by ·Comments Off on Earwig (2021, Lucile Hadzihalilovic)

House mostly bare, frozen teeth girl’s only toys are twists of paper

It’s 24 minutes before the first words are spoken: a phone call checking on girl and her teeth.

You must start preparing the girl to leave, in 13 days.
Caretaker Paul Hilton (Lady Macbeth) is to teach her how to behave outside.

Provoked by stranger at bar, he attacks Celeste with a bottle (Romola Garai: older Saoirse Ronan in Atonement). Laurence (Alex Lawther of The Last Duel) says he will take care of her. Movie follows the attacked barmaid as she recovers, Laurence invites her to live at his country house.

Guy comes and installs permanent glass teeth.

Caretaker embraces Celeste as she chews his face off.

Angelo Muredda in Cinema Scope:

Earwig resonates on much the same unusual frequency as Hadzihalilovic’s previous films Innocence and Evolution, which similarly engage the thematics of children on the way to maturity being dumped into strange institutional settings with cryptic rules seemingly designed to feed upon their bodies and souls. Viewed in this context, Earwig can easily be read as the payoff to an imagistic science-fiction triptych about the low-key horrors of parenting and being parented, and the ways in which assorted care homes and finishing schools maim the very children they try to shape.

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.

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 Evolution (2015, Lucile Hadzihalilovic)

A strange movie to begin with – I had to remove “weird” and “mysteriously” from all over this post. Suffice to say that everything that happens in this movie happens mysteriously. There’s a tiny bit of dialogue, and low music during intense moments, but most of the time it’s all unsettlingly (mysteriously) quiet. Lucile is typecasting herself as a creator of inexplicable fables where children grow up in isolated gender-segregated environments then are set free into our world in the final minutes.

Nicolas lives with his mother who isn’t his mother (Julie-Marie Parmentier of Around a Small Mountain) down by the sea. She feeds him wormy kale stew, lets him hang out with the other boys in town who are all the same age, assures Nicolas that the dead boy he spotted underwater was just a dream, and sneaks out at night to slither in nude star-patterns with the other boys’ mothers (who aren’t their mothers).

Nicolas is taken to the hospital for a belly injection, then again for an ultrasound, which detects a rogue heartbeat down there. So I guess the mermaid-mothers are raising boys and growing new things inside them? We see from Nic’s friend Victor’s fate that the boys don’t survive the birthing process. Nurse Stella (Roxane Duran of The White Ribbon) takes a liking to Nic because of his sketchbook, takes him through the underground caves acting as human scuba gear and releases him back to the city.

Very nice photography, especially the underwater scenes in the beginning, with an alien coolness that recalls Under The Skin. The women having gills and the birthing experiments might point towards the movie title for clues as to what’s going on, but it doesn’t feel like a mystery to be solved, more an imaginary world (more dangerous than it first appears) to soak in for a while. Recalls some glimpses from the A Cure for Wellness trailer, but I disagree that Evolution counts as horror.

Ehrlich:

It’s been a decade since Hadzihalilovic’s only other feature, 2005’s Innocence, and it seems as though the writer-director has been hoarding her nightmares ever since … If Evolution has a thematic through-line, it’s Hadzihalilovic’s propensity for stripping male bodies of their autonomy … it’s an oblique return to childhood, to a time when there was no clear boundary between imagination and reality, when everything you didn’t understand was beautiful and terrifying in equal measure.

D’Angelo: “To watch Hadzihalilovic’s films is to be reminded that life itself is a deeply perplexing mystery — that we’re all born into rigidly stratified societies, laden with inexplicable rules and run by people whose minds we can’t access.”

by ·Comments Off on Innocence (2004, Lucile Hadzihalilovic)

Iris is brought to a spooky boarding school by coffin (it’s actually not that spooky, except for the fact that it appears in a strange movie called Innocence and people are brought there via coffin), is given a schedule and a colored-ribbon hierarchy, dance lessons, play time and a series of rules to never break, then we wait to see what happens when each rule is broken.

The instructors, including Marion Cotillard, the same year she was so good in A Very Long Engagement, and Hélène de Fougerolles of Va Savoir, are businesslike with a vague sadness – rumor is they’re former students who tried to escape and are punished by remaining here forever. Normal students take dance classes for a few years, then in their final year they perform in front of a paying audience in an underground theater that seems like it’s going to be more sinister than turns out, but the movie sticks to its title until its final images when the graduated students are released into the world, and we see our first glimpse of masculinity for 110 minutes.

“Obedience is the only path to happiness.”

Based on a 1903 story from the author of Pandora’s Box and shot with all natural light by Benoît Debie (Calvaire, Irreversible). Supposed to be less story-driven than a sumptuous sensual experience, so it’s a shame I watched in SD. But I had it on my mind since her new movie is being released and since I was just looking at greatest-film polls (somehow wrongly thinking that this one appeared on the BBC list), so was anxious to watch.

A runaway:

M. D’Angelo:

Another disappointingly blatant allegory — they’re back in fashion, it seems — but in this case it doesn’t matter so much, as Hadzihalilovic’s unnervingly precise direction kept me thoroughly engrossed … the opening sequence of “establishing shots” alone is so exquisitely judged, in terms of composition and juxtaposition and even duration, that it more than compensates for the jejune content.