Favorite rock docs watched this year:

1. Athens GA Inside/Out and Two Headed Cow (Tony Gayton)
2. Zorn I-III (Mathieu Amalric)
3. The Little Richard Story (1980, William Klein)
4. The Elephant 6 Recording Co. (2022, Chad Stockfleth)
5. Hot Pepper (1973, Les Blank)
6. Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda (2017, Stephen Schible)
7. Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind (2022, Ethan Coen)
8. Travelin’ Band: Creedence Clearwater Revival at the Royal Albert Hall (2022, Bob Smeaton)
9. Oulaya’s Wedding and The Divine River (Hisham Mayet)
10. Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You (2023, Ryan Daly & Will Oldham)
11. The Other One (2023, Henry Threadgill)
12. Bad 25 (2012, Spike Lee)

Favorite shorts watched this year:

1. Bouquets (Rose Lowder)
2. Pas de deux (1968, Norman McLaren)
3. Persian Series / I Take These Truths / Yggdrasill (Stan Brakhage)
4. Face Like a Frog / Quasi at the Quackadero (Sally Cruikshank)
5. E-Ticket (2019, Simon Liu)
6. The Fatal Glass of Beer (1933, Clyde Bruckman)
7. The Secret Cinema (1968, Paul Bartel)
8. Hedgehog in the Fog / The Heron and the Crane (Yuri Norshteyn)
9. Contractions (2024, Lynne Sachs)
10. Cowboy Jimmy / Cow on the Moon / The Playful Robot (Dusan Vukotic)
11. Remedial / Institutional / Saxon (Owen Land)
12. Scénario de Sauve qui peut la vie (1979, Jean-Luc Godard)
13. Sand or Peter and the Wolf (1969, Caroline Leaf)
14. Wee Wee Monsieur (1938, Del Lord)

Needs further study:
Me (2024, Don Hertzfeldt)

Zorn I (2010-2016)

Rehearsing bands, mixing albums… setting up and breaking down equipment, cleaning his sax, unglamorous work. It documents JZ’s first time working with Nate Smith at The Stone, which is such a small place. Amalric is recruited to read some Rimbaud on the Conneries album. No onscreen text but if you cross-reference with Discogs you can figure out when some of the scenes took place. When I am rich, after buying every Tzadik album I’d like to find or recreate the black t-shirts Zorn is always wearing with his different ensemble designs.


Zorn II (2016-2018)

“It was terrible when John started working with people who could actually read music. It fucked things up for the rest of us” – Ribot. Zorn and Dave Lombardo played a duo set at the Louvre. They soundtrack Harry Smith films, and during a dance scene Amalric cuts in some Maya Deren. This episode is more concert-backstage, shows and rehearsals, almost wall-to-wall music, and is therefore great.


Zorn III (2018 – 2022)

Emails between Barbara Hannigan and JZ combines with some Cobra philosophy scenes to make this one about the composer’s relationship with the musician, really good. Prepping a difficult vocal piece which will be Hannigan’s JZ debut in Lisbon with Gosling as her pianist. Gave me a better appreciation for that first BH/JZ CD, which I’d written off as “not my thing” a few weeks earlier. Amalric seems intent on making each of these movies a different type of thing (this one is intensive prep/process) instead of just “more adventures in the life of Zorn.” Good quotes:
“You’ll see me start to die. That’ll be your cue.”
“You can go relatively satanic on this one.”
“I keep forgetting you people have to breathe.”


Must hear soon:
Masada box
Moonchild trio
Psychomagia
Zorn/Hannigan 1 and 2

Two bearded guys head home from a construction site and alas, we follow the guy with the less interesting beard, who makes a stew of everything edible in his fridge, like we did after thanksgiving. Long-take, follow-cam, 4:3, meditative fest-film – too quiet and patient for Katy, who ditched after five minutes.

The guy is getting his car repaired for a trip to his mom’s house, where he’s hinting he might stay for a long period, and in the meantime he visits coworkers and friends and family, dropping off bowls of soup. People talk about plants, and their dreams, and eat soup. He meets a woman who studies moss (whose thoughts we’d heard in an earlier scene) at a restaurant, then sees his sister Anca, and briefly dreams the movie’s best scene: crossfades and focus pulls in the forest. When he runs into the moss woman a second time he drops everything to follow her for a quiet day in the woods before finally exiting Brussels (leaving behind soup for her).

Devos in Cinema Scope:

“What is it that I want to do? I think it came down to wanting to make films about people being relatively OK with each other, and making that into something challenging and exciting enough to stand on its own.”

Ahead-of-its-time parody of MTV’s The Real World, also predicts the Almereyda Hamlet with chilling accuracy. Ben Stiller would go on to direct Heat Vision and Jack, but he and Janeane would never again be as cute as they are here. Ethan would arguably be cuter in the Before movies and even Hamlet. Winona is so cute in this that she bends time and space, creating a continuum of cuteness (a cuteinuum) with her other movies, rendering their relative cutenesses impossible to rank. Every scene in this has one good thing about it and the rest is just okay.

L’emission a deja commence (2023, Bertrand Mandico)

Puppet people talk about truth in media and introduce a series of pissing-fruit cartoons. How do you explain this sort of thing to potential investors?


The Last Cartoon (2022, Bertrand Mandico)

Kind of partly a cartoon – some abstract brightly-colored patterns – but the performance-art people take over, narrating in French and English about conflicting futures of cinema.


Four Unloved Women Adrift… (2023, David Cronenberg)

The autopsy mannequins make heated moaning sounds.
Mostly close-ups, only showing the full scene at the end.


The Menacing Eye (1960, Jerzy Skolimowski)

If my first short had been a stylish silent 2-minute backstage knife-throwing drama, I would also have grown up to become Jerzy Skolimowski.


Little Hamlet (1960, Jerzy Skolimowski)

A small group hanging around a half-demolished building plays out a silent slapstick story with musical narration which is sort-of a loose version of Hamlet.


The Miu Miu Affair (2024, Laura Citarella)

Meant to be another fashion ad like the Luca and the Lynch, but LC makes a Trenque Lauquen spinoff, a mystery about a missing fashion model that gets increasingly hazy and vague. it’s not great exactly, but it’s great for one of these.


Let Your Heart Be Light (2016, Romvari & Campbell)

She trims the tree while half-watching Meet Me in St. Louis on a laptop and drinking from her Chantal Akerman mug, then switches to a mix of trad-xmas songs before Sophy comes over to hang out.


I’m Hungry, I’m Cold (1984, Chantal Akerman)

The one who looks familiar is Maria de Medeiros (The Saddest Music in the World), the less hungry one is Pascale Salkin of Gang of Four. The most charming and fast-paced Akerman movie since Saute me ville?


and some auteur music videos…

PJ Harvey – I Inside The Old I Dying (Cocina & Leon)

The Wolf House team creates the illusion of a days-long journey within a single room, so cool. Man gets chomped to death by a beast, man’s dog grabs one of his bones and buries it, it grows into a tree.

New Order – Blue Monday (Breer & Wegman)

The main things happening here are (1) Breer animation, (2) a dog balancing on furniture, (3) the band members being bothered by floating tennis balls. These things get integrated in fun ways (e.g. the band members watch a flipbook of Breer’s drawings of the dog).

The Breeders – Divine Hammer (Richard Kern)

The focus is on Kim pulling poses indoors, and the other three have a minor thread going on a tour of strip clubs. They should’ve cut out the shots of Kim as the Flying Nun.

The Roches – Hammond Song (Lewis Klahr)

Lewis does his clip-art mashup thing. Lucky me to find this right after discovering the group – I’ve been playing their debut album this week. He made this forty years after the song came out.

Mystical Weapons – Colony Collapse Disorder (Martha Colburn)

Instrumental guitar rock by Sean Lennon and Greg Saunier, the only song here I didn’t already know. More clip-art, the religious and planetary icons giving flashbacks to the Harry Smith shorts. Faster cut than Klahr and with added digital glitch edits (or else my copy was defective).

Cheesy, stupid movie whenever anyone is talking, but it’s also the most handsome-looking one of these movies in a while, and Jet Li is back, and his and Clubfoot’s action scenes are hot. The action is chopped up more than usual, but it works, until it doesn’t. Music is hit or miss – playing the OUATIC theme on Western instruments is cool but sometimes the composer plays a choir on a sampling keyboard, which is less cool. Wong loses his memory on a trip to America, joins a native tribe and hooks up with Agent Tammy Preston (in her only acting role outside of Twin Peaks). Sammo sure is trying some things to revive the series, sometimes successfully, but goes too broad and ends up with anti-racism for babies, nowhere near the heights of his Millionaire’s Express.

Our guys are joined by Billy (stuntman Jeff Wolfe), far right:

Cote loves shallow-focus shots (so do I). Watching this reminds me that his covid movie came out a hundred years ago, and Soderbergh’s is still not out?

Odd-jobs guy is over-sheltering his 12 year-old. Each of them finds dead bodies in the snow and keeps it as a secret: dad hides his body in the abandoned motel like The Wire season 4 and the daughter hangs out and chats with hers in a frozen field. They seem nice.

Director and actor won prizes at Locarno, where it played with fellow chilly films Winter Vacation and Cold Weather.

Côté in Cinema Scope 44:

People ask me, “Why curling?” Well, first of all, curling is a collective sport, so he could get closer to his community if he would curl. The moment he hears about curling, there’s a spark in his eyes – the only positive thing in his life during the whole film is curling … The film is very simple: how do you connect with the world of the living?