msicism posts
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Files: 38
June Director of the Month
I'll have at least one more Ray write-up (for The Big City), possibly another, before May is over. But now, let's set the agender for Pride Month.
Betrayal (Lewis Milestone, 1929)
That feeling when you discover your wife with your best friend.....
Road to Nowhere (Monte Hellman, 2010)
Neither a disaster nor an auteurist triumph, Road to Nowhere tells us a few things about the changes in B-movie logic since Hellman made his genre masterworks. In the age of cable TV and streaming video, there's only artsploitation, an attempt to titillate the viewer in order to separate them from their precious attention. This is essentially a deconstructed erotic thriller, but not deconstructed in the Derridean sense. More in the culinary use of the term: all the elements are there, but th...
Devi (Satyajit Ray, 1960)
Faith and reason, at it again. As is often the case in Ray's films, Devi provokes crucial questions regarding the treatment of women in Bengali society. But he does this by taking their dehumanization to the limits of tolerability. In this regard, Ray is less a feminist than a humanist, never delivering broadsides against the patriarchy (that was Ritwik's métier) but proposing that women's oppression degrades us all.Devi is the most direct statement of this thesis that I've seen...
Final Destination Canada (and more!)
Due to my short attention span recently, I have been watching a ton of public service announcements on YouTube. Just from a filmmaking perspective, a lot of these are really fascinating and demonstrate a remarkable audiovisual economy. There is usually some sort of gimmick that relates to the topic being propagandized (reckless driving, workplace accidents, child abuse, etc.) and the directors are simply following that gimmick to its logical conclusion.But what is really interesting to me about ...
The Big Experimental Rundown (Part Two)
ABOVE: a pharmacist working at a SteenbeckReach Capacity (Ericka Beckman, 2020)Much like A Tribe Called Quest, Ericka Beckman has come back years later and still makes the shot. She has not been especially prolific of late, but Reach Capacity goes some ways to perhaps explaining why. This is experimental film as an Arthur Freed production, with careful, visually precise costuming, staging, and location shooting. All of it looks deceptively simple, and it's clear that Beckman and her crew mad...
Madalena (Madiano Marchetti, 2021)
I had previously watched half an hour of Madalena during Rotterdam, and although it was certainly impressive enough formally, it left a bad taste in my mouth. First-time director Madiano Marchetti has the beginnings of a sharp visual sense, and Madalena displays a highly unusual sense of place. Set in the farmlands of Brazil, the film is punctuated with the almost electric green of soybean fields in midday. But Marchetti uses these wide open spaces to to convey a paradoxical claustrophobia. As i...
Slower Traffic Keep Right
Since I have not been producing writing as quickly or as often as I have been in the recent past, I figured I owed you all some explanation. You are, after all, paying customers, without whom I'd probably be unable to produce as much "content" as I do. For the past month, I have been dealing with a health issue, and although it is not yet resolved, things seem to be on the right track.I will spare you the rant that my family has heard numerous times, about how utterly revolting the U...
The Big Experimental Run-Down (Part One)
Despite the fact that avant-garde film and video are sort of my bailiwick, I've been spending much of my time on this Patreon focusing on feature-length narratives. This is mostly due to laziness; really digging into experimental films is more difficult and requires more concentration that I've had lately. With this in mind, I want to go back and address some of the more impressive experimental films I've seen over the last few months.A Woman in Trouble is a Temporary Thing (Karen Ya...
Gull (Kim Mi-jo, 2020)
Gull is a rather simple film, although its depiction of the aftermath of sexual assault is undeniably disturbing. In her first feature film, Kim clearly wants to get one very important point across. Women in Korea who've been the victim of sex crimes are extraordinarily low on the culture's priority list, well below such considerations as decorum, business and economics, family reputation, the impact of the crime on the victim's male partner, and the maintenance of class hierarchies....
Aparajito (Satyajit Ray, 1956)
Considering Aparajito in relation to Pather Panchali, I began having significant doubts about Ray's approach to narrative construction, especially with respect to character. There's an odd slackness here that I think is supposed to echo the free-floating observational style of Pather, but this sequel plays a bit like a truncated epic, with large swatches of dramatic time missing but no real formal function of the ellipses. Aparajito focuses more squarely on Apu, from his youth (Penaki Se...
The Killing of Two Lovers (Robert Machoian, 2020)
The Killing of Two Lovers is a film that focuses most of its attention on things that don't happen. From the opening scene, Machoian introduces David (Clayne Crawford) as a sort of rural Hamlet, struggling with the urge to make a cruel yet decisive move, ostensibly for the sake of his family. As it turns out, he is prevented from taking that drastic measure precisely because of his family. Outside his former bedroom, David hears a toilet flush, reminding him that his four children are all in...
Moon, 66 Questions (Jacqueline Lentzou, 2021)
As has been the case with several of this year's New Directors / New Films selections, Moon, 66 Questions is a bit frustrating, since it seems to promise much more than it delivers. To be a bit more specific, first-time feature director Jacqueline Lentzou ends her film on a poignant if inevitable note, and this frank expression of emotion buys Moon some retroactive goodwill, especially considering just how withholding it has been up to that point.On a purely narrative level, Moon is a film a...
An Enemy of the People (Satyajit Ray, 1989)
There are a few particularly interesting things about Ray's take on Ibsen. First, until about a year ago, Ganashatru (An Enemy of the People) was largely considered to be one of Ray's very worst films. Reviews I've read strongly imply that Ray, who was ill at the time of the film's production, had completely lost his touch. Basic elements like editing and blocking are roundly criticized, giving the sense that for certain commentators, Ray had slid not only into dotage but incompe...
Faya Dayi (Jessica Beshir, 2021)
This is a uniquely frustrating documentary, because it has so much potential.First-time director Beshir uses an intellectually impressive approach to the problem of depicting contemporary life in eastern Ethiopia, choosing to focus not on the plight of a single subject or family. She does focus on a specific community -- the Oromo farmers of Harar and the network of individuals surrounding them. But essentially, Faya Dayi forgoes a strictly human focus in order to adopt a more materialist stance...
Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray, 1955)
As I've addressed here and on other forums, I had no direct exposure to the Official Film Canon as such. Coming to cinephilia from a focus on painting and sculpture, I gravitated toward experimental cinema, and being a grad student during the 90s, I was steeped in the Godardian "counter-cinema" trajectory, partly because those films provide more grist for critical theory, but also because they were the works being rediscovered at the time. This is all a long way of saying that I saw ...
Downstream to Kinshasa (Dieudo Hamadi, 2020)
In recent years, the documentaries of the DRC's Dieudo Hamadi have started receiving more recognition in the West. (True/False awarding him the 2018 True Vision award certainly helped raise his profile.) His latest been selected for Cannes, but of course that edition of the festival didn't happen, so Downstream to Kinshasa ended up world premiering at 2020's scaled-back TIFF. This is all to the good. Hamadi brings a unique style and perspective to his work, and I suspect that eventua...
Comedy Corner (workshop material)
Konstantin Chernenko and Pope John Paul I walk into a bar. "One vodka and one cabernet," Chernenko announces, but the bartender points to two gentlemen on stools. "They're already having your drinks," he says."The Lord giveth...." remarks JP1, but the Soviet president is visibly irritated. "You mean we didn't even make it to the end of this joke?"
Film About a Father Who (Lynne Sachs, 2020)
This is a difficult film to evaluate. It's the latest in a recent spate of auto-portraits of filmmakers and their families, and obviously one of the difficulties with these projects is that the filmmaker is ensnared within their own narrative. This is theoretically "correct," in terms of the post-structuralist critiques of objectivity in fields like sociology and ethnography. If we understand the dangers of objectifying an Other, it seems that there's no better way to circumvent ...
Wood and Water (Jonas Bak, 2021)
Clocking in at a lean 80 minutes, Wood and Water is one of those films that gets so much right for so long that it's actually a bit nerve-wracking. Is the filmmaker going to make a misstep? First-time feature director Jonas Bak doesn't err, exactly. His film is a stately, poetic examination of self-discovery, the pull of family, and the backdrop of history that tinges our relationships even when we aren't aware of it. But for the first 45 minutes or so, Wood and Water is really somet...
Sleepwalk (Sara Driver, 1986)
I did not care for this movie. But it has undeniable significance as an artifact.I'm probably in the minority here, but I just don't think this 1980s NYC downtown filmmaking has aged very well. After sampling Alexandre Rockwell's In the Soup and lasting about 15 minutes, I turned to Driver's debut film, and there are certainly things about it to recommend. Like all No Wave entries, Sleepwalk is a partly accidental, partly intentional snapshot of a city in transition. Giuliani'...
Mask ON! Lights DOWN! Roll FILM!
I do believe that Zhang Yimou is going to lure me back into the theater. I don't know who this Cliff Walker guy is, but he's got me intrigued.
Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock, 1943)
I decided to close out Hitchcock Month with Shadow of a Doubt mostly because I read that it was the director's personal favorite. I think I can see why. In certain respects it's a very strange film, and I wonder whether Hitchcock felt as though he'd taken a few liberties with it without arousing any suspicions of self-indulgence. It can certainly be taken as a star vehicle for Joseph Cotten, and a reasonably entertaining, tightly wound chaos machine. The family at its center is comic...
Fixing a Hole
Hello, friends.I am writing this quick note to "put out feelers" on a topic of no real importance, unless you are an obsessive-compulsive like me.I am missing a few issues in my complete run of Cinema Scope, and I was wondering if by chance any of you had extra copies of these that you'd be willing to sell.Number 2: Best of the NinetiesNumber 3: Hou, Brakhage, S. CoppolaNumber 4: Cannes 2000Number 14: Assayas, Jia, David Gordon GreenNumber 15: Cannes 2003, Elephant coverNumber 17: K....
The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock, 1938)
"There is definitely something queer on this train..."I don't know that I have a great deal to say about The Lady Vanishes beyond my one-sentence Letterboxd review, which declares this film to be the greatest ever Scooby-Doo episode. In a lot of ways, this film sets the terms for thousands of other jury-rigged whodunnits and bottle-episode mysteries, in the sense that Hitchcock is formally articulating the reversals and misdirections of classic Agatha Christie without any overt conte...
Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)
And it is here that the exactitude of Hitchcock's filmmaking runs up against the intractability of my personal taste. Rebecca is formally magnificent. Its use of the preposterously grand Manderley estate as a kind of architectural corpse, a labyrinth that exerts the power of the previous Mrs. de Winter, is not only poetically precise. It seems to have forever set the cinematic terms for gothic horror. Many a haunted house has been erected since 1940 and they all seem to owe a stylistic debt ...
Irradiated (Rithy Panh, 2020)
Just a few days ago, Strand Releasing picked up the U.S. rights to this film. This surprises me, because from what I've read and heard, the response to Irradiated was overwhelmingly negative when it premiered last year in Berlin. But I must say, I'm glad that more people will have the chance to see it. I certainly don't mind when my own opinion of a film differs from the voice of the majority. But here, I find myself in a more uncomfortable position. Most of the bad reviews I've ...
But Wait! There's Moor!
The Tragedy of Othello -- the Moor of Venice (Orson Welles, 1951)First of all, let me say that I am happy that no one has gotten around to "cancelling" Welles or his Othello, given the present's understandable sensitivity to blackface. It may be that this is a film that's simply not on the radar of any culture-warriors of the left or the right. Or perhaps we're seeing a rare instance in which the historical context of the performance -- makeup included -- are being taken into...
North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959)
North by Northwest: a review by Michael Sicinski[ABOVE: Roger and Eve meet in the trees before the Climax]The name of this film is North by Northwest and it is awesome. There is very little in this film that is not completely awesome. There was this really bad-ass scene where the protagonist, Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is in the middle of some farmland and all of a sudden this dude flying a crop-dusting plane starts dive-bombing him and shooting from the plane. It is thrilling and visually cap...
Rifkin's Festival (Woody Allen, 2020)
First things first. I'd kind of sworn off Woody Allen, for the obvious reasons. Even if we don't know precisely whether he is guilty, I felt that it was the judicious thing to refrain from supporting his creative endeavors. And in truth, I didn't think I'd be missing much. But the entire premise of Rifkin's Festival was simply too perverse to ignore, and through the Magic of the Internet, I was able to watch it without providing its maker any remuneration.To be honest, I was ...
