Tabla de contenidos para July - August 2015 en Film Comment

THE DEATH OF CINEMA WAS PROCLAIMED IN THE LATE NINETIES. i forget why but I think it had something to do with Susan Sontag feeling like they don’t make ’em like they used to. Godfrey Cheshire followed up at the end of 1999 with “The Death of Film/The Decay of Cinema,” a surprisingly prescient if overly pessimistic set of predictions about the implications of the digital revolution that was just getting underway in film. Fifteen years on, the digital makeover of cinema has been fully accomplished. There are many shoot-on-film holdouts in Hollywood, in the independent scene, and in the avant-garde and art world. They maintain an attachment to the romance of celluloid when it comes to the making and exhibition of films and I’m with them one hundred percent.…

A SPANISH-LANGUAGE CRITICAL JOURNAL with a robust presence online and in print, Lumière obliquely outlines its editorial bent in a short essay praising Fritz Lang’s The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb as “the only blockbusters that aren’t blockbusters… The producer really wanted to make a golden calf. And Fritz Lang made a film.” Which is to say: Lumière gives the overused term termite art fresh meaning. Overseen by editor Francisco Algarín Navarro, the largely self-financed publication looks at cinema’s past and present with fresh eyes. Fully embracing the expansive space available on the Web, Lumière’s site offers exhaustive multimedia symposiums on filmmakers ranging from Allan Dwan to Manoel de Oliveira. (Its print issues are available to read online with Issuu.) At 462 pages, the Dwan dossier, available in…

IN ALL THE THINGS HE LOVED, FUN WAS VITAL TO RICHARD, BY WHICH I mean his appetite for wonderment in life. In the summer of 1990, Richard, his wife, Mary, and I had a plan. They were invited to the Telluride Film Festival, where Richard was to discuss Garbo and the book he had written about her. I suggested they should go there the way my wife, Lucy, and I had first made that trip—driving through the West. So they came to San Francisco, and on the appointed day, at 6 a.m., the three of us arrived at the Avis office to pick up our rental car. I forget which model we had selected, but it was an ample and suitable vehicle for that journey. Then the woman at Avis…

CHARLES NAPIER MAKES AN IMPRESSION. LET US CONSIDER FOR A moment the impression he makes—as Sheriff Harry Sledge in Russ Meyer’s Supervixens (75)—while stomping on the lovely Shari Eubank’s face. It is a lasting one. To watch this cartoon-cornpone character actor—jaw as big as a jar of pickled eggs and mouth filled (as Meyer used to boast) with “four more teeth than Burt Lancaster”— swerve from erotic bemusement to homicidal frenzy in the blink of a psychotic eye is to remain forever scarred. Wearing a leer as bent as a country road and a pair of spiffy saddle shoes, the Kentucky-born Napier (1936-2011) brutally stabs, beats, and electrocutes the frighteningly vulgar Eubank in her bathtub (don’t worry, she’s resurrected halfway through the film). By the time the actor is done,…

THE TWO MASTERWORKS THAT DEFINED CANNES 2015 FOR ME—AND, I would guess, for no small number of otherwise disgruntled festivalgoers— were by a pair of fellow travelers, additionally united by their exclusion from the main competition. At first blush their films may seem worlds apart—Miguel Gomes’s wild and sprawling, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s quietly serene—but deep affinities underlie this mutual regard: the fondness for bifurcated tales; the class-conscious appreciation of folk traditions and proletarian pleasures; and perhaps above all, the undying belief in the power of fiction to generate its own reality. THE HUNGER FOR STORIES IS INEVITABLY what sets Gomes’s films in motion, and the start-stop, infinitely expanding framework of Arabian Nights is a dream match for his favored mode of shaggy-dog shapeshifting. The amorphous subject matter— the daily hardships of…

Director: Antoine Fuqua Country/Year: U.S., 2015 Opening: July 24 Where: Wide IT’S OFFICIAL: JAKE GYLLENHAAL IS ONE OF the best actors working today. He follows up last year’s pair of impeccable, surprising turns in Enemy and Nightcrawler with this powerhouse, body-altering performance as Billy Hope, a top boxer who, early in the film, steadily loses everything— his career and fortune, his self-control and dignity, and, most devastating, his young daughter, who is put into state care when he’s declared an unfit parent—after the sudden death of his cherished and grounding wife (Rachel McAdams). A man of few words, Billy is largely left to communicate with his bulging muscles and pained expressions, and Gyllenhaal brings to the table the appropriate level of aggression, suffering, and, finally, forceful determination when his fallen…

Director: Liz Garbus Country/Year: U.S., 2014 Opened: June 24 Where: New York STANDING STOCK-STILL BEFORE A PIANO, Nina Simone kicks off a concert by leveling her serpentine gaze at the crowd. Like a performance artist, she stretches silence past the point of comfort, drawing power from the dumbstruck anxiety of her spectators. Then, with a comedian’s sense of timing, she breaks into a smile, bobbing her head with a spontaneous glee that cuts through the tension. Director Liz Garbus gets it right when she opens her new documentary about Simone with this cunning bit of audience manipulation—a moment that foregrounds the musician’s fearsome mix of passion and playfulness, her delight in the perilousness of musical utterance. But with such an electrifying intro, it’s all the more disappointing to watch the…

Life of Action: Interviews with the Men and Women of Martial Arts and Action Cinema By Mike Fury Mill City Press, $24.99 Performing in Hong Kong action films has long been a rite of passage for martial artists making their way into the movies, from Chuck Norris to Scott Adkins. But while that was once a path to stardom, it is now a road that leads direct to video. Journalist and fight choreographer Mike Fury interviewed 35 men and women in the action-film industry (most of them with martialarts backgrounds) for this collection, which addresses the state of the fight film today. The book is split into three parts: actors, stunts, and filmmakers. It opens with Adkins, a remarkably gifted British athlete who studied judo, tae kwon do, and kickboxing.…

PERHAPS I’M BEING OVERPROTECTIVE OF A MOVIE THAT I adore, Marielle Heller’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl, but I got riled up after seeing the trailer, which takes the single misstep Heller made—sappy, psychedelic animations of birds and flowers that are supposed to represent the fantasies of Minnie Goetze, the most forthrightly lewd and courageously sexual, adolescent female protagonist ever beheld in an American movie—and makes it seem as if they convey the tone of the entire shebang. It’s easy enough when watching the movie itself to dismiss the cliché of girlish innocence in those animations, which are dropped in for just a few seconds here and there, or view them with a certain irony, as if Minnie is as surprised as we are to find such uncool art…

IN BEAUTY AND THE DEVIL (49), THE SECOND FILM DIRECTED BY René Clair after his return to France at the end of World War II, the rejuvenated Faust (Gérard Philipe), reveling in his wealth, power, and erotic success, suddenly finds himself thrust back at the whim of Mephistopheles (Michel Simon) into his impoverished former self, sleeping on straw among rats. With hindsight, it looks like a horrible premonition of what, over the next few years, was to happen to Clair himself. Once considered one of the finest French directors, on a par with Renoir and Carné, he was singled out by the iconoclasts of Cahiers du Cinéma as a prime representative of the despised cinéma de papa, his work dismissed as artificial and emotionless. Clair’s election in 1960 to the…

WHILE THE CANNES EXPERIENCE FOR MANY CONSISTS OF GLAMMING it up to watch high-profile movies in the festival’s spotlight sections— on endless lines, discussing the important things in life like celebrity sightings, selfie sticks, and red-carpet fashion rules—there are others who frequent the decidedly unglamorous Market, the underbelly of Cannes, if you will, obsessively looking to buy or program films, or simply to discover them. So as some attendees checked off their lists the latest “essential” cinema by festival mainstays and select newcomers, the Market dwellers, such as myself, experienced an entirely different Cannes. In other words, while friends and colleagues basked in arty, reputable cinema, I “slummed it,” watching savage horror films, sleazy thrillers, sci-fi oddities, and assorted other uncharted questionables. A refuge from the obscenely overcrowded Croisette—in part…

Director: Asif Kapadia Country/Year: U.K., 2015 Opened: July 3 Where: New York and Los Angeles FOR HIS FOLLOW-UP TO THE HAUNTING RACEcar driver chronicle Senna, Asif Kapadia chooses a pop-culture tragedy with proven appeal. But it’s an open question as to whether the rise from obscurity and wellpublicized fall of Amy Winehouse is a productive match for Kapadia’s archivally driven brand of storytelling as visual re-assembly. Amy opens with a cherubic Winehouse singing at her 14th birthday party and finishes, logically if unenlighteningly, with her demise from alcohol poisoning in July 2011. In footage collected from public and private sources, showing her in and out of performance (and blurring the distinction), the talented North London–born star is as bracingly brash and vulnerable as ever, leaping off the screen. Kapadia layers…

Director: Kyle Patrick Alvarez Country/Year: U.S., 2015 Opening: July 17 Where: Limited THERE ARE NO DIRECT REFERENCES IN The Stanford Prison Experiment to the tumultuous cultural upheavals that shook up many American college campuses between 1968 and 1972. It’s only by indirect cues that the film suggests the texture of the world outside the institutional hallway where most of its action occurs: haircuts, styles of dress, passing movie references, or generational catchphrases like the epithet— “fascist pig!”—an imprisoned student spits at his showboating, sadistic guard. Kyle Patrick Alvarez’s third feature isn’t the first fiction film inspired by the notorious 1971 experiment in which students were paid to assume the roles of guards and prisoners in an elaborate simulation of prison life that quickly devolved into physical and mental abuse. But…

BOX SET PICK Agnès Varda in California Criterion Eclipse, $44.95 YOU HAVEN’T SEEN CALIFORNIA until you’ve seen it through the eyes—and camera— of Agnès Varda. The godmother of the French New Wave first came to Los Angeles in 1967 when her husband Jacques Demy was offered a short-term contract with Columbia Pictures. But she was so smitten with flower power and progressive politics—not to mention the light, oh the light!—that she remained until 1969, returning again briefly in the early Eighties. Now compiled, the work from these stateside sojourns finds Varda in her element as a Left Coast outsider. A languorous look at Hollywood leisure and its discontents, 1969’s seriocomic Lions Love (…and Lies), is ostensibly the main attraction. Forming a ménage à trois, Warhol’s favorite waif, Viva, and Hair…

The career of prolific Californiaborn actress Anna May Wong (1905-61) and her contrastingly short, itinerant life left an imprint on visual culture to such an extent that she has become a sort of cinematic ur-image of Chinese femininity. Graceful and tensile, she inhabited the hyperbolic roles she was given by Hollywood with arresting beauty and calm repose. Because Wong is a figure encompassing East and West yet belonging to neither, it is fitting that she features as a muse in “China Through the Looking Glass,” an exhibition at The Costume Institute of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibition, the first of its kind, looks at the many ways in which traditional Chinese aesthetics have been appropriated by Western high fashion, and sets a monumental precedent. Bringing together over 140…

NOAH BAUMBACH’S FILMS ARE PERSONAL AND distinct, at once aesthetically ambitious and familiar. The handheld Super 16 intimacy of The Squid and the Whale (05) segued to the washed-out naturalism of Margot at the Wedding (07), whose Rohmer influence seamlessly begat the Francophilia of Frances Ha (12). The writer-director’s most recent films, While We’re Young (14), and now Mistress America reveal fresh growth (in a career as of this year entering its third decade), having abandoned some of the bile and vitriol that drove his earlier work and culminated in Greenberg (10). The distinction between lives as led and lives as depicted retroactively has always been part of Baumbach’s work; he mines amused discomfort and drama in watching characters struggle to fictionalize their lives. Mistress America returns to this struggle,…

“THE DEMONIZING RHETORICS OF THE VARIOUS international ‘wars’ on terrorism, drugs, and crime are so much semantic apartheid,” writes Mike Davis in Planet of Slums. “They construct epistemological walls around gecekondus, favelas, and chawls that disable any honest debate about the daily violence of economic exclusion.” One might enlarge on Davis’s statement by evoking the tacit collective understanding of the condition of the poor, embodied in the gentler but no less exclusionary rhetoric of op-ed pieces and radio chat shows, no matter what the political stripe. There is never a “we,” but always an “us” and a “them,” and “they” are heard from when a statistic needs fleshing out or when a “good story” (usually a narrative of redemption) or a compelling “character” has been identified. This kind of stuff…

SLOW MOTION, REVERSE MOTION, AND FAST MOTION WERE A PART OF FILM from the beginning. But it took a while for them to become narrative tools because, like everything else at the dawn of cinema, they were at first merely toys. Filmmakers were so busy telling stories that they didn’t think about these tricks as tools until later. V PART PAUL SCHRADER is a screenwriter and director of 19 films to date. He has been contributing to Film Commentfor over 40 years. Because film is essentially photography across time, it’s the only art form in which you can manipulate real time. All you have to do is to dissociate the number of exposures per second from the number of frames projected per second: if you shoot 16 frames of film per…

TWO STUNNING MOVIES WON BIG AWARDS AT THE 14TH TRIBECA FILM Festival. Camilla Nielsson’s Democrats, which follows the drafting of and country-wide referendum on Zimbabwe’s new but as yet unimplemented constitution, took the top award in the documentary competition. Laura Bispuri’s Sworn Virgin claimed the Nora Ephron Prize with a depiction of gender morphing and blurring that might have made Ephron’s head spin. I’ve been going to the TFF since its inception and boy, has it changed. What was once a catchall for every kind of film with the purpose of drawing people back to lower Manhattan post 9/11 has become a multimedia populist celebration, bearing the brand of one of the world’s wealthiest zip-codes. The TFF has something for almost everyone: a sports film section; a free drive-in located…

Director: Nadav Lapid Country/Year: Israel, 2014 Opening: July 31 Where: New York IN NADAV LAPID’S FASCINATING AND ORIGINAL third feature, the actress nanny of a child prodigy jokes about his precocious, yearning love poems: the boy sounds more like a 40-year-old spinster than the 5-year-old kid he is. She says this to Yoav’s forty-ish titular teacher, Nira (willowy Sarit Larry), who has become fixated on the gifted boy (Avi Schnaidman). Nira is something of a spinster herself artistically speaking, dabbling in a poetry class without distinction, and she grows obsessed with the mystery of Yoav’s inspiration—which, indelibly, occurs each time with his announcing “I have a poem” and then pacing and dictating. Not that Nira wants to replicate Yoav’s achievement—she views herself as his amanuensis and, more troublingly, as his…

Director: Sean Baker Country/Year: U.S., 2015 Opening: July 10 Where: New York and Los Angeles THERE’S NOTHING INHERENTLY WRONG WITH following the “write what you know” principle. Yet as the guiding aesthetic of the predominantly white, male world of American independent filmmaking, it’s stultifying. Sean Baker—a straight, white cisgender (a person whose gender identity matches their sex at birth) man from New Jersey—has collaborated with a variety of subjects, fashioning fictions from their lived experience. In Tangerine, the sources of firsthand insight are Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor, two trans women of color who star as Sin-Dee and Alexandra, sex workers and besties. It’s Christmas Eve and Sin-Dee is fresh out of lockup, looking to reunite with her fiancé and pimp Chester (James Ransone). Alexandra informs her that Chester…

Wild Bill Wellman: Hollywood Rebel By William Wellman Jr. Pantheon, $40 WILLIAM WELLMAN JR.’S BIOGRAPHY OF HIS FATHER HAS plenty of thrills before its subject even reaches Hollywood. Born on Leap Year Day in 1896, director William A. Wellman’s school days ended when he dropped a stink bomb smack onto a headmaster’s bald spot. Targeting prowess thus established, and with World War I raging, at age 19 Wellman joined first the French ambulance corps, then the Lafayette Flying Corps, where he earned a Croix de Guerre with two palm leaves and the nickname Wild Bill. He married a Frenchwoman who was killed when the Germans shelled Paris. After that, he spent time as a stunt pilot in an air show. Somewhere in there was a stint as a semi-pro hockey…

Bob Peak ONE OF THE GREAT AMERICAN POSTER ARTISTS, Bob Peak (1927-1992) encapsulated the Swinging Sixties and the Blockbuster Eighties with equal panache. Peak was a successful Madison Avenue commercial artist for almost a decade before he broke into movie poster design, illustrating the six-sheet for West Side Story in 1961 and the pink-hued one-sheet for My Fair Lady (the first movie poster to win an award from the Society of Illustrators) three years later. The best of his Sixties posters—with their elongated limbs and sartorial swagger—are reminiscent of fashion spreads, but Peak’s sense of composition and color, balancing white space with ornate line drawing, is remarkable. He gravitated toward musicals or mod spy stories, and his posters for Modesty Blaise (66), Kaleidoscope (66), In Like Flint (67), and Mame…