by ·Comments Off on A Man and a Camera (2021, Guido Hendrikx)

Guido (Stranger in Paradise) is being confrontational in a new way: by walking up to people’s houses and filming them without speaking. He groups the chosen encounters by the type of reaction, so in early scenes everyone he meets is standoffish or defensive or aggressive, then a section of people who figure he’s up to something harmless and play along. The woman seen below introduces him to her baby, saying it’s also deaf & mute. It gets more tense than The Balcony Movie when people start letting him into their houses. One guy is very easygoing but warns Guido that the neighborhood groupchat has called the cops on him. In the end he’s making repeat visits to known-friendly houses. It’s kind of the essence of documentary, showing up and letting the subjects control what happens. Guido has a new one set in Sudan which premiered over a year ago.

from Mads Mikkelsen’s Cinema Scope article on interventionist documentaries:

The true protagonist of A Man and a Camera, however, is the latter half of the titular duo. There is a basic understanding at work here that the very act of filming is transgressive, and that being filmed generates an alienating self-consciousness in the unwilling subject of the camera’s attention. In any social situation, the presence of a camera makes for an uneven game; through his repeated acts of passive-aggressive monomania, Hendrikx simply amplifies this dynamic to study its effects.

by ·Comments Off on 2nd Chance (2022, Ramin Bahrani)

Catching up with a True/False film we missed at the fest, with special guest Katy’s Mom. After a traumatic incident, local man Richard invents bulletproof vest, promotes it endlessly by shooting himself and by publishing a newsletter counting the lives he’s saved. He’s not so interested in discussing lies he’s told or lives he’s endangered with a later revision to the vest that simply didn’t work as well, and confronted with Richard’s uncomplicated hero-story version of the truth, Bahrani interviews a “saved” cop who turned on his friend, wearing a wire to prove the company knew they were selling a deadly product. Most upsetting scene is when Richard gets his combat-addled dad to shoot him, most upsetting omission from the film is that Richard also invented explosive bullets to defeat his own vests. Instead of simply nailing Richard, who offered free guns to cops who’d kill the guys who shot them, Bahrani follows a redemption story of the fallen-out friend and his reformed attacker.

by ·Comments Off on Mutzenbacher (2022, Ruth Beckermann)

Formally superior to the True/False Venus movie we half-watched, it’s a casting call of men (all men) reading aloud from the eponymous book, a girl’s early-1900’s sexy diary, assumed to have actually been written by a creepy old man. This opens certain conversations – one guy wants to know why we speak of toxic masculinity but not toxic femininity, another won’t read the page he’s assigned because it’s too vulgar (then the off-camera director, the only female voice among a hundred men, reads it to him). But mostly it’s not interrogating or contextualizing the text. And it’s not an audiobook movie – the film somehow remains focused on the delivery of the words, more than the words themselves. Neither is it scolding the men (always in pairs) or the viewer for participating, but rather it becomes celebratory in scenes where all the readers gather and chant passages from the text in unison. A strange and wonderful movie.

real film heads would know you don’t hire a boom operator for a casting call:

Beckermann’s career sounds worth exploring, as laid out by Darren Hughes in Cinema Scope (there’s also a book on her out there by the Austrian Film Museum). Beckermann:

I like to be surprised. I didn’t know these men before. There was a waiting area with a buffet, and then I just asked my assistant to bring two or three in. So I didn’t even know who would be with whom … Today there are many taboos. At the time when Mutzenbacher was written you had Sigmund Freud, and people talked about sexuality probably more than today.

if a guy with an ear-horn comes along, you absolutely put him front and center:

by ·Comments Off on Rewind & Play (2022, Alain Gomis)

Grungy documentary outtakes, then a French TV studio – the idea being that Gomis is showing the rushes from a conventional half-hour Thelonious Monk TV appearance. We do get to hear him play more than once, first in a traveling shot around the studio where everyone else is chatting and not paying any attention, then for a few songs in a row after the interviews have gone badly.

A Michael Caine-ish host talks about Monk to the viewers in French while leaning on the piano, then they do retakes of the interview questions until it feels like Monk is caught in a Lynchian limbo. Monk suggests they forget the interview and go to dinner, they can’t have a conversation because the interviewer wants to rephrase everything in French and Monk won’t repeat the same answer twice in the same way. And certain topics are forbidden as “not nice.” This movie landed with good timing for me, as I’m “getting into jazz” and just watched a trio whose latest album is a Monk tribute.

Michael Sicinski on lboxd:

Gomis’s presentation of the material, largely untouched, not only displays the technical mechanics involved in “making TV,” although there’s that. When Monk doesn’t provide satisfactory answers to Renaud’s questions, the crew adopts a plan-b mode, showing Monk playing during extended shots, and then later shooting B-roll with Renaud pretending to listen appreciatively. But more than this, we are seeing how a media apparatus deals with an artist it finds difficult or uncooperative. French TV is trying to sell a product called “Thelonious Monk,” and the man himself is perceived as an impediment to that pandering.

Max Goldberg in Cinema Scope:

Rewind & Play brings to light the violence of getting an artist to say what you want them to say. Not coincidentally, it also centres the musical performances recorded for Jazz Portrait, allowing them to flow together as a solid block of song. Taken together, the two things insinuate a sharp critique of the standard music documentary.

by ·Comments Off on Bird Movies 2: All That Breathes (2022, Shaunak Sen)

Daniel Fienberg in Hollywood Reporter:

Depending on your level of investment, All That Breathes could be a documentary about climate change and the crucial need to understand how animals are adapting and how humans need to adapt. It could be a spiritual piece about the webs of synergistic connectivity between, well, everything that breathes. It could be a humanist meditation on how we treat each other, how we tear people down by comparing them to animals, but how really we should treat everything and everyone just a bit better. Or it might just be 91 minutes with a couple of brothers who really like birds.

–
Bird Suite (1994)

Semi-anonymous Australian VHS, following our bird theme. A solid hour of birds doing bird things, with no titles or narration, just symphonic music. Great work showing birds hanging in the air, a good segment showing different species in apparently natural environments in close-up then zooming out to show they’re in a human city. It also made pelicans look graceful, which is an achievement.

by ·Comments Off on Navalvy (2022, Daniel Roher)

Watched this the night before it won the oscar. I was rooting for All That Breathes, not because I’d watched it yet but because it has birds. No birds here, just a Russian man with great popular support, considered the best hope against Putin. The movie follows from his sudden illness on a flight to Siberia, through his recovery in Europe and the investigation into whether he was poisoned, through his triumphant hero’s return to Russia… haha just kidding, he was arrested immediately and will be in prison indefinitely. Pretty good doc, most notable for having footage of Navalny prank-calling his suspected assassins into revealing exactly how they attempted to kill him (underpants poisoning) and cover it up. The director previously made a doc about The Band, but I should really watch The Last Waltz first.

by ·Comments Off on All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022, Laura Poitras)

Katy and I enjoyed some oscar-nominated docs the week of the awards. This is a structurally satisfying doc about Nan Goldin’s life and art and activism through three health epidemics: the mental health crisis that took her sister, AIDS which took many of her friends, and her own opioid addiction, for which she seeks revenge through public protests to convince museums to refuse Sackler drug money.

Matthew Eng for Reverse Shot:

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed retains the impassioned clarity of Poitras’s style while enlisting its primary subject as its co-author. Goldin provides illuminating, clarifying, and always candid commentary on the many chapters of her life in one-on-one interviews with Poitras, conducted on weekends during COVID, included here under the agreement that Goldin would have final say over which of her words were included in the finished film. (She also served as a music consultant on the film, compiling an eclectic playlist that ranges from The Velvet Underground and A Taste of Honey to Lucinda Williams and The Facts of Life’s Charlotte Rae, singing the Brechtian ballad that inspired the title of Goldin’s landmark exhibition, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.) A great deal of Poitras’s film is fittingly composed of Goldin’s work, presented to the audience in the photographer’s preferred format: the slideshow, which has long been the crux of Goldin’s practice. It is a simple yet immensely effective device—its clicks evince a pleasing tactility—that lets Goldin’s photography speak for itself and enhances the attention-seizing potency of her portraiture with its stark staging, electric colors, and magnetic characters.

Won the top prize at Venice against all the big oscar dramas (Tár, Banshees, The Whale), the arthouse faves (No Bears, Saint Omer) and the would-be contenders (Bones & All, Blonde, Bardo, White Noise). This took three editors: Amy Foote (The Work), Joe Bini (Grizzly Man), Brian Kates (Killing Them Softly). We skipping Risk, not in any hurry to catch up with it, so it felt like Poitras was gone for nearly a decade.

by ·Comments Off on Moosa Lane (2022, Anita Mathal Hopland)

Oops, we picked a bum closing film… should’ve caught Hummingbirds on Thursday, and gone home after Mariachi on Sunday. Living Hour was good at least – a chill 5-piece from Winnipeg. Norwegian-Pakistani-Danish filmmaker visits her dad’s family in Pakistan over 15 years, watching her cousins grow up and start their own families and/or die young from cancer. Weak attempt to universalize the story via poetic narration about othering and inbetweenness, really it’s just home movies.

Hopland has previously made her own variation on The Road Movie with On the Edge of Freedom, a portrait of Russian stunt jumpers that’s been described as “a one hour compilation of a bunch of YouTube videos.” The producer worked on a Mads Brügger movie I haven’t seen, and the editor also did Venus.

by ·Comments Off on Feet in Water, Head on Fire (2023, Terra Long)

From the Blue Note balcony, feat. Landlady again. Hand-processed(?) 16mm shot in Coachella Valley, CA. Date palms, fault lines, Salton Sea. Local culture in form of a Scheherazade parade. Interviews with a shopkeeper and the current and former owners of date farms. A sloth, a parrot. A real inventory of things – the look of the film and its location holding all the things together, but just barely.