by ·Comments Off on The Second Game (2014, Corneliu Porumboiu)

The one where the director watches a scoreless soccer game on TV with his dad, a soccer game his dad coached, and they discuss the game, players, era, and political context… difference in rules and tactics between then (1988) and now, the political implications of this army-vs-police game and the risks of being its referee. It’s movie-as-audio-commentary, and I was on board for the first half, until it runs out of interest and energy, just like most audio commenataries. Dad complains about the picture quality (“it’s from the stone age”) and he also takes a phone call which causes digital interference in the sound recording, so both layers have their tech problems.

Jordan Cronk in Cinema Scope: “It quickly becomes clear that the least interesting thing occurring on screen is the game. Rather, interpersonal rivalries, intimidation tactics, convenient editing, and extracurricular ploys provide the drama in a parallel conflict taking place just beneath the surface.”

Dad: “You couldn’t make a film out of this. Nobody would watch it, it’s all in the past. Football is like everything else, like cinema and art: they all have their moment, you consume it, and it’s over.”

Porumboiu, arguing that the game is like his films:

by ·Comments Off on 2 + 2 = 22 (2017, Heinz Emigholz)

Mostly a rock doc of some guys recording motorik music.

The title is probably a Godard reference, but I’m still in the mid-1960s on my rock doc playlist, that one’s a couple years away.

by ·Comments Off on Happy as Lazzaro (2018, Alice Rohrwacher)

Innocent Lazzaro works on an illegal tobacco farm slave plantation, and while his young master is enlisting him in a kidnapping extortion scheme, the others are being discovered by authorities and freed into the real world. Laz falls down a mountain and wakes up years later (unaged and part-wolf) to find his old friends.

by ·Comments Off on I Am Not Madame Bovary (2016, Feng Xiaogang)

Watched this for its circular frames and I had an enjoyable time. The title is a translation quirk, the English-language equivalent of a notorious cheater, but movie is based on the novel I Did Not Kill My Husband which would’ve been catchier.

Mike D’Angelo compares it to the Zhang Yimou movies, and that checks out. Bingbing Fan (best known as a tax criminal, also 17th-billed in an X-Men movie) fake-divorces her husband as a real-estate scheme, and when he goes off with another woman instead of remarrying her, she pesters the government for decades (until his death) trying to get the fake-divorce reversed. By the end all the government officials are new people because she got their predecessors fired, and nobody knows how to stop this woman from causing a scene every year.

Beijing:

The Mayor was in Touch of Sin, her “cousin” Wang in Hidden Blade, seducer/traitor/rapist Datou was Andy’s rival cop in Blind Detective, and the court guy who hired the seducer starred in Cliff Walkers.

by ·Comments Off on 4:44 Last Day On Earth (2011, Abel Ferrara)

Another good downbeat movie about the last day on earth. Willem Dafoe very relatable on his last day: he complains about being allowed to sleep, he skypes some friends and when they start playing blues guitar he mutes them. Excellent scene with a delivery driver. Dafoe lives across from the old Essex Market location, over a Popeyes Chicken on Delancey Street. He fights with his ex, and his current girl (of Go Go Tales) freaks out. He sees his buddy Paul Hipp (Bad Channels) at a drug dealer’s apartment – there’s some last-minute grappling with drugs and sex and religion (all Ferrara hallmarks). I’m way behind on my Ferrara films – this came between some late-2000s documentaries and the 2014 Pasolini and Welcome to New York, none of which I’ve seen.

Al Gore whining about climate change, Willem Dafoe singing the blues:

When the world is ending and also your laptop battery is dying:

Before the world ends you should always check in with Natasha Lyonne:

by ·Comments Off on Season of the Devil (2018, Lav Diaz)

Trancefilm, eases you into slow rhythms so you get alternately fascinated and bored. On one hand it’s a musical and I love it, on the other it’s about paramilitary violence and I was sick of that subject before pressing play. I had a few small beers, spaced out a little, and how’d we start hanging out with this drunk poet? Watched this movie featuring a Janus-headed military leader in anticipation of seeing Lav’s Magellan in theaters (a Janus Films release).

by ·Comments Off on Alexandre Larose shorts

930 (2006)

Rorschach black/white blobs in a slow reversal strobe, shifting to other things but always returning to what looks like a graveyard image morphing into the back of a person’s head. The sound turns from circus music at 10% volume (to trick you into cranking up your speakers) to nightmare industrial grinding at 100% to bubbly noise-reduction artifacts at 25% to a piano tune recorded in a room with terrible acoustics. Actually filmed inside a train tunnel, so that headstone image was the tunnel entrance. Larose is Canadian, roughly my age, and supposedly did more interesting work later, so let’s go.

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Artifices #1 (2007)

Ordinary traffic/street lights streaked into timelapse lines with ambient-doom music. It shows you the dot form and the line form, so know what you’re looking at, then a mirror view of the camera’s rotation apparatus at the end, so you know how they made it. Under/overscanned with visible sprocket holes, an impressive condensation of technique and imagery in three minutes.

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Ville Marie (2009)

Shapes and forms, sometimes human, in reverse-image flicker motion. Green person next to towering inferno. Unexpected face kaleidoscope. Trance-pulse, rainbow blotch, lot of different things visually as the soundtrack moves from haunted-house ambient to light piano to projector noise.

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La Grande Dame (2011)

Changing perspectives on building window grids, silent

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Brouillard #14 (2014)

Holy cow, what is this? Could be someone walking the same grassy path towards (and into) the water sixteen times, the images overlaid and masked so they bob and weave into each other, but I’m not sure if that would account for the trees being blown apart into pointillist abstractions. It adds up to a very cool trance effect, made even better by the song “Aghora” by Bill Laswell, which I added since it’s the right length.

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Saint Bathans Repetitions (2016)

1. Grainy indoor low-light scenes with a window in the background and a low hum on the soundtrack, not as cool as the bass parts in the Bill Laswell song, but the image is unstable, subtly changing into different scenes without you realizing how.
2. Similar fragmentary image instability but in nice clear color. A guy and his sixteen trailing shadow-images travel easily through the house, his actions causing exponentially-layered creaking-wood sounds.
3. Vague b/w dream of the previous segment.
4. b/w mountain textures
5. b/w but less vague, the guy and his shadows sit on a couch, the soundtrack clattering echoes in response.
Ohhhh, the layering was done in-camera, Larose must be a mad genius.

by ·Comments Off on The Extravagant Shadows (2012, David Gatten)

Opens with music, then literature, then watching paint dry, and stories… or we’ll call them texts, to be safe.

We get into our routine of new color, new text, then of course he starts changing the patterns. After the first hour, instead of text appearing over the colors then going away, the text starts changing, crossfading into new texts. Twenty minutes later there is sync sound for the first time. There have been slight light shifts before, but around the same time as the sound, the current paint color becomes unstable – it turns out this was filmed outside in Colorado, and he hoped that clouds would add some chance into the mix. Soon the idea that this might be a single time-lapsed shot (or real-time, turns out it’s quick-drying paint) goes out the window, as the scene cross-fades into different colors and textures.

Mouseover to make years pass by:
image

Halfway through, the title Anonymous Life Among the Definite Articles begins a more storylike story than usual, about a woman with a memory of a man and a bookstore. As soon as this story is reaching some kind of climax, he paints a color, then a new color before the first one has fully dried, the brush moving in splotches instead of nice even lines, making a blue/tan mess, over which plays our third hourly classic pop song. He runs some text about seeming and seemings, which I didn’t follow at all. Now all the rules are changing – he does multiple coats of the same color, plays multiple pop songs in a row. I lost my mind when he painted a diagonal line instead of a straight vertical, causing K to laugh at me. She says the movie is a palimpsest.

Essential interview at Idiom, where I learned the songs are “from a 1968 Merrilee Rush album called Angel of the Morning”…

Aaron Cutler:

Though many [texts] originally come from other writers, including Stefan Zweig, Maurice Blanchot, and Henry James (from whose short story “The Jolly Corner” Gatten took Shadows’ title), the tale that they obliquely tell — made up of overlapping possible stories that lovers might share, if chance allows — is of Gatten’s invention.

Gatten:

My background of consuming and enjoying [commercial cinema] probably helped me conceive work that was different, and closer to the aesthetic experience of the fine arts. I admire the idea of the oppositional cinema, but what I’m making is just in favor of itself, and not necessarily opposed to something else — I like the other thing too, it just isn’t what I’m doing … For the kind of experience I seek, I don’t want anyone to forget who they are or where they are, and I want my viewers to be active in a different way. I want the chief activity to be that of the viewer approaching the screen, and for the meaning of the work not to be inherent, but rather to be a product of someone’s engagement with it.

Daniel Kasman:

Since the paint is quick-drying, we also witness the change in texture of the painted surface itself, along with the evolution of the light conditions, so cracks, welts, smashed gnats, ripples and other distortions become apparent second by second. These changes — in light/color, texture — are often happening at the same time Gatten is fading in, or out, long excerpts of text, and the result is that as your eye scans the text to read it, “behind” the text the “background” seems to be changing with your reading. It is almost as if you, the viewer, are changing the image through the act of reading, which dovetails into the text’s mysterious evocation of almost/not-quite/happenstance/erstwhile relationships: the act of reading, of seeing, is so quicksilver that it changes the nature of the subject being seen, read, and the reading’s subject, the love, the memory.

Holly Willis in Film Comment quotes Gatten on the earlier Byrd films, then on Shadows:

“There will be a lot of words in these films,” he explained, speaking with characteristic precision. “You won’t be able to read all of these words. I expect that this will provoke anxiety. That is as it should be.” This anxiety, Gatten explained later in an interview, is significant: “The enjoyment of reading and the anxiety of not being able to read are the two sides of the coin: you can’t have one without the other.”
…
“I have moved in a few of the recent works to language that is not difficult because it is not available physically; it is that it’s more abstract. The questions become, ‘How does one get from one piece of legible language to the other piece of legible language?’ and ‘How does meaning accrue between those legible things?’ It’s less now about physical, visible legibility and more, I think, conceptual legibility or illegibility.”

Michael Sicinski has an overview of Gatten’s work leading up to this movie:

Taken as a whole, Gatten’s work over the past eighteen years has been an ongoing inquiry into cinematic knowledge, its connection to, and its role as a part of, the broader history of human knowledge … This strange new work is undoubtedly a continuation down the formal and phenomenological pathways forged by the Byrd films…

Gatten’s texts (which seem to be an amalgam of original and appropriated material) give the distinct impression that an actual story is developing. That is, The Extravagant Shadows is not just a feature, but it is almost a narrative. And what is it about? These textual fragments are preoccupied with two key elements: emotional connection and various methods of communicative transmission. Two figures are trying to make contact with one another … We read of the mails, the telegraph, the selection of books, the distance between nations. Eventually, the speaker (or speakers) seem to doubt the efficacy of writing altogether.

by ·Comments Off on Go Down Death (2013, Aaron Schimberg)

Mildly Lynchian, but some scenes play too much like theater, despite all the big-swing cinema in the other parts. I feel like there’s photography here, and performance, and a sort of world or story, but none of it gels. It’s generous to its unusual actors at least. Playlist called it a “half-remembered dream” which seems right.