Joe Ruffell
Profile
Joe Ruffell is a film fan and student, and hopefully one day director, from Portsmouth U.K., who has family in Sydney, Australia.]
Joe Ruffell
(in no particular order)
Goto, Island of Love (Walerian Borowczyk, 1968)
Borowczyk's first live action film is a strange and beautiful masterpiece. The final sequence is one of the most moving things I have seen in film.
Hitler, ein Film aus Deutschland (Hans-Jurgen Syberberg, 1977)
Ceaselessly inventive 'historical' cinema.
El Dorado (Howard Hawks, 1966)
Beautiful movie with one of John Wayne's finest performances.
Distant Voices, Still Lives (Terence Davies, 1988)
Seldom have the experimental and the emotional come together to such effect.
Kikujiro (Takeshi Kitano, 1998)
Kitano's best film yet.
Lancelot du Lac (Robert Bresson, 1974)
My favourite Bresson, probably.
Fox (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1975)
I wanted to include a Fassbinder and found it hard because his films are so numerous. I settled on this as it's pretty close to a portrait of RWF and another brilliant examinaton of class exploitation.
The Ballad of Cable Hogue (Sam Peckinpah, 1970)
Maybe not such a brilliant achievement as Pat Garrett or The Wild Bunch but I love this humourous little Peckinpah movie.
Tetsuo II: Bodyhammer (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1991)
I thought my list was getting a little too ''pantheon''-like so I thought I'd include this. I think Tsukamoto is one of the most interesting directors working today. Crazy body-horror with a nice line in black humour.
Big Wednesday (John Milius, 1978)
A great movie about Vietnam, growing up and surfing. Marvellous.
[Joe Ruffell is a film fan and student, and hopefully one day director, from Portsmouth U.K., currently spending time with family in Sydney, Australia.]
Rich and Strange: An Introduction to the live action features of Walerian Borowczyk
The work of Walerian Borowczyk is perhaps not as well known as that of directors he is often said to have influenced or to be a contemporary of: Svankmajer, Oshima, Terry Gilliam and The Brothers Quay. This is at least partly due to the fact that after an extremely successful career as a maker of bizarre animated short films and a number of distinctive live action features, Borowczyk's work became gradually more and more interested in cinema's potential for the erotic. In this article, I intend to discuss Borowczyk as an underrated director of live action features (it seems he is still quite highly regarded in animation circles) as his films are undiscovered territory to most modern cinephiles who were not around in his early '70s critical heyday. -- Joe Ruffell, December 2001 via http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/18/borowczyk.html [April 2003]
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