Cinema 2010: Looking Back at my Cinema Experience of the Year

One of the best things about 2010 was my exploration of the cinema of Coen Brothers. Except ‘Intolerable Cruelty’ and their latest, ‘True Grit’, I have finished watching all of their films, some more than once. This, and finishing Kieslowski’s ‘Dekalog’ were the best achievements of the year. But there was a lot more.

Watched more than 200 movies in 2010, about 75 from the Greatest Movies list. It included some of the best English-language films like: ‘The Third Man’, ‘Blade Runner’, ‘Walkabout’, ‘Life of Brian’, ‘Network’, ‘The Exorcist’, ‘All About Eve’, ‘GoodFellas’, ‘Midnight Cowboy’, ‘Crimes and Misdemeanors’, ‘Deliverance’, ‘Sex, Lies, and Videotape’, ‘Rumble Fish’, ‘Rosemary’s Baby’, ‘Traffic’, ‘Lolita’, and ‘The King of Comedy’. I was also fascinated by the two films of Wes Anderson that I saw: ‘Rushmore’ and ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’.

Also experienced some classics of World Cinema for the first time: ‘M’, ‘Battleship Potemkin’, ‘The Rules of the Game’, ‘The Cabinet of Dr Caliguri’, ‘Nosferatu’, ‘Shoeshine’, ‘The Man with the Movie Camera’, ‘Knife in the Water’, The Orphic Trilogy, ‘Rififi’, and ‘Raise the Red Lantern’.

But the most fulfilling experience was discovering greats like Luis Bunuel, Robert Bresson, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Abbas Kiarostami. I was also introduced to the cinema of Sam Peckinpah, Nagisa Oshima, Takeshi Kitano and Lars Von Trier.

Discovery of Shakti Samanta was the highlight of my Hindi cinema experience. And I also watched some of the best Hindi films for the first time, like Jewel Thief, Waqt, Shakti, and the hugely underrated ‘Disha’.

And to add to this, continued watching more of Fellini, Bergman, Hitchcock, Antonioni, Tarkovsky, Godard, Truffaut, and Ray.

The Film Book of the Year was Nicholas Proferes’ ‘Film Directing Fundamentals’. Earlier, I was pretty confused when every other person praised a film’s ‘amazing direction’. Thanks to this book, I have begun to understand what the job of a director is. The last section of the book discussed three films in detail: ‘Notorious’, ‘8 ½’, and ‘The Truman Show’. It was such a rewarding experience that I want to continue the exercise by studying more films and writing about them in detail. Starting with the one-hour films from the ‘Dekalog’ would be great. Only wish a day had more than 24 hours…