Innholdsfortegnelse for July - August 2017 i Film Comment

The wide, wide world of cinematic nonfiction Where were you when i was there, fucking myself? Where were you? Doing what?” the subject asks, thrusting his finger so far toward the unseen filmmaker that it moves out of focus. The moment comes halfway through the knotty new documentary A River Below, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in April. It’s a film that comes on as an activist exposé of illegal slaughtering of the Amazon’s endangered pink river dolphin, then turns into an ethical hall of mirrors. Suddenly the supposed bad guys are revealed to be impoverished can’t-win middle men, while the tactics of wildlife defenders like the speaker of the above quote, Richard Rasmussen, a biologist and gregarious celebrity host of a popular show on National Geographic Brazil,…

Redefining the boundaries of the new-media age In the first act of cardboard computer’s curious, episodic point-and-click adventure game Kentucky Route Zero, the player’s avatar—a grizzled deliveryman named Conway, in the midst of finishing his final job for Lysette’s Antiques— finds himself detoured into dropping off an old television set to eccentric mathematician Weaver Márquez. Once it’s set up, a strange image appears on the screen, resembling the view of the nearby barn as seen from the living-room window behind the set. Weaver queries Conway: “That’s not how it’s supposed to look. You’ve made a mistake setting it up. Is it a foreign object to you? Which of your parents was it who wouldn’t allow you to watch television?” At that point, the player is allowed to select Conway’s response…

Closer Look: An Yvonne Rainer retrospective runs July 21 to 27 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. “How do you unhook this audience that dreams with all its eyes open?” —yvonne rainer, “More Kicking and Screaming from the Narrative Front/Backwater,” Wide Angle (1985) While the current vogue in the culture wars is for representation above all else, in the 1970s feminist artists and writers were consumed by how to reconfigure narrative entirely. From Laura Mulvey’s seminal “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema” to Constance DeJong’s influential postmodern novel Modern Love, women advocated for a new type of story, one that did not replicate a scopophilic, male view. Conventional narrative was regarded as not just an expression of the patriarchy, but a tool for indoctrinating society into One of the most…

Any festival that programs one unassuming masterpiece; two vibrant, pulse-racing American indies by relatively unknown directors; one exquisite, wonderfully acted depiction of New York history by an indie veteran; two romantic comedies of manners by French veterans at the top of their game; one epic TV series; and one genre-busting Korean/American production that outraged both critics and guardians of the movie business status quo should not be dismissed out of hand. While the favorite films of my colleagues from around the world may not correspond to mine, most critics did find a few films to at least like very much at the 70th Cannes Film Festival. Sadly, that’s just not enough. When one watches an average of four movies a day for 12 days, and the vast majority of them…

Considering that the barrage of bad news out of washington reaches you no matter what country you’re in, going to Glamorous Cannes certainly did not feel like a vacation from reality. Keeping up with the latest presidential crisis or gaffe du jour was like carrying around a baby monitor transmitting the sounds of your house on fire. “Yes, there it is—still on fire. Off to the Lumière I go!” In the immediate terms of festivalgoing, one result was that—next to the litany of venality and cruelty described in Washington Post or New York Times news alerts—envelope- pushers looked tame and minor movies could feel pretty darned minor. And perhaps it was the conditioning of world events, but more and more movies felt built around Messages and Issues, a sensation I…

Director: Dustin Guy Defa Country/Distributor: USA, Magnolia Pictures Opening: July 28 The new film by dustin guy defa is a web of breezy vignettes that perfectly captures the experience of living in New York City circa 2017 by way of 1979. Set over the course of one day, multiple story lines coexist but never unite, treading alongside each other and crisscrossing in turn. A teenage girl cuts class with her best friend only to feel scorned when two boys join their party unannounced. Two clumsy reporters, one of them on her first day on the job, follow detectives on the beat investigating a possible murder case while a good-natured record collector chases after a con artist, and a watch repairman works in his shop on East Broadway. Playing a broad…

DVD/DEBUT BLU-RAY/DEBUT STREAMING EXCLUSIVE TO VOD Recent Indian indies on Netflix Bollywood blockbusters might be the main draw of Netflix’s Indian Movies category, but its most interesting offerings come—rather surprisingly—from the country’s burgeoning independent wave. The 200-odd-title selection houses some of the most formally inventive and politically audacious Indian indies from recent years, many of which never find an outlet outside of international film festivals. In Nagraj Manjule’s debut Fandry (2013), a Dalit boy’s infatuation with his fair-skinned, upper-caste classmate sets the stage for a searing indictment of the caste system. The film represents a growing trend of Marathi indies in which a child’s coming-ofage brings into sharp focus the social schisms and indignities of mofussil Maharashtra. Poet-turned-director Manjule leavens the movie’s angst with rhythm and restraint. Captured in dreamy…

Joseph McBride prefaces each piece with a contextualizing introduction, and part of what makes this volume fun is the informal history it offers of a key critic’s own evolving taste and career. Two Cheers for Hollywood: Joseph McBride on Movies By Joseph McBride, hightower Press, $38.50 Anyone who’s read his astute critical biographies of Capra, Ford, Spielberg, and Welles knows that Joseph McBride is one of our most invaluable film historians. No less ambitious but more personal are his three most recent books: his hefty Into the Nightmare: My Search for the Killers of President John F. Kennedy and Officer J.D. Tippit (2013), his very moving and painfully candid The Broken Places: A Memoir (2015), and now an even heftier volume collecting half a century’s worth of his film journalism…

Filmmaking according to the makers It always starts with the story—whether it’s in a beat sheet form or a script or a treatment of some kind. You break it down, you get to the city you want to shoot in, and you start looking. Hopefully I get some description from the screenwriter—of, say, a house, or an apartment building, or an office. And I start looking with that in mind. I try to get there two or three weeks in advance to get a sense of the place and get some things lined up. Then the production designer joins me and we drive around endlessly. When I go to a city for a project, I look for the civic center, the oldest part of the city, the historic part. Then…

Closer Look: Good Time opens on August 11. Recently i rode a crowded e train to new york’s JFK Airport. The one-stop journey from Jackson Heights–Roosevelt Avenue/74th Street to Forest Hills–71st Avenue is a protracted one, a fact that attracts entrepreneurs looking for a captive audience. Sure enough, as soon as the doors closed a man piped up to hawk light-up fidget spinners and bling bling rings. Five dollars each, buy two get one free. With practiced skill, everyone looked extra intently at their smartphones, books, companions, and empty laps. Eventually the dude got on a ramble, comparing himself to LeBron James and offering surprisingly detailed basketball analyses before looping expertly back to the light-up fidget spinners and bling bling rings, five dollars each buy two get one free. This time…

Call it a mess, or call it the Borgesian quest to construct the infinite library. The latter seems truer to the private workstation of filmmaker Chris Marker, who, early in his career, wrote the narration for Alain Resnais’s Borgesian 1956 documentary on the Bibliothèque Nationale, Toute la mémoire du monde. Absent a photographic portrait of the notoriously camera-shy artist at work, one searches these shelves to confirm the encyclopedic scope of his themes and obsessions. A Star Trek compendium acts as utopian pop-culture double to Marker’s dark sci-fi experiments (La Jetée, Level Five); a book on Moroccan secret-prison survivor Ali Bourequat attests to Marker’s concern for social justice and human rights (Report on Brazil: Torture); multiple titles on May ’68 reflect Marker’s dedication to the memory and promise of revolution…

Many years ago now, the writer Larry Gross predicted that the term “indie” would devolve from the designation of an actual economic position within the film industry to pure marketing speak. He was correct, of course. The common usage of “auteur” has similarly devolved and, like “liberal” before it, become a damning epithet. “It’s an auteur film...,” one hears. What does that mean? Like all words that have come unmoored from their actual origins (by the way, I’m not referring to the actual French word for “author,” but the cinema- specific usage), it now indicates a range of possible implications, exactly what shade depending on the implicator. Sometimes it simply means the work of an individual; sometimes it stands for esoteric, rarefied, or self-indulgent; and sometimes it stands for a…

Remembering cinéastes who have passed on Back in the days when i was happily under the sway of andrew sarris’s auteurist categories and thinking a lot about defining directorial style, I would get stumped on Jonathan Demme. Clearly he possessed a humane attitude toward people and their untidy situations, but he could also do exploitation pictures. On the formal side, ensemble films like Handle with Care (1977) and Melvin and Howard (1980) seemed to have a frowsy casualness, but Demme and his longtime DP Tak Fujimoto could calibrate the variations in camera angle and gradations of lighting in the Hannibal-Clarice encounters in The Silence of the Lambs (1991) so that each tightly wound conversation had its own precise— almost geometrical—arrangement in space. Actually, I still think a lot about directorial…

Andrzej Zulawski’s fluid, roving camera is so attentive to every pang, twinge, or slightest hint of agony that it seems to expose the characters’ every nerve. Director: Andrzej Zulawski Country/Distributor: France, Rialto Pictures Opening: July 14 The films of andrzej zulawski, who died in February 2016, have been slow to receive theatrical runs in America, leaving him still one of the more overlooked European auteurs. His 1975 tragicomedy L’Important c’est d’aimer was a César-winning success in France, putting Zulawski back on his feet after a period of gloom following the failure of The Devil. Yet at the time it was shown in the U.S. in a dubbed version as That Most Important Thing: Love. The French-language original makes its debut U.S. theatrical engagement only now (under its French title and…

Germaine Dulac has been pigeonholed with the surrealists for her use of jump cuts and distorted lenses, though it is her cunning insight into the psychology of her characters that distinguishes her work today. Early Women Filmmakers: An International Anthology 1902-1943, Flicker Alley One of the enduring mysteries of cinema is how women amassed so much power in its infancy, only to lose it quite quickly. Diversity of course remains an issue today, with female directors still fighting for parity. This wide-ranging three-disc set, made up of 25 shorts, features, actualities, and animations, showcases works from the usual suspects—pioneers Alice Guy-Blaché, Lois Weber, and Mabel Normand; German animator Lotte Reiniger, French theoretician Germaine Dulac, and Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl; Dorothy Arzner, who for years was the only woman directing in…

There’s a moody vibrance to Closeness’s many interiors, full of shadow and nocturnal colors, and we get the sense that there’s no escape to a greater outside world. One of the very rare discoveries at Cannes this year, Kantemir Balagov’s debut feature turns a story about a kidnapping into a restless portrait of a frustrated young woman. Set in 1998 within a Caucasus community where Jewish and Kabardian clans live side by side, Closeness begins as an in-the-fray look at a tight-knit family. Ilana (a riveting Darya Zhovner) works with her dad, a mechanic. She shares a crass bond with her brattishly funny brother, David (Veniamin Kac), who’s the center of attention because of his engagement. Then David and his fiancée disappear, and a ransom is demanded. The kidnapping causes…

King of Hearts abounds in slap stick violence that turns deadlyon a dime, as chance run-ins and incidental happenings come to have crucial s ignificance . King of Hearts Philippe de Broca, 1966, Cohen Media Group When he was in his twenties during the algerian War, Philippe de Broca spent two and a half years making films for the French army. He came home, apprenticed under Chabrol and Truffaut, and in the mid-’60s directed two farcical and brightly colored movies about servicemen that hardly looked or moved like the war films on which they riffed. That Man from Rio (1964) centers on an air-force pilot (Jean-Paul Belmondo) who spends his weeklong leave driving and flying across Brazil to rescue his lover (Françoise Dorléac) from a band of conspirators. King of…

Soon after the world premiere of Good Time at Cannes, its star, Robert Pattinson, could finally sit still for a moment for an interview in a hotel on the Croisette. He was affable, thoughtful, and talking just like a film nerd. You’ve worked with David Cronenberg, James Gray, the Safdie Brothers. Next up is Claire Denis in High Life. Do you have a list of filmmakers you’re checking off? I just got a little part I’m super-happy about, with Ciro Guerra, who did Embrace of the Serpent. That movie was beautiful. I like finding people who make these alien artifact movies, like Claire Denis. I watched all of her movies over last weekend, and each of them was this little unique universe. What’s your favorite Claire Denis film? I really love…

As you might expect of any change-resistant 70-year-old, cannes leans heavily on the tried and true. Yet amid the pageantry of old masters on autopilot, there are special cases, filmmakers for whom repetition is not a matter of revisiting past glories but a means of renewal. A maestro of this rare art, Hong Sang-soo was back at the festival this year—with two films, no less—to prove that some forms of déjà vu are more interesting than others. The increasingly prolific Hong premiered Claire’s Camera and The Day After, his 20th and 21st features (and his second and third of the year), on successive days. To counter the common rap that he makes the same film over and over, The Day After, which competed for the Palme d’Or, is one of…

Director: Eliza Hittman Country/Distributor: USA, Neon Opening: August 25 Idon’t really know what i like” is a recurring line spoken by closeted 19- year-old Frankie, the protagonist of Eliza Hittman’s Beach Rats, and while the words are a shield of armor the boy wears, they also speak a truth greater than he probably even knows. He says these words in response to queries about his sexual preferences and proclivities, usually asked by older men he meets while displaying himself on webcam on the site Brooklyn Boys. What constitutes his “type” may be unclear—as he says at one point, he engages mostly with middle-aged men because it’s unlikely they’ll know his friends—but there is one thing Frankie clearly knows that he likes: to be the recipient of these men’s appreciative gazes.…

Director: Michael Almereyda Country/Distributor: USA, FilmRise Opening: August 18 In marjorie prime jon hamm plays a hologram, which may seem like odd casting of an actor with such fleshly presence. Still, when not buffed to the gills and poured into a Mad Men power suit, Hamm looks scaled down to affably human; even the granite jaw aims to please. The Prime’s agreeable nature will become relevant, if only because the movie, adapted by director Michael Almereyda from Jordan Harrison’s Pulitzer-nominated stage play, is in part an inquiry into the evolving connection between us humans and the technology we’ve created. Hamm represents a mostly obedient piece of software named Walter, who’s been programmed to boost the flagging memory of Marjorie (the incomparable Lois Smith, reprising her stage role), an elderly widow…

Books about all aspects of filmmaking and film culture Sélection officielle By thierry Frémaux, grasset, €23.40 Slackers be warned: as overachievers’ journals go, this offering from the man from Cannes is the most upsetting read since Brian Eno’s A Year with Swollen Appendices. Thierry Frémaux’s book is an unnerving master class in the art of time management from a man who combines two more-than-engrossing super-jobs—délégué général or executive officer of the Cannes Film Festival, and director of the Institut Lumière in Lyon—with a daunting amount of travel and a love of sport, bicycles, Lyonnaise cuisine, Bruce Springsteen, and... tractors (if you ever wondered what he chats about with George Clooney). The detachable color slip adorning the book shows Monsieur Frémaux grinning on the red carpet, holding up an umbrella—a reminder…