by ·Comments Off on Concorso Shorts 2019

Some shorts I could find online that played Locarno in 2019

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Carne (Camila Kater)

I figured watching an animated short unsubtitled would be fine, turns out it’s wall-to-wall narration in Portuguese. From what I can follow, five women’s stories about their bodies, chronologically through the life cycle, each in different animation styles (stop-mo, watercolor, flash, clay, Breer).

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In Vitro (Lind & Sansour)

Dry, serious sci-fi displayed in wide split-screen. Older woman in hospital bed is confronted by younger clone who questions her implanted memories and her purpose in the purgatorial present-day while the survivors of a global plague are kept indoors and underground.

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Volcano: What Does a Lake Dream? (Diana Vidrascu)

A movie about islands and earthquakes with distorted colors and cool sound design is for sure gonna remind me of Rock Bottom Riser. Gets caught up a little too hard in video effects wilderness but still my favorite of this bunch.

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Our Territory (Mathieu Volpe)

Italian narrator (speaking French) is weird and sad about encountering a neighborhood of poor African immigrants.

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White Afro (Akosua Adoma Owusu)

Adapted from a salon worker interview and a promotional film about giving white people afros, interspersed with Toni Morrison quotes, the picture highly distressed with film junk.

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Swinguerra (Benjamin de Burca & Barbara Wagner)

Ninety percent of this is sexy Brazilians dancing, what is not to love?

by ·Comments Off on A Film About a Woman Who… (1974, Yvonne Rainer)

A decade after seeing the doc about her, I’ve finally watched a full Rainer feature. “Dry” is still the word I’d use, though it’s structurally busy and playful.

Four people on a couch are reading slides of the same essay Yvonne is reading us on the soundtrack. The slides also have photographs, and we’ll see silent motion film of some of those photos being posed.

A male narrator takes over but the words are still from a female POV, now with pauses representing missing words, “is it possible that I have really ___, that I will never make ___?” Other times the narration will cut off mid-sentence. Much more eventful than the Akerman movie I watched the night before, but harder to sit through.

“For some reason she is embarrassed about her reverie.” Relationship psychology… starts telling a story of a bad(?) date with brief scenes and numbered intertitles, establishes a rhythm, then one title sticks for a long time and we hear an opera song and the story sidetracks to something new. Things like this keep the movie from ever getting tedious.

Studiously avoids sync sound until halfway through the movie: a woman at a surreal dinner scene gives an entire sync monologue like it’s no big deal, then before we can get used to this she is rudely interrupted by an intertitle and the film goes completely silent. These sorts of ruptures are the rule here. The great DP Babette Mangolte also shot Jeanne Dielman and Hotel Monterey (but not the Akerman I watched this week), and Rameau’s Nephew, which I’d love to add to this thread of 1974 movies if I can find the time, but maybe its four hour play with sound synchronization would be too much coming after this (edit: it was).

It incorporates retakes and loops, silences and blackouts, and the slowest-motion stripping you’ve ever seen. Ends on piano music and dance poses, then a brief cycle of violence via intertitles at the beach but I never figured out its structure or momentum, it could’ve ended on anything.

by ·Comments Off on Daughters (2024, Angela Patton & Natalie Rae)

I’d read a little about this movie beforehand, and didn’t bring any kleenex, so stood outside the Missouri Theater staring up at its walls thinking “I am the brick, I am the mortar, I will not cry at the movie,” and this pretty much worked. Slyly highlights the broken horrors of the prison system through personal stories from inside and outside, the two sides meeting at the father-daughter dance, an invention of activist and co-director Patton. The dads are told to use the dance as a promise to change and be present for their families, and soon some are getting out but others are being shut away for decades (the movie never says why any of them are inside). A particular five year-old is so open, talking lovingly and often of her feather, then in postscript she’s eight, acting completely distant on a phone call with him. Older jaded kids have trouble with the concept, but give in when it’s dance time. A lovely movie that will go far unless it’s immediately dumped onto streaming and lost in the content ocean. At least twenty producers, and a production company that did Faya Dayi and The Territory. Opener Good Looks was a noisy four-piece rock group.

by ·Comments Off on Menus-Plaisirs & La Danse (Frederick Wiseman)

La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet (2009)

Paris Opera, from classes to group and individual rehearsals to grand public performances. The final duo dance was the first music I recognized, a string piece. After my jazz era maybe I’ll get into ballets. At least one Pina Bausch piece, at least I can recognize those. Clicking the dancers’ names on lboxd for fun, I found actors from The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, early straight-to-netflix movie Divines, a Binoche feature, two obscure Deneuve movies, and Bonello’s Sarah Winchester short.

Michael Sicinski in Cinema Scope 42, after quoting C. Huber calling FW’s work the “Great American Novel”:

La Danse … represents both a bend in the river for Wiseman and a sort of coming-to-the-fore of tendencies that were probably there all along but whose presence was difficult to discern … This is a Wiseman film with virtually no struggle on the sociological scale … upping the spectacle and downplaying those detailed, Zolaesque dimensions for which his great novel is usually vaunted … One starts to get the sense that, at this point in his career, the filmmaker may be starting to see the value in letting non-intervention tip over into tacit boosterism.

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Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros (2023)

We got caught up in the kitchen drama, but none of the customer/restaurant scenes are as memorable as the one in The Truffle Hunters. Nobody comments on the situation, which I think about constantly, where a French tire company gets to decide which eateries worldwide are legendary/great/decent. More from Will and Filipe.

Jay Kuehner in Cinema Scope 97:

The four-hour runtime here mimics that of a multi-course sit-down meal, digestible in its digressions … There is no cultural or institutional polemic here … Detours to various rendezvous with suppliers, whose respective practices of raising cattle, goats, and legumes reveal deep commitments to the land and its biodiversity, lessons on the necessity of minimal intervention in nature, but they also lack the immersive tendencies of Wiseman’s more cynical work due to the rather perfunctory blocking of the encounters between chef and farmer, suggesting a choreography of content that inevitably flatters both parties. While not hagiographic, Wiseman’s portrait of this culinary dynasty is no doubt conditioned somewhat by a persistent PR apparatus.

by ·Comments Off on Piccadilly (1929, EA Dupont)

Our second Dupont movie after Variety. Rather than Anvil/Alloy we went with the music on the blu-ray, which was fine. After a talkie introduction scene, simply terrible, awkwardly tacked on (starring John Longden who I just saw in Quatermass 2) we get a proper silent film with glamorous costumes and camera moves. The setup is that Valentine (Claudette’s fiancé in It Happened One Night) runs a successful club with star dancers Victor (Hitchcock’s Blackmail) and Mabel (star of The Devil Dancer two years earlier), then after a falling out, the dancers are replaced with kitchen worker Anna May Wong, a vast improvement. Tensions build in the second half – Mabel is jealous that Valentine is sweet on Anna, and maybe murders her, but in the ensuing court drama we learn that Anna’s boy Jim (not her brother, as she’s told people) did the crime. Smooth little drama, mostly noteworthy for its Anna May content.

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 Something Different (1963, Vera Chytilová)

In the mood for another 1960’s Czech movie after Loves of a Blonde. Chytilová pre-Daisies doing the hybrid-doc thing before it was invented. The mom having an affair with a light-haired guy isn’t terribly enlightening – I came for the dance segments. Good photography overall, but one particular shot, the camera upside-down then rotating rightside in sync with the dancer’s flip, takes your breath away.

by ·Comments Off on Three by Claire Denis

Voilà l’enchaînement (2014)

Alex Descas and Norah Krief (a Shakespeare actress) are a mixed-race couple, and not incidentally. She calls him a stud, asks him to tattoo her name on his body, he says both remind him of slavery/ownership. Time passes, she’s paranoid, reports him to the cops for domestic violence and he’s arrested. His prison monologue about “the trap” and his ponderings on racism afterwards feels too much like reciting the moral at the end of an educational film, though I like the rhythm of his speech.

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Duo (1995)

Very short, the camera cruising around a painting (of another mixed-race couple) while Descas smokes outside the frame.

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Towards Mathilde (2005)

This played at Big Ears, but we were too busy seeing live music. A rehearsal/process movie, prepping for a show that uses squirky noises and elastic materials, working out to PJ Harvey songs. One of my arms has been stiff lately and I’ve kept a small weight by the bed and the desk so I can grab it anytime and stretch out. I’m not usually inspired to do this during movies, but with this doc focusing so much on arm movements, I got a real workout. The day I watched this the new Denis hadn’t screened at Cannes yet, but the Cronenberg had, and I happened to read a Kristen Stewart interview right after watching this:

The most simple answer comes from a place of wisdom. You don’t have to complicate certain ideas. Like, “The body is reality.” At first, I was really trying to shove that concept in my head: What does it mean to me and the world and on every level? But he was like, “I shoot people.” That’s it! It’s a body. All of that is surprising. These are really lofty concepts, but also they’re not at all.

by ·Comments Off on West Side Story (2021, Steven Spielberg)

None of my notes are useful (see Goodbye Dragon Inn instead) because I assumed I was going to rewatch it with Katy, and maybe someday I will. The lyrics to “America” and “Gee Officer Krupke” are so great, the actors and camera work are swell, and it’s all a Lincoln Center origin story.

Nov 2023: Watched again with K (who liked it) and M (who did not). Since this came out two years ago, Maria and her boyfriend’s killer Chino have appeared in the Hunger Games prequel, Ariana DeBose has become a Disney/Marvel star, and Riff is doing films with Luca Guadagnino and Jeff Nichols.