by ·Comments Off on Town Bloody Hall (1979, Hegedus & Pennebaker)

A panel of feminists is convened to rebut a Harper’s article written by shitstarter Norman Mailer. We didn’t do our homework and read the Mailer article first, but followed the arguments just fine. Anyway, amazon says it’s available as a 240-page hardcover, which they categorize under “Spies & Political Thrillers,” so what is going on.

1. Jacqueline Caballos runs a women’s advancement organization, gives a nice political speech.
2. Writer Germaine Greer is smart, funny and quick. She has a completely different approach to Caballos, who never speaks again.
3. Jill Johnston’s speech is like an SNL sketch full of jokes and references. She gets in an argument over exceeding her time, and after some makeout anarchy, leaves the movie forever.
4. Lit critic Diana Trilling knows Norman well, and seems to be the most balanced person onstage, not that that’s a high bar.

Norman’s an egoist who says he’ll fade into the background and let the women speak during the Q&A, but doesn’t – it doesn’t help that most questions and comments (including Susan Sontag’s) are addressed directly to him. Nice to spend some time checking in with the pop intellectualism of the 1970’s, unable to imagine this event taking place today.

by ·Comments Off on From the Wild Sea (2021, Robin Petré)

Our first-ever T/F guest viewer agreed with Katy that the movie was sad and hard to watch. Seals, dolphins and swans, rescued and released by British + Irish orgs. Some delightful seal/swan antics, less-direct wounded animal shots than Bird Island. Per Paste, “a story of slow, tiring disaster.”

by ·Comments Off on A Thousand Suns / Metaphor / A So-Called Archive

A Thousand Suns (2013, Mati Diop)

Starts with very few indications that it’s not a purely observational doc following the lead actor of Touki Bouki making his way to an anniversary screening, but by the end we’re in a new realm with nude women in the Alaskan snow. Nice use of Tex Ritter’s “High Noon”

Diop in Cinema Scope:

The sole element of reality that I kept in my film is that Magaye Niang stayed in Dakar and Myriam Niang left for Alaska. From there I took fictional liberties, but the phone conversation that is heard in the film remains quite faithful to the real conversation that I recorded between the two actors. Nothing is true and nothing is false in my film.

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Metaphor or Sadness Inside Out (2014, Catarina Vasconcelos)

The metaphor is an elephant. Bookending square-frame film segments with HD in the middle, circling around memories of a mother who died when her kids were teens. More focus on family, photos and letters – a proto-Metamorphosis of Birds that stands well on its own, and an example of how to use home movies and photographs in poetic ways.

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A So-Called Archive (2020, Igwe Onyeka)

Upbeat promo soundtrack introduces a museum while the camera shows its pigeon-infested remains, tracing cobwebs, tattered filmstrips and lines of decay. Filmed inside two shuttered colonial archives in UK and Nigeria, this was already a fascinating little movie and the online description only improves it.

by ·Comments Off on Radiograph of a Family (2020, Firouzeh Khosrovani)

Even for me, three movies is a lot on a work day. More family history told through photographs, and we think stock footage but with sources uncredited. No tricks pulled with the photos except in the poster shot when torn and discarded pics of pre-revolutionary mom are reassembled. Some tricks with the house scenes though, camera slowly gliding through a long house with furnishings that change according to the political and family situation in each part of the story. Iranian Mom gets a culture shock upon marrying a secular scientist and moving to Europe, but when they return to Iran she embraces the Islamic Revolution and becomes the dominant force in the household.

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 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 Misc Shorts watched March 2021

Cold Meridian (2020, Peter Strickland)

Rehearsal footage from a recent dance piece never publicly performed, edited with a shampoo-hair ASMR lady whispering to her online viewers about their previous site activity. Nice thing to watch while drowsy on a plane – as far as the ASMR stuff goes, the shampoo thing is interesting at least, the whispering is nice, and I don’t get the crinkling paper/cellophane thing at all.

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De Natura (2018, Lucile Hadzihalilovic)

Beautiful little film. Two girls are out in nature, and we get shots of sky and trees and mushrooms, all more rapidly edited than the Strickland until it gets dark and chills out at a campfire in the end. Streams and waterfalls much nicer than crinkling paper.

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Olla (2019, Ariane Labed)

Very red-haired Olla is visiting a guy she met online for the first time. He speaks French, she doesn’t know it, but practices while cleaning the house in high heels while he’s at work… so she’s a servant/gf? Nice looking movie, shot on 16mm. She carefully removes his mother from the apartment before blowing it up in the end.

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Which is Witch (2020, Marie Losier)

A man in fancy military dress is frozen stiff, gets dragged into a cave by a deer woman. Then three women wearing statue of liberty crowns dance around him, and he’s released… but still frozen, so I’m not sure what this accomplished. My first Losier, not the Guy Maddin collab, but still the kind of hazy costumed maximalism I enjoy. Thanks to Mandico in the credits, that makes sense.

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Elektra (2020, Asia Argento)

Like a music video montage of scenes from a longer film, which I appreciate in a way since the longer film doesn’t look very good. A daughter is resentful of her mother, both of them in glamorous feather dresses from the company that commissioned this short, until matricide ensues, then a straight-up fashion show in an abandoned palace (Guadagnino hid his movie’s advertising origins better). It’s at least better than the last movie I saw that Argento directed.

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The Little Story of Gwen from French Brittany (2008, Agnes Varda)

Promo-looking movie about an LA film programmer from Varda’s own neighborhood who moved out to the states and made it work. Shout out to Marker’s Immemory!

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After Before (2016, Athina Rachel Tsangari)

Hangout behind-the-scenes and rehearsal and shoot footage isn’t usually terribly interesting, but we are suckers for the Linklater/Delpy/Hawke trio.