msicism posts
Posts: 1188
Files: 38
Ghost Town Anthology (Denis Côté, 2019)
For years now, I have greatly admired the work of Quebecois director Denis Côté without ever exactly falling in love with it. Granted, I am not well acquainted with his earliest features. I first became aware of Côté's career with his 2009 film Carcasses, which examined the life and environment of a scrap-collecting loner, a film that had certan affinities with the documentary vignettes of U.K artist Ben Rivers. After enjoying aspects of his 2010 film Curling, I went back and caught up w...
Just Don't Think I'll Scream (Frank Beauvais, 2019)
Is cinephilia healthy? It's a question I suspect a lot of us ask ourselves from time to time, and although we may have our doubts, we keep coming back to the cinema, that artificial world, for pleasures and reassurances that our "real" lives cannot provide. As I have mentioned on various occasions, I became a hardcore cinephile after my first wife left me and I was living alone in relative isolation. I found myself seeing upwards of four films a day, just to stave off the loneliness ...
MS Slavic 7 (Sofia Bohdanowicz, with Deragh Campbell, 2019)
This midlength film, about Audrey (Campbell), a young literary executor researching the correspondence between her great-grandmother, Polish-Canadian poet Zofia Bohdanowiczowa, and Polish-American writer / Nobel Prize nominee Jozef Wittlin, is starkly, startlingly material-oriented. Much of its running time is devoted to Audrey poring over the physical letters and artifacts from the Harvard Archives where Bohdanowiczowa's papers are deposited. We see the careful handling of envelopes and man...
High Flying Bird (Steven Soderbergh, 2019)
Although Soderbergh's latest opened in a few theaters (NY and LA, I think), this is a Netflix production. So in one respect, it's a film without film, a piece of cinema that exists in a still-evolving netherworld that is being negotiated and legislated, by audiences and critics and even the Academy. Making sure that form follows function, Soderbergh has not only made the film on an iPhone, insuring that the images are produced by a device as small as the one on which many people will act...
I Wrote an Ad for the Democrats.
They can use it for free.---------------------------From the very beginning, Donald Trump has done very little to hide the fact that he was using the Presidency to make himself richer. He has laughed off the accusation, but never denied, that he was making policies for his own personal gain. In fact, many of his diehard supporters seem to enjoy this about Trump, like it’s a sign of gangster machismo – a literal “Don” getting away with in it plain sight.But what they forget is, it’s the...
More Than You Bargained For
I should be writing about Steven Soderbergh's (quite lovely) High Flying Bird in this space, but that can wait for a little while. While I used to enjoy the practice of writing a short something-something about every film I saw -- formerly at Letterboxd, and now mostly here -- the experience has been a bit stressful of late. This is partly due to problems with my health. I have had a migraine headache off and on for the past week and a half, making my Spring Break a real oasis of relaxation....
Soleil Ô (Med Hondo, 1970)
Med Hondo, one of the key figures in the history of African cinema, passed away on March 2 at the age of 82. Although his work is not nearly as well known anywhere as it ought to be, it has made more significant inroads in Europe (France in particular) than in the U.S., where he is virtually unknown. I had not heard of him until very recently, and while that in itself proves nothing -- there are lots of people and things I've never heard of -- I had heard of Soleil Ô, probably his best-know...
Sauvage (Camille Vidal-Naquet, 2018)
A filmic portrait of a young man on the margins of society, Sauvage is precisely the kind of misguided liberal exercise that betrays a condescending attitude toward its subject under the guise of care. From its lackluster realist approach, which is clearly meant to signal raw, poetic immediacy but feels clumsy and second-hand, to its peripatetic, ambling plotline, Sauvage is a puppet show for the deeply concerned, an opportunity for a certain class of filmgoer to flex his or her empathy muscles ...
Vever (Deborah Stratman, 2019)
Deborah Stratman's lovely new film is a collaboration with Barbara Hammer, comprised mostly of footage that Hammer shot in Guatemala in 1975 but never fashioned into a completed work. This material is both observational and incredibly well-composed, exhibiting the lyrical quality of a film like Bruce Baillie's Valentin de las Sierras, showing a particular way of looking at an environment without trying to pin it down or capture its truth. This associational mode is supported by Stratman&...
The Magic Life of V (Tonislav Hristov, 2019)
The Magic Life of V is an interesting specimen, in that it actually becomes less compelling of a film the more we learn about its protagonist. In the beginning, we don't know a great deal about Veera, or "V" as she calls herself. We simply see her entering various LARPing scenarios -- one based on the Harry Potter universe, another that is vaguely futuristic and paramilitary, involving tracking and killing dangerous mutants. But as the film goes on, we see that V is using LARPing as ...
The Hottest August (Brett Story, 2019)
In what strikes me as a rather direct nod to Chris Marker and Edgar Morin's classic Le Joli Mai, Brett Story's new film has her traveling around New York City asking semi-random individuals whether they are optimistic about the future, and what they think it holds. Although the question provokes some interesting answers, and finds that people are perhaps not so much distributed along a political spectrum as across a complex ideological web, the results are rather disjointed. Story can so...
Now something is slowly changing (mint film office, 2018)
Just a brief note on this one, since I turned it off at the 45 minute mark (with an hour left). This film is a highly objective, deeply unprejudiced look at "coaching" culture, from business retreats to personal-objective achievement seminars to YouTube ASMR channels. Portions of these scenes and environments are presented in seemingly modular fashion, with no obvious build or argument. Formally, the film resembles the frontal, planimetric style of Ulrich Seidl, and thematically it calls...
The Chambermaid (Lila Avilés, 2018)
Although The Chambermaid is a strong film on its own merits, I found myself mentally comparing it with Roma as I watched it. Both films focus on relatively young women in service professions, showing them hard at work cleaning up after people who are higher on the socioeconomic ladder than they are. But Roma was too often maddeningly opaque, offering us a largely external view of Cleo as the world swirled around her. By contrast, The Chambermaid uses our observation of its central character, Eva...
The Plagiarists (Peter Parlow, 2019)
In different circumstances -- referring to highly abstract works of the avant-garde -- I have argued that the biggest risk that a work of art can take is being willing to be mistaken for nothing. In its own subtle way, The Plagiarists, directed by Peter Parlow and co-written by Robin Schavoir and filmmaker James N. Kientiz Wilkins, is just such an artwork, a film that is so negligible on its face that it is possible to miss its much broader implications. Shot on Beta SP, the film looks like a gr...
Polishing Off Cannes 2018 (or trying to)
Leto (Kirill Serebrennikov, 2018)On the face of it, Leto ["Summer"] is the sort of film that is probably better suited to the Un Certain Regard sidebar than the rare air of Competition. But then again, it's difficult for me, and I suspect others, to fully judge its aesthetic and intellectual impact. This is a film made by Russians for Russians, raising to the level of towering myth a particular part of history that is mostly unknown to non-Russians, aside from a few savvy aficionados...
Two Things I Read Today, or, Doing Cinephilia Better
Quite by chance, I read two articles today that worked in tandem to make me reflect, not only on what I'm doing here, but what I am accomplishing or not accomplishing in my (minor) career as a writer and public citizen. It isn't as though the issues addressed were completely new to me, but they were expressed in a way that prompted me to think deeply about what they had to say.The first was an interview in The Guardian with Robin DiAngelo, the sociologist who wrote the bestseller White F...
Brief Notes on a Couple of Films, or "Meh"
Everybody Knows (Asghar Farhadi, 2018)Or, as I'm sure Mike D'Angelo would say, "Everybody Whiffs." After going from strength to strength for four films straight (possibly even more -- I still have not seen Fireworks Wednesday), Farhadi turns in an actual bad film. While I'm sure it will seem like blasphemy, or at least an unmerited slap in the face, to make the comparison, I'm going to chalk this failure up to Shyamalan's Disease. Farhadi has built his reputation on f...
I'm Still Here (Casey Affleck, 2010)
Sorry for the lack of posts, guys. I just had a writing deadline, followed by a spike of activity in my copy editing job, and now followed up with a stack of papers to grade. But I will be back very shortly with some T/F selections, stuff from Berlin, and some New Directors / New Films entries, all in good time. Thanks for your patience and, as always, your patronage.
Chinese Portrait (Wang Xiaoshuai, 2018)
It seems like only a few weeks ago (and in fact it was) that I was commenting on Wang Xiaoshuai's Shanghai Dreams in this very spot. And my overall assessment of the filmmaker was not very positive. I found him to be a lackluster social realist whose work, while certainly competent, was almost deliberately averse to surprise.Well, it's always nice to have to eat those kind of words. Wang is having a real moment right now, just having dazzled the Berlinale with his newest and purportedly ...
Tempting Devils (Jean-Claude Brisseau, 2018)
French cinema's favorite pervy uncle is back, and he's using a MacBook Pro to create a strange approximation of the sublime. Brisseau's latest exhibits the nubile flesh to which his audience has become accustomed, although to be fair, one of his three actresses is probably approaching middle-age and is a less glaring example of someone who shouldn't be caught within 100 feet of the old lech. But it's to Brisseau's credit that his softcore lesbian threesomes are probably t...
Les Proies (The Game) (Marina de Contes, 2018)
The English title of Les Proies, "The Game," is a bit misleading. I suppose de Contes did not want to call it "The Quarry" because of the multiple meanings of that word, and "The Prey" sounds far more dramatic than the film actually is. But "game" implies its own double-meaning which is not entirely applicable here. There is no game-playing in this film. It depicts a group of men who are deadly serious about their hobby, and fully cooperative in its execution. The...
Present.Perfect. (Shengze Zhu, 2019)
This compilation film, which won the Tiger competition at Rotterdam, is subtle in its construction, so you might not immediately notice that it actually proposes a radical new relationship between spectator and performer, something that takes us beyond mere film. Present.Perfect. is composed of segments of live streams from various individual's web channels across China, "anchors" who host their own "showrooms" for fun and profit. We typically associate live stream with porno...
No Data Plan (Miko Revereza, 2019)
(Over the next few weeks, I'll be writing about films that are screening at the True/False Festival, that screened at Rotterdam, or are coming up at Berlin. If you are curious as to which festival(s) a given film played in, check the tags at the bottom of the post.)The last thing that experimental cinema needed was another train film. The connection between trains and the avant-garde has been well documented by the likes of Tom Gunning, Lynne Kirby, and Wolfgang Schivelbusch, and if you thin...
Pigs and Battleships (Shohei Imamura, 1961)
Wow, this one's a doozie. I had forgotten just how much anarchic activity and social commentary Imamura could layer into a film, and at times both the plot and the frame are full to bursting with wild images and ideas. It's certainly a pleasure to see a film so replete and yet so formally controlled. And at the same time, Pigs and Battleships is a somewhat exhausting experience, a bit like a Very Special Episode of "The Phil Silvers Show" as orchestrated by Emir Kusturica. Needle...
Anarchy vs Ennui: The Tiebreaker
The choice is yours:You can get with this:Or you can get with that:
Rotterdam (or Anywhere)
What should I watch next? One of these exciting new selections from IFFR, or a classic I haven't seen, or a new release?
Gone Fishin'
A Wild Stream (Nuria Ibáñez Castañeda, 2018)Ashore (aka Terra Franca) (Leonor Teles, 2018)There's something about fishing that just seems to appeal to contemporary documentary filmmakers. Maybe it's the fact that, aside from a few minor technological improvements, it hasn't changed very much for hundreds of years, and so watching (mostly) men and (some) women engage in this particular form of labor seems like resistance in the face of the monolith of global capital. It's also ...
Pig (Mani Haghighi, 2018)
This film was my first extended exposure to Iranian independent Mani Haghighi. I say "extended," because several years ago I started watching, but did not finish, his debut film Men At Work, about a group of guys on a road trip up in the mountains who encounter a semi-precarious looking rock monolith and become irrationally obsessed with knocking it down. It struck me at the time as a bit too one-note, but looking back, that was clearly the point. It's a film, like Pig, about masculi...
Our Time (Carlos Reygadas, 2018)
How to we distinguish between between art and real life? The Russian Formalist Victor Shklovsky argued that art was a process of estrangement, putting us at a distance from the familiar so that, in a dialectical reversal, it would come closer to us again, less habituated in our perception and instead renewed, so that it may shine forth. (His often cited dictum is that art "makes the stone stony.") By contrast, Derrida, following from Heidegger, argued that it was enframing that set artis...
At Eternity's Gate (Julien Schnabel, 2018)
The real question here is, do we really need another film about the Vincent Van Gogh story? While there's no denying his stellar achievements or his influence on the modern art that followed in his wake, Van Gogh has become so ingrained in the global consciousness as a story that it becomes harder and harder to see the paintings themselves. What's more, the particular circumstances of his autobiography fit so neatly with a dominant perception of what a true Artist is -- mad, driven, abus...
