Innholdsfortegnelse for January-February 2019 Vo.l 55 No.1 i Film Comment

YOU’D BE FORGIVEN FOR DISPLAYING symptoms of whiplash after the past few months in the film world, much less the past year or several years. From distribution to production to exhibition to (let’s not forget) the films and filmmakers themselves, there’s been a series of constant shifts and changes, some good, some bad, some hard to qualify. Many of them hit us right where we live, quite literally, as in the closing of home streaming service Film- Struck, already a legendary resource in its own time. The nature of moviegoing continues to evolve, and as it ever was in the history of motion pictures, it’s a strange and brutish tango between catering to the wishes of moviegoers (actual and perceived) and precisely monopolizing the pathways of their consumption. We do…

Ah, the winter months, when sleigh bells ring-a-ling their way past December and into the wastelands of January and February—or not, depending on where you live and what role/havoc climate change has played in your local weather system. ’Tis a time of list-making and prize-giving, when films are deemed naughty or nice, and the book is slowly closed on 2018 forevermore, that we may never need contemplate these films again, and also that we might make way for new product. It is a magical moment when proprietary discs and links carpet-bomb the homes of twinkle-eyed voters across the land, and when critics in sundry joyous organizations put on their party hats to join in the apple-cheeked fun of award-giving and merrymaking, allowing themselves a winner-take-all rest from the nasty business…

Ina Diane Archer (Smithsonian) 1. Something Good – Negro Kiss (1898)2. Milford Graves Full Mantis3. Ganja & Hess4. Sorry to Bother You5. BlacKkKlansman6. If Beale Street Could Talk7. Black Panther8. Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day9. Personal Problems10. United Skates Andrew Chan (The Criterion Collection) Araby Bitter Money Burning Hale County This Morning, This Evening Let the Sunshine In Madeline's Madeline ROMA Sorry to Bother You Summer 1993 Western Justin Chang (Los Angeles Times) 1. Burning2. First Reformed3. Zama4. Black Panther5. Private Life6. If Beale Street Could Talk7. The Rider8. Western9. Shoplifters10. Happy as Lazzaro K. Austin Collins (Vanity Fair) 1. First Reformed2. If Beale Street Could Talk3. You Were Never Really Here4. Zama5. Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?6. Burning7. The Other Side of the Wind8. The Rider9.…

Director: Lukas Dhont Country/Distributor: Belgium/Netherlands, Netflix Opening: January 18 At first, Lukas Dhont’s Girl promises a creative intervention within the fastexpanding array of trans-themed cinema. The plot concerns the determination of teenaged Lara (Victor Polster) to keep training as a ballet dancer while entering the most medically intensive stages of her transition. With broad support from teachers, doctors, and her unmarried father (the reliably strong Arieh Worthalter), Lara’s story has a rare shot at centering a trans character’s distinctive ambitions rather than brutal antagonism. With sympathetic nuance, Girl’s early sequences explore how two regimens of corporeal transformation mirror but also disrupt each other, once some familiar dance-academy dangers (overtraining, under-eating, etc.) endanger Lara’s candidacy for a gender-confirmation process that imposes its own heavy demands on her mental and physical health.…

Director: Asghar Farhadi Country/Distributor: Spain/France/Italy, Focus Features Opening: February 8 Asghar Farhadi is unsurpassed in his surgical examination of the ways in which unexpected developments can bring history to the fore, and up to now his scalpels have been implication and nuanced ambiguity. But in his eighth film as director—and his first in Spanish—the distractingly oft-repeated title seems to herald an unfortunate new approach to imparting information: everybody will know everything, even if it means clumsy exposition (an elderly character exists to divulge backstory in drunken accusatory rants), heavy-handed foreshadowing (we’re way ahead of the characters in anticipating plot twists), and redundancy (conversations are reprised with different participants but the same narrative takeaway). One would like to blame the shift in cultural context: as splashily lensed by Almodóvar DP José…

Director: Meredith Danluck Country/Distributor: USA, The Orchard Opening: January 4 In this debut narrative feature from director Meredith Danluck, Katherine (Katherine Waterston) is an American photographer in Brussels whose marriage to a Belgian movie star (Michiel Huisman) is in turmoil. After opening with his suicide, the action abruptly leaps forward to a year later, when Katherine’s mother (Mary Kay Place) arrives in Belgium to help her reluctant daughter clear out the late husband’s effects so that their apartment can be sold. This belated return to their shared home (and to the scene of his death) triggers a cascade of fragmented memories and vaguely ominous discoveries, and Katherine is gradually, inexorably drawn down a path of sinister associations in pursuit of some previously unsought truth. Anchored by smart, sensitive performances from…

uu3000 Nights Mai Masri, Palestine/France/Jordan/Lebanon/Qatar/United Arab Emirates, 2015; Amazon Big Father, Small Father and Other Stories Dang Di Phan, Vietnam/France/Germany/Netherlands, 2015; Filmatique CAM Daniel Goldhaber, USA, 2018; Netflix Cold Heaven Nicolas Roeg, USA, 1991; Amazon Crater Luca Bellino & Silvia Luzi, Italy, 2017; Filmatique The End? Daniele Misischia, Italy, 2017; Amazon Family Viewing Atom Egoyan, Canada, 1987; Kanopy Frost Sharunas Bartas, Lithuania/France/Ukraine/Poland, 2017; MUBI Fyre Chris Smith, USA, 2019; Netflix Kita Kita Sigrid Andrea Bernardo, Philippines, 2017; Netflix Last Night at the Alamo Eagle Pennell, USA, 1983; Amazon & MUBI The Lift Dick Maas, Netherlands, 1983; Shudder Messi Álex de la Iglesia, Spain, 2014; Amazon Nothing But the Night Peter Sasdy, UK, 1973; Amazon Our New President Maxim Pozdorovkin, USA, 2018; multiple major platforms Postcards from the Zoo Edwin, Indonesia/Germany/Hong…

SINCE MY TEENS, I’VE BEEN A KEEN READER AND CINEPHILE. I shared this with Harun Farocki, my teacher, friend, and collaborator. Transit is dedicated to Harun. He gave me Anna Seghers’s 1944 novel, upon which it’s based. Growing up in West Germany, I was discouraged from reading Seghers because she was a communist. Transit follows refugees fleeing Nazism, stranded in Marseille. This parallels today’s European refugee crises and rising neo-Nazism. Writing the film, I experimented with narration, thinking of Defoe and Sterne’s first-person (often unreliable) narrators. While shooting, I played the voiceover but had the actors improvise different actions, creating a disjunction. Anachronisms also do this—Transit’s 1944 characters are filmed in contemporary Marseille. The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973) and Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the…

Nicolas Rapold The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (A) Burning (B) The Death of Stalin Hale County This Morning, This Evening Happy as Lazzaro Let the Sunshine In Monrovia, Indiana (C) Shoplifters Sorry to Bother You Zama Rep Pick: Soft Fiction (Chick Strand, 1979) Michael Koresky The Ballad of Buster Scruggs Bisbee ’17 (D) Burning Happy as Lazzaro Hereditary If Beale Street Could Talk (E) Let the Sunshine In ROMA Shoplifters Zama Laura Kern 1. Hereditary (F)2. Loveless (G)3. The House That Jack Built (H)4. Eighth Grade5. Hold the Dark6. Anna and the Apocalypse7. Puzzle8. Annihilation9. I Am Not a Witch10. A Quiet Place Steven Mears 1. First Reformed (I)2. You Were Never Really Here (J)3. A Bread Factory4. Burning5. BlacKkKlansman6. Paddington 27. Lean on Pete8. Shoplifters9. Minding the Gap10. Personal…

EVERY YEAR THAT PASSES UNDER the Trump presidency builds upon its prior injuries to democracy and dignity through the slow creep of normalization: people get used to it, whether they hate it, love it, don’t care, or are too busy or beleaguered to care. That’s why it’s been heartening and soul-stirring to see efforts among filmmakers to counter or confront this toxic tide with something greater, something more beautiful, something to make us both think and act. If one of the deepest pains of the past two-year eternity has been the insensitivity and outright hostility toward minorities demonstrated by our highest leadership, then a corresponding source of hope and joy and insight has been the triumphs of black filmmakers at so many levels in 2018. The victory of Barry Jenkins’s…

IN 1978, THE BRITISH CRITIC RAYMOND DURGNAT JOINED THE FACULTY OF THE University of California at San Diego, where one of his new colleagues was the legendary painter and film writer Manny Farber. The following year, on October 27, he heard Farber give a talk at the Museum of Modern Art as part of a series of lectures by American film critics. Farber had finished his last major pieces—including four long essays for this magazine, co-written with his wife Patricia Patterson, on such subjects as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Taxi Driver, and Chantal Akerman—two years before. He was revered for his indelible style: a dense weave of description that focused intensely on a movie’s spatial arrangements and the ways in which actors moved, slouched, or breathed within a frame. In the…

Director: Steven Soderbergh Country/Distributor: USA, Netflix Opening: February 8 WITH HIGH FLYING BIRD, STEVEN Soderbergh discovers yet another profession whose practitioners’ for-hire physiques stand in for the gig-to-gig economics of his own creative hustle: to the martial-artist hit woman of Haywire, and the sex workers of The Girlfriend Experience and Magic Mike, add basketball players. His new film, for Netflix, ups the metaphorical ante in a couple of ways: High Flying Bird considers hoopsters as content creators in an entertainment industry upended by streaming sites, and as black laborers in a marketplace controlled by white owners. Touching down as Colin Kaepernick and others have prompted a more open discussion about pro sports as a “plantation,” High Flying Bird might attract more attention for Moonlight writer Tarell Alvin McCraney’s script than…

Director: Jonas Åkerlund Country/Distributor: UK/Sweden, Gunpowder & Sky Opening: February 8 The work of Jonas Åkerlund has been seen as outrageous from the get-go, with the notoriety of his early music videos for The Prodigy and others. In Lords of Chaos, Åkerlund turns his eye to the insane true story of Norwegian death metal bands Mayhem and Burzum, whose playacting at nihilism and satanism eventually bled into actual murder and arson across Norway. The marriage of director to material is ideal, given Åkerlund’s own membership in a Swedish death metal band as a youth and his decades of experience in the music world. Unsurprisingly, this gives the film fertile aesthetic grounding. There are reams of inkblack hair and mottled white face paint, double denim, knives plunging into wrists, and stage…

Clouzot: The Early Works Six films, France/Germany/Austria, 1931-1933; Kino Classics + La vérité France/Italy, 1960; The Criterion Collection THE TWO-DISC SET CLOUZOT: THE EARLY WORKS SHOULD BE called Writer for Hire, or, better yet, With a Song in My Heart. This record of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s cinematic apprenticeship contains his directorial debut, a short called The Terror of Batignolles (1931), and six features that employed him only on their script teams. Clouzot’s 15-minute burlesque/heist film, complete with an O. Henry twist, does anticipate the sardonic sensibility of Clouzot classics such as the poison-pen saga Le corbeau (1943). The rest draw on the musical stage and popular theater of the 1930s. Even Carmine Gallone’s Dragnet Night (1931) turns out to be a singing-boxer movie. Gallone’s extramarital romp My Cousin from Warsaw (1931),…

Library Streaming Services Kanopy & Hoopla Digital THE SINGLE BEST STREAMING SITE REMAINS the one you can access for free with your library card. An Australian-founded company originally serving the university market, Kanopy first developed its streaming platform in 2010, and in 2017 began working with U.S. public libraries, including the New York, Brooklyn, and Queens systems. With each rental by a patron, the library pays Kanopy a fee, which it splits with the media’s rights holder. Kanopy is available as an app on set-top boxes, as well as via your web browser. Kanopy is best known as “the site where you can stream the Criterion Collection for free,” and indeed at time of writing there are nearly 400 Janus/Criterion titles among Kanopy’s over- 30,000-strong catalog, including extracanonical titles from…

By Salka Viertel NYRB Classics, $17.95 For decades now, Salka Viertel’s long-out-of-print The Kindness of Strangers has survived through secondhand booksellers and word of mouth. Born to a wealthy Jewish family in what is now part of Ukraine, Viertel was an accomplished writer but never any kind of widely known name, even during her peak years in 1930s and 1940s Hollywood. The memoir’s hook upon publication in 1969 (and perhaps even now) was Viertel’s long and close friendship with Greta Garbo, for whom she wrote or co-wrote Queen Christina, Anna Karenina, and Conquest; Salka even had a bit part in Anna Christie. Viertel’s account offers plenty of Garbo, as well as portraits of the author’s husband—director and screenwriter Berthold Viertel—and her three sons, who included yet another writer, Peter Viertel.…

THE BEST POSTERS OF 1918 THIS MAGAZINE IS FULL OF 2018 LISTS, SO I THOUGHT I’D GO back in time and consider the posters of 1918. The abiding impression one gets from looking at the movie posters of 100 years ago is of color. Stone lithography printing, which until the early 1920s was the primary poster printing technique, produced particularly rich tones and hues, and the one-sheets, three-sheets, and six-sheets of the late teens are a riot of bright, bold, and dramatic color. By 1918, movie posters had been in existence for over 20 years, but the First World War had precipitated a boom in poster design and printing for propaganda purposes, and by the end of the war the studios were making a concerted effort to attract well-known artists…

FROM THE FIRST, GODARD’S MOVIES HAVE BEEN INFORMED by his belief in film as the medium in which the history of the 20th century is written. His collage films, beginning with the epic Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988- 1998), describe how the medium in which this history of the world is inscribed shifts from celluloid, which is projected to a collective audience in theaters, to videotape, the Internet, and discs, all available for personal viewing; and how these works also could be used to “write” image histories as personal as literary histories always have been. To these mediums has been added, in the 21st century, digital cinema. Godard’s collage films, then, are about the inscription of the world in moving images and the reinscription upon re-inscription of that history in keeping…

Unless you were alive in the 1960s and ’70s, you probably haven’t spent much time with young Aretha Franklin as a screen presence, looking fly in the bouffants and afros of her peak stardom, sounding like the Holy Ghost touching down in your living room. One of the inevitabilities of true pop longevity is that the artist’s image—no matter how bolstered by her glory days—is constantly made subject to the unkindest revisions. And so it was that the miraculousness of Aretha’s first decade of live television performances gave way to an absurdly protracted lioness-in-winter phase that elevated her at certain points and cheapened her at others. Starting in the ’80s, she repeatedly played a caricature of herself in commercials for Nintendo, Pepsi, and Pizza Hut, and by the turn of…

1. Zama Like her previous mordant and tantalizingly elliptical dissections of the bourgeoisie, Lucrecia Martel’s Zama tells a story of colonialism, this time through a Spanish functionary in a South American backwater who awaits a reprieve (return to the mother country) that will never come. In his illfitting wig and scarlet coat, Don Diego de Zama (a brilliantly inscrutable Daniel Giménez Cacho) watches, waits, fumbles, fawns, and resists in encounters that suggest but don’t explain—a voyeur of his own life. The movie is an adaptation of a superb novel by the Argentine writer Antonio Di Benedetto, the portrait of a man out of joint with his time and place—like the local fish that spends its life near the shore, fighting the water that seeks to cast it upon dry land.…

IN NOVEMBER, FILMSTRUCK WAS STRUCK its fatal blow. For those unaware, the dearly departed U.S. streaming service, which launched in fall 2016, was a coproduction of Turner Classic Movies and Warner Bros. Digital Networks; in addition to its deep catalog of Hollywood classics, American independents, and international rarities, it featured an exclusive channel programmed by the Criterion Collection. That sounds impressive on paper, but nothing could compare to the awesome, even overwhelming experience of simply browsing FilmStruck. If scanning the collections of other streaming services could be likened to panning for gold, looking for something to watch on FilmStruck was like swimming through Scrooge McDuck’s treasure vault. No matter where your search began or ended, you were going to find something worthwhile—or, often, revelatory—whether you wanted to watch Casablanca for…

Director: Christophe Honoré Country/Distributor: France, Strand Releasing Opening: February 15 A welcome complexity has crept into recent films recounting the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, rejecting the impulse to paint the era’s gay men as either pathologized deviants or skeletal saints raging against the dying of the light. Add to this corpus Sorry Angel, writerdirector Christophe Honoré’s knowing and unsentimental tale of an intergenerational affair in mid-’90s France. Thirtysomething writer Jacques (Pierre Deladonchamps) meets college-age Arthur (Vincent Lacoste) while in Brittany for work. They soon separate, with Arthur navigating comingout and Jacques returning to Paris to juggle responsibilities to his young son, his neighbor and confidante Mathieu (Denis Podalydès), and another friend in the late stages of AIDS-related illness. Honoré chronicles his two protagonists with empathetic but clear eyes,…

24 Frames Abbas Kiarostami, Iran/France, 2017; The Criterion Collection The Adventures of Prince Achmed Lotte Reiniger, Germany, 1926; Milestone Films Araby Affonso Uchôa & João Dumans, Brazil, 2017; Grasshopper Film Await Further Instructions Johnny Kevorkian, UK, 2018; Dark Sky Films The Black Windmill Don Siegel, UK/USA, 1974; Kino Classics Brewster McCloud Robert Altman, USA, 1970; Warner Archive De Palma & De Niro: The Early Films Greetings, USA, 1968; Hi, Mom!, USA, 1970; The Wedding Party, USA, 1969; Arrow Video Horror of Dracula Terence Fisher, UK, 1958; Warner Archive I Am Not a Witch Rungano Nyoni, UK/France/Germany/Zambia, 2017; Film Movement John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection Julien Faraut, France, 2018; Oscilloscope Makala Emmanuel Gras, France, 2017; Kino Lorber My Name Is Julia Ross Joseph H. Lewis, USA, 1945; Arrow Academy Perfect Blue…

When at a wedding, the question of anyone knowing a reason why the bride and groom should not be hitched often prompts strong yet unspoken thoughts—but in the movies, they can be voiced loud and clear. In Mel Ferrer’s The Secret Fury (1950), lovebirds Ellen and David (Claudette Colbert and Robert Ryan) are about to say their “I do’s” when a stranger comes forth accusing Ellen of bigamy, triggering a highly dramatic chain of events. Is Colbert’s character a villainess, psychologically troubled, or is she a wronged woman? Unfortunately, the answer can’t easily be found, as the film—a curious mix of melodrama, courtroom thriller, and crime noir—is impossible to find, save the occasional awful-quality DVR floating around or TCM airing. Bosley Crowther might have called the movie “cheap and lurid…