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Richly individualistic movies still get made. They’re out there. Rich history cannot but produce rich potential. Looking back and forward, as the British Film Institute turns 75, they asked seventy-five figures to comment on “Visions for the Future. There’s a rangy bunch of notions floating through the videos where a largely male assemblage answers two questions: What one film would you wish to share with future generations? And “What exits you about the future of the moving image?” Untethered from the necessities of finance and distribution, optimism reigns in the 150 brief videos, with contributors ranging from musician Nitin Sawnhey’s words on Pather Panchali; Ken Russell on Metropolis; Gurinder Chadha on Ozu’s Tokyo Story; Patrick Marber (Closer) on The Red Shoes; and Sir Roger Moore (Bond, James Bond) on Lawrence of Arabia. Robert Altman liked to say that he was never inspired by a good movie, only the bad ones that showed him what never to do in his own work, yet the litany of titles in like having the 400-plus titles of the Criterion Collection fall on your head: with all the crises crashing around the world in the world of film today, isn’t it amazing that this many remarkable movies have been made despite the complacency and corruption often visited upon the form? (Or, as a Romanian director once said to me, “We are just a little planet with little insects, but what beautiful insects we are.”)
Composer Michael Nyman advocates Carlos Reygadas’ amazing Silent Light, which has begun a one-week run at MoMA in Manhattan, for being “an extraordinary, transcendent meditation on love and religion.” That opening shot is embedded above, a glorious six-minute sunrise that encompasses the stars, the sky, animals and man. Seen on a proper screen, you see neither the past nor the future but an eternal present. A work of obstinacy and vision, Silent Light holds rare beauty. Here’s a condensation of Nyman’s comments: “What excites me is that filmmaking is accessible to anybody and everybody. There’s obviously the same danger that there is with very accessible music technology—synthesizers and computer programs—that you can equally come up with crap as you can come up with a masterpiece. That’s the danger. Whether it breaks down the studio system or it breaks down the hegemony of studios and big producers, conditioning the way we see images, and the way that narratives are put together and the way that specific subjects are dealt with, I think—I hope—Hollywood is in a terminal stage. Maybe this almost free cinema will be the future. Visual education on the internet, even with YouTube, I think will increase and make these Hollywood dinosaurs into what they are, relics of 19th century theater.”

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Here’s a sample of Manohla Dargis’ finely wrought rave: Reygadas’ “silky camera movements and harmoniously balanced widescreen compositions still enthrall, but he now comes across as less committed to his own virtuosity and more invested in finding images — of children bathing, trees rustling, clouds passing — that offer a truer sense of the world than is found in melodramatic bloodletting.” And of the opening: “mesmerizing, transporting…. the seemingly unmoored camera traces a downward arc across a nearly pitch-black night sky dotted with starry pinpricks. Accompanied by an unsettling chorus of animal cries and screams (what’s going on in there?), the camera descends from its cosmic perch into the brightening world and then, as if parting a curtain, moves through some trees onto a clearing that effectively becomes the stage for the ensuing human drama.”