by ·Comments Off on Wood and Water (2021, Jonas Bak)

Rough going for the first half hour. Opens in a church, already a bad sign. White-haired Anke has just retired, calls her kids, a crappy phone call in a lovely town. Her pink-haired daughter spends time with her, going through photographs, reminiscing about when dad was alive, but her depressed son is stuck in Hong Kong because of the protests. The movie seems to be avoiding sync sound, feels remote. Just when I was ready to pull the plug, Anke flies to HK to visit him, and everything picks up – a German woman leaving her hostel and wandering into the umbrella protests is inherently more interesting than being sad at home.

So it’s one of those movies where a troubled person goes on a trip to someplace new, meets a bunch of friendly people who each reflect some part of the lead’s own life/journey. She never locates her son (her actual son is the director), but she does tai chi in the park with his doorman, the camera following their hands. Wow, a Brian Eno score, and last night’s movie was Jim O’Rourke, I’m hitting the modern composer/rocker jackpot. A couple nights later we watched Taming the Garden, which also could’ve been called Wood and Water.

by ·Comments Off on Barbara (2012, Christian Petzold)

Nina Hoss is an East German rural doctor, also smuggling money and saving up to escape. Coworker Ronald Zehrfeld is friendly to her, but she’s got a secret boyfriend and is being stalked by sinister Rainer Bock.

Excellent photography and compelling story, a delight to watch. I saved this one for a day when I needed a sure thing. In The White Ribbon, Bock was a doctor, and in Phoenix Hoss and Zehrfeld were married, and Transit has the same ending (lead character is able to escape but gives their chance away to another), all my German movies coming together. Starting to think that Casablanca was a formative influence on Petzold.

by ·Comments Off on The Girl and the Spider (2021, Ramon & Silvan Zürcher)

There is in fact a spider, also a cat and a couple dogs, and MVP: an owl in a tree. Mainly it’s a breakup movie, Lisa moving out of Mara’s place into her own new place, family and friends and neighbors turning out to help, and Mara lurking and sulking. Doesn’t exactly have a strong narrative drive – it does have that surprising sense of discovery in the camera angles and scene structure that I loved in The Strange Little Cat. For the first half I was thinking “ehh there’s not much here,” and in the second half: “I’m German now and everyone in this movie is my friend.” Speaking of German, while listening to the words I learned that Hans Zimmer’s last name is Room, and Carolee Schneemann’s is Snowman.

Blake in ‘Scope:

Character motivation and cause-and-effect logic is either nonexistent or gets buried beneath myriad layers of movement and spoken phrases that may or may not make any sense to us. We can only get caught up and washed along in the film’s beautiful display of things resuming, moving along, never being the same again … A cut in a Zürcher film, especially this one, is almost always a revealing, never a suture. It exposes the mark that we heard being etched; the angle that reconfigures our understanding of the spatial dynamics of the setting or environment; the beholder that we and/or the character couldn’t sense was present watching what we were watching — the subject we never knew our gaze belonged to. There’s an acknowledgment, shot to shot, cut to cut, that there is more to the world than what we can presently see or say that we know … And at the present moment, I can think of few worthier undertakings for a narrative cinema practice than one that challenges and is curious about the ways that humans perceive themselves, others, and the perceptions of others.

by ·Comments Off on One, Two, Three (1961, Billy Wilder)

Cagney is a Serious Fast Talking Businessman who yells all his lines in Cold War Germany. He’s a Coca Cola executive (which means a lotta references to Atlanta), pitting pop culture and business against commie mentality. The German language jokes are sharp and funny, from former Berliner Wilder. Oscar nominated b&w cinematography by Daniel Fapp, who shot color oscar winner West Side Story the same year. The jokes and politics are good, as is most of the farce stuff, but Cagney is a disaster.

The daughter is with beau Horst Buchholz, just off The Magnificent Seven:

“You want the papers in triplicate or the blonde in triplicate?”
“See what you can do.”

Sexy secretary Ingeborg was in Rivette’s The Nun, the boss’s Southern party-girl daughter was in the following year’s State Fair, and her dad had been in Shockproof. The boss isn’t doing a Southern accent, exactly, but I like that all you can see out the window of his Atlanta office is parking lots. References to Omaha, La Dolce Vita, and Playboy.

Atlanta:

Commies:

by ·Comments Off on The Passenger (1975, Michelangelo Antonioni)

Photojournalist Jack Nicholson isn’t having a great time in Saharan Africa, sees an opportunity and grabs it, stealing the identity of his suddenly deceased hotel neighbor, the only other white guy in town. Jack’s abandoned wife Jenny Runacre (The Final Programme, Jarman’s Jubilee) investigates, while Jack faithfully follows the dead guy’s appointment book, even after learning that he was an arms dealer, and meets the same fate as the guy he’s impersonating, though he gets to hang out with Maria Schneider along the way.

Maria, Jack, Gaudi:

Thought I’d seen this a long time ago, but maybe I’ve confused it with The Conformist again. MA: “Actually, the entire story takes place in a short period of one day, from early morning until some time before sunset” – that’s not true, it’s set in four countries and we see a UK newspaper article about Jack’s death in Africa, and we see Jack’s appointments spread across a week in the book. Maybe he meant as the film was originally written. The fourth movie I’ve seen in the last few years to play in the 1975 competition at Cannes. Argh, the execution footage in this wasn’t faked.

Las Ramblas:

by ·Comments Off on Monks: The Transatlantic Feedback (2006, Palacios & Post)

The Torquays was a successful five-piece band of U.S. soldiers who’d stayed in Germany after their war service, playing nightly shows when two serious German art-school dudes approached them and convinced them to rebrand as The Monks and play a pared-down but forceful new kind of rock music. We spend much time with the band members, leaving no anecdote untold and culminating in a one-off NYC reunion show with celebrities like Jon Spencer in the crowd. Still one of the greatest albums ever made… this two-hour movie has only about 15 minutes of illuminating stories, but it’s nice to spend so much time in a world where the Monks mattered.

by ·Comments Off on No More Fleeing (1955, Herbert Vesely) and Vogel shorts

Rare, cool wasteland-set movie, a whole methodically-posed headfuck art-feature a half decade before Marienbad. Vague reverb-affected announcements echo on the soundtrack as a truck drives over gravel and desert. I’m happy to see there are still flocks of birds after the German apocalypse. Driver drags passenger’s luggage to an abandoned-looking town where he finds a kid among drum-and-bass soundtrack jazz. The man loses his shit, pulls a gun on the kid (covered in ants) for not speaking, the woman spills her drink on purpose. Everything from the editing to the focus and music and sound takes turns messing with your head.

A monologue about Sisyphus as the moody driver lies under the truck covered in oil. I can’t tell if the movie is a time loop or if we spent some time in a flashback. Eventually the man finds a cute girl and shoots her dead – biggest surprise is when the cops show up and bust him, in what I’d assumed was a lawless wasteland. After the Goalie, I programmed an accidental double-feature of German stories of motiveless murder.

The credits claim participation by Hans Richter (according to a Richter interview, not true) and commentary by Albert Camus. Played Locarno ’55 alongside a couple of Jiri Trnka features and a Karel Zeman, a lot of nazi movies, and the latest prestige dramas from the US, UK, Germany and France

Vogel’s descriptions are off to a shaky start. “In a desolate, destroyed landscape – bearing now irrelevant traces of technological society – a man and a boy try to find their way under a
fierce sun.” There’s cars, oil, money and cops, all still relevant, and the boy isn’t trying to find his way anyplace.

–
More of Vogel’s Subversives…

Blue Moses (1962, Stan Brakhage)

Melies motion/edit tricks in a flickering cave. Sync sound! Clean dialogue, no music/fx, of a rich-voiced Wellesian actor, or maybe Charlton Hestonian per the film title. He seems to be riffing in a field, unsure what to say, Brakhage holding still on the actor but going into jitter-mode whenever the camera looks away at the scenery. The actor goes through a range of looks, sometimes wearing so much makeup he looks like a cartoon. Repetition of the credits (drawn in chalk on the rocks). In the last section the actor’s words and a projector beam with Stan’s shadow draw our attention to the filmmaking process. I’m out of the habit of watching Brakhage films – this is from the Dog Star Man years and is very good. Actor Robert Benson, a fellow Colorado resident, had also appeared in Desistfilm.

–
Canyon (1970, Jon Jost)

Full-day time-lapse looking over the Grand Canyon… shooting a few seconds at a time, lap dissolving the segments. I’d only seen narrative(ish) work by Jost, wasn’t aware of the shorts. Silent, so I played El Ten Eleven’s “Growing Shorter,” which worked great.

Mouseover to move the sun:
image

by ·Comments Off on The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1972, Wim Wenders)

“This is a book about the subversion of existing values, institutions, mores, and taboos… by the potentially most powerful art of the century.” I saw it was Amos Vogel’s 100th birthday and celebrated by beginning to read his Film as a Subversive Art. The plan is to watch some movies covered within, though sticking to grand long-term viewing projects isn’t my forte. Hey, Vogel went to UGA before moving to NYC, wonder what the Athens film scene was like back then.

A modern alienation movie, the still camera and attention to jukeboxes presumably an influence on Kaurismaki. The Goalie is on leave after arguing with a ref, wanders about with nowhere special to be, seeing movies and picking up women, the movie sexlessly fading to black whenever he’s alone with one. After spending some time with ticket taker Gloria he randomly strangles her, and it fades out on this too. The people get more eccentric as he goes to the country to visit an old friend and his focus on the local newspapers turns from soccer scores to the murder investigation closing in on him.

Wim’s debut feature. A film marquee advertises a then-nonexistent Patricia Highsmith adaptation – a few features later, Wenders would make his own. Our hero Arthur Brauss (who explains the title in the final scene) had smallish roles in a Peckinpah, a Frankenheimer, an Elaine May.

Per Vogel:

His world – a glossy, Americanized Vienna – is seen as existential mystery, lacking explanation. Fearful matters are touched upon in laconic, strange dialogue. An air of vague dread, intensified by the film’s magic realism, permeates the mysteries hinted at but never confronted.

by ·Comments Off on Katzelmacher (1969, Rainer Fassbinder)

Broke mopey people have sullen conversations against plain backgrounds, all referring to some plan but not cluing us in, their relationship swapping getting out of hand. Nihilist movie full of banalities, even in love, some pleasant repeated shots like a couple walking toward camera with different characters every time.

The director plays a Greek who everyone turns on, painting him as a large-cocked rapist, while he just wanted to be friends. Hanna Schygulla and Hans Hirschmüller return from Fass’s debut, which I watched in 2015 – maintaining six years between features, I’ll get to Querelle in the year 2183. But maybe I’ll increase the pace since watching this drab movie improved my drab week – funny how art can work.