Innholdsfortegnelse for September - October 2017 i Film Comment

COCOTE NELSON CARLO DE LOS SANTOS ARIAS ILIKE THE IDEA THAT THE FILM IS A CIRCLE because we speak in circles, so maybe if you spend a lot of time with me, you will see that I also think in circles, you know?” Nelson Carlo De Los Santos Arias said to me (somewhat circularly) at the Locarno Film Festival in August. His narrative debut feature, Cocote, walked away with the jury prize in the festival’s new, somewhat ambiguously titled section Signs of Life, after lighting up the screen with life, death, and all the fire in between. The Dominican-born director hitches dynamic film technique and shifting perspectives to a story of vengeance that simmers and explodes: a man who works for a rich family in the island’s capital of Santo…

Director: Todd Haynes Country/Distributor: USA, Amazon Studios Opening: October 20 THE MUSEUM OF JURASSIC TECHnology in Los Angeles houses such treasures as a crucifix carved into the desiccated pit of a fruit, a fungus-petrified “stink ant” from the Cameroon, and the skeleton of a European mole. Proper historical wonders or dustbin rejects from curiosity cabinets? Is there a difference? This odd place, found, not like a “real” museum should be, among uninviting storefronts in downtown Culver City, is a museum only inasmuch as it takes museums as its subject. A thoroughly self-aware object, full of unexpected marvels one might not consider for eternal display, it was on my mind throughout Todd Haynes’s Wonderstruck, which, like all of Haynes’s films, is a thoroughly self-aware object, full of unexpected marvels, and which…

Director: Sean Baker Country/Distributor: USA, A24 Opening: October 6 SEAN BAKER DIRECTS FICTION FILMS like a documentarian hesitant to work within a journalistic framework, often casting nonprofessional actors in roles that draw upon marginalized experience. Most recently Starlet, about a young white blonde California girl and porn actress who forms an unlikely friendship with a grieving old woman, and Tangerine, which follows two black trans women as they hunt down a boyfriend’s new cis white girlfriend, garnered attention from critics enthralled with their stylistic savvy. The Florida Project focuses on a mother, Halley (Bria Vinaite), likely in her early twenties, and her daughter, Moonee (Brooklynn Prince), who’s 6 years old. The two live together in a single room at a bright lavender motel in Orlando near Disney World. Moonee spends…

I love the stories that came out of Cannes about your watching Top of the Lake: China Girl with the audience and soliciting their guesses between episodes as to who might be the culprit. At your upcoming retrospective in New York, which films are you most eager to re-experience with an audience? I suppose In the Cut [2003], which was so badly received at the time it was released, especially in America. The Portrait of a Lady [1996] is also a film that I personally come back to a lot. Nicole [Kidman] is far better in that than anyone gave her credit for. In just the first two episodes of China Girl, we see powerful images that also operate as mysterious gestalts for the whole series. One is that rolling suitcase pushed into…

The wide, wide world of cinematic nonfiction IN WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S “ALL THE WORLD’S A STAGE” LINE FROM AS YOU LIKE IT, participants are famously characterized as “merely players,” subject to the garish banalities of life’s inevitable stages. But the metaphor (voiced by the character Jaques, to be fair to Willie) doesn’t hold for very long, not least because “players” are never merely so, for they are also occupationally equipped with the ability to consciously be and inhabit their roles. On stage or off, before the camera or behind it, there’s power in the play. In Raed Andoni’s Ghost Hunting, former inmates of Jerusalem’s Al-Moskobiya interrogation center come together to construct a set and perform scripted scenes dramatizing their own experiences of torture, dehumanization, and isolation. The camera records these scenes,…

TALKING TO VILLAGERS ACROSS FRANCE AND POSTING giant images of them onto walls, Agnès Varda and JR rode together all over the countryside to bring us their new film, Faces Places. The two put ordinary people in the spotlight, giving them a platform for not only their images but their voices. The power of Faces Places (Visages Villages in French) lies in the telling of stories: the filmmakers and the people they meet recount personal details, and new experiences and social events are created through the staging of photo shoots. Taken together, the modern tales they tell become testimonies of our times. Faces Places is a traveling chronicle, a bit like The Beaches of Agnès (2008) with more strangers and one major addition: Varda’s companion is her friend JR, the…

NEAR THE END OF ZAMA, AFTER THE SMALL COMPANY of soldiers he’s joined have been captured, plundered, and body-painted by Guaná, after the objective of their mission has been exposed as fraudulent, and they are ailing and marooned in some far-flung, sun-beaten South American heart of darkness, our titular protagonist, the 18th-century magistrate Don Diego de Zama (Mexican actor Daniel Giménez Cacho), surrounded by men convinced they’re going to lay claim to some fabled trove of precious stones sculpted to resemble coconuts, tells them, “I’m going to do for you what no one did for me: I say no to your hopes.” It is the only time in this film that Zama performs anything that might resemble an altruistic gesture: with the extinguishing of hope comes a profound existential relief.…

It’s become a cliché to call a filmmaker “rebellious,” but from Gance to Eisenstein to Pasolini to Buñuel, the 20th century saw true rebels who fiercely defied both the cinematic and political establishments of their time. Though his name is not as familiar to most cinephiles, Nikos Papatakis (1918-2010)— nick named Nico in Fr ance—hold s a profound and unique place in this lineage through a body of wor k that blends anarchic fury w ith visceral and transcendent poetry. Born in Addis Ababa to an Ethiopian mother and a Greek father, Papatakis was an outcast by nature, mocked and ostracized as a child for being biracial. Throughout a life spanning nearly a century of histor y and three continents—Africa, North America, and Europe—he consistently aligned himself with the humiliated…

Director: Frederick Wiseman Country/Distributor: USA, Zipporah Films Opening: September 13 OVER A HUNDRED YEARS AGO, STEEL billionaire Andrew Carnegie funded the construction of New York City’s branch library system. Power created knowledge, one might say, and in Ex Libris: The New York Public Library, Frederick Wiseman surveys the institution and, in the process, reexamines how knowledge can be power. And I do mean process: Wiseman remains voracious for the stuff of daily life. He shows us people reading, researching, and surfing the Web, administrators circling round policy, the star speakers at public events (from Ta-Nehisi Coates to Patti Smith), the library’s classes and reading groups (serving ages 8 to 80 and beyond), the fundraisers for shaking the trees, and the vital community role of library spaces in informing citizens and…

• DVD/ ⋆ DEBUT • BLU - RAY/ ⋆ DEBUT ▸ STREAMING ▸ EXCLUSIVE TO VOD ⋆⋆ The Fabulous Baron Munchausen Karel Zeman, Czechoslovakia, 1961, Second Run (region-free) MERGING COMPUTER-GENERATED SPECIAL EFFECTS WITH live action has made “the willing suspension of disbelief” obsolete by suspending disbelief for us. We’re no longer silent partners with the filmmakers, using our own creative fancies to connect with theirs. So now more than ever, it’s exhilarating to watch the cinematic tall tales of the great Czech director Karel Zeman. His movies openly mix live action with every analog tool for exploring the fantastic, including hand-drawn and cutout animation, puppetry, mattes, double exposures, miniatures, and optical illusions, such as forced perspective. His playful virtuosity invites us to participate in his grand, intricate game. In The…

BUREAUCRACY, PRISONS, AND ABSURDLY soul-sickening bad times in the countryside all have pride of place in Russian literature and film—but why choose just one? Sergei Loznitsa’s A Gentle Creature is a moveable feast of folly and venality in the backwaters of the superpower-turned-rogue-state, as seen through the eyes of a hapless petitioner. Stoic and unflinching, Vasilina Makovtseva plays a woman who journeys to a prison town to find out what happened to her husband, after a care package is returned to her. It’s an almost comically corrupt place, where she’s snubbed by cops on the take, ferried about town by a pimp, and barely helped by a civil-rights lawyer who faces hostility from the government and the public. Perhaps this is a good moment to say that much of A…

Soleil Ô / Oh, Sun Med hondo, 1970, film foundation/World Cinema fund ONE OF THE FIRST THINGS THAT THE UNNAMED WEST African man at the center of Med Hondo’s first feature does in Paris is pick up a newspaper. Copies of the daily paper—an artifact of what he calls the “sweet France” where he wants to make a home—will follow him throughout the ordeal of exclusion and humiliation he’ll soon suffer. He circles classifieds advertising jobs for which he’s summarily turned down on the basis of his race; he’s reading a paper when he meets the white woman who scorns him after their night together; it’s after he despairingly hurls a stack of magazines and newspapers across his sparse rented room that we enter the cathartic, rage-filled nightmare sequence with…

THE NASHVILLE-BORN WRITER AND DIRECTOR DEE REES has come a long way since her early, post–business school jobs as a panty-liner salesperson in Cincinnati and a hawker of wart removers and bunion pads on behalf of Dr. Scholl’s in New York. Rees had always been creative, and on one fateful shoot for a shoe-insole commercial discovered that she enjoyed life on a film set. Soon after, Rees signed up for New York University’s graduate film program, where she would count professor Spike Lee as a mentor, and for whom she would later serve as an intern on Inside Man (2006) and the Hurricane Katrina epic When the Levees Broke (2006). While at NYU, Rees came out as gay to her family, and started writing the semi-autobiographical short Pariah, which would…

Remembering cinéastes who have passed on GEORGE A. ROMERO DIED ON JULY 16 IN TORONTO, ONTARIO, WHERE HE HAD been living full-time since 2004, after having discovered that he was no longer able to get projects off the ground in his longtime home base of Pittsburgh. To lose Romero to Canada was bad enough, but to lose him entirely was an intolerable blow, for among a great many things he was the patron saint of independent American regional filmmaking, which came out of genre and exploitation. Doing piecemeal industrial and commercial work, Romero gave himself the nearest equivalent to the studio-era apprenticeship period that forged Don Siegel, to take one example. An all-around craftsman of the type rarely encountered today, he knew every end of his operation inside and out.…

Director: Yuri Ancarani Country/Distributor: France/Italy, Kino Lorber Opening: September 8 MUCH OF THE HISTORY OF ART IS also a history of wealth, and the degree to which you value artists’ ability to slip commentary about the ruling class into their commissions will determine your interest in The Challenge. In this film comprised of lengthy, largely wordless shots of Arab falconers at a tournament in Qatar, images—presented without any explanatory titles or guiding narrative—are our primary guide to an ultra-elite world of privilege in the middle of the desert. There’s not much to distinguish the film’s exquisitely composed, opulent visions of the Middle East (shot by Jonathan Ricquebourg, Ancarani, and Luca Nervegna) from the images of flagrant excess you’d find in the Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog or a sleek, highend fashion…

Books about all aspects of filmmaking and film culture Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling By David Bordwell, University of Chicago Press, $40 FEW EXCEED DAVID BORDWELL AT THE JOB OF LOOKING AT cinematic technique and describing how, exactly, the trick is done. In Reinventing Hollywood, we aren’t dealing with Bordwell the shot-counter but with the Bordwell of The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies and Narration in the Fiction Film, working in the mode of historical survey, here used to argue convincingly for the Hollywood of the period as a hotbed of narrative experimentation. Bordwell’s designation of “1940s Hollywood” is determined by film-historical events and identifiable trends rather than by the dictates of the calendar, and lasts from 1939 to 1952, encompassing the…