Innholdsfortegnelse for May - June 2015 i Film Comment

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…

RICHARD CONTE IS IN MME. ROSE’S “SWEDISH MASSAGE & REDUCING” parlor, getting his chicken choked. Well, he’s getting choked like a chicken, anyway. Hope Emerson is doing the choking, her mighty hands clamped around his neck in one of the key scenes in Cry of the City (48), Robert Siodmak’s onyx ode to Italian-American New York City in the days when elevated trains still crisscrossed lower Manhattan. Emerson is playing one Rose Given, an old-school therapeutic masseuse the size of a voting booth. We first see her in silhouette, a gigantic ink spot spreading in the darkness, backlit and walking toward us, toward Conte, whose wounded-killer-onthe-lam has been sent to her parlor for sanctuary… he thinks. Emerson’s got other ideas. She wants a cut of the loot Conte’s headed for,…

Bae Doona (b. 1979) Perhaps one of the most unconventional actresses working today, from the time she starred in Bong Joon-ho’s Barking Dogs Never Bite (00), dashing around an apartment complex trying to save pups, she’s excelled at portraying people who live in their own inner reality while fully capable of taking (often strenuous) action in the real world. Bae made her debut in the horror film The Ring Virus (99) before Bong cast her in his first feature. This was quickly followed by two coming-of-age films, Plum Blossom (00), in which she plays a suicidal obsessive, and Jeong Jae-eun’s Take Care of My Cat (01), in which her character tries to find her way in the world after graduating high school. Next, she was cast as a young kidnapper…

A DECADE AGO, FEW VIEWERS OUTside of South Korea would have seen or heard of many Korean documentaries, with the possible exception of Byun Young-joo’s groundbreaking Murmuring trilogy (95-99) about the lives of “comfort women” who were forced into sexual servitude by the Japanese military during World War II; or Repatriation (04), Kim Dong-won’s moving portrait of former North Korean spies living in Seoul after serving long prison sentences. South Korean documentaries were highly dynamic, but were also often regarded as insular and inaccessible to non-Koreans. Some might argue that that description still holds. But much has changed in the past 10 years, and contemporary documentaries arguably display more creative energy than any other sector of the Korean film industry. The subjects covered by local filmmakers have grown more diverse,…

Director: Andrew Niccol Country/Year: U.S., 2014 Opening: May 15 Where: New York IN GOOD KILL, THE WAR MOVIE, LIKE THE postmodern warfare it depicts, looks a little different from the norm. Ethan Hawke plays a former fighter pilot who now spends his days remotely flying armed drones and raining death down upon target individuals selected by his superiors. He does so from what resembles a trailer in an Air Force base outside Las Vegas, raising existential (and legal) questions: is he really a soldier at war, or something closer to a particularly deadly technician? In Niccol’s topical chamber piece, the psychological toll of the battlefield never goes away: it’s freshly replenished by the ongoing campaign of drone killings and by the dispiriting moral vacuum created by the government’s bureaucratic methods.…

Director: Quentin Dupieux Country/Year: France/Belgium, 2014 Opening: May 8 Where: New York MUSIC IS ALWAYS AN IMPORTANT ASPECT OF Quentin Dupieux’s films, so it’s no mistake that he chose Philip Glass’s “Music with Changing Parts” for Reality: the piece suggests an apt metaphor for both what happens in the film and what it’s like to watch it. The characters are simplistic, easily recognizable figures drawn from a variety of genres—an aging auteur struggling to inject art into reality TV, a nutso movie producer, a Z-list diva, a precocious but lonely little girl—but through repetition, their problems and quirks snowball into dissonance and absurdity, blurring the line between what’s real and what isn’t. Because this is a Dupieux movie, what’s “real” doesn’t matter: stress dreams turn into movies that bleed into…

LO-FI PICK Another Girl Another Planet Screen Edge, $14.95 WITH RETRO TECHNOLOGIES ALL THE RAGE, it’s a wonder Pixelvision isn’t better known. The PXL 2000 was a camcorder manufactured by Fisher-Price in 1987 that recorded low-res, black-and-white images onto audiocassettes. Sadie Benning first realized its artistic potential in a series of video diaries, and Richard Linklater incorporated it memorably in Slacker. But as Paul Schrader likes to say, the toy (literally—it was marketed as a toy for children) became a tool when Michael Almereyda produced a handful of featurettes in the Nineties. Blown up to 16mm, these films resemble transmissions from a far-off galaxy. Almereyda wrote at the time: “You have the sense that you’re watching something intensely fragile and secret, on the threshold of visibility.” The erratic flux of…

Compound Cinematics: Akira Kurosawa and I By Shinobu Hashimoto Random House, $21.95 Screenwriter Shinobu Hashimoto’s collaboration with Akira Kurosawa produced eight features, and as Hashimoto describes it in this memoir of his creative life, theirs was a significant if conflicted decades-long entanglement, though in strikingly dissimilar ways for each of them. Thanks to their time together, and collaborations with a half-dozen other scenarists whom Hashimoto sketches with enormous respect and affection, world cinema has touchstones like Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Ikiru, and The Hidden Fortress. But Hashimoto’s book is far from being a valedictory summation of impassioned artistic midwifery. It doubles back again and again to feelings of self-recrimination, the guilt and misunderstandings of years spent envisioning a personal cinema for a mass audience, and a nagging sense of compromised achievement…

IN 1974, AFTER HARBORING DISSIDENT AUTHOR Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his country home, cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich was forced into exile from the USSR. Fifteen years later, the Soviet Union dissolved, and Rostropovich returned to Moscow to conduct a concert with the National Symphony Orchestra. In Soldiers of Music: Rostropovich Returns to Russia (91), Albert Maysles—the late New York–based Direct Cinema pioneer whose very first film, the 14-minute documentary Psychiatry in Russia (56), was shot in Moscow—accompanied the celebrated musician and his family to document the emotional weeklong journey. Midway through the film, the family travels to the grave of another Soviet dissident, scientist Andrei Sakharov. Just prior to this scene, we’ve watched Rostropovich tell broadcast journalist Mike Wallace that Sakharov was the greatest figure of his generation. Wallace, a…

Boo Ji-young (b. 1971) Though economically and technologically advanced and increasingly progressive, Korea still boasts few female directors. But a new name has recently emerged, joining the likes of Yim Soon-rye (Forever the Moment, 08), Bang Eun-jin (Princess Aurora, 05), and Byun Young-joo (Helpless, 12). After working as a script supervisor on Lee Jae-yong’s Untold Scandal (03), Korean Academy of Film Arts graduate Boo Jiyoung made a strong feature debut with Sisters on the Road (08). A meditative journey that contemplates the state of womanhood in modern Korea, Boo’s film gave established stars Kong Hyo-jin and Shin Min-a the opportunity to deliver performances of greater range than usual. Following Myselves: The Actress No Makeup Project (12), an experimental omnibus in which actresses were invited to film themselves, Boo broke through…

FOR MANY, THE WORLD PREMIERE OF DOMINIK GRAF’S ESSAY documentary Then Is It the End? The Film Critic Michael Althen was the 65th Berlinale’s true closing-night celebration. Sure, there was another day of screenings ahead, capped by the awards ceremony, and, yes, it was presented in the International Forum of Young Cinema and not as part of the Official Selection. But that didn’t really matter to German cinephiles—and it was strictly for them that the film was shown, sans subtitles or headphone translation. The screening was standing-roomonly for this act of collective commemoration for Althen, one of the few German critics revered by readers and colleagues alike, for he actually had something to say, and did so stylishly. His death in 2011, at only 48, left a gaping hole in…

Director: André Téchiné Country/Year: France, 2014 Opening: May 15 Where: New York and Los Angeles FIVE YEARS AFTER The Girl on the Train, André Téchiné tackles another real-life cause célèbre in which the central transgression may never have occurred. Like Chabrol, his concern is less for the crimes, or paranoid accusations, than for the emotional and interpersonal tensions they incite. The bulk of the film recounts events leading up to the 1977 disappearance of heiress Agnès Le Roux (Adèle Haenel). Her lover Maurice (Guillaume Canet), a lawyer who’d helped Agnès’s mother (Catherine Deneuve) take control of a casino and then dethroned her with help from Agnès, emigrated to Panama when she went missing. Agnès’s body was never discovered, but her fortune found its way into Maurice’s bank account. While most…

Director: Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy Country/Year: Ukraine, 2014 Opening: June 17 Where: New York WE OPEN ON AN ACT OF KINDNESS: A WOMAN at a bus stop gives a shy deaf boy detailed directions to his destination. It will be the only instance of generosity in the film. Immediately upon arriving at the grim boarding school for the deaf that serves as the main setting for The Tribe—Ukrainian director Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s takenotice debut feature—Sergey (Grygory Fesenko) is hurled into a pit of abuse, criminality, and bone-deep misanthropy. In due course he becomes part of the brutality, mercilessly mugging townspeople and pimping out female classmates to truckers, until even stirrings of love and conscience are expressed with clenched fists. Slaboshpytskiy’s gambit is to thrust us into the domain of the deaf by eliminating…

Film Rhythm after Sound: Technology, Music, and Performance By Lea Jacobs University of California Press, $34.95 I’LL START WITH A SIMPLE DECLARATIVE STATEMENT: THIS IS a brilliant book. If you care about the way that movies are made and experienced, you need to read it. Now. The best of Hollywood cinema, writes Lea Jacobs in the closing paragraph of her introduction, was, “above all, a rhythmic art.” By the time you get to the Afterword, you might want to change the tense from past to present and expand the definition to cover cinema as a whole. Rhythm has been invoked often in critical and theoretical circles since the birth of cinema, but selectively, discontinuously, and often in vague terms. For instance, a great deal has been made of Eisenstein’s Odessa…

Raymond Gid THE MOST SPIRITUALLY INCLINED of poster artists, Raymond Gid (1905-2000) was a designer whose work is instantly recognizable, even without that distinctive elegant signature that sits above his titles. While the great mid-century French affichistes like Boris Grinsson, Jean Mascii, and Roger Soubie were all realists and superb draughtsman, Gid’s work was notably more abstract, painterly, and impressionistic. His best posters center on elongated, faceless figures standing as if in judgment or penitence. Unlike his prolific contemporaries, Gid did not paint all that many movie posters in his long career; in addition to those pictured here for Jean-Pierre Melville and Henri-Georges Clouzot, he designed posters for Carl Theodor Dreyer, Marcel Carné, René Clair, André Cayatte, and Jean Rouch. But he also created memorable posters for worthy causes such…

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…

Director: Roy Andersson Country/Year: Sweden, 2014 Opening: June 3 Where: New York LIKE THE RUMINATING BIRD OF ITS TITLE, Roy Andersson’s latest film (the concluding chapter in his trilogy about “being a human being”) perches decidedly above the world it studies, gazing down fixedly upon its inhabitants from a perspective at once sympathetically engaged and assiduously distanced. A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence surveys an array of characters— mostly urban sad sacks whose pallid skin and doughy physiques externalize some inchoate malaise—though the film returns most consistently to a pair of traveling salesmen hawking some truly depressing novelty gags. “We want to help people have fun,” one of the peddlers mumbles and Andersson indeed offers viewers some genuine art-house giggles in his wryly observed comic vignettes, captured…

Director: Crystal Moselle Country/Year: U.S., 2015 Opening: June 12 Where: New York FREAKY FAMILIES, SHUT-INS (OFTEN IN THE form of outsider artists), and pop-culture fandom are irresistible to documentary filmmakers. Crystal Moselle hit the jackpot with The Wolfpack, after spotting a band of long-haired youths striding down a New York street in Reservoir Dogs outfits. It turns out the brothers were leading a hermitic existence in a Lower East Side housing project—prevented by their Peruvian hippie father from going outside more than a few times a year, home-schooled by Mom, but permitted to watch countless movies. There’s no way that a twisted backstory of dysfunction and paranoia couldn’t lurk behind this bizarre state of affairs, but Moselle respects her six articulate, soft-spoken subjects enough not to portray them solely as…