The Martinican writer Édouard Glissant, whose play Monsieur Toussaint forms the core of this film, wrote of the "right to opacity." In his theoretical work Poetics of Relation, Glissant explained that a subaltern aesthetics needed to claim for itself a space of incomprehensibility, untranslatability, or radical unfamiliarity to the outsider. This strategy could be not only subversi...
2020-10-05 21:46:43 +0000 UTC View Post
As I briefly mentioned on Letterboxd, I wasn't really prepared for The Last City, which as far as I am concerned is Heinz Emigholz's "Hal Hartley film." Think about it. Much like Hartley's Flirt or The Girl From Monday, The Last City is a highly stylized, semi-low budgeted, globetrotting film about characters who, to a large extent, are embodiments of ideas rather ...
2020-10-05 20:01:56 +0000 UTC View Post
There is an essential monumentality that is sealed into the very making of this film, fired like clay, such that it seems designed to flout the typical standards with which we evaluate cinematic objects. It is not just the daunting length of The Works and Days, although at eight hours, it is a film that asks its viewer to rearrange his or her daily routine in order to accommodate it. And unl...
2020-10-05 19:11:25 +0000 UTC View Post
Just a brief word on the Rose Garden Massacre super-spreader event, and the illness of President Trump and others.
I have seen all sorts of things on social media, mostly written in desperation, by Republican loyalists. A lot of them are conspiracy theories, people wondering why no Democrats have contracted COVID-19. So bizarre, right? (Silly! George Soros sent us the vaccine months ago.) But I...
2020-10-04 16:25:01 +0000 UTC View Post
This is a film that is probably less suited to home streaming than anything else I've seen so far in 2020. It really requires the complete, enveloping atmosphere of the darkened cinema to fully accomplish what its maker sets out to do. I myself came away from watching Beginning with a deep ambivalence, trying to reconcile its formal organization with what I initially perceived as a kind of e...
2020-10-02 17:13:00 +0000 UTC View Post
I turned this off after 48 minutes.
I didn't realize until after I stopped watching (and checked in with Letterboxd, where I saw Steve Erickson's comments) that Ewing has been making documentaries for years with filmmaking partner Rachel Grady. Is this provenance part of the problem? Hard to say; some directors make the transition with considerable grace.
But the bottom line here is that ...
2020-10-01 22:45:06 +0000 UTC View Post
Here's a hypothesis. Just as Stan Brakhage was the defining figure in experimental film for a particular generation, and Hollis Frampton sort of became the dominant figure for the subsequent generation, we are going to look back at this period in avant-garde cinema and determine that, despite the obvious pluralism that characterizes our moment, a great deal of the dominant work in the field seems to ...
2020-09-30 04:42:03 +0000 UTC View Post
[SPOILERS. BUT FRANKLY I WISH SOMEONE HAD SPOILED IT FOR ME.]
As was the case with The Year of the Discovery, My Mexican Bretzel purports to be a reexamination of a particular period of time based on the recorded material available to the filmmaker. It seems as though a dark corner of history is going to be productive...
2020-09-30 03:34:23 +0000 UTC View Post
Based on the rapturous reviews in the trades, we can probably expect to see Mangrove staking out some significant real estate in this year's admittedly-unorthodox Oscar race. That's fine; it's certainly well directed, and although it suffers from a script that functions squarely within Loach-Laverty territory, the uniformly excellent acting often comes close to putting it all across. Man...
2020-09-30 02:55:20 +0000 UTC View Post
My lovely wife Jen, who is, shall we say, "cinema adjacent," came in and out while I was watching Nomadland, and after it was over, she said flatly, "seems like that should've been a Kelly Reichardt film." And, well, she's not wrong. As much as I admired The Rider, I was concerned about Chloé Zhao making the move to a bigger budgeted, higher profile project this early in her career...
2020-09-28 00:30:09 +0000 UTC View Post
A consensus seems to be building that Isabella is a bit of a disappointment from Pineiro. I'll have to disagree, although I certainly see that it represents a somewhat different path for this filmmaker whose work has been thus far marked by an almost modular consistency. Several years ago, I met Piñeiro briefly when I was introducing him at the Houston Cinema Arts Festival. Kicking off the ...
2020-09-27 21:14:18 +0000 UTC View Post
As it happens, I was tasked with writing the catalogue blurb for the Viennale for this one. Here's what I came up with:
"Working primarily in English for the first time, Pedro Almodóvar adapts Jean Cocteau’s one-act play about a woman on one end of a telephone call, gradually falling apart as her lover ends a long-term affair. This highly precise featurette is a showcase for a bracing, multi...
2020-09-27 19:28:20 +0000 UTC View Post
One of the most undeniably impressive films of 2020, The Year of the Discovery is also one of the most frustrating. A fiction / documentary hybrid, or perhaps more properly, a creation of a supporting document for an event whose traces have all but evaporated, The Year of the Discovery examines Spain in 1992 by focusing on the trade union uprisings in Cartagena that ultimately led t...
2020-09-27 17:52:46 +0000 UTC View Post
A fascinating first effort, Slow Machine belongs to a grand tradition of highly ambitious American independent cinema whose reach exceeds its grasp. That's not necessarily a bad thing, and will be closely watching to see what this team does next. But I worry, because projects this unusual and unresolved often take years to follow up. (Cf. Kyle Henry's Room, Scott King's Treasure...
2020-09-27 06:33:25 +0000 UTC View Post
Despite its obvious third-person perspective, this is probably the Currents feature I've seen that comes closest to the intensely personal first-person cinema that we've tended to associate with the avant-garde for many years. With its opening shots depicting what appear to be the locations of the death of each of the filmmaker's parents (although they are actually still alive), The Plastic House...
2020-09-27 05:50:14 +0000 UTC View Post
Well, like it or not, the "supercut" is now officially a film genre. This means we're going to be seeing a lot more of these found-footage slice-and-dice efforts devoted to all manner of themes -- internet images of Native peoples (Of the North), cinematic depictions of the heavens (★), and of course the granddaddy of them all, Christian Marclay's The Clock. These are works that s...
2020-09-27 05:06:04 +0000 UTC View Post
Pereda, now on this ninth feature, seems like a director who should have made the leap to Main Slate status by this point. This year, in particular, Pereda is joined in NYFF by two filmmakers whose work his superficially resembles -- Tsai Ming-liang and Mathías Piñeiro. Like those two, Pereda has made a series of features that are almost modular recombinants of one another, with a recurring cast of...
2020-09-27 03:33:09 +0000 UTC View Post
It's weird. Streetscapes [Dialogue] was such a tonic precisely because, after so many years of silently walking us through some of the world's most important buildings, Emigholz suddenly burst forth with a million ideas about the world, the self, human consciousness, sexuality, cinema, the works. It's somehow not as satisfying seeing him till this same ground again, as though this heady logo...
2020-09-27 03:07:59 +0000 UTC View Post
I'm actually a bit envious of those viewers for whom the righteous glory of The Inheritance appears to be coming out of nowhere. This often when an experimental filmmaker crosses the threshold and enters slightly more accessible territory, but so often the forms and ideas that made that artist special in the first place get lost in translation. Not here. The Inheritance is the logic...
2020-09-27 02:53:07 +0000 UTC View Post
I wanted to take a quick break from NYFF-mania, and so I thought I'd check in with an experimental film that wasn't programmed by the team, from a maker who has shown at TIFF, Rotterdam, Crossroads, and a number of other prominent showcases. I myself have run hot and cold with Duff's films, particularly her Catalog series, a conceptual project for which I have not really found an "in" as a v...
2020-09-24 23:04:57 +0000 UTC View Post
See You In My Dreams (Shun Ikezoe, 2020)
Neither flesh nor fish, not exactly a narrative short but not particularly avant-garde either. A grainy para-narrative work with shades of Maya Deren (sort of), but a general lack of organization or motility. Images and sounds never assert themselves, as though interior concepts like "dream" and "memory" allow for an overall refusal to e...
2020-09-23 05:32:06 +0000 UTC View Post
At the risk of the sort of hyperbole that rightly gets you put in Critic Jail, I'd love to mail a copy of this film to every citizen in the United States. But then, of course, would that do a damned bit of good? Most of them wouldn't watch it, and a large percentage of it would dismiss it as fake news. To Dufresne's credit, The Monopoly of Violence never once utters the words "America" or "T...
2020-09-22 10:03:23 +0000 UTC View Post
This one is getting roundly panned by the NYFFers, and I can understand why. "Tasteful" is being thrown around as a pejorative, and there is indeed a strange despondency to Song's film, like it isn't certain what sort of spell it wants to cast but knows that whatever it is, it doesn't want to break it. After awhile, I felt like I understood The Calming a bit better though, and perhaps by it ...
2020-09-21 21:30:30 +0000 UTC View Post
[SPOILERS, IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT HAPPENS TO ANIMALS ON THE FARM...]
At the risk of national stereotyping, Gunda represents one serious case of Russian-style whataboutism. Designed to tug at the tear ducts of the middlebrow arthouse audience, Kossakovsky's film asks us to watch a litter or little piglets grow up, all the while using subtle cinematic techniques -- point of view shots, i...
2020-09-21 04:02:37 +0000 UTC View Post
Ekphrasis (Riccardo Giacconi, 2019)
"Ekphrasis" is a term from classical art history, and it means the detailed description of the contents of an image. It was one of the key principles of art writing in Vasari's day since, of course, there were no reproductions to be placed alongside a written analysis of a work of art. The writer had to provide a "verbal picture" of the artwo...
2020-09-20 06:18:19 +0000 UTC View Post
For quite some time now, I've been struggling to come up with some sort of parallel or analogy for the highly evocative, poetic formalism of Mary Helena Clark's films. Clark tends to organize her work in a very capacious fashion, joining together sounds and images that do not have an immediate affinity. Her "soft montage" has a way of hovering in the unconscious for awhile, where certain connections ...
2020-09-18 02:12:15 +0000 UTC View Post
In 2007, filmmaker and scholar John Gianvito made Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind, a feature documentary / landscape study that followed a trail of forgotten historical markers and gravesites, tracing a silent testimonial network that told of an often-forgotten, seldom spoken-of leftist foundation of the United States. Now, in 2020 when we arguably need it the most, Gianvito offers a q...
2020-09-17 23:56:48 +0000 UTC View Post
Mostly because I have been focused on the Currents selections, I have not paid a great deal of attention to the Main Slate, at least apart from knowing what's in it. I am not reading reviews, and have mostly avoided synopses, just because I have a lot going on at the moment. I would like to congratulate Mike D'Angelo on this state of affairs, because what it means is that I am going into a lot of the...
2020-09-17 18:29:52 +0000 UTC View Post
An Arrow Pointing To a Hole (Steve Reinke, 2020)
This is a sufficiently complex work that demands more analysis than I can provide at the moment, unfortunately. I have grown more and more impressed with Reinke as an artist over the past few years, partly because I don't think there's anybody who is doing exactly what he does. His work has a certain diaristic element to it, alon...
2020-09-17 06:08:09 +0000 UTC View Post
If The Wandering Soap Opera was analogous to Eyes Wide Shut -- a work that a master had all but completed, that only needed minor technical finishes in order to bring to fruition -- then I'm afraid The Tango of the Widower... is more along the lines of "Free As a Bird" by "The Beatles," a patchwork effort cobbled from the contents of an old file folder, something that ought...
2020-09-17 04:32:16 +0000 UTC View Post