by ·Comments Off on Drylongso (1998, Cauleen Smith)

Indie drama wih peppy editing, handheld segments, swish pans. Pica is too iconoclastic to succeed in her photography class, meets April, who dresses like a boy to avoid harassment and joins P at her night job pasting up photos after P finds her friend Malik murdered by a serial killer. It’s all cute, creative and contrived in equal measure, and gives no indication of the far-out places Smith would end up in her latest shorts.

“a tribute to the richness of what can be made with little and shared without limit” – Yasmina Price’s Criterion essay is good.

by ·Comments Off on Un Chant d’amour (plus Goldin and Giolo)

Un Chant d’Amour (1950, Jean Genet)

Contact between adjoining prison cells. Almost narrative, then it doubles back on itself or fantasizes itself out of the prison, or introduces a murderous prison guard.

Basically the same image in Be Sure to Behave:

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The Demands of Ordinary Devotion (2022, Eva Giolo)

Objects and processes, an excellent example of this sort of thing, nicely edited with a great focus on sound.

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Stone, Hat, Ribbon and Rose (2023, Eva Giolo)

Scenes from bigger spaces, ambient outdoor sounds in less controlled environments, cut with short snips of people indoors making noises on everyday objects when used unusually. How does a horn sound when you rub it, or a plant when you hug it, videotapes when they’re stacked? “Stop filming a train station, you’re not Chantal Akerman,” I demanded of the movie, not realizing it was made as a tribute to her, part of an omnibus feature. Forgot I’d watched one of Eva’s a couple years ago. Her follow-up to this was filmed on an island and her latest short sounds anthropological, getting further from the enclosed spaces of Demands and Flowers.

Michael Sicinski makes the new one sound pretty fun, and writes that these two:

exhibit Giolo’s particular brand of editing, which tends to allow individual shots to play out before being replaced by an entirely different sort of material. Shots with humans tend to be followed by ones without, landscapes succeeded by interiors, brown, natural colors followed by saturated reds and blues.

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The Other Side (2021, Nan Goldin)

One of the famous slideshows, and it is really a slideshow, a parade of images (sometimes images of parades) with short crossfades, set to a mixtape. I probably liked two of the seven songs and most of the images, many of which were in vertical formats ill-suited to my wide TV.

by ·Comments Off on L’important c’est d’aimer (1975, Andrzej Zulawski)

I’m going with the original title, since the English That Most Important Thing: Love has always annoyed me. Made between The Devil and Possession, the camera rushes and roams, the Delerue music rises and fades.

Seedy burnout photographer Fabio Testi (a Monte Hellman regular) interjects himself into the lives of fallen actress Romy Schneider (Inferno, The Trial) and her husband Jacques Dutronc (the Godard of Every Man For Himself). They’ve all got some intense half-unspoken feelings for each other, and strict rules around their encounters. Despite his own money problems, Fabio bankrolls a Shakespeare play with Klaus Kinski to get his new actress friend some self-respect. Feels very based-on-a-novel, and it is, but Zulawski and DP Aronovich (Providence, Time Regained) keep it interesting enough.

Fabio’s book collector friend:

by ·Comments Off on The Shadowless Tower (2023, Zhang Lu)

I thought this would be more mysterious and experimental… I think I heard about this movie around the same time as John Smith’s Black Tower and got them mixed up?

Xin Baiqing is a Beijing food critic who is just like me: a middle aged guy who likes to drink and is pretty boring but with a few quirks that only make him seem offputting to people. He has a sister and a daughter and an estranged dying wife and an ex-con dad (Horse Thief director Tian Zhuangzhuang) who the family pretends doesn’t exists but who bikes 300km to see them in secret on their birthdays. Xin hangs out with food photographer Huang Yao, plays at being her boyfriend, then her father.

by ·Comments Off on A Film About a Woman Who… (1974, Yvonne Rainer)

A decade after seeing the doc about her, I’ve finally watched a full Rainer feature. “Dry” is still the word I’d use, though it’s structurally busy and playful.

Four people on a couch are reading slides of the same essay Yvonne is reading us on the soundtrack. The slides also have photographs, and we’ll see silent motion film of some of those photos being posed.

A male narrator takes over but the words are still from a female POV, now with pauses representing missing words, “is it possible that I have really ___, that I will never make ___?” Other times the narration will cut off mid-sentence. Much more eventful than the Akerman movie I watched the night before, but harder to sit through.

“For some reason she is embarrassed about her reverie.” Relationship psychology… starts telling a story of a bad(?) date with brief scenes and numbered intertitles, establishes a rhythm, then one title sticks for a long time and we hear an opera song and the story sidetracks to something new. Things like this keep the movie from ever getting tedious.

Studiously avoids sync sound until halfway through the movie: a woman at a surreal dinner scene gives an entire sync monologue like it’s no big deal, then before we can get used to this she is rudely interrupted by an intertitle and the film goes completely silent. These sorts of ruptures are the rule here. The great DP Babette Mangolte also shot Jeanne Dielman and Hotel Monterey (but not the Akerman I watched this week), and Rameau’s Nephew, which I’d love to add to this thread of 1974 movies if I can find the time, but maybe its four hour play with sound synchronization would be too much coming after this (edit: it was).

It incorporates retakes and loops, silences and blackouts, and the slowest-motion stripping you’ve ever seen. Ends on piano music and dance poses, then a brief cycle of violence via intertitles at the beach but I never figured out its structure or momentum, it could’ve ended on anything.

by ·Comments Off on Little Murders (1971, Alan Arkin)

By the time Patsy brings her nihilist photographer boyfriend Elliott Gould home to her parents you’ll be thinking “this was obviously based on a play,” but at the same time there’s a happy realization that the characters are going to remain eccentric, untethered to realistic behavior. Of the movies I’ve seen written by cartoonist Jules Feiffer, this was better assembled than the Alain Resnais.

Gould’s girl is Marcia Rodd and her family is: Hoffman’s mom in The Graduate, Mr. Mushnik, and Snowden in Catch-22. Guest stars are brought in to monologue: the director as a cop, the late Donald Sutherland as an existential priest, and Amazon Women‘s Murray as a judge.

Maybe we should’ve seen it coming from the title, or from the movie’s first scene where Gould is being attacked by a street gang, but the story takes a dark turn when Rodd gets randomly killed with a rifle, and city violence becomes the movie’s new main focus, ending with Gould shooting the director (offscreen). Memorial screening for Sutherland, and belatedly/additionally for Arkin.

by ·Comments Off on A Photographic Memory (2024, Rachel Elizabeth Seed)

Good photography (by others) and music (by Mary Lattimore) but this falls straight into the personal/parents doc template with the usual outcomes. Mom died before Rachel was two, R doesn’t remember her, so she goes on a journey to find footage and associates. Goes where mom went, meets who she knew, makes mom’s ex-boyfriend cry while Rachel is breaking up with her own husband. I don’t feel like they came up with compelling way to turn their audiotape archives into cinema – re-enactments with faces hidden, video of tape machines, the old kachunk-slideshow from Sr. She performs as her mom, edits herself into film of her mom, interviews other girls who didn’t have moms, generally makes everything about herself and her loss. The stuff about the nature of photography and memory was more interesting than the parental pinings. Her dad seems cool anyway. Some good voices in this, but not the director’s, which is who we’re mostly hearing. When looking for trailers I found one from a decade ago – this was shot and kickstartered back then, and it took this long to finish. Somewhere in the long process it picked up producers who worked on Joonam, Hottest August, Aquarela, Her Smell, and Cameraperson, and the editors of Crip Camp and The Devil and Daniel Johnston. Horns and drums by Gora Gora Orkestar made the trip to the Jesse worthwhile.

by ·Comments Off on Alice in the Cities (1974, Wim Wenders)

Early Wenders muse Rüdiger Vogler drives past Richmond, gets to NYC and sells his car, then goes to Shea Stadium – I like this guy already. He’s a writer/photographer disowned by his editor for wandering the States and ignoring his story and deadlines, but he’s got enough cash to fly home. After he meets a woman and her daughter at the airport then the woman disappears, the movie sneakily adopts my least favorite movie plot of all (aimless adult gets stuck with precocious child), but somehow remains good. Robby Müller did nice work in Goalie, kills it here. Almost Kaurismäkian in its large-heartedness – rare that I watch a movie from the 1970s and think things were better back then. Rüdiger keeps behaving in a very relatable manner (he drops the girl at a police station and goes to a Chuck Berry concert).

Rüdiger on TV: “All these TV images come down to the same common, ugly message: a kind of vicious contempt. No image leaves you in peace. They all want something from you.”

by ·Comments Off on Female Trouble (1974, John Waters)

“Who wants to be famous? Who wants to die for art?” I should’ve watched this a very long time ago, like before Cecil B. Demented. Divine is Dawn, who storms out of her parents’ house as a teenager since she didn’t get the cha-cha heels she wanted for Christmas, immediately gets pregnant, flash-forward and she’s got a teenage daughter called Taffy (Mink Stole) and a hairdresser husband named Gator.

Divine & The Dashers:

Then the plot goes haywire. Taffy seeks out her real father (also Divine) and stabs him to death, then threatens to join the Hare Krishas. Gator’s aunt Ida throws acid in Dawn’s face, and the Dasher photographers who own Gator’s hair salon try to make the disfigured Dawn famous, everyone agreeing that she looks even more beautiful now. None of the performances are “bad” because they’re all on the same heightened wavelength, but the dialogue is mostly yelling and it finally gets tiresome during the court scene that sends Dawn to the electric chair.

Post-acid Dawn with daughter and caged Aunt Ida (Edith Massey):