Tybout: Mastering difficult cinema

Although losing weight and spending more time with your family are admirable New Year’s… Although losing weight and spending more time with your family are admirable New Year’s resolutions, I’ve elected to make a much more difficult lifestyle change: I’m going to watch all the movies I’ve been avoiding.

For me, the advent of 2011 is more daunting than inspiring — after all, I’m one year closer to graduation and have less renown, less money and fewer career prospects than Lil Wayne had at 15. More troublesome to me than my lack of hip-hop cred, however, are the places I haven’t been, the people I’ve never met and, most importantly, the movies I haven’t summoned the will to watch.

Although there’s an innumerable quantity of films that have evaded me by sheer chance, there are also certain movies that I’ve quite consciously steered clear of, despite society’s admonishment that they’re important and worthwhile. This is a situation with which I’m sure my readers can commiserate. Nevertheless, it’s time I abandon my squeamishness and delve headfirst into the world of Difficult Cinema.

Below are the four movies that I resolve to conquer by the end of 2011.

“Eraserhead” (1976): A mainstay in film school curricula, David Lynch’s first feature-length effort — a black, phantasmagoric odyssey through an industrial wasteland — orbits cinematic discussions like an Inquisition-era priest casting doubt upon the unfaithful. Consequently, for every college course on cinema, there are at least two to three students who bear the film’s title on their shirts.

In my defense, descriptions of the movie don’t exactly sell it — the word “nightmare” occurs with alarming frequency. Furthermore, Lynch’s more contemporary masterpiece, “Blue Velvet,” is genius in a disturbing, repulsive sort of way, and takes a good few weeks — or years — to recover from. Nonetheless, “Eraserhead” has amassed such a zealous following that it seems irresponsible of me not to watch it.

“Fanny and Alexander — The Television Version” (1982): By contrast, Ingmar Bergman’s autobiographical epic about the extravagant Ekdahl family isn’t so much frightening as it is insurmountable: at 312 minutes — 312 minutes of slow, ponderous, art house cinema — I’ve never quite mustered the resolve to add it to my Netflix queue. Of course, there’s the comparatively slim 188-minute theatrical version if I decide its more robust incarnation isn’t worth my while, but because Bergman expressed preference for the latter, I’d at least like to attempt to honor the filmmaker.

Thankfully, I have faith in my attention span — I mastered Steven Soderbergh’s two-part, four-and-a-half hour “Che,” hacked my way through Akira Kurosawa’s three-and-a-half hour “Seven Samurai” and vanquished Michael Mann’s 170-minute “Heat.” How difficult can one more indulgent masterpiece be?

“A Clockwork Orange” (1971): I made it about two-thirds of the way through Stanley Kubrick’s lewd, disaffected barrage of a movie — beatings, rapes and all — and then, noticing the hour, decided it was time to go to bed (doubtlessly, unpleasant dreams ensued). That I never resumed my viewing is a fact I don’t entirely regret.

Nevertheless, “A Clockwork Orange” demands my engagement, in part because the latter half is supposedly an astute rumination on free will and totalitarianism. Whether this is actually true is a question you’ll have to ask me at the end of 2011 — if I’m not scarred beyond repair.

“Enter the Void” (2009): Gaspar Noé’s sensory overload embodies all the above-mentioned “difficult” qualities: It’s depraved, bizarre and painfully long. In fact, from the film’s trailer — a garish montage of clubs, drugs and sex — the experience seems akin to how most people describe a bad LSD trip.

Regardless, “Void” — a film about a drug dealer lost in Tokyo before and after his death, composed almost entirely of first-person shots — is one of the most talked-about movies in current critical spheres, and it merits my attention for just that reason.

Of course, since its release, “Void” has been accused of that age-old cinematic sin: being all flair and no substance. Whatever that means, I’ll refrain from criticism until I experience the visual and auditory blast first hand.