msicism

Is "Images" Worth Repeating?

I decided to ask Lou and John. Their answer was unequivocal.

Images (Robert Altman, 1972)

Wow, it's easy to forget what a long shadow Ingmar Bergman cast over the arthouse directors of the 70s. From its focus on fractured female subjectivity right down to its Vilmos Zsigmond cinematography, whose faded browns and greens resemble the early color work of Bergman and Tarkovsky, directors who began in black-and-white, Images is off-brand Altman. But I must say I was a bit surprised b...

Submitted for Your Approval, #4: oh my homeland (Stephanie Barber, 2019)

Currently featured at the online Screening Room at the Baltimore Museum of Art, along with several other Barber films and numerous other artists' works, oh my homeland (stylized in all lowercase, like most of Barber's recent titles) is a kind of found cinematic object. As Barber herself explains it, she is interested in both history and portraiture, using found footage to generate new contex...

Submitted for Your Approval, #3: Alfred (Esther Urlus, 2020)

Upon having a look at Esther Urlus' latest film, my friend Darren Hughes asked me why her work isn't programmed more regularly in North American experimental film showcases. I'm not exactly sure. I first discovered her work while reviewing a group of avant-garde shorts for the Nashville Film Festival over ten years ago, and have made it a point to keep tabs on her output ever since. If I had to guess as to why she's not better known on these shores, I'd offer this two-part hypothesis. First, ...

Submitted for Your Approval, #2: Movie That Invites Pausing (Ken Jacobs, 2020)

On the one hand, Movie That Invites Pausing covers familiar territory for Ken Jacobs. His work with pulsating forms, and in particular the complex play of flatness and depth generated with his Eternalism video system, resembles relatively recent works such as Krypton is Doomed (2005) and Seeking the Monkey King (2011). As in those films, here Jacobs is operating with essent...

Submitted for Your Approval, #1: Patrick (Luke Fowler, 2020)

Scottish filmmaker Luke Fowler is an unusual figure in experimental film: not exactly a documentarian, not precisely a maker of essay films, and yet someone whose complex works certainly partake of those genres. He explores a very particular mien, which is intellectual history, having made films dealing with figures as diverse as R.D. Laing, E.P. Thompson, Margaret Tait, Paul Cézanne, and recently a group of experimental composers, including Christian Wolff, Cornelius Cardew, and Martin Bart...

Air Conditioner (Fradique, 2020)

To my knowledge, this is the first film I have ever seen from the nation of Angola. 34-year-old Fradique (real name: Mário Bastos) studied in the U.S. and has made several shorts, and spent several years making a feature-length documentary, Independence, about Angola's titular struggle. Air Conditioner, which played Rotterdam and which I caught as part of the online We Are One fest...

The Final Word [on / from] Twitter

So yeah, just for the record, Twitter did not receive any complaints about my most recent account. I did not do anything offensive, or violate any rules of conduct. Rather, they simply found it. And since they decided the last time that I was permanently banned (for, if you'll recall, calling an actual Nazi a "Nazi c*nt"), they suspended the new account, just because.

So I am done with...

Eeb Allay Ooo! (Prateek Vats, 2019)

I wanted to jot down a few quick words about this film before it completely evaporated from my memory, because it's actually not bad, and will be the only film I will end up watching from the We Are One Film Festival, an event so poorly timed it almost seems like a throwaway joke in a Pynchon novel. Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Etc.

As it happens, most of the films featured in t...

A Word About the Month of June

I try to keep this space generally restricted to film, with the occasional whiny excuse for why I have failed to write about film for a particular span of time.

There are a lot of reasons why I don't particularly feel like expounding on the current social unrest in the United States. For one thing, I am not entirely sure it's my place to do so, or that I would have anything meaningful to add to...

The Infiltrators (Alex Rivera and Cristina Ibarra, 2019)

I have mixed feelings about this documentary, partly because the film is about such a crucial, timely subject without itself being particularly timely. The Infiltrators highlights the very important work of the National Immigrant Youth Alliance, a team of college-aged activists who have worked to help free undocumented immigrants from ICE detention centers and prevent deportations of nonviol...

Blood and Fire

The best films give us flawed, complicated protagonists, people whose responses to problems are knotty and unpredictable. Like those of us existing in the real world, rich, well-rounded characters should be composed of conflicting drives and impulses, and part of the narrative tension in a film involves watching them grapple with those internal conflicts. There are, of course, numerous ways to go abo...

What Should I Watch Next?

I just finished getting my Summer course online and ready to go, and I need something to wash the taste of Ema out of my mouth. (Review forthcoming.) What would you go with, if you were a paunchy bespectacled Houstonian under quarantine?

One 'Medium,' One Underdone

Medium (Edgardo Cozarinsky, 2020)

So many documentaries about the arts tend to feel like medicine. They are so intent on telling you just how serious and important their subject matter really is, either because they are afraid you won't take heed otherwise, or (more likely) so that by the end of the film, you feel as if you have accomplished some monumental task. So a small, sp...

DAU. Natasha (Ilya Khrzhanovskiy and Jekaterina Oertel, 2020)

The first film to be released from the gargantuan DAU project (five others are now available), Natasha resembles what we typically think of an an art film, at least on its surface. That's to say, it is mostly comprehensible as a standalone work of art, and it succeeds in conveying a specific time and place and populating it with reasonably understandable characters. But of course, k...

Oberhausen (Part III)

ABOVE: Uber housing, Pittsburgh, PA

So this is the last batch of short films I watched as part of Oberhausen 66. This may be a tedious exercise for my handful of readers, but I wanted to do it as an aide memoire, since it's always the case that I eventually forget about several of the films I see.

2020-05-22 19:36:45 +0000 UTC View Post

Oberhaus-Party (Part Two)

TV's Ken Ober (1957-2009)

Here is a second heaping helping of my reviews from Oberhausen 66. Overall, I wasn't quite as taken with these films. But I did discover a potentially interesting new filmmaker.

Further Radical (Stefano Canapa, 2020)

A sequel to an earlier piece ca...

Oberhausin' (Part One)

The latest big-name event to drop its payload online is the 66th edition of the Oberhausen Short Film Festival, an annual mixed bag of experimental debuts, distributor showcases, international calling cards, and undefinable whatsits. Even with the abbreviated running times, there was too much to take in, so I gravitated toward known entities and intriguing descriptions, same as I would have had I been doing the festival "on the ground." Here's the first group of viewings.

2020-05-18 22:47:05 +0000 UTC View Post

Circumstantial Pleasures (Lewis Klahr, 2020)

For years now, Lewis Klahr has mastered a particular kind of cinema. Using cut-out and object animation in stop-motion, he has used the copy-stand as a sort of field of dreams, moving fragments of forgotten romances, movie stars, confrontations, and half-formed ideologies across the screen in a way that tends to bypass our capacity for logic. Instead, his image shards and plangent sounds hit us in th...

Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue (Jia Zhangke, 2020)

Even in a year where there's no Cannes, and new films of any kind are few and far between, there's been relatively little fanfare for this sparkling new documentary from Jia Zhangke, which perhaps indicates the extent to which we've come to take this master filmmaker for granted. In a somewhat unexpected turn, Jia has taken his recent style -- more polished, arguably more commercial -- and applied it...

Sorry to say...

Pardon the extended silence here. Not exactly what you're paying for. Apologies.

In addition to the usual COVID-19 related "life is terrible," "hope I can hug my dad again before he dies" sluggishness, I was derailed last weekend by final grading for my five classes for the spring term. I have also been trying to be offline and more present with my wife because she's going through some hard tim...

Where Has My Mind Been?

Several weeks ago, at the kind request of filmmaker / cinephile Maximilien Luc Proctor, I curated a program for the Ultra Dogme Virtual Film Festival. There has been a lot of great programming from Ultra Dogme over the last several weeks. If you missed my program (which was admittedly a bit...odd), you can have a look here...

Visions du Réel 2020: Quick Notes, Part Two

So this is a quick second installment of my report on films I watched for the at-home version of the Swiss documentary festival. Most of the stuff I viewed will be addressed in an upcoming festival report for Cinema Scope. Below, I am jotting down some remarks on films I did not cover in that piece.

On a Clear Day You Can See the Revolution From Here (Emma Charles / Ben Evans James, 202...