Innholdsfortegnelse for May-June 2020 Vol. 56 No.3 i Film Comment

In The Viewing Booth, we’re effectively watching footage over Maia Levy’s shoulder, filtering our own reactions through hers, or at least accommodating them both. And as she tries to situate the footage, determining who made it and what they’re trying to achieve, we’re doing the same. IT’S EARLY APRIL IN 2020, AND IN BROOKLYN, NEW YORK, the ambulance sirens are unrelenting. Also constant are helicopters whirring overhead—patrolling? Evacuating? Thousands upon thousands of people are sick with COVID-19. Today, Wednesday, April 8, nearly 800 died in New York, up from similar numbers the days preceding. Inside—always, infuriatingly, necessarily, inside—I’m searching for information, evidence, footage of what’s outside. A few days ago I watched a video recorded by former Fox News personality Todd Starnes outside of a quiet Brooklyn Hospital Center. “Why…

IN ONE OF THE MOST FAMOUS SHOTS IN FILM HISTORY, Gone with the Wind’s Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) walks desperately through the carnage of the Civil War in an Atlanta depot searching for Dr. Meade (Harry Davenport). The camera, focused on Scarlett, pulls back farther and farther to reveal an endless landscape of human slaughter. Confederate soldiers lie dead or dying, groaning in misery, as Scarlett traipses through them. Medics carry wounded soldiers through the depot, and then a tattered Confederate battle flag creeps into the frame from the left, waving over the destruction. It’s such a memorable punctuation to Fleming’s Lost Cause drama that Spike Lee used the scene in the overture to BlacKkKlansman, his 2018 film about a black police officer who works undercover to foil the Ku…

POPULAR CINEMA HAS DRILLED US ENDLESSLY IN THE spectacular destruction of metropolises at the hands of supervillains, but for decades in America’s cities, far more mundane systemic forces have been hard at work. Christopher Harris’s still/here (2000) is a landmark film for precisely portraying the sense of absence in devastated urban neighborhoods, through an intricately woven tapestry of sound and images of predominantly African-American northern St. Louis, a city that as a whole dropped from 900,000 to 300,000 in population in the second half of the 20th century. After a rapid-fire Bolex montage of streets, Harris’s mesmerizing black-and-white 16mm feature counterpoints often eerily still shots of damaged and fallen buildings and grassy lots with a haunting mix of audio clips and recorded monologue, phasing in and out of commentary and…

“The Madonna of the Rocks is not a picture. It is a window.”— H.D., Notes on Thought and Vision, 1919 IT IS A RAINY DAY IN 1925. THE IMAGIST POET H.D. (née Hilda Doolittle) is living in a house with a group of friends in Montreux, on the shores of Lake Geneva. They decide to head into town to see a film they’re curious about, one which had been released recently in Germany: The Joyless Street, directed by G.W. Pabst. H.D. is excited to get a look at this newcomer named Greta Garbo, supposedly a great beauty. Before going into the theater, H.D. studies the poster. She notices that Garbo’s name is not blown up to signify her importance. The producer’s credit is the same font size as the names…

An Unmarried Woman Paul Mazursky, USA, 1978; The Criterion Collection THERE’S A MOMENT EARLY IN PAUL MAZURSKY’S An Unmarried Women when Erica (Jill Clayburgh) and her gal pals are tippling and pondering 8 x 10 glossies of Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn. “Why don’t we have stars like that anymore?” they wonder. (Jane Fonda and Streisand, they agree, don’t fill the bill.) “Why don’t we have their self-confidence?” Well they might ask. The 1970s were a time when the Young Turks of the New Hollywood were reinventing cinema in their own image, with no obligation to include female stars. Nevertheless there appeared a group of films that did feature women wrestling with the impact of 20th-century feminism, and the dissolution of the marriage ideal in a world that had rendered…

Coursing throughout The Last Stage is the fear that the world would not find out what had happened, from the prisoners desperately scanning smuggled newspapers for mention of their plight to the Grand Guignol ending and call to action. The Last Stage Wanda Jakubowska, 1948 Poland’s National Film Archive – Audiovisual Institute, with Tor Film Production IT REMAINS A SHOCK FOR MOST PEOPLE TO DISCOVER THAT a film about the Auschwitz death camp was released in 1948: Wanda Jacubowska’s The Last Stage, soon followed by Alfréd Radok’s Distant Journey, both presented this past winter at the Berlin International Film Festival. Jakubowska’s landmark feature starts on a city street, where a man and a woman are talking, in the kind of throwaway moment that might run under the bustle of the…

Sridevi speaks with a tremulous lilt, her tone carefully conveying a sense of displacement. Often, though, she needn’t speak at all. Her eyes, which one character poetically describes as “two drops of coffee on a cloud of milk,” make their own declarations. THOUGH THE 1983 FILM HIMMATWALA MADE THE Indian actress Sridevi a star in Bollywood, she once claimed that she saw its success as a curse. “In Tamil films, they love to see me act naturally,” she lamented to the magazine India Today in 1987. “But in Hindi films all they want is a lot of glamour, richness, and masala. My bad luck was that my first big hit in Hindi films turned out to be a commercial one.” The exception came much later, with Gauri Shinde’s English Vinglish…

THE WORKS AND DAYS (OF TAYOKO SHIOJIRI IN THE SHIOTANI BASIN) C.W. WINTER AND ANDERS EDSTRÖM ELEVEN YEARS AFTER their modest, award-winning feature debut The Anchorage, C.W. Winter and Anders Edström return with an opus several times more ambitious. In The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin), the two filmmakers depict the life of a farmer and his family in a remote valley in Japan’s Kyoto Prefecture. Shot over a period of 14 months, the film adopts the form of an eight-hour workday, complete with three intermissions (one 45-minute break, bookended by a pair of 15-minute interludes) meant to replicate a typical schedule. But where such daunting length might suggest something tedious or one-note, The Works and Days is constantly shape-shifting, mixing ravishing landscape imagery and…

Alice Guy Blaché Vol. 1: The Gaumont Years (1897-1907), Vol. 2: The Solax Years (1911-1914), USA; Kino Lorber The Intrigue: The Films of Julia Crawford Ivers, USA, 1915-1916; Kino Lorber FEW DIGITAL COMPILATIONS HAVE HAD AS REVELATORY AN effect on American film history as the six-disc box set Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers, curated by feminist film historian Shelley Stamp and produced and distributed by Kino Classics. Available on Blu-ray and DVD, it is also streaming on kinonow.com, and a small selection of the films are available on Netflix. The amazing box set includes films by 20 female directors, many of whom also wrote, produced, and starred in their own features, series, and shorts. Alice Guy-Blaché, whose directing career began in 1896 and whose technological innovations in sound rivaled Edison’s, and…

Something about the cruise ship in Window Boy Would Also Like to Have a Submarine reminded me of the Marx Brothers and the crowded stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera, leavening the film with a ready hint of absurdity. THE REAL SUBJECT OF THIS COLUMN AT a moment of zero theatrical releases could be “all of them,” but in the interest of space, I’ll focus on a single movie that definitely was not slated for a run that we know of. Premiered at the Berlin Film Festival and then programmed in New Directors/New Films, Alex Piperno’s debut feature, Window Boy Would Also Like to Have a Submarine, is both humble and far-reaching in its casually fantastical conceit. The premise feels liberating in our current world where free movement…

Director Pierre Léon’s gambit is to focus on a single scene, honing in on it with an almost play-by-play fidelity to the book. As such, it’s the most concentrated rendition of the story, but in its own way, curiously expansive. ANY ATTEMPT AT A CINEMATIC ADAPTATION OF Dostoevsky’s The Idiot must first contend with what Andrei Tarkovsky called the “architectonics” of the novel. As he puts it in the notes for his own unmade version, “there are two epicenters in the novel, both creations of genius, separated by nearly five hundred pages. Between them lie two massive parts—the second and third, which are a kind of summary of the first explosion…and the start of a new exposition…” Dostoevsky’s attempt to depict “the positively good and beautiful man,” The Idiot tells…

THE PEOPLE ARE ALL PALE AS MUSHROOMS, BLENDING in with the ashen cityscapes, sterile white rooms, and drab, half-empty restaurants. Stuck in meticulously composed dioramas, they enact miniature comedies and tragedies—sometimes it is hard to say which—filled with deadpan humor and haunting bleakness. We could only be in a Roy Andersson movie, where desperate existential quandaries bump up against the implacably mundane, human suffering is met with blank-faced embarrassment, and even horrors are hushed by elegant framing and the harmony of muted colors. Andersson’s latest film, About Endlessness, hews to the same idiosyncratic method he established in his previous three features, collectively dubbed the “Living Trilogy.” A series of vignettes, each captured in a single, stationary shot, are linked by recurring motifs and characters but without an overarching plot. Almost…

THERE’S A BIT OF TRIVIA ABOUT THE EXHIBITION of pornographic movies in India that I’ve always found fascinating. Producing and distributing pornography is illegal in the country, and for decades, before sex became streamable on smartphones, short reels of hardcore porn were made illicitly and supplied to small cinema halls, where they were spliced randomly (often in the projection booth itself) into censorapproved feature films. Scholar Amit S. Rai describes encountering these “bits reels” in the midst of a movie screening in Mumbai in 2000, and watching it along with the audience. “Cannot forget that I saw a police officer in full uniform in the balcony seats, leaving the show with everyone else,” he adds. Most of us, I imagine, have had the experience of squirming in our seats while…

WHAT IF WE LEFT THEIR CONTENTS ASIDE and examined their physical qualities (paper, ink, weight, etc.)?” Camilo Restrepo says in his 2015 documentary short, Impression of a War, as the camera zooms into the warped, oversaturated pages of discarded Colombian newspapers. “Would it be possible to get an idea of the true life of this country? An altered idea, granted, but perhaps an eloquent one?” The question seems to guide the Colombian filmmaker’s decade-spanning oeuvre: a collection of five resplendent, form-bending shorts that are united by their fascination with physical film as an index—imprinted with the time and place of its making. Shot on dense, flickering Super 8 and 16mm film—developed by Restrepo himself at L’Abominable, an artist-run laboratory in Paris—his shorts extend this notion of indexicality to every object…

Books about all aspects of filmmaking and film culture Music by Max Steiner: The Epic Life of Hollywood’s Most Influential Composer By Steven C. Smith, Oxford University Press, $34.95 FILM SCORE COMPOSERS MAY HAVE FACED THE STEEPEST uphill battle when the movies began to talk. In a new book on Max Steiner, Steve C. Smith quotes Oscar Levant on a post–Jazz Singer producer’s incredulous reaction to a new kind of music cue: “‘But where would the audience think the orchestra is coming from?’” More than any other composer for the screen, Steiner met the challenge of establishing and refining a musical language for narrative film head-on. “Concert music is full of secrets,” one colleague, Rebecca composer Franz Waxman, observed. “Film music must make its point immediately.” To that end, Steiner…