Innholdsfortegnelse for January - February 2016 i Film Comment

Welcome to film comment’s annual end-of-year jamboree. Jamboree? I think that’s a good word for it since it feels like we’re throwing a big party to celebrate cinema in all its diversity—and inviting an all-star cast of contributors and colleagues to join us by sounding off in list form on their favorites from the past 12 months. It’s been our tradition for 15 years now, and so in this case, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. That’s why longstanding readers will notice that we’ve revived one of the year-end package’s features, Terra Incognita, which was abandoned in 2014 but has returned by popular demand. This guide to films our contributors have cited before most of us have even caught a whiff of them is a handy heads-up to what’s…

There’s a moment roughly a third of the way into The Revenant, Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s survivalist Western cum frontier existentialism fable, when a group of men are pulling a wounded trapper along on a primitive sled. Their comrade, a man named Hugh Glass, has been mauled by a grizzly bear; the rest of his hunting party, exhausted by Indian attacks and brutal winter weather, are barely able to drag him along the icy path. They come to a steep, snowy incline, and attempt to push the makeshift gurney up the hill Sisyphus-style, Glass’s groans of pain resounding through the landscape. “That’s us right there,” the 52-year-old filmmaker says, referring to himself, his star Leonardo DiCaprio, and the rest of his cast and his crew. “The cold, the snow, the pain,…

The Academy of Muses (1) José Luis Guerín, Spain AFTER HIS HIT-AND-MISS FORAY INTO diary film, José Luis Guerín gets back on track with this playful story of the intellectual and emotional battle between a university professor (Raffaele Pinto) and the women around him—his wife and his students. A good excuse to develop a talkative work-inprogress— based on fact, molded with fiction— in which the titular “muses” rise up against their passive role by discussing and redefining the traditional notions of beauty, desire, and love.—Manuel Yáñez-Murillo El cielo del centauro (2) Hugo Santiago, France/Argentina FIFTY YEARS AFTER HIS MASTERPIECE, Invasion, Hugo Santiago returns to his beloved hometown with a fantastical fable that celebrates its uniqueness in delirious high spirits. A Frenchman arrives in an impossible Buenos Aires to deliver a…

IN FOCUS: Arrow’s Blu-ray box set of Kinji Fukasaku’s Battles Without Honor and Humanity series was released in December. Will the real Kinji Fukasaku please stand up? Well, which one? The one revered by contemporary Japanese filmmakers and foreign critics for his violent yakuza movies? Or the one responsible for lightweight, studio-made sci-fi, fantasy, and swordplay spectaculars like Message from Space, Samurai Reincarnation, and Legend of Eight Samurai? Or the writer and director of the gender-bending, high-camp 1968 Yukio Mishima adaptation Black Lizard? Or the angry young man who self-financed a pair of morally outraged indie dramas, If You Were Young: Rage and Under the Flag of the Rising Sun? Or the team player who effectively co-directed 20th Century Fox’s Pearl Harbor blockbuster Tora! Tora! Tora!? Or the enfant terrible…

THE CLUB Director: Pablo Larraín Country/Year: Chile, 2015 Opening: February 5 Where: New York PIETY AND BLASPHEMY ARE ALL THE SAME in Pablo Larraín’s boisterous denunciation of the Catholic Church. Defrocked for transgressions ranging from pedophilia to baby trafficking, four middle-aged priests live together in a house of penitence in a remote Chilean coastal town. Their quiet, anonymous existence, is overseen by a methodical guardian angel, Sister Monica (Antonia Zegers), until a fifth sinner turns up and unleashes demons from the past. In a film permeated by a sense of doom, Larraín’s expressionistic use of lens distortion entraps the characters, suggesting that there is no place to hide when the truth erupts like vomit. But what makes The Club stand out so vividly from other recent depictions of religious corruption…

W.C. Fields by Himself Edited by Ronald J. Fields Taylor Trade, $18.95 AN OBJECT OF FUN, W.C. FIELDS READILY BECOMES AN OBJECT of obsession too. I find myself replaying isolated bits, or whole strings of gags, from his movies. The idea is to figure out what makes a joke tick—why every single toss of fake snow in The Fatal Glass of Beer followed by Fields’s lack of reaction adds up to a winner. But I’m generally chuckling too much to break it down. (Sometimes the movie itself repeats the gag; perhaps as a result of this priming, “It ain’t a fit night out for man or beast” echoes in my brain with alarming frequency.) The scrutiny was also a habit of the performer: W.C. Fields by Himself demonstrates, in the…

THE BOOK OF LIFE Basking in the afterglow of In Jackson Heights, the irrepressible Frederick Wiseman is making another movie in New York. Last fall, the filmmaker was spotted shooting at the flagship 42nd Street branch of the New York Public Library, the nation’s third-largest public library (after the Library of Congress). Reports have placed Wiseman at a talk by awardwinning writer Ta-Nehisi Coates and, yes, a meeting or two. The film would be Wiseman’s 10th documentary in the city (his first was Hospital, in 1970, at Metropolitan in East Harlem) and his 41st in all. ANGST IN HIS PANTS From Holy Motors to Sparks: Leos Carax is angling to direct a musical, developed in close collaboration with the cult American band. He has picked his two leads— Adam Driver…

†Indicates lists are unranked *See Terra Incognita, pages 42-45 Chahine MONTREAL 1. Arabian Nights 2. Bridge of Spies 3. Victoria 4. Son of Saul 5. Mountains May Depart 6. Inside Out 7. Cemetery of Splendour 8. The Theory of Everything 9. Hard to Be a God 10. Office Richard Combs† LONDON The Assassin Cymbeline The Duke of Burgundy Goodbye to Language Inherent Vice Life of Riley National Gallery Nightcrawler Sicario Taxi Manohla Dargis LOS ANGELES 1. The Assassin + Mad Max: Fury Road (tie) 2. “Luminous Intimacy: The Cinema of Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler” 3. Bridge of Spies 4. Carol 5. In Jackson Heights 6. The Martian 7. The Kindergarten Teacher 8. The Diary of a Teenage Girl 9. The Big Short 10. Sixty Six Anton Dolin MOSCOW 1.…

THE TWO RELATIVELY WELL-KNOWN TITLES on my list, Cemetery of Splendour and Mountains May Depart, have both been taken as disappointments by some but strike me as fine achievements. Apichatpong’s film is likely the closest he’ll ever get to agitprop: it’s a state-of-the-nation lament for Thailand’s chaotic, militarist present and darkly unpromising future. Jia’s film is his feisty response to the Film Bureau’s banning of A Touch of Sin: crafted to sail through China’s censorship and to appeal to as many Chinese viewers as possible, it’s an unyielding attack on threats to human values and on false notions of freedom. Ahn’s Alice in Earnestland (1) is the sparkiest debut of the year, a rollicking theater-of-cruelty comedy in which one damaged woman stages a murderous retaliation against everything in Korea that…

SOUND DESIGNER WALTER MURCH ARGUES THAT HEARING IS BASED ON physiognomy: your eyes face forward and your ears face sideways. So you see what’s in front of you and hear what’s around you. That’s how we evolved as animals, but it was something that wasn’t taken into account in the early sound era when you were looking at people talking on screen and assumed that you heard them frontally, when in fact, you heard them from both sides of your head. PART VIII In Spring 2011 Paul Schrader taught a 15-week course at Columbia University, “Films That Changed Filmmaking,” about the influence of technology on film throughout the history of cinema. Working with Robert Brink, Schrader has now produced a series of articles based on the talks for publication in…

TOP 10 1. The Assassin Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tai./China/H.K./Fr., 15; Well Go USA $24.98 2. Jan Troell x 2: The Emigrants, Swe., 71 + The New Land, Swe., 72; Criterion $39.95 3. Death by Hanging Oshima, Jap., 68; Criterion $29.95 4. The Martian Ridley Scott, U.S./U.K., 15; Fox $29.98 5. The Diary of a Teenage Girl Marielle Heller, 15; Sony $30.99 6. Sicario Denis Villeneuve, 15; Lionsgate $29.95 7. Bitter Rice Giuseppe De Santis, It., 49; Criterion $19.95 8. I Knew Her Well Antonio Pietrangeli, It./W. Ger./Fr., 65; Criterion $29.95 9. Experimenter Almereyda, 15; Magnolia $26.98 10. Eden Mia Hansen-Løve, Fr., 14; Broad Green Pictures $26.99 RECOMMENDED Irene Dunne x 4: Consolation Marriage, Paul Sloane, 31; Ann Vickers, John Cromwell, 33; Sweet Adeline, Mervyn LeRoy, 34; Never a Dull Moment, George…

The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907-1933 Edited by Anton Kaes, Nicholas Baer, and Michael Cowan University of California Press, $65 Beginning not with the birth of film but the birth of film writing, The Promise of Cinema offers an invaluable compendium of critical and theoretical texts—originally published in journals, newspapers, and magazines in Germany and Austria—that span the prewar period up to the rise of National Socialism. Some of the selections appeared in Anton Kaes’s pioneering 1978 anthology Kino-Debatte, but this bold, new American offshoot is considerably more ambitious in scope, including a vast number of texts that have never been published before in English. Readers now have access to a dazzling array of insights into the world of cinema during its heady first decades. The expertly chosen…

YOU WOULDN’T KNOW IT FROM THIS SEASON’S DISPIRITINGLY SAMEY, WELL-HEELED awards candidates. You wouldn’t know it from the thumbnail-friendly titles recommended by Netflix. You wouldn’t know it unless you were somehow able to see for yourself, either at film festivals, or at fleeting weeklong runs at the art house, or through targeted searches online, spurred by critical testimonials or social-media chatter. But the truth is that 2015 was another phenomenal year for nonfiction film. For several years now, the most consistently adventurous, unpredictable, intelligent, and downright exciting films have been works of nonfiction. While narrative features have long operated within, or provocatively pushed against, established genres and aesthetic modes, the nonfiction form is in the midst of inventing new genres and modes, which are expanded, exploded, refined, and interrogated as…