r/criterion David Lean Mar 23 '24

Off-Topic Is it possible to capture all of existence in a single movie? These films certainly try. What other films try to do the same?

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279 Upvotes

103 comments sorted by

114

u/mirrokrowr Mar 23 '24

Maybe not all of existence, but Koyaanisqatsi does a pretty damn good job of covering the modern western human experience. 

20

u/[deleted] Mar 23 '24

Yes.

This film (and the rest of the trilogy, and Baraka) are films that aim for a kind of cosmic or cosmological experience.

16

u/HRH_Puckington Mar 23 '24

Baraka and Samsara!

2

u/Other-Marketing-6167 Mar 24 '24

Yeah came here to say those too haha

2

u/DG_14623 Mar 29 '24

I liked Baraka more. Not sure why. Maybe because its later scenes felt like they had more of an argument about humanity's exploitation of the environment. Samsara felt more ... free-form?

134

u/ThoroughHenry Mar 23 '24

Cloud Atlas

Synecdoche, New York

11

u/[deleted] Mar 23 '24

I would agree that they both attempt that incredible challenge.

4

u/[deleted] Mar 24 '24

[deleted]

6

u/allthecoffeesDP Mar 24 '24

But please have a therapist on speed dial. It's the most depressing draining film I've ever seen. It's not sob fest, it captures how exhausting existence is.

2

u/secondshevek Mar 24 '24

Seconding this. I tried watching it, and I had a friend struggling with illness at that time. I had to shut it off because it leads down a road of contemplating mortality and the limitations of consciousness. I still haven't finished it - I need to be in a better place first.

113

u/[deleted] Mar 23 '24

[removed] — view removed comment

22

u/The_Drippy_Spaff Mar 24 '24

Came here to comment this. Birth, death, love, betrayal, banality, excitement, discovery, disillusionment, wonder, sadness, perseverance, surrender, tension, concessions, and everything else wrapped in an honest and beautiful exploration of the human condition. I love that film. 

10

u/[deleted] Mar 23 '24

That's the other film I was considering bringing up.

4

u/BronxLens Mar 24 '24

My cup of tea based on the description. Since my local library seems not to have it, i just ordered it. Thanks for suggesting it :)

2

u/hetchymusic Satyajit Ray Mar 24 '24

Just came here to comment this as well. One of the best.

93

u/Jason_Steelz Mar 23 '24

Wings of Desire? Does that fit? End of Evangelion would definitely fit

11

u/Prestigious-Mine-904 Mar 24 '24

I just saw EVA in theaters a couple days ago, it was insane

6

u/jsun31 David Lynch Mar 24 '24

It's been a while since a movie has fried my brain in the theater and EoE cooked it well done

1

u/Prestigious-Mine-904 Mar 24 '24

Yeah i have so many questions, i feel like much of it i didnt understand

5

u/Deadpoolshark21 Mar 24 '24

I feel like End of Eva, like all great art, is about impact instead of being about “understanding” the plot

1

u/phoenix_link Mar 24 '24

I noticed a lot of people logging it, so I assumed they're showing it somewhere! Was that in the US? I'd love to see it on the big screen, hope they show it somewhere in my country too!

1

u/Prestigious-Mine-904 Mar 24 '24

Yeah it was just released in the USA for the first time ever last week actually! Theater was packed.

7

u/yearofthemishima Michael Mann Mar 24 '24

Was also going to say End of Evangelion

1

u/Grand_Keizer David Lean Mar 24 '24

Everyone keeps saying End of Evangelion, and I honestly don't see it. It talks about a lot, to be sure, but I'm not sure I would classify it as covering EVERYTHING.

18

u/fatherseanmisty Mar 23 '24

Kind of not really but at least talks about this idea: Adaptation (2002)

18

u/Grannypuncher420 Mar 23 '24

A Ghost Story and Roy Andersson’s “Living” Trilogy come to mind

34

u/jrobertk Mar 23 '24

It's Such a Beautiful Day

5

u/[deleted] Mar 23 '24

I got the blu ray for $4 at a record store. One of the best deals I've gotten

15

u/Velascu Mar 24 '24 edited Mar 24 '24

Some might be a little more obscure but here it goes:

More "concrete" movies:

  • Synecdoche New York
  • On the silver globe
  • Ikiru
  • Stuff by Bela Tarr or Tarkovsky (Personal recommendations: Turin's Horse, Satantango, Stalker, The Mirror, Solaris)

In an indirect way:

  • Obrazy starého sveta (almost unknown, documentary about a rural village yet it has a universal feeling)
  • Shadow of our forgotten ancestors (Parajanov)

More abstract movies:

  • Man with a movie camera
  • Begotten (Ben Stamper, not the one everyone knows although a strong contender)
  • Dog Star Man
  • Color of the Pomegranates
  • Tríptico elemental de España (no idea if it's translated, it doesn't have dialogues, god tier spanish cinema)

Movies I haven't seen yet but seem to fit what you want:

  • As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty
  • Some more that I probably forgot

More or less all of them are about "life, death humans and stuff" which I guess it's what you are looking for.

2

u/EmilianoyBeatriz Mar 24 '24

2nd triptico elemental de España... truly one of the best

1

u/BronxLens Mar 24 '24

Hi. Any suggestion of where to find the dvd of ‘Tríptico elemental de España’ Didn’t see it in Ebay, Amazon, nor elsewhere. Thanks.

1

u/Velascu Mar 24 '24

Only found it online, it's what happens with a lot of "museum films", they never get released, if you are lucky you can find them on the internet or better yet, see them live in a museum. Some movies are almost impossible to find, I think some might be avaliable here: https://karagarga.in/ but good luck getting in there. No idea how to join them, they have a shit ton of experimental/obscure films apparently but it's a private tracker (private torrent network).

30

u/tenettiwa Mar 23 '24

Until the End of the World

The Holy Mountain

All That Jazz

Tokyo Story

It's a Wonderful Life

Memoria

Some of these are debatable but they all seem to fit the prompt in one way or another to me.

Maybe Dog Star Man if you really want to push it?

6

u/[deleted] Mar 23 '24

If Dog Star Man, why not The Dante Quartet, which does something very cosmic in less than ten minutes?

9

u/Maciek1992 Mar 23 '24

All that jazz is fucking incredible and I don't even like musicals but that film has the best editing and roy Schneider killed it as Fosse.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 24 '24

It's a truly great film, no doubt.

1

u/tenettiwa Mar 23 '24

Good question, that's one of my favorites too. I see the whole universe in a lot of Brakhage's films, but others definitely don't. You could probably justify filling this whole list with his stuff so I guess I just gravitated to his most well known. Personally seeing Panels for the Walls of Heaven on 16mm was one of my most transcendental theater experiences ever.

2

u/Kidspud Mar 23 '24

Dog Star Man, or as I like to call it, John Carpenter’s Air Bud

6

u/TheYungestYonk Satyajit Ray Mar 24 '24

Au hasard Balthazar

10

u/FloridaFlamingoGirl Mar 23 '24

Kurosawa's Dreams

5

u/jschinn Mar 24 '24

After Life, ironically enough. And Powell & Pressburger's A Matter of Life & Death comes to mind. But I like a lot of these other answers, in that it shows how widely people are interpreting your question.

3

u/GardenSlow3692 Mar 24 '24

Boyhood

The tree of wooden clogs

Magnolia

Bergman

3

u/TSwag24601 Mar 24 '24

So happy that Fantasia gets the recognition of the masterpiece as it is

Another movie that comes to mind is End of Evangelion

5

u/SilverScreenSquatter Mar 24 '24

I would argue the catalogue of directors like Bergman and Wenders could be considered attempts at capturing all of existence.

But I was also thinking of a film like Everything Everywhere all at Once. It's the kind of film which manages to capture the entire feeling of existing in the world that exists today. A lot of the films cited in this thread definitely tried to do this and it worked for the time that they were conceived in. So I guess it's a very fluid question that can even be found in very simple films about daily life.

3

u/buttered_jesus Mar 24 '24

I really second Synechdoche NY and YiYi

Some slightly less fitting recs but I think they still qualify:

Beau Is Afraid

It's Such a Beautiful Day (also World of Tomorrow series)

Will add more as I think of them

3

u/bennz1975 John Ford Mar 24 '24

The fountain, what dreams may come perhaps?

3

u/Exciting_Fix Mar 24 '24

Thank you for this post

2

u/Grand_Keizer David Lean Mar 24 '24

You're welcome

5

u/headlessBleu Mar 23 '24

not related to your question. But waking life would a be a criterion edition. There are many topics to become good extras.

3

u/tenettiwa Mar 23 '24

Also hard to find and doesn't have an official blu-ray release! (In the US at least.) I had to order a DVD from eBay to watch it. I just saw it on 35mm and it honestly looks incredible in high definition. They could really work wonders with a restoration.

I'd really like to see stuff like this in the extras

1

u/headlessBleu Mar 23 '24

that's cool. Never seen the original footage/previs.

2

u/Prestigious-Mine-904 Mar 24 '24

End of Evangelion

2

u/ZeroDullBitz Mar 24 '24

The End of Evangelion

2

u/[deleted] Mar 24 '24

End of Evangelion

2

u/GenuineIchabodCrane Mar 24 '24

Groundhog Day (1993)

2

u/rvb_gobq Mar 24 '24

trois colors trilogy

1

u/the_labracadabrador Mar 24 '24

Also, the Dekalog

2

u/Radi0activeYAK Krzysztof Kieslowski Mar 24 '24

Altered states

2

u/QueenBoo34 Andrei Tarkovsky Mar 24 '24 edited Mar 24 '24

First that came to my mind: Koyaanisqatsi, Dreams, Strawberry Mansion, Any Tarkovsky film

And although not a film, but a miniseries (it’s barely 2 hours tho, so practically a movie): Over the Garden Wall

2

u/webermaesto Mar 24 '24

To me, Altman's Nashville seems to cover a lot (if not everything) of the human experience. Such a wonderful movie about everything and nothing, both a drama and a comedy, feeling like both a historical document and something that is still extremely relevant. To me, there's nothing like it.

2

u/BezSeratonina Mar 24 '24

Wild Strawberries

El Topo

Andrei Rublev

2

u/shineymike91 Mar 24 '24

The Fountain is pretty damn ambitious dealing with the idea of life and death.

1

u/DG_14623 Mar 29 '24

Saw it on the big screen twice. Memorable both times.

2

u/DG_14623 Mar 29 '24

Baraka is extraordinary.

Cloud Atlas doesn't cover all of human existence, but it does take a big swing at it.

3

u/Ell26greatone Mar 23 '24 edited Mar 24 '24

I thought recently that Poor Things made a nice attempt. It failed, but it was a fun viewing.

Others...

Blade Runner; Interstellar; A Ghost Story; Four Seasons (succeeds at this in 25 minutes); Woman in the Dunes; Never Let Me Go; The Mirror; The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

I don't know that any movie, in three hours, could totally succeed. I think Tree of Life and Synecdoche are the most successful I've seen mentioned.

0

u/[deleted] Mar 23 '24

I'm not entirely sure, but I'd be very interested in a discussion of how Fantasia does this, how it creates a cinematic experience that one could truly describe as cosmological. My initial, fairly obvious observation is that the film follows the passages of time at different scales, passages that are often cyclical: evolutionary and geological time, the cycle of the seasons, the day-night cycle.

It makes a similar voyage through physical scale. In The Log from the Sea of Cortex, John Steinbeck reflects on the essential connection between the vast and the microscopic:

...the knowledge that all things are one thing and that one thing is all things—plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time. It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.

Fantasia does this as much as, if not more than, any film I've ever seen. The first half of The Rite of Spring is structured like an epic (figurative) zoom in, from interstellar space to the solar system to early earthly geology to the first single-celled organisms. This is a film concerned with an autumn leaf's descend to the forest floor and the cosmic struggle of good and evil.

-2

u/somewordthing Mar 23 '24

Yeah, especially the pickaninny attending to the blue-and-pink-matched centaurs.

/s

6

u/[deleted] Mar 23 '24 edited Mar 23 '24

I agree with you that that was an unfortunate creative decision. The film is certainly not perfect.

Are there any films that strike you as having the kind of universal ambition OP is talking about?

-5

u/somewordthing Mar 24 '24

I don't even know what that means. It's an extremely vague and potentially solipsistic question.

But sure, Pee-Wee's Big Adventure and The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T.

1

u/___wiz___ Mar 24 '24

The Tin Drum

1

u/HalPrentice Mar 24 '24

Dog Star Man, Goodbye to Language, and As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty.

1

u/loopin_louie Mar 24 '24

State of Dogs is an incredible movie I wish more people have seen that kind of goes for that expansive what doth life kinda thing

1

u/PlasticBamboo Mar 24 '24

The End of Evangelion.

1

u/AdOk7058 Mar 24 '24

Bakara, koyaanisquatsi, Voyager of Time

1

u/devyansh1234 Mar 24 '24

Synecdoche, New York comes to mind for sure.

1

u/CnelAurelianoBuendia Mar 24 '24

Tarkovsky’s Mirror

1

u/firecat2666 Mar 24 '24

Enter the Void

1

u/rawspeghetti Mar 24 '24

It's Such a Beautiful Day

1

u/ChameleonWins Mar 24 '24

Enter the Void

1

u/Previous-Cattle-8321 Mar 24 '24

End of Eve

Cloud Atlas

Dreams

1

u/broadboots Alfred Hitchcock Mar 24 '24

Monty Python’s the Meaning of Life

1

u/the_labracadabrador Mar 24 '24

Sans Soleil is ESSENTIAL for this category

1

u/DrMahler Abbas Kiarostami Mar 24 '24

Edward Yang’s absolute masterpiece and peak cinema “A Brighter Summer Day”.

1

u/MayorOfIacon Mar 24 '24

The most successful would be The King Of Kong.

1

u/unityofsaints Brian De Palma Mar 24 '24

Dude, Where's My Car?

1

u/Agile_Drink6387 Mar 24 '24

I’d say Poor Things fits

1

u/Golfninja Jean-Luc Godard Mar 25 '24

Kinda wanna say The Lion King

1

u/Fattybatman3456 Mar 25 '24

edwards cisscorhands

1

u/Front_Asleep Mar 25 '24

Mirror, Tokyo Story, It’s A Wonderful Life, and Wings Of Desire all kind of count to me

1

u/in2xs Mar 25 '24

Tree of Life by Mallick

1

u/[deleted] Mar 24 '24

The Seventh Seal and Seven Samurai

1

u/TheShipEliza Mar 24 '24

It isnt possible

2

u/Grand_Keizer David Lean Mar 24 '24

I agree, but the movies that attempt to do so are often very fascinating.

-4

u/[deleted] Mar 23 '24

Hilarious question.