by ·Comments Off on Sleeping Sickness (2011, Ulrich Köhler)

White doctor Ebbo has opened a clinic in Cameroon and is sorry to be leaving. Three years later Black doctor Alex arrives to find that WD never left and the clinic’s finances and practices are problematic. As the tension ramps up, WD disappears, possibly shot and/or eaten by a hippo.

Produced by Maren Ade, this won a prize at Berlin alongside The Turin Horse and A Separation. White doctor was in Prospero’s Books, Black doctor in 35 Shots of Rum, wife in The Strange Little Cat, and fellow white doctor Hippolyte Girardot was in everything, including the last couple Resnais movies. Hippolyte, Hippo… hmmm.

Mark Peranson in Cinema Scope:

The masterstroke in Kohler’s screenplay is how the destabilizing aspects of the narrative place viewers – for entirely different reasons – in the same off-balance mental space as Alex, who comes across as permanently jetlagged, despite the fact that Cameroon and France share a time zone. Something has instilled a bit of the Kurtz in Ebbo, and though Kohler surely has some idea, he leaves the gaps in for us to fill – daring simpletons to proclaim the cause as “Africa” – and then takes it up a notch. In the last extended sequence – one might say the film’s third part – Kohler places us in the nighttime jungle, and lets us get lost again.

by ·Comments Off on Dust Devil (1992, Richard Stanley)

Hardware was silly fun, Color Out of Space a real cool time, this movie is the Richard Stanley tiebreaker, and… I can dig it. We got just-okay storytelling, but baller filmmaking – South African post-Twin Peaks cult-killer stuff, with at least three cool birds.

Shelter me from the power of the finger:

Chelsea (one of Deborah Unger’s girls in Lynch’s Hotel Room) is on the run, and connects with roaming psycho Robert John Burke (between Hal Hartley movies). Everything this guy does, he does ominously. Her husband (of Space Mutiny: MST3K season 8) is after Chelsea and cops Joe and Ben (both of Cry Freedom) are after RJB. Eventually everyone will die except Chelsea, but she takes on the serial-psycho spirit and becomes the new RJB. The DP supposedly shot Highlander III: The Sorcerer in 1994, but that must be an AI hallucination – there were only two Highlander movies.

by ·Comments Off on Dahomey (2024, Mati Diop)

Really is a doc about artworks being repatriated from France to Benin. The conceit of having the ancient artworks do the narration and the responses from modern museum attendees made this more interesting than it might’ve been.

by ·Comments Off on Cobra Verde (1987, Werner Herzog)

Intro with a storyteller and a poem sets this up as a fable or legend, then some great storytelling economy as Klaus Kinski going from mourning his dead mother, leaving home, to penniless gold digger, to merciless bandit in a few minutes.

Kinski is hired as slavedriver of a sugarcane plantation. There among macaws and storks, bats and crabs, he knocks up all three of the owner’s daughters so they decide to send him to certain death in the deadly kingdom of Dahomey within Benin. He’s rescued from the insane king by an insane prince, and trains a woman army, but is he happy? He is not.

Werner Herzog’s Black Panther:

Entire movie was worth making for the scene of a goat taking communion:

by ·Comments Off on Fata Morgana (1970, Werner Herzog)

Opens with multiple plane landings from the same angle, almost some Same Player Shoots Again repetition but you can tell they’re different flights from the changing patterns of birds on the ground. The heat-haze over runway connects this to the desert scenes that follow, featuring some beautiful dune photography. Desert cities and very dead animals. A voiceover sometimes breaks in to read some biblical-sounding earth-formation text, which I could do without.

Part two, new narrator and text, not as archaic, plus some nice Leonard Cohen songs, and German researchers with sync audio. And part three, I don’t even know what to tell you. This all starts out as a photography demo, then becomes a collection of eccentricities and natural phenomena – Herzog in a nutshell. Dave Kehr: “Every shot has a double edge of harsh reality and surrealist fantasy.”

Christoph Huber in Cinema Scope 94:

Initially conceived as a sort of science-fiction film, Fata Morgana ended up closer to what today is labelled as an essay film, although it still seems to be rooted firmly in the realm of the fantastic, or even psychedelic. The film’s title is a perfect encapsulation of Herzog’s filmic universe, conjuring a desert mirage that can be filmed, although it does not exist – a reflection of reality, like cinema itself … There’s both a strange beauty and a barren, seemingly eternal sadness to Fata Morgana that bespeaks the ineffable, metaphysical qualities and intensity of experience Herzog tries to wrestle from visible reality.

by ·Comments Off on Sublime Frequencies double-feature

The James River Film Society, a mysterious organization which never emails me no matter how many times I submit my address to their subscription link, counterintuitively programmed a pair of hour-long Sublime Frequencies documentaries from director Hisham Mayet at a lovely large theater at noon on a beautiful Saturday, so I came out, along with as many as nine other people.

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The Divine River: Ceremonial Pageantry in the Sahel (2012)

Short riverboat setup, then it gets right into rocking and boogies down for forty minutes or so, each scene in a new location with a new musician or group. Apparently shot in Mali and Niger, there’s much dance, some cool structures and landscapes, and per the Sublime mission, no English translations or narration or titles. I figured the epic animal slaughter scene would be a good time to hit the restrooms – it’s also weirdly where the movie ended.

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Oulaya’s Wedding (2017)

More of a straight doc about a particular event, clearly explained to us. Group Doueh is a famed wedding band in Dakhla, a town on a coastline peninsula in Western Sahara, an area bordered by Mauritania and Morocco. The Doueh musicians’ own daughter is getting married, so they’re throwing the biggest party ever and inviting everyone. We get a behind-the-scenes look at the setup and prep in the first few days, then the event itself under a massive tent. Interviews with family and guests (spotlight on the gay male dancers). Plenty of music, so I could keep on bopping in my seat. We’ve long heard that Mdou Moctar and Tinariwen started as wedding bands, so the main attraction here was to see what these weddings are like.

by ·Comments Off on Shorts Watched in July 2023

Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer (2019, Sky Hopinka)

Split screen (sorry, “two-channel”) film, water and sky giving way to drawings and stories (text on screen, and one stereo channel reading the text aloud). Sounds academic, but really cool in the way Hopinka’s films tend to be.

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Kicking the Clouds (2022, Sky Hopinka)

Interviewer’s mother talks about language for a while then gives greater family context, the camera showing beadwork, people from a distance, ground and trees, poetry, and of course clouds.

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We Need New Names (2015, Onyeka Igwe)

This covers a lot of ground: racial and gender difference, family history and belonging, tradition and its meaning. Clips from black/white archival films of African dance, and modern video of different dance, each of them tourist-docs the way the narrator is removed from the rituals she sees, including dancing pallbearers at her grandmother’s funeral (who reportedly died at age 103 – mom says that’s not true “but I think you should leave that alone”).

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Crocus (1971, Suzan Pitt)

Mom and kid move with awkward paper-doll joints, sliding all over the floor, which is better than dad, who moves with no joints at all, like a he-man figure with a gigantic cock. When the adults finally get down to it, the camera spins around them, then various suggestive objects fly through the room and out the window.

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Lili Reynaud-Dewar

In Montreal we checked out a three-part exhibit of her solo works, including a room with a four-screen re-enactment of Pasolini’s final interview with rotating participants reading the same lines, the rare multi-channel video piece that really worked for me. In a larger room was a parallel array of screens showing 30-some dance videos made over a decade – some of which are on vimeo, so I got screenshots.

by ·Comments Off on This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection (2019, Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese)

4:3, excellent color, trendy arthouse long takes, unusual sound mix. Great looking/sounding, reminds of Jauja. Per the commentary, the trajectory of the long takes were designed to mirror cycles of life.

She is Mantoa, is told her son has died (in her introduction scene, the movie’s best), and that the town will be resettled and a dam built. Enter a low-voiced narrator, and another entry in the “rural woman goes to the city and deals w bureaucracy” genre, more enjoyable at least than A Gentle Creature. Her house burns down. A kid dies. It is a burial, pretty much.

by ·Comments Off on Crossing Voices (2022, Raphaël Grisey & Bouba Touré)

Our seventh True/False. Travel is exhausting, so we took Thursday off and started early on Friday… earlier than musician Cemone James, who arrived late. Seems like only her guitarist and keyboardist were awake. The movie is a quite long and rambling montage of archive footage, still photos, video, film, computer map imagery, and radio broadcasts. Protests and strikes, neverending for decades, trying to be able to live and thrive in their own land. At one point Touré nicely sums it up, panning over the photos and posters covering the wall of his room, saying “life is a struggle” again and again and again. He stays in France, spends a few months a year back in Mali. Between protests he became a photographer and hung out with Med Hondo. He died in early 2022, his close collaborator Grisey finishing the film.