Terence Nance’s Top10

I watched this movie because someone told me that Fassbinder made more than forty movies in fifteen years, and at the time I was having a quarter-life crisis revolving around the question of how to crack the nut of being prolific. So I watched it to figure that out, and it was transcendent but casually so. Then later someone told me that Fassbinder achieved his output by consuming lots of meth (or the sixties version of meth) and never sleeping and that he died at thirty-seven, so I decided being prolific wasn’t for me because I want to meet my grandkids and get foot massages.

Watched a lot of this on my phone on the RER B because I kept seeing the cover or poster or something. Watched it in sections on my phone, which must be blasphemy. I watched it while I was in postproduction for An Oversimplification of Her Beauty and briefly became insecure about finishing the movie because I felt that, as a person making a movie about making a movie about all the women in my life, I was accidentally plagiarizing 8½.

From whence I came.

Watched this while on walkabout in France because I had an idea to make a movie about dysphasic doppelgängers of the opposite sex. Don’t know why it affected me, but it did.

Dad showed this to me when I was four, I think. I didn’t remember that until I watched it in my early twenties after seeing Badlands and recognized all of it. Changed my life. Didn’t know you could do something both epic and casual.

Saw it recently in theaters during the re-release because I wondered where Wes got his thing from.

Saw it with my whole family when I was seven. Sat in my uncle Linny’s lap, I think, or next to him. He covered my eyes when Mookie rubbed ice on Tina’s areola. I saw through his fingers. I thought I was those people, but I was a child.

Saw it in Paris; Wes hosted a screening. I didn’t know white Americans made good movies. Got me digging. Finally watched Citizen Kane because of it.

Don’t know why he works on me, but he does. Saw Life Aquatic in a theater but was oblivious before that. Didn’t know you were allowed to go for the internal laugh before this.

Ja’Tovia, my be-all and end-all at the time, took me to see this in the theater. I didn’t know people could make movies that were art. So she started my career by taking me to this and then to Amélie not too long after that. I didn’t know that filmmakers were allowed to go off on tangents, and since I don’t think linearly, this introduced me to the idea that I had a place in cinema.