it's a shooting guideline for a establishing
a dependable screen geography. If you keep the camera on
one side of your scene, you end up with a consistent left and
right across all the shots. And although this kind of screen
continuity pervades almost every film you could have seen in theaters for
the past century, Yasujiro Ozu tossed it out
the window when he made Tokyo Story. >> Speaker 4: [FOREIGN]
>> CineFix Host: Composition was everything to Mr. Ozu, a man who never once used a zoom. Avoiding moving his camera at all
costs and used one dissolve, ever. So when it came to deciding
between a coherent space and a beautiful match cut,
he chose the latter. The man was notorious for replacing
the famously predictable 180 degree rule with his own disorienting
360 degree version. In place of left, right geography,
he substituted perfect graphic matches. But it worked. His patient storytelling and playful
style are only an obstacle insomuch as they are unfamiliar to the audience. But, after ten minutes of acclimation,
they're just as engrossing as any generic shot shot-reverse
shot dialog scene and then some. At number seven, we also wanna honor films that took
the whole idea of representing reality, filming the world and capturing its light,
and said [BLEEP] it, let's blow it all up. Think Cocteau's Orpheus, or
2001 Stargate or Throw Away Your Books. Rally in the Streets. Think Tarkovsky's mixture of
film stock in Andrei Rublev, Spielberg's selective
color in Schindler's List, and Wes Anderson's eclectic aspect
ratios in The Grand Budapest Hotel. However for our number seven, we think there's none
rule-breakier than Enter The Void. >> [MUSIC] >> CineFix Host: Part feature film,
part cinematic DNP trip, Enter the Void is the closest thing
there is to a mainstream incarnation of the strobe film, which was actually
a real thing in avant garde cinema. And, close your eyes epileptics,
because they look like this. And that's enough of that. Enter The Void used lighting and
camera and visual effects in a way unlike
anything ever before it. The story is an out-of-body POV
experience in more ways than one, and an absolute visual revelation in
terms of how to view the world, which is why we have no problem
including it on our list. So what this all comes
down to is expectation. Rules are expectations, and breaking them
isn't necessarily violating an inflexible law of gravity, so much as it is
throwing the audience a curveball compared to how they've
learned to interpret cinema. One of the easiest ways to quickly get
audiences on board with different sets of film conventions is by bundling them up
into convenient packages called genres. When we set of specific genre signifiers, we know the kind of language
the film is about to start speaking. So, we can pull out our mental
phrasebooks and follow along. But what happens when films
break from their conventions? When they specifically subvert
the expectations they've gone out of their way to establish. These are films like Million Dollar Baby,
Audition, and Life is Beautiful, Dead or Alive, Sunshine, or. Cabin in the Woods broke
it down in meta fashion. But for our number six we're going with From Dusk till Dawn. >> [SOUND]
>> Speaker 5: What the-
>> [SOUND] >> CineFix Host: Quick-talking Tarantino-esque crime film, starring
Tarantino and a fresh from TV Clooney, >From Dusk till Dawn makes it just about
halfway through without a single undead, before quickly pivoting into
the kind of balls out, actiony, vampire shoot-em-up that's pure Rodriguez. Does it work, depends on who you ask, and whether they like surprise
birthday parties or not. But it definitely breaks the rule. Definitely raises some awesome questions
about expectations and genre freedom, and finishes with a bang and a middle finger
to tradition, in true b-movie fashion. Shifting gears to the broader
strokes of storytelling and moving fully beyond the physical
craft of filmmaking, one of the most allegedly unassailable
features of the story is the protagonist. Stories are about people,
according to Aristotle, common sense, and your eighth-grade English teacher. Or at least animals
that act like people or fish that behave in
a slightly human manner. But what about films that say screw that, like Au Hasard Balthazar and
its protagonist donkey. Or Rubber's sociopathic tire. Phone Booth and Barry buck tradition by getting rid
of everything but the protagonist. And Russian Ark makes the history
of an entire country its hero. But we think our number five belongs
to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, for dramatically and
shockingly changing courses midstream. >> [SOUND] [MUSIC] >> Speaker 6: Aah! >> CineFix Host: Hitchcock purposely
set out to mislead his audience, and then devastated like an old
timey George R R Martin. He used their expectations against them, carefully cueing them to invest in
Marion Crane as the hero of the film, before stabbing them in
the metaphorical heart. Because while Psycho's twist
is almost a cliche now. At its time, it was almost unthinkable. Making the effect all the better and reinvigorating screen death with
the kind of impact it deserved. So filmmakers can fracture images,
genres and heroes. Is nothing sacred, how far can they go? We all know how stories work, beginning,
middle, end, one thing leads to the next, a character wants something and
we watch them try to get it. Or do we?
Film makers like Tarantino, Nolan, and Kurosawa thought differently in films
like Pulp Fiction, Memento, and Rashomon. They swapped the order up, flipped
it backwards, and ran the tape back. The Sweet Hereafter went
backwards before it was cool. Run Lola Run revised itself three times. Planet Terror chopped out a whole
ten minutes for funsies, and Intolerance told four
stories at the same time. But for the film we think that gave
a middle finger to story structure best, it's gotta go to
Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad. >> Speaker 7: [FOREIGN] >> CineFix Host: Truth, fiction, time, place, logic, and cause all fold in on
themselves, creating an Escher-like narrative structure that refuses to be
linearized in any kind of story map. It's a question with no answer,
a film with no meaning, as beautiful as it is enigmatic. It is a story about a story. A story a man is telling a woman
that we may or may not believe. Resnais claims that when he wrote
the story, he didn't believe it. But when he directed it, he did. They loved, they didn't. They knew each other, they never met. She's dead, alive, does it matter? The film marches onward with
no clear meaning or truth. Just a story unlike any other, yet
like them all at the same time. Okay, so we can chop and
screw a plot like a 90s DJ, what about throwing it out all together? The cardinal sin of storytelling
is to be boring, right? Well, maybe not. Clerks is just a few guys
at a convenience store, Gummo meanders through a strange world
with no real sense of direction. My Dinner with Andre is
just a conversation. Man with a Movie Camera
is just images of a city. The wold, and Cléo de 5 à 7 is two hours
in the life of a young singer waiting for medical test results. But that's all still a little much for
our number three, which goes to great lengths to tell
a story with as little action as possible. In Jeanne Dielman's 23 Quai du Commerce,
1080, man, that is a whole sentence worth of French. So you know what, [BLEEP] it. Let's just write it up
there on the screen. >> CineFix Host: The film
is honest about life in a way most others are not. It does not select the fascinating,
it does not focus on the important. It does not trim the fat. Director Chantal Akerman spares no detail. Nothing is extraneous. Peeling potatoes is as
important as murder. For over three hours, Jeanne Dielman
meditates on the daily routine of a mother as she cooks, cleans,
engages in sex work, and repeats. By foregoing the extravagant, the mishandling of a single spoon is a
major plot point and cause for attention. It is an attempt at life un-distilled, and it's a beautiful, tiny epic for
its narrative sins. But the envelope pushes further. Sure we can throw out plot, but what about
causality, what about coherence and logic? Enter surrealists. A world where 1 plus 1 equals blue. Check out Vera Chytilová's Daisies,
Lynch's Eraserhead or Inland Empire. Villeneuve's Enemy or
Lanthimos's the Lobster. But if there's a clown king of
the surrealist film tricksters, it's gotta be Luis Bunuel. And we could go with just about any of
his work, but for our number two pick, we'll give this slot to the most
successful bizarro fest, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. >> [SOUND]
>> Speaker 8: [FOREIGN] >> [SOUND] >> Speaker 9: [FOREIGN] >> Speaker 10: [FOREIGN] >> CineFix Host: True to its surreal nature, it is not easy to summarize The Discreet Charm of The Bourgeoise. It is a story about wealthy French diners repeatedly showing up for meals they are unable to eat. Instead, they find themselves evading the
police, or sneaking off to have sex, or imposed upon by the army, or
in the dream sequence of a stage play. They never stop searching for a feast, constantly frustrated
by illogical interruptions. But they never question
their reality either. It is a bizarre story world where anything
can happen, asking us all to interrogate our own logical assumptions and
those of the stories we consume daily. The surrealists were definitely onto
something by rejecting waking logic in favor of the oneiric sort. But they're not the only ones to do it. In the same way we receive
visual information as a child, before words have meanings and
concepts have rigid associations. Visionary filmmakers have sought to
breakdown the rule of ordered thought and speak to us primally. So for our number one slot, we wanna
honor filmmakers that have set out to break the greatest rules of all,
those of the human mind. Kubrick dabbled in this
with 2001: A Space Odyssey, Malick with Tree of Life, Fellini with
8 1/2 and Antonioni with L'Avventura. But this slot belongs to none
other than Andrei Tarkovsky, whose every film could top this list, but
we're going with our favorite, The Mirror. >> [MUSIC] [SOUND] >> Young Boy: Papa. >> CineFix Host: There's nothing
like dissecting a non-verbal film out loud to suck the life of it. But they pay me by the words, so
please forgive me for trying, and trying and trying and trying. >> [SOUND]
>> CineFix Host: Thank you. Tarkovsky was a genius to
whom no rules could apply. His films are poetry
where others are prose. His images speak, but
not in words or symbols. They did not attempt to convey to us
logic or language or concrete plot. But instead, thoughts, motions, memories
in the abstract, before processing and verbalization. To use his words, he was a sculptor in
time, and as pretentious as it may sound, we believe it. Which is why his
masterpiece is our pick for the best rule-breaking film of all time. So what do you think? Do you disagree with one of our picks? Did we leave out one of your
favorite cinematic mavericks? Let us know in the comments below,
and be sure to subscribe for more CineFix movie lists. >> [MUSIC]
