Tabla de contenidos para September - October 2016 en Film Comment

CHAPTER FIVE OF E.M. FORSTER’S 1910 NOVEL Howards End places the reader right in the middle of a Beethoven concert at London’s Queen’s Hall. A handful of the book’s principal characters are attending, including the art-loving sisters Margaret and Helen Schlegel; their younger brother, Tibby; their Aunt Juley, who raised them; and the lower-class Leonard Bast, whom they first meet during this outing. Though it’s a meeting that will hasten major changes in the fates of them all, the chapter stands out in the mind for much less narratively functional reasons. Here, Forster is trying to describe the ineffable: the feelings stirred up by music, specifically the divine Fifth Symphony, and the differing responses all these individuals have to it. The thrilled Aunt Juley taps her feet; the curious Margaret…

 IN RICHARD FLEISCHER’S 1959 FILM Compulsion, DEAN STOCKWELL PLAYS JUDD STEINER, a young law student embroiled in a sadomasochistic (and most probably sexual) relationship with his best friend, Artie Straus (Bradford Dillman). It is one of the many film versions of the story of murderous duo Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who in 1924 killed 14-year-old Bobby Franks for no other reason than to show they were smarter than everybody else. Based on the 1956 book by Meyer Levin, Compulsion had the year after publication been turned into a Broadway play, in which Stockwell originated the role of Judd and Roddy McDowall appeared as Artie. Born in 1935, Dean Stockwell has been different things to different generations. Starting out at age 7, then getting a contract with MGM, he was…

CLOSER LOOK: Toni Erdmann screens in the 54th New York Film Festival and opens on December 25. THE CHARACTERS IN MAREN ADE’S FILMS YEARN FOR connection, even when they believe—erroneously—in their self-sufficiency. Characters—inseparable from the actors who embody them—are what one remembers from her films, as well as the freedom one feels while watching them to identify completely, or in part, or not at all with their experiences, dilemmas, behaviors, and contradictions. Our consciousness of our connection to these fictional characters is as much a part of the world of Ade’s films as the characters’ connections to one another. I cannot think of another relatively mainstream narrative film that invited me to be as fully present as I was when watching Ade’s Toni Erdmann. But maybe I’m just a pushover…

The film tracks three ages in the life of Chiron: as a boy, a teenager, and an adult. It’s almost like a piece of music with movements. You have this character who is sort of receding inside himself. And the music within the film tells us what he can’t. In the beginning it starts out very, very small. Once you get to that third story, the music [the actual soundtrack] starts to get a lot more expressive and sensual. Is some of the music slowed down? It’s this Southern form of hip-hop called “chopped and screwed,” where the voice is really deep and it’s really slowed down and lines are repeating. I grew up listening to it; it started in Houston and Tampa . . . but Houston claims it.…

Film practitioners have long tried to describe the abstract power of their practical tools. Director and critic Alexandre Astruc famously called the movie camera a caméra-stylo, or camera-pen; likewise Agnès Varda coined the term cinécriture to describe her style, the sense of a film being written by the camera. And even earlier, British documentarian Basil Wright—colleague of nonfiction trailblazers John Grierson and Humphrey Jennings— wrote: “What is fundamentally important is to realize that where the camera is put must depend, not on an attempt to make the shot ‘striking’ or ‘interesting’ at all costs, but on the urgency of expression affecting the man behind the camera.” This statement is found in a functional, almost instructional essay titled “Handling the Camera,” from a wonderfully stuffy 1937 collection of writings for burgeoning…

NOTHING SAYS “STAKING YOUR CLAIM” LIKE REISSUING TWO iconic Westerns in which steadfast heroes face down a wellarmed mob in defense of their lives and their brands. That’s the bold stand Olive Films is taking here, inaugurating its “Olive Signature” collection and going up against Criterion and its VOD posse to carve out a niche in the boutique restorations market. “Highlighting cult favorites, time-honored classics, and under-appreciated gems,” Olive Signature promises, and thus far they deliver, with scintillating transfers from 4K remasters, hyper-faithful audio, and illuminating bonus features. Written by Carl Foreman as McCarthyist storm clouds gathered on the horizon, Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952) charts the apprehension of a frontier marshal (Gary Cooper) on his wedding day that an outlaw he sent to prison is returning with his gang…

THE PRE-SHOW News, views, conversations, and other things to get worked up about MAILE MELOY GENEROUSLY LET ME HAVE MY WAY WITH HER stories and let me swap up some of the shorts as I was going. Her stories popped out to me because right away there’s such a sense of place. The characters are really tied into their environment. And I liked the idea of making a film about working women.” “With Night Moves, Charles Burchfield’s paintings carried the day. For Certain Women, I was just getting to know Montana and getting a feel for the pace of how people speak and move around, and what directs people’s thinking, as far as a rancher versus someone living in the city.” “In the beginning in the script, I imagined the…

THE SHOT: A SINGLE PIECE OF PHOTOGRAPHIC FILM, loaded onto a spool and threaded between a plate and shutter, captures light as framed through a lens. The cut: trim a piece of film, join it to another, and the juxtaposition forms new meaning. Movies became known to us as sequences of discrete images, assembled in a specific order and duration. Technological innovation has changed how those images are created and viewed over the past century, yet our root understanding of what constitutes a “movie” has remained largely unaltered since the 1930s. But what if the shot and the cut weren’t the alpha and omega of film grammar? One answer is virtual reality (VR), the exact implications of which have remained vague in the popular imagination. It represents a newly responsive…

The 13th bolsters the sense of DuVernay as a figure in the American film landscape without obvious parallel. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. —the 13th amendment, passed by Congress on January 31, 1865, ratified by the states on December 6, 1865 AVA DUVERNAY’S NEW DOCUMENTARY The 13th is a disturbing, expansive chronicle of national shame, excavating with clinical precision the long history of racial inequality in the United States. It focuses particularly on how the nation has produced the world’s highest rate of incarceration—a shocking opening statistic informs us that America represents five percent of the world’s population, yet is home to nearly…

BERTRAND TAVER NIER OPENS THE FIRST CHAPTER OF his mult i-part documentar y My Journey Through French Cinema facing the horizon, squinting at the sun. A child of the war, he talks about the liberation of Lyon and seeing the sky alight with celebration. He recalls his father, editor of the literar y review Confluences, who hid Louis Aragon in their home during the Occupation. And he tells of wartime malnutrition that caused strabismus, sending him, at age 6, to a sanatorium, where he saw his first movies. There was something about the screen just at the moment it lit up that instilled hope. My Journey Through French Cinema is Tavernier’s voyage into the light. It is an ingenious mix of the personal and the historical in which he tells…

THERE ARE MANY WAYS TO WATCH OLD MOVIES NOW, but few experiences are more sublime than the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, a four-day marathon held every year at the Castro Theatre. Established in 1922, the movie palace is a vast cavern of shadows, with lights picking out the ornate gilded columns of the theater organ and the sharp silver petals of an art deco chandelier. From the balcony you can watch dust floating up in the projector’s flickering beam, while on the 50-foot screen Louise Brooks hops a freight train or Douglas Fairbanks walks on the ceiling or Buster Keaton grabs a passing car that whisks him sideways out of the frame. Live music responds to the moving images with lover-like attention. After hours of this, it’s a shock…

“One of the reasons we, or at least a lot of people of color, got into film at UCLA in the ’60s, is that we wanted to tell our own stories,” says Charles Burnett from his Los Angeles home. “We reacted to the number of negative images that Hollywood wanted to continually perpetuate. We were searching for answers to questions like: ‘What is the black experience? What is relevant? How can we tell stories that will create social change?’ And not just produce positive images, but realistic images of people with all their flaws and heroic aspects and everything. The whole gamut of who we are as people.” Burnett, now 72, is reflecting on his early days as a member of the movement at UCLA in the 1960s and ’70s…

IN THE NEW FILM The Lovers and the Despot, WE’RE GIVEN A RARE GLIMPSE INTO THE inner workings of state-sponsored propaganda. As recounted in Robert Cannan and Ross Adam’s thriller-like yarn, in 1978 South Korean showbiz veterans (and former power couple) director Shin Sang-ok and actress Choi Eun-hee were abducted and conscripted into making movies for the North by Supreme Leader Kim Jong-il. In audiotapes secretly recorded by the duo, they talked openly with Kim about what was expected. “From now on, my film producer is ‘Producer Kim Jong-il,’” Shin says. “There are things I want to make to promote our Dear Leader’s image. That would be good for me too.” Shin laughs, and so does Kim. “Thanks,” the Dear Leader says. “I’ll give you everything I’ve got.” When attempting…

Moonlight revels in the elevation of everyday experience, transforming the commonplace into the iconic. THE HALF-LOVELY, HALF-DANGEROUS ENERGY OF TWO little boys running in the sunlight, moving together instinctively like a flock of birds. The exhilaration of learning to float in the ocean, gently released from loving grownup arms. The first touches of desire in the safe, warm dark with a friend one fervently hopes will become more than a friend. Moonlight, the remarkable new film by Barry Jenkins, who directed the gentle romantic drama Medicine for Melancholy (2008), revels in the elevation of everyday experience, transforming time’s passing into a series of rites of passage, the commonplace into the iconic. These are the kinds of moments and images that critics love to champion as “universal,” but in practice this…

CLOSER LOOK: Julieta screens in the 54th New York Film Festival and opens on December 21. IT’S A SUNNY SPRING AFTERNOON, AND PEDRO ALMODÓVAR DOESN’T feel comfortable. He’s in the study at his production company, El Deseo, located in Madrid. For those gathered there—his brother and producer of all his films, Agustin Almodóvar, and other employees—the sound that comes out of the air-conditioning device is almost inaudible. But Almodóvar says that it’s “hammering” his brain. So he decides to move the interview to an adjacent room, less colorful but quieter than his. The explanation is simple: Almodóvar suffers from tinnitus, a sensation of noise (like a ringing or roaring) that can only be heard by the one affected. It’s an inner sound that usually manifests during periods of hard stress…

Aquarius BY YONCA TALU Director: Kleber Mendonça Filho Country/Distributor: Brazil/France, Vitagraph Opening: October CLARA, THE RESPLENDENT 65-YEAR-OLD protagonist of Aquarius, is destined to take her place among cinema’s most valiant and tenacious heroines. From her sensuous, Bond Girl–like emergence from the ocean, to her morning exercise complete with taekwondo moves, Clara (Sônia Braga) conveys a warrior spirit even through her most ordinary actions. A widow and retired music critic, she leads a simple and leisurely existence in the Brazilian coastal town of Recife, immersed in lustful memories summoned by the tunes of her youth and the sunlight that shines through the large windows of her almost century-old apartment overlooking the beach. Engrossed in this luminous daydream, one could wish for Clara’s placid routine to constitute the entire film, but director…

THE MOST CELEBRATED IMAGE IN ABBAS KIAROSTAMI’S CELEBRATED FILMOGRAPHY might be the aimlessly kicked can rolling haphazardly down a street in his 1990 masterpiece Close-up. The moment’s reputation is deserved. In a Kiarostami film, artistic intentions are intricately entangled with the larger, accident-prone world in which he and his (usually untrained) performers feel their way toward elusive human truths. I too love the spinning spray can, but it’s not Kiarostami’s only memorable symbol of the unpredictability and undecidability found in all activities and environments. The swirling paint in The Colors (1976), the pathway in Where Is the Friend’s Home? (1987), the mountain road in Life and Nothing More… (1992), the rolling apple in The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), the advancing-retreating driftwood in Five Dedicated to Ozu (2003)—all these are…