Ooh, this was a toughie. Every once and awhile someone asks me what film might be a good place to start exploring the work of Straub/Huillet, and I usually tell them Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, Not Reconciled, or Moses and Aaron. I had never seen this one, and I can tell you, by no means should anyone ever start the journey here. It's brutal.
But I came away wit...
2019-06-25 22:42:52 +0000 UTC
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Maybe critics and academics have gotten what we wanted, and now it's a Pyrrhic victory. After decades of decrying the God-like truth claims of standard, "transparent" documentary, we have achieved a glut of so-called hybrid docs that tell their story, expose the conditions of their own making, and even incorporate fictional elements, all to forcefully reveal the fact that things like history and trut...
2019-06-25 00:41:41 +0000 UTC
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Promising as a debut film, but mostly a trifle, this played Rotterdam and ACID and is the sort of film that you can typically expect to round out the Contemporary World Cinema lineup at TIFF, where you yourself might use it to plug a large afternoon hole in your schedule. A co-production of the Netherlands (courtesy of the Hubert Bals Fund, of course) and Bosnia, Take Me Somewhere Nice is th...
2019-06-23 23:59:43 +0000 UTC
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Much silly comedy is wrung from the fact that Amy uses a stuffed panda instead of her hands to masturbate. But far more subversive from a kink standpoint is the fact that, during the Barbie hallucination, she starts to get off on her own bimbofication. Of course, Molly's having none of it, but then her acceptance of Amy's desires is matched only by her general incomprehension of them, which is of cou...
2019-06-23 01:46:36 +0000 UTC
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One of the reasons I so admire Kevin Everson's films is the determinedly "minor" nature of his short works. Each of them seems to represent a snapshot of one small aspect of African-American life (contemporary or historical, sometimes both), and taken together they form a kind of endless mosaic of African-American experience. But in their extreme specificity and locality, and the fact that they are a...
2019-06-22 19:50:44 +0000 UTC
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This might be a film emergency. You need to watch this, like, now.
Ken Jacobs has been working for years now on his current "Eternalism" method, which is a digital mutation of his Nervous System film-performance works. Those works, which used identical strips of film and a propeller to show out-of-phase, frame-by-frame motion and generate 3D effects, has now been adapted with the help of a comp...
2019-06-22 02:21:39 +0000 UTC
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One of the consistent joys of previewing the work included in the annual San Francisco Crossroads Festival is the inevitable discovery of new talent. But one thing I've realized over time is that, for the most part, significant new voices in experimental filmmaking don't just come from anywhere. One frequently finds that new filmmakers of note turn out to be the students of older, somewhat establishe...
2019-06-20 02:25:35 +0000 UTC
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Of course it was a commission. How did I not see that?
At first I was quite taken with Emigholz's latest film, since, in a way, it struck me as a continuation of the unusual path he took with two of his recent works, Streetscapes [Dialogue] and 2+2=22 [The Alphabet]. After all, here was an artist who needed to mix it up a bit. For nearly two decades, Emigholz has been...
2019-06-19 21:16:11 +0000 UTC
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This article made be hungry for some fried cala-molly.
2019-06-18 03:15:43 +0000 UTC
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This will, alas, have to be a tentative evaluation, since the screener I watched was unusually substandard, and the film in question is one of particular delicacy in terms of light and shadow. In fact, I strongly suspect this may be Serra's very finest work to date, although to be certain, it would be necessary to see it as clearly as possible.
Having said all that, certain things about Lib...
2019-06-17 23:44:56 +0000 UTC
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One of Heise's more purely observational films, Consequence is a 65-minute study of a crematorium. It is almost wordless. There are a few brief conversations in the background, but comprehending them is in no way necessary to following what is essentially an examination of a work environment. The film has certain family resemblances to other such around-the-factory documentaries, such as Tac...
2019-06-17 02:37:29 +0000 UTC
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Some artists, like Beatrice Gibson, get more interesting over time, partly because of developments in their work, but also because you learn to read their signals and more fully occupy their world. Unfortunately, some artists get less interesting over time, and one of those artists is Thorsten Fleisch. The German experimentalist has been on my radar for over a decade, having occasionally placed films...
2019-06-16 05:39:07 +0000 UTC
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While I was a bit ambivalent, and even perplexed, by some earlier Gibson films (such as 2014's F For Fibonacci and 2015's Solo for Rich Man), I have been duly impressed with her last two efforts -- last year's I Hope I'm Loud When I'm Dead and her latest, which is in some senses a related work. This happens sometimes, and I'm not certain whether Gibson's work has shifted in...
2019-06-15 21:42:32 +0000 UTC
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More Harmony, less melody.
The Beach Bum is, in its own comically irritating way, a complete success when Korine and Matthew McConaghey work together to create an all-enveloping atmosphere of Florida burnout culture. It's not just the authenticity, although that helps -- the skin is appropriately ruddy and sun-crusted, the frozen drinks are in suitably ridiculous glasses, and Korine in...
2019-06-14 21:26:36 +0000 UTC
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Well, I have to take a somewhat unexpected trip, so I will be out of pocket for a week. I am going to try to get at least one post up here while I'm on the road, but if I fail to give you your money's worth, you'll know why. At any rate, very soon I will be attending to the Last Days of the McConaissance, which I sincerely hope will actually turn out to be the birth of the Baroqueghey.
2019-06-07 22:18:25 +0000 UTC
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This review contains minor spoilers. The tabula rasa types should steer clear. That means you, Mike.
As of this moment (June 2019), Sergey Dvortsevoy's Ayka is the only one of last year's Cannes Competition titles not to have found a U.S. distributor. In fact, by this point almost all of them have been released here. (Leto...
2019-06-04 17:09:23 +0000 UTC
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Over the next few days, I am going to be prioritizing watching some of the 2019 films from Cannes that I now have access to. However, I also have a backlog of 2019 commercial releases to deal with, not all of which I am going to actually end up seeing. (I must make an unplanned trip to California, and I'm also teaching online right now.) So maybe you guys could tell me which of these you'd most like ...
2019-06-02 21:00:33 +0000 UTC
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Never not interesting, Ferrara's take on the final days of Pier Paolo Pasolini (Willem Dafoe) nevertheless falls squarely into the "interesting failure" column. It's mainly, I think, a problem of reverence. Ferrara seems to be trying to tamp down his usual from-the-hip style of directing in favor of something more stately. But that often leads to trouble; his idea of "stately" equals the Roman statua...
2019-06-02 19:22:14 +0000 UTC
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On twitter earlier today, my homie Willow (like a number of folks) was taking stock of the relative commercial failure of Booksmart, which had a disappointing Memorial Day weekend. In addition to noting, correc...
2019-05-28 03:13:06 +0000 UTC
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Hey, remember when Guy Maddin delivered a full-on brother vs. brother melodrama in just under seven minutes?
That was awesome.
Now, I don't mention Maddin (or The Heart of the World) lightly, although given the Oedipal business undergirding Bait, Careful might be a better point of comparison. But as 2019-05-26 02:43:06 +0000 UTC
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While doing a little research on Suleiman's latest film It Must Be Heaven, I came across this early work I'd never seen. I was vaguely aware of it, as it turned up in Video Data Bank and Facets Video catalogs long before I knew who Suleiman was, and the description always caught my eye. Alas, I never rented it.
Although Homage is a minor component of Suleiman's overall body of...
2019-05-25 00:37:29 +0000 UTC
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I mean really. Lars von Trier makes an admittedly stupid joke, and Thierry Fremaux throws him out of Cannes for seven years, but the festival happily rolls out the red carpet for a guy accused of sexual assault and his brand new four-hour T&A crapfest. Cowards and hypocrites, but we knew this.
2019-05-24 04:56:32 +0000 UTC
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This helped Kechiche secure some funding, but I guess auctioning off the Palme d'Or made up the rest. No matter: come Saturday, he'll have another!
2019-05-24 01:08:20 +0000 UTC
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...subscribers, for the multiple postings. I have discovered, painfully, that Patreon is indeed not a blog, and goes well out of its way to protect the (perceived) proprietary rights of others. All I wanted to do was make a Cannes joke, by cutting immediately to Sir Mix-A-Lot and a bunch of women in evening gowns twerking, as he performed "Baby Got Back" with the Seattle Symphony. But this platform wouldn't let me start the video at a specific time. And then when I tried to post it a...
2019-05-24 00:17:31 +0000 UTC
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Ghanaian filmmaker Akosua Adoma Owusu is gradually building one of the most vital bodies of work in the so-called avant-garde. Like many of the best experimental filmmakers working today, Owusu's work is formally challenging but fundamentally accessible, because it faces outward, directly engaging with basic human concerns -- history, memory, and cultural experience. I think her latest film, with the...
2019-05-22 04:22:17 +0000 UTC
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Amidst the various reviews and reports coming out of Cannes this year, I am noticing the lack of one specific, frequent lament. No one has claimed that any film in Un Certain Regard or the Quinzaine rightfully "belonged in Competition." Not the Bonello. Not the Dumont. Certainly not the Herzog. Possibly the Eggers, but nobody seems to think it's much of a crime. So yeah. Maybe Fremaux and company are getting better at this...?
2019-05-21 21:42:20 +0000 UTC
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What if, in a year with over a dozen serious contenders, they awarded the Queer Palme to Young Ahmed? I think you get where I'm coming from.
2019-05-21 16:02:32 +0000 UTC
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[NOTE: This is something of a subscribers-only preview, I guess, of part of my next article for Cinema Scope, which will be about Thomas Heise's documentaries. It seemed like this was a good place to share my thoughts on this film, as well as to jot them down while they are fresh in my mind.]
Although German documentary filmmaker Thomas Heise remains mostly unknown in North American circles, he...
2019-05-21 04:54:22 +0000 UTC
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This jarringly experimental narrative film from a relative newcomer (this is only his second feature) marks Burak Cevik as someone to watch. Although, in the end, his reach exceeds his grasp, I've never been one to fault an artist for ambition, especially at this stage in their career. Essentially a layered meta-narrative about a dastardly deed committed (indirectly) by Cevik's aunt when she was 21 y...
2019-05-19 19:14:42 +0000 UTC
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There are films that I watched when they were new, and although I may have liked them well enough at the time, they didn't strike me as anything particularly special. But then, a strange thing happens. They stick with me over the years, far more than "better" films do. It can be specific lines of dialogue, a chosen image, or a performance that in retrospect starts to seem far more emotionally potent ...
2019-05-19 05:00:19 +0000 UTC
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