by ·Comments Off on Fellow Citizen & First Graders

Toothache (1983)

I hurt my tooth on a potato chip, so what better time to catch up on some early Kiarostami films. I’ve had the Koker blu box set for a couple years now, so it’s time to watch that, but first checking out the films he made just before Where Is The Friend’s House.

This would be a completely uninteresting educational short – first half follows a kid who doesn’t like to brush his teeth, and second half is a lecture from his dentist. The one thing that gives it an edge is that during the entire dental lecture you can hear the kid and other patients squealing and crying while getting poked and drilled.

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Fellow Citizen (1983)

Stress-inducing condensed hour at work with a traffic guard tasked with preventing people from driving into the city center unless they have a permit or a special exception. Guess what, it turns out every single automobile driver in the city is a very special person with very special circumstances who deserves to be let through. Our guy lets them all through but feels increasingly taken advantage of and starts denying access more and more, among nonstop yelling and honking. Ends with a pure frustration montage set to the most psych-rock song of any Kiarostami film.

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First Graders (1984)

After an attendance-taking intro, we spend the day in the principal’s office doing conflict resolution. Unlike the people at the traffic stop, the participants here seem unaware of the camera. They are little kids with undeveloped concepts of right, wrong, truth, etc., and you can see their big puzzled thinking faces in closeup. Halfway through, the camera unexpectedly follows the kid on crutches home, getting a bicycle lift from his dad. Overall some suspiciously posed/staged camera angles for a straight doc. It also follows an American Beauty plastic bag, as AK keeps changing his mind about what kind of movie to make.

by ·Comments Off on Flipside (2023, Christopher Wilcha)

Introducing Chris with clips from his film The Target Shoots First, he fast-forwards his life since, getting to keep working behind the camera while starting a family. But to his regret, “I direct tons of commercials, hundreds of them, but I don’t finish even one of my own films.” So, he starts shooting Flipside Records where he worked when he was a teen, but fortunately that’s not the movie, since we’ve got enough record store docs. Instead he stitches together his partial docs into a Cameraperson meta-doc about lessons from human experience, and the art life. Upsetting to learn that I once lived 20 minutes from Flipside – of course I couldn’t drive then, so we never explored further than Boonton.

Wilcha in interview with Vikram Murthi, whose enthusiasm got me to watch this:

[The Target Shoots First] was made at CalArts, on those machines and with the help of my mentors who would watch cuts. A lot of these people were serious artists — like, for instance, James Benning. His advice to me at one point was, “Make 60 one-minute sequences,” which is so James Benning.

Vadim Rizov:

When, early on, Wilcha shows that cult TV icon Uncle Floyd is a regular crate-digger [at Flipside], I flashed to my only real reference point for him, David Bowie’s “Slow Burn” from 2002’s Heathen (no contrarianism intended, one of my favorite Bowie albums). An hour later, Wilcha drops the song as performed live in concert, not cutting away for over two minutes as my heart briefly stopped at this unexpected treat.

“I always had this feeling that the world was gonna forget, and that I was somehow in charge of remembering.”

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Knock Knock, It’s Tig Notaro (2015)

Funny, when Wilcha talks about never finishing a documentary since Target, this road-trip stand-up doc never comes up. Sure he’s a co-director, but he’s got other Flipside/This American Life crew members, so it seems like a Wilcha joint. Documents Tig’s tour with Jon Dore (star of movie The Pickle Recipe) to houses, farms, and other venues proposed by fans.

by ·Comments Off on Anhell69 (2022, Theo Montoya)

Self-portrait of the suicidal trans youth of a hopeless city, with sober narration from a coffin.

The director cast Camilo in his gay ghost dystopia film, but Camilo died, and half his friends followed, real ghosts in an actual dystopia.

by ·Comments Off on The Night Visitors (2023, Michael Gitlin)

Onscreen text, echoey voice clips, gentle electro music with handclap percussion, poetry, research – all presented as weirdly as possible. Focused primarily on being weird, secondarily on moths. Takes a long sidetrack to make fun of a Poe story, and another to discuss the dumbass scientist who imported the mega-destructive spongy (nee-gypsy) moths from Europe.

by ·Comments Off on Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger (2024, David Hinton)

Feels like more of a Scorsese movie than some other docs he supposedly directed, but the main appeal here is to watch lovely HD clips of the best P&P movies you’ve seen before and learn about all the others. I wanted Marty to tell me that the little-seen post-Hoffman movies were masterpieces waiting for rediscovery, but he did not.

by ·Comments Off on Subject (2022, Hall & Tiexiera)

A doc about docs and their fallout. The women who were teens when The Staircase was made about their family feel doubly exploited when The Staircase 2 comes out… a star of Hoop Dreams was one of the few participants covered here to profit from the film’s receipts and merch… Bing Liu’s family therapy in Minding the Gap somewhat backfired… Capturing The Friedmans guy wants to escape the shadow of the movie. Sometimes we’re just catching up with a subject later (The Wolfpack). After each example, a small team of scolds points out that there is no way to ethically create or consume art.

by ·Comments Off on Art Talent Show (2022, Tomás Bojar & Adéla Komrzý)

Not really a talent show, but admissions week at an art academy. A pretty enjoyable True/False doc. Vadim Rizov: “beautifully shot and consistently funny while observing a zone where inspiration and bullshit perpetually dwell side-by-side out of impossible-to-separate necessity.”

by ·Comments Off on Ren Faire (2024, Lance Oppenheim)

I should’ve done this in a TV roundup with The Sympathizer since I have nothing to say about it, but too late, I already created the post. Long doc about Texas Renaissance Festival founder “King” George’s half-hearted attempts to delegate and hand off power (and to date young women with natural breasts at the olive garden) and the employees and would-be successors whom he keeps screwing over. Lance shoots the hell out of it. Good enough to make us consider his sperm doc.

Lance is aware of the artifice and performance, wishes for a “documentary-subject performance” oscar in his Vulture interview.

by ·Comments Off on Peppers & Garlic double-feature (Les Blank)

Hot Pepper (1973)

Rock doc about accordionist Clifton Chenier, made two decades into his recording career, and one decade before he’d win a grammy. No awards or recording studios in sight here, it’s more front porches and basement parties. Interviews with locals about their thoughts on racial integration (they’re for it). No fly on the wall, everybody waves at Les while he’s filming street scenes, and his camera is attentive to passers-by and animals and clouds, as usual. I imagine the interview with Chenier’s grandma would’ve killed with a crowd. Made the same year as another Louisiana music doc Dry Wood, and right before the Leon Russell movie.

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Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers (1980)

Just a doc about garlic and its many uses and the people who are into it, but this is Les Blank so of course it’s a musical. Glad to see the featured Oakland barbecue joint is still family owned and sort-of in business. He digs up Werner Herzog for a sound bite about why his Nosferatu didn’t have a garlic subplot (this was pre-Fitzcarraldo/Burden of Dreams). Wim Wenders did some camerawork for this – why?

Garlic & Flamenco: