Tabla de contenidos para March-April 2019 Vol. 55 No.2 en Film Comment

THE FILM THAT CATAPULTED FREDI WASHINGTON TO FAME WAS JOHN M. STAHL’S 1934 adaptation of Imitation of Life, for her role as a housekeeper’s daughter who is passing as white. Anticipating the reaction to her performance as the woeful Peola Johnson, she told Associated Negro Press reporter Fay Jackson, “I don’t want to ‘pass’ because I can’t stand insincerities and shams. I am just as much Negro as any of the others identified with the race.” Later she became one of the founders of the Negro Actors Guild. Her brother-in-law, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., was the first African-American elected to Congress from New York, and then-president of the NAACP Walter Francis White counted her among his closest allies. But Washington had played the role so well that critics and audiences…

FILMMAKERS LEAVE A TRAIL OF UNMADE PROJECTS behind them, and among the most famous and long-deferred of these dream movies there are some recurring motifs. There are the science-fiction films: Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune, of course, or Alain Resnais’s unlikely teaming with Stan Lee on The Monster Maker. Then there are the Bible-based movies, like Carl Theodor Dreyer’s “Jesus film” or Robert Bresson’s adaptation of the Book of Genesis or Paul Verhoeven’s biopic of his historical Jesus of Nazareth. With High Life, Claire Denis imagined a movie that improbably combines aspects of both types at once—and, more improbably still, she actually made the thing. Set largely aboard an adrift spacecraft, her film has all the expected trappings of science fiction, but Biblical imagery and overtones circulate throughout the work, which begins…

So you see the Dau films as trailers for the online material? The films themselves are trailers for the matrix: it’s more a way to introduce the characters and the stories. For this “event”—I don’t like this word—we knew we needed a space where the audience would have enough physical time and enough space to learn and react to the movies, and spend the right time between the movies, before and after. After watching four films, I realized that watching Dau wasn’t really about piecing together a narrative, but more about exploring its world. Most of them have the shape of a movie, but it was important for me to keep this raw feeling—that’s why we chose theaters under construction. One life is finished, another life didn’t start yet. It’s raw—you can never make…

AS CYCLES OF CULTURAL PRODUCTION AND consumption are increasingly beset with carefully calibrated career-advancing controversies and histrionics, the notion of true sacrifice for one’s art, of genuine risk-taking, of a cinema inextricable from the toil of lived reality can seem more remote than ever. The titular animal in Hu Bo’s An Elephant Sitting Still is a fabled creature in inner Mongolia’s Manzhouli, the odd object of preoccupation for the film’s four dissipated characters that is at once ancient and stoic; an inanimate, timeworn witness to human atrocities and a symbol of resistance against a hostile world of smugness and decadence—in short, an apt metaphor for the pursuit of such a pure cinema. But in the time following the film’s tormented production as its writer-director-editor took his own life at 29…

Ash Is Purest White BY ABBY SUN Director: Jia Zhangke Country/Distributor: China/France/Japan, Cohen Media Group Opening: March 15 TWELVE FEATURES INTO HIS OEUVRE as China’s most essential modern filmmaker, Jia Zhangke continues to remix his own work in Ash Is Purest White, a doomed romance whose protagonist resolutely takes control of her own life. The film opens with documentary footage from 2001, shot soon after Jia got his first video camera and featuring a sleeping young child on a bus as the motion outside the moving vehicle rattles the frame. Even without that background knowledge, it’s an effective bit of placesetting, both reminding us of Jia’s indie documentary chops and signaling his personal connection with the location (near his own birthplace in China’s industrial northwest). Despite its sprawling, two-decade timeline…

Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words By Ennio Morricone in conversation with Alessandro De Rosa, Oxford University Press, $34.95 EARLY IN LIFE, ENNIO MORRICONE HAD TO DECIDE WHETHER to become a musician or a chess master. A maestro… or a maestro. It’s over several games of chess that Morricone opts to conduct this extended series of interviews with composer Alessandro De Rosa—and before long, the anecdotes start flying: “I happened to play a few games with Terrence Malick although I was much better than him.” While Morricone occasionally displays the same caution in his discourse as he would sitting opposite the Grandmaster Boris Spassky (against whom he once played), he reveals what he loves most about both chess and music: risk-taking. Despite a classical upbringing as a trumpeter and a…

THESE AREN’T IDEAL TIMES FOR TREADING THE SOFT SOIL of cinematic hybridity. It’s become harder to justify flights of factual indeterminacy. Questions that might have been stimulating as rhetoric or theory—what is truth? does the camera only lie? are people only ever performing?—feel queasier in a political environment where such indeterminacy has been perverted and weaponized. The questions remain—in fact they’ve taken on greater weight—but it’s not something to fuck with, not something to kick around as idle provocation. This puts documentaries in a tricky place, particularly documentaries that aim to wrestle with rather than affirm their own authority. In immensely insecure times, revealing the fictive edges of the nonfiction canvas can seem like an aggressive pile-on, regardless of honest intent. Maybe it’s time to invert the picture, consider the…

I WAS 2 YEARS OLD WHEN THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST WAS released, so I was only superficially aware of the controversy. Still, when I first fell in thrall to Martin Scorsese’s astounding body of work (a stranglehold that has only tightened), this was the film that stood most clearly apart from the others in its reputation—either as an outrage, a disappointment, a bold curiosity, a noble attempt, a career peak, or an unfortunate valley. Its hysterical reception prevented anyone from watching it without bias, and so the event was deeply muddled, and one’s attitude toward the film hinged on one’s “position” and whether they felt it really was as “truly horrible and completely deranged” as Franco Zeffirelli claimed. Here’s a movie that was branded as unconscionably blasphemous (and immediately…

“This next one’s a cover.” So says Becky Something (Elisabeth Moss), the ’90s alt-rocker at the center of writer-director Alex Ross Perry’s Her Smell, midway through the film, as she sits on a piano bench right before what might just be the most important moment of her life. Becky is—or was—the lead singer and guitarist of the all-female trio Something She, alongside bassist Marielle Hell (Agyness Deyn) and drummer Ali van der Wolff (Gayle Rankin), and she has—or had—something of Kathleen Hanna’s unsanded defiance, something of Courtney Love’s tabloid magnetism. By this point in the film, Becky is at the start of her redemption arc, before getting the band back together to rebuild the wreckage of youthful destructive creativity. This comes in a sequence like the end of Olivier Assayas’s…

“Let’s lift this veil.” These are the first spoken words in Sunset, the new epic period drama from director László Nemes. They are delivered from outside the frame, to Irisz Leiter (Juli Jakab), whose finely featured face emerges from below the brim of a grandly elegant hat. Her eyes have a faraway look and the faintest trace of a beatific smile; it’s the last time we’ll see her wear such an expression. When an unseen shopgirl offers to take her size, her eyelids flutter and her whole bearing shifts subtly, as though emerging from a fragile reverie. Indeed, what follows is an oneiric, peripatetic fable, suffused with a firelit, golden-hour haze, where luminous surfaces cast menacing shadows; where the sumptuous textures and elegant choreographies of polite society strain to conceal…

Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons By Hannah Frank, University of California Press, $34.95 TAKING ON THE SISYPHEAN TASK OF ANALYZING THOUSANDS of individual frames from animated cartoons, Hannah Frank’s intricately argued book suggests an imaginative, alternative chronicle of labor in commercial studio animation. The materialist study maintains the layered “photographic origins of cel animation”: a single pictorial frame of a cartoon is assembled from sheets of discrete acetate cels, each hand-drawn, inked, painted, and then stacked over painted or collaged backgrounds, making up a singular “document” that is then photographed. The process results in an animated film narrative, and that cartoon in turn becomes a record preserving each of these documents because of the industrial practice of washing or reusing sheets after the photography is complete.…

THE TITLE OF ROBERTO MINERVINI’S DOCU-mentary—still undistributed in the U.S.—refers to a 19th-century spiritual, but might as well have been spoken aloud by his resilient Louisiana and Mississippi subjects. What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? looks partly at two young brothers and at steadfast members of the New Black Panther Party as they canvass and protest, but its central, inspiring, and heart-wrenching personality has to be Judy Hill. She’s the proprietor of a bar that may go under, tough-love listener to many, and a survivor herself of so much, as we learn. Outspoken yet also strong enough to be vulnerable in her openness, Hill has experienced the ravages of drug addiction and yet still draws upon reserves of strength to comfort others. As shown most recently by…

Fad’jal Safi Faye, 1979, Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée (CNC) THE SENEGALESE FILMMAKER AND ETHNOGRAPHER SAFI Faye’s second feature—an intricate portrait of a rural village that weaves between staged scenes and observational footage—goes by three names. “Fad’jal” refers to the town at the film’s center, a coastal farming and fishing community where Faye has family roots. Its name derives from a pair of words that roughly translates to “come and work.” In France, the movie got a subtitle—Grand-père, raconte-nous (“Tell us, Grandpa”)—to emphasize the long scenes of live storytelling that organize it. Working and listening become the film’s two competing sources of momentum. Under a tree, an elderly man teaches a group of children about the village’s past. Reenacted scenes from its history—the birth of its female…

OF ALL THE ACCOLADES BESTOWED ON JAFAR PANAHI’S new film, 3 Faces, the Golden Orange it won for Best Film at the Antalya Film Festival has to be the most ironic: it came with a bonus of one million travel miles by Turkish Airlines, a sponsor of the festival promoting its “Miles and Smiles” program. The award surely must have brought the requisite smile to Panahi’s face, though for the wrong reason. He’s been prohibited from traveling abroad by the Islamic Revolutionary Court in Iran for 20 years—part of a severe verdict that also banned him from making films for 20 years. As draconian as the sentence was, Panahi’s reaction was equally bold and defiant. He ignored the ban and continued to work surreptitiously, and ferociously. He has made four…

TAKE ME SOMEWHERE NICE ENA SENDIJAREVIC WITH AN ACUTE SENSE OF CULTURAL AND GENERATIONAL DYNAMICS, ENA SENDIJAREVIC’S debut feature Take Me Somewhere Nice puts a fresh spin on the coming-of-age movie. Introduced through a prism of reflections in a mirrored dressing room, the film’s teenage protagonist, Alma (played with ingratiating moxie by newcomer Sara Luna Zoric), is a young woman of many conflicting impulses and identities. Idling away her summer in the Netherlands with her mother, the Bosnian-bred Alma seems happy if not satisfied with her situation; when word arrives that her estranged father is in the hospital, she decides to visit him in the Balkans. With the reluctant help of her shady cousin Emir (Ernad Prnjavorac) and his friend Denis (Lazar Dragojevic), with whom she quickly develops a romantic…

IN THEORY, I’VE COME TO PARIS AS A FILM CRITIC, BUT MAYBE I’m bringing the wrong set of tools to this job. Ostensibly, Dau, the much-anticipated multimedia project by Russian director Ilya Khrzhanovsky, is a film, or a series of films. But it also claims to be something more: as the publicity material puts it, “a pluridisciplinary epic project,” existing “at the intersection of film, science, performance, spirituality, social and artistic experimentation, literature, and architecture.” Maybe the standard criteria of cinema don’t apply; standard moviemaking methods certainly don’t. Dau premiered in January in Paris, trailing a uniquely enigmatic backstory. In 2006, Khrzhanovsky began work on his second feature, conceived as a biopic of the Nobel-winning Soviet physicist Lev Landau (1908-1968). But Khrzhanovsky decided that the project needed to be more…

THE TITLE OF CHRISTIAN PETZOLD’S NEWEST FILM packs a lot of meaning into two syllables. It refers to the papers sought by refugees desperate to escape from Nazi-occupied Europe—transit visas, which permit the holder to pass through a country provided they don’t stay. But the word “transit” starts a train of thought that passes through “transitional” and “transitory,” through ideas about in-betweenness and ambivalence that have run throughout the director’s work. Since the mid-1990s, Petzold has fashioned a series of stripped-down yet fiercely engrossing dramas that marry the satisfactions of traditional narrative with a mood of dislocation and transience. His characters tend to be adrift in lives that are somehow provisional, restless yet becalmed, caught between escaping from the past and sinking in its nets. The family in The State…

IT WASN’T MUCH OF A SURPRISE BY THE TIME NOMINATIONS were announced: Netflix, the 800-pound gorilla in the room, became the first home entertainment platform to snag a nomination for Best Picture at the Academy Awards thanks to Alfonso Cuarón’s ROMA. Within a matter of hours it was revealed that Netflix had become the first streaming company to join the MPAA. The line between cinema and home entertainment is becoming harder to maintain—perhaps more so than ever before. That isn’t to say ROMA did not receive a theatrical release. Netflix reportedly reached out to exhibition circuits with the intent of four-walling premium auditoriums nationwide, targeting rooms equipped with 70mm projectors and immersive audio systems from Dolby Atmos. It was always going to be a hard ask, but especially as the…

OF THE DIRECTORS WHO CAME TO INTERNATIONAL PROMINENCE DURING the Golden Age of Hong Kong cinema, Ringo Lam wasn’t the most ingeniously adaptable, the most shameless, the most baroque in style, or the most extravagant in violence (though in those last two categories he could more than excel). What Lam’s films were unsurpassed in, though, was temperature—the sheer blistering, blast-furnace heat of their passionate hatreds. This was the era of a pop cinephile culture that encouraged the cultivation of directorial signatures—John Woo’s crucifixes and doves, Wong Jing’s cardsharp showdowns—and for his own trademark, Lam chose fire. His breakthrough film, 1987’s City on Fire, caught alight, and the conflagration spread through his oeuvre. It wasn’t just an image, but a temperament. Heated expressions of disaffection were common in the movies produced…