msicism

My Night at Maud's (Éric Rohmer, 1969)

First things first: I'm sure my old friend Gabe Klinger would like me to point out that, for some reason, in the U.K. the film was released as My Night With Maud.

Far and away my favorite Rohmer so far, Maud strikes me as a film in which the director is playing to his greatest strengths. His primary concerns -- morality, the ...

Crimes of the Future (David Cronenberg, 2022)

In terms of my response to Crimes of the Future, I owe a significant debt to my friend Steve Carlson, whose comment on Twitter helped orient my viewing. Steve (who loves the film) suggested that it's a comedy, and that its portentous tone is primarily a misdirection. I will concede that Crimes is a dark comedy, one that maps a possible future of increasing depersonalization and mism...

RRR (S. S. Rajamouli, 2022)

It's unusual for a popular Indian film to gain much critical or commercial traction in the U.S., apart from the Desi circuit, a parallel distribution network that occupies American multiplexes but is typically treated like another world. RRR is probably the most notable crossover hit since Aamir Khan's Lagaan back in 2001. (Greater access to media in the digital age seemed to porten...

Prometheus (Dominic Angerame, 2021)

In other writing, I've lamented the fact that so many showcases for experimental film have so fixated on discovering new talent that many old masters of the field have been left by the wayside. Recently I've reflected on this frustration, and I have realized a few things. First, the response comes from a place of personal anxiety. I worry that my own aesthetic sensibility is so calcified that I simpl...

Claire's Knee (Éric Rohmer, 1970)

Perhaps because Rohmer knew that La collectionneuse was too subtle for idiots like me, he thoughtfully made Claire's Knee, a film that is perfectly frank about the lechery of its leading man. Jérome (Jean-Claude Brialy) is a middle-aged, retired diplomat, and that the fact that Rohmer has assigned him that occupation strikes me as significant, even though not much is made of it in ...

Both Sides of the Blade (Claire Denis, 2022)

This is an extremely difficult film to evaluate. I will state for the record that I did not enjoy watching it, although enjoyment is of course only one reaction that a work of art can provoke. What makes Both Sides of the Blade so confusing is that its dominant formal features make it, to my mind, a failure as a film. But I suspect that they may have been fully intentional strategies on Clai...

The Integrity of Joseph Chambers (Robert Machoian, 2022)

For In Review Online's Tribeca coverage: 

"[...] As Joe treks through his best friend’s private land with a borrowed rifle, we see that he is an untrained buffoon who has no business wielding a firearm. He barely knows how to load it, and when he does he swings it around like a toy, more than on...

Maria Schneider, 1983 (Elisabeth Subrin, 2022)

Elisabeth Subrin is a filmmaker who uses her art to make interventions into feminist theory. This was the challenge that Laura Mulvey posed in the early 70s when she wrote "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," that only a new form of filmmaking could avoid the misogynist pitfalls of classic Hollywood. Subrin's work in this area is, to my mind, more successful that Mulvey's work with Peter Wollen, i...

The Tomb of Kafka (Jean-Claude Rousseau, 2022)

The more work I see by Jean-Claude Rousseau, the harder it is for me to pin him down. He is a bit of an anomaly in the contemporary film world. He makes short films and featurettes that are clearly experimental in their overall approach. But they frequently have a subtle documentary element, and they also seem equally committed to painterly considerations like landscape and portraiture. He is miles a...

La collectionneuse (Éric Rohmer, 1967)

[NOTE: Because a lot of things have taken me away from Patreon work this month, I am continuing to focus on Rohmer through July.]

Just out of curiosity, I went back over my screening logs to see how often I'd engaged with Rohmer's cinema. And, well, it hasn't been terribly often. I saw Reinette and Mirabelle sometime in the 90s, and after that: The Lady and the Duke (seen 2001...

De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, 2022)

TIFF WAVELENGTHS 2022

After the genre-redefining triumph that was Leviathan, Paravel and Castaing-Taylor took their Sensory Ethnography down a dead end street with Caniba, a literally unblinking portrait of infamous murderer-cannibal Issei Sagawa. It's difficult to conceive the thought process behind making such a film because, among other things, the duo's co...

Letterboxing

Hey, just a note to say I watched a couple of recent films, and I didn't think I had a lot to say about them. So I did quick write-ups on Letterboxd instead of putting anything here.

To wit:

Dark Glasses (Dario Argento, 2022)

"It'd sort of be special pleading to complain about ableism in a film so  patently absurd, but Diana's function almost all of the time is...

VIVE LE DROIT!

So the Director of the Month for June is the one and only Éric Rohmer. So looking forward to getting down with this guy at long last.

Stay tuned...

Two People (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1945)

Following the artistic triumph of Day of Wrath, Dreyer made Two People, a film that has a fairly shaky reputation. By some accounts the production was troubled; Dreyer apparently did not like either of the two lead actors but was prevented from replacing them. (The Cowboy: "These are the two people.") After it sat on the shelf it got a cursory release, after which Dreyer made six do...

Will-o'-the-Wisp (João Pedro Rodrigues, 2022)

TIFF WAVELENGTHS 2022

Since his feature film debut O Fantasma back in 2000, João Pedro Rodrigues has been one of the most protean filmmakers on the international scene. His emergence coincided with the general rediscovery of Portuguese film in the late 90s / early 00s, and in certain respects Rodrigues' style and attitude reflects an unholy alliance between two of tha...

June Director of the Month

This month, I want to be a bit more focused in my viewing. In light of this, I'm giving you a poll with a fairly limited slate of choices. This will probably not be a continuing thing.

A Chiara (Jonas Carpignano, 2021)

If you are a filmmaker or group of filmmakers -- let's say, the Dardennes brothers -- the desire to combine a rough cinematic realism with contemporary sociopolitical problems is understandable. It allows one to employ techniques (close-ups, handheld camerawork, the intense observation of a restless main character) that convey urgency. Or at least that's how we have customarily learned to read these ...

Michael (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1924)

While it's difficult not to marvel at Michael's candor regarding same-sex attraction, specifically for a film made in 1924, it may be useful to place it in context. One of Dreyer's German films made for UFA, Michael would probably be considered a canonical Weimar film had it been directed by nearly anyone else. Since Dreyer, of course, went on to become the quintessential Danish mas...

Cannes Marginalia (Final)

At the end of 2021, I set it as a personal goal to attend Cannes this year. Like many of my personal goals, I failed to achieve it. I'll spare you the details.

However I am reviewing a few Cannes titles for In Review Online, and I figured I'd mention it here.

Magdala (Damien Manivel, 2022)

[...] 2022-05-27 03:18:32 +0000 UTC View Post

Pleasure (Ninja Thyberg, 2021)

Sometimes we want to explore the messiness of complex situations, the way that not every action, decision, or emotion falls in line with social or political orthodoxy. But that's not always possible. It can be very difficult to address certain hot-button topics, and there can often be a sense that if we don't make our position crystal clear -- insusceptible to misunderstanding, carefully controlled t...

Jim Jennings (1951-2021)

One of the true unsung heroes of American experimental cinema, Jim Jennings has passed away, following a five-year mental and physical degeneration resulting from Alzheimer's. I will be writing a fairly extensive career summarizing obituary for the next issue of Cinema Scope, but for now I wanted to direct you to this website -- https:/...

Paris, 13th District (Jacques Audiard, 2021)

There's nothing particularly wrong with Paris, 13th District (aka Les Olympiades). It has quite a lot going for it, actually. The black-and-white cinematography is crisp and dynamic, using the buildings of the titular arrondissement as a visual refrain, tying the various story strands together in with an unfussy formalism. The three lead actors are all suitably charismatic....

Whitman Mayo

That's it. That's the post.

Master of the House (Carl Th. Dreyer, 1925)

You know what? Women really do hold up half the sky!

There's nothing particularly complicated (or compelling) about this early Dreyer effort. It painstakingly details the plight of a family in economic straits, ruled by Viktor (Johannes Meyer) not so much with an iron fist as a relentless streak of assholism. Bitter about his failed business, Viktor treats his beleaguered wife Ida (Ast...

Fresh (Mimi Cave, 2022)

[MILD SPOILERS]

Bless this movie's heart. Fresh is an attempt at psychological body-horror that is so besotted with its own dominant metaphor that it can't be bothered to do such basic things as rounding out its characters, attending to its subplots, or building a recognizable world that doesn't stop just millimeters beyond the edge of the frame. I've seen a couple of reviews that have...

Vortex (Gaspar Noé, 2021)

I cannot say I necessarily disagree with the conventional wisdom on Vortex. In most respects it is a fine film, and there's certainly no denying its technical excellence, especially when compared with most of what passes for "cinema" on a daily basis. As J. Hoberman once wrote regarding Godard's Numero Deux (a film that shares some notable characteristics with Noé's latest), "every...

Covering More (Prismatic) Ground

(Just a random-ass jawn for my Philly peeps.)

open sky / open sea / open ground (Martín Baus and Libertad Gills, 2022)

It's perhaps appropriate that the only image I can find from this delicate Super-8 film is so tiny. It gives a sense of how defiantly small the work is...

Some Brief Notes on.....

Although I was not able to completely devote my weekend to the Prismatic Ground online film festival -- a challenging and always intriguing selection of experimental documentaries -- I did get to sample a fair amount. (With the help of James Hansen, I have secured links for some of the films I missed, so I will probably weigh in on those later.) I ended up having mixed feelings about the selections o...

X (Ti West, 2022)

Shakedown: 1979

Confession: I've never seen any of Ti West's other films, and so even though I spent a lot of X kind of wishing Rob Zombie had tackled the material instead, I eventually had to give The Other Mr. West props. X takes a lot more formalist care than it really needs to, something I quite enjoyed despite the fact that the pretentious filmmaker character (Ow...

Vampyr (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1932)

This is the one major Dreyer film I'd never seen, and wow, what an oversight. Made twelve years after The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Vampyr picks up the Expressionist mantle and runs with it, producing a film that is more formally daring in almost every way. To be fair, Robert Wiene wasn't much of a director, and much of what made Caligari unique was all...