We regret that we couldn’t stay for all 24 hours of The Clock in Minneapolis some years ago, so while in Boston it was easy to catch all 60 minutes of Doors, which plays on a loop with no beginning or end. People from classic movies (with some modern-auteurist exceptions: Phantom Thread, Lost Highway) enter doors, then we cut to the opposite angle and they’ve transformed into somebody different. I thought the cuts were going for maximum contrast (old person to young, man to woman, black/white to color), and I thought he was purposely choosing cheapie Brit dramas so we’d never recognize a clip/actor, but every time I thought I’d found a pattern he’d switch it up. Very funny to me that it’s 95% G-rated harmless scenes (some light gunpoint threats) except for the two minutes a class of small children was being ushered in, then it switched to Fire Walk With Me / Scream horror, and the kids were ushered right back out. We also saw Sara Cwynar’s Alphabet exhibit and her giant awesome mural in the lobby, where the desk people told me it’s pronounced “swinn-arr”. Katy watched Rose Gold with me when we got home, and felt eight minutes was long enough so she didn’t want to check out Glass Life afterwards.
Tag: museum
Dahomey (2024, Mati Diop)
Really is a doc about artworks being repatriated from France to Benin. The conceit of having the ancient artworks do the narration and the responses from modern museum attendees made this more interesting than it might’ve been.
National Gallery (2014, Frederick Wiseman)
I’ve started to appreciate how fast Wiseman’s cutting is – the movies are long but he wastes no time. We hear from preservationists, lectures on individual paintings, internal meetings. Some unusual perspectives: an art appreciation workshop for the blind, creating ornate picture frames, protests outside. Most mindblowing segment was about researching where a painting was commissioned, how the angles and lighting in the painting match the location where it originally hung.
Shorts Watched in July 2023
Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer (2019, Sky Hopinka)
Split screen (sorry, “two-channel”) film, water and sky giving way to drawings and stories (text on screen, and one stereo channel reading the text aloud). Sounds academic, but really cool in the way Hopinka’s films tend to be.
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Kicking the Clouds (2022, Sky Hopinka)
Interviewer’s mother talks about language for a while then gives greater family context, the camera showing beadwork, people from a distance, ground and trees, poetry, and of course clouds.
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We Need New Names (2015, Onyeka Igwe)
This covers a lot of ground: racial and gender difference, family history and belonging, tradition and its meaning. Clips from black/white archival films of African dance, and modern video of different dance, each of them tourist-docs the way the narrator is removed from the rituals she sees, including dancing pallbearers at her grandmother’s funeral (who reportedly died at age 103 – mom says that’s not true “but I think you should leave that alone”).
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Crocus (1971, Suzan Pitt)
Mom and kid move with awkward paper-doll joints, sliding all over the floor, which is better than dad, who moves with no joints at all, like a he-man figure with a gigantic cock. When the adults finally get down to it, the camera spins around them, then various suggestive objects fly through the room and out the window.
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Lili Reynaud-Dewar
In Montreal we checked out a three-part exhibit of her solo works, including a room with a four-screen re-enactment of Pasolini’s final interview with rotating participants reading the same lines, the rare multi-channel video piece that really worked for me. In a larger room was a parallel array of screens showing 30-some dance videos made over a decade – some of which are on vimeo, so I got screenshots.
Black Night (2005, Olivier Smolders)
“There’s a problem with your films. I don’t understand it. It’s not clear at all.”
A Belgian movie, watched for the Shadowplay thing, but I opted to cover Ferat Vampire instead because this one seemed… more difficult. As the red curtains open and the film begins, diorama-like, full of seared memories and dream logic, I tell myself “don’t call it Lynchian, that’s what everyone has said about it,” but Goodreads tell me that Smolders wrote a book about Eraserhead and Vimeo says he made a video called Lynch Empire, so nevermind, it’s Lynchian. This is his only feature to date, in a 35-year career of shorts.
Kids walk towards the camera, a bug is pinned to the wall, twin Poltergeist II preachers are flashback-puppeteers, causing a wolfman to kill the girl to big choral music, like hymns with some Thin Red Line mixed in. The girl lives again, only to be killed with scissors. Then the doctor, who is viewing these memory-plays by peering into our suit-wearing protagonist’s ear, says he’s fantasizing and he never had a sister, let alone a murdered one, and he needs to chill out.
Our man has an a static Crispin Glovery intensity, and a facial birthmark so we can conveniently tell who plays him in flashback, living in a city under near-permanent eclipse (the second time in 24 hours I’ve thought of Dark City). He works as the bug guy in a museum – a zoo worker in a room full of film cans – and we’ve seen multiple sets of identical twins at this point, making this the second movie this year after the Mandico short to be strongly reminiscent of A Zed & Two Noughts.
Enough with all the comparisons to other films – we go into overdrive when a black woman (the museum security guard) appears, sick and naked and pregnant, in his bed. We hear her thoughts, untranslated (at least on my DVD), while he deals with his stress by watching anthropological films of a beardy colonialist white man (his father, and the museum director). She make him promise not to leave, he immediately runs into the hallway while she gets killed by the ghost of his dead sister, then turns into a cocoon that births a white woman who goes to the museum, naked but for a leopard-skin coat, and murders a taxidermist, the sun comes out and everyone gets annoyed, and now the allusions/symbolism are out of my league.
Anyway, the closeup of leaf insects are great. This would seem to be a cult movie in need of a cult. Smolders was reportedly born in Kinshasa, says in the extras that his film’s vision of Africa is “a fantasized territory based on stories written by … large museums which … fanatically classified a universe that they didn’t understand.” He also says that the story’s logic is based on the rule that “what happens to a character is exactly what he most fears, yet desires at the same time.”