An irregular online film supplement edited by A. S. Hamrah.
May 29, 2017
What better device than a drone to pursue a man running away?
The ability to move a camera through the air is not much younger than cinema itself, but the technology has never been so cheap and accessible, or so smooth in its execution. Even in a festival designed to celebrate it, the drone does its job so well that it’s easy to forget.
April 24, 2017
On the Fast and the Furious movies
Every film franchise is a testament to growth and conquest. In the case of the Marvel movies, that growth is exponential and expanding: movies beget more movies, more spinoffs, more series that emerge from spinoffs. What sets the Fast and the Furious series apart from franchises like this—at least for now—is its habit of folding all that hot-media-property energy back into itself, making the movies all the more strange and intense.
March 6, 2017
What is Adam Curtis doing?
There is nothing in HyperNormalisation Adam Curtis has not done before, except that his pace is increasingly relaxed, with lengthy, drifting, wordless sound/image juxtapositions that feel closer to contemporary “artists’ film” than anything on television. You could read this languor generously, as a conscious new direction in his work. Or it could simply be the sign of burgeoning self-indulgence, the kind of thing cult figures often become susceptible to.
July 5, 2016
“They write about me like I’m a maniac. I’m not . . . I’m forty years old, I’ve got four kids, a house, and a mortgage.”
When Zappa shows up in a suit and tie debating Robert Novak on Crossfire, the effect is less the ’60s freak who became a normal adult than an uncompromising individual voice channeled into a different format.
May 24, 2016
On Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet
Anecdotes swirl around Straub and Huillet. On set, they preferred phrases like “please” and “thank you” to “action” and “cut.” They considered over-dubbed sound, studio sets, and illusionistic cuts phony and cheap, but they praised filmmakers—including Chaplin, Mizoguchi, and John Ford—who used those devices particularly cannily. According to the filmmaker and critic John Gianvito, Straub once proclaimed that most films were “made to keep [the masses] in their place, to violate them, or to fascinate them,” and boasted that his and Huillet’s own movies “give people the liberty to get up and leave.”
March 16, 2016
No doubt many Puritans, like many film critics, were self-righteous.
The Witch is effective as a chiller, and the acting is tremendous—everyone’s wound so tight you expect springs to pop out of their heads. But we are aware from the first shot that this is a Serious Film, more Arthur Miller than Eduardo Sanchez, because the cinematography is trendily washed out, the better to show off the blood that spatters every other scene. There are visual echoes of Goya; the end title informs us loftily that much of the dialogue comes from period sources. The filmmakers are so desperate to be taken seriously that they’ve forgotten to have much fun.
February 25, 2016
Oscar Movies, 2016
The movies can put a positive spin on anything. Seeing the world anew, or for the first time, becomes an allegory of motherhood and childhood in Room, which puts its protagonist (Brie Larson) in a situation not unlike Matt Damon’s in The Martian, but Earthbound, and worse.
February 18, 2016
There have been surprisingly few recent English-language films about infidelity, at least once you exclude movies that treat the subject as little more than a secret for characters to hide and reveal, a temptation for them to resist, or a sin for which they’re obliged to atone. It’s striking to see two films that consider their characters’ romantic betrayals so quietly and reflectively, with so little moralizing. That they arrive at very different conclusions—about what it means to be unfaithful, about how much strain a relationship can take, and about the extent to which committed relationships between people are, in the end, possible—suggests how many dramatic possibilities infidelity can give a filmmaker when it’s treated with seriousness and care. It also suggests a good deal about Haigh and Kaufman’s relative degrees of comfort with the kinds of grown-up, advanced-age relationships they’ve chosen to depict.
February 16, 2016
On Fort Buchanan
With its recycling of soap opera dialogue and its knowing embrace of cliché, Fort Buchanan seems to imply that melodrama applies the same logic to emotion that pornography applies to sexuality—that it creates a world in which vast and spontaneous intensities of feeling are exchanged with prolific frequency and little consequence.
October 28, 2015
Court and the Indian state
The first scene of Chaitanya Tamhane’s debut film, Court, opens with a distant view of a makeshift stage in a Bombay slum. Workers have gathered to watch a charismatic Dalit singer, who, backed by vocalists and drummers, belts out jeremiads against the false gods of the age: the greed found in glitzy new shopping malls and the “dense” thickets of racism, nationalism, and caste-ism into which people have fallen.
October 22, 2015
On the sequel to The Act of Killing
Eyes gouged; eyes augmented; eyes blinded with old age; eyes guarded, darting, glassed-over; eyes squinting to check if the horizon has sharpened. A boy shuts his hard as he struggles to absorb his history lessons at school. His sister puts on their father’s glasses, giggling at how they warp her world. Eyes multiply, kaleidoscopic, as the structuring metaphor of Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Look of Silence, a new documentary on the anti-Communist purges in Indonesia that, between 1965 and 1966, killed up to a million people.
July 15, 2015
On Fanon and the ethics of anticolonial resistance
“Concerning Violence” is something other than a straightforward entreaty to revolutionary action. It is an encouragement to face the specter of absolute violence, from both sides of the imperial divide, and decide where we stand politically and ethically in relation to it.
May 7, 2015
On Clouds of Sils Maria
In the opening scenes, you can feel Assayas clearing the ground for the drama of persuasion, seduction, and control between Maria and Val that will eventually take up the film’s center. Here there will be no men, and no attempts on the part of men to claim a right to either woman’s body, history, or name.
March 6, 2015
This flood of black faces on screens both big and small is enough to summon the ghost of Hansberry, peddling her sanguine ’50s vision—but A Raisin in the Sun is a play about the dignified underclass, the downtrodden-but-upright proletariat, whereas Dear White People and Black-ish don’t dare to gesture—however idly—at the poor. These days, even the upright cannot be downtrodden, so the face of blackness thrust forth by both the TV series and the film is well-spoken, well-heeled, white collar.
August 21, 2014
Level Five is having its first theatrical release at a moment when wars are not just being remembered in digital arenas, but are increasingly being fought in them too.
Marker knows his fakes. There’s a video from the Vietnam War of a man burning alive, but part at the end where he gets up is typically cut out. “[The burning man] testifies against war, you cannot weaken his testimony for the sake of a few frames,” explains Marker, probing, “Truth? . . . The truth is, most didn’t get up. So what’s so special about this one? The ethics of imagery?”
June 20, 2014
On Boyhood
Most artworks about childhood and adolescence have to account for the fact that children don’t see their internal crises reflected in the adults around them. This is why parents always say, “It’s not the end of the world,” and why to children it sounds like a lie.
May 21, 2014
On Times Square
The film is a mess. It denounces gentrification, consumerism, television, psychiatry, censorship, cops, dads, and squares, and though its flailing critiques and silly romanticism befit a teen movie, they give away the film’s agenda to cash in on all things rebellious. It doesn’t even make sense, socially or geographically, to set a punk movie in Times Square.
March 26, 2012
Essential Killing is all the more political a work for refusing the obvious ways it could be about politics.
March 21, 2012
Lately Gibson has taken the role of embittered, vengeful victim beyond performance.
March 20, 2012
Slacker, though often canonized as a portrait of 1990s youth culture, is at root a local film. It was shot and produced entirely in Austin with local non-actors and musicians like the Butthole Surfers’ drummer Teresa Taylor. The fictionalized, documentary-style film doesn’t have a plot or recurring characters.
March 19, 2012
Film in Khmer culture acts as an emotional release for all the hidden things these young people were never told about
March 16, 2012
The master takes us there, but we will learn nothing we don’t teach ourselves.
March 15, 2012
If Weerasethakul’s movies are everything I think they are—mysterious, haunting, inventive—in a word, good—why do they make me fall asleep?
These are very slow, irruptively weird movies, where ugly faces break spontaneously into gorgeous, toothy grins and no one screams and runs away when a monkey-man shows up to dinner. Weerasethakul’s films present a challenge to the normal grammar of criticism, which strives to articulate what a work is “about.” What they are “about” is less interesting than what they are about to get into, or turn into.
March 14, 2012
The movie is practically a catalog of everything Brecht thought you shouldn’t do.
March 13, 2012
In late Varda forgetting becomes a structuring mechanism and a stylistic impetus: memory takes shape collectively.
May 29, 2017
What better device than a drone to pursue a man running away?
The ability to move a camera through the air is not much younger than cinema itself, but the technology has never been so cheap and accessible, or so smooth in its execution. Even in a festival designed to celebrate it, the drone does its job so well that it’s easy to forget.
April 24, 2017
On the Fast and the Furious movies
Every film franchise is a testament to growth and conquest. In the case of the Marvel movies, that growth is exponential and expanding: movies beget more movies, more spinoffs, more series that emerge from spinoffs. What sets the Fast and the Furious series apart from franchises like this—at least for now—is its habit of folding all that hot-media-property energy back into itself, making the movies all the more strange and intense.
March 6, 2017
What is Adam Curtis doing?
There is nothing in HyperNormalisation Adam Curtis has not done before, except that his pace is increasingly relaxed, with lengthy, drifting, wordless sound/image juxtapositions that feel closer to contemporary “artists’ film” than anything on television. You could read this languor generously, as a conscious new direction in his work. Or it could simply be the sign of burgeoning self-indulgence, the kind of thing cult figures often become susceptible to.
July 5, 2016
“They write about me like I’m a maniac. I’m not . . . I’m forty years old, I’ve got four kids, a house, and a mortgage.”
When Zappa shows up in a suit and tie debating Robert Novak on Crossfire, the effect is less the ’60s freak who became a normal adult than an uncompromising individual voice channeled into a different format.
May 24, 2016
On Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet
Anecdotes swirl around Straub and Huillet. On set, they preferred phrases like “please” and “thank you” to “action” and “cut.” They considered over-dubbed sound, studio sets, and illusionistic cuts phony and cheap, but they praised filmmakers—including Chaplin, Mizoguchi, and John Ford—who used those devices particularly cannily. According to the filmmaker and critic John Gianvito, Straub once proclaimed that most films were “made to keep [the masses] in their place, to violate them, or to fascinate them,” and boasted that his and Huillet’s own movies “give people the liberty to get up and leave.”
March 16, 2016
No doubt many Puritans, like many film critics, were self-righteous.
The Witch is effective as a chiller, and the acting is tremendous—everyone’s wound so tight you expect springs to pop out of their heads. But we are aware from the first shot that this is a Serious Film, more Arthur Miller than Eduardo Sanchez, because the cinematography is trendily washed out, the better to show off the blood that spatters every other scene. There are visual echoes of Goya; the end title informs us loftily that much of the dialogue comes from period sources. The filmmakers are so desperate to be taken seriously that they’ve forgotten to have much fun.
February 25, 2016
Oscar Movies, 2016
The movies can put a positive spin on anything. Seeing the world anew, or for the first time, becomes an allegory of motherhood and childhood in Room, which puts its protagonist (Brie Larson) in a situation not unlike Matt Damon’s in The Martian, but Earthbound, and worse.
February 18, 2016
There have been surprisingly few recent English-language films about infidelity, at least once you exclude movies that treat the subject as little more than a secret for characters to hide and reveal, a temptation for them to resist, or a sin for which they’re obliged to atone. It’s striking to see two films that consider their characters’ romantic betrayals so quietly and reflectively, with so little moralizing. That they arrive at very different conclusions—about what it means to be unfaithful, about how much strain a relationship can take, and about the extent to which committed relationships between people are, in the end, possible—suggests how many dramatic possibilities infidelity can give a filmmaker when it’s treated with seriousness and care. It also suggests a good deal about Haigh and Kaufman’s relative degrees of comfort with the kinds of grown-up, advanced-age relationships they’ve chosen to depict.
February 16, 2016
On Fort Buchanan
With its recycling of soap opera dialogue and its knowing embrace of cliché, Fort Buchanan seems to imply that melodrama applies the same logic to emotion that pornography applies to sexuality—that it creates a world in which vast and spontaneous intensities of feeling are exchanged with prolific frequency and little consequence.
October 28, 2015
Court and the Indian state
The first scene of Chaitanya Tamhane’s debut film, Court, opens with a distant view of a makeshift stage in a Bombay slum. Workers have gathered to watch a charismatic Dalit singer, who, backed by vocalists and drummers, belts out jeremiads against the false gods of the age: the greed found in glitzy new shopping malls and the “dense” thickets of racism, nationalism, and caste-ism into which people have fallen.
October 22, 2015
On the sequel to The Act of Killing
Eyes gouged; eyes augmented; eyes blinded with old age; eyes guarded, darting, glassed-over; eyes squinting to check if the horizon has sharpened. A boy shuts his hard as he struggles to absorb his history lessons at school. His sister puts on their father’s glasses, giggling at how they warp her world. Eyes multiply, kaleidoscopic, as the structuring metaphor of Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Look of Silence, a new documentary on the anti-Communist purges in Indonesia that, between 1965 and 1966, killed up to a million people.
July 15, 2015
On Fanon and the ethics of anticolonial resistance
“Concerning Violence” is something other than a straightforward entreaty to revolutionary action. It is an encouragement to face the specter of absolute violence, from both sides of the imperial divide, and decide where we stand politically and ethically in relation to it.
