Innholdsfortegnelse for May-June 2018 Vol. 54 No.3 i Film Comment

Faced with Derek Jarman’s visionary deathbed opus, your eyes aren’t closed, you’re not getting lost in the infinite space of your own darkness—you’re open and awake to his blues. THERE’S PLENTY TO SEE IN EXTINCTION, A NEW FILM by Portuguese director Salomé Lamas. In black, white, and smoky gray, a young man stares back at us in slow motion. That same man sits in the back of a car as it hurtles down wet streets, then wanders around desolate landscapes, conversing with various strangers about the collapse of the Soviet Union and the splintering that followed. Yet no matter how arresting these images are, the most important activities in Extinction aren’t visually depicted. In fact, for many minutes at a time, there’s nothing to see at all, save for a…

AN ELEPHANT SITTING STILL HU BO THE WORLD IS JUST DISGUSTING.” VARIATIONS ON THIS SENTIMENT CROP UP DURING An Elephant Sitting Still, Hu Bo’s first and final feature, shot through with nearly Eastern European levels of intermittently sardonic bleakness. Set in a hardscrabble northern Chinese town, this saga of school bullying, small-time gangsters (or bigheaded hoodlums), disrespected elders, and awful youngsters exists amid generalized unease and despair. Opening with a tossed-off tale about a star elephant (shades of the Werckmeister Harmonies whale?), Hu and cinematographer Fan Chao go on to mesmerize with shallow-focus closeup setups that keep characters looming in our minds, with occasionally baffling sequence shots through the desolate terrain they traverse on their way to school or violent encounters. At 234 minutes, and with a title like a…

How was your experience acting in Let the Sunshine In? I took it as a challenge to have to abide by such a demanding text, but also as a gift, because you rarely get such well-written scripts. I went into the shoot without any preconceptions because I had never worked with Claire before. But I realized that she was very open to what could come out of the scenes, and our collaboration unfolded very naturally as we both managed to stay in tune with one another. Isabelle simultaneously embodies seduction and innocence, with her pure, vulnerable, and idealistic inner world. For me, innocence does not belong to an age and you can be as innocent at 90 as at 2. Isabelle is going through a difficult phase in her life…

THE FIRST THINGS YOU TEND to hear in a film by the German documentarian Peter Nestler are dates, figures, and facts. The narrators who guide us through his movies often start by telling us that, for instance, the area covered by In the Ruhr Region (1967) is “some 60 kilometers long and 25 kilometers wide,” or that Quito—one of the cities Nestler visited for Pachamama – Our Land (1995), a study of indigenous art and music in Ecuador—is “2,850 meters high,” or that the Greek merchants who once controlled the region at the center of Fos-Sur-Mer (1972) “exported tin, copper, slaves, gold, and salt.” In the first minutes of Up the Danube (1969), a boy in a classroom gives a long, granular account of the Battle of Mohács, a decisive…

Close-watching is the rule rather than the exception among CinemaTexas writers, and much is made of their ready access to a reel-to-reel viewer on which to watch and rewatch the films they are addressing. CinemaTexas Notes: The Early Days of Austin Film Culture edited by louis black, with collins swords university of Texas press, $29.95 UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS’S CINEMATEXAS NOTES IS A SLICE of Lone Star State film history, compiling a selection of essays that were handed out before four-nights-a-week screenings of 16mm prints at the Jester Auditorium from the early 1970s to mid ’80s, shortly before the founding of the Austin Film Society by Richard Linklater and several CinemaTexas veterans, including Charles Ramírez Berg and Louis Black—Austin Chronicle editor, South by Southwest founder, and compiler of this volume. The…

“At some point, it’s hard to establish a border between actor and non-actor. And you know, they’re all actors as much as I am a non-actress, too. There’s very little difference.” MRS. HYDE MARKS ISABELLE HUPPERT’S second feature with director Serge Bozon, following Tip Top. She plays Mrs. Géquil, a frumpy science teacher for underprivileged high-school students, in a tale that takes an odd, electric turn into the fantastical. You’ve spoken of looking for authenticity as an actor. How did you find that in this film? It’s absolutely possible, even if the film is not realistic at all, [as] within this completely imaginary world of Bozon. It depends on what you call authentic: [Mrs. Géquil] has her own way of being authentic, actually. She can be very funny, but she…

There was a lot of prep on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Synecdoche, New York. Both of those movies take continuity like poetry, which for me is really, really fun. PEOPLE TEND TO THINK OF SCRIPT SUPERVISING AS KIND OF SECRETARIAL work, but it’s really not that at all. It’s filmmaking work. You have to think like an editor, you have to know your lenses, you have to be able to cut in your head and put all these little pieces together in a sequence, and then run that sequence through your head and see if there are any bumps. You’re not just writing down stuff that happens. Because movie production is scheduled for budget, we rarely shoot in script order. It’s the script supervisor’s job to make…

IS IT FORTUNE OR FOLLY TO HAVE MADE IT THROUGH DECADES of life still convinced that love is a birthright? It’s one thing to believe that great romances can happen—of course they do—but quite another to think that, just by virtue of being alive, you’re entitled to something entirely contingent on the reciprocity of another. The films of Claire Denis, preoccupied as they are with the most ineffable registers of human experience, might not be an obvious source of clarity on the subject. But delve deep enough into her filmography and you’ll find a few workable theories on this business of desire. Perhaps the most cogent is the one trotted out in a memorable scene in Nénette and Boni (1996), in which an urgently horny teenager (Grégoire Colin) gets an…

IN TROPICAL CLIMATES, THE DISTINCTION between indoors and outdoors is more fluid—buildings are designed to allow breezes to flow through. This architecture figures prominently in Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias’s Cocote, not simply because it was shot in the Dominican Republic but because the idea of malleable boundaries is central to its aesthetics and commentary on national identity. Mixing a variety of film formats and visual styles, this wholly syncretic (in both the critical and religious sense) work follows Alberto Almonte, a black gardener who works for a white family in Santo Domingo, when he is called home after the murder of his father Eusebio. Though Alberto (Vicente Santos) is a convert to Pentecostal evangelicalism, the rest of his family practices Los Misterios, a religion that blends African and…

THE CAST OF THOUSANDS IN STEVEN SPIELBERG’S future-set virtual reality epic Ready Player One is a bit like an exploded comic con, the collective crossover event labor of an army of pixel pushers and IP rights negotiators. Faces in the surging crowds of avatars include Freddy Krueger, Spawn, Beetlejuice, Street Fighter II’s Chun Li, Gundam, and the Battletoads from the 1991 video game of the same name; among the toy chest of fetish objects are the Holy Hand Grenade from Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), a scissor-doored DeLorean à la Back to the Future (1985), and a Madball, the brand of foam bouncy balls bearing gnarly, grotesque faces which were popular in the schoolyards of the 1980s. In the film’s teeming crowd scenes, 30-odd years of accumulated popular-culture…

A breathtaking, taut work possessed of an otherworldly meditative stillness, First Reformed feels at once hauntingly out of time and haltingly urgent. Director: Paul Schrader Country/Distributor: USA, A24 Opening: May 18 I THINK IN THE WHOLE WORLD THINGS are going very badly. People are becoming more and more materialistic and cruel … Cruel by laziness, by indifference, egotism … Money is becoming their God. God doesn’t exist anymore for many.” This is Robert Bresson in a 1976 interview with Paul Schrader during a production hiatus on his penultimate film, The Devil, Probably, a staggering portrait of eco-hysteria. Bresson wanted the film to express “the mess we have made of everything … We shall kill ourselves by trying to go on living.” This rigid fatalism is clearly shared by Schrader, who…

Robin By Dave Itzkoff, Henry Holt and Company, $30 DAVE ITZKOFF’S BIOGRAPHY OF ROBIN WLLIAMS TRACES the comedian’s early life as the son of a rootless auto executive through his red-hot stand-up beginnings, stardom, and subsequent professional and physical decline. The story Itzkoff tells is of an electrically talented artist who took the modal, free-form comic abstraction of Jerry Lewis and transformed it into a cultural remix of characters and celebrity impressions on fast-forward. There is admittedly a bit of the “sad clown” narrative to Williams’s story. As Eric Idle poignantly observes here, “Robin’s blinding speed and flash of wit was an effort at concealment, rather than revealing.” Yet Itzkoff’s book doesn’t pound clichés into the ground, and rather treats Williams’s struggles as simply one dimension (albeit a large one)…

Clad in a full-length coat and wild-haired, Scary Mother’s Nato Murvanidze cuts a figure out of expressionist painting, looming and grimacing; the prose she reads aloud makes Bruno Schulz sound grounded. WHEN STRUCK BY INSPIRATION, THE fugitive writer in Scary Mother simply rolls up her sleeves… and scrawls notes on her arms. The habit doesn’t endear Manana (Nato Murvanidze) to everyone, and when she disappears for days at a time, her husband worries she’s taken leave of both their kids and her senses. Ana Urushadze, the Georgian writer-director of this darkly comic first feature, reflects Manana’s fervid focus back onto the world, walking us through the cramped psychological landscape of Soviet-era living ruins, and into the amniotic red chamber in the back of a stationery store where Manana secludes herself.…

The nightmarish sequences that dominate the beginning of Fragment of an Empire are full of arresting visions of soldiers clashing at night and bodies caked with frost. Fragment of an Empire Fridrikh Ermler, 1929, EYE Filmmuseum, San Francisco Silent Film Festival, and Gosfilmofond of Russia AMONG EARLY SOVIET FILMMAKERS, FRIDRIKH ERMLER (1898-1967) was both one of the most politically exemplary—he had fought in the Revolution, during which he was tortured by the Whites—and one of the most committed to striking a naturalistic tone. His final silent feature, Fragment of an Empire, centers on a shell-shocked World War I veteran named Filimonov who lives through the Revolution in oblivious seclusion and comes back to reality after a decade to find Russia greatly changed. It was a fanciful premise, but Ermler was…

Tsai Chin commands about the same amount of screen time as the other lead actresses, but she operates with the suffer-no-fools imperiousness of someone who knows she deserves top billing. YEARS BEFORE “TIGER MOTHER” ENTERED THE AMERICAN LEXICON, the character of Lindo in The Joy Luck Club gave cinematic form to long-running jokes about Asian-immigrant parenting. Originating in Amy Tan’s best-selling novel, this prickly matriarch was immortalized by Wayne Wang’s 1993 film adaptation, played by Tsai Chin with a fixed scowl and piercing gaze. Lindo takes pride in her daughter, Waverly, for her accomplishments as a chess prodigy, and Chin shows how that pride can be taken to embarrassing extremes and then quickly withdrawn when its object shows signs of unworthiness. Shimmying happily down the streets of San Francisco’s Chinatown…

An embodiment of the idealistic naiveté of the 19th century, Beethoven can appear cruel and mocking from the perspective of the jaded wreckage of later times. IN A 1992 INTERVIEW, THE COMPOSER, WRITER, FILMMAKER, and all-around avant-garde Renaissance man Mauricio Kagel conveyed a revealing anecdote about the subject of his sole feature-length film, Ludwig Van (1970). He said that an ethnological expedition in Africa had played for the locals a recording of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The Africans listened respectfully. In great suspense, the interlopers asked for their opinion. The verdict: too many notes. The moral of the story is that what we hear in music is conditioned by the history and musical traditions that we bring to bear on it, whether intentionally or not. If Beethoven was too unfamiliar to…

Is Let the Sunshine In a product of your and Christine Angot’s own experiences of womanhood? It’s not direct autobiography, but there is a strong autobiographical element that’s treated with distance and perspective. Christine and I were really laughing while writing this film. We were looking at these situations as things that we’ve been through and left behind, so there was no heartbreak or turmoil involved in the process whatsoever. You’ve said that the film has a fragmented form because the idea has its roots in Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, but it actually comes across as your most fluid work since the action is centered on a character who induces a lot of identification. That certainly has to do with Juliette, who gave her character a continuous and radiating…

SHE HAD “PRIVATE RITUALS.” THIS IS ONE OF THE ONLY things we learn about the deceased Ellen Leigh during a eulogy by her daughter, Annie Graham (Toni Collette). We glean from Annie’s hesitantly delivered funeral speech that the family matriarch was cold, distant, imperious, and, most of all, secretive. It’s one of those ostensibly expository scenes placed at the beginning of a film that says everything and nothing at once. If we listen hard, we think we might catch shards of meaning, but, coming so early, the scene is disorienting, and as diffuse as Ellen’s past. Who are these mourners, and why do they seem so disaffected at such a presumably emotional moment? Why have more people shown up for the service than Annie says she ever would have expected?…

What keeps Angels Wear White from being a total bummer is Mia and Attorney Hao’s struggle for agency, and the possibility that films like this one can bring forward the need for justice. Director: Vivian Qu Country/Distributor: China, KimStim Opening: May 4 IN NANFU WANG’S HOOLIGAN SPARROW (2016), a fearless documentary about the Chinese women’s rights activist Ye Haiyan, we follow the protests she organized against the light sentences received by a middle-school headmaster and a government official who were found guilty of having taken six girl students to a hotel where they sexually abused and raped them. The documentary circulated worldwide even as Ye had her passport revoked by the Chinese government, several of her fellow protesters were jailed, and the female lawyer who worked with them, after signing…

Tamer El Said and DP Bassem Fayad’s fleet shooting places characters in and among real-life scenes as they happen, further complicating In the Last Days of the City’s interplay between fact and fiction. Director: Tamer El Said Country/Distributor: Egypt/Germany, Big World Pictures Opened: April 27 THERE’S A PLEASING FORMAL CONfusion that enlivens In the Last Days of the City, the years-in-the-works directorial debut feature of Egyptian filmmaker Tamer El Said. As the film begins, Khalid (the actor Khalid Abdalla), a serious thirtysomething filmmaker, visits the latest in a long line of flats he’s viewed with an overeager realtor frustrated with his picky client. The camera picks Khalid out on the street hailing a cab to head downtown, and joins him for the ride, but it seems distracted, more interested in…

Cristiano’s life in Araby is out of an outlaw country song, with the spaces between the notes expressing working-class yearning—not least for the lost promise of Brazil’s stalled socialist project. Directors: João Dumans & Affonso Uchoa Country/Distributor: Brazil, Grasshopper Film Opening: June 8 ARABY OPENS WITH TOWNES VAN Zandt’s “I’ll Be Here in the Morning,” and returns later to the song, with its mournful, stripped-down arrangement evoking “the [wind] that blows/Down a lonesome railroad line.” Job-site guitar sing-alongs and a bluesy soundtrack are at the heart of Araby, which follows the laborer Cristiano (Aristides de Sousa) through a transient life that takes him out of prison and along the highways of the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, living hand-to-mouth, job-to-job, and carrying almost nothing but his memories of former friends,…