Innholdsfortegnelse for November - December 2017 i Film Comment

The wide, wide world of cinematic nonfiction There are innumerable instigations for a work of nonfiction—countless stories, subjects, ideas, lenses, angles, forms. This mess inevitably reduces to a more manageable mix of strategies and genres— agitprop, music, investigative, cinema vérité, reenacted, hybrid—but even these are plentiful and plenty elastic. For all of the variety on display this year at the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival, one particular genre of documentary dominated the discussion. Nearly half of the films in the TIFF Docs lineup were profiles or bios of famous people—artists, writers, statesmen, sports figures, scientists, etc.—while such films comprised roughly a third of NYFF’s Spotlight on Documentary slate. In a certain respect, that’s no great surprise considering the culture at large, in which our celebrity…

The conceptual art installation that gives Ruben Östlund’s The Square its title is no needling interactive performance à la Marina Abramovic; neither is it a James Turrell–esque light immersion nor a Paul McCarthy bait-the-bougies horror show. Nevertheless, the tiny quadrant, installed into the concrete plaza in front of the X-Royal Museum in Stockholm, is a provocation. The brainchild of an Argentinean artist named Lola Arias, whose work is said to be inspired by “relational aesthetics” and who is crucially never seen in the film, “The Square” is intended, in its oft-repeated, lofty explanatory text, as “a sanctuary of trust and caring...within its borders we all share equal rights and obligations.” Four by four meters of utopia, then. As the Museum’s suave curator and most public face, Christian (Claes Bang), explains,…

One of the early films kevin jerome everson made in Charlottesville, Virginia, was a short assemblage of interviews and scenes shot in 2005 around Fifeville, a historically black neighborhood in which property values had recently started to rise. Everson had by then been teaching for five years at the University of Virginia, where he is still on the faculty; he co-directed Fifeville with the theologian Corey Walker as part of an advanced documentary class. Like most of the 135 shorts and nine features Everson has finished since 1997, the film comes from encounters with real people in a precise setting but never moves predictably. Spoken testimonies, views of the area, and short interstitial scenes run up against one another; a boom dips into the frame; many scenes begin with one…

Director: Hou Hsiao-hsien Country/Distributor: Taiwan, Cohen Media Group Opened: October 27 At a time when taiwan was being hailed abroad for the stability of its economy and its status as a nascent democracy, the island’s capital was entering international art-cinema consciousness as an emblem of oppressive industrialization—an inferno of neon lights, American fast food, and soulless architecture. Hou Hsiao-hsien arrived at Taipei as a subject a few years after his urbanite compatriot Edward Yang had already established it as a backdrop of social discontent (most notably in Taipei Story and The Terrorizers). But when he finally did, the result was one of the great and most inexplicably underappreciated slow burns of his career, a scabbed wound of a film whose identification with disaffected city youth paved the way for the…

Innocent By Gérard Depardieu, translated by Rainer J. Hanshe, Contra Mundum Press, $16.50 Here are some things that gérard depardieu likes: the novels of Michel Houellebecq, Marguerite Duras, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and “literary anarchs with big mouths”; the paintings of Odilon Redon; spontaneity; Saint Augustine; hatha yoga; Shaolin monks; Russians in general; Vladimir Putin in particular; and any personalities that are “immense.” Here are some things that Gérard Depardieu dislikes: globalization; intellectualism; hypocrisy; premeditation; the Taliban; the films of Jean-Luc Godard; American foreign policy; European Union agricultural policies handed down by Brussels; the Enlightenment; social networks; the institution of marriage; Hergé’s cartoon creation Tintin (“a muckracker, a snitch, a copper”); and the contemporary “France of the purge and denunciation,” in which he sees the craven spirit of the Occupation alive and…

You had been working on an Internet-related drama called Flashmob. What happened? The problem was financial. It would have been either an American co-production or at least 50 percent of the film would have been shot in the United States, and the European producers were afraid that we’d lose money and they wouldn’t be able to obtain financing for it. But the real problem was that my female protagonist was a woman in her late twenties/early thirties, who weighed 350 pounds, and I couldn’t find that actress. How did you arrive at the story in Happy End? I took the part of the young girl who poisons her mother that was in Flashmob and adapted it for the new script. I wrote the new script because I wanted to work with Jean-Louis…

LE FORT DES FOUSNARIMANE MARI Narimane mari’s follow-up to her superb Bloody Beans satirizes the rigidity of Algeria’s colonial past while offering a model for a future free of its ghosts. Employing a clearly delineated triptych structure, Le Fort des fous opens with a series of French legionnaires peacockishly performing exercises for an official photographer (sometimes posing with assorted Algerian tools and artifacts) around Charles de Gaulle’s Algerian compound; their voices are distorted and accompanied by asynchronous subtitles. In the second section, inaugurated with a Pasolini quote about radicalizing the silent majority through death, two characters from the previous chapter have joined an itinerant utopian community traversing the beaches and wilds of Kythira, Greece. As beautiful as these images are, the crowds call to mind the migrant crisis in other…

Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future And time future contained in time past. —The Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot “When you get there, you’ll already be there.” One of the most haunting lines of television, ever, is uttered shortly before Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) reenters earthly dimensions in Twin Peaks: The Return. After being trapped in the Red Room for (presumably) the last 25 years, he falls through the floor, passes through a black glass box in a New York City high-rise (an inter-dimensional wormhole?), and finds himself in the Purple Room: a Romanesque dungeon suspended between an endless sea and hazy constellations. The line is spoken by the second supernatural woman Cooper encounters there—the first seemed to sacrifice herself in order to protect…

The title of alain gomis’s feature félicité is also the name of its heroine—or rather, it isn’t quite. Late in the film, we discover that the Congolese singer played by Véro Tshanda Beya Mputu nearly died as a child; when she recovered, her grateful family replaced her African birth name with a French word for joy. Mputu’s usually solemn, sometimes unreadably absent expression seems to express anything but joy; perhaps one reason is that Félicité’s name leaves the character stranded between cultures, between her African identity and a borrowed word from a European colonial power. Félicité may be Alain Gomis’s least overtly political film, but this French-Senegalese director has consistently explored themes of hybrid identity in the post-colonial world. The title of his first feature, L’Afrance (2001), says it all:…

“This party is in honor of you,” Jafar Panahi says as I enter his apartment for a celebration during the Fajr festival. “Without you, I might be in prison.” Since I know that he doesn’t speak English, and must have learned these words just to greet me, I am doubly honored. The greeting reflects legal difficulties Panahi is still enduring but that go back to the so-called “stolen election” that secured a second term for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Iran’s presidency in 2009. A supporter of the country’s “green movement” and backer of opposition candidate Mirhossein Mousavi, Panahi was arrested in July of 2009 in a Tehran cemetery near the grave of Neda Agha-Soltan, who was slain during the post-election protests. He was released a few hours later, but the following…

Director: Craig Gillespie Country/Distributor: USA, Neon Opening: December 8 Hollywood was built on underdog stories, but those underdogs had to be uncomplicated and behave properly on their way to a win, like Rocky, Rudy, or Seabiscuit. The story of ice skater Tonya Harding’s ignoble fall before the 1994 Winter Olympics over an attack on fellow Team USA competitor Nancy Kerrigan is, by contrast, a knotted ball of classism, sexism, and 24-hour-news-cycle hysteria that has only very flawed, difficult humans at its center. Based on “irony-free, wildly contradictory” interviews (per the opening credits), I, Tonya alternately embraces and deconstructs the “white trash versus ice princess” narrative circulated by supposedly respectable (and not at all respectable) journalists. But more than just a campy retelling of a shopworn tabloid tale, Steven Rogers’s screenplay…

Director: Greta Gerwig Country/Distributor: USA, A24 Opening: November 3 Greta gerwig’s lady bird takes place in her hometown of Sacramento, “the Midwest of California,” in the words of the film’s title character. It’s a conservative, homogenous place where photos of once-Governor Ronald Reagan still hang proudly in people’s homes, and where it’s assumed by parents that attending a local college is preferable to traveling 3,000 miles away for school. Joan Didion, born and raised in Sacramento, wrote, “My mother made the trip from Sacramento to Los Angeles in 1932, to see the Olympics, and did not find reason to make it again for 30 years.” Gerwig co-directed and co-wrote a number of features in her “mumblecore” beginnings before her fruitful collaboration with Noah Baumbach (Frances Ha, Mistress America). Her first…

Jean rouch remains most widely known for the “experiment in cinéma-vérité” of Chronicle of a Summer (1961), the documentary landmark he made with sociologist Edgar Morin. Yet the films that came before and after revised, at pivotal moments in 20th-century cinema, many filmmakers’ sense of the artistic and conceptual possibilities for combining sounds and images. Icarus Films and Les Films du Jeudi have brought together all-new 2K digital restorations of eight key films that Rouch made from the mid-1950s through the end of the ’60s. hh Eight Films by Jean Rouch Icarus Films Though associated with a synchronous observational style, Rouch redefined the meeting of fantasy and reality on screen. His cinema remaps the role of dislocations in the act of filmmaking—as small-scale, nimble, and riding on the improvisatory openness…

Cai shangjun’s sprawling, stinging character study begins in trash and darkness. In the opening shot of The Conformist, we see a crow, twitchily picking through glistening garbage before realizing it’s trapped inside a closed bin. Suddenly the bird is freed—and a bracing open-air landscape of shantytowns hits the screen, with the animal’s distracted savior, Bo (Huang Bo), early on his own path out of confined circumstances. Not that Bo is a sympathetic hero that we root for. Set in the borderlands of Russia and China—signaled obliquely early on by the Cyrillic language signs as Bo drives through town to grift a gambling den—the story is centered on a man who commits crimes, informs to the police, and poisons the close relationships he develops with women through his violent volatility. He’s…

Grandeur et décadence d’une petite commerce de cinéma Jean-luc Godard, 1986, capricci films Some of the most bombastic scenery-chewing in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1980s movies was committed by Godard himself. But Godard’s cameo in Grandeur et décadence d’une petite commerce de cinéma, his elegiac feature from 1986, is mellow and subdued. We see him and an aging fictional film producer named Jean Almereyda (Jean-Pierre Mocky) meet by chance, sit in a car, and fall into a pattern of relaxed, low-key industry banter. “I’ve got to go,” the producer tells him eventually. “My wife is doing screen tests in my office and I’d rather be elsewhere.” They get to talking about screen tests. “That’s nice,” Godard says with a tightlipped smile. “You get to see people.” We see a great many people…

Filmmaking according to the makers Ever since the workers left the lumière factory, “real people” have played an essential role in cinema. The notion of what constitutes nonprofessionals or non-actors can be a slippery one, but broadly speaking, the sociopolitical authenticity and unfiltered psychological realism presumed in such casting has been sought at least since Italian neorealism. (Or some fusion of the two: “People ask, where did you find these faces?” Fellini said to Roger Ebert in 1969. “None of them are professional actors; these faces come from my private dreams.”) Today, a tradition of utilizing non-actors is alive and well in films from the U.S. to Taiwan to Iran, but there remains something radical in featuring an untrained performer on screen. The non-actor problematizes the tidy binary between documentary…

The footage of david lynch blinking back tears during the standing ovation at the Cannes premiere of the first two episodes of Twin Peaks: The Return is an obvious contender for wholesome meme of the year. But more than vindication for a man who entered the “booed at Cannes” canon with Fire Walk with Me 25 years earlier or a break from his mystical Eagle Scout routine, the tears spoke to something deeper yet plainly obvious, as they often do in Lynchland. It was one of the most notable times during his 50-year career that there wasn’t lag time between the work and the appreciation. For someone who has left such an indelible mark on film history, Lynch has made just 10 feature films in 40-plus years. During the sizable…

That the model for public film exhibition that has been in place in the United States for the last four decades has failed and is failing isn’t necessarily a tragedy, for catastrophe can breed experimentation, and bring with it the opportunity for rebirth. But even that silver lining has a tarnish—if there were to be a renaissance of film art, would there exist an audience of any size capable of noticing it? Outside of major industry cities or those with unusually robust arts scenes, which are mostly anchored by a college campus, moviegoing is limited to one or maybe two sets of options: always the multiplex, occasionally the art house, which if you’re lucky will slip something interesting in between Dame Judi Dench vehicles. The former serves bored teenagers; the…

In the brief annals of mainstream queer cinema, Call Me by Your Name falls in line with Moonlight in taking a resolutely non-hysterical, non-polemical approach to homoeroticism, treating sexual encounters with a kind of unhurried, tactile sensuality. Society, as enforcer and inhibitor, plays very little part, as both stories take place outside the bounds of middle-class morality—but from different, even opposing ends of the spectrum. Barry Jenkins’s triptych involves a black man’s coming-of-age in Miami, while Luca Guadagnino’s portrait of a teenager’s sexual awakening takes place in a luxuriant corner of Lombardy, but both have demonstrated crossover appeal, Moonlight having garnered multiple awards including last year’s Oscar for Best Picture, and Call Me by Your Name currently carrying ecstatic preopening raves from Sundance and Toronto film festivals. The Italian director…

Director: Martin McDonagh Country/Distributor: USA, Fox Searchlight Opening: November 10 More than 20 years after fargo, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri returns Frances McDormand to Midwestern Gothic territory. In place of the Coen Brothers’ sense of welltrodden own-backyard geographical specificity, the British-Irish playwright and filmmaker Martin McDonagh lays his film’s scene in a fictional burg in the Show Me State, a town of indeterminate size and unclear location. We might guess that it’s meant to be somewhere in the Ozarks for the terrain—actually played by the Black Mountains of Western North Carolina— has its share of peaks, and there is apparently a tourist trade, for McDormand’s character, Mildred Hayes, runs a shop selling homey little tchotchkes. In her free time, however, Mildred likes to needle the Ebbing police department about…

Books about all aspects of filmmaking and film culture Michael Curtiz: A Life in Film By Alan K. Rode, University Press of Kentucky, $50 On the eleventh page of alan k. rode’s new biography, Michael Curtiz directs his first movie. It is 1912 in Budapest, and Mihály Kertész, who was born Emmanuel Kaminer and will become Mike Curtiz, is an actor who steps in to direct Today and Tomorrow, advertised as “The First Hungarian Dramatic Art Film.” Still on page 11, he makes another movie. Then another, and another, until, more than 500 pages and 181 movies later, he collapses while directing The Comancheros in 1962. The first full-length biography of Michael Curtiz contains little besides accounts of moviemaking, because—aside from a few hobbies like polo, skeet-shooting, and sex—he didn’t…