msicism

Pedestrian At Best (Part One)

In my recent podcast discussion with the Great Peter Labuza (coming soon to an Internet near you), the prospect of writing about matters other than film was addressed. I mentioned how I doubted there were a great many outlets available for my musings on other artforms, let alone politics. But the fact is, I just don't have much of value to say in some areas, and certainly nothing that another writer couldn'...

Thunder Road (Jim Cummings, 2018)

I suppose in retrospect it makes sense that this was a short film first. The funeral is, indeed, a showstopping set-piece of anguished discomfort, and one could imagine it as a stand-alone work of cringy "art." In a way, this detachability -- the idea that a moment like that could be taken out of context and used to define everything the follows -- is the basic idea of Thunder Road's larger plot, a...

9 Fingers (FJ Ossang, 2017)

Apart from a couple of very stylish short films, this is my first engagement with "punk" filmmaker FJ Ossang. Granted, this is his most recent film, and I have not seen the work on which the director built his reputation. (Based on my experience with 9 Fingers, I certainly intend to.) But the "punk" appellation seems all wrong. He's a Goth, if anything, relying on thick, pulsating slabs of monochro...

A Family Tour (Ying Liang, 2018)

In the midst of its scathing critique of the repressive government of the People's Republic of China, a totalitarian state that "disappears" its critics and rips families apart, A Family Tour does something of which, ironically, the old Maoist regime would probably approve. This film is a rigorous act of self-criticism on the part of director Ying Liang, a melancholy look at the life of a dissident...

Cold War (Pawel Pawlikowski, 2018)

Practically from the jump, there was no question that Cold War was one of the best directed and (perhaps even more to the point) best edited films I'd seen this year. From shot to shot, the film just seemed to snap together like parts of a puzzle. As I noticed this phenomenon, I looked closer, and lo and behold, Pawlikowski's "secret" was the employment of old school Soviet style montage. ...

not an entry on Aurora Borealis (Márta Mészáros, 2017)

I tried to watch this film, but it was a ghastly flavor of Europudding. It soon became clear that it was yet another story about (spoiler, I guess) a family with Nazi secrets hidden in its past. But the acting, pacing, and writing were all uniformly terrible, partly owing to a multinational cast grinding it out in broken English. I lasted 15 minutes.

But this made me think. Many years ago, back when I...

Ash is Purest White (Jia Zhangke, 2018)

There are times when I feel a bit out of my depth with respect to a given film, and yet of course, despite this fact, I have feelings and reactions to it. At this point in my "career," virtually no film simply leaves me utterly dumbfounded, but there are better and worse reactions, more or less qualified takes on any given work of art. I firmly believe that. For example, I have my strong suspicions that my ...

Cinderella (Ericka Beckman, 1986)

On the web page for this film, there's a pullquote from P. Adams Sitney, who declares Beckman "the most self-confident and aggressive stylist of the younger generation." One has to smile at a statement like this, since coming from Sitney it could just as easily be a backhanded compliment. I'm reminded of other aesthetes, such a...

Life After Love (Zachary Epcar, 2018)

The scene, as far as I can tell, is a parking lot beneath a BART station at twilight, a kind of stationary urban ark that can easily be mistaken for a ferry. The sun glints off a field of cars, their distinctive colors blanched out by the evening half-light. Epcar's camerawork slides and skids along the surface of things, tracing the language of automotive design -- a less sexualized, more matter-of-fact ve...

An observation...

Thus far, I have 37 patrons. That's great! Thank you all so much. 

Oddly enough, that's 36 men and one woman.

I'm not sure if that says something about the current economy, about film criticism in general, or about my writing in particular, but I thought it was worth noting.

From the Notebook of... (Robert Beavers, 1971/1998)

First, a word about the double date. Many of Beavers' films have two dates of completion, because he finished shooting the footage during the first listed year, and completed the editing (or in some cases, re-editing) in the second. As a result, many if not most of Beavers' films were unavailable throughout the 70s and 80s.

From the Notebook of... is unlike any of the other Beavers films I've...

Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 (Kazuo Hara, 1974)

This is a film I'd been meaning to see for years, and I finally got around to it, now that I am doing research for my upcoming Diary Film course. As it happens, Kazuo's film is not exactly right for the class, since technically speaking this is more of a 2nd-person portrait film, with the filmmaker's personal involvement in the profilmic events mostly alluded to indirectly by the people onscreen. Certainly ...

Mirror (Robert Morris, 1969)

Among the original group of minimalists, Robert Morris was probably the closest to a bridge figure between the emerging "primary structures" movement and the slightly earlier, related but distinct school of conceptual art. If you look across his career, there are certainly intellectual commonalities and consistent concerns. But his work was constantly changing shape. From the early show of laquered plywood ...

Field (Ernie Gehr, 1970)

Through the kind assistance of Mr. James Hansen, I was able to finally see one of the few classic Ernie Gehr films that had thus far eluded me, and it did not disappoint. Made in the same year as Serene Velocity, which many still consider to be Gehr's signature film, Field exhibits completely different compositional tendencies while also adhering to the same abstract painterly approach as ...

A Season in France (Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, 2017)

Some films grab you immediately. In the first five minutes of Mahamat-Saleh Haroun's latest film -- his first made outside his native Chad -- we meet Abbas (Eriq Ebouaney), a refugee from the wartorn Central African Republic. He and his kids are living in a nice urban apartment which, we will soon find out, is a temporary situation that's about to end. In the opening moments of the film, Abbas is startled b...

Diary Films: a course-to-be

Next semester I am teaching a couse called "The Diaristic Mode in Film and Video." I a currently working to compile films to include in the syllabus, and there is a pretty wide array, although I worry that there are films and filmmakers out there working in the diary / journal mode who I am not aware of or who I am simply forgetting. Here's a list of what I have so far.

Jonas Mekas

Alain Cavalier

Agnès Varda

Anne Charlotte Robertson

Gina Kim

Caveh Zahedi

Ro...

Wishing Well (Sylvia Schedelbauer, 2018)

I am a fan of Schedelbauer's work. Although there have been hundreds of "flicker films" and found footage films across the history of the avant-garde, her work has an unusual, pulsating rhythm that, against the odds, really feels like something new. Her way of simultaneously toggling between two distinct images while also adjusting the zoom, so that there's a competing hypno-wheel effect, truly hits the ner...

Barbara (Mathieu Amalric, 2017)

There are many international films that are so specific to their national culture and mythology that they simply don't circulate very much beyond their borders, even failing to reach those viewers predisposed to seek out and appreciate foreign cinema. Usually these non-starters are comedies, reliant as they so often are on micro-distinctions of class and ethnicity that are mostly lost on non-locals. Conside...