Innholdsfortegnelse for July - August 2016 i Film Comment

“MY WHOLE THING IS HOW to close the distance between you and an audience, and you and a character. I just think people are a little uptight and weird about that.” That’s Kristen Stewart explaining (and perhaps epitomizing) her acting approach to an interviewer at Cannes last year while promoting Clouds of Sils Maria. Her casual immediacy and cool understatement has developed beyond a deconstruction of her star power into an ever-evolving technique of unheralded emotional nuance. This year, Stewart returned to Cannes in not one but two films—an even closer collaboration with Olivier Assayas, Personal Shopper, in which she’s on screen for nearly the entire film, and Woody Allen’s Café Society—and earlier, at Sundance, she starred in the climactic story of Kelly Reichardt’s triptych Certain Women. With the Allen…

Every year, we’re assured that virtual reality is the future. At times, VR seems to be just another tool for giant media conglomerates seeking to position themselves on the bleeding edge of taste. But as an exhibition of early computer films at Museum of the Moving Image reminds us, corporate patronage of the vanguard can yield groundbreaking art. Several of the filmmakers in MOMI’s concise, 37-minute program were in residence at NASA, IBM, and Bell Labs—all leading players in the Cold War—and even repurposed tools of modern warfare to create their art. A cross section of collaborations between artists and scientists, Computer Films of the 1960s offers views of extremely arcane aesthetics and inventive practices. The world’s very first computer special effects reel, John Whitney’s kinetic Motion (61), anchors the…

IN HIS 40 YEARS AS A POSTER ARTIST, Clément Hurel (1927-2008) created more than 1,000 posters, the best of which are distinguished by a striking stylization and a bold, often eccentric use of color that set him apart from his more studiously realist peers. Born in Nancy in northeastern France, Hurel was a fine-arts student at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris when a cousin who worked in film distribution suggested that he try his hand at poster design to earn some extra money. One of his earliest designs was of a glowering, green-tinted Orson Welles for The Stranger, made in 1946 when Hurel was only 19. He soon became so sought-after that he reluctantly had to drop out of school. Throughout the 1950s and ’60s he worked tirelessly, producing…

NATHANIEL DORSKY HAS A TENDENCY, DURING THE TALKBACKS THAT OFTEN FOLLOW screenings of his short films, to answer a question with a second one: “What do you think?” “How did that shot seem to you?” Audience Q&As more often fit the description Dorsky used for bad conversation in his 2003 book Devotional Cinema—“an exhausting exchange of self-confirming, predigested concepts”—and his way of running them helps suggest what makes him such a distinctive, unorthodox filmmaker. Dorsky often compares his cinematic methods to the work of keeping up a conversation. Both involve the preservation of delicate equilibriums and the sustaining of carefully chosen tones. Both have the potential, as Dorsky wrote in the same passage, “to be balanced or unbalanced,” and both involve handling people with graciousness and care. It’s always been…

CAPTAIN FANTASTIC Director: Matt Ross Country/Year: U.S., 2016 Opening: July 8 Where: Limited THE ROBINSON CRUSOE FANTASY SEEMS TO hold a peculiar grip on American indies. With some regularity, films like Captain Fantastic (and Swiss Army Man) appear, featuring outliers who patch together their homes and personal styles from outré or whimsical sources. Perhaps certain indie directors identify with these DIYers, who often see their idiosyncratic visions come crashing up against limits imposed by the rest of the world. Single dad of six Ben (Viggo Mortensen) is the latest go-it-aloner to hit screens, prominent in ad stills in a retro red wedding suit alongside his Scooby Doo–palette family. Living with his well-trained kids in mountain-man isolation, he’s a fiercely protective, unreconstructed leftist like Daniel Day-Lewis’s in The Ballad of Jack…

As a musician, composer, political activist, and filmmaker, Frank Zappa was a consummate misfit whose obstinacy often gave rise to cunning innovation. In 1966, Zappa instigated the “necessity” that brought about The Mothers of Invention when he balked at MGM/Verve’s insistence that his band discard their supposedly obscene name, The Mothers, and convinced the label to accept his revised moniker. As he grew older he collaborated less with real, live, fallible musicians, and instead composed and performed remarkably complex orchestral music using the Synclavier, a sample-based, early digital synthesizer. And as he approached the zenith of his disgust with the American government during the Reagan era, he helped inspire the popular “Rock the Vote” youth movement when he became the first musician to install voter registration booths at each of…

Lime Kiln Field Day shows Bert Williams to be a leading man of some depth, blending his slapstick qualities with a much more profound sense of loss and yearning. WRITING IN THE PREFACE OF HIS CLASSIC 1977 text Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900–1942, Thomas Cripps lamented that there would be no need for his book at all “were it not for the peculiar racial arrangements in which a highly visible yet numerically inferior ‘black’ group has been customarily, and often legally, ostracized from, exploited by, and occasionally patronized by, a numerically and politically dominant ‘white’ group.” Despite social and legislative gains for African-Americans over the years, and the mirage of a “post-racial” America under Barack Obama, Cripps’s core sentiment retains a hard grain of truth,…

HOW DO YOU LOOK THE WORLD DEAD IN THE EYE? In the films of Chinese documentarian Wang Bing, time expands to such leviathan extremes— in the case of his video installation Crude Oil (08), a total of 14 hours—they make you feel as though you’ve been forced into a staring contest with reality. Even at their most static, his images vibrate with a corrosive, pent-up energy, intensified by the sense that much of the marginal, rural, and post-industrial life they capture is in the process of vanishing. Our looking becomes a kind of waiting, a Beckett-like suspension. After failing to realize his dreams of breaking into the film industry, Wang stumbled into the documentary field without the formal training that had characterized his country’s previous generation of nonfiction filmmakers, even…

MAKING HISTORY PICK Pioneers of African-American Cinema, Kino Lorber, $79.95 THIS IMPRESSIVE FIVE-DISC SET GATHERS A STUNNING ARRAY OF 16 FEATURES AND more than a dozen shorts, plus fragments, excerpts, and trailers from black-cast “race” movies and other examples of African-American filmmaking from 1915 to 1946. This is, quite simply, a vital collection, which dispels any hegemonic view of early black cinema as historically important but aesthetically lacking. Most of the films are indeed rough—rapidly made affairs produced on Poverty Row budgets. But many, like Richard Maurice’s amazing Eleven P.M. (28), push past such limitations and achieve clear, unique artistic visions. Shot in Detroit, Maurice’s film opens with a frame story of a journalist dreaming a modern fairy tale about a street violinist, a wayward youth, and an orphan girl.…

Talking About Ken Russell By Paul Sutton Buffalo Books, $125 BEARING CLOSER RESEMBLANCE TO A FAMILY BIBLE THAN A director monograph, Paul Sutton’s tome (expanded by 40,000 words from the sold-out 500-copy first edition published last September) is a fascinating exploration of Ken Russell’s oeuvre, the inner workings of the BBC, censorship, cinematic craft, and much more. Despite its heft, Sutton has “limited” his scope to film, television, novels, and photographic work for which Russell or his collaborators did on-record interviews (either previously published or directly with him), supplemented by letters and other archival materials. The array of voices is truly dazzling, from Mercedes Quadros, the actress (then only 10) in his 1958 short Amelia and the Angel; to Billy Williams, cinematographer for Billion Dollar Brain, The Rainbow, and Women…

Stone Male: Requiem for the Living Picture By Joe Carducci Redoubt Press, $29.95 In the introduction to Stone Male, Joe Carducci mentions a handful of film actresses who embody a certain unstudied quality that he admires before noting that “this book is not about them.” So what is it about? Well, as the joke goes, it’s about 400 pages of closely spaced, heavily illustrated text. It’s about Francis Ford, his baby brother John, and the westward migration of the movies. It’s about a particularly American type of screen acting— “untheatrical embodied drama”—that, in Carducci’s estimation, slipped into pictures by way of the second unit, through real-life cowboy/stuntman/performers (Richard Farnsworth, Ben Johnson) or the actors who studied them (most notably, “Duke” Wayne). For a goodly piece of its length, it’s about…