In 2016, Mexican filmmaker Manuela de Laborde released what was probably that year's most acclaimed experimental film. As Without So Within is a nearly 30 minute long abstract study in color and volume, featuring several distinct movements organized around a particular type of form. These are mostly geometrical solids -- spheres, cones, etc. -- that de Laborde photographs under varying condi...
2021-07-14 21:25:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Lots of filmmakers were forced to change up their methods in order to keep working during the Covid-19 lockdown. But Hong Sangsoo is one from whom you might not expect any dramatic changes, since most of his films are intimate talkfests built around just a handful of actors. In Front of Your Face is very recognizably a Hong film. The very first shot features a close-up of a sleeping woman, J...
2021-07-14 00:42:52 +0000 UTC View Post
Ball's in your court, Ron.
10. Do You Know Why I Pulled You Over?
9. Rain Delay (Ron Delay)
8. The First Time We Saw the Beatles In Concert (A Tragedy)
7. You Make Me Feel Somewhat Alive
6. Cannibal Tours
5. There Are Other Mountains, You Know (Cézanne's Doubt) 2021-07-13 03:47:18 +0000 UTC View Post
English titles of foreign films can often be clumsy and misleading, and Softie is not a particularly apt rendition of Petite nature. The phrase is a derogatory expression meaning "hothouse flower," "weakling," or something with crueler gay overtones, such as "pansy." The epithet-du jour in English would probably be "snowflake," although that might mislead audiences into thi...
2021-07-13 02:38:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Occasionally I enjoy a film so much that I am a bit suspicious of the experience. Why does this particular movie seem to be pushing all my pleasure buttons? Is it pandering to me? Granted, I work to temper this suspicion with a recognition that films (at least most films, anyway) are made to be enjoyed, and that enjoyment can take a lot of different forms. So why was I riveted through all ...
2021-07-12 18:13:53 +0000 UTC View Post
"Why didn't Bergman make films about happiness?" wonders Chris (Vicky Krieps) to her husband Anthony (Tim Roth). Although Hansen-Løve takes her time clarifying exactly what we're watching, we eventually discover that this is an aesthetic debate between two film directors who are in love. And while Bergman Island is not a uniformly upbeat film by any means, it does suggest that the beauty al...
2021-07-09 20:43:12 +0000 UTC View Post
It's going to be an interesting month! To be honest, I don't have a lot of experience with the classic Hollywood musicals. And the ones I've always known and liked have been the Busby Berkeley films, with their (mostly) dancerly anonymity and geometric focus. By contrast, it's pretty evident that Minnelli, working with the Freed Unit at MGM, favored star vehicles, with dynamic performers like Gene Ke...
2021-07-07 20:00:50 +0000 UTC View Post
It has to be said: the British are simply made of sterner stuff. From 1939 to 1945, Powell and Pressburger essentially made World War II the primary subject of their filmmaking. It plays a role even in A Matter of Life or Death, which would otherwise be a somewhat slight afterlife-fiction on par with something like Here Comes Mr. Jordan. In fact, the influence of this film on Albert...
2021-07-05 04:01:15 +0000 UTC View Post
LET'S DO THIS. (At least one more Archers film to come, though.)
2021-07-03 04:47:49 +0000 UTC View Post
When watching The Red Shoes, I was quite taken with the Archers' bizarre, experimental approach to combining ballet and cinema, so much so that I wanted to see them fully commit to that method without relying on a wraparound story. This interest is what prompted me to watch The Tales of Hoffmann ahead of acknowledged classics like 49th Parallel or Colonel Blimp. In...
2021-07-02 03:24:22 +0000 UTC View Post
Another of the leading lights of experimental cinema at the moment, Zachary Epcar has very quickly defined a highly individual style. In such recent films as Return to Forms (2016) and Life After Love (2018), he has exhibited a new variety of California cinema, quite different from the West Coast filmmaking of the 1960s and 70s. Artists like Robert Nelson, William Wiley, Ed Ruscha, ...
2021-06-30 21:21:21 +0000 UTC View Post
Just an update: I have not forgotten about the July director-of-the-month poll, but have decided to delay it by a few days. I want to get a couple more Archers films under my belt, but June has been a wild month, with my son coming back home from New Jersey (with his best friend and their dog and cat in tow), a lot of house-related insanity (new AC, new roof), and of course I'm also teaching an onlin...
2021-06-30 04:33:08 +0000 UTC View Post
German film artist Vika Kirchenbauer has been making work for awhile now, but it was her previous film, Untitled Sequence of Gaps (featured at Oberhausen and NYFF) that really solidified her place as a significant voice in avant-garde cinema. That work was a somewhat elliptical essay film about the visible spectrum. It described how there are multiple optic fields existing side by side, and ...
2021-06-29 17:45:25 +0000 UTC View Post
A "minor film" in all senses of the word, A Canterbury Tale is also a stark distillation of the humanist wisdom that exemplified the Archers' approach to a complex world. This is a film whose plot is so flimsy as to practically signpost to the viewer that narrative is not really a concern. Instead, A Canterbury Tale is besotted with local peculiarities, glancing portraiture, and the...
2021-06-28 22:26:15 +0000 UTC View Post
Ironically, one of the unexpected benefits of the wholesale switch to digital projection has been a resurgence of Super-8 filmmaking. Not so long ago, even major institutions like MoMA and the Whitney were largely incapable of presenting work in 8, and if they did, there was no guarantee of projection quality. Now, more and more people are exploring the unique qualities of Super-8 -- tactility, inten...
2021-06-26 21:22:16 +0000 UTC View Post
It's been so long since I've gone to a movie theater that I forgot how shitty they are.
I just got back from a failed attempt to see The Sparks Brothers at the Houston Area's newest googleplex, only to find that the show had been bumped to 11pm, no doubt to accommodate another screening of F9.
Keep in mind, during the pandemic, Houston's only arthouse cinema, the River O...
2021-06-26 03:15:10 +0000 UTC View Post
For those who are still struggling with the question of whether the pornographic gaze can ever really be turned to feminist purposes, Belladonna of Sadness offers an extreme test case. Simultaneously bizarre and conventional, bound by genre and mythology while saturated in yesterday's avant-garde aesthetics, Yamamoto's film is undeniably familiar even as it seems sui generis. Be...
2021-06-23 05:17:12 +0000 UTC View Post
Among this film's many virtues is it strange, remarkable opening scene. The Red Shoes begins with a large group of college-aged men and women clamoring at a gate. You'd think they were waiting for admission to see Elvis or Sinatra at the height of their fame, but in fact these are rush-ticket holders climbing over each other to see a ballet. Up in the nosebleed section, one group of friends ...
2021-06-19 03:04:33 +0000 UTC View Post
I am a few posts behind at this point, mostly owing to domestic endeavors. Our AC has given up the ghost, which is pretty serious in Houston in June. So we are having a new unit put in all day tomorrow. (Hooray for credit!) In a few days I will write up some of the really strong experimental films I've seen recently (by Manuela de Laborde, Zachary Epcar, and Vika Kirchenbauer).
But I also had t...
2021-06-17 05:36:46 +0000 UTC View Post
At least as far back as Frederick Wiseman's High School (1968), documentary filmmakers have consistently been compelled by the inner workings and personal dynamics of the classroom. A pretty wonderful screening series could easily be programmed around this topic, one that would feature such vastly different works as Nicolas Philibert's To Be and To Have (2002), Amanda Rose Wilder's ...
2021-06-16 00:56:42 +0000 UTC View Post
To state the obvious, we would not be paying any attention to this medium-length public service announcement if it weren't a work-for-hire by a major film artist. Then again, if Romero weren't behind the camera, The Amusement Park would be a lot more "professional," and considerably less weird. This isn't a film that stands up against the classic of the Dead trilogy, most...
2021-06-11 02:02:54 +0000 UTC View Post
A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I'd been having some issues with illness. I'm pleased to report I have gotten a clean bill of health.
To sum up: I have a sizable lump on my right nut. My first urologist checked it out and said (and I quote), "ooh! That's gonna need to come out." Then he sent me for an ultrasound to confirm the problem. That test showed no lump at all, and the same doctor told...
2021-06-08 22:27:52 +0000 UTC View Post
The jury is not exactly out on Black Narcissus. It is considered one of the very best artifacts from the Powell / Pressburger partnership, which surely makes it one of the greatest British films of all time. At the same time, encountering it not in 1947, or 1997, but in 2021, I cannot help meeting it with a fair dash of ambivalence. This isn't so much about "presentism," much less...
2021-06-07 01:14:05 +0000 UTC View Post
As stunts go, A Man and a Camera is fairly clever, and certainly provides the viewer with an extended cinematic Rorschach blot, as Hendrikx's fundamental ideas about human nature gradually come into focus over the film's 63 minutes. In a suburban Dutch neighborhood, the director begins by silently filming those he finds walking or workin...
2021-06-06 01:20:00 +0000 UTC View Post
The Ann Arbor Film Festival used to (and maybe still does, I don't pay attention anymore) have a panel discussion on the last day of screenings. It was called "What the Hell Was That?" and it provided a second look at a handful of films that were particularly befuddling to audiences, based on informal discussion around the festival. I was on the panel in 2012, and we addressed such hard nuts as Laida...
2021-06-04 22:36:47 +0000 UTC View Post
Alas, this is my first exposure to Bressane, possibly the key Brazilian director of his particular era. That era, incidentally, is the post-Cinema Novo movement known as Cinema de Boco do Lixo, or the "Mouth of Garbage" Cinema. Bressane's best-known film remains his 1969 cri de coeur entitled Killed the Family and Went to the Movies, one of the key works of Boco do Lixo. Unlik...
2021-06-04 03:53:19 +0000 UTC View Post
I wanted to complete my Ray run with an unusual selection, a film that doesn't seem to hold an especially high place in the director's canon. So I want to thank Adam Nayman for his insightful review on Letterboxd, which indicated that The Coward is both uncharacteristic of Ray and also of a piece wit...
2021-06-03 03:13:07 +0000 UTC View Post
The more Rays I've seen, the stranger it seems to me that the Apu trilogy continues to be regarded as his crowning achievement. This may say less about Ray, and more about the sort of anthropologically-tinged realism that Western critics expect when watching films from the Global South. The Home and the World, another Tagore adaptation, is a complex, nearly flawless examination of various cr...
2021-06-02 02:39:39 +0000 UTC View Post
The Archers are off to a commanding lead, so if you haven't voted yet, you could still sway the results. Of course, any minute the trucks filled with mail-in ballots will arrive, so the winner has probably been decided long ago....
2021-05-30 01:06:16 +0000 UTC View Post
Although they are very different directors, something about Ray has been reminding me of Ozu. Of course part of it pertains to the overarching themes of their respective bodies of work. Both men, in their unique ways, are analyzing the pull in their cultures between modernity and tradition. Judging from the films themselves, and the history surround them to some extent, this crisis has a rather diffe...
2021-05-30 01:03:09 +0000 UTC View Post