by ·Comments Off on Irreversible (2002, Gaspar Noé)

It’s Cannes Fortnight 2021! I was gonna watch this anyway, eventually, then noticed there’s a new Gaspar playing Cannes this year, so “eventually” became now. In in the mood for some cinema after taking things easy post-True/False, rounding up some recent Cannes titles I missed, and some by this year’s crop of directors.

Wonked-out closing/opening credits sequence, then the camera spirals and weaves around a courtyard, Massive Attack’s La Protection Centrale. I didn’t know what was happening for a good long time, the I Stand Alone guy philosophizing with anonymous Frenchman Albert Dupontel (a war survivor in A Very Long Engagement), but it becomes clear as the movie woozily whips us through the rest of the story in reverse order. I was gonna say it takes us from one sordid scene to another, but that’d be underselling one of the most extremely sordid films of the last twenty years. I read a piece recently, thought it was by Charles Bramesco but can’t find it now so who knows, calling Promising Young Woman a weaksauce take on the rave/revenge story, and it came to mind a few times while watching this, a decidedly strongsauced rape/revenge story, because is that such a desirable thing? Is the point to seek out the most extreme rape/revenge cinema? Ultimately, the “time destroys all things” thesis, the film title and the reverse-action gimmick framing the horrors had me appreciating this much more than, say, Revenge, though I can’t feel naughtily transgressive about liking a movie that comes highly recommended by every critic I respect.

by ·Comments Off on Lux Aeterna (2019, Gaspar Noé)

Looong split screen dialogue, Béatrice Dalle doing most of the talking, with Charlotte Gainsbourg, playing “themselves.” They discuss experiences on movie shoots, death by fire, nudity, and creepy producers.

Next, a producer is telling bald DP Max to take over the movie from director Dalle before the production falls apart, and a cameraman is tasked with spying on her. Meanwhile, Karl from Love is wasting people’s time, trying to get them to sign onto his own film.

The shoot ends with Gainsbourg (and Fury Road’s Abbey Lee) tied to (digitally) burning stakes when the lighting goes haywire. She and Dalle, tormented from all sides, have breakdowns as the picture devolves into flashing blue and red fields.

by ·Comments Off on Shorts Watched September 2019

Peter Tscherkassky’s Cinemascope Trilogy

I’ve watched these before, first in 2008 and at least once since then, but this time I thought to play them on the big TV while listening in headphones to better hear the audio textures over the noise of our air conditioner – a good idea!

L’arrivée (1999)

One short scene: a train arrives, woman gets off and hugs the guy waiting for her, but given every available footage treatment within its two minutes, soft fluttering on the soundtrack.

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Outer Space (1999)

The crazy one – this holds up better than ever in HD. As much care given to the soundtrack as the visuals, full of fluttering, looping and reversing.

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Dream Work (2001)

Dedicated to Man Ray. This is my jam… appreciation of classic cinema while also interrogating/destroying it. This same day I read a couple of articles mentioning nostalgia in cinema, Letterboxd’s interview with Rick Alverson, and a Ringer review of the new Refn series, which gets compared to Twin Peaks: “Showtime gave the auteur free rein under the pretext of Twin Peaks nostalgia, even if Lynch ultimately sought to weaponize those feelings against his audience.” I think Weaponized Nostalgia needs to be a new genre.

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Shot-Countershot (1987, Peter Tscherkassky)

Ooooh, never seen this before. Scene from a classic film, slightly processed, of a guy playing harmonica, drawing his gun, and getting drilled. It’s a single camera take, so I assume the title is a gunshot joke. This 20-second bit of silliness does not detract from my love of his major works.

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Crossroad (2005, Phil Solomon)

Argh, machinima. A dude in Second Life acts bored in a rainstorm, and runs in circles through a forest, a bouquet of flowers spinning nearby as if suspended from a string. I did appreciate the way the 3D objects clipped as they spun too close to the camera, revealing themselves as origami structures of 2D surfaces. Dedicated to David Gatten. I’ve only seen one other film by Solomon, in Nashville a decade ago. This was codirected with Mark LaPore, who died the same year.

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Liberian Boy (2015, Mati Diop & Manon Lutanie)

I felt guilty finally watching my first Mati Diop film without African Studies Katy, while she sat unaware in the other room, but I’m not sure she’d have gotten much out of this white kid doing (very good!) Michael Jackson moves against a greenscreen whilst holding a knife. Lacking any African studies scholars in the room, I don’t know what it meant, but it’s a cool piece. The kid also appears in the latest Nobuhiro Suwa film.

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Shoot (2014, Gaspar Noe)

The camera is a soccer ball (representing France?), kicked around in a courtyard – pretty nice La Region Centrale rig with an unpleasant soundtrack of percussive kicks mixed with tinnitus whine.

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Nectar (2014, Lucile Hadzihalilovic)

Nectar is collected from the body of a flower-eating woman. Hive-honey harvesters seduce men into a Matrix global pollination scenario. Olga from Film Socialisme plays the Queen of Bees.

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Two-Gun Mickey (1934, Ben Sharpsteen)

Minnie is cruel to animals. Mickey rescues her after a shootout with Pegleg Pete and his men. The movie promotes automatic weapon use, and makes an overweight, handicapped foreigner the villain.

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The Fly (1980, Ferenc Rofusz)

Pleasantly short fisheye (flyeye?) lens animation from a fly’s POV, entering a house and being vanquished by a resident. Won the oscar, the only other nominees being one by the Evolution guy and one by The Man Who Planted Trees guy. The Hungarian director was still making shorts as of 2017.

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Toy Sequence (1990, Péter Szoboszlay)

Fun, short Toy Story prequel, a nursery coming to stop-motion life in the night, the pieces transforming and rearranging themselves, and the dolls being generally creepy.

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Filmstudie (1926, Hans Richter)

Richter the dark Master of light, pattern and pacing, a hundred years ahead of his time. I’ve previously raved about three of his other shorts – was not impressed with my terrible copy of his late collaboration with Cocteau, but overall it looks like I’ve loved his work and need to check out his feature Dreams That Money Can Buy. Anyway this one is mostly eyeballs and wands of light, but it’s impressive.

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Night Music (1986, Stan Brakhage)

I forget just how short this is, not counting titles and credits. The film I’ve watched the most times.

by ·Comments Off on Climax (2018, Gaspar Noé)

I keep thinking I haven’t watched a Gaspar Noé film since I Stand Alone, but that’s because I forget about Love, which if I’d remembered, I might not have gone out to let this movie mess up my mind on an especially heavy weekend. But Love is forgiven, because this totally worked for me, as horror and a filmmaking exercise and an ensemble dance piece and an extended collective freakout. Every player gets their own solos (in interview, dance and neurosis), and their interactions after the spread of the drug punch (and/or the collective paranoia) prove horrible, sometimes fatal. It’s all shot with a confident, formalist flair, unafraid to get ugly.

Blake Williams in Filmmaker:

The film ends up reaching, or at least approaching a state where it can’t even decide itself who is fucking and who is dying — the camera, now upside down, even loses its own bearings on gravity and horizons. It’s a monumentally liberating film, and so what if it offers us nothing other than the pleasure of being entirely there with it for the time it’s in front of us.

by ·Comments Off on Love (2015, Gaspar Noé)

I guess it’s been fifteen years since I watched Gaspar Noé’s I Stand Alone on videotape and didn’t enjoy it, and his name keeps coming up, so as part of my Festifest Quest to become more familiar with the film-festival auteurs of these days, I thought it best to watch a 2d blu-ray of Noé’s 3d porno. And I didn’t enjoy it. Maybe he’s a big screen filmmaker and you need to experience the glory in a proper theater – not that his films ever show where I live – but more likely he is making uninteresting movies that I should avoid in the future.

Salo, hardcore The Defiance of Good, Flesh for Frankenstein:

Okay, I liked the editing a lot. I’m a sucker for good editing, and this thing’s got it. Well-composed shots (though most are horribly lit) and lots of sex, two more things I like. The list ends there. Murphy is a sadsack who hates his blonde wife Omi and his family and his stupid life, so he dreams in flashback of his ex-girlfriend Electra and his stupid life with her. He comes across as a total dick, but once you get to better understand his situation… he’s still a dick, which deflates the sex scenes and the drama.

M, Birth of a Nation:

So Murphy and Electra were together, did drugs and had sex and initiated a threesome with a cute neighbor in their building. Murph fights Electra’s ex-boyfriend art-dealer Noé, played by our director Noé, then the cop arresting Murph tells him about a sex club, where he goes with Electra. He wears one of those Fassbinder shirts in the style of the Metallica logo and tells everyone he’s a filmmaker, though we never see him work. First time his girlfriend’s out of town he cheats with the cute neighbor, condom breaks, bam, two years later he’s stuck with the cute neighbor and their kid (named Gaspar, of course) and Electra’s mom is calling saying she hasn’t heard from her daughter in months, and has anyone seen her, but no they haven’t.

Murphy keeps stereoscopic photos in his I Stand Alone VHS box – self-reference much?

Taxi Driver?

Freaks, Taxi Driver:

Katy saw a single frame of this movie, on pause, and said it “doesn’t look very nice.” Not as stylized as I expected, really an actor’s showcase (and they’re fine, but the English dialogue needs work), though there’s some cool fake-sounding mixing in a couple of club scenes. I dig the music choices – “Maggot Brain” over the threesome.

B. Williams in Cinema Scope:

For a myriad of technological and social reasons, this current 3D wave is the first that’s been sustained long enough for us to get a stereoscopic porno that we have the opportunity to take somewhat seriously. If last year, with Adieu au langage, we were finally able to see 3D’s voice crack, Love might best be taken as its first date: a dumb, awkward, unseasoned, and horny experience that is best forgotten in the long term but serves as a logical and necessary step for now.

by ·Comments Off on Destricted (2006)

“A compilation of erotic films intended to illuminate the points where art meets sexuality”

A real mixed bag. I sat down just to watch the Larry Clark segment (which turned out to be the best) and ended up watching the rest, because the transition from Impaled into The Triplets of Belleville would have been too awkward.

Impaled by Larry Clark
Casting couch for a porn film. Bunch of guys (one, a virgin, flew in from Utah) sit down and answer questions: why are they here, what experience do they have, what’s their history with pornography, and what would they like to do? Then each gets up and shows off his package to the camera. They pick a guy, then the girls come in one by one, but they guy stays in the room and gets to make his own choice. Picks a 40-yr-old mom who will do anal, maybe because she’s the cuddliest to him during the interviews. Awkward sex ensues, with the same lighting and angles as the audition. Strange, enlightening.

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Sync by Marco Brambilla
Surprisingly cool. Just two minutes of extreme editing from one porn image to the next, forming a pattern of similar shots and poses. Must have been awful to make this. Director made Excess Baggage and Demolition Man!! Must have been awful to make those too.

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We Fuck Alone by Gaspar Noé
Along with Catherine Breillat and Todd Solondz, I like to avoid Gaspar Noé whenever possible. Was dreading this one, but even though it wasn’t any good, it also turned out not to be overly traumatic. There’s some standard porn stuff on TV, and the same show is playing in two bedrooms. The girl is masturbating in her bedroom very gently and lovingly with cuddly fluffy teddy bears helping her. The boy is masturbating in his bedroom roughly, treating his blowup doll like a slave, finally sticking a gun in its mouth. Do you see the point we are trying to make here? Goes on for 15 minutes. Oh, with a strobe-light effect on the entire thing.

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Balkan Erotic Epic by Marina Abramovic
Bunch of weirdness involving the recreation of fake-sounding Balkan old wives’ tales. Group nudity out in the fields, men humping the ground, and women with baddd saggy boobs. Abramovic apparently has made a career of this, with her other works called Balkan Baroque and Making the Balkans Erotic.

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Death Valley by Sam Taylor Wood
Single shot of a guy jacking off in Death Valley – I didn’t get it. Katy said the backdrop looked fake. Director is a woman who does video work for the Pet Shop Boys.

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Hoist by Matthew Barney
Barney creates a tractor-machine with a spinning crankshaft in the center that looks like his trademark vasoline on a clay pottery wheel, then hoists it on a crane, while a guy within the tractor who has a turnip up his ass rubs his penis against the vasoline. High-concept I am sure.

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House Call by Richard Prince
As far as I can tell, this was just a short doctor-makes-house-call porn piece, filmed, worn, transferred to video, played on a TV and videorecorded. Third or fourth-gen porn with abnormal music and horrible color. I dunno, I got distracted at this point.

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