msicism posts
Posts: 1188
Files: 38
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 by it, considering its relatively bad reputation. I've often seen this film listed alongside Quinte...
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 contexts in which previously understood cinematic documents might be reconsidered.What she presents us w...
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 hy...
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 essentially abstract surfaces and using gradual motion, along with the gentle optical disruptions of flicker, to imply depth -- at...
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 Bartlet...
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 festival, is the sort of highly accomplished debut that one usually finds in the Discovery or Contemporary World Ci...
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 Twitter. I will have to, you know, make some actual friends in real life, I suppose, which should be...
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 this online pseudo-event were several years old, since despite the supposed spirit of COVID-era camar...
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 conversation. But mostly, I think that anything less than a doctoral dissertation on the su...
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 nonviolent detainees. They've done this using public pressure, legal maneuvering, and one particularly unusua...
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 about this, and realism is only one of those. However, the last two films I've seen, quite by ch...
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, sprightly film about high culture is always a joy. Medium is a brief portrait of Argentinian musician Margarita Fernán...
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, knowing a bit of the background on Khrzhanovskiy's perverse enterprise produces some deeper resonances throu...
Oberhausen (Part III)
ABOVE: Uber housing, Pittsburgh, PASo 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.Camera Trap (Chris Chong Chan Fui, 2019)A brief conceptual work jointly commissioned by the Smithsonian and the Hutan-Kinabatangan Orangutan Conservation Program in Borneo, Camera Trap combines image...
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 called A Radical Film that I have not seen, Further Radical is similarly based on a pun. Aiming to return to the "roots" of the cinema, Canapa has applied thin slices of black radish to the unexposed filmstrip, resu...
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.A Month of S...
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 the back pocket or our brains, where we store dissolving recollections of events that we cannot rem...
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 to his interests in nonfiction. In its crisp framing, vibrant use of color, and audi...
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 times. Her mom is terminally ill and has taken a precipitous slide. (This would be ...
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. The program was called The Death Channel.If you'd like to support the efforts of Ultra Dogme, which I certainly recommend, they too have a Patreon, which can be found her...
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, 2020)Like a lot of recent documentaries, On a Clear Day wants to make broad, sweeping statements about a given cult...
Technoboss (João Nicolau, 2019)
Cinema and obsolescence: two great tastes that go great together. Although we are in the midst of "exceptional circumstances" that may hasten the decline of the movies as we have traditionally understood them, we have been bemoaning the death of the medium for as long as anyone has been paying attention to it, and it's worth stopping to take stock every once in awhile. All technologies evolve faster than the human sensorium can process those changes, virtually insuring that most of u...
Visions du Réel 2020: Quick Notes
I have been doing what I can to dip into this year's online edition of the Swiss documentary festival, and I may end up doing a longer write-up. At least I am hopeful that I will be able to. But for now, I wanted to share some thoughts about the first batch of films I've seen, before they completely evaporate from memory.Nardjes A. (Karim Aïnouz, 2020)In recent years the protest documentary has become a bit of a staple, as filmmakers strive to make a record of political unrest around th...
(puzzle answers)
As you can see, there was a theme running throughout my planned crossword. In short, failure and futility.USWNT without goalkeeper Solo (6 letters) - NOHOPEwow, this sucks (6 letters) - VACUUMclarinetist Acker (4 letter) - BILKTay-Tay bugbear (5 letters) - KANYEthe end en Francais (3 letters) - FINrenounce, as if for Lent (6 letters) - GIVEUPthis PD botched the JonBenet case (7 letters) - BOULDERpast food chain Burger ___ (4 letters) - CHEFsummer gridiron folly (4 letters) -USFLrejected beverage...
The Pettifogger (Lewis Klahr, 2011)
In one of those odd confluences of ill-timing and bad circumstance, I never got around to seeing Lewis Klahr's debut feature until now. There's no real excuse for this. I consistently find Klahr to be among the most compelling makers of experimental cinema working today, and his second feature, Sixty-Six, is one of my very favorites of the previous decade. (I hope to see his latest feature-length work, Circumstantial Pleasures, in the near future.)One of the things that makes Klahr's...
Images 2020: Seen and Not Seen
Today (in between watching episodes of the perfectly passable Netflix series "Ozark"), I have been dipping into the live stream of this year's Images Festival. All online, for obvious reasons, Images kicked off on Friday with Sky Hopinka's maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore, which I've already seen. Good choice for an opener, and given the State of Things, this global streaming event means that Hopinka's film is now just as "distributed" as Trolls: Wo...
Good Trash, Bad Rubbish
Les Coquillettes (Sophie Letourneau, 2013)Light as a souffle and a pitch right down the middle to a bored cinephile audience needing distraction, Les Coquillettes is essentially a French episode of Sex and the City that takes place at the Locarno Film Festival. Several reviews compared Letourneau's work to that of Lena Dunham, which also makes sense -- as with Girls, the auteur takes center stage here, as a thinly veiled version of herself. And as with Dunham, it's not a completely flatt...
Krabi, 2562 (Anocha Suwichakornpong and Ben Rivers, 2019)
To everything there is usually a season, and the spring is typically when the films from the previous fall festival season slowly make their way into the larger world, in arthouse cinemas and on various streaming platforms. But of course, we all know this is not a typical spring. As COVID-19 has its way with the planet, movie theaters are closed and distributors are in a holding pattern. Many of the films making their way to VOD and streaming are ones that debuted earlier this year, at Sundance,...
