msicism

The Tragedy of Macbeth (Joel Coen, 2021)

"It's the Scottish play, whaddya need, a roadmap?"

Joel Coen's take on Macbeth was one of the few major-auteur films from 2021 that I still needed to catch up with, and although I didn't exactly set out to skip it, I always seemed to find something better to do. That's because I had certain suspicions about it based on the stills and clips I encountered, and for the most part those sus...

Sundown (Michel Franco, 2021)

While watching Sundown, I was convinced for about an hour that, against all odds, Michel Franco had made a film I sort of liked. Like the earlier Chronic, this film showcases a delicately recessive performance by Tim Roth, and unlike that earlier film, Sundown seemed less concerned with shock tactics and more interested in providi...

Flash Poll: Wrapping 2021

Now that the semester is over, I want to prioritize finishing off the major films from last year. As per usual, I will eventually see all the films from last year's Cannes competition, and will also strive to complete the NYFF Main Slate. However, it could take awhile, and I wanted your input on which of these films I should prioritize.

Please select TWO choices from the options below.

No...

Electra, My Love (Miklós Jancsó, 1974)

This appears to be the point at which Jancsó descends into silliness, but Electra, My Love is by no means without interest. Here Jancsó abjures the specifics of Hungarian history that usually anchor his films, and although Electra has all the pertinent political elements in place, it stages the classical myth with a style of theatrical pageantry that screams of the 1970s. The resu...

Silence and Cry (Miklós Jancsó, 1968)

Interiors!

With Silence and Cry, it seems Jancsó was trying something different, and the results are mixed. The primary themes are still in place, as the action takes place immediately following the dissolution of the Hungarian Communist government in 1919, and the temporary consolidation of authority under the Royal Police. These officers were the remnants of the falled Habsburg Mona...

Red Psalm (Miklós Jancsó, 1972)

Happy May Day!

While Red Psalm is a far cry from the triumph of The Red and the White, is does depict Jancsó's art at a particular moment of mastery. Essentially an abstract cinematic pageant depicting a Socialist peasant uprising and its violent obliteration, the film reflects a protracted cycle of rebellion and counter-rebellion, punctuated with highly formalized intrusions...

May Poll

We are not quite done with Jancsó. But let's go on and set the course for the merry, merry month of May.

This time, I am including directors with whom I'm rather familiar, but about whom I haven't written much (or anything), and/or whose films I have not seen for a long time.

The Red and the White (Miklós Jancsó, 1967)

Often, the great modernists were forced to devise a new formal approach to their art in order to fully accommodate the subject matter they wanted to explore. This isn't a new observation, of course, but I think it reminds us that radical styles can become routinized once they become detached from the historical circumstances that helped produce them in the first place. Which is really just my long-wi...

Putting It Together: Two Avant-Garde Films

The Red Thread (Larry Gottheim, 1987)

Thanks to Max Proctor's wonderful Ultra Dogme site, I had the chance to catch up with some films I had not seen by Larry Gottheim, one of the most under-acknowledged masters of the 1970s "structural" avant-garde. He remains best known for his fi...

Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan (Chor Yuen, 1972)

In 2013, avant-garde filmmaker Shambhavi Kaul produced a short film called Mount Song. It consisted of isolated, moonlit village scenes, often covered in patently artificial snow. Open structures with hatched bamboo roofs, and highly organized rows of trees with white blossoms, all vaguely evoke the Qing dynasty, but only as filtered through the haptic imagination of the cinema. Kaul repeate...

Robe of Gems (Natalia López Gallardo, 2022)

If you are not familiar with the work of Natalia López Gallardo, the opening sequence of Robe of Gems, her feature directing debut, will help you place her immediately. Following the opening credits, we get an uncomfortably long black screen that slowly begins to brighten. Over the course of about four minutes, the image fades in to a tree-covered landscape at dawn, saturated with a hazy, p...

Fabian: Going to the Dogs (Dominik Graf, 2021)

Nothing in Dominik Graf's latest film is as exciting as its first ten minutes. In the opening sequence of Fabian, Graf and cinematographer Hanno Letz take us through the tunnels of a U-bahn station in present day, the camera gliding past present-day commuters. As the camera floats up the stairs and out of the station, we see posters for the 1931 election which will end the Weimar Republic, s...

Feathers (Omar El Zohairy, 2021)

Based on the little bit I'd read about Feathers (the 2021 Cannes Critics' Week winner), I expected a comedy. And I suppose an argument could be made for Feathers as a pitch-black comedic enterprise, if you've got a cruel sense of humor. It's committed to a bitter absurdism, introducing the suggestion of magic and/or the supernatural to induce a slow, grinding, Kafkaesque nightmare. ...

A Couple of Recent Views

Grandma's House (Sophy Romvari, 2018)

I watched this, along with the somewhat more straightforward Nine Behind (2016), on the Criterion Channel, which has wisely decided to showcase the work of Romvari, a very unique maker of short films. They are not exactly experimental, nor are they essay films, and although they all engage with narrative elements, one couldn't real...

The Wilkinson Household Fire Alarm (Morgan Fisher, 1973)

Morgan Fisher is an unusual figure in experimental cinema. While his work is clearly aligned with the concepts and procedures of structuralism, he isn't always cited as one of the major figures of that "school." Fisher's work is wry and rigorous; it is probably closest in attitude to the films of Hollis Frampton. But where Frampton's films are wide-ranging in approach, reflecting his underlying fasci...

Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper (David Rimmer, 1970)

This is a bit of classic as far as Canadian structural film goes, although it isn't shown all that much these days. (A few years ago, TIFF Wavelengths premiered a restoration print, although I don't recall its general reception.) I'd previously only seen Variations in a highly degraded video transfer, so this lovely copy sort of makes me feel as if I'm seeing Rimmer's film for the very first...

Agnus Dei (Miklós Jancsó, 1971)

Obviously it's a bit premature to make any grand declarations about Jancsó, seeing as I've only seen three of his films, one so long ago I can barely remember. But seeing Agnus Dei closely on the heels of The Round-Up, I feel like I've now gotten a fairly solid sense of the style, the brand, the atmosphere. I joked about this on 2022-04-13 16:43:06 +0000 UTC View Post

The City and the City (Christos Passalis and Syllas Tzoumerkas, 2022)

A film that is far more interesting than successful, The City and the City more than lives down to its odd, elliptical title. It seems that its makers are laboring under a false assumption. Given that its subject is a complex, sprawling one -- the lives and fates of Jews living in Thessaloniki, particularly following the Nazis' occupation of Greece -- it only makes sense that the film's make...

The Round-Up (Miklós Jancsó, 1966)

The first of Jancsó's films to really break through in the West, The Round-Up seems to suggest things to come. The film is explicitly about the situation in Hungary following the failed 1848 revolution. With the Habsburgs firmly back in power, the military was rounded up dozens of defeated rebel soldiers and their fellow-travelers, essentially toying with them until they receive the order o...

The Cathedral (Ricky D'Ambrose, 2021)

Often we follow filmmakers who show continued promise, but for whatever reason are unable to bring their talent and vision to the next level. So it's incredibly gratifying when all the pieces come together and a "subject for future research" (to borrow Sarris's phrase) achieves the breakthrough that all previous works have been suggesting was on the way. Ricky D'Ambrose's The Cathedral is su...

Welcome to the Yawn Show

Miklós Jancsó, that is! The Hungarian master, who shone brightly in the 60s and 70s, fell out of favor in the 80s, and is now making a comeback here in the 20s, is April's Director of the Month. Actually, very few of these films are available online, so I will most likely purchase the Kino Blu-ray set. But for now, I do have a copy of  Round-Up (not affiliated with the Monsan...

April Director of the Month Poll

In Reverse

So I've been swamped with work this semester, and I am not getting to write as much here as I'd like to. In light of this, I have decided to make some minor changes. 

1. I am bringing back the monthly director poll. I felt like those auteur-plunges really helped me focus my attention, and were much more educational than just the odd, random film from 1972.

2. I am not entirely abando...

The Novelist's Film (Hong Sangsoo, 2022)

Once again giving the lie to the common claim that all Hong films are the same, The Novelist's Film pointedly demonstrates the formal limitations of his method. Although Hong's latest rallies in the end, proving to be somewhat more complex than its banal first-half would suggest, The Novelist's Film is one of the few recent Hong films that feels like a dramatic exercise rather than ...

Azor (Andreas Fontana, 2021)

One of 2021's standout debut films, Azor is a meticulous and frustrating experience. Loosely patterned on Heart of Darkness -- even ending with a literal trek into the jungle and discovering the hidden nexus of political power -- Azor is a film that asks us to observe the fastidious naivety of its protagonist while affording its viewers the benefit of hindsight. It's not th...

Master (Mariama Diallo, 2022)

[NOTE: This review contains spoilers.]

In his review for the 2014 comedy Let's Be Cops, Wesley Morris observed, "all movies choose their moment. It's called a release date. Some moments, however, choose their movies." He was of referring to the "coincid...

Jackass Forever (Jeff Tremaine, 2022)

1.

2.

3.

2022-03-24 23:49:10 +0000 UTC View Post

Losing Ground (Kathleen Collins, 1982)

There's no getting around the historical importance of Losing Ground, it being the second feature film directed by a Black woman. (See below.) Taken exactly as it is, Losing Ground is a flawed film, but one that is never uninteresting. Like so many debut filmmakers, Collins directs Losing Ground as if she will never have another chance to m...

Three Floors (Nanni Moretti, 2021)

Moretti's latest is bizarre. The film hurtles from incident to incident, almost as if an entire season of some middling prestige-TV entry had been edited down to a mere two hours. It's also tonally inscrutable. Random life-shattering events that seem to cry out for Sirkian treatment are presented with a dour middlebrow realism. Now, it's been quite some time since I've really liked a Moretti film ( 2022-03-18 05:13:28 +0000 UTC View Post

Lingui (Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, 2021)

Chad's leading auteur -- perhaps the country's only regularly working director -- has never been known for his subtlety. Haroun has a particular m.o., which is focusing on small groups, usually a family, in order to observe their interpersonal dynamics in the midst of a much larger sociopolitical problem. This has included such topics as revenge killings (Dry Season), the Chadian civil war (...