by ·Comments Off on T/F-ish Shorts 2021

The Coyote Shorts Program:

Department of Injustice (Travis Wood & Chloe Gbai)

Didactic anti-racist dialogue in an ironic-jokey automated phone tree framework. Looks like street and news photography mapped into a 3D gaming engine, which is neat at least.

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Spirits and Rocks: An Azorean Myth (Aylin Gökmen)

Opens with b/w volcanic rock photography, so a good pairing with last night’s Rock Bottom Riser. The stock footage scenes announce themselves when the widescreen frame goes square. Smoke and trees and rock, textures and landscapes, really great looking.

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VO (Nicolas Gourault)

Former Uber self-driving test riders tell all, circling around an accident that killed a bicyclist in Arizona while the human operator was watching TV episodes on a cellphone instead of looking at the road. Along with news footage and camera views inside and outside the car, we get repeated radar-view driving scenes, what the car “sees” of its environment.

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Maat Means Land (Fox Maxy)

Takes the game-engine mashups of the first short to the next level… also this and the second short featured lizards, and there has been a theme of image manipulation – overall a well assembled shorts program. This film has everything at once, too many to start listing, all kinds of distorted music and styles and presentations, returning to scenes involving indigenous people and land. A sign about killing the colonizer in your head cuts straight to Tupac, extremely reminiscent of the latest Adam Curtis.

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The Truth About Hastings (Dan Schneidkraut)

And finally the Adam Curtis connection brings us to a Nebraska-set numerology-obsessed conspiracy-theory voiceover over shots of a conference-room family gathering full of meats and Husker games, the picture gradually shimmering and smearing to reveal the alien intelligence underneath. “A Runza restaurant exactly nine minutes away – think about it.”

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Plus some non-Coyote shorts we watched over the course of the week…

The I and S of Lives (Kevin Jerome Everson)

Simply a guy rollerskating around the Lives in DC’s Black Lives Matter Plaza… Sicinski compares Everson’s films to Lumiere actualités, I dunno, I find them especially pleasant to watch and hope they become regular, comforting presences in T/F programs. I’m even leaning towards checking out Park Lanes, or at least the shorter Tonsler Park.

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Brontosaurus (Jack Dunphy)

This guy’s name kept coming up – I think he was in the online game show with the Beasts of the Southern Wild director and an especially good MC, and this made us decide to check out his film. I was pretty sure I’d remember an eight-minute short i watched late at night (which somehow offended Katy so we watched the Everson afterwards as a palate cleanser) but now it’s a month later and I’m afraid I do not… the only letterboxd review just says “Raw,” which is no help. I can see I rated it 3.5 stars, that ain’t bad!

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Homage to the Work of Philip Henry Gosse (Pablo Martín Weber)

Another forgotten short, but apparently well loved and referenced in my All Light, Everywhere notes. Fossils vs. creationism, artificial images and Syrian war.

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O Arrais do Mar (Elisa Celda)

The one where we could barely see anything happening, filmed late at night on a Portuguese beach. Some fishing was involved, some hanging out – a long and sleepy movie.

by ·Comments Off on Delphine’s Prayers (2021, Rosine Mfetgo Mbakam)

No music, little camera movement, background noise from others in the house or from a laptop tuned to Nollywood TV, otherwise all focus is on Delphine. Raped + pregnant at 13, prostitution to get by in Cameroon and Belgium, proposed to by two white men and due to circumstances she married the one she’s not in love with. Shunned by family after a sick niece died in her care, but that’s all forgotten after she moves to Europe and they assume she’s rich. She speaks English with a heavy dialect and French mixed in – Katy thinks it’s shady that the subtitler rephrased her dialogue when we can hear her speaking different words. All the titular prayers come at once, in a breakdown near the end. Better than most single-subject monologue films I’ve seen, still not my preferred mode.

by ·Comments Off on Rock Bottom Riser (2021, Fern Silva)

I’d meant to play this movie again the next day at work, just listening in the headphones, because the unexpected music and the way every interviewee had a different sort of audio processing on their voice was striking. But the rental expired and I had to settle for the Smog song.

Definitely on the avant-garde side of the documentary spectrum, but with terrific sound. Some very joyful edits. Before watching I read the Sicinski Cinema Scope article twice, and now want to watch all of Silva’s movies. Already by the time the opening title hit, the movie’s physical nature was nothing like I’d imagined. The talking heads are never shot in standard doc style, and he talks around the issues we imagined it’d confront head-on, but productively. The island/ocean nature calls back nicely to our last T/F movie of 2020, and still the last movie we’ve seen in theaters, MaÅ‚ni. Volcanic lava and disputed native lands, with Rat Film levels of digression.

By showing us a collage of discontinuous moments from a given lifeworld, Silva expresses the density of any given social formation, its atmospheric pervasiveness and resonance. As such, his films show us things that serve to emphasize just how much we cannot know … What Silva shows quite clearly through his oblique strategy of creative nonfiction is that the radical flattening of culture and history on which global capital thrives actually has its limits.

by ·Comments Off on Aleph (2021, Iva Radivojevic)

“Buenos Aires is a city of birds” was a promising statement, but the movie ended up being full of humans philosophizing in monotone, with very few birds. Clara is disaffected, claims to have no feelings, later a girl in another city will claim to feel too much. We visit Greenland, Kathmandu… oh I was gonna list more, since I screengrabbed the credits, but ND/NF uses more serious copy protection than Sundance, and my shots all came out black. Too bad – the shots would’ve been the only way I could’ve sold this one (edit: stole some shots from a trailer). Rented based on its description as a Borgesian puzzle, mostly got narrators flatly declaring Borgesian ideas. The universe is being dreamed, or is in a speck of dust, you know. The long misty riverboat ride with a whispering ghost would’ve put me to sleep on a normal night, but fortunately I watched this in the afternoon. Montage of close-ups of eyes in Mexico City was nice.

by ·Comments Off on We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021, Jane Schoenbrun)

Casey is eating string cheese in the opening scene, says she’s taking the World’s Fair Challenge. Repeats the words, stabs herself with a pin, then hits play on a video which based on the reflections on her face appears to be the end of Lux Aeterna. Alex G music and Albert Birney video game animation. Abandoned strip mall aesthetic when she goes outside. Multiple creepypasta and Paranormal Activity references. “I love horror movies and I thought it might be cool to try actually living in one.” She’s using Photo Booth app for video recording, I don’t think that’s a thing? Sleep?walks to the shed and admires daddy’s rifle, then watches ASMR videos. Commenter JLB sends her a laughing-clown twisted picture of herself, claims to be “nobody” just wants to help her. We soon see JLB, a bald Tim Roth-ish guy. Then a cheap cinematic adaptation of the same story as an autoplay video. I like that she’s going through all this and her channel videos only have 50 views… but what is she even going through? And what does JLB know, or is trying to help her from? She makes a response video addressed to him, a tarot card reading accusing him of being pathetic. Problem with found footage films is that in seeking authenticity, your movie looks very bad. 70 minutes in the major event that’s happened as a result of her Challenge is that she’s torn up her favorite stuffed animal then cried about it – or maybe this was normal sleep deprivation / moody teen / youtube overdose behavior. “They’re just videos” JLB: Casey… “That’s not even my name” She calls him a pedophile and hangs up. A year later she contacted him and they met up in NY. After Saint Maud this is my second movie of the month that hints at horror but ain’t horror.

by ·Comments Off on T/F/ND/NF/ETC 2021

True/False announced their May 2021 plan for outdoor screenings back before we had any idea of vaccine rollout schedules, so we opted for the “Teleported” home experience, which included a giant box of goodies sent to our house. Of the 16 feature selections this year we were only offered 7 – plus the shorts programs, so that’s 11/20. Miffed as I was not to have Summer of Soul as a viewing option, we still did better than the in-person crowds, who could only watch one outdoor screening per night for a maximum of five. But five (or seven) movies in five nights is not how we do True/False – so I also rented multiple titles (including T/F films not included in Teleported) from the concurrently running New Directors/New Films festival and some earlier docs from elsewhere, to curate our own particular festival. The final schedule:

B’s pre-screenings:
Aleph (ND/NF)
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (ND/NF)

Tue:
Rock Bottom Riser (T/F via ND/NF)

Wed:
Delphine’s Prayers (T/F)
Coyote Shorts (T/F)

Thu:
Metaphor or Sadness Inside Out (2014, from a T/F director)
No Kings (T/F)
Radiograph of a Family (ND/NF)

Fri:
A Thousand Suns (2014 T/F)
Town Bloody Hall (1979)
Songs That Flood the River (T/F)
A So-Called Archive (2020, from a T/F director)

Sat:
From the Wild Sea (T/F)
All Light, Everywhere (T/F via ND/NF)
Now Something is Slowly Changing (2019 T/F)

Sun:
Gunda (2020, from a T/F director)
Faya Dayi (T/F via ND/NF)
The Grocer’s Son (T/F)

Plus four shorts from the other T/F programs.

Did Not Finish:
We / Nous (ND/NF)
Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then (2010)

Unwatched T/F:
Dirty Feathers
Homeroom
Inside the Red Brick Wall
Petit Samedi
Sabaya
Summer of Soul
This Rain Will Never Stop
The Two Faces of a Bamiléké Woman
Users

by ·Comments Off on Mandibules (2020, Quentin Dupieux)

Manu (Grégoire Ludig of Dupieux’s Keep an Eye Out) picks up his friend Jean-Gab (David Marsais) in a stolen car to get paid to deliver a briefcase, but they sidetrack upon discovering a giant fly in the car’s trunk, then take over an old man’s camper as a training ground to teach to the fly to rob banks. After they burn down the camper attempting to cook a meal, blonde India Hair (Staying Vertical) mistakes Manu for her classmate and brings them home. “Rich girl fridge!” “Gimme that ham!” Brain-damaged Adèle Exarchopoulos rats on them, the fly eats a dog, things work out in the end. Fun and short, I will keep watching Dupieux movies forever.

by ·Comments Off on Monks: The Transatlantic Feedback (2006, Palacios & Post)

The Torquays was a successful five-piece band of U.S. soldiers who’d stayed in Germany after their war service, playing nightly shows when two serious German art-school dudes approached them and convinced them to rebrand as The Monks and play a pared-down but forceful new kind of rock music. We spend much time with the band members, leaving no anecdote untold and culminating in a one-off NYC reunion show with celebrities like Jon Spencer in the crowd. Still one of the greatest albums ever made… this two-hour movie has only about 15 minutes of illuminating stories, but it’s nice to spend so much time in a world where the Monks mattered.

by ·Comments Off on Fixed Bayonets! (1951, Samuel Fuller)

Haven’t seen this in a long time – it’s the snowy one about the guys left behind when the larger army moves out, ordered to act as if they’re the entire army to fool the enemy into staying put as long as possible. Our dudes get picked off until paranoid Richard Basehart is the highest rank. The whole drama of whether Basehart will be able to lead effectively if he’s in charge is overblown, because he’s only in charge for the last ten minutes and he leads just fine. For me the real drama was the nighttime conversation between him and Gene Evans. Evans is a gruff, down-to-earth character actor and Basehart a tormented over-enunciating drama-school type, and it’s a relief that they manage to inhabit the same scene without it seeming ridiculous.