by ·Comments Off on Pictures of Ghosts (2023, Kleber Mendonca Filho)

Vital viewing for fans of Neighbouring Sounds, showing the history of Kleber’s family in their apartment where that movie was filmed. Funny, I mentioned Chris Marker in my writeup of his Green Vinyl, and the first thing I notice in his apartment is Marker’s book “Staring Back” – and I referenced Do The Right Thing in the same post, and here’s Kleber wearing a Do The Right Thing shirt. As Tsui Hark says, we all have the same references so we all make the same films. “Fiction films are the best documentaries” he says in part two, about the disappeared cinemas of Recife, Brazil, while reviewing the only known footage of certain destroyed landmarks in the backgrounds of features. The third part is the shortest, literally turning the locals into ghosts.

The director in Cinema Scope, on shooting digital:

At the end of the day it’s not the celluloid that makes a film, it’s the attitude that goes into each and every move … It’s quite perverse. I remember in the ’80s when CDs were introduced, the industry sold the idea that vinyl was nothing and you should get rid of it. It was part of the strategy to get CDs into people’s homes. In my family we kept the vinyl and also bought CDs. I like the idea of adding new ideas and experiences. I don’t understand why the industry always has to sell subtraction. With 35mm and digital, the best thing would be for me to have more options. But capitalism always finds a way to fuck everything up.

by ·Comments Off on June 2022 Shorts Part 7: Fern Silva

Again, I’m away from my Cinema Scope collection, but this time the Michael Sicinski article that put me in touch with Silva’s work is available online.

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In The Absence of Light, Darkness Prevails (2010)

Chintzy dance music plays over astronomical images perverted by interlaced video screens. Reverse monochrome of baby sea turtles heading into the ocean. Some kind of costumed street event. Weedwhacking the jungle. The camera playing with a campfire. And so on, the sound design ranging from innocuous to annoying. Shock ending, the camera suddenly escaping the planet through a hole in the ground!

Per MS, this was filmed in Brazil and “examines human and animal experience at multiple levels of abstraction … this is the film in which the subjective element in Silva’s work is fully incorporated into a total way of seeing, one not bound to individual history or biography.”

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The Watchmen (2017)

Naked man in a field, then a pulsing light, lasting for just long enough that I assumed the rest of the movie would be the pulsing light, but no. Prison yard, prison wall, abandoned prison, prison guard tower – so there’s the title. Various hot dog places. Return to the naked man and the pulsing light, with a voiceover about the watchman. Very mysterious.

MS:

The Watchmen takes as its subject Illinois’ now-defunct Joliet prison, perhaps best known for being featured in 1980’s The Blues Brothers … Silva stands at the heart of the prison and starts spinning his camera, faster and faster, describing the curved walls of the panopticon; not coincidentally, the flicker and blur of this accelerated image, with flecks of light disrupting the darkness, forms a combination camera obscura and phenakistoscope.

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Ride Like Lightning, Crash Like Thunder (2017)

A perversely looped version of “Pale Blue Eyes”… a bird trapped in an apartment… the title card made from a Metallica album cover. A guy plays us the intro to Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy.” A red-coated birdwatcher gives an unexpected callback to Brown Thrasher. Reappearing scary hands creep from behind objects.

Hey look, it’s what I hope to get out of watching these shorts:

Hey look who’s in this:

MS:

Ride Like Lightning, Crash Like Thunder was Silva’s final film before embarking on the Rock Bottom Riser project … A return of sorts for Silva to the Hudson River region of New York, where the filmmaker’s alma mater Bard College is located, Ride Like Lightning is not explicitly about experimental filmmaker (and Bard professor) Peter Hutton, but shares with Hutton’s work a keen fascination with the Hudson River area, its landscape and shifting seasonal character.

by ·Comments Off on The Territory (2022, Alex Pritz)

Begonia opened with a big voice and a full band on keyboards and drum pads. An Issues Doc, invaders killing the indigenous people and the rain forest. Brief time is spent with the invaders themselves, poor misunderstood white supremacists who feel entitled to the land because it’s “undeveloped,” very easy to root against them even though they’re victims of the same government/capitalist system that has repressed the others. The main story follows the young new leader of a Brazilian indigenous community, educated and tech savvy, using cameras and drones to document the destruction and fight back, leading missions to peacefully arrest the invaders and destroy their settlements. A woman in the nearby city is a supporter who has fought alongside them for decades. Marvelous extreme close-ups on local creatures. Our screening got a rare burst of mid-film applause: after covid hits, the local media wants to come film the native community, breaking quarantine – but they say we have our own camera equipment, just send us your shot list.

by ·Comments Off on Three by Ephraim Asili

Many Thousands Gone (2015)

Better in concept than in specifics. Juxtaposing street scenes in NYC and Brazil with emphasis on dance, silent film with improv music added after, this all sounds great. What we get: so-so photography with blowy sounds in the audio, reminiscent of that grating windbag noise on Nine Inch Nails “A Warm Place”.

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Kindah (2016)

Flutey frequencies that bugged me even more than the windy blowing, but the middle half was all percussion and the photography seems to have improved even if the subject matter (group dance routines in Jamaica and New York) is less inherently interesting, so we’ll call it even.

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Fluid Frontiers (2017)

Short poems and segments about slavery and blackness, read to us on camera, the book covers visible. Detroit and Southern Ontario, the split locations in these films getting closer together each time.

Sicinski in Mubi says the locations are an Underground Railroad reference and “a tribute to Detroit’s Broadside Press, a publishing house of the late 60s and 70s that specialized in radical black poetry … They are reciting works by the Broadside poets, reading them directly from the original chapbooks … Asili insists on a place-based activism, making it clear that only certain kinds of interventions could occur in certain places.” Asili’s debut feature The Inheritance looks to be worth watching.

by ·Comments Off on No Kings (2020, Emilia Mello)

Fishing community, focused on blonde girl Lucimara who catches crabs on the rocks, and smiling poet Ismail. Indigenous community riverside rain forest movie, reminded Katy of A River Below, while kids left to their own devices wiith dangerous tools gave me a La Cienaga feeling. Flash forward at the end, Luci in the city, and the first time I thought the movie had really shown us something, Luci older and more mature after we’d been getting to know her at age 11.

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 At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul / The Unliving

At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (1964, José Mojica Marins)

Opens with a woman talking to the audience, Elvira-style, then the screaming sfx over the opening titles make it feel like this is gonna be a campy carnival ride of a movie. It’s not really, despite the TV Batman scene transitions, must just be José “Coffin Joe” Marins having as much fun in the editing room as he appears to be having in the lead acting role. The dubbing (and everything else) isn’t technically great, but it’s an honestly eccentric movie, up there with Death Bed on the pile of horrors with justifiable cult reputations.

Joe/Ze is the most feared man in town since he has no faith, and no compunction about violence and murder. He’s also a rude, shitty guy – at the beginning his woman tells him something, he replies “you have talked enough,” and walks out. He goes to the bar, cuts off a guy’s hand, whips another guy terribly, then returns home and kills his wife with a tarantula, then a second later he’s getting all moral on a random man. Seeking an heir, he kills his friend and rapes her girl, but she commits suicide – then the doctor wants to investigate the friend’s death, so Ze pokes out his eyes and sets him on fire.

After dude has been so terrible you’d think the last ten minutes of him screaming and running from vengeful ghosts would be more rewarding, but that fact that he lives to appear in a sequel gives the impression that Marins wasn’t serious about the comeuppance, he just enjoyed being bad for ninety minutes. Even on my standard old DVD, the avenging ghost’s stop-motion granite aura looked rad.

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The Unliving (2010, Hugo Lilja)

I had some extra time, checked out a nice HD copy of this half-hour Swedish short. Nice twist on the ol’ zombie apocalypse. Mark and Katrin are in love – he installs wiring in zombie brains turning them into docile workers, she goes on raids into the city and nailguns zombies to walls so they can be captured and brought to Mark’s lab. They’ve each got problems – she kills a coworker who gets bitten, which is against the rules – and he spots his own mom and brings her home instead of drilling her brains, which is definitely against the rules. I assume their bosses are corrupt and there’s a whole gov’t conspiracy going on and this would’ve been expanded had they ended up making a feature version, which it feels like this very much wants to be… I kept stopping myself from being impressed with the massive amount of work put into this short because it ends up feeling like an overpriced advertisement for something, or an extended trailer for a miniseries. Or maybe I’m just cynical – it has some good character bits, like Katrin coming home, seeing her partner’s zombie mom, and stress-eating cereal. The director and writer finally got their break into features with 2018’s space adventure Aniara.

by ·Comments Off on Kid (2015, Júlio Bressane)

At Locarno 2015, Julio Bressane served on a jury, programmed a section of Brazilian films, and presented his new work Garoto (Kid). I was psyched for this, since I’ve seen Bressane’s name around forever. He has an early feature called Killed the Family and Went to the Movies and a brand new one starring a parrot, a woman and “a large portion of raw meat.”

A young woman (Marjorie Estiano, star of Good Manners) calmly philosophizes in static scenes shot with a video-looking handheld camera. She tells her mute boyfriend a story about a boy who loved killing, then she, um, kisses and performs oral sex on the camera. Later, they go to her friend’s house (Josi Antello of Sentimental Education), where the boy apparently freaks out, killing Josi then running away to wander through the desert accompanied by quiet wild-west sounds and the effect of wind overloading a microphone.

Inspired by a Borges story about Billy the Kid. Struck me as a sort of half-assed Révélateur, every shot held too long in that familiar arthouse fest-film way, but without the technique to keep it interesting. I admit a scene that kept panning to a man softly drumming on a painted board was intriguing – the first time it happened. The lo-fi video look might’ve just been me getting a poor-quality copy online, but the mic problems say maybe that’s not the case… either way, it made me think of LNKarno discovery Jean-Claude Brisseau, especially when he positions the two actresses in front of his bookshelves. On one hand, Brisseau seems 100x more interesting and I should look up more of his films… on the other hand… the new Bressane stars a parrot!

Bressane’s messaging was ahead of its time:

by ·Comments Off on Bacurau (2019, Kleber Mendonca Filho & Juliano Dornelles)

Opens with a woman returning to town to a mixed welcome just in time for a funeral featuring some light hostility – but you can tell from the Star Wars scene wipes that this is picking up where Aquarius left off, and is gonna be a good time. Not TOO good of a time – I was disappointed when the flying saucer a half-hour in just turned out to be a drone… but the drone turned out to be operated by a group of American hunters descending on Bacurau because the mayor has sold out the townspeople as wild game.

The town pulls together pretty quickly, unlike the hunters, who turn on each other whenever things go wrong. You’d think the mayor would know this, but Bacurau features at least two notorious killers, a history of violent revolution, a museum full of vintage defensive weapons, and (I’m not sure how this is related) a love for psychedelic drugs.

When two hunters pause mid-action to fuck, I’m pretty sure it’s a Cannibal Holocaust reference. Movie’s logic has an Udo Kier-shaped hole in it. After insisting that he’s more American than the Americans, he acts like they’re going on a rescue mission for the missing advance couple, then shoots one of his own guys after taking random potshots at main street, then almost kills himself, then whines like a baby at the town mayor, then says something like “we’ve killed more people than you know”, but his group was acting like they just met for this mission, then some “you haven’t heard the last of us” line as he’s being buried alive under the city. Wonder if they didn’t give him a script, and just let him make any decision he chose. I’ve been bummed out lately by some overwritten movies with predictable story arcs, so I’m not sure this is a complaint. Cinema Scope on the movie’s weirdness, not specifically on Udo Kier:

If Bacurau is a genre film, it’s one whose tension relies most on the fact that genre can no longer be relied upon. The unpredictability of these genre shifts is only amplified by the same reversals in tone or perspective already discernible from the beginning, which become increasingly jarring as the film progresses, producing an off-kilter, anything-goes atmosphere that is still careful to stop just short of the incoherent or the arbitrary.

The town doctor is Sônia Braga, lead of Aquarius, and the woman returning to town in the beginning was also in Aquarius playing Sônia’s character in flashbacks. The hunter who gets shot by Udo for calling him a nazi was in Support the Girls. Udo Kier is of course best known for Puppet Master 12: The Littlest Reich.