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Lore (Sky Hopinka, 2019)

A very interesting change of pace for Hopinka, both literally, in terms of the general tempo of the film (more of a steady lento than previous films), and figuratively. In that latter sense, I mean that some of Hopinka's more recent films, such as Anti-Objects, Dislocation Blues, and Fainting Spells, have engaged in broadly based social and cultural commentary, working to connect First Peoples' signifying systems and political resistance to affective and emotional structures, in a kind o...

Teal (Björn Kämmerer, 2019)

Given the structuralist nature of the work, you might expect Björn Kämmerer's new film Teal to have a nice round number of shots. But nope. It has 204. I can't say that I know exactly why, except that having 204 instead of an even 200 seems to set up the expectation for a clean pattern only to break it, and breakage is precisely what this film is about. With each passing second, Kämmerer, whose camera is trained on a neutral black background, has the image sliced vertically by a piece...

The Giverny Document (Ja'Tovia Gary, 2019)

A good work of art is often about something. It has an idea about a given topic and perhaps makes a series of propositions about that topic, hopefully in a creative way. But one way that a work of art can achieve greatness is by not simply being about something, not just identifying a given issue and pointing to it, over there. Rather, a great work of art often enacts problems, arranging itself as a kind of field where crises of meaning can occur in real time. Great works of art are not demonstr...

Austrian Pavilion (Philipp Fleischmann, 2019)

Unlike so many of the experimental filmmakers who have come out of Austria in recent years, Philipp Fleischmann is not primarily concerned with cinematic perception, the ontological basis for the movies, or problems of signification. Granted, his films tangentially touch on these matters, but Fleischmann is much more of a conceptualist of institutions. He has more in common with artists like Hans Haacke, Daniel Buren, and especially Michael Asher. His films, while not cameraless by the tradition...

¡Hace Color!

Hi all, so sorry for the lack of updates, especially after I promised some sneak-peeks into the upcoming avant-garde season. But to be honest, it's been hotter'n hell down here in Houston (avg temp: 99º, some days up to 101º), and I just haven't felt like doing anything. I can't think, I can't write, I can barely form a sentence.I can, however, waste time on Twitter, which, I have to say, is a big site of self-disappointment. I feel like an addict who has fallen off the wag...

The Sky is Clear and Blue Today (Ricky D'Ambrose, 2019)

After Ricky D'Ambrose's expansion into feature-length territory with Notes on an Appearance, it's gratifying to see that he is still a master of the short form. There are so few filmmakers who can produce brief narrative works that don't feel like truncated sketches (or worse, advertisements made to secure more funding). But D'Ambrose, like Ted Fendt, is a contemporary cine-economist, having deeply imbibed the lessons of Bresson and Straub / Huillet and fully understanding ho...

QT Discourse Free Zone

Well folks, if you came here looking for my hot-to-lukewarm take on Once Upon a Time...In Hollywood, you're out of luck. As the debates rage on throughout The Film Twitter and elsewhere amongst the Interwebs, I have not had time to see that particular White Elephant. I've had a lot of work to do, in various areas of my life.But more significantly, once I see the film (sometime next week, maybe), I don't expect to have a lot to say about it. I might be surprised, but frankly, I feel n...

The Souvenir (Joanna Hogg, 2019)

A Twitter acquaintance of mine, Jeva Lange, wrote a terse but dead-on review of The Souvenir on Letterboxd. She simply remarked, "This is a horror movie." Now, she responded much more positively to The Souvenir than I did. In fact, a quick check of Letterboxd and a few other informal metrics seems to indicate that while a simple majority of my friends have generally appreciated the film more than I did, an overwhelming majority of my women friends have liked it more than I did. And this ...

No Respect

Today, while hunting around the Interwebs for recent episodes of the best talk show on TV, I stumbled upon something. A (relatively) new British panel show called There's Something About Movies. What a delightful surprise! I'd thought for ages that this would be a great idea -- a show that looked at the world of cinema with the irreverence and offbeat-geeky perspective that Mock the Week brings to politics, Wait! Wait! Don't Tell Me! brings to current events, and that Never Mind the ...

Mektoub, My Love: Canto Uno (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2017)

"Indulgent" is not an adjective I throw around lightly. As a diehard defender of experimental film, I am all too aware that the world is filled with nitwits and know-nothings to gleefully lob that term at virtually anything that doesn't conform to a shopworn, Sid Field three-act narrative structure. And I'm a firm believer that an intellectually curious viewer should frequently be willing to meet an art object more than halfway.But Mektoub, My Love: Canto One, a film that has alr...

Notes on 3 Recent Films by Colectivos Los Ingrávidos

I discovered the work of the Mexican filmmaking group Los Ingrávidos last year while previewing films for the Crossroads festival. I discovered their highly impressive Sun Quartet, a suite of films that were not like anything I'd seen in a very long time. Highly political yet fiercely dedicated to a highly unique, challenging aesthetic, the work of Los Ingrávidos combined documentary footage of protests, diary material, traditional Catholic imagery, and a dense visual and sonic layering th...

Non-Fiction (Olivier Assayas, 2018)

The French title of Non-Fiction is Doubles vies, and the fact that there are essentially two unrelated titles for this film indicates just how fundamentally incoherent it is as a text. There's a certain tedium involved in watching Assayas toggle back and forth between a standard-issue, echt-French tale of urbane intellectuals engaging in extramarital affairs, on the one hand, and a barely theatricalized TED Talk about the crisis of our digital future on the other.The couplings and deceptions...

A Faithful Man (Louis Garrel, 2018)

Few first-time directors have as many resources at their disposal as Louis Garrel, major French actor, son of legendary director Philippe Garrel. And he certainly used them, co-writing the screenplay with the great Jean-Claude Carrière, bringing on Irina Lubtchansky as D.P., and hiring French cinema axiom Laetitia Casta along with relative newcomer / fellow scion Lily-Rose Depp. Brother Louis wasn't exactly trying for a modest debut.And yet, A Faithful Man is maddeningly slight. A sort of s...

Sword of Trust (Lynn Shelton, 2019)

I can't speak with any real authority about Lynn Shelton as a director. I wasn't as impressed with her breakout Humpday (2009) as some others were, although I thought the follow-up, Your Sister's Sister (2011) was a very sharp chamber drama that took a potentially crass, sensationalist premise and afforded it a significant degree of dignity while still allowing the essential foibles of the three protagonists to bubble up into dark comedic territory. After that Shelton pretty much fel...

Pain and Glory (Pedro Almodóvar, 2019)

Pedro Almodóvar is like an emotionally unavailable boyfriend. It seems that on the rare occasions that he lets down the guard of his fantastical, melodramatic style and instead gestures toward some kind of self-disclosure, critics swoon as if the director is actually opening up and giving us a peek at his soul. This was particularly the case with All About My Mother, and ever since then, there has been a fairly direct correlation between the degree of autobiography in Pedro's films and the ...

Science Without Substance (Daniel Barnett, 2019)

It took me a few false starts, but I finally sat down with Dan Barnett's new feature film. Barnett, for those who've joined the program already in progress, is a key figure in American avant-garde film who has not really gotten his due, despite being enormously influential for other's in the field -- the definition of a "filmmaker's filmmaker." Not too long ago I wrote about White Heart, Barnett's 1975 film that has sort of become his defining classic, even though it ...

Ralf's Colors (Lukas Marxt, 2019)

German-based, Austrian-born experimental filmmaker Lukas Marxt has been an interesting figure for quite awhile now. Where so many of his Viennese colleagues have produced a unique brand of cinema that focuses squarely on the materiality of the filmstrip and the physical manipulation of images, Marxt has followed a different path. Seemingly inspired by the process-oriented video art of the 1970s (e.g., Vito Acconci, Joan Jonas, Peter Campus, Woody and Steina Vasulka) as well as the massive sculpt...

Back on Twitter (Somewhat)

So some of you may have noticed that, after all my pontificating and garment-rending, I am back on Twitter. I could be stubborn and stay away as a point of pride, but life is too short for such face-spiting gestures. But I am not exactly jumping in with both feet. I think that the three months away helped me to figure out how I can minimize Twitter's presence in my daily life while still allowing it to serve as a basic communication device.After all, while I was able to keep in touch with so...

La Flor (part three / conclusion) (Mariano Llinás, 2018)

There's no point denying the overall power and importance of La Flor. Before seeing the film, I jokingly referred to it as a "megalith," and unbeknownst to me, Llinás cites the giant stone structures of antiquity as a source of unexplained power. (This is during Episode Four, when Professor Gatto is investigating witchcraft and other supernatural phenomena.) Although Llinás is not so immodest as to draw the parallel himself, there is an implied connection between the massive calend...

La Flor (part two) (Mariano Llinás, 2018)

Well past the halfway point of this monster, and I must say I am feeling rather ambivalent. There is a formal elegance underpinning La Flor that seems undeniable. The more I see of Llinás' overall architecture, the clearer it becomes that he has set out to create a cinematic work with the expansiveness of Joyce or Proust, even as his sensibility -- gamesmanship, narratological self-consciousness -- is more in line with folks like Borges or David Foster Wallace. If we consider La Flor just i...

Douglas Crimp (1944-2019)

The art critic and queer theorist Douglas Crimp passed away a few days ago, on July 5, at the age of 74. Douglas was a professor of mine during the nineties, while I was completing a Masters in Art History at the University of Rochester, and we remained in intermittent contact in the years after that. I would be hard-pressed to fully express the extent to which my encounter with Douglas and his work helped shape my own thinking and critical practice; he was without a doubt one of the most influe...

Sorry bud.

La Flor (part one) (Mariano Llinás, 2018)

Of course it is entirely too premature for me to say anything too intelligent about La Flor, since I am only in the middle of Section Two (I think). More specifically, I have seen the mummy episode and am in the middle of the Siempreverde / scorpion toxin double plot. But a few things seem provisionally clear.1. Llinás' ensemble of four actresses seems to have been deliberately selected to function, physically speaking, as variations on a theme. It's not that they are difficult to tell ...

Meanwhile, in the Real World

“Every day, to earn my daily bread I go to the market where lies are bought. Hopefully I take up my place among the sellers.” (David Ehrlich)

Supply and Demand

So folks are quitting this Patreon, not exactly in "droves," but with enough regularity to make me think perhaps a change might be in order. My own priorities, as far as movie watching and writing are concerned, may not be 100% conducive to a satisfactory reading experience for the subscriber, and this is something I could always use some feedback on.For instance, it's just past "midterm," the midpoint of 2019, and I am feeling like I haven't seen enough new films from th...

Earth (Nikolaus Geyrhalter, 2019)

In some respects, this is Geyrhalter's weakest film in quite some time. Whereas the power of his work had always lay in his still, nearly silent images, Earth is quite verbose, featuring brief interviews with numerous men and women involved in the mining, tunneling, and earth-moving industries that the film is profiling. Essentially another cinematic warning flag regarding the unchecked rapaciousness of the capitalist anthropocene, Earth is a very literal film, showing six global instances o...

Apollo 11 (Todd Douglas Miller, 2019)

Theirs is to win / If it kills them / They're just humans / With wives and children . . .A beautiful real-life companion piece -slash- corrective to the fictionalizations of First Man, Miller's Apollo 11 is a no-frills piece of nonfiction filmmaking because it lets the footage tell the tale. Comprised almost exclusively of NASA's own documentation of the preparation for and execution of the trip to the moon, Apollo 11 can be slow-going at times, if you aren't already captivated b...

Distributor List!

If you're like me, you find yourself constantly checking in with the websites of various independent film distributors, to see what they have picked up recently, or when a particular film of theirs is going to be released. But it can be hard to remember all the significant ones. So I decided to make a list of them here. It's mostly for my own reference, but feel free to use it yourself, and if you think I missed anything important, please comment!A24Altered InnocenceAmazon StudiosArtMatt...

Our Mothers (César Díaz, 2019)

Originally a film I stopped watching at the 30-minute mark, I decided to go back to it upon learning that Ela Bittencourt had written about it in the latest Cinema Scope. I haven't read her piece yet, but considering that Ela felt the film was worth her time and attention, I figured I should at least see it through. Although my overall opinion of Our Mothers didn't change a great deal, neither is a film I particularly regret seeing. But this does feel awfully thin for a Camera d'Or w...

Three Rejected Post Ideas

I had some momentary plans, and then I thought better of it. Here's a sampling of what I chose not to subject you to.1. An Open Letter to Lights Camera JacksonAfter his Booksmart stunt (which, please tell me someone has called him out for ripping off Leonard Maltin's two near-silent non-reviews), I considered writing a heartfelt post in which I challenged the still-young man to think hard about whether he wanted to be human clickbait, or construct meaningful discourse that might actually...