November 14, 2017
FICValdivia 2017

November 14: The link above leads to the Spanish-language homepage for the 24th edition of the Festival Internacional de Cine de Valdivia, which took place this year in the Chilean seaside city of Valdivia from October 9th through 15th. The festival’s English-language homepage can be found here. 

I was pleased to attend the festival as a member of the three-person jury for the Official Latin American Short Film Selection, together with the French programmer Agnès Wildenstein (of DocLisboa) and the Bolivian filmmaker Carlos Piñeiro (of the collective Socavón Cine). We awarded the competition’s chief prize to a beautiful Colombian film called Palenque and a special mention to a fine Argentinian film called Niebla (aka Fog). I reprint below, both in Spanish and in English, the jury’s justifications for its decisions:

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Español: Primero queremos agradecer al FICValdivia por invitarnos, ha sido una linda experiencia. La Selección Oficial Cortometraje Latinoamericano es un buen ejemplo de la diversidad de propuestas cinematográficas que el mismo género de cortometraje ofrece. 

Por la belleza de un gesto puramente cinematográfico y por la ser la representación de un momento único y sencillo a orillas del mar, el Premio Especial de Jurado va para la película Niebla, de Flavia de la Fuente.

El premio a Mejor Cortometraje va para un film con una mirada auténtica, por su increíble cambio de personajes y por una edición grandiosa. Un lugar especial se muestra a través de temas que tocan la vida y la muerte acompañados de un magnífico ritmo musical en Palenque, de Sebastián Pinzón Silva.

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English: We would like to begin by thanking FICValdivia for inviting us this year. It has been a beautiful experience. The Official Latin American Short Film Selection gives a good example of the diversity of cinematic proposals that the short form offers.  

For the beauty of its purely cinematographic gesture and for its representation of a unique and lovely moment at the seashore, the Special Jury Prize goes to the film Niebla, directed by Flavia de la Fuente.

The Best Short Film prize goes to a film with an authentic gaze, incredible shifts of character, and graceful editing. A special place is shown through motifs of life and death and through the constant rhythm of music in Palenque, directed by Sebastián Pinzón Silva.

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A listing of highlights throughout FICValdivia’s other sections this year would soon grow tedious. Suffice to say that the more one looks through the festival’s catalogue and website, the more that one will likely discover. 

I spent most of my viewing time in the Sala Paraninfo, which specialized in attentive 16mm projection. Among the experiences there for which I was grateful were screenings of Dimitri Kirsanoff’s Ménilmontant and five films directed by Deborah Stratman. My greatest sense of discovery in Paraninfo - and, in fact, in the festival - came from the spectacular evening of two programs of Japanese experimental films called “La Gran Ola de Tokio” (”The Great Tokyo Wave”), especially Takahiko Iimura’s On Eye Rape and Kohei Ando’s trilogy of works collectively titled Like a Passing Train. 

16mm is a delicate art, and good 16mm screenings should be cherished. So, for that matter, should good-quality 8mm, 35mm, and 70mm projections, as well as good-quality DCP and ProRes screenings. Among FICValdivia’s virtues is how it continues to care for screenings in different formats - both analogue and digital - with the understanding that a support is not only a kind of material, but also a form of expression.

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September 8, 2017
Azazel Jacobs Discusses The Lovers

September 8: The link above leads to the homepage for the American film criticism magazine Cineaste, which is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. This special issue’s articles include my review of The Lovers, a beautiful new romantic comedy that shows how the members of a suburban upper-middle-class American couple (played by Debra Winger and Tracy Letts) find their plans to take up residence with adulterous partners thrown into confusion by their falling into passion once more with each other.

The Lovers is a sad and wonderful film that continually finds ways to grow outwards what could easily be a flat scenario. In the review, I discuss how the film gives clichéd situations and settings new life through careful and delicate attention to detail in a way that echoes the internal revivals experienced by the characters, who together form a walking lexicon of ordinariness that blossoms into strangeness over time.

The careful depiction of this transformation process - occasioned by an entity glimpsed throughout the film, no less than love itself - is to be expected from Azazel Jacobs, the writer-director of The Lovers. Jacobs’s first feature, Nobody Needs to Know, is an intriguing piece of experimental fiction that takes place during a film shoot and asks how closely and well cinema can depict peoples’ inner lives. His four remarkable follow-up features - The GoodTimesKid, Momma’s Man, Terri, and The Lovers - all act seemingly in response. 

These films take on the task of seeing and hearing how far indelibly, even disturbingly, lonely people will go beyond themselves to connect with each other. The ways in which these incomplete people strive to complete themselves through gathering around shared points of interest inevitably gain weight as metaphors for spectators’ relations to art. The Lovers is certainly a film that serves to help its viewers feel less lonely. Speaking just for myself - and hopefully without giving too much away - the film’s unexpectedly happy ending left me feeling the happiest I’ve felt after seeing a new film in some time.

The Cineaste review of The Lovers is print-only, so I urge readers of this post to buy a copy of the issue and help keep this important magazine afloat. As research for the piece, I interviewed Jacobs by e-mail about his work on his film, and an edited version of our exchange appears below.       

How do you direct chemistry, and how do you think that you were able to create chemistry between the lead actors in The Lovers?

Azazel Jacobs: I’ve heard Tracy Letts say that creating chemistry is part of an actor’s job, and I think he’s right. As a director, I try to help with the selection of the crew, specifically through finding like-minded people with whom actors will be up to risk things, and to be vulnerable and open. Also, in general, actors are at the strongest vantage point of anyone to see through bluffing, and in my experience, it’s worked out best to just admit to them when I don’t have a good answer to a problem and try to sort out the solution together with them, which forces at least a sort of honest chemistry. I find it hard to ask actors to be truthful without being so myself. In terms of The Lovers, that synchronicity was created completely by Debra Winger and by Tracy – it truly was there from their first moment onwards, and it didn’t ask for much directing, only awareness of what was going on.

To what extent do you storyboard or shot-plan scenes? What impact does this extent have on your work with technicians and actors?

Jacobs: My cinematographer Tobias Datum and I make a shot list when I think that a movie may happen, but before it’s a sure thing, and definitely before we have actual locations. There are a few images I have in my mind when I am writing – kind of destination points I try to hit – which we then use just to get into the conversation: Mikey with shaving cream in Momma’s Man, Terri in the bath tub in Terri, Michael and Mary with wine in The Lovers. Since we are close friends and we meet up pretty regularly, there has also been a continuing conversation about things that we find to be currently inspiring and that we hope to bring into whatever we approach next.

Shot listing without locations focuses a conversation on what is happening emotionally and leads us to sketch ways to depict it. It also means that none of what we do is precious and that all of it is easy to put away in production for the sake of letting actors and locations lead the way while still having the fundamental goals already established.

What interests you most about the home and office spaces in The Lovers? What do you believe that they reveal about the characters, and the characters about them?

Jacobs: The films most inspiring to The Lovers were the members of Roy Andersson’s “Living trilogy”, along with Cassavetes’s Opening Night, Bergman’s Dreams, and Allen’s Interiors. What was directly inspired by these films was their usage of space as narrative. In these films, plot passes through the space surrounding the human characters, and the space itself goes through the biggest transformation of any character from start to finish.

I aim for finding a location’s ability to inform depth and flatness, both physically and psychologically. It’s getting into the space with a crew and a camera and watching actors enter and find their way that finally erases the way I’ve been picturing the space (for sometimes way too long) and that allows the film to live.

Some of my favorite location details in The Lovers involve the home’s way of reminding me of the set of a home onstage in Opening Night. The bannister and the camera’s manner of capturing Mary’s walk down it recall to me Norma Desmond’s walk from Sunset Boulevard. Lucy’s home was built in 1929 and was due to be destroyed after we wrapped, and production designer Susan Tebbut and her crew brought out its spirit (as well as Lucy’s) for posterity. These are just a few of the things that quickly come to my mind. I wanted The Lovers to exist in a place of comfort, leading to the idea that some of that comfort has created the film’s situation.

I also think of costumes as locations – what shells do these characters exist in? The very first conversation that I have when planning a film, the conversation that first begins to make the film and people in it begin to feel real, is my wife Diaz, who designs the costumes. She is the first person to read a script, so naturally we talk about how the people look, a discussion that leads into describing their world.  

Mandy Hoffman’s score is crucial to The Lovers. How did you and she conceive the score in tandem with the rest of the film’s creation?

Jacobs: I wrote and shot with no other music in mind other than the song that is physically played in the story. I asked Mandy to expand that one song from its practical beginnings into something that grows dramatically. I showed her a semi-rough cut of the scene without any other footage, nor did I share the script with her. The music that she created for the film brought forth roots in old Hollywood and Western European movies from her own instincts. I surely saw the influence of some of those films while writing the screenplay – the film’s premise alone is so Depression-era screwball – and her gravitating to that influence was a testament (to me) that it still existed in the footage. Previously, we had shied away from anything that could be even remotely conceived as manipulative, but here was a clash, a contrast between image and sound that felt like it communicated how people were feeling without telling the audience how to feel.

Excited by this development, editor Darrin Navarro and I brought on music consultant Daniel Schweiger and music editor Brett Pierce and, along with our music supervisor Dan Wilcox, we temped out the rest of the rough cut that we had at that moment with period-era music. I’ve never temped music before, and it wasn’t so much to help Mandy, but more to make me more comfortable with the idea of using a score, since the choice felt radical and I wanted to be convinced. A lot of Paul Misraki and Georges Delerue, along with some Francis Lai, was placed throughout the film. I showed this cut to Diaz and then, after feeling secure, to the producers Ben LeClaire and Chris Stinson, and then, ultimately, to A24.

I doubt that Mandy used this temp score for much more than accelerating our conversation – for example, determining when we liked the music to contrast or sync up with the story. Since piano is a character in The Lovers, we took it out of the score, despite it having always been our base instrument in the past. This move left the floor open for both of us, and Mandy began sending me her home studio versions of the score that were expansive, particular, and so inspired.

To do this score correctly, ultimately with a real orchestra, was an unforeseen and relatively big expense. Probably close to a tenth of the film’s total budget was spent on something that none of us could truly say would work until it was done. But the music she wrote instilled a confidence in us all, it and it offered a chance to make something that I personally hadn’t encountered before.

How do the screenwriter Azazel Jacobs and the director Azazel Jacobs work together?

Jacobs: I wrote The Lovers with one person in mind – a teacher, mentor, friend, and collaborator named Gill Dennis who suddenly died a few months before I started the script. The writing felt like a way of continuing a conversation that had been interrupted. He was a real lover and a fighter with a great laugh that I could hear while writing. He was someone who was profoundly moved by the drama in life, the things we do to each other, amazing and horrible, and the relationships, bubbles, and experiences that we can find ourselves inside or outside. I wrote The Lovers with him in mind and then tried to forget when I was directing in order to see what actually emerged, let others who helped make the film tell their stories within it. In the end, I still felt like the film was for Gill.

Your father Ken Jacobs is a very great filmmaker. What do you believe that you have learned from him that has been most important to your own filmmaking?

Jacobs: I hope too many things to list. I can easily see similar fascinations with time and space, continuous loops, dress-up, make-believe, celebration, and despair. I distinctly remember being a little kid and him giving me advice that I use every day while making films. My dad told me to sit on his knees and then said that he was going to teach me some magic words to give me strength that I could use whenever I wanted. All I had to do was to repeat them three times. The words were, “Fuck it.”

In The Lovers, Michael says it once, Mary says it the second time…

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June 25, 2017
Olhar de Cinema '17 - awards and impressions

June 25: The link above leads to the English-language list of prize-winning films at the sixth edition of the Brazilian international film festival Olhar de Cinema (“Cinema View”), whose most recent edition took place June 7th-15th. The same list can be found in Portuguese here. 

I worked as one of three programmers of feature-length films for this year’s edition of the festival, which led me to regard the prospect of awards with a mixture of excitement and regret. An award or mention can always help a film, even if in a small way, and the giving of prizes should therefore be cherished. At the same time, there will inevitably be a number of great works that do not take home honors, and a programmer must hope for potential spectators to continue to discover these films as well. I hope for readers to discover all of the films that screened in Olhar de Cinema this year, and for these films to have further screenings in Brazil and around the world.

The festival’s three principal juries (each comprised of three members) made their decisions independently, without soliciting input from each other or from the festival’s programmers. All nine of the jurors approached their work with great seriousness and senses of personal responsibility, and I would like to thank Marcelo Alderete (New Views), Mónica Delgado (Other Views), Philippe Gajan (Competition), Lili Hinstin (N.V.), Luís Fernando Moura (O.V.), Guto Parente (Comp.), Barbara Rangel (O.V.), María José Santacreu (Comp.), and Ulrich Ziemons (N.V.) for their presences at Olhar de Cinema this year. They were all fine professionals, dream audience members, and wonderful guests.

When I look at the list of prize-winners, some impressions about the festival’s programming strike me, particularly in relation to the top award-winning features of the three competitive international sections: Kevin Jerome Everson’s Tonsler Park (New Views), Tatiana Chistova’s Convictions (Other Views), and Joshua Bonnetta and J.P. Sniadecki’s El mar la mar (Competition). The impressions that I will list here are my own, without any effort to speak for those of other people.

1. It strikes me initially that all three of the films deal directly with processes connected to citizenship. Tonsler Park shows members of a historically disenfranchised group of people (African-Americans) voting, learning how to vote, and helping others vote on 2016’s Election Day in the U.S.A. Convictions presents a series of interviews between members of Russian draft boards and young Russian men seeking deferment from military service (some of whom ultimately prove successful). El mar la mar relates, in largely elliptical fashion, encounters between individuals who have crossed the Mexico-U.S.A. border illegally and individuals who have greeted them (whether intentionally or by happenstance) on the other side. The film registers people perceiving a humanity shared between them as citizens of the world.

2. During a year in which Olhar’s selection of new films contained clear and strong examples of fictional narratives, feature-length documentaries, and overtly experimental endeavors, the juries opted to grant their top prizes to three films that I feel comfortable calling experimental documentaries. Each film takes a different aesthetic approach to its work in this ever-expanding genre, with Tonsler Park falling closest to pure observational filmmaking, Convictions to political activist cinema, and El mar la mar to what Maya Deren might have called a “film-poem”. Yet each of the films is also open enough in its form to contain elements from other genres such as fiction (or, if one prefers, fictionalization), along with a critical capacity for self-questioning and reflection on how disparate elements might fit together.

3. It is possible that these three films were the lowest-budget works in their sections. I am confident that they were all in the bottom halves. Tonsler Park was recorded entirely in one day by a prolific artisan and his small crew and met its world premiere less than three months afterwards. Convictions was shot on low-grade digital equipment by teenagers at its director’s behest, resulting in crude and startling material that contains all the technical defects one would expect as necessary components of the work’s force and power. El mar la mar, a film realized across two countries, was made virtually in its entirety between two tremendously talented people, the listing of whose names in sources stating the film’s credits reaches comic heights of repetition. Every film faces challenges on its way to being born and greeting the world. These are three compelling test cases.  

My impressions collectively lead me to believe that the festival’s juries acted bravely in their decision-making, even if individual members disagreed with the results or, to the contrary, followed impulses that were obvious to them. There were many great films of larger or comparable scales in the festival whose prizes would have been justly awarded, but the particular conjuncture of these three particular titles, to me, sends a democratic message. I find in the grouping a bold but humble suggestion that many different kinds of films can be considered equals. And why not?

The juries’ decisions inspired some comments that I made on the last day of the festival, post-awards night, while introducing the reprisal screening of Tonsler Park. I include here a revised and expanded version of these remarks:

“An interesting coincidence is that the New Views jury, which gave its top prize to Tonsler Park, awarded a Special Mention to another film in the section, John Torres’s People Power Bombshell: The Diary of Vietnam Rose. Interesting because the American Everson and the Filipino Torres are friends, and because Everson has frequently cited films by Torres and other directors from the New Philippine Cinema as influences on his own practice. 

“More coincidences: Another filmmaker from this group that Everson has cited as an influence is Khavn De La Cruz, who was represented in Other Views this year with his film Alipato – The Very Brief Life of an Ember. And John Torres, in addition to his connections with Khavn and with Kevin, is friends with the Thai filmmaker Anocha Suwichakornpong, who was the subject of Olhar de Cinema’s Focus section this year. During her time in Curitiba, Anocha told me about her admiration both for Torres and for Everson as artists, and she expressed a desire to see their new works.

“More coincidences: The American filmmaker J.P. Sniadecki, one of the two co-directors (with Canadian Joshua Bonnetta) of Competition winner El mar la mar, is friends with the Chinese filmmaker Xu Xin, who directed the Other Views entry A Yangtze Landscape. Xu Xin even invited Sniadecki to join him on the boat trip that resulted in A Yangtze Landscape, and although Sniadecki missed going, he watched the recorded material with excitement afterwards.

“The Chilean-American filmmaker Niles Atallah, whose Competition film Rey received a Special Mention this year, is an admirer of the great Chilean documentarian Ignacio Agüero. Atallah even appears speaking about his film in an interview in Agüero’s latest feature, This is the Way I Like It II, which played in Olhar de Cinema’s Special Screenings section. Niles attended Olhar this year with a desire to accompany the festival’s F.W. Murnau retrospective, but while he was here, he also watched This Is the Way I Like It II projected for the first time.

“The Spanish filmmakers Chema García Ibarra and Lois Patiño faced each other in separate programs of Olhar de Cinema’s Short Film Competition this year with their respective films The Disco Shines (filmed in Reha Erdem’s homeland of Turkey) and Fajr (filmed in Morocco). The two are good friends, and they met socially in Madrid a few days before their works screened in Curitiba. 

“Even Curitiba’s own João Castelo Branco – co-director, with Elizabeth Moreschi, of a beautiful documentary about childrens’ inner lives called Scribbles, Doodles and Other Monsters that screened in New Views – worked as the cinematographer on Guto Pasko’s Mirada Paranaense entry Among Us, the Stranger, an observational record of the Ukrainian community in the Brazilian state of Paraná.

“I mention all these connections in the interest of saying that independent cinema – independent both in its vision and in its spirit – is a global community; and that any film made with this vision and spirit, in any part of the world, immediately enters into dialogue with the rest of the world, including with all of you. We hope for you all to have good screenings of these films, as well as good conversations.”

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Now that the festival’s sixth edition has concluded, I would like to note an aspect in which I found my work for the most recent installment of Olhar de Cinema to be rewarding. The work quite simply expanded my horizons, and it has made me want to continue pursuing both internal and external discoveries.

Some of the most crucial discoveries that I have made recently have been of films that did not screen at Olhar de Cinema. There were numerous inspirational works that I watched during the past several months that, for various reasons, the festival could not present. In keeping with this post’s pattern of three, I therefore wish to cite three additional films that have premiered since last October, that did not screen at Olhar de Cinema, and that continue to grow inside my mind, with the hope that these films can continue their travels and be seen as widely as possible. 

Lidia Sheinin’s Harmony, Alexandre Koberidze’s Let the Summer Never Come Again, and Sompot Chidgasornpongse’s Railway Sleepers are all humanist works that look backwards and forwards at once. They propose formal innovations particular to their current moment while also studying the delicacies of human figures in motion in ways that gently and even sweetly harken back to cinema’s inception. The world is richer for the unique presences of these independent films, and for all other wonders like them.    

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June 10, 2017
Sunrise as Comedy [by David Kalat]

June 11th: The following text was written by film critic and historian David Kalat on the occasion of this year’s F.W. Murnau retrospective at the Brazilian festival Olhar de Cinema. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans screens in the festival June 11th and 12th. More information about the retrospective can be found in English at http://olhardecinema.com.br/2017/en/2017/retrospective-f-w-murnau/ and http://olhardecinema.com.br/2017/en/screenings-2/#.retrospective, and in Portuguese at http://olhardecinema.com.br/2017/2017/olhar-retrospectivo-f-w-murnau/ and http://olhardecinema.com.br/2017/filmes/#.olhar-retrospectivo.

Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s Sunrise is the dictionary definition of a classic film. It won (for all intents and purposes) the first ever Academy Award, has been placed on the National Registry, and was the first silent film put out on Blu-Ray.  It routinely places in “Best Of” lists, it’s a picture whose artistry is intended to be accessible to mass audiences.  It is conventionally beautiful, conventionally narrative, conventionally stirring.  It needs no apologies or excuses, it’s just excellent in every way.  

But did you know it was a comedy?

Consider the basic premise: Sunrise presents a sexy, vampish “Woman of the City” who invades a rural idyll where her very presence corrupts a naïve young man.  In order to pursue this temptress, the young man comes to believe his only escape from his existing small-town romance is to kill his girl, which he utterly fails to accomplish, and thereby sets in motion the plot developments of the rest of the film.

Just six months before Sunrise hit theaters, American audiences saw the exact same plot in Harry Langdon’s comedy Long Pants!

In this context, it’s worth remembering that Langdon’s film crossed enough taboos (or do I mean tabus?) that some audiences didn’t find it funny at all.  Meanwhile, Murnau does pitch Sunrise like a comedy, and its contents are not very much distinguishable from what constituted comedies of the same period. For example, Sunrise’s main characters go on a date to a carnival, where they run into money problems and an out-of-control animal (see Harold Lloyd’s Speedy), and the film climaxes with a catastrophic storm (see Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr.)

The young man (George O’Brien) rows out to the middle of the lake with his trusting wife (Janet Gaynor) where he intends to drown her.  But when push comes to shove, as it were, he loses his resolve and rows mindlessly to the opposite shore, where they board a trolley car.  And in one of the most astonishing sequences in all of cinema, the shell-shocked couple gather their wits as they are transported from what might as well be a medieval village straight out of Nosferatu through a forest to an industrial patch and finally arriving in a futuristic Metropolis, all in the span of a couple of minutes.  There is no such trolley ride anywhere in the world—this thing might as well be a time machine.

The transformation is absolute.  The opening scenes take place in a silent movie world of exaggerated gestures and portentous symbolism.  But the city reveals more naturalistic acting, more observational in tone.  And the city scenes are obsessed with the details of the setting—the cars, the clothes, the architecture, the store fronts, the people-watching, the traffic.

Dramas do not often get bogged down in such observational fascination with their setting.  Although it happens sometimes (as with the semi-documentary approach of Billy Wilder’s People on Sunday, or perhaps Robert Wise’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture), this is a technique more familiar from comedies, where the observational detail is part of establishing the ironic commentary. Think Jacques Tati’s Playtime, or Chaplin’s City Lights, or Jean Renoir’s Boudou Saved From Drowning, or just about anything by Harold Lloyd.

Murnau introduces two outsiders into this cityscape—scraggly, haggard refugees from a horror film who have stumbled into this world in a state of high emotional dudgeon and will encounter it as if they are visitors from another planet. Again, the parallel is to a comedy’s structure, with the outsider hero(es) providing for a commentary on the world around them.  Charlie Chaplin rarely stumbled into any of his adventures after a botched murder attempt, but all Murnau has done is to provide a context for his protagonists’ alienation where someone like Chaplin uses his costume as a shortcut to the same ends.  Like Boudou or Mr. Hulot, George and Janet are outsiders invading this space.  We will witness its familiar contours through their eyes.

Setting in a film in the juxtaposition of old versus new has been a central recurring feature of many important comedies (Steamboat Bill, Jr., Mon Oncle, Modern Times, Yoyo) and also specifically places Sunrise squarely in the zeitgeist of late 1920s comedy.

For example, consider what happens once George and Janet arrive in the city.  They proceed to stumble from one episodic set-piece to another. In one of these, they crash a wedding ceremony and are overwhelmed by the moment (wedding vows take on an eerie significance when juxtaposed with trying to kill your wife).  George breaks down, begs for forgiveness, and the two stagger into the street in a romantic haze.  In another transformation of setting not unlike the trollycar ride that brought them here in the first place, they lose track of where they are and see themselves in the fields of home—until car horns bring them back to reality.  And what ensues?  Slapstick havoc in the middle of traffic, that’s what—a punchline, just like you’d expect.  Traffic-based gags abound in comedies of this era.  The scene emphasizes the modern tribulation of city streets packed with noisy cars going every which way.

Observations on the comic aspects of traffic are fundamentally the stuff of movie comedy. Thanks to the coincidence of the age of movies and the age of cars, there wouldn’t have been much to say about traffic prior to the dawn of film.  It doesn’t really belong in any other medium.  Paintings can’t capture the movement well; theatrical performances can hardly stage this indoors; no one would write a book about traffic because it isn’t a literary subject–but 1920s comedians put such material into movies all the time. 

Pointedly, Sunrise does not view this transformation from rural life to modernity as a bad thing.  It seems to be tilting that way in its early scenes, the way the evil vamp is called “Woman of the City,” as if her corruption is connected to her sophistication. Once George and Janet arrive in that city, however, what they find is wonder, fun, and welcoming strangers. The city folk are sometimes a little perplexed by the two rubes, but never in a mean way—and no matter what George and Janet do or misunderstand or break, they are greeted by smiles and tolerance.

Sunrise shows how the new world, threatening as it is to the old, doesn’t have to lead exclusively to corruption—it is possible to navigate your way through this modern world and still come out morally whole.  As such, Sunrise is about hope in the face of wrenching change.

As it happens, 1920s screen comedy was itself undergoing a wrenching change, metamorphosing from silent physical slapstick to a new talkie genre of romantic comedy.  The solo comedians of slapstick’s Golden Age had to make way for a new breed of female stars, who took equal footing with their male costars.  The end product of that transformation would be the screwball comedy, whose genre conventions presuppose flirtation as a form of combat, or vice versa.  The stars of 1930s romantic comedies “meet cute” and engage in reel after reel of open combat, before discovering that hate is just a variation on love; you have to really care for somebody deeply to want to fight them that badly.  Fists give way to embraces and the former opponents end up in each other’s arms.

This is, you may note, the template of Sunrise—in which the couple starts off as opposed to one another as humanly possible, and end up as tightly allied as conceivable.

Sunrise is not just structured like a comedy, it is absolutely jam-packed with comedy actors.  Janet Gaynor, the female lead, was a fairly inexperienced young actress whose resume before showing up here largely consisted of comedy work—Laurel and Hardy’s 45 Minutes From Hollywood, Syd Chaplin’s Oh What a Nurse, Clara Bow’s The Plastic Age, Charley Chase’s All Wet, and various and sundry Hal Roach one-offs.

Once she and her hubby/attempted murderer George O’Brien make their way into the city, they spend the rest of the film encountering comic actors: Ralph Sipperly, the Barber, came from Fox’s own comedy shorts division.  Jane Winton, the Manicure Girl, came from such comedies as Footloose Widows, Why Girls Go Back Home, and Millionaires.  Then there are the Obtrusive Gentleman (Arthur Housman) and the Obliging Gentleman (Eddie Boland).  Both Housman and Boland were small-time comedy stars who were brand names in their own right, having top-lined their own respective series of comedy shorts.

On top of all the comic actors, there are actual jokes: the wedding reception mistaking the peasant couple for the bride and groom, the business at the photographer’s and the headless statue, the comic misunderstandings at the salon, and a drunken pig!

This is a “silent film” in that no dialogue is spoken, but it has a synchronized soundtrack that includes sound effects and music, and sure enough the various slapstick punchlines get their little “boing!” and “wah-wah” music cues just like you’d expect. 

Murnau’s allegiance with the world of comedy continued in the follow-up feature to Sunrise, City Girl (whose title, a riff on “Woman of the City,” signals from the outset its agenda vis a vis Sunrise).  City Girl opens with a scene in which a rube on a train unwisely reveals a fat bankroll and his own unwary attitude towards his money, rendering him an easy mark for the attention of a grafter.  And once again we find Murnau pulling plot points from the films of Harry Langdon—in this case, the short Lucky Stars.

Murnau stuffed the cast of City Girl with comedy veterans, too: Eddie Boland is back (briefly); Guinn “Big Boy” Williams was a regular supporting actor in silent and talkie comedies (including the brilliant Ladies Night in a Turkish Bath with Jimmy Finlayson); David Torrence earned his slapstick comedy credentials a few years after working with Murnau, in the Laurel and Hardy film Bonnie Scotland; and Richard Alexander was on the front end of what would prove to be a wildly varied career that included Harry Langdon’s See America Thirst, as well as Laurel and Hardy’s Them Thar Hills and Babes In Toyland.

Finding such comedy references in a Murnau film may be jarring to those who think of him only in terms of Nosferatu and other grim fables.  That may be a sizeable contingent, I realize.  It is generally the tendency of critics who write about Murnau’s films to identify the comic elements as something imposed on Murnau against his wishes by the studio in an effort to Americanize and popularize his films.

The primary English language text on Murnau is Lotte Eisner’s The Haunted Screen — the very title of which signals its preoccupations and prejudices when it comes to Murnau.  And so in her fealty to those prejudices, Eisner skips over, dismisses, or otherwise brushes under the rug any of Murnau’s works that don’t fit the bill.

Lotte Eisner suggests that all these tawdry jokes were inserted into Sunrise by Fox gag men and Murnau was obliged to go along with them.  Hey, but wait a minute–Sunrise was famously made without studio interference, and even after his falling out with Fox, Murnau never said that Sunrise was anything other than a work of total creative freedom.  You can’t have your cake and eat it too—you can’t say Murnau had total creative freedom but he also had to tolerate jokes inserted into the script against his will. If Sunrise was Murnau’s vision, his vision was prone to flirt with comedy.

Now might be the time to note, ahem, that The Last Laugh has its own comic elements, in which a bleak story comes to a tragic end, and then reboots itself as a comedy for its final reel—inspiring the English language title.

For that matter, Murnau made The Finances of the Grand Duke, a mild action-comedy about a master thief that in many ways anticipates similar lighthearted fare along the lines of Arsène Lupin or To Catch a Thief or a fair chunk of Steven Soderbergh’s back catalog.

The magic of Murnau is that his genius was not limited to vampires and demons—the man was also gifted with a deft comic touch.  Sunrise is Murnau’s comedy masterpiece.

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(Notes: 2)
  
May 29, 2017
Olhar de Cinema '17

May 29: The link above leads to the English-language version of the homepage for the international film festival Olhar de Cinema (“Cinema View”), whose sixth edition will take place June 7th-15th this year in the Brazilian city of Curitiba. The Portuguese-language version of the site can be found here. 

I helped program the feature-length films in this year’s edition of the festival alongside Antônio Junior and Eduardo Valente. I have additionally programmed Olhar series devoted to the films of two marvelous auteurs with many resonances between them: The Retrospective section surveys the work of F.W. Murnau, while the Focus section shines a light on Anocha Suwichakornpong.  

This year’s full lineup of films at Olhar de Cinema (with synopses and showtimes included) can be found in English here and in Portuguese here. I have seen enough of the features and shorts up to now to be able to say (with what I hope constitutes minimal bias) that more than half of the festival’s overall selection this year is worth championing outright. I therefore wish for Olhar de Cinema’s audiences to feel overlapping sensations during this edition’s events - pleasure and satisfaction with the films that they are watching, and hope and excitement with thoughts of films to watch in the near future. 

Yet, with that said, an amazing festival lineup could easily also be organized of films that were considered for Olhar de Cinema this year and that, for various reasons, were ultimately not included in the lineup. I wish success and good luck to everyone associated with these films and hope that audiences - both in Brazil and around the world - are able to discover them soon.

I also wish to give personal thanks at this time to two people who guided me towards Olhar de Cinema. The first is the festival’s Director and Director of Programming, Antônio Junior, who invited me to participate in this year’s selection process after I attended the festival as a critic in 2014 and 2015. The second is former Olhar de Cinema programmer Gustavo Beck, who was instrumental in securing those trips for me and who is now programming for a number of international festivals that include Cinéma du Réel, IndieLisboa, RIDM, Rotterdam, and Brazil’s own INDIE Festival. Contemporary world cinema has few better friends than Gustavo, and festivals and cinematheques around the globe will encounter few better viewers. 

And, speaking of viewing, I hold two final wishes for now: That as many people as possible who want to come to Olhar de Cinema this year are able to do so, and that all of you who come enjoy yourselves. We look forward to seeing you. 

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May 25, 2017
Cine sin limites: Claudio Caldini, Jorge Honik, and Narcisa Hirsch

May 25: After several months without blogging, I return with a link to a new website (elegantly designed by Valéria Guimarães). The site’s chief function is to detail the work of the initiative Mutual Films, co-founded by myself and by Mariana Shellard, which up to now has been involved with organizing three film series and producing one feature-length film. The initiative’s name pays homage to the Mutual Film Corporation, the company where a certain Little Tramp got his cinematographic start. We hope for our Mutual Films to always maintain a playful spirit.   

The first film series which Mutual Films’s team both curated and produced was the recently concluded “Cine sin limites: Claudio Caldini, Jorge Honik, and Narcisa Hirsch”, which took place during May 4th-14th at the Centro Cultural São Paulo. The series brought to São Paulo 71 short works of Argentine experimental cinema, with its focus being on the three great titular artists, all three of whom were in attendance (as was Daniela Muttis, Hirsch’s longtime assistant and a filmmaker herself) for several screening introductions and Q&As. 

The films included the world premieres of Honik’s major Elementos and Hirsch’s indelible Aigokeros, several international premieres, and a last-minute surprise addition of Caldini’s Simulacro. The works were screened primarily in their best existing digital copies, with three screenings dedicated to additionally showing films by Caldini and by Honik in their Super 8 originals. Two free public talks were also held - one between the three filmmakers and decades-long friends (with me moderating), and then, after they had left São Paulo, one between the series curators and the Argentine artist, curator, and researcher Mariela Cantú.

The link offered at the outset of this post leads readers to the series release, as well as to its trailer, relevant additional research links, and downloadable PDF files of its two short Portuguese-language catalogue books (one with our curatorial essay, film synopses, and the series schedule, the other with a variety of texts by the artists themselves about their works). A full series schedule and program descriptions can be found in Portuguese here.

At the risk of sounding immodest, I can say that it was a beautiful series, and that the screenings and events unfolded in warmly memorable fashion. Our gratitude goes to everyone who helped realize the series, including the participating filmmakers; Célio Franceschet, Carlos Gabriel Pegoraro, and the team of the Centro Cultural São Paulo; Leandro Villaro (head of the boutique label antennae collection, which provided many of the series’s digital screening copies); and Lucas Vega (generally agreed upon as the best Super 8 projectionist in Brazil). My own personal gratitude additionally goes to Mariana Shellard, whose start-to-finish passion inspired the series and who, with each such work, further distinguishes herself for me as one of the finest film programmers in the world.  

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February 22, 2017
Tehran is the Capital of Iran ("Disruptive Film: Everyday Resistance to Power")

A blurb about a disruptive film. Brooklyn Magazine, February 15.

Tehran is the Capital of Iran recently screened in New York at Anthology Film Archives within the series “Disruptive Film: Everyday Resistance to Power.” The film was directed by the Iranian master Kamran Shirdel, and is one of four amazing short documentaries of social observation and critique that Shirdel made in Iran during the 1960s.

The three-program series within which the film screened was co-curated by the American filmmakers, programmers, and teachers Ernest Larsen and Sherry Millner. This series marks the latest iteration of a theme around which they have programmed many times in the past, including for an upcoming trio of DVD releases from Facets Multimedia.

In addition to the films that I cite in the Brooklyn Magazine piece (and Larsen and Millner’s own 41 Shots), the films from the Anthology screenings that I have seen and admired include Conakry, Nouvelle Société N° 6, Prayer of Fear, Semiotics of the Kitchen, Threnody for the Victims of Marakana, and Xochimilco.

I conducted a short interview with Larsen over e-mail about the “Disruptive Film” screenings at Anthology:

What inspired your “Disruptive Film” work? What do you hope to convey with its curating?

Ernest Larsen: Sherry Millner and I were asked back in 2007 to curate ten programs for the 2008 Oberhausen Film Festival of short-form political/experimental films. The considerable success of the resulting programs, grouped under the title “Border-Crossers and Trouble-Makers,” inspired us to keep researching, especially as we were then asked to put together a similar series for the following year’s Subversive Film Festival in Zagreb. We began to think that it might be possible to assemble - however slowly and incrementally - an alternative history of political/experimental media so often neglected or occluded, with a focus on short films. We gathered films from many countries, many historical points of struggle and resistance. Finally, after screenings in many unconventional venues, including social centers and squats in southern Europe, we started putting together the Disruptive Film DVD sets under the invitation of Facets Multimedia. Our friend, the filmmaker Jill Godmilow, joined us in this labor of love that has so far resulted in Volume 1 of an eventual three volumes.

What inspired the particular selection of films that screened at Anthology? Why these three programs at this moment in time?

Larsen: In 2014, we were invited by the folks at the Flaherty Foundation to curate a series of six programs at Anthology Film Archives, which we did under the title of “Cinematic Ammunition.” This time, we were interested in putting together three nights of films to reverberate with the current state of political unrest in the United States. The first night, for example, was about “Radical Visions of Resistance to Police Violence,” and included six films from six countries. For the third night, we scheduled four feminist films, all with historical roots in the late 1960s through the mid-1970s, including Godmilow’s Scum Manifesto, a new remake of the classic 1970s video of the same name. 

You and Sherry Millner co-directed two films in the series, 41 Shots and Graven Images. What inspired you to make these films? What did they each represent you for at the time of their making, and what do they continue to represent for you today?

Larsen: Sherry and I made 41 Shots in 2000 as a response to the NYPD Street Crime Unit’s murder of immigrant street peddler Amadou Diallo, who was standing in the vestibule of the apartment building in which he lived. We finished the video essay before the trial of the four police officers, and it was subsequently used by the Diallo family in organizing protests. It highlighted the Giuliani-era espousal of the implicitly racist “broken windows” theory that the then-Mayor used to justify his zero-tolerance policies. Remarkably this theory, though widely discredited, is still in operation throughout the U.S. and in many other countries around the world. The ascendance of the Black Lives Matter movement since late 2014 has called attention to problems with the “broken windows” theory. So 41 Shots has retained an all-too-eerie relevance.

Graven Images uses the provocative image of a burning American flag to suggest that extreme patriotism might be a mental illness, a form of psychosomatic blindness, in a sense. The film poses, somewhat ironically, the question of the fundamental(ist) relation between the Judeo-Christian prohibition against “graven images” and the iconic status of the American flag. Graven Images was shot on Flag Day at Randall’s Island, when members of the American Legion solemnly and ritualistically burn damaged flags. Today’s so-called alt-right movement depends on the continued evocation of this virtually religious irrational devotion.

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January 18, 2017
¡Palante, Siempre Palante! The Young Lords

A blurb about a provocative film. Brooklyn Magazine, January 18th.

¡Palante, Siempre Palante! The Young Lords will screen in New York this Sunday, January 22nd, at 5 P.M. at the Maysles Cinema. The screening will feature the presence of the film’s director, Iris Morales (a former Young Lord), who will also participate in a talkback session with the artists Shellyne Rodriguez and Miguel Luciano afterwards. Morales’s nonfiction book Through the Eyes of Rebel Women: The Young Lords, 1969-1976 was published last year. More information about both the film and the Young Lords can be found at the website http://www.palante.org.

The Brooklyn Magazine blurb contains a quote from Morales which was condensed and edited from an e-mail exchange with her. The full exchange appears below and is posted here with her permission.

Iris Morales: The Young Lords represented a new generation of Puerto Rican activists in the United States.

How did you come to make a film about them?
Morales: In the mid-1980s, I was running a youth video training program in New York City. We couldn’t find films about the participation of Puerto Ricans and Latino/as in the social justice movements of the 1960s. The young people in the program encouraged me to produce !Palante, Siempre Palante! The Young Lords in order to fill this void. The film was broadcast on national public television in 1996 and continues to be screened at college and community venues.

How did you decide that you would structure the film?
Morales: I began the process by asking: What is the story, and who tells it? From the start, I knew that I wanted the members of the Young Lords to be the narrators, to relate our experiences from the inside out, collectively. I decided on the documentary format. Another critical question was: Who is the audience you want to reach? My goal was to make the history accessible to young people, especially Latino/as who rarely saw themselves represented in a positive light, especially in film. I wanted young people to see themselves as agents of positive social change. These ideas guided me in many aspects of the filmmaking process, including the choice of the voiceover narrator (Patria Rodriguez) and musical selections.

What compelled and inspired you about the Young Lords, and what do you believe can be learned today from studying their work?
Morales: I was a community activist and member of the Young Lords. I continue to believe in the power of the people to transform society and create a society for the benefit of the many, instead of for the few. The past people’s movements contain lessons of successes and failures that can inform the ongoing struggle for justice and human rights.

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August 4, 2016
For Peter Hutton

A blurb about the work of the late, great film artist Peter Hutton, with a focus on his early film July ’71 in San Francisco, Living at Beach Street, Working at Canyon Cinema, Swimming in the Valley of the Moon. Brooklyn Magazine, August 2.

The occasion for this piece is a screening of films by Hutton in New York at the Museum of Art and Design (MAD), which will take place tonight within the Museum’s ongoing film series “Eye on a Director: Canyon Cinema,” devoted to the work of the vital California-based filmmakers’ cooperative. This particular program (which was co-curated by Canyon director Antonella Bonfanti and USC professor Michael Renov, the second of whom will also be present for a post-screening Q&A) pays tribute to a director who built Canyon’s shelves and who had his films distributed through the co-op.

Hutton - whose last film, Three Landscapes, premiered in 2013 - was slated to attend the event before he passed away from cancer this June. During some very limited interactions that I had with him earlier this year, it became clear to me that he was a person of great humor and boundless generosity. He was also a wonderful storyteller, as demonstrated in the various talks and interviews with him that can be found online.

He brought a warm and generous spirit to his films, whose narratives always consist of a person opening his eyes as widely as possible to the wonders surrounding him. In addition to the works in MAD’s program, Hutton’s wonderful films include At Sea, Boston Fire, Florence, In Titan’s Goblet, New York Portrait (all three parts), Time and Tide, and many others.

Below follow two tributes to Hutton. The first, shorter note comes from the film critic and teacher Scott MacDonald; the second, longer piece comes from the filmmaker and former Canyon Cinema director Denah Johnston.

Scott MacDonald: To paraphrase Frampton’s (nostalgia): I cannot remember one moment spent in Peter’s company that I did not thoroughly enjoy. And I cannot remember one moment watching, showing, or writing about Peter’s films that was not a deep pleasure. I can’t imagine any filmmaker was been more widely beloved – or who will be more continually missed.

Denah Johnston: When I first saw Peter Hutton’s films, I was wide-eyed and soaking in the different kinds of experimental film within the context of an undergraduate survey class. My focus and work at that time was with fine art photography, so it was particularly striking to me that Hutton was working with moving images in order to heighten stillness and sense of place. We screened Peter Hutton’s Budapest Portrait (Memories of a City) (1986) together with Peter Kubelka’s Unsere Afrikareise (1966). From my notebook:

“It is clear to me what Peter Hutton is saying. How he uses a visual language to give shape, content, and form to his impression(s) of Budapest as a landscape - a land other than that which he is from. It is clear he is an outsider in the shots he takes. One can find a good deal of them on a walk - however, some scenes take great care in their particular, hard-to-reach vantage point.

“Budapest Portrait is evidence of the amazing spell of Eastern Europe. With Hutton’s technique of holding a shot for so long and allowing motion to occur in and through the frame, he is transmitting the experience of being-there to the viewer. What it is to stand in this alleyway or look up at that building, etc. He is concerned with an overwhelming sense of place, why it is different to be here as opposed to there. The master of moving still images, Hutton creates moving photographs. 

“In terms of his cinematography, what I find to be of such great interest is his inversion of movement that ultimately works against narrative expectations. Predominantly people are predominantly fixed, still, motionless. As if in an attempt to freeze time, the rest of his images seem to flow and function much more smoothly. While it seems unnatural to freeze life, Hutton uses a sleight of hand to undermine our understanding and experience of reality: here, the landscape is what moves, people do not.”

In working with the Canyon Cinema collection for three years, I had many interactions with Peter, from technical lab geekery to the more esoteric applications of cinema. He was always thoughtful and kind, and as he was an early filmmaker member of the cooperative, it was incredible to have his support for the reinvigoration of the organization. 

I knew, but apparently forgot, about his involvement with Canyon Cinema operations in the early 1970s. I was particularly surprised one day in 2013 when, while Kym Farmen was working to fix a shelf that holds prints, she discovered the following handwritten note: “Built by David Boatwright and Peter Hutton on July 23, 1971.” This discovery was soon followed by a revelatory screening of a film he made in the same year called July ‘71 in San Francisco, Living at Beach Street, Working at Canyon Cinema, Swimming in the Valley of the Moon.

While there is an incredible variety on display among the films that make up the Canyon catalogue, they share a common spirit and a focus towards the exploratory - how this is investigated explodes in a million shapes, sizes, and colors. But Peter’s work is a constant flow. Like a river it is endless, rampant, wild, polished, and untamed all at once. It is no secret that the shelves he built hold the collection for reasons other than structure. He will be sorely missed and fondly remembered for his encouragement, example, and instruction on how to see and to be in the world.

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(Notes: 2)
  
July 27, 2016
Ticket of No Return

A blurb about a lovely film. Brooklyn Magazine, June 15.

The occasion for this piece was a screening of Ticket of No Return at Brooklyn’s Spectacle Theater. As part of my research, I entered into contact with Ticket’s director, Ulrike Ottinger, who sent me a statement, posted below, about her intentions with the work. Ottinger’s most recently completed film, Chamisso’s Shadow, premiered earlier this year.

Ulrike Ottinger: I arrived in Berlin for the first time in the fall of 1973 to document a happening by Wolf Vostell entitled Berlin Fever. I was immediately fascinated by this strange city. At the time, Berlin was still surrounded by the Iron Curtain, falling out of time, poor, gray, and ugly, but also in the center of political interest. I decided instantly that, instead of moving to New York (as I had previously planned to do), I would move to Berlin.

I became a flaneur in the streets of different quarters of the city. They sometimes still had a village-like character, with the wonderful parks of Prussian kings that had been designed by Peter Joseph Lenné and the abandoned industrial areas of the former Reichsbahn where trees grew on buildings that had fallen into ruins in the midst of high coal mountains. One of the typical Berlin stocks came to seem to me to lie in streets and places near the Berlin Wall, with the absurdity of people looking and waving at each other on opposite sides without being able to get together.

The city had a wild nightlife with a lot of alcohol (not so many drugs, at least not at that time). It took me a while to approach themes and find a film aesthetic that would help me get a hold of this multifaceted city. Once I did, I decided to make the Berlin Trilogy: Ticket of No Return, Freak Orlando, and Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press.

I started to take thousands of photographs with my star and partner, Tabea Blumenschein, in original locations. At the time, there was a highly politicized discussion being held (especially among Berlin filmmakers) about the need to make realistic films that, for ideological reasons, banned all kinds of fantasies. In my opinion, though, these fantasies are part of our reality, too.

I liked giving a filmic answer to this schism. For Ticket of No Return, I decided to have two protagonists who would represent two different aspects of one persona. There would be the realistic figure of a bag lady from Banhof Zoo (Zoo Station), and there would be an elegant lady coming from some mysterious place who would not speak or be able to communicate with anyone except for the bag lady, her alter ego. The film has a liquid structure, and the sounds of breaking glass and high heels walking along pavement become the work’s rhythm and leitmotif. There is also a color dramaturgy staged, from blood red to yellow, blue, fading pink, and finally reflecting mirror fabrics dissolving in a mirror-corridor.

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