Innholdsfortegnelse for September-October 2018 Vo.l 54 No.5 i Film Comment

PERHAPS IT’S MISCHIEVOUS TO SPOTLIGHT a 13.5-hour film for consideration as a theatrical release, but if it helps, you can think of La Flor as a six-film cycle rather than a single piece, though that still doesn’t quite cover its interconnections. Screened at the Locarno Festival in August over multiple installments, Mariano Llinás’s serial work shifts gears from one genre to the next—mummy horror to music-biz melodrama to spy thriller to more unclassifiable realms that together rebel against the very notion of completion. Rather than bearing the burden of outright masterpiece status, it’s a diverting and beguiling chain of attractions working a long game of narrative suspension and release. Shooting over 10 years, the Argentine filmmaker depends upon the same four actresses to tackle a variety of roles, with a…

Barbara Hammer x 10 1974-1983, electronic arts intermix and academy Film archive THE ARTIST AND EXPERIMENTAL FILMMAKER BARBARA HAMMER said in 1979 that she considered herself a “lesbian egoist.” It was a blessing. “Feminist egoism,” she said, gave her “a way of seeing others, of feeling compassion, nurturing, communicating.” In the films Hammer made between 1973 and 1979—a crucial period in her long and varied career, and the subject of a series of new restorations—she lavished attention on women’s bodies, tracking them as they came into contact with one another or set themselves in motion alone. She had come out in 1970. “Touching another body similar to my own,” she later said, “increased my sense of touch. It gave my cinema a tactility.” She wanted her viewers, too, to feel…

REED MORANO MADE HER MARK AS A FEATURE CINEMATOGRAPHER WITH Frozen River (2008). She followed that success with Kill Your Darlings and The Inevitable Defeat of Mister & Pete, both released in 2013, the same year that she was invited into the American Society of Cinematographers. In 2015, she directed and photographed Meadowland. Her second feature as a director, I Think We’re Alone Now, opens in September, and she’s currently in postproduction for The Rhythm Section, her first big-budget studio movie, an action-thriller starring Blake Lively and Jude Law. You were a cinematographer for 15 years before you directed Meadowland. Did you always want to direct? When I started NYU film school, I assumed that I would direct because I was into writing and photography. But the first time I…

LIKE THE ORIGINAL MASTER OF SUSPENSE (AND SADISM), ALFRED HITCHCOCK, Jeremy Saulnier delights in toying with the everyman, consistently placing his characters in precarious positions well outside their safety zones. His debut feature, Murder Party (2007), trails a dorky loner, Christopher, to a Halloween get-together he randomly finds an invite to, unaware that he will end up the prey of attention- and blood-hungry Williamsburg hipster artists who plan to slaughter someone in the name of their vocation. In his sensational followup, Blue Ruin (2013), Dwight, an unkempt, peaceful recluse, feels it’s his honorable duty to seek vengeance when he hears the news that the man who was imprisoned for killing his parents 20 years earlier is being released. And Green Room (2015) sees an unseasoned punk bank, The Ain’t Rights,…

SOMETHING HAS TO BE DONE ABOUT THE BENCH. The scene is the Monrovia Lions Club in Monrovia, Indiana, where a meeting is being held. A concerned woman, flanked by a man in shirtsleeves who is somewhat paying attention, would like to raise the matter of the bench. First of all, it needs to exist. The club’s 100th anniversary looms, and she is proposing to allocate funding to build a commemorative bench in town. Perhaps near the library, where another bench is currently slated to be built, thereby providing a pleasing logistical and visual symmetry. There’s a certain amount of back-and-forth as the case is made for construction, and oddly, momentarily unmade. Then the apparent leader of the meeting, another woman who will later be spotted browsing a gun shop, moves…

NARRATING HER DOCUMENTARY GENERATION WEALTH, FILMMAKER AND photographer Lauren Greenfield diagnoses “a shift in the meaning of the American Dream.” The dream had turned “into a quest for fame and fortune, and we had left behind the values of hard work, frugality, and discretion that had defined our parents’ generation.” Greenfield’s ambitious, scattershot movie is a follow-up to her 2012 The Queen of Versailles, which follows Westgate Resorts founder David Siegel and his wife Jackie’s endeavor to construct an 85,000-square-foot house in Orange County, Florida, designed in imitation of Louis XIV’s palace. Generation Wealth strings together an overarching theory of accelerationist affluence by way of revisiting old photographic subjects, including the Siegels. It doesn’t work, but not because it’s asking questions that aren’t worth asking. Generation Wealth sports an Amazon…

Director: Tamara Jenkins Country/Distributor: USA, Netflix Opening: Sept. 21 WHEN WE FIRST MEET RACHEL (Kathryn Hahn) and Richard (Paul Giamatti) in Private Life, they are years into their journey of trying to get pregnant. Exhausted and devastated, they’ve seen their relationship get coopted and their bodies snatched. This is Tamara Jenkins’s first film since 2007’s Oscar-nominated The Savages, which, in turn, came nine years after Slums of Beverly Hills. Just one movie a decade is either an indictment of the industry or indication of how deeply Jenkins works. Maybe it’s a bit of both. Private Life is sometimes harrowing, sometimes hilarious, and always character-based, providing insight into an experience that millions of people share but that’s rarely covered in film. The film plunges into the absurdities and humiliations of IVF:…

Director: Robert Greene Country/Distributor: USA, 4th Row Films Opening: September 5 TO GET TO BISBEE, ARIZONA, AN OLD copper mining town a mile high in the Mule Mountains, you turn off the I-10 in Benson, probably passing a Border Patrol checkpoint meeting the northbound traffic at the turnoff to Nogales, and then Tombstone, which you can’t miss for the billboards of men with guns pointed right at you, like Justus D. Barnes in The Great Train Robbery. In Old Bisbee, the redbrick former banks and municipal buildings creeping up the hillsides are today occupied by antique stores, real estate offices, and microbreweries for tourists and retirees. The rest of the town, one of the poorest in Arizona, lies on the far side of the inoperative Copper Queen Mine pit—once its…

‣‣ America to Me Steve James, Bing Liu, Rebecca Parrish & Kevin Shaw, USA, 2018; Starz IN THE FOURTH OF 10 UNMISSABLE HOURS OF America to Me, a white high-school physics teacher in a well-to-do, majority-white suburb of Chicago asks two of his black students to critique his memoir about race in the U.S. The overt dynamics of this encounter concern the students’ differing responses and guiding philosophies. The unspoken upshot, indelible in this scene and many others, is the unfair but all-too-familiar spectacle of people of color being solicited to provide uncompensated pedagogy around race for white figures, however well-intentioned, who hold power over them. America to Me faces a version of this trap: how does one anoint over a dozen kids as both textbooks and instructors for invisible,…

WINNER OF THE PALME D’OR AT CANNES, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters follows a makeshift family living on the margins of society. We spoke just as the director was preparing for his first film outside of Japan, in France, with Juliette Binoche, Ethan Hawke, and Catherine Deneuve. Shoplifters and your previous film The Third Murder are very different but both bring together crime and family ties. Do you see them as having something in common? They’re both films about people’s “invisible” aspects. The Third Murder views them from the inside, Shoplifters from the perspective of society. Was your aim in Shoplifters to bring Japan’s “invisible people” into the light? I can’t say that’s the only aim, but in making films I’ve always tried to shine a light on people who have been…

HE DIED CRASHING A JAGUAR XK140 AT A NOTORIOUSLY TRICKY JUNCTION outside Liverpool at 3 o’clock in the morning on August 18, 1958. Bonar Colleano was 34, and a movie star—at least in Great Britain, where he’d spent most of his working life. Colleano had cornered the market on brash Americans in U.K. productions; comically gangly, hawk-nosed, and bushy-haired, he had the equipment of a born character actor, although he’d been top-billed a few times, too. If you hear his name mentioned outside the U.K. now it’s because—well, I mean, what a name—and because he plays a U.S. airman in the Powell-Pressburger masterpiece A Matter of Life and Death (1946), the best movie he appeared in. But in Britain he lives on, especially in the cavalcade of postwar films broadcast…

FAUSTO ANDREA BUSSMANN FEVERISH AND FANTASTICAL, THE CINEMA OF ANDREA BUSSMANN IS ONE ROOTED IN stories, myths, legends, and parables. Her films, shape-shifting objects that freely interact with sources of literary and anthropological origin, engage ethnographic traditions through an intuitive, experiential approach to narrative. (Tellingly titled, her 2016 co-directed feature debut Tales of Two Who Dreamt reads as a succinct encapsulation of her interests.) A metaphysical gloss on Goethe’s classic moral tale, the Canadian-born Bussmann’s first solo feature, Fausto, is structured around a series of stories concerning Oaxacan mythology. Set along the region’s black sand beaches, the film frames its many fictions as a series of recollections: of a captive woman lost at sea, of a housekeeper who stumbles upon an enchanted manor, of a blind zookeeper haunted by his…

THE OPENING SCENES OF ROMA, ALFONSO CUARÓN’S first Mexican film in 17 years, draw us into a spell of domestic labor. The washing of patio tiles—which will find an eloquent rhyme in the tidal roar of the film’s climax—possesses a lulling lyricism that feels strikingly distant from the abrupt, ribald openings of Cuarón’s previous Mexican films, Sólo con tu pareja (1991) and Y tu mamá también (2001). ROMA’s protagonist, to whom these opening scenes function as a kind of ode, also represents a radical departure from her predecessors in terms of gender, class, race, temperament, and social stature. ROMA is closer to autobiography than anything Cuarón has made—the dreamy little boy who recalls a past life as a sailor would appear to be the director’s nearest surrogate in the film—yet…

CHICK STRAND MADE 20 FILMS AND TAUGHT CINEMA at Occidental College for 24 years. But she also freelanced for UC Berkeley’s School of Criminology, transcribing interviews with FBI agents and pot smokers. Later, she’d type policies for the State Farm Insurance Company and deliver the Los Angeles Times to homes that hadn’t received their Sunday editions. In Ohio, in addition to painting houses, she briefly served as a string news reporter, filming, among others, the American Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell. (“He mistook me for a Jew. I looked him right in the eye and told him that I was—and then proceeded to use my telephoto lens right on his fucking mouth.”) Her collaborator, the painter Neon Park, worked as a taxi driver, often transporting drafted soldiers down to the Navy…

Director: Antonio Méndez Esparza Country/Distributor: Spain/USA, CFI Releasing Opening: October 24 BECAUSE THERE IS NOTHING FLASHY, cool, or kinetically exciting about Antonio Méndez Esparza’s second feature, you might not realize while watching Life and Nothing More that it is a near-perfect film, one that easily bears comparison with early works by the Dardenne Brothers, Ruby in Paradise by American indie pioneer Victor Nunez (who, here, is an executive producer), and Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep. Set in northern Florida in 2016-17, it focuses on Regina (Regina Williams), an African-American woman in her early thirties who works in a diner for minimum wage in order to provide for her two kids, 14-year-old Andrew (Andrew Bleechington) and his 3-year-old sister (Ry’nesia Chambers). Regina’s husband is doing hard time and she’s desperate for…

Director: Rungano Nyoni Country/Distributor: UK/France/Germany, Film Movement Opening: September 7 THROUGH A SHODDY METAL FENCE in the Zambian countryside, a group of gaggling tourists—black and white, young and old—peer out at a maypole. Its white ribbons are tied to the bodies of women wrapped in blue sashes, faces painted white. The guide explains that the ribbons “prevent the witches from flying.” For if they fly, then they may also kill. Thankfully for the tourists in this opening scene from I Am Not a Witch, this never happens. Within the gates of the “witch camp”—a settlement and labor camp of accused women—their bodies are bound to the land. Enacted in 1914 by the British colonial government, the Zambian Witchcraft Act states that the practice of witchcraft by those accused as witches…

IT’S A TRUISM OF COMEDY: WHAT’S FUNNY TO SOME MAY NOT BE FUNNY TO OTHERS. But the effect of such a disparity can be dicier in documentary. If you find yourself not laughing, and alienated by others’ laughing, it can be tempting to find that laughter suspect. We might blame the film and filmmakers for eliciting it, and judge the film and its audience for judging the people on screen. That something so natural can also be so bedeviling makes comedy in documentary both endlessly fascinating and frustratingly stunted. Even when filmmakers successfully thread comedy throughout a nonfiction narrative without diminishing or making punch lines of their characters—recent exemplars include Dina (2017), Breaking a Monster (2015), and Ne me quitte pas (2013)—critical reception and distributor confidence tend to fall short.…

A 1931 MELODRAMA ABOUT MARRIAGE AND ITS discontents, Seed is directed with characteristic restraint and simplicity by John M. Stahl. On its release, the film did well financially but met with faint praise, sniffed at by critic Creighton Peet as “a rather dull little movie of the God-how-wewomen-suffer school,” and criticized by Mordaunt Hall in The New York Times as “lethargic” with “unimaginative” direction. Seed subsequently disappeared from view, though in recent years it has occasionally surfaced for a screening at MoMA or the Pacific Film Archive. When the UCLA Film & Television Archive loaned their print to be screened at Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna this past June, it emerged as one of the discoveries of the festival, a delicately unsparing drama that deserves comparison with the works of…

MANY ARTISTS HAVE BEEN BEWILDERED OR embittered into cinema; it’s an art form hospitable to the aggrieved. That part of the filmmaker that feels unseen or misunderstood gets to relish the power of holding his audience captive for two hours, forcing them to perceive the world’s ugliness as he does. In the films of the great Korean director Lee Changdong, you can detect a passionate fury quivering in nearly every frame and, along with that, a temptation to lash out, to give humanity what’s coming to it. These are movies in which any awful thing can happen: people commit suicide, manipulate and terrorize each other, become victims of extortion or sexual assault or the ravages of old age and abandonment. Cruelty has about as comfortable a place in everyday life…

LEAVE IT TO THE COEN BROTHERS TO MAKE AN ANTHOLOGY film brimming with colorful characters, unexpected turnabouts, engrossing scrapes and dilemmas, picturesque vistas, and symmetric structural and visual pleasures in which the territory of mankind amounts to little more than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a film made up almost exclusively of anti-heroes—not to be confused with antiheroes, commonly used to describe protagonists like Travis Bickle or William Munny, whose often vile actions do little to expunge their fascination or their ability to ably carry a narrative. Joel and Ethan Coen’s gallery of reprobates here are quite the opposite of what we would traditionally refer to as a hero: feckless, loveless, aimless, murderous, weak-willed, greedy, or pathetic, and it’s unlikely that any…

AS CANIBA TRAVERSED THE EXPERIMENTAL FESTIVAL circuit over the last year—Venice’s Horizons section, TIFF’s Wavelengths section, NYFF’s Projections section—it was dogged by controversy over its choice of subject, a known cannibal and murderer, and whether the film validated his desires or diminished his crimes through impertinent irreverence. The stakes regarding what makes an appropriate subject feel particularly high right now. Facing rising illiberalism worldwide, the various structures of the documentary film industry, from funding to exhibition, are currently obsessed with finding morally and politically worthy subjects. The thinking goes somewhat like this: filmmakers should profile the deserving voiceless, subjects should be allowed to speak “in their own words,” and they should be filmed with aesthetics that convey their worth as humans to counter their prior objectification or powerlessness. It’s true…

Director: Ruth Beckermann Country/Distributor: Austria, Menemsha Films Opening: Oct. 19 During his campaign to become President of Austria in the 1980s, records surfaced that Kurt Waldheim, the fourth Secretary-General of the United Nations, had served in Nazi Germany’s Wehrmacht during World War II—a fact that he had previously denied. Using contemporary archival material, including footage she herself had shot, the Austrian documentarist Ruth Beckermann shows the astonishing development of events: Waldheim won the election and completed a full presidential term, despite indisputable proof that he had been present at killings and deportations in Yugoslavia and Greece. He had been doing the same as everyone else, he earnestly reasoned in interviews, and had not participated directly. Beckermann’s documentary makes it brilliantly clear how all of this was possible: Waldheim believed he…

Foucault at the Movies Edited by Patrice Maniglier and Dork Zabunyan Translated by Clare O’Farrell, Columbia University Press, $26 IN THE JUNE 1981 ISSUE OF CAHIERS DU CINÉMA, THE CRITIC Serge Daney dubbed Michel Foucault “a constant, irreplaceable, and essential reference.” This might come as something of a surprise, since the philosopher, best known for his critical genealogies of madness, sexuality, and the prison, wrote relatively little about film. Yet the correspondences between his thought and the liveliest art, argue Patrice Maniglier and Dork Zabunyan in Foucault at the Movies, are considerable. They admit in their introduction that the subject of film-philosophy is au courant these days, noting how, all too often, such writings amount to little more than the intellectual parlor game of pointing to pictures that delineate philosophical…