[from August 2022]
Here is my top ten films of all time: the first gives, among other things, the game away that these are all imagined films, what Girish Shambu has termed a ‘speculative cinephilia’. #2 emerges from my work as a researcher on the podcast The Film We Can’t See, which informed my sense of an unseen cinema far broader, more inclusive and thus more aesthetically, technically and culturally dynamic than the cinema we can see. #6 and #8 are known and documented unfinished projects by historical filmmakers (of which I could have included many dozens more), some are entirely imaginary projects by historical filmmakers, and in some cases I have taken historical individuals and imagined them as directors.
#0 is the only film directed by an imaginary director, although starring a real actor, and it is also not entirely imagined by me, but an extension or Part 2 of Julie Dash’s film Illusions (1982), perhaps the foundational work of reparative speculative cinema, with thanks to Karen Alexander for her discussion of the film at Cinema Rediscovered.
Cinema Redirected? This list is far from definitive, and in fact intended to invite other contributions, as we all make our own speculative cinemas.
Changing film history changes history: and yet we live with/in the history we have. Part of the challenge has been seeing these films through and in the gaps, thinking about why they have been ‘lost’ – not only in terms of not being made (which they weren’t) but, if I wish to commit to their existence, why they have not changed the world as we know it, due to the various ways in which even artistically, critically and/or commercially successful films can lose their visibility, especially when made by filmmakers from marginalised communities.
0. Mignon Dupree, Windtalkers (1944)
Dupree’s first fiction feature stands out as both an astonishing technical achievement whose poignant and despectacularised battle scenes equal those in Come and See, and a powerfully argued narrative that led to an amendment to the GI Bill, reneging its accommodation of Jim Crow laws. Esther Katon’s breakout romantic lead role as Julie, the head nurse, was cruelly denied an Academy Award nomination, while her co-lead, Mohawk actor Jay Silverheels, received a nomination for his performance as Joe, the lead codetalker – but in the category of ‘supporting’ role, which both he and Dupree refused to acknowledge. While some contemporary critics question the casting of a Mohawk actor in a Navajo role (and that character’s tragicised fate), the film remains extraordinary for casting all its Indigenous characters with Indigenous actors, many of them non-professionals drawn from USO staff and servicemen, who deliver outstanding performances under Dupree’s skilled direction. The loss of her brilliant career to a vicious McCarthyite investigation incited by her former colleague remains one of the most profound tragedies of Hollywood cinema. John Woo’s 2002 film is not a remake, but borrowed the title unacknowledged.
- Alice Nuvalinga, ‘Avannarleq’ (1922)
Despite – or because of – its brevity and efficiency, this moving, witty and beautiful one-reel, single-take film is a foundational documentary, not least in its contestation of the Flahertys’ Nanook of the North (1922). As well as being both a direct and sideways critique of that film, it was made with camera and stock purloined from that invasive production. During breaks in the Flahertys’ laborious set-ups, Inuk performer Nuvalinga (who plays ‘Nanook’s wife’) rapidly learned cinematography, and worked with Allakariallak (‘Nanook’) to devise a very short film drawing on their expertise in front of camera, one that could include as many community members as wished to be involved, in order to craft a message to their descendants, who have reserved the right to show the film only within community and approved settings. Recent screenings in programmes by First Nations curators, in some cases featuring a live improvised score by Inuit artist Tanya Tagaq, have shown the profound and abiding influence of Nuvalinga’s dynamic staging, stunning sense of natural light, and framing of beloved faces and places. ‘Avannarleq’ is technically translated as ‘north’, but its meaning of ‘the right direction’ is clearly at play in Nuvalinga’s corrective to the Flahertys’ exploitative approach.
- Sergei Eisenstein, Fuck! (1932-35) (Блядь!/Biyad’!)
Shot in Berlin, Paris, London and New York in 1932, but not finished until 1935 as post-production proved complex, costly and controversial, with the original American developing house at one point threatened under Comstock laws, this legendary film did for cinematic and lived sexuality what Strike! (Стачка/Stachka, 1925) did for cinematic and lived radical politics. Screened only in private venues in London, Moscow and Paris on release, the film was unseeable for years due to censorship, and its content was the subject of intense speculation. It was known to have led to Louise Brooks’ brief third career in France (foreshortened by the outbreak of war), as both a performer and a screenwriter collaborating with Colette, Jean Cocteau and Josephine Baker, among others. Eisenstein’s better-known subsequent collaborations with Paul Robeson after his relocation to the USSR are clearly influenced by the collaborative liberatory development of this first project. Due to the survival of a partial soundtrack lifted from a damaged print, the film earned a deserved reputation as Eisenstein’s first successful sound film. Sadly, its co-screenwriter with Brooks, Magnus Hirschfeld, died just weeks before its premiere in Paris, and (as reported by H.D. in her diaries) a subsequent English-language print had an opening intertitle dedicating the film to ‘Mutter Magnesia’.
- Marilyn Monroe, Burning the Crucible (1958)
Considered the first Hollywood feminist film, Monroe’s adaptation of her ex-husband’s play is a necessarily radical reimagining in which Abigail turns on John Proctor by reaching out to Elizabeth (an incendiary Method performance by an unrecognisable Monroe in full Puritan garb), and, as the girls chase out the male judges, Tituba becomes the rightful leader of Salem. For a long time, it was best known for its Oscar-winning score by Ella Fitzgerald, her first public foray into composition which arose through conversations about the play between the two friends during her El Mocambo residency. Letters show that it was Fitzgerald’s pursuit and inspiration in developing what she initially titled ‘Tituba Sings’ that led Monroe to question Miller’s behaviour and seek out support for her addictions. Winning the rights to the play in the divorce, Monroe was able to make good on her desire to produce and direct, with new research arguing that the film’s roman à clef relates not just to her relationshiop with Miller, but – in the character of the judges and priests – to her own devastating experience of Hollywood sexism (and of her collaborator’s experience of racism), which defeated all further attempts at collaboration between the friends, leading to Monroe’s severe depression in 1962. Post-#MeToo, the film’s visionary brilliance has been recognised, and the film’s 2022 accession to the Library of Congress will hopefully lead to further screenings and publications that interpret it outside the prurience that too often marks Monroe studies.
- Sara Gómez, Una Palabra Más (1979)
It took Gómez five years to make her second fiction feature, as she balanced recovering her health and raising her children with setting up a school-within-a-school to focus on teaching Afro-Cuban women, who had been underrepresented at ICAIC. Several of her students crewed on Una Palabra Más, which refines the docufiction hybrid of De Cierta Manera not least through the audacious sung-through voice-over. Its keystone street dance scene, with its protagonists passing on an urgent message between themselves as they move through its non-professional cast of hundreds has been oft-imitated, but never bettered. Despite being hard to view after its initial, rapturously-received run on the international feminist film festival circuit, its playful, loving narrative of three generations of women living and working together, as a framework for depicting (while critiquing) the revolution’s complex feminisms, including around women’s sexuality and motherhood, was widely written about, with a particularly notable essay by B. Ruby Rich that has been cited by Jennie Snyder Urman as a key influence on Jane the Virgin. The film was also championed, remembered and quoted in her biodocs by Agnès Varda, who kept in touch with her assistant director from Salut les Cubains (1963); she described their conversations about reproductive justice and film narrative as central to her development of L’une chante, l’autre pas.
- Grunwick Collective, We Make Film (1979)
This literally striking documentary is both an intimate record of labour activists in their own words, and a reflexive deconstruction of the industrial processes of film, shown from the inside. Its use of still photographs, working structurally through multiple genres from family snapshots to sporting news to crime scenes, as the connectors between the two strands remains unique in British documentary, and gives the film its haunting power. Unable to be distributed to cinemas due to the uncleared soundtrack of Lata Mangeshkar songs (some taped at her 1974 concert at London’s Royal Albert Hall), the film screened widely at union and community meetings. An incisive roundtable discussion between Stuart Hall, Susheila Nasta and Laura Mulvey, transcribed for publication in New Left Review, led to its widespread adoption on film and media courses in the early 1980s when it was made available on VHS for community and educational use via Concord Media. But the film was taken out of circulation when the filmmakers, who were never publicly named, were investigated and secretly blacklisted under the Major government of the early 1990s. Never digitised, this key moment in British film history is only viewable via Cinenova on Umatic video. It deserves a full and respectful restoration, under the supervision of the surviving members of the collective.
- Michael Powell, A Wizard of Earthsea (1984)
Unquestionably the defining fantasy film of all time, and the only great wizarding film made at a British film studio. While its animatronic dragon set new standards – who doesn’t remember Yevaud’s fiery final blink, or the incredible aerial ‘dragon ballets’ – it was the explosion of its cinematic magic, reviving and revisiting techniques from The Red Shoes and A Matter of Life and Death, that made the film both a popular and critical success in its day, both on screen and on VHS, as did a stunning debut performance from Tilda Swinton in the somewhat attenuated role of Arha/Tenar. The protagonist Ged, the outcast wizard who undergoes a long struggle after a deep failure, is clearly a resonant figure for Powell; like Ged, the director did achieve a return, thanks to this film, to the full embrace of the cinematic establishment. A planned sequel adapting The Farthest Shore proved difficult to finance and was, all too poignantly given the book’s plot, halted by Powell’s death, with the lack of a sequel leading to an attrition in viewing. A complex rights situation means that the film has only recently been restored and digitised, with a Bluray release making the film available for the first time in over 20 years – possibly prompted by an image widely circulated on social media a few years ago, showing a young Yamada Naoko clutching her bootleg dubbed VHS copy. It’s been recently announced that Yamada will become the first female director at Studio Ghibli, with an adaptation of Tenar and The Other Wind, the fourth and fifth books of the Earthsea trilogy, tentatively titled Dancing on The Dragon’s Tongue (2025).
- Park Nam-Ok, 의 딸/The Daughter (2002)
Few filmmakers have a career as remarkable as Park’s, with two major fiction feature films separated by nearly five decades. The Daughter is the embodiment of mature style, a film that both shows the influence of her time spent in Hollywood, by utterly rejecting and dismantling its narrative language. Inspired by Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (Agnès Varda, 2001), Park used the innovations of mini-DV to shoot a stunning companion piece to her first film The Widow(1954). Its surprise impact on the international festival circuit kickstarted a new wave of Korean women directors, who turned to centring older women character actors to stunning effect. Park’s use of restored material from her older film to create the main character Joo’s memories of her mother is electrifying, at once a sophisticated reflection on Park’s own decades of longing to make cinema, and a reconsideration of the auteurist oeuvre as a biographical project. Due to The Widow’s lack of presence in the Anglosphere, The Daughter (strictly, The Daughter of) has remained largely underknown until the Wachowskis’ recent citation of its cinematic flashbacks as an influence on Matrix Resurrection, which generated considerable interest in an upcoming Bluray release of the English-subtitled high-quality digital transfer made briefly available via the Korean film archive during the first year of the pandemic.
- Sarah Maldoror, Un Portrait de Madiba (2004)
Redefining the biographical documentary much as The Fog of War (Errol Morris, 2003) redefined the talking head, Maldoror’s authorised portrait of Nelson Mandela is a conversation between two great revolutionaries and artists (and ageing bodies), a complex interweaving of decolonial histories across Maldoror’s experience of Guinea-Bissau, Angola, Algeria and France, and Mandela’s of South Africa. An honest consideration of the difficulties of turning ideals and desires into practical governance, and a penetrating look at the shift from radical to national and international hero, Maldoror’s film also sets a standard for documentary integrity in its refusal to hagiographise while retaining a sense of rigorous respect. A recent videographic essay on the political aesthetics of green and gold in the film, shown in relation to the colour patterning in Maldoror’s earlier Sambizanga, provides a fascinating auteurial read of a film that plays stringently and strategically with the question of authority. Made for ARTE with a focus on televisual exhibition, the film is best known in France and la Francophonie, not achieving the international profile of Errol Morris’s work. The recent restoration and reappraisal of Maldoror’s oeuvre, under the guidance of her daughter Annouchka de Andrade, will hopefully lead to a wider release of this extremely significant film.
- Tayf, طيف / Tayf (2015—
Taking its name from a Mashrou’ Leila song, this ongoing collection of anonymised short films embodies the dual meaning of its title – ghost/shadow, and spectrum – in collectively exploring LGBTIQ+ spaces, their erasures, memories, reflorescences, diasporas and destructions across the Arabic-speaking world. Apprehended inaccurately the West as a ‘YouTube’ film (and often described as the ‘first great YouTube crowdsourced film project’), the film and initial filmmaking collective actually innovated a non-commercial platform that defied government surveillance as well as corporate social media companies, allowing filmmakers to ‘dead drop’ and edit films securely using blockchain. Travelling as memes, GIFs and clips alongside the ever-growing anthology (which currently stands at around 47 hours of films or film, given that they can be watched as individual entries or as the constantly-changing edit via the collective’s YouTube channel but also via other, more secure platforms given that it is unclear how much YouTube edits or removes at any moment), Tayf has been described as both a moment and a movement, a transformational digital project whose collaborative aesthetics of exchanged objects and matched gazes prefigure the TikTok make-up brush challenge and influenced a generation of queer audiovisual image-makers.
- Albertina Carri, Autobiografía de Rojo (2024)
Shot on expired 35mm and hand-developed, Carri’s latest film is yet another shape-shifting move after Las Hijas del Fuego (2018). While retaining that film’s concern with queer sexuality and landscape, its visionary incorporation of hand-drawn animation and shimmering sound palette make the film a summative statement not only of her own work but of the buena onda and the new New Queer Cinema. At once an adaptation of Anne Carson’s novel-in-verse and a response to, and expansion of, the narrative’s use of Buenos Aires and of the history of the dictatorship, Carri’s film has been hailed for its revitalisation of political aesthetics in narrative cinema, including its creative soundtrack by trans feminist sex work activist and musician Sasha Sathya. A decolonial tango explosion, Sathya’s opus incorporates aspects of the characters’ dialogue and Geryon’s voice-over into songs that are sometimes diegetic and sometimes extra-diegetic, reflecting the presence of music in the poem. Logan Rozos’ transformative central performance as Geryon added a Silver Bear to the film’s Golden Bear and Teddy Award at the 2024 Berlinale. 3D printed copies of Geryon’s red wings (designed by Santiago Artemis) were the must-have costume at 2024 Prides worldwide, demonstrating the film’s rapid accession to queer cult status.