Innholdsfortegnelse for March-April 2020 Vol. 56 No.2 i Film Comment

SINCE THE LATE 1970S, LONDON-BASED ANIMATORS THE QUAY BROTHERS, Stephen and Timothy, have been constructing and exploring dreamworlds of their own. Or perhaps not entirely their own, since their singular animations stem from and alchemically transform elements from modern culture—literary, artistic, musical. They have made films inspired by the animation of Jan Švankmajer and the music of Stravinsky, Leoš Janáček, and Karlheinz Stockhausen; and have adapted (that being a very flexible term) writings by Robert Walser (1996 live-action feature Institute Benjamenta) and Polish writer Bruno Schulz. But such source material serves above all as a seed, to be tended and lavishly mutated in the crepuscular hothouse of the Brothers’ imagination. This year’s Rotterdam Film Festival contained two magisterially haunting new Quay works. One was the 21-minute, 35mm animation The Doll’s…

THIS IS NOT A BURIAL, IT’S A RESURRECTION LEMOHANG JEREMIAH MOSESE CRYPTIC AND SINGULAR IN SHAPE and rigorously specific to its setting in the highlands of Lesotho, Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s third feature tells the story of an 80-year-old woman, Mantoa (Mary Twala Mhlongo), who is informed that her village is about to be flooded for the construction of a dam, forcing its residents to resettle in the city. But Mantoa is resolute in her desire to be buried alongside her ancestors, even as her neighbors pack up their belongings and dig up their dead to take them along. Mosese’s story is based on the realities of the apartheid-era Lesotho Highlands Water Project, but the film unfolds like a surrealist fable: an oneiric opening sequence in a smoke-filled bar, featuring a…

WITH SATURDAY FICTION, DIRECTOR LOU YE returns to a motif that has long pre-occupied him: how the individual’s fate is intertwined with that of the nation. The city of Shanghai on the eve of the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack is Lou’s setting for a story of romance and espionage, both centered on a famous actress, Jean Yu (Gong Li), who is in the middle of rehearsals for a play. The scenario finds China at the turning point of World War II, but with Lou at the helm, it’s also a tense yet tender exploration of history and truth. Li’s character negotiates the considerable drama of her double lives during wartime, from romantic attachments to dangerous entanglements with foreign agents. (Mark Chao plays Tan Na, the director of the play Li…

Play Time: Jacques Tati and Comedic Modernism By Malcolm Turvey, Columbia University Press, $30 Jacques Tati: The Complete Works Edited by Alison Castle, Taschen, $225 FORMIDABLE FORMALISTS ROBERT BRESSON, jean-pierre Melville, and Jacques Tati are the three musketeers of postwar, pre–Nouvelle Vague French cinema, although, paradoxically, it’s crowd-pleasing Tati rather than ascetic Bresson or tough guy Melville who may have been the most inner-directed. Eclipsing in ambition Chaplin’s most grandiose self-projections, Tati’s magnum opus PlayTime was a career derailer at once self-effacing and megalomaniacal. What made Tati tick? Taking his title from the master, Malcolm Turvey has written the first book-length, English-language study since David Bellos’s 1999 biography; it’s somewhat shorter but more confident of Tati’s importance, and almost exclusively focused on his aesthetic strategies, with “new critical” readings yielding…

Making Images Move: Handmade Cinema and the Other Arts By Gregory Zinman, University of California Press, $45 Devoid of zeitgeisty romanticizations of the analog, Gregory Zinman’s book, Making Images Move, presents a defiant yet clear-eyed alternative history of the origins of cinema. THE ETHOS OF ARTISANAL CRAFTSMANSHIP PERMEATES modern life, or at least its marketing does. But recently, there’s also been a genuine return in film and video to the archive and to visual cues that convey physical materiality—bolstered, perhaps, by a swell in filmmaker-run collectives and experimental festivals that champion the crossovers of “moving-image artists.” Devoid of zeitgeisty romanticizations of the analog, Gregory Zinman’s Making Images Move: Handmade Cinema and the Other Arts presents a defiant yet clear-eyed alternative history of the origins of cinema. Primarily a scholarly reconsideration…

THERE’S A MOMENT EARLY IN DICK JOHNSON IS DEAD, the new film by Kirsten Johnson, that flaunts a particularly cinematic power. At its Sundance premiere in January, it jolted some people seated behind me into paroxysms of shock. Johnson has prepared her audience, via voiceover, for what promises to be an exploration of the impending death of her father—even though he’s actually alive and on screen, and complicit in her emotional and creative process(ing). Then we see Dick Johnson walking down the street and an air conditioner falling, swift as a seamless edit, onto his head. Even as the elder Johnson is beatifically splayed on the pavement, clinically shot from above while bloodred spreads on the sidewalk like a Giallo halo, I heard a whisper from the row behind: “Is…

Given the far right’s backlash against human rights, the filmmakers’ inclusion of precisely those populations that are under attack—blacks, women, LGBTQ communities, other minorities—is a gesture as much of courage as it is of hope. IN BACURAU, A REMOTE, ISOLATED TOWN IS ATTACKED BY A small group of armed, drone-assisted outsiders. The sertão, or backcountry, where the action unfolds, has often featured in Brazil’s popular culture and arts as a forbidding, uncharted, and parched territory. It is the country’s Wild West—a vast landscape marked by violent conquest and the resistance of the indigenous people and the black quilombos (communities historically created by runaway slaves). Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles’s new film won the Jury Prize last year at Cannes, where it gave me one of my two most hair-raising…

MADE BY A NATIVE OF THE NO-LONGER-EXTANT GERMAN Democratic Republic, Thomas Heise’s historical memoir–cum–three-generational family history begins somewhere in the Black Forest with an invocation of a Brothers Grimm Kindermärchen—a slow tilt up a wooden post to a faux rustic sign reading “According to Legend, Here Stood the Grandmother’s House.” Life-sized wooden cutouts of fairy-tale creatures lurk among the trees. Once upon a time… If Heimat Is a Space in Time were a fiction film like A Hidden Life or Jojo Rabbit (to name two recent features glossing over the worst episode of Germany’s recent past), it would be an avant-garde masterpiece—a narrative interweaving multiple voices, including that of the state, eschewing transitions, and alternately doubling back on itself or jumping unexpectedly into the future. As it is, Heise’s scrupulous,…

SUNDANCE 2020 BROUGHT JOHN COOPER’S 11-YEAR run as festival director to a close. I didn’t always agree with Cooper’s selections, and occasionally I was appalled by his rejections. (He admitted that he didn’t get Honeyland when he first saw it, and was only saved from embarrassment by his colleagues’ support of the now-celebrated doc.) But Cooper always managed to place the festival at the center of important conversations around independent film, so much so that Sundance sometimes seemed more than a refuge or a market, but a platform that could have an effect, however small, on a world now hurtling toward totalitarian capitalism and the sixth mass extinction. This year, 50 percent of the films were directed or co-directed by women, and there were more films that were made by…

Bamboozled SPIKE LEE, USA, 2000; THE CRITERION COLLECTION Spike lee’s 14th narrative feature is a dramedy edging on horror, with an ironic sensibility sharpened by the director’s bold artistic and technological choices. According to his interview with Ashley Clark for the DVD extras, Lee was motivated by the centenary celebrations of cinema in the late 1990s to consider the darker side of film history. These supplements also reveal the influence of earlier cinematic critiques of the small screen and its manipulative broadcasting, like Sidney Lumet’s Network and Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd. In a plot loosely borrowed from The Producers, creatively frustrated network employee Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans) comes up with a plan to escape his contract: he proposes a shockingly offensive minstrel show, enlisting two homeless street…

Maya Deren’s work—which she primarily wrote, shot, and edited herself—showcases an artist determined to puzzle out film’s relationship to modernity. Maya Deren Collection Eight films, USA, 1943-85; Kino Lorber & Re:Voir IN HER 1946 ESSAY “AN ANAGRAM OF IDEAS on Art, Form, and Film,” Maya Deren laid out her anti-manifesto approach to the artist’s manifesto. “In my case I have found it necessary, each time, to ignore any of my previous statements,” she said. Kino Lorber and Re:Voir’s new box set features 2K restorations of eight of Deren’s films, which show this revision in action. The collection allows for an appreciation of her evolving film statements as they unfold across an unfortunately short life: the symbolic psychodrama (she emphatically rejected any misapplied labels of “surrealism”) of the groundbreaking Meshes of…

What the Ross Brothers nail is the sense of home and belonging, and really the emotional freedom and safety, that The Roaring 20s provides for its patrons—which anyone blessed with a reliable local can immediately relate to. THE MOVIES ARE GRACED WITH MANY FINE scenes and moments in bars, but how many films grab a stool and stay, start to finish, in one sozzled setting? Enter Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, or should I say: enter The Roaring 20s—the dive bar where Bill and Turner Ross’s site-specific documentary takes place. Except, it’s a little more complicated than just one specific site… but we’ll get to that. For starters, know that the Ross brothers have filmed a delightful and suitably bittersweet look at a bar’s final night before shutting up shop. Cozy…

What Warrington Hudlin ended up making with Street Corner Stories was both a glinting inversion of the campus documentary and a patient, precise film about work. Street Corner Stories Warrington Hudlin, 1977 Yale Film Study Center WARRINGTON HUDLIN MADE HIS FIRST FILM IN 1974, when he was a senior at Yale. He wanted to document what he later called the “split-consciousness experience” that shaped how he and other black students and university employees related to an inhospitable and often hostile institution. The result was an anthology of candid, incisive interviews. Hudlin called it Black at Yale: A Film Diary. The Film Study Center at Yale restored that film in 2017. Now the Center has given the same treatment to Hudlin’s second New Haven documentary, a bustling 1977 portrait of a…

ISABELLE HUPPERT POSSESSES A GIFT THAT VERY FEW—AND usually very great—screen actors have: a perfect poker face. We can only appreciate this attribute in context, because on a lesser performer it could seem like expressionlessness—an indicator of a lack of substance, or worse, a lack of interest. In Huppert’s case, where our appreciation of her intelligence and profundity is instantaneous, we always know she is thinking something, but what that is, is known only to her. She could be simply holding back, keeping the mystery alive for the audience; she could be internalizing the character’s feelings because the scene demands it; or most likely, she could be refusing to base her reactions on the demands of a camera, instead opting to react to her character’s circumstances exactly how (and when)…

THERE’S NO SHORTAGE OF MOVIES SOLD ON THE premise that viewers want to have the bejesus scared out of them. George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) and ensuing zombie cycle are classic examples. Romero’s The Amusement Park—completed in 1973, and recently rediscovered, restored, and screened at the Museum of Modern Art—is another one. Which is quite an accomplishment for an hour-long public service film about being nice to the elderly. Commissioned by the Lutheran Service Society of Western Pennsylvania and the Pitcairn-Crabbe Foundation (a charitable organization dedicated to supporting religious education and community-oriented projects), it was never released, reportedly because the producers were horrified by the results. The backers might have been swayed by the appeal of using a local filmmaker. Though born and raised in the Bronx,…

KELLY REICHARDT’S DECEPTIVELY MODEST EPIC First Cow opens with a wide, static shot of a barge, heavy with consumer goods, pushing down the Columbia River. As the ship moves across the screen, the contrast between the rust, paint, and metal, and the surrounding wilderness, a network of leafless, winter branches skirting the wide water, becomes more and more pronounced. The endlessly complex ecosystem is, for the strangely inhuman vessel, a commercial shipping route, nothing more nor less. Like the story that follows, this shot is deceptively straightforward, gesturing toward one of the themes—nature vs. society, with the human being somewhere in-between—that the filmmaker has been worrying since her 1994 debut, River of Grass, itself set in the liminal landscape of the Florida Everglades. With First Cow, Reichardt has managed to…

“History develops; art stands still.”—e.m. forster MOVIE LOVERS SEEM TO HAVE BEEN GRIPPED by fear for the fate of our beloved medium for almost as long as cinema has existed. If we’re particularly worried now, here at the beginning of the third decade of the weird 21st century, it’s probably because we’ve devalued, soiled, and decimated art, beauty, and nature at the hands of capital, and one can’t completely separate the state of cinema from the fate of the planet. As humans, we have expedited our own extinction via an industrial process that has been generally concurrent with the technological ascent, commercialization, and decline of the movies across the 20th century. It would appear that the popular art form of the motion picture is in terrible shape. Yet the cloud…

Never Rarely Sometimes Always BY SHEILA O’MALLEY Director: Eliza Hittman Country/Distributor: USA/UK, Focus Features Opening: March 13 A HIGH SCHOOL TALENT SHOW opens Eliza Hittman’s third feature, Never Rarely Sometimes Always. Autumn (Sidney Flanigan) stands at a microphone, singing a cover of “He’s Got the Power,” accompanying herself on the guitar. Her energy is grim and the pop lyrics, about a man who makes her do things she doesn’t want to do, here sound alarming. It’s a stark contrast with the acts that preceded hers, which had a 1950s theme: girls in poodle skirts and boys with slicked hair, doing Bye Bye Birdie–type dance numbers or a doowop song. Solemn, contemporary Autumn cuts through the kitschy view of teenage life that’s straight out of Leave It to Beaver or the black-and-white…