Ryland's latest film reminds me of an unexpected combination of two independent artists with very different approaches to the outside world. On the one hand, there is a certain John Magary vibe to I WISH YOU WOULD. (First Blake, now Ry -- what is it with my friends stylizing their titles with all-caps?) If you saw The Mend (and if you're reading this, I suspect you did), ...
2021-03-16 23:53:34 +0000 UTC View Post
I know the conventional wisdom on True Mothers is that it's another Kawase dud. But I beg to differ. It's obviously not perfect. It's the most plot-driven film Kawase has made thus far, and there are moments where she lets slip that she isn't entirely conversant with this kind of filmmaking. In particular, major events are set up by random, implausible coincidence. Is this true of the source...
2021-03-16 03:11:06 +0000 UTC View Post
Nightjohn is based on a 1993 book by Gary Paulsen, a popular author of children's fiction. The film adaptation was co-produced by Hallmark and the Disney Channel, and as one watches Burnett's film, one can immediately see that there is a didactic purpose at the heart of the project. While it is instructive to compare Nightjohn with other cultural-landmark productions, such as Ro...
2021-03-14 22:01:24 +0000 UTC View Post
For a good long while, the films of the British structuralists were seldom seen, in part because of their bad reputation. There are various reasons for this, among them national chauvinism as well as a broader backlash against formalist experimentation, as a different ethos (part punk, part Godardian) became momentarily dominant in avant-garde circles.
But the most common rap against Brit...
2021-03-14 03:55:23 +0000 UTC View Post
Early this mornin'
when you knocked upon my door
Early this mornin', ooh
when you knocked upon my door
And I said, "Hello, Satan,"
I believe it's time to go." (Robert Johnson, "Me and the Devil Blues")
One of the first things one notices when watching To Sleep With Anger is the pacing. By now the cinema has various rhetorical maneuvers with which to suggest othe...
2021-03-13 19:32:46 +0000 UTC View Post
With his 2018 film, "I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians," Radu Jude introduced a style of self-reflexivity and Godardian disruption that I quite liked in theory. Not many people are making films like that anymore, since so much international art cinema has instead gravitated to the slow cinema / master-shot approach, one that favors large slabs of presumably revela...
2021-03-11 19:01:57 +0000 UTC View Post
Quo Vadis, Aida? is fine work by any standard, but leave it to me to find some niggling problems with it. Žbanić's film is well acted, expertly shot and edited, and successfully conveys the horrible inevitability of the 1995 Srebrenica Massacre is Bosnia. Bosnia Muslims knew full well what was coming, partly because they were no strangers to the almost gleeful butchery of Serbia's Army of ...
2021-03-08 22:15:12 +0000 UTC View Post
A "quoddy," I just learned, is a type of sailboat traditionally used for fishing. It is very specific to the area where Maine meets New Brunswick, and it is a colloquialism that will mark one as hailing from that North Atlantic region. Canadian artist Paulette Phillips has made a very unusual film called The Quodd...
2021-03-08 03:13:45 +0000 UTC View Post
I'm sure you've seen this by now, if you're the type of person who would watch things like this. I find this to be a multi-layered narrative worth unpacking. Bath and Body Works is a particular kind of store: a mid-priced mall shop that sells its customers the (literal) aroma of bourgeois luxury and class. But of course, its products are merely substitutes for the spa treatment B&BW's clientele cannot afford.
Also, as the COVID-19 vaccine makes its way around the country, and people...
2021-03-08 00:33:34 +0000 UTC View PostFirst, I want to thank James Hansen for alerting me to the fact that these films are streamable through the Pacific Film Archive. I'd have missed them otherwise. I recall first encountering Sara Kathryn Arledge's name in Wheeler Winston Dixon's 1997 book The Exploding Eye, a sort of alternate history of experimental film. She is cited as a pioneer, and looking at her work, one can immediately understand its importance. Primarily a painter, Arledge made hundreds of artworks on glass s...
2021-03-07 20:14:26 +0000 UTC View Post
The Internet is stupid, and for the most part, memes are the stupidest part of the stupid Internet. But occasionally, people inexplicably latch onto something worthwhile, momentarily bringing it out of obscurity. One such instance was Cecelia Condit's 1983 video Possibly in Michigan, a piece of surreal ...
2021-03-07 19:40:44 +0000 UTC View Post
The title is a sly joke. While it's true that in the course of Côté's film, an unseen character is described as badly needing a shower, "social hygiene" actually refers to the COVID-19 protocols under which the film was made. Côté makes a discovery: Straub and Huillet were pioneers of social distancing, and although the film is no Othon, it adopts the couple's "actors-holding-forth-in-a-...
2021-03-07 06:06:13 +0000 UTC View Post
THIS REVIEW IS TOTALLY SPOILERIFIC. SORRY.
A triptych of stories that are mostly unrelated, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, as the title implies, is about the role of chance in our lives, in particular the way it complicates our ability to control our own destiny. Considering the nature of the project, and the structure of Hamaguchi's film as essentially three detachable shorts, WFF<...
2021-03-07 04:36:07 +0000 UTC View Post
For awhile now, I've needed to go back and rewatch Anocha's 2016 film By the Time It Gets Dark, a film I did not much care for at the time. It's one of those instances in which a film has a very particular wavelength that I suspect I just couldn't align with. I found it desultory and ill-shaped, but that may have actually been the point. In any case, Anocha's latest film is far more coherent...
2021-03-05 19:13:14 +0000 UTC View Post
[NOTE: Despite the watermarks on these stills, nothing will happen if you press 8.]
I think I can safely say that most readers of this Patre-blog were probably as bowled over as I was upon seeing Ramon Zürcher's debut film The Strange Little Cat back in 2013. The film seemed to come out of nowhere and played by its own distinct rules. I guess you could call it a structuralist family c...
2021-03-04 22:11:09 +0000 UTC View Post
In getting started on the films of Charles Burnett, I decided to go with his film maudit, something I would probably never have gotten around to watching were it not for this project. Although there are Burnett films with worse reputations (e.g., his film about Namibia), The Annihilation of Fish is the movie that a fair number of critics and audiences saw upon its release, and the r...
2021-03-04 01:49:29 +0000 UTC View Post
As I mentioned at the end of my notes on Wife! Be Like a Rose!, Naruse certainly paid attention to the groundbreaking work that Douglas Sirk was doing in the 1950s. The complex interplay of melodramatic conventions and evolving gender ideologies that was visible in Wife!, but often irreconcilable, is masterfully handled in Naruse's final film. Openly built on contrivance and co...
2021-03-03 22:36:54 +0000 UTC View Post
In just under ten minutes, Straub's newest film disrupts any lingering ideas we may have about historical progress, if it doesn't invalidate them altogether. A speaker (Christophe Clavert), seen mostly from the back as he walks around a lake, explains very patiently that if revolution comes, it will be total...
2021-03-02 04:27:57 +0000 UTC View Post
If one wanted to embark on a post-structuralist analysis of Naruse, I'd submit that Wife! Be Like a Rose! would be a fantastic place to start. Traversed by numerous ideological double-binds, this film explicitly affirms patriarchy and female servitude while disrupting that idea at every turn. As Cahiers famously write about Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln, this is a "cracking text." (It's ...
2021-03-01 22:12:11 +0000 UTC View Post
There were two clear leaders, so now let's see how this shakes out.
2021-02-26 06:37:31 +0000 UTC View Postis available to watch online, totally free.
Check it out.
2021-02-25 00:34:19 +0000 UTC View PostHey, I still have a few days (and a few Naruses) to go, but I wanted to get the March poll going. As you may notice, I have swapped out a couple of nonstarters with new options. And I've dropped in a major figure I'm woefully behind on, even though I have seen seven of his films. Choose wisely!
PS: I miscounted. I've seen eight Hitchcocks. A fraction less shameful.
2021-02-24 22:17:58 +0000 UTC View PostBecause of my exciting Bear Grylls adventure in Texas living, I've fallen a bit behind in writing up films. As it happens, I feel no particular need to go long on these.
Psalm IV: Valley of the Shadow (Phil Solomon, 2013)
One of the final films Solomon created before retiring, Psalm IV obliquely refers to his earlier "Twilight Zone" influenced films made between ...
2021-02-24 06:42:08 +0000 UTC View Post
I'm all lost in the supermarket
I can no longer shop happily
I came in here for that special offer
A guaranteed personality
"Uneven development" is a bit of a cliche in critical theory, but sometimes it can pinpoint very specific social pathologies. Yearning is a case in point. Like so many of Naruse's films, this one is about a family contending with the onslaught of...
2021-02-24 04:34:29 +0000 UTC View PostI just learned that there is a new zoomer trend / meme asserting, quite sincerely, that Helen Keller never existed. Because, dude, there's just no way...
https://twitter.com/theneedledrop/status/1363990349623029765
How fascinating that this ableist meme gets going so shortly after the release of Her Socialist Smile, the John Gianvito documentary that details Keller's lefti...
2021-02-23 00:21:08 +0000 UTC View Post
First of all, my apologies for not being deeper into Naruse at this point. Last week was pretty rough. Now I am dealing with the aftermath of the winter storm, which means fixing a lot of screwed-up plumbing. I did nothing yesterday but disassemble and reassemble sink and shower fixtures and toilet "guts." (As Red Green famously said, "if the women don't find you handsome, they should at least find y...
2021-02-22 22:39:14 +0000 UTC View Post
Judas and the Black Messiah (Shaka King, 2021)
This is a film with a great deal of ostensibly political content, but it's not at all clear what its agenda actually is. One of my old profs, German cinema specialist Anton Kaes, used to always begin an analysis by asking, "what is the question to which this film is the answer," and that idea -- the social purpose of Judas...
2021-02-20 20:15:43 +0000 UTC View Post
An Ozu comedy, although neither as broad or as melancholy as I Was Born, But... This strikes me as a very strange film, although I suspect it falls in line with dominant ideas of the time regarding marriage and gender. Part of the conflict seems to center around the fact that Komiya (Tatsuo Saitō), a mild-mannered medical professor, is mostly content letting his uptight wife Tokiko (Sumiko ...
2021-02-19 07:33:40 +0000 UTC View Post
By some odd quirk of the YouTube algorithm, this excerpt from The Dick Cavett Show popped up on my watch list. It's just under 24 minutes, and I humbly suggest you watch it. It's a panel discussion assembled on June 7, 1968 -- the day after Robert Kennedy was assassinated. A few things are startlingly clear.
1. The major aspects of our cultural discussion -- race relations, economic disparity, gun violence, the violence of the American psyche -- have not changed very much. This is prett...
2021-02-19 03:29:00 +0000 UTC View PostI watched this because I happened to have it on my fully-charged laptop when the power went out, and I needed a distraction from the biting cold. I certainly don't have insights to offer that can compare with Blake Williams' excellent review for Cinema Scope, but I'll provide what I can.
