Film Comment May - June 2015

THIS ISSUE PROVIDES FURTHER EVIDENCE THAT FILM COMMENT HAS GOT NOTHING against a good sequel—provided it isn’t a retread but actually expands upon and deepens the original. Last year’s “Made in Hong Kong II” midsection was a 22-years-on follow-up to guest editor David Chute’s fondly remembered May/June 1988 Midsection “Made in Hong Kong.” And, likewise, this issue’s 30-page blowout on South Korean movies (guest-edited by the tireless Goran Topalovic) picks up where contributing editor Chuck Stephens’s 2004 “Korea Prospects” left off—with a shift in focus to the commercial mainstream cinema of the last 10 years. Why do it? Quite simply because in recent decades Asian cinema has become a major force in the movies, one that can’t be ignored. And Korean filmmaking in particular has demonstrated a vitality and excitement…

THE ITALIAN STRAW HAT & TWO TIMID SOULS René Clair | 1928 | Cinémathèque Française SPINELESS FIDGETY GROOMS, nervous young brides, steely grande dames, hot-tempered men of wide girth, mischievous children, mustachioed bureaucrats, lawyers and justices full of hot air, levelheaded women and their doddering, droopy-eyed husbands... Look long and hard enough at any shot in René Clair’s two adaptations of a 19th-century vaudeville playwright named Eugène Labiche, which were the great comic filmmaker’s final silent features, and it takes on the character of a cartoon strip. Watch the films move, on the other hand, and what emerges is their thrilling and curious pace. Born in Paris two years before the turn of the century, Clair had a special gift for stretching out a scene, heightening tension, and piling stress…

WRONG DIRECTIONS I would have overlooked Amy Taubin writing that Selma takes place in Arkansas as an editing error once, but twice in the same review? Also, the march was from Selma to the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery, not the Montgomery County Courthouse (though, in the scheme of things, the County Courthouse is nearby). I’ll be happy to give her a tour if she’s in town. MARTIN MCCAFFERY DIRECTOR, CAPRI THEATRE MONTGOMERY, AL AMY TAUBIN RESPONDS: I apologize to everyone involved in the making of Selma and to Film Comment’s readers, several of whom wrote letters correcting the glaring error in my essay, “The 50-Year March” (January/ February 2015). In 45 years of film criticism, I’ve three times made the kind of factual mistake that wakes me in the…

While clubs and discos worship the power of loud bass beats, cinema has long sought to suppress such aural impact. It took a maverick like Dennis Hopper to let Gary Rydstrom’s sound design blast Ice-T’s 808 kick-boom into the Dolby-SR mix of Colors in 1988. Focused on racial issues and territorial divisions, Colors is a landmark for allowing the soundtrack to be fat, compressed, and loud— just like rap producers who mixed their beats to sound like gunfire, not drums. That booming bass reverberates a quarter-century later in Sion Sono’s 2014 film Tokyo Tribe, which is basically West Side Story remade as the world’s first all-out rap musical. Minus the love story. Hardly any dialogue. Nonstop hip-hop. All in Japanese. Its soundtrack—100 percent Japan but sounding straight out of Compton/Brooklyn,…

Shot over eight non-contiguous nights in July and August 2014, on and around a welltrafficked corner of Harlem—a deli, a dollar store, a pizzeria, and a Pathmark serve as photographic backdrops—the nonfiction film Field Niggas has the mission and scope of a gallery show but lives online via YouTube. Or at least it did, until its unique formal conceit and 60-minute run-time suggested an experimental documentary to the True/False Film Fest, which screened it in March and advised filmmaker Khalik Allah to stop showing it for free. There’s certainly something unclassifiable about the project. As the photographer converses with his subjects and communes with the chaos on the corner of Lexington and 125th Street, slowmotion street portraits—some stolen, most posed—unspool as dialogue and location sounds carry on at regular speed,…

DOMINIK GRAF IS A WALKING CONTRADICTION. HE’S ONE OF GERMANY’S few certifiable cult auteurs, yet one of his countrymen’s least recognized masters, even though his TV films and series often top the ratings. And while he’s won more awards than any other director in German television history, he’s also something of an outsider and misfit. There’s no filmmaker in Germany today who’s more prolific or more devoted to film and television as forms of enlightening popular entertainment. Graf also writes DVD reviews, book prefaces, and essays for DVD booklets, and has become the most outspoken cinephile in the German media’s top echelon, unearthing treasures galore in the Eastern European archives, the twilight zones of Sixties and Seventies Hollywood and Euro cinema’s fringes, and even his country’s dust-gathering TV libraries. THE…