The Joy of Minor Works
The Joy of Minor works. Edit by Andrew J. Eisenman. Photography by Riccardo on Pexels. The Lady Vanishes lobby card and poster courtesy of Gaumont-British Picture Corporation. The Little Girl Who Conquered Time courtesy of Toei. The Visitor in the Eye poster courtesy of Toho. The Straight Story poster courtesy of The Walt Disney Company. Only Yesterday Poster courtesy of Gibli Studios. Three Thousand Years of Longing poster courtesy of MGM. Rocky Balboa poster courtesy of MGM. Petite Maman poster courtesy of Neon. The Terminal poster courtesy of Dreamworks. Monsieur Verdoux poster courtesy of United Artists.
I spend an unreasonable amount of time watching films, an annoying amount of time if you ask the people who have to share a living room TV with me. Watching the amount and way that I do, working my way through director’s complete Oeuvres, checking out films with adjacent topics like a rambling train of thought, all while trying to keep up with the latest releases and restorations, I make and read a lot of lists. And when you start building lists and asking others for advice on where to start on a topic, a few turns of phrase will start popping up. “Essential,” “You can skip that one,” “a movie that doesn’t exist,” “disavowed,” “greatest work,” “primer,” “minor work.”
I hate that word: “minor work.” Of course, some films take more work or have a larger impact, but every finished film required of its artists a silly-big amount of effort. It’s typically box-office discrimination or a lack of availability that labels something a minor work. And frankly, some of my favorite films are “minor works.”
Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House (1977) is a classic of surrealist film experimentation, its 2009 screening at the New York Asian Film Festival brought his name to the States in a more mainstream way than ever before, becoming a classic of cinephile darling brand The Criterion Collection. I, like most people with taste, love this schlocky horror comedy full of hand-drawn effects, crazy scares, and broadly sketched teen heroes. It’s ridiculous and fun and “essential,” but it’s not even close to my favorite Obayashi film.
My favorite Obayashi film is also one he’s known for internationally but far less in the US, and its own place in the canon has diminished over time since an animated adaption of the same source material was released in 2007 and took its place as the definitive adaption.
Obayashi’s The Little Girl Who Conquered Time (1983) is a major work turning minor, a brilliant adaption of Yasutaka Tsutsui’s classic Japanese novel The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.
I came to this movie in 2022 when a Twitter thread (RIP my precious bird app, I always hated loving you) about favorite musical climaxes in Film made the rounds, and part of the 3rd act climax popped up. A few months later, in December, I’d thought about that clip every day until I couldn’t take it anymore, and I jumped into a bunch of film forums and discord groups to describe it, find the name of the film, and ultimately, import the Blu-Ray to the US. It’s included in the 3rd Window Film’s box set of Obayashi’s 80’s period. It’s also available on The Internet Archive, it turns out, but the transfer is atrocious. I’ll link to it anyway. The entire 10 minutes long sequence starts at 1:15:24 and ends at 1: 25:25, but the chunk that drew me in so deeply begins at 1: 23:41.
In this clip that held me for so long, Kazuko, a schoolgirl who is accidentally slipping in and out of time, finally takes control of her new ability and chases love interest Kazuo into the time stream. It’s a climactic montage set to a haunting score, and here Obayashi uses still image photography and the tool of montage to create a balletic, expressionistic journey through time with the addition of hand-made, at-the-time-groundbreaking special effects. The whole sequence is full of love and passion, and it’s an all-time favorite for me. Even the parts that haven’t aged well in 40 years have charm and heart that’s hard to grasp. Speaking years later on this, Obayashi said: “The work of a superhuman, I’d say. It was done by an experienced artist who was suffering from cancer at that time. He snuck out of hospital and worked on this. And it turned out to be his last work. He spent his last days working out of his love for filmmaking. And that will stay forever in this film. So what film does is give eternity to things made by mortal beings. In that sense, this film preserved an eternal love with amazing scenes.” (The Little Girl Who Conquered Time (1983), Third Window Films, Archival Interview with Nobuhiko Obayashi)
Is that not “essential?”
House is considered Obayashi’s “greatest” work, while films like School in the Crosshairs (1981), Her Motorbike, Her Island (1986), and The Little Girl Who Leapt Through Time (1983) make up the major works, with later films like Hanagatami (2017) and Labyrinth of Cinema (2019) being large but less universally beloved entries.
But another favorite of mine is his quick follow-up to House, A Visitor in the Eye (1977) because, frankly, it’s insane. This film is an adaption of a single issue of the 70’s Manga Black Jack, about a mysterious unlicensed doctor and his assistant/wife who is 18 years old but looks and sounds like a 6-year-old child. Even though it’s a Black Jack story, the protagonist is Chianti Komori, a collegiate tennis player who takes one to the eye from her coach (who is also in love with her) and receives an experimental cornea transplant, a cornea stolen from an “Eye Bank” run by the mob. Soon after, she begins to hallucinate about a man in a cape, but not the same mysterious man in a cape that operated on her eye, no, this is a different man who she instantly falls in love with.
Like any director worth his salt, Obayashi felt the need to create his own take on Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), and he made the extremely chaotic choice to do it here. De Palma made a moody erotic thriller in Body Double (1984), Park Chan Wook created a slick neo-noir with Decision to Leave (2022), Obayashi made a little candy-coated soap opera, and I love it so, so much.
Like I said earlier, my favorite Obayashi is a major work turning minor, but what’s really behind the idea of a minor work? When studying Oevre’s, I’m a completionist, but not everyone is. The idea of Major and Minor works is one of curation, and I’m typically all for curation. You can watch a movie or two a day for the rest of your life and still have films to discover. And the medium’s less than 200 years old! There are so many more centuries worth of books and music and plays and paintings to discover. Somewhere along the way, we all need curation to focus on what we really want to experience. This act of choice is constant. If you’re studying Spielburg’s early work, watch Duel (1971), not Sugarland Express (1974). You want to get into David Lynch? Start with Eraserhead (1977) or Blue Velvet (1986), skip The Straight Story (1999), get to Inland Empire (2006) only if you love the darkest stuff in Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Dr. (2001). That’s what you’ll hear.
I’m a big Oscars guy, and I love Letterboxd, but I often struggle with the very idea of “rating” art. Yet here I am, writing articles evaluating art for publications like Ergo and Elements of Madness. The Oscars I rationalize because of what they do for the nominees and winners. The real “award” isn’t a statue, it’s the cultural and financial permission to keep doing the work. When reading critical reviews, I care more for the words than the starts, but in places like Letterboxd, a digital alter to Curation, it becomes a way to start conversations with friends. If I have your phone number and we’re Letterboxd friends, I’ve probably texted you at odd hours to discuss a film you’ve logged, especially if you’ve ranked a masterpiece 2 or 3 stars. Likewise, I’ve found some of my favorite little secret films from seeing someone log after they themselves found it on a list somewhere. But the ranking of “major” and “minor” works is something I’m still not so on board with.
When we make a work of art, it is the culmination of all the craft we’ve learned before. Even serialized work stands on its own in some manner, but all art leans on the work that came before. What I’m trying to get at is when you’re looking at a list of movies or books, they might not all matter to you at a glance, but they all mattered to the artist, so they have the ability to matter to you too.
There really is nothing like discovering a “minor work” of an artist you love and unearthing a new layer of understanding about this thing that’s meant so much to you. I’ll never forget responding so deeply to The Little Girl Who Conquered Time, only to discover on the House special features one of Obayashi’s short films Emotion (1966), where he first figured out how to use photo montage and color to play with time and well, emotion. It was like watching Spider-Man: The Animated series as a kid and discovering a reprint of his origins in Amazing Fantasy #15. Just joyous. So in honor of the Minor Works, here are 10 of my favorites:
The Little Girl Who Conquered Time (1983) and Emotion (1966)
I’ve already spent a lot of time praising The Little Girl Who Conquered Time, but one thing I haven’t mentioned yet is that not only is the script a great high-school romantic drama, but the use of color is really lovely. Here, Obayashi creates a relationship between color and love that you see him first experiment with in the short film Emotion, just as he experiments with still-frame-montage.
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FboGiiYH1ik&t=7s
Where to watch:
The Little Girl Who Conquered Time: Third Window Films, the Internet Archive
Emotion: The bonus features of House from The Criterion Collection, the Criterion Channel
The Visitor in The Eye (1977)
Vertigo is cool! Riffing on Vertigo is even cooler! Check it out.
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prV0I4-4kYU
Where to Watch: YouTube, DVD Lady
The Straight Story (1999)
In between his erotic, dream-logic classics Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Dr. (2001), David Lynch made a family film for Disney. Richard Farnsworth plays Alvin Straight, a retired, recovered alcoholic who’s lost his license from old age. When his estranged brother has a heart attack a few towns over, Farnsworth retrofits his riding lawnmower/tractor and takes off on the open road. David Lynch is best known as the creator of Twin Peaks, where the dark underbelly of a small town causes the citizen to cope by acting out with increasingly extreme sincerity and silliness. In The Straight Story, David Lynch takes that sincerity and forges an entire film out of it. It’s not his most popular film because his other film’s dark depravity and more open experimentation are generally “cooler,” but filling a film with this much sincerity without seeming cheesy or campy is arguably the hardest thing he ever pulled off. Except maybe for Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). That’s a miracle.
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BauhJIjn9UkWhere to watch: Disney+, BluRay
Petite Maman (2021)
After the critical success of Celine Sciamma’s lesbian love story Portrait of a Lady of Fire (2019), which is now ranked #30 on BFI’s Sight and Sound’s Greatest Movies of All Time, the French filmmaker followed up with a short and sweet 72-minute film about an 8-year-old girl meeting her mother at 8-years-old in a time-traveling forest. It’s a life-affirming, sweet time that doesn’t overstay its welcome, my 3rd favorite film of 2022 after Everything Everywhere All At Once and Avatar: The Way of Water. You can find it on streaming or the new Criterion edition Blu-Ray releasing in May.
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdORAHCydyY
Where to watch: Hulu, The Criterion Collection
Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022)
Seven years after Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), George Miller returned with a film about Tilda Swinton falling in love with a genie played by Idris Elba, and none of you watched it. You should do that, it’s great. It’s silly and full of both beautiful people and vistas to look at.
Trailer: https://youtu.be/TWGvntl9itE
Where to watch: Rent VOD, BluRay
The Terminal (2004)
Part of Steven Spielberg’s trilogy of films reacting to 9/11, The Terminal isn’t nearly as beloved as Minority Report (2002) and War of the Worlds (2005), but it’s also the only film in the trilogy that stars Tom Hanks employing a ridiculous accent against Stanley Tucci. Inspired by a true story, Hanks plays a man trapped in Kennedy Airport when his home country falls to revolution during his flight. It’s a great look at the weird place American culture was at in 2004, balancing geopolitical commentary with romantic comedy and workplace comedy, it’s a weird artifact and I think it’s a crucial part of understanding how Spielberg changed as an artist after 9/11. In the other two films in this unofficial trilogy, he’s working with much more defined feelings about the world. In contrast, The Terminal is like a Polaroid of his tumultuous brain taken mid-thought.
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZqQRmhRvyg
Where to watch: Paramount+, BluRayRocky Balboa (2006)
In the lead-up to Creed 3’s 2023 release, I finally bit the bullet and watched the two Rocky sequels everyone says to skip, Rocky V (1990) and Rocky Balboa. Rocky V I can’t really recommend, but my hot take is that Act 3 is the end of a much better film than Acts 1 and 2 are. Rocky Balboa, however, gets a hard “SEE IT” from me. It’s a drastically different film from the rest of the franchise, a quiet drama about retirement and growing older while the dead stay the same age. The film trades the heightened world of the Rocky films for a too-good-to-last past and a modern present. Rocky runs a restaurant named after Adrian, who’s passed away from cancer, and he whiles away his days telling clients the same stories of his glory days over and over again. Polly is a drunk who can’t keep up with the times, and Rocky Jr. is a suit-and-tie guy who resents his father. Where earlier Rocky films had real fighters play new characters like Hulk Hogan’s appearance as “Thunderlips” in Rocky 3, this is a film set in the real world of 2006, with Mike Tyson and other sports personalities showing up as themselves, with only Antonio Traver playing a character. Even the boxing moves away from the stylization of the Rocky films, using TV cameras from real broadcast angles for much of the final fight before bringing back some of that surreal editing from Rocky IV and V. I don’t think everyone will love it as much as I do, but I do think most people will enjoy it, and it certainly isn’t a “skippable” Rocky sequel.
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tab8fK2_3w
Where to watch: Amazon Prime, BluRay
The Lady Vanishes (1938)
This film is one many familiar with Alfred Hitchcock will recognize, but for the average Joe, this one won’t make it onto a list full of Psycho (1960), Vertigo (1958), Rear Window (1954), The Birds (1963), Foreign Correspondent (1940), Dial M for Murder (1954), Notorious (1946), and the 39 Steps (1935).
The Lady Vanishes is full of classic Hitchcock tropes, a murder seen by a protagonist who can’t prove it, a train, spy craft, and international intrigue. It’s a ridiculous mystery/romantic comedy that devolves into a big-budget action film, and it’s one of the most fun times you can have watching a Hitchcock classic.
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dPl5LVYSAo
Where to watch: Amazon Prime, Plex, The Criterion Channel, The Criterion Collection
Monsieur Verduex (1947)
One of America’s greatest villains struck again when then FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, having failed to frame Charlie Chaplin for sex trafficking, basically used the radically liberal politics of this film to brand Chaplin a communist and kick the British actor-director out of the United States. And I just love that story, the Red Scare period of our history was insane, and the parallels to what’s happening in Florida right now totally don’t fill my heart with fear every morning.
In this film, Charlie Chaplin plays a blue-beard serial killer seducing and marrying rich widows for their money, then murdering them for the money. The twist? The Stock Market made him do it! After the stock market crash of 1929, charming banker Monsieur Verduex is forced to do whatever it takes to provide for his invalid wife and young son. Comparing serial killing for profit to the Holocaust and the post-WW2 military-industrial complex, and the growing gun lobby in America, Chaplin raged against the machine so hard the machine showed him the door.
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eND72dzh7EU
Where to watch: HBOmax (soon to be renamed MAX), Amazon Prime, The Criterion Channel, The Criterion Collection
Only Yesterday (1991)
Not the “minor work” of a filmmaker but a studio, I’m still trying to come to terms with the fact that my two favorite Studio Ghibli films aren’t Hayao Miyazaki films. My favorite Studio Ghibli film is the coming-of-age drama about art Whisper of the Heart (1995) by Yoshifumi Kondo, who died shortly afterward. But Whisper isn’t really discussed as a “minor” work because it’s generally expected that had Kondo survived, their body of work would have been extensive and lauded. No, my favorite “minor” Ghibli film and 2nd overall is Only Yesterday.
A TV film the studio produced in 1991, it wasn’t imported to the US until Ponyo’s release in 2008, and the American dub is one I recommend you check out after the subbed edition, as it includes a really lovely early performance from Daisy Ridley.
Only Yesterday and Whisper of the Heart are both what I think of as “Lifestyle Ghibli,” adult and teen dramas without the fantastical elements of films like My Neighbor Totoro or Porco Roso. Instead, Only Yesterday uses the medium of animation to bring to life a reality more real than real, a hand-drawn snapshot of 1991 that features the best drawings of Mitsubishi sedans and boxy CRT computers you’ve ever seen. The story sees a young professional in her 30s take a vacation to the historic Takase district of Yamagata City while reminiscing about her childhood. That’s it, that’s the film, and it’s so compelling and powerful a meditation on life and growing up, its release actually spurred a historical conservation movement in Japan that saw much of the land it portrayed being turned into Nation Park-esque property, preserved for the people.
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gSKk-wwLsY
Where to watch: HBOmax (soon to be renamed MAX), BluRay
A maxim my friends and I repeat back and forth to each other when we feel overwhelmed by the era of too much TV, Tik Tok Musicians, and multi-decade movie franchises, is that no matter how many films you watch, you’ll never run out. What a wonderful time to be alive! I hope you take that to heart and let some minor works give you some major joy.
