Innholdsfortegnelse for July--August 2018 Vo.l 54 No.4 i Film Comment

JIA ZHANGKE’S ASH IS PUREST WHITE OPENS and closes in the world of Chinese small-town gangsters, the world of jianghu. It is the narrative of a woman, Qiao (Zhao Tao), who begins as a gangster’s moll, is soon betrayed, but finds her independence by staying true to the code of the underworld. At Cannes, I spoke with Jia about the film, which Cohen Media Group will distribute in the U.S. Because Ash Is Purest White is a melodrama centered on a female character, I wondered if it was influenced by the 1940s Hollywood “women’s picture” genre. No, I think the film was influenced mainly by the Hong Kong Triad films of the 1980s and ’90s—John Woo and Johnnie To. What I wanted to express is jianghu as an integral part…

CERTAIN REAL-WORLD HORRORS REMAIN UNFATHOMABLE, UNGRASPABLE, and seemingly impossible to capture on film. Systemic subjugation, torture, premeditated mass murder—the immensity of these horrors can feel beyond comprehension, even as we’re also aware that they’re not beyond human capability. The incomprehensibility can actually enable man’s abuse of man, in that the limits of our imagination become a shield against accepting or believing these realities. Relatedly, though there are still limits to what a camera can record, our visually mediated culture can make limitations harder to identify and tolerate. Since these days it seems like cameras can go anywhere and do anything, and that everyone has access to platforms on which to broadcast immediately what they capture, it can be difficult to accept that something might remain beyond the camera’s reach, or…

I GIVE YOU THOMAS. IT’S BY YOU THAT I WANT TO BE BETRAYED.” So said Jean Cocteau to Georges Franju, after he’d seen the director’s powerful, bitterly ironic documentary Hôtel des Invalides (1952). The 22-minute film, narrated by the great Michel Simon, at first appears to be simply a guided tour of France’s war museum in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, a huge complex that also includes a military hospital and a retirement home for veterans. But by shrewd juxtaposition of images—from a half-suit of armor to a hobbling, legless veteran, from a priest in ceremonial splendor (via a glimpse of a patriotic slogan on the altar cloth, “Paradise is under the protection of the sword”) to the twitching, disfigured faces and truncated bodies in the congregation—it becomes a subversive…

“THIS IS SPIKE LEE.” AND WE WENT ON FROM THERE… Lee spoke with me during a break from shooting the second season of She’s Gotta Have It in Brooklyn. BlacKkKlansman seems to be made so that a broad audience could watch it as a drama about historical events and then— I disagree with that. A film made for a broad audience would not have the words of the great Kwame Ture. And I know that for a fact. I think that’s what the movie does, though: it keeps throwing things at you, just when you think you know what it’s going to be. My films are not one thing. They have many different elements, mixed into subject matter, style, music… It’s a Spike Lee joint. It’s not just one thing.…

ALTHOUGH I’VE MADE FILMS ABOUT MEN WHO KEPT JOURNALS, I never kept one myself. I was not a collector. I have director friends who still have the first scrap of toilet paper they ever used. But not me. I threw my past out the window like a greasy wrapper. I regret this. More and more so as I look back on the times and events I’ve witnessed. But recently I came across a window to those missing memories. My brother Leonard died in 2006. Recently his widow, Chieko, became seriously ill and needed to dispose of 20 boxes of stored possessions. My brother, unlike me, kept things. In those boxes I found 50 letters I had written to him between 1966 and 1970. Because Len was teaching at Doshisha University…

CANNES BEGAN ONE DAY EARLY THIS YEAR, BUT IT MIGHT AS WELL HAVE been one week longer, or one month. The festival can feel like it’s been happening for ages before it’s even started, thanks to the anticipation of the lineup, the ceremonial unveiling of the lineup, the ceremonial evisceration of the lineup, and of course the pronouncement of the entire festival as dead and ready for the slab long before anything has even screened. The process is partly foreseeable for an institution with such an outsized reputation—live by the sword of fame, die by the sword, you might say—but amid the noise, it’s worth distinguishing between the opportunistic or lazy hype and the legitimate cases for improvement. For example, you might hazard a guess that companies basing their business…

Director: Carlos López Estrada Country/Distributor: USA, Lionsgate Opening: July 20 WRITTEN BY AND STARRING Tony Award–winner Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal, Carlos López Estrada’s Blindspotting is on the surface a buddy comedy about two friends who work for a moving company in Oakland. Collin (Diggs) is on his final days of probation, living in a halfway house, and actively trying to stay out of the kind of trouble that could send him back to jail. Collin’s best friend, Miles (Casal), has a big heart but also a tendency to be reckless. They hustle to keep their heads above water in this rapidly gentrifying city, at one point tasked with emptying out a soon-to-be overpriced home for a tech bro. Their bond soon begins to fray, which sends the film into…

Director: Josephine decker Country/Distributor: USA, oscilloscope Opening: August 10 ELLIPTICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL, Madeline’s Madeline makes a dizzying head trip out of a troubled teenager’s foray into theater and its destabilizing effects on her perceptions of reality and fiction. But unlike the sometimes indulgent affectations of art reflecting on its own artifice, Josephine Decker’s new film roots itself within a knotted (and rarely addressed) intersection of performance, mental illness, and race, collapsing the false dichotomy between aesthetic abstraction and grounded social critique. Madeline’s Madeline departs, in this regard, from Decker’s previous narrative features. Both Butter on the Latch (2013) and Thou Wast Mild and Lovely (2014) exemplify the filmmaker’s flair for translating the fissures and frissons of the subconscious to the screen, but their striking formal improvisations fail to coalesce into…

IT ALWAYS BEGINS WITH AN IMAGE AND A SOUND. IT’S LIKE WHEN I was a kid… the long car trips from Italy to Germany, at night in the backseat. I would fall asleep and lose sense of time. Waking up, not knowing where I was, even before opening my eyes I would listen to sounds that generated images, shapes, characters in my head. I very much liked abandoning myself to that first confusion to create my “films” from random sounds and evoked images. For Happy as Lazzaro, the initial sound was that of a city clogged with traffic: engines, horns blowing, tires screeching; whereas the first image was a lone wolf moving among cars unseen. The wolf trots through traffic, maybe running away, until I lose sight of it. Who…

WITH OVER 100 CREDITED FILMS, INCLUDING VÍCTOR ERICE’S EL SUR, several of Pedro Almodóvar’s career highlights (including his breakthrough Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown), and 12 collaborations with Vicente Aranda, José Luis Alcaine has produced a cinematographic oeuvre that is a treasure of Spanish cinema. Born in Tétouan, Morocco, in 1938, Alcaine fell in love with Classical Hollywood cinema during his childhood in Tangier, where he discovered the European cinema that was censored by the Franco regime in Spain. Later, as a graduate of the Official School of Cinematography in Madrid, he was a pioneer in the use of fluorescent tubes for film lighting in the late ’70s. Reducing costs and expediting processes, this innovation reinforced his commitment to a restrained realism that could simultaneously embrace a…

THE OPENING CREDITS OF LOVE IS THE DEVIL, John Maybury’s unconventional 1998 biopic of the painter Francis Bacon, play out over elusive, elliptical images of a man falling through a black, undefined space. The figure’s descent is accompanied by the dissonant wails of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s score, which helps to establish the emotional world of both the film and its artist subject. The frames of Bacon’s paintings are unusually unforgiving, delineating a world of tormenting loneliness whose inhabitants are often cordoned off in yet another layer of encasement, be they clinical vitrines or various doorways to oblivion. The atonal chilliness of the soundtrack gives another dimension to this sense of isolation, and recalls Bacon’s musical contemporaries, the postwar modernists who, like the painter, made their names giving voice to the subjective…

SORRY TO BOTHER YOU, READER, BUT I NEED TO TALK about Boots Riley’s unprecedented (as the pundits say daily) debut feature in the first person, at least for a bit. It’s so challenging to describe the action without spoilers even after multiple viewings that I will let Boots himself summarize the plot via his Sundance Labs fellowship blurb: “A black telemarketer with self-esteem issues discovers a magical key to business success… When he uncovers the macabre secret of his corporate overlords, he must decide whether to stand up or sell out.” Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield) is the insecure, young, black telemarketer, who’s based upon Riley’s own experiences in phone sales and fundraising. Cassius has a loving and emotionally supportive girlfriend, Detroit (Tessa Thompson, from Dear White People), a multimedia performance…

ON APRIL 5, ISAO TAKAHATA, CO-FOUNDER of Studio Ghibli, passed away at the age of 82. For most Westerners, especially for those who became fans post–Princess Mononoke, Studio Ghibli is simply a synonym for Hayao Miyazaki’s films and imitators. Yet the studio and Miyazaki’s legacy would not exist without Takahata, an animation director who was an instrumental force in advancing Japanese animation in terms of technical skill and narrative refinement. Prior to Takahata’s pioneering work in the late 1960s and ’70s, anime was strictly kiddie stuff, intent on imitating the form and success outlined by Disney. Rather than simply reacting against or satirizing this variety of hand-drawn animated film (as has been the case in America for the past several decades, even though that type of Disney kiddie flick doesn’t…

THERE WAS A MOMENT IN EACH OF THREE VERY DIFFERENT FILMS AT THE 71ST Cannes Film Festival that made me come alive. Form and meaning fused, and suddenly movies were not beside the point. These epiphanies occurred, respectively, in the final seconds (just before the end credits) of Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Livre d’image (The Image Book); at the opening of the coda to Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman; and midway through Lee Chang-dong’s Burning. What more could one want of any film or any film festival—even one as grueling as Cannes—than such epiphanies? Of course, the films in which they occur have to be good enough to allow one to experience not just a shock or a thrill, but rather an aesthetic, philosophical, and political revelation—all of these at once. As always,…

FREQUENTLY CREDITED AS THE IGNITER OF CINEMA NOVO AND A PIVOTAL FIGURE in Latin American filmmaking, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, who died this past spring at 89, was above all else a masterful interpreter of human behavior. Among the rare class of directors whose dramas were as poignant as his dark comedies were uproariously funny, he created works that defied social and aesthetic conventions while also commenting upon them. Born in São Paulo in 1928, dos Santos was a lifelong cinephile. This love was imparted to him by his mother, who would take him on daily post-lunch marathons at the theater across the street from their house with the caveat: “Whoever does not eat everything does not go to the movies.” At the University of São Paulo he immersed himself…

Director: Bo Burnham Country/Distributor: USA, A24 Opening: July 13 A QUINTESSENTIAL MILLENNIAL, the 27-year-old comedian Bo Burnham famously launched himself to fame at a young age, garnering fans and acclaim as a teenager posting self-made musical-comedy videos on YouTube. With Eighth Grade, his feature directorial debut for which he also wrote the screenplay, Burnham has crafted a gracefully empathetic testament to the irony and anguish inherent in being a teenager in the 21st century, stumbling toward adulthood in an intensively connected world. In a bracing departure from other recent indie coming-of-age dramedies (Lady Bird and The Edge of Seventeen come immediately to mind), Burnham’s film dignifies a less well-represented, largely misunderstood age group, at that unwieldy in-between life stage when a person has left childhood behind but hasn’t quite committed…

Montage: Life, Politics, Cinema By Mrinal Sen, The University of Chicago Press, $27.50 MRINAL SEN ONCE QUOTED A LETTER THAT NOVELIST Elio Vittorini sent to Communist Party leader Palmiro Togliatti in the 1940s: “The point is not to pocket the truth, but to chase the truth.” Sen cited this line, written in critique of orthodoxy among European Marxists, as having shaped his politics, but it also serves as an excellent introduction to his work as a pioneering auteur-provocateur of the Indian New Wave. Although deeply inspired by neorealism like his contemporary (and sometime rival) Satyajit Ray, Sen has always been less interested in capturing reality than in weaponizing it—or making it “unpretty,” as he says in Montage, a recently republished collection of his writings—in his cinematic crusade against the class…

THE UNSEEN AND UNSPOKEN CONVEY multitudes in The Load, the first narrative feature by Serbian director Ognjen Glavonic. Set in the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia at the height of the Kosovo War, the film, a standout in this year’s Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, follows Vlada (Leon Lucev), a middle-aged man hired to transport a truckload of unspecified cargo from Kosovo to Belgrade. In any other context a seemingly mundane task, Vlada’s mission from the start carries an air of unease; the desolate, overcast Serbian landscape, littered with burning cars and barricaded bridges, resembles nothing less than an apocalyptic wasteland. A distinctly quiet film (often all that can be heard is the roar of Vlada’s truck and the sound of bombs exploding in the distance), The Load is a work…

Hyenas Djibril Diop Mambéty, 1992, Thelma Film AG, with the support of the Cinémathèque Suisse THE ACCLAIMED SENEGALESE FILMMAKER DJIBRIL DIOP Mambéty said that he started the second of his only two features, Hyenas, because he “had to find one of the characters from Touki Bouki,” his electrifying 1973 portrait of two disaffected lovers on the run. In that film’s final minutes, Anta, a young woman, had sailed away from her lover, her family, and her home in Dakar in hopes of finding renewal in Europe. The character Mambéty chose for his next film, Linguère Ramatou (Ami Diakhate), also fled Senegal in her youth, but it’s her anger that sears and illuminates this story. When Hyenas begins, she returns to her old village, Colobane, after many years away, “richer than…

GEORGE C. SCOTT CLAIMED TO HAVE THREE YARDSTICKS FOR MEASURING the success of a performance: 1) how much the character eclipses the star’s personality; 2) how freshly the actor presents the basic emotions that give films their foundation (“love, anger, fear, pity”); and 3) a “joy of performing” quality, which he maintained “separates the great ones from the good ones.” Joy is not the first trait one ascribes to the tightly coiled leading man whose thunderous rasp and mercurial temper led Mike Nichols to remark: “Everyone is afraid of George C. Scott.” While torrents of whimsy have occasionally issued from the star, notably in his orgasmic pantomime of an aircraft laden with nukes in Dr. Strangelove (1964) or the closing passages of the 1984 TV movie A Christmas Carol (in…

IN A CASE WHERE THE EVENTS OF HISTORY IMPROVE UPON the fantasies of fiction, BlacKkKlansman, the latest Spike Lee joint, is based on the 2014 memoir written by Ron Stallworth, a black undercover police officer who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in 1979. True to the director’s lifelong interest in depicting black history, he hews close to the truth of the author’s accounts. Stallworth did become a card-carrying member of the Klan; he did wire a white police officer and send him to rendezvous with the Klan’s Colorado Springs chapter; and he did have an ongoing phone correspondence with David Duke, leading to an uncomfortable dilemma when he was assigned to be Duke’s bodyguard during the white supremacist politician’s trip to the local chapter. However, Lee does not get lost…

IN 1898, AT OLD MADISON SQUARE GARDEN, NIKOLA TESLA demonstrated one of the defining innovations of contemporary civilization. He steered a small boat by remote radio control. His patent was ambitiously entitled “Method of and Apparatus for Controlling Mechanism of Moving Vehicle or Vehicles,” and indeed the technological principle would quickly come to find applications in everything from radio and TV clickers to military aircraft. Remote operation allowed users to manipulate machines from a distance, limiting travel, conserving energy, creating a new manner of robotic movement, and qualitatively dissociating labor by placing an intermediary between intended action and physical outcome. More than a century after Tesla’s patent, the principle remains—as does its moral, experiential, economic, and aesthetic implications. While the employment of remote-controlled drones for military and surveillance purposes has…

FOR THE LAST 19 YEARS OF MY life, I’ve traveled to the Cannes International Festival of Film, in one capacity or another. Every year, when I come home, I’m asked about the festival and how it was, and I confess that I never really know what to say. In the reports published annually in this magazine, various writers including myself have attempted to enumerate and describe the inconveniences and annoyances and humiliations, small and large, that are simply part of the Cannes “experience,” in addition to the festival’s general atmosphere of listlessness, and exhaustion. “Oh, I feel so sorry for you…” people say in response. “Did they make you go to the south of France to watch movies? Sounds terrible…” Of course it’s unseemly to complain about going to the…

Director: Gus Van Sant Country/Distributor: USA, Amazon Studios Opening: July 13 I BEGAN WATCHING Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot with no foreknowledge of the film’s backstory—a state of innocence almost impossible to come by in this day and age. I thought it must be based on a true story: why else make a guy-triumphs-over-handicaps-to-become-an-artist picture except as a docudrama? Why else would Gus Van Sant and Joaquin Phoenix, the director and actor who first paired up in the darkly funny To Die For (1995), embrace the triumph-over-adversity formula complete with a vision and an epiphany, unless it had some special meaning? And hasn’t the very idea of redemption, and the narrative arc that supports it, fallen out of favor among the unruly agnostics of contemporary cinema? In…