msicism

at cross purposes...

In the off hours, I've tried to stay busy, but often this has meant a lot of projects begun with the best of intentions that have proven destined to remain half-finished. Recently, I thought I would attempt to construct a crossword puzzle, mostly as a lark but also as a tribute to my pal Kameron Collins, who was cruelly driven from Twitter by hundreds of angry Beyoncé fans. These days, I often look out on the barren landscape that is Twitter, much as the Once-ler gazed over the despoiled lan...

Bruce Baillie (1931-2020)

Bruce Baillie: consummate filmmaker of the West Coast avant-garde. Co-founder of Canyon Cinema. Instigator of what would become SF Cinematheque. We know he is one of the all-time greats. Why has it taken us so long to act like it?

Some filmmakers are axiomatic; others are, perhaps, contingent. In his classic send-up of academic criticism, 2020-04-11 05:19:58 +0000 UTC View Post

Days (Tsai Ming-liang, 2020)

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS.

Above is a still from the first shot of Tsai Ming-liang's latest film, his first feature in seven years and an apparent coming-out of retirement. It is among the most painfully lovely images Tsai has ever made, in a career defined by exacting composition and a subtle, expressionistic use of color and chiaroscuro. The above shot introduces a muted ...

Wilcox (Denis Côté, 2019)

It's strange. It seems patently obvious that Denis Côté is the most consistently interesting director currently working in French Canadian cinema, but you wouldn't necessarily know that to judge by his overall reception. His films have mostly gone unreleased south of the border, and although he has the support of a few of the major international festivals (most notably Berlin and Locarno), he's nei...

Window Boy Would Also Like to Have a Submarine (Alex Piperno, 2020)

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS.

Destined to go down in the Wacky Title Hall of Fame, alongside Teenage Hooker Became Killing Machine in Daehakno and On the Marriage Broker Joke as Cited by Sigmund Freud in Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, or Can the Avant-Garde Artist Be Wholed?, the debut feature by Uruguayan director Alex Piperno is highly inven...

My First Film (Zia Anger, 2018)

As a special presentation during these days of international lockdown, filmmaker / artist Zia Anger has been recently conducting live streams of her film-performance My First Film, which has played to great acclaim over the past year at various venues around the world. It's difficult, of course, to know exactly how closely the streaming feed approximates Anger's live presentation, although o...

Two Recent Short Films: Going Home Again

Signal 8 (Simon Liu, 2019)

Simon Liu's films are characterized by a tactility that lands somewhere between the grungy and the ethereal, which perhaps has to do with the unique qualities of one of his favored subjects -- Hong Kong. A city of contrasts, to be sure, so much of Hong Kong is awash in glowing neon and held together by the hard, polished surfaces of capital. And yet, ...

The Invisible Man (Leigh Whannell, 2020)

SOME SPOILERS FOLLOW.

I understand why so many critics are impressed with The Invisible Man. There's a lot that's impressive here, which is why I found it so disappointing that Whannell was incapable of making the film gel satisfactorily. Unlike so many contemporary B-grade horror films and thrillers (including many from Blumhouse, which produced Invisible Man...

The Cordillera of Dreams (Patricio Guzmán, 2019)

As Guzmán states in the voiceover of his latest essay film, this is the twentieth film he has made about his native Chile, most of them having been made from the distance of exile. As he has gotten older, his work has gotten more philosophical and reflective, shifting away from the more straightforward testimonial approach of works like Chile, Obstinate Memory and Salvador Allende....

Sibyl (Justine Triet, 2019)

Sadly, thanks to the unmatched global distribution of COVID-19, there will most likely be no 2020 Cannes Film Festival. When you consider that Cannes is essentially the magnetic north of the art film universe, the single point around which any given year's cinematic priorities are organized, it's difficult to imagine the long term repercussions of it simply (or not so simply) not happening. But hey, ...

Red Moon Tide (Lois Patiño, 2020)

This is the second feature, and the first fiction work, from Galician auteur Lois Patiño, whose short film Night Without Distance, from 2015, was in my estimation the single best entry in that year's Toronto International Film Festival. I was obviously quite interested to see what sort of direction he'd take with this, his first effort beyond the (loose) bounds of experimental documentary. ...

małni – towards the ocean, towards the shore (Sky Hopinka, 2020)

Sky Hopinka is a fascinating filmmaker for a number of reasons. Not only is he one of the most prominent experimental filmmakers of the moment; he is also probably the highest-profile Indigenous media artist currently working in the United States. There is a long history of radical Indigenous film and videomaking that has yet to be written. A key moment in this history would be the work of Navajo fil...

More to come....

It's just been a bit crazy, you know?

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The Metamorphosis of Birds (Catarina Vasconcelos, 2020)

Although this film has certain specific points of reference -- I'll get to that in a minute -- there is something rather singular in the way it is assembled that makes The Metamorphosis of Birds a rather, um, odd duck. It is a deeply personal film, almost a cinematic family scrapbook designed for the director's father (the first character we see in the film) as an aide memoire as he...

System Crasher (Nora Fingscheidt, 2019)

Honestly, I'm not going to pretend that I understand film distribution anymore. Here's a film that was very successful in its native Germany, won the (now discontinued -- oops!) Alfred Bauer Prize at the Berlinale, and yet Netflix scoops it up and dumps in into its massive vortex of algorithmic content without so much as a token theatrical release. I mean sure, it's no Atlantics. But it is a...

Uppercase Print (Radu Jude, 2020)

Romanian director Radu Jude's previous film, "I Do Not Care If We Go Down In History As Barbarians" (quotations marks are part of the official title), was an intellectual endeavor whose ambition frequently outstripped its formal capacities. An openly Brechtian exercise designed to examine the problem of historical representation and national memory, "...Barbarians" strongly resemble...

Still Processing (Sophy Romvari, 2020)

In French, the word for photographic developer -- the chemical itself -- is révélateur, which is a reminder of the power contained within what we now call "analog images." The body leaves a physical trace on a photosensitive surface, and that surface is then reverse-transferred onto paper as a reminder of that physical presence, the exact moment when light of a certain intensity kissed the...

Two Short Takes

Z = |Z/Z•Z-1 mod 2|-1: Lavender Town Syndrome (Andrew Norman Wilson, 2019)

I enjoyed this structuralist mini-narrative quite a bit more than I liked Wilson's 2018 film Kodak, which was not at all. This one has much more in the way of visual interest. From a fixed viewpoint out a window, Wilson trains his camera on a single balcony of a rounded, modernist apartment bl...

My Nudity Means Nothing (Marina de Van, 2019)

Although Marina de Van has made two feature films in the interim, it feels very much like her latest, My Nudity Means Nothing, is a conceptual follow-up to her 2002 breakthrough In My Skin. That earlier effort was a strange slice of feminist body-horror, in which a woman, played by de Van, suffers a leg injury and then becomes obsessed with the phenomenological status of her own bod...

The Wolf House (Cristóbal León and Joachín Cociña, 2018)

Although I am sure to see films this year that are somewhat better than The Wolf House, I will be quite surprised if I see one that is as unique. A combination of fake documentary, stop-motion animation, and time-lapse painting, The Wolf House is so replete with visual and sonic information that it can be a bit exhausting. Everything is shifting and "alive" at all times in this film...

The Hart of London (Jack Chambers, 1970)

In Bart Testa's essay on Jack Chambers' experimental classic The Hart of London, he compares the film to two other feature-length Canadian avant-garde works that were made around the same time: Michael Snow's La Région Centrale (1970) and Joyce Wieland's Reason Over Passion (1971). Whereas those two films are somewhat self-contained, summary works, The Hart of London 2020-02-27 04:51:15 +0000 UTC View Post